Book of the Month/June 2015

I bought this book, By the People, on the strength of the subtitle, which was “Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.” Having read it, I want to tell you some of the wonderful things about it, and then talk about a face plant that Murray accomplishes in the last few pages. That face plant is a function of his libertarianism, but all the wonderful stuff earlier is a function of that same libertarianism as well, so we evangelical conservatives takes what we can gets.

This book is a really important one for Christian leaders to read, and for them to promote in their congregations. This is because we are coming down to it, and Christians — who are naturally dutiful citizens, as the apostles Peter and Paul reminded us to be — need to get their heads around the idea of responsible and sane disobedience. We need to get our heads around the fact that we are well past the point where continued obedience and compliance are irresponsible and insane. Murray does not share our concerns, but what he outlines is directly related to our concerns nonetheless.

First, Murray shows how bad the tyrannical state has gotten, and he sketches how it came to pass that it was able to get so bad. Who was asleep at the switch? In this section, Murray gives an outline of the growth of the administrative state, and shows how our established courts gave a deference to bureaucratic “experts” that they should not have given.
Second, Murray demonstrates, with multiple examples, how sclerotic our government has become. Sclerotic is a favorite word of Murray’s but it answers to his purposes. It simultaneously explains the heavy-handedness of government inspectors, but it also sets the stage for Murray’s suggested solutions — liberty without permission — by showing how incapable of deft, supple, or nimble responses the government necessarily is. This advanced sclerosis is the reason the government is being so bad, and it is also the reason why the government would have no effective responses to the plan that Murray puts forward.

The way the government keeps us all intimidated is by making “an example” of this hapless individual, or that vulnerable small business. Big corporations either become part of the problem, in what I call crony crapitalism, or they submit quietly to government-led shakedowns. This is because paying the fine is cheaper than fighting the case in court, even if you prevail in court. The examples Murray gives of governmental grasping and mendacity are enough to curl your hair. But this only works when most of the victims are kept in line. The system depends on voluntary compliance. What happens when that compliance evaporates? Murray suggests an instructive way for us to find out.

I should note that he is not a bomb-thrower, calling for us to man the barricades. For example, he says that we should not start with tax resistance — individual taxpayers opting out of the system are easy for the government to pick off.

Murray’s approach sees the occasional travesty perpetrated by some governmental agency as an “insurable hazard.” Not every dentist gets hauled before the authorities for not complying with some lunatic regulation that some functionary at OSHA decided to apply. But this kind of thing happens enough that most dentists decides to go through the hassle of complying rather than to run the risk. But why not treat the long shot of a government inspection the same way you would treat the threat of a tornado or flood? Suppose the American Dental Association asked its members to pay one hundred dollars a year into a defense fund, and the deal would go like this. If you run your office in compliance with the ADA’s best practices standards, then don’t worry about nit-picky government regulations. Just don’t worry about it. If you run into trouble, the ADA will pay all your fines, and will defend you in court.

In an economy as regulated as ours, there are many edifying ways for this approach to be put into practice.

I mentioned Murray’s face plant earlier. Right near the end of the book, he writes off “social conservatives,” excluding us and our issues from the “resistance.”

“I would argue that not one of the hot-button issues that have had social liberals and social conservatives screaming at one another for decades falls into that category. Not abortion, not gay rights, not any of the others” (p. 259).

First, this is a tactical blunder, because the really important high profile battles involving governmental overreach are going to be with evangelical bakers and florists. For someone as well-read as Murray obviously is, it is nothing short of astonishing that he appears blithely unaware of the religious dimension of this battle. Murray poses a “this is ridiculous” test for evaluating governmental action, which is a good test. But while libertarians write books defending liberty, there have been an awful lot of social conservatives exercising their liberty, and they are coming into conflict with Leviathan as a result. This was a really good book, but for a social scientist of Murray’s caliber, this lapse really was an unforced error.
As an aside, Murray is alright with those evangelicals who fought for social issues like outlawing slavery. But that is only because that battle was fought long ago, and “everybody knows” what to think of slavery. But think for a moment about what abortion actually is, and admit to yourself that black children in the United States were treated better in 1858 than they are currently being treated in 2015. This is not a defense of any horror that attended slavery — it is only to place those horrors alongside the ghoulish barbarities of Planned Parenthood, white barbarities staunchly defended by the black occupant of the Oval Office, President Stepin Fetchit.

This also reveals the stark philosophical limitations of libertarianism. This blindness was obvious in Murray’s book, but it was even more obvious to me because at the same time I was reading Murray I was also reading How Civilizations Die by David Goldman. He, unlike Murray, iss acutely aware of how important faith is when it comes to the health and survival of nations. Libertarians love the liberty tree, but they have no idea what kind of soil it grows in.

“States fail, Augustine argued, because peoples fail, and peoples fail because they love the wrong things. A nation defines itself by what it loves, and the wrong sort of love condemns it to eventual ruin” (Goldman, p. 251).

I thought about making Goldman’s book this month’s selection, and I highly recommend you all read it also, but the need of the hour is for evangelicals to start practicing disobedience. So Murray first, and then Goldman.