SECTION 3: 9-11 56. WHAT NOT TO DO September 14, 2001

Suddenly, after the attack, all of our wealth and all of our freedoms are up for grabs, and not only by foreign terrorists, but by our own government and its uncritical cheerleaders. Is there a limit to how much liberty can be compromised in the name of security? How much spending Congress should authorize? How much money and credit the Federal Reserve should create? How much business can be regulated?

Apparently not. But why not? A government unconstrained by law, tradition, or public opinion is nothing short of despotic. Not everything can be justified in the name of punishment, prevention, and safety: not conscription, not the elimination of privacy, not killing innocents, and not the use of nuclear weapons that necessarily violate the tenets of just war. Yet one US senator, no less, has called for the death of innocents on grounds that terrorists don’t distinguish between military and civilian targets. In other words, we are being told to fight terrorism by becoming terrorists ourselves.

Robert Higgs, author of Crisis and Leviathan, has shown how government grows the most during times such as these. In a usual wartime situation, the government massively expands and then falls back only partially after it is over. This creates a ratchet effect that guarantees a relentless march of the state. Every new spending program creates a precedent said to apply in peacetime. How often have we heard calls for a “Marshall Plan” to solve this or that social issue?

The present circumstances are even worse than wartime, where at least there is a starting point and an ending point (though Clinton’s wars have clouded even this). A war against terrorism, already begun in the 1980s and so far spectacularly unsuccessful, promises to be perpetual because of the endless number of conceivable threats. We’ll never know if we are winning or losing the war since something as monstrously huge as the recent attack could happen anytime.

It is proposed that we be on permanent war alert, which means that we must permanently trade our liberty for a promised (but undelivered) security. Bush’s requested $20 billion, make that $40 billion and rising, for antiterrorist measures is just the beginning, but think for a moment of just how much money that is. That’s the annual budget of a very mature federal agency, more than twice the total spent by all the world’s citizens going to the movies, and more than the entire GDP of Panama and Slovenia combined.

The US government already spends nearly $10 billion and employs nearly 1,000 people to work on counterterrorism exclusively, and it has gained us nothing. Are we really supposed to believe that quadrupling this budget will somehow work to prevent future attacks? The money so far has done nothing but saddle the American people with more armed federal agents and invasions of privacy. It’s a sad commentary that many Americans, for now, say they are willing to shell out more in taxes and give up commercial freedoms. It is even sadder to note that the purchased security won’t actually be delivered.

So far we haven’t even been spared the commentator who pops his head up to observe, after a natural disaster, that at least the government-directed rebuilding effort will be good for the economy. One might think that the sheer scale of the losses would be too immense for that classic Keynesian fallacy to rear its head. But no: writing in Slate, Timothy Noah informs us that “we live in a very wealthy nation that responds to horrible disasters by spending large sums of money.” This spending will, he predicts, “provide a meaningful Keynesian stimulus to a national economy.”

Must we recount Frédéric Bastiat’s parable of the broken window? The story goes that a boy throws a rock through a store window, and everyone is justly sad. Suddenly, Timothy Noah’s nineteenth-century equivalent shows up to say, hey, this is actually great! Now the glazier will be paid to fix it, and he in turn will buy a suit, and the process will multiply until everyone is actually made better off. What this forgets is the alternative uses of the resources that are spent in rebuilding: the unseen costs of property destruction.

And speaking of unseen costs, what about the alternative uses that might have been made of the $40 billion (for now) to be spent on counterterrorism that will go to hiring more government employees to boss everyone around? This kind of spending multiplies the damage already done by the terrorists, destroying more wealth and channeling more resources from social needs into political ones.

There have been many other equally absurd actions, all of which amount to compromising our personal and commercial liberty. The first impulse of the government in all times of crisis is control and coercion. So it was no surprise that all planes, private and commercial, were forcibly grounded, including those carrying overnight packages. But this action has already bankrupted Midway Airlines, and others will follow in the United States and Britain. If it gets worse, so will the pressure to subsidize them.

New regulations are being imposed that will dramatically increase the costs associated with air travel, some of them (like the elimination of curbside check-ins) making no sense whatsoever. The presumption is that the airline industry itself has no incentive to prevent hijacking. Well, perhaps if airline crews had not been barred (decades ago) from carrying weapons, this never would have happened. Leave it to the government to prohibit owners of airlines from defending their own property (and customers) when it is most vulnerable and thus necessary.

Perhaps, too, if the airlines weren’t so busy obeying preposterous government demands (like asking every passenger if our bags have been with us the whole time) and otherwise doing things the federal way, they could have designed some serious antihijacking measures that didn’t also attack the paying customers. Government “security” crowds out real security provided in the commercial marketplace.

The coercion generated by the crisis first showed up in the harassment of gasoline retailers, who, trying to conserve resources in the face of a wildly gyrating spot-market price for gas, raised prices. To threaten them and investigate them gives us a clue into what government will do with its new powers: not go after difficult-to-find criminals, but the easy-to-find innocents who are just trying to make do.

Then there’s monetary policy, the means by which the government taxes when the legislative process seems too cumbersome. Thus the Federal Reserve injected $38 billion one day, another $70 billion the next, and established a $50 billion swap line with other central banks the next. Now that’s power. Not all of this new money will make its way into the economy; at least, that should be the hope. To destroy the purchasing power of the dollar in response to the destruction of the US financial district is a heck of a “response” to terrorism.

As for the draft, someone please explain how conscripting America’s young men and women into the military—forcibly taking them away from their jobs and schools—is going to prevent more attacks like we saw September 11. It’s a power grab, of course. The government is using this occasion to do what it could only have dreamed of doing last week.

Civil liberties are already being curtailed. The government’s invasive “carnivore” software is being shopped around the nation’s leading Internet Service Providers, to permit the feds to spy on all email communications. Until now, the ISPs resisted. But in the aftermath of the new Bush “antiterrorism” act passed by the Senate, they will not be allowed to say no.

As regards the mainstream print media, they are their usual selves: allowing their pages to be effectively enlisted in the war effort without complaint. Hence, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are both whooping it up for bombing anything and everything, on the theory that yet another display of rampant imperialism will deter future attacks and not actually have the reverse effect. By pursuing this course, we are made less secure, of course.

What, then, should the government do in this time of crisis? Less, not more. It was the US foreign policy of unyielding empire that incited these attacks in the first place. It’s hard to say when the turning point was. It might have been 1990, when the United States gave tacit approval to Iraq to invade Kuwait and then bombed Iraq back into the stone age for doing so. It might have been the war on Serbia, or the bombs in Sudan, or the destruction of the Chinese embassy, or any number of other foreign adventures.

Most likely, the turning point was May 12, 1996, when Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations, explained to Lesley Stahl of CBS that 500,000 dead Iraqi children, killed by US sanctions, was morally justified to get Saddam. “We think the price is worth it,” were her exact words, words that were mostly unreported here but which rang out throughout the Arab world. She was then made Secretary of State. That was five years ago. We continue to bomb Iraq, often on a daily basis, and the sanctions are still on. We should not do unto others what we do not want them to do unto us.

There’s never a good time to give up liberty. But when everyone else is calling for despotism to fight despotism, it’s the best time to stand up and say: We will not be moved. We need more, not less, liberty.

57.
FORGOTTEN VICTIMS OF 9-11
August 2002

In all discussion of 9-11, one year later, much attention is given to the firefighters, police, and emergency workers whose services, as employees of the public sector, were called on that day. You may hear about the innocents who died on the airplanes that were hijacked and used as missiles. The people you won’t hear about are those who were specifically targeted and murdered.

They were, after all, working for the private sector. They were traders and merchants, people working in the field of economic enterprise. In an ironic tribute to their value, these people were targeted because the terrorists hoped to cripple the US economy. It would appear that the terrorists understood something that even our own elites do not understand.

If you find that observation shocking, consider the current campaign against business. Though Republican, the Bush administration has followed the FDR model in subtly and not-so-subtly blaming the private sector, specifically those in finance and accounting associated with large enterprises, for the current recession and the gutting of pensions that resulted from falling stock prices.

These people have been scapegoated for the downturn in the business cycle, just as the terrorists scapegoated the New York financial sector for what they see as the belligerence of US foreign policy. Not understanding the resilience of American enterprise, the terrorists hoped to put a big dent in American prosperity.

US government elites, however, have for a year attacked the same class of people while overestimating the extent to which financial markets can be hamstrung, hindered, and harassed without consequence.

True, the campaign has so far been limited to those individuals and institutions that can readily be accused of “fraud” even though most of the issues under consideration are complicated matters of accounting principles that no jury is competent to adjudicate. Make no mistake, however, the merchant class as a class is under fire, just as it has been throughout history during periods of economic downturn.

Congress, of all institutions, has hauled business executives in front of them to accuse them without trial, asking questions so asinine that they can’t possibly be answered with a straight face. Greenspan himself has blamed the “infectious greed” of the business class for the downturn in the markets.

Most outrageously, Bush has drawn an analogy between the 9-11 terrorists and the American business class! That was the subtext of his remark that “In the aftermath of September 11, we refused to allow fear to undermine our economy and we will not allow fraud to undermine it either.” Thus did he promise “No more easy money for corporate criminals. Just hard time. ...This law says to every dishonest corporate leader, you’ll be exposed and punished. The era of low standards and false profits is over.”

But look at the names of the businesses that suffered destruction and death in the 9-11 attacks. They were Deutsche Bank, Fiduciary Trust, Kemper Insurance, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Cantor Fitzgerald, Oppenheimer Funds, Credit Suisse First Boston, and others involved in banking, finance, insurance, accounting, management, and the craft of trading generally.

These are the companies that invest our savings, provide insurance, trade currencies, and coordinate prices across borders and markets. They are not perfect. They are not all-knowing. And during this bear market, many of them have lost money. But it is they who take the risk to find entrepreneurial opportunities in markets of all sorts. Even today, as in ancient times, their craft is wrongly considered ignoble and perhaps even inherently dishonest. And yet, they are the people who work daily to sustain prosperity and improve the lot of mankind.

After they were so cruelly attacked on 9-11, the federal government stepped in to make two great promises, both of which turned out to be lies. First, the feds assured us that they would bring to justice those who brought those attacks about. They have not done so. They have violated liberties and stepped up Leviathan, but Osama and his co-conspirators remain at large, and one wonders whether the government prefers it this way in order to keep us all constantly afraid.

The second great promise the government made was that it would protect us and American prosperity from further attacks. And true to form, the same people have spent the last year attacking business, casting aspersions on traders and those in the financial industry, rounding up executives, and deliberately obscuring the difference between boom-market accounting and outright fraud.

Let us not forget that all this began with a multiple hijacking. And what has the government done to prevent that in the future? It has vastly increased the inconveniences for average travelers, which has in turn bankrupted several airline companies (also private enterprises). These companies are still not allowed to arm their pilots to protect their planes—an entire year later! Meanwhile, the United States is engaged in a foreign policy that might as well be designed to incite further attacks.

What lessons have we learned since 9-11? As usual, nothing. What should we have learned? First, that enterprise has its enemies and these enemies have no hesitation about using violence to achieve their ends, whether that violence comes from terrorism, the Justice Department, or the sidearm of the officially empowered regulator. Second, we should have learned that we cannot trust the government to give us justice or provide us security.

During this anniversary, you will hear many tributes and much discussion of the meaning of it all. Keep track, if you can, of all the times when you hear mention of the occupations of those who died in the World Trade Center, the vocations to which they dedicated their lives. I wonder whether you will find any examples at all.

And yet it remains true that those who understand the contribution of enterprise to civilization must mourn the lost lives of those who worked in the World Trade Center. We grieve for their lost vocations as well, and we owe it to them to appreciate anew their contribution to society.

58.
COUNTERTERRORISM (BY GOVERNMENT) IS IMPOSSIBLE
March 2004

At last the topic of 9-11 has shifted onto productive ground. Thanks to the efforts of former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, some thought is being put into the government failures behind the attacks. “Your government failed you,” he says. Precisely, and in many more ways than he or anyone else at these hearings is willing to say.

Here is the problem. The core failure goes way beyond anything the current government managers—however inept, distracted, or corrupt—can correct. If you tell your dog to make you dinner, for example, you can observe later that the dog failed to do so, and have great regrets about this. But what you learn from this experience and how you proceed are the crucial questions. Does the dog need better tools, more scoldings, and a professional trainer? Better to observe that the dog is not the right one for the job. In the same way, the government is not the right one for the job of providing security for the American people.

The conclusion of the commission investigating the policies leading up to 9-11 will be the same as from every government commission: a recommendation that the government should have done more and should do more in the future. Both Clarke and his critics presume that the war on terrorism is something that the government can fight, and the debate is over whether the government had done enough prior to 9-11 to sort through intelligence findings, name al Qaeda as the key problem, and anticipate the attacks.

Bush’s critics are thrilled to hear Clarke restate what has long been known: the Bush administration was obsessed with Iraq to the exclusion of the radical Islamic threat.

There can be no question about this administration’s Iraq fixation. The Bush regime had it in for Iraq for a whole range of reasons, from personal vendettas to oil to regional political issues and probably a few others we are not privy to. It certainly cries out for explanation why this poor country, ruled by a man the US government had long backed, suffering under sanctions for a decade after an unjustified war, should be invaded and occupied even though it represented no threat to the United States.

Clarke believes Iraq was a distraction, and he is surely right. He also believes that more should have been done sooner to counter genuine terrorist threats, that the attacks on Afghanistan should have taken place earlier, that Bin Laden should have been taken out earlier, that the military and the spooks should have taken more liberties in zapping the bad guys before the bad guys zapped us.

The solution implied in this approach is something no American should favor. It implies not less warmongering but merely a different form of imperialism, focused on one country instead of another, this set of intelligence data instead of that, while not even addressing the question of why the United States might be the subject of attacks at all. It is even possible that more Clarkeian-style counterterrorism would have inspired more attacks sooner, but we’ll never know since there are no controlled experiments in the relationship between politics and the real world.

And despite all the partisan wrangling about the Clarke message and the hearings in general, the upshot is a message that perfectly accords with something that every bureaucrat and politician wants to hear: that government needs a freer hand, that it did not do enough, that it needs more resources, that it should not be hamstrung in any way. What are government commissions for, except to announce such findings and create a cover for Congress and the White House (whoever happens to occupy it) to demand ever more money and power?

The real question to ask is whether it could have been any other way. Say the US had killed Bin Laden. Cheney is of course correct that this would not have prevented 9-11. Even if it had, there would have been other attacks of a different sort. Or say the US had entirely destroyed al Qaeda (whatever that would mean): Albright is correct that the ideology behind al Qaeda’s existence is still everywhere to be found because it represents not a peculiar conspiracy by a few, but a response to US policy in general.

The government can spend many years and billions of dollars preventing attacks that have already occurred by doing things it might have wished it had done years or decades ago. But note that there has been no discussion at all of the actual policies that everyone knows inspired the attacks and made them easier to carry out.

Just to mention a few: the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, the sanctions against Iraq, the continuing intervention in the ever-lasting Israel-Palestine conflict, the propping up of secular dictatorships all over the Arab world, the raising up and funding of Islamic radicals to counter Soviet influence in Afghanistan, and the regulatory prohibitions in the United States against permitting airlines to manage their own security issues. The US government cannot pursue all these policies and then react in shock when it turns out that some people exploit them with violent intent.

Many observers of these policies predicted that something along these lines would take place. You don’t need to be a “counterterrorism” bureaucrat to see it. The response to the events of 9-11 around the world was very telling. While the world felt awful for America, most everyone (except Americans) believed that something like this was inevitable. As for who was responsible, the enemies of the United States have become countless. The government’s response was to make ever more enemies, which is what the recent US policy in Iraq has done.

In other words, the only real way to prevent terrorism is to do less in the way of government policy and more in the way of private provision and trade, which would be far easier to do if the warfare state would stop fomenting trouble all around the world.

How can the market provide security? This gets us into another huge area, and nothing I could write in a column would fully convince anyone of such a radical thesis, so let me merely refer you to the book, The Myth of National Defense, edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, which shows that security is not a unique good that must be provided by the state. (Even if you don’t own it, there is no good excuse not to read it: mises.org/etexts/defensemyth.pdf.)

Let me mention just one issue that has impressed many people who are following the hearings: that of information overload. There are so many bits of intelligence data that are flying in and out of government offices, how can policy makers possibly assess the relative seriousness of various threats, much less prepare coherent responses to them?

Contrary to what the government implies, this is not a problem unique to the public sector. A typical multinational corporation faces an information problem just as serious: data flying from every country concerning a million different topics and conditions, every one of which could have a profound effect on profitability the very day it is received.

How do corporations deal with the problem of information overload? They rely on market signaling and the decentralized planning of millions of private individuals to provide guidance, and they depend heavily on the minute-by-minute feedback mechanism as provided by prices. The government has no such institutions at its disposal, neither to convey information, nor assess its accuracy, nor provide ongoing feedback on how it responds to conditions.

The lesson we should take from 9-11 is that the government cannot protect us. It is utterly inept, and no changes in policy as recommended by a commission or present or ex-government officials are going to change that.

59.
AN INEVITABLE BOG
November 2001

Let’s just say the postal system were private, and delivering packages of anthrax to government offices. Imagine, then, how dramatically different the spin would be. The carrier companies would be catching hell for not having the proper security measures in place, and for obviously “putting profits ahead of safety.” All political pressure would be for nationalizing the mails. Surely this is the only way to assure total protection!

But, of course, the post office has always been nationalized, before Nixon renamed it an “independent” government-chartered faux-corporation to lose more money than ever. Has government involvement in the mails protected anyone from infection? No. Does the post office have any system in place to assure its customers it is not delivering packages laced with disease? No.

If the mails were private, companies would compete on speed, price, and even safety. You might be loath to open anything from a disreputable company. But under the present system, there is only one supplier. On certain types of packages, consumers have no choice but to send and receive using the government’s service, which offers no guarantee of anything.

Precisely because it is a government operation, the post office isn’t on the hot seat, just as the government’s failure to provide security wasn’t blamed for 9-11. There’s this absurd presumption that government is always better at providing security than the market, and when the government proves to be terrible, the presumption is that any system would have failed under the circumstances, but that government failed less than others would have. What a leap of faith!

Here’s a concrete example of market-provided security—based in the use and defense of private property—that relates directly to 9-11. On July 6, 1954, back before the FAA decided to disarm pilots, an armed teenager forced his way onto an American Airlines DC-6, with 58 passengers on board, on the tarmac at Cleveland airport. When it became clear that he had every intention of hijacking the plane, the captain, William Bonnell of Fort Worth, Texas, took out his little .38-caliber Colt and blasted him. (The story appears in the Houston Chronicle.)

The story had no real impact at the time, just as robberies prevented by private gun ownership never make the news. That’s the way the market provision of security works: it means routine checking for every contingency. We lock our houses and cars even when we feel no grave threat that we will be robbed. We have alarm systems on our houses, maybe only because it means lower insurance rates. Even grocery stores use monitors in parking lots and store aisles, not because the management believes thieves and hoodlums are everywhere, but just to be on the safe side.

That’s the market at work, which is not to say that market provision of security is perfect. The key difference between it and government is that it responds to violations of property and to the threat of such violations with proactive measures. It has every incentive to do so. The most the government can do is to keep issuing its preposterous demands for us to go on “the highest state of alert”—with no other information and no attempt to assess the reliability of whatever “intelligence” they claim to have.

[Note: What the heck is this “highest state of alert” anyway? To hear the Justice Department talk, you’d think the entire nation had been through drills and learned all the proper responses. Instead of helping us prepare for attacks, then, the government denies us information that might actually help (if such information exists).]

Bizarre is the only way to describe the proposals to put government in charge of security at airports. If the post office has no means of preventing the delivery of disease, and the government’s jails can’t keep out drugs, why would anyone believe the feds can improve the already federally supervised security at airports? The only real benefit will be for public-sector unions, who will recruit more dues-paying members, and for those who want to acculturate us to more regimentation.

Not only has the government botched the provision of security; it has botched the war. Whether it’s bombing Red Cross buildings and mud huts with civilians inside, inspiring people to emigrate to Afghanistan in order to fight, or failing to find Bin Laden (or even cough up indisputable evidence that he was involved), the war has so far been a typical government failure—not unlike the War on Drugs.

No surprise that headlines in the US and the UK this week observe the same downtrend in public support for the war effort. Though support is still high, majorities are no longer willing to say that the war is going well, or predict that it will end well. As the stories in the New York Times and the London Observer have emphasized, the key is not the raw polling numbers but the trend, which suggests that public support is weakening.

Bin Laden is still at large, for one thing. And the status of the other nine on the FBI’s “most wanted” list doesn’t inspire confidence. Many of them have been at large for years, right here in the good old US of A. What makes anyone believe that the same government that can’t catch its own fugitives is going to nab characters like Bin Laden in some godforsaken hell between the border of China and the Caspian Sea?

There are always those who say that the reason for the failure is that government isn’t going far enough. We didn’t spend enough on welfare for the War on Poverty, we haven’t cracked enough skulls during the War on Drugs, we haven’t given public schools enough money in the War on Illiteracy, and we haven’t dropped enough bombs or used enough troops in the War on Terror.

In same way, after 72 years of Soviet socialism, you can still find ex-apparatchiks who say that socialism was never really given a chance. Some people will never give up their faith in power.

60.
THE MEANING OF SECURITY
September 2004

Let’s think about the word security, which has been in the news lately because the Bush administration seeks a major shift in the way funds are spent in Iraq. It wants $3 billion moved from spending on reconstruction to spending on “security.” There’s a political science lesson in that usage.

The reason for the shift, of course, is the obvious unraveling of anything resembling civilization in Iraq: bombings, killings, mini-wars are everywhere. Whole regions of Iraq are lost to US control, and not even Baghdad is holding. Of the $18 billion Congress allocated for public works, the Bush administration argues that it makes sense to divert some to bring a measure of public stability to the country.

But what are we really talking about when we say “security”? It is money taken from you and me to be spent to force the Iraqi population to submit to the puppet government that rules only because of the United States. It is money to pay for more police, weapons, bullets, bombs, spying, arresting, torturing, jailing, maiming, and killing.

The theory is that more fear and more fear-inspiring bloodshed will tame the guerrillas and stop them from plotting more bombings, shootings, killings. The money will buy compliance, and pay the bills of those who use force to try to bring it about. Many people would be happy for an end to violence, to be sure, but the primary purpose is the protection of the state from rebels.

Submission and compliance: that is what is meant by the term security in the state’s lexicon. It is an interesting choice of words. Its use in public life dates at least to the advent of Social Security, a tax scheme that promises to put you on welfare in your old age in exchange for paying 14 percent of your income to support current retirees who constitute the wealthiest demographic slice of the American population. Even in this case, the term security meant compliance, as shown by the tendency of recipients to back ever more redistribution.

Now we have the Department of Homeland Security, a gargantuan agency that administers foreign and domestic spying, sends hither swarms of agents to harass us at airports, conduct drills in the event that the government decides that martial law is the only option, and generally suppress any and all signs of insurrection wherever they might appear. Here too the term security means submission, control, compliance, obedience, and stability for the state.

Who is this security trying to secure? We are told it is for our own benefit. It is government that makes us secure from terrible threats. And yet, if we look closely, we can see that the main beneficiary of security is the state itself.

We all understand this intuitively. Let’s say you know that someone is after you—an ex-spouse, for example—and threatens your very life. Would you call the Department of Homeland Security and expect a response? No, the DHS is there to protect the state, as evidenced by the comparatively energetic response that a threat to the president’s life would elicit.

Of course, there is a need and demand for authentic security. We all seek it. We lock our doors, deter criminals with alarms, arm ourselves in case the alarms don’t do it, prepare for the worst in the case of natural disaster, save for the future, and construct our professional lives in ways that minimize the chance of disadvantageous turns of events. This is what security means to us in the real world.

It is not unexpected that the state would seek the same thing: security not for us but for itself and its employees. The state has a special reason to desire security: its agents are always a minority of the population, funded by eating out their substance, and its rule is always vulnerable. The more control it seeks over a population, the more its agents are wise to watch their backs.

Where does that leave the rest of us in our demand for security? In the world of ideas, a vigorous debate is taking place about the extent to which private enterprise is capable of providing security, not only as a supplement but as a full replacement for state-provided security.

Advocates of fully privatized security point out that in the real world, most of the security we enjoy is purchased in the private sector. Vast networks of food distribution protect against starvation, private agents guard our homes, insurance companies provide compensation in the event of unexpected misfortune, and the locks and guns and gated communities provided by private enterprise do the bulk of work for our security in the real world.

In our community, we spent days preparing for what was expected to be the terrible hurricane Ivan. It didn’t do much damage here, but in all the preparations, this much is clear: no one counted on the government to do anything to protect us. And no one counts on the government to do any reconstruction either. We depend entirely on our own efforts, while post-disaster clean up would have been done entirely by private contract.

The message of this school of thought is that liberty and security (real security) are not opposites such that one must choose between them. They go together. Liberty is the essence of the free enterprise system that provides for all our material needs, that helps us overcome the uncertainties and contingencies of life.

As for the public agencies, how do they act in a crisis? They are reduced to sending out warnings to “stay alert” and otherwise blowing big alarms as if no one can look outside their windows, listen to the radio, or check the web. This is pretty much all Homeland Security does with its laughable system of color-coded alerts. They also order us to leave our homes, search us, and threaten us with arrest if we protest.

The truth is that government has less ability to protect us in an emergency than we have to protect ourselves. And despite all the propaganda you hear about brave public workers, the same was true during 9-11. The bottom line is that it represented the greatest failure of state security in a generation. That is the real lesson from that day.

Iraq too demonstrates a lesson concerning public and private security. When it is politically feasible, the high muck-a-mucks in Iraq choose to use private security firms to protect themselves. This was the major undertaking of its mercenaries when the US civilian government was running matters. How ironic that even the state chooses private contractors when it can. When it seeks genuine security, it too buys it on the free market.

Americans have something in common with Iraqis: experience has told us that when the government promises to bring us security, it means only that it wants more control over our lives so that the state can enjoy longevity and peace at our expense. The real choice isn’t between liberty and security; it is between our security and the state’s.

61.
A TRIBUTE TO TRADE
Setepmber 11, 2001

[This column is dedicated to the memory of the friends and associates of the Mises Institute who died at the hands of the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center.]

The sight of New York City’s twin World Trade Center towers falling to the ground, the result of an act of deliberate aggression, seems to symbolize two points that seem entirely forgotten today: the magnificent contribution that commerce makes to civilization, and just how vulnerable it is to its enemies. If the enemies of capitalist commerce are hell-bent on the destruction of the source of wealth, there are few means available to prevent it.

From the two towers soaring 1,300 feet above the city, a person on the 110th floor enjoyed a panoramic view stretching 55 miles: a broad vision of human civilization. Much more important for the flowering of civilization is what went on there: entrepreneurship, creativity, exchange, service, all of it peaceful, all of it to the benefit of mankind.

What kind of service? Germany’s Deutsche Bank occupied four floors. The financial firm of Morgan Stanley took 20 floors, and at the time of the explosion, the firm was hosting a meeting for the 400 members of the National Association of Business Economists. Fred Alger Management, a training ground for young traders and stock analysts, occupied the 93rd floor. Bond dealers for Cantor Fitzgerald took up floors 101 through 105. Mass Mutual was on the 33rd floor.

Fiduciary Trust, a wonderful money management company, employed 500 people who worked on five floors at the very top of the building. Other companies there included Network Plus, Harris Beach & Wilcox, Oppenheimer Funds, Bank of America, Kemper Insurance, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Sun Microsystems.

Here were the brokers who invest our savings, trying their best to channel resources to their most profitable uses. Here were insurance companies, which provide the valuable service of securing our lives and property against accidents. Here were many retailers, who risk their own livelihoods to provide us with goods and services we as consumers desire. Here were lenders, lawyers, agents, and architects whose contributions are so essential to our daily lives.

Some of us knew men and women who are now dead. But most of them will remain anonymous to us. Whether we knew them or not, they were our benefactors nonetheless, because in the commercial society, the actions of entrepreneurs benefit everyone, in mostly imperceptible ways. They all contribute to the stock of capital on which prosperity itself is based. They work daily to coordinate the use of resources to eliminate waste and inefficiency, and make products and services available that improve our everyday lives.

Think especially of the remarkable people in that place who facilitated international trade. They daily accomplished the seemingly impossible. Faced with a world of more than two hundred countries, and hundreds more languages and dialects, with as many currencies and legal regimes, and thousands of local cultural differences, and billions of consumers, they found ways to make peaceful exchange possible. They looked for and seized on every opportunity that presented itself to enable human cooperation.

No government has been able to accomplish anything this remarkable. It is a miracle made possible by commerce, and by those who undertake the burden of making it happen.

We often hear platitudes about the brotherhood of man. But you don’t see it at the United Nations or at the summits of governments. There you see conflicts, resolved usually by the use of other people’s money taken by force. But at the World Trade Center, the brotherhood of man was an everyday affair.

It didn’t matter if you were a small rug merchant in Nepal, a fisherman off the Chinese coast, or a machine manufacturer in the American Midwest, the people who worked here put you in contact with others who valued what you did and what you could give to others. Consent and choice, not conflict and coercion, were at the core of everything. Their watchword was contract, not hegemony.

True, the objective of all these merchants and traders may have been their own personal betterment, but the effect of their work was to serve not just themselves but everyone else as well. Because the beneficial effects of trade are not just local but national, and not just national but international, the inhabitants of these buildings were in many ways the benefactors of all of us personally. The blessings we experienced from their work came to us every time we used a credit card, withdrew money from the bank, bought from a chain store, or ordered something online.

In short, these people were producers. Frédéric Bastiat said of them: they are the people who

create out of nothing the satisfactions that sustain and beautify life, so that an individual or a people is enabled to multiply these satisfactions indefinitely without inflicting privation of any kind on other men or other peoples.

Yes, they earned profits, but for the most part, their work went unrewarded. It was certainly unappreciated in the culture at large. They are not called public servants. They are not praised for their sacrifices to the common good. Popular culture treated these “money centers” as sources of greed and corruption. We are told that these people are the cause of environmental destruction and labor exploitation, that the “globalists” inside the World Trade Center were conspiring not to create but to destroy. Even after all the destruction wrought by socialism, capitalists must still bear the brunt of envy and hatred.

The impulse to hate the entrepreneurial class shows up in myriad ways. We see it when franchise restaurants are bombed, as they frequently are in France. In the United States, the government works to “protect” land from being used by commerce, and increasing numbers of our laws are built on the presumption that the business class is out to get us, not serve us. The business pages more often report on the villainy, rather then the victories, of enterprise. Or take a look at the typical college bookstore, where students are still required to read Marx and the Marxians rather than Mises and the Misesians.

All the enemies of capitalism act as if its elimination would have no ill consequences for our lives. In the classroom, on television, at the movies, we are continually presented a picture of what a perfect world of bliss we would enjoy if we could just get rid of those who make a living through owning, speculating, and amassing wealth.

For hundreds of years, in fact, the intellectual classes have demanded the expropriation and even the extermination of capitalistic expropriators. Since ancient times, the merchant and his trade have been considered ignoble. In fact, their absence would reduce us to barbarism and utter poverty. Even now, the destruction of the property and people at the once-mighty towers of the world has already impoverished us in more ways than we will ever know.

Those who understand economics and celebrate the creative power of commerce understand this higher truth, which is why we defend the market economy at every opportunity. That is why we seek to eliminate the barriers that governments and anticapitalists have erected against the businessmen’s freedom.

We see them as the defenders of civilization, and so we seek to guard their interests in every way we know how.

We mourn the lost lives of those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, which are no more. We mourn their lost vocations. We owe it to them to appreciate anew their contribution to society.

As Mises wrote,

No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.