The Occidental Quarterly-Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

 By Brenton Sanderson

Free to Lose: Jews, Whites, and Libertarianism

 The Occidental Quarterly

Editor’s Note:
The essay below, from the Fall 2011 issue of  The Occidental Quarterly, is one that every High School and College student should read. It is short, concise, scholarly and has exceptional explanatory value!

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The political philosophy of libertarianism has recently attracted a wave of support in the United States among the mainly White Tea Party movement, and the supporters of Ron and Rand Paul. The catalyst has been the perceived failings of the Obama administration’s response to the global financial crisis and subsequent recession: a response characterized by an ideologically-driven expansion of government ownership, spending, and regulation of the US economy, with a corresponding decline in individual liberty. To espouse free market libertarianism in this context seems a rational corrective to Obama’s neo-Marxist agenda, given the libertarian commitment to the maximization of individual liberty and minimisation of the state – at a time when a bloated dysfunctional state seems to lie at the heart of the problems facing White people.

While there is a spectrum of libertarianism that straddles the left-right binary of contemporary politics, in today’s world, libertarianism is primarily associated with the commitment to market liberalism that was the hallmark of the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economics. A watershed moment in the history of post-war libertarianism was the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to the libertarian theorist Friedrich von Hayek in 1974. For the preceding thirty years the economic theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes held sway throughout the West. Keynesianism, involving state intervention in the economy through deficit spending to stimulate output and employment, is based on the idea that governments can and should act to eliminate the worst vicissitudes of the business cycle. Through manipulation of the federal budget a government can, theoretically, engineer economic outcomes.

Keynesianism emerged as a midway position between free-market libertarianism and socialist state-planning. However, the stagflation crisis that emerged with the OPEC oil crisis of the early seventies threw the post-war Keynesian consensus into turmoil. It set the scene for the re-emergence of political support for free-market libertarianism, and ultimately for the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US — and, subsequently, their legions of political imitators throughout the world. At the forefront of this renaissance of libertarian thought, alongside Hayek, was a group of Jewish intellectuals whose ideas and advocacy were key to this achievement, and to libertarianism’s subsequent and enduring appeal. The most prominent and influential of these figures were Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand.

It is one of the seeming paradoxes of political history in the past century that Jews have been prominent as theorists and activists for ostensibly opposing ideological forces: socialist collectivism on the one hand, and free-market libertarianism (and neoconservatism) on the other. However, this paradox begins to fade when viewed through the lens of Professor Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. According to this theory, Judaism emerged historically as a strategy to promote the economic welfare and reproductive success of Jews as a genetically distinct population. In Culture of Critique MacDonald examines a range of twentieth-century intellectual movements that had a decisive Jewish involvement and concludes that they share a common tacit agenda in promoting the group evolutionary interests of Jews — often at the expense of non-Jews. Accordingly, they can be accurately regarded as Jewish intellectual movements that are, in reality, post-Enlightenment manifestations of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A major focus in Culture of Critique is on the role of Jews in the formulation and advocacy of Marxist and cultural-Marxist ideologies, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.
My purpose here is not to determine whether libertarianism is, like the Frankfurt School, a Jewish intellectual movement. This requires more extensive treatment than can be given here. Here I will examine, firstly, why free-market libertarian ideas have held a strong attraction to a prominent subset of Jewish intellectuals; and secondly, I will discuss the practical effect of libertarian economic and social policies on European-derived populations.

JEWS AND LIBERTARIANISM
 
In a speech to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1972 entitled Capitalism and the Jews, Milton Friedman, perhaps the pivotal figure in the history of modern libertarianism after Hayek, explored the seeming paradox that, despite the Jews having thrived under capitalism, they had played a central role in the formulation and advocacy of leftist political ideologies. He observed that, despite the Jews as a people having done very well under capitalist societies,

“for the past century, the Jews have been a stronghold of anti-capitalist sentiment. From Karl Marx through Leon Trotsky to Herbert Marcuse, a sizable fraction of the revolutionary anti-capitalist literature has been authored by Jews. Communist parties in all countries, including the party that achieved revolution in Russia but also present-day Communist parties in Western countries, and especially in the U.S., have been run and manned to a disproportionate extent by Jews—though I hasten to add that only a tiny fraction of Jews have ever been members of the Communist party. Jews have been equally active in the less revolutionary socialist movements in all countries, as intellectuals generating socialist literature, as active participants in leadership, and as members.”

Friedman finds this somewhat difficult to reconcile with the fact that “the Jews owe an enormous debt to capitalism.” It is obvious that, as an intelligent and capable people, the Jews are always likely to thrive in the competitive context of the unfettered market. Accordingly, it seems apparent to Friedman that the real enemy to Jewish interests (and the interests of other able minority groups) are the barriers to entry and anti-competitive practices that, in various historical instances, have restricted their full participation in the economic affairs of a nation. For Friedman, it is axiomatic that

“the feature of capitalism that has benefited the Jews has, of course, been competition. Wherever there is a monopoly, whether it be private or governmental, there is room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly—whether these criteria be color of skin, religion, national origin or what not. Where there is free competition, only performance counts. The market is color blind. No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or atheist; by Whites or blacks. Any miller who wishes to express his personal prejudices by buying only from preferred groups is at a competitive disadvantage, since he is keeping himself from buying from the cheapest source. He can express his prejudice, but he will have to do so at his own expense, accepting a lower monetary income than he could otherwise earn.”

Friedman was influenced by Ludwig von Mises, who expressed a similar view in 1944. Identifying why free market capitalism is good for Jews and other minorities he writes:

“In an unhampered market society there is no legal discrimination against anybody. Everyone has the right to obtain the place within the social system in which he can successfully work and make a living. The consumer is free to discriminate, provided that he is ready to pay the cost. A Czech or a Pole may prefer to buy at higher cost in a shop owned by a Slav instead of buying cheaper and better in a shop owned by a German. An anti-Semite may forego being cured of an ugly disease by the employment of the ‘Jewish’ drug Salvarsan and have recourse to a less efficacious remedy. In this arbitrary power consists what economists call consumer’s sovereignty.”

Another celebrated Jewish libertarian, who nevertheless rejected the label, was Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum). While Rand and her theory of Objectivism have never been widely respected in academia she has exerted an enormous popular influence through her writings. In her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) she also made the link between the extent of free markets and the relative absence of discrimination against minorities in a society. She writes that

“no political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism. A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany — and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

The foregoing statements, each framed in the language of ethical universalism, clearly disclose the chief attraction of free-market libertarianism to Jews like Friedman, von Mises and Rand. Free markets, they affirm, advance the interests of Jews through imposing an impersonal economic discipline on non-Jews through which their ethnocentricity and anti-Semitic prejudice can be circumvented. That this proposition contains a great deal of truth is confirmed, I would contend, by the historical record: Jews have indeed prospered under the conditions of free market capitalism among often hostile majority European-derived populations.
It may have occurred to the reader, however, that while Friedman, von Mises and Rand opposed the existence of monopolies that provided “room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly,” the reality is that Jews, even in the freest of markets, are notorious for developing and using ethnic monopolies in precisely this fashion. Indeed this is a major theme of MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone where he observes that from “the standpoint of the group, it was always more important to maximize the resource flow from the non-Jewish community to the Jewish community, rather than to allow individual Jews to maximize their interests at the expense of the Jewish community.”

The massive extent of Jewish nepotism in their business dealings is so exhaustively documented (very frequently by Jews themselves) as to be beyond dispute. Such is the rarity of instances where Jews use other Jews in a purely instrumental manner that they are cause for great shock and trauma within the Jewish community (witness the Madoff affair). Given this, it seems to me that while, as Friedman, von Mises and Rand assert, the free market may work efficiently to hinder ethnocentric discrimination among Whites (a group that MacDonald characterizes as, owing to their evolutionary history, strongly predisposed to individualism), the hyper-ethnocentrism of the Jews (and the Chinese) predispose them to transcend this “rational” discipline im- posed by the free market. MacDonald makes the point that the propensity of these groups to engage in “tribal economics” involving high levels of within-group economic cooperation and patronage confers on these groups “an extraordinarily powerful competitive advantage against individual strategies.”
Accordingly, the free-market libertarian agenda, when promoted in the context of a society that is multi-racial, and where some racial groups exceed Whites in the degree of their ethnocentricity, may not promote the group evolutionary interests of Whites in enhancing their access to resources and reproductive success. The truth of this proposition is confirmed, I would submit, by the tendency of European governments through history to impose laws barring Jews from many industries and professions. That such laws were so widespread, and deemed so necessary, is surely indicative of an awareness, borne of experience, of the tendency of Jews to adopt a racial collectivist strategy in competition to the individualistic strategies of the majority Europeans — and that this would invariably result in Jewish market dominance, and concomitant outbreaks of anti-Semitism. That such restrictions were rendered less effective by their inconsistent application across the political patchwork of European jurisdictions through history was regarded by Friedman as a saving grace for Jewish populations. He noted that

“Throughout the nearly two thousand years of the Diaspora, Jews were repeatedly discriminated against, restricted in the activities they could undertake, on occasion expelled en masse, as in 1492 from Spain, and often the object of the extreme hostility of the peoples among whom they lived. They were able nonetheless to exist because of the absence of a totalitarian state, so that there were always some market elements, some activities open to them to enter. In particular, the fragmented political structure and the numerous separate sovereignties meant that international trade and finance in particular escaped close control, which is why Jews were so prominent in this area.
It is no accident that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the two most totalitarian societies in the past two thousand years (modern China perhaps excepted), also offer the most extreme examples of official and effective anti-Semitism…If we come to more recent time, Jews have flourished most in those countries in which competitive capitalism had the greatest scope: Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Britain and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — a case that is particularly pertinent when that period is compared with the Hitler period.”

Agreeing with the thesis that free markets have been good for Jews, Jerry Muller, in his recently published Capitalism and the Jews (2010) observes that when Jews have been allowed to compete with Non-Jews on equal terms, they have always done disproportionately well. Nevertheless, this economic success has been cause for both pride and embarrassment to Jews. It has prompted some anti-Semites to (erroneously) condemn capitalism as inherently Jewish. For the left, meanwhile, the reality of differential group achievement under conditions of legal (and assumed biological) equality is an embarrassment and a disgrace. The left have learned to hide their embarrassment under the intellectual fig leaf of “White racism.”

WHITES AND LIBERTARIANISM
 
It seems evident from the foregoing that, the only time that Whites will be acting in their own evolutionary self-interest in embracing the free-market libertarian agenda will be when they either live in a racially homogeneous society where their group interests are not imperilled by the utility-maximizing behavior of individuals; or in a multi-racial society where competing racial groups do not exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism, or exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism but lack the native endowment of intellect to capitalize on this by effectively employing altruistic group strategies in competition with individualistic Whites.

The consequence of this, I would argue, is that the realization of the free-market libertarian agenda is likely to disadvantage Whites in a society with significant Ashkenazi Jewish and East-Asian populations. Such societies certainly include the contemporary United States and most other Western nations. In contrast, experience has shown that other racial groups, with their relatively lower mean IQs, despite their comparatively higher levels of ethnocentrism, are unlikely to out-compete Whites in the context of a free market economy. These groups, however, present an evolutionary threat to Whites of an entirely different order: with their comparatively high birth rates, crime rates, and levels of welfare-dependency involving the large-scale transfer of resources away from White communities.
If White ethnocentrism could be enhanced sufficiently to prompt Whites to adopt cohesive group strategies on a large scale (i.e., strategies that involve some controls on individual behavior—a form of altruism), then the economic playing field could be leveled sufficiently to allow more effective competition with Jews. However, given that Ashkenazi Jews have significantly higher mean IQs than Whites (particularly with regard to verbal IQ, which is a strong predictor of commercial aptitude); they are probably still likely to generally out-compete Whites in such a hypothetical conflict of racial group altruistic strategies. Nevertheless, the large-scale adoption of altruistic group strategies, even if offering only a partial improvement in the relative economic welfare of Whites compared to other racial groups, would be worthwhile.

However, a major barrier to Whites adopting altruistic group strategies are the ideologies that dominate the climate of opinion (especially in education) in Western nations today, some of which are explored by MacDonald in Culture of Critique, and which are calculated to thwart the emergence of manifestations of White ethnocentrism. MacDonald observes that a century ago the social sciences were effectively divorced from the biological sciences. While a reconciliation of sorts began in the 1970s, the humanities and large sections of anthropology continue to remain virtual intellectual closed shops, estranged from the contradictory findings of the biological sciences. Indeed given the leftist monopolization of these fields, resulting in the doctrinaire rejection of inconvenient scholarship and biology, it is hardly surprising that utopian socialism of the most naive variety routinely emanates from the academy.
It has undoubtedly been one of the chief attractions of leftist collectivism for Jews that free-market libertarianism — through the theoretical removal of the possibility of state coercion of individuals — effectively protects non-Jews in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behaviour. Friedman concedes the point, noting that

“competitive capitalism has permitted Jews to flourish economically and culturally because it has prevented anti-Semites from imposing their values on others, and from discriminating against Jews at other people’s expense. But the other side of that coin is that it protects anti-Semites from having other people’s values imposed on them. It protects them in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behavior so long as they do it at their own expense. Competitive capitalism has therefore not eliminated social anti-Semitism. The free competition of ideas that is the natural companion of competitive capitalism might in time lead to a change in tastes and values that would eliminate social anti-Semitism but there is no assurance that it will. As the New Testament put it, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’”

Implied in the above is that anti-Semitism is essentially irrational, and that Jews, while able to avoid economic manifestations of anti-Semitism through the operation of the free market, will have to wait for non-Jews to become more enlightened for social anti-Semitism to disappear. Likewise, for von Mises: “the truth is that while the Jews are the objects of anti-Semitism, their conduct and qualities did not play a decisive role in inciting and spreading its modern version.” Therefore, consistent with Jewish intellectual movements like Freudian psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School, anti-Semitism is characterised by these leading theorists of free-market libertarianism as being symptomatic of delusion or of the psychopathology of non-Jews, rather than a mostly rational and predictable response to a threat to the group evolutionary interests of non-Jews.
It would seem that libertarian ideas are particularly hazardous to the collective interests of White people because we are naturally attracted to them. As MacDonald notes, our evolutionary history makes us prone to individualism in the first place. You then get a negative feedback loop where libertarian ideology intensifies this innate individualism to encourage ever greater individualism among Whites, and an ever greater aversion to manifestations of White ethnocentrism. Thus, where the spirit of free market libertarian individualism reigns, Whites willingly maximize their individual self-interest at the expense of the group evolutionary interests of the White community — with disastrous long-term consequences.

MULTICULTURALISM, IMMIGRATION, AND LIBERTARIANISM
 
It is clear that many of the political stances adopted by White libertarian individualists neatly dovetail with many of the doctrines of the anti-White left — multiculturalism being the prime example. The pro-market individualism of Western nations has, as a by-product, led to the embrace of a profoundly shallow concept of culture. Many Westerners now see cultural differences as if they were merely differences in consumer tastes and preferences. In a consumerist society, diversity is celebrated — as diversity is the basis for consumer choice. The consumer is king, and he demands that his own personal and individual preferences be satisfied.

Multiculturalism is, therefore, the natural anthropology of a consumer-friendly economy. Because our own lives are filled with personalized choices, each made according to our unique tastes, we have come to approach culture in the same spirit. For many Whites, a culture is like an individual choice of a consumer product. Accordingly, the naive White multiculturalist treats differences in human cultures as if they were analogous to a preference for Coca-Cola over Pepsi — that is, mainly a difference in consumer tastes — consumer sovereignty at work. This view, however, is radically different from the view implicit in less tolerant traditions like Judaism and Islam that regard cultures as weapons in the struggle for survival and supremacy of those who carry on those traditions. It is not surprising that, in an intellectual climate of almost limitless White libertarian tolerance for cultural diversity, non-White immigrant communities feel free to openly express disdain for European-derived peoples, disparaging their culture and their central place in the historical development of the world.
A large majority of Jews have historically been strongly in favor of a libertarian immigration policy for the White-majority countries in which they choose to reside. That this attitude is generally not extend- ed to the state of Israel is, naturally enough, a source of consternation and ridicule among White nationalists. MacDonald has examined this phenomenon extensively, regarding it as a foundational tenet of almost all Jewish intellectual movements that have historically emerged from Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Interestingly, this rampant hypocrisy extends to the likes of Friedman and Rand. For instance Friedman’s position with regard to immigration to the US was that, providing that immigrants (from whatever racial or cultural source) are entering the nation to take up employment, as opposed to state welfare, there is no rational reason to oppose that immigration. With reference to the large scale immigration into the US in the late nineteenth century he opined that:

“You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’ What’s the difference? How can people be so in- consistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today?

Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”

So if there is a job waiting for an individual — regardless of their race — then it would be irrational to exclude that person. However, the apparent attraction of non-discriminatory immigration for Friedman did not extend to the state of Israel. While Friedman frequently railed against the socialist tendencies of various Israeli governments, he was a strong supporter of the ethno-state of Israel, and there is no record of him ever noticing Israel’s racially-restrictive immigration policy — much less decrying it. This surely demonstrates that in such matters the ingroup moral criterion of whether it was “good for the Jews” surpassed his universal libertarian commitment to the supposed benefits of a free and open immigration policy.
Ayn Rand demonstrated an even greater capacity for hypocrisy with her attitude toward respective manifestations of White and Jewish ethnocentrism. She declared that “there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement” and espoused the moral superiority of her type of individualism which “regards man — every man — as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.” For Rand, however, “every man” ostensibly did not include the Arabs in their conflict with Israel. Instead she regarded the fight between Israel and the Arabs as fight between civilized men and savages. Appearing on Donahue in 1979 she declared that: “If you mean whose side should you be on — Israel or the Arabs? I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it’s bringing industry and intelligence and modern technology into their stagnation.”

So to what extent does the libertarian immigration agenda, advocated with such patent inconsistency by the like of Friedman and Rand, serve the interests of Whites in terms of immigration policy? White racial nationalists generally do not have a problem with immigration per se, but rather with non-White immigration that shifts the demographic balance of power away from European-derived populations. Because of their strict individualism, libertarians dismiss the importance of race in human affairs. This is reflected in the fact that many of the most prominent libertarian theorists, endorse a policy of non-discrimination with regard to immigration — although this principal is rarely extended by Jewish libertarians to the state of Israel.
The anthropological reality is, as Frank Salter observes, the precise opposite of the individualist fantasy propagated by libertarianism: that, until recent decades, almost all human societies have sought, like Israel, to prevent permanent mass migration in their own group evolutionary interests. Western societies since about 1965 have been the rare exceptions. Salter observes that:

“Hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists, farmers and herders have all laid claim to a territory and fiercely defended it. Marriage partners have been found almost exclusively within the ethnic group, encompassing the local dialect. The psychological motivations for this are well established in such predispositions as social identity mechanisms, collectivism, assortment by similarity, innate cognition of human kinds, and rational choice. Evolutionary origins of territoriality and ethnocentrism are indicated by their being human universals as well as being found in apes. And from the evolutionary perspective, which acknowledges the limited carrying capacity of all territories and of the world itself, it is maladaptive to allow one’s lineage — family, clan or ethnic group — to be replaced by others.

The vital interest all societies have in controlling a territory also falsified the assertion that national security consists solely of defending individual citizens from attack, for example by vetting immigrants for terrorist connections, as is already the practice with tourists. Unlike tourists, immigrants affect the receiving country’s numbers, identity and cohesion. Societies thus have a corporate interest in retaining national sovereignty, which entails control of a territory. This helps to explain the historical pattern of corporate liberty being put before citizens’ rights. Inviting the world to a country as prosperous as Australia would result in the displacement of the Australian people inside their historical homeland. This is an outcome even more maladaptive than enslavement because it would be permanent.”

The question then arises as to why European-derived people in Western nations would, through accepting large-scale non-White immigration, act in a way that is entirely contrary to their group evolutionary interests. Part of the problem, discussed at length by MacDonald, is that Northern Europeans are, as a product of their evolutionary development, inherently more individualistic and less ethnocentric than other racial groups. This makes them predisposed to the type of individualism that has been at the core of Western market capitalism for centuries — an individualism that originally was a source of strength, and that has only become problematic in the context of the establishment of large non-White communities within formerly homogenous White nations.
While individual Whites may benefit from non-White immigration (such as a business proprietor or a leftist political candidate), in terms of their evolutionary interests as a distinct genetic community, non-White immigration is a huge negative. MacDonald has pointed out that more ethnocentric and less individualistic groups (most prominently Jews) have exploited this tendency of Europeans to lobby for changes to immigration policies to serve their own group interests. I think it is quite clear that the libertarianism of Friedman, von Mises and Rand, whether intentionally or not, has aided and abetted the cultural Marxists in serving Jewish group interests with regard to its influence on immigration policies in Western nations.

Thus, it is this very libertarian individualist agenda favoring the free global movement of people, in conjunction with the openly anti-White and anti-Western agendas of the cultural Marxists that have facilitated the demographic transformation of Western nations in the past few decades. Because of their denial of the significance of race, libertarians are never going to be allies in the fight to save White populations from demographic and political eclipse. The growth in popularity of libertarian ideas among Whites is as likely to undermine White racial solidarity as effectively as any of the more openly anti-White nostrums of the left. As White racial nationalists and activists we urgently need to convey to patriotic White libertarians that racial collectivism is the only effective means to promote our group interests now and into the future. It is lesson that was learned many centuries ago by those that have worked tirelessly to promote their own group evolutionary interests at our expense — with Judaism being the classic example.
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