The Left, The Right, and the State

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. just came out with a good book. "The Left, The Right and the State." The book reveals the way our government works today and I found this excerpt from the introduction to explain it perfectly.

The left wants the state to distribute wealth, to bring about equality, to rein in businesses, to give workers a boost, to provide for the poor, to protect the environment. I address many of these rationales in this book, with an eye toward particular topics in the news.

The right, on the other hand, wants the state to punish evildoers, to boost the family, to subsidize upright ways of living, to create security against foreign enemies, to make the culture cohere, and to go to war to give ourselves a sense of national identity. I also address these rationales.

So how are these competing interests resolved? They logroll and call it democracy. The left and right agree to let each other have their way, provided nothing is done to injure the interests of one or the other. The trick is to keep the balance. Who is in power is really about which way the log is rolling. And there you have the modern state in a nutshell. Although it has ancestors in such regimes as Lincoln's and Wilson's, the genesis of the modern state is in the interwar period, when the idea of the laissez-faire society fell into disrepute -- the result of the mistaken view that the free market brought us economic depression. So we had the New Deal, which was a democratic hybrid of socialism and fascism. The old liberals were nearly extinct.

The US then fought a war against the totalitarian state, allied to a totalitarian state, and the winner was leviathan itself. Our leviathan doesn't always have a chief executive who struts around in a military costume, but he enjoys powers that Caesars of old would have envied. The total state today is more soothing and slick than it was in its interwar infancy, but it is no less opposed to the ideals advanced in these pages. How much further would the state have advanced had Mises and Rothbard and many others not dedicated their lives to freedom? We must become the intellectual dissidents of our time, rejecting the demands for statism that come from the left and right. And we must advance a positive program of liberty, which is as radical, fresh, and true as it ever was.

Rockwell focuses on pointing out the problem with the economic policies of both the right and the left, while advocating liberty, and the classical liberal perspective. He points out that the root problem is the amount of power our federal government has been given.