Resurgence of the Warfare State

The Crisis Since 9/11

By Robert Higgs

The Independent Institute

Copyright © 2005 The Independent Institute
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-945999-56-0

Contents

Introduction,
Part I Crisis and Leviathan, Again,
1 Glory Days for Government,
2 Crisis Policymaking,
3 Wake Up to the Law of the Ratchet,
4 Every Step We Take,
5 Crisis-Induced Losses of Liberties,
6 Wartime Curbs on Liberty Are Costless? (It Just Ain't So!),
7 Benefits and Costs of the U.S. Government's War Making,
Part II Airport (In)Security,
8 Federal Oversight Won't Improve Airport Security,
9 The Pretense of Airport Security,
Part III The Draft,
10 Will the Draft Rise from the Dead?,
11 Censored Mail,
Part IV The Political Economy of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Industrial-Congressional Complex,
12 The Cold War,
13 U.S. National Security,
14 The Government Needs to Get Its Own Accounting House in Order,
15 Nation Trembles as Congress Reassembles,
16 If We're Really in Danger, Why Doesn't the Government Act as if We're in Danger?,
17 Free Enterprise and War, a Dangerous Liaison,
18 War Prosperity,
19 Suppose You Wanted to Have a Permanent War,
20 How Does the War Party Get Away with It?,
21 The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think,
Part V Bush and the Bushies,
22 The President Is Reading a Book, I'm Afraid,
23 George Bush's Faith-Based Foreign Policy,
24 On Crackpot Realism,
25 Camelot and the Bushies,
26 Is Bush Unhinged?,
Part VI The Road to War,
27 Iraq and the United States,
28 Helplessly, We Await the Catastrophe Our Rulers Are Creating,
29 To Make War, Presidents Lie,
30 Saddam Hussein Can't Blackmail Us with a Fissionable Softball,
31 Why the Rush to War?,
32 Paul Craig Roberts Interviews Robert Higgs on War and Liberty,
33 Nuke France,
Part VII Slaughtering the Innocent,
34 Collateral Damage,
35 Military Precision versus Moral Precision,
36 Some Are Weeping, Some Are Not,
37 Are Pro-war Libertarians Right?,
38 Not Exactly an Eye for an Eye,
39 Defense of Your Home Is Not Terrorism, Not Even in Iraq,
40 What's So Special About Those Killed by Hijackers on September 11, 2001?,
41 The Crimes at Abu Ghraib Are Not the Worst,
42 Has the U.S. Government Committed War Crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq?,
Part VIII Cake Walk,
43 WMD Blues,
44 Taking Stock One Year after the U.S. Invasion of Iraq,
45 Can Bullets and Bombs Establish Justice in Iraq?,
46 Bush's Iraq War,
47 The Iraq War — A Catastrophic Success,
Acknowledgments,
Further Reading,
Index,
About the Author,

CHAPTER 1

Glory Days for Government

An Economic Historian Talks about National-Security Crises and the Growth of Government

Originally appeared September 20, 2001

Michael Lynch of Reason interviews Robert Higgs shortly after 9/11.

As Operation Infinite Justice gets under way, the war drums are beating across the land, and a battle will surely come, although we know neither when nor what particular form it will take. Only this much is certain: though our government didn't bring on last week's terrorist attacks and everyone in Washington would certainly give plenty for them not to have occurred, war is a great friend of the state. In such troubled times, people look to the federal government for action and assurance. To get predictions about what we might expect to happen this time around, I checked in with economic historian Robert Higgs, whose book Crisis And Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 1987) insightfully chronicled how national crises in the twentieth century consistently helped grow the size and scope of our federal government. Higgs is a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of the institute's quarterly journal The Independent Review.

REASON: What's the thesis of your book?

ROBERT HIGGS: In a nutshell, it's that when a crisis of major significance occurs — something as large-scale and pervasive as the Great Depression or the world wars — there's an overwhelming public demand for government to act. In the twentieth century, every national emergency has seen federal government take unprecedented action to somehow allay the perceived threat to our security. These actions have taken a great many forms, but the common denominator is that they all entail the increased exercise of power by government over society and the economy. When the crisis ends, many of the emergency actions cease. But not all of them. Each emergency ratchets up the size and scope of the federal government. In some cases, agencies that had a very strict relation to the emergency transform to take on new missions.

REASON: What's an example of an agency that transformed itself?

HIGGS: The War Finance Corporation in World War I was created to provide funds for various munitions enterprises. When the war ended, the War Finance Corporation turned to financing agricultural cooperatives and the export of agricultural products to Europe. It lived on until 1925. In 1932, it was revived to bail out railroads and other big companies that were going bankrupt during the Great Depression. During World War II, it was used for a multitude of new missions, including building new defense plants and stockpiling defense materials. When it was finally abolished in the 1950s because of scandals, it was immediately re-created in part as the Small Business Administration, which itself has taken on a variety of tasks over time.

REASON: Are the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a large enough crisis to feed Leviathan?

HIGGS: It's a big enough perceived emergency to cause the government to extend into areas it may not have moved into so quickly, particularly surveillance of ordinary citizens and ordinary locations where people might congregate for business or recreational purposes.

REASON: Is it appropriate for individuals to worry about government expanding at this time?

HIGGS: It's extremely appropriate, because historically a large proportion of all government expansion has taken place as an emergency or crisis action. It's precisely under conditions such as those that exist at present that we ought to worry the most about the expansion of government.

REASON: What ought we to look for this time?

HIGGS: We can expect thousands of reservists to be called to active duty and taken away from their ordinary jobs. We can expect the assignment of military forces to some unprecedented duties. It appears that some military units are going to be used for domestic police activities. It is clearly going to be the case that the FBI will become far more active in surveillance activities. The government will mount a variety of overseas actions requiring the armed forces, and perhaps a number of civilian employees, to attempt to kill, to disable, or to damage what are taken to be terrorist cadres, camps, or facilities. It is also fairly clear that the government is going to have to bail out the airline industry and maybe the insurance industry. When the government takes large-scale, unprecedented actions of this sort, unanticipated consequences always occur. Then the government has to expand even further to deal with those consequences.

REASON:...