A cogent argument can be made for national security in the sense of protecting one’s free country against foreign tyrants. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that some exceptions could be made to economic freedom in the name of the “common defence.” In his book The State, Anthony de Jasay argues more daringly that the only function of the “capitalist state” or minimal state would be to prevent an ordinary state from replacing it, whether domestic or foreign.
A minimal state… “if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin would say. Two current examples illustrate that what the state does in the name of national security or related justifications is generally aimed at increasing its own power.
The Chinese state plans to impose new national-security measures on Hong Kong. The Wall Street Journal reports (“China Plans New National-Security Laws for Hong Kong,” May 22, 2020):
In April, the new liaison-office director [for the Chinese government], Luo Huining, declared that Hong Kong’s legal framework for national security must be improved as soon as possible, especially after Beijing waited more than two decades in vain for the city to do so.
The same apparatchik said in a speech:
We must never allow Hong Kong to become a breaching point for risks to our national security.
The Journal article also reports on a letter from the Chinese Foreign Ministry to ambassadors of other countries with the purpose of defending Beijing’s position:
The Foreign Ministry letter also said “Hong Kong has become a notable source of risk to China’s national security” because of legal loopholes and a lack of enforcement mechanisms.
I think it should not surprise anybody familiar with the economic analysis of politics that our own states—in the “free” countries—also use national security to increase their own power, albeit not as uncontrollably as the Chinese government does. Think about the Trump administration imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allied countries in the name of national security and threatening to do the same on automobile imports from Europe.
A few days ago, on May 19, the same administration did something similar, even if it is not as immediately obvious how it harms Americans (while it clearly hurts poor people who are legitimately looking for asylum in America), and even if national security took a public-health face. The Wall Street Journal explains (“Trump Administration Extends Order Blocking Migrants at Border,” May 19, 2020):
The Trump administration extended a public-health order allowing it to reject migrants crossing U.S. borders without giving them access to the asylum system until the government determines the new coronavirus no longer poses a danger to the public.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the indefinite extension on Tuesday. The order was introduced in March for a duration of 30 days and extended in April for another 30 days.
The public-health order allows the government to turn back any migrants it encounters crossing the border—including unaccompanied children and anyone asking for humanitarian protection—without taking them into custody or allowing them to file asylum claims.
What’s nice of Mr. Trump is that, with his limited understanding of the world, he often reveals his ulterior motives as a badge of honor—in this case, that the extension of the public-health order has little to do public health. The Wall Street Journal quotes him:
Every week, our border agents encounter thousands of unscreened, unvetted and unauthorized entries from dozens of countries. And we’ve had this problem for decades. With the national emergencies and all of the other things that we’ve declared, we can actually do something about it.
This looks pretty close to what Rahm Emmanuel (pardon me but I am tempted to write, borrowing from Mr. Trump’s invectives, the radical left, do-nothing Democrat Rahm Emmanuel, or the Democrat Savage Rahm Emmanuel) said in 2012:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by this is, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.
Both President Donald Trump and Chairman Xi Jinping invoke nationalism to excite their respective political bases and reinforce their power. Nothing new there, perhaps, but two amusing facts are worth noting. In the Hong Kong story, the Wall Street Journal reports:
“I feel sick,” said Dennis Kwok, a pro-democracy legislator in Hong Kong who has in recent weeks been the target of criticism from Beijing for holding up legislation, including delaying the passage of a proposed bill that would criminalize disrespect for China’s national anthem.
Compare that with a tweet of November 29, 2016 from president-elect Donald Trump:
Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
Fortunately, constitutional constraints prevented Trump from following up on this idea, as on many of his electoral promises. The Supreme Court had long ruled that burning the flag is protected by the First Amendment.
The reality remains that in America, China, France, Canada, and most other countries, national security is generally a fraud. Think about all states in the world, even far from American shores but including the American state, used 9/11 as an excuse for increasing their surveillance power over their own citizens. The interesting question is how different states succeed in getting away with it. How does the state, a complex institution, democratic or not, always push to become Leviathan?
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Hutcheson
May 23 2020 at 8:47am
Good post marred by the Marxian personification of the State/Leviathan.
Pierre Lemieux
May 23 2020 at 10:51am
@Thomas: If your comment is not (I believe) an effective criticism, it is certainly a valid interrogation. My last sentence was precisely meant to address it in advance. Part of the answer is in an Independent Review (Summer 2015) article of mine:
SaveyourSelf
May 23 2020 at 9:28am
I would like to take a shot at this problem. The solution comes down to human nature, lack of competition, and the tribal nature of our species.
1. Human wants are unlimited. Government employees are human. So the wants of all governments are infinite.
2. We know that monopolies run by people with unlimited desires often act in their own interests at the expense of their customers. We also know that companies in competitive industries will go out of business if they place their own interests above their customers.
3. Governments, historically, have very little competition excepting perhaps during brief periods of war.
4. Governments are largely monopoly institutions. As such, they will, predictably, make decisions for the enrichment of their own members at the expense of their customers. A lifetime of guaranteed retirement and health insurance after a single day of work is an off he cuff example of such one sided largess.
5. Humans, both in and out of the government, are members of a tournament species in which winners of contests are awarded the power to ration resources away from others of lower rank in exchange for protection from predators. The rest of the tribe assumes, at an instinctive level, that their long term outcomes are improved if the dictates from higher ranking members are respected, even when short term outcomes are obviously worsened by the decisions made by members with rank and authority. This hierarchical rationing system is solidified by the common experience of childhood in all human beings.
6. Citizens of every type of government including democracy, communist, and totalitarianism, accept political contests as legitimate mechanism for determining societal rank. Thus political leaders are treated as tribal authorities and conferred rationing powers over all members of society, but especially over the losing members of the political contest.
7. Modern societies are not tribes. The usual tribal mechanisms that restrain overuse of power in small groups (like close observation and teaming up to outnumber the alpha in an argument) are largely unavailable and ineffective in large societies.
8. The original setup of the United States with a minimalist central government tightly restrained in power with relegation of all powers not expressly written in the Constitution out to states created a situation where many small governments of similar size were in competition with each other but not allowed to resort to violence or trade restrictions against one another. This setup was, to my knowledge, the most competitive yet non-violent arrangement of any government system anywhere in the world and possibly in all of history.
9. The US civil war followed by the socialist revolution has moved power away from the states and the individual and to the federal government, which markedly decreased the competition in the US society as a whole. What little political competition that remains today comes from the two party systems and the separation of powers at the national level. The text of the constitution is completely ignored save for a few of the amendments regarding individual rights. I am tempted to blame Abraham Lincoln and FDR for this tremendous centralization of power but, in truth, it was and is the general desire of the whole of the American population over time that this alteration in the structure of the US political system occur. The presidential election is accepted as the greatest of races in a tournament species addicted to hierarchy. Americans consider their president the ultimate Alpha and encourage him to exercise greater authority over rationing than their states or legislators or even themselves. Support for this theory is historical. The crimes that get presidents impeached for is lying. Not stealing, or starting pointless wars that get citizens killed, or raising tariffs that lower citizens’ standard of living. It’s lying.
10. Thus, my argument amounts to this: States always tend toward Leviathan because they are comprised of people with unlimited wants, generally lack competition, and because they operate using small tribal rationing mechanisms that are ineffectual in large groups.
Pierre Lemieux
May 23 2020 at 10:57am
@SaveyourSelf: I also believe, with the classical-liberal tradition, that competition is the key (if there is a key). Note however that, from the viewpoint of its captive clientèle, war makes a state less competitive, not more. Try to immigrate or trade during a war! More generally, one has to answer de Jasay’s argument that political competition in a democratic state helps it become Leviathan (the “plantation state”). I say a word about this in my article on The State, linked to in the above post.
Jon Murphy
May 23 2020 at 10:53am
Good post. I am currently working on an article with a colleague of mine demonstrating that, from a national defense justification perspective, the Jones Act and the Defense Production Act don’t make sense. Rather, we discuss, they only make sense from a public choice perspective.
War and national security are a useful rhetorical tool used to shut down opposition, even when such rhetoric makes no sense.
Pierre Lemieux
May 23 2020 at 11:05am
@Jon: Interesting topic. Let me know when your article is published. You might want to cite Peter Navarro’s 1984 book The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues are Stealing America!
Thomas Hutcheson
May 24 2020 at 9:11am
Good luck. Will the article apply in any specific way to these two policy errors? “Public choice” can explain almost anything.
Jon Murphy
May 24 2020 at 9:24am
Well, yes. It will apply specifically to those two policy errors.
Jon Murphy
May 24 2020 at 9:58am
I agree that public choice is very powerful. Its power comes from the fact it can explain a lot of things with very few assumptions that were previously unexplainable via standard economic theory without a lot of assumptions. All we really need to assume is that 1) governments are made up of individuals and 2) people act in political situations the same as they act in economic situations.
Pierre Lemieux
May 24 2020 at 11:24am
@Thomas: In case you were being ironic, two sorts of theory must be distinguished. It is true that a theory that explains everything and its contrary is useless. However, a theory that explains lots of things otherwise unexplainable except with some deus ex machina (or evil scapegoat) is useful; it is arguably the essence of science. Recall Nozick’s defense of invisible-hand explanations (in Anarchy, State, and Utopia).
Craig
May 23 2020 at 1:37pm
To suggest anybody coming from Central America should be able to get asylum is dubious. The claims are obviously contrived. Its contrived for a purpose. If I were in Guatemala, I’d try to come to WA state and get assistance from the RAP and state based refugee programs. Asylum programs are welfare. The vast majority of applicants aren’t fleeing wartorn countries. They’re fleeing relatively poor countries and are applying even when they know their application will be eventually denied.
Pierre Lemieux
May 23 2020 at 2:00pm
@Craig: Then, let them apply according to international law and see which applications are not valid. Otherwise, it is using “national security”/”public health” as an excuse.
Craig
May 23 2020 at 2:13pm
International ‘law’? You just gave me a heart attack ……
Pierre Lemieux
May 23 2020 at 2:25pm
Do you think that “law” is an exclusive creation of the national state and that what is agreed by (most) national states is not law? These two beliefs appear to be contradictory.
Pierre Lemieux
May 23 2020 at 2:27pm
Craig: This, by the way, is a fundamental question, much discussed in the history of political philosophy: Is law nothing but the diktat of the strongest? For a small example, see https://www.econlib.org/is-the-state-your-father-or-your-mother/.
Craig
May 23 2020 at 2:56pm
At this point we have the benefit of hindsight. The old adage applies, ie “I’ll let you write the law, but I’ll write the procedure and I’ll win every time.”
The asylum law is being abused most migrants skip out on their hearings and something like 90% of all people seeking asylum from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador prevail in these cases anyway.
They know that once they’re in, they’re in.
Craig
May 23 2020 at 2:33pm
See for instance Hurricane Mitch which gave Honduras some serious problems. As a result, in 1998 many Hondurans (and I think Guatemalans too) applied for and received temporary protected status.
Ok, makes sense, right? But then they will go home when the emergency is over, right?
Well, guess when they ended that?
2018. Trump ended it. TWENTY YEARS later. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/05/608802896/dhs-ends-temporary-protected-status-for-hondurans
Now as to whether its an excuse or not. Fine….but the borders are currently closed, no? At least, generally, right? Why would this be an exception? Why would this be a priority? Do they have a coronavirus treatment in their backpacks? If so, by all means, let them in.
Mark Brady
May 24 2020 at 11:43pm
I wish the very best to the people of Hong Kong, indeed to all the people of China, but exactly in what way are the policies of the state apparatus of the People’s Republic of China toward Hong Kong any more or less reprehensible than their persecution of, let us say, the Tibetans or the Uyghurs or, for that matter, the Han Chinese? Pierre might point to the 1984 agreement between the PRC and the United Kingdom for the return of Hong Kong in 1997, but that argument turns on acknowledging the validity of international agreements between sovereign states, and do state minimalists like Pierre really want to go that route?
Pierre Lemieux
May 25 2020 at 7:50pm
@Mark: International agreements that limit state power (without, of course, creating a supranational Leviathan) have much to say for them. Isn’t this why Hayek favored fixed exchange rates (although I was not on his side on that)?
Mark Brady
May 25 2020 at 11:49pm
Are fixed exchange rates examples of international agreements? The decision to fix an exchange rate is usually taken unilaterally by one state. An example is the UK’s decision to fix sterling at $4.03 at the beginning of the Second World War, and to devalue sterling to $2.80 in 1949, and to $2.40 in 1967.
Craig
May 26 2020 at 11:07am
@Mark Bretton Woods?
@Pierre International agreements that limit state power (without, of course, creating a supranational Leviathan) have much to say for them
Fair enough, but I think the conservative fear is that the President and Senate can create the ‘unconstitutional treaty’ — Back in the 1950s there were a couple of state cases that essentially said, “Well, the UN Charter is supreme now and we have to abise by it” (I am going to look for that)
The conservative response, which Eisenhower opposed, was the potential for the unratified Bricker Amendment: “nor shall any treaty be valid which is contradictory to the Constitution of the United States”
So when you say above, “let them apply according to international law” –No, sir, no good, let them apply in accordance with a uniform rule of naturalization propounded by Congress. Now, if you say to me, there’s an awful war in some remote place and the other countries say, “Let’s make an agreement to process the asylum petitions of those fleeing that conflict.” — now you are making a treaty, but that treaty cannot be self executing by the President and Sentate alone. CONGRESS must modify the statutes to adhere to the agreement. At which point, the individuals seeking asylum, to the extent they lodge applications in the US, are having their applications processed in accordance with AMERICAN LAW.
Craig
May 26 2020 at 12:16pm
“@Pierre International agreements that limit state power (without, of course, creating a supranational Leviathan) have much to say for them”
Of course one thing you might point to is the UN and the theoretical restriction on the ability to employ military force without the approval of the UN. But it doesn’t actually work to limit the power of the federal government to utilize military force, I could refer you to the post-WW2 history of course to show that surely didn’t happen.
But more specifically we could look at the Invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq? What a waste, right? At the time though one argument that was bantered about is that the US invasion of Iraq was ‘illegal’ — but the Iraq Resolution was passed and the thing about treaties? They aren’t constitutions. A subsequently passed statute takes precedence over a previously ratified treaty.
If we were to take the UN prohibitions against the utilization of military force as completely binding, the US would not be able to use military force without the approval of the UN and, more specifically any member of the Security Council, all of whom, individually, possess a veto power.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 2 2020 at 1:31pm
@Craig: Indeed, I was thinking of Bretton Woods.
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