“I am a strong opponent of the free market idea because it is a utopian idea that presupposes a world without sin. It presupposes a world without borders. After all, if we are a free market and other countries are protectionist,… There is going to be a disadvantage.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Easy Chair talk
http://www.pocketcollege.com/wiki/index.php?title=Unemployment_-_EC354
Here we have another proof that RJR was NOT a movement libertarian. I believe what RJR was doing by calling himself “Libertarian” at times was attempting to co-opt the movement in his direction by subtly redefining the word.
Another problem with movement Libertarianism is that it absolutizes property rights, extending those property rights as even being over the self. The problem is that property rights are not absolute but have to be relativized in relation to the true property owner — the God of the Bible. If we absolutize our individual property rights then we make ourselves to be gods, suggesting that there is not a higher ownership beyond ourselves. It is true that we have ownership privileges but only as stewards of God, most high.
When we absolutize property rights as our property rights, we get this kind of mindset as expressed by movement Libertarians,
“The proper groundwork for analysis of abortion is in every man’s absolute right of self-ownership. This implies immediately that every woman has the absolute right to her own body, that she has absolute dominion over her body and everything within it. This includes the fetus…Abortion should be looked upon, not as “murder” of a living person, but as the expulsion of an unwanted invader from the mother’s body. Any laws restricting or prohibiting abortion are therefore invasions of the rights of mothers.”
Murray Rothbard
“Ethics of Liberty”
“Regardless of his age, we must grant to every child the absolute right to runaway and to find new foster parents who will voluntarily adopt him, or to try to exist on his own. Parents may try to persuade the runaway child to return, but it is totally impermissible enslavement and an aggression upon his right of self-ownership for them to use force to compel him to return. The absolute right to run away is the child’s ultimate expression of his right of self-ownership, regardless of age.”
~~Murray Rothbard
“The Ethics of Liberty”
Rushdoony warned against this kind of Libertarianism,
“Modern libertarianism rests on a radical relativism: no law or standard exists apart from man himself. Some libertarian professors state in classes and in conversation that any position is valid as long as it does not claim to be the truth, and that therefore Biblical religion is the essence of evil to them. There must be, according to these libertarians, a total free market of ideas and practices.
If all men are angels, then a total free market of ideas and practices will produce only an angelic community. But if all men are sinners in need of Christ’s redemption, then a free market of ideas and practices will produce only a chaos of evil and anarchy. Both the libertarian and the Biblical positions rest on faith, the one on faith in the natural goodness of man, the other on God’s revelation concerning man’s sinful state and glorious potential in Christ. Clearly the so-called rational faith of such irrationalism as Hess and Rothbard represent has no support in the history of man nor in any formulation of reason. It is a faith, and a particularly blind faith in man, which they represent.”
R. J. Rushdoony
~~Institutes of Biblical Law — pp. 289-290
