R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher, historian, and archaeologist who taught at Oxford in the first half of the twentieth century, was much esteemed by Ludwig von Mises, especially for his essay “Economics as a Philosophical Science” and, more generally, for his work in the philosophy of history. In this week’s column, I’d like to consider a point that Collingwood makes in his “Fascism and Nazism,” published in Philosophy in 1940, that helps us answer a vital question that confronts us today.

The question is this. The case for a complete free market and a noninterventionist foreign policy is an excellent one. Mises showed conclusively that socialism cannot work, and there is no intermediate system between capitalism and socialism that is sustainable in the long run. The failure of an interventionist foreign policy that leads to futile and horribly destructive wars is evident. Why, then, don’t we see these manifestly excellent policies in effect today? The answer may appear obvious. Our government is controlled by powerful elites who favor other policies. But this just pushes back the question: Why have these malign forces been able to take control?

Collingwood argued that the England of his day faced the same question:

Free speech and free inquiry concerning political and scientific questions; free consent in issues arising out of economic activity; free enjoyment of the produce won by a man’s own labour—the opposite of all tyranny and oppression, exploitation and robbery—these were ideals based on the infinite dignity or worth of the human individual. . . . All over the world liberal or democratic principles, having lost their “punch” and having become mere matters of habit, have lost their initiative and have been thrown on the defensive.

Why was so successful a polity now being attacked by the dark forces of Nazism and fascism? (Of course, communism should be added to the list, but Collingwood said that he didn’t know enough about Soviet Russia to comment on it. By 1940, there was more than enough evidence available about Communist tyranny, but he turned a blind eye to it.)

Collingwood’s answer was that the philosophical defenses of a free society offered at the time were bad ones, “bad” not only in the sense that the arguments had flaws but also in that they failed to inspire the defenders of freedom to effective action. There were two such defenses on offer.

The first of these was utilitarianism, and this failed because “liberty is or was an end in itself, an absolute value; and the only values recognized by utilitarianism were derivative values, the values of means.” The other defense appealed to moral intuitions; one could, in this view, directly grasp that liberty is a good. Collingwood dismissed intuitionism, in my view too quickly: it simply rests on unsupported opinions. “Intuitionism gave no grounds for anything at all: its only reason was the ‘woman’s reason,’ ‘It is so because it is so.’” (In these politically correct times, one could not say that, but Collingwood was slightly misquoting Lucetta in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona: “I think him so because I think him so.”)

The fundamental failing of these defenses was not philosophical inadequacy, though; it was rather that they did not inspire people. The free society, as Collingwood conceived it, was the outgrowth of a Christian culture that did inspire people; but a secularizing movement, which Collingwood called “Illluminism,” eroded the basis of a free civilization while at the same time extending and developing the principles of liberty inherent in it. Collingwood did not propose a religious restoration; long before the article was written, he had ceased to be a Christian believer, at least according to conventional understandings of that religion. But defenders of a liberal polity would need to capture the inspirational force that had been lost if the battle against fascism and Nazism was to be successful. Fascism and Nazism were able to use the emotional force that supporters of freedom no longer possessed.

Beliefs or habits long inculcated will survive for a time their logical grounds. All over Europe, during the nineteenth century, the grounds of the habits and beliefs called liberal or democratic were being destroyed by the anti-religious propaganda of Illuminism and its heirs. . . . Alike in Italy, Germany, and in Spain, the vast majority of the population is sympathetic to the liberal-democratic ideals and hostile to the Fascist or Nazi minority that has seized power. . . . And persons belonging to that majority know very well why power has been snatched from their hands. It is because their Fascist or Nazi opponents have somehow contrived to tap a source of energy which is closed to themselves.

To the extent that Collingwood is right in his diagnosis, what can contemporary supporters of freedom do? I believe that if we look to the Ron Paul movement, we can see the needed enthusiasm to which Collingwood drew attention. The movement is founded on a sound Rothbardian view of ethics and on a rigorously developed free-market economics, based principally on the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. The movement includes both religious believers and nonbelievers, but both have proved that they have the necessary enthusiasm to halt and reverse the Leviathan state and its corporate allies.

In the efforts of Ron Paul and his supporters, we see precisely the enthusiasm that Collingwood attributed to religion:

The real ground for the “liberal” . . . devotion to freedom was religious love of a God who set an absolute value on every individual human being. . . . The doctrines concerning human nature on which liberal or democratic practice was based were not empirically derived from research into anthropological and psychological data: they were a matter of faith; and these Christian doctrines were the source from which they were derived.

If those of us devoted to Mises and Rothbard maintain our enthusiasm, we can hope for success in securing freedom against the dark forces that threaten it.

America’s “monthly federal deficit hit a record $249 billion in November—$57 billion more than the same month last year—with federal spending also hitting new heights in consecutive months, while tax revenues dropped,” reports the London Daily Mail.

The deficit is $57billion higher than it was in November of 2021—which is a record-breaking year-on-year change. Federal spending is up $28billion from last year to $501billion in November 2022, according to the Treasury Department. . . .

. . . [R]evenues are down $13billion year-to-year to $252billion. . . .

Spending was, in part, driven by an 18 percent—or $14billion—increase in Medicare spending and a 94 percent increase in education costs. . . .

The Treasury’s interest costs on public debt grew 53 percent or $19billion during November. . . .

For the first two months of fiscal 2023, the Treasury’s interest payments are up $48billion, or 87 percent. . . .

“. . . the deficit would have been almost $400 billion lower had the Biden Administration not decided to enact an inflationary, costly, and regressive student debt cancellation plan in August,” [Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget,] noted.

Joe Biden’s costly plan to cancel student loan repayment for many students encourages colleges to raise tuition by making it more attractive to take out big loans to cover college tuition. When students are willing to borrow more to go to college, colleges respond by increasing tuition and hiring more unnecessary college bureaucrats. The Daily Caller notes that a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that “each additional dollar in government financial aid translate[s] to a tuition hike of about 65 cents.”

Biden issued a plan to forgive $10,000 or $20,000 in student loan debt for many borrowers, at a cost of $500 billion to taxpayers. That plan was been declared illegal by a judge in Texas and also was temporarily blocked by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. But the Biden administration has appealed these rulings to the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments in February about whether the people challenging the plan have legal standing to do so and, if so, whether the plan is legal or not.

Forgiving student loans increases inflation. Jason Furman, chairman of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, called Biden’s debt cancellation plan “reckless.” He said, “Pouring roughly a half-trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless.”

In addition to his $500 billion student loan cancellation plan, Biden also is changing income-driven repayment plans in ways that will also spur colleges to raise tuition and stick taxpayers with the tab. Biden’s changes “will make college much more expensive” for taxpayers and many students, reports Reason magazine.

Between the student loan bailout and the changes to income-driven repayment plans, the overall cost of Biden’s plan could be over a trillion dollars, according to analysts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Monthly budget deficits could rise further as recently passed spending bills go into effect. In early August, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which is likely to lead to a vast increase in corporate welfare, wasteful spending, and subsidies for uncompetitive businesses. The money is already starting to be awarded to politically favored businesses, as a November 27 article in the New York Times illustrated. Late last month, the Senate also voted along party lines to ratchet up government spending by passing the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. Although it is described as a $740 billion spending package, it is likely to cost far more than that, judging by its fine print. For example, taxpayers will be on the hook for more bad loans.

As Phil Kerpen notes, the “bill authorizes” the commerce secretary, Jen Granholm, “to make $250,000,000,000 in loan guarantees for ‘energy infrastructure.’ That’s a lot of Solyndras. If any substantial portion of these loans go bad,” the budget deficit could rise further. The bill will also result in drug manufacturers raising the launch price of drugs. That will cost consumers more.

Massive government spending under Biden has caused inflation, according to economists like Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Larry Summers, and Obama advisor Steven Rattner. As Rattner noted in the New York Times, Biden has spent “an unprecedented amount” of taxpayer money, which resulted in “too much money chasing too few goods.”

As the author of Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, I guess I should not be surprised to find myself squarely in the digital gulag—banished, perhaps permanently, from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter permanently suspended my account several weeks ago, mere days before Elon Musk took over the helm. Although I cannot be sure, I may have been banned because I suggested that the transgender movement is part of a multipronged neo-Malthusian depopulation campaign. (Note that I said nothing to or about any transgender individuals and thus broke no “Twitter rules,” whatever they may be. I may have been mistaken, but surely being “correct” is not a condition for major social media use. Or is it? Of course it is.)

Now Facebook has demanded proof that I am who I say I am, and has completely barred me from my account, which has been, at least temporarily, utterly erased from the site. I submitted a picture of my driver’s license, which Facebook rejected, and then a picture of my passport along with my license. I await Facebook’s response, which I read could take anywhere from forty-eight hours to forty-five days to arrive.

I am considering deleting my account, so I will lose thousands of followers and contact with many people with whom I’ve become friends. That’s how the digital gulag system works. One is sucked into social media networks, and then the social media networks have control over your connections, which they can sever on a whim.

Excuse me if I find the timing of my banishment somewhat curious, since I have just written a new book on the global agenda of the Great Reset, with a foreword by Lew Rockwell, which is due to be released on Amazon in early January.

By now it should go without saying that the elements of Big Digital—the megadata services, the social media plat­forms, the artificial intelligence (AI) agents, the apps, and the develop­ing internet of things, internet of bodies, digital identity, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)—are not only the products of monopolies or would-be monopolies but have also been incorporated by the state as apparatuses of a new corporate-state power.

With the ongoing publication of “the Twitter files” and other revelations, collusion between Big Digital and the state can no longer be credibly denied nor can data sharing and coordination among social media sites and Google. Google and Facebook track online and “offline” behavior (if “offline” can any longer be considered to exist) and essentially know everything imaginable about their users.

It is often suggested that this data is used exclusively for advertising purposes. But user data is also shared with the surveillance state, and this is far more troubling. Visited a verboten website? Imagine how the state might make use of such information.

One suggested solution is to go Galt—to seek a digital Galt’s Gulch and to remove oneself and thus one’s digital footprints, as much as possible, from Big Digital’s ambit. This is easy to say for those who do not rely on social media to promote their wares, but certainly extrication from the totalitarian Googleplex is possible, at least in principle.

In fact, for many true dissidents, it will likely become inevitable. But what will it mean? Will Big Digital make survival outside of its reach impossible? When does the digital gulag become more than virtual? At what point does your life depend on Big Digital? Digital identity and CBDCs will seal many fates; one will either opt into the totalitarian regime or face the consequences of complete exclusion.

Six years after the election of Donald Trump, the Republican Party is still adrift. On the one hand, the GOP has embraced an antiestablishment and populist message. On the other hand, Republicans have not quite figured out how to balance populism with classically liberal values like constitutionalism and free markets. Indeed, populism and classical liberalism seem to be in direct conflict.

Questions remain about how Republican populists will regulate (or not regulate) Big Tech, how they will protect blue-collar jobs without limiting economic freedom, and how they will push back against political elites without destroying vital institutions.

Ironically, the politician that populist-minded Republicans should look to for guidance was a Democrat: Grover Cleveland (1837–1908). Elected mayor of Buffalo, New York, in 1880, Cleveland was a political outsider who rode a wave of populist sentiment to the governor’s mansion and then to the White House in 1884. Working through many of the same challenges we face today, Cleveland molded a unique political model: one that was steadfastly populist, but true to classically liberal principles.

Best known today for being the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, Cleveland rose to prominence during a time of widespread political corruption. During the so-called Gilded Age of the 1880s, politicians routinely participated in graft, bribery, and collusion. Dim as things were, it also provided an opportunity for a political outsider like Cleveland to win votes by fighting back against the elites and their political machines.

As mayor of Buffalo, he worked hard to fulfill his duties without showing favoritism toward any particular individuals or groups, including his own friends. In a striking display of professional fidelity, Cleveland vetoed a street-cleaning contract that the city alderman had awarded to his close friend and former client, George Talbot. Talbot’s bid was not the lowest and it was clear to everyone that he intended to award kickbacks to the Aldermen—a classic example of Gilded Age corruption. Following his veto, Cleveland wrote to his friend, “While I was your attorney, I was loyal to your interests. Now the people are my clients and I must be loyal to them.”

As Troy Senik writes in his excellent new biography, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, “in an environment as corrupt as Buffalo, being a classical liberal also made him a de facto populist.”

Cleveland’s populist-flavored classical liberalism can be seen most clearly in the two controversies that defined his presidencies: tariff reform and the silver debate. It may be difficult to imagine today, but in the nineteenth century, the tariff was a hot-button issue. Not only were tariffs the biggest source of federal revenue, making up 60 percent of total revenue in 1884, but they were also used as instruments of economic planning and privilege. High tariffs shielded powerful corporations from foreign competition.

Since the federal government enjoyed a large budget surplus in 1884, nobody could point to raising revenue as a justification for high tariffs. For President Cleveland, taxing American consumers more than was necessary was morally abhorrent and violated the government’s constitutional authority. “The right of the government to exact tribute from the citizens,” he said during a campaign speech, “is limited to its actual necessities, and every cent taken from the people beyond that required for their protection by the government is no better than robbery.”

That high tariffs were also used to enrich economic elites only made it worse. As Troy Senik writes in his biography, “in contrast to how the issue would often be framed in future generations, Cleveland came to the conclusion that lowering tariffs was the true populist position.” Though Cleveland was ultimately unsatisfied with it, a compromise bill was eventually passed that lowered tariffs on a few major goods.

More successful was his fight against the inflationists. At the time of Cleveland’s election, a fierce debate was raging about what the US dollar would be based upon. Already on a bimetallic standard, many wanted even more silver to be added to the monetary base in order to inflate the money supply, devaluing the dollar and thus making it easier for the working class (mostly farmers) to repay debts. By the 1890s, inflation had become the cause célèbre of populists like William Jennings Bryan who thought the gold standard was holding back the working class.

But Cleveland didn’t yield the populist angle so easily. He argued, contrary to the claims of the inflationists, devaluation would actually hurt the working poor. He sternly promised that he would protect the laborer and the farmer against any policy that would lead to a “shrinkage in the purchasing power of the dollar for a full dollar’s worth of work.” During his second term, he successfully repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and restored America to the gold standard. Though the inflationist populists roared, to Cleveland there was no contradiction: protecting America’s monetary integrity was the key to helping the working class.

Cleveland would not have called himself a populist and he certainly didn’t fit the stereotype. He never riled up crowds with big, exciting speeches or engaged in demagogic grandstanding. The way he understood his role differed from that of other famous populists who railed against the status quo, but who had no real principles of their own.

Cleveland had rigid principles and did his best to stick to them. He didn’t see himself as a mere mouthpiece for the grievances of specific groups, but as an administrator hired by the people to serve the interests of the entire country. He served as a bulwark for the common man against the elites, but he made sure to stay within his constitutional limits. Indeed, modern Republicans who want to claim the populist label for themselves would do well to follow Cleveland’s example.

In the face of rampant crime, many individuals and businesses turn to private security as an alternative to government protection. One example is the Karco gas station in Philadelphia, which has hired heavily armed guards from Pennsylvania S.I.T.E. Agents to patrol its premises. The guards are equipped with Kevlar vests and either AR-15s or shotguns, and the owner claims that since hiring the guards, the gas station has been free of loitering and other criminal activity.

The failure of state police and the justice system to effectively protect citizens is what has led many people to turn to private security and the use of firearms for self-defense. In some states, restrictive gun control laws and limitations on self-defense like “duty to retreat” laws have only further contributed to this trend. As a result, many individuals and communities have been forced to take matters into their own hands to feel safe and secure.

Hans-Herman Hoppe, in his work The Private Production of Defense, argues that the provision of security is best left to the private sector. He argues that private security firms have a stronger incentive to protect their clients, as their reputation and continued business depends on it. In contrast, state police are not accountable to the individuals they are supposed to protect, and therefore have less incentive to protect them effectively.

Economist Bruce L. Benson also argues in favor of private security, citing empirical evidence that shows private security to be more efficient and effective than state police. Private security firms can tailor their services to the specific needs of their clients, allowing for more effective protection. Additionally, private security firms can be held accountable through the market, with clients able to choose which firm to hire based on their performance.

Benson observes that the private security industry has seen a growth in demand and sophistication in the last few decades. This is due to the increasing use of technology such as closed-circuit television and laser technology, as well as the training of security personnel to take advantage of these technologies. Private residential and business developments are being designed with security in mind

Studies of the consequences of private-sector crime control activities are rare, but several informative ones exist. One such study, conducted in the ’80s, examined the actions and effects of the private security force in Starrett City, a high-crime area of Brooklyn. The study found that the private security force in the area was much more effective at reducing crime than the public security forces. This is likely due to the increased level of training and development of private security personnel, as well as the use of advanced security technologies.

Patel’s decision to hire guards to protect his business is a prime example of the benefits of private security. Not only did it effectively protect his business, but it also allowed him to choose the level of protection he deemed necessary. The failure of state police to adequately protect his business and property left him with no other option than to turn to the private sector. As the US continues to face harsh crime waves and criminal justice corruption, the realization of the public that private security is viable and necessary is a silver lining.