Primera Reunión del Club de Lectura: Rothbard

Ayer dimos por inaugurado el Club de lectura y la mayor parte del tiempo hablamos de un trabajo de Murray Rothbard titulado The anatomy of the state aportado por Pablito. Es oro en polvo  y por eso acordamos seguir tratandolo en la próxima reunión. Siguiendo el lema que adoptamos (“las ideas son para esta vida”) encontramos muchos motivos para aplicar ese análisis a nuestra actual situación y también relaciones con lo que cada uno traía que es el tipo de sinergia que pensé que se iba a dar al proponer formar el club.

Rothbard desenmascara las falsedades del intento por justificar al estado, sobre todo al identificarlo con “nosotros”. La organización política en definitiva no es otra cosa que un medio de subsistencia de quienes se benefician de ella procurándose bienes y servicios producidos por otros. Todo disfrazado tras una variedad de peligrosas creencias que se suceden unas a otras a medida que se agotan. Desde que la producción debe preceder a la depredación, dice Rothbard, el mercado libre es anterior al estado.

Se me ocurrió a raíz de esta última frase el aspecto hipócrita que se encuentra detrás del ecologismo cuando con la excusa de “preservar al ambiente” se depreda a otros seres humanos. Pero no quiero irme del tema aunque en el club está permitido.

Con un enorme realismo y una lógica impecable Rothbard señala algo que otros autores también enseñan que es que las mayorías están necesariamente detrás de todo tipo de gobierno y que las “ideologías” son formas de abaratar el costo de mantenerse en el poder demostrándoles a esas mayorías que todo es por su bien. 

Les dejo algunos párrafos que están muy buenos y que a pesar de que parecen escritos para nosotros como vimos anoche, señalas problemas generales:

“…Therefore, the King alone cannot rule; he must have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the prerequisites of rule, for example, the members of the State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy or the established nobility. But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the “intellectuals.” For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the “opinion-molders” in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear…”

“…If “Ruritania” was being attacked by “Walldavia,” the first task of the State and its intellectuals was to convince the people of Ruritania that the attack was really upon them and not simply upon the ruling caste. In this way, a war between rulers was converted into a war between peoples, with each people coming to the defense of its rulers in the erroneous belief that the rulers were defending them. This device of “nationalism” has only been successful, in Western civilization, in recent centuries; it was not too long ago that the mass of subjects regarded wars as irrelevant battles between various sets of nobles…”

“As Bertrand de Jouvenel has sagely pointed out, through the centuries men have formed concepts designed to check and limit the exercise of State rule; and, one after another, the State, using its intellectual allies, has been able to transform these concepts into intellectual rubber stamps of legitimacy and virtue to attach to its decrees and actions. Originally, in Western Europe, the concept of divine sovereignty held that the kings may rule only according to divine law; the kings turned the concept into a rubber stamp of divine approval for any of the kings’ actions. The concept of parliamentary democracy began as a popular check upon absolute monarchical rule; it ended with parliament being the essential part of the State and its every act totally sovereign. As de Jouvenel concludes: Many writers on theories of sovereignty have worked out one . . . of these restrictive devices. But in the end every single such theory has, sooner or later, lost its original purpose, and come to act merely as a springboard to Power, by providing it with the powerful aid of an invisible sovereign with whom it could in time successfully identify itself. Similarly with more specific doctrines: the “natural rights” of the individual enshrined in John Locke and the Bill of Rights, became a statist “right to a job”; utilitarianism turned from arguments for liberty to arguments against resisting the State’s invasions of liberty, etc. “