<blockquote>
"Civilization is not "just there," it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization — you are done..."- Ortega y Gasset</blockquote>
<blockquote>"The steady decline in the underpinnings of our civilization began in the late nineteenth century, and accelerated during the World Wars I and II and the 1930s. The decline consisted of an accelerating retreat back from the Revolution, and of a shift back to the old order of mercantilism, statism, and international war.
In England, the laissez-faire capitalism of Price and Priestly, of the Radicals and of Cobden and Bright and the Manchester school, was replaced by a Tory statism driving toward aggressive Empire and war against other imperial powers. In the United States the story was the same, as businessmen increasingly turned to the government to impose cartels, monopolies, subsidies, and special privileges.
Here as in Western Europe, the advent of World War I was the great turning point — in aggravating the imposition of militarism and government-business economic planning at home, and imperial expansion and intervention overseas. The medieval guilds have been re-established in a new form — that of labor unions with their network of restrictions and their role as junior partners of government and industry in the new mercantilism. All the despotic trappings of the old order have returned in a new form. Instead of the absolute monarch, we have the President of the United States, wielding far more power than any monarch of the past. Instead of a constituted nobility, we have an Establishment of wealth and power that continues to rule us regardless of which political party is technically in power. The growth of a bipartisan civil service, of a bipartisan domestic and foreign policy, the advent of cool technicians of power who seem to sit in positions of command regardless of how we vote (the Achesons, the Bundys, the Baruchs, the McCloys, the J. Edgar Hoovers), all underscore our increasing domination by an elite that grows ever fatter and more privileged on the taxes that they are able to extract from the public hide.
The result of the aggravated network of mercantilist burdens and restrictions has been to place our economy under greater and greater strain. High taxes burden us all, and the military-industrial complex means an enormous diversion of resources, of capital, technology, and of scientists and engineers, from productive uses to the overkill waste of the military machine.
...
There is, then, a third alternative — one that has still gone unheeded amid the great debate between liberals and radicals. That alternative is to return to the ideals and to the structure that generated our industrial order and that is needed for that order's long-run survival — to return to the system that will bring us industry, technology, and rapidly advancing prosperity
without war, militarism, or stifling governmental bureaucracy. That system is
laissez-faire capitalism, what Adam Smith called "the natural system of liberty," a system that rests on an ethic that encourages individual reason, purpose, and achievement. The nineteenth-century libertarian theorists — men like the Frenchmen of the Restoration era, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, and the Englishman Herbert Spencer — saw clearly that militarism and statism are relics and throwbacks of the past, that they are incompatible with the functioning of an industrial civilization. That is why Spencer and the others contrasted the "military" with the "industrial" principle, and judged that one or the other would have to prevail.
What I am suggesting, in short, in the oversimplified categories made popular by Charles Reich, is a return to "Consciousness I" — a Consciousness that is brusquely dismissed by Reich and his readers as they proceed to take sides in the great debate between Consciousness II and III. To Reich, Consciousness I was made obsolete by the growth of modern technology and mass production, which made the turn to the corporate state inevitable. But here Reich is not being radical
enough; he is simply adopting the conventional liberal historiography that big government was made necessary by the growth of large-scale industry. If he were familiar with economics, Reich would realize that it is precisely advanced industrial economies that require a free market to survive and flourish; on the contrary, an agricultural society can plod along indefinitely under despotism provided that the peasants are left enough of their produce to survive. The Communist countries of Eastern Europe have discovered this fact in recent years; hence, the more they industrialize the greater and more inexorable their movement away from socialism and central planning and toward a free-market economy. The rapid shift of the East European countries toward the free market is one of the most heartening and dramatic developments in the last two decades; yet the trend has gone almost unnoticed, for the left finds the shift away from statism and egalitarianism in Yugoslavia and the other East European countries extremely embarrassing, while the conservatives are reluctant to concede that there may be
anything hopeful about the Communist nations.
Furthermore, Reich is clearly unaware of the finds of Gabriel Kolko and other recent historians that completely revise our picture of the origins of the current welfare-warfare state. Far from large-scale industry forcing the knowledge that regulation and big government were inevitable, it was precisely the
effectiveness of free-market competition that led big businessmen seeking monopoly to turn to the government to provide such privileges. There was nothing in the economy that objectively required a shift from Consciousness I to Consciousness II: only the age-old desire of men for subsidy and special privilege created the "counter revolution" of statism. In fact, as we have seen, this development only cripples and hampers the workings of modern industry; objective reality would require a return to Consciousness I. In this world of remarkably swift changes in values and ideologies, such a change in consciousness cannot be ruled out as impossible; far stranger things have been happening."
- Murray N. Rothbard,
Capitalism versus Statism, 1972</blockquote>