As the United States comes to a point where military interventionism and building an American Empire abroad has made the United States less safe, less prosperous, and most importantly less free, most Americans still hold the rosey-glassed view that the US Military constantly fights for our freedom. This is an unfortunate situtation because as historian John V. Denson has shown, wars in American history have resulted in a loss of freedom in America. But is it possible that people view the military as the bedrock of society? In a recent blog post by David Theroux of the Independent Institute, Theroux has found such a person. Theroux comments as follows: "While numerous liberal and conservative pundits have long mistakenly supported military Keynesianism as necessary for national defense and economic prosperity, Kristof has now taken this view far further to claim that the military provides the all-inclusive socialist model for all of society." Nicholas D. Kristof, author of the article "Our Lefty Military", claimes that : "The business sector is dazzlingly productive, but it also periodically blows up our financial system. Yet if we seek another model, one that emphasizes universal health care and educational opportunity, one that seeks to curb income inequality, we don’t have to turn to Sweden. Rather, look to the United States military. You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works. The military helped lead the way in racial desegregation, and even today it does more to provide equal opportunity to working-class families — especially to blacks — than just about any social program. It has been an escalator of social mobility in American society because it invests in soldiers and gives them skills and opportunities." In the following statement, Kristof assumes that the private sector of the economy (i.e. the free market) is the cause of recessions and depressions. But as historian Tom Woods has shown, it has been government intervention into the economy, and more specifically, the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve of deliberate destruction of the currency that "blows up our financial system". And as Theroux explains, "And as Research Fellow Jonathan Bean reveals in his Institute book, Race and Liberty in America, desegregation not only began in the private sector decades before federal courts and laws intervened, but it was government regulations (e.g., Jim Crow laws, labor regulations, etc.), including that mandated by the military, that institutionalized racism on a huge scale and made desegregation so difficult." German-Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck would proclaim, " Call it socialism or whatever you like. It is the same to me." as he constructed a welfare-state in Germany to pursue war in the 1880s. Kristof finishes his article with this declaration: "So as the United States armed forces try to pull Iraqi and Afghan societies into the 21st century, maybe they could do the same for America’s. Hoo-ah!" As Theroux has noted, this goes back to a quote from Benito Mussolini: "Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.
—”The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932) So what should be the role of military in a free society?
The military in a free constitutional republic should be limited to protecting the country from an attack or invasion from a foreign government. The military should not be an engine or model of social engineering at home or abroad, and it certainly should not be utilized to build an American Empire overseas while facilitating the advent of a welfare-regulatory-state at home. In short, the United States needs to return to the original foreign policy of noninterventionism. By following a foreign policy of armed neutrality and strategic independence with free trade and travel, the desire to build an American Empire overseas and expand the powers of the central government at home will be nullified, along with the collectivist desires of men like Nicholas Kristof
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