Dr. Joseph Fulda is a highly educated philosopher, author and educator. His latest work, "Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism" is destined to become THE essential work on libertarian thought.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Your book is called "Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism." When a person takes steps they generally like to know where they are going. Could you briefly summarize for us the major tenets of libertarianism?
JOSEPH FULDA: Libertarianism is a complex web of ideas which boil down to the famous dictum, "That government is best which governs least," modified by George Will's qualifier, "up to a point."
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Libertarianism has been called by some, "a high toned word for anarchy." How do you answer this criticism?
JOSEPH FULDA: By referring to that qualifier, "up to a point." No libertarian properly so called denies the state its proper role: the protection of the life, liberty, and property of one man against the intrusions of others. This implies at the minimum a civil adjudication system, a criminal justice system, and a national defense system.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Did you have any formative experience that initially attracted you to the Libertarian movement?
JOSEPH FULDA: Only recently have I come to believe that libertarianism will never be implemented by Republicans and that a third party is necessary. My political awakening came during the 1980 Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, a libertarian Republican. I read voraciously as only a graduate student does, both sides, and came to my beliefs based on my reading....Reagan was the catalyst; the library had the reactants; the product is the present book.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Your answers to questions tend to be short and to the point. Is this reflective of your libertarian outlook?
JOSEPH FULDA: Not at all; it's reflective of my writing style, both in the book and elsewhere. I adhere to Chekhov's dictum: Conciseness is the sister of talent.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: How is libertarian thought any different from the Objectivist view proposed by Ayn Rand? Her story "Atlas Shrugged" outlines what happenS when state control runs amok and many of her books extol the benefits of a free society based on private ownership.
JOSEPH FULDA: Ayn Rand did a great deal for freedom, principally by vivifying it in her splendid novels. At the same time, her comments about love, selfishness and its virtues, and independence-particularly in her nonfiction--are neither necessary to nor sufficient for the libertarian position, but they have alienated many who might otherwise be sympathetic to the cause of freedom by both the absolutism of her positions and, perhaps more importantly, the stridency of her tone.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: One of the problems with the libertarian movement may be that all of its thinkers tend to be independent. Has this made it difficult to organize a cohesive and organized political movement that can represent the libertarian perspective in our government?
JOSEPH FULDA: No, I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem lies more in the difficulty of launching a third party in our system, particularly in the face of a Republican Party which uses the rhetoric of libertarianism to win elections, but does very little to carry through. Put metaphorically, it is hard to install the true heirs of the Founding Fathers when there's a very strong and powerful pretender to the throne.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: You seem to have some antipathy for the Republican Party. As you say they have swiped the Libertarian rhetoric, but have failed to deliver on the promise. What has caused this gap between words and action?
JOSEPH FULDA: Not antipathy, Bill, disappointment, profound disappointment. The gap between rhetoric and deeds is probably due to the pressures of reelection--every two years in the House--and the ease of pacifying highly focused small groups of voters with money taken from voters at large who are neither organized nor highly focused. Instead of Madison's "faction counteracting faction," we have "you support my special program, I'll support yours" in which factions combine to depredate the public.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Why would a third party be any better than the Republicans?
JOSEPH FULDA: It might not be. The same pressures would be there, after all. But with entirely new people, people not accustomed to spending their life in government "service," there might be more hope. That, after all, is the idea behind term limits, which neither established party seems inclined to seriously consider, let alone enact. The public choice school of economics is pretty convincing about the difficulty of maintaining liberty through representative government. Many-but not all--of the Founders have been proven overoptimistic about representative government as a check on government usurpations--Thomas Paine, to cite one well-known figure. We now know that representative government and suffocating government can coexist.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Perhaps the most controversial libertarian view has to do with drugs. Libertarian's generally believe that NO drugs should be illegal. Can you explain the logic behind this position and whether you agree with it?
JOSEPH FULDA: Except the one or two drugs that predictably cause violent behavior. Libertarians going back to John Stuart Mill feel that harm to one's self--preventable in full only by a totalitarian nanny state--is not the proper object of government attention. Government exists to protect one man against the intrusions of others, not to protect him from himself. Protecting someone from himself (provided he is capacious) is by definition denying him the freedom to choose how he lives. Put much more bluntly, if someone wants to live life in the ultra-fast lane and die before he reaches 35, preferring his conception of the good life for a long life, that is his choice to make. We may--and I would argue should--try to persuade him otherwise, but we should not force the issue. It is, after all, his life....
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: You have mentioned the founding fathers as if they were libertarians in general. Do you see them as such? If so, why has our government, in the last 200 years, fallen away from the vision they had for America?
JOSEPH FULDA: They certainly wrote and spoke libertarian thoughts, but they did not always practice the modernity they preached, as George Will put it. The seductions of using force for noble or seemingly noble ends are great and in times of crisis, such as the Great Depression, those seductions can be too great to resist. We now know that government brought on the Great Depression as explained in detail by Friedman, Rothbard, and Sennholz, but at the time government was seen as a savior--by most, not all. And, once constitutional limits on government power are abrogated, they are hard to put back into place. As Jefferson remarked, the tendency always is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield. Then, also, there are some of the Constitutional Amendments, the income tax, the direct election of the Senate, the expansion of the suffrage to include untaxed persons, all of which have led to greater roles for the federal government. Between the formal amendments and the usurpations that began in a time of crisis and were fairly quickly ratified by the Supreme Court, we no longer have the same system as that put into place by the Founders.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: When your wrote your book, "8 Steps towards Libertarianism" you must have had an audience in mind. Who did you write this book for and why should they buy it?
JOSEPH FULDA: The audience is college graduates (high school graduates over 60, too), especially recent college graduates--the elite of the masses or the masses of the elite--who though sophisticated enough to argue both sides of almost any current issue do not argue from the original American understanding of the role of government in society. I wrote this book for them, to give them an appreciation of the heritage of American political and economic thought on which this country was Founded. This country, after all, is as George Will reminds us a work of practical philosophy. I want the current generation of thinkers and leaders to understand this and feel this as deeply as I do.
CONSERVATIVE MONITOR: Thank you so much for the interview. I'm sure our readers will enjoy our conversation. By the way, do you have any projects in the works to which we can look forward?
JOSEPH FULDA: My pleasure, entirely my pleasure. I'm seeking a publisher for my third book, _Applying Libertarianism_, and support for a monumental study in progress, _Privacy, Privacy Rights, and Intellectual Privacy Rights_.
