President Jimmy Carter makes remarks before departing for Camp David, September 3, 1978. Photo courtesy of Jimmy Carter Library
At LewRockwell.com, Llewellyn H. Rockwell explains Murray Rothbard’s feelings about President Jimmy Carter’s calls to sacrifice for the state. Rockwell writes:
The death of ex-President Jimmy Carter on December 26, 2024, at the age of one hundred resulted in many comments about him. Most that have come my way have favorable, and, at least by comparison with his successors, he can point to some genuine achievements. We shouldn’t be deceived though, into rating him as a good president. The great Murray Rothbard certainly didn’t think so, and in this week’s column, I’d like to consider some of the things Murray said about him.
Murray identified a key theme in Carter’s presidency, the stress on pain and sacrifice, and he mordantly mocked it: “Pain—our pain, of course—has been a constant theme of Jimmy Carter’s since he burst on the national scene. During the 1976 campaign Carter assured us that ‘Ah feel yo’ pain,’ and such is his enthusiasm for this empathy that he has gone out of his way to inflict pain ever since. After he went to the mountaintop last summer to receive his revelation on energy, he proceeded to remind us of his ‘pain’ motif and then to scourge us for the mortal sin of wishing to buy foreign oil.”
Murray identified a deep foundation of Carter’s calls for sacrifice. Politicians love sacrifice, because it enhances the power of the state. The best way to get people to accept sacrifice is to involve them in war. But this is risky. War is dangerous, especially in the nuclear age. By calling for a war to conserve energy, Carter hoped for the advantages of a war without the risks of a military confrontation. “What the State, what every would-be tyrant wants, of course, is war. War, especially a war that the State is in no danger of losing, provides the perfect milieu for all power to redound to the State, for siphoning wealth from private into governmental hands, for making the bastards obey. War, as Randolph Bourne so perceptively pointed out a half-century ago, ‘is the health of the State.’ For, generally, in their private lives, people wish only to go about their business in freedom, to be left alone with the money they have earned to run their lives as they see fit. Throughout history, governments and their rulers have sought to pull the wool over the eyes of their subjects, to make them like, or at least be resigned to, the oppression and exploitation they suffer at the hands of the State. And War has always been the open sesame to this end: the specter of the enemy at the gates makes the public yield to the eternal plea of their State masters for discipline and sacrifice. The plea for sacrifice is always the harbinger of the despot. And so the Carter administration looked frankly for the ‘moral equivalent of war’ — the peacetime substitute for war hysteria and war despotism, for the zeal for sacrifice.”
Read more here.
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