Monday, July 25, 2016

It's Time to Privatize Foreign Policy

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

 I have a new article out “They Said No to Big Government.”

 Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins in November, the U.S. government will continue a foreign policy of political and military interventionism in the affairs of other nations around the world. Hillary represents a continuation of the post-World War II consensus among the foreign policy establishment that America must be the paternalistic intervener in the affairs of other nations for social order.

 Trump is not the isolationist he is often painted. He is just as much of a foreign interventionist; he just wants to renegotiate the terms of the “deal” under which America plays global policeman.

I suggest that, perhaps, it is time to think "outside the box," and privatize foreign policy under which private citizens would determine and decide whether they considered conflicts in other countries to deserve their support to assist people being oppressed or invaded. But in a free society, it should not be the role of the government to involve itself in the internal affairs of other nations.

 Americans went off to fight for the independence of countries in South America against Spanish rule in the nineteenth century. America “leftists” fought on the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Americans gave financial support to the Contras who were fighting the Soviet-supported Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. And hundreds of Westerns, including Americans, have gone off to Syria to fight against the Islamic State with Kurdish and other opposition forces.

This should be the model of foreign affairs in a free society when it does not involve actual or clearly imminent attack on the territory of the United States. It becomes a matter of individual choice whether to support and volunteer to assist those in other lands facing oppression or invasion. And not politicized as “reasons of state.”

http://www.epjresearchroom.com/2016/07/its-time-to-privatize-foreign-policy.html

Best,

Richard

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