by Pierre Lemieux

Just a few hours after the tragic events of September 11 (when these lines are written), we are already hearing voices suggesting that free societies are too vulnerable to terrorism, and that they should therefore become less free. But the main lesson of these events should be at the polar opposite: the states that rule over us, and pretend to protect us, should be as different as possible from the tyrants or would-by tyrants who commit these horrendous crimes.
Whatever rights we relinquish, whatever power we give to our own states, we will never be perfectly protected against violence ' if only against violence from our protectors, but there is more to it than this. The lingering question is, How is it that our powerful states, the American state first among them, cannot protect us against murderers who must have planned for months, if not years, a concerted action to highjack a number of planes and crash them on different objectives? How is it possible that a state which spends more than a third of what people produce in the United States, a state that has the FBI, the CIA, the BATF, the NSA, army intelligence, satellite spies, Carnivore, etc. ' how is it possible that this state cannot discover and kill an extended terrorist plot on its very own territory? Even limited by the Constitution, the American state is the most powerful state in the history of mankind, and it won't do to answer that it lacks power to accomplish its protection mission.
The fact is that relatively little of contemporary state resources is actually spent on the protection of its citizens. Not more than 15% of total public expenditures (all levels of government) in the United States are spent on public protection, i.e., law enforcement and national defense. Moreover, a large part of these resources is spent on detrimental regulation, control of peaceful citizens, and protection against false, victimless crimes. Resources allocated to these fields cannot be spent on pursuing real criminals and conspirators. If the state did not spend so much controlling drugs or guns or regulating markets, not to think of redistributing money to people from whom it was taken in the first place, it would certainly have more than the resources needed to fight world terrorists efficiently.
In his Tuesday night address, George Bush said: I've directed the full resources for our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice. This is a figure of style. Law enforcement is in large part directed against peaceful citizens.

Did Airport Security Aid the Terrorists?

From today's vantage point, the wars on victimless crimes look like an absurdly tragic diversion. We can only laugh at the Jihad on smoking. We can only laugh, or cry, at the question: Have you packed your luggage yourself. What have been the benefits of airport tight security and compulsory searches, besides the violation of our traditional rights? Think about the unthinkable. What if, on the flights that crashed on the World Trade Center, a couple of passengers had been armed? Wouldn't this have compensated for other problems, and perhaps small tragedies, caused over the years by a few armed passengers? It wouldn't be the first time that state intervention prevents small tragedies at the cost of monumental ones. Our societies might be more vulnerable to terrorism not because they are too free but, indeed, because individuals are not free enough.
Yet, perhaps no human institution can prevent madmen from committing mass crimes. Historically, most of these madmen were called kings or presidents or führers. Individual madmen were generally much less successful at wreaking havoc. Technology has democratized the capacity to inflict damages, but we still know no better way to protect individuals from mass crimes than to restrict state powers.
States are more dangerous than individuals. The September 11 crimes were committed by tyrants or would-be tyrants, and these events tell us more about tyranny than about what remains of our liberty. We can say about the murderers what Auberon Herbert wrote about the bomb-setting terrorists of his days: Dynamite is not opposed to government; it is, on the contrary, government in its most intensified and concentrated form. . . . It is the perfection, the ne plus ultra, of government.[1]
True, some tyrants are worse than others, and the ones who rule over us in Western democracies are certainly preferable to Islamic types of tyrants ' or to whatever type of barbarians attacked unarmed civilians at the World Trade Center, and killed passengers of four commercial flights. Certainly, we should not fight our still (relatively) mild tyrants as violently as we would fight more totalitarian ones. Yet, we should beware of identifying individuals with the states they live under. As Bertrand de Jouvenel showed [2], it is this identification that was the basis for the 20th century's total wars. The terrorism we have witnessed in New York City is the ultimate collectivism: private individuals in the two towers, not to say in the highjacked planes, were considered by the murderers as agents of the U.S. government.

What Should Be Done

The libertarian reaction to these terrorist attacks should be two-fold. First, the murderers must be brought to justice. In our statist world, we should support legal government efforts to achieve this. Joint public-private solutions could be envisioned. Governments could ask for voluntary contributions and set up a fund to pay bounties to whomever would bring the suspects to justice, or perhaps execute the guilty. Then, let all the rednecks, adventurers and soldiers of fortune compete to, say, bring bin Laden in. I suspect that such free competition would be more effective than the CIA or the army.
Second, whatever state action is taken, it must not constitute an excuse for restricting our liberties even more. The main danger in reacting to the crimes of tyrants is that our states become more similar to them. Free individuals will lose the war against terrorists if their own governments trample on their liberties under the excuse of protecting them. It is tragically ironic that the September 11, 2001 tragedy follows decades of government restricting our liberties under the guise of fighting foreign tyrants or terrorists.
We should heed what Frederick Douglass, the 19th century escaped slave, wrote about an episode of his servitude: . . . and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.[3] If preserving liberty entails some risk, let's refuse that others force their anti-liberty trade-off on the rest of us. In fact, one does not buy peace by giving up liberty.

[1] Auberon Herbert, The Ethics of Dynamite [1894], reproduced in The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays by Auberon Herbert (Indianaoplis: Liberty Fund, 1978), pp. 192 and 194.
[2] Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of its Growth [1945] (Indianapolis: Lib- erty Fund, 1993).
[3] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself [1845] (Toronto: New American Library, 1968), p. 103.