Butler Shaffer on a free society

We may look to the day when the human spirit walks away from its self-imposed bondage.  In that day, men and women may discover that death in service to the state is not heroic; that obedience to power does not confer meaning upon one's life; and that a lengthened leg-chain is not to be confused with liberty.

~ Butler Shaffer, The Wizards of Ozymandias: Reflections on the Decline & Fall

Butler Shaffer on interpreting the Constitution

The Constitution, itself, should remind us that “laws” do not exist in a vacuum, but are the products of human action which, in turn, is behavior driven by people pursuing their self-interests. With legislation created by a political system that enjoys a monopoly on the legal use of force, it is clear that laws are but the means by which some people pursue their ends at the expense of others.

From the very creation of the national government, to how its different branches would act, there has always been a fuzziness as to the meaning of words used in the Constitution. This is due to the fundamental nature of all words. Being abstractions, their application to real-world events inherently depends upon their interpretation. When the Supreme Court tells us that it will have such authority, it is telling us that the government thus created by this document will be the interpreter of its own supposed “limited powers.”

~ Butler Shaffer, "The Myth of the Constitution," LewRockwell.com, April 5, 2017

Butler Shaffer on constitutions

Formal constitutions were written, presuming to create a state by contract, in the collective name of “We the people.” In the American version, political authority was to be disbursed among three major branches, with the legislative branch to enjoy sovereign power; a proposition that would make it difficult – if not impossible – for an individual to enjoy unchecked authority. Coupled with the illusion that the exercise of power could be restrained by words written on parchment, it was believed that reasonable persons could therefore trust state power. That some of the most repressive actions of the Soviet Union were conducted under a written constitution loosely modeled on the American one, should disabuse anyone of the thought that governmental powers could be restrained by words.

~ Butler Shaffer, "The Myth of the Constitution," LewRockwell.com, April 5, 2017

USSR Constitution Day
1949

Lew Rockwell remembers Butler Shaffer

Butler belongs in the pantheon of genuine heroes, along with his friends Murray Rothbard and Burt Blumert. Fortunately for us, another of those heroes, Butler’s friend Ron Paul, is still here to lead us and inspire us. Wherever people value liberty, Butler Shaffer will be remembered with respect and admiration.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Butler Shaffer, R.I.P.," LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2019

Butler Shaffer
1935 - December 28, 2019

Lew Rockwell on Butler Shaffer's experience as a Goldwater conservative

We mourn the passing of our good friend Butler Shaffer, who died yesterday afternoon at the age of 84. Butler was a libertarian at a time when there were very few libertarians in the world. Like many supporters of the free market, he was first attracted to the Republican Party. He supported Barry Goldwater for President in 1964, but he soon came to realize that limited government was a chimera and that the State was by nature opposed to liberty.

As he put the issue in a letter to me in November 2014: “It was just a few months more than 50 years ago that I sat in the Cow Palace in San Francisco as part of my state’s delegation to the Republican National Convention (i.e., the Goldwater Convention)... Afterwards, I was enjoying a drink at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel with one of Goldwater’s advisors. I asked: “Now that Goldwater has the nomination, let us suppose that he gets elected president. What do you think he would do to begin cutting back on federal government power?” “What do you mean?” my acquaintance answered. I reminded him of Goldwater’s book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” wherein he proposed eliminating a few government programs (federal involvement in education being one area). The other man answered: “don’t be absurd: if Goldwater gets elected president, the most we would hope to accomplish would be to slow down the rate of growth of government.”

This conversation helped to confirm the sentiments to which I was already becoming more firmly attracted. I went back home; walked away from any delusional thinking about ‘cleaning up the whorehouse’; and never looked back.

With this view of the state, Butler was naturally attracted to the anarchism of Murray Rothbard and Robert LeFevre, and he wrote from this perspective for the rest of his long life.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Butler Shaffer, R.I.P.," LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2019

Butler Shaffer and Lew Rockwell

Butler Shaffer on the decline of Western Civilization

What I was saying – and what I have been saying for many decades – is that Western Civilization should be spoken of in the past tense; that its life-affirming conditions have been destroyed by the content of our thinking.  I have written elsewhere that civilizations are created by individuals; they are destroyed by collectives.

~ Butler Shaffer, "'The Death of Western Civilization' - Continued," LewRockwell.com Blog, November 14, 2015

Butler Shaffer on justice and 9/11

One of the emptiest words in our culture is "justice." Its vacuous quality is what makes it so popular: it requires little in the way of focused, intelligent explication to employ it. To those on the political "left," justice" gets translated into a demand for money to be taken from some and bestowed upon others. Those on the political "right" use it as a plea for the building of more prisons and the hiring of more police officers to ferret out more persons to fill them. When people tell me "I demand justice," my response is to warn them to temper their insistence, as they might just get it!

When pressed for a definition, I reply that justice is the redistribution of violence. In its simplest form, X commits a wrong upon Y, for which Y demands retaliation against X. In its more complex form in our collectivized world, fifteen Saudis, two men from the United Arab Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese join in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings. As these men were killed in the process, the demands for "justice" led most Americans to accept the bombing and killing of innocent men, women, and children in such unrelated places as Afghanistan and Iraq! Justice and rationality have little to do with one another.

~ Butler Shaffer, "What Is Justice?," LewRockwell.com, July 13, 2009