Several readers have alerted me to an article in the New York Times the other day by Gail Collins, making fun of Ron Paul for not believing in the need for various government agencies and functions. I haven’t had time to glance at it — I spent the weekend exclusively with the family, and spiritually far away from the New York Times — but I may put together some kind of response this week.

One reader in particular shared with me the kinds of comments that accompanied the article. They were overwhelmingly of the low-self-esteem statist variety: we’re too stupid to figure out how to organize society without guys with guns directing everything, so Ron Paul is silly and naive to believe in freedom.

Thus: “It’s unlikely that Ron Paul would be here today if he had grown up in the world he wants the rest of us to live in. There’s a reason we stopped living like self-sufficient nomads and built civilizations which could provide food, education, health care, defense, and commerce to a large and diverse citizenry.”

Let’s leave aside that England had achieved practically universal education well before the introduction of “free” schools, or that every single good this person insists we are too stupid and helpless to provide without guys with guns can indeed be and has in fact been so provided.

Let’s focus just on commerce.

(1) The person quoted above actually thinks opposition to government power means opposition to commerce and a retreat into self-sufficiency. I hardly know what to say. One of the key classical liberal (libertarian) criticisms of government is that it disrupts commercial activity and undermines the international division of labor.

(2) Worse than this elementary mistake is the casual assumption, shared by folks across the ideological spectrum, that we owe the great achievements of mankind, including commerce itself, to guys with guns.

For one thing, what is so impressive about the international division of labor is that it occurs without central direction of any kind. Note what happened when this guy tried to build a toaster from scratch, entirely on his own. It turned out to be an unspeakably difficult thing that took him nearly a year and a pile of dough, and the toaster wound up working for ten seconds.

Yet the production process by which the various inputs that go into toaster production are produced, transported, and assembled, in just the right quantities without any surpluses or shortages, occurs every day without any Global Toaster Production Planning Board. And it isn’t just a matter of getting a few pieces together. It isn’t even just a matter of understanding mining or wiring. Every stage involves technical knowledge possessed only by a very few, and requires the outlay of capital and the allocation of productive factors to make it a reality. Toaster production requires the manufacture of rubber in order to make the tires that the trucks will need to transport the toaster’s component parts. Thus the more closely we look at it, the more mind-bogglingly complex the whole matter becomes. That this occurs every day without our appreciating or even noticing it is truly incredible.

The classic work on this is Leonard Read’s great little essay “I, Pencil.”

(3) The extension of commerce has in fact involved striking down state-imposed barriers to the free interaction of individuals. It’s a bit rich for the state to try to take credit for it.

(4) The more sophisticated critic may argue that the legal infrastructure necessary to make commerce work originated with the state. Wrong again. Merchant law developed in medieval Europe without the involvement of the state. This is particularly remarkable given that it sought to provide dispute resolution and basic legal standards across a wide territorial expanse that included peoples who spoke different languages and practiced different customs. You can read a good discussion of it in the classic work of Bruce Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State.

(5) For all the commitment to peace and nonviolence that is supposed to define progressivism, there’s a tad bit too much admiration for what we might call a military model of social organization for my taste. The casual assumption that all good things come about because of large-scale organization overseen by a leader barking out orders speaks ill of their understanding of how society actually functions.

In such a context, it may be interesting to note the zeal with which progressives (with only a handful of exceptions, so there goes the myth of the progressive peacenik) urged U.S. involvement in World War I. Yes, Germany had to be smashed, they said, but the American economy also needed the kind of regimentation and central organization that the pressures of wartime would surely bring. Once people had become accustomed to government direction of the economy, they would be more prepared in peacetime to abandon or at least modify their backward ideas about the sanctity of private property and all that.

I conclude with these remarks by Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, a man of the Establishment if there ever was one:

On the military reservation…there is ordered serenity. The parts do not exist on their own, but accept their subordination to the whole. Beauty and utility are merged in gray stone…. The post is suffused with rhythm and harmony which comes when the collective will supplants individual whim…. The behavior of men is governed by a code…. The unity of the community incites no man to be more than he is. In order is found peace; discipline, fulfillment; in community, security…. Is it possible to deny that the military values — loyalty, duty, restraint, dedication — are the ones America most needs today? … America can learn more from West Point than West Point from America…. If the civilians permit the soldiers to adhere to the military standard, the nations themselves may eventually find redemption and security in making that standard their own.

In short: shut up and obey, citizen. It is this principle, and not your vaunted “voluntary social interaction,” that makes the world go round.