The Complete

Libertarian
Forum

1969–1984

Edited by Murray N. Rothbard

The Ludwig von Mises Institute is dedicated to advancing the Austrian School of economics and libertarian scholarship. Founded in 1982, the Institute defends individual liberty, the free market, private property, sound money, and peace. Its broad range of teaching programs, fellowships, publications, and conferences is supported by voluntary donations. For more information, see Mises.org, write us at info@mises.org, or phone us at 1-800-OF-MISES.

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Contents

1969

Preview Issue, March 1, 1969

Why The Libertarian?

The Nixon Administration: Creeping Cornuellism

State of Palestine Launched

“Private” Enterprise at Work

A People’s Court?

Sitting on the Sidewalk Outlawed

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.1, April 1, 1969

The Scientific Imperial Counsellor: “To Restore Faith in Government”

FBI and CIA (Karl Hess)

“Dear Ted”: Prelude to Repression?

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.2, April 15, 1969

Tax Day

Tax Revolt in Wisconsin

Tax Revolt (Karl Hess)

Transformation of a Newspaper

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.3, May 1, 1969

The Student Revolution

My Taxes (Karl Hess)

Vol. 1.4, May 15, 1969

Mailer for Mayor

Repression, Domestic and Foreign (Karl Hess)

S.D.S. and Black Self-Determination (Stephen Halbrook)

The Panthers and Black Liberation

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.5, June 1, 1969

The Movement Grows

The Coming White Terror (Karl Hess)

Don’t Tread on Me

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.6, June 15, 1969

Massacre at People’s Park

Where are the Specifics? (Karl Hess)

Confiscation and the Homestead Principle

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.7, July 1, 1969

The Meaning of Revolution

What the Movement Needs (Karl Hess)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.8, July 15, 1969

Nixon’s Decisions

SDS—Two Views (Murray Rothbard and Leonard P. Liggio)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.9, August 1, 1969

Revolution in Minnesota

The Real Rebels (Karl Hess)

Nelson’s Waterloo

The New Deal and Fascism

Heinlein and Liberty: A Warning (Wilson A. Clark, Jr.)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.10, August 15, 1969

Listen, YAF

Leaders and Heroes (Karl Hess)

Against the Volunteer Military (Walter Block)

Vol. 1.11, September 1, 1969

National Liberation

Reform (Karl Hess)

The Czech Crisis, Part I (Leonard P. Liggio)

Vol. 1.12, September 15, 1969

The Revolution Comes to YAF (Jerome Tuccille)

The YAF Power Play

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.13, October 1, 1969

Anarcho-Rightism

Conservative Libertarianism (Karl Hess)

The New Boston Tea Party

National Review Rides Again

Abolition: An Acid Test

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.14, October 15, 1969

We Make the Media

Class Analysis

The Czech Crisis (Leonard P. Liggio)

Vol. 1.15, November 1, 1969

The Conference

Robin Hood Revisionism (Karl Hess)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.16, November 15, 1969

Ultra-Leftism

Neoliberals in German Politics (Leonard P. Liggio)

A YAF Conversion

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.17, November 15, 1969

The Anti-War Movement

A Letter to Moloch

The Airline Cartel

A Leftist Looks at YAF

Recommended Reading

Vol. 1.18, December 15, 1969

Notes on Repression

Cults and Criticisms (Karl Hess)

The Military-Industrial-University Complex (Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.)

1970

Vol. 2.1, January 1, 1970

Anarcho-Communism

The Working Class (Bill Goring)

Lurking in the Wings (J. M. Cobb)

My Loyalty Oath (Ann C. Bardsley)

Vol. 2.2, January 15, 1970

AHA Convention (Leonard P. Liggio)

From Libertine to Libertarian (Jerome Tuccille)

What’s Your Excuse Now?

Against Taxation

USIA Network

Organized Crime (Joseph R. Peden)

Vol. 2.3, February 1, 1970

Biafra, RIP

Left and Right: The Psychology of Opposites (Jerome Tuccille)

Massacres in Vietnam (Leonard P. Liggio)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.4, February 15, 1970

The Task Ahead

Phony Libertarianism (Jerome Tuccille)

Meet Libertarians

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.5, March 1, 1970

Free Bill Kunstler!

People Justice (Joseph R. Peden)

Doctors and Drugs

The Great Society (James Dale Davidson)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.6, March 15, 1970

The New Left, RIP

For a New America

Vol. 2.7, April 1, 1970

The Mad Bombers

The Knudson Revolt

Liberty and the University (Edwin G. Dolan)

Tax Resistance (Jerome Tuccille)

Census Resistance

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.8, April 15, 1970

The Cure For Air Pollution

U.S. Imperialism (Vincent Ninell)

The Individualist

The Tuccille Book

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.9, May 1, 1970

Farewell To The Left

Natural Allies Revisited (Jerome Tuccille)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.10, May 15, 1970

The State of the Movement (Leonard P. Liggio)

Vol. 2.11, June 1, 1970

The New Movement: Peace Politics

The New Libertarianism

The Judges

The Lenin Centennial (Edwin G. Dolan)

Vol. 2.12, June 15, 1970

The Nixon Mess

Anarchism and Government (John V. Peters)

Abortion Repeal

From the “Old Curmudgeon”

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.13–14, July, 1970

On Civil Obedience

From the “Old Curmudgeon”

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.15–16, August, 1970

Hatfield for President?

Black Flag for a New Decade (Edwin G. Dolan)

The State: Enemy of Latin America (Stephen P. Halbrook)

Bits and Pieces (Jerome Tuccille)

Nixon and the Economy (Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.)

Vol. 2.17, September 1, 1970

The Socialist Scholars Caper

More on Ardrey

Bits and Pieces (Jerome Tuccille)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.18, September 15, 1970

Fall Reading

A Not So Radical Guide (Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.)

Vol. 2.19, October 1, 1970

When Revolution?

Bits and Pieces: On Sexism (Jerome Tuccille)

The Case for Elites

From the “Old Curmudgeon”

Gems of Statism

Vol. 2.20, October 15, 1970

Polarization

O Canada (Joseph R. Peden)

Gun Laws (Stephen Halbrook)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.21, November 1, 1970

White Terror in Quebec

Gems of Statism

Free Enterprise and Free Education (Edwin G. Dolan)

Bits and Pieces (Jerome Tuccille)

The Shaffer Dictionary (Butler Shaffer)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 2.22–23, November 15–December 1, 1970

The Elections

Retreat from Freedom

Stirrings, Right and Left

Power and Market

Bits and Pieces: Optimism One (Jerome Tuccille)

The Shaffer Dictionary (Butler Shaffer)

Vol. 2.24, December 15, 1970

Death of the Left

Hawaii—Growth and Repression

Anarchism—A New Convert

Recommended Reading

1971

Vol. 3.1, January 1971

Nixonite Socialism

To Our Readers

Social Darwinism Reconsidered

Native Americans and Property Rights (Leonard P. Liggio)

Bits and Pieces (Jerome Tuccille)

Knee-Jerk Radicalism

Recommended Reading

Vol. 3.2, February 1971

Take Off

Come One! Come All!

Libertarianism: A Warning (Tibor R. Machan)

On Women’s Liberation (Edwin G. Dolan)

Living Free

Bits and Pieces: The Psychological-Political Dichotomy (Jerome Tuccille)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 3.2, March 1971

Take Off II

Facing Bureaucracy (Norman H. Crowhurst)

In Defense of Non-Romantic Literature (Jerome Tuccille)

From the “Old Curmudgeon”

Recommended Reading

Vol. 3.4, April 1971

The Conning of America

Stateless Societies: Ancient Ireland (Joseph R. Peden)

Bits and Pieces (Jerome Tuccille)

A Libertarian Rebuttal: Conservatism Examined (James Dale Davidson)

Army Intelligence Reads The Forum

Vol. 3.5, May 1971

Orwell Lives

Ireland: Neutralist and State Capitalist (John P. McCarthy)

Contempt for the Usual

Chamberlain and Hess (Robert LeFevre)

Is Pot Harmless?

From the Old Curmudgeon

Recommended Reading

We Beat the SST

Libertarian Book News

For Bengal

Vol. 3.5, June 1971

How to Destatize

Syndical Syndrome

Jerome Daly Once More

The Senate and the Draft

Bits and Pieces (Jerome Tuccille)

Nixonite Socialism

Recommended Reading

Vol. 3.6–7, July–August 1971

Dumping Nixon

Liberty: From Rand to Christ (Joseph R. Peden)

Comment (Murray Rothbard)

Bits and Pieces: Presidential Politics (Jerome Tuccille)

Traditional China and Anarchism (M. Rubinstein)

From the Old Curmudgeon

Vol. 3.8, September 1971

The End of Economic Freedom

You Read it Here

Vol. 3.9, October 1971

Attica

Reprint Bonanza

Disestablish Public Education (Leonard P. Liggio)

A Note on Revolution (R.A. Childs, Jr.)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 3.10, November 1971

Nixon’s NEP

We Fight the Freeze

Confession—Pavlovian Style (Lucille E. Moran)

Libertarian Wit: Review of Tuccille’s It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand

Vol. 3.11, December 1971

The UN and The War

Mises Festschrift

Recommended Reading

The Population Hysteria (Jerome Tuccille)

Libertarian Conference

1972

Vol. 4.1, January 1972

Politics ‘72

Purist Deviationism: A Strategic Fallacy (William Danks)

Libertarians Versus Controls

The Shaffer Dictionary

On Punishment: Two Comments and a Reply

Vol. 4.2, February 1972

Phase II Cracking

The Political Circus

For Croatia

The Shaffer Dictionary

Recommended Reading

The Movement Marches On

Immortality and the Law (Jerome Tuccille)

From the Old Curmudgeon

Vol. 4.3, March 1972

The Party

The Shaffer Dictionary

The Rising Sun (Leonard P. Liggio)

The Political Circus

From the Old Curmudgeon

The Lone Eagle (Justus D. Doenecke)

Vol. 4.4, April 1972

A Bunch of Losers

Ashlosky for President (Edwin G. Dolan)

Philosophy and Immortality (Jerome Tuccille)

Recommended Reading

The Conservation Question (Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.)

Short People, Arise!

Vol. 4.5, May 1972

Nixon’s World

The Party Once More

Review of John Hospers’ Libertarianism, Part I (R.A. Childs, Jr.)

The Liar as Hero (Walter Block)

From the Old Curmudgeon

The Shadow Cabinet

Recommended Reading

Frank S. Meyer, RIP

Vol. 4.6–7, June–July 1972

McGovern???

The Party Emerges

Another Lone Nut

Review of John Hospers’ Libertarianism, Part II (R.A. Childs, Jr.)

Anationalism and Immortality (Jerome Tuccille)

The Polish Ham Question (Walter Block)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Garbage in New York (Joseph R. Peden)

Academic Freedom? (Peter Sherman)

Vol. 4.8–9, August–September 1972
(This issue features Joseph Peden as editor)

Confronting Leviathan

Arbitration: A Fundamental Alternate Institution (Ralph Fucetola, III)

The Law of the Sea

Transnational Relations

Review of Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law (Gary Greenberg)

Localism and Bureaucracy In the 19th Century China (M. Rubenstein)

Bombing the Dikes

America’s Newest Enemies

Vol. 4.8, October 1972

November??

No, No McGovern

McGovern for President (Lyla O’Driscoll, Gerald P. O’Driscoll)

Open Letter to the Internal Revenue Service (Jerome Tuccille)

Nixon or McGovern? (Joseph R. Peden)

Archy’s Last Gasp

The Slumlord as Hero (Walter Block)

The Schmitz Ticket

Unity or Cadre

Recommended Reading

Vol. 4.9, November 1972

Beyond the Sixties

From the Old Curmudgeon

The Senate Rated

The Strip Miner as Hero (Walter Block)

The Elections

Whither the Democracy?

Recommended Reading

Revisionism From the Center: A Review Essay (Chris R. Tame)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 4.10, December 1972

The Movement

Hospers on Crime and the FBI

The Blackmailer as Hero (Walter Block)

From the Old Curmudgeon

Ezra Pound, RIP (James Dale Davidson)

We Make the Electoral College!

Freedom, Pot, and National Review

Recommended Reading

A Response to the Challenge (Tibor Machan)

The Editor Replies

Bormann Once More

1973

Vol. 4.11, January 1973

The Apotheosis of Harry

Sex Breaks Up a Cult

The Pimp as Hero (Walter Block)

Review of A. Ernest Fitzgerald’s The High Priests of Waste (Robert Sherrill)

The Other North American Election (Samuel Edward Konkin III)

Recommended Reading

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

From the Old Curmudgeon

Vol. 5.2, February 1973

The Sticks in the Closet

Hospers Replies (John Hospers)

The Editor Rebuts

The Old Curmudgeon as Hero (Walter Block)

A Libertarian Poll

Movement Magazines

Vol. 5.3, March 1973

The Mayoral Circus

The Blackmailer as Villain (Gary Greenberg)

The Blackmailer as Hero: A Reply (Walter Block)

Heroes and Scapegoats (Walter Block)

Life vs. Death: The Final Barricade (Jerome Tuccille)

The Rise of Roy Ash (Bill Evers)

Denial of Protection (Tibor Machan)

Vol. 5.4, April 1973

Present at the Creation

Tax Rebellion

Personal “Freedom”: Review of Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (R.A. Childs, Jr.)

The IBM Case: A Comment (Dominick T. Armentano)

Contra Psychological “Liberation”

Jim Davidson and the Week That Was

From the Halls of Montezuma . . . (Joseph R. Peden)

Monthly Index of Liberty

Recommended Reading

Vol. 5.5, May 1973

Notes on Watergate

Review of Murray Rothbard’s For A New Liberty (J. Neil Schulman)

Floyd Arthur “Baldy” Harper, RIP

McGovern vs. Rothbard

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Anti-Tax Demonstration (K.W. Kalcheim)

Hospers On Rothbard’s Rebuttal (John Hospers)

Recommended Reading

The Editor’s Final Rebuttal

Vol. 5.6, June 1973

The Mayoral Circus II

Blockian Ethics (Roy Halliday)

Blockian Ethics—A Reply (Walter Block)

The Editor Comments

Harry Browne Replies (H. Browne)

The Editor Rebuts

Feds and Rebs (K.W. Kalcheim)

The Need For a Movement and a Party

Rothbardiana

The Old Curmudgeon

Vol. 5.7, July 1973

Economic Mess

On Man and Perfection (Tibor Machan)

Harper’s Last Article

Liberty or Order: 1970 Domestic Spying Plan (Bill Evers)

Parento on the Prospects for Liberty (Vilfredo Pareto)

Public Schools: The Counterattack Begins (Joseph R. Peden)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 5.8, August 1973

Oil and American Foreign Policy (John Hegel III)

101 Way to Promote Libertarian Ideas

News Notes (Joseph R. Peden)

Recommended Reading

The Meaning of War

Vol. 5.9, September 1973

American Monopoly Statism (Joseph R. Stromberg)

Libertarianism and Social Transformation (Stephen Halbrook)

Use Immunity: Let the Punishment Fit the Crime (Joseph R. Peden)

Comment (Joseph R. Peden)

Vol. 5.10, October 1973

Hands off the Middle East!

Libertarians and Culture: A Challenge (James Dale Davidson)

Send Money!

“The Libertarian”: The Gospel According to LeFevre

Revolution in Chile

Friedman’s Value-Free Value: Human Liberty (Tibor Machan)

Technology Forever (Jerome Tuccille)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 5.11, November 1973

Ludwig von Mises, RIP

Libertarian Party

From the Old Curmudgeon

The Middle East

Music: The Art No One Thinks About (Kenneth LaFave)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

The Fall of the Republic

Mr. First Nighter, Soft on the Enemy? (H. Primae Noctis)

For Conspiracy Theorists Only!

The “Final Solution” to the Arab Problem

Vol. 5.12, December 1973

Congress ’73

Are We Another Rome? (Joseph R. Peden)

The Machinery of Friedman (Joseph Salerno)

Maddox Attacks Revisionism (Bill Evers)

Rand on the Middle East

1974

Vol. 6.1, January 1974

Energy Fascism

Mises and History (Leonard P. Liggio)

Danish Delight

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 6.2, February 1974

Two Tiers Crumble

Relevance?

What Kind of “Purity”?

An Open Letter to Irving Kristol

Political Kidnapping

Rothbardiana

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Background of Middle East Conflict (Bill Evers)

Save the Oil Industry!

The Home Front: Review of G. Perrett’s Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph (Justus D. Doenecke)

101 Ways to Promote Libertarian Ideas

Vol. 6.3, March 1974

Seven Days in May??

European Politics (Leonard P. Liggio)

The British Elections

Libertarianism and Humanist Psychology (Martin Andrews)

Why No Oil Refineries

How to Deal With Kidnapping

Libertarian Songs

Libertarian Dinner Club

Civil Liberties, Selective Style

Vol. 6.4, April 1974

Five Years Old!

FLP Convention: One Step Forward, One Step Back

The Mysterious World of the CIA

Phillip H. Willkie, RIP

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Review of John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching (William Stewart)

Vol. 6.5, May 1974

Impeach the . . . (Expletive Deleted)

BFL Expands

Uncle Miltie Rides Again

Purity and the Libertarian Party

The Growth of Revisionism from the Centre: A Review Essay (Chris R. Tame)

Rhodesia—Unjust Land Seizure (Bill Evers)

Vol. 6.6, June 1974

Reflections on the Middle East

European Politics (Leonard P. Liggio)

For Tuccille (Roger Lea MacBride)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

For Kurdistan

The Hiss Case Revisited

From the Old Curmudgeon

Contra Federal Campaign Funding (Bill Evers)

Vol. 6.7, July 1974

World-Wide Inflation

Destutt de Tracy: Early French Classical Liberal (Leonard P. Liggio)

Conservative Myths in History: Review of E.v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (Ralph Raico)

Comment on the CLA (Lynn Kinsky)

The Prophetic Vision of Hillaire Belloc (John P. McCarthy)

New Rothbard Book

Vol. 6.8, August 1974

Whoopee!!

Kennedy Marriage Revisionism

Libertarian Advance

School or Jail?: Review of W. Rickenbacker’s The Twelve Year Sentence (Joseph R. Peden)

From the Old Curmudgeon

Recommended Reading

In Search of the Old Curmudgeon (James Dale Davidson)

About Quotas (W.R. Havender)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 6.9, September 1974

Natural Law, or The Science of Justice (Lysander Spooner)

Only One Heartbeat Away

The Non-Dismal Science (Leonard P. Liggio)

Vol. 6.10, October 1974

The Ford in Our Present, Or Can Greenspan Save Us?

LP Platform

Austrian Economics on the Rise (Richard M. Ebeling)

Davidson and “Women’s Lib” (Linda V. Seawright)

Science and Human Liberty (Tibor Machan)

Hayek and the Nobel Prize

Vol. 6.11, November 1974

The Elections

Voting and Politics

After Rabat, What?

Economic Determinism, Ideology, and the American Revolution

Report from Europe

Vol. 6.12, December 1974

The Emerging Crisis

Libertarian Scholarship Advances

Women’s Lib: Goldberg Replies to Kinsky (Steven Goldberg)

Boston Libertarian Dinners!

Henry Hazlitt Celebrates 80th Birthday

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

1975

Vol. 7.1, January 1975

Government and the Economy

Society Without a State (Murray Rothbard)

The Demise of Fractional Reserve Banking? (Karl E. Peterjohn)

Vol. 7.2, February 1975

Oil War and Oil Imperialism (Joseph R. Stromberg)

Tax Rebellion in Willimantic

Foreign Affairs (Leonard P. Liggio)

The Day-Care “Shortage”

Sense on Oil—At Last!

Vol. 7.3, March 1975

Inflationary Depression

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Profits Regulation and Inflation (Hartwell C. Herring III, Fred A. Jacobs)

The Aliens Are Among Us (J. Neil Schulman)

Spooner vs. Liberty (Carl Watner)

“Under”-Population

Forthcoming Spring Books

Vol. 7.4, April 1975

The Death of a State

LP Convention—Come One, Come All!

The AIB Conference: From Scholarship to Political Activism In Assassination Revisionism (Alan Fairgate)

Nozick Award

Assassination Revisionism Once More

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 7.5, May 1975

Mayaguez, By Jingo

Peasants and Revolution: A Review Essay (Joseph R. Stromberg)

Hobbes and Liberalism (Bill Evers)

Say’s Law Revisited (Richard M. Ebeling)

Libertarian Ripoff of the Month Dept.

Vol. 7.6, June 1975

The Case for Optimism

From Crank-Up to Crack-Up (Ludwig v. Mises)

The Bankruptcy of Liberalism

Recommended Reading

On Income Differences (W.R. Havender)

The Ethics Gap

Burton K. Wheeler, Montana Isolationist, RIP (Leonard P. Liggio)

Vol. 7.7, July 1975

Dictatorships

The Division of Labor and the Libertarian Movement (Tom G. Palmer)

Fanfani’s Fall (Leonard P. Liggio)

The Second Austrian Conference

From the Old Curmudgeon

Vol. 8.8, August 1975

Winston Churchill: An Appreciation (Ralph Raico)

Vol. 8.9, September 1975

The LP Convention

ALL Founded

Depression and Inflation (Richard M. Ebeling)

Rothbardiana

On the Women’s Liberation, or the Male Chauvinist Pig as Hero (Walter Block)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 8.10, October 1975

The Sinai Trap

Is the Grass Any Greener. . .? Review of Laura & Odie Faulk’s The Australian Alternative

Arab Wars

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

From the Old Curmudgeon

Class Analysis and Economic Systems (David Osterfeld)

“Libertarian” Sci-fi

Friedman and the Liberals (Tibor Machan)

Vol. 8.11, November 1975

Politics: November ‘75

Foreign Affairs Review (Leonard P. Liggio)

Recommended Reading

Is Dayan Just Another Rommel?: Review of A. Bober’s The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism (Joseph R. Stromberg)

Vol. 8.12, December 1975

Stop Reagan!

On Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I

Whither Anarchy? Has Robert Nozick Justified the State? (Randy Barnett)

From the Old Curmudgeon: My New Year’s Wish for the Movement

Recommended Reading

LP Literature

The Polish Question In Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Diplomacy (Leonard P. Liggio)

Right-Center Chic

1976

Vol. 8.13, January 1976

U.S. Out of Angola!

FDR and the Isolationists (Bruce Bartlett)

Right-Wing Libertarians and the Cold War (Joseph R. Stromberg)

MacBride vs. Reagan

The ABM Slips Away

Libertarian Bicentennial

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Free Doug Kennell

Libertarian Environmentalists

Vol. 9.2, February 1976

The Presidency ’76: The Morning Line

We Make the Media!

Revisionism and Libertarianism

Center for Libertarian Studies Formed!

Fuller, Law, and Anarchism (Randy E. Barnett)

Von Hoffman vs. Schlesinger

Vol. 9.3, March 1976

The Early Primaries

Libertarian Feminists Organize

African Roundup

The Lebanon Tragedy

Capitalism, Socialism, and Bureaucratic Management (David Osterfeld)

The State vs. the Amish (Joseph R. Peden)

Foreign Affairs (Leonard P. Liggio)

Vol. 9.4, April 1976

FLP Split!

Combatting Conservatism

A Political Party, Once More

The “Defense Gap” Mythology

Recommended Reading

Vol. 9.5, May 1976

The Zen Candidate: Or, Browning Out In the Movement

On Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia—II

The Invisible Hand Strikes Back (Roy A. Childs, Jr.)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 9.6, June 1976

Ford Vs. Carter?

Who’s Behind . . . ?

Secession, The Essence of Anarchy: A Libertarian Perspective on the War For Southern Independence (Joseph R. Stromberg)

The Psycho-Presidency

Economic Scapegoats: Heroes or Scoundrels? Review of Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable (Bill Evers)

Vol. 9.7, July 1976

MacBride’s New Book

News From Spain

CLS Booms!

Democratic Convention Notes

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Foreign Affairs: Palestine (Leonard P. Liggio)

The Education Grab

Russia! (Justus D. Doenecke)

Vol. 9.8, August 1976

The State As An Immoral Teacher (Ouida)

Cold War Revisionism (Walter E. Grinder)

Vol. 9.9, September 1976

Education By Bribes and Coercion (Auberon Herbert)

Thinking About Revolution: Two Books of Importance

The First Two Years of WWII (J.P. McCarthy)

Vol. 9.10, October 1976

To the Elections

The LP Convention

Libertarianism for Profit? A Letter and Reply

“Benediction” Speech at the LP Convention

Storm Over the “Scum”: Defending the Undefendable Block

A Letter From Britain

Recommended Reading

Vol. 9.11, November 1976

The LP: Retrospect and Prospect

Kuhn’s Paradigms (Leonard P. Liggio)

Toward a Libertarian Movement (Tom G. Palmer)

Health and Liberty

Metric Mania

Vol. 9.12, December 1976

Carter & Co.—Back at the Old Stand

Nobel Prize for Friedman

Kropotkin’s Ethics and the Public Good (W.M. Evers)

From the Old Curmudgeon

New Libertarian Scholarly Journal!

1977

Vol. 10.1, January 1977

LP Election Scoreboard

More on Carter & Co.

Life With Mises (Richard M. Ebeling)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Fair Trial vs. Free Press: Court Decision Imperils Press (Bill Evers)

Land Reform: Portugal and Mexico

Relaxation in China?

Vive Le Quebec Libre

Vol. 10.2, February 1977

The War Over Foreign Policy

Recommended Reading

Libertarianism and Property Rights (Walter Block)

One Man Against OSHA

From the Old Curmudgeon

The Natural Gas Caper

Anarcho-Capitalism and the Defense of the Nonstate (David Osterfeld)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 10.3, March 1977

The New End of Ideology?

In Defense of Gradualism (Robert Poole, Jr.)

The Fallacy of Gradualism: A Reply (Tom G. Palmer)

Human Rights at Home: the Flynt Case

The New L.R.

A Black Writer’s View of Roots (Anne Wortham)

A Great Day for Freedom

From the Old Curmudgeon: The “Libertarian” Church

Kidnappers at Large

America and “Human Rights”—East Timor Division

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Zaire—Katanga Rises Again!

Vol. 10.4, April 1977

At the Summit

The Death of General Hershey

The Great Felker Caper

The Historians’ Betrayal

The Tuccille Defection

Carter on Inflation

Jesus and Marx: Review of Dale Vree’s On Synthesizing Marxism and Christianity (Justus D. Doenecke)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 10.5, May 1977

Begin Begins

Liberty and the Drug Problem (R. Childs)

Power, Obedience, and Education: a Review Essay (Joseph R. Stromberg)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Who are the South Moluccans?

Vol. 10.6, June 1977

The Water “Shortage”

The State and Education (Austin W. Wright)

The “Humane” N-Bomb

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Open Door Imperialism: Review of W.A. Williams The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (R.D. Grinder)

Racism or Sexism: Which Way?

The FLP Goofs Again

Vol. 10.7, July 1977

Do You Hate the State?

Should Abortion Be a Crime? The Abortion Question Once More

Canadian Breakup

Exciting New Magazine: Inquiry

In Defense of Pirateering (J. Michael Oliver)

Seeking the Political Kingson: A Review Essay (Justus D. Doenecke)

Vol. 10.8, August 1977

Tax Rebellion in Illinois!

Panama Canal Question

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Convention Report (Milton Mueller)

Keynote Address to the LP Convention (Murray Rothbard)

Recommended Reading

Vol. 10.9, September 1977

The Bakke Case

Higher Education: The View of Insiders (Justus D. Doenecke)

Defending the Defendable (Gary Greenberg)

Toward a Libertarian Theory of Abortion (Walter Block)

Vol. 10.10, October 1977

The New York Mayoralty

Do You Love Liberty? (David F. Nolan)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

That Noble Dream (Justus D. Doenecke)

Public Parks: the New York City Case (Walter Block)

Abortion: An Exchange

The Sadat Hype

Vol. 10.11, November 1977

Two Exits

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Rent Control: the New York City Case (Walter Block)

The Critique of Interventionism (Richard M. Ebeling)

Rendering Unto Caesar: Those Preachers Again (Justus D. Doenecke)

Vol. 10.12, December 1977

L’Affaire Efron

Truth On the Scaffold (Justus D. Doenecke)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

1978

Vol. 11.1, January–February 1978

The Last Word on Efronia

Market Prospects for Nuclear Power (Patrick L. Lilly)

Vol. 11.2, March–April 1978

Strengthening the LP

Block and the Rights of the Father (Jocelyn Maxwell)

Assassination Revisionism

Block on Abortion (Roger E. Bissell)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 11.3, May–June 1978

Victory for Tax Revolt!

Solidarity—But Not Forever (Justus D. Doenecke)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 11.4, July–August 1978

Camp David and After

Abortion Rights of the Child (James Sadowsky, S.J.)

Why Free Schools Are Not Free (Frank Chodorov)

Slaves Contracts and Inalienable Will (Sheldon Richman)

The Street Peddler (Walter Block)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

The ABM Rises from the Grave (Bill Birmingham)

Vol. 11.5, September–October 1978

Lessons of People’s Temple

Bring Back Belloc (T. Palmer)

Shall the State Educate the People? (Thomas Hodgskin)

Truth

Newsletters of Libertarian Interest

Towards Freedom of Choice in Education (Joseph R. Peden)

Rub-a-dub-dub Three Men in a Tub (Sheldon Richman)

Vol. 11.6, November–December 1978

LP Breakthrough

And Gladly Teach: Power and the Professors (Justus D. Doenecke)

Lost Cause

1979

Vol. 12.1, January–February 1979

The Space War

An Anarchist Without Adjectives (Wendy Grosscup)

The Political Economy of Inflation: Government and Money (Tom G. Palmer)

Vol. 12.2, March–April 1979

Ten Years Old!

Abraham Lincoln (Lance Lamberton)

The Thatcher Myth (David Ramsay Steele)

In Defense of Free Immigration (Richard Ebeling)

Vol. 12.3, May–June 1979

Listen Again, YAF

John C. Calhoun (Lance Lamberton)

Libertarians on the Battlements

’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous

Sharing

LP Radical Caucus Formed

Crime and Sacrifice (Walter Block)

Vol. 12.4, July–August 1979

Nuclear Power Crisis

Nuclear Power: Beyond “For” or “Against” (Milton Mueller)

Technological Facts on Nuclear Energy

Review of The Disaster Lobbby (R. Childs)

Excerpt from The Disaster Lobby (Melvin J. Grayson & Thomas R. Shepard, Jr.)

SLS Proposal (Milton Mueller)

Current LP Planks (Bill Evers & Murray Rothbard)

Late Bulletin: LR Suppresses Free and Open Debate on Nuclear Power!

Vol. 12.5, September–October 1979

The Iran Threat

Zionism as It Sees Itself (Elmer Berger)

The Duelist (Walter Block)

Prose in the Social Sciences: Problems and Remedies (Justus D. Doenecke)

Deflation: The Time Is Now (Robert L. Formaini)

Vol. 12.6, November–December 1979

The Menace of Opportunism

Law in Anarchy (Charles B. Olson)

Opportunism Revisited

Billboards (Walter Block)

1980

Vol. 13.1, January–February 1980

And Now Afghanistan

Notes on Iran, Afghanistan, etc. by the Old Curmudgeon

“Revolutionary” Fascism: A Review of Jorge Edwards’ Persona Non Grata (Alfred C. Cuzan)

The Ruling Class: Kolko and Domhoff (Lance Lamberton)

Army

Vol. 13.2, March–April 1980

The Presidential Campaign: The Need for Radicalism

The Ballad of the IRS

The Nuclear Issue Once More

Quebec: Province or Nation? (Leonard P. Liggio)

Canadian Separatism: the Second Front (Samuel E. Konkin III)

Vol. 13.3, May–June, 1980

Opportunism, Nukes, and the Clark Campaign

Fired from LR

Evers for Congress

Some Thoughts on Supply-Side Economics (Richard M. Ebeling)

Abortion and Self-Ownership: A Comment (George H. Smith)

Free Market Revisionism: A Comment (Robert L. Formaini)

Vol. 13.4, July–August 1980

Ethnic Politics in New York

The Boston Anarchists and the Haymarket Incident (Wendy McElroy)

Is It Legal to Treat Sick Birds?

“Free-Market” Congressman in Action?

Bloated and Swollen

Isolationism Reconsidered (Barry D. Riccio)

Vol. 13.5–6, September–December 1980

The Clark Campaign: Never Again

Carter’s Administration

Clark for President: A Campaign Critique (David F. Nolan)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

1981

Vol. 14.1–2, January–April 1981

It Usually Ends with Ed Crane (Special Conflict Issue)

Television 1981

The War for the Soul of the Party

George Jacob Holyoake, Libertarian Agitator (Richard A. Cooper)

Vol. 15.3–4, June–July 1981

Crane/Cato Once More, Part 1: An Open Letter to the Crane Machine

Catogate: Who’s the Mole (or Moles) at Cato?

Hallmarks of a Free Society

The Moral Foundations of Property Rights (Brian Summers)

Against the ERA (Wendy McElroy)

Contra Reason: Review of Arianna Stassinopoulos’ After Reason (Richard A. Cooper)

For a New Liberty Back (Richard Cooper)

Vol. 15.5–6, August 1981–January 1982

Big News! Lib. Forum Reorganized!

LP/10: A Mixed Bag

The Kochtopus: Convulsions and Contractions

Hayek’s Denationalized Money

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Against a Government Space Program (Thomas M. Coughlin)

Consolation for Activists

1982

Vol. 16.1, February 1982

Are We Being Beastly to the Gipper?—Part I

This is the Movement You Have Chosen (The Old Curmudgeon)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 16.2, March 1982

Are We Being Beastly to the Gipper?—Part II

Campaign Memoirs Spring/Summer 1981 (Emil Franzi)

This is the Movement You Have Chosen (The Old Curmudgeon)

Exit Marty Anderson

Movement Jabs

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Vol. 16.3, April 1982

To the Gold Commission

Roosevelt and Dissent (Justus D. Doenecke)

This is the Movement You Have Chosen

Are We Being Too Beastly to the Gipper?—Part III

Vol. 16.4, May 1982

Oh, Oh, Oh, What A Lovely War!

The Historical Claims to the Falklands

Felix Morley, RIP

Are We Being Beastly to the Gipper?—Part IV

Changing Judgments and Alliances

Real World Notes (The Old Curmudgeon)

Vol. 16.5, June 1982

More on the Falklands

Free Texas, RIP (Michael Grossberg)

Fuhrig for Senate

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Voluntaryists Organize

Vol. 16.6, July 1982

Double Victory for Aggression

Flat-Rate: The Latest Con

Houston: The Turning of the Tide

Are We Being Too Beastly to the Gipper?—Part V

Vol. 16.6, August 1982

Smear: The Story of Update—Part I (Derrick Welles)

Crane’s Grand Design for Update

The Post Office as Censor (Dyanne M. Petersen)

The Assault on Abortion Freedom

Will the REAL Tom Palmer Please Stand Up? (Derrick Welles)

Don’t Cry For Iraq

Vol. 16.7, September 1982

Blockbuster at Billings

The Death of Reaganomics

Smear: The Story of Update—Part II (Derrick Welles)

Vol. 16.8, October 1982

The Massacre

Debate On ERA (Joan Kennedy Taylor and Wendy McElroy)

Smear: The Story of Update—Part III (Derrick Welles)

Vol. 16.9, November–December 1982

The Election

The LP and The Elections

The War in the British Movement

New Grass-Roots Hard-Money Group!

The New Libertarian Vanguard

The Real World (The Old Curmudgeon)

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Falkland Followup

1983

Vol. 17.1, January 1983

The Economy: the Year Ahead

Leave the Street Vendors Be! (Jon D. Wisman)

Movement Memories

Vol. 17.2, February 1983

For President: Gene Burns

The Crane Machine Revealed

Eubie Blake: RIP

Economic Notes

The Logic of Anarchy (Carl Watner)

Recommended Reading

Margaret Mead: Justice at Last!

Four Ways to Insure a Very Short Phone Conversation

Vol. 17.3, March 1983

The New Menace of Gandhism

The Burns Campaign

An Open Letter to the English Movement

Vol. 17.4, April 1983

Movement Depression

Free Franzi

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

1776: A Buffoonery (Emil Franzi)

The Pentagon’s Budget Through Soviet Eyes (Jon D. Wisman)

Crane Machine Notes

Vol. 17.5–6, May–June 1983

frontlines, RIP

Leonard Read, RIP

The New Menace of Gandhism: A Comment (Wendy McElroy)

Gandhism Once More

The Real Conventioneers’ Guide to New City

FDR: The True Legacy (Jimmy Harris)

Vol. 17.7–8, July–August 1983

Ronald Reagan, Warmonger

Letters on Gandhi

High Tech “Crime”: A Call for Papers

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

Cassandra Moore for Palo Alto City Council!

Vol. 17.9–10, September–October 1983

Up From Chaos: Total Victory: How Sweet It Is!

Keeping Low-Tech (The Old Curmudgeon)

Vol. 17.11–12, November–December 1983

New Airline Massacre: Where’s the Outrage?

The Bergland Campaign

Life In “1984”

Living Liberty, and All That

Reagan War Watch, Part I

Mercantilism and Public Choice (R.A. Cooper)

1984

Vol. 18.1–2, January–February 1984

Bergland Campaign in High Gear

The Nebraska Seven (David Bergland)

Who Is the Real Mafia? (Emil Franzi)

Crisis ’83: The Council of Foreign Relations and the Libertarian Party (Howard S. Katz)

Reagan War Watch, Part II

Vol. 18.3–4, March–April 1984

Campaign Fever ’84

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

This is the Movement You Have Chosen (The Old Curmudgeon)

New York Politics

Still Keeping Low Tech (The Old Curmdugeon)

Fifteen Years Old!

Vol. 18.5–6, May–June 1984

Democrats Self-Destruct

Eric Mack and the Anarchist Case for War

New Crane Machine Floperoo!

Prohibition Returns!

Vol. 18.7–8, July–August 1984

Patriotic Schlock: The Endless Summer

Life in “1984”

Democrat Convention Notes

Arts and Movies (Mr. First Nighter)

The Miss America Caper

Campaign Notes

Vol. 18.8–12, September–December 1984

The State of the Movement: The Implosion

Why the Apotheosis of Ronnie?

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

PREVIEW ISSUE

MARCH 1, 1969

35¢

Why The Libertarian?

The libertarian movement is growing at a remarkable pace throughout the country. Yet the organizational forms, the means of communication, among libertarians are not only miniscule, but actually suffered a considerable blow during 1968. Last year saw the collapse of the Freedom School-Ramparts College of Palmer Lake, Colorado, with its attendant Ramparts Journal, Pine Tree Press, and Pine Tree Features. New Individualist Review, the theoretical quarterly published by graduate students at the University of Chicago, is all but defunct, and had been moribund for a long time. The need is acute for far more cohesion and inter-communication in the libertarian movement; in fact, it must become a movement and cease being merely an inchoate collection of diffuse and haphazard personal contacts.

The launching of The Libertarian, a twice-monthly newsletter, was announced at the first meeting of The Libertarian Forum, founded by Gerald Woloz and Joseph Peden in New York City for periodic dinners, lectures and discussions among libertarians. The fact that over sixty persons attended this initial dinner-meeting, some coming from as far away as Buffalo, Delaware, and South Carolina for the affair, demonstrates both the rapid growth of the movement and the widespread eagerness for increased activity and organization.

We believe that one of the greatest needs of the movement at this time is for a frequently appearing magazine that could act as a nucleus and communications center for libertarians across the country. We also believe that while many libertarians have thought long and hard about their ideal system, few of them have been able to rise above the merely sectarian exposition of the pure system to engage in a critique of the present state of affairs armed with the libertarian world-view. This kind of critique is not merely “negative”, as many libertarian sectarians believe. For it is the kind of work that is indispensable if we are ever to achieve victory, if we are ever to get our ideal system off the drawing board and applied to the real world. In order to change the present system we must be able to analyze and explore it, and to see in the concrete how our libertarian view can be applied to such an analysis and to the prospects for social change.

One would think that such a need would be obvious. No movement that has been successful has ever been without organs carrying out this kind of analysis and critique. The key word here is “successful”; for a magazine like The Libertarian is desperately needed only if we wish to unite theory and action, if we wish not only to elaborate an ideal system but to see how the current system may be transformed into the ideal. In short, it is needed only if our aim is victory; those who conceive of liberty as only an intellectual parlor game, or as a method for generating investment tips, will, alas, find little here to interest them. But let us hope that The Libertarian will be able to play a part in inspiring a truly dedicated movement on behalf of liberty.

The Nixon Administration: Creeping Cornuellism

Changeovers in Administration are always a disheartening time for any thoughtful observer of the political scene. The volume of treacle and pap rises to the heavens, as the wit and wisdom and the high statesmanship of both the outgoing and incoming rascals are trumpeted across the land. But this year things are even worse than ever. First we had to suffer the apotheosis of Lyndon Baines Johnson, before last November the most universally reviled President of modern times; but after November, suddenly lovable and wise. And now Richard Nixon has had his sharp edges dissolved and his whole Person made diffuse and mellow; he too has become uniquely lovable to all. How much longer must we suffer this tripe? It is bad enough that we have to live under a despotic government; must we also have our intelligence systematically defiled? Already, Ted Lewis of the New York Daily News, a dedicated Nixonian, tells us gleefully that the new charm and grace and folksy friendliness of Dick and his aides are so pronounced that maybe this time the Presidential “honeymoon” will last the full four years.

Amidst the cloud of goo surrounding the new Administration, it has been difficult for anyone to penetrate the fog and figure out what the new President is all about. Of the thousands of top jobs at the immediate disposal of the new Administration, only 90 have been filled. We have been getting inured to both parties and both sets of rulers having the same policies; but now it looks as if the very same people continue in power, regardless of who happens to be chosen by the public. How much clearer can it be that the much vaunted free elections in the United States are a sham and a fraud, designed to lull the public into believing that their votes really count? It had long become physically impossible for any of us to cast a vote against such ageless and lifetime oligarchs as J. Edgar Hoover; now the same applies to almost everyone in government. In the few cases where the same people do not remain, there is a game of musical chairs with a few people shuffling in and out of the usual Establishment institutions: General Dynamics, Cal Tech, Litton Industries, the Chase Bank, etc. Certainly nothing startling can be expected on Vietnam, where Ellsworth Bunker remains as Ambassador, William Bundy, a longtime hawk, remains in the State Department post on Southeast Asia, and Henry Sabotage returns to head the negotiations in Paris.

Add to all this the fact that the Nixon Administration has been remarkably quiet and torpid—to the hosannahs of the press who proclaim that a return to Babbitt is just what the country needs—and one begins to wonder if there will be any change at all. To the cognoscenti, a little-heralded article in the Washington Post (Jan. 26) makes clear that a new note will indeed be added. It is a note that will mark the peculiar essence of the Nixon content and style; we might call it “Creeping Cornuellism”.

The rise to fame and fortune of Richard C. Cornuelle is a peculiarly 20th-century variant of the Alger success story. Twenty years ago, Dick, a bright young libertarian, was a student of the eminent laissez-faire economist Ludwig von Mises at New York University; and with a few other libertarians of that era he soon saw that the consistent libertarian and laissez-faire position is really “right-wing anarchism”.

As the years went on, Dick decided to abandon the world of scholarship for direct action, which he originally saw as bringing us closer to anarchism in practical, realistic terms. On reading De Tocqueville, he claims to have been the first person in over a century to realize that there exists, in addition to government and private business, a third set of institutions—non-profit organizations. Anyone who had ever heard of a church bazaar also realized this, but Dick brushed such considerations aside; he had found his gimmick, his shtick. He dubbed these non-profit institutions the “independent sector”, and he was off to the races.

After several years of promoting such startlingly new activities as private welfare to the aged, and loans to college students, Dick found a disciple: T. George Harris, an editor of Look. Taking advantage of the Goldwater debacle, Harris published an article in Look at the year’s end of 1964, hailing Dick Cornuelle as the New Messiah, of the Republican party and of the nation, and heralding as the new Gospel a book which Cornuelle was working on—with the substantial assistance of Harris himself. On the strength of the article, Dick’s book was published by Random House, he became Executive Vice-President of the National Association of Manufacturers, and revered advisor to Nixon, Romney, and Reagan, thus pulling off one of the neatest tricks of the decade.

Cornuelle’s stress was on the glory of private charitable institutions, and on the importance of businessmen contributing to more private welfare programs. In another worshipful article following up the Look piece, the San Francisco Examiner (March 28, 1965) asked Dick the $64 question: In essence, if the voluntary welfare sector is so great, where do you fit in? In short, what’s your program? Here entered the virus of Cornuellism. For it seems that, as superb as it is, the “Independent Sector didn’t keep pace while the rest of the country was developing.” The Independent Sector, it seems, has “never learned to organize human activity efficiently.” The Examiner adds: “To show the Independents how, Cornuelle thinks it may be necessary to add another department to the Federal government, of all things . . . It would be an agency that would find out what public problems are coming up and decide how to meet them effectively.” Proclaiming enthusiastic support from all wings of the Republican Party, as well as—big surprise!—a “number of liberal Democrats”, Cornuelle wistfully admitted that the one exception to the Cornuelle bandwagon was Governor Rockefeller, because “He’s committed to state action as opposed to Federal action.” So much for right-wing anarchism!

There is no need to keep belaboring the Cornuelle Saga, After all we are not so much interested in the triumph of one man’s career over “dogmatism” as we are in what this portends for the Nixon Administration. For here is what the Washington Post now reports: a “central theme” of the new Administration will be a nationwide drive to stimulate “voluntary action” against social ills. It adds that Secretary George Romney is “in charge of planning the voluntary action effort.” This concept needs to be savored: government, the quintessence of coercion, is going to plan a nationwide “voluntary” effort. George Orwell, where art thou now? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Voluntary Action is Government Planning.

The Post goes on to say that Romney, Secretary Finch, and the President “are devotees of the idea that vast and untapped energies of volunteers in an ‘independent sector’ can transform the Nation.” Nixon endorsed the idea in 1965, and recently declared that “the President should be the chief patron of citizen efforts.” And it turns out that last year, Secretary Finch was co-author of a book on the independent sector, with—you guessed it—Richard C. Cornuelle, the “godfather of independent action” and head of the Nixon task-force on independent voluntary action. Two major programs are emerging: a mixed public-private organization chartered by the Federal government to stimulate voluntary action drives, and a series of Presidential awards, like the World War II Navy “E” for Efficiency, to be bestowed by the President in person for outstanding voluntary efforts.

Oh right-wing anarchy, where art thou now? So now we are to have “voluntary” actors bedecked with honors by their Chief, the nation’s top coercive actor; and we will have Dick’s long-standing dream of a Federal agency to stimulate and coordinate these efforts. The Libertarian, for one, would not bet a substantial sum against the prospect of our old friend Dick being appointed to head the new bureau. Who, after all, is better qualified?

But we must not look at this sordid story as merely the saga of a former anarchist who coined a “new” political philosophy which might well result in his climbing to a high post in government. The situation is far more sinister than that. For this “voluntary” hogwash has a familiar smell: the smell of the Presidency of Herbert Hoover, whose political life-style was one of frenetically promoting “voluntary” programs, with the mailed fist of governmental coercion always resting inside the velvet glove. Hoover’s pseudo-“voluntary” New Deal was the complete forerunner of Franklin Roosevelt’s candidly coercive New Deal. It has another smell: the smell of Mussolini’s fascism, in which coercive government multiplied its power by mobilizing the support of masses of misguided “volunteers” from among the citizenry. And finally, Nixon-Cornuellism has the smell of the burgeoning corporate state—the political economy of fascism—which has increasingly marked the American system. It is the “enlightened” corporate state where nothing is any longer distinctively “private” or “public”; everything is cozily mixed, in an ever-intensifying “partnership” of Big Government and Big Business (with Big Unionism as the happy junior partner). This is the sort of polity and economy that we have in the United States, and Creeping Cornuellism embodies still more of it.

Not only more of it; for Nixon-Cornuellism is, to the libertarian, a peculiarly repulsive variant of American corporatism. For it cloaks and camouflages the viper of statism in the soothing raiment of voluntaristic and pseudo-libertarian rhetoric. What political style can be more disgusting than that?

State Of Palestine Launched

During February, the state of Palestine is being launched at Cairo. For the first time in many centuries, Palestine is being proclaimed as an independent nation, free, at least in aspiration, from foreign imperial domination. The delegates are a mixed team of guerrilla fighters from Al Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations, as well as members of the Popular Liberation Front.

A highly significant preliminary meeting took place in January in Cairo, at a conference called by the Communist Party, and shepherded by delegates from the Soviet Union. The Communist line has been to force the Arabs to accept the Soviet peace plan and the UN resolution of November, 1967, which is to guarantee the borders of Israel once it surrenders its gains acquired during the Israel-Arab war of 1967: In short, to ratify all the previous aggressive gains of Israel if she withdraws from her latest conquests. Despite the fact that the conference was loaded in favor of the Communist line, the conference was swung from Communist control in favor of a militant position by the leadership and the oratory of Dr. Nabeel Shaath, 30-year-old American-educated professor, formerly teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and now head of the proposed Palestinian state residing in unoccupied Jordan.

Dr. Shaath, a Christian like most of the Palestinian delegation to the conference, declared that “We will not accept any substitute for a war of national liberation. We will not accept any settlement that denies our rights, be it the Security Council or any other proposal or political settlement.” Shaath proclaimed the goal of the Palestinians to be the return of the forcibly exiled Arab refugees to their homes and properties in Palestine, and declared: “We are fighting today to create the new Palestine of tomorrow, a progressive and democratic nonsectarian Palestine in which Christian, Moslem and Jew worship, live peacefully and enjoy equal rights.”

Previous to this meeting, Al Fatah affirmed its emphasis on the independence of its “armed Palestine revolution” from all governments everywhere, obviously implying the reactionary machinations of the Arab governments of the Middle East as well as of the long-standing cynical maneuvers and manipulations by the Soviet Union.

“Private” Enterprise At Work

The way “private” enterprise works in our era of the neo-fascist corporate state is well shown in an article in the Wall St. Journal (Feb. 5) on the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships. The NCHP, created by President Johnson, but supposedly run along the Nixonian lines of revving up the “engine of private enterprise”, wants to raise $50 million from private industry to invest in low-rent housing projects which would eventually mount up to $2 billion of capital.

Praiseworthy? But wait. In order for the corporation to get started, there must be a substantial flow of Federal funds to subsidize rentals in the new projects. The NCHP wants $150 million from the Federal government for this year and next before it sets up business as a corporation. With this huge subsidy, “private enterprise” in the form of the NCHP would be willing to build 10,000 low-rent units in the first year, and hopefully move up to 60,000 units annually.

A particularly desired form of federal subsidy would be to pay a subsidy that would keep mortgage interest costs down to a near-zero sum of 1% per year. With this kind of subsidy, a whole roster of the nation’s largest corporations stand eager to do their great humanitarian work. This includes Kaiser Industries Corp, whose head, Edgar Kaiser, is the president of the NCHP, Westinghouse, Metropolitan Life, Deere and Co., and Ling-Temco-Vought. Many of the biggest banks, such as Chase Manhattan, First National City, Bank of America, Mellon National, would be willing to lend the corporation money to launch its operations. Also, not surprisingly, a host of local realty firms would be happy to join in the bonanza.

“Whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of a right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government; the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

— Declaration of Rights of Maryland, 1867

The big attraction, apart from humanitarianism, is a huge, guaranteed profit, or, as the Journal puts it, “a guaranteed, Government-supported market to attract profit-motivated private industry and investors.” The estimated annual rate of profit for these investors would begin at over 24% and end at 17%. Pretty good returns for “helping the poor”!

A People’s Court?

In the January 1969 issue of The Center Magazine Gerald Gottlieb, a consultant to the Center For Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif., has made a proposal of great interest to libertarians. Reviewing the failure of the World Court and other international judicial bodies to preserve the peace and ensure justice to individuals, he proposes the creation by private citizens of a universal court of man “independent of nations and able to render judgment upon those who misuse sovereign power”. Its jurisdiction: crimes against human rights and peace; its legitimacy: arising from the sovereign rights of the people retained by them and not granted to governments. How would such a body enforce its jurisdiction and decisions against sovereign states? By arousing world public opinion through any and all media, through appeals from professional and business associations, churches, social institutions, etc. Recalcitrant States would be faced with boycott and public degradation by an aroused world public. While Gottlieb eventually would depend upon the coercive influence of other states, this is not crucial to his argument. The recent success of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal in arousing European sentiment against American actions in Vietnam, and the propaganda success of the American Commission of Inquiry on Conditions in Ireland in 1920-22 in forcing the British government to moderate its policy in the Irish rebellion, suggests that privately-constituted international courts may serve to mitigate the criminality of sovereign states, or at least focus world attention on their grosser violations of human liberties.

Perhaps libertarian foundations and scholars could sponsor further study of this proposal—so libertarian in principle and so feasible in practice.

J.R.P

Sitting On Sidewalk Outlawed

The city of San Francisco has adopted a law giving the police the right to arrest anyone found sitting, lying, or sleeping on the sidewalk. The criminal sitter is subject to punishment of six months in jail and a $500 fine. The law, passed to the great glee of the citizens of the town, is commonly known as the “anti-hippie” law, and everyone is looking forward with enthusiasm to cracking down on hippies who are notorious users of the streets.

While we hold no particular brief for hippies, we must note one more step on the road to a totalitarian America. So now we can’t sit on the street! The police are assuring everyone that the law will be used reasonably, and only against large groups of sitters who obstruct the sidewalks. But liberty requires not that despotic laws be passed and then only moderately enforced, but that the law not be passed at all.

This new incident points up a vital problem in political philosophy: who gets to own and therefore to control the streets. For so long as the urban governments are allowed to continue to own the streets, we are at any time liable to be oppressed by all sorts of regulations and controls made over those of us who use the streets—which means everyone. Thus, during the riots of the summer of 1967, all the cities decreed compulsory curfews for everyone, thus making criminals out of anyone having the effrontery to walk out of his home after, say, 10:00 P.M. How much more despotism over our daily lives is needed before we question whether we are, indeed, a free country?

The only ultimate solution to this problem is to abolish all government ownership and control of the streets, and to turn the nation’s streets over to private ownership, which might assume all sorts of individual, cooperative, or corporate forms. But until that golden day, we must at least see to it that government exercise its ownership powers as little as possible. We must proclaim that the streets belong not to the government, but to the people, for the people to use as they see fit. Community no-ownership is far better than government ownership; for a little obstruction of the streets is better than frozen tyranny.

In the meanwhile, the citizens of San Francisco can count their small blessings, for their streets were saved from a graver fate. One of the eager beavers on the board of supervisors urged a law prohibiting anyone from “standing aimlessly” on the pavement. The law failed to pass, not of course because the supervisors were taken with a sudden fit of concern for the liberty of the individual who might, sometime, wish to stroll or even stand, rather than stride purposefully down the street. No, as so often in the past, vested self-interest came to the unwitting rescue of liberty. For the anti-sitting law was passed under pressure of the local merchants, and the merchants became uneasy at the thought of throngs of aimlessly strolling tourists, with money in their pockets, getting hauled off unceremoniously in the paddy wagon. Like politics, liberty sometimes makes strange bedfellows.

RECOMMENDED READING

Irving Louis Horowitz, “Young Radicals and Professorial Critics”, Commonweal (January 31, 1969). A thoughtful defense of young student radicals and a critique of their conservative Social Democratic opposition among the faculty.

Paul M. Sweezy, “Thoughts on the American System”, Monthly Review (February, 1969). Keen insight into the nature of the American system by one of America’s most intelligent Marxists. Sweezy sees the Nixon appointments as demonstrating an interchangeable ruling class shuttling back and forth between industry and government, and he also examines the differences and “contradictions” between national and local ruling elites. He is also refreshing on the Left for not dismissing the Vietnam War as already ended.

TWO NEW LIBERTARIAN PERIODICALS!

Factotum Bulletin, a bulletin for news of the libertarian movement. Can be obtained from the Center for Libertarian Studies, 1507 W. Hildebrand, San Antonio, Texas 78201. Irregularly published, as supplement to the Center’s Libertarian American.

The Libertarian Connection: a unique bi-monthly. For the subscription price of $2.50, every subscriber has the right to send in stencils which the editors guarantee to mimeograph and staple. It is truly the readers’ magazine. Available at 5610 Smiley, Los Angeles, Calif. 90016.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. I

APRIL 1, 1969

35¢

The Scientific Imperial Counsellor:
“To Restore Faith In Government”

America now has, whether we know it or not, an imperial Counsellor. He is a new kind of appointee of the Nixon Administration, a White House aide but with Cabinet rank, empowered to range all over the sphere of domestic policy. The astute Business Week calls him “The adviser who may be closest to Nixon”: Dr. Arthur F. Burns. (Business Week, March 1).

Arthur Burns, a professor of economics at Columbia University, was the first Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers of the Eisenhower Administration. In that Administration Burns took his stand against the old-fashioned conservatives who wanted to roll back some of the New Deal aggrandizement of the federal apparatus. Though he had his technical quarrels with the Keynesians, Arthur Burns was instrumental in saving the day for the permanent Keynesian policy of expanding during recessions and cutting back during booms, and in saving the very existence of the Keynesian-interventionist Council of Economic Advisers itself. Now that old-fashioned conservatives have disappeared from the Republican party, no one talks in terms of abolishing the CEA or its mandate toward perpetual statism.

One of the curious aspects of Arthur Burns’s rise to the pinnacle of power is that, among all economists, he was preeminent as the supposedly value-free “scientist”, the technician, the man who eschews politics and ideology. And yet here he is, at the peak of his career, in the most political, the most ideological job of them all. But, oddly, Burns himself does not acknowledge this fact. He still thinks of himself as a simple scientific technician, at the service of society; he now says of his own role: “I’m not interested in power and influence, I’m interested in doing a job.”

Thus, Burns has become almost the caricature of modern American social science: a group of disciplines swarming with supposedly value-free technicians, self-proclaimed non-ideological workmen simply “doing a job” in service to their masters of the State apparatus: that is, to their military-political-industrial overlords. For their “scientific” and “value-free” outlook turns out to be simply marginal wheeling and maneuvering within the broad frames of reference set by the American status quo and by their masters who enforce that status quo. Lack of ideology simply means lack of any ideology that differs at all fundamentally from the ruling system.

But it seems that these are days of crisis, and in times like these, even the most narrow of statistical craftsmen must become “philosophers”, i.e., must give the show away. So Arthur Frank Burns. Burns himself allows to Business Week that economic problems nowadays are “trivial”, in comparison to the larger domestic concerns over which he now assumes his suzerainty. For, Burns opines, the really important problem is that “a great many of our citizens have lost faith in our basic institutions . . . They have lost faith in the processes of the government itself.” “The President keeps scratching his head,” Burns goes on, “and I as his adviser keep scratching my head—trying to know how to build new institutions . . . to restore faith in government.”

So that is what our new imperial Counsellor is up to. The aggressively “scientific” statistician has become our purported faith-healer, our evangelical Witch Doctor, who has come to restore our faith in that monster Idol; the State. Let us hereby resolve, everyone, one and all, that Arthur is not going to get away with it.

But soft, we must guard our flank, for there is a host of so-called “libertarians” and free-market advocates who swear up and down that Arthur Burns is God’s gift to a free-market economy. Which says a great deal about the quality of their devotion to liberty, as compared to their evident devotion to Power.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

FBI And CIA

Washington power struggles are off and squirming. We note that H. E. W. and Agriculture are vying for control of the programs with which to feed, and also co-opt, the hottest current item among political constituencies, hungry Americans. We hear that the Army, sensing a danger that the endless ground war in Vietnam might not be endless after all and certainly can’t be victorious anyway, is looking for new frontiers on which to place its guidons and that chemical-bacteriological warfare may be just the ticket. (A ticket which, incidentally, may also gain it a better seat than ever at the game of riot control.) All the other services, of course, want their own bug battalions.

We sense, also, that the jet setters of the aero-space conglomerates are pitted in some sort of dinosaurian battle against the graying herd-elders of the industrial establishment for control of not only the available soul of the Administration itself but for the control of the more wordly goodies to be found in taking over government programs (at cost-plus) as we move from the vilified practice of a welfare state run from the White House to the now panegyrized practice of a welfare state, run for fun and profit, from corporate board rooms with the White House just signing the checks and setting the goals. There is little change in who pays the bills, of course.

Libertarians have every reason to view all of these matters with knowledgeable horror. They could predict any enormity of the state simply because they know that enormities are the nature of the state, enormities and crimes against liberty.

There is one area of struggle in Washington, however, that may be viewed with special horror. It is the struggle between the CIA and the FBI for covert control of the government, the world, the galaxy or whatever else comes along.

Talk of the rivalry between these two agencies, or baronies, is a Washington commonplace. Most comments on the struggle, however, reflect mainly from the exotic persons and bureaucratic principalities involved, with endless speculation, for instance, upon whether there were more FBI or CIA informers and paid provocateurs involved in our recent spate of political assassinations. Actually these arguments are rather like parsing scaldic verse, almost entirely academic, in that they concentrate on bureaucratic commas and semi-colons without attending much at all to content.

The content of the struggle mainly involves the weapons with which it is being fought, and the styles of the wielders of the weapons. There is no basic difference beyond that inasmuch as both factions are merely symptoms of an inevitable sickness of the State itself.

The CIA has far and away the greater edge in economic power and in freedom of violent movement. Assassination has been its business overseas all along. There are obvious restraints on its use at home. There also are obvious opportunities for its selective and discreet employment; particularly against the more obscure obstructionists in any situation, persons who mightn’t be widely missed but who might be the crucial difference between one policy or another in its early, intimate stages. The political murder of private citizens has never really caught on here but that is not to say that an imaginative man might not have a go at it anyway—particularly with the vast conspiratorial depths of the CIA upon which to draw.

When it comes to money the CIA has no equal. Although the FBI does have some special and very confidential funds to spend on informers and other covert employees, and even though some cynics might suspect that it could even keep for its own uses some of the vast criminal funds which it regularly, and pridefully, “recovers” when busting bandits, the Bureau has got to come in second. The Agency is not audited at all. There is a Congressional group that is supposed to supervise it but no one really imagines that they can do anything like a thorough job. For one thing, the personnel of the CIA is carried on the payrolls of other agencies and its continual involvement with “national security” means that official secrecy cloaks its daggers and its doings quite effectively.

It is from the CIA’s money-power that much of its realpolitik powers derive. Its subsidy of everything from publishing houses to labor organizations is now well known. No newsman to whom I have recently spoken doubts for a moment that this subsidized estate within a subsidized state is not still thriving. Even if the excuse for the subsidy is, as it always is claimed, exclusively for activities of the person or group outside of the country, these CIA subsidies provide a selective means of encouraging persons or groups who, despite international activities, almost invariably must have some domestic clout as well. This clout, do not misunderstand, is not used on direct behalf of the CIA. But it can be used on behalf of those policies of which the CIA approves and which ultimately will enhance its power.

Where the CIA uses dough, the FBI uses data. Its chief influence, as opposed to outright pressure, derives from the selective use of its files. It is not imaginable, for instance, that even a President could get an item from the FBI’s files if the Director specifically did not want him to have it. After all, it is employees of the Director, not of the President, who tend those files and everyone knows how easy it is for a piece of paper to either appear or disappear in a bureaucracy.

Thus, from President to legislator to syndicated columnist, the FBI can offer data not as something that may be demanded but as a boon which may be conferred—upon the helpful. President Johnson’s notorious use of FBI data to persecute political foes is another Washington press corps conversational commonplace as is the mock dismay at the fact that J. Edgar Hoover should have found in or made of Lyndon Johnson one of his most eloquent supporters despite the fact that, at the outset of The Great Society, it was assumed that the President and the Director followed somewhat different muses.

Thus, in this modern Machiavellian melodrama, we see directly pitted against one another the old-fashioned money and muscle. Florentine intrigue, cloak-and-daggerism of the CIA and the more American, corporate-organizational, file-case, computer-card snoop-and-snitchism of the FBI.

Libertarians, for what small comfort it may bring to a group which probably occupies a special place in files of both the Agency and the Bureau, happen to have the only sure solution to the disease of secret-policism which is what both CIA and FBI represent in a germicidal sense: cure the disease by curing the cause, the State. Every State, sooner or later, has had an urge to defend itself against foes real or imagined, foreign or domestic. This has always resulted in some form of secret or political police organization. There are no exceptions to this iron law of the dungeon.

So long as nation states exist, so long will political police prowl amongst us.

All of which brings us to the remarkable story, recently revealed in the press, of how, according to Nikita Krushchev, the top cop of the Soviet Union, Lavrenti Beria, was done in.

Director Beria, it is now said, made the mistake of entering a Kremlin meeting without his bodyguard whereupon Krushchev, a genuine genius at getting to the nitty gritty of any situation, shot him.

It is predictable that conservatives, particularly, are still clucking and tushing about this latest revelation of the brutality of politics in a totalitarian state. It could not happen, they may exult, in a safe and civilized land such as ours.

And that is precisely the point.

In democratic America there has appeared no way to relieve the head of the political or secret police of his command. In short, what this great Republic lacks in vivid personnel relations, it more than makes up for in tenure.

“Dear Ted”: Prelude To Repression?

There is nothing quite so ominous as the emergence of Richard Milhous Nixon as educational theorist. In his tenure in office so far, Mr. Nixon has been the Man Who Isn’t There, a zero wrapped in a vacuum. Except in the case of our kids; there the President has made a stand, in his “Dear Ted” letter to Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University, and a man who has rivalled the clownish S. I. Hayakawa in vowing to get tough with our students.

So eager was the President to get his views known on this subject that he released the letter to the press (New York Times, Feb. 24) even before Ted had received it. As might be expected, our new educational philosopher came out foursquare against “violence”, “intimidation”, and “threats”, and called for the “rule of reason” to prevail. “Whoever rejects that principle,” intoned Nixon, “forfeits his right to be a member of the academic community.”

Mr. and Mrs. America, how long are we going to suffer this solemn farce? Here is the President of the United States, in command of the mightiest engine of terror and intimidation the world has ever known, a man who every day murders American soldiers and Vietnamese peasants in the hills and rice paddies of Vietnam, a man whose entire machinery of State lives off systematic theft, a man who heads the machinery of slavery known as the draft. And he has the gall to express his horror at the violence of some kids who have broken a few windows, or who have stepped on some campus grass. He has the sheer bravado to call for the substitution of reason for force! In this he shows himself an apt pupil of his beloved predecessor, who had the brass to say, during the July, 1967 urban riots: “We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done, or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated.” Someone should instruct these worthies about the mote and the beam.

“There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wineshop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.”

— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871

But apart from the farcical elements of the situation, Nixon’s entry into educational theory poses an ominous question: is this the prelude to general repression on our campuses? For Nixon, in the Dear Ted letter, openly hinted about possible action “at the state and Federal levels” to crack down on the college campuses. This was supposed to be the prelude to a call for Federal investigation of the campuses at the National Governors’ Conference a few days later. Despite the dubious constitutionality of this proposal, Governor Reagan ardently pushed for the idea, but happily the governors turned it down. Perhaps this has stopped any political groundswell for a Federal crackdown on the campuses; at any rate, the governors have at least given a setback to the Reagan theory of education by bayonet. Let us hope the setback isn’t just temporary.

LIBERTARIAN ASSOCIATES

The following people were generous, and even heroic enough to subscribe to The Libertarian as Libertarian Associates, paying $15 or more:

Mr. James Altes New York, N.Y.

Mr. and Mrs. Walter Block New York, N.Y.

Mr. J. M. Foley Burlingame, California

Mr. Walter Grinder Bogota, New Jersey

Dr. Harold H. Saxton Mayville, N.Y.

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stern Wilmington, Del.

RECOMMENDED READING

Donald Barnett, “Angola: Report from Hanoi II”. Ramparts (April, 1969). Happy Day! Ramparts lives! The reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. In this article, the anthropologist Dr. Barnett presents an exciting and heartwarming story of his stay with the guerrilla forces of the national liberation movement in Portuguese-run Angola. One thing is made clear: what with the Portuguese government taxing all the peasants’ surplus above subsistence and burning peasant villages and herding them into concentration hamlets, and the guerrillas scrupulously buying everything they use from the peasants, whom do you think the overwhelming mass of peasants supports?

P. T. Bauer and B. S. Yamey, Markets, Market Control and Marketing Reform (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). 421 pp. 90s. Not really about marketing, but a collection of articles about the free market and government interference, particularly in underdeveloped countries. Professor Bauer is the world’s preeminent economist specializing in underdeveloped countries.

Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (New York: McGraw-Hill). 256 pp. $5.95. The story of the almost-victorious French revolution of May, 1968 by its heroic young anarchist leader. The case for an anarchist rather than a Bolshevik revolution.

John Duffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence (New York: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1968. Available from O’Hare Books, Flanders, N.J. 07836). 662 pp. $8.50 hardbound, $5.75 Flexicloth. The War Crimes Tribunal, sponsored by Bertrand Russell, held its sessions on genocidal American aggression and atrocities in Vietnam at Stockholm and at Copenhagen during 1967. The Tribunal was outrageously smeared in the American press. Here is the detailed record of its hearings and reports. Indispensable for any serious student of the Vietnam War.

Karl Hess, “The Death of Politics”, Playboy (March, 1969). This article marks the appearance of a shining new star in the libertarian firmament. An excellent article, and the first time that the libertarian position has hit the mass market. Lingering traces of statism are due to the fact that the article was written while Mr. Hess was in a period of transition toward the full and complete libertarian credo.

————, The Lawless State. (Lansing, Mich.: Constitutional Alliance, Feb. 5, 1969. Available from Constitutional Alliance, P.O. Box 836, Lansing, Mich. 48904). 30 pp. 400. Rousing libertarian attack on the State. One of the first of a series of handy and inexpensive “minibooks” from this publisher.

David Horowitz with David Kolodney, “The Foundations”, Ramparts (April, 1969). David Horowitz is becoming the best and most intelligent of a new and much-needed breed: muckrakers of the present State Monopoly system. Here he exposes the work of the big foundations, their tie-ins with the government, corporations, universities, and the black movement. First of two parts.

James Ridgeway, The Closed Corporation: American Universities in Crisis (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968). Paper. 241 pp. 95¢. Excellent muckraking book on the universities and their tie-in with the military and governmental-industrial complex. Should silence those naive souls who still think of our universities as private institutions and dedicated communities of scholars.

Madeleine B. Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1968). 208 pp. $6.00. A scholarly, though often sneering, biography of a brilliant if eccentric founder of American individualist anarchism.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. II

APRIL 15, 1969

35¢

Tax Day

April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself.

The first great lesson to learn about taxation is that taxation is simply robbery. No more and no less. For what is “robbery”? Robbery is the taking of a man’s property by the use of violence or the threat thereof, and therefore without the victim’s consent. And yet what else is taxation?

Those who claim that taxation is, in some mystical sense, really “voluntary” should then have no qualms about getting rid of that vital feature of the law which says that failure to pay one’s taxes is criminal and subject to appropriate penalty. But does anyone seriously believe that if the payment of taxation were really made voluntary, say in the sense of contributing to the American Cancer Society, that any appreciable revenue would find itself into the coffers of government? Then why don’t we try it as an experiment for a few years, or a few decades, and find out?

But if taxation is robbery, then it follows as the night the day that those people who engage in, and live off, robbery are a gang of thieves. Hence the government is a group of thieves, and deserves, morally, aesthetically, and philosophically, to be treated exactly as a group of less socially respectable ruffians would be treated.

This issue of The Libertarian is dedicated to that growing legion of Americans who are engaging in various forms of that one weapon, that one act of the public which our rulers fear the most: tax rebellion, the cutting off the funds by which the host public is sapped to maintain the parasitic ruling classes. Here is a burning issue which could appeal to everyone, young and old, poor and wealthy, “working class” and middle class, regardless of race, color, or creed. Here is an issue which everyone understands, only too well. Taxation.

TAX REVOLT IN WISCONSIN

On Tuesday, April 1, the most significant American election since last November occurred in northern Wisconsin. Mel Laird had been elevated from his long-time post as Congressman from this district to his present berth as mighty, hawkish Secretary of Defense. A special election was held on April 1 to fill the Congressional spot.

The Republicans had won this post with great ease for decades, usually amassing about two-thirds of the vote. This year, State Senator Walter Chilsen, Laird’s hand-picked successor, was seemingly safe, and he made his safety even more secure by wrapping himself in the mantle of the Nixon-Laird Administration, and making the election a referendum of the supposedly popular new regime.

Yet, this April, young David Obey, the Democratic choice, defeated Chilsen handily in a stunning upset; the vote was approximately 63,000 to 59,000. Everyone is agreed on the major reason for the upset: the great issue which Obey hammered at again and again—high and crushing taxation. Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Warren Knowles had run for re-election on a platform of pride on not raising taxes; true to political form, as soon as he was safely back in, his political greed came to the fore, and the Republicans of Wisconsin swung behind a program of higher taxes. The outraged public rallied around Obey’s attacks on high taxes, and taxes proved to be a hotter and more important public issue than the Nixon Administration, the Party of Our Fathers, and even love for Mel Laird. An explosion over taxes is at hand, if leaders should arise to articulate the people’s deepest wishes.

“To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State is doing.”

— Benjamin R. Tucker, 1893

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

TAX REVOLT

For those who retain a residual, if not romantic attachment to the notion of peaceful change there is at least one Springlike sign of encouragement along the Potomac. A substantial tax rebellion is underway.

Far and away the largest share of mail to Capitol Hill as well as to the White House concerns taxes—not comments on them, but angry statements of refusals to pay either some or all of the State’s lootish tribute. The same thing is happening at local levels in the 50 states where, as a matter of fact, taxation has been growing overall at a more rapid pace than even at the Federal level. Farmers in Pennsylvania, householders in Brooklyn, housewives in the southwest, all have mounted direct assaults against organized theft by the State. At the local level the success of tax rebellions is astonishing. Any group that can gather a hundred or so members seems assured of, at least, protection against flagrant suppression and has, obviously, a good chance of success. The picture is neither so clear nor so rosy at the Federal level. The number of resistors is surely growing but, because there is no organized or united force in the field, the Federals have open to them such means of suppression as the selective persecution of ‘leaders’ to set Spockian examples. Attorney General Mitchell’s selection of just that device to deal with campus disorders could be a hint of direction but should it fail to suppress the campuses—as hopefully seems to be the case—then it may not be tried against tax resistors.

Another approach could be in the broadest social pressure, with impassioned campaigns to vilify those who resist, as near or actual traitors, and to extol for the “quiet majority” the patriotic, humble, and holy virtues of submitting to taxation without so much as a whimper and certainly not a groan. The Stakhanovites of the Nixon Administration, we may anticipate, will be quiet and eager taxpayers (let’s hear it for Quiet Quentin, he didn’t even claim a deduction for himself!) and their children, equally docile on the campus.

The tax rebellion, also, has evolutionary stages. It will pass from rebellion into revolution at approximately the moment it coalesces, either around a conscious organizing effort or spontaneously around a particular incident.

In either case there seems little, that the State could do about it—as a broadly based movement rather than one in which individuals may, as at present, be picked off and/or terrorized without support or succor.

At any rate it is the nightmare of the State today.

***

Washington, a far cry from most cities, is provided with three competing daily newspapers, not to mention several in the nearby suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Freedom of the press, you might think, would be enhanced by this fortuitous situation. The truth is drearily different.

Washington also has an ‘underground’ newspaper, the Free Press. It is, as are so many of the type, a generally lighthearted mixture of psychedelic coming and ahhing and radical politics. It has perhaps as great as, but surely no greater, a range of explicitly sexual or scatalogical slang as any current best-seller.

The Free Press is regularly harassed by the police. It now must print hundreds of miles away. Persons selling it have been arrested for the possession of pornography while, in full admission of the essentially political nature of the paper, a judicial refugee from the Flintstones in nearby Maryland has arranged to have some of the editors charged with, believe it or not, sedition against the Free State. (Yea, Free.)

Meantime, how have the watchdogs of liberty responded? The ‘open Administration’ of Richard Nixon apparently couldn’t care less if the paper were closed down. The journalism clubs, associations, and guilds are as silent as the grave. The Washington Post says the fuzz might as well leave the Freep alone because it isn’t influential anyway, thus reducing freedom of the press to a solely utilitarian level and adding a new sub-basement to the structure of The Post’s morality. But the Freep, bless it, still appears.

***

Daily there is new evidence that probing and defending the military-industrial complex is to become a major matter in Congress this session—perhaps the hottest issue of all if the war can be cooled down or, as at present, virtually ignored. In the continuing drama of disputes without difference, opponents of the welfare state now will rise mightily to man the battlements of the warfare state—and, of course, vice versa. As as American President once remarked, in another regard, one hopes neither side runs out of ammunition.

“The schoolboy whips his taxed top, the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying Englishmen, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, flings himself back on his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.”

— Sydney Smith, 1830

LIBERTARIAN ASSOCIATES

The deepest thanks of The Libertarian go to the newest group of those generous enough to become Libertarian Associates by subscribing at $15 or more:

Mr. R. Dale Grinder Columbia, Mo.

Mr. Milton M. Shapiro Claremont, Calif.

Mr. James Evans, Jr. Los Angeles, Calif. A. R. Pruitt, M. D. Halstead. Kan.

TRANSFORMATION OF A NEWSPAPER

Since the early nineteen-fifties, the National Guardian was considered by many to be a firebrand radical newspaper on the furthermost fringes of the left. It had been so branded for its heroic stand against the onslaught of McCarthyism. In many ways it is true that the National Guardian was the spokesman for “far-left” opinion. But it is equally true that beyond its outspoken anti-McCarthyism, the National Guardian surely was not a radical newspaper.

In a subheading under the National Guardian’s banner was the accompanying motto which expressed both the content and the purpose of its existence. It read: “An Independent Progressive Newsweekly.” Reformism, not radicalism, was indeed its intent and its history, ever since its origins in the reformist Wallace campaign of 1948.

A couple of years ago, after the New Left had begun to stir, the management and direction of the National Guardian began to change. As 1967 became 1968, the “coup” was all but complete. What remained was to alert the public to the newspaper’s new intentions. In February 1968, the statist-patriotic term National was dropped from the paper’s masthead; and, more importantly, the accompanying motto was changed to read: “Independent Radical Newsweekly.”

Although it was from the beginning true to its announced intentions of being a genuinely radical newspaper, i.e., attacking the United States monopoly capitalist-imperialist system rather than simply trying to reform a depraved system that was beyond repair, the new Guardian did have its share of problems. It was indeed radical, but it could no longer truly be called a newspaper.

The new management and staff were inexperienced. The call to radicalism stepped on the ideological toes of many of the National Guardian’s former readers. Subscriptions expired, unrenewed. Impassioned letters of disbelief and abhorrence stormed in with cries of anti-Semitism because of the new leadership’s stand on Black Power and the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

Confronted with the major task of rebuilding a large part of its circulation and saddled with an inexperienced, underpaid (often unpaid), and sometimes incompetent staff, the Guardian hobbled along, leaving much to be desired in the area of reportorial journalism.

Most of the pages of the Guardian were given to editorializing. Series after series of eight and ten-part “think pieces” filled its pages for six or seven months. The only really redeeming feature of the Guardian during this period was the weekly report of Wilfred Burchett from Cambodia on the Vietnam War. Burchett’s articles were always poignant, perceptive and uncannily correct in their predictions of unfolding events in southeast Asia.

During the last two months, and particularly in the last several issues, a happy change has been taking place. The pages of the Guardian have been filled with what a newspaper should contain—news. Gone are the misplaced and often incompetent “think pieces”. Editorials are at a minimum. The news stories are most often relevant, and many of them are well-written. The Guardian seems on its way to-becoming a first-rate newspaper.

“Of all debts, men are least willing to pay taxes. What a satire is this on government!”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

There appears to be a battle going on under the surface for ideological control of the Guardian between the New Left anarchists and decentralized socialists and some remaining remnants of Old Left Marxism, but it seems certain that it is a battle which the Old Left is doomed to lose. Most of the young radicals see the old Marxists for what they really are—conservative authoritarians.

In many of the news stories and some of the editorials there is a disquieting, almost inexplicable, sentimental disposition toward a working class movement. This tends to produce some news stories and editorials which are irrelevant to libertarian concerns; but, fortunately, this does not interfere with the fine reporting done in other areas.

Apart from Burchett’s reports, now coming from Paris, there are many on-the-spot reports on American Imperialist activities from such places as Latin America, North Korea, and Africa. There is also excellent coverage of the accelerating student movement across the country.

The coverage of the United States military-industrial-university complex and its inner machinations has become increasingly pointed and revealing. Especially fine in this area has been the research and reporting done by the staff of the North American Congress of Latin America. NACLA is a young research group which has expanded far beyond its original intent to study the origins and effects of American Imperialism in Latin America. The NACLA people are doing the laudatory and very necessary work of finding out just which corporations and which universities are receiving government contracts and funds. They are reporting this information along with the discoverable facts on exactly which perverted project each of these corporations and universities is pursuing!

One other weekly attraction is well worth mentioning. The “Wanted” feature picks out one of the members of the state-industrial-university system and gives a brief sketch of his personal criminal activity; thereby giving us a more meaningful concrete and personal understanding of the Power Elite.

The Guardian is, of course, not a libertarian newspaper; but as it improves as a newspaper, it has become increasingly a better source of pertinent information which can be quite helpful to libertarians. In fact, it is the only place where one can find detailed and comprehensive reporting on all aspects of what is generally known as The Movement. As such, it now, more than ever, deserves to be read by libertarians.

— Walter E. Grinder

RECOMMENDED READING

LEFT AND RIGHT. The latest, special 1968 issue of this journal of libertarian thought features a substantial, definitive article by the late historian Harry Elmer Barnes on “The Final Story of Pearl Harbor”. This was Dr. Barnes’ last work, and synthesizes the “revisionist” insights over the past two decades on the real story of Pearl. $1.25, available from Left and Right, Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, N.Y. 10025.

Leviathan, Vol. 1, No. 1 (March, 1969). New monthly magazine, 56 pp. in tabloid form. New Left periodical, with high-level muckraking and insights into the current American scene. Particularly recommended is the article by Jim Jacobs and Larry Laskowski, “The New Rebels in Industrial America”, a sympathetic insight into the Wallaceite trends among many industrial workers. Also Peter Wiley and Beverly Leman, “Crisis in the Cities: Part One”, on government-corporate “partnership” in the ghettoes, James O’Connor’s overview of the linkage of State and university, and Steve Weissman’s critique of the government-corporate world at Stanford.

Economic Age, Vol. 1, No. 1 (November-December, 1968). A new semi-popular, semi-scholarly English bi-monthly, published by the Economic Research Council, and specializing in free-marketish articles. Recommended in the first issue is G. Warren Nutter, “Trends in Eastern Europe”. In contrast to many free-market economists whose fanatical anti-Communism blinds them to the enormous and heartening changes in Eastern Europe, Professor Nutter hails the accelerating shift from socialism to the free market in the Communist countries. He even concludes that “In a profound sense, the hope of the West lies today in the East.” 2 pounds sterling per year; available from Economic Age, 10 Upper Berkeley St., London W1, England.

Yale Brozen, “Is Government The Source of Monopoly?”, Intercollegiate Review (Winter, 1968-69). A good article in this ISI periodical is something to savor. Professor Brozen shows how government is the source of monopoly in many ways, direct and indirect. Major concentration of the article is the ICC.

Gabriel Kolko. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York: Random House, 1968), 685 pp. $12.95. Monumental and definitive. This is it; the first of a multi-volume study of the origins of the Cold War. Kolko is far superior to such previous leading Cold War revisionists as D. F. Fleming, because Fleming worshipped FDR and thought of Roosevelt’s foreign policy as noble, only to be sabotaged after his death. Kolko is revisionist on U.S. imperialism during as well as after World War II, and shows that America launched the Cold War while World War II was still going on. Kolko exposes the economic interests amidst U.S. imperialism during these years, and also is the first leading historian to develop the Trotskyist insight that the “sellout” at Yalta and other World War II conferences came from Stalin selling out the Communist revolution throughout Europe and Asia on behalf of his Great Power imperial agreement with the U.S. Indispensable for understanding the history of the Cold War and of U.S. foreign policy in our time.

Marion Mainwaring, “Brittany: Revolution in a Cemetery”, The Nation (February 24, 1969). A charming article from Brittany on a grievously neglected national liberation movement—this one from the oppressed Breton people, a Celtic people with their own language and culture, who have been ruled for over 400 years by an illegal occupation by the French. Like other national liberation movements throughout the world, the Breton movement has been growing rapidly. Eventual goal is a Celtic Federation including independent nations in: Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Wales. Normans and Occitans (the southern French speaking the langue d’oc and akin to the Catalans oppressed by Spain) are also beginning to yearn for their freedom.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. III

MAY 1, 1969

35¢

The Student Revolution

All through the land, this wondrous month of April, the student revolution has spread to campus after campus, even to the most conservative and the most apathetic. Last year confined to Columbia and a few other campuses, this spring’s revolutionary wave has hit all types of campuses, from mighty elite Harvard to working-class San Francisco State, from poor-boy Queensborough Community to formerly conservative Catholic Fordham. This is a wave that must be considered, that must be understood, for it clearly heralds a mighty and accelerating phenomenon in American life.

Many of us, including this writer, thought that the dearth of student revolutionary activity last fall, after the high point at Columbia the previous spring, meant that the campus revolution was fizzling, and was in serious trouble. But, beginning in the late fall with San Francisco State and then Berkeley, the student rebellion has reached a crescendo this spring which few of us have ever dreamed could be possible in America. Of course, the pattern of student activity—of all types—is to start slowly in the fall and reach a peak in the spring. But this year’s peak is so far above last year’s that the permanence of the student revolution seems evident. And all reports state that each succeeding class is more revolutionary than its elders, that freshmen are more radical than seniors; finally, the sudden emergence of radical high-school movements throughout the country again ensures the deepening of the campus rebellion in the years to come.

How, then, should we respond to this remarkable new phenomenon? There are two typical responses to any revolution against State power anywhere, whether it be campus, Negro, or national liberation front. These are the Conservative and the Liberal. The Conservative “answer” is to shoot them down, to use maximum coercion, to bring in courts, police, armies, missiles, you name it, anything to crush and kill. This response accords with the conservative view of the State generally, which is to preserve and cherish the State’s rule at all costs. The Liberal “answer” is to cozen and sweeten, to co-opt with petty and trivial reforms fueled by great gobs of Federal tax-money. In the end, if the revolutionaries persist and refuse to be either beaten or bribed into submission, the liberal, too, turns to State coercion, but with more hand-wringing and more do-gooding pieties. In the end, he will use almost as much force as the conservative, but his “humanitarian” patina often makes him even more repellent to the true libertarian.

In our judgment, neither of these tactics—apart from their morality or immorality—is going to work. The conservative tactic, in fact, is precisely the one that has led to the greatest victories for the revolution. The model proceeds somewhat as follows: a small group of radicals presents their demands; the demands are brushed off by the Administration; the radicals seize a building and/or strike; the Administration calls in the cops, who wade in and beat and club and arrest; this naked manifestation of State brutality polarizes and radicalizes the campuses, pushes almost all the moderate students to the side of the radicals, and the revolution is on. This was the pattern, for example, at Columbia, at San Francisco State, at Harvard. The liberal tactic is by far the most dangerous for the revolution—most clearly successful at this year’s sit-in at formerly sedate Sarah Lawrence—but this too is increasingly failing, witness Cornell and the City College of New York. What, then, would be the successful tactic in dealing with the student revolution? It is beginning to look as if the only successful tactic, ultimately, will be what the press calls “capitulation”. It is interesting that the press and the politicians are beginning to refer to the student body of our nation as one of those “aggressor enemies” that we have become all too familiar with in the past: the “Huns”, the Nazis, the Commies; and now it is our kids, virtually the entire generation of them. What are we supposed to do with them, Mr. Conservative? A little napalm? Or maybe the H-bomb, a “clean” one perhaps, so it won’t fall on too many of us adults? How far are you prepared to go in using brutality and suppression as your answer to all the problems of this century?

For make no mistake; a generation is speaking. Anyone who is the slightest bit familiar with the campus situation knows the total absurdity of the typical conservative belief that the whole thing is being manipulated by a few “Commies” and “outside agitators” who nip from campus to campus exerting their supposedly Svengali-like effect on the nation’s youth. These rebellions are spontaneous and spur-of-the-moment; they take inspiration and heart from rebellions on their fellow campuses, but they are in no sense manipulated by any arcane forces from outside. They stem from the deepest yearnings and values of the kids on campus.

Whether or not capitulation is the only tactic that will work, it is our contention that it is the only moral response we can make. Let us approach this question by considering the usual baffled cry: What do these kids want? Capitulate to what?

The goals of the revolution can be broken down into two different categories: the immediate and the ultimate demands. The immediate goals are the concrete, day-to-day demands that emerge from the everyday crises and irritants of each campus, and each campus and each group of kids will have different variations on a very similar national theme. The ultimate demands deal with the kids’ perception of the fundamental evils inherent in our present educational system, as well as a vision of what that system could and should be like in the future.

The immediate demands deal with concrete cases of the particular university either being repressive or tying in with the military-industrial complex and the war activities of the government. The prime goal is to sever the universities’ all-pervading tie-ins and linkages with the government and its war machine. This year’s major protest demanded the abolition of ROTC on campus. ROTC has become intolerable to our youth; the spectacle of military training insinuating itself as a legitimate part of academic life and of the educational process, the realization that ROTC is training officers to enslave their fellow soldiers and to murder en masse in Vietnam, has become too obscene for any of our articulate and self-respecting kids to tolerate. And these kids never forget that the ROTC is training an elite officer corps who will be employed to enslave and command that hapless mass of youngsters—among whom will be many from our campuses—who will become enmeshed in the toils of the draft. One of the events that radicalized the ordinarily cool Harvard student body was an arrogant speech by President Pusey defending ROTC on campus as supplying a much-needed Harvard elite to our officer corps. This sort of pretension of the right of Harvard men to rule was much too blatantly despotic for the libertarian instincts of the present student generation.

This year ROTC; last year the protests were against the university’s intimate connections with the Institute of Defense Analysis (Columbia), and against the university allowing its facilities to be used for recruiting purposes by the armed forces and its mass of murderers, and by corporations such as Dow Chemical heavily involved in the production of napalm, an instrument of this mass murder.

Everyone gets excited over student disruptions, sit-ins, a few bread crumbs left in rooms, a few blades of grass trampled on; all this leads the general public to a frenzy of denunciation of the “violence” committed by the students. But where oh where is anything like the equivalent frenzy directed at the monstrous engines of violence, slavery, and mass murder against which the kids are directing their protests: the army, the draft, the war, the police? Why not try to tote up the balance sheet of violence committed by both sides and see what comes out?

We are particularly puzzled by that legion of “libertarian conservatives” who condemn the kids unreservedly for “initiating violence”. But who has initiated violence? The kids, or the universities that collaborate in the draft and the war machine, who eagerly obtain funds from the taxpayers for all manner of research and grants, including research for germ warfare? The tie-ins between government and the universities link them inexorably, as witness the acts set forth in James Ridgeway’s recent The Closed Corporation. Particularly grotesque was the Randian argument, put forward by Robert Hessen in a widely distributed article, that Columbia was private property and that therefore the students were and are everywhere violating the sacred rights of private property; in addition, there is a definite sense in the Randian approach that our university system is really pretty good and that the rebel students are in the process of busting up a sound and virtuous institution. Apart from the various specific tie-ins with the State which the Columbia rebels were pinpointing (such as the IDA), nearly two-thirds of Columbia’s income comes from governmental rather than private sources. How in the world can we continue to call it a private institution? Where does private property come in?

In fact, Columbia, as most of our universities—and of course all of our frankly state-owned universities such as San Francisco State or Berkeley—is governmental property, paid for by government though run by corporate leaders tied in with government. And government property is always and everywhere fair game for the libertarian; for the libertarian must rejoice every time any piece of governmental, and therefore stolen, property is returned by any means necessary to the private sector. (In libertarian theory, it is hot possible to steal from someone who is already a thief and who is only losing property that he has stolen. On the contrary, the person who takes stolen property from a thief is virtuously returning it to innocent private hands.)

Therefore, the libertarian must cheer any attempt to return stolen, governmental property to the private sector: whether it be in the cry, “The streets belong to the people”, or “the parks belong to the people”, or the schools belong to those who use them, i.e. the students and faculty. The libertarian believes that things not properly owned revert to the first person who uses and possesses them, e.g. the homesteader who first clears and uses virgin land; similarly, the libertarian must support any attempt by campus “homesteaders”, the students and faculty, to seize power in the universities from the governmental or quasi-governmental bureaucracy.

Randians retort that public universities, too, are under the rule of legitimate authority because these authorities are elected by the taxpayers, who therefore “own” these campuses. Apart from the fact that university trustees are scarcely elected by anyone, this is a particularly grotesque argument for alleged libertarians to use. For it brings them squarely back to the virus of Social Democracy against which they began to rebel decades ago. The government “represents” the taxpayers indeed! If this were true, then any kind of libertarian viewpoint goes by the board, and we may as well all become Social Democrats, applauding any conceivable activity of government so long as an elected government performs the deed. Surely the basic libertarian insight is that the taxpayers do not rule, that, on the contrary, they are mulcted and robbed for the benefit of the State and its cohorts, and therefore the idea that the “public” or the “taxpayers” really own anything is a fundamental lie palmed off on us by the apologists for the State. It is not we but the government rulers that own “public” property, and hence the vital importance of getting all this property from the “public” to the private or “people’s” sector as rapidly as possible. “Homesteading” is often the easiest and most rapid way of accomplishing this goal.

It is particularly amusing that the one act of students which upset the most people, and especially called upon their heads the charge of “initiating violence”, was the act of the Cornell black students in bringing rifles and ammunition on campus. Laws were immediately and hysterically passed imposing the severest penalties on such action. But what’s wrong with carrying guns? Does not every American have a constitutional right to bear arms? And these weren’t even concealed arms, so why the fuss? Surely the crime comes not in carrying weapons but in using them aggressively. Libertarians and conservatives know this full well when they quite properly call for the repeal of gun laws, restricting the right of everyone to bear arms. Why does everyone forget all this when Negro students bear arms? Could it be that for many “libertarian conservatives” racism runs far deeper than devotion to liberty?

Another broad type of immediate demand is the ending of the university’s use of the property-killing power of eminent domain to oust ghetto poor from their homes (major charges at Columbia and Harvard). Surely the libertarian, opposed to urban renewal and eminent domain, can only applaud this goal. A third type of widespread demand is an insistence on simple academic freedom—an insistence that the university is a place for freedom to express radical political views without harassment. The San Francisco State rebellion was touched off by the university’s firing of instructor George Mason Murray, a Black Panther, and this year’s Berkeley strike by the attempted firing of Panther Eldridge Cleaver. The current Queens-borough Community College rebellion was touched off by the firing of a Progressive Labor member of the faculty, Don Silberman. In all these cases the rebels are fighting for an elemental feature of what makes a genuine university.

Again, conservatives might protest that the trustees have the right to fire anyone they please. But, as we have pointed out, this is not so in the vast bulk of our universities that are openly or covertly governmental. The trustees of those colleges that are genuinely private have the legal right to fire anyone, it is true; but so then do the faculty and the students have the right to quit, to demonstrate, or to strike—in protest against the kind of a university where the trustees would do such a thing. And here again, any person concerned with education and freedom of inquiry must agree with that vision of a university where academic freedom rather than trustee dictation prevails.

Another crucially important demand concerns the ways in which the university reacts to the other demands of the rebels: that the State must not be called in to decide the issue. Again, everyone gripes at the disruption of the educational process caused by canceled classes or a barricaded door. But the really violent destruction consists in calling in the police, the brutal cops with their mace and their clubs and their tear gas. It is no wonder that police brutality has been the major and almost instant catalyst of radicalization on campus. There can be no education, no dialogue, no community of scholars, where there are helmets and clubs and bayonets. “Cops Out!” is an elemental and crucial cry that erupts from the embattled rebels, and it is one that any person of elemental good will, let alone a libertarian, must commend. Even more despotic is the new and sinister instrument of Statism first employed this year by Columbia University: the court injunction. The labor unions knew precisely what they were doing when they lobbied to pass the Norris-LaGuardia law outlawing the use of injunctions in labor disputes; libertarian theory requires the extension of this principle to abolishing injunctions everywhere!

For the injunction has two profoundly tyrannical features: (a) it moves to prohibit someone in advance from specific actions that, for libertarians, are totally legitimate. Thus, Mr. X. is enjoined by the courts from demonstrating at College Y because the courts have concluded that X might engage in an illegal action. But to move thus in advance of action is totally illegitimate; a libertarian legal order moves only against people after they have proceeded to commit a crime, and not before. And (b) the alleged violator of an injunction gets thrown into jail by the judge at the latter’s discretion, without a jury trial, without a proper defense, the right to cross-examine, etc. Furthermore, the judge can keep jailing anyone whom he adjudges in “contempt of court”—whether for violating injunctions or for any other reason—as long as he feels like it. The whole area of “contempt of court” is one where judges can reign by their whim unchecked by law or rights. The entire field must be swept aside in the system of libertarian law.

Along with the demand for keeping the State and its minions out of campus disputes comes one for general amnesty, both civil and criminal, in the courts and in the university. Again a perfectly legitimate demand, especially since in the vast majority of cases the kids have done nothing wrong according to libertarian doctrine. Somehow, the curious theory prevails that “it’s okay to disobey a law or a rule, provided you’re willing to take your punishment”, and therefore amnesty very often meets widespread resentment. But the whole point is that the kids, and libertarians too, don’t recognize the justice of the particular rule or law, and that is precisely why they violate it. So therefore they should not, at least according to their lights, be punished. Besides, Mr. Christian Conservative, what’s wrong with mercy?

“There are but three ways for the populace to escape its wretched lot. The first two are by the routes of the wine-shop or the church; the third is by that of the social revolution.”

— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

My Taxes

On April 15, I sent the following letter, accompanying my filled-out 1040 Form, to the Tax Collector:

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America establishes a bill of particulars in regard to intolerable infringements, abuses, and denials of political power which belongs to the people.

The Federal government of the United States of America today is guilty of exactly every sort of infringement, abuse, and denial stated as intolerable by the Declaration of Independence.

I cannot, in conscience, sanction that government by the payment of taxes.

Further, the Federal government of the United States of America has established as a principle, and ruthlessly by the power of its officials enforces as a practice, that it can demand the primary loyalty of the people, that it can exercise all political power on their behalf, that it can wage war without their approval, and that it can and should establish the standards of their behavior and the goals of their lives.

I could not in conscience sanction such a government by the payment of taxes.

Finally, the Declaration of Independence, in the clearest possible language, tells Americans that when a government becomes destructive of the ends of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that it is the right and the duty of the people to abolish such government, to “throw off such government.”

It is in the spirit of that Declaration, and in comradeship with men everywhere who seek freedom and to throw off such governments, that I now refuse to pay the taxes demanded by the government in the attached form.

If the bulk of the immediate demands of the student rebels is proper and praiseworthy from the libertarian point of view, what of the ultimate demands? What do “they” want, down deep? Mainly it is what we touched on earlier: (1) the demand to transfer power from the trustees to students and faculty; and (2) the severing of the university from the government-military-industrial complex. Both demands are interconnected; for the students perceive as few others do, that the American university is a critical and vital part of the ruling system, the instrument by which the Establishment trains the rising generation to become cogs in the military-industrial machine. The new rebels want no part of being such cogs; and all libertarians must bless them for their revulsion against the educationalstatus quo. The students see that the only way to remove the universities from their “brainwashing” and apologetic role on behalf of the State and its allies is to transform the very nature of the university into student-faculty rule. And why not? As we have seen, for governmental universities this is an eminently libertarian demand, a necessary means for transforming governmental into private property. But, in addition, it is a worthy objective for genuine education, and there is no libertarian reason why even legitimate trustees cannot transfer power voluntarily. Such eminent universities as Oxford and Cambridge are essentially “producers’ co-ops”, owned and directed by the faculty. Student-faculty power means a shift back to the university, not as servitor of the military-industrial complex, not as apologist for the State, but as a genuine community of scholars searching for and discovering the truth. This is the vision that animates the student revolutionaries, and it is a noble vision indeed. Considering what our universities have become, it is also a vision radically different from the status quo: hence it is revolutionary.

It is particularly ironic that conservatives and libertarians should be so distressed at the prospect of students having a say in the universities. After all, a free-market proponent is supposed to favor “consumer sovereignty”, and what are students but the consumers of the educational product? Why react with hatred to any attempt by the consumers to influence their education?

Furthermore, conservatives have for decades inveighed, and properly so, against the American educational system. They have seen how that system imprisons and indoctrinates the youth of America into the statist system, how it functions as intellectual apologists for the State apparatus. For decades, no one did anything about this insight. Now, at long last, that the students are reacting precisely against this system, now that they see the evil and are trying to change it, why, Mr. Conservative, why in hell are you on the other side?

The students see even more than the traditional Conservatives did. They see that, apart from other tie-ins, corporations have been using the government schools and colleges as institutions that train their future workers and executives at the expense of others, i.e. the taxpayers. This is but one way that our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs. Whatever that process may be called, it is not “free enterprise”, except in the most ironic sense.

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

— Abraham Lincoln, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861

And so, libertarians must hail the student revolution, their means and their ends, their demands both immediate and ultimate. These kids, the first generation in a century to really see and understand the evils of the State, deserve encouragement and support and not our condemnation or our petty complaints. Libertarian students and adults alike have begun to realize this truth. One heartening event has been libertarian participation in some of the recent rebellions. One prominent young libertarian not only participated whole-heartedly in the Cornell rebellion, but he was the only person among the rebels to vote against thanking President Perkins for his liberal concessions to student demands.

The most striking adherence came at Fordham University, where the Fordham Libertarian Alliance constitutes our best-organized chapter on the college campuses—hopefully, a harbinger of the future. FLA was the first group on the Fordham campus to raise the libertarian demand of “Abolish ROTC”; SDS, dominated by Progressive Labor on that campus, hung back for weeks because of fear that the “working class” would not go along with such a demand. But finally, SDS swung into line, and the Fordham sit-in on April 23-24, which lasted over 24 hours, included members of SDS, FLA, and mainly, unaffiliated individuals. The sit-in was unpremeditated, spontaneous; there was no manipulation by a few sinister persons, let along outsiders. Instead, everything was spontaneous, joyous, done by discussion and genuine consensus. FLA members conveyed their exhilaration at the true spirit of community animating all of the students, and their joy at the liberating act of taking control of their own lives, at acting dramatically and even heroically for a moral cause. They experienced, for that unforgettable day in their lives, the shared joy of liberation, one that, perhaps some day, all of us may share. God bless them and their generation.

Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up by a sign carried by some of the kids at an anti-war march in New York City on April 5. The sign read simply: “Death to the State. Power to the People.” How can you fault a movement having that as a slogan?

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. IV

MAY 15, 1969

35¢

MAILER FOR MAYOR

Norman Mailer’s surprise entry into the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City, to be held on June 17, provides the most refreshing libertarian political campaign in decades. Mailer has taken everyone by surprise by his platform as well as his sudden entry into the political ranks. The Mailer platform stems from one brilliantly penetrating overriding plank: the absolute decentralization of the swollen New York City bureaucracy into dozens of constituent neighborhood villages. This is the logic of the recent proposals for “decentralization” and “community control” brought to its consistent and ultimate conclusion: the turmoil and plight of our overblown and shattered urban government structures, most especially New York, are to be solved by smashing the urban governmental apparatus, and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments. Each neighborhood will then be running its own affairs, on all matters, taxation, education, police, welfare, etc. Do conservative whites object to compulsory bussing of black kids into their neighborhood schools? Well, says Mailer, with each neighborhood in absolute control of its own schools this problem could not arise. Do the blacks object to white dictation over the education of black children? This problem too would be solved if Harlem were wholly independent, running its own affairs. In the Mailer plan, black and white could at long last live peacefully side-by-side, with each group and each self-constituted neighborhood running its own affairs.

Mailer and his running mate for City Council President, the writer Jimmy Breslin, realize full well that this striking new idea cuts totally across old-fashioned “left”-“right” lines, that it could logically have an appeal to both groups, or rather to those in both groups that are truly attracted by an essentially libertarian vision. Those who want compulsory integration or those who want the blacks to continue under white rule will not be satisfied with this vision; but those who yearn for liberty, who want whites and blacks to treat each other as independent equals rather than as rulers of one over the other, should flock to the Mailer standard.

Mailer’s other positions flow from his basic libertarian insight. He is opposed to compulsory fluoridation of the water supply, and he favors the freeing of Huey Newton—both libertarian positions in the freeing of the individual and the community from the boot of the State. One of Mailer’s key proposals is that New York City secede from New York State and form a separate 51st State: a position not only consistent with breaking up large governmental bodies but also with the crucial libertarian principle of secession. Secession is a crucial part of the libertarian philosophy: that every state be allowed to secede from the nation, every sub-state from the state, every neighborhood from the city, and, logically, every individual or group from the neighborhood. Mailer’s vision actively promotes this position. He is the first political campaigner since the Civil War to raise the banner of secession, a mighty call which unfortunately became discredited in the eyes of Americans because (a) the South lost the Civil War, and (b) because it was associated in their minds with slavery.

Another superb part of Mailer’s libertarian vision is his reply about where the New York City government would raise funds; he points out that citizens of New York City pay approximately $22 billion in income taxes to the federal government, and that New Yorkers only receive back about $6 billion from federal coffers. Hence, if New Yorkers kept that $22 billion in their own hands . . . That way lies secession indeed!

While Mailer’s all-out decentralization should appeal to left and right alike, in actual fact so far the great bulk of his support is coming from the kids of the New Left. On the West Side of Manhattan, there is in the New Left-oriented Community Free Democratic club at least a strong bloc of ardent Mailer-Breslin adherents. As far as I know, there is nothing like this support on the Right-wing. Again I put the question to Mrs. Conservative: how come? You’ve been griping, and properly so, about swollen governmental bureaucracy for thirty years. For all that time you’ve been calling for decentralization, for fragmenting the government. Now, at long last, a candidate comes along that takes this position (Mailer calls himself a “left conservative”, by the way). Why aren’t you supporting him?

And so The Libertarian makes its first political endorsement: Mailer for Mayor of New York City and Breslin for President of the City Council. But this of course runs us squarely into the very widespread sentiment among libertarians against any support, vote or endorsement whatever for any political candidate. The contention is that any such support constitutes support of, and joining in with, the State apparatus and is therefore immoral for the libertarian.

While I respect this position, I consider it unduly sectarian. The point is that whether we vote or endorse or not, the offices of President, Senator, Mayor or whatever will not become vacant; someone will continue to fill these offices during the coming years. Since there is no way for us to opt for keeping these offices vacant, since we will be stuck with someone in these positions come what may, why shouldn’t we at least express a hope that someone rather than someone else will fill such positions? If we know that either X or Y will fill a given political post, why can’t we express our hope that X will win, or, more likely, that Y will lose? Since we are not yet able to reach that blessed state when both can lose, why not do the best we can with the material at hand for the time being? Or, to put it another way, the State apparatus allows us our biennial or quadrennial electoral choice. It is, to be sure, a piddling choice, a marginal choice, a choice which means little and which of and by itself cannot radically change the existing system. But it is at least something, it is at least some kind of a choice that we are allowed between different groups of would-be masters, and often such a choice may be important—as in the Mailer ideas and candidacy for this year. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of the choices, however piddling, that our State rulers permit us to exercise?

I take as my text Lysander Spooner, one of the great Founding Fathers of individualist anarchism. Spooner wrote:

“in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent [to the U.S. government] . . . On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments . . .

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or even consented to.” (Spooner, No Treason: Larkspur, Colorado, 1966, p. 13.)

There is another important reason for not necessarily scorning the endorsement of political parties or candidates. And that is the seeming fact that it is almost impossible to organize ordinary middle-class citizens into action except through political parties. Blacks are organized in the ghettoes, students on campuses, workers—for good or ill—in labor unions, but where are the permanent issue-oriented organizations that successfully attract the great bulk of the country in the middle-class? It seems that the middle-class is only organizationally attracted by political parties, party clubs, etc. If this is so, then political parties become a necessary instrument of the libertarian movement, because if we are to achieve victory we must eventually obtain at the very least the passive support, and hopefully a more active support, of the majority of the middle-class of the country. No organizing among the middle-class has been done by the New Left, although there have been perennial futile attempts to organize the industrial workers by the Marxist elements. The issues, I am convinced, are there: high taxes, inflation, inter-racial clashes arising from failure to achieve community control, a losing or stalemated war, all this can be brought home to the majority of the population. The rhetoric, of course, will have to differ from the rhetoric that appeals to students; but the underlying ideas and philosophy can be the same: individual liberty. But it seems clear the the organizational form for organizing the middle class will have to be a political party or something very much like it.

Libertarian sectarians should ask themselves seriously: do we want victory? If we really want victory for liberty, then we must employ the means necessary for its attainment, and it looks as if political action will be one—though by no means all—of those necessary means. And so Mailer for Mayor.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

REPRESSION, DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN

Latest horrifying report in town is that the Department of Justice, perhaps making use of the barbaric special-arrest-and-detention-camp provisions of the McCarran Act, is planning to escalate its war against dissenters from sniper attacks against leaders to mass arrests of activists generally.

Whether the rumor is true or not, the very existence of the McCarran Act’s provisions for broad round-ups of ‘dangerous’ persons during a time of ‘emergency’ plus the actual maintenance of prison camps on a stand-by basis (as graphically portrayed in Look magazine some time back) is bound to make one wonder.

Should any Senator or Congressman seriously be looking for a libertarian cause to pursue, the abolition of the McCarran Act’s repressive provisions would be an interesting one to consider. For one thing, even proposing it should polarize the legislators, very usefully and very visibly. The lip-service liberty lovers who reach for state power whenever their special notion of order is disordered would, of course, recoil in horror, pompously shouting that the nation must thus defend itself. Liberals would be in their usual dilemma, trying to figure out whether they would lose any patronage or power if the prison camps were closed.

**********

Not a rumor, but just as horrifying, are plans for the new Civil Disorders War Room at the Pentagon. Fed by FBI data channeled through the White House, the new war room will seek completely to computerize all the factors involved in civil disorder such as the location at all times of known activists, militants, dissenters, critics—in short, everyone who attacks the state—as well as the availability and location of all repressive forces from U.S. marshals to paratroopers, state troopers and just plain old storm troopers such as the new Federally-trained phalanxes of paramilitary ‘riot’ police from most of the major cities.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the war room will be the computer’s reported ability to deal with pictures as input data. It is said that police routinely will photograph all public (and as many private as possible) meetings of dissenters. The photos will then be scanned and, if they show sufficient visual identity points for a face, persons pictured can instantly be identified and their presence at the particular meeting added to the disorder data bank for use in future analyses. Onward and upward with science in the service of the state.

**********

Behind the farce of Vietnam there is tragedy, of course. Its main outline is the number of men, women, children, and soldiers who will die while the politicians in Saigon continue to use the politicians in Washington to bolster their bureaucratic barony. The bureaucrats in Washington, meanwhile, will be concerned solely by the electoral implications of what they do and not by the murder in which they are involved. The tragedy involves all those who must pay for this role-playing with their lives or sanity.

That the tragic sense has reached many in Washington is becoming more and more obvious, although there is no indication that it has penetrated the high, black-iron fence of the White House. At other levels of government, and particularly in the Pentagon itself, there is a growing recognition of the fact that the war is being and will be won by the NLF. Bitterest of all is the recognition that in justice they should win. In the months just ahead this should result in some interesting psychiatric, if not political studies and introspections. No matter what, militarists will continue to justify the war. It should sink them deeper and deeper into a brooding paranoia in which, although all of the facts are against them, they continue to think that it’s all simply an assault on their honest patriotism. But for men of some residual conscience, every day that the war continues will create more of a crisis. Some may even be forced to make decisions—to renounce their role in the tragedy and to seek the redress of immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and long-range withdrawal from imperialism altogether.

S. D. S. And Black Self-Determination

Passing a resolution shining throughout with pure libertarianism and marred by only a few traces of Marxism, the recent Students for a Democratic Society convention in Austin, Texas committed themselves wholeheartedly to the support of the radical Black Panther Party and other black revolutionary groups who have as their purpose the abolition of the American State.

The text of the resolution began: “The sharpest struggles in the world today are those of the oppressed nations against imperialism and for national liberation. Within this country the sharpest struggle is that of the black colony for its liberation . . .” It might have added, of course, that as long as the American Leviathan exists most of us, even the Caucasians, will be enslaved; but it is true that, due to such brutes as the racist white police, far more oppression is executed upon the Negro community.

The Panthers were looked upon by the resolution as the most promising liberators of the blacks. Certainly, now that Negroes everywhere are rejecting the Statist fallacies of the NAACP and other conservative groups and embracing the demands for total freedom advocated by harbingers like Rap Brown, the Panthers offer much potential as an organizing body in the struggle to unshackle the chains that Big White Brother has imposed. As long as it confines itself to freeing the people from political power while not imposing its own rule, the Black People’s (Panther) Army, which is “to be used not only in the defense of the black community but also for its liberation,” may be most important.

Though one or two socialist fallacies blemish the logic of the document, it is made clear that the abolition of the State is the primary and ultimate goal. “The demand for self-determination becomes the most basic demand of the oppressed colony.” Self-determination, taken to its logical conclusion, means the right of every single individual to be free of all political power, i.e., anarchism. Thus it is quite ironic that the U.S. Government, which holds millions in bondage everywhere, pays lip service ‘to the right of self-determination (remember LBJ’s sophisms wherein he pleaded for the self-determination of the South Vietnamese).

Reactionary nationalism, the type of nationalism best exemplified by Hitler and encompassing the Führers of all nation-states in history, is totally rejected, while the completely different revolutionary nationalism, which means simply the uniting of individuals to throw off colonial tyranny, is applauded. As Panther leader G. M. Murray made clear, “We must destroy all cultural nationalism, because it is reactionary and has become a tool of Richard Milhous Nixon and all the U.S. power structure which divides the poor and oppressed, and is used by the greasy-slick black bourgeoisie to exploit black people in the ghetto.”

Everyone professing libertarianism must go hand-in-hand with SDS in “its commitment to join with the Black Panther Party and other black revolutionary groups in the fight against white national chauvinism and white supremacy.” The right of every individual to be free of any nation-state in general, and the U.S. despotism in particular, must be actively supported.

(Note: for the full text of the SDS resolution, see New Left Notes, April 4, 1969, p. 3.)

— Stephen Halbrook

EDITOR’S COMMENT:

The Panthers And Black Liberation

While I do not want to detract from Mr. Halbrook’s excellent article, and while I realize that the great majority of revolutionary anarcho-capitalists are highly enthusiastic about the Black Panthers and their potential for leading a black liberation movement, I must record my serious reservations about the value of the Panthers.

The Panthers have three great virtues: (1) their enormous ability to upset and aggravate the white police, simply by going around armed and in uniform—the supposed Constitutional privilege of every free American but apparently to be denied to radical militant blacks; (2) their considerable capacity for organizing black youth; and (3) excellent black nationalist ideas—particularly in emphasizing a black nation with their own land in such areas as the Black Belt of the South—as expressed in some writings of Eldridge Cleaver.

But there are growing offsetting tendencies so serious as to call the overall merit of the Panthers into grave question. In the first place, there are increasing tendencies for the Panthers to abandon black nationalism almost completely for the Old Left virus of black-white Marxist working-class action. The problem is not only increasing infusions of Marxist rhetoric into the Panther material, but an unfortunate eagerness to reach out and make alliances with white radicals, thereby contradicting the whole point of black power, which is to develop separate black movements resulting in black national self-determination. Even tactically, the original idea was to have alliances between strong, independent black and white radical movements; neither the Panthers nor the white radical movements have grown sufficiently to validate any sort of alliance now, even as a tactic. The most absurd example of this was the decision of the Peace and Freedom Party last year to nominate Eldridge Cleaver for President—a ridiculous decision for both the white and black movements since it involved a supposed black nationalist running for President of a white Republic—the U.S.A. It makes black nationalist sense to run candidates from Harlem or Watts; but not for Senators or Presidents from predominantly white constituencies. The question then arises: are the Panthers really black nationalists?

The second big reservation comes from the increasingly thuggish and Stalinoid tendencies in the Panther movement: viz. (1) the inexcusable pulling of a gun by the Panthers on SNCC leader James Forman, a fellow revolutionary black-nationalist, at a presumed peace meeting between the two groups. Pulling a gun on the State enemy is one thing; pulling a gun on fellow revolutionaries is quite another, and cannot be condoned in any way. Eldridge Cleaver’s reported statement that Forman should have been shot because his strategic views make him “objectively counter-revolutionary” puts the whole affair in an even more grisly light. (2) The equally inexcusable pulling of a gun by the Panthers on the Peace and Freedom party leaders in New York to force those veteran bootlickers of the Panthers to withdraw their duly nominated candidate for the Senate, the pacifist David McReynolds, in order to leave the line blank and allow the Panthers to secretly support the black nationalist Herman Ferguson, who ran a predictably poor race for the Senate on the competing Freedom and Peace party ticket. (3) The outrageous and vicious attack on black revolutionary columnist Julius Lester by Kathleen Cleaver in the Guardian of May 3 for his tactical disagreement with the SDS resolution on the Panthers. This article, devoid of analysis and long on snarling invective, was in the worst tradition of Stalinist billingsgate, in those days often preparatory to a Stalinist purge.

All this means that we should, at the very least, withdraw our enthusiasm from the Panthers. In any event, it is the responsibility of whites to build the white movement, and to concentrate our time and energies therefore on white rather than black affairs.

RECOMMENDED READING

COUNTERPOINT. The nation’s finest student libertarian periodical. Free, and published irregularly in mimeographed form by the Fordham Libertarian Alliance. Solidly anarcho-capitalist, Counterpoint has become increasingly trenchant and radical over the past year. Vol. 2, No. 7 has an excellent article expounding free-market anarchism by Mario J. Rizzo, an exposure of the relations between big business and government in founding the ICC by Joseph Castrovinci, and a refutation of the familiar “if you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?” argument by David Hagner. FLA led the Fordham sit-in for the ouster of ROTC and every libertarian will enjoy FLA’s handbill “ROTC OUT”, published at the height of the agitation. All available from Fordham Libertarian Alliance, Box 763, Fordham University, The Bronx, N.Y. 10458.

Leviathan. In our April 15 issue, we neglected to give the address of this New Left monthly. It can be obtained from Subscription Department, Leviathan, 2700 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025. Price is $5 a year, single copy 50 cents.

NACLA Newsletter. Published 10 times a year by the North American Congress on Latin America. NACLA is the country’s best muckraking organization, no longer confining itself to Latin America as the title might suggest. Latest NACLA publication is the booklet Michael Klare, ed., The University-Military Complex, price $1.00, an indispensable reference handbook of the detailed tie-ins between university professors and the military. Available from North American Congress on Latin America, P.O. Box 57, Cathedral Park Sta., New York, N.Y. 10025.

Barton Bernstein, ed., Towards A New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (Random House, 1968: Random House-Vintage Paperbacks, 1969). A collection of representative essays, some excellent, by younger New Left American historians. Particularly recommended are Jesse Lemisch on the “mobs” during the American Revolution, and the Revisionist foreign policy articles of Lloyd Gardner and Robert F. Smith. Both are Revisionist on World War II and the Cold War, and Smith is the first historian to footnote Jim Martin’s American Liberalism and World Politics, the mammoth 2-volume dissection of the shift of American Liberals from “isolationism” to war during World War II.

James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900-18 (Beacon Press, 1968; Beacon Paperback, 1969). Indispensable complement to Gabriel Kolko’s work on the origin of government regulation of business in the Progressive Era from the desire of Big Business to achieve monopolistic privilege through government. Weinstein concentrates on the pro-government intervention ideology of Big Businessmen. The “enlightened” Big Business leaders scornfully referred to the NAM (in those days controlled by free-market small businessmen) as “anarchists”.

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A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. 1, NO. V

JUNE 1, 1969

35¢

THE MOVEMENT GROWS

The libertarian movement, bless it, is on the march. For the first time in memory, there is now a nationwide libertarian organization in existence, the Radical Libertarian Alliance. It was born on May 17, on the occasion of the third meeting of the Libertarian Forum in New York City.

Until this year, the libertarian movement was pitifully small and beleaguered, and any talk of any sort of libertarian organization or even occasional meetings was hopelessly Utopian. But now the movement has been escalating with extraordinary rapidity. In the old days, there would be one new convert a year, and he would be worked on with painful slowness before his conversion could be complete. But now we keep running into kids, some college freshmen, who are not only libertarians, but full-fledged and self-converted, with the “correct line” on everything, from competing private defense agencies to private property rights to war revisionism to alliance with the New Left. It has all been very gratifying.

Compare the state of the movement now, say, to that of a year ago. One year ago the New York movement contained about half a dozen people; now, for the first time in living memory it has escalated to far beyond the capacity of one person’s living room. It was for that reason that Joseph Peden and Jerry Woloz decided to found the Libertarian Forum, basically conceived as a way for the whole New York movement to meet periodically in the confines of one room. We met for the first time on January 31 at the Great Shanghai restaurant in New York City. We expected about 20 people to appear; we got over seventy. It was a glorious moment. People came from as far away as South Carolina and Buffalo for the occasion. The editor spoke about the necessity for thinking in revolutionary terms.

The next meeting was on April 11, when Karl Hess, our most recent and our best-known convert, spoke on the need to avoid letting a sectarian emphasis on economics block our alliance with other, New Left, groups which are overall libertarian in thrust without being sophisticated in economics. The attendance at this meeting was again over seventy. The atmosphere at both meetings was highly enthusiastic, and several on-the-spot conversions were made to the cause. The “Devil” was represented in both cases by his advocates in the form of assorted Randians and red-baiters, who served as useful foils for spirited argument.

The spirit and the attendance at the Forums gave rise to much agitation to progress beyond these simple meetings, and to advance toward a wider and better-organized movement. Our best organized group had been the Fordham Libertarian Alliance, which led the sit-in at the once conservative Fordham campus demanding the ouster of the military cadre known as ROTC from the campus. The FLA had begun only in this academic year, with Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., who graduates this spring with honors in economics, as its dynamic leader. Two years ago, Jerry was a bright young right-winger and ROTC leader, who favored the war in Vietnam. Now he stands as one of the leading spirits of anarcho-capitalist youth. Jerry will proceed next year to graduate work in economics at UCLA, leaving FLA in the capable hands of Frank X. Richter, Dave Hagner, and a host of others.

An important anarcho-capitalist group has also rapidly emerged at Wesleyan College, phenomenal in that it consists almost exclusively of freshmen, led by John Hagel III. Hagel and his remarkable colleagues have already seized control of the Free University at Wesleyan, at which John is already teaching a course in anarchism, and have done extensive organizing work in colleges and prep schools throughout the New England and even Middle Atlantic states. The Wesleyan group also helped lead an anti-ROTC sit-in at the Administration Building there. Adopting the principle of alliance with the New Left, the entire Wesleyan group formed the Earl Francis Memorial Chapter of SDS, and will battle within SDS against the Marxist forces. (Earl Francis was a heroic individualist martyr to the U.S. government; the government refused to recognize his home-steading claim to a gold mine on U.S. land on the grounds that the mine was too small, and ordered him off the land and his house blown up; Francis complied, blowing himself up along with it.)

At State University of New York at Buffalo, Roy A. Childs, Jr. has made the paradigmatic progressive transition from Randianism to Lefevrian pacifism to revolutionary anarcho-capitalism, and has been writing a column in one of the college newspapers and been heard on Buffalo radio.

In the meanwhile, at Stanford University Professor Ronald Hamowy of the history and contemporary civilization departments has been carrying on radical libertarian activities of his own. To old friends, the emergence of the former moderate Ronald as revolutionary is one of the joyous surprises of this age of polarization. Last year, Ronald Hamowy was one of the two or three Stanford professors to support the sit-in for university reform. In the course of his radical activities there, he gave a notable speech, carried in the Stanford paper, which sharply criticized the rigidly non-violent tendency of the draft resistance movement of that era. This year, it was Ronald who suggested the sit-in tactic employed by the student rebels against military research at the Stanford Research Institute, and he sat in for the week-long demonstration. Then, when a court injunction threatened to be employed against a second group of sit-ins, Ronald organized an open letter to the Administration threatening a faculty strike—i.e. refusal to hand in grades—should any student be jailed for violating the injunction against them from even attending their own classes. Not only has Stanford been threatening to fire the signers of this letter, but there have been mutterings that Ronald by his action is trying to “intimidate” the court and is therefore in a state of contempt of court and could be immediately jailed. Such is just one aspect of the repression that is growing and accelerating against the dissenters in this “free” country. (In the old days, libertarians always used to be asked the question: “Well, after all, what liberties have we lost?” No one has asked this question for a long while; the repression is too obvious.)

Speaking of repression, a little whiff of it was felt at the third meeting of the Libertarian Forum at the Jager House in New York, when the libertarian scholar and activist Leonard P. Liggio spoke on the libertarian nature of the New Left. Less than twenty-four hours after the end of this harmless meeting, we heard from unimpeachable sources of someone who had read the report in sextuplicate of a cop spy at the meeting, the other carbons going to other cop organizations. And yet, countless libertarian-conservatives still revere and identify with the polizei! It seems that there were SDS members—horrors!—at the Forum meeting, and that many SDS people are tailed wherever they go by some form of undercover cop.

At any rate, out of that Forum meeting emerged the Radical Libertarian Alliance. In keeping with its libertarian nature, it is envisioned that RLA will be organized in the form of strictly autonomous chapters. At the beginning, most of the chapters will be in various colleges, but there are also several non-campus chapters. There are regional organizers, and there will be meetings in the various regions. The national functions are ones of service: education and coordination. There will be a national Speakers’ Bureau, which will send speakers around to the various chapters for purposes of education and inspiration and a national Publications Bureau to print leaflets and other material. The first material to be issued by the Publications Bureau will be a founding statement of aims and principles, a statement which defines the goals, the strategy, and the principles of the Radical Libertarian Alliance. All who agree with this statement will be admitted to the individual chapters.

Officers of RLA are as follows: Regional Coordinators: John Hagel III for New England and for Prep Schools, Wilson A. Clark, Jr. of the University of North Carolina for the South, and Gerald O’Driscoll as the “missionary” coordinator for California. Overall North American Coordinator is Karl Hess, 1085 National Press Building, N. W., Washington, D.C. Treasurer is Walter Block, 380 Riverside-Drive, New York, N.Y. Anyone who wants to send funds to RLA should send them to Walter. The key post of corresponding secretary has gone to Roy A. Childs, Jr., 109 Wende, Buffalo, New York 14211. Anyone who wants information or advice on joining the organization, forming chapters, getting speakers, etc. or who wishes to send news to other members, should contact Roy Childs.

It is estimated that already, when RLA has hardly been formed, there are at least 26 college chapters alone. The potential for rapid growth is enormous, beginning this fall, especially on those campuses where SDS has come under the control of Marxist elements and where RLA could fill an immediate libertarian vacuum.

Onward and upward!

“An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.”

— Henry Clay, 1818

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

The Coming White Terror

There is going to be a time of repression in this country. It may be quite harsh. For many, including libertarians, it may be frightening and discouraging. For the only vaguely committed it will be too much to bear and they will move back to safe positions in liberal-land or conservative-country, those establishment enclaves whose philosophically peripatetic borders seem now to overlap lovingly and lastingly on the American political landscape.

The facts of the repression are clear, even if not overt. The Deputy Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, an old friend who, I can assure you, is more than capable of matching rhetoric to action, has been quoted in The Atlantic as saying that student dissenters would be “rounded up” and placed in “detention camps”. His subsequent denial of the quotation was not categorial but only complained that he had been, as politicians apparently always are, misquoted and that, ah hah, even if he had said something like that he hadn’t meant anything like that.

Mr. Kleindienst, as with every one of his political associates with whom I have worked, is sensitive first and foremost to national mood. Although they may sometimes seem to buck its ordinary ebb and flow, they all turn and run in the face of its occasional floods. Such a flood is now evident, with more than 80 percent of persons answering recent polls saying that they approve of stringent crack-downs on student dissent. It is my notion that buried in these responses, and not by too much racist dirt at that, is an implicit desire also for a crackdown on black militants.

The Administration, with some of the most attentive political antennae we have ever seen—look at the power wielded in it by publicists!—is surely going to play the repressive mood for all it is worth. And how much it is worth is, in turn, clearly evident in the fact that Super Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has become Puissant Politician merely and solely because he has bumbled himself, like the British at Balaclava, into a bloody, dumb, eventually disastrous position of pig-headed glory. The fact that merely cracking a few student skulls has been enough to propel this second-rate social democrat into a first rank of right-wing respect, equal to and possibly even in advance of that other pillar of West Coast educationism, Max Rafferty, must be lesson enough to Richard Nixon and his court that there are political riches in the blood of repression.

There is, however, a growing interpretation, even among some who call themselves libertarians but who probably would be more comfortable as conservatives, that the New Left has brought it all on themselves and, consequently, upon the rest of us and that, in a convenient application of what the Christians might call the Agnus Dei shift, it is the New Left into whom all the daggers of recrimination may be thrust.

No.

It is the libertarian instinct and interpretation that tells us that it is the state, and not those who attack or resist it, that is the guilty or most guilty party in the development of any repression and that to call repression merely reaction is to overlook or even deny the dynamics of state development.

In that dynamic development, the state, any state, always becomes more repressive over the long run rather than less. There are no exceptions to this in the development of any state where the power has been delegated by the people to the politicians, no matter how benign those politicians may seem at any particular point of the development.

Thus, the actions by the New Left, or even the Crazies, that have goaded the state into its current quiet frenzy, are hastened by but not created by those actions. The state must, sooner or later, become more rather than less coercive and repressive. That movement may be accelerated by people’s resistance but it is not created by that resistance. Has not, in fact, the structure of government, state, local, and national, actually become more repressive year by year in this country whether in times of peace, war, languor or riot? The answer is that it has and the very political party which now occupies (and occupies is just the word) the positions of power today is also the very political party which in past campaigns has documented and dealt with that onward course of repression in greatest detail. They are silent now, of course, because what it once called oppressive under Democrats becomes orderliness under Republicans.

Libertarians, who, throughout modern political history, have presented the only clear and consistent analysis of state power, know that the difference between the natural or spontaneous order of a free society, and the enforced order of a state system, is the very difference between the day of human liberation and the night of state coercive-ness.

(Some details of that night as it now unfolds in Washington, appear to include the systematic arrest, on a wide variety of unrelated charges and as often as possible by local police, of student leaders and, subsequently, and perhaps depending upon the reaction to that, of non-student militants and radicals. The Black Panthers, of course, face a repression far more harsh and the key to its success very likely is simply to what extent local police forces, now frothing with a really rabid zeal, can execute Panthers without publicity. They will be helped, probably, by all of those liberal and conservative editors who feel that Panther revolutionary rhetoric is a threat to the orderly development of their own political programs.)

Libertarians have a rather clear-cut choice in facing the repression. They tacitly or otherwise support the state or they can remain with the Resistance. There is no convenient middle course such as simply opting out of the struggle. There may be an appearance of such an option but it is illusory. For instance, even if one is able to retreat to a position in which one has no contact with either the state or the Resistance, a reaction in regard to the state-resistance question is inevitable. For one thing there will be many times when a friend who has not retreated could use your help. By not helping him, and if he is resisting, the state itself has been helped. This is not to call for selfless heroics, but only for principled recognition of the fact that there are two sides in this struggle and libertarians, whose analysis is the most pertinent of all, should not contemplate being able to avoid taking one of those sides. Nor should they avoid the possibility—and I say it is inevitability—that a choice which does not support the Resistance, even if with grave reservations regarding some of its character or characters, actually opposes it and that any choice which does not oppose the state, actually supports it.

Not every libertarian should or could be found at the barricades resisting or in the tunnels undermining state power. None, of course, want to end up in jail. And now they will see the power of the state, awesome and even frightening, and they will see the jails eagerly eating the revolution.

Tactics may have to change. That is only wisdom. But direction? Never! The course is to liberty. The state is the enemy.

DON’T TREAD ON ME

If the Rubber Manufacturers Association can buy enough bureaucrats, the old Fisk slogan “Time to Re-tire” will cease to be a mere advertising slogan and become a gunpoint command.

The April newsletter of the National Highway Users Conference notes that the RMA has “suggested” to the Federal Highway Administration a three-part “tire safety program”. It calls for state laws that would require tire inspection 1) on a periodic basis, preferably semi-annually at a state inspection station; 2) by law enforcement authorities on a spot-check or random basis, and 3) as a pre-condition to the sale of all used vehicles.

The RMA inspection program would make it mandatory to remove passenger car tires from service when tread depth is less than l/16th of an inch. The association pointed out to the Government that this depth has already been recognized by the National Highway Safety Bureau, which requires all new tires to have molded tread wear indicators at the 1/16-inch mark.

The RMA said that only a few states already have compulsory tire inspection programs and expressed dismay that two-thirds of all cars on the road can still be driven without periodic checks for worn-out tires (i. e, by people other than the owner).

All states should enact statutes which would permit “policing authorities” to require removal from a vehicle of any unsafe tire whenever and wherever it may be found, the RMA stated.

The inspection program, the newsletter said, was “submitted in response to proposed Federal motor vehicle safety standards for vehicles in use.” It’s a classic example of how business uses the Government for its own benefit, and helps explain why, after a short bleat of protest for the record, the auto industry crawled in bed with Ralph Nader when he made his propositions.

The propagandists would have you believe the consumer is being protected by the “auto safety” program, but what consumer has the time or the know-how to “respond” to “proposed motor vehicle safety standards”? Car-buying, after all, takes up a very small part of his day.

RMA lobbyists, on the other hand, have absolutely nothing better to do all day than badger and bribe bureaucrats into passing laws that will force more tires on an unwilling public. Once again it is being demonstrated that regulatory agencies work to the benefit of the producer instead of the consumer.

How sweet it is for the country club set in Akron. They can cut loose some of that high-price marketing help that tries to tempt drivers into buying new tires and rely instead on tax-supported state police to do the “selling”.

Some day soon you may be flagged down by a cop with a .38 caliber pistol in one and .38 caliber calipers in the other. He’s authorized to poke around in your tire tread, then force you into the tire store that happens to be nearby. It promises to be the best fee-splitting scheme since justices of the peace started going out of style.

Traditionally the tire industry has been relatively unregulated and consequently highly competitive. But now it is trying to blow out the little Fisk boy’s candle and climb on the wide-tread bandwagon of the Federal Highway Administration.

— Peter Blake

FOR REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHO-CAPITALISM

A fully consistent concern with human liberty such as that which The Libertarian espouses, necessarily involves the acceptance of what may be called Revolutionary Anarcho-Capitalism. Let us see why.

Liberty can only exist when no one’s rights are violated. Since man rightfully owns his own body and the produce of any unclaimed natural resources he mixes his labor with, he has a right to trade this produce with other individuals or groups of individuals. Any threat or initiation of violence against a man or his property is in violation of man’s rights and hence inimical to liberty. So far, Capitalism. (Note, however, the difference between this free-market philosophy and that of our present liberal corporate “capitalism”.)

The “Anarcho” part comes in when it is realized that government by its very nature is coercive. Even a “pure” democracy, one not ruled by a power-elite, such as ours is, is coercive. People who have not consented to the democratic process in the first place will be coerced if they are outvoted. The Anarchistic strain is strengthened by the understanding that the free market provides a better product at a lower price for all goods. For defense, courts, police, roads, information, a money medium, as well as for goods where even classical liberals would restrict government intervention. So far, Anarcho-Capitalism.

Anarcho-Capitalism is not enough, however. Unless we realize that defensive violence in response to aggression is fully consistent with libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism can lead to a sterile pacifism. (“Government depredations are immoral, but opposition is also immoral; we can therefore only educate.”). Education alone cannot achieve liberty as can be seen by assuming the most favorable case for “educationalism”. Let’s suppose, for example, that all the people in the world who presently reject Anarcho-Capitalism through lack of knowledge learn the error of their ways. While this would be a great boon, what of the people who defend statism not through error, but through immorality? No ruling class in history has ever given up its power through sweet reasonableness and rational argument. For this, a Revolutionary Anarcho-Capitalist movement is needed.

— Walter Block

RECOMMENDED READING

Karl Hess, “In Defense of Hess,” The New Guard (April, 1969). It is rare indeed for us to be recommending any article in this YAF publication, but Hess’ article is a stirring defense of anarchism. Interestingly enough, reports are that Jerome Tuccille, who argues the archist point of view in the same issue, has since been virtually converted to the libertarian position.

Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (Bantam, paper). A huge, sprawling, badly organized best-seller, which yet contains indispensable information on the rich families and their relationship with government.

Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Harcourt, Brace, and World, paper). A fascinating, monumental history of the city. Includes analysis of the original city as being a parasitic, military arm of the State, living off society.

Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (Regnery, paper). It is great to have this modern classic back in print, and in paperback. Nock was an excellent stylist and a profound libertarian, and his book is must reading, despite its suffering from a profound historical pessimism that isolated Nock and robbed him of most of the impact he could have had.

Jacobus ten Broek, Edward Barnhart, and Floyd Matson, Prejudice, War and the Constitution (University of California Press, paper). A reprint of a thorough, scholarly account of America’s most vicious invasion of civil liberties: the mass evacuation into concentration camps of America’s Japanese’-American citizens in World War II.

Gordon Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars (Dutton, paper). An impressive indictment of the favorable attitude of the German Catholic hierarchy toward the German State and therefore toward Hitler’s wars.

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A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. VI

JUNE 15, 1969

20¢ 35 ¢

MASSACRE AT PEOPLE’S PARK

Sometimes it is difficult to escape the conviction that there is a sickness so deep in the soul of the American people that they are beyond redemption. On May 15 and in ensuing days the massed armed might of the State, local police, state police, National Guardsmen, zeroed in on a few thousand unarmed citizens of Berkeley, California, who were doing what? Who had taken a muddy lot and transformed it lovingly into a “people’s park”. For this crime, and for the crime of refusing to move from this park which they had created with their own hands, the brutal forces of the State, led by Governor Reagan, moved in with fixed bayonets; shot into the unarmed crowd, wounding over 70 people and murdering the innocent bystander James Rector; flew a helicopter over the crowd and sprayed a super-form of mace over everyone in the area, including children and hospital patients; rounded up hundreds of people and humiliated and tortured them in the infamous Santa Rita concentration camp—one of the major camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II. All this has happened in our America of 1969, and where oh where is the nationwide cry of outrage? Where is the demand for the impeachment of the murderer Reagan and all of the lesser governmental cohorts implicated in this monstrosity?

Sure, there are a few protests from liberals who feel that the use of force was a bit excessive, but one gets the distinct impressive that for the great American masses the massacre was a pretty good show. There is our pervasive sickness. Why this range of reaction from indifference to enthusiasm for this terrible deed? Because the Berkeley park-creators were apparently longhairs and “hippies”, and therefore subhuman with no rights or liberties that need to be respected. There are apparently tens of millions of God-fearing Americans who favor the genocidal destruction of hundreds of thousands or even millions of young people whose only crime is to persist in esthetic differentiation from the mass of the populace.

The American soul-sickness is also manifest in the pervasive reaction to the problem of “violence” in America. Mention “violence” and the average person begins to fulminate against isolated muggers, against Negroes who burn down stores, and against students who blacken a few ashtrays in university buildings. Never does this average American, when he contemplates violence in our epoch, consider the American army and its genocidal destruction of the people of Vietnam, or the American police in their clubbing at Chicago, or their murdering and gassing at People’s Park. Because apparently when the State, the monopolizer of violence, the great bestial Moloch of mass destruction, when the State uses violence it apparently is not violence at all. Only virtually unarmed citizens using force against, the State, or even simply refusing to obey State orders, only these citizens are considered to be “violent”. It is this kind of insane blindness that permitted President Johnson to trumpet that “we shall not tolerate violence, no matter the slogan”, and President Nixon to denounce student violence while lauding the military-industrial complex, and not be laughed out of office.

The cry has gone up that all this was necessary to defend the “private property” of the University of California. In the first place, even if this little lot was private property, the bayoneting, gassing, torturing, and shooting of these unarmed park-developers would have been “overkill” so excessive and grotesque as to be mass murder and torture and therefore far more criminal than the original trespass on the lot. You do not machine-run someone for stealing an apple; this is punishment so far beyond the proportion that “fits the crime” as to be itself far more criminal than the original infraction. So that even if this property were legitimately private the massacre is still to be condemned.

Secondly, it is surely grotesquerie to call the muddy lot “private property”. The University of California is a governmental institution which acquires its funds and its property from mulcting the taxpayers. It is not in any sense private property then, but stolen property, and as such is morally unowned, and subject to the libertarian homesteading principle which we discuss below. The people of Berkeley were homesteaders in the best American—and libertarian-tradition, taking an unused, morally unowned, muddy lot, and transforming it by their homesteading labor into a pleasant and useful people’s park. For this they were massacred.

This is it; this is an acid test of whether any person can in reason and in conscience call himself a “libertarian”. Here the issues are clear and simple; here there are no complicating factors. There is no alleged “national security” involved; there is no “international Communist conspiracy” at work; there are no stores being burned; there are no solipsistic students bellyaching about classes being suspended. The issues are crystal-clear: the armed, brutal, oppressive forces of the State stomping upon peaceful, unarmed, homesteading citizens. Anyone who fails to raise his voice in absolute condemnation of this reign of terror, anyone who equivocates or excuses or condones, can no longer call himself a libertarian. On the contrary, he thereby ranges himself with the forces of despotism; he becomes part of the Enemy.

TO OUR READERS:

Change Of Name

After we had launched The Libertarian, we discovered that a monthly mimeographed periodical with the same name emanating from New Jersey had been publishing for several years. To avoid confusion with this publication, we are hereby changing our name to The Libertarian Forum; no change is involved in policy or format.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

Where Are The Specifics?

Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America. It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense.

Because so many of its people, however, have come from the right there remains about it at least an aura or, perhaps, miasma of defensiveness, as though its interests really center in, for instance, defending private property. The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.

Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf-master relationship to political-economic power concentrations.

Libertarians are concerned, first and foremost, with that most valuable of properties, the life of each individual. That is the property most brutally and constantly abused by state systems whether they are of the right or left. Property rights pertaining to material objects are seen by libertarians as stemming from and as importantly secondary to the right to own, direct, and enjoy one’s own life and those appurtenances thereto which may be acquired without coercion.

Libertarians, in short, simply do not believe that theft is proper whether it is committed in the name of a state, a class, a crises, a credo, or a cliche.

This is a far cry from sharing common ground with those who want to create a society in which super capitalists are free to amass vast holdings and who say that that is ultimately the most important purpose of freedom. This is proto-heroic nonsense.

Libertarianism is a people’s movement and a liberation movement. It seeks the sort of open, non-coercive society in which the people, the living, free, distinct people may voluntarily associate, dis-associate, and, as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. This means a truly free market in everything from ideas to idiosyncrasies. It means people free collectively to organize the resources of their immediate community or individualistically to organize them; it means the freedom to have a community-based and supported judiciary where wanted, none where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most desirable. The same with police. The same with schools, hospitals, factories, farms, laboratories, parks, and pensions. Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.

For many, however, these root principles of radical libertarianism will remain mere abstractions, and even suspect, until they are developed into aggressive specific proposals.

There is scarcely anything radical about, for instance, those who say that the poor should have a larger share of the Federal budget. That is reactionary, asking that the institution of state theft be made merely more palatable by distributing its loot to more sympathetic persons. Perhaps no one of sound mind could object more to giving Federal funds to poor people than to spending the money on the slaughter of Vietnamese peasant fighters. But to argue such relative merits must end being simply reformist and not revolutionary.

Libertarians could and should propose specific revolutionary tactics and goals which would have specific meaning to poor people and to all people; to analyze in depth and to demonstrate in example the meaning of liberty, revolutionary liberty to them.

I, for one, earnestly beseech such thinking from my comrades.

The proposals should take into account the revolutionary treatment of stolen ‘private’ and ‘public’ property in libertarian, radical, and revolutionary terms; the factors which have oppressed people so far, and so forth. Murray Roth-bard and others have done much theoretical work along these lines but it can never be enough for just a few to shoulder so much of the burden.

Let me propose just a few examples of the sort of specific, revolutionary and radical questions to which members of our Movement might well address themselves.

—Land ownership and/or usage in a situation of declining state power. The Tijerina situation suggests one approach. There must be many others. And what about (realistically, not romantically) water and air pollution liability and prevention?

—Worker, share-owner, community roles or rights in productive facilities in terms of libertarian analysis and as specific proposals in a radical and revolutionary context. What, for instance, might or should happen to General Motors in a liberated society?

Of particular interest, to me at any rate, is focusing libertarian analysis and ingenuity on finishing the great unfinished business of the abolition of slavery. Simply setting slaves free, in a world still owned by their masters, obviously was an historic inequity. (Libertarians hold that the South should have been permitted to secede so that the slaves themselves, along with their Northern friends, could have built a revolutionary liberation movement, overthrown the masters, and thus shaped the reparations of revolution.) Thoughts of reparations today are clouded by concern that it would be taken out against innocent persons who in no way could be connected to former oppression. There is an area where that could be avoided: in the use of government-‘owned’ lands and facilities as items of exchange in compensating the descendants of slaves and making it possible for them to participate in the communities of the land, finally, as equals and not wards.

Somewhere, I must assume, there is a libertarian who, sharing the idea, might work out a good and consistent proposal for justice in that area.

Obviously the list is endless. But the point is finite and finely focused.

With libertarianism now developing as a Movement, it earnestly and urgently requires innovative proposals, radical and specific goals, and a revolutionary agenda which can translate its great and enduring principles into timely and commanding courses of possible and even practical action.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”

— Thomas Jefferson, 1787

CONFISCATION AND THE HOMESTEAD PRINCIPLE

Karl Hess’s brilliant and challenging article in this issue raises a problem of specifics that ranges further than the libertarian movement. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of “professional” anti-Communists in this country. Yet not one of these gentry, in the course of their fulminations, has come up with a specific plan for de-Communization. Suppose, for example, that Messers. Brezhnev and Co. become converted to the principles of a free society; they than ask our anti-Communists, all right, how do we go about de-socializing? What could our anti-Communists offer them?

This question has been essentially answered by the exciting developments of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Beginning in 1952, Yugoslavia has been de-socializing at a remarkable rate. The principle the Yugoslavs have used is the libertarian “homesteading” one: the state-owned factories to the workers that work in them! The nationalized plants in the “public” sector have all been transferred in virtual ownership to the specific workers who work in the particular plants, thus making them producers’ coops, and moving rapidly in the direction of individual shares of virtual ownership to the individual worker. What other practicable route toward destatization could there be? The principle in the Communist countries should be: land to the peasants and the factories to the workers, thereby getting the property out of the hands of the State and into private, homesteading hands.

The homesteading principle means that the way that unowned property gets into private ownership is by the principle that this property justly belongs to the person who finds, occupies, and transforms it by his labor. This is clear in the case of the pioneer and virgin land. But what of the case of stolen property?

Suppose, for example, that A steals B’s horse. Then C comes along and takes the horse from A. Can C be called a thief? Certainly not, for we cannot call a man a criminal for stealing goods from a thief. On the contrary, C is performing a virtuous act of confiscation, for he is depriving thief A of the fruits of his crime of aggression, and he is at least returning the horse to the innocent “private” sector and out of the “criminal” sector. C has done a noble act and should be applauded. Of course, it would be still better if he returned the horse to B, the original victim. But even if he does not, the horse is far more justly in C’s hands than it is in the hands of A, the thief and criminal.

Let us now apply our libertarian theory of property to the case of property in the hands of, or derived from, the State apparatus. The libertarian sees the State as a giant gang of organized criminals, who live off the theft called “taxation” and use the proceeds to kill, enslave, and generally push people around. Therefore, any property in the hands of the State is in the hands of thieves, and should be liberated as quickly as possible. Any person or group who liberates such property, who confiscates or appropriates it from the State, is performing a virtuous act and a signal service to the cause of liberty. In the case of the State, furthermore, the victim is not readily identifiable as B, the horse-owner. All taxpayers, all draftees, all victims of the State have been mulcted. How to go about returning all this property to the taxpayers? What proportions should be used in this terrific tangle of robbery and injustice that we have all suffered at the hands of the State? Often, the most practical method of de-statizing is simply to grant the moral right of ownership on the person or group who seizes the property from the State. Of this group, the most morally deserving are the ones who are already using the property but who have no moral complicity in the State’s act of aggression. These people then become the “homesteaders” of the stolen property and hence the rightful owners.

Take, for example, the State universities. This is property built on funds stolen from the taxpayers. Since the State has not found or put into effect a way of returning ownership of this property to the taxpaying public, the proper owners of this university are the “homesteaders”, those who have already been using and therefore “mixing their labor” with the facilities. The prime consideration is to deprive the thief, in this case the State, as quickly as possible of the ownership and control of its ill-gotten gains, to return the property to the innocent, private sector. This means student and/or faculty ownership of the universities.

As between the two groups, the students have a prior claim, for the students have been paying at least some amount to support the university whereas the faculty suffer from the moral taint of living off State funds and thereby becoming to some extent a part of the State apparatus.

The same principle applies to nominally “private” property which really comes from the State as a result of zealous lobbying on behalf of the recipient. Columbia University, for example, which receives nearly two-thirds of its income from government, is only a “private” college in the most ironic sense. It deserves a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation.

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to “private” property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their “private” property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murdered must be “respected”.

But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the “private property” of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics—without compensation, of course—per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves—the government—would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private.

And there is another consideration. Dow Chemical, for example, has been heavily criticized for making napalm for the U.S. military machine. The percentage of its sales coming from napalm is undoubtedly small, so that on a percentage basis the company may not seem very guilty; but napalm is and can only be an instrument of mass murder, and therefore Dow Chemical is heavily up to its neck in being an accessory and hence a co-partner in the mass murder in Vietnam. No percentage of sales, however small, can absolve its guilt.

This brings us to Karl’s point about slaves. One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land—their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land should have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of reparations from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. The fact that the land remained in the hands of the lords paved the way inexorably for the Bolshevik Revolution, since the revolution that had freed the serfs remained unfinished.

The same is true of the abolition of slavery in the United States. The slaves gained their freedom, it is true, but the land, the plantations that they had tilled and therefore deserved to own under the homestead principle, remained in the hands of their former masters. Furthermore, no reparations were granted the slaves for their oppression out of the hides of their masters. Hence the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to “reparations”, reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for “40 acres and a mule” to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.

Alan Milchman, in the days when he was a brilliant young libertarian activist, first pointed out that libertarians had misled themselves by making their main dichotomy “government” vs. “private” with the former bad and the latter good. Government, he pointed out, is after all not a mystical entity but a group of individuals, “private” individuals if you will, acting in the manner of an organized criminal gang. But this means that there may also be “private” criminals as well as people directly affiliated with the government. What we libertarians object to, then, is not government per se but crime, what we object to is unjust or criminal property titles; what we are for is not “private” property per se but just, innocent, non-criminal private property. It is justice vs. injustice, innocence vs. criminality that must be our major libertarian focus.

RECOMMENDED READING

Liberation, Until recently, this monthly magazine was a rather boring pacifist journal, with endless articles about peace ships and nuclear fallout. Now, under the de facto editorship of Dave Gelber, it has become an exciting New Left magazine. Particularly recommended is Ron Radosh’s scholarly dissection of the phony radical Norman Thomas, in his “Norman Thomas and Cold War Socialism” (February, 1969) and his debate with the pacifist David McReynolds (May, 1969). Liberation is available for 75 cents per issue or $7.00 per year at 339 Lafayette Street, New York, N.Y. 10012.

Journal of American History (June, 1969). This issue of the official journal of the Organization of American Historians has three important articles:

Charles W. Roll, Jr., “We, Some of the People”, studies the apportionment of the state conventions that ratified the American Constitution, and concludes that there was significant malapportionment that favored the pro-Constitution forces, especially in South Carolina, New York, and Rhode Island, and that this malapportionment played a crucial role in pushing through the Constitution. An important reinforcement of the Beardian view of the Constitution.

Thomas G. Paterson, “The Abortive American Loan to Russia”, is a highly useful contribution to Cold War Revisionism, showing how the U.S. used the carrot of a proposed loan to Russia during and after World War II to try to wring massive political concessions. The article whets one’s appetite for Professor Paterson’s recent doctoral thesis, “The Economic Cold War: American Business and Economic Foreign Policy, 1945-50” (U. of California, Berkeley, 1968), available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Gordon B. Dodds, “The Stream-Flow Controversy”. Good article debunking the scientific claims of conservationists, particularly the theory that deforestation causes floods.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. VII

JULY 1, 1969

35¢

The Meaning Of Revolution

In his vitally important article in this issue, Karl Hess properly refers to the genuine libertarian movement as a “revolutionary” movement. This raises the point that very few Americans understand the true meaning of the word “revolution”.

Most people, when they hear the word “revolution”, think immediately and only of direct acts of physical confrontation with the State: raising barricades in the streets, battling a cop, storming the Bastille or other government buildings. But this is only one small part of revolution. Revolution is a mighty, complex, long-run process, a complicated movement with many vital parts and functions. It is the pamphleteer writing in his study, it is the journalist, the political club, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. It is all this and much more. Each person and group has its part to play in this great complex movement.

Let us take, for example, the major model for libertarians in our time: the great classical liberal, or better, “classical radical”, revolutionary movement of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These our ancestors created a vast, sprawling, and brilliant revolutionary movement, not only in the United States but throughout the Western world, that lasted for several centuries. This was the movement largely responsible for radically changing history, for almost destroying history as it was previously known to man. For before these centuries, the history of man, with one or two luminous exceptions, was a dark and gory record of tyranny and despotism, a record of various absolute States and monarchs crushing and exploiting their underlying populations, largely peasants, who lived a brief and brutish life at bare subsistence, devoid of hope or promise. It was a classical liberalism and radicalism that brought to the mass of people that hope and that promise, and which launched the great process of fulfillment. All that man has achieved today, in progress, in hope, in living standards, we can attribute to that revolutionary movement, to that “revolution”. This great revolution was our father; it is now our task to complete its unfinished promise.

This classical revolutionary movement was made up of many parts. It was the libertarian theorists and ideologists, the men who created and wove the strands of libertarian theory and principle: the La Boeties, the Levellers in seventeenth-century England, the eighteenth-century radicals—the philosophes, the physiocrats, the English radicals, the Patrick Henrys and Tom Paines of the American Revolution, the James Mills and Cobdens of nineteenth-century England, the Jacksonians and abolitionists and Thoreaus in America, the Bastiats and Molinaris in France. The vital scholarly work of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Bailyn, for example, has demonstrated the continuity of libertarian classical radical ideas and movements, from the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries down through the American Revolution a century and a half later.

Theories blended into activist movements, rising movements calling for individual liberty, a free-market economy, the overthrow of feudalism and mercantilist statism, an end to theocracy and war and their replacement by freedom and international peace. Once in a while, these movements erupted into violent “revolutions” that brought giant steps in the direction of liberty: the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution. (Barrington Moore, Jr. has shown the intimate connection between these violent revolutions and the freedoms that the Western world has been able to take from the State.) The result was enormous strides for freedom and the prosperity unleashed by the consequent Industrial Revolution. The barricades, while important, were just one small part of this great process.

Socialism is neither genuinely radical nor truly revolutionary. Socialism is a reactionary reversion, a self-contradictory attempt to achieve classical radical ends liberty, progress, the withering away or abolition of the State, by using old-fashioned statist and Tory means: collectivism and State control. Socialism is a New Toryism doomed to rapid failure whenever it is tried, a failure demonstrated by the collapse of central planning in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. Only libertarianism is truly radical. Only we can complete the unfinished revolution of our great forebears, the bringing of the world from the realm of despotism into the realm of freedom. Only we can replace the governance of men by the administration of things.

“The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy – to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by a withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.”

— Ulysses S. Grant, 1885

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

What The Movement Needs

This may well be a long, cool summer of consolidation.

The political establishment will be seeking to consolidate its power behind an advancing wave of law-and-order blue-nose, Constitutional ‘constructionism’. (Constructionism is a new code word for reading the Constitution as instrument of state power rather than individual freedom.)

Radical opponents of the state also will be consolidating. The picture with SDS is now one of building new structures on either side of a schism. YAF is said to be facing a similar task with pro-state “trads” under lively assault from those with at least anti-statist tendencies if not fully fledged libertarian positions. The Resistance, after Staughton Lynd’s moving plea for a “new beginning”, will be attempting to broaden its base far beyond that of fighting the draft. And, of course, the Panthers will simply be trying to stay alive.

For libertarianism, burgeoning now as a movement rather than merely a mood, it will be a crucial time, testing the difference between the dedicated and the dilettante.

The young people in the movement are irrepressible and, in the long term, so is the movement. In the short term, however, much of its velocity will depend upon whether it attracts, along with its great and growing ranks of young militants, those few men of substance who, in the early stages of most movements, can make a difference of years in the movement’s development. Engels’ financial support of Marx is an example. The few who supported the early spokesmen of the New Left are a latter-day example. There are few similar examples on the right, interestingly enough, inasmuch as right-wing support almost exclusively has been toward the institutionalization of a currently vested interest (i.e. anti-Communism, corporate protectionism, class or race privilege, religion) rather than in the development of a new movement.

Because, therefore, there may be a man of substance, and libertarian values, somewhere, who, watching the movement develop, may want to participate in it rather than just talk about it, some words of friendly (dare we say comradely?) advice may be in order.

First there is the simple responsibility to be serious. Taking a pioneering interest without following through could be more destructive of morale than silence. For young people, particularly, the idea of faintheartedness may be the hardest of all to take; There always is hope that heroes will come along and it would be better to have that hope remain unrequited than to have it dashed.

Then there is resistance to a familiar syndrome, the notion of “one thing for sure, we can’t do the whole job alone.” There are two points to make about this to anyone who may appear as a serious supporter of the libertarian movement.

1. You may have to.

2. If so, you can.

The first point, of course, is that it shouldn’t make any difference how many are similarly interested. For an individualist and a libertarian, surely, his own interest should be sufficient to the action. If only one such person appears, that is 100% more than we have now anyway!

The second point is simply a citation of the need of the most effective use of what resources are available rather than any despair that they are limited. If they are all that there is, then prudence says only “use them well.” And courage says, only, “use them!”

One consideration arising from that is the need to use available resources to produce a well-rounded base, if nothing else, hoping that on the base, subsequently, new support will arise. – At the same time, securing a base also helps secure the on-going momentum of the movement itself, by recognizing that it is a movement and that it does require not just casual advancement but hard, full-time organizing, propagandizing, crusading and so forth.

If, on the other hand, there already was a more general sort of support available, the movement could afford what is now a luxury: the support of very specific researches or programs. As it stands, the urge to build various superstructures before the movement is firmly based as a movement is to tactically do just what such imprudence would do tectonically: create a top-heavy structure which would topple in any stiff wind.

One course, in forming the base, would be to inventory needs and evaluate priority versus’ cost and so forth. Practical as well as visionary men should examine this agenda carefully lest the caution of the one extinguish the beacons of the other or the passions of the latter ignore the prudence of the former.

Some of the items which should, in my view, earnestly be considered are these:

—Full-time movement organizers and co-ordinators, at least on a regional basis.

—Creation of even the most modest East Coast ‘center’ for libertarian studies to fill an incredible geographic vacuum. Although the West Coast has seen the development of such centers, the East remains barren.

—Support of our own movement activists, the spearhead people whose speaking on campus, pamphleteering, even arrests and trials, provide the sort of excitement centers which, to cite a compelling example, turned the New Left from a phrase by C. Wright Mills into the wedge which has now opened wide the entire range of radical, revolutionary developments in America.

—Entry into new media, such as films, for libertarian ideas as well as on-going encouragement for those who can break into the regular media. How many good libertarian books or articles go down the drain each year simply because potentially productive people cannot take the time, or afford to do the work on a speculative basis? The number, no matter how small, is too large if the libertarian mood is to turn into the libertarian movement.

—A campus organization. Plans for the Radical Libertarian Alliance already are well advanced as plans. But practical organizational work, production of recruiting materials and so forth requires some practical support which the non-existent means of the founding members simply cannot provide. This does not mean that R. L. A. will not move at all, without added support. It will move, indeed, no matter what. Its founding chapters and members are not to be stopped. But its people know full well that they will, not move with the summer-lightning speed of, say, SDS or YAF because, as in the one case, it does not have (thankfully) the relatively well-heeled zeal of a Progressive Labor Party to send travelers across the country and keep the literature coming or, as in the other case, it does not offer eccentric millionaires a chance to advance their own quirky causes by buying the energies of the young. R. L. A., to be precise about this point, would rather poop along on pennies than take anybody’s money if it came marked with any word other than LIBERTY.

—Travel support for permitting libertarians with something to say to say it where the action is. The fact that the several outstanding libertarian-SDSers couldn’t even afford the train fare to the Chicago convention is just another evidence of wasting major opportunities for want of minor investments.

Not one of those suggestions is made in a spirit of exclusion or primacy. They cover areas which seem commonsensical but they are intended to convey, first and foremost, a sense of base-building as opposed to panacea-pathing. The libertarian who says that this action or that action is all that should be taken or that this or that will ‘solve’ everything is avoiding action, not taking it.

Fixated, narrowly focused approaches may build egos but they can scarcely build movements. The purpose of a revolutionary, in one of the truisms of our time, is to make the revolution. To a libertarian that should mean that the advancement of liberty and the opposition to coercion by all means possible and necessary. It means each person making his part of the revolution as he can best do it, recognizing always that each part is subsumed under the vision of a movement. Many of us may be always restricted to just doing one job or another in the movement. None of us, happily, if we retain faith with liberty itself, will waste our time seeking to be leaders or wanting to be.

We do not want to lead or be led. We want to be free.

We now sense in a way that gives us ties with men in many lands and in many postures of political development, that being free always will be a chancy, iffy, and very conditional transitory condition until the institutions of coercive power have been brought down.

We have advanced through the stage when many thought that freedom could be found simply by retiring to a hilltop somewhere far distant. We know that such a hilltop may be by next Tuesday the site of another government radar station, just as the valley below it may be a detention camp.

We now know that men who want to be free cannot run forever. Sometime, somewhere they must stand firm—and fight, not as the state’s agents fight, with bloody hands and blazing eyes, but as free men fight, in a movement of resistance, with respect for life, each man as he can and each man as he will.

My overall point is that a movement demands many elements. It requires public heroes and private genius; it must work out in the streets as though it were the confident spearhead of a triumphant cause, it must work in garrets and offices as though there would be no tomorrow, it must sometimes bite its tongue at tactical errors, loving the sinner even while deploring the sin.

It must seek its friends in other lands, creating a new citizenry of un-bordered liberty. It must create and recreate its literature. It must teach its young and, equally important, it must find its young.

It must sustain its weary, heal its wounded, and protect its cadre. And, above all, it must know its own heart and mind and be aware of itself as a Movement. Finally, it must have a sense of time and place, knowing where the world is and not nostalgically looking back at where it was. And if it errs it should err on the side of dedication and vision, not on the side of inaction.

Libertarians are not determinists who feel that unseen, mystic forces move men and history in inexorable patterns, up and down fated graphs. Libertarians, being radicals, know that men can move history, that Man is history, and that men can grasp their own fate, at the root, and advance it.

Interestingly and compellingly, libertarians have been through much of this before in this lovely but looted land. The first American revolution, just as with the Russian, was almost a libertarian and not a statist victory. The victory, instead, of the Federalists, with their glib talk of “legal systems” and of measuring liberty in terms of special favors to those who would best “serve” society, was not a foregone conclusion any more than Stalin’s victory was the end in Russia. Contrary forces now seethe in both lands.

Also, in the days before the first American revolution, men heard the same arguments we hear today—that we could never beat the system, so why try; why risk oppression by being uppity; why not keep on trying to go through channels and why not chuck it all because the majority of people don’t want any trouble anyway.

In those days it was erring on the side of militancy and civil disobedience that gave libertarians the opportunity even to speak and to speculate. Caution then would have meant an even deeper gloom today (just look at the Mother Country!).

We are again at such a time and place.

You—whoever you are!—now have it in your power to some extent or another move history and advance libertarianism as a Movement and not a mere moral mutter.

This summer, then, should be the time when you decide just how seriously you actually do take the times—and yourself.

DEFENSE FUNDS

As the oppressive reign of the White Terror begins to roll over the land, defense of the elementary civil liberties of dissenters becomes ever more acutely necessary. Two new defense funds merit our interest and our contribution.

One is for bail money and legal and medical expenses for the arrested and wounded in the People’s Park massacre. Contributions should be sent to: The People’s Park Defense Fund, c/o Free Church, 2200 Parker St., Berkeley, Calif.

The other is for the defense of the eight political dissenters at Chicago last year who have been shamefully indicted by the federal authorities for “conspiracy to promote disorder and riot” under the infamous “anti-riot” Title XVIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The entire spectrum of laws against “conspiracy”, along with “incitement”, are methods of suppressing, not concrete action but political defense and freedom of speech. Laws against “conspiracy” have no part in libertarian law, which is only concerned with defending persons and their rights against acts of invasion. Contributions toward the costly defense against this mass indictment may be made out to “Chicago Defense Fund”, and mailed to the Capital Committee to Defend the Conspiracy, 28 E. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, Ill. 60604.

Recommended Reading

Faustino Ballve, Essentials of Economics (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York; Foundation for Economic Education, $3.00 cloth, $1.50 paper). The best single brief introduction to economics. Written from an Austrian rather than Chicagoite viewpoint. Fills an extremely important need.

Andrew Kopkind and James Ridgeway, “Law and Power in Washington”, Hard Times (June 16-23, 1969). A brilliant muckraking dissection of the politics not only of Abe Fortas but of Fortas’ important Washington law firm. Its editors are New Left radicals; this impressive weekly newsletter has improved considerably since the departure of Old Left liberal R. Sherrill. Hard Times is available for $7.50 per year, $6 for students, at 80 Irving Place, New York, N.Y. 10003.

Frederic Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (Foundation for Economic Education, $2.00 paper), and Selected Essays in Political Economy (Foundation for Economic Education, $2.00 paper). The most significant writings of the great 19th-century libertarian laissez-faire economist. Both highly recommended, but the latter more important as containing more systematic articles.

Benjamin Page, “Signals from North Korea”, The Nation. (May 19, 1969). Indispensable if you want to find out what’s going on at the next hot spot which the U.S. might be cooking up in Asia.

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VOL. I, NO. VIII

JULY 15, 1969

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Nixon’s Decisions

After half a year of painful agonizing, of backing and filling, of puttering delays, the pattern of decisions of the Nixon Administration is finally becoming clear. It is not a pretty picture. In every single case, the Nixon Administration has managed to come down on the wrong side, on the side of burgeoning statism.

In Vietnam, the war goes on. A simple statement, which the American public hasn’t seemed to understand ever since the negotiations began in Paris last May. The United States has been using the negotiations as a smoke-screen cover behind which to step up the war in South Vietnam, where of course the war began. But first the initial euphoria led Americans, even most of the young anti-war activists, to proclaim that the war was over. And then everyone waited to “give Nixon a chance” to end the war. How long must we wait for this “chance”? How long must we wait to proclaim that the Emperor has no clothes, and that the war goes on? The peace forces in Congress are beginning at last to wake up, and indications are that the anti-war movement will rouse itself from its year-long sleep by this fall. Disgusted by Nixon’s deliberate delays, the National Liberation Front has finally formed the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam which has already been recognized by many countries. The final step in the NLF plan will be to form a provisional coalition government of all anti-imperialist and neutralist forces, which will deliver the final hammer-blows that will shatter the Saigon puppet regime.

In the vital area of the draft, Nixon put on a typically Nixonian performance. After muttering about replacing the draft with a volunteer army and appointing a committee to study the subject, Nixon finally came out in favor of a lottery-draft, the old Kennedy scheme which would replace the current selective slavery system with slavery-by-chance. Hardly an improvement. But, once again, the smokescreen of reform befuddles the public into thinking that a significant improvement is being made.

The military-industrial state has proceeded apace, and the arms race stepped up with the Nixon decision to go ahead with the ABM and MIRV missile boondoggles. Chemical and bacteriological research and experiments continue despite some public exposure. In the field of civil liberties, we shudder in expectation of Burger Court reversals of the excellent landmark libertarian decisions of the Warren Court. The Administration continues to speak about crackdowns on student dissidents, and Deputy Attorney-General Kleindienst spoke of rounding up student dissenters and placing them in “detention camps”. And now the Department of Justice, in a memorandum submitted in the infamous trial of the Chicago 8, brazenly asserts the right of the President or his aides to invade illegally the privacy and property of Americans through electronic snooping if the President in his wisdom and majesty should decide that the people spied upon might be acting against some form of “national security”, foreign or domestic.

In the sphere of economics the Nixon Administration had been highly touted among conservatives. It was supposed to herald a return to the free-market and a check upon galloping inflation through monetary restriction. Again, nothing has happened. The much publicized monetary tightening has been half-hearted at best, and provides no real test of the effectiveness of monetary policy. For the Administration has been doing precisely what its spokesmen had been deriding the Democrats for doing: trying to “fine-tune” the economy, trying to cut back ever so gently on inflation so as not to precipitate any recession. But it can’t be done. If restrictionist measures were ever sharp enough to check the inflationary boom, they would also be strong enough to generate a temporary recession. Furthermore, the basic Nixon Administration commitment to inflation is revealed by its devotion to the world inflationary Special Drawing Rights, and its refusal to consider any rise in the gold price, much less any return to the gold standard.

Instead of cutting back on its own monetary inflation (generated by Federal Reserve purchases of government securities), the Administration has perpetuated the tyranny and the red herring of the 10% income surcharge, another statist heritage of the Johnson Administration. What happens is that the federal government pumps new money into the economy through Federal Reserve expansion, and then, when the people begin to spend their new money and prices begin to rise, the government proceeds to denounce the public for “spending too much” and levies higher income taxes to “sop up their excess purchasing power”—thus levying both a swindle and a double burden upon the long-suffering public. Spending and government fiscal policy, furthermore, are irrelevant to price inflation, which is determined by the supply and demand of money. And even if it were not irrelevant, it is surely unmitigated gall to assume that a tax, a payment for which the consumer receives no service in return, is somehow worse than a price, for which the consumer at least receives a product in exchange. To advocate higher taxes in order to check higher prices is like advocating a person’s murder in order to cure him of disease.

And waiting in the shadows, for the time when the income tax surcharge clearly will have failed—as it already has—lies the spectre of price and wage controls. Secretary of Treasury Kennedy has already threatened us with this spectre, this program for economic dictatorship which is at the opposite pole from anyone’s definition of the free market. Not only is it dictatorship, but it doesn’t work, only serving to add massive economic dislocations to the inflation that proceeds on its merry way. Why, one might ask, does powerful multi-millionaire businessman David Kennedy ponder price and wage controls? Not because he has been somehow brain-washed by “leftists” or because he suffers from capitalist guilt feelings, as conservatives like to believe. But because the business community is beginning to turn more and more to price and wage controls, as a means of using the power of government to clamp down on wage increases. For in the later stages of an inflationary boom, wages begin to catch up to price increases, and this has been happening in recent months. One more example of the present-day “partnership” between government and business!

In addition to this pattern of statism, the Nixon Administration, led by leading conservative-liberal Daniel Moynihan is seriously considering proposing a nation-wide guaranteed annual income through a “negative income tax”. Both conservatives and liberals have become enamoured of this scheme in recent years—a scheme that would inevitably cripple the incentives to work and earn and thereby wreck the American economy.

So what do you say about all this, Mr. “Libertarian-Conservative”—you who looked forward to a “Fabian” rollback of the State during the Nixon Administration, you who put your trust in all those Chicagoite and Randian advisers? When are you going to abandon your reformist illusions? When are you going to face up to the necessity for real opposition to government?

In the meanwhile, it has now become evident that everywhere, down the line, foreign and domestic, there is no difference whatsoever between the Johnson and the Nixon Administrations (even unto the repeated attacks on the “neo-isolationism” of the critics). The only difference is in style and personnel, the replacement of vulgar Texas corn-pone by bland uptight hypocritical Northern WASP. And even in esthetic repulsiveness, it is very difficult to choose between them.

SDS — Two Views

I: Liberated Zone

The chickens came home to roost for SDS. The SDS national convention was in the process of being taken over by the Progressive Labor Party when SDS split in two in June. By its ability to move its members to key national meetings PL was in a position to take control of the national convention which most SDS members avoid as irrelevant to the real political work which occurs on the local level. SDS chapters are independent of the national convention and disregard its decisions.

PL as a Communist organization was welcomed by the trade union wing of the SDS old guard who wished in 1966 to counterbalance the overwhelming flood of students who had joined SDS to oppose the Vietnam war. Committed to clearly radical anti-imperialism rather than Marxist reformism, the mass infusion of youth had already brought about the election of newcomer Carl Oglesby as SDS president in 1965.

PL had made original contributions to the black liberation struggle, student freedom and support of freedom of travel to Cuba. When the May 2nd Movement was founded in the spring of 1964 to oppose the dangerously escalating American intervention in Vietnam by sending medical aid to the NLF, PL members participated in its work. In 1965 when M2M played a leading role in developing a consciousness of opposition to the draft while SDS leaders fumbled the issue, PL members tried to restrain this radicalism and replace anti-imperialist struggle by a trade union fight for socialism. While M2M members viewed Lin Piao’s “Long live the victory of people’s war” as the crucial analysis for anti-imperialist struggle, PL adopted the sectarian and trade unionist socialism associated with the anti-Mao Communists in China. PL forced the dissolution of M2Min order to work in the wider recruiting ground of SDS, but many PL members in M2M, viewing this action as Stalinist, resigned from PL to continue the struggle against the draft and imperialism.

PL had come to oppose the NLF and Ho Chi Minh as capitalist, black liberation as nationalist rather than socialist, Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution because of the 26th of July Movement was no socialist, Castro was not a Communist and Cuba not a Marxist State. Clearly PL was a crippling counterweight to the revolutionary mass of students in SDS. But, the trade unionist SDS old guard was ousted at the 1966 Clear Lake, Iowa convention by “Prairie Power”, an anarchist trend that swept in from the trans-Mississippi Great Plains region. Although increasingly militant against the draft and university complicity in the war, SDS was held back by PL’s conservatism which fears alienating trade union workers by ‘adventurous’ anti-war action.

The 1968 East Lansing, Mich. SDS convention met in a crisis situation. PL paralyzed the convention, and sought to deflect SDS from anti-war action to a Worker-Student Alliance. SDS national leadership found itself unable to challenge PL effectively. Strong opposition to PL was presented by the SDS anarchist groups whose many black banners of libertarianism were rallying standards against PL. Finally, a lengthy criticism of PL was launched in which former M2M members took a leading role. As a result PL’s attempt to elect members to the SDS national committee was defeated by a narrow margin.

The warning of these events did not effectively penetrate the SDS national leadership. The three national officers ultimately split into three different directions. One became allied with PL, which gained supporters because it emphasized the necessity of winning over the major part of the American people and opposed excesses of Panther-mania, which not only supports the Black Panthers against police repression but uncritically accepts the excessive posturing and the Stalinism that had developed since the jailing of their founder, Huey Newton.

This Panther-mania was created by Mike Klonsky, a second national officer acting as a self-appointed white nominator of the vanguard of the Black liberation movement. Emerging at the 1969 convention as the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, this position views the proletariat as the main force of revolution. The third national officer, Bernardine Dohrn, identified with the Action Faction which denies the leading role in revolutionary struggle to the industrial working class. Recognizing the validity of the revolutionary nationalism and right to self-determination of the Black and Spanish nations in America, they consider the international context—United States involvement in imperialist adventures—as central to undermining the monopoly system and creating the basis for revolutionary action. At the 1969 convention its position paper was called “Weatherman” after its slogan taken from an anti-authoritarian folk song—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” The paper declared:

As imperialism struggles to hold together this decaying social fabric, it inevitably resorts to brute force and authoritarian ideology. People, especially young people, more and more find themselves in the iron grip of authoritarian institutions. Reaction against the pigs or teachers in the schools, welfare pigs or the army is generalizable and extends beyond the particular repressive institution to the society and the State as a whole. The legitimacy of the State is called into question for the first time in at least 30 years, and the anti-authoritarianism which characterizes the youth rebellion turns into rejection of the State, a refusal to be socialized into American society.

SDS split into two conventions at Chicago. One is dominated by PL’s Worker-Student Alliance and includes the SDS Labor Committee. The New Left SDS includes about a dozen tendencies including the Action Faction, RYM II, Praxis Axis, ISC, Marxist humanists, old guard SDS populists, Prairie Power activists, anarchists and libertarians. (One SDSer’s reaction to the convention was, “Us anarchists have got to get organized.”)

The New Left SDS has adopted two basic principles at its convention: “One: We support the struggle of the Black and Latin colonies within the U.S. for national liberation and we recognize those nations’ rights to self-determination (including the right to political secession if they desire it).

“Two: We support the struggle for national liberation of the people of South Vietnam, led by the National Liberation Front and Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, led by President Ho Chi Minh . . . We support the right of all people to pick up the gun to free themselves from the brutal rule of U.S. imperialism.”

Having been on the defensive for some time because of PL’s dogmatic hegemony, the original movement spirit has re-emerged in SDS. The ultimate result of the, 1969 New Left convention was the reaffirmation of native American radicalism as part of the international anti-imperialist revolution.

— Leonard P. Liggio

II: Continue The Struggle

There is no question about the fact that the PL cancer had to be excised. In structure, PL was imposing upon a previously open and warm-hearted movement the rigid party discipline and the manipulative maneuverings of a typical Marxist-Stalinist cadre. In content, PL had become systematically counter-revolutionary; every struggle, whether it be for black national self-determination, national liberation against U.S. imperialism, against ROTC and the draft and the war in Vietnam, for student power or the People’s Park, every one of these struggles was hampered or seriously crippled by PL’s opposition, in the name of the sainted Marxian “working class” and because the “working class wouldn’t like it.” In the end it became clear that PL and its WSA satellites would have to go.

The problem is that in the course of this injection of PL and the reactive battle against it, SDS might have been poisoned permanently. For in too many quarters, especially in the vocal national leadership, the old 1966-67 libertarian spirit had been replaced by the virus of Marxism-Stalinism. The mere excising of PL is not nearly enough to insure healthy survival; continuing struggle is necessary to save the “old” SDS.

For while the virtue of the old SDS is that it had an open libertarian spirit rather than a dogmatic Marxian ideology, this very absence of positive theory left a vacuum which, inevitably, Marxism came to fill. For in the course of struggling against PL’s invasion, too many of the “New Left” opponents of PL began to adopt their enemy’s ideology, to call themselves “communists” (even if with a “small c”), and to take on more and more of the trappings of Marxism and socialism. The most infected group within the newly purged SDS is the “Factory Faction” or the “RYM-2” group, headed by Mike Klonsky and Bob Avakian. The Klonsky clique, while being worshippers of the Panthers, place major emphasis on student permeation and conversion of the industrial working class—probably the most reactionary group in the country today. The Klonsky clique also wants to convert SDS into a Marxist-Stalinist cadre organization—a fate which would be equally as bad as becoming a Progressive Labor front. While it is true that the Factory Faction was defeated in the election of officers of the purged SDS, it still remains a menace, especially for its working-class ideology.

Another irritant within the new SDS is the Trotskyite-Draperite Independent Socialist Club, which, like PL, hurled nearly all of its members into SDS and into voting at the national convention. Dogmatically Marxist and so “third camp” as to oppose national liberation struggles, the ISC remains a danger in the wings; its power to manipulate and destroy was well seen last year when it showed itself able, despite being a tiny minority, to control completely and thereby in effect to wreck the fledgling Peace and Freedom Party.

Leonard Liggio has mentioned uncritical “Panthermania” as another large continuing problem for SDS. A further problem, inherently absurd but growing as a menace because nearly everyone in the movement has been too chicken to fight it, is the hokum of the “women’s liberation struggle”. The women’s liberation movement is not a rational and sensible battle against discrimination against women in employment, or against the “feminine mystique”. These positions are scorned by the women’s liberationists as akin to “white liberalism” and “integrationism”. Insisting on a total analogy with black liberation, the women’s liberationists claim that women, too, are systematically oppressed by men and that therefore a separate women’s power struggle is needed against this oppression. This idea seems to me absurd, and probably at least as good a case could be made for the view that men are oppressed and exploited by parasitic women (e.g. through divorce and alimony laws). But, at any rate, the insistence on analogy with the black movement is even more absurd, for the logical conclusion of the women’s liberation struggle would then be . . . women’s nationalism or separatism. Are we supposed to grant women an Amazonian state somewhere? Men-and-women, happily, are inherently “integrationist” and one may hope that they will remain that way.

In practice, women’s liberation seems to boil down to (a) girls allowing themselves to be as ugly as possible; (b) conning the husband into taking care of the baby; and/or (c) a neo-Puritan ideology of crypto-Lesbianism. At any rate, in allowing women’s liberationism to grow in influence unchallenged, SDS is in danger of making a mockery of its own principles.

But the major problem in SDS is that in order to expel PL, SDS found it necessary, for the first time, to lay down ideological requirements for membership. Until now, there have been no such requirements; now SDS has adopted two principles which every SDSer must support. These are the principles which Leonard Liggio cites in his article. There is nothing wrong with them; on the contrary, they set down an excellent line of support for national liberation struggles, both foreign and domestic, external and internal, against U.S. imperialism. But the problem is that if good principles can be adopted as conditions for membership, then so can bad principles, and it behooves us to be on guard against them.

In fact, waiting in the wings is an expanded set of “unity principles”, which were introduced by the Klonsky clique, but happily rejected by the rank-and-file of “old” SDSers at the convention. But these five principles now get referred to the membership and the chapters for discussion, and it is imperative that at least “point 5” be rejected. Points 1 and 3 are essentially a reaffirmation of the already adopted two points: support for national liberation struggles, internal and external, against U.S. imperialism. Point 4 is an innocuous repudiation of red-baiting. So far so good. But Point 3 fully endorses the women’s liberation hogwash, e.g.: “The struggle for women’s liberation is a powerful force against U.S. imperialism. We are dedicated to fighting male supremacy, to destroying the physical and spiritual oppression of women by men . . . We encourage the formation of ‘women’s militias’ to ensure the fulfillment of the program of total equality for women.”

But if Point 3 should simply be defeated in the interests of sanity, Point 5 is intolerable for any libertarian. Point 5 is a flat-out commitment for socialism: “Recognizing that only through socialism, the public ownership and control of the means of producing wealth, can the people be freed from misery, we declare ourselves a socialist movement . . . Further; . . . socialism can only come through the leading role of the proletariat.” Here is the sticking-point; no libertarian can be a member of an explicitly socialist organization, and one, furthermore, that would make socialism a condition of membership.

But in the meantime there is no cause for despair. The five points failed of adoption at the SDS convention. Furthermore, at Chicago a group of “anarchists, libertarians, and independent revolutionaries” met, symbolically at IWW hall, to form a separate third-force caucus. This group is still in SDS, and remains to continue struggle. That struggle now begins for the minds and the hearts of the local campus chapters, where the membership resides, and where Marxist-Stalinist sectarian factionalism is at a minimum. A particularly shining opportunity appears in those areas (such as New England, and parts of New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area) where SDS chapters have been dominated by PL. Here, an opportunity arises to form new, libertarian-oriented “true” SDS chapters in competition to Progressive Labor.

Even more does the crisis in SDS provide a striking opportunity for the growing student libertarian movement to organize itself as a radical, militant movement free at last from any possibility of socialist subjugation. Radical libertarians are becoming strong enough to organize themselves into a separate movement for the first time. Already, there are two militantly radical libertarian organizations in the field: the Radical Libertarian Alliance, and the Student Libertarian Action Movement, centered in Arizona and with chapters in Georgia and Colorado. There is also a strong possibility that anarcho-libertarians increasingly persecuted in the Young Americans for Freedom will split off after the YAF national convention on Labor Day and form their own organization, freed at last from YAFite fascism. A merger of these three organizations could form a powerful force on the nation’s campuses next year.

— M. N. R.

Recommended Reading

NEW AMERICAN REVIEW, NO. 6. (New American Library: Signet paperback, $1.25. $4.00 for four issues.) Editor T. Solatoroff, of this paperback periodical, writes that the word that best expresses recent trends of thought is “libertarian”. Particularly recommended in this issue are:

Jane Jacobs, “Why Cities Stagnate”, an excellent and perceptive libertarian analysis of the vital importance of the free play of small, innovative entrepreneurs in a city’s healthy growth. A keen attack on government planning and public housing while the same government prevents blacks and other urban dwellers from launching their own activities.

Emile Capouya, “The Red Flag and the Black”: how anarchism has been reviving, particularly during the French revolution last year.

Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “The Merger Movement: A Study in Power”, Monthly Review (June, 1969). A highly perceptive study of how the Established corporations have used the political arm to cripple and harass conglomerate mergers and their “new men” entrepreneurs. Why don’t free-market economists have as keen a sense of political realities?

Tiziano Terzani, “Storming the Institutions”, The Nation (June 16, 1969). Important article on the revolutionary situation that is rapidly developing in Italy—provides a good background to the current Italian political crisis.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. IX

AUGUST 1, 1969

35¢

PEOPLE’S MONEY:

Revolt In Minnesota

The idea prevails that to favor gold or silver money is to be a mossback reactionary; nothing could be further from the truth. For gold (as well as silver) is the People’s Money; it is a valuable commodity that has developed, on the free market, as the monetary means of exchange. Gold has been replaced, at the dictate of the State, by fiat paper—by pieces of paper issued and imprinted by the government. Gold cannot be produced very easily; it must be dug laboriously out of the ground. But if paper tickets are to be money, and the State is to have the sole power to issue these virtually costless tickets, then we are all at the mercy of this gang of legalized, sovereign counterfeiters. Yet this is the accepted monetary system of today.

Not only is this system of the State’s having absolute control of our money been accepted by Establishment economists; it has been just as warmly endorsed by the powerful “Chicago” branch of free-market economists. Twenty years ago, almost all conservative, or free-market oriented, economists, favored a return to the gold standard and the elimination of fiat paper. But now the gold standard economists have almost all died out and been replaced by the glib, technically expert Chicagoites, to a man scoffers at gold and simple-minded endorsers of fiat paper. The gold standard has died from desertion of its cause by the right-wing and its economists. Numerous right-wingers who should know better yet continue to fawn upon Milton Friedman and his Chicagoites. Why? Presumably, because they have power and influence, and one never finds conservatives lacking these days when it comes to toadying the power.

In the midst of this monetary miasma, there has now come a voice from out of the past, from the Old Right, and it is one of the most heartwarming events of the year.

Two years ago, Jerome Daly, a citizen of Savage, Minnesota, a suburban town just south of Minneapolis, refused to make any further payments on the mortgage which he had owed to his bank. At his jury trial (First National Bank of Montgomery vs. Jerome Daly) in December, 1968 before Justice of the Peace Martin V. Mahoney, a farmer and carpenter by trade, at which the bank tried to repossess the property, Mr. Daly argued that he owed the bank nothing. Why? Because, the bank, in lending him money, had loaned him not real money but bank credit which the bank had created out of thin air. Not being genuine money, the credit was not a valid consideration, and therefore the contract was null and void. Daly argued that he did not owe the bank anything.

In making this seemingly preposterous argument, Jerome Daly was being a far better economist—and libertarian—than anyone knew. For fractional reserve banking—now a system at the behest and direction of the Federal Reserve Banks—is, like fiat paper, legalized counterfeiting, the creation of claims which are invalid and impossible to redeem. Furthermore, Daly contended that this kind of creation of money by banks is illegal and unconstitutional.

Even more remarkable than Mr. Daly’s thesis is that the jury unanimously held for him, and declared the mortgage null and void; and Justice Mahoney’s supporting decision, delivered last Dec. 9, is a gem of radical assertion of the rights of the people and a thoroughgoing assault on the unwisdom and fraudulence and unconstitutionality of fractional reserve banking.

Bewildered, the First National Bank of Montgomery, Minnesota proceeded in routine fashion to file an appeal with Justice Mahoney for a higher court. But the catch is that in order to file an appeal, the plaintiff has to pay a fee of two dollars. Justice Mahoney, O happy day, refused to accept the appeal on January 22 because Federal Reserve Notes, which of course constituted the fee, are not lawful money. Only gold and silver coin, affirmed the judge, can be made legal tender, and therefore the fee for appeal had not been paid. Justice Mahoney followed this up with supporting memoranda on January 30 and February 5, which are heartwarming blends of sound economics and strict legal constructionism, and which also declared the unconstitutionality of the Federal Reserve Act and the National Banking Act, the capstones of our current interventionist and statist monetary system.

There the matter rests at the moment; but where does it rest? We have it on the authority of Justice Mahoney that debts to fractional reserve banks (i.e. the current banking system) are null and void, that their very nature is fraudulent and illegal (in short, that the banks belong to the people!), that Federal Reserve Notes and fiat paper are unlawful and unconstitutional.

Never has there been a more radical attack upon the whole nature of our fraudulent and statist banking system.

Furthermore, with these embattled Minnesotans, their radicalism is not only rhetoric; they are prepared to back it up with still further concrete acts. Jerome Daly has already announced that if any higher court of the United States, “perpetrates a fraud upon the People by defying the Constitutional Law of the United States (Justice) Mahoney has resolved that he will convene another Jury in Credit River Township (where Savage is located) to try the issue of the Fraud on the part of any State or Federal Judge”. Daly adds, moreover, that the Constable and the Citizens’ Militia of Credit River Township are prepared to use their power to back up the jury’s decision and keep Mr. Daly in possession of his land. The people of Savage, Minnesota, in short, are prepared to fight, to resist the decrees of the state and federal governments, to use their power on the local level to resist the State.

Many dimwits in the libertarian movement—and they are, unfortunately, legion—have charged that in recent years, I have simply become a “leftist”. From the literature of Mr. Daly and his supporters, it is quite clear that this is a heroic band of Old Rightists, of people who have not been nurtured on National Review or the lesser organs of current Right-wing opinion. I am equally and eagerly as willing to hail their libertarian action for the people and against the State, as I am such “leftist” actions as People’s Park.

The test, as Karl Hess indicates in this issue of The Libertarian Forum, is action; action now vis à vis the State. Those who side with the liberties of the people against the government are our friends and allies; those who side with the State against the people are our enemies. It is as simple as all that. The problem, as far as the Right goes, is that in recent years there have been zero actions by the Right against the State; on the contrary, the Right has almost invariably been on the side of the State: against the demonstrators at Chicago, against People’s Park, against the Student Revolution, against the Black Panthers, etc. If the test is, as I hold it to be, action, and “which side are you on, the people or the State”, and not the closeness of agreement on the fifth Lemma of the third Syllogism deduced from whether or not A A, then the Right-wing in recent years—and this means the entire right, from Buckleyites and Randians straight through to phony “anarchists” (or “anarcho-rightists”)—has been a dismal failure. Indeed, it has ranged itself on the side of the Enemy. Thus, in the matter of tax resistance, ten or fifteen years ago the banner of tax refusal was carried by such “rightists” as Vivien Kellems; now the self-same flag is carried by such “leftists” as Joan Baez.

If the “libertarians” of the Right-wing are at all interested in my approbation, there is a simple way to attain it: to acquire one-hundredth of the fortitude and the revolutionary spirit of the New Left resisters against the State; to return to the tradition of Sam Adams and Tom Paine, of Garrison and John Brown, and, in recent years, of Frank Chodorov and Vivien Kellems. Let them return to that great tradition or let them, as rapidly as possible, sink into the well-deserved dustbin of history.

In the meanwhile, all hail to the heroic rebels of Savage, Minnesota, to the perceptive and courageous Jerome Daly and Justice Martin Mahoney. Anyone who wishes to read the full documentation of this case can write to Jerome Daly, 28 East Minnesota St., Savage, Minn. 55378. Anyone who wants to contribute funds (In donations of $1 or more) to carry this case to the Supreme Court is urged to send his checks to the Minnesota Action Fund, 628 Stryker Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 55107.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

The Real Rebels

Now, officially, I am an enemy of the state. Now, technically, I am a fugitive from one of the state’s national police agencies. Now, fundamentally, I am convinced that in the confrontation between the state and freedom there can be no middle ground, no safe haven, no neutral corner, nook, or cranny.

My own situation is not offered as in any way an exemplary model. It is not a course to be recommended, but simply to be reported. I have for some time refused to sanction or support the state system of this or any nation by the payment of taxes. The Internal Revenue Service’s police force is, as a result, now in the process of attempting to seize all property belonging to me. Since my property consists of the tools and books needed to make a living, this action is not simply one of administrative punishment but involves an aspect of survival. I believe in self-defense. Therefore, I will surely attempt to thwart them. This is civil disobedience. Fine.

Also, wherever and whenever possible I have been speaking out against the state and attempting to rally opposition to it. One result has been that the Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently has given to various “conservatives” information from government files which they consider derogatory but which, frankly, I do not inasmuch as it simply attempts to make the point that I tend to be extreme in my political views. True enough. I do believe, as a matter of fact, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. (Incidentally, I am rather painfully aware of the technique in which the FBI uses its files to defame political dissenters because, when I was on ‘the right side’, I was given, as were many of my colleagues, substantial FBI data to be used against rebels, reds, and resisters.)

As a result of becoming a rebel in active fact as well as a rhetorical rebel, certain notions regarding resistance to the state have come into sharper focus for me. (Needless to say, I do not mean that a purely rhetorical rebel cannot be a real one also. It really depends on whether the rhetoric is, in fact, rebellious or merely windy. My colleague, for instance, is as true a rebel as you will find even though he has not, so far as I know, even been arrested for jaywalking.)

I am more convinced than ever that the state must be resisted, not just debated or evaded. The debate, which has raged in the legislature and even in the courts for generations, has achieved nothing but momentary changes in the velocity of state power development. The direction has never changed. Every year, regardless of the rhetoric of our supposed representatives, the direction of state power has been upward. This has proven, to be a dynamic of the system itself and not merely a function of factions within the system. There is every reason to believe that the development of central power will virtually reach critical mass under the present highly defensive, repression-minded, centralist ‘moderate’ or ‘progressive’ Administration (which is supported, do not forget, by the Conservative establishment as well).

The simplest fact of the improbability of representational reform is that in order to get elected, as all agree, a man must promise to “do” something for his constituents. Then to stay in office, he must actually do something, or at least appear to. This hardly makes it feasible for the man to resist the state. He must, instead, use it, curry favor with it, or so play the bureaucratic game as to even outpoint it as in the case of elderly committee chairmen.

Some say, however, that the voters could be ‘educated’ to elect anti-statist candidates. Since all organs of mass media are either controlled by the state or its state-capital ‘partners’, and since almost all schools, also, are either Owned or controlled by the state, from elementary grades through the university, the means of reaching, in order to educate, tens of millions of voters is obscure at the very best.

Others say that in a time of crisis, at any rate, people might turn to ‘anti-statist’ candidates for their own self-preservation. Skipping the fact that the notion of an anti-statist candidate is a contradiction in itself, it should be recalled that in this example it is the crisis, not the candidacy that would be the decisive factor. There may be a lesson in that for those who will struggle to learn it.

That I prefer resistance to reform does not, however, mean that I prefer a particular kind of resistance. My kind, civil disobedience and sounding off, might not be appropriate for many others. I certainly do not claim that it is the most effective course. It just happens to be what I can do, therefore I do it.

Would not retreat from government be just as effective? Perhaps so, if that is what one can do best, or all that one can do. It should be borne in mind, however, that all such retreat is done, ultimately, at the sufferance of the state and under the Damoclean sword of the state. When, or if the retreat irks the state, it will end the retreat. The same applies to those who feel that they can coexist with the state because they measure liberty purely in terms of personal property and profit and highly regard or at least tolerate the state so long as it protects that. The point to remember is the same: all property in a state system exists at the sufferance of the state. When it wishes to take the property, it can.

As a radical American politician once put it: “The state that is powerful enough to give you all you want is powerful enough to take it all away.” No better comment could be made upon the illusory hopes of having a state that is both powerful enough to protect you against all ills foreign and domestic and also somehow weak enough never to threaten you.

Finally, there is the matter of alliances. With whom does an enemy of the state make alliances? There may be a million answers of contentious detail. There is only one answer of overall principle: You do not make alliances with the state itself, you do not make alliances with agents of or supporters of the state—even though you may attempt to change them. The range of alliance, therefore, is restricted to those who also oppose the state.

Within that range there may be many variations of principle, many different goals. Those differences should and must determine future actions. Present actions, however, should be determined by present needs. No need is greater than opposition to the state and reduction of its power. Without that reduction of power all meaning of other differences must remain purely academic.

To refuse to oppose the state we have because we fear, for instance, the state we might have, is to refuse to grasp reality while trembling before ghosts. (Why not, instead, lay the groundwork for resistance to all state power even while resisting the one at hand?)

Today, everywhere in the world, it is established and coercive authority that is called into question, that is under siege. Literally, one cannot even go to the moon to avoid it.

How then neutrality here on earth?

The timeless revolutionary question is timely again: which side are you on? Are you an enemy or friend of liberty? Are you an enemy or friend of the state? Will you be content to act as an agent of the state, or hide as a refugee from it? Or will you resist it where you can, as you can, when you can?

It is liberty that is the idea most threatening to the state. And all men who hold it as an ideal are enemies of the state. Welcome!

Nelson’s Waterloo

President Nixon’s sending of none other than Nelson Rockefeller on an extensive tour of Latin America demonstrates Nixon’s moral obtuseness to the hilt. Sending Nelson on a fact-finding tour of Latin America is like sending a fox on a fact-finding tour of the chicken coops. And while Americans are conveniently blind to the facts of U.S. imperialism, the people of Latin America—the cooped chickens—are all too well aware of them. They know that Rockefeller is their Emperor, that the Rockefeller Empire, with its intimate blend of political and economic rule, is far more their dictator than any of the petty generals ruling over them can ever hope to be.

And so the people of Latin America, at every stop, gave their hated Emperor the reception which he so richly deserved. Three countries barred his entry, and in virtually every stop, riots, demonstrations, anger were the order of the day. Even Rockefeller’s military satraps in charge of the various countries could not keep their subjects in check. All this is prelude to the Latin American Revolution to come, a revolution which will make Vietnam look like a tea party.

The New Deal And Fascism

Interesting new evidence has emerged on the close ties of Roosevelt’s New Deal and fascism. George Rawick reports that some ten years ago he spent a considerable amount of time with Frances Perkins, then professor of labor economics at Cornell University and Secretary of Labor under FDR. Madame Perkins related that at the first meeting of the Roosevelt Cabinet in March 1933, Bernard Baruch, financier and key adviser to almost every President of modern times, walked in with his disciple General Hugh Johnson, soon to become head of the NRA, bringing to each member of the Cabinet a copy of a book by Giovanni Gentile, the Italian Fascist theoretician. La Perkins adds that “we all read it with great care.” (Additional query: what was Baruch doing at a Cabinet meeting?) To be found in George Rawick, “Working Class Self-Activity”, Radical America (March-April, 1969), p. 25.

Radical America is an excellent bi-monthly journal of U.S. radicalism, and is the closest thing to a theoretical journal that is associated with SDS. Available at 50¢ per issue or $3 per year at 1237 Spaight St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703.

“The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.”

— Pascal, 1670

HEINLEIN AND LIBERTY: A Warning

One of the more distressing tendencies among American right-wing “libertarians” is a symptomatic willingness to identify popular authors as freedom-loving if they so much as use the term liberty in their works. The undisputed guru of this coterie is Robert A. Heinlein, writer of scores of science fiction short stories and novels; his book, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, is often singled out as representative of “anarchist” or “libertarian” science fiction. It is an enthralling novelette describing a futuristic moon colony which rebels against planet Earth under the aegis of a small group of classical liberals who have come into power via revolution. The rhetoric of these bourgeois revolutionaries is unabashedly Randian, although a signal character is identified as a “rational anarchist”.

“Moon” is the latest production of the prolific Mr. Heinlein, noted also for “Stranger in a Strange Land”, which supposedly captivated the attention of hip people several years ago. One would expect Heinlein to be somewhat sympathetic to the Movement, having read his Utopian creations which hint at the possibilities of an open society; to the contrary, a bitter awakening is in store for Heinlein fans who are more than armchair devotees of liberty.

According to a February issue of National Review magazine, Robert Heinlein is one of 270 signers of a jingoist petition circulated in the U.S. Author’s Guild by the facile William Buckley and his spiritual cohort Frank S. Meyer. The petition, a belated retort to an earlier anti-Vietnam war roster of authors (which was eminently successful), calls for “the vigorous prosecution of the Vietnam war to an honorable conclusion.” Deep contemplation is not necessary to comprehend the statist, authoritarian implications of such New Right weasel words and the concomitant beliefs of men who would endorse it.

Only one other science fiction writer joins Heinlein in the missive, Poul Anderson; the other signatories are well known in the rightist arsenal (Stefan Possony, Eugene Lyons, Brent Bozell, John Dos Passos, Francis Russell . . . ad nauseam). The case of Robert Heinlein is useful in evaluating both the politics of his followers and the commitments of entrenched and established American writers: It is clear that a writer cannot serve two masters, both justice and the mighty dollar—one must give way, if not on the written page, then in one’s personal life. While Heinlein has never been so explicitly libertarian as to be judged hypocritical, the lesson remains an open and obvious one.

An interesting footnote to this question comes from our British comrades: Several years ago, in Anarchy magazine, the monthly publication of Freedom Press in London, an article appeared on science fiction in the English language, in which Heinlein was singled out as “the only fascist science fiction writer in America.” This prophetic note comes from a libertarian community that has no need for propertied quislings.

— Wilson A. Clark, Jr.

Recommended Reading

RAMPARTS. August 1969 issue. An all-star issue, featuring the best and fullest report to date on the battle of People’s Park. Also: a perceptive article on Mel Laird by Karl Hess, a stress on the central importance of Vietnam by Franz Schurmann, and a superior piece of Rocky-baiting by David Horowitz.

Michael Gamarnikow, Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe (Wayne State University Press). The best single book on the remarkable rush of the Communist countries of Eastern Europe to shift from central planning to a free market. Unfortunately omits Yugoslavia.

Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, paper). Useful material on current U.S. imperialism, particularly on banking connections and foreign aid.

Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy (Monthly Review Press, paper). Reprint of the first great dissection of early twentieth-century American imperialism.

Jack Newfield, “T. H. White: Groupie of the Power Elite”, The Village Voice (July 17, 1969). Brilliant and acidulous dissection of the best-selling political reporter “Teddy” White,

Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (W. W. Norton, paper). Refutes the standard historians’ myth that Jackson, by his war against the Second Bank of the U.S., engendered bank inflation and then collapse.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. X

August 15, 1969

35¢

LISTEN, YAF

This open letter is addressed to the libertarians attending the YAF national convention in St. Louis this Labor Day weekend. Notice I said the libertarians in YAF; I have nothing to say to the so-called “traditionalists” (a misnomer, by the way, for we libertarians have our traditions too, and they are glorious ones. It all depends on which traditions: the libertarian ones of Paine and Price, of Cobden and Thoreau, or the authoritarian ones of Torquemada and Burke and Metternich.) Let us leave the authoritarians to their Edmund Burkes and their Crowns of St. Something-or-other. We have more serious matters to discuss.

In the famous words of Jimmy Durante: “Have ya ever had the feelin’ that ya wanted to go, and yet ya had the feelin’ that ya wanted to stay?” This letter is a plea that you use the occasion of the public forum of the YAF convention to go, to split, to leave the conservative movement where it belongs: in the hands of the St. Something-or-others, and where it is going to stay regardless of what action you take. Leave the house of your false friends, for they are your enemies.

For years you have taken your political advice and much of your line from assorted “exes”: ex-Communists, ex-Trots, ex-Maoists, ex-fellow-travellers. I have never been any of these. I grew up a right-winger, and became more intensely a libertarian rightist as I grew older. How come I am an exile from the Right-wing, while the conservative movement is being run by a gaggle of ex-Communists and monarchists? What kind of a conservative movement is this? This kind: one that you have no business being in. I got out of the Right-wing not because I ceased believing in liberty, but because being a libertarian above all, I came to see that the Right-wing specialized in cloaking its authoritarian and neo-fascist policies in the honeyed words of libertarian rhetoric. They need you for their libertarian cover; stop providing it for them!

You can see for yourselves that you have nothing in common with the frank theocrats, the worshippers of monarchy, the hawkers after a New Inquisition, the Bozells and the Wilhelmsens. Yet you continue in harness with them. Why? Because of the siren songs of the so-called “fusionists”—the Meyers and Buckleys and Evanses—who claim to be integrating and synthesizing the best of “tradition” and liberty. And even if you don’t quite believe in the synthesis, the existence of these “centrists” as the leaders of the Right gives you the false sense of security that you can join a united front under their aegis. It is for that very reason that the fusionists, those misleaders, are the most dangerous of all—much more so than the frank and open worshippers of the Crown of St. Wenceslas.

For note what the fusionists are saying behind their seemingly libertarian rhetoric. The only liberty they are willing to grant is a liberty within “tradition”, within “order”, in others words a weak and puny false imitation of liberty within a framework dictated by the State apparatus. Let us consider the typically YAFite-fusionist position on various critical issues. Surely, you might say, the fusionists are in favor of a free-market economy. But are they indeed? The fusionists, for example, favor the outlawry of marijuana and other drugs—after some hemming and hawing, of course, and much hogwash about “community responsibility”, values and the ontological order—but outlawry just the same. Every time some kid is busted for pot smoking you can pin much of the responsibility on the Conservative Movement and its fusionist-Buckleyite misleaders. So what kind of a free market position is one that favors the outlawry of marijuana? Where is the private property right to grow, purchase, exchange, and use?

Alright, so you know the Right-wing is very bad on questions of compulsory morality. But what about the hundreds of billions of dollars siphoned off from the producers and taxpayers to build up the power of the State’s overkill military machine? And what of the state-monopoly military-industrial complex that the system has spawned? What kind of a free market is that? Recently, National Review emitted its typical patrician scorn against leftist carpers who dared to criticize the space moon-doggle. $24 billion of taxpayers’ money of precious resources that could have been used on earth, have been poured into the purely and totally collectivistic moon-doggle program. And now our Conservative Hero, Vice-President Agnew, wants us to proceed on to Mars, at Lord knows what multiple of the cost. This is a free-market!? Poor Bastiat and Cobden must be turning over in their graves!

What has YAF, in its action programs, ever done on behalf of the free market? Its only action related to the free market has been to oppose it, to call for embargoes on Polish hams and other products from Eastern Europe. What kind of a free-market program is that?

YAF, the fusionists, and the Right-wing generally, have led the parade, in happy tandem with their supposed enemies the liberals, in supporting the Cold War and various hot wars against Communist movements abroad. This global crusading against the heathen is a total reversal of the Old “isolationist” Right-wing of my youth, the Right-wing that scorned foreign intervention and “globaloney”, and attacked these adventures as statist imperialism while the Nation and the New Republic and other liberals were berating these Rightists as tools of the Kremlin. But now your Right-wing leaders embrace every socialist, every leftist with a 100% ADA voting record, every Sidney Hook and Paul Douglas and Thomas Dodd, just so long as they stand ready to incinerate the world rather than suffer one Communist to live. What kind of a libertarian policy, what kind even of “fusionist” policy is that justifies the slaughter of tens of thousands of American soldiers, of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese peasants, for the sake of bringing Christianity to the heathen by sword and brimstone? I can understand why the authoritarians applaud all this, they who would like nothing more than the return of Cotton Mather or Torquemada. But what are you doing supporting them?

Surely every libertarian supports civil liberties, the corollary and complement of private property rights and the free-market economy. Where does the Right-wing stand on civil liberties? You know all too well. Communists, of course, have to be slaughtered or rounded up in detention camps. Being “agents of the Devil”, they are no longer human and therefore have no rights. Is that it? But it is not only on the Communist question where the conservatives are despots; don’t think this is just one flaw in their armor. For in recent years, American politics has instructively begun to focus on very crucial issues—on the nature of the State and on State coercion itself. Thus, the cops. The cops, with their monopoly of coercion and their overwhelming superiority of arms, tend to brutalize, club, and torture confessions from people who are either innocent or have not been proven guilty. What has been the attitude of the Right-wing, and your fusionist leaders, toward this systematic brutality, or toward the libertarian decisions of the Warren Court that have put up protections for the individual rights of the accused? You know very well. They hate the Warren Court almost as much as they do Reds, for “coddling criminals”, and the cry goes up everywhere for all power to the police. What can be more profoundly statist, despotic, and anti-libertarian than that?

When Mayor Daley’s cops clubbed and gassed their way through Chicago last year against unarmed demonstrators, the only libertarian reaction was to revile Daley and the cops and to support the rights of the demonstrators. But your fusionist leaders loved and applauded Daley, with his “manly will to govern”, and the brutality unleashed by his cop goons. And take the massacre at People’s Park at Berkeley this year, when one unarmed bystander was killed, and hundreds wounded, and thousands gassed by the armed constabulary for the crime of trying to remain in a park which they had built with their own hands on a state-owned muddy lot. Yet your “fusionists” denounced People’s Park and hailed Reagan and the cops.

And then there is the draft—that obnoxious system of slavery and forced murder. There is nothing anyone even remotely calling himself a libertarian can say about the draft except that it is slavery and that it must be combatted. And yet how namby-pamby YAF has been on the draft, how ambiguous and tangled the fusionist leaders become when they approach the subject? Even those who reject the draft do so only apologetically, and only on the grounds that we could have a more efficient army if it were volunteer. But the real issue is moral. The issue is not to build up a more efficient group of hired killers for the U.S. government; the issue is to oppose slavery as an absolute moral evil. And this no fusionist or Rightist has even considered doing. And even those who reject the draft as inefficient love the army itself, with its hierarchical despotism, its aggressive violence, its unthinking obedience. What sort of “libertarians” are these?

And what of the nation’s educational system in which so many of you have been enmeshed? For years, I heard your fusionist leaders condemn in toto, the American educational system as coercive and statist, and, when in their cups and heedless of their political status, even call for abolition of the public school system. Fine! So what happens when, in the last few years, we have seen a dedicated and determined movement to smash this system—to return control to the parents, as in Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, and take it from the entrenched educationists—or, as with SDS and the colleges, to overthrow the educational rule of the government and the military-industrial complex? Shouldn’t the fusionists have hailed and come to the support of these educational opposition movements? But instead, they have called on the cops to suppress them.

Here is surely an acid test of the fusionists’ alleged love of liberty. Liberty goes by the board as soon as their precious “gder” is threatened, and “order” means, simply, State dictation and State-controlled property. Is that what libertarians are to end up doing—fronting for despots and apologists for “lawnorder”? Our stand should be on the other side—with the people, with the citizenry, and against the State and its hired goon squads. And yet YAF’s central theme this year is its boasting about inventing tactics to call in the judges, call in the cops, to suppress SDS opposition—opposition to what? To the State’s gigantic factory for brainwashing! What are you doing on the barricades defending the State’s indoctrination centers?

It’s pretty clear, or should be by now, what they’re doing there, the fusionists. They’re right where they belong, doing their job—the job of apologists for the State using libertarian rhetoric as their cloak. And since, in recent years, they have snuggled close to Power, these apologetics have become more and more blatant. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the “libertarian-conservatives” used to hail Thoreau and the idea of civil disobedience against unjust laws. But now, now that civil disobedience has become an actual living movement, Thoreau is only heard on the New Left, while the Right, even the “libertarian” or fusionist Right, talk only of lawn-n-order, suppression and the bayonet, defense of State power by any and all means necessary.

You don’t belong with these deceivers on the political make. I plead with you to leave YAF now, for you should know by now that there is no hope of your ever capturing it. It is as dictatorial, as oligarchic, as close to fascism in structure as is so much of the content of YAF’s program. There is no way that you can overthrow the Jones-Teague clique, for this clique is entrenched in power. And behind this clique lie the fusionist gurus: the Buckleys, and Rushers, and Meyers. And behind them lie the real power in YAF—the moneybags, the wealthy business men who finance and therefore run the organization, the same moneybags who reacted hard a few years ago when some of your leaders decided to take a strong stand against the draft.

When YAF was founded, on the Buckley estate at Sharon, Connecticut, there was heavy sentiment among the founders against the title, because, they said, “freedom is a left-wing word.” But the “fusionists” won out, and freedom was included in the title. In retrospect, it is clear that this was a shame, because all that happened was that the precious word “freedom” came to be used as an Orwellian cloak for its very opposite. Why don’t you leave now, and let the “F” in YAF stand then for what it has secretly stood for all along—“fascism”?

Why don’t you get out, form your own organization, breathe the clean air of freedom, and then take your stand, proudly and squarely, not with the despotism of the power elite and the government of the United States, but with the rising movement in opposition to that government? Then you will be libertarians indeed, in act as well as in theory. What hangover, what remnant of devotion to the monster State, is holding you back? Come join us, come realize that to break once and for all with statism is to break once and for all with the Right-wing. We stand ready to welcome you.

Yours in liberty,
Murray N. Rothbard

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

Leaders And Heroes

We had a chance to learn a lot about leaders lately.

Also heroes.

There was, for example, the moonshot. The three Federal employees who went on the trip were passengers in fact, passengers in life-style, passengers in character, the great culminating passengers of the great bureaucratic trip. But by going along for the ride they have become heroes, instand, officially certified heroes who, in all probability, will be featured, like meat loaf, in the menus of the state’s school system until some other Federal employee makes it to Mars.

Politically there was another great passenger hanging on for all he was worth (and that is all he’s worth, come to think of it). Richard Nixon, whose only discernible qualification for any office has been that he wants it (oh, does he want it!) treated the affair in proper perspective. He said, gosh, that it was man’s greatest moment. He meant his greatest moment, of course—a fact he gave away by both dropping his name on the moon and dropping his cool with the astronauts, telling the entire world that the neatest thing about being President was actually getting to take free rides to historic events rather than staying home to watch them like all the kids who didn’t want to be leaders quite bad enough. (One recalled, as this marionette figure spoke, that he also had remaked, while helicoptering over Washington’s rush hour traffic, that he was glad he didn’t have to drive to work. His attitude toward the moon thing seemed just about on the same level: he was really glad to get to see the doings close up instead of at home like the working stiffs.)

There was also that leader of the downtrodden, Ralph Abernathy. He said that the whole thing was so awe inspiring that it even made him forget poverty for a moment. And why not? He had an entire special section of seats reserved for him at the launching, thus becoming the first extraterrestrial Tom, you might say. The awesome demonstration probably also made him forget, if he ever had bothered to think about it in the first place, that a lot of his brothers and sisters are being killed these days because they happen to want to solve their problems here on earth.

There also was Billy Graham, gently chiding his old buddy Dick about the moon thing being the greatest moment in man’s history. Fourth greatest, he corrected, right after Christmas, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. (Or maybe fifth, right after the invention of the padded collection plate and the 100% religion depletion tax allowance.)

For the best performance by an American leader, however, the prize really had to go to Teddy Kennedy, starring in a re-run of Dickie Nixon’s little-dog-Checkers speech, as produced in actual tragedy by the inmates of the state of Massachusetts under the direction of dynastic destiny out of sheer chutzpah. Since nobody else seems to give a damn that somebody got killed in the process why should we, eh folks?

To savor the play we must first appreciate the scenery. Here is the Senator from Massachusetts, one of the nation’s richest, most pampered young men. Unlike the temporary President of the United States, who got the job by holding his breath and threatening to turn blue unless we let him have it, Teddy Kennedy is widely felt to have some dibs on the job by sheer hereditary right, having not made much ado about any more profound qualification. And here, of course, is this tragedy; indeed, one dead girl in a world full of dead and dying can be called tragic. The point is how it is all perceived. And it is perceived as a problem in practical politics, nothing more. Even the surviving partner in the tragedy perceives it as nothing more and goes on TV to make the point as publicly as possible.

Teddy, it is said, just as it was said of Nixon in his time of crisis, is fighting for his life. It’s a stirring thought. It would be the only thing in that life he ever did have to fight for.

But what manner of warped and hollow men could be said to be fighting for their lives—even forgiving journalistic hyperbole—when all that is involved is whether or not the man will hold a public office? And what manner of people can take seriously the posturings of such public men or translate such public pulling into private agony?

The incident, indeed all of the incidents, tell us perhaps more about our society, our ‘system’ than even about the cardboard cutouts, the political Barbies and Kens who strut on the particular stage at the particular moment.

This supposedly noble land had been bred and fed on this obviously ignoble fare. It seems now impossible to say that all of this horseshit is just some aberration of an otherwise perfect civil comity and economic dynamism. It rather seems that all of this sort of loathsome leadership is the inevitable result of a system which, along with its vast capacity for producing goods, has an exactly equal capacity for producing evils.

Teddy Kennedy, telling his people (his forelock-pulling people down there in the Kennedy village that is the laughably sovereign state of Massachusetts) telling his people that he must be loved if he is to lead them, suggestively warning that if he had to step down they would lose more than a great man, they would lose a great name, asking the ever-loving folk in his ever-loving village to make the great decision for him (oh, my god; decisions, decisions, why not ask the little people to share this great burden with me); Teddy Kennedy who must actually think that whether he stays in the Senate or not is somewhere near as important as whether some man in Roxbury can pay his rent this month, or whether any man will live the night through in Vietnam, that Teddy Kennedy is your Teddy Kennedy America! Just as Richard Nixon is. Just as are Bobby Baker, Litton Industries, Dow Chemical, Nelson Rockefeller and all the other great practitioners of state capitalism and the profiteers of state imperialism.

What I kept thinking as I watched the national leaders disport themselves, and thought of their origins, was that to really love this land you must first learn to loathe this nation and the system for which it stands.

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Against The Volunteer Military

Many libertarians have been misled into supporting the volunteer military proposal. The argument typically goes something like this: the draft is a clear violation of the principle that each man is a complete self-owner; that to take away the free use of a man’s life for two years is to nationalize his most important piece of private property—his own person.

The argument continues: the lottery merely bases the slavery inherent in a draft system on mathematical chance instead of on the chance of getting a deferment and is therefore equally servile. Universal service merely seeks to hide the slavery inherent in the draft system under the cloak of egalitarianism-slavery for all.

The volunteer military idea is seemingly strengthened by analogy to the free market: coercive systems are always inefficient and this applies to coercive systems of acquiring military personnel. A market wage for soldiers will attract the most highly motivated soldiers, the soldiers most likely to re-enlist. Below market-wage soldiers will be poorly motivated, inefficient and will not re-enlist in high percentages—necessitating high training costs due to the high turnover in personnel.

In order to see why the above argument is fallacious, mischievous, and anti-libertarian let us consider the following: A concentration camp is set up whose purpose it is to torture innocent victims. Those unfortunates are dragged in kicking and screaming, are then subdued, tortured, maimed and finally killed. There is only one fact disturbing this otherwise idyllic picture—the concentration camp torturers are not hired at the going market rate as “free enterprise” demands; rather, they are, horrors! draftees. A group of “libertarians” is worried about the poor motivation and inefficiency of the torturers who were drafted against their will and “who just cannot seem to put their hearts into it.” In addition, the sad fact is that the re-enlistment rate is low—necessitating high training costs due to the high turnover in personnel.

What does this “libertarian” group then recommend? It recommends that future torturers be hired at market wage rates—a “volunteer torturary” as it were.

It is not hard for the true libertarian to see the error in volunteer military sentiment when viewed through this analogy. The point is that we must first determine whether the proposed job of the hirelings is consistent with libertarian principles. If it is, only then do we look into the method of hiring which must, of course, be voluntary.

If we mistakenly support voluntary methods of hiring people before we consider precisely what they are being hired to do, we may well become unwitting supporters of the efficient violation of liberties.

In the present political context the consistent libertarian must oppose the draft, but he must also oppose all imperialistic armies, be they drafted or hired.

What the proponents of the volunteer military forget is that there is a fifth alternative to manning imperialistic armies by the draft, lottery, universal service, or the volunteer military—opposition to imperialism under any guise even under the guise of the free market.

Is the libertarian, then, a pacifist, opposed to all armies? Far from it. The libertarian supports defensive armies whose soldiers are hired voluntarily. But this is not enough! Such armies must be paid for only by people who desire defense services and who voluntarily pay for them. Such armies would be more efficient than many presently known, but this efficiency the libertarian could wholeheartedly applaud since it would be used to protect, not violate, liberties. Moreover, such armies would be fully just since they would also be support without violating liberties.

— Walter Block

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A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XI

September 1, 1969

35¢

National Liberation

The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points up, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed peoples. Aside from being a necessary condition to the achievement of justice, national liberation is the only solution to the great world problems of territorial disputes and oppressive national rule. Yet all too many anarchists and libertarians mistakenly scorn the idea of national liberation and independence as simply setting up more nation-states; they tragically do not realize that, taking this stand, they become in the concrete, objective supporters of the bloated, imperialistic nation-states of today.

Sometimes this mistake has had tragic consequences. Thus, it is clear from Paul Avrich’s fascinating and definitive book (The Russian Anarchists, Princeton University Press, 1967), that the anarchists in Russia had at least a fighting chance to take control of the October Revolution rather than the Bolsheviks, but that they lost out for two major reasons: (1) their sectarian view that any kind of definite organization of their own movement violated anarchist principles; and (2) their opposition to the national independence movements for the Ukraine and White Russia on the ground that this would simply be setting up other states. In this way, they became the objective defenders of Great Russian imperialism, and this led them to the disastrous course of opposing Lenin’s statesmanlike “appeasement peace” of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, where Lenin, for the sake of ending the war with Germany, surrendered Ukrainian and White Russian territory from the Greater Russian imperium. Disastrously, both for their own principles and for their standing in the eyes of the war-weary Russian people, the Russian anarchists called for continuing the war against “German imperialism”, thereby somehow identifying with anarchy the centuries-old land grabs of Russian imperialism.

Let us first examine the whole question of national liberation from the point of view of libertarian principle. Suppose that there are two hypothetical countries, “Ruritania” and “Walldavia”. Ruritania invades Walldavia and seizes the northern part of the country. This situation continues over decades or even centuries. But the underlying condition remains: The Ruritanian State has invaded and continues to occupy and exploit, very often trying to eradicate the language and culture of, the North Walldavian subject people. There now arises, both in northern and southern Walldavia, a “North Walldavian Liberation Movement”. Where should we stand on the matter?

It seems clear to me that libertarians are bound to give this liberation movement their ardent support. For their object, while it might not be to achieve an ultimate Stateless society, is to liberate the oppressed North Walldavians from their Ruritanian State rulers. The fact that we may not agree with the Walldavian rebels on all philosophical or political points is irrelevant. The whole point of their existence—to free the northern Walldavians from their imperial oppressors—deserves our whole-hearted support.

Thus is solved the dilemma of how libertarians and anarchists should react toward the whole phenomenon of “nationalism”. Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it, if liberatory we should favor it. Thus, in the Ruritanian-Walldavian case, those Ruritanians who defend the aggression or occupation on the grounds of “Greater Ruritania” or “Ruritanian national honor” or whatever are being aggressive nationalists, or “imperialists”. Those of either country who favor North Walldavian liberation from the imperial Ruritanian yoke are being liberators, and therefore deserve our support.

One of the great swindles behind the idea of “collective security against aggression”, as spread by the “inter-nationalist”-interventionists of the 1920’s and ever since, is that this requires us to regard as sacred all of the national boundaries which have been often imposed by aggression in the first place. Such a concept requires us to put our stamp of approval upon the countries and territories created by previous imperial aggression.

Let us now apply our analysis to the problem of Northern Ireland. The Northern Irish rulers—the Protestants—insist on their present borders and institutions; the Southern Irish or Catholics demand a unitary state in Ireland. Of the two, the Southern Irish have the better case, for all of the Protestants were “planted” centuries ago into Ireland by English imperialism, at the expense of murdering the Catholic Irish and robbing their lands. But unless documentation exists to enable restoration of the land and property to the heirs of the victims—and it is highly dubious that such exists—the proper libertarian solution has been advanced by neither side and, as far as we can tell, by no one in the public press. For the present partition line does not, as most people believe, divide the Catholic South from the Protestant North. The partition, as imposed by Britain after World War I and accepted by the craven Irish rebel leadership, arbitrarily handed a great deal of Catholic territory to the North. Specifically, over half of the territory of Northern Ireland has a majority of Catholics, and should revert immediately to the South: this includes Western Derry (including Derry City), all of Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Armagh, and southern Down. Essentially, this would leave as Northern Ireland only the city of Belfast and the rural areas directly to the north.

While this solution would leave the Catholics of Belfast oppressed by outrageous Protestant discrimination and exploitation, at least the problem of the substantial Catholic minority in Northern Ireland—the majority in the areas enumerated above—would be solved, and the whole question of Northern Ireland would be reduced to tolerable dimensions. In this way, the libertarian solution—of applying national self-determination and removing imperial oppression—would at the same time bring about justice and solve the immediate utilitarian question.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

REFORM

Liberal reformers, among their many mystical rites, particularly are devoted to the rational use of the state’s taxing power. The most rational use, they seem to feel, is in the redistribution of income.

Thus, when Richard the Reformer Nixon recently announced that he too had seen the light and now was ready to smite the rich and relieve the poor, the pitty-patting of the vested ventricles could be heard loud in the land.

Alas, it is all nonsense.

Taxes can never seriously affect the incomes of the rich. Nor are there any known instances of the government actually transferring substantial sums of money to the poor regardless of its source.

Begin, if you will, with the corporations, those artificial, state-coddled economic monstrosities from whose especially privileged endeavors flow the major wealth of the very rich. Corporations cannot pay taxes. Customers pay taxes. Corporations merely collect them. The point is that corporations are not taxed like thee and me. They are taxed only on what they have left over after deducting all of the costs of making it in the first place. They do not pay taxes out of savings, the way individuals must. It is, therefore, apparent that tax increases, for corporations, are paid simply out of price rises or, to repeat, by the customers.

The liberal zeal simply to increase taxes on the corporations is witless at best. It just shifts more of the heavy spending of the state into a relatively “painless” area where the dumb taxpayer, not realizing how the state happily encourages such fictions, growls about rising costs rather than about rising taxes which may, in fact, be what the price rise is about anyway.

But what about just taxing away all of the profits, wouldn’t that discourage price rises? Liberals just don’t know their corporations, apparently. The corporation is perfectly capable of declaring a zero profit at the end of any given year just by raising the bonuses, dividends or even salaries of its owning fat cats.

Conservatives, of course, have long since understood the invulnerability of the preferred position in which laws place corporations. They wouldn’t dream of blowing the whistle on them, however, because (1) conservative ideologues and muckrakers usually get their support from corporations, (2) they tend to be the relatives of corporate owners, or (3) they actually feel that the corporations represent some sort of countervailing power to the state.

That, on the conservative side, is as dumb a posture as the reform zeal is on the liberal side. Corporations in no way present a countervailing force to the state. They are, in effect, licensed by the state, they are treated in special ways (i.e. as though no one in them had any individual responsibility) by the state, taxed in special ways by the state, and so forth. They are either simply economic arms of the state or, to put it another way, the state is simply the police arm of the corporations. Under the American system of state capitalism, as under the similar system in the Soviet Union, that’s just the way it is.

The liberal reformists, however, at least feel that they have been given a great lift by Richard the Righteous in that he has closed up a lot of loopholes through which the very rich have crawled without paying any taxes on huge incomes. They miss, in their mean little zeal for revenge, the big point about such people. The closing of one set of loopholes or, indeed, all loopholes, just means that the rich guy must shift his method of income. It is one of the concomitant strengths of being rich in a state-capitalist system in the first place that it supposes an ability to collect income in whatever form, whenever, and however desired. Only the poor must live pinned tightly to urgent weekly demands of wages and withheld taxes.

There are some loopholes, of course, that would cause pain if obliterated, such as the still scarcely scratched oil depletion allowance. On the other hand, it actually would be more productive of benefit to the poor if, instead of simply clobbering the oily ones, the notion of depletion simply was extended. Manual laborers, for instance, obviously are depleted faster than any damn oil well but the state obdurately refuses to acknowledge it.

Something similar may be observed in another liberal attitude toward the poor. The Nixon Administration’s decision to relieve the very poor of any tax payment at all is liberally viewed as government’s reasonable attempt to get more money into the hands of the poor.

The money belonged to the people in the first place! The government now is just refraining itself from stealing so much of it. But are the poor relieved of the war tax on telephones when they use them? Are they relieved of war taxes on other items? Are they relieved of the taxes and the tolls of the predatory local governments who prey on them? Of course not. In short, for every dollar that government boasts that it is getting into the hands of the poor, it is still likely—and there are no real studies on the subject—that the poor continue to pay more out in tribute to the state at all its wretched levels.

For instance, when government liberally boasts that the poor ‘get’ something from government they include in their bookkeeping the poor’s share of the monstrous defense budget or the lunatic lunar boondoggles. Those are programs the poor would probably would be quite happy to forego if only the government would get altogether off their backs.

The point of all this is that among the grandest mistakes reformers ever make is summed up in the attitude toward taxes and corporations and poor people. The state is simply a gigantic corporation, just like G. M, just as predatory, just as bureaucratic, just as ‘profit’ (power) crazed, but with the added horror of having at its disposal the entire machinery of actual physical coercion.

To regard the taxes (profits) of the state as somehow more pleasant than the profits of the state-sheltered corporation, to think that the bureaucrats of the state have any more concern for the poor than the bureaucrats of the corporation, is one of the most fatal flaws in the reformist character.

THE CZECH CRISIS:

PART I:

The Eastern European Roots

By Leonard P. Liggio

Czechoslovakia, the most industrially advanced East European country when the Communist party assumed power at the end of World War II, had in two decades become economically stagnant. Serious slowing of economic growth was evident by 1962 when the aggregate product grew only 1.4 percent and industrial output declined 0.7 percent. In 1963 aggregate product declined 2.2 percent and national income declined 3.7 percent. Heavy subsidies were expanded for two decades to construct and operate industries without regard for their ultimate productivity. The annual subsidies to maintain these ‘white elephant’ factories has been a phenomenal fifteen percent of the total net national income. Further, twenty percent of the claimed national income consists of unsold finished products which are unsalable due to poor quality or high prices because of inefficient production.

In 1962 there was a deep agricultural failure when production fell 6 percent. This catastrophe was the final result of Communist leader Antonin Novotny’s reversal in 1955 of the party policy of full support for private farmers. Systematic pressure was placed on the small and medium private farmers to enter collective farms. Novotny in 1963 appointed a new premier to try to deflect public opinion toward the political superstructure and away from the real causes in the basic economic system. However, Czech economists began an overall study of the economy. A commission of the economic institute headed by Prof. Ota Sik was strongly influenced by the Yugoslav system of market socialism based upon free price mechanism and profitability as the test of value.

Yugoslavia made the earliest major innovations when it was read out of the Soviet bloc in 1948. The Yugoslav League of Communist leadership, headed by Josef Tito, survived Soviet denunciation because it had gained public support by recognizing that the solution of the problems of the peasant farmers and of agricultural productivity was crucial for an underdeveloped country. Experience indicated that collectivization of agriculture was not the solution for agricultural productivity; this deviation from the Soviet model was a major accusation against Tito.

Brutal purges were conducted in East Europe between 1948-53 against national communists who advocated the principle of autonomy from the Soviet party and its practical application in abandoning agricultural collectivization. Wladislaw Gomulka, Polish party leader until purged as a ‘Titoist’ in 1948, explained (after his rehabilitation in 1956) the root of Stalin’s ‘cult of the personality’ in the Soviet Union as primarily based in Stalin’s policy of collectivization of agriculture after 1929. Gomulka indicated that the introduction of mass violence for the first time in Soviet society led to the elimination of Leninist principles in the communist party and the complete domination of police-state methods in the Soviet Union. (In 1956 Gomulka reversed the collectivization of agriculture in Poland.)

Having challenged the Soviet model in agriculture, the Yugoslavs adopted new techniques in industry. Tito called for the initiation of the gradual withering away of the state apparatus beginning with workers’ ownership of state enterprises. “In the Soviet Union after thirty-one years,” Tito said in 1948, “the factories belong to the state, not to the people . . . they are run by civil servants.”

The Yugoslav party aimed to replace the role of the state bureaucracy in firms by substitution of workers’ self-management. The firm’s workers would control the management of the firm and share in its profits. The test of efficiency is directed to the firm’s competition in the supply and demand market. The goal of eliminating compulsion was introduced. According to vice-president Edward Kardelj: “The maximum effort and initiative of the individual does not depend so much upon directives and controls as it does upon the personal, economic, social, cultural and material interest of the worker who is working and creating in freedom.”

The influence of the Yugoslav experience was very important during the 1956 Thaw. In East Germany, the faculty of the German Academy of Economic Science had engaged in extended discussions of the problems of the withering away of the state. The Academy’s director, Prof. Fritz Behrens, had prepared detailed programs for major decentralization of the economy. It was held that rationality and productivity required autonomy for industrial enterprises. These programs were severely criticized as “anarchism” by the East German government.

Nevertheless, these economic policies received partial application in the New Economic System of the 1960’s. Despite East Germany’s rise to the sixth largest industrial producer in Europe, and three-fold increase in workers’ real income, its investment costs in 1965 had risen phenomenally and it was paying six times what it did fifteen years earlier. The unfinished investments were valued at one year’s gross fixed investment. Planning in building and housing construction had created a disaster. The compulsory collectivization of agriculture in 1960 severely crippled that sector with slaughter of livestock, neglect of fields, and flight of farmers to the cities. The regime was forced to increase investment in agriculture by thirty percent to maintain a stagnant rate of production. Additionally, food comprised twenty-five percent of East Germany’s imports in place of further investment in agriculture. Much of the food imports came from Poland’s private agricultural system.

East Germany’s New Economic System was introduced to gain reliable cost accounting, reduction of production costs, and managerial autonomy. But, the emphasis has been upon achieving this through the panacea of the electronic computer, leaving the central planners in ultimate control. Thus far, the results have not been a major transformation of East German economic production.

In Hungary during the mid-1950’s the popularity of workers’ councils and self-management of firms developed in newspaper discussion of Yugoslav policies following exchange visits of Hungarian and Yugoslav workers. In 1954 the Institute of Economics was established and it presented detailed criticisms of the centralized planned economy, the development of heavy industry at the expense of agriculture, the lack of a role for industrial profitability, the unreal price system. The untenability of planning was examined by Janos Konrai, The Excessive Centralization of Economic Management, Budapest, 1957. Thus, in 1957 the Committee of Economic Experts was formed to propose reform of the economy. Its program called for decentralization, price reform, material incentives, independence for individual firms, abolition of the state control of foreign trade and encouragement of private farms. The government never responded to the proposal, but it contained the ideas which appeared in the New Economic Mechanism, prepared in 1965-66 and implemented in 1968 because of the growing economic crisis. The Hungarian program is the most far-reaching with the exception of Yugoslavia.

In Poland during the 1956 Thaw decentralization and workers’ self-management were introduced. As described in a Polish student weekly, “Workers’ self-government was initiated in Yugoslavia essentially as an initiative from above, in the form of a decree, prepared for the most part by comrade Kardelj on a theoretical basis. In our country, as we all know, it was wrested from the ministers by the workers themselves.” But Gomulka rebuked the idea of far-reaching administrative decentralization in May 1957. “If every factory became a kind of cooperative enterprise,” Gomulka said, “all the laws governing capitalist enterprise would immediately come into effect and produce all the usual results. Central planning and administration . . . would have to disappear.”

As a result, Poland’s cooperation was limited to pioneering in the advocacy of radical economic theory. Oskar Lange’s writings were especially important. Lange has emphasized that Austrian economics, especially the work of Ludwig von Mises, is the sole rational alternative to Marxist theory. The Misesian critique of planning and of calculation under socialism is the major problem for Marxist economists. But even in theoretical discussions, the Polish economists can only go so far. Thus, Stefan Kurowski, the leading Polish exponent of the free market, has, with a few exceptions, not been allowed to publish his studies.

Thus, in the 1960’s, advocacy has been limited to regulated markets and free price formation within central planning. Warsaw Professor Wlodzimierz Brus (General Problems of the Functioning of a Socialist Economy, 1961) was attacked in 1967 (“The Antinomies of the Market Theories under Socialism”) for arguing that planning and the free market are mutually exclusive and that not only a free market in labor but also in capital goods is necessary.

The failure in Poland to proceed with market economy reforms delayed economic development. Late in 1967 three Communist Party plenums were devoted to the economic crisis which was causing unrest in major industrial cities. Food and clothing were in short supply; state warehouses were bursting with unsalable goods due to high prices or inferior quality. In November there was a thirty percent increase in the price of meat. The government explained the meat shortage: managers of minimally controlled enterprises had such good consumer response that they hired more employees to meet the demand but this “excessive increase in employment” was not called for in the central plan and their wages drove up the price of meat. General agricultural problems have developed since Gomulka reversed his private-oriented farm policy; the production of small tractors necessary for Polish farms was halted and only large tractors, for state farms, were available. The private farmers’ fear of collectivization has caused declines in production growth.

With economic crisis threatening to generate popular protest, free market-oriented economists became the scapegoats to hide the real causes rooted in central planning. In March 1968 protests against the existing system had been spearheaded by university students. To the slogan “Long Live Czechoslovakia” they marched through the streets and occupied university buildings and the Ministry of Education with predictable results: a police riot. The student demand for an investigation of the police was met with expulsion of students and dismissal of liberal faculty, such as Adam Schaff for his Marxism and the Individual Leszek Kolakowski, the principal theorist of anti-authoritarian Marxism. Brus and Kurowski were charged with encouraging the students by their programs to undermine central control of the economy (“Socialist Democracy and Market Socialism” in the party newspaper). Brus, Tadeusz Kowalik and Ignacy Sachs were expelled from the party for holding that only the “market can guarantee the basic economic structure during the process of development.”

The intellectual as well as material impact of the economic collapse of orthodox Marxist economics in East Europe has been compared with the 1929 Depression for the West. While the politicians in both cases resisted change, there is a marked difference between the response of economists and intellectuals in the West during the 1930’s and those in the East in the 1960’s. The former, refusing to challenge the Establishment seriously, opted for more elaborately theorized forms of the status quo in the form of Keynesian and Marxist economic theory. In the East the Establishment was really challenged by the intellectuals and economists, who embraced free market economic theory.

Their adoption of market economics was both a response to real conditions and the result of intellectual willingness of some economists East and West to seek dialogue and exchange of conflicting ideas. It is a credit to the East European economists, often members of Communist parties, that they were open to non-Marxist ideas. As Marxists they came to recognize that there were no differences between Marxist economics and the mercantilist, monopoly economics dominant in Western universities; the only clear alternative to the catastrophic planned economics in the East was the free market. Equally important was the openness of European market economists in originating discussions with Marxists. Year after year, they attended joint East-West conference, travelled to the East to initiate dialogue, and invited East Europeans to discuss their Marxism in the West. Unlike Americans they were not inhibited by adherence to the official Anti-communist line, although identification with U.S. policy hardly appears deducible from free market economics. Their healthy, self-confident activism in overcoming the obstacles to dialogue with Marxists has had important historical effects.

(The concluding part will appear in the next issue.)

Hear Ye! ANNOUNCING Hear Ye!

A

Libertarian Conference

The Columbus Day Weekend In New York City From Friday Night, Oct. 10 through Sunday, Oct. 12

At The Hotel Diplomat

Speeches! Panels! Parties!

FEATURED SPEAKERS

KARL HESS

Dr. MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

PANELISTS INCLUDE: Walter Block, R. A. Childs, Jr., Walter Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Peden, Robert J. Smith, Jerome Tuccille

COST: Students $7.00 Non-Students $10.00 (10% extra at door)

All who bring sleeping bags are assured of floor space.

For Reservations and Further Information, Write:

The Libertarian Conference Committee

Box 341 Madison Square Station New York, N.Y. 10010

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XII

September 15, 1969

35¢

REPORT FROM ST. LOUIS:

The Revolution Comes To YAF

BY JEROME TUCCILLE

The place was Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn, St. Louis, Missouri.

The time, August 38-31, 1969.

The occasion, the annual National Convention of the “conservative” student organization, Young Americans for Freedom.

It had been apparent for six months and longer that the leadership of YAF, a traditionally conservative youth organization since the days of its inception in 1961, was being challenged from within by a persistent group of disaffected intellectuals. Just how strong they were, how many they numbered, was impossible to say. Their presence within YAF was revealed every now and then through the publication in The New Guard, the official YAF magazine, of an occasional article dealing with anarchist philosophy or the organization and operation of an anarchist society. But, by and large, The New Guard reflected the conservative thinking of the majority of its readership.

On the surface, there was no indication whatsoever of any major confrontation arising at the convention. Key speakers for the occasion, secured by the conservative YAF leadership, included the usual right-wing luminaries: William F. Buckley, William Rusher, Al Capp (Yes, Al Capp!), Fulton Lewis III, Barry Goldwater, Jr., Phyllis Schafly, Phillip Abbott Luce; major emphasis in the various seminars was placed on formulating an effective strategy for combatting the New Left on campus. All in all, if one merely read the proposed agenda circulated several weeks before the convention, it promised to be a routine excoriation of everyone to the left of Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, with maybe a few wrist-slapping comments for George Wallace and the fire-breathing ultra right.

However, several hours before opening session a group of New York rebels distributed the August 15th issue of The Libertarian Forum which contained an open letter to the convention from Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, urging the libertarians to split completely from the conservative movement.

At the same time, rumors were circulated to the effect that Karl Hess was arriving in St. Louis to address the convention on opening night. Since he was not a scheduled speaker, the implication here was that a demonstration would have to be staged by the radicals to demand that Hess be given a chance to express the opposition point of view. The conservatives, applying their overkill mentality to this potential crisis, were visibly dismayed by the fact that the rebels had come up with a “name” speaker of their own. The fact that the YAF leadership had loaded the convention with some sixteen hard-line conservatives of impeccable anti-communist: credentials was, apparently, not enough. The enemy had come up with Hess as a gesture of defiance, and the only thing to do, of course, was “escalate” their side of the conflict.

To make matters worse for the conservative point of view, Barry Goldwater, Jr. sent word prior to the convention—evidently upon hearing that there might be some ‘trouble’ in St. Louis—that he could not attend. He suddenly felt a need to be with his constituents over the Labor Day weekend.

At approximately 4:30 P.M., just three and a half hours before William Buckley was scheduled to deliver the opening address, Karl Hess’ son, Karl Hess IV, received word that his father would not be permitted to speak on the floor of the convention. Also, many of the anarchist and radical libertarian delegates discovered that they were having difficulty receiving the proper credentials which would admit them for the voting session on Saturday. Young Hess announced to the press that a ‘mini-convention’ would be held under the arch, the symbolic gateway to the west, at 11:00 P.M. following Buckley’s speech. His father was arriving later that evening and would speak to any dissident YAFers who wished to hear his remarks.

Realizing that a major split was underway—made all the more apparent by the heavy television and press attention the anarchists were receiving as they arrived in St. Louis with their black flags unfurled—William F. Buckley called a press conference at 5:30 P.M. Buckley was questioned mainly as to the nature and seriousness of the imminent split which now threatened to disrupt the entire convention. He denied that the confrontation was serious, claiming that the dissident element was too miniscule to be of any real importance. At this point, Karl Hess IV, leader of YAF’s Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance, Walter Block and myself acting as spokesmen for the Radical Libertarian Alliance, broke into the conference and invited Buckley publicly to debate with Hess under the arch later that night, since the YAF leadership would not provide for such an encounter as part of the official proceedings. Buckley declined, stating that he had an article to write that evening and, in any event, he did not think the issue was important enough that it could not wait until a later date.

Now the breach was visible, having been made an issue in Buckley’s own press conference, and the only question that now remained was how many dissident YAFers would split off to the open-air meeting in support of the opposition. The matter remained in abeyance until 8:00 P.M., at which time the convention was officially declared open. But before Mr. Buckley could be introduced to the crowd, a delegation of California anarchists staged a demonstration, demanding that their chapter chairman, Pat Dowd, who had earlier been dismissed for his radical views, be given a seat with the delegates on the stage. The demonstration would have remained a procedural one, rotating around the seating of the ousted chairman, had the conservatives not sent up a ringing chant in support of Buckley. Cries of, “We want Buckley! We want Buckley!” now dinned throughout the ballroom, only to be met with the opposition call, “We want Hess! We want Hess!”

It was only now that the press and the conventioners themselves had a chance to estimate the size of the dissident faction. The ferocity of the cries in opposition to the conservatives clearly startled the traditionalist contingent which now stated chanting the official slogan of the convention:

“Sock it to the Left! Sock it to the Left!”

“Sock it to the State! Sock it to the State!” was the answer to this new attempt to drown them out.

Finally, after a half-hour delay during which the ousted California chairman succeeded in claiming his seat upon the stage, William F. Buckley rose to deliver the official opening remarks of the convention.

The fact that he was, indeed, more than just a little concerned over the size of the opposition forces present in the hall was immediately apparent by the direction of his speech. The first fifteen minutes was devoted to a ringing denunciation of Rothbard’s open letter to the convention, and criticism of some remarks made by Karl Hess in the same issue of their Libertarian Forum. As usual for Buckley, his excoriation dealt with the style rather than the content of the letter, as if the main crime committed was their bad manners in confronting the issues head on rather than fondling them like gentlemen. He continued his speech with the usual conservative tirade about the perils of international communism and our need to arm ourselves at all costs and defend our nation even “unto the consummation of the world.”

Presumably, then, we would all go to heaven with the Pope for blowing up the earth in the name of God.

Another interesting fact worth mentioning here is Mr. Buckley’s attitude on the question of freedom. In his speech he mentioned that freedom is for those who agree to live within the framework of our traditions. Those who deny these traditions become “excommunicants” who then lose their right to the freedom guaranteed by our constitutional republic. Here, precisely, is the mystical element in the conservative mentality which has pushed them so far apart from their former allies: the notion that freedom is a gift to be dispensed among our worthy citizens by a moralistic government. The anarchists claim that freedom is a natural right, and if the state denies it to its citizens, they have a right to seize it themselves.

At 11:00 P.M., following the opening ceremonies, a slow trickle of students began heading for the silver arch dazzling in the moonlight. Gradually their numbers grew, swelling to a crowd of some three hundred sprawled along the hillside beneath the arch facing the Mississippi. Hess, surrounded by his son and other leaders of the radical faction, then delivered his now familiar message. The Right had abandoned its stated principles championing the individual. Power to the People was formerly an old Republican concept, and was now a policy of the New Left. The conservatives, heretofore critical of our expanding federal bureaucracy, were now aggrandizing more power unto the state in order to fight ‘the communist menace’. The chief threat to liberty in the United States was not the splintered radical left, but the efficient, and near-omnipotent United States government. Decentralization and neighborhood control was the only answer for the growing urban crisis, and the Right must join forces with the New Left in a united attempt to realize these goals.

The Hess message was a popular one for those assembled on the hillside—an estimated 20-25% of the total 1200 attending the convention—but his endorsement of a Libertarian Right and New Left coalition clearly polarized the group into two broad camps. The more radical element was enthusiastic about joining forces with at least some libertarian (voluntary commune) factions of the New Left; the more conservative were visibly disturbed and registered some doubts about the “inherent totalitarian tendencies” of collectivism, whether voluntary or otherwise. After Hess’ speech, the crowd broke up into discussion groups, and that’s how the night ended at approximately 3:00 A.M., with a dozen units of concerned students debating issues under the stars.

The main hope of the conservatives the following morning was to divide their opposition into two weak and ineffectual camps. These would be the more “conservative” libertarians who were interested in working within YAF to elect their own directors to the National Board which was completely controlled by hard-line Buckleyites, and to adopt a few libertarian planks into the official platform, calling for: active resistance against the draft; a denunciation of domestic fascism as a twin evil to international communism; legalization of marijuana; immediate pull-out from Vietnam; several changes in YAF’s official Sharon Statement; and an assortment of other pertinent resolutions. These libertarians, led by Don Ernsberger and Dana Rohrabacher, were by far the larger of the two dissident groups, claiming over three hundred members for their Libertarian Caucus.

The second faction of rebels consisted of radical libertarians of anarchists, most of them belonging to Karl Hess IV’s Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance. This contingent was more interested in splitting off from YAF entirely and forming a new alliance with New Left anarchists and anti-statists. They numbered no more than fifty hard-core radicals, but had high hopes of siphoning off as many of the libertarian group as possible by the end of the convention.

The second day proceeded pretty well along the lines that the conservatives had planned. Except for Dr. Harold Demsetz’ speech in the morning enumerating various benefits of the free market, the general tone of the speeches of the day was a hammering away at the negative theme of anti-communism.

But if Friday was a field day for the conservatives, Saturday would be remembered as the day on which all those of even quasi-libertarian sentiment consolidated their forces in general disgust against the whole tone of the convention. The session opened at 11:30 A.M., an hour and a half later than scheduled. The first ninety minutes were occupied by challenges from the floor on the seating of delegates, with the libertarians charging that many of their people were being purged by the conservative leadership in order to minimize their strength during the voting for directors to the National Board and platform resolutions.

Finally the rollcall of states began. The Libertarian Caucus was basing its hope on a slate of nine candidates ranging ideologically from moderate libertarian to anarchist. If two or three of their candidates were elected, and perhaps one or two of their minority plank resolutions passed, the Ernsberger group would have considered it a victory and divorced themselves entirely from the radical Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance. However, this was not to be the case. Before half the roll was called, it was evident that every one of the libertarian candidates was being thoroughly routed and the conservatives eventually succeeded in electing all their candidates to the nine available positions. It was at this point that talk of a walk-out began to spread, for the first time, into the ranks of the moderate libertarians.

Next came the voting on the minority platform resolutions. Disaffection spread rapidly among the entire opposition as, one by one, they saw their resolutions hammered down by the conservatives: immediate withdrawal from Vietnam—defeated; legalization of marijuana—tabled; denunciation of domestic fascism—hooted down and defeated. Then came the issue which was finally to polarize the convention into two hostile, openly-warring camps. The libertarians offered their resolution advocating active resistance to the military draft, and saw it trammeled by a solid majority. It was after the reading of the majority plank on the draft which limited anti-draft agitation to legal channels, that the event took place which was to force everyone present to make an instant decision: either in support of the conservative majority, or against them with the radical libertarians. There could no longer be any room for fence-straddling.

A young man, who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons, stepped forward and grabbed a microphone in the center of the floor. Clearly announcing that it was the right of every individual to defend himself from violence, including state violence, he lifted a card, touched it with a flame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash. For fifteen or twenty seconds the hall was locked in numb silence, finally to be shattered by an enraged war cry:

“Kill the commies!”

The next second can best be described as the instant radicalization of the moderate libertarians. While the first onrushers were knocked back by five or six radicals surrounding the “criminal commie”, the ranks of the Libertarian Caucus solidified into a barrier separating the radicals from the howling conservative majority. In the swinging and pushing which followed, the young student who had triggered the melee escaped outside the convention hall. The libertarians, stepping on chairs and raising their fists against the conservatives, sent up a chant:

“Laissez faire! Laissez faire!”

There was no question where they stood now: in clear opposition to the conservative majority.

The majority found their own voices, and howled back in reply:

“Sock it to the Left! Sock it to the Left!”

This was countered with:

“Sock it to the State! Sock it to the State!”

The issues were clearly drawn, and three hundred and fifty libertarians suddenly found themselves in violent opposition to their former conservative allies numbering some eight or nine hundred strong. It took the best part of the next half hour to calm everyone down and get them outside the convention hall. In the early evening hours that followed, the conservatives met privately and passed a resolution condemning the card-burning act as “illegal”, and denouncing the radicals as being “outside the mainstream of Young Americans for Freedom” (echoes of 1964).

This was not to be the end of the visible conflict separating the two groups. Later that night, while the libertarians were conducting their own meeting to discuss future strategy, a swarm of conservatives went stomping throughout the floors of the inn shouting: “Kill the libertarians! Kill the libertarians!” Suddenly it dawned on the minority opposition exactly who their main enemy really was. The New Left? New Leftists had never demanded the blood of the anti-statist Right. The situation was so shocking to some of the instantly-radicalized that there was even talk of traveling only in groups, and locking themselves into their rooms.

However, this defensive attitude was not to last for any considerable length of time. The smell of success had been too exhilarating. In the corridor outside the main convention hall, Dana Rohrabacher, Don Ernsberger, and several of the “moderate” libertarian group were actually setting the pace for the radical anarchists. The former moderates were now painting placards with anarchist slogans—“Smash the State!” “I am an enemy of the State!”—and posting them up on the walls. While a chorus of boos greeted them from conservative onlookers, Rohrabacher mounted a chair and started the now-familiar cry: “Laissez faire! Laissez faire!”

This was picked up instantly by about a hundred fifty of the former moderates, and now it was their turn to go tromping through the corridors of the hotel, forcing the conservatives to scurry into locked rooms. When the counter-demonstration finally exhausted, itself, the conservatives managed to muster a small counter-counter-offensive, chanting the cry, “Lazy fairies!” as they passed the radicals, thereby putting themselves in the unique position of repudiating their own economic philosophy and openly embracing our current system of state-corporate fascism.

The climax of the convention for the radicals came in the form of a meeting of all the libertarian and anarchist groups, including two SDS anarchist chapters. The meeting decided to form a communications network to keep all the organizations, including any New Left organizations that care to participate, in continuous contact with one another. This new loosely-knit organization will be called the Libertarian Confederation, and will be managed and operated by the Maryland-based Society for Rational Individualism.

Some of the radicals will split off entirely from YAF; others will remain on an individual basis and continue to proselytize among the conservative ranks. The most important thing to emerge from this convention is that, for the first time, the most influential forces on the Libertarian Right will be working to establish an open and working coalition with the New Left in their common struggle to resist the abuses of the United States government.

YAF Power Play

In an article written on the St. Louis convention, “Young Authoritarians for ‘Freedom’”, our anarcho-libertarian comrade, Joseph M. Cobb, former editor of the New Individualist Review, contributes an important insight about the racket inherent in the YAF organization. Speaking with one of the founders and long-time leaders of YAF at the convention, Cobb was surprised to find this leader admitting the following:

The anarchists, he charged, were “ruining everything”. Why? Because, Cobb reports, the “National Office of YAF is playing a double game with the older generation of businessmen and politicians, and making it pay”—pay in the form of plush offices, high salaries, and expense accounts. From these right-wing moneybags YAF raises a great deal of money for such theocratic programs, beloved of the right-wing, as the “Campaign for Voluntary Prayer” in public schools. But few students would be attracted by such programs, so programs such as the prayer campaign “generated money which was used to cover money-losing projects, but ones which the kids dig—such as abolishing the draft.” Thus, the YAF leadership obtain money for right-wing causes, but then must use part of the money to attract a mass base of kids, without whom the money would disappear in the long run—thus making YAF a kind of two-way racket. Cobb adds that “YAF is upset because these crazy kids, with their principled opposition to the state, are going to overturn the National Office’s carefully balanced financial-ideological system.”

Cobb concludes with the important insight that “the only way the National Office people can get away with their programs for fund-raising and semi-reformist free-market-ism is to promote the philosophy of “fusionism”! . . . Fusionism is a pseudo-philosophy which attempts to reconcile the libertarian anti-statist position with the traditional conservative authoritarianism. The fusionists are almost perfect examples of the Marxist sociology-of-ideas theory: each social class will invent ideas which further its own class interests.”

Note On Libertarians

It is dramatic and heartwarming that the Revolution has come to YAF. But the euphoria engendered by St. Louis must not be allowed to obscure the fact that this Revolution has not yet succeeded, for the moderate “Libertarian Caucus” has largely decided to stay within this authoritarian organization, to work from within for change. As long as they continue to do so, they will continue to provide a libertarian cover for fascism. They may have been radicalized by the confrontation at St. Louis, but they clearly have not been radicalized enough. To discover why this is so, the curious phenomenon of “conservative” libertarians or even anarchists must be analyzed at length, and this will be done in the next issue of the Libertarian Forum.

Recommended Reading

The Tranquil Statement. A brilliant, rip-roaring statement, adopted aboard the S. S. Tranquil, by the Anarchist Caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom. 15 pp. Available for 35¢ from Elizabeth Crain, 1085 National Press Building, 14th and F Sts., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20004.

Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (Pantheon). A great and unusual book. Not only the best scholarly but angry dissection of the intellectuals in the ruling class, centering on their role in Vietnam. But also excellent for World War II Revisionism in the Pacific, and Spanish War revisionism (pro-anarchist). Professor Chomsky has a clear fondness for the anarchist position.

David Horowitz, ed., Containment and Revolution (Beacon Press, paper). Good essays on the origins of the Cold War; includes a fine paper by Todd Gitlin on the origins of the Cold War in Greece during World War II, and an appreciation of Senator Taft by a young New Left historian.

F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (Devin-Adair). It is good to have this outstanding early work of World War II Revisionism, hitherto only published in Britain, at last available in the U.S. The first work that showed that it was Britain, not Germany, that began deliberate mass strategic bombing of civilians.

Hear Ye! ANNOUNCINC Hear Ye!

A

Libertarian Conference

The Columbus Day Weekend In New York City From Friday Night, Oct. 10 through Sunday, Oct. 12

At The Hotel Diplomat

Speeches! Panels! Parties!

FEATURED SPEAKERS

KARL HESS

Dr. MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

PANELISTS INCLUDE: Walter Block, R. A. Childs, Jr., Walter Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Peden, Robert J. Smith, Jerome Tuccille

COST: Students $7.00 Non-Students $10.00 (10% extra at door)

All who bring sleeping bags are assured of floor space.

For Reservations and Further Information, Write:

The Libertarian Conference Committee

BOX 341 Madison Square Station New York, N.Y. 10010

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XIII

October 1, 1969

35¢

Anarcho-Rightism

Karl Hess’s brilliant article in this issue turns the spotlight on a new and curious phenomenon of “libertarians” and even “anarchists” who yet are strongly opposed to revolutionary change, and who therefore at least objectively stamp themselves as defenders of the existing state and the status quo. But this opposition to revolution is no accident; it is part and parcel of the entire world-view of these people—whom we may call “anarcho-rightists”. For the anarcho-rightist, beneath the veneer of his professed anarchism, still remains what he generally was before his anarchistic conversion: a benighted right-winger.

In a sense, it is heartwarming that the overwhelming logic and consistency of the anarcho-capitalist position has won over a large number of former laissez-fairists and Randians. But every rapidly developing movement has growing pains; anarchism’s growing pain is that this conversion has, in all too many cases, been skin deep. The curious conservatism and moderation of the Libertarian Caucus of YAF is but one glaring example of this defect.

Let us analyze the anarcho-rightist. In effect, he says: “O.K., I’m convinced that it is immoral for a government to impose a monopoly of coercion by the use of force, and it possible or even probable that the free market could supply all services now considered governmental, including judicial and police protection. Since this is anarchism, I am an anarchist.”

But his anarchism is only an anarchism for the far distant future, to be achieved solely by patient education, the issuing of leaflets and pronouncements, etc. In the meanwhile, in his concrete, day-to-day attitudes, the anarcho-rightist remains fully as right-wing as he was before. His anarchism is only a thin veneer laid on top of a moral of profoundly “anarchist” and statist views, views that he has not bothered to root out of his social philosophy.

Thus, the anarcho-rightist remains an American patriot. He reveres the American government as the “freest in the world”, he worships the Founding Fathers (failing to realize that the Constitution was a profoundly statist coup d’etat imposed upon the far more libertarian Articles of Confederation), he loves and admires the two major enforcement-good squad arms of the State: the army and the police. Defining the police a priori as defenders of person and property, he supports their clubbing, beating, and torturing of dissenters and opposition movements to the State. Totally ignorant of the American guilt for the Cold War and of the long-time expansionist nature of U.S. imperialism, he supports that Cold War in the belief that the “international Communist conspiracy” is a direct military threat to American liberties. Critical of Establishment propaganda in domestic affairs, he yet has allowed himself to be totally sucked in by the Establishment propaganda about the Communist bogey. Hence, he supports the American military. Even if he opposes the Vietnam War, he does so only as a tactical error that is not in American “national interests”. Although a self-proclaimed libertarian, he shows no concern whatever for the genocidal American murder of millions of innocent Vietnamese peasants. And, beset by a narrow, solipsistic desire to keep his university classes open, he actually takes the lead in defending the State’s brainwashing apparatus—the American schools and colleges (either State-owned or State-subvened)—against the rising opposition to that educational system.

In short, the fact that, in philosophic theory, the anarcho-rightist is indeed an anarchist should cut very little ice with those anarchists who are truly opponents of the American State, and who are therefore revolutionaries. For when it comes to concrete actions, actions in which he must line up either for the State or for the opposition to that State, he has generally lined up on the wrong side of the barricades—defending the American State against its enemies. So long as he does so, he remains an opponent rather than an ally.

A strategic argument has been raging for some time among revolutionaries whether or to what extent the anarcho-rightist offers prime material for conversion to the revolutionary position. Basically, how much time one spends working on any given rightist is a matter of personal temperament and patience. But one gloomy note must be sounded: there is a grave tendency among many rightists to be solipsistic: in short, to not give a damn about principle, about justice, or, in the last analysis, about liberty. There is a tendency for rightists to be concerned only with their own narrow monetary profits and immediate creature comforts, and therefore to scorn those of us who are dedicated to liberty and justice as a cause. For these ignoble solipsists, any form of dedication to principle smacks of “collectivism” or “altruism”. I had wondered for years why so many Randians, for example, place such great emphasis on combatting “altruism” (which has always struck me as an absurd social philosophy of little importance.) Now I am beginning to realize that for many of these people, “altruism” means any form of devotion to principle, to liberty and justice for all men, to any principle, indeed, which may disturb their own cozy accommodations to the statist evils which they recognize in the abstract.

Thus, when, many years ago, I raised a call for a revolutionary libertarian movement, I was dismissed by these people as crackpotty and unrealistic. There could never be a revolution here, and that was that. Then, in the mid-1960’s, when, almost miraculously, the New Left revolutionary movement began to take hold in America, these libertarians shifted to a new position: that a revolution in this country would never be libertarian, it would only be Marxist and dictatorial. But now, now when libertarian revolutionism has begun to spread like wildfire among the youth, now the anarcho-rightists have begun to display their cloven hooves: they have begun to reveal that they oppose even a libertarian movement. Several of such people have recently declared that I, or rather the revolutionary libertarian movement of which I am a part, am “more of a threat to them” than the State. Why? There appear to be two reasons. First, that any revolution will disturb their cozy accommodations, their petty profits, their lousy classes. In short, their dedication to liberty is so weak, so feeble, that they oppose bitterly any rocking of the boat, any disturbance to their cozy little lives. They don’t really oppose the State, certainly not in practice. They can “live with” the State quite contentedly. The second reason is that many of these people cringe from revolutionary justice, because they know that much of their income and wealth have derived from unjust State robbery.

And so these anarcho-rightists sit basely on the sidelines, hugging their petty comforts, griping and carping about the revolution while the New Left and other revolutionaries put their lives on the line in opposition to the very State which they claim to oppose but do so much to defend. And yet, should the revolution ever succeed, these people expect that the fruits of liberty will drop into their laps, that they will reap benefits which they have done not one whit to earn through struggle. And O the recriminations that they will heap upon us if liberty is not then handed to them, unearned, upon a silver platter. For their own opportunist sakes, anarcho-rightists might ponder the fact that successful revolutionaries, no matter how libertarian, tend to be very impatient with those who have opposed them every step of the way. As Karl Hess has eloquently written, the position of any revolutionary tends to be: “No voice, no choice; no tickee no shirtee; no commitment now, no commitments later.”

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

Conservative Libertarianism

Libertarianism has managed to develop its own form of counter-revolutionary conservatism. Its future as a movement, much less as an influence on future social change, could be crushed by it if unopposed and unanalyzed.

Underlying this conservatism are an undying and undeniable respect for institutionalized, traditional injustice, as opposed to possible future injustice, and the unbeatable contradictions of reformism.

No person even on the fringes of a libertarian discussion can have escaped the explicit wording of the former or the overtones of the latter.

Libertarians, this conservative position holds, cannot take part in revolutionary action because, as it now stands, such action always is dominated by persons with a healthy disrespect for private property and a feverish fondness for communist rhetoric.

The argument is made, time and time again, that “if they get power, they will be worse than what we have.” The notion that they might include libertarians if only libertarians were up there on the barricades working with them either eludes these conservatives or they reject it because of their spotless, yea immaculate conceptions of theoretical purity. But most pernicious is the possibility that such persons truly mean what they say: that they prefer the certainty of the injustices we have to any risk of injustices that we might have. There is a trap here deep enough to engulf freedom itself. Theories do not produce revolutionary action. Rather, revolutionary actions enable theories to become practices. It is from the ferment of the action that the ferment of the idea brews its future impact. Long before Mao or machineguns it was apparent that political thought, without political act, equalled zero and that political ideas born in the minds of men have a chance to grow only after actions by the hands of men. Not even Christianity or Ghandian resistance grew solely as an idea. All great ideas have grown as the result of great actions.

No example comes to mind of a great teacher who was not also a great exemplar, a personification of and not merely a mouthpiece of his ideas. Take Christ and the money-lenders. He unquestionably had the benefit of sound advice in regard to economic analysis and pedagogy. He could have held classes to expose usury to a few who would go out and expose it to more and so on and on until the entire world was revulsed by the practice and ceased doing business with the usurers. The story, of course, is different. It tells of a decision to teach by acting.

In the more real, or at least contemporary world we can think of the many political and economic theorists—some of them libertarians!—who did not have the act of revolution to spread their thoughts, as did Karl Marx.

If Bakunin or Warren had had a Lenin we might live in a free and anarchistic world today.

The consequence of conservative libertarianism’s concentration on ideas to the exclusion of action is to turn a prudent sense of priority on its head. The priorities, as I see them, are to first participate in social change so that, second, there will be a chance of influencing its direction later on. Unless one can reject flatly the possibility that there is even going to be a change, the priority should not be to fret about what it might be like, the priority is to maintain a position from which or in which you can do something about it.

The impossibility of simple neutrality in this situation should be apparent. You cannot just say “a pox on both of your houses” because, unfortunately, you happen actually to live in one of the houses. By that act alone neutrality is made impossible—except for those very rare few who actually can withdraw totally, to dream out their isolation so long as, and only so long as, the unleashed dogs of the system, against which they have refused to struggle, are not set upon them.

From the conservative position comes the position of libertarian reformism. It holds that, since there is a good base to build upon—the at least lip-service traditions of liberty in this country, for instance—that the way to avoid the dangers that might lurk on the other side of revolutionary change is to opt for evolutionary change. The repeal of certain laws is, in this position, held as crucial and, of course, it probably is true that if the withholding tax were repealed that the government would be bankrupted as millions of taxpayers simply found themselves unable to pay up.

That is, this situation might be true if it were not for the amazing ingenuity of American state-monopoly-capitalism. Few if any corporation heads would stand idly by and see the source of their prosperity—a partnership with the state—seriously jeopardized. One can imagine a “voluntary” tax withholding system going into effect which, if anything, might be more effective than the state system which, after all, is operated by businessmen anyway even though with a lot of wasteful bureaucratic interference. Same with the voluntary or even ‘corporate’ military concepts. A libertarian should be the first to recognize that such systems would, if anything, make imperialism more effective by making its military machine more efficient. Such reforms, in short, would not necessarily end injustices but might merely streamline them.

More pertinent is the central error of reformism as a possible instrument of change. To reform a system you must, first of all, preserve it against attacks more precipitous than those called for in the reformist timetable. This position not only makes neutrality impossible, it makes siding with the system (the state) unavoidable in the long run.

I sum up my concern over these matters in this way: Libertarians are faced with a real, not merely theoretical world in which revolutionary change is at the very least a real possibility everywhere. If libertarians will not participate in that change they cannot influence that change now or later. It is the important characteristic of this journal that it does not intend to relegate the black flag of the most revolutionary of positions, libertarianism, to the sidelines of any revolution, no matter the color of the other banners unfurling.

The New Boston Tea Party

While thousands of libertarians sit on the sidelines, griping about any action that might ruffle the feathers of the State, two hundred and fifty rebellious and admirable taxpayers staged a new Boston Tea Party, on September 14, at the small community of Boston, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. These citizens, many of them conservative businessmen and women, were vigorously protesting the proposal of Governor Raymond P. Shafer to impose that iniquitous instrument, a state income tax.

The protestors, dressed like their illustrious forebears as Indians, paddled a canoe onto the waters of the Youghiogheny River, and dumped into the river cardboard containers labelled “tea”.

The tax rebels also revived another institution with a glorious and long-lived tradition in America—hanging politicians in effigy. Governor Shafer was hung in effigy, and any politicians who arrived at the demonstration in person were given a hostile, though non-violent, reception.

National Review Rides Again

National Review, the intellectual Field Marshal of the New Right, is getting worried. After several attacks on myself during the course of this year, N. R. has begun to make clear that the rapid growth of the libertarian movement is getting to be a burr under its “fusionist” saddle. In our last issue, Jerry Tuccille detailed Bill Buckley’s devotion of the first half-hour of his keynote address at the YAF convention at St. Louis to a bitter attack upon mine and Karl Hess’s articles in the “Listen, YAF” issue of the Libertarian Forum. Now, Jared C. Lobdell, in the official report on St. Louis (NR, Sept. 23) tries to pooh-pooh the dramatic confrontation at the convention, repeats the same tired old line that “traditionalists” and libertarians are in perfect agreement (on liberty “within the framework of the Western tradition”), except, of course, for a few “extremists” who are for liberty outside Western tradition (whatever that is supposed to mean). That’s us folks, us who really believe, as Buckley correctly charged at St. Louis, that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

But now NR has wheeled out its heaviest gun, Frank S. Meyer, to do battle with libertarianism (“Libertarianism or Libertinism?”, NR, Sept. 9)—a sure sign that we are really hurting the Right-wing, for Meyer, a shrewd political strategist, never wastes his words on purely intellectual controversy. All of his columns are calculated for their political impact. Seven years ago, Meyer felt called upon (in his “Twisted Tree of Liberty”, now reprinted in his collection, The Conservative Mainstream) to print an attack upon what was then a very tiny group because we split with the Right-wing on the presumptuous grounds of being opposed to nuclear annihilation. Now that our polarization from the Right-wing is complete and our ranks growing every day, Meyer attempts a more comprehensive critique of libertarianism.

Meyer begins with the complaint that libertarians are really “libertines” (hedonists? sex-fiends?) because we “reject” the “reality” of five thousand years of Western civilization, and propose to substitute an abstract construction. Very true; in other words, we, like Lord Acton, propose to weight the growth of encrusted tradition and institutions in the light of man’s natural reason, and of course we find these often despotic institutions wanting. To Meyer, we propose to “replace God’s creation of this multifarious, complex world . . . and substitute for it their own creation”. Very neat. The world as it is, in short the status quo of statism and tyranny, is, in the oldest theocratic trick in history, stamped with the approval of being “God’s creation”, while any radical change from that tyranny is sneered at as “man’s creation”. Meyer, the self-proclaimed fusionist and “conservative libertarian”, thus stamps himself as simply another incarnation of Sir Robert Fillmer and Bishop Bossuet, another intellectual apologist for the divine right of kings.

Meyer then proceeds to set up a straw man: we libertines, he thunders, believe in liberty as man’s highest end, whereas conservatives uphold liberty as man’s highest political end, i.e. to free man so that he can pursue his own ends. But no libertarian I have ever heard of considers liberty as anything but the highest political end; the whole idea of liberty is to free man so that every individual can pursue whatever personal ends he wishes.

Having knocked down this straw man, Meyer leaps to his real complaint: that we libertines wish to free man so that each person can pursue whatever goals he desires. This, not the phony political end vs. absolute end, is Meyer’s real grievance. No, he declares, men should only be free to pursue their ends within the framework of tradition and “civilizational order”. I have wondered for years what Meyer and his cohorts have really meant by their constant talismanic incantations to “Western civilization”. What, after all, is “Western civilization” or “civilizational order”? In attacking us for our sympathy with the “rampaging mobs of campus and ghetto” and our opposition to the war machine against Communism, the answer becomes fairly clear; what Meyer means by the “bulwarks of civilizational order” is, plainly and bluntly, the State apparatus. It is the State that Meyer is anxious to preserve and protect; it is the State that he holds to be synonymous with, or at the very least, essential to, his beloved but highly vague “Western civilization”. If one reads the National Review theocrats long enough, one almost begins to sympathize with the Russian “Anarcho-Futurists” of Kharkov who, in 1918, raised the cry, “Death to world civilization!”

If Meyer’s poorly reasoned piece is the best that can be hurled against us, and I suppose it is, then we libertarians have nothing to fear on the intellectual front. Libertines of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains—and the privilege of endless subjection to theocratic cant.

Abolition: An Acid Test

It has come to our attention increasingly of late that many self-proclaimed libertarians balk at the idea of abolishing slavery. It is almost incredible to contemplate, for one would think that at least the minimal definition of a libertarian is someone who favors the immediate abolition of slavery. Surely, slavery is the polar opposite of liberty?

But it appears that many libertarians argue as follows: the slave-masters bought their slaves on the market in good faith. They have the bill of sale. Therefore, respect for their property rights requires that slavery be left intact, or at the very least that the slave-master be compensated for any loss of his slave at the market value.

I used to believe, and have written articles to that effect, that the idea that right-wingers uphold “property rights over human rights” is only a left-wing smear. But evidently it is not a smear. For these libertarians indeed go to the grotesque length of upholding property rights at the expense of the human right of self-ownership of every person. Not only that: by taking this fetishistic position these pro-slavery libertarians negate the very concept, the very basis, of property right itself. For where does property right come from? It can only come from one basic and ultimate source—and that is not the pronouncement of the State that Mr. A belongs to Mr. B. That source is the property right of every man in his own body, his right of self-ownership. From this right of self-ownership is derived his right to whatever previously unowned and unused resources a man can find and transform by the use of his labor energy. But if every man has a property right in his own person, this immediately negates any grotesquely proclaimed “property right” in other people.

There are five possible positions on the abolition of slavery question. (1) That slavery must be protected as a part of the right of property; and (2) that abolition may only be accompanied by full compensation to the masters, seem to me to fall on the basis of our above discussion. But the third route—simple abolition—the one that was adopted, was also unsatisfactory, since it meant that the means of production, the plantations on which the slaves worked, remained in the hands, in the property, of their masters. On the libertarian homesteading principle, the plantations should have reverted to the ownership of the slaves, those who were forced to work them, and not have remained in the hands of their criminal masters. That is the fourth alternative. But there is a fifth alternative that is even more just: the punishment of the criminal masters for the benefit of their former slaves—in short, the imposition of reparations or damages upon the former criminal class, for the benefit of their victims. All this recalls the excellent statement of the Manchester Liberal, Benjamin Pearson, who, when he heard the argument that the masters should be compensated replied that “he had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated.”

It should be clear that this discussion is of far more than antiquarian interest. For there are a great many analogues to slavery today, an enormous number of cases where property has been acquired not through legitimate effort but through State theft, and where, therefore, similar alternatives will have to be faced once more.

Recommended Reading

RAMPARTS, October, 1969 issue. An all-star issue. Particularly recommended are: Karl Hess’s beautifully written, “An Open Letter to Barry Goldwater” (must reading!); David Horowitz’ “Sinews of Empire”, a blistering exposé of international studies institutes in academe; Michael Myerson’s dissection of David Dubinsky and the ILGWU in “ILGWU: Fighting for Lower Wages”; and Peter Collier’s sensitive critique of the myths propagated by the moondoggle in “Apollo 11: the Time Machine”.

Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, “The Great Moondoggle”, Monthly Review (September, 1969). An excellent dissection of the various reasons for the incredible moondoggle program, especially the desire to instill patriotism among the masses by and on behalf of the ruling class. A thoroughly anti-State critique, this is the article Ayn Rand should have written, instead of the jejune apologia for the space program that she did write in the Objectivist. The fact that this article was written in a leftist magazine is a precise indicator of what’s wrong with the Right.

Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (Archon Press). A reprint of the best single book on Pearl Harbor by the great leader of Pearl Revisionism.

Hear Ye! ANNOUNCING Hear Ye!

A

Libertarian Conference

The Columbus Day Weekend In New York City From Friday Night, Oct. 10 through Sunday, Oct. 12

At The Hotel Diplomat

Speeches! Panels! Parties!

FEATURED SPEAKERS

KARL HESS

Dr. MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

PANELISTS INCLUDE: Walter Block, R. A. Childs, Jr., Walter Grinder, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Peden, Robert J. Smith, Jerome Tuccille

COST: Students $7.00 Non-Students $10.00 (10% extra at door)

All who bring sleeping bags are assured of floor space.

For Reservations and Further Information, Write:

The Libertarian Conference Committee

BOX 341 Madison Square Station
New York, N.Y. 10010

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XIV

October 15, 1969

35¢

We Make The Media

The dynamic, cascading, coruscating upsurge of the revolutionary libertarian movement has finally broken into the nation’s mass media—a sure sign, in those unsympathetic quarters, that we are becoming a force to be reckoned with. In the last few weeks, our movement has garnered important publicity in the nation’s press.

Item: The New York Times, for Sunday, September 28, has a long, objective article on Karl Hess, entitled “Goldwater Aide Now a Radical; Adopts Anarchism Philosophy”, along with a fine picture of Karl. After reporting on the influence of the war in Vietnam and the suppression of the student revolt in turning Karl into a pure libertarian, the Times quotes him on Vietnam: “‘We should not have intervened in Vietnam,’ he said. ‘If we had to intervene, we should have been on the other side.’ In comparison to Ngo Dinh Diem, the N. L. F. sounds like a bunch of constitutionalists.” On his shift from anti-Communism to anarchism: “I concluded that my enemy is not a particular state—not Cuba or North Vietnam, for example—but the state itself.”

Item: Newsweek, September 29, has another article on Karl, “Ideologues: You Know He’s Right”. In contrast to the objective tone of the Times, the Newsweek article is snide and supercilious. Typically, in the course of sneering at Karl’s “zigzag” career, Newsweek conveniently forgets to mention that Karl Hess was once one of its own editors. But, in the annals of public relations, “every knock is a boost”, so long as the name gets spelled right, and not only is Karl mentioned, but so too is our own little, no-budget Libertarian Forum—our first breakthrough into the mass media!

Item: the sober, well-edited journal of corporate liberalism, Business Week, has a lengthy article in its September 27 issue, “Economics: Radicals try to rewrite the book”. This is an objective portrayal of new trends in New Left economics, particularly as embodied in the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE). In addition to the inevitable socialist and Marxist trends in the New Left, Business Week notes, in some surprise, a new element: “free-market anarchism”. The feature in this section is our friend Mike Zweig, a leader of URPE and assistant professor of economics at SUNY at Stony Brook. There is a very good picture of Zweig, with the caption, “calls himself a free-market anarchist”, and then Zweig’s views are discussed as follows:

“There is, in fact, a decided strain of anarchism among the New Left that persists even when the radicalism takes more systematic form. Zweig argues for a society that begins with a revolution to redistribute property (‘the existing distribution of property is the result of theft’) and ends with freedom from any governmental interference.

According to his analysis, modern capitalism has failed because so many of the ‘real costs’ of economic activity are borne by the public at large. Air pollution is an obvious example. A free market that forced everyone to pay the real social costs of production would probably maximize welfare with a minimum of constraints, he contends.”

To Business Week, all this is a “powerful challenge” but “to economists over thirty, such utopian thinking is a sign of intellectual confusion.” But far from being confusion, what Mike is clearly advocating is the extension of private property rights so as to prevent such invasion of private property as has been permitted to occur in the case of air pollution—a pollutant invasion of the person and property of much of the population. What Mike, in short, is advocating is the very “free market” which so many Establishment economists are supposed to be advocating but, alas, in rhetoric only.

And so we’re on the march. Onward and upward.

Class Analysis

Many right-wing libertarians appear to be uneasy in the face of class analysis when it is used to interpret and explicate the nature of political reality. Indeed, one gentlemen at the first Libertarian Forum took the position that there is no such thing as a class. Now obviously the word “exists” is used equivocally; no collective entities exist apart from the individuals which constitute these entities. Yet to say, for instance, that “society” does not exist as some strange entity over and above the individuals who live together in certain relationships and constitute society is not to say that these individuals do not in fact relate to each other in a certain way. Likewise people who share common interests and/or characteristics are said to belong to a class, or sub-division of the society which they help to constitute. Thus, all redheaded females belong to a class, as do all Roman Catholics, and so forth. All who have an interest in a particular piece of legislation also belong to a class. And, all those who share a common commitment to a wide variety of measures, the net result of which is to protect, secure and enhance their power and wealth—to preserve the status quo—belong to an economic class (to characterize the class relevantly). The class above described would in fact be a ruling; class, assuming of course that their ends are actually effected. The key distinction here is not that the ruling class wishes to preserve the avenues by which people can competitively attain positions of wealth, but rather the ruling class is one which seeks to prevent the above, and to use political means (i.e., the coercive power of the state) to secure and expand further the class’s economic gains.

A ruling class, or power elite if you will, can be semi-liquid in composition, admitting new members selectively. Also, other classes may be allowed to share in specific spoils so that people victimized by those in power can be occasionally placated, and made to feel that they also have, a stake in the system. It is necessary to the maintenance of any ruling class that it convince other groups that what it is doing is in their interest as well—that is, what in fact is intended to benefit the few must be peddled as being in the “general interest”. For instance, historian Gabriel Kolko has done a magnificent job of showing how federal regulation of business, long heralded as government control of business for the commonweal, is in fact business control of government, in order to limit competition and cartellize the various industries affected. Moreover, in each instance such regulation was conceived and supported by business to do just this. Yet, the masses have been sufficiently propagandized to believe the opposite of the reality of the situation (cf. The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation). Today, as a result, there exists a welter of enactments which have effectively cartellized the economy to a large extent (something not possible on a real free market as Kolko and others have demonstrated). In other words, there exists a system of monopoly capitalism in which the business elite have, by gaining effective control of the state apparatus, isolated themselves from the full effects of competition. Backing this system up is the whole defense complex which through massive contracts, and, in the last analysis, war, insures that the system keeps operating. Labor is but a junior partner in all this, with small business getting enough to keep this segment relatively content. The poor—those excluded from sharing in the power and wealth of the state capitalism system—are given sops of poverty programs.

The intellectual’s role in all this is crucial. He must effectively propagandize the mass of people by extolling the virtues of the system, and by helping the ruling class come up with suitable reform measures to patch up the more glaring problems, And, in the final analysis, the intellectual, as has been seen at the Stanford Research Institute, stands ready to assist in subduing the natives if they become restless. The intellectual also has a share in the system.

The task of the libertarian is two-fold. He must work as a scholar to destroy the myths which serve to justify and perpetuate the status quo. It is a sad commentary on the right-wing that whereas they were once in the forefront of this endeavor, with men such as Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, they are now the backbone of the intellectual apologists for the state apparatus. Today the debunking task has fallen to the New Left.

Secondly, and crucially, the libertarian as activist must be ready to step in to help in an overt way to aid in the destruction of the system. No ruling class has ever voluntarily given up power. Education must never stop, but there comes a time when action is also called for (as the Marxists have perceived, there is also education-through-struggle). Those so-called libertarians who, while espousing high sounding principles in support of liberty, in the concrete support state power against any active resistance have clearly failed in both tasks. And those who seek to avoid the problem by trying to “escape” have not only failed as libertarians, but also failed as human beings. Whereas the former group have consigned themselves to the dustbin of history, the latter have a “class” all to themselves: human ostriches.

— Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.

LIBERTARIAN ASSOCIATES

We are profoundly grateful to the Libertarian Associates, who subscribe at the rate of $15 or more, for helping us keep the Libertarian Forum coming to you. The latest list of Libertarian Associates includes:

Robert S. Borden, M. D., Groton, Mass.
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Robert Schaal, Seattle, Wash.
Ken Schmidt, Muskegon, Mich.
Ronald Travis, Los Angeles

The Czech Crisis

Conclusion

The Prague Spring . . . And After

By Leonard P. Liggio

The New Economic Model prepared in 1963 by the Czech economic institute commission headed by Ota Sik contained more advanced concepts than other East European proposals. This was due to the fact that the Czechs had begun their free inquiry later and thus were able to begin at the point where the economists of the other countries had ended. Also, there were a few Czech economists who were willing to espouse entirely radical positions which gave their colleagues the opportunity to present far-reaching changes as a moderate program. Eugen Loebl, director of the Bank of Slovakia, courageously led the criticism of orthodox Marxist economic theory. Although he had just been rehabilitated after years as a political prisoner, Loebl declared that the country needed a mixed economy with 200,000 (30%) of small privately-owned enterprises. (According to Stanford Research Institute-International, entrepreneurs in Czechoslovakia are “already quite free to start small industries” under the 1968 reforms.) Prof. Radoslav Selucky was dismissed from his professorship for the radical market program that he proposed.

Sik’s New Economic Model required that enterprises earn their own way, that investments be financed by the enterprises from their own resources or by borrowing at interest, that prices by determined in the competitive free market based upon the law of supply and demand, and that profits be the criterion of economic efficiency. After strong attacks on it by orthodox theorists, the party adopted it in 1965 and it was scheduled for implementation in January 1967 with the withdrawal of subsidies and central planning and the freeing of enterprises to decide what to produce and at what price to sell it.

Not only was the New Economic Model diluted from the beginning, but ultimately it was made ineffective by the party leadership. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of the partial implementation as well as earlier removal of controls in selected sectors was reflected in major reductions in material costs of production (the first decline in fifteen years). About 40 percent of the 9 percent rise in the gross income of industrial enterprises during 1967 resulted from savings on material costs. There was a 7 percent growth in industry and 8 percent in national income. The opposition of the right-wing, dogmatic party leadership headed by President Novotny was increasingly resented by the younger party leaders. This was given expression by Alexander Dubcek in his October 1967 criticism of the regime for its hostility to radical economics and its suppression of freedom. This attack on authoritarianism projected Dubcek to prominence and led to his election as first party secretary in January.

The immediate issue in the Communist party’s October plenary meeting was the assault by clubs and tear gas by the Prague police against the thousands of Czech students marching in protest against conditions at the university. Orthodox communist establishments are as fearful of the anti-authoritarian spirit of youth as are the liberal bureaucratic establishments in the West. The students demanded (and eventually were granted) the dismissal of the police officials responsible for the assault on the student protesters. Thereafter, during the ‘Prague Spring’ Czech students were at the center of the radicalization process in their country. “There was an incredible spirit of Liberation. Especially among students—young people generally—there was a spirit of defying anything laid down by authority—the Government, the Party, schools, parents. The atmosphere of questioning was everywhere.” (“Spirit of defiance”, New Left Notes Sept. 16, 1968).

The student struggle was initiated by an ideologically developed cadre of university dissenters called the Prague Radicals; many of them had been expelled or drafted into the army for their organized protests in the universities. But after January 1968 the Prague Radicals were free to organize openly; bypassing the established Czech student association, they formed new youth organizations. The final removal of Novotny by his resignation as president in March was the result of Prague student demonstrations welcoming a national student cavalcade to protest U.S. genocide in Vietnam.

The Soviet invasion forced radical political activism upon the vast majority of Czech students. On November 17 Prague Radicals announced a student strike and occupied the university buildings. They were inspired by the example of the Columbia SDS; SDS activists had been in contact with the Czech students. On the following day all the universities in Czechoslovakia were closed by student strikes and two-thirds of Prague university students joined the occupation of the buildings were SDS-style teach-ins were held. In the succeeding months Prague Radicals demonstrated against censorship and limitations on freedoms until the regime ordered the dissolution of the new student organizations in June 1969.

The sabotage of the New Economic Model by the party right-wing during 1967 had led to the critical central committee plenary session on December 19 which was characterized by violent debates between conservative supporters of central planning and the liberals favoring market economics. Sik led the attack, insisting that to achieve economic reforms and combat bureaucracy the party and government structure would have to be blasted apart by popular action. The centrists were won over to reform and Dubcek was elected party first secretary on Jan. 5, 1968.

Although Ota Sik was appointed deputy premier in charge of the committee of economic advisers, a much more conservative deputy premier was entrusted with actual control over economic departments. Czech radicals proposed market determination of prices, competition among enterprises, incentives for worker productivity, and the end of bureaucratic planning and controls. Centrists preferred cautious change ideologically, politically and economically, and denounced “excessive” freedom. They placed emphasis upon half-way measures such as managerial efficiency, and on maintaining economic planning by technicians and computers with some price freedom but limitations upon the independence of enterprises. Centrists resisted complete decentralization of industrial management, worker self-management of firms, and competition among enterprises for credits and markets. Centrist attitudes parallel those formulated in the Soviet Union under the inspiration of the pioneering but limited contributions of Prof. Liberman of Kharkov University. But Ota Sik has criticized Libermanism as inadequate and simplistic despite its great impact on Soviet economics. Such reforms merely substitute improved goals or indicators, or are “an endeavor merely to limit the number of directive tasks and indicators set by the central planning and managing body.” (Ota Sik, Plan and Market under Socialism, White Plains, 1968).

Thus, the centrists desired a convergence with the humane, manipulative bureaucracy of Western Europe and America behind whose facade of political democracy the bureaucracy’s control expands. Czech radicals continued to publicize their demand for dismantling the bureaucracy, restoration of self-ownership to individual firms and implementation of the free market. Dubcek condemned the “ingrained evil of excessive levelling of incomes and egalitarianism which has rewarded unskilled work more highly than skilled work.” Sik emphasized protection of the consumer: from high prices due to inefficient workers or enterprises and from inferior products caused by “the monopoly position” of state enterprises. “All the lagging enterprises,” Sik noted, “are being protected to the detriment of good enterprises which show initiative and also to the detriment of the consumer.”

To achieve these objectives the Czech radicals sought the reorganization of the Communist Party in order to create a popular movement for reform: the 14th Communist Party Congress was announced for early September 1968. Preparations had been made during preceding months through district elections of Congress delegates; these were almost completely younger members dedicated to reform. The obvious result of the Congress would be the election of a party central committee devoid of conservatives and overwhelmingly radical in commitment. To forestall the party Congress which would have been a qualitative transformation in the nature of a Communist party, the Soviet invasion was launched on August 21. The day before the Soviet invasion, Pravda blasted Czech radicals as subverters of socialism for refusing to follow orthodox Marxist economic planning and centralization.

Within days of the invasion an extraordinary party Congress was held secretly in a Prague industrial plant protected by a volunteer workers’ guard. While the Soviet army ‘controlled’ Prague a new party leadership was appointed by the Congress. The support of the reformers by the students is understandable given the revolutionary spirit of modern youth against authoritarianism. What is the explanation of the widespread, ideologically developed support of the general public and of the workers in particular? For about a year economists had conducted “evening schools of economic policy” for workers in the major industrial centers in order to provide a clear understanding of the New Economic Model and its benefits to the workers as producers and consumers. Thus, during the ‘Prague Spring’ new elections were held for local and general trade union leaders, and younger activists committed to the reforms were elected. After the invasion the trade unions assumed important roles in resisting restrictions on freedoms and organizing mass support for the economic and political reforms which had been introduced. Trade union newspapers and educational departments have become the sanctuaries for reform writers and economists removed after the invasion.

The strong support of the general public for the reform program is the result of the heavy involvement of intellectuals and writers in the reform movement. The year previous, in June 1967 during the Congress of the Writers’ Union, several leading writers and editors were expelled from the party for attacks on the conservative cultural functionaries. The Writers’ Union journal was suspended. The writers and intellectuals realized that their freedom was at the sufferance of the bureaucracy so long as the government controlled the budget for books and periodicals as well as all jobs and salaries. The need of writers to control the media through which they express themselves caused them to join the advocates of free market economics. Economic independence from the government for quality intellectual production was recognized as analogous to economic independence for quality material production. Similarly, it was clear that intellectuals had suffered from pay equalization standards as much as managers, and that the introduction of salary differentiation in the New Economic Model would mean equivalent increases for managers and intellectuals.

The strong intellectual commitment of the Czech public to political and economic reforms will have positive effects in the long-run despite the immediate obstacles. Similarly, the material conditions which impelled consciousness of the need for reforms will not be solved by half-way measures. The Soviet Union has slowed but it has not terminated the reduction of its advantageous trading position in East Europe. West European business has sought East European markets to escape U.S. financial domination; the six East European countries are “the fastest growing regional market in the world” and West European business earned about $3 billion in exports there during 1967. East Europe offers the advantages of large reservoirs of engineers and technicians educated at the tax expense of East Europeans and a low wage labor force disciplined by twenty years of Communist trade unionism. The U.S. share of that trade is minimal since U.S. products tend to be non-competitive with West Europe to whom the East Europeans have turned to escape Soviet economic hegemony. The U.S. would prefer to establish semi-political bilateral trade agreements with the Soviet Union, thus avoiding the embarrassment of the non-competitiveness of U.S. products. Thus, the coolness if not hostility of the U.S. toward the “Prague Spring”, since economic liberalization would not benefit the U.S.; and the refusal of the U.S. to aid Czechoslovakia by returning the gold deposited in here during World War II. The U.S. by its official statements virtually invited the Soviet invasion, and despite a few muted protests, insisted that there would be no interruption in bilateral U.S.—Soviet negotiations.

In comparison, it was several years after the 1956 Hungarian crisis before U.S. disappointment at the failure of its Hungarian supporters wore off sufficiently for bilateral negotiations. Hungarian events were extremely complex with positive as well as negative aspects, and the heartfelt speeches by Czech delegates (since purged) at the U.N. protesting the Soviet invasion clearly differentiated between the two in the face of the U.S. delegate’s self-interested joining of the two events. There was no assumption as in Hungary of army commands by officers previously retired because of their connections with the CIA and NATO (instead a leading conservative general fled to the U.S. when Dubcek was elected). There was no withdrawal of Czechoslovakia from the Warsaw Pact. There was no Czech appeal for intervention of U.S. forces. On the other hand, radical reforms based upon free market economics were not an issue in Hungary. The Czech delegates noted the U.S. disinterest if not hostility to the Czech free market reforms, and denounced the U.S. as equally responsible for the Soviet invasion because the U.S. had initiated the Cold War which had created the atmosphere for internal repression in Czechoslovakia. The concepts of freedom in the “Prague Spring” did not find their inspiration in America; therefore the Czechs could not be disappointed in the lack of American interest in their liberation.

Compared to the situation in Hungary after November 1956 the current situation in Czechoslovakia is far worse. The replacement of Alexander Dubcek by Gustav Husak after more than fifteen months of the January reforms is a major step backwards, while the accessions of Janos Kadar in Hungary and Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland in the fall of 1956 were forward steps compared to the Stalinist regimes they replaced. Hungary and Poland are agricultural countries (60%) compared to Czechoslovakia (30%), with the heaviest concentration in Slovakia. The Hungarian and Polish farmers benefited from the liberalization of the Kadar and Gomulka leaderships and have played an important role as stabilizing forces since 1956. Similarly, the Catholic Church plays a significant moderating role in rural Hungary and Poland, which is of great assistance to the Communist parties. Only in Slovakia does the Catholic Church have great influence, and that is the most moderate region, causing the least problems for the post-Dubcek leadership.

Having exhausted other means of resistance the Czechs have undertaken a passive resistance campaign in the arena of production. A producers’ strike has been in progress in Czechoslovakia for many months, and the economy has become the central point of struggle. Inflation, shortages, poor quality goods have been the result of the passive resistance responding to central planning, abandonment of workers’ councils, and rejection of free market principles. In Prague, for example, during the first half of 1969 only 276 apartments were completed; fifteen per cent of last year’s rate. An official economic report declared that production continues to fall, imbalance grows, increased wages representing the largest part of income growth. The Soviet interruption of the Czech Radicals’ development of freedom has resulted economically in a great leap backwards. The current general strike of the producers has created a grave economic crisis in Czechoslovakia, and the Novotny regime fell precisely because it could not solve the economic crisis.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XV

November 1, 1969

35¢

Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

THE CONFERENCE

The first New York Libertarian Conference is over. It was a wild and woolly time, both exciting and dull, wonderful and a shambles. It was great that we held it, but it is highly doubtful that another conference will ever be held in the same form. To quote Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness . . .”

In contrast to the P.R. snow jobs handed out by other conference organizers, attesting to the joy and grandeur abounding at their meetings, this will be a candid, unvarnished report and appraisal of the Conference. Our readers deserve no less. It is only fair to add that the appraisal of most of the other organizers of the Conference is far more favorable than my own.

PHASE I: The Triumph

Looking backward, the Conference may be divided into two phases, which differed as Day and Night. Phase I, from Friday night through Saturday afternoon, was indeed a triumphant occasion. In the first place, the attendance. By forgetting to put in our ads that anyone could attend a single session for only $2.50, we unwittingly discouraged a lot of our New York people; perhaps thirty or forty more would have appeared if not for this oversight. But even so, over 200 people attended the Conference, perhaps as high as 220, almost all of whom came from out of town. And what out of town! It was incredible. People came, just for this Conference, all the way from California, Florida, Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, a large contingent from Michigan, and one heroic young man, John H. C. Pierce, who gave up his summer vacation in order to hitch-hike to the Conference from northern Manitoba! We, the organizers of the Conference, looked out across this sea of faces and hardly recognized a soul. It was a great and historic moment.

As amateur organizers of conferences, it is true that we packed far too much material in the Saturday afternoon panels. There was virtually no break between noon and six P.M. But what material! The papers were of a uniformly high and even scintillating level, and made real contributions to libertarian knowledge. We hope to publish the papers and speeches at the conference in paperback form, to make them available to libertarians across the country and as a permanent part of the libertarian literature.

In the meanwhile, a brief summary of the Phase I papers:

On Friday night, I gave a lengthy overview of the libertarian system, beginning with the natural right of self-ownership, developing the structure of property rights in libertarian theory, and ending with a call for the abolition of the State as quickly as possible. On Saturday, in the Economics panel, Professor Laurence Moss of Columbia and Queens Universities, gave a spirited and witty talk on the “Economics of Sin”, pointing out that the State is continually redefining the “sin” that it outlaws in order to extend its power over the mass of the people, especially the poorest sectors of the populace. Jerry Tuccille, our most recent important convert from the idea of limited government, gave a rousing talk pointing out that laissez-faire, considered logically, must lead one to free-market anarchism. We are honored to be the first publication to announce that Jerry’s book, Radical Libertarianism, will soon be published by Bobbs-Merrill. Mario J. Rizzo, an honors senior in economics at Fordham University, proved to be one of the stars of the Conference, giving a brilliant paper standing Marx on his head, and arguing that, in the kind of interventionist, corporate state economy that we have today, business profits indeed tend to be an index of exploitation of the rest of society, since they are usually derived from the use of State privilege. In short, much of Marx, while totally fallacious for competitive, free-market capitalism, turns out to be unwittingly applicable to the state-monopoly system that we suffer under today. Professor Walter Block, of Rutgers and New York Universities, delivered a sharp critique of the statism and deviations from liberty of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

In the “Politics and Liberty” panel, Roy A. Childs, Jr., a student in history and philosophy at SUNY, Buffalo, summarized his recent article which brilliantly used Randian terminology to demolish the inner contributions of the Randian concept of “limited government”. (Roy’s article is “Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand”, The Rational Individualist, August, 1969). I gave a talk on how competing police forces and courts could work, and work well, in an anarchist society, and Professor Joseph R. Peden of Baruch College, CUNY, gave a learned and fascinating paper on the thousand years of successful, anarchistic “law and order” in medieval Ireland, an eminently workable society that only fell to the brutal English conquest in the seventeenth century.

The Foreign Policy panel was another highlight of the meeting. R. Dale Grinder, of the history department of the University of Missouri, delivered a learned, witty, and illuminating paper on United States imperialism in China and the Far East, from 1880-1920. Walter Grinder, graduate student at New York University, traced the origins of the Cold War to the counter-revolutionary, expansionist drive of the United States, back from World War II through the aftermath of the first World War. Professor Leonard Liggio, of City College, CUNY, recalled for us the great founder of modern isolationism and anti-imperialism, the laissez-faire economist (and abolitionist) Edward Atkinson, who founded the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War, and even sent “subversive” anti-war pamphlets to our soldiers waging an imperialist conquest of the Philippines. This is the isolationist heritage which the New Left has now taken up and the Right-wing has unfortunately abandoned.

So far, so great; but during the Saturday session, an undercurrent of rebellion rumbled from various “Young Turks” who, apparently restive at having to follow trains of thought for more than one paragraph, began to gripe about the “over-structuring” of the conference and to call for general “rapping” (open discussion). The time was to come, all too soon, when general rapping would unfortunately take over. And with this rapping came the disintegration of the conference.

PHASE II: Disintegration

Phase II covers Saturday night through the end of the conference the following night. The disintegration began after Karl Hess’ rousing speech Saturday night, calling for action against the State. Karl threw the meeting open to questions and general rapping, and that’s when trouble arose. The first thing that happened was an intensifying polarization of left and right-wings, each pushing the other into harder, more extreme, and more disparate stands. The point is that within the New York movement, agreement is intense and widespread, and the divergence between “right” and “left” is only a matter of tactics and nuance rather than fundamental principle. But hold a conference like this one, advertised widely and open to one and all, and massive extremes of left and right are bound to appear. It was inevitable that, once widespread rapping began, the almost total lack of communication between extreme left and extreme right, between ultra-left anarchists and anarcho-rightists, would lead to an aggravating polarization between them. Each extreme reacted on the other with cutting dialectical force, each pushing the other farther away from its position. Instead of the conference bringing both extremes, both “deviations” from the main line, together, the rap sessions only served to drive them further apart.

Take, for example, the late Sunday afternoon session, supposed to be devoted to Campus Organizing. The polarization process had continued through Sunday (the demoralization being aggravated by another one of our tactical miscalculations, since half of the people left for home around that time. We did not realize that, outside of New York, no school or business observed Columbus Day). The Campus Organizing session was to be a vital part of the conference, when our campus chapters were to discuss student organizing, development of RLA (the Radical Libertarian Alliance), relations with other fraternal libertarian campus groups, etc. Instead, everyone was so caught up with the intensifying left vs. right struggle that no one bothered to deal with campus organizing, and every speaker plunged further into an orgy of hatred, with left and right winding up literally screaming at each other.

In my view, the major source of intellectual aggression at the conference came from the ultra-left. The problem is that the Sober Center, the intelligent main-line forces, had been geared all along to withstand assault from the extreme right, from those forces that still revere the U.S. government, still favor the Cold War, and still want to “protect” the government-run campuses from student rebellions. The extreme right was there, sure enough, but a larger menace came from the ultra-left, and the center, being geared psychologically only to oppose the right-wing, never really realized the extent of the ultra-left problem that was becoming a major force at the conference.

Thus, the major assault on the center (that is on the Conference itself, which was largely centrist-run), came from ultra-leftist Wilson A. Clark, Jr., formerly a student at the University of North Carolina, and now residing in Washington, D.C. Denouncing the New York group and the “power structure” of RLA (what a laugh that is!), Wilson proceeded to identify two groups as the major Enemy on which the libertarian movement is supposed to concentrate its ire: (a) all academic economists, without exception, that is economics per se; and (b) all people who wear neckties. As a special bonus, Wilson went on to attack people who favor proper English, in contrast to such cultural goodies as soul rapping, street argot, and whatever. Wilson’s inchoate tirade was certainly one of the low points of the conference.

Various other speakers, carried along on a tidal wave of ultra-leftism, even those who knew better, called for an abandonment of the “capitalist” part of anarcho-capitalism, and presumed to claim that a viable anarchist society could be composed of “psychic” exchanges and “tribal sharing” carried on by hippie communes.

By far the best reply to the Clark forces came from Mario Rizzo who, nattily dressed in jacket and tie, announced that one could see from his attire which side of the cultural struggle he was on. Rizzo pointed out that the ultra-left was really abandoning the proper emphasis on political revolution, on abolition of the State, to stress “cultural revolution”, a “revolution” whose implications range from misleading and irrelevant to totally wrong-headed and divisive. Addressing the cultural revolutionaries, Mario concluded by saying that if, as he suspected, they proposed to use coercion to impose their anti-necktieism, then “to hell with you.”

If polarization and “cultural” hogwash was one measure of the disintegration during Phase II, another was the sudden emergency of a typically ultra-left call for immediate action, virtually any action, against the State. The cry was first raised on Saturday night when one ultra-leftist in the audience raised the call, “On to Fort Dix!” This referred to a New Left action against Ft. Dix, New Jersey that had been planned for Sunday. Theoretically, it was supposed to involve merely a demonstration at the fort on behalf of various military prisoners and in opposition to the war. But it was also rumored that an attempt would be made to march onto the fort itself. While there is nothing morally wrong, of course, with the idea of people invading an army fort—quite the contrary—there is a vast gulf between moral correctness and strategic and tactical wisdom. It was that wisdom that was so conspicuously lacking. Nothing could be achieved by such an “invasion”—certainly not a successful capture—and the only thing that could possible be accomplished would be to be gassed and/or bayoneted, and/or clubbed, and/or shot, plus a possible ten years in jail for (literally!) stepping on the grass of army property.

What is more, the wisdom was particularly lacking from the people at our conference, few of whom had heard of the Ft. Dix action until that moment. But the process of polarization had done its ugly work. Goaded beyond endurance by the right-wing’s attack on the very concept and morality of revolution, not only the ultra-left but even the bulk of the center responded swiftly and emotionally to the cry of “On to Ft. Dix!” It was as if, after defending the very concept of action against the State, the center and left felt that they had to rush out and seize the opportunity for any action whatever. It reached the monstrous point that the entire center was willing to call off the whole Sunday daytime proceedings of the convention, a convention for which they had lovingly prepared for many months, in order to rush off in a delirium to embrace the receiving end of the tear-gas canister and the bayonet. Anarcho-martyrism rearing its ugly head!

This sudden onrush at the conference was a superb example of one of the major reasons that anarchist revolutions have never been effective. It demonstrates, for example, why the anarchists lost out to their allies the Bolsheviks after the October 1917 Revolution in Russia. The anarchists were strong in Russia; but anarchists have, tragically, always been what the Randians very effectively call “whim-worshippers”, creatures of the emotional moment, worshippers of the immediate spontaneous emotion of the hour, people who scorn rational forethought and purposeful, long-range planning. One of the main reasons that the Russian anarchists lost out to Lenin is because Lenin, above all, was no whim-worshipper, but a master of patient organization, strategic insight, rational forethought, long-range planning and tactical timing. It is always the kooky anarchists, who suddenly raise the cry, “Seize the street!”, “Storm that government building!”, “Charge the cops!”, and of course it is always the kooky anarchists who are first to get their heads beaten in—and to no avail. Note that it is not the morality of these anarchist actions that is in question (as it is in the case of anarcho-rightists who defend the government or government schools) but the sanity of the actions.

My own role, all of late Saturday night and early Sunday afternoon, was a hasty but in many ways effective one-man crusade to stem the ultra-left tide, and to save the conference: by opposing the Ft. Dix mania. I managed to persuade the great bulk of the center to remain at the conference on Sunday, thus permitting the sessions to continue, so that only a small ultra-left contingent went on the Dix escapade. Most of the speeches on early Sunday afternoon were an implicit or explicit attack on ultra-leftism: Jerry Tuccille effectively reminding the meeting that our main reservoir of potential mass support was the vast middle class (the same middle class so scornfully written off as The Enemy by Clark and others); Leonard Liggio gently but firmly reminding worshippers of the Black Panthers of the Panthers’ abandonment of black nationalism; and myself directly attacking ultra-leftism, Panther-mania, and the Ft. Dix adventure.

As the warriors began returning from Ft. Dix, ultra-left emotionalism started to reach another peak. One left youth leader lamented that he had not been gassed at Dix. And undoubtedly the all-time low arrived when an ultra-left woman from the Phoenix Coalition of Michigan (so ultra-left as to make Wilson Clark appear like a corporation executive) rushed to the podium, fresh from her gassing, to curse obscenely and hysterically at the entire audience for being in New York rather than at the barricades.

The conference ended ingloriously Sunday night on a note of (unfortunately rational) paranoia. For it became evident that the hotel room, the lobby of the hotel, and the street outside were suddenly crawling with plainclothes cops, their badges and their guns bulging prominently from their supposedly civilian attire. One Wobbly leader, familiar with the New York fuzz, spotted a Bureau of Special Services plain-clothesman (the division specializing in political dissent). Why were they there? Were they going to bust the convention? Were they going to apprehend the Ft. Dix marchers? Were some or all of us going to be charged with Conspiracy to cross state lines to incite a riot, h la the infamous Chicago case? Nobody knew, and we still don’t know, but prudence at last won over machismo, and most of us beat it the hell out of there. The convention petered out on a grotesquely ironic note, with the remaining rappers still griping that the main trouble with the conference was that there had not been enough rapping!

Lessons Of The Conference

One obvious lesson of the Conference is the emergence of ultra-left adventurism as a major threat to the movement. And so just as we have devoted several issues of the Libertarian Forum to an attack on anarcho-rightism, we must now devote some energy to a critique of ultra-leftism (which will be appearing soon).

A second lesson is that this sort of large, totally open convention—gathering all manner of leftists, rightists, and cops—has become counter-productive. The need now is for smaller, far more selective, and more homogeneous meetings, in which there will be far more room for much-needed internal education of cadre, and for genuine discussion and dialogue. Leftists and rightists can only be moved toward the center separately, where they cannot reinforce each other’s errors through mutual denunciation. Only when and if left and right have effectively blended into the center will there be need for a second open convention.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

Robin Hood Revisionism

When I was a wee conservative, counting bond revenues at my mother’s knee, it was the dear lady’s practice to frighten me to death with tales of that arch-bandit, Robin Hood. The conservative wisdom was and is that no more dastardly crime lurks in the heart of man than the infamy of taking from the rich to give to the poor. Entire sweeps of political philosophy, in fact, seem to have been motivated by little else than antagonism to poor Robin and his hoods. On the other hand, an entire sweep of political reality, in this nation, was and is motivated by the reverse proposition, that it is okay to rob from the poor and give to the rich.

The Democrats have done it through a welfare system in which the poor are “client” victims who get the crumbs from the bureaucratic table which is the system’s principal purpose. They also characteristically steal the poor blind through construction projects, licenses and franchises, and such other thefts as are most appropriate to men who have risen from precinct politics.

The Republicans have done it through, most lately, the warfare state of corporate liberalism, in which the lives of the poor are daily robbed of meaning or hope so that they may be used solely as cogs in the industrial machine which is the system’s principal purpose. They also steal through the total use of the state and its power, its credit, its regulations, to the end of special advantage for the corporate elite, a form of theft most appropriate to men who have gone to the best schools.

So much for the reverse. What about Robinhoodism, straight and unalloyed? Should we frighten tots with his image? Was his the worst of crimes?

Robin, after sober reflection, wasn’t a half-bad sort. He had one wretched notion that we shall discuss later, but his work, by and large, was healthy, useful, and quite impeccable politically—so far as it went.

Who did he rob? He robbed a bunch of rich churchmen, for one thing. Now what in the world is wrong with that? To hear the conservative diatribes against Robin Hood you would think that the mere fact of having riches is the only standard against which to judge the theft of those riches. In short, the conservative notion is that to steal anything from anybody is a crime—regardless of the source of the thing being ripped off or the nature of the owner’s position in regard to the society in general.

The churchmen, whom Robin robbed, represented one of the great ruling classes of all time and, like every ruling class, their power and their self was the result of the sort of theft that becomes legitimized by longevity. Although much of the income being derived by churches today is from voluntary contributions, much of the capital upon which churches base their economies was extracted in times when the churches had real clout and could force contributions. The Roman Catholic church, of course, is the main user of such capital and is coming under increasing pressure from its priests to divest itself of what even a rudimentary ethical sense should be able to identify as ill-gotten gains. Robin didn’t wait for divestiture. He helped out. So, on the count of robbing rich churchmen, Robin seems quite acceptable to a libertarian.

Robin was most noted, as a matter of fact, for stealing from government officials. Rich government officials. Now how do government officials become rich? How did the Sheriff of Nottingham make his? Or Lyndon Johnson? Or you name him. Politicians make their money by using their office; by, in an ethical sense, stealing advantages which lead to gains. I would say that such gains also are stolen. So, apparently, did Robin Hood.

It seems to me, as a matter of fact, that Robin Hood’s attacks against the militant arm of the state have been purposefully overlooked by conservatives in their attacks against Robin Hood. There has been a preoccupation, instead, with the technicalities of whose forest it was, whether the Sheriff represented a mere aberration in the divinely inspired order of Western civilization, and whether Robin wouldn’t have been better advised to press his case in a duly constituted court (presided over by the Sheriff of Nottingham!).

The reason for this oversight on the part of conservatives may not be innocent or merely myopic. Robin Hood’s main crime, you see, was against an established order, one duly established in accord with the laws, customs, etc., of the time. Robin, on the other hand, thought it was illegitimate. He was, it should be recalled, a very political cat. His gripe was—ah hah—against THE STATE. Those upon whom he preyed, were lackeys or running dogs of THE STATE. It is possible that the specter of Robin Hood today haunts so many conservative dreams not because of their pure thoughts on property rights so much as because of the possibly impure origins of the property dearest to their own hearts. Otherwise, why get so excited about Robin Hood?

There is one reason. It is the only thing that I hold against the old boy and his gassy greenclad gang. They were hung up on King Richard. Now, being hung up on any king is a mistake, I feel. But, until Dick showed up, big as life and raring to get back in the king business, Robin was a beautiful guy. As often happens in life, he was the sort you could go along with wholeheartedly so long as he didn’t have the power he eventually wanted. When the king came back, of course, libertarians in the gang should have just gone back to the woods and started all over again and, by then, they should have had enough local support to stand a better chance than ever of success.

In short, while Robin was robbing, he was doing nothing that should offend libertarian sensibilities and the fact that so much of what he was doing was aimed specifically against state authority should actually draw libertarian cheers. The subsequent fact that he took some of the loot from his anti-state forays and returned it to the people most sorely victimized by the state should draw not only libertarian cheers but humanist ones as well.

There is one other thing about Robin Hood. He apparently is alive and well in Latin America today. The inter-urban guerrillas in Uruguay seem to operate in his spirit but without that hang-up about kings. Good.

I bet you a monk’s bag of silver that conservatives line up with the Sheriff of Nottingham. But don’t worry, Robin, libertarians are on your side.

RECOMMENDED READING

PACIFIC RESEARCH AND WORLD EMPIRE TELEGRAM. A fine, new scholarly publication, concentrating on foreign affairs analysis, and put out by the Pacific Studies Center of East Palo Alto, California. The Sept. 10 issue has excellent articles on Eritrea’s revolution against Ethiopian imperialism (and its U.S. supporters); government subsidies for big business programs in the ghettoes; and the revolutionary movement in Thailand. 12 issues available for $5.00 (50¢ per issue), from Pacific Studies Center, 1963 University Avenue, East Palo Alto, Calif. 94301.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XVI

November 15, 1969

35¢

ULTRA-LEFTISM

The Marxians, who have thought longer and harder about revolutionary change than anyone else, have very perceptively discovered two major contrasting errors, two major deviations from the proper revolutionary “line”: “right-wing opportunism” or “liquidationism”, and “ultra-left adventurism”. Right-wing opportunism is above all a moral failure, a willingness to abandon principle for the sake of a “practical” working within the system, a course which invariably leads to becoming a part of the system itself and to opposing the very cause to which the rightist is supposedly devoted. “Ultra-left adventurism” is by no means a moral failure; in fact, the ultra-leftist acts in the world to attempt to achieve the common goal as rapidly as he can. The problem is the ultra-leftist’s total lack of strategic sense; in rushing at the Enemy blindly, emotionally, and with insufficient preparation for allies, he not only inevitably gets clobbered, but he also sinks his own cause at the same time. While the ultra-leftist is morally lovable, his emotional lashing-out at the system can be equally as disastrous to the cause he espouses as the cynical opportunism of the right-liquidationist. Both deviations from the main revolutionary line of rational, protracted struggle must be combatted.

In recent months, ultra-leftism has emerged as a serious problem both in the New Left and in the libertarian movement. On the New Left, ultra-leftism has been chiefly responsible for the galloping disintegration of SDS. The ouster of the Progressive Labor wing of SDS provided an opportunity and a challenge to the remainder of this leading New Left group to return to the libertarian, non-Stalinist, revolutionary path which had marked SDS for a year or two after its 1966 convention. Within the non-PL wing of SDS, the triumph of the “Weatherman” faction over RYM-II was also a hopeful sign, since RYM-II’s Marxism, Stalinism, and worship of the “working class” was almost as aggravated as that of PL. But now the Weathermen are wrecking SDS through their total immersion in ultra-left adventurism.

The Weatherman strategy consists largely of kamikaze charges against the police. Calling for a massive “invasion” of Chicago (“pig city”) on October 8-11, only a couple of hundred frenzied Weathermen and Weatherwomen showed up, to charge the police and get clobbered and arrested for their pains. The latest issue of the Weathermen’s New Left Notes, which used to be the most important theoretical and strategic journal for the New Left, consists solely of pictures of Weathermen and cops slugging it out, interspersed with a few incoherent paragraphs cursing at American society. The curses are understandable; but this whole hysteria has about as much in common with genuine revolution as a barroom brawl has with truly mass action.

The hysteria, and the pitiful failure, of the Weathermen stem not so much from personal psychosis as from incorrect strategic theory. The Weathermen are superb in realizing who the enemy is; the enemy is the State, the State’s goon-squad police, and the public school system, which the Weathermen correctly identify as a vast prison-house for the nation’s youth. (In contrast, PL and RYM-II oppose the Weathermen’s goal of destroying the public school system, because the “working class” likes the schools.) Further-more, in contrast to all other Marxian sects, the Weathermen have come to realize that they cannot rely on the industrial “working class” as their potential reservoir of allies. Everyone recognizes that the working class is precisely the most reactionary, the most social-fascist, the most racist element of American society, and the Weathermen realize that American Marxists have boxed themselves into a complete dead end in pinning their hopes on the workers.

But if not the working class, who? Who is to be the “agency of social change”, the main reservoir of recruits for the revolution? The most sensible answer would be the “middle class” (or as former SDS theorist Greg Calvert called them, the “new working class”), which is after all the vast bulk of the population. But the Weathermen are blocked from trying to appeal to the middle class, (a) because this would end the chronic Marxian-New Left emphasis on the most evidently downtrodden groups, for even though the middle-classes are exploited by the ruling class, it is hard for ultra-left romantics to get stirred up over injustice to those who are not super-poverty-stricken; and (b) because the New Left is so filled with hatred of the middle-class “bourgeois” life-style that it refuses to consider the middle-class as anything but part of the Enemy. If not the working class, or the middle-class, then who? In desperation, the Weathermen reached toward another group: working-class youth-motorcycle hoods, outlaws, high-school dropouts, etc. They fail to realize that even if they could organize the young hoods, they couldn’t accomplish “anything, because the hoods have even less social leverage, less potential to mobilize masses of people (almost all of whom hate the hoods, and with good reason) than the students of SDS.

Having disastrously decided to concentrate on organizing the youth-lumpen, the Weathermen had to decide how to go about it. How to reach the lumpen? It was obvious that campus groups were not the way, and neither could the young lumpen be reached by journals or theoretical discussions. The only, way seemed to be to “gain the respect” of the machismo—instincts of the young hoods by engaging in street-combat with the cops. These street fights were supposed to serve as “exemplary actions” (a current in-phrase) which would mobilize and inspire the young hoods and lead them toward the Weathermen. Well, of course, this nonsensical tactic has not worked and will not work. The only “example”, the only lesson, that any sensible young hood can draw from Weathermanship is that here are a bunch of loonies who go charging the cops and only get clobbered and busted for their pains. What even remotely national young hood would be other than repulsed by the Weatherman “example”?

As far as the Weathermen go, the interesting problem for speculation is what they will do in a year or so, when it will have become obvious, even to them, that they have failed and that they have not raised the standard to which the hoods and dropouts have repaired. If any of the Weathermen are alive and out of jail by that time, perhaps they will then come to their senses, and rethink their strategy and tactics.

Contrast to the futile desperation of the Weathermen the brilliantly successful strategy and tactics of the Vietnam Moratorium. Returning to the successful grass-roots tactics of the Vietnam 1965 teach-ins, the Moratorium of October 15 mobilized literally millions of the “silent majority”, the middle-class, in every village and community in the country, in dramatic opposition to the endless war in Vietnam. While all the factions of SDS stood aloof, scornful of the insufficient radicalism of the Moratorium people, millions of Americans poured out in the largest demonstration in America’s history, and in support of a demand that was phenomenally radical for a middle-class movement: immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam. If we realize that only a year ago, the middle-class would not support any demand more radical than “please, Mr. President, stop the bombing”, the achievement of the Moratorium is seen to be dazzling indeed. For the future, the idea of escalating the pressure one day per month of the war, is another superb tactical method for mobilizing millions for a continuing increase of pressure on the U.S. government. (But let us hope that the anti-war movement will not be diverted, as it was in 1965, away from local grass-roots actions to spectacular but scarcely productive mass demonstrations confined to Washington.)

The success of the Moratorium stems from its focusing on winning the support of and radicalizing the middle-class—the great bulk of the American population. And here, in particular, lies a crucial lesson for the libertarian movement. The prime center of our movement, as well as the New Left, is now and will continue to be the college campus. Here is the recruitment ground for our cadre and the immediate theatre of our activity. But insofar as we wish to move out into the adult community—and we can never hope to win unless we ultimately do so—we libertarians have a particularly ripe potential in the vast middle class. Here is where we have our “comparative advantage” as compared to the Marxian New Left, and so here is where we should move from our campus focos.

Let me put it this way: at our Libertarian Conference on the Columbus Day weekend, it became evident that both our right-wing and our ultra-leftists were focusing on the wrong problem. The right-wing began the error by charging that, comes the revolution, we libertarians would inevitably lose out to the Marxists, and another State would replace the current monstrosity. In response to this charge, our ultra-lefts proclaimed that what we must do is march out on the barricades with the New Left, earn their respect, and then use this respect to convert the New Left from Marxism to libertarianism. This, I submit, misconceives the problem and the nature of the revolutionary process. The revolutionary process is a huge, complex pattern of activity, with each person and each group concentrating on what it does best—the division of labor is just as important and as valid in revolution in any other sphere of activity. Our objective should not be to convert the Weathermen or the Panthers—probably a hopeless task, and less than crucial in any case. Our objective should be to act where we have a comparative advantage—with the middle class. Put it this way: suppose that it came to a revolutionary crunch, and somehow the mass of the middle-class found themselves forced to choose between us and the Marxists, us and the Weathermen. Which of us would they choose? I don’t think there is any question about the answer. They would choose us, because we stand for freedom and for the rights of private property.

So we don’t have to have an inferiority complex relative to the Marxian New Left. In the long run, our attraction for the middle-class masses is infinitely greater than theirs. So let us pursue the division of labor within the revolutionary process. Let the Weathermen or the Panthers charge the police or try to storm the Department of Justice building. Let us cheer them on as they do battle with the U.S. State Leviathan. But let us not confuse cheering for them with our own strategic and tactical needs. Let us do what we can do best, which is to spread the message and the actions of freedom, and of radical defense of property rights, to the middle-class masses who are potentially our allies and supporters. If we do so, then we won’t have to worry about who will win out in the final result.

For years I have advocated an alliance between libertarians and SDS, but many people have misinterpreted the meaning of such an alliance. I meant, first of all, that when SDS battles the State, it is morally incumbent upon us to support and cheer SDS on, but this does not mean that we should be participating in these actions. Again—the division of labor. (In the same way, we should cheer on the Biafrans as they battle for their freedom against the massed might of the Nigerian State—but that doesn’t mean that it somehow our duty to rush out there and participate in the war.) Secondly, SDS was, in those days, the only revolutionary movement going, it was itself instinctively libertarian, and the only way that our tiny handful of pure libertarians could act to change the world was to orient ourselves to SDS. But now all that is changed: SDS, in the past year, has become largely Stalinoid and is rapidly disintegrating, and the pure libertarian movement has been growing by great leaps and bounds. In this situation, our best strategy is not to join SDS but to develop our own libertarian organizations, on campus and in the adult world, to recruit new pure cadre and to attract the scores of thousands of radical and instinctively libertarian kids who are properly disgusted with the disintegrating SDS and are looking for a place to go. We can provide that ideological and activist home. This is our historic opportunity, and we would be derelict in not taking advantage of this ripe potential for rapid growth.

But if we must orient to the middle-class as our long-range strategy, then this means that many of us must give up much of the petty and irrelevant nonsense that is wrapped up in today’s “cultural revolution”—a “revolution” that can never do anything but totally alienate the middle-class. It is too bad that the middle-class is silly enough to place any importance whatever on the fripperies of hair, life-style, etc. But as long as they do, it is criminal negligence to toss away opportunities to influence them in order to cling to the dubious benefits of the drug-rock culture. If millions of kids could go “Clean for Gene” in 1968, isn’t it infinitely more important to go “Clean for Anarchy”?

“Everything I see about me is sowing the seeds of a revolution that is inevitable, though 1 shall not have the pleasure of seeing it. The lightning is so close at hand that it will strike at the first chance, and then there will be a pretty uproar. The young are fortunate, for they will see fine things.”

— Voltair, 1764

FDP:

NEOLIBERALS IN GERMAN POLITICS

West German President Gustav Heinemann, following this fall’s election, called on Social Democratic Party leader Willy Brandt to become chancellor and Free Democratic Party leader Walter Scheel to become foreign minister in a new cabinet. This coalition’s domestic program is centered upon the reduction of taxes for the white collar and blue collar middle classes, civilian control over the military, and increased individual freedoms. In foreign affairs, they propose permanent good relations with the Soviet Union based upon West Germany’s recognition of the “inviolability of the borders and demarcation lines” in Europe, including the border between East and West Germany, de facto recognition of the East German government through a general treaty, and diplomatic recognition to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. This would mean a renunciation of the Hallstein Doctrine whereby West Germany withdrew diplomatic relations from any country recognizing East Germany; now many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America will be likely to recognize East Germany. Meanwhile, West Germany will be able to improve its trading position in East European countries which have long had relations with the U.S., England and France. The Free Democratic Party (FDP) controlling the foreign ministry will give the impetus to this East Bloc diplomatic policy.

The FDP’s policies have been characterized as the “traditions of libertarianism and economic neoliberalism”. It is the heir of the radical individualism of Locke and the rationalism of the French Revolution. Rooted in the values of education and independent property, FDP has been the party of creativity and rebellion. It came into existence after World War II when there was a widespread belief that radical liberalism was outmoded and must disappear before the conservatives’ militarism, clericalism, and authoritarianism or the socialists’ manipulation, repressive tolerance, and exploitation. But, FDP challenged the post-war world with the radical economics of the Austrian School of Mises and Hayek against the Christian Democratic (CDU) and Social Democratic (SPD) parties. When Konrad Adenauer organized the CDU his 1947 program called for nationalization of industry. But, the early necessity for CDU to form a coalition with FDP forced the laissez-faire economist Ludwig Erhard up on the U.S. and Adenauer in 1948 as post-war economic coordinator. Since Erhard belonged to the CDU it was that party and not FDP which gained popular credit for Erhard’s rigorous monetary policies. When the West German government was formed, FDP leader Prof. Theodor Heuss became president, and FDP assumed the justice and interior (police) ministries to keep watch that civil liberties were not violated by the state.

FDP’s disenchantment with CDU came from Adenauer’s pro-U.S. foreign policy. Germans were not enamoured of the U.S. after the brutality they had suffered during the war (cf. Veale, Advance to Barbarism) and during occupation (cf. Salomon, Fragebogen, which was the most widely read post-war German book). Adenauer was viewed as betraying Germany’s historic role of balancing East and West, both during the nineteenth century and the inter-war period. FDP challenged the re-militarization of Germany by the U.S. and led the battle alongside the SPD for reunion of the Saarland Germans when Adenauer sought to sacrifice them to France to gain approval for German re-militarization.

By the mid-1950’s FDP’s demands fox diplomatic relations, with the Soviet Union, trade with East Europe and a neutralist foreign policy pointed to an end to the coalition with the CDU. Extra-parliamentary protest in the streets against U.S. dominated foreign policy influenced the FDP and SPD in parliament into opposition. This street protest was led by now president Heinemann who had resigned from Adenauer’s cabinet and party in 1950 over CDU militarism. As a leading Protestant and anti-collectivist, Heinemann led a campaign for neutralism, and later joined the SPD to agitate for his principles.

In 1957 Adenauer split the FDP, absorbing its cabinet members into CDU while the majority of FDP went into parliamentary opposition. From that date CDU leaders have sought to abolish the proportional representation electoral law in order to destroy the FDP. Dr. Thomas Dehler became FDP chairman and opened party posts to the “Young Rebels” who sought coalition with SPD, who were FDP partners in several state governments. These angry young men rejected the “end of ideology” concept of the 1950’s and replaced “practical” objectives with a totally ideological commitment summarized as “Repeal laws, bureaucracy, and taxation.” They represented the same intellectual ferment which produced the New Left in England and America. The “Young Rebels” established the magazine Liberal and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for radical education. The “Young Rebels”-FDP alliances with SPD in state governments obviously required a broader agreement than opposition to NATO and U.S. foreign policy, or support for civil liberties. Along with the. FDP, SPD reacted to the feudal, corporatist, Christian socialism of CDU; SPD denounced economic planning in its new program: “Competition and the freedom of initiative of the entrepreneur are important elements of the SPD economic policy.” It further declared: “We Social Democrats demand a free economic development, free competition and private property conscious of its responsibilities to the general good.” Thereafter, SPD often supported Erhard when the statists of the CDU deserted his laissez-faire programs.

Opposition to Erhard in CDU was centered among the Christian trade unionists and major business interests. In 1959 when President Heuss’ term ended, Adenauer was persuaded to accept the presidency until he realized that Erhard was the popular choice to succeed him as chancellor. Adenauer then tried unsuccessfully to force Erhard to become president. Thereafter, FDP campaigned for the retirement of Adenauer and the appointment of Erhard as chancellor. In 1961 that issue gave FDP its highest vote depriving CDU of a majority in Parliament. A CDU-FDF coalition was based on Adenauer’s retirement.

The coalition temporarily split in October 1962 in the Spiegel affair. That magazine, which had the closest ties to FDP, was closed by government police and its editors imprisoned on charges that they had earlier printed information critical of NATO military policy. This suppression occurred in the same week that followed Kennedy’s launching of the Cuban crisis about the editors were known to be critical. Amidst student demonstrations against a police state, FDP ministers resigned and returned only on the dismissal of the guilty party, defense minister Franz Josef Strauss. Adenauer was forced to set his own resignation for mid-1963 when SPD threatened to join FDP in a coalition headed by Erhard. Erhard became chancellor in 1963 in a coalition with FDP. This coalition was successful in the 1965 national elections. But, when Erhard was pressured by the U.S. in 1966 to impose tax increases to pay U.S. occupation army costs to offset the expenses of the Vietnam war, FDP voted against the taxes and Erhard resigned. The new CDU chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, restored Strauss (a supporter of U.S. war in Vietnam) to the cabinet. To FDP, coalition was impossible with anyone like Kiesinger who had declared: “the question these days is not one of the freedom of the individual vis-à-vis the state, but vice versa, a question of how to defend the authority of the state against an unbridled, anarchic freedom.”

Thereafter, FDP, under the chairmanship of Walter Scheel, used its opposition role to champion the right of protest of German youth and citizens’ rights against the state. In the spring of 1969 FDP joined with SPD to elect Heinemann as West German president in preparation for a joint campaign against Kiesinger in the fall elections. The authoritarianism of Kiesinger, Strauss and the CDU were repudiated by the voters.

— Leonard P. Liggio

ATTENTION, LIBERTARIANS

Many readers of the Libertarian Forum have expressed interest in finding other libertarians near them. Therefore, early next year, the Forum will begin to publish the names and addresses of people who would like to be contacted by other readers of the Libertarian Forum. If you’d like your name to be included, please fill out the coupon on the back of this notice.

A YAF Conversion

Many of us have known Ralph Fucetola III, until recently state chairman of New Jersey YAF and member of the Libertarian Caucus, as an extreme right-winger, and a warmongering and red-baiting “libertarian”. From a recent letter of Fucetola’s to the New Left newsletter Hard Times (Oct. 20-27), it appears that Ralph has seen the light. He writes that he was the one who originally introduced Don Meinshausen (HUAC agent in SDS who later recanted publicly) to Herb Romerstein, long-time HUAC operative and anti-Communist “expert” on youth movements. Ralph adds: “In return, Don introduced me and the rest of the almost-libertarian right to what was happening to our generation. Now it’s three months later, the right is splitting, “anarchy” is the wave of the future. With Don’s—and Karl Hess’s—help we learned the quasi-fascist nature of much of the conservative movement; we learned that we have a role in the Movement, that the state can be stopped, that freedom can be won.” Great, Ralph. May your example be followed by many others. There is more joy in Heaven . . .

Recommended Reading

RAMPARTS, November 1969. With former editors Scheer and Hinckle out, Ramparts is better than ever. Particularly good are: J. Goulden and M. Singer, “Dial-A-Bomb: AT&T and ABM”, an excellent dissection of the giant monopoly AT&T’s political clout in American’s government-industrial complex (and note the revelations about the exploitative super-proci
exploitative super-profits made from defense sub-contracting); Sol Stern’s “Canyon: A Troubled Paradise”, about the persecution of the private property of hippieish Canyon, California by all conceivable agencies of local government; and Earl Shorris’ dissection of the new Social-Democrat idol of the right-wing, “Hayakawa in Thought and Action”.

Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States (Princeton University Press). This huge, sprawling (1,005 pages) and expensive book is a thorough, definitive history of religious and consistent pacifism before the Civil War. Much material on such great people and individualist anarchists as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Clarke Wright.

Michael A. Heilperin, Aspects of the Pathology of Money (London: Michael Joseph), $9.50. Professor Heilperin, a student of Ludwig von Mises, is one of the very few economists who still favor a return to the gold standard. This is a collection of his valuable monetary essays ranging over four decades.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action (Cambridge University Press), $7.50. A new translation of this little classic, one of the best defenses of laissez-faire in political philosophy. This book influenced Mill’s On Liberty, and is considerably better than Mill’s compromising work.

Corinne Jacker, The Black Flag of Anarchy: Anti-statism in the United States (Charles Scribner’s Sons), $4.50. A pleasant, though superficial, little book which, however, serves as a useful introduction to the history of American anarchism. For one thing, it is the only history of American anarchism now in print.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XVII

December 1, 1969

35¢

The Anti-War Movement

October and November saw the outpouring of the most massive opposition movement in the long, black history of the government of the United States. In the October Moratorium literally millions of Americans demonstrated in every village and hamlet in the land. In November, nearly a million took the trouble to travel to Washington and San Francisco for a weekend of demonstration. In a country long inured to “backing the President” in any foreign crisis, this determined and ever growing mass movement against the war is a truly remarkable phenomenon. Who among us, ten, five years ago, could have predicted that millions of Americans would raise their voices and bring their persons to the point of total opposition to an American war effort?

Too many libertarians make various “domestic” questions: the census, taxation, neighborhood control, the central cutting edge of their anti-state concerns. As vitally important as these issues are, they pale into insignificance beside the vital importance of the war and its creator, American imperialism. It is war, losing, perpetual, stalemated war, that will ultimately bring down the American Leviathan. If we look at all the successful revolutions of this century, all of them (with the exception of the Cuban in a very small country) were made possible by a losing or a stalemated war into which the State had brought the country. The stage for the Russian Revolution was set by a disastrous and losing war fomented by the Russian Empire. The Chinese Revolution was made possible by Chiang’s lengthy war against the Japanese. Even the French Revolution of 1789 was the consequence of heavy war debts incurred by the French State. Nothing brings about a revolutionary crisis situation—and no revolutions can occur without such crises—so completely as a “no-win” war; nothing so starkly reveals the inadequacy of the existing State to its citizenry. A losing war is more powerful than decades of patient education in the vital task of demystifying and desanctifying the State apparatus in the eyes of its subject population.

America truly has a bear by the tail in Vietnam. Vietnam is not simply an unfortunate blunder, a mistake that can be promptly rectified. Vietnam is part and parcel of the entire concept of U.S. foreign policy since World War II (in many ways since Woodrow Wilson). For the whole thrust of that policy is to create and preserve American politico-economic domination of the world, or at the very least to preserve that degree of world domination which she already has. This means an American policy of world-wide counterrevolution: the suppression of revolutionary and national liberation movements throughout the “Third World”. Until Vietnam, America was able to exercise its control through puppet and client states, and therefore suffered only a minimal drain on its manpower and financial resources. But in Vietnam this policy was shattered forever on the rock of people’s guerrilla war, a war backed to the hilt by virtually the entire population of Vietnam, North and South. Contrary to much liberal opinion, the Vietnamese war is not a civil war—either between North and South or between different factions within the South. It is a war fought by imperial America and a few of its puppets in Saigon against the liberation movement of the Vietnamese people. It is therefore a war which America cannot win.

The massacre at Song My is not a question of a few battle-crazed soldiers becoming trigger-happy. Such massacres are inherent in the American war effort, and must needs occur time and time again. They have to be a systematic part of the American effort because that effort consists of attempting to use our superior firepower to suppress the independence and the liberation of an entire people. In that sense, the entire population is “VC”, and therefore our war inevitably consists of deliberate slaughter of that huge “enemy”. There is only one way to stop the American massacre policy: to get America the hell out of Vietnam.

Despite the common mythology, President Nixon doesn’t “want peace”—except, of course, the peace of death to the instincts for freedom of the people of Vietnam. For in a way not mentioned by the Establishment, the “domino theory” is correct. It is correct not in the sense that mythical Chinese will “aggress” against more countries in Asia; but in the sense that a clear-cut victory of the Vietnamese people against the American oppressors will give great heart to similar victims of American imperialism throughout the Third World. More liberation struggles will then erupt in Asia and Latin America, and we will have “many Vietnams”. American imperialism will result in a series of permanent stalemate wars, and thereby Death to Leviathan.

The conflict between the dove-moderates and the hawks is but one consequence of the losing Vietnam war. What the Marxists call “the sober circles of American imperialism”—the Harrimans, the Cliffords, etc., seeing the disastrous mess in Vietnam, are now willing to “cut and run”, to take their stand for American imperialism elsewhere—in what would hopefully be more favorable terrain. The right-wingers, as ever motivated by their frenzied and “principled” desire to crush all opposition everywhere without quarter, are determined to save every single domino, come what may.

It is increasingly clear that the Nixon Administration is a right-wing administration. Richard Nixon is an unprincipled and pragmatic opportunist on all conceivable questions but one: “anti-Communism”, that is world counterrevolution. Hence the negotiations at Paris, never very advanced, are moving rapidly backward, and hence the phoniness of the troop withdrawals. I am willing to make the flat prediction that the war in Vietnam will continue for the duration of the Nixon Administration, because the President, cast in the mold of 1940’s anti-Communism, is incapable of liberal co-optation, is incapable of a graceful “cut and run” pullout.

Therefore, the war will go on and on. And therefore, “the movement” is, and will continue to be for many years, primarily an anti-war movement. From May 1968 until the end of that year, virtually the entire Left was duped by the Paris negotiations into thinking that the war was over; then for many months, the Left was paralyzed by the view that Nixon would keep his promises and end the war shortly. Now all that is over. The growth of the anti-war movement is all the more remarkable because it has only been alive for a few months, after a lapse of a year and a half.

And so the renascent anti-war movement builds and builds, surge after mighty surge, month after month. The “silent majority”, a concept based on a few thousand hack Republican telegrams to the White House, pales beside the many vociferous millions, whose number and whose radicalism escalates every week that the war drags on. Every month’s Moratorium will build the pressure, will escalate slowly but surely in its massive pressure on the government, and will continue to radicalize countless millions of middle-class liberals. Yesterday it was “stop the bombing”; today it is “immediate withdrawal”; tomorrow it will be support for the NLF and/or mass civil disobedience, and/or a tax strike or a general strike. The endless war will be the open sluice-gate for massive radicalization.

In the face of this great upsurge, the Nixon Administration has made clear its bursting desire to move over into open fascism—to all-out repression of anti-war dissent. The evidence has been clear for several weeks: Spiro Agnew’s shift from unconscious clown to conscious fascist threatener of the press and the media; Attorney-General Mitchell’s incredible assertion that Agnew was too soft on the traitorous dissenters; Deputy Attorney-General Kleindienst’s move to attempt to indict the life-long pacifist David Dellinger for “incitement to violence”; White House aide Kevin Phillips’ call for the “willingness to go out and crack skulls”. The right-wing Administration is obviously straining at the leash, bursting to give vent to the typical rightist desire to crush and stomp on all opposition.

Only one thing is restraining the Administration from moving into open fascism: the knowledge that the cardinal point of the liberal credo is at least the facade of civil liberties. This facade of freedom to dissent is vital to the whole system and ideology of corporate liberalism; this is its central distinction from open dictatorship. And both conservatives and liberals know that if all-out repression comes, it will have to be far worse than in the old McCarthy-HUAC era of the 1940’s and 1950’s. For the reason why the corporate liberals went along with this repression, or did not fight it too strongly, is that the repression was carefully confined to Communist party members and “Communist fronts”. The witch-hunters of those days always claimed to be perfectly content with “heretics” and dissenters; it was not their ideas or their active opposition that concerned them, went the line, but the fact that these were “transmission belts” for the “international Communist conspiracy” through “Communist fronts” certified by the Attorney-General or other sources. Liberals could then step aside and be unconcerned with a narrowly pin-pointed repression. But as even the Department of Justice knows by now, there are no Communist fronts any longer; no one can point to Mr. X’s membership in so-and-so many front groups. Any repression will have to be directed against any and all members of the opposition, which could include liberals as well as anyone else.

Therefore, if Nixon-Agnew attempt open fascism, the result will be a fantastic shift leftward of all liberals everywhere. Even the austere New York Times will be ready to man the barricades. Open fascism could well generate a real revolutionary crisis in the United States.

Our present situation, then, is fraught with enormous opportunities. The prognosis is that, since the war will go on, the anti-war movement will spread and intensify; and if Nixon unleashes his right-wing instincts for all-out repression, he could generate a successful revolution. Only one thing could spoil this picture: if the Administration succeeds in maneuvering the anti-war movement into precipitate violence, and then making that violence an excuse for moving into open fascism. If the movement gives Nixon that excuse, then it would tragically polarize the mass of middle-class liberals rightward instead of leftward, and thus so isolate itself that Nixon could stomp on the radicals without generating liberal resistance. In the coming period, then, it becomes especially important for radicals in the anti-war movement to avoid as the plague any stigma of violence, which would reverse the process of radicalizing the liberal masses, and give Nixon the opportunity to move unopposed into open fascism. Great success is in the air for the anti-war movement; let us not kick it away in futile ultra-left adventures.

A Letter To Moloch

For some time past I have been telling others that the best way to kill a beast is to starve him to death, to withhold from him that particular type of nourishment which keeps him alive, well and powerful. Moloch thrives on human sacrifice; he demands a sizable portion of human productivity in the form of tax dollars which he converts into weapons of murder and other tools of coercion to oppress the very people from whom he exacts his nourishment. Since it is hypocritical to incite others to action while doing nothing oneself, I have decided to take a few small actions designed to give Moloch a hunger pang or two.

The first is membership in the War Resisters League by which one agrees to withhold the tax portion of his monthly phone bill, which is largely used to finance the war in Vietnam. Those desiring more information about this project can contact WRL at Room 1025, 5 Beekman Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10038.

The second step is of a “religious” nature. After careful consideration I have decided to become an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, an honor which carries with it broad benefits in the form of tax reductions. Anyone discovering a sudden yen for that old-time religion can write the Universal Life Church, 1766 Poland Rd., Modesto, California 95351, and be ordained just for the asking.

Other measures will include refusal to pay my surtax, sales tax on COD purchases, and any other steps anyone can suggest as a means of bumping Moloch from his pedestal. All suggestions are welcomed and will be held in confidence.

To the list of rallying cries now being raised across the nation by our fellow revolutionaries, I would like to add yet another:

STARVE THE BEAST!

— Jerome Tuccille

The Airline Cartel

As Adam Smith so wisely noted: “People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices.” For many decades the world’s international airlines have met seasonally to act out Smith’s scenario under the auspices of their cartel—the International Air Transport Association. At these meetings the airline representatives would seek to eliminate competition in the vital area of international fare rates. Fixing prices for air travel meant that competition was limited to auxiliary services—the quality of food, the beauty of stewardesses, the supply of magazines and sweets.

But three factors have recently converged to destroy, at least for the moment, the smooth working of the cartel. Within the next year, 27 airlines will be receiving the first of some 183 Boeing 747 jumbo jets now on order. These carriers are designed to accommodate 350 to 500 passengers and demand a very rapid rise in the number of overseas passengers if they are to be economically profitable. But the whole thrust of the IATA rate policy has been to prefer high fares to an expanded market. Now the market must be expanded as the jumbo jet enters the scene.

Secondly, a number of airline executives have been urging drastic fare reductions, coupled with redirecting merchandising efforts toward creating a mass market for offseason overseas travel. But others have preferred to base their off-season rates on the small but steady stream of businessmen customers who must travel during the offseason whatever the fare. And so the regular fares have remained high and the passenger traffic low, the summer traffic paying for the underutilized winter flights. This dispute over merchandising has been heightened by the desire of certain European countries to expand their tourist season to increase regular year-round employment and develop their winter resort facilities. Advertising has begun to push ski holidays in the Alps, theatre holidays in London, winter music and art festivals in Paris, Amsterdam and Rome.

Lastly, the various governmental bodies which supervise the airlines have, under the pressures of conflicting national interest groups, been less able to coordinate their policies to maintain the cartel and its rate schedules. The dam finally broke when on Sept. 19, Alitalia announced that, since the American CAB had failed to approve, except on a temporary basis, the rate schedule agreed upon at the IATA conference in Dallas, Alitalia was breaking the cartel agreement and cutting its economy fare for New York-Rome round trip off-season flights from $573 to $299 for a minimum of 22 days’ stay abroad. Pan American and the other lines soon announced that they would meet the Alitalia rates. Fares to all points in Europe dropped proportionately, and some lines like Iberian offered free additional flights to Stockholm, Paris and other cities for passengers buying an Iberian flight to Madrid. The immediate effect of the fare reduction was a dramatic jump in sales and passenger loads. The stimulation of the free market has brought new interest in off-season travel and good bargains for vacation seekers. But the big question remains whether the IATA will be able to put the lid on again. A meeting is due to be held in Caracas to establish the fares for the summer of 1970. If the proponents of competition have their way, no such agreement will be made, and the international cartel will be smashed. As Paul Friedlander put it in the N.Y. Times (11/16/69), “if the lesson holds, and the industry can sweep away its 50 year old IATA-dominated tradition of restrictive pricing, selling and treatment of the customer, it might give the spirit of competition an opportunity to build new markets for the airlines, expanding the present limited market to a genuine mass market able to pay the prevailing air fares and willing to fill all the new seats in the brave new airplanes about to come competitively into aviation’s, marketplace.” Or as Adam Smith put it, they must recognize that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of production”.

Note: The N.Y. Times (11/26/69) reports that the IATA meeting in Caracas has tentatively agreed upon a new uniform trans-Atlantic rate schedule which, while reducing fares somewhat from the old IATA rates, would eliminate competition among the airlines in the area of individual and group ticket prices. How long the monopoly can maintain itself is still open to question, since the factors contributing to its breakdown still exist.

— J. R. P.

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A Leftist Looks At YAF

The circus came to town in St. Louis over Labor Day weekend, and the freaks on display were truly an entertaining bunch. John MacKay and Randy Teague were co-ringmasters, making sure that everything” came off just as they had planned. Main attractions included William F. Buckley, Jr., doing his famous word game act. He can cut another notch in his pencil for having won over yet another audience without having used one iota of logic in his entire speech. Also on hand were Fulton Lewis III and Buz Lukens, with Buz stealing the show with some of the most hate-filled, nonsensical demagoguery we have heard in a long time. Keep it up, Buz, we war lovers are behind you all the way! Among the most touching scenes of the show was provided by Officer McClintock of the Pueblo. Most of the audience pitied him because of what he had been through and because the United States government refused to annihilate his captors. A small clique of true libertarians also pitied him, because they couldn’t believe that anyone could be so stupid as to go through what he went through and still come out of it with the same narrow-minded Weltanschauung that he had been fed originally by U.S. propagandists. And what circus would be complete without a clown? On hand to keep everyone in high spirits was that old stand-by, Al Capp. Al was in his usual form, regaling all with such insightful witticisms as the one about how it’s better to be in a rice paddy with the enemy in your cross-hair than to be in college. With rib-ticklers like that, it is no wonder he is the darling of the right.

So if one went to St. Louis for entertainment, one was sure to find satisfaction. The trouble is, is that the above named performers and the bulk of their audience were not simply making idle jests about the desirability of stamping out freedom and self-determination around the world, but were actually serious in their threats and fulminations. The leaders of this venomous gang call themselves “traditionalists”, or “trads”. But with a program like theirs, one wonders what tradition they referring to. Certainly no organization which espouses collective massacre can claim any attachment to a tradition of individual liberty. No organization so adoring of the destructive powers of government can say the philosophy of laissez-faire is part of their tradition. What tradition can there be for an organization which descries the growth of state power one minute, and calls for a greater “defense” budget the next? What philosophy of yesteryear hailed the freedom of the individual to determine his own life as a paramount good, and still insisted that he could not break a law even if obeying meant he became a slave to the government’s will? Even Thomas Hobbes had the generosity to allow for the individual’s self-defense in the face of government aggression. Who, then, can these trads call their intellectual ancestors? Looking back over the history of man, there is only one theory which can be found that is consistent with the ideas of these trads: the theory of the fascist, totalitarian state.

YAF is a morass of contradictions. It wants to be radical but it doesn’t want to break the law. It claims to be fighting for democracy, yet its own internal policy is dictated by a dogma which allows for democratic process only when the majority decision of the voters agrees with the policy of the National Board. YAF board members seem to think that democracy consists of purging all dissenting voices within the organization. The most glaring contradiction in YAF is, of course, the name itself. If “young” means having a senile, illogical, hate-filled mind encased in a young body, then the “Y” in YAF makes sense. If “American” means love of aggressive imperialism abroad and violent repression at home, then the “A” in YAF fits. And if “freedom” means enslavement to arbitrary rule, then the “F” in YAF is comprehensible. I, however, do not share their definition of these terms. Nor will the bulk of American youth be able to make much sense of them. As a youth movement, YAF is hopelessly out of step. YAFers march more with Metternich than Marcuse. Intelligent American youths will be found joining SDS, the RLA, SLAM, the Panthers, or some other such militant anti-government force. Even militant right-wingers with essentially the same viewpoint as YAF will shun it because of YAF’s aversion to action. YAF will continue to exist, though, as a showplace where conservative American businessmen can go to reaffirm their faith in a fascist future for America. That is all that YAF ever really was—or will be.

— John Hogen

Famous Last Words

“Ultra-left adventurism is fun.”

— A libertarian militant

Recommended Reading

Milton Kotler, Neighborhood Government (Bobbs-Merrill, hard cover and paper). Brief work on neighborhoods vs. the expanding central city. Particularly valuable is the historical discussion of the “imperialist” way in which the central cities in the U.S. have seized control over the outlying neighborhoods, very often through the state legislatures and without the neighborhoods’ consent. (Also see Karl Hess’s review of the Kotler book in the December Ramparts.)

Murray N. Rothbard, “Review of J. Weinstein’s The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918”, Ramparts, December 1969. Review of a book that ranks with Gabriel Kolko’s in revealing how our present interventionist, Mixed Economy, was put in by Big Business for purposes of monopolization.

I. F. Stone, The Hidden Theory of the Korean War (Monthly Review Press), $7.50. It is good to have this great Revisionist work on the Korean War back in print (originally published in 1952). Stone shows conclusively that the U.S. was responsible for the war. For you anarcho-rightists still bamboozled by Cold War myths, read it!

Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins 1763-1797 (University of North Carolina Press). Brilliant, definitive, neo-Beardian work on the political struggles over the Constitution and in the 1790’s in New York. One of the best books on the whole period.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. I, NO. XVIII

December 15, 1969

35¢

Notes On Repression

I – JUDICIAL FASCISM

As the Nixon Administration bursts at the seams in its eagerness to move into all-out repression of dissent, some crucial implications of its current actions have gone largely unnoticed. Take, for example, the notorious “Conspiracy” trial of the Chicago 8. Many people have remarked that the law itself, which appropriately was passed by Congress as a “civil rights” measure, is unconstitutional, since it outlaws the crossing of state lines with “intent” to “incite” to riot, all of which vagueness clearly violates the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.

Many more people have noted the unbelievable actions of Judge Julius Hoffman, who has made a continuing mockery of any meaningful principles of justice. Thus, Hoffman sent marshals across the continent in order to arrest two lawyers and drag them to Chicago as prisoners, for the sole “crime” of withdrawing from the case by telegram instead of in person. The judge proceeded to force Panther leader, Bobby Seale, to be represented by William Kunstler, even though Seale refused Kunstler’s aid and in lieu of his ailing lawyer Charles Garry, preferred to defend his own case. Not only did Judge Hoffman force Seale to be defended by a lawyer not of his own choice, but Kunstler himself didn’t want to defend Seale against the latter’s wishes. What kind of a “free country” is it when a man is forced to accept an unwanted lawyer? Then, when Bobby Seale proceeded to defend his case anyway, Judge Hoffman had Seale gagged and shackled in court, to form a sight strongly reminiscent of Nazi or Soviet “justice”. Finally, when Seale tried to escape his bondage and protest his treatment, Judge Hoffman quickly sentenced the prisoner to an unprecedented four years in jail for “contempt of court”.

The point for libertarians to focus on is not the particular despotism of Judge Hoffman, but the evil of the system itself, the American legal and judicial system, that establishes federal judges as petty despots, free to dictate to people at will and virtually unchallenged. The judge is absolute ruler in his court, in practice really not subject to higher judicial review. Furthermore, the power to declare guilty and sentence someone for contempt of court totally violates the basic legal rule of separation between prosecutor and judge. The judge makes the charge of contempt against the defendant. The judge then “hears” his own case as he sees fit, and then the judge, without benefit of jury trial, declares the defendant guilty and pronounces sentence. There is no excuse for this kind of judicial proceedings, and it is high time that libertarians, always alive to the evils of tyranny in the moral and economic spheres, turn their attention to the legal field as well. Libertarian law must be a law shorn of all elements of tyranny and aggression against those not yet proven to be criminal invaders of the person and just property of another man. Judicial despotism is a good place to begin.

II – RADIO-TV

Vice President Agnew’s ugly attacks against the news media, with their clear threats of censorship and their danger to the freedom of the press, have obscured the fact that the news media, and especially radio and television, are closely tied in with the Establishment, with the powers-that-be. Any one of independent mind has long discovered that fact about the American media. Agnew’s seemingly radical attack on the media is a phony, a mere reflection of the deep split, especially over Vietnam, between the two major factions of the ruling class: the sophisticated corporate liberals and the relatively Neanderthal conservatives. Agnew did not care to attack the vast majority of the nation’s newspapers, which are fiercely conservative; instead, he centered his ire on the two bastions of Eastern corporate liberalism: the New York Times and the Washington Post. The networks, which are solidly corporate liberal, came in for a far more roundhouse treatment.

Agnew’s proto-fascist assault should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the networks are monopolistic, and also that virtually no one, certainly not Agnew, has zeroed in on the roots and essence of this monopoly. The original sin came in 1927, when Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover put through the Radio Act of 1927 which nationalized the ownership of air waves (and television channels); from then on, radio frequencies and TV channels continued to be owned by the federal government, which granted licenses to use these frequencies and channels, and set up a Federal Communications Commission to regulate their use. The result could scarcely have been other than censorship and monopoly. As Professor Coase writes: “The situation in the American broadcasting industry is not essentially different in character from that which could be found if a commission appointed by the federal government had the task of selecting those who were to be allowed to publish newspapers and periodicals in each city, town, and village of the United States.” (Ronald H. Coase, “The Federal Communications Commission,” The Journal of Law and Economics, October, 1959, p. 7). In particular, the networks have been able to use the FCC as their tool in outlawing the use of pay-TV, a potentially powerful competitor to the present system of advertiser-paid television.

Radio and television frequencies were, when first discovered, analogous to the opening up of a new Continent. They should have been allocated just as the land of the American Continent was in the main allocated: on the libertarian, homesteading principle of total private ownership to the first user. Radio and TV frequencies should be private just as land is private; only thus can the airwaves escape the blight of corporate-governmental monopoly. The homesteading principle applies equally to both cases.

There are two common arguments against private property in airwaves. One is that different radio and TV stations would be able to interfere and drown out each other’s signals, thus causing “chaos”. This ignores the crucial historical fact that the American common-law courts were, in the 1920’s, working out the perfectly sound doctrine that one station’s interference with a previous station’s signal is an invasion of property rights, and can be prevented on that basis. Thus, as Coase says, “In the case of Tribune Co. v. Oak Leaves Broadcasting Station [Circuit Court, Cook County, Illinois, 1926] . . . it was held that the operator of an existing station had a sufficient property right, acquired by priority, to enjoin a newcomer from using a frequency so as to cause any material interference.” (Coase, p. 31n.) Hoover and other statist-monopolists, knowing this full well, rushed through the Radio Act of 1927 so as to prevent the development of competition and private property rights in the airwaves. As Professor Milton Friedman writes in an excellent and lucid article on the subject, “The owners of these rights [in the airwaves] would have private property in them, which they would protect from trespass as you and I protect our land from trespass, through the courts. They could buy and sell the rights, subdivide them, recombine them, as you and I do with our land. They would have the full protection of the Bill of Rights just as the press now does.” (Milton Friedman, “How to Free TV”, Newsweek, Dec. 1, 1969, p. 82).

The second popular argument against private property in the airwaves is that air frequencies are “limited” in supply. Such an argument can only stem from profound economic ignorance. All resources, all goods are “limited”: that is why they are owned in the first place, and that is why they command a price on the market. If a good were unlimited—as, say, clean air in the days before pollution—there would be no question of owning it or pricing it, since the good would be superabundant in relation to human desires. It is precisely goods that are limited in supply that must be owned by someone—whether by private persons or government—and thereby allocated to their most productive uses through the price system. Iron mines are limited; land is limited; labor is limited; raw materials are limited; capital goods are limited; Rembrandts are limited. Must all these be nationalized therefore?

Now that government has preempted and retained its “domain” over the airwaves, the precise path of getting from nationalized to private airwaves is far less important, than getting rid of the present abomination. There are two cogent alternatives: one is the Coase-Friedman plan of the FCC’s selling the existing frequencies to the highest bidders. The trouble with this is that the money for the sale goes to an illegitimate recipient: the federal government. The other path is more in accord with homesteading principles: simply granting private property in fee simple to the existing stations. In either case, the FCC would then go promptly go out of existence. Governmental monopolizing of the airwaves would at last be at an end.

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

Cults And Criticisms

One of the most recondite of Christian heresies is that of stercoranism in which proponents argue to the death over whether the sacred elements of the communion wafer are retained forever in the body or whether they are expelled excretally. This and all other such heresies gained headway, and popularity, rather long after Christianity had emerged as a revolutionary doctrine. In its revolutionary phase, Christianity had emerged as a revolutionary doctrine. In its revolutionary phase, Christianity split no such hairs. It was a thunderous on-my-side-or-against-me sort of thing and, in the houses on either side of that single division there were, as one well known Christian put it, “many rooms”.

In the existential struggle between liberty and authority there also are many rooms, indeed, a thousand flowers bloom on either side of the dividing line.

My own summary of the matter is known as The Oink Principle. It states that if it oinks it is your enemy. If it does not oink it may not be your best friend but it is, at least, not your enemy.

I have consulted lately with my very dear friend, Murray Rothbard, on this matter and he tells me that although he will continue to criticize my, and others’, left wing adventurism, that he has not detected a single oink from my room. I have not, in turn, heard any such sound from his.

There are others, however, who may take Murray’s criticisms as some sort of anathema being pronounced upon them. They may mistake simple criticism for lethal exclusionism. This strikes me as a needless reaction. There are many anarchists who hold, for instance, that not even God is god. Why should they make the mistake of thinking that Rothbard is? He is a comrade, not a deity; a brilliant economist, not a burning bush; a revolutionary theorist, not an executioner.

It is clear by my actions, I am sure, that I do not agree with a substantial portion of Murray’s recent criticism. I even disagree with the emphasis upon criticism itself which seems to have overtaken him. I would prefer, and hopefully expect, that his talents would be turned more to analysis of the political situation generally rather than to the personalities of our part of it in particular. Having even said that, however, I must admit that his latest criticisms of left wing adventurism, which did contain pointed comments about many of us, also contained a thoughtful commentary upon the possibilities of politicizing liberals. I am, as a matter of fact, in close and regular contact with several of the other adventurists criticized in Murray’s commentary. Neither they nor I feel personally offended at all by what he had to say.

We simply disagree.

We say, in effect, “Well, that’s Murray.” We expect that, when all is said and done, Murray, similarly, will sigh and say, “Well, that’s them.”

In struggle there must be room for diversity or else what’s a revolution for? But diversity need not mean bitter divisiveness. Let us divide, indeed, from those who do not stand with us against the common enemies—authority, reaction, counter-revolutionism, elitism, the state. Let us divide, indeed, from the pure theory pettifoggers who seek sanctuary from the state in their solipsism, who support imperialism if it is profitable, genocide if it is by Westerners, and injustice if it is legal.

Of course, divide from them. They are on the other side anyway. But Murray, Clean for Anarchy, is not the enemy of those of us who are Dirty for Dope, Hirsute for Hedonism, Rowdy for Revolution, Randy for Rutting, or Pouring Down for the Weather Bureau. He is the critic of those things. Not the enemy of those things.

Parse not every subordinate clause for an offense. Don’t look under every verb for a worm. Look at the heart of the man and not the varicose veins of his occasional prose. Maybe even then there will be those offended or discontented. So be it. Look then away from the single man there and to the single movement everywhere, the movement toward liberty. If we permit any one of us to so dominate our emotions as to defeat our purposes, then we offer to our enemy a nasty little victory on the platter of personality.

I do not believe in the organic reality of the state or of the movement. I do not believe in things of Man that exist apart from Man. Man’s works are done by men’s hands and heads. But I believe in cooperation. I believe in movements of men. I believe in orders of priority in those movements and in that cooperation. And I believe that not one of us is so important, influential, charismatic, or anointed as to form in and of ourselves a movement or even a focus for a movement.

Therefore, to take the criticism of one person, or the resentment of another, as somehow of an order of importance comparable to the movement itself strikes me as crucially bad judgment.

Let those with grievances discuss them, by all means, aggrieved with griper. Let a thousand memos blossom, a hundred thousand affinity groups flower, and let them carp and cavil—and grow.

But let us not mistake any such part for the whole of the movement. One man’s criticism is one man’s suggestions. But let two men’s reactions overcome their other concerns and what should have been a suggestion may well become a psychosis. This is not to say that the persons criticized are most at fault. It is not to say that anyone is at fault. It is to say that when Rothbard rumbles all need not quake and similarly it is to say that Rothbard, rumbling, should realize that for many who feel him as their mentor, it is difficult to resist an over-reaction. Above all it is not to say that the tactics of the movement must not be debated, even if the debate inevitably involves personalities, life styles, etc. Of course there needs to be such debate.

What we need to do is to debate, disagree, decide, go ahead, often following different courses, sometimes with new comrades but not wasting our time just on making points. We want to make a movement, instead; we want to make our history, not feather our nests or feed our egos.

Murray is not the movement. I am not. You are not. We are. Anarchists are not the movement. Communists are not the movement. Utopian socialists or Utopian laissez-faire-ists are not the movement. Revolutionary nationalists are not the movement. Pacifists are not the movement. Retreatists are not the movement. Weathermen are not the movement. Fidel is not. Ho is not. Eldridge is not. Spock is not. Liggio is not. Abbie is not. They are. We are.

Take the Weathermen for just an instance. Some hate what they did. But how could you in all good conscience hate what they are? They are your brothers.

Murray may dislike what many of us do. He may dwell overlong on it and over loud. Is that an exorbitant price to pay, for instance, for his “Anatomy of the State”? I say it’s a bargain.

Similarly, there are many who dislike what he does. But surely they must recognize that Murray cannot put them in jail, steal them blind, censor them, kill them—as can agents of the state.

Finally, if there must be an ongoing debate about decorum among our little band then at least let it be open and even in the pages of this journal. Murray has raised points to which some, obviously, are dying to answer. Let them do it and let them do it promptly and precisely. Inter-personal notes or memos, as I suggested earlier, might be best of all, but mutterings and rumors will not do at all.

Why don’t I write such answers? Because, as Murray knows, I have heard his criticism, respectfully, and I have rejected it for myself alone. My heart truly does belong to the left. And it is an adventure. An adventure in liberty. And not even Clean Murray, I know, really considers that leprosy.

To my comrades: I love you all!

The Military-Industrial-University Complex

As good as it is, there is more to the October Ramparts than Karl Hess’ masterful “Open Letter to Barry Goldwater”. David Horowitz (author, among other works, of The Free World Colossus) has a hardhitting piece on the universities and those controlling influences, the foundations; or, as Horowitz terms the two, “The Sinews of Empire”. The esteemed editor of this newsletter has pointed out time and again how the role of the intellectual in the statist society is to act as apologist for the ruling class. Horowitz graphically demonstrates specifically how the kept intellectual of today’s United States has in fact apologized for, influenced, and helped shape U.S. foreign policy.

At the end of the Second World War, a new discipline, that of International Studies, with its numerous subdivisions of specific area studies, was inaugurated. Horowitz views this new discipline as a major weapon forged by the foundations in order to gain a great deal of control over major universities in support of ruling class interests. It is, after all, necessary for any ruling class to insure the perpetuation of views salutary to its interests, as well as the recruiting of new personnel to carry out these interests in policy roles. Specifically, a rationale for the new U.S. global imperium was needed, and the foundations, mainly through the various new Institutes of International Studies, determined that the universities would come up with same (or at least those key universities which provide “leadership” to the academic community). The institutes soon became devices for insuring that those academicians who held the “correct line” were rewarded, and that those who did not died on the vine. Power in the affected universities shifted to a marked degree from the relevant departments to the new institutes. Advancement was fastest and most lucrative in these new fields. As anyone who understands the market process could have guessed, resources, talent and research went into the newly subsidized areas. But of course only “productive” (productive to the interests of the foundations, i.e., the ruling class) research would be rewarded. Small wonder that dissent is so lacking in the academic world—it literally was starved while establishment intellectuals prospered. Where would a young man in Harvard or Stanford go but where the money, power and prestige lay?

Who were the men who controlled the foundation money which went to universities after the war? To cite an example, the Russian Institute of Columbia, the first of this new breed of academic subdivisions, was first headed by Geroid T. Robinson, who had been head of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, USSR Division. In 1945 the Rockefeller Foundation had made a five-year grant of $1,250,000 for the purpose of setting up the institute. The man who was responsible for the disbursing of this money was one Joseph Willits who, like Robinson, was a member of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations (as were, of course, David, Nelson and John D. Rockefeller). The man who succeeded Robinson in 1951, Philip E. Mosley, was also a member of the CFR, and a former state department officer. Indeed, of the five who headed the institute, only one—Robinson—had had any prior connection with Columbia. Four had been with the OSS or State Department, and three were in the CFR. The new academic discipline had a membership with strange and curious credentials.

In 1948 Columbia received an East Asian Institute from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1949 it was the Carnegie Foundation’s turn to set up a Columbia institute—the European. The cast here was especially interesting. The European Institute was initially headed by Grayson Kirk—Columbia professor, Carnegie Corp. trustee, CFR member, and Mobil Oil Director. Next year Kirk resigned to become Columbia provost, and was succeeded by Schuyler Wallace, CFR member in good standing. The present head is . . . Philip Mosley, the second head of the Russian Institute. This basic pattern was repeated at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. As Horowitz puts it, “Like the Hapsburg Royalty, they like to keep the family small and intimate.”

Anyone who thinks that academic freedom, or its offspring, intellectual honesty, can survive long in an atmosphere as described above is either terribly naive or rather stupid. Pressure for intellectual conformity can be as subtle as the lure of handsome grants. Or it can be as explicit as the guiding directive of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, wherein the purpose of the Institution is described as “. . . to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx—whether Communism, Socialism, economic materialism, or atheism—thus to protect the American way of life from such ideologies, their conspiracies and to reaffirm the validity of the American system.” If in fact communism, socialism and atheism (Does this make the non-theist, Henry Hazlitt, a conspirator in the promulgation of the evil teachings of Karl Marx?) are evil, such an institute is a very poor device for either discovering the evils, or producing effective counter-arguments (as can readily be seen from the Institution’s output). A priori assumptions do not make for objective analysis. A university’s function is not to produce propaganda but the truth. To do anything else is to cease to function as a center of learning. To function consciously as a “protector” is to become a tool of whomever one is protecting. To become a “protector” of, and to “reaffirm the validity of the American system”, is to become a tool of the U.S. corporate state and its global imperium. This is what Stanford has done. This is what most universities have done.

It is especially tragic that conservatives, who have talked so much in the past about the “liberal establishment”, should be so cold towards the findings of such scholars as Horowitz. For what is the “military-industrial-university” complex but the “liberal establishment” writ large? The only difference is that the rather ridiculous assumption of conservatives that men like Roosevelt and Rockefeller were (are) crypto-socialists has been replaced by the reality of their being proto-fascists. Of course the reason for this shift in the thinking of conservatives is quite obvious, as can be seen strikingly in the case of their chief spokesman, Bill Buckley, the man whom Gore Vidal has so charmingly referred to as a “pro-crypto Nazi”. Buckley, the “liberals’ conservative”, has, like so many of his followers, become part of this establishment. Now that conservatives are in power (even if they have to share it with their partners in the welfare/warfare system, the liberals), and have their man, Strom Nixon, in the White House, they want no more anti-establishment talk. Also explained is why conservatives have reacted so strongly against all recent attempts to carry out one of their former lofty ideals—smashing the statist educational power, be it Columbia, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, or whatever.

No, if the New Right has joined the Old Left, and if the Old Right is literally almost dead, then it is clear that libertarians can turn only to the New Left in their opposition to statism. It is not a question of whether they will make good or bad allies, but that the New Left are the only possible allies. Not to ally with them would be to ratify the existing statist oppression, together with its infrastructure (e.g., the universities). Besides, as can be seen from a little study, the New Left has been correct all along on most major issues (e.g., the universities). The New Left is essentially correct in both theory and practice. They are for “Power to the People”. Damn it, Mr. Conservative, whom are you for power to?

— Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.

ATTENTION, LIBERTARIANS

Many readers of the Libertarian Forum have expressed interest in finding other libertarians near them. Therefore, early next year, the Forum will begin to publish the names and addresses of people who would like to be contacted by other readers of the Libertarian Forum. If you’d like your name to be included, please fill out the coupon on the back of this notice.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 1

January 1, 1970

35¢

Anarcho-Communism

Now that the New Left has abandoned its earlier loose, flexible non-ideological stance, two ideologies have been adopted as guiding theoretical positions by New Leftists: Marxism-Stalinism, and anarcho-communism. Marxism-Stalinism has unfortunately conquered SDS, but anarcho-communism has attracted many leftists who are looking for a way out of the bureaucratic and statist tyranny that has marked the Stalinist road. And many libertarians, who are looking for forms of action and for allies in such actions, have become attracted by an anarchist creed which seemingly exalts the voluntary way and calls for the abolition of the coercive State. It is fatal, however, to abandon and lose sight of one’s own principles in the quest for allies in specific tactical actions. Anarcho-communism, both in its original Bakunin-Kropotkin form and its current irrationalist and “post-scarcity” variety, is poles apart from genuine libertarian principle.

If there is one thing, for example, that anarcho-communism hates and reviles more than the State it is the rights of private property; as a matter of fact, the major reason that anarcho-communists oppose the State is because they wrongly believe that it is the creator and protector of private property, and therefore that the only route toward abolition of property is by destruction of the State apparatus. They totally fail to realize that the State has always been the great enemy and invader of the rights of private property. Furthermore, scorning and detesting the free-market, the profit-and-loss economy, private property, and material affluence—all of which are corollaries of each other—anarcho-communists wrongly identify anarchism with communal living, with tribal sharing, and with other aspects of our emerging drug-rock “youth culture”.

The only good thing that one might say about anarcho-communism is that, in contrast to Stalinism, its form of communism would, supposedly, be voluntary. Presumably, no one would be forced to join the communes, and those who would continue to live individually, and to engage in market activities, would remain unmolested. Or would they? Anarcho-communists have always been extremely vague and cloudy about the lineaments of their proposed anarchist society of the future. Many of them have been propounding the profoundly anti-libertarian doctrine that the anarcho-communist revolution will have to confiscate and abolish all private property, so as to wean everyone from their psychological attachment to the property they own. Furthermore, it is hard to forget the fact that when the Spanish Anarchists (anarcho-communists of the Bakunin-Kropotkin type) took over large sections of Spain during the Civil War of the 1930’s, they confiscated and destroyed all the money in their areas and promptly decreed the death penalty for the use of money. None of this can give one confidence in the good, voluntarist intentions of anarcho-communism.

On all other grounds, anarcho-communism ranges from mischievous to absurd. Philosophically, this creed is an all-out assault on individuality and on reason. The individual’s desire for private property, his drive to better himself, to specialize, to accumulate profits and income, are reviled by all branches of communism. Instead, every one is supposed to live in communes, sharing all his meager possessions with his fellows, and each being careful not to advance beyond his communal brothers. At the root of all forms of communism, compulsory or voluntary, lies a profound hatred of individual excellence, a denial of the natural or intellectual superiority of some men over others, and a desire to tear down every individual to the level of a communal ant-heap. In the name of a phony “humanism”, an irrational and profoundly anti-human egalitarianism is to rob every individual of his specific and precious humanity.

Furthermore, anarcho-communism scorns reason, and its corollaries long-range purpose, forethought, hard work, and individual achievement; instead, it exalts irrational feelings, whim, and caprice—all this in the name of “freedom”. The “freedom” of the anarcho-communist has nothing to do with the genuine libertarian absence of interpersonal invasion or molestation; it is, instead, a “freedom” that means enslavement to unreason, to unexamined whim, and to childish caprice. Socially and philosophically, anarcho-communism is a misfortune.

Economically, anarcho-communism is an absurdity. The anarcho-communist seeks to abolish money, prices, and employment, and proposes to conduct a modern economy purely by the automatic registry of “needs” in some central data bank. No one who has the slightest understanding of economics can trifle with this theory for a single second. Fifty years ago, Ludwig von Mises exposed the total inability of a planned, moneyless economy to operate above the most primitive level. For he showed that money-prices are indispensable for the rational allocation of all of our scarce resources—labor, land, and capital goods—to the fields and the areas where they are most desired by the consumers and where they could operate with greatest efficiency. The socialists conceded the correctness of Mises’ challenge, and set about—in vain—to find a way to have a rational, market price system within the context of a socialist planned economy.

The Russians, after trying an approach to the communist moneyless economy in their “War Communism” shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, reacted in horror as they saw the Russian economy heading to disaster. Even Stalin never tried to revive it, and since World War II the East European countries have seen a total abandonment of this communist ideal and a rapid move toward free markets, a free price system, proft-and-loss tests, and a promotion of consumer affluence. It is no accident that it was precisely the economists in the Communist countries who led the rush away from communism, socialism, and central planning, and toward free markets. It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science”. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. Yet this sort of aggressive ignorance is inherent in the creed of anarcho-communism.

The same comment can be made on the widespread belief, held by many New Leftists and by all anarcho-communists, that there is no longer need to worry about economics or production because we are supposedly living in a “post-scarcity” world, where such problems do not arise. But while our condition of scarcity is clearly superior to that of the cave-man, we are still living in a world of pervasive economic scarcity. How will we—know when the world has achieved “post-scarcity”? Simply, when all the goods and services that we may want have become so superabundant that their prices have fallen to zero; in short, when we can acquire all goods and services as in a Garden of Eden—without effort, without work, without using any scarce resources.

The anti-rational spirit of anarcho-communism was expressed by Norman O. Brown, one of the gurus of the new “counter-culture”: “The great economist von Mises tried to refute socialism by demonstrating that, in abolishing exchange, socialism made economic calculation, and hence economic rationality, impossible . . . But if von Mises is right, then what he discovered is not a refutation but a psychoanalytical justification of socialism . . . It is one of the sad ironies of contemporary intellectual life that the reply of socialist economists to von Mises’ arguments was to attempt to show that socialism was not incompatible with ‘rational economic calculation’—that is to say, that it could retain the inhuman principle of economizing.” (Life Against Death, Random House, paperback, 1959, pp. 238-39.)

The fact that the abandonment of rationality and economics in behalf of “freedom” and whim will lead to the scrapping of modern production and civilization and return us to barbarism does not feaze our anarcho-communists and other exponents of the new “counter-culture”. But what they do not seem to realize is that the result of this return to primitivism would be starvation and death for nearly all of mankind and a grinding subsistence for the ones remaining. If they have their way, they will find that it is difficult indeed to be jolly and “unrepressed” while starving to death.

All this brings us back to the wisdom of the great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset: “In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported . . . Civilization is not ‘just here’, it is not self-supporting. It is artificial . . . If you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization—you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilization. Just a slip, and when you look everything has vanished into air. The primitive forest “appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back. The jungle is always primitive and, vice versa, everything primitive is mere jungle.” (José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York: W. W. Norton, 1932, p. 97).

A Comment

The Working Class

The recent Libertarian Forum articles on “The Conference” and “Ultra-Leftism” are among the most thought-provoking I have read in a long time. Since I find myself in total and sometimes violent disagreement with about ninety-five per cent of the statements made, I shall confine this rebuttal to a few major points. This does not mean that I concur with any other points made.

Since it is a term that has validity only in retrospect, “ultra-leftism” provides an excellent whipping boy for radical historians. The “ultra-leftist” is the guy that failed; had he succeeded, he would have been a “daring tactician” or a “charismatic figure”. While in some cases “ultra-leftism”, whatever it really is, may have been the revolution’s downfall, in other cases (most notably Spain) it could have saved the day.

At any rate, Murray is wrong to regard “ultra-leftism” as a cause of the decline of SDS; the true lesson for us here is that it was a symptom of the true cause, a far greater danger. Murray states that, “The hysteria, and the pitiful failure, of the Weathermen stem not so much from personal psychosis as from incorrect strategic theory.” Exactly the reverse is true since Weatherman’s “ultra-left” errors have psychological origins. Upper middle-class and upper-class kids, instead of sticking to their own valid, campus-related issues, feel so hung-up about their soft easy upbringing that they try desperately to attach themselves to someone else’s more urgent, “down-to-earth” struggles (e.g. Blacks, rank-and-file unionists, etc.). Furthermore, no longer being “down-to-earth” at all themselves once they leave their own sphere, the campus, they adopt a revolutionary ideology totally alien to the American situation. Finally, rejected by Blacks and workers and community people for being pushy, elitist, scrawny idiots, they set out to prove their manhood after a crash course in karate and get their asses whipped, setting back serious radical organization everywhere they go.

Few people will join a revolution unless it is in their own self-interest. All too much of the Movement consists of people who have arrived at a purely intellectual commitment to a revolution that will bring about the society they visualize. When their appeals in the name of humanity, social justice, freedom, equality, or other vague concepts fail to create a mass movement, they withdraw into their own little self-righteous circles, and put out increasingly sectarian and increasingly unread manifestoes.

Murray, as with so many other radicals, declares that the working class is hopelessly reactionary, racist, etc. OK, make your revolution without them—if you can. And if you can, what will you do with this large, restive, powerful, and hopeless group afterwards—the final solution to the labor problem? Equally valid sweeping criticisms can be directed against the middle class (or any other class)—smugness, reformism, even racism of a more sophisticated and less easily eradicable form. At any rate, if “American Marxists have boxed themselves into a complete dead end in pinning their hopes on the workers,” couldn’t this be because most American Marxists are declasse middle class with absolutely nothing to offer the working class?

If anyone thinks the role of the working class is irrelevant, he should ask himself a few questions: Who could shut the country down faster, ten million intellectuals or one million dockers and truckers? If labor is hopelessly co-opted, why is the country being swept with wildcat strikes and even with sanctioned strikes for that matter; why are the fat-ass unions plagued with black caucuses, rank-and-file caucuses, etc.? If the workers were not a potential danger, why does the whole system, especially the schools, the press, and the church, try so determinedly to keep them from thinking for themselves? History shows that workers can act when they see the necessity. And they do ACT. Murray has a distaste for action, but seriously, how else will the Revolution come about?

Aside from the accuracy or error of the articles in question, the articles are a tactical error. Ad hominem attacks, and indiscriminate blasts at important segments of the libertarian movement can only serve the purpose of turning the Libertarian Forum into a minor sectarian sheet constantly congratulating itself on its own correctness. In its short lifetime the Forum has done two difficult jobs: it has demonstrated, in the language of the “rightist” libertarian and to the “rightist” libertarian, the necessity of revolution; and it has called together a lot of people who otherwise would be struggling alone. Is it now to drive them apart?

— Bill Goring

Lurking In The Wings

In the days of the First World War, when governments were wildly stomping out the lives and futures of their people in the name of nationalism and national destiny, one American radical described the process: War is the health of the State. In time of war, the subjects of rulers enthusiastically rally to them—hate the Enemy, volunteer to kill whomever the government wants eliminated, and cheerfully contribute higher taxes. The power and wealth at the command of the state positively swells beyond the peacetime bureaucrat’s wildest dreams. But the issuing of commands always requires willing ears to hear and obey them.

Let it never be said that Uncle Sam doesn’t plan ahead. In 1961 the Office of Emergency Preparedness sprang up meiotically from the four Civil Defense agencies which have functioned for twenty years. The star program of the O.E.P. is the National Defense Executive Reserve: when the war comes, and the government gets its chance to expand overnight, the personnel problem will be solved—in advance. Just as the army maintains officers in reserve status to fight the Enemy, the bureaucracy has the N.D.E.R. standing like 4,000 minutemen ready to fight on the home front—fighting the people (as it were).

Any agency or department head can establish an N.D.E.R. unit. Units currently exist for the Secretary of Commerce, Business and Defense Services Administration, Office of Oil and Gas, Office of Minerals and Solid Fuels, Bureau of Public Roads, Office of Emergency Transportation, Economic Stabilization Agency, Office of Defense Resources, and others.

In times of national emergency, isn’t it curious how the conventional wisdom holds that the spontaneous powers of citizens to organize and bring resources to bear on problems should and must be constrained by bureaucratic control? This is the philosophy of the state, of state-socialism and state-capitalism; the philosophy behind the National Defense Executive Reserve. At the very moment when red-tape and bureaucracy should step aside and let people solve the emergency problems, the government plans to step in, reinforced, to strangle the nation! Who can estimate the added cost in wealth and human life which the growth of bureaucracy and bureaucratic inefficiency has imposed in the past, and will impose tenfold in any future war or national emergency? At a time when the mechanisms of trade and decentralized decision-making—the ability to take instant action, at one’s own economic risk on the basis of localized, specific information—are more than ever needed, the government has habitually aggrandized its own power and authority by prohibiting any activity not first initiated or sanctioned by some bureaucrat’s authority.

In cases where a man supplies an urgent demand and makes a good profit (which should encourage others to watch for similar urgent demands in the future, and supply them in advance), the government makes sure that the is castigated as a “war profiteer”, and certainly taxed if not imprisoned or killed! Such activities will be the duty of the expanded bureaucracy, staffed by the National Defense Executive Reserve force. War is the health of the state.

The state is the pathology of modern society. The expanding substitution of Authority for Trade as the proper form of interaction among people is the full-time job of the millions of little statesmen who labor “in the public interest”. It is the symbiotic relationship between the Authority-merchants of the state and profit-seeking entrepreneurs which causes the perversion of honest economic activity into the exploitative system of state-capitalism. Amazing is the magic of Authority, so legitimate in the public’s mind in contrast to raw, coercive Power; and nothing legitimates the use of Power as well as an Enemy danger. Just like far-sighted land speculators, the bureaucrat Authority-merchants are prepared: the National Defense Executive Reserve awaits their country’s call.

— J. M. Cobb

ATTENTION, LIBERTARIANS

Many readers of the Libertarian Forum have expressed interest in finding other libertarians near them. Therefore, early this year, the Forum will begin to publish the names and addresses of people who would like to be contacted by other readers of the Libertarian Forum. If you’d like your name to be included, please fill out the coupon on the back of this notice.

My Loyalty Oath

“GAINESVILLE, FLA.—Three University of Florida professors and one librarian were fired Nov. 26 because they refused to sign the state’s loyalty oath. Dismissed were law professor Leroy L. Lamborn, psychology instructor Evan Suits, architecture instructor Jerome Miller, and library clerk Ann Bardsley . . .”

The whole thing is pretty ludicrous, really, and I suppose I should be laughing. But being fired has had an unfortunate effect upon my sense of humor. Last week I was an unoffensive librarian, laboring among my catalog cards and dusty bookshelves. Now I am unemployed and publicly branded as an enemy of the state. And all because of a little green IBM card with a seven-line loyalty oath printed on it.

The State of Florida has required a loyalty oath of all recipients of its funds since the early Cold War days back in 1949. When I went to work for the University of Florida a year ago, the oath appeared under my pen between fingerprinting and a form detailing my life history. I signed it with distaste, but I needed the job very badly, and had no choice. The law requires that the oath be notarized. Early this year the university administration decided it had been a bit lax about having the oath notarized—a matter that the Board of Regents and other reactionary politicians consider of utmost importance. So the University’s 3,000 fulltime employees and several thousand more part-time student employees, graduate assistants, and others on the state payroll, were ordered to take a little green IBM card with the oath printed on it and sign it before a notary. All, of course, at the taxpayer’s expense.

The oath originally had a provision in it stipulating that the signer was not a member of the Communist party. A suit by Stella Connell, an Orlando, Fla., schoolteacher, won a court decision knocking out the clause about being a Communist as unconstitutional, so the signing stopped while the University ran around printing up new oaths without the offending clause. Then they began collecting signatures all over again. We were told that those who refused to sign would not be paid until they did. Most of the employees were irritated from having to chase around notarizing the oath, and several hundred—including two entire departments of the University—were so offended by the principle of the thing that they threatened to refuse to sign. But by the November 26 deadline, almost all had surrendered to economic necessity and signed the oath. The three professors and I who still maintained our refusal to sign, were fired. Since I am not a professional educator, I shall probably be able to find a new job. But the three professors, whose jobs are inextricably tied to the government-dominated field of education, face financial and professional ruin.

Because of the events of the past few weeks I now have a great deal of time to consider not only my own reasons for not signing the oath, but the whole purpose and consequence of this oath.

The oath we refused to sign says:

“I the above-named, a citizen of the State of Florida and the United States of America, and being employed by or an officer of the University of Florida and recipient of public funds as such employee or officer, do hereby swear or affirm that I will support the Constitution of the United States and of the State of Florida; that I do not believe in the overthrow of the United States or of the State of Florida by force or violence.”

I refused to sign this oath because it is a piece of pernicious nonsense and an unwarranted invasion by the state into the privacy of the individual. It is nonsense because even if it were desirable to root subversives out of the University, whether they were floor cleaners or professors, no dedicated subversive would blow his cover by signing it. It is pernicious for a number of reasons.

On a practical level, it is a waste of the taxpayer’s money. On a legal level, the many citizens of other states and countries who had to sign it perjured themselves by doing so. Most of my foreign friends were amused—in a contemptuous sort of way—by having to sign the oath, but several were bitterly resentful. If they had refused to sign, they could have lost their visas and been deported. “If I am forced to sign this,” a Persian friend told me, “then the constitution to which I am affirming my support really is not worth the paper it is written on, is it?”

But to me, the worst aspect of being coerced into signing this oath is its effect on individual liberty. What business is it of anyone’s what I support or do not support, believe in or do not believe in? As long as I am an efficient and reliable librarian, who cares what I think about the Constitution of the State of Florida? The answer is, of course, that the state is so unsure of the loyalty of its citizens, particularly the more intelligent people that work in universities, that it cannot rest until it has extracted a pledge of fealty from them.

One of the dangers in making people sign these silly things is, of course, that it reminds the individual that the only way to stay safe and secure is by unquestioning obedience to the state. Unquestioning obedience leads to Buchenwald and Song My, and the destruction of all individual initiative and responsibility. In a University, any kind of loyalty requirement strangles the atmosphere of intellectual freedom which is necessary for scholarly inquiry.

Looking back on this, I wonder: was it better to keep quiet, sign, and stay, or get fired, leaving the university to those more reactionary or subservient than I? Either way, it seems to me, we would have a mighty quiet university. If we had backed down on this, Evan Suits, Lee Lamborn, Jerome Miller, and I would be working for the University of Florida today. And perhaps our sensitivity to individual freedom might have served as some kind of good influence. But it also seems that one can surrender a little here, and a little there—always hoping to fight back next time—until the will to resist is gone.

Since I wasn’t planning the violent overthrow of the government, etc., I could honestly have signed the oath. But the government that demands loyalty to some constitution or belief today, will tomorrow demand our allegiance to some party, or governor, or religion, or . . . Fuehrer. The time to stop the state is now, not when it has become so oppressive that you no longer have the strength or the means to fight.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is taking our suit for reinstatement through the courts, has a motto: “Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty”.

I agree.

— Ann C. Bardsley

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 2

January 15, 1970

35¢

AHA CONVENTION

By Leonard P. Liggio

I. Anarchism on the Agenda

Libertarianism has become academically respectable. Just as the respectability of isolationism emerged five years ago, here is another debt that we probably owe to the New Left. Within a month, a symposium on anarchism was held at a major university with Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess as the principal speakers, and a session of the American Historical Association was devoted to Anarchism. The historical significance of a filled-to-capacity AHA session on anarchism was noted in his introductory remarks by Richard Drinnon of Bucknell University, the chairman. Paul Avrich, Queens College, who gave the first paper, is the author of a recently published book on Russian anarchists; his book was the subject some months ago of an intensive oral commentary by Murray Rothbard. As in almost everything concerned with the growth of libertarian perspectives, Murray Rothbard has been the preeminent pioneer; his open and world-ranging inquiry into libertarian thought and action is the exemplary standard toward which all others’ achievements in libertarian analysis has been directed.

Avrich’s discussion indicated that the monumental conflict between the respective world-views of Marx and Bakunin remain as significant today as a century ago; yet, despite Avrich’s depth of scholarship, a resolution of Bakunin’s own contradictory positions appears as distant as ever. Marx’s call for regimented industrial and agricultural armies had no appeal for the peasant who might be already oppressed by just such a feudal organization of agriculture. Anarchists historically have had a strong interest in peasant farmers and agricultural land as anarchism has flourished in opposition to the feudal landholding systems.

Gabriel Jackson, U. of California-San Diego, discussed the very controversial question of the institutions of Spanish Civil War Anarchism. The participation of an expert such as James J. Martin would have been invaluable. In the anarchist regions of civil war Spain, the free peasants’ land ownership was recognized and tenants turned their lands into freeholds. But, serfs in completely feudal situations were generally transformed into workers on a collective, with occasional liberation into cooperatives. Anarchist ideologists in Spain, after a year, called for a reexamination of the collectivist organization, as it was not productive and was simply living off earlier capital accumulation. Similarly, they had intense criticism of the anarchist military columns for their sectarianism. When their campaigns took them into a district they sought to impose their rationalism by church burnings; peasants were forced to transfer their private farms into collectives; money was outlawed on pain of execution. This anarchist sectarianism of the military columns contributed to the famous popularity of the Spanish Communist Party—as the defender of private property and money, the peasants and townsmen sought protection in C.P. membership. (Noam Chomsky’s “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship”, in his American Power and the New Mandarins, presents a libertarian critique of Jackson’s liberal treatment of the Spanish Civil War.)

Paul Goodman, the concluding speaker at the session, began with a critical examination of the radical proposals presented at the convention (see Part II). He said that the radical appeal to the historians should have been on the basis of their competence and professional independence, which are being oppressed by political and academic authorities. Anarchists historically found their support among the skilled workers whose competence excluded external management or control, as well as among workers in potentially dangerous work where success was based not on authority but on mutual trust and self-control. The migrants from rural areas who were the main source of unskilled labor were not familiar with self-managing modes in industry and sought solutions in the collectivism of the Marxist unions.

Goodman explained the Marxist rhetoric among student protestors as originating in a similar distinction. The majority of American students are not interested in attending school; they are inmates of school-jails because of the compulsory attendance laws, conscription, etc. They should be permitted to gain their education in appealing work situations; collectivism appears as a reasonable solution only to those in an unnatural situation. Those students who benefit from liberal arts education have sought an improvement in the educational method by transforming the authoritarian classroom situation necessitated by the school-jail institutions into situations permitting more and better study. Five years of intensive investigation have shown that the main student dissatisfaction and support for transformation of universities comes from the upper half of the student body’ the lower half is satisfied since the educational system is aimed at their level.

Adam Smith’s free market economics was noted by Goodman as the epitome of anarchism. The attempt to establish private property against its negation in the state made laissez-faire a revolutionary ideology before its adherents came to compromise with, rather than destroy, feudalism and accepted state monopoly economies. The independence of the competent, the innovator, the entrepreneur, the creator, said Goodman, is at the root of anarchism. Technological progress, Goodman pointed out, has been achieved by the independent innovator and entrepreneur outside of the authoritarian universities and monopoly institutions. The struggle to affirm private property, the absolute ownership of the fruit of one’s free innovation or competence, and to abolish the present negation of private property ownership, is central to anarchist action. Since modern society prepares people more completely for competent independence, the flowering of anarchist thought and action is a reasonable expectation.

II. Long March Made Longer

A major aspect of the AHA convention was the business meetings. In the last couple of years the major scholarly associations in America have been placed on record by their members as opposed to United States aggression against the Vietnamese people. Last year, at the AHA convention which was moved to New York from Chicago to protest the police riot by Mayor Daley’s ‘finest’ during the Democratic National Convention, the major debate concerned the boycott of Chicago. The right-wing liberals proposed that the convention should have been held in Chicago to bring the benefits of the liberals’ “superior enlightenment” to Chicago. The caucus of younger members was totally ineffectual last year. The main speeches were a series of Marxist circumlocutions which drove the majority from the hall in search of freedom from boredom. A minor theme was the attack on the movement of student protests at universities by the leading academic Marxist, Eugene D. Genovese, who since has been appointed chairman of the history department at the University of Rochester.

After almost a year of inaction, a revived committee of younger historians popped-up under the ubiquitous Arthur Waskow. Waskow had acted during the early years of the Anti-Vietnam war movement as a retarding influence seeking dialogue rather than confrontation with Rusk, Bundy, Rostow et al., and as late as last spring spoke at a major conference at the New York Hilton against political organization around anti-militarist issues, proposing instead the liberal issues of environment and ecology. Now he appeared at the convention in the colors of a militant. In the early years of this decade a Conference on Peace Research in History (in which several of the contributors to the Libertarian Forum participated) was organized in the AHA by William L. Neumann—revisionist historian, anti-imperialist spokesman and a leading student of Harry Elmer Barnes. This Conference’s December 1965 meeting in San Francisco occurred after almost a year of U.S. bombardment and invasion of Vietnam. But the program of which Waskow was chairman avoided historical analysis of U.S. policy in the Pacific upon which the Vietnam intervention was premised. On the eve of the 1965 convention the press had announced that the leading radical historian, Staughton Lynd, then at Yale, had arrived in Hanoi to study the effects of U.S. bombing as a representative of Viet-Report. Waskow criticized Lynd for his efforts opposing the Vietnam war by confronting the U.S. government.

The proposals at the 1969 convention which issued forth from Waskow could only have been composed in Bedlam. In essence, they were an attack on the concept of competence. Instead of appealing to historians on the basis of their alienation due to the authoritarian denial of their professionalism in the universities and the AHA, their expertise was equally attacked by the Waskow group. This explicit denial of the historian’s role could not seriously have been proposed, as a means of radically educating historians—and, needless to say, it did not. In contrast, at the Modern Languages Association convention, the radicals led by the New University Conference were able to organize their colleagues on the basis of the general denial of their professionalism, to reform the association and to elect as president for the following year, Louis Kampf, MIT humanities chairman. Despite this problematic AHA situation, Staughton Lynd received about thirty per cent of the votes cast for the AHA presidency.

The final business meeting was devoted to a discussion of resolutions, especially concerning Vietnam. A lengthy resolution emanated from the Waskow group; it began with an opposition to the Vietnam war but mainly dealt with a number of domestic issues such as the police murders of the Black Panthers. Perhaps it was believed that the wider opposition to the Vietnam war would carry a resolution containing issues for which there would be less support. Such a scheme has about it much of the odor of the Old Left rather than the honesty of the New Left which faces issues directly no matter how unpleasant the answers. Additionally, the resolution was burdened with having Waskow as floor leader; as he appeared to be speaking half the time through a dozen interventions, many neutral participants drew negative conclusions about the anti-Vietnam positions.

A substitute motion was offered by William L. Neumann as chairman of the Conference on Peace Research in History. It stated: “We, historians and citizens in this meeting of the American Historical Association, deplore and condemn the war in Vietnam as ill-advised and immoral; we urge immediate withdrawal of all military involvement; and we further pledge ourselves to a fundamental reevaluation of the assumptions of American foreign policy.” Staughton Lynd called on the meeting to support this resolution. Neumann’s anti-war resolution was narrowly defeated by a vote of 610 to 645 in a meeting attended by ten times the number of members who had attended any previous business meeting.

The most outspoken critic was Eugene Genovese, who during the convention was described as having become the Sidney Hook of the younger generation of scholars. For several years Genovese has conducted a personal vendetta against Staughton Lynd because Lynd is not a Marxist and thus bases his politics upon universal moral concepts. Although one might wish Lynd were more rigorous in some historical analyses, he has made the greatest contribution during the 1960’s to post-American Revolution historical scholarship. Genovese’s Marxism causes him to adopt positions of traditionalist, official historians against revisionist radicalism. The logic of Marxism led Genovese to become the leading contemporary spokesman for southern slaveholding, and Karl Marx’s humane opposition to the crime of slaveholding is condemned because this was inconsistent with Marxism. During the past year Genovese opened a wide-front attack on the student movement because he views the New Left as the major impediment to Marxism. At the AHA convention Genovese demanded that the executive council “put down the New Left, put it down now, and put it down hard.” Genovese is becoming the heir-presumptive to the repression propounded by the ex-communists of National Review and the New Leader.

From Libertine To Libertarian

When left-wing critics of the 1930’s attacked him for not embracing doctrinaire Marxism, Ernest Hemingway replied:

“. . . I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation . . . I believe in the absolute minimum of government.

“A writer is an outlyer like a gypsy . . . If he is a good writer he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it . . .” (Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969).

In the foreword to his own book, Baker writes:

“[Hemingway] was the fierce individualist who resisted fad and fashion like the plague . . . who believed that that government is best which governs least, who hated tyranny, bureaucracy, taxation, propaganda . . .”

It is clear to anyone who has read Hemingway’s work that the novelist, while never an advanced political thinker—and never pretending to be one—, was writing from the viewpoint of a man obsessed with the raw concept of individual freedom. He was the ultimate artist, the essential loner, the recalcitrant individualist who gave substance to William Hazlitt’s theory of “living unto oneself”, of being “a part of the world and yet apart from it at the same time.” Hemingway was the libertarian in embryo, the undeveloped philosopher with a mania for personal liberty, with a hunger for life and the pleasures of life, who gave full reign to his drives and desires without regard for those who would squeeze him into a neat ideological compartment. His only cause was his art, his writing, the perfection of his language, and a search for truth as reflected through his novels.

Hemingway operated within the framework of a basic libertinism, a kind of humanized but non-intellectualized hedonism. The tragedy of his life is that he never advanced beyond this embryonic stage philosophically. While he pursued liberty and spent his life learning how to “live free”, he neglected to construct an ethic to discipline his actions. Consequently, the “spiritual” aspect of his life—the part that is concerned with basic questions of morality, with right and wrong, with good and evil—suffered beyond repair. Peace of mind eluded him; an elemental happiness was denied him to the end. He took his life with his own hand less than a month before his sixty-second birthday.

Frank Meyer notwithstanding, the philosophy of libertarianism and the attitude of libertinism are not to be confused by any except the ignorant. If the libertine is the libertarian in embryo, the true libertarian is the libertine developed to the highest level of ideational morality. He is the libertine strung out to the limits of his potentiality. While the libertine is concerned solely with liberty, the libertarian turns his attention to liberty and justice as an inseparable concept. The libertine operates from the basic premise: I have a right to be free; the libertarian from the premise: I have a right to be free—and so does everyone else.

We can only speculate as to what Hemingway might have become psychologically and emotionally had he been exposed to the writings of Mises, Bastiat, Spooner, Hayek, Rothbard, etc. Perhaps he would have dismissed philosophical libertarianism in the same manner he dismissed doctrinaire Marxism, without realizing that an artist’s morality is evident in his product and affects its final quality. Then again, having rejected Marxism as incompatible with his own notion of freedom, he might have rejoiced at the discovery of a philosophy more attuned to his own native urges.

Today it is possible to look back on Hemingway’s life with some degree of objectivity. The art he produced, if it is good, will long outlive the memory of the man. In reviewing his career nine years after his death, it is possible to appreciate an individual who was a lifelong friend of liberty, though sadly enough, never its master—a libertarian in embryo who failed to idealize his basic attitude toward life.

— Jerome Tuccille

What’s Your Excuse Now?

Last spring, the big revolutionary event in America was the Columbia Revolution. Most “libertarians” condemned this particularly successful New Left venture on the grounds of injury to “private property rights”, putting forth the quaint theory that Columbia University is private property.

This winter, the big revolutionary event is the strike at San Francisco State, a strike which, even more successfully than at Columbia, managed to induce black and white students and the nearby black community to join forces against the administration, and also to enlist essentially conservative and guild-minded faculty. Surely no one could possibly call San Francisco State College a wholly government-owned institution, any kind of “private property”. It is government property, and therefore an institution which all self-proclaimed libertarians are supposed to be against. And yet, despite this most successful disruptive strike against SF State, rumblings and gripings are emerging from the California libertarian movement, including petty peevishness about classes being obstructed. So what’s your excuse now, comrades, for being counter-revolutionary?

Against Taxation

One of the most hopeful recent developments has been the rise of opposition to taxation. Taxation is the vital fuel on which the State runs and has its being. Cut off its funds, its supply, and the State Leviathan will wither and die. Furthermore, a movement in opposition to taxation is bound to strike a responsive chord with the entire tax-exploited middle class. There has recently been formed a National Taxpayers Union, which is dedicated to lancing the State at its vital core: its swollen and unchallenged power of taxation. The energetic libertarian James D. Davidson is the executive director, and Murray Rothbard is one of the four members of the executive committee. For information, write to the National Taxpayers Union, Suite 100,415 Second Street, N. E., Washington, D.C. 20002.

USIA Network

One of the most repellent aspects of statism is that we the taxpayers are forced to pay for our own brainwashing—for the propaganda which the government beams in our direction. One of our ministries of propaganda, the United States Information Agency, is beamed at hapless people overseas. It was to be expected that when our right-wing Administration took over, the thrust of conservatives in power would not be to dismantle the USIA, but rather to boot out subsidies for liberal books and replace them with well-stocked libraries filled with the works of deserving conservatives.

This, indeed, is exactly what has happened. Frank Shakespeare, new head of USIA, is an ultra-conservative, and a friend of conservatism’s pre-eminent TV personality, William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was promptly appointed as a member of the USIA’s Advisory Commission. Buckley began to push for more conservative books in USIA libraries, and induced Shakespeare to hire Jim Burnham, Buckley’s co-editor on National Review, to compile a list of deserving books. For nearly $1000, Burnham came up with a five-page list, which—surprise of surprises!—included prominently the works of both Burnham and Buckley, to which Burnham gave high praise. Buckley, wrote Burnham, is “one of the best-known writers of his generation”, and, what is more, “James Burnham’s books have been translated and debated in every major country.” Pretty neat all around. As lagniappe, Burnham also recommended the works of several other editors and contributors of National Review: M. Stanton Evans, John Chamberlain, Russell Kirk, Henry Hazlitt, Stefan T. Possony, and the late Whittaker Chambers.

And so, the result of the Buckley-Burnham shuffle is that National Review has reaped its reward for loyalty to the Nixon campaign and to the Administration. The loser, as usual, is the American taxpayer.

ORGANIZED CRIME

It is a commonplace of history that laws drafted to harass or suppress one socially deviant group will at some future time be used to attack groups or individuals other than those originally persecuted. Thus the emergency powers granted the German Chancellor by the Weimar Republic were used by Hitler to destroy the Weimar regime and plunge Germany into the horrors of the Nazi dictatorship. It is with this in mind that libertarians should examine more closely the Nixon administration’s new legislative war against “organized crime”.

In the President’s message to Congress last April, “organized crime” was identified as the Cosa Nostra— or the Mafia—an “alien” organization said to number some 5,000 individuals working regionally in 24 “families”. (New York Congressman Mario Biaggi, a much-decorated police hero, considers this a gratuitous insult to the Italian-American community.) In the eyes of the Feds, the Mafia’s most heinous crime seems to be that it successfully serves a profitable and expanding market with goods and services which the State has either outlawed or monopolized for itself.

According to Nixon, the Cosa Nostra has a virtual monopoly on illegal gambling—by which he means that the government’s licensed gambling operations are its only real competition; they also are responsible for supplying the American public with illegal drugs like heroin—which is needed by those who become addicted in much the same way a diabetic needs insulin, or like marijuana, whose effects have been described by responsible physicians as less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. (That alcohol and tobacco remain legal may be due to their being a major source of State revenue.) To complete the picture, “organized crime” is accused of underwriting the loan-shark business and actively participating in fraudulent bankruptcies. In other words, the Mafia lends money to high-risk debtors at interest rates commensurate with the probability of default, rates forbidden by law despite the obvious needs of the market; and as for fraudulent bankruptcy, the whole concept of bankruptcy is itself a fraud and a theft by which the State cancels the legitimate indebtedness of the debtor at the expense of the creditor. Indeed the principal criminal actions of the Mafia used to justify the Nixon war on crime are crimes only because they are defined as such by the tyrannical statists who rule America. The Cosa Nostra—serving well its vast American market with profits estimated at $50 billion from gambling alone—is no more sinister than Dow Chemical Company—probably less so.

What then is the real purpose of this new Crusade? Let us look at the weapons which the Feds are demanding from: the Congress. Already authorized to use wiretapping, Nixon wants Congress to legalize the granting of personal immunity from prosecution for witnesses called before federal juries; the result will be to compel witnesses to testify against their will—to become informers or rot in prison. In New York where such a law is already in effect, a professor from the State University has twice been sent to jail for a term of 30 days for refusing to tell a grand jury which of his students is smoking pot.

A second weapon will be to make it a federal crime for a local policeman or public official to accept a bribe from gamblers; also, any gambling operation which involves 5 or more persons or lasts for 30 days or whose daily take exceeds $2,000 will be a federal crime. The clear effect of these laws is to create the skeleton of a national police force reaching into every city and hamlet, every home, factory and shop in America. The ubiquitous football pool will now become a potential federal criminal conspiracy!

But even more ominous is the proposal to create a panoply of weapons to attack the property of “organized crime” through the injunctive powers of contempt and seizure (shades of Truman and the steel mills I), through “monetary fines and treble damage suits” and “the powers of a forfeiture of property”. Let it be noted that none of these extraordinary powers can be limited to the Cosa Nostra—since no such entity exists in law. These “weapons” will apply to the persons and properties of individual citizens who will be convicted of crimes against the State. Or will anyone be safe from sudden disruption or seizure of his wealth on the ground that it is tainted as having been derived from some Mafioso? The President specifically cites his desire to strike “a critical blow at the organized crime conspiracy” by levying fines on their real estate corporations, treble damages against their trucking firms and banks, and seizing the liquor in their warehouses.

In case you still doubt the broader implications of the Nixon war, the President promises that if the Federal Racket Squads successfully enforce the new laws—squads composed of agents of the FBI, SEC, IRS, Post Office, Narcotics and Customs Bureaus and the Secret Service among others—“building on this experience” the Attorney General “will determine” whether “this concept of governmental partnership should be expanded (to other major problem areas) through the formation of additional squads.”

We wonder who will succeed the Mafia as public enemy Number One? Mr. Kleindienst’s “ideological criminals”?

— J. R. P.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 3

February 1, 1970

35¢

BIAFRA, RIP

After more than two years of heroic struggle against overwhelming odds, little Biafra lies murdered—murdered by the centralizing State forces of Nigeria, forces that were backed, of course, by those two great centralizing powers of our time, the United States and the Soviet Union. Over two million Ibo tribesmen—the bulk of the citizens of Biafra—lie dead, two million more lives racked up on the permanently bloody altar of central State power.

The American public is totally unfamiliar with the real situation in Africa. They tend to think of “countries” like Nigeria, the Congo, Gabon, etc. as genuine countries, as people bound together by common ties of culture, language, fellowship, and other attributes of nationhood. Nothing could be further from the truth. None of these African countries are countries in any legitimate sense of the term; they are geographical figments, grotesque parodies of nationhood.

How did they get that way? These nations, though now independent or quasi-independent, are all legacies of Western imperialism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Britain, France, and Portugal engaged in a mad scramble to conquer and carve up the numerous tribes and the vast land area of the African continent. The carving was purely the result of scramble and agreement, and had nothing to do with the ethnic, cultural, or tribal boundaries in the continent. Regions and districts were based purely on the administrative convenience of the imperial power, not on the needs or realities of the tribes involved. Many tribes were split down the middle by the boundaries of these “countries”.

One would think that when the British and French finally left Africa, this unholy mess would be straightened out and the needed realignment and splitting-up of countries finally take place. But this was not to be. For the British and French could only rule the immensely greater populations in Africa by finding local rulers, satraps and collaborators, to govern the native population on behalf of the imperial power. The first step of an imperial power is to find or create channels of rule by creating native satraps and “quislings” who can serve as transmission belts for imperial dictation. The Western powers found those satraps in two ways. One was by working through existing tribal chieftains, helping these chieftains cement their rule over their own tribes and over other tribes in the region. Another was by creating an educated urban elite who would staff the offices of government and rule the scattered but silent rural majority of the country. When the British and French made their orderly withdrawal from their official empire, they took care to leave their bureaucratic and feudal satraps in charge of the various countries. Britain and France then remain as de facto, though no longer de jure, imperialists, and the new native elites remain close economic and political collaborators with their old masters. The last thing that the new elites want is self-determination and national justice for the numerous African tribes; their own parasitic and exploitative power rests on retaining the old imperial boundaries and strong central governments derived from imperial rule.

Nigeria, for the libertarian, is a particularly poignant example of the African middle. By favoritism and gerrymandering, the British made sure that the newly independent Nigeria would be governed by the feudal chieftains and emirs of the backward Moslem North. Not only suppressed but also systematically slaughtered were the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria. Everyone knows that the Ibos are generally hated in West Africa for being the embodiment of the “Protestant” virtues: intelligence, hard work, thrift, entrepreneurial ability. Give a few Ibos half a chance and they will create jobs, commerce, and wealth wherever they go. Even more fascinating for the libertarian is that the Ibos, of all the tribes in the region, have always been libertarian and quasi-anarchistic. Their tribe never suffered from centralized rule, and their methods of government were so loose and so local as to be virtually tantamount to no aggressive government—no State—at all. Hence they gave the British conquerors of the nineteenth century by far the most trouble of all the tribes, because the British could find no tribal rulers, no satraps, to act as transmission belts for their rule. Because of the anarchism of the Ibos, the British found them almost unconquerable and found that they could not be ruled. Hence the British, too, hated the Ibos.

When the government of Nigeria began to subject the Ibos to persecution and slaughter, they declared their independence and established the nation of Biafra. Of course Britain supported the Nigerian State. Of course Soviet Russia, with its horror of decentralization, secession, or national independence from central rule, backed the Nigerian State. And of course the United States did the same, piously inveighing against the “Balkanization” of the African continent. All of these Empires want the Third World to have unitary and “efficient” rulers who can follow their own orders, and dictate easily to their subjects below. All of these monster States are implicated in the shame of the murder of little Biafra.

We can only hope that someday Biafra will rise again, and that ethnic justice, come that resurrection morn, will redraw the map of Africa.

LEFT AND RIGHT

The Psychology Of Opposites

What is Left? What is Right?

On the rapidly changing American scene the distinction between Left and Right is becoming more and more a question of personal psychology. The scramble of ideologies is undergoing such an upheaval at present it is virtually impossible to label a political candidate on the basis of his position papers. When Norman Mailer ran in the Democratic Mayoralty primary in New York City last year he identified his political position as “to the left and to the right of everybody else.” And he was right. His radical decentralist program defied all standards of liberal/conservative traditionalism. He scornfully referred to this tradition as “the soft center of American politics” and offered a program closest to the quasi-anarchist position of Paul Goodman.

Anarchists, and those calling themselves anarchists, abound on both sides of the political spectrum, from the grabbag collection of SDS to the split-off faction of YAF. Timothy Leary, running for Governor of California, adopts a platform of pure free-market libertarianism and is called a “Radical Leftist”. Ronnie Reagan, long-time favorite of conservative free enterprisers, promises to Preserve and Protect the corporate-liberal status quo even if he has to break some skulls doing it.

(Curious, isn’t it, what superb bulldogs the conservatives make for the liberal superstructure?).

As Bulldog Nixon swings the Right more accurately into a position of total repression, and Spiro the Righteous roams the earth impugning the courage of those who would rather live than die in Vietnam, everyone of even the slightest libertarian sympathies is polarized more sharply to the Left. So Left is Right and Right is Left. Free market is Left and Socialism is Right. Voluntary communes are Left and State Capitalism is Right.

It’s enough to give you a headache.

But the long-term test of whether an individual will identify with the Left or with the Right is one—as I mentioned earlier—of personal psychology. The Left, it seems to me, has the capacity of bleeding for flesh-and-blood human beings. Even the horrible liberals, lately scorned by both radical capitalists and pot-happy flower children, were originally motivated by the desire to “help the oppressed”. The fact that they chose the worst means possible of doing it—coercion rather than freedom—is another question entirely. The concern for fellow human beings which originally motivated them was genuine. Now they are fat and powerful and they use the Reagans and Agnews to protect them when all attempts at co-optation end in failure. They are the New Conservatives while those who call themselves conservatives are nothing more than bully boys for their corporate-liberal mentors.

The Left bleeds for flesh-and-blood people.

The New Left—the radicals, the revolutionaries, the students who are turning against their social democratic parents—are driven by outrage; they are obsessed with a mania for justice because other human beings are victimized by racism, because fellow humans are imprisoned in rotting tenements riddled with filth and rats. They see the injustice that exists around them and they are incensed because they have the capacity to identify with the victims of an unyielding and thoroughly unresponsive superstructure, a system controlled and operated by insatiable racketeers and their political puppets who will never give up power until they are smashed out of existence.

The Left bleeds for people.

While the Right—even our anarchist friends recently separated from YAF—concern themselves with abstractions. They are more upset over the fact that their free market principles are not given a chance to operate than they are because fellow humans are trapped in overcrowded schools and ghettos. They seem to be incapable of emphasizing with suffering individuals and dismiss all such concern as misguided altruism. Their notion of justice is one which involves only themselves, and they fail to see that they will never enjoy personal freedom until all men are free of injustice. The Objectivist drive for liberty is not so much to create a world in which all men are free to live their lives in peace, but rather to conjure a society in which Galt-like superheroes with wavy hair and “ice-blue eyes” can demonstrate their economic superiority over “parasitic illiterates who litter the welfare rolls.”

Thus it is possible for our anarcho-Objectivist friends in Philadelphia to hold demonstrations calling for the “Release of John Gait”—while Bobby Seale is fighting for his existence in Chicago.

Thus it is possible for our Objectivist friends in Maryland to ask me to prove that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark “had not committed or threatened to commit violations of the rights of others . . .”—after they had been shot in their beds at four in the morning by Chicago police (this article is my answer to them).

Thus it is possible for these same right-wing anarchists to speak of the Vietcong as “communists” and “morally evil” despite the fact that ninety-five percent of them have probably never read Karl Marx and are concerned mainly with the swollen bellies of peasant children.

How does one begin to understand such a mentality? How does one begin to understand an individual who can bleed for an unlikely, dehumanized character out of fiction but not for the young victims of an early-morning police raid on the apartment? How does one understand the special arrogance of fellow “anarchists” who are content to establish a personal sphere of economic freedom and let the rest of society go to hell with itself? How does one understand a “libertarian” organization which wears on its masthead the American dollar sign (hardly the symbol of free market currency), or fellow “anarchists” who cavort in public in stretch suits and gigantic dollar signs plastered over their torsos?

It would be too easy to blame it all on Ayn Rand. This gentle lady did not create this special psycho-mentality out of nothing; she merely tapped an attitude that was already there simmering under the surface and brought it into the open. The fact that so many people responded so enthusiastically to her Cult of Total Self-Absorption (as distinct from genuinely rational self-interest) provides a good deal of insight into the makeup of the right-wing mentality.

The Objectivists, despite all their talk of individual liberty and limited government, are inveterate Right Wingers. Anarcho-Objectivists are no exception for they still adhere to the psychology of fiction-worship and are incapable of bleeding for the flesh-and-blood world surrounding them.

The philosophical division between free market anarchists and voluntary communists is growing less important in light of the current struggle to free the neighborhoods from outside control. The purist ideals of total communal sharing and a totally free market of individual traders are important in themselves as ideals, as logical ends of different though consistent processes of reasoning. But the most important factor in the rough-and-tumble struggle for survival, the war to secure the right of flesh-and-blood people to control their own affairs, is the psychology of comradeship. It is the ability to identify with the actual victims of injustice that cements the bond uniting revolutionaries on the Left, whether they call themselves anarcho-communists, free market anarchists, or just plain radicals.

Terminology has ceased to be important. As we enter a period of overt repression it is this crucial psychological attitude toward our fellow human beings that will determine on which side of the political fence each one of us will stand.

— Jerome Tuccille

Massacres In Vietnam

The Old Right’s great responsibility over the last quarter century has been that of bearer of the most profound truth about the American state. As Harry Elmer Barnes expressed it after the U.S. had unleashed its massive bombings of Vietnam—“we always knew that the business of the U.S. government is mass murder.” The Old Right at the end of the second great imperialist war in 1945 recognized the special repugnance of the U.S. government. The burden of that fact was so great that many sought to evade the responsibility by adopting the historical amnesia of the New Right which paralleled the historical blackout about that war imposed by the Old Left (that this parallel is more than accidental may be suggested by the fact that many of the philosophers of the New Right had been the creators of the historical blackout when they were part of the Old Left).

The massive bombings of civilians by the U.S. air force was a natural development of American imperialism. The fire bombings of German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden, of Japanese cities such as Tokyo, and finally the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, was the result of the unquestioned assumption which formed the foundation of U.S. policy. The development and application of strategic airpower to civilian populations is the unique contribution of the U.S. to that whimsical facade labeled Christian Civilization.

The Old Right found a uniting element in its condemnation of the U.S. technological implementation of its program which declared a whole people to be The Enemy. On October 5, 1946, in his famous Kenyon College speech “Equal Justice under Law”, (in Arthur Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, An Anthology of Individualist Thought in the United States Citadel Press), which attacked the launching of the Cold War by the untried war criminals of the second world war, Churchill, Truman et al., Senator Robert A. Taft analyzed this American advance to barbarism. Taft described the Cold War policy as an abandonment of international law and the substitution of naked U.S. police power. This was a continuation of the American foreign policy which had lost sight of the truth that the police are incidental to the law, and that any deviation by the police from absolute adherence to law makes the police the creators of complete disorder in society. The U.S. failure to respect the law of humanity by its war against civilians had created the postwar disorder in world society. “Our whole attitude in the world, for a year after V-E Day,” Taft declared, “including the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems to me a departure from the principle of fair and equal treatment which has made America respected throughout the world before the second World War.”

The continued application of total war against civilians was carried out against the Korean people by the U.S. air force, 1950-53. Although some of the facts of U.S. genocide against the Korean people were reported at the time in European papers, little was known about it in America due to the blackout by the government-inspired press (the tentative moves recently by a few elements of the media toward independence brought forth the massive bellows from the offices of the chief magistrate as well as of the president of the senate).

Thus, when the U.S. unleashed its massive fire power against the Vietnamese people, it was remnants of the Old Right who understood immediately the absolute barbarism being applied in Vietnam while the Old Left and most of the amorphous New Left spent months in utter confusion about the realities of U.S. policy due to an almost incurable patriotism. The pacifist movement had shared the Old Right’s analysis and burden regarding American barbarism during and since the second world war. As a result they were equally in the forefront in understanding the genocidal nature of the war against the Vietnamese people (A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd were most active in this regard).

Old Right elements in the current anti-imperialist movement emphasized what others had not the memory or the experience with U.S. barbarism to know. Thus, they were in a position to perform a vanguard function by initially raising the issue of genocide and presenting the earlier history of U.S. barbarism to convince those anti-imperialists who had not yet shed their love affair with the U.S. government. Finally, after the U.S. intervention in Vietnam had become understood, the anti-imperialist movement adopted the radical critique presented by the Old Right. The Old Right transmitted to the Movement as a whole the realization that the U.S. government and its agents are war criminals. The recognition of the criminal nature of the U.S. state and its servants was the major intellectual advance which permitted the Movement to grow from protest to resistance.

The Vietnamese in the northern and southern parts of their country have been subjected to the war crimes committed by the U.S. war criminals for more than five years. They have been poisoned with chemicals and anti-personnel gases, bombed by anti-personnel bombs, cluster bombs and the many other devices developed by U.S. know-how. B-52 saturation bombings, ‘free fire zones’ air strikes, search and destroy missions, torture, atrocities and massacres by the U.S. have become the everyday life of the Vietnamese people. Having suffered this genocide the Vietnamese may wonder if it was not irony when the incumbent chief U.S. war criminal insisted that the atrocities and barbarism must continue in order to save them from . . . massacres. As recent revelations have verified, the Vietnamese are being subjected daily to massacres by the U.S. The victims include men, women and children. The most famous crime attributed to the Germans during World War II was the 1942 massacre in the Czech town of Lidice where every male was shot, but not the women and children. The U.S., unlike the Germans, has universalized the atrocity to make a Lidice out of the whole of Vietnam.

The chief manager of genocide touched all our hearts by his sincerity when he declared recently: “We saw the prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered the city of Hué last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death and buried in mass graves.” The case of Hué was discussed in an article in The Christian Century (Nov. 5, 1969) by Len Ackland who had lived in Hué and speaks Vietnamese. Writing about the seizure of Hué by the National Liberation Front, he said: “When on the first day of the attack, about 20 Vietcong entered Gia Hoi (a precinct of 25,000 residents in Hué) in order to secure the area, they carried with them a list of those who were to be killed immediately as ‘enemies of the people.’ According to Le Ngan, director of Hué’s special police, the list consisted of five names, all those of officers of special police.” The Catholic priest of the district explained that “none of his clergy or parishioners were harmed by the NLF.” The Saigon rulers refused to make Hué an open city to save the lives of the citizens. Instead, the Saigon army and U.S. marines undertook the systematic destruction of Hué by bombing and artillery in order to dislodge the NLF who had gained control of the city without resistance. No Saigon officials have sought to estimate the number of people killed by the American bombings and artillery attacks on Hué. Tran Van Dinh, a former Vietnamese envoy to Washington who broke with the Thieu-Ky regime, is a resident of Hué and described how members of his own family had been reported by the Saigon government as killed by the NLF while the family knew they had been victims of the U.S. bombing and had been buried in temporary graves since a regular burial was impossible during the U.S. bombardments. As George McT. Kahin, Cornell professor and America’s most prestigious Southeast Asian scholar, has noted, the three thousand people who died in Hué were mainly the victims of U.S. bombs, bullets, shells and napalm—an additional aspect of the overall genocide committed by the U.S. against the Vietnamese people. So much for the fabricated “Vietcong massacres”.

Having observed the complete lack of accuracy in the presidential statement, it is necessary to ask why it was possible for the NLF to take Hué in a few hours without many shots while it required 26 days for the U.S. marine corps to recapture Hué at the price of thousands killed by American bombardments. The northern half of South Vietnam (part of the province of Annam which is divided by the 17th parallel) had been the center of the struggle of Vietnam’s Buddhist majority for freedom from the Diem dictatorship which they caused to be overthrown in 1963. When the Thieu-Ky government imposed similar restrictions on their freedom, the Buddhist students in cooperation with the civil authorities and army commanders in this region in this region established an autonomous government in early 1966. Accepting the good faith of U.S. pro-consul, Henry Cabot Lodge, these civil, military and religious leaders of the Vietnamese of the region were betrayed and the Saigon troops were flown into Hué and other cities in U.S. transports to seize control and arrest the local leaders. Those who escaped became members of the National Liberation Front. Thus, leading the forces which entered Hué two years later were the former Buddhist leaders of Hué. These were welcomed by their compatriots, the citizens of Hué, while the Saigon officers and troops fled. Given the purges and executions committed by the Saigon police in Hué for two years, that only five special police in the district, according to the non-NLF source, were to be punished suggests the validity of the frequent accusation against the NLF that they are too mild and insufficiently rigorous in carrying out popular justice against the major criminals of the state apparatus. But, then it has always been beyond the conception of our European minds how Asians have such reverence for human life, even of an enemy. The race against time is whether the Vietnamese will have taught this to Americans before they are exterminated.

— Leonard P. Liggio

Recommended Reading

ANTIOCH REVIEW. The Fall, 1969 issue ($1.50) is a special issue devoted to a critique of the professional scholarly associations. Particularly recommended are Alan Wolfe on the political science association and Martin Nicolaus on the sociologists.

Frederick Forsyth, The Biafra Story (Baltimore: Penguin Books, paper, $1.45). A sympathetic account of the Biafran struggle by a British journalist.

H. D. Graham and T. R. Gurr, The History of Violence in America (New York Times: Bantam Books, paper, $1.25, 822 pp.) Fascinating report on the history of American violence, as delivered to the national commission on violence. Particularly recommended are the two deeply and thoroughly researched articles by Prof. Richard M. Brown: “Historical Patterns of Violence in America”, and “The American Vigilante Tradition”, on the numerous American movements for private, non-governmental justice.

George Kateb, “The Political Thought of Herbert Marcuse”, Commentary (January, 1970), 15 pp. A quietly effective refutation of much of the nonsense perpetrated by the leading New Left philosopher.

Mickey and John Rowntree, “More on the Political Economy of Women’s Liberation”, Monthly Review (January, 1970), 6 pp. The first sensible article on the women’s liberation hokum, pointing out that capitalism emphatically does not insist that women remain in the home (certainly a precapitalist hangover), and rational economic reasons why wage rates for women tend to be lower and unemployment rates higher than for men.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 4

February 15, 1970

35¢

THE TASK AHEAD

The libertarian movement stands on the threshold of a notable future. In the past year, the movement was launched into the “take-off” stage of its hoped-for future growth. In the past year, libertarianism has changed from a congeries of local small “circles” into an emergent mass movement, largely among the nation’s youth. The strong and militant libertarian minority broke off, or was broken off, from the conservative-statist Young Americans for Freedom, including virtually the entire YAF body from California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia. The large and growing California movement is moving toward its own organization, and is organizing its own Left/Right conference in Los Angeles at the end of February. The Pennsylvania and other ex-YAF elements have merged with the Society for Rational Individualism to form the new, many-thousand strong Society for Individual Liberty. The Student Libertarian Action Movement, several “Libertarian Alliances” and numerous organs and journals of opinion have emerged during the past year. Articles expressing or commenting on this new and vibrant trend have appeared in such mass-circulation magazines as Playboy, Ramparts, Newsweek, and—the latest—Cavalier (March, 1970), and the accession of Karl Hess to the pure libertarian cause has had an enormous impact.

The burning question before us is: where do we go from here? How do we accelerate our growth and build upon, rather than lose, our momentum? This is a problem which all of us must think about and discuss, especially since strategy and tactics are an art rather than anything like an exact science.

It seems to me that the prime consideration is to develop the libertarian movement—the “cadre”—as such. Many libertarians spend too much of their time and energy worrying about alliances: should they ally themselves with Right or Left or whatever? A far more important task is to build our own movement, especially now that we are strong enough to do so. Only by building our own movement, after all, can we spread and develop our own notably important and striking body of ideas. Strategic and tactical alliances with other groups are all very well, but they should flow from our own strength, with the idea always uppermost that we are “using” our allies as leverage to make our own ideas more effective.

Unfortunately what has happened all too often is that libertarians have forged alliances out of weakness, and then have begun to abase themselves before those allies, whether of Right or Left, so that soon the means becomes an end in itself, and preserving the alliance, or keeping our allies happy, comes to take on more importance than the spread of our own doctrines. Let us always remember that we should be using our allies, rather than the other way round. This means that it is fatal to stop criticizing our allies from our own principled point of view; for once we stop doing that, we begin to abase ourselves before tactical allies, and to lose sight of the point of the whole proceeding: the advancement of libertarianism. We should stop worrying about alienating our allies, and let them worry more about alienating us.

Furthermore, we have reached a point in history where there is little room for fruitful alliances with other organizations. YAF is of course impossible; but so now is SDS, which has become either orthodox Stalinist, or, as in the case of the Weathermen, politically psychotic. What has happened is that the Weathermen, finding no mass base of support anywhere, has decided that the entire American population, that is those who are not Weathermen members, are The Enemy, and therefore must be wiped out—in a despairing and crazed attempt thereby to help the liberation movements overseas. Therefore, the Weatherman leadership now exalts indiscriminate violence against any Americans, including even the abominable and psychotic murder of Sharon Tate. As a result, the Weathermen chanted “Charlie Manson power”, and hailed the murder of “the pig” Sharon Tate, since in their lexicon, everyone, not simply the police, have become “pigs” who are to be “offed” (gotten rid of). There is little or nothing to be gained, at this point, from organizational alliances; what we must do, then, is to attract the myriad of unorganized individuals, on the Left or the Right, who are instinctively libertarian, and who are groping for libertarian guidance and fellowship. This, as I understand it, is part of what the February California conference is designed to do.

But if we are to concentrate on developing our own organization, then we must be able to deal with divisions; among ourselves, for right now we encompass a very wide spectrum from “extreme right” to “extreme left”. Unless we can find a way to “peacefully coexist” among ourselves, there is little we can do to advance our cause in the “outside” world. But this means that the width of our spectrum has to be reduced, for if our differences are too wide, we become inherently more antagonistic than harmonious, and any attempts at unity will be a phony papering-over of differences that will fail just as readily as an alliance with YAF or SDS.

What I would like to see, then, is for both the extreme right and the extreme left of our movement to move sharply toward the center—to use an odious term, toward our “mainstream”. For our “anarcho-rightists”: for our ex-YAFers, ex-Randians, etc. this means largely abandoning totally their vestigial devotion to the American State: toward our Constitution, our foreign policy, our army, and our police. We must hold as our foremost objective the abolition of that State. For our anarcho-leftists this means abandoning the capricious urge for immediate “action” against that State, regardless of its certain failure, and the tendency to abandon free-market and individualist principles for the sake of unity with a powerless and trivial handful of communist-anarchists. Both extreme groups should prepare themselves to settle down, calmly and soberly but with cool and passionate dedication, to a thoughtful and protracted lifelong struggle for liberty and against the State. But this means that we must try to build a permanent movement, and that we try to develop lifetime careers that would enable each one of us to maximize our influence on behalf of liberty. And this means abandoning the “now generation’s” heedless and hedonic emphasis on the immediate present moment, and instead returning to the old-fashioned “Protestant ethic” emphasis on building steadily and rationally toward the longer future. We must try our best to become, as much as possible, “professional libertarians”, that is, people with lifelong careers in the service of libertarianism.

One important form of struggle which tends to be scorned by both of our extremes is simple, orthodox political action. This kind of working for political candidates is surely unglamorous, but it is often important for itself—in keeping a far “greater evil” out of office on behalf of a decidedly “lesser evil”—and also in reaching vast numbers of middle-class citizens who cannot be reached in any other way. We would like to abolish these various political offices, but so long as these offices exist, and the State offers us a choice, however puny, we often can influence our fate in an important way by deciding between them. And while, in the ultimate sense, we oppose both candidates, there are often times when one is far worse than the other; if, for example, we were faced with a choice between Richard Cobden or Genghis Khan for President, we would surely plunge into the Cobdenite movement with enthusiasm, despite Cobden’s falling a bit short of the pure anarchist position. But what we should then do would not be to bury our own identify within that movement, but rather continually propagandize within it for a more pure and consistent libertarian viewpoint. Such is the proper role of an ideological alliance.

What the movement needs more of, in short, is what the country as a whole needs more of nowadays: the tempering of the immediate, hot-headed, irrational passions of the moment into a sober, rational, farseeing, dedicated, protracted struggle toward a libertarian future.

Phony Libertarianism

Shortly after the YAF convention last August that organization was stripped of its libertarian veneer when several hundred libertarian radicals and anarchists split away to form their own society. Now it is apparent, judging by the YAF magazine The New Guard, that subtle attempts at co-optation are being made to seduce the dissidents back to YAF.

Co-optation is a rare practice for the Right Wing. The Right has always preferred to bludgeon its opponents out of existence than to corrupt them with favors. After all, it is ungentlemanly for any self-righteous protector of Christian civilization to sully his reputation by flirting with the Devil.

But the latest editor of The New Guard, Ken Grubbs, is a decent fellow in many ways. He really thinks of himself as a libertarian and he would rather sit down and reason with the occupiers of People’s Park before unleashing Ronnie Reagan to chew them up. I suspect that if it comes to a final showdown Ken Grubbs will turn his head sadly rather than stay and enjoy the massacre. And that is more than one can say about your run-of-the-mill Buckleyite.

Understanding this, we can now flip through the January, 1970 issue of The New Guard until we come to an editorial entitle, “YAF: a Philosophical and Political Profile”. The editorial deals with the results of a “survey” designed to ascertain the philosophical/political makeup of the YAF membership. For the first time to my knowledge Objectivism has now been admitted into the “mainstream” of YAF thought. According to this mythical “survey” ten percent of the YAF membership subscribe to the Objectivism of Ayn Rand while another twelve percent adhere to the libertarianism of Ludwig von Mises. How does the rest of YAF break down? Nine percent apparently like Frank Meyer’s “fusionism”; forty-eight percent thrill to the tune of Bill Buckley’s “conservatism”; another fifteen percent dance to the beat of Russell Kirk’s “traditionalism”; and the final six percent march in goose-like step to L. Brent Bozell’s “radical traditionalism”.

Even if we were to accept these figures as the results of a genuine survey it would still mean that seventy-eight percent of the YAF membership subscribe to a pro-administration, pro-status quo position ranging the Right Wing gamut from Frank Meyer to Brent Bozell (Bozell, by the way, recommends a church-state reverence for a Christian past with Roman Catholicism offered as the “path to our salvation” while Russell Kirk relies upon “moral prescriptions from our ancestors” and an “aristocracy based upon vocational, artistic and intellectual excellence.”).

But even Objectivism these days is no guarantee of libertarian principles. Jeffrey St. John is an Objectivist and he continually makes the rounds tooting his horn for the destruction of “international communism” and the suppression of dissidents at home. In short he is a conservative, as Ayn Rand herself has become a selfish conservative, adding a dash of atheism to the Right Wing brew which is only now becoming fully assimilated into it.

All this is nothing more than a prelude to the piece de resistance of the January issue, an article entitled “The Theatre of the ‘Conspiracy’”, authored by the Hippie Hatchet Man of the New Right, Phillip Abbott Luce.

What is one to make of Luce?

What is one to make of anyone who exchanges one brand of fascism for another and, hypocritically enough, tries to label his new position libertarianism? The very word, libertarian, is shortened to four letters in the mouth of someone like Luce. It is easier to respect the raw, open, undisguised hatred of Strom Thurmond than the same Right Wing line when it is deliberately concealed by long hair, aromatic weed, and New Left cultural jargon.

Luce begins his article by describing the Conspiracy Trial in Chicago as a “legal happening”. He then goes on to excoriate the defendants for their “overt refusal . . . to cater to the generally accepted etiquette of courtroom procedure.”

He continues:

“The defendants have made it abundantly clear from the time of their indictments that they consider the trial a crock. One of the defendants, Tom Hayden of SDS infamy, has written, ‘Since the trial has sparked widespread international concern, the Conspiracy hopes to turn it into a political showdown.’”

“From the outset, the eight defendants have attempted to make a mockery of the trial.”

“. . . Judge Hoffman is in a most unenviable position of having to attempt to act as a responsible and reasonable judge over a group of incorrigible media-oriented indictees. What indeed is a judge, conditioned to sane trials, to do when a defendant keeps shouting ‘You fascist dog! You fascist pig!’?”

“. . . to the Conspiracy the whole thing is a revolutionary game to be played on their terms or not at all.”

“The defendants have done everything possible to turn their trial into a stage show.”

“Bobby Seale had the dubious distinction of being the most outrageous of the defendants . . . He was aiming for publicity and possible martyrdom. His outbursts gained him both when the judge was forced to bind and gag him lest he continue to disrupt the trial.”

“Judge Hoffman was ultimately forced to sentence Seale to four years in prison for contempt of court.”

In the course of his despicable diatribe Luce refers to himself as a “civil libertarian” and even hints that he is a “radical”.

He is, of course, nothing of the sort. It would be too easy to dissect his analysis of the trial (part of which was originally published in National Review) and show him up for what he really is, but his own words condemn him more effectively than anyone else’s possible could.

Can any libertarian doubt that the Chicago trial is a political act staged by the federal government to make an example of some of the leading dissidents in the country?

How can any libertarian condemn the defendants for refusing to play according to the rules established by their executioners?

If the trial is not a mockery of justice, then what is it? And if it is a mockery, how can a libertarian fault the victims for treating it as such?

How can any judge be forced to sentence anyone to four years for contempt of court—unless by the political authorities?

How can any libertarian criticize Seale for demanding his moral right to defend himself? And how can any libertarian regard such a demand as contempt of court deserving of punishment?

How can anyone of even the slightest libertarian persuasion portray Judge Hoffman in the role of a reluctant victim of circumstances—a man who has shown nothing but contempt for the defendants and their attorneys from the start, mispronouncing their names and upholding every objection raised to every point they have tried to make in their own behalf?

No, Phillip Abbott Luce is not a libertarian. Nor is he a radical. With his long hair and hippie demeanor he is an effective weapon for the New Right in its attempts to co-opt the libertarian Right and in its desire to cloak its authoritarian nature with a facade of superficial libertarianism.

Whatever the reasons, he has allowed himself to be used as bait by the Buckley establishment. When they tire of his services they will cut him off. Perhaps, then, he can head up the Libertarian Wing of the American Nazi Party or go scuttling back to Progressive Labor.

What genuine libertarianism has to offer is consistent and persistent opposition to the policies of the U.S. government. Anything less gives libertarianism a bad name.

— Jerome Tuccille

MEET LIBERTARIANS

EAST

Massachusetts

William Baumgarth
114 A Richards Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass. 02138

Scott Borowsky
62 Overbrook Drive
Wellesley, Mass. 02181

Cathy Longinotti
Dawes House
Smith College
Northampton, Mass. 01060

Connecticut

Sign of the Dollar
219 Hamilton St.
Hartford, Conn. 06106

New York

Edward Smith
627 Second Ave.
New York, N.Y. 10016

New Jersey

Ralph Fucetola III
65 Mount Prospect Ave.
Verona, N. J. 07044

Pennsylvania

R. Lawrence Conley
923 4th Ave.
E. McKeesport, Pa. 15035

Delaware

Sally Stern
533 Country Club Drive
Woodbrook,
Wilmington, Del. 19803

SOUTH

Virginia

Teddy G. Caudell
4043 Tennessee Ave., N. W.
Roanoke, Va. 24017

Tennessee

Karen and Garrett Vaughan
Apt. 2201
5709 Lyons View Pike
Knoxville, Tenn. 37919

Georgia

John L. Snare
Box 33
Mercer University
Macon, Ga. 31207

Florida

Stephen Halbrook
514 Leisure Lane
Tallahassee, Fla. 32304

Randy Sides
Box 14481
Gainesville, Fla. 32601

Alabama

E. E. Culver
3405 Atlanta Ave.
Montgomery, Ala. 36109

Louisiana

Richard C, Johnson
Box 20882
Louisiana State Univ.
Baton Rouge, La. 70803

Texas

Mike Holmes
113 Baker College
Rice University
Houston, Tex. 77001

MID-WEST

Wisconsin

Donald McKowen
9343 West Lincoln
Milwaukee, Wise. 53227

Ted Sanstadt
Box G
Waushara Argus
Wautoma, Wise. 54982

Illinois

William J. Haga
Box 2068, Sta. A
Urbana, Ill. 61820

Missouri

David Zubatsky
323 Clara
Apt. 202
St. Louis, Mo. 63112

Mike Medvic
9018 Tudor
Overland, Mo. 63114

FAR WEST

Nevada

Arene Hackett
2150 Pinon Hill Dr.
Carson City, Nev. 89701

California

Northern California

Chris Gould
40 Tappan Lane
Orinda, Calif. 94563

Hal Jindrich
555 Middlefield # 5201
Mountain View, Cal. 94040

Rod Manis
Hoover Institution
Stanford, Calif. 94305

Sharon Presley
1154 Hanover
Daly City, Calif. 94014

Rosalie Nichols
2861 37th Ave.
Sacramento, Calif. 95824

Southern California

Kenneth Berger
2125 Via Rivera
Palos Verdes Estates,
Calif. 90274

Lowell Ponte
511 Terracina Boulevard
Redlands, Calif. 92373

Milton Shapiro
451 Converse Ave.
Claremont, Calif. 91711

Armed Forces

Jerry Whitworth
CR Division
USS Ranger CUAGI
FPO San Francisco, Calif. 96601

Hawaii

William Danks
1645 Dole St.
Apt. 402
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822

Canada

John Egolf
Box 523
Souris, Manitoba, Canada

Byron Fraser
5487 Buckingham Ave.
Burnaby 2, British Columbia,
Canada

Recommended Reading

James M. Buchanan, Cost and Choice (Chicago: Markham Pub. Co., 1969). A prominent Chicago School economist goes a long way toward adopting the Austrian theory of individualist, subjective value economics. Brief and non-mathematical, the book adopts the Mises-Hayek theory of costs.

Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, $5.95). Brilliant, scintillating work celebrating the primacy for economic development, past and present, of free-market cities. Also see the appreciative review by Richard Sennett, “The Anarchism of Jane Jacobs”, New York Review of Books (January 1, 1970).

James O’Connor, “The Fiscal Crisis of the State: Part I”, Socialist Revolution (January-February, 1970), 42 pp. (Available for $1.50 from Agenda Publishing Co., 1445 Stockton St., San Francisco, Calif. 94133). Analysis of current statism by a young Marxist economist who understands that the struggle to control and use the State is the current form of the “class struggle”.

Joseph Pechman, “The Rich, the Poor, and the Taxes They Pay”, The Public Interest (Fall, 1969), 22 pp. (Available for $1.50 at 404 Park Ave. So., New York, N.Y. 10016.) How the poor, rather than the rich, pay the taxes for the modern American welfare state.

John M. Peterson and Charles T. Stewart, Jr., Employment Effects of Minimum W age Rates (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, August, 1969), 165 pp. (Available for $2.00 from the American Enterprise Institute, 1200 17th St. N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036.) The most thorough, up-to-date study on the extent to which minimum wage rates have caused unemployment.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 5

March 1, 1970

35¢

Free Bill Kunstler!

The infamous Conspiracy trial in Chicago has piled repressive horror upon horror: conviction under a patently unconstitutional law that sends people to jail not for any criminal actions but solely for “intent”; the dragging of defense lawyers across the continent under arrest because they withdrew from the case by telegram; the refusal to permit Bobby Seale to defend himself; the subsequent shackling of Seale and then his summary conviction by Judge Hoffman for contempt and being sent to jail for four years; the convictions and sentencing of the defendants by Hoffman for contempt; the willingness of the minority jurors to override their belief in innocence in order to get home; and finally and most infamously, the summary conviction of the defense lawyers for contempt, with the chief lawyer, William Kunstler, being sentenced for more than four years in jail, for the crime of zealous and militant defense of his clients.

The actions of Judge Hoffman have, as nothing else, exposed for all to see the despotic nature of the federal judicial system in America. The judge is a tinpot tyrant, and very little that he says and does has, in actual fact, been subject to the review even of other judges, let alone the public at large. Contempt convictions enable the judge, the allegedly aggrieved party, to “try” the case himself, without benefit of jury or defense counsel or the usual safeguards of the legal system, and then to declare guilt himself and to carry out the sentence.

All this is bad enough, and the contempt convictions of the defendants are bad enough, but the conviction of Bill Kunstler strikes at the heart of any chance that defendants, especially political defendants who are charged with the crime of dissent, will be able to get any sort of fair trial in America. For if Bill Kunstler is sent to jail, what lawyer is going to put his neck in a noose for any future defendants? Who is going to be active and zealous and try his very best on behalf of his clients? And that, of course, is the purpose of Judge Hoffman: to strike a mortal blow at militant legal defense, and thereby to deprive any further dissenters of the right to the best defense they can possibly get.

As in everything else, Judge Hoffman was brutally frank about his purpose. In the course of sentencing Kunstler, Hoffman said: “If crime is, in fact, on the increase today, it is due in large part to the fact that waiting in the wings are lawyers who are willing to go beyond professional responsibilities, professional obligations, professional duty in their defense.” He added that the knowledge that such lawyers were available had a “stimulating effect” on potential criminals. Sure; if we eliminated defense lawyers altogether, it is still more sure that the conviction rate in this country would skyrocket; and we would also be hip-deep into a totalitarian society. One of the glories of the Anglo-Saxon legal structure is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty after the best possible case has been put up in his defense; if we are going to scrap this elementary legal safeguard, then this country is really lost, and none of us are safe.

If we are going to prevent total fascism in this country, if we are going to save the vestiges of American freedom, then all of us must make the freeing of Bill Kunstler a central concern. Here is a cause which surely our entire libertarian spectrum, regardless of other differences, should be able to back without stint or qualification. As Jerry Tuccille has urged, let us worry less about the oppression meted out to a non-existent fictional character, and more about the real oppression going on around us. One leading young writer, who calls himself a “philosophical anarchist”, has complacently and smugly declared: “After all, America is 95% free.” Well, Bill Kunstler is soon going to be zero free, and if his conviction for defending dissenters is allowed to stand, if he is going to be incarcerated for that sort of “crime”, then make no mistake, none of us is free.

Renew! Subscribe!

The Libertarian Forum is coming close to its glorious first anniversary, and the time for renewals is fast approaching. We are already the longest-lived, and the most important, libertarian organ in the country. Where else do you know that regularly, twice a month, you will receive news of the libertarian movement, analysis of events of the day from a libertarian perspective, discussion and critique of libertarian theory and practice? Furthermore, we have a nationwide circulation, and this means that each one of us, who tend to be isolated in his or her own community, can keep contact regularly with the broader, nationwide movement. The Libertarian Forum provides to each of us a sense of broader community which, at least so far, is the only one that we have.

So we urge each one of you to renew your subscriptions as they fall due. Furthermore, we are operating on a shoestring, and so any more subscriptions that you can get for us would be deeply appreciated. If each one of you found just one more subscriber for us we would be on a handsome footing.

We have only done as well as we have out of the generosity of our Libertarian Associates, who have earned our lasting gratitude by donating $15 or more during this first year of our existence. Renewals, and expansion, of our Associates is vital to our continued existence and growth. Associates and potential Associates should realize that it is only their generosity that allows us to make the Forum available to students at a reduced rate, and students, of course, are by far the largest source of new libertarians.

We welcome the following to the ranks of the Libertarian Associates:

Roy Halliday, Saugerties, N.Y.

H. G. Jinrich, Mountain View, Calif.

Jack Montgomery, State University, Arkansas.

PEOPLE JUSTICE

A significant control element in the preservation of law and peace within a society is the potential criminal’s fear of public exposure—not the imprisonment or fines he may suffer, but the humiliation and personal shame that results from the discovery and the publication of his delinquency. All criminals avoid, if they can, exposure to the censorious judgment of public opinion. By the same token, if a particular act is not judged criminal by public opinion, the State has great difficulty in capturing, prosecuting and convicting the alleged criminal successfully. Ultimately, in any society, a crime is any act that is not socially acceptable to the community as a whole, and the criminal is an isolated social deviant from the mores which the community by the widest social consensus determines to be “the law”. This would be just as true in an anarchic society as it is in a society which has developed the instrumentality we call the State.

This suggests that libertarians might do well to turn their attention to the task of exposing the manifest criminality of the State and its lackeys—not only by decrying taxation as theft or in the generalized terms so common in libertarian literature—but in specific and concrete terms with names, dates, places, victims and the specific crimes committed.

In the early history of the Celtic and Germanic tribes from whom so many of us are descended, free men met regularly with their neighbors to denounce alleged criminal acts committed by members of the community and to demand justice in the form of compensation to the victim for his injury. The community as a whole heard the case and in various ways aided the injured party to achieve his rights. Henry II of England is given credit for “creating” the grand jury as a means by which crimes could be detected and criminals brought to justice. Actually his jury system was part of a successful attempt to transfer the prosecution and punishment of crimes from the hands of free men acting within the traditions and with the consent of their neighbors to the hands of the royal justices and the royal courts imposing royal law for royal profit. The primitive but effective people’s courts were coopted and transformed into State courts, imposing legal rules and penalties unknown previously, and creating a State monopoly over the means of securing justice. As is well attested, this monopoly became the chief instrument by which the medieval state was strengthened and the profits of the courts were a most valued source of its income. In our own times, the grand jury has become an instrument of State oppression, controlled by judges and district attorneys, and selected from a narrow, unrepresentative panel of citizens. It is notorious that prospective jurors are selected from lists of property holders, chambers of commerce, and other highly select groups. This selectivity is used to ensure that the grand jurors reflect and protect the interests of the local ruling elites—racial, social and economic. In some areas, the grand jurors have openly acknowledged their group role by forming permanent “grand jurors’ associations” which perpetuate their collective self-identity and enhance their social solidarity. Thus the grand jury system is an important agency for the ruling elite who wield the power of the State, and monopolize the processes of justice. It seems to me that libertarians must find a way to reverse this process. We must take the law into our own hands once again like our ancient forefathers. We do so already in many ways—for example, we usually punish those who fail to pay their debts by publicizing the fact, thus alerting the community at large and greatly limiting the debtor’s future opportunities for delinquency. Newspapers publish the names of persons arrested, convicted or even suspected of crimes, thus opening them to public shame and ostracism. We regularly ask prospective employees, tenants, borrowers for letters of recommendation as to their character, and general reputation. A good reputation is still among a man’s most valued possessions.

Since we no longer possess the power to attain justice by threat or use of violent force upon those who have aggressed against us, deprived us of rights or property, (the State having seized and monopolized this power)—we must seek justice by the only means still readily available to us—the mobilization of public opinion. The criminals must be identified, their crimes exposed to the public eye, their reputations in society blackened until they are overtaken by remorse and offer to submit to justice and make compensation to the victims of their crimes.

Is this just another Utopian libertarian scheme? Another moral tract on what might be if we can “smash the State” in an apocalyptic moment? I believe it is not. Let us look for a moment at the Song My massacre and the Vietnam war as a whole. It is very likely that the immediate perpetrators of this atrocious crime will never be tried and punished by the courts of the United States, military or civil. The technicalities of the law, the pre-trial publicity, the lack of jurisdiction of military courts over ex-soldiers, and of civil courts over acts perpetrated outside their jurisdiction, the general political nature of the whole episode make it unlikely that much will come of the case. What would be valuable, however, is for some means to be found to determine the actual scope of the massacre, the names of those responsible and the degree of their guilt. If the men involved were so ruined in reputation that they were driven to retire from the army, or even forced into exile—the cause of justice would be served and the next time an officer led his troops into another Song My he would think more than once about murdering its population. If the government cannot perform this service, it could and should be done by private citizens who could constitute themselves as a Commission of Inquiry and set about the task of publicizing the nature of the crimes and the identification of the criminals.

In fact, on a broader scale, this job has already been done. In 1967 Bertrand Lord Russell, the distinguished British mathematician and philosopher, convoked an international panel of famed writers, historians, lawyers and scientists to sit as a tribunal to inquire into charges that the United States government had perpetrated a series of war crimes in violation of specific international treaties on the rules of war and a host of common crimes against the Vietnamese people. Two sessions were held, in Stockholm and then in Copenhagen, in which expert witnesses gave testimony in vivid detail as to the enormity of U.S. criminal acts in the Vietnam war. Though invited to testify, American officials refused to answer the charges and confined themselves to harassing the members of the tribunal and its staff, and demanding that their NATO allies cooperate in the task. The testimony was completed four months before the Song My massacre—but the American people were kept unaware of its findings. It documented in the most damning detail a record of human bestiality that places the United States among the all-time greats as a criminal State. (The full record of the testimony before the tribunal is available in paperback from O’Hare Books, 10 Bartley Road, Flanders, New Jersey, Price $5.75, appropriately titled Against the Crime of Silence.)

Indeed, the same technique is being used by former Justice Arthur Goldberg and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP to investigate the nationwide crackdown on the militant Black Panther Party. Since J. Edgar Hoohaw described the Panthers as the greatest single threat to the internal security of America (whatever happened to the Communist Party?), local police across the country have slain 28 Panthers, wounded, arrested and harassed hundreds of others, and subjected them to such violence that their white attorney has described it as “genocidal”. While the Goldberg-Wilkins Commission is clearly not sympathetic to the Panthers’ political views, its own prestige as part of the American Establishment, its very existence as an independent focus of public scrutiny of the police and their repressive tactics, ought to make the State and its lackeys more cautious in their continuing repression, and awaken those many Americans who still believe “It can’t happen here!”. The Russell Tribunal and the Goldberg-Wilkins Commission of Inquiry offer libertarians excellent models for future action. Serious thought should be given to the possible creation of private commissions of inquiry, local or national in scope, to expose the criminality of the State and its minions, to arouse the public against the vile and dastardly invasions of personal privacy by the FBI and other wiretappers, to inform them of the political and economic links between various special interests and the officials of the State, and of the rampant criminality of the police themselves. There is already a widespread suspicion that the cause of justice is deflected for reasons of State. When a respected member of the Warren Commission, Sen. Russell of Georgia, publicly admits that he thinks Lee Oswald was part of a conspiracy whose other members are still at large, how can the public believe in the integrity of justice under our State? When the admitted assassin of Martin Luther King publicly disputed the judge who sentenced him, insisting that he was not the sole murderer, the court silenced him and the case was closed. As Tom Wicker pointed out in the New York Times, (Dec. 16, 1969):

By now it is almost established practice for the Government to look outside existing institutions for a remedy or an explanation when serious crimes or shocking situations become too apparent to ignore. (This) derives from a developing mistrust of the official institutions and agencies of American justice—a mistrust, most seriously, of their motives, their very willingness to be fair and impartial, and a growing skepticism about their ability to function.

If Wicker is correct, the American people may be waiting for us to act!

— J. R. P.

Doctors And Drugs

Two recent medical reports on drugs make an important contribution to the raging controversy over the endemic use of drugs among the “now” generation.

I. The Canadian Report

Canada has appointed a commission of inquiry into the spreading use of drugs, headed by Dr. Keith Yonge, president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. A memorandum by Dr. Yonge, summing up what will be concluded in the report, has been published in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Dr. Yonge’s findings lend scientific confirmation to the empirical impressions of many of us who have observed friends and acquaintances becoming absorbed into the “drug culture”. Dr. Yonge writes:

“. . . the use of these drugs (from marijuana on up) does indeed induce lasting changes in personality functioning, changes which are pathological in so much as they impair the ‘mental and social well-being’ . . . . The harmful effects are of the same order as the pathology of serious mental illness (psychosis), namely in distorting the perceptual and thinking processes and in diverting awareness from reality, impairing the individual’s capacity to deal with the realities of life.

“The argument that marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol is specious . . . The primary action of alcohol is that of a relaxant. Impairment of mental functioning occurs when intoxicating quantities are taken. Marijuana, as with all the psychotropic drugs, on the other hand, acts solely as an Intoxicant, its effects being primarily the distortion of perception and reasoning.

“In psycho-social development man grows from the prevalence of self-gratification and dependency, with little regard for reality, to the prevalence of self-determination and . . . involvement in his society. Against this progression, the trend toward ‘instant’ self-gratification and artificial self-exploration (by the use of psychotropic drugs) is distinctly regressive—a reversion to the immature, the primitive. The regression is further evidenced in the other trends in group behavior with which the non-medical use of drugs tends to be associated—reversion to the crude or primitive . . . however much these may be rationalized as emancipation from socio-cultural oppression.”

Right on, Doctor!

II. The Berger Report

A remarkably keen insight into one of the major causes of the spreading drug abuse was contained in an article in the December issue of Medical Times, by Dr. Herbert Berger, chairman of the Committee on Drug Abuse of the Coordinating Council of the City of New York, and associate professor of clinical medicine at New York Medical College. Reporting on a study of 343 teenage drug addicts and their families over a seven-year period, Dr. Berger found one striking factor common to all these youths: “an absolute hatred of ‘Compulsory Education’”, a hatred that came upon them early in primary school and had become fully developed by the age of 12. As Dr. Berger writes: “These are often uneducatable individuals. They believe that we arbitrarily deny them their freedom and insist on their attendance in school. Like all who are jailed they resent both the jailer and the jail. Society has incarcerated them in school—against their will. This is, in their eyes, an unjust punishment, therefore they feel within their rights to retaliate by breaking school windows, by criminal activity and by disrupting classes.”

Dr. Berger concludes that if education were made voluntary, some students would go eagerly to school, while “others would embrace apprenticeship in trades where they are sorely needed . . . Left to their own devices these adolescents may develop at their own pace: some quicker, some slower than that which an arbitrary society has chosen for them. Their goals may be vastly different from those which we have established. They are not necessarily wrong. Who would dare argue that a good carpenter is not a greater asset than a poor lawyer!”

Dr. Berger’s findings independently confirm the writings of Paul Goodman and others on the crippling effects of compulsory attendance laws on the nation’s youth. The youth are now indeed being imprisoned in the vast jailhouse of our public schools merely for the “crime” of being under 16 or 18 years of age. To liberate them the compulsory attendance laws must be repealed.

Postal Note

We have been hearing from several subscribers that they have not received some issues of the Forum, or that an issue has been severely delayed. The fault, dear reader, lies not in us but in our beloved Post Service. So if any of you should fail to get any issue, let us know, and we will try to send you the missing copy.

The Great Society

“What, then, is the productive contribution of government?”

— Murray N. Rothbard

The distant, leveled ground is stubbled with the stumps of trees.

The masons holler to teams of workmen on the slope

Pushing boulders by twos and threes.

The masters, waiting on the raised catwalk,

Shrug their stooping shoulders.

The stonecutters lay their chalk and chisels down.

Nimrod has come today.
To put an old crone to work.
Sweeping up.

— James D. Davidson

Recommended Reading

Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (Oxford Univ. Press, paper, $1.95). The neglected story of the role played by Negroes in the abolitionist movement.

Ronald Radosh, “The Bare-Knuckled Historians”, The Nation (February 2, 1970). Excellent report on the fracas at the December historians’ convention.

Peter Dale Scott, “Tonkin Bay: Was There a Conspiracy?”, New York Review of Books (Jan. 29, 1970), 11 pp. (Available for 50¢, annual sub. for $10, at 250 West 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10019.) The best work yet on Tonkin Gulf Revisionism, showing not only that there was no North Vietnamese attack even after severe U.S. provocation, but also that lower echelon intelligence officials undoubtedly fabricated the attack to induce the President to attack the North.

A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Fawcett, paper, 95¢). The great revisionist work on 1939, now out in a second edition, in which Taylor effectively answers his critics.

Stanley Diamond, “Who Killed Biafra?”, New York Review of Books (Feb. 26, 1970). Excellent pro-Biafra article by a distinguished anthropologist.

Edmundo Flores, “Land Reform in Peru”, The Nation (Feb. 16, 1970). The story of the only relatively thoroughgoing land reform not put into effect by Communist-led governments.

Peter Michelson, “Fictive Babble: Review of Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto”, New Republic (Feb. 21, 1970). Slashing critique of Rand’s latest book, including the point that the Rand of 1969 has begun to write like the villains of her own novels.

Murray N. Rothbard, “The Guaranteed Annual Income”, The Rational Individualist (September, 1969). (Available for 50¢, annual sub. $4.00, at 800 Hillsboro Drive, Silver Spring, Md. 20902.) A critique of the Nixon welfare program.

Robert Z. Aliber, “Gresham’s Law and the Demand for NRU’s and SDR’s: A Reply”, Quarterly Journal of Economics (November, 1969), pp. 704-05. Points out that the SDR “paper gold” will not necessarily cure the U.S. balance of payments. Gresham’s Law will induce foreign countries to prefer SDR’s to dollars, not just to gold.

(In general, the New York Review of Books is a brilliantly edited, scholarly bi-weekly tabloid eminently worth reading.)

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 6

March 15, 1970

35¢

The New Left, RIP

We have to face it; we must face it: The New Left is dead. Dead as a doornail. Kaput. For those of us who hailed the New Left when it appeared, and urged libertarians to ally with it, this is a painful realization. But reality must be faced. That glorious, heady, revolutionary period of the life of the New Left (1964-1969) has come to an end.

First, the evidences of death. The evidence is everywhere. Perhaps the patient is not totally dead, but surely it is “medically dead”; the brain is long gone, the heart and spirit are failing fast, and what we are left with are the final reflexive convulsions of the corpse: the mindless and febrile twitchings of such pathetic and decaying groups as the Weathermen and the Patriot Party, the feeble high-camp of Yippie guerrilla theatre, the arrant nonsense of Women’s Liberation. The heart and body of the New Left are gone.

Almost from its inception, SDS was the heart and soul of the New Left, the bearer and carrier of its best libertarian and revolutionary instincts. SDS is dead, in an aggravated state of rapid disintegration, its onetime open libertarianism replaced by a handful of fanatic Stalinoid sects. The broader anti-war movement, which had SDS at its core, has folded completely in a few short months. At the brink of a crucial take-off after the October and November 1969 demonstrations, the left-liberal Moratorium, possibly scared of its own potential, possibly intimidated by Mitchell and Agnew, simply tucked tail and ran, folding at the horrifying prospect of its own rapid growth. And the New Mobe, organizer of the successful November demonstration, has sundered apart, taken over by feeble ultra-Left groups who want to graft on to the anti-war issue every cause but the kitchen sink. While America’s genocidal war in Vietnam goes on, virtually the entire Left has suddenly gotten bored with the whole issue and hived off to worry about the Environment—an eminently safe and co-optable issue where even Richard Nixon has become a militant. (Will the fellow who advocates air pollution please stand up?) Sure, Nixon’s cunning and demagogic Nov. 3 speech won over the “silent majority” temporarily. But what kind of a movement is it, how viable is it, that folds up and disappears at the first sign of a setback? Even the Democratic politicians, who had rediscovered the war issue at the time of the October moratorium, have slipped back into innocuous silence.

The student movement, which again had SDS at its heart, has also faded away. Columbia, Berkeley, San Francisco State, City College, Cornell, all the great centers of past struggle, are quiet and likely to remain so. It’s true that it’s been a cold winter, and that come spring, the students may well start up again. But even if they do, their demands are no longer in any sense revolutionary or even meaningful. Let’s face it: does one more “black studies institute” really matter? Are we supposed to go to the barricades for a demand that is innocuous at best, ludicrous at worst? The revolutionary student movement is dead also.

And black nationalism, the only sometime revolutionary force outside the students, has also shot its bolt. SNCC, the great and imaginative co-founder of the New Left and of the black liberation struggle, is dead. The Muslim groups and the Republic of New Africa have faded away. The cultural nationalists have disappeared. What we are left with are the Black Panthers who have (a) abandoned black nationalism for Marxism, and (b) are being systematically chopped down by the police, who are overreacting to a threat that never really existed, since the Panthers have far more support among adoring white radicals than they do in the black community. In retrospect, black nationalism has been finished since the murder of that superb leader, one of the great men of our epoch, Malcolm X. Those who murdered Malcolm knew that the black community would not be able to come up with anyone remotely approaching his stature and his potential. Those who came after Malcolm have been pygmies, excrescences upon a dying though only emerging cause. Instead of black national liberation, we now have only . . . what? Demands of black studies institutes, and, of course, the dashiki and the Afro haircut. The black liberation movement is dead.

II

If, then, the New Left is dead, this does not mean that its short life was not a glorious one. Its accomplishments were many and remarkable. It created the most intense, the most notable, and the most far-flung anti-war movement in the history of protest against American imperial wars. The New Left anti-war movement was begun by SDS in early 1965, and spread to almost an entire generation, and beyond. It succeeded in toppling an American President, and in forcing a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. It managed to use that war, furthermore, to bring a consciousness of the imperialist nature of American foreign policy to millions of people. And it also managed to use the war to radicalize countless numbers of Americans, to reveal the imperial corporate state nature of the American system.

In the process, and here is perhaps the New Left’s biggest achievement, it destroyed Liberalism. Liberalism, with its muddled thinking, its hypocrisies, its almost universally accepted cover for corporate state tyranny and imperial aggression, has been forever exposed, in its total intellectual bankruptcy, by the young New Left movement. No one will hereafter take Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Max Lerner, or Walt Rostow seriously. To accomplish this destruction of Liberalism with no support in the Establishment, with virtually no financial resources, and in complete opposition to a State-subvened culture, was a remarkable feat. And it took the New Left, with its passionate dedication and its ability to expose the consequences in reality of Liberalism’s rhetoric, to do the job.

The New Left began in late 1964, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and while it hardly succeeded in overturning the American university system, it has made an indelible mark. Before the New Left, corporate liberalism had succeeded in establishing a monstrous educational Leviathan that treated the growing mass of students as passive cogs in the machinery, as raw material to be processed to take their place in the state-monopoly system. The New Left has changed all that; the students and the youth are no longer the passive instruments of the “Age of Apathy” of the 1950’s, no longer the “Organization Men” of that epoch choosing jobs upon graduation with careful calculation of their pension rights. The youth are now almost universally active, independent, critical, even militant. Moreover, the universities will never again be able to treat the students as simple cogs; at least partial reforms have taken place, so that the wishes and views of the students will be at least consulted and to some extent heeded. The Liberal educationists will never again sit so pretty and comfortable upon their educational thrones.

Thus, the New Left made an indelible imprint upon an entire generation, a whole age-group becoming adults in fundamental opposition to bureaucracy and authoritarianism, refusing totally to be the Organization Men of their predecessors. This legacy of the New Left will remain, as will, of course, continuing notable contributions from particular individuals and scholars: the inspiring insights of Paul Goodman, the blend of moral passion and historical scholarship of Noam Chomsky, the fundamental revision of the study of the domestic and foreign American Leviathan by William Appleman Williams and his numerous and able young students in the historical profession.

III

But the New Left leaves also an unfortunate and negative tendency in American Life, and one that shows every sign of spreading through the country even as the political revolution goes to its grave. I refer to the so-called “cultural revolution”, or “counter-culture”, that blight of blatant irrationality that has hit the younger generation and the intellectual world like a veritable plague. There are strong signs, in fact, that the spread of the cultural “revolution” even as the political revolution fades is no accident; for, as Aldous Huxley foresaw in his remarkable Brave New World three decades ago, it is relatively easy for the Establishment to co-opt the cultural rebels by simply adopting the new “counter-culture”, and keeping the erstwhile rebels content on the ancient formula of despots: “bread and circuses”, except that now it’s dope and circuses. What better way to pull the teeth of knowledgeable dissent than to spread the ethic of indiscriminate “love”, the substitution of the hallucinatory exploration of a mythical “inner space” for a rational and purposeful acting upon reality in order to change it, the conscious abolition of reason and clarity of thought on behalf of vague, inarticulate stumblings and primitive “non-verbal communication”?

There are growing signs that the Establishment has indeed decided to embrace the “counter-culture”. Time, in its review of the 1960’s, called for precisely this kind of co-optation. And Time, Life, and the New York Times all celebrated the passive puerilities of the “Woodstock Nation”, while carefully and completely ignoring the murders and the systematic violence at the West Coast rock festival last December at Altamont. A particularly horrifying straw in the wind is the fact that the New York Times devoted the coveted front page of its Sunday Book Review of February 22 to a laudatory blurb for the works of the English psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Laing, the logical culmination of the militant irrationality of the counter-culture, goes so far as to proclaim the superior virtues of insanity in our “sick society”.

Thirty years ago, Ludwig von Mises wrote of a “revolt against reason” which he saw around him. But that revolt was tiddly-winks compared to the current open, all-out drive to liquidate reason and to substitute the ethic and the epistemology and the life-style of insanity.

How did the counter-culture take hold of the New Left? It began with an admirable desire to avoid the mistakes of the Old Left, especially the Old Left’s emphasis on government action and reform through government. Instead, the New Left wished to emphasize individual or personal liberation. But instead of arriving at a philosophy of individualism and rationality, the form of personal “liberation” which it came to adopt was the counter-cultural “liberation” from reason and the consequent enslavement to unexamined whim.

Let us look more closely at this spreading counterculture: the contempt for reason, logic, clarity, systematic thought, or knowledge of history; the hostility to science, technology, and human material progress; the hatred of hard work, planning, and long-range forethought; the hostility to “bourgeois comfort”. In education, the cultural rebels are opposed to reading, to course content, to gaining knowledge, as “structured” and “repressive”; in place of which they would put free-form, gradeless, “rapping” about their own unexamined and puerile “feelings”. And, the counter-culture exalts: immediate, momentary sensory awareness, aggravated by hallucinatory drugs; a corollary Rousseauan worship of the primitive, the “noble savage”, the poverty-stricken, of “back-to-nature”; dropoutism and living from moment to moment on pure subsistence. In religion, the strong rational elements of our Western Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition have been thrown overboard for a banal Oriental mysticism and devotion to magic, astrology and Tarot cards. All in all, we are being hit with an extreme, mystical, anti-intellectual degenerate form of what Sorokin called “sensate culture”. What it amounts to is a systematic, multi-faceted attack on human reason.

Noam Chomsky has written, on the counter-culture: “One bad effect is the revival of fanaticism. A lot of youthful dissidents think in terms of an unrealistic time-scale when they think of social change. When Marx wrote about capitalism, he was highly indignant, but he didn’t go out and have tantrums in the streets. Youth, like other marginal groups, will fail to make a distinction between what’s emotional and what’s rational. Rationality is not a gift you should concede to the enemy if you want to succeed.”

For those who are eager to discover a different culture, what a blessed relief it is to turn from the sewage of the counter-culture to the genuine, rational culture of the Enlightenment! The recently published second volume of Peter Gay’s superb history of the Enlightenment, The Science of Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969, $10.00, 705 pp.) carries one into a glorious world, of Condorcet, of Hume, the Physiocrats, the philosophes; they were not, most of them, anything like consistent libertarians; but their entire cultural framework was one of devotion to: reason, science, technology, human progress, individual liberty, free trade, and the free-market economy. We find the great Condorcet and his paean to rational liberty: “The moment will come, then, when the sun will shine only on free men on this earth, on men who will recognize no master but their reason.” One Condorcet, one philosophe, is worth the whole contemporary pig-pen.

The time has come for us to make a stand for reason. The time has come for us to realize that liberty, no matter how glorious, is not enough; for what good would liberty be, what good any social system, if entire generations go crazy, following Leary into a drug-besotted retreat from the world, following Marcuse into a “liberated” and “un-repressed” ignorance and whim-worship, following Laing into open insanity? We must raise the banner of Liberty and Reason, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable! We must eradicate the counter-culture before it destroys the world.

IV

If the genuine, the political New Left is dead, and what we are left with, overshadowing its positive legacy, is the spreading plague of the counter-culture being embraced by the Establishment, then what of the future? What is now the prognosis for the Movement? In the first place, there is no necessity for long-run despair. All revolutionary movements proceed in zigs and zags, with revolutionary periods succeeded by periods of counter-revolution and falling-back. We are now at the beginning of a period of counter-revolution.

As the Marxists discovered long ago, there is a proper strategy and tactic for periods of recession and counterrevolution. This strategy amounts to a sobering up, a cool abstinence from provoking State repression, a quiet concentration on patient, long-range educational work, on what the Marxists call “base-building”. The heady wine of r-r-r-revolutionary posturing and phrasemongering must be replaced by the cool draught of rational analysis.

Furthermore, there may well be great positive benefits from this coming period of recession. Leonard Liggio has offered a brilliant analogy between the zig-zag fortunes of the Movement and the Austrian (Mises-Hayek) theory of the business cycle. In Austrian theory, the recession is the healthy and necessary response of the economy to the excesses and malinvestments of the preceding inflationary boom. Perhaps there are similar cycles in the fortunes of revolutionary movements. For just as the late stages of an economic boom throw up excesses and malinvestments which must be cleansed by recession, so the later years of the New Left had increasingly buried its sound elements and thrown up unsound and degenerate forms which are now all that survive. Perhaps the function of the coming recession is to serve as a healthy purgative: to cleanse the Movement of these excrescences, of this diseased tissue, so that, come the opportunity, the Movement will be a sound and healthy organism ready for the next advance.

For A New America

The now unfortunately defunct journal Studies on the heft was by far the outstanding theoretical and scholarly product of the New Left. It began in 1959, when the New Left was only a gleam upon the horizon, founded by a bright young group of graduate history students at the University of Wisconsin, who were under the inspiration of Professor William Appleman Williams. The first, or Wisconsin, phase of Studies was, in my view, its finest; there, it brought to the intellectual world the insights and researches of Williams and his students, insights that were destined to change the course of American historiography and even the way in which young scholars began to look at current America. The Williams contribution was to destroy the generally accepted image of the New Deal and of the Wilsonian and Progressive periods of twentieth-century America. The Williams school has shown that, rather than the Progressive-Wilson-New Deal being “progressive” movements by the mass of the people to curb and regulate Big Business and establish an anti-business form of welfare state, they were really generated by Big Business leaders themselves in order to cartellize and monopolize the economy through the instrument of Big Government. And rather than the foreign wars and interventions by Wilson and FDR being “enlightened” moves to spread democracy and “collective security” throughout the world, they turn out to have been aggressive acts to establish the world-wide hegemony of an American Empire, at the service of this same Big Business ruling class. The function of the Liberal intellectuals was to serve as ideological apologists for this neo-mercantilist corporate state. Hence, Williams’ brilliant term, “corporate liberals”.

After the movement of Studies to New York in 1963, the journal lost much of its emphasis on scholarship and revisionist American history, and plunged actively into New Left “movement” activity, with lengthy reports and commentaries, for example, on the short-lived “community action projects” among the urban poor. In its later years, Studies was increasingly torn apart between those of its editors who wanted to continue to stress movement activism as well as the emerging “cultural revolution”, and the more theoretical who wished to turn the journal into a center for building a frankly socialist theory on behalf of a supposedly imminent socialist party. But the problem was that both tendencies were no longer interested in continuing the real genius of Studies, its historical scholarship. The deadlock among the editors caused Studies to fold in 1967.

In a profound sense, the opening and closing of Studies performed similar historic roles: for just as the emergence of Studies foreshadowed the later birth of the New Left, so its death also foreshadowed the New Left’s demise. The same tendencies which tore Studies apart (mindless activism and the counter-culture on the one hand, sectarian Marxian socialism on the other) were two of the major reasons for the later dissolution of the New Left as a whole.

An important book has now been published which contains the best of the articles from Studies on the Left. It is a pleasure to see that the best articles from Studies have been resurrected, enshrined, and available in book form. The book is For a New America (New York: Random House, $10.00), edited by James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, two of the editors of Studies (Weinstein being undoubtedly the single most important editor over its life-span.)

The star of the collection is undoubtedly Part I, “American Corporate Liberalism, 1900-1948”, which presents a Williamsite revision of modern American history. Every article in this section is important and to be recommended. They include William A. Williams’ review-article of Ernest May’s whitewash of American Imperialism at the turn of the century; Martin J. Sklar’s lengthy and devastating critique of Wilsonian “liberalism”; James Weinstein’s discussion and explanation of the pro-union attitudes of the Big Business Establishment during the Progressive period and Ronald Radosh’s exposition of the pro-corporate state views of American union leaders; Murray N. Rothbard’s critique of the widespread myth that Herbert Hoover believed in laissez-faire, showing instead that Hoover was the founder of Roosevelt’s New Deal and corporate state; and John Steinke and James Weinstein’s delightful little revelation that Joe McCarthy learned his red-baiting from none other than the liberal Norman Thomas.

Parts III and IV, which deal with ethnic questions, are also excellent, featuring one of the earliest statements of the black power position (1962) by Harold Cruse, and a scintillating defense of Hannah Arendt against her Zionist detractors by Norman Fruchter. Part II, “An American Socialism”, is the least valuable part of the book, representing a tortured attempt of the “theoretical” wing of the later Studies board to develop a new prolegomena to the theory for a new socialist party. But even here, Weinstein’s review-article of the scholarly literature on the Socialist Party is very useful, as is especially Gabriel Kolko’s realistic pessimism on the viability of both the Old and New Lefts.

There are, inevitably for such a collection, a few articles from the old Studies which I miss, and which could easily have been included if the tendentious socialist articles had been dumped: the conflict which raged around the Fruchter article, between Fruchter and Old Left Judeophile Marxists Louis Harap and Morris U. Schappes (Fall, 1965); Michael A. Lebowitz’ brilliant review-article of Lee Benson’s Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Winter, 1963); Joseph R. Conlin’s review of Old Left Marxist Philip Foner’s history of the IWW (Mar.-Apr., 1966); and Todd Gitlin’s and Shin’ya Ono’s searching critiques of the dominant “pluralist” theorists of American political science (Summer, 1965).

All in all, one of the most important books of the year.

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VOL. II, No. 7

April 1, 1970

35¢

THE MAD BOMBERS

Over fifteen years ago, a nutty, oddly likeable little man named George Metesky started placing bombs around mid-town New York City, fortunately setting them in such a way that no one was injured. After several bombings, Metesky, dubbed the “Mad Bomber” by the press, was finally picked up and put away. Nowadays, not only would he be a hero of the Left, but he is almost a model of its current incarnation. Like the Newest Left, he had a genuine political grievance, in fact much the same political grievance; in his case, it was injustice at the hands of Con Edison, a State-created and privileged monopoly. And like the, present Left, he despaired of or was uninterested in carrying out a protracted ideological and political struggle against Con Ed and the State which created it. Instead, like the newest Looney Left, though devoid of mass popular support (to put it mildly) he decided to go over into armed struggle. His decision was certainly less conscious and less ideological than that of the Newest Left; but it was also considerably less dangerous.

There have been mutterings on the Left for months about going over into armed struggle, or into urban guerrilla warfare against the System. Now it looks as if they have done so. The insanity of their decision can be easily gleaned by reading the works and studying the examples of the successful revolutionaries and guerrilla warriors. Over and over, the vital point is that before launching armed struggle, the guerrillas must have the support of the bulk of the population of the area (whether peasants or urban residents). They must, in the metaphor of Mao and Che, “swim as a fish in the water” of the surrounding population. Fidel, for example, did not begin his revolution by landing with a handful of armed men in Oriente Province. He began it with years of previous political education and preparation which built up enthusiastic support in the Cuban population, especially among the peasantry. He arrived at the proper “water” first before putting in the “fish”. And it was precisely Che’s complete failure to heed his own advice that led to his own murder and to the rapid extinction of his guerrilla band in Bolivia.

If guerrillas launch their struggle without public support, they are doomed to total failure, to ending just like Metesky and Che. But not only that: the reason why American counter-insurgency quickly evolved into genocidal slaughter in Vietnam is precisely because the Vietnamese guerrillas had the support of virtually the entire population, and therefore the American effort necessarily meant war conducted against the entire population. In short, armed struggle against popular support means genocidal war. It is hard to see how the new Mad Bombers of the Left can help but deteriorate in a similar way. The Mad Bombers, of course, have nothing like the power of the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. But they face an urban population in America who are totally and violently opposed to their aims and their tactics. They are operating in a water in which they cannot hope to swim. Therefore, the logic of the situation demands that they begin to bomb everyone and everything. So far, they have been scrupulous in setting their bombs at night, and in giving advance warning to clear the buildings. But how long will it go on before the Bombers begin to escalate their struggle against the entire American population?

The Looney Left has apparently fallen for the old turn-of-the-century Left-wing anarchist and nihilist nonsense of the “propaganda of the deed”, the notion that daring and violent deeds will attract the support of the masses to one’s cause. All that these deeds can attract will be the undying hatred of the vast bulk of the American population, which will call down upon the head of the Looney Left the full force of the State apparatus. The only question now is how many innocents will be dragged off to the pokey from the provocations of the unhinged. And so, in a striking illustration of the “cleansing” process that we mentioned in our last editorial (“The New Left, RIP”, Mar. 15), the Looney Left, frenzied, unhinged, its judgment hopelessly addled by drugs, proceeds to bomb its way to self-destruction.

The Knudson Revolt

Four years ago, Ken Knudson, a member of the pacifist Peacemaker Movement, pioneered in a new form of tax resistance: the idea of claiming enough exemptions on the Form W-4 Employee’s Withholding Exemption Certificate so that no tax can be withheld from one’s wages. Last fall, on October 5, at Lincoln Park in Chicago, a dozen people gathered to form the first tax resistance group based on the Knudson method. All the members adopt the Knudson approach and claim the exemptions; then they take the money which would have been paid into the U.S. treasury and pool it into a cooperative association, the Chicago Area Alternative Fund, which uses the funds for constructive, as well as voluntary, purposes. Anyone interested can write the Fund at 1209 W. Farwell, Chicago, Ill. 60626.

Liberty And The University

I recently received from a colleague a little packet of literature publicizing the activities of the University Centers for Rational Alternatives, Inc., a loose organization of scholars and educators formed for the purpose of defending academic freedom, “the freedom to speak, to teach, to learn, to inquire, to criticize, and to challenge” within the university community. Perceiving these to be principles which I strongly support myself, my first reaction was a cautious Bravo! and I read further. Soon I found the UCRA taking a position against arson, assault and battery, deliberate destruction of academic hardware, looting of files, forcible occupation of buildings, and intimidation of students. Right on! I said to myself, and read right through the little packet of literature.

Strangely, however, my enthusiasm began to cool by the time I had finished. Although I did not encounter a single statement which, in isolation, could be construed to violate sound libertarian principles, going back to read between the lines, to study what was left unsaid as well as what was said, to consider the context in which high-sounding principles were presented, I began to find grounds for suspecting that the UCRA was not such a staunchly libertarian organization as its rhetoric implied.

The big tip-off was that in all the pages devoted to elaboration of the ways in which SDS goonsquads posed a threat to freedom in the university community, there was barely a mention of the frequent failures of the university itself to promote liberty within and without its institutional perimeters. And one need not appeal to some specious, new-leftish distortion of the meaning of the term “freedom” to show that the university’s record is not spotless. Let us examine three ways in which the university falls short of the ideal:

First, if a free society means one in which the threat to the individual of coercion by arbitrary authority is minimized by strict observance of the principle of the rule of law, the academic community should form itself as a model, a miniature replica, of such a society. Yet within the university, the range of arbitrary authority which the student is expected to accept in exchange for access to the knowledge he seeks is often unnecessarily broad. It must not be forgotten that what the students are protesting is often the meddlesome paternalism of an administration which, far from promoting the development of the student as a free individual, seems aimed instead at inculcating the pseudo-value of “respect for authority” as an end in itself. How can the UCRA insist that the rule of law (a system, we are taught, based on the impartial application of explicitly formulated general rules to decisions for specific cases) must extend to the university campus when the procedures for disciplining students, selecting administrators, and dismissing faculty members are a model of the rule not of law, but of caprice, favoritism, prejudice, and vacillating submission to transient pressure groups? Sidney Hook, the founding father of the UCRA, gives away too much of his true position when he fondly recalls his golden undergraduate days at Columbia when “Nicolas Murray Butler was both the reigning and ruling monarch.” (NYU Alumni News, May 1968).

The second way in which the university too often violates libertarian principles occurs when it itself strays across the line, so insistently drawn by the UCRA, between mere advocacy of a cause, defensible no matter how repugnant the cause itself, and the actual use of physical force or threat of force to advance that cause. We don’t need to be so abstract as to point out that every time the university accepts a dollar in tax money, extorted from citizens by the Internal Revenue Service, it is cooperating in the perpetration of initiated violence. There are more direct instances available. When the university cooperates with the Selective Service System, it is contributing to the biggest sell-out of the American tradition in the history of the nation. (One constructive accomplishment of the campus left has been to bring about a limitation of university complicity in this form of legalized slavery.) Again, when it allows its relations with the military to drift beyond the point of allowing the military to state its own case against the pacifists (recruiting and probably even most ROTC activities are defensible on grounds of academic freedom) to the point of donating the time of its salaried staff or permitting unpaid use of its facilities and real estate to pursue military objectives, the university is coming dangerously close to putting its corporate finger on the trigger.

Finally, one of the oldest principles of libertarianism holds that although the use of defensive violence is legitimate to counter force initiated by others, defensive force must never be excessive. You don’t hang a pickpocket; and you don’t flog a peeping Tom. So why should the UCRA cheer university administrations on when the police whom they call in to quell campus disturbances throw restraint to the wind and, instead of exacting an eye for an eye, take ten for one?

If the UCRA were truly a libertarian group, they would be as concerned with those threats to freedom that originate from within the academic establishment as they are with those posed by the campus rebels. The fact that its members are silent on these points is sufficient reason to suspect that it is something quite different. But what? Not simply another stuffy voice protesting youthful affronts to decorum and good grooming (although Hook lets his guard slip again to expose a good measure of this attitude as well: “during a talk I was giving, one of these bearded fellows stood up and tried to break up the meeting. He had a big black beard. It probably hid a weak chin.” (NYT, Jan. 26, 1969).

No, no such petty principle could have united Abba Lerner, A. A. Berle, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lewis Feuer, Edward Teller, Henry Walich, and Bertram Wolfe! What does this motley collection of corporate liberals, old socialists, and unreconstructed conservatives have in common that could have brought them together, if that common principle is not a true concern for academic freedom? One doesn’t have to exercise much imagination to see that what they all have in common is a position of privilege within the academic establishment. The UCRA is a united front action of the academic elite to defend themselves against a perceived threat to their status!

But still, shouldn’t the campus libertarian welcome the voice of the UCRA speaking out on behalf of academic freedom, even though their perception of the problem is one-sided and their motives are suspect? No, because an organization of this type actually poses a threat to the advancement of academic freedom. It addresses itself to those scholars and teachers with natural libertarian inclination, who are alarmed by campus disruptions, and attempts to persuade them that to defend academic freedom they must uphold the state quo (or even the status quo ante, in some cases). Intentional or unintentional, this is a splitting tactic by which the UCRA forestalls what would be the only genuine hope for establishing academic freedom (and the only genuine threat to the privileged position of the academic establishment), which lies in the potential of an alliance between the libertarian right and the radical left.

Libertarians in the academic community must learn to keep a cool head in the campus crisis, and not be panicked into thinking that the only alternatives are to support the UCRA elite, who benefit from their position of power within the old repressive institutions, or to sell out to the new left, which aims at replacing these old with new but equally repressive revolutionary institutions. Instead, they must pursue the goal, no matter how difficult it may seem, of promoting a libertarian alternative with an appeal to the best elements of both the left and the right. Academic freedom, yes; academic privilege, no!

— Edwin G. Dolan
Ass’t. Prof, of Economics Dartmouth College

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Tax Resistance

With the income tax deadline looming steadily on the horizon, those who have been flirting with the idea of not filing might pick up a small paperback entitled, How to Refuse Income Taxes, authored and published by Lucille E. Moran. The book can be obtained by sending a dollar to Miss Moran at P.O. Box 641, Tavernier, Florida 33070. I have not yet read the book, but Miss Moran says she has been refusing to file for eight years at this point (legally) and has gotten away with it. The key point is not to file at all, claims the authoress. Her book will fill you in on what to do from there.

Free market libertarians are not the only ones concerned with tax resistance. The Manhattan Tribune, a radical left weekly published in New York City, has recently offered two articles on tax refusal by Bob Wolf who is also a regular contributor to The Realist. One of his pieces dealt with the ten percent surcharge added to the phone bill four years ago to help finance the war in Vietnam. Bob states that about six thousand people including himself have so far refused to pay the tax. When the federal government tried, to collect $2.97 from him last April, he wrote to his tax collector and advised him that since the war was illegal he (the revenue agent) might want to re-examine his own position to avoid being tried at a war crimes trial in the future. He also offered to help find the taxman a job in some legitimate field of work.

Finally, the government managed to collect $6.00 in back taxes from Bob by sending a couple of agents to his employer’s office and putting a garnishee on his salary. The cost in time and labor to the government certainly far exceeded the amount collected. As Bob still refuses to pay the tax voluntarily he again owes some $16.00 in outstanding taxes. He is patiently waiting for some well-salaried government agents to drop around at his employer’s office once again and personally demand Uncle Sam’s “protection” money.

The second article dealt with the War Tax Resistance 330 Lafayette St., New York City, an organization that distributes anti-war tax literature and offers the services of tax-resistance counselors. Among the sponsors are Dr. Benjamin Spock, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Allen Ginsberg!

This group is mainly concerned with the deduction of that portion of our total taxes used to finance the war and to manufacture war machinery. In the original statement issued by this organization the point was made that the “right of conscientious objection to war belongs to all people, not just to those of draft age.” Bob Wolfe in his own letter to the tax assessor warns that those seeking to enforce the collection of war taxes may be guilty of complicity in the commission of war crimes.

The main drawback in using the Vietnam war as the basis for one’s refusal to pay taxes is that this position is invalidated the minute the war ends. For this reason free market radicals who conscientiously object to all taxes might be more interested in Miss Moran’s proposal for its long-range possibility. In any case tax resistance is an area where radicals of every persuasion can make common cause, using whatever arguments they will to serve their own libertarian ideals.

— Jerome Tuccille

(Ed. Note: The February 13 issue of Tax Talk, published by War Tax Resistance, lists the names and addresses of the War Tax Resistance centers throughout the country, as well as news of other WTR activities.)

Census Resistance

This is the year of the decennial Federal snoop, the compulsory invasion of the privacy of each one of us by our Big Brother in Washington. In addition to the usual head count, the Census Bureau will mail every person a questionnaire, forcing us to answer a minimum of 23 questions, under penalty of a $100 fine. Furthermore, twenty percent of us will be compelled to fill out an additional questionnaire containing over 66 questions.

One way of combatting the compulsory Census is to support those bills in Congress to make the non-head count questions strictly voluntary. Another way is Resistance. If you decide to resist (the maximum penalty for this step being a $100 fine after legal prosecution) or even to answer the questions under protest, CENSUS RESISTANCE ’70 provides a form for you to send to them, informing them whether you are answering under protest or are refusing to answer the questions; they also have a form for you to attach to your census questionnaire telling the Census Bureau of your protest or refusal. In this way, CENSUS RESISTANCE ’70 is organizing a mass protest movement. Furthermore, this organization plans to take to the federal courts and on up to the Supreme Court to fight the first case in which the government tries to fine someone for census refusal (Only two such fines were levied in the 1960 census). For information, write to: CENSUS RESISTANCE ’70, 304 Empire Building, 13th and Walnut Sts., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107.

Capsule Wisdom

“Is it reason that produces everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent and taste. What is Virtue? Reason in practice. Talent? Reason enveloped in glory. Wit? Reason which is chastely expressed. Taste is nothing else than reason delicately put in force, and genius is reason in its most sublime form.”

M. J. DeChenier—1806

Recommended Reading

A. S. DeVanyet al, “A Property System for Market Allocation of the Electromagnetic Spectrum: A Legal-Economic-Engineering Study”, Stanford Law Review (June, 1969), pp. 1499-1561. Comprehensive article on how private property rights could be allocated in radio-TV frequencies.

F. A. Hayek, “Three Elucidations of the Ricardo Effect”, Journal of Political Economy (March-April, 1969), pp. 274-85. It’s great to have Hayek back writing economics, this time a welcome addition to Austrian business cycle theory, in rebuttal to the criticisms of Sir John Hicks.

Henry Hazlitt, “Compounding the Welfare Mess”, National Review (Feb. 24, 1970). Brief critique of the Nixon welfare program.

Robert A. Mundell, “Real Gold, Dollars, and Paper Gold”, American Economic Review (May, 1969), pp. 324-31. An anti-gold Chicago economist concedes that the root cause of the balance of payments problem has been the American artificial undervaluation of gold.

Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (2 vols., Princeton University Press, paperback). Professor Palmer’s epochal work now in paperback. An integrated study of the French and other European—as well as the American—Revolutions, showing the connections. Definitive. American Revolution is shown to be a truly radical one. Sympathetic to the revolutionary cause.

Warren C. Robinson, “A Critical Note on the New Conservationism”, Land Economics (November, 1969), pp. 453-56. When the ignorant blather of conservationists was at last refuted by economists a decade or so ago, the conservationists fell back to a more limited position, of preserving a few natural amenities. Refuted here by Prof. Robinson, who also points out that the average taxpayer earns hardly more than half the average income of the wilderness camper whom that taxpayer is forced, by the conservation program, to subsidize.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

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Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Washington Editor, Karl Hess

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 8

APRIL 15, 1970

35¢

The Cure For Air Pollution

The new glamor issue in American politics is pollution. It is common to hear predictions that human life has only a few more decades left on this planet. And it is common to hear increasingly strident demands for massive governmental action to stop pollution NOW. Only the government can save us, so the chorus goes, from the evil industrialists who pollute in order to make a profit.

This “emergency” is exactly what the Monster in Washington wants. Just as war and depression are used as excuses for stampeding the people into turning their lives over to an all-too-eager government, so pollution promises to be the issue that will keep the Monster fed now that the people are taking its war away from it. Before we feed the Monster, let us look at its role in causing the pollution crisis.

We will not look at the multitude of ways government itself pollutes (Atomic Energy Commission, Army Engineers, Supersonic Transport, etc.) or encourages others to pollute (farm program, oil import restrictions, highway construction program, etc.). Instead we will do what must seem rather strange for a libertarian, by focusing on an area where government should have acted but didn’t (which is rather strange for a government). Government has defaulted in the little-known corner of the law known as the law of nuisance.

The right to property necessarily implies the right to use one’s property free from the interference of others, as well as the obligation not to use it in any way which interferes with the rights of others. One who dumps garbage on your lawn is violating your right to property. More subtly, one who allows particulate matter to escape from his factory smokestack five miles away so that it leaves a layer of soot on your house is also violating your right to property. Because he is violating your rights, he has no right to operate in such a manner. His only moral alternatives are to find a way of running the factory so that it doesn’t pollute your property, to pay you to put up with the pollution, or to close the factory.

Unfortunately, the law of nuisance has applied this principle only partially. The reason is the peculiar division of the law of nuisance into two parts—private and public—which have little in common with each other. Private nuisance is a field of tort liability in which an individual can maintain an action to collect damages for or to enjoin any unreasonable interference with his use or enjoyment of his land. Public nuisance is a field of criminal law in which the state can prosecute anyone whose act or omission causes inconvenience or damage to the public at large. Almost all public nuisances are defined by statutes. The only time an individual is allowed to bring an action for public nuisance is when he has suffered a special damage which the public at large has not suffered.

Air and water pollution caused by industry obviously fall into the category of public, rather than private, nuisance because it often affects thousands of people. And since it affects the people in a given area relatively uniformly, no private individual is allowed to sue. The only thing left is government prosecution, but government has typically been the “partner” of industrial polluters until now.

Why does government prohibit private suits for public nuisances? The official reason is to prevent a “multiplicity of suits”, but the reason underlying that is to prevent the hindrance of industrial expansion by making industry pay for its pollution or stop polluting.

Even if private suits for public nuisances were allowed, the slowness and costliness of the statist adjudication system would be an effective bar to the maintenance of property rights in most cases. A major reason why people have not put more pressure on the courts to allow private suits for public nuisances is probably that most people realize that the courts are simply too inefficient to help them.

What is the result of all this? Pollution has reached its present destructive level largely because people whose rights have been violated have not been provided a legal remedy, and because the monopolistic nature of government prevents them from turning elsewhere for a remedy. It is as if the government were to tell you that it will (attempt to) protect you from a thief who steals only from you, but that it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood, and further, that it will prevent you from protecting yourself.

Now that the pollution problem has literally thrust itself into people’s faces, they attack the profit system and demand that government “go after” industry. To continue the above analogy, it is as if people were to respond to a rash of thefts by attacking the character of everyone who enters the neighborhood and by demanding that the government lock up all such strangers.

The solution is not to protect businessmen from paying for their own pollution, nor is it to penalize businessmen for being businessmen. The solution is to recognize the right of individual people to protect their property rights.

— Frank Bubb

U.S. IMPERIALISM

Spurred on the experience in Vietnam, a whole new generation is demanding to know the truth about American foreign policy. They no longer believe the continual flow of lies coming from the State Department and Pentagon. They want to know why U.S. soldiers, bombs and napalm are massacring a whole people in southeast Asia. Why are American boys being sent to kill and die in the hills and jungles of a peasant country ten thousand miles away? Whose interests are these soldiers defending? Since it is the peasants who are being slaughtered (perhaps by the millions), it is obvious that it is not the peasants’ interests that are being defended. The questioning generation in the U.S. knows that it is not their interests that are being “defended”. Just whose interests are being defended?

Fortunately, each year brings an increasing number of profound Cold War myth-debunking or “revisionist” articles and books into publication. During the past decade an important reawakening to place among academics, and among radicals in general, concerning the nature and history of U.S. imperialism which have helped to shed light on whose interests America’s foreign policy has been defending in southeast Asia and elsewhere. 1969 was a vintage year for such works. Apologizing for passing over other important contributions, it seems fair to limit the field to the following three works mainly because of their brevity, pointedness and clarity: Corporations and the Cold War, ed. by David Horowitz (Monthly Review Press, 249 pp.); The Roots of American Foreign Policy by Gabriel Kolko (Beacon Press, 166 pp.); and The Age of Imperialism by Harry Magdorff Monthly Review Press, 208 pp.). Each of these books is an important contribution in its own right; taken together, they combine to become a superb introduction to a clearer understanding of U.S. imperialism.

The Horowitz collection contains a seminal essay by William A. Williams, “The Large Corporation and American Foreign Policy”, in which this master revisionist sets forth his grand thesis: In the 1890’s after the manifest destiny of continental empire had been fulfilled, the businessmen and governmental leaders continued on with the “frontier thesis” mentality. That is, they believed that the option of continental expansion had acted as a safety valve which served to ease the social and economic dislocations among the more populous and established business, industrial and agricultural communities. There was some truth to this thesis, and since the depressed economic conditions of the 1890’s coincided with the end of the continental frontier, the “frontier thesis” was further confirmed in the minds of the ruling elite. This confirmation was fashioned into an institutionalized ideological faith.

Rather than busying themselves with the necessary task of restructuring (decentralizing and liberating, my solution, not Williams’) the domestic economy (an economy which was seriously distorted by both the Civil War and postwar intervention), the U.S. ruling class began on a well planned course of extra-national political-economic expansion within the categories of the “frontier thesis” in order both to “solve” the domestic ills and to maintain and extend their own position of economic control within the domestic sphere. The ideology which accompanied this expansion was that the extension of the free market was an extension of freedom. However they, of course, never tried to reconcile the inherent contradiction of free trade rhetoric and the central role that the state played in bringing about that “free trade”. Freedom, self-determination and international peace came to be defined in terms of conditions which did not interfere with the new engine of international peace and freedom—“America’s” expanding commercial relationships otherwise known as the Open Door Policy.

The American foreign policy over the past seven decades has been a continuous implementation of this basic policy. “Economic expansion abroad equals prosperity at home” has been the constant theme.

Lloyd C. Gardner’s “The New Deal, New Frontiers, and the Cold War: A Re-examination of American Expansion 1933-1944” in the Horowitz collection is a brilliant reinterpretation of the “Good Neighbor” Roosevelt Era. The New Deal, far from being a period of “socializing” the economy, was, in its first phase, a period when the corporate-liberal leaders of U.S. state capitalism regrouped themselves for reentry into the shattered international economy, this time better prepared at home (more centralized control) to gain absolute global domination. Foreign political-economic expansion once again became the key to pulling the domestic economy out of depression. Armed with the Reciprocal Trade Act, the Import-Export Band, Lend-Lease, and finally with massive military might, the U.S. leaders had, by 1946, gained what they sought—control of the “free world” empire including the IMF and World Bank abroad and the Full Employment Act at home.

The Open Door Policy had but one more nut to crack, Bolshevism, and so the Americans began and heated up the Cold War. Not only was entry into the Russian markets important, but perhaps even more importantly, the Cold War was needed (along with export and investment outlets) to maintain Keynesian “defense” spending which would ensure the smooth operation of the whole vast system, as well as keeping the “free world” from throwing off its imperialist yoke through leftist insurgency.

Gabriel Kolko begins his book with a very important chapter, “The Men of Power”, in which he convincingly identifies Big Business leaders as the ruling class in America. He shows that this ruling class dominates all of the important command posts through which limits are placed on the American System, both economic and political. There is a definite appearance of pluralism throughout the system; however, although certain competition and dissent is tolerated with the limiting parameters laid down by the ruling class, no competition or dissent is tolerated which would change the fundamental character the system’s limits.

Big Business needs have become the singularly important “fount” for determining both domestic and especially foreign policy. Two excellent essays in the Horowitz collection complement Kolko’s findings perfectly: “Business Planners and American Postwar Expansion” by David W. Eakins is, in a word, a gem, and one looks forward with anticipation to reading his forthcoming book along similar lines. The corporate liberal research associations were very busy and very influential throughout the New Deal, WW II, and in the postwar period. These business “think tanks” served as the key link between Big Business and government both as a repository of policy plans and as a willing source of supply for key personnel to implement those policies.

The intricate interrelationships between the National Planning Association, the Committee for Economic Development and the plans and implementation of the Marshall Plan are studied in detail. The NPA had what was later to become the Marshall Plan ready in 1944 and they were only waiting for a politically propitious moment to make it operative. The plan had no humanitarian intent whatsoever and was based solely on American domestic needs to keep corporate liberalism from retreating back into depression, to bring all of Europe under the American hegemony, and to increase corporate profits. The Truman, Acheson, Harriman “Red Menace” campaign came to their aid, and the business community increased the velocity of that scare campaign to the point where the politically propitious moment did arrive.

The second of these essays is G. William Domhoff’s “Who Made American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963?” The answer is that Wall Street made and implemented the policy during these years. Domhoff explores the vital importance of the Council on Foreign Relations as the key link between Big Business and the various executive departments which carry out U.S. foreign policy. In addition to the CFR, the importance of the CED, the RAND Corporation, the National Security Council and other organizations as additional links are discussed.

Kolko’s chapter, “The U.S. and World Economic Power”, is an important overview of the international economy and the U.S. role in it. Fortunately Harry Magdoff’s more detailed work fits in with Kolko’s essay to give a more complete picture of the international web of U.S. imperialism.

Together they show how important the Third World’s raw materials are to the U.S. domestic economy and that it is imperative for the U.S. ruling class to maintain access to and control over these materials.

Foreign aid is used in various ways to serve U.S. corporate interests (it serves no-one else’s). It is used as a subsidy to the export sector. It is used to build infrastructure for the import sector. It is used to buy and maintain friendly comprador governments and oligarchies. It is used as a carrot to woo while military and CIA presence is used as the stick to convince. A careful mixture of grants and loans are used to make the various “free world” economies mere political-economic appendages to the U.S. economy. Both Kolko and Magdoff stress the “oneness” of U.S. economic, political and military foreign policy aspects. Magdoff’s chapter “Aid and Trade” is an absolutely devastating exposure of foreign aid.

In his chapter “The Financial Network”, Magdoff displays a keen depth of understanding concerning the nature of central banking and its role in the U.S. as an agency of imperialism. Central banking (the Fed), credit expansion, the major banks and their overseas branches, the IMF, and the dollar as the international reserve currency; all of these are discussed along with their interrelationships with one another and their relation to foreign aid and the spread of U.S. economic-military presence throughout the world.

Magdoff also destroys the “GNP myth” which states that since the annual foreign trade is less than 10% of the GNP, it is not very important to the economy, and therefore any talk of economic imperialism is just so much Marxist-Leninist propaganda. To say that, say, 5% of GNP is somehow unimportant in the first place would be ridiculous because 5% is a big chunk in absolute terms. But more importantly, what kinds of goods are included in that 5%? GNP figures tell us little. The imports are materials which are absolutely necessary for the survival of the system as it now functions. The exports are vital to those corporations which do the exporting. And, then, who generally controls these exporting and importing businesses? Members of the ruling class, of course. But even more important than the import-export trade is the overseas investment. Only the yearly capital exports are included in the GNP figures, the accumulated totals are not. Total revenues flowing from overseas investments have now reached the point where, by themselves, they are higher than the GNP of any other western nation. The relation between overseas investment, government aid in making those investments, and the profits thereby generated to the ruling class cannot be overestimated. U.S. imperialism is a fact, GNP or not.

The two final chapters of the Horowitz collection strike the final death knell to any lingering illusions concerning the relation between free enterprise and the U.S. economy. The U.S. economy may be a market economy, but it is a ruling class encapsulated, increasingly fascistic market economy. Joseph D. Phillips’ “Economic Effects of the Cold War” and Charles E. Nathanson’s “The Militarization of the American Economy” are frightening essays which show just how intimately interrelated business and government have become. It is increasingly difficult (often impossible) to tell where the one sphere ends and the other begins.

Kolko’s final chapter “The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-1966: Origins and Objectives” is probably the best short (52 pp.) overviews yet to appear on the history of the Vietnam War and on Vietnam’s strategic importance to the U.S. world empire. The Vietnamese War was not an inexplicable mistake into which the U.S. just happened to slip. Neither is the war a civil war. It is an imperialist war between the people of Vietnam and the American imperialist aggressors aided by their compradors in Saigon.

Kolko goes through the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Yalta and Potsdam, to the victory of the people’s revolution in China, to the complete economic support of the French via Marshall Plan funds, to the Geneva Conference of 1954, to American “advisors”, and finally through the massive buildup of ground troops and the introduction of advanced mass murder techniques—good old “Yankee knowhow”.

One point is brought out with particular clarity. The U.S. ruling class is indeed rightly worried about the “fall” of Vietnam leading to a series of similar “falls” throughout southeast Asia and elsewhere; for the domino theory is correct:, though not in the crude sense that it is usually presented. As the Vietnamese win their self-determination by throwing off the American aggressors and their comprador Saigon regime, other peasants will see that it can be done, and together, the peoples of southeast Asia will ultimately push the American beast from their lands. As this happens the U.S. world hegemony will begin to crumble everywhere, and consequently the domestic system which depends for its stable existence on the world empire will enter a period of internal convulsions.

If libertarians are ever to forge a movement, they must be knowledgeable social critics, thoughtful strategists and relevant activists. To do this, they must know and understand the enemy (they must know whose interests are being defended in Vietnam), i.e., they must know and understand U.S. imperialism. An investment of several hours in reading these three books will take one a long way towards such an understanding.

— Vincent Ninell

The Individualist

An excellent new libertarian magazine has just beer launched! This is The Individualist, the new monthly journal of the Society for Individual Liberty, and an outgrowth of The Rational individualist, the magazine of the predecessor Society for Rational Individualism. The individualist is a fully professional magazine, with numerous ads, and excellent layout and art work; the new publisher is the young libertarian, James Dale Davidson, who is also executive director of the new and rapidly growing National Taxpayers Union. Featured in the initial, February, 1970 issue (recently off the press) is an article on “The Great Ecology Issue: Conservation and the Free Market”, by Murray N. Rothbard, who will contribute a monthly economic column for the magazine. The article is a libertarian critique of all aspects of the latest Ecology, or Environment, craze.

The forthcoming March issue will focus on a critique of the Pentagon and military spending, featuring an informative inside look at military spending by former Assistant Secretary of Defense A. Ernest Fitzgerald.

The Individualist is a bargain, available for 75¢ a copy or $5.00 per year, at 415 Second St., N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002.

The Tuccille Book

Sound the trumpet! Ring dem bells! I have recently had the privilege of reading the manuscript of Jerome Tuccille’s forthcoming new book, Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative, which Bobbs-Merrill will be publishing in May. It is an extremely important book, and one which I can recommend wholeheartedly.

The vital importance of Jerry Tuccille’s book lies in its filling a critical gap that has long existed in the libertarian literature. In the past year especially, numerous college students and other new people have shown increasing interest in libertarianism and in our libertarian activities. But, when they come to us and ask for a single book that will clearly, simply, yet comprehensively show them what libertarianism is all about, what have we been able to offer them? Only a scattering of mighty tomes, leaflets, and journal articles, all important, but none of which can provide to the newcomer a clear and comprehensive survey of the field. The loss of adherents to our cause because of this defect has undoubtedly been great.

But now Jerry Tuccille arrives to remedy this crucial defect. The Tuccille book provides, with great lucidity and clarity, inexpensively and in remarkably short space, a thorough survey of not only the basic principles, political, economic, and strategic, of libertarianism, but also an exciting recent history of the libertarian movement, and its relationship to the various strands of “Left” and “Right”. Now we have a book to give to the budding libertarian—and one which all of us can enjoy as an overview of the field. After the neophyte reads Radical Libertarianism, we can then supply him with more specialized readings as he so desires.

Another great boon for the cause is the fact that Jerry’s book is being published by a prominent, major publisher. This means that the book can and hopefully will be widely available, and also that each one of us can push the book in our local book, library, college, radio, and TV outlets. The Tuccille book gives us a focus for education, and for agitation, a central focal point for our activity. Many youthful libertarians have been understandably restive at the lack of clear-cut forms of activity which they may usefully undertake. Well, here is a center for their activity of which they can be truly proud.

A particularly welcome feature of the book, from my point of view, is the remarkable soundness of Jerry Tuccille’s positions on virtually every one of the problems with which he deals. It is not very often that a critic as notoriously finicky as myself, as ready as I am to do battle with “heresies” of the right or the left, can find so little to disagree with as in Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism.

You owe it to yourself: read this book, then recommend or buy it for your friends. And then push it—everywhere!

Details on the price, etc., will be printed here as soon as the book is available.

Note: The book has already received a good advance notice in Virginia Kirkus’ newsletter for librarians, an excellent one in Publishers’ Weekly, and a grudging acknowledgment in National Review. Onward and upward!

Recommended Reading

Now in paperback:

Two excellent new books, reviewed earlier in the Forum:

James Weinstein and David W. Eakins, eds., For a New America (Random House, paper, $2.95), reviewed Mar. 15.

Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Random House, paper, $1.95), reviewed Feb. 15.

Two economics textbooks: new and improved editions have recently appeared of the following excellent economic texts:

Morris Bornstein, ed., Comparative Economic Systems (Revised edition, Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin). By far the best reader on this topic. Contains crucial articles by Mises and Hayek on the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, Hayek’s famous article on the price system as a transmitter of knowledge, Eucken on central planning in Germany, and the best single article on free-market developments in Yugoslavia by Rudolf Bicanic.

W. E. Kuhn, The Evolution of Economic Thought (2nd edition, Cincinnati, Ohio: Southwestern Pub. Co.). A completely neglected volume, this is the best text on the history of economic thought. Contains a full and fair account of Menger, Bohm-Bawerk and the Austrian School, the Mises-Hayek theory of the business cycle, and the Mises-Hayek refutation of economic calculation under socialism.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 9

MAY 1, 1970

35¢

Farewell To The Left

Now that Spring has arrived, the Left is on the move again, but where is it going, and how is it trying to get there? After five months of torpor, the anti-war demonstrations on April 15 were a feeble shadow of last November, and the fragmented crowds seemed more interested in the irrelevant problem of the Black Panthers than in opposing the expanding war in Southeast Asia. Concentrating on the Panthers not only deflects support and attention from the anti-war cause; it also focuses efforts on purely legal defense instead of opposition to the government’s war policies.

And there is another consideration. Too many in our movement are willing to sacrifice truth and the making of vital distinctions on the altar of political “unity” with our supposed allies. It is true that the police murder of Panthers Hampton and Clark in Chicago last December was unconscionable. It is also true that a systematic campaign to destroy the Panthers by all levels of government seems to be underway. But we must also distinguish the New York trial of the Panthers from the Hampton-Clark murder and the Chicago trial of the Conspiracy 7. For the Panthers in New York are charged, not with dissenting speech as was the Conspiracy, but with a conspiracy to bomb department stores—an undoubted criminal offense. The fact that their excruciating high bail discriminates against the poor and serves to imprison the Panthers before conviction is true and deplorable. But it is also true that these particular Panthers might well be a group of criminals and therefore deserving of no support whatever from anyone claiming to be a libertarian.

In recent months, in fact, there has been an increasingly dominant tendency on the Left—apart from the nefarious bombings—to engage in wanton violence against property that is indisputably private. The latest tactic of the Left is “trashing”—the indiscriminate breaking of windows on houses, buildings, cars. Trashing may be psychologically satisfying to those who enjoy acts of destruction; but what else can it accomplish? Strategically, trashing is an excellent means of “turning off” almost everyone, working class and middle class alike, all of whom react in horror to such wanton nihilism, and who know full well that their own properties might be next. And even apart from strategy, what is the meaning and purpose of trashing? What but an indiscriminate assault on private property, and therefore on the concept of private property itself?

In the days of the New Left, of for example the Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State and Peoples’ Park struggles, their assault was against property that was either clearly governmental, or was governmental down-deep (such as Columbia). It was then possible for libertarians to support such people’s campaigns against State and State-created property. But the current, or Newest Left, shows no interest in any such distinctions; it seems to be against all property period, and especially property that is private. Take, for example, last year’s seizure of a small, undeniably private, and non-governmental Spanish church in East Harlem by a Puerto Rican gang called the Young Lords. The Young Lords seized the church by force and violence, and demanded the “right” to use the church premises to feed and indoctrinate the public, all in the name of calling themselves “the community” and “the people”. As if the congregation that owns the Church is not just as much a part of “the people” as this youth gang! Being anti-Christian, furthermore, the Young Lords could only see the Church space as remaining “unused”, since religious services cannot qualify as legitimate “use”.

The shocking point about this hooligan action was not so much the act itself, but the response on the part of New Yorkers. The entire Liberal community reacted by lavishing praise upon the Young Lords, and it chastised the church for not being responsive to the “needs of the people”. Not one word was devoted to attacking this deed as aggression against private property. Even the libertarian movement in New York was strangely silent.

Recently, hooliganesses of the Women’s Liberation Movement seized the offices of Grove Press, and issued numerous “demands”. One particularly revealing demand was the call upon Grove Press to stop printing “dirty books” which “degrade women”. Once again, Women’s Lib shows itself to be a twisted 20th-century reincarnation of Puritanism, of the old harridan Carrie Nation destroying bars and saloons with her ax. But the point is that once again the Left, almost automatically, employed violence—not against government property, or quasi-government property, or against the police—but against property that is indisputably private. Fortunately, Grove Press did not answer in the spineless Liberal manner of John Mack Carter, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, to a similar recent invasion. Instead of defending his office, Carter spoke to these intruders for 11 hours, and wound up paying them to put out a women’s lib supplement of the Journal. Grove Press called in the police to carry those female invaders out, and proceeded to charge them with criminal trespass. Crime is crime, and it must be put down with due and proper firmness; otherwise, appeasement of the criminal aggressor will only encourage his (or her) voraciousness for further aggression. As libertarians, and as people, we want a non-aggressive world; and to achieve this we must reinforce the general reluctance to commit crime by apprehending and punishing the criminal.

But, it might be asked, isn’t it a terrible thing to call in the State police for self-defense? Certainly not. While no libertarian enjoys calling upon the State for defense, the fact remains that the State has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of the function of police protection. In such a situation, the State police are the only ones we can call upon for defense. Who among us, set upon by a gang of muggers, would fail to call for the police if we could? But the defense of property against Left hooligans differs not one iota from its defense against non-political muggers. To say that calling in the police for defense against crime is immoral is also to say that walking on the streets is immoral or flying on planes is immoral, or sending a letter is immoral, because these are all, unfortunately, monopolized or subsidized by government. If it is moral to use the monopoly Post Office, it is equally moral to use the services of the State police to aid in one’s defense against crime. For while the State is the major criminal organization in our society, it is by no means the only one.

And it is not only the current means employed by the Left that I am attacking; it is their new-found ends as well. Of what relevance to libertarianism, for example, are the demands of the Women’s Liberationists? In what way is it “libertarian” to foist their perverted values upon the general culture and upon society? In what way is it libertarian to agitate for black studies institutes, or for a 5% raise for cafeteria workers? In what way is it libertarian in any sense to call for umpteen billion dollars of tax money to “beautify” the environment? Let us take, for example, the current demands of the student rebels and contrast them to the student rebellions of 1968 and 1969. The major 1968 demand at Columbia, the main purpose in view, was eminently libertarian: the divesting of Columbia from support of the American war machine. The 1968-69 student demand at Fordham was similar: to divest Fordham of the mercenaries of ROTC. But what are the current demands of the student rebels? At Columbia, the demand is so absurd as to be understandable only to the psychotic participants in our “counter-culture”: that Columbia put up the bail money for the Black Panthers. What in the world has Columbia to do with the Panthers? The absurdity and irrationality of this “December 4” movement at Columbia should be evident. This is apart from the important point that the Panthers may well be guilty of the serious charges against them.

The current Fordham rebellion is demanding . . . what? Equal student participation with the faculty in determining curriculum and policy, and, in particular, the retention of an English professor who was denied tenure. Is this what the student “revolution” has come to? Once anti-militarist, are we now going to the barricades to enforce the principle that any teacher, no matter how incompetent, must be continued for life once he is hired? But who is better able to determine his competence, or who should be more in a position to pass such judgment, than his own colleagues in a department? Furthermore, to call for a voice for students in decision-making is scarcely the same as calling for equal or total student power. Students, after all, do know far less than their teachers; otherwise, why do they agree in such large numbers to pay considerable sums in tuition to supply salaries to those same teachers? The educational theory of the counter-culture: that students and teachers are all “equal”, that no one knows more than anyone else, that courses should consist not of content and knowledge but of “rapping” about students’ feelings; all this makes nonsense of going to school or college in the first place. For this kind of rapping can far better take place at the local candy store.

We can go further than this. If both the ends and the means of the current Left have become either irrelevant or antithetical to liberty, we must then ask ourselves: do we want the current Left revolutionary movement to succeed? Let us put it this way: if we could push a magic button, and replace Nixon and his Administration by, say, Mark Rudd or Robin Morgan of Women’s Lib, would we push that button? In my view, no rational libertarian could answer Yes to this crucial question. To contemplate America in the grip of the Weathermen or Women’s Lib is to envision a truly nightmare world. Not only does Dick Nixon shine in comparison; I would venture to predict that a Rudd or a Morgan reign would make even Joe Stalin seem like Albert Schweitzer. For make no mistake: the Left is now in the grip, not just of Marxists-Stalinists, but also, for the first time in the history of Marxism, it is a movement that is Marxist in ideology but totally nihilist in attitude, world-view, and lifestyle. There have been few more repellent blends in the history of social thought than the current one of the goals of Stalin blended with the attitude and tactics of the nihilist Nechayev. For at least the Marxism of Stalin’s day tried its best to be rational, to pursue the goals of science and reason; they did not pursue insanity almost for its own sake, or as a “liberating” force.

If, then, we have nothing in common with either the means or the purposes of the current Left, then we must cease thinking of ourselves, in the current political and ideological context, as “Leftists”. We must bid farewell to the Left.

One tragedy in this whole affair is that many of the libertarians of New York, New England, and Washington, D.C. have completely forgotten the crucial strategic principle of Lenin: that, in associating with other groups, one must remain firm and steadfast in one’s principles, while remaining open and flexible in one’s tactics, in response to ever-changing institutional conditions. The original idea in allying ourselves with the New Left was to work with a new generation permeated with strong libertarian elements. Now that the New Left has died, and its genuine libertarian elements have disappeared, objective conditions require that we make a tactical shift away from the current Left. Instead, too many of our young East Coast libertarians have done just the opposite of Lenin’s strategic advice: they cling as a vital principle to the mere tactic of alliance with the Left; and they abandon their original principles (free-market, private property rights) that led them to becoming libertarians, and therefore into making tactical alliances in the first place. They have placed their very libertarian principles in the category of a disposable tactic, while they raise to the status of a mighty principle a mere tactical alliance. They have tragically allowed the means to become an end, and the end to become a mere means.

It was several years ago, I believe, that the brilliant young Marxist historian, Eugene D. Genovese, began denouncing the New Left as “nihilistic gangsters”. At the time, I thought he was unfairly traducing a great and hopeful young movement. Now I think he might well have been more prescient, more far-seeing, than the rest of us. Perhaps Gene saw more deeply into the processes of change as they had begun their work. At any rate, “nihilistic gangsters” is certainly what the Left has become. Let us therefore bid them farewell.

I agree with all of Jerry Tuccille’s strictures against conservatives in this issue; but the Left provides us no solace either. The distinguished Leftists he mentions are only a few of the honorable exceptions to the bleak Left-wing landscape.

We must face the hard facts: in the current world, we should think of ourselves as neither Leftists nor Rightists. We are libertarians period, with precious little hope of allies among the organizations of either wing. Since there is therefore no hope whatsoever for a libertarian revolution in the foreseeable future, our only viable strategy is to abandon the current thirst for mindless activism, and to build a long-run libertarian movement. In short, to leave the streets for the study, to place our emphasis on education, not just for other people but also for ourselves, to build up and add to the noble structure of libertarian theory and scholarship that already exists. There is much work to be done, in developing libertarian theory as well as in spreading the gospel of that theory to those who have not yet heard of it. For those who are looking so desperately for something “to do”, here is an enormous task waiting to be done.

We must abandon the range-of-the-moment view so typical of our counter-culture, and we must return to the long-range view of such of our founders as Albert Jay Nock. Nock, writing in an age (the 1930’s and 1940’s) of rock-bottom hope for libertarians, said that he did not despair, because in every age, no matter how benighted, there are always a few, a Remnant, that understands. At the very least, that Remnant will pass the torch of rational libertarianism to future generations. There is a goal which, while limited, has the virtue of being eminently attainable, if we but have the will.

PROTOS

a new monthly national newspaper for libertarians

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LEON KASPERSKY,

1110 Edgemont St., Los Angeles, Calif.

Natural Allies Revisited

The shaky alliance between libertarians and conservatives was originally predicated on the assumption that, despite their obvious differences, they were really “natural allies” beneath the surface. Now that the breach on the Right has become a permanent fissure it might be worthwhile to re-examine this premise more closely to see just how valid it was to begin with.

Surely the rhetoric delivered by both camps was similar if not identical. Rand and Reagan, von Mises and Buckley have all spoken in terms of “individualism”, “self-reliance”, “free enterprise”, “private initiative”; without exception libertarians and conservatives alike have denounced “collectivism” as the prime evil afflicting modern society. Theoretically, they appeared to be cut of the same cloth and when they disagreed on specific issues it was regarded more as a family squabble than as a serious falling-out over fundamentals.

The main bond cementing the libertarian-conservative alliance was an economic one; both schools identified themselves primarily with free-market economic principles. When conservatives became repressive on questions of civil liberties, censorship, sex and abortion laws, military conscription, libertarians took them to task but still continued to fall back on the “natural allies” argument. After all, conservatives were still champions of the free market. If they got a bit touchy on other issues it was because their basic premises were mangled. So what if they were a little inconsistent? Everybody knew that most conservatives were anti-intellectual and none too clever. All they needed was a little education. Stick with them and pretty soon they would all be libertarian radicals, quoting Aristotle instead of Jesus and Pope Paul, starting their own post offices and hiding draft dodgers in their finished basements.

Slowly it became apparent that the only common ground uniting libertarians and conservatives was their theoretical adherence to the free market. On virtually every single issue that came to prominence in the ’60’s—anti-abortion legislation; censorship of “offensive” literature; civil disobedience and dissent; repressive sex laws; the war; draft resistance; decentralization and neighborhood control; pollution; ad infinitum—libertarians and conservatives found themselves on opposite sides of the fence. It was at this point that libertarians began to ask themselves a key question: just what is the free market anyway? is the free market merely the elimination of public welfare? is it an end to income and corporate taxes? is it freedom for company A and company B to produce war machinery for an overseas military escapade?

Or is the free market something else? is the free market primarily the right of people, individually or cooperatively, to trade voluntarily without interference? If the free market is another name for voluntarism, voluntary trade and voluntary association, then does it not include all he issues enumerated above? is not abortion a free-market decision between doctor and patient; “offensive” literature a free-market decision between seller and buyer; civil disobedience a free-market decision by individuals not to put up with legalized violence; sex a free-market decision between or among consenting adults; decentralization a free-market attempt to take power away from centralized bureaucracies? If the answer to all these questions was yes, then could it be said that conservatives really believed in the free market?

So it has come to pass that the free-market rhetoric of conservatives is just that: flimsy sloganeering. Neither Nixon in Washington nor Reagan in California is any more a free enterpriser in practice than were the liberals who preceded them. Replace a liberal administration with a conservative one and you have merery come up with a change in priorities. The conservatives would rather fill the bellies of cops than those of welfare recipients, and perhaps they would prefer to raise public funds through a different set of taxing procedures—but these are the only real differences. It’s difficult to see how any one administration is more laissez-faire in the economic sense than another.

If this is the case, it follows that the only bond left uniting libertarians and conservatives—dedication to the free market—is actually nonexistent. In fact, on an issue-to-issue basis, a better case can be made for the claim that there are more points of agreement between libertarians and liberals. At least liberals are more frequently libertarian on noneconomic questions and, as we are witnessing, not much worse than conservatives on the economic issues.

One practicing liberal who has grasped this fact lately is Tom Wicker of the New York Times. His article in the January, 1970 issue of Playboy, “Forging a Left-Right Coalition”, was a perceptive look at the startling similarities between libertarians of the Left and Right. His column in the New York Times, March 29, 1970, “Will the Real Conservatives Please Stand Up?”, describes how Senator Sam Ervin’s bitter attack on No Knock and Preventive Detention laws is not inconsistent with his opposition to civil rights legislation. “Ervin’s kind of conservatism . . . is not the kind . . . that holds cheap the rights themselves. It is not affected with the myopia that prevents fearful men from seeing that if individual rights are taken away from any man or class of men they are taken away from all; and that once suspended or destroyed they are most unlikely to be recognized again by a state power that will have been loosed from the restraints of the ages.” We hear little talk of this kind from conservatives these days who talk instead of suspending certain liberties until the world is safe from communism.

Murray Rothbard has frequently spoken of the importance of both revolutionary and reformist tactics in the struggle for liberty. While we are organizing our tax rebellions and anti-war protests we might also consider the possibility of turning libertarianism into a major political force in the United States. The Free Democrats of West Germany have served a useful purpose, aligning themselves with whatever party comes closest at the time to their own ideals. The election of civil libertarians to office is useful for the very practical reason that they are less likely than conservatives to use repressive measures in order to crush anti-state activities. If we can stop thinking of libertarianism primarily in economic terms, and consider it instead in its broader aspects involving civil, social, moral, and intellectual freedoms as well, we will finally stop regarding ourselves as a “rational” subdivision of the Republican Party.

Libertarians and conservatives are no more “natural allies” than were Lysander Spooner and Edmund Burke. As free enterprise becomes less and less a part of Right Wing economic policy in American, the bond that tied libertarians to the Right grows more and more threadbare. So we find ourselves once again assuming the traditional libertarian position: intellectuals in opposition to authoritarian government—the disloyal opposition. As radicals in opposition to the status quo we are, by definition, members of the Radical Left as far as political posture is concerned.

As the ’70’s roll on it will, I think, be on the Left among the Paul Goodmans, Carl Oglesbys, and Norman Mailers that we find our future allies for freedom.

— Jermone Tuccille

Recommended Reading

Anarcho-capitalism, the idea that the free market can supply police and judicial protection by means of privately competitive agencies, was once only a gleam in the eye of the editor of the Libertarian Forum. In the past, the libertarian French economist Gustave de Molinari championed the idea in 1848, shocking his mentor Frederic Bastiat with his “extremism”; but Molinari didn’t elaborate the concept, and in later years he partially retreated from it. The American individualist anarchists of the late 19th century, Benjamin R. Tucker and Lysander Spooner, also championed the idea, but again rather sketchily. The major flaw in their proposal was that each jury was supposed to make an ad hoc, on-the-spot decision, without any guidance from a rational, objective Law Code requiring adherence to the rights of person and property.

In the last year or so, however, anarcho-capitalism has come into its own, and there are now available three expositions on how Stateless, privately competitive courts and police forces could work.

One, published last year, is a booket by Jarret B. Wollstein, Society Without Coercion, available for $1.50 from the Society for Individual Liberty, 800 Hillsboro Drive, Silver Spring, Md. 20902. Another is the booklet by Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty, available for $3.95 from M. G. Tannehill, Box 1383, Lansing, Mich. 48904. And finally, there is an article by David Friedman, one of the most recent converts to anarcho-capitalism, “The Prescriptions of 2001”, in his column. “The Radical”, published in the YAF magazine, The New Guard (March, 1970), available at 60¢ a copy or $4 a year, at 1221 Massachusetts Ave., N. W., Washington, D, C. 20005. Bets are now open on how long Friedman will be able to put up with YAF, and/or vice versa.

A fourth exposition will soon be available in the midst of a new, full-sized book by Murray N. Rothbard, called Power and Market. More news later.

Jerry Tuccille’s scintillating new book. Radical Libertarianism: A Right-Wing Alternative (Bobbs-Merrill), will be available in early May. The price is $5.00, a veritable bargain!

Three excellent articles have appeared recently which, from different perspectives, strongly and trenchantly attack the irrational counter-culture of today’s youth, while at the same time attacking the “rational” statism of the Establishment against which the youth are reacting. These are:

Robert Brustein, “Revolution as Theatre”, The New Republic (March 14). The young left as irrational “guerrilla theatre”.

Michael Novak, “Do Students Want Education?”, Commonweal (March 13). No, answers Novak, sadly but strongly.

Robert Nisbet, “Subjective Si! Objective No!”, New York Times Book Review (April 5). Assailing the anti-objectivity of recent radical “social science”.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 10

MAY 15, 1970

35¢

THE STATE OF THE MOVEMENT

(Editorial Note: We are proud lo reserve this issue for an article on the state of the Left by Professor Leonard P. Liggio. Of all the libertarians in this country, Leonard Liggio has had the closest long-time association with the New Left and with its most important publications. In the light of this special knowledge, Professor Liggio’s analysis of the current state of the Left takes on particular importance. Leonard Liggio teaches history at the City College of the City University of New York.)

BY LEONARD P. LIGGIO

I

The Movement has been facing the disintegration of the primary centers of the New Left, especially SDS, with confusion and dismay. What is really necessary is rational, cool-headed and realistic analysis. First, the general reaction of confusion and dismay reflects both emotionalism and conservatism (the same thing ultimately)—sadness at the loss of something familiar. Second, it reflects a refusal to face reality, to understand the current state of the Movement on the basis of analysis of the past and allocation of responsibility.

The Movement is defined by the central issue of American politics—foreign affairs. American imperialism, abroad and imposed on the Black nation on this continent, establishes the American political spectrum. The Movement is the opposition to that imperialism. While the issues were not presented as clearly in the first half of the 1960’s, in 1965 it became unquestioned. Vietnam has been world historically significant on a multitude of levels. The Movement’s progenitors were the remnants whose commitment to anti-U.S. imperialism survived the New Deal’s intervention in 1941: the Old Right, pacifists, and independent socialists. What had not been united by common ideology before, was fused by the common fate of sedition trials, FBI harassment, draft resistance convictions, etc. during the Second World War. A decade later this decimated group provided the chief opposition to U.S. intervention in Korea.

Draft resistance is the major focus of anti-imperialist activity. As a result those imprisoned for draft resistance have historically been the moral leadership of the Movement—after what they have suffered there is little more that the State can do. Dave Dellinger served his prison term for heroic opposition in the Second World War just as Larry Gara and Staughton Lynd did during the Korean War. Of that period, Michael Harrington wrote:

Thus the leading figures in the pacifist peace movement in the early ’50’s—among them A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day and David Dellinger—were from an earlier-political generation. By-and-large they were isolated, from the mainstream of American liberalism which supported the containment policies of the Truman Administration, backed the Korean War and had not yet reacted to the H-Bomb. And being without any great political influence, they found themselves having to devote most of their efforts to defending their own political ideas: raising funds to aid conscientious objectors and draft resisters and fighting the government, particularly the FBI, which tended to confuse all opposition with support of the Soviet Union. (“The New Peace Movement”, The New Leader, August 20, 1962.)

Opposing corporate liberalism, aiding draft resisters and fighting the government—the essentials remain constant!

When the Johnson-Humphrey administration escalated the U.S. intervention in Vietnam in early 1965, a unique grass-roots response developed on college campuses—the teach-ins. Spontaneous individual opposition to the government was offered the dual opportunity of immediate protest and of information for continuing protest. The teach-ins were organized by faculty and student groups, frequently including the local SDS chapter. The government’s reaction was swift: to try to discourage them and where that was not possible to send out government speakers to repeat Dean Rusk’s brilliant analysis of world affairs. On each campus the teach-ins became the starting point for long-term organizing against the war among the students and among their neighbors. But, their non-continuation relieved the government of the daily indications of grass-roots opposition represented in every college teach-in.

SDS played a central role in these events, since its radical opposition attracted thousands of students who were awakened politically by the war. SDS itself became temporarily paralyzed after the summer of 1965. Its opposition to the government had lost it its last friends among defenders of the American welfare state, starting with Irving Howe. It was in that milieu that some of the old guard SDS leadership had received its inspiration; and yet the popularly elected president, Carl Oglesby, and vice president, Jeff Shero, represented the large number of new members drawn from all over the country (bad-mouthed as “Texas anarchists” by the Old Guard). This newer group was described at the time by Staughton Lynd:

In SDS as in SNCC workers seek to apply the participatory philosophy to their own organizations, ask-that central offices be abolished, leaders rotated, and executive committees be curbed by general staff meetings . . . For the moment participatory democracy cherishes the practice of parallelism as a way of saying No to organized American, and of initiating the unorganized into the experience of self-government. The SNCC or SDS worker does not build a parallel institution to impose an ideology; on it. He views himself as a catalyst, helping to create an environment which will help the local people to decide what-they want . . . In the meantime the very existence of the parallel institutions is felt to be a healthier and more genuine experience than any available alternative. It seems better to sit in the back of the room in silent protest against the bureaucrats up front than to seek to elect a man to join the executive committee, (“The New Radicals and ‘Participatory Democracy’” Dissent, Summer 1965.)

With native American genius the SDS mass membership opted for direct opposition to U.S. imperialism—by confrontation with the draft. Coming from within the American people, they did not fear the Justice Department, Federal Courts or the rest of the U.S. apparatus of repression. The SDS Old Guard, however, faced by the FBI, sought the familiar cover of the government’s apron strings, and using its vast liberal contacts in the Johnson-Humphrey administration, it managed to blunt SDS opposition during the fall of 1965. In this situation, others began to fish in troubled waters.

II

A coalition of groups was formed in Berkeley in the fall of 1965 to hold a mass demonstration against the war. Instead of the long-term organizing and hard ideological work that characterized the New Left, the Berkeley march was based upon the idea that U.S. aggression in Vietnam could be stopped quickly by the impression made upon the government by a mass demonstration. While one-shot mass action appealed to the traditions of the Old Left, the underlying conception was something different—the politics of theatre. Emphasis was placed upon publicity, any kind of publicity, for its own sake. The march was supposed to shake the foundations of imperial America by the “energy” that theatrical politics represented. This introduction of the theatre of politics alongside serious political work has had profound consequences, for it occurred simultaneously with the widespread introduction of the drug culture and was viewed as the politicized aspect of that culture.

That this occurred at Berkeley was not accidental. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in the fall of 1964 against the educational factory system was one of the most revealing events of the 1960’s. Its target, Clark Kerr, was the monarch of the academic establishment. One of his foremost contributions to contemporary civilization was the recommendation that to prevent rebellion against the “new slavery” (Clark Kerr’s own term) that current American bureaucracy represents, the general use of drugs among the population should be introduced during leisure hours. Is it accidental that as the opposition and resistance to the Vietnam aggression became widespread among educated American youth, vast infusions of drugs occurred throughout the United States? Principals of high schools in major metropolitan areas permit the known selling of “foreign mud”, as the Chinese call drugs, since it maintains their primary objective—order, which would otherwise be disturbed by the students’ rage against the compulsory education system. As Henry Anderson has noted:

What is needed is not more people blasted out of their minds. There are more than enough people out of their minds already, including almost all the world’s statesmen. What is needed is more people in their minds—their right minds. It is not really humanizing to hallucinate that everything is lovable, loving and lovely. For everything is not. What is needed is more people who can see what is really there . . . Nothing pleases the keepers of our political-economic zoo more than contented, amiable, unambitious inmates. Nothing displeases them more than critics who voice their discontents and do something affirmative about them. Aldous Huxley perceived this clearly in Brave New World, and it is one of the ironies in this vale of ironies that Huxley himself became enthralled by what he had earlier perceived as one of the techniques of Anti-Man.

That irony is all the more significant for libertarians since Huxley’s example contributed mightily to gutting libertarianism of its promising organizational and literary potential (in southern California typically); mescaline cultism in the late 1950’s made libertarianism the weak reed it is today.

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement raised very significant issues about American society and its domination by corporate liberals. The role of libertarians in its leadership was heartening. However, it may be meaningful that once the Vietnam intervention had escalated and raised the level of consciousness, local libertarians tended to abandon their leadership roles and refused to participate in the development of the anti-war protest that led to the massive Vietnam Day rally at Berkeley in late May. Local libertarians were indeed denouncing the anti-war activists and leading the “filthy speech movement” instead. Why? Libertarians must examine their attitudes to explain their continuous failure to participate in meaningful opposition to the government, and their attraction to irrelevant actions. Libertarians must be credited with positive stands opposing the draft and contributing to the New Left’s attack on conscription. But once that was achieved there was a tendency to reject long-term commitment to the practice of that policy and the inspiration of other policies consistent with it. Except for the rare individual libertarians, young and mature, who wrote, spoke or acted publicly against the war, the libertarians’ silence on such real issues have been deafening. And then they wonder why they are not taken seriously.

III

During 1966 the Movement regained its momentum and its media-centered politics was balanced by serious organizing programs. This new impetus in SDS was the result of the emergence of “Prairie Power”; a real takeoff in the Movement had occurred. (Those interested in Movement thinking during this transition period should read the essays of SDS and SNCC organizers, and comments including Ronald Hamowy’s “Left and Right Meet” in Andrew Kopkind (ed), Thoughts of Young Radicals.) SDS engaged in quiet, efficient and successful organizing. It boycotted all mass demonstrations.

Among the reasons they were successful was the loose organizational and ideological nature of SDS. With almost no real national bureaucracy, each organizer and each autonomous chapter established its own forms, its own place, its own image. Since there was little official SDS ideology, and what there was was populist and libertarian, it was attractive to the large numbers of American students who were growing conscious of their opposition to the educational factory system, the bureaucracy, the draft and the war. They could develop politically in a Movement which could desire victory of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam while wishing their own victory in America on a different set of priorities and philosophy. SDS’s decentralization permitted the articulation of people’s natural instincts for freedom.

If numbers of libertarians had participated in this development there was every reason to expect that libertarian inclinations could have been clarified into a consistent libertarian philosophy. At the time Movement people hoped very much that libertarians would participate actively. But libertarians generally attacked the New Left and criticized the few libertarians who understood the importance of the Movement to the future growth of libertarianism and the importance of libertarianism to the future growth of the Movement. No libertarian can honestly criticize the movement who has participated in it. To those who bemoan the current situation of the New Left, one must legitimately ask! where were the libertarians when their participation would have made a difference?

Thus, in the absence of any number of Consistent libertarians in the Movement, the natural instincts in SDS became confused. This confusion was aided by the entry into SDS of members of traditional socialist groups. Although traditional socialist groups hared SDS for its anarchism, their response was nor criticism but participation. Just as libertarians assumed important roles in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and anti-draft resistance because they had a consistent ideological analysis of affairs, so with the refusal of libertarians to participate, others with a consistent ideological analysis, in this case socialists, naturally assumed leading roles. In the reaction of SDS activists to this process, many became psychologically exhausted and retired, while others sought to fight the socialists organizationally without opposing their philosophy. In the end these activists rationalized their complete alienation from the rank and file of SDS and, in the last year, abandoned the rank-and-file SDS (after pestering them with their socialistic harangues), and sought a new rank-and-file among the street corner youth and the drug culture.

The roots of that turn in direction had two sources. One was the recognition after these elements in SDS had adopted socialism that the American blue- and white-collar worker as well as the SDS-oriented college student all rejected socialism as the means of liberation from total slavery in America. Second was the widespread growth of the hippie culture with its adoption of conservative, i.e., communitarian, ideas. The hippies with their biblical coats of many colors, modes of life, etc. became a ready attraction for the picture-oriented newsmedia. Their publicity attraction to the media was a magnet to those who, in contrast to the serious SDS organizers for whom anonymity was a primary premise, felt that publicity and politics were the same things. Some of the publicity-minded organizers of the Berkeley mass march, such as Jerry Rubin, had made the claim that the hippies were the revolutionaries. Along with Abbie Hoffman, a protest at the Pentagon in the fall of 1967 was turned into a hippie “happening” to levitate the Pentagon. (While politicized hippies were charging the ranks of the airborne division—once they had broken through they did not know why they had done it and withdrew—a last-minute SDS decision to send experienced organizers resulted in their convincing several dozen troops to defect and led to the new development of GI organizing.) From that “happening” the sky was the limit for media-oriented politics and the Yippie party was established to run a pig in the 1968 presidential election. Membership in the Yippie party never exceeded three but the media treated it as though it had fifty million. Why?

Perhaps some explanation is to be found in the following comment by Irving Howe, prince of the right-wing socialist gang who form the intellectual vanguard defending the existing academic system and who represent everything that libertarians are against. After abstracting the political New Left from his comments, he discussed the cultural New Left:

The “new leftist” appears, at times, as a figure embodying a style of speech, dress, work and culture. Often, especially if white, the son of the middle class . . . he asserts his rebellion against the deceit and hollowness of American society. Very good; there is plenty to rebel against. . . He tends to think of style as the very substance of his revolt, and while he may, on one side of himself, engage in valuable activities in behalf of civil rights, student freedom, etc., he nevertheless tacitly accepts the “givenness” of American society, has little hope or expectation of changing it, and thereby, in effect, settles for a mode of personal differentiation.

Primarily that means the wish to shock, the wish to assault the sensibilities of a world he cannot overcome. If he cannot change it, then at least he can outrage it . . . But “the new leftist” is frequently trapped in a symbiotic relationship with the very middle class he rejects, dependent upon it for his self-definition: quite as the professional anti-Communist of a few years ago was caught up with the Communist party which, had it not existed, he would have had to invent—as indeed at times he did invent. So that for all its humor and charm, the style of the “new leftist” tends to become a rigid anti-style, dependent for its survival on the enemy it is supposed to panic. To epater le bourgeois—in this case, perhaps, to epater le pere—is to acquiesce in a basic assumption of at least the more sophisticated segments of the middle class: that values can be inferred from, or are resident in, the externals of dress, appearance, furnishings and hair-dos . . .

Victimized by a lack of the historical sense, the “new leftist” does not realize that the desire to shock and create sensations has itself a long and largely disastrous history. The notion, as Meyer Schapiro has remarked, that opium is the revolution of the people has been luring powerless intellectuals and semi-intellectuals for a long time. But the damnable thing is that for an almost equally long time the more sophisticated and urban sectors of the middle class have refused to be shocked. They know the repertoire of sensationalism quite as well as the “new leftist”; and if he is to succeed in shocking them Or even himself, he must keep raising the ante. (“New Styles in ‘Leftism’”, Dissent, Summer 1965.)

The shared commitment of adult and youth to physical externals explains the media’s insatiable hunger for new sensations and avoidance of serious political values. Among the media’s creations has been the Black Panthers.

IV

Huey Newton had a brilliant approach to resistance to oppression: by tailing the Oakland police in the ghetto and insisting on police observance of ordinary civil liberties; Newton’s insistence on the vindication of every person’s right to carry arms was another positive contribution. However, the media found this a new sensation, and instead of encouraging Black people in other cities to develop similar neighborhood self-defense programs the Panthers launched a national party that imposed local units in other cities. The media trap has been literally fatal to the Panthers. The ever-thoughtful Julius Lester has offered an excellent analysis:

I see around me almost an entire generation of black youth being martyred needlessly and because I have been a part of the movement, because I have contributed my thinking to this revolution of ours, I must bear some of the responsibility for the needless deaths. It takes more than guts to make a revolution. It takes more than courage to risk one’s life for an ideal. It takes more than a willingness to die. It takes sense enough to know when to say “Advance” and when to say “Retreat”. It takes sense enough to know what your organization can do and what it can’t do. Because one has a gun and some bullets doesn’t mean to go out and shoot a cop. Cops, guns and bullets are not in short supply. They’ll be there whenever one is ready. Prior to that, however, one needs to build himself a base, so that when he proceeds to shoot that copy, he has minimized as much as possible the dangers of losing his own life . . . The deaths of Hampton and Clark were needless because they were totally without protection against what eventually happened. If they had a base in the black community, the police would not have dared come in and shoot them in cold blood. The Black Panther Party has support within the black community, but it has no real base. Its base is among the white radicals. Black America has related to the Panthers as involved spectators at a football-game. They have not been involved as active participants. And because they have not it is a simple matter for the police to come into the community and take off whomever it wants to . . . Just as it hurts the parent of a soldier killed in Vietnam that his child died for no reason, it hurts to say the same about Hampton and Clark. But it must be said in the hope that, some lives will be saved . . . The young are the revolution’s most valuable resource. The Panthers have used that resource irresponsibly, endangering lives when it was not necessary, and most of all, by adhering to a politics of romanticism, not revolution, a politics which enshrines the dead and does little for the living . . . And tactically, the Panthers should be supported . . . Though I find the politics of the Panthers to be, in great part, but not wholly, destructive, it is impossible to forget that the Black Panther Party is composed of individuals . . . I must oppose the organization and support the individuals in it whom ‘the man’ is trying to take off. (Liberation, February 1970.)

White radicals have been committed to media showmanship and not to serious politics. When SNCC in 1966 ‘emphasized the concept of Black Power among Black people, the white former organizers of SNCC were asked to organize their fellow white people. For white America’s liberation was the best thing possible for Black America’s liberation. But this path was not pursued, since it was realized that organizing white Americans was not possible when grounded on the socialist concepts being espoused in SDS. Instead, SDS’s leadership attacked those in the Movement who did begin such work. Thus, in April, 1969, at the Austin, national council meeting, SDS condemned SSOC (Southern Student Organizing Committee centered in Nashville), which along with SNCC was SDS’s fraternal associate. SSOC had been founded by the southern whites who had worked in SNCC. With the Confederate flag as its symbol it sought to develop political consciousness of their oppression among southern whites on the basis of their equally separate culture. The assault on SSOC was the clearest signal to the Movement of the New Left’s organizational disintegration. Carl Oglesby has commented:

At the last SDS Thing I was at, the Austin NC, the handwriting was already on the wall . . . For a long time I was baffled. Last fall the word began to reach me: It was being said that I had “bad politics”. How could that be, I wondered, since I thought I had no politics at all. But by winter I conceded the point: no politics is the same as bad politics. So there followed a time in which I experimented with only the “mass line”. It didn’t come to much. My mind and my instincts only became adversaries. By spring I had to deactivate, couldn’t function, had to float. What I know now is that this did not happen to me alone. On every quarter of the white Left, high and low, the attempt to reduce the New Left’s inchoate vision to the Old Left’s perfected remembrance has produced a layer of bewilderment and demoralization which no cop with his club or senator with his committee could ever have induced . . . SDS will have to take its share of the blame for this. Much more interested in shining with the borrowed light of Panther charisma than in asking all the hard practical questions, much more interested in laying out the metaphysical maxims that identify the “vanguard” than in assuming real political responsibility, this SDS, which so often chews its own tongue for being “petty bourgeois”, must shamefully confess its origins precisely when it tries to vainly transcend them in worship of “solidarity” which really amounts to so much hero-worship . . . it is net lost causes, however heroic, or martyrs, however fine, that our movement needs. It needs shrewd politicians and concrete social programs. Not theoretical (really theological) proofs that The People Will Win in the End, but tangible social achievements now. Not the defiance of a small, isolated, band of supercharged cadre who, knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with mankind itself, will face repression with the inner peace of early Christians, but a mounting fugue Of attacks on political crime of all sorts, oh all fronts, at all levels of aspiration, from all sectors and classes of the population, so that repression can never rest, never find a fixed or predictable target. (Liberation, August-September 1969; this special issue has not been as widely read as it deserves.)

V

The restoration of good politics is required for the Movement’s future. The disappearance of organizational efforts which practiced bad politics is a very favorable development and is a reflection of the basic health of the Movement. Furthermore, the conditions from which the Movement sprang have intensified. The factory educational system has not been restructured; the military system has not been abolished. Yet those who are subject to those systems, who are in schools and have to arrange their future choices facing taxes on their bodies and on their incomes to maintain militarism, are increasing daily. The overwhelming significance of this was presented in a special issue of Fortune, “American Youth: Its Outlook is Changing the World” (January 1969), which is must reading for anyone interested in the Movement; particularly important are the articles “A Special Kind of Rebellion” by Daniel Seligman, and “Student Activists: Free-Form Revolutionaries” by Charles Burck. The latter concludes: “Philosophically, what seems likely to be most durable is the Movement’s strong individualism and its quest for personal freedom.”

Seligman emphasizes that youth would be important today if only by their sheer numbers; additionally, “there is undeniably something special in the educational level Of today’s youth. Educated youth have to be taken seriously in any society; even when they condemn it bitterly, they are presumed to be its future leaders. Almost eight million members of the young generation today are or have been in college (versus about two million for that 1938 group). No other society in history has ever had to deal with mass-educated youth.” But Fortune is concerned not merely with college youth but with what it calls the “forerunners” among college students. “Forerunners”, now almost 45% of college students, are those whose – attitudes differ from others in college, but whose attitudes will become increasingly prevalent in society, thus, Fortune emphasizes that it is not a question of a generation gap, which has the agreeable implication that this younger generation will accommodate eventually to the State. It is the attitudes of the ‘forerunners’ that will become dominant in America; “this particular young generation is by all odds the most interesting to come along in all of U.S. history,” Fortune editorialized, “it will shortly preside over the revolutionary changes that await us.”

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 11

JUNE 1, 1970

35¢

The New Movement: Peace Politics

There is no doubt about it: Richard Milhous Nixon is the most effective organizer that the anti-war movement has ever had. Before Cambodia, and its ancillary Kent State, the anti-war movement was dead as a dodo. Confused and lulled by the Johnson Paris negotiations followed by Nixon’s promises of withdrawal, the anti-war movement had all but disappeared into ecology and into the febrile nonsense of guerrilla theatre, Women’s Lib, Weathermania, Panther worship, Yippies and Crazies, etc. The only organization with a potential for heading a mass movement, the Vietnam Moratorium, had dissolved in despair. Now, at the one stroke of the aggression into Cambodia and the consequent massacre at Kent State, Dick Nixon has revived the anti-war movement at a pitch, an intensity, a breadth and a sanity many times what it ever was before. A veritable Phoenix, a giant, has arisen from the ashes, and it’s all a brand new ballgame.

None of this glorious flowering renders obsolete our recent pessimistic editorials (“The New Left, RIP”, Mar. 15; “Farewell to the Left”, May 1). On the contrary, one of the happiest facts about the recent upsurge is that, at long last, it consists of “real people”, and this great influx of real people has totally dwarfed and rendered insignificant the whole gaggle of Crazies-Panthers-Weathermen, etc. of the extreme Left. The interesting point is that the shocking events of Cambodia and Kent State impelled millions of people to think at long last: “Alright, now this is serious. Now we must stop this monstrous war.” And with this welcome turn to seriousness, the movement suddenly realized that all the hogwash and puerility, the guerrilla theatrics and the indiscriminate “trashings”, the pointless demonstrations and the rock-throwings, had to go. Seriousness had to replace self-indulgence. And it was clear that seriousness could mean only one thing: concerted, non-violent purposive political action, that is, action upon our political “representatives”.

To those libertarians who reject violent revolutionary action, either out of moral or strategic principle, I would say this: If you oppose violent action, then you have the profound moral obligation to favor and to press all effective forms of non-violent action. Non-violence must not mean passivity. In the present context, non-violent political action can take numerous effective forms, all of them amounting to irresistible political pressure upon the politicians in Congress and even the executive branch. The new anti-war movement has swiftly moved into these forms of action. There is the lobbying and the petition campaigns in Congress; one of the most effective and “consciousness-raising” is the petitions for the McGovern-Hatfield bill to cut off all appropriations for our Southeast Asia adventure after July of next year. Another is the mass campaign for the impeachment of Richard Nixon for his barbaric aggression in Southeast Asia, an aggression that is unconstitutional for its violation of the sole power of Congress to declare war, and flagrantly anti-libertarian for its high crimes against peace and against humanity, its mass murder and mass destruction. The fact that the impeachment campaign will undoubtedly not succeed is totally beside the point; its effectiveness lies in getting the previously unthinkable idea of impeachment of our rulers into the public consciousness; the result will be a massive desanctification and delegitimation of our rulers among the populace. So that maybe the “fifth” impeachment campaign from now will succeed.

Vigorous peace lobbying and political petitions mean finally, peace politics. It means favoring or punishing political candidates, particularly in the national arena, on the single crucial political theme of our epoch: war or peace. It means the same sort of ruthless concentration on this overriding issue that brought the Anti-Saloon League its victory in the Prohibition Amendment. It means, in short, that if two people are running for office, of whom A favors immediate withdrawal from Southeast Asia, while B is better on lower taxes or on price control but fudges on the war, we must choose A, and regardless of his party affiliation.

It has taken the Left-liberals, i.e. those who make up the bulk of the anti-war movement, a very long time to arrive at this sensible and cogent idea of Peace Politics. Indeed, this was precisely the overriding issue, the issue of war, peace and America’s imperial foreign policy, that led me and a tiny handful of friends to “leave” the Right-wing over a decade ago. It was the Right-wing’s inexorable shift from pro-peace “isolationism” in the thirties, forties and early fifties, to its current position of all-out war that made our break with the Right-wing inevitable.

It is long forgotten now, but the unsung originator of Peace Politics was Mark Lane, then an Assemblyman in New York. Many months before tragic events were to thrust him into the role of pioneer in Kennedy Assassination Revisionism, and at a time when the peace movement was Old Left and embodied in the SANE Nuclear Policy Committee, Mark conceived the simple but cogent idea that the Left should concentrate its political action on the one overriding issue of war or peace, and, for example, that it be prepared to endorse otherwise conservative candidates who might be better on the peace question than their liberal opponents.

I well remember the small meeting in New York called by Mark Lane to propagate his idea among the Left and among the peace groups. Aside from Leonard Liggio and myself, I don’t think there was one person in that room who had anything but scorn for Mark’s proposal. Pacifist after pacifist, leftist after leftist, liberal after liberal, arose to denounce the idea: it would neglect and disparage civil rights for Negroes, it would neglect the crucial goal of socialism, it would subordinate personal “witness” and street demonstration for the more comfortable indoor activity of old-fashioned political action. And so the opportunity was lost, the Left and the anti-war movement drifted impotently for several more years—until our bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and the Lane idea of peace politics was lost and forgotten, seemingly beyond repair.

But now the idea of peace politics has been almost miraculously revived. The student movement has been transformed into a university-wide movement of students, faculty, and even college presidents. Young people who became Clean for Gene are now, in far greater numbers, becoming Clean for McGovern and Hatfield. Anti-war sentiment has expanded in the ranks of businessmen, particularly those who do not subsist on the handouts of war contracts, and even unto the President’s Cabinet. The anti-war movement has, for the first time, become a truly mass movement, made up in the greatest part, as we said above, of “real people”. These real people will be nothing if not repelled by trashing, guerrilla politics, Panthermania, and all the rest of the nonsense of the ultra-Left. Real people understand lobbying and petitions, and they understand political action at the polls. They can readily understand Peace Politics. Here is the only direction that the anti-war movement can go if it is to succeed. Already, the movement had succeeded in toppling Lyndon Johnson, and now it has certainly caused the Nixon Administration to be at least more cautious in its evident aim of expanding the war.

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The Libertarian Forum takes no pleasure in being consistent and almost along, left, right or center, in predicting that Richard Nixon’s aim was not to withdraw from Vietnam but to get further into the war under the guise of a rhetorical withdrawal. Nixon’s lies and hypocrisies will no longer work. The supposedly absolute June 30 deadline for withdrawal from Cambodia is already seen at the time of writing (May 23) to be a sham and a hoax; for we will continue at the very least to supply air and artillery support to the Saigon invaders of Cambodia, and we will continue to use our fleet to blockade the Cambodian coast. And what will happen when the forces of Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia (recently deposed by a CIA-led military clique) and his National United Front (misleadingly smeared in the American press as “North Vietnamese”) capture the Cambodian capital of Pnom Penh? At the very least, a strong, militant and growing Peace Politics movement might be able to prevent Nixon from following his instinct to move into Cambodia en masse to make “free Cambodia” safe for its current military dictatorship. At the most, Peace Politics might be able to force America to get out of Southeast Asia.

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Jerry Tuccille’s article in this issue, written before the Cambodian invasion, turns out to be remarkably prescient. For now its call for a form of tactical rapprochement with Left-liberalism has suddenly become of the highest relevance. And Peace Politics is the path.

The New Libertarianism

With the official disbanding of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and the disintegration of New Left activism in general, a vacuum has been created within the radical movement. As the productive elements of New Leftism fade away, the void is quickly being filled by a familiar two-headed beast: the old scarred and ugly face of doctrinaire Marxism and the more hideous visage of self-righteous nihilism. The absence of a well-formulated philosophical base to support the activist programs of the New Left has given birth to a new generation of crusading irrationalists, frustrated bomb-throwers, and penis-hating feminists.

What this means to libertarians is that the fundamental anti-authoritarianism and anarchism of the radical movement is in serious danger of being eroded. The great challenge that is presented to libertarians at the beginning of the 1970’s is to salvage this splintering movement and transform it into a healthy and creative radicalism over the next ten years.

It is to make the New Libertarianism the movement of the 1970’s; to make our brand of radicalism as influential in the next decade as the New Left was in the middle and late 1960’s.

How do we go about it?

The first thing we ought to learn is how to avoid the mistakes of our predecessors. The last best chance for free market radicalism in the United States came in the late 1950’s following the publication of Atlas Shrugged and the establishment of Objectivism as an organized intellectual movement. Some twelve or thirteen years later we now see that Objectivism has failed in its long-range goals; it has failed to strike a responsive chord in the general population. While Objectivist literature has sold into the millions, the basic tenets of Objectivist philosophy have not, and I think we can safely say, will not take root in society at large. The high sale of books is no guarantee that the public is also buying the ideas presented. A quick scan of the best-seller lists is ample proof that people prefer a “good read” more than anything else.

Objectivism has failed to become a mass movement primarily because it failed to grapple, except in an arrogant and highly superficial manner, with the key issues of the past ten years. While Objectivists engaged in the exclusive luxury of abstractions and ideology, a war was going on, housing and education among other vital institutions were coming apart, the cities were exploding with violence, the American middle class was falling into a daze, and government grew increasingly more repressive.

What was the Objectivist cure for this? Selfishness.

What was the cause of all our ills? Altruism.

What should we do about exploited minorities? Leave them alone.

This is hardly the stuff to fire the imagination of a populace literally begging for solutions and definitive answers to their questions. Why? The Objectivists failed to respond. Champions of the marketplace, they remained aloof from the disordered marketplace of American society and the public has rewarded them accordingly with silence.

If the New Libertarianism is to succeed it will have to do so by responding to the issues, by applying theory to the marketplace. The way things are shaping up, the primary concerns of the next few years are going to be: the continuing war in Asia and its progenitor, an imperious U.S. foreign policy; ecology and pollution control; housing and education; women’s rights (as distinct from the loony women’s separatist fringe); day care centers for working mothers; the development of expanded abortion facilities; cheaper and better medical assistance for the poor. To these we can add our own bête noir—taxation and the regulated economy.

Instead of replying, “rational self-interest”, when people want to know how to meet these concerns, we will have to demonstrate how a strict enforcement of property rights will protect them from environmental contaminants; why the free market will provide them with abortion clinics and day care centers (perhaps as a fringe benefit of private employment); how expanded health care can be made available to all without the AMA to lobby against competition and restrain the flow of medics into society. After all, is it not the purpose of the free market to supply demand in the most efficient manner? Why should suggestions to meet the demands of low-income groups be simplistically dismissed as altruism if these suggestions are in accord with libertarian principles? is it not in our own interest to offer solutions to the issues before the authoritarians co-opt them for their own ends?

Another tactic we will have to develop if we are to build a mass libertarian movement is obtaining favorable exposure in the major media. The major organs of communication are largely controlled by liberals. It was the liberal news-media which actually brought the New Left into prominence through constant and favorable exposure. A blackout in the mass media will lead to the certain death of any incipient movement. If the ideas are not favorably analyzed by the opinion-makers (And let’s face it. Public opinion is a manufactured product. If most people were rational enough to formulate their own opinions we would now be living in at least a reasonably libertarian society), their chances of taking root are reduced to nil.

To do this will require severing any lingering ties with the brand of “conservatism” currently practiced by the Nixon-Agnew-Reagan-Buckley Club and staking out a more independent course. The liberals are completely down on the New Left these days. They have finally realized that the current crop of New Leftists actually wants to kill them. “Kill a Parent a Day” was the theme of a recent SDS gathering. The liberals in their usual muddled and soft-headed manner are capable of sitting down over martinis and debating the pros and cons of whether they should be wiped out or not. By merely not advocating the wholesale slaughter of liberals we offer a Modest Proposal (If only Jonathan Swift were alive today) agreeable to at least the less-masochistic liberals. I have no doubt that some of them crave Death by Flagellation. But most are ready to lionize anybody who is not in favor of exterminating them and I see no reason why we should not capitalize on this situation while it lasts.

There is an area on the Left, ranging from Mailer and Goodman among the radicals to Hamill and Wicker among the quasi-libertarian liberals, that is becoming more receptive to the New Libertarian position. It strikes me that this is the best strategic position for us at the beginning of the 1970’s, with the more outspoken critics of government repression who have access to the major communications media. The alternative is to remain in an ideological Ivory Tower, vilifying everyone not in full agreement with ourselves as “irrational” and “immoral”, where we are certain to die the slow inevitable death of the Objectivists. If the New Libertarianism follows a similar fate, any hope for free marketism in the foreseeable future will vanish with it. It will certainly be a long time before an opportunity such as this is made available again.

It is for us now to succeed where the Rand and her mimics failed before us.

— Jerome Tuccille

The Judges

Americans used to have an enormous, almost religious, reverence for the federal judiciary, and especially for the members of the Supreme Court. They were as gods. As a result, this group of life-appointed oligarchs, with the absolute power to make the final, ultimate decisions on interpretation of the laws and of the Constitution, had unquestioned power to rule our lives. Calhoun, one hundred and forty years ago, forecast the pernicious, statizing role of the Supreme Court, deducing his prediction from the very nature of government. If you have a Constitution, he pointed out, however rigorous the limits it places on government, these limits will dissolve if you leave the power to interpret that Constitution in the hands of a monopoly Supreme Court, appointed by the government itself. This means that one organ of government is able to decide on the limits of its own power, and over the years, the party in power will inevitably decide to keep expanding that power, and weakening its limits. The results, Calhoun saw early on in the process, will necessarily be to dissolve the constitutional checks on federal power. And that is precisely what has happened. The idea of a strictly limited, laissez-faire government turns out to be a Utopian, unrealistic one. It can never work, which is one of the main reasons why anarchists see the necessity for eliminating the State altogether, rather than try to limit and confine it once it is there.

In recent years, however, we have had the growth of a healthy skepticism and irreverence toward the Supreme Court, and the more this spirit of doubt and hostility spreads, the better. This means that libertarians should welcome all the campaigns to question or impeach the Supreme Court, regardless of the specific merits or demerits of the people involved. The seemingly foolish Birch Society campaign to impeach Earl Warren had the liberating effect of desanctifying, or de-legitimating, the Chief Justice in the eyes of much of the public. Ditto the roar of disapproval that ousted Abe Fortas, ditto the lengthy and caustic going-over accorded Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, ditto the impassioned drive to impeach Justice Douglas. All of these have their very useful cumulative impact. The Supreme Court will never be the same.

Movers, Write!

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The Lenin Centennial

April 22 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and is a date which should not pass unnoticed by libertarians. And not alone because of our gratitude to him for providing a colossal practical confirmation of Benjamin Tucker’s 1897 prediction that “whatever the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all must kneel!”

Quite aside from their socialist content, he who takes advantage of this centennial year to review a few of Lenin’s writings will discover many sound principles of importance to any movement opposing the status quo. The following examples are drawn from the famous pamphlet “What is to be Done?”

On theory: “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” The importance of theory is still greater, because “our party is only in the process of formation, its features are only just becoming outlined, and it has not yet completely settled its reckoning with other tendencies in revolutionary thought which threaten to divert the movement from the proper path.”

On alliances: “Only those who have no reliance in themselves can fear to enter into temporary alliances with unreliable people.” But, [now quoting Marx], “If you must combine, then enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement, but do not haggle over principles, do not make ‘concessions’ in theory.”

On spontaneity vs. consciousness: Lenin mocks the view that “in the same way as men and women will multiply in the old-fashioned way notwithstanding all the discoveries of natural science, so the new social order will come about in the future mainly as a result of elemental outbursts, notwithstanding all the discoveries of social science and the increase in the number of conscious fighters.” He warns that following the spontaneous movement, the line of least resistance, leads to “the domination of bourgeois [read “statist”] ideology for the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than Social-Democratic [read “libertarian”] ideology; because it is more fully developed and because it possesses immeasurably more opportunities for becoming widespread.”

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On terrorism: The terrorists argued that their methods were necessary to “excite” the movement, and give it a “strong impetus”. Lenin replied, “It is difficult to imagine an argument that disproves itself more than does this one! Are there not enough outrages committed in Russian life that a special ‘stimulant’ has to be invented? On the other hand, is it not obvious that those who are not, and cannot be, roused to excitement even by Russian tyranny will stand by ‘twiddling their thumbs’ even while a handful of terrorists are engaged in single combat with the government?”

On organization: “Our primary and most imperative practical task [is], namely, to establish an organization of revolutionists capable of maintaining the energy, the stability, and continuity of the political struggle.”

These and many other passages deserve the attention of libertarians as the 1970’s begin, for our movement today has much in common with the bolshevism of the Iskra period. As Lenin wrote in 1902,

We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and are under their almost constant fire. We have combined voluntarily, especially for the purpose of fighting the enemy and not to retreat into the adjacent marsh, the inhabitants of which, right from the outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group, and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now several in our crowd begin to cry out: Let us go into this marsh! . . .

Oh yes, gentlemen! You are free, not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and will render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us, and don’t besmirch the grand word “freedom” . . . .

Within fifteen years of writing these words, Lenin’s “compact group” had become the dominant political force in Russia. What can we learn from him to help us do as well? What will 1984 bring if we fail?

— Edwin G. Dolan

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 12

JUNE 15, 1970

35¢

THE NIXON MESS

It is increasingly apparent that the major qualities necessary to a man’s becoming President (demagogy, slick political opportunism) are unsuited to resolving what the Marxists call the “inner contradictions” of his program and of the system for which he has become responsible. A President invariably begins his term with the enormous advantage of a lengthy “honeymoon” and the best of support from press and country; he continues with the enormous advantage of the power and prestige of his monarchial office. But his usual eclectic, vacillating, and ad hoc policies cannot, by their nature, resolve any major crises into which he and his predecessors’ programs may have embroiled the country. It took “master politician” Lyndon Johnson four years to lose his “credibility” among the public; it has taken master politician Richard Nixon only a year to get into the equivalent mess.

The central feature of Nixon’s Administration is the absolute contradiction between the rhetoric of his promises and the reality of his program. He has promised peace, prosperity, withdrawal from Vietnam, and a turn toward freedom of enterprise; he has brought us precisely the opposite. The contradictions have been so glaring that even the long-patient American public has begun to awaken to the true situation.

Take, for example, the draft. Nixon begins on a cloud of voluntarist rhetoric, hints about a volunteer army, and the appointment of the Gates Commission which recommends immediate repeal of the draft. Anarcho-Nixonite friends assured me at the start of his reign that, if he brought us no other goodies, at least he would end conscription-slavery. What has he wrought, in reality? A phony lottery scheme, phony because the high numbers are being drafted in addition to the low. And phony also because along with the supposed relief of the lottery came the increased slavery of removal of collegiate and graduate school deferments. So that the draft has gotten worse rather than better. Never before have so many of our youth contemplated flight to Canada.

Promising early withdrawal from Vietnam, Nixon has brought us only a widening and deepening of the war into all of Southeast Asia. The CIA-engineered overthrow of the popular neutralist Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia by a military clique meant that the tiny Cambodian Communist guerrilla forces (the Khmer Rouge) were joined by a mighty mass movement headed by Prince Sihanouk himself; now we and our puppets face the forces of the new National United Front, overwhelmingly backed by the Cambodian population. We have gotten ourselves into a much deeper tangle than before, even if our forces really leave eastern Cambodia by the end of June.

On the economic front, Richard Nixon’s “free enterprise” government has proposed a catastrophically statist guaranteed annual income program, which destroys the incentives to work among the mass of the population, a program which has only been temporarily halted by Senator John Williams’ (R., Del.) embarrassing discovery that, in Massachusetts, for example, a family on the “negative income tax” dole can make over $7,000 a year, considerably more than the annual income of the average working family of the area.

Particularly embarrassing for Nixon and his “free market” economic advisers is Nixon’s inflationary recession. Since approximately last November, the American economy has been in a decided recession, with industrial production and “real” GNP falling, other indicators of economic activity declining, unemployment rising, the stock market in dire trouble; and yet, price inflation continues galloping away at a rate of about 7% a year, while interest rates, already the highest for over a century, continue their inexorable march upward. All that Nixon’s economic advisers can do is to continue to assure us that prosperity is just around the corner. As Gore Vidal acidly put it, historically Democrats have gotten us into wars, and Republicans into recessions; Richard Nixon has performed the notable feat of getting us into both, and at the same time!

The phenomenon of inflationary recession cannot be understood by Establishment economists, whether of the Keynesian or the Milton Friedman variety. Neither of these prominent groups has any tools to understand what is going on. Both Keynesians and Friedmanites see business cycles in a very simple-minded way; business fluctuations are basically considered inexplicable, causeless, due to arcane changes within the economy, although Friedman believes that these cycles can be aggravated by unwise monetary policies of government.

I remember vividly a prophetic incident during the 1958 recession, when the phenomenon of inflation-during-recession hit the country for the first time. I attended a series of lectures by Dr. Arthur F. Burns, former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, now head of the Federal Reserve Board, and someone curiously beloved by many free-market adherents. I asked him what policies he would advocate if the inflationary recession continued. He assured me that it wouldn’t, that prices were soon levelling off, and the recession soon approaching and end; I conceded this, but pressed him to say what he would do in a future recession of this kind. “Then,” he said, “we would all have to resign.” It is high time that we all took Burns and his colleagues up on that promise.

For both Keynesians and Friedmanites have essentially one set of recommended policies for business fluctuations. In an inflationary boom, taxes are supposed to rise, monetary policy to be more stringent; in various ways, and with different emphases among the two groups, money is taken out of, or not fed into, the economy. Conversely, during a recession, money is fed into the economy, deficits are incurred, and the economy stimulated. But, during recessions, activity and employment are supposed to be falling off, and prices falling; what happens if prices are still rising? Our economic managers are then caught on the horns of an escapable dilemma; if they pump money into the economy, they may turn around the recession, but then prices will gallop away at an alarming rate; and if they tighten the monetary screws in order to stop the inflation, then recession and unemployment will deepen alarmingly. The Nixon response, predictably, has been to take neither clear-cut line, but to fudge, hesitate, vacillate, do both and neither. And the result, predictably, is that Nixon has prolonged the dilemma, has prolonged the mess of inflation-cum-recession. With no clear-cut program, Nixon has impaled himself more and more upon the dilemma’s horns.

When Nixon first came to office, he continued the rapid rate of monetary inflation of the Johnson Administration. Finally, his conservative advisers won out and Nixon stopped expanding the money supply, which remained constant from about June, 1969 to February, 1970. He was prepared to accept the recession which inevitably arrives when monetary inflation stops, or at least a mild form of recession; but he was also assured by his Friedmanite advisers that price inflation would end by the end of the year. The recession arrived, all right, on Friedmanite schedule, but lo and behold! prices have continued on their rapid advance. Having no theoretical tools to explain this, the Friedmanites could only come up desperately with wider and wider statistical “time lags”, to the extent that Friedman has now begun to talk, almost absurdly, of two-year time lags between cessation of monetary inflation and a fall in prices. Frightened by the failure of Friedmanite policy, the Federal Reserve Board, under the supposedly free-marked and anti-inflationary Arthur Burns, has resumed, since February, the old disastrous 9-10% annual rate of monetary inflation.

The fact is that only “Austrian School” economics, virtually unknown today, can explain the phenomenon of price inflation of consumer goods during recession. It is not at all a question of mechanical statistical “lags”, lags which seem always to change as the desired economic result disappears over the horizon. The Austrians point to two reasons for continuing price increases. One is unknown to the mechanistic Friedmanites, but acknowledged by other, more sensible economists: that prices depend not only on the quantity of money but also on the subjective demand to hold money on the part of the populace. As an inflationary boom proceeds and prices continually rise, expectations of future increases become built-in to the psychology of the public. Hence, their demand to hold money begins to fall, as people decide to make their purchases now rather than later when they know that prices will be higher. The mere cessation of monetary inflation cannot, all at once, reverse these inflationary expectations. Hence, prices will keep rising until the determination of the government not to inflate the money supply further becomes credible among the public. The Nixon Administration’s anti-inflationary sincerity has never become credible, partly due to the hysterical attacks by Friedman and his followers on the hard-money, non-inflationary Nixon policy from June, 1969 on. With the money supply constant at long last, Friedman and his influential followers began a continuing drum-fire of attack, calling for resumption of Friedman’s talismanic proposal of a continuing expansion of the money supply by 3-4% per year. When Burns and Nixon finally resumed monetary inflation in February, of course, Friedman now felt that they had gone too far, but the point is that Friedman’s moderate inflationism had a disastrous effect upon the short-lived non-inflationism of the Administration and upon its credibility among the public.

The second basic reason for inflation of consumer goods’ prices in a recession is a uniquely Austrian explanation. For the heart of the Austrian theory of the business cycle is that the inflationary boom leads to over-investment of the “higher orders of production”, an over-expansion in capital goods’ industries. What is needed during a recession, and what the recession accomplishes, is a shift of resources from the swollen capital goods, to the underinvested consumers’ goods industries. What impels this necessary readjustment is a fall of prices in the capital goods industries relative to consumer goods, or, to look at it another way, a rise in consumer goods’ prices relative to other prices. The beginning of a recession is marked by wage and cost pressure upon profits in the capital goods industries, with selling prices in these industries relatively falling, and the relative rise in prices and therefore in profits in consumer goods inducing resources to move into these latter industries. The process ends with the end of, and therefore recovery from, the recession.

As a result, every recession in the past has been marked by this shift of resources, and a rise in consumer goods prices relative to capital goods prices (and also to other “producers’ goods” prices, such as wages in capital goods industries.) But the point is that nobody worried about this, because in past recessions monetary deflation, contraction of the money supply, meant that prices in general were falling. Nobody cared, for example, if consumer goods’ prices fell by 10% while producers’ goods prices were falling by 20%. But now, absolute federal control of the banking system means that we never can enjoy an outright contraction of the money supply, and hence prices in general can never fall. Therefore, the relative rise in consumer goods prices that occurs in every recession now takes the most unpleasant form of an absolute rise in the cost of living.

The absence of monetary deflation and hence of a general fall in prices has unpleasantly removed the veil over the usual rise of relative consumer prices. The absence of the old-fashioned monetary deflation means that the consumers have to suffer both recession and unemployment and ever-higher prices of the goods they must buy. The supposedly “humanitarian” manipulation of the monetary and credit system to end old-fashioned deflation during recessions (a manipulation agreed to by Keynesians, Friedmanites, and even many Austrians), has brought us only the worst of both worlds: the worst features of both inflation and recession.

As for those annoyingly high interest rates, they must continue to climb ever upward; the only thing that can bring them down is a really stiff recession, a recession which includes the levelling off of prices. But since the Nixon Administration is not willing to contemplate a stiff recession and a truly anti-inflationary program, interest rates can only continue their march into the stratosphere. (And since the high interest rates were probably the major factor in the stock collapse, it is hard to see the stock market engaging in any brisk recovery.)

In the short run, the only sound way out for the Nixon Administration is to be willing to engage in a truly rigorous anti-monetary inflation program, to stop inflating the monetary supply and, indeed, to engage in some old-fashioned monetary contraction. The recession would then be sharp but short-lived, and recovery would be brisk and healthy. The anti-inflationary monetary contraction must be sharp and determined enough to offset the inevitable rise in relative consumer prices and to change the inflationary expectations of the public; it must be rigorously “hard money”. Only then will prices level off and even (gloryosky!) decline, and only then will interest rates fall. The Administration must cease pursuing the Friedmanite pipe dream of a levelling off of prices along with recovery but without abandoning monetary inflation. In the long run, of course, we need a total overhaul of our inherently statist and inflationary monetary system, with a liquidation of the Federal Reserve System and a return to a genuine gold standard.

But the Nixon Administration is likely to turn, if turn decisively it does, in precisely the opposite direction. Unwilling to bring monetary inflation to a halt, unwilling to go into a truly “hard money” program, it might very well add onto its vacillation and drift a turn toward the totalitarian method of wage-and-price controls. Already there are ominous signs of wage-price controls on the horizon. Arthur F. Burns, the man our anarcho-Nixonites assured us was soundly free-enterprise, now talks of “voluntary” or even coercive price controls. Such business economists as Pierre Rinfret and Lionel Edie and Co., have already frankly called for wage-price controls. There are two things wrong with such controls: one, they are the totalitarian antithesis of freedom or the free economy, and two, they don’t work, leading instead to the “suppressed” inflation of black markets and eternal shortages and misallocation of resources. Why, then, are so many of our “conservative” business economists reaching for such controls? Precisely because profit margins are being squeezed by the pressure of wage-costs, as they always are in recessions; and therefore, these business economists hope to stop wage increases by the use of compulsion and the State bayonet.

Guaranteed income schemes; continuing budget deficits; monetary inflation; and now wage-price controls; under the cover of traditional free-enterprise rhetoric, the Nixon Administration continues us ever further down the path toward the economy of fascism. But none of this will solve the crises brought on by his and his predecessors’ policies. He cannot end the war in Southeast Asia by expanding it, and he cannot end price inflation by continuing to inflate the money supply, or by coercive attempts to overrule the forces of supply and demand. Richard Nixon is sinking deeper into his own quagmire. He cannot bring us peace, he cannot bring us inflation-less prosperity. Nixon’s goose is cooked.

ANARCHISM AND GOVERNMENT

Ludwig von Mises, the greatest modern advocate of democracy and representative government, has never raised any objection against the modern anarchist position; every critique of anarchism made by Professor Mises has been aimed at the older authors of the movement, those who believed that the members of society would all voluntarily submit to the moral code. The older anarchists who held this view were Utopians, i.e., they believed that a perfect society was attainable, where no one would break the moral code. Modern anarchists do not hold this view, however. Rather, they recognize that no social system could conceivably guarantee that no one would break the moral code. Modern anarchists are fully aware that the search is not for a perfect social system, but for the best (most moral) system among those conceivable. Because anarchists seek the best, they naturally choose that system which in no way institutes the breaking of the moral code. This means a system in which no government, i.e., taxing authority or legalized coercive agent, exists. Anarchism, like any other projected social system, is based upon fundamental moral principles. In dealing with social systems, the primary question we must ask is the moral one. Only secondarily is it necessary to inquire into the utilitarian aspects of the system we have chosen. Thus, the demonstration that in a perfectly moral, anarchist, society—perfectly moral in the sense that no criminal actions are legalized—everyone would be better off materially and psychically is secondary to our major concern. The question whether anarchist society is “workable” betrays an immaturity of mind and lack of knowledge and vision. One thing is outstandingly clear to the student of history: Free men are capable of devising methods of coping with all their problems, moral and utilitarian, without invading the freedom and property rights of others. Historical examples are innumerable. In short, anarchism does not expect that everyone will obey the moral code requiring that no one invade the property rights of another; but, anarchism does hold that, in our efforts to prevent and punish such invasions as do occur, we may not invade these same rights (as is done when government is established). Thus, anarchism simply requires that human rights not be invaded by anyone or any group for any reason, supposedly beneficial or otherwise. The State is by nature an invader of men’s rights, just like any “private” criminal; and government must be subject to the same-moral sanctions as are imposed already upon such “private” criminals. Anarchists hold that morality must be upheld in all cases, and not abandoned whenever State actions are involved. Men have long since rejected the Divine Right of Kings; surely it is now past time to do the same with all claims that the State is Extra-Human or Extra-Moral. The State must be judged on the same level and by the same principles as all other human actions and institutions; one rule applies to all. If, upon examination, the State is found to be committing immoral or criminal acts (as anarchists hold it is), then the State must be treated in the same way that we treat a “private” criminal. Anarchists ask no more than this. It is often objected to the anarchist analysis that, while morally it is correct, it ignores the fact that government is a necessary part of any society, that no society could exist without it. This argument would, indeed, carry much weight if it were valid. But it is, in fact, a perfect example of the logical fallacy of begging the question. The necessity of government is just assumed. The Statist, if he wishes to use this argument, must first explain why the State is a necessary part of any social system. In fact, the requirement of explanation lies doubly heavy upon the Statist’s shoulders because he is arguing that he be allowed to institute criminalism. He is, in effect, arguing that there must be an outlaw in every society in order for that society to remain intact. This doctrine is not only paradoxical; it is obviously absurd as well. For the whole purpose of morality is that outlaws should be eliminated from society. Yet the Statist has the temerity to assert that in every geographical area one outlaw (and his legions) are required if the moral code is to be upheld. Reason demands that this criminal assertion be rejected.

— John V. Peters

Announcing the Formation of the

INSTITUTE FOR MARKET ECONOMY STUDIES

A non-profit foundation dedicated to the dissemination of voluntarist-anachrist principles. Plans are under way to hold classes in free market economics biweekly in the New York area.

For further information, write

Box 763

Fordham University,

Bronx, New York 10458

Abortion Repeal

On one point, at least, the Women’s Liberation forces are libertarian and correct: and that is the basic libertarian concept that every person and therefore every woman has the absolute right to govern and control her own body (or, as we might put it, everyone has the fundamental property right in his own body, or the “right of self-ownership”). This fundamental property right immediately rules out slavery, and the draft. And it also rules out any and all laws restricting any woman’s right to perform an abortion.

Too many libertarians tend to dismiss the traditional Catholic counter-argument as unworthy of discussion. That argument is important and cogent, but, I believe, wrong: that abortion constitutes the killing of a living human being, and is therefore tantamount to murder. If the Catholic position were correct, then all abortion would have to be outlawed as murder. The proper answer, I believe, has nothing to do with turgid and slippery arguments as to when life really begins, when the fetus becomes human, when the soul arrives, etc. The vital consideration, from my point of view, is not whether or to what extent the fetus lives or is human, but precisely the fundamental libertarian axiom that each individual has the absolute right of property in his or her own body.

The crucial point is that the fetus is contained within the body of its mother; it is, in fact, a parasite upon that body. The mother has the absolute right to get rid of this parasitic growth, this internal part of her body. Period. Therefore, abortions should be legal.

From The “Old Curmudgeon”

A German politician of a few decades ago once said: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my revolver.” I’m sure we can all think of a lot of words we’d like to substitute for “culture” in that remark. For example: “counter-culture”; “youth culture”; “alienation”; “sense of belonging”; “the Environment”; “the community”; “relevant”; “Women’s Liberation”; “where his head’s at”; “groovy”; “rapping”; and “Right On!”

Free Men Make The Best Freedom Fighters

Modern nomad/troglodytic living is easy, low-cost, comfortable—offers substantial freedom and safety NOW. 4 issues memo-forum to nomad-trog in trade for life-style description; others $2.

Preform 1f, Box 141, Glendale, CA 91209

RECOMMENDED READING

Individualist Anarchism. Until recently, there have been virtually no books in print on the fertile field of the American tradition of individualist anarchism. Now, two important books fill some of this need.

Henry J. Silverman, ed., American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath Co., 1970, paper), immediately replaces Krimerman and Perry’s Patterns of Anarchy as the best collection of readings in individualist anarchism. Professor Silverman has collected significant readings on American libertarianism, beginning with Jefferson and Paine, and then moving quickly to the anarchists, most of whom, fortunately, were individualists. Included in this handsome volume are contributions, among others, from Warren, Tucker, Spooner, Thoreau, Garrison, Ballou, as well as contemporary contributions from American anarchists. The latter include Carl Oglesby’s call for a left-right alliance, Karl Hess’s classic “Death of Politics” from Playboy, the scintillating “Tranquil Statement” of the Anarchist Caucus of YAF in the summer of 1969, co-authored by Karl Hess’s son, and two contributions from Murray N. Rothbard: “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” from Ramparts, as well as the “Student Revolution” from the May 1, 1969 issue of your own Lib. Forum. The collection is nothing if not up-to-date. Price is not listed on the cover; this paperback must be ordered either from Heath or from a college bookstore.

The pioneering history of American individualist anarchism has just been reprinted: the 1932 study by Eunice Minette Schuster, Native American Anarchism: A Study of Left-wing American Individualism (available at $12.50 from the Da Capo Press, 227 West 17th St., New York, N.Y. 10011). Schuster’s study is much less satisfactory than James J. Martin’s Men Against the State for Warren, Spooner and Tucker, but Martin’s book is out of print, and also does not cover such important Christian anarchists as Ann Hutchinson, and the Garrison movement. So Schuster is indispensable for students of American anarchism.

DOUBLE ISSUE

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 13-14

JULY, 1970

35¢

On Civil Obedience

Mr. Leonard E. Read, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest established organization for laissez-faire, has now given us all an Independence Day present: a frank repudiation of the American Revolution and of that great libertarian document, the Declaration of Independence, on which that Revolution was grounded. (“Civil obedience”, Notes from FEE, July.) How have Mr. Read and FEE, who proclaim themselves to be libertarian and have many times hailed that same Declaration, gotten themselves into this odd position? FEE was the organization where, over twenty years ago, I first met the late Frank Chodorov, a great libertarian who introduced our generation of young libertarians to Thoreau and his Essay on Civil Disobedience. How is it that now Leonard E. Read writes an essay sternly calling upon everyone to obey the law at all times, regardless of how immoral or unjust any law may be? For twenty-five years, Leonard Read has labored to bring us liberty, and, behold, he has brought us the profoundly anti-libertarian stone of Civil obedience.

Apparently, Mr. Read was provoked into writing this essay by running into trouble with his youth cadre. He tells us that after he and his colleagues had finished instructing their Undergraduate Seminar on the immorality and injustice of the bulk of our laws, the main question raised by the students was: “Am I not warranted in breaking an immoral law?” An excellent question, indeed, but one that apparently disturbed Mr. Read. For even a believer in laissez-faire, let along an anarchist, must concede that the great bulk of our laws is despotic, exploitative, immoral and unjust. Why, then, should these criminal and unjust edicts be obeyed? Why indeed?

Mr. Read is very firm on his answer to the students: no law, no matter how immoral, may be disobeyed. No one must knowingly disobey any law, regardless of its content. He is not nearly as clear, however, on the reasons for his stand, which quickly become cloudy, self-contradictory, and irrelevant.

Mr. Read’s first reason for commanding obedience to all law is a curious one, considering his past record as an ardent defender of each individual’s following his own moral principles, of being true to himself, whatever these principles may be. After preaching the immorality of invading the natural rights and the property of any individual for nearly twenty-five years, Mr. Read has apparently and suddenly become a moral relativist. If the individual is to disobey an immoral law, he wonders, “how is an immoral law to be defined?” Even if he is sure that regulation or special privilege is immoral, he says, his is “quite a minority view these days”. And then he adds, rather sadly for someone who had once been so firm on each individual’s following his own moral judgment: “contemporary ethical standards vary so that no law will pass everyone’s test of morality”, and so no person may use his conviction of a law’s immorality to break that law.

Let us be quite clear what Mr. Read’s current position implies. The government, let us say, passes a law, ordering every citizen to turn everyone known by him to be a Jew (or Negro, or redhead, or whatever) over to the authorities to be shipped to a concentration camp. Mr. Read would surely consider such a law criminally unjust; but he would feel morally obligated to obey, because who is he to set his own ethical views against “contemporary ethical standards?” Mr. Read considers conscription a monstrous slave law; and yet, he would presumably condemn any young person evading the draft for disobeying the law, and presumably would also turn this young draft evader in to the authorities if the law so decreed.

Mr. Read’s argument evidently suffers from a grave inner contradiction. He raises the variability of definitions of morality and of ethical standards as an argument for not acting on one’s own perception of the injustice of any law. And yet he turns around and enjoins upon us all the absolute ethical commandment of obeying all laws, no matter their content, even though he admits in his article that many people dispute the justice of these laws. In short, Mr. Read uses ethical variability as the reason for ethical relativism, for preventing people from acting on their own moral judgments, and yet from that selfsame ethical variability he somehow comes up with a universal ethical absolute: obedience to every law, regardless of one’s moral judgment. If, indeed, ethical standards are variable and therefore we should not presume to act on our own moral principles, then neither can there be an absolute ethical imperative for everyone to obey the law. Mr. Read can’t have it both ways.

DOUBLE ISSUE

NOTICE: During July and August, we will publish special Double Issues: one covering July 1-July 15, and another August 1-August 15. We will return to our regular publishing schedule in September.

Let us contrast Mr. Read’s ethical relativism and plea for civil obedience to some of his own earlier writings, writings in those golden days when FEE was at the center of libertarian thought and activity in this country. Thus, in his “The Penalty of Surrender” (Essays on Liberty, Vol. I, FEE, 1952, pp. 253-63), Read wrote eloquently that one must not compromise one’s moral principles, because, in the field of morality, the slightest compromise can only mean surrender. Read recognized then, of course, that no person is infallible, and that therefore one’s moral principles might be in error, but that he must follow them nevertheless. “A principle . . . is a matter of personal moral judgment . . . I am convinced that no person is capable of rising above his best judgment. To live in strict accordance with one’s best judgment is to live as perfectly as one can . . . A rule of conduct emerges with crystal clarity: reflect in word and in deed, always and accurately, that which one’s best judgment dictates. (Italics Read’s.) . . . To do less, to deviate one iota, is to sin against yourself, that is, against your Maker as He has manifested Himself in you. To do less is not to compromise. To do less is to surrender I” (Ibid., pp. 258-60.) Hear, hear! But how does the eloquent and uncompromisingly principled Leonard Read of the early 1950’s square with the Leonard Read of 1970, who claims that since “contemporary ethical standards vary, and the majority may not agree, no individual is justified in breaking a law that he may consider deeply immoral? Isn’t his later position “surrender” and “sin”? And, furthermore, the early Read said: “Principle does not lend itself to bending or to compromising. It stands impregnable. I must either abide by it, or in all fairness I must on this point regard myself, not as a rational, reasonable person, but rather as an unprincipled person.” (Ibid., p. 256.)

Another eloquent product of the early Read was “On That Day Began Lies.” (Ibid., pp. 231-252.) Read took his essay from a text by the frankly anarchist Leo Tolstoy. “From the day when the first members of councils placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their work to the present day,” Read built his article on this superb passage. Again Read wrote: “the nearest that any person can get to right principles—truth—is that which his highest personal judgment dictates as right. Beyond that one cannot go or achieve. Truth, then, as nearly as any individual can express it, is in strict accordance with his inner, personal dictate of Tightness. (Italics Read’s.) The accurate representation of this inner, personal dictate is intellectual integrity. It is the expressing, living, acting of such truth as any given person is in possession of. Inaccurate representation of what one believes to be right is untruth. It is a lie. . . Thus, the best we can do with ourselves is to represent ourselves at our best. To do otherwise is to tell a lie. To tell lies is to destroy such truth as is known. To deny truth is to destroy ourselves.” (Ibid., p. 233.)

Read went on to attack the idea of subordinating one’s own perception of truth to the opinions of other men in “councils”, organizations or governments, and particularly to attack the idea that a group of men labelling themselves “government” can morally perform acts (murder, theft, etc.) that individual men would not perform. He concludes: “How to stop lies? It is simply a matter of personal resolve to act and speak in strict accordance with one’s inner, personal dictate of what is right. And for each of us to see to it that no other man or set of men is given permission to represent us otherwise.” (Ibid., p. 252.) And let us underline here that, in both of these early essays, Mr. Read writes of “acting” and of “deeds” as well as merely speaking in accordance with one’s inner convictions.

And finally, Leonard Read’s noble Conscience on the Battlefield (FEE, 1951), a pamphlet which seems to have been long out of print at the Foundation. Here Read candidly condemned war as “liberty’s greatest enemy” and as, simply, “evil”. The essay is written in the form of a dialogue between Read’s current self—or his Conscience—and with what would have been his self if he had then been dying on a battlefield in Korea. Read admonishes the dying soldier that, simply because the government had sent him there to fight, the soldier cannot escape moral guilt for killing his fellow human beings. The government’s calling it moral or legal or calling it war cannot alter the fact that killing in that war was unjustified murder of his fellow men.

Read wrote of the “failure to grasp the idea that when the right to act on behalf of one’s self is delegated to another, this cannot reasonably be done without an acceptance of personal responsibility for the results of the delegated authority . . . Let authority for your actions be transferred to government, a collective, without an exact accompaniment of your personal responsibility for that authority . . . and . . . you will act without personal discipline as a result of the mistaken belief that there can be authority without responsibility . . . And this, I submit, is the illogical process—call it foreign policy or whatever—which leads you to kill another person without remorse or a feeling of guilt.” (Ibid., pp. 30-31.) And the fact of government action is no moral aid to one’s conscience, for government “is but a name given to an arrangement which consists only of individuals. They—and they alone—are responsible for what they do collectively as government. They—and they alone—are subject to Judgment.” (Ibid., p. 29.)

And the early Read went even further in his moral condemnation of the American war-machine; in the guilt for “there can be no distinction between those who do the shooting and those who aid the act—whether they aid it behind the lines by making the ammunition (the “merchants of death”?) or by submitting to the payment of taxes for war.” (Ibid., p. 11.)

Now I am not saying that the Leonard Read of 1951 would have counselled the soldier or the taxpayer for the war machine to break the law—to refuse to involve himself in the guilt of mass murder. But surely it is inconceivable that the Read of 1951 would have condemned the man of conscience who broke the law by refusing to participate in mass murder, especially by referring to minority positions and to differing “contemporary ethical standards”.

So much for Read’s argument against an individual refusing to obey a law he considers immoral. Read’s second argument against law-breaking is scarcely an argument at all: it is the raising of the old spectre, the old bogety, of “anarchy”. He seems to place himself squarely in the middle-of-the-road, in the middle between socialism on the one hand and the “enormous anarchistic reaction” to socialism on the other. But from his tone, and from his curious injunction that State laws must be obeyed regardless of their content, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Read regards anarchism—the maximum of individual liberty—as somehow a far greater threat to his version of liberty than socialism itself. He must, else he would not opt for obedience to all state laws, no matter how despotic, as compared to the outside chance of anarchism! A curious position indeed, especially since the ranks of anarchism are enormously weaker than the might and power of the State. That Mr. Read has gone far down the statist road is evident also from the fact that his legendary politeness and courtesy in polemic has begun to slip: “I see an enormous anarchistic reaction . . . And back of it all—giving the movement a false dignity—are an increasing number of persuasive writers and speakers flaunting the labels of scholarship.” (Notes from FEE, p. 1.) Never has Mr. Read written in such angry personal tones of writers and speakers on behalf of statism or socialism. Curious once more!

“Anarchy,” writes the current Mr. Read, is “approaching epidemic proportions.” (Would that it were so!) Anarchy, Read warns, is “unplanned chaos”, which is no better than the “planned chaos” of socialism. “Unplanned chaos”—an interesting term. Does Mr. Read mean by this term the free market, for that is precisely what we free-market anarchists advocate? But if freedom and the free market is “chaos”, how then does Leonard Read’s view of the market differ from that of Karl Marx, who scornfully referred to the market as “anarchy of production”? is freedom, at last, to be called “chaos”?

The term “planned chaos” is taken from a booklet of the same title by the distinguished laissez-faire economist, Ludwig von Mises. But Mises does not, as does Read, contrast government planning to planlessness as the available polar alternatives. To Mises, the desideratum is that each individual plans for himself: “The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself or should the paternal government alone plan for all? The issue. . . is spontaneous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus governmental omnipotence.” (Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1952, p. 45.) And Mises adds: “There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work.” (Ibid., p. 17.) The aim of free-market anarchists is precisely to end governmental omnipotence and planning, and to substitute for this each man’s planning for himself. Or does Mr. Read, in contrast to Mises, consider each man’s planning for himself to be “planless chaos”? (This is not to say that Mises is an anarchist, but that Mises would not make the egregious error of referring to the market as “planless chaos”.)

We should add that the early Read had a far different view of “chaos”; to him, “chaos” signified the individual’s abandonment of principle: “If principle is abandoned, even compromise will not be possible. Nothing but chaos!” (Essays on Liberty, Vol. I, p. 263.)

Mr. Read admits that almost everyone breaks laws every day, but only, he hastens to add, because they don’t know what the laws may be. Thus, he cites a business firm which might or might not be breaking the antitrust laws for almost any action it may perform. So far, so good (although this contradicts the position taken in Conscience on the Battlefield, pp. 14-15.) But Mr. Read has not looked deeply enough at reality. Surely, he must be familiar with the fact that every citizen breaks laws, knowingly and intentionally, every day. Does he not know that millions, every day, discard gum wrappers on streets, fudge a bit on their income taxes, cross the street on the red light, commit fornication out of wedlock, etc.—and without the world falling apart? Has not even Leonard Read himself, even he, once in a while driven 62 miles per hour in a 60-mile per hour zone?

Read professes joining the revolutionaries in his “distaste for the plethora of oppressive laws presently on the statute books”. But the remedy, he insists, must only be repeal of the laws rather than breaking them. But how in the world does he think that laws get repealed? The best way of forcing our politicians to repeal a law is to render that law absolutely non-enforceable, in short, by mass breakage of that law. How does Mr. Read believe that perhaps the single greatest tyrannical law in American history—Prohibition—got repealed? Prohibition got repealed because it had become totally unenforceable in that greater part of the country where people decided that the act—even as a Constitutional amendment—was absurd and despotic, and they simply and knowingly ignored the law. The mass drinking during Prohibition was one of the greatest—and most successful—movements of mass civil disobedience in history. It won, and surely every libertarian must consider this victory a’ great triumph for liberty—a triumph brought about by nothing else than mass breakage of The Law. Leonard Read writes that “lawbreaking merely adds to the existing confusion”, and that “if any idea or action does not lead to enlightenment, it is worthless, if not downright destructive.” Contrary to Mr. Read, the lawbreaking during Prohibition was very clear, and extremely enlightening, both to the government and to the general public. What it told the government was that Prohibition was an act so despotic and so invasive of the personal freedom of the public that that law could not be enforced, regardless of the sums of taxpayers’ money spent on government snoopers and prohibition enforcement agents. The lawbreaking enlightened the public and the government that there are some limits beyond which the government may not go in its dictatorship over society. The government will never attempt Prohibition again, thanks to that lawbreaking and that enlightenment. This is a process of enlightenment which the Marxists have aptly called “education through struggle”.

Mr. Read, in contrast, apparently believes that laws are repealed by one individual genius rising up and sounding the trump, and then, presto, the unjust law is dissolved. This Great Man view of history is all too popular among the public ignorant of historical processes, and Mr. Read picks a peculiarly absurd example by singling out the alleged influence toward libertarian repeal of oppressive laws by one Father Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi, according to Read, was a sixteenth-century Venetian priest, “whose analysis, reasoning and expositions crumpled the mighty power combination of Church and State. . .” He then quotes the historian Andrew Dickson White as hailing Sarpi, who had “fought the most bitter fight for humanity ever known in any Latin nation, and won a victory by which the whole world has profited ever since.” (Notes from FEE, p. 2.)

Leonard Read accuses some of us of giving the anarchist movement a “false dignity” by “flaunting the labels of scholarship”. Well, that is one sin which Mr. Read can never be accused of committing. No scholarship—or historical knowledge whatsoever—is being flaunted here. In the first place, it is historiographical nonsense to think that a law, let alone a structure of laws, can be “crumpled” by one person writing a book, no matter how persuasive that book. Other things have to happen, too, but these are things which Mr. Read does not choose to face, for they involve pressure, social forces, politics, and even violence. They involve, in short, a struggle against Power. But setting this point aside, one boggles at the ignorance of history flaunted by Mr. Read: no one with the slightest knowledge of sixteenth or seventeenth-century European history can treat Mr. Read’s account of Father Sarpi with anything but a round horselaugh. Not only didn’t Father Sarpi “crumple” a darn thing, either directly or indirectly; Sarpi’s role was, to the contrary, to defend the laws of the Venetian State against the Church. Rather than the prophet of “repeal of oppressive laws”, Father Sarpi was the apologist for existing State law against its Churchly critics. Furthermore, and to put the cap on Mr. Read’s historical balderdash, these Venetian laws were decidedly oppressive and anti-libertarian. They included the refusal of the Venetian State to allow the Church the right to establish orders or erect religious buildings without state permission, and the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Venetian territory. Leonard Read’s heroic prophet of liberty who supposedly “crumpled” an entire structure of oppressive laws by writing a book, turns out to be merely an apologist for existing oppressive laws! Leonard Read the historian makes Leonard Read the social philosopher tower like Aristotle.

Perhaps Mr. Read’s problem is that he took as his historical authority one Andrew Dickson White, a man who was not even a very good historian when he wrote his works in the late nineteenth century. History is a cumulative discipline, and historical scholarship seventy-five odd years ago was in its infancy. And even in that age of flagrant bias and feeble scholarship among all too many historians, Andrew Dickson White was particularly blinded in his historical outlook by his almost fanatical anti-Catholic bias. Father Sarpi was against the Papacy, and for Andrew Dickson White that was credentials enough.

Is Mr. Read, then, counseling obedience to all law? is there no edict,’ no oppression, no injustice, no matter how flagrant or how gruesome, that Leonard Read will not swallow? No, he is willing to draw the line somewhere: where freedom of speech is infringed. I shall obey the law, Mr. Read states, “so long as I am free to speak my piece and write about it.” He adds with self-satisfaction: “That’s my criterion!” for “turning revolutionary”.

I have heard this criterion from Ayn Rand and now from Leonard Read, but I must confess that I simply cannot understand how this criterion is arrived at. How is it grounded in libertarian principle? Neither Read nor Rand has offered any derivation for their criterion. In fact, the criterion seems to me an absurd one for a libertarian to promulgate. Suppose that a man burgles my home, assaults me and my family, and kidnaps me; have I no moral right to defend myself provided that he allows me to register my protest and even send a letter to the Times? What sort of libertarian principle is this? For that is what Mr. Read is saying: no matter how much the government criminally robs us, kidnaps us, enslaves us, brutalizes us, we must not defy or disobey the edicts of this criminal gang provided they allow us to raise our voices in protest. But why? Why?

I can understand such an argument from Social Democrats like Sidney Hook. For people like Hook, property rights are unimportant; indeed the only right worth defending is freedom of speech (and to press the lever at the ballot-box). Given the preservation of such freedom of speech, such “human right”, every act of government is morally legitimate and therefore must morally be obeyed. But Leonard Read and Ayn Rand are supposed to be upholders of property right; they are supposed to believe that property right is a human right just as sacred as freedom of speech. How come this abandonment, this surrender of the rights of property, including the property right in one’s own person as is violated in conscription? How can libertarians and defenders of property rights suddenly abandon such rights as unimportant, and claim that the right of self-defense, or even the moral right to disobey unjust laws, arises only when freedom of speech is violated? Do not Read and Rand know that freedom is indivisible, that the willingness to sanction the loss of freedom in one area means that other areas inevitably are abandoned? Surely they have written this many times, as did Mr. Read in “The Penalty of Surrender”. On what day began lies?

Furthermore, aside from his abandonment of libertarian principle, Mr. Read, as in his acceptance of the Sarpi fable, betrays a curiously naive view of strategy in the real world. Does he really believe that he can accept an increasingly totalitarian framework of laws and of State power, keep counseling total civil obedience, and then, when the State puts the final nail in our coffin by suppressing our freedom of speech, suddenly say. “OK, that’s it. I now become a revolutionary.” Does he really believe that one can meekly accept 99% of one’s enslavement and then suddenly stand up, a defiant revolutionary, at the last nail in the coffin? Read the revolutionary would last about ten seconds before finding his way to the nearest hoosegow. But perhaps Mr. Read believes that, like Father Sarpi, he need then only rise and proclaim: “I become a revolutionary”, for the State’s oppressive regime to “crumple” once more.

I agree with Herbert Marcuse on virtually nothing, but his analysis of freedom of speech in the United States as the keystone in a system of “repressive tolerance” is close to the mark. It is as if the Establishment can oppress us by all manner of laws, privileges, and regulations, but then ostentatiously allow dissenters like Ayn Rand or Leonard Read to speak and publish, and then tell everyone here and abroad: “See, we do have a free country. What are you all complaining about?” Freedom of speech, especially when, as in the case of Leonard E. Read, it conspicuously does not lead to action against the State, serves the State well as its showcase, its “Potemkin village”, to bamboozle the public into believing that we in fact live in a “free society”. By embracing freedom of speech as the only freedom worth defending or clinging to, Leonard Read and Ayn Rand fall beautifully into the co-opting trap of repressive tolerance.

One wonders, too, whether Mr. Read realizes that even freedom of speech, especially that of the more annoying dissenters, is being interfered with, harassed, and crippled, right now in the United States. Such repression has taken myriad forms: for example, the Chicago Trial of the Conspiracy 8, the Chicago police riot of 1968, FCC regulation of radio and TV stations, the outlawing of the Washington Free Press, the persistent governmental harassment of the San Diego underground press, the endemic wiretapping indulged in by government, and numerous other examples, What was the massacre at Kent State but the murder of students who were exercising their freedom of speech and assembly by peaceful demonstrations? Even if our puny little libertarian movement has been harassed and intimidated in our exercise of freedom of speech and assembly by the force of government. Every one of our dinners and conferences in New York was infiltrated and reported on in detail by police spies, plainclothesmen virtually surrounded our major New York conference, and FBI agents have intimidated people who had attended the conference (obviously getting their names from police spies.) Do you, Leonard, consider this an invasion of our freedom of speech and communication? What of your criterion now?

Senator Sam Ervin (D., N. C), one of the few conservatives in Congress genuinely concerned about liberty of the person, has been conducting a lone, one-man campaign in the Senate attacking the existence of computerized files in the Federal government containing a dossier on hundreds of thousands of American “malcontents” who have committed no crimes. Senator Ervin says that the existence of these files brings us close to being a “police state”. The Senator charges that “the very existence of government files on how people exercise First Amendment rights, how they think, speak, assemble and act in lawful pursuits, is a form of official psychological coercion to keep silent and to refrain from acting.” (New York. Times, June 28.) Are you, Leonard Read, going to be less critical of our burgeoning police-state than Senator Ervin, a man who has never claimed to be a consistent libertarian? I know, too, that I and many other peaceful libertarians are on that infamous list.

Of course, it is very possible that Mr. Read simply does not care about this repression of freedom of speech, even of the speech of libertarians. For he does say that his criterion rests on whether “I am free to speak my piece and write about it.” I have no doubt whatever that, long after the freedom of speech and communication of others, of active anti-Statists, has been suppressed, Leonard E. Read will be allowed to speak and publish unhampered. His freedom of speech is not likely to be in danger, not so long as any tolerance remains in our system of repressive tolerance. Perhaps, after all, Mr. Read is only concerned about his freedom of speech, and the devil take anyone else’s. But at least he should ask himself: why? Why is it that my freedom of speech remains unsullied while others are suppressed? is it because the State considers me a boon rather than a bane, especially as I continue to preach ardently in favor of civil obedience?

Having proclaimed, but not defended, the criterion of free speech for disobeying any law, Mr. Read goes on to a third argument for civil obedience: an argument from strategy. Mr. Read asserts that anarchists, “who flout law and order as a matter of principle, cannot logically or convincingly present the case for freedom,” whereas himself and FEE can do so, because “our respect for law and order may well engender a corresponding respect for our commitments to freedom.” Perhaps, but I don’t see it; it seems to me rather that anarchists who declare that unjust laws may morally be disobeyed, will engender respect for their consistency in upholding the principle of freedom, for their consistency in principle and in deed. On the other hand, FEE’s respect for a system of law which surely observes, at the hands of any libertarian, only condemnation, can only seem to most people, and to most budding libertarians, as craven surrender of principle. To quote the early Read, FEE’s course will seem to most thinking people as “sin” and “surrender”. Why in blazes does a system of laws and decrees which even Leonard Read acknowledges to be unjust and oppressive deserve “respect”? Does the burglar, the kidnapper, the mugger, deserve “respect” for his decrees? On that day began lies I

Finally, Mr. Read gives us our Independence Day present: his repudiation of the Declaration of Independence. Quoting the Declaration, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter it or abolish it”, Read makes an enormous concession: that, on the grounds of the Declaration, we should all long ago have become revolutionaries! He admits: “the grievances listed (in the Declaration) are hardly distinguishable from the oppressive laws imposed on us by our own government. According to the Declaration, I should have turned revolutionary several decades ago.” Hear, hear! However, he says, he rejects the criterion of the Declaration—which amounts to the right of self-defense against long-continued abuses of liberty—for his own “criterion” of invasion of freedom of speech.

His argument against the Declaration, however, is not in his own realm of libertarian social philosophy but in the role of Leonard Read as Historian. “The more I study the history of revolutions,” Read intones, “the more evident” it is that “the replacement (is) worse than the government overthrown!” The American Revolution is, apparently, a miraculous exception to this historical rule. So much for revolution!

In contrast to his gaffe on Father Sarpi, Leonard Read is joined in this historical error by many historians and by the great mass of the American public, who have thereby been lulled into repudiating revolutions and denying their own revolutionary past. This old bromide is, however, dead wrong; we might almost say, in reverse, that most revolutionary governments have been far better, on balance, than the ones overthrown. Even the French Revolution, much abused by Tories and Conservatives then and since, and surrounded by armed invaders from counter-revolutionary crowned heads, was on net balance a great blessing for liberty and free enterprise. The French Revolution swept aside crippling feudal and mercantilist restrictions and oppressions, and set the stage for agricultural liberty and for the Industrial Revolution in France. I will here simply refer Mr. Read—and other counter-revolutionaries—to a monumental work of comparative history, Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Moore conclusively demonstrates that, in contrast to Tory mythology, it was precisely through violent revolution that America, Britain, and France were able to achieve as much liberty and democracy as they did; in contrast, it was those countries which industrialized without internal violence: e.g. Germany and Japan, which landed in modern totalitarianism. (Indeed, poring through Moore, now available in paperback, is one of the best single antidotes to the ignorance of history that unfortunately goes beyond Mr. Read to the entire libertarian movement.)

Mr. Read and FEE have not always been so down on the Declaration of Independence. Quite the contrary. Thus, in an article for FEE lionizing the Declaration, Ralph Bradford hurled this challenge to his contemporaries: “Would You Have Signed It?” (Ralph Bradford, “Would You Have Signed It?”, Essays on Liberty, Vol. VI, FEE, 1959, pp. 9-18.) Obviously the Leonard Read of 1970 would not have. Stoutly defending the Declaration and its signers, Bradford denounced the modern critics who dismiss the Declaration “because the principles asserted in those documents come between them and their plans for collectivization by force.” (Ibid., p. 11.) Bradford concluded his article: “The thing to remember is that when the chips were down, they (the signers) were men! The piece of paper they had signed was not a thing a signer could squirm out of or explain away later. It was not a vague statement of political and social principles. (Italics mine.) . . . In bold phrases it recited the political and economic sins of the King of England, and it declared that the Colonies were free from the rule of the British government. In the eyes of that government, such statements were treasonable; and treason was punishable by death . . . Would you have signed it?” No, most assuredly, the Leonard Read of today would not, in a million years, have signed such a document.

To conclude: Leonard E. Read, sternly and with unusual asperity, has told us in no uncertain terms that we must respect and obey all laws whatsoever, regardless of how unjust, unless and until Leonard Read’s freedom of speech shall be impaired. He has offered no intelligible argument whatsoever, let alone an argument grounded in libertarian principle, for this commandment to civil obedience. The conservative theorist James Burnham was far clearer and more candid in his ultimate argument for government: irrational mystery, Burnham wrote: “there is no adequate rational explanation for the existence and effective working of government . . . Neither the source nor the justification of government can be put in wholly rational terms . . . Consider the problem of government from the point of view of the reflective individual. I, as an individual, do in fact submit myself . . . to the rule of another—to government. But suppose that I ask myself: why should I do so? why should I submit myself to the rule of another? what justifies his rule? To these questions there are no objectively convincing answers in rational terms alone . . . why should I accept the hereditary or democratic or any other principle of legitimacy? Why should a principle justify the rule of that man over me? . . . I accept the principle, well . . . because I do, because that is the way it is and has been.” So enamoured is Burnham of this mystical “argument” for civil obedience that he actually lauds the mythology that States were founded by gods, and thereby have divine sanction: “In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of Cities were known to be gods or demigods.” (James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959, pp. 3, 6-8.) But suppose, we may counter to Jim Burnham, we now begin not to accept the principle of the legitimacy of rule. What then? Obviously, Burnham’s mystical decrees can scarcely be persuasive argument to anyone but Burnham himself, if that. We must be guided by reason and by libertarian principle, and in that realm, Mr. Read’s case has not even begun to be made—perhaps, because he dimly sees that he can make no case for civil disobedience in reason and in liberty.

As we look over this sorry record, a persistent question confronts us: where are the laissez-faire revolutionaries? You don’t have to be an anarchist, after all, to be a revolutionary (although it helps). Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, the signers of the Declaration, the patriots of the Boston Tea Party, none of these men were anarchists, no, they were, somewhat like Leonard E. Read, laissez-faire libertarians. And yet what splendid revolutionaries they were! There is a world of difference, however, between them and Leonard E. Read—and what a difference, O my countrymen! Somewhere in the explanation of that difference lies the key to the tragic decline of the American Republic. Frank Chodorov and Ralph Bradford and the Leonard E. Read of twenty years ago understood that difference full well.

Meanwhile, while Mr. Read stands up and orders our youth to respect and obey all laws whatsoever while their (or his!) freedom of speech remains, I for one am willing to stand behind our earlier group of laissez-faire libertarians, they who were “men”, they who never surrendered principle, they for whom on no day began lies, they who magnificently wrote:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness . . . when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

Adam Smith Warned You: Inflation Always Leads To Crisis.

“When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has been brought about at all, has always been brought about by a bankruptcy.” —THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

One great economist after another has agreed with him. From Frederic Bastiat to Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman and Henry Hazlitt—all have Warned of the irreparable damage inflation does to a nation and the appalling toll it can take from your labor, your savings, your plans . . . and your dreams.

In previous inflations a few farsighted investors managed to prosper. But the loopholes by which they salvaged their wealth are being tightened in this one. There is no sure way to protect yourself.

Are you prepared, now:

• to see the value of your stocks cut in half?

• to lose your job or business?

• to have your loans called?

• to see mortgages and car loans soar further in cost?

• to face a general business recession?

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From The “Old Curmudgeon”

Penn Central may be in a veritable mess, but one recent managerial tactic at that railroad was truly a stroke of genius. Six female employees, beguiled by the propaganda of Women’s Lib, had protested vigorously that they were being shunted into the “stereotyped roles” of secretaries and typists. They demanded absolutely equal treatment with men. The management responded by giving them the equal treatment they so richly deserved: shifting them to the dangerous and backbreaking job of checking freight cars, a job that had previously been confined to the male “oppressors”. Liberated females, however, somehow are never satisfied. When they complained about the shift, the management retorted: “They wanted equal rights, didn’t they?”

It’s about time the Women’s Libbers realized that not all male jobs are the glamourous ones of advertising executives, publishers, lawyers, etc. The Women’s Libbers deserve the “liberation” they want; first step: freight-car checking.

RECOMMENDED READING

Panther Revisionism.

Robert Brustein, “When the Panther Came to Yale”, New York Times Magazine (June 21). Panther disruption at Yale.

Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, New York (June 8, 40(5). A brilliant, scintillating article that is the Talk of the Town. Witty, insightful dissection of Panther-worship among New York’s Beautiful People. Lenny Bernstein and his cohorts will never be the same.

Drug Culture.

Milton Travers, “Each Other’s Victims,” McCall’s (June). A moving true story of a father’s struggle to save his son from the drug culture.

Anarchism.

Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book (New York: Haskell Reprints, $15.00). At last, back in print, the great classic of individualist anarchism; it’s a pleasure to read Tucker’s logical, “plumb-line” dissection of numerous deviationists.

American History: Big Business, Big Labor, Big Government

Melvin I. Urofsky, Big Steel and the Wilson Administration (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, $8100). Excellent Kolko-esque study of the role of Big Business in the statism and collectivism of the Wilson era, concentrating on the steel industry.

Robert H. Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919-1929 (Lexington, Ky., University of Kentucky Press, $8.25). Excellent work on the pro-union views of Herbert Hoover and his wing of the Republican Party.

Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, $10.00). The best book so far on U.S. labor leaders as willing servants of American imperialism abroad. Concentrates on U.S. labor in World War I, also in the Cold War.

DOUBLE ISSUE

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. II, NO. 15-16

AUGUST, 1970

35¢

Hatfield For President?

Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Oregon) has become famous in recent years for his courageous independence from the Nixon Administration, and for his intrepid battle against the draft and the Vietnam War. Year after year Senator Hatfield has introduced bills for the abolition of conscription, and he is now co-author of the McGovern-Hatfield amendment designed to cut off all funds for the war in Southeast Asia by 1971. At the end of June, Senator Hatfield amazed Washington by breaking party protocol and sharply suggesting that Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew might not be nominated in 1972, especially if the war and the economy continue in the mess that they’re in now. Columnist Mary McGrory reports that “some of Hatfield’s like-minded colleagues in the Senate whispered ‘Right On’ to him the morning after”. (New York Post, June 30.)

A friendly Senate colleague of Hatfield’s explained to Miss McGrory, concerning Hatfield’s statement that the party might turn to Ronald Reagan in 1972, that “Mark did not want to seem to be pushing himself forward as a candidate.” And the knowledgeable Miss McGrory adds: “The disillusioned Senator’s name might turn up in the New Hampshire primary ballot in 1972. He might even be running as an independent with John V. Lindsay. . .”

There has been rising interest within the peace movement in a third political party, a party that would mobilize all the forces against conscription and war in a broad coalition that would, once and for all, smash the old frozen party structures, especially the Democratic Party, run by the bosses and hacks, and bring vital issues and choices concerning them back into American politics. As the extreme Right said six years ago (but not lately): we need a choice not an echo, and we have been getting only echoes for far too long. The Republican Party was born in the 1850’s, when the Whig party structure refused to take a clear-cut stand on the extension of slavery, and so they were shunted aside for a new party designed to focus upon that neglected issue. The Democratic Party has refused to take a clear-cut stand against the war and against conscription, it has been virtually indistinguishable from the Republicans in the great blob of the Center, and it deserves therefore to disappear in the wake of a new party which will mobilize the public on these vital issues.

When most people think of a possible new party, they think of a candidate something like John Lindsay, and, indeed, most people think of Senator Hatfield as being ideologically similar to the liberal New York mayor. But this is not the case, and libertarians especially should be alerted to the crucial differences. Mark Hatfield thinks of himself, not as a modern-day liberal but as a “classical liberal”, a nineteenth-century liberal devoted to the creed of a strictly limited government: limited at home and abroad. Hatfield thinks of himself as a disciple of Senator Robert Taft, and his courageously antiwar policy is of a piece with Taft’s “isolationism”, the foreign-policy of the Old Right before the “World Anti-Communist Crusade”-mentality infected and took over the conservative movement in this country. In domestic affairs, too, Mark Hatfield believes in reducing the power of government to its classical liberal dimension of defending the free-market economy.

Above all, Mark Hatfield has had the acute perceptiveness to be virtually the only one of the small band of classical liberals in Congress to see that the old rhetoric, the old political labels, have lost their usefulness. He has been the only one to see that the classical liberal is more happy with many aspects of the New Left than he is with his old-time allies in the conservative movement. In short, Mark Hatfield is the only classical-liberal politician I know of who understands and agrees with the Left/Right concept—with the idea that the libertarian has more in common with the New Left than with the contemporary Right. More important, Mark Hatfield sees that the only hope for liberty on the political front is to forge a new coalition, a coalition combining the libertarian ideas of both Left and Right, and consisting of the constituencies to whom these ideas would appeal: students, anti-war people, blacks, and middle-class whites opposed to statism and war. A Hatfield-forged coalition would base itself squarely on slashing the powers of government at home and abroad: in getting out of Southeast Asia and reestablishing a pro-peace, “isolationist”, foreign policy; in repeal of the draft; and, domestically, in reducing the powers of Big Government in favor of a free, decentralized society.

Senator Hatfield is intelligent enough to see that, in contrast to a generation ago, a libertarian program of today, in today’s political climate, cannot be couched in rhetoric pleasing only to an extreme right-wing that is now hopelessly anti-libertarian. His rhetoric will be modern, in keeping with the perceptions of today, and in keeping with his knowledge of how a broad libertarian coalition could be forged. And make no mistake: the Senator does refer to himself, consciously, as a libertarian, and this in itself is almost unheard of in American politics.

I know, I know; I know all about the cries of protest that will now be welling up in scores of libertarian hearts, those hearts which, like mine, are steeped in innate and instinctive distrust for any and every politician. The remarkable thing is that Mark Hatfield himself understands such distrust just as well, and probably shares it. A while ago he told a group of us, spontaneously bringing up the point himself: “I have not, like Faust, sold my soul to politics.” I believe him. And if the time should ever come when Mark Hatfield runs for the Presidency, I shall enlist without hesitation behind his banner.

DOUBLE ISSUE

NOTICE: During July and August, we will publish special Double Issues: one covering July 1-July 15, and another August 1-August 15. We will return to our regular publishing schedule in September.

Black Flag For A New Decade

Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative. By Jerome Tuccille. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. 109 pp. $5.00.

Here is a book which goes on the must read list for radicals interested in sorting out the politics of the sixties with an eye to identifying some blind alleys and finding some new directions. Tuccille speaks for the rapidly growing numbers of radical libertarians, people who know where they are going, and speaks to the broadest possible spectrum of people who want to get to the same place but just haven’t gotten things quite straight in their heads yet. He has written, quite simply, the best, most up-to-date, statement of radical libertarian principles there is around, and, since a major publisher has had the good business sense to see its enormous sales potential, everybody can get a copy without writing to some obscure P.O. Box in New York.

Unless you are a very recent subscriber to this magazine, and have thus missed articles here by radical libertarians Murray Rothbard (June 15, 1969) and Karl Hess (October, 1969) you don’t have to ask what is radical libertarianism. But in case you do want an answer to that question, Tuccille’s book is where to find it. That’s what he wrote it for. When you read it, you will find that radical libertarianism (or anarcho-libertarianism, a label some prefer) is a movement right-wing in origin and ecumenical in appeal. Taking one thing at a time, let’s look at the right-wing origin first.

You don’t have to get very far into the book before you find out that radical libertarianism is not a “new right” being set up to complement the new left. The new right are the finks—William Buckley deserves and gets more abuse than anyone else—who sold out on the last shreds of the American Revolution along about the time of the Korean War. They are the ones who, in Rothbard’s words, dedicated themselves to “the preservation of tradition, order, Christianity and good manners against the modern sins of reason, license, atheism and boorishness”. The new right are the Greek Colonels and John Mitchells.

The old right used to have a pretty strong libertarian element in it, although anyone who can’t remember back that far himself will probably not have heard of three-quarters of the names Tuccille cites. If you go way back, you get to Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner—Lysander who?? These were men who didn’t like American imperialism and militarism, state monopoly capitalism, high taxes, and parasitic bureaucrats, cops climbing your fire escape to peek and see if you are violating the laws which regulate sexual conduct among consenting adults, or customs agents who snoop to see what sort of imports you are bringing back from Acapulco. They did like isolationism and volunteer armies (if any), community control, doing your own thing, and, if anyone had thought it up yet, they would have liked Black Power (as Tuccille does).

Well, it is nice to know that radical libertarians are for all those good things, you may be saying to yourself, and maybe all the quotes from Thomas Jefferson will be useful for winning over a few YAFers (in fact, Tuccille has a very interesting appendix on the subject of the libertarian breakaway faction of the YAF), but of what interest is all this right-wing stuff to me, a card-carrying member of the Woodstock generation? Answer is simple: radical libertarians know how to bridge the phony “gap” between left and right. That means that you can get enough people on your side to make things happen now, in the seventies, before 1984 catches your fraction of a faction with its pants down.

The simple libertarian lesson is that left and right are only irreconcilable opposites so long as they are fighting it out for who gets to run the state. As long as it is class against class, state capitalism vs. state socialism, then politics of revolution is just a matter of kto-kovo (translation: who screws whom) as Lenin would have put it. The irreconcilability of the statist left and the statist right derives from two simple axioms. (1) There can only be one state in a given country at a given time, and (2) all states are alike regardless of who runs them. That last is important. If there were any substantive difference between state capitalism and state socialism, the historical process might someday bring about a resolution of the conflict. But as it is, it’s just scorpions in a bottle.

So, now we are all convinced that statism is a hopelessly bad trip, but does that help? Won’t we just have another round of kto-kovo with the anarcho-socialists fighting it out with anarcho-capitalists? Tuccille makes a big point of raising this question and answers a decisive no. It is worth quoting him at some length on this.

This is the beauty of anarcho-libertarianism: utter and complete toleration for any and all styles of life so long as they are voluntary and nonaggressive in nature. Only under such a system can the capitalist and socialist mentalities coexist peacefully, without infringing on the rights of other individuals and communities.

The capitalist and socialist schools of anarchy . . . are united on the most crucial question of all: the absolute necessity for people to take control over their own lives, and the dismantling and final elimination of state authority over the life of man. Their major disagreement is one of personal attitudes concerning the makeup of human nature itself. Will man, left to his own devices, elect to live privately, trade his wits and talents on the open market, accept the fruits of his own labor and provide for his own happiness, and agree to relieve the misfortunes of those less talented than himself by voluntary means—or would he prefer to organize himself in voluntary communes, share the tools of production and the fruits of labor without angling for a larger proportionate share than his fellows, and live in a condition of spontaneous social communism?

Tuccille thinks the former. Tom Hayden thinks the latter. The two could cheerfully coexist in separate enclaves in an anarchist society. But far more important than the possibility that they could cheerfully coexist is the fact that even if their contrasting life styles generated the utmost antipathy and personal hatred, as long as the state had been dismantled and finally eliminated, and as long as both recognized and acted on the fundamental libertarian principle that “every individual has the right to defend himself against any person or organization . . . that initiates the use of force against him”, then the prejudice of the one could never mean the enslavement of the other.

— Edwin G. Dolan

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The State: ENEMY OF LATIN AMERICA

Unfortunately it seems that all too often libertarians, when debunking the great “U.S. Government is the international good guy” myth by pointing to the revisionist histories which are so unmarred by jingoism and great power chauvinism, concentrate on the topics which Leviathan’s apologists choose to emphasize—namely the world wars, the Cold War, and Vietnam—and ignore the other manifestations of U.S. imperialist aggression which the press of the U.S. ruling class fails to mention. Why always be on the defensive and explode only the lies Amerika chooses to discuss, why not attack every oppression the world’s greatest oppressor executes? The broad revisionist must be broad indeed.

The subject of U.S. imperialism in Latin America is undoubtedly one of such ignored topics. Moreover, the study of Latin America is doubly the responsibility of the libertarian, for the domestic situation there, besides being inseparable from U.S. imperialism, is highly significant on its own account as a problem which demands consistent explanation from the viewpoint of free market economics. Can any school ignore Third World development and still hope to win adherents in this day and age?

Many on both Left and Right have attempted to explain the political and economic problems of Latin America—the poverty and misery, the lack of freedom, and so forth—and have contributed highly significant but questionable analyses. These pitfalls are recognizable in two well-known representatives of the Left and Right, men who are highly libertarian in many areas—namely, Che Guevara and Ludwig Von Mises.

Che presented the Left analysis clearly in his speech “On Sacrifice and Dedication” delivered on June 18, 1960. The U.S. imperialists had been kicked out because “the first thing we want is to be masters of our own destiny, to be an independent country, a country free from foreign interference, a country that seeks out its own system of development without interference and that can trade freely anywhere in the world.” In a word, the libertarian imperative of national self-determination was finally a reality. But what next? “Basically, there are two ways. . .One of them is called the free enterprise way. It used to be expressed by a French phrase, which in Spanish means ‘let be.’ All economic forces, supposedly on an equal footing, would freely compete with each other and bring about the country’s development.” So far, so good. “That is what we had in Cuba, and what did it get us?” Wait a minute, Che, did not the U.S. and Cuban States consistently sabotage the free market in Cuba before the Revolution? Indeed, every example of “free enterprise” Che enumerates may be traced to dislocations caused by, in his own words, the tendency of Cuba’s businessmen “to make deals with the soldiers of the moment, with the politicians in power, and to gain more advantages.” In such a system “wealth is concentrated in the hands of a fortunate few, the friends of the government, the best wheeler-dealers.” Naturally Che also pointed out how the U.S. Government prevented Cuban development. Hence, if anything, his critique of the old system should have led him to advocate its opposite—the free market—instead of rejecting economic freedom just because the old ruling class misleadingly called their system free enterprise. Yet, on the contrary, after tracing all evils to the State, Che exclaimed that “we, the government, should carry the weight and the direction of industrialization, so that there will not be any anarchy.” But the Cuban people abhorred this (no doubt Batista had used the same excuse!): “And today, in the process of industrialization which gives such great importance to the state, the workers consider the state as just one more boss, and they treat it as a boss.” The workers acted so for good reason: in spite of the laudable—but fruitless—fight of certain elements within the Cuban government against bureaucracy and commandism through the 60s, the inherent nature of the all glorious Plan, the antithesis of the free market, reveals itself today in the increasing authoritarianism and bureaucraticism of the new Cuban State. According to the latest reports—e.g., Adam Hochschild in Liberation, Dec. 1969 and Maurice Zeitlin in Ramparts, March 1970—all decisions are made by the top elite and shoved down the throats of the masses below.

Enough of the Left analysis at this point; it has a good critique but very bad proposals. The Right analysis does not even offer a decent critique. Take Mises; to be sure, in the purest economic theory he is the age’s greatest economist, but his views on world affairs, particularily his naive beliefs on U.S. history, are totally unrealistic. According to Mises, the wealth of the West, especially Amerika, and the poverty of the East and the Third World stem from the fact that the former have been peaceful “free” enterprisers while the latter, due to several factors such as statism, suffer from a shortage of capital. (cf. Human Action, 3rd ed., pp. 496-8). Mises’ solution for Latin America would no doubt be more capital investments from their kindly Northern Neighbor.

Paul Baran knew much more about Latin America and the rest of the Third World than does Mises. He states categorically that “the principle obstacle to their development is not shortage of capital.” Baran, a Marxist, could just as well have been a free market economist on this question: he clearly traced the present gross misallocation (not scarcity) of most Third World capital to State intervention in the market (cf. Baran, Political Economy of Growth, Ch. 7). Andre Gunder Frank, James Petras, and other Marxists have written a wealth of literature documenting—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—the essential role played by the State in keeping the masses of Latin America in poverty. Actually, any competent writer on Latin America, including everyone from UN (and hence U.S. imperialist) propagandists like Raul Prebisch to neo-fascists such as Helio Jaguaribe, cannot fail to mention that which is inseparable from Latin American under-development and poverty: the Imperial Northamerican State and the various Latin American semi-feudal States. To be sure, virtually everyone, like Che, discounts the inherent oppressiveness of the State when it comes time to propose a solution; yet if they offered a solution consonent with their critiques, they could propose nothing other than revolutionary free market anarchism.

One of the best comprehensive documentaries on the subject, which would serve as an excellent introduction to interested libertarians, is Latin American Radicalism, ed. by Horowitz, Castro, and Gerassi (Vintage, $2.45). There is obviously no space here to discuss all the many State interventions which have sabotaged the economies of the various Latin American countries; a short summary of the general position of the articles in this volume indicates the astounding role of the State in insuring utter poverty for the masses.

O. M. Carpeaux traces U.S. imperialism in Latin America from the time of the Monroe Doctrine, promulgated to give the U.S. privileges in world commerce and as a cover for Western expansion, and from the aggressions against Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, etc., TR’s Big Stick imperialism, the various Marine invasions in this and the last century, and so forth ad nauseam. Ample evidence is given to prove how the U.S. over and over has invaded Latin American countries and killed its people, monopolized its resources and seized its means of production in order to insure Amerikan hegemony primarily so that big business could secure—through privileges denied competitors—high yielding investments, rich deposits of raw materials, and restricted markets. The U.S. has never been content to abide by the rules of fair play in the market place of the world; no, Amerikan business has always demanded State-enforced privileges to suppress competition in “her” markets, to monopolize the sources of raw materials, and to insure a higher return on investments than the market would have set.

The story of U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965 is told by Goff and Locker, who document the sugar interests of LBJ’s advisors. This of course is part of a more general study concerning the alliance between the U.S. imperialists and the feudal Latin American oligarchies by which both use each other to oppress the masses but ultimately the latter play marionette to the former or face a coup sponsored by the CIA. John Saxe-Fernandez documents the military aid by which the U.S. keeps the Central American dictators in power. What is to be done? is answered by Debray, Che, Torres and other revolutionaries in the last section. The volume clearly demonstrates the truth of the prediction by the great liberator Bolivar in 1829: “The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”

And Mises says the road to development is paved with more Western capital! Naturally, the libertarian would never want to see free trade restricted; but the U.S. Government has forever insisted on sabotaging the free market and bringing the rest of the world to its knees by bribes in the form of “grants” from the Alliance for “Progress” and other such organs, or force in the form of CIA assassinations or Marine Massacres. Truly, liberation from U.S. domination would do much to unshackle the chains on the Latin American economies.

An added effect of the death of U.S. imperialism would be that the various dictators could be overthrown and the means of production seized by the masses, who would have owned them in the first place had a free market existed all along rather than feudalism/state capitalism. Few if any of the Latin American oligarchies could stay in power a week if there were no U.S. imperialism to back them up.

One has only to study the economic history of almost any country in Latin America to understand how governments, kept in power by foreign governments (first Spain and other European colonialists, later the U.S.) have never allowed a free market so as to hold the masses in serfdom and guarantee the small ruling elite all the wealth. Every government intervention in the economy has as its purpose to grab more wealth for the ruling class; it is no accident that wherever a State exists wealth coincides with—not the ability to serve consumers in the market—but ruling power, i.e., the ability to plunder the poorer members of society.

Aldo Ferrer, by no means a radical, shows how the process works in his important book The Argentine Economy. While he does not say so in those words, Ferrer traces stagnation to the State and offers economic analyses and empirical data to substantiate how the Argentine State intervenes in the economy to increase the wealth of the rich, the ruling class. Virtually every single upset in the economy or reason for under-development in Argentine history was directly caused by the State; the inference which Ferrer fails to draw, the other side of the same coin, is that none of this could have occurred without a State. It takes a State to plunder the masses, it takes a State to make the poor poorer so the rich can get richer, it takes a State to make the free market an impossibility. The present State was exported from the State of Spain. Its purpose was an imperialist one, namely, to extract wealth from the colony so that, through mercantilist manipulation of the economy, the ruling class would become richer. Together with the new requirement of plunder by a new ruling class—the one residing in the colony, this necessitated the extermination of the Indians (Argentina rapidly learned “free enterprise” à la Northamerical) and monopolization of the land. All of this presupposed a State. Unused land reserved for monopolists by the State, Ferrer points out, had as its purpose exploitation of the poor by their rich oppressors by perpetuating a monopoly of the valuable land resource in the hands of a small elite. Wages were forced down well below their marginal productivity, since the masses were not allowed to homestead and so had to work for wages in order to survive, and since the big landowners could get by with gross inefficiency and hence high agricultural prices since they owned all the natural resources.

The masses were (and are) also exploited by the wealthy elite through the State’s policy of never-ending inflation. As Ferrer clearly shows, inflation is based on a governmental desire to spend money it has “created” on those holding the puppet strings, but even more on the fact that prices rise faster than wages, i.e., real wages decrease while profits zoom upwards. This profit inflation is all the better for the rich in control of the State to make plundering returns and capital accumulation through theft; furthermore, import costs rise which means a bounty on exports, all of which amounts to price increases for the masses and State privileges for domestic producers on the home and foreign markets. Finally, as if the above were not enough to fulfill the parasitic urges of the criminal class controlling the State to concentrate all the wealth in their hands, all sorts of blatantly regressive taxes—especially tariffs and excise taxes—are imposed upon the masses. Tariffs, which are high as heaven in Argentina, of course allow domestic business to be grossly inefficient and charge exorbitant prices to the poor. Insult is added to injury when the plunder extracted by regressive taxation is spent progressively—that is, all the subsidies and spending of the State are for the benefit of the ruling oligarchy.

Ferrer hesitates to employ such strong language but his data certainly back it up. They back up the class nature of the Argentine State, the principle that the purpose of the State is to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer, and the inference that the State must be abolished, the ex-propriators expropriated, and a completely free market substituted for the present system of monopoly State feudalism/capitalism if real economic development is ever to occur.

— Stephen P. Halbrook

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Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

The Black Declaration of Independence printed in the New York Times, July 3, 1970, is one of the most refreshing documents to emerge from the Black Power movement since the speeches of Malcolm X. With incisive clarity the authors of this statement have brilliantly paraphrased the language of the original Declaration of Independence and catalogued a long list of grievances with a notable absence of emotionalism and simplistic rhetoric. The document was prepared by the National Committee of Black Churchmen, 110 East 125th St., New York City, and signed by forty black clergymen of various faiths.

Starting with the opening words of the Declaration of Independence—“When in the course of Human Events, it becomes necessary for a people . . .”—the Black Declaration goes on to enumerate a multitude of abuses inflicted on the black community by government. These include: the “desecration” of “Dwelling Places, under the Pretense of Urban Renewal”; swarms of “Social Workers, Officers and Investigators” sent into the black communities to “harass our People”; the stationing of “Armies of Police, State Troopers and National Guardsmen” in ghetto neighborhoods “without the consent of our People”; “the dissolution of school districts controlled by Blacks” whenever they oppose outside domination; and racist attitudes in general which have isolated blacks in dilapidated areas and denied them adequate housing, schooling and employment as well as their ordinary Constitutional Rights.

The value of this Declaration rests in the fact that its creators have confined themselves to a careful historical analysis of calculated injustice, and they have stayed clear of generalized polemics about “fascism”, “capitalist exploitation”, and the usual sloganeering that has replaced reasonable discussion at a time it is needed most.

The document ends with the statement that blacks have continually petitioned government for an end to “Repressive Control” and that government has “been deaf to the voice of Justice and of Humanity.” The final tone is ominous: “. . . unless we receive full Redress and Relief from these Inhumanities we shall move to renounce all Allegiance to this Nation, and will refuse, in every way, to cooperate with the Evil which is Perpetrated upon ourselves and our Communities.”

This breath of fresh air is a welcome change at a time when the American nation is being inundated on all levels by torrents of fiery prose. Unless there is a sharp reversal of our government’s foreign and domestic policies at once, the Second American Revolution may pre-date the two-hundredth anniversary of the first.

*********

From the New York Times, July 5, 1970, comes word that Governor William G. Milliken of Michigan will sign a bill allowing citizens the right to file suit against public agencies and private industries which pollute the environment. Michigan will become the first state to specifically insure citizens of this fundamental right to protect their own property against unwanted invasion by contaminating elements. Other states planning similar legislation are New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Colorado, California and Texas, and a federal bill is now before the U.S. Senate.

All the authorities are doing here is putting on the books a right which has always belonged by Natural Law to the people: the right of self-defense. The injection of harmful ingredients into our air supply is automatically a violation of property rights since they will eventually find their way into someone else’s lungs. Likewise, water, sound and soil pollution invariably results in physical harm to other persons.

So we can thank the politicians for stating a principle which should have been obvious to everyone years ago. One beneficial aspect of this legislation is that, for a rare change, legality coincides with Natural Law. The Law ’n’ Order Neanderthals don’t have to worry anymore about breaking a law when they sue the Atomic Energy Commission for poisoning their children.

*********

Lately, a few libertarians have grown fond of supporting the Mafia as a legitimate black market organization operating outside the entrepreneurial restraints of government. They reason that many Mafia activities such as gambling, melting silver coins, loansharking, prostitution, even peddling narcotics are voluntaristic in nature and ought not to be considered illegal.

Much of this is true. But what is overlooked is the fact that the Mafia no more welcomes competition in its various enterprises than does the federal government, and has gone to even greater lengths to suppress it. The racketeers have supplied their competitors with cement boots before taking them swimming, firebombed their places of business, and run competing ice cream and garbage trucks from the highways. They have utilized torture, mutilation and murder to keep their “free market” businesses from enduring the hardships of competitive enterprise.

In addition, Mafia-controlled unions are responsible for the grand-scale pilfering that has gone on for years on the docks and at our airports. The Cosa Nostra families are no strangers to the less-than-subtle art of extortion—shaking down neighborhood storekeepers for the right to stay in business. So, while there is a hilarious side to the spectacle of exotic characters with names like Tony “Big Walnuts” Perrotta or Mario “Apricots” Terrazzo eluding the clutches of Big Government, it is dangerous to romanticize their peculiar brand of Black Market Monopoly. The Mafia is every bit as Law ’n’ Order-happy as Spiro Agnew. It is its own law and its own order. And Mafiosi have never been too strong on due process.

Nixon And The Economy

The editor has commented recently (June 15 issue) on “The Nixon Mess.” In some respects Professor Rothbard has understated the case against Nixon. Consider what is euphemistically being referred to as “the liquidity crisis.” What this crisis amounts to is a profit squeeze on firms in the capital goods industries—Professor Hayek’s “higher orders of production.” Rothbard has explained in the June 15 article that liquidation in the capital goods industries is a necessary condition for the end of a boom, and a return to economic “normalcy.” Much investment specialized to these industries must become worthless in the process; it would have been better, of course, if the investments had never been made. However, bygones are bygones, and no policy could be more wistful and ill-conceived than one which would attempt to “save” investments which have been demonstrated (on the market) to have been unwisely pursued. As much capital as is possible must be salvaged, and re-invested in the production of consumers’ goods, so that resources can be applied to the production of goods that are most highly desired. It is this latter process which eventually slows the price-inflation in the consumers’ goods industries (by increasing the supply of consumers’ goods), and eventually results in the proper ratio of investment in capital goods relative to consumers’ goods—the correct “structure of production.”

In effect, the Nixon Administration has announced that it will not permit this process to be carried out. Arthur Burns recently stated (The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 1970) that the Federal Reserve System “is fully aware of its responsibility to prevent . . . a scramble for liquidity” (i.e., disinvestment).” An unnamed official of the Fed (WSJ, 7/3/70) has stated that that organization finds even Friedman’s suggestion for steady growth in the money supply too extreme (calling Friedman’s idea “sheer fanaticism”).

Consider also the implications of the Penn Central fiasco. The Nixon Administration, by its actions, is all but saying that it will not permit any large corporation to go under. The railroads are a clear case of an industry which needs disinvestment. Conservative estimates see 35 percent of the nation’s trackage as not being economically justifiable. Probably at least that much of Penn Central’s trackage should be pared. Yet the government wants to step in, to lend the corporation money, in order to try to prevent the inevitable. For years the railroad has been covertly disinvesting in the only way it could—given the tight regulation of the industry—, by allowing the quality of its service to deteriorate. This is no longer enough. Unfortunately, the Nixon Administration will undoubtedly duplicate the policies of the Eisenhower Administration as regards the railroads: grant loans to the weakest lines in order to tide them over a recession. Professor George Hilton, in his The Transportation Act of 1958, has amply demonstrated the folly of the previous loan guarantees given the railroads. Railroads are even more susceptible to economic fluctuations (especially the Eastern lines) than a capital goods industry like steel. A given percentage downturn in steel or auto production often results in a greater percentage downturn in rail profits. If the railroads had been permitted to disinvest earlier, they would not be in the trouble they are in now. If not permitted to disinvest now, they will be in even worse shape when the next recession hits.

Nixon, however, is not satisfied to emulate past follies. He is apparently determined to extend government aid to any major firm in any industry that wants it. A lot of ignorant people have written a lot of arrant nonsense about inflation’s being caused by a “wage-price spiral.” But the kernel of truth hidden in all this talk must not be overlooked. Ever since the Hoover New Deal, the policy of the federal government has been moving toward one of assuring the profitability of American big business (thus guaranteeing for itself an important source of support for its policies—foreign and domestic). With the government more and more willing to underwrite losses, there is less and less incentive for corporate heads to heed the warnings of the market, and curtail operations where indicated. If he should continue to invest when he should be disinvesting, the businessman can now go to the federal government should crisis strike. All of this, we are told (WSJ, 7/3/70), has led some of Nixon’s top aides to an “anti-business feeling”; these aides point out that business executives preach free enterprise, but “come running to us” when they get into trouble. One can be sure that these aides will soon “shape up,” or be “shipped out!”

The point here is that the business executive now need not cut prices in the face of falling demand; or resist wage demands of unions. Union leaders need worry less about whether they are asking for more than a market wage. The federal government has announced its willingness to supply cash—virtually to print money up if necessary—to major corporations that find themselves in a “liquidity crisis” (i.e., find themselves over-extended). Keynesian Walter Heller has spoken of an “inflationary bias” in our economy. In doing so, he is perhaps being more prescient than Milton Friedman (for some reason inexplicable to this author, Professor Friedman considers Nixon to be a brilliant man bent on bringing libertarianism to America). Up with free enterprise!

What is happening now is what Ludwig von Mises predicted nearly sixty years ago would happen to those countries which adopted the economics of inflationism. Inflation up until very recently in this country has been largely unanticipated; it has in effect been a tax on money holdings. The public is now beginning to expect further inflation, and, as with any tax, are finding ways to avoid the tax. In economic terms, they are decreasing their demand for money. Rather than go through the painful process of contradicting these inflationary expectations, the government has apparently chosen to meet them. To do this, the government must continue to inflate at something like the present 9 to 10 percent rate. But this will lead to expectations of inflation, and a further decrease in the demand for money; and to a “need” for further inflation . . . Mises has been largely dismissed by modern economists. His analysis is not supposed to be “applicable” to a modern economy (wasn’t Germany a modern economy in the 1920’s?). Yet seldom has an analysis been so applicable as is Mises’ now. Unless the present course is reversed, we are on the long, slow (but inevitable) road to the destruction of our monetary system. And, as Mises has so often and so ably pointed out, if there is any one institution whose evolution is necessary for modern civilization as we know it, it is that of money. If this administration does not blow us up, it may have the dubious distinction of having brought us to the economic ruin that so many others have failed in accomplishing.

— Gerald O’Driscoll, Jr.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NO. 17

SEPTEMBER 1, 1970

35¢

THE SOCIALIST SCHOLARS CAPER

Once again, dear reader, your own Lib. Forum has made the mass media. The fact that the reference, though prominent, was also malicious, distorted, and absurd, should not make us despair. However distorted, “as long as the name is spelled right” and it was, some of the tens of thousands out there who read about us might have the urge to look into us more closely, to see the Devil plain as it were, and then their conversion is always possible.

The story begins with the Socialist Scholars Conference, which, confusedly, is the name both for an organization of socialist scholars and for the conferences that they have held in New York every year since 1965. Not being a socialist, I am not a member of the SSC organization, but I have attended many of their conferences, for many of their papers and panels have been lively, interesting, and informative. Never having much influence on the Left, the SSC conferences have been declining in recent years, since they have suffered, along with the rest of the Left, from a growing group of young militants who hold scholarship and intellect to be worthless and “irrelevant”, and who therefore long to purge the word “Scholars” from the title. (If we ask the logical question: If they don’t want scholarship, why do they join an organization of scholars and then try to wreck it? Why do they bother?—then we are in deep waters indeed, for then we would be trying to explain much of the destructiveness and unreason that has overcome the Left in recent years.)

From the beginning, into these pleasant if not earth-shaking sessions strode one Mrs. Alice Widener, wealthy owner and editor of an unimportant, Red-baiting newsletter called USA. A self-styled “authority” on the Left, La Widener arrived every year at the SSC sessions, and reported on them with unwavering misinterpretation and ignorance of what the whole thing was all about. La Widener trying to make sense of all the nuances of social philosophy was truly a bull let loose in a china shop. One famous gaffe of hers was the time she attended a session on slavery featuring Eugene D. Genovese and Herbert Aptheker. Trying desperately to link the then famously radical Genovese with the admitted Communist Aptheker, Widener had them in solid agreement, when the entire scholarly world knows that, in their views on slavery, Genovese and Aptheker could not be further apart in every possible way. But apart from the misinterpretations of Widener was her strange notion that the SSC was in some way the Politburo of the Left, so that its papers and panels set down the annual line for all the Left underlings everywhere. Widener’s annual reports from the conferences, ever agog with new crisis and horror, have always provided welcome horselaughs for the SSC members, who were particularly amused by the fact that, of all the people in the country, in or out of the SSC, only Mrs. Widener seemed to think of these sessions as having any earth-shaking importance.

Mrs. Widener’s annual blatherings only took on importance from the fact that they have been solemnly reprinted, year after year, as lead articles in Barron’s., a pro-laissez-faire Wall St. weekly of large circulation, blessed with an editor of neo-Randian persuasion; from Barron’s, they percolated to a readership of conservatives who imbibed her annual nonsense as Gospel, and took from it their world-view as to what was going on in the world of Left scholarship.

Well, comes 1970 and the June 13-14 meeting, and Professor Leonard Liggio and myself were invited to speak at a panel to be organized by Professor Liggio, and devoted to “Left/Rightism”—specifically, to a reassessment of the Old Right and how it prefigured much of the New Left criticisms of welfare-warfare America. We devoted considerable care to preparation of the papers, and I must say that much enjoyment was had by all, although how much influence we had on the assembled Left is dubious, since the overwhelming majority of our audience were our own libertarians, with an occasional leftist wandering in who didn’t seem to know the difference between Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt. At any rate, our entire panel was devoted to an appreciative portrayal of the hard-hitting views of the Old Right and their libertarian approach to war, foreign policy and militarism, as well as to education, state-monopoly-capitalism, decentralization, the judiciary, and civil liberties. Especially lauded by us were such “Old Rightists” as: Senator Taft, John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov, Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Felix Morley, Senator borah, H. L. Mencken, Rep. Howard Beffett, etc.

Enter La Widener. (USA, June 19-July 3; Barron’s, July 13.) Or rather, enter La Widener by remote control, since it is all too clear that she did not attend any of the Conference. Her entire report is taken up with lengthy quotes from unimportant position papers issued ahead of the Conference by the SSC organizers; there is not a word on any of the panels, that is, on the content of the Conference itself, except, mirabile dictu, on ours! To our panel came her assistant, one Falzone, accompanied by a certain Miss Poor from the Orlando Sentinel. (In thus ignoring all the other panels, Widener-Poor-Falzon completely missed the real story of the Conference, which was its total domination by the crazed forces of Women’s Liberation, whose well-attended and almost continuous panels barred The Enemy—men—from daring to attend. Seconded, I might add, by singularly truculent and unscholarly youths from the Free Joan Bird Committee.)

So there we are, Leonard Liggio and myself, with our names spelled correctly, on the front page of the mighty Barron’s! There, Poor-Falzon-Widener report that in introducing me, Professor Ronald Radosh, moderator of the panel, made “snide remarks” about the American flag (Oh no! Good God! Not that!), and added that I had once, somewhere, described the flag as a “rag”, and they noted that I did not immediately leap up and protest this attribution. So much for what I didn’t say at the panel. Next, in a truly cunning piece of research that must leave us all agog, our intrepid authority on social movements finds repeated links between Professor Liggio and myself (Oh, wow!). From there, our indefatigable scholar goes on to find what she believes to be the key, the key evil article which set the line for the entire Socialist Scholars Conference, and since we already know that the SSC in turn functions as the Politburo of the Left, for the entire Left-wing in America. And that article, dear reader, is none other than Leonard Liggio’s “State of the Movement”, which comprised the Lib. Forum of May 15. So there we are, emblazoned on the front page of Barron’s as kingpin of the entire Left in America! There follows two quotes from the Liggio article: one in which Leonard dared to quote favorably from Julius Lester (in a highly intelligent attack that he had levelled on the ultra-adventurism of the Panthers), and another in which she scoffs at an example of Liggio’s “so-called Libertarian thinking, the example being praise for early SDS opposition to the draft!

I suppose we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that there are people in this world so divorced from reality that they really believe that Leonard Liggio and the Lib. Forum are the high panjandrums of the American Left—just as there are people who believe that the world is being run by twelve secret Jewish Illuminati. And I suppose we must accept the fact that there are “authorities” on political philosophy so lame-brained as to believe that a libertarian is someone who approves of the draft. But what is this nonsense doing on the front page of Barron’s”?

But, and here we rise from the merely stupid to the slightly sinister, isn’t it odd that in all the concentration by Mrs. Widener on our panel, there is not a single word of what we actually said at the panel, at the content of our rather lengthy remarks? On this, the actual substance of what we said at the Conference, the team of Poor-Falzon-Widener falls strangely silent. The reason for this odd silence should be clear; if she had written one word of what we actually said at the Conference, it would have blown her entire thesis of us as leading Marxists and socialists sky-high. For even a gullible conservative readership that has virtually forgotten its past might think twice at talks exclusively devoted to praising Taft, Nock, Flynn, etc.

The Barron’s article predictably sent many conservative readers into a tizzy. Instead of rejoicing at the fact that some socialists, at least, are coming to see a great deal of merit in libertarian, Old Right perspectives, their reaction was just the opposite. “What! Murray Rothbard, a free-market economist, is now a socialist! What happened?” Obviously, what these people need badly is to stop reading La Widener and to start reading the Lib. Forum and its ancillary and recommended readings. Like all prospective readers, they are welcome. Why did we put on this panel at the Socialist Scholars Conference? Because we were asked. I am sure that we would do the same at a conference of conservative intellectuals; but the important point is that we have not been asked by any such conference, which says a great deal about the current ideological scene.

At any rate, I have written a letter of protest to Barron’s setting the record straight, which has of this writing not been printed (perhaps following the Randian line of denouncing but not “giving sanction to” The Enemy?). If it is printed, then the Great Socialist Scholars Caper will have one more installment.

More On Ardrey

Some further notes on Jerry Tuccille’s critique of the Ardrey-Lorenz fad among libertarians:

1. The “territorial imperative” thesis can be, and has been, used far more easily to defend not individual private property but collective-herd property, as well as interstate wars. Thus, dogs prefer to use lampposts which other dogs have also used, thereby displaying a collective tribal “property” “instinct”?

2. The “instinct” concept is generally tacked on when we lack a genuine explanation for a phenomenon. Thus, even Adam Smith explained the universal phenomenon of exchange and market, not in terms of mutually rational advantage, but of an innate “instinct”, or “propensity to truck and barter”. Man, in particular, must use his mind to learn, to formulate his goals and the means to attain them. He has no inborn instinct to guide him automatically to the correct choices, as the bird or the salmon are supposed to be guided.

3. The whole basis for the “territorial imperative” among animals rests on the fact that animals are bound within the environment in which they find themselves. If a group of animals are adapted only to the environment of a certain area, X, and they are forced to leave X they will die. They must then defend this environment to the death. Man, on the contrary, is unique among living beings for his capacity to change his environment, to leave, transform, and alter his circumstances on behalf of his own survival and progress. Man is not bound to a fixed plot of earth and all the environmental conditions upon it; he can move, he can build shelter against the elements, he can transform the earth, etc. And so the animal-derived argument for territory cannot apply to man.

4. As for scholarly authority, a friend of mine tried to organize a scholarly conference of biologists, ethnologists, etc. to discuss the Lorenz thesis; try as he might, he could not find one scholar to take the Lorenz side. All the others had flatly rejected it.

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POWER AND MARKET extends praxeology to a critique and refutation of important anti-market ethical doctrines, including: the problems of immoral choices, equality, security, the alleged joys of status, charity and poverty, “materialism”, “other forms” of coercion, human and property rights. Also an exposition of libertarian social philosophy in refuting a book solely devoted to attacking it.

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Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

A subject getting much attention lately is the studies on evolution and human behavior performed by a new breed of ethnologists whose chief pioneers are Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and Desmond Morris. Playboy covered the new ethnologists in an article by Morton Hunt appearing in the July, 1970 issue, and the New York Times Magazine recently published an interview with Konrad Lorenz. Basically, what the ethnologists are saying, is that man has survived and become dominant over all other earthly creatures because he was the most murderous and most savage of all the primates. The primordial ancestors of man were the first to develop the use of weapons, and in the struggle for survival through evolutionary time, man emerged triumphant because he learned the art of murder and violence better than his competitors. Man, according to the ethnologists, is still largely driven by violent genetic instincts which set him off from time to time on an orgy of war and mass destruction.

The part of this theory which is of primary concern to propertarians is the claim that man’s hunger for real estate, for a private plot of earth over which he can reign supreme, is an integral part of his nature as a violent being. According to Ardrey, it is useless for the social engineers to try to “socialize” man, to take away his property and make him share his possessions with the multitudes, because to do so is to tamper with the basic nature of man as a private, acquisitive animal. What the socialists are doing is forcing man to act in variance with his own nature, and thus they are setting the stage for revolutionary uprisings against their governments. The “territorial imperative”, man’s drive for private chunks of real estate, say the ethnologists, is stronger than his sexual urge. Ardrey argues that since this instinct is inborn in man it will be part of his genetic makeup as long as he exists. It is better to leave man alone, to let him have his land and possessions, since to tinker with his instincts will only increase his penchant for violence.

The controversy involved here is that most free-market libertarians base their arguments for private property and free trade on reason: the private-property, free-trade system is better because it is the most rational way for man to exist. What Ardrey is saying, at least implicitly, is that a socialist society is somehow more rational and would be a less violent way for man to live. But since man is more instinct-driven, more apt to act on irrational instincts than he will on rational considerations, and since this is part of his basic, unchanging nature, it is better to leave him alone with his selfishness, his greed, his drive for land and gadgets.

Both Ardrey and Lorenz seem to be contradicting themselves later when they state that man does have the capacity, because of his evolving brain, to overcome his violent nature. Both Ardrey and Lorenz declare explicitly that man’s emerging capacity for reason may enable him to chain down his murderous instincts and live in harmony with his fellows. They have put themselves in the precarious position of saying, on the one hand, that man can never overcome his violent nature because it is permanent in his genes and, on the other, that man’s reason does give him a chance for peace after all. They are attempting to have it both ways and therefore their arguments in favor of man the competitive property owner are tenuous at best.

The great weakness in this position, it seems to me, rests in the fact that the ethnologists attribute man’s survival over the millennia to his “violence-prone” nature. If it is true that the ancestors of man (and here a layman has to defer to the knowledge obtained through years of scientific studies) survived by developing weapons and slaughtering their fellow primates, does this necessarily mean that they did so because they were instinctively murderous? If original man created tools and weapons half a million years ago it is indicative that, even then, he was beginning to develop his capacity for reason. Ardrey admits that it was a time of fantastic hardship for all living creatures on the continent of Africa, where he claims our species first emerged. If this is the case and the various primate species were forced down from the trees onto the land in their quest for a dwindling food supply, it follows that the creatures who survived would be those who were best able to defend their food and land from marauding bands. In the age of pre-civilization there simply was not enough to go around. Many had to die and only a limited few were able to stay alive and procreate their species. Does this mean that the few, those who developed the means of survival were “murderous” and “savage”?

For one to reason this way he would also have to believe that, in a present crisis, if the earth were savaged by a massive famine with not enough food to feed the world, only the most violent and murderous would survive. This is simply not the case. It is the most rational, the most capable and productive of our species who would outlast the rest. Murder would be primarily an act of self-defense committed against those who were also capable of murdering for a crust of bread.

If the originals of our species were able to survive the perils of the ice age, as well as the designs of less-acquisitive, less-inventive creatures, they are to be commended instead of denigrated as “savages” and “murderers”. We surely have a great inheritance to live up to. They have shown us that our drive for property, food and comfort is ours because it is good and rational, and not because we are genetically-driven killers. It is here, in their basic premise, that Ardrey and his colleagues have gone astray.

*****

One of the best statements to date on the question of abortion reform appears in the August, 1970 issue of Ramparts. In an article entitled, “Abortion Reform: The New Tokenism”, Lucinda Cisler, president of New Yorkers for Abortion Law Repeal, warns against the enthusiasm engendered by the sudden rush to liberalize abortion laws in many of our states. Cisler’s message is directed primarily at feminists, but her reasoning has ecumenical appeal because of its basic libertarian foundation.

She begins by listing the usual arguments given by legislators for their endorsement of abortion law reform: “they are concerned with important issues like the public health problem presented by illegal abortions, the doctor’s right to offer patients good medical care, the suffering of unwanted children and unhappy families, and the burgeoning of our population at a rate too high for any economic system to handle.”

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All these reasons are good in themselves, she continues, but in the final analysis they are peripheral to the key principle involved: justice for women. The liberalizers of existing abortion laws are operating under the premise that a woman’s body belongs to the state, and because of this underlying logic the mere reform of abortion laws is insulting and patronizing to women. Cisler sets her sights on the total repeal of all regulatory codes governing abortions on the grounds that a woman “belongs to herself and not to the state”, and the decision to have or not to have an abortion is hers alone to make.

While many advocates of abortion law repeal have welcomed reform of abortion laws as a “step in the right direction”, the author warns that in the long run it may be a dangerous seduction since “it can buy off most middle-class women and make them believe things have really changed, while it leaves poor women to suffer and keeps us all saddled with abortion laws for many years to come.” The four major restrictions imposed on even the most liberal of the new reform bills are as follows:

1. Abortions may only be performed in licensed hospitals. Cisler argues that this not only drives up the cost of abortions, but it subjects women unnecessarily to a new host of “guidelines” established by generally conservative hospital administrations. It also limits the number of abortions that can be performed by making it illegal to obtain an abortion at a clinic or in a doctor’s office;

2. Abortions may only be performed by licensed physicians. This again serves the purpose of driving the cost over $300, and it protects the doctors’ monopoly from paramedics who can “be trained to do a great many things that physicians do not”;

3. Abortions may not be performed beyond a certain time in pregnancy, unless the woman’s life is at stake. This restriction is insidious since, in effect, it says to women that “(a) at a certain stage your body suddenly belongs to the state . . . and (b) because late abortion entails more risk than early abortion, the state must ‘protect’ you, even if your considered decision is that you want to run that risk . . .” This regulation requires “that we must be in a state of tutelage and cannot assume responsibility for our own acts”;

4. Abortions may only be performed when the married woman’s husband or the young single woman’s parents give their consent. According to the author, the “objection to vesting a veto power in anyone other than the pregnant women is too obvious to need any elaboration.”

All in all, this is one of the most eloquent and cogent declarations yet from a prominent leader in the struggle for individual rights for women.

RECOMMENDED READING

Murray Kempton, “Union Blues,” New York Review of Books (April 9, 50¢). Witty, perceptive dissection of the union leader as junior partner in the Establishment.

Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916-23 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press). Study of business and U.S. foreign economic policy in the post-World War I era; inspired by Beard and Williams.

“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; but to tyrants, I will give no quarter . . .”

William Lloyd Garrison

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NO. 18

SEPTEMBER 15, 1970

35¢

FALL READING

Anarchism.

Great News! The outstanding history of individualist anarchism in America, the superb and scholarly James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908, is back in print! (paperback, Ralph Myles, Publisher, Colorado Springs, Colo., 315 pp., $2.50). This edition is remarkably inexpensive, yet excellently printed—in contrast to the 1953 original. The footnotes are actually at the bottom of the page! Also photographs are added of the leading individualist anarchists: Josiah Warren, Benjamin R. Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and Ezra Heywood. A must book.

Minor correction: the updated Martin bibliography omits to mention the recent reprints by Burt Franklin, New York, of Stephen Pearl Andrews, The Basic Outline of Universology (1967), Andrews, The Primary Synopsis of Universology (1967), Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1965), and Warren, True Civilization . . . (1965).

Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, $6.00, 166 pp.), is a concise, highly lucid work that deals with the history of anarchist theory (European, there is no mention or seeming knowledge of the American individualists) topically rather chronologically, and with a history of the outstanding examples of anarcho-syndicalism. This French anarchist is clearly influenced primarily by the quasi-individualist Frenchman, Proudhon, and so his exposition of anarchist theory gives little offense to the individualist or even the believer in the free-market. However, Guérin’s version of the collectivist-communist anarchists Kropotkin and Bakunin, as well as of the amoral might-makes-rightist Max Stirner, considerably prettifies and distorts their views, to make them appear to be almost reasonable men. The unfortunate introduction by Noam Chomsky goes far beyond Guérin to assert that an anarchist must be a socialist (!) Professor Chomsky would be well-advised to steep himself in the Martin book, and then see if he will maintain this view. An appreciative review of Guérin can be found in the Liberated Guardian (July 14) by Leonard P. Liggio. There is, alas, no index.

Spencer H. MacCallum, The Art of Community (Institute for Humane Studies, 1134 Crane St., Menlo Park, Calif. 94025, paperback, $2.00; hardcover, $4.00; 118 pp.), is also well calculated to disquiet Professor Chomsky. This is the first systematic presentation in print of what might be called the “Heathian” sub-variant of anarchism, after its creator, Mr. MacCallum’s grandfather, Spencer Heath. The Heathian goal is to have cities and large land areas owned by single private corporations, which would own and rent out the land and housing over the area, and provide all conceivable “public services”: police, fire, roads, courts, etc., out of the voluntarily-paid rent. Heathianism is Henry Georgism stood on its head; like George, Heath and MacCallum would provide for all public services out of rent; but unlike George, the rent would be collected, and the land owned, by private corporate landlords rather than by the government, and the payment therefore voluntary rather than coercive. The Heathian “proprietary community” is, of course, in stark contrast to the scruffy egalitarian commune dreamed of by anarchists of the Left.

William O. Reichert, “Anarchism, Freedom, and Power”, Anarchy (London, May, 1970. Available for 40¢, or $5.00 per year from Freedom Press, 84B Whitechapel High St., London, E. 1, England.) A pleasant article on anarchism, reprinted from the American philosophical journal, Ethics.

Libertarianism and Libertarians.

Carl Bode, Mencken (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press). While Bode does not give much space to Mencken’s deep and pervasive libertarian views, this is a thorough and sympathetic biography of the great wit and individualist. The best biography of Mencken in English, it will probably not be surpassed until the French biography by Guy Forgue is translated.

Hugh Gardner, “The New Gypsies” (Esquire, September, 1970, $1 per copy, $7.50 per year, pp. 109-10). A scathingly satirical report on the libertarian retreatists, the “nomads” and “troglodytes”, a group that richly deserves satire.

Middle-aged libertarians who enjoy wallowing in nostalgia, as well as the young who are eager to read of the history of their movement in the 1950’s, will find indispensable Eckard Vance Toy, Jr., Ideology and Conflict in American Ultra-conservatism, 1945-1960 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation in history, University of Oregon, 1965; available in Xeroxed paper-bound copy from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.). Based solely on the extensive correspondence of the conservative Seattle industrialist James Clise, this study focusses on the activities and problems of the Foundation for Economic Education and Spiritual Mobilization. Anyone who had anything to do with either organization in those days will find himself prominently in these pages, usually fairly portrayed. One interesting point is a reminder of how Spiritual Mobilization was wrecked by a peculiar, right-wing variant of the drug culture (usually mescaline in those days) and mystical personality-cult centered around the English-born guru Gerald Heard.

Milton Mayer, Man v. The State (paperback, Santa Barbara, Calif.: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, $2.25, 191 pp.) is a beautifully written essay on behalf of liberty and in opposition to the State by a veteran and consistent opponent of war. Discussion of law, dissent, and civil disobedience, with praise for such seemingly disparate libertarians as Thoreau and the “right-wing anarchist” publisher R. C. Hoiles. It is obvious that his discussants at the Center, in the Epilogue of the book, have completely missed the point, and these include the New Left communitarians.

Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus The State (paperback, Baltimore: Penguin Books, $1.95, 350 pp.) First reprint in eighty years of this classic by one of the outstanding libertarian theorists of the nineteenth century. Also includes four other essays by Spencer.

Women’s “Liberation”.

Murray N. Rothbard, “The Great Women’s Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight”, The Individualist (May, 1970. 75¢ the issue, $7.50 per year, from 415 Second St., N. E., Washington, D.C. 20002). Ironically for the argument that women are “oppressed”, this is the only systematic, hard-hitting critique of women’s “liberation” that has ever been published. This article has already brought forth a stream of hysterical abuse and vituperation from various (male) libertarian youth leaders, who seem particularly offended by favorable references to heterosexuality.

William Davis, “Let’s Have Equality for Men”, Punch (England, November 12, 1969). Delightful article, taking the position that it is the men, not the women, of the world who are the “niggers”. Davis writers: “Man is the nigger of the world, condemned to slavery so that the privileged sex can have its baubles, bangles, and beads.” This is the speech that turned the tide against the Women’s Lib resolution before the Oxford Union.

Nancy R. McWilliams, “Feminism and Femininity”, Commonweal (May 15, 1970), pp. 219-221. A highly sensible, most welcome article on Women’s Lib by a young psychologist.

Youth and Youth-Culture.

John W. Aldridge, In the Country of the Young (Harper Magazine Press, $5.00). Highly perceptive critique of the herd, or tribal, mentality of the current generation of youth.

Richard Hofstadter, “The Age of Rubbish”, Newsweek (July 6). The eminent historian perceptively pin-points the crucial problem of the current youth-culture: the sudden loss of a sense of “vocation”, of craftsmanship and purposeful work. Hofstadter points out that: “Young people don’t have anything they want to do . . . I think this is one of the roots of the dissatisfaction in college. Students keep saying that they don’t know why they are there. They are less disposed than they used to be to keep order partly because the sense that they are leading a purposeful life is gone. They have the feeling that . . . they don’t have any say about their lives. The truth is that all too often they haven’t decided what they want their lives to say.”

Education.

James D. Koerner, “The Case of Marjorie Webster”, The Public Interest (Summer, 1970, $1.50 the copy, $5.00 per year.), pp. 40-64. An excellent report and discussion on the case of Marjorie Webster Junior College for girls in Washington, a proprietary, profit-making college victimized by regional accrediting associations, nominally private but tied in to the federal government bureaucracy, and which refuse to accredit profit-making colleges as a matter of “principle”.

James M. Buchanan and Nicos E. Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy (New York: Basic Books, $5.95, 187pp.). A hard-hitting critique, from a Chicago School, free-market economic point of view, of our peculiar higher educational system in which the consumers do not buy the product, the producers do not sell it, and the “owners” do not control the process. A well-balanced review of the book can be found in the Dartmouth Conservative Idea for June, 1970, by Professor Edwin G. Dolan.

Anti-Egalitarianism.

One of the most important books in years is Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, $7.50, 408 pp.). This lengthy, erudite work by a conservative-libertarian German sociologist focusses on the overriding problem of the envy of one’s betters (in any way—achievement, intelligence, good fortune, etc.). He demonstrates that the heart of socialism and communism is an overwhelming desire to eliminate envy by appeasing its aggressive appetites: by rendering everyone uniform and equal. Schoeck demonstrates that this is a vain dream, that envy cannot be appeased out of existence. He uses anthropological findings to show that egalitarian tribal and peasant communities, happy, loving and sharing in the fantasy world of Left-intellectuals, are actually worlds driven by hate, suspicion, envy, and the fear of the envy of one’s neighbors. Much of the current drive for egalitarianism, Schoeck indicates, comes from affluent intellectuals driven by guilt and therefore shame over the supposed envy of others. The supposedly idyllic Israeli kibbutz is also cut down to size. This book will give a firmer and more rigorous perspective to opponents of socialism, communism, and communalism.

George P. Elliott, “Revolution Instead—Notes on Passions and Politics”, The Public Interest (Summer, 1970), pp. 65-89, is a discursive but fascinating series of notes on the political scene. Professor Elliott calls himself a “libertarian”, is highly critical of hippies, youth culture, and child-centeredness, and has an original critique of “getting stoned”. Elliott, too, zeroes in on egalitarianism as a vain and destructive attempt to appease envy, only to aggravate it.

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (paperback, New York: The Viking Press, $1.45). Reprint of the classic turn-of-the-century critique by a French sociologist of crowd behavior, and of the herd-mentality.

Ethnic Politics.

It was only as recently as the 1950’s that Samuel Lubell became the first political analyst with the courage to break the iron taboo against the acknowledgment of the great importance of the ethnic in politics: of the Jewish vote, the Irish vote, etc.—something, of course, that every working politico knew full well. Now, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, in their sparkling 95-page introduction to the second edition of their classic Beyond the Melting Pot (2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The M. I. T. Press, $1.95, 458 pp.), achieve another breakthrough: the zeroing in on the new alliance of Jews, upper-class WASPs, and lower-class Negroes, that has achieved power in New York City, at the expense of everyone else, particularly the mass of working-class and lower-middle-class Irish and Italian Catholics.

Murray Schumach, “Neighborhoods: 69 Homes in Corona at Stake”, New York Times (August 11, 1970), p. 35. The touching story of how the New York City government is preparing to bulldoze the homes of several blocks of independent but politically powerless Italian homeowners in Corona, Queens, while an upper-class Jewish country club, using city-owned land, thumbs its nose nearby.

Father Andrew Greeley, “The Intellectuals as an Ethnic Group”, New York Sunday Times Magazine (June 15). Father Greeley, a sociologist with a uniquely witty, intelligent, and orthodox role in Catholic journalism, here wields the rapier against the snobbishness and cultism, the ethnic “in-group”-ism, of the fashionable liberal intellectuals.

Revolutions.

John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, $10.00, 456 pp.). A model of an historical work: thorough, definitive, scholarly, and beautifully written. The saga of the libertarian, peasant Zapatista revolution, centered in the Mexican state of Morelos.

K. S. Karol, “The Two Honeymoons of Fidel Castro”, Scanlan’s Monthly (September, 1970, $1.00 a copy, $12.00 per year). Critical overview of the peregrinations of Castro’s Cuba.

Thomas L. Blair, The Land To Those Who Work It (Garden City, L. I.: Doubleday Anchor paperbacks, $1.95). The history of the quasi-syndicalist “self-management” experiment in Algeria during the Ben Bella regime, and before Colonel Boumedienne imposed the current Stalinist system.

Military-Industrial Complex.

Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism (New York: McGraw-Hill, $8.50). Critical study of the increasingly “state-managed” military-industrial complex.

Murray L. Weidenbaum, The Modern Public Sector (New York: Basic Books, $5.95). Sophisticated but clearly written. On the new ways by which government has penetrated and permeated the “private” sector, especially in military and space areas.

U.S. Foreign Policy.

Peter Dale Scott, “Laos: The Story Nixon Won’t Tell”, New York Review of Books (April 9); Scott, “Cambodia: Why the Generals Won”, New York Review of Books (June 18). Excellent, scholarly information on our newest plague-spots; shows the duplicity of the CIA toward even our own government leaders.

I. F. Stone, “A Century of Futility”, New York Review of Books (April 9); “Theatre of Delusion”, ibid. (April 23); “The Test Ban Comedy”, ibid. (May 7). Excellent and thorough review of America’s disarmament duplicities over the past generation. Particularly important is the April 23 article, which highlights the crucial but generally unknown decision of the United States to rescind completely its own offer of general disarmament with inspection, after Khrushchev had accepted it on May 10, 1955.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Review of David Horowitz, ed., Corporations and the Cold War”, Ramparts (September). Review of new book of essays which presents studies of the responsibility of U.S. corporations for American imperialism and the Cold War, as well as the growth of the military-industrial complex. Particularly interesting are the articles by Professors Domhoff and Eakins on the foreign policy roles of such “corporate liberal” organizations as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Committee for Economic Development.

Big Business and Politics.

Warren Hinckle, “The Law Firm That Runs California”, Scanlan’s Monthly (September). The story of the sinister and pervasive role of the Los Angeles law firm of O’Melveny and Myers in running California politics.

European History.

A. J. P. Taylor, “Scarred Monuments”, New York Review of Books (April 9). The witty, iconoclastic English historian comes out squarely against Tories, and in favor of revolutionary 18th-century liberalism.

Crime Revisionism.

For generations, it was an article of emotional faith among Left-liberals that Sacco and Vanzetti, in the famous murder-and-robbery case of the 1920’s, were innocent martyrs. Then, only a decade ago, Sacco-Vanzetti Revisionism was launched by R. H. Montgomery and by Francis X. Busch, and then by David Felix and especially Francis Russell in his Tragedy at Dedham. Now, Francis Russell, in “Sacco-Vanzetti: The End of the Chapter”, National Review (May 5), finds new evidence which confirms his thesis that Sacco was definitely guilty, while Vanzetti was not—but knowingly shielded the guilty party.

A Not So Radical Guide

A Radical’s Guide to Economic Reality. By Angus Black. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970. 87 pages.

Angus Black is a pseudonym, but the word is out that the book was written by a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Chicago. The Chicago influence is strong. In fact, in many ways, A Radical’s Guide to Economic Reality is a “hip” version of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Black is apparently trying to appeal to participants in the drug culture, and other such “dropouts.” He seems to be making an honest effort to educate his audience to economic reality by speaking about subjects that they’re likely to have special interest in, and in terms that they will understand. However, Black has adopted an exceedingly patronizing attitude toward his readers. One doubts that any of the people to whom he is ostensibly appealing will either appreciate his style, or accept his arguments (indeed, some of his readers may be impervious to any form of argument, but that is another matter).

A more fundamental weakness is the intellectual tradition within which the book is written. The Chicago School is not generally characterized by any insight in the basic problems which beset the United States today. Milton Friedman, titular head of the school, thinks Richard Nixon is a profoundly intelligent man who is leading this country back to laissez-faire. The real meaning of the Vietnam War (the war was not a mistake) is lost on the Chicagoites. Analyzing the American economy through the rosy glasses of a model of “perfect competition,” they are unable to see the brute reality of the military-industrial complex. Moreover, their economic analysis is faulty in certain other respects, so that on key questions (e.g., inflation), they fail to come up with the fundamental objections to current policy. A Radical’s Guide suffers from all of these deficiencies, and some of its own.

Still, the book is a beginning—an attempt to communicate free market solutions to specific problems, to classes of people usually inimical to this approach. Would that Black had written less flippantly, though. Len Liggio has an article on Anarchism in the July 14 Liberated Guardian, written in plain English, and devoid of a patronizing attitude, which is far more likely to bridge the gap with the Left.

The book is short. A glimpse at the chapter titles gives an indication of what is in order for the reader: “Big Business or Screw the Customer and Full Speed Ahead”; “Our Tax System—A Field Day for the Rich”; and so on. Black is particularly good on some points. On the California grape boycott:

I want to help the grape pickers, so I eat grapes for breakfast, grapes for midmorning snack, grapes for dinner, and grapes for that midnight raid on the ice box. In this way, besides the makers of Keopectate, I help grape pickers. How? Simply by raising the value of grapes and therefore increasing the demand for grape pickers.

Besides taking up the grape boycott, Black examines the problem of unions in general, pointing out the necessarily discriminatory nature of unions. But he pulls his punches on major issues, and often comes up with “compromise” solutions which perpetuate the very problem he concerns himself with. In taking on the tax system, Black makes a telling point as to who really pays the taxes, and then lamely suggests a flat 20% income tax (plus a negative income tax for the poor). No analysis is attempted of why the tax system is set up the way it is presently. Surely Black doesn’t believe that the electorate, given fresh insight by a reading of Black’s book, could go off to Washington, and change the tax system. This is to overlook the vested interests who are responsible for the system as it is now; it is also to assume naively that power is wielded by the general populace in the country. It is to fail to analyze the situation realistically.

More importantly, one must ask why there is no critique of the federal income tax per se (à la Frank Chodorov’s classic essay, “Taxation is Robbery”). One would think that anyone with pretentions to being a libertarian would at least take up the issue of the morality of taxation. Black does not.

Like most Chicagoites, Black is reasonably good in his critique of economic fallacies, but has a penchant for discovering “problem” areas where the market is alleged not to work. Thus, to solve the problem of poverty, we need a negative income tax. There is “underinvestment” in education, so we need educational vouchers. No analysis of why the market sometimes “fails” is offered (on the alleged problem of market failure, see Murray Rothbard’s new work, Power and Market).

Alas, one suspects that there may be a problem of class interest in all this. The idea of educational subsidies is generally a favorite of Chicagoites. This despite their critiques of so many other subsidy ideas. One feels that their position on this matter may be colored by a beneficial interest in the subject of education.

The last chapter is perhaps the most curious, as it is titled: “A Plea for Anarchy.” Certainly if one had bought Black’s basic critique (even though it is not flawless), he might be on his way to a position of anarchy. But, “No,” says Black, we can’t have anarchy because:

There would be open season on wops, wetbacks, kikes, niggers, hippies, redheads, and cripples if the constitution didn’t exist . . . Anarchy is not the answer. We would therefore keep government, but reduce its power over our economic, moral and social lives.

For anarchy to work, according to Black, “all members of society must be fairly homogeneous.” Now, the arguments in this book are, at times, deficient, but nowhere else are they as bad as the above.

The argument as stated by Black is an old canard. Only, in fact, if the population were (absolutely) homogeneous could government be justified (Why one would be desired is a separate question). Only in a heterogeneous world (such as we have) is there a problem of individual liberty. If we all thought alike, and desired exactly the same ends, then living under an absolute “dictatorship” would not involve an infringement on individual liberty; ex hypothesi, the dictator would merely be telling us to do what we wanted to do. In a heterogeneous world, on the other hand, people do not think alike. Therefore, any authority which would coerce man is a violation of individual liberty. John Stuart Mill put it perceptively:

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

(From On Liberty)

It took thinkers more perceptive than Mill to see that the existence of any government, however limited, is inconsistent with individual liberty.

In sum, A Radical’s Guide to Economic Reality is worthy of the attention of libertarians; it could and should have been a better book. For a better book, see Jerry Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism.

— Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NO. 19

OCTOBER 1, 1970

35¢

WHEN REVOLUTION?

To the anarcho-rightist, to say nothing of rightists generally, I am a veritable Mephisto, inciting my young and unformed charges to bloody riot, violence, and rapine. To the anarcho-leftist, on the other hand, I am a reactionary cop-out, weakening the revolutionary will and doing the State’s work by calling for study, scholarship, and passivity. To others, it seems that I careen wildly from month to month, calling for bloody revolution in one issue and denouncing it in the next. In the meanwhile, the fixed principles which I attempt to apply to the changing flux of events, tend to disappear amidst the hubbub.

Let us then hammer out the libertarian principles step by step. First, it is axiom of libertarian thought that the State is a criminal gang, living off the robbery of tax-coercion and using these funds to murder, pillage, enslave, and endow favored groups with special privilege. The State is founded and has its very being in the use of aggressive violence. Therefore, any violence used against the State is moral, for it is the moral equivalent of using violence to protect one’s person and property from armed marauders. The act of revolution is, therefore, always moral. For similar reasons, any revolutionary act against any State is aesthetically pleasing, for at least some State is being weakened, or some State official is getting his deserved comeuppance.

Having said this, however, we must bring other vectors of principle into our final judgment: into our final decision on whether to “support” (which means at least to cheer for) any given concrete revolution. Let us detach principle from emotion for the moment, and postulate the hypothetical government of Ruritania. We read that a revolutionary movement has been formed in Ruritania and has just blown up a government post office. Since revolution per se is both moral and aesthetically pleasing, our initial judgment is to cheer: Hooray, a monopoly post office has been destroyed, part of the criminal Ruritanian apparatus has been whittled away.

But having made this judgment, we must inquire further into the specific context. What, for example, are the principles of this revolutionary movement? What political ends does it have in mind? Suppose we find that the Ruritanian Revolution has one guiding principle: the destruction of all redheads, under the theory that all redheads are agents of the Devil. We must now weigh two principles in making our judgment on the Revolution: one, the joy in seeing a criminal State weakened and overthrown; and two, the consideration of what might replace this State. We must then consider: how bad is the existing State (perhaps it is dedicated to murdering all blondes for the same reason), and then weigh this against the probable badness of the new Anti-Redhead State once it achieves power. The point here is that our final judgment is complex, and that different libertarians, no matter how similar and pure in their libertarian principle, can and will make different judgments on whether or not to support the Revolution. Thus, Libertarian A may say: The existing Ruritanian State is bad, of course, but at least it doesn’t wantonly murder redheads; holding my nose, I denounce the Revolution and support the existing State as the lesser evil. But Libertarian B may say: Of course, I deplore the prospective murder of redheads. But the Revolutionary regime will probably impose far lower taxes, and will be less harsh on brunettes than the current regime; so I will hold my nose and support the Revolution. And Libertarian C can have an entirely different kind of judgment. He may say: I agree with A that if the Revolution actually ever seized and held power, their murdering of redheads would make them more evil than the existing State. However my judgment of the situation tells me that the Revolution can never hope to achieve power. They might well, however, be able so to weaken the existing State that neither will be able to rule, and Ruritania will be transformed, despite the desires of both parties, into a decentralized, almost Stateless society, with small pockets of local rulers, and even local anarchies. Therefore, I support the Revolution.

The point is that, once we pass the first step: the first vector of cheering for any armed self-defense against the State, we can no longer be guided by pure theory alone. We must then use our strategic and tactical judgment; we then have to employ libertarian principle as a complex “art” rather than as strict application of pure science. And, on these judgments, equally good libertarians will necessarily differ. Or, to put it this way: we live, to use the Randian terminology, in a mixed-premise world. In a sense different from the way they mean it, the villains in Randian novels are right: governments, political parties, and most people, are neither “black” nor “white”; they are bundles of varying shades of mixed-premise “gray.” And therefore, libertarian judgments on varying States, political leaders, revolutions or whatnot are always difficult and never carry the guarantee of absolute truth. To crib from one of my own examples, if Richard Cobden were leading a political or a revolutionary movement against Genghis Khan, our moral choice between them would be easy indeed; but in the real world, we are usually not confronted with such clear-cut polar choices, and hence we must make our difficult judgments between mixed-premise people, institutions and movements; we must always make complex choices of “lesser evils.”

And here we have a vital clue into the inner totalitarian nature of the Randian Cult. For Randians firmly believe, not only that their group must agree on the same basic principles, but that they also must agree on every single specific application: down to such remote cases as who to vote for in the New York mayoralty election. But since even those who agree completely on the science of liberty will inevitably differ on its application to our mixed-premise world, the Randian movement had to face the choice between allowing its members to take many different positions on concrete applications, or enforcing a total “line” on its membership; and unfortunately it chose the latter.

At this point, many libertarians will cry out: but why must we choose at all? Why can’t we take a neutral position on all these choices, and support no one except pure libertarians wherever they emerge? The answer is that we can’t because we live in a real world, a world of different grades of mixed-premises, a world where not everyone is equally bad. And in this world, events continue to happen whether “we approve or not; elections take place, wars are fought, revolutions are waged. If we are to be aware people in a real world, we must take sides in these events, if only to favor one or the other outcome. Richard Cobden was not only better than Genghis Khan but also better than the Tories of his day; Robert A. Taft was better than Franklin Roosevelt; Mark Hatfield is better than Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon. How can we live in the world and not choose between outcomes of events whenever there are any gradations of value that we can place upon such outcome? We live, to be sure, in a mixed-premise world, but some mixes are better, and some worse, than others. Furthermore, to “choose”, or to “support”, does not necessarily mean voting or active participation; it can mean simply: whom do we cheer for on election night? Or, whom do we cheer against? Not to make even this kind of choice is to surrender hopelessly to ignorance and obscurantism.

Suppose now that we do not face mixed-premise choices; suppose that we have a flourishing revolutionary movement consisting only of certified 100% pure libertarians. Given such a pure libertarian movement, we then know that the world ushered in by such a revolution will be far superior to the present. Do we then call for immediate armed insurrection against the State? Not necessarily, for now we must exercise the highly difficult—and again unscientific—art of strategic and tactical judgment. For while we have the absolute moral right to use force to repel armed marauders, we do not have the moral duty to do so. We may often find ourselves in situations where we are hopelessly outnumbered by the armed burglars, and therefore our strategically wise course is to give in. Man has no moral duty to seek martyrdom. Therefore, even where a revolution would be unimpeachably and unequivocally moral, it would not necessarily be strategically or tactically correct; when to launch a moral revolution, if at all, depends on one’s concrete judgment of the relative strength of forces, of the probabilities of success, etc. And, again, in this necessary but difficult judgment, opinions among pure libertarians will differ, and differ markedly.

As for the current situation in the United States, it seems to me that we can be as close to scientific as any strategic judgment can ever get: there is no hope whatever, now or in the foreseeable future, for a successful libertarian revolution in America. Such a revolution must then remain in the realm of moral theory for any foreseeable time to come; and surely no sober person, acquainted at all with American reality, can disagree with this judgment. In that case, the libertarian movement, whatever its tactical alliance with right or left on this or that concrete issue, must concentrate its energies, now and in the future, on the indispensable educational work of expanding its theory and spreading it to as many “converts” as possible. Our major areas of concentration must be the study, the library, the press, the living-room, the seminar, the lecture-hall. We are primarily an educational movement or we are nothing.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

ON SEXISM

The effort this time around is an unpleasant one for I find myself obliged to comment on Murray Rothbard’s women’s liberation article in the Spring-Summer issue of The Individualist, a former monthly publication which now seems to be coming out semi-annually.

A topic as controversial and as much in the news as women’s lib is these days requires a strong, uncompromising stand on one side of the issue or the other. Clearly, Dr. Rothbard’s moderate, middle-of-the-road approach to the subject is not a fair one for either side. People have a right to know the facts. They expect to read an article and come away with a clear understanding of the ethical and psycho-epistomer . . . mer . . . mer, the abstract questions around which the whole issue revolves. Dr. Rothbard, eager as always to please both factions, the pros and cons, the Lefts and Rights, has written a vacillating, bleeding-heart type article which can only please whim-worshipping concrete-bound second-handers and muscle-mystics.

As anyone who has been following the current struggle for women’s liberation knows, there is a tight bond uniting the rational fringes of Left and Right in their common sisterhood. One is quick to detect a touching parallel between Dolly Tanner decked out in her superman shirt, Lucy Komisar in her purple jumpsuit, and Rand’s Gait-like heroine, Dagny Taggart, dashing off in a billowing evening gown to save the railroads. Only the cynical would see this as a shrill undertone, an element of just-barely-controlled hysteria uniting the fringes in their sisterhood. The gentle Rand would no more welcome Ti-Grace Atkinson into her living room than Ti-Grace would send Miss Rand a Mother’s Day card, and yet their jaws are clenched, though separately, in a common struggle to liberate their species.

One of Rand’s earliest ideals was the image of the liberated female who never cooked her own meals (or anyone else’s), who did little or no housework, who rose to the top of the business world through competitive efforts and won the admiration of men who previously resented her presence among them. The parallels between the ideals listed above and the current cry of “No more diapers, no more dishes, no more housework!” are obvious enough.

On the question of sex, the Randian heroine is invariably a free agent, judging her partners according to a merit system, selecting the highest ranking in her own hierarchy of values, discarding a present lover as soon as she meets another who is more rational. Sexism, although it goes by a different name, has no place in the Objectivist Ethic. It is the height of immorality for a man and woman to hop in bed simply because they like the shape of each other’s buttocks. There is no toleration of sex object-ism in Objectivism. Disciples are permitted carnal bliss only if they are intellectually compatible and share the same values, the same sense-of-life, the same moral code.

But Rand puts a curious twist on her analysis of how people are supposed to know when and if they are intellectually compatible. Obviously, lengthy philosophical discussions are time-consuming and extremely distracting, especially if one has an itch to satisfy his sexual needs. Upcoming students of Objectivism will be happy to know that Rand has provided them with a shortcut. It is not necessary for would-be bedmates to probe each other’s psyches at length to determine whether they can make it together or “not. Truly rational people have the capacity of recognizing each other on sight. This is not the same as regarding each other as sex objects. Of course not. Intellectual compatibility can be seen in the set of someone’s jaw and the direct, confident glare of his or her eyes. Rational men and women are invariably tall, beauteous and lean, with thick wavy hair, drilling eyes and strong jutting jaws something like Barry Goldwater’s. This poses a problem for short dumpy individualists who can practice eye exercises ad infinitum, but can never alter their stature and bone structure no matter how hard they try.

So, when rational human beings recognize each other on sight they are permitted to ravish each other at once in a violent, all-consuming act of love. The crowning height of ecstasy, of course, is to be raped on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange by a philosophical heir of William Graham Sumner.

Another Infectious group on the fringes is the “Stick-It-In-The-Wall-Mother-****** Collective” of Boston, Massachusetts. According to a leading commissar for this outfit, all talk about oppressed blacks, chicanos, Indians, etc. . . is nothing but “irrelevant crap” promoted by “the mainstream pig media.” (She and Spiro Agnew are apparently intellectually simpatico). Women are the most oppressed of all, of course, and “lesbianism is a new way of relating now that women have rejected bullshit traditional heterosexuality.”

(By the way. Has anyone ever noticed what a great set of knockers Gloria Steinem has?)

**************

Just for the record, it might be worthwhile to comment on this business of “sex objects.” One can sympathize with the cry against the “thingification” of women—the psychological phenomenon of regarding them as brainless mannequins and receptacles for consumer goods (the “you’ve come a long way, baby” syndrome)—but this ought to be separated from the issue of sex objectification. This is largely an involuntary reaction to begin with. Most strongly-sexed heterosexual men automatically begin to melt a little at the sight of a shapely, partially exposed leg, a soft heaving bosom, a glimpse of flesh along the midriff. This is purely a physiological reaction based on one’s personal aesthetics.

Women also view men as sex objects and, fortunately, they have been doing it from time immemorial. Those little eye games you see played by strangers on subways and buses are proof enough of that. Certainly, the sexes are not responding to one another’s sense-of-life, Ayn Rand notwithstanding.

And since it is impossible to recognize a philosophical bedfellow on sight, people are initially attracted to one another’s physical attributes. This is what draws them together first. Later on, after they have had a chance to know each other better, they can make a more balanced assessment of the other’s overall qualities and decide if there is any basis for a lasting relationship.

(Steinem’s legs aren’t bad either).

PROTOS

a new monthly national newspaper for libertarians

Trial subscription: send one buck for five issues. Two bucks for one year.

Checks payable to editor

LEON KASPERSKY,

1110 Edgemont St., Los Angeles, Calif.

The Case For Elites

In an attempt to sidle up to the Left, many libertarians have been given to denouncing “elitism”. The cornerstone of the individualist-libertarian insight, however, is that all people are different. Every individual is unique. Every man differs in his character, personality, intelligence, and range of interests. Given a free society, then, every individual will find his own level of ability and Interest. Libertarians, then, are the reverse of egalitarians; we do not subscribe to the impossible Left-ideal of compulsory egalitarianism, of an antheap world in which every person will be identical, uniform, and equal. As individualists, we know and glory in the fact that a free society will release the energies of every Individual to develop his capacity and his interests to their full extent.

In that free society, then, “natural” or voluntary elites will arise in every form of human endeavor. There will be a division of labor, and therefore voluntarily accepted leaders, or elites, in every activity, whether in scholarship, corporations, lodge meetings, or the local bridge club. As Jefferson pointed out, we oppose not “aristocracies” or elites per se but “artificial”, coercive elites, men who achieve and wield power by means of aggressive violence and exploitation. We are “egalitarian” only to the extent that we oppose a ruling class that extracts its revenue by violence and uses violence to push people around; we are opposed to such a ruling class or to the special privileges which such rulers inevitably dispense. But we do not believe that a free society will result in equality of income or condition; instead, people will then be free to rise to whatever natural elite status their abilities can bring them, and which they will earn as leaders or producers in various fields of endeavor. We recognize, and delight in the fact, that Edison was a better inventor than the tinkerer next door, or that Ludwig von Mises is a greater economist than the instructor around the corner. We simply do not believe (as neither did they) that this natural superiority gives them the right to rule coercively over the local instructor or tinkerer.

In our proper indignation against the ruling class, let us not throw out the elitist baby with the statist bathwater.

From The “Old Curmudgeon”

Highly recommended Movie: “Joe”. Setting aside the rather melodramatic plot, the film brilliantly and fairly contrasts three distinctive New York cultures: Upper Class-WASP, hippie-youth, and working-class Queens Irish (Joe himself). See it and find out which of the three cultures you identify with, an identification which is no problem at all for Old Curmudgeons everywhere.

********

Note that the Women’s Libbers are now “demanding” not abortion-freedom, but “free” (that is costless) abortions, a notable example of the absurdity of the movement and of the Left generally these days. Who do they think are going to supply these free abortions?

********

Perceptive recent cartoon by the brilliant Left-cartoonist Jules Feiffer:

He: Have you ever been in love?

She: Yes, I love the people.

He: I mean something smaller than the people.

She: I love the kids. I think they’re great.

He: But a person—have you ever been in love with a person?

She: One person?

He: Like a man.

She: I’ve loved men . . . Dylan. Che. Mao.

He: Can you ever love me?

She: (eyes narrowing). Sexist!

ANARCHY

Ever reviled, accursed, ne’er understood

Thou art the grisly terror of our age.

“Wreck of all order,” cry the multitude,

“Art thou, and war and murder’s endless rage.”

O, let them cry. To them that ne’er have striven

The truth that lies behind a word to find,

To them the word’s right meaning was not given.

They shall continue blind among the blind.

But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,

Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.

I give thee to the future! Thine secure

When each at least unto himself shall waken.

Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest’s thrill?

I cannot tell—but it the earth shall see!

I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will

Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

— John Henry Mackay

NOW! AT LAST!

The long-awaited work by

Murray N. Rothbard

The sequel to “Man, Economy, and State”

Is Available!

IT is CALLED

POWER AND MARKET

POWER AND MARKET demonstrates how a free market can be truly free, providing protection and defense without the need for coercive, monopolistic government.

POWER AND MARKET analyzes all forms of government intervention and their consequences, focussing on intervention as a grantor of monopolistic privilege, direct and hidden.

POWER AND MARKET dissects the rationale and effects of every kind of taxation, including the poll tax and the “Randian” voluntary taxation solution.

POWER AND MARKET provides the first thorough critique in years of the Henry George “single tax”.

POWER AND MARKET exposes the inner contradictions of the theories of democracy.

POWER AND MARKET extends praxeology to a critique and refutation of important anti-market ethical doctrines, including: the problems of immoral choices, equality, security, the alleged joys of status, charity and poverty, “materialism”, “other forms” of coercion, human and property rights. Also an exposition of libertarian social philosophy in refuting a book solely devoted to attacking it.

Available in paper ($3.00) or hard-cover ($6.00).
From:

Institute For Humane Studies

1134 Crane St.

Menlo Park, Calif. 94015

Gems Of Statism

1. From William F. Buckley’s column of September 10: “Mr. Lindbergh’s journals will revive a debate which almost tore America apart, from the ultimate business of which we were saved by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which annealed the whole nation. What experience could do such a thing for America today?” Hoping for another Pearl Harbor to “anneal” the nation, Chairman Bill?

2. Monsignor John Sheridan, asked in his column for Our Sunday Visitor (August 30), why there is an absence of priests and monsignori in peace marches, replied: “We must remember that we have delegated certain community responsibilities to our elected government and we must cooperate with that government in its broad strategy; otherwise, we shall have chaos.”

3. Humanist Quote of the Month: “Senator Long (D., La.) told his colleagues that Mideast terrorists should be ‘killed and strung up by their heels until the flies eat their flesh’.” Los Angeles Times (September 21).

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NO. 20

OCTOBER 15, 1970

35¢

POLARIZATION

The “radicLeft” (to coin a phrase) is getting what it wants: polarization. And so Bernardine Dohrn, the Voice from Underground, sounds the trumpet call for the Mad Bombers and their supposed legion of supporters; while, on the other side, Vice-President Agnew tours the country having great success in mobilizing Middle America to smash the Left. I will give you one very swift guess which side the vast majority of the American people are going to join, ever more vociferously out for blood.

Let’s look at the matter for a moment from the point of view of the “average American”, now known as the “Middle American”, the average, sober, industrious Forgotten Man of William Graham Sumner who pays but pays uncomplainingly in taxes and inflation for all the mixed-economy, welfarist, and subsidy programs of government. He is the Forgotten Man who works hard, improves his lot but finds much of the improvement taken from him by taxes and rising prices, goes to Church with fair regularity, and puts his overwhelming trust and devotion in the American flag and the Constitution. Beset by problems but correctly convinced that his lot is the best on earth, our Forgotten Man finds his greatest joy in what Left-intellectuals savagely deride as “bourgeois culture”: in Lawrence Welk, in drinking beer in front of televised football on Sunday afternoons. Now, in the last several years, the Forgotten Man looks around him and finds all of his most cherished values, his devotion to thrift, cleanliness, hard work, improvement of his material standard of living, and “bourgeois” enjoyment in his leisure standard of living, and “bourgeois” hours, derided with great savagery by what looks like the whole mass of the younger generation. And he finds his most cherished moral precepts derided also. The Forgotten American has always been, in theory, in favor of the virtues of chastity, decency, and fidelity. He had never completely cleaved to them in practice, but his missteps were always furtive, shamefaced, and therefore kept hidden, so that while he had sometimes deviated from the rules in practice, their theoretical purity remained unsullied. Now he finds the Youth Culture openly proclaiming and flaunting the rupture of all the rules, for the youth now proclaim that what he had thought were vices are now really the New Virtues: promiscuity, pornography, drug addition, obscenity, bisexuality, total disrespect for private property.

And he finds his own cleaving to the rules derided by the young as “hypocrisy”; the fact that few people, no matter how high-minded, can be 100% perfect in cleaving to moral rules is now used by the young to damn him self-righteously while they proclaim the old hated vices to be the True Morality. He finds cleanliness replaced by filth, virtue by vice, movies with an enjoyable plot and identifiable heroes replaced by pornography and morbid irrationality.

And then, to top it off, the Forgotten American finds this generation of youth trampling on property, destroying colleges, and burning and defiling the symbol he has been taught to revere most highly—the American flag, as well as calling for defeat in wars in which his country has engaged. And when he looks to find the focus for this monstrosity, he finds it in the nation’s colleges. He had always vaguely distrusted the intellectuality and the seeming bent toward some sort of subversion of existing values and institutions among academics. During the “consensus” world of the 1950’s and early 1960’s, when intellectuals had rediscovered America and found power positions in the system, this suspicion was overlayed; but now it was back in full fury. It particularly hurt that the sons and daughters of upper and upper-middle classes, the ones who had enjoyed the advantages of affluence and education which the Forgotten American had always vainly desired for his own children, that these were the heart and soul of the new horror. And furthermore, the Youth Culture is clearly in league with the accelerating drive toward ever greater welfare handouts, with what he sees as the pampering of the blacks and their ever-increasing commission of crime, and which are far more visible to him than the equally increasing handouts to the military-industrial complex.

Amidst this continuing and increasing assault on everything which he holds dear, the Forgotten American has been almost remarkably patient. Part of this patience has undoubtedly been bewilderment, bewilderment at the fantastic rapidity of social change in the last few years, and because he is far less articulate than the youth and their host of “radiclib” supporters among the intelligentsia. Alone, the Forgotten American cannot rouse himself to action; he needs a leader, a man who can articulate his anguish, who can mount a vociferous counter-attack upon his enemies. In Vice-President Agnew he has at last found such a leader; hence the great success with which Agnew, a man hardly possessed of magnetism or inner charisma, has been mobilizing Middle America. Middle America has at last found a champion, and God help the Left if ever the Nixon Administration should abandon its shilly-shallying stance Of 90% rhetoric and 10% action and actually devise a comprehensive program of action. For the Young Left has spat in the face of Middle America for a long time now, with surprisingly little retaliation. What will happen when that sleeping giant awakens, and gets in some blows of his own, especially now that Mr. Agnew has articulated his resentment?

The Middle American backlash against the left youth has already begun. The famous books by Kevin Phillips, and more recently by Scammon and Wattenberg, have enraged the liberals, but none has successfully refuted their observations: that the wave of the political future lies with the Middle American who is fed to the gills with students, youth, bombings, crime, and the blacks.

The Democratic National Committee, adopting Scammon-Wattenberg as their text, and alive to these “social issues”, is moving to purge the liberals of their influence in party councils.

Why, we might ask, is Agnew having more success in his campaign than did Joe McCarthy in his attempt in the 1950’s to rouse the masses in populist fashion against the liberals? The main difference is that in the 1950’s the Establishment was liberal, and McCarthy therefore found himself trying to lead a populist assault against the Establishment, including such a mighty symbol as the American Army itself. Now Mr. Agnew is using all the resources of the Executive branch, and therefore of the Establishment, against the liberals and the Left. As a result, the press and media, which while centrist is far less liberal than in the 1950’s, have been effectively neutralized by the pressures inherent in a Vice-President, whereas they were able to gut McCarthy (and Goldwater, for that matter) savagely with blessings from the federal government.

As for the radic Left, they have only just begun to pay the price of their years of arrogant self-isolation from Middle America, of their total failure even to try to convince the man whose values they so utterly despise. Their increasing radicalization has only served to demoralize and confuse their own supporters, while mobilizing the mass of the American people against them with accelerating intensity. In their insulated and hopped-up frenzy, the Weathermen have totally forgotten the strategic advice of their own supposed mentors: Mao, Fidel, and Che—the warning that one does not go over into guerrilla action until one is supported by the mass of the population. In their fanaticism, Bernardine and her comrades believe that a few “exemplary” bombings will arouse the masses to their call; the masses will be aroused alright, but in the opposite direction. Every new outrage by the Left brings us a giant step closer to fascism, a fascism which will inevitably fall not only upon those who have been continually trying to provoke it but upon many innocents as well.

If President Nixon were only smart—which he gives no signs of being—he would get us pronto out of Vietnam and abolish the draft. This would totally defuse the major political issue of the Left, neutralize the liberals, and allow the Administration to smash the then totally isolated radicals with a minimum of fuss or “spillover.” In their blindness, the conservatives fail to see that Vietnam is the only issue on which the Left can hope to mobilize any sort of mass support, and that deprived of that issue, the Left Revolution would crumble completely.

In the meanwhile, however, the exuberant hopes of the new Peace Politics of last spring have been dashed on the rocks of the accelerating polarization between the bombers of the campus and the bombers of Vietnam. President Nixon’s meretricious gestures in the direction of peace have temporarily defused the Vietnam issue. Still, the only sane political course is to try to preserve and strengthen the peace bloc in Congress. This means to support in particular the races of Duffey (D.) in Connecticut, Metzenbaum (D.) in Ohio, Grossman (D.) in Arizona, Hoff (D.) in Vermont, Sesler (D.) in Pennsylvania; and the re-election attempts of Hartke (D.) in Indiana, Hart (D.) in Michigan, Burdick (D.) in North Dakota, Williams (D.) in New Jersey, Moss (D.) in Utah, Proxmire (D.) in Wisconsin, and Goodell (R.), in New York. All of these men voted correctly, from the libertarian viewpoint, on the three most important votes of the current Congress: No on the ABM, Yes on the Hatfield-Goldwater bill to move rapidly toward raising the pay of GI’s so as to abolish the draft, and Yes on the McGovern-Hatfield resolution to pull totally out of Vietnam by mid-1971. Particularly important (though not very likely) would be the re-election of Senator Goodell, as a reward for his courage and independence in bucking a Republican President on the Vietnam War, and thereby earning the bitter attacks of the Vice-President; in Charles Goodell lies the lingering hope for Peace Republicanism, and that is precisely why the Administration and the Conservative Party want him retired.

At this point, however, support for Peace Politics seems as dim a hope within the libertarian movement as it is in the nation at large. To some this would be an interruption in their task of “making revolution” in a couple of weeks; to others it would sully their sectarian purity; to still others it would interfere with their personal careers. And so confrontation and repression loom around the corner, with few caring about any last-minute attempt to steer our nation onto a saner course.

O CANADA

Recently Americans have become more aware than usual that something exists to the north of us besides Alaska and the North Pole. To some it is a happy refuge from the long arm of the draft board; to others a last frontier where rugged individualism can express itself creatively and successfully; some wish to enjoy life at a pace thirty years behind that of the Pepsi generation; others look to exploit a cornucopia of natural riches for the benefit of God’s chosen ones—the Americans. Yes, Canada is, at last, penetrating the consciousness of the American public—and to the Canadians nothing should be more frightening than that!

Canada, compared with the U.S., is an underdeveloped country; larger in area, it has but a tenth the population of its aggressive neighbor. In the nature of things, the two nations have been linked economically, and to a great extent culturally. Only within French Quebec does an American feel himself a foreigner—and the English-speaking Canadian has felt the same. Canadian national culture may have deep roots but the leaves of the plant are rather fragile, and the flowers are often cut and shipped to market in New York, Boston and California.

Apart from the perennial questions of bilingualism and Quebec separatism, the most ubiquitous concern of Canadians is the quest for economic development. Acutely conscious of their lower standard of living, rural poverty, and dependency upon American capital and markets, Canadians see industrialization as the magic formula for catching up with America in terms of modernity and prosperity. In their desire for speedy progress, they have, unfortunately, been persuaded to rely on the use of governmental coercion to accumulate capital and direct its allocation. The chief instrumentality of this policy is the so-called development plan and the development corporation. While the plan establishes how and in what areas capital is to be allocated, the development corporation gives or lends capital taken from the taxpayers to corporate capitalists unwilling or unable to risk their own funds on the government’s plans. While the transfer of capital from one group—the taxpayers—to another—subsidized private corporation—is well known in the United States (the World Bank, AID and Small Business Administration to mention but a few examples), the practice has recently accelerated rapidly in Canada at the federal, provincial and even municipal levels, and in the last few years the inevitable results are beginning to appear.

Let us confine our attention to the Maritime Provinces—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, a region which suffers endemic unemployment (10.8% against the national average of 6.7%) and a per capita income of $1712 compared to the national average of $2317 (1967). Between 1961-1966 the region lost through migration 103,000 persons—leaving behind less than two million inhabitants. (We will exclude Newfoundland which entered the Canadian confederation in 1949 and suffers the same ailments as the older maritime provinces). The outmigration includes people of all social classes and educational levels, including university graduates who find that the newly attracted industries tend to draw their managerial and technical personnel from their home bases in the United States, Europe or Toronto. Even local governmental bodies hire outsiders to an inexplicable extent. The Halifax city council recently planned to hire as city manager an American from Oklahoma I Only the protests of the city’s small black population who learned of the American’s reputation as a racist ended the negotiations.

Yet despite these economic conditions, the region is blessed with great natural riches: fine harbors, good fishing grounds, bountiful forests, a good mixture of fine pasture and croplands, an energetic and intelligent people, and a nearness to both European and American markets. Why then the lack of material prosperity?

Part of the answer lies in events which occurred a century ago but still dominate the economic condition of the Maritime provinces. There were very grave reasons why the Maritime provinces should never have joined Canada in the first place. The trade of the provinces was almost wholly directed to the United States and Europe; its products were not needed in upper Canada, and the manufactured goods made there could be purchased more cheaply in the U.S. The only economic reason for joining the Canadian confederation was that the Maritime provinces, particularly Prince Edward, had developed a mania for building railroads—the costs of which far exceeded the potential revenues of the governments. The Canadians offered to absorb the large public debts of the provinces and link the Maritime provinces by rail with upper Canada. Anti-confederation feeling was so strong that for years after Confederation (1967-73) the Maritime governments were controlled by anti-confederate political parties—but they had so few members in the Ottawa parliament that they could safely be ignored. However, the region’s trade was now subordinated to the economic interests of upper Canada which used Confederation to raise tariffs on manufactured goods coming from the U.S., thus increasing the cost of living of the Maritimers without any noticeable advantages to its inhabitants.

This unfavorable trade situation persists and is well illustrated by the recent announcement that railroad rates in the Maritime region are to be raised 25% and in Sept. 1970 a further rate increase is planned. But, the increases do not apply to shipments of grain and flour, meat, zinc fertilizer, potash, sulfur, phosphates, nickel concentrate, or butter; some iron and steel products, trailers on flatcars and all freight carried between the U.S. and Canadian depots are also excluded. Manufactured goods shipped from West (Ontario) to East (Maritimes) also enjoy special discounts, which do not apply to such goods moving from the Maritimes westward. As can be clearly seen, the railroad rates reflect the economic needs of upper Canada, and discriminate against the local products and manufactures of the Maritime provinces, which serve simply as a bridge for goods being imported and exported by upper Canadian interests. The building of the St. Lawrence Seaway was but another blow to local Maritime interests, which have continually been sacrificed by federal laws favoring upper Canadian capitalists.

Since the mid-sixties, the Maritime provincial governments have sought economic prosperity through provincially-financed industrial development corporations. As in the U.S., all the political parties espouse this approach and differ only in their claims to be more efficient, farseeing and honest servants of corporate capitalism. The New Democratic party, which is routinely described as Canada’s socialist party, has at least one leader, Premier Schreyer of Manitoba, who boasts that the New Deal is his model. Apparently there is no vocal libertarian criticism or analysis of the Canadian scene, although three new publications in the Maritime area have recently begun to zero in on the development corporation boondoggle (The Mysterious East, Fredericton, N. B.; the Fourth Estate, a newspaper published in Halifax, N. S., and The Square Deal, a monthly paper concerned with affairs on P. B. I.) But the tone of these is reformist and muckraking rather than analytic and ideological.

What has the development corporation achieved so far?

Without any appreciable increase in population, the Maritime Provinces have greatly increased their public debt: between 1962 and 1969 the debt of Prince Edward has risen from $36m to $78.3m; New Brunswick’s from $195m to $323m and Nova Scotia’s from $220 to $329.5m. New Brunswick is having considerable difficulty in finding new tax sources due to concessions given to industry and a retail sales tax already at the prohibitive rate of 8%. If this indebtedness continues to rise it may well end in the termination of all provincial autonomy. How did this come about? And is this the end of it?

In 1963, despite a decision by federal authorities not to invest in it, the Nova Scotian development corporation at government bidding agreed to finance the construction of a “heavy water” plant in cooperation with an American inventor-entrepreneur Jerome Spivack. It invested $12m in 51% of Spivack’s Deuterium Corp. of New York on the understanding that Spivack would raise the remaining $18m needed to construct the $30m project. The American firm of Brown and Root were to do the construction. By 1966 the costs had risen to $40m due to labor disputes with B&R, Spivack had failed to raise the $18m and the development corporation decided to buy him out for $2m and become sole owners of the uncompleted plant. Two years later, still incomplete, it was decided to double the plant’s capacity, raising the estimated costs now to $83m without producing an ounce of heavy water. Shortly after, it was discovered that someone had left salt water stagnating in miles of tubes and cylinders which had ruined them through corrosion. The Nova Scotian government now came to the rescue of its own development corporation by buying 51% of its shares in Deuterium; it then hired consultants who reported that it would take at least two more years and another $30m to complete the work. The cost to the Nova Scotian taxpayers now has reached the staggering sum of $110m with $700,000 interest paid annually. The population of the province is about 756,000. At the present time the plant is still not in production and the Premier, Mr. Smith, admits it will probably operate at an annual deficit of $5-6m. This is but one example, albeit the most spectacular, of progress via development corporations.

Puny by comparison is the Nova Scotian loan of $18m to two Toronto businessmen to build a plant for their Clairtone Sound Corp. at Stellarton, N. S. The new plant was to bring work to at least 640 local people. Three years after construction, the owners suddenly sold out to the development corporation for $2m. A few weeks later it was revealed that Clairtone had lost $800,000 during the first half of that year. The plant is still producing with a work force of less than 100, its deficit has now risen to $18m, and the value of its stock-wholly owned by the development corporation—is now one-tenth the price paid to the carpetbaggers from Toronto.

In New Brunswick the development corporation has achieved comparable successes. It planned to make the town of Dorchester an industrial center by financing the building of a fertilizer plant, and eventually subsidiary facilities, in the Westmoreland Chemical Park; electric lines, roads and railways were built to link the park with the floating dock to which ships would bring the raw chemicals through the Bay of Fundy, noted for its herculean tides. Today the $6m park lies idle; the Fundy tides make it impossible to dock the ships that carry the vital raw materials.

When in 1966 an election brought to power the Liberal party led by young Alex Campbell, Prince Edward Island’s 108,000 people were still without the benefit of an industrial development plan. The new premier soon created the Economic Improvement Corp., which hired experts who took three years to tell the islanders what they already knew—that their economy was based solely on agriculture and fishing, that their real income was declining, and that they needed an industrial development corporation. It was suggested that the government invest $750m over 15 years to encourage the establishment of new industries, consolidated farms (clear the land of people) and processing plants, and encourage tourism. The key to industrialization must remain better communication with the mainland, but proposals for a bridge across the channel to New Brunswick were laid aside. In summer, motorists wait four and five hours to cross on the ferries and until something can be done to make access of people, cars, and freight easier, it is difficult to believe that the $750m will be well spent. But the plan has been accepted by the electorate and we may await the almost certain recurrence of the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick experience.

About 5% of our subscribers are residents of Canada, and it encourages us to hope that we might hear from them in future regarding developments in their own provinces. With so much to offer its people, Canada should become one of the most prosperous societies in the world, if it can avoid wars, and the waste and theft of its people’s capital and talents. This can only be assured by the operations of the free market; we see them, in Canada, a magnificent opportunity for libertarians to alert their countrymen to the real character of corporate capitalism, its alliance with the state to rob and pillage the people through taxation to enrich the few who can make the right political connections; its inevitable destruction of local economic interests in favor of national or international elites. We would hope that our readers across the border would enter into dialogue with the dissenting voices that are appearing in the pages of the Last Post, The Mysterious East and Canadian Dimension so that libertarian ideas may enter the consciousness of the thinking Canadian public.

— J. R. P.

Gun Laws

The indifference which seems to pervade many libertarian circles regarding recent gun control laws—laws which are likely to forge the final links on the chains shackled to the average American citizen—is dangerously surprising. Apparently no one perceives the importance of what has occurred.

Few realize the extreme shackles placed on actual or potential gun owners by the acts snowballing into the Gun Control Act of 1968 (Public Law 90-618). To purchase a gun one must make a sworn statement of identity, which is sent to the local police chief—who decides whether the applicant may own a gun on the basis of whether he is a “law-abiding” citizen (i.e., if he obeys every order of the power elite). Firearm ownership is denied to convicted felons, dishonorably discharged veterans, aliens illegally in the U.S., and former citizens who have renounced their citizenship, viz., all potential opposers of the Establishment. Users of “dangerous drugs” like pot, anyone under 21, as well as many others are also denied the right of ownership. Ownership of fully automatic, large caliber, or other firearms is absolutely prohibited to everyone but the State.

Even those qualified to own an arm are hampered by total registration, a fact unknown to the general public. Besides direct registration of newly purchased guns, “backdoor registration” of all other guns occurs due to the requirement that merchants record the name, address, etc., of all buyers of ammunition. These records are subject to police and Federal snooping. All producers and retailers are also fettered by high license fees and other outrages.

Some state and local governments have gone even more berserk. In many areas, anyone possessing a firearm is under constant harassment by the police. Complete registration, as well as the charging of atrociously high license fees, have left many with the necessity of surrendering their guns. The states of New York, New Jersey, and Illinois are particularly oppressive in this regard.

On the local level, the situation in Miami reads like a chapter from 1984. To apply for gun ownership, one must submit to the police extensive personal information. While at this point they have not gone quite as far as Rhodesia, where 32 blacks were recently sentenced to death for the “crime” of possessing firearms, anyone who is caught carrying a “dangerous weapon” without police approval gets a minimum of 6 months or $1,000 in fines. To help enforce these repressions, a $100 bounty is paid to anyone who is willing to squeal on his neighbor for firearms violations. Other cities are on the same road.

The ultimate goal of the power structure is the total abolition of private (non-ruling class) gun ownership. In mid-January 1969 the Illinois Academy of Criminology spoke favorably of this goal, and hundreds of other groups and individuals openly admit similar ambitions. The minimum they will settle for is complete police control of all firearms as is the case in Soviet Russia.

The masses are taught to believe the lie that such laws will reduce crime. Nothing could be further from the truth, because gun ownership by the general population simply does not cause crime. In 1966, twice as many guns per home were owned in Canada as compared with the U.S., yet the gun homicide rate of the former was only one-fifth that of the latter (American Rifleman, Aug., 1968, p. 46). And surely, if one wants to kill another, the absence of a gun will act as no safeguard; in Japan, where civilian guns are outlawed, the murder rate without guns is almost twice as high as the U.S. rate without guns (American Rifleman, Nov., 1968, p. 17).

On the contrary, gun ownership by the immense majority serves to prevent crime. Criminals have second thoughts regarding killing and plundering peaceful individuals who may be armed. But they have no hesitations when they are confident that their victims are helpless. Since criminals will always have guns (no criminals would register their guns, and besides, zip guns are easy to make), it is necessary that potential victims be able to arm themselves to prevent crime. Each month the American Rifleman, under the column “The Armed Citizen”, cites numerous instances in which private guns have prevented crimes.

Thus the avowed goal of State gun control is false. What, then, is the real reason why the power elite wants to leave the people defenseless?

It has already been observed that guns are necessary for peaceful individuals to protect themselves from criminals. But who has been the most ferocious criminal in history? It is obvious: the State I

The U.S. Government, though they trust themselves with the largest arsenal the world has ever known, including everything from napalm and M-16’s to tanks and H-bombs, will not trust its thralls with .22-cal. revolvers. Why does this trust not exist? The people want to be free, a great number of blacks as well as many non-ruling class whites desire self-determination, and the Establishment must frustrate these movements. Laissez-faire gun ownership is feared for the same reason that Hitler would have been afraid of a gun-owning Jewish population or Stalin a bunch of pistol-packing Ukrainians. Well does the State know Mao’s dictum: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The rulers realize that the only way to retain their control over the people is to monopolize the firearms. The powers-that-be perceive that the people can never exercise their right to be free if they have no might to be free. Thus it is in part by gun control that Big Brother perpetuates his hegemony.

Besides those already mentioned, one of the most important steps taken by the U.S. Leviathan has been to forbid the importation into the U.S. of surplus military rifles. American gun manufacturers, including Winchester-Western, Remington, and Savage gave tremendous support to the passage of this act to prevent competition from old and low-priced but reliable foreign arms. The State’s motive is evident too: these inexpensive guns were within the buying power of everyone, and outlawing further importation prevents the many who cannot afford expensive American guns from acquiring a means of self-defense.

Understanding the political (or rather, the anti-political) utility of guns for the people, it is deplorable that the police can know who owns which firearms. But unless present trends are reversed, these quasi-private guns will not be around to worry about—they will be confiscated, leaving the people with no protection whatever.

There are few methods available to prevent this. The National Rifle Association has been a somewhat effective lobbyist in Congress to preserve the Second Amendment freedom to keep and bear arms, but it is likely that such efforts will only delay confiscation. The best mode available seems to be that employed by the people of Chicago last fall: only one-third of the city’s 1,200,000 firearms were registered in accordance with the ordinance requiring total registration, and of the two million gun owners in Illinois, less than one-fourth obtained the required license (American Rifleman, Dec, 1968, p. 6). Only mass civil disobedience can prevent Big Brother from totally disarming his serfs.

— Stephen Halbrook

Annual Festival Of Liberation

November 14-15, 1970

BOVARD HALL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Sponsored By Rampart College in Cooperation With California Libertarian Alliance and Action Coalition for Freedom

“Authoritarianism vs. Libertarianism”

SPEAKERS: Murray Rothbard (First time on West Coast)

Paul Goodman

Dr. Thomas Szasz

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Robert LeFevre

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POWER AND MARKET

POWER AND MARKET demonstrates how a free market can be truly free, providing protection and defense without the need for coercive, monopolistic government.

POWER AND MARKET analyzes all forms of government intervention and their consequences, focussing on intervention as a grantor of monopolistic privilege, direct and hidden.

POWER AND MARKET dissects the rationale and effects of every kind of taxation, including the poll tax and the “Randian” voluntary taxation solution.

POWER AND MARKET provides the first thorough critique in years of the Henry George “single tax”.

POWER AND MARKET exposes the inner contradictions of the theories of democracy.

POWER AND MARKET extends praxeology to a critique and refutation of important anti-market ethical doctrines, including: the problems of immoral choices, equality, security, the alleged joys of status, charity and poverty, “materialism”, “other forms” of coercion, human and property rights. Also an exposition of libertarian social philosophy in refuting a book solely devoted to attacking it.

Available in paper ($3.00) or hard-cover ($6.00).
From:

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Recommended Reading

Out in Paperback:

John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (Random House, Vintage, $2.95). See Lib. Forum, Sept. 15.

H. L. Nieburg, In the Name of Science (Quadrangle). Incursions of the U.S. Government into science.

Arno J. Mayer, The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-18 (Random House, Vintage, $2.95), and Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking, 1918-19 (Random House, Vintage, $3.95). Brilliant two volumes on the development of Wilsonian imperialism after World War I. A truly trans-national history that deals with the American and various European internal political struggles as well as with conventional diplomatic history. A work of historical tapestry that ranks with Robert R. Palmer on the age of the French Revolution.

Conservation.

E. F. Roberts, “Plead the Ninth Amendment I”, Natural History (August). A law professor at Cornell urges the use of the highly libertarian Ninth Amendment by citizens who sue polluters in the courts.

The Middle East.

Uri Avnery, Israel Without Zionists (Macmillan, $6.95). An anti-Zionist work by the leader of the Israeli “New Left.”

Women’s Lib.

Perhaps the backlash against Women’s Lib has at last begun. Midge Decter’s “The Liberated Women”, Commentary (October, $1.00), is a devastating portrait of the typical woman’s libber, who scorns her true freedom of choice in order to agitate for a “freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty.”

Left/Right.

It is a measure of the parlous state we are in that some of the sanest comments on social and ideological matters can now be found in such (formerly despised) Social Democratic organs as Comentary, Encounter, Public Interest, and Dissent. Thus, Nathan Glazer, in “On Being Deradicalized,” Commentary (October), affectingly relates his hegira from “mild radical” in the late 1950’s to “mild conservative today. Glazer’s “radicalism” was his attraction to the libertarian, anti-war, and decentralization positions of such as Paul Goodman and Dwight MacDonald; his shift “rightward” came not so much from a basic change of view as from his realization that the radical Left has become bent on destroying the university, and from his growing awareness that no society can survive without the inner self-disciplines of hard work and without modern technology and the industrial system, all of which our Youth Culture Rousseauists are out to destroy.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NO. 21

NOVEMBER 1, 1970

35¢

White Terror In Quebec

The press, as usual, has it all backward; as usual, it strains at a gnat while cheerfully swallowing a camel. The wave of horror at the kidnapping of two government officials by the Front de Liberation du Quebec has hardly been matched by any indignation at the wave of White Terror that Prime Minister Trudeau has imposed on that long-suffering province. Quite the contrary. Thus, the good grey New York Times (October 19) denounces the “atrocity” of the “cold-blooded murder” of Quebec’s Labor Minister, but hails the “vigorous and necessary” measures of despotic repression that Mr. Trudeau has brought to the province. These measures include the decree outlawing all members of the FLQ, and the rounding up, without search warrant or indictment, of hundreds of separatist leaders and placing them in jail without trial. One man’s “atrocity” is another man’s “vigor”.

Even more ominous is the reaction of U.S. officials to this shining example north of the border. While Attorney-General Mitchell made the headlines in assuring us that this can never happen here, the Times reports that unnamed State Department officials take great comfort in Mr. Trudeau’s “gutsy” actions, and see them as a model for dealing with our own dissidents and revolutionaries. Total fascism may well come to America in the name of “guts.”

The deeper problem in Canada is also studiously ignored. For Canada is really not a nation at all, but rather a geographical expression. In our October 15 issue, Professor Peden showed that this is true even for Canada’s beleaguered Maritime Provinces; how much more is this true of the French nation of Quebec, which has groaned under the Anglo heel for over two centuries! In the mid-eighteenth century, Canada was French; it was then conquered, in a naked act of aggression by Great Britain, and the French of Quebec have lived under Anglo tyranny, discrimination, and exploitation ever since. Now that Quebec is becoming increasingly urban and educated, its people are increasingly anxious to end this carefully fostered myth of a Canadian “nation”, and to achieve independence for their own French nation once more.

Here, again, our purely educationist Libertarians are caught in an impossible bind. What is their prescription for freeing Quebec, with its French language, culture, and nationality, from the Canadian yoke? Education will not do the job here, because no amount of “education” will persuade Canada simply to give up the prestige and perquisites of its imperial rule over Quebec. Any attempt by Quebec to secede peacefully would be met in the same brutal and violent way that the “free” United States met the attempt by the South to secede a century ago. A peaceful solution, therefore, will unfortunately not work, simply because Anglo Canada will not permit it. Hence, the going over by the FLQ into guerrilla warfare and armed insurrection. The FLQ are not the northern equivalent of our crazed Weathermen, simply because the mass of the Quebeckers endorse its goals, though not yet its current tactics. The only chance of a peaceful secession lies in the separatist political party, the Parti Quebecois, which, while newly formed, had great successes in the last provincial elections. But then again, I don’t see any great huzzahs among our libertarians for the PQ either, presumably because it indulges in the impurity of running for electoral office. But again we must put the question to our educationists: what advice would you give the Quebec people?

Gems Of Statism

1. Chairman Moa and the Church.

National Review-niks had better take a second look at the “martyred” Bishop James Walsh, recently released from twelve years in a Chinese Communist prison. For the 79-year-old bishop, now safe in Rome, praised the Chinese regime for three great advances it is supposed to have made: equality of women, equality of races, and, in particular, “an absolute ban and prohibition on all manifestations of immorality and indecency in regard to theatrical displays, or publicity, or action.” (New York Times, August 27). And, come to think of it, this item might also give pause to those libertarians who have embraced Chairman Mao as the “greatest libertarian of the twentieth, century.”

2. Most Persecuted Minority-Department

Contrary to Ayn Rand, big businessmen scarcely consider themselves as “America’s most persecuted minority.” Thus, in mid-October a group of the nation’s leading and most powerful corporation executives, assembled as the Business Council advising the Nixon Administration, hinted strongly in the direction of new government policies that would hold down wage increases. The businessmen claimed that they certainly were not thinking of wage or price controls, but this danger looms increasingly large as the Administration loses its timid and fitful battle against inflation. Austrian theory shows that in the later stages of a boom wages tend to catch up with prices, squeezing profits, and it is then that businessmen are tempted to turn to the totalitarian (and ineffective) coercion of price-wage controls. (New York Times, October 18).

Free Enterprise And Free Education

Higher education in the United States, as everyone knows, is a field in which private institutions are engaged in a desperate struggle to hold their own against the competition of the heavily subsidized state run multiversities. In this business, just keeping your head above water is a tough assignment. After all, how long do you think a private barber shop or restaurant could stay in business faced with state financed competitors, where the customers did not have to pay for their purchases, the producers did not have to sell their products, and the owners (taxpayers) exercised only nominal and sporadic control?

The system under which higher education is organized and financed in this country has had widespread and deleterious effects on the quality of the services rendered. The first effect is the most widely publicized. The low cost of matriculation has meant that our colleges and universities have been filled with a flood of “students” who value the education relatively little by comparison with alternative pursuits, but are willing to drop in and see the show given a sufficient subsidy. If they take it into their heads that they don’t like what they see, they lose next to nothing by shutting the school down or tearing it up. Faculty members, whose paychecks keep rolling in strike or no strike (and think of all that extra time to devote to publications! hardly have an interest in standing up to the students, and the result is chaos.

The second effect is perhaps less widely known, but even though less spectacular is equally disturbing. According to a study reported in the New York Times of July 19, our institutions of higher education are year by year becoming more uniform, more like one another. Anyone in academic life is familiar with the pressures in any college which tend to work against diversity of political views, teaching methods, life styles, etc. within a given institution. The chief redeeming feature of the system heretofore has been the great range and diversity existing among institutions. Now, it seems, this diversity is gradually being nibbled away by the pressures of the system.

The third effect of the organizational and financial peculiarities of American higher education is, however, the most serious of all. It has, in fact, contributed substantially to the other problems just mentioned. Faced with the overwhelming financial pressures generated by the competition of state subsidized institutions, almost all of what we nominally call “private” institutions have swallowed hard once or twice, and then put their hands out too. Building grants, research grants, development planning grants, matching grants, travel grants, and above all, the half-hidden grants implicit in the tax deductibility of alumni contributions have flooded in, each with its attached earmark, restriction, provision, loyalty oath, reporting procedure or other string by some other name. A lucky few have become rich, powerful clients of the state and are able to throw their weight around a bit in Washington, but most, like the welfare poor, have been given just enough to stay alive in a state of abject, impoverished dependence.

Against this bleak background, Royalton College of South Royalton, Vermont stands out in startling contrast. Incorporated in 1965 as a proprietary, stock corporation, with its President and Director the principal stock holder by virtue of ownership of all but two of 2000 shares, Royalton College has never accepted aid from the state in any form (although it has from time to time accepted students who in turn have, as individuals, accepted government assistance in the form of veterans’ benefits and the like). Royalton College has not even accepted the indirect subsidy of tax-deductible contributions since, although it has never in fact made a profit (for reasons which will become clear below, not by intention) and has amended its articles of association so that any potential profits would automatically be plowed back into improvement in its educational facilities, it has refused to be reorganized as a non profit institution.

In 1967, the College received a visiting committee from the board of higher education. On the basis of the enthusiastic report that committee concerning the high academic achievements of the infant institution, the board voted to give the college the power to grant four year degrees. This privilege was accomplished by a list of 17 conditions to which the college must adhere, but since these conditions related only to the type of academic qualifications which would be the concern of any certifying agency public or private, the college agreed to them.

It was too much to hope, however, that the state would permit a wholly free and independent institution to exist peacefully and grant degrees within the realm of its authority. In 1968, less than a year later, some reports appeared in the local yellow press questioning the advisability of permitting education to be conducted by an institution with Royalton’s unique (unique in the educational world, that is) financial organization. The board of education panicked, sent another visiting team, and, on the basis of the college’s financial structure, suspended its degree granting powers.

At this point, the school filed suit to nullify the suspension. The argument was made that the degree granting powers were essential to continued operation of the college, and especially that suspension of the powers once granted was much more damaging than would have been a delay or refusal of the original grant of certification. It was contended that the action of the board was unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious, constituted a breach of contract, and violated the college’s rights to equal protection and due process as guaranteed by the federal and state constitutions. The petition of the college was sustained by the Vermont Supreme Court, and the order of the board was vacated. The grounds of the decision, however, were relatively narrow. The court based its action on the fact that nothing had been said about the school’s finances that in the future, the board might decide to refuse certification of some other institution solely on the basis of its proprietary status.

Meanwhile, in the District of Columbia, another case was making its way through the courts that was to provide a direct test of this important principle. The school involved in this case was Marjorie Webster Junior College. This institution had asked the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools to accept an application for accreditation, and had been refused on the grounds that in order to be considered for evaluation, an institution must be a non-profit organization with a governing board representing the “public interest.” The Marjorie Webster case was brought under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, on the grounds that the Middle States Association exercised a monopoly in the field of granting accreditation. Middle States argued, on the other hand, that education was not a “trade,” and that a combining to restrain the conduct of education thus did not constitute a restraint of trade. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found in favor of Marjorie Webster, writing that “Higher education in America today possesses many of the attributes of business. To hold otherwise would ignore the obvious and challenge reality.”

Thus the important principle appeared to be established that an accrediting association could look only at the genuine academic credentials of an institution, and could not arbitrarily refuse even to consider a proprietary institution. The way seemed open for Royalton to make an application to the New England Association of Colleges for the full accreditation which, unlike the not nationally recognized certification of the Vermont State Board, would enable the college to be a full-fledged member of the educational community.

Once again, however, it proved too much to hope that all would be smooth sailing for proprietary education, for recently the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed the lower court’s ruling in Marjorie Webster vs. Middle States. This court, in addition to ruling that education was not part of the business world and hence outside the scope of the Sherman Act, wrote that “it is not unreasonable for Middle States to conclude that the desire for personal profit might influence educational goals in subtle ways difficult to detect but destructive, in the long run, of that atmosphere of academic inquiry which, perhaps even more than any quantitative measure of educational quality, appellant’s standards for accreditation seek to foster.”

Did it never occur to Middle States or to the Learned Judges that financial dependence on the civilian and military agencies of the state might also influence educational goals “in subtle ways” (!) and destroy academic freedom? Did they never learn in their principles of economics courses that it is not upon the charity of the butcher and the baker that we depend for our meat and bread, but upon their profit-seeking self interest? The decision of the court represents the kind of thinking that is turning all of American higher education into one giant academic soup line—the meat and bread is free, yes, but the quality???

The Middle States and New England Associations are, of course, private, voluntary, non-profit organizations, and the courts were wise in recognizing this as a factor in the case which should make them reluctant to intervene hastily or casually in their affairs. However, two aspects of the nature and activities of these associations are objectionable, I think, on strict libertarian grounds. First, the associations in question seem to exercise an effective monopoly in the area of certification. Whether or not this is a benign, “natural” monopoly, or one aided and abetted by the state is, at least, open to question. Second, and much more important, various governmental agencies concerned with education base certain actions of their own on the decisions of the associations to accredit or not to accredit. For Royalton, the most directly harmful of these decisions have not been any refusals to hand out unwanted grants or aid, but actions which have made it virtually impossible, in certain area, for the college to help itself! For example, it turns out that foreign students cannot get permission from the State Department to study at schools which are not on the list, a matter of critical importance to a school like Royalton which specializes in international affairs.

In short, the future of free, independent, proprietary higher education in the United States looks to be trouble. The ultimate answer may be to establish a competing accreditation agency which will not suffer from the delusion that quality education must be socialized education, but this will, to say the least, take time. Meanwhile, you can do something now to help proprietary education by patronizing it. We do not need handouts; we need just a few, serious, qualified, paying students. For a catalog and a bonus copy of the details of the court cases described above, write to the Director of Admissions, Royalton College, South Royalton, Vermont 05068.

— Edwin G. Dolan

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

Congratulations to Dana Rohrabacher for having been chosen Libertarian Pinup Boy of the Month by the editors of Rap, the apparent successor to Pine Tree magazine. Rap is real groovy, man, with all sorts of penetrating insights into contemporary hippie jargon. The next issue will feature a pullout centerfold in living color of Robert LeFerve being transmogrified to a mountaintop while he contemplates whether or not to slash the chains that bind him. Private property you know.

* * * *

Which brings us to the subject of anarcho-land grabbism and anarcho-shopping centerism.

Free market anarchists base their theories of private property rights on the homestead principle: a person has the right to a private piece of real estate provided he mixes his labor with it and alters it in some way. Anarcho-land grabbers recognize no such restrictions. Simply climb to the highest mountain peak and claim all you can see. It then becomes morally and sacredly your own and no one else can so much as step on it.

But, you might contend. Suppose fifty people claimed all the land in the United States? In an age of rocket ships it is even possible for one rather self-centered propertarian to go into orbit around the earth and claim the entire globe as his personal backyard. What would the other unfortunate three billion do if our space-age propertarian ordered them all off the planet?

Have no fear, counter the land-grabbers. Such a state of affairs would be so inconvenient, not only to the three billion trespassers, but to the landlord (earthlord?) as well that reason would induce him to sell off large chunks of land to the highest bidders, and rent out the rest. So you see, nobody would actually have to leave the earth, although the least Galt-like among us would no doubt find themselves confined to the cheapest plots on Antarctica.

Anarcho-shopping centerism is better known by its official name, the proprietary community idea. Its chief proponent is Spencer H. MacCallum, grandson of Spencer Heath, who outlines his philosophy in a recently published book, The Art of Community. On one level the book is a very interesting history of the development of real estate interests and the organization of commercial properties. MacCallum describes the trend leading away from the neighborhood structure of small village shops and community meeting-places toward large shopping centers and industrial parks servicing the needs of larger and larger segments of the community. He records this development over the last two centuries and shows how, today, shopping and industrial centers offer, not only supermarkets and other shopping services to the public, but movie houses and theaters, restaurants, health and recreational facilities, nightclubs and taverns, and even centers of employment.

No one who has grown up in the United States in the years following World War II will argue with MacCallum over this point. Social chroniclers from John Updike to Norman Mailer have been satirizing the suburban sprawl in fiction and in articles since the early 1950’s. The ugliness of plasticized suburbia complete with its manicured lawns, jack-in-the-box houses, cocktail-shaker morality and creeping-horror shopping centers is a well-documented fact by now. It is only when MacCallum the Historian becomes MacCallum the Advocate that one turns back to his book with a kind of fascinated horror.

As the story unfolds one becomes aware of the fact that the “proprietary community people” are actually in love with shopping centers. They are mad about those enormous parking lots with their giant-sized Korvette’s and Grant’s knick-knack stores and Hills supermarkets and Cinema Artsy I and II and penny bubble gum machines and psychedelic pizza parlors and Tony-the-lover barbershops and bouffant beauty salons and Fred Astaire dance emporiums and Jerome Mackey judo schools. The Heathians are so crazy about them, in fact, that they want to make them bigger and more complex and move people into them. Yes, they want to erect high-rise apartment buildings on the premises, the ones with orange and lavender walls and spotted goldfish swimming in imitation-marble fountains in the lobbies. They see no point in making people drive on public roads to get to this real-life Disneyland; they want them to move in and be a real part of this mind-blowing phantasmagoria.

They want America to become one big shopping center, one great big Lefrak City.

This way, you see, with Heath-MacCallum Real Estate Enterprises providing all the essential services one can hope for in life—housing, schools, police and fire protection, garbage removal, judo lessons, roads and parking areas, pizza parlors, bubble gum machines, art theaters featuring the latest Rock Hudson movie—there won’t be any need for Uncle Sam anymore.

The government will just wither and die away.

Now you know why Right Wing businessmen are so partial to this brand of “libertarianism.” Why they like to keep the idea up on a “flagpole” where more people can see it. Why they like to slap it against the wall and see if it will stick.

* * * *

There is nothing radical or even political about the schemes of “retreatist” or “escapist” libertarians. Their pipedreams are only entrepreneurial fantasies—rather hideous ones at that—designed to “maximize profits.” They have nothing whatsoever to do with the world of conscription, military imperialism, federal curtailment of civil liberties and institutionalized racism. Libertarianism is meaningless unless it tells us what we can do in terms of political reality to liberate our society.

As long as the apparatus of power remains in the hands of the power-elite, it is still for the present authorities to use and misuse that power in any manner they choose. It is for them to snuff out the “alternatives” any time they decide to do so. While one is creating his voluntary institutions it is mandatory that he encourage tax and draft resistance, and engage in radical politics at the same time to keep the pressure on the authorities while the new society is being built. Or else he may find it smashed before the foundation has begun to set.

(If shopping centers are the alternative, that may not be such a bad idea.)

The Shaffer Dictionary

By Butler Shaffer

The following definitions comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous—and often frustrating—manner.

GOVERNMENT: an institution of war, theft, murder, rape and predation, . . . the absence of which, it is said, would lead to disorder.

TAXATION: a practice employed by governments in looting all of its citizens in order to obtain the necessary funds to chase down and punish looters.

WAR: the price men are forced to pay in order to keep peace among the politicians.

RECOMMENDED READING

Education

Jacques Barzun, “The Conflict of Action and Liberty”, The Humanist (September-October, 75¢), pp. 14-18. For years there has been no wiser critic of our educational system than Barzun, who now in a brilliant and bitterly pessimistic article declares that the American university is dead. Murdered by two groups: first by the scientistic behaviorists and vocationalists, and finally by barbarian youth. The only hope is to form new small “lay monasteries” to ride out the dark ages ahead.

Statism in America

I never thought that I would agree with J. K. Galbraith on anything, but his witty “Richard Nixon and the Great Socialist Revival”, New York (September 21, 40¢) correctly zeros in on the acceleration of pro-Big Business “socialism” under the Nixon regime. Galbraith particularly discusses the Lockheed affair and the business drive (seconded, incidentally, by National Review) for the nationalization of the bankrupt Penn Central railroad.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NOS. 22-23

NOVEMBER 15 – DECEMBER 1, 1970

35¢

THE ELECTIONS

We live in a time of increasingly intense and unpredictable changes in attitudes and values, a time when a valid analysis of existing social and ideological trends may be completely outmoded a few months later. Who, for example, could have predicted last spring that the flourishing antiwar movement would now be dead as a dodo? Dead. . .or dormant? Any analysis of the November elections has to keep this humbling fact in mind.

Be that as it may, the press has underestimated the crushing defeat suffered by the Nixon Administration. Despite an ardent nation-wide galvanizing effort by Nixon and Agnew, despite their continual hammering at the seemingly popular issue of polarization against the Left, despite enormously greater financing and a demoralized Democratic opposition, the Democratic Party has emerged from the 1970 elections as the secure majority of the country. The Democrats gained nine Congressmen and no less than eleven governors, and their victories were scored throughout the country, South, West and Middle West. The famous Nixonian “Southern strategy” totally collapsed, and governorship races were lost throughout the South; only in Tennessee did the strategy succeed. In fact, only in Tennessee, New York, and Connecticut did the Republicans do very well at all. The common argument that the Republicans lost far fewer House races than the Administration usually loses in off-year elections overlooks a crucially important fact: that President Nixon, in contrast to all previous Presidents, did not bring a Republican House into office with him.

Furthermore, the fact that the Democrats lost a few seats in the Senate takes on proper perspective only when we realize that an unusually large number of Democratic senators were up for re-election this year-the products of the Democratic sweeps in the 1958 recession year and in the 1964 Goldwater debacle. It is all too easily forgotten that the Republicans began 1970 with the expectation of capturing the Senate.

It is about time that political commentators face the fact that the Republicans have not organized either house of Congress since 1954, and that, apart from the Presidency, we are drifting close to a one-party Democratic nation. Furthermore, there is no hope for Republican control of Congress in the foreseeable future.

The Nixon-Agnew failure seems to be due to several factors. One is the offsetting of the anti-Left “social issue” by the mess that the Nixon Administration has made of the economy; a second is the fact that the peace issue, despite its dormancy, still remains (the peace candidates in Congress did fairly well). Another reason is the fact that Nixon-Agnew overplayed their hand. While Middle Americans revile the Left, hippies, students, bombers, etc., they also have a great need to revere their President, to consider him as a wise authority figure a bit above the battle. And so the brawling nature of the Nixon-Agnew campaign put the Middle American voters off, discomfited them, made their wise authority images seem too much like local wardheelers for comfort. Furthermore, the Democrats were able to draw the teeth of Agnewism by shifting notably rightward, by stressing their own devotion to “law and order”. Thus, the clumsy attempt by the Republicans to turn such a generally revered and moderate figure as Adlai Stevenson into a crypto-Weatherman backfired badly by making the Republicans rather ridiculous, a backfiring that also beset Agnew’s attempts at rhetorical alliteration.

The failure to polarize the country against the Left was also considerably helped by the fact that the Left seems to have suddenly disappeared. The campuses are always quieter in the fall than in the spring, but even so the extent of campus relapse into apolitical passivity this fall has been truly remarkable. The Yale students have turned dramatically from the Panthers to football and Boola-Boola, and on campus after campus the story is the same.

The larger meaning of the election, then, is that the prospect of civil war that seemed to be looming on the horizon, a war in which fascist repression would have crushed a vociferous Left, seems now but a ghost of the past. The Center still holds, and more strongly than it has for several years.

Retreat From Freedom

Leonard E. Read seems to be worried; apparently he is having considerable difficulty in defending the thesis that everyone must obey all laws, no matter how noxious they may be. And so in the current Notes from FEE (“Defiance of Law”, November), Mr. Read returns to the dialogue (see “On Civil Obedience,” Lib. Forum, July). Except that it is a curious form of dialogue indeed, for Mr. Read cleaves to his lofty principle that no critic or emitter of fallacy may be mentioned in his work. At first glance, this principle seems to have a monkish, almost saintly air, an air of discussing only ideas and never people; until we realize that this attitude stifles any sort of intellectual dialogue whatever, for it means that one need never comes to grips with anyone else’s views. If philosophers or scholars upheld this view, any sort of intellectual advance would be stifled; there would be no book reviews, no critique of the unsound or advance of the sound in anyone’s work. If, for example, Henry Hazlitt, a valued contributor to Fee, had cleaved to this principle, he would never have been able to come to grips with and refute the views of Lord Keynes, for Keynes cannot be refuted without his name being mentioned enroute.

At any rate: Mr. Read seems to be worried about the anarchist critique of his worship of unjust law, and so he now returns to a further defense, a defense in which he can only sink into a quagmire of ever deeper statism. In the first place, taking up our example of Prohibition, Mr. Read advances the curious argument that if one persisted in drinking in violation of the law, no one would be interested in repealing it, since the liquor would then be readily obtained. Here, Read ignores the fact that liquor was indeed obtained during the 1920’s, but only at the high cost of decline in quality, rise in price, deprivation of access, and occasional arrest. Historically, Prohibition was repealed precisely because law enforcement broke down in the face of massive civil disobedience, not because the law was piously heeded and then people turned to legal channels of repeal. But perhaps it is also a lofty principle of Mr. Read’s to ignore inconvenient historical fact as well the names of his Opposition.

There is no point in going over Mr. Read’s latest lucubrations in fine detail, except to indicate that in his desperate attempt to salvage his apotheosis of The Law he falls into two statist fallacies so grievous as to cause the late Frank Chodorov, great individualist and former staff member of FEE, to revolve in anguish in his grave. First, Read asserts that man in not only an individual, he is also, in addition, a “social being”, and that therefore he must adopt not only self-responsibility but also, “social responsibility”. In declaring that “society” exists as a sort of super-entity more than, and clearly higher than, each individual member, Read is flying against the great principle of methodological individualism held by FEE staffer Ludwig von Mises and against the truth noted by Chodorov that “society are people.” Second, and still worse for a presumed libertarian, Mr. Read makes a second mighty leap to imply that “society” is somehow embodied in whatever structure of positive law happens to exist, and that therefore the very fact of being human and living in society requires that one obey all the laws, because one is necessarily stuck in the existing society; “Law breaking,” declares Read, is therefore “no more rational than resigning from the human race.” In thus presuming to identify the individual with society and then society with the State, Mr. Read completes his steady path away from liberty and toward despotism, for he has thereby repeated the essence of every statist apologia in modern history. Even though one of his FEE staff members is head of the Nockian Society, Mr. Read has tragically forgotten Albert Jay Nock’s great demonstration of the inherent disparity and conflict between society and the State.

Nock; Chodorov; Mises; Tolstoy; Thoreau; wherever we look, we find that in recent years Leonard E. Read has beat a steady and increasingly rapid retreat from freedom. It is a sad tale, but one not uncommon in the history of thought.

The Shaffer Dictionary

By Butler Shaffer

The following definitions comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous—and often frustrating—manner.

EDUCATION:

the method I use to promote my ideas.

PROPAGANDA:

the method you use to promote your ideas.

DO-GOODER:

one who has demonstrated total incompetence at handling his own affairs, and who seeks to make this talent available to others.

PUBLIC EDUCATION:

the recognition that, in an egalitarian society even the ignorance should be shared.

DICTATORSHIP:

the kind of government under which other men live.

CIVIC-MINDED:

that quality exemplified by those who work unselfishly for the realization of government projects which will provide them with government contracts.

POLITICIAN:

one who, recognizing the value of truth and reason, seeks to preserve the same by economizing their use.

STATEMANSHIP:

the distinction between “statesmanship” and “tyranny” is the distinction between “seduction” and “rape”: a brief sales pitch.

CONSPIRACY:

anything done by two or more persons of which I disapprove or do not understand.

STIRRINGS, RIGHT AND LEFT

In these changing times, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell “left”, “right” or in between without a detailed scorecard. There are new stirrings throughout the left-right spectrum, and all through that spectrum authoritarian and libertarian elements appear and vie for support. The November Festival of Liberation in Los Angeles, for example, was addressed not only by such veteran anarcho-capitalists as Robert LeFevre and the editor of the Lib. Forum, but also by the confused and inconsistent but definitely anarchistic “leftist” Paul Goodman, and also by the great one-man crusader for liberty in the psychiatric profession, Dr. Thomas Szasz, who while now embraced by the New Left, himself looks upon Hayek and Mises as his philosophical mentors. And over at the bastion of Conservatism, National Review, a recent reviewer, while hailing Soviet Democrat Irving Howe’s recent edited work attacking the New Left, also praised the New Leftist journalist Nicholas von Hoffman for his critiques of Liberal Social Democracy.

On the Left, increasing support for the libertarian and anarchist positions has appeared recently in several forms. The liberal weekly The Nation has recently acquired the veteran left-anarchoid Emile Capouya as its literary editor, a move which is perhaps reflected in the recent favorable lead review of several anarchist books. (Kingsley Widmer, “Anarchism Revived: Left, Right, and All Around,” The Nation, November 16). Professor Widmer, himself an anarchist (probably of the anarcho-syndicalist variety), reviews the Tuccille book, Radical Libertarianism, Daniel Guérin’s Anarchism (both recently reviewed in the Lib. Forum), and Professor Robert Paul Wolff’s (a recent convert to anarchism) In Defense of Anarchism (Harper & Row, 86 pp. $4.50, Paper $1.00). Even though he disagrees with Tuccille’s laissez-faire capitalism, Widmer’s treatment of Jerry’s book is the most favorable of the three. Widmer sees that our kind of anarchism is the expression of a native American libertarianism which “may be one of our finest and most redeeming heritages.” Widmer calls our position “anarcho-rightism”, which “takes laissez-faire economics and open competition seriously–not just as a rhetorical cover for corporate merger with the state–and rigorously holds to liberal notions of the absolute autonomy of the individual.” Again, accurately, Widmer adds that “Anarcho-rightism can be related to many avowed 19th-century anarchists, such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, and . . . to a long line of right-wing iconoclasts, such as H. L. Mencken, and to elements in the thought of our contradictory agrarians and Populists.” He then mentions the role of myself and Karl Hess, and gives an accurate account of Tuccille’s positions on police, neighborhood and voluntary associations, removal or drastic limitation on the State, etc. While friendly to Tuccille, Widmer shows lack of understanding of the free market in speaking of Tuccille’s “mad faith in the harmonious morality of the market place”. It is, of course, not at all a matter of “faith” but of rational understanding of economic law, an understanding of which most anarchists, past and present, have been lamentably ignorant. There is also the usual left contention that even free-market corporations are somehow private “states”, which Widmer wishes to see replaced by “workers’ control”. However, Widmer concedes the sincerity of the anarcho-capitalist position, and declares that “it’s a pleasure to hear from a rightism which is not merely a cover for snobbery and greed.” He ends the review of Tuccille by noting Carl Oglesby’s call of a few years ago for “the fusion of libertarian Right and Left in America”, and he brands Tuccille superior to Noam Chomsky’s introduction to the Guérin book in recognizing the need of the American movement to “break out of leftist cliches”, and not, like Chomsky, identifying anarchism with socialism.

In his review of Guérin, Widmer criticizes the French follower of Proudhon and Bakunin for still being tied to the mystique of the “working class” and ignoring the individualist aspects of anarchism, while Chomsky is criticized for “his narrow insistence on following somewhat doctrinaire European historians and seeing anarchism as purely integral to socialism. . . . He does not recognize that much of what can, and has been, reasonably called anarchism, from William Godwin through Paul Goodman, has been non-Socialist in any usual leftist sense. The anarcho-Marxism of the New Left, now often subordinated to neo-Leninism, linguistically misleads him.”

Widmer concludes his review-article on a hopeful and ecumenical note. “Whether by way of traditional European Left-libertarianism, native American individualistic rightism, or philosophical anarchism, we arrive at the necessity for transforming our institutions. Why are we anarchists now almost in fashion in America? Because, in fact, the state’s illegitimacy is becoming widely, if fragmentarily, manifest to many.”

In the meanwhile, left-liberal Margot Hentoff has a perceptive review of Bill Buckley’s The Governor Listeth in the New York Review of Books (December 3). (Worth the price of admission is the cartoon of Chairman Bill by the marvelous political caricaturist David Levine, making Buckley look something like an evil chipmunk). Essentially, Mrs. Hentoff is nostalgic about Buckley’s former libertarianism and attacks him for abandoning his previous quasi-libertarianism principles to sit at the feet of Power and the Establishment. Mrs. Hentoff observes the fact that in his recent essays, “we come upon him in the middle of a journey toward a rather awful kind of moderation,” a moderation that has come upon Bill as he “moves away from the absence of power, that condition which was his abiding charm.” Hear, hear! Buckley, she notes, “is beginning to take on the weight of middle-aged responsibility, sounding more often like a resilient prince of the Church than like a purifying spirit.”

For example, Mrs. Hentoff notes that Buckley comes out in favor of the government having the “responsibility to declare hopelessly irresponsible parents unqualified to bring up children, who could then be turned over to charitable organizations to bring up”; at this point, she adds, “one realizes that Mr. Buckley is very far from either the radical right or the conservative libertarians.” She then notes that Bill Buckley has read the free-market economist Milton Friedman out of his movement (on much the same grounds as he read me out years ago-for the supposed intellectual frivolity of advocating denationalization of lighthouses). Arguing about legalization of narcotics. Buckley reports that Friedman came out against the licensing and compulsory inspection of prostitutes, noting that “after all, if the customer contracts a venereal disease, the prostitute having warranted that she was clean, he has available a tort action against her.”

What Professor Friedman was adumbrating here was simply the libertarian common law, and the availability of tort actions at that law for fraud, a method for more moral than, and superior to, any government inspection. And what, Mrs. Hentoff asks, is Buckley’s comment on this? “The articulation of libertarian theory to such lengths as Mr. Friedman is able to take it ought to be understood as a form of intellectual sport. . . . But it is terribly important not to take this kind of thing seriously.”

As Bill Buckley moves toward the seats of Power, confers with the President in the Bahamas, and becomes a kind of intellectual Clown Prince of the Administration, any kind of serious devotion to liberty can seem only like sport and frivolity in his eyes. It seems that “seriousness” is only warranted by the imprimatur of the State. From the master of the arch and recondite quip, from a man who once claimed to be a libertarian, all this is high irony indeed.

Mrs. Hentoff perceptively sees that “what happened to Mr. Buckley, along with the rest of us, was the breaking down of traditional ideological compartments, the blurring of traditional alliances and enmities. Not only did the old New Deal and New Frontier politics lose credence with the left, but the left then walked off with the conservative banners of nonintervention, freedom from government coercion, rugged individualism, decentralization, and, in some cases, radial separatism.” At the same time, Bill Buckley was abandoning these very causes and becoming an effete and impudent servitor of Power.

While Bill Buckley is attacked for abandoning libertarianism by a left-liberal, an olive branch has been held out to libertarians from a most unexpected quarter. Young ultra-traditionalist Brad Evans, in a fascinating article, “The Young Conservatives: Coming Unglued”, Triumph (November), virtually calls for an alliance with the libertarians at the opposite pole, as against the Power-loving statist Buckleyites in the “fusionist” Center. Coming from a leading follower of Brent Bozell and his pro-Carlist Spanish Catholics, men who revile Generalissimo Franco as a liberal sellout, this is wondrous news indeed. But it makes a considerable amount of sense. For Mr. Evans sees that, unlike the fusionists and their steady march toward apologetics for the American State and the status quo, the libertarians, like his own Triumphantists, totally reject the American Leviathan. Both groups cleave to principle and both eschew the opportunism of Power.

But, furthermore, Mr. Evans displays a genuine admiration for the libertarian position, for he understands that like the Catholic libertarian Lord Acton, the clinging to an absolute moral position provides a solid groundwork for a radical attack on the status quo. In contrast, Brad Evans has nothing but scorn for Buckleyite fusionists, at whose hands fusionism “provides a haven for those who theoretically espouse maximum individual freedom, but recognize that cause to be outside the conventional American political configuration, and so quake at the consequences of carrying through the logic of their position.” Furthermore, fusionism is “a convenient tool for those who see the currents and would make their damnedest for political paydirt.” Similarly, the yen for power leads the fusionists to take a Burkean stand for the American Constitution; as Evans perceptively sees, the trouble with this Burkean mentality “is its compatibility to any regime, whatever its virtues or lack of them, so long as it is the established regime. For opportunistic fusionists it thus affords a rational for conformity to, even apologetics for, a going order that is the object of the critique of both of the constituent theses, libertarian or traditionalist, of the fusionist synthesis. Because of the Burkean reverence for what is, that is to say, the aspiring fusionist politician can identify himself with the order while at the same time maintaining fundamental theoretical opposition to its characteristics.”

Turning from the despised fusionists to the libertarians, particularly the ex-YAF libertarians, Mr. Evans describes their various schools of thought, and tries, gently but firmly, to point us on the “road to Rome.” Recognition of an objective moral order, such as is provided in Roman Catholic thought, would provide the libertarian, as in the case of Acton, with a firm and comprehensive philosophical groundwork from which to oppose State power. Mr. Evans declares that “the good life is the life lived in accordance with the natural order of man’s being-the life that flows from a well-ordered soul”; and a society possessing a state “which cuts itself off from moral authority has at its command only naked power, without the justification of any authority.”

Mr. Evans concludes his interesting article by stating that “The fact that libertarians and traditionalists have chosen to eschew the pursuit of pluralistic contentment and have cast off the shackles of political power-mongering is perhaps a sign of the inauguration of a higher, fuller commitment. It raises the encouraging prospect that the two may soon rise from their seats at the Piraeus and make their way, together, back to the city – and then to The City.”

I am willing to engage in a philosophical dialogue with Mr. Evans; it may surprise him that I, at least, believe firmly in the existence of an objective moral order, one discoverable by man’s reason. Furthermore, I see nothing at all wrong with any religious tradition, among which Roman Catholicism is out-standing, which endorses this rational moral order and attempts to encase it in a theistic framework. Some of the best libertarians I know are devoted Roman Catholics. Even Carlist Catholic-Triumphantists had their Carlist State, one which they believed to have sufficient moral and theological “authority”, their alliance with libertarianism might come to an abrupt end. Thus, Mr. Evans does disquietingly say that “the laws of the American state which they (the libertarians) properly recognize as evil are not evil because they issue from a state, but rather because they lack any grounding in legitimate authority.” Perhaps if Mr. Evans delved more deeply into the rational (and even theological) moral order, he might find that the State, any state per se, is morally evil because it is founded and has its very being in permanent aggression against the life and property of its subjects. Then Mr. Evans and the libertarians could indeed return together to the city, and some of us even to The City.

Among all the fusionists, I have always had a particular fondness for Frank S. Meyer, the founder of fusionism, and despite his numerous ideological sins: his fondness for Voegelinian traditionalism, for the American Constitution, for war and militarism, and for a global crusade for the slaughter of Communists, at home and abroad. For despite these sins, Frank Meyer has always been the one Buckleyite who has been visibly uneasy at the toadying to Nixonism that the Conservative Movement has become; he has been by far the most libertarian, as well as the most rationalistic, of the National Review crew, as his numerous debates within that movement—e.g. with Bozell, Burnham, and Donald Zoll—can well attest. Of all the Buckleyites, he has been virtually the only writer willing to make waves, willing to stand up for principle even when it becomes embarrassing. Thus, only Meyer had the courage to oppose the disastrous and statist Nixon-Friedman guaranteed income program from the very start. Take, also several of Meyer’s recent writings. There is his slashing review of Garry Wills’ new book, Nixon Agonistes (National Review, October 20). Now it is true that one would expect Meyer to read Wills out of the conservative movement for having become a New Leftist. But the brunt of Meyer’s hardhitting critique is that Garry Wills, now as before when he was a conservative, has been throughout largely animated by a deep-seated hatred of nineteenth-century liberalism. The step from a pro-Ruskin anti-free-market Catholic Conservative to an anti-free market New Left communalist is not so very great, after all.

Another fine reaffirmation of his libertarianish position is Meyer’s recent “Richard M. Weaver: An Appreciation”, Modern Age (Summer-Fall, 1970), in which Meyer pays tribute to the late Professor Weaver’s blend of the traditionalist and libertarian (though of course still archist) position. And then, Frank Meyer has become the only National Review-fusionist with the guts to take out completely after the “counter-culture”; for the rest of the fusionists, with their fine eye to the main chance, have clearly been reluctant to alienate their youth constituency. Meyer’s recent “Counterculture or Anticulture?”, (National Review, November 3) is a slashing rationalistic attack on the new nihilism. Meyer calls the counterculture, “that amalgam of dope, rock, scruff, amorality and superstition which thrives on the campuses and in the pseude-intellectual enclaves of our great cities.” But it is not a counterculture, but an “anticulture”, “for culture is and always has been dependent for its very existence on civility, on a widespread acceptance of standards which make civilized order possible.”

In contrast, charges Meyer, “the hallmark of the counterculture . . . is precisely its principled hatred of civility, its violent opposition at all levels to ordered freedom, to the tradition of rational discourse, to the very structure of civilized life. Above all, it hates the prime characteristic of the civilized man, that internalized discipline which looks with suscipicion upon these spontaneous, unexamined emotional reactions we have inherited from our barbarian and animal past. The unexamined life which Socrates found unworthy of civilized man is to the devotees of the counterculture their be-all and end-all . . . The constant target of their attack is “middle-class values”, a phrase that inquiring analysis reveals to denote the entire gamut of the values upon which Western civilization is founded . . . Whatever one may think of the specific components of the counterculture, considered severally each of them has an anticivilizational aspect; taken together. . .these aspects reinforce each other to make of the counterculture as a whole a formidable attack on civilized values.”

Specifically: “The styles in hair and dress are the least dangerous of these phenomena, except insofar as they are consciously directed toward antagonizing the rest of society and insofar as the predilection for dirt and scruff breaks down self-discipline. Rock, with its incessant and insisting sensual destruction of an ordered universe, with the nihilistic impact of so much of its verbal content, ‘provides the kids’, as John Coyne writes in his new book The Kumquat Statement, ‘with their phraseology, their philosophy, their life-style, the ideas and attitudes that motivate them. . .’ Marijuana. . .is celebrated as a mode of escape from conceptual thinking, from the pressures of self-discipline without which civilization is impossible. Add to this stew the sort of beliefs and myths that pervade the counter-culture-the hatred of ‘the ethic of achievement’, the attack upon the nuclear family and heterosexual monogamy in the name of “polymorphous sexuality”; stir in the superstitions that proliferate within it–astrology, phony Eastern mysticism, Satanism. Corrosive of reason and tradition alike, this devil’s brew”, concludes Meyer, constitutes a great danger to civilization.

To turn from the libertarian and rationalistic stirrings of Evans and Meyer to the recent work of Leonard Read’s youth leader, Dr. George C. Roche III, is a dizzying plunge into banality. Roche’s article “On Anarcho-Libertarianism: What’s In a Name?”, (New Guard, November) is only interesting as an indication that Mr. Read has been hurting from our exposure of his retreat from freedom, and young Roche has apparently been assigned to make the rebuttal. Mr. Roche does not quite violate the Readian tenet of never mentioning the name of an opponent, but he does quote the editor of the Lib. Forum at some length without mentioning my name. (Under its new management, the New Guard has obviously jettisoned any and all pretense at libertarianism, as can be seen from its recent gutter-review of the book by its former valued contributor, Jerry Tuccille, by one Jared Lobdell). Mr. Roche, who Jerry Tuccille, by one Jared Lobdell). Mr. Roche, whom FEE has absurdly billed as having completed Lord Acton’s history of freedom, repeats the discredited Widener smear about my appearance at a Socialist Scholars Conference, and points with horror to Kent State having been described by me as the murder of peacefully demonstrating students, and the Chicago Conspiracy trial as having also been described as a repression of free speech. (What else were they?) After Roche somehow tries to mesh me with Russian Nihilists, Herbert Marcuse, and Mark Rudd, we can mercifully leave this great “historian of freedom” to his invicible ignorance; except that I am also attacked for daring to praise the French Revolution as being fought for property rights; our historian avers that “the French Revolution was totally unconcerned with property rights or personal rights for anyone.” Apparently this eminent historian of freedom has never heard of Sieyes, or Condorcet, or the Declaration of the Rights of Man or the enormous influence that the American Revolution had upon the French. But it suffices here to inform Mr. Roche that there is on the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education one Ludwig von Mises, and Mr. Roche might find it illuminating and disturbing to ask Professor Mises sometimes about the French Revolution. Perhaps that will shake him out of the Burkean quagmire into which he has sunk.

POWER AND MARKET

Power and Market: Government and the Economy, by Murray N. Rothbard. Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies. Hard Cover, $6.00; paperback, $3.00. 225 pp. Also available from Society for Individual Liberty, 400 Bonifant Road, Silver Spring, Maryland 20904.

by R. A. Childs, Jr.

Nearly nineteen years ago, a young man in his mid-twenties, not yet having received his Ph.D., set out on the task of boiling down the magnum opus of Ludwig von Mises-Human Action-into a concise volume suitable for use as a college text in economics. Over the years, the plan was changed; the task snowballed until it was finished in 1959. No longer a “boiled down” version of HUMAN ACTION, the work had become a masterpiece in its own right, more comprehensive in purely economic issues than HUMAN ACTION itself, more carefully systematic, encompassing more issues in the subject than any work before or since. The work, however, was pronounced “too long” and “too anarchistic” by its financier-publisher; most of the last third was thrown out altogether; the rest was severely condensed into the last chapter of the published work.

The book was poorly promoted. Instead of being advanced as the work to supplement or even replace Mises, as a purely economic treatise (and as being much easier to read and understand), it was publicized by the Foundation for Economic Education as merely “a graduate-level comprehensive development of the economic principles of the free market by one of the outstanding young students of von Mises”. It has since gone out of print.

The work was MAN, ECONOMY, AND STATE: A Treatise on Economic Principles (2 vols., Van Nostrand, 1962). The author is Murray N. Rothbard.

Now, at last, what was to have been the third volume of that work, the literal culmination of an entire school of economic thought (Austrianism), has been published, revised and updated, by the Institute for Humane Studies. It is entitled POWER AND MARKET: Government and the Economy. In 225 closely-packed pages, it presents a comprehensive critique of the role of the state in the economic system. It now can be said of POWER AND MARKET, when taken together with MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, which is still independent of it. What Henry Hazlitt correctly said of HUMAN ACTION when it appeared in 1949: it extends the logical unity and precision of economics beyond any other work. As Mises went beyond his teacher, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, so Murray Rothbard has gone beyond Mises.

It is important at the outset to point out precisely how and where Rothbard has gone beyond Mises, with the publication of this work. It is undeniable that Mises’ contributions to the science of economics have been immense, but his philosophical framework is unfortunately Kantian. Rothbard is, on the other hand, an unblemished Aristotelian, taking note of many of the contributions to philosophy made by the Thomists.

Mises believes in the subjectivity of values, that all ethical standards are arbitrary, that concerns with justice are idle; he is a frank ethical nihilist. Rothbard, on the other hand, believes in the necessity of establishing principles to guide men’s choices and actions-in a rational ethic. With such differences in philosophical frameworks, it is to be expected that Rothbard and Mises will have some differences.

In particular, Mises’ value-subjectivism and anti-justice positions lead him to simply dismiss ethical questions out of hand. It also leads him to adopt many starkly anti-libertarian positions. In HUMAN ACTION, he states that “he who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is. . .an abbettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all. The maintenance of a government apparatus of courts, police officers, prisons and of armed forces requires considerable expenditure. To levy taxes for these purposes is fully compatible with the freedom the individual enjoys in a free market economy.” Thus, Mises does not even consider taxation and the draft to be violations of freedom! How, with positions like these, can Mises objectively analyze these and other statist measures? The answer is that he only skims over them.

Murray N. Rothbard thus becomes the first major economist to be a ruthlessly consistent adherent to free-market principles. Mises’ statist positions blinded him to many things which Rothbard treats as interventions–simply because Mises thought them “necessary.” The position which Rothbard takes in POWER AND MARKET is a position which Mises should have taken more than twenty years ago. If he had, he would have saved all of us a lot of trouble arriving where we have at last arrived without him.

POWER AND MARKET is Rothbard’s departure from the mistaken path Mises has taken. It consists of seven tightly integrated chapters taking up government intervention in the dealings of men, and refuting the rationalizations so often used to justify the initiation of force by the state against individuals.

In chapter one, and in the last part of his chapter on taxation (the section on “Voluntary Contributions to Government”), Rothbard takes up a great many arguments against a purely free stateless, market, and gives summary answers to the questions of how a free market can enforce the rights of person and property against aggressors without a government. Unfortunately, he doesn’t go into this practical problem enough, but his work here can easily be supplemented by such works as Morris & Linda Tannehill’s THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY, and Jarret Wollstein’s SOCIETY WITHOUT COERCION (especially the 2nd edition, now in preparation). He shows brilliantly, however, why a government cannot conform to the libertarian rule of non-initiation of force; in this respect, Rothbard takes a radical turn away from even traditional laissez-faire economists, by repudiating the state in its entirety. Answering the charge that a government is a necessary precondition for the free market, Rothbard says that “It was the fallacy of the classical economists to consider goods and services in terms of large classes; instead, modern economics demonstrated that services must be considered in terms of marginal units. . . .If we begin to treat whole classes instead of marginal units, we can discover a great myriad of necessary, indispensable goods and services, all of which might be considered as ‘preconditions’ of market activity. Is not land room vital, or food, . . . or clothing, or shelter? Can a market long exist without them?. . .Must all these goods and services therefore be supplied by the State and the State only?” Especially interesting is his integration of ethical and economic arguments. Discussing the hotly debated question of whether or not a State can exist without initiating force, Rothbard rebuts the “limited governmentalists” in a crucial ethical-economic argument which no archist has yet succeeded in refuting.

Chapter two is a presentation of the fundamentals of intervention into peaceful social relations. Unlike Mises, who treats only a relatively small class of coercive actions as “interventions” into the free market, Rothbard takes up the issue systematically, classifying as “intervention” any initiation of force in social relations. Thus it is important to note that this is not merely a work on economics; in a much wider and important sense, it is an analysis of the indirect effects of the initiation of force in society. It fills in the skeleton, so to speak, of the fundamental libertarian principle of non-initiation of force, with complex theoretical analysis-showing both its direct consequences, and its complex indirect consequences.

Three broad categories are treated: ausistic, binary and triangular intervention. “Autistic intervention” is when the intervener commands “an individual subject to do or not to do certain things when these actions directly involve the individual’s person or property alone.” It occurs when the aggressor coerces a person (or many persons) but does not receive any good or service in exchange. “Binary intervention” occurs when the aggressor enforces “a exchange between the individual subject and himself, or a coerced ‘gift’ to himself from the subject,” such as highway robbery, taxes, enslavement, and conscription. Thirdly, there is “triangular intervention,” in which the aggressor compels or prohibits an exchange between a pair of subjects. Rothbard analyses the relations between intervention and conflict, the nature of democracy and voluntary actions, the relationship between individual “utility” and resistance to invasion, and several other issues.

Chapter three treats a host of interventions under the general heading of “triangular intervention”. Price control, product control, licenses, standards of quality & safety, immigration laws, child labor laws, conscription, antitrust laws, conservation laws, eminent domain, and a host of other things fall before Rothbard’s logic. Rothbard is here, as elsewhere, a master of the “reductio ad absurdum”. Thus, for example, he reduces the principle behind tariffs to smitherens, just by extending it to its logical outcome–to show that it is an attack on trade itself and thus leads inevitably to economic solipsism. If we cannot legitimately trade freely with people outside the state? or city? or, finally and absurdly, Jones’ farm? Where does it suddenly become absurd to keep on extending the principle and halting trade for the benefit of incompetents? His arguments are clean, concise and ruthless.

Chapter four and five are a back-to-back treatment of two major forms of “binary interventionism”: Taxation and government expenditures. He shows the distortions wrought on the free market by all forms of both. In the Chapter on government expenditures, he offers an analysis of subsidies and government ownership, showing how they distort the market, and undertakes very incisive critiques of both public ownership and democracy. He lays bare the fallacies of ever trying to conduct government on a so-called “business basis.”

Murray Rothbard’s chapter on taxation is the most incisive analysis in existence. While Mises, in HUMAN ACTION, devoted only six pages to the intervention of taxation, and even claims that there can be such a thing as a “neutral tax,” Rothbard devotes over 65 pages to ruthlessly dissecting all economic and moral arguments for taxation. Rothbard considers the market effects of virtually every form of taxation, and virtually demolishes the notion of neutral taxation, a mythical beast which, Mises says, “would not divert the operation of the market from the lines in which it would develop in the absence of any taxation.” Especially interesting is his section on the so-called “canons of justice in taxation,” offering a criticism of all the traditional notions of this absurd concept. As in the rest of POWER AND MARKET, Rothbard is not content merely to refute the trivial arguments usually brought forth in all sorts of economic issues, and turns his guns on the fundamentals, such as stopping to consider why the economists consider the canons of “justice” in taxation in the first place. In this case, the quest arose from the earlier philosophical quest for the “just price” of goods in general. Eventually, in economic thought, the “just price” was simply dropped, or considered coextensive with the free market price. But why then do economists still harp on a “just tax”? Obviously because while the just price would be equated with the market price, there is simply no “market tax” for taxation to be linked with, since it cannot be voluntary. The quest for a “just tax,” then, has its roots in statist apologetics – in the minds of those economists who will simply not carefully and objectively consider the nature of the state itself. As for the commonly considered notions of the “just tax,” says Rothbard, all merely smuggle a fundamental presupposition in through the back door-the notion that taxation itself is somehow “just”. The “justice” of a particular form of a treatment, after all, is derived from the justice of the fundamental treatment itself. And nobody has ever succeeded in justifying taxation itself. Rothbard, in point after point, succeeds in reducing taxation on economic and ethical grounds to oblivion.

Chapter six is perhaps the most innovative in the book. It is the introduction of a new task for praxeology in philosophy: the title is “Antimarket Ethics: A Praxeological Critique.” It consists of a critique of over 16 different ethical positions in their objections to a free market–everything from the position of altruism to the position of the Aristotelian-Thomistic school of philosophical thought, ranging over such diverse issues as the morality of human nature, the impossibility of equality, the problem of security, the problem of “luck”, charity, poverty, human rights and property rights, over-and-under-development and the natures of power and coercion. This last is especially exciting. Rothbard takes up the difference between power over nature and power over man; he reduces the bogey of “economic power” to dust, showing that it is simply “the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange.” Every case of “economic power,” he shows, rests solely on someone’s right to refuse to make, or to continue to make, a certain exchange on the market. And more: he shows that there are only two options open to us, and that we must choose between them. This is a marvelous dissection of what he calls the “middle of the road statist.” Suppose, says Rothbard, that “A refuses to make an exchange with B. What are we to say, or what is the government to do, if B brandishes a gun and orders A to make the exchange? This is the crucial question. There are only two positions we may take on the matter: either that B is committing violence and should be stopped at once, or that B is perfectly justified in taking this step because he is simply ‘counteracting the subtle coercion’ of economic power wielded by A”. Whether we like it or not, in other words, we must either defend, in moral principle, A’s person & property against invasion by B, or we defend B’s alleged “right” to enforce an exchange. “If we choose the ‘economic power’ concept,” says Rothbard, “we must employ violence to combat any refusal of exchange; if we reject it we employ violence to prevent any violent imposition of exchange. There is no way to escape this either-or choirce.” And: “What would be the consequence of adopting the ‘economic-power’ premise? It would be a society of slavery: for what else is prohibiting the refusal to work?”

The final chapter treats crucial questions of the nature of economics and its uses, the nature of the implicit moralizing of most economists, economics and social ethics, and the differences between the market principle and the principle of coercion. His notion of the relation between economics and ethics is especially vital: economics, he says, cannot by itself establish ethical positions, “but it does furnish existential laws which cannot be ignored by anyone framing ethical conclusions—just as no one can rationally decide whether product X is a good or bad food until its consequences on the human body are ascertained and taken into account.”

POWER AND MARKET is replete with intellectual ammunition for the libertarian. In fact, no other book provides so much information which can be readily digested and used in debating crucial issues of our day, when they involve the free market. It is original and comprehensive in scope: its systematic critiques of statism are devastating on every level. This is not merely a book on economics – it is a book on the nature and forms of coercion on every level. It shows the fallacies of everything from taxation, to democracy, to government spending, and devastates such arguments as those of “economic power” and the bogey of “production vs. distribution”–merely by pointing out, in this last case, that it is the existence of taxation and government itself which creates for the first time a separation of “distribution” from production, bringing the whole pseudo-problem into being In case after case, Rothbard squashes the arguments of statists of every breed, by reducing them to absurdities, by pointing out their unadmitted premises, smuggled-in ethical positions, and plain logical fallacies.

With POWER AND MARKET, libertarianism and Austrian economics move into the intellectual vanguard of economic thought. It is the best work in economics since Rothbard’s own MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, which was in turn the best work since Mises’ HUMAN ACTION.

Saying that reading POWER AND MARKET is a must for any libertarian interested in presenting an intellectual case for liberty is an understatement. With works of this caliber in every field of intellectual endeavor, the foundations for a comprehensive and fully integrated libertarian ideology would be firmly established.

POWER AND MARKET does not, as some might think, belong on a shelf besides MAN, ECONOMY AND STATE, nor next to HUMAN ACTION. In more than one way, it belongs on a shelf by itself.

NOW! AT LAST!

The long-awaited work by

Murray N. Rothbard

The sequel to “Man, Economy, and State”

Is Available!

IT is CALLED

POWER AND MARKET

POWER AND MARKET demonstrates how a free market can be truly free, providing protection and defense without the need for coercive, monopolistic government.

POWER AND MARKET analyzes all forms of government intervention and their consequences, focussing on intervention as a grantor of monopolistic privilege, direct and hidden.

POWER AND MARKET dissects the rationale and effects of every kind of taxation, including the poll tax and the “Randian” voluntary taxation solution.

POWER AND MARKET provides the first thorough critique in years of the Henry George “single tax”.

POWER AND MARKET exposes the inner contradictions of the theories of democracy.

POWER AND MARKET extends praxeology to a critique and refutation of important anti-market ethical doctrines, including: the problems of immoral choices, equality, security, the alleged joys of status, charity and poverty, “materialism”, “other forms” of coercion, human and property rights. Also an exposition of libertarian social philosophy in refuting a book solely devoted to attacking it.

Available in paper ($3.00) or hard-cover ($6.00).
From:

Institute For Humane Studies

1134 Crane St.

Menlo Park, Calif. 94015

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

Optimism One

Libertarians who have not yet discovered the writings of F. M. Esfandiary are in for an electrifying experience as they come across this author for the first time. Esfandiary is an Iranian-born novelist, essayist and social critic, now living in this country, who has recently published his fourth book. I have had the pleasure of reading two of his novels–Identity Card and Day of Sacrifice – both of them dealing with the incredible stagnation of governmental bureaucracy and cultural reactionism in the middle east. Now this author has come out with his first book of nonfiction, Optimism One, published by W. W. Norton & Co., New York City.

Optimism One is the product of one of the most original and revolutionary thinkers of our time. In a crystal-clear prose style, carefully trimmed of all verbal fat, Esfandiary sets forth a philosophy that runs counter, on every level, to the prevailing intellectual pessimism espoused by most current writers. Esfandiary is in love with life, in love with being on earth and the prospect of reaching across the universe, in love with the modern technology that has brought the human race the highest standard of living it has ever known. There are times when he sounds a bit like an open-ended Ayn Rand might sound today had she developed her vision and expanded it, instead of choking it off with personal biases.

Esfandiary sees a day, not too far off, when man will have shucked off all his old gods: religion; cultural stagnation; fear of his own potential; guilt reactions to feats of accomplishment; the myth that “things are worse now than they have ever been” (according to the author, there is more freedom and less violence in the world today than ever before and the trend is continuing); the notion that the ego and the self is somehow evil; the idea that man needs the institution of government to survive; and ultimately, the myth that death is inevitable. As the author puts it: “If it is natural to die then the hell with nature. Why submit to its tyranny? We must rise above nature. We must refuse to die.”

Esfandiary is not the first to talk about suspended animation (cryonics), the implantation of the human brain in more durable synthetic bodies (cyborgs), controlled mutation and anti-gravity centers as a means of creating physical immortality. But he is the first non-science fiction writer, to my knowledge, to speak of these developments as inevitable and as beneficial for the human race. The reaction of most people to the concept of cryonics (freezing a dying body until a day when science can reverse the process) has been: “But there are too many people on earth already! What will we do if nobody dies anymore?”

Space travel and the distribution of the human race on other planets is usually the first solution offered by advocates of cryonics. But Esfandiary’s vision is more farranging than that. He regards the act of in-body conception as primitive and reactionary. Civilized people of the near-future will refuse to procreate in the old way but will, instead, generate life outside the body (this has already been accomplished in Italy and elsewhere although, as far as I know, the foetuses were destroyed within a week or two after conception). Women’s liberationists will be happy to know that they may soon be liberated from the “tyranny of childbirth.” With more and more people living indefinitely, the need for procreation will diminish. The quality of life will come under the direct control of science; more durable life-forms will be generated outside the human body and the birthrate will fall to a level now undreamed of.

Current concepts of education, housing, entertainment and commercial enterprise will also be radically altered in the rapidly-approaching age of communications satellites, lasers, magnetic tapes, telepsychic communication, individual cartridges for television, transportable dwelling units (Buckminster Fuller, Safdi and others already have working plans for apartment units that can be detached from apartment complexes and navigated over land and water).

Esfandiary also considers government to be an archaic institution, and he is optimistic that more people will come to realize this and do away with it just as they are doing away with their immature psychological dependence un religion and other forms of superstition. At the same time he recognizes the need for political action to reduce the misery and enslavement many people are suffering at the hands of government today.

Esfandiary is a radical in the purest sense of the word. He accepts nothing on faith, nothing as an absolute merely because most others happen to accept it as a given truth. His vision transcends the present and speaks of the future in its historical perspective, as a logical development to what has already taken place. He does have idiocyncracies which sometimes get in the way of his logic (he is moralistic about not eating meat and fish for example), but most of his ideas are solid. Buy Optimism One and read it. Then go back and read his fiction. He is a writer whose voice, I am reasonably sure, will rise high above the usual babble that passes for serious thought today.

*The subject of cryonics and life extension in general is one that will become more important as time goes on. Readers with any information on the subject are invited to write me % P.O. Box 41, East White Plains, N.Y. 10604. No hate mail please.

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME II, NO. 24

December 15, 1970

35¢

DEATH OF THE LEFT

Signs of the death of the Left are everywhere. When we proclaimed last spring that the New Left was dead, at least in heart and brain (“The New Left, RIP”, March 15) we shocked many of our readers; but now it is clear to all that the Left is in a state of total collapse. For example, the campus. Last spring, the eminent conservative sociologist R.A. Nisbet wrote an article asserting that the student revolution was finished; Cambodia and Kent State seemed to make a mockery of Professor Nisbet’s claim, but now he has had the last laugh. It is true that the student movement is always least active in the fall, and then picks up momentum in the spring; but not since the glorious days of the apathy of the 1950’s has the student movement, on campus after campus across the country, been so totally kaput. Reports from all over the country confirm this observation.

Thus, take Columbia and Yale, two hotbeds of insurrection only a short while ago. Only last spring, Panthermania had seized the Yale campus like a frenetic disease; agitation for the Panthermania had seized the disease; agitation for the Panthers was everywhere, even unto afflicting Yale’s liberal President Kingman Brewster. But now numerous unbelieving obeservers report that politics is totally dead at Yale; that the students have returned to the supposedly long gone Old Cultural pursuits of football, frat parties, and boola boola; students have resumed their pre-1965 concerns with studies, note-taking, and personal careers. The same story holds at Columbia, once a seedbed of the student revolution. At the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, which struck for about a week after Cambodia, students have reverted to their ancient conservatism; the only political activity this fall on campus was for Jim the student preferential poll by a large majority. But not only at Brooklyn Poly; the Left and the liberals had engineered a week or two-week pre-election recess on the campuses in the expectation of student antiwar activity; but the only really conspicuous student activity in New York this fall was for Buckley. The absence of all but conservative political activity on the campuses is for example, noted in The New Right”, Newsweek, December 7).

In our rapidly changing society it is perhaps perilous to analyze any phenomenon as permanent, but this seemingly strange happening can be easily explained. Our revolutionaries have long analyzed the escalating march of revolution as seemingly inevitable: beginning with leaflets and petitions for civil rights or for an end to bombing North Vietnam, the students, frustrated at the lack of success, escalated to mass demonstrations; then to sit-ins and non-violent resistance; then finally to violent revolution. Pursuing every route, every alternative, without success, the students finally turned to violent uprising. The litany of excalation proclaimed by the revolutionaries proved to be correct; but what they forgot to ask was what would happen once the turn to violence came. What then? There were two possibilities; one was a successful, spreading insurrection-a possibility which had no chance at all, given the hatred for the students by the vast bulk of the American population. And the other was that once the violent route had begun, once the students had taken their climatic peek into the abyss, that the entire movement would then fizzle and die. The orgiastic climax came this year-with the mad bombings of the Weathermen and the murders at Kent State. The students had their climactic look at violence and its consequences; that was obviously not working; the other paths hadn’t worked; and so everyone went home, forgot about politics, and sunk back into the peace and quiet of the 1950’s. What the revolutionaries forgot was that, with all routes exhausted, the more probable conclusion was not all-out violent revolution but abandonment of the whole losing business. It was a Long March through six years of trouble and excitement and turbulence; but it looks very much as if Baby has Come Home at last. It was precisely the fact that the student revolution had gone blooey that accounts for the lack of success of Agnew in trying to polarize the masses against the kids this fall; for it was clear to many voters that our Vice-President was engaged in thumping a very dead horse.

What was accomplished by the six years of turmoil? On the campuses, not very much. The larger anti-war movement, I believe, accomplished a great deal in creating a climate of opposition to the war, in preventing any further escalation, and in ousting Lyndon Johnson from office. But, on the campuses, the center of the troubles, very little was changed except for the worse. The large, impersonal bureaucracracies of our universities remain just as large and even more impersonal than before; our State-ridden colleges are even more State-ridden than they were when the whole business began. What has been added is negative: a crumbling still further of educational standards on behalf of aimless “rapping” and the absurd myth that everyone, regardless of ability or fitness, is entitled to a bachelor’s degree by divine right. And as a corollary: idiotic “black studies” institutes, “women’s studies” institutes and similar boondoggles. Six years is surely sufficient to evaluate the results of any movement; and on that basis, any sensible person should greet the death of the student revolution not with mourning and lamentations but with a sense of profound relief. “Social Darwinism” has once again been vindicated, a movement with bad premises (febrile, egalitarian, anti-intellectual and anti-rational) has burned itself out. The road is now cleared for a new and better beginning.

In the larger culture the Left is also in its death throes. We have been living in an increasingly sick culture; over the last year, that sickness has been embodied in intense and febrile faddism; the media, almost as if someone had pushed a button, have taken one absurd ideological fad after another, pushed it to an intensity unheard of before, and then dropped it as suddenly as it had begun in order to run after some new glamorous craze. Thus, from sometime after the end of October 1969, all of a sudden the media had discovered The Environment; and it was impossible for anyone to pick up a book or a magazine, to listen to the radio or to watch a TV show, without The Environment being beamed at you from all directions. Environment clubs were everywhere; paperbacks were poured out, each repeating the data of every other in a frantic quest for the quick buck; and then. Boom!, the orgiastic climax of Earth Day last spring, and Bingo! The Environment was forgotten, finished. Now whatever merit the Environment or pollution has as an issue, of one thing we can be damned sure: we did not have a pollution-free environment up till October 1969, suffer grievously from it until Earth Day, and then have pollution magically disappear ever since.

After Earth Day, we were happily spared hearing any further about The Environment, but then Women’s Lib took its place. Once again, it was impossible to pick up a magazine or watch a TV show without being subjected to the endless repetitions of the Women’s Lib cacophony; and once again, dozens of paperbacks were rushed to press to take advantage of the new hoopla. But, praise the Lord, there is only just so much that the human mind can take, and once again there are sweet signs that Women’s Lib has begun to have its day. The one good thing about sick faddism is that it must burn itself out; after the 2000th harangue about Women’s Lib or The Environment, the audience finally calls a halt, and sanity, at least on this particular fad, must return.

The sickness of our culture is also embodied in the total, the complete absence of a sense of humor, particularly among our youth. If we had any sense of humor at all, any sense of perspective on the absurd and the idiotic, then the faddism and cultism of our time would never get under way. What we need today is not the magnificent rationality and wit of one H.L. Mencken, but a platoon, an army of Menckens to clean the Augean stables and to save us from the next onslaught of faddism, to prick the balloons before they get under way to plague us with month after month of solemn and raucous hooey.

In the meanwhile we happily have Tom Wolfe, and Wolfe has, almost singlehanded, destroyed the phenomenon that he himself named “radical chic.” In the June 8 issue of New York, Wolfe, in a brilliant, witty article, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” (see the Lib. Forum, July), devastatingly reported on and lampooned the “radical chic” of Panthermania among affluent New York liberals. Neither the Panthers nor Panthermania nor “Lenny” Bernstein has been the same since. Now Stewart Alsop reports that, partly because of the self-destructive inner nature of faddism, partly from the Wolfe article, “Radical Chic is Dead.” (Newsweek, December 14.) As Alsop notes: “Watch the faces at some more-or-less politically sophisticated gathering the next time the ‘rage and alienation’ of ‘the kids’ is mentioned. Is there not a certain glazing of the eyeballs? Or when Eldridge Cleaver, say, or the Black Panthers, or Dr. Timothy Leary, or the youth culture, or Ti-Grace Atkinson, or women’s lib, or the Gay Liberation Front, or some other icon of radical chic is introduced . . . The fact is that radical chic . . . was essentially a fad, and all fads die . . . The promoters of the fads go from excess to greater excess, to hold the attention of the faddists, until appetite sickens on the surfeit, and so dies. When this crossover point is reached, the fad suddenly comes to seem a bit silly, or a little sickening, or very boring, or all three together.” Now, Tom Wolfe has hammered a few more nails in the coffin, with the reprint of his article in book form, along with another hilarious article, “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”, showing how radical leaders of minority groups in San Francisco organize confrontations in order to frighten and intimidate liberal anti-poverty bureaucrats (“Mau-Mauing”), so that these bureaucrats (who “catch the flak”) will put these leaders onto the state gravy train. (Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $5.95.) The Left is hollering like stuck pigs, but none of their clamor can put radical chic back together again. Tom Wolfe has never been known as a conservative, but a long-time association with left-liberals will do the trick; and now Wolfe reports to the New York Sunday Times Book Review that Helmut Schoeck’s important conservative-libertarian work Envy (Lib. Forum, Sept. 15) is one of his three favorite books of 1970.

And now women’s lib, too, is beginning to fade-partly under the hammer blows of writers who have begun to mount a counter-attack. In Commentary, Midge Decter and others have slashed away at women’s lib; also John Corry in Harper’s, Martha Lawrenson in Esquire. And now the weightiest dissection of all: a long review-article of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics by the brilliant Social-Democrat polemicist Irving Howe. (Irving Howe, “The Middle-Class Mind of Kate Millett”, Harper’s, December, $1.00.) Howe eviscerates Millett as theorist, as historian, and as literary critic; and when he is done, there is nothing left, either of Miss Millett or of the rationalizations for women’s “liberation.” Furthermore, Howe asserts that, in all probability, there are important biological differences between men and women, derived from (1) “the distinctive female experience of maternity”; (2) “the hormonic components of our bodies”; (3) “the varying possibilities for work created by varying amounts of musculature and physical controls”; and (4) “the psychological consequences of different sexual postures and possibilities”, namely, the “fundamental distinction between the active and passive sexual roles” as biologically determined in men and women respectively. Howe also notes that Miss Millett cites with approval Dr. Eleanor Maccoby’s study of female intelligence, but neglects to mention Dr. Maccoby’s admission that “it is quite possible that there are genetic factors that differentiate the two sexes and bear upon their intellectual performance . . . For example, there is good reason to believe that boys are innately more aggressive than girls-and I mean aggressive in the broader sense, not just as it implies fighting, but as it implies dominance and initiative as well–and if this quality is one which underlies the later growth of analytic thinking, then boys have an advantage which girls . . . will find difficult to overcome.” Maccoby adds that “if you try to divide child training among males and females, we might find out that females need to do it and males don’t.”

Irving Howe sees that underlying Miss Millett’s attitude is a rage against the very existence of women. “Miss Millett dislikes the psycho-biological distinctiveness of women, and she will go no further than to recognize–what choice is there, alas?–the inescapable differences of anatomy. She hates the perverse refusal of most women to recognize the magnitude of their humiliation, the shameful dependence they show in regard to . . . men, the maddening pleasures they even take in cooking dinners for ‘the master group’ and wiping the noses of their snotty brats. Raging against the notion that such roles and attitudes are biologically determined, since the very thought of the biological seems to her a way of forever reducing women to subordinate status, she nevertheless attributes to ‘culture’ so staggering a range of customs, outrages, and evils that this ‘culture’ comes to seem a force more immovable and ominous than biology itself.”

Howe also perceptively points out that, in a wider sense, underlying the revolutionaries of the Left is a hatred for “the usual”, a raging contempt for the ordinary life of men and women, a life which is sneeredat as “one-dimensional”: “this scorn for the inherited pleasures, ruses, and modes of survival by which most of us live; this nagging insistence that life be forever heroic and dramatic, even if ordinary humanity must be herded by authoritarian party bosses and ideologues to make it so.” Howe sums this up as the left intellectuals’ “contempt for ordinary life, contempt for ordinary people, contempt for the unwashed and unenlightened, contempt for the unschooled, contempt for blue-collar workers, contempt for those who find some gratification in family life, contempt for ‘the usual.’”

Howe concludes that “you would never know from Miss Millett’s book that there are families where men and women work together in a reasonable approximation of humanness, fraternity, and even equality.” Movingly, he declares that he has known two worlds; one, the world of his current intellectual friends, is a world where the women, along with their men, “have it hard”, but, “are struggling and fulfilled human beings creating the terms of their freedom even as they recognize the bounds of limitation that circumstance, gender, history and fortune impose upon them.” The other world he has known was the world of his parents, poor struggling immigrant Jewish workers on the Lower East Side.

I recall my mother and father sharing their years in trouble and affection, meeting together the bitterness of sudden poverty during the Depression, both of them working for wretched wages in the stinking garment center, helping one another, in the shop, on the subways, at home, through dreadful years. And I . . . know that . . . there were thousands of other such families in the neighborhoods in which we lived. Was my mother a drudge in subordination to the “master group”? No more a drudge than my father who used to come home with hands and feet blistered from his job as presser. Was she a “sexual object”? I would never have thought to ask, but now, in the shadow of decades, I should like to think that at least sometimes she was.”

Three cheers, Irving. Right On!

And yet women’s lib has taken its toll. I personally know half a dozen couples whose lives have been wrecked by the canker of women’s lib. Previously happily married, in each case the wife absorbed the sweet poison of the supposed existence of “male oppression”, stormed against her husband as living embodiment of this oppression, and then broke up their home. Worst of all, in each of these cases the stunned male continues to assert that his wife was somehow right, as he wallows in the masochistic guilt of the “male liberal.” One New Left leader in this situation, writing to us in objection to our stand against women’s lib, tells us that we do not understand that women, suffering from “male colonial oppression”, have to separate themselves from men for years to “get their sisterhood together.” O judgment, thou hast fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason!

HAWAII-GROWTH AND REPRESSION

One of the most important and fastest growing libertarian movements in the country is in the state of Hawaii. Led by the intrepid Bill Danks, a graduate student in American Studies at the University of Hawaii, the Hawaiian movement is organizing a giant libertarian conference in January. The theme of the conference will be “Freedom in our Time”, and there will be panels on Ecology, Poverty, War and Peace, Students Versus the System, the Free Market and Monopoly, and Strategy for Change. Speakers from the mainland will include Paul Goodman, Robert LeFevre, David Friedman, Roy A. Childs, Jr., and Tibor Machan; Hawaiian speakers will include Danks and Dr. Arthur Carol, professor of economics at the University of Hawaii, and a distinguished new addition to libertarian ranks.

Even more remarkable is the fact that the libertarian movement was able to take control of a major radio station in Honolulu, KTRG, which for two years was beaming libertarianism at the listeners for many hours per day. Or at least was until recently, when the naked arm of fascist repression descended upon the station–and none so bold or so interested as to make any protest. It was a two-pronged assault; for one thing, the FCC, which has life and death control over the nationalized radio-TV airwaves, closed the station down. The second prong was the indictment of several of the leading personnel of the station on the heinous grounds of . . . refusal to answer questions in the 1970 census!

On the mainland, there have been little or no attempts to crack down on either the massive number of census violators, or even on the intrepid libertarians who agitated for census resistance. But in Honolulu, in a case where an important radio station had come under libertarian control, the State clearly used this absurd “crime” in order to crack down on libertarian dissent from the existing system. (How about it, Leonard Read? is civil disobedience moral now?)

Specifically, on November 19, penal summonses charging refusal to answer census questions were served on: David Watamull, president and general manager of station KTRG, Donald P. Dickinson, manager and moderator of the station, and Bill Danks, leader of Census Resistance ’70 in Hawaii. Conviction carries a maximum penalty of $100 fine and 60 days in jail. The government wanted to try these men at the hands of the U.S. Commissioner, since this is classified as a “petty offense”, but the three defendants successfully insisted on moving the trial to Federal Court, where they can demand a trial by jury. Our three libertarians are being defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, and are expected to challenge the constitutionality of the compulsory census laws. A warrant was also made out for Bill Steele, former head of Hawaii YAF, but Steele has apparently skipped the country. Even our little movement now has its martyrs and exiles!

And now we have our slogans of liberation: Free Dave Watamull! Free Don Dickinson! Free Bill Danks! Amnesty for Bill Steele! Let the cry resound throughout the land.

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Write in detail Daniel Rosenthal, CMR Inc., 421 Fifth Ave., Pelham, N.Y. 10805.

Anarchism – A New Convert

In Defense of Anarchism

by Robert Paul Wolff. Harper & Row, 1970. 86 pp. $4.50; paperback $1. Reviewed by Jerome Tuccille.

Professor Wolff has presented us with a valuable contribution to the expanding anarchist library. In his preface the author admits that he has failed to analyze the “material, social, or psychological conditions under which anarchism might be a feasible mode of social organization.” This defect he hopes to correct in a larger work on the subject in the foreseeable future. What is important about the book is that Professor Wolff, after a long period of careful research and exploration during which he tried to find a satisfactory justification for political authority, has reached the conclusion that “anarchism would seem to be the only reasonable political belief for an enlightened man.” In the course of this brief and lucid account of the subject he proceeds to explain why this is so.

The author opens his book with a three-part section dealing with: the concept of political authority; the concept of individual autonomy; and the inevitable conflict that must arise between the two. The largest drawback in this section rests in the fact that Wolff assumes the morality of individual autonomy as a given absolute, and is therefore rather sketchy in his philosophical justification for individual self-determination.

In Part Two he analyzes the several forms of democratic government that have been suggested in the attempt to bridge the gap between political authority and individual autonomy. He discusses unanimous direct democracy, representative democracy, and majoritarian democracy in turn, spending a bit too much time attacking Rousseau’s shaky defense of majoritarianism in the Social Contract. Wolff concludes that unanimous democracy is totally unworkable and that direct majoritarian democracy, with each citizen voting on every issue that comes up (possible now through technological development), is still a long way from guaranteeing the autonomy of each individual in society. Every form of political rule depends on the abridgment, to one degree or another, of the right of the individual to determine the course of his own life. To agree to abide by the will of the majority, or the will of parliament, of that of a dictator, requires the surrender of one’s personal autonomy, and no matter how “democratic” or “benevolent” the rule it is still “no more than voluntary slavery . . .”

The final section offers “utopian glimpses of a world without states.” By the author’s admission it is the weakest part of his presentation, speaking in general terms about “far-reaching decentralization” and “voluntary compliance.” For practical alternatives readers are advised to turn elsewhere (Jane Jacobs, some of Goodman, some of Jefferson, Rothbard, others). Individualist libertarians will also find Wolff’s comments on the free market a bit naive and unsophisticated.

All in all, however, this is a good, tightly-written, basic text to recommend to friends who are interested in a justification for philosophical anarchism.

Recommended Reading

Sunday December 6 was “Karl Hess Day” in the nation’s media. On that same day, two major articles on Karl, both substantial, well-written, and sympathetic, appeared in the nation’s press. These were Tony Lang, “Karl Hess is Aflame With the Idea that Every Man Can Run His Own Life”, Washington Post magazine section, with a picture of Karl on the front cover; and James Boyd’s “From Far Right to Far Left-and Farther”, New York Sunday Times Magazine. The Boyd article is particularly good, as Jim is sympathetic to the libertarian cause and knowledgeable about the movement. The Boyd article also twice mentions the Libertarian Forum as the leading libertarian publication! Both articles play up Karl’s quintessential (and lifelong) instinctive libertarianism, and both gloss over his current flirtations with communalist, syndicalist, and anti-capitalist heresies.

The libertarian movement is also discussed in “The New Right”, Newsweek, Dec 7. Noting that Jim Buckley had most of the student activists in his camp this fall, Newsweek goes on to speak of the division among rightist youth between “libertarians” and “traditionalists”. Also, the word “libertarianism” has been mentioned in several previous issues of the New York Times, with articles on its new “Op-Ed” page by libertarian rightist journalist Jeffrey St. John.

Hey, could it be that libertarianism is going to be the new fad to replace Women’s Lib, as the latter nears the inevitable end of its run in the media?

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 1

January, 1971

35¢

Nixonite Socialism

It is traditional at the turn of the year to survey the state of the economy and to try to forecast what lies ahead. Despite the Pollyanna chorus with which we have been deluged for the last year by “conservative” and “free-market” economist-whores for the Nixon Administration, we can state flatly that the state of the economy is rotten, and destined to get worse.

In the 1960 campaign there first appeared the curious phenomenon of “anarcho-Nixonites”, several friends of mine who had become aides to Dick Nixon, and who assured me that Tricky Dick had assured them that he was “really an anarchist at heart”; once campaign pressures were over, and Nixon as President was allowed his head, we would see an onrush toward the free market and the libertarian society. In the 1968 campaign, anarcho-Nixonism redoubled in intensity, and we were assured that Nixon was surrounded by assorted Randians, libertarians, and free-market folk straining at the leash to put their principles into action.

Well, we have had two years of Nixonism, and what we are undergoing is a super-Great Society—in fact, what we are seeing is the greatest single thrust toward socialism since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It is not Marxian socialism, to be sure, but neither was FDR’s; it is, as J. K. Galbraith wittily pointed out in New York (Sept. 21), a big-business socialism, or state corporatism, but that is cold comfort indeed. There are only two major differences in content between Nixon and Kennedy-Johnson (setting aside purely stylistic differences between uptight WASP, earthy Texan, and glittering upper-class Bostonian): (1) that the march into socialism is faster because the teeth of conservative Republican opposition have been drawn; and (2) that the erstwhile “free-market” conservatives, basking in the seats of Power, have betrayed whatever principles they may have had for the service of the State. Thus, we have Paul McCracken and Arthur F. Burns, dedicated opponents of wage-price “guideline” dictation and wage-price controls when out of power, now moving rapidly in the very direction they had previously deplored. And National Review, acidulous opponent of the march toward statism under the Democrats, happily goes along with an even more rapid forced march under their friends the Republicans.

Let us list some of the more prominent features of the Nixonite drive—features which have met no opposition whatever in the conservative press. There took place during 1970 the nationalization of all railroad passenger service in this country. Where was the conservative outcry? It was a nationalization, of course, that the railroads welcomed, for it meant saddling upon the taxpayer responsibility for a losing enterprise—thus reminding us of one perceptive definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses. There took place also the Nixonite fight for the SST boondoggle, in which $300 million are going to follow a previous $700 million of taxpayers’ money down the rathole of gigantic subsidy to an uneconomic mess. Bill and Jim Buckley can find only ecological pollution as an argument against the SST—an outright looting raid upon the taxpayer without even a flimsy cover of “national security” as a pretext. The only argument seems to be that if we do not subsidize the SST, our airlines will have to purchase the plane from-horrors!—France; on this sort of argument, of course, we might as well prohibit imports altogether, and go over to an attempted self-sufficiency within our borders. How many SST’s might be purchased on an unsubsidized market is, of course, problematic; since the airlines are losing money as it is, it is doubtful how much revenue they will obtain from an airfare estimated at 40% higher than current first-class rates.

And then there is the outright $700 million gift from the U.S. government to Lockheed, to keep that flagrantly submarginal and uneconomic company in business indefinitely. And then there is agitation for the friendly nationalization of Penn Central Railroad. Senator Javits is already muttering about legislation for the federal bailing out of all businesses suffering losses, which is the logical conclusion of the current trend.

Neither has any note been taken of the Nixon Administration’s plan for tidying up the construction industry. Many people have scoffed at the revisionist view (held by such New Left historians as Ronald Radosh) that the pro-union legislation of the twentieth century has been put in at the behest of big business itself, which seeks a large, unified, if tamed labor union junior partnership in corporate state rule over the nation’s economy. And yet the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which in effect compulsorily unionized the railroad industry in exchange for compulsory arbitration and a no-strike policy, was put in at the behest of the rail industry, anticipating the later labor policy of the New Deal. And now the construction industry has gotten the Nixon Administration behind a similar plan; all the members of the present small but pesky and powerful construction unions are to be dragooned into one big, area-wide industrial union, and then to be subject to massive compulsory arbitration. The fascization of America proceeds apace.

To top it off, the Administration is readying two socialistic “welfare” measures of great importance: one further socializes medicine through nationwide major medical “insurance” to be paid by the long-suffering poor and lower-middle class Social Security taxpayer. And surely it is only a matter of time until the disastrous Friedman-Theobald-Nixon scheme of a guaranteed annual income for everyone is forced through Congress, a scheme that would give everyone an automatic and facile claim upon production, and there by disastrously cripple the incentives to work of the mass of the population.

In the area of the business cycle, it should be evident to everyone by this time that the Administration, trying subtly and carefully to “fine-tune” us out of inflation without causing a recession, has done just the opposite; bringing us a sharp nationwide recession without having any appreciable impact upon the price inflation. A continuing inflationary recession—combining the worst of both worlds of depression and inflation—is the great contribution of Nixon-Burns-Friedman to the American scene. While it is true that a recession was inevitable if inflation was to be stopped, the continuing inflation was not inevitable if the Administration had had the guts to institute a truly “hard” money policy. Instead, after only a few months of refraining from monetary inflation, the Administration has been increasingly opening the monetary floodgates in a highly problematic attempt to cure the recession—while at the same time failing to recognize that one sure result will be to redouble the chronic rise in prices. But now the Administration has swung around to the Liberal thesis of monetary and fiscal expansion to cure the recession, while yelling and griping at labor and employers not to raise wages and prices—a “guidelines” or “incomes” policy that is only one step away from wage and price controls. This direct intervention is supposed to slow down the wage-price spiral. In actual fact, the direct intervention cannot slow down price increases, which are caused by monetary factors; it can only create dislocation and shortages. Pumping in more money while imposing direct price controls and hoping there by to stem inflation is very much like trying to cure a fever by holding down the mercury column in the thermometer.

Not only is it impossible for direct controls to work; their imposition adds the final link in the forging of a totalitarian economy, of an American fascism. What is it but totalitarian to outlaw any sort of voluntary exchange, any voluntary sale of a product, or hiring of a laborer? But once again Richard Nixon is responsive to his credo of big business liberalism, for direct controls satisfy the ideological creed of liberals while at the same time they are urged by big business in order to try to hold down the pressure of wages on selling prices which always appears in the late stages of a boom.

While we can firmly predict accelerating inflation, and dislocations stemming from direct controls, we cannot so readily predict whether the Nixonite expansionism will lead to a prompt business recovery. That is problematic; surely, in any case we cannot expect any sort of rampant boom in the stock market, which will inevitably be held back by interest rates which, despite the Administration propaganda, must remain high so long as inflation continues.

TO OUR READERS

With this issue, the Libertarian Forum completes almost two years of successful, unbroken semi-monthly publication, and we have accomplished this task without sending out letters pleading for funds. The time has come, however, when financial pressures have forced a change in our publishing policy. We have suffered, first, from the inexorable inflation of costs that has hit all enterprises, and which we, at least, know is fundamentally due to the expansion of money and credit generated by the federal government. We have suffered, also, from a loss of revenue stemming from two sources: (a) a shift of many subscribers from regular to the student category—a sign that we are reaching more young people but also a financial loss to the magazine; and (b) a falling off of Libertarian Associates who subscribed at $15 and above, a falling off that is inevitable after a new publishing venture has become self-sustaining and established.

Since the Libertarian Associates had, in effect, been subsidizing our student subscribers, we can therefore no longer afford to carry the latter at a financial loss. We are therefore hereby eliminating the student category, and raising all of our subscription rates to $7.00 per year.

We are also cutting costs substantially by going over to a monthly, 8-page, publication. This is our first monthly issue. By becoming a monthly we will save a considerable amount on costs of mailing, handling, and shipping, as well as personal wear and tear on our miniscule staff. And while we will no longer be able to comment as rapidly on the news, we will benefit our readers by having more space available per month (saving on space for mastheads and addresses), and more room for longer articles.

And so, from the new monthly Libertarian Forum, Happy New Year to all!

All in all, how much more of Nixonite “anarchism” can freedom stand?

Social Darwinism Reconsidered

My esteemed libertarian colleague, Professor Leonard Liggio, who has always been out on the frontier of libertarian thought and practice, has of late been ruminating on Social Darwinism. There is no creed over the past century, in fact, with the possible exception of the Nazi movement, that has received as bad an intellectual “press” as Social Darwinism. It is high time that we subject this much reviled Social Darwinism to a re-evaluation.

The Liberal stereotype of the Social Darwinist is of a sadistic monster, calling for the “extermination of the unfit.” But in reality the true Social Darwinist is a benign and cheerful optimist, and he arrives at his optimism from a scientific inquiry into the processes of natural law and of cause and effect. For the Social Darwinist is above all a scientist, and as a scientist he sees that the natural law of what is best for man may be violated but never avoided. The natural law of cause and effect works its inexorable way, and what this means is that bad premises, bad goals and ineffective means, are dysfunctional for man and inevitably wreak their toll. On the other hand, rational premises, values and techniques, lead with equal inexorability to benign results. This means, that over the long run, the dysfunctional must come to a bad end, must cleanse itself and wipe itself out, while only the truly functional and proper can remain and prosper. Any artificial interference in these beneficent natural processes can only delay and distort the results; hence, we have a powerful argument for non-interference in these natural workings.

Take, for example, hippie culture and hippie values, with its hatred of reason, its emphasis on instant whim and mystical irrationality, its communalism and repudiation of the division of labor, its scorn of science, technology, work, private property, long-range thinking, and the production of material goods and services. There have been few creeds in human history that have been more dysfunctional than this. Now since men possess free will, since they are therefore free to adopt and act upon any creed they wish, it is possible for masses of men to become hippies; but it is not possible for them to remain long in this condition, because of the built-in “self-destruct” mechanism that the law of cause and effect imposes upon those who pursue this philosophy. Thus, when some time ago I began to despair at the spreading of hippie communes throughout society, Leonard Liggio commented cheerfully: “Don’t worry about it; one hard winter will dispose of the problem.”

There is a great deal of wisdom in this “Social Darwinian” attitude. Unfortunately, this dysfunctionality has not been as vivid as it could be, because foolish parents and taxpayers mulcted for welfare payments have been around to subsidize this anti-life credo and to maintain it indefinitely. Remove these subsidies, take away the indulgent check filled out by parent or welfare board, and the hippie phenomenon would have died a much deserved natural death long before now. Social cleansing brought about by the workings of natural law would have steered these misguided folk onto the proper and functional path long ago.

Let us consider two troubled parents of my acquaintance and the contrasting ways in which they have dealt with the phenomenon of hippie children. One parent said to his daughter who was yearning to drop out of college and to try the hippie path: “O. K. I’m not going to try and stop you. But I’m not going to subsidize this decision. If you want to drop out and become a hippie, you get no further financial support from me.” The daughter dropped out, tried romantic hippie poverty, and in six months concluded that this was not for her; next year, she was back in college and enjoying it. The other parent, in contrast, himself steeped in foolish permissivism, said, after considerable wailing and anguish: “I don’t agree with what you’re doing, but I will always stand behind you and send you money if you need it.” This course virtually insured that his children would continue on the hippie path indefinitely. Cause and effect were prevented from teaching their salutary lessons.

At a recent libertarian conference I ran across a man who put his libertarian position on drugs in starkly Social Darwinian terms. He said, in effect: “Let’s legalize all drugs. Then these drug-taking kids will kill themselves off, and the problem will be eliminated.” Harshly and crudely put, perhaps, and of course there are other libertarian grounds for legalization. But again our friend had a keen point: take away the artificial props, allow premises and nature their head, and the law of cause and effect will correct the situation with dispatch. If, as I firmly believe, psychedelic drugs destroy mind and body, then the removal of artificial restrictions will reveal this fact starkly and clearly, and the drug-takers will either fall by the wayside or correct their disastrous path.

The great libertarian Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner put the matter very clearly: “Almost all legislative effort to prevent vice is really protective of vice, because all such legislation saves the vicious man from the penalty of his vice. Nature’s remedies against vice are terrible . . . A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness . . . Now, we can never annihilate a penalty. We can only divert it from the head of the man who has incurred it to the heads of others who have not incurred it. A vast amount of ‘social reform’ consists in just this operation. The consequence is that those who have gone astray, being relieved from Nature’s fierce discipline, go on to worse, and that there is a constantly heavier burden for the others to bear. Who are the others? When we see a drunkard in the gutter we pity him. If a policeman picks him up, we say that society has interfered to save him from perishing. ‘Society’ is a fine word, and it saves us the trouble of thinking. The industrious and sober workman, who is mulcted of a percentage of his day’s wages to pay the policeman, is the one who bears the penalty. But he is the Forgotten Man. He passes by and is never noticed, because he has behaved himself, fulfilled his contracts and asked for nothing.” (Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, Caxton Printers, 1966, pp. 113-115.)

Or, as that other great libertarian Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer pointed out, both the state welfare system and unthinking private charity “not only stop the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation—absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family. And thus, in their eagerness to prevent the really salutary sufferings that surround us, these sigh-wise and groan-foolish people bequeath to posterity a continually increasing curse.” (Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, London, 1851, p. 324). But both Sumner and Spencer strongly endorsed that great maxim of nineteenth-century private charity: helping men to help themselves, so that they can set themselves on the proper, functional, and rational path.

Libertarians have never given proper weight to the immense significance of the demonstration by Ludwig von Mises, fifty years ago, that socialism cannot calculate, and therefore that socialism and communism simply cannot function in a modern industrial society. And since the immense population of the modern world requires an industrial society to survive, this means that socialism, being totally dysfunctional, cannot endure and must inevitably collapse. Already we have seen crucial illustrations of this great truth: notably in Lenin’s total backtracking from the attempt to leap into the Communist goal of a moneyless “War Communism” shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution and his shift back to the quasi-market economy of the NEP; and in the rapid shift, since the 1950’s, of Eastern Europe (notably Yugoslavia) away from socialist planning and toward a free-market economy. All this indicates that socialism cannot endure, and that the long-run victory of liberty and the free market is virtually inevitable.

All this does not mean that libertarians should remain passive and quiescent, or that we should refrain from speeding up Nature’s timetable as much as we possibly can. But the point is that, quintessentially and metaphysically, we should remain of good cheer. The eventual victory of liberty is inevitable, because only liberty is functional for modern man. There is no need, therefore, for libertarians to thirst manically for Instant Action and Instant Victory, and then to fall into bleak despair when that Instant Victory is not forthcoming. Reality, and therefore history, is on our side. Social Darwinism—that seemingly bleak and bitter creed—provides us, through the instrument of science and reason, with the unquenchable long-run optimism that liberty one day shall triumph.

Native Americans And Property Rights

By Leonard P. Liggio

PART I

Libertarians owe a debt of gratitude to The Individualist for publishing “The Property Rights of American Indians,” by Rosalie Nichols (February, 1970). I do not agree with some of the points made by Miss Nichols, but I think that the topic is one of fundamental importance to libertarians. The matter of precise understanding of property rights in actual practice is basic to libertarianism; yet it is an area of the most profound ignorance and plain sloppiness among many libertarian-oriented people. If such people are not reliable on the matter of property rights, one wonders whether they have been drawn to libertarianism not by its rigorous theory and practice but by heaven knows what accidental cultural attractions. Central to the libertarian is which claims and titles are and which are not property; flowing from this theoretical discovery must be action to defend property in the hands of its rightful owners and to place it in the hands of these rightful owners wherever non-owners have occupied or used it. Justice is the ultimate objective of libertarians.

Obviously, any libertarian who concerns himself or herself with such matters is engaged in the preeminent libertarian activity. Rosalie Nichols clearly is such a person. Any differences which I may have with her are secondary to the fact that she has embarked upon preeminent libertarian activity. It is an honor to engage in a dialogue with her.

The history of the European immigrants’ relations with the native Americans is one of unrelieved violence. In that shameful history the English immigrants were conspicuous by their violence. Other European peoples have been less violent, and the French were reknowned for the almost good relations which they maintained with all Indians, gaining friends even among former enemies, as Rosalie Nichols notes. For almost four hundred years the English immigrants have maintained a permanent system of violence against the native Americans.

The original sovereignty claimed by Europeans over the American Indians and over the land of North America was based upon the European claim of religious superiority. Since Christianity was viewed by the Europeans as giving Christian governments and Christian individuals a superior claim compared with others, including the inhabitants, the European claim to dominance is based on their Christian religion. This was the basis by which the native Americans were denoted as ‘savages’ while the barbaric Europeans were denoted as ‘civilized.’ As Rosalie Nichols indicates, it was the designation as ‘savage’ or pagan upon which the rights of the American Indians to life, liberty or property were violated. One recalls the famous description of the landing of the English in North America: “First, they fell on their knees to pray; then, they fell on the Indians.”

Fall on the Indians they did. In New England the Indians first encountered by the English immigrants had the misfortune to occupy and cultivate the better farm lands as well as to prefer to sell their furs to the highest bidder. Clearly savages par excellence; extermination was their fate. The other New England Indian tribes inhabiting the valuable river valleys flowing into Long Island Sound—Pequots, Narragansetts, Mohegans, etc.—were later massacred or sold into slavery in the West Indies by methods too gruesome to describe . . . but sanctioned, when not led, by ministers of religion and civilized officials. In Virginia several campaigns were fought against the Indians who had originally welcomed the settlers in the James River region; the institutionalization of Black slavery (the Indians were too ‘savage’ to accept enslavement which was the original hope of the labor-short, land-rich European officials) led directly to the desire for huge plantation tracts and the wars to oust the Indians from the other river valleys.

Whatever the roots of European violence, even the argument that the profound differences between Europeans and native Americans could mitigate some of the violence—irrational as that argument is—is unsupportable; the model of the methods, attitudes and practice of violence carried on by the English upon the native Americans was established in the violence of the English ‘plantations’ imposed on the Christian, European, and neighboring Irish (of which the current civil war in Ulster is one product). Late nineteenth century English and American social theorists (mainly socialists), creating the intellectual foundation for the New Imperialism of this last century, singled out their English forebears’ violence against the Irish, native Americans, et al. as proof of their racial superiority—aggressors and conquerors are defined as superior to the exploited and oppressed in superman theories—and as the justification for the wars of extermination and conquest launched by England and America, and which have culminated in the American aggression in Vietnam.

However rationalized, the Europeans’ claim to sovereignty over North America is logically unsupportable. However, Rosalie Nichols claims that the North American continent could be legitimately claimed by the native Americans. She says: “The American continents were not ownerless.” Yes, if it is meant that certain lands were owned. Certain lands were owned and the major part was unowned. I doubt if she means that the native Americans claimed sovereignty over North America (although, of course, if such a thing as sovereignty could be legitimate the native Americans would have possessed it and not the Europeans). But, the property rights of the Indians to the land they owned must be recognized; as well as the fact that that right was totally violated by the English immigrants.

When the English immigrants landed in the Chesapeake Bay and the Massachusetts Bay they were welcomed by the Indians. The English settlers brought manufactured products not yet developed by the Indians and the Indians taught the English immigrants agricultural methods not yet developed by the English. The Indians did not view the establishment of private property in land by the immigrants as anything wrong, immoral or in violation of their rights. The Indians along the Atlantic coast recognized that there was more than enough land there to satisfy many hundreds of times the tens of thousands of immigrants who poured out of England to find a freer and better life in America. The difficulty was that the English immigrants were not satisfied to live alongside the Indians in mutual recognition of rights. The English insisted upon the power of government over the lives and the lands of the Indians. According to the English, there could be no free exchange between individuals and groups living their own lives on the wide land. The English had to have the monopoly over people and land. The people and the land had to be obedient to English immigrant officials.

The problem then was not the matter of settlement and private property, but the matter of government. Where government exists, private property rights are negated. When the English immigrants came, they were divided into two groups, or classes, the farmers who settled and worked their private property and the rulers who had assumed government positions. The English immigrant farmers and the Indians tended to live in peace and mutual respect. It was the claim of government over the Indians by the English immigrant officials which was the cause of aggression and genocide against the Indians. The government officials in all the colonies used their offices as the means of their personal enrichment; since there was little in the form of liquid capital to be seized, they seized lands in the hopes that future immigrants would have to purchase lands from them if there were none available for free settlement. The governors did not attempt to develop the land to turn it into private property; rather they assigned each other large tracts of lands which they left unimproved and undeveloped—there was no mixing of labor with the lands. It was pure feudalism or land monopoly, the negation of private property. Most of the lands in the colonies not occupied by settlers were distributed among the government officials as land grants (there were also large land grants given to the courtiers by the English kings).

Of course, these tracts included the areas on which the Indians were settled and had carried out their industries of farming, fishing and hunting. So the Indians suffered the double violence of being placed under the government of English immigrant officials and of English land grantees—often the same people. If the Indians did not accept English immigrant government, war would be made upon them; if they did not accept English feudal landholders, war would be made upon them—by governments. In addition, if the Indians continued to live and to work these lands it would be difficult to get new immigrants, who now had to go to one of the land monopolists to get land, to pay much or any money for land which the Indians already lived upon and worked. The ordinary settler had enough common sense and respect for rights not to want to claim land which the Indians already lived upon and worked.

If the immigrants merely went in and worked unused land the Indians would have no objections, or if they came to an understanding with the Indians who might be using the land—the Indians valued very low economically their marginal uses of the land for hunting and fishing,—the Indians would have no objections. But, this disturbed the feudal landlords who wished to assign lands and collect ‘prices’ or taxes. The existence of Indian settlement and farming undermined the feudal land monopolies, so the land had to be cleared by the extermination of the native Americans.

During the colonial period, the Middle Colonies witnessed less violence against the Indians. In part, this was due to the fact that most of the settlers there were not English. Like the French in the St. Lawrence and Ohio-Mississippi valleys, the Dutch, Swedes and Germans were more interested in the profits of commerce and good farming in peaceful accord with the Indians than in the destruction of lives and money in the plundering of the Indians. This situation was institutionalized with the founding of Pennsylvania by the Quakers; as in so many other matters, the Quakers are worthy of close analysis by libertarians.

The relations of the Quakers with the Indians were a model of justice which was constantly commended by the Indians themselves. The last of a series of mutually agreeable treaties between the Indians and the Quakers, the Treaty of Easton of 1758, placed the final limitation on European settlement. Pennsylvania released all claim to the soil west of the Alleghenies and of a large section east of the Alleghenies and north of the present Sunbury, as long as the Indians did not sell the territory to any other government.

This treaty of the Quakers was used by English government officials at a conference with northern Indian chiefs at Canajoharie on the Mohawk River west of Albany as an example of English intentions (April, 1759): “I hope this surrender will convince you and all other Indians how ready your brethren the English are to remove from your hearts all jealousies and uneasiness of their desiring to encroach upon your hunting lands, and be a convincing proof to you how false the accusations of the French are that we are at war with them, in order to get your country from you.” Of course, the French accusation was accurate; the English had gone to war against the French to gain the trans-Appalachian Indians’ land which was protected by the French.

The officials in England in league with the American officials and the heirs of officials, who inherited the huge feudal domains that were the fruits of office-holding in America, hoped for even larger rewards by gaining land monopolies across the Appalachian Mts. Having monopolized the lands along the Atlantic coast, the planters by control of the government apparatus excluded the newer immigrants from homesteading the wide lands along the Atlantic coast. Since the Atlantic coast region is able to support many times its present population there was no economic need for Europeans to settle beyond the mountains. The only attractive resources—minerals—were either in the Appalachian Mts. or bordered major waterways such as the Great Lakes, and could have been extracted by miners whose settlements would be approved by the Indians without any difficulties.

But, as a result of the feudal land system along the Atlantic coast, the new immigrants could not pay the high ‘prices’ demanded by the government officials and their heirs; they hoped to be able to homestead across the mountains. Crossing out of the control of the seaboard officials, into the lands of the western Indian tribes, these settlers could and did homestead farms and gained the recognition of the local Indians. An ideal situation would have been the acceptance by the European settlers of the essentially stateless society of the Indians. The Europeans could have developed among themselves and with the Indians a social system based on free exchange which was the basis of much of the economic life of the Indians. The Quakers’ excellent relations with the Indians were based on the fact that they were the only Europeans dedicated to social relations based upon equal and free exchange—which explains why Quakers have always been out of step with other Europeans.

An imperfect but acceptable system was proposed by some of the wise organizers who carried forward the American Revolutionary struggle against English officialdom and their associated American feudal landholders. The revolutionary impetus for the abolition of feudal holdings and their replacement with the institution of private property would have meant that there would be plenty of land for homesteading along the Atlantic seaboard. But, retaining elements of Christian messianism, the United States government claimed the trans-Appalachian territories inhabited by the Indian tribes. However, the trans-Appalachian areas were projected as states in the American Confederation: states composed of and controlled by the Indians themselves.

During the period of the American Revolution the control of the trans-Appalachian territory by the Indians was recognized in treaties with the American Congress such as that between the Delawares and the Continental Congress (September, 1778). In return for a trade dependency in which the Americans had the monopoly right of supplying goods for purchase by the Indians, the United States proposed that the Indians could form state governments in the trans-Appalachian area which would be equal to the states of the European settlers on the Atlantic coast. “. . . the United States do engage to guarantee to the aforesaid nation of Delawares, and their heirs, all their territorial rights in the fullest and most ample manner as it hath been bound by former treaties, as long as the said Delaware nation shall abide by and hold fast the chain of friendship now entered into. And it is further agreed on between the contracting parties should it for the future be found conducive for the mutual interest of both parties to invite any other tribes who have been friends in the interest of the United States, to join the present confederation, and to form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have a representation in Congress.” A similar project was promised to the Southwest Indians in the Hopewell Treaty of November, 1785 with the Cherokee Nation: “That the Indians may have full confidence in the justice of the United States, respecting their interest, they shall have the right to send a deputy of their choice, whenever, they think fit, to Congress.”

The Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress in 1787 declared: “The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their land and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights, and liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” In conforming with that a treaty was drawn up with the Indian tribes north of the Ohio River and west of the Allegheny mountains. Signed in January, 1789, the United States did “confirm the said boundary line; to the end that the same may remain as a division line between the lands of the United States of America, and the lands of said nations forever,” and did “relinquish and quit claim to the said nations respectively, all the lands lying between the limits above described, for them the said Indians to live and hunt upon, and otherwise to occupy as they shall see fit.”

This reasonable arrangement was quickly overthrown by the new government which took control in April, 1789 as a result of the overthrow of the Continental Congress and the Articles of Confederation by the coup d’etat in Philadelphia in 1787. The control and exploitation of the lands west of the mountains was a major cause for the calling of the secret conclave in Philadelphia and for the Constitution it produced. Just as the impetus for the abolition of feudal holdings and the institution of private property following the revolution was blunted, so the impetus for the aboliton of slavery had been blunted. Part of the drive for the new, more powerful central government was in defense of slavery. The limitation against slavery in the whole west as originally intended was restricted to the Northwest territory, opening the Southwest territory to slavery. The plantation areas of the coast had become depleted and the slave-holders required new territories extending through Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi for plantation cultivation. Land clearing by the extermination of the Indians was necessary to make room for the slave quarters.

The early aggressions by the new United States government were defeated by the Northwest Indians in November 1791; but the United States army reversed this defeat and “the big push westward over the prostrate bodies of slaughtered Indians was begun.” A thorough and detailed description of the process of genocide carried out by the United States government against the American Indians would be required for a final view of the subject. A study of the “Five Civilized Nations” of the Old Southwest would be a good beginning. The Cherokee, Chocktaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole had some of the most developed and productive villages among the American Indians. Their skill in agricultural industry made them especially subject to elimination. By 1838 the “Five Civilized Nations” had been driven over the “Trail of Tears” from their rich lands to the barren territory across the Mississippi River.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

A few months back I mentioned in this column that a short booklet, HOW TO REFUSE INCOME TAXES – LEGALLY, written by Lucille E. Moran, might be a good investment for libertarians interested in beating the revenue authorities. My good friend and “legal advisor,” Lucille Moran, has now come up with another booklet called WHAT LICENSE? WHY YOU CAN SUE YOUR DOCTOR, BUT NOT YOUR ‘LAWYER’, available for two fiat dollars through the Independent Bar Association of Massachusetts, P.O. Box 187, Islamorada, Florida 33036. I have read the piece in manuscript form and can testify that it is a truly radical attack on the judicial system in the best libertarian tradition and well worth the price. Miss Moran is a muckraker and radical of the Old Right variety (an anarchist although she doesn’t like the word), an individualist activist well versed in natural law and early-American history centering around the revolution. She analyzes the stranglehold that privileged groups have on our judicial system and advocates the creation of independent bar associations such as her own (of which I am a board member). Lucille is now opening shop as a legal advisor at an initial fee of $100 for those who need counsel in avoiding the income tax.

What are her credentials? The fact that she has not filed and gotten away with it for over eight years. What establishment lawyer can make that claim?

* * * * * *

The libertarian movement has grown at a refreshing pace during the past year. It has received favorable coverage in such diverse publications as Playboy, Penthouse, Cavalier, The Wall Street Journal and Nation’s Business, and was deemed worthy of a lampooning in the September, 1970 issue of Esquire. Any idea that catches on and becomes fashionable runs the risk of being exploited by unsavory characters with a firm grasp on the “pulsebeat” of the nation. So it was predictable that such a one as Jeffrey St. John, a fanatical Buckley conservative four years ago, a slavishly devout Objectivist two years ago, and a fanatically slavish Buckleyite Objectivist today, would publish an article in the New York Times identifying himself as a libertarian. They are stumbling out of the woodwork, tripping over one another’s ambitions in a mad race to latch onto an accelerating bandwagon. Others of that stripe are sure to follow.

* * * * * *

Realistically speaking, libertarianism is still a minor fringe movement virtually unknown among the general population which can barely pronounce it let alone understand what it’s all about. For this reason libertarians must seek out alliances with larger groups in order to achieve even limited political goals. There simply are not enough libertarians around to constitute a single movement independent of all others. Murray Rothbard touched on this in his October 1st editorial, “When Revolution?” The question that poses the biggest problem for us today is: alliances with whom?

The Right Wing is, of course, hopeless all the way down the list of issues important on today’s political scene: foreign policy; economics; civil liberties; a broad range of domestic policies including the draft, abortion laws and censorship (if only libertarians had known three years ago what the traditionalist half of the conservative alliance would be like once it ascended to power)! Our old friend, “Chairman Bill,” has now established himself as a self-appointed censor of the publishing world. Recent issues of National Review have singled out Bobbs-Merrill and Pantheon as prime vehicles for radical left literature. These latest broadsides, along with Agnew’s open threats against the major media, have not been without some effect on at least one of these publishing houses that I know of firsthand. “Private” censorship, like private anything, may prove far more efficient than the heavy-fisted state variety.

So we turn leftward in our search for potential allies and what do we find? On the farthest Left a rather rancid bunch of murderers, bombers, self-righteous faggots, dykish loudmouths, and crusading nihilists (that’s nihilists, not anarchists). Murdering, bombing and bank-robbing in the present political context may be called a lot of things, but none of them revolutionary. The situation is different in Uruguay where the Tupamaros have turned bank-robbing into a highly effective revolutionary tactic. Ninety-five percent of the population can barely feed itself let alone put its money away in a savings account. When a bank is hit down there it is the wealth of the ruling class that is being stolen and a loud cheer goes up from the exploited peasantry. In the United States eighty percent of the population has the sweat of its brow tied up in the banking system; an attack on the banks is an attack on the vast majority of the “people” in the country and can hardly be considered a “revolutionary act against the state.”

The brainless adventurists of the far Left have been too dim-witted to see the distinction, and have virtually destroyed the radical movement by the employment of tactics totally unsuited to the current American situation. This mania for copying examples set by rebels in foreign societies, and inability to analyze what needs to be done in our uniquely “American” situation, is responsible for much of the failure of the activist Left. Knee-jerk radicalism has become as much – or more – of a problem as knee-jerk liberalism.

Closer to the center on the liberal Left we find the same sorry bunch of welfare statists and New Deal bureaucrats that libertarians had criticized (along with their traditionalist allies) when they were conservatives. These think-tank experts and central planners have have always been consistently inconsistent and will remain so; they are remarkably “pragmatic” on all issues including the war and the military draft, formulating their positions a la John Lindsay according to the results of the most recent polls. It is clear that libertarians have nothing to gain by an alliance with this claque.

Broadly speaking, this leaves us with one remaining option for alliances on the Left: the radical Left as distinguished from the nihilists on the far Left and the liberals on the center Left. This group is comprised of all constructive rebels with a positive commitment to immediate peace abroad, radical decentralization and community organizing domestically, repeal of abortion laws, elimination of all censorship regulations, true social and economic equality for women (as opposed to the absurd smokescreen issue revolving around “sex objects”), and an end to racial discrimination. In my view, at least, the most effective tactics are political education and civil disobedience—a boycott of government institutions if you will and the construction of neighborhood alternatives. More activist measures such as the seizure of abandoned housing and public property in poverty areas has also proven effective in certain instances.

Indiscriminate violence against the innocent as well as against the political authorities can never have any place in a libertarian strategy. The “offing of pigs” is a blind tactic which, as Dave Dellinger has frequently pointed out, fails to consider that cops and firemen, to name just two groups, are merely small pawns carrying out the orders of a superior power. The destruction of a police station or the murder of a cop does not make a revolution; a large-scale tax rebellion, a proliferation of “strikes” in the ranks of the military, a boycott of centrally-controlled schools and of elections when no real alternatives are offered, might add up in the long run to a genuine revolutionary movement with mass support.

Violence, even morally-justified violence like the destruction of draft board files, has only succeeded in chasing large groups of potential allies further to the Right. Many in the middle class who would like to see an end to the war and who believe that government has gotten “too big” have been frightened into a repressive political attitude. More bombings, more bank robberies and “offing of pigs” will usher in 1984 ten years ahead of schedule.

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Knee-Jerk Radicalism

I – Free Whom?

We are all familiar with, and properly scornful of, “knee-jerk liberalism”, the kind of attitude which for every problem calls for the passing of a law or the vast expenditure of Federal funds. But many of us have been less attuned to the equally egregious “knee-jerk radicalism”, and it is about time that we call this attitude to account.

For example, there is our perfectly proper hostility toward repression, toward any sort of crippling of free speech or inquiry by the State apparatus. But for radicals this is generally an unthinking reflex; and so the cry goes up: Free X! Free Jim! Free Joe! Free Horace! Free the Oshkosh Eleven and the Kalamazoo Twelve! The libertarian, of course, has at the center of his being the call for freedom for everyone, with, however, one vital exception: the criminal. In the libertarian creed, the criminal deserves not freedom but punishment, a punishment, to be sure, that does not go beyond the extent to which he has deprived some innocent victim of the latter’s liberty. It follows, then, that it is not permissible to raise the cry of freedom automatically and unthinkingly; if the State claims that Joe Blow is an axe murderer, it is not a priori impossible that the State is right; and that Mr. Blow deserves the gallows rather than mass hysteria and demonstrations on his behalf. It all depends then, (a) on the nature of the crime with which Mr. Blow is charged; and (b) if the “crime” is truly a crime for the libertarian, on the facts of whether Mr. Blow is guilty as charged. Each case must be considered and judged on its own merits; discrimination between cases is a libertarian necessity.

In some of its recent campaigns, then, the Left has been evidently correct: these are the cases where the “crime” itself is simply a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech or assembly. Thus, the Chicago Conspiracy trial was clearly an invasion of free speech in its very charge (of “conspiring to cross state lines with intent to incite riot”); so too were the old Smith Act trials (“conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the government”), and so too is the recent conviction of Juan Farinas for distributing antidraft leaflets at an induction center (and there by allegedly “disrupting the Selective Service System”). The Left is also correct in its defense of the Fathers Berrigan, who, while passing over from speech to action, destroyed draft records, records of a criminal organization engaged in enslaving our youth—and so hardly a “crime” by libertarian standards. Other Left agitations may be justified on the grounds of unclarity of the facts: for example, in the cases of Huey Newton or the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss.

But in their most recent agitations the Left has been engaging in unjustifiable knee-jerk activity. “Free Angela?” But Angela might well be a murderess as charged, and surely murder comes under the rubric of high crime for a libertarian. “Free Bobby?” But Bobby too might well have murdered Alex Rackley, and it is to the eternal shame of the Left that the torture and murder of the Negro Rackley has received nothing but shrugs and even approbation by our radical “civil libertarians”. And there does not seem to be, either in the Seale or the Davis cases, any of the fuzziness of the facts that legitimately called the Hiss and Rosenberg cases into question. Indeed, the Left seems to come dangerously close to saying that it does not care about the facts, and that Angela and Bobby must be freed simply because they are leftists and radicals—a position for which no genuine libertarian can have anything but contempt. If they are murderers then they should pay the price. And neither is it obvious that we should “free Eldridge”—a convicted rapist who violated the terms of his parole.

Let us keep our “repression” straight.

II – The New York Review

The New York Review of Books is a brilliant and extremely well-edited radical bi-weekly; but despite its important contributions, particularly in foreign policy, it has sometimes suffered from knee-jerk radicalism. But the January 7 issue contains welcome signs of a shift toward a more independent and rational view. Thus, the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick has a blistering attack on the counter-culture (“Militant Nudes”), in a review of several movies (Ice, The Groupies, Trash, and Gimme Shelter) as well as a novel by Marge Piercy. And Murray Kempton has a sardonic review of Tom Hayden’s Trial (“Three Who Didn’t Make a Revolution”).

But particularly important is an article by the prominent Harvard economist Wassily W. Leontief, “The Trouble With Cuban Socialism”. As a highly sympathetic observer of the Castro regime, Leontief sadly engages in a critique of Cuban socialism which could hardly be exceeded by a laissez-faire capitalist. Leontief is forced to record the Cuban system as an economic disaster, and cites the basic causes as the elimination of a rational market price system destroying economic calculation of benefits and costs, and the low morale and productivity brought about by the Cuban attempt to replace economic incentives by “moral” (altruistic) ones. The successes of the early days of Castroism are perceptively attributed to the Cubans living off the accumulated capital of the previous regime. That the Cuban economy has not collapsed totally is attributed to the fact that Cuba is a small island which exports and imports heavily from the world market, and therefore can take many of its accounting prices from that market.

All in all, the article is a triumph of rationality over sentiment, and should be required reading for all leftists—including those libertarians who have become enamoured of the communist and anti-market path.

Recommended Reading

Youth Culture. A former leading beatnik warns that the younger generation is repeating the major reason for the failure of the beats: the ignoring of intellect and reality. James Lincoln Collier writes: “Our hearts were all in the right place . . . The ingredient that was missing was thought . . . the intellectual center was all mush . . . The failure of Kerouac and his friends was . . . that they did not recognize that nature has its rules. They thought that by an act of sheer will they could change the world. In fact they could not. You cannot do anything out of sheer will. To change anything you have first to study and read and most of all think like hell until you begin to grasp where you are, what the world is like, and what the problem is.”

“And this is what troubles me”, Collier continues, “about the young people who are today the focus of the attempt to change things. They have not bothered to think anything through. I listen to 20-year old political activists who have never read “The Republic” or “Das Kapital” or for God’s sake even the American Constitution . . . Arguing with people who don’t know what they’re talking about is pretty hopeless. They keep telling you . . . ‘all that rationalist stuff never worked, we’re going to do it by intuition.’ This, precisely, is what the leaders of the Beat generation were saying, and it is why they all came to nothing in the end: they never did find out what it is really like out there. It is not reason which has failed: it is man’s failure to use it which has caused all the trouble . . .

Reality is iron: it can only be managed by people who understand what iron is like. Nixon and Agnew and Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover have bad hearts . . . but by Jesus they have done their homework . . . A good heart is not enough.” James Lincoln Collier, “No Satori in Iron”, the Village Voice (Dec. 24).

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 2

February, 1971

TAKE OFF

After two years of rapid growth and accumulating publicity, the libertarian movement has at last taken off into the empyrean. How long this will last no one can foretell, but at least for the moment we have become well-known, and, even, who could have predicted? respectable!

The critical turning-point has come with the article by Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto, Jr., “The New Right Credo – Libertarianism”, in the New York Sunday Times Magazine of January 10. Not only that – but this audience of over a million influential readers was also treated to the article as a front cover picture: with Lehr and Rossetto looking at the reader flanking an enormous red fist, under which was the caption “laissez-faire”. It is surely well over a century since laissez-faire has been widely represented as the radical and even pugnacious creed that it really is, and it was a pleasure to see the article if for this reason alone. The Times and other media had previously given considerable publicity to Karl Hess, but rather as a lone curio than as a member of an ever-widening movement. Here was the first major piece on the movement itself, and written by two of its young leaders. The article is festooned with pictures of some members of the libertarian pantheon, the relevant ones being Hess, Rand, Tuccille, and myself, a juxtaposition well calculated to send Ayn Rand, at least, up the wall.

Lehr and Rossetto are the leaders of the “Freedom Conspiracy” – the libertarian club at Columbia University, affiliated with SIL. It is ironic, and also indicative of the divergence among libertarians in applying their creed, that Lehr and Rossetto first came to the attention of the Times and the media for their work for Buckley for Senate, – a political stance with which at least three, and possibly all, of the pantheon were in profound disagreement.

The rewards of fame are heady indeed; in my case, consisting of several college friends whom I had not seen in over a decade calling to ask “hey, what is this libertarianism?” and the hardware man on the corner slapping me on the back: “So you’re an ulta-liberal, eh?” More tangibly, Chairman Bill himself was goaded into devoting an entire column (Jan. 14) to the libertarians. So long as the libertarian split in YAF remained unpublicized, Bill Buckley could ignore the movement from his lofty papal perch and print blather in National Review about the harmonious convention at St. Louis. But now that the split on the right was in the open, and the Times had devoted two lengthy articles in two months to this new creed, Buckley clearly felt that he owed it to the conservative legions to protect their flank from this new threat – especially when the threat was particularly annoying in taking seriously the conservative rhetoric about individual liberty.

Buckley’s column was characteristic: a blend of cheap debating points (e.g. smirking at the kids for “co-opting”

Spinoza as a libertarian, when the co-optation was clearly a feat performed by the Times’ picture editor); pseudo-scholarship (“absolutization of freedom . . . is the oldest and most tempting heresy”. Where, Bill? Who are this legion of ancient libertarian heretics? Tell us so we can add them to the pantheon); and petty bitchery (e.g. referring to Jerry Tuccille only as a “semi-literate gentleman”). As for myself, I am apparently back in Buckley’s good graces as a lovable (or perhaps not quite so lovable) nut, endlessly intoning my well-known passion for de-nationalizing lighthouses. (The changes are rung on the well-worn lighthouse theme in a particularly cretinous review of my Power and Market by a spiritual whelp of Buckley’s in National Review Jan. 26). The only new feature of the review is the charge that the purely free market society would be tantamount to feudalism – this from a magazine that has endlessly extolled the virtues of feudalism as compared to the modern despotic state! Karl Hess is found to be “nauseating” rather than lovable for his pointing out that the Soviet Union is at least one up on us for having executed Beria, while we still have J. Edgar Hoover; apparently Chairman Bill’s appreciation of political wit suddenly disappears when it is, for once, directed against his own totems.

The most interesting aspect of the Buckley column is the fact that in the last paragraph, Buckley apparently felt driven to concede grudgingly that perhaps his friend Nixon “has not sufficiently indulged the presumptions in favor of individual liberty”. The fact that Buckley has been driven by the libertarian publicity to criticize the Nixon Administration for the first time since it assumed office is itself testimony to the anxiety of Chairman Bill to protect the libertarian flank of his conservative coalition. Thus, the libertarian movement has already made a significant impact on the American political scene.

An important consequence of the Buckley column is the keen interest promptly taken in the whole affair by the, highly influential “Op-Ed” page of the New York Times – the new forum for opinion and controversy opposite the Times’ daily editorial page. On January 28, the Times published a blistering reply to Buckley by Jerry Tuccille, “A Split in the Right Wing”. At this writing, it is scheduled to publish a follow-up column by myself, further attacking Buckley and expounding the libertarian philosophy in the issue of Feb. 9, to be followed perhaps by further comments from Buckley and Karl Hess.

Libertarianism is the new rage, and it is incumbent upon all of us to strike while the iron is hot; in this receptive atmosphere to push the creed in book, article, lecture, radio and TV. Let us seize the opportunity to expand the cause. One of the revelations of this new atmosphere is the friendly interest in us by liberals of all persuasions, in and out of the media. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the liberals, if they heard of us at all, considered us as more extreme, more evil, than the conservatives. Now, however, seeing our devotion to peace, freedom from conscription, decentralization, and civil liberties, the liberals realize that, from their point of, view, we are much better than conservatives, and, indeed, almost-allies. There are two factors at work here: the tactical political insight that we can be useful allies to the liberals in whacking the conservatives; and, more deeply the realization by Very many liberals that there is something profoundly wrong with the Leviathan State they have wrought upon us since the New Deal, and that maybe these libertarians are in some way on the correct path out of our contemporary troubles. In any case, now that libertarianism is having its day in the sun, may we prove as adept at taking advantage of the opportunities for success as we have been in years of slogging through the ideological wilderness.

Come One! Come All!

Hear ye! Hear ye! The rapidly growing Libertarian movement in New York City is holding a libertarian conference, the first conference since the October, 1969 gala at the Hotel Diplomat. This conference will be held on the weekend of March 13-14, at Columbia University Law School. Speakers include Murray Rothbard on Strategy for Liberty, and Austrianism vs. Friedmanism; Jerry Tuccille on Psychology of Left and Right; and a debate between Roy A. Childs, Jr. and Jeffrey St. John on Anarcho-Capitalism vs. Limited Government. The conference is being organized by the New York Libertarian Alliance, an affiliate of the Society for Individual Liberty. For details on the conference, write to Gary Greenberg, 460-5D Old Town Road, Port Jefferson Sta., N.Y. 11776.

Libertarianism: A Warning

Libertarianism is experiencing, paradoxically, both a fantastic upsurge in numbers and popularity and a serious blow to its continued effectiveness. In order to make this clear, it will be necessary to take a serious look at what effectiveness within the context of libertarianism would have to be (and is, on many occasions). Before I do that, let me adduce some facts which I think will serve to demonstrate my claim.

Today America is experiencing what might properly be considered a very important choice in its political directions. This choice has existed, of course, throughout America’s history – which is to say, individual citizens in this country have always had the choice between pursuing wise or unwise political ends (as well as, and logically tied to, wise or unwise personal ends). The culmination of past errors has, however, flowered only in the last few years. To put it bluntly, the curtain may be falling on the close of the few decades of individualism in the world.

There is no inevitability to this, of course, but, free will notwithstanding, the implications of past misbehavior cannot be avoided; at best, they may be coped with rationally. Which is just what our problem is. Unless libertarians attend carefully to coping with the implications of the misbehavior of past members of this society—including, of course, at times their own past misbehavior – there is not very likely going to be a way to cope with it and thus no successful, rational actions will be taken to cope with it.

From the realms of industry, education, military defense, criminal court procedures, farming, ecology, to those of unionism, poverty, and art (yes!), the implications of corruption and bankruptcy in values are surrounding us. What are libertarians, on the whole, doing these days? Well, here we are getting into some delicate matters, so let me point out that I am dealing in generalizations, statistical ones, based not on a precise count but on the general but oft reliable knowledge I gain by keeping tabs on both the world in general and libertarianism in particular. As such, my answer to the above question must be seen for the generalization that it can only be. As regards, then, the great majority of young libertarians, writing in the various journals, active on the various campuses, present at the numerous meetings – scholarly and other – the bulk of them is concerned with dealing with utopianism. Too many have lifted their eyes from reality to the never-to-be-reached future. Even those who are non-utopians in their theoretical explorations in libertarian political philosophy are engaged predominatly in scholastical debates about the most minute details of – of all things – the structure of a libertarian society. This concern with Platonic perfection, this attitude of producing a final, absolute, static, non-contextually perfect societal structure is now a part of the libertarian intellectual movement – but not practiced by intellectuals, individuals who have become specialists at for example political theory, ethics, epistemology, economics, sociology, psychology, or other intellectual fields. Everyone in the libertarian movement included in this special category of Utopian involvement has become an “expert” at everything relating to society and man. There simply is no division of labor, on the whole, within this new class of people. Without the slightest awareness of the difficulties of ethics and meta-ethics, young libertarians are writing books on the subject of how men ought to act in all kinds of specialized circumstances, of what should men in voluntary cooperation or out of it do for themselves in all kinds of specialized circumstances, etc. There is very little respect for education among the libertarians; there is, in fact, an anti-intellectualism in the sense that matters of intellectual concern are treated frivolously, in two page essays and in hundred page dissertations alike. Intellectual rigor which gave birth to the movement in men’s minds, which produced the discoveries of Locke, Spencer, Mill, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Rand, et al. through hard work, has fallen by the wayside. Respect for the human mind, resulting in respect for reality, is slowly leaving libertarianism, at least in many circles.

Many, of course, are doing hard work – which is where man’s salvation lies. Hopefully these reap beneficial results in their own personal lives. It would be so much more productive in behalf of our central aims to do the hard work we can do well within our respective fields of competence. If we haven’t got such a field, we ought to find one. For, to get back to a point I promised I would return to, our effectiveness lies centrally in our own individual abilities to lead the best lives we can within the context–needs, abilities, requirements, obstacles, problems, realities – of our own lives. It does not appear that many libertarians are taking their own philosophical position seriously enough to live it within their own lives consistently (or at least to try to do so to the best of their abilities). The evidence for this lies in what I have laid before the reader. It is clearly bad for one to do something badly – and so many libertarians are doing bad thinking these days, thinking which produces no knowledge because it is thinking about things that are very difficult to think about without very thorough preparation. We would not trust a man totally untrained in medicine to be our doctor. And so forth. Nor should we trust people totally untrained in the specialized thinking required to cope with very complicated and refined philosophical, political, psychological, sociological, economic, etc. problems to do this thinking for us well. Others who are not libertarians catch on to this, of course, and there is just one important place where effectiveness is suffering. We aspire to be doctors of these fields, but few go through the difficulty of earning their doctorates – not necessarily in universities (they are not always the right places these days to earn a meaningful doctorate, although they ought to be). Too many of us do not earn doctorates simply by failing to educate ourselves thoroughly within the fields in which we make pronouncements. Too many of us have lost respect for man’s mind and, therefore, our own absolute need to become mentally equipped to cope with reality. That, in part, explains why so many of us turn to problems of future societies – the context within those realms is as open as is the context within speculations about dancing angels on the head of a pin. Tomorrow is not around to fly in the face of our speculations, so tomorrow is an easy target for those willing to speculate wildly.

I say all this with utter sincerity; partly I say it as a result of some self-investigations, partly because I know the substance of the libertarian intellectual movement, and mostly because of my love of liberty for myself and all human beings. I hope, therefore, that, instead of hostile reactions, we may embark upon some serious considerations as we come across the ideas expressed above.

— Tibor R. Machan

ON WOMEN LIBERATION

The benefit which the libertarian right can derive from alliance with the radical left, as well as the strictly defined limits of this alliance, arise from the nature of socialism as an inherently incompatible mix of polar-opposite political philosophies–libertarianism and mercantilistic statism. From the former, the left draws its sensitivity to the abuse of power, and from the latter, the readiness to wield state power to advance its chosen ends. Those who imbibe this strange mixture develop an uncanny ability to sniff out with great accuracy the large and the petty pathologies of our social system, and an equally uncanny ability to propose solutions which surpass the disease in destructiveness.

The latest fad of the left is Women’s Liberation, and in pursuit of this cause, its combined forces have surely reached new heights of muddled thinking and misdirected rhetoric. Nonetheless, libertarians would be well advised to consider the old maxim, that fifty million freaks can’t be all wrong all of the time, before writing off Women’s Lib all together. History tells us time and again that when the left says something’s wrong here, something is indeed wrong. To find out just what is wrong and what to do about it, the libertarian need only rotate the analysis and recommendations of the left by 180 degrees or so and extrapolate according to the tables in the back of The Wealth of Nations.

In the case of Women’s Lib, for example, the left wing analysis has it that the feminine half of humanity is being brutally exploited by the capitalistic, male-chauvinist sexist “system”, and that the State in shining armor must come riding to the rescue on a bundle of tax money. The libertarian, decoding this message, concludes correctly that the male-dominated state is riding roughshod over the fairer sex, and that only a quick injection of laissez-faire can save the day.

Now, let’s be more specific. The exploitee dearest to the hearts of the braless set is Mrs. American Housewife, inexorably trapped by the system in the triple role of sex object, nursemaid, and cleaning woman. Trapped by the system, yes, but by just what part of the system. By the brainwashing of the socialization process? By the prejudice of the male-chauvinist captains of industry? The leftists gloss over this delicate issue with a little sloganeering, but the libertarian, with his usual incisive insight, quickly identifies the true mechanism of oppression – the TAX SYSTEM. Here is the chain which binds the housewife to her stereotyped role – a multi-billion dollar subsidy from Washington for her husband-oppressor!

How does it work? Well, to begin with, we must note a fact which is somehow passed over by the leftist Women’s Libbers, namely, that the housewife is a highly productive and in many respects highly skilled worker, producing an extremely valuable service. Corresponding to the massive aggregate service output of American housewives is an income stream of equal magnitude – but an income stream which remains wholly implicit, never makes it into the national income accounts, and is never tapped by the Internal Revenue Service. Compared to this most gargantuan of tax loopholes, the oil depletion allowance and municipal bonds are mere pinpricks!

Now, as any student of Economics I knows, when differential rates of taxation are applied to different lines of production, a misallocation of resources develops. If oil production is taxed and coal mining is tax exempt, we may be sure that the use of coal will increase, and that coal will be used unproductively in areas where oil would in fact be a more efficient fuel. Likewise, then, if housewife services are untaxed, while commercial janitorial services, child care centers, laundries, restaurants, and houses of prostitution are taxed, then housewives will have a competitive edge, and every male wanting any of these services will be encouraged to contract for them via marriage rather than contracting for them via the market.

Suppose a woman, before marriage, has been trained in the skill, let us say, of computer programming. Suppose her marginal product as a computer programmer is $3.00 an hour, while her marginal product as a domestic servant is only $2.25. Clearly, it would be good economics for her to find employment as a programmer and hire various specialists to fulfill the bulk of her cleaning, cooking, and child care functions, pocketing a clear premium of 75 cents an hour. Yet what if her husband is already earning $10,000 a year, putting her in the 30 percent tax bracket? That leaves her with $2.10 take home from her programming job, less than enough to pay the cooking, cleaning, and child care contractors. This poor woman is indeed trapped in the home in an employment which does not exploit her full training and productivity, just as the Women’s Liberationists claim. Oddly enough, however, the conventional order of villain and hero (tax supported state sector vs. profit supported capitalist sector) is reversed – who now appears to set the trap, and who would offer her a way out if left free to do so?

What is to be done to end this massive misallocation of human resources? Short of the ideal, but long-range, solution of abolishing the income tax altogether, it would appear that there are two ways to end the distortion. On the one hand, an attempt could be made to measure the income generated by domestically employed housewives, and subject it to taxation at the rates applicable to all other forms of income. Alternatively, a tax deduction could be allowed for the purchase of commercially produced “domestic” services.

From the point of view of equity and pure theory, I think that the first approach has superior merit, if one must choose between the two inequitable and theoretically objectionable alternatives. The weight of practical arguments, however, I think, favors the latter. The key issue in choosing between the options is that of information gathering. If domestic income were taxed, the incentive for the household would be to hide it, and for the IRS to build up a huge snooping and prying apparatus to combat this tendency. People are already objecting, after all, to a census form which once every ten years asks how many toilets you have in the house. What if in addition you had to fill out a monthly report detailing the number of times you mopped the kitchen floor or washed your underwear? In contrast, if domestic service substitutes were tax exempt, the information required would be happily volunteered by the tax payer. In addition to keeping track of the number of gallons-worth of gas tax paid, and of expense-account dinners, he would also keep receipts and records of payments to janatorial contractors, day care centers, appliance sales and rental outlets, etc.

For a dramatic example that clinches the relative superiority of the deduction scheme, consider the important household service of sex. The extended taxation method would not only require records to be kept of the frequency of intercourse, but would have to tackle the forbidding problem of deciding which partner was the “producer” and which the “consumer”! In contrast, under the deduction system, it would only be necessary for the taxpayer to keep receipts from the services of (male or female) prostitutes. Here, consumer and producer would be clearly identified, and, if the taxpayer preferred to keep his sex-life private rather than to claim his deduction, he could do so at his own discretion.

Removal of the tax incentive for household production would have immediate beneficial repercussions of both an economic and sociological nature. Those women who did not have a natural comparative advantage for the performance of housework would flow into the labor force, creating an immediate spur to production. At the same time, millions of new jobs would be opened up in the rapidly expanding fields of commercial child care, janitorial contracting, production of ready-to-wear clothing and ready-to-eat foods, manufacture of labor-saving appliances, and so forth. As soon as these services became widely available (many of them at reduced cost because of the opportunity to exploit economies of scale) women would no longer have to duck in and out of the labor force every time a child arrived, or of necessity hold only part-time jobs. Employers would immediately recognize this, and drop their reluctance to put female employees through expensive managerial and on-the-job training programs. The next generation, fully accustomed to female bus drivers and bank presidents, and to male secretaries and school teachers, would grow up without the occupational stereotypes of our present society which the Women’s Liberationists find so unnecessary and artificial.

Of course, the full liberation of women would require a few other changes in addition to tax reform. Needless to say, all of the misguidedly paternalistic laws designed to “protect” the “weaker sex” by barring females from certain lines of employment, or limiting their hours of work, would have to be written off the books. The cultural adjustment of the younger generation would be facilitated by replacing public with private education, so that women would not be forced to send their children to schools where the curriculum, dictated by male-chauvinist boards of education, shunted little girls into home-ec classes, and little boys into wood working and machine shop. The institution of marriage would have to be put on a truly contractual basis, that is to say, restrictions on the scope, nature, and duration of marriage contracts would have to be abolished. This would open the way for experimentation with fixed-term marriages, various forms of alimony and child support clauses or none at all, homosexual marriages for both sexes, and assorted communal, multi–lateral, interlocking, or even Heinieinian chain marriages.

So you see, beneath the phantasmagoria of RAT and SCUM, there is something to the idea of Women’s Liberation after all, for the plight of women in our society is but a specific manifestation of the general lack of liberation. As in the case of blacks, migrant workers, soldiers, and hippies, the left has once again pointed out to us one of the multiple projecting tips of the huge iceberg of statist repression. The leftists, not knowing that all of these visible sore points of society are connected underneath to a common mass, think that the iceberg can be done away with by cutting off the tips, but we libertarians know that this would have the effect only of making another, probably larger part of the iceberg rise to the surface at another point!

How easy it is to expose the Women’s Lib radicals for what they are, a group of pudding-headed, slogan-chanting neo-amazons, but this is only half the task which libertarians must undertake. We must go beyond this to include a Women’s Liberation plank in our general program, to use the Women’s Lib issue as an opening for libertarian agitation and propaganda, and to hammer, hammer, hammer in the point that no single oppressed group will be free until all men are free, living in a society where repression is abolished and the free market is triumphant!

— Edwin G. Dolan

Living Free

For some time now I have seen enunciated in the libertarian press the view that the important thing about liberty is not the “negative” and rather petty goal of getting rid of statism, but the “positive” act by each libertarian of “liberating himself”, of “living a truly free life”, of “living anarchy”, etc. Now I must confess that I simply do not understand what these people are talking about, or, more concretely, that either they are writing pure rhetorical gibberish, or they are slipping into grave and even dangerous error.

Since their inception, libertarians have always been accused of being “negative”. “Why do you always attack the government? Why can’t you advocate positive programs?” has always been a popular charge against us. Happily the “living free” advocates do not wish to achieve their “positive” goals through government, but the fundamental error still remains. The point is that the fundamental definition of liberty is “negative”: it consists in the absence of molestation, the absence of invasion of anyone’s property rights in his person or material goods by other people. And the first philosophical error of every statist or socialist, left or right, is always to denounce the “superficiality” of “negative” freedom, and to set forth their views of “positive” freedom, which can include a grab-bag of goodies from full employment and three-square-meals a day to the present fad for “personal liberation.” One of F. A. Hayek’s great contributions in his Road To Serfdom was, once and for all, to eviscerate the call for “positive” freedom, to reveal the fatal admixture of the concepts of freedom and positive power or wealth in the same context. This is not to deny the value of wealth or other positive goods, but simply to distinguish between freedom and other good things in life.

It follows then that libertarianism per se is indeed “negative”, and that liberty is, to be sure, not the be-all and end-all of anyone’s personal philosophy. The libertarian does not believe that liberty per se provides the magic panacea for all ills or the magic guide for all actions; he simply advocates the liberty for every man to work out his own goals and his own personal philosophy. Once liberty is achieved, there can be all sorts of moral philosophies which different libertarians can pursue; the rationalist libertarians, for example, among whom I include myself, would hope that the free man would use his liberty in accordance with a rational ethic, an ethic derived from a rational study of the objective nature of man. But this plea for rationalism is on a different plane than the wider plea for liberty.

Talk about “living a free life” or “living anarchy” then becomes, at best, meaningless pap. As long as the State exists and has its being, none of us can be totally free; on the other hand, we all enjoy varying degrees of partial freedom, of partial non-molestation. Obviously, the enslaved draftee, for example, enjoys little or no freedom. If we zero in on coercive violence as being the sole obstacle to freedom, then, the hokum about “personal freedom” allows us to bask complacently in our present highly imperfect state. It is dangerously close to the old reactionary view that “the slave is completely free so long as he knows he’s a slave” – a bromide that has always struck me as being almost obscene in its smugness. The concept of “living free” comes close to being the age-old opium of the intellectual. Over the centuries this is a bromide that has taken many forms: from the Hegelian “freedom is the opportunity to obey the perfect orders of the perfect State” to the present-day “true freedom is exploring your inner feelings.” In none of these forms should this cop-out concept be at all palatable to the libertarian.

Take for example the latest Winter 1970 issue of the quarterly RAP, the organ of Rampart College of Los Angeles.

This issue has the advantage over the previous one of featuring a profile of Kathy Forte, who is a lot prettier than the previously featured Dana Rohrabacher (and if this be “sexism”, then make the most of it!) But Kathy’s “philosophy”, as described in the article, seems to consist largely of defining freedom as dancing barefoot on the beach. An estimable activity perhaps – though what do you do with those of us who don’t like sand? – but surely having nothing in the world to do with freedom. If Kathy wishes to define freedom as dancing on the beach, then us anti-sanders are going to rise up angry in protest; if, on the other hand, she merely wants to use her freedom in this way, well that’s fine, but then the whole discussion has been shifted from “freedom” to moral or esthetic philosophy. And the danger is that the freedom-dancing group will come to regard the whole problem of statism and violence as irrelevant and unimportant; for as long as they let you dance on the beach, why worry?

Thus, Kathy states: “There are many external ways to achieve liberation . . . but all of them mean looking very deeply inside yourself. That’s where you must find your own spiritual high—without politics, without institutions, without the games designed to keep people cut off from experiencing life.” Without politics, fine. But “without institutions”? How can any civilized life be conducted without institutions? And suppose many people don’t want to “look very deeply inside themselves”? What’s wrong with that? Why is it supposed to be our function to pester and harangue them into doing so? Why can’t one be a libertarian without “looking deeply”? And what “games” is she talking about? It is easy to sneer at other people’s values and life-styles as “games”; if we wished to be nasty, we might even apply such derogatory terms to spending one’s life dancing on the sand.

Elsewhere in the article, Kathy indicates that she means such “games” as “power games” and “ego trips” such as are allegedly prevalent in YAF, trips which block one off from “a higher trip called life.” But why is Kathy’s “life trip” any more moral, any more rational, than the “ego trips” in YAF? I am the last person to leap to the defense of YAF as an institution or as a group of people, but it is not self-evident to me that the desire of YAFers’ both to advance their ideals in the world and to advance their personal careers is “anti-life”. On the contrary, and setting aside the unfortunate YAF involvement with Republican politics, it strikes me that the YAFers’ desire to advance both personal careers and ideals in the world is a lot more moral, a lot more rational, and a lot more attuned to the life of man as a purposive, goal-seeking being, than pirouetting on the seashore.

After all, libertarians, if they have any personal philosophy beyond freedom from coercion, are supposed to be at the very least individualists, and if they are individualists they should be heartily in favor of each individual’s advancing of his own “ego”. What’s, wrong with ego? and why are libertarians falling into the cultural-New Left trap of denigrating ego and purpose in favor of some sort of cloudy ego-less whim?

There is a basic and important problem here for the libertarian movement. And that is that most libertarians are ex-Randians, and that, after having liberated themselves from the totalitarian and bizarre aspects of the Rand cult, all too many libertarians have tossed over the important core of Aristotelian doctrine: the emphasis on reason and purpose, the cleaving of one’s actions to an objective and purpose, the cleaving of one’s actions to an objective, rational ethic. Too many libertarians have thrown out the rational baby with the Randian bathwater. And since no man can live with no personal ethic at all, the unfortunate drift has been in the direction of “cultural New Leftism”, and all the aimlessness, inrrationality, and whim-worship which this doctrine implies.

Thus, for example, in the same issue of RAP, the editors answer a question from a reader about prostitution, and they write that “prostitution is the outgrowth of psychological and political repression, not of freedom”, and “we think that free choice would be a liberating force and that most people would seek beauty rather than ugliness.” Without discussing the morality of prostitution, we are here on very dangerous waters indeed. What, for example, is “psychological repression”? “Repression” of what? Methinks there is underlying these words the cloven hoof of Herbert Marcuse and “left-Freudianism”, a doctrine highly fashionable on the Left today but I believe highly pernicious. We have seen in the last couple of years the danger of libertarians catering to anti-libertarian ideologies on the New Left; the same holds true for the catering to the pervasive anti-rationalism of the New Left “counter-culture.”

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL-POLITICAL DICHOTOMY

Much of the confusion concerning the question of whether libertarianism is now a phenomenon of the Left or of the Right can be resolved if we think in terms of Left and Right politics and Left and Right psychology. It is my contention that an individual can be a psychological Right Winger and a political Leftist, a psychological Leftist with Right Wing politics, or that he can belong psychologically and politically to the same side of the division.

In the broadest sense, Left Wing psychology operates in terms of concretes. Left Wingers are more apt to see the world in its specific reality; they relate directly to sensual experience; they identify with the victims of injustice and therefore have a more naturalistic understanding of what injustice means. Psychological Leftists are more feeling-oriented in the sense that they are more willing to break a philosophical principle to rectify an unjust situation. Even if they do not believe in robbing the rich to feed the poor they may be willing to do so if they see someone going hungry. They are also philosophical in that they intellectualize their own attitudes, but they are usually not so bound by philosophical absolutes that they will not break one for the sake of relieving someone else’s misery.

The psychological Right Winger, on the other hand, deals more with abstractions. He is also against injustice and on the side of liberty, but he is more likely to become incensed because his theories are not being put into operation than he is because somebody’s baby was bitten by a rat. He knows that there is discrimination in the world, that some people are denied decent housing and adequate employment, but he is more annoyed at the “irrationality” of this condition than he is by its real-life effect on human beings. Not only is the psychological Right Winger unconcerned about the specifics of injustice, he may even denounce all sympathy for the misery of others as misguided “altruism.”

Both psychological Left Wingers and psychological Rightists can be violently anti-state, but their different psychological attitudes will flavor the nature of their anti-statist motivation. The psychological Leftists will fight the authorities, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives, as long as there is one little pocket of injustice remaining in the world; the efforts of the psychological Rightist will be directed toward securing his own personal freedom and putting his theories into practice if only on a limited scale. The psychology of the Left is primarily altruistic and world-oriented; that of the Right selfish and ego-oriented From this we can see that the psychology of Left and Right can co-exist within the framework of a Left Wing political perspective (in the case of anti-establishment radicals), and also within the framework of a Right Wing political perspective (in the case of pro-establishment liberals and conservatives).

The great danger inherent in this condition is that the psychological Right Winger may abandon his Left Wing political position and align with the political Right if the going gets too rough. His doctrinaire selfishness renders his mania for self-preservation paramount over all other considerations, and he may temporarily renew his alliance with his Right Wing political counterpart in a crisis situation. The psychological Left Winger runs the risk of being so self-less and other-oriented that he will be driven to Left Wing adventurism if his goals are not achieved tomorrow. In other words, the radical movement can be betrayed on both counts – by the psychological Rightist who will compromise his political principles to save his own neck; by the psychological Left Winger who will adopt suicidal tactics in the cause of his service to humanity.

At its worst, the psychology of the Left rejects reason altogether. It can be so selfless, so other-oriented, so concerned about the happiness of the “general community” that it exhibits little if any understanding of personal interests, the value of self-esteem or even self-regard, or the importance of rational considerations as a guideline for human action. To die rather than to live for one’s beliefs takes on heroic proportions. To go to jail is regarded as morally superior to remaining free and struggling for an ideal. So is born the adventurism of the psychological far Left which is every bit as defeatist and destined to failure as the retreatism of the extreme psychological Right.

So it would seem that a mixed psychology is the ideal condition: a mentality that is committed to reason but not to the extent that it begins to regard itself as infallible; a mentality concerned with personal happiness, but not to the extent that it is willing to sacrifice the happiness of others to attain its own ends; a mentality that recognizes good and evil in the world, but not to the point where all others not in agreement with itself are viewed as reincarnations of Beelzebub; a mentality vitally concerned about abstract questions of morality but, again, not to the extent that it is unwilling to re-evaluate the abstract when concrete evidence calls it into question; in brief, a balanced mixture of the ego and the other, the abstract and the concrete.

As for politics? If Left is broadly defined as opposition to an inequitable status quo, and Right as an attempt to preserve and protect an inequitable condition in society, then it is mandatory by any standard of morality to throw one’s lot in with the political Left. But the Right sees itself as safeguarding, not inequity, but a just and moral religious and cultural tradition. To my way of thinking, Right Wing politics is justified only in a libertarian or reasonably libertarian society providing a great degree of liberty and justice for all its citizens. The Right Wing sees this condition as already having been largely achieved. It is for each individual to make up his own mind on this subject, to weigh the evidence pro and con and reach his own conclusions.

When the war is over, when all American troops are home, when the institutions of this country are in the hands of the people in the neighborhoods, when there is a semblance of economic and social justice for the myriad groups which constitute this society, it will be time enough to talk about preserving and protecting the status quo. When that day arrives the onus of being a political Right Winger, a custodian of the status quo, will have become, happily enough, a thing of the past.

Recommended Reading

The Right. There have been several annotated guides to the right-wing, but none so thorough, perceptive, and fair-minded as the new booklet by Ferdinand V. Solara, 58 Key Influences in the American Right (available for $1.95 from Polifax Press, P.O. Box 20067, Denver, Colo. 80220). Ignore the soggy title; Mr. Solara has done his homework; he has done thorough independent research, as well as eliciting information from the groups and publications involved. Admittedly, he has unavoidable difficulties in defining “right-wing”, as well as difficulties with his numerical scale: O for total “1984” government; 10 for zero government and total individual freedom. (Where, for example, would Mr. Solara place anarcho-syndicalists or anarcho-communists?) However, I can have no objections to a scale which, delightfully, places myself and the Lib. Forum as the only publication or organization with a 10 rating. We at the Forum are proud to accept the accolade. Solara’s comments on us are amusing and perceptive, e.g.: “The Libertarian Forum . . . is the end-point of the American political spectrum; beyond this, there lies only the static of random noise. Its editor . . . is . . . consistent in his thinking to the point that he frightens 99% of his compatriots on the American Right.” Characteristically, not one of the other “rightist” outfits mentioned the Forum admiringly; however, we may not be loved, but we’re feared!

In his questionnaire, Mr. Solara asked each group or publication to list other right-wing groups which it admired or disliked; it is typical of the namby-pamby attitude of most of the groups that very few – excluding, of course, ourselves – could bring themselves to express public antipathy toward any other group.

Mr. Solara divides the American Right into five separate nuclei or sectors, each of which have their separate groupings, central and satellite organizations: the National Review group, the Birch Society group, the Liberty Lobby sector, the racist-paramilitary sector, and the admittedly far looser “independent” sector, which is very roughly free-market or libertarian, and among whom we are included. Certainly Human Events and probably “Our Peoples Underworld” are better included in the National Review than in the Independent sector, but apart from this there are remarkably few errors in the volume. There are important omissions, (e.g. Modern Age, Intercollegiate Studies Institute) but but these are probably accounted for by Mr. Solara’s policy not to include organizations that did not care to reply to his questionnaire (typically, The Objectivist specifically requested that it not be included in the book.) Highly recommended.

Pollution and the Law.

All those interested in the legal defense of property rights against pollution will find indispensable the summary of recent developments in tort liability law by Harvard professor Milton Katz, The Function of Tort Liability in Technology Assessment (pamphlet available free from the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society, 61 Kirkland St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138). It becomes clear to the libertarian in the article that the stopping of an invasive nuisance requires more than simple compensation for damages (the Chicagoite solution); it requires also a permanent injunction against continuing invasion. The injunctive proceeding is one of the great legal defenses against invasion of property, and it must be used to the hilt.

Privatizing the Public Sector.

Some of the ways in which “public” activities are being turned over to the infinitely more efficient private sector are summarized in “Creeping Capitalism”, Forbes (Sept. 1, 1970). Forbes points out that even liberals, fed up with the ever-growing urban mess, are beginning to look with favor on private, market solutions to our problems.

Thus, on police: two-thirds of all the nation’s law enforcement officers are now private. And, to those who think it’s impossible: “on a typical block of big corporate headquarters buildings in Manhattan . . . it’s possible that perhaps 20 different private police forces are working at any one time.” Private fire-fighting companies are discussed, including the Rural/Metropolitan Fire Department, a private corporation which has been fighting fire for over two decades in a wide area of Arizona, ranging from large cities to small towns and rural regions.

Education.

Richard F. Schier, “The Problem of the Lumpenpro-fessoriat”, AAUP Bulletin (Winter, 1970, $1.50). A blistering critique of the educational Left, especially of the discontented younger faculty, who lead in the debasement of educational standards. Thus, Professor Schier: “it is not surprising that people are drawn to reform who cannot, in their own careers, meet the traditional expectations. For such people the seemingly modest insistence that they have little, if anything, to teach students aside from a narrow and technical specialty. . . has more than a germ of truth. Professionalism does require specialization and cerebration and is not well adapted to the heightening of sensory awareness nor sympathetic to what is called, in the modish jargon, nonrational ways of knowing. Hence the drive away from traditional education, with its emphasis on the intellect, to affective education designed to educate the whole man . . . . Nor is the popularity of such innovations with students difficult to understand . . . . The competitiveness of the grading system is unpleasantly demanding, and it is pleasurable to be told that one’s emotions are an adequate or perhaps a surer guide to Truth. Scholarship is painful in a way that the eroticization of experience is not.” Schier goes on to add that the especial popularity of the new reforms at the “best” colleges is a way of trying to keep down a competitiveness in getting ahead which has always been annoying to Establishments already in power. And the working-class students at the lower-ranking colleges resist these “humanitarian” reforms for the same reason.

Isolationism.

The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $12.95, 1038 pp.) The massive, fascinating pre-war and wartime diaries of a fearless opponent of America’s entry into World War II. Particularly interesting is the courage of a moral leader who could not think in terms of the political jungle; hence Lindy’s spurning of the opportunity to become the mobilizer of the isolationist forces even after Pearl Harbor. (Note particularly his confrontations with John T. Flynn (541) and Herbert Hoover (546)). The friendly reviews in some liberal journals (e.g. the New Republic) of the man for long most hated by liberals indicates a growing willingness to re-evaluate all of America’s wars.

Economics.

F. A. Hayek, “Three Elucidations of the Ricardo Effect,” Journal of Political Economy (Mar.-Apr. 1969), pp. 274-85. An important article in which Hayek, returning for the first time in decades to economics, explains how, in Austrian theory, injections of increased money can lead to continuing distortions in relative prices.

John K. Gifford, “Critical Remarks on the Phillips Curve and the Phillips Hypothesis”, Weltwirschaftliches Archiv. (1969-I), pp. 79-94. A much-welcomed critique of the highly overrated “Phillips curve”, which allegedly sets off against each other price changes and unemployment, in inverse ratio.

Journal of Law and Economics (April, 1970).

Steven Cheung, “The Structure of a Contract and the Theory of a Non-Exclusive Resource”, on property and externalities, particularly as applied to weaknesses of absence of private property rights in the fisheries.

Kenneth G. Elzinga, “Predatory Pricing: the Case of the Gunpowder Trust”. A decade ago in the same journal, John S. McGee exploded once and for all the common myth that Rockefeller built his Standard Oil complex on “predatory price cutting”: on deliberately cutting prices below cost, driving out competitors, and finally raising prices. Now, Elzinga does a similar demolition job on the same myth as applied to the Gunpowder Trust at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bernard H. Siegan, “Non-Zoning in Houston”. A lengthy, excellent article demonstrating in detail how the absence of all zoning works well in Houston, indeed better than in zoned cities. The aims of zoning are accomplished better through private covenants in real estate contracts, restricting development in the area to certain activities.

Journal of Law and Economics (October, 1970).

Yale Brozen’s “The Antitrust Task Force Deconcentration Recommendation”, taken together with the paper by Eugene M. Singer, “Industrial Organization: Price Models and Public Policy”, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (May, 1970), provide the most up-to-the minute refutation of the common left-liberal contention that “highly concentrated” industries have higher rates of profit; Brozen and Singer refute the major studies proposing this view.

Negroes and Education. Thomas Sowell, “Colleges are Skipping Over Competent Blacks to Admit ‘Authentic’ Ghetto Types,” New York Sunday Times Magazine (Dec. 20). A black free-market economist points to the scandal of university discrimination against competent Negro students, in order to give scholarships to incompetent but politically “in” blacks.

Women’s Lib. The counter-revolution against women’s lib noted by TIME (“Women’s Lib: A Second Look”, Dec. 14).

Reprints.

Greenwood Press, Westport Conn., has reprinted the full run of a large number of radical American journals, from 1890 on, and is engaged in the task of doing the same for right-wing magazines. Of particular interest to libertarians is Greenwood’s reprint of the entire run of Benjamin R. Tucker’s magnificent Liberty, all 17 volumes, bound, 1881-1908, with an introduction by Prof. Herbert Gutman. The price, unfortunately, is a prohibitive $545.00, but we understand that Liberty will soon be available for something like one-tenth the cost on microfiche.

Greenwood Press has also reprinted the following books: George L. Anderson, ed., Issues and Conflicts (1959). A forgotten but important book of revisionist essays, brought together by the William Volker Fund. Particularly good are the essays by William Neumann on China, Alfred M. Lilienthal on the Middle East, Louis Martin Sears on Revisionism, Roland Stromberg on “collective security”, and Richard N. Current on the Kellogg Pact. Price: $15.25.

Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953). Long out of print, this is a classic, the last great work of World War II revisionism, especially on Pearl Harbor, and including Harry Barnes’ blast against the “historical blackout.” Also includes excellent articles on early Cold War Revisionism by George Lundberg, William L. Neumann. Includes articles by Tansill, Sanborn, Morgenstern, Greaves. Price: $19.50.

Charles A. Beard, The Devil Theory of War (1936). An important between-the-wars work of revisionism. Price: $8.25.

Charles Vevier, The United States and China, 1906-1913 (1955). A Williamsite revisionist view of U.S. imperialism and the quest for investments in China. Ranks with McCormick in applying the Williams view to Asia. Price: $10.75.

NOW! AT LAST!

The long-awaited work by

Murray N. Rothbard

The sequel to “Man, Economy, and State”

Is Available!

IT is CALLED

POWER AND MARKET

POWER AND MARKET demonstrates how a free market can be truly free, providing protection and defense without the need for coercive, monopolistic government.

POWER AND MARKET analyzes all forms of government intervention and their consequences, focussing on intervention as a grantor of monopolistic privilege, direct and hidden.

POWER AND MARKET dissects the rationale and effects of every kind of taxation, including the poll tax and the “Randian” voluntary taxation solution.

POWER AND MARKET provides the first thorough critique in years of the Henry George “single tax”.

POWER AND MARKET exposes the inner contradictions of the theories of democracy.

POWER AND MARKET extends praxeology to a critique and refutation of important anti-market ethical doctrines, including: the problems of immoral choices, equality, security, the alleged joys of status, charity and poverty, “materialism”, “other forms” of coercion, human and property rights. Also an exposition of libertarian social philosophy in refuting a book solely devoted to attacking it.

Available in paper ($3.00) or hard-cover ($6.00).
From:

Institute For Humane Studies

1134 Crane St.

Menlo Park, Calif. 94015

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 2

March 1971

75¢

TAKEOFF II

The past month has seen a ballooning, an expanding, a veritable wonderment of publicity for the libertarian movement. For the first time in my life, I meet average intellectuals: in colleges, in TV studies, in the press, who are extremely sympathetic toward and interested in the libertarian doctrine. Libertarians are literally popping up everywhere, and the chances are large that the next intellectual or opinion-moulder you meet will either consider himself a libertarian or at least be interested in the idea. The basic reason seems to be the failure of Liberalism, a failure evident to all but the most obtuse liberals. After all, Liberals have been in power for nearly forty years, and what they have wrought has been the Frankenstein’s Monster of Presidential war and dictatorship, the war in Vietnam, and the Leviathan government, the military-industrial complex, and big bureaucracy at home. And so many Liberals are ripe for a way out. The New Left, to the extent that it still exists, has become Stalinist and crazed; the conservatives, with their devotion to Throne, Altar, and the Big Bomb are out of the question. So who does that leave as the new road to salvation? Us!

The current tidal wave of publicity was touched off by Chairman Bill’s overreaction to the Lehr-Rossetto piece in the New York Sunday Times magazine section, as noted in our last month’s editorial. The momentum might have died with Buckley’s snide and bitchy column of Jan. 14; but Jerry Tuccille, having been sneered at by Buckley as a “semi-literate gentleman”, was provoked into belting out an attack on The Chairman, which he simply sent in to the New York Times remarkably influential Op-Ed section (the new page of the daily Times opposite the editorial page which is devoted to lively controversy and challenging ideas.) The editors liked the Tuccille piece, and printed it on Jan. 28: “A Split in the Right Wing.” Jerry pointed out that Buckley’s anti-libertarian hysteria was prompted by the fact that, with the Times article by Lehr-Rossetto, the libertarian-conservative split on the Right has at last received nationwide publicity, there by eroding Chairman Bill’s much-coveted power base.

The Op-Ed editors then asked me to follow up Tuccille’s piece with a philosophic statement of what this new libertarianism is all about; and this was printed as “The New Libertarian Creed” in the Times of Feb. 9.1 pointed out the evil influence of National Review in converting the old Taft-era right-wing from a roughly libertarian, individualist, and isolationist creed to the present crusade for extirpating Communists at home and abroad, and apologia for Big Government at home, both of which we have come to know so well. I also briefly outlined the libertarian philosophy as resting on two basic axioms: the absolute right of every individual to “self-ownership”, to the ownership of his own body; and the right to own all virgin resources that the individual finds and transforms by his personal energy. From these two axioms can be derived the entire system of property rights, freedom of contract and bequest, and free-market economy. I also pointed out that the conservative’s revered “law and order” really means the coercive dictation of the State, the historic harbinger of disorder and aggression, an aggression against person and property which it habitually commits through the robbery of taxation, the enslavement of conscription, and the mass murder of war. I ended by pointing out that libertarians are in the historic American tradition of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and Garrison; and that in contrast, James Burnham, in a recent National Review (Dec. 1) called for a new Bismarck for America and for a re-evaluation of fascism. Accompanying the article were pictures of Mencken, Jefferson, and Robert Taft.

The “New Libertarian Creed” was then placed into the Congressional Record (Feb. 24, pp. S1888-S1889) by Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Ore.) Senator Hatfield declared: “One of the unique and well articulated new philosophies on the political scene is libertarianism. Although it claims a long history, it has not received much public attention until rather recently. Its proponents vary in their intellectual histories, coming to this point of view via the right wing of the Republican Party on one extreme and from the New Left on the other.” Hatfield then proceeded to read my article into the Record as a “most comprehensive and concise presentation of this perspective.”

Buckley wound up the exchange with his “The Conservative Reply”, New York Times (Feb. 16). The article was a typical Buckley performance: a series of catty ad hominem smears and misrepresentations, carefully avoiding the substantive issues. One gets the impression, indeed, that Buckley has ceased to think at least a decade ago, so caught up is he in his career as the rich man’s insult-comic (although somehow less lovable than Jack E. Leonard).

As usual Buckley rings the changes: first, on the Karl Hess comparison of Beria and J. Edgar Hoover. As usual, Chairman Bill misses the point. It was not that Karl claimed that Hoover is as bad a character as Beria; the point Karl was making was that in one sense at least, Soviet Russia is more democratic than the United States: that they managed to depose the head of their secret police, whereas we are apparently unable to do so. An astute and witty point. And then, once more, for the 858th time, there is me and lighthouses. It should be clear to the most superficial reader of mine and Buckley’s writings, that he and his cohorts have devoted at least twenty times as much space to the lighthouse question as I ever have. Bill Buckley may consider socialized lighthouses to be one of the burning questions of our time, but I certainly do not.

In his article, in fact, Buckley affirms that the State does good as well as bad things, but the only positive example he can point to are those lighthouses again. One begins to wonder what accounts for Chairman Bill’s strange obsession with lighthouses? Setting aside with reluctance the possible Freudian interpretation, we are left with the thought that Mr. Buckley is very anxious to keep coercing landlubbing taxpayers into donating free light to his beloved sailboat–a true example of the “welfare state” in action, and surely a worthy reason for abandoning the free market.

Bill, I’m willing to make a trade: if you’ll give up the Cold War and the war in Southeast Asia, I’ll let you have your beloved socialized lighthouses, and may Social Darwinism work its way on your boat!

Buckley tries to defend himself against my charge of statism by wheeling into position four distinguished free-market economists, “whose intellectual fortress continues to be National Review.” The problem is that of those he mentions, one (Wilhelm Ropke) has been dead for years, another (Ludwig von Mises) has never written for his magazine, and a third (F. A. Hayek) broke with the magazine many years ago, vigorously denouncing Bill Buckley for his tasteless implication after the death of Dag Hammerskjold in an airplane crash that the latter had been cheating at cards. Buckley’s reply to Hayek was typical of his aristocratic taste and refinement: tossing off his remark as a jeu d’idee and implying that Hayek was not familiar enough with the English language to appreciate the Buckleyite wit. That leaves only Henry Hazlitt, who writes but seldom for National Review in any case.

Again for the umpteenth time, Buckley repeats Hazlitt’s charge that I am an “extreme a priorist”, a charge coming with ill grace from Henry, since the methodology of his own and his mentor Mises’ economics is precisely “extreme a priorism.” In the only piece of reasoning in his article, Buckley again gets matters completely mixed up: presuming to link me with the “extreme a priorist” view that every landowner owns the heavens up till infinity, Buckley conveniently ignores the fact that this is diametrically contrary to my own “homesteading” theory of property. On the contrary, it is his and Hazlitt’s presumably sensible and non-extremist common law that takes this admittedly absurd position. And so it goes, a farrago of smear, error, and clouding of substantive issues.

It might have struck some of Buckley’s readers that there was one curious omission in his pantheon of free-market economists: Professor Milton Friedman. Undoubtedly because even such a sober, conservative and Establishmenty economist as Friedman has been read out of the movement by Buckley for his kooky, “frivolous”, and extremist defense of free trade, legalized narcotics, and freedom for prostitution. In fact, it becomes ever clearer that any theorist who does not fit in cozily and completely as a champion of the status quo will be denounced by Chairman Bill for frivolity and absolutism.

It is clear that the conservatives are hurting from the libertarian upsurge, otherwise Buckley would not be devoting so much valuable space to our continuing excommunication.

Sure enough, on Feb. 23, National Review returned to the attack with a malicious editorial, “Serving Their Times”. Stooping to the very conspiracy view of history for which Buckley once read the Birchers out of the movement, N. R. asserts that the evil liberal New York Times has entered into a conspiracy with me and other libertarians to do the Times’ “dirty work” in attacking conservatism. Well, well! And, terrible thing, we were paid for this work by the Times, “with its offer of the check and the space to frolic in.” Buckley’s fulmination that we are all paid agents of the Times runs up against a few cold facts: (1) that the Times slipped badly enough in its conspiratorial work to give Buckley rather than myself or any other libertarian the last word in the dispute, there by allowing his smears and innuendos to remain unanswered. (2) that the Times magazine recently did a laudatory story on the Buckley family without visible protest from the chairman. (3) that the amount of money all of us received from the Times is as nothing compared to the money which Chairman Bill receives, day in and day out, for his regular column in the ultra-Liberal New. York Post. Who’s selling out to whom, Mr. Chairman? To cap the irony, Buckley conveniently forgets how Lehr and Rossetto came to write their article in the Times, which touched off the entire furor. They came to the Times’ attention for their ardent work for Buckley for Senate in last fall’s campaign!

Here we must record a refreshing interlude in the Buckleyite snake pit. William F. Rickenbacker, former editor of National Review and libertarian economist, has a letter in the March 9 issue of N. R, gently but firmly reproving one Witonski for his Buckleyite review of my Power and Market. This break in the N. R. monolith of hostility to liberty must be chalked up to the fact that the magazine could hardly refuse to print a letter from one of its former editors.

Turning to more pleasant matters, the next piece of scintillating publicity for our cause came in an organ which hardly fits the pattern of liberal conspiracy. The widely-read weekly, the National Observer, published a lengthy, amusing, sprightly, and perceptive article on the libertarian movement in its issue of March 1. The article by James R. Dickenson, “Abolish Government”, takes up the entire coveted upper half of the front page of the issue, and spills over to a large part of an inside page. Other subtitles in the Dickenson article are: “Down with all Governments!”, and “Own Your Own Road, Hire Your Own Police”. Dickenson did a great deal of work on the article, as is evident from the contents, and he is perceptive enough to base his summaries of the libertarian position on lengthy Interviews and quotes from myself, Leonard Liggio, Jerome Tuccille, and Karl Hess – and is also astute enough to perceive the differences between Karl and the rest of the movement. Generally a delightful article, highlighted by an amusing front-page cartoon on the movement, depicting a group of Breughel-like libertarians with swords aloft, blindfolded, carrying flags upside-down, and dancing around an eagle tied to the stake.

Another important contribution to the recent publicity on libertarianism is the March 1 issue of WIN, the semimonthly journal of the pacifist War Resisters’ League (30¢ per copy, $5.00 per year, available from 339 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. 10012.) Virtually the entire issue is devoted to “right-wing libertarianism.” The lead is an article by myself, “Know Your Rights”, the most comprehensive survey to date of the libertarian movement – who we are, and what are the different positions in the libertarian spectrum. The article first outlines the central core of the libertarian creed, and then goes on to a description and critique of the positions of FEE, the Randian movement, the neo-Randians, Robert LeFevre, the California and Hawaii movements, the development of SIL and RLA, the split within RLA. and the emergence of the National Taxpayers’ Union. Then there is an excellent article by Leonard Liggio, “Your Right to be Against War”, in which Leonard sets forth and analyzes the history of the anti-militarist and anti-imperialist movement in the twentieth century, the filiation from Old Right to New Left, the roles of Albert Jay Nock and Senator Taft, etc.

Another article in the WIN issue is an interesting contribution by a left-wing Friedmanite, Henry Bass, “Libertarian Economics.” Bass instructs his fellow syndicalists that they must incorporate the insights and truths of free-market economics in any vision of a utopian syndicalist society. Finally, Karl Hess contributes “What’s Left?”, a critique of the extreme right-wing of the libertarian movement, in particular Stanford’s Harvey Hukari, Jr. and the striking gap between Ayn Rand’s novels and her current political views. While Karl’s strictures are well-taken against the extreme right-wing of the movement, he does not come to grips with the sober center-mainstream of anarcho-capitalism. To top off the issue, one Bob Calese has compiled a useful bibliography of right-wing libertarian literature which includes the individualist anarchists: Andrews, Warren, Tucker, Spooner, Greene, Mackay, Swartz; libertarian classics such as Spencer and Nock; modern contributions such as Mises, Rand, Rothbard, Tannehill, Wollstein, Tuccille; and historical accounts and collections such as Martin, Silverman, Krimerman and Perry.

All in all, the issue is must reading for libertarians.

Newspapers and magazines: can other media be far behind? Numerous radio appearances by various libertarians were capped by my appearance on the NBC-TV Today show on March 8. – Furthermore, books galore by major publishers on libertarianism are scheduled for next winter’s season; there will be libertarian manifestoes, readers, personal statements, reprints, and non-fiction novels. If National Review is livid now, it had better brace itself for the flood of books next season. Onward and upward!

Notice To Subscribers

Because of the imminent rate increase in postage the subscription price of the Libertarian Forum will be $8.00 per year.

The Libertarian Forum will soon resume its former twice-monthly publication schedule in response to reader reaction.

Facing Bureaucracy

BY NORMAN H. CROWHURST

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

— Declaration of Independence.

To me, for whom the “long train” has extended over nearly 20 years, that particular sentence of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the mechanism by which “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed,” has come to have very real meaning.

Only when I was faced with a choice of what crime I should elect to commit at the instigation of a government agent, for which I, not he, would be punishable, did I finally realize that something is very, very wrong in America.

But let me start at the beginning, for my story will show how almost imperceptibly freedom can be encroached upon-just as others may have experienced it, with the difference that encroachment on mine was pushed further than the average citizen’s, for reasons that will emerge from my story.

My career, a highly successful one, started in England before World War 2. I was chief engineer of a leading electronics company, not long after ‘electronics’ was prevalently explained as ‘an outgrowth of radio, which is an outgrowth of electricity’! At the same time I was senior lecturer at two of London’s colleges, with responsibility for curriculum coordination between districts.

World War 2 resulted in concentrating my attention on the electronic communications equipment needed to win the war. After the war, bureaucracy raised its ugly head very quickly in Britain, making life quite difficult. After countless frustrations with the socialist government, the Land of Opportunity attracted my attention, and my wife and I emigrated in 1953.

Because my reputation preceded me I found work easily – in fact I had a choice. The first selection was a job with Fairchild Recording, developing multi-track sound to go with the then-new wide-screen movies. Fairchild also had government contracts to develop systems for the armed services, which had been “my bag’ in my native England.

This was where I should have been alerted that trouble was brewing, but perhaps America was too new for me to see the trend. I was precluded from this development work, because (a) I was not yet an American citizen, and (b) I did not possess security clearance. However, with my reputation, I encountered no difficulty finding other work.

After a little more than a year with Fairchild, I left full-time employ with that company, continued as a consultant to do work permitted to me, and extended my consulting clientele elsewhere. Being precluded from government-connected projects created “no sweat” for the time being.

From 1958 to 1961, one of my major clients was CBS Laboratories in Stamford, Connecticut. The Labs had a similar mix of work to that at Fairchild, part for consumer or industrial application, part for government contracts. However, several times engineers working on a particular government contract intimated that they would like to consult me about what they were doing, but were not permitted to do so.

In 1961, the CBS executive made a decision that affected me seriously: the Labs were to do no work except that ‘covered’ by government contracts. However, a coincidence gave me one more job before our association terminated. The classified job about which the engineers had wanted to consult me became declassified by being authorized as operational. It was called “Net Alert.”

So my final job was writing the operating manual for NetAlert. As an engineer, I could not resist asking why they adopted somewhat inefficient ways of designing certain parts of the system. Then I learned that these places were precisely where they could have used my services. I found it a little frustrating to describe a system that I could easily have improved upon, when it was ‘frozen’ – all I could do was describe it.

During the late 50s and early 60s, I received several work offers for which I was highly qualified – both the people offering and I knew that – but when they learned that I had no clearance record, they sought other means of getting the work done – or else forgot about the contract opportunity altogether.

The reason for this reaction was simple. Obtaining clearance for a person of foreign birth (even if he eventually gets it) takes about 18 months. Such contracts are open for competitive bid between different companies. So a company cannot make a bid contingent on perhaps securing the services of a man necessary to its fulfilment, when that “perhaps” cannot be resolved for 18 months hence.

So I continued to work in areas that avoided this problem. However, I began to realize that my work opportunities were dwindling, as the government extended its activities into more and more fields, under one pretext or another. I have received dozens of letters from newly-formed government agencies, asking for personnel recommendations, to fill vacancies for which I was qualified, but “need not apply” for this reason.

In 1960 my wife and I became citizens. We liked what we learned, in studying about our new country. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States made a lot of sense to us, and we identified very readily with the principles there enunciated. Citizenship should be a step toward solving what was obviously looming as a problem.

In 1962, I started renewing my interest in education, and to further this, I wrote to England to obtain written confirmation about my career there. That was when I discovered that the Department Head under whom I did most of my work could not obtain written verification, because all records of my schooling and teaching work before World War 2 were destroyed by enemy action during the war.

Complicating my problem was the Englishman’s typical attitude, “Don’t those stupid Americans know we had a war here? Why should they insist on us producing documents that no longer exist?” I had letters explaining the situation from people who knew me – wouldn’t that be enough for anyone?

In 1962, something else began, that promised to help. I received a letter typed on plain paper, with a Virginia address, and signed ‘Earl Holliman.’ He wrote to ask me some technical questions, which I answered, as I did all letters from readers of my books and articles. Next came a letter on the stationery of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, identifying Earl Holliman as a Colonel in that service, thanking me for my information and asking more questions.

To cut a long story short, in 1964, Colonel Holliman asked if I would be prepared for retention by the U.S. Army Security Agency as a consultant, for which a relatively low order of security clearance was needed. As a possible door to resolve my growing problem, I readily agreed.

As a precaution, I mentioned the difficulty in verifying certain parts of my record in England, but was told to submit this application, that this need not prevent my securing clearance. So I filed some forms in quintuplicate and received notification they had been received: I should know the result in about 6 months.

But about 3 months later, I received a letter with another, much larger bunch of forms, saying the requirements for clearance had changed, would I please complete these? It did not occur to me at the time that the reason for a change in requirements might be because they had changed the clearance being sought for me – nothing was said about that. I just assumed this was still the same application.

I did not receive a response until over 2 years from my original application: clearance denied. No reason given, and a letter asking for explanation received the answer that reasons could not be given as a matter of “national security.”

During this time, while my reputation continued to expand, my work opportunities continued to contract: more people would ask me to undertake something, then withdraw the offer when the security problem was mentioned. They apparently assumed that anyone with my background would have “picked up” security clearance somewhere along the way. When they found I had not, they dropped me like the proverbial hot potato: to even discuss anything with me could be “dangerous” for them.

So when I got this freeze-out letter, I wrote to Senator Wayne Morse, who tried to elicit some information from the U.S. Army Security Agency, as unsuccessfully as I had myself. After Senator Hatfield was elected to office, I wrote to him; he tried again, with more success.

The answer he obtained was that there were 3 reasons why I had been refused clearance: (1) my wife’s parents were not American citizens, being British by birth, and having lived, worked and now retired, in their native England; (2) my records could not be verified satisfactorily; and (3) they could trace no details of my pre-World-War-2 associations, either those I mentioned in my application, or any others. They made it quite clear that there was no suspicion that I might have had ‘undesirable’ associations. On the other hand, there was no evidence that I had not.

About this time. Bob Packwood defeated Wayne Morse as Senator from Oregon, and Bob became interested in my case. He took up the matter, and as a result of his representations in my behalf, the first and third reasons were withdrawn, but on the second the agency remained adamant: they must have access to original written documents; no affidavits and no copies of information that I had in my possession would be acceptable as evidence of my career back there.

Now, the reason given for this rigid requirement was the relatively high order of security clearance being sought. For lesser levels, the requirement might not be so stringent.

What had happened? Where did my clearance application get “upped” in level? What was that change in forms, about 3 months after my initial application? A piece of news about a year later gave me a clue as to a possible, but I hoped improbable, reason, but I tried to pursue the possibility anyway.

This was when the dispute about deployment of ABMs first came up. I read one small news item suggesting that there was doubt about the effectiveness of the weapon, and that it had never been tested, even on a simulated interception. So I wrote to ask about this and the only responses I could get were assertions that all kinds of “experts” had “testified.”:

Some time later a conservative group solicited my support for lobbying for the ABM. So I wrote to this group to question its validity as a weapon, saying that I believe we vitally need such a weapon, if we could be sure it works. In reply this group sent me a booklet, issued by the American Security Council, prepared by a committee of 31 experts.

The names of the 31 experts are listed. They include not a single person competent to judge the question I have persistently asked, and concerning which I certainly could answer, IF I had the facts. In the book’s 72 pages, less than one page is devoted to the objection, “It Won’t Work,” in which my question is not even mentioned.

The main argument of the book is that deploying ABMs is a matter of military strategy. No argument about that. But I suggest that if the enemy should obtain reliable information that the weapon does not work, the strategy is not very strong! Which brings me to my question, and its relation to my security clearance application.

For an ABM to successfully intercept an incoming enemy ICBM, it needs four essential parts:

1. A warhead capable of destroying the incoming ICBM when it meets it.

2. A propulsion system (rocket) capable of thrusting it up into space fast enough to effect the interception at a safe distance before the ICBM’s intended arrival here.

3. A steering mechanism capable of ensuring that the ABM does actually intercept the ICBM.

4. An electronic guidance system, capable of receiving data about the course of the ICBM, and correcting its own course to ensure that the steering mechanism does its job of intercepting properly.

The panel of experts address themselves to the first three requirements, but not to the fourth, and no expert on the panel is competent to judge this. Nor has the ABM been tested.

The layman has no way of knowing what is involved, so he tends to trust the experts. Congressmen are laymen, in this sense. But the communists have people who are not laymen in this field. Of that you can be sure!

Let me explain the problem this way: can you fire a gun to “shoot down” a bullet coming toward you? The best gunman alive (or dead) has never attempted this. Bullets travel faster than sound, at about 1000 mph. ICBMs travel through space at from 3 to 10 times the speed of a bullet, and any ABM that can intercept them must travel at least at an equal speed.

Presumably this possibility has been verified under item 2 above. And presumably item 3, the capability of steering precisely enough to hit head-on at a cumulative speed of approaching 20,000 mph has been verified too. What has not been verified is the electronic system that can direct the steering so it actually DOES that.

Electronic systems can be designed to function in millionths of a second. But in a millionth of a second, these two objects, the ICBM and the ABM, will be approaching one another by a distance of more than 100 feet. And if their courses miss one another by 100 feet, they miss one another, period!

If the electronic system reacts only a millionth of a second slow, or over-reacts in a way equivalent to a millionth of a second fast, no hit! And if the system is designed that way-which has not been checked, either way – the possibilities of an “accidental hit” are not even as good as the possibility of your shooting down a bullet speeding toward you.

The notion that a sheer quantity of such defense will prevent some of the mass of enemy ICBMs getting through – the pepper-pot theory – is sheer nonsense, in this context. How many bullets would you have to fire off to stop the other man’s bullet hitting you, “by accident”?

That is the key question, now how do I connect this with my security clearance application? One of the jobs about which I gave information was with a technical school where I wrote the very first textbook published about Electronic Navigational Aids and Guidance Systems, right after World War 2.

I did not name the book in my application, because I have more than 40 books and close to 1000 magazine and journal articles published, so it seemed pointless to attempt to list them. But one of the first things the investigators would learn, on checking my work at that job, would be that I wrote that book, which is still used as a text.

Realizing this I began to see why my clearance application was apparently uprated. Somebody saw that I could be useful to check the ABM guidance system, unaware that somebody else in the bureaucracy had reasons for not wanting it checked!

This was affirmed later, when I met another electronic engineer, a native-born American, with capabilities similar to my own, who had also been invited to apply for clearance, and been refused in a similar way, although he had no basis for determining why he was refused.

Now put these items together: the only thing not checked about the ABM is that item 4, which is vital – and nobody competent to do that has been retained as an expert. Two people with that competence (to my knowledge – there may be more) have been invited to apply for clearance, and both have been inexplicably refused.

Had I been asked to check the design, even if I could find no fault in the theoretical design, I would want to see it tested on an actual simulated intercept mission: it is too easy to be a microsecond “off” here or there. Such a test has never been conducted either. Some experts with no knowledge of this kind of system have declared it will work, and that no test is necessary!

In my own case, the reason finally given for refusing clearance, and stated with adamance as an unbendable “rule,” is the one that I was told at the beginning did not matter loss of prewar records. Had there truly been such a rule, I should have been so informed, to save unnecessary application and processing at taxpayer expense. Obviously, this “reason” was invented after the event. What other explanation is possible? And why the “need” to invent such a “rule”?

While uncovering this basis for the peculiar action – and this issue seems too hot for anyone to tackle – portends ill for our country’s future, the problems that the action itself has created for me personally are no small ones either.

During that same period, in an endeavor to break the growing impasse, at my own expense I developed a new circuit principle which became the subject of a U.S. patent in 1967. This cost me a great deal of my own resources, and I produced a convincing demonstration of its effectiveness. Its first major application would be in high power sound projection, for which any company wanting to develop it would seek government support, for application by army, navy or airforce.

As soon as the patent was issued, several companies contacted me about it, hoping I would work with them as consultant on its development with some arrangement to our mutual benefit. As such a possibility was based on an enquiry from a government agency, one question inevitably asked was, did I have security clearance? Upon learning my status, the matter was promptly dropped. So I have invested, thousands of dollars, plus a few years of my time, in something that government bureaucracy is effectively prohibiting from further development, because of their other decision.

In 1967 I encountered yet another severe setback. Much of my income, as other sources receded, had been from my books and articles. But that year proved a bad one, for several distributors went bankrupt, returning their stocks of books to the publishers for refund or credit. This resulted in reverse royalties that wiped out my income that year. Actually, this was a cancellation of a large part of my 1966 income, and should be treatable as such.

But the Internal Revenue Service refused to accept this explanation, and insisted that I pay tax based on my cancelled earnings, even when I had no actual income. I was living on loans from the bank to support future work, and by advances from publishers, also against future work. The IRS agent was not satisfied: I must negotiate more contracts with advances, for work I could not possibly do, and then declare bankruptcy, when I had “found” that I could not fulfil the contracts.

He made some other suggestions, each of which was equally dishonest, if not outright illegal. He also told me that it was fruitless to appeal his decision, since I had already written to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in Washington, as a result of which letter (and a few more) he was visiting me.

I managed, at the time, to get a further loan to pay the immediate tax he demanded, partly because he threatened that if I did not, and if I did not sign a completely false statement of my financial position that he wrote for me to sign, he could seize all my property, including my technical library, thus preventing me from even fulfilling the contracts I had already signed.

The following year, I retained a tax accountant to prepare my return. Then I found that, not only do I not get any refund for income extracted as return against previous years, but when I repay the loans I obtained to carry on living, these are also taxable as further income! I am being taxed several times over. The only offset to make it possible for me to live is to have the accountant fill in all kinds of deductions I could not possibly have paid to anyone, to which I put my signature on the 1040 form.

This was when I reread the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and saw the light. Twice already I had been coerced into perjury: this must stop. The only way was to refuse to cooperate at all. Putting anything on that form committed me, and there was no legal way I could make a true return.

Somewhere around this time I learned about Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, and about Willis Stone’s Liberty Amendment. When I made the decision to quit allowing myself to be forced into perjury, and to stand upon the Constitution, as we had undertaken to do when we took the oath as citizens, I wrote to Leonard Read. His response was that he would not refuse to pay taxes in any way whatever, unless he was ready to start a revolution, which he was not! Did I have any choice?

I also attended a “tax revolt” meeting organized by the Liberty Amendment people. They urged me to support their cause – at a time when I could not afford a penny to support anything! Willis Stone himself told me, when I tried to explain my position, that I must pay my taxes first, and then support his movement to get taxes repealed: that was the democratic way, he told me. When I asked him what I could use for money, first to pay impossible taxes on fictional income that I did not even have, then to support his program, he did not understand and said I must obey the law. He could not seem to understand that I had been given no possible way of obeying the law: my choice was only how I must choose to disobey it!

That was about the time when I realized the full import of those words in the Declaration of Independence that I put at the head of this article. I wrote a 10-page statement, setting this forth, sent a copy with my blank, but signed 1040 form, to the IRS, with copies to President Nixon, our two Senators and the District congressman.

It is high time that we did just what the words that head this article say. It is our right and our duty. But we sure have to be pushed, before we realize it!

“War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley.

IN DEFENSE OF NON-ROMANTIC LITERATURE

BY JEROME TUCCILLE

It should be self-evident that there is something seriously amiss with the literary views of someone who regards Mickey Spillane as one of the great writers of our time, but this apparently is not the case. A growing number of libertarians are now entering society with erroneous ideas about the great body of literature that pre-dates the publication of The Fountainhead. It is almost ironic that these New Intellectuals, who are so far advanced in the fields of economics and philosophy, are almost passionately illiterate when it comes to the subject of literature. They have accepted the literary pronouncements of Ayn Rand at face value without bothering to explore them as deeply as they have her more abstract theories, and they are willing to champion publicly the literary tradition of Victor Hugo – Ayn Rand – Mickey Spillane even as they challenge Randian political concepts.

This article is an attempt to add more balance to the Objectivist Inheritance. In the last year or two many Objectivists have abandoned the trappings of classical liberalism for the more consistent doctrine of political anarchism (thanks in large part to the hortatory talents of Roy Childs). Now these same Objectivists who have had the independence of mind to break officially from the papal aspects of Randianism ought to look more closely at her views regarding literature.

In her article, “What is Romanticism? (Part 1),” appearing in the May, 1969 issue of The Objectivist, Rand cites the following “Romantic” novelists as belonging to the “top rank” in the literary hierarchy: Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz in Quo Vadis, Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter; and among “Romantic” Playwrights, Schiller and Rostand. Later in the same article she blames “Naturalistic” tendencies for the “breakup of Romanticism.” She lists H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Sinclair Lewis as being among the “better-known” Naturalists (as far as characterization is concerned) and the best that Naturalism has to offer, which is of course many notches below that of even the mediocre Romantics. For contemporary examples of the best authors in the “simplified, more obvious” Romantic School she names: Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming and Donald Hamilton, all mystery-pulp writers (Part 2 of the same article, The Objectivist, June, 1969).

The “destroyer of Romanticism was”, predictably enough, “the altruist morality.” Again in the same article she compares Naturalism with journalism, the mere recording of “real life” events and characters, and she vilifies Balzac, Tolstoy and Zola as the archetypical practitioners of this accursed art. They dealt with “stolen concepts”, “social determinism”, and their values are “concrete-bound.” Apparently there are wide gaps in the Rand’s reading background for she makes no mention at all of English and American literary giants of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: Hardy, Galsworthy, Maugham, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Waugh, and others. This is a serious omission and necessarily belongs in any valid discussion of the nature of literature.

In rebutting her thesis, it has unfortunately become necessary to state the obvious: Ayn Rand to the contrary, Naturalism and journalism are not to be confused. There is a world of difference between a realistic accounting of last night’s riot in a daily newspaper and a Naturalistic portrayal of the quality of life in a given society at a given time by an accomplished novelist. The novelist brings a depth of insight to his subject matter which a journalist may not possess. Those journalists who do have this incisiveness of mind usually graduate into novelists, a la Hemingway.

The best literature usually combines good Naturalism with good Romantic values – that is, a superb rendering of what it was like to live in a certain place at a certain time, along with a moral message which will aid the reader in his own quest for values to live by. The element that makes We The Living a better novel than Atlas Shrugged is Miss Rand’s gripping and Naturalistic account of what it was like to be in Leningrad, circa 1920s, when the revolution had already been betrayed by power-lusting bureaucrats, combined with the Romantic struggle of a young woman and her lover for the right to live their own lives. It portrays believable people in a believable situation while expressing positive moral values. On the other hand, the dialogue in Atlas Shrugged belongs in a comic strip and the characters in a James Bond fantasy.

The quality that separates good Naturalistic rendering of events from bad Naturalism is the artist’s capacity for selectivity – knowing what to put in and knowing what to leave out. This is what makes Hemingway and Maugham good Naturalists (economy of style; saying more with fewer words), and Thomas Wolfe a bad Naturalist (including every extraneous detail with a floodtide of words). If it weren’t for good Naturalists such as Hardy, Galsworthy, Anderson, Fitzgerald, we would all be harder pressed to understand the true quality of life that existed in nineteenth and twentieth century England and America. A single novel of Hardy’s is worth far more than a thousand newspaper clippings from his era. Journalists relay surface events to the public; a good Naturalist drives beneath the surface to the spiritual, intellectual, and psychological currents of his time.

Didn’t Victor Hugo employ Naturalism in his Romantic story of the life of Jean Valjean? What else would you call his artistic rendering of the conditions of French society that Valjean found himself enmeshed in? Or Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed? What else would you call the vivid imagery he used to describe the street scenes of Moscow and the Siberian countryside? It is apparent that Rand excoriates the Naturalist Emile Zola because she views his intriguing descriptions of working conditions in eighteenth-century France as an attack on capitalism. It is – an attack on state capitalism, but Rand has not troubled to see the distinction and berates Zola for his “moral depravity.”

Rand has little to say about comedy and satire. On the two occasions on which I heard her speak about the subject she denounced both as “negative” values, and satire as particularly evil because it negates viciously. It would be too easy to attribute these views to the fact that Miss Rand is incapable of writing comedy and has absolutely no understanding of the nature or purpose of satire.

Satire is the highest form of comedy and the best satire is an extremely positive value because it negates that Which deserves to be negated. It’s purpose is to destroy that which is evil by holding it on a skewer for public ridicule. Even a “sense of humor” and “laughing at oneself” (condemned, of course, by the Rand as a chipping away of self-esteem) is an attempt to eliminate the worst in man (and in ourselves) by focusing on human imperfections with the hope of doing something about them. But if one is perfect to begin with . . . Evelyn Waugh was probably the greatest satirist writing in English this century, and his son Auberon is following closely in his steps. Kurt Vonnegut is the closest approximation we have in this country of a first-rate satirist using the novel as an effective vehicle for social criticism. Art Buchwald and Jules Feiffer are now attempting to use satire in the theater, but whether they will stake out lasting reputations in this direction remains to be seen. So what if satire doesn’t offer positive values for the reader to identify with? Isn’t the stripping away of hypocrisy and immorality value enough? Does one have to produce a philosophical treatise every time he writes a story?

A contemporary “serious writer” whom Ayn Rand admires very much is Allen Drury. Drury has produced some of the dreariest prose since Theodore Dreiser, and his novels are little more than apologias for the type of gunboat diplomacy advanced by Teddy Roosevelt. He calls himself a Robert Taft Republican but he is really a hard-line conservative, which is why he is so popular with the Buckleyites – and now the Randians. Mickey Spillane, presenting Mike Hammer as his protagonist in the struggle between “good guys” and “bad guys”, permits his hero to break the arms of innocent people in order to extract information from them and he is praised by Miss Rand as a valuable Romantic writer. The fantasy world of James Bond is surely not “concrete-bound” (entertaining fantasy, yes; concrete-bound realism, definitely not) so it is promoted as the best of contemporary Romantic literature. This is the type of absurdity that the literary views of Ayn Rand inevitably lead to. I would suggest that she has fallen into the pitfalls of her own “mind-body dichotomy” regarding the subject of literature. More concrete-bound Naturalism in the field of Romantic fantasy might help to elevate it to the level of serious literature.

Despite all the trash that is offered in the pages of the New York Times Book Review as “good modern fiction,” one does not have to turn to Mickey Spillane or Allen Drury as an alternative. There are many good writers publishing fiction today whom Ayn Rand has apparently never even heard about. She might pick up the novels of Friedrich Duerrenmatt and discover concise Naturalistic description as a background for Romantic moral themes. She might read An Operational Necessity by Gwyn Griffin or King Rat or Tai-Pan by James Clavell for valuable Naturalistic Romanticism of the type she employed in The Fountainhead. The Godfather by Mario Puzo reveals more insight into the psychology of mobsters than can be found in a hundred news reports.

She might read Mother Night or Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut for good social and political satire; Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov for Romantic themes in the realm of science fiction.

Anyone who thinks Naturalism is unplotted should study An Operational Necessity for tense and exciting plot structure. Those who think Naturalistic description is journalism ought to re-read Hemingway and Fitzgerald for economy of style and precise selection of detail. Miss Rand, herself, could use a jolt of imagination to liven her own predictable phraseology. Those who see only real-life characters in Naturalism fail to understand the subtleties of interpersonal relationships depicted by first-rate Naturalists such as Mary McCarthy. Any who think that Naturalism is devoid of moral themes should read The Quarry by Duerrenmatt. Or they can read any one of the above books for all four of these basic ingredients in a single work. Plot, theme, characterization and style are not copyrighted products of Romantic fantasists.

Literature is an exciting and multifaceted subject. It ought to be explored in great detail by those who want to enlarge their capacity for knowledge and enjoyment. Anyone who pretends to compartmentalize it with trite sloganeering does an injustice to himself. And rational men are capable of better things than parrotting the simplistic, school-girl rhetoric of others.

From The ‘Old Curmudgeon’

Have you noticed how many leftists at one and the same time hold (a) that we have entered a “post-scarcity world” making obsolete any concern with private property, a free price system, or with work and the Protestant ethic; and (b) that capitalist greed is destroying our natural resources, and therefore that government must step in and plan for their conservation? To the observer, this may seem irrational and inconsistent; but there is a “higher” consistency here: use any stick, self-contradictory or not, with which to clobber the free market and the rights of private property.

In every cloud there is a silver lining, and so there is one good fall-out from Women’s Liberation: the savage attack that the women’s libbers have been mounting against Freudianism. Until a year or so ago, the Left-liberal intellectual held Freudianism, an irrationalist creed which all Old Curmudgeons have been opposing for many years, as virtually their prime article of faith. But now the Women’s Lib assault has seriously weakened the devotion of the guilt-ridden male liberals to their Freudian faith. In a war between Freudians and Libbers, we are reminded of the old joke about the wife who hated her husband and found her husband attacked by a bear. Torn in her sympathies, she alternately shouted: “Go Husband! Go Bear!” in the hopes that these two antagonists would kill each other off. In the same spirit, we raise the cry: “Go Libbers! Go Freudians!”

One of the more amusing items in the grim news of the day was the recent report that Mrs. Patricia Buckley Bozell, managing editor of the Ultra-Catholic Triumph, had taken a swing at Ti-Grace Atkinson, leading Women’s Libber, for charging at a speech at Catholic University that, even assuming the Virgin Birth to be correct, that this makes God’s “male chauvinism” even worse, for this means that God had impregnated Mary without even sex as a compensation. While of course all libertarians deplore any physical assault upon the exercise of free speech, I confess to a sneaking sympathy for Mrs. Bozell. To have this creature spawned by the dregs of our culture heap obscene abuse upon the Catholic faith on the campus of a Catholic university would seem almost too much provocation for a dedicated Catholic to bear.

Apart from this: by what right did the federal judge force Catholic University to permit Atkinson to speak on its campus? Here was a clear invasion of Catholic University’s property right in its own campus, and the clear implication that anyone has the right to speak on anyone else’s property, even unto abusing the property owner himself. This is the kind of “free speech” which every genuine libertarian should steadfastly oppose.

Recommended Reading

Libertarianism.

The Individualist, monthly organ of SIL (415 2nd St., N. E., Washington, D.C., 50¢ per copy) has a particularly stellar product in its February isssue. Featured are Murray N. Rothbard’s “Milton Friedman Unraveled”, an evisceration of Friedman’s “libertarian” pretensions; a laudatory review of Rothbard’s Power and Market by U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Ore.); an excellent critique of the Friedmanite scheme for school vouchers to parents by George H. Pearson, “How Tuition Vouchers Socialize Private Education”; a defense of free will by Jarret B. Wollstein, “Free Will and the Natural Order”; and James D. Davidson’s attack on psychiatric tyranny, “The Dangers of Psychiatry”. The issue also features an ad for pro-private school leaflets available from the Center for Independent Education, at which George Pearson is associate director. (Address of the Center for Independent Education is 9115 East Thirteenth, Wichita, Kansas 67206).

In his review of Power and Market, Senator Hatfield writes that it “argue(s) persuasively against the economic functions of government”, and “suggests alternative method of dealing with problems normally assumed by government.” Hatfield concludes that “I look forward. . . to the further application of this praxeological method to the practical problems of today . . .” and ends with the famous quote from Thoreau that “That government is best which governs not at all.”

Also to be commended is the February issue of Reason (750¢ per month, $6.00 per year, P.O. Box 6151, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93105). There is a very good article by Robert Poole, Jr., “The Power Crisis”, on the ways in which government has been creating crises through its various interventions in different parts of the fuel industry. And an excellent article by Roy Childs, Jr., “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism: A Revisionist History”, the first of a two-part article in which Roy sets forth a revisionist analysis of the intimate connection between big business and the emergence of statism in twentieth-century America. The article also features an analysis by Roy of the philosophy of history and historical inquiry.

One thing which the libertarian movement has been in desperate need of is a quarterly scholarly journal. We now have a libertarian quarterly, Libertarian Analysis, whose first Winter, 1970 issue has recently been published ($1.25 per copy, $5.00 per year; P.O. Box 210, Village Station, New York, N.Y. 10014.) Its basic stance emerges out of the RLA (Radical Libertarian Alliance) background of its editorial board: a quest for unity between “left” and “right”-wing anarchists. Aside from reprinted articles from Paul Avrich, Paul Buhle, and Noam Chomsky, the first issue contains three original articles: Murray N. Rothbard’s “Individualist Anarchism in the United States: the Origins”, a history of little-known anarchist thought and practice in 17th century America; Joseph R. Peden’s “Courts against the State”, a case study of three notable twentieth-century private commissions of inquiry against governmental atrocities; and a letter by Karl Hess calling for a revolutionary strategy.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 4

April, 1971

75¢

The Conning Of America

Never let it be said that the Lib. Forum is a grim, relentless monolith. Indeed, even within the Sober Center of the anarcho-capitalist movement, we have a range of views stretching all the way from Jerry Tuccille to myself. Everyone else, from Bill Buckley to Ed Muskie to Abbie Hoffman, is a damned extremist, outside of our mainstream dialogue.

Thus, I disagree totally with Jerry’s overall estimate of Charles Reich and his “greening”. To the contrary, I regard Reich’s Con Game as largely a P. R. shuck, and to the extent that the phenomenon is real, as a symptom of a diseased society and a degenerate culture rather than any sort of ally in the fight for liberty.

To raise the least important point first, the aesthetics of the title is itself enough to render to Reich the back of our hand. Who can fail to reach for his figurative musket at anyone who uses a word like “greening” in the title of a book – or anywhere else for that matter? Have we lost all respect for the English language? Indeed, if we wished to skirt the edges of obscenity, the “browning” of America would be a far more accurate title.

But the concept of “greening” has more important implications. For Professor Reich is in his book a naive and adoring celebrant of every repellent aspect of our youth anti-culture. The “greening” is Reich’s symbol of his hoped-for massive rejection of technology and civilization per se and the return to the tribe, the commune, the soil, and primitivism generally. The fact that Reich is opposed to Con II I find less than impressive, since he is hardly the first to take up the cudgels against the ideology of state corporatism. More important is Reich’s equally scornful rejection of Con I: i.e., the ethic of work, purpose, reason, the free market, technology, civilization, and private property – which, I insist, is intimately wrapped up with libertarianism and certainly with any libertarianism that is rational and workable in a country of two hundred million population. Above all, and like so much of the Left, Reich and the anti-culture totally reject the division of labor — a system absolutely crucial to the survival of man in the age of mass population as well as to the full development of the faculties and abilities of every man. But the Left hates and reviles the division of labor because such division leads straight to variety and diversity – to the individuation of every man – and there by negates the Left-socialist-communalist ideal of equality and uniformity of all men. Equality and uniformity can only be achieved in a world of small primitive communes, in which every man and woman does everything at once. The least one can say about such a world is that the vast bulk of the current population would quickly starve and die out; the most one can say is that, in addition, the true humanity – the individuation of every person and his full creative development – would be stifled in the bud, would be destroyed on the altar of the crippling and profoundly anti-human ideal of equality and uniformity.

Reich’s hatred of work and the division of labor erupts in all sorts of ways: for example, his glorification of hippie youth because they wear all-purpose uniforms, where one set of clothes suffices every person for all his activities: playing, sleeping, etc. Those of us who wear suits for working, dressier clothes for parties, shorts for athletics, pajamas for sleeping, etc. are reviled for “alienating” themselves by splitting themselves up into different roles. The uni-clothed man or woman, on the contrary, is ready at any moment to roll in the grass or mud, to sleep, walk around, etc., thus preserving his perpetual state of ad hoc spontaneity (read: irresponsibility and caprice, or “whim-worship”). Let us set aside the correct but too easy point that one great attraction for the hippies is that the uni-clothes don’t have to be washed. More important, this example at one and the same time reveals the hippie-Reich hatred for work, and for the division of labor.

On work: it is clear that no one, even in our permissive age, is going to hold a job for long wearing uni-clothes, especially if he has just rolled in the mud. Secondly, the adoration of caprice and whim-worship means that no one will be able to launch a career, to do a concentrated job of productive work, to advance his mind and intellect, or indeed to do any amount of passable work at all. And as for the division of labor, the old left-wing assault on “alienation” is very precisely the product of the absurd leftist myth that specialization, concentration on a particular line of endeavor, “alienates” one from the “whole man”, from the product of one’s labor, etc. In recent years, it has been fashionable on the Left to exalt the “early Marx”, who concentrated his hostility upon “alienation” and the division of labor, as contrasted to the “later Marx” beloved of the Old Left. But the later Marx, as baneful as he was, at least tried to arrive at a rational system, and tried to understand the workings of society in a systematic way. In our proper reaction against the Old Left, let us not leap from the frying pan of Old Left state despotism to the fire of New Left nihilism and barbarism.

In short, I say to hell with both Con II and Con III. The only hope for America, and for the rest of the world for that matter, is a return to Con I.

To quote again from Frank S. Meyer’s devastating blast at the youth culture (“Counterculture or Anti-culture?”, National Review, Nov. 3):

“It is not a counterculture, it is an anti-culture, for culture is and always has been dependent for its very existence on civility . . . The hallmark of the counterculture, however, is precisely its principled hatred of civility, its violent opposition at all levels to ordered freedom, to the tradition of rational discourse, to the very structure of civilized life. Above all, it hates the prime characteristic of the civilized man, that internalized discipline which looks with suspicion upon those spontaneous, unexamined emotional reactions we have inherited from our barbarian and animal past. The unexamined life which Socrates found unworthy of civilized man is to the devotees of the counterculture their be-all and end-all . . . The constant target of their attack is ‘middle-class values’, a phrase that inquiring analysis reveals to denote the entire gamut of the values upon which Western civilization is founded . . . Marijuana, addictive or not, physically harmful or not, is celebrated as a mode of escape from conceptual thinking, from the pressures of self-discipline without which civilization is impossible”.

“Add to this stew the sort of beliefs and myths that pervade the counterculture – the hatred of the ‘ethic of achievement’, the attack upon the nuclear family and heterosexual monogamy in the name of ‘polymorphous sexuality’: stir in the superstitions that proliferate within it – astrology, phony Eastern mysticism, Satanism. Corrosive of reason and tradition alike . . .”

One point that the youth culture makes is a perpetual gripe at the alleged “hypocrisy” of their elders. Yet what is more grossly hypocritical than the spectre of this Charles Reich, very comfortably ensconced in his professorship at Yale, wearing love beads, celebrating the hip, and calling upon everyone else to drop out, to take to the tribal and the communal hills? What is more repulsive than this man, living high on the hog from the royalties of a runaway best seller, sneering at “capitalist greed”, scoffing at the materialism of our culture, etc.? I think it perfectly legitimate to call upon Professor Reich to put up or shut up: to drop out himself, to leave Con II Yale, to abandon his materialistic royalties, and to hie him to a hippie commune, or forever hold his peace. Are there any takers on a bet that the good professor will do no such thing? How much longer are we going to reward these parasites, waxing fat by exploiting a “materialism” which they themselves proclaim to be the quintessence of evil? How much longer are we to take such Con Men seriously?

Unquestionably the best article I have seen on the Reichian greening was by the sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger in the New York Times Op-Ed page of Feb. 15, “On the Eve of the Blueing of America”. The Bergers brilliantly and incisively make the crucial point: that despite Reich’s arrogant claim to be the prophet of a coming America composed exclusively of primitive tribal communes, that this counter-cultural dropping out will only affect the sons and daughters of the upper classes. Perhaps there will be mass dropouts from work, from reason, from responsibility and purpose, but these dropouts will come only from upper-class Jews and WASPS, dropping out from affluence, Harvard, and Berkeley. But the working-class kids, the students at Fordham and Wichita State, are not about to drop out, not by a long shot. They have not been raised in a luxury which they can afford to scorn in order to seek out a “romantic” life of egalitarian poverty. They have been raised close enough to poverty to hate it and to devote themselves to escaping from its spectre. In short, the working class kids, and especially such “ethnics” as Poles, Irish, and Italians, are not going to drop out; on the contrary, they will rise up rapidly to fill the needed technological and business jobs to keep our society and our economy going and progressing. In short, the sons of the blue-collar workers will rise rapidly to fill the jobs abandoned by the effete and permissively raised children of the affluent. In this way, the “working class” will triumph in a manner which will be as gall and wormwood to the Marxists who have called for a proletarian uprising. Surely this is an excellent and hopeful prognosis for America – an America where Horatio Alger will be more relevant than he has been for many decades.

In short, Con III is profoundly dysfunctional – a tragic dead end for America. Whoever follows that route will end up as the flotsam and jetsam of our society; far from allying ourselves with the “greens”, we should give them nothing but our contempt. We should ally ourselves with the healthy rather than the diseased forces in America – with the decent citizens of the working and middle classes – and upper as well – who cleave to the Con I virtues of hard work, purpose, and rational individualism. The real struggle of the future is Con I vs. Con II, and our task is to “raise the consciousness” of the Con I’s, to show them that so long as the corporate statists of Con II are on their backs, they will never be allowed to achieve their own values and life-goals. Let the Con III dropouts sink into the cesspools of their own making. Our lot is with William Graham Sumner’s Forgotten Man, the “honest, sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts and taxes, “the man “who has no political influence, and who has known no way in which to secure the chances of life except to deserve them”, the man “hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies.” Our lot is with Middle America.

First Midwest Libertarian Festival

Come one, come all! The Middle West, which has been lagging behind the two Coasts in holding libertarian festivals, announce its first libertarian conference!

The Midwest Libertarian Festival will be held on Saturday, May 1, at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, at 10:00 A.M. Host: Paul Varnell.

Exact location of the conference will be available at the Information Desk, Student Center.

Guest Speakers: Tibor Machan, David Friedman, Joseph DeJan.

“Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind of rule, springing out of, and necessary to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is in all cases the same–less government.”

— Herbert Spencer.

AVAILABLE!

1968 Pearl Harbor issue of

Left And Right.

The final story of Pearl by the historian,

HARRY ELMER BARNES.

$1.25 per issue.

BUY FROM LEFT AND RIGHT,

Box 395 Cathedral Sta.

New York, N. Y, 10025

Stateless Societies: Ancient Ireland

By Joseph R. Peden

Libertarians have often dreamed of escaping the tyranny of the State; some have sought to do so by seeking refuge in distant and uninhabited lands where they could live in solitary hermitage or in small communities held together by the principle of voluntary association and mutual aid. But historians know that such experiments seldom survive in peace for long; sooner or later the State finds and confronts them with its instinctive will to violence, its mania for coercion rather than persuasion, for compulsion rather than voluntarism. Such has been the fate of the Mormons and Mennonites, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Amish people, among others.

As exploited peoples all over the world are beginning to realize, their true enemy is always within their midst – the coercive violence of the State – and it must be fought constantly in the very heart of its dominions. Every libertarian must fight the State from where he is: in his home, his place of business, in the schools, community and the world at large. His task is to resist the State and to dismantle it by whatever means are at hand.

Historically, States do not dismantle willingly or easily. While they can disintegrate with startling speed, as in Russia in 1917 or France in 1968, almost always new States arise to take their place. The reason for this, I believe, is that men cannot bring themselves to believe in the practical feasibility of a society in which perfect liberty, security of life and property, and law and justice can be attained without the coercive violence of the State. Men have for so long been enslaved by the State that they cannot rid themselves of a Statist mentality. The myth of the State as a necessary part of social reality constitutes the greatest single obstacle to the achievement of a libertarian voluntarist society.

Yet the historian, if he but chooses to look and report his findings, knows that many societies have functioned successfully without the existence of the State, its coercive apparatus and monopoly of organized violence. It is my purpose here to present one example of such a society, one that existed for more than a thousand years of recorded history, terminated only by the massive military efforts of a more populous, wealthy and aggressive neighboring State. I will describe for you the millenial – long anarchic society of Celtic Ireland – destroyed after a six-century struggle against the English State in the wake of the military victories, confiscations and genocidal policies of successive English governments in the 17th century.

English historians have usually justified Ireland’s fate by characterizing its people as uncivilized and barbaric, its society as being anarchic. Christopher Dawson is quite clear on this point: “The essence of barbaric society is that it rests upon the principle of kinship rather than on that of citizenship, or that of the absolute authority of the State”. Ireland certainly relied upon kinship relationships in its social cohesion and it never by any stretch of imagination enjoyed the dubious benefit of a citizenship conferred by the absolute authority of the State.

The distinguished Anglo-Irish historian of the Norman invasion and colonization of Ireland, G. H. Orpen, said quite frankly that Celtic Irish society was “anarchic” in that it had scarcely any of the political institutions or officials customary in a “civilized society”. Nationalist historians like Eoin MacNeill, who actively participated in the overthrow of English rule in the period 1916-1922, considered these opinions just another smear by the English conquerors and insisted that the ancient Irish had as much of a State as they needed.

A younger generation of Irish historians, less caught up in the great struggle for national liberation than MacNeill, have candidly admitted the embarrassing fact: Irish society was indeed anarchic. As D. A. Binchy, the leading contemporary Irish expert on ancient Irish law, has written: “there was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice” and “the State existed only in embryo”. “There was no trace of State-administered justice”.

But if Ireland was essentially an anarchistic (or libertarian) society, how was law and order maintained? How was justice secured? Was there not incessant warfare and rampant criminality?

To answer the last of these questions first – of course there were wars and crime. Has there ever been a society-statist or otherwise – without war and crime? But Irish wars were almost never on the scale known among other “civilized” European peoples. Without the coercive apparatus of the State which can through taxation and conscription mobilize large amounts of arms and manpower, the Irish were unable to sustain any large scale military force in the field for any length of time. Irish wars, until the last phase of the English conquest in the 16th and 17th centuries, were pitiful brawls and cattle raids by European standards. The contemporary Irish historian, Kathleen Hughes, has remarked that one reason why the English conquest, begun in the 12th century under Henry II and completed only under William III in the late 17th century, was so long in being achieved was the lack of a well-organized State in Celtic Ireland. A people not habituated to a Statist conception of authority are incapable of considering a defeat in war as anything more than a temporary limitation upon their liberty. Submission to the enemy is viewed as no more than a necessary and temporary expedient to preserve one’s life until opportunity for revolt and recovery of liberty presents itself. The English, of course, considered the Irish notorious in their faithlessness (they repeatedly repudiated oaths of submission and allegiance to their English conquerors); they were repeatedly characterized by English commentators as natural-born, incorrigible rebels, barbarians, savages who refused to submit to the kind of law and order offered by the English State. The Irish, unfettered by the slave mentality of people accustomed to the tyranny of the State, simply refused to surrender their liberty and libertarian ways.

Let us now examine more closely Irish society and Irish social institutions.

The basic polity of the ancient Irish was the Tuath. Membership was restricted to Free men who owned land, or were members of recognized learned professions, – poets, seers, physicians, jurists or clergymen, or who were skilled craftsmen, millers, metal workers, architects, wood carvers, shipwrights, fishermen, musicians, chariot-makers, etc. Excluded were propertyless men, slaves, foreigners, outlaws and minor artisans. Political actions were undertaken within the annual assembly of all the Free men; kings were elected or deposed, wars declared and peace treaties agreed upon, questions of common interest discussed and policies decided. The assembly was the sovereign people acting.

The members of the tuath were not necessarily bound by ties of kinship, except incidentally. It was not a tribe or clan in the sense of being based upon a common kinship – real or imaginary. Kinsmen often lived and acted within different Tuatha and individual members could and often did secede, and join another tuath. Also two or more tuatha could and did coalesce into one body. The tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension. Historically there were from 80 to 100 or so tuatha at different periods in Irish history, and few were larger than perhaps a quarter to a third of the modern Irish county. The population is unlikely to have exceeded 25,000 souls, and was usually smaller.

The chief personage within the tuath was the king. The nature of kingship in ancient Ireland must be sought in pre-Christian times. As is commonly the case among ancient peoples, the basic social unit – here the tuath – was essentially a cultic association. The cult is the basis for social, political and military cooperation among the body of worshippers. The king is first and foremost the high priest of the cult; he likewise presides over the assembly of worshippers and acts in their behalf in secular as well as sacred functions. The Irish kings were clearly the chief priests of the tuath; their inauguration ceremonies, the sites of the assemblies, the traditions of the people confirm this fact. The conversion to Christianity modified the religious functions of the kings to fit the requirements of Christian practices, but did not entirely eliminate them.

As was common, the kingship was hereditary, like pagan priesthoods. The king was elected by the tuath from within a royal kin-group (the derbfine) consisting of all males in three generations descending from a common ancestor who was a king. The royal kin-group usually nominated one of its members, or if a dispute arose and could not be settled otherwise, joint kings were elected. Kings who displeased the tuath were often deposed, and those who were mutilated in any way had to abdicate – the result of a religious taboo, one of many that were attached to the office of king.

To what extent was the king the representative of a State? The Irish kings had only two functions of a State-like character: they were required to preside over the assembly of the tuath and represent it in negotiations with other tuatha; and they were expected to lead the tuath into battle when it went to war. He clearly was not a Sovereign himself and exercised no rights of administering justice over the members of the tuath. When he himself was party to a suit, he submitted his case to an independent judicial arbiter. And he did not legislate.

How then was law and order maintained?

First of all, the law itself was based upon immemorial custom passed down orally through a class of professional jurists known as the filid. These jurists added glosses to the basic law from time to time to make it fit the needs of the times; several schools of jurisprudence existed, and the professional jurists were consulted by parties to disputes for advice as to what the law was in particular cases, and these same men often acted as arbitrators between suitors. They remained at all times private persons, not public officials; their functioning depended upon their knowledge of the law and the integrity of their judicial reputations. They are the only “judges” Celtic Ireland knew; their jurisprudence was her only law, national in scope, and completely detached from the tuath, the kings and their respective wishes.

How was this law of the filid enforced? The law was enforced by the action of private individuals allied with the plaintiff and defendant through a system of sureties. Men were linked together by a number of individual relationships by which they were obligated to stand surety for one another guaranteeing that wrongs would be righted, debts paid, judgements honored, and the law enforced.

The system of sureties was so well developed in Irish law that there was no need for a Statist system of justice. There were three different kinds of surety: in one the surety guaranteed with his own property the payment of a debt which the debtor did not or could not pay; another kind saw the surety pledge his person that the debtor would not default; if the debtor did default, the surety had to surrender himself as a hostage to the creditor; he then had to negotiate a settlement with his captor. In a third instance, a man might pledge to join the creditor in enforcing the judgement against the debtor if he failed to pay the full amount of the judgement; in this case the debtor was liable to double damages since he must pay the original creditor and also pay a compensation to the surety for compromising his honor.

Almost every conceivable legal transaction was worked out through the taking and giving of sureties. As the Irish law made no distinction between torts and criminal offences, all criminals were considered as debtors – owing restitution and compensation to their victims – who there by became their creditors. The victim gathered his sureties and proceeded to apprehend the criminal or to publicly proclaim his suit and demand that the criminal submit to adjudication of their differences. At this point the criminal might send his sureties to negotiate a settlement on the the spot or agree to submit the case to one of the filid.

The Irish law recognized the all too likely fact that a poor man may have difficulty in getting a rich, powerful man to submit a dispute to negotiation or arbitration by the filid. It therefore provided for a special kind of distraint. According to this procedure, the plaintiff was obliged to appear at the gate of the defendant’s house and sit there from sunset until sunrise fasting the whole while; the defendant was likewise bound either to keep a similar fast, or submit to adjudication of the dispute. If he broke his fast, or refused to submit to adjudication for three days, he was said to have lost his honor within the community, and could not enforce any claim of his own. As the law code put it: “He who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all. He who disregards all things is paid by neither God nor man”. Thus the ultimate sanction was to be considered an outlaw by the community – to lose one’s own legal status. This custom, which invokes the moral feelings of the community to insure justice, was used during the Anglo-Irish war of 1916-22 when Irish prisoners in English custody used the hunger strike to win public sympathy for their cause. (Those reminded of the tactic of Gandhi in his struggle against British imperialism should not be surprised to learn that ancient Hindu law has a fasting procedure just like that in ancient Irish law).

The essentially libertarian nature of Irish society can also be seen in the fact that the native Irish never issued coinage. Historians have generally interpreted this phenomenon as another sign of the barbaric nature of the Irish society and its economic and technological backwardness. Indeed, although in contact with the Celtic states of ancient Britain and Gaul, and later with the Roman and Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain, and with the Viking princes who established trading colonies all around the coasts of Ireland, all of whom issued silver coinage within their realms, it is strange that the Irish never followed suit. They certainly had access to both gold and silver from native sources; they travelled abroad and knew the monetary usages of their neighbors; and the metalworkers capable of creating such masterpieces as the Tara brooch or the Ardagh chalice were certainly capable of striking coins.

Why then did they not do so? Libertarians can see one possible reason immediately. Coinage is usually the product of the State monopolists, who, through legal tender laws, compel sellers to accept state coinage which is always overvalued in comparison to its bullion value. Only the coercive power of the State can sustain the use of a debased coinage in the free market which prefers bullion which exchanges at its free market value rather than at a state imposed exchange rate.

Thus the peculiar absence of coinage among the Irish a thousand years, after its introduction in Britain is further testimony to the absence of the State in Irish society.

Under the impact of the Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century, Irish institutions and customs under went considerable strain as they tried to cope with so alien a social and political system as that represented by the statism of the English imperialists. But in the end the two systems were incompatible. Under the Tudor monarchy with its strong absolutist tendencies, a systematic, intense and ultimately successful policy of conquest and cultural genocide was directed against the native Irish. The rebellions, conquests, and confiscations of the 17th century finished the destruction of the old anarchic society. Yet surely the spirit of liberty lived on in the hearts of the Irish peasantry to emerge again and again down to the present day whenever the oppression of the foreigners became too great. The shadow of the past is always very real and present in Ireland, and the memory of liberty has never faded from the minds of the people.

Note: Historians writing about stateless societies have a tendency to use “statist” terminology and conceptions in describing essentially stateless ideas and institutions. Irish historians have been particularly guilty in this respect. Least affected are the works of Myles Dillion, The Celtic Realms (London, 1967), and Early Irish Society (Dublin, 1954); also D. A. Binchy, Anglo-Saxon and Irish Kingship (London, 1970); and Kathleen Hughes, in her introduction to A History of Medieval Ireland (London, 1968), by A. J. Otway-Ruthven.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

(This article will appear in a paperback anthology, dealing with Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, to be published later this year.)

The division between libertarians and conservatives in Right Wing circles has received a good deal of publicity in the past few years, and especially since the early fall of 1970. Libertarians have accused the Buckleyites of sacrificing their stated principles in favor of individual liberties in order to carry on an increasingly hawkish foreign policy against Communist China and the Soviet Union; the conservatives have derided libertarians for failing to understand the ominous nature of the communist threat which they regard as the single greatest evil afflicting mankind today. For those on the Left who have been confused by all this ideological squabbling off their starboard, it is worth taking a look at some of these distinctions more closely.

The libertarian-conservative rift does not merely involve differences over foreign policy, as some have claimed. While the conservatives have included a large dose of libertarian rhetoric in the presentation of their philosophy, especially as regards economic freedom in the marketplace, their main concern has always been the maintenance of traditional order in society. They speak of individual liberty, but by no means in absolutist terms. According to William F. Buckley, Jr., the freedom of the individual is to be contained within the structure of an orderly society based on the preservation of traditional western religious and cultural values. Order has always taken dominance over liberty in the conservative hierachy, and this accounts for their championship of censorship laws and other legislation governing the sexual and moral practices of the population.

Libertarians, on the other hand, are absolutists on the question of individual liberties. While free market libertarians are committed to an Ethic of private property and economic freedom, their main emphasis is on voluntarism; that is, they are not concerned about the habits and life–styles of other people so long as they remain non-aggresive. The individualist libertarian is willing to permit others to group together in communes, to share their wealth and property and means of production, if such a system is organized on a voluntary basis. He is not interested in regulating the non-violent activities of the general citizenry in any way, even when he considers their moral and cultural values to be at total variance with his own. The libertarian believes in defensive violence when his own freedom is threatened, but he will never try to violate the rights of others or force them to adopt a certain pattern of life because he thinks it is morally superior.

So we see how David Brudnoy, writing in the December 15, 1970 issue of National Review, can denigrate The Greening of America by Charles A. Reich as an “Epistle to the Unwashed.” The conservative is morally outraged by Reich’s infatuation with the youth subculture, and not impressed at all by the fact that Reich’s message is profoundly libertarian in most of its major aspects. The sensibilities of the conservative, his disdain for all cultural innovations outside the mainstream of the American tradition, take priority over his rhetorical devotion to the principles of voluntarism and individual freedom.

There is much one can say against the Reich book. He is too eager to embrace every aspect of the youth subculture as positive and beneficial. He is too tolerant of the wide-Suit epitomized the American Corporate image, and pro-spread use of drugs and their so-called “mind-expanding” faculties, even as drugs – especially hard drugs – are becoming less and less important on the campus social scene. Most damaging of all is Reich’s condemnation of reason and logical thought in favor of “less rigid” forms of communication: mind expansion, mysticism, rapping, etc. . . . It was precisely this lack of commitment to logical and constructive thinking which was responsible for the gradual degeneration of the New Left between 1965 and 1970. Starting out with a healthy, though basically instinctive penchant for decentralized political power at home and anti-militarism in foreign affairs, the New Left, largely because of its failure to develop a positive and rational program of its own, turned to philosophical nihilism and terroristic acts of “propaganda by the deed” as a means of bringing down the Corporate State. Without a sound philosophical base, and the ability to translate abstract principle into concrete political terms, no movement can hope to survive over the long run. It would be a sad development if this basic flaw in Reich’s conception of Consciousness III was to become responsible for its demise over the next few years.

Less crucial than this is the fact that Reich doesn’t seem to fully understand the cause of the transition between Consciousness I and Consciousness II. He defines Consciousness I as the “American dream . . . that success is determined by character, morality, hard work and self-denial.” Consciousness I believes in self-interest, competitiveness and suspicion of one’s neighbors. Consciousness II is defined as the belief in the supremacy of organizations and institutions over the Ethic of individual freedom. Consciousness II is the “assumption of corporate power to plan the economy, allocate resources, divide areas of business activity, fix prices, limit entry of new businesses, and . . . control the buyers themselves.” But Reich refers to the growth of monopolies and corporate power, and the consequent destruction of the free market, as the aggrandizement of “private power” which later gave way to the creation of the “Corporate State.” He fails to understand that the emergence of Corporate Power and the development of the Corporate State are one and the same thing. He still clings to the erroneous view that the free market brought about its own destruction and resulted in “monopolistic private power,” and that the Corporate State was established during the Roosevelt era as a means of regulating the inequities of the marketplace.

This is simply not the case. As we have learned from a variety of sources – free market economists Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt on the Right; revisionist historians Gabriel Kolko, William A. Williams and G. William Domhoff on the Left – the consolidation of monopoly power in the late-nineteenth century was brought about with the vital assistance of an already-emerging Corporate State sixty years before Franklin D. Roosevelt came along. Reich correctly identifies the great “Robber Barons” of the 1900’s – Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Harriman and Ford among others – as the real “socialists” and “collectivizers” of American society, the “uprooters” and “killers” of the “American dream.” But he does not recognize the fact that these “subversives” did not destroy the freedom of Consciousness I by “market exploitation,” but, rather, they used State Power as a means of destroying the competitiveness and decentralization of the market to further their own interests. Consciousness I and the freedom of the marketplace was not subverted by a “Calvinistic” uptightness and suspicion of one’s fellow man, as negative and unhealthy as these attitudes are. The Ethic of individualism and free trade was ultimately brought down by the only power capable of doing the job – the power of political authority acting to further the interests of a few corporate lobbyists at the expense of the powerless multitudes.

Against these defects in the Reich presentation, we can counterbalance his masterful dissection of Consciousness II and his description of Consciousness III and the prospects it offers for the “Greening” of the American society of the future. No one has succeeded as Reich has in driving to the core of the Corporate State mentality. In the 1950’s the Organization Man and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit epitomized the American Corporate image, and provided us with a good deal of insight into the dehumanizing aspects of a society in which the individual had lost almost complete control, over the direction of his own life. We lived with this new awareness for a while and lamented the fact that Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Bombs and Big Politics seemed to dominate our entire way of life. But before we could do anything to rectify the situation, we suddenly passed from the bland and faceless Eisenhower era into the grinding crush of John F. Kennedy’s Ivy League imperialism. From Dwight D. Eisenhower, father of all the people–he was the American people for Christ’s sake! – we placed our fate in the hands of J.F.K.’s think-tank intellectuals and his legions of pragmatic social engineers. And then, of course, in the aftermath – the aftermath of L.B.J, and Vietnam and the inevitable erosion of civil liberties at home – the problems of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were suddenly trivial by comparison. We now look back to the “Ike” days with a certain fondness, as if everything was really okay back in the ’50’s, those halcyon years of “free enterprise,” rock’n roll and Thursday night bowling games.

This is the great power of the Reich analysis. He opens our eyes wide and clear to the fact that we have been living a dream for fifty years and longer. On one hand there is the Consciousness II mentality reassuring us that things will be all right again with the proper planning, proper organization, proper reordering of priorities; the Consciousness II mentality with the sheer arrogance to assert that Vietnam would never have been if only J.F.K. were still around – the same J.F.K. of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile show–down, the same J.F.K. who was responsible for unleashing Robert MacNamara on the world. And on the other hand we have Consciousness I still adhering to the brainless assumption that the Organization Man was a free enterpriser, that the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was a heroic individualist who would find his true level through integrity and hard work in the open marketplace.

Both Consciousness I and II are living the lie. I is more lovable, perhaps, in that he is the one who has had his ideals shot down and his dreams destroyed. But II has also become victimized by his own system to such an extent that he believes – he actually believes after all that has happened – that another forty billion dollars or a new busing law is going to cure the ills of mankind.

In one of Reich’s most incisive chapters, “The Machine Begins to Self-Destruct,” he describes how this gigantic bureaucratic Monolith is already collapsing of its own inefficiency. The Corporate State is falling apart because of its inability to function any longer. We see it happening every day, all around us, particularly in our urban centers. We are undergoing nothing less than a complete institutional breakdown. Our educational facilities for elementary and high school grades are virtually inoperative, and in many cases they have become a physical as well as a mental hazard to the young. Police protection – theoretically a necessary evil designed for the protection of life and property – has long been an agency of domestic imperialism. Sanitation, fire prevention, housing, libraries, museums, parks, transportation, nearly every civic service one can think of is either in a state of disrepair, or else it is operating on a level far below that which we have a right to expect. On top of it all the tax schedule is higher now than it has ever been – many claim we have reached the saturation point – and our local governments are all claiming bank ruptcy. So we have empty public coffers, a near collapse in all our vital institutions and an excruciating tax rate which, if it is raised much higher, will most likely foster a state of active resistance in the law-abiding middle class. No one but the most adamant Consciousness II will deny that the machine is, indeed, self-destructing.

Now we come to Consciousness III According to Reich, Consciousness III “starts with self. In contrast to Consciousness II, which accepts society, the public interest, and institutions as the primary reality, III declares that the individual self is the only true reality.” III “postulates the absolute worth of every human being – every self.” “But III’s do not compete in ’real life.” They do not measure others, they do not see others as something to struggle against. People are brothers, the world is ample for all.” Consciousness III rejects . . . manipulation of others, for one’s own purpose. . . .” This emphasis on individual self-esteem and corresponding respect for the individuality of all others, with the accent on non-violence, non-coercion and non-aggression, is the basis for the libertarian philosophy. Consciousness III, shorn of the negative aspects outlined earlier – reliance on drugs and denigration of rational thought – is profoundly libertarian in all its elements.

If Reich is guilty of anything in his discussion of the Consciousness III mentality, his guilt rests in a naive faith that a change in consciousness will revolutionize the entire face of American society. It is true, certainly, that a fundamental change in everyone’s basic attitudes toward life will eventually result in a complete restructuring of a society’s political, social and cultural institutions. But this is rather like saying: if everyone refuses to aggress against his neighbors, we will have eliminated the need for police protection; or, if everyone stopped drinking to excess we will have done away with alcoholism. The Reich prescription for a Revolution by Consciousness is actually a tautology. The Revolution and the adoption of Consciousness III are identical. We will have a libertarian society if everyone becomes a libertarian. We will have an end to military imperialism and an expansion of domestic civil liberties if Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Melvin Laird, John Mitchell and every other power-merchant in the country becomes a III, a libertarian. Until that happens, unfortunately, we must continue to resist, to disobey, to fight against the Corporate machine in the most intelligent manner we know how. It is necessary, as long as the military draft remains in force, to fight it openly and support those who refuse to have their lives nationalized in the name of national defense; to engage in tax resistance as a means of weakening the power of centralized government; to boycott elections when no real alternatives are offered; to agitate for local control of schools, police, sanitation and other civic institutions; to keep the pressure continually on the political structure in order to break it down and make it more responsive; to work for reform within the system to achieve desired changes in our judicial, social and economic policies, and to implement revolutionary tactics such as massive civil disobedience whenever reform becomes impossible.

This is not to minimize the impact of the Reich message, however. He has given us a valuable document in this time of violence and militaristic nation-states. Charles Reich is a true revolutionary, a brother in the struggle against power and political tyranny. It is for libertarians, and anyone else who believes in the future of mankind, to join in the expansion of Consciousness III, to improve upon it and intellectualize it in the areas it is weakest, and to get on with the struggle to “Green” and libertarianize the earth.

A Libertarian Rebuttal: Conservatism Examined

By James Dale Davidson

Those who have followed the growing split in the right wing movement realize that many old-fashioned, red-blooded Americans would be perfectly happy to see the collapse of the U.S. Government. This – you may say–is not an ordinary opinion. Obviously not. But it is hardly so harebrained as it might seem. Advocates of libertarianism have made a compelling case for a totally free market, a case which most people have never heard and much of which has only recently been set forth for the first time. Dr. Murray Rothbard, the outstanding economist, has published POWER AND MARKET, a devastating critique of all functions of government. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of Dr. Rothbard’s ideas. Writing in the February issue of the INDIVIDUALIST, Senator Mark Hatfield comments as follows: “(N)ot only does he argue persuasively against the economic functions of government, but also suggests alternative methods of dealing with problems normally assumed by government. In other words, one cannot offhandedly reject the thesis of this book as a flight of fancy.”

When a U.S. Senator says that a proposal to abolish his job cannot be dismissed as a flight of fancy, you may properly infer he is telling the truth. Libertarianism makes sense. Those who have never been attracted to conventional “right wing” thought find libertarianism appealing. This is not lost on Mr. William Buckley and his conservative cohorts at NATIONAL REVIEW. Ever since libertarian ideas came to public attention, the Buckley crowd has tried desperately to obviate their appeal. Having no arguments to answer libertarianism, the conservatives have turned to ad hominem attack. At first, Buckley suggested that all libertarians were, in his words, “irresponsible libertines.” The contention was that anyone who takes liberty seriously invites being debauched. The conservatives abandoned this approach only when the appeal of debauchery proved irresistible. After one speech delivered by Mr. Buckley to a Young Americans for Freedom group, hundreds of listeners responded to warnings of “libertinism” by seeking out a libertarian meeting in order to join in the fun.

It is now obvious, even to conservatives, that in a country where “X”-rated movies are sold out the charge of debauchery does little to discourage converts. The latest conservative tactic, one presently employed, is to suggest that all libertarians are crude, naive fanatics. The conservatives’ version of a libertarian, if he could be brought to life, would be a sort of humorless, philosophic bird–watcher who falls out of bed every morning at four to sneak out in the woods in search of a previously unsighted solipsism. Consider the notion, popularized by Buckley, that libertarianism arises from a desire to de-nationalize lighthouses. In a flood of articles in various publications in recent months conservatives have harped continuously about lighthouses, so much so that one wonders about the source of their fascination. In all of libertarian literature there is scarcely one sentence about lighthouses.

So why – you wonder – is there such a big fuss? The answer is that as always it is the conservative tactic to portray any departure from the status quo as something ridiculous. In all the conservative attacks upon libertarians one would be hard pressed to find one argument which does not rest upon the contention that an idea is silly if its implications extend beyond the bounds of consensus politics. But surely, you may tell yourself, there must be more to conservatism than that. No, hardly. Conservatism is just what Russell Kirk has always insisted it should be – the belief that whatever exists is good.

Mr. Buckley says that libertarians are naive, but one could hardly imagine a more naive, mindless doctrine than conservatism. Conservatives do not believe anything in particular. They have no specific philosophy. In practice, they are always a generation or so behind the times. Whatever the liberals advocated 25 years ago, conservatives are defending today. If you doubt it, employ an empirical test. Read today’s Mr. Buckley and try to distinguish his pitch from that of yesterday’s Harry Truman. The difference is not worth yawning over.

It does not take much of a philosopher to realize that with the conservative position constantly (if slowly) changing, those who advocate it are caught up in a plexus of absurdities. For example, Buckley is deeply offended by unflattering comparisons between heroes of the American state and their counterparts abroad. His attitude is inevitable, for by the very nature of conservatism, conservatives cannot see all societies in the same light. Conservatives favor stability and preservation of the status quo. But they can favor only one status quo at a time. If they were logical, they could hardly help but admire such noble personages as Premier Kosygin, who has probably done more to maintain the status quo than any government leader in this century. Kosygin is one of history’s great conservatives.

Buckley and his crowd cleave to contradictions which would make modest men blush. They claim to be a force against statism. Yet their most notable libertarian gesture of the past decade was when James Burnham came out in favor of legalizing firecrackers. They say they favor liberty. But their prime occupation is apologizing for Richard Nixon, a man who has about as much respect for human liberty as Mao Tse Tung. Buckley says that he and his chums understand what the free market really is. Yet who among them (I do not count Henry Hazlitt as part of the Buckley crowd) was ever concerned or knowledgable about economics? Look at the backgrounds of the NATIONAL REVIEW contributors. They are a coterie of ex-commies and religious mystics and theocrats.

As the American state becomes more totalitarian (and who could deny that it is?), Mr. Buckley will be impelled by the dynamics of his own illogic to apologize for whatever happens. He has gone along with the gag this far. Why stop now? Unless he admits to the libertarian contention that political positions need not be defined by what is admissible in the status quo, Buckley will turn out to be no better than the tired old men of another time who shrugged over Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

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Libertarian Conference

The libertarian conference held at Columbia University Law School, New York City, on March 13–14, was a resounding success. Three hundred people attended the conference, and everyone was struck by the seriousness and eagerness to learn of virtually everyone in the audience Gary Greenberg, the New York Libertarian Association, and Society for Individual Liberty (SIL), are to be commended for an excellent and expert organizing job. In contrast to the RLA conference in New York a year and a half ago, there was no hysteria, no uproar, no screaming at each Other by Left, Center, and Right factions of the movement. There was no lunging for the microphone by rowdies of any of the factions. More and more it becomes clear that SIL and its affiliates – and regardless of minor differences within its ranks – are going to be the major conduits for libertarian organizing in this country.

Highlight of the conference was the debate between Roy Childs, Jr. and the sinister Jeffrey St. John, veteran Randian-Buckleyite radio and TV commentator, on “anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government”. Making his debut as a debater, Roy gladdened the hearts of all libertarians by clobbering and turning-inside-out the suave rhetorician, trapping St. John repeatedly in ignorance, logical contradictions, and outright evasions. More important, the largely neo-Randian audience realized this full well, and was deeply impressed by Roy’s superior logic. Now that the Randian monolith has been shattered forevermore, there are a great many Randians around the country who are interested in and susceptible to the rational arguments for anarcho-capitalism.

All this illustrates a growing truth about our movement: that the most susceptible to extensive and long-lasting conversion to Liberty are far more the sober, sensible middle classes of our country, rather than the drug-besotted ranters against work, individualism, and private property, that handful calling for destruction of “Amerika” and all its works.

Army Intelligence Reads The Forum

Recent revelations of the snooping activities of Army Counterintelligence showed that the Army was engaged in massive spying and reportage on virtually every group–left or right-wing – in some way outside the Establishment consensus in American life. One of the activities of the Army’s Counterintelligence Analysis Branch (CIAB) was to subscribe to “underground” publications, and the cover address it used was “R. Allan Lee Associates” of Alexandria, Va. When the revelation broke recently, we realized that, sure enough, R. Allan Lee Associates had been until recently subscribers to the Lib Forum, only failing to renew just before the publicity hit the fan.

Who knows what secret name and address the CIAB is, using now, somewhere among our vast array of subscribers? But at any rate, welcome CIAB, even if you are using stolen taxpayers’ money to report on taxpayers; maybe you’ll learn something from reading us. And more important, to you, Mr. and Mrs. Libertarian out there, if the CIAB is reading us avidly and with care, can you afford to lag behind?

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 5

MAY, 1971

75¢

ORWELL LIVES

Do you ever get the feeling that the rest of the world is crazy and that you are one of the few sane people in it? I suppose that psychologists would consider such a feeling a sign of deep neurosis – except of course if you happened, empirically, to be correct. And reading the daily press is enough to induce such a feeling in even the sanest amongst us. In particular the stream of pronouncements emanating from the Nixon Administration. Every President, every Administration, has lied, lied grossly and systematically, to the public; but surely none before Nixon has elevated the Lie, big and small, to the constant and the universal. There used to be the charge against Hitler that he used the technique of the Big Lie; yet Nixon lies continually and habitually, on virtually every issue, and the horrendous problem that arises is: how can he get away with it? Why don’t the American people laugh him off every public forum?

Take for example the unemployment statistics. Every month a new statistic emerges, and the Nixonian experts anxiously examine its entrails for signs and omens. Always, and invariably, and whatever happens, the omens are pronounced to be superb. Thus, in one month, the unemployment falls by one-tenth of one per cent. So small as to be meaningless, right? Wrong, for Nixon’s crew will pronounce this to be the beginning of recovery from our recession. And then, the next month, the unemployment rate rises again by one tenth of one per cent. What does the Nixon team do? Do they admit that by their own logic things are looking gloomy? Do they at least have the good taste to keep their mouths shut? Not on your tintype. For there they are again, saying: Yes, this is a very good thing, for it shows that “unemployment is bottoming out.”

Better is good; worse is good; whatever happens is terrific. On this Orwellian logic rests the rock of our Republic. There is first the Nixonian expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, each time proclaiming that, of course you ninny, this is how you “wind down” the war; any dolt knows that the way to phase out a war is to expand it. In Orwell’s world, the Ministry of War has become the Ministry of Peace, and so in the world of Tricky Dick. And the Laos invasion: we were going to nip into Laos, “cut the Ho Cho Minn trail” as if this “trail” were some sort of superhighway which we tear up (It is, in fact, an enormous, thirty-fifty mile wide network of jungle trails) – capture the base of Schepone, and maybe even stay there permanently to keep the trail “cut”. So then we get bogged down, and the military genius of Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the hero of Dienbienphu – turns the American-Saigon invasion into another Dienbienphu, a veritable disaster, in which the cream of the Saigon puppet troops get chopped up, from which the remainder barely escaped with their lives, and in which we lost many hundreds of helicopters. And our reaction? It was a great victory, we did just as we meant to do, we never, er, never meant to capture Schepone, or even to cut the trail – but by George we delayed their “timetable” I And since no one is privy to this mystic timetable, or even whether it exists at all, any thing can be said about it without fear of contradiction. So it doesn’t matter whether we win, lose, or whatnot – whatever happens, it was a glorious victory. How can we put up for another minute with this systemic fabrication and falsehood?

Or take Mr. Nixon solemnly proclaiming that all his life he has been “a deeply committed pacifist” I How can he say this, how can he dare, this mass murderer, this supporter of all of America’s wars and chief murderer of the current war? Whether one is a pacifist or not, this is surely a new height of affront.

Or Nixon’s gall in coming out against abortion because he is deeply committed to the “sanctity of human life”. Again from a mass murderer, a man who can order the systematic bombing of thousands upon thousands of innocent peasant women and babies, this killer and bomber and napalmer has the unmitigated gall to pout because women are ejecting fetusus from their bodies! For shame!

And then Nixon, the self-proclaimed champion of law and order, rushes in to interfere with the judicial process because of his “compassion” for the convicted little mass murderer Calley. Mr. Nixon was indignant enough about the mass murderer Manson to interfere against him in the judicial process. But Calley killed far more people than Manson, and yet here Nixon intervenes in the murderer’s favor.

Here it must be conceded that large numbers of Americans participated too in the mass outpouring of “compassion” for this convicted butcher. Orwell lives here again, for this was an American public that showed no compassion whatever when millions, yes millions, of Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian peasants were brutally and genocidally massacred by American weaponry. They showed precious little compassion for the women and babies whom Calley slaughtered at My Lai. No, it was only to Calley that their warmth and goodness reached, these same Americans who sternly oppose the “coddling of criminals”, who yearn for law and order. Let us indeed cease coddling criminals, especially those who have been duly convicted. Indeed, not being liberals, libertarians do not shrink from capital punishment when capital crimes are involved. “Let the punishment fit the crime!” is the old motto, and it remains good today.

Meanwhile, one good thing has emerged from this mess — the arrival of an authentic hero, Capt. Aubrey M. Daniel, III, of Orange, Va., the fearless and tireless prosecutor of the murderer Calley. Not only did he resist pressures within the Army, but Capt. Daniel sat down and wrote a tart and trenchant letter to Mr. Nixon attacking the President’s gross interference with the Judicial process. There are precious few heroes in American life for us to ignore or fail to salute one when he finally comes along.

From An Old Curmudgeon

Beauty is Youth, Youth Beauty . . . From Harriet Van Home’s column (New York Post, April 16): “When we tune in a Late Late Show and see young players named Ingrid Bergman, Henry Fonda, Joan Bennett and such we feel we are looking upon a lost super-race. They had shining hair and fine bones and the whites of their eyes were always clear. Their diction was crisp, they moved through terrible plots with innocent goodwill. They stood straight and they laughed beautifully. By comparison, today’s young people look messy, dull and terribly uninteresting.”

Ireland: Neutralist And State Capitalist

by John P. McCarthy

Although virtually unnoticed until quite recently, the Northern Irish Government’s record of maltreatment of its Catholic minority is now obvious to any well-informed person, particularly to anyone of libertarian sentiments. At the same time many libertarians might be unaware of the situation in the rest of Ireland. There things are much more pleasant, especially in the matters of minority treatment and social harmony, although certain criticisms are in order. Possibly the following analysis by a non-libertarian, or at least a non-anarchist who has, however, certain libertarian instincts, might be of interest.

Back in the ideologically uncomplicated days of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s Robert Welch was able to give mathematical percentages indicating the degree to which nations were under the “operational control” of International Communism. One of the nations, along with the Union of South Africa, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, and Nationalist China, that he found all but completely free from Communist influence was the Republic of Ireland. Admittedly, the dozen or so members of the Irish Communist Party of that time did not swing much political clout, and in that sense Welch’s ratings can be considered legitimate. However, one cannot avoid the suspicion that Welch rated Ireland, which was put in most inappropriate company, by a most second-hand evaluation that drew very little from actual knowledge of the conditions in the nation. Probably Welch gave Ireland a good rating for the simple reason that his enemies – the “Comsymps” and the “Globaliberals” – disliked Ireland. But their views were as unfounded, and were based not so much on the situation in Ireland as on both Establishment Liberalism’s inherent Anglophilism and the decided anti-Establishmentarianism of pre-Kennedy Irish-America with its reputation of isolationism, McCarthyism, and pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

In point of fact, the Irish socio-political situation, then and now, does not fit the’ simplistic black and white categories of either the Birchers or the Liberals. For instance, the Irish were among the pioneers in the revolutionary nationalist tactic of guerilla warfare, yet the Republic of Ireland almost uniquely has permitted the old ascendant class – the Anglo-Irish Protestants – to maintain their predominant status in the economic and social structure of the nation, as well as preserve an inordinate degree of political influence. Furthermore, while the Irish Government has had a record of imposing certain moral regulations on the population, such as literary censorship (greatly relaxed of late) and prohibition of the sale of contraceptives, it has scarecely penalized or inhibited Protestants as such from the free exercise or propagation of their religious beliefs. (One might argue that Protestants are more desirous of the prohibited literature and the contraceptives, yet the prohibitions apply to everyone and are not specifically designed to discomfort Protestants.)

The Irish Government did not join the Soviet Union the Republic of China, Great Britain, and the United States in the democratic anti-Axis crusade of the 1940’s. Yet her record as a functioning, multi-party, proportionally-represented, functioning parliamentary democracy has few rivals in the twentieth century, and she is rather dissimilar to the authoritarian regimes that had similar strongly non-Communist ratings in the Birch score card. Her neutrality has been consistent throughout the Second World War and the Cold War, as she envisions herself – only recently a European colony – as having a special relationship with the recently independent Afro-Asian nations. Indeed, Ireland even takes the United Nations seriously – so seriously that her representatives, to the disappointment of most Irishmen, have hesitated to mount the U.N. soap-box over the Northern issue even though most members use the General Assembly for such purposes. The record of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the scholar, academician, and former Irish diplomat (probably most famous for his Congo adventurism, but more deserving of fame for permanently deflating Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a television debate concerning the C.I.A.), was not really a departure from an Irish diplomatic tradition that places primary emphasis on questions like the inviolability of neutral and small nation rights against big power pressure. Irish compassion for Biafra is a more recent manifestation of this tradition.

Cruise O’Brien has now become the most celebrated member of the Irish Labour Party, a group that was redbaited by the governing Fianna Fail Party in the last general election because of its espousal of an “alien” ideology – socialism. Paradoxically, one of the seventeen Labour representatives in the 144 seat Dail (the Irish National Assembly) in addition to Cruise O’Brien is Stephen Coughlan, the former Mayor of Limerick, whose political views and manner are somewhere between those of Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy. Actually, very few in Ireland find anything wrong with socialism, and public corporations occupy a greater role in the economy there than in almost any nation this side of the Iron Curtain. It is only the name, which suggests atheism and materialism, that offends. But even that is changing, as in the last few years the Catholic Church in Ireland has become taken up with an interest in socialism. Church-sponsored seminars have started to emphasize the compatibility of Christianity and Marxism.

Irish students, emerging from a period of political indifference and careermindedness, like students everywhere have been taken up with the charm of socialism. As might be expected they identify the Irish state-capitalism with capitalism, and when pressed for an example of socialism suggest various voluntary cooperatives like that organized by Father James McDyer at Glencolumbkille, Co. Donegal, where local peasants, combining their capital with donations from exiles in America, have had relative success in setting up a weaving factory and a vegetable processing plant. But many of the leaders of these highly decentralized cooperative movements, like Father Patrick Campbell, who is connected with the Achill, Co. Mayo cooperative, prefer to avoid association with the state and, possibly unconsciously, are much closer to the free economy ideal than the state-capitalism condemned by the students.

There have been two major phases in the state-capitalist record of the Irish Government (which has been controlled by the Fianna Fail Party since 1932, with the brief exceptions of 1948-1951 and 1954-1957). The first phase was the attempt between 1932 and 1959 to implement the revolutionary ideal of national economic self-sufficiency with the usual weapons of protective tariffs, subsidized industries, and state corporations. Much of this, of course, grew out of Prime Minister (the Taioseach) Eamon DeValera’s aim to complete the severance of any ties with Great Britain. DeValera’s opposition, the Old Free State Party (now known as the Fine Gael Party) that he had ousted from power, naturally was hostile to this unrealistic effort of Ireland to end her economic relationship with England. Appropriately, larger Irish businesses with international outlets sympathized with that party. However, aside from this historic opposition to the economic self-sufficiency dreams, Fine Gael is scarcely opposed to state-capitalism on general principle.

The second phase of Fianna Fail’s state-capitalist policy began in 1959 when DeValera moved upstairs to the honorific Presidency of Ireland, being succeeded as Taoiseach by Sean Lemass who was not taken up with any of DeValera’s enthusiasm for preserving traditional rural Ireland and maintaining economic and cultural isolation. However, his policies were no less state-capitalist. It is true that he did take steps towards customs reductions, freer trade with England, and eventual Irish membership in the Common Market. He also reversed an earlier policy inhibiting foreign ownership of businesses in Ireland, as he sought to encourage foreign investors in Ireland with long-term tax exemptions and government-built plants, only insisting that most of their production be for export. Relatively soon thereafter improved balance of trade and export figures drew great acclaim for Lemass. In 1966 he retired, leaving his successor, Jack Lynch, to handle a skyrocketing inflation and strongly revived trade imbalance among other problems.

In the midst of all this, the Irish Government is proceeding with its plans for preparing Ireland for the expected admission to the Common Market. The planning consists of deciding the economically appropriate areas for industrial, commercial, and agricultural development, and directing government funds, subsidies, and tax exemptions to these areas. Other places, particularly in the West in large sections of Donegal, Mayo, and Kerry, are consigned by the planners to further depopulation and economic decline. To ease the economic death agony, the government will continue its palliatives such as munificent welfare assistance and home improvement grants. But only in tourism, which is highly subsidized, is any possibility seen for development and expansion.

Many in Ireland, from Churchmen through cooperative organizations to the I.R.A., are critical of the Government’s plans and suspicious of E.E.C. membership because of the Government’s acceptance of and commitment to the merciful elimination of the Western peasant communities. Possibly the West’s demise is an inevitable economic development paralleling tendencies in other lands, but now it must also be seen as being positively promoted by state action, even if only in the directing of subsidies to other areas. Admittedly most of the critics would only want to redirect the subsidies to the peasant areas and apply other protective devices. But such would fail to get at the root of much of the rapid depopulation of the Western Irish countryside.

The psychological and numerical erosion of the traditional Western Irish peasant life can be attributed to historical and contemporary circumstances. Centuries of imperialist landlordism with arbitrary evictions and higher rents for self-improved holdings induced a reluctance to innovate and advance. Then in the twentieth century, when the peasants obtained title to their holdings, government paternalism has prevented the natural self-improvement and development that ought to coincide with private property ownership. A passive waiting on outside direction and assistance has combined with cynicism about the success of the ostensibly benevolent assistance programs of the government. For instance, improvements in either living quarters or agricultural methods usually await government grants before being undertaken, even when such could easily be afforded by the recipient. The natural sources of potential wealth in the West of Ireland such as vegetable cultivation and fishing are scarcely developed, while local leaders pressure the authorities for prestige projects like aubsidized factories in areas completely inappropriate in terms of skilled labor, raw materials, or transportation. The people, who are more realistic, encourage their youth to disdain the miserable pay in the subsidized factories in favor of better wages in London and elsewhere.

The extraordinary work ethic and entrepreneurial energy of immigrants to the United States from the West of Ireland is adequate proof of the wonders that could ensue from the shedding of paternalism. This suggests that similar energies among their kinfolk at home could disprove the government planners and make a relative success of the West of Ireland if allowed to be unwrapped.

Another recent enthusiasm of the Irish Government is for the centralization of various public services and quasi-public industries. For instance, in education, in the name of improvement and expansion, small one-room country school houses are being closed to allow amalgamation into larger schools covering greater districts. Similarly, there is a drive underway for centralization of the three colleges of the National University and the unification of the Dublin college with Trinity College. Enlightened opinion is overwhelmingly sympathetic to these rationalizing and modernizing steps. Yet, here is an instance in which a lesson might be taken from the misery of the overcentralized educational systems, on both elementary and university levels, of the United States. However, statist planners are certain to remain unaware of the merits of decentralization in such matters as personal responsibility, creativity, and human contact.

Contempt For The Usual

In his scintillating dissection of Women’s Lib in the December Harper’s (see the Lib. Forum, Dec 15), Irving Howe set forth an insight which deserves elaboration: the “contempt for the usual” endemic on the Left, New and Old. For apart from the tendency on the Left to employ coercion, the Left seems to be constitutionally incapable of leaving people alone in the most fundamental sense; it seems incapable of refraining from a continual pestering, haranguing and harassment of everyone in sight or earshot. (And here the Randian movement falls into much the same error.) The Left is incapable of recognizing the legitimacy of the average person’s peaceful pursuit of his own goals and his own values in his quietly sensible life. Many libertarians who are enamoured of the principles of Maoism point out that, in theory at least, the decentralized communes and eternal self-and-mutual-criticism sessions are supposed to be voluntary and not imposed by violence. Even granting this point, Maoism at its best, forswearing violence, would be well-nigh intolerable to most of us, and certainly to anyone wishing to pursue a truly individualist life. For Maoism depends on a continual badgering, harassing, and pestering of every person in one’s purview to bring him into the full scale of values, attitudes, and convictions held by the rest of his neighbors. I am reminded of several ardent American Maoists who, a few years ago, were taking a Chinese plane out of Hanoi. On the plane they were politely but persistently subjected to a continuing high dosage of Maoist propaganda: not only were pictures and booklets of the Chairman virtually everywhere, but the Chinese anthem “East is Red” was played over and over on the loudspeaker and the hostess sweetly but urgently demanded to know why these Americans were not joining in the community sing. By the time the plane ride was thankfully over, the young Americans had permanently lost their enthusiasm for the Maoist ideal. The point is that in the Maoist world, even at its most civilized, the propaganda barrage is everywhere.

To put it another way: one crucial and permanent difference between libertarians and the Left is in their vision of a future society. Libertarians want the end of politics; they wish to abolish politics forever, so that each individual may live his life unmolested and as he sees fit. But the Left, in contrast, wants to politicize everything; for the Left, every individual action, no matter how trivial or picayune, becomes a “political” act, to be examined, criticized, denounced, and rehabilitated in accordance with the Left’s standards. No person can pick up a spoon, go for a walk to his favorite pub, or turn on TV, without being carefully watched and denounced for taking a wrong political line, or for not moulding all of his values and his life in accordance with “genuine revolutionary” standards. (In the Randian movement, a badgering of almost equivalent intensity is beamed at all movement members to mould them into models of Randian “rationality”.) On the Left, this politicizing of life has accelerated in intensity in recent years.

The Women’s Lib movement, of course, has been in the forefront of this elevating of hectoring and pestering into a universal moral obligation. No one can pick up a dish rag without his or her action being weighed and judged in the light of its “politics”. Mutual aid and cooperation between loved ones, hitherto spontaneous and unforced, becomes a matter of endless debate, rigorous weighing and computing, and the grim toting of ledgers and accounts.

The “ordinary man”, the average person, is a particular target of the Left demons of politics. Recently, for example, football has come under the heavy guns of the Left intellecutals. There is nothing the “middle American” enjoys more than sitting in front of a TV set on a weekend afternoon, beer can in hand, watching a pro football game. Now this innocent and delightful pastime, this surcease from the cares of the day, comes under the scorn and gunfire of our contemporary Medusas and Savonorolas. Football, they claim, is evil because it is rugged and competitive; scoring should be abolished so that there are no winners and no losers (and hence no excellence and no mediocrity). Every player is dragged down to the same level, and all the fun goes out of the sport. Furthermore, watching pro football is also deemed an evil because it is the acme of the division of labor, of the general specialization in the economy and society which is the one thing hated above all by the Left-wing. What a sin to have football played by those who are best at the game while others delight in the spectacle and pay for the privilege! And so the Left moves in, hell-bent for the stamping out of joy, of excellence, of the market, of specialization. Away with pro football! Let everyone go out there on the greensward, and let everyone participate in eurythmic exercises! And as in the old joke about the revolution and “strawberries and cream” (“Comes the revolution, everyone will have strawberries and cream . . . and like it!”), the New Communist Man is expected to be a man or woman who finds his highest delight in non-competitive eurythmics. And if he or she is so benighted, so mired in “bourgeois hangups” as to resist the move from the TV set to the eurythmic field, then a little coercion will be applied to guide him to the proper path.

The crucial point here is that those libertarians whose only philosophy is to oppose coercive violence are missing a great deal of the essence of the ideological struggles of our time. The trouble with the Left is not simply its propensity for coercion; it is also, and in some sense more fundamentally, its hatred of excellence and individuality, its hostility to the division of labor, its itch for total uniformity, and its dedication to the Universal and Permanent Pester. And as it looks around the world, it finds that the main object of its hatred is the Middle American, the man who quietly holds all of the values which it cannot tolerate. And since most Americans are now Middle Americans, the Left’s chances for success are predictably close to zero.

The great libertarian William Graham Sumner once wrote that the moral law of the free society can be summed up in the phrase: “mind your own business!” At first sight, this seems a rather narrow ethic for mankind. But Sumner, if one looks more deeply, has hold of an extremely important point: the great reluctance of the Reformer to leave people alone, to allow them to run their lives as they see fit, without subjecting them to the chronic nagging and badgering of the Universal Social Worker. One would hope that the free society of the future would be free, not only of aggressive violence, but also of self-righteous and arrogant nagging and harassment. “Mind your own business” implies that each person attend well to his own affairs, and allow every other man the same privilege. It is a morality of basic civility, of courtesy, of civilized life, of respect for the dignity of every individual. It does not encompass all of morality, but by God it is a necessary ingredient to a truly rational and civilized social ethic.

To examine whence comes this attitude of the intellectual would require a mighty treatise. (Such treatises are all too rare; intellectuals write extensive and caustic studies of social classes, businessmen, politicians, middle classes, etc., but almost never of intellectuals themselves). But a bit of speculation is in order. One reason might be that every intellectual, as he grows up, acquires a sense of the superiority of himself and his confreres to the ordinary folk around him. Sometimes this sense of superiority may be justified; often it is not. But for many intellectuals this leads to a life-long attempt to demonstrate, to flaunt their superiority to the average man. Instead of peacefully and cheerfully going about his own affairs and his own productive work without worrying about his social ranking in relation to others, the intellectual begins to express his cosmic contempt by mocking the insights and values of those around him. It is not merely that football and beer are derided on behalf of pot and eurythmics. It is far more serious than that. The rot begins to permeate the entire culture. Thus, the average man is an unself-conscious philosophical realist; he believes that the world and consciousness both exist; he believes in purpose, rationality, advancement of his career and his standards of living. So the intellectual throws over realism in supreme contempt as trivial and “superficial”; instead he substitutes one form or other of philosophical subjectivism and mocking paradox. The average man also possesses and unself-conscious rational esthetics: he enjoys fiction with a plot and with a dramatization of moral struggle; he enjoys art that depicts real things in a beautiful form; he enjoys music with melody, harmony, and rhythm. And so all of these must also be thrown over as naive and superficial, and we are subjected to the triumph of the avant-garde: of “art” that is meaningless design, of fiction that is morbid and absurd, of “music” that is stripped of melody or balance, of movies that substitute lunatic montage and grainy photography for truly artistic blends of narrative, plot,’ and rational continuity – virtues that are, again, derided as! “slick” and bourgeois. In one area of culture after another, and in one discipline of knowledge after another, the morbid, the absurd, the irrational, systematically replace the “bourgeois” virtues of reason, advancement and harmonious blend of form and content. And whoever refuses to like the new culture is mocked and scorned as a naive and hopeless clod, brainwashed by old-fashioned bourgeois standards. And all this to exalt the phony superiority of the intelligentsia and to degrade the instinctive rationality of the average man.

What I am saying then is that in this unequal war between the intellectual and the bourgeois, a war in which the clever and facile intellectual has all the aces in his hand, that the average man, beset and bewildered though he may be, is really right. The average man may not see deeply, but he sees clearly and correctly. And this means that one of the great and unfilled tasks of the rationalist intellectual, the true intellectual if you will, is to come to the aid of the bourgeoisie, to rescue the Middle American from his triumphant tormentors. Our task is to provide for the bourgeois the intellectual tools, the philosophical groundwork and framework for his correct but half-formed instincts. In the name of truth and reason, we must rise up as the shield and the hammer of the average American. In the present state of our corrupt and decadent culture, there is no nobler task. And in the course of our doing so, there will come about a re-integration of theory and practice, of the intellectual and the bourgeois, which will provide a far more harmonious base for genuine fraternity and solidarity than all the avant-garde communes, than all the nagging and pestering, on the face of the globe,

Chamberlain And Hess

By Robert LeFevre

John Chamberlain, appearing in the New Haven (Connecticut) Register, recently unsheathed his pen and took a stab at the growing libertarian movement. He chose as his bete noir Karl Hess, of Goldwater fame and misfortune. According to Chamberlain, Hess may be a general of a libertarian cause, but this general lacks an army. In the course of putting down the libertarian movement he linked Hess with “his brother-in-merry-anarchism” Murray Rothbard and then stated: “Here and there a shy libertarian bloom pokes its head above the snows. But it is a delusion to think that an army is following Karl Hess.”

Now I am among those who did not approve of Karl’s boisterous insistence that the way to attain freedom is to “man the barricades” in the streets and to use any type of violence necessary to destroy political office holders. As a matter of fact, at USC a year ago, when Karl had made just such an appeal, I followed him to the platform and in large measure “turned off” the libertarians present. Since then, so far as I am able to learn, Karl has moved toward the position of Progressive Labor or even the Trotskyite camp, and apparently has disclaimed the libertarian position. If Karl is calling himself an anarchist, it is certainly not the anarchism of Murray Rothbard, who proclaims unceasingly the validity of private property and a market without intervention.

But the real purpose of Chamberlain was not to attack Karl Hess. Rather, it was to link the libertarian movement to Hess, who may be a falling star, and by this process to sweep the deck clean of any riff-raff who don’t buy the Conservative position of “I hate and fear Russia”; “I hate and fear China”; “I hate and fear Cuba”; etc., ad nauseam.

Now, it is no wonder that John Chamberlain has not been able to sniff many new libertarian blooms lately. He hasn’t been in the garden where they grow. So I want to encourage John to go out of his office so he can learn just what is happening. Apparently he is hoping for a resurgence of a love of liberty on campus. At least it is possible to glean this bit of grain from the bushel of chaff that accompanied his article. The steam behind the “New Left,” so called, may very well be subsiding.

After all, the sop thrown to many campus lefties by the Nixon administration by legalizing the ballot for eighteen-year-olds may very well have brought a substantial number of New Left people into the arms of the Establishment. But you don’t look for libertarians among those who slavishly manipulate the ballots and hope the monster will spew a few crumbs from its table. You’ll find libertarians among the rapidly growing number of campus people who don’t want to play political darts and in consequence aren’t going to vote at all.

Now in THIS area, if John cares to look, he may find the beginning of an army, it wears many cloaks and it marshals under a number of banners. And it isn’t following Hess or anyone else to the barricades. It is insisting on reason and logic and a revolution of the mind that impels individual rejection of the coercion of government per se.

Is Pot Harmless?

A recent dispatch from Berkeley (Doug Shuit, “Expert Switches, Sees Harm in Pot,” New York Post, Mar. 29) reports that the distinguished psychiatrist Dr. D. Harvey Powelson, director of the Student Psychiatric Clinic at Berkeley, has changed his mind about the “harmlessness” of marijuana. His previous Polyanna view, he reports, was based on a limited sampling of students; but now, after observing 500 students in the last five years, Dr. Powelson has changed his mind.

What Powelson reports is what most of us, observing kids on drugs, have also seen with our own eyes: for example, that pot has a “cumulative effect, and that prolonged use . . . could result in chronic changes similar to those seen in organic brain diseases – islands of lucidity intermixed with areas of loss of function.” Furthermore, use of marijuana often results in a “disorder of thinking characterized by a general lack of coherence and an exacerbation of pathological thinking processes.” Regular pot-users often become “will-less – anomic”, “to do anything requires a gigantic effort”. As to the contention of the drug-enthusiasts that marijuana “heightens perception”, Powelson retorts: “It affects you in the same way any kind of delirium does. It focuses your attention. But it’s pathological in a sense because it results in cutting out all the peripheral things a person looks at. When an ordinary person looks at something, he sees everything, all the peripheral things. But when you’re in a delirium and you see, for example, a shadow, you have a heightened sense of the shadow because all your attention is focused on the shadow and you see nothing else.”

Powelson adds that one reason that drug users claim that there are no harmful effects from pot “is that often a person high on marijuana cannot determine the changes that occur in his thinking. One of the first things that’s impaired is your judgement of your own system.”

No doubt out drug-enthusiasts can come up with some psychiatric swinger or other to deny this point. But this overlooks a vital point. And that is the curious and brusque dismissal of the judgement of the overwhelming majority of the medical profession. The usual rebuttal by our drug fans is that the doctors are engaged in some sort of Calvinistic conspiracy against enjoyment, as embodied in pot and other psychedelic drugs. Now I am the first one to concede that there are many political conspiracies around, and that there are monopolistic collusions in the medical profession. But what earthly reason would there be for such a “conspiracy”? What would doctors have to gain? And as for Calvinism, we have not been living in a Calvinist culture for a long, long time. The entire emphasis of our culture is hedonic, sensate, pleasure-loving. To postulate some sort of mass Calvinistic throwback among conspiring physicians is too grotesque to warrant the slightest consideration.

And moreover: suppose we concede for a moment that all the returns are not yet in, that there are two points of view, that there is a great need for further study in this area. So what? Surely the sensible and rational person, confronted with a new, powerful, and unstudied drug which a large body of physicians claim is harmful, surely such a person will abstain from this needless danger until all, the returns are in? What is the masochism that leads our youth to rush pell-mell into the grave risk of destruction of their mind and consciousness? From whatever angle we look at the problem, once again the instincts of Middle America are right, and the anti-culture is tragically wrong.

Recommended Reading

Nixon and Co.

Witty, sardonic, emphatically “in”, unerring in zeroing in on the defects of those persons and groups (a vast number) whom he hates, and unique in being absolutely unafraid to use ethnic humor, Noel E. Parmentel, Jr. is back! This time he eviscerates a pet hate, Henry Kissinger, and along the way spears his boss Nixon. See Noel’s two-part piece in the Village Voice, “Portnoy in Tall Cotton: Or Making It on the Potomac” (March 11, March 18). Thus,’ Noel says of Kissinger, author of an adoring study of Metternich, that “the man is more Sammy Glick than Metternich.” On Betty Friedan: “Mrs. Betty Friedan takes on Norman Mailer and any and all other comers whose male chauvinism and sexism seek to exploit her obvious and manifest visual appeal.” On White House aide Martin Anderson: “‘Dr.’ Anderson is, or was, roughly equivalent to Cardinal, played off against Miss Ayn Rand’s Popess, in the Objectivist church or synagogue . . . In any case, ‘Dr.’ Anderson bears more resemblance to Elisha Cooke, Jr. in the ‘Maltese Falcon’ than to Gary Cooper in ‘The Fountainhead’ (‘Dr.’ Anderson has since foresworn the epistemology of John Gait for that of Spiro Agnew.)” For his pains, National Review accused Noel of being anti-Semitic, while one irate Voice reader called him a “closet Nazi”. Well, aren’t these the days when all oppressed minority groups are being called on “to come out of the closet?”

The Left.

I have been meaning to recommend in the highest terms a brilliant article that appeared in the Dec 1, 15th Anniversary issue of National Review by Eugene D. Genovese (!), “The Fortunes of the Left.” One of this generation’s outstanding Marxist scholars, Genovese, who has spent his entire life on the Left, has for it nothing but almost total contempt. Genovese begins by pointing out that the Left is in total ruin; that its chances of seizing power “are slightly inferior to the chances of a seizure of power by a coalition of the Campfire Girls and the Gay Liberation Front under the leadership of Ti-Grace Atkinson.” Whereas the New Left of the early and mid-60’s had considerable promise, it has descended into suicidal “madness”, into a “cult of violence generally manifested in blustering and sporadic and self-defeating acts of nihilism, which are no more than the acting out of adolescent fantasies of revolution . . .”

The Weathermen, Genovese points out, are largely an invention of the media, who found them “cute”; while the “cultural revolutionaries” of the youth culture are the “problem children of the solid bourgeoisie”, a phenomenon that terrifies the solid citizens of the Right and Center, “who interpret their own inability to discipline their children as the beginning of the end of civilization. (I suspect that it is, in fact, only the beginning of the end of the quaint notion that children can be raised without occasional spankings.)” So long as the cultural revolutionaries persist, supported by the media “that hail everything young as intrinsically good and misunderstood”, so long will working class and middle-class Americans be totally repulsed, and so long will it be impossible to build a sober and decent Left in this country, The ideology of the current youth-Left is “liberal-nihilist”, and therefore associates the entire Left in the public mind with a “repudiation of those values which are necessary to any civilized existence.”

The original New Left, Genovese adds, contributed many positive virtues: its libertarian instincts, its “critical spirit, an assertion of humane values, a hatred for regimentation and, on a more direct political level, a strong suspicion of centralization in general and Big Daddy government in particular.” But now, these early strivings, which intersected at many points with the best of conservatism, have been reversed: partly because of the “inability of the Now Generation to bear setbacks, defeats and other irritants to the compulsion for instant gratification.”

What Genovese is calling for is a sort of socialist, or decentralized-socialist, counterpart of what I have been calling for in the libertarian movement with equal lack of success: taking one’s place in a sober, protracted commitment to a libertarian (or, in his case, socialist) caucus within a broader anti-war political coalition, amid the anti-war politicians of the McCarthy-Lindsay-McGovern-Hatfield variety. But this sort of program fails to fulfill the lust for instant gratification so endemic in the present-day. Genovese calls also for a dialogue between the Left and Right opposition to the current status quo, and hails such socialist intellectuals as William Appleman Williams for striving to incorporate decentralist-conservative insights into a socialist program.

In his analysis of the current political scene, Genovese presents to the N. R. readers for the first time in their lives the great truth that there is not very much difference between Old Left and New Right: “President Nixon’s right-wing liberalism is the counterpart of the Communist Party’s left-wing liberalism – that is, each advances solutions within the established consensus of liberal social policy.”

The only hope for a sane Left opposition, Genovese concludes, is the disappearance of the youthful nihilists; it is only the “certain defeat of the carriers of apocalyptic fantasies” that can “clear the way for the long, slow work of finding new ground on which to stand . . .”

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Conservation.

It hurts to recommend anything in National Review, but truth must always triumph in our hearts over prejudice. The April 6 issue has an excellent article by the Lib. Forum’s own discovery, Edwin G. Dolan, “Why Not Sell the National Parks?” Dolan, far more of an outdoorsman than many of useffetes in the New York movement, makes the point: if the conservationists want to preserve the parks, wilderness, etc, why don’t they buy these areas? Shouldn’t they trust themselves to preserve these areas rather than some government bureaucrat?

We Beat The SST

The glorious triumph over the SST was not only an important victory for liberty over the Leviathan State and the military-industrial complex; it was also an instructive lesson for libertarians on who our natural political allies may be in the present historical period. Who favored this billion-dollar boondoggle? The Nixon Administration, the war-mongers, the Conservative Movement, the entire uneconomic and sub-marginal aircraft industry, Big Unionism — tied in with that industry: in short, the entire Establishment force of the Unholy Triad: Big Business-Big Government — Big Unionism, working together in that unholy “partnership” that characterizes the current American political system. Who opposed the SST? First and foremost, every single economist, regardless of political persuasion, left, right, and center; and then, Left-liberals of the anti-war and anti-militarist movement; Old Right conservatives opposed to the waste of taxpayers’ money; and libertarians.

One of the most amusing and enlightening aspects of this new-found unity among economists: from Friedman to Heller and Galbraith, was the Congressional testimony of the high panjandrum of Orthodox Keynesian economics, Professor Paul Samuelson. Samuelson declared that we must stop the orgy of “pyramid-building” in which we have engaged for many years. This was an “in-joke” reference to one of the most famous remarks of Samuelson’s Master, Lord Keynes, to the effect that the building of pyramids is just as economically sound as any more productive expenditure, for both will increase that revered figure, the Gross National Product, by the same extent. In fact, pyramid-building is better! Samuelson’s repudiation of pyramid-building, his justifiable concern for what is being done with our productive resources, signals The End of Keynes. For the Liberals have had their Keynesian Economics rule us for over thirty years; and now they are beginning to realize that what they have reaped is vast governmental waste in behalf of the GNP, the growth of a State Leviathan, and the proliferation of endless imperial wars. Yearning for pyramids, the Liberals have reaped missiles and napalm and H-bombs and germ warfare. And they don’t like the results.

If we analyze the vote in the Senate, we find that the leading Conservatives voted en masse for this statist boondoggle: Brock, Buckley, Curtis, Dole, Fannin, Goldwater (ponder that, ex-Goldwaterite libertarians I), Gurney, Hruska, Thurmond, Tower, et. al. They were joined by the war-liberals among the Democrats: Inouye, Jackson, McGee, Symington. But the interesting – and crucially significant – votes were those cast against the SST by a minority of conservatives: Bentsen, Byrd (Va.), Chiles, Ervin, Gambrell, Griffin, Hansen, Jordan (Id.), Miller, Prouty, Roth. (And for nostalgic Old Rightists, there was the glorious spectacle of veteran isolationist-libertarian H. R. Gross (R., Io.), that veteran guardian of the taxpayer, voting against as well.) We have it on good authority that at least two of the Senate conservative votes were shifted by the testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee of the intrepid libertarian, James Davidson of the National Taxpayers Union. And so the libertarian movement, for the first time, exercises its political muscle – not through violence or hysteria but through the use of reason and persuasion. And if we remember that a shift of three votes in the Senate would have put the SST over, we can see the importance of the libertarian “intervention” into the political scene. Onward and upward!

Libertarian Book News

The fall and winter season will be a surging, glorious time for the publication of important new libertarian books from major publishers. Watch this space for developments as they occur.

One of the most important books – and one which will get major publicity – is by our own Jerome Tuccille. Stein and Day will be publishing a book by Jerry on the current right-wing and libertarian movements, and it is shaping up as a veritable blockbuster. Present plans are for the book to be a “non-fiction novelized non-fiction, the closest parallel being the witty and insightful novels of the French writer, Roger Peyrefitte. There will be a fictional hero, a Yossarian – Everyman, in search of the truth, who goes from one right-wing movement to another, and finally from one branch of the libertarian movement to another; in each group the Everyman encounters real people with real names, and they engage in fictionalized dialogue in which they present their real views, and Jerry’s hero responds with the author’s real reactions.

And it’s going to be a blockbuster: witty, hilarious, iconoclastic, as St. Jerome rides out to slay the Dragons of Deviationism, to expose the crazies, to prick the balloons of posturing pomposity, to employ the sword-pen of satire on behalf of reason, and common sense. And so: deviationists of all stripes, beware! Humorless fanatics, en garde! Jerry is out to get you! And you will probably find yourself, named and revealed, in the pages of his sparkling book. And the title – oh boy, the title – the title, my friends, is calculated to send three-quarters of the libertarian movement into an instant conniption fit. The title is: IT USUALLY STARTS WITH AYN RAND. And so libertarians, gird your loins; brace yourselves for the Tuccille blitz.

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Also this fall, Jerry Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism, so far the only book on our movement, is coming out in paperback. The hard-cover edition, which came out early last year, encountered two misfortunes: the fact that the book predated by a year the sudden publicity storm for the libertarian movement, and the early death of the book’s brilliant young editor, a man highly sympathetic to the cause. But now the major publishing house of Harper and Row will be putting out the book in paper this fall, and so we can expect a major publicity push for this book as well – as well as the tapping of the vital mass paperback market.

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Coming also in the fall season is a new libertarian book by Harry Browne, author of the current runaway best seller by Arlington House, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation ($5.95). (The book has sold a phenomenal 90,000 copies to date, largely on the strength of personal radio and TV appearances by the author.) The new book, tentatively titled How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, will be published by Macmillian, and will get top publicity – (it will have to, to recoup the amazing advance paid by the publisher.) Judging from Harry’s general position, the book will probably stress how the individual (either Harry or the reader) can escape the crippling hand of the State in his own life.

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Also, Harper and Row is scheduled or rumored to be producing other paperbacks of interest in the fall; a collection of essays by David Friedman, and a reader on capitalism edited by Professor Dorothy James, which will consist of original articles from all ends of the spectrum, left and right, critical of the existing status quo. Especially featured will be libertarian authors, since Professor James (and we hope she’s right!) expects libertarianism to be the wave of the future on college campuses. Included in the James collection will be essays by Rod Manis, Tibor Machan, and Murray N. Rothbard.

For Bengal

Considering the traditional apathy and ignorance of most libertarians in foreign affairs, I don’t suppose that many have taken a stand on what the press misleadingly terms a “civil war” in East Pakistan. In fact, the situation there is scarcely a “civil war”; it is a mass movement by the people of East Pakistan – the Bengalis – to rid themselves, once and for all, of the tyranny and despotism of the Punjabi-run central government of the West.

One of the major problems blocking most libertarians from supporting national independence movements is their pettifogging semantic hangup on the phrase “national self-determination”, a concept, by the way, that loomed large in that very nineteenth-century liberalism to which libertarians consider themselves the heir. “National self-determination”, most libertarians patiently explain, is an erroneous concept, an equivocation on the world “self”; since the self can only be each individual, libertarians should only support “individual self-determination” rather than national. But this analysis, while philosophically correct, misses the whole essential point: the point that these national movements are primarily concerned with getting other imperial states and nations off their backs. “National self-determination” is only a harmless metaphor for a movement against imperial dictation. The point, for example, about the nascent but growing Scottish National movement is that it is concerned’ with ending the domination of Scotland by English imperialism, a domination which is cultural, economic, and throughout political.

The same is true for the crisis in Pakistan. For Pakistan is in no sense a genuine nation, but a geographical abortion, created by the British as they were forced to leave the Indian subcontinent shortly after World War II The Bengalis of the East have nothing whatsoever in common, except for their religion, with the Punjabis of the West; culturally, linguistically, ethnically and by every other criteria, they are separate nations. Furthermore, the political structure of Pakistan establishes a despotism by the Punjabis over the numerically superior, and far more productive, Bengalis. The Bengalis are the merchants and the traders of India; and a large chunk of their productive earnings are taxed away by the central Punjabi government to build up a vast Punjabi-staffed army and central bureaucracy, as well as to subsidize the Punjabi large-landlord class. The Punjab government has always been a thinly-veiled military dictatorship; and it was the decision of that government to suspend Parliament in the wake of its loss in the recent Pakistani elections that touched off the current crisis. It was that suspension that finally convinced the long-suffering Bengalis that there was no hope for them to attain autonomy within the Pakistan framework, and that decided them for national Bengali independence.

The fighting in Bengal is not a civil war, but a counterrevolutionary struggle by a Punjabi army to crush the independence forces, in other words the people of Bengal. Hence the use by that army of familiar genocidal tactics, for it realizes that the entire population of Bengal is its “enemy.” Hence its systematic massacre of civilians, hence its imposition of curfew and censorship, and its expulsion of all foreign correspondents from the country. The similarity with the American use of mass terrorism in Southeast Asia should be striking and expectable, for in Southeast Asia we, too, are trying to impose an external rule on an entire population, all of which therefore becomes “the enemy”, to be slaughtered wherever found. Genocidal slaughter is the logical conclusion of imperial war.

Another instructive point: the Great Powers, including the United States and Communist China, are all supporting the Pakistan government, since they all have deals with that government and they all value “stability” everywhere. Which shows where Great Powers, whoever they may be, will stand when it comes to justice and statism.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph. R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 5

JUNE, 1971

75¢

How To Destatize

The libertarian movement has long been far stronger on ultimate principle than it has in strategic thinking. While we cannot overrate the importance of providing a theoretical picture of the society toward which we are striving, we have done much more of this needed theorizing than we have considered how in the world to get from our current “here” to the ideal “there.” This deficiency of strategy and tactics is highlighted by our general failure to consider two dramatic recent victories for liberty, for destatizing, and to ponder what lessons they may offer for future strategy. These recent victories are the generally rapid movement for the repeal of abortion laws, and the successful movement to rollback and eventually abolish rent controls in New York State.

To use those much-abused terms once more, the “right-wing” of the libertarian movement tends to be pure “educationists”, while the “left-wing” tends to call for immediate destruction of existing society. Both strategies are self-defeating, and both in effect insure that the success of liberty can never be achieved. The educationists call for increased devotion to education, to spreading the ideas and the scholarship of libertarianism throughout society, for a new form of “cultural revolution” in behalf of reason and liberty. Now while I wholeheartedly endorse the proposal for ever-wider education, the problem is that this strategy is necessary but scarcely sufficient for victory, i.e. for translating these libertarian concepts into the real world. The educationist view tends to hold that as more people are converted, the State will somehow automatically wither away. But how? And by what mechanism? Often the educationists explicitly rule out all possible mechanisms for pressuring the State to roll itself back or dismantle itself: violence is dismissed as evil, mass demonstrations as coercive, voting or influencing politicians as injuring libertarian purity, civil disobedience as violating the principle that while the laws are on the books they must be obeyed. But how then is the State to be rolled back? The educationists have thereby systematically ruled out all ways but one: convincing the men in power to resign.

In short, Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson or Henry Kissinger or whoever is supposed to read Atlas Shrugged, or Power and Market or Human Action or This Bread is Mine or whatever and say: “Eureka! This is it! They’re right, and I’ve been wrong. I resign and look for honest employment.” Now certainly such instant conversions by our sinners are conceptually possible, and once in a while, in isolated cases, they indeed happen, and should be saluted and cheered. But surely history shows that such large-scale conversions are highly unlikely, to say the least; no ruling elite in history has voluntarily surrendered its power on any grounds, much less on massive recognition of its own sins. And surely for libertarians to rest their strategic perspective on such conversion of sinners would be folly indeed. And yet that is the strategic dead-end to which our educationists would consign us.

It is true that our left-wing R-r-revolutionaries confront the problem of Power, which the educationists do not; but their strategic prescription of instant and indiscriminate destruction is not only self-defeating but suicidal as well. The moral legitmacy of self-defense against the State is beside the strategic point: the point being that the use of violence only serves to alienate the very American public whom we are trying to convince. And “alienate” is of course a very tame word here: “polarize”, “enrage”, would be far more accurate. Another point which the violent revolutionaries forget is that there has never been a successful armed revolution against a democratic government; all toppled governments have been seen by the public to be outside themselves, either as dictatorships or monarchies (Cuba, China, Russia, 18th Century France, 17th Century England) or as imperial powers (the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution). The Left is fond of pointing to the Tupamaros of Uruguay as a successful urban guerrilla movement, but the evident point here is that the Tupamaros have not at this writing succeeded, or shown any signs of doing so. So long as free elections exist, then, the use of violence by American rebels will only prove suicidal and counter-productive.

We must reject then both strategies: the defeatist torpor of the educationists, and the frenzied nihilism of the Revolutionaries. What then should be our positive strategy? This is a difficult problem, especially since the art of strategy and tactics depends on the forces at work at the particular time. But here is a prime strategic lesson: that while we must be pure and consistent in principle, we must be flexible in tactics. We must be willing to adopt any tactic that seems likely to bring about the goal of liberty, any tactic, that is, that is not in itself immoral and itself violates the libertarian creed. Take, for example, the MayDay Tribe demonstrations this spring in Washington. In contrast to the effective and moving demonstrations that preceded MayDay, the goal of the Tribe seemed to be to blockade and “trash” private automobiles, thus typically expressing the Left’s hatred against the private car. For the libertarian, however, not only was the May Day tactic counterproductive in alienating the great bulk of Americans, it also violated libertarian principle by directing its’ ire against private property – the very thing that the libertarian is concerned to defend and expand. No genuine libertarian could consider such trashing in any way except with abhorrence.

For a more positive model, let us consider the two most prominent victories for destatizing in recent years: the repeal of abortion laws and the substantial removal of rent control in New York. How did these victories come about? Let us consider the rent decontrol case first, as a simpler model. Rent control has been imposed in New York since World War II, and a few years ago it was even imposed anew on post-war buildings. Seemingly, it was a system destined to last forever. All these years, the aggrieved landlords of New York had protested, but in vain. The new recent ingredient was clearly the patent failure and collapse of housing in New York City in the last few years. For few new apartment houses have been built in recent years, due to rent controls and zoning restrictions; existing housing has deteriorated, and abandonments of houses by landlords unable to pay taxes have increased, adding to the plight of the homeless. Furthermore, the Liberal claim that rent controls are merely a temporary device until the apartment shortage disappeared was given the lie by the fact that the shortage of apartments in New York has gotten visibly worse rather than better. In short, as a result of rent controls and high property taxes, the housing situation in New York has reached a crisis stage, and it was this crisis situation that impelled the state authorities to turn to new solutions – to turn, indeed, onto the firm path of decontrol. But the lesson here is that the government cannot be induced to change its ways by theory alone; it was the crisis situation brought about by controls that led Governor Rockefeller and the state legislators to turn to the free-market theorists who were there with the decontrol solution at hand. Theory, however correct, will not be put into effect unless a crisis situation arrives to force the government out of its habitual bureaucratic inertia and onto a search for new solutions.

Abortion reform also had the ingredients of sound libertarian theory at work plus a crisis situation. The theory had been propounded for years by pro-abortion groups, but was accelerated recently by the fact that the Women’s Lib groups, in their raucous and annoying manner, had stumbled across a purely libertarian theory which they propounded with force and effect: that every woman has the absolute right to own and control her own body. The attention devoted to Women’s Lib by the media assured that the politicians finally were able to hear, not a wishy-washy liberal plea for moderate abortion reform, but the “extreme” – and consistent – view that the State had no right to pass any abortion restrictions whatever.

While libertarian theory had been firmed up and spread more aggressively, a crisis situation was becoming ever more blatant: and this was the massive, non-violent civil disobedience of women and doctors who obtained their abortions illegally. And not only were increasing numbers of women and doctors willing to ignore the law; but others were increasingly willing to broaden the fuzzy zone that often exists between legality and illegality: for example, doctors willing to stretch the definition of “endangering the health of the mother”, which made abortion permissible. Furthermore, it was also becoming evident that, taking place as they did under conditions of illegality, the abortions were both unnecessarily expensive and unnecessarily dangerous. In the case of abortions, then, it was mass civil disobedience that brought about the crisis situation, while the spread of libertarian theory made the government more willing to turn to the de-statizing solution. But not only theory: also the use of the theory to pressure the politicians, by petition, by noise, by threat of votes, etc.

As the Marxists would say, there is needed for victory both the “objective conditions” and the “subjective conditions.” The objective conditions refer to crisis situations in the real world; for libertarians, finding crisis situations is easy, especially since these crises (e.g. the abortion mills, housing decay) have invariably been created by the government itself. The subjective conditions refer to the need for groups of libertarians to propound the libertarian solutions to these crises and to pressure the politicians when the objective conditions are ripe. Both methods were applied in the successes of housing and abortion – and both successes were won without a self-conscious group of pure libertarians bringing their wider and more systematic doctrines to bear on the struggle. How much greater will the success be when libertarians will have made their mark as an active, expanding, self-conscious movement, stepping into crises as they appear and providing the benefit of their far more systematic insight, or, to paraphrase the Marxists, “raising the level of libertarian consciousness” among all parties concerned! Times, moreover, are going to be increasingly ripe for this sort of action, because crises are piling up as the failure of the Welfare-Warfare State becomes increasingly manifest in field after field: education, foreign policy, conscription, welfare, transportation, etc. As crisis situations multiply, libertarians will find their own opportunities multiplying as well, provided we are not stultified by the educationists or discredited by the nihilists. And we must remember that if we do not pursue these opportunities, more sinister forces – socialists or more likely fascists – will be standing in the wings to offer their alternatives to the failure of the Liberal-Conservative Consensus. Considering the numerous failures and tyrannies of socialism and fascism it will be easy to discredit these alternatives – provided that we are there to offer liberty as the only rational — and reasonable – alternative to the existing order. But a reasonable alternative emphatically does not include insane blatherings about “ripping off Amerika”. Liberty is profoundly American; we come to fulfill the best of the American tradition, from Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Jeffersonian movement, and beyond. As Benjamin R. Tucker put it, we are “unterrified Jeffersonian democrats”, and we come not to destroy the American dream but to fulfill it.

Syndical Syndrome

New Yorkers have recently had to suffer yet another irresponsible blackjacking at the hands of power-drunk labor unions. This time it was the bridge tenders and garbage incinerator workers who, angered at the state legislature’s balking at their receiving pensions which no private industry could afford, took their frustrations out on an innocent public by not only striking but sabotaging traffic facilities. Admittedly, there was no way that they could win their strike, since upstate legislators could hardly be brought to their knees by traffic tieups and sabotage in New York City, but it was a nice way to have a couple of days off while sticking a knife into the ribs of John Q. Public. Libertarians must always concede the right to strike, since otherwise labor would be compulsory rather than voluntary; but if employers had the fortitude and they were allowed to do so by law, they would automatically fire any and all strikers, and thereby take the strikers’ quitting their jobs with the serious response that they deserve. In the case of outright sabotage and destruction, along with threats of violence against those who continue to work or are hired to replace the strikers, the unions who commit such aggression should be treated as the criminals that they are. And since such coercion is the general rule in strikes, these criminal penalties would, in a libertarian society, be widespread rather than nonexistent as they are now. For it should never be forgotten that a libertarian society does not mean the total absence of coercion but only the absence of coercion against non-criminals. Those who invade the rights of others by violence deserve their proper check and punishment by the force of law.

In the light of the black record of union violence and intimidation over the years – a violence inherent in their assumed power to keep non-strikers off “their” jobs it is difficult to understand why so many libertarians have lately become enamoured of anarcho-syndicalism and the “working class”. For the arrogant and coercive labor unions are indeed “syndicalism” in embryo, and the harbinger of any future fully syndicalist society.

Of the three major proposals for running an advanced industrial society – socialism, syndicalism, and free-market capitalism – syndicalism is the most blatantly unworkable and most rapidly disastrous. For in such a society, there must be some rational mechanism for allocating resources efficiently, for seeing to it that the proper amounts of labor, land, and capital equipment are employed in those areas and in those ways most efficient for satisfying the wants and desires of the mass of consumers. Free-market capitalism not only provides the most smoothly efficient way, it is also the only method that relies solely on voluntary inducements. Thus, suppose that a great number of new workers are needed in a new and expanding industry, say, plastics or electronics. How are these workers to be supplied? The market way is to offer new jobs at higher wages in these new areas and fields, while firing people or cutting wages in those industries that are in decline (say the horse-and-buggy industry). The pure socialist way is to direct the labor out of one industry and into another purely by coercive violence, i.e. by forced labor direction. The socialist method is both despotic and highly inefficient, and so even the socialist countries have been turning more and more to free-market methods in the allocation of labor. But at least socialism is an attempt at a rational allocation of labor in a modern, industrial society.

Syndicalism, on the other hand, i.e. full worker “ownership” of “their” industries, does not even attempt to achieve a rational allocation of resources. Both the free method of market allocation and the coercive method of central dictation are eliminated. And what is to take their place? In effect, nothing but chaos. Instead of a coordinating mechanism there is now only the chaotic will of groups of brawling monopoloid syndics, each demanding parity and control regardless of economic law. Does anyone think for one moment that the horse and buggy workers would have permitted higher wages in the budding automobile industry? Or have permitted the dismissal of workers? All one need do is to observe the arrogant behavior of unions with monopoly power to know the answer. But the problem lies deeper than bad will on the part of union syndics. The problem is that, even in a community of “saints”, even in an improbable world of meek and altruistic union monopolists, there would be no way for the syndics to make their decisions on wages, employment, or allocation of production. Only a system of market pricing and wage rates, guided by profit and loss considerations for market firms, can provide a mechanism for such decisions.

Furthermore, the myriad jurisdictional disputes that already plague our system of unionism would be far more intense and out of control in a syndicalist society. Take for example carpenters working in the steel industry. Would the carpenter syndic “own” the product of their carpentry, or would they be merged unheralded and unsung into the general syndic of steel workers? Professor von Mises has scoffed at the syndicalist cry of “steel to the steel workers, aluminum to the aluminum workers, syndical society, who indeed would own the garbage, the garbage collecting syndic or the street maintenance and repair syndic?

Syndicalism would therefore be totally incapable of organizing an industrial economy, and this total failure is, indeed, the economic embodiment of the dysfunctionality of the anti-technological youth culture which has given rise to the new syndicalism. In a recent Firing Line interview, Bill Buckley asked Karl Hess the elementally silly question: in an anarchist society, if one group of workers wanted to work from 8 to 4, and another set in the same plant wished to work from 9 to 5, who would decide? Karl, trapped in an anarcho-syndicalist framework, could only lamely reply that the workers would come to some sort of agreement. The proper and swift answer would have been that the stockholder -owners would decide, just as they are doing now. Anarcho-capitalism is an easily explainable system, precisely because its configuration would be very similar in most ways to the society that we have now.

Like the New Left generally, the proponents of syndicalism suffer most from a total ignorance of economics, and therefore of the ways in which an industrial society can function. If the syndicalists can be persuaded to get “into” reading, especially of a subject which they usually define as being inherently “repressive”, they might learn something from the critiques of syndicalism in Mises’ Socialism and Human Action, and in Henry Simons’, Economic Policy for a Free Society.

It is true that the Yugoslav economy is working well, but the remarkable Yugoslav shift from socialist central planning to a relatively free market economy has never been clasped to the New Left bosom. For while the workers in each plant indeed own their plants, the relations between plants are strictly governed by a free price system, and by profit and loss tests. It is precisely the adoption of the free market, of money, prices, competition, self-reliance, etc. by the Yugoslavs which prevents the anarcho-syndicalists and the other egalitarians and anti-marketeers of the New Left from treating Yugoslavia with anything but pained silence. Furthermore, the Yugoslavs are rapidly moving in the direction of individual shares of ownership for each worker, and the subsequent trading of such shares in some sort of “people’s stock market”, which will culminate their shift to a free-market economy.

The Yugoslav system, therefore, is indeed not syndicalist, but a market economy of producers’ cooperatives. If this is really all that the anarcho-syndicalists demand, then they can easily bring the new society into being, by simply forming producers’ coops owned by the workers themselves. In free-market capitalism, there have never been any restrictions on workers banding together in producers’ coops to own their own capital equipment. And yet, in the free economy, producers’ coops have been notorious by their non-existence, or rapid failure in competition with “capitalist” firms. The reason is that, unknown to the economically ignorant syndicalists, the capitalists perform an extremely important service to the workers, as a result of which most people prefer to be hired by capitalists rather than be self or cooperatively employed. The two basic functions are those of the “capitalist” per se and those of the “entrepreneur”. As a capitalist, the employer saves money from his possible consumption, and invests the money in paying workers their income in advance of sale of product. In an automobile factory, the capitalist pays workers their weekly wages now; in a producers’ cooperative factory, the workers would have to go without income for months or years, until their product is finally sold to the consumers. The capitalist earning of “interest” for this advance payment is precisely equivalent to the creditor who earns interest by lending someone money now while being repaid at some point in the future. In both cases, “interest” is earned as payment for savings and time preference for income now rather than waiting for the future.

The second service performed by the employer is to assume the significant risks of entrepreneurship. A producers’ cooperative firm invests resources in a product, and then hopes to sell that product to the consumers at a net profit. But suppose that the efficiency and the foresight of the workers is minimal; suppose, in short, that they produce an Edsel that fails to sell? If they do, their income is negative rather than positive, and they lose capital assets which they can scarcely afford. In the capitalist economy, the employer assumes these capital risks, and only he therefore is subject to monetary losses if his product is inefficiently produced or if he cannot achieve satisfactory sales.

Most workers are unwilling or unable to assume these risks of entrepreneurship, and therefore they greet the employer’s willingness to do so, as well as to pay them in advance of sales, with sighs of relief. Or would if they understood the process. We can confidently predict that if Yugoslavia ever allows full-scale capitalist employment (as it does now for small-scale enterprise) that its producers’ coops will rapidly give way to orthodox “capitalist” modes of production – to the benefit of all concerned.

The question of whether a future free society will be “coop” or communal or capitalist brings up the most disturbing problem about the anarcho-syndicalists and communalists. This is the famous “question of Auban” the question that “Auban”, the individualist anarchist hero of John Henry Mackay’s novel The Anarchists, put to the left-wing anarchists. In essence: would you, in your proposed anarchist society, permit those who so wished to have private property, to engage in free market transactions, to hire workers in “capitalist” relations, etc.? The communist anarchists in Mackay’s book never answered the question clearly and lucidly, and neither do any left-wing anarchists that one may encounter today. (For the Auban speech from Mackay, see Krimerman and Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy (Doubleday, 1966), pp. 16-33.) Generally, the left-anarchists reply that, in their Utopian society, no one will be so base as to want to indulge in private property or in capitalist social relations. But suppose they do? one persists. The answer is generally either a repeat of the Utopian answer or an evasive silence.

And when the left-anarchists can be pressed for an answer, the response is disturbing indeed. Take for example one of our most distinguished socialist-anarchists, Professor Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our “right-wing” libertarian movement; apparently he is – I am afraid unrealistically – concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute “the greatest tyranny the world has ever known”. (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? than Ghengis Khan?) Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an “anarchist” at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an “anarchist”. And I very much fear that the same can be said for the other varieties of left-anarchists: communal, syndical, or whatever. Beneath a thin veneer of libertarian rhetoric there lies the same compulsory and coercive collectivist that we have encountered all too often in the last two centuries. Scratch a left-wing “anarchist” and you will find a coercive egalitarian despot who makes the true lover of freedom yearn even for Richard Nixon (Arghh!) in contrast.

If this analysis is correct, as I believe it is, then it makes all the more absurd the hankering by so many of our “left-wing” for an intimate comradely alliance with the anarcho-left. Beneath superficial agreement in rhetoric, there is nothing in common between genuine libertarians and collectivist “anarchists”. Superficially, we both oppose the existing system – but so too do monarchists, Nazis, and those who hanker for a return to the Inquisition – scarcely enough for a warm and comradely dialogue. It is indeed fortunate for Liberty that the left-anarchists have about as much chance of victory as some of our Conservatives have to restore the Bourbon dynasty. For if they did, we would soon find that the embrace of left-anarchy is the embrace of Death.

Jerome Daly Once More

Readers of the Forum may remember that we had pointed to the struggle of the intrepid libertarian activist, attorney Jerome Daly of Savage, Minnesota, against fractional reserve fiat banking (Lib. Forum, Aug. 1, 1969). In 1967, Mr. Daly refused to make any further mortgage payments to his bank; at his jury trial (First National Bank of Montgomery v. Jerome Daly) in December, 1968, Daly argued that the bank had loaned him, not real specie money but only bank credit which it had created out of thin air, and which was therefore valueless. Since it was valueless, the credit was not a valid consideration, and the contract was, according to Daly, null and void. Remarkably, the jury and Justice of the Peace Martin Mahoney ruled in Daly’s favor, and, furthermore, Mahoney refused to accept the required fee from the Bank for a judicial appeal, on the ground that only gold and silver can be used to pay such fees.

The unfortunate death of Judge Mahoney ended the Daly case; but now Mr. Daly is back in action. In 1966, Mr. Daly had deposited $71 in silver coin in a savings account at the Savage State Bank. Now he is suing the bank for return of the silver coin which he had deposited; he refuses to accept the fiat paper of the government. At the end of April, the Justice of the Peace of Credit River Township decreed that the bank must pay gold and silver coin to a depositor upon demand! In a companion decision, the same court held that the State Treasurer of Minnesota must pay an income tax refund check of $61 in nothing but gold or silver coin. This decision is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, not on the correctness of the decision but on whether the Justice of the Peace had jurisdiction in the case.

In the meanwhile, Mr. Daly has also been active on the tax resistance front. He hasn’t paid income taxes since 1965, claiming that the income tax is unconstitutional and also that the IRS returns violate the Fifth Amendment. Daly also ties the claim in with the Minnesota court decision on the unconstitutionality of banks’ issue of fiat money. What Daly does is to submit an income tax return, consisting of over 40 pages of his legal claims, and suggesting that the IRS sue him for the tax in U.S. District Court. So far IRS has not sued Mr. Daly, who is now holding seminars around the country instructing people how to fill out similar income tax forms. (For further information, Mr. Daly can be reached at 28 East Minnesota St., Savage, Minn. 55378).

Recommended Reading

The Individualist. The April issue, just out, features an article by Murray N. Rothbard, “Education: Free and Compulsory”, a philosophical discussion of the nature of the education of children and a critique of compulsory education by the State. Also featured are two excellent review-articles: Professor Edwin G. Dolan’s review of Robert P. Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism; and Roy Childs’ review of G. William Domhoff’s The Higher Circles.

Revisionism, in the March issue of Reason, Roy Childs continues his great educational work in instructing SIL members in the nature of empirical reality in twentieth-century America. This is the conclusion of his two-part article on “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism: A Revisionist History”.

Education. A valuable stream of inexpensive leaflets generally priced at 10¢), has been pouring forth from the Center of Independent Education, 9115 East Thirteenth, Wichita, Kansas 67206. These include leaflets on education by Armen Alchian, Robert L. Cunningham, David Friedman, Benjamin A. Rogge, E. G. West, and James M. Buchanan. Particularly important is a critique of the dangerous Friedmanite scheme for educational vouchers by George Pearson, Another Look at Education Vouchers, which can also be found as “The Case Against Education Vouchers” in the April-May issue of Reason.

Libertarian Growth. The burgeoning importance of libertarianism is reflected in the Spring issue of Modern Age, the leading conservative quarterly. (743 North Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611, $4.00 per year, $1.25 per issue.) Rothbard and libertarianism are discussed in no less than four places in the Spring issue, ranging from the highly favorable review of Power and Market by H. George Resch, to an objective and respectful account in M. Stanton Evans’ “Varieties of Conservative Experience”, to a harsh account by Gary North, to a silly smear by Donald Zoll, who accuses us of being secret agents of Herbert Spencer. (I for one am happy, now and formerly, to hail Spencer’s Social Statics as the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written.)

Meanwhile, our favorable recognition in the media continues to expand. David Deitch wrote a series of three articles on our movement in the Boston Globe, April 10, 11, and 12. The first deals with the National Taxpayers Union, the second is a general interview with Murray Rothbard, and the third deals with Senator Hatfield’s proposals for tax reform.

The Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin or January 24 has a lengthy article on SIL’s Philadelphia offices, including pictures of David Walter and Don Ernsberger. And the Stanford Daily of May 27 has a long article proclaiming the death of YAF and its replacement by the new libertarians.

Garland Reprints. In these days of massive reprinting, the libertarian should be alert to reprints of classics in his areas of interest (unfortunately they are usually very expensive.) Now Garland Publishing, Inc., 24 West 45th St., New York, N.Y. 10036, has announced the publication of a Garland Library of War and Peace, a mighty series of 328 volumes, largely anti-war and isolationist, and focussing most heavily on World War I and environs. The books are available individually, or in a complete collection for $4500, and are supposed to be available now (though this is doubtful). Many of these works are indispensable for any libertarian interested in foreign policy, and at the very least, everyone should send away for the handsomely produced catalog. Some of the important titles follow.

John Foster Dulles, War, Peace and Change (1939). $11.00. Dulles’ isolationist work about Europe in the 1930’s.

Charles H. Hamlin, Propaganda and Myth in Time of War. $9.00. Includes Hamlin’s excellent 1927 booklet on U.S. aggressive wars throughout its history, as well as his critique of U.S. war propaganda by educators during World War I.

Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World. War. $13.00. A classic on war propaganda.

Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, Propaganda and the War (1940) $18.00. An excellent and detailed study of war propaganda in the late 1930’s.

Edmund D. Morel, Truth and War (1916) $17.00. The leader of English revisionism on secret diplomacy and World War I.

Albert Jay Nock, The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922). $7.50. The first American revisionist work on World War I. By the great libertarian writer and theorist.

Caroline Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations (1925), $21.00. Comprehensive work on English revisionism of World War I.

Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War Time (1928), $11.00. The classic work on British atrocity stories fabricated about Germany in World War I.

Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda in the Next War (1938) $11.00. A chilling forecast of British propaganda to be used to draw the U.S. into World War II.

Irene Cooper Willis, England’s Holy War (1928), $19.50. Critique of English press propaganda in World War I.

John Bakeless, The Economic Causes of Modern War (1921), $14.50. On the economic causes and colonial rivalries leading to World War I.

Frederic Bastiat, Paix et Liberte 1849), on classical liberalism, free trade, and peace, and their opposition by socialism and nationalism; includes within it the later classical liberal work by Emile Laveleye, On the Causes of War (1872). Both for $10.

Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of R. Cobden, 2 vols. $34.00. A treasure chest – the collected works of the great libertarian and “isolationist”.

John A. Hobson, The War in South Africa 1900). $18.00. The book also includes G. P. Gooch’s pamphlet The War and its Causes (1900); the classic volume on Boer War Revisionism.

Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends (1952). $18.00. The first work of Cold War Revisionism, which stood alone for a decade until Fleming.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of Tomorrow (1904). $11.00. A great libertarian work, and of all the Garland collection, a must for every libertarian. Deals not so much with war and peace as with the free market economy, in which Molinari, the Belgian libertarian economist and successor to Bastiat, goes beyond the master to the brink of free-market anarchism.

Parker T. Moon, Imperialism and World Politics (1926). $24.00. A classic, this remains the best single work ever written on imperialism. A country by country history of the development of imperialism, it is objective and unmarred by Marxian fallacies.

Charles A. Beard, The Devil Theory of War (1936), $7.50. A brief analysis of the U.S. entry into World War I based on the revelations of the Nye Committee. By the Dean of revisionist history.

Henry N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (1914), $16.00. A blistering critique of competing Euopean imperialisms, written on the brink of world war.

H. C. Engelbrecht and Frank C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death (1934), $16.00. The classic muckraking work on the tie-in between war and the munitions industry, or what would now be termed the “military-industrial complex.”

Seymour Waldsman, Death and Profits (1932), $10.00. The first critique of the armaments industry and World War I.

Edwin M. Borchard and William P. Lage, Neutrality for the United States (1940), $21.00. The great work of “international law revisionism”, by the leader of “isolationist” international lawyers. Mostly on World War I, with a supplement on World War II. Shows that the U.S. consistently violated international law, and that we: had far more international-law grievances against Britain than we had against Germany.

Clarence M. Case, Non-Violent Coercion (1923), $19.75. A classic sociological espousal of non-violent action.

Barthelemy de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence (1938), $15.00. A classic work by a Dutch non-violent revolutionary left-anarchist.

Cook, Chatfield, and Cooper, eds., Three Generals on War $22.00. Three pamphlets from the 1920’s and 1930’s by generals who turned against war. Includes the revulsion against the killing that he had done by General Frank Crozier, a blistering attack on World War I by General Christopher Thomson, and the famous repudiation of his own service to the U.S. military-industrial complex by General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket.

Cook, Chatfield, and Cooper, eds., Sermons on War by Theodore Parker. $6.00. Three sermons attacking the Mexican War by the great minister, abolitionist, and classical liberal.

Franziskus Stratmann, The Church and War, a Catholic Study (1928), $12.00. The classic repudiation of the Thomist doctrine of the “just war” in the light of modern conditions of warfare, by an eminent Catholic theologian.

Blanche Cook, ed., American Anti-Imperialism, 1895-1901, $15.00. A collection of essays and previously unpublished correspondence by the great laissez-faire anti-imperialists of the turn of the century, including Edward T. Atkinson, and William Graham Sumner.

Blanche Cook, ed., Max and Crystal Eastman on Peace, Revolution and War. $15.00. Selected essays and correspondence by the great libertarian-inclined journalist Max Eastman, including his early days as a left anti-militarist and his later views of the cold war. Also includes essays by Eastman’s sister Crystal, a leading anti-militarist in the feminist movement.

Blanche Cook, ed., Oswald Garrison Villard: The Dilemmas of the Absolute Pacifist in Two World Wars. $15.00. Until now the only biography of the great pacifist and laissez-faire liberal journalist has been the Old Left hatchet job by Michael Wreszin. Now Professor Cook collects writings and unpublished correspondence to show the consistency of Villard’s pacifism and anti-militarism in World Wars I and II. A very important work.

The Senate And The Draft

It is one thing to be against the draft pro forma, even to vote against it in Congress; it is quite another to really fight against it in the crunch, on a crucial vote that might have some possiblilty of success. This year, the crunch came on the Senate vote, on June 23, to impose cloture to shut off a planned filibuster on the two-year extension of the draft. Since two-thirds of those voting are needed to shut off debate, and since many Southerners have been supposedly committed to the filibuster as preserving the right of the minority to talk an objectionable measure to death, here was a real chance, and the only one on the horizon, to smash the draft. Here then, on the cloture vote, is a real test of the dedication of a Senator, either to abolition of the draft or to retention of the filibuster principle.

Most Southerners, lifelong devotees of the filibuster, hung their heads and voted for cloture, since “national security” (i.e. military slavery) was at stake, and the latter came first. On the other hand, many liberals, supposedly against the draft, voted for cloture because they are more devoted to majority tyranny than to the abolition of slavery. Most shameful are those supposedly anti-draft conservatives, headed by Barry Goldwater, who voted for the anti-draft Hatfield-Goldwater amendment last session, but who voted for cloture this June. These include Goldwater, Fannin (R., Ariz.), Boggs (R., Del.), Gurney (R., Fla.), Fong (R., Haw.), Jordan (R., Id.), Dole (R., Kan.), Pearson (R. Kan.), Cook (R., Ky.), and Prouty (R., Vt.). Since a shift of only three votes in the Senate was needed to preserve the anti-draft filibuster, a special cry of shame should be directed against these ten renegades.

In fact, only five Republican senators withstood Administration pressure enough to stand fast against cloture. These five men deserve a special vote of thanks from all Americans dedicated to liberty: Case (N. J.), Hatfield (Ore.), Javits (N.Y.), Mathias (Md.), and Schweiker (Pa.).

As for the Democrats, we should record that handful of Southerners who favor the draft but who love the filibuster principle better: Allen (Ala.), Byrd (Va.), Ellender (La.), Fulbright (Ark.), McClellan (Ark.), and Spong (Va.). Among the liberals, the egregious Hubert Humphrey, Mike Mansfield (Mont.), and Edmund Muskie, all voted for cloture, although Muskie’s vote was perfectly in keeping with his vote against Hatfield-Goldwater last year. The most pleasant surprise was the anti-cloture vote of Teddy Kennedy, notorious champion of the lottery system and opponent of the Hatfield-Goldwater amendment. Good Lord! Does this mean we might be getting Camelot again?

Special commendation should be meted out to the major organizers of the draft filibuster, Senators Mike Gravel (D., Alaska) and Alan Cranston (D., Calif.) This is Gravel’s first leadership role in the Senate, and bears a happy augury of the future.

“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.” — Thomas Babington Macauley.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

VANDENBERG by Oliver Lange. Stein and Day, New York. 1971. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 1970.

Good fiction is a product that has always been difficult to find. There are many elements which go into the making of a novel, and a weakness in any one of them can either destroy the final product completely or provide it with a structural flaw that seriously reduces its total impact. The author’s style, his use of dialogue, his narrative skill, his depth of insight into his own characters, his plot structure and the organization of his material, his discipline and architectural control over the building of his book, his selection of detail – knowing what to put in and what to leave out – his ability to maintain a firm grasp on his basic theme and thread it into his story so the reader is drawn into the fiction progressively as it unfolds – all these are essential pillars upon which the final product will rest. If any one is seriously flawed, the novel will fail. If all are good and sound and carefully developed by the author, the novel will stand firm and endure.

It is because of all these fickle variables that go into the creation of a novel, because of the overwhelming difficulty an author faces in getting all these pieces to fit together and work as a whole that the writing of good fiction is the most difficult job a writer can attempt. It is nerve-racking work and exhausting work. There are only a handful of people in any generation who can do it well. More novels are closed and left unread after fifty pages than are given a thorough and enthusiastic reading. There simply isn’t enough good fiction, in the avalanche of books that is published every year, to satisfy the appetites of people like myself who literally hunger after a good piece of serious fictional writing.

For this reason it is an exciting experience to come across two new novels in the span of a couple of weeks which not only qualify as top-quality fiction, but fiction which is also of interest to the libertarian reader. Vandenberg, the more recent of the two books, a current bestseller published this past Spring by Stein and Day, is explicitly libertarian in theme. In perhaps the only serious flaw in the story the pseudonymous author, Oliver Lange, has invented a Russian dictatorship in the United States sometime in the near future. The means of takeover is never adequately explained. We only know that it was bloodless and mysterious and somehow not completely credible in terms of contemporary political reality. Lange would have been much better off had he stuck with our present regime in Washington and shown how it might have evolved into a full-scale dictatorship, a much more likely possibility than the one he presents. The story he tells would have been equally valid and a bit more credible.

Overlooking this point, the bulk of the novel is rich with exciting narrative and vivid description, crisp dialogue and a tense momentum which carries the reader right on through to the final pages. The story deals with the attempts of an individual, a fifty-year-old painter named Vandenberg, to avoid the reaches of dictatorial government and live his life as a self-owned human being. He escapes from a “rehabilitation” center in the southwest where the authorities, through the use of drugs and political indoctrination, attempt to break down the resistance of recalcitrant individualists and fit them into a state-controlled socio-economic system. Vandenberg escapes and is driven into the mountains with nothing more than the clothes on his back. With a powerful driving style and descriptive detail, Lange shows us how Vandenberg is able to obtain food and the materials essential to his own survival, and elude the various efforts to re-capture him over an extended period of time. Later on, after he has established a mountain hideaway and the search is virtually abandoned by the political authorities, Vandenberg is joined by several cronies who are as anxious as he is – for various reasons — to assert their own individuality. The final section of the book deals with Vandenberg’s plan to dynamite the “rehabilitation” center from which he escaped and free the political prisoners, to set an example for others who feel as he does and eventually launch an underground movement to actively resist the rule of total government. The ending is about as up-beat as it could be in the time-span Lange is covering, and the reader is left with the understanding that Vandenberg’s efforts will bear fruit over a period of time.

Several reviewers have referred to the “Hemingwayesque” tone of Lange’s style, dialogue and characterizations, and the comparison is not without substance. Vandenberg himself is a hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living individualist – not unlike a Hemingway hero. The dialogue is terse, clipped and to-the-point, another Hemingway trademark. The survival scenes in the mountains are reminiscent of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories in that they deal with the individual and his ability to dominate his natural environment. Finally, Lange’s description of the raid on the “rehabilitation” camp is as exciting as some of the war scenes in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But comparisons are always dangerous. Hemingway was a master novelist who produced a great body of work over a period of more than thirty years. Lange (as far as I can tell, not knowing his true identity) has given us a single novel, a fine piece of art which deserves to be judged on its own merits. And there is much in it to make it a more-than-worthwhile experience for the libertarian, and for the general reader.

Deliverance by James Dickey is one of those landmark novels which comes along every twenty years or so, a novel which towers in every respect so high above everything else written in its time that it belongs to its own category. James Dickey turned form advertising to full-time poetry in 1961 when he was thirty-eight-years-old, and through the decade of the ’60s he has staked out a reputation as one of our leading poets. In 1970 he published his first novel, Deliverance, which has just come out as a $1.25 paperback.

Reading Deliverance is, simultaneously, one of the most terrifying and ennobling experiences one is apt to find anywhere – short of actually living the adventure Dickey unfolds in his book. Dickey’s status as a major poet is evident in virtually every sentence for a solid 278 pages. The sensuous floodtide of his language has a narcotic effect on the reader as the author pulls you deeper and deeper into the flow of his narrative. The story itself is about three generally average men – one a salesman, another a supervisor in a soft-drink company, the other an art director in an advertising firm – and a fourth man, an expert archer and outdoorsman, who decide to break from routine and take a canoe trip down a remote river in a southern mountain range. Their adventure starts off quietly enough, with each man making plans to be away from job and family for a three-day period. But before they are actually in the water and launched on their way downriver, the reader is aware that there are dark times looming ahead and all will not come off according to plan.

On the second day of the trip, two of the party are ambushed and attacked by a couple of mountaineers who are totally hostile to any visitors from the world beyond their mountain range. From this point onward the story becomes a flooding, cascading exercise in terror and human endurance. What we are faced with is this: four men from an established world of laws, order, organization and social structure have entered a place in which there is none of these. Suddenly our four adventurers find themselves in a direct confrontation with nature and human aggression. There is no court of appeals out here, no law or police they can turn to for protection, no source of authority higher than themselves. They are in a place where every citizen is a deputy sheriff, where their attackers represent the forces of law and order. Our four adventurers are devoid of any peaceful means of protecting their rights of survival. Their choices are now, either to “take the law into their own hands” and provide for their own defense, or to submit to the tyranny that is forced upon them.

Their predicament is complicated by the fact that the leader of the expedition, the archer-outdoorsman, suffers a crippling injury which puts him out of action. One of the three “average” men, the advertising art director who has no prior experience in a survival situation, is forced to take command and lead his party to safety. Dickey’s description of what this average individual is capable of doing, of the heights he is capable of reaching, of the mental and physical gymnastics he is able to perform when it literally becomes a matter of life-or-death, is without equal in recent fiction. The powerful driving force of the author’s narrative is all-of-a-piece with the violent cascading rush of the river. And the river with its many rapids and treacherous falls, representing as it does their only means of exit from this lawless place, seems to be symbolic of life itself. Here are four individuals who are suddenly and unexpectedly forced to combat the tyranny of nature and human depravity, forced to rise above it all in their struggle for survival.

Vandenberg and Deliverance are similar in that they both deal with individual men locked in a life-and-death struggle with other men and with their natural environment. But each book is a unique and separate reading experience unto itself. They are different from each other in more ways than they are similar. Each book is a fine example of good first-class fiction. If at all possible, they should be read together, one right after the other. One can only hope that Lange and Dickey will give us more like this in the future.

“Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.” — Herbert Spencer.

Nixonite Socialism

(Continued)

1. The Lockheed Boondoggle. The Lockheed scandal was first broken by a Pentagon official, the libertarian-oriented A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who was fired by the Pentagon for his pains, and now heads the Businessmen’s Educational Fund, dedicated to the reduction of wasteful military spending. Now, the Nixon Administration proposes a $250 million guaranteed loan to bail out this flagrantly inefficient corporation. Secretary of Treasury Connally, defending the Lockheed subsidy on behalf of a “conservative” Administration, declared that we don’t have a free enterprise economy anyway, so why not bail out our largest defense contractor. In contrast, “liberal” Senator Proxmire (D., Wisconsin), who is close to Fitzgerald and who has the highest rating of the National Taxpayers Union of anyone in the Senate on tax-and-spending bills, charged that a loan guarantee to Lockheed and other such firms would wreck the entire “vitality and discipline” of the free enterprise system.

So who’s the “liberal” and who the “conservative”? Senator Proxmire, by the way, is running for the Democratic nomination for President, although one would never know it from the studied lack of publicity he has been receiving from the press.

2. The Deficit. The astute Establishment columnists Evans and Novak report that the Nixon Administration, which had actually forecast a budget surplus for fiscal 1971, is now expecting a $23 billion deficit. The estimate has been getting ever larger for months. Added to a currently estimated $23 billion deficit for fiscal 1972, this amounts to the largest two-year deficit in American history, barring the all-out war of World War II. Evans and Novak report that many economists are beginning to worry about perpetual inflation (Well, well!). They are also beginning to realize that the perpetual deficits and inflation are raising interest rates, and thereby possibly keeping the economy in a state of simultaneous recession. It is indeed possible that the astute “free enterprise” economists of the Nixon Administration will have ushered in the lovable era of perpetual inflation-recession.

“A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefitted.” — Herbert Spencer.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NOS. 6-7

July-August, 1971

75¢

DUMPING NIXON

We are now entering a daffy, exciting, exuberant season of Presidential politics. Perhaps come the fall of ’72, with all the hoopla over, we shall be faced with the grim, cold, sobering choice of Nixon vs. Muskie, and the fix is probably in already. But at this stage of the game, we can exult in the seemingly limitless possibilities, as dozens of Democratic candidates jostle each other, black, female, Third Sex, and Lord knows how many other caucuses abound, and third and fourth parties make noises in the wings. At this point, the great quadrennial American extravaganza looms as the most exciting in decades.

Let us begin with a few clear guidelines. For the libertarian, other things being equal, the first desideratum is to punish the incumbent. If we cannot yet abolish the office of President, we can at least make a start toward redressing our grievances by ousting the existing tenant for his numerous high and low crimes and misdemeanors. If we cannot punish the President to the full extent of the natural law, we can at least retire him to the private life he so richly deserves. We can establish a new and glorious tradition of the one-term President.

That’s if other things are equal, and that at least provides us with our first guideline. But other things, of course, are never equal. When we come further to consider the record in office of Richard Milhous Nixon, it is hard to find one redeeming feature, one splotch of white in the black record of the Nixon regime.

Let us summarize:

The shameful genocidal war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia continues, and Nixon has fiercely resisted every attempt by the Congress, no matter how feeble, to put an end to the war. The latest Hanoi-NLF offer totally exposes the Nixon mendacity on the phony prisoner-of-war issue, but still the Administration refuses to accept the offer, and the genocide continues.

The draft continues in full force, despite anarcho-Nixonite assurance that at least Nixon would remove conscription-slavery. Instead, Nixon simply adopted the old Kennedy lottery scheme, which conservatives and libertarians had scorned for years.

“Conservative”, neo-Friedmanite economic manipulation by the Nixon Administration has brought us the new and glorious phenomenon of the inflationary recession. The recession is still with us, while inflation proceeds merrily on its way.

“Conservative” Nixon economics has brought us the largest peacetime federal deficit in our history, which now looms as something like $27 billion, with another $30 billion promised for next year.

“Conservative” Nixon economics is eagerly attempting to foist on us probably the single most disastrous plan ever proposed in America: the neo-Friedmanite Family Assistance Program, which will lock an increasing number of Americans into a parasitic automatic dole.

Nixon has accelerated the system of what has aptly been called “Big Business socialism” or “corporate communism”, in which the government comes ever more nakedly to the support and rescue of inefficient large corporations: e.g. the SST, Lockheed, passenger railroad service boondoggles.

The Nixon administration has moved ever closer to wage and price controls, which have been advocated by high Administration economists. In the meanwhile, it has exercised such controls in the construction industry, and for the rest of industry has adopted the old Democratic “jawboning” policy of verbal threats and intimidation which it had previously spurned.

The Nixon administration has savagely moved to suppress freedom of the press in the famous Pentagon Papers affair, including the criminal indictment of Daniel Ellsberg and an unprecedented attempt to impose prior censorship before publication. The despotic and reprehensible dissents of Nixonite judges Blackmun and Burger, coupled with the narrow and flimsy arguments of most of the other members of the bench, show that we are scarcely out of the woods even on prior censorship. (O.K., Read and Rand: is this enough to make you revolutionaries?) One of the major reasons for dumping Nixon is the looming menace to the structure of civil liberties built up by the Warren Court. With Justice Douglas and the magnificent Hugo Black nearing retirement, our personal and civil liberties are truly in peril unless Richard Nixon is removed from office.

When we add the unrelieved horror of the Nixon record to the original guideline against incumbents, we conclude with one great injunction that every libertarian should be able to support with enthusiasm for 1972: DUMP NIXON!

Here is a goal which all shades of the varied libertarian spectrum should find exhilarating, and indeed the signs are that a broad coalition of left, right, and center libertarians are banding together to work with other anti-Nixon forces in this crusade of cleansing and retribution. It is particularly significant that many of the current anti-Nixon libertarians were high in the Nixon-youth forces in the 1968 campaign.

Clearly, the first place to try to dump Nixon is the Republican primaries. Unfortunately, Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Ore.) has resisted all efforts urging him to run for President, and Nixon’s only Republican opponent is Rep. Paul McCloskey (Calif.), whose only libertarian asset, aside from a dogged and sincere manner, is his staunch opposition to the war in Vietnam. But still this is the major single issue, and the more votes racked up for McCloskey the more the embarrassment and discomfiture for King Richard. At best, there is always the possibility that McCloskey might be able to emulate Gene McCarthy in being so successful as to force the President to withdraw; and at worst, the embarrassing support for the relatively unknown Congressman will clearly be a vote of non-confidence in the President, and will soften him up for the election in November.

Some YAFers and other honest conservatives, in despair at the Family Assistance Plan and especially at Nixon’s grandstand visit to China, which is a deep affront to their most cherished rhetoric if not really significant in itself, are turning in despair to a Draft Reagan movement. But honesty ha never been a strong conservative suit, and indications are that the Buckleyite realpolitik will triumph, and that Republican conservatives, including of course Mr. Reagan, will dutifully if painfully keep their counsel and support the President. Is there no indignity which conservatives are not prepared to swallow?

Let Us assume then that, after as much trouble as can be made for him, Mr. Nixon will sweep into the renomination. What then? The Democratic field is a crowded and ebullient one. In order to make some sense of the large lineup, let us first divide the hopefuls into a rough left-center-right grouping, depending on the intensity of their opposition to the abomination in Southeast Asia.

On the Right, we have those Democrats who are roughly Johnson-Nixon hawks on Vietnam. There is, first, that egregious gasbag and onetime darling of New Deal liberalism, Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Humphrey’s record of toadying to LBJ marked a new low even for American politics, and the thought of a Nixon-Humphrey replay is almost too much for the human soul to contemplate. No, no, not that! Then there is the man who represents the antithesis of libertarianism in American politics, the man who is wrong on every conceivable question, the “Senator from Boeing”, Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) Bad on the war, bad on the military-industrial complex, bad on the draft, bad on economics, bad, bad, bad. Mr. Statism. Another right-wing hopeful is Rep. Wilbur Mills (D., Ark.), bad on the war and draft, “conservative” fiscal expert and advocate of wage-price controls. Never. And finally, Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles, rightist, clown, crusher of civil liberties, and happily with no chance whatsoever of the nomination.

In the center, demarkations between center and left become rather fuzzy. The epitome of the Center is Ed Muskie (Me.), cool, grey, colorless, fairly good on the war at this point, fairly bad on the draft. Probably the eventual candidate when the party hacks have had their day, Ed Muskie is the furtherest right candidate who could be acceptable as an alternative to Nixon, and then of course only barely and without enthusiasm. Teddy Kennedy, possessed of lots of family charisma, is under the twin clouds of Chappaquiddick and Camelot, but has been moving leftward in an interesting fashion – especially his recent vote in support of the Gravel filibuster against extending the draft. Ramsay Clark is a shadowy dark horse with mysterious backing, whose only claim to our attention seems to be his revulsion against even his own tyrannies as Attorney-General. Senator Birch Bayh (Ind.) is a colorless middle-of-the-roader with some labor union support, which makes him suspect, and whose only leadership came in electoral reform and the Haynesworth-Carrswell cases, estimable perhaps but hardly making him Presidential timber.

On the Left, the man with by far the best libertarian credentials in the Democratic Party has been so badly treated by the press that scarcely anyone knows that he is in the race. This is Senator William Proxmire (D., Wise), a man with an impeccable record on the war and the draft, and heroic leader in the Senate on behalf of economy in government and in opposition to the SST and Lockheed boondoggles. Highly knowledgeable and of proven leadership ability, William Proxmire has the highest rating in the entire Senate from the National Taxpayers Union on spending-and-tax votes in the last Congress, far higher than any other Senator. Proxmire is close to libertarian financial expert A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who broke the Lookheed scandal, and is sympathetic to the broad libertarian cause. PROXMIRE FOR PRESIDENT!

Of the remainder of the Left, Senator George McGovern (S. D.) is the respected leader of the anti-war constituency, especially now that Senator Hughes’s (Io.) propensity for the occult has apparently led him to withdraw from the race. McGovern is also solid on the draft. However, he (1) lacks charisma, and (2) suffers from domestic statism, especially the guaranteed annual income scheme.

It now appears that we are not to be spared a resurgence of Eugene McCarthy. Symbolically important on the war three years ago, McCarthy is poor on the draft, and is an odd sort of anti-hero in style and performance: erratic, offhanded, lazy, he has a generally poor sense of timing in manner as well as substance.

It is hard to take the loudly proclaimed entry of Senator Fred Harris (Okla.) very seriously. A Johnny-come-lately on the war and the draft, Harris just seems to be a statist with an affected “populist” style. Having done a poor job in the national committee, and facing certain defeat in primary and re-election races next year, Fred Harris apparently concluded that he had no place to go, after failing on a smaller scale, than failing as presidential candidate. Neither can we take seriously the candidacy of Rep. Anderson (Tenn.) whose one political issue seems to be support for the Berrigan brothers.

Of course, the big dramatic race is now expected to be made by one candidate possessing authentic charisma: Mayor John Lindsay of New York, expected to make a melodramatic switch of parties and then run for the Presidency. Lindsay has charisma, that is, everywhere except in New York City, and it would be hard to find any New Yorker, regardless of political persuasion, who will not predictably spit fire and curses at the very mention of Lindsay’s name. And with good reason. If it is unfair to blame the entire visible deterioration of New York City in recent years on Lindsay’s stewardship, it is also evidently true that he has hardly succeeded in stemming the tide. In fact, Lindsay is a spectacularly bad administrator; he manages to alienate all concerned groups in every area without helping the situation, and he approaches every problem with a scoutmasterish air of moral superiority that is far more annoying for being totally unjustified. I concede Lindsay’s good record on Vietnam and the draft, but no New Yorker can contemplate Lindsay’s accession to the administration of the entire country without a grimace of horror. Only one good thing has John Lindsay done as Mayor: he has evinced a genuine concern for civil liberties. He has kept the cops more or less under leash; and his concern for civil liberties has led him to place New York City in the forefront of freedom for pornography and prostitution. Until recently, that is; for in recent weeks, the onset of Presidential fever has apparently led Lindsay to a drastic shift rightward on the matter, and he has instituted a continuing crackdown on “vice” – thus cancelling the only good deed of the Lindsay regime.

The Democrats’ chances in 1972 are excellent; predictably, therefore, in view of their long-standing genius for self-destruction, we can count on them trying desperately to kick those chances away. The latest manifestation is the new Women’s Caucus, almost completely left-Democratic, which might well bolt the ticket if a woman is not nominated. Already, Rep. Shirley Chisholm (N.Y.) has decided to run for President, her major qualification being that she is both black and female, and thereby can run as representative of two “oppressed” caucuses. If only Mrs. Chisholm had been also a Chicana, a student, a Youth, an Old Person and a Welfare Mother, she could be the living embodiment of every “oppressed” and un-liberated group in the country. But even as it is, we are unfortunately living in a world where the candidacy of Mrs. Chisholm is not automatically laughed into the oblivion it so richly deserves.

A third and even a fourth party also loom as possibilities in 1972. About George Corley Wallace one can only have mixed feelings. In contrast to Fred Harris an authentic populist, Wallace makes many sound and trenchant criticisms of the existing system: of its corporate statism, its unholy alliance between Establishment rich and welfare recipients to exploit the bulk of the working and middle classes, of its compulsory integration and school bussing. But, alas!, the Wallace policies hardly sustain the promise of his sound critiques; a superhawk on Vietnam and the Cold War, Wallace is also scarcely known for devotion to civil liberties; on the contrary, we can expect the ultimate unleashing of the police and of repression under a Wallace as President.

There remains the possibility of a New Left fourth party, as yet unnamed. In theory, a fourth party could do an effective job in pushing the Democrats to the Left and in a pro-peace direction, by using the time-honored device of the carrot-and-the-stick, promising (a) that if the Democrats nominate a Proxmire or a McGovern, the New Party would run him on its line as well; but (b) that if the Democrats nominate a Hubert Humphrey, the New Party would run its own man in opposition. This seems to be a simple and effective strategy, but for some reason few third parties – among whom New York’s Liberal and Conservative Parties are notable exceptions – have the wisdom and maturity to pursue such a course. Going on past record, we can predict that either the New Party will collapse and not be heard from again, or that it will stubbornly insist on running its own candidate no matter what the Democrats do, and thereby threaten a dangerous split in the anti-war forces. If the black and female caucuses do not succeed in wrecking the Democrats’ chances, then perhaps the New Party will finish the job.

LIBERTY: FROM RAND TO CHRIST

By Joseph R. Peden

In the midst of what appears to be a renaissance of libertarian thought, and a period of rapid increase in the numbers of its adherents – especially among the young college activists – it might be well for us to devote some attention to a remarkable personal testament entitled “Road to Freedom – Or to Nowhere?” published in Rough Beast #4 (1522 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20036). The author, Warren Carroll, formerly publisher of Freedom’s Way, a pioneer libertarian publication, has produced a rare document – an analytic repudiation of libertarianism by a onetime true believer.

Although Carroll is familiar with several schools of libertarian thought – that of the individualist anarchists such as Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov and the Rampart College group, and the limited-government classical liberals of The Foundation for Economic Education, he tends to identify libertarianism with Objectivism. As a former Randian Carroll knows the strengths and weaknesses of Objectivism intimately and his detailed and of ten perceptive critical analysis and disillusionment is colored by this personal experience.

Carroll begins his analysis by pinpointing a basic dilemma which besets Objectivists: how can they most effectively create an objectivist social order? If they plunge into the political cauldron they are bound to compromise or sacrifice intellectual consistency – the hallmark of Objectivist morality. If they refrain from political action, they remain intellectually chaste, but doom their movement to “perpetual ineffectiveness”. To Carroll this dilemma is a “fatal short-coming” of libertarianism. Moreover, faced with this inner conflict, the libertarian is likely to be assaulted by a sense of despair that mankind in general will ever have the same passion for intellectual consistency that he has.

“By definition, the existing pattern of government everywhere prevents the realization of the libertarian dream, and the trend of current history sets steadily toward more and more concentration of power in government. Participation on any significant scale in either the political or economic system now existing entails compromises of principle that most libertarians find unacceptable. Increasingly they find themselves hemmed in and blocked on every side by their own philosophy. What was to have been a road to freedom becomes, in the real world, a cage.”

“As the realization grows . . . that he is caught in a trap, . . . increasingly his thought turns either to violence or to flight.” Those who succumb to violence “are quickly absorbed by the New Left and cease to be libertarians”; those who turn to flight – to desert isles or nomadism or hermitage – thereby affirm the Utopian character of libertarian philosophy. “In these two swamps of failure the libertarian movement in all its forms is being swallowed up.”

Clearly Carroll knows whereof he speaks. He seems to have undergone the great intellectual crisis he so accurately describes. The sordid public dispute between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden seems to have precipitated a decision by Carroll to flee to the uninhabited waste of Tasmania. There he was further traumatized by finding the few isolated inhabitants gathered around a TV set watching the Ed Sullivan Show and the Australian government firmly in control of all uninhabited lands. His faith in libertarianism as a workable moral philosophy was finally shattered.

From this disillusionment, Carroll now sees three fundamental errors and a “still more fundamental failure of vision which taken together are fatal to the libertarian dream”.

First of all, says Carroll, there is a “drastic misapprehension of the nature of man”. Libertarians view man as naturally good and rational but corrupted by institutions i.e. the State, the schools, the family, etc. But equally, libertarians know that institutions are merely individuals acting in concert in accordance with their interests, instincts or traditional ways. Therefore, the responsibility for the evils in society cannot be placed upon institutions but upon the individuals acting within the collective behavioral framework we call an institution. “But if men got themselves into their present state through their own corruption, how then do libertarians expect to bring them out of it? The failure of all their specific programs gives the answer to that question: they cannot”.

Here one should note that Carroll raises the very crucial question of the nature of evil in man – a subject of the greatest philosophical and practical importance which deserves serious analysis by libertarians. But he also asserts that because of their inadequate theory as to the true nature of man, the specific programs of libertarians have, historically, failed and in fact cannot succeed. Since he does not give further detail or example to illustrate what he has in mind, one hesitates to comment further than to say that as no fully libertarian society has existed in European civilization since libertarian philosophy first emerged in the age of the Enlightenment, one can hardly prove or disprove Carroll’s sweeping judgement as to its pragmatic effectiveness. One can only point empirically and historically to the fact that since the 18th century there has been a continual expansion of individual liberty as an ideal and social reality in a host of areas of human thought and action. I would give Carroll’s indictment a Scottish verdict of “Not Proven”.

A second error, according to Carroll, is the libertarian’s “optimistic misreading of history”, his assumption that “his system has never failed because it never has been tried, while in fact it has never been tried because it would certainly fail! The failure of the approaches to a libertarian society which were made in the past, particularly in the 19th century, is the proof we have that a fully libertarian society would be even shorter-lived and less successful.” I have already stated my belief that Carroll’s historical verdict on libertarian efforts in previous centuries is not proven. But his accusation of misplaced optimism is central to the condition of despair which permeates his entire attitude towards libertarianism. As a professional historian Carroll shows a surprisingly crude appreciation of the complexity of human society and of the process by which societies undergo change. Libertarian philosophy is largely the product of the 19th century drawing inspiration from the intellectual legacy of the enlightenment. Does he really think that scarcely two centuries would see the triumph of so radical a moral, social and economic philosophy? Christianity as a wholly integrated moral and practical philosophy has been with us for two thousand years and its failures are at least as glaring as those of libertarianism. Does the failure of Christians and their society to conform to the ideals of the philosophy of Christ mean that their “system” would totally fail if ever tried? Are both Christians and libertarians hopeless Utopians? I think not. They may well be the only true realists. Only a person of the narrowest historical perception could dismiss libertarians as guilty of “optimistic misjudgement of history”. They are simply not historical determinists and they recognize that a century is but a minute in the history of the human race. They do have faith in the ultimate value of and vindication of their philosophical insights – as do believing Christians.

I think that Carroll is so frustrated by the collapse of his own Utopian libertarianism that he has lost historical perspective. As Paul Goodman has pointed out, the libertarian revolution is not the work of a day – or a decade – or a lifetime. It is a continuous process through the ages. The focus of the struggle changes from time to time and place to place. Once it involved the abolition of slavery; now it may be women’s liberation; here it may be a struggle for national independence; there it may center on civil liberties; at one moment it may require electioneering and party politics; at another armed self-defense and revolution. Carroll expected too much too soon. There is a tendency among many libertarians to look for an apocalyptic moment when the State will be smashed forever and anarchy prevail. When they realize that the great moment isn’t about to come in their time, if ever, they lose faith in the integrity and plausibility of the libertarian philosophy. Like a Christian awaiting the Second Coming of Christ when the reign of Justice shall be established and evil men receive their just punishment, the libertarian awaits the coming of the rational and anarchic age. But to lose one’s faith in the validity of Christianity because evil continues to thrive in the world makes as much sense as losing one’s faith in libertarianism because the New Order has not yet triumphed over the Old. Such attitudes are naive and not be be expected from mature, sophisticated men of learning. Carroll’s experience should warn us that libertarianism can quite easily become merely an adolescent fantasy in minds that are immature and unseasoned by a broad humanistic understanding. It should not be an idee fixe or magic formula, but a moral imperative with which one approaches the complexities of social reality.

In his discussion of what he considers to be a third fatal error, Carroll gives further clue to what ultimately repelled him in libertarianism – the “fundamental inadequacy of the materialistic value system which, in essence, they all accept”. Crediting Ayn Rand with at least attempting to transcend the obvious limitation of materialism by setting up life itself as the source of value, Carroll accurately perceives that “objectivism in practice measures the value of life in material terms, by the financial profit or the personal satisfaction that can be realized from it”. It is one of the great ironies that Leftists who philosophically are materialists are psychologically quite ready to sacrifice life, liberty and personal comfort for the Cause; yet Objectivists who are rhetorically preoccupied with morals, concepts, dialectic and reason are notoriously adverse to anything that smacks of idealistic altruism. Wealth and the bitch goddess success are the household dieties of the Randian cult. Who else but a Randian would sport a dollar sign as a personal fetish or totem? If they were not so narrowly chauvinistic the Randians might have chosen the more universal symbol of their cult – the golden calf. Worshippers of wealth and success, and hedonists, are seldom very attractive people. They are incapable of either love or true friendship for both are founded upon disinterested loyalty and self-sacrifice to the needs of another. It is not surprising that an audience at a West coast convention should wildly applaud a young man who openly bragged that he had betrayed his fellow students to the police and his only regret was that he had not done it for money! Or as an ex-Randian once put it, the only poetry that will ever come from the Randians will be an Ode to Greed.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Mr. Carroll has abandoned libertarianism (which he tends to identify with Objectivism) and sought elsewhere for a new certitude and a new basis for his moral values. Indeed, it is to his credit that he did so. He has found a new faith; he has become a Christian. The great tragedy here is that he fails to perceive that libertarianism is not incompatible with a Christian world view. Libertarianism is not the atheism, materialism and unrestrained egoism of Objectivism or of Stirnerism or other variant schools. It is essentially the belief that voluntarism is the only just basis for human social relationships; that man is a creature whose inherent worth and dignity is beyond price; that man should live in conformity to his nature as perceived through the light of reason; that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Is this at all incompatible with Christianity? The Christian is, I would argue, a natural anarchist by faith. He has a profound respect for life and human dignity; he governs himself by the inner law of conscience illumined by the teachings of Christ; he denies the State as a source of good or truth – at best it is a punishment placed upon men for their evil deeds; and he accepts moral responsibility for the consequences of his acts. The Christian finds true liberty by living his life in conformity to the will of God as manifest in the law of nature and the revealed wisdom of the great poets, prophets and sages of all ages. If Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, the Anabaptists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not libertarians and Christians, the words are meaningless.

Carroll has done us a great service in underscoring the ultimate inadequacy of Objectivism as a social and personal philosophy, and the danger of equating libertarianism as a social philosophy with objectivism’s often perverse and anti-human values. The Randian value system is a potential-millstone around the neck of the libertarian movement. Many observers have noted that Objectivist rhetoric is repellent to many people otherwise attracted to libertarian voluntarism, decentralization, and even the market economy. Carroll’s experience should alert us to the spiritual bankruptcy of that particular school of libertarian thought, and direct us to introduce young libertarians to alternative ethical value systems – such as Christianity – which are rationally and historically compatible with essential libertarian principles.

Comment

by M. N. R.

Dr. Warren Carroll’s Leap Over the Wall from Randianism to Triumphantist Christianity highlights two important problems that deserve far more attention than they have received from libertarians: the growing problem of defection, and the status of Christianity and the Christian ethic within the movement.

As Professor Peden points out, a major reason for Carroll’s defection was his thirst for Instant Victory – a flaw that he shared with all too many libertarians. When that Instant Victory was not forthcoming, Carroll took flight for a retreatist Utopia in Tasmania, and when that proved abortive, abandoned the cause altogether. Why can’t libertarians settle down cheerfully to a lifelong struggle for liberty? Carroll says repeatedly that libertarianism offers “no reward along the way”, no “reward in the road itself” except for the eventual attainment of liberty. But why not? Why is there not joy in dedication to the advancement of truth, justice, and liberty? The businessman, after all, finds joy in the ceaseless pursuit of profit and growth, the scientist in the endless quest for ever-expanding truth; why may not the libertarian obtain the same from the “long march” toward liberty? Every other “career” offers joys and satisfactions in the functioning of the career itself, and apart from specific achievements emanating from it. Why should the “career” of liberty hold any less excitement and reward for the libertarian?

Carroll does have a small point here, however. In that all too many libertarians have, in their commendable “purism”, systematically ruled out any conceivable strategy for even ultimate or eventual victory. By ruling out virtually all tactics except pure education, libertarians have almost doomed themselves to perpetual defeat, which might be enough to discourage even the stoutest of heart. On the contrary, it is precisely in the area of strategy and tactics where the libertarian should be flexible and pragmatic – in contrast to the realm of principle where he should be “doctrinaire” and consistent.

On the whole issue that Carroll raises about the nature of man and his institutions, Carroll is about the one millionth person to totally misinterpret the libertarian view in this area. He states that “all libertarian schools view man as naturally good and naturally rational”; in contrast, I don’t know of one that holds such an absurdly naive doctrine. And yet this has been the major charge hurled at us by archists for generations. To set the record straight hopefully for good and all, the libertarian believes, along with everyone else, that man is a mixture of good and evil. What we are trying to do is to eliminate institutions which are inherently evil and thereby provide a legalized, legitimated channel for evil to proceed unchecked in society. There should be nothing very mysterious about that.

This brings me to the whole question of Christianity and the Christian ethic. Not a Christian myself, I have seen for years how Christian libertarians have been abused, badgered, and hectored by militant atheists and presumptuous Randians, and their libertarian bona fides sharply questioned. Being on the whole – perhaps as a result of their Christian training – far nicer people than their tormentors, these Christian libertarians have put up with this shabby treatment with calm and good humor. But it should be crystal clear that a libertarian movement which imperiously insists upon atheism as a necessary condition for membership is going to needlessly alienate countless numbers of potential supporters. Atheists, to be sure, believe that Christianity, like other theism, is an error; but there are millions of errors in the world, and it passeth understanding why this particular one should bar Christians from the libertarian community. There is certainly no substantial reason why Christians and atheists cannot peacefully coexist within the libertarian movement. It is high time, therefore, for all libertarians, Christian and atheist alike, to blow the whistle on the anti-Christian abuse that has infected the movement for so long a time.

But there is more to the tale than that. For while every rationalist libertarian must hold reason higher than tradition, there is one sense in which the traditionalist conservatives have gotten hold of a very important point, and one that has been unfortunately overlooked by the rationalists. And that is wrapped up in the great truth of the division of labor: the fact that the vast majority of people have neither the ability nor the skill to carve out a rational ethic on their own. Ethics is a science, a discipline like other disciplines; and as in any other branch of knowledge it is vain folly to begin exploration of the science afresh and on one’s own while disregarding all the other explorers and thinkers who have gone before. I once knew a Randian who tried to deduce astronomy a priori and out of his own head without bothering to consult any of the other literature in the field. While this was a caricature and a half-jest on his part, it exemplified all too well the rationalist – and particularly the Randian – disposition to attempt to carve out a body of thought without bothering to read one’s predecessors. In the field of ethics and philosophy in general, it is simply an empirical fact that the greatest thinkers, for two thousand years, have been Christian; and to ignore these Christian philosophers and to attempt to carve out an ethical system purely on one’s own is to court folly and disaster.

Apart from their respective merits, then, it is no accident that, in practical application – from sex to music – Christian ethicists should have a far more rational batting average than the Randian. After all, Randian thought has only been in existence for a decade or two, while Christianity has had two thousand years to develop. We stand on the shoulders of the thinkers of the past, even though of course we must use our reason to correct them.

But there are further, and grimmer, implications here for rationalists. For if few people have the ability or inclination to carve out an ethical system on their own, this means that they must – if their actions are to be guided by any coherent set of values – take them passively, almost on trust. But who then are the masses of men to trust for their system of values? Surely that system with the longest and most successful tradition, with the largest quota of great minds – in short, the Christian ethic. This is a bitter pill for many of us non-Christians to swallow, but I am afraid it is inescapable nevertheless.

This conclusion is reinforced when we look around at what has happened to much of today’s libertarian movement. The peculiar aspects of the Randian ethic are as nothing to the bizarreries, to the outright lunacies, into which so many ex-Randians (who constitute the bulk of the libertarian movement) have sunk, in their vain attempts to carve out a system of objective ethics on their own. (The latest craze, so we have heard, is “rational bestiality.”) The Christian ethic is, in the words of the old hymn, a Rock of Ages, and it is at least incumbent upon the individual to think long and hard before he abandons that Rock lest he sink into the quagmire of the capricious and the bizarre.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

At this writing libertarians are about to enter a working coalition with Allard Lowenstein’s Dump Nixon movement for the Presidential campaign of 1972. The New York Times is scheduled to publish a letter, authored by myself and signed by representatives of the leading libertarian groups in the country, announcing our support for the Lowenstein organization and our reasons for supporting it. Toward the end of July a press conference will be held to further publicize these efforts.

A libertarian-left liberal alliance? The prospect shouldn’t be any more surprising than the libertarian-conservative alliance that existed in this country until the middle of 1969. Less so. In today’s political atmosphere the bonds of agreement between ourselves and the liberal left are more numerous than they ever were between libertarians and William Buckley conservatives, with whom we shared only a rhetorical commitment to a free market economy. Liberals of the George McGovern-Allard Lowenstein-Eugene McCarthy school are closer to our views on (1) the war in southeast Asia where they favor an immediate end to all American hostilities, (2) the military draft which they consistently oppose, (3) civil liberties at home, a vital area in which conservatives have traditionally made their weakest showing (the Nixonite assault on freedom of the press, along with Nixon’s infatuation with no-knock legislation, are two of the most dangerous threats to basic freedoms we have faced in recent years), and (4) international economic, cultural and social cooperation where left liberals are more consistently in line with libertarian principles while conservatives, despite Nixon’s recent overtures to Red China, maintain a primarily protectionist attitude.

Only in the area of domestic economic policy do left liberals differ sharply with free market libertarians, but even here we see that a conservative administration has not come any closer to our own ideal (if anything, it has been more disastrous since it promotes the same centralist schemes with laissez faire sloganeering).

So why should we bother entering coalitions with anyone? Why not remain aloof from the manswarm of American politicking and continue to push our own brand of philosophical purism?

First of all, we must remember that any alliance is undertaken strictly for tactical reasons. Basic principles are never compromised. The idea is to convert those with whom we come in contact.

Second, libertarianism per se is not large enough to operate effectively as an independent movement. We have to broaden our base of operation and become directly involved in the give-and-take of realpolitik if we are to be taken seriously by the general public. We have to offer solutions that make sense, and to do this we have to get out into the arena where the battles are being waged. Articles and books are not enough.

Third, in order that we may make life a bit more bearable for ourselves, it is in our own best interests to see that the “best” candidates get into office. Liberalized draft laws, abortion laws, tax laws, trade laws, sex laws, ad infinitum, are better than oppressive laws in all these areas. While reforms tend to co-opt and defuse the radical thrust toward an ideal condition, co-optation is never more than temporary at best.

Fourth. As we fight for the right kind of reforms we must simultaneously maintain our revolutionary posture. That is, while we are fighting to libertarianize society through the vote, we must also refuse to be drafted, to pay taxes, to obey the myriad restrictions on peaceful activities.

If we are going to work with non-libertarians, it follows that we must seek out a viable group somewhere along the political spectrum with whom we find ourselves most compatible. By “a viable group” I mean one that is politically alive and active and operating with a good measure of support. Reform liberals fit that bill for us at the present moment. If we are far apart on economic principle, it is the one area where we are miles apart from every other major faction in the country. At the very least, left liberals are sympathetic to the politics of radical decentralization, and it is through this avenue that we must channel our efforts to achieve the libertarian ideal of individual liberty (Every time I bring up the subject of “decentralization,” I am hounded by morons who want to know why we should fool around with a system which might lead to neighborhood tyranny. If the reasons aren’t apparent by now, then to hell with it. Suffice it to say that neighborhood dictators are easier to deal with than the immensely more powerful ones in federal, state and city governments).

As far as actual candidates are concerned, again we are talking about the “lesser of evils,” about the “best of a bad lot.” Politicians, by definition, are a “bad lot” according to libertarian theory. But as long as we are saddled with a system based on patronage, graft, corruption and the apportioning of power – with no real hope of eliminating that system in the near future – we are forced to think in terms of “degrees of evil” whenever we step beyond the confines of ivory-tower purism. It is only by working with other groups, such as reform liberals, that we can hope to influence them in their own choice of political candidates – perhaps guide them toward one or two more acceptable to us out of a stable of half a dozen or so.

The way the political sweepstakes are shaping up for 1972, this is how the various entries look from this observer’s vantage point:

MARK HATFIELD is perhaps the most acceptable of all. He is serious about getting out of southeast Asia, about eliminating the military draft, about liberalizing trade and diplomatic relations with all other nations, and he has taken a uniquely libertarian position on the middle east – that is, he is the only major politician to speak out publicly for the displaced Palestinians, the real victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict. On the negative side, he continues to vote for centralist welfare schemes, although he has lately spoken favorably of Rothbardian economic principles. Most damaging of all, he voted for Nixon’s no-knock legislation, an inexcusable violation of libertarian principle which requires a very cautious attitude toward his general position on civil liberties.

GEORGE McGOVERN. Good On the war. Good on the draft. Speaks favorably about political decentralization. His stand on the middle east is typically liberal establishment: unabashedly and unqualifiedly pro-Israel. Economically, he is liberal-welfarist, though he seems open to decentralist alternatives.

EUGENE McCARTHY. The remarks on McGovern apply generally here with one major exception: he appears to be a bit more flexible on the middle east. However, his credibility as a serious contender has been considerably weakened by his own inertia following the 1968 campaign.

PAUL McCLOSKY continues to be a one-issue candidate; he is against further U.S. participation in the war. His position on other issues has remained vague until this writing. Most damaging: he is on record as being in favor of the military draft. Still, he might be worth supporting as an anti-Nixon candidate in the primaries if there is no-one else, since he will be an embarrassment to the administration if nothing else. Another important consideration here is the fact that McClosky is backed by Norton Simon, reported to be a strong economic libertarian who will influence McClosky considerably. This possibility is worth watching closely.

JOHN LINDSAY. Bad in so many different ways. He is an unprincipled wheeler-dealer who bends with the political winds. One thing he does have going for him is the fact that he is highly susceptible to pressure. He is good on civil liberties and not likely to come down hard against radical activism (draft and tax resistance, general civil disobedience) if it has any degree of public support at all. This could be a valuable asset to the radical movement.

EDMUND MUSKIE still looks like the front-runner among Democratic hopefuls. Muskie has a history of vagueness and vacillation on virtually every issue one can think of: the war in Asia; the draft; civil liberties; international trade; domestic social and economic policies; even on the question of environmental pollution in which he is supposed to have a strong interest. Not much here to offer the libertarian cause.

HUBERT HUMPHREY. Equally bad. He operates with the New Deal mentality of thirty years ago and his role as Vice President during the early and middle war years borders on the criminal, despite his recent babblings about “withdrawal from Vietnam.” The worst of the traditional political hacks either party has to offer.

HENRY JACKSON. Totally unacceptable from a libertarian point-of-view. He is a New Deal-Great Society welfarist on domestic issues, and his past and present position on Vietnam makes Barry Goldwater sound dovish by comparison. He would also deal severely with domestic dissenters. A disaster for the libertarian cause.

TED KENNEDY. The dimmest of the Kennedy brothers, and completely unacceptable to libertarians. He is adamantly pro-draft, militantly pro-Israel, and as deeply committed to a centralized, quasi-socialistic economy as any other candidate. He is unintelligent and dominated by advisers – the wrong advisers for libertarian purposes.

Right now these are the only men who can be considered serious presidential hopefuls by any stretch of the imagination. Another dark horse possibility rests with the New Party, a left-liberal reformist group, founded by Gore Vidal among others. Vidal is a thorough-going cultural and civil libertarian with a Menckenesque view of the American scene in all its aspects. He is highly individualistic on social, cultural, spiritual and moral questions and, while exhibiting some New Dealist tendencies in his economic philosophy, he is highly sympathetic to the concept of local control of institutions. The New Party is touting Ralph Nader, muckraking critic of the Corporate State, as a presidential hopeful. Nader’s great contribution to date has been as an effective gadfly on the governmental hide. He is most assuredly not an economic libertarian, but he is a disruptive force in opposition to the American status quo, and the reforms that will be generated by his movement will likely serve to benefit the individual – especially in the area of economic consumption.

Beginning in the fall of 1971, libertarian groups in the northeast will be making concrete plans for the new Hampshire primary to be held the following spring. Bill Baumgarth and others in the area have founded Citizens for a Restructured Republic, a libertarian front group, to work actively with other anti-Nixon forces. We should all dig in and lend these efforts our support, in any way possible. The candidate (or candidates) who will receive our support in the primaries depends largely on what happens over the next six months or so.

All in all, it is shaping up to be one hell of a time.

Traditional China And Anarchism

By Murray Rubinstein

(Professor Rubinstein’s fine summary of traditional Chinese political concepts suggests an important lesson for libertarians. In Chinese thought the anarchist ideas were applied within a statist structure; there had been no attempt to overthrow the state but merely to introduce anarchist practices to modify and improve the situation. The result was oppressive; anarchist ideas cannot be applied while the state system continues in existence. In fact, it may be that the application of anarchist ideas within a statist structure can only lead to worse oppression. The state is the central issue; its abolition is the central objective. The introduction of anarchist practices or operations while the state continues to exist may not only be irrelevant but if widespread in application may result in worse oppression. This is an important warning for libertarians. What was the reason for the failure in China to move to an anarchist society? Elitism. There was a disdain for the common people and their institutions. The clan and self-help organizations provided a suitable basis for a libertarian legal system. But their powers were curtailed and limited because they were viewed as a threat to the state structure from which the ruling class drew its wealth. Although they might be committed to the anarchistic philosophy of the Chinese sages, the local rulers recognized that they drew their wealth from the statist structure. Thus, they viewed all activities against the standard of the preservation of the statist structure and acted in their official capacities not as anarchist philosophers but as statist oppressors. — Leonard P. Liggio).

The Chinese Civil Service System with it complicated examination path and its structured pattern of rule and control from above seems far distant from an anarchistic model of society based on free association or voluntarism, and a laissez-faire economy. Yet at the heart of this system are basic concepts very close to those libertarians adopt as their own.

The ideological basis of the System was a combination of Taoism and Confucianism which represented a functional application of these seemingly contradictory thought systems. It is my purpose to examine some of these basic tenets and see how they were modified in the process of application.

Taoism, in its philosophical form, is represented by two major works, the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Way) and the Chuang Tzu. Each of these books is a product of the Warring States period, an age in which much of Chinese phiolsophy was developed. Taoism on this level is a pantheistic thought system which holds that the universe is a continuum in which all matter is in the process of becoming differentiated and then non-differentiated. The Taoist believes that there is a single source to the “ten thousand things” and that he must reestablish his unity with the universe. The inner harmony of nature should be related to the outer harmony of man’s actions. To achieve this external harmony is to leave things alone. The best government is the least government; the best ruler is he who is content to leave his subjects alone.

Confucianism on the surface seems the opposite of this WuWei (non-action) form of rule (or non-rule). It is a philosophy that seems to stress precedent and strict adherence to rites and ceremonies. Li (ritual) is only one aspect of the Confucian ideology, for there is also deep faith in Jen (benevolence-good) and chih (wisdom). The operation of government and thus of society should be in the hands of the Chun-tzu – the gentleman who advises the ruler and leads by moral virtue. The Confucians viewed formal punitive law as negative and only to be used as last resort. There was no formal concept of civil law, for in a society based on virtue such would be unnecessary. In the Analects, this belief in government by virtue is expounded at length:

95. Confucius said, “If a ruler himself is upright, all will go well without orders. But if he himself is not upright, even though he gives orders, they will not be obeyed.”

97. Confucius said, “Lead the people by laws and regulate them by penalties and the people will try to keep out of jail, but will have no sense of shame. Lead the people by virtue and restrain them by rules of decorum and the people will have a sense of shame and moreover will become good.” Theoretically, therefore government means good men, living properly, rather than good laws, strictly enforced.

How did these ideas, Taoist and Confucian, work out in application? Taoist political thought was never put into practice, but the ethics became formalized and a concrete set of rituals and church structure were developed. This religious Taoism can still be seen in operation today on Taiwan.

Confucianism, on the other hand, did become the state orthodoxy. In the reign of the Han emperor Wu Ti the philosophy of Confucius, as it had been passed down and thus modified since 500 B. C., became the theoretical basis for government. During the T’ang Dynasty a method of examination was developed and a complicated government structure developed to make use of the talents of the trained scholars. The means of choosing and utilizing the potential Chun-tzu was thus devised. Once the student had passed through the three stages of exams, the district level, the province level and the central administration level and had achieved the degree of Chin Shih, he was ready to put into practice the lessons he had learned (lessons learned by memorizing and analyzing the works of Confucius and the other “Classics”). He became on the district level the embodiment of the concept of ‘rule by good men’. But instead of letting society run itself, he found himself forced to rule as a despot, acting as tax collector, judge, jury and prosecuting attorney, defense chief, police chief, flood control expert, and moral instructor to the local gentry. He was constantly under the scrutiny of his superiors and had to move to a new post every three years in accordance with custom. The magistrate was thus an overburdened local bureaucrat, very far from the ideal of a man leading by the force of moral virtue alone.

The lesson of Traditional China for those who believe in freedom and the creation of a totally free society is this: that ideas are not enough, that even concepts conceived of by men such as Confucius and Lao Tzu can become stale, rigid, even despotic in application. China in the formative centuries developed proto-anarchistic ideas. The total, unsystematic application of those ideas created a system as rigid, as formalistic, as tyrannical as any we have today.

From The Old Curmudgeon

(Once again, the need for him arises. Tall and lean, he dons his mask, leaps on his trusty white horse, and rides off into the West. Champion of Truth, Defender of Justice, scourge of deviationists, heretics, sinners, and evildoers, the bane of Young Whippersnappers, he rides again. In a storm of thundering hooves, with a hearty “Hi-yo Silver”, here he is, back by popular demand . . . the Old Curmudgeon.)

Excess Curmudgeonry.

I never though I’d have to say this, but as a long-time champion of both Old Curmudgeonry and the Golden Mean, I have to admit that there can be such a thing as being too much of a curmudgeon. For example: under the guidance of Jerome Tuccille and Murray Rothbard as Advisory Editors, Arno Press, a respected reprint publisher and subsidiary of the New York Times, is putting out a series, hopefully by this Christmas, of reprints on “The Right-Wing Individualist Tradition in America.” One would think that libertarians and individualists would jump at the chance of wide distribution in hard cover. But no! Several Old Right-wing Curmudgeons, sequestered away on their literal or figurative mountaintops for decades, have sniffed some sort of Establishment Plot in all this and have refused to sell their copyrights to Arno – preferring to clasp their privately printed and almost unknown editions to their hermitic bosoms.

Come on, fellas; we respect and admire you for your lonely battles over the decades. But new times have arrived; it is at last “in” to be an individualist. Come on, relax and enjoy the New Dispensation; after all, we wouldn’t want to vindicate the old left-wing smear that we became individualists in order to justify our anti-social psyches, would me?

Special Issue On The Freeze

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 8

September, 1971

75¢

The End Of Economic Freedom

On August 15, 1971, economic freedom died in America. And the terrible thing is that everybody cheered. Where was the opposition? Where are the people who, for four decades now, have been denouncing wage and price controls?

Where are the businessmen? For decades, the business community has been proclaiming its devotion to free enterprise, to the free price system. For decades, they have been attacking direct controls on prices and wages. Where are they now? They are the loudest and most delighted of the cheering squad for Mr. Nixon’s New Totalitarian Economic Policy. On the day after Nixon’s sudden and dramatic price freeze, the Washington Post reported that the mood of the business and banking community was “almost euphoric.” William P. Gullander, head of the National Association of Manufacturers, expressed his delight at the wage-price freeze; and George G. Hagedorn, chief economist of the NAM, and who has many times proclaimed his devotion to the free market, joined in the hosannahs. The Chamber of Commerce of the United States, which in 1951 had issued a report on The Price of Price Control demonstrating that price and wage controls do not work and impose a terrible burden on the economy, was scarcely less enthusiastic in hailing the program.

On August 24, furthermore, Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans met with eleven of the heads of the nation’s biggest corporations; Stans reported delightedly that all of our biggest businessmen not only hailed the controls, but “want to be sure the program does not terminate on Nov. 12”. In fact, not a single businessman of any stature, not one, has been reported to be anything but enthusiastic about the wage-price freeze. And so where is all the talk about the free enterprise system? Where are the men to rise and defend our lost economic freedom?

The conservatives of this country have scarcely done any better. For decades, they too have opposed “creeping socialism” and have been particularly vehement in attacking direct controls over wages and prices and their dictation to the individual on what price or wage he may charge or pay on the market. Where are the conservatives now? For the most part, we have heard only a resounding silence. In fact, many conservatives have simply joined in the cheering, have hailed the dramatic move by our “strong” President, and have curiously forgotten their supposed devotion to “strict” construction of the Constitution as a protection for our liberties. The slight amount of conservative criticism that has appeared has been timid and wistful, with a nary a mention of the dictatorship that has suddenly buried our economic freedom, and scarcely a fraction of the righteous indignation with which they greeted Mr. Nixon’s grandstand announcement of his trip to Communist China. Human Events expressed the hope that the controls would not be permanent; and the nation’s most prominent conservative, William F. Buckley, in a dithering column of August 19, stated that the controls were not necessary but that, on the other hand, Mr. Nixon saw that controls could work for an “intermediate length” of time, even though they cannot work either in the “short” or the “long” run. By what principles or what precise length of time we can enjoy “intermediate” success with price and wage controls, neither Mr. Nixon nor Mr. Buckley has bothered to let us know.

And where are the nation’s economists? For at least two decades, virtually all the nation’s economists, let alone Arthur Burns, Paul McCracken and the other Administration economists who have led us to the destruction of the free economy, have told us, with all the certainty of which they are capable, that price and wage controls do not work, that they tackle only the symptoms and not the causes of inflation, that controls do not halt inflation but only bring about shortages, distortions, disruptions, and black markets. Yet, virtually all of them have jumped on the control bandwagon, with no hesitation whatever – even Professor Samuelson, whose own best-selling textbook reveals the unworkability of direct price controls on the market. It is no wonder that virtually the only economist to champion controls all along – J. K. Galbraith – has hailed Mr. Nixon as a “repentant sinner”; he could have included the nation’s economists in the gibe. There have only been a few honorable exceptions to the stampede: Milton Friedman mildly criticized the controls as unworkable – but without denouncing the invasion of freedom involved. And 16 Chicago School economists headed by Allen Meltzer of Carnegie-Mellon University, did issue a statement denouncing wage and price controls as “inequitable, wasteful, inefficient and destructive of personal freedom”. But that is literally all. How ironic that the only large-scale and determined attack on the wage-price freeze was launched by the very Democrats and labor unions that had been calling for controls for many months! Some of the union rhetoric was impassioned and even denounced the controls as dictatorial and unconstitutional – thus reminiscent of the conservatives and businessmen of days gone by. Leonard Woodcock, head of the United Automobile Workers, even charged that “Nixon’s is the hand that held the dagger” but that the Democrats, in passing the authorization for controls in the first place, had put the dagger into his hand.

But it is highly unlikely that the nation’s unions, despite their passion and their early talk of non-compliance and a general strike, will be the instrument to save American freedom. For the unions, after all, have long championed such controls, and merely resent the fact that profits weren’t frozen as well. Furthermore, they are already showing indications that if unions are given their share as partners in a tripartite control arrangement, such as ruled the country during the days of NRA and World War II – a tripartite rule of big business, big unions, and big government – they will end their outcry. In short, labor unions hardly oppose the controls in principle; they just want a bigger share of the pie.

The Cause of Inflation

The controls won’t work. The prime reason why they won’t work is that they do not tackle the cause of inflation, but only lash out at the symptoms. Let us see why. Every price is simply the terms of an exchange on the market, an exchange with money on one side and some good or service on the other. When I buy a newspaper for a dime, ten cents in money is being exchanged for one newspaper; when I buy a hat for $5, five dollars in money is being exchanged for one hat. And so the key to what makes prices high or low is the relationship between the supply of goods available and the supply of money which can be used to purchase them. Suppose, for example, that by some magic process, the quantity of money available in the country doubles overnight. The supply of goods remains the same, for nothing has really happened to lower or raise them. But then we will all enter the market with twice as many dollars burning a hole in our pocket as compared to yesterday. And if consumer tastes remain about the same, this means that twice as much money will be bidding for the same amount of goods, and all their prices will approximately double; we will all have to pay twenty cents for the same newspaper and $10 for the same hat.

In the unhampered free market economy, the supply of goods and services usually increases, as investment and productivity rise. This means that the tendency of the free market will be for prices to fall, some prices of course more than others, depending on where productivity increases the most. It is rare that production actually decreases in a free economy, and certainly in the last decade as inflation has continued and accelerated, production has generally continued to go up rather than down. So we cannot account for the continuing inflation from the production side. Where then is the culprit? It is the money side, for the supply of dollars has continued to go up, and even to accelerate, especially during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations. And as the supply of dollars has risen and risen ever faster, prices have gone up as well – all prices: including rents, wages, and interest rates. This year, for example, the supply of money has been increasing at a rate of 12-16%; is it any wonder that prices have kept increasing as well? Furthermore, in all the hullaballoo about everything being “frozen”, one of the vital factors conspicuous for not being frozen is the money supply, which keeps on rocketing upward.

Who, then, is responsible for the continual and growing increases in the supply of money? It is not big business or little business or labor unions or consumer “greed” or international speculators or any of the other economic forces that government has focussed on to pin the blame for inflation. The culprit is none other than the federal government itself. It is the federal government and no other organization that has absolute and effective control of the supply of money, and regulates it to its own content. It is the federal government that has been merrily increasing the supply of money, to “stimulate” the economy, to finance its own now enormous budget deficits, to help out favored borrowers, to lower interest rates, or for any other reason.

Note then the stance of the government, whether it is the Nixon or Johnson or any other administration in the history of inflation. First it pumps more money into the economy, and continues to do so. Then, as the new money inevitably spreads throughout the society, and as prices and wages and rents inevitably increase in response, the government itself becomes increasingly possessed with righteous indignation. It issues edicts, bellows about social responsibility, and denounces various groups in turn for supposedly causing the price inflation. Business is denounced for raising prices, labor unions for asking and obtaining wage increases, landlords for raising rents, and sometimes consumers for spending too much. But never, never does the government bother to point to its own responsibility for the whole problem. Instead, it continues to pour more money into the system, and then to wax indignant when prices and wages rise in inevitable response. The White Knight of government, with its myriad of experts and advisers, marching out to man the ramparts of the “fight against inflation”, turns out to be the very culprit who is the source and origin of the whole problem.

How does the government increase the money supply? The old candid days of simply printing more greenbacks, such as caused inflation during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, is now hopelessly out of date. For one thing, the process was too clear, and when the “Continental dollar” printed in massive lots during the American Revolution became virtually worthless, it was clear to almost everyone that the unlimited printing press of government was the responsible agent. It was from that experience, by the way, that the old American phrase, “Not Worth a Continental”, originated. The current inflationary process is much more subtle, though no less effective, and hence understood by very few non-economists. It works something as follows:

The controller and virtual dictator of the money and banking system is the Federal Reserve Board, appointed by the President. The Federal Reserve Act gives to the Federal Reserve Banks, run by the Board, the monopoly of the issuance of paper money, and forces the nation’s commercial banks – not, by the way, against their will – to keep their reserves at the Fed. The commercial banks are then allowed to create money – in the form of demand deposits, or checking accounts – to a multiple of approximately 1:6 on top of their total reserves. In short, if total bank reserves at the Fed are $10 billion, the banks are allowed to create and lend out up to $50 billion more, until their checking accounts total $60 billion. Almost always, the banks are eager to do so. If, then, bank reserves increase by another $1 billion, they will create $6 billion in new money in the economy.

The key lever in the creation of new money and the expansion of the money supply, then, is the total of bank reserves. These are under the complete control of the Federal Reserve Board itself, which keeps seeing to it that bank reserves increase, and at a rapid rate. How does the Fed do this? Basically, by going into the “open market” and buying assets. Actually, it doesn’t matter what kind of assets the Federal Reserve Banks decide to buy. Suppose, for some reason, the Fed takes it into its head to buy one of my old typewriters. It purchases a typewriter from me for $30. The Fed now has another typewriter in its offices, valued at $30. I – and this is the crucial step here – have a check for $30 on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I can’t do anything with the check; the Fed does not have personal accounts with the public. I have to take my $30 check and deposit it with my commercial bank, say Chase Manhattan. I now have an increase in $30 in my bank account; the total money supply in the economy has already increased by $30, since checking accounts function as money. But this is by no means all; the Chase Bank delightedly takes the $30 check on the Fed and deposits it in its own account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This increases the Chase’s reserves by $30, and it – or more precisely, the banks as a whole – can now increase the nation’s money supply by a multiple of 6:1, by $180 altogether, $150 of which go into new loans to business.

Therefore, if the Fed buys any asset from a member of the public, total bank reserves increase by the same amount, and the total money supply increases by six times that amount.

In actual practice, the Fed doesn’t bother seeking out my old typewriters. Neither does it incur the charge of favoritism involved in buying corporate stocks. In practice, it confines its purchases to existing U.S. government bonds and other securities. If the Fed buys $1 million worth of U.S. government bonds from private bond dealers, total bank reserves will increase by $1 million, and the money supply as a whole by $6 million.

And so the major culprit of the inflation has been the Federal Reserve Board, which has been merrily buying government securities on the open market and thereby levering the money supply ever upward. The chairman of the Fed for the last year and a half, and therefore the biggest single culprit, the bearer of the major share of the guilt, for our inflation, has been none other than Arthur F. Burns – the same Arthur Burns who has been hailed so fulsomely by the press for his great work in pressuring President Nixon to freeze wages and prices. Arthur F. Burns, the man most responsible for inflation, thereby becomes in the eyes of the public the greatest battler against it.

You Read It Here

“In the short run, the only sound way out for the Nixon Administration is to be willing to engage in a truly rigorous anti-monetary inflation program, to stop inflating the monetary supply and, indeed, to engage in some old-fashioned monetary contraction. The recession would then be sharp but short-lived, and recovery would be brisk and healthy. The anti-inflationary monetary contraction must be sharp and determined enough to offset the inevitable rise in relative consumer prices and to change the inflationary expectations of the public; it must be rigorously ‘hard money’. Only then will prices level off and even (gloryosky!) decline, and only then will interest rates fall. The Administration must cease pursuing the Friedmanite pipe dream of a levelling off of prices along with recovery but without abandoning monetary inflation. In the long run, of course, we need a total overhaul of our inherently statist and inflationary monetary system, with a liquidation of the Federal Reserve System and a return to a genuine gold standard.”

“But the Nixon Administration is likely to turn . . . in precisely the opposite direction. Unwilling to bring monetary inflation to a halt, unwilling to go into a truly ‘hard money’ program, it might very well add onto its vacillation and drift a turn toward the totalitarian method of wage-and-price controls. Already there are ominous signs of wage-price controls on the horizon. Arthur F. Burns, the man our anarcho-Nixonites assured us was soundly free-enterprise, now talks of ‘voluntary’ or even coercive price controls. Such business economists as Pierre Rinfret and Linel Edie and Co. have already frankly called for wage-price controls. There are two things wrong with such controls: one, they are the totalitarian antithesis of freedom or the free economy, and two, they don’t work, leading instead to the ‘suppressed’ inflation of black markets and eternal shortages and misallocation of resources. Why, then are so many of our ‘conservative’ business economists reaching for such controls? Precisely because profit margins are being squeezed by the pressure of wage-costs, as they always are in recessions; and therefore, these business economists hope to stop wage increases by the use of compulsion and the State bayonet.

Guaranteed income schemes; continuing budget deficits; monetary inflation; and now wage-price controls; under the cover of traditional free-enterprise rhetoric, the Nixon Administration continues us ever further down the path toward the economy of fascism.”

– “The Nixon Mess”, The Libertarian Forum, June 15, 1970.

The Function of the Price System,

The free price system, the free fluctuation of all prices, wages, and rents, which has been so blithely destroyed by the President, is the heart and soul of the functioning of the market economy. The Freeze, or any direct control, of prices strikes at the heart of the effective working of our economy, and will act to reduce the economic system to chaos. For each and every price, of the innumerable prices of all varieties of goods and services in the economy, reflect the individual forces of supply and demand. If the demand for frisbees rises and the demand for hula hoops falls, the price of the former will increase and the price of the latter will fall, and this will give the signal to the toy manufacturers, through the increased profits in frisbees and the decline in hula hoops, to shift from producing the latter to the former. Similarly, if copper becomes more scarce, its price will rise, and the scarce product will be allocated to those uses and firms which can most profitably and productively employ copper. The more marginal uses will be sacrificed for the more important. And if a new invention occurs, say, in frisbee machinery, the lowered costs will lead to a greater production and hence a fall in frisbee prices. In this way, prices – all prices, including wages and rents – are a sensitive and ever responding indicator to the changes in the underlying forces of supply and demand. A free price system leads businessmen in pursuit of profit and in avoidance of loss, to produce most efficiently those products most desired by the mass of consumers. Cripple that system and the intricate price mechanism for conveying signals and information to producers is destroyed. The economy, is then at sea without a rudder, with nothing to tell the producers what they should produce and what means of producing are most efficient.

The Freeze Won’t Work

At the very beginning of a freeze, not much appears to be different – understandably, since prices and wages as of August 14 reflected the supply and demand forces on August 14. At first, then, the frozen prices approximate the free market results. But as time goes on, the freeze becomes more and more artificial, more and more out of tune with the ever-changing forces of consumer taste and demand, and producer supply and efficiency. The longer the freeze continues, the more distortions, inefficiencies, and misallocations of resources appear in the economy. That is why in the history of controls, such as OPA in World War II, they begin in euphoria and increasingly become ineffective, diastrous, and unworkable.

Indeed, as of the writing of this article in the first week of September, intractable problems have already appeared in the freeze. Teachers are hired continuously but they only are hired officially at the beginning of the fall term; shall they receive a previously-agreed upon wage increase? The September 6 issue of the New York Times reports a series of totally contradictory answers to tough questions posed about the freeze in Internal Revenue offices throughout the country. For example: can a landlord raise rent if he puts in a new incinerator? No, say some IRS offices, that’s a violation of the freeze; yes, say others, because the incinerator improves the dwelling which is therefore a different, and superior, housing product deserving of more rents. But if we adopt the latter, highly sensible, position, what standard does the government at in setting the new fixed rent? On wages, the government at first tried to freeze wages even if the person is promoted — an absurd position which then freezes a man’s salary for more productive work, and which cuts his real wages and ends the incentive to accept promotions. It then reversed itself, allowing higher pay for promotions. But then again: how high can the increase be? If the standard is the prevailing job, suppose “new” jobs, both real and phony, are created; what is the standard then? Another good question that the Times posed to the IRS: suppose that an employer wants to reward an employee. He can’t give him a wage rise or a bonus during the freeze, but is he permitted to grant an extra week’s vacation? This is of course an increase in the employee’s pay per unit of work. The befuddled reaction of the government officials is just the beginning of the headaches they will confront, and the evasions they will, step by step, inevitably concede:

“The question about whether an employee could be given an extra week’s vacation as a reward for good work produced slightly more no’s than yes’s. But one official, who said that the extra vacation was prohibited by the freeze, volunteered the suggestion that the company go ahead and do it anyway. ‘It would be considered a bonus,’ the official said. ‘But who will know. Just don’t say anything about it.’”

Problems are endemic. The professional athletes justly complain that their brief working life means that they suffer a greater injustice from the freeze than the rest of the labor force. An owner of a laundromat in New York State had just been about to raise his prices, after a considerable rise in costs; but now that he cannot, he is losing money and announces that he will have to go out of business.

The freezing of all unit prices, indeed, does not necessarily insure the continuing profits of each business. Take, for example, the case of a businessman who must replace worn-out machinery or a landlord who must install a new boiler. His rents, and his profits, were calculated on the basis of his old costs; but the boiler or machinery price, while no higher than on August 15, is likely to be considerably higher than it was in, say, I960, when it was originally installed. And so the higher capital prices will cut severely into his profits.

There is another point here that must be emphasized. There are other elements that enter into a firm’s costs besides the prices it must pay for specific units of labor or raw materials or equipment. For a firm might have to shift its purchases from a less expensive to a more expensive material, or from less to more highly skilled labor. And, if it does so, its costs will increase, and its profits possibly turn into losses, even though the price of each particular thing has remained the same. (On these and other problems of price controls and freezes, see Jules Backman, ed., Price Practices and Price Policies, New York, Ronald Press, 1953, Part V.)

Any price control will, of necessity, fix the price higher, lower, or precisely the same as the free market would have set. The freeze begins with the latter and rapidly deviates as time goes on. If the price is set too high, then unsold surpluses will pile up; if the price is set too low, then – provided that the controls are carried out – shortages will develop. Since the purpose of the freeze and further controls is to set maxima rather than minima, and since they are being imposed to deal with an inflationary problem, then we can expect that shortages will grow and intensify as the controls continue.

You Read It Here

“Consider also the implications of the Penn Central fiasco. The Nixon Administration, by its actions, is all but saying that it will not permit any large corporation to go under . . . Nixon is apparently determined to extend government aid to any major firm in any industry that wants it . . . Ever since the Hoover New Deal, the policy of the federal government has been moving toward one of assuring the profitability of American big business . . . With the government more and more willing to underwrite losses, there is less and less incentive for corporate heads to heed the warnings of the market, and curtail operations where indicated . . .

The point here is that the business executive now need not cut prices in the face of falling demand; or resist wage demands of unions. Union leaders need worry less about whether they are asking for more than a market wage. The federal government has announced its willingness to supply cash – virtually to print money up if necessary – to major corporations that find themselves in a ‘liquidity’ crisis (i.e. find themselves overextended).”

– Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., “Nixon and the Economy”, The Libertarian Forum (August, 1970).

In short, prices rise in the first place because the federal government has been pumping too much money into the economy, and increasing money leads to higher prices. If, then, the government tries to cure the price rise by issuing freeze or control orders, this is equivalent to a physician trying to cure his patients fever by breaking open the thermometer and holding down the mercury column. More to the point, the analogy would be complete if the physician has been injecting fever germs into the patient all along.

As controls continue, then, either or both of the following will happen: (1) to the extent the controls are effective, shortages will emerge and intensify – and we will once again all enjoy the wartime phenomena of shortages of meat, cigarettes, gasoline, and whatnot. During World War II, people were more willing to bear these conditions because they thought – wrongly – that the shortages were the inevitable result of the war effort and not of the OPA price ceilings. But now there is no all-out war to mask the grim economic realities. (2) The controls can and will be increasingly avoided and evaded. One form will be outright “black” markets, with all the scarcity, corruption, and disallocations that they imply. Actually, the “black market” is simply the market, the free market, trying desperately to emerge in the midst of the crippling network of controls. Another form will be all manner of indirect avoidance and outwitting of the controls. We have already mentioned in wage controls such devices as phony promotions and extra vacations. There are numerous others, including getting around price ceilings by subtle reduction in the quality or size of the product. Soon we will find, for example, our candy bar packages containing even more air than they already do, or the quality of the chocolate declining still more. Even with a vast network of controls, even with a million-man enforcement arm, it would be impossible to police all of these end-runs around controls.

A well-known method of getting around a price freeze is simply to shift to a new product. Since the product wasn’t being produced at all at the date of the freeze, there are no price guidelines for the government to impose. In Allied-occupied Germany after World War II, where the Allies imposed severe price ceilings specifically to punish Germany and to cripple its industrial recovery, the result of the controls was truly grave shortages in the necessities of life, food, clothing, etc., which had been produced in the pre-World War II base year. Instead, the energies of the German industrial machine poured into all sorts of trivial new products – toys, gimcracks, etc. Germans went starving and poorly clothed while surfeited in toys. It was only with the “Currency Reform” of 1948 which lifted the price controls that Germany was able to eliminate the shortages rapidly, to shift from toys to useful products again, and to move on to the famous “economic miracle” of the postwar years. (For the instructive story of price control in occupied Germany, see Nicholas Balabkins, Germany Under Direct Controls, New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1964).

And so, the attempt to hold down the symptons – price inflation – while pouring in new money only leads to what has aptly been called “repressed inflation”, in which the repression bursts forth in the form of evasions and black markets.

Or else the government itself will reluctantly and increasingly grant exceptions and exemptions to the undoubted “inequities” of the price and wage freeze. We have seen that these insoluble inequities have already emerged. Suppose that we have Mr. Jones, who is making $2000 below the prevailing wage in his occupation, and was just about to receive an increase. Or take the laundromat owner going on the rocks. It is obvious – and openly acknowledged in Washington – that the absolute price-wage freeze cannot be extended forever. Something will have to be done about the inequity cases, the businesses losing money, the athletes with special problems, etc., and these problems of a changing economy will develop increasingly as time goes on. But if the economy can’t be frozen indefinitely, then neither – in the eyes of the Administration – can the freeze be simply lifted at the end of 90 days. For then the repressed inflation will burst into the open, and prices and wages will soar to compensate for the enforced freeze. The only other option for the Administration will have to be permanent price and wage controls – with a vast army of bureaucrats making decisions about every individual inequity. In short, a recrudescence of the already failed OPA of World War II.

You Read It Here

“Well, we have had two years of Nixonism, and what we are undergoing is a super-Great Society – in fact, what we are seeing is the greatest single thrust toward socialism since the days of Franklin Roosevlet. It is not Marxian socialism, to be sure but neither was FDR’s; it is . . . a big-business socialism, or state corporatism, but that is cold comfort indeed. There are only two major differences in content between Nixon and Kennedy-Johnson . . . (1) that the march into socialism is faster because the teeth of conservative Republican opposition have been drawn; and (2) that the erstwhile ‘free-market’ conservatives, basking in the seats of Power, have betrayed whatever principles they may have had for the service of the State. Thus, we have Paul McCracken and Arthur F. Burns, dedicated opponents of wage-price ‘guideline’ dictation and wage-price controls when out of power, now moving rapidly in the very direction they had previously deplored . . .

But now the Administration has swung around to the Liberal thesis of monetary fiscal expansion to cure the recession, while yelling and griping at labor and employers not to raise wages and prices – a ‘guidelines’ or ‘incomes’ policy that is only one step away from wage and price controls . . .

Not only is it impossible for direct controls to work; their imposition adds the final link in the forging of a totalitarian economy, of an American fascism. What is it but totalitarian to outlaw any sort of voluntary exchange, any voluntary sale of a product, or hiring of a laborer? But once again Richard Nixon is responsive to his credo of big business liberalism, for direct controls satisfy the ideological creed of liberals while at the same time they are urged by big business in order to try to hold down the pressure of wages on selling prices which always appears in the late stages of a boom.”

– “Nixonite Socialism”, The Libertarian Forum, January, 1971.

In recent years, Europe has seen a dismal record of failure of wage-price controls. From 1965 to 1970, for example the Labor government of Great Britain imposed a wage-price freeze to combat inflation, “voluntary” for the first year and compulsory thereafter. By 1970, it was clear that wages and prices had been advancing faster during the freeze than it ever had before. By June, 1970, when the British government abandoned the controls as hopeless, wages were rising at an annual rate of 10% and prices by 7%.

Price-controls have also played a vital but little-known part in the political history of Asia. One of the major reasons for the downfall of Chiang-kai-Shek, for example, was the fact that, due to national deficits and paper money inflation, China had been suffering, before and during World War II, from a runaway inflation, and Chiang had met the problem by imposing severe price and wage controls. The inevitable result of the controls was grave shortages throughout the country, and, as in so many cases in the past since the Edict of Diocletian in ancient Rome, the government met the problem by escalating the penalties for evading controls. Chiang, in fact, ended by making an example of black marketeers by executing them publicly in the streets. In this way, he lost his merchant and middle-class support; in contrast, the Communists, whenever they occupied an area of China, ended the monetary expansion and thereby cured the inflation. Is it any wonder that Chiang lost China?

As shortages pile up from the price controls, we can expect the next totalitarian advance: rationing. With demand permanently greater than supply at the frozen price, the government will try, in one area after the other, to impose compulsory quotas for everyone’s purchases, as it did during World War II. The result will be further dictation and bureaucracy, a vast network of ration points and ration coupons, favoritism, inequities, corruption, and further black markets. For in the free economy, it is price that performs the rationing function, smoothly and easily. But it does more; for if there is a shortage of, say, tires, a higher price will not only “ration” the tires to those demanding them the most, it will also call more tires into production. Compulsory rationing will perpetuate the shortage.

Americans should never forget our last tragic experience with peacetime controls. After World War II, the Truman Administration tried to cling to vestiges of price controls; in particular, the ceilings on prices of meat. The result, during 1946, was a severe meat shortage, and a diversion of meat into the black markets. Finally, President Truman reluctantly lifted the controls on meat on October 14, 1946, after which the meat shortage quickly disappeared. At that time, Truman said:

“I recognize the hardships that many of you have undergone because of the lack of meat. I sympathize with millions of housewives hard-pressed to provide nourishing meals for their families . . . thousands of veterans and other patients in hospitals throughout the country . . . Many workers have been thrown out of work by the meat shortage. The by-products from lawful slaughter of livestock are sorely needed . . . for insulin and other necessary medicines . . . and for hides; and already some of our shoe factories are closing and workers are being laid off for lack of leather . . . There are reports of widespread disregard and violations of the price-control law. Experience shows that this leads to a tendency to disregard the sanctity of other laws of the country.”

But while President Truman was forced to throw in the towel on controls, the disquieting point for all of us and for the future is that he had given long and serious consideration to mobilizing the army and seizing meat in the packing-houses. Recognizing, however, that the meat was not in the packing-houses but in the farms, Truman added:

“Some have even suggested that the government go out on the farms and ranges and seize the cattle for slaughter . . . We gave it long and serious consideration . . . We decided . . . it would be sholly impracticable because the cattle are spread throughout all parts of the country.”

And so, the President concluded wistfully, “there is only one remedy left – that is, to lift controls on meat.”

And so, President Truman recognized that he had two basic alternatives to remedy the mess that controls had created: either return to a free economy or go on to a totalitarian state. His decision for freedom was reluctant and hairline – and influenced undoubtedly by the farm vote that was being lost for the coming 1946 elections. Is President Nixon going to bring us the totalitarian society that we barely escaped under Harry Truman?

The Phony Freeze

Apart from all other considerations, the freeze is a phony one. Democrats and unions have centered on the failure to freeze profits, without realizing that profits are not a regular price but a residual, which may and do shift wildly from being large, small, zero, or negative. But other prices have not been frozen.

For example: cunningly, the government exempted from the freeze fresh foods. This means that the scandalous farm price support program, in which the taxpayer is forced to pay farmers for growing less or even no food, will continue merrily on its way, contributing to price inflation. The government gave as its argument that if price ceilings are imposed on seasonal foods, say cantaloupes, this would create grave shortages of cantaloupes as their supply becomes scarce in the autumn. Very true; but doesn’t this mean that the supply of all other goods will also become short, though not as quickly and evidently? Freezing prices of processed foods while allowing the price of raw foods to rise, furthermore, will aid the farmers, but will also mean that the wholesalers and retailers of these foods will be suffering losses and will either stop operating altogether or go into black markets. Isn’t it insane to allow plentiful supplies and free prices in, say, fresh strawberries, while imposing ceilings and therefore shortages in the frozen variety?

Secondly, interest rates are free, the government again giving as its argument that a ceiling on interest rates will dry up the supply of credit. Very true – but again, why not apply the logic elsewhere? Furthermore, if the government did go on, as the Democrats have urged, to freeze interest rates, they could never freeze interest yields on bonds, which will rise as bond prices fall.

Thirdly, consider this grave inconsistency: on August 16, Secretary Connally exulted that the price freeze had caused stockmarket prices to rise by 30 points. What kind of thinking is this – to force prices down while chortling because stock prices are going up? Aren’t stock prices also prices? Why cheer when they go up while forcing others to stay down?

Fourthly, state and local taxes are specifically exempt from the freeze. The Oregon cigarette tax, for example, is going up as scheduled. Aren’t taxes prices? Doesn’t a higher tax also contribute to price inflation? Or do our rulers think that it is a hardship to pay more for goods that we want and use while it is not a hardship to pay more – taxes — for services that are nonexistent or negative (the activities of government)? What is the logic here?

Fifthly, as everyone knows, President Nixon accompanied the freeze by announcing a 10% across-the-board surcharge on imports. This is going to raise the price of imported products by approximately 10%. So Mr. Nixon is combatting inflation by deliberately raising a whole host of prices! For the consumer this makes no sense; it makes sense only as a giant subsidy to inefficient domestic firms and industries that have been hit by efficient competition from foreign firms.

Sixthly, the government announced that welfare payments are not included in the freeze. And here we have probably the most horrendous single piece of logic in the entire program. For the announcement read that only prices and wages in payment for productive services are being frozen. Since welfare payments are not made for productive services, they call rise willy-nilly. In short, it is evil for someone to pay a worker more for his productive services; it is perfectly OK to pay a welfare client more for not producing at all! What sort of insane logic is this?

Big Business and Unions

One of the main reasons that the American public as a whole, and many conservatives and businessmen, favor the wage-price freeze is because they believe that unions and their demands are responsible for inflation. They are flatly wrong. The unions are responsible for a host of economic ills, feather-bedding, restrictionism, misallocation of resources and wages, but inflation of prices is not one of them. Consider this: a union makes a demand for a large wage increase. Why does the employer agree to pay it? This is the crucial question. Demands mean nothing; l, for example, could demand a tripling of my salary and be thrown out of the office as a result. The point is that employers are able to pay the demands, and the question to ask is: how come? Why are they able to pay? The idea that businessmen simply pay higher wages and then “pass it on” in higher prices is economic nonsense. For surely business-: men are always trying to sell their products at as high a price as possible. If they can get a higher price, why in the world should they wait for unions to ask more before they raise their prices?

You Read It Here

Let it never be said that Uncle Sam doesn’t plan ahead. In 1961 the Office of Emergency Preparedness sprang up . . . At a time when the mechanisms of trade and decentralized decision-making – the ability to take instant action, at one’s own economic risk on one the basis of localized, specific information – are more than ever needed, the government has habitually aggrandized its own power and authority by prohibiting any activity not first initiated or sanctioned by some bureaucrat’s authority.

– J. M. Cobb
“Lurking in the Wings”
The Libertarian Forum
Jan. 1, 1970

Or look at it this way: suppose all unions in the country should demand an immediate quadrupling of their wages and salaries. Does anyone think that the employers would agree? Why not, if all they have to do is to pass the raise on in higher prices? Furthermore, consider real estate prices, which have risen rapidly in recent years. How come, since there are no unions, no collective bargaining, involved here?

Obviously, something else is involved – and that something else is the aforesaid increase in the money supply. If the money supply increases at 10% per year, then all prices and wages will tend to rise by approximately 10%, and the employers will be able to pay the 10% increase. Once again, it is the hidden force of the money supply that is at work in determining the inflation.

Furthermore, empirically, union wage rates do not rise, overall, faster than non-union wages; in fact, in an inflation, the slowness of collective bargaining tends to make union wages lag behind non-union. Consider, for example, how very much the wages of domestic servants have gone up since World War II. Everyone knows this, and everyone also knows that there is no union in the domestic service field. So, again, unions cannot be the culprit.

One of the characteristics of the late stages of an inflation is that wage rates begin to press on prices, and profits are squeezed. It is clear that many big businessmen favor the freeze because they are trying to coerce wage rates from rising. Furthermore, they know that while both are in the long run unenforceable, price controls are easier to evade than wage controls. The worker is a visible, and indivisible, entity, and so his wage rate is more controllable; but the candy bar can easily be shaved a bit or its quality lowered without attracting attention. Furthermore, the reason for the enthusiasm of General Motors and Ford for the whole Nixon package is evident: for in addition to wage control, the auto manufacturers reap the benefits of the 7% excise tax cut on autos, and of the burden of the import tax surcharge on their burgeoning European competitors – to say nothing of the further burden that the dollar devaluation places on foreign imports.

Furthermore, the “voluntary” freeze on dividends clearly hurts the small investor, while leaving the large stockholders, who are more interested in a rise of stock prices than in dividends, completely unscathed. Here is another reason for big business to look kindly on the program.

Permanent Controls Equal Fascism

It is now clear that price and wage controls of some sort will succeed the 90-day freeze – in short, that we have now entered a political economy of permanent direct controls. There is only one word for this New Economic Policy, a word that is at first glance harsh and exaggerated, but is in fact precisely appropriate. That word is “fascism.” A system of permanent price and wage controls, administered by a central government bureaucracy, probably headed by some form of tripartite board including Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government – this is precisely what fascism is, precisely the economic system of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. This is the economy of the “corporate state”, administered by dictation from the top, controlled and monopolized by Big Business and Big Union interests, with the individual, and the consumer, the person who suffers. In short, the mass of the American public will suffer from this system of corporate statism, from the death of the free price system, from the invasion of individual rights, from the hampering of growth, efficiency, and productivity, that the system will entail.

NOTES ON THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY

Nixon’s grasp of affairs economic
Is so sparse as to be almost comic.
But it’s not so amusing
That our rights he’s abusing
As his deficits grow astronomic.

– David F. Nolan

For now for the first time we have permanent peace-time controls. At least the World War II and Korean War controls, as bad as they were, were recognized as purely a wartime emergency expedient; they were not supposed to herald a new totalitarian economic system. But now we have such a system. And no organized group, left, right, or center, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, has come out in principled opposition to the New Economic Fascism. The unions have already made it clear that they will accept the new system if they achieve their due share of power as junior partners in the tripartite control system. Presumably they will get their wish.

Far more important than the grave economic consequences of the new system are the political and moral implications. For where are our inalienable rights? By what conceivable right does the federal government dare to step in and tell free individuals how much they can agree to pay for goods and services? By what right does it step in to say that I cannot pay X-amount for a product or a service, or that someone cannot sell it to me for the agreed price. If two kids are swapping, for example, a penknife for two frisbees, how dare the government step in and threaten penalties or even jail if the kids do not exchange one penknife for one or for three frisbees – for this is what price control in essence means.

Even the price controls of World War II, moreover, exempted newspapers from the controls, because the government realized that price controls on newspapers implies a grave infringement on freedom of the press. But even the press is not exempt from the controls; does freedom of the press mean so much less nowadays?

There is also the Caesarism involved in the freeze by Presidential edict. If the President can simply go on TV and unilaterally declare an immediate freeze, then all of our liberties, moral, political, and Constitutional, are truly gone. If the President can do this, then he is truly another Caesar, another Mussolini, another Hitler; his power is then absolute. Is our Constitution completely forgotten? Are we going to put up passively with a slide into absolute Presidential dictatorship? And by what stretch of Constitutional finagling can the President freeze local rents? What gives him the power to freeze rents in a Peoria boardinghouse? Where is the “interstate commerce” here? Are there to be no restraints on the President’s absolute power?

Already, a few law professors have spoken out against the new despotism. Four law professors at Catholic University Law School are bringing suit against the government to outlaw the freeze. And, in a trenchant letter to the New York Times of September 6, Professor Arthur S. Miller of George Washington University Law School warns that “Congress has abdicated its legislative function.” He adds that “no such sweeping delegation has ever been upheld (by the courts) outside of wartime . . . The war powers, furthermore, are not usable to uphold the delegation or the President’s actions”, or even the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970 itself. Miller also points out that the President acted secretly and in great haste, while Congress was out of session: “That is government by fait accompli – hardly in consonance with the spirit of the Constitution.” Miller also points out that the government’s abrogation of contractual wage increases after Aug. 14 “varies the obligation of contracts. It takes contract rights (property rights under the law) without paying just compensation required by the Constitution.” Miller adds that “World War II and Korean War-precedents, if that they are, are not controlling. The war powers are not a source of power here. Even if they were, Chief Justice Warren said in 1967 that they do not ‘remove constitutional limitations sageguarding essential liberties.’”

Professor Miller concludes his welcome letter by warning that President Nixon’s declaration of national emergency can hardly add to his constitutional powers. It is part of a growing package of government by executive decree or fiat. The American people should be very sure that they want to travel much further down the perilous path of economic controls and executive domination.”

Selective Controls

There are hints that the Nixon Administration, in a vain attempt to impose permanent price and wage controls without constructing a huge bureaucratic apparatus to run our lives, may try to impose “selective” controls on a few industries. One prediction is that controls may be imposed only on industries composed of large businesses. It is true that big businesses, being highly visible and in the public eye, are superficially easier to control than smaller firms. But “selective” controls, however selected, can never work for long. If, for example, the prices of automobiles are frozen, and the prices of the numerous parts that the auto companies buy from small manufacturers are allowed to rise, then clearly the auto firms will begin to suffer heavy losses. The pressure will then be great to extend the controls to the parts industries, and so on to the various raw material industries. Capital, furthermore, will begin to leave the frozen industries for the unfrozen. And if wages in big firms are frozen while those in small firms are allowed to rise, then obviously workers will begin to leave the former for the latter. Selective controls, in short, are soon found to be unworkable; they set up inexorable pressures either to remove the controls altogether and return to a free economy, or else extend the controls to the entire economy.

Wake Up America

And so fascism is here – and it doesn’t even work. We have sold our birthright of freedom for a mess of inedible pottage. Our economic dictators should at least heed the warning of their predecessor, Field Marshal Hermann Goering. After his capture by the Allies, Goering stated: Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people’s wages and prices – people’s work. If you do that, you must control people’s lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried it and failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that too and it failed. You are no better planners than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here.” (Quoted in F. A. Harper, “A Just Price and Emergency Price Fixing,” Essays on Liberty, Volume II, Irvington on Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education. 1954 pp. 198-99.)

With both political parties silent or enthusiastic about the new statism, and all the organized groups scrambling aboard to increase their share of the pie, there is only one way that we can be freed from this monstrous incubus of permanent price-wage controls. And that is if the American public itself takes a hand. Only the American public can break the new chains which our Caesar has forged. Only the American public can render the wage-price controls unenforceable, by “voting with their feet” in their everyday lives. But to do this, the public must be able to hear voices of opposition, voices who will raise the cry: “This shall not pass!”

“An autocrat’s a ruler that does what th’ people wants, an’ takes th’ blame f’r it. A constitootional ixicutive, Hinnissy, is a ruler that does as he dam pleases, an’ blames th’ people.” — Mr. Dooley.

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 9

October, 1971

75¢

ATTICA

Some political issues are crystal-clear for the libertarian, issues on which he can come to firm conclusions very quickly – such as wage-price controls or the draft. Others, however, are morally more complex, and require the fine scalpel of rigorous analysis before the libertarian may take his stand on one side or another. Such an issue is Attica and the entire prison problem in which it is wrapped.

Unless I miss my guess, the left-wing of the libertarian movement has already taken its stand, in the following kind of simplistic syllogism: (a) prisons are State-run; (b) prisons are coercive; (c) Attica was a rebellion by political “revolutionaries” against the State. Ergo, we should take our stand with the prisoners and denounce the resolution of the Attica question as a “massacre.”

I contend that the conclusion is dead wrong. But before analyzing the core of the problem – the libertarian attitude towards prisons and criminals – let us clear up some tangential but dramatically important issues.

(1) The Fuss. In the first place, one wonders what the great fuss – the sense of surprise, shock, of a felling among many people that somehow Attica marks a significant milestone – is all about. For those of us who were raised on the prison movies of the 1930’s, there is nothing surprising or shocking about the course of events. There were countless scenes the prisoners in the mess banging their spoons against their cups, and led by young Jimmy Cagney or Dane Clark; then finally some guards are grabbed as hostages, the prisoners capture the inside cells, a young prison psychiatrist tries in vain to mediate, and then comes the great climactic scene when the state reestablished its authority, and Jimmy Cagney dies in agony. It’s all there, and the conclusion of the scenario is inevitable. It should be clear to everyone that (a) the government runs the prisons; (b) that by the nature of the prisoner situation, prisoners are ruled severely by their jailers; and (c) that any mutiny by the prisoners is going to be put down and put down hard.

In fact, the entire fuss, and the whole spate of fascinated publicity, was generated by a grave strategic and tactical error on the part of the prison authorities. By “negotiating” with these hoodlums and criminals, by treating them as if they were a legitimate political pressure group, the authorities fed the absurd fantasies of the prisoners of being “revolutionaries” engaged in a profound revolutionary act. By negotiating day after day, furthermore, the authorities fed similar fantasies on the part of the liberals and leftists on the outside – and the whole farce was intensified by the institution of the negotiating committee, and the host of free publicity granted to such agitators as William Kunstler and Bobby Seale, who accomplished nothing except a publicity build-up for themselves. And they “accomplished” something else: consciously or unconsciously feeding the absurd hopes of the prisoners that somehow they might “win”, and thereby hardening the prisoners’ stand. Of course, when the crunch came, agitators like Kunstler, Seale, and Tom Soto of YAWF were safely outside the gates.

It is clear that the major error of the authorities was the shilly-shallying, the endless negotiating that built up the prisoners’ fantasies and morale. What the authorities should have done was to move in fast and hard, immediately, say a half hour after the mutiny. At worst, the killing would certainly not have been more extensive than it turned out to be.

The tragedy of the hostages does not negate this position. For one of the points that prison guards have made clear all during this crisis: that the authorities must move quickly and not be swayed by the hostage problem. For if they are, then this will serve as an open invitation to all prisoners everywhere to grab a few guards, and the guards would be helpless as a result. And as for the moral guilt of the killings, it should be clear that this lies upon the head of the kidnappers themselves, and not upon the guardsmen who were trying to end the crisis and rescue the hostages.

There are other points that came out during the crisis. The time-honored prison method of dealing with trouble-makers is to break them up – if there are, say, 50 trouble-makers, they are broken into five or so groups, with each being shipped out to different prisons in the system. But, under the influence of debilitating liberalism, the state of New York had previously prohibited this sort of treatment – thus allowing the buildup of a cohesive mutinous group within Attica prison.

And then, under an excess of sentimental liberalism, New York State had, a few years ago, abolished capital punishment for murderers. This meant that a hard core of murderers existed within Attica, ready to stir up trouble and take maximum measures for mutiny.

Thus, at least within the immediate context of the prison system, the conservatives are right: the crisis was allowed to develop and intensify because of the debilitating influence of liberalism – in abolishing capital punishment, in disallowing the breaking up of criminal cadres in the prisons, and in allowing endless “negotiations” which were bound anyway to end in failure.

(2) The “Revolutionaries.”

The old-fashioned criminal has always tended to be a “right-winger”, for he has generally acknowledged that his actions were morally wrong, that he had broken the moral law. Hence, while personally trying to keep out of prison as much as possible, the old-fashioned criminal does not challenge the correctness or propriety of the prison system per se. Hence, when sent to prison, he tries not to be a trouble-maker, tires to win privileges and early parole by good behavior, etc.

But, in the last few decades, liberals and leftists have turned their mischievous attentions to the prison system, and to the concept of crime and punishment. They have promulgated the absurd theory, for example, that “society” (i.e. everyone except the criminal, including his victim) is responsible for crime, and not the criminal himself. Criminals have of course become adept at using their increasing literacy to wrap themselves in left-wing justifications for their misdeeds. In the thirties and onward, it was sentimental liberalism that they clasped to their bosoms, whining that they were not responsible, but only the fact that not enough playgrounds had been provided for their childhood, or because their mother and father hated each other. In recent years, this liberal cop-out has been succeeded by revolutionary leftism. Now the murderer, the rapist, the mugger, can preen himself as a member of the vanguard of the “revolution”; every time he knifes an old lady he can proudly label it a “revolutionary act” against the Establishment.”

This phony “revolutionism” was rife at Attica, especially among the hard core of the mutineers, and it will continue to be rife so long as softheaded liberals in the media continue to disseminate this hogwash.

Once begins at last to sympathize with the exasperated Conservative Party leader in Queens, who, after the umteenth justification by Black Panthers and others of themselves as “political prisoners” or “prisoners of war”, finally said: “O. K., if these people are prisoners of war, let them be treated as such. In other words, let them be locked up until the ‘war’ is over.” For another curious aspect of this whole line of argument is this: why do criminals expect, and often get, preferential treatment when they proclaim that they are “revolutionaries” dedicated to overthrowing society and the existing system? If you knife a candy store owner and then trumpet this as an “act of the revolution”, why shouldn’t you expect to be treated even worse than otherwise by authorities whose very task it is to protect existing society? Why expect “acts of violent overthrow” to be treated especially gently by the very people who are being “overthrown”? On the contrary, they should expect even harsher treatment as a result, for what kind of boobs are they who take threats of violence against themselves as passports for that violence? And yet, such boobs have obviously abounded in recent years. Once again, only firm and swift action against criminals, regardless of alibi, will restore proper perspective and end this latest form of “revolutionary” cop-out for crime.

(3) Liberal “Humanitarianism”.

Another interesting point in the whole prison question is the pernicious role of liberal “humanitarianism” in dealing with crime. The classical argument for punishment of crime is that the purpose is (a) retribution for the criminal’s invasion of the victim’s rights; and (b) deterrence of future crime by isolating the criminal from other potential victims. And yet, liberals have for decades denounced retribution and the very concept of “punishment” itself as barbaric; instead, they would substitute the idea of “rehabilitating” the criminal so that he would re-enter society as a better person. Superficially more humane, the objective consequence of this liberal humanitarianism, as libertarian psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz has pointed out in the case of psychiatric methods of dealing with crime, has been a monstrous and unjustified tyranny over the prisoner.

For example: suppose that a certain crime calls for a punishment of five years in the pokey. The liberal comes along and says: No, this is barbaric punishment; let us not simply give this man five years, let us let him loose when he becomes “rehabilitated”, when he becomes a better person. A better person, that is, according to the prison authority, who now is supposed to become a healer, teacher, and ethical guide as well – or, in the case of the psychiatrist, when the prisoner is pronounced psychiatrically “cured.” This may mean, of course, that, of the original five year prisoners, Prisoner A may get turned loose after a few months. But it also means that Prisoner B may receive a life sentence, because he has not yet been “rehabilitated.” In short, objective law and therefore objective punishment which “fits the crime” and is somehow proportionate to it, gets tossed away, and is replaced by the subjective decisions and whims of the “humanitarian” overlords of the prison system. As a result, some prisoners receive “indeterminate sentences” of inordinate length; and also as a result, the jailers have to become the censors of the prisoners’ reading, associations, and writing in jail; for how else will they become “rehabilitated”?

In short, the “humanitarian” program of liberalism becomes a far worse – and a far less justified – tyranny over the prisoners, who no longer enjoy the certainty of objective punishment, who must work to please their Big Brother rulers, and whose lives are now permanently at the mercy of their brain-washing authorities. Once again, Dr. Szasz has almost singlehandedly begun to force a reexamination of the tyranny of psychiatric liberalism in ruling over the prisoners.

We conclude, therefore, that in every aspect the liberals and the left have failed or are dead wrong, and that the response of hard-headed conservatism on the prison question and on the Attica crisis has been the correct one.

But wait, the libertarian left, might cry, what of the context? You might be correct within the context of the prison system, but what of that system itself? Shouldn’t a libertarian be totally opposed to it? Here, there are three questions to distinguish: (A) are the prisoners really criminals? (B) Aren’t prisons themselves tyrannical rule over the prisoners? And (C) Aren’t the prisons government institutions and therefore to be combatted?

On the first point, it is true that the prison population contains not only people whom libertarians would agree are criminals (murderers, muggers, thieves, rapists, etc.) but also non-criminals who have engaged in what are now called “victimless” actions: pornographers, drug possessors, pimps, income tax evaders, draft resisters. But the point is that in the question of Attica this point is irrelevant. For Attica is a “maximum security prison”, a prison specifically designed for people whom libertarians acknowledge to be criminals: murders, rapists, etc.

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The second point brings up the whole problem of crime and punishment in a libertarian society. Would prisons exist in such a society? In my view, libertarianism does not bar defensive violence, which is perfectly legitimate as a defense or punishment against violent aggression. In my view, the libertarian creed states that an aggressor loses his rights to the extent that he has deprived victims of theirs. Hence, it is perfectly proper to exact capital punishment on murderers, who have deprived victims of their right to life, or to exact a lesser punishment which is in some way proportionate to other crimes. It is true that the focus of punishment in a libertarian world would be different than it is now, for the focus would be on forcing the criminal to recompense the victim rather than on exacting such recompense to a meaningless “society” as a whole. But force against the criminal, isolating him from potential victims, forcing him to work to repay the victim, etc. would still remain, and therefore a prison system might remain as well. Certainly there is nothing in the libertarian creed to rule out the existence of prisons, and much to imply that they will still be here. And, again, since criminals lose their rights proportionally to their crimes, they will be subject to rule by prison authorities as they are now.

Thirdly, it is true that prisons are now government owned and that this would change in the purely libertarian society. But we must always distinguish carefully between legitimate services that the State has now monopolized and arrogated to itself, and illegitimate activities that no one, including the State, should be permitted to perform. An example of the latter is the draft, which is the illegitimate enslavement of innocent people to serve the purposes of others. The draft could therefore never exist in a purely libertarian world. But other services are legitimate but now coercively monopolized by the government: e.g., postal service, roads, police, . . . and prisons. In opposing the Post Office, libertarians do not oppose postal service per se; on the contrary, we wish to make that service more efficient and of higher quality by allowing competing private postal businesses. The case of the prisons is similar; a libertarian world would not be devoid of prisons, but would have more efficient ones run on a competitive private basis. Until the day when the government divests itself of the compulsory monopoly of the post, roads, and police, therefore, we must continue to make use of their services, and the same applies to prisons as well.

We conclude therefore that, even when taking the widest context into account, the libertarian must support the tough conservative line on the question of Attica and other prison mutinies.

REPRINT BONANZA

A veritable reprint bonanza for libertarians will be issued this winter by Arno Press, 330 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. Arno, a subdivision of the New York Times, specializes in reprint series devoted to some phase of American history. The forthcoming series, “The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America”, all bound similarly in hard-cover, will be available either as an entire set or in individual volumes. Advisory Editors for the series were Murray N. Rothbard and Jerome Tuccille; the series will be advertised in an annotated brochure written by the advisory editors. The series is not perfection: for one thing it was limited to 38 volumes, for another, many books we would have loved to reprint have already been reprinted by other publishers or are scheduled for reprinting. And furthermore, various curmudgeons refused to sell reprint rights to their books to Arno. Still and all, the series should be a great boon for libertarians to catch up on great books which have long been unavailable. Furthermore, the advisory editors went to special pains to balance the list, so that the 38 books are roughly equally divided into five categories: libertarian, anarchist, free-market economics, isolationist, and conservative.

The entire set of “The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America” will be available for $492.00. Urge every library you know to obtain one! Show the publisher the large size of the libertarian market! Furthermore, if you order the set before December, you will get a 15% discount – $418 for the set!

The individual books and their estimated prices follow:

William Bailie, Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist (1906), 182pp. $8.00. The only biography of any of the great giants of American individualist anarchism – by a follower.

Thomas H. Barber, Where We Are At (1950). 268pp. $11.00. A charming book, lashing out at American bureaucracy, and employing “economic determinism”, by a lovable old curmudgeon. Witty, hard-hitting.

Harry Elmer Barnes, Pearl Harbor After A Quarter Of A Century (1968). 138 pp. $7.00 The final story of Pearl, by the dean of American Revisionists. Reprinted from the final issue of Left and Right.

Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice: De-Bunking the War Guilt Myth (1928). 438 pp. $19.00. A delightful book, with Harry lashing out at all his enemies on World War I Revisionism. A treasure-trove, including the evisceration of war propaganda by America’s eminent historians during the War, by C. Hartley Grattan.

Harry Elmer Barnes, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets. 332 pp. $14.00. Harry Barnes was a great pamphleteer, and this collection includes all of Harry’s post-World War II Revisionist pamphlets, all of which were privately printed and were known only to a tiny “underground” of right-wing isolationists. The collection includes Barnes Blasting the Historical Blackout, a review-essay on A. J. P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War; The Chickens of the Interventionist Liberals Have Come Home to Roost: The Bitter Fruits of Globaloney; The Court Historians Versus Revisionism – a critique of Langer and Gleason, and of Feis, on the road to World War II; Rauch on Roosevelt, a critique of Basil Rauch; Revisionism and Brainwashing: A Survey of the War-Guilt Question in Germany After Two World Wars, which includes a discussion of the monumental revisionist work on 1939 by David L. Hoggan; Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books, an annotated bibliography dealing with World Wars I, II, and Cold; The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout (9th, final edition), an exciting blast, detailing the discrimination against revisionist literature by “objective” historians and reviewers; and Was Roosevelt Pushed Into War By Popular Demand in 1941? Must reading.

Louis Bromfield, A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), 344pp. $15.00. The last product of the “Old Right” – a plea for domestic liberty and foreign “isolationism” by the famous novelist. Attacks the Cold War from “the right”.

John W. Burgess, Recent Changes in American Constitutional Theory (1923). 130 pp. $7.00. Read this, if you want to know what real “strict constructionism” looks like. The eminent political scientist and constitutional lawyer claimed that both the draft and the income tax were unconstitutional.

Charles H. Carroll, Organisation of Debt Into Currency: And Other Papers. (1964). 468 pp. $20.00 Reprint of the collected essays of an ultra-hard money, 100% gold economist of the mid nineteenth century. From the old Volker Fund, Van Nostrand series.

Harold M. Fleming, Ten Thousand Commandments: A Story of the Antitrust Laws. (1951). 228pp. $10.00. Excellent critique of the antitrust system, and the way it promotes rather than combats “monopoly”, and restricts competition.

John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (1944). 284pp. $12.00. A brilliant work, analyzing the similarities between the political economies of fascist Italy, Germany, and the New Deal, and prophesying that the New Deal and its World War II would bring to the United States the permanent rule of the military, the garrison state, and the political economy of fascism. Flynn’s concluding sentence: “My only purpose is to sound a warning against the dark road upon which we have set our feet as we go marching to the salvation of the world and along which every step we now take leads us farther and farther from the things we want and the things that we cherish.”

George Harris, Inequality and Progress. (1897). 174pp. $7.00. An excellent and neglected work that stresses the importance and necessity for inequality. Particularly needed now in an age when fatuous egalitarianism has infected even the libertarian movement. Stresses the variety and individuality of man.

Individualist Anarchist Pamphlets. 140pp. $7.00. A collection of excellent, rare individualist anarchist pamphlets of late nineteenth century America. A great bargain. Includes: Henry Bool’s Apology for his Jeffersonian Anarchism, Lysander Spooner’s No Treason, Nos. 1 and 2 – from the great master of individualist anarchism and antistatism, the great critic of the Constitution; and Edwin C. Walker’s Communism and Conscience. A must.

Bruce W. Knight, How to Run a War (1936), 258pp. $11.00. A slashing, sardonic critique of war, especially America in World War I. With a new preface by Professor Knight.

Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (1943). 282pp. $12.00. A great individualist and rationalist, Rose Lane was the unsung heroine and inspiration for libertarians in the 1940’s and 50’s. A beautifully written, lilting prose-poem to freedom in human history. Rose Lane stopped writing for many years in protest against the self-employed social security tax, and she deserves the widest distribution. With a new introduction by Roger MacBride and a new forward by Robert LeFevre.

Flash! Because of the great interest in Mrs. Lane’s book, Arno Press will also print simultaneously an inexpensive paperback of the book. Available from Rampart College as well as Arno Press.

Left and Right: Selected Essays. 124pp. $7.00. A great bargain; this includes two rare pamphlets. One is the all-isolationist, all anti-Cold War issue of the right-wing individualist monthly Faith and Freedom, April, 1954 issue. This issue includes essays by Garet Garrett, Ernest T. Weir, and “Aubrey Herbert” (Murray N. Rothbard). The other selection is the now classic, and long out-of-print, first issue of the libertarian journal Left and Right 1965), containing articles by Murray N. Rothbard and Leonard P. Liggio.

James McGurrin, Bourke Cockran: A Free Lance in American Politics. (1948). 388pp. $17.00. Sympathetic biography of a leader of the Bourbon Democracy of the late nineteenth century: an aggressive champion of free trade, individual liberty, anti-imperialism, and opponent of the income tax.

H. L. Mencken and Robert R. La Monte, Men Versus the Man (1910). 260pp. $11.00. The only important work by Mencken as yet out of print, this features the scintillating debate between Mencken, individualist, libertarian, and sparkling wit, and a leading socialist of the period.

Zacariah Montgomery, comp. Poison Drops in the Federal Senate (1889). 146pp. $7.00. A blistering attack on the growth of compulsory attendance laws in the American school system.

Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State(1935). 220pp. $9.00. A great libertarian classic. No libertarian should be without this, one of the great works in libertarian political philosophy. Also anticipates Kolko’s views of big business with a hard-hitting Beardian analysis of the development of the American Constitution and government.

Marshall Olds, Analysis of the Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike (1922). 504pp. $21.00. One of the great and undeserved victories of organized liberalism was the Interchurch report on the steel strike of 1919, which won great sympathy, and paved the way for federal government pressure to force the steel industry into an 8-hour day. Here is the totally neglected other side of the picture, the comprehensive critique of the report from the point of view of the steel industry.

The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner

The only collection available . . . 34 rare and provocative works (1834-1886) in six volumes . . . With an extensive critical biography and individual introductions by Charles Shively . . . Bound in durable library cloth and printed on acid-free paper.

Send for free brochure listing other research editions, including The Collected Works of John Jay Chapman in 12 volumes, introductions by Melvin H. Bernstein.

Write to M & S Press, Box 311, Weston, Mass. 02193.

Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) was an intellectual activist — for 50 years not only probing; but vigorously prodding his government and society. Prolific, producing more than 30 separately published books, pamphlets, and broadsides (the existence of many not even known to the Library of Congress), Spooner is one of 19th century America’s most profound and coherent minds. While producing some of the finest constitutional arguments ever devised against slavery, Spooner concerned himself equally with the subtle subjugation of supposedly free citizens by a governmental system which he saw become increasingly restrictive of personal rights.

“There is no difference, in principle — but only in degree — between political and chattel slavery,” he declared in 1867. A nation which fought to free slaves should be prepared to fight to free the rest of its people — even if (as he suspected) this required the overthrow of the Constitution.

Lysander Spooner had an absolute genius for opposing the government; and his protests against governmental restraint were not limited to brilliant writings on slavery, the Constitution, the jury system, copyright practices, and the economics of our rapidly industrializing country. Spooner actually forced a reduction in postal rates — by setting up his own private mail company in competition with the U.S. Post Office — and at the same time scored important points for freedom of the press. Charles Shively’s biography, using hitherto unexamined Spooner papers and letters only recently deposited in the New York Historical Society, brings to light much in Spooner’s life that is important to 19th century American history including, for example, Spooner’s little known plan to force the release of John Brown after Harper’s Ferry — by kidnapping Governor Wise of Virginia — and Spooner’s own personal relations with such men as Brown and Gerrit Smith.

Lysander Spooner is remarkably prophetic of governmental interventions into personal and community life, and in his understanding of the psychological as well as the economic problems of industrialization and the dangerous pressures of conformity. These M & S Press volumes provide a rich and vital historical dimension for much of our own contemporary social and political protest.

CONTENTS

Volume I: Biography and Miscellaneous Writings

A. DEIST
Deist’s Immortality (1834)
Deist’s Reply (1836)

B. MAIL COMPANY
The Unconstitutionality of the Laws
. . . Prohibiting Private Mails (1844)
Who caused the Reduction? (1850)

C. RADICALISM & ANARCHISM
No Treason, No. 1 (1867)
No Treason, No. 2 (1867)
No Treason, No. 6 (1870)
Revolution (1880)
Letter to Bayard (1882)
Natural Law (1882)
Letter to Cleveland (1886)

Volume II: Legal Writings (I)
“To the Members of the Legis. of Mass.” (1835)
Spooner vs. M’Connell (1839)
Illegality of the Trial of Webster (1850)
Trial by Jury (1852)
Drew vs. Clark (1869)

Volume III: Legal Writings (II)
Law of Intellectual Property (1855)
Articles of Association of the Spooner
Copyright Co. (1863)
Letter to Scientists and Inventors (1884)

Volume IV: Anti-Slavery Writings
Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845-60)
Defence for Fugitive Slaves (1850)
Plan for the Abolition of Slavery (1858)
Address of the Free Constitutionalists (1860)
Letter to Sumner (1864)

Volume V: Economic Writings (I)
Constitutional Law Relative to Credit (1843)
Poverty (1846)
New System of Paper Currency (1861)
Our Mechanical Industry (1862)

Volume VI: Economic Writings (II)
Considerations for Bankers (1864)
A New Banking System (1873)
Our Financiers (1877)
Law of Prices (1877)
Gold and Silver (1878)
Universal Wealth (1879)

6 hardcover volumes•2400 pages•ISBN 087730-006-2•$140.00 per set

Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically (1926). 324pp. $14.00. The great work on the State, its history and its nature Indispensable for libertarians. Oppenheimer punctures completely the mystical “social contract” view of the State, and shows that it was born in violence and conquest, and continued on this course thereafter.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943). 302pp. $13.00. Another indispensable work for libertarians, a great and challenging work on political philosophy. Particularly important are Mrs. Paterson’s critique of the anti-trust laws, her defense of the gold standard, her superb dissection of progressive education (“Our Japanized Educational System”), and her devastating blast at the politics of liberal altruism (“The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”).

C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson, Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States. (1937). 292pp. $12.00. One of the best books on the 1929 depression, applying Mises-Hayek business cycle theory to the facts of the depression. Unfortunately has been totally neglected by economists and others.

Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds., Scientism and Values (1960). 290pp. $12.00. One of the best of the out-of-print Volker Fund series of books, embodying conservative and libertarian scholarship. This is a critique of dictatorial scientism in the social sciences. Includes articles by Richard M. Weaver, Pieter Geyl, Eliseo Vivas, Helmut Schoeck, Murray N. Rothbard, and others.

John W. Scoville, Labor Monopolies – Or Freedom (1946). 196pp. $8.00. One of the best, and most hard-hitting, books ever written on labor unionism. Includes an economic critique and a dissection of the habitual violence of unions. By a former economist for Chrysler Corporation.

John W. Scoville and Noel Sargent, comps., Fact and Fancy in the TNEC Monographs (1942). 830pp. $35.00. A massive, thorough, monograph-by-monograph critique of the TNEC monographs, the greatest single force for trust-busting during the New Deal. Totally neglected.

Carl Snyder, Capitalism the Creator: the Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society (1940). 492pp. $21.00. An excellent economic – and moral – defense of capitalism and its beneficial creative force in civilization. By the former economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Poor on money, however.

Society Without Government (1969-70). $10.00. The first hard-cover compilation of two works indispensable for libertarians: Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty, and Jarret B. Wollsteing, Society Without Coercion. Both answer the vital question: how could a libertarian society, without a State, provide police and judicial defense activities purely through the free market?

Lysander Spooner, Let’s Abolish Government. 418pp. $18.00. Absolutely indispensable. Here is a collection of the major works of the greatest individualist anarchist theorist of all time. Contains: An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard (1882), the magnificent No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority #6 (1870), and the brilliantly hard-hitting Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886).

Charles T. Sprading, ed., Liberty and the Great Libertarians: An Anthology on Liberty: A Hand-Book of Freedom. (1913). 546pp. $23.00. Another indispensable book for libertarians. The best libertarian anthology ever compiled, by an individualist anarchist follower of Spooner and Tucker. Contains articles by: Edmund Burke (his repudiated, anarchist book), Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, William Godwin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Josiah Warren, Max Stirner, Thoreau, Herbert Spencer, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Josiah Warren, Robert Ingersoll, Spooner, Tolstoy, Benjamin R. Tucker, William B. Greene, Auberon Herbert, and many, many others. Also an excellent introduction by Sprading. Don’t miss it!

William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883). 172pp. $7.00. A superb work, a great classic of political philosophy by this leading libertarian, individualist, and “Social Darwinist.” Great critique of liberal reformers and “uplifters.”

Frederick B. Tolles, George Logan of Philadelphia. (1953). 388pp. $17.00. Sympathetic biography of this leading individualist, pacifist, and Jeffersonian. Broke with Jefferson on Logan’s opposition to the war of 1812 against Britain. The “Logan Act” was designed to suppress his peacemaking activities.

Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism. (1893). 528pp. $22.00. The greatest single classic of individualist anarchism. A collection from Tucker’s magazine Liberty, featuring Tucker’s brilliant, lucid, logical, and withering critiques of any and all deviations from Tucker’s “plumb line”. Particularly good on the State and on land, weak on money and economic theory.

Hamilton Vreeland, Jr., Twilight of Individual Liberty (1944). 188pp. $8.00. Excellent work, detailing the areas in which the courts have weakened the constitutional defenses of individual liberty and have aggrandized government power.

What is Money? 106pp. $7.00. A compilation of two books, one modern, the other of the late nineteenth century, setting forth a libertarian analysis and prescription for money – in short, favoring the separation of money from the State. They are: Murray N. Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1963), and the totally neglected Isaiah W. Sylvester, Bullion Certificates: The Safest and Best Money Possible: The People’s National Currency (1884). Both available for the first time in hard cover.

Harold F. Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827-1905. (1934). 326pp. $14.00. Sympathetic biography by one of our leading economic historians of one of the great leaders of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberals in America. A Boston businessman, Atkinson was also a distinguished journalist, economist, champion of free trade and hard money, and vigorous battler against late-nineteenth century American imperialism.

Ambrose Pare Winston, Judicial Economics: The Doctrine of Monopoly as Set Forth by Judges of the U.S. Federal Courts in Suits under the Anti-Trust Laws. (1957). 194pp. $8.00. A devastating and totally neglected little book, in which economist Winston rigorously dissects the classic anti-trust cases, the ones in which the government supposedly had the best case against business, the cases “in restraint of trade.” Using the detailed court hearings for the first time, Winston shows the utter fallacy – legal, economic, and philosophical-behind the trust-busting in every instance.

Disestablish Public Education

by Leonard P. Liggio

One had to be struck by the vehemence with which Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (New York, Harper & Row, 1971) has been attacked. The review in the New York Times Book Review (July 11, 1971) by one of the educational establishment is an example. Why this violent reaction, one wondered, reading through the review? And then, the answer came. Illich’s advocacy of the free market in education is the bone in the throat that is choking the public educators. The reviewer says: “If the consumer approach has misled and cheated people in supermarkets (and particularly poor and uneducated people), why would any of the free market mechanisms so popular in radical circles work better in education?”

One cannot allow to pass un-noted the reviewer’s remark that “free market mechanisms” are “so popular in radical circles.” The historic conjunction of free market and radical when free market concepts were in their prime and really challenged the monopoly system, has been restored. After being long lost in the baggage of stand-pattism, the free market has been liberated as the result of the hard work of recent libertarian economists, philosophers, and historians, and has moved to the forefront as the only solution to the chaos of the monopoly system.

Illich begins by saying that “I had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.” He feels that the public school system is the paradigm of all the “bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state,” and that his basic approach to de-monopolizing education (ending its compulsory nature in all its aspects) is the answer for the rest of the corporate state’s bureaucracy. Illich’s solution is to de-finance these institutions – remove their tax support. Illich notes: “Justice William O. Douglas observed that ‘the only way to establish an institution is to finance it.’ The corollary is also true.” Illich wants to eliminate the tax support for the schools as well as health, welfare and one supposes American business in general. Illich contrasts right-wing (monopoly) institutions with left-wing (free market) institutions, showing the advantages of the un-tax supported, competitive approach to serving consumer wants:

“Right-wing institutions, as we can see clearly in the case of schools, both invite compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving similar results.

Toward, but not at, the left on the institutional spectrum, we can locate enterprises which compete with others in their own field, but have not begun notably to engage in advertising. Here we find hand laundries, small bakeries, hairdressers, and – to speak of professionals — some lawyers and music teachers. Characteristically left of center, then, are self-employed persons who have institutionalized their services but not their publicity. They acquire clients through their personal touch and the comparative quality of their services.”

Illich places public education near the extreme right of the spectrum: “they belong near the extreme of the institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums.” Illich presents an interesting contrast between science in a free market and science in the monopoly system:

“An even more valuable body of scientific objects and data may be withheld from general access – and even from qualified scientists – under the guise of national security. Until recently science was the one forum which functioned like an anarchist’s dream. Each man capable of doing research had more or less the same opportunity of access to its tools and to a hearing by the community of peers. Now bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing teams.”

Just as the role of the state has transformed science and deformed it, the role of the state has been to deform education and learning. Compulsion and public tax support are the common destructive elements. The right-wing or tax-supported approach – the current matter of government aid to Lockheed which developed from government contracts is instructive – with its twin of compulsion must be confronted.

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.”

Until that happy day when education is disestablished Illich is searching for methods of moving strongly away from the public education system. He has been influenced by the conversations and papers of members of the Chicago school of economists who advocate a program of tuition grants.

“Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice.”

The approach of the Chicago school of economists, in this as in so much else, requires two comments: first, they more than any other group address themselves to real issues and not imaginary constructs; and second, as they are not libertarians, their solutions fall far short of the answers which the free market offers. A tax credit approach, for instance, would be preferable. But, however much they may be holders of the truth, libertarians do not bring that truth to those such as Illich who are seeking it. While Chicagoans are here, there and everywhere, giving or attending seminars, libertarians retreat. How many libertarian scholars will be contributing to the seminar on “Alternatives in Education” next year at Illich’s Center for International Documentation in Cuernavaca. Mexico?

A Note On Revolution

BY R. A. CHILDS, JR.

“Revolution” has been defined, by all too many libertarians as well as by most other people, as simply massive acts of direct violence. But “revolution” is really the application of Aristotelian final casuality to the process of social and political change, and should not be confused with throwing bricks or any other random acts of violence. But what does this mean?

It means that revolution, in contradistinction to evolution as an approach to social and political change, is truly goal-directed, having as its end the ending of any current political-statist system, and the replacement of statism with a libertarian society. Final casuality is really not anything complex: it is the process of choosing and acting which results when the end one has established determines the means required to attain it. These means must be truly worthy of the end, or capable of attaining it, which means that they must be determined by reason, by thinking about the context in which one finds oneself and one’s political system, and deciding what would be the best possible way of attaining the end.

Does revolution involve violence? Not necessarily, but probably most likely it will, at least in its final stages. What the libertarian must focus on is that such violence must always be defensive or retaliatory violence, not invasive, aggressive violence. It may be necessary in the final stages of any revolution because there always tend to be those in the “ruling class” who will not simply quit using aggression and intimidation voluntarily, and whom people must defend themselves against, peacefully if possible, violently if not.

What I want to call special attention to here is the fact that revolution is not merely any concrete violence against, the state apparatus, the set of institutions and men who systematically use aggression to accomplish their ends. Indeed, in many not texts such violence will be truly counter-revolutionary and unproductive of the end of liberty. But violence should not therefore on that account alone be ruled out a priori as a means of dealing with the systematic coercion of the State.

To quote Murray N. Rothbard, in July of 1969 (“The Meaning of Revolution,” LIBERTARIAN FORUM): “Revolution is a mighty, complex, long-run process, a complicated movement with many vital parts and functions. It is the pamphleteer writing in his study, it is the journalist, the political club, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. It is all this and much more. Each person and group has its part to play in this great complex movement.”

What integrates all of these actions and functions? Very simply, the end of getting rid of the coercive apparatus of the State. If one believes in a “limited government,” then he must still admit that by his own standards what we have today is light-years from any such thing, and that therefore he too is in favor of getting rid of the coercive apparatus of the present State.

The point that I want to make, then, is a simple one. In answer to the oft-asked question of “when is it time for a revolution?” the real answer becomes, in view of the above: it is always time for revolution, whenever there is a State ruling over any people anywhere. Because, remember, revolution is not merely the acts of violence near the end of the road, when victory is almost won – it is each and every action which is taken to attain, the final end of the abolition of the State. The tactics and strategy will change from time to time and place to place, depending upon the concrete nature of the State which a movement is concerned with. And, finally, we should also be aware that there are such things as roundabout means of production, i.e. establishing certain pre-conditions for the final victory. If we ignore these points, then we run the risk of becoming irrelevant to the time and place we live in. If we remember them, then at least we have a chance for victory, for we shall understand the true meaning of what it is to advocate setting a revolution into motion.

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Recommended Reading

Psychology, Culture, and Standards.

There is never much to recommend in the New York Sunday Times Book Review, but the July 4 issue has a superb, slashing attack on the Esalen hokum and, by extension, modern culture generally. This is Donald Kaplan’s review of the new book, Here Comes Everybody, by William Schutz, founder of Esalen and the Encounter group “therapy.” In the course of his demolition of Schutz and the Encounter cult, Dr. Kaplan also makes a fine, wistful defense of intellectual standards and points up the evident decline of standards in our present culture. Kaplan concludes: In psychology, “the learned community that ultimately maintained intellectual standards is becoming less learned by leaps and bounds . . . By all that has ever been worth believing, a book like “Here Comes Everybody” should be the beginning of the end for the movement it mirrors. But at this moment I am persuaded by Professor Chargaff’s observation: ‘That in our days such pygmies throw such giant shadows only shows how late in the day it has become.’”

Contra Women’s Lib.

The counter-attack on the Women’s Lib pathology continues. James Lincoln Collier has a valuable anthropological critique, “Millett-Mailer Nuptials: The Anthropology of Sexism”, Village Voice, July 1. And Mary McCarthy, certainly a fiercely independent writer for three decades, scoffs at Women’s Lib as well. Miss McCarthy states that “I have more sympathy for American men than women”. She reports that French Women’s Lib is particularly exercised by wife-beating, but comments that “The dominance of American husbands by their wives is worse than a Saturday night beating. The Craig’s-wife type still exists. Even thought control of a husband is common in the United States. The whole business of the man in the office and the wife as the culture bearer gives an ineffable superiority to women.” And, on the current rejection of men by the Libbers: “To have a fatherless child is a terrible mistake and hard on the child. To bring up a child in a community of women is like a Greek satire.” Miss McCarthy might have added that large parts of our culture are becoming unconscious satire.

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 10

November, 1971

75¢

NIXON’S NEP

In our special September issue on the wage-price freeze (which received considerable attention throughout the country), we did not have a chance to examine the other, vitally important aspects of President Nixon’s New Economic Policy. To us, it is unaccountable that many conservatives and even libertarians reacted in this way to the Nixon economic package: “Well, of course we don’t like wage-price controls, but. . . the rest of the package is so good that the overall effect might be favorable.” For the rest of the package is almost as bad as the price controls, and is likely to have even more disastrous long-range effects.

I don’t speak of the piddling proposals for an investment tax credit, which would only return us to the Democratic policy, or the even more piddling proposals to reduce a deficit which will still constitute the largest two-year deficit in peacetime American history. For the critical remainder of the package is its international economic and monetary policy. In the international part of the NEP, President Nixon announced, single-handedly and dramatically, perhaps the most savage program of nationalistic economic warfare in our history. After decades of lauding our allies of the “free world”, Mr. Nixon turned suddenly and dealt them a vicious economic blow, a blow which changed the world economic picture overnight, and returned the world to the disastrous economic warfare of the 1930’s. The brutal assault on exports from efficient foreign competitors, particularly from the amazingly productive and thrifty Japanese, will shatter the structure of international trade and the international division of labor, and lead to pernicious political consequences. It is true that the proclaimed American “free trade” policy, from Cordell Hull onward, has always been far more solicitous for freedom for our exports than for freedom for exports from abroad. But the unilateral imposition of the 10% surcharge, coupled with going off gold and bludgeoning the Japanese into accepting stringent quotas on their exports of textiles, is a blatant reversion to economic nationalism, warfare, and autarchy. It is true that, for many years, American industry has been losing the competitive race in many areas, partly because so much capital and technological research have been diverted to unproductive military channels, partly because the increasingly inflated dollar has been overvalued. But attempting to cure this inefficiency by a reversion to blatant protectionism will not only injure the American and the foreign consumer in countless ways: in the long run it will not even aid American industry, or the deficit in the balance of payments.

Protectionism not only injures the American consumer directly, by using coercion to prevent him from buying the cheaper textiles or cameras or automobiles that he would like to buy. It also injures the consumer indirectly and even more intensively, by freezing labor, land, and capital resources in the increasingly inefficient industries, and thereby preventing them from moving into those industries that are more efficient and have a competitive advantage in selling at home and abroad. By this freeze, the efficient export industries are prevented from expanding, and thus these industries are hurt, along with the consumers who would benefit from the more efficient allocation of resources. But, as the 19th century libertarian economist Frederic Bastiat put it, the latter effect, however crucial, is “unseen”, whereas the direct aid to the inefficient and floundering textile, steel, and camera industries is visible and “seen.” And furthermore, of course, the foreign countries cannot be expected to take this brutal affront lying down forever. Already, Denmark has placed its own 10% surcharge on American exports, and we can expect American exports, and consumers everywhere, to suffer grievously from the general and accumulating breakdown in international trade. As Western Europe moves toward economic unity, we can expect ever stronger measures of retaliation from the disillusioned and understandably embittered nations of Europe. The tough, “hard-nosed” negotiating attitude of Secretary Connally, who seems to think that he is dealing with Mexican field hands on a Texas ranch, will of course only accelerate the disintegration of the world market.

Particularly disquieting politically is the attitude pervading the Administration toward Japan, which it is hardly an exaggeration to say verges on the war hysteria that developed in the 1930’s. We have to go back to George Orwell’s 1984, or to some of the imaginative writings of the Old Right revisionists, to catch the flavor of the anti-Japanese hysteria that has been sweeping the American government. For Orwell and the revisionist writers postulated that it is almost as if, every twenty years or so, the ruling insiders in the Establishment push a few buttons, and suddenly national “friends” become national “enemies” and vice versa, not only in the government but throughout the nation’s press and media. Thus, in the late 19th century, Germany was “good” and Russia “bad”; in the first decades of the 20th, however, Russia was “good” and Germany “bad”. After World War I, Germany was “good” again and Russia “bad”; in the mid-1930’s, Germany shifted to “bad” and Russia became “good”; and since World War II, Germany has been “good” again and Russia “bad.” Who knows when the next switch will occur? On the Asian front, in the early years of the twentieth century, Japan was “good” and China “bad”; and then, by the mid-1930’s, Japan became “bad” and China “good”; and, finally, after World War II, Japan became “good” again and China was “bad”. But now, another dramatic Asian reversal appears to be underway. At the same time that the Establishment is beginning to move toward a “China good” policy once again, Japan is swiftly becoming “bad”. We seem to be back in the atmosphere of 1937 once more. Japan, so recently a progressive and staunch bastion of the “free world”, is being referred to in the press once more as “aggressive”, expansionist, troublesome. A friend of ours who was until recently on the senior staff of the Council of Economic Advisors reports that, throughout the Administration, every time Japan sells another yard of textiles or another camera in the U.S., the anti-Japanese hysteria pervading our government rises another notch. As one cynical wag put it, it’s a good thing that Japan is unarmed, otherwise we would be provoking it into another Pearl Harbor.

So what was there about the Nixon package that could tempt some libertarians into partial approval? Ironically, it was Nixon’s going off gold, a step that did even more than the 10% surcharge in driving the world into a competitive policy of national economic warfare. The irony is particularly acute because for over twenty-five years, the small, unsung – and still unsung – band of “Austrian” economists: headed by Mises, Rueff, Heilperin, Hazlitt, and including your editor, warned day in and day out that the Bretton Woods system was headed for certain collapse. The irony is that for twenty-five years the Establishment economists, now so righteous in ditching Bretton Woods, pooh-poohed the Austrian warnings, and asserted that the system was graven in stone, that the dollar was an eternal rock, and could not be shattered. And now, though some libertarians have been slow to realize it, Bretton Woods has been ditched in the reverse of an Austrian direction, and toward even worse and more pernicious systems.

Some historical background: for generations before 1914, the world monetary system was roughly one of free trade, allied to and intertwined with a “classical” international gold standard. Every national currency was defined as a certain weight of gold, and therefore was, in effect, that weight. All paper currencies were convertible into gold, and, therefore, into each other, freely and without governmental restraint. Not only did this mean the monetary and therefore the virtual economic unification of the international economy. It also meant that the redeemability of paper currency into gold provided a vital check upon the inflation of paper currency by governments, and hence kept inflation and the business cycle within moderate bounds. (The fact that the gold standard was partly vitiated by central banking and fractional reserve banking only weakened but did not destroy the effectiveness of the world monetary order.)

World War I wrecked the international gold standard and the pieces were never put back together again. Every country financed the war effort by large-scale currency inflation, and every major country but the U.S. abandoned the gold standard, to go over into paper currencies governed by the fiat of the nation-State. During the 1920’s, the world moved, not back to a classical gold standard, but to currencies tied only nominally to gold, and actually to the British pound, which in turn was tied to the dollar, which remained the only currency clinging to the older gold standard. Britain, furthermore, insisted on returning to nominal gold at a highly overvalued par, overvalued in relation to the severe inflation of the pound during and after the War. The result was a chronic British deficit in the balance of payments, and inflation in the U.S. to alleviate that deficit. The overinflated currencies collapsed in the Great Depression, and every country, including the United States, went over to a world of fiat paper currencies, inflation, exchange control and blocked currencies, competing devaluations to stimulate one country’s exports and block the other fellow’s exports, competing protective tariffs, and a general breakdown of international trade which helped perpetuate and intensify the depression on a world scale. And no less an authority than Secretary of State Cordell Hull repeatedly testified that the economic warfare of the 1930’s was directly responsible for the outbreak of World War II.

One of the major American war aims was to reconstruct a new international monetary order from the shambles of the 1930’s. But, once again, it was not to be a classical gold standard, with its concomitant of free trade, laissez-faire, and avoidance of inflation. The new order, established by severe American pressure at Bretton Woods in 1944-45, was a recrudescence of the shaky and unsound system of the 1920’s, with two important differences: (a) the new order rested on the dollar, and not at all on the pound; and (b) no country, including the U.S., returned to a full gold standard, in which each currency was redeemable in gold. Instead, gold was re-established as redeemable only for dollar balances held by foreign central banks; American citizens were no longer to enjoy the gold hedge against inflation. American citizens were still prohibited from owning gold, as they had been since 1933, ostensibly for the duration of the bank crisis “emergency.” The dollar price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce, which had been the official price since 1934, and all other currencies were fixed in terms of dollars. Moreover, the other countries were allowed to fix their currencies in terms of their pre-war exchange rates, rates which did not reflect their considerable inflation. Hence, most foreign currencies were overvalued in terms of dollars, while dollars in turn were undervalued.

The world returned to an international monetary order, with roughly fixed exchange rates and a fair amount of interconvertibility of currencies. But foreign countries now held their reserves in dollars more than in gold, and the supply of dollars was in the hands of an ever-inflating American government. Thus, in the early post-war period overvalued foreign currencies suffered from a predictable “dollar shortage”, and the propaganda then arose that the U.S. had a “world responsibility” to supply dollars to these countries in foreign aid to “cure” their continuing and ever-present shortage. But around 1950, international economic conditions began inexorably to change. European – and Japanese – economies and currencies became sounder and relatively less inflated, helped by the advice of highly-placed Austrian and semi-Austrian economists: Wilhelm Ropke and Alfred Muller-Armack in Germany, Jacques Rueff in France, President Luigi Einaudi in Italy. Gradually, as Keynesianism took hold in the U.S. and lost credit abroad, the dollar became increasingly inflated, both absolutely and relatively to the continent of Europe. The dollar became increasingly overvalued, (a) in relation to such “hard” currencies as the West German mark, the French franc, the Swiss franc, and the Japanese yen, and (b) and equally important, overvalued in relation to gold at the frozen price of $35 an ounce. The continuing dollar inflation brought about an increasing overvaluation and a perpetual deficit in the U.S. balance of payments, made up by the piling up of dollar balances abroad, along with a continuing outflow of gold, bringing down American gold holdings from $22 billion to less than $10 billion.

The Austrian economists continually warned against the coming collapse of the system, and urged the end of dollar inflation as a cure to the deficits, along with the return to an international gold standard as a permanent check on inflation. The Austrians differed on the best path to return to gold; the soundest plan was that of Rueff and Heilperin for a drastic increase in the price of gold as part of the return; such an increase would cure the overvaluation of every inflated currency with respect to gold, and, by putting more gold behind every currency, facilitate a general return to the gold standard. The Mises-Hazlitt proposal for an initial floating of currencies to find the “free-market price” of gold ignored the basic fact that, on a truly free-market, there would be no independent national currencies, and that every currency, being only a different weight of gold, would automatically find its “exchange rates” fixed in relation to one another. In the deepest sense, to talk about a “free market” of dollars and francs is as absurd as calling for a “free market” between ounces and pounds: both are eternally fixed at a weight ratio of 16:1.

The Establishment met the challenge by moving in the opposite direction. Anxious in the long-run to destroy gold altogether as a monetary commodity so as to allow unlimited inflation and dictation of the money supply by governments, the world central banks first abandoned the vain attempt to keep gold at its undervalued $35 an ounce on the free market. Instead, the authorities, in the late 1960’s, destroyed the single gold price, and established a “two tier” gold price system, attempting to insulate the central bank price at $35 from the higher market price. Next, as gold flowed out and dollar balances piled up, even distinguished American economists – some of them “renegade” Austrians – devised the absurd theory of “benign neglect.” Let the Europeans sizzle, the theory went, they can do nothing else than pile up dollars. Dollars are anyway more important than gold; gold is an obsolete relic, and dollars are backed by the most productive economy in the world. Therefore, why worry about deficits? To reinforce the trend away from gold and toward inflatable paper, the world authorities then established an SDR system of paper units to supplement gold in American currency reserves.

But none of these expedients helped for long. By August, 1971, over $40 billion of dollar claims to gold had piled up in European hands, and Europeans expressed their unwillingness to continue subsidizing American dollar inflation by holding off on their right to redeem in gold. President Nixon was faced with a crisis run on the dollar, and met it by plunging the world back into the monetary and economic chaos of the 1930’s. “Benign neglect” was clearly no longer enough.

By cutting all ties with gold, furthermore, Nixon has gone over into totally fiat money; he has cut the last link, with an independent, market, commodity check upon inflation. Austrian economists like Rueff realized that, while the dollar may have been overvalued in relation to foreign currencies, going over to a floating rate is a cure worse than the disease: for it abandons the last, balance-of-payments, check upon American inflation. Before August 15, the American authorities at least had to keep a wary eye on the balance of payments deficit and the gold outflow, and therefore were at least partially restrained in their inflation of the money supply. Now, only falling exchange rates remain as a check, and this is a flimsy reed, especially since American export interests are whooping it up for devalued dollars which would bring them competitive advantages abroad.

What else could President Nixon have done? He could have adopted the Rueff plan: of a drastic increase in the price of gold, and a concomitant move toward restoration of the full international gold standard. But this of course is the last thing the Administration – and the entire economic Establishment – wants. Note, for example, how stubbornly Secretary Connally has resisted even the most feeble West European efforts to induce us to raise the price of gold by only a negligible amount. The reason is that the Establishment knows full well that a rise in the price of gold would bring gold back more strongly into the international scene. It would hinder the long-run aim of the Establishment to abandon gold altogether. Hence, no libertarian can look upon the abandonment of Bretton Woods for a far worse system as anything but an economic disaster.

Libertarian perception of the international monetary scene has been grievously distorted by the pernicious role of the Friedmanites of the Chicago School. For the Friedmanites have long advocated their pet solution for world money: the total abandonment of gold, and freely-fluctuating exchange rates between the various national fiat paper moneys. Hence, the Friedmanites have helped divert libertarian and conservative opinion away from gold and toward the absolute control of the monetary system by the nation-State, a State which invariably leans toward inflation. Hence, the misguided cheers of many libertarians for at least the international side of the NEP package. But, apart from the evils of abandoning commodity money and relying on absolute state control of money, the Friedmanites are unrealistic Utopians whistling in the dark. Even if freely fluctuating exchange rates were desirable (which I would not concede for a moment) it is absurd of the Friedmanites first to grant absolute monetary power to the State and then to call upon the State to leave exchange rates free to fluctuate. No government, possessed of the monetary power granted to it by the Friedmanites, will consent to leave exchange rates alone. Hence, the naivete of the cry of many Friedmanites and quasi-Friedmanites since August 15: “Hey, the governments are not allowing floating rates; instead they are instituting a ‘dirty float’, with exchange controls, interferences in convertibility, etc.” What did the Friedmanites expect? Will they ever stop putting their trust in Power?

Equally ludicrous was the expectation of the Friedmanites — and even some Austrians who should have known better — that now that the dollar has been severed from gold, the U.S. government will allow American citizens to own and sell gold. Again, the Friedmanites miss the point – that the Establishment is interested, not in maximizing economic freedom, even in distorted Friedmanite terms – but in abolishing gold altogether to pave the way for unchallenged fiat paper. If the government should allow gold, which they have so long proclaimed to be a “worthless”, Neanderthal “relic”, to be owned by American citizens, then the ever-present threat will be there for Americans to turn from increasingly worthless paper dollars to their own use of gold as a stable and sound currency. This is what many Americans, especially in gold-plentiful California, did during the disastrous greenback inflation of the Civil War. The outlawry of gold is a vital step on the road to unchecked government control of money and toward unchecked paper inflation.

And so President Nixon, in the international part of his NEP package, has plunged the world into a system far worse than the unfortunate Bretton Woods system that is now dead as a doornail. Our Caesar has plunged us back into the destructive world of the 1930’s, into a world of unchecked paper inflation, of exchange controls, economic warfare, accelerating protectionism, and breakup of the world market. He has plunged us, in short, into the precise international counterpart of the economic fascism at home. The package is, we must admit, consistent and of a piece: in both domestic and foreign economic policy, the aggrandizement of the nation-state, the crushing of the market economy, the perpetuation of inflation, the substitution of statism and conflict for the harmony and voluntarism of the free market. We are faced, in the economic sphere, with fascism in domestic policy and foreign, at home and abroad. And all this, mind you, in the name of “freedom”.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, those libertarians still bemused by the “good old Dick Nixon” syndrome, and who foolishly predicted that all controls would disappear after the 90 days, have one hopes, learned an instructive lesson. Phase II is almost here, and we are promised the first permanent peacetime controls since the unlamented, and still unconstitutional, NRA. Of course, not “permanent”, only for two, three . . . how many? years. Pervading the whole show is the stream of private and even quasi-public utterances assuring us that the President doesn’t “really” believe in the controls, and that he and his economic planners know that they won’t work. Rather than reassuring, all this tells us is the certain knowledge that the Administration has transcended mere economic ignorance and error, and is actively and cynically guilty of moral turpitude. In the meanwhile, the President’s rhetoric, as for example in his Phase II address of October 7, becomes increasingly Orwellian and collectivist.

Thus, the architect of international monetary chaos calls his program a “campaign to create a new monetary stability”; the creator of a new protectionism says that “this nation welcomes foreign competition.” The speech was studded with altruist-collectivist rhetoric, ominously reminiscent of the famous Nazi slogan: “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz.” (“The common good comes before the individual good” – the “common good”, of course, as interpreted by the rulers of the State apparatus.) Thus, the President spoke of his “call to put the public interest ahead of the special interest,” and to “put their country’s interest above their interest in fighting this battle.” Even more blatantly collectivist was the President’s egregious “What is best for all of us is best for each of us.” Whenever the government speaks of “sacrifices”, furthermore, it is time for the citizen to guard his pocket and to run for the hills; sure enough, the President called for willingness to “sacrifice for a long-term goal”. It is characteristic of such pleas, of course, that it is always “you and him sacrifice”; I have not seen any dramatic evidence lately of any great sacrifices incurred by President Nixon, Secretary Connally, or the rest of their coterie.

“Confident”, moreover, that the wage-price controls can be sustained “on a voluntary basis”, the President sternly warned that if any Americans should fail to cooperate with this system of “voluntary restraint”, the “Government must be and will be prepared to act against them”, and will “be backed by authority of law” to make its “decisions stick.” Thus, the President has given us a new and creative definition of the “voluntary” – that is, the “voluntary” backed by a hefty measure of coercion. Challenged by libertarian questioners in a debate on the NEP with your editor in Washington on October 19, Dr. Herbert Stein, quasi-Friedmanite member of the Council of Economic Advisers and principal architect of Phase II, seriously replied – after a spell of being befuddled by the question – that the program is indeed voluntary, “just as voluntary as taxes.” A wave of sardonic libertarian laughter greeted Stein’s remark, at which point I could not refrain from pointing out that for the first time that night I whole-heartedly agreed with a statement by Dr. Stein.

In fact, Stein’s open cynicism is “indicative of all too much the criticism of Friedman himself and many of his disciples has been strangely muted. Thus, Stein, commenting on my charge that the controls won’t work in checking inflation, really agreed, and added, in effect, “so why worry about them?” In short, since the controls won’t work, they are simply icing on the cake, or “cosmetic” in Friedman’s words, and will therefore eventually be repealed. There is no recognition here of the economic harm that will be wrought, the distortions, black markets, declines in quality, as well as the political harm in foisting a system of fascistic controls on the public – not to speak of the immorality of a demagogic appeal to the public in the razzle-dazzle showmanship of the NEP. Furthermore, the smug view that simply because a policy won’t work means that it will shortly disappear ignores the political dynamics. The President, for example, is trying to carry water on both shoulders by imposing controls, and yet by keeping a minimal bureaucracy for enforcement and for making the almost infinite number of price and wage decisions that make up the economy from day to day. After the controls fail, then, the Democrats will inevitably call for a wider bureaucracy and for more stringent enforcement, and the economic disaster can be prolonged for many years.

The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner

The only collection available . . . 34 rare and provocative works (1834-1886) in six volumes . . . With an extensive critical biography and individual introductions by Charles Shively . . . Bound in durable library cloth and printed on acid-free paper.

Send for free brochure listing other research editions, including The Collected Works of John Jay Chapman in 12 volumes, introductions by Melvin H. Bernstein.

Write to M & S Press, Box 311, Weston, Mass. 02193.

Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) was an intellectual activist — for 50 years not only probing; but vigorously prodding his government and society. Prolific, producing more than 30 separately published books, pamphlets, and broadsides (the existence of many not even known to the Library of Congress), Spooner is one of 19th century America’s most profound and coherent minds. While producing some of the finest constitutional arguments ever devised against slavery, Spooner concerned himself equally with the subtle subjugation of supposedly free citizens by a governmental system which he saw become increasingly restrictive of personal rights.

“There is no difference, in principle — but only in degree — between political and chattel slavery,” he declared in 1867. A nation which fought to free slaves should be prepared to fight to free the rest of its people — even if (as he suspected) this required the overthrow of the Constitution.

Lysander Spooner had an absolute genius for opposing the government; and his protests against governmental restraint were not limited to brilliant writings on slavery, the Constitution, the jury system, copyright practices, and the economics of our rapidly industrializing country. Spooner actually forced a reduction in postal rates — by setting up his own private mail company in competition with the U.S. Post Office — and at the same time scored important points for freedom of the press. Charles Shively’s biography, using hitherto unexamined Spooner papers and letters only recently deposited in the New York Historical Society, brings to light much in Spooner’s life that is important to 19th century American history including, for example, Spooner’s little known plan to force the release of John Brown after Harper’s Ferry — by kidnapping Governor Wise of Virginia — and Spooner’s own personal relations with such men as Brown and Gerrit Smith.

Lysander Spooner is remarkably prophetic of governmental interventions into personal and community life, and in his understanding of the psychological as well as the economic problems of industrialization and the dangerous pressures of conformity. These M & S Press volumes provide a rich and vital historical dimension for much of our own contemporary social and political protest.

CONTENTS

Volume I: Biography and Miscellaneous Writings

A. DEIST
Deist’s Immortality (1834)
Deist’s Reply (1836)

B. MAIL COMPANY
The Unconstitutionality of the Laws
. . . Prohibiting Private Mails (1844)
Who caused the Reduction? (1850)

C. RADICALISM & ANARCHISM
No Treason, No. 1 (1867)
No Treason, No. 2 (1867)
No Treason, No. 6 (1870)
Revolution (1880)
Letter to Bayard (1882)
Natural Law (1882)
Letter to Cleveland (1886)

Volume II: Legal Writings (I)
“To the Members of the Legis. of Mass.” (1835)
Spooner vs. M’Connell (1839)
Illegality of the Trial of Webster (1850)
Trial by Jury (1852)
Drew vs. Clark (I860)

Volume III: Legal Writings (II)
Law of Intellectual Property (1855)
Articles of Association of the Spooner
Copyright Co. (1863)
Letter to Scientists and Inventors (1884)

Volume IV: Anti-Slavery Writings
Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845-60)
Defence for Fugitive Slaves (1850)
Plan for the Abolition of Slavery (1858)
Address of the Free Constitutionalists (1860)
Letter to Sumner (1864)

Volume V: Economic Writings (I)
Constitutional Law Relative to Credit (1843)
Poverty (1846)
New System of Paper Currency (1861)
Our Mechanical Industry (1862)

Volume VI: Economic Writings (II)
Considerations for Bankers (1864)
A New Banking System (1873)
Our Financiers (1877)
Law of Prices (1877)
Gold and Silver (1878)
Universal Wealth (1879)

6 hardcover volumes•2400 pages ISBN 087730-006-2•$140.00 per set

All this is reminiscent of the time when he, and numerous other economists, ranging from the Austrians through the Chicagoites to the Democrats and New Dealers, participated in a conference on inflation and price controls during the last control period, in the Korean War. After Austrian Henry Hazlitt had attacked price controls for causing a meat famine, Friedman made a comment which frankly put him “in between” Hazlitt and the defenders of controls. Friedman of the Friedmanite response to the wage-price controls, for said: “I think the real argument against price control is precisely that it produces this illusion of famine when there is none.” (A. Director, ed., Defense, Controls, and Inflation, University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 243.) In short, while price controls do not work, they have no harmful effects either – an ironic twist to those who suffered from the meat famine of 1946 under the OPA.

Just as this issue was about to go to press, Milton Friedman has to some extent redeemed himself by writing a two-part critique of the controls in the New York Times Op-Ed page of October 28 and 29, “Morality and Controls.” Particularly in the latter article, Friedman at last took a strong stand on the immorality and on the dictatorial nature of the government’s presuming to outlaw voluntary price and wage agreements between buyer and seller, employer and worker. It was a bit late in the day, but we are glad that Friedman finally saw the light.

There is a sense, of course, in which Phase II rests, even for short-term success, not on the “voluntary” consent, but on the support of the great majority of the public. For lacking a large bureaucracy, enforcement will have to be placed largely in the hands of the public. And that is why libertarians have a unique opportunity to help wreck the controls earlier than otherwise: for it is up to us to raise the banner of opposition, to educate the public on the unworkability and the evils of the New Economic Policy. We have an historic responsibility; we can strike a blow for freedom far beyond what seems likely from our small numbers. By merely pricking the bubble of the bemused national consensus, we can help restore sanity and liberty to the nation.

We Fight The Freeze

Unfortunately – since it reflects a massive default by conservatives, businessmen, and economists – the task of openly and resolutely battling the wage-price freeze has fallen to the libertarian movement. We have, however, risen to the occasion.

In this struggle, the lead has been taken by your editor. In addition to the widely noted special issue of the Lib. Forum in September, which generated a need for a massive reprinting, Murray Rothbard denounced the freeze as “fascism” in the New York Times Op-Ed page of September 4, in a lead article called “The President’s Economic Betrayal.” There was the aforementioned debate in Washington with Herbert Stein on October 19, parts of which were carried on CBS-TV and which was noted for strong audience opposition to the freeze in the Wall Street Journal of Oct. 22. In addition, Rothbard opposed the freeze on the Lee Leonard TV Show (Channel 5), and on radio stations WNYC, and WBAI-FM, there inaugurating a monthly libertarian series on that station. Furthermore, a lengthy interview with Rothbard on the freeze appeared in the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News Global of Aug. 22, entitled Is This the Death of the Free Market? The sympathetic interview appeared on the initiative of libertarian reporter Peter Blake. The Times Op-Ed article stimulated the New York Sunday News (Brooklyn) to do an interview with Rothbard on October 17, neatly titled Laissez Faire Called Fairest System of All.

The most massive organized libertarian effort against the controls was a full-page ad that appeared in the Sunday Washington Post of Oct. 10. Drawn up largely by Rothbard and James Davidson, executive director of the National Taxpayers Union, the ad was submitted by the newly-formed Committee to Restore Freedom, organized by the NTU. Denouncing the controls as tyranny as well as being unworkable, the ad pointed out that the price inflation is caused by monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve System, and called on everyone to “do his part to see to it that wage-price controls are made unenforceable.” All libertarians are urged to send their names and their contributions for further ads and television appearances to the Committee to Restore Freedom, which can be reached at 319 5th St., S. E. Washington, D.C. 20003.

The list of signers of the CRF ad constitute a veritable roll-call of honor in these dark days. Among economists they include: Henry Hazlitt; Dr. Hans Sennholz, Chairman of the Economics Dept., Grove City College; Dr. D. T. Armentano, Economics Dept., Hartford University; Dr. John Snare; Dr. H. E. French, III; Dr. Laurence Moss, Economics Dept., University of Virginia; Colonel E. C. Harwood, head of the American Institute for Economic Research; and in a sense our prize catch, Dr. Sam Peltzman, Economics Dept., UCLA and until recently a senior staff economist of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Businessmen who signed the ad should be particularly honored, defying as they did not only the general run of business opinion but also risking possible retaliation against their businesses by the federal control bureaucracy. Businessmen signers included: Charles Koch, head of Koch Industries; Robert D. Love, head of the Love Box Co.; and John L. D. Frazier; all of Wichita, Kansas; William L. Law, head of Cudahy Tanning Co. of Cudahy, Wisc.; William Grede, head of Grede Foundries, Milwaukee, Wisc.; Frank Bond, head of Holiday Universal of Baltimore; Charles A. Pillsbury, of the Pillsbury family of Minneapolis; Henry J. Hohenstein of Creative Equity Corp.; Mrs. Fabiola C. Moorman and Leonard P. Cassidy, of Quincy, Ill.; George E. Judd, head of Judd & Detweiler; Alvin M. Benesch, of AIM Enterprises, Washington, D. C; and John Zeigler, head of John Zeigler, Inc. of New York City.

Other libertarian leaders who signed the ad included: Robert D. Kephart, publisher of Human Events; Stephen J. Ganslen, of Human Events; Edward Nash, head of Nash Publishing Co., Los Angeles; George Pearson, of Wichita, Kan.; Jarret B. Wollstein of SIL, and editor of the Individualist; Roy A. Childs, Jr. and James A. Webb of the Individualist and SIL; Phillip Abbott Luce; Gary Greenberg, head of the New York Libertarian Association; A. Ernest Fitzgerald, formerly of the Dept. of Defense and now head of the National Taxpayers Union; Leonard P. Liggio of the History Dept. of City College, CUNY; C. Merton Tyrrell; and attorney David J. Mandel of New York City.

One constructive thing that libertarians can do is to place this ad in local newspapers around the country. Already, Charles Koch is in the process of placing the ad in the Wichita, Kansas press, and young libertarian lawyer Butler Shaffer is placing it in the Omaha, Nebraska papers.

We have had strong differences in the past with objectivist commentator Jeffrey St. John, but St. John rose nobly to the occasion: delivering a moving tribute to Professor Ludwig von Mises on his 90th birthday, September 29, over CBS-Radio Spectrum. In the course of his tribute, St. John mentioned that a group of disciples of Professor. Mises has single-handedly rallied to battle the wage-price controls, and to place the ad in the Washington Post. St. John referred to the wage-price freeze as Nixon’s Mein Kampf.

Other trenchant attacks on the controls have now begun to appear: Henry Hazlitt in Human Events (Sept. 4); Davis Keeler in his Research Review (Sept. 20) (The review is published monthly by the Economic Research Corp., P.O. Box 365, Barrington, Ill. 60010); and Frank S. Meyer in a critique of Phase II in National Review (Nov. 5). Also doing good work against the freeze have been the Research Reports of the American Institute for Economic Research of Great Barrington, Mass., and the magazine Cointact in Dennison, Ohio. I am also informed that the Birch Society has been attacking the wage-price controls as fascism.

In sum, libertarians have acquitted themselves well in quickly and strongly reacting to the New Economic Policy. As the bloom falls off the rose – and there are increasing signs of disenchantment among business and the public as the freeze is beginning to fall apart – hopefully the public will begin to turn to libertarians for politico-economic leadership.

Confession — Pavlovian Style

BY Lucille E. Moran

Before quizzing individual witnesses or suspects, every police officer from village constable to FBI agent, including those of intermediate jurisdiction, such as city cops and county sheriffs, utters the assurances of the Miranda warning.

Even Revenue agents piously intone the Miranda options in face-to-face interviews with witnesses or suspects. But, in their instance, the recitation is MEANINGLESS, when they say:

“Under the Constitution of the United States you have the right to refuse to answer any questions or make any statements that may tend to incriminate you under the laws of the United States. However, anything you say or any evidence which you produce may be used against you in any proceeding which may hereafter be undertaken by the United States. Do you fully understand this?”

While other statist investigators seeking leads, information and evidence on which prosecutors can build cases, arrange to immunize those who agree to perform as State Witnesses, revenuers usually start off with such a whopping advantage over their marks that they tend to believe no need for similar amnesties exists for the kind of people they pursue.

Their activities begin where most other detective work leaves off. They start with a confession signed and submitted by their prey and work backwards. The confession they hold is known as a Tax Return Form.

This wondrous state of affairs arises from an easy device so simple and obvious it is overlooked by the guileless and unwary it aims to entrap: The MIRANDA options are slyly omitted from where they rightfully belong-ON TAX RETURN FORMS.

The whole income tax stratagem has survived to date by wilfully mistiming the announcement that what you confess on Tax Return Forms may be used against you. By the time revenuers get around to notifying the gullible of this fact, they are already attempting to shake them down on the basis of their signed confessions.

Revenue attorneys and Justice Department prosecutors (who do their pinch-hitting) promote the mendacity that in tax suits the accused and their star witness should be one and the same person.

Unfortunately, this falsity is similarly entertained by people who think of themselves as “tax-payers”.

But, of the two opposing parties perpetuating this fraud, the act of consent by members of the body politic is the more grievous. For it has encouraged the opposition to practice the misconception that in cases concerning tax collections the immunities from prosecution, penalties and punishment, routinely afforded State witnesses, may be suspended and the law of this land still observed.

The error committed by timid souls who file returns and accept the label “tax-payers” (as if it indicated a fixed status or political class) might have the mortal effect of a complete forfeiture of their rights to the Enemy consistent with the legal maxim “volenti non fit injuria” (if you consent to a wrong, you can’t claim to be injured by it) – except for certain inadvertencies that gained emphasis during the past decade.

The most significant took form as a suddenly fastidious concern by members of the entrenched bench-bar to protect persons accused of offenses against Natural Law from self-incrimination – which, of course, is itself a far more serious breach of Natural Law. What we know as Fifth Amendment securities are restraints on the eternal temptation of Inquisitors to coerce people into acting as witnesses against themselves, under threat of prosecution, penalty or punishment. The ‘Fifth’ consistent with Natural Law politics, thereby prohibits under any legalistic pretext, circumstances by which people could be called to an accounting by accusing them of that old favorite of tyrants: CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE.

Reciting the Miranda options to punks and hoods suspected of pulling jobs or being material witnesses thereto, amounts to carrying coals to Newcastle. They’ve been around enough to know they aren’t obliged to trade their secrets for NOTHING.

They demand and get something in return. Before consenting to supply information expected of State witnesses and informants, experienced hoods exact their price in the immunities they are due. Having pegged the opposition’s modus operandi, they jolly well know their adversary can’t proceed into prosecution without the information and evidence they have to barter.

No one need grandstand advisements to cons and felons to avoid the mistake of relinquishing their right to claim injury by going along with statist treacheries. They already know who needs whom most. And, that self-confession is violative of Natural Law unless it has a return, at least in absolutions, if not always in money, from those who rely on receiving their statements.

Can you imagine the hue and cry from “sharing” Liberals were legislation enacted making it a crime for punks and felons to refuse, on the one hand, to supply statists the information needed to prosecute them; or for making confessions on the other, that statists don’t believe are quite up to snuff? The opposition might have to set up a separate court system along the lines of Star Chamber devoted exclusively to handling such Crimes against the State.

Yet, the adversary has done JUST THAT and successfully hooked reputable persons of irresolute character into going along with the tax stratagem. Revenuers dispose of most cases of resistance through the dummy ‘Tax Court of the United States’, which isn’t a court at all, but a deliberately misnamed executive chamber. It is operated by Treasury Department employees for quietly disposing of matters involving revenue collection from their view — and property rights and entitlements from yours – without jury-trial. A handful are tried by Justice Department prosecutors in United States District Courts in hopes of busting people as “criminals” as object lessons to others that don’t think of themselves as fixed in some class called “tax-payers”.

Although the first line of the CODE OF ETHICS subscribed to by Internal Revenue employees admits that the act of informing against one’s self, or anyone else for that matter, can’t be made compulsory, by the following language, “The Federal system of taxation is based on voluntary compliance by the people of the United States”, (emphasis mine) revenuers and Justice Department dudes depend heavily on making the tax scheme seem involuntary and mandatory to trusting souls, who being unwise to the ways of the world are susceptible to programs for conditioning their responses so they will react predictably.

These worthies rush to file an annual confession of their activities, as if it were their Easter duty, with a display of signal responses comparable to Pavlov’s dogs failing to obey their instinct to bite when their food is withdrawn.

Evading publication of the Miranda options on Tax Return Forms is the first deception used to sensitize the unwary in order to enlist their help and consent for a scuttling of Natural Law processes and safeguards.

The quarry is further conditioned by the statists’ covert withholding (oops) of the fact that the Federal system of taxation has always rested on the volition of individual members of the body politic. This operates to suppress the principle that – those who don’t care to contribute to their own undoing, DON’T HAVE TO – and, conversely, those who want to tell on themselves and/or make free will donations, CAN.

By thus joining these two failures to supply timely information, a majority is led into the misapprehension that within a Natural Law political system, they are still duty-bound to fling themselves into the role of victims of any ruse devised by the minds of cunning men.

Heartened by their ability to induce otherwise honorable members of the body politic into reacting with attitudes reflecting the misguided notions of Old World politics, the opposition has availed itself of the other side of this fantasy and enacted legislative frivolities on this basis.

Section 7203 of United States Code Chapter 26, the Internal Revenue Title, dramatizes the extent of delusions belabored by servants, acting solely on delegated authority, in presuming to exchange roles with their natural lords and masters in this land from “sea to shining sea.”

By the oddest coincidence, Section 7203 of Chapter 26, just happens to be entitled, “WILFUL FAILURE TO FILE RETURNS, SUPPLY INFORMATION OR PAY TAX”. And, its provisions attest to the objective of neutralizing Natural Law politics under pretensions of “law” and process in order to regiment people into classes and destroy the body politic:

“Any person required under this title to pay an estimated tax or tax, or required by this title or by regulations made under authority thereof to make a return, keep any records, or supply information, who wilfully fails to pay such estimated tax or tax; make such return, keep records, or supply such information at the time or times required by law (sic) or regulations, shall in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000.00 or imprisoned not more than 1 year, or both, together with the costs of prosecution.”

Consider the handsome reduction in salaries for FBI agents and money for paying off their informants, if similar accommodations could be written for FBI convenience. The savings in informants’ fees alone would be substantial, if the value attached to such necessary services by one Bureau spokesman is an index. He acknowledges that – “one good informant is worth 50 agents.”

If crooks and hoods would only cooperate enough to give a yearly accounting of themselves to their friendly, neighborhood FBI office, on or before a designated day of holy obligation, Federal agents could enjoy the fun of busting them for Crimes against the State. This would be a much easier task than trying to nail them for crimes against natural law without demolishing it, in the doing.

Then, shady characters could be prosecuted for wilful failure to file annual confessions, supply information, etc., and tried by jury in a United States District Court on charges of such disobedient deportment. With any luck at all, Justice Department prosecutors could show that the defendant lacked the proper demeanor of docility and refused to cooperate by failing to comply voluntarily with the rule of men. Then the culprit would be convicted, locked up and federal coffers would ring just as merrily. He’d have to ante up the costs of his own prosecution, as well as a disobedience tax of not more than $10,000.

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In light of the foregoing, the Independent Bar Association uses, and advocates the use by Tax Rebels, of three techniques for check-mating the opposition with their own implements:

It places the burden on the other side by citing the first line of the CODE OF ETHICS subscribed to by Internal Revenue employees, about “voluntary compliance”; it reminds the adversary of its plan to hoodwink respectable members of the body politic into walking into Federalist traps by a wilful and calculated omission of the Miranda options from Tax Return Forms; and, at the first sign of revenuers’ interest in an individual’s business, it slaps them with a piece of certified mail containing an Independent Bar Association DEMAND FOR IMMUNITY FORM, which states in part, “Please further take notice, that this is only what every run-of-the-mill punk and hoodlum knows he can demand and get for providing Federalists with the information they need to proceed.

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LIBERTARIAN WIT

Review of Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand New York: Stein & Day. 192pp. $6.95

by The Old Curmudgeon

Humor is the key. The dividing line on the new Tuccille book is whether or not you have a sense of humor. And by humor I do not mean the ability to enjoy one-liners by a stand-up comic I mean socio-political wit and satire. In any age, this sort of a sense of humor is in all too short supply. In the present age, this high sense of wit and satire has disappeared almost to a vanishing point. We are surrounded by belligerent and humorless fanatics, blighted souls who believe that in order to be “serious about your values”, wit and humor must be tossed into the discard. And, sad to say, the libertarian movement is scarcely a conspicuous exception to this miasma, to say the least. It is not just that wit and satire are great joys in themselves, a part of the happy and joyous affirmation of life and its values that should be enjoyed by everyone. It is also that a sense of humor lends one a rational perspective, keeps one in tune with reality and what is generally known as “common sense.” It is impossible to conceive of people blessed with a sense of humor, for example, howling that the titles “Mrs.” and “Miss” must be purged from the language, or coming to the view that the practice of bestiality is a rational moral obligation.

What the libertarian movement needs most is a bracing dose of wit and satire, and this is precisely what Tuccille offers in his new book. If you have a sense of humor, you’ll find it consistently hilarious; if you don’t, you’ll hate it. If you don’t, then take a few Miltowns first, but read it anyway. It will do you good.

Already the carping has begun. “There are a whole host of factual errors in the book.” This criticism misses the whole point of the book. Tuccille not and does not claim to be a scholarly historian; he is a novelist, and his portrayal of the persons and events in the libertarian movement is a novelist’s satiric and hilarious reconstruction; it is not the literal truth but the novelist’s truth, the keen perception of the essence of the movement by reconstructing events through Tuccille’s vivid and satiric imagination. It is novelized non-fiction, somewhere in between the witty and more novelistic political novels of Roger Peyrefitte and the personal journalism of Jimmy Breslin. By presenting poetic truth it captures the spirit of our often kooky movement far better than a sober-sided and scholarly history could do. The book is already a best-seller, so . . . relax and enjoy it.

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME III, NO. 11

December, 1971

75¢

The UN And The War

As we write, the UN has sat down to thrash over the new war between India and Pakistan, and anguished cries are being raised about the unfortunate “ineffectually” of the United Nations. The anguish is sadly misplaced. For the real points about the UN is that it is only tolerable so long as it remains ineffectual.

For the whole concept of the United Nations is mischievous. First, because underneath the UN lurks the possible danger of a genuine world government, that world government that used to be the rallying cry for all manner of well-meaning liberals. Give us a world government, give us “One World”, and there will be nowhere on the planet to escape its tyranny. At least nowadays, we can shop around from one government to the next, and escape from a site of greater tyranny to a lesser-and our retreatists can at least dream of setting up their own private and stateless islands. But come a world government, and these options will be rudely taken from us.

Happily, the dream of world government remains a misty and far-off ideal, smashed on the rock of Great Power hostility. But a grave danger remains, the highly dangerous principle that lies at the heart of the UN philosophy. This principle is the New Deal-Wilsonian concept of “collective security against aggression,” the siren song under which two World Wars and a Cold War have been fought in our century. The “collective security” principle postulates that in every war there is a clear-cut, easily discernible, “aggressor.” Usually the “aggressor” is simple-mindedly branded as the first State that crosses another State’s borders with troops. The “collective security” principle holds that all the nations of the world are then duty-bound to get together to use force majeure against the “aggressor”, and to defeat his evil designs. In practice, in our century, the United States has taken upon itself the “collective security” role, the White Knight in shining armor that sets out to defend the entire world against the Bad Dragon of aggression.

The fallacies and dangers in this doctrine abound at every hand. The first problem is the simplistic definition of “aggression.” The analogy, usually implicit but sometimes expressly held, is always taken from aggression by one individual upon another. If Smith is seen to be jumping on and stealing a watch from Jones, then Smith can easily be labelled the “aggressor”, and police may be called upon to defend Jones and apprehend the criminal for return of the loot. But while we might be able to say easily that Jones deserved to have the watch and that therefore Smith was an aggressor, the same can scarcely be said for State X which has been invaded by State Y. For to call State Y an “aggressor” per se must mean that the present territorial boundaries of State X are somehow morally and rightfully its own, in the same way that Jones’ watch is rightfully his own. But since national territories have invariably been acquired by previous aggression rather than by voluntary social contract, to leap automatically to the defense of the invaded State is an absurdity. On what moral grounds are we to cry “Halt” and thereby ratify every aggression previous to, say, December 1971 as legitimate and moral?

To turn the analogy around, suppose that on deeper investigation we find that Smith was not stealing Jones’ watch, but simply catching Jones who had previously stolen Smith’s watch, and that therefore Smith’s seeming act of “aggression” was really an act of self-defense? This is certainly possible among individuals, and indeed often happens. But how then can we justify an automatic ganging up on State Y which might be retrieving territory previously grabbed by State X? Furthermore, since all States are aggressors anyway against their own population, even the most aggrieved State can never, for libertarians, aspire to the simple status of innocent victim, as say Jones may have been when set upon by Smith. No State, in fact, is worth the extra State aggression upon their subjects that will be involved in every State’s ganging up on the “aggressor” in the collective-security mystique.

In the collective security myth, then, all States are supposed to join against the aggressor in the same spirit as a policeman against an individual criminal. Hence, the absurd American use of the term “police action” rather than “war” to characterize our imbroglio in Korea in the early 1950’s.

Furthermore, there is no way to prevent the ganging up of collective security from being a league of States dedicated to defending the status quo, no matter how pernicious, by coercion. The League of Nations or United Nations then necessarily becomes a gang of States trying to preserve their territories and privileges by force against the newer nations that are trying to win their place in the sun, or against aggrieved States trying to recover some of their national territory. Moreover, the ganging up insures that any war, anywhere in the globe, no matter how trivial, will be maximized into a world-wide conflict. Collective security then becomes a method for the global aggrandizement of dispute and conflict, so that all peoples everywhere get drawn into the net of warfare and killing. In these days of brutal weapons of mass destruction, in our age when warfare rests on the mass murder of innocent civilians, the globalizing of conflict via collective security is a monstrous death trap for the peoples of the world. The sooner the United Nations, or any other scheme of collective security, disappears, the safer shall all of us be.

As for the United States government, ever since the be-knighted Woodrow Wilson (the self-righteous prig whom H. L. Mencken dubbed “The Archangel Woodrow”), we have been the world’s number one champion of the status quo. Therefore, in the complex world of foreign affairs, there is a good rule of thumb for the libertarian: find out the stand of the Untied States, and it will be the wrong one. The American genius for taking the wrong side is unfailing.

Such has been the case in the current war on the Indian subcontinent. To speak of the “territorial integrity” of Pakistan – or India, too, for that matter – is a grisly joke. Neither country is a “nation” in any sense; both are disparate congeries of clashing ethnic, cultural, racial, and linguistic groups. Both “nations” are creatures carved out by British imperialism, Britain’s last bitter legacy to the conquered nations of the subcontinent. But of these injustices, the worst and most glaring is the situation in East Pakistan (East Bengal). As we pointed out in our May, 1971 issue (“For Bengal”), the Punjabis of West Pakistan have, since the inception of this absurdly divided State, been exploiting and ruling over the far more productive Bengalis of the East. Last Spring, the Bengali crisis came to a head when the ruling oligarchy of Punjab, defeated in an election, suspended Parliament and arrested the Bengali leadership. This was the final straw that provoked the Bengali drive for autonomy and home rule into a determined movement for independence, for “Bangla Desh” (Bengal Nation). The Punjabis of the West responded by wielding the Pakistani army (totally Western) as an instrument of repression, mass torture, and literal genocide against the Bengali population, especially against the hated Hindu minority. As in all forms of counter-revolution, and counter-guerrilla warfare, genocide against the mass of the population was made necessary by the fact that the entire population of Bengal are opposed to the Punjabi oppressors.

Here, in Bengal, there is no clique of generals, no Communist question, to cloud the issue, as there is in Indochina; here is simply a nation of Bengalis trying to throw off an imperial Punjabi yoke. And yet, once more, the United States takes the Pakistani side; the U.S.’s deep yearnings for stability and order – for the status quo — and its military alliances with Pakistan, clearly come before any considerations of justice for the Bengali people.

India could have continued to serve as a base for Bengali guerrilla war and as a haven for the mass of Bengali refugees – already the staggering total of over 9 million. But India was forced to move quickly – not only from overwhelming sympathy for its Bengali brethren (West Bengal is part of India), but also because the flood of refugees has created an enormous economic problem in West Bengal, a state already impoverished and over-populated. For the inflow of refugees has already greatly lowered the West Bengali wage rate and driven up the price of food and other necessities; to return the refugees to their homes without delay, India felt forced to strike quickly. Naturally, the United States, defending the status quo and true to the fetish of collective security and “aggression”, leaped in to try to use the UN as a club for forcing India to suspend hostilities. (With China and Russia bitterly on opposing sides, our knee-jerk anti-Communists must feel puzzled about what side to take.) Fortunately, it looks as if the Russian veto will bar UN coercion; but if not for this happenstance, the nations of the world would have been mobilized to fasten the chains upon the people of Bengal. But this was a fortuitous accident. It is high time that we cease to rely on some Great Power veto, and that we ditch the collective security myth altogether; it is high time to revive the grand old “isolationist” slogan: that we withdraw from the United Nations.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” — Thomas Paine.

Mises Festschrift

The Institute for Humane Studies (1134 Crane St., Menlo Park, Calif. 94025) is to be commended for its noble work in organizing and publishing a handsome two-volume festschrift in honor of the 90th birthday of the beloved Grand Old Man of economics, social philosophy, and laissez-faire, Ludwig von Mises. The book, Toward Liberty, is beautifully bound, contains the imprint of Mises’ signature, and includes contributions from 67 members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of free-market oriented economists and intellectuals. The contributions are photographed from the typescripts. A recent photograph of our Nestor graces the front of the book.

The most important contribution of this volume is the fact that it exists, embodying as it does a small portion of the debt and the honor that all of us owe to Professor von Mises; the book will endure as a living testament to the esteem in which all of us hold our lieber meister.

The contents themselves are, as is inevitable in this kind of volume, a mixed bag. Some articles hastily rephrase the author’s well-known themes; many others set forth in a kind of primer fashion the functions of the market economy. Other articles are unfortunately written as if Mises’ great body of work never existed: their content is either non or even implicitly anti-Misesian. There are, however, when all this said, an unusually large number of articles that contribute important and original material, and within the Misesian framework.

Let us review the outstanding articles, taking them in order of their appearance in Toward Liberty. (Here I must note my lack of competence in assessing the twelve articles written in a foreign language.) Professor George A. Duncan of the University of Dublin contributes an excellent, hard-hitting critique of modern “growth economics”, “Growth Delusions.” In the course of the article, Professor Duncan provides a trenchant critique of modern mathematical economics. Professor Sven Rydenfelt of the University of Lund, in his “Rent Control in Sweden”, outlines the unfortunate consequences of rent control in creating a shortage of housing; the article is particularly welcome because historical and illustrative studies of the effects of rent control are almost non-existent.

Professor William Hutt of the University of Dallas provides us with the latest chapter in the unique and continuing saga of his one-man crusade against Keynesian economics (“Reflections on the Keynesian Episode.”) Professor Ludwig M. Lachmann of the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, one of the world’s most subtle and high-powered members of the “Austrian School” of economics, provides a superb essay which one might wish were typical of all the contributions: an “Austrian” essay in subtle and sophisticated critique of currently orthodox “equilibrium theory.” I myself think that Lachmann puts a little too much emphasis on the attack on equilibrium, which after all does provide a useful tool in explaining the direction in which the market economy is always moving. In going further to assert that the market does not even move in a consistent equilibrating direction, Professor Lachmann is following in the Hayekian rather than in the straight Misesian path. But Lachmann’s “Ludwig von Mises and the Market Process” remains an outstanding contribution, and should send readers back to his totally-neglected book, Capital and Its Structure, an excellent contribution to the Austrian theory of capital and its intricate interrelations.

An article of comparable importance by another leading Austrian School economist is Professor Israel M. Kirzner’s “Entrepreneurship and the Market Approach to Development.” Professor Kirzner, of New York University, here develops his important battle on behalf of the Misesian, and in criticism of the dominant Schumpeterian, approach to the role of the entrepreneur. Kirzner points out that the entrepreneur is not the disrupter of equilibrium, the disturber of the peace as it were, but rather the person who leaps toward equilibrium by spotting maladjustments in the economy and taking steps to correct them. Kirzner also cogently points out the important political implications of this distinction for the underdeveloped countries.

In a rather hastily organized but fascinating article, Professor Simon Rottenberg of the University of Massachusetts provides a pro-market critique of the fashionable new book by the British socialist R. M. Titmuss, attacking the idea of the sale and purchase, rather than the free gift, of human blood. (“The Production and Exchange of Used Body Parts.”) And finally, Professor Hans F. Sennholz, of Grove City College, in one of his best articles in years, provides an excellent and devastating critique of the now-popular Friedmanite views on money. Sennholz’s “Chicago Monetary Tradition in the Light of Austrian Theory” is the best extant Austrian critique of Chicagoite monetarism.

Recommended Reading

Jerome Tuccille, Radical Libertarianism: A New Political Alternative (Harper & Row, paper, $1.25). Jerry Tuccille’s first book, still the best introduction to libertarianism and the libertarian movement, had the misfortune of coming out (1970) just too early for the boom in libertarian publicity in the spring of this year. Now it is out in inexpensive paperback, and suitable for being spread throughout the land by every “missionary” for libertarianism. Buy It! Push it!

Broaden Talks! The monthly magazine Reason (Box 6151, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93111) has an excellent special October issue ($1.25), containing a reprint of the important Sennholz-Austrian critique of Friedmanite monetarism. It also features a lengthy, fascinating interview with Nathaniel Branden, in which Branden for the first time in print reveals much of the true inner nature of the upper strata of the Ayn Rand cult. Those of us who have been personally familiar with the Randian cult can endorse all of Branden’s sharp criticisms, and welcome the putting into print of what has until now been only an oral tradition of exposure of the true nature of Randianism in action. The Rand-Branden split has had a happy effect on the development of the Objectivist movement, for it has meant that Objectivism has become “polycentric”, and hence the breakup of the old Randian monolith has encouraged individual Objectivists to do something which they were never able to do under orthodox Randianism: to think for themselves. (It is typical that when a friend of ours showed a leading Orthodox Randian this issue of Reason, the latter expostulated: “Of course you’re going to cancel your subscription!” Protect yourself from creeping heresy by never reading it!)

Paul Lepanto, Return to Reason: An Introduction to Objectivism (New York: Exposition Press, 154 pp. $6.00). A comprehensive introduction to objectivist philosophy, undoubtedly the best available. It is written – mirabile dictu – without the traditional Randian rancor against all heretics and unbelievers, actual or potential. One suspects that a major reason for Mr. Lepanto’s sane approach is his statement, “I am not personally acquainted with Miss Rand or her associates, past or present; I know them only through their works.” Would that other Randians had taken the same course!

Libertarian Analysis. We have a libertarian quarterly (Box 210, Village Station, New York, N.Y. 10014, $1.00 per issue, $4.00 per year), of which two issues have appeared since the first, Winter 1970 issue. Its potential excellence has been marred by its dubious fundamental premise: a close working alliance between “right-wing” and left-wing anarchism. But the result is that each issue has at least one article to be recommended. In the first issue, Murray N. Rothbard, “Individualist Anarchism in the United States: the Origins”, explores the unknown history of anarchist theorists and institutions in several colonies in 17th century America. Joseph R. Peden’s “Courts Against the State” is a welcome exploration of three cases in the twentieth century when private commissions of inquiry into criminal actions of States played an important role. The first such commission, the 1920-21 American Commission of Inquiry on Conditions in Ireland has been the most neglected, and is now the most timely.

In the second, Spring 1971 issue, Professor Justus Doenecke’s “Lawrence Dennis: the Continuity of American Isolationism” is an excellent article by America’s foremost scholar of isolationism on one of its foremost – and most consistent – leaders and theorists. And in the current, September, 1971 issue, the brilliant young libertarian historian R. Dale Grinder, in “H. L. Mencken: Notes on a Libertarian”, provides a fine introduction to the work of one of the great, and certainly the wittiest, libertarians of this century.

Sacco-Vanzetti Revisionism. Francis Russell’s definitive history of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Tragedy in Dedham (New York: McGraw-Hill, paper, 503 pp., $3.95), is now out in paper, with a new introduction on the latest aspects of the case. Russell shows that, contrary to left-wing mythology, Sacco was guilty of murder while Vanzetti was probably an accessory. Other revisionist works are the books by Busch (1952), Montgomery (1960), and Felix (1965).

Ludwig von Mises. In celebration of Mises’ 90th birthday, Murray N. Rothbard, “Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for Our Age,” Modern Age, Fall 1971 (743 North Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611), not only sets forth Mises’ notable accomplishments, but provides a philosophic-sociological explanation of the general contemporary neglect of Mises and the Austrian School. Based on the seminal sociological work in the history of science by Thomas S. Kuhn.

Genetics and the IQ. There is nothing better calculated to send egalitarian leftists up the wall than any acknowledgment of the genetic, hereditary basis of intelligence. And yet, it is true – eppur si muove. In a critically important article, Professor Richard Herrnstein of Harvard, in “I. Q.”, Atlantic Monthly, September, 1971, summarizes the best evidence on this controversial subject. Must reading. Herrnstein also points out that economic egalitarian measures will only leave more room for inequalities based on intelligence.

The Myth of the Welfare State. Several recent articles have done much to destroy the myth that the current welfare state really aids the poor and redistributes income and wealth on their behalf. Leonard Ross, “The Myth that Things are Getting Better,” New York Review of Books (August 12), summarizes recent studies, in taxes and in higher education particularly, showing that the welfare state, in the U.S. and in England, does not, on net; take from the richer and give to the poor. Irving Kristol, “Welfare”, Atlantic Monthly, August 1971, indicts left-wing social workers as being largely responsible for the disgraceful acceleration of the welfare rolls in recent years. Roger A. Freeman, “The Wayward Welfare State”, Modern Age (Fall, 1971), focusses on the federal budget, the level of welfare payments as the cause of increasing welfare, and education, urban renewal and crime in the welfare state.

THE POPULATION HYSTERIA

By Jerome Tuccille
(an excerpt from a forthcoming book)

The problem of overpopulation is usually the first objection raised against the prospect of extended life.

If the human race keeps procreating at its present rate, there will be only one square yard for every person by the year 2500. How can we think about permitting people to stay alive another twenty or thirty years when there are so many of us going hungry today? When we are increasing our numbers by one million a week? When there will be six or seven billion humans on this planet by the year 2000?

With the possible exception of environmental pollution, no subject has incited the ire of the Doomsday Prophets as much as the population problem. One can remember the day, back in the early 1960’s, when the Machine Age Scare was the cause of apoplexy and near-hysteria in Think Tanks around the country. Apparently, we were entering an age of Creeping Mechanization which was destined to drive battalions of American blue-collar workers to the welfare rolls. By 1966, it seemed, the unemployment rate would be pushing 40 or 50 percent, and computerized robots would be prancing about the countryside doing everything from repairing faulty carburetors to boiling three-minute eggs in roadside diners. When 1966 passed into history, human automobile mechanics were still fleecing the public as though they had been tutored by John Dillinger; flesh-and-blood plumbers and electricians were moving into neighborhoods inhabited primarily by doctors, politicians and other racketeers; hash slingers across the nation had been unionized and commanded wages that turned insurance executives green with envy. The machines, far from putting the American workforce on relief, had created entire new industries and thousands of jobs that never existed before.

A few years later the American public was treated to the next in a never-ending series of globe-shattering crises: the Famine Scare of 1967. In this year the brothers Paddock, Paul and William, warned us in their highly-acclaimed book, Famine – 1975, that India was doomed to be ravaged by large-scale famines. The famines would occur possibly as early as 1970 or 1971, definitely by 1972 or 1973, and most of its population would be decimated by 1975. The Paddocks promoted a “triage” system to save the world, a system used in military hospitals during wartime in which only those patients with some chance of survival are given medical treatment. They advocated that the United States, as the most productive country on earth, initiate massive foreign aid programs to those starving nations with a small chance of survival, and cut out foreign aid altogether to undeveloped nations, like India, for whom starvation was inevitable. Fortunately for India several private foundations ignored the advice of the Paddocks, and as a result India was able to develop a hardier wheat strain leading to a bumper crop in 1970. Now we anticipate that – barring some unforeseen cataclysm such as earthquakes or major war – India will be self-sufficient in food production early in this decade. The Paddocks made some other ominous predictions – among them: experimentation with rice and wheat strains would end in failure, and Pakistan would be wasted by famine before 1972. Statistics show that the development of hybrid rice and wheat strains enabled Pakistan to talk about exporting wheat in 1971, prior to the resurgence of its political disputes with East Pakistan and India. 1971 United Nations figures indicate that food production in the Far East – another area condemned to annihilation by the Paddocks – was “rising at a rate comfortably ahead of the population growth” because of the development of high-yield rice and wheat strains.

Another Doomsday Prophet, Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, Professor of Biology at Stanford University, informed us in 1969 that it was utopian to expect underwater agriculture to lead to increased food production in the near future. Farming of the sea is “another myth promoted by the ignorant or the irresponsible,” according to Dr. Ehrlich. Yet, the facts show that advances in marine agriculture have played a decisive role in the increase in food production throughout Asia in 1970 – a year after Ehrlich’s dire prediction.

Next we arrived at a point in time when we might normally expect a new crisis of monumental proportions to erupt on the American scene, and the experts have not disappointed us; not many take global famine seriously any longer, but overpopulation and environmental pollution are the twin juggernauts destined to destroy life on earth forevermore. Dr. Ehrlich is back again with The Population Bomb, predictably predicting that, not only are “hundreds of millions of people going to starve to death in spite of any crash foreign aid programs,” but also that nothing now can “prevent a substantial increase in the world deathrate . . .” From this he goes on to tell us that seven billion people will inhabit our little ball by 2000 AD, and by 2800 AD the population of earth will be housed in a two-thousand storey apartment house that covers the entire planet no less. The author, having already determined that the battle against famine was lost and that worldwide famines would grip the earth by the early 1970’s does not tell us how we will manage to survive until 2800 AD in sufficient numbers to fill a high-rise dwelling of such mammoth dimensions.

In the late 1960’s, when Madan G. Kaul, Minister of the Indian Embassy, predicted that his country would be self-sufficient in food production by 1971, Dr. Ehrlich dismissed him as a utopian dreamer, claiming that he had yet to meet anyone as optimistic as Kaul. But, as mentioned earlier, India is on the brink of self-sufficiency. When India launched a vasectomy program in 1964 to control population growth, Ehrlich stated that this was also doomed to failure due to the reluctance of the citizenry and the technical problems involved in performing so many. Yet, a New York Times article in October, 1971, informs us that the turnout for voluntary vasectomies has far exceeded expectations, and new vasectomy camps are planned for all of India’s 320 districts. The Indian government had originally distributed condoms to the male population, but later discovered that they weren’t being used properly. Accordingly, vasectomies are now regarded as a safer alternative.

Dr. Ehrlich presents us with several scenarios for the years ahead guaranteed to titallate the fancies of necrophilec the world over. They range in scope from the destruction of the entire population of earth, with cockroaches as the planet’s only survivors, to his most “optimistic” outlook in which only 500 million people will have starved to death by 1980. Even the United States, the world’s only remaining hope, is doing next to nothing to reduce its own birthrate – merely “bailing out a sinking ship with a small and leaky thimble” is the way he puts it. This last is somewhat at variance with most recent statistics on the subject, showing that U.S. fertility rate in summer of 1971 had dropped to its lowest level since the late 1930’s, and the trend is ever-downward. The present figure is just slightly above the “optimum” level set by the advocates of Z. P. G. (Zero Population Growth). Moreover, the results of a study released in October, 1971, reveal that half the American population now favors liberalized abortion laws, an incredible jump from the 15 percent of 1968. Ehrlich concludes by criticizing our growing concern for organ transplants and life extension techniques at a time when the human race is tottering over the abyss, and he recommends governmental remedies that border on totalitarianism: prohibitive taxes on cribs, diapers, toys and other baby items; reverse progressive taxation rising for each birth; government-authorized vasectomies; nationalized adoption agencies; and, piece de resistance, a powerful federal agency authorized to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a “reasonable population level” in the United States. The only thing he leaves out is Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal that we eat unwanted children. He suggests that we lower the population of earth to one or two billion from the current level of 3.5 or 3.6 billions of human beings.

Compared with Dr. Ehrlich, Philip Appleman, another population alarmist who authorized The Silent Explosion, is a veritable Pollyanna. While he claims that his projected world population of six billion for the year 2000 is more than we can properly feed, he at least refrains from predicting the certain demise of civilization by that time. He makes some incisive attacks on both the Catholic Church and the Communist Party for shaping the attitudes of their respective constituencies against the entire concept of planned parenthood. Marxist ideology, says Appleman, defines socialism as an economic system capable of providing abundance for everyone on earth. By definition there is no such thing as overpopulation in a communist society. Numbers are irrelevant.

The Catholic Church, of course, has not only opposed birth control for its own adherents, but it has traditionally fought to impose its own morality on the general population through the legislative process. It has taken the attitude that it is the duty of every Catholic mother to bear as many children as nature will allow, and the moral obligation of the “have” nations of the world to feed them all.

“The Roman Catholic Church,” according to Appleman, “is the only Western institution of any importance that is consciously and actively obstructing population limitation.”

In both cases, however, Appleman concedes that there is ground for optimism. Despite ideology, there is good evidence that Communist China is concerned about burgeoning population and is taking measures to control it behind the scenes. Author Edgar Snow reports that Party functionaries receive no extra compensation for more than two children; contraceptives are widely available and extremely inexpensive; practice, both in Red China and in the Soviet Union, is in dialectical opposition to Marxist propaganda. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the clergy as well as the “faithful” are in open revolt. Progressive Catholic journals such as Commonweal have been leading much of the fight, exhorting their readers to re-evaluate traditional Church teachings on papal infallibility, celibacy for the priesthood, and the birth control issue. America, another Catholic publication which used to editorialize against “unilateral depopulation in the West” lest we all “find ourselves eating with chopsticks,” has grown less belligerent of late. Ironically enough, Roman Catholics are declining in proportion to the overall population, partly because of defections from their own ranks, partly because of their opposition to birth control for non-Catholics as well as themselves. The Catholic Church at various times throughout its history has violently opposed surgery, inoculation, lending money on interest, eating meat on Fridays, belief in a heliocentric solar system, reading certain books and watching certain films, and, of course, family planning. This last prohibition, one can safely predict, is destined to go the way of the others.

Another cause for carefully guarded optimism, according to Appleman, is the decline of militarism among the young. For centuries our generals have been yelling for larger and larger populations, presumably to supply them with fodder for their armies. Presently, the “More People, More Power” mentality has been all but discredited in the more advanced countries at least. Latin American machismo which measures a man’s masculinity by the size of his progeny is also in a state of rising disrepute. Religious traditions at work in other parts of the world (India, for example, has approximately one-fourth of the world’s cattle supply, but refuses to slaughter it for meat because most of the population holds the cow to be a sacred animal) will be challenged with increasing literacy and education of the masses.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the Utopian Futurists who dismiss all concern over rising population with the same casual optimism they exhibit on the Clonal Hitler Scare. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll work it out somehow.” Arthur McCormack, a Catholic priest who takes a “middle-of-the-road” position on the population issue, has little patience with extreme optimists who claim that “as long as man possesses the capacity for thought, he has no reason to fear the future.”

R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century, has earned the everlasting enmity of Z. P. G. enthusiasts by claiming that he could take the entire population of earth today and provide everyone with decent housing and adequate privacy on the islands of Japan. His plan calls for the erection of a gigantic, mile-high apartment complex, with each unit self-contained for power and sewage and a recycled water supply, and capable of being separated from the complex and used as a vehicle for transportation. In one fell swoop he solves the housing shortage and the parking problem, as well as pollution of the environment. Those who are inclined to shrug off this proposal with a laugh might do well to recall that Fuller’s dymaxion houses and geodesic domes were once roundly denounced as “impractical” and hopelessly “utopian,” and his theories on the tetrahedronal structure of matter have made a profound impact in the field of sub-atomic physics. Fuller started to talk about building homes with self-contained electricity and recycled water supplies in 1928, thirty years before this concept became a reality in American and Russian space capsules. According to Fuller, there is virtually no limit to the amount of people that can be comfortably supported on earth with proper architectural and recycling techniques. Whether or not one looks forward to sharing the planet with a trillion human beings tiered on top of one another, however privately, in cities reaching to the stars, we cannot help but admire a man with the courage to propose such daring schemes at a time when technology and procreation have become synonymous with racistsexistfascistkapitalistexploitation.

Another unbridled Utopian is Iranian-born novelist and essayist, F. M. Esfandiary, who teaches a course on futurism at the New School for Social Research in New York City. The highlights of Esfandiary’s course are his lectures on physical immortality and the New Technology. He has been called a “radical optimist” by Publisher’s Weekly, and his theories have been simultaneously endorsed by Dr. Glenn Seaborg, former Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and a reviewer for the Village Voice. Esfandiary casually discusses such concepts as universal solar and nuclear power and colonization of the planets as though they have virtually been accomplished, and Doomsday predictions are rejected impatiently. He maintains that the human race advanced a half step through-out history until the beginning of the twentieth century, and fifty miles during the past seventy years or so. He charts our present rate of development on a hyperbolic curve quickly accelerating upward toward infinity, and says that no one can fully anticipate the changes that will occur in the next twenty years let alone the next one hundred. Esfandiary considers pessimism to be a result of a lack of historical perspective, an inability to comprehend the fact that forty years ago people spent most of their waking hours scrubbing out a bare existence while, today, technology has freed a large portion of western civilization from the drudgery of menial labor. Having spent his earliest years growing up in Iran, Esfandiary makes the statement – “I have seen the past, and it doesn’t work”–as he awaits the future with optimism.

Other visionaries have taken the position that there is no need to worry about overpopulation because, with proper technology, the state of Kansas can produce enough food to feed the entire world; there are more open spaces on earth today than a hundred years ago (latest census figures in the U.S. show that both the countryside and the central cities have lost population to the suburbs, resulting in a pattern of more abundant natural land and more even distribution of people around our urban areas); the earth can easily support upwards of 500 billion people; if we gave every family alive today a decent housing plot, they would all fit inside Texas with room to spare; ground fish and other marine products offer a revolutionary breakthrough in the struggle to create a high-protein, low-cost food supply; there is more than enough timber in the Amazon jungle to build a house for every family on earth; when India decides to slaughter its cattle, it will become a major exporter of beef to the developing nations; arid and frozen lands can now be brought under cultivation for the first time. These statements are denounced in the most excoriating language by Messers. Paddock, Appleman, Ehrlich and other Doomsday Prophets, and they are given a fair hearing by middle-of-the-road population alarmists like the priest and author, Arthur McCormack.

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Behind most of the hysteria surrounding the rising population of earth is the spectre of the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus who, back in 1798, presented the world with his now-famous dictum. The Malthusian Absolute holds that population growth increases geometrically, while growth in food production increases arithmetically. If this is true, it follows that any increase in population anywhere on earth is bound to result in dwindling food supplies, hunger and starvation.

It is somewhat incredible that this formula is still taken seriously when it was at least partially discredited in Malthus’ own lifetime. Neo-Malthusians invariably fail to tell us that the good reverend qualified his own “Absolute” in 1817 when he admitted that some population growth can be beneficial until the time when a “proper or natural limit” is reached. While Malthus lived out his final years, England, his native land, increased its own population fivefold through immigration, rising birthrate and declining infant mortality while at the same time enjoying a period of economic growth and prosperity during the Industrial Revolution. The United States, again experiencing rising affluence and economic prosperity, increased its population tenfold during the nineteenth century. Both England and the United States became major exporters of food while simultaneously importing labor and assimilating more and more people. In modern times, the island-city of Hong Kong had the fastest population growth on earth during the 1960’s – primarily due to mass emigration from mainland China – and it has become a bustling focal point of market activities in the Orient. Conversely, Ireland and Sicily have been losing people steadily from the beginning of the century until the present, and they are among the poorest countries in the West.

Doomsday Prophets usually cite China as an example of what can happen economically to a nation with too many mouths to feed. What they leave out is the fact that China, with its 800 millions or so, has a population density of only 200 per square mile – roughly a third that of England and a fifth that of Holland which is importing labor from southern Europe to keep pace with a constantly rising living standard. Breakthroughs in marine agriculture and hardier wheat and rice strains have enabled much of the Far East to keep food production roughly 3 percent ahead of population growth in recent years. In addition, freer trade policies with countries like China are bound to result in an expansion of their sluggish economies, and a concomitant liberalization of domestic political rule as they open their borders to other countries of the world.

Another favorite bogeyman theory of the population alarmists is the Spreading Desert Scare. Poor cultivation methods of the past have turned much of the earth into desert, with 17 percent of it now arid and another sizable chunk too frost-covered to farm. The theory holds that poor farming techniques still being used will increase the amount of land unusable by man in the future. But here again we learn from U.N. statistics that most increases in food production during the past thirty years have been accomplished on land already under cultivation; in the United States, for instance, 75 percent more corn is being grown on 27 percent less land than was used in 1938. A new variety of rice developed in Taiwan has six or seven times the yield of the old kind, and is more resistant to adverse weather conditions. Arthur McCormack tells us that the arable land of the world can be doubled easily with present methods, and with heavy expenditures of capital and new techniques it can be increased eightfold if it should ever become necessary.

As new machinery is brought onto the farms, children are less in demand as extra hands and, instead, become a drain on parents whose rising affluence is independent of manual labor. As we study the history of the industrialized nations, we learn that a general pattern has developed: rising industrialization and affluence results in a leveling off and then a decline in the birthrate. It makes far better sense, then, for proponents of Z. P. G. and other population alarmists to support industrialization rather than oppose it, as many of them have done with their call for a “return to nature.”

A case in point is the hullabaloo over the use of insecticides that gripped the nation in the middle 1960’s, and is still with us today. While concern that pesticides eventually find their way into human bodies is justified, pesticide abolitionists have overlooked the fact that some 33 million tons of food a year – enough to feed more than 500 million people – are destroyed by rats and insects. It is a bit irresponsible for people who are worried about food production to take such an extremist position before they investigate alternatives to the indiscriminate use of DDT. Many of these same individuals have also opposed the development of processed marine products, a low-cost protein source, with the argument that ground fish heads and organs are “unpalatable”. Yet they rail against the fact that the starch content in the American diet is only 25 percent while it climbs over 50 percent in Africa, Asia and South America.

Turning again to the United Nations – an organization which no one has ever accused of trying to whitewash the existing poverty in the world – we learn that the problem is largely one of “undernourishment” rather than mass starvation. 14 percent of earth’s population is said to be undernourished – that is, subsisting on unbalanced diets usually heavy with starch – a different thing entirely from “starvation in the streets.” Yet, when an enterprising American firm tried to export a low-cost protein supplement made from marine products, the federal government banned it from the market on the grounds that it was “unsuitable for human consumption.” Presumably, the authorities with their boundless humanitarianism preferred that everyone on earth should have a pound of steak each week instead, but, unfortunately for the “Third World” people, there is precious little protein content in the good intentions of “humane” politicians.

In 1950 Julian Huxley warned the world that there would be three billion people on earth by 2000 AD, more than this tiny globe could possibly support. His crystal ball must have been slightly cracked the day he wrote that article, for the figure was reached in the 1960’s – almost forty years ahead of schedule – and the general living standard of man on earth has continued to rise with each passing year. U.N. estimates for the year 2000 are for somewhere between 5.4 and 7.5 billion people to be romping about the earth. Dr. Ehrlich states that, unless we reduce our numbers to one or two billion, we will all be starving in the streets; R. Buckminster Fuller maintains there is no limit to what man, with his incredible ingenuity, can achieve.

Who is right?

Arthur McCormack, taking his stand with the moderates, says that 50 billion people seems to be the limit considering the habitable land now available, and the possibility that some desert and frost regions will be cultivated in the future. This figure, at the current rate of population growth, will be reached in 2110 AD. Others, a bit less optimistic, put the limit at 30 billion which would be attained in a hundred years at out present rate of growth.

The key questions it seems to me are, first of all, is there any such thing as a “natural limit” to human population on earth and, second, is it realistic to base projections on the current rate of growth? If it is true, as precedent has shown it to be, that industrialization leads to declining birthrate, and that virtually the entire planet will be industrialized within the next twenty-five years, then we can expect a sharply reduced birthrate for the whole world before the year 2000. Z.P.G. advocates have been quick to inform us that the rate of growth is a relative factor – that is, it is based on the ratio between the birthrate and the deathrate – and that, if man should finally succeed in conquering death, it will mean that the human race would have to stop reproducing altogether merely to maintain a steady level. But if the day arrives when the human race does attain mastery over natural death, we will still be exposed to the dangers of the unforeseen: the speeding vehicle; a falling rock; environmental disasters. Some of us will elect, for religious, philosophical or psychological reasons, to pass away normally rather than prolong physical life. People will continue to die even if we have the means of preserving life indefinitely, so it does not follow that any procreation at all will necessarily mean a rise in population.

Another item the Doomsday Prophets never consider is the fact that two-thirds of this planet is covered by water, and the “square yard for every human” projections are invariably based on figures for land mass. We are now talking about building jetports at sea, and once this is done the construction of hotels, shops and permanent communities around the jetports will follow inevitably. Donald H Elliott, director of the New York City Planning Commission, talks about the development of a gigantic offshore complex that will include a jetport, nuclear power plant, waste-disposal center and deep-water seaport. He maintains that the technical problems have already been solved. In Holland a variation of this concept has been realized in the form of “Polders” – area reclaimed from the sea housing more than seven million Hollanders. Cleveland and Chicago are studying proposals for floating jetports and facilities supported on caissons in Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. Cost studies indicate that the sale of land-based airports to private developers could raise much of the money required for the projects. Eventually, the notion of floating cities further out to sea will become a reality. Environmentalists like to howl about the “desecration of the oceans” when these alternatives are suggested, yet they are the first ones to decry the lack of beachfront areas for the masses. Seaborne cities will solve the problem of lebensraum for future populations, and they will also create thousands of miles of man-made “coastline” for surfers and sunbathers throughout the world. International communities for those tired of life in belligerent nation-states should be a more-than-welcome change.

Surely by the time we have the technology to eliminate natural death as a threat to man, the problems of interplanetary travel and the “homesteading” of space will be small in comparison. No one today can seriously doubt that there will be some form of human settlements on the moon before the end of this century; villages on other planets will be established shortly afterward. Until that day arrives, the human birthrate will continue to decline through education further industrialization and technological advances.

The prospect of overpopulation should not be taken seriously as an argument against our efforts to make man immortal. Chances are good that the timber of the Amazon is not going to be merchandised to house the entire world, and Kansas is not going to be called upon to feed it. Even if Buckminster Fuller’s schemes for supporting a limitless population should turn out to be practicable, most likely it will never be necessary for the human race to cluster together in mile-high file cabinets. We all have a vested interest in keeping the place we live from becoming as crowded as an anthill. Present trends continuing, the birthrate will continue to decline in the advanced nations and this decline will spread to other areas as they become industrialized. Through cloning and modernized farming techniques we will be able to lay the Malthusian Absolute forever to rest. And the technology that enables us to minimize the risks of death will also provide us with means to live our lives in comfort and prosperity.

Libertarian Conference

The libertarian conference held in New York City on the weekend of November 13-14 was by far the most successful libertarian conference ever held, at least on the East Coast. It was a striking success not simply because it drew the largest audience yet for East Coast libertarians – over 400 persons. And not just because it was capably and smoothly organized by the New York Libertarian Association and the Society for Individual Liberty. For here was a deeper success story that struck everyone attending the conference. This was the harmony of views and attitudes that pervaded all factions gathered there. For in striking and dramatic contrast to the fiasco at the Hotel Diplomat on Columbus Day 1969, and even in visible contrast to the successful conference held last March, there was no brawling and clashing of factions, no marked hostility or mutual excommunications. While of course there are still marked differences between the various groups and tendencies in the movement, the various extremes have clearly drawn closer together. This drawing together enables all the factions to work harmoniously, not in an artificial “unity” that tries to paper over severe disagreement, but in a genuine harmony of common interest and enthusiasm. To borrow the Marxian phrasing, what were previously “antagonistic contradictions” within the libertarian movement have happily given way to “non-antagonistic contradictions.” The libertarian movement is now united as never before.

What has happened is that a new maturity, a new sense of responsibility, has now permeated all factions of the movement, at least on the East Coast. The wild-eyed extremes, both on the left and on the right, have both moved sharply toward the sober and responsible Center. Specifically, the febrile militantes of the ultra-left have abandoned their shrill cries to “rip off Amerika”, their yen for street warfare, and their enthusiasm for anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism. The left-wing has come to a new and sober appreciation of the virtues of Middle America and the middle class, and seems to have found once more at least some of its old devotion to private property and the free market. For their part, the right-wing “deviationists” have learned a great deal about the Establishment and about foreign policy; they seem to have lost most of their old enthusiasm for the Cold War, for red-baiting, and for the Founding Fathers. At the November conference, when Professors Leonard Liggio and Walter Grinder set forth their pro-isolationist, anti-imperialist, and anti-ruling elite analysis, the former hostility of the right-wing was replaced by a kind of resigned acceptances. The Sober Center, firmly pro-private property and anti-imperialist, which for a long time seemed to its despairing members to consist of twelve people trying to cope with ten thousand “deviationists” on their far left and right, has apparently triumphed at last.

And so there is reason to be more optimistic about the future of the movement than ever before. Our growing pains seem to be over. The quantitative leap forward in the last two years has at last been matched by a new accession of maturity and responsibility. We advance into the future with high hope.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 1

January, 1972

75

POLITICS ’72

1972 – the year of the great quadrennial circus and extravaganza, the one year out of every four when the American public is most attentive to politics, if not to political issues. Where should libertarians stand on the 1972 election?

Already, it is evident that libertarians will be roughly divided into two camps on their attitudes toward the 1972 campaign. One camp, perhaps the majority, takes the purist non-voting position: the view that all politicians and parties are evil, the State is evil, and that for any libertarian to vote is to lend his moral sanction to the electoral process and therefore to the State apparatus which rides to power on the strength of that process. The only moral course for the libertarian, this position holds, is therefore not to vote and to promulgate non-voting among the population. The latest manifestation of the non-voting camp is the newly formed League of Non-Voters (Box 1406, Santa Ana, Calif. 92702), organized by Sy Leon and other libertarians in Southern California.

Non-voting – or “voting for oneself” – is the classic anarchist position, and no libertarian can be unsympathetic to an organized drive for non-participation in elections. This is especially true if we consider that all politicians of whatever party are constantly exhorting the electorate: “We don’t care how you vote, but vote!”, which obviously means that they care deeply about being able to claim a “mandate” from a large turnout of voters. A small turnout would deflate any such claim.

Yet there are flaws and dangers in this simplistic non-voting stance. The chief danger is that the moral sanction argument is the other side of the coin of the statist argument for the legitimacy of democratic government: that since X millions have voted for President or Senator so-and-so, this means that these rulers have broad popular support, or even that their rule is “voluntary”, and sanctioned by the public. It is precisely this argument that has formed the chief stumbling-block for libertarians in arguing against government action under a democracy.

In arguing against voting as a moral sanction we need only turn to the Founding Father of pure libertarianism, Lysander Spooner. Spooner built a large part of his individualist anarchist position on refuting the notion that voting necessarily means support. Thus Spooner:

“In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having ever been asked, a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defense, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot – which is a mere substitute for a bullet — because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency, into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defense offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.”

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby ameliorating their condition. But it would not therefore be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to.”

(Lysander Spooner, “No Treason, No. II”, pp. 5-6, in The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (Weston, Mass.: M & S Press, 1971, Volume I).

In short, if the rulers allow us to make this one choice, as petty and miserable as it may be, this one say over our political lives, it is not immoral to make use of this opportunity. As I wrote somewhere else, if Richard Cobden and Ghenghis Khan were running against each other for President, the libertarian would surely have no hesitation supporting and voting for Cobden, despite his falling short of full purity. But if that is so, then the fact that we have no Cobdens, alas!, running now is only a matter of degree; it is still not immoral to use the electoral process when a significant choice presents itself. The use of the electoral process is not, then, immoral per se, as the non-voting camp would have us believe.

A second error is that the non-voters misconstrue the nature of our problem. The major problem is not whether or not we should vote; the major problem is that, regardless of what we do, the office of the Presidency and other political offices will not, unfortunately, be declared vacant. Regardless of what we do, there will be a President, 100 Senators, etc., come 1973. In that case, what attitude do we take on the question of who occupies these offices? Even if we do not vote ourselves this November, whom do we hope that others will vote for? When the ballots begin to trickle in, whom do we cheer for, or whom do we cheer against, on Election Night? To argue against voting is not the same thing as arguing that, in public or even in our hearts, we must be completely and totally indifferent to the outcome of the election. Why? What possible moral position holds that we must be neutral in word and deed? Come Election Night, perhaps even Mr. Leon and his colleagues will, in the quiet of their living-rooms, be silently cheering for one rather than the other candidate. If not, then they must hold that both candidates are, and must forever be, completely identical, so that there will be literally no difference in the outcome. But since we know from the nature of man that no two people or parties can ever be totally identical, that there is always some diversity however marginal, it then follows that the idea that there is literally no difference between the candidates is a fallacious construction of the nature of man. There is, then, always a difference of sorts; Cobden we would clearly choose over Ghenghis Khan; what then of 1972? We must therefore discard the a priori indifferentist position, and begin to examine the parties and candidates to see if the differences are sufficient to merit our taking a stand. And, again, the important question here is not whom we vote for, but whom we support or oppose.

This brings us to the real world of 1972, and it brings us also to the other major libertarian camp for this year: the camp that says – DUMP NIXON! The Lib. Forum has repeatedly called for the dumping of Mr. Nixon, most recently in the July-August 1971 issue (“Dumping Nixon”), and Mr. Nixon’s record is even more monstrous now than it was last summer.

In the first place, other things being equal (which, granted, they rarely are), the libertarian always favors the dumping of an incumbent President and party. If Mr. Nixon and his opponent were simply Mr. X and Y, alike as two peas in a pod, then the libertarian would favor the dumping of the incumbent X. For two reasons: one, because it is always best to overthrow any entrenched machine or President, lest their entrenchment sink ever deeper into society. And two, to punish – to punish the incumbent for the inevitable transgressions and invasions of rights during his term of office.

For the libertarian, then, any incumbent begins his campaign with one strike against him, even if he were simply Mr. X. But Richard Nixon is not simply Mr. X, not just another holder of the Presidential chair; he has compiled a record of malignity on every front, foreign and domestic, that has not been matched since the days of Franklin Rossevelt. Since our last catalog of Nixonite horrors last summer, the President has enormously accelerated the gravity of his sins. The wage-price freeze, suddenly brought to us over television on the night of August 15, catapulted America into the full-fledged economy of fascism, with its panoply of tripartite economic controls under the direction of an all-powerful Executive. The first establishment of peacetime price-wage controls since the unconstitutional NRA of the New Deal, Mr. Nixon’s New Economic Policy was by far the biggest single leap into statism since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The displacement of the market by central controls through Presidential fiat was accompanied by an equally drastic, and even more savage, repudiation of the dollar’s backing in gold, thereby threatening a world-wide depression as a result of international monetary and economic warfare. The re-establishment of fixed exchange rates and the slight devaluation of the dollar in December, has restored some health to the international money market, but the resolution is clearly temporary, since neither the fixity nor the devaluation make any sense while the currencies remain in no way redeemable in gold. Again, President Nixon has aped FDR in his plunge into totally fiat money; the difference being that, after 1934, FDR at least continued to redeem foreign-held dollars in gold; this last shred of soundness in the world’s monetary system has not been torn away.

On the crucially important foreign policy front, the Libertarian Forum and its editors have been virtually alone, year in and year out, in proclaiming that the Vietnam and Indo-china war has not been about to “wind down.” Even the most ardently anti-imperialist forces on the Left have been completely fooled twice: once, after Lyndon Johnson’s retirement and the opening of the Paris peace talks; and next, after the inauguration of Mr. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy, aided and abetted by Nixon’s grandstand announcement of his trip to China. The recent resumption of large-scale bombing of North Vietnam should at last make it crystal-clear that the war in Indochina is not over – and that Mr. Nixon has simply been returning to Johnson’s discredited policy of pre-1965: that is, providing financial and air support, plus “residual” artillery and other support, while our Indochinese puppet troops absorb the brunt of the fighting on the ground. In short, “Vietnamization”, or rather, “Indochinization”.

Nixon’s seemingly cunning policy was to draw the teeth of American protest by eliminating American ground casualties, and foisting them on the Indochinese, while confining our military action to increasingly devastating bombing of the NLF forces in South Vietnam – thereby avoiding the more spectacular and less politically palatable bombing of the North. That crafty policy – to continue the war while quieting American interest in the proceedings – has now been smashed on the rock that Nixon and his predecessors have always overlooked: the total lack of support for our puppets among the Indochinese population. In particular, the American puppet forces in Cambodia and Laos are on the brink of total defeat. In Cambodia, they virtually hold only Phnom Penh, the capital, and their hold on that is increasingly shaky; the rest of the country belongs to the Communist-led National United Front. Nixon’s unpopular and disastrous invasion of Cambodia in 1969 has led only to the total defeat of the American puppet forces in that country. Similarly, the even more disastrous American invasion of Laos, an invasion which was ambushed and routed by the North Vietnamese-Pathet Lao forces, has led only to the recent resounding successes for the Pathet Lao in the most strategic areas of Laos: the total conquest of the Plain of Jars and the Boloven plateau. Particularly important here was the conquest of the Plain of Jars in late December, including the wiping out of no less than seven battalions of American-sponsored Thai troops and the severe crippling of three more; and the wiping out of four battalions of CIA-trained Vang Pao mercenaries and the crippling of six more. The American skein has about run out in Laos and Cambodia – and this at only the beginning of the Communist-led offensive of the 1971-72 dry season. In desperation, Richard Nixon turned to the only tactic he knows: punishing the innocent civilians of North Vietnam by mass terror bombing. Nixon hopes that such massive bombings will somehow induce the Communist forces to suspend their operations throughout Indochina, but he will fail just as surely as as the similarly aimed Johnson-McNamara bombings failed before.

Richard Nixon came to the White House after making crucial promises to the American people: he promised us an end to the war in Vietnam, an end to the draft, prosperity without inflation, a sound fiscal policy, and the preservation of the free market economy. He promised us bread, and he has given us a stone. The war in Indochina goes on, indeed was further expanded into Laos and Cambodia; the draft goes on, with the Kennedy-style lottery put in to allay protest; and we have a long-drawn-out Nixon recession wedded to a continuing high rate of inflation. We have the greatest peace-time deficits in American history and instead of preserving the free economy President Nixon has buried it in an avalanche of wage-price controls. Looming ahead of us we have two cherished plans of the Nixon Administration: a disastrous guaranteed annual income scheme (the Family Assistance Program), and socialized medicine through national health insurance. All this, and also a large increase in executive power and dictation, and Supreme Court appointments who can be counted on to erode and reverse the hard-won civil liberties gains of the Warren Court. All in all, the greatest single leap into collectivism since FDR.

There can be only one reaction of libertarians to the grisly Nixon record: punish, punish, punish. Get him out of office! Retire him to the private life which he so richly deserves.

There is only arrow left to the bow of the libertarian opponent of the Dump-Nixon strategy: might not the Democrat be even worse? He would have to be considerably worse to have us abandon the joy of defeating Richard Nixon, though I concede that that would be logically possible. But in fact any likely Democrat on the horizon is bound to be considerably better. Let us take the vital areas. On the Indochina War, we can expect that any Democrat (except for Jackson and possibly Humphrey) will end the war in short order. On the draft, we have a far better chance for abolition, and certainly for amnesty to draft resisters, with any Democrat (except Jackson) than with our supposedly anti-draft President. On civil liberties, any of the Democrats (except Jackson) will be far superior to Nixon. But what about the economy, it may be asked? What indeed? Considering Nixon’s fascist record, it is hardly possible for any of the Democrats to do worse. Particularly when we consider the vital strategic fact that no Democratic President would have been able to drum so many statist measures through a rather conservative Congress. If Muskie or McGovern had been President this year, any price controls would have faced a chorus of opposition and would have been rendered unworkable very quickly; and neither man would have as much chance as Nixon to push through FAP or national health insurance. The one area that conservative Republicans have been fairly good on over the years has been government interference in the economy; but their opposition has been totally neutralized by the fact that their “conservative” President, using their own rhetoric and from their own party, has been driving through the collectivist legislation. Only removal of Nixon from office will enable the conservative Republicans to rouse themselves, and once again provide some opposition to socialistic measures by the Executive. Thus, even in the area of the seemingly strongest case for Nixon over a Democrat, we find that absolutely indispensable to the rebirth of a conservative opposition to galloping socialism is the defeat of Richard M. Nixon. Only the nomination of Scoop Jackson by the Democrats would seriously vitiate this argument of “anyone but Nixon.”

One of the most heartening political developments of recent months is the recognition by many conservative militants of the strategic necessity of defeating Richard Nixon. Rep. John Ashbrook (R., Ohio) has courageously decided to enter several early primaries against the President, backed by most of the conservative theorists and organizers, including YAF and the American Conservative Union, National Review and Human Events. The more votes that Ashbrook rolls up in the primaries, the more embarrassing for the President, and the greater the possibility of a really significant conservative rebellion against Nixon: the running of Ashbrook for President on a “fifth party” ticket. The hurting of Nixon in the primaries will be only symbolic and psychological; it is the running of an independent Ashbrook in selected key states with a large conservative constituency (e.g. Ohio, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania) that could wreck the President’s bid for another term. Many of these states are usually so close that a candidate hiving off 10-15% of the conservative vote from Nixon could submarine the President.

The danger is that Ashbrook and the fifth party might be bought off with a few militaristic concessions – since unfortunately the agitation of the conservatives is not so much over price-wage controls or FAP as it is over the China trip and the conservative call for even more expenditure on overkill missiles. But if the conservatives are mad enough and can stay mad, and if Ashbrook builds up considerable support in the primaries, then an independent conservative candidacy could perform the much reviled but generally necessary role of the “spoiler”.

All this means that what happens in the Democratic convention becomes of primary political importance to the libertarian. His major goal here is to see to it that the Democrats do not nominate someone totally unacceptable (Jackson, Wilbur Mills, Mayor Sam Yorty of Los Angeles), and that the Democrats are not riven by irresponsible and kooky caucuses (Chisholm) or fifth parties (Spock, McCarthy), though the threat of a Spock or McCarthy ticket is a useful means of combatting a Jackson or Humphrey candidacy.

Of the viable candidates, we do not face a spectacularly worthy lot. The Lib. Forum’s endorsed candidate, Senator William Proxmire (D., Wis.) – one of only four Senators to vote against extension of wage-price control authority (the others being Goldwater, Fulbright, and Harris) – bowed out of the race with an eloquent and charming statement to the effect that he had managed to alienate both Big Labor and Big Business and was therefore bereft of campaign funds. Harris’ absurd candidacy was over almost as soon as it began, and Birch Bayh (D., Ind.) has been replaced by his Indiana colleague and factional enemy, the even more obscure Vance Hartke. Eugene McCarthy is too erratic to take seriously. This leaves us three candidates: Lindsay, McGovern, and Muskie. The fascination of much of the nation for Lindsay is one of any New Yorker’s abiding puzzles; for it is very difficult to mention the name “Lindsay” to any New Yorker, be he left, right, or center, and whatever his occupation or income, without unleashing a geyser of abuse. Everyone in New York reviles Lindsay, and with good reason: for he has succeeded in blending an arrogant High Moral Tone with an almost spectacularly inept and bungling administration. We favor peace, amnesty and civil liberties – issues on which Lindsay’s record is a good one, but does America deserve Lindsay the Administrator? The danger of a Lindsay candidacy, however, is remote; for he will surely manage to alienate most of the party cadre before he finishes his run. George McGovern, in contrast to Lindsay, has a deadly lack of charisma; worse from the libertarian point of view is McGovern’s unrelenting socialist thrust on domestic issues.

This leaves us with Ed Muskie, the leading contender. We have written that Muskie is grey, colorless, and the favorite of the party hacks. All this is true. But relative to his confreres, Muskie is beginning to look pretty good. There is in his very coolness, his very lack of color and his extreme caution, a happy augury of a President who, like Calvin Coolidge, might just snooze his way through the White House. In short, Muskie looks to have the makings of an inactive President, which, short of a Libertarian Hero who will roll back the New Deal, is about the best that a libertarian can hope for these days. It is difficult to conjure up an image of Muskie girding us all for a further leap into collectivism, or of Muskie pushing the buttons for another war somewhere in the world.

Two minor serendipities with Muskie. One was his refreshingly honest statement that a Negro could not be elected Vice-President, a welcome bit of candor on an issue mired in hypocrisy and cant; another is the marvelous information that Muskie is disliked by his flinty old mother. What other Presidential candidate in decades can make such a statement?

Purist Deviationism: A Strategic Fallacy

By William Danks

A growing problem exists among many newly radicalized libertarians. In coming to realize the vicious immorality and blatant evil of statism, they often attempt to “purify” themselves from their social and cultural context. They try to cleanse themselves from what is felt to be the all-pervading sickness of their surroundings. This is a mistake. Logically, the idea of stepping out of one’s environment is confused. Psychologically, it’s an acceptance of collective guilt-by-association. Strategically, in terms of building an effective, relevant libertarian movement, it’s the worst sort of fallacy.

The “purification” process has several aspects: 1) removal of oneself from any source of income that comes directly or indirectly from the government, 2) refusal to make use of government services, 3) refusal to become involved in politics, 4) total refusal to co-operate with (i.e. supposedly “sanction”) the government in any way, and 5) armed resistance against the state.

Clearly, any of these actions are moral, and can be tactically useful in specific circumstances. The point is, however, that such efforts can not achieve their own ultimate purposes and are positively harmful to both the individuals involved and to the libertarian movement that they ostensibly support.

In the sense that the “purist” desires, it is simply impossible to have an absolutely “non-governmental” income. No matter how “private” one’s occupation appears to be, there will always be a certain percentage of one’s customers that either work for the state or for a company that does state business. To be consistent the “purist” must view all revenue so derived as “tainted.”

Given the nature of our statist economy, there is simply no place to go for someone who “wants nothing to do with the whole rotten mess.” The sector of the economy known as “private” is only relatively so, and is degenerating rapidly. Even the so-called “parallel economy” of the libertarian market is infected with some money coming from state sources.

But so what? The only way out of this supposed dilemma is either suicide or total retreatism – two unreasonable options that are in no way morally required of man. A much better alternative, both logically and strategically, is to realize the revolutionary context in which one lives and then act accordingly. The “purists” are correct in feeling that no sanction should be given to the state. Yet, that’s exactly what they are doing when they accept the coercive conditions imposed by the state and then try to act “morally” as if they were in a moral context (i.e. volitional freedom). Rand called this the “sanction of the victim.” It’s what the rulers are counting on.

The same applies to the use of government services. LeFevre and others have pointed out the practical advantages of self-reliance in the face of increasing governmental inefficiency. But the refusal to call the police or fire department, or to ride on public transportation, or to use a library, or attend a state university, is oftentimes just plain foolish. It’s a misidentification of government to view it as some kind of organism with a life of its own. Government is nothing more than a parasite living off the people. When the people make use of a government service they are only reclaiming a little of their own life’s blood. Again the moral question is inapplicable. You can’t steal from a thief. You can’t be a parasite of a parasite – you can only be either a parasite or a host.

In this regard the strategic fallacy of “purism” leads to tremendous alienation of libertarians from the lower and middle classes. By attacking government workers, welfare-recipients, public-housing residents, food-stamp users, etc. libertarians appear to be attacking the victims of the state (for a brief reminder see Rod Manis’ “Government vs. the Poor” – Rampart College pamphlet) and thereby (implicitly) defending the real villain, the state itself. The crucial polarization should always be between the people and the government, not between different groups of people.

Refusal to become involved in politics is impossible. Everyone living in a nation-state is “involved” in politics to the very extent that their life is not theirs to live as they please. When the time comes when a person has a real option to not be involved in politics, then the revolution will be over and we will have won.

Of course, what the “purist” means is refusal to vote, run for office, or support any candidates. Again these are moral choices that anyone is free to make, but also again they are far more harmful than good. Although there will be crisis situations when a non-vote drive can be tactically worthwhile (in terms of publicity and education), the nature of today’s social/political context indicates little general value in political celibacy. Libertarians and libertarianism will simply be passed by.

The proper libertarian political activity is abolitionism. A ballot can work two ways. Libertarians should never allow a proposal to pass by that they don’t vote against. This will also be the role of libertarian candidates, when and if they are developed – to veto bills. In the meantime selective support should be given to those traditional politicians that are most opposed to the worst aspects of the present system (e.g. Vietnam, the draft, censorship, etc.).

Points 4 and 5 of the “purification” process run together and are the most dangerous to everyone concerned. A case with which I am personally acquainted serves as a good example. A young man recently converted to libertarianism drives a car daily but refuses to get a license. He can’t bring himself down to the level of asking the state for permission to drive. The possible penalties if he is caught (which is only a matter of time) – $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

Of course the young man’s position is morally correct. Of course the state is ripping-off the fee it charges for driver’s licenses. Of course such license requirements are infringements of liberty. And the young man is quite willing to resist if they try to take him in. Fine. But this is not the place to fight. The price of victory on this issue is too high, the results of the victory would be nearly inconsequential anyway, and most importantly – the issue presents an easy way to put libertarians away without attracting much sympathy for their cause.

If a distinction must be made between “statist” and “Anti-statist” actions, let the distinction be a rational and sophisticated one, arrived at through careful “in-context” analysis. A basic division to be considered is whether an action (be it voting, working, etc.) is performed in the system in order to bring it down and abolish it, or whether it’s performed for the system in order to perpetuate and expand it. Therefore it’s at least conceivable that virtually any government job (short of something like state executioner) could serve an anti-statist purpose. In extreme circumstances a libertarian could even take such abhorrent jobs as tax-collector or FBI agent and still be actively furthering the anti-statist cause (by internal sabotage, inefficiency, purposely following false leads, etc.). In today’s more normal times there is certainly a place, uncompromised and as rationally pure as possible, for libertarians in all parts of their society.

We have only one world to live in, and that’s the world we have to win. Libertarianism is the philosophy of reason, justice, peace and freedom. It can not be betrayed by recognizing the facts of reality and acting accordingly. It can only be betrayed by not doing so; by accepting such spuriously self-righteous positions as that of Utopian “purism.”

Libertarians Versus Controls

The fight of the libertarian movement against the Nixon wage-price controls continues to receive recognition by the media. Increasingly, for example, your editor and John Kenneth Galbraith have been juxtaposed as the major protagonists in the battle over direct controls. Thus, in his review of the second edition of Galbraith’s New Industrial State, economist Professor Robert Eisner of Northwestern (Saturday Review, October 2, 1971, pp. 45-46) found himself torn between the two points of view. After praising Galbraith, Eisner added: “But in an eloquent recent contribution to the Op Ed page of The New York Times, Murray Rothbard declared that on August 15 fascism came to America. I winced a bit at the rhetoric, but winced more when President Nixon, in his Labor Day address to the nation, defended his wage-price freeze with an appeal to each American for ‘personal sacrifice’ and ‘faith in his country.’ This does have a rather totalitarian ring about it . . . Galbraith, along with many of us, complains at the clear big-business bias in Nixon’s new economic policy . . . But what should Galbraith have expected in view of his own compelling arguments on the inextricable interweaving of the mature corporation and the State? Is the moral of all this that we should turn over more power to the government? And will democracy and justice really be served if George Meany’s belated protests are heeded and tripartite boards of government, business, and labor set the terms of the transactions by which we work and live? I seem to recall that tripartite boards of this type were indeed the hallmark of Benito Mussolini’s overhaul of the Italian economy a few decades ago.”

The Galbraith-Rothbard polarization has just appeared in the January, 1972 issue of the Intellectual Digest, a well-edited monthly of several hundred thousand circulation. Under the headings: “Economics: left & right”, several pages are excerpted from Galbraith’s recent book, under the caption of “The Inevitability of Controls”. Immediately following Galbraith, there is a condensation of your editor’s Lib. Forum piece on the freeze of last September, under the caption “Controls Won’t Work.”

Choose, America: Rothbard or Galbraith!

We are happy to see increasing signs of disaffection from the controls by conservatives, economists, and businessmen. Human Events, National Review, the Freeman, YAF, The American Conservative Union, have all, if sometimes belatedly, taken a stand against the price-wage controls. Without attempting to slight anyone, we might mention: Frank Chodorov, “The Tale of Two Students”, The Freeman, December, 1971 (it is a pleasure to see this reprint from the eloquent and hard-hitting writings of the great individualist, and to have Chodorov introduced to the current generation); Allan C. Brownfeld. “Phase II: Challenge to Economic Freedom,” Roll Call, October 28, 1971 (a conservative Washington publication); W. Allen Wallis, “Wage-Price Controls Won’t Work,” Wall St. Journal, December 22, 1971 (from a leading Friedmanite economist); and Hendrik S. Houthakker, “No Use for Controls”, Barrons, November 8, 1971 (particularly important as emanating from a former member of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers. Prof. Houthakker concentrates on the price-raising policies of the federal government in construction and oil.)

Meanwhile, Rothbard’s use of the term “fascism” to describe the leap into controls has drawn an anguished outcry from the social-democratic author Theodore Draper, “The Specter of Weimar,” Commentary (December), Mr. Draper lumps this charge with various left-wing uses of the term for contemporary America. In his easy pointing to the fact that we do not have concentration camps or brownshirts, Draper totally overlooks the fact that I was pointing to the fascist economy – though of course it is legitimate to conjecture that a fascist economy may well breed the rest of the fascist trappings. The Wall St. Journal (Dec. 20, 1971), while editorially commending the Draper article, is clearly worried about the totalitarian implications of the wage-price freeze, as well as the “evident willingness on the part of many to give up on the individual and on all the enormous potentialities of individual liberty.” The Journal concludes that “the public’s current docility toward the aggrandizement of the state” might well portend “socialism or some Orwellian type of totalitarian horror.”

The Shaffer Dictionary

By Butler Shaffer

The following definitions comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous — and often frustrating — manner.

GREEDY: one who puts his selfish interests ahead of mine.

HONOR: the last refuge of a man whose prejudices have come into conflict with his judgment.

LOYALTY: continuing to lend one’s support to an institution when no good reason exists for doing so.

SOCIALISM: meatless cannibalism.
Also, the idea that we should divide up the wealth of all those who have more than I do.

On Punishment: Two Comments And A Reply

I

Dear Editor:

I wish to take issue with certain assertions which you made in your October article on “Attica” with regard to capital punishment.

In your view, and I quote, “the libertarian creed states that an aggressor loses his rights to the extent that he has deprived victims of theirs. Hence, it is perfectly proper to exact capital punishment on murderers, who have deprived victims of their right to life, or to exact a lesser punishment which is in some way proportionate to other crimes.”

My question is; in your view, is the libertarian “creed” based on the moral concept of justice, or not? If it is based on justice, then by what stretch of the imagination could “a life for a life”, or “an eye for an eye”, or “a leg for a leg”, etc., fill the criteria for justice? In my view, justice is concerned with the repayment of, or compensation for, values which have been taken away. If an aggressor breaks my leg, or causes me to lose the use of an eye, how will my breaking his leg, or depriving him of the use of his eye, compensate me for the loss of the use of mine!

You talk about “punishment” as though it is a necessary and valid part of justice; it is not – in fact punishment is a biblical concept which is quite irrelevant to the concept “justice”. My own view, based on the moral concept of justice is that anyone who deprives another of his rightful values, owes a debt to the deprived person, which is proportionate to the value loss, and the deprived person has the right to use defensive force in order to obtain compensation (as much as humanly possible). This does not imply “an eye for an eye”. You may ask the question, “what then would you have done with a murderer?” Let us assume a rational anarchistic society based on the moral principles of non-sacrifice, non-aggression, and justice, and someone commits a murder. Of course, there is no way by which the dead person can ever be recompensed; how then would we apply the principle of justice?

Let us not forget that the victim of the murder is not the only person to whom a debt is owed by the murderer. True, the victim is dead, but what of others who may have been deprived of their rightful values as a result of the untimely death of the victim! What of a wife’s loss of values, or children, or persons for whom the victim had assumed responsibility? Here at least some measure of compensation (albeit insignificant by contrast to the value loss) can be made by the murderer by having him productively employed (in strict security premises), and for the rest of his life he pays not only for his own upkeep, but the balance of his earnings he pays to his victim’s estate. We can assume that the victim would have lived and accumulated values, for as long as the murderer lives. Of course if the murderer refuses to work, he does not eat, and by so doing he would be depriving himself of his own values. No one has any moral obligation whatsoever to sustain the murderer’s life, but he, by his dastardly act of aggression, owes a life-long debt. To send him to his own death, is to deny the other persons whom he deprived, of their right to as much compensation as is humanly possible.

— Ernestine Perkins

II

Dear Editor:

In the October, 1971 issue of the Libertarian Forum, Murray Rothbard endorsed the tough conservative line on the Attica prison riot. Some of Rothbard’s factual statements conflict with other accounts I have seen, but rather than dispute his “facts” I would like to question his theory of punishment.

It is important to understand what punishment is. It is a hardship imposed on someone, (usually someone judged to be an offender) above and beyond mere correction of physical damage or return of stolen property. Punishment is not self-defense, it is not restitution of property; it is an additional hardship imposed against the will of the recipient.

The recipient of punishment is the victim of coercion imposed on him, usually with the intention of harming him and, perhaps, deterring others from breaking the rules of the punishers. The prisoners at Attica were not there for restitution of property, or self-defense, but for punishment.

The form of punishment advocated by liberals is aimed at rehabilitation. As Rothbard rightly observed, the terms of this kind of punishment are determined by the “subjective decisions and whims of the ‘humanitarian’ overlords of the prison system.”

The inmates at rehabilitation centers are not volunteers and they do not know beforehand the length of their imprisonment. Rothbard contends that punishment through rehabilitation is bad because the prisoners “no longer enjoy the certainty of objective punishment” and that, a libertarian world would not be devoid of prisons, but would have more efficient ones run on a competitive private basis.

In order to decide whether punishment through rehabilitation is worse than “objective” punishment, we must know what “objective” punishment means. If it means penal laws written down in books and enforced uniformly, then either 1) there must be unanimity of opinion in society about what the laws should be or 2) there must be a State monopoly to impose one set of laws. Anyone who knows Murray Rothbard knows that he does not advocate State monopoly of anything, so he must think there is unanimity of opinion about penal laws. He must think there is an objective standard which each of us can use to decide the correct amount of punishment appropriate for each particular crime. The fact that there is neither unanimity of opinion nor uniformity of punishment practices (even among libertarians) seems to contradict the notion of a natural criterion for punishment. If such a criterion exists I would like to know what it is.

The only clues Rothbard gives are that the punishment should be proportional to the crime and should somehow fit the crime. This implies a measurement of crime and a measurement of punishment. Such measurements require units to objectively calibrate the subjective experiences of pain and suffering associated with crime or punishment. This assumes not only that pain and suffering can be measured, but that everyone experiences the same degree of pain and suffering from the same punishment.

Many of the arguments that Rothbard so brilliantly expressed against the quest for a just tax in Power and Market seem to be equally valid when used against his theory of just punishment. An objective theory of punishment seems to require interpersonal measurement of utility.

Such measurement is impossible. All codes of punishment are arbitrary, whether they be based on the principle of “an eye for an eye” or “two eyes for an eye” or any other sadistic scheme. The only way to have a uniform “objective” system of punishment is to impose one of the arbitrary punishment codes by force on the whole society.

This can only be done by a government. It is the realization of this fact, I think, which caused Ayn Rand to reject the doctrine of anarchism. This knowledge is implicit in her definition of government in her essay “The Nature of Government.”

“A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control – i.e., under objectively defined laws.”

This is a correct statement of fact and it gives a clue to the mystery of what it is about government which appeals to Ayn Rand. If you believe in retaliation, the only alternative to a government, which (ideally) retaliates against people in accordance with laws that are written down and enforced equally on everyone, is a system with competing retaliation agencies. These agencies would retaliate against criminals in different ways and in different amounts, which would obviously be inequitable and unfair. If retaliation were permitted in the absence of government, criminals would suffer unequal amounts of punishment for similar crimes and some would suffer more for small crimes than others would for big ones – depending upon the state of mind and whims of the ones determining the punishment. This is unacceptable to Ayn Rand – it isn’t objective enough.

Only a government, which enjoys a monopoly on the “right” of retaliation in a geographic area, can lend a sense of impartiality, and uniformity to the administration of punishment and, by so doing, make retaliation seem like justice. It is because Ayn Rand believes in retaliation more than she believes in the right to not be aggressed against, that she is willing to condone the coercive monopoly of government.

Ayn Rand was forced to choose between two mutually exclusive concepts of justice: vindictive vengeance objectively and uniformly administered or the inalienable right of everyone to freedom from aggression. The former requires a coercive government, the latter requires anarchy. Ayn Rand, being basically a hater, chose the former.

I hope that Murray Rothbard will prove to be more devoted to the principle of nonaggression than to the lust for revenge.

— Roy Halliday

III

Editor’s Reply:

The comments of Ernestine Perkins and Roy Halliday provide a welcome opportunity to expound a bit on one of the most grievously neglected areas of libertarian theory: the theory of punishment. I hasten to add that the burden of formulating a theory of objective punishment (i.e. punishment that is not simply a whim of the legal code) falls not only upon us, but on all legal systems anywhere: be they democratic, socialist, or monarchical. All except the absolute pacifists, who would allow all criminals to go scot free, have to search for a rational principle for punishment of crime.

In the first place, most libertarians, exempting again the absolute pacifists, would certainly agree that the prime focus of punishment must certainly be restitution to the victim, forcing the criminal to restore his ill-gotten loot to the person he injured. This, indeed, was the prime focus of punishment in ancient times, and it is only with the rise of the modern State that the focus of punishment became payment of a so-called “debt” to “society”, while the hapless victim is forced to pay taxes for the support of his persecutor in jail, (on the history of the legal concept of restitution and its decline, see the excellent work by Stephen Schafer, Restitution to Victims of Crime, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, I960).

My contention, however, is that simple restitution is not enough. In the first place it would grant to the thief a virtual license to steal; if A steals $5,000 from B, A would rest secure in the knowledge that the worst that could happen to him is that he would have to pay back the $5,000 (the including of interest and the cost of apprehension doesn’t change the magnitudes very much.) Secondly, the restitution concept cannot handle satisfactorily what happens to the criminal who assaults or maims or murders his victim; an attempt to assess a scale of monetary equivalents which he would be forced to pay the victim (or, in the case of murder, his heirs) is grotesque, and was one of the great failings of the ancient law. A beaten man does not simply have to pay medical costs; he loses his dignity, he suffers pain, and he suffers the invasion of his most precious possession: himself.

I hold, instead, that any criminal loses his own rights to the extent that he has aggressed against another; in other words, that the victim (or his heirs) can exact a punishment up to whatever may be considered equivalent or proportionate to the extent of the original crime. The attempt to do this is summed up in the famous legal maxim: “let the punishment fit the crime.” There is no doubt about the fact that such measurement is often difficult; but it must be attempted nevertheless. The great turn-of-the-century English libertarian Auberon Herbert put the case very well: “. . . a man has forfeited his own rights (to the extent of the aggression he has committed in attacking the rights of others . . . It may be very difficult to translate into concrete terms the amount of aggression, and of resulting restraint; but all just law seems to be the effort to do this. We punish a man in a certain way if he has inflicted an injury which lays me up for a day; in another way if he takes my life. No doubt the law of every country is most imperfect . . . but there is generally underlying it the view (which is, I think, true) that the punishment or redress – both in civil and criminal matters — should be measured by the amount of aggression; in other words that the aggressor – after a rough fashion – loses as much liberty as that of which he has deprived others.” (Auberon Herbert and J. H. Levy, Taxation and Anarchism, London: The Personal Rights Association, 1912, p. 38.)

How do we begin to approximate proportionality? A few guidelines present themselves. First, in the question of theft, the above criminal A who stole $5,000 should also have $5,000 taken from him. In short, he should have to pay back the victim, B, not only the original $5,000 (plus interest and costs) but also another $5,000 which is the amount that he forfeits as punishment for the act of aggression. This principle of double payment has been accurately termed by a libertarian wag “two teeth for a tooth.” In the case of personal assault, it seems clear that the most precise proportionality is to inflict the exact same beating or assault upon the criminal as he had inflicted on the victim – although, here, too, more must be added to compensate the victim for the terror of uncertainty and sudden invasion of rights that accompanied the original act, and that a simple equivalent beating cannot really equal. In the case of murder, of course, the only equivalent is capital punishment, and it is precisely this fitting of the punishment to the crime that is the rational groundwork for this maximum penalty. The case for prisons is not the prison per se but the probable necessity of isolating the criminal from his future victims: the idea that the prisoner should labor in prison until his victim is fully compensated was, again, prevalent in older law, and was Herbert Spencer’s suggestion to be restored as the guiding principle of prison punishment. Of course, it should also be noted that in the future libertarian society where all land, including streets, is privately owned, much of the need for segregating criminals will be taken care of by not allowing criminals or risky types into various private areas: the rules for admission being of course determined by the land and street owners themselves.

The concept of vengeance has received a very bad press in recent decades, but I have never seen a satisfactory refutation of it; invariably the modern punishment theorist quickly dismisses it as “barbaric” before he races on to treat the deterrence (utilitarian) or “reform” (liberal-humanitarian) concepts of punishment. The pseudo-humanitarian concept of “reform” I have already discussed in the “Attica” editorial; and to rely primarily on deterrence leads one into the genuine barbarism of – say – advocating capital punishment for stealing an apple and a much lesser punishment for murder, since most people have an innate reluctance to commit murder while many people are not loath to steal apples, so that more intensive deterrence is then required. In my view, proportionate vengeance is not only the most Just, but also the most genuinely humanitarian, of these three alternative theories of punishment. In any case, I see nothing wrong with the desire for vengeance; if a man’s infant daughter is cruelly butchered, why should he not desire the butchery of the criminal in return, and why should he not have this desire executed? Professor Schafer well calls this exaction of vengeance “spiritual restitution” to the victim; most libertarians would agree to material restitution of a theft – why not spiritual restitution as well? Schafer writes: “The evil visited on the wrongdoer in punishment is intended . . . to endeavour to compensate the victim for his encroached or destroyed right by offering him some spiritual satisfaction. . . it is generally accepted that one of the tasks of punishment is what might be called — ’idealistic damages’, or ‘spiritual restitution.’” (Schafer, p. 120). (See also the defense of capital punishment by Donald Atwell Zoll, in “A Wistful Goodbye to Capital Punishment,” National Review, December 3, 1971).

In the libertarian society of the future, however, there would still be a way out for pacifists and quasi-pacifists like Mr. Halliday. For all prosecution would be exercised by the victim or his agents, and not by any sort of “district attorney” presuming to speak for “society” as a whole. If, then, Mr. Halliday were victimized by criminals, he could choose not to exercise his right to punish at all, or may choose to exercise it to any extent less than is his due. (Or, if he were murdered, he could instruct Mb heirs In advance, by notice, not to do so.) Alternatively, he could make a voluntary contract with the criminal, allowing the wrongdoer to buy his way out of any exacted punishment. If, for example, someone beats up Mr. Halliday, he could allow the criminal to buy his way out of a retaliatory beating. The situation, then, would by truly libertarian. Pacifists, or others who desire money over precise vengeance, could relieve the criminal of his punishment; those of us who prefer vengeance would of course allow such victims to do so. Why will they not allow us to exact due punishment? And if they don’t, what sort of libertarianism is this? In the libertarian society of the future, moreover, Mr. Halliday could continue to try to convince future victims to become pacifists or quasi-pacifists; while I could continue to persuade them otherwise. No one could compel those victims who are opposed to punishment to exact such punishment; and, similarly, they should not be able to prohibit vengeance-bound victims from doing so.

I need only comment on a few observations by Mr. Halliday. First, there is no attempt here to measure subjective pain or utility, but to measure” objective deeds of aggression and retaliate in kind. Second, Mr. Halliday is really saying that it is impossible to have any sort of objective law, or objective law code (not Just for punishment) without a coercive monopoly government. Here he is simply falling into Miss Rand’s trap. Objective law existed long before government (e.g. in the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law) and was worked out by privately competitive Judges long before the State imposed its monopoly. Since law is objective, it is discoverable by reason and doesn’t need government to formulate it – on the contrary, government, subject as it is to the caprice and whims of legislators, is most unlikely to respect objective law, as history has amply demonstrated. The objective Law Code would be the libertarian law of outlawing aggression against person and property, defining what that property is, setting up rules for trials to determine who the criminals are (e.g. permitting cross-examination of witnesses, etc.), and, in the libertarian society that I envision, all the privately competing courts and defense agencies would be pledged to abide by this objective Code. Any court which flouted this libertarian Code and imposed its own rules would be deemed to be Itself guilty of aggression (e.g. courts which decided that all redheads are ipso facto criminals.)

Third, Mr. Halliday liberally sprinkles his comment with smear terms: “sadistic”, “vindictive”, “hater”, etc. These are simply that – smear terms – and prove nothing. Not only do I see nothing wrong with “hating” crime and injustice, I hold that genuine love of Justice requires such hatred. As Professor Zoll writes, “A humane society is a compassionate society, but compassion is only significant in terms of justice, of a sensitivity to the valid claims of men which rest upon the restraints on usurpation, aggression and terror.” (Zoil, p. 1354).

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens.”

— H. L. Mencken.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 2

February, 1972

75¢

PHASE II CRACKING

Richard Milhous Nixon has achieved another “first”: generally it takes a year or two of price-wage controls before they visibly begin to collapse, and the heady euphoria of the public turns to sour recrimination. But in his wisdom, Richard Nixon has managed to have Phase II visibly cracking before it has hardly begun. The bloom is off the rose, for the public, for unions, and even for the staunchest supporters of the controls, the nation’s businessmen. As the ardently pro-control Business Week put it (Jan. 29) “The Phase II honeymoon is over.” Prices skyrocket in the stores, coal miners gain a 17% wage increase, while other people’s wages are frozen and rent controls are firmly imposed. Some businesses are allowed price increases; others are brought sharply to book. Throughout the land, there is a crazy patchwork pattern of discrimination, enforcement, and exemptions, and the early euphoria of the public has turned to disgust and anger. The controls were expected by the Administration to put an end to the “inflationary expectations” of the public; and of course they have not succeeded.

The Administration has, predictably, met this problem with a blend of ever more Byzantine evasions and rationalizations, combined with a Connally-led exercise in hard-nosed “toughness” directed against the controls’ staunchest supporters: the businessmen. Herbert Stein meets rapid price increases with the declaration that this is great because he expected the post Phase I price “bulge” to be even greater than it is. Robert F. Lanzilotti, economist and member of the Price Commission, complains that consumers do not realize that raw agricultural products are exempt from controls, and therefore should not complain about their rapid rise. “I wish,” he added wistfully, “we could get this message across to the housewives.” (Lotsa luck.) (Business Week). In the meanwhile, the Administration has helped the food-price raising process along by boosting price supports for milk. Utility rates and postal rates – and of course – taxes go up, and, as we predicted, the quality and size of many products have declined, thus constituting a hidden price increase. Jergens Lotion in Denver, for example, now costs the same 59¢ for a bottle that has oddly diminished from 4 3/4 to 4 oz.

But the Administration is nothing if not “tough”. While prices have been decontrolled for small business, the Justice Dept. suddenly lashed out at Time Saver Food Stores of New Orleans, suing the store for over $100,000 in price control violations. Secretary of the Treasury Connally, too, has been addressing meetings of businessmen and denouncing them for not bringing about economic recovery. He attacked them for complaining about the vast uncertainty brought about by the patchwork price-wage controls, and for not being stimulated by the investment tax credit to increase capital spending (this in a time of large amounts of excess capacity!) The problem, as acknowledged by Argus investment research, is that Phase I and Phase II “evidently had a more depressing effect on business spending for inventories and other requirements of economic recovery than anyone had expected” (not us!). Connally will find out that no amount of Texas toughness is going to induce businessmen to suffer losses voluntarily in order to pull the Nixonite chestnuts out of the fire. Finally, the Administration sternly insists that they will keep wage and price controls indefinitely; or as Connally told businessmen in a burst of madcap illogic that will make old pragmatist John Dewey turn over in his grave, they will keep the control program “until it works.” In ah age of socio-economic lunacy, this is probably the most lunatic statement of them all.

Finally, C. Jackson Grayson, head of the Price Commission, threatened that if the price-wage controls do not work, we will have to go over into “socialism”; there we have it — the final wormy promise in the Nixonite apple-barrel.

America, America! How much more of the Monster Milhous will we have to take before he is dumped?

But never fear; the nation’s economic big-wigs, conspicuously including “free market” economist Milton Friedman, have declared their contentment with Nixon’s economics. In a recent issue, Newsweek (Jan. 31) coyly asked their three-man panel of economists to give President Nixon “marks” for his economic performance for 1971. Right-centrist Nixonite Henry Wallich predictably checked in with the fawning: “President Nixon has clearly earned the top grade of honors.” Liberal Paul Samuelson recorded a “69” or “C+” for Nixon, since the President’s “new economic policy pulled up his average for the year.” But what of Milton Friedman, who allegedly provides the “right-wing” balance to the other two? Curiously enough, his mark for Tricky Dick was almost the same as Samuelson’s: “75.” Why such a high grade, since Friedman added that Nixon’s monetary policy was “terrible” (though he blamed this on the Federal Reserve Board), the deficit too high, and the wage-price controls a “major mistake”. (Remember when the Communist fellow-travellers used to mildly deplore the “mistakes” of Stalin – like slave labor camps?) So why a mark as high as 75? Nixon’s “bold”, “highly desirable and long overdue” action in “closing the gold window” – that means plunging the country and the world into a totally fiat currency, divorced from the sound commodity money: gold. Apparently, in the eyes of Friedman, the boldness and beauty of Nixon’s fiat declaration of bankruptcy was good enough to offset the other “mistakes”.

If you had asked me, Newsweek, for my “grade” for Richard Milhous Nixon, I would have loudly and unhesitatingly given the correct libertarian answer: “F”, and expulsion.

The Political Circus

II New Left Redux?

The tattered remnants of whatever debris remains from the defunct New Left have gathered themselves together in a “People’s Party”: their major mass base is the old Peace and Freedom Party of California (the other state PFP’s have long since folded); the leading theoreticians and organizers are the intellectuals from the Institute of Policy Studies, in Washington; and their current national candidates are Dr. Spock for President and Negro civil rights leader Julius Hobson for V. P. Their “big names” are Spock and the acidulous Gore Vidal.

For many years now, the intellectuals of the New Left have been promising us some “new” form of socialism, a decentralized, quasi-libertarian, anti-statist system that would discard the bad old Leviathan State. Until now, the New Left intellectuals have contented themselves with cloudy rhetoric, some of it promising, while presumably hard at work cogitating and hammering out the concrete shape of their new concept. What, exactly, would any sort of “libertarian” socialism look like? And how could the free-market be suppressed without establishing a Leviathan State? And if the free market were allowed, how would this be “socialism”?

Well, after many years, we now have our answer: the platform of the new People’s Party, a platform designed as a “transitional program to decentralized, democratic socialism.” (Charles Briody, national chairman of the People’s Party, in The Guardian, Feb. 2, 1972). There are one or two obeisances to decentralization: community control of the police, and “guaranteeing the rights of minorities (how about majorities?) to control their own communities.” Launching his campaign in Washington, Dr. Spock added local control of schools, including opposition to compulsory bussing. (New York Times, Jan. 28, 1972). But there we have it. For the rest we are offered:

A Federal Jobs Administration to provide “meaningful” work for the unemployed;

An end to the wage freeze, but a “real freeze on prices and corporate profits”;

A vigorous campaign of federal trust-busting;

A guaranteed annual income of $6500 a year for a family of four, plus a national pension adjusted yearly for cost of living increases for every American over 60;

A sharply progressive tax structure which would soak the very rich and the corporations, “along with legislation prohibiting the passing on of such taxation to consumers”;

Prohibition of all discrimination against women, blacks, and homosexuals (but not against WASPS?);

Free medical care for everyone, “of the highest possible quality” (Wanna bet?);

Courts and prisons designed to “rehabilitate, rather than punish, criminals”;

Governmental child care centers everywhere (the parents, however, to decide their policies);

Government provision of educational opportunities for all, “including the guarantee of free tuition and living expenses through the college, technical or professional school of one’s choice.”

What does all this amount to? Something unfortunately all too familiar to all of us. There is nothing libertarian, voluntary, or even decentralized about any of it; it is, purely and simply, our old friend Socialism, our old tyrant the Leviathan State. After years of flim-flammery, of soul-searching, of lofty talk about alliances with the middle class and with Goldwaterires and Wallaceites, the New Left magician has finally whisked off the cloak from his new product, and what we have is . . . just the Old Left. Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose.

II Chisholm

When the great H. L. Mencken, libertarian and political satirist, lanced the pomposities and imbecilities of the America of his day, he – and the other great satirists of the past – had the advantage of being able to take existing reality and exaggerate and parody its less attractive features. In short, they had a healthy base in reality from which to work, from which to lampoon the absurd parts of society. But sometimes it seems that life itself has become a parody, defying in its buffoonery any attempt of the satirist.

What would Mencken have done, for example, with the entry into the Presidential race of Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D., Brooklyn?) Mrs. Chisholm, in the kickoff speech of her campaign, announced that not only did she “represent” all the women and all the blacks and Chicanos in America, but even “all the people of the United States.” (Loud applause.) In the immortal words of Samuel Goldwyn, “Kindly include me out” of this “representation.” Standard political hyperbole? Perhaps. But let us ponder Mrs. Chisholm’s interview in the New York Post (Jan. 26). Striking what some objectivists might applaud as the right note of megalomaniacal “self-esteem” tinged with paranoia, Mrs. Chisholm asserted: “I am self-confident. Enormously self-confident. Otherwise I never would have survived those people who are looking to destroy me politically.” Who, Shirley? Name names; how many billions, how much psychic energy is being poured into this nationwide plot? But the reporter adds that “she brushes aside the question of who they are.” Yes indeed.

Mrs. Chisholm then pressed on to explain why she is more qualified than virtually all past Presidents to hold down the office. “Thirty-six or more persons have been President of these United States. Experientially (?) and educationally I am better than all, excepting six or seven (come, come, no false humility now.) I have four college degrees, I am 10 points away from a doctorate (Oh, wow!) and I have a near-genius IQ. Close to 160.” (Mohammed Ali may be the “greatest”, but Shirley is the “smartest.”)

And still more: “I am a very brilliant-minded woman. I can feel political questions. And I am quick on the draw.” (The fastest mouth in the East?) Of the other Presidential candidates Mrs. Chisholm likes best none other than that Lochinvar of urban problems, Mayor Lindsay. Why? Replied the near-genius. “We’re both Sagitarians, with strong leadership traits.”

H. L. Mencken, Where Are You Now, When We Need You Most?

Of Interest To Libertarians

Those who are seriously interested in the prospect of income tax evasion can now buy, for $15.00, a packet called THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR INCOME TAX REFUSERS. The packet has been put together by Lucille Moran who states: “If you are a serious tax rebel, this packet is your answer. This is a simple, tough assault that works because it strikes directly at the heart of the income tax strategy.” The kit contains a step-by-step approach for those who no longer want to cooperate with IRS. The packet can be obtained by sending a check for the above amount to Lucille E. Moran, P.O. Box 641, Tavernier, Fla. 33070, and mentioning that you saw this information In the Libertarian Forum.

Another tax rebel, Gordon L. Cruikshank, has founded a new religion, akin to the Universal Life Church, for those seeking the political benefits of spiritual ordination. The church is the LIFE SCIENCE CHURCH, and you can be ordained by writing to the Rev. Cruikshank at 2207 Cardinal Drive., Rolling Meadows, Ill. 60008.

–Jerome Tuccille

For Croatia

The turbulent history of Yugoslavia, since World War II and indeed since World War I, can only be fully understood in terms of age-old ethnic and national struggles within the Balkans. The latest rioting and purges in Croatia are only the most recent chapter in a story that is just beginning. The major problem is that “Yugoslavia” is not really a nation; it was a typical misbegotten product of Woodrow Wilson’s imperialism after the first World War. In the good name of “national self-determination”, the U.S., the British, and the French created a group of ill-conceived client states. “Yugoslavia” was such an artificial creation, a geographical entity rather than a nation in which the Serbs constituting about half the total population were established as imperial dictators over the other ethnic and national entities in the new country. Backward and dedicated to statism within and without their own land, the Serbs tyrannized over the other national groups: the Croats, Slovenes, Hungarians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims – each one of which constituted national, cultural, territorial and linguistic entities of their own. Of these oppressed minority nations, the most important were the Slovenes and the far more numerous Croats – progressive, Western-oriented, enterprising, and productive far beyond the other “Yugoslavian” nations. To add to their differences, the Croats and Slovenes were Catholics, while the others were Orthodox or Muslims.

During World War II, under German tutelage, the Croats, after centuries of struggle, achieved a truncated form of independent state under their leading independence and guerrilla organization, the Ustashi. But their independence was severely limited by German and Italian occupation, and especially by Italian annexation of large chunks of Croatia and the imposition of an Italian King. Furthermore, while the Ustashi slaughtered the Serb minority in Croatia and in the mixed region of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Italians looked favorably on the activities of the Serbian terrorist organization, the Chetniks, who massacred Croats in the Italian zone. With the pacifist Croatian peasant leader Vladko Matchek (representing the bulk of the Croats) refusing either to collaborate with the Germans and replace the fanatical Ustashis or to lead a guerrilla resistance movement against the occupation, the anti-German guerrilla movement in Yugoslavia soon divided into two groups: the exclusively Serb Chetniks, under Draja Mihajlovitch, and a multiethnic Partisan movement under the Croat Marshal Tito (Josip Broz). Tito’s thundering success over Mihajlovitch was due not so much to his Communism, as to the fact that he had forged a movement of ethnic equals, while Mihajlovitch largely confined his activities to the age-old Serb occupation of slaughtering Croats.

Since World War II, and especially since Tito’s courageous break with Stalin and the international Communist movement, Tito has led Yugoslavia into a remarkably rapid shift away from socialist planning and a strong central state into an amazing degree of decentralization and autonomy for the various nations, as well as toward an explicitly individualist social philosophy and a free-market economy of extensive private ownership, worker ownership of factories replacing state ownership, a free price system based on profit-and-loss, private control of investment and credit, the welcoming of private foreign investment, and freedom to emigrate abroad. So autonomous are the various Yugoslav nations, for example, that Slovenia is allowed to have its own consular treaties with Austria, treaties that do not apply to the rest of the country.

Leading the struggle both for political decentralization and for a purely free-market economy have been the Communists of Croatia and Slovenia, the most industrialized, productive, and thrifty areas, and particularly in the fore front have been the Croatian and Slovenian economists, whose writings sound very much like Goldwater, Reagan, or Ludwig von Mises. The Croats, for example, have bitterly attacked the establishment of “political factories” by the Yugoslav central government, in which the productive Croats have been taxed to subsidize lazy and unproductive people in the Albanian region and Montenegro. And throughout this exciting period of rapid shift from socialism to freedom (a shift which soon envisions a free stock-market and ownership by individual instead of collective workers), it has been the Serbs – the “conservatives” – who have clung to the Old Order and been most resistant to this libertarian advance. It is almost exclusively the Serbs, for example, who staff the organs of the central government. To the extent that in 1967, Tito was forced to fire his Number 2 man and picked successor, Aleksandr Rankovitch, who had been in control of the hated secret police, after which that sinister agency of every totalitarian state was dismantled. And throughout the argument among economists it was always the Croats, centered in Zagreb, battling against the conservative crypto-Stalinists in Serb Belgrade.

The rapid and inexorable change in Yugoslavia pursued the logic of freedom; and it is characteristic of such an era of great change that the expectations of the people, especially in Crotia, rose to demand the pursuing of that logic to its conclusion. The Croats, led by the Croatian Communist League and more militantly by striking university students, came to demand: a wider free market, and abolishing the practice of the central government taxing Croatian earnings of foreign exchange in order to subsidize the rest of Yugoslavia. And looming behind these demands was the ultimate logic: Croatian independence at long last, after a thousand years of oppression.

Tragically, the aging Tito refused to pursue this logic the final step. Last December, Tito partially reverted to his Stalinist past. Over a thousand Croat students were arrested, and a ruthless purge has hit the Croatian Communist and intellectual leadership, many of whom are now awaiting trial for such high crimes as “counter-revolution” and “denigration of the state.” The Croatian Communist leadership, headed by Miko Tripalo and Mrs. Savka Dabeevic-Kucar, have all been ousted and may themselves be brought to trial, perhaps for “high treason.” As one Croat woman lamented, “We used to feel that we were so different from the Poles and the Czechs, now we don’t feel different at all.” (James Feron, in the New York Times, Jan. 25).

Meanwhile, the old Ustashi movement lives on in exile, in West Germany, home of over half a million Yugoslavs, mainly Croats, working temporarily abroad. From there, the Ustashi conduct some guerrilla activities against Yugoslavia. The poor befuddled New York Times, failing as always to comprehend national liberation movements, can’t make up its mind whether the Ustashi, and its current leader, Dr. Branko Jelic, are “Nazis” or “Communists.” On the one hand, they ruled under the tutelage of the Nazis in World War II; on the other hand, they recently organized the “League of Croatian Communists Abroad”, and are rumored to have accepted funds from Soviet intelligence. The solution to the puzzle should be plain, however; the Ustashi are simply Croat nationalists, and as Dr. Jelic candidly admitted, he would “sleep with the devil” is necessary to achieve an independent Croatia. (James Feron, and David Binder, in the New York Times, Jan. 28).

Last year, the Lib. Forum called for and predicted the rise of an independent Bangladesh. Our predictions were fulfilled. We cannot predict an independent Croatia so readily, but the logic of events is clearly in that direction. Marshal Tito cannot live forever, and the centrifugal forces which he himself set in motion make almost inevitable the collapse of the “collective presidency” representing each nation which is to succeed him, and the division of the misbegotten country of Yugoslavia into its constituent parts. Croatia will rise again.

Will The Real (Howard Hughes, Clifford Erving, Helga Hughes, George Holmes, Hannah Rosencantz . . .) Please Stand Up.?

What a lot of glorious fun the Howard Hughes caper is! It has all the necessary ingredients: an unfolding, ever more labyrinthine tale of mystery, chicanery, high finance and high level intrigue, subject to numerous interpretations and endless speculation – and all of no Importance whatsoever. For surcease from worldly care, it is just what we all needed to tide us over between the Super Bowl and the New Hampshire primary.

The Shaffer Dictionary

By Butler Shaffer

The following definitions comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous — and often frustrating — manner.

ANARCHY: a chaotic system devoid of political government; hence, the absence of wars, depressions, and other manifestations of law and order.

CANNIBALISM: pre-capitalistic socialism.

MARXISM: a New Deal program for atheists.
A philosophy which would have won the overwhelming support of the Catholic and Protestant churches, and the Democratic and Republican parties, but for the strategic blunder of having endorsed atheism.

GENERAL WELFARE: that which serves my personal interests.

BOONDOGGLE: that which serves yours.

BANDIT: one who believes that even a little man can aspire to a political career.

WAR-HERO: a man who commits atrocities for our side.

INFIDEL: one whose judgment has been distorted by fact, reason, and logic.

Recommended Reading

Rothbard pamphlets. Murray Rothbard has recently had two pamphlets published. One is Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor (50¢, from the Institute for Humane Studies, 1134 Crane St., Menlo Park, Calif. 94025.) This is a reprint of the article in Modern Age (Summer, 1971), attacking left-wing egalitarianism and the yen to crush the division of labor and therefore individual freedom and development. The other is Education, Free and Compulsory (available from the Center for Independent Education, 9115 E. Thirteenth, Wichita, Kan. 67206); the first part of this pamphlet appeared in the April, 1971 Individualist. The pamphlet is a history and critique of compulsory attendance laws, and outlines an individualistic philosophy of education.

Rule of Law. One of the most dangerous notions, which caught on in some libertarian circles in the early 1960’s, was F. A. Hayek’s grounding of political philosophy on the “rule of law.” Now Professor Ronald Hamowy, a former student of Hayek’s, has published a brilliant, thorough, and scholarly evisceration of the rule of law, and demonstrates that it provides no groundwork whatsoever for a libertarian political philosophy. See Ronald Hamowy, “Freedom and the Rule of Law in F. A. Hayek”, Il Politico (Pavia), (1971, No. 2), pp. 349-77. Cold War Revisionism. Cold War Critics is a book containing an excellent series of articles on early critics of the Cold War. Of particular interest to libertarians is: Ronald Radosh and Leonard P. Liggio, “Henry A. Wallace and the Open Door”, pp. 76-113; and Henry W. Berger, “Senator Robert A. Taft Dissents from Military Escalation.” (Leonard Liggio is the historian, long-time libertarian, and valued Lib. Forum contributor). The brunt of the two articles is that Robert Taft was a far more trenchant and consistent critic of the Cold War and American imperialism than Henry Wallace, who was himself an imperialist of a slightly more pacific and sophisticated breed. See Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971, paper $2.95).

Wage-Price Controls. Now that direct controls are once again upon us, the American Enterprise Institute (1150 17th St., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036) has performed an important service by publishing a pamphlet, Colin Campbell, ed., Wage-Price Controls in World War II, United States and Germany, 73 pp., $3.00, collecting and reprinting notable contemporary articles critical of the workings of American and German controls. Included are articles by Mansfield, Cherne, Keezer, Mendershausen, and Eucken.

The Movement Marches On

The distinguished English weekly, The Manchester Guardian, has published an article that will cheer the heart of every libertarian. (John Windsor, “A Right State of Affairs,” The Manchester Guardian Weekly, December 25, 1971, p. 15.) The Guardian reports that the British libertarian movement, which it calls “guerrilla capitalism,” “threatens to become the New Year’s trendy political curiosity.” While acknowledging that the British movement still has only about thirty members, it takes its future quite seriously. There are quotes and descriptions of the new movement, which centers around an American-style hamburger restaurant In Kingston-upon-Thames run by the American-born Pauline Russell, a graduate of UCLA. The restaurant, the Transatlantic Success, publishes the magazine The Guerrilla Capitalist, selling for ten pence, and the group is called the Radical Libertarian Alliance. Also mentioned in the article is Richard King, former Australian bee remover who ran a “guerrilla capitalist” postal service during the British postal strike, delivering magazines profitably at one-third the charge levied by the British Post Office. Other libertarians cited in the group are Chris Tame and the Indian Mansur Nathoo, editor of the Guerrilla Capitalist, who is studying for a Ph.D. at the University of London.

One happy note: the article declares that in the USA there are “an estimated 200,000 practicing libertarians.” Well, well, well! We hadn’t thought it was nearly that many, but who are we to correct such a distinguished journal??

Immortality And The Law

By Jerome Tuccille
(an excerpt from a forthcoming book)

The legal problems created by extended life – not to mention immortality – would be overwhelming say the critics. We would have to rewrite the law books, probably redefine the entire question of death. Such items as suicide and murder would assume radically new meanings for all of us. Morality would be more thoroughly intertwined with politics, involving spokesmen from the various religious denominations and further eroding the wall dividing church and state. As government has gotten itself progressively entangled in moral issues – abortion; birth control; sexual customs; pornography; prostitution – it has penetrated more and more deeply into a province considered to be the exclusive domain of the religious authorities. One can imagine a life-death freeze in 1984 modeled after Richard Nixon’s wage-price freeze of 1971, with a tripartite board of rabbis, priests and ministers advising the president. To be sure, Holy Rollers, fakirs, theosophists and whirling dervishes will all be clamoring for equal representation, charging the government with oppression for not adopting a “quota system” for religious minorities.

Insurance companies, too, are bound to suffer a dramatic upheaval. Do they pay off life insurance policies on people suspended in liquid nitrogen? Are they “dead” or not? What about inheritance? Does the estate of a suspended human being pass on to his family, or is it held in abeyance until he is reanimated? How about pension plans? It’s one thing to retire an individual at sixty-five and pay him a salary until he expires five, ten or fifteen years later. But for sixty or seventy years? The whole question of “mandatory retirement age” will have to be re-evaluated.

Government has also gotten itself firmly entwined in the insurance business through social security, medicare and similar welfare measures. When our average life expectancy is increased to a hundred and twenty-five, social security payments will continue for sixty years instead of five or ten. Government pension plans are the most outrageous in existence anywhere. In New York City it is possible for a man to join the police force or fire department at twenty-one and retire at forty-one with three-quarters pay until he dies. Presently, he can expect to live another thirty years and already the money paid out annually in pensions to retired New York City employees is equal to the amount paid in salaries to contemporary civil servants, and it is rising proportionately every year. With a major breakthrough in the anti-aging field the pension fund could double or triple in a matter of years, and the private wage earner in New York City will find most of his taxes winding up in the pockets of ex-cops and firemen.

No private industry in the world could survive for long with such corrupt and shortsighted policies. The government, with its stranglehold on the earnings of honest citizens, is not subject to market competition and can keep the fantasy going a bit longer. But sooner or later the bubble has to explode.

The error made by opponents of immortality from the viewpoint of legality is the old familiar one of putting the cart before the horse; they fail to comprehend that legal forms do not determine reality, that the case is quite the opposite. Any legal structure which does not conform to the reality of the world we live in is at best archaic and obsolete, at worst immoral and dictatorial. Since the reality of the world around us is fluid, dynamic, constantly changing because of experimentation and new discoveries, it is incumbent upon the legal system to adapt itself to the evolving reality of life.

Historically, legality has never been able to keep up with the rapid pace of human achievement. It has always lagged two and three generations behind the times, and at any given moment there are laws on the books which reflect the thinking and social attitudes of fifty years before. In New York State today it is illegal to call a tavern a “saloon” – a hangover from the pre-Prohibition era when the word saloon identified a place where intoxicating beverages were sold without meals and was later outlawed. Today it is legal to operate such an establishment, but illegal to use the word which describes it. A well-known bar in New York City, O’Neal’s Baloon, originally opened with the name O’Neal’s Saloon in the late 1960’s. The state liquor authorities stepped in shortly afterward and demanded that the name be changed. Rather than spending a lot of money having a new sign put up, the owner – actor Patrick O’Neal – merely took a can of paint and changed the S to an awkward B. Patrons still refer to the pub as O’Neal’s Saloon even though the official name over the door conforms to the requirements of legislators in Albany.

There are many reasons why the legal code remains resistant to change while the reality of life progresses as a result of human ingenuity. The most obvious is the nature of the men who invariably control the structure of government. Those attracted to government seem to be, with few exceptions, the most cautious, shortsighted, conformist and authoritarian among us. Our journalists, media spokesmen and university intellectuals are constantly crying out for “new, young, progressive and charismatic” leaders to enter the breach and launch a New Great Frontier Deal to save the world. Yesterday’s hero was John F. Kennedy; today’s is John Lindsay; tomorrow’s will surely be the anti-war veteran John Kerry of Massachusetts (with his initials J.F.K., his tousled hair and New England accent, how can he miss?). But aspiring politicians, however intelligent, charismatic or redolent of Camelot, must make deals along the way with czars of labor, business and the military who tend to be somewhat less than inspired. The drive to power breeds its own corruption, hence conformity and devotion to the status quo and the the balance of political power.

Another, more subtle reason why legality always lags behind reality is that a large portion of the general population despises individual greatness and always acts to whittle it down to a less threatening level – a level it can readily understand and cope with. Any innovation is seen as a threat to tradition, the general standard of living and vested interests. Witness the hue and cry in recent years over the “tracking” of New York City public school students according to their level of development. The idea that someone else’s child may be more advanced in a given area than one’s own is unacceptable to many people. The fact that we are not all equal in capability and intelligence, that some people are more talented or able to make money than we are, is a subject guaranteed to turn any relaxed social gathering into an emotional free-for-all. Paradoxically, it is usually the Law and Order custodian of our so-called “free enterprise” system who is the first to yell for the gestapo at the first sign of Social Darwinism arising in his own neighborhood.

The fundamental question behind all this is whether the legal structure should concern itself with matters of morality in the first place, or whether it should limit its concerns strictly to aggressive social behavior. Early in 1971, when crime figures for the preceding year were released, a sharp distinction was drawn between “victimless crimes” and “crimes involving one or more victims.” The overwhelming majority of legislation on the books deals with the victimless variety – things people do to themselves or do voluntarily with other adults: whom they sleep with; how they sleep with them; the books they read; the plays and movies they watch; the stuff they pump into their own arms or suck into their own lungs; the list is endless. Obviously, the subject of legality becomes extremely complicated as the law presumes to dictate more and more standards of behavior to the public.

But if one believes that the law should have nothing to say about non-aggressive behavior, as libertarians have long argued and many others now appear to be discovering, then the issue is seen from a different viewpoint entirely. If one maintains that abortion, birth control, reading matter, public entertainment, sexual practices, gambling, drug addiction, self-abuse in general, ad infinitum, ought to be left to the discretion of each individual, the issue of legality is separated from morality and confined to its only legitimate function: protecting the innocent from aggression.

Does this mean that there should be no way of determining the answers to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter? That far-reaching issues like inheritance and pension payments should be left up in the air with each individual making up his own rules? Not at all. Over the years, for whatever reasons, we have become increasingly dependent on government to write our contracts for us. It’s difficult to think of one major contractual agreement that is not regulated by government to one extent or another: marriage; divorce; alimony; wage-price contracts; buying and selling of businesses; domestic and international trade agreements; insurance policies; etc. Not only has government entered the moral sphere and regulated non-aggressive behavior, it has also become the major author or arbiter of virtually every contract signed in the United States; this is another activity that should be left to the exclusive province of the people concerned.

If an individual wants to have himself stored in a cryo-capsule rather than planted in the earth, he has a right to sign a contract with some “freezer plan” company stipulating that he be reanimated as soon as possible. What happens if the cryonics outfit pulls out the plug and has him chopped up for icecubes? The would-be reincarnee can minimize his risks by dealing with a reputable firm (just as he does with any product he buys) and avoiding the fly-by-night charlatan who operates out of his icebox, or he can appoint a third party – family or attorney – to protect his interests while he is suspended. A bank account of five hundred dollars, with compounded interest over a period of forty or fifty years, can buy a hell of a lot of protection, as the banks are quick to inform us. A willful violation of contract is an aggressive act, and it is at this point that the legal authorities should step in to safeguard the rights of the innocent. In this case it would be murder as well, since the suspended party would be deprived of all hope of biological life.

The question of whether an individual can have himself frozen any time he wants to also comes up. Should suicide be illegal? (If so, what is the proper penalty for a suicide – twenty years standing in the corner?) In any case, suspension with the possibility of reincarnation could not really be considered self-destruction. It may be that a depressed forty-year-old who wants to have himself frozen even though he is in good health needs a psychiatrist rather than a cryonics engineer, but no one has yet found a way of legislating sanity. Some governments have managed to legislate insanity by declaring radicals mentally ill, but that’s another story.

If our frozen hero also happens to be well-heeled, we still don’t need the law to tell us what to do with his estate. It’s up to him to decide beforehand whether he wants to pass it on to his family, in which case he could leave a will, or keep it in his own name, earning interest to pay expenses while he is suspended, which could be written into the contract with the cryonics company. There are any number of variations on these two options, all of which could be accounted for in a contract, with a law firm appointed as trustee. He might want to stipulate that, if he cannot be resuscitated after a hundred years, everything he owns passes on to his living descendants. Lawyers are very good at drawing up long, complicated, and extremely boring documents. The point is, we don’t need politicians to tell us how to handle these affairs. What happens if he hops into the freezer without leaving any will or contract behind? This would probably be handled the same way it is today – the family takes the case to court and agrees to live with its decision.

A more delicate question is what to do with somebody who really does want to commit suicide. He decides he hates life completely and doesn’t want to live another minute let alone three hundred years. So he turns on the gas jets and asphyxiates himself. But his family decides that he was nuts at the time and didn’t know what he was doing, and they have him resuscitated. The poor guy wakes up in a hospital room and wonders, “what the hell am I doing here? I seem to be alive again.” Every time he knocks himself off, somebody has him reanimated. Maybe his estranged wife wants him alive to keep making alimony payments. There’s no way out for him. He can’t even kill himself. If we really want to do ourselves in permanently, we may find it necessary to literally blow ourselves to bits.

The state of death will have to be redefined in legal terms to protect the interests of the living. If we can bring people back from what is considered clinical death today, then, obviously, the word “death” in its present context ceases to have any meaning. To keep abreast of evolving reality, the concept of death can only be applied to those beyond all hope of biological reanimation. We cannot force reality to conform to obsolete concepts. The concepts themselves have to change, and the body of law which “legalizes” them must harmonize with reality if the law is to be considered just. Death, simply, is the absence of life. At present, life ceases with clinical death. In the foreseeable future, it will continue to exist until all traces of biological life have been destroyed.

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When should life insurance policies be paid off? Every insurance policy has a list of insuring agreements, definitions, exclusions and conditions. Moreover, these various categories are in a constant state of change; almost every time we renew an automobile or a homeowner’s policy, definitions have changed slightly, exclusions have been added or eliminated, agreements have been expanded or restricted to keep pace with changing social conditions. These contracts between insurer and insured are rewritten every year, and the question of death and payments can be redefined just like any other provisions in the contract. It is hardly a cataclysmic concern requiring action from the federal government. In fact, the easiest way to confuse the issue is for government and its legions of Think Tank “intellectuals” to “study the situation.” Perhaps there will be a provision that partial payments are made to the family while a policy holder is suspended; perhaps the policy will cover the costs of his suspension; perhaps interest from his estate will be used toward premium payments until he is biologically dead; most likely there will be variations on all these alternatives, and a proliferation of different types of insuring agreements. If an individual merely wants to protect his wife and children from starvation when he is no longer earning a living for them, the old policy, payable on clinical death, will serve the purpose.

The most serious obstacles will probably lie in the field of pensions and retirement. The original pension plans were devised as a form of old age insurance, a means of providing people with an income when they could no longer support themselves. Inducing companies to take care of ex-employees who had devoted most of their lives to industry was a major breakthrough for the trade union movement. Over the years, however, the concept of pensions, like that of “relief” programs for the hungry, has been perverted completely from its original meaning. When you reach a situation like we have with civil employees in New York City, described earlier, pension plans are really welfare programs for workers still in the prime of life. The idea of the overburdened taxpayer supplying a man in his forties with eight or nine thousand dollars a year, while he is earning a full salary on a new job, is nothing less than criminal.

(If you want to have a little fun sometime, walk into any bar in the Inwood section of Manhattan on a Friday night, and strike up a conversation with the nearest patron. Mention casually that you think the New York City pension system should be scrapped tomorrow, then sit back and watch the reaction. Don’t get too comfortable, though. Chances are you won’t be conscious long enough to finish your drink.)

Supporters of federal welfare measures talk about social security as though it were the greatest invention since the frozen daiquiri. In reality, any private insurer that operated an insurance program the way Uncle Sam does the social security system would be hauled before a Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, then flogged on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Ralph Nader. Can you imagine Aetna Insurance Company, for example, forcing the public to buy an old age policy under the pain of arrest, and then refusing to pay on it if the policy holder had the audacity to earn more than X dollars a year past the age of sixty-two? It simply wouldn’t be tolerated. Yet, when the government treats people in such cavalier fashion, it is heralded as a great humanitarian advance.

(If you want to have some more fun, attend a Golden Age Club gathering on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and tell the assemblage that social security should be junked tomorrow. You’re apt to be caned to a quivering pulp.)

The idea of forcing people to retire at a certain age, regardless of health or mental acuity, is another practice that needs to be overhauled. The psychology behind putting a productive human being “out to pasture” is devastating and self-fulfilling. Can there be anything more crushing for an individual than to think of himself as “useless,” no longer “needed,” his services no longer “required” by society? How many cases of premature senility have been induced by this measure? If the unions really want to do their membership a favor, they will fight for the right to work indefinitely instead of pushing for self-defeating wage increases that drive their employers into bankruptcy – as happened in the newspaper business in New York City. Discrimination based on age is probably the most far-ranging of all since it affects everyone, white and black, male and female alike. Extended youth and vigor into the advanced years will render “mandatory retirement age” even more anachronistic than it is today, and obligatory social security payments more ludicrous than at present.

The word retirement and all the psychology behind it ought to be retired to pasture.

Still we are faced with measures on the books that ought not be there, with people who have paid into a government program for forty years and deserve some return on their money, others who have labored for twenty or twenty-five years with the understanding that a pension would be theirs when their time was served. Admittedly, it would not be fair to bring everything to a halt tomorrow and start anew. All of us, to one degree or another, have been sucked into the system and the economic jolt would be cataclysmic for all but the wealthy.

The ideal way to handle the problem would be to declare an immediate “moratorium” on the salaries of politicians, from the president all the way down to the lowliest mayor, and pay back every taxpayer in the country on a dollar-for-dollar basis. If reparations are to be made to people forced to pay taxes against their will, they should be made by the parties responsible for the situation – elected officials — rather than by other victims. If A steals from B and C, it is A who ought to make reparations to both of them; asking B to continue supporting both A and C is immoral and supremely arrogant. Unfortunately, the ideal solution requires an act of revolution, with a revolutionary tribunal in the catbird seat dispensing justice without interference. While such an alternative may be pleasurable to think about, it is somewhat less than realistic in the present political context. Most likely, we are going to be saddled with the existing political system until the end of this century. In the meantime we can launch a Do-It-Yourself Tax Reform Program by joining together and refusing to file for income tax, withholding property taxes, and fighting for federal revenue sharing and local control of public funds.

As far as civil service pensions are concerned, again it is the people responsible for this absurd situation who should be taken to account. Mayor X signs a contract granting retirement at three-quarters pay at age forty-one, or full pay at forty-six. The average wage earner, himself struggling along at $7500 a year, then must pay additional taxes to supply a pension of $9000 a year to someone who is now working privately for another $9000 a year as a wire lather or insurance investigator. Clearly, the taxpayer is under no obligation to honor this agreement, and he has every right to resist with every means at his disposal. If anyone ought to pay it is the employer, in this case Mayor X and his appointed “advisors.”

The problem is easier to handle in the private sector. With extended vigor, private firms will simply keep employees on the payroll longer. The question of how long an individual should be able to work, when he retires (if ever) and how much he gets, is best left for labor and management to work out themselves without interference from government. As political institutions continue in their steady decline, the functions of policing, fire protection, judicial services, sanitation, etc. . . ., will be handled by private companies. Government as we know it today is destined to collapse gradually, like all obsolete institutions, and eventually wither away – though not necessarily for the reasons anticipated by Karl Marx. Exactly how long it will” take is impossible to say, but certainly by the turn of the next century the way the human race administers its affairs is going to be drastically different than it is today.

Our present concepts of legality are going to change accordingly. Law will be less a matter of morality and elitist rule, more a guideline to be followed by panels of arbitration. It will have nothing to say about how long we live and how we go about doing it. These decisions will be ours to make as free, autonomous individuals.

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen, and, anyhow, there are not enough of them to fill the offices.” — George E. Macdonald.

From The Old Curmudgeon

I. From the Personal to the Cosmic.

It is becoming increasingly evident that one of the most important aspects of the sickness of twentieth century American culture is the tendency to “cosmicize” the personal. By investing grand cosmic significance, to every random personal qvetch and petty complaint, the would-be intellectual easily acquires a swollen efflatus of unearned importance. Reality is short-circuited, and the desire of non-achievers for instant weight and moment without the need for brains or effort is thereby fulfilled. It is surely no coincidence that the cult of psychoanalysis achieved by far its greatest popular success in the United States. Every random emotion, every trivial dream, became pregnant with great moment and significance, and every analysis and and fellow-traveller of analysis found himself possessed of an inexhaustible treasure-trove for meditation and discussion.

The Women’s Lib movement has now gone psychoanalysis one better in the rush to pander to the hubris of every member and devotee. For now every random qvetch and complaint becomes not only of great personal moment, but of world-historical significance; every petty squabble becomes another cosmic battle in the ten-thousand year struggle against the conspiracy of “male oppression.” Psychoanalysis is now left far behind, as, in the words of one Women’s Lib leader, “more and more women were learning that what was once considered personal and private was in fact part of a larger system of political oppression.” (Gail Pellet, “The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution,” Socialist Revolution, March-April 1972, p. 138.) Thus, one of the most vicious tendencies of the Left, the politicalization of life, marches on to a higher plane. Libertarians must realize with full clarity that their goal is precisely the opposite – the total depoliticalization of life, including politics. Politicalization crushes the individual; depoliticalization frees him. Between these conflicting tendencies no quarter is possible.

II. A Hostage to Censorship.

It is time to blow the whistle on an argument against censorship of pornography that has been commonly adopted by liberals: that it is absurd to censor manifestations of sex (which is “clean and healthy”), while depictions of violence (John Wayne movies, etc.) remain uncensored. Instead of taking a stand on the absolute right of person and property to sell, buy, or possess any sort of literature, pictures, films, etc. that anyone may wish, the liberals shift the argument to maintaining that the depiction of sex is healthy and violence “unhealthy”.

Clearly, the liberal argument is a two-edged sword that can result in more censorship rather than less. For the reaction of the authorities may well be to impose a new censorship on depictions of violence, either instead of or in addition to the traditional censorship of pornography. We would be no better off than before. The public has just as much of a right to see or purchase portrayals of violence as of sex, free of invasive interference by governmental censors. Arguments over “health” are necessarily inconclusive, ephemeral, and can differ from one expert to the next, from one year to another. Only the argument from the natural rights of the individual is absolute, apodictic, and eternal, cutting through differences of time, place, or expert opinion. Here is yet another lesson on way the libertarian must take his stand on natural rights rather than on the shifting sands of alleged “social utility.”

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 3

March, 1972

75¢

THE PARTY

When I was a kid growing up in New York I noticed that many of the adults I met were want to refer in awed and reverent terms to “the Party”. It was not clear whether they were members of “the Party” or not but it was clear that this organization was the central focus of their lives. At the time I thought that they were just unusually fervid Democrats; it was quite a while before I realized that they were speaking of the Communist Party. Now the New York Times has printed a lengthy article about a Libertarian Party that has been formed in Colorado, a Party planning to hold a convention and run a Presidential ticket this year. (Anthony Ripley, “New Party Makes a Debut In Denver”, New York Times, Feb. 6). The question arises: do we have ourselves a Party? And if we do, or even if we don’t, do we want one?

Whether we have ourselves a Party may be gleaned from some simple facts, culled from the Ripley article and from the LP’s literature. According to Ripley, temporary national chairman of the party, David F. Nolan asserts that total nationwide membership is now 250, though the party “hopes” to have 1,000 members by the national convention in June and 10,000 members by Election Day. The party’s literature states that it has only one state chairman (in Colorado) and advertises for people to sign on as state chairmen. The L. P. conducted a nationwide poll of its membership to ask whom they would like to see run for President of the United States. Your editor came in first in the poll, thus becoming the runaway plurality choice of the 52 people who participated in the voting. The L. P. called on all of its members to swamp me with a nationwide letter and card-writing campaign urging me to run for President. A deluge of 5 letters and calls came flooding in.

Do we have a party and is it equipped to run a Presidential campaign? Surely the above facts speak eloquently for themselves. Apart from ideology, which we can table for the moment, what any party needs to run a nationwide campaign are two vital elements: lots of party workers, and lots of money. A party possessing 52 active members and one state chairman clearly has almost none of either crucial requisite.

To clear away the personal question first, while I am of course honored to be the first choice for the Presidency I have, to put it with extreme mildness, no ambitions for higher office. Indeed, even if the party had 100,000 members and $1 million in its coffers, I can only repeat the famous phrase of General Sherman: “If nominated I shall not run; if elected I shall not serve.”

To return to the problem of the party, it is distressing that the dedicated young Coloradoans” who constitute the L. P. do not seem to realize that the chances of getting any of their desired luminaries (e.g. Alan Greenspan, Ernie Fitzgerald) to run for President are zero as well. 52 activists do not a party make. Even the Peace and Freedom Party, which had 100,000 signatories and 10,000 activists in party clubs throughout California in early 1968, collapsed very quickly even in California and never really got beyond the bounds of that state.

If the New Left, with an enormously greater reservoir of resources in money and manpower, has never been able to get a party off the ground, it should be crystal clear that the time is scarcely at hand for a libertarian political party. To add to the problem, the growing but still relatively miniscule number of developed libertarians are so individualistic, by the very nature of their creed, that they have scarcely been able to form ad hoc organizations, let alone a disciplined party which, according to Mr. Nolan, “will require its candidates to sign specific pledges”, presumably to cleave to the party platform. Apart from that, a large majority of libertarians, for varying reasons, are opposed to any sort of participation in the political process, so that the greater number of potential supporters would have nothing to do with such a party in any case.

It should be clear that, at the very least, any talk of a libertarian party is grossly premature, and will be for many years to come. If the L. P. is determined to go ahead in any case, then surely the sensible thing for it to do would be to start small, in keeping with their resources, and stick to grass-roots organizing in Colorado. Not only is Colorado the center, if not the only area of strength, for the party, but the extremely liberal electoral laws of that state require only 300 signatures on the ballot. Let the party run, say, Mr. Nolan for the Senate this year and see what happens. If it can get 10% of the vote, then the time will come for the rest of the movement to re-evaluate its prospects. (Most minor parties remain at a dead end with something like 2-3% of the vote.)

Apart from the extreme unrealism of launching a Libertarian Party at this time, there are other considerations that give great pause even to those of us who are not opposed to participation in politics as a matter of principle. The libertarian movement has only recently begun to mature, and to develop a harmony and unity of purpose among its varied and disparate factions. The spectacle of a party convention with leftists, Randians, and half a dozen other factions at each others’ throats over platform and candidates is not one that can fill anyone devoted to the movement with delight. Furthermore, in the possible but unlikely event of healthy for the libertarian movement as a whole or for the cause that we are all trying to promote. There is also a good chance that the media will heap ridicule on a party whose reach is so much greater than its grasp, and this of course would be damaging to the greater cause as well, a great deal of publicity accruing to a party which represents only a small fraction of libertarians, most libertarians will feel called upon to take steps to dissociate themselves from a platform or candidates which do not reflect their views, either of Ideology or of strategy. None of this can be.

As to the temporary platform of the party, there are, as one would expect, some very good things in it, ranging from repeal of all “crimes without victims” to abolition of the draft to repeal of the various regulatory agencies to asserting the right of secession and immediate withdrawal from Indochina. There are, however, some glaring clinkers in the platform, even conceding that these are “transitional” demands rather than an immediate call for the full and complete libertarian program. The major clinkers are in the vital fields of: taxation, money, and foreign and military policy.

In the crucial area of taxation, the party platform confines itself to the admirable though minor call for ending the discrimination against single persons in the income tax system, and to a vague request for some sort of reduction of taxation and government expenditures. Surely, at the very minimum any sort of party calling itself libertarian must call for (a) an immediate and drastic reduction in taxation — let’s say 50% across the board to begin with; and (b) immediate repeal of the income tax, the despotic and critical key to the federal revenue system. Failing repeal of the income tax, a libertarian party should at least call for repeal of the withholding system, which came in as a wartime “emergency” measure in World War II, and is the key to any large scale depredations through the income tax. The curious thing is that Nr. Nolan was formerly head of the Youth division of the Liberty Amendment Committee, which made its prime plank repeal of the income tax. As such, Nr. Nolan, at least, should be alive to the importance of abolishing the income tax system. As a matter of fact, the party could well include the other plank of the Liberty Amendment group: a constitutional amendment which would abolish all government activities that compete with private enterprise. Where is this plank? Is a Libertarian Party to fall behind the Liberty Amendment Committee in the extent of its libertarianism?

In the field of money, there is also a grave falling away from the pure libertarian creed. While the party does look forward to eventual abolition of the Federal Reserve System, its concrete monetary program is disquietingly Friedmanite: it calls, for example, for the right of private persons to own gold. Fine, but scarcely enough for a libertarian vanguard. Where is a plea for a return to the gold standard, or more precisely for a return to the people of the billions of dollars of gold that the federal government confiscated from us in 1933 as a “depression emergency”? In addition to the simple right to own gold, we should also have the right to get our gold back from the government’s hoard; and this means gold redemption, once again, from the presently government-dictated and controlled fiat dollar. In Friedmanite fashion, the Libertarian Party would leave total control of our money supply in the hands of government and its fiat paper currency. Similarly, in the international monetary field, the party calls for freely fluctuating exchange rates, again a venerable Friedmanite panacea. Once again, the desideratum is for gold to be the money in international affairs as well, a policy which Western Europe at least would be happy to agree with. Is the Libertarian Party to be significantly less libertarian than Jacques Rueff or the Bank of South Africa?

Even more disquieting is the party’s position on military and foreign affairs. While it does happily advocate immediate withdrawal from Indochina and the United Nations, and an end to foreign aid and to “attempts to act as a policeman for the world”, this policy of “isolationism” is negated by the party’s call for continuing military alliance with the Western “democracies.” Thus, we are to keep a military alliance with “democratic” England, which is still persisting in its age-old imperialist policy of shooting unarmed Irishmen. Furthermore, there is no recognition in the party platform of the evils of domestic militarism and of the “military-industrial complex”, and the party calls upon us to retain our nuclear deterrent. There is no hint of enthusiasm for any sort of disarmament, even for joint disarmament with unlimited inspection. Nineteenth-century classical liberalism was wrecked largely by its failure to break with militarism and foreign interventionism, and the Libertarian Party shows no real signs of fully surmounting this age-old handicap.

There are also no attempts to cope with some of the major problems rightly agitating millions of Americans: the crises in welfare, education, pollution, urban affairs, etc. But, as we have indicated, deficiencies in their platform is only one of the problems that confront the Libertarian Party. Genuine progress can only come from taking one step at a time.

The Shaffer Dictionary

By Butler Shaffer

The following definitions — comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous — and often frustrating — manner.

BUREAUCRACY: a practice of requiring that ten copies of every government form be filed in order to justify the hiring of additional government employees to handle the increased work.

RED TAPE: what bureaucrats engage in between legal holidays.

TRAITOR: one whose unquestioning loyalty to the government is not as unquestioning as mine.

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES: a group of men who clearly recognize that freedom cannot exist so long as witches are permitted to run about.

PEACE: a failure of governments to function properly.

DRAFT: a compulsory system of slavery in which young men are forced, under penalty of imprisonment, to jeopardize their lives in order to preserve their freedom.

TARIFFS: restrictions placed on the importation of foreign goods for the protection of domestic producers, so as to enhance their profitability thus enabling them to pay the taxes necessary for the support of foreign aid programs which provide assistance to those nations which cannot sell their goods in this country.

PROFITEER: a despicable man getting rich by doing things which I wish I had thought of first.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Those who wave the sword Of human benevolence Forget its sharpness.

— Jack Wright

The Rising Sun

By Leonard P. Liggio

The major Nixon Counter-Revolution of mid-August 1971 was a possibly fatal act of violence domestically; less well-known are the foreign affairs implications of the Nixon Counter-Revolution. The unpublicized remarks of the central figures of Nixon-finance regarding international relations may indicate the most dangerous aspects of all in the administration’s long-run strategy. The greatest violence was directed against Japanese business as the principal cause of the monetary disarray in which the American Treasury found itself publicly exposed during 1971. Their attitude was revealed by a remark that American monetary problems, as well as the Nixon administration’s many other problems, could be solved if only the Japanese once again could be manuevered into a second attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States gained an additional quarter century of international financial dominance by its success in bringing about a war with the Japanese. Even if only another decade could be gained by another war, think what the American Treasury might be ready to risk. Anyone interested in further background regarding the origin of the United States intervention in the second world war should consult the recently published book by Richard Minear, Victors’ Justice, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press). The most important source on that matter is the work edited by the late Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.

The Nixon administration’s singling out of Japan as Enemy Number One came as a surprise to those who had not understood the long-run conflicts that have been basic to the economic development of the United States and Japan. These economic conflicts lead to political and military conflicts. The lead editorial in the New York Times, January 11, 1972, “U.S.-Japan: Summit or Nadir?” summarized some of the issues:

But the limited results of the Nixon-Sato meeting in San Clemente suggest that in Japan’s case, the malaise stirred by last year’s “Nixon shocks” will not be quickly dissipated . . . The crux of the problem is that the United States for a quarter-century has been the fixed sun around which Japan has revolved. That sun now has moved. The certainty that it will be in its place every morning is gone. Japan’s concept of a benevolent America, acting in the common interest, has been fundamentally altered. Mr. Nixon last summer announced the opening of an era of rivalry with America’s allies in West Europe and Japan, coinciding with his “era of negotiations” with the rivals of the past, Russia and China. He began to talk of promoting American interests first and to act in the same way — on pocket-book as well as political issues abroad. Tokyo, as a result, has begun to talk about and grope for a revival of a Japan-centered foreign policy.

The Times reported that Premier Sato’s “economic aides are moving to reduce Japan’s dependence on the United States and the dollar. They have announced plans for a “yen settlements union,” a kind of yen bloc in Asia that faintly recalls the World War II Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

Alongside the basic international monetary conflicts between the dollar and the yen, there has been the strong Nixon administration opposition to free competition between Japan and the United States in regard to textiles, electronics, steel, etc. In late January, Tadayoshi Yamada, permanent executive counsel of the Nippon Steel Corporation, representing Japan’s steel makers in negotiations with the U.S. State Dept., confirmed a three year agreement to reduce Japan’s steel exports to U.S. American steel makers complained that the previous three agreements had allowed too great a freedom to Japanese exporters. In the earlier agreement Japanese exporters were permitted an overall growth rate of 5 percent a year. However, within those limits Japanese exporters sold Americans high-priced specialty steel products at a total 50 percent above the earlier level. In the new agreement there is provision for only a 2.5 percent yearly growth, for a banning of shifts of unused quotas from one category to another, for specific quotas for stainless steels, tool steels, alloy steels, etc., and for an annual reduction in the quota for specialty steels. Finally, the Japanese must limit exports to West Coast United States to one third of their quotas. Under the previous agreement, Japan’s steel export was strongest to the West Coast due to major shortages in U.S. steel production; and U.S. firms felt deprived of the vastly higher prices they could have gained in the shortage period but for Japanese competition. (In Europe, Japanese steel competition is being met with increased concentration in the steel industry. When in January the formation of a German-Dutch steel trust, the second largest on the continent, was announced, it was said by one of the executives “I don’t think it would be unfitting” to call the new company, the “Anti-Japan Company.”

These agreements represent a major deterioration of Japanese relations with the United States because they result from the Nixon administration’s threat to establish extremely harsh restrictions of trade against Japanese products. In seeking alternative major markets, the Japanese foreign ministry in January indicated pleasure at the prospect of vastly increased trade with the People’s Republic of China. Major trade between Japan and China was begun in the 1950’s through the sending of a Japanese prince, deeply interested in Chinese “culture, to be a permanent resident of Peking. Thus, although no diplomatic relations existed due to United States pressure, in Japanese eyes, the residence in Peking of this prince was of equal importance, and he was the host to the many trade delegation from Japan that visited China. Trade with China was carried on through numerous “friendly” trading companies which Japanese firms established for this purpose to avoid American displeasure.

However, the United States pressured the Japanese government to place so many restrictions on Japanese trade with China that Japanese exports to China stabilized at over a half billion dollars a year. The United States wished Japanese business to direct its energies to light industrial products for sale to South-east Asia (where the U.S. wished Japan to play a military role also) rather than the heavy industrial products for the China market. Thus, the South-east Asian economies were viewed as necessary for keeping Japan in the junior partner role which the U.S. wanted for it rather than as an independent world trader President Eisenhower, in his “falling dominoes” press conference of April 7, 1954, while the question of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam hung in the balance, indicated the relationship between Vietnam policy and American aims for Japanese dependence: “It (successful Vietnam revolution) takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go — that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live. So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.” In the spring of 1955, explaining the increasing United States intervention in Vietnam, Secretary of State Dulles indicated that America’s reasons included creating economic opportunity for Japanese light industries — “there is a good chance of Japanese textile goods, for instance, moving into Indo-China.” But, Japanese heavy industry developed despite America’s plans for Japan, and the restrictions imposed by the United States on Japan’s exports make China the logical market for Japan. In 1972 China indicated that it wished to send trade missions to Japan to discuss trade with the steel, shipbuilding, electronics, automotive and railway industries.

China has indicated that automobile and railway trade are first on their list. China would like to establish the railway technology that has made Japan’s railway system the most advanced in the world. World interest has centered on the high-speed trains on the New Tokaido Line, where trains average one hundred miles an hour between Tokyo and Osaka. The Japanese foreign ministry welcomed China’s initiatives for it had been redefining Japanese policy toward China and had drafted a paper setting forth Japan’s three principles for establishing formal diplomatic relations. These principles are: “that the People’s Republic is the sole legitimate Government of China, that Taiwan belongs to China, and that the question of Japan’s peace treaty with the Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan (that is, its abrogation) is to be dealt with in the course of government-level negotiations between Japan and China.” Japan has also initiated major trade relations with North Korea.

The present nadir of U.S.-Japan relations is the result of the sharp contradiction between American aims for Japan as its junior economic and military partner and Japanese desires for economic independence (read competitiveness) and a military position in Asia much smaller than desired by the United States for Japan. In the military area, Japan was seen as playing an active role in future ‘local’ Asian wars, with the United States merely providing the money and equipment, so that the U.S. would not suffer the domestic crisis which has accompanied the Vietnam intervention. The Nixon doctrine represented the most explicit statement of this objective. Thus, Nixon’s anti-competitive monetary and trade policies were accompanied by pressures on Japan to re-militarize. The interrelationship of these two policies, of course, is that re-militarization is very expensive and would require large increases in Japanese taxation, thereby greatly reducing the competitive and monetary advantages Japan has enjoyed. (Any study of American monetary and trade decline in the last thirty years would require centering on the taxation and expenditures of the military budget.)

American policy toward Japan has been prefigured in the analyses of former ambassador and Harvard professor Edwin Reischauer over a period of two decades. “In an industrialized country, Japan has the factory power which generates modern military strength,” Reischauer noted in a 1950 essay for the Foreign Policy Association. “Although far weaker industrially than Western Europe, the United States or the Soviet Union,” he continued, “Japan is still the only other centre capable of producing significant military power today, and it is militarily all the more important because of its isolation from the other great industrial nations. Japan, therefore, is an area of major military significance, an area which, if it were to shift sides, could appreciably alter the balance of power in the world.” Reischauer in an article in Foreign Affairs (January, 1967) looked forward to the implementation of a new self-consciousness by the Japanese in military policy: “a close partnership with the United States, including a defense relationship, is seen to be greatly in Japan’s interests, and not an undesirable situation forced on Japan by American might or historical accident.”

During a Japanese-American conference at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in January 1969, Reischauer said: “Without bases in Japan and the support of Japanese economic power and technical skills, the United States could not have done what it has in East Asia during the past two decades.” In response former Japanese foreign minister, Aiichiro Fujiyama replied: “I do not believe that a United States military withdrawal from the Far East would necessarily precipitate an outbreak of fighting. Nor do I believe that renewed hostilities on the Korean peninsula would inevitably spread into an all-out war. If the elements that can cause war are present and are not resolved, fighting will resume regardless of the American presence, but I do not believe that present conditions will lead to such an impasse. Although American military aid to South Korea helps to keep the situation inflamed, the Chinese and the Soviet Union have withdrawn the active support from North Korea that brought about a major confrontation in 1950 . . . I could not bring myself personally to approve a continuing American military presence in Asia, and I do not think that China would ever voluntarily accept it.” Suji Kurauchi (Director of Japan’s House Committee on Foreign Affairs) concluded by noting widespread Japanese fears “that the United States is grooming Japan for a military role in Asia similar to the one it expects West Germany to play in Europe . . . Many Japanese fear that as the United States moves to make Japan its successor as the policeman of the Pacific, rearmament will naturally follow.”

This role of Japan as Pacific policeman became central to American objectives with the impact of the intervention in Vietnam. In the period” immediately preceding the January 1968 TET Offensive, U.S. pressure on Premier Sato intensified, and he travelled in South-east Asia to prepare opinion for an increased Japanese support of the United States. A press offensive was launched in the U.S. by official academics in favor of Japanese remilitarization, and deepest regret was expressed that until then “in political affairs abroad, she has remained largely inactive if not frankly isolationist.” The November 1969 Washington meeting of Premier Sato with Nixon was the culmination of a campaign for a new foreign policy for Japan based on rearmament. In his policy speech to the Diet on February 14, 1970, Premier Sato declared that the nineteen-seventies would be a decade during which Japan’s power would grow to carry “unprecedented weight in world affairs.” However, there developed strong but unpublicized opposition to this policy in the majority Liberal-Democratic party which is composed of many factions. In addition, the Defense Agency which is the center for pressure for re-militiarization is unable to apply full pressure because officials from the Ministry of Finance hold high positions in the Defense Agency and they are strongly opposed to policies which will increase the tax burden and reduce Japan’s competitive advantage in world trade. Thus, Premier Sato during 1970 was forced to reverse the pressure to create a climate of public opinion favorable to remilitarization. He denied the goal of “great-powerism” as well as the fears that “with her expanding national strength and rising nationalism, Japan might well behave in such a way as to disturb the international equilibrium . . . It is entirely a new case that a country such as Japan, possessing great economic strength, has no significant military power and yet makes its presence felt throughout the world.”

Japan has become the world’s third largest industrial power after the United States and the Soviet Union. It has gained the position from which it could transform its present satellite role into economic independence, if partnership with the United States did not provide an area of economic growth. The time has come when the United States has failed Japan’s needs in the economic, monetary and trade areas and Japan is establishing its economic independence of the United States. A self-directed and self-confident Japan may be the natural result of Japan’s economic independence. Vastly increased trade with China would be one aspect of that development. There has also been a large expansion of Japanese investment in Siberia. Joint Soviet-Japanese companies have been developing timber, mineral, water, and transport facilities in Siberia. Siberia is a major source of raw materials for Japan. A recent example results from the decline in American production of coking coal, the importation of which was central to Japan’s steel industry. The Soviet Union is building a 270-mile railroad to connect with the Trans-Siberian railroad from Chulman coal fields in the Yakut Republic of the USSR and which might extend to the Aldan coal center further north. The river and rail transport in Siberia and the short distance over the Sea of Japan from Vladivostok makes that area attractive to Japan as a raw material supplier. Consortia of Japanese firms and banks are investing heavily in Alaska, especially in timber, pulp mills, iron, coal, copper, and pipelines and leases in the oil-rich North Slope of Alaska. Japan purchases almost 80% of the exports of Alaska. Almost half of British Columbia’s mineral output goes to Japan, along with timber, pulp and crude oil from the tar sand deposits.

Heavy Japanese investment has been placed in raw materials production in Australia, New Zealand and especially Indonesia. Japan is a member of the ten-nation consortium called the Amsterdam Group which re-financed Indonesia’s three billion dollar debt. Japan generally contributed a third of the total amount of the re-financing. (A good recent study on this and similar matters is Teresa Hayter, Aid as Imperialism, Penguin Paperbacks, 1971; also see, Bruce Nissen, “The World Bank: A Political Institution,” Pacific Research & World Empire Telegram, Vol. II, Number 6, September-October 1971, pp. 9-23, from Pacific Studies Center, 1963 University Ave. East Palo Alto, California 94303. Another important source of information on the Far East is: Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Building 600 T, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.) Japan is especially anxious to develop the oil production of Alaska’s North Slope and of Indonesia, and has made major oil discoveries in the southern Ryukyuan island chain about 100 miles north-east of Taiwan on the edge of China’s continental shelf (50 miles from the mainland). A UN economic study indicates there might be more than 15 billion metric tons of oil in this off-shore field. At present more than 90% of Japan’s oil imports come from the Middle East through the narrow and shallow Strait of Malacca, between Malaya and Sumatra, connecting the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. The shallowness of the passage makes the use of the famous Japanese-built super-tankers quite difficult. Britain has begun its withdrawal from the Indian Ocean as a defense interest. The United States had embarked on a large build-up in its naval interest in the Indian Ocean, and the Soviet Union has promised to match any United States naval plans there. The recent American naval activity in the Indian Ocean regarding the developments in Bengal relate to those plans. Thus, Japan, which has never maintained any peacetime naval forces beyond the Pacific Ocean, and is limiting itself to the North Pacific, finds the Indian Ocean route less than satisfactory and welcomes the development of oil resources within the Pacific Ocean itself. The Pacific Ocean’s depth and expanse make it especially suitable for using Japan’s super-tanker fleet. (FORTUNE magazine is a good source of economic information regarding Japan; especially useful are the issues of July, 1957, July, 1963 and September, 1970.)

During the 1960’s Japan extended its markets and supply sources to all parts of the world, tripling its gross national product. This was accomplished through an almost total political isolation or invisibility. Presently, the deeply sensitive Japanese are anxious and distraught over the humiliating treatment they have been receiving from the Nixon administration. They have not been consulted on major diplomatic matters which directly concern them. They have seen major US monetary policies directed against them. “They also sense an underlying American antagonism that they fear is rooted in racial prejudice.” (New York Times, January 6). “Yet, in one of those paradoxes that are the mark of Japan in Western eyes, the Japanese are showing greater personal and national self-confidence than in previous years. There is a sense of National pride in Japanese accomplishments, particularly in the visible results of the “economic miracle.” (Ibid.) If this self-confidence continues, Japan will eschew any of the military and political roles which the United States wishes to impose on it. In addition to its international economic role, any sense of mission will be best directed internally. “Most of the problems of foreign relations before us cannot be solved without taking proper action in domestic policy,” a recent official statement emphasized; “in brief, the Japanese people are now expected to show the world their sense of responsibility and power of original thinking, which should accompany their growth.”

The Political Circus

McGovern as Hatchet-Man.

It is high time to revise the universal view of George McGovern as a sincere, likable, Mr. Nice Guy. For the McGovern forces are increasingly playing the role of hatchet-men, hacking away at everyone else on the “left” competing for the same constituency. While this of course is standard political practice, it hardly squares with the Nice Guy image.

In New York, the McGovern forces have been slashing away at the horrendous record of Mayor Lindsay, and here they are playing an amusing and worthwhile role, if hardly gentlemanly. But the situation is more serious in New Hampshire, where the McGovern people have been bitterly attacking Rep. Paul McCloskey, for fear that the anti-war youth and independents will flock to the Republican primary. As the McCloskey people have been pointing out in rebuttal, for a sincere anti-war person this is terribly self-defeating strategy, since a strong showing by Pete McCloskey in the New Hampshire primary could have an immediate and vital impact in ending the war in Vietnam. For the anti-war, dump-Nixon forces, the first order of business is to ravage him in the Republican primaries, to show that Nixon has no mandate, and has lost the support of even the Republican voters. McGovern’s hatchet role is not only unworthy, it calls sharply into question his allegedly superior “sincerity” as compared to the other candidates in the field. Indeed, Pete McCloskey has shown high courage in early going into lone opposition to a President of his own party.

As icing on the cake, the McGovern forces have been attacking McCloskey on the grounds that he has not shown enough commitment to “progressive domestic policy and legislation.” (New York Times, Feb. 6) Apparently, McCloskey dared to vote against increased federal health and housing appropriations, for example. For libertarians the information that McCloskey is not nearly as socialistic as McGovern is hardly calculated to swing us into the McGovern camp.

“Hinceforth th’ policy iv this gover’mint will be, as befure, not to bully a sthrong power or wrong a weak, but will remain thrue to th’ principle iv wrongin’ th’ sthrong an’ bullyin’ th’ weak.” — Mr. Dooley.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Mod Psychology. The California Libertarian Alliance, in its eternal quest for the hip and the mod, has now latched on to “humanist” psychology. On our desk is an announcement of the first major Libertarian Conference in the Los Angeles area in over a year, geared to the theme of “The Psychology of Freedom”, and held on Feb. 12-13. The Conference is exploring the alleged “similarities between the humanists and the libertarians” and an “analysis of the humanist vs. the behaviorist schools.”

Apart from the valiant battle of Dr. Thomas Szasz (a speaker at the November, 1970 Libertarian Conference in L. A.) against compulsory commitment of mental patients, and the interesting researches of Sharon Presley into the personalities and attitudes of different wings of libertarians, it is difficult to see any relation whatsoever between psychology and libertarianism. Psychology is designed to help people, to aid individuals in achieving their goals? Well, so are a lot of other things, including penicillin and bone surgery, driver-education and Berlitz. So what? No one has yet presumed to organize campaigns for these good things on behalf of “libertarianism.” It is high time that libertarians heeded the justly famous article of Professor Walter Grinder, reprinted in the December issue of The Abolitionist (“What Is A Libertarian?”, pp. 5-8, available for 36¢ from P.O. Box 14, Verona, N. J. 07044). Grinder wrote: “Lately, we hear more and more about the ‘libertarian’ life style. The praises of the ‘libertarian’ mind opening experiences of grass and acid are unending . . . Some or all of these activities may very well have positive merit and increase the desirability of living. I am not passing judgment on any of them except to say that they have as much to do with libertarianism as, say, playing checkers or being particularly fond of the concertos of Rachmaninoff . . . So if those who are circulating the spurious myth that an ‘if it feels good, do it’ life style is essential to libertarianism will cease in their assertions, I will not engage in the propagation of the equally preposterous ‘libertarian’ symbiotic relationship between liberty and the game of checkers.” (p. 6) The same can be said of psychology as a whole or any of the schools thereof.

There is a further problem in libertarians’ identifying with any particular branch of psychology. If is be a science, psychology is somewhere in the infant state, and to hitch our wagon to one particular star is equivalent to 18th century libertarians identifying themselves with the phlogiston theory. Furthermore, there is nothing at all about “humanism” that is more libertarian or even more individualist than any other school of psychology or psychotherapy. It is absurd to say that psychoanalysis, for example, is any less libertarian than humanism — Dr. Szasz, for example, is a psychoanalyst. And neither can the much reviled behaviorism be brusquely discarded; there is an enormous difference between the totalitarian politics of B. F. Skinner and behavior therapy as a psychological method between therapist and patient. The insights of behavior therapy, in fact, are now being used by all schools of psychotherapists. (Not of course that I am trying to claim that libertarians as such should advocate behavior therapy!)

So come on, fellas; or are we going to be treated next year to a Conference on the “New Libertarian Astronomy?”

“The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.”

— Thomas Paine.

The Lone Eagle

Review of The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970) By Justus D. Doenecke

He was always a loner, the man called Slim, and yet in his own way he has always felt secure. Surely, his inner confidence was phenomenal, and could convey to the casual onlooker the false sense of placidity. While Charles A. Lindbergh never finished college, he was widely-read, and the simple writing style shown here in his war diaries bears its own eloquence of dignity and restraint. A single act of heroism had catapulted him to the status of the world’s foremost pioneer of flight. Yet he always retained a love of the soil, hating the blights technology made upon the landscape.

To understand Lindbergh, one must comprehend an aviator who could still say, “This hour I rode the sky like a god, but after it was over, how glad I would be to go back to earth and live among men, to feel the soil under my feet and to be smaller than the mountains and the trees” (p. 222). Annual retreats to the wilderness were essential, for only there could he gain “the strength that comes from solitude and distance and starlight nights” (p. 359). Cities were centers of “unhappiness and uninspired drabness,” whose “tension and turmoil” one could feel while flying 5,000 feet above (p. 450).

The son of a populist congressman, and the husband of a sensitive and poetic heiress, Lindbergh held to a Jeffersonian concept of a natural aristocracy rooted in the land. Mass culture — as reflected in the tabloid press, popular novels, the cinema — generated “the decline in character that is obvious in the nation today” (pp. 534, 601). Modern art was both “diseased and perverted” (p. 149). The Lone Eagle even felt alienation from his neighbors on Long Island Sound, and his reflection could almost have been made by Nick Carroway at the end of The Great Gatsby: “We get along with them without difficulty, but we do not understand their ways, and they do not understand ours — beyond that border line of superficiality which screens the depths of human character as a shore line screens a continent” (p. 262). Where, he wondered, could one find in America today “the character of the pioneer” and “the courage of the Revolutionary Army”? (p. 360)

His posture was martial. In a real sense, he was a militarist, finding military training essential for his own sons (“They must be taught how to fight well, to survive” — p. 10), as well as for such decaying nations as Great Britain (p. 163). Indulgent parents merely prevented their children from gaining the necessary “character and resourcefulness” (p. 521). Pacifism was folly.[1] War would always break out when nations differed on issues of “vital importance”. Yet, humanity must reduce its frequency by intelligent and mutually-beneficial agreements backed by sufficient force (p. 170). Said Lindbergh, himself a colonel in the Air Force Reserve, “Trust of one’s enemy should not pass far beyond knowledge of his actions” (p. 270). In his critique of Moral Rearmament, he stated, “I am not sure that peace and good will would make men happier if they had to be taken in excess” (p. 232). Even while speaking against American intervention, he noted that he would rather be flying with the air corp than “stumping the country with pacifists,” and mused, “If only the United States could be on the right side of an intelligent war” (emphasis his —p. 478).

Of all virtues, heroism is primary, and courage necessitates the continual facing of physical obstacles. “Is life so dear,” he reflected, “that we should blame men for dying in adventure . . . I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed” (p. 60). Indeed, he wanted personal foreknowledge of death, “the last, and possibly the greatest, adventure in life” (p. 297).

Yet any contest between Germany and Britain would be fratricidal, breeding chaos and communism while depriving Europe of her “best blood” (p. 78). The Colonel’s instincts were always Germanophile. “I cannot help liking the Germans,” he wrote in March, 1938. “They are like our own people. We should be working with them and not constantly crossing swords” (p. 5). Again, not long after endorsing the Munich Conference, Lindbergh commented, “The Germans are a great people . . . The future of Europe depends on the strength of this country” (p. 110). For in his eyes, it was “European Germany” which played the crucial role of holding back “Asiatic Russia” (p. 78).

German anti-Semitism was upsetting, particularly in a people so orderly and intelligent. Noting German resentment against supposed wealth secured by Jews during the inflation of the 1920s, he commented that the Germans “undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem, but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?” (p. 115). (It would have been interesting to have learned what to Lindbergh would have been involved in a “reasonable solution”). After observing the polgrom of November 10, 1938, and the viciously anti-Semitic propaganda films, the Lone Eagle claimed to understand Jewish bitterness (pp. 218,245). Still, it was far preferable to let Germany make a drive to the East than to risk any conflict. England’s sudden guarantee of Poland was shocking. There was no possible way to come to her aid, and chances for blundering into war were greatly expanded (p. 245). And, like Professor Alan John Percival Taylor twenty-two years later, Lindbergh found Danzig a spurious issue on which to fight a major war.

The flyer often compared German “virility” to British “decadence” (p. 498). A nation “losing ground” in both war and commerce, England was composed of “a great mass of slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people (pp. 22,47). “Asleep too long,” she was facing a “loss of spirit and hope and spark, nearing the end of a great era, without more than vague realization, and with a sort of dazed complacency” (p. 161). In one sense, it was a time to mourn, for “A strong British Empire is essential to world stability” (p. 280). France, Lindbergh believed, was even worse: “a corrupt and demoralized nation” (p. 81).

Russia, in particular, met with the colonel’s scorn. While the Russian people were “open and lovable,” their social system could never work (p. 58). All communism was debilitating. Comparing bands of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and English Communists, Lindbergh commented, “It always seems that the Fascist group is better than the Communist group. Communism seems to draw the worst of men” (p. 75). Lindbergh must have found much, distasteful in American culture rooted in Communism, for he claimed that the model city on exhibit at the New York World’s Fair was merely one more example of “extremely subtle Communistic propaganda” (p. 398).

His public comments were often less reserved than his private ones. While he expressed the hope in his diary that Hitler would be wise enough to realize that he could dominate “all of the Eastern hemisphere without war” (p. 173), by March, 1940 he was telling readers of the Atlantic Monthly that Germany had “the right of an able and virile nation to expand.” The war, he declared, was between “different concepts of right” with the Allies representing “the static, legal ‘right’ of man,” the Germans “the dynamic forceful ‘right’ of nature.” Even in April, 1941, Lindbergh noted in his private journal that England and France bore more long-range responsibility for the war than did Germany (p. 479). A British victory would merely lead to the Bolshevization of Europe; American participation would guarantee “race riots, revolution, destruction at home” (pp. 420, 478)[2]. A negotiated peace was imperative (p. 478). At one point he declared in a public speech that an agreement between America and Germany “could maintain civilization throughout the world” (address of August 4, 1940). Hitler’s Invasion of Russia fortified his anxieties. “I would,” he told an audience in San Francisco, “a hundred times rather see my country ally herself with England, or even with Germany with all her faults, than the cruelty, the godlessness, and the barbarism that exists in Soviet Russia” (address of July 2, 1941). The Germans had “faults,” the Russians were “barbaric”!

Lindbergh always shunned publicity, partly because of the circumstances surrounding the murder of his son, but in 1939, he threw himself into the heat of political conflict. War with Germany must be avoided if “Western Civilization” was to be preserved. His diary continually stressed the “Jewish interests” behind the prowar mass media, a group working hand-in-glove with the “intellectuals,” the “Anglophiles,” British agents, and “international financial interests” to betray a populace opposed to conflict (pp. 404, 481). He would come to their defense. The Colonel noted that America First rallies drew “a high type of people — better than a cross section of a community” (p. 532). Even those Manhattan dwellers who attended isolationist rallies were “far above the average of New York,” and hence “worth fighting for” (p. 552 —emphasis his).

In many ways, the sections dealing with the isolationist crusade are the most disappointing. Conversations with such people as John Foster Dulles are mentioned but not disclosed (p. 359). He mentions early strategy meetings with the backers of the right-wing Scribner’s Commentator, and his belief that Verne Marshall’s No Foreign War Committee might serve as the eastern counterpart to America First (p. 427), but fails to explain why he broke from the Marshall group (p. 440). He hints about “successful action in the Orient” (p. 412), but does not say what he means. One is curious about the degree to which Lindbergh’s racial doctrines were influenced by the French scientist, Dr. Alexis Carrel, or to what extent his geopolitical concepts were affected by Lawrence Dennis, an exponent of elitist corporatism. One also wonders if the bague Auden-like prose of his wife’s Wave of the Future (a book, incidentally, whose proceeds were to go to the American Friends Service Committee was ever clarified). When Lindbergh spoke in the November, 1939Reader’s Digest about securing “our White ramparts” from “Mongol and Persian and Moor,” did he have in mind Japan, Russia, or all of Asia? In the March, 1940 Atlantic piece he compares Russia’s eastward pressure to the Huns, but much still remains unclarified. And how does his anti-Japanese feeling coincide with his comment, made the day after Pearl Harbor, that the United States had been goading the Japanese? (“We have,” he said, “brought it on our own shoulders”, p. 561). Then there is the matter of his continual cries for rearmament. As the Lone Eagle kept emphasizing that the United States was safe from armed attack, one wonders whether or not he was envisioning a world policed by America in one sphere “Germany in another — a world which might perhaps see the end of “Asiatic” power?

Lindbergh fails to make clear why he did not return his Order of the German Eagle, or why he did not clarify his Des Moines speech in which he accused “Jewish groups” of fomenting war and asserted that only a peaceful America could remain racially tolerant. One biographer, more friendly to Lindbergh than most, declared that these words could either be interpreted as a threat or a prophetic insight, based upon first-hand observation of Nazi life.[3] At any rate criticism came not only from such liberal non-interventionists as Chester Bowles, Philip Jessup and John T. Flynn, but from Herbert Hoover (who called it “an anti-Jewish speech”),[4] the Chicago Tribune, and the Hearst papers. Bowles in particular wanted clarification, as he had urged Lindbergh to run for the Senate. In the eyes of the New York advertising executive, Lindbergh would be the “technological expert who can talk objectively and convincingly about the millions of Americans who lack the proper food, the numbers who lack the proper housing, the proper hospital care . . .”[5]

Other points need confirmation. If Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia was sympathetic to isolation, why did he not rally other southern conservatives? (pp. 261, 263) Did FDR really toy with offering Lindbergh a new cabinet post, Secretary for Air, in order to retain his silence? Did Lindbergh, as John Chamberlain claims, really go on a mission to Germany to rescue the Jews of Europe?[6] In light of the superior maneuverability of the British Hurricanes and Spitfires to the Messerschmitt 109s, and in light of the shortage of fighters during the Battle of Britain, was not Lindbergh’s stress on the superiority of the German air-force overdone?

The last section of the book is in many ways the most revealing. Though believing that war would invariably result in the loss of freedom at home, the Colonel felt duty-bound to participate in the conflict, (pp. 566-7). Rejected by the Roosevelt Administration for military service, and receiving personal insults from Secretary of War Stimson concerning his “political views” and “lack of aggressiveness,” Lindbergh flew over fifty combat missions as a civilian test pilot. Here one of the world’s leading proponents of airpower becomes outraged over the impersonality of bombing. Not only does he equate the bombing of Cologne with Canterbury, but his own firsthand experience sobers him. “You press the trigger and death leaps forth,” he writes after one mission. “—4,200 projectiles a minute. Tracers bury themselves in wall and roof . . . Inside may be death or writhing agony. You never know” (p. 822). At one point he refuses to kill a possible enemy he sees from the air, noting the quiet courage in the man’s deliberate pace. “His bearing, his stride, his dignity — there is something in them that has formed a bond between us . . . I shall always remember his figure striding over the sand, the fearless dignity of his steps” (p. 821).

The air ace ‘is continually shocked by the callousness of American’ troops who would, according to Lindbergh, often shoot on sight Japanese prisoners desiring to surrender (pp. 880-1). American forces, he confessed, “have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life” (p. 859). After witnessing the American conquest of Biak Island, he noted, “We hold his (the Japanese) examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts . . . for our people to kill by torture and to descend to throwing the bodies into a bomb crater and dumping garbage on them nauseates me” (pp. 880, 883). These aspects of the volume were ignored by reviewers of all political persuasions: as far as either the New York Review of Books, the New Republic or National Review is concerned, World War II must still be seen through Star-Spangled glasses.

Little wonder that when the Lone Eagle Visited the German Concentration Dora, he was reminded of the atrocities of the coral caves of Biak (p. 996).[7] “It is not the Germans alone,” he wrote, “or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation” (p. 998). For some, such comparisons might be a grievous crime; for others, let us hope, it is the beginning of wisdom.

[1] The Lone Eagle found little merit in the film, All Quiet on the Western Front, declaring, “It will not add to the courage of our country” (p. 277). Upon discovering that he liked the pacifist lobbyist Frederick J. Libby, he wrote that he found the Maine Quaker showing “unusual under-standing and intelligence (if one can apply the latter term to a pacifist)” (p. 320).

[2] In his introduction written in 1970, Lindbergh pointed with dismay to America’s “internal dissatisfaction and unrest,” as well as the breakdown of the British and French empires, and the menaces of Russia and China. Human losses are put, characteristically, in biological terms: “We lost the genetic heredity formed through aeons in many million lives.”

[3] Walter S. Ross, The Last Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 317 Wayne S. Cole notes that many anti-Semites were encouraged by his comments. America. First (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), p. 144.

[4] H. Hoover to J. Scott, September 14, 1941, the Papers of Herbert Hoover, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.

[5] C. Bowles to R. D. Stuart, Jr., July 15, 1941, the Papers of the America First Committee, Hoover Library of War, Peace, and Revolution, Palo Alto, California.

[6] “Adventure in Honesty,” National Review, November 17, 1970, p. 1213.

[7] Though Lindbergh has never regretted his militant non-interventionism, he did claim in May, 1945, that it was Hitler who “threw the human world into the greatest convulsion it has ever known” and whose plans had “brought such disaster to the world” (p. 949).

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 4

APRIL, 1972

75¢

A BUNCH OF LOSERS

Perhaps we are being what the Marxists call “impressionistic” (or what the Randians call “journalistic” rather than “metaphysical”), but it is very hard to escape the impression from the early Democratic primaries that the contenders are all a bunch of losers, every one. Let us ponder our gaggle of aspirants in turn.

Lindsay. Certainly the most heartwarming result of the Florida primary was the evisceration of John V. Lindsay. Striding arrogantly through the state as he does through New York City, assuming the mantle of God’s gift to the American public, Big John was the recipient of almost universal adoration by the media, and of spectacularly lavish financing. Coming out of a record of administrative disaster coupled with corruption and centralized statism, Lindsay was able to pre-empt the Left with a frankly despotic position on compulsory busing. The upshot of the charisma, the media acclaim, and the billboards plastering the state of Florida was a measly 7% of the Democratic vote, at a phenomenal cost of $6 per vote. (Generally, $1 per vote is considered the outsize figure in politics; John Ashbrook emerged from the Republican primary at about 25 cents a vote.) Surely we have now heard the last of John Vliet, and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.

Muskie. After a disappointing victory in New Hampshire, Muskie’s 9% in Florida should, by rights and by logic, put the quietus to his chances for the nomination. After all, his appeal was that of a Lincolnesque frontrunner, but what kind of a frontrunner amasses 9%? Unfortunately – unfortunately because he has clearly been repudiated by the American public – the Democrats might still turn to Muskie in the end. Muskie has all the qualities that commend themselves to centrist Democrats anxious to unify the party: a Lincolnesque air, a colorless, “sincere” personality, and very tepidly liberal on the issues. The only trouble with that strategy is that he can’t seem to get any votes — but given the factionalism and the genius for self-destruction of the Democracy, they might still wind up with Muskie. Note, for example, the desperate clinging to Muskie in the New York Times editorial of March 16, as the good grey Times surveyed the Florida debacle. But Muskie is a loser, and he would surely go down to a craggy, Lincolnesque defeat in November.

The Muskie defeat has been attributed by his own aides to an interesting factor: he spoke too much. They now claim that he should have kept his mouth shut, and victory would have been his. An ironic commentary on the quality of our leaders! Then there was Muskie’s sobbing on coast-to-coast television. Liberal columnist Harriet van Horne (for whom the term “bleeding heart” would have to be invented if it didn’t exist) gushed that Muskie’s breakdown showed him to be a gentle man, and not hung up on “masculine role playing”. Fine and dandy, but this was clearly not the reaction of the American voter, who wondered, not without some justice, how Muskie would react to really important emotional stress in a national crisis.

McGovern. It is true that McGovern did not campaign in Florida, but still he was on the ballot, and a whopping 6% hardly brands McGovern as the emerging choice of the American people. McGovern and Lindsay both claim to be the new “populists”, but there were precious few of “the people” to cheer them on. McGovern’s good showing in New Hampshire could have been largely due to a negative interest in Muskie, as well as the intense concentration of left-wing college youth, which will not be duplicated elsewhere.

Finally, McGovern is just too far left for the American people, and he would be clobbered handily should he gain the nomination. There is one aspect of the Florida returns that has not been noted: the right-of-center candidates in the Democratic primary got a huge 75% of the votes, leaving only 25% for the left. Say what you will about the conservatism of Florida, but the figures remain eloquent on the repudiation of the left by the mass of the voters.

Wallace. The real winner in Florida, of course, was George Wallace, and this was not an unwelcome sight. Let us ponder the issues on which Wallace pounded hard in the campaign: opposition to compulsory busing, opposition to high taxes, to bureaucracy, and to foreign aid. There has a lot of loose talk about the importance of a “new populism”, of a populist campaign against the ruling classes. But George Wallace was the only true populist in the race, the only true champion of the average American against the ruling elite. It is not a coincidence that each one of these populist issues were libertarian issues as well. The New Left, for all its obeisances to “populism”, for all its talk about someday appealing to the Goldwater and Wallace voters, has never been able to make the grade: largely because it has never been able to bring itself to call for a lowering of taxes (they merely want to shift the “priorities” of government spending). And secondly, because the New Left, for all its bowing to black nationalism, has never been able to abandon the civil rights ideal of compulsory integration, which, in busing, involves the transporting of children to outlying areas for alleged “social gains.” George Wallace has been able to denounce high taxes and busing without flinching, and so he captured the votes. A further irony is that the National Black Political Convention, meeting in Gary, Indiana, itself denounced compulsory busing, and called for black control of black education. This is not only a stand that harmonizes with the anti-busing whites (one faction at the Black Convention actually called for a Presidential ticket of Wallace-Chisholm!) but approaches the libertarian position as well.

This is not to say that the libertarian could endorse Wallace for the presidency; there are two major stumbling-blocks – his ultra-hawkish attitude on Vietnam, and his questionable devotion to civil liberties. But Wallace, as many of the liberal Democrats have acknowledged, has raised the issues that touch the hearts of the American voter, and he has raised them correctly; and no Democrat who ignores this challenge and continues to talk in terms of the tired, old, statist and centralizing liberalism can hope to win the Presidency.

But Wallace, in his own way, is a loser too, for he could scarcely hope to be nominated by the national Democratic party. We are back to Square One.

Mills. No observer has mentioned the fact, but the Florida primary has also put the boots to the candidacy of Wilbur Mills. In New Hampshire, he was a write-in candidate, but in Florida he was on the ballot in a sympathetic, fellow-Southern state. Mills amassed close to zero votes. Let us hear no more of Wilbur Mills, and let us be thankful.

Humphrey. The egregious gasbag, the old retread of the Fair Deal – undoubtedly he is the second winner in Florida, coming in after Wallace with 18% of the vote. The really dismal feature of the voting is the recrudescence of Hubert. No, no, not that! To top everything, Humphrey has lately shucked off his dovish clothing and returned to the Vietnam hawk he truly is. It is too much; another choice between Humphrey and Nixon is too much for the human soul to stomach. Furthermore, even if Hubert should win the nomination, which he might well do, the Democrat Left would, and properly so, react in horror and mobilize a vengeance-fourth party – and all the more power to them. And so Hubert, in November, would be a hopeless loser too.

Jackson. Scoop also did fairly well in Florida, although 13% of the vote hardly reflects a public clamor. Ideologically, though, Scoop is even worse than Humphrey; he would be the “McBrook” Mr. Hyde to Professor Dolan’s “Ashlosky”. Scoop, furthermore, would be even more likely to face an angry fourth party uprising – and so he too would lose in November.

Chisholm. Shirley Chisholm, after campaigning long and in Florida, and after claiming to be the living embodiment of every black, Chicano, and female, got 4% of the vote. Enough said.

McCarthy. It is true, again, that McCarthy did not campaign in Florida. But he was on the ballot, after all, and his nearly zero vote should be enough to end any possibility of a McCarthy boomlet.

Yorty. Sam Yorty, with close to a zero vote dropped out.

Hartke. Vance Hartke supplied the comic relief of the campaign. He had one billboard up in the state of Florida, a billboard that will go down in the history of American politics. It read “WALLACE SUPPORTS HARTKE”; it was only in tiny letters that the reader was informed that this was not George, but Milton Wallace, Hartke’s campaign director in Florida. Milton brought Hartke, however, close to a zero vote. If anyone in the country exists who happened to be worried about a “Hartke threat”, he need worry no longer.

And so there we have it, as sorry a lot as it has been our misfortune to see in many a day. Where is our shining knight to lead us to the dethronement of the Monster Milhous? Where, indeed, for he is surely not on our list. It begins to look as if there is one man, and one only, who has the charisma, the magnetism, and the broad support in all wings of the party and in all classes and ethnic groups in the country to do the job. And he isn’t running . . . or is he?

An ironic sidelight to the affair is the spectacular counter-productivity of Lib. Forum endorsements. First we endorsed Senator Hatfield, and he didn’t run. Then, we endorsed Senator Proxmire (who, incidentally, was the only “liberal” Democrat to vote strongly against busing), and he promptly dropped out. Then we began to sidle up a bit to Ed Muskie, and we see what has happened to him. Is there Somebody Out There Who Doesn’t Like Us?

Ashlosky For President

By Edwin G. Dolan

With the field already so crowded a rumor – not even confirmed – of another congressman about to enter the race for president runs the danger of being greeted by a yawn. But to ignore congressman John Paul Ashlosky, representative from an obscure district in one of our midwestern states, would be a serious mistake – he is definitely a candidate with a difference.

His possible entry into the Republican primaries is especially significant in view of the two opposition candidates who had been running in New Hampshire.

On the one hand, we have John Ashbrook of Ohio, who offers voters an opportunity to express their outrage at Richard Nixon’s sellout of everything he personally and the Republican Party generally have ever stood for in the area of economic policy. But many who would like a chance to register their dismay at Phase I and Phase II and inflationary recession are held back by the fear that a vote for Ashbrook would be interpreted as an endorsement of that candidate’s stance on foreign policy, which sustains a degree of militarism, interventionism, and crusading anti-Communism which they would just as soon see left behind as we head into the fourth quarter of the century.

On the other hand, there is the late candidacy of Paul McCloskey of California, who gave the voter a chance to tell the Administration that he hasn’t been fooled by the troop withdrawals and other cosmetics of Vietnamization – that Nixon’s stance during the Bangla Desh crisis shows him as willing as ever to prop up sagging military dictatorships everywhere, and to stand four-square for reaction in the four corners of the earth. Yet a vote for McCloskey might have been taken as a vote for Republican me-too-ism on that whole range of policies, domestic as well as foreign, on which the left-wing of the Democratic party is basing its presidential drive.

So in this situation, the hoped-for candidacy of Ashlosky will combine the best elements of both opposition candidates (Nixon himself already combines the worst) and give the voters a chance to express themselves unambiguously on the issues. A few remarks from a recent speech by the congressman will show the form his platform is taking:

“What we have witnessed in recent decades is a convergence of Conservatives and Liberals, Republicans and Democrats, on one fundamental tenet of ideology – that whatever the problems we face, the solution is to be sought through ever more highhanded use of the power of the federal government.

“When political realignments seem imminent in any part of the world, the response is the power of bombs, fleets, and military aid. When the bankrupt economic policies of three administrations face us with runaway inflation and history’s largest budget deficits, the answer is more power – the power to abrogate contracts, stifle the market, and impose a totalitarian-style system of comprehensive controls. And when our public school system reveals its failure either to educate our sons and daughters, or to do anything but exacerbate tensions between races and economic classes, the answer is still more power – power which can’t lift us up but can force us down to a uniform level of mediocrity.

“In my view, the runaway growth of government power is not the solution to our problems – it is the problem. To this policy based on power, I oppose a policy based on freedom. Freedom for the people of the world to struggle with their own problems and if need be, to fight their own wars with their own weapons. Freedom for the individual to enter the market place to buy and sell, to bargain and negotiate without the crushing burden of economic controls, confiscatory taxation, and inflationary spending and monetary policy. And freedom for people to seek local solutions to local problems, solutions based on decentralization and community control, on diversity and individual initiative.

“I believe that American politics in coming years will witness the rise of a united opposition, based on the principles of anti-imperialism abroad and individual sovereignty at home, which will defy the outmoded labels of left and right. If you feel that my candidacy for president would hasten the emergence of this movement, I will be your candidate.”

John Paul, where are you? America needs you! We have not yet begun to fight!

ROTHBARD

(in print and on tapes)

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Philosophy And Immortality

By Jerome Tuccille
(an excerpt from a forthcoming book)

Are philosophical principles absolute? Or will philosophy and political ideology, like our legal codes, have to evolve with new developments in technology and social structure in order to keep from growing obsolete?

Several writers of science fact and fiction have claimed that present struggles between “capitalism” and “socialism,” “fascism” and “communism,” “individualism” and “collectivism” will have no place in the world of the near future. Novelist F. M. Esfandiary talks not only about the coming New Technology, but about New Economic principles as well in his first non-fiction book, Optimism One. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler states that present-day economic and political ideologies are already obsolete, and the notion of total individual freedom is a romantic pipedream. B. F. Skinner, in his 1971 best-seller, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, claims that man is so totally conditioned by his environment that the concepts of personal liberty and free will are nothing more than Utopian myths. He argues that people must be conditioned from birth to live in peace with their neighbors if the human race is to survive – although, exactly who will do the conditioning is never fully explained. Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller take the position that property, both communal and private, will be an archaic concept in an age of transience and universal mobility. Toffler also thinks that ownership and property are losing their meaning with built-in obsolescence, mass-produced throw-away items, rental rather than purchase of automobiles and housing, and the corresponding decline in materialistic permanence.

These are intriguing assertions, especially since they come from writers who have been imaginative visionaries in the field of technology and science. Fuller and Clarke, particularly, have been remarkably prescient in writing about such varied concepts as weather prediction, space travel, global communication satellites, fusion power, moving sidewalks, recycling, domed cities, etc. . . ., years before anyone else decided they were practical. At this writing, New Jersey is looking into the feasibility of building a domed city according to Fuller’s specifications – approximately thirty-five years after Fuller discussed this possibility in connection with New York City. When a few strong-willed individuals have been right so many times while virtually everyone else was dismissing them as incorrigible Utopians, there is a tendency to take everything they say on faith once their ideas have been vindicated. In reality, however, their individualism and tenacity in the face of criticism puts the lie to their own statements concerning the obsolescence of choice, free will and individual determination.

It seems to me that we do someone, as well as ourselves, a disservice whenever we institutionalize him as an omniscient seer, oracle or harbinger of the future. Every new proposal, regardless of who is presenting it, deserves to be scrutinized on its own merits. The fully infallible man has not been invented yet, and chances are good that infallibility will continue to elude us long after immortality has become routine. The problem, when it comes to analyzing predictions, is to strike a happy balance between our natural tendency to demolish everyone who sounds original and creative, and to deify those who turn out to be right more frequently than not. We have to develop the ability to distinguish between the Jeanne Dixons and the Buckminster Fullers of the world – even the element of Jeanne Dixon residing within a Buckminster Fuller.

Although the various circumstances of life already mentioned – law, technology, social structure, political institutions – continue to change with increasing momentum, there are certain universal truths which remain constant through the ages. Our visionaries, for the most part, have developed an expertise at speculating on the variables of life while at the same time ignoring completely the abstract principles which ought to govern human affairs. There are few exceptions – Heinlein and Robert Silverberg come immediately to mind – who have tackled moral and social problems while fictionalizing the concrete world of tomorrow, but they remain a small minority. Some futurists have even been known to bend their avowed philosophical precepts when it comes to securing funds for a pet scientific project of their own. While the human race can save itself some time and agony by listening more carefully to technological projections which may seem quixotic for the moment, we should also understand that philosophy is a separate discipline with little or no connection to the hard sciences.

Certain principles are so fundamental to the entire human condition that no serious person, regardless of his politics, will take exception to them. For example, it is hard to visualize anyone in his right mind maintaining that non-aggressive people do not have a right to basic human freedoms: freedom of speech, of assembly, of picketing and dissent, of association, of economic trade. Anyone who openly advocated that some men have the moral right to enslave others would be roundly denounced as a “fascist,” a “communist,” a “racist,” a “sexist,” and a no good SOB. Anyone maintaining that some individuals have a right to dictate reading matter, sexual habits and general lifestyle to others invariably means that he would be among those doing the dictating. Many of us may harbor these ambitions secretly, but hardly anyone stands up at a public podium expressing these secret desires in abstract terms.

As we look at the world around us, we see that most political regimes are based on singularly n on-libertarian principles, though whenever political leaders are interviewed they always claim that their prime interests are the “freedom and prosperity” of their constituents. The Greek colonels, Generalissimo Franco, Mao, Brezhnev, and Spiro Agnew are all in power to further the principles of human liberty, even as they do everything in their power to suppress the civil liberties mentioned above.

So, it seems, the human race does not practice what it preaches. We have a unique way of translating universal truisms – always based on the axiom that man has a right to his freedom – into the most grotesque political forms imaginable. There appears to be a bit of the dictator in too many of us – the urge to be in a position to tell others how to live, what books to read, what flags to salute, ad nauseam. Otherwise we would not tolerate the authoritarian regimes now governing most of the world. If man truly desired his freedom, he would rise up en masse and seize it from those who withhold it from him. Revolution would be a spontaneous outcry heard around the globe. Instead, sadly enough, our rulers rule with the tacit approval of the masses while the human race continues to delude itself with verbal devotion to the abstract principles of liberty. We get, apparently, the kind of society that the majority secretly desires.

Yet all this does not alter the fact that the principles themselves are still valid. Man does have a natural right to conduct his affairs without interference from others so long as he does so in a non-aggressive fashion. We may differ on what exactly constitutes an act of aggression. Some maintain that private ownership of a parcel of real estate is a “rip-off which ought to be suppressed; others think pornography is an attack on the “moral climate” of the nation and ought not be available to the public. Between these extremes, however, most people can agree on a long host of issues which clearly fall into one category or another. Murder, assault, robbery, fraud, destruction of property, pollution are all obviously aggressive activities; gambling, the voluntary exchange of goods, the various forms of self-abuse and victimless acts are just as clearly non-aggressive. Even though honorable people may disagree over concrete issues, the abstract principles behind them remain constant nonetheless.

Consequently, when Alvin Toffler states that individual freedom is a pipedream – when B. F. Skinner claims that free will and liberty is nonexistent because of environmental conditioning – what they are doing is speculating subjectively about certain conditions of contemporary life. It may well be (although neither author has succeeded in proving his theory) that man’s actions and decisions are predetermined by his conditioning and he is unable to exercise individual freedom in any real sense. It may also be true that built-in obsolescence and rental of commodities will change our ideas about property and ownership. But these are all descriptions of real or imagined social conditions, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the abstract principles of natural human rights. The axiom that man has a right to his freedom has not been called into question; whether or not he is capable of exercising that freedom is another story.

Both Toffler and Skinner go a step further, however, when they turn from speculation to advocacy journalism. Toffler talks about the obsolescence of present-day economic principles and political ideology. Since economics and politics are nothing more or less than the result of philosophical principles applied to concrete issues, Toffler is saying in effect that we need to develop a new metaphysics to help us deal with the world of the future. Where Toffler is somewhat circumspect, Skinner goes all the way and calls for the politicization of his behavioristic psychological theories. Not only does he speculate about man’s inability to function freely, he evidently wants a board of behavioristic bureaucrats appointed to plan the kind of conditioning man will be subjected to. (With Ehrlich’s panel of experts determining the size of our population, a board of rabbis, priests and ministers telling us who will be frozen and who will die, and now Skinner’s corps of behavior determinists, the New Great Fair Society of today will look like laissez faire paradise in comparison.)

While new scientific discoveries add to the body of knowledge available to man, it is difficult to foresee any developments requiring that we re-evaluate our natural rights as human beings. More specifically, no matter how many people we freeze and bring back to life, how many clones and ectogenes we create in the laboratory, how many cyborgs we manufacture, how many space ships we send toward the stars, how many diseases we learn to cure through biofeedback, and how many immortalists are walking the earth five hundred years from today, it will not alter the philosophical fact that aggression is immoral and people have the right (even if not the ability) to go to heaven or hell in their own way. This principle is unchanging and will remain so until all intelligent life, whether it is flesh and blood or mostly machine, becomes extinct.

It may be that struggles between “capitalism” and “socialism,” “individualism” and “collectivism” will die out as the years roll by; but this will be due to a change in terminology more than anything else. The distinctions between totalitarianism and freedom, between coercion and voluntarism, between repression and spontaneity will be with us for as long as some people try to exercise power over others. It makes little difference whether we call a free society socialist or capitalist, collectivist or individualist. Language is flexible while reality is not. Labels are unimportant, but concrete conditions are vital to everyone.

Looking at Future Shock merely as a speculative work, we find that Toffler’s predictions concerning free choice and liberty are refuted by some of his own technological projections. While he is telling us that freedom of choice is a “meaningless concept,” romantic rhetoric to the contrary, he goes on to state there will be more diversity in the near future through a proliferation of consumer goods and lifestyles and, consequently, more flexibility and options for everyone. He is telling us, simultaneously, that there will be more choices available in all areas of life, and that our ability to choose will be increasingly limited. Does he mean that Madison Avenue will become more adroit at molding public opinion and controlling consumer demands? Or that we will be paralyzed with indecision when faced with more than a small variety of alternatives? He does not tell us, unfortunately.

Logically, it would seem that man’s ability to use his power of choice assumes an added dimension with every increase in available alternatives. “Freedom,” “freewill,” and “self-determination” had a strictly limited meaning when most people labored twelve and fourteen hours a day merely to feed and house themselves. A “free” man was still a slave to economic hardship. Even today, many people are required to spend half their waking hours at boring, dissatisfying jobs just to buy necessities. In this respect we are more “free” than we were forty years ago, but it is a relative factor. In the kind of world Toffler is speaking of, however, where machines do all man’s drudgery for him, where today’s luxuries are mass-produced inexpensively for everyone, where moral codes, family structure and lifestyles are flexible and dynamic, total freedom becomes possible for the first time in history. Yet this is the world in which Toffler says individual freedom and choice will be a meaningless concept. If there is one way to free man from his present “conditioning” by hardship, drudgery and puritanical traditions it is through the technological advances and mobility which Toffler anticipates.

It is also difficult to understand how contemporary economic principles can ever become obsolete.

An advanced economy depends upon the availability and exchange of goods. Since no society however affluent is totally self-sufficient, worldwide prosperity depends upon the mobility and transfer of goods as they are required from one society to the next. This will always be so unless we reach a day when each individual is capable of manufacturing all goods and services for himself, an unlikely if not impossible situation.

The economic options available in the future will be basically the same as they are today. Societies can either own goods in common, produce them collectively and closely manage their distribution and exchange, or ownership, production and trade can be carried out privately in a free and fluid marketplace. There are, of course, many variations on these alternatives: nationalization; management without nationalization; domestic management with international laissez faire; national laissez faire and international management; one-world nationalization or management; one-world laissez faire; etc. . . Even the colonization of other planets will not alter these conditions, for the same principles will apply to extraterrestrial societies as they develop. While honorable men can (and probably will) disagree among themselves as to what type of arrangement will produce the best results (the same as with political institutions), the abstract principles underlying these issues remain constant: should man be free or controlled? should economic trade be free or managed?

Even concepts like ownership and property, which will grow obsolete according to Fuller and Clarke, will be subject to the same analysis. It seems to be true that we rent many goods today that were purchased yesterday, and the life-expectancy of most consumer items is far less than it used to be, but this doesn’t change the nature of property and ownership per se It only means there are fewer owners and more renters today than existed thirty years ago, and there are likely to be even fewer owners and more renters by the year 2000, present trends continuing. This may be what Clarke and Fuller mean to say, but in their enthusiasm for forecasting scientific developments they seem to be advocating a change in economic principles as well.

As for the kind of economic order we are heading toward? Latest indications are that, on the international level at least, we are evolving toward a freer market in trade and cooperation. It is becoming more and more difficult for a single nation to place restrictions on the free movement of goods across national boundaries. When that avowed “free trader,” Richard Nixon, imposed a 10 percent surcharge on U.S. imports in 1971, it was the first serious attempt by a major country in a decade to derail the movement toward freer global trade that has been building since World War II. And it met with failure. The age when a superpower, however super it may be, can dictate self-protective economic policies to the rest of the world is now over. The new age is characterized by a more even balance of economic power distributed among the United States, the European Common Market, the Communist bloc, Japan, and the developing African and “Third World” nations.

In the closing days of 1971, twelve leading economists from various countries met in Washington, D.C. and unanimously recommended major changes in world economic policies. While each proposal was not pure laissez faire, the general tone was certainly in favor of freer trade among nations. Among the list of recommendations to avoid “further economic and political crises” were: elimination of all remaining tariffs on industrial goods over a ten-year period; negotiations to limit high-price domestic policies which create food surpluses and lead to import barriers (ironically enough, while the United States was allegedly fighting inflation in 1971, Nixon was promising the farmers that the government would do all it could to keep food prices from falling too low); a gradual phasing out of agreements limiting free trade in steel, textiles and similar products; a reduced role for the U.S. dollar as a world reserve currency, and adoption of some form of fixed standard – possibly gold – to determine exchange rates. These proposals, coming as they did from the Brookings Institute and other liberal organizations rather than from laissez faire economic associations, indicate a broader acceptance of free market systems. Even more pertinent is the fact that these economists acknowledged the relationship between restrictive trade policies and political turmoil, including war.

“What is involved,” said a spokesman for the group, “is the wider question of how the international community should order relationships. If economic differences drive countries apart, world order will be notably prejudiced.”

The relationship between economic warfare and nationalistic militarism has been well catalogued by both revisionist historians and libertarian scholars during the past twenty years. Now this kinship is more generally accepted, and with this new awareness will come a broad-based movement toward a free global marketplace. What we are witnessing in the world today is not the adoption of a new metaphysics and new economic principles but, instead, the vindication of basic libertarian principles as they apply to all areas of human intercourse. These principles are emerging by default as authoritarian institutions decay and fall along the wayside on our march toward a civilized world community.

Recommended Reading

Rothbardiana.

Murray Rothbard has a dissection of the Value-Added Tax in the conservative weekly Human Events (“The Value-Added Tax is Not the Answer”, March 11.) He also has a review of the Festschrift for F. A. Hayek, Roads to Freedom, sketching the Austrian philosophical position, and praising the contributions of Lachmann, Bauer, and Popper. (In the Political Science Quarterly, March 1972). There is also a free-swinging and lengthy interview with Rothbard in the Feb. 25 issue of the new anarcho-objectivist fortnightly tabloid, The New Banner (available in a special reprint for 100, and for a year for $7.00, from The New Banner, Box 1972, Columbia, S.C. 29202). Here Rothbard comments on Ayn Rand, anarchism, political parties, the New Left, strategy for libertarians, the movement, the Friedmans – father-and-son, price controls, and many other topics.

Banfield. One of the most brilliant books of the last couple of years is Edward C. Banfields’s The Unheavenly City, now out in paperback (Little, Brown.) Banfield details the destructive influence of government on urban economics and urban society, and turns the Marxists neatly on their head by pointing out that the major problem with the poor is their “lower class” values and “lower class” culture that most of them have adopted. The book is a fine, ringing defense of the importance of what have been much derided as “bourgeois values”: thrift, hard work, low time preference, foresight, rational purpose, etc. No book in years has infuriated the Left as has Banfield.

Ecology and all That. The libertarian answer has now been provided for us on the ecology question, and by our own Edwin G. Dolan, in his paperback: TANSTAAFL: Economic Strategy for the Environmental Crisis (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). Here is a handy and brief reply to the ecological Left – and written by someone who is obviously personally fond of conservation and the great outdoors I As a special lagniappe, also, this is the first book to mention the Lib. Forum – specifically, Frank Bubb’s fine article on property rights and pollution. Retreatism. Before our perfervid retreatists rush off to a coral reef or an ocean platform, they might well stop and consider a less quixotic solution — to live in one of the Safe Places outlined by David and Holly Franke in their best-selling book (Arlington House, 932 pp., $13.95). The Frankes unearthed 46 towns in the U.S. which enjoy low crime rates, low pollution, and low taxes – and they describe them all in detail. Moreover, the book is very handsomely produced, with hundreds of charts, maps, and photographs.

“The freest form of government is only the least objectionable form.” — Herbert Spencer.

The Conservation Question

By Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.

During a fight over “saving” a cluster of redwoods, Ronald Reagan is reported to have remarked that “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Needless to say, the good governor was roundly berated for his callousness. Yet there was some truth in what the governor had to say. One wonders whether the more extreme (consistent?) members of the conservation lobby would have us save every last tree, plant, and repulsive reptile from extinction, no matter what the cost. There is some question whether the early American colonists would have ever gotten off the boats if there had been an incipient Sierra Club in the 17th century. After all, to have felled a tree, or killed a turkey would have been to upset the ecology of the continent. All the other species and creatures of the earth are supposed to be permitted to run loose, preying on their natural enemies, consuming natural resources, etc., but man is supposed to recriminate about what he does in order to survive, and sometimes, advance his standard of living. Nature, too, destroys, but this is often overlooked in all the blather from conservationists. In fact, man is, in one important respect, at a disadvantage vis à vis other animals; he does not possess instincts to insure his survival. Man must rely on his reason, and his ability to conquer natural forces in order to survive. There is no question that in the process man destroys forests, fouls streams, and, yes, exterminates whole species of other animals. So what? Species have disappeared quite independently of any action by man, as have forests. We are constantly reminded by ecologists that man is part of nature, yet when he does what every other species does – grow and expand at the expense of other species – his actions are condemned as unharmonic with, and destructive of nature. In fact, the truth is precisely the opposite. It is in man’s nature to control and subdue what are termed “natural forces,” to build “artificial” dwelling places, precisely because, if he does not, man will not survive. Like it or not, there is a struggle in nature for the world’s scarce resources, and if men do not use their unique talents, these resources will go to the ants and elephants. Then, surely, there will be a return to pristine nature; no man, however, will be there to appreciate it. Lest we forget, the business of man is man, and this does not necessarily imply that either the number or the comfort of seals and alligators should be maximized.

Of course, my quip about the early colonists was silly. There were no conservationists among the colonists for a very good reason. People who have to confront nature on a day to day basis are not given to waxing eloquent about the joys of same. The sunrise on a desert may be beautiful to the middle class urban dweller, but it spells frost and ruin to the citrus grower. A winter scene in the Rockies makes for a beautiful Christmas card, but it means starving cattle for the rancher. Nature is beautiful to those who can choose the conditions in which they wish to confront it, and who have a place to retreat to after they have dabbled in pioneer life.

It should also be noted that the original motive of conservation was to preserve natural resources for future growth of the economy. It was feared that too fast a depletion of the nation’s resources would lead to economic stagnation and decline, and that for a variety of reasons, it was doubted that the market could effectively allocate these resources over time. Most conservationists would agree that this is not the problem anymore. The demonstrated ability of technology to advance faster than resources are depleted has obviated any need for guardianship over the earth’s resources in order to prevent economic stagnation. Indeed, today’s conservationists seem to desire economic stagnation! And there in lies the difference between the “old” and “new” conservationism. Today, conservation is seen as providing for the present and future amenities associated with unspoiled natural environments, for which the market (again) is alleged to fail to make adequate provision.[1]

But “amenities” associated with contact with the natural environment are hardly to be compared with the need to conserve natural resources in order to insure the continued growth of a complex economy. Nor does what is known as the “irreproducibility” argument stand up to scrutiny. There are some wonders, such as the Grand Canyon, which must be kept, or be lost forever (though, again, this fact does not, of and by itself, prove that they should be preserved). But such is the exception. For most, contact with nature means a visit to a state park, a drive through the country, or a picnic on a scenic overlook. But such assets are reproducible, and, in fact, have been growing steadily as state parks and other public and private facilities have grown to meet increasing demand.[2]

Some economists have argued that such amenities are so-called “collective consumption goods”, and must, therefore, be provided by the government. Besides the fact that the conclusion doesn’t even follow given the collective good assumption, the assumption is wrong. We do not see much private investment in the saving of threatened scenic wonders (though the fact we see any should at least give pause to the conservationists), because as long as there is a reasonable hope of governmental action to supply desired services, the consumer-conservationist will be well-advised to put his money into lobbying aimed at obtaining the desired services “free,” or at well below cost, rather than into purchasing a private supply. To take Professor Robinson’s example, suppose a group of wealthy individuals started a “Cadillac for the people” organization, and contributed $1,000 each to lobby to get the government to supply Cadillacs at $2,000 each. If the lobbying were successful, it would have proved a bargain. If the supply of Cadillacs dried up as a result, it would not prove that Cadillacs are a common consumption good which cannot be supplied by the market. It would only serve to prove anew that when something is sold at a price below the market-clearing price, demand will exceed supply.[3]

The old conservationism did not stand on solid grounds, either. The allocation of natural resources over time is one with any other capital problem. To conserve means to postpone use of a resource – to consume less today in order to consume more tomorrow. It is a matter of less now, more later. To follow the famous dictum of Gifford Pinchot that “conservation means the greatest good of the greatest number, and that for the longest time,” would be to never use resources at all. What we can do, however, is to maximize the value of our natural resources. But, this the free market does as it does in maximizing the value of any asset over time.[4]

Moreover, it must be emphasized that to conserve or postpone the use of one resource usually involves depleting or accelerating the use of another resource. Resources are substitutes for one another. If coal, for instance, is conserved for heating purposes, more oil will have to be used. Conserving all resources would be literally impossible, without a drastic lowering of the standard of living, if not the extinction, of the human race. Again, we get back to what seems to be the logical end of conservationism, old or new the impoverishment or destruction of the human species.

To say that the market doesn’t save enough resources for the future is to express an unsupported value judgment about how well people should be off now relative to those who live in the future. Why should people in the future have a special claim on the people who live now? Either the conservationist is saying that the future does have a claim on the present, or that the market does not allocate properly over time. Neither has ever been successfully argued.

All This is not to say that there is no truth in what “ecologists” have to say. However, the observed “pollution” problem stems from the government’s laxity in enforcing the ordinary law of torts against industrial polluters. By lowering the cost of “pollution-intensive” production, the government has, in effect, encouraged pollution, and the growth of pollution producing industries at the expense of non-polluting industries. Air and water pollution involve poisoning people. There is an elementary property rights problem involved – the right of people to their lives and property. As usual, the government isn’t doing what a policing agency should be doing, and is doing what is shouldn’t. There are hopeful signs that pollution law will take a new turn, recognizing a principle that would be the cornerstone of any libertarian legal code: that people shall not be deprived of their persons or property without due process.

[1] On the differences between the old and new conservationism, see Warren C. Robinson, “A Critical Note on the New Conservationism,” Land Economics, XLV, No. 4 (November, 1969), 45-56.

[2] For a statistical mathematical argument that at least one state government (California) has actually supplied fewer parks and campgrounds than would be supplied on the free market, see Gordon Brown, Jr., “Pricing Seasonal Recreation Services,” Western Economic Journal, IX, No. 2 (June, 1971), 218-25.

[3] It is often assumed that the federally operated recreation network is redistributive. Lower income groups by and large receive no benefit from such services. The 1959 study of Wilderness Areas in California found that the average income of wilderness campers was over $10,000 compared to a U.S. average annual income of about $6,000 (think of all the expensive, specific capital required for camping). To the extent that taxes from lower income groups support the National Parks and Forests, it is these groups who are subsidizing upper middle class consumers of “amenities.”

[4] For an excellent article on this problem, see Scott Gordon, “Economics and the Conservation Question,” Journal of Law and Economics, I (October, 1958), 110-21.

THE STATE

The harpies attack

Snitching from blind masses’ plates,

Screeching platitudes.

– Jack Wright

“This was the American Dream: a sanctuary on earth for individual man: a condition in which he could be free not only of the old established closed-corporation hierarchies of arbitrary power which had oppressed him as a mass, but free of that mass into which the hierarchies of church and state had compressed and held him individually thralled and individually impotent.” — William Faulkner.

Short People, Arise!

Surely, one of the most imbecilic movements of our time is the drive to secure pro rata quotas everywhere for various “minority groups.” Academic departments in universities are being assaulted, by the government as well by propaganda, for not assuring their quotal “rights” to “minorities”, now illogically defined as: women, blacks, Chicanos, and youth. And every state delegation to the Democratic convention is supposed to have its assigned women-black-Chicano-youth quota, or the gods will descend in their wrath. The full absurdity of this hoopla has gone undetected because not fully and totally applied. Why aren’t Irish, Italians, Albanians, Poles, Mormons, etc., assured their quotas in the Pantheon? Are we to have endless legal challenges, for example, because the Alabama delegation doesn’t have enough one-legged Swedes, or because Harvard University doesn’t employ enough Polish Catholics? And, of course, no one seems to mention which ethnic or whatever groups will have to be dumped and lose their jobs to accommodate the rising minorities. Which groups are over their assigned quotas?

All this was highlighted some months ago when J. K. Galbraith called on all corporations to hire blacks as top executives, in proportion to their number in the total population, and, to go further, to hire them in proportion to the surrounding population in their immediate geographic area. Father Andrew Greeley, the highly intelligent conservative sociologist, countered to ask whether Galbraith is prepared to give up his post at Harvard, and to call upon Harvard to hire Irish Catholic academics in proportion to their share of the population in the Boston area. Touché!

As long as all the various “oppressed minority” groups are getting into the act, I would like to put in a plea for another, unsung, oppressed minority: short people. We “shorts”, I have long believed, are the first to be fired and the last to be hired; our median income is far below the income of the “tails”; and where in blazes are the short people in the top management posts? Where are the short corporation leaders, the short bankers, the short Senators and Presidents? There is surely no genetic evidence to prove that short people are inferior to talls (look at Napoleon!) Short people: end oppression by the talls! Develop short pride! Call for short institutes, short history courses, stop internalizing the age-old propaganda by the talls that you must be consigned to inferior roles in our society! Demand short quotas everywhere!

It is good to see that scholarship is now bolstering our perceptive instincts about short oppression. Professor Saul D. Feldman, a sociologist at Case-Western Reserve, and himself a distinguished short, has now brought science to bear on our problem (Arthur J. Snider, “Society Favors Tall Men: Prof.” New York Post, Feb. 19). Feldman reports that of recent University of Pittsburgh graduating seniors, those 6-2 and taller received an average starting salary 12.4% higher than graduates under 6 feet. Aha! Furthermore, a marketing professor at Eastern Michigan University quizzed 140 business recruiters about their preferences between two hypothetical, equally qualified applicants for the job of salesman. One of the hypothetical salesmen was to be 6-1, the other 5-5. The recruiters answered as follows: 27% expressed no preference (Hooray!), 1% would hire the short man, but 72% said that they would hire the tall man!! For shame!

Professor Feldman went on to point out that scorn of the short pervades our entire American culture (a “sick” culture, surely.) Women discriminate notoriously in favor of the talls over the shorts, and in movies how many shorts have played romantic leads? (Some, like Alan Ladd, were short, but his shortness was always cunningly disguised by the bigoted movie moguls, e.g. Ladd stood on a box in the love scenes.) Feldman also pointed out the subtle corruption of our language (presumably as engineered by the tall-conspiracy) Look how “shorts” are treated: people are “short-sighted, short-changed, short-circuited, and short in cash”. Feldman also declared that when two people run for President, the taller is almost invariably elected.

OK, short people: we now have the ineluctable findings of statistical science to bolster out qualitative folk-wisdom. Short people of the world, arise! Demand your rights! You have nothing to lose but you elevator shoes!

Oh, one final note: short liberation, we must all realize, does not in any way mean an anti-tall movement. Despite the age-old tyranny of the talls, we are out to liberate all people, short and tall alike. Consciousness-raising groups for guilt-ridden tall sympathizers with our movement are now in order.

“The word state is identical with the word war. Each state tries to weaken and ruin another in order to force upon that other its laws, its policies and its commerce, and to enrich itself thereby.”

— P. A. Kropotkin

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 5

MAY, 1972

75¢

NIXON’S WORLD

Richard Milhous Nixon has long thought of himself as a world statesman. His genius, he has felt, really lies in foreign affairs: not in domestic policy, but in the impact he would have as President on the world scene. Let us assess the Nixonian record.

1. Vietnam.

In 1968 Richard Nixon had a plan for ending the war in Vietnam; it was a plan which he clasped to his bosom; it was a secret plan, the fruits of which we would all be contemplating should he attain the Presidential office. We have a lot to contemplate. Milhous has become the greatest bomber in the history of mankind; he had rained more tonnage of bombs than anyone else in history. The latest offensive of the NLF-DRV in Vietnam shows quite clearly how successful Milhous has been in “winding down the war.”

At the Lib. Forum we take no pride in our Cassandra-like warnings, day in and day out, that the war in Vietnam was not over, was not “winding down”, was and would continue to be the prime and central issue. Sometimes we stood alone: during the Paris negotiations, and before Cambodia when almost the entire anti-war movement was convinced that Vietnam was over. Nixon could have ended the war as soon as he took office; he could have blamed the whole thing on the Democrats, packed up his marbles, and gone home. But we knew, given the Nixonian mindset, that he wouldn’t. “Vietnamization” was the palpably absurd but typically Nixonian attempt to defuse the opposition at home by ending American ground casualties and continuing and accelerating our rain of death and devastation from the air. But this was simply a return to the pre-1965 Johnson policy, a policy that had already failed with Johnson, and which the Pentagon Papers reveal that the astute CIA had long predicted would be a failure.

Ever since World War II, the United States policy-makers have been fascinated with the big bomber. Bombing seemingly allows us to have our cake and eat it too: to punish, devastate, and control nations throughout the globe, while doing it from a safe distance above the ground; we could commit mass murder and not get our hands bloody. But it didn’t even work in World War II, even against an industrialized Germany which was far more vulnerable to bombings than the peasant and jungle population of Vietnam or the rest of Southeast Asia. The Strategic Bombing Survey, in Europe after World War II, found to its shock and amazement that mass bombing had had no really crippling effect on the German war machine. Millions of innocent civilians, women and children, had indeed been slaughtered; but the factories continued to produce, and even the torn railroad tracks were quickly rebuilt by the German population. And as for breaking enemy morale, bombings, whether in Germany or England, only served to cement the population behind their government’s policy. But the fascination with mass bombing continues.

Even the Nixon Administration now knows that its hokum about bombing war supplies “at the top of funnel” in North Vietnam is a pack of lies. There is no “funnel.” We are bombing in North Vietnam purely out of rage and frustration; out of a vicious vindictiveness; if we can’t get to the enemy in the South, if we can’t see or touch the NLF or Hanoi troops in the South Vietnamese arena, why we can jolly well kill the civilians up in the North. But the danger is that the pointless murder in the North will be worse than pointless; for part of the American mythology has always been the myth of “outside” control. There is no real problem in South Vietnam, we maintain, and so we have to write off the NLF as purely a puppet of Hanoi; and, proceeding further, we have to write off Hanoi as a puppet of someone else. First it was Peking that was supposed to be pulling the strings; but now, with this myth evidently breaking down, Milhous is yearning for a confrontation with the Soviet Union. We are back to the old discredited myth of Moscow as outside string-puller. The Administration’s whining about Russian aid to Hanoi would be ludicrous if it were not so deadly; for Russian aid is less than one/tenth of the massive and enormous aid which the U.S. has been pouring in to shield our veritable puppets in Saigon.

The mighty offensive of perhaps the greatest military genius of our age, General Vo Nguyen Giap, has already demonstrated, dramatically and finally, the fraud of “Vietnamization.” Is it not crystal clear to everyone, everywhere, that without the massive American air and naval support,’ as well as military aid, our Saigon puppets would collapse in a matter of days? Where, indeed, is the mythology of the well-armed and heavily primed “million man” Saigon army? Where have they gone? If Saigon really had a million well-trained men, would they have to dangerously deplete their forces around Saigon and in the Mekong Delta and rush them north?

Many Nixonite frauds now lie in shambles. There was the absurd notion that, with “Vietnamization”, the NLF would simply “fade away”. Some fadeout! There was the totally phony Nixon “peace plan”, the sensation of a day and now quietly forgotten. The “peace plan”, so widely hailed in the American press, was a humdinger: first a general ceasefire, then the withdrawal and the disarming of NLF and Hanoi troops, and then a “free” election in the South, supervised and controlled by the same Saigon crooks who have long made a mockery of all elections in the South (Neutralist opponents of Thieu still languish in Saigon jails!) The Paris peace talks had long been a phony, consistently sabotaged by the Nixon Administration; until they were finally suspended altogether. It was only when Nixon cut off the Paris talks that General Giap finally decided to strike. Now, of course, the Nixon Administration declares that we cannot resume these talks “under fire” and unless we “negotiate from strength,” which means no negotiations at all. And then there was the totally fraudulent “prisoner of war” issue, fraudulent because Milhous knows full well that, in every war in history, there is one and only one way to secure return of POW’s: by ending the war. If we really want to aid American prisoners of war, the only way to do so is to end the war – to pull out and come home.

There is only one way to end the monstrous horror that is the Vietnam War: and that is for the United States to get out, pronto, lock, stock and barrel. But that is the one thing that Nixon will not do. Only the ouster of Milhous from the White House offers hope that the horror will come to an end.

2. China.

The China trip, another sensation of the day, has happily begun to fade from memory. It was a truly repellent spectacle. The idea of normalizing relation with China, of ending the Cold War with that country, is fine, just as all inter-state relations should be so normalized. But this did not mean that Mr. Nixon had to make a total ass of himself, hailing Chinese Communist society, calling for a long march together, engaging in fawning toasts and all the rest. Is the American government, or the American character, really incapable of dignified relations? Must we either condemn every other government as an evil menace about to conquer the world, or else picture them as the greatest human invention since the discovery of the wheel? Certainly the TV viewer will long remember the contrast between the dignity and intelligence of Chou En-lai and the silly and insincere fawning of Mr. Nixon. It was not a pretty sight.

Why was it done? Who Knows? But if it was done in the hope that China would put pressure upon Hanoi or the NLF, it was a vain and ludicrous hope as by now should be evident. The Communist nations are now “polycentric” largely because they had all bowed the knee to Stalin in the past, and had time and again been clobbered and betrayed for their pains. They will never do so again.

3. Bangladesh.

We have before denounced Nixon’s policy of support of Pakistan and Punjabi imperialism, and its joining China in hostility and near-intervention against the Bengali rebellion. There was, however, method in Mr. Nixon’s madness; for Nixon was pursuing the dream of Woodrow Wilson which has guided nearly every Administration in this century: the dream of America intervening to prop up the status quo everywhere, to combat “aggression”, to put down and stamp out any and all revolutions (whether Communist or not) against all status quo States everywhere. It is the evil and imperialist dream of “collective security”. The Bengalis were presuming to disturb that status quo and therefore had to be put down. By his policy, and by his lagging in recognition of the new nation, Mr. Nixon has permanently alienated the Indians and the Bengalis.

4. Ceylon.

One of the ugliest examples of Wilsonian imperialism in years was the joining together of all the Great Powers – the U.S., Soviet Russia, Great Britain, and China – to send massive aid to the socialist government of Mrs. Bandaranaike in Ceylon, in order to suppress the youthful rebellion by the “Guevarist” JVF in that torn country. All objective observers agree that without that aid, the rebels would have been successful; and we have, again, another bout of mass the account of Richard Nixon.

5. Cyprus.

The problem in Cyprus is a complex and knotty one; but suffice it to say that the island is 80% Greek and 20% Turk, and that the Greeks on Cyprus have yearned for decades for unity (enosis) with their fellow Greeks on the mainland. The head of the Cypriote government, Archbishop Makarios, though originally pledged to enosis, has betrayed the cause. The Greek government has been trying to pressure Makarios to submit. As for the guarantees of autonomy to the Turks on the island, Makarios has been systematically violating them, and one of the reasons for the Greek pressure against him is to preserve the autonomy of the Turks against Greek Cypriote discrimination and possible slaughter. In this situation, enosis makes great good sense; wouldn’t you know, then, that Mr. Nixon, once again Wilsonian to the core, should, in the recent Cyprus crisis, step in and save the day for Makarios by severely warning the Greek government against any use of violence against the Cyprus regime? Once again, with uncanny accuracy, Milhous intervened where it was none of our business, and on the wrong side.

6. Northern Ireland.

As usual, the crisis in Northern Ireland has been grievously misrepresented in the American press. The version we get is: the Catholics and Protestants irrationally “hate” each other, and that Northern Ireland is, after all, largely Protestant and therefore entitled to their own land and autonomy. The hatred is there, of course, but if we only take the trouble to inspect the slogans of the two sides in their marches and clashes, we can begin to see the true situation. For the Catholics call for civil rights, for an end to discrimination and gerrymandering, for an end to internment and torture without trial in British-Northern Irish concentration camps, and for the ouster of the British troops. The Protestants call for crushing the Catholics, for keeping them “in their place”, and for hanging the Pope. Get the picture?

More particularly, it is a lie and a myth that Northern Ireland is “largely Protestant.” The partition that gave Northern Ireland to the Protestant ascendancy was a phony partition, a typically Wilsonian device imposed by British bayonets. The largest part of the land area of Northern Ireland has a clear majority of Catholics: namely, the counties of Tyrone, Fermanagh, Londonderry (including the torn and bleeding Derry City), southern Armagh, and southern Down. The truly just solution for bleeding Ulster would be a second partition: in which the above areas would join the Irish Republic, leaving to an independent Northern Ireland the city of Belfast and county Antrim, northern Armagh, and northern and eastern Down. The problem would then be reduced to minor dimensions, leaving only the Catholic minority in Belfast in a state of oppression. But, too much blood has flowed for either side to accept such a rational solution. The best that can be hoped for now is unity with the Irish Republic, with strong guarantees of autonomy for the Protestants in the north.

By this time, it is pointless to ask where the Nixon Administration has stood in this crisis; naturally and predictably, it has lent its considerable weight to the British and Northern Irish side, and thereby helped to perpetuate the turmoil.

7. International Monetary Relations.

With characteristic vainglory, President Nixon dubbed the Smithsonian agreement of December 18 as the “greatest monetary agreement in this history of the world.” It took only a few short months for the “greatest agreement” to show definite signs of crumbling. The soundest – and the most libertarian – international monetary order would be a world gold standard, with each currency indelibly fixed in terms of units of weight of gold; a far distant second best would be a pseudo-world gold standard of the Bretton Woods type; a distant third would be the Friedmanite dream of national fiat moneys and fluctuating exchange rates, a world which emerged on August 15, 1971 and lasted until December 18. But the Nixon Administration has managed to bring us the worst features of both fixed and fluctuating exchange rates: by fashioning a world where exchange rates are fixed but where there is no international money (such as gold) to validate them. Fixed exchange rates with no international money to back them up make no sense whatever, and it would be difficult to find any reputable economist to defend such a system. The pattern of exchange rates fixed on December 18 is already obsolete; the dollar is still overvalued; and the shaky shoring up of the system depends on the continuing willingness of foreign nations to absorb dollars ad infinitum, willingness which must soon come to an end. Throughout, Nixon and Secretary Connally stubbornly refuse to consider any restored convertibility of dollars into gold; by this stubborn monetary nationalism they are making inevitable a rapid relapse into the fiat currencies, blocked accounts, exchange controls and crippling of international trade, of the 1930’s.

In short, Mr. Nixon’s record in the international monetary field is of a piece with his record in international politics. Both can be summed up as: statism, moral evil, and consequent disaster.

The Party Once More

Mr. David F. Nolan, temporary national chairman of the Libertarian Party, writes in high dudgeon that while it is true that the party had only 52 activist members last November, that it now (March 24) has “nearly 350 members” and six state chairmen. Anyone who thinks that his makes any difference for the viability of a nationwide party is welcome to re-evaluate our position (Lib. Forum, March, 1972).

More substantially, Mr. Nolan writes that the primary purpose of the Libertarian Party is not immediate electoral victory but to educate the public in libertarian ideas. We never thought otherwise. But the problem with this approach – a long-standing objective of minor parties – is that the psychology of the mass of the public being educated is overlooked. Let us take, for example, the poor old Socialist Labor Party, which, doggedly, every four years for nearly a century, has been nominating Presidential candidates and getting them on the ballot. What impact on the electorate has the SLP achieved? The problem is that the party has been so small, so flagrantly unviable, that the educational impact for socialism by the SLP has ranged sternly from zero to negative. For what is the reaction of the public? The reaction of the average citizen is that here is a tiny collection of kooks making a mockery of the electoral process (which the average person unfortunately reveres) in presuming to run someone for the Presidency. In short, the SLP is invariably written off as a bunch of crackpots, and their ideology often goes down the drain with them.

Why then does the SLP continue to slog along, decade after decade, even though unheeded by one and all? Because they manage to ingest just enough funds to keep the party bureaucracy going; in short, as so often happens with ideological and social action groups, the ends have been lost sight of, and the means – the preservation of the party bureaucracy – have become the end.

The way to avoid this unhappy dead end is to confine oneself to viable parties, that is to parties whose publicly proclaimed grasp is not absurdly beyond their means. An example are the Liberal and Conservative Parties of New York, which are large enough to have considerable weight within the state. And because of this weight, they do have considerable educational impact as well. But note that even they, as powerful as they are, are prudent enough not to extend their reach into any of the other states.

Libertarianism

By John Hospers

(Nash, $10.00, 488 pp.)

— reviewed by R. A. Childs, Jr.

Part I

Whenever a new libertarian work appears, we should focus on two aspects of it in evaluating it: what gaps does it fill in the existing body of literature, and what are its flaws? I am assuming that if it is a basically libertarian work, that its virtues will be more numerous than its flaws, that it will excel in respects in which it is fundamentally correct than those in which it is not. This is true of the new work by Dr. John Hospers, LIBERTARIANISM. It is a very great contribution to the growing library of libertarian literature, and it has its flaws.

First, the easy question: what are its contributions and strengths? It is, first and foremost, a comprehensive, integrated and systematic statement of the libertarian political philosophy. Those who have been looking for a comprehensive yet not-too-technical work to use in introducing people to the libertarian philosophy need look no longer. In most respects, LIBERTARIANISM is now the work to give to people who want to understand what the libertarian political philosophy is all about. It performs an heroic task in integrating most of the libertarian arguments that I have seen on behalf of a social philosophy of freedom. In doing this in terms of essentials, with a very conversational style, it easily replaces more than a half-dozen libertarian works as serving as an overview of our ideology is concerned. One need no longer pile up works by Rand, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Carson, Friedman, Paterson, Mises and the Tannehills for the neophyte to read. LIBERTARIANISM will serve just as well. By thus confronting the most often heard and repeated objections to liberty and laissez-faire, Hospers makes it possible for the newcomer to libertarianism to spot those areas and issues which are the greatest problems for him, thus enabling him to go on to more specialized study. There is not a great deal here which will be new to someone already acquainted with libertarianism, as Hospers himself is the first to admit. That isn’t the purpose of the work – its purpose is to provide for a systematic overview of libertarian arguments for liberals and conservatives alike.

There is a generally excellent discussion of liberty, rights, property, the role of government (Hospers advocates a limited government), rent control, federal housing projects, price fixing, minimum wage laws, social security, tariffs, automation, monopolies, medicine and the state, welfare, public utilities, roads, licensing, inspection, consumer protection, conservation, coinage, education, and so forth. The best part of this type of discussion in the Hospers book is the constant subordination of economic arguments to ethics, though the two are usually integrated. He bases his case strongly on natural rights, which is the greatest virtue of his work vis à vis those of Hazlitt, Carson, Mises, and the others who cover some of the same territory.

These, then, are in summary form the greatest virtues of the work: its scope, integration, clarity, and systematic working out of a multitude of arguments for libertarianism.

Its flaws are few, but that doesn’t mean that they are insignificant. On the contrary, I think that they are crucially important. To sum up my objections: Hospers errs precisely when and where he follows Rand too closely on three issues – limited government, history, and foreign policy. The limited government dispute isn’t that important in the context of the book – Hospers devotes the last chapter to the question “Is Government Necessary?” and presents the anarchist case there, in the form of a dialog between an anarchist and an archist. Hospers makes one major error here: he takes up the case for the structure of an anarchist society from the Tannehill’s book THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY and presents it as though it were something agreed upon by all libertarians of the anarchist variety. But nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are alike necessarily only on one issue: they all deny the necessity and legitimacy of a State. For positive alternatives to the State, we have nearly as many proposals as we do anarchists, just as there are as many conceptions of limited government as there are people who take the time to attempt to work out a constitution and define the “proper” functions of government. In a sense, though, while anarchism is fairly well presented, Hospers creates a straw man, by having the anarchist in his dialog state that his “main contention” is that anarchism is a more efficient system. This is not the “main contention” of me, Wollstein, Rothbard, or a host of other anarchists. So the problem with Hospers’ treatment of anarchism, as I see it, is that he fails to recognize that all anarchism has to do to be validated as anarchism, is to refute alleged justifications for the State. Positive theories are a secondary matter. Similarly, all that an atheist has to do to validate atheism per se is to refute proofs for the existence of God. Since the burden of proof is on the proponent of any positive theory, “negative” positions such as atheism and anarchism are themselves justified when those positive positions are refuted. What they attempt to put in the place of the positive theory is another matter.

But far more important than anarchism is Hospers’ position on matters of history and foreign policy. There is a long chapter on “Liberty and International Relations” which will undoubtedly be second only to the chapter on anarchism in raising controversy. But unlike the anarchism chapter, in his treatment of foreign policy he does not even acknowledge the existence of an opposing libertarian view. His view is, basically, Randian. My view is, basically, Rothbardian. Between these two poles there is a world of difference.

First, on domestic history, Hospers makes absolutely no use of the excellent discoveries and insights of the revisionists. Thus although there is a criticism of business/government partnerships, there is no real critique of the role big businessmen have played in furthering statism. Down deep, Hospers has the view of “big business” as “America’s persecuted minority,” to use Ayn Rand’s phrase. Thus though he is critical of the anti-trust laws, he does not seem aware that the major force in putting them over on America was big businessmen and financial leaders, such as J. P. Morgan and Eldridge Gary. Though he is critical of federal housing projects, he does not seem aware that these were rammed through largely with the backing of the giants of the construction industry who witnessed falling profits and a “recession” during parts of the 1950’s and ’60’s. Though ostensibly addressed largely to liberals, Hospers overemphasized their role in the growth of American Statism vis à vis that of the business and financial community. It was big businessmen and financiers, for instance, who supported the first “liberal” professors in style at the end of the 19th century, who bankrolled the “Progressive Movement,” who put up the money for such organizations as the American Historical Association and American Economic Association, and who paid the bills of THE NEW REPUBLIC. Yet none of this is mentioned by Hospers.

Part of my disagreement with this emphasis, or lack of it, by Hospers lies in his distinction between the public and private sector. “In most nations of the world, there is what is called the ‘public sector’ and the ‘private sector.’ More accurate labels would be the coerced sector and the uncoerced sector. In the uncoerced sector – that is, the free market – we have only voluntary exchange. In the coerced sector, conditions are imposed on the free market by govern-which distorts the market and impedes its efficiency.” Now my objection to this is fundamental: the radical distinctions are not between the public and private sectors, or public and private ownership and control, but rather between just and unjust ownership and control. Ultimately, all decision making comes down to a few individuals, or one person, over a specific property. It is morally irrelevant whether this be “private” or not. What is relevant is whether or not it is just. Suppose, for instance, that a thief makes off with someone’s watch. Is that watch in his possession now “public” property? Is is “private” property, which, remember, is equated by Hospers (and Rand, apparently) with the uncoerced, free market sector? Or take the case of a government seizing everyone’s property and giving it to individuals who are not technically part of the State apparatus. Is that “private property,” or the “free market, uncoerced sector”? Also take the hypothetical case of someone justly owning something and donating it to those in the government, such as somebody’s donation of a private library to the government. Is this part of the “public sector” which is equated, with the coercive sector”?

The point is this: whether public or private, the real moral distinction is between property which is justly held, and that which is unjustly held. And a large part of the “private sector” in the world is property which is, by libertarian standards, unjustly held, such as is the case with the land in in the multitude of feudalist countries which still exist. But if this is true in one case, it may also be true in another. Which cases it is true in, can only be established by means of detailed research and by the application of libertarian principles. I submit that had Prof. Hospers approached the issue this way, he would have been far more harsh on so-called “private” people and institutions than he has been in LIBERTARIANISM. The questions of “ultimate responsibility” and the like are, of course, different issues, and must also be analyzed. But it is Hospers’ concern with “public” or governmental actions which has led him to play down the role of practically anyone except liberal intellectuals in the rise of Statism.

There is the same problem in the case of Hospers’ critique of student takeovers of university campuses. The argument against this in the case of justly established “private” universities is clear. But what about State universities? And what about the so-called “private” universities which are nearly 90% bankrolled by the state? Or which seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain? Or those which align with the State to do “research” into ways and means of destroying other people’s lives and property? Whatever one’s position on these might be, it is surely more complex an issue than Hospers makes it.

Let us take one final, related, issue before zeroing in on foreign policy: the case of the students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants at the height of the Vietnam War. Hospers makes it a simple case of free speech. A good case can be made for this position. But if one holds – as I do – that the Vietnam War is a criminal war for which the U.S. is far more responsible than the Communists of North Vietnam, then the issue becomes more complex. In his chapter on international relations, his response to the menace of the Communist criminals is not “having relations of any kind with such nations – not diplomatic and, more important, no trade . . .” This is not made clear – does Hospers support U.S. government prohibitions of American citizen trading with communist countries? If so, then this is the age-old problem of whether or not one is morally justified in coercively preventing one from trading with a criminal. If one is, and if the U.S. government is also criminal (i.e. it initiates force, though perhaps in lesser measure than some other government), then are private citizens justified in preventing other “private” citizens – such as Dow Chemical – from trading with our criminal government? This is an extremely complicated issue, and I think that Hospers does it a disservice in discussing it in only a few paragraphs. I myself am opposed to preventing Dow from recruiting on campuses, but the issue is not so simple as Hospers makes it sound.

The Liar As Hero

By Walter Block

It is all too easy to be an advocate of free speech when it comes to the rights of free speech of those with whom one is in agreement. It is all too easy to wax eloquent about the free speech rights of people who recite the boy scout pledge or the pledge of allegiance, or who sing the star spangled banner. Or other equally controversial things. The real test of free speech advocacy, is when it comes to controversial speech; better yet, when it comes to vicious, nasty speech that practically everybody is against.

There is perhaps nothing nastier or more vicious than libel, especially when it is personal and even false. We must therefore take especial care to defend the free speech rights of the libeler who furnishes us with a most important arena for free speech protection. For if the free speech rights of libelers and slanderers can be protected, the rights of any of the rest of us who do not give as much offense will certainly be more secure. If the free speech rights of libelers and slanderers are not protected, they are done a disservice, and the rest of us are that much less secure.

The reason that there has not been much action (to say the least) in behalf of the slanderer and libeler on the part of civil libertarians is that it is widely felt that they (unjustifiably) ruin people’s reputations. Grim tales about lost jobs, friends, etc., abound. Far from being concerned with the free speech rights of the libeler and slanderer, civil libertarians have been concerned with protecting what they call the rights of those who have had their reputations destroyed by libelers and slanderers. It should be realized, however, that the truth as well as falsity can ruin reputations; so merely stopping false charges from being uttered is no guarantee of maintaining a person’s reputation. If we take the view that reputations are all somehow sacrosanct, then we must prohibit all sorts of denigration, even truthful ones. No kind of unfavorable literary criticism, satire, movie, play, music, or book reviews could be allowed. All diminish reputations to some degree.

Although it is interesting that the deniers of free speech to libelers would not be willing to consistently deny free speech to all detractors, this alone will not clearly and unambiguously establish the free speech rights of the libeler. In order to do this, we must realize that a person’s reputation is not his private property – as, for instance, is his coat. His reputation is rather what other people think of him. His reputation consists solely of the thoughts of other people. Thus, to prohibit the slanderer from ruining someone’s reputation is to prohibit the slanderer from trying to affect the thoughts of other people. A man does not own his reputation any more than he owns the thoughts of others –because that is all his reputation consists of. A man’s reputation cannot be stolen from him any more than can thoughts of other people be stolen from him. Whether his reputation was taken from him” by fair means or foul by truth or falsehood, he did not own it in the first place and hence should have no recourse to the law for damages.

Paradoxically, reputations, owned or not, will probably be more secure without laws prohibiting libelous free speech. Nowadays, with laws prohibiting libelous falsehoods there is a natural tendency for the public to believe any publicly made libel or slander. “It would not be printed if it were not true,” reasons the gullible public. If libel and slander were freely allowed, there would be so much of it, and from every possible slant, that the public would not be so gullible. Scurrilous attacks would have to be checked out or substantiated before they would have much effect. Commercial agencies like Consumers Reports or the Better Business Bureau might arise to meet the demand on the part of the public for more accurate scurrilous information.

Until that great and glorious time when vicious nasty false remarks are accorded their proper free speech protection, we should all, liars and truth tellers alike, give aid and comfort to the libeler and slanderer; failing that, we should at least recognize them for the heroes that they are. For it is the libeler and slanderer who is on the front lines of the battle to protect the freedom of speech of us all.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Psychology and All That.

My strictures against the California Psychology conference gave rise to a few critical letters from the California movement, ranging from the cogent to the frenetic. Roy Childs pointed out, quite correctly, that humanistic psychology is philosophically far more akin to libertarians than behaviorism, since both believe in free will. Roy holds that the Conference made no particular commitment to forms of therapy. All this is fine, although the conference literature made far more grandiose claims. But it still leaves the conference as just one recent example of the festering growth, both in the libertarian movement and in the American culture as a whole, of what we might call psychologism.

The hallmark of the psychologizer is that the focus of his attitudes undergoes a severe change. Instead of concentrating his activities on grappling with the outside world (including the world of ideas), he turns morbidly inward, and spends his energies worrying about his own psyche and inflicting this worry on all around him. Note that I am not trying to denigrate the almost universal existence of psychological problems, their importance to the individual, or the possible value of therapy. What I am attacking is the person’s elevation of his psychic problems into a matter of seemingly cosmic significance, in the course of which the person’s effectiveness in dealing with the outside world withers amidst the bog of fuzzy-headed morbidity. A typical psychologizer will say: “I now see that all these political and economic problems are unimportant; the only really important concern is one’s inner ‘growth’, experiencing one’s feelings, expanding one’s ‘openness’.”

Not only does all the palaver about inner growth shift the focus from the outside world, thereby often intensifying the person’s troubles, but the psychologizing promotes not only chuckleheadedness, but also the very instability, hedonism, and “whim worship” that the world is suffering too much of in the first place. Much of the humanist writings, particularly those of the late Abraham Maslow, contain a great deal of value, emphasizing as they do free individual choice and the importance of individual self-development. But the problem is that even in the best of these writings, whim-worship is encouraged, because they have no moral principles, no ethical guides for choice to offer to their readers and followers. Stressing individual self-development without setting rational moral guides for that development (develop where? in what direction?) leads to caprice, hedonism, instability, and irresponsibility – in short, whim-worship.

I suppose it was bound to happen; much of this is an overreaction against Randianism. Many of these people are former Randians; after spending several years in the cast-iron rigidities of Orthodox Randianism, in which the slightest deviation from the tastes of the cult was condemned as “irrational”, many ex-Randians have gone whole hog the other way: in place of a rational ethic they have substituted unstable and hedonic submission to whim and caprice; in place of reason they have set unanalyzed feelings upon the throne.

A large part of the newly burgeoning psychologism in the libertarian movement is due to the intensifying influence of the New Nathaniel Branden, in his post-Randian development. In many ways, the New Branden is Rand-gone-Hollywood, as the old emphasis on reason begins to get lost amidst the hip and the mod, in immersion in all the fashionable, Hollywood-spawned techniques of the day from hedonism to encounter groups to the Instant Cure. As a veteran battler against Orthodox Randianism, I never thought that I would ever come to say this: but I think that the Movement could benefit from an increased dose of the Old Rand, with her insistence on the primacy of a rational ethnic. Let us not throw out the rational ethical baby along with the Orthodox Randian bathwater.

The Shadow Cabinet

Back in the days when I was a youthful extreme rightist, one of our great party pastimes was to conjure up a “dream cabinet”, a cabinet to be installed in the unlikely event that we would “have our druthers”. And regardless of the differences of opinion amongst us, there was always one selection we could all agree upon: “For Secretary of Labor . . . Westbrook Pegler.” Yes, those were heady days.

But now, lo and behold!, fantasy cabinet-making has come out of the closet. It is now indeed the fashion among those presidential candidates without what used to be called a “Chinaman’s chance” for victory. The candidate – be he Dr. Spock or Senator McCarthy – issues a promise of what might have been. Not one to be caught lagging, I hereby present my shadow Cabinet – the men and women whom I would have chosen had I swept to victory on the Libertarian Party ticket this year. Each one of these choices could be trusted to do the appropriate and proper thing by his chosen field of expertise. There are, I’m afraid, many gaps in the Cabinet, but that is because I have not yet been able to find the right man for the vacancy.

And now, heed this, America:

Secretary of State

Leonard P. Liggio

Head of the Middle Eastern Desk

Stephen P. Halbrook

Ambassador to the Court of St. James

John P. McCarthy

Secretary of Defense

Robert LeFevre

Secretary of the Treasury

Jerome Daly

Secretary of Labor

Sylvester Petro

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Edward C. Banfield

Secretary of Transportation, and Head of the Obscenity Division of the Dept. of Justice

Ronald Hamowy

Head, Anti-Trust Division

Sam Peltzman

Head, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Rosalie Nichols

Head, National Institute of Mental Health

Dr. Thomas Szasz

Head, Voice of America

Karl Hess

Head, NASA and the Patent Office

Andrew J. Galambos

Administrative Assistant, in Charge of Minority Groups

Walter Grinder

Administrative Assistant, in Charge of Women’s Rights

James D. Davidson

and last, but certainly not least,

Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare

Ayn Rand

“The art of government is the organization of idolatry.”

— George Bernard Shaw.

Recommended Reading

Rothbardiana.

Murray Rothbard continues to proliferate on several fronts. Rothbard’s attack on the Value-Added Tax in Human Events, “The Value-Added Tax is Not the Answer,” (March 11), was inserted into the Congressional Record of March 14 by Senator Harry Flood Byrd (Ind., Va.). Byrd states that he is still keeping an “open mind” on the VAT but states that Rothbard “makes some interesting points” on the subject.

Shortly afterward, prominent New Left columnist Nicholas von Hoffman (Washington Post, March 17), devoted his column to denouncing Phase II, and quoted at length and approvingly from Rothbard’s article on price-wage controls during World War I. The article is from a forthcoming book, edited by Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard, A New History of Leviathan (Dutton, paperback); von Hoffman clearly absorbed the major lesson of the book, which analyzes American political policy, foreign and particularly domestic, from the Progressive period until the Korean War; that President Nixon is following the Wilsonian doctrine, and that that doctrine involved a close partnership between business and government, for the purpose of cartellizing the American economy. One of the explicit selling points of the New History of Leviathan is that New Left and “Old Right” historians here join not in their policy conclusions but in their analyses of the current American political system and how it got that way. The book contains the following articles: Martin J. Sklar on Woodrow Wilson; Murray N. Rothbard on “War Collectivism in World War I”; Rothbard on “Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez-Faire”; Ronald Radosh on “The New Deal”; James Gilbert on James Burnham; David Eakins on “Policy Planning for the Establishment”; and Leonard P. Liggio on National Security Managers from World War I to the present. The book is prefaced by an introduction by the eminent New Left historian William Appleman Williams, in what is probably the most blisteringly anti-State essay that he has ever written.

von Hoffman.

Nicholas von Hoffman, indeed, grows increasingly libertarian. Last year, he published two columns praising the devotion to libertarian principle of libertarian businessman Robert Love of Wichita; now, in his April 10 column in the Washington Post, von Hoffman devotes a laudatory essay to the youthful Washington libertarian James Davidson, head of the National Taxpayers Union and a remarkably effective one-man Washington lobby for the cause. Von Hoffman concludes his column by saying that Davidson’s “politics are too good to believe in, too good for people to try.”

Austrian Economics.

It is always a pleasure to welcome a newcomer to the tiny but rapidly growing world of “Austrian School” economics. Now Miss Sudha R. Shenoy, graduate student in economics at the London School of Economics and daughter of free-market Indian economist B. R. Shenoy, has published an excellent new collection of anti-Keynesian essays by the great Austrian economist F. A. Hayek. The collection is judiciously culled from Hayek’s past and current writings, and is preceded by an excellent brief introduction by Miss Shenoy, “The Debate, 1931-1971”. The value of the collection, as well as the introduction, is not simply as a critique of Keynesianism, but in setting forth the basic Austrian methodology and point of view, and it is thereby an implicit (and sometimes explicit) critique of Anglo-American macro-economics in general, including the “Classical” and Friedmanite doctrines. This little paperback, published by the free-market English organization, the Institute for Economic Affairs, is must reading for anyone interested in the Austrian point of view. (Sudha R. Shenoy ed F A Hayek, A Tiger by the Tail, London: Instituted Economic Affairs, 1972. Address: 2 Lord North Street Westminster, London SWIP 3LB, England. Price in England is one pound. IEA publications are often available from Transatlantic Arts, Inc. in New York.)

Miss Shenoy also provides us with the most up-to-date critique of Indian central planning (hitherto provided by B. R. Shenoy) in another IEA pamphlet, India: Progress or Poverty? (same price.)

Libertarian Magazines.

Some excellent libertarian periodicals of remarkably high quality have recently been launched. We have already mentioned the new anarcho-objectivist fortnightly tabloid The New Banner (35¢ a copy, $7.00 a year, from Box 1972, Columbia, S.C. 29202), but it continues to fulfill the difficult task of putting out a lively and interesting publication, with a nice blend of news and theoretical discussion. Particularly good is the “Market Alternatives” column of Dave Foster, who continues to spin out and defend the concept of private courts and police in the free society against all comers.

One of the best of the new publications is the little-known Stanford Independent, issued by the Stanford libertarian movement, whose guiding inspiration is the brilliant Bill Evers. The first, Nov.-Dec. 1971, issue has an excellent article on the theory of justice by Evers, developing the libertarian theory of property rights, citing natural law theory, Locke, Spooner, Rothbard, and Childs. An equally good article by Joe Kalt, “Anarchism Derived,” develops the concept of anarchism from natural law and libertarian philosophy. To top it off, Mark Venezia outlines the different strands and factions in the current libertarian movement. The second issue, March, 1972, contains a scholarly legal, critique of the law of “statutory rape” by Bob Litterman, a critique of the theory that unions cause inflation by Robin Friedman, and a review by Bill Evers of Andrew Van Melsen’s Thomist work on The Philosophy of Nature. These are but the highlights of these two issues. The Stanford Independent is available free – but all contributions are welcomed – at P.O. Box 2122, Stanford, California 94305.

A mimeographed, but lively, publication is New Libertarian Notes, published by the New York University movement and edited by the ebullient Samuel Edward Konkin III. NLN is a 12-pager, comes out ten times a year, and costs $2.50 for the year, 40¢ per issue. Available from Konkin, 235 E. 49th St., New York, N.Y. 10017. The May issue contains, among other things, a continuing series on World War II Revisionism by William Gillespie.

Last but not least there is Outlook, a new libertarian monthly emerging out of the old Abolitionist, with Jerry Tuccille as its editor-in-chief. Outlook’s intention is to include material by all wings of the libertarian spectrum, even unto the realms where the libertarianism wears pretty thin. With Tuccille at the helm, we can confidently expect lots of satire, and fun and games. Outlook is available for 50¢ an issue, or $5.00 a year, at Box 1027, Newark, N. J. 07101.

Frank S. Meyer, RIP

There are surely few more painful tasks than to write about a very close friend shortly after his death. It was one Frank’s remarkable attributes that without giving an inch in argument, he was able to separate the personal from the ideological more clearly than almost anyone I have known: and so he could continue to be close friends with people who differed sharply from him in many areas. Frank indeed was one of the great conversationalists of our day; talking with him was always a profound pleasure, whether in all-night conversations in Woodstock or over late-night phone calls. For Frank’s great erudition was matched by a veritable passion for ideas, and so conversation with him meant a fascinating play of ideas and insights over a vast range of human thought, history, events, politics, people, chess (not the least!), and on and on. Frank indeed gave off an intellectual excitement matched by few people in my experience; pacing up and down, a cigarette in one hand and a Scotch in the other, he would convey that excitement to everyone in the room, and enrich all of our lives. He was exciting, stimulating, fun; and with all that, he cared deeply for each and every one of his legion of friends. And so when I think of Frank, I think first not of the towering eminence in the conservative movement that he truly was, but of the wonderful quality of his friendship. The death of Frank Meyer is a great loss in my own life, and I am sure in the lives of all of his friends. Every person is of course unique and irreplaceable, but Frank leaves a gap in our lives that can never come close to being filled.

Frank and I shared a special bond, the bond of dedicated Night People in a world of 9-to-5. One of the tributes to Frank in National Review mentioned the joy at always being able to call Frank at 3 in the morning. For a Night Person, this was still more appreciated. Frank was even more steadfast than I in his all-night schedule, and at the times when I would zonk out early, Frank would playfully accuse me of betraying our Night People principles.

One of the great joys of knowing the Meyers’ was experiencing the quality of the marriage between Frank and Elsie. Never have I known two people so close, so intimate on every level; in this age of instability, here was a truly rare marriage, a marriage to cherish even for those of us who experienced it as friends.

In the field of ideology, Frank Meyer towered mightily over the rest of the conservative movement. Not only for his erudition and intelligence, but also because among them all he was by far the most dedicated to the liberty of the individual. That I do not believe that his attempt to fuse conservatism and libertarianism can ultimately hold does not detract from the importance and the nobility of the venture. Among all of his colleagues, Frank Meyer never yielded to the temptation to bend the knee to Power, to join the Establishment, to play patty-cake with President Nixon. He held the banner of his conservative-libertarian principles aloft, and denounced with all the great intelligence at his command all attempts to betray them.

In no area was Frank more dedicated a libertarian than in the field of education. Scorning both the public school system and the miasma of Progressivism that the private schools have become, Frank Meyer, quietly and without fanfare, proceeded on the heroic; and enormously difficult task of educating his two sons at home. The energy and devotion that this task consumed can only make the rest of us stand in awe and admiration. The result of this devoted tutoring was two sons who, on the first formal exam of their lives, sailed into Yale and are proceeding to make their mark in the world with brilliance and in steadfast devotion to conservative standards and values. The education of John and Gene Meyer is one of Frank’s finest accomplishments.

Frank’s quality of taking ideas seriously can be seen from the way in which he handled his defection from the Communist Party, in which he had risen to be one of its leading “cadres.” He was not content, along with the bulk of his ex-Communist colleagues, to rush into print with glib explanations and excuses. When he left the Communist Party, Frank Meyer went off to Woodstock and meditated deeply, on his life, his ideas, and values. He took years to do this, but the price was worth it; for when he “returned” to the world of ideas and actions, he had hammered out his new conservative ideology and comprehensive world-view. How many people have had the vision, the fortitude, the dedication, the sheer guts to do this, to take the time arid energy to mould their own personal reconstruction?

By the time he had re-emerged, Frank had become a Christian, but various theological doubts had prevented him from joining the Catholic Church. Very shortly before his death on Holy Saturday, however, his doubts resolved, Frank was received into the Church, and a Requiem Mass was held for him the following Wednesday. As soon as he was received into the Church, Frank found peace before the end. One of the writers of tributes in National Review said that he was looking forward to the Frank Meyer of old debating Thomas Carlyle in Heaven. Given my own theological views, I can’t say that I expect this to happen, but I can hope. And I do.

“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly, to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.”

— Samuel Adams

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NOS.6-7

JUNE-JULY, 1972

75¢

McGOVERN???

At this writing, it is clear that only a miracle will keep George McGovern from the Democratic nomination for President. Perhaps the unions, the centrists, the party bosses, can mobilize a last ditch stand for the “old politics” and stop the crazies — but the chances look slim at best. But even if the McGovern steamroller sweeps to a first ballot victory, the convention will scarcely be a dull one. For the real fun of the convention will be what might be called a “meta-spectacle”: the spectacle of contemplating the reactions of the mass of Middle America as they watch the goings-on in Miami over TV.

For what they will be watching is the sudden seizure of power by all the forces whom they hate and fear: the ruthless triumph of the scruffy Left — hippie youth, college kids, blacks, women, Chicanos, welfare mothers — the whole kaboodle. The comfortable old faces and power brokers — the Daleys, the party leaders, the union officials — will be all but gone, swept aside by “grass roots” power fueled by lunatic reforms insisting on quotal representation for highly selected “minorities.” Along with the visible embodiment of their gut enemies, Middle America will see these forces push through programs and issues which will scare the bejabers out of them: everything from the economic insanity of a $1000 gift for every American to be financed by everyone making more than the gigantic sum of $12,000 a year, to the legalization of homosexual marriages. And even if the more sensible politicos in the McGovern camp are able to tame their power-happy militants and tone down many of these programs, their radical scent will be there, to pervade the convention and the following McGovern campaign with the odor of inevitable and crushing defeat.

Two weeks before the California primary, Hubert Humphrey launched a belated campaign to inform the American public of the real ideas being promulgated by the left kids and their “sincere”, slightly cretinous front man. In those two weeks, Humphrey was able to reduce the McGovern lead almost to the vanishing point. But this campaign of education will be as nothing compared to the massive Republican effort, which need only point the finger at the McGovernite programs and at their proponents, to send the South Dakotan down to a defeat more crushing than that of Barry Goldwater. To win the election, McGovern would have to hold the 1968 Humphrey states (essentially the Northeast plus Texas), and pick up a few more key states, such as California, Illinois, and Ohio. The chances of McGovern carrying Texas are surely nil, and he can scarcely carry the other states either, in the face of massive defections of the elderly, Jews, ethnics, WASPS, blue collar workers, etc. — in short, virtually the entire voting population over 30. Furthermore, the humiliated Daley machine will surely sit on its hands, and thus end any chance of carrying Illinois Even New York is hardly safe for McGovern, considering the likelihood of an ultimate Conservative endorsement for Nixon, and of serious low income Jewish defections from a McGovern ticket.

In the extremely unlikely event of a McGovern triumph in November what would a McGovern administration be like? In the first place, the Left would become totally insufferable once again: any “New Left”, anti statist and anti-Presidential glimmerings would go by the board now that the Left felt itself in power once again. As New Left columnist Pete Hamill wrote some months ago: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a President we could like again?” Decentralization and community control would disappear in a new coalition unpleasantly reminiscent of FDR, and the new push would be on behalf of a compulsory egalitarian variant of collectivism. On the other hand, of course, there would be some compensations: the Conservatives, Bill Buckley, National Review et. al. would suddenly find their anti-statist voice after years of cozying up to Power. In politics, I’m afraid that the vehemence of one’s anti-statism depends upon one’s own distance from the seats of Power.

More substantively, a McGovern administration would undoubtedly get us out, posthaste, from the horror of the Indo-chinese war. Civil liberties would improve, but whether McGovern could push a repeal of the draft or the promised $30 billion reduction in defense spending through a hostile Congress is doubtful indeed. On the domestic front, the key question is whether McGovern would be able to get his horrendous economic program through the Congress. The one hope for a tolerable McGovern presidency would be to have his economic policies blocked by an extreme right-wing Congress while he is free to “bug out” abroad. Here we have to ponder whether Congress, used to being supine before the President; will really offer determined resistance to McGovernomics. At least, the conservative Republicans, tied inexorably to the statism of Nixonomics, would be able to resume their former resistance, to galloping collectivism.

In the meanwhile, while hoping against hope that a harmless fellow like Muskie will be able to stop McGovern at the pass, there are already a few things to rejoice over in this election year. For a New Yorker, there have been two delights. One was the total collapse of the Lindsay boomlet, to such a degree that we may look forward to a speedy retirement of Big John from public life. A second was the crushing of the monstrous Bella Abzug, that Gorgon blend of Sophie Portnoy laced with Karl Marx. The issue between La Abzug and Bill Ryan on New York’s West Side was not so much ideological as aesthetic, and it is pleasant to contemplate the considerable reduction of noise pollution in politics with the departure of “Battlin’ Bella” from the public scene.

The Party Emerges

From all sides, I have been bombarded with the question: have I “sold out” to the newly emerged Libertarian Party? Or, to put it less violently, have I shifted my position?

It is true that I have agreed to become an economic adviser to John Hospers, the Libertarian Party candidate for the Presidency, and that I have joined an Academic Advisory Board for the New York party (called “The Free Libertarian Party.”) But I have not changed my position in the least. My strictures against the LP were not the result of “anti-party principle”; I never believed that forming a political party itself violates libertarian principle. My arguments against a national ticket were strategic and prudential; and these arguments still remain. As long as the LP has gone ahead and nominated a national ticket (Hospers-Nathan) I wish it well; but realistically I do not expect much, either by way of votes or of mass conversion, to emerge from the campaign.

I remain, furthermore, more enthusiastic about campaigns on the local level at this stage of the game. The New York FLP is pursuing this kind of strategy by concentrating its energies on two local races in Manhattan (Gary Greenberg for Congress and Forum contributor Walter Block for Assembly), and one on the loosely affiliated “Independent Rights” ticket, with Guy W. Riggs for Assembly from Poughkeepsie. Greenberg and Block, moreover, are happily using the campaign to radicalize the party itself. There are several imaginative ways by which Greenberg and Block are going beyond the rather stodgy laissez-faire platform of the official party. In the first place, Greenberg and Block go beyond the official party call for total amnesty for draft resisters, and advocate “reparations to be paid out of the pockets of the politicians and personnel who maintained the draft.” If the draft is slavery and is criminal, then shouldn’t the criminals be forced to compensate the victims? Here is “radical” libertarian doctrine not to be found in the orthodox political guidebooks of Objectivism. Greenberg and Block go on from there to another joyously radical demand: “A War Crimes Tribunal should be established to examine whether or not war crimes have been committed during the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon administrations.” Then they pursue the logic to go beyond the mere finger-pointing of, say, the old Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal: “Perpetrators should be prosecuted.” Here are planks truly worthy of libertarians who are not afraid to be “radical” — i.e. to pursue the logic of their position to its uttermost.

Greenberg, in his capacity of dealing with taxation at the federal level, has also had the courage to outrage objectivist sensibilities by calling for the raising of income tax exemptions to $12,000, as a concrete first step in the ultimate party objective of abolishing taxation altogether. The objectivists complained that this exemption of lower and middle income groups would increase the degree of progressiveness in the income tax structure. So it would; but the important question is not the degree of progressiveness, but the amount which each group has to shell out in taxes. The wealthy would not suffer by such a program — in fact, they would be slightly better off from the rise in exemptions — and the poor and middle class would benefit enormously by the tax burden being lifted from them. In fact, why stop at $12,000? We need at least a $20,000 tax exemption to liberate the hard-working middle class of this country from income tax slavery.

Contrast, too, the quality of the “populism” exhibited by the tax reform programs of Gary Greenberg and the slightly better-known George McGovern. McGovern’s is a completely phony “populism” which would soak to the ’gunnels everyone making over $12,000 a year. Greenberg would completely free the lower and middle income groups from the exploitation and the oppression of income taxation. For real populism, vote Greenberg and Block!

Another Lone Nut?

John F. Kennedy; Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George Corley Wallace; the litany of political assassinations and attempts in the last decade rolls on. (And we might add: General Edwin Walker, and George Lincoln Rockwell. In each of these atrocities, we are fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is supposed to have been performed, must have been performed, by “one lone nut” — to which we can add the one lone nut who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement. One loner, a twisted psycho, whose motives are therefore of course puzzling and obscure, and who never, never acted in concert with anyone. (The only exception is the murder of Malcolm, where the evident conspiracy was foisted upon a few lowly members of the Black Muslims.) Even in the case of James Earl Ray, who was mysteriously showered with money, false passports, and double identities, and who vainly tried to claim that he was part of a conspiracy before he was shouted down by the judge and his own lawyer — even there the lone nut theory is stubbornly upheld.

It is not enough mat our intelligence is systematically insulted with the lone nut theory; we also have to be bombarded with the inevitable liberal hobby horses: a plea for gun control, Jeremiads about our “sick society” and our “climate of violence”, and, a new gimmick, blaming the war in Vietnam for this climate and therefore for the assault on George Wallace.

Without going into the myriad details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn’t anyone see a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what is more were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large sections of the populace against our rulers. All therefore constituted “populist” threats against the ruling elite, especially if we focus on the mainstream “right-center” wing of the ruling classes. Even as Establishmenty a figure as John F. Kennedy, the first of the victims, had the capacity to mobilize large segments of the public against the center-right Establishment.

And so they were disposed of? We can’t prove it, but the chances of this pattern being a mere coincidence are surely negligible. If the only problem is a “sick society”, a “climate of violence”, and the absence of gun laws, how come that not a single right-centrist, not a single Nixon, Johnson, or Humphrey, has been popped at?

Review of Hospers’ Libertarianism

By R. A. Childs, Jr.

Part II

Now on to foreign policy. Perhaps the single most disappointing aspect of Hospers’ otherwise excellent book is his lack of a clear, blunt, uncompromising statement of isolationism as an ideal in international relations. This, it would seem, is a crucially important aspect of libertarianism: that the military, and political power of a State should at least be confined to within its borders, and that no State should be allowed to risk war by militarily protecting those who choose to take risks and do business, own property and the like in other nations. In my view — they should be permitted to do such, but at their own risk. They — and the government — should not be allowed to jeopardize the peace and the very lives of other citizens by becoming politically and militarily involved outside the borders of the nation.

This is not the only bad aspect of this chapter. He shares the Randian belief that the Soviet Union is primarily responsible for the Cold War, and an anti-Russian tone permeates this entire chapter, as though that were the primary focus of libertarianism. Indeed, such references to Russia are to be found throughout the book — one instance of Hospers’ overly narrow focusing on applications of Libertarian principles. Other instances could have been picked from a much wider historical and political scope, and this would have served to differentiate libertarianism from conservatism much more than does Hospers by focussing on the Soviet Union. And there is also the fact that result of the problems caused by the second World War. Suppose, even,

First off, I think Hospers makes several historically inaccurate statements in this chapter. He makes reference to the U.S. grants of food to Russia in 1918, for instance, but curiously omits to mention the 20,000 troops which Wilson sent over to help crush the Bolshevik regime, thus perpetuating the civil war which was not between the forces of Communism and those of freedom, but between Bolsheviks and supporters of the Czar. There is also no mention of the key issue which was responsible for the triumph of Lenin — that he promised to pull Russia out of the first-World War, which Kerensky was stubbornly continuing. There is constant reference to the forced labor and other monstrous things adopted in the Bolshevik’s reign, but no mention of the sufferings imposed by the Czar, particularly in the war.

But this is really irrelevant. Let us grant that the Soviet Union may well be the most monstrous regime, domestically, that has ever existed. What has this to do with foreign policy? It is the Randian belief that dictatorships are more warlike than “democracies” or “freer countries.” But historically this is not true. Besides, the domestic policies of another government should not be considered in considering issues of foreign policy, unless we are to abandon, in principle, the doctrine of isolationism. The most that can be made out, on Randian grounds, is that the American (or another) government can enter a war only in response to another government’s having “initiated” military attacks. Barring this, the actions of another government should be, politically and militarily, irrelevant. Morally, it is a different matter entirely.

But the Cold War is a much more complicated matter. Let me approach the subject this way. Suppose, John Hospers (and all Objectivists), just suppose, that the Cold War was not begun by the Soviet Union. Suppose that the Left in Eastern Europe was quite independently strong as a result of the problems caused by the second World War. Suppose, even that the victory by revolt of the domestic Communist and other Left political groups in Europe during and after the war was not encouraged by Stalin, but perhaps even opposed, on grounds of maintaining stability and not antagonizing the West (remember that the Soviet Union was extremely weak after the war). Suppose that most of the victories of the Left in Europe had little to do with Stalin, and that the same was true it Asia, particularly in China and Vietnam. Suppose that militarily 01 otherwise, the Soviet Union was no threat to the United States at the close of World War II, and had no aggressive intentions. Suppose that what actions it did take in Eastern Europe were motivated not out of a desire to “conquer the world,” but rather from a desire to be surrounded by, buffer states, to prevent a recurrence of the three invasions by means of Eastern Europe which had already occurred in the 20th century. Suppose further that U.S. business, financial, intellectual and political leaders mistakenly held that U.S. prosperity depended upon having vast and continually expanding foreign markets for American goods and investments. Suppose that they thought that political stability in most of the world was a necessary condition of this expansion. Suppose that this were threatened by growing nationalistic and revolutionary movements — communist and non-communist alike — across the globe. Suppose that the response of American leaders was to oppose all upsets of this kind not under their control. Suppose that they found it necessary, as one American Senator so eloquently put it at the onslaught of the Cold War, to “scare hell out of the American people” in order to gain widespread support for the policies necessary to accomplish their goals and combat world-wide resistance. Suppose that the myths of the Cold War were in fact founded in this context and for this purpose. Suppose furthermore that the Soviet Union’s foreign policy has been largely a response to this and that without this policy of the American government, that they would never have become involved in world politics the way they have, preoccupied as they were with building “socialism in one country.” Suppose, finally, that through tortuous routes, it is the U.S. which today is responsible for actively sustaining the Cold War, and not the Soviet Union. What would our attitude as libertarians then be toward the Cold War?

Now it should surprise no one — but unfortunately it will no doubt do just that — to learn that all of these “supposes” have been extensively documented and argued for in a wide variety of sources for the last twenty years or more. Regardless of whether or not these claims are true — the issue is this: should this point of view be carefully and open-mindedly considered? Would one’s position on these historical details affect one’s appraisal of the Cold War, and the alleged “need” for a large defense establishment? Finally, again, would this affect one’s view of U.S. foreign policy, and one’s evaluation? I think the answer to all these is a resounding “yes”!

But this is not considered by Hospers. Using mostly right-wing sources for his case here, he maintains that the Allies “gave” Russia a huge empire constituting almost one-fourth of the world’s land mass and a billion people . . . while the U.S. and Britain got nothing out of the war except mountainous debts.” All right, let’s take a calm look at this. In the first place, no “giving” was involved. In the case of China, as ever. American military leaders in that country admitted during and after the second World War, Chiang, the ex-communist, was a gangster. Among other things, he heavily inflated the currency of China so that using 1939 as a base year, the price level rose from “1” in that year to about 85,000 seven or eight years later. In an attempt to fight the inflation, Chiang imposed wage and price controls. They were violated left and right. He then completely alienated his supporters by proceeding to murder businessmen and merchants in the public square for violating these monstrous laws. The Communists were the only major force fighting Chiang, and did in fact end the inflation after their victory — which is not to endorse them. The point is that Chiang was a gangster, and that the American government maintained this man in power for years. When they finally reduced their support, Hospers calls this act a “hair-raising horror story” and a “shoddy chapter in American history.” It is one thing to oppose the Communists. It is quite another to endorse Chiang-Kai Shek.

Now for another point Aside from the fact that nothing was “given” to Russia, and that the communist victories in many Eastern European countries were not simultaneously Soviet victories, and aside from the fact that the U.S. had for a long time also supported other gangsters on practically every continent on the globe in the name of “fighting communism,” there is much to dispute in his assertion that the U.S. and Britain gained nothing but “mountainous debts.”

Let’s take up the debts issue. In fact, these debts are mainly to large banking concerns closely aligned with the State who yearly reap literally billions of dollars in interest payments — paid for the loan of money which they just printed up! So someone is benefitting, and we can therefore ask whether or not this, among other things, was what was intended by wracking up such a large debt. Whatever else the debts serve as, it is obviously an excuse for the State to steal people’s money to pay off, for the most part, some very influential financiers.

Finally, what else did America get out of the war? Well, let us grant that Britain lost more than it gained by almost any standard. If we use a rational ethic, which alone can define what constitutes a real, objective, “benefit” to someone, then we can say that no one benefitted from World War II, or from any other war. But let’s take the issue of “benefit” and “gain” in a narrower, more journalistic sense. Before the war, the U.S. had troops in a handful of foreign countries. Today, it has troops in more than sixty. American foreign investments which pull in handsome profits for a select few of American businesses and investment houses, have grown very rapidly since the war. And with the international monetary scheme patched together at the close of the war, the American government helped to “integrate” other nations into the American monetary system, thus tying them into the complex American state-system. Foreign aid, regularly attacked by rightists as “altruistic,” serves the purpose of subsidizing American corporations and of tying foreign nations into the American economic system — all within a basically State-controlled, protectionistic system. The list of this aspect of the fruits of the second World War is virtually endless.

One can also question the validity of Hospers’ assertions that the Soviet Union is a military threat — either existentially or even in mere intent — to the U.S. We find Hospers stating this: “It is at least likely, however, that Soviet Russia (perhaps in combination with China) will unleash an aggressive war against the U.S.; its growing missile system is . . . geared less for defense than for an aggressive first strike. As its nuclear weaponry increases and that of the United States decreases relative to it, as is now happening month by month, there is a strong possibility that once the Soviet Union has attained a clear nuclear superiority over the United States, its leaders will issue an ultimatum to the United States government, presenting it with a choice of nuclear annihilation or military takeover and enslavement. There is also a strong possibility that instead of such direct shoot-it-out methods, the Soviet Union may play a waiting game: its leaders, seeing how much of the world has already fallen to them with American help, and seeing how successfully they have mesmerized and deluded American liberals for fifty years, are aware that the United States is becoming gradually collectivized in any case, have only to continue their present policies and the entire world may yet drop into their lap like a ripe plum. With American policy as it has been since World War II, there is considerable likelihood that things will happen exactly in accordance with such anticipations.”

I want to make it clear at this point that however much I admire, respect and like John Hospers, I cannot let this passage go by without commenting on it. In my opinion, this attitude is the most dangerous one that a libertarian could take, and is potentially the most destructive for libertarianism as an ideology, and as a movement. Classical liberalism failed largely because of the pitfalls of utilitarianism, evolutionism, and its failure to confront in bold and uncompromising terms the growing militarism of the turn of the century. I think that this is the worst threat to libertarianism as well. This passage is factually inaccurate from beginning to end. It is all backwards. It is the result of failing to keep up with and confront the discoveries of revisionist historians. Moreover, it shows the importance, in a single passage, of something that I have been stressing for two years: of the critical importance of doing intensive research into current and historical world events before passing judgment on them from a libertarian perspective. Unless one confronts the works of Kolko, Williams, Weinstein, Gardner, Horowitz and others, one is making judgments about world affairs with the same justification as a doctor pronouncing on a patient about whom he knows nothing. It is a fact that both theory (which Hospers is generally brilliant in considering) and the minutiae of history are necessary for sound judgments of current world affairs. If one doesn’t have theory, then the evaluation is arbitrary and subjective. If one doesn’t have the wealth of historical and empirical detail needed, then the evaluation is little more than a guess — and, usually, it is a bad guess.

That is my objection to this and similar passages of Hospers’. By making factual errors regarding the Cold War, he implicitly comes out in favor of increasing the defense budget and of increasing the military capacities of the U.S. government!!! But any libertarian who does that faces a paradox: the defense budget is maintained by robbery, and the military capacity of the U.S. is already great enough to kill everyone on earth several dozen times. What on earth is libertarian about either of these? Is it any wonder that the people of the world often express some anti-American sentiments when they are implicitly threatened by the greatest array of weapons that the world has ever seen? And if the actions of the American State in foreign affairs — which I think are imperialistic, resting on a denial of free trade and on coercive manipulation of other nations — are performed in the name of “free enterprise,” is it any wonder that those who would revolt against the blood-stained status quo revolt also against the ideology which cloaks the poison of U.S. foreign policy?

The rest of Hospers’ chapter simply misses the points being raised by any major critic of U.S. foreign policy today. He does not understand the mechanisms and anti-free-market nature of colonialism and imperialism. He hasn’t studied these crucially important areas enough.

But my disagreements have been emphasized enough. How, after all this, can I still praise the book? Simple — the passages which I am against comprise a maximum of 10% of the book, probably a good deal less. And in other respects, I have merely criticized omissions of issues, such as the role of big business in the rise of Statism. I have dwelt for such a long time on my disagreements because I think they are fundamental and important — especially in view of the fact that these are key issues on which Hospers is most likely to confuse and alienate the Left.

LIBERTARIANISM, thus, is a mixed book. He addressed it largely to intelligent, open-minded liberals, and solved the problems which they raise against laissez-faire. But he left out the potentially strongest part of his case: he didn’t make use of any of the left-wing historically revisionist works which in reality bear out the libertarian argument, neither in domestic nor foreign policy. All the major problems faced today, in foreign and domestic policy, are a result of the denial of liberty by the American and other governments. This is the first thing that a libertarian has to show leftists. Furthermore, libertarians need, perhaps more than they are aware, to reject the past of America as well as the rest of the world. There was no garden of laissez-faire in the 19th century, and the aim and purpose of the “founding fathers” was not to establish laissez-faire by means of the constitution. This means that we must look at the 19th century with fresh eyes, praising the men and institutions who deserve it, and damning those who deserve that. This is one of the flaws of LIBERTARIANSIM: it is too defensive, and wants to claim too much of the past, in matter or spirit, as its own ancestor. There is too much of conservatism left in it.

But despite all this, it is really a good book, and is as I said in the beginning: the best book to hand to somebody who has become interested in attaining a comprehensive overview of the libertarian political philosophy. But if we take our ideology and our tiny movement seriously, then we must be careful in our reservations. Ninety per cent of the book is superb. The rest is just plain wrong.

Anationalism and Immortality

By Jerome Tuccille

(The following is an excerpt from HERE COMES IMMORTALITY, a new book to be published by Stein & Day later this year. In the preceding chapter, Walt Disney has been thawed out and reanimated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, thus becoming the world’s first reanimato. The event has been televised around the world and has shaken the very foundations of modern civilization. Now . . .)

The 1990’s, under the leadership of the world’s first reanimato, marked the beginning of the anationalist age.

Disney was not the first to set up headquarters at sea by any means. In 1975, Burlington Industries became the first corporation to build an island-headquarters in the Atlantic Ocean, two hundred miles east of New York City. There, in international waters, the company was no longer subject to the laws of any nation and was free to trade in the international marketplace without restrictions.

Later in the decade, an offshore complex which included a jetport, nuclear power plant, waste disposal center and deep-water seaport was built off the eastern tip of Long Island. The ostensible reason for this was to relieve air traffic congestion on land, but when the Mayor of New York City moved his administration to the island complex, the true reason was quickly seen by all.

Developers in Cleveland and Chicago followed suit, constructing jetports and power plants supported on caissons in Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. Throughout the 1980’s several more companies set up shop off both the east and west coasts of the United States, and six more jetports were established offshore.

But it wasn’t until 1991 that the concept of anationalism finally took hold. Disney wasn’t interested merely in escaping tax laws by moving out to sea. It wasn’t merely freedom from bureaucratic regulation that he was after. The vision Disney had in mind went way beyond these noble, though limited aspirations.

The dream for Disney was the creation of complete and independent parallel societies which, in effect, would compete with governments throughout the world. The concept of multi- or international corporations was already obsolete before it really got started in the mind of the reanimato. Disney would establish a series of island-communities complete with housing, schools, shops, hotels, industry, theaters — everything necessary for comfortable human existence — in international waters all over the globe.

They would not, of course, be subject to the laws of any nation. They would be free to trade among themselves and also with existing nation-states whenever it was possible. These island-societies would, in a sense, be proprietary communities developed and managed by Disney. Enterprises which, in another sense, would become a giant landlord over a new, anationalist, sea-borne world society.

Floating Lefrak Cities on a grand scale, so to speak, with total ocean living for everyone.

When word of exactly what Disney was up to finally got out, sparks began to fly in virtually every country on the planet. The idea of unregulated anational communities was quickly denounced as fascism of the highest order one day, and anarchism of the lowest order the next. Some nations wanted to extend their national limits two thousand miles out to sea thereby rendering the concept unworkable from the start, but in many cases — most notably the newly emerging “Fourth World” nations — the proposed new limit vastly exceeded the size of the countries themselves.

In the United Nations, now situated on the floating jetport off the shores of Long Island, Disney was accused of trying to turn the entire planet into a giant shopping center with himself as universal landlord (earthlord?). The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. maintained that, if Disney were permitted to have his way, the oceans would be filled with gargantua apartment buildings, mile-long department stores, penny arcades, Jerome Mackey judo schools, Fred Astaire dancing schools, high-rise health clubs and sauna baths, psychedelic pizza parlors, and amusement parks the size of Rhode Island.

The earth would eventually start to look like a never-ending Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

At this point the ambassador from the Soviet Union suggested that the idea of One World Government, discussed for decades in government and academic circles, was long overdue. Only by creating a World Presidium with jurisdiction over the entire planet could counterrevolutionary schemers such as Disney be stopped.

The British ambassador politely objected to the world Presidium; he thought the word Parliament sounded much more democratic.

Israel wanted the world governing board to be called a Knesset; the United States held out for Congress; the Chinese delegation remained silent, figuring they would overthrow whatever group came to power anyway; and the Italian delegates fought among themselves, kicking and punching in the aisles, casting aspersions on one another’s ancestry.

Meanwhile, as the debate raged inside the towering glass walls of the United Nations, Disney proceeded to build.

His first island-community went up in the Atlantic, sixty miles southeast of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. His second was built further out to sea, another hundred miles east southeast of the first one. As the third ocean-community was under construction, Disney discovered he was no longer alone in his rush to create an anationalist empire. Competitors were now entering the market, timidly at first, then gradually more boldly, even as the governments of earth debated their fate at the U.N.

Hughes Industries, Helmsley-Spears, Lefrak, Levittown, Boise-Cascade and other companies were airlifting platforms out into the Atlantic, erecting modular cities in a matter of months. Some had already inaugurated STOL transport services, free of charge to prospective tenants, in a mad race to populate their communities faster than the rest. Within the space of thirty-six months, a veritable man-made archipelago had been built beginning from a point sixty miles off Martha’s Vineyard and extending in a wide arc all the way to the Straits of Gibralter. A similar network running from southern California toward Hawaii was also in the works.

On March 8th, 1994, the United Nations passed a resolution calling for the creation of a One World Governing Body with full authority over the entire planet. The World Parlgressidium — a designation finally agreed upon by the various delegates — would consist of two hundred and eleven members, one each from every nation on earth. There would be, in addition, a five-man executive board comprised of the chief executives of the United States, Russia, the European Commonwealth, China and Japan, with veto power over the legislative body. A World Court would also be established which would serve as the final court of appeals in all judicial matters.

Each nation would maintain its traditional methods of selecting officials, whether by majoritarian election, representative democracy, military coup or one-party dictatorship, for the purpose of administering local affairs. Every six years each nation would hold a general election to select its ambassador to the Parlgressidium.

It was a comprehensive plan, thorough in every detail. It was democratic, fair and tough at the same time. Everyone would have a say — to one extent or another at least — in deciding the people who would dictate the fate of the entire planet. It was a bold, daring, adventuresome proposal, highly innovative and imaginative, even revolutionary in all its implications. Disney and the rest of the maverick developers who were attempting to make a mockery of established authority would be given six months to dismantle their sea-borne monstrosities — or else be blasted right out of the water. Enough was enough already. Give a hooligan too much rope, and he tries to hang you with it.

The resolution was read live on global television on April 15th, 1994. The only problem was: no one seemed to be watching. Where the hell was everybody anyway?

As it turned out, Disney had picked that day to throw a monumental bash on Ocean Village number one. There was STOL service from most areas of the globe, and helicopter shuttles from the United States mainland. Who would stay home and watch television when he had a party like this to go to? It was Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and all the Worlds Fairs in history rolled up in a single happening.

Disney was a past master at the formula E plus P = PG (Entertainment plus Pizazz = Profits Galore). The mobs flocked in from every nook and cranny on earth, some with their life savings in tow. More lucre changed hands that day than on any other day in memory. Parades? Candy canes? Balloons? Trombones? All the trappings of manufactured gaiety were present in spades. President Rockefeller (elected by a hair in 1992) wanted to send in the Marines to break up the affair; the Secretary-General of the U.N. thought it best to land an international taskforce to avoid the stigma of “U.S. imperialism.”

But they discovered too late that Disney had hired the Marines and Green Berets to police his own operation. Cagey entrepreneur — he had anticipated something like this. Most of the military personnel through the world were now working for the anationalist developers who, after all, paid them much more than the current minimum wage. The politicians of the earth were virtually unprotected. They were at the mercy of every thug and rapist who wanted to have at them.

The United Nations sent out an appeal to the masses. We offer you stability, the security of international law and justice, protection from our common enemies. What do they offer? Parades? Gimmicks? A lifelong sideshow? They’re turning the whole planet into a great big funhouse.

The consensus was, however, that the people preferred the earth to be a great big funhouse rather than a great big lunatic asylum.

Within a year one of the largest migrations in the history of mankind was well under way. The whole world was going anational – all because of the wacky dream of the world’s first reincarnee.

Reanimation and anationalism all before the turn of the century. What, pray tell, could the future hold in store after this?

The Polish Ham Question

By Walter Block

Supposed exponents of free trade, like YAF, conservative clubs, the Birch Society, and other right wing groups have long been actively opposing the importation of Polish hams. We shall prove that whatever principles such actions could be based upon, they are not the principles of the free market, laissez-faire system, which holds supreme the rights of trade, of property, and of voluntary association.

Opposition to the importation of Polish hams has been defended on the grounds that it is immoral to trade with thieves or receivers of stolen merchandise — a description that eminently fits the Polish government. A description, however, which also eminently fits the U.S. government, with its vast taxing system, its monstrous budget deficit, its astronomical national debt! But more destructive of the private property system even than this are the following: it is the U.S. not the Polish government which destroys property more than 10,000 miles from its own shores in the name of defense. It is the U.S. not the Polish government that threatens the destruction of the whole world with a nuclear might capable of doing just that 1,000 times over. It was the U.S. not the Polish government that was the first and only country to destroy human life (the most important private property right) on a scale unmatched before or after by dropping a nuclear bomb on a center of civilian population; and to make matters worse, after the Japanese government had offered to surrender.

Thus if there is anyone who should not be traded with, it is this U.S. government.

Such a course, however noble sounding, is not required by any libertarian principle. The consistent libertarian is no more required to refuse to trade with the U.S. government than he would be required to refuse to hand over his money to a gunman who threatened his life for that purpose. (“Trade” here includes such things as using the self-enforced governmental monopolies in roads, post-office, courts, TVA; it includes trading with government “client” monopolies in such fields as electricity, gas, and state colleges; it includes trading with those who hold a State license in order to trade, like doctors, lawyers, plumbers, barbers and taxi-cab drivers; it includes trading with anyone who deals with State-supported, coercive-restrictive unions; it includes, perhaps most analogously to the gunman, paying taxes). Consistent refusal to deal with government thieves would involve one in committing suicide, since governments control all of the earth’s surface. This is anathema to libertarianism, which holds life, not death, as the ideal.

A U.S. citizen’s trading with the U.S. but not the Polish government cannot be defended on the ground that “It was the U.S. but not the Polish government that seized the U.S. citizen’s property; and therefore it is the U.S. citizen’s subsequent trading with only the U.S. government that is an attempt to regain his stolen property. Since trade with Poland would not accomplish this, it is therefore illegitimate.”

There are two weaknesses with this defense. First, the import of this argument does not so much defend trade with the State as it defends retaking the stolen property from the State. One does not urge trade with the burglar as justified punishment. One can always trade with him.

Second, according to this argument, the U.S. citizen can trade only with governments that have seized his property; he cannot trade with governments (like the Polish government) that have not seized his property. Accordingly, he could not make a trip to Canada, a country that regularly seizes its own citizens property, but one which does not seize the property of U.S. citizens. A U.S. citizen who lives in Maryland, for instance, could not even make a trip to Nevada, for instance, for the state of Nevada, like that of Poland, had not seized any of his property.

The answer to the Polish ham enigma is this: libertarians must realize that we are all faced with overlord States, some more aggressive and some less. The answer is not to single out Communist States for opposition. All are born in aggression and involuntarism. The way to bring the blessings of laissez-faire to the Polish people is first to secure it for ourselves. The enemies of free enterprise and private property rights here in America are immeasurably benefitted when those who favor the free market are too busy worrying about the “tiger-at-the-gate” to wonder at the absence of freedom right here.

Arts and Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Sometimes a Great Nation. dir. by Paul Newman with Newman and Henry Fonda.

A great libertarian and individualist movie, this film predictably bombed out with the left-liberal youth that make up the bulk of the New York movie audience. The picture puzzled them profoundly; it was starkly individualist, fine; but how come that the great enemy of individualism turned out to be unions and their goon squads in the surrounding “community”? And that the heroism of Fonda and his family consisted in the heinous activity of strikebreaking in order to fulfill their business contracts in lumbering? The reviewers set the picture down as glorifying nineteenth-century individualism and its virtues, and that it does. This is a rugged, heroic, explicitly individualist picture; it is one of the great ones, and if the Left and the Women’s Libbers don’t like it, the appropriate reply is the great gesture of defiance with which Paul Newman, bloody but unbowed, ends this epic.

The Godfather. dir. by Francis Ford Coppola with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino.

The Godfather is one of the great movies of the last several years, and its enormous popularity is eminently well deserved. In the first place, it is a decidedly Old Culture movie, or “movie-movie”; it is gloriously arriere-garde, and there is not a trace of the avant-garde gimmicks and camera trickery that have helped to ruin so many films in recent years. It is a picture with heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys; there is not a trace of the recently fashionable concern with the “alienation” of shnooks and cretins searching endlessly for a purpose in life. The pace is terrific, the suspense and plot and direction and acting all excellent. Many of the lines are memorable, and “we’re going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” has already burned its way indelibly into American culture.

The key to the movie is the first scene, when an elderly undertaker, having gone to the police and to the courts for justice for his raped and beaten daughter, and failed abysmally to get it, at last turns to the Corleone Family for that precious quality, justice. Brando, as Don Vito Corleone, the “Godfather”, berates the undertaker: “Why did you go to the courts for justice? Why didn’t you come to me?” And it is further made gloriously evident that the Corleone Family’s concept of justice is advanced indeed. When the undertaker asks Don Corleone to kill the assaulters of his daughter, Don Vito is shocked: “But that is not justice. They did not murder your daughter.” With a keen sense of the concept of proportionate justice, of punishment fitting the crime, Don Vito agrees to make the rapists “suffer” as the daughter had suffered.

The central theme of the plot is the growth of son Michael Corleone; originally a college lad grown apart from the old Sicilian Family ways, Michael takes his stand with the family when his father is nearly murdered by other, aggressor Families, and toughens into the role of successor to Don Vito. (Actually, the word “godfather” is a weak translation of the Italian word compare, which also has connotations of: friend, best man, patron.)

A crucial political statement in the picture comes when Michael is trying to explain to his disapproving WASP girl friend what the Family is all about: essentially their entrepreneurship of illegal goods and services, their necessity to enforce their own contracts, and (regrettably for the libertarian) their penchant for monopoly in which they are a pale reflection of “respectable” and “legitimate” government. Michael tells his girl that his father is a man of power and influence, and hence the methods he employs, “like the President of the United States.” The girl replies: “But the President doesn’t order anyone killed”, to which Michael rebuts: “Now you’re being naive” — a masterpiece of political understatement.

But above all, a movie-movie in the grand tradition: a rugged, magnificent epic.

“Democracy substitutes selection by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” — George Bernard Shaw.

Garbage in New York

By Joseph R. Peden

High on the list of lasting impressions of New York by the casual visitor is the dirt and trash which litters the public and often private spaces throughout the city. Keeping a city of eight million residents and some two million daytime commuters neat and clean would be a formidable task under the best of circumstances, but longtime residents of New York believe that the situation has worsened greatly in recent years. It is a commonplace of local legend that, following a regional snow storm, roads and streets in suburban communities will be cleared in hours, while city streets remain uncleared for days. In 1968 after a heavy snowfall had stranded residents of many areas of the city for three to four days because local streets were not cleared of snow, the outraged public learned that the city sanitation department had two-thirds of its snow clearing equipment out of service due to faulty maintenance. When citizens organized to complain of failure to pick up garbage regularly, they were likely to be awakened at three or four in the morning by the grinding of mashers and the crash of empty cans being hurled from the trucks by city sanitation men. While sanitation pickup in the slums never could cope with the somewhat cavalier methods of garbage disposal of slum residents — out the nearest window or in the nearest empty lot — service in middle class residential neighborhoods also began to deteriorate noticeably. Meanwhile Mayor Lindsay had paid off his political debt to the powerful Sanitation workers union by granting them wage increases making them the highest paid sanitation men in the nation and guaranteeing them retirement at half pay after twenty years service — a privilege enjoyed previously only by firemen and policemen. The cost of these pensions will burden the city for decades to come — but the Mayor will presumably have retired to another state by the time the bills come due.

The increasing costs of municipal sanitation services prompted the City Administrator to conduct a study of the comparative cost of municipal and private carting services within the city. The private carters are licensed by the city and restricted generally to collecting from commercial and industrial companies whom the municipal sanitation service refuses to serve. Thus while the city maintains a near monopoly over residential collection, and of the sweeping of the streets and collection from litter baskets in public spaces, private carters serve the business community as well as a few large residential estates which find municipal services too untrustworthy, even though free.

The private carters collect about a fourth of all waste in the city, and dispose of it in either the municipal dumps for which they pay a fee, or in private dumps, most of which are located in nearby New Jersey. Maximum rates are set by the municipal agency for private carting which is in the hands of some 450 separate firms.

The City Administrator’s report was a blockbuster: it claimed that private cartmen collected refuse at about one-third the cost of the municipal sanitation department — $17.50 per ton compared to $49.00 per ton. A closer study of the report revealed that the municipal costs were $39.71, but using a projected inflationary factor the estimated costs would soon reach the $49 per ton figure. The discrepancy in cost was still so great that the city’s sanitation department — newly renamed the Environmental Protection Agency — began in some panic its own study. Two years later, it reported that the private carting costs were only 18% less than the municipal service — $31.43 per ton compared to $38.43 per ton.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a privately funded watchdog agency, non-partisan and a long-time scourge of bureaucratic incompetents decided to make its own survey. Within a month, it issued a report challenging the EPA figures. Its staff concluded that the EPA had excluded 40% of the municipal sanitation routes from its cost estimates, and had used figures from only seven of the 450 private carting firms to estimate private costs. Rather than the $31.43 per ton cost for private carters, the CBC found private costs to range between $20.71 and $25.58, depending on how one computed the weight of waste — by the ton or the cubic yard. It also discovered that the EPA estimate of its cost for collecting waste in districts with one and two-family houses was $47.90 per ton while in two neighboring towns in Nassau County private carters charged $17.50 or less per ton — a figure very close to that for private carting in the city according to the City Administrator’s report.

What accounted for the discrepancy between the EPA costs and those of the private carters? The CBC reported that, first of all, the city paid its sanitation workers wages 20% higher than those paid by private carters, and the fringe benefits were also somewhat higher. But, the CBC report added, “the most significant difference is in the inherent efficiencies of private as opposed to municipal operations. The incentives of profit and competition act to increase efficiency in a way the Department of Sanitation could never duplicate, even under the most aggressive leadership. The high proportion of owner-supplied labor and direct supervision also acts to increase the relative efficiency of private cartage firms.”

The CBC recommended that the “sensible course of action” for the City to follow would be to seek bids from private contractors for selected sanitation districts — beginning with the very high cost areas of one and two family homes. While allowing for time for the private carters to “tool up” for the extra work, a gradual conversion to private cartage might save the fiscally distressed city as much as $59-77 million annually.

Under increasing criticism, the EPA desperately looked for some way to save its bureaucratic empire. Step one was the decision to raise the fee charged to private carters using municipal dumps to dispose of waste. As the private carters soon realized, this was a squeeze play in which the sanitation department reduced its costs per ton while increasing private carters costs per ton — reducing the discrepancy between their respective costs.

Step two was to find a way to delay responding to the recommendations of the CBC and the requests of the private carters association for discussions on future contracting of residential waste collection by private firms. Letters to the EPA went unanswered and the city agency desperately tried to avoid the problem by publicizing other gimmicks. Plans were announced for selling advertising space on municipal litter baskets. Unfortunately, potential advertisers had to accept the fact that about 6000 of the 18,000 baskets disappear from the streets annually — no one knows quite where they go. When private carters offered to empty the public waste baskets in the heavily commercial districts of the city — estimating a cost of 70 cents per basket as against a $2.00 cost to the city — they were met with stony silence. Meanwhile the EPA officials exulted in the fact that an association of real estate managers in mid-town Manhattan announced that they would henceforth undertake the formerly municipal function of keeping the streets in front of their properties clean by daily sweeping. This was not a matter of municipal pride but a commercial necessity if they were to attract tenants to the depressed office space market.

Step three was a political masterpiece in the best New York tradition. The EPA announced in Feb. 1972 that a pilot project to test the comparative efficiency of private waste collection in residential areas would be sponsored by the EPA. The pilot district was to be Bedford-Stuyvesant — the worst black slum in the city if not the nation. And the contract to organize the new garbage collection service would be given, not to experienced, professional commercial carting firms, but to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corp., a non-profit social rehabilitation agency established as a pilot project by the late Senator Robert Kennedy for social and economic reconstruction of slum areas through the efforts of their inhabitants. The private carters were stunned by this insanity. An EPA spokesman admitted that it would not be a fair test of private vs. city sanitation services, but it would generate jobs and test whether the slum dwellers could keep the slum cleaner than outsiders. It had two other advantages: it threatened the private carters with involvement in New York’s messy racial politics if they opposed the scheme, and it postponed any immediate action on their demands for letting out bids for private garbage collection in other districts by professional, experienced carters. As the EPA explained, further pilot projects were envisioned, but the Bedford-Stuyvesant project had first priority (“Because it is there”) and would tie up the limited managerial manpower of the city department for months if not years.

Slightly more than a third of America’s cities rely entirely on private sanitation services; the rest have either municipal monopoly or semi-monopoly operations like New York. The empirical data produced in New York clearly indicates the superiority of the private over the municipal service. Libertarians might find this a profitable area of political agitation and public education for the hard pressed urban taxpayer. But if we are to turn back the forces of Statism we cannot rely on mere theoretical economic arguments, much less ethical entreaties. What is needed is hard research, using all the techniques of the social sciences, to prove the efficiency, and profitability, of our libertarian approaches to concrete social and economic problems. With the exception of the Chicago economists who have long pioneered in using their economic analysis to liberate us from Statist solutions, libertarians have tended to rely on pious if true generalities — balm to the convinced but irrelevant to ever-pragmatic Americans. If libertarianism is to make any impact upon American social reality, we must begin to produce the detailed socio-economic research data to support our theoretical economic and philosophical analysis, and use it efficiently in our educational work. A fine example of this kind of work was the excellent study of “Taxis and Jitneys: The Case for Deregulation” (by Sandi Rosenbloom) in the February 1972 issue of Reason (294 Via El Encantador, Santa Barbara, CA 93111, 75 cents). Unfortunately, far more common are articles like that of Clarence Carson on Garbage disposal in The Freeman (October 1969), pp. 622-628. This is essentially a descriptive essay of the problems, and exhortation for a free market solution, and the moralistic charge of “waste not, want not”. But not a single word or statistic to ground its argument in the socio-economic realities. Utterly useless to convince the hardheaded businessman, legislator or taxpayer. Mere balm to the faithful. Libertarians need far better factual data if they are to make any impact upon contemporary public opinion.

Academic Freedom?

By Peter Sherman

More phony-white-liberal crocodile tears have been shed over the issue of academic freedom than perhaps over any other. More academics have waxed more eloquent over it than over perhaps any other topic receiving their tender attention. In the eyes of some, it has been equated with the very basis of western civilization. In the eyes of others, judging by their anguish, it has been equated with the Second Coming! There is not a day that goes by that does not see the American Civil Liberties Union in a virtual state of apoplexy over some real or imagined violation of academic freedom. And all this seems pale in comparison with the gnashings of teeth and frothings at the mouth by labor unions of professional academics and teachers in this fair land of ours.

From the name itself, academic freedom would seem to be innocuous enough. All it would seem to mean would be that academics, like anyone else, should have freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to come and go, freedom to quit a job. The usual freedoms that everyone has. Such is not the case, however. “Academic freedom” has a very special meaning: the freedom to teach the subject matter in whatever way the academic in question wishes the subject taught, despite any wishes to the contrary that his employer may harbour. In other words, the employer may not fire the academic as long as he teaches the subject matter in any manner that the academic, not the employer, wishes. Now this is a very special, not to say spectacular doctrine indeed! This point may easily be proven by applying the doctrine of academic freedom to almost any other occupation. Let us consider “plumbers’ freedom” for instance.

What would plumbers’ freedom consist of? The right to place pipes and plumbing equipment in the position his experience had taught him was best. But suppose a customer wanted his plumbing in a place that differed with the plumber’s professional, artistic, aesthetic, and other judgments as to where the plumbing should be. The plumber is of course free not to take a job if his sensibilities are outraged. (We do not yet have forced labor in this “land of the ‘free’”, except, of course, when some old men decide to force some young men to fight in a jungle 10,000 miles away and call if a draft). But suppose he demands not simply the right to refuse the job, but the right to take the job and to do it his way. If there were any “plumbers’ freedom” analogous to the way “academic freedom” is run, he would have just that right!. He would have the right to say that when his professional competence is at odds with the desires of the customer, his views should prevail. The customer is not always right, it would seem.

It will be objected by the academic freedom-lovers that there are great differences between plumbers’ freedom and academic freedom and that therefore only the latter is justified. There are several differences. Let us, however, examine them to see if they amount to much.

One alleged difference between plumbers and academics is that plumbers usually rent their services directly to the customer, while the academician rents his services to the customer (students, or parents of students) through an intermediary — the university. But the problem with this objection is that it is by no means or immediately obvious why this should make a difference, or is indeed relevant at all. Secondly, although they are perhaps in a minority, there are many plumbers who do not work directly for the customer, but rather work through an intermediary plumbing firm; and there are likewise many academics who work directly for customers as tutors. In any case, we can consider these two cases and see if “vocational freedom” makes any more sense here than in the usual cases.

Plumbers’ freedom makes no more sense in the case of an employed plumber than in the case of a self-employed one. Plumbers’ freedom would mean that the employee of a plumbing firm would be free of any job requirements placed upon him by either the owner of the plumbing firm or by the customer. Since the firm serves as an agent of the customer, the employee’s plumbing “professionalism” would prevail over the desires of the customers. Any employee could refuse to work on a big construction job if the plumbing specifications were not to his “professional” liking. And of course he could not be fired, for such a firing would violate his “plumbers’ freedom”.

Likewise, academic freedom makes no more sense in the case of an academic tutor working directly for the customer than it does in the case of an academic serving the consumer indirectly through the intermediation of a university. Such “academic freedom” would mean that the tutor would be entirely in charge of determining the way the lesson would be taught, and that as long as the tutor stuck to the subject matter for which he was hired, he could not be fired by the student. This is such an unexpected conclusion that it bears repeating, even though it follows directly from the logic of how academic freedom works in the university context: if a tutor working for a customer-student has what in the university context passes for “academic freedom”, he could not be fired from that position for merely exercising his “professionalism” in a way that displeases his student-employer. The only grounds that exist for firing someone with complete rights of “academic freedom” would be gross violations of the law or professional incompetence. He could not be fired by the student over a “mere” disagreement over a substantive issue concerning the subject matter.

Another alleged difference between plumbers and academics, (alleged, let me hasten to add, by academics, not plumbers), is that the academic vocation, but not the non-academic ones require free inquiry, un-trammeled rights of expression, the right to pursue their thoughts wherever their intellects shall lead them. What can one say of this arrant nonsense, except that it is probably more indicative of maniacal, religious elitism than anything else? Perhaps the plumbers could reply with the old aphorism that “Those who can, do, while those who cannot, teach.” This reply would be just as relevant to the question at hand. For we are not dealing with the question of how onerous or intellectual the various vocational pursuits are. We are dealing with the propriety of “vocational freedom” in protecting the supposed right to a job as long as certain formalistic job requirements are fulfilled regardless of the wishes and desires of customers and employers. Even if we accept this elitist allegation on the part of the academics on its own grounds, it still opens up a can of worms for academic freedom-lovers. For if we accept the view that intellectual professions should have the protection of “vocational freedom” we still have to deal with “doctors’ freedom”, “lawyers’ freedom”, “chemists freedom”, “musicians’ freedom”, “artists’ freedom” and so on, in mind-boggling array. Would “doctors’ freedom” give the doctors the “freedom” to prohibit us from smoking cigarettes, for instance, without giving us the right to fire them for such temerity? Would “artists’ or musicians’ freedom” give artists and musicians the right to charge us for music and art we did not appreciate? Considering the way “academic freedom” operates, one would be hard pressed to deny these conclusions. One shudders to contemplate what “chemists’ and lawyers freedom” would entail. To say nothing of “politicians’ freedom”.

And if we reject this academic elitism, the panorama is vastly widened. It now would include “taxi-drivers’ freedom”, where the taxi-drivers go where they want to go and YOU pay for it; “baby-sitters’ freedom” where the baby sitter decides when baby goes to sleep. And so on. If we reject intellectual elitism, we find it harder to see just why plumbers, carpenters, tradesmen, etc., should not also have “vocational freedom”. Why after all, should “vocational freedom” be reserved to only the teachers of these disciplines? If the vocation is so deserving that the teachers of it must be protected by “freedom”, then surely the practitioners must be likewise protected. And if the practitioners are not deserving of the “freedom” not to be fired, then how can the teachers merit such treatment?

What we are dealing with here under the question of “academic freedom” is nothing less than a disguised attack on the very right of individuals to freely contract with one another. It is a denial of the sanctity of contract. It is a denial of the rights of individuals to make contracts with one another that do not include clauses stipulating “rights” of “academic freedom”. In its effects it resembles nothing so much as the medieval guild system, in its restrictions, protectionism, and fostering of a caste system.

There is one ground upon which “academic freedom” can be supported, although it is a ground upon which precious few of its adherents would wish to support it. “Academic freedom” may be defended on the ground that it is perhaps the only device by which control over the educational system in this country may be wrested away, at least in part, from the ruling class, or power elite which now controls it. To substantiate this claim would take us too far afield. (The interested reader is referred to “The Higher Circles” by G. William Domhoff.) Supposing it to be true for the sake of argument, however, we can see that it constitutes a defense of “academic freedom”. For if the ruling class analysis is true, then it is not the innocent student-consumer who is being defrauded by “academic freedom”. It is not the innocent student-consumer who is being forced to maintain in employment an academic whose services he no longer desires. It is the non-innocent ruling class which is being so forced. If the ruling class theory is correct, academicians with views favorable to the ruling class have nothing to gain from “academic freedom”. They will be retained in any case. It is the academic with views that are not amenable to the ruling class, and he alone, that can benefit from an “academic freedom” which prevents ruling class employers from firing him on ideological or other non-formalistic grounds.

But this is no reason to continue to obfuscate the issue of academic freedom. Academic freedom, as such, is fraud and theft, because it denies individuals the right of free and voluntary contracts. That it can also be used for good ends should occasion no surprise. Throwing rocks at people is also an illegitimate activity. Yet David could hardly have slain Goliath by eschewing this practice.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NOS. 8-9

AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, 1972

75¢

Confronting Leviathan

In the very first issue of Libertarian Forum (preview issue dated March 1, 1969), the editor expressed our desire “to unite theory and actions”, “to see how the current system may be transformed into the ideal” and “to inspire a truly dedicated movement on behalf of liberty”. Inspired by these goals, in the same issue, we commended a suggestion by Gerald Gottlieb of the Center for Democratic Institutions that private citizens create an international “Court of Man” to investigate and publicize, and hopefully stop, violations of human rights by sovereign states.

We commented at the time that “perhaps libertarian foundations and scholars could sponsor further study of Gottlieb’s proposal — so libertarian in principle and so feasible in practice”. In March 1970 we published further comments on the subject in Lib Forum and also an account of three privately created international commissions of inquiry which played a significant role in European history between 1920 and 1940. (See J. R. Peden, “Courts against the State”, Libertarian Analysis, v. 1 Winter 1970). But as far as we know, libertarians have not responded to our suggestions for more research or action along these lines. If our own ideological compatriots have remained idle, others have not. What follows is a brief description of several projects which have been undertaken with great success in limited areas using the technique of privately sponsored citizens’ commissions of inquiry.

1. COURT-WATCHING

One of the oldest libertarian associations in the United States is the Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. The Quakers, though few in numbers, have always been formidable enemies of Statists. From their founding in the 17th century in England, they have been frequent victims of persecution by governmental authorities who refuse to respect any limits on their power. The Quakers are generally an intelligent, virtuous, hardworking people, indomitable in their moral certitude and inner self-possession in the face of tyrants. Pacifists and activists with a passion for the works of peace, reconciliation and justice, they have traditionally been the fine cutting edge of libertarian sentiment in America. They were among the first to struggle against the evils of slavery and racism; they fostered prison reform and abolition of capital punishment; they have continuously fought against imperialism and militarism and supported the extension of civil liberties in all areas. The Quakers have not only been courageous, but also remarkably innovative in their work against the injustices of the State. They were ‘active in the peace movement, before Wilson’s war, helped to care for the refugees that war produced through the American Friends Service Committee, and were influential in founding the American Civil Liberties Union. More recently they have been active in draft and war tax resistance and, most recently, “court-watching”.

In January 1970 The Friends’ Suburban Project — sponsored by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers) — began a systematic monitoring of the municipal courts of Chester, Pa., a city of some 60,000 people, mostly poor and nearly half Black. The “court-watching” consisted of regular attendance by one or more of the project’s members at both arraignments and preliminary hearings in the Chester Police and Court Building.

The regular editor, Murray Rothbard, is on a well-earned vacation in Europe. Editorial responsibility for this issue is entirely that of the publisher, Joseph Peden.

The Magistrate’s court in Chester had long been noted for its corrupt and illegal procedures, and the court-watchers were able over a six-month period to document these irregularities. They discovered (1) that 64% of all defendants had no legal counselor or attorney; (2) that half the occupants of the city jail were being held because they could not post bond while awaiting trial; (3) that 75% of those brought into court were Blacks or Puerto Ricans; that they invariably had more serious charges and a greater percentage of multiple charges placed against them than did whites; (4) that while 33% of all blacks were remanded for trial, only 14.5% of whites were so honored; (5) that 10% of the blacks paid fines of over $100, but no whites did so.

During their court-watching, the monitors did not attempt to disrupt the court, or even intervene in the cases. They were carefully trained to know what legal procedures were required by Pennsylvania statutes and the rights of defendants and spectators in judicial hearings. They prepared and distributed leaflets on the rights of accused persons and sources of legal aid to defendants and notified the magistrates of their presence. They also met with the city solicitor, police chief and others to explain the purpose of their project — to improve the administration of justice in accordance with the federal and state constitutions.

At first the police reacted as expected and on two occasions arrested monitors — only to have the charges dropped when the court found it necessary to recognize the right of citizens to frequent a public building. It soon became apparent that the presence of white, middle-class court-watchers was creating a new atmosphere in the Chester courts. The magistrates were more attentive to each case, tended to set lower bail, and be less abusive and more considerate of the procedural rights of defendants. The police were more cautious in their testimony, more selective in their arrests, and less abusive to the accused.

A number of more important changes have been made. For the first time, court records are now available for public scrutiny; and public defenders are being appointed for all cases involving indictable offenses. Arraignments are no longer held in secret; the time and place of such hearings are posted publicly and the general public is permitted to witness them. Municipal judges are now sending fewer cases to higher courts; charges are lessened or dropped locally to save time and money for both the state and individual. Perhaps most important of all, a bail bond monopoly shared by two friends of the presiding magistrate has been broken; eight bondsmen are now available to defendants and there is a marked tendency to reduce bail or release the accused on his own recognizance.

While the court-watchers were not entirely free of official harassment, the response of the community has been positive, and many state and local officials rallied to the project’s support. The sense of professionalism of the legal fraternity was challenged by the court-watchers, and this proved a powerful stimulus in winning their support for reforms. Libertarians — especially those who believe that government is necessary if only to maintain a system of justice — might well support similar projects in their own towns and cities. Certainly the worst tyranny occurs whenever government officials themselves violate the laws they are committed to uphold. This is especially so when the laws are concerned with civil liberties and judicial procedures. The Court-Watching technique is but one relatively inexpensive way in which a few individuals can expand the realm of liberty in their own community. (Those interested in “court watching” may write for the “Court Action Handbook” — 50 cents per copy — to Friends Suburban Project, Box 54, Media, Pennsylvania 19063).

2. STORMING THE BASTILLE!

One of the most innovative and successful applications of libertarian principles in recent years has been the creation of an international network of civil libertarians who have undertaken the task of monitoring the fate of unfortunate individuals who have, for reasons of conscience, been arrested and imprisoned for their political beliefs. Amnesty International was founded in 1961 in London by a British lawyer, Peter Benenson, to mobilize world public opinion in behalf of all “prisoners of conscience” — bona fide victims of some State’s violation of their human rights as defined by articles 5, 9,18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

How does Amnesty International work? At its London headquarters a research staff receives information from a variety of sources as to the names of individuals held captive in various countries for “crimes” which stem from the failure of the governmental authorities to recognize basic human rights, as defined by the Declaration. Information about each individual prisoner is obtained, and each case is carefully considered. A crucial standard is that no prisoner will be helped by Amnesty International if he has used violence in exercising his human rights. AI supports freedom of thought, conscience, religion, the press and speech; it condemns the use of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners; and arbitrary detention, arrest or exile. But it will not support the cause of a prisoner whose resort to violence places him in the status of a common criminal.

Once AI is convinced that the prisoner is eligible for support of the organization, the full case study is sent to one of the hundreds of groups located in 28 countries throughout the world. AI has about 20,000 members organized into local groups or chapters of from 3 to 15 or more members. Each group presently pays annual dues of $129.00 for 8 memberships ($15.00 for each individual member beyond the 8). At any given time the group is assigned three cases — always prisoners of a nationality other than their own, and distributed among the ideological forces of East, West and Third World impartially. Unfortunately, there are oppressive States in all ideological camps so that AI’s non-partisanship is secure.

With the information provided by the London staff, the AI chapter prepares a campaign to persuade the respective State to release its prisoner — to grant amnesty. The methods chosen to achieve this vary with the circumstances; letters to the chief officials of the foreign government; visits to the local embassy and consulates; use of private contacts with local business corporations, churches, professional organizations; publicity in the home media of the group; agitation in parliament and press; visits to foreign office officials asking them to intervene. The art of persuasion passes into the need to make a nuisance of the case; to harass the bureaucrats, embarrass the regime, to make such a stink, internationally, that the government will release the prisoner just to quiet the whole affair. The prisoner is kept informed of the work of his friends and his relatives are encouraged by friendly letters and often financial aid. The essential aim is to free the prisoner — and “quiet” diplomacy is preferred to any premature and fatally damaging politicizing of the case.

Amnesty International has tended to be strongest in Northwestern Europe; there are over 300 chapters in West Germany and almost as many in Sweden; these constitute more than half the total number of chapters. In the United States, it has been slower in developing, probably due to preoccupation with the struggle against the Vietnam war. There are now over 2000 individual members and active chapters exist in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Boulder, Omaha, Columbia, Mo. and Hesston, Kans. Most of the members seem to be college professors and students. It is not necessary to belong to a group; individual members will be assigned a single case to work upon.

The non-partisanship of AI is proven by a sampling of the published lists of recent prisoners which have been helped by the organization: these include a Roman Catholic bishop held by the Red Chinese; a Taiwanese city councilman imprisoned for circulating a petition asking clemency for a prisoner of the Chiang-Kai-shek regime; a Watusi monarchist imprisoned by the Republic of Rwanda; Huber Matos, imprisoned by Fidel Castro for over 12 years; a Jehovah’s Witness whose missionary work was not appreciated by the Soviet Russian government; Captain Howard Levy, the American Army doctor imprisoned because he refused to teach first aid to Green Berets who would use it as a political weapon.

Amnesty International has not limited itself merely to seeking amnesty for prisoners of consciency. In recent years it has caused a sensation in many quarters by sending investigation teams into certain countries to gather evidence of widespread use of torture and abuse of prisoners by certain governments as a matter of deliberate national policy. Their report of the regular use of torture by Israeli officials in interrogating Arab prisoners was bitterly denounced by the Israeli government and other Zionist sympathizers; the British government was similarly enraged when Amnesty teams publicly reported the use of torture by British troops in Aden, and more recently, in the prison camps of Northern Ireland. Their reports on the atrocious treatment of political prisoners in Greece contributed significantly to the forced resignation of Greece from the Council of Europe for violating the European declaration of human rights.

Libertarians in search of a meaningful activity which can involve group or individual creative political work might well consider joining Amnesty International. How many of us can say that we helped to free a fellow human from a tyrant’s bondage? Amnesty International has liberated more than 3500 prisoners of conscience in the last decade. Moreover, Rumanian officials admitted privately that the agitation of Amnesty groups compelled the government of that Communist country to review its prisoner problem — resulting in the liberation of some 2000 political prisoners that were unknown to AI and, until then, forgotten by the Rumanian government itself. Write for further information to Amnesty International, 200 West 72nd St. New York, New York 10023.

3. J’ACCUSE

In early November 1971 the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice sponsored a series of anti-war events in Washington that included a rally at the White House during which an eviction notice was delivered to its occupant; meanwhile the direction of the nation’s attention was focused on the efforts of thousands of young activists to bring the government machinery to a halt by blocking the bridges and highways leading to the center of the city. The result of that escapade war — the illegal arrest and detention of over ten thousand people at the direction of the Attorney-General of the United States!

While the attention of the media was focused on these dramatic and colorful proceedings — right out of the Late Show Nazi war movies — a possibly more important event was in progress elsewhere in Washington — the special hearings held by a private body known as the People’s Grand Jury. A broad spectrum of citizens who have been active in antiwar actions in the last decade sat for nearly 25 hours to hear testimony from experts and eyewitnesses about the actual methods of American warfare in Southeast Asia, the secret war in Laos, prison conditions in South Vietnam, the “Operation Phoenix” assassination teams, chemical and biological weaponry, and domestic political repression. Among the jurors were radical activists like Father James Groppi and Sister Elizabeth McAllister; Rosemary Reuther, a Catholic theologian; Bob Eaton, a Quaker recently freed from prison for draft refusal; and Tom Grace, wounded at Kent State. The testimony itself was more or less an updating of similar testimony presented to the Russell War Crimes Tribunal in 1967.

As expected, the newspapers carried nothing on the contents of the hearings, but they were videotaped and made available for showing through the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice, 917 15th St. NW Washington 20005. The publicizing of war crimes and other related criminal activities of the State and its minions is a crucial part of any libertarian movement. It is the most effective method of minimizing these criminal acts and rallying decent public opinion against them. The People’s Coalition understands this and is reportedly planning to convene “people’s grand juries” in conjunction with the Daniel Ellsberg trial. A similar body met to publicize the harassment of anti-war activists during the trial of the Harrisburg 8 — Father Philip Berrigan and friends. So far, these “people’s grand juries” have attracted only radical support — liberals have been conspicuous in their absence. The reason is, that such private commissions of inquiry implicitly assert that the courts themselves are not impartial but are in fact agencies of the oppressive state apparatus. In the Harrisburg case the judge confirmed this by refusing to accept the fact that the jury was deadlocked, and three times refused to release them from duty. The result was a compromise verdict in which all were acquitted of the conspiracy charges but two were found guilty of sending messages out of prison — a charge they admitted and which has never before been prosecuted in a federal court.

So far the holding of “people’s grand juries” has been useful in focusing public attention on the political character of the prosecutions, or the scope of the government’s own criminality. But this tactic is appropriate only in relatively restricted circumstances. What might be more useful would be the establishment of permanent privately sponsored “grand juries” which could regularly hold public hearings to expose governmental corruption, inefficiency, and violations of civil liberties. In other words, a libertarian parallel or alternative to the traditional grand juries of the State. — JRP

Arbitration A Fundamental Alternate Institution

By Ralph Fucetola, III

Arbitration is a non-state method of conflict-solving. Historically, arbitration was the professional mediation of disputes within a traditional structure which resulted in a BINDING declaration of rights. This form of adjudication predates the coercive state and generally depended on ostracism and conscience for its binding quality.

With the advent of state-sponsored “justice” several centuries ago, arbitration was neglected and even outlawed. The king would only permit his agents to produce “justice” — and world history tells of the bloody, criminal results, State courts, though, often originated from the nationalization of arbitration institutions. For example, the commercial law aspect of the old English Common Law Courts was taken from the Law Merchant, a type of very successful private arbitration tribunal.

Since the early 1900’s, arbitration has undergone a renaissance: governments now permit it — and actively encourage it for international business transactions.

Men have turned to arbitration for one prime reason: arbitrators are usually “persons having special knowledge and experience in foreign trade, commerce, industry, agriculture, transportation, insurance and other related matters as well as law . . .” (Peoples’ Republic of China, Arbitration Decree). Expertise separates the arbitrator from the judge; an arbitrator is a person who is trusted for his knowledge and reputation, a judge is a political appointee.

Presently in New York City, arbitration tribunals decide more cases each year than the number of commercial cases decided by the United States District Court there. Besides expertise, three other factors encourage this increasing use of arbitration: (1) arbitration is a private matter, thus privacy may be protected; (2) it can be less time-consuming and less expensive than the government’s courts; (3) it is primarily based on the CONTRACT (statutory “law” and procedures are of little importance). Libertarians see two other reasons for engaging in arbitration: firstly, private justice, even its present semi-regulated form, is somewhat removed from the state; secondly, arbitration can make use of libertarian principles of law or even a libertarian law code, thus negating some of the worse features of statutory law.

Arbitration is insulated from the state because the legislation which “legalized” it (which recognized the rebirth of arbitration at the hands of various trade associations around the turn of the century) specifically provides that an arbitration award may be enforced by summary process in the state’s courts, and, except for blatant procedural defects, the courts will not look into the reasons for the award. The major failing of modern arbitration is conditioned by its “legality”: enforcement is often via the state apparatus, rather than the traditional method of ostracism.

Nonetheless, one may structure an arbitration situation so that the state’s mailed fist is as far removed as possible by creating an automatic ostracism which forces the wrongdoer to INITIATE legal action (an action which can be defeated by simply producing the arbitration award.) For example, the original arbitration agreement of the Abolitionist Association (which publishes “OUTLOOK, the Libertarian Monthly”) provided:

“The parties, expressing a desire to implement libertarian principles of law . . . within the context of the . . . Partnership Agreement . . . (agree) . . . that any party who refuses to cooperate with the arbitration procedure or decision shall be deemed to have withdrawn from the Partnership; and all parties to this Agreement agree to enforce this provision and hereby appoint each other as attorneys-in-fact, separately and irrevokably, for the sole purpose of enforcing this provision . . .”

The agreement further provided an automatic arbitration procedure which resulted in a decision against any party not cooperating, and forced withdrawal under the arbitration clause, resulting in a loss of investment.

Within a conducive social context, totally private arbitration can be more effective than the semi-statist version which the Abolitionist Association was compelled to use. In ancient Ireland, as Joe Peden noted in his article on non-state justice in Ireland (LIBERTARIAN FORUM, April, 1971), a system of family ties and ostracism enforced arbitration for nearly 1,000 years. This was done within the context of a highly decentralized society in which private professional arbitrators developed an island-embracing common law based on the ideas that no man may initiate violence, and all must keep their agreements.

Variations on ostracism are used by various trade associations to give binding effect to their arbitration decisions when the dispute involves members of the association in those fields in which membership-in-good-standing is necessary for economic survival. Other methods of enforcement have been suggested. An example which readily comes to mind is the joint purchase of a bond or insurance conditioned upon performance of the arbitration decree. This requires that potential parties to a dispute prepare the enforcement method in advance of a dispute. In a truly free market situation, arbitration institutions, credit bureaus, trade associations, bonding agencies, insurance firms and banks would all find it in their interest to work together to provide effective economic sanctions (primarily sophisticated versions of ostracism) against those who flaunt arbitration.

Arbitration is a method of conflict-solving without a state. It is not a method of achieving justice — though it may do so; nor does it necessarily apply correct principles of law. It is concerned with the “private law” created by the contract. Even in the most ideal situation, arbitration tribunals are not private, free market courts of law. Arbitration is primarily a devise for private dispute settlement which works best when the opposing parties value their continuing relationships (to each other or to some concerned group) more than they value prevailing in the dispute. Arbitration is an alternative to an institution — the state’s courts — and as such deserves our support and our participation.

The Law Of The Sea

One of the earliest European treaties concerning the use of sea territories was negotiated between Rome and Carthage dividing the western Mediterranean into two mutually exclusive commercial monopoly zones. With the expansion of Roman power the whole Mediterranean became a “Roman lake” in which Rome’s exclusive control was challenged only by occasional “pirates”. During the medieval period, freedom of the seas was the rule, but in practice the merchant-dominated city-states of Italy and the Baltic region tried, with considerable success, to assert regional sea monopolies. In the 15th century Spain and Portugal received a Papal grant of exclusive sovereignty over all the seas and lands west and east, respectively, of a papally drawn line through the Atlantic. Needless to say, these sovereign claims were challenged by the ships of England, Holland and other European powers, and were a constant source of friction among the maritime powers for centuries.

The first theoretical challenge to the concept that the seas could be incorporated within the sovereign territory of a state came, appropriately, from a Dutchman, Hugo Grotius. The Dutch had made a mockery of English, Spanish, Portuguese and Scandinavian claims to sovereignty over the high seas. Dutch merchant adventurers refused to recognize any limitations on their right to sail any sea and trade in any port, and backed up their will by daring military-commercial warfare. Grotius’ contribution was to provide an argument on natural law principles denying that property rights can exist over sea territories. He asserted that the seas could not properly be enclosed, or delimited, and are therefore unappropriable as private property. The seas were considered a free good, open and available to all men, like the air they breathed.

Grotius’ argument was not immediately accepted, except by the Dutch, but it entered into the polemics of international law and politics. The United States was one of the first states to officially accept the Grotian doctrine of freedom of the seas, and gradually the other European powers in the 19th century adopted the same position.

Following World War II, a new problem arose due to the advance of technology which permitted drilling for gas and oil in coastal tidewaters. The treasures of the sub-seabed were for the first time becoming open to exploitation and no clear principle of law existed as to the ownership of these resources. In 1942 Venezuela and England negotiated a treaty dividing the sub-seabed mineral resources of the Gulf of Paria between themselves but continuing to recognize the “freedom of the seas” doctrine regarding the sea surface and sea space.

The United States opened a new era in the international law of the sea by the Truman proclamation of Sept. 1945. It asserted that the U.S. considered the “natural resources of the subsoil and seabed of the continental shelf beneath the high seas but contiguous to the coasts of the United States as appertaining to the U.S. subject to its jurisdiction and control”. While the “freedom of the seas” was upheld, the U.S. also asserted its right to establish “conservation zones” in those areas of the high seas “contiguous to the United States where fishing activities have been or in future may be developed”. The aims of the Truman administration seem to have been twofold: to encourage the negotiation of treaties on conservation of fisheries, and domestically, to assert federal jurisdiction over that of the states over the wealth of the tideland oil deposits. But the effect was otherwise. An international “gold rush” began as every coastal nation hurriedly established claims over contiguous seas before others did so. In doing so these other powers often went beyond the limits of American claims in accordance with their own national interests and the geographical conditions prevailing.

All states had recognized that freedom of the seas had some geographic limits. In the 18th century the three mile limit had become the standard limit of full sovereignty — a distance approximating the range of naval cannon at the time. While the U.S. has steadfastly held to this rule since 1793, other nations have variously held a four, six and even a twelve mile limit. At the Geneva conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958, only 23 of the 86 states represented still held to the 3 mile limit. What was clearly happening was that increasing realization of the potential wealth of the sub-seabed, seabed, sea space resources — minerals, fuels, fisheries — was steadily eroding the previous international legal consensus on the limitation of sovereignty over the seas.

As an editor of the New York Times recently put it, the nations of the world now face the very real prospect of “anarchy at sea”. Despite conflicting claims, there is no international consensus — hence no recognized international law — on the sovereignty and governance of the sea surface, sea space, sea bed and sub-seabed. Libertarians would argue that the problem is not a question of “anarchy” — the absence of a monopoly of violence within a given territory — but rather the absence of any recognized law of property covering sea territory and sea resources. Men can live and utilize resources without the sovereign state, but no economic progress or human survival is possible where there is no common consensus as to property rights. The very serious problems of conservation of fisheries, pollution control, mining and drilling, laying of cables, and electronic detectors or other gadgets would be greatly simplified if there were recognized demarcations of property and property rights on, in and under the seas. Ideally, what Murray Rothbard calls the “homestead” principle ought to govern the situation. Effective claim, demarcation and productive utilization of any sea surface, sea space, sea bed or subsoil ought to be recognized as establishing a property right. International law already recognizes these principles in the discovery of new lands; the same principles could as easily be applied to the seas and their resources.

Any move in this direction would have to come from a corporation large enough to make its claims effective. The establishment of the “Republic of Minerva” by promoter Mike Oliver and associates is a model of this libertarian approach. Unfortunately, they have chosen to protect themselves from the existing states of the South Pacific by pretending that Minerva is itself a “state” entitled to recognition as a sovereign entity under existing international law. The limited capitalization of the Minerva project probably precluded a successful operation under their real colors — that of a private real estate development corporation. A real breakthrough would have to have the backing of someone like Howard Hughes whose Hughes Tool Company has already invested over $50 million in undersea dredging machinery to mine for manganese on the sea floor. So far, despite the great power of the multinational oil corporations, none has expressed any desire to “homestead” outside the protective covering of a sovereign state.

If future development of the resources of the seas and seabeds will not take place in a pure libertarian framework, what alternatives seem likely?

There is an extremely strong effort being made to create an Oceanic Regime under whose sovereign control all the surface, space, beds, subsoil and resources of the seas would be placed. This plan has been vigorously advocated by the staff of the Center for Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara under the leadership of Elizabeth Mann Borgese. In 1968 Mrs. Borgese published a draft of a constitution for an Oceanic Regime. Its chief features were that the regime itself would be sovereign and enjoy a judicial capacity in all land states equal to that enjoyed most fully by any of its citizens; in other words it could sue and be sued, own property and conduct its businesses within the territory of any state in the same capacity as a private citizen or a domestic corporation. The Oceanic regime would be governed by various assemblies and commissions elected by its constituent members — which include all states, inter-governmental and non-governmental associations, private corporations holding licenses from the Oceanic Regime, and the regime’s own employees. The regime would have total control over the use of sea territories and their resources, including price and quality controls over goods and services, and competitive factors, control over shipping and cargo, and the movement of armed forces operating on the seabed. This monopolization of all ocean spaces and resources beyond a twelve mile limit, would also render all these great resources common property — res nullius and res communis.

The establishment of the Oceanic regime is just the beginning of a more ambitious project — a universal world state. As Mrs. Borgese puts it: “An ocean-born, landward-spreading world view may be the world view of the 21st century”. From a libertarian viewpoint, the Oceanic regime would be an unmitigated disaster — a projection on a universal scale of the corporate state capitalism which is the antithesis of the free market and a voluntarist society. Yet Mrs. B. and the Center staff have been very successful in promoting their scheme. The Center financed an international conference held in Malta in 1970, and another in the same place in 1971. Experts from many fields related to the law and economics of the sea and its riches read papers, exchanged views, and kept their respective governments informed of trends. In addition to publishing their draft constitution, the Center has published a selection of these papers, and articles indicating the progress of discussions. Their efforts were rewarded when the United Nations decided to call an international conference on the Law of the Sea to be held in 1973.

But whether the U.N. conference will take place as scheduled is now uncertain. At a preliminary meeting called to draw up an agenda, the diplomats fell to squabbling about everything. There is a basic division between the supporters of an Oceanic Regime or reasonable facsimile, and those opposed to that approach. Most of the states which lack a coastline realize that only an Oceanic Regime can guarantee them a piece of the action. But coastal states are extremely reluctant to give up control over their contiguous seas.

The major obstacle to adoption of the Oceanic regime is the day-to-day fact that, regardless of international conferences, individual states are acting on their own to assert sovereignty over the seas. The following cases will illustrate the main trends of the situation:

1. Despite continuing opposition from the United States, Ecuador, Peru and Chile have effectively claimed the right to control all fishing within 200 miles of their coastline. Brazil has followed suit and gone further to claim a 200 mile territorial sea. Iceland has been at odds with Britain since 1948 over fishing rights in the North Atlantic. Iceland has progressively expanded the area over which she claims exclusive fishing privileges. Recently she announced that no foreign fishing would be allowed within a zone fifty miles from her coastline. Six governors of the New England states have been unsuccessfully urging Washington to establish a 200 mile fishing zone off the coast of the U.S.

2. Indonesia and Malaysia have provoked a crisis among the maritime nations by asserting a 20 mile limit for their coastal territorial waters. This means that the Straits of Malacca — a vital international waterway through which some 40,000 ships a year now pass — has been effectively annexed by the two neighboring states. While continuing to respect the right of innocent passage, their claim would limit the movement of foreign warships unless 48 hour notice was given. Both U.S. and Soviet fleets ignored this rule during their maneuvering through the Indian Ocean during the Bangla Desh crisis. Also, maritime states realize that such territorial claims over straits were the cause of the third Arab-Israeli war. The Gulf of Aqaba was closed by Egypt and Arabia as part of their territorial waters. The Israelis claimed this to be a violation of international law and attacked. The unilateral assertion of extensions of territorial waters will increase the number of potential armed clashes over access to narrow waterways.

3. An increasing number of states have cooperated in seizing the seabeds and sub-seabed mineral deposits of their contiguous waters. The North Sea was divided into agreed territorial slices by Germany, Britain, Holland, Denmark, France and Norway. While the immediate purpose of this act was to clear the way for exploitation of gas and oil deposits, it has now been extended to policing the sea for pollution control purposes. Italy and Yugoslavia have divided the Adriatic between them, and the Baltic, Black and Mediterranean Seas are in the process of being similarly treated. Canada has asserted its sovereignty over the territorial seas between the large islands north of its frozen land mass, an action viewed with deep suspicion in Washington.

Given the enormous wealth at stake, it seems to me that the coastal states will not surrender their existing claims to the sea territories and seas resources — some of which are already producing revenues and profits. Also, apart from the United States which loosed this scramble and now is trying desperately to control it, the great powers — Russia, China, France, Britain, Japan as well as many secondary powers like India, South Africa, Brazil and Portugal — all these have extensive coastlines which, if extended 200 miles or more offer great potential wealth. Is it likely that these powers will surrender control of that wealth to some Oceanic Regime? I think not.

Thus the pattern for future ownership and control of the world’s sea territories and sea resources seems already to be emerging. Annexation of continental shelves, of sea surfaces and sea beds, of sub-seabed and sea space resources by individual states will become the rule. China has already asserted her support for the 200 mile limit claimed by Peru, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador. The many island-states — large and small — will also find this policy in their interest.

With the claims of sovereignty will come the imposition of national laws regarding property rights. The participation by individuals, private or public corporations in exploiting the seas will be governed by local law. This will not be a libertarian solution; but it at least permits a variety of local practices to prevail. It prevents total monopolization of the world’s sea resources by an Oceanic Regime and will allow at least some areas to be developed in a free-market framework. Homesteading on the high seas, even if under the cover of state sovereignty, offers some scope for adventurous free-enterprisers. And international law will once again be created, not by artificial ideological constitution-makers, but by a spontaneous recognition of mutual self-interest signified by contracts (treaties) arrived at by negotiation and consensus among the nations of the world. — JRP

Transnational Relations

I

On June 19, 1972 the International Federation of Airline Pilots’ Associations conducted a world-wide strike — the first of its kind in history. The pilots hoped to pressure the United Nations and its member governments into taking stronger measures to prevent international airplane hijacking and to cooperate in the apprehension, extradition and punishment of the hijackers.

We suggest that this strike organized by an international federation or professional associations, directed at the several governments of the world, may be an act of great future significance. The pilots’ association is just one of nearly 800 international professional associations that have been developing rapidly over the last several decades at a current rate of some 9 per cent per year. The movement to organize individuals internationally by professions began in the 19th century but really caught on after the second world war under the indirect, and sometimes direct influence of the United Nations, especially through its coordinate organizations like UNESCO, FAO and ILO. Voluntary, privately-financed international professional associations originally were organized to sponsor international congresses where scholars, professional experts and related persons could meet to exchange information and theories of mutual interest. Papers were read, discussed and published; joint research projects undertaken; problems aired; personal friendships created and sustained. The international “republic of letters and sciences” which had linked the savants of Europe in medieval, renaissance and 18th century Europe, only to be sadly disrupted by the nationalistic disruptions of the 19th and 20th centuries, seemed about to flourish once again. But now to the older professions based on the traditional liberal arts and sciences, there was added the new professions; the ecologists, economists, pilots, financiers, advertising executives, travel agents, journalists, librarians, sportsmen of various specializations. There are now a minimum of 1,515 international, non-governmental organizations which hold between three and four thousand meetings annually, involving at least a million people, and at least half of these are the work of international professional associations.

While many of these associations are relatively free of ideological pressures, other are not. Often they have provided the only neutral forum in which professional persons have been able to meet their fellows from other lands outside the net of international politics and nationalistic restrictions. In many cases these associations have been able to transcend national interests and provide a focus and forum and mechanism by which the policies of nation-states can be effectively challenged. For example, international associations of jurists have been very active in investigating violations of human rights by criminally-minded States; international journalists’ and publishers’ associations police and publicize attacks upon the freedom of the press; several international sports associations have put effective pressure on the government of South Africa to change its policy of racial segregation which violates, among other things, the professional sportsmen’s concept of fair play. Even rather minor groups like the European Union of Ramblers (a federation of hiking clubs) founded in 1969 has, in addition to mapping out international hiking paths throughout Europe, pressured the various European governments to abolish all passport and customs formalities for international hikers and travelers in general.

There is clearly an increasing trend of international professional associations taking action to compel governments to shape their policies and laws in ways which will enhance the work of the professionals, and provide an environment conducive to their respective needs and desires. The strike by the international pilots’ association is just the most visible example of the trend. Yet, according to Prof. William M. Evan of the University of Chicago (in an article in International Associations No. 2 (1972) published at 1 rue aux Laines, 1000 Brussels, Belgium), there is little systematic research on the role of these associations as components in the present and future international order. Sooner or later the political scientists will take note of their existence, only to integrate them within the network of a state-structured international system. But would this not be an ideal subject for further study by a libertarian scholar? Here are private, voluntary organizations operating in ways that transcend national boundaries, national ideologies and narrow “political” interests. Might not these associations be models for a libertarian world societal structure of the future?

II

Let us now consider another international phenomenon which is already getting widespread attention — the multi-national corporation (MNC).

It is not the far flung geographic dimensions of the multi-national corporation that is new: the 17th and 18th centuries saw business enterprises, centrally directed from London, Amsterdam and elsewhere in Europe, which owned properties, markets and plantations on several continents. Yet, in addition to their being smaller in the magnitude of their capital resources compared to the larger modern MNC, they usually operated within the framework of a national imperial monopoly system in which most of their products, markets and properties were within the political control of their home country. Efforts to break into foreign markets frequently erupted into international wars, or free marketeering (usually called piracy or smuggling).

But the modern MNC finds its factories, mines, plantations, markets, manpower under the control of a multiplicity of sovereign governments which it must deal with individually to secure its centrally directed ends. Operating often under a dozen flags or more, its entrepreneurial tasks become very complex and its efforts to protect itself from the vagueries of so many governments compel it to maintain a “foreign office” equal to that of many nation states — and better than most if it is to avoid grave difficulties. The MNC must have a corps of diplomats and intelligence agents to conduct its corporate relations with the various nation-states. These corporate “State departments” and CIA’s are usually discreetly hidden under less traditional political nomenclature, but their existence is certain. Occasionally they are exposed to the general public, as in the case of the ITT memos to various Nixon administration officials urging that the U.S. government do something to prevent President Allende of Chile from assuming office after his election. There is some evidence that ITT was prepared to take steps on its own to overthrow the Chilean regime, and more will be revealed in the future. General Motors, with a gross international product surpassed by only three other “corporations” — the United States, West German and Soviet Union governments — set its secret agents to work trying to dig up something with which to blackmail Ralph Nader. Historical literature abounds with well-researched studies of the international policies of United Fruit, Unilever, and the oil companies; and it would be naive to think that corporations with such great economic power as the MNCs are not today using it to manipulate the international political state system for their own ends.

In 1970 Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs held a conference on “Transnational Relations”. The papers read at the conference are now available (Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, Jr. eds. Transnational Relations and World Politics, Harvard University Press, $4.95 paperback). The scholars contributing to this volume challenge the traditional model of international politics in as radical a fashion as the cubists did in the arts, or Galileo and Copernicus once did in astronomy. The message is that multinational corporations, international professional and trade associations are already exercising a controlling influence over the movement of labor, capital, resources and technology across national frontiers; that some 85 MNC have assets greater than some fifty member states of the United Nations; that governments and electorates have little control over the economic destiny of their nations; that nations with the traditional centralized, nationalistic economic structure are doomed when faced with the challenge of transnational corporations which can swiftly move capital, personnel and technology to wherever it will function most efficiently. Special studies on the role of scientists, the transnational role of the Roman Catholic Church, labor unions, and monetary exchange systems are also included.

For libertarians these new international institutions pose new problems. Is the MNC to be feared or cheered from a libertarian perspective? Is the MNC one of the new societal institutions which will replace the state as the norm of large scale socio-economic organization in a libertarian, voluntarist world society? Or is the MNC merely an embryonic form of a new state arising within, and gradually displacing, the older, more familiar but decaying nation-states of our present and recent past? Did not modern Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, and even India, arise from the decadent principalities of the feudal age?

There is no guarantee that a libertarian society would not lapse into statism; and there is no reason to assume that multi-national corporations will retain their present juridical status of private, voluntary corporate societies. Many would go further and say that many nation-states are already merely agents of the large multi-national corporations which are the real sources of political power in society.

Libertarians must give more attention to these problems. We have a decided penchant for regurgitating the problems and analyses of the great libertarian thinkers of the past. But our eyes ought to be equally on the present if we expect to have any impact upon the shaping of the future. It is only a matter of a short time before we will begin to see attempts to engage in international collective bargaining. Multinational corporations are certain to call into being multinational trade unions. The superstructures already exist; the occasion awaits. Where will libertarians stand on this issue? What are the alternatives? Do we expect that American working men will see American corporations shift their capital abroad and close their plants at home and not react? Are we prepared to educate the public on this issue?

Also, how does a person protect himself from the criminal aggressions of large multi-national corporations? We are already deeply involved in the complicated problem of ecological aggressions against the persons and property of individuals who cannot defend themselves against the corporation and its ally — the state.

Clearly we must begin to give greater thought to creating countervailing forces — libertarian in structure and method — to protect individuals from the sheer power exerted by, not only the State, but by any corporate body that begins to act in state-like fashion — coercively in disregard of the natural rights of individuals and the principles of justice. These countervailing forces may take the form of international professional associations, or private commissions of inquiry into the crimes of States and other state-like corporate entities; or it may take the form of supporting the creation of an expanded international law based on contract with international institutions and procedures for enforcement. Other tactics, structural forms, technological innovations will offer possibilities now unimagined. The important thing is that libertarians turn their attention to these problems which will shape the destiny of the next centuries. — JRP

Freedom And The Law

By Bruno Leoni

(Nash Publishing, Los Angeles, 1972)

Reviewed By Gary Greenberg

The Libertarian movement seems to be forever doomed to the tireless debating of Anarcho-capitalism versus Limited Government. After all is said and done, the debate usually snags on the question of objective law and the certainty of knowledge of the laws of the community. Very rarely is any working knowledge of how law developed and how law is practiced ever exhibited.

Those on both sides of the issue who wish to pursue these debates and lack this practical knowledge, ought to call a cease-fire long enough to enable them to read Bruno Leoni’s fast reading and informative study FREEDOM AND THE LAW. Written in a manner that is vividly clear for the layman, Leoni examines the major legal systems of Western Civilization, specifically The Common Law and The Code Law.

Common Law is a system of jurisprudence based on a belief in natural law. Common Law holds that there is a set of transcendental values which remain only to be discovered by jurists. The approach of Common Law is to examine disputes on a case by case basis, using the past decisions of jurists as a guide, while applying reason and experience to the facts of the case. A right rule of law exists but it must be found.

Code Law is based on a system that views law as only what is legislated. It is founded on the belief that the source of law is Government. Its proponents assert that the need for certainty and objectivity requires that the rules of law be known in advance and written for all to see. Leoni is clearly in favor of the common law approach to jurisprudence and tries to demonstrate the fallacy of the “certainty” argument offered by the Code advocates as well as the impracticality of the Code compared to the usefulness of the Common Law.

Leoni points out that since the legislature is the source of the written law in Codes, at best Codes offer only a short term certainty. Leoni compares Code advocates to the Keynesians who assert that in the long run we’re all dead.

Another intriguing economic argument is made against the code by analogy to the argument against planned economies. Starting from the assumption that Von Mises has proved the impossibility of economic planning in the State-planned economy, Leoni argues that the Code writers try to achieve the same thing as the economic planners, a set of rules to anticipate all the possible interrelations amongst individuals. The author thinks it is more than just a coincidence that those societies that opted for natural law (Rome, England, U.S.) tended to have strong free market-oriented economies, whereas the Code oriented societies (France, Germany, Italy) had weak free market economies.

Both Anarcho-capitalists and Limited Government advocates seem to be heavily involved in a fantasy in which proponents of their side will sit down and write the Libertarian Law Code. This is just an extension of the Code argument. Those who feel that there must be a written law in advance for all situations will profit greatly from reading this book. Hopefully, they will realize that trying to write the Once and Future Libertarian Law is akin to convening a conference of libertarian physicists and writing the One And Only Forever Laws of Libertarian Physics.

Law is a science. One doesn’t impose the laws of a science on people. The laws of science find their way into society through the study of the discipline by the scholars in the field and the general agreement among the scholars that the rules work. The same is true of Jurisprudence. Whether or not people’s rights will be respected under the law depends upon what the legal philosophers think about the issues and not whether or not the laws are interpreted by Anarchist judges or Limited Government Judges. I think if this point is grasped, much of the debate between the two sides will fade as the proponents of both views realize that there are much more fruitful purposes to which libertarian energies can be applied. Hopefully this Libertarian version of How-Many-Angels-Can-Dance-On-The-Head-Of-A-Pin will become nothing more than a pleasant diversion.

Localism And Bureaucracy In The 19th Century China

By Murray Rubinstein

Phillip A. Kuhn in his Harvard East Asian series monograph, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China, seems to be describing a society and situations remote and foreign from our own. He examines in both a chronological and cross sectional fashion the development, operation and utilization of organizations created for the purposes of local self-policing and local self-defense in South China during the middle decades of the 19th century. The student and advocate of local control and individualism will find more in Kuhn’s study than perhaps Kuhn himself realized or intended. Mr. Kuhn gives us a warning that local autonomy and community control are valid objectives and appropriate systems but may become distorted by either alien or ultra-radical ideology — introduced by means of force — or by operations of the central state and its servants.

The author uses historical, narrative, and sociological analysis to create a picture of a central government in decline and its local branches in a state of flux. He first traces the origins of militia demonstrating that local military units of a voluntary nature were part of the Chinese tradition (though traditionally Chinese intellectuals have tried to create the opposite impression — that Chinese were by nature non-militaristic and that the greatest times are those when the military on all levels is least important). He then examines the origin of the systems designed to halt rebellion during the years 1820 to 1860. The major sections of his book are devoted to examining the varieties of local military-civilian defense structures and the means by which central officials utilized these newly created institutions to defeat the Taipings (the “God Worshipers” — a society following a religion that was an amalgam of Christianity, Confucianism, and local folk belief. The Taipings controlled east central China from 1850 to 1864 and seriously threatened the Central Government) the Nien fei (Nien bandits — a group of guerilla style marauders who controlled the area just north of Taiping territory in the 1850’s and 1860’s) and the Moslem rebels (Chinese Moslems of Turkic descent who revolted in the 1860’s and 1870’s and gained control of large parts of modern Sinkiang province).

The main system created by the officials (in charge of local areas but holding Confucian degrees and appointed by the central government) Kuhn shows, grew out of two existing institutions that were considered mutually exclusive in normal times. The Pao Chia system was one in which families, neighborhoods, and towns were organized into units designed to police themselves and root out any people whose behavior differed from the norm. It had originated in the Sung dynasty (900-1200) and had been reintroduced by the ruling dynasty. The tuan tien system was created to organize village defense against bandit incursion and local uprising. It was created by local clan leaders and gentry (confucian scholar graduates who had either not accepted or not been given a government post). District officials and gentry returned from government service such as Chiang Chung-Yuan were instrumental in integrating both into an interlocked system of local registration (the Pao-Chia element) and local defense. Villages were organized along family lineage lines into “simples” (single village) and “multiplex) (multiple village) organizations. Out of these surveillance-defense units came the “Braves” — irregular troops of local men, and finally personal and provincial armies that became the common armies which suppressed the rebellions in this period and created the mold for the war lord armies of the twentieth century.

But where the warning and the contemporary relevance? It is this Kuhn is picturing a society in the process of breaking up. Present were many tensions not unfamiliar to us. There was racial and ethnic conflict, rural and urban competition, and finally, the basic tension between the citizen striving for freedom and economic independence and the state trying to control his mind and tax him to his limit of endurance. The local organizations began as independent efforts to solve local problems by local means. The success these efforts had in suppressing banditry and in self-policing was seen by the government as a phenomenon that had to be directed or it could easily get out of hand. Thus the officials and the literati came in, creating official structures, Introducing confucian precepts and giving the people a feeling they were aiding in an effort beyond the confines of their local area.

Hope In Ireland

Life has conquered, the wind has blown away Alexander, Caesar and all their power and sway; Tara and Troy have made no longer stay — Perhaps the English too will have their day.

— Frank O’Connor

Mr. Lindsay proclaims the 51st State. Mr. Rockefeller calls for local government referendums. Mr. Nixon and Senator McGovern say “power to the people”. Representatives of the establishment are using the slogans of the masses to create the impression that power will be returned to its rightful place. The Confucian Civil Servants are again at the gate using the people’s desire for self-rule to further enslave them. Instead they hope to use populist institutions to preserve and maintain the structure of the state. Kuhn shows us how the state emerged triumphant again in China. Will the new sense of localism, individual consciousness and self-rule be again perverted to the means of the Leviathan?

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Bombing The Dikes

The following are direct quotations from testimony given before the International War Crimes Tribunal summoned to meet in Stockholm and later Copenhagen in 1967 by the world-renowned philosopher and mathematician, Lord Bertrand Russell. Five years later, they may prove to be of more than antiquarian interest.

I

“In April 1945 General Eisenhower proposed to send a “very strongly worded message” to the German High Commissioner for Holland, Seyss-Inquart, telling him that “the flooding of large areas of Holland with the resulting destitution, starvation and the enormous loss of life to the population will constitute a blot on his military honor . . . He must be told to cease opening the dikes and take immediate steps to assist in every way the distribution of food . . . and that if he fails in this respect to meet his clear obligations and his humanitarian duty, he and each responsible member of his command will be considered by me as violators of the laws of war who must face the certain consequences of their acts”. Confronted by such grave warnings, Seyss-Inquart agreed to stop the destruction of the dikes and cooperate in relief measures. Nevertheless, the barbarism of Seyss-Inquart in destroying the dikes and starving the Dutch civilians made him appear in the eyes of the Western officers as “one of the worst war criminals”. He was one of the 24 Nazi leaders executed at Nuremberg.”

(Testimony of Prof. Gabriel Kolko)

II

“On May 13, 1953, while armistice negotiations in Korea were bogged down, 20 US F-4’s attacked and destroyed the Toksan irrigation dam in North. Korea. The Americans also bombed the Chasan, Kuwonga, and Toksang dams and scheduled the bulk of the rest for attack — only the armistice prevented their destruction. The flash flood resulting from the destruction of Toksan dam resulted in a deluge of 27 miles of valley farm lands”.

(Source: Air University Quarterly VI (1953/54, 40-41.)

III

“Vietnam is a part of the monsoon area, and the rainy season comes in July, August and September. These are the months when the water level is at its highest . . . One who remembers the great disaster which resulted from the breaking of the dike of the Red River in August 1945 which brought death and famine to two million people, and rendered hundreds of thousands of families homeless, can understand just how serious the bombing of dikes during the rainy season can be . . . According to the report of the Vice-President of the Water Conservancy Commission in Hanoi, U.S. bombings of the entire dike network were exceptionally violent and concentrated in the months of July, August and September 1966, when the water level was very high.”

(testimony of Tsetsure Tsurishima, member of the Japanese Commission of Inquiry)

IV

“War crimes are the actions of powers whose arrogance leads them to believe that they are above the law. Might, they argue, is right. The world needs to establish and apply certain criteria in considering inhuman actions by great powers. These should not be the criteria convenient to the victor, as at Nuremberg, but those which enable private citizens to make compelling judgements on the injustices committed by any great power. It was my belief, in calling together the International War Crimes Tribunal, that we could do this, and this book is the record of the Tribunal’s considerable success. It serves not only as an indictment of the United States by abundant documentation, but establishes the Tribunal as a model for future use.” (Lord Bertrand Russell in his Introduction to the Tribunal’s published hearings.)

America’s Newest Enemies

“My defense, as far as my fellow Christians are concerned, is something like this. A great world power is grown distracted in mind and gigantic in pretension. The nation is fearful of change, racist, violent, a Nero abroad in the world. It seeks, moreover, to legitimize its crimes. It stifles dissent, co-opts protests, orders its best youth into military camps, where methods of murder exhaust the curriculum. Most Christians accede to the orders. Many do so with sore hearts, most are convinced of the necessity of right reason and patience, and they say “Let us work and wait for better days”. But some cannot wait while the plague worsens. They confront Caesar’s stronghold, his induction centers, troop trains, supply depots. They declare that some property has no right to existence — files for the draft, nuclear installations, slums and ghettos. They insist, moreover, that these condemned properties are strangely linked one to another — that the military invests in world poverty — that Harlem and Hanoi alike lie under the threat of the occupying and encircling power.

These things being so, some Christians insist that it is in rigorous obedience to their Lord that they stand against Caesar and put his idols to the torch. They say, moreover, that it is not they who are guilty — it is Caesar. It is not they who must answer for crimes against humanity — it is he. It is not they whom the unborn will abominate — it is he.”

(Father Daniel Berrigan in No Bars To Manhood)

“The schoolboy whips his taxed top, the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; anal the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven percent, flings himself back on his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.” — Rev. Sydney Smith.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 8

OCTOBER, 1972

75¢

NOVEMBER??

Once again we come to our quadrennial extravaganza, and once again libertarians, even hard core libertarians united on basic principles, differ widely on which side, if any, to support in the election. The three contrasting articles in this issue — ranging from anti-McGovern to anti-Nixon to pro-McGovern — attest to this fact, as do the widespread campaigns by the non-voters and by the Libertarian Party. Neither should this broad disagreement cause any distress, for it is inevitable. The important point is that this is not a disagreement on basic principle, but on tactical stances in a political world marked by a myriad of confusing “grays”. There are, I think we can all agree, elements of truth in all these positions; the problem, as Ludwig von Mises wrote long ago about the task of historians, is to figure out the proper weights to be assigned to these arguments, and to make one’s final choice accordingly. But there is no ironclad way of wringing a universal agreement on such weighting, even by hard-core libertarians who agree on every single one of the points involved. As the Marxists would say, these disagreements, in contrast to quarrels over basic principle, are “non-antagonistic” rather than “antagonistic” “contradictions”.

It is the expectation of total agreement on specific strategy and tactics that could convert a band of colleagues into a totalitarian cult; for since there is no rational way to command full agreement on tactics, such agreement could only be imposed arbitrarily by a Führer or by a party “central committee”. This was the trap that the Randian cult fell into, and it is one which I hope we never fall into again.

No, No McGovern

By Murray N. Rothbard

Having attacked Richard Nixon since the inception of his Administration, having argued early on for a “Dump Nixon” stance by libertarians, I now have to stand up and report that I cannot swallow George McGovern or the McGovernite movement for which he stands as a bumbling front man. I agree with every word of criticism that Joe Peden has for President Nixon; but I come not to praise Richard Nixon but to bury George McGovern.

The argument for dumping Nixon was always for me a presumption rather than an absolute commandment. The presumption was for the pro-peace candidate and for the candidate out of power, and therefore my inclination was to support the Democratic nominee whoever he might be. Other things being equal I would have, but other things are not equal, and for me the monstrousness of the McGovernite movement overrides all other considerations in this campaign.

Specifically, I cannot abide McGovernism for two basic reasons. First is his economic program, which would involve a compulsory egalitarianism and a collectivism far beyond anything contemplated by Mr. Nixon. The McGovernite proposal of $1000 grant for every man, woman, and child in America would mean a $210 billion monstrosity that would have to be financed by crippling taxation on the middle class, on all people making over $12,000 a year. The press and the public have been confused in lumping together the “populism” and the “tax reform” measures of McGovern and of George Wallace. Governor Wallace proposes the lowering of taxes on the mass of Americans, middle and working class alike; McGovern proposes the drastic raising of taxes on these same Americans. George Wallace would lower the exploitation of the average American by the State; George McGovern would enormously increase that exploitation. In short, Wallace is the true populist, while McGovern proposes a giant leap into oppressive collectivism under the guise of a phony populist rhetoric.

The rebuttal to this charge by my pro-McGovern friends is that Congress would never pass the McGovern program anyway, so why worry? Perhaps; but for me one of the most chilling moments of the Democratic convention was when Speaker Carl Albert arose to pledge his eternal support to McGovern as President. Congress has been supine for decades, and I simply cannot bring myself to trust the cause of the last shreds of economic sanity to the likes of Carl Albert. I don’t think we can afford the risk.

My second overriding problem with McGovern is the McGovernite movement itself, particularly as reflected in the lunatic and dangerous quota system which is seeks to impose on American life. No longer is status and advancement to depend on the achievement of each individual; instead, we are to have coerced quotas to bring the “oppressed” groups in the population up to their numerical share of the total population. The groups favored with the “oppressed” label are, of course, highly selective, being confined to women, blacks, youth, and Chicanos, all of whom are to receive their quotal share regardless of individual merit or of the choice of the voters. Already, such McGovern supporters as Jack New-field and Joe Flaherty have written angrily and bitterly of the discrimination thus imposed on groups not favored by the McGovernites: for where is the quotal representation for blue collar workers, Irish, Italians, Poles, etc.? Furthermore, the imposing of quotas to compel a rise in status of one group means ipso facto that other groups are going to be coercively burdened and discriminated against by the McGovernites. These groups are of course never openly mentioned, but they amount to the most successful groups, largely adult male heterosexual WASPS and Jews.

In its destructive quota thinking, the McGovernite movement is of a piece with its economic program: in both cases, the motivating drive is a compulsory egalitarianism that would tear down the successful on behalf of a highly selective group of the so-called “oppressed”. Of course, at bottom, the egalitarianism is as phony as the McGovernite claim to populism and to representing a cross-section of the “peepul”. The true reflection of McGovernite “populism” is the statistic that no less than 39% of the delegates to the Democratic convention have attended graduate school! What we are seeing then is a naked grab for power on the part of an eager new elite of graduate students and upper-middle class “reformers” (those who used to be called “parlor pinks.”) It is a drive to fasten a new Mandarin class of self-styled intellectuals upon the country, a class that would reach for absolute power and the crushing of other groups and indeed of the bulk of American citizens. Our current ruling classes, as reprehensible as they are, at least allow for a great deal of pluralism, and for relatively secure status for most of the groups in the population. We can see from the ruthlessness of their quota system that the McGovernite elite would be far more totalitarian and hence far more dangerous in their wielding of State power. The sooner and the more completely that the McGovernite movement is crushed to smithereens, the more viable will be the long-run climate of individual freedom in America.

The McGovernite movement is, in short, in its very nature a kick in the gut to Middle America. And yet the libertarian movement, in its program for getting the government off the backs of the individual, aims to be the fulfillment of the aspirations of that same Middle America. When Middle America, therefore inevitably responds in November by its kick in the gut to the McGovernite movement, it behooves libertarians to stand and cheer. The sooner McGovernism is disposed of, the better for us all. Why in the world should libertarians, whose principles are at an opposite pole from McGovernism, agree to tar themselves with the reviled McGovernite brush?

It is important, too, for libertarians to drive the lesson home after November that the Nixon victory will be not so much an endorsement of Nixon’s Presidency as it will be the absolute repudiation of McGovernite collectivism. The path will then hopefully be cleared for a further expansion of libertarian ideas and activity among the American public.

For me, there was an extra dimension of aesthetic horror at the McGovernite convention. For as I watched the convention, I began to have a sense of déja vu, of having seen all this hogwash before; suddenly, I realized the connection: for what I was seeing was an updated version of the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948. There was the same emphasis on left-wing youth, on the “oppressed” minorities; and there was the same emphasis on Old Left folk-songs. Twice in his acceptance speech George McGovern (a former delegate to the Henry Wallace convention) solemnly quoted from left-wing folk songs; and when he ended his speech with the Woody Guthrie “This land is your land, this land is my land, from the redwood forests to the New York island . . .”, I thought I was living in a rousing comic parody of Old Left baloney. Except that the parody, alas!, was all unconscious; what we were seeing was the worst of the Old Left, from official program to aesthetic values, at last triumphant in the Democratic party. I raise the spectre of Henry Wallace not to red-bait; for the real problem with the Wallace movement was not its Communist associations but its rampant Old Leftism, from its economic program to its aesthetic attitudes.

And while McGovern would clearly be more in favor of peace than Richard Nixon, the peace and the “isolationism” would be strictly limited. For the McGovern foreign policy is unfortunately not “isolationism” at all, but a recredescence of the Wallace and Truman policies before the Korean conflict; in short, McGovern stands for a nuclear deterrent (albeit at lower cost) plus a maintenance of American troops and interventionism in Europe and the Middle East. One of the most shameful aspects of McGovernism at the convention (which went unrecorded by the media) was the way in which McGovern consented to the Jackson platform plank, pledging continued American troops in Europe and the Mediterranean for the support of Israel, and ramming this plank down the throats of the reluctant delegates. In a recent New York Review of Books, McGovern supporter I. F. Stone perceptively termed McGovern’s foreign and military policy “left-wing McNamaraism”, which means maintaining military intervention in Europe and the Middle East while cutting our losses in Indo-China. While this would be superior to the Nixonite maintenance of the war in Indo-China, it is far from the isolationism and neutrality of libertarian dreams. And on such civil libertarian questions as amnesty and abortion, McGovern has already gone far to undercut his own previously libertarian positions.

On balance, then, McGovernism offers little good and much evil for the libertarian; in the 1972 election I hold that McGovernism is the greater evil and that therefore we should all look forward with equanimity to its pulverization in November.

McGovern For President

By Lyla and Gerald O’Driscoll

It is our contention that libertarians should not sit out the 1972 Presidential election, but should actively support the candidacy of Senator George S. McGovern. This is not to say that McGovern is a libertarian or that all of his policies are sound. Rather, the case to be made is that McGovern’s candidacy and tenure in office could serve libertarian causes, and would do so more effectively than that of the incumbent This, of course, is one of the best reasons for a libertarian to support any candidate.

Consider the neglected issue of statism versus personal liberty McGovern’s opposition to the draft began with his opposition to the Vietnam War and has since then been firm and unequivocal. McGovern favors amnesty for draft resisters — a genuine amnesty, not an opportunity to do alternative service. The McGovern welfare scheme and the planned reduction of military expenditures, whatever their defects, constitute proposals for the beginning of the end of these two overgrown bureaucracies. Nixon’s the one who would extend the long arm of the state into the living room to restrict the use of drugs and into the operating room to prevent the termination of unwanted pregnancies. Nixon’s the one who wants more electronic surveillance of citizen activities. Nixon’s the one who wants the taxpayers to bail out Lockheed and to finance new and ever more expensive playthings for the generals Is there any question which set of positions on the issue of statism versus personal liberty corresponds more closely to those of the libertarian?

Nixon’s the one who brought us ‘peace-time’ wage and price controls — the most fantastic and costly scheme ever devised as a means of providing employment for sign-makers and printers. McGovern has promised to end the wage and price controls, and to return to a relatively free market, recognizing military expenditures and government waste as prime causes of inflation. Is there any question which position on this economic issue corresponds more closely to that of the libertarian?

Nixon’s the one who bought Teamsters’ support by granting a pardon to Hoffa. McGovern owes little to organized labor, and the union bosses know it. That’s why, once Hubert Humphrey was our of the running, they were desperate in their attempt to get the Democratic nomination for Nixon’s look-alike, talk-alike, the Senator from Boeing. But isn’t it great to have a chance to support someone who isn’t owned by the unions?

The editor of this journal has protested that while a McGovern administration might be able to end the Indochina War and improve civil liberties, a supine Congress would offer little opposition to the McGovern economic policies; or else the good proposals would be blocked, and the bad ones passed. To this we must reply, in the first place, that at least there are some good proposals in McGovern’s platform! In the second place, McGovern has been one of many advocates of a flow of power to the Legislative Branch and away from the Executive. (This used to be a position supported by Conservatives, in recognition of the fact that Congress more closely represents the interests of the people than does a government centralized in the President’s office.) Asked by a reporter whether his programs could get through Congress, McGovern replied, roughly, “I want to be a President, not a dictator,” and explained the active role he thought Congress should take in policy-making. Libertarians should welcome such talk of decentralization of power. Should McGovern’s anti-statist and anti-Presidential ‘glimmerings’ go by the board (as those of Richard Nixon did) when he is inaugurated, we are probably no worse off than we were before. The past decade has educated many to the dangers of executive power. Those who were angered by the deception and arrogance exhibited in the Cambodian invasion, those who know that they were deliberately misinformed about the facts of the Tonkin Gulf incident, and those who still wonder whether the Marines should have been sent to the Dominican Republic will not roll over and play dead simply because George McGovern is in the White House. Their voices will still be heard. And we might even, be better off, for, as the editor points out, McGovern’s tenure in office would force conservative Republicans to rediscover their anti-statist voices and sentiments.

McGovern’s candidacy can serve the cause of liberty. Now, more than ever, libertarians must find places in the McGovern campaign — registering voters, canvassing precincts, working in campaign offices. Put McGovern in the White House and bring America home again.

Open Letter To The Internal Revenue Service

This is in response to the notice I recently received regarding the nonpayment of my taxes.

For your own enlightenment, I would like to refer you to the Internal Revenue Service Code of Ethics which, presumably, you swore to uphold when you accepted your present position. You will note that the first sentence of this Code reads: “The Federal System of taxation is based upon voluntary compliance by the people of the United States.”

To the best of my knowledge, the word voluntary has never meant involuntary or mandatory. Voluntary means voluntary, and I have voluntarily chosen not to comply.

Also, for your information, I would like to state that the method you are using to collect taxes is in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution specifically protects United States citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures, against incriminating themselves, against doing anything at all which is at variance with their consciences; I’m sure you can see that requiring people to fill out lengthy forms and submit personal papers and documents each year, as well as seizing their property and possessions if they fail to do so, is a clear violation of our Constitutional protections.

It is also illegal. I would like to refer you to the so-called Miranda Decision (I’ll be happy to provide you with a copy if you can’t dig one up yourself, particularly sections 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13,14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 37, 39, 43, 45, 49, 56, 57, 58, 59, 68, 73 (this one is very important), and 75. In short, you are prohibited by the Miranda decision from forcing people to incriminate themselves, and forcing them to do anything which violates their Constitutional rights.

In view of the fact that the I. R. S. is in violation of established law, I would appreciate your sending me form 843 since 1 would like to file a claim for taxes which were collected illegally from me over the years.

Thank you for your cooperation, and I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Jerome Tuccille

Libertarian

Nixon Or McGovern?

By Joseph R. Peden

The readers of Libertarian Forum have little doubt as to Murray Rothbard’s views on the candidacy and policies of Sen. George McGovern. Clearly McGovern is not the answer to a libertarian’s prayer. His economic policies are clearly socialist in intent and method, and his greatest hope is to restore public faith in government! Yet libertarians always face the lesser of two evils when participating in the political processes of contemporary America — and in this case George McGovern is virtually saintly compared to the tyrant of San Clemente.

It was the widespread notion among libertarians that the new Nixon administration was dedicated to reversing the trend towards socialism that induced us to begin the publication of Libertarian Forum in March 1969. Murray Rothbard knew that the incoming Nixon team — with Arthur Burns, Dick Cornuelle, Kleindienst and the White House “Objectivists” — with Milton Friedman hovering in the wings — would not be able to cope with the fiscal crisis created by the economic dislocations of the cold war and Vietnam. By July 1969 — less than six months after the Nixon team took over the White House — Rothbard summed up: “After a half year of painful agonizing, of backing and filling, of puttering delays, the pattern of decisions of the Nixon administration is finally becoming clear. In every single case, the Nixon administration has managed to come down on the wrong side, on the side of burgeoning statism” (Lib. Forum July 15, 1969).

The intervening years have only confirmed the acumen of that analysis. A year later, Libertarian Forum’s editor reviewed the “Nixon Mess” (June 15, 1970):

“Guaranteed income schemes; continuing budget deficits; monetary inflation; and “voluntary” price controls; under the cover of traditional free-enterprise rhetoric the Nixon administration continues us down the path toward the economy of fascism. But none of this will solve the crises brought on by his and his predecessors policies. He cannot end the war in Southeast Asia by expanding it, and he cannot end price inflation by continuing to inflate the money supply, or by coercive attempts to overrule the laws of supply and demand”.

It was precisely fourteen months after this was written that Nixon announced his “New Economic Policy” of price and wage controls, tariff and quota restrictions and devaluation of the dollar. As this is being written, news reports indicate that this year’s federal deficit will be about $37 billion. So much for “winning the war” against inflation!

Given Nixon’s record on domestic economic and fiscal issues, why would anyone prefer him to George McGovern? If we turn to foreign policy, McGovern is infinitely preferable from a libertarian perspective. McGovern does not merely pledge himself to end the Vietnam War; he pledges to end the “Vietnam thinking” — the paranoia and militaristic mentality which got us into Vietnam and keeps a $14 billion military establishment in Germany nearly 30 years after World War II. Nixon has offered to send troops to Israel during the Jordanian-Syrian crisis, sent aircraft carriers against India, and actively supports military dictatorships in Brazil, Greece, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

Nixon and Laird have made it clear that the detente with Russia and China will not halt the continuing massive spending on military hardware. Plans call for the complete rebuilding of the navy, more ABM missiles to be installed around Washington to match Moscow’s defenses; and Indian Ocean task force and bases, and untold varieties of new planes and weapons. Nixon doesn’t even pretend that the military budget will be decreased and our military obligations reduced. McGovern has promised to cut the military budget within four years by some $35 billion; to reduce troop commitments in Europe and Asia; to shift our priorities from foreign adventuring to domestic renovation; or as libertarians might put it, to shift from non-productive to productive investments of capital and labor. If McGovern fulfills even part of his promise, he will have shifted national policy significantly in the right direction. Conservative columnist Joseph Alsop has accused the North Dakota senator of being an isolationist in the tradition of Robert Taft. What an endorsement! There is just enough truth in the charge to make this libertarian smile with nostalgic pleasure.

Lastly, can any libertarian deny that McGovern and the Democrat party have consistently been more solicitous of civil liberties than Nixon and the Republicans? Under the Nixon administration, the Justice department has openly claimed the right to wiretap and bug without judicial warrant on the basis of Presidential prerogative. The argument was strengthened by the assertion that neither Congress nor the courts could limit this prerogative by statute or judicial decree. Similarly, Nixon announced that he was not bound by any Congressional restriction on the disposition of troops, ships or planes — by reason of his prerogatives as commander-in-chief. Congressional committees have been denied access to governmental records — including records needed by the General Accounting Office to audit the expenditure of federal funds as required by statutes. Has any libertarian forgotten the prosecutions of the Harrisburg. 8, the Chicago 7, innumerable Black Panthers, on the catch-all of charge of conspiracy? That these political trials have resulted in no meaningful convictions is due to the good sense and integrity of the juries — who were compelled to their findings by the evidential weakness of the federal government’s cases. But the prosecutions were meant as much to harass the accused as to convict them — and in this respect were very successful in diverting the defendants from more productive political activities.

If Nixon is re-elected, the Attorney-General for the next four years will be William Kleindienst who publicly asserted that his job as Mitchell’s assistant was to prosecute “ideological criminals”. Nixon will also continue to nominate jurists of the character and ideology of Burger, Haynesworth, Carswell and Rehnquist. Can any libertarian rest easy with that prospect before him? Does not the fact that the Justice Department actually stopped publication of the Pentagon Papers in the NY Times for ten days, and subsequently has attempted to subpoena Sen. Gravel of Alaska for reading them on the floor of the Senate give sufficient indication of the Nixon administration’s valuation on freedom of the press?

If the libertarian movement is to flourish and grow in influence it must have the fullest possible freedom from fear of censorship, harassment, or persecution by government agencies. The whole past history of the Nixon administration indicates that civil liberties hold a low priority and valuation in its thinking, and that another four years in office constitutes an unacceptable risk of further deterioration in our civil liberties. This fact, along with the evident failures to end the war, redirect national priorities along peaceful non-militaristic lines, and halt the gallop of inflationary forces, convinces me that libertarians ought to support and vote for George McGovern in November.

I have voted for Richard Nixon in 1960 and again in 1968. I voted in the hope that he would find a way to end the war in Asia as he promised, and reverse the drift towards socialism. He has not ended the war; he has in fact escalated the level of violence by invading Cambodia and Laos, and unleashing a bombardment of the Vietnamese people greater in magnitude than that of World War II. He publicly admitted his conversion to Keynesian economics, and removed the last political prop of the free market philosophy by his capture of the Republican party. He deserves an ignominious defeat at the polls. I will vote for George McGovern as the lesser of two evils in 1972.

Archy’s Last Gasp

Under the hammer-blows of anarcho-capitalism, the intellectual groundwork of the State, including its “limited government” variant, has visibly crumbled in recent years. It is significant, therefore, that in the last days of the State’s intellectual respectability, who should rush in to furnish the last defense of the State but the neo-Randian proponents of “limited” government? In the last few months, the neo-Randians, in desperation at seeing the State go down the intellectual drain, have mounted a concerted assault on anarcho-capitalism.

Thus, in its March, 1972 issue, Reason magazine contained a “special supplement on anarcho-capitalism”, with three articles devoted to attacking anarcho-capitalism and the editor of the Libertarian Forum. Mr. James Kuffel, in typical Utopian Randian fashion, feels it to be a smear on government to identify it with coercive taxation — which has in fact always been a hallmark of government. To the Randian mystics, taxation is an “improper” function of government, and therefore a coercive monopoly government abstaining from coercive levies appears to be a realistic alternative. Mr. Kuffel also tries to rescue the Randian smear term “competing governments”, which, as far as I know, no anarcho-capitalist has ever used to describe his desired system. Mr. Kuffel believes that conviction in a judicial trial “presupposes the power of prior arrest”; given this fallacy, he finds it easy to attack as unrealistic my own canon that “any sort of force used against a man not yet convicted of a crime is itself an invasive and criminal act . . .” Yet, a trial can and has proceeded in absentia; in an anarcho-capitalist society, a defendant accused of crime would be informed of his trial and invited to appear to defend himself; if he refuses, then trial would proceed in absentia, and of course the defendant would then opt for considerably reduced chances to avoid conviction. After conviction, seizure and punishment could duly proceed. Also, Mr. Kuffel, ignorant in typically Randian fashion of history, cannot imagine the application of different laws within the same territory. Yet this has happened, and successfully so, in history; in post-Roman Europe, for example, different Germanic tribes (Franks, Visigoths, etc.) lived peacefully side by side, and different laws were applied to the different tribal members. In a legal case, the first question asked was: “What law do you come under?” In the anarcho-capitalist society, of course, the individual would not be stuck in the tribe of his origin, but could subscribe to varying courts or defense agencies. But the point is that in pre-modern Europe and elsewhere, there was no need for a territorial legal monopoly for law to operate successfully.

Mr. Ron Heiner’s essay laboriously seeks to show that in any society conflicts will arise that go beyond voluntary arbitration and will necessitate coercive judicial procedures. He also maintains that competing private courts will reduce to warring factions in the absence of general legal rules to which the courts will agree to abide. I do not challenge these contentions, only the non sequitor of Mr. Heiner that therefore a State is required to lay down these general rules. On the contrary, libertarian legal theory suffices to lay down a general law code — enshrining and developing the implications of the libertarian principle of non-aggression against person and property — which, in my own view of anarcho-capitalism, all the courts would be pledged to follow. Reason, not the State, is the proper agency for laying down this Law Code, and this can be seen in the ways in which judges worked out the principles of the best parts of our legal system: the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law. Once again, the Randians reveal themselves abysmally deficient in their knowledge of history. In addition, Mr. Heiner keeps repeating as a talisman that the market can only work in the sphere of voluntary relations, so that any measure of coercion must involve non-market principles. But here he is trapped in his own semantics; for the market provides, not merely voluntary relations, but legitimate services of all types, including the service of coercive (but legitimate) defense of person and property from violent assault.

Mr. Charles Barr confines his attack to the first chapter of my Power and Market, which briefly sets forth the outlines of an anarcho-capitalist defense and judicial system. In a tizzy because I do not mention Ayn Rand in the book (which was largely devoted to other themes), Mr. Barr totally ignores pages 120-23 of Power and Market, in which I expose the inconsistencies and fallacies of earlier versions of the Utopian Randian hope for a voluntarily supported government. (As in so many other areas, Miss Rand did not originate this concept.)

Mr. Barr then has some fun with my idea of a “basic legal code”, which all anarchistic courts would be pledged to apply. Where does the code come from, he asks in different ways? The answer is simple, and should be particularly simple for a Randian who professes to follow the dictates of rationality: Reason. Reason dictates the basic legal code of non-aggression against person and property, the definitions of property, etc. Will anyone be free to secede from this code, he taunts? But since the code is simply non-aggression, any person who violates it or any court which refuses to abide by it, either commits or sanctions aggression, and thereby becomes an outlaw or an outlaw court. If Jones aggresses against Smith, and a court to which Smith takes his case decides that aggression was justified because it has adopted a different code (e.g. that Smith is a redhead and it is alright to aggress against redheads), then the court has become outlaw and its decisions will not be recognized by the rest of society. What we are dealing with here is not incidental minutiae of legal proceedings, in which there well might be competition (e.g. judges vs. juries), but the basic legal code of non-aggression itself. Mr. Barr professes to find the concept of “social agreement” to this basic code “mysterious”; but of course it should be evident that no social system or legal system from libertarian to theocratic, can endure unless the majority of society agree to it and are willing to abide by it. After all, what are libertarians trying to do except to convince the public to adopt and abide by libertarian principles? What I am simply contending is that a basic libertarian legal code enshrining the principle of non-aggression is a crucial aspect of such principles and of such agreement. There is nothing mysterious about it. Of course, to Mr. Barr, trapped in apriori and Utopian Randian definitions, “the attempt to set up a legal system in the absence of government” is a “central contradiction.” But, again, pace the common law, law merchant, etc.; it was done all the time, Mr. Barr, sometimes by custom, sometimes by reason; or have you forgotten about the latter concept?

Dr. Tibor Machan returns to the assault on anarcho-capitalism in the June 1972 Individualist. Dr. Machan professes himself confused about the great archy-anarchy debate, and his confusion is indeed manifest in the article. Like his fellow Randians, he tries to salvage the Utopian Randian vision of government; why must government acquire its revenue by the compulsion of taxation, he wants to know? The answer should be clear: once grant to one agency the power to enforce a compulsory monopoly of ultimate defense in a given territorial area, once grant it the right to outlaw competing police and judicial agencies, and its coercive power is already so great that its enforcement of compulsory taxation is a brief further step in its grab for power. This is in theory; in practice, of course, there was never this separation to begin with; the bandit gang that achieved the power to call itself the “State” never had any compunction about exercising as much coercion and extracting as much plunder as it could get away with.

Dr. Machan calls upon anarcho-capitalists to be “complete”, to spell out in detail “the precise character of arbitration and defense agencies” in the future society. But this cannot be done, precisely because no one can blueprint the free market in advance; we don’t know how many agencies there will be or their precise makeup for the same reason we do not know how many and which companies will be producing iron bars fifty years from now. But we can set down certain basic guidelines, and this we have already done. Finally, Dr. Machan falls into the Rand-Barr fallacy by saying that once the anarcho-capitalists commit themselves to “some kind of legal system” they will no longer just be anarcho-capitalists, but presumably also some kind of archists as well. But the point about my own view of anarcho-capitalism is that it encompasses the adoption of a libertarian legal code as part of its very core.

Finally, as a kind of comic footnote to the Reason barrage, the Perkinses write in the June-July issue in reply to Reason’s anti-anarchist supplement. The Perkinses presume to read me out of the anarchist movement by pointing in horror to my “erroneous concept of a ‘basic legal code’ without a government.” In contrast, the Perkinses repudiate a legal code but call instead for a ‘moral code’ founded on natural law . . . the moral code of . . . nonaggression and justice.” If the Perkinses had given a little thought to the matter, before popping off in all directions, they would have realized that the “basic legal code” of libertarian law that I’ve been writing about is precisely the natural law code of non-aggression that they are promoting.

We conclude that anarcho-capitalism stands, and that the last desperate attempt by neo-Randian archists to save the State collapses. But let us conclude by hurling a final challenge to the neo-Randians, a challenge which at least two leading Randians have been subjected to in recent years, and which neither could begin to answer. The challenge is as follows (Messrs. Barr, Heiner, Kuffel, Machan et al, please take heed): OK, we know that you are against competing private defense agencies within a given geographical area. But suppose that, heedless of your edicts, two or more such agencies exist already. Each consciously pursues and applies a libertarian law code which all of us would agree to. On which one of these agencies would you bestow your approval, and which would you presume to outlaw? What would be your criteria for choosing one over the others? I await you answer with great interest.

The Slumlord As Hero

By Walter Block

The slumlord, alias the ghetto landlord, alias the rent gouger, alias the tenement landlord, is proof that man can attain to the station of the devil himself while still alive. At least in the view of most people. Recipient of vile curses, pincushion for needle-bearing tenants with a penchant for voodoo, exploiter of the downtrodden, the slumlord is surely one of the most hated figures of the day. And the indictment is truly monumental, as befits so august a villain: he charges unconscionably high rents; he allows the building to fall into disrepair; his buildings have cheap lead paint which poisons the babies who lick it; he never paints; he allows junkies, rapists, and drunks to harass the tenants. The falling plaster, the overflowing garbage, the omnipresent roaches, the leaky plumbing, the roof cave-ins, the fires, are all integral parts of the slumlords domain. Practically the only healthy aspect of the situation is the size of the rats. Or so goes the indictment.

Actually, however, the indictment is spurious. The owner of cheap housing is no different from any other purveyor of low cost merchandise, or for that matter, no different from any other purveyor of any kind of merchandise, cheap or expensive, at least as far as pricing policy is concerned. They all charge as much as they can get.

Consider the purveyors of cheap, low-cost, inferior and second hand merchandise as a class. What they have in common — is that they all buy and sell cheap, low-cost, inferior and second hand merchandise. And one thing stands out about such merchandise above all else: it is cheaply built, inferior, and second hand. Now, a rational person would not expect high quality, exquisite workmanship or superior new merchandise at bargain prices; he would not feel outraged and cheated if bargain merchandise proved to have only bargain qualities. We do not expect from margarine what we expect from butter; from a used car what we expect from a new car; from a rowboat what we expect from a yacht; from the bleachers what we expect from the 50 yard line seat; from the paper dress what we expect from the mink coat. But such is the nature of the human condition, especially in the urban setting, that when it comes to housing, all rationality flies out the window. People expect safe, clean, sound, well kept, well painted, well run housing at prices that do not at all reflect these qualities. They expect mansions at prices proper for hovels.

But what of the claim that the slumlord overcharges for his hovels? That people have a right to expect at least moderately safe, clean, well maintained housing for the high prices they are forced to pay? This claim is completely erroneous. First of all, practically everyone tries to get the highest price obtainable for what he produces (and to pay the lowest prices for what he buys). Not only landlords. Workers try to obtain the highest wages they can get. Even downtrodden, minority group member workers. Even socialist workers. Even babysitters. Even communal farmers who work with their hands, share and share alike, and eat only “natural” organic foods. Other businessmen beside landlords try to obtain the highest prices possible for their wares. It is not even necessary to list such businessmen. No one has ever heard of a businessman who does not try to obtain the highest prices possible for his wares. Widows and orphans and others who save their money for a rainy day try to get the highest interest rates possible for their savings. We could, with equal reason, namely none, castigate the workers, widows and orphans for trying to exploit the people to whom they are selling or renting their services and capital by trying to obtain the highest return possible. The point is, of course, that the landlords of dilapidated housing are being singled out and blamed for something which is almost a basic part of human nature: the desire to barter and truck, and to get the best bargains possible.

Secondly, the claim fails even implicitly, to distinguish between the desire to charge astronomical prices for one’s wares, which practically everyone has, and the ability to do so, which is not quite so widespread. Of course the landlords would like to charge astronomical prices for their real estate; but this is irrelevant. The question that must be answered if any sense is to be made out of the anti-landlord claims is: How is it that the landlords are able to charge such high prices? Now what usually stops anyone from charging an inordinately high price far anything is the competition from others who will begin selling the same product as soon as its price shows any tendency to rise markedly. If the price of frisbees starts to rise, old members of the industry will expand production, new entrepreneurs will enter the industry for the first time, old worn out, used frisbees will start being sold in a second-hand market, etc. All these activities will tend to counter the original rise in price. If landlords are raising the prices of housing because of a sudden housing shortage the same forces will come into play. New housing will be built by both old real estate owners and new ones, entering the industry for the first time; old worn-out housing will tend to be renovated; basements and attics will be pressed into use at least until the prices of housing show signs of decreasing again. All these activities will tend to drive the prices of housing back down to where they were before the landlords began raising them in the first place. And they will tend to cure the housing shortage that began the price rise.

If some landlords tried to raise the rents in the absence of a housing shortage, they would discover difficulties in trying to keep their apartments rented. They would suffer from high vacancy rates as the duration of tenancy declined and as they encountered difficulties renting to new tenants; for both the old tenants and the prospective ones would be tempted away by the relatively lower rents of the landlords who had not raised their rents. Even if all landlords somehow banded together to raise rents, so that no tenant could take advantage of the landlords who had not raised their rents, they would not be able to raise rents in the absence of a housing shortage. For one thing, any such attempt would be met by new entrepreneurs who were not party to the cartel agreement rushing in to fill the gap. They could buy up existing housing, or build new housing; this would add to the stock of housing, and tend to drive down rents as tenants began to flock to non-cartel landlords. For another, each landlord who was party to the cartel would begin to feel strong financial pressures to break the agreement. At the new higher prices composed by the cartel, tenants would tend to use less space, whether by doubling up or by just seeking less space than before. As the tenants demanded less space, it would be harder and harder for the cartel landlords to keep their buildings fully rented. Inevitably, the cartel would crack up, as the landlords sought to find and keep tenants in the only way possible: by lowering rents.

In the third place, the argument that the slumlord over-charges for his dwellings is specious because, at bottom, there is really no legitimate, scientific, or even reasonable sense to the concept of overcharging. Overcharging can only be charging more than the buyer would like to pay. But since we would all really like to pay nothing for our dwelling space (or perhaps minus infinity, which would be equivalent to the landlord paying the tenant an infinite amount of money for living in his building), all landlords who charge anything at all, can be said to be overcharging. Everyone who sells anything at any price greater than zero can be said to be overcharging, for that matter, because we would all really like to pay nothing (or minus infinity) for everything we now buy.

On the assumption that the claim that the slumlord overcharges for his dwelling space is spurious, then, we are still faced with the visions of the rats, the garbage, the falling plaster, etc. Is the slumlord responsible here? Although it is fashionable in the extreme to say Yes, I fear that this will not do. For the problem of slum housing is not really a problem of slums or of housing at all! It is either a problem of poverty, or it is no problem at all, but in either case it is not the fault of the slumlord.

To show that slum housing, with all the horrors it contains, need not even be a problem, all we need do is to consider the case of people who could well afford high quality housing, but who instead prefer to live in slum housing, with all the attendant rats, garbage, lead paint, etc., because of the money they can save thereby. Now this might not be to the taste of you or I, but it ill behooves us to class the freely made choices of other people which affect themselves only as problems. For which of us, in such a state, would not be in danger of having his most cherished choices, tastes, desires characterized as “problems”? And there might even be conditions under which even you and I would voluntarily choose to live in slum housing, although we could afford better quality. (This, of course, would make it perfectly all right, and not a problem at all.) We could therefore hardly blame the slumlord, in this case, for providing such people with just what they want.

In the most usual case, however, the reason people choose to inhabit slum housing is because they cannot afford better. But this is hardly to say that the fault lies with the slumlord who provides the housing. On the contrary, the slumlord is providing a necessary service, given the poverty of the tenants. If a law were enacted prohibiting the existence of slums, and therefore of slumlords, without doing anything else (like giving these poor people decent housing or a higher income), it would greatly harm not only the slumlords, but the slumdwellers as well. If anything, it would harm the slumdwellers much more, for the slumlords would only lose one of perhaps many sources of income; the slumdwellers would lose their homes, and be forced to rent much more expensive dwelling space, with consequent and very harmful decreases in the amount of money they would have left to spend on food, medicines, and other necessities. So the problem is not the slumlord. It is poverty. The only way the slumlord can legitimately be blamed for the evils of slum housing would be if he were the cause of poverty in the first place. And this not even the most fervent detractors of slumlords would contend.

Why is it then, if he is no more guilty of underhandedness than other merchants, that the slumlord has been singled out for a vilification perhaps unequaled by any other group of “exploiters”. Why all the hue and cry about the slumlord? Although the answer to this can only be speculative, it seems to me that there is a positive and very strong relationship between the amount of governmental interference in an economic arena, and the storm of abuse and invective heaped upon those businessmen responsible for serving that arena. Instead of testing out the implications of this view in all possible areas, let us see if we cannot pinpoint the link between government involvement in the housing market and the sad plight of the slumlord’s public relations.

That there is strong and varied government involvement in the housing market cannot be denied. There are scatter site housing projects that create havoc and racial tension. There is public housing in general which has been a cruel hoax on the poor with its rampant crime, poor planning and administration, with its lookalike buildings which in all too many cases are soon reduced to vertical slums. Urban renewal, known by some as “Negro Removal”, has destroyed more housing than it has created, destroying neighborhoods on a mass scale in the process. Zoning has served as a thinly disguised veneer for racism. Building codes have led to higher housing costs which get passed on to the poor, graft for the inspectors, but not to the eradication of slums. The list is seemingly endless. In each of these cases, the spillover effects from the bureaucratic red tape and bungling are visited upon the slumlord. The slumlord bears the blame for the overcrowding engendered in many cases by the urban renewal program in the first place. He is blamed for not keeping his buildings up to the standards set forth by the unrealistic building codes, which if met, would radically worsen the status of the slumdweller.

Perhaps the strongest link between the government and the disrepute in which the slumlord is held is the rent control law. This is a very direct link, whereby rent control legislation changes the usual profit incentives that put the entrepreneur in the service of his customers in to those which make him the direct enemy of his tenant-customers.

In the usual case, the way the landlord earns money is by serving the needs of his tenants. If he fails to serve these needs, they will tend to move out more quickly, setting up extra costs for the landlord in terms of greater vacancy rates, extra costs for the greater turnover such as advertising, cleaning up between tenants, greater repairs, the costs of the agent showing the apartment, etc. The landlord who fails to meet the needs of the tenants will also suffer financial losses directly, insofar as tenants will only remain with him and his poor service at lower rents than the apartment would otherwise command. It is like any other business: the customer is always right, and the merchant ignores this dictum only at his own peril.

But in our present rent control system the incentives are all turned around. Here the landlord can earn the greatest return not by serving his tenants well, but by mistreating them, by malingering, by refusing to make repairs, by insulting them, etc. For when the rents are legally controlled at rates far below their market value, the landlord earns the greatest return not by serving his tenants, but by getting rid of them, so that he can replace them with higher paying non rent-controlled tenants.

If the incentive system is all turned around under rent control, so is the self selection process through which entry into the landlord “industry” is determined, for the types of people attracted to an occupation will be strongly influenced by the type of work that must be done in the industry. If the occupation calls (financially) for service to consumers, one type of landlord will be attracted; if the occupation calls (financially) for harassment of consumers then quite a different type of landlord will be attracted. In other words, in many cases the reputation of the slumlord as cunning, avaricious, willing to cut corners, etc., might be well deserved, but it is because of the rent control program in the first place, that the slumlord acts in this way.

We must remember, however, that if the slumlord were prohibited from lording it over slums, and if this prohibition were actively enforced, the welfare of the poor slum dweller would be immeasureably worsened. We must remember too that the basic cause of the problem of the slums is not at all the doing of the slumlord, and that the worst “excesses” of the slumlord are due to governmental programs, especially rent control, and not to the slumlord himself. So the slumlord does make a positive contribution to society. Without him, the economy would be worse off. That he continues in his thankless task, amidst all the abuse and vilification, can only give evidence of his basically heroic nature.

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The Schmitz Ticket

I must admit to a sneaking fondness for the Schmitz-Anderson Presidential ticket of the American Independent Party. While Rep. Schmitz lacks the charisma of the party’s 1968 candidate, George Wallace, he is infinitely more libertarian and far more intelligent; he brings to the Presidential ticket the perspective of the John Birch Society.

The Birchers have recently been trying, as best they can, to add some realistic analysis to their formerly locked-in and hopped-up anti-Communism. Gary Allen’s recent None Dare Call It Conspiracy, for example, uses the insights of New Left historian Gabriel Kolko to add opposition to the Big Business ruling class (the Rockefellers, the Kuhn-Loebs, the Council of Foreign Relations, etc.) to the old anti-Communist armamentarium. The Birches have at last begun to realize, in short, that to call Nelson Rockefeller a “Communist” is absurd and misses the whole point; you don’t have to be a Communist to yearn for the fruits of State power, and there have of course been statists and totalitarians from time immemorial, long before Karl Marx was born.

Furthermore, as the brilliant New Left journalist Nicholas von Hoffman pointed out in his appreciative reporting of the AIP Convention this summer, Schmitz et al. have been moving from the vague and ambivalent “win it or get out” view on Vietnam to all-out opposition to a frankly labeled imperialist foreign policy of the United States. As part of a consistently anti-war foreign policy, for example, John Schmitz has been trying to form an anti-Establishment alliance in California with the New Left underground paper, the Los Angeles Free Press. In an exclusive interview with that paper, Schmitz (September 8, 1972), points out that he is the only Presidential candidate who opposes any American war in the Middle East as well as Vietnam. Thus, Schmitz says:

“We’re the only ones who have taken a stand for neutrality in the Mid-East. I maintain that ‘doves’ are nothing but ‘hawks’ for the other side. Some are just mad because they’re shooting communists and not Arabs . . . For example, how can McGovern really be anti-war when he’s committed to sending troops to the Mid-East . . . Let him explain that to his peace followers.”

Schmitz told the L. A. Freep: “If you want a real anti-Establishment, anti-war candidate, I’m your man.” Schmitz also denounced Richard Nixon for being “totalitarian,” and leading us into a police state in America. When asked about his support base, Schmitz replied that “we appeal basically to those tax-paying Americans carrying the load . . .”, and he attacked “welfare at both ends”, welfare per se, and “the Lockheed loan, AMtrak, and other types of welfare to big industry.” Schmitz concluded that “I maintain with Jefferson ‘that government is best which governs least’.”

In an interview with Business Week (October 14, 1972) John Schmitz explained his economic views, and they are enough to warm the cockles of a libertarian heart. Schmitz denounced the Keynesianism of the Nixon Administration, the swollen national debt, and deficit spending. Likening Nixonism to the “corporate state, as in Nazi Germany”, Schmitz again denounced government welfare to business, and called for the federal government to get out of welfare and education altogether. Furthermore, John Schmitz called courageously for a return to the gold standard at a higher, free market price, and denounced the International Monetary Fund for engaging in elitist planning of the international monetary system. When asked by Business Week “how else could you coordinate a monetary system involving 124 nations,” Schmitz, God and/or Reason bless him, replied:

“Well, the way economist Ludwig von Mises says, There are certain natural laws and laws of economics that are far better than any man can devise. You just foul things up by intervening.”

When Business Week asked Schmitz if he gets his economic ideas from von Mises, Schmitz replied:

“I read his books. Von Mises probably would not go along with our anti-monopoly plank, although he is not as libertarian as some of his disciples.”

Schmitz also denounced wage-price controls, and pooh-poohed the idea that a cut in government deficit spending would cause recession: “When you cut spending in the government sector, that money goes into private spending.”

Wow! So why not Schmitz for President? Well, I must admit it is with a certain reluctance that I put aside my support. On the theoretical level, however, the Birchers still persist in linking all the conspiracies and ruling classes together, so that the Rockefellers, et al. wind up secretly controlling the Communists. Why can’t there be competing groups of power-seekers? And on the practical political level, the hopped up anti-Communism is still there, leading Schmitz to call for still greater defense and military spending, enabling him to take a seat (though a bit shamefacedly) on the House Internal Security Committee, and leading him to call for prohibiting all trade “with the enemy”. And, dammit, to denounce the three released Vietnam POW’s as traitors for not immediately checking in with the military on their release.

So I must finally resist the temptation, strong though it is, to support the Schmitz-Anderson ticket. But I must admit that the more votes that Schmitz can roll up the better, for it would provide a base, a groundwork for rallying an opposition to Nixonite despotism in the next four years.

Unity Or Cadre

Every ideological movement must find a balance between narrow sectarianism and a flabby and diffuse breadth. Both deviations from the correct path must be avoided: a sectarianism which excommunicates everyone who disagrees, however slightly, from the true faith; and a flabby desire for “unity” which ends by embracing everyone at all related to the central position, and thereby eventually forgetting about the basic principles themselves. In short, there are equal dangers in insulating cadre from everyone else, and in dissolving cadre completely into the general population. Both errors tend to liquidate the movement itself: the former by remaining isolated and ineffectual, the latter by dissolving cadre and thereby losing the very point of the whole business: the infusion of the basic core of principles into the body social.

The way around both of these errors is a central position: to emphasize and retain and nourish cadre — the hard core of true-believing militants; and then to use this cadre base to diffuse these principles and influence non-cadre in numerous ways, including the recruitment of some of them into the cadre itself. In the libertarian movement we have not suffered from excessive sectarianism since the breakup of the organized Randian movement in the summer of 1968; indeed, as libertarian ideas have lately been influencing more and more people in all parts of the spectrum, the danger has been far greater of losing cadre and forgetting basic principle in the quest for a phony “unity”. Such unity is phony because differences are often so great that “unity” can only be achieved by neglecting vital intellectual issues. As these issues are neglected, the movement itself becomes ever flabbier, and tends to forget about some of its own most basic principles. Keeping the faith on vital issues can only be sustained by polemicizing against error and deviation wherever it rears its head. But “unity” means that we can’t spear error for fear of division in the movement.

As in every ideological movement, libertarians have been hearing the cry that “we have only been talking to ourselves.” On the contrary, I maintain that we haven’t been talking enough to ourselves; we have been talking so much to outsiders that we have failed to nourish, reinforce, and advance our own cadre and our own hard-core principles. Thus, in the last few years we have had a host of broad, open conferences designed to attract broad masses of interested people and establish working contacts with partial libertarians. This is all very fine and useful work, and I am not trying to denigrate such conferences. But unfortunately we have at the same time neglected the vital work of organizing, sustaining, and advancing cadre.

Hence, the importance of the highly successful Libertarian Scholars Conference held the weekend of September 23-24 at the Williams Club in New York City. To be a successful cadre conference, the meeting had to be relatively small, and hence the organizers, Professors Block and Grinder, determined that the conference had to be by invitation only. Immediately, of course, the expected howls of rage arose from our “participatory democratic” wing, complaining (a) that any conference by invitation is by itself “elitist”, and (b) why wasn’t good old Joe Zilch invited? Happily, Block and Grinder stuck by their elitist guns. The proper reply to such griping includes the following: (1) what’s wrong with “elitism”?; (2) we’ve had plenty of open conferences, now we need some small, closed ones; and (3) if you want to organize a conference that is either open or includes good old Joe Zilch then you are free to organize your own.

In any case, the success of the conference raises the hope that this will be the first of many annual such meetings. At last we move toward the nourishment of libertarian cadre.

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Recommended Reading

Isolationism and Revisionism.

Justus D. Doenecke, The Literature of Isolationism: A Guide to Non-Interventionist Scholarship, 1930-1972 (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, paper, $1.85, 89 pp. Also available from the Laissez-Faire Book Store, 29A Mercer St., New York, N.Y. 10003.)

A superb work. Professor Doenecke, who has been hard at work for years on a definitive study of World War II isolationists and their attitudes toward the Cold War, here gives us all the benefit of his scholarship, in an appreciative, sprightly, and thorough guide to all the scholarly writings on the area of isolationism. This is not simply a bibliography; all works are discussed and annotated in an ordered context, and each one weighed and evaluated. Doenecke has not only combed published books and journal articles, he has also ferreted out every unpublished doctoral dissertations on the subject (these can all be purchased in bound, Xeroxed copies from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan and, while book prices have been rising, Xeroxed book prices have actually fallen in recent years!). Doenecke has not only combed the field with unusual thoroughness, but he is an open-minded scholar in the best sense of that term: he rejects nothing because it might be “unrespectable”. This delightful booklet is indispensable for anyone interested in the area of isolationism and revisionist foreign policy. Representative chapter titles: “Theory,” “The Interwar Years,” “Movements and Leaders”, “The Politics of War and Bipartisanship,” “Opposition to Consensus Politics”, and “The Revival of ‘Isolationism’”.

James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, $2.50, paper, 248 pp.)

Dr. James Martin is perhaps our foremost anarcho-revisionist scholar, and this is a sparkling collection of his essays, largely on World War II, but also including the Cold War, most of which once appeared in the now unfortunately defunct Rampart Journal. There are some exciting new insights here, including for example Jim Martin’s study of the totally neglected Peace Now movement for a negotiated peace during World War II, and the unmerciful smear treatment that the movement received at the hands of the Establishment. Martin also includes both the original German text and his own English translation of a highly revealing foreword that J. M. Keynes wrote to the German edition of his General Theory. The edition appeared in Nazi Germany in 1936, and is strangely not at all mentioned in Roy Harrod’s “authorized” biography of Keynes. Keynes tells his German readers that “The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition . . .” Among other goodies, this book is the only place where Keynes’ German preface is available.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 9

NOVEMBER, 1972

75¢

BEYOND THE SIXTIES

The smashing repudiation of McGovernism (for no one claims to see any great love for Richard Nixon) by the American people is both the symbol and the living embodiment of the death of the 1960’s. More specifically, of the final passing from the scene of the second half of the 1960’s, the era of the New Left. In a heady rush of excitement during those wild few years, the New Left swiftly escalated their tactics and their goals, from pressure to demonstration to campus takeovers to outright violence. The brief frenzy of violence reached its culmination with the “whiff of grape” at Kent State in 1970; that show of firmness was enough to demoralize and destroy the New Left and to end the flurry of violence. The only thing left was to “work within the system,” and the result was the McGovernite movement; now that movement has been smashed to smithereens, and there is nothing now for the Left but to shut up and fade away.

Those were indeed wild and wooly years; but in retrospect we can see far better than at the time that the whole movement was a flash-in-the-pan: a sudden, exuberant, and radical outburst that was destined to disappear as quickly as it arrived. The outburst to be sure, was breathtakingly swift; never before in America had the political, social, and cultural changes — “revolutionary” changes in the broadest sense — been so swift and so seemingly irresistible. It is easy to see now, however, that these changes of attitude and ideology were confined, not simply to youth, but to students and younger faculty in elite Ivy League colleges, people who were well situated by virtue of wealth and articulateness to make far more noise than their numbers or their genuine influence ever deserved. An important recent study by the Hudson Institute only serves to confirm other evidence of how deeply conservative the great bulk of the middle and working classes — including the youth — have continued to be throughout all the hullabaloo. (Frank E. Armbruster, The Forgotten Americans: A Survey of Values, Beliefs, and Concerns of the Majority, New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972, $9.95, 454 pp.)

The academic year 1969-70 (it is fitting to trace this campus-based “movement” in terms of academic years) was the frenzied culmination before the dissolution of the New Left. That was the year when the SDS was captured by the Weathermen, who proceeded to “go underground” after celebrating the Manson Family’s torture-murder of Sharon Tate. It was the year of the last giant, violent demonstration in Washington; the year when the Berrigans and their allies talked wildly of “kidnapping Kissinger”; the year that ended when the shock of Kent State brought the movement out of their relatively safe but looney revolutionary posturing and into the harsh light of reality. It was the year, too, when some libertarians lost their perspective and got caught up in the frenzy: from street fighting to drug parties to portentous mutterings about the imminent launching of “urban guerrilla warfare.”

In retrospect, too, it is obvious that many of us caught up in the excitement of the moment, far overweighted the libertarian and anti-statist elements of the New Left and underweighted the statism and the dangers of the ongoing “revolution.” Of course, that error in perspective was aided by what used to be called a “cultural lag” — by failing to assess the swift changes that always occur in a revolutionary situation, and which virtually eliminated the libertarian elements in the New Left after a couple of years in the mid-1960’s.

It also seems clear that, while its narrow base of support made the passing of the New Left inevitable, the swiftness of its demise may be credited to the brilliant strategic policies of the Nixon administration and its allies in authority throughout the country. The crucial element here was a policy of firmness, a refusal to give in any further to the seemingly irresistible “revolution”. The firmness was demonstrated in numerous ways. There was the whiff of grape at Kent State, there were the mass arrests at the Washington traffic-tieup demonstration, and, to a lesser extent, the prosecution of such leading figures of the movement as the Berrigans and the Chicago conspiracy trial. A determined policy of not giving in further to Negro demands, e.g. mobilizing the general public hostility to compulsory bussing, not only defused the black “revolution” but has ended all traces of urban Negro rioting for several years now. In its policy of firmness and determination, the Nixon administration must surely have taken its cue from the public reaction to the police clubbing of demonstrators at the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968. This massive reaction, which surprised many of us at the time but really should not have, was an almost universal condemnation and hostility toward the demonstrators for their provocations, rather than against the police who did the clubbing. That reaction surely told the incoming administration that the public would cheer a policy of firm suppression of the “revolution”. And it is certainly instructive to note how little resistance the boastful revolutionaries put up to even the minimal force used by the administration.

Joined together with the firmness of the government was the resistance of the college administrators. Led by S. I. Hayakawa, the administrators found, once again, that a policy of determined resistance to the student rebels was enough to make the rebellion wither away with remarkable rapidity.

In addition to the stick, the carrot. For the Nixon administration again saw, with strategic brilliance, that along with a policy of due firmness and resistance, it must also defuse the major grievances of at least the broad base of followers of the revolution. The major grievances were twofold and interconnected: the draft and the Vietnam War. There was surely no single act that defused the revolution more swiftly than the adoption of the lottery draft. Combined with a steady reduction of draft calls, the lottery quickly ended what had seemed to be, but obviously was not, a principled opposition to the slavery of the draft, and as a consequence the student rebellion itself. Furthermore, the cunning policy of “Vietnamization”, while hardly satisfying the true-blue opponents of the war, was enough to defuse the issue, not only for the bulk of the American people but also for most of the campus rebels. For the crucial point was that American troops in Vietnam, and therefore American casualties were swiftly and steadily reduced by the Administration. And that meant, too, that those few young men who were drafted would at least not be sent to the hell of Vietnam. The fact that countless Vietnamese continued to be slaughtered was to become only a remote and abstract concern even for the erstwhile rebels. The carrot and the stick had done its work with consummate artistry.

There was another important stick, too, that played a large role in eviscerating the New Left and the abortive rebellion. That was the recession of 1969-70, and particularly the academic recession for college graduates that hit the following year. Suddenly, a sellers’ market for college graduates, the era of the 1960’s when every graduate could write his own ticket for jobs, was succeeded by a very tight “buyers’ market”, with heavy unemployment for educated youths. If the Nixon administration had planned it that way, nothing could be better calculated to end the posturing, the “greening”, the phony dropping-out among the youth, than a sharp dose of economic reality in the form of recession and unemployment. It was back to reality, back to studying, to careers, etc. for our former rebels. Suddenly, campus youth wanted, not formless “rapping” and the use of the campus as a base for furthering the “revolution”, but course content to prepare them for jobs and careers. The “educational revolution” proved to be as much a flash in the pan as the rest of the hoopla.

What then remains of the New Left, of the heady years of the late sixties? Not very much. There seem to be only three things, none of which can give any comfort to rational libertarians: women’s lib, hallucinogenic drugs, and rock. Rock, I am informed, has receded considerably from the noisy cacophony of the “acid rock” of a few years ago; and not only has rock visibly softened, but there has now arisen a welcome “nostalgia craze” for the Old Culture of the 1950’s. And the old “rock-and-roll” of the fifties, while hardly any great shakes as music, was, in its happy innocence, far more the tailend of the great Old Culture popular music of the 1920-1950 era than it was the prefigurement of the irrational “hard rock” of the sixties.

In the monstrously irrational culture of hallucinogenic drugs, marijuana unfortunately remains, but at least there has been a visible recession in the use of LSD and the other powerful “hard drugs”, presumably reflecting a drawing back from their ugly Social Darwinist consequences.

Women’s lib is still with us, but it is unclear at this point what lasting impact it will have. Beyond a welcome drive for abortion-freedom and beyond a drop in population growth, it seems likely now that the most that will happen will be a greater stimulus for women to fulfill themselves in careers. The man-hating crazies who make up the core and the vanguard of women’s lib seem destined to disappear as simply a media shuck; after all, how many more times can the public bear to watch the Robin Morgans and the Kate Millets, or even the Gloria Steinems, cavort on television?

Overall, the rational libertarian can take good cheer from Herman Kahn’s shrewd prediction of the cultural trends of the 1970’s:“Remember 67 per cent of America is quite square and getting squarer. I call this the counter-reformation, the counter-counterculture. It’s the biggest thing going in America today and it will either dominate or heavily influence the next decade or two.” (Herman Kahn, “The Squaring of America,” Intellectual Digest, Sept. 1972, p. 18.)

Surely, the massive repudiation of the McGovernite movement is a firm indication that Kahn’s prognosis is correct. For one of the elements in that repudiation was Middle America’s accurate perception of the McGovernite movement — as exhibited, for example, at the Democratic convention — as the embodiment of the “counter-culture.” In smashing McGovernism, Middle America eagerly seized the opportunity to deal a gut blow to the counter-culture it detests: to upper-class kids flaunting drugs, hippies, dirt, rock, open sexual perversion and promiscuity, rejection of the work ethic, and living parasitically off welfare or parental subsidy. Add to this an upper-class embracing poverty as a virtue, and sneering at Middle America’s concern about crime in the streets from safe vantage-points in the suburbs.

If, indeed, the seventies loom as a return to the “squaring of America”, then what does this imply as the proper strategy for the new and growing libertarian movement? Clearly, it implies that strategy and rational principle meet: that we cast off the trappings of the counter-culture which all too many libertarians adopted in the heady days of the sixties. That we return home, home to our “bourgeois” rational roots, home to the old values which Middle America has miraculously preserved throughout the years when the upper classes and the intellectuals betrayed them. Home to becoming the vanguard of the vast bulk of Middle America, a people whose instincts are sound but who lack the consistent articulation of that philosophy — rational libertarianism — which provides the solution for their irritations and resentments as well as the correct path for achieving their goals of peace and freedom and secure prosperity.

Concretely, what do I mean by a Middle American orientation? What sort of specific work can be done? The sort of thing I mean can be seen by briefly examining four estimable organizations, two scholarly and two activist. In the world of scholarship, the Institute for Humane Studies of Menlo Park, California has done yeoman work over the years in gathering Fellows, in publishing books and pamphlets, and in sponsoring conferences at home and abroad on such vital matters as property rights and human differentiation. There is also the Center for Independent Education of Wichita, Kansas, which has published pamphlets in support of private and full-cost education as contrasted to public schools, and has sponsored a conference on compulsory education, critically examining its legal, historical, economic, and philosophical aspects. On the activist front, there are two admirable organizations, each headed by young libertarians. One is the National Taxpayers Union, where Jim Davidson has done yeoman work, almost singlehanded, in Washington lobbying against taxation and government spending, tipping the balance against the SST and helping to defeat the disastrous Family Assistance Plan. Davidson was also partially responsible for inducing the Republican platform committee to call for the legalization of gold. Earnest Fitzgerald, former high Pentagon official, head of the NTU, and chief exposer of the Lockheed scandal, has recently published a book (The High Priests of Waste, Norton), which expands his revelations of waste in government spending.

The other activist organization is the National Committee to Legalize Gold, headed by two youthful New Orleans libertarians, James U. Blanchard III and Evan R. Soulé, Jr. With high professionalism and enthusiastic organization, the NCLG distributes a regular bulletin on gold, and has held a series of press conferences throughout the country calling for legalization of gold, and defying the Treasury Department by holding aloft an illegal bar of gold. And while concentrating on gold legalization as the first step, the NCLG happily makes clear that its ultimate objective is abolition of the Federal Reserve System and the substitution of the gold standard for government fiat paper.

Both the NTU and the NCLG are admirable models of what an activist libertarian organization, oriented to the concerns of Middle America, can accomplish.

Meanwhile, it’s a comfort to know that we’ll still have Dick Nixon to kick around — for Four More Years.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Watergate, Schmatergate.

Frankly, I’ve gotten awfully tired of the endless griping about Watergate. Even National Review has expressed its deep concern about the goings-on. All around me I hear left-liberals complaining about the “moral apathy” of the American public on this issue. It is an “apathy” which I confess I share. The public reaction is: “well, that’s politics”; politics always consists of dirty tricks by one party on the other. Yes, of course it has. Only pseudo-moralists with little sense of history can claim otherwise. Have we all forgotten the previous elections in which the Democrat prankster Dick Tuck played numerous practical jokes and dirty tricks on the Republicans? Where were the left-liberal moralists then? I’ll tell you where they were: right in there enjoying the spectacle of good old Dick Tuck making fools of the Republicans. You don’t like the shoe on the other foot, do you fellas? With all the real problems in the world, can we really get so upset about the fumbling capers of the USC clique?

Australopithecus, Where Art Thou?

Australopithecus has been highly touted by the evolutionists as the “missing link”, as our ancestor who wandered the earth approximately 2.5 million years ago. But now all this has been knocked into a cocked hat by the finding of a skull by Richard Leakey, about 2.6 million years old, that is closer to modern man than Australopithecus. So now what? It’s back to the drawing board, evolutionists!

“The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.” — Max Stirner

The Senate Rated

One of the pleasant pastimes of ideological groups is rating Senators from their own point of view. Not to be outdone, the Lib. Forum has taken the rated votes compiled by the New Republic, American Conservative Union (published in Human Events), and the National Taxpayers Union (published in Dollars and Sense), and combined them to rate Senators on libertarian vs. statist votes on various key issues. The numerical ratings after the names of the Senators are the plus-libertarian votes, followed by the statist votes (e.g. 20-22 means 20 libertarian votes and 22 statist votes.) We have also grouped the members of the outgoing Senate into six categories: Very Good, Good, Moderate, Bad, Very Bad, and Excruciatingly Bad. (No Senator rated an Excellent.) We realize that the quantitative vote fails to weigh qualitative matters on the issues, but we feel that enough votes have been recorded to give a pretty good idea of the Senator’s ideological drift.

Very Good:

H. Byrd (Ind., Va.) 33-12

Roth (Rep., Del.) 32-13

Good:

Ervin (D., N. C.) 25-18

Proxmire (D., Wise.) 27-18

Fannin (R., Ariz.) 26-19

Dominick (R., Col.) 24-17

Curtis (R., Neb.) 26-19

Buckley (R., N.Y.) 28-16

Brock (R., Tenn.) 23-15

Hansen (R., Wyo.) 22-16

Jordan (R., Id.) 24-19

Moderate:

Allen (D., Ala.) 23-21

Fullbright (D., Ark.) 20-20

Chiles (D., Fla.) 22-19

Talmadge (D., Ga.) 20-23

Church (D., Id.) 18-22

Stennis (D., Miss.) 21-24

Pastore (D., R. I.) 20-24

Spong (D., Va.) 24-20

Goldwater (R., Ariz.) 20-16

Weicker (R., Conn.) 19-23

Gurney (R., Fla.) 19-25

Griffin (R„ Mich.) 21-21

Hruska (R., Neb.) 21-24

Cotton (R., N. H.) 22-23

Hatfield (R., Ore.) 21-17

Bennett (R., Ut.) 21-17

Thurmond (R., S.C.) 20-23

Bad:

Jordan (D., N. C.) 14-22

Bentsen (D., Tex.) 17-26

Stevenson (D., Ill.) 18-27

R. Byrd (D., W. Va.) 17-26

Hartke (D., Ind.) 15-23

Eastland (D., Miss.) 15-22

Symington (D., Mo.) 18-27

Burdick (D., N. D.) 19-26

Pell (D., R. I.) 17-23

McGovern (D., S. D.) 13-21

Dole (R., Kan.) 18-26

Cook (R., Ky.) 19-25

Young (R., N. D.) 18-27

Saxbe (R., Oh.) 16-23

Taft (R., Oh.) 17-26

Bellmon (R., Okla.) 16-23

Tower (R., Tex.) 18-25

Very Bad:

McGee (D., Wyo.) 8-28

Sparkman (D., Ala.) 11-31

Gravel (D., Alaska) 11-27

McClellan (D., Ark.) 11-22

Cranston (D., Calif.) 13-31

Tunney (D., Calif.) 13-31

Ribicoff (D., Conn.) 10-32

Bayh (D., Ind.) 13-30

Hughes (D., Io.) 15-28

Long (D., La.) 13-31

Muskie (D., Me.) 15-27

Kennedy (D., Mass.) 16-28

Hart (D., Mich.) 11-33

Humphrey (D., Minn.) 7-26

Randolph (D., W. Va.) 14-29

Nelson (D., Wise.) 18-29

Anderson (D., N. M.) 11-27

Hollings (D., S.C.) 15-29

Montoya (D., N. M.) 14-29

Moss (D., Ut.) 10-31

Harris (D., Okla.) 15-25

Magnuson (D., Wash.) 13-32

Bible (D., Nev.) 13-31

Cannon (D., Nev.) 12-31

Mondale (D., Minn.) 15-28

Eagleton (D., Mo.) 14-29

Mansfield (D., Mont.) 12-27

Metcalf (D., Mont.) 7-27

Allott (R., Col.) 14-26

Boggs (R., Del.) 14-31

Fong (R., Haw.) 12-29

Percy (R., Ill.) 15-27

Miller (R., Io.) 14-29

Pearson (R., Kan.) 12-32

Cooper (R., Ky.) 16-29

Smith (R., Me.) 16-29

Beall (R., Md.) 14-30

Mathias (R., Md.) 12-30

Brooke (R., Mass.) 10-33

Case (R., N. J.) 12-32

Javits (R., N.Y.) 16-29

Packwood (R., Ore.) 16-27

Schweiker (R., Pa.) 16-29

Scott (R., Pa.) 11-33

Baker (R., Tenn.) 13-29

Aiken (R., Vt.) 17-27

Excruciatingly Bad:

Inouye (D., Haw.) 7-34

McIntyre (D., N. H.) 7-33

Williams (D., N. J.) 9-34

Jackson (D„ Wash.) 6-36

Stevens (R., Alaska) 9-34

Stafford (R., Vt.) 6-33

Grouped by parties, we have Republicans: Very Good — 1, Good — 7, Moderate — 9, Bad — 7, Very Bad — 18, Excruciatingly Bad — 2. If we lump the Goods and Bads together, we get: Republicans: Goodish — 8; Moderate — 9; Baddish — 27.

The Democrats fare considerably worse by libertarian standards, though obviously neither party deserves hosannahs. Very Good — 1, Good – 2, Moderate – 9, Bad — 10, Very Bad – 28, Excruciatingly Bad – 4. Lumping together: Goodish — 3; Moderate — 9; Baddish — 42.

The two best Senators are Roth of Delaware, who is nobly following in the footsteps of his predecessor, John J. Williams; and Harry Byrd of Virginia, following in the footsteps of his economy-minded father. The absolutely worst Senator in a bad lot is none other than the man the Lib. Forum has already called “Mr. State”, Scoop Jackson of Washington.

We can now analyze the fortunes of the incumbent Senators on the bases of our classifications. Of the “Good” Senators, 2 (Curtis, Hansen) were re-elected, and 1 (Jordon, Id.) died, and was succeeded by a similarly-inclined conservative, McClure. Make it 3 victories and 0 defeats for the Goods.

Of the Moderates, 3 won (Griffin, Thurmond, Hatfield), and 1 lost (Spong). Of the Bad Guys, 3 won (Eastland, Pell Tower) and none lost. Of 16 Very Bad Guys running for re-election, 10 won (Pearson, Baker, Case, Brooke, Mondale, Metcalf, Percy, Sparkman, McClellan, Randolph), but no fewer than 6 bit the dust (Miller, Smith, Boogs, Allott, Harris — whose conqueror in turn lost to the Republican Bartlett, and Anderson, whose surrogate lost to the Republican, Domenici.) On the other hand, 2 Excruciatingly Bad Guys won (Stevens, McIntyre) and none lost. If we lump the Goods and the Moderates together, we get a record of 5 won and 1 lost; if we lump all the Baddies together, we get 15 won and 6 lost. Dare we then say that in this election, when everything below the Presidential level was ideologically mixed, that the American public was partially hitting out at the worst enemies of liberty?!

The Strip Miner As Hero

By Walter Block

There are basically two methods of mining coal: strip mining and deep mining. In deep mining, which is used to mine coal from a great depth, an intricate set of tunnels, shafts, braces must be set deep in the earth at great cost. Apart from this, deep mining has the disadvantage of causing black lung disease, the dread miner’s disease caused by breathing in coal particles in deep and enclosed places. Deep mining must also bear the onus of numerous mine entrapments that occur with deathly regularity where hundreds of miners at a time can be trapped far below the surface of the earth due to a cave-in, escaping gas, an explosion, or water seepage.

In strip mining, as the name implies, the earth is stripped, layer by layer, until the coal stream is unearthed. Strip mining is thus very easily utilized for streams of coal which lie close to the earth’s surface, and in cases where the surrounding earth is not strong enough to support the braces necessary for deep mining. Although especially well suited for mining coal that lies close to the surface, strip mining has proven feasible at up to moderate depths, competitive therefore with deep mining at some depths. Strip mining is free of the dangers of cave-ins, of black lung disease, and is very much cheaper than deep mining. This makes available to the poor a source of cheap energy, which in many cases may well mean the difference between life and death! In spite of these advantages, strip mining has been roundly condemned by practically all sources of “informed, liberal, and progressive” opinion.

The supposed explanation for this otherwise inexplicable state of affairs centers around two criticisms of strip mining: it causes pollution, and it is a despoiler of the natural beauty of the landscape. But as can be seen from even a cursory examination of the case, these two criticisms of strip mining will hardly suffice as an explanation of the extreme antipathy shown to the strip miners. The vilification and abuse heaped upon the strip miners by the liberals cannot be reconciled with their humanistic principles, which hold human life to be of great value. And life is on the side of strip mining. For there is no black lung disease on the surface of the earth where strip mining takes place; there is no danger of cave-ins and entrapment many miles beneath the surface of the earth for the strip miner. So even on the assumption that the two arguments of despoiling beauty and causing pollution held against the strip miner are correct, it is hard to see how supposedly humanistic people can favor deep mining over strip mining.

It is even more puzzling when we reflect on the fact that the two criticisms are by no means correct. First consider pollution. Although it is indubitably true that pollution results from the activity of strip miners, this is hardly a necessary concomitant of strip mining. Rather, it is the result of a failure of the courts of this land to apply the laws of trespass to the strip miners. If the law against trespass were vigorously enforced, there would be no connection between strip mining and pollution at all.

What is presently done during the mining of coal in the stripping method is to take the large amounts of earth that must be peeled away in order to expose the coal, and to pile it up into huge mounds. Now, these mounds are usually piled up near streams of water and substantial amounts of earth are borne away by the stream, contaminating the stream, and the many lakes and other waterways the stream feeds into. Also, the de-nuded land serves as a source of mud slides, with no grass to hold the water. But there is no reason for this! If the strip miners were made to bear the full costs of their activity, and if the people whose downstream property was damaged had the right to obtain preventive injunctions to stop this practice if they were unwilling to be compensated for the damages by the strip miners, then the practice would cease. Strip mining would no longer be linked with pollution.

It is most important to see that the present link between pollution and strip mining is not inherent, but is rather due entirely to the failure to apply the common law of trespass against the strip miners. Imagine if you will, any other industry that was allowed to violate the law in this manner, such as the oil tanker industry. Now, there is no necessary connection between the oil tanker industry and pollution, but if oil spills were allowed, there soon would be a connection between the tanker industry and pollution, at least in the minds of the public. And so it is with the coal mining industry, and with strip mining in particular. There is nothing about the strip mining method of coal mining that is inherently pollutant causing. It is only because the laws of trespass have not been rigidly applied to to the strip miners that the link between stripping and pollution exists. Let these laws be fully adhered to, and this whole argument against strip mining would disappear.

What of the other argument against the strip miner: that stripping spoils the natural beauty of the landscape? The first thing to realize is that when it comes to beauty, there can be no objective standards which ought to be forced upon other people. What is beauty to one person can be ugliness to another; what is ugliness to one person can be beauty to another. It is true that what strip mining does is to remove the vegetation, grass and trees from the landscape. It can turn a lush, fertile landscape into a veritable desert. But some people like the desolation and emptiness of the desert! The painted desert in Arizona, the salt flats of Utah and the Grand Canyon of Colorado are considered by many people to be places whose beauty is without equal.

While hardly an expert on the esthetics of scenery, it seems to me at least that one of the concomitants of natural beauty is contrast. The mountains right next to the ocean along the California coast, the skyscrapersringing thesouthern part of Central Park in New York City, as well as the small bits of desolation provided by strip miners among the lush greenery of the Appalachians all benefit from stark contrast and are immeasurably beautified thereby. So, on the grounds of destroying the beauty of the landscape, it does not seem that we can unambiguousely and objectively fault the strip miner. If anything, according to at least some tastes, the strip miner beautifies the landscape.

Apart from that, however, this seems to be the wrong way to deal with the objection. For the real question is not whether or not strip mining adds to or detracts from beauty but rather, which people shall be allowed to make the choices on the disposal of land which can affect its beauty? If we take the view of those who criticize the strip miner for despoiling natural beauty, and would forbid him if they had the power, we become enmeshed in unsolvable paradoxes. If the lovers of nature can prevent the strip miner from changing it (perhaps improving it, in his own mind) of then a Pandora’s box will be opened. For on the same logical basis, we can prevent all farmers from clearing virgin soil and planting upon it; we can prevent the builder from erecting buildings or bridges, factories, hospitals, etc. And by extending this principle of forbidding everything we decide is ugly, various groups in the population are sure to begin to forbid long hair, dungarees, rock music, beads, pot smoking, or, alternatively crew cuts, tuxedoes, symphonic music, brassiers and whiskey.

Some people argue that striping is unnatural. These liberals would be the first to object if homosexuality or miscegenation were objected to on these grounds. They would point to all the discoveries in medicine which are certainly “unnatural”, namely man-made. But when it comes to strip mining, all logic flies out the window. To say that a thing either is or is not a result of nature alone or of man alone cannot determine its intrinsic worth. To argue that the desolation caused by strip mining is ugly because it is unnatural or because it perverts nature is to completely ignore the “artificial” contributions to beauty made by such men as Rembrandt or Mozart.

The Elections

Apart from the smashing repudiation of McGovernism, anticipated by all observers including the Lib. Forum, and welcomed by most, the ideological complexion of the rest of the elections was a mixed bag. There are certain results, however, that we can hail with particular and unambiguous joy.

One was the massive roadblock that Governor Arch Moore (Rep., W. Va.) put in the way of the rising young charismatic Rockefeller, John D. (Jay) Rockefeller, IV, for the Governorship of West Virginia. Sweeping in with 55% of the vote, Governor Moore postponed for many years, and perhaps ended indefinitely, the spectre of yet another Rockefeller buying himself a state and vaulting into a national political career. Isn’t Nelson enough? One particularly charming aspect of the Moore victory was his use of sophisticated “economic determinist” muckraking to stop young Rocky. Moore asked this pungent question: why has young Rockefeller emigrated from New York, come to West Virginia, and there tried to put an end to the strip coal mining industry in the name of the “environment”? Why if not to confer a monopoly privilege on coal’s great competitor, oil, in which the Rockefeller family has a consuming interest? Arch Moore, welcome to the ranks of Revisionism!

Another serendipity was the victory for the Senate in North Carolina of ultra-conservative Jesse Helms over liberal Nick Galifianakis. Helms, a TV commentator, is an advocate of the magnificently libertarian Liberty Amendment, which would abolish the personal income tax and sell all government assets competitive with private enterprise. We expect to hear many great things from Senator Helms.

A third goodie was the victory for the governorship of New Hampshire of Meldrin Thomson, Jr. (Rep.) Thomson; a book publisher, previously ran for the governorship on the American Party ticket, and his major plank was a pledge to keep New Hampshire In its superb role as the only state in the union with neither a sales nor an income tax. Tax rebellion was also responsible for the defeat of high-tax Delaware Governor Russell Peterson (Rep.) by conservative Democrat Sherman Tribbitt, as well as the defeat of high-tax Richard Ogilvie (Rep., Ill.) for the governorship by the charismatic, wealthy young Dan Walker. Ogilvie was heartily punished by the voters of Illinois for daring to put in a state income tax after he had campaigned against the proposal. On the other hand, we must record the defeats of the anti-tax campaigns for the governorship of Ed Smith (Rep., Montana) and Al Rosellini (Dem., Washington.) (Dem., Washington.)

There are a couple of particularly amusing notes in the election. One is the total neglect lavished by the women’s libbers on the female candidacies of conservative Republican Louise Leonard for Senator from West Virginia, and of Mary Breeden (who asserted that “taxation is theft”) on the American Party ticket for Senator from Kentucky. Another is the total ineptitude of the writing team of conservative Noel Parmentel and liberal George Gilder, who went down to Louisiana to aid the Senatorial campaign of Ben Toledano (Rep.), who was slaughtered with a mere 19% of the votes.

Finally, the election saw the emergence of the Libertarian Party. We still do not know how many votes were recorded for the Hospers-Nathan ticket on the ballots of Colorado and Washington. We have already hailed the New York campaigns of Greenberg and Block in these pages; another Congressional write-in candidacy for the LP was in the 30th Cong. District of California, where the distinguished young libertarian lawyer Manuel Klausner ran on the LP ticket. Klausner, an editor of Reason, followed Greenberg and Block in giving an imaginative individual twist to his campaign literature. He came out, for example, for rational pricing of congested streets and roads, and for a return to the spoils system and an end to the oligarchic tyranny of the civil service system.

Last but not least, we have what seems to be an authentic libertarian in Congress! This is young Steven D. Symms, from the 1st Congressional District of western Idaho. While winning on the Republican ticket, Symms, an apple grower, is also reputed to be a member of the Libertarian Party, the Society for Individual Liberty, and the National Taxpayers Union. Has one of our own actually made it to Congress? Let us scrutinize young Symms’ voting record with care, and try to get him to include libertarian literature into the Congressional Record.

Whither the Democracy?

Where do the Democrats go from here? If they wish to remain a viable national party, with a good shot at the Presidency, their primary task faces them clearly and squarely: the purging from the party of the McGovernite debris. The McGovernites must be blasted loose from their controlling positions in the party structure, and the Democrats must insure against a repeat of the disastrous 1972 convention by getting rid of the McGovernite “reform” rules which imposed the quota system on the delegates. The fight will not be an easy one, since the McGovernites, as ideological fanatics, are determined to hold on at any cost. Already, they are trying to cover themselves by jettisoning the person of McGovern, and claiming that the land slide defeat was merely a problem of his personal “image”.

The first step in the required purge is to depose La Westwood from the chairmanship of the National Committee, or to get rid of the person whom the Republican newsletter Monday has pungently referred to as “the Democrat National Committee chairthing.” The ouster of La Westwood is Consideration No. 1 in the taking back of the Democrat Party from its usurpers. A second task, which will prove more difficult, is to keep the chairmanship out of the hands of someone like the Kennedy stalking-horse Larry O’Brien, whose pro-McGovern rulings at the convention irretrievably compromised his supposedly neutral position in the party.

In the longer run, it is clear to everyone that there is only one man who can unite all factions of the Democrats under his own charismatic, left-liberal banner: obviously Teddy Kennedy. The problem for all sane and sober Americans is: How can we keep from getting Camelot again? How can we nip the Kennedy Dynasty in the bud? How can we keep the choice in ’76 from narrowing down to Teddy vs. Agnew? Or Teddy vs Percy? Isn’t it about time for a full-scale investigation of the unclarified anomalies of the Chappaquiddick affair? If Teddy resumes the eternal bellyaching about Watergate, how about a counter-ploy on Chappaquiddick?

Recommended Reading

Revisionism.

A great book bonanza is now available from Ralph Myles Publisher (Box 1533, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80901). Myles, headed by the eminent revisionist and anarchist historian Dr. James J. Martin, has recently reprinted several classic revisionist works, in hard cover and for the first time in paperback. These are:

Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice.
441 pp. Cloth $9.00; paper $2.95.

This is a fascinating and detailed account of Harry Barnes’ struggle on behalf of World War I Revisionism, including the text of his debates with detractors and anti-revisionists, and the great muckraking attack on historian-apologists who served as propagandists during the war, by Barnes’ student C. Hartley Grattan. Includes a new introduction by the late William L. Neumann. First published in 1928.

Michael H. Cochran, Germany Not Guilty in 1914.
268 pp. Cloth $6.95; paper $2.50.

This is a remarkable, unique, and tragically neglected work, first published by Dr. Cochran under Harry Elmer Barnes’ aegis in 1931. It is a thoroughgoing, detailed, point-by-point and devastating critique of the outstanding anti-revisionist history of the origins of World War I, Bernadotte E. Schmitt’s The Coming of the War 1914. It is a tragic commentary on the historical profession that the Schmitt book continued to win high honors among historians while Cochran’s refutation was completely forgotten. With a new introduction by Professor Henry M. Adams.

Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Civilian and the Military: A History of the American Anti-Militarist Tradition.
360 pp. Paper $3.00

Originally published in 1956, this book is the finest history ever written of militarism and its opposition in America. By our leading individualist historian. Again, largely neglected since publication, it is all the more welcome in this paperback edition. With a new introduction by Professor Ekirch.

Rothbardiana.

Rothbardiana continues to progress on various fronts. Rothbard has a review article in The Antitrust Bulletin (Summer, 1972) of Robert Heilbroner’s edited work in celebration of the socialist Adolph Lowe, R. Heilbroner, ed., Economic Means and Social Ends. Rothbard discusses Lowe’s attempt to replace economics by technology and values imposed by an elite, methodology, the entire problem of “prediction” in science and in the world, and the problem of values and economics.

We infiltrate The Nation, with Jerry Tuccille’s excellent review of Rothbard’s new edition of America’s Great Depression! (The Nation, October 16). We understand that there was quite an ideological tussle within the Nation’s board of editors before they would print Tuccille’s review.

The Weekend edition of The Chicago Daily News (Oct. 28-29) has an article by Dan Miller, “Business Not ‘Wild’ About Peace”, about problems of transition to a peacetime economy should the Vietnam War soon be over. It includes a long paragraph of quotes from Murray Rothbard, including his gloomy prediction that the government, instead of cutting taxes, will undoubtedly shift any cut in war spending to other forms of domestic boondoggles. The article also includes excellent quotes from Northwestern Univ. economic historian Jonathan Hughes, who denounces the effects of government deficits, high taxes, and domestic boondoggles in causing stagnation and inflation. “The people,” concludes Professor Hughes, “are already taxed out of their wits.” The solution “is for the economy to go back to producing things people want to buy voluntarily. The only way that can be done is with a massive federal tax cut. The government must allow the people to decide how they want to spend their money.” Hear, hear!

Revisionism from the Centre

A REVIEW ESSAY

By Chris R. Tame

Exponents of “New Left” historical revisionism will often find their analysis attacked on grounds other than those concerning its objective truth. The obvious political motivations and importance of the work of historians such as William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, and James Weinstein provides for historians of the “liberal” consensus a convenient excuse for ignoring or denigrating their work. Of course, the even more blatant political motivation and biases in the work of orthodox liberals is rendered culturally invisible (to the majority) by its very dominance. Therefore, the arrival at revisionist conclusions by historians of the “centre”, without any strong political motivations (at least, strong radical ones), is doubly welcome — both for its inherent validity and for its utility as “unbiased” verification of radical revisionism. Although we are not, of course, exactly being deluged by such non-radical sources of revisionism, it is nevertheless true that we are increasingly observing the appearance of scattered articles and books which manifest insights and analysis in support of the “New Left” and Libertarian historical case.

Thus, in his essay “The Wisconsin Idea and Business Progressivism” (Journal of American Studies, July 1970), Stuart Morris makes his conception of the Progressive Era perfectly clear from the start: “The ‘progressive era’, 1900-16, can best be interpreted . . . in terms of the ‘rationalization’ of corporate industrial capitalism . . .” The focus of his essay, however, is on the 1920’s a period which for the liberal orthodoxy (e.g. Hofstadter’s Age of Reform, Schlesinger’s Crisis of the Old Order) is essentially one of the decline of Progressivism, a “return to normalcy” and the supremacy of optimistic, self-satisfied business forces — in all, “an unfortunate inter-regnum” (H. F. May). Morris demolishes the liberal interpretation. In a close examination of many Progressive (and especially Wisconsin Progressive) intellectuals, he identifies the nature of their thought as essentially elitist and conservative — anti-laissez faire, of course, but anti business most definitely not. For individuals like Charles Van Hise, Herbert Croly, Charles Evans Hughes, F. C. Howe, F. J. Turner, and Richard T. Ely, the core of their approach was the concepts of “efficiency” and “control” — a managerial, elitist ethos. In the words of John R. Commons, “The outstanding fact (is) the importance of Management. Instead of capitalism moving on like a blind force of nature, as Marx thought, here we see it moving on by the will of management.” Thus, Morris argues, the movement for business efficiency and rationalization which was manifest in various forms in the 1920’s (including, for example, the establishment of university schools of business) was simply a continuation of the same ideological motivation as that of the earlier Progressives. “Business education . . . was not simply a function of economic rationalization”, writes Morris, “. . . it was also a product of progressive aims and assumptions”. If outright political activism declined in the 1920’s, this was as much to the nature of Progressivism itself as to other factors. Progressivism had simply shifted its focus to other measures to attain the same ends as before. Thus, F. C. Howe (in Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy, 1912) saw “scientific efficiency” as “one of Wisconsin’s contributions to democracy”. Herbert Croly declared that expert administration was the “instrument which society must gradually forge and improve for using social knowledge in the interest of valid social purposes” (Progressive Democracy, 1914), and Louis Brandeis became the prophet of Business, A Profession, (1914). In Morris’ words, “Like the Fabians in England, the progressive intellectuals heralded the arrival of the reformer as expert . . . This emphasis on information and practicality served to minimize any distinction between the expert and the reformer and to enlist both in the service of the state”.

However, the most substantial contributions to the revisionist case to derive from non-radical sources have come from two other, more prominent, historians: Robert H. Wiebe and Samuel P. Hays.

Robert Wiebe’s Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1968; originally published, 1962) obviously bears immediate comparison to Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism, but it is only right to say that the latter work is far superior. Both in the arrangement of his material and the depth of his research Wiebe falls far short of Kolko’s achievement. He also reveals, in a number of comments, far more elements of a liberal historiographical “hangover”. However, this is by no means to denigrate Wiebe’s work. Businessmen and Reform is marked by a striking realism in its approach to the issues of government regulation, constantly focusing on the hard actuality of economics ignored by the “liberals”. In contrast to the liberal mythology of a monolithic and peculiarly malevolent business community, dogmatically opposed to “government regulation for the public good”, Wiebe analyzes the vitally important clash of interests within the ranks of business, making it clear that this economic conflict lay at the root of the demand for government control. Although Kolko’s discussion of most of the major areas of conflict (the railroads, antitrust, banking, etc.) is more detailed and comprehensive, Wiebe’s account is far from being worthless or unilluminating. His discussion of anti-trust and the tariff, or his discussion of the triangular conflict between the ambitious city bankers and the small county bankers in the Mid-West and the large established Eastern banking houses, should especially be read in conjunction with Kolko. Overall, then, Wiebe clearly establishes the validity of his fundamental conclusions; “. . .both the idea and impetus for reform,” he states, “came from prospering businessmen on the make, men like Edward Bacon, Herbert Miles, and George Perkins . . . the business community was the most important single factor or set of factors — in the development of economic regulation”.

Samuel P. Hays is probably known to a segment of Libertarians for his work, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1929 (Harvard University Press, 1959), in which a number of anti-market myths are dispelled. Specifically, he shows that the range wars of the 1880’s were due to the fact that property rights could not be acquired, and that the lumber corporations were not universally engaged in short sighted resource exploitation. However, the importance of the book does not lie merely in these two limited points. For, in fact, in an analysis of this particular aspect of Progressive reform Hays attacks the core of liberal mythology. “The conservation movement”, he writes, “did not involve a reaction against large-scale corporate business, but, in fact, shared its view in a mutual revulsion against unrestrained competition and undirected economic development. Both groups (i.e., corporate leaders and Progressive reformers) placed a premium on large-scale capital organization, technology, and industry-wide co-operation and planning to abolish the uncertainties and waste of competitive resource use”. This point Hays drives home throughout the book: the demand for conservation regulation came from the large corporations themselves, united with Progressivism in general by a shared elitist and technocratic social ethos. The precise implications of his research, however, are outlined in the essay “The Mythology Of Conservation” (in H. Jarrett, ed., Perspectives on Conservation, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1958): “Few can resist the temptation,” Hays declares, “to use history to formulate an ideology which will support their own aspirations, rather than look squarely at the hard facts of the past”. And the liberal historians, he makes clear, are the most guilty of succumbing to this temptation. Their devotion to the concept of “publiccontrol” is the summum bonum of political life has blinded them to the nature of such control in practice. As Hays makes quite clear in the context of his research on Conservation, “Public control is not an end in itself; it is only a means to an end. Conservation means much more than simply public action; and we should be more concerned with the history of its objectives rather than of its techniques. In fact, by dwelling on the struggle for public action historians have obscured the much more basic problem of the fate of conservation objectives”. The identification of state intervention as inherently in the “public interest”, to be no more questioned than Motherhood or Democracy, distorts historical reality. Holding such concepts the measure of all virtue, it is clear why no examination of the real motives of their proponents — or even of who those proponents actually were — could emerge from liberal historiography. In Hays’ own words: “The widespread use of the concept of the public interest often obscures the importance of political struggle, and substitutes rhetoric for reality. It permits bitter political contests to be far beneath the calm surface of agreed-on language and technical jargon . . . The great danger of the ‘public interest’ is that it can lull one into complacency by persuading him to accept a mythological instead of a substantive analysis of both historical and contemporary conservation issues”.

Professor Hays, moreover, has not merely restricted himself to demolishing this one sphere of liberal mythology. In his essay “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era” (Pacific Northwest Quarterly, October 1964; and reprinted in A. B. Callow Jr., ed., American Urban History Oxford University Press, N.Y., 1969), Hays has performed an analysis as astute and important as Weinstein’s work in this field. Once more he demolishes the facade of liberal historiography: “Because the goals of reform were good its causes were obvious; rather than being the product of particular people and particular ideas in particular situations, they were deeply imbedded in the universal impulses and truths of ‘progress’. Consequently, historians have rarely tried to determine precisely who the municipal reformers were or what they did, but instead have relied on reform ideology as an accurate description of reform practice”. Liberal historians have thus seen the urban political struggle of the Progressive Era as a conflict between public impulses for “good government” against the corrupt alliance of machine politics and the “special interests” of business. In the modified versions of Mowry, Chandler, and Hofstadter, the role of the middle-class is stressed, but although this interpretation apparently rests upon a slightly more scientific approach, it is equally deficient, in fact, in logic, and depth of research, and is still subject to the same ideological self-delusion. For his definitive analysis of the topic Hays draws from a wide range of research — from the results of his own efforts, from work that has appeared recently, and from work that has been available for decades (such as the case studies of the city-manager governments undertaken in the 1930’s under Leonard White’s direction.) The source of Progressive municipal reform, Hays conclusively demonstrates, lay in the upper-classes. The financing of New York’s Bureau of Municipal Research, for example, came largely from Carnegie and Rockefeller, and this pattern of corporate financial support for reform organizations is the same in every case. Urban Progressivism derived essentially from the new upper class of corporate leaders and the younger and more advanced members of the professions, individuals who sought to apply “expertise” and “managerial control” to public affairs. A clear examination of Progressive aims reveals that their principal objection to the existing system of local government was to the fact that it gave representation and effective control to the lower and middle classes, rather than to the more suitable elements — themselves!

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The essence of Progressive municipal reform lay not in such measures as direct primaries, the initiative, referendum and recall, so often emphasized by liberal historians, for these were in fact often irrelevant and ineffective in practice and utilized more for tactical and propagandistic ends. Rather, it constituted the centralization of the system of representation, the shift from ward to city-wide election of councils and school boards and the establishment of the commission and city-manager forms of government. Such centralization destroyed the existing balance of representation and allowed the upper-classes to dominate government. It is no wonder then, that, as the studies carried out under Leonard White’s direction revealed, the lower and middle classes overwhelmingly opposed the Progressive reforms. The conclusion of Hays’ devastatingly incisive essay is uncompromisingly clear: “The movement for reform in municipal government, therefore, constituted an attempt by upper-class advanced professional, and large business groups to take formal political power from the previously dominant lower-and middle-class elements so that they might advance their own conceptions of desirable public policy”.

Hays has thus performed a brilliant analysis of two major aspects of Progressivism and has enunciated clearly the reasons that most liberal historians have been unable either to discover historical actuality or even recognize such actuality when it faces them in the available documentation. Yet he has also attempted to go further, to integrate revisionist perspectives into a general theory of historical causation. His essay “The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880-1920”, (Political Science Quarterly, September, 1965) is thus valuable as a description of this theory as well as for the wealth of bibliographic information it contains (information of which no Libertarian student of history should fail to be aware and to utilize). In fact, the essay is one of the most complete and devastating attacks ever made on liberal historiography. Hays surveys an extensive range of (principally) recent research on a plethora of socio-political topics, all of which, he demonstrates, fail to conform to liberal mythology, and whose significance and importance will go unrecognized as long as this mythology predominates. Thus, in Hays’ summary: “The liberal framework, more concerned with the formal and the episodic, has become increasingly restrictive rather than conducive to further social analysis. It has prevented historians giving full attention to the political role of working people, the influence of ethnocultural factors in politics, the changing characteristics of elites, the role of the business community in reform, the treatment of urban life as a system of social organization, the source of anti-reform impulses, the conflict between local and cosmopolitan cultures, the growth of bureaucracy and administration, the growth of education as a process of cultural transmission and social mobility, the development of ideology and its relationship to practice, and the examination of inter-regional economic relationships. Most important, it has obscured significant shifts in the location and techniques of decision making in a more highly systematized society . . .” And this slashing indictment, it should be emphasized, is thoroughly documented on every point raised. Also of note in this essay, in relation to Stuart Morris’ study of the Progressive ethos cited earlier, is Hays’ own account of the ideological factors that made possible the cooperation of the new industrial elite, the professional classes, and the intelligentsia: “This new (i.e., corporate) elite”, he writes, “was highly attractive to patricians and intellectuals. While many in both groups had rejected the materialism and brashness of the new industrial elite, they found in the tendencies toward rationality and systematization an acceptable outlet for their talents, and thereby became reconciled to the very business community which earlier they had abhorred.”

Thus the Libertarian may be well pleased that there has developed a parallel stream of revisionist historical analysis alongside that from the ‘New Left’, one from, so to speak, the “centre”. Yet this “centrist” revisionism does contain implicit dangers, dangers to be found in Hays’ general theory of “social analysis” that is offered as an alternative to the “liberal framework”. Specifically, this danger lies in economic cum-technological determinism. Thus, the growth of political centralization and the nature of “Progressive” political movements, is seen by Hays as a result of “the systematizing and organizing processes inherent in industrialism . . . the dynamic force in social change in modern life . . . Political movements in modern industrial society can be distinguished in terms of the role which they played in this evolving structure.” (Emphasis mine). Centralization and the “Progressive” reforms are seen as the “techniques which these systems (i.e., modern industrial ones) require”, and the “persistent upward flow of the location of decision-making”, as the natural consequence of the “evolution from smaller to larger and larger systems”. Of course, there are elements of truth in the view that changing economic structures will involve changing social structures. Yet it is also equally clear that the deterministic tendency in Hays’ thought obscures the socio-political alternatives that may have existed. From the point of view of the Libertarian, it is apparent that vital questions of the nature and legitimacy of property rights and of market conditions are overlooked or held of no account. Thus, Hays’ social analysis could equally well serve the same function as that presently done by the liberal framework — as an historical consecration, a justification for the status quo and for that “persistent upward flow of the location of decision making”. This tendency is equally apparent in Wiebe’s Businessmen and Reform, in his statement, ironic now in retrospect, that “With so few signs of domestic upheaval at the beginning of the 1960s (!) any elite would take pride in the record of America’s durable business leadership”. Revisionism from the centre, therefore, can easily become absorbed once more into the “American Celebration”.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Ruling Class. dir. by Peter Medak, written by Peter Barnes, with Peter O’Toole.

Here is the umpteenth British film that attacks and satirizes the British upper classes. So what else is new? What is new is the depths of irrationality and absurdity to which the film sinks. Here is the apotheosis of the “non-linear” movie; very little of the film makes any sense at all, either in philosophy, plot, continuity, or camera work. The camera work is mod-absurdist, employing every irritating trick that has unfortunately been learned in the last decade. From the prototype absurdist film that flouts the law of identity, Morgan, comes the tactic of people suddenly becoming, and unbecoming, apes, skeletons, or what have you.

Where The Ruling Class differs from other irrational films is in three ways: its length, its acting, and its “philosophy”. For the film rolls endlessly on; Medak and Barnes are always enchanted with their own supposed brilliance and importance, and every trick of theirs has to be stretched out and beaten over the head. The movie seems like four or five hours long by the end, although I am informed that the excruciating experience lasted for but two hours and a half.

The acting features — and O how does it feature! — Peter O’Toole, who cavorts on the screen for virtually every minute of the picture. Peter O’Toole has been one of the most overrated actors of the last two decades, and given anything like his head, he will twitch, quiver, shake, and generally chew any and all of the available scenery. To save any film what O’Toole needs is a firm directorial boot fastened upon his neck; even in that superb film, Lawrence of Arabia, in which O’Toole made his debut, that twitching and quivering augured badly for the future. But in The Ruling Class, O’Toole is lovingly given his head, and a veritable shambles ensues.

The “philosophy” with which this pretentions film is encumbered, is a highly jejune one. In the first half of the picture, O’Toole plays a psychotic aristocratic who is convinced that he is Jesus and God, and every once in a while he leaps on to a home-made cross to get back to his roots. O’Toole leaps and quivers, shouting that God is Love and everyone must love one another. Then, after a psychiatrist is sent to cure him everyone thinks he is cured, since he no longer thinks he is Jesus; but aha! he is secretly convinced that he is Jack the Ripper, and proceeds to systematically murder any girls (and lots of other people) he can get ahold of. While Jack the Ripper, which Medak and Barnes persist in identifying with the Old Testament God of wrath, O’Toole leaps to political leadership of the House of Lords by preaching capital punishment and death to all criminals. You see, the imbecile point of the picture is this: when O’Toole, as a sweet and lovable nut, goes around preaching Love to All, everybody thinks he is crazy; but when he shifts to preaching fire and brimstone, he is elevated to leadership of the Tory upper class. Profound? Not really; for let’s face it, O’Toole’s first incarnation was just as nutty as the second; first, because indiscriminate Love, Love for everybody is as impossible and unnatural a goal as we might conceive; and, second, because O’Toole was crazy, after all, and deserved, if not commitment, a wide berth by everyone, especially the long-suffering members of the audience. There is no denying that some scenes in the first part are funny, before the picture turns into a grim welter of random killings, but the humor is completely buried by the deadweight of the picture as a whole.

One of the most unforgivable effects of the New Wave in British movies is that it has managed to destroy a film industry that was once the finest in the world. If you want to see a superb, truly witty, and beautifully acted satire on the British upper class, try to find a rerun of a triumphantly Old Culture film of two decades ago, Kind Hearts and Coronets — with Dennis Price and especially Alec Guinness. Back to the Closet, sickies and absurdists, and let us have good movies again!

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 10

DECEMBER, 1972

75¢

THE MOVEMENT

In a few short years, the libertarian movement has grown rapidly, but not continuously. Essentially, it has grown in two great bursts. The first, which raised it off the ground from a tiny handful of people, centered around the famous libertarian splitoff from YAF in August 1969. It was this split and the self-consciousness gained during it that created the current libertarian movement. The second great burst, which we dubbed “the takeoff”, was occasioned by the Lehr-Rossetto article in the New York Sunday Times Magazine, and by the spate of media publicity which followed it in the winter of 1970-71. Since then, we have had numerous new magazines of various and diverse types, continuing publicity, numerous conferences, and a host of Libertarian Parties in various states of the Union.

All this is fine, but one begins to get the distinct feeling that for the last year or so the movement has been stuck on a plateau, that it has in a sense been doing little more than milling around. New magazines have sprouted, but others have fallen by the wayside. In addition to qualitative improvement, to clearer foci of activity, we are in acute need of another “great leap forward”, a leap that will bring us sharply out of the “sect” category and begin to make a palpable impact on American life.

For some time, it has been a matter of interest to libertarians to estimate how many of us there really are in the country as a whole. The answers have ranged from the wildly optimistic 100,000 (which would include everyone who has ever purchased an Ayn Rand novel from Academic Associates) to the sober judgment of our old colleague Leonard Liggio, who places the total number of libertarians at somewhere around 300. Your editor, as always a middle-of-the-roader, has estimated the total at 10,000. Of course, much of the difference depends on what level of libertarian activity and consciousness one includes in the definition. In my view, however, one has to be at least a regular reader of a libertarian periodical to be included as an active “member” of the movement. Libertarians who don’t bother to read any of their own literature — or, for that matter, to read at all — can hardly be included in any estimate of our total number.

On this basis, however, I am afraid that I must revise sharply downward my estimate of 10,000 libertarians. For there is no libertarian periodical, regardless of promotion, advertising, layout or whatever, that has been able to get its circulation above two to three thousand. Considering organizational membership as well, there seems no real warrant for gauging the movement at more than 3,000.

In the midst of this puzzlement over the size of our active or potential market, Robert D. Kephart, the young genius publisher of Human Events who several years ago became a convert to pure libertarianism, had a noble conception. That conception was to found a new periodical, a monthly and eventual bi-weekly, which would be highly professional and geared to the widest possible market, not simply of libertarians but of all those, on the right, left or centre, seriously interested in liberty. Kephart’s idea was to found the libertarian counterpart of the spectacularly successful and highly influential New York Review of Books. The new periodical was designed to tap the resources, not just of scholarly and knowledgeable libertarians, but of able scholars of all ideologies whose writings or fields of expertise could contribute significantly to libertarian theory and knowledge. To this end, Kephart gathered together a staff of potential contributors, ranging from objectivist psychologists to New Left historians: all fields of human endeavor, from history to philosophy to the arts and sciences, were to come under the new magazine’s purview. Naming the new periodical The Libertarian Review, Kephart chose the brilliant young libertarian Roy Childs to serve as the editor. Furthermore, Kephart brought to the new venture all the publishing expertise with which he had managed, in a few short years, to so boost the circulation and efficiency of Human Events as to bring it well into the black — a major feat for any ideologically oriented magazine.

The staff was gathered, reviews and articles for the first couple of issues were assigned and secured, and publication of the first issue was scheduled for January 1973. As further essential preparation for the enterprise, Kephart purchased the existing book-selling services of the movement — SIL Book Service, and Libertarian Enterprises —, combining them into Books for Libertarians, and assiduously purchased and gathered together a huge mailing list including everyone remotely associated with the libertarian cause. Then, Bob set about trying to secure enough initial subscribers to L. R. to yield a reasonable prospect of putting the journal on a paying basis.

Kephart estimated that an initial total — or at least the firm prospect of the total — of 10,000 subscribers was needed to make L. R. an economically viable proposition. Yet his best efforts could not boost the prospective number of subscribers above 5,000; and so, as a result, the black news came that Libertarian Review had died stillborn; the great conception was not to bear fruit.

The tragedy of the stillbirth of L. R. is that here was the means for our next great leap forward; there is no doubt that this periodical would have served as the great center, the focus of (a) attracting a large number of new libertarians; (b) spreading our ideas rapidly and effectively to the “outside world”, and (c) refining and advancing our knowledge of theory and of empirical reality.

Are there really no more than 5,000 libertarians in the entire country who read? Optimistically, Bob still insists that the problem is not so much our total number as the dispersion of the troops — the fact that there is no existing libertarian periodical in which ads for L. R. could tap a high ratio of eager subscribers. In short, any new conservative periodical or organization does not have to rely on costly direct mailing to a scattered and dispersed audience; it can advertise in Human Events or National Review. We have no such journal that could serve as a similar advertising outlet.

Bob intends to continue running Books for Libertarians indefinitely, in wait for the day when a Libertarian Review might become feasible. But there is no brooking the fact that we have, all of us, suffered a serious setback.

Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization. There are two fundamentally opposed principles on which social life may be organized — compulsory cooperation and voluntary cooperation, the one implying coercive institutions, the other free institutions. Just in proportion as military activity is great does the coercive regime more pervade the whole society.

— Herbert Spencer

Hospers On Crime And The FBI

The Friends of the FBI, Inc., the organized friends of our national secret police, has published an extensive survey of all the presidential candidates and their answers to its questionnaire (Friends of the FBI, Inc., 1660 L St., N. W., Suite 1214, Washington, D.C. 20036, November 3, 1972). It is instructive to compare the libertarian quality of the answers of John Hospers, the Libertarian Party candidate for President, with those of Dr. Benjamin Spock of the People’s Party and of Linda Jenness of the Socialist Workers’ Party.

1. Q. Do you favor retention of the FBI as it is now constituted?

A. Spock: No. Jenness: No. The FBI should be abolished. Hospers: I favor the retention of the FBI . . .

2. Q. Do you favor major changes in its area of responsibility? What changes?

A. Spock: It should get out of this business of judging who is politically respectable, spying on protestors, fabricating false evidence (as in my case), interfering with legal demonstrations . . . These latter activities are unconstitutional and harmful to a democracy. Hospers: No.

Chalk up a clear libertarian victory for Spock and Jenness.

3. Q. Should overlapping law enforcement responsibilities as now undertaken by the FBI, Bureau of Narcotics and other policing agencies of the federal establishment be consolidated under one command?

A. Spock: Control of narcotics should be made primarily a medical matter. The FBI should be an investigative organization, not a policing or prosecution or publicly accusatory one . . . Jenness: The policing of activities such as heroin and other narcotics pushing should be controlled by the Black, Puerto Rican and Chicano communities which are most affected by them. Hospers: Yes.

Spock again comes closest to the libertarian position, which is to eliminate narcotics enforcement altogether. Jenness’ answer is simply idiotic. But Hospers strikes out again.

3. Q. What is your attitude toward court-authorized electronic surveillance?

A. Spock: Dangerous and impermissible in a democracy because it will always be easily abused for political purposes. Jenness: Any use of electronic surveillance, whether court authorized or not, is a violation of every person’s basic right to privacy. It is furthermore clearly in violation of the Constitution of the United States. Hospers: Courts should be very careful as to what surveillance they authorize, so as not to violate the individual’s right of privacy.

Again, Hospers’ answer is shilly-shallying, less libertarian than Spock’s, and far less than Jenness’, who gave the answer that the Libertarian Party candidate should have given.

4. Q. (Essentially) For what criminal activities should electronic surveillance be used?

A. Spock: I oppose its utilization for all types of criminal activities. Hospers: It should be employed in combatting: espionage; sedition and treason; organized crime; the illicit drug traffic; criminal conspiracy to commit crimes of violence . . .

Spock here joins Jenness in all-out opposition to electronic surveillance, which is clearly an invasion of the individual’s right to privacy in his property. Hospers not only endorses such invasion to combat legitimate crimes, but also for “sedition and treason” (What’s that? Isn’t libertarianism in itself “seditious”?); organized crime (which is largely the sale of legitimate goods and services unfortunately declared illegal); and the drug traffic (ditto.)

5. Q. What program would you favor to streamline the Federal court procedures so that the accused could be given as rapid a trial as possible?

A. Spock: Many more and better lawyers paid for by the government so that all defendants . . . will be assured a fair trial. Many more judges. Jenness: The courts should be reformed to insure not only that the accused gets a speedy trial, but also that it is a fair one. This means that Blacks, and members of other oppressed nationalities in this country should have a jury of their peers . . . This also means the end to excessive bail in political cases. Hospers: Increase greatly the number of federal and state judges. Also legislation to the effect that if a trial was not conducted within a certain time, the case would be dropped.

All are bad here. Spock wants more government handouts for compulsory egalitarianism and more mulcting of the taxpayers. Jenness is back with the absurd quota system, but at least indicates that there is something wrong with the bail system, which clearly discriminates against poor defendants. Hospers is fine on calling for speedy trials, but is even worse than the others in urging greater mulcting of the taxpayer for still more incompetent and politically-appointed judges. Surely the libertarian answer would include (a) shifting more cases from government judges to private arbitration, and (b) eliminating the bail system so as to free all defendants not actually caught in the act until their conviction has been obtained.

6. Q. What need do you see for prison reform. . .?

A. Spock: Vast and complete prison reform so that prison is for rehabilitation . . . Jenness: (A long list of proposed “rights” for prisoners). Hospers: No compulsory mental (psychiatric) detention. If many of the present crimes were no longer legal crimes, the prison load would be greatly relieved.

At long last, a clear-cut libertarian victory for Hospers. Spock sinks into the totalitarian liberal miasma of “rehabilitation”, which of course would gauge sentences of prisoners on the judgements of physicians or psychiatrists on whether the prisoners have been “rehabilitated.” Jenness would hardly distinguish prisoners from anyone else. Hospers’ answer is fine, but needs to be supplemented, particularly by a stress on shifting the entire concept of punishment to emphasize restitution by the criminal to his victim, a concept which is now completely forgotten.

7. Q. Do you consider our present penal laws and court interpretation of them to be as fair to victims as to the accused?

A. Spock: Yes, as far as I know. Jenness: (A whole string of irrelevancies about taxing the rich, Angela Davis, the Vietnam War, Third World “oppression”, etc.) Hospers: No. The accused is constantly reminded of his rights, even when it means that testimony necessary for conviction is thereby made impossible. (Hospers then goes on to advocate the restoration of capital punishment, and concludes:) The pendulum should surely swing back to consideration for the rights of victims.

While stiffer sentences for criminals, including restoration of capital punishment for murder, is a fine libertarian position, one stops short at Hospers’ attack on “constantly reminding” the accused of his rights. These rights include the right not to be subject in a forced confession, and are basic to any libertarian concept of society. The difference here, and the vital one, is between an accused person and a convicted criminal. Deal harshly with the latter, but be scrupulous about protecting the rights of a man who is, on Anglo-Saxon as well as libertarian canons of justice, innocent until proven guilty. Hospers has tragically forgotten the canon of the great English jurist Blackstone: “It is better that:ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” On balance, Spock wins out again over Hospers.

8. Q. Which of the following areas of criminal activity deserve top federal priority: organized crime; unorganized street crime; illicit drug traffic; sex crimes; other?

A. Spock: Organized crime deserves top federal priority. Hospers: Organized crime and unorganized street crime deserve top federal priority as does illicit drug traffic as long as laws prohibit it. Sex crime does not, except for rape.

Note the logical clinkers here. First, the question does not ask which laws should be enforced, but which deserve top priority? Surely, then, a libertarian would not advocate top priority for enforcing those laws which should not exist on the books at all. Hospers does this for sex crimes; why not for “illicit drug traffic?” If, on the other hand, Hospers insists on taking the blind rightist position that all laws should be enforced to the hilt so long as they are on the books, then why exempt sex crimes? In fact, of course, the top priority here should be unorganized street crime, since “organized crime” is largely legitimate entrepreneurship.

9. Q. Should laws against so-called “victimless” crimes be repealed? If so, which ones? Here all three, Spock, Jenness, and Hospers, came out in favor of repeal of the whole kit and kaboodle, the libertarian position.

For a brief quantitative summary on matters of crime and the FBI, on the eight separable questions above, Dr. Spock gave the best libertarian answer or tied for the best five times, Linda Jenness three times, and John Hospers three times.

The Blackmailer As Hero

By Walter Block

Is blackmail really illegitimate? At first glance it is not hard to answer this question. The only problem it would seem to pose is why it is being asked at all. For do not blackmailers well, . . . blackmail people? And what could be worse? Blackmailers prey on your most hidden deep dark secrets, they threaten to publicize them, they bleed you white, they can even drive you to suicide. Blackmail is so evil that even to consider its legitimacy will strike many as an unmitigated evil; even those scholars who would otherwise favor the spirit of free and untrammeled inquiry.

We shall push on in any case. And we shall find that the critique of the blackmailer falls like a house of cards; we shall find that the case against blackmail is based on a tissue of unexamined shibbleths, blown out of all proportion, and on deep philosophical misunderstandings.

What, exactly, is blackmail? Blackmail is the offer of a trade; it is the offer to trade something, usually silence, for some other good, usually money. If the offer of the blackmail trade is accepted, then the blackmailer maintains his silence and the blackmailee pays the agreed amount of money. If the blackmail offer is rejected, then the blackmailer may exercise his right of free speech, and perhaps announce and publicize the secret. Notice that there is nothing amiss here. All that is happening is that an offer to maintain silence is being made. If the offer is rejected, the blackmailer does no more than exercise his rights of free speech, something he has a complete right to do in the first place, whether or not the offer is made or accepted.

The only difference between a gossip or blabbermouth and the blackmailer is that the blackmailer will refrain from speaking — for a price. In a sense the gossip or the blabbermouth is much worse than the blackmailer, for the blackmailer at least gives you a chance to shut him up. The blabbermouth and gossip just up and spill the beans. A person with a secret he wants kept will be much better off if a blackmailer rather than a gossip or blabbermouth gets hold of it. With the blabbermouth or gossip, as we have said, all is lost. With the blackmailer, one can only gain, or at worst, be no worse off. If the price required by the blackmailer for his silence is worth less than the secret, the secret-holder will pay off, and accept the lesser of the two evils. He will gain the difference to him between the value of the secret and the price of the blackmailer. It is only in the case that the blackmailer demands more than the secret is worth that the information gets publicized. But in this case the secret-keeper is no worse off with the blackmailer than with the inveterate gossip. (He may still be better off with the blackmailer, even here, because the typical blackmailer gains nothing if he publicizes the secret — except the dubious value of making sure that the secret-keeper knows he is not bluffing — so the secret keeper may well be able to bargain down the blackmailer’s price.) It is indeed difficult, then, to account for the vilification suffered by the blackmailer, at least compared to the gossip, who is usually dismissed with merely slight contempt.

Blackmail need not entail the offer of silence in return for money. This is only the most well known form. More generally, blackmail may be defined as threatening to do something, anything, (which is otherwise entirely legal) unless unless the blackmailer’s demands, financial or otherwise, are met. In its more general form there are several acts which qualify as blackmail but interestingly enough, far from receiving the vilification associated with blackmail, have even attained respectability among certain segments of the population. As an example, let us consider the lettuce boycott, beloved of every radio-lib worth his limousine.

The lettuce boycott is (a form of) blackmail!! What is being done in the lettuce boycott (and every other boycott, for that matter), what the lettuce boycott consists of, is making threats to various retailers and wholesalers of fruits and vegetables. These threats are that if the retailer or wholesaler handles non-union lettuce, people will be asked not to patronize their establishments. The not inconsiderable energies, time, and money of the lettuce boycott movement will be brought to bear on all handlers of non-union lettuce.

Now, there are plenty of reasons to oppose the boycott of non-union lettuce. But I am here concerned to show that the lettuce boycott is indeed blackmail, and that, as a form of blackmail, it is entirely legitimate. We can see that the lettuce boycott conforms perfectly to the more general definition of blackmail as a threat that something otherwise entirely legal will take place unless the blackmailer’s demands are met. In this case, the threat is to withhold patronage from establishments unless they refuse to handle non-union lettuce. Although it is not legal to threaten this, it is perfectly legal not to patronize establishments that one, for any reason, does not like. So the lettuce boycott is legitimate, and blackmail as well, a pair of strange bedfellows if ever there was one.

Let us consider the question of the threats involved in blackmail, because perhaps more than anything else, it is this aspect of blackmail that is most misunderstood and feared. Now threats are usually considered evil, and rightly so. The usual dictum against aggression warns of aggression against non-aggressors as well as the threat of such aggression. And the reason is not hard to fathom. If a highwayman were to accost us, it is usually the threat of aggression that will get us to do his bidding. It is the threat of aggression that will relieve us of our possessions. If the highwayman actually had to use aggression against us, as opposed to the threat thereof, it would be practically an admission of defeat. So the threat of aggression is entirely illegitimate.

But notice that the threat involved in blackmail is entirely different. In aggression, what is being threatened is aggressive violence, something that the aggressor has no right to do. In blackmail, however, what is being “threatened” is something that the blackmailer most certainly does have a right to do! To exercise his right of free speech, to gossip about our secrets, or in the case of the lettuce boycott, to threaten not to patronize certain stores. One can hardly call the “threat” in blackmail a real threat. When contrasted to the real threat of the highwayman, the “threat” of the blackmailer can only be characterized as an offer to keep silent, and not as a real threat at all. The blackmailer never threatens bodily violence or any type of violence. If he did, he would no longer be a legitimate blackmailer; he would be an illegitimate aggressor, who uses threats as a means of coercion.

There is one case where blackmail would not be legitimate, but not because it is blackmail. It would rather be illegitimate because it would be in violation of a contract. For instance, if the secret-keeper takes a lawyer or a private investigator into his confidence on the condition that, among other things, the confidence be maintained in secrecy, then, if the lawyer or private investigator turns around and tries to blackmail him, it would be in violation of the contract, and therefore illegitimate. It is only when the blackmail violates an agreement that it is illegitimate. If there is no contract, if it is a perfect stranger who holds the secret, then the blackmail is legitimate because perfect strangers have free speech rights. It is only someone who has sold his right to speak freely (about the secrets of his client) like the lawyer or the private investigator who then has no right to engage in blackmail.

In addition to being a legitimate activity, blackmail has many good effects, the litanies to the contrary notwithstanding. And once we get over the shock that there is anything at all that can be said in favor of blackmail, it is not too surprising that this should be so. For apart from some innocent victims that get caught in the net, who does the blackmailer prey upon? There are two groups. On the one hand we have the murderer, the thief, the swindler, the embezzler, the cheater, the rapist, etc., all criminals and violators of the stricture against aggression upon non-aggressors. On the other hand we have people who engage in activities which are not illegitimate themselves, but go against the mores and habits of the majority of the people. There are the homosexuals, the sado-masochists, the sex perverts, the communists, the adulterers, etc. It is my contention that the institution of blackmail has beneficial, but different, effects on each of these groups, none of which seem to have been realized by writers on the subject. Let us consider them each in turn.

In the case of the criminals, blackmail, the threat of blackmail, and the very existence of the institution of blackmail serves as a hindrance. It makes the payoff to the criminal less certain and less rewarding because if caught, the criminal must now share some of his “hard won” loot with the blackmailer, with the risk that the blackmailer can always turn him in. Even with blackmail illegal, this can have a much greater effect than many people would believe possible. How many of the anonymous “tips” received by the police can be traced, directly or indirectly, to blackmail? And the value of these tips cannot be over estimated. How many criminals are led to pursue crime on their own, eschewing the aid of fellow criminals in “jobs” that call for cooperation — out of fear of possible later blackmail? Since there are always some people on the verge of committing crimes, or at the margin of criminality, as the economist would say, where the least factor will propel them one way or another, the additional fear of crime-related blackmail may be enough, in many cases, to dissuade them from crime.

Imagine then how much more effective blackmail would be in curtailing real crime if blackmail itself were legalized! Then the blackmailer would not have to worry about possible legal steps being taken against him because of his public-spirited preying on criminals. This would undoubtedly encourage the quantity and quality of such blackmail efforts, with attendant depredations upon our criminal class.

It is sometimes said that what diminishes crime is not the penalty attached to the crime but the certainty of being caught. Although this controversy rages with great relevance in the debates on capital punishment, we need not enter into it here. For our purposes it will suffice to point out that the institution of blackmail does both. It increases the penalty associated with crime, since criminals are forced to share a part of their loot with the blackmailer. It also raises the probability of being caught, as the blackmailers are now added to the police, private citizens, vigilantes and others whose function if not purpose it is to suppress crime. And let it be added that blackmailers who can often be members of the criminal gang in good standing are in an especially good position to foil crimes. Their “inside” position surpasses even that of a spy or infiltrator, who is forced to play a part. The blackmailer can live the part of the criminal, for until he turns against the gang as a blackmailer, he really is a criminal. Legalizing blackmail also will at one fell swoop allow us to take advantage of not one but two crime-fighting adages: “divide and conquer,” and “take advantage of the lack of honor among thieves.” So it is pretty clear that one effect of legalizing blackmail will be to diminish crimes of aggression.

The legalization of blackmail will also have good effects upon actions which may be illegal but are not criminal in the sense that they involve aggression but are at variance with the mores of the majority of the people. Far from suppressing them, the legalization of blackmail will have a liberating effect.

Even now, with blackmail still illegal, we are witnessing some of its beneficial effects. Let us take homosexuality as an example. Homosexuality may be illegal but is not really criminal since it involves no aggression. For individual homosexuals, we must admit, blackmail causes untold harm and can hardly be considered beneficial. But for the group as a whole, or rather, for each individual as a member of the group, blackmail has helped. Blackmail has helped the gay community as a whole by making homosexuality more widely known, by making the public more accustomed to homosexuality, and by placing the homosexual in a more open light. In so doing, the blackmailer has contributed to forcing the homosexuals to make themselves more known. Let it be repeated. Forcing individual members of a downtrodden group out into the open, or “out of the closet”, can by no stretch of the imagination be considered doing them a favor. Forcing anyone to do anything can usually only violate rights; and forcing someone to do something “for his own good” is a particular rung in hell reserved for liberals. But still it must be realized that practically the only way a downtrodden group of people can attain liberation is by being known to each other so that they can cooperate with each other. And it must be realized that one important effect of blackmail is to force people out into the open where they will be able to know each other. In this way blackmail can legitimately claim some small share in the credit for the liberation of groups whose only crime is to deviate from the norm in some non-criminal way.

It is not surprising that this should be so when we reflect upon the old aphorism that “the truth shall make you free”. For the only “weapon” at the disposal of the blackmailer is the truth. If it were not for the truth, the blackmailer would be in no position to be able to blackmail. But in using the truth to back up his threats, as upon occasion he must, without any intention on his part he sets the truth free to do whatever good, as well as whatever bad, it is capable of doing.

The law of nature, being co-eval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is superior in obligation to every other. It is binding all over the globe, in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid derive their force and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from the original.

— Blackstone

From The Old Curmudgeon

The Flickering Match. Mr. Fred Woodworth is unhappy. That much, at least, is fairly clear. What he is unhappy about is far less clear, but it seems to revolve about the insufficient recognition accorded to the greatness of Mr. Woodworth and his monthly tabloid The Match. Having granted to the State the benefit of their hysterical billingsgate for several years, and having failed to accomplish its immediate overthrow, Mr. Woodworth and his colleagues have now turned their baleful attentions to the libertarian movement. Each faction and tendency in the movement, and the movement itself for that matter, has been in its turn excommunicated by Mr. Woodworth for insufficient purity and for failure to acknowledge the primacy and importance of The Match. It is quite true that The Match has existed for several years, but quantity does not quality make, as witness the turgid and very long-lasting The Weekly People, organ of the Socialist Labor Party. Indeed, The Match has ranked for clarity and interest scarcely a centimeter ahead of The Weekly People, having focussed on repeated and spectacularly unsuccessful calls for immediate overthrow of the State, and lengthy and turgid reprints from the anarcho-communist classics. The general failure of the libertarian movement to pay much attention to The Match is the product, not of a conspiracy as Mr. Woodworth seems to believe, but of simple good sense.

Debasement of Language. The latest phase of the assault by the New Barbarians on the English language is at the same time an assault on biological reality: the campaign to purge the word “man” from the language and substitute the unisexual term “person.” If the barbarians have their way, we will soon by subjected to such phrases as the following:

“Quick, send for the repairperson.”

“A foeperson worthy of his or her steel.”

“The sturdy yeopeople of England.”

“The rights of huperson beings.”

“Friends, Romans, and countrypeople . . .”

“When is the postperson coming?”

“The International Longshorepeople’s Union.”

“Madpeople in authority . . .”

“God created person in his own image, in the image of God created he him and her . . . The Lord God formed person of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his or her nostrils the breath of life; and person became a living soul.”

“Person is the measure of all things.”

“The proper study of personkind is person.”

The Christmas Spirit. From Pogo:

1st Character: “You mean we’re all dedicated to peace an’ love for the next month?”

2nd Character: “Yep . . . with goodwill toward all.”

3rd Character: “Kind of takes the bloom off’n the bush don’t it?”

The International Commission for Inquiry into War Crimes in Vietnam, founded by Lord Russell in 1967, has recently completed its third session in Copenhagen, Denmark. Two earlier meetings were held in Stockholm and Copenhagen in 1967 and 1968. While the American press did its duty by ignoring as much as it could the evidence that emerged from the tribunal’s investigations, the press of Europe gave much greater coverage and the resulting horror among the general public did much to dissipate America’s image as a defender of liberty and human dignity. What is most surprising about this latest session of the tribunal is that it was officially opened by a speech of the Danish Prime Minister Anker Joergensen who demanded that the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam. This public association with the privately sponsored “war crimes” tribunal by the Danish leader “shocked” the American State Department which sent a note of displeasure to our NATO ally. Among those who signed reports on American War Crimes submitted to the tribunal was Anthony Russo, a co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers trial; Prof. Chandler Morse of Cornell University; Sean MacBride, former Foreign Minister of Ireland; and — Ramsay Clark, former Attorney General in the cabinet of retired war criminal Lyndon B. Johnson! The times they are a-changing!

Ezra Pound, RIP

By James Dale Davidson

Ezra Pound is dead in Venice at the age of 87. He was recognized as a genius. During his long life he helped to shape modern literature, both through his own work and through the immense influence he exerted on others. Pound discovered Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. “It is probable,” Joyce wrote, “that but for him I would still be the unknown drudge that he discovered.” Under Pound’s influence, William Butler Yeats abandoned Celtic romanticism for the mature style which made him one of literature’s greatest pgets. Ezra Pound edited “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s masterwork, cutting it in half. In appreciation, Eliot lauded Pound with the dedication, “il migior fabbro,” (the better artisan). Pound authored a prodigious body of poetry. His bitter masterpiece, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” expressed the feelings of a generation after the disillusionment of World War I.

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilazation.

. . .

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

The Cantos, a huge, rambling poem which occupied Pound for most of his life, has generated divided critical comment. Attacked by some as incoherent, it has been praised by others as the great epic of modern times.

Perhaps one of the great translators in history, Pound published English versions of works written in such diverse tongues as: Chinese, Ancient Egyptian, Anglo-Saxon, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Greek, French, and Provencal. He even found time to write an opera, “The Testament of Francois Villon.”

Few men have assumed a more dominant role in the literature of their time. Yet Pound died an exile, shunned by the liberal intelligentsia. In an article published in World magazine just two weeks before Pound’s death, critic Irving Howe wrote, “The time has not yet come when Ezra Pound should be honored by his fellow writers.” That is a rather problematic statement considering that Pound has already been honored by his fellow writers. His great contemporaries, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, Frost, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, and others were high in his praise. What Howe really means by the phrase “his fellow writers” is the New York liberal establishment, the self-important moral guardians of the world.

Howe and his associates will be long forgotten when Ezra Pound is still remembered. Yet they should not remain unanswered. Why deny Pound the honor due a great poet? Because he was a bad man? Because he was illiberal? Pound has been considered bad for one reason — he did not support American participation in World War II. In fact, he loudly opposed the war, openly urging an end to the hostilities. His position in regard to World War II was not unlike that of innumerable liberal luminaries toward the unhappy War in Vietnam. Pound spoke out. But in his case he spoke out over Rome Radio and was indicted for treason.

When the U.S. entered the Second World War, Pound was earning a living broadcasting commentary in Italy, where he had been a resident for several decades. Upon hearing that war had been declared, Pound rushed from Rome to his home in Rapallo, sold everything, and planned to leave with the other Americans aboard the last train to Lisbon. But the American consul refused to allow him on the train. Denied the right of refuge, Pound was trapped. Faced with financial ruin, he continued his radio program on the condition he would never be asked to say anything “contrary to his conscience or contrary to his duties as an American citizen — which promise was faithfully observed by the Italian government.” Upon the War’s end, Pound was arrested by American soldiers and thrown into a prison camp. There he was left exposed to the elements, imprisoned in an open steel cage at the age of 60. Somehow, he survived. When he was returned to the United States he was never able to stand trial. Instead, he was declared “insane” and committed to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. There he remained for 12 years.

The shoddy treatment which Pound suffered at the hands of the American government was in many ways parallel to the treatment afforded Alexander Solzhenitsyn by the Soviet state. Both were arrested in 1945. Both were arrested for criticizing their respective governments — Solzhenitsyn in a letter and Pound before a microphone. Both confined in conditions of cruelty, Pound in a military prison camp and Solzhenitsyn in Siberia, where he was kept in a cell with frozen walls, protected only by underwear. Both Pound and Solzhenitsyn have been accused of “insanity”, primarily because of their political views. The parallel is a strong one. But there it ends.

While Solzhenitsyn is accorded the support he deserves in his struggle with state tyranny, Pound was shunned until the moment of his death. The critics, professors, and cross-word puzzle experts who earn their livings jabbering over the literature Pound helped to create, imagine themselves too moral to extend him their praise.

This is not to say that a writer’s values, political and otherwise, are irrelevant to the merit of his work. Far from it. Every writer’s reputation should suffer to the extent that his writing extols fallacious and destructive ideas. Most of the poets and novelists of this or any era have been thoroughly mixed up about many facets of life. John Stuart Mill described Samuel Taylor Coleridge as an “arrant driveller,” when it came to his abilities as a political economist. From a libertarian perspective, that charge applies to Pound. But that should not blind us to the strengths of Pound’s insight. He deserves credit for a valiant effort to penetrate the political and cultural morass in which we still live. As a humane and perceptive man, he sought answers to the sickness of civilization, as it was revealed in the destruction of World War I. Writing in 1918 Pound said he, “began investigation of the causes of war, to oppose same.” To his credit, he sought a systematic solution, one which recognized the overwhelming impact of economics. If the solution he achieved was imperfect; tinged with Fascistic implications, Pound more than requited his error by enduring imprisonment for thirteen years.

The fact that Pound admired Fascists is no worse from a libertarian point of view than the fact that Irving Howe and company admire liberal corporatists who are little different from Fascists. In fact, Pound saw some of the evils facing society with a good deal more acuity than his liberal critics. He was almost alone among writers in understanding that inflation is one of the pervasive factors curtailing civilization. Much of his poetry is devoted to attacking the practise of banking as it is known in the modern world — whereby banks create money out of nothing and then charge interest on it. He said:

“and the two largest rackets are the alteration

Of the value of money

(Of the unit of money . . .)

and usury or lending

that which is made out of nothing.”

(Canto 74)

Even though Pound employed a muddled definition of “usury”, this is a valid liberation concern. He simply lacked a sound theoretical base from which to develop a solution.

In studying the causes of World War I, Pound reached much the same conclusion as that achieved by revisionist historians. He felt that the war was brought on by international profiteers. Like the John Birch Society, Pound considered the Federal Reserve to be a private corporation, and agitated for “government” takeover of the money supply. This is why he admired Mussolini. He believed Fascism would end inflation. “Mussolini,” Pound wrote, “followed Andrew Jackson in opposing the tyranny of state debt.” Too bad he never read What Has Government Done To Our Money?

Pound was off the mark, but not that far off. Although he was accused of Anti-Semitism, he made clear he was not opposed to Jews, only to the Rothschilds, who remain the prototype of scheming bankers. He said, “I am accused of Anti-Semitism. Why then do I respect Spinoza, esteem Montaigne as a writer, and work to re-establish the fame of Alex del Mar, who I believe was a Jew?” Although he erred in believing Fascism could eliminate inflation, Pound had an essentially accurate view of the evils of state control. “Socialism,” he said, “is synonymous for imbecility because it wants to govern by multiplying bureaucracies, tyrannically controlling all minor activities . . .”

Yes, there is much in Pound to delight a libertarian. What man who said “I have a total contempt for Marx and Freud,” could be all bad? His understanding of space exploration seems more to the point than that of some self-processed libertarians. “You cannot live in a Sputnik and you cannot find your food in a Sputnik. What mankind needs is an internal harmony, which may balance the increase of brutality and desperation we are living through.” True enough. And in an age when Bleeding-Heart liberalism has permeated everything, with myriad crackpot groups seeking subsidy and “reparations” from the society which has “held them down,” it is still refreshing to read Pound. “No one in society,” he wrote, “has any right to blame his troubles on anyone else. Liberal thought has been a mess mush because of the tendency to produce this state of mind.” He did have a talent for language.

Though the liberals may be silent about Pound, in death as in life, his work contains much to please a discerning reader. With all its obscurity, his poetry sparkles. And it is the record of a man who not only wrote put his vision of the tragedy of modern life, but suffered for it as well. Remembering his years in prison and the insane asylum it is not hard to hope that “Uncle Ez,” as he sometimes called himself, rests in peace.

We Make The Electoral College!

On December 18, the august members of the Electoral College met to cast their votes for President and Vice-President of the United States. Constitutionally, the electors can vote for anyone they please, and on that day, to the undoubted consternation of the Establishment, one of the presumed Nixon electors from Virginia cast his vote for John Hospers and Toni Nathan for President and Vice-President.

The publicity value for libertarianism and for the Libertarian Party was enormous, and it surely more than justifies the decision of the LP to wage its campaign. Why, Hospers and Nathan got almost as many electoral votes as McGovern and Shriver!

Who is this intrepid elector, this man who quietly defied the political gods? He does not, in fact, come out of the blue. Middle-aged libertarians remember him well as a leading, if rather moderate, member of the movement: Roger Lea MacBride, grandson and executor of the notable libertarian writer Rose Wilder Lane. Born in 1929, Rober graduated from Princeton, where he was one of the founders of the “Free Enterprise Society”, and from which he went on to Harvard Law School, where he managed to keep his strict constructionist outlook. While at Harvard, he wrote a scholarly booklet on The American Electoral College, which Caxton published in 1953. After graduation, Roger settled down in Vermont, and into conservative-libertarian Republican politics; for several years he was a Representative in a State House. In later years, Roger moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he rose to prominence in Republican party affairs, in 1972 becoming a Presidential elector. The over-confident Republicans had forgotten the libertarian who lurked beneath the common Republican rhetoric — not knowing that for MacBride the talk of freedom was not just rhetoric but very serious business indeed.

MacBride did not simply cast his maverick vote; he explained his position. He declared his vote to be “an attempt to put party principle ahead of party politics.” MacBride added that “in casting my vote for another candidate I am trying to tell (President Nixon) that he has lost his way; that this country should not move to a controlled mercantilistic economy . . . “He explained that he could not vote for Nixon because he has moved the government toward “ever greater control over the lives of us all.” (Ronald Taylor, “Electoral College Confirms Nixon Despite Defector,” Washington Post, Dec. 19.)

In an appreciative column written on the day of the vote, Nicholas von Hoffman tells us more about Roger and his choice, (von Hoffman, “A First Vote, Maybe a Last,” Washington Post, Dec. 18.) Von Hoffman relates that the Republican politicos in Virginia “must have thought he was just another guy after the boodle and not a convinced and deeply strict constructionist.” MacBride agonized over the decision (“This is no overly demonstrative Abbie Hoffman of the far right.”) He further quotes from Roger his worry about the slide of the country into “Connalyism, the managed controls for corporations . . . the return to mercantilism . . . What I’m really trying to say by this is, ‘Break loose from Big Brother.’” Hear, hear!

Von Hoffman also writes appreciatively of the now-forgotten Bricker Amendment, derided by all right-thinking liberals in the fifties as “isolationist, looney-bin right-wing-ism, and the kind of thinking that martyred Woodrow Wilson and destroyed the League of Nations.” He notes that MacBride had written another book in favor of the Bricker Amendment, “a proposed constitutional amendment that would have subjugated to the advice and consent of the Senate the President’s powers to make executive agreements with foreign powers.” But, as von Hoffman trenchantly concludes, “It got shot down and we marched into Vietnam and now it’s Fulbright and the sophisticates (who bitterly opposed the Bricker Amendment at the time) who’d like to get it back.”

Welcome, Roger, it’s a pleasure to see you strike a powerful and publicity-packed blow for liberty. And the Hospers-Nathan ticket now become, at the very least, immortalized in the record books.

Freedom, Pot, And National Review

It is rare indeed that any debate takes place within the august pages of National Review, and few that did not involve the late Frank Meyer, with Frank generally taking the libertarian position. But now the headlines have been made with NR’s October 8 issue, over the question of legalizing marijuana. Generally, the libertarian reaction has been chortling or huzzahing over the partial conversion of Bill Buckley to the call for legalization. I submit that this is an unfortunately simplistic response.

In the first place, Richard Cowan’s article in favor of legalization was not at all on libertarian grounds. On the contrary, the burden of his article was that pot should be legalized because it is not very harmful, if it be harmful at all. Buckley’s conversion is on similar grounds. Even so, he inconsistently advocates not legalization but “decriminalization”, which apparently means that the sale of marijuana should be illegal but not its purchase or possession. Buckley apparently feels that it is argument enough to say that “Thus it was, mostly, under prohibition.” Is Prohibition to be the model of the free or the good society? In a press conference, Buckley added the sly note that he himself had once smoked the weed, but, as befits a staunch defender of law-and-order, only on a yacht outside the three-mile limit. Are we supposed to applaud Mr. Buckley’s fortunate status as yacht-owner?

The libertarian case for legalization of anything has nothing whatever to do with whether it is harmful or not. The libertarian maintains that it is up to each individual to run his own life, and that it is his right, as Herbert Spencer once wrote, to go to hell in his own way if he so chooses. The argument against Prohibition had nothing to do with whether or how much alcohol could be harmful; so that medical reports or statistics on drunken driving were totally beside the point. Put on such grounds, it was Professor Jeffrey Hart, an opponent of legalization and an anti-libertarian who had by far the best of the debate. Hart stated at the beginning that he didn’t care, in the context of the argument, whether or not marijuana was harmful; for even if it is, “that doesn’t mean they (harmful things) should be illegal. . .” Hart seized unerringly upon the note of special pleading in the Cowan article, the implication that Cowan favors legalization because he personally considers it it a good thing. In particular, Hart jumped on this passage of Cowan: “The importance of marijuana to its youthful users is less the pleasure it gives the individual than the tribal value of it. The drug’s use in the counterculture is . . . as a social lubricant . . . so fundamental a part of the new social life . . .”

Hart responded to this in a magnificently Old Curmudgeonly manner. Hart replies that “Marijuana is indeed an integral part of the counterculture of the 1960’s”, and it is precisely because Professor Hart — along with the bulk of Middle America — would like to smash that counterculture that he favors maintaining the current status of the law. As Hart writes with relish: “the meaning of those laws in the current historical circumstance is plain enough. They aim to lean on, to penalize the counterculture. They reflect the opinion, surely a majority one, that the counterculture, and its manners and morals, and all its works are bad.” He concludes: “as for the ‘new social life’, érasez l’infâme.”

Mr. Hart has scored some palpable hits. Not only against Mr. Cowan but also against all too many libertarians. For many libertarians address the marijuana issue not simply in the terms: “Everyone has the right to run his own life”; but also with the claim either that marijuana is harmless or even that it is a positive good. The underlying note of special pleading on this issue is all too often evident.

It is important for libertarians to set the record straight on this issue. It is important, for one, to make it crystal clear that calling for the legalization of anything never implies for the libertarian any sort of advocacy of the thing itself. The libertarian, for example, favors the legalization of gambling, not because we advocate gambling as a good thing, but because this is part of every person’s right to order his own life in his own way.

There is an excellent way, I submit, to make the libertarian position crystal clear in the case of marijuana; it is a way, furthermore, that will extend the emphasis of the libertarian position itself. And that way is always to link marijuana with heroin. For no one says that heroin is harmless; and, what is more no one is running around the country advocating the “philosophy” of taking heroin as a method of “greening” or of “expanding one’s consciousness.” Every thinking person hates and reviles heroin. So therefore if we always link our advocacy of legalization of the two drugs there will be no possible confusion or implication that we favor pot for its own sake, and, furthermore, the idea of legalizing heroin would also be advanced at the same time. If someone asks us whether we favor legalizing pot, let us therefore always answer: “Yes, and heroin too, and for the same reason.” Let the special pleaders wince though they may.

Recommended Reading

Authority vs. Power. Too many libertarians make the mistake of believing that liberty is the polar opposite of “authority”. The brilliant conservative sociologist R. A. Nisbet has been demonstrating just the reverse: that genuine authority, the authority of standards, of civilization, of language, above all of reason, is based on voluntary consent. Furthermore, the mistaken revolt against this kind of authority leads to cultural and social chaos, and finally to a turning toward the imposition of social order by force, by the evil of power and coercion, particularly by an adored dictator (Mao, Fidel). For the most recent of his writings on this subject, see Robert A. Nisbet, “The Nemesis of Authority”, Intercollegiate Review (Winter-Spring 1972). Should be particularly sobering reading for our left-wing.

Child Labor. Nearly a half century ago, the young English economist William H. Hutt published a remarkable article pointing out that the child labor prevalent in the England of the Industrial Revolution was really a boon to the working children and their families, considered in the context of their previous miserable existence. The article was reprinted in F. A. Hayek’s classic volume of collected essays in defense of the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism and the Historians. Last year, the English leftist Brian Inglis attacked the five-decade old article; now Professor Hutt publishes his cogent reply, which serves to update his original contribution. Important for anyone interested in the Industrial Revolution. See W. H. Hutt, “The Poor Who Were With Us,” Encounter (November, 1972).

Railroad Regulation. Albro Martin’s widely hailed Enterprise Denied is an attempt to criticize American railroad regulation in the twentieth century. But in a devastating review-article, Professor George Hilton, an outstanding authority on railroad history, shows that Martin understands neither the economics of cartels nor the historical contributions of Gabriel Kolko, and thus believes that the railroads have been opposed to federal regulation. Hilton shows that Martin’s policy conclusions fit with his analytic mistakes, since he wants only to modify the regulation but leave the crippling cartellizing programs of the ICC. Hilton, in contrast, clearly advocates the ICC’s abolition. George W. Hilton, “Albro Martin’s Enterprise Denied,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science (Autumn, 1972).

Isolationism. Professor Justus Doenecke, our foremost historian of America isolationists, has reworked his study of Lawrence Dennis which originally appeared in Libertarian Analysis. See Justus D. Doenecke, “Lawrence Dennis: Revisionist of the Cold War,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (Summer, 1972).

A Response To The Challenge

The editor of The Libertarian Forum puts the following challenge to those who consider government a morally justifiable, even necessary, part of a free society:

Suppose that, heedless of your edicts, two or more competing private defense agencies exist already within a given geographical area. Each consciously pursues and applies a libertarian law code which all of us would agree to. On which one of these agencies would you bestow your approval, and which would you presume to outlaw? What would be your criteria for choosing one over the others?

I submit that this is a totally impossible supposition, a contradiction in terms. For the following reasons:

If libertarian law applies within a given area, and that area is inhabited by individuals who own the properties that are part of the area, these individuals could not make a contract with two separate law enforcement agencies pertaining to the protection of the same properties. This is because hiring one party to protect my property excludes hiring another to do the same thing in the same respect. So two competing defense agencies cannot exist within the same given geographical area, not under libertarian law. (I am assuming that libertarian law does not violate the laws of identity and non-contradiction.)

The rest of the questions do not apply — no choice need be made between two such agencies in the same area, since two such agencies could not exist within the same area. Thus no criteria would have to be established for making such a choice.

The editor of LF posed an interesting challenge. I believe that I have met it. But let me speculate on what he might answer to the response above.

He might say that “given geographical area” does not mean “same given geographical area.” It means: “the same general vicinity”. But this is something very different. A general vicinity may or may not be suitable for service by different “defense agencies”. Thus the general vicinity of Germany is serviced by the government in Bonn, the general vicinity of Spain by the government in Madrid, etc., etc. But the general vicinity of North America is serviced by the governments in Washington and Ottawa, while the general vicinity of South America is serviced by the governments in the various Latin American capitol cities. So what is a general vicinity, a “given geographical area”?

The editor of LF does not say and so his problem is not clearly enough stated for a solution.

The fact is that when we speak of servicing an area with law enforcement, we must specify the criterion of jurisdiction. The advocate of government by the consent of the governed argues that at any specified period of time, consistent with the type of service involved, etc., only one law enforcing agent or agency, under a unified authority, can and ought to be given jurisdiction; this because with more than one agent, conflict of authority, diversity of purpose and method of operations, etc., will develop, such that the goal of law enforcement will suffer. (It is as if one had two “powers of attorneys”, two people empowered to act in one’s own behalf, each bound separately by the same commitments, each acting separately in one’s best interest, each concerned with the same tasks. Impossible.)

Strictly speaking, government by the consent of the governed carries only a minimum of rules or requirements that lead to (contextually) fixed provisions. One of them is that two governments cannot service the same geographical area for the same purpose, at the same time, etc. The precise length of service is left open. The condition of disengaging (and engaging) service is left open, also (except for certain moral provisions). And, most importantly, the size of the geographical area being serviced by any law enforcer is left open; here the matter hinges primarily on convenience and (contextual) necessity. Just as the markets of bakers, car manufacturers, barbers, and lawyers differ in size, so the markets serviced by a given government would differ, depending on the specific requirements of the service being rendered. (After all, the governments of Lichtenstein and mainland China “service” different size markets — or would, if they were governments by the consent of the governed.)

What the editor of LF and many others do not realize is that in a sense there already exists competition between law enforcement agencies, only their kind of law and enforcement is in need of serious improvement.

Finally, I would like to request of the editor of LF that he refrain from characterizing my view as “Utopian Randian”. That is simply a smear and is not called for in the attempt to undertake to solve a difficult set of problems in political theory.

— Tibor R. Machan

The Editor Replies

Dr. Machan has indeed firmly grasped one horn of the dilemma confronting all advocates of a voluntarily-supported but compulsory monopoly government (whom we may call “Randian” political theorists for short.) But in doing so Dr. Machan has, willy-nilly and apparently unwittingly, fallen headlong into anarcho-capitalism! For by reducing his supposed inner contradiction to the individual (“hiring one party to protect my property excludes hiring another . . .”, etc.), he had precisely adopted my position. It is precisely my view that each individual should have the right to subscribe to any police or other defense service he wishes to protect his own property. But if Smith has this right, and Jones, etc. each with his own property, this is what anarcho-capitalism is all about. The Randian position asserts that there must be a single monopoly defense agency over a given territorial area; the area is never specified — which is a basic flaw in the entire position — but whatever it is, whether Canada or Lichtenstein, it must assuredly be larger than the property of one individual. And it is that concept to which I threw down my challenge. For if Dr. Machan is really arguing for the “geographical area” being the property of each individual, then he has indeed adopted anarcho-capitalism, and we must welcome him to our ranks.

Actually, Dr. Machan’s alleged inner contradiction is not even correct when dealing with an individual’s property. For while it is not very likely empirically, there is certainly no inner contradiction, no impossibility in reality, for an individual to purchase the services of two or more defense agencies in protecting his property. An individual, after all, can and does subscribe to two or more life insurance policies with different companies, or two fire insurance policies over the same property.

To rephrase our challenge to the Randian political theorists: You assert that for any given geographical area (that area being defined as larger than the property of one individual) there must be a compulsory monopoly of defense service. But suppose that two or more such defense agencies, despite your pronouncements, already exist in that area, each consciously pursuing and applying what we would all agree was a libertarian law code of outlawing aggression against the person or property of another. On which one of these agencies would you bestow your approval, and which would you presume to declare an outlaw?

And what would be your criteria of choice for one over the others?

Bormann Once More

Every year or so some poor devil in South America is seized by the scruff of the neck, taken to the capital city, and fingerprinted and harassed without mercy, under the claim that he is the Real Martin Bormann, former high official of the Nazi regime. Usually he is an impoverished peasant of German extraction, and usually the legalized kidnapping is done at the behest of the Israeli espionage service, which seems to have the run of the nations of the world. After a couple of weeks, the evidence becomes manifest that the poor lug is not Bormann, sighs of regret go up around the world, and the peasant is kicked back to his home without so much as a by-your-leave. The sighs of regret, it need hardly be added, are not for the injustice done to the peasant, but to the new failure to apprehend Herr Bormann.

Now a new team of writers maintain that they have at last found the True Bormann, and that he is, would you believe Alive and Well and Living in Argentina. We have no way of knowing at this writing whether he is a true or a pseudo-Bormann, but we would like to advance the heresy that it doesn’t really matter very much. And the further heresy that whether he is or not, this new patsy should be left alone, to end his days in peace.

It is now 27 years after the end of World War II, after the liquidation of the Nazi regime. How much longer is that bloody war to go on, to creep onward claiming yet one more victim? We hold no brief for any state official, but Bormann is not being pursued for the rest of his life and perhaps into the grave for any crimes that he or the German state may have committed over its citizens. He and his colleagues are being pursued for the crime of making war, and that is a crime that only the losers in a war ever get punished for. The Judgment at Nuremberg, was in the words of the English writer Montgomery Belgion, indeed “victor’s justice”, and the high war-making crimes of the Allied victors did not so much as come into question, much less enter the dock at Nuremberg. When the war-making rulers of any other country than Germany or Japan begin to receive equivalent justice from war crimes’ tribunals, then it will be time enough to pursue the last remnants of the National Socialist regime. In the meantime, how about letting the old guy alone, and turning our attention to currently active war crimes?

While we are on the subject of amnesty for Bormann, we might mention the case of that long-standing “prisoner of peace”, Rudolf Hess, who still languishes, 27 years after the war, in solitary confinement in Spandau prison. Hess, defecting from his role as a top official in the Nazi regime, flew alone to Britain during the war in a vain attempt to negotiate peace. Important Communist defectors are invariably given the royal treatment in the West; yet Hess, for his pains has only received lifetime solitary imprisonment at Spandau. Where are the cries for amnesty in the Hess case? Where are all the leftists who have been howling to “Free Huey”, “Free Angela,” and “Free All Political Prisoners”? Why are they so silent on the longest-standing political prisoner of them all? Why are there no campus radicals chalking “Free Rudolph: on the walls of ivy?

“In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free and to be in chains.” — King Stanislaus Leszcynski of Poland

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IV, NO. 11

JANUARY, 1973

75¢

The Apotheosis Of Harry

The American postal authorities used to boast that neither rain nor sleet, etc. shall stay those intrepid couriers on their vital rounds. But as 1972 drew to its end, the mail was suddenly stopped by federal order. In a way, I suppose that this gesture was an appropriate one: a final kick in the teeth of the American public by the shade of Harry S. Truman.

Surely the scale and grandeur of the apotheosis of Harry Truman was unprecedented, even for a media that fawns abjectly upon all Presidents, past and present. When Ike Eisenhower — surely the best President in the past half-century, though this is scarcely a fulsome compliment — died, there was little of the media hysteria lavished upon Truman: at least I do not remember that every network lavished continuing attention for days upon every detail of the President’s life as well as his funeral arrangements. And I’m certain that the mail wasn’t stopped.

But there is method in the madness. For it was the role of the little “populist” from Kansas City’s Pendergast machine to bring this country into the full-scale system that has characterized us since World War II: into our modern role as Corporate State at home and Emperor and Global Crusader abroad. If Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Moses who brought America toward the Promised Land of Corporate Monopoly Empire, with the President as all-powerful Emperor at home and abroad, then Harry Truman was the Joshua who completed the Rooseveltian task. In paying tribute to Harry Truman with the utmost sycophancy, the media are celebrating the present and seemingly permanent status quo. It is in this light, too, that we must consider the fulsome tribute paid to Truman by his one-time supposed “enemy”, Richard Nixon.

In point of fact, there was scarcely a single act committed by President Truman that was not the quintessence of evil; the Truman administration was an unmitigated disaster for freedom, both at home and abroad. It was Harry Truman who launched and then institutionalized the Cold War; it was Harry Truman who fastened the military-industrial complex and the garrison state upon America. It was Harry Truman who institutionalized government budgets that were gigantic by any peacetime criteria in the history of the country. It was Truman who carved out the policy of permanent counter-revolutionary suppression of radical movements in the Third World: from Greece to Iran to the Middle East. It was Truman who put America permanently in Asia as the world “policeman” by his unconstitutional act of entering the Korean civil conflict. It was Truman who, in short, first boldly took us into war without so much as requesting a declaration of war from Congress (in Korea), and thereby cemented the absolute despotism of the Chief Executive in foreign affairs in an act far beyond anything which Franklin Roosevelt had ever contemplated. It was Truman who induced the United Nations to seize Arab lands on behalf of the new state of Israel.

It was Truman, furthermore, who took us in a giant leap toward domestic collectivism and bureaucratic socialism, with his Fair Deal program, a program that later bore fruit in federal aid to education, Medicare, and compulsory integration. It was Truman who instituted price and wage controls during the Korean conflict, and whose “state of emergency” has continued ever since, to account for a raft of domestic despotism. It was Truman, moreover, who severely repressed civil liberties with his loyalty and security programs; not Joe McCarthy but Harry Truman was the real and effective opponent of civil liberties during-the late 1940’s and early fifties. Consider the unfortunate hacks whom Truman appointed to the Supreme Court: every one a defender of government prerogatives in every area as against the liberty of the individual. Look around at the Truman record, and there is scarcely a single area that one can observe without indignation; his administration was truly a cornucopia of horrors.

Last but not least, there was the Truman act of mass murder of innocent civilians at Hiroshima, compounded by Nagasaki. His decision to drop the atomic bomb for the first and let us hope the last times, was done for “reasons of State” as a counter in the emerging Cold War. Not only was it totally unnecessary as a measure to defeat Japan, but what is more Truman knew full well that it was unnecessary. In the long and bloody record of shame in American foreign policy, there is no single act of degradation that can compare with this.

In face of the ghastly Truman record, we cannot remain silent in obedience to the polite canon that one must not speak ill of the dead. If we cannot speak ill of the dead, where is the justice that only the historian can bring to the record of the past? The great classical liberal historian Lord Acton once wrote that the muse of the historian must not be Clio, as generally thought, but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of innocent blood. And in the case of Harry S. Truman, there is O so much blood to avenge.

Sex Breaks Up A Cult

Many Americans have gone in for Indian swami cults. In the swami cult, the Swami is the absolute leader whose every word and act is venerated by his adoring followers. One of the most popular and charismatic swamis has been the Swami Satchidananda, who came to the U.S. from Ceylon in the mid-60’s, and who amassed, under the aegis of his Integral Yoga Institute: 25 centers, 5000 initiates, and 20,000 serious students. From the revenue from these followers, the Swami has gained a luxurious pad in Connecticut, as well as a jet-set life style and famous show biz luminaries as his disciples.

But then a serpent came to Eden. The Swami had always preached strict celibacy for his cult members, a celibacy which seemed to fit the holiness and wisdom exuded by the Swami’s message. But, this summer, it turned out that the Swami may have believed himself to be above the moral law he had preached. For one of his leading disciples broke with the Master and charged in some detail that she and the Swami had been having sexual relations for some time.

Grave crisis struck the cult. As Howard Smith writes in the Village Voice (Dec. 14): “All that inner peace trembled. Coast-to-coast wild rumors and racy stories swirled through the incense smoke. Emergency meetings were held, accusations flew, counter-plots and counter-coups were rampant. General confusion led to schisms and disgust. For a while it was like Peyton Place among the Karma Cadre.”

Two factions, a pro- and anti-Swami faction, developed. The pros cleverly pointed out that the Swami “had never actually come right out in plain words and said he was celibate. It was they who tricked themselves.” The anti-wing left the whole movement in despair, maintaining that “he is a phony therefore it is all phony.” The pros were also shaken, but they tried in vain to hush the whole thing up. Finally, even the pros gave the Swami two alternatives: (1) either stay as the Swami but play down the emphasis on celibacy; or (2) get out as the Swami.

After a display of much “righteous anger”, the Swami Satchidananda “took a kind of guru-ish Fifth Amendment — I am your master and therefore I shouldn’t be questioned.” Finally, the Swami wrote a letter to his disciples admitting nothing and telling them it was time for them to take their spiritual enlightenment in their own hands.

Once again, as so many times in history (e.g. the Saint-Simonians, the Comtean movement), Sex had broken up a cult. Do libertarians see any parallels?

The Pimp As Hero

By Walter Block

The honest, hard working, long suffering pimp has been demeaned unjustly long enough. It is time, it is past time, that this ancient wrong be set right. In this day and age, pimps have been singled out for ridicule because of their pinky rings, their flashy custom-made Cadillacs, their fur coats. From time immemorial, pimps have everywhere been treated as parasites who prey upon prostitutes. Even revolutionary groups, who might have been thought to be able to empathize with other downtrodden minority groups, have viciously turned on pimps.

If we are ever to make a fair assessment of this harassed minority group, we must endeavor to calmly and dispassionately take stock of what in actuality the pimp does. We can no longer depend upon old wives tales or “folk wisdom”. But before we begin our analysis, we must clear up one point: the claim that pimps use coercion and the threat of violence (to gather and keep a stable of prostitutes on their payrolls). Of course some pimps do! This, however, in no way contradicts our view of the pimp as an honest and productive workingman. Is there any profession where not one practitioner is guilty of foul play? Of course not. There are bricklayers, plumbers, musicians, priests, doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs who have gone berserk and violated the rights of their fellow creatures. Are these professions, then, qua professions to be castigated in their entirety? Of course not. And so should it be with the ancient and honorable profession of pimping: the actions of any one, or even of all pimps together, cannot legitimately be used to condemn the profession qua profession, unless the action is a necessary part of the profession. It is in this way that we know, for instance, that the profession of kidnapping small children for ransom is an evil profession, qua profession. The action is evil and is a necessary part of the profession.

In this case, if some of the practitioners perform good deeds like contributing a part of the “take” to charity, or are “good family men”, or even if all of them do so, the profession is still an abomination. It is an abomination because by its very nature evil acts are committed in its name. In this article then, we shall try to evaluate the profession of pimping, ignoring the evil acts performed by some pimps which have nothing to do with their profession.

The function that the pimping profession serves is that of a broker. Just like brokers of real estate, insurance, stock market shares, investments or commodity futures, the pimp-broker serves the function of bringing two parties to a transaction together at less cost than it would take to bring them together without his good offices. We know that each party to a transaction served by a broker gains from the brokerage. Each party to the transaction is just as free to look for the other party without the aid of the broker, as he (or she) is to make use of the brokerage services for the brokering fee. From the fact that people voluntarily patronize brokers we know that, at least in their own minds, they are benefiting from the existence of the brokers.

And so in the case of the pimps. The customers gain from the use of pimps in that they are spared useless or wasteful waiting and searching time. Many customers would rather phone a pimp whom they trust for an assignation with a prostitute than spend time and effort searching one out. For one thing, the customers can gain the security of knowing that the prostitute comes recommended by the pimp. For another, all the customer need do is pick up the phone; he need not even venture outside to find a prostitute. And on rainy days, this can be of inestimable benefit. As for the prostitute, she (or he) also gains — or else, as we have seen, she would not work through a pimp. The prostitute gains the time that would otherwise be spent in searching for customers. And as every good businessman knows, time is money. The prostitute can also gain the security of knowing that there is some modicum of protection supplied by the pimp; in this profession, the customers that one deals with sometimes leave something to be desired. More important than protection against unruly customers, as important as that may be, is the problem of protection against policemen, whose profession, qua profession, it might be added, consists of harassing prostitutes who are engaged in voluntary trade with consenting adults. The pimp is of inestimable aid to the prostitute in this regard, in that assignations by phone are much less dangerous than streetwalking or bar hopping.

Then there is the problem of wear and tear on sometimes very expensive clothing. The prostitute working without benefit of a pimp must constantly dress and undress between customers. With a pimp setting up appointments one right after the other, there is little or no need for engaging in such costly and uneconomical activity. Thus, far from raising the costs of the service the pimp, like any other broker worth his salt, will actually lower the costs.

The prostitute is no more exploited by the pimp than is the manufacturer exploited by the salesman whom he hires to go out and drum up business for him. The prostitute is no more exploited by the pimp than is the actress who pays an agent a percentage of her earnings to go out and get jobs for her. In all these cases, the prostitute-employer earns more than the cost to her of the employee-pimp, otherwise the employer-employee relationship would not take place. And this is a precise way to look at the relationship that the prostitute bears with respect to the pimp: employer to employee.

We have defended the professional pimp on the grounds that he performs the important and even necessary function of brokering. Actually, however, the pimp’s profession is more honorable than many of the other brokering professions because several of them, such as banking, insurance or the stock market in many respects rely on restrictive state laws to discourage their competition. Whatever may be said of pimps, it cannot be said that they have stooped that low.

The High Priests Of Waste

By A. Ernest Fitzgerald

(398 pages. Norton. $8.95.)

Reviewed By Robert Sherrill

(Editor’s Note: Robert Sherrill, a distinguished journalist, is Washington editor of The Nation and author of many books and articles. This book is available from Books for Libertarians, 422 First St., S. E., Washington, D.C. 20003).

Ernie Fitzgerald is like a film critic who is smart enough to know that Bob Hope is a wretched peddler of wahoo humor but who is too kind hearted, or something, to hate Paramount for foisting him off on the public. In other words, Fitzgerald is an insider with an insider’s shortcomings as well as an insider’s strengths. He is inside Arms, which under certain circumstances, can be almost as entertaining an industry as Hollywood; and having been “a part of the arms-buying process for most of twenty years,” he says he hopes that the criticisms written into The High Priests of Waste will result in our tidying up the Pentagon — that is to say, “will encourage critics to try to create conditions in which the good guys may thrive rather than damning the whole Pentagonal crew.”

If one considers the chronic mismanagement of the military affairs of our government ever since the days of Forrestal (at least), one will conclude quickly enough that Fitzgerald’s wish falls far short of our need, which is that Jehovah should rouse himself from his drunkenness long enough to see to it that, in Old Testament style, not one Pentagon stone is left standing upon another and that all its shredded secrets are scattered to the four winds. That’s the kind of tidying up we need. Then we can build anew.

Meanwhile — a word that in these days signifies preliminary despair — we do at least have Fitzgerald, and despite his kind heartedness, he is quite wonderful.

First of all there is the matter of the Fitzgerald style, the titillating and refreshing effect of which is, like a bubble bath, hard to convey in small doses in this review. Quite a few books in the general category of military-industrial expose have come my way in recent years and without exception I have had to keep reminding myself, as I read them, that life is indeed a grim and unpleasant thing and that these writers were quite justified in their own deadly seriousness. Until Fitzgerald came along, I don’t recall ever reading anything on the topic that provoked more than an occasional smile. Fitzgerald, on the contrary, is good for a great many laughs: “. . .for the first principle of the expediting art is to stride purposefully from hide-out to resting place. In addition, of course, the accomplished aerospace expediter never leaves a place of refuge without carrying something — a part, a clipboard, or a sheaf of papers.”

And then there is the matter of the Autonetics Division of North American Aviation, from whence (as Adelaide would say) Fitzgerald and his fellow consultants were summarily kicked because they uncovered a melange of costly stupidities, one of which Fitzgerald describes:

“For a number of reasons, it is important that Minutemen missiles point more or less straight up. One of the functions of the airmen manning the missile launching sites was to go to the missile silo periodically and check to make sure the missile was standing straight up. The airmen got cold doing this chore, so Autonetics was commissioned to solve the problem. Autonetics’ brilliant engineers correctly concluded that a tent would be a good shelter from the bitter northern wind, confirming the decision of countless generations of Indians who inhabited the region in times past. Unhappily, even though the ignorant savage had solved the problem after a fashion, missile gap technology was not equal to the task. All the Autonetics tents blew away, computers and wind tunnels notwithstanding.”

But Fitzgerald’s banishment by Autonetics was back in the days when he was a private consultant and could be kicked out by aerospace companies. Later he went to the Pentagon as Deputy for Management Systems in the Air Force, and after that the military-industrialists didn’t use their feet on him; they and their allies in the Pentagon used invisible accounting trapdoors and VuGraphs. A VuGraph is a large screen on which Colonels draw intricate charts and from which they deliver interminable lectures to explain why it is absolutely impossible to spend fewer “megabucks” (Pentagonese for one million dollars) on a particular system, and to explain further why waste helps attain the “social goals” of (1) equal employment opportunity, (2) seniority clauses in union agreements, (3) programs for hiring the handicapped, (4) apprentice programs, (5) aid to small business, (6) aid to distressed labor areas, and (7) encouragement of improvements to plant layouts and facilities. That is the summation of an actual lecture which Fitzgerald received.

I won’t use the word genius, but it certainly takes a profound talent to explain the complex financial juggling of the Pentagon via both real and simulated case histories in such a way as not to provoke drowsiness in the reader. Fitzgerald is a master of the simulated case history, using Dickensian characters like “General Palmy” and “Colonel Clapsaddle” and “Secretary Crumley Quillpen” to fill out one of the neatest dramas of hokum/fraud — better known as “The Aardvark Missile Case” — that I have read. Aside from being a deft method of instruction, this light comedy is pure subversion. One could read a hundred stories about Pentagon cheating in the Washington Post (that is, if the Post were still reporting such things) and still come away with some middling hope that the Pentagon might yet reform itself. After laughing through the Aardvark Missile Case, all hope is gone — and yet, for the first time one feels that perhaps the billions spent at the Pentagon may be worth it for the sheer diversionary perversionary fun they provide, something worthy of Nero behind the sofa with a goat. When “Major Buck” succeeds in tricking “Assistant Secretary Doe” into thinking he has caught the key mistake in the Aardvark program — a mistake that was, in fact, planted to give Doe that delusion — and when Major Buck “discovers” that the cost error can be traced back to PIGA, or as he explains to the increasingly baffled Doe, “the pendular integrating gryoscopic accelerometer,” then we come to suspect that Samuel Clemens is alive, even if unemployed at the moment, in Washington.

Okay, enough of levity. Back to grimness. As you must already know, Fitzgerald was fired from the Pentagon a few years ago because when he was called before Senator Proxmire’s Joint Economic Committee and asked if the C-5A was going to suffer from a cost overrun, he answered factually: yes, a couple billion dollars worth — an overrun that had been covered up by both Lockheed and the Army in such a way that if the same trick had been pulled in a bank all officials would have wound up in the penitentiary.

That, however, was not the first outburst of honesty that had got Fitzgerald in trouble. He had also been gauche enough to complain when he found that factory labor efficiency on one Minuteman contract ranged from 3.2 percent to 7 percent of what those workers would have been expected to produce if they had been on a civilian, commercial contract. At the same time, their rate of pay was increasing five times faster than commercial contract workers.

Fitzgerald figured that if all the obvious padding were taken out of the contract — and he had itemized the soft areas for his superiors to look over — the Pentagon could save $500,000,000. McNamara’s cost-estimating experts refused to even consider Fitzgerald’s reform proposals. The reason was that he was defying the principle of “historical costs,” the principle that guides the financing of all Pentagon programs. It is such an insane principle that a normal person will inevitably find it hard to follow. It comes to this: The right cost is what the contractor charges.

No, it’s not a joke. This is a sacred principle. Costs are not judged by what the weapons could be manufactured for. Costs are judged by what the contractor charges: this, then, becomes history, and thereupon it is elevated to the dogma of Historical Cost, and thereafter all further cost adjustments are built upon it. No looking back is allowed, no turning again to measure the cost of that program by what it would cost if civilians out in the world were doing it.

Contracting between the giant corporations and the Pentagon, explained with precision in this book, makes up in ardor what it lacks in grace; it is experience which Fitzgerald likens to “a track meet with participation limited to middle-aged ladies, each weighing in excess of 300 pounds” and which one of the more candid generals at the Pentagon likened to “contention among bullmoose for the privilege of servicing the government cow.”

It is very rewarding love-making, however. General Dynamics, for example, humped the cow so poorly that the milk doubled. It earned twice as much money as originally contracted for by building an F-111 that is not yet safe to fly (at last count, something like 24 had crashed.)

Within the Pentagon and the aerospace industry, serious criticism of such things is not permitted. Revenge is certain and swift. When a small cost control consultant company, Performance Technology Corporation, first broke the code by pointing out how Pratt & Whitney could save federal money and then compounded its sin by showing how the Pentagon could require other economies from other companies, PTC was assassinated by the Air Force. It was done very cleverly. The Air Force hired PTC for a complicated job but kept withholding payment; PTC borrowed heavily to stay in business while it waited for the Air Force payment. After the Air Force owed PTC about 170 percent of the company’s net worth, part of the contract was abruptly cancelled retroactively and the company was wiped out.

A Navy contracting officer who tried to affect thrift in the building of the Mark 48 torpedo program was eased out of procurement, then out of the Navy, and — like the end of an Evelyn Waugh story — wound up as an AID buyer in Ghana.

For his heresies, Fitzgerald was in the early days subjected to an endless round of coaching from colonels and GS-15s on the social value of the military-industrial partnership. When that failed to suppress him, he found his mail channeled to other offices where it was opened, and his speeches censured and lost. Finally he was fired.

Knowing the character of the Pentagon from having witnessed previous episodes of revenge, Fitzgerald should not have been surprised when its officials knifed him. I really doubt that he was, though he at least pretends to be.

It took place with unusual flagrancy even for the Pentagon. Fitzgerald went to work at the Pentagon in September 1965. When his three years probation was up in September 1968, he was officially notified that he was being converted to career tenure. This meant that, barring being caught with his hand in the till or dating Christine Jorgenson, he was secure and permanent.

But the official notification had gone out before he had testified to Lockheed’s theft of government funds. His snitching on a Georgia defense plant infuriated Senator Richard Russell, who was unfortunately still alive and running the Senate Appropriations Committee. Apparently Russell said something to the Pentagon because shortly thereafter Fitzgerald received a note to the effect that the Pentagon bosses were terribly sorry but that the notice of career status had been a computer error and that actually they had meant to tell him he was no longer needed.

What was the excuse? Civil Service records — later grudgingly opened for him to see — showed that officials had compiled a list of his sins which included driving an old Rambler automobile. This, said the bureaucratic gumshoe, indicated Fitzgerald was a “pinchpenny type of person.” Lockheed and Autonetics, among others, could have told them that without an investigation.

The C-5A overrun episode is probably recounted here with as many details as most readers would desire. But there are several omissions and several interpretations that I would quarrel with. I feel the officials of Lockheed handled our money in a criminal fashion. I think Fitzgerald should have made the back-alley quality of their thievery a more palpable thing, and I think one way to have done this would have been to point out the stock juggling that was going on behind the scene among Lockheed officials at the same time they were screwing the taxpayer. This was brought out fairly thoroughly in a quiet SEC investigation, but generally ignored by the press at the time. It was also soft-pedaled by the SEC, which said it didn’t want to single out Lockheed for rebuke but felt that stock manipulations at all defense corporations should be investigated. It promised to do so. That was how long ago — three years? four years? — and the SEC has not made a move in that direction yet.

I also think Fitzgerald was far, far too easy on the spineless liberals involved in this thing. I mean such fellows as Senator Metcalf of Montana, who has made a career of talking tough about corporations but backs down when he can strike a blow against the crooked ones. Made loquacious and expansive and generous by an overdose of grape, Metcalf came to the Senate floor blowing off about “not wanting to be responsible for unemployment” and cast the deciding vote to bail out Lockheed with a $250 million government-guaranteed loan. I also mean such fellows as Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, who has been posing around here for years as a red hot populist but with increasing frequency opts out in favor of the big corporations, perhaps partly because he is suffering the natural decay of advanced age. Chairman of the House Banking Committee, Patman perhaps could have blocked the loan if he had tried. At least he could have made it much more embarrassing for all the crooks in the deal. But when his fellow Texan, Treasury Secretary John Connally, mastermind of the loan, asked Patman to play along, he did. In fact, he even drafted the loan legislation. Fitzgerald mentions Patman’s role only offhandedly and almost sympathetically.

Others may interpret such attitudes in this book in a kindlier way. They may see them as evidence that Fitzgerald came away from his harrowing experiences retaining his balance, without bitterness, slow to excess, etc. I, having none of those qualities where Congress and the Pentagon are concerned, find them a failing in an otherwise invaluable book.

The Other North American Election

By Samuel Edward Konkin III

While Richard Nixon bored everyone with his landslide on November 7, Canadians were treated to a cliff-hanger a week earlier on October 30. The pollsters confidently predicted a Trudeau return as Maritime provinces’ results swung slightly towards the Liberal Party, and Quebec cut the Progressive Conservative seats from four to two (out of 74). True, the Social Credit Rally (Ralliement Creditiste) increased their popular vote substantially, but gained only one seat. Then Ontario came in with the social democratic New Democrat Party and the Progressive Conservatives slashing into the Grit (Liberal) standings. And then the West.

In Alberta, all four Liberal seats were buried under a Tory (PC) avalanche. British Columbia moved the Tories-even with the Grits, and brought in the NDP main strength. The Northwest Territories gave the NDP their first “frontier” seat (Grit loss) and the Tories held on to the Yukon to put them one seat up, 109-108.

Canada does not allow absentee balloting, except for one special case. The Social Credit Party’s sole gain was at the expense of Jean-Luc Pepin, a Liberal Cabinet Minister involved in what Murray Rothbard called Quebec’s “White Terror” suspension of civil rights of a few years ago, and, since the Creditistes are the federal party which most free market libertarians (especially minarchists) in the U.S. would sympathize with, it seemed like divine justice. Unfortunately, the military votes Grit, and their absentee ballots reversed the 100-vote margin, knocking the Creditistes back to 14 seats. Libertarians can probably read symbolism into that as well.

The final standings of 109 seats each for the Liberals and P. C.’s, 30 for the NDP, 14 for SC, one Independent Conservative and one Independent (speaker of the House Lucien Lamoureux — non-partisan) tell the average American nothing, assuming he even heard of them. For the libertarians wanting of know who to cheer and who to boo — as Dr. Rothbard is wont — even less. I shall undertake here to give you a programme to go with your scorecard.

The Social Credit Party used to be based in the rightist West, Alberta and British Columbia, and was a free market, pro-American party with a funny money policy they could not legislate because they had only controlled provincial governments. They never had more than a minority in the national House of Commons. In 1963, they defeated John Diefen-baker’s minority Tory government because he failed to balance the budget. In 1962, Real Caouette led his Quebecers into the House in larger numbers than the Western wing, and the party eventually split. The Western wing withdrew in favor of P. C.’s to stem the Trudeau sweep of 1968, and never recovered. Caouette kept his more orthodix Social Credit position, appealing populistically to the Quebec habitants (peasant farmers) and stayed in the House. Recently he tried to expand westward, but failed to restore the party outside Quebec (although there are still a few Socred diehards lurking in rightist circles in ranch and oil country). The Alberta provincial Socreds were thrown out of office for the first time in 35 years in 1970 by Kennedyesque Tory Peter Lougheed, and their very survival as a party depends on Lougheed’s self-destruction. This year in British Columbia, W. A. C. Bennett’s 20-year Socred regime was ousted by the NDP in an even greater victory, marking a swing from far Right to far Left in the Canadian four-party spectrum. Although Caouette increased his popular vote markedly, and signs of organization were seen again throughout Canada, the recent net effect for the “good guys” (least worst guys) is down.

The Leftist bad guys, the New Democrat Party, which is labour backed and oriented, like the British Labour Party, now has three provincial governments (B. C, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) and their largest-number of seats ever in the Federal House. American investors are fleeing B. C. right now, and Canadian capitalists are screaming to the federal government to bail them out by preventing nationalization of federal regulated industries. Plus ça change, plus c’est la méme chose.

The big gains federally were reaped by Robert Stanfield’s Progressive Conservative Party, but it cannot take over the government without 25 more seats — and the Creditistes haven’t got that many. The Tories are conservative, but in the British/European sense, not (except for a small Ontario faction) in the American quasi-libertarian sense. Hence they love mercantilism and fear gradual socialism much less. Thus NDP support for the right Welfarist concessions is thinkable, and the NDP’s and PC’s both are anti-American (just as the Liberals and SC’s are pro-American). Their foreign policy might seem more appealing to a libertarian; but it manifests itself in increasing government regulation of corporations (50% of Canadian companies are American controlled) and in little which could be considered objective anti-imperialism. The NDP leader, David Lewis, will “throw his support behind whichever of the old line parties is prepared to deal adequately with unemployment, inflation, old age pensions, and a more equitable tax system.”* Coming from a socialist, that seems ominous. I doubt that libertarians could imagine a worse nightmare than a de facto socialist-traditionalist coalition.

Trudeaumania is gone, but Pierre Elliot Trudeau clings on. He has not resigned, and it looks as if he will try to keep governing, daring the Opposition to precipitate an election by defeating him on a non-confidence motion. Here, precedent is murky. There is no reason the figurehead Governor-General can’t ask the Tories to try to gain confidence for a majority — but in 1926, Governor General Lord Byng refused Liberal Mackenzie King’s request for dissolution of Parliament, and invited Conservative Arthur Meighen to govern. His bungling Progressive supporters blew a “pairing”, bringing him down only days later, and William Lyon Mackenzie King rode to victory attacking Byng’s interference. Would Roland Michener have the guts of Lord Byng? Ultimately, the Tories may be thwarted by this vestige of royal privilege. Michener was a Conservative, to add to the irony, but was appointed by a Liberal government, following a recent cross-party tradition.

Still, Trudeau has a problem if Michener doesn’t give him an issue. The electorate might decide to finish the job by giving Stanfield a majority. Diefenbaker ended 22 years of Liberal government in 1957, and dissolved his minority government early in 1958 calling for just such a majority. He won a record 208 out of 265 seats.

On the other hand, Lester Bowles Pearson won two minority governments in a row of 1963 and 1965 after a Tory minority of 1962, failing to get the majority he craved. He limped along in the Centre, depending on Social Credit support.

It is in the Grits’ interest to give the Tories the government, so that Stanfield can begin to alienate voters. But it’s not in Trudeau’s interest, as shown by Diefenbaker’s ouster after his election defeat by a particularly brutal purge which caused enough resentment in the West to give Trudeau his 1968 victory in the first place. Trudeau’s ouster would not be so regionally oriented, because half of the Liberal seats are in Quebec anyway, and his followers have nowhere to go but the Creditistes, the Tories being unthinkable and the NDP frowned on by the Catholic Church.

The French-English split is being played up by foreign papers, and the Separatists may be bolstered by the defeat of their centralist enemy Trudeau — but that is a Provincial effect, not a Federal one. Furthermore, resentment against compulsory bilingualism/biculturalism is found in the third of the population of non-WASP origin (mostly in the West) such as German, Ukrainian, Galician, Icelander, Dutch, Russian, and others who are just speaking English in the first or second generation. The only real amelioration will be found in reviving the Social Credit and Union Nationale’s (a Quebec provincial party, recently defeated by the Grits) demand for greater decentralism and provincial rights. The present trend is the other way, but Canadians are a remarkably non-revolutionary lot, pointing with pride to their “evolution” from Great Britain, as opposed to the Americans’ messy violence. Quebec independence will be gained gradually if at all, by the Parti Quebec parliamentarily (with both RIN-socialistic-and RN-Creditiste-wings) and not by the ten to fifteen FLQ**goons.

Revolution in Canada is a bigger joke than in the U.S., and rather than radical change, resulting from elimination of Trudeau’s flashy, slightly-leftist liberalism (he flirted with price controls but never implemented them, by the way) one should expect stodginess, anti-communist witchhunts from Liberal renegade Paul Hellyer, and the ominous economic changes resulting from NDP support. Canadian libertarians and their American allies should be hoping for a new election and a minority government with Creditiste swing vote power. Failing that, how about Parliamentary Chaos?

*Page 1, The Edmonton Journal, Tuesday, October 31, 1972.

**Front de Liberation Quebecois RIN = Reassemblement pour l’Independence Nationale, and RN = Ralliement Nationale. The Nationale recurring in Quebec party names has the opposite meaning of “nationwide”.

SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Before becoming a well-known libertarian activist and writer, Mr. Konkin was a Socred activist, and Chairman of the University of Alberta Social Credit Party from 1966-68. He became senior participant in the Model Parliaments, and was involved in all Canadian and Alberta elections from 1962 to 1968. He is now a foreign student at New York University, a candidate for a Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

This is the time of year for movie critics to roll out their awards and their ten-best lists, and I am forced to take a long, hard look at the cinema from the fact that I cannot come up with a “ten best” list at all. For in the cinema we must wage the same struggle that we should have been fighting in the rest of the culture since the turn of the twentieth century: on behalf of the old, bourgeois values and against the morbidity and unreason of the avant-garde. Unfortunately, the avant-garde has now become “the garde”, and so it becomes more important than ever, in the movies as well as in literature, art, and music, to raise the standard of the arriere-garde — a rear-guard struggle against a diseased culture.

The carriers of the disease are of the course the intelligentsia, for the cultural instincts of the middle-class are sound, and generally they put up a lengthy resistance to the irrationalism of the cultural “elite”. We then have two cultures: the sound, if often stodgy, “commercial” culture of the bourgeoisie; and the arrogantly morbid, involuted culture of the intellectuals. This unhealthy split between the cultures did not really exist before 1900; before that, when what we might call the “classical culture” held sway, the leaders in art, fiction, music, etc. were of the same cloth, albeit on a far greater and more creative level, as the popular artists; indeed, the greatness of the leaders — of the Rembrandts, Mozarts, Verdis, etc., was cheerfully acknowledged by the mass of the bourgeoisie. “High” culture was profound, to be sure; but it was also understandable on the mass level, as well as repaying long hours of diligent study. Keats, Mozart, Rembrandt, etc. were instantly understandable to the mass as well as being profoundly intellectual leaders of the culture.

But at approximately the turn of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia began to succumb rapidly to morbidity and irrationality; cultural disease swiftly replaced cultural health. The differences between the rationalist, the romantic, etc. variants are not very important here; the vital point is that the glorious “classical” mainstream of art and culture: from the Renaissance to the magnificent Baroque to the 18th century rationalists to the 19th century romantics — that all of these form the noble heritage of Western culture and civilization. And that that heritage began to crumble rapidly into cultural degeneracy: a degeneracy that included the flight from realism, classicism, and rational space in art; from purpose and plot in fiction; from clarity in literature generally; and a flight from melody and harmony in music. It was, in classical terms, a flight from beauty in the fullest sense and the embrace of the ugly; a rush away from optimism, purpose, and life toward morbidity and death; and an escape from reason on behalf of the irrational.

While the bourgeoisie have put up a heroic resistance to this twentieth-century plague, they were bound to lose out when permanently deprived of intellectual and cultural allies. And so in fiction, where have been the great classical writers since Somerset Maughan? In the theater, where are the successors to Shaw and Wilde? In art, the Wyeths, John Koch and a few others have kept the realist tradition beautifully alive, but they have been largely ignored by the chi-chi art world which has rushed to lionize the Picassos, Mondrians, and Pollocks. In music, the barbarities of modern music, from the atonal to the electronic, have fortunately been checked by the customers, who insist on the recording and the concertizing of the classical masters. In popular music, however, both “classical” pop and “classical” jazz have lost out to the barbarities of atonal modern jazz and of acid rock.

For a long time, the movies were the last stronghold of the arriere-garde. There are two good reasons for this: one, that the movies are our newest art form, and two, that since movies are dependent on a mass audience, the basically sound taste of the masses for a long while kept the intelligentsia on a short leash. But now the spread of irrationality has hit the movies in a big way, and the defense of the classical movie — the “movie movie” — must be a bitter struggle against the rising if not dominant tide of “intellectual” degeneracy.

By “degeneracy” I of course do not mean pornography, which serves as a wrong-headed focus for many conservatives. Pornography had always formed a harmonious “left wing” within the Victorian culture. The problem in the movies is not sex but unreason, an absurdism that infects both the point of view of the film and the techniques of the camera. The Enemy on the movie front is not the California porno king; our war to the metaphorical knife is not with the makers of Deep Throat but with the Bergmans, the Bunuels, the Antonionis, the Fellinis, the Godards. The truly obscene is not the happy, fun-loving School Girl, but such monstrosities as Juliet of the Spirits and Last Year At Marienbad.

Neither is “violence” the problem, as so many movie critics are maintaining. Violence is a perfectly proper dramatic tool; the real question is the point of view, is how violence is being used in the film. Once again: look to the intellectuals, to the avant-garde, and you will find precisely the wrong point of view. The intelligentsia, for example, loved A Clockwork Orange, with its random and meaningless violence, but they hated with a purple passion those films where violence is used as an instrument of justice, of defense against crime. In short, they hate Dirty Harry or such great John Wayne films as Chisum or Rio Bravo, and they have the gall to denounce the supposedly “meaningless” violence of such Sam Peckinpah masterpieces as The Wild Bunch. (It is interesting that the intellectuals preferred Peckinpah’s inferior Straw Dogs to Wild Bunch, precisely because the employment of violence, while still defensive, did not have the latter’s clarity and point.)

It is of course a standard trick of the intellectuals to take the most banal works of classical culture and to use them as straw men on behalf of the avant-garde. But classical culture is certainly not a monolith; there are varying degrees of merit in classical films as anywhere else. Of course, Mary Poppins, for example, was banal and boring; but contrast it to such fine musicals as My Fair Lady and the magnificent Gigi!

The Golden Age of the cinema was the thirties and forties. It was then that we could delight in Gone With the Wind, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Lady Vanishes; it was then that we could enjoy the sophisticated wit of the Cary Grant-Katherine Hepburn movies and the hilarious farce of the Marx Brothers, as well as Mr. Old Curmudgeon himself, W. C. Fields. Indeed, by far the three best movies that I saw in 1972 were revivals from that better age. Two were from GBS: Major Barbara and Pygmalion. It is instructive to compare Pygmalion with the later My Fair Lady, the musical based on the former play, when Pygmalion lacks the famous music, it has far more of the original Shavian bite; also the acting in Pygmalion is far superior: Wendy Hiller is miles ahead of Audrey Hepburn, and even that excellent actor Rex Harrison is eclipsed by the cool austerity and luminous intelligence of Leslie Howard. Major Barbara, despite Shaw’s socialist beliefs, is one of the great arguments for capitalism in the history of the film, done with high Shavian wit and intelligence; and then there is the magnificent acting of Robert Morley, in addition to Harrison and Hiller.

And finally, the incomparable English film, The Importance of Being Earnest, perhaps the greatest motion picture ever made. The marvelously witty Oscar Wilde play never flags for a moment, and the acting is high-style perfection, performed by Michael Redgrave, Michael Dennison, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Greenwood, Margaret Rutherford, and the incomparable Dame Edith Evans. There, my friends, was a movie!

But to return to the cinematic slough of 1972. Certainly the best film of 1972 was The Godfather, which we have already hailed in these pages. The Godfather is us classicists’ candidate in the award sweepstakes. Already, of course, both the masses and the intelligentsia have spoken: the masses by perceptively making The Godfather the box-office smash of all time; the intellectuals by rejecting it for avant-garde tinsel: the New York Film Critics choosing the eternally boring and morbid Bergman’s latest, Cries and Whispers, and the even more pretentious National Society of Film Critics selecting the irrationalist Bunuel’s latest offering. (In my view, the only good Bergman was one of his earliest, before he adopted the unbecoming mantle of Profound Thinker: his Smiles of a Summer Night, done as a high style Restoration-type farce. Which is just about the one Bergman movie that the critics don’t ooh and aah about.) I have faith, however, that the good old bourgeois Academy will spurn the Continental mish-mash and heap its awards on the truly great Godfather.

The other awards? Best director and best picture awards should usually run together, and so Francis Ford Coppola gets our accolade. For best actor it’s for me a tossup between Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in our favorite movie. Brando’s acting was a mighty and brilliant tour de force, by far the best Brando in that actor’s checkered career. But, on the other hand, Pacino’s was a far longer part, and it was a subtle and splendid performance, in which the character changed gradually but vitally in the course of the picture. For best supporting actor. Robert Duvall will probably get the Academy Award for his consigliori in The Godfather (even the New York Film Critics selected Duvall), but far superior are two splendid performances by British actors in Frenzy: either the subtle acting of Alec McCowen as the inspector, or Barry Foster’s suave and two-faced villain. For best actress, there is simply no one that I can choose; 1972 was a bad year for actresses. Please, Academy, not the impossibly awkward and pseudo-elfin Liza Minelli in Cabaret! I am afraid, however, that Liza will get the award, purely as a remnant of the still flourishing cult for one of Hollywood’s all-time worst singers and actresses: Liza’s mom Judy Garland. For supporting actresses, Vivien Merchant’s gourmet-loving inspector’s wife in Frenzy towers over an indifferent lot.

As for the “ten best” movies, I cannot find the heart to put nine other movies of 1972 on the list. Certainly one, however, is Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy in which the Old Master returns to the fine suspense of his early English period — could it be a coincidence that he returned to England to make the film? If not for Coppola’s great achievement, I would surely pick Hitchcock as the best director of the year. Another excellent film was the best of the “caper” genre in years, Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock. A fine blend of humor and suspense, the excellent direction blended sterling acting performances from George Segal and Robert Redford, and featured a marvelously funny Zero Mostel as the crooked lawyer (Zero would place as the best supporting actor on my list below McCowen and Foster.)

When we get past The Godfather, Frenzy, and The Hot Rock, we have to reach a bit. The Hospital featured a slashing and witty attack on the large city hospital, highlighted by the typically excellent acting of George C. Scott. I haven’t seen Sleuth, but the play was splendid and subtly changing suspense: my only a priori reservation is that Sir Laurence Olivier always tends to overact and chew the scenery, especially in productions that he obviously feels are beneath him. As a result, one is supposed to applaud Olivier’s acting tricks and to forget the character he is playing. (See, for example, Olivier’s performance as the dervish leader in the forgotten Khartoum.) Even in classical films, Olivier sometimes ruins the picture by hamming it up, as he did in Richard III.

Also on the list, but not with very high marks, is Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon. Rohmer is one of the few French directors to continue in the classic tradition, and for this he is ostracized by the French film world. As the founder of the famous French journal Cahiers du Cinema, Rohmer kept insisting throughout the dark days of the avant-garde on the high merits of Hitchcock and even — perhaps going a little too far — of Jerry Lewis! Chloe is one of a fascinating set of “moral tales”, in which Rohmer single-handedly restores intelligent and subtle dialogue to its rightful place in the cinema. Unfortunately, Chloe suffers by comparison with the previous Rohmer tales released here, notably Claire’s Knee and the superb My Night at Maud’s. The problem is that in Chloe both the hero and the heroine are decidedly unappealing, so that one ends up not really giving a damn whether he succumbs to temptation and sleeps with her or not (the problem of all of the Moral Tales.) Still, Chloe in the Afternoon rates as far and away the best foreign picture of the year.

Coming to the bottom of the “eight best” list, we have Play It Again, Sam and They Only Kill Their Masters. Play It is hardly in the same league with Woody Allen’s hilarious Bananas, but this clumsy movie does center around a warm and affectionate tribute to the great Bogart, and no picture that does that can be all bad. Masters is a quiet, gentle detective drama, and would scarcely make any best list in a good movie year; but it is an engaging sleeper, and contains a fine, quietly wry performance from James Garner.

What of my fellow critics? Are there any whom I can generally recommend? Not really; there is unfortunately no one who is really aware of the great classical avant-garde struggle, much less wages a consistent battle on behalf of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Even the best are a quivering mass of ad hoc sensibility. Perhaps the soundest of the lot is Paul D. Zimmerman of Newsweek. Unquestionably the worst is the most famous: Judith Crist of New York, who can be depended upon to love the awful movies and hate the good ones. Rex Reed of the Daily News always pitches his critiques on a note of scarcely controlled hysteria. On the other hand, Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice is better than most: being saved by his being a disciple of Rohmer. John Simon of the New Leader is often good, largely because he dislikes almost everything — but not for the right reasons. Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic is often sensible. But all in all, a rum show.

“Work and earn; pay taxes and die.” — Old German Proverb.

Recommended Reading

Natural Gas Shortage. Gilbert Burck, “The FPC is Backing Away From the Wellhead”, Fortune (November, 1972) is a good, up-to-date account of the way in which FPC regulation has created a shortage of natural gas.

World War II Revisionism. In recent years, younger historians of modern Germany, in America and elsewhere, have brought a fresh perspective freed of wartime passions and distortions to their controversial field of study. In a series of brilliant articles, the eminent left-liberal English historian Geoffrey Barraclough, a distinguished historian of Germany who in no sense can be accused of pro-Nazi views, has done a block-buster job of synthesizing the insights of the new literature. Essentially he does for Germany’s “domestic” scene what his famous counterpart A. J. P. Taylor did for German foreign policy a decade ago. Particularly important are Geoffrey Barraclough, “The Liberals and German History: Part II,” New York Review of Books (November 2, 1972), and “A New View of German History: Part III,” New York Review of Books (November 16, 1972). Must reading for revisionists.

Airport Congestion. In recent years, free-market economists have begun to zero in on the cause of airport congestion: the operations of airports, which are invariably government-owned and operated, and which systematically charge a uniform and absurdly low fee for the use of runways. In contrast, the airports grant monopoly privileges to its concessionaires (restaurants, bars, insurance, parking lots) which is turn charge monopoly prices for low-quality service, out of which the airports get a rake-off. The best monograph on the subject has just appeared, a pamphlet by Professor Ross D. Eckert, Airports and Congestion (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1972, $3.00).

Nisei Revisionism. One of the most barbaric acts in American history was our incarceration of all innocent Japanese-Americans into concentration camps for the duration of World War II. But most revisionist books critical of this action pin all the blame on right-wingers: racist army officers, California business competitors with the productive Japanese, etc. Now, a proper pinpointing of major blame on America’s liberals arrives with William Petersen’s excellent “The Incarceration of the Japanese-Americans,” National Review (Dec. 8, 1972).

Guernica Revisionism. For decades, we have been subjected to Left propaganda about Guernica, Fascist planes supposedly deliberately terror-bombing the civilian population of this Basque town. A new book by Luis Bolin, however, reveals that Guernica was not bombed at all, but dynamited by the Red forces themselves in order to launch the propaganda effort. See Jeffrey Hart, “The Great Guernica Fraud,” National Review (January 5).

Econometric History. An excellent critique of the new econometric history, on general methodological grounds, and particularly as applied to the history of slavery in the U.S., can be found in a lengthy article by Harold D. Woodman, “Economic History and Economic Theory: The New Economic History in America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Autumn, 1972).

Environmentalism. A good critique of the Club of Rome anti-growth hysteria can be found in Wilfred Beckerman, “The Myth of Environmental Catastrophe,” National Review (November 24, 1972). Technology and the Counter-Culture. A good critique of the anti-technological impetus of the counter-culture, and its similarity to Old European conservatism, can be found in Stephen Tonsor, “Science, Technology and the Cultural Revolution, The Intercollegiate Review (Winter, 1972-73).

From The Old Curmudgeon

For Closed Marriage. I see that a few libertarians, for some reason, are recommending the jejune best-seller by the O’Neills, Open Marriage. In their insipid work, the O’Neills cleverly have it both ways. By being deliberately vague and non-specific, their work can be read on two levels. On one level, it is simply another string of cliches that have come down to us ever since Shakespeare said it far far better: “To thine own self be true.” The changes have been rung on this through best-sellers like Dale Carnegie and now the O’Neills. If this is all they mean, that, e.g. each partner in a marriage should fulfill his or her self to its best potential, then the “open marriage” concept is unexceptionable but tediously banal: it would be hard to find anyone to disagree. On the other hand, the book can be read on a second level, and I suspect that it is the titillation of the authors’ never-quite-coming out-with-it that is responsible for the mass appeal: i.e. a call for sleeping around by both partners. One can hear the titters: Is that what they mean by all the hoopla about growth by each partner, about seeking independent experiences and then bringing the “new knowledge” to the partner, etc.?

If that is what they mean, then we are simply getting the old seduction shuck: “Come on, it will rejuvenate your marriage”; “you’ll bring new experiences to your (husband, wife).” If that is what they mean, then I am foursquare for the “closed marriage”, the marriage in which two partners live in trust and fidelity, in which they blend into a lifelong emotional intimacy to the glories of which the promiscuous and the seduction-shuckers are deaf, dumb, and blind.

The only good Indian is . . . (1972-style)

“The real problem confronting the American Indians in the western United States today is that the Bureau of Indian Affairs is carrying out the policy of the Department of Interior . . . and that policy is opposed to the private rights to the use of water of the American Indians. No one is recognizing that in substance and in effect the Indian rights are being communized . . . communized for the use of the non-Indian community.”

William H. Veeder, water expert, in The Indian Historian, Summer 1972

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 2

FEBRUARY, 1973

75¢

Nixon’s Second Term

The Sticks In The Closet

Nixon’s second Administration has already taken a fascinating and rather remarkable new turn, a pattern that is consistent in all the major political arenas, foreign and domestic. So far not a single political observer has discerned this important new pattern, and little has been said about the second term except for a few references to personnel changes and some misleading remarks about Nixon’s new budget. Yet the new pattern is a vital one, and may well set the political picture of the next four years.

In every major area, foreign and domestic, Mr. Nixon has suddenly and swiftly called a “truce”, a major retreat from the overweening statism of his first administration. The truce is not only in Vietnam but everywhere; but, in every case, what we have is a truce rather than a genuine “peace”. In the immortal words of Dr. George Shultz and Dr. John Dunlop, the administration is “keeping its stick in the closet”, ready to be brandished over the head of recalcitrants. And yet, for the libertarian this is, after all, a major step forward; we would prefer to abolish the stick altogether, but it is far better to have it in the closet than in active and aggressive use.

Let us observe this “armed truce” or retreat in every major arena: among them, Vietnam, the draft, price-wage controls and, more loosely, the new budget.

Vietnam and Indo-China. In Vietnam, of course, we have the official truce or cease-fire. It is not to wash away the blood of millions of innocent Vietnamese victims on the Nixonian and American record to hail the cease-fire that has come at long last. We must credit Mr. Nixon for finally ending the fighting, for stopping the bombing, for pulling out American troops. The truce came far too late, but, Happy Day! it came. The U.S. will be murdering no more people in Vietnam.

What did the war in Vietnam accomplish? Nothing, if we compare, for example, the situation after the truce of 1973 with the truce of 1954. Nineteen years later, the Communists and their allies in the Vietnamese resistance are in far better shape, and control far more population and territory than they did after their misguided adherence to the Geneva Agreements, when they pulled all their troops out of the South. Betrayed after those agreements by the failure of the U.S. to conduct free elections, the resistance forces would of course never agree again to a unilateral disarmament and pullout of troops.

If the war was fought in vain, neither is the current cease-fire in very sturdy shape. Even the Nixon Administration has termed the truce “fragile”, which is a hefty understatement. So while we hail the end of the fighting, we must remember that the American stick is very much in the closet: the task of the anti-war forces is to agitate to make sure that we don’t pull the stick out once more and begin the tragic and bloody mass murder all over again. The stick is close by: American air power is near at hand, at bases in Thailand and elsewhere, our naval power is off the coast, and those old Kennedy-style “civilian advisers” are still there to support the Thieu dictatorship.

There will undoubtedly be plenty of temptation for the U.S. to use the stick, to send bombers and troops back into that unfortunate country. Thieu has made it crystal clear that he has no intention of arriving at a political settlement with the PRG (Previsional Revolutionary Government), which means that no true peace in the area has been achieved. The political struggle of the civil war will continue, and could erupt at any moment into military conflict. In order to get the Americans out, the North Vietnamese and the PRG (to the probable unhappiness of the latter) made a remarkable concession: in contrast to every past war, when prisoners of both sides were exchanged at the end of the conflict, the North agreed to a unilateral release of American prisoners. This means that literally hundreds of thousands of Communists and other resisters will continue to rot in Thieu jails; and their fate remains fuzzy and unclear. The Thieu-Nixon excuse that these prisoners are not POW’s but civilian dissenters because they didn’t wear an official uniform is of course pure sophistry, and deliberately evades the very nature of guerrilla war, in which the civilians are the resistance forces. This truce, then, constitutes a monstrous injustice to the huge mass of prisoners of the Thieu dictatorship; and it is the big reservation that we must have to our joy over the end of the fighting.

The important point now is, that when and if armed civil war erupts again, whether over Thieu’s prisoners or over any other issue, that the U.S. keep its hands off: that we at long last allow the Vietnamese to settle their quarrels themselves. We must see to it that Nixon never takes the stick out of the closet again, that he does not re-enter the war; to do that, it would help enormously if he pulled air, naval, and land forces fully and completely out of the entire Asia area.

The same, of course, applies to Laos and Cambodia, where the war continues. At this writing, a similar truce appears likely in Laos, where the Pathet Lao resistance forces are closely allied to Hanoi and may predictably bow to Hanoi’s pressure. In Cambodia, however, the situation is different, and here we should call for immediate American withdrawal from propping up the Phnom Penh dictatorship. The point here is that the Cambodian resistance forces, the National United Front, are led, not by Communists but by the deposed ruler, Prince Sihanouk, who is not likely to bow to any Communist desire for a ceasefire. Furthermore, the Sihanouk forces are far closer to total victory than were the opposition in Laos or Vietnam. Only massive American aid is keeping the Lon Nol dictatorship in power in Phnom Penh and a few other outposts; the rest of the country is already in the hands of the Sihanouk forces.

The Draft. Nixon’s partial retreat from statism in Vietnam is matched by his decision to end — or sort of end — the draft. This monstrous blot on American life is at last over, and no longer will every American boy and every family be trying to live their lives with the sword of Damocles of enslavement to kill or be killed hanging over their heads. Libertarians must rejoice at the Nixon decision to stop the draft at last — a decision, by the way, brought about largely by the pressure over the years of free-market economists demonstrating that the “shortage” of enlistees in the Army can easily be cured by paying the GI’s market wage rates.

But once again, our joy at the Nixon decision must be qualified: the stick is in the closet but it is still alive. We have a “ceasefire” and not a “lasting peace.” For the damnable machinery of the draft is still intact, ready to be used at a flip of the Presidential switch: and every American boy will still have to register at the age of 18, endure the dehumanizing indignities of the pre-induction physical, and receive his number on the roulette-wheel of the national lottery. Furthermore, the draft is not ended at all for the nation’s physicians, who are still subject to the special penalties of the doctor draft. Libertarians should get behind the new bill of Senator Mark Hatfield to abolish the entire evil machinery of the draft: the registration, the draft cards, the whole shebang, lock, stock, and barrel. For Senator Hatfield’s absolute firmness on the draft question, he can be forgiven much waffling on other issues.

And the stick is there in another sense: for President Nixon remains “hard nosed” on the amnesty question. The idea seems to be that American youth deserve some sort of “punishment” in the form of enslavement: and if they have managed to flee for their lives and avoid enslavement into the army, then at least they should be sent to jail (the conservative solution) or to compulsory bedpan service among the poor (the “Liberal” solution). Amnesty is not a question of whether “we” should mete out deserved punishment to draft evaders or deserters, or whether we should indulge in Christian forgiveness of crime. The draft itself is a supreme crime, and therefore draft evaders and deserters should be regarded not as criminals but as heroes, in precisely the same way as decent men regarded the slaves who ran away via the underground railroad. But the draft evaders and deserters disobeyed the law? Correct, and in precisely the same way as the slaves disobeyed the law; for let us never, never forget that slavery, until the 13th Amendment, was supremely legal.

The most puzzling and distressing aspect of the amnesty affair is the position of many so-called “libertarians” and alleged opponents of the draft who adopt the conservative view of upholding punishment for disobeying the law. Even when the law is enslavement! For some time I have wondered where many of our “libertarians” would have stood on the slavery question if this were 1858 instead of 1973. Would they really have been in favor of immediate and unconditional abolition? One wonders. Or would they have been griping about the salves’ “disobedience to law”, of the necessity of their abiding by the Constitution and of accepting due punishment? Would they have warned that the slaves must not be freed until the masters were “compensated” for their loss of capital assets? Elementary linguistics would seem to place “liberty” and “slavery” at diametrically opposite poles; but considering the “law über alles” approach of many of our “libertarians”, this question becomes a relevant and disturbing one. We have heard, for example, that Ayn Rand is opposed to amnesty, and that our supposed “first libertarian Congressman”, Steven Svmms, is against amnesty as well. Good Lord, it’s enough to make a “LeFevrian” out of us all. Is our First Libertarian Congressman going to be less libertarian on this vital issue than Bella Abzug? Let is be said then loud and clear: THE libertarian position on amnesty is Unconditional Amensty Now, for draft evaders, resisters, and deserters, with perhaps a parade and a brass band thrown into the bargain. And an apology for the law that forced them to flee.

Price-Wage Controls. On this issue, too, Mr. Nixon has inaugurated Phase 3, with the removal of direct price and wage controls on every area except food, health, and construction (where Nixon has installed permanent price and wage fixing machinery). Again: an action to be hailed; no single act is more destructive of a free economy than price-wage controls, and if we all denounced their imposition on the black day of August 15, 1971 as fascism then we must hail their removal as a major retreat from economic despotism. Once again, the market will be permitted to function.

Of course, the motives for Nixon’s action do not seem to be the most noble. Price controls take some time for their flaws and distortions to develop: for the longer they last, the more do their controlled prices diverge from the prices that would be obtaining on the free market. The strains and distortions were beginning to develop by the end of 1972. They were aggravated by the continuing inflation and by the recovery from the 1969-71 recession both of which put on greater pressure for an increase in prices and costs. Furthermore, the potentially disastrous profit restriction on prices was beginning to have its effect. For Phase 2 had mandated that if a business firm were making high profits, it could not raise its price and could even be forced to lower it; whereas a firm making low profits would be allowed to raise prices. While the recession lasted and profits were low, the effective impact of these controls on the economy was negligible. But as profits began to increase upon recovery during 1972, business firms were increasingly feeling the pinch. More and more distortions were piling up, as “black markets” developed in wage controls by phony upgrading of jobs, and as businesses began to create inefficiencies in order to register lower profits. One firm was reported by the pro-control Business Week as deliberately encouraging larger expense accounts among executives, and as scheduling its annual stockholders’ meeting for the first time in the Bahamas, because “if we have to be inefficient, we may as well enjoy ourselves.” As these distortions piled up, the bulk of American business, which had previously supported controls as a way of keeping down union wage rates, began to shift their allegiance, and began to “rediscover” the merits of the free market.

In switching his position, then, Mr. Nixon knew on which side his bread was buttered. But at least he had the perception to realize what was going on, and to switch out of controls after only a year of Phase 2.

But of course, once again, we have only a truce and not genuine peace. It was for Phase 3 that the Administration coined its phrase about “the stick in the closet.” The artificial and arbitrary price and wage “guidelines” are still there, and the Administration can be expected to try to intimidate business, especially large business and large unions, into obeying these “voluntary” yardsticks. Compulsion is available at any time for the Administration to use. So once again, we should not rest content until the entire control machinery is dismantled for good and all.

Mr. Nixon’s recent proposal to dismantle farm price supports is another unexpected and welcome move in the same “ceasefire” pattern. Perhaps the imbecility of using controls to keep prices down while at the same time continuing to keep farm prices up began to impress itself on the Administration. At any rate, Nixon aims to phase out most farm price supports and acreage controls which cut food production — to the horror of the organized farm bloc. Even in Nixon’s welcome proposal, however, he does not propose to go all the way, and there would still be provision for maximum acreage control if the government in its wisdom felt that production was likely to be “excessive.” However, once again, Mr. Nixon has taken a decisive step to dismantle the farm price-raising program which has plagued this country since the days of Herbert Hoover (not Franklin Roosevelt, by the way.)

The Budget. A lot of nonsense has been written by supposedly astute political observers about the proposed Nixon budget. To talk of a “drastic revolution” in fiscal policy, of “stringent budget cutting”, etc. is sheer nonsense. Orwellian “Newspeak” at its worst. In the old days, “cutting the budget” meant just that: reducing government expenditures. Now, Nixon is hailed/accused of being a “budget cutter” because he would increase the federal budget by “only” $18 billion. What kind of a “cut” is that? Despite the “peace dividend” supposed to attend the end of the Vietnam War, military spending is granted a substantial increase. The idea, furthermore, that the government is “committed” to budget items in the future which cannot be removed is again nonsense; no Congress can legally commit a future Congress to anything. The fact that any program, once begun, becomes politically very difficult to remove, is of course true, but this is quite another story. These programs are not natural or divine disasters, like earthquakes not amenable to human interposition. What is required to remove them is political courage, a courage insured and fueled by political pressure from the aggrieved taxpayer.

With all this said, we must still hail the President for daring to call for outright removal of many “welfare” programs, including the racketeering Office of Economic Opportunity and other “anti-poverty” schemes. In this sense, the Nixon budget is a small step forward. It is an even bigger step if it means — which is not yet clear — that Nixon has abandoned his disastrous welfare “reform” plan and his burgeoning scheme for national health insurance. If he has, then his budget, coupled with the retreat on price controls, does constitute a significant partial retreat from domestic statism and a truce against its further advance.

*********

All in all, then, the second Nixon Administration has very swiftly developed into a new form which is far more promising for libertarians than anything we might have dared to expect as late as last November. Your editor’s judgment in finally landing on Nixon’s side seems at this point to have been vindicated. In foreign policy, we are now in curious waters, in some senses in a world which we have not seen since the 1920’s. For, with the truces in the Cold War which Nixon has in a sense concluded with Russia, China, and now in Vietnam, for the first time in a half-century our government is not holding up before our frightened eyes the spectre of a rampaging Enemy, just about to launch a dreaded attack upon American shores. Of course, the Cold War too is in the closet, ready to be trotted out again at any time that the Administration feels an acute need to conjure up a rampaging “Enemy” once more. But as of this moment, we are more at peace than we have been for a half-century. What will Mr. Nixon do with his all-round truce? Will he turn to something like the Eisenhower posture, and be content to snooze his way through the rest of his reign? Will we really be able to enjoy a relatively passive Administration for the next four years? Or will his restless nature lead Mr. Nixon into some new statist adventure, at home or abroad, to an arena where he can once again exert his potential power and might, where he can launch some new aggression? To paraphrase the old adage, we can hope for — and now even expect — the best, but we must be prepared for the worst.

Hospers Replies

It was something of a surprise to me that one of several dozen questionnaires which I rather hastily filled out during the recent presidential campaign (and not intended for publication) suddenly appeared in the Libertarian Forum (December 1972 issue), and even more that the remarks I made were taken out of context so as to produce a result very different from the one intended. I trust that the motive in doing this was something other than malice; but whatever the motive, I would like to clarify a few points with reference to that questionnaire, without attempting here to discuss the whole of it.

I have profited immensely from reading the Libertarian Forum during the last few years, and Dr. Rothbard’s articles in particular have been unfailingly incisive, clear and informative, often more so than any other written material on the same subject anywhere. These pieces alone are worth many times the cost of subscription. In general, I agree completely with the articles on economic questions: in fact, many of them have helped to shape my own views on these issues. Virtually my only disagreements have been on one issue, international relations — and then only on some aspects of that. Our differing attitudes toward the police force probably result in large measure from our differing attitudes toward the current international scene.

That a police force of some kind is necessary, given the present state of society, seems obvious: that a private police force (or forces) would be ever so much more efficient than a state or municipal one seems also too plainly true to require much argument (though the questionnaire gave me no opportunity to indicate this: one was given space only to answer the specific questions asked, and no others). And among police forces in this country, my own dealings and those of everyone I know with the F.B.I. have been far more pleasant, or should I say less unpleasant, than with any local or state police force I have ever had dealings with (partly, no doubt, because of the superior training and education of the F.B.I.). Despite the fact that a national police force of any kind is always a great potential danger, I must admit that I would much rather deal with a member of the F.B.I. than with any local policeman I have ever encountered.

Now unlike (apparently) the editors of this journal, I do believe that international threats to our security do exist — not merely threats to the United States government, but to the safety of individuals in the United States. I do not deny of course that the United States has committed its share of aggressions. (Let me state for the record that I denounced the involvement in Vietnam from its very beginning, though not so much because it constituted aggression by the U.S. when it was entered into as because the U.S. had no business becoming militarily involved in such overseas ventures.) But I also believe that the Soviet Union can hardly be construed as a peaceful and non-aggressive nation (I mean of course its leaders, not its people in general). In the Cuban crisis of 1962, for example, if the Soviet Union had had a 4-1 military lead over the United States instead of the other way round, it seems to me highly probably that Soviet bombs would have dropped on the United States. Except for American military might — which on other grounds is to be deplored, e.g. the advance of statism that usually accompanies militarism — it seems to me extremely likely that attempts to Sovietize all or part of the world would have been made, and would have been successful. Most people did not believe Hitler when he announced his intentions in Mein Kampf, and most people have not believed the writers of the Russian revolution when they say (as the Communist Party theoretician Mikhail Suslov said not so long ago) that the present detente with the United States will be only temporary, and will last only until the Soviet Union gains a clearcut military superiority over the United States, at which time there will be “a renewed assault upon the West.” And, to quote a historian whom no one who has read his works can call a militarist, an alarmist, or a far right extremist, Professor Carroll Quigley: “We do not know if the Kremlin is insatiable for conquest, as some ‘experts’ claim, or is only seeking buffer security zones, as other ‘experts’ believe; but it is clear that Soviet orders to advance were prevented by the American possession of the A-bomb after 1945. It does seem clear that ultimately Soviet forces would have taken all of Germany, much of the Balkens, probably Manchuria, and possibly other fringe areas across central Asia, including Iran. Such an advance of Soviet power to the Rhine, the Adriatic, and the Aegean would have been totally unacceptable to the United States; but, without the atom bomb, we could hardly have stopped it.” (Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: a History of the World in Our Time, p. 864. New York: Macmillan, 1966.)

The Libertarian Forum apparently does not take such remarks seriously: it seems to be so concerned with fighting statism in this country that it prefers not to believe that there could be unpleasant, if not catastrophic, effects upon Americans of statism overseas; whereas I, while acutely aware of galloping statism in the United States (having spent most of my time in the recent presidential campaign attempting to fight it), am also worried about even more tyrannical statism overseas — not so much as it affects the Russian people (though that too is cause for distress), but as it could well affect the American people in the event that we choose to disarm at this critical juncture in history and thus lay ourselves open to any foreign aggressor that has a yen for Sovietizing the United States by force of arms or by ultimatums based on that force. (See Chapter 10 of my Libertarianism.)

It may be, of course, that certain side-effects of military preparedness in the United States — such as destroying American freedom in the very act of trying to preserve it against possible foreign attack — will be so ghastly as to outweigh the effects of preparedness against such aggression. It may also be (not that I necessarily think it is true, but only possible) that if the United States freed its economy by entirely disbanding the Departments of H. E. W., Agriculture, etc., and Defense, the resulting economic prosperity would be so tremendous that it would be worth running the risk of foreign aggression just to see it happen. But I would still be worried lest during the period of transition to a free economy, particularly with the cessation of “loans” of wheat and technological assistance to the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union would interpret this development as being so hostile to its interests that it would take advantage of our disarmament to take military action against us. At least, I do not see how the “disarmament now” libertarians can be so sure of the U.S. S. R.’s peaceful intentions that they would be (as they apparently are) content to risk the lives of millions of Americans by totally, or almost totally, dismantling its present military forces.

It is this difference in the estimate of the intentions of foreign nations that undoubtedly underlies the difference in attitude (between the Libertarian Forum and myself) toward the United States military and police apparatus. If military preparedness can deter potential aggressors (and admittedly it can also cause them to arm themselves faster), the result is surely well worth the cost. And if the F.B.I. or any other police organization can prevent the bombing of Grand Central Station by foreign or domestic saboteurs, by discovering the identity of the plotters and apprehending them to time to avert catastrophe, I for one am grateful for it, and consider the money spent on them more than justified by the dividends yielded in protection of life and property. If you and I are safer because these organizations exist, they are to that extent at least worth having around; that after all is what they are for, to protect us. I grant, of course, that they engage in other activities as well which are clearly not protective, and obviously I deplore those activities. The question is whether one should throw the baby out with the bath-water by eliminating at one stroke those organizations which do, at least sometimes, succeed in protecting us against threats to our life and liberty from both foreign and domestic sources.

I for one am not prepared to take that risk. At the very least, the proposition that there is no such risk is in no way self-evident, nor is it so obvious as to leave no room for argument. But the attitude of some libertarians appears to be: “I’m so convinced that I’m right (about there being no foreign threats to our safety) that I’m willing to risk not only my life but yours, by disarming, on the assumption that my calculations are correct.” Such a person is welcome to risk his own life on that assumption, but I don’t want him to risk mine along with it. It is possible, as some libertarians have said, that the chief danger to your and my liberty in 1973 comes not from Brezhnev or Mao but from Richard Nixon; but that no threat arises from these foreign sources at all, in view of their explicitly stated intentions, seems to me so plainly false that only by putting on intellectual blinders and seeing only what one wants to see is one enabled to put forward such an assertion.

My neighbors Smith and Jones may be so anxious to buy a new car that they will spend their money on it rather than on guns or burglar alarms for their homes, rationalizing their action with the consoling thought that the man across the street who has been uttering threats and buying lots of guns will take their example to heart, scrap his guns, and desist from any aggression. But Latvians and Czechs will not be so easily persuaded; they will wisely conclude that it is better to live without the new car than to be in constant danger of being robbed or shot.

— John Hospers

The Editor Rebuts

First. I should like to make it clear, to Dr. Hospers and to his many admirers, that I have nothing but the greatest esteem for him, both as a friend and as the outstanding theorist and spokesman for the “limited archy” wing of the libertarian movement. I wrote the article to which he is objecting (“Hospers On Crime and the FBI”, Lib. Forum, December 1972) not out of malice — but out of sadness, sadness at the numerous violations of libertarian principle committed by the Presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in the questionnaire. I am firmly convinced, moreover, that the numerous flaws, fallacies, and inconsistencies in Dr. Hospers’ general position stem not from personal eccentricities but from the very essence of his “conservative libertarian” position. Between Conservatism and Libertarianism there are numerous and grave inner contradictions, and the attempt to mix the two will lead inevitably to grave problems and anomalies, as we have all recently seen, for example, in Ayn Rand’s attack upon amnesty for draft evaders. But since Dr. Hospers is a man of great rationality, objectivity, and dedication. I have every confidence that he will eventually embrace the truth and jump completely over the conservative wall.

Now as to specifics. Dr. Hospers states that the questionnaire was not intended for publication; yet when a presidential candidate, in the heat of his campaign, answers a questionnaire designed for all the candidates, this is surely and legitimately News, and publication of the results can scarcely be regarded as a breach of confidence. When one runs for the Presidency, and assumes an important role as spokesman for libertarianism. then one’s utterances become especially subject to careful scrutiny. Hospers the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party rather than Hospers the man was the subject of scrutiny in our article.

As for the “context”, of course readers can only decide the merits of my summary by obtaining the questionnaire from the Friends of the FBI. But one notable fact is that Dr. Hospers makes not a single rebuttal to any of the points in my article nor an explanation of any of his answers. Instead, virtually his entire reply is devoted to the “Russian Question”, a matter irrelevant and out of context if there ever were one. As I recall, there was not a single mention, either in the questionnaire or in Dr. Hospers’ answers of the Russian Question, nor of course in my article. Indeed, what in the world the Russian Question has to do with whether or not the FBI should prosecute the drug traffic, or wiretap, or whether the police should remind accused persons of their constitutional rights, passeth understanding. Are we going to be like the typical Conservative, who drags in the Russian Threat like King Charles’ Head to justify any and all acts of government tyranny? Once we go that route, once we begin to justify a loss of liberty now in order to “defend” that liberty later, we are not only abandoning liberty itself: we are justifying every act of statism, from the draft to oil proration laws. Indeed, every such act has been justified by conservatives in the name of the Russian Threat and of national defense.” And in these justifications, we can see how the State has for centuries used the “foreign threat” to aggrandize its power over its deluded subjects.

Before getting to the Russian Question itself, I would like to say that I fail to be impressed with the politeness of the FBI. That they are better than many local police is hardly a commendation; do we prefer Attila or Genghis Khan? In fact, on the score of education, intelligence, and suavity, the CIA has the FBI beat hollow; and yet the foul deeds of the CIA have become glaringly known. But the major point is the usual libertarian case for decentralization: that when we confront despotism by the FBI we have no place to go short of leaving the country; whereas to avoid despotism or brutality by, say, the West Waukegan police force all we have to do is to skip to East Waukegan: surely a far more comfortable choice.

But to get to the Russian Question. In the first place, whether or not Russia constitutes a critical military threat is strictly an empirical question, and therefore not a question that can be resolved in a few pages of philosophical or political controversy. For example, it is logically conceivable that Great Britain constitutes an imminent military threat to the U.S., and that Edward Heath is planning a sneak atomic attack on New York in 48 hours. Logically conceivable, but of course empirically laughable — even though we could make out a case of sorts, citing the fact that we were twice in grave military combat with Great Britain, and so on.

Since it is an empirical question, I will have to be a bit high-handed and say flatly that it is my considered view that there is not a single shred of evidence of any Russian aim or plan to launch a military attack upon the United States, either in the past, present, or future. In fact, the evidence is all the other way, even in the time of Lenin, and certainly in the time of Stalin and his successors. Since the time of Lenin and his magnificent (from a libertarian, pro-peace point of view) conclusion of the “appeasement” Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the Soviet Union, vis à vis the other Great Powers, has consistently pursued a policy of what they have long termed “peaceful coexistence”, in fact often bending over backwards to pursue a peaceful foreign policy almost to the point of national suicide. I am not maintaining that the motivation for this unswerving course was any sort of moral nobility; it is the supremely practical one of preserving the Soviet State at all costs to other aims and objectives, buttressed by the Soviets’ firm Marxian conviction that, since capitalist states are doomed anyway, it is foolhardy in the extreme to court or risk war. The Soviet policy has always been the defensive one of hanging on to what they have and waiting for the supposedly inevitable Marxian revolutions in the other countries of the world. Lenin’s adherence to that policy was only confirmed by the “socialism in one country” doctrine of Stalin and his successors.

We all too often forget several crucial facts of modern European history: and one is that, from the point of view of ordinary international relations, Russia (any Russia, not just Soviet Russia) was a grievous loser from the settlements imposed by World War I (Brest-Litovisk, Versailles). Any German, Russian, or Austrian regime would have been “revisionist” after the war, i.e. would have sought the restoration of the huge chunk of territory torn from them by the victorious powers. Old Czarist Russia was shorn of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Western Byelorussia (grabbed by Poland after its war of aggression against Soviet Russia in 1920-21), and Western Ukraine (lopped off by Czechoslovakia and Rumania). Any Russian government would have hankered for its lost and grabbed territories. And yet, the Soviets did very little about this hankering; certainly they made no move whatsoever to make war to get the territories back. The Hitler-Stalin pact, much reviled by the uncomprehending Western press, actually made excellent sense for both major “revisionist” post-Versailles powers, Germany and Russia. For the essence of that pact was the commonality of revisionist interests by both powers: from that pact, Germany got its lost territories back (plus an extra chunk of ethnically Polish Poland), and Russia peacefully re-acquired its old territories, with the exception of Finland. No dire Russian military threat to the West, let alone’ the United States, can be conjured up out of that.

The next crucial and unfortunately forgotten fact is this: that Hitler turned brutally upon his ally and savagely attacked Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941. In this attack, Hitler was joined by the fascist regimes of Rumania and Hungary (Polish Poland and Czechoslavakia had by this time disappeared, or been swallowed up by Germany.) Why Hitler did this foolhardy act, an act that lost him the war and his head, is still a puzzle to historians. But we can say that his motives were compounded out of two factors: (a) his long-held desire to seize the “breadbasket” of the Ukraine; and (b) his hysterical anti-communism which fully matches the equivalent anti-Communism of the American Conservative movement. In his hysteria, Hitler too, like our conservatives, thought he saw an imminent Russian Threat: and so he decided on what is now called a “preemptive strike.” But of course Hitler, like our American Conservatives, was deluded; for the events of the war revealed that Stalin’s unwise trust in his ally led him to neglect elementary preparedness and thereby almost lost him the war as a result. Stalin’s pacific policy was carried almost to the point of national suicide.

What of Stalin’s “expansion” into Eastern Europe? This expansion was scarcely aggression in any rational sense: it was purely the inevitable consequence of Russia’s rolling back and defeating the German aggressor and his Hungarian and Rumanian allies. It is only by a grievous “dropping of the context”, of forgetting that Russia got into the war as a result of German aggression, that we can possibly point the finger of threat of “aggression” at Russia’s military march into the aggressor countries.

As his evidence for alleged Soviet “orders to advance” into Western Europe at the end of the war, Dr. Hospers cites only a paragraph from Professor Carroll Quigley. Yet Professor Quigley is not in any sense a specialist on the history of the Cold War nor does he command any respect whatever in the historical profession. And with good reason. The only place 1 have ever seen Professor Quigley cited as an authority is in several Birchite tracts, tracts which, whatever their devotion to individual liberty, are scarcely noted for the profundity or the accuracy of their scholarship. If any readers are interested in the best scholarly evidence on Russia and the Cold War, let them turn to the excellent and notable researches of such distinguished historians as Gabriel Kolko, Lloyd Gardner, Walter LaFeber, and Gar Alperovitz, researches which back my interpretation to the hilt. I repeat: there is not a shred of evidence of any Soviet aim or plan, much less “orders”, to invade Western Europe at the end of World War II or at any other time. If Dr. Hospers would care to cite some real evidence for his charge, I would be delighted to hear it.

In fact, read correctly. Professor Quigley’s citation is simply one more of numerous indications that it was the United States that launched the Cold War, that it was the United States that brutally and immorally brandished its monopoly of atomic weapons in an attempt to cow Soviet Russia into getting out of the conquered territories of Eastern Europe and to open them to American influence and penetration. In fact, historians from such opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum as Gar Alperovitz (in his great work, Atomic Diplomacy) and the late Harry Elmer Barnes, have shown that the very genocidal dropping of the A-bomb on an already vanquished Japan was done largely for the purpose of using atomic diplomacy as a counter in the American-launched Cold War.

As for the Cuban crisis of 1962, there is not a single piece of evidence of any Russian aim to drop missiles on the United States. In fact, the Soviets had plenty of their own missiles; and any idea that Cuba would launch a missile attack on the U.S. seems to me in the Great Britain-as-military threat category. In fact, the Soviet missiles in Cuba were as nothing to the missiles with which the United States had long encircled the Soviet Union. It is evident to me that the only possible purpose of Khrushchev’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba was to safeguard Cuba against an American attack: an attack the prospect of which was scarcely ludicrous, considering the 1961 CIA attack on Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. As Richard Walton points out in his excellent recent book on the Cuban crisis, the cause and motive power of the crisis was President Kennedy’s aggravated sense of machismo, his dangerous desire to face down the Russians in any sort of confrontation even at the risk of worldwide nuclear devastation. In fact, the Cuban settlement satisfied both parties: Kennedy looked like the macho conqueror, forcing the Russian missiles out of Cuba; while Khrushchev gained the informal but vital concession from Kennedy that the U.S. would launch no further aggression upon Cuba. Unfortunately for Khruschchev, his Soviet colleagues did not appreciate the loss of macho face, and Khruschchev was deposed for his pains.

Dr. Hospers’ only other piece of evidence is unsupported references to various Communist theoreticians, which he likens to Hitler’s “announced intentions” in Mein Kampf. In the first place, as the eminent left-liberal English historians A. J. P. Taylor and Geoffrey Barraclough have pointed out, far too much has been made of the importance of Mein Kampf in assessing Hitler’s policies. To say that someone’s actions can be fully explained by a tract, written in very different circumstances a decade or more earlier, is highly simplistic as historical method. But more relevantly, Communist “announced intentions” are very different from those of Mein Kampf. The announced intentions of all the Marxist-Leninist theoreticians, from Lenin down to the present, are notably different: they call repeatedly and consistently for a policy of peaceful coexistence by Communist countries with the “capitalist” powers. There is never any equivocation about that. However, they do warn (to varying degrees, depending on the wing of Marxism-Leninism) that capitalism inevitably begets imperialism, and that imperialism will tend to launch a war against the Communist powers. Therefore, they call for alert preparedness and oppose any unilateral disarmament by the Communist powers. And given the black record of American aggression in the Cold War and elsewhere, I must say that they have a point: not in the inevitability of capitalism begetting imperialism, but in a wariness over the possibly aggressive intentions of American imperialism. In short, there is infinitely more evidence of an American military threat to Russia than vice versa; and the “announced intentions” of Marxism-Leninism confirm rather than rebut this conclusion.

In fact, after decades of study of Marxist-Leninist writings, I have found only one theorist who has ever advocated a Soviet attack on the United States: and that is the crazed Latin-American Trotskyite, Juan Posadas. But since Senor Posadas has no standing within the world Trotskyite movement, let alone among the Communists in power, I think we can safely assure Dr. Hospers that the Posadas threat is about as critical as our hypothetical threat from the armed might of Prime Minister Edward Heath.

Curiously, Dr. Hospers seems to be most worried about a Russian attack during the period of transition to a free economy, when the U.S. State shall have been abolished. How Russia could see this development as “hostile to its interests” is difficult to see; on the contrary, the Russians would breathe a sigh of relief at being free of the threat of American aggression, a threat which they have felt deeply ever since we intervened with troops and weapons to try to crush the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918-20. The Russians, indeed, have been anxious to conclude a joint disarmament agreement with the U.S., and have ever since they accepted the American proposal to that effect on May 10, 1955: a proposal which the U.S. itself promptly repudiated and has balked at ever since. Contrary to American propaganda, incidentally, the Russian proposal was for general and complete disarmament coupled with unlimited inspection; it was the United States who, while insisting on inspection, balked at any kind of effective disarmament.

To proceed to Dr. Hospers’ final point: what of those Americans who are not persuaded by our evidence, and who persist in fearing the Russian Threat? He accuses us anarcho-capitalists who wish to dismantle the American State of “risking not only my life, but yours, by disarming”. But the point is that, in an anarchist society, those who fear a foreign threat and wish to arm themselves defensively, are free to go ahead and do so. Dr. Hospers happily concedes that private police forces would be more efficient than the police force of government monopoly; so why not private defense forces or “armies” as well? Contrary to Dr. Hospers, anarchists do not propose to force those who wish to arm defensively to disarm: instead on the contrary it is he and other advocates of archy who are now forcing us to arm against a foreign threat that many of us believe does not exist. It is no more moral to tax someone to pay for one’s own defense, whether real or imagined, than it is to draft him for the same purpose. And, besides, if the FBI is really protecting us against the sabotage of Grand Central Station, then why couldn’t the owners of that station do a far better job?

The Old Curmudgeon As Hero

By Walter Block

Imagine, if you will, the problems of the real estate developer trying to supplant a whole city block of moldy decrepit tenements with a modern residential complex replete with gardens, swimming pools, balconies, and all the other accoutrements of fine living. Not so much all the government-made problems such as zoning laws, licensing requirements, bribes, permissions for architectural plans, etc.; to be sure, they are widespread, stultifying, and exasperating. Let us focus instead on the problems posed by the old curmudgeon who happens to live on the block in the most decrepit tenement of all. A building, however, that he is exceedingly fond of. Some might even go so far as to say overly fond of, since he refuses to sell the old homestead to the builder at any price. The builder offers hundreds, then thousands, and then even millions. But the old curmudgeon steadfastly refuses. The builder offers a paid trip to Europe, to Israel, to anywhere but to no avail.

As important as this instance may be, it is only one of the many cases where the old curmudgeon supposedly interferes with the well being of the multitudes. The old curmudgeon, who may be a little old lady, a wizened bitter old man, a great big fat jolly but stubborn person, has long been active, defending the old homestead against the inroads of highway builders, railroad magnates, mining companies, dam and irrigation control projects: indeed, we owe the plots of many of our Western movies to this theme. It is the old curmudgeon, or his spiritual soul mate, who served as the inspiration for the enactment of eminent domain legislation: a staunch human barrier to any and all progress, feet planted firmly at the crossroads, arms stubbornly crossed in front of chest the motto of the old curmudgeon a strident, defiant “NO!”

So goes the popular view of the holdout. In this paper, however, I shall argue that the popular view is entirely mistaken; that on the contrary, it is the old curmudgeon, seemingly always standing in the way of progress, who actually stands for the greatest hope that progress has ever had; that this attack on the old curmudgeon who refuses to sell his property at the demand of some big builders is really a disguised attack on the concept of private property itself.

It is an attack on the basic concept of private property itself because according to that doctrine, each owner of property shall have the full right to decide its use, as long as this use does not interfere with every other property owner’s similar and equal right to the use of his own property. In the case of eminent domain, when the state forces the property owner to give up the rights to his property on terms that he would not voluntarily accept, the rights to private property are abridged.

There are two main arguments for private property: the moral and the practical. According to the moral argument, each man is the complete owner of himself, to begin with. So the primary object of property rights, the person itself, is the foundation of property rights, from whence all other property rights flow. But the ownership and control of each person by himself ineluctably results in certain fruits of that ownership and control. These fruits of man’s labor come under the ownership and control of each man in accordance with what he has produced, by the same principle under which he received ownership and control over his own body in the first place. The principle under which each person comes to control and own himself is the principle of homesteading, or of natural control or of natural regulation or of natural governance. That is to say, each person is the natural owner of himself because, in the nature of things, it is he, it is his will, that controls his body. Imagine if nature was different. If everytime I looked, you saw; if everytime I willed an arm to raise and scratch an ear, it was your arm that did so; if everytime you itched, I felt it. And if everytime you looked, I saw; if everytime you willed an arm to raise and scratch an ear, it was my arm that did so: if everytime I itched, you scratched. Then you would no longer own that body, and I would no longer own this one. Rather, you would own this one and I would own that one.

According to this principle of natural homesteading which justifies self ownership, man not only owns his own person, but he also owns the fruits of that person, that which he produces, those parts of nature hitherto un-owned with which man mixes his labor and transforms into a more productive existence. The moral way that these non-human properties can change ownership is either through voluntary trade or voluntary gift giving. This is because these are the only ways of changing ownership which are consistent with the original owners natural homesteading rights: they are the only methods by which the homesteaders maintain control even in giving up ownership rights, for they are the only methods by which ownership is given up on a voluntary basis.

The property now owned by the old curmudgeon was gained for him by just such a process. There was an original homesteader, there were sales of the land, perhaps the land was given in the form of a gift at one time or another. But the final result was that the land passed into the control of the old curmudgeon, if he is indeed the rightful owner, through an unbroken chain of voluntary events, all consistent with the principle of natural homesteading.

Any attempt to wrest it from him without his consent would therefore be in violation of the principle of natural homesteading and hence immoral. It would amount to an act of aggressive force against an entirely innocent party.

Many people realize this when it comes to resisting the demands on the part of a private business for condemnation of the old curmudgeon’s property. They realize, perhaps, that one private business has no legitimacy over another. But when it comes to state condemnation, through eminent domain laws, the story is very different. Here, there is very little opposition, even though, in many if not all cases, there are still private interests, using the government’s eminent domain powers to their own ends. Much of the urban relocation programs, for instance, are at the behest of private universities, of private hospitals. Much of the condemnation of private property by the government’s use of eminent domain laws is done for the special interests of private lobbies and special interest groups. Done to benefit that part of the public that favors the aggrandizement of museums, parks, roads, public theatre, opera, and concert halls. The condemnation of the land now used for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City is a case in point. A vast tract of land was condemned to make way for “culture”. People were forced to sell at prices the government was willing to pay, involuntarily. Whose culture can be made perfectly clear by reading the list of subscribers to Lincoln Center, which reads like a who’s who of the ruling class.

Now let us consider the second argument for private property rights: the practical argument. One practical argument for private property rights is that of stewardship; it is the claim that under the stewardship of private property, the “best” care will be given to the property of the older generation that is handed down to the younger, and that the younger generation will “best” be able to add to its heritage. According to the stewardship view of property, it is not terribly important just precisely who gets control of any given piece of property. What is important is that all property be privately owned, and that precise delineations between the property be clearly marked off.

According to the stewardship view, all property gets given out somehow (equally or unequally, it does not matter), no forced or involuntary transfer of the property is allowed, and each person works his property to the best or worst of his ability (it does not matter which). What does matter though, what is crucially important as a matter of fact, is that a market system be in operation so that those that “mishandle” their property eventually lose some of it and have less and less as time goes on, and that those who nurture and husband it well eventually gain some more and have more and more as time goes on. Thus, as these better able to maintain a good stewardship over property become responsible for more and more, and those unable to maintain a good stewardship have less and less, the general level of stewardship will rise, and better and better care will be taken of the property.

The way that the laissez-faire market place works this out is simplicity itself. First of all, it defines the “proper maintenance” of property as that kind of maintenance or care-taking that maximizes the money return from or the value of that property. The market then tends to insure that the good caretakers earn more money than the bad ones. This enables the good caretakers, on net balance, to buy out the bad ones. For example, the “good” farmer, the one who maintains his crops and farm animals in good condition, will prosper, earn more money, and in the long run, tend to be able to either buy out the bad farmer, or to be able to bring more and more acres into cultivation. In any case, as time wears on, this stewardship system, in rewarding the good stewards, and penalizing the poor stewards, increases the average level of stewardship. And it does so automatically, without political votes every four years, without political purges, without fuss or fanfare.

Of course, this stewardship argument assumes a complete laissez-faire capitalist system. Any government infringements, such as loans and subsidies to prop up failing businesses (bad stewards who mismanage their property) such as the Lockheed loan, vitiate the whole effect. For then the mismanagers will not succumb to the more effective stewardship of the good managers. The government interposes itself between the bad caretaker and in effect, an outraged public, one that did not voluntarily choose to patronize the entrepreneur in question. Other forms such infringements can take are the granting of franchises, licenses and other types of monopoly advantages to one select individual, or group; the granting of tariffs and quotas to protect inefficient domestic “caretakers” against the competition of the more efficient foreign stewards; the awarding of government contracts which pervert the original consumption wishes of the public.

Why, it may be asked, if the goal of this practical argument for property rights is that it tends to promote good stewardship of the scarce resources of the planet, cannot the government help the process along a bit by transferring the control of resources from those who have proved themselves bad managers in the market to those who have proved themselves good managers? In this way, the vagaries of the market system will be suspended, and those who would eventually have been able to prosper in the ordinary course of events will be able to do so much more quickly. The problem with this, of course, is the insurmountable one that the market system works automatically day by day, to determine who are the good and bad managers each day. Past reputation and abilities count for nought. If the government attempts to hasten the process by transferring money from the poor to the rich, it will only succeed in transferring money from those who were poor managers in the past to those who were good managers in the past. (This is true on the assumption of a laissez faire society: of our own society, we can make no such claim. Practically none of the current income transfer from the poor to the rich occurs out of a motivation to encourage good stewardship nor has that effect.) There is no guarantee that the future will resemble the past. That those who were successful entrepreneurs in the past will be successful entrepreneurs in the future. Also, what of the people who are now poor but are destined by their own efforts to be very good managers and in the future become rich? A governmental program whose purpose was to spur on stewardship based on past accomplishments would involve taking money away from these future good managers.

The reason it is important to discuss this question is that it is at the root of the original problem of the old curmudgeon who refuses to sell his property. For what is the old curmudgeon who refuses to sell his property but a “backward”, probably poor individual who is by all standards not a good manager? A prime candidate for being relieved of his money by a scheme whose goal is to speed up the market process of creating good stewards. But we have seen why this scheme is bound to fail. When we apply it to the case of the old curmudgeon we can see that not only does the free market have a tendency to reward good managers in the future, but that also, at any given time, there will tend to be a rough proportionality between the amount of private property amassed by an individual and the efficiency with which he cares for it. Of course there will be exceptions. Even assuming a laissez faire economy there will be some good managers with precious little to manage and some bad managers with an embarrassment of riches. But these will be the exceptions, not the rule. On the average in a laissez-faire economy, there will exist at any given time a rough proportionality between stewardship ability and the amount of private property amassed.

Therefore, stripping the old curmudgeon of his rightful possessions because of seemingly poor stewardship, in addition to being immoral, is even impractical from the point of view of the stewardship argument for private property. As small as it is, the old curmudgeon has demonstrated his ability to manage it, if for no other reason than that it is actually in his possession.

There is another practical argument for private property besides the stewardship argument. For want of a better name, we may call this the praxeological argument for private property. One complaint that the praxeologist would have about the stewardship argument would be that such terms and phrases as “good maintenance”, “the greatest good for the greatest number”, “efficient stewardship”, “proper handling o! property”, “maintaining property in good order”, etc., have no precise definition; that the definition of “proper maintenance” of property in terms of maximizing the money return from or the value of that property begs the question of the perspective from which such evaluations are made. All too often, the praxeologist would charge, the implicit evaluation is made from the perspective of the large builder, and not from the perspective of the old curmudgeon.

The praxeological view focusses on the question of how to evaluate the level of satisfaction inherent in any business transaction or state of affairs. And the answer given is that the only scientific statement that can be made about such occurrences is that when a voluntary trade between two people takes place, both gain in the ex ante sense. The ex ante sense is the sense in which both parties to the trade, at the actual time of the trade, each value that which they gain from the trade at a higher level than that which they must give up in the trade. In the ex ante evaluation of the trade, it is therefore apodictically certain that both parties to the trade gain from it. We know this because the two parties would not have voluntarily agreed to make the trade unless, at the time of the trade, each had valued what he was to receive more than what he was to give up. Thus no one can ever make a mistake on a trade, in the ex ante sense. In the ex post sense of evaluation, which is usually contrasted with the ex ante sense, one can certainly make a mistake in trade. For the ex post sense evaluates the trade from the vantage point of the future. One most certainly can value what one receives in trade more than what one gives up — and then reverse one’s evaluation in the future, when it is too late to call off the trade.

Returning to the case of the old curmudgeon who refuses to trade his old homestead even for a million dollars so that the big real estate developer can supplant the whole city block of tenements with a luxury complex. The praxeologist would vehemently reject the contention that there is any loss in welfare, stewardship of property, “proper” usage of property or whatever. For the praxeologist, as we have just seen, the only time that we can make a judgment about welfare, or good stewardship, etc., is when two people make a trade; and the only thing that we can say, as scientists, about the trade, is that both parties to it gain from it in the ex ante sense (or else they would not have voluntarily entered into the trade). But the case of the old curmudgeon refusing to sell his homestead for a million is precisely not a case where two parties enter voluntarily into a trade. It is precisely a case where no trade takes place. We cannot therefore deduce that welfare or good stewardship was thwarted. If anything, the only thing that we can deduce from the failure of the trade to take place is that although perhaps the real estate developer valued the old homestead more than the million dollars he was willing to give up for it, the old curmudgeon decidedly did not so value these two properties. Oh the contrary, from his failure to sell, we can only conclude that he valued the old homestead more than the, million dollars. And who is to say him nay? Since no interpersonal comparisons of utility or welfare can have a scientific basis (there is no unit by which such things can even be measured, let alone compared between different people) there is” no one who can legitimately say that the refusal of the old curmudgeon to sell his property is “harmful”, or causes problems, or is “obstructive”. Of course the old curmudgeon’s choice is obstructive of the real estate developer’s goals. But then, the goals of the real estate developer are just as obstructive of the goals of the old curmudgeon. There is no scientific, let alone moral, reason to regard the curmudgeon’s goals and values as inferior to those of the developer.

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A Libertarian Poll

Mr. Ferdinand V. Solara. an inveterate chronicler of things libertarian and conservative, has just released the results of a questionnaire polling the intensity of the respondents’ devotion to various’ libertarian individuals, publications, and organizations. It is scarcely Mr. Solara’s fault that the representativeness of his sample can be questioned; 155 answers are not a large sample of the movement, and perhaps his Colorado base helps account for the high percentage of objectivists and other “limited archists” among his respondents (approximately ¾ of those answering were limited archists and ¼ anarchists.) Perhaps Colorado also accounts for the fact that 60% of the pollees were Libertarian Party members.

Mr. Solara asked his respondents to rate various magazines and organizations on a scale ranging from A to E. One interesting result is the picture of the intensity of devotion of members or subscribers, gauged from how many gave an “A” rating to “their” groups or journals. Of the organizations, there was generally a near 1:1 correlation between members and an “A” rating: that is, the two were roughly equal. One major anomaly is the Liberty Amendment Committee, which had only 4 members but which garnered an “A” rating from 24 respondents; this indicates that many people esteem the Liberty Amendment Committee who wouldn’t dream of joining the organization. On the other hand, the other leading anomaly was our old friend YAF, which had 29 members among those polled, but which only got an A from 2 of them. There are presumably a great many disaffected members of YAF, as well there might be.

Of the publications listed, we are happy to announce that a close A/subscriber correlation held true for only three journals: Reason, A is A News, and the Lib. Forum. All the other listed magazines revealed a severe falling off of ratings, presumably reflecting a severe disaffection among their subscribers. There is, however, an anomaly in regard to the Lib. Forum. That is, that while we have developed a high degree of subscriber loyalty, our number of subscribers among the pollees was relatively small, far smaller than several of our colleagues in dire loyalty trouble. In short, folks, we have a great product, but not enough readers imbibing all the goodies we have to offer. Let us remedy that, and round up more subscribers! Why deprive so many people of the blessings conferred by the Libertarian Forum?

Movement Magazines

Manny Klausner the estimable young editor of Reason, chides us for our gloomy account of the stillbirth of Libertarian Review, (Lib. Forum, December 1972) and wishes to correct the record by pointing out that the monthly Reason now has over 5,000 subscribers and bids fair to rise to over 6,000 in a short time. Well taken, but I doubt whether this happy news is enough to cut the gloom about the current good health of the libertarian movement. For, on the other hand, we must consider that no less than three of our leading libertarian magazines have bit the dust in recent months, and a fourth is at least in serious trouble. The Individualist, formerly a fine monthly magazine issued under the auspices of the Society for Individual Liberty, has apparently expired. Libertarian Analysis, a quarterly journal that tried to be a home for scholarly articles, is dead. And The New Banner, an ambitious tabloid biweekly of high quality produced by the South Carolina movement, has apparently collapsed as well. And now Outlook, an organ of much of the New York movement which had achieved a high quality in recent issues, is, if not expired, at least in the throes of a bitter internecine conflict. It looks as if there is a good chance that we will soon be left with Reason as virtually our only magazine. Despite the many fine qualities of Reason, this means that the fortunes of the movement are in worse shape than we wrote last December, rather than better; apart from Reason, the libertarian publishing world is in a shambles

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 3

MARCH, 1973

75¢

THE MAYORAL CIRCUS

Ever since the open primary was instituted in New York a few years ago, politicians have deeply regretted this extension of democratic choice. And well they might, for the power of the party bosses has been superseded by the fun and games where every man-and-his-brother can, and do, leap in to battle for political office. If they can do so, the politicos will soon wrap up the open primary, but in the meanwhile we can all enjoy the circus spectacle.

The circus has come to full bloom this year, as approximately a dozen “serious” candidates vie for the top prize of the Mayoralty. We hereby present a “reader’s guide” to the present status of the New York mayoral race.

The central, overriding fact of the contest is the withdrawal of New York’s universally (within the city) despised and reviled incumbent, Big Jawn Lindsay. Lindsay had managed, in a perverse way, to unify the city: for in recent years it has been extremely difficult to find anyone, regardless of race, creed, color, income class, ideology, or national origin, who does not go into a conniption fit at the very mention of the hated Lindsay name. The essential nature of the common hatred of Lindsay is the clue to current New York politics. For Lindsay, in his person and in his policies, embodies the essential program of what has been deliciously dubbed as the “limousine liberals”. Limousine Liberalism is the political alliance of arrogant, upper-class, Park Avenue WASPS (richly embodied in Lindsay’s person) with the militants of the black and Puerto Rican “ghettoes.” Lindsay Liberalism is the aggrandizement of the central municipal bureaucracy and the government, levying ever-higher taxes on the middle and the working classes, for the benefit of the aforesaid bureaucracy, favored big business interests, and the ghetto militants. Lindsay Liberalism is the government sternly telling the middle and working classes of the city: “Let’s you and him integrate the schools”; “Let’s you and him integrate housing and the neighborhoods”; “Let’s you pay more for welfare clients and the housing of drug addicts”; “Let’s you sit by while street crime and mugging runs rampant, and let’s you ‘solve’ the crime problem by providing more anti-poverty money and more playgrounds.” And while Lindsay and his upper-class colleagues keep issuing such stern injunctions to the average citizen of New York, they themselves are busy sending their own kids to exclusive private schools, and living in Park Avenue apartment houses tightly ringed with security measures to keep out the unwanted.

For the average New Yorker, the nub of the entire problem is crime. He could have continued to put up uncomplainingly with high taxes, galloping welfare, traffic congestion, pollution, and the rest of the urban ills of our society if only crime had been kept under control. And by that he means street crime: the sudden mugging and assault for purpose of robbery, “kicks”, or a combination of the two. The New Yorker is no longer impressed with crime statistics that show other cities with a higher rate of crime in forgery, auto theft, embezzlement, or bank robbery. He is of course opposed to these categories of crime, too, but the kind of crime that hits him in the gut, literally and metaphorically, is street mugging, and it is here that New York has come to “excel” — to the extent that New York has become a nationwide sick joke for television comedians. The New Yorker has lost patience with the age-old liberal “explanations” for crime: economic, historical, and sociological. He wants street crime cracked down on, hard and right now.

Lindsay’s first term was difficult enough, but while he quickly lost the support of the Irish, Italian, and Polish middle and working classes — known in New York as “the ethnics” — he still retained the support of the mass of New York Jews, a group which had long been synonymous with the word “liberalism.” With Jewish, Negro, and Puerto Rican support, and with his opponents split, Lindsay managed to squeak through to reelection in 1969. But in his second term, the mass of New York Jewry has defected as well; and, indeed, the story of New York politics has been the massive shift “rightward” of the middle and lower-income Jews of Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. (There are very few lower-income WASPS in New York City, scarcely enough to constitute a voting bloc.) This rightward shift has been propelled by the hammer-blows of street mugging; as they themselves, their friends and relatives and neighbors, have come under the gun or knife, preservation from street crime has taken first rank in the concerns of New York’s Jews as well as the other ethnic groups. The crime question has thus become the central, overriding fact of New York politics, and most of the passion expended on such issues as welfare, public schools, and housing is related to crime at the central core.

The one exception to this loss of Jewish support for Lindsay Liberalism is the West Side of Manhattan, a district rife with middle and upper-class Jewish intellectuals, who continue to cling to their old liberalism, even though even here fissures have begun to surface. The result is that in recent years, New York City politics has seen a dramatic split between Manhattan and the other boroughs: with the other boroughs “conservative” (especially on issues of crime and “law-and-order”), and Manhattan — consisting largely of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, upper-class WASPS, and the aforesaid West Side Jews — remaining stubbornly left-liberal. It is no accident that Manhattan was the only borough, that gave McGovern a clear-cut majority in 1972.

After surveying his chances, and despite his evident desire to continue in office, John Lindsay wisely took himself out of the mayoral race. The last straw was when Lindsay’s major political supporter, shrewd old Alex Rose, the absolute boss of the Liberal Party of New York, refused to endorse the Mayor’s re-election bid. But Lindsay remains as arrogant as ever, and he threatens to run for governor next year, on the theory that he can still command support outside the city. But if he runs, he will undoubtedly be slaughtered at the polls once more.

The field is now wide open for the mayoralty. The June Democratic primary now has about a dozen entries. Let us go down the list, reading approximately from Left to Right.

On the extreme left, there is Assemblyman Jesse Gray, of Harlem. A blend of nine parts crafty street brawler and one part Marxist-Leninist, Jesse is one of the least attractive candidates to come down the pike in many a year. He is, no doubt, the only black candidate in the field, but even his black support is dubious, for two major reasons: (1) Blacks (and Puerto Ricans) don’t vote very heavily in any election in New York — one of the least well-kept secrets of New York politics; and (2) Jesse is not even supported by New York’s Black Caucus, headed by Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton and Brooklyn’s Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm; his only major black supporter is Brooklyn’s State Senator Waddaba Stewart, who was recently on the losing end of a power struggle in the black Bedford-Stuyvesant area with Shirley Chisholm. Jesse’s chances may be set as somewhere close to zero.

Next we come to the major Left candidate, Congressman Herman Badillo of the Bronx. As the only Puerto Rican candidate, Badillo hopes to snag the black and Puerto Rican votes in the June primary. Badillo, however, lost in a ruthless, slam-bang, war-to-the-knife battle at the March convention of the New Democratic Coalition, the umbrella outfit for all the “reform” Democrat clubs in the city. Despite early support, the NDC, consisting largely of left-liberal Jews on the West Side and elsewhere, finally gave its endorsement instead to Albert Blumenthal (see below). The NDC endorsement was coveted largely because it provides the clue to campaign funds from wealthy liberal Jewish contributors. The angry Badillo bitterly charged the NDC with “racism”, and the fat is in the fire. Badillo’s reliance on black and Puerto Rican votes is probably hopeless because (1) blacks and Puerto Ricans don’t vote in large numbers, and (2) the arrogant, grim Badillo is distrusted by many Puerto Ricans in New York. The distrust is personal, religious and ethnic, embodied in: Badillo’s cool and arrogant personality, his marriage to a Jewess and his previous courting of NDC and Jewish-liberal support, and to the fact that he is an Evangelical Protestant while the mass of Puerto Ricans are Catholics. Badillo’s chances are surely not as negligible as Gray’s, but they are now slim indeed.

This brings us to the official NDC candidate, Albert Blumenthal. Blumenthal, the Assemblyman from the West Side, is a cool, tough customer who is proud of his “pragmatic” record in the State Assembly. Now that he has the NDC endorsement, he can be expected to move swiftly to appeal to the crime-fearing masses of New York’s outer boroughs. While Blumenthal may well carry Manhattan, the chances of his succeeding in gulling the rest of New York into accepting his more moderate “image” are not very bright.

If Blumenthal is the official candidate of Left-Center Liberalism, there are other dark horse candidates in the same zone who might, but probably will not, catch on. City Councilman-at-Large Robert Postel from Manhattan, has been running on the strength of his fearless exposes of corruption by the young hot-shots in the Lindsay administration. But Postel has garnered little support, political or financial, and can be expected to drop out of the race. Slightly to the right of Blumenthal is former West Side Reform Assemblyman Jerome Kretchmer. While ideologically similar, Kretchmer has a rough-and-ready style that appeals far more to Bronx and Brooklyn ethnics than does the austere Blumenthal. But Kretchmer’s credibility is indelibly marred by his having just resigned as Lindsay’s garbage commissioner (now called Environmental Protection Administrator), after which he suddenly discovered the corruption of the Lindsay administration. A darker, and more powerful, horse suddenly emerging from the wings is none other than former Mayor Robert Wagner. Wagner was scarcely beloved in his day, and his bid for a comeback was snuffed out four years ago; but eight years of John Lindsay has made Wagner’s reign seem like the Golden Age, and the Liberal Party’s Alex Rose has been making noises in Wagner’s direction. It is possible that Wagner may stay out of the tangled Democrat primary and run only on the Liberal line, where Rose can dictate the candidate.

Moving to the Center, we have Congressman Ed Koch, from the East Side of Manhattan. While one of the original left-liberal Jewish reformers, Koch has moved sharply rightward in recent years, taking up the cudgels against crime and against the Lindsay attempts to place low-income, racially integrated public housing in Forest Hills, Queens (Jewish) and school busing in Brooklyn’s Canarsie (Italian and Jewish.) In an increasingly polarized New York, however, Koch has lost the support of the Left, while still not trusted by the conservative masses. Koch’s chances, too, are minimal.

On the surface, one might think that Centrist Sanford Garelik has all the qualifications for success. A “tough cop” most of his life, Garelik has law-and-order appeal; now President of the City Council, Garelik has been conspicuously anti-Lindsay over the last four years. Furthermore, he was supported for his present post by the Liberal Party, and, as a Jew, might be expected to appeal to the now conservative Jewish masses of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Yet Garelik has picked up scant support for the mayoral race. One reason is that Garelik appears to be extraordinarily dumb, even by ordinary political standards. Jokes have been spreading throughout the city about Garelik’s supposed inability to find his own office in the morning. The Liberal Party shows no signs of supporting him, and Garelik has been tainted with the corruption issue with a recent disclosure about his accepting Christmas presents while high in the police force. Furthermore, his “tough cop” image among conservatives is greatly dwarfed by that of Mario Biaggi (see below).

One dark horse picking up support, and somewhere in Center or Left-Center, is the Italian lawyer Mario Cuomo. It was Cuomo who engineered the compromise that saved at least some of the homes of a group of beleaguered low-income Italians of Corona, Queens from the Lindsay bulldozer. Cuomo’s intelligence and ability has deeply impressed some of the Jewish reformers, and he shows signs of being endorsed by the shrewd, tough leader of the Queens Democracy, Matthew Troy. Troy established himself as leader of the “left-wing” of the Democrat regulars by being the only enthusiast among the regular leadership in the city for the candidacy and the Presidential race of George McGovern. Despite his gloss of liberalism, Troy has connections with his conservative constituency, stemming from his own early conservatism as well as from the far more principled conservatism of his father (Matthew Troy, Sr.) who had long established himself as the loudest advocate of the Catholic cause in Ireland. Cuomo’s chances depend, first, on where Troy will go, and much of Troy’s actions will be determined by his active personal feud with the Democratic boss of Brooklyn, Meade Esposito.

Moving to the Right of Center, we have the important candidacy of the present Controller of the City of New York, Abraham Beame. As something of a fiscal conservative and well-known budget-cutter, Beame has considerable appeal to the Brooklyn-Bronx mass base, an appeal reinforced by his being Jewish and a long-time member of the Brooklyn Democrat machine. As such he will undoubtedly be backed to the hilt by Brooklyn boss Esposito, and probably by Bronx Democratic leader Patrick Cunningham. Beame is also strongly backed by New York’s real estate interests, who probably fell that Beame will not push to re-impose New York’s previous and disastrous system of rent control. Beame’s support is being spearheaded by the powerful Shubert Theatre chain, headed by one Irving Goldman, and by forces close to the powerful Tammany (Manhattan regular) Surrogate judge, S. Samuel DiFalco. Beame’s major drawback is his advanced age; he admits to 67, but the scuttlebutt claims that he is approximately 73. Also, he is a candidate distinctly lacking in charisma, as was revealed in the campaign in which he lost to Robert Wagner. Beame has shrewdly tried to turn the age issue to his advantage, however, by promising to be strictly a one-term mayor, a promise that is a heady one to many New Yorkers surfeited with eight years of Lindsay.

The Right-wing candidate, and the probable favorite at this writing, is Bronx Mario Biaggi. A tough Italian cop for many years, Biaggi is the leading “law and order” candidate, and is thus highly attractive to the now conservative Jewish masses as well as to his own Italian constituency. Biaggi has built an impregnable political base in his home area of conservative, home-owning, middle-class Italian East Bronx, where he was almost unanimously re-elected as Congressman in 1972 with Democrat, Republican, and Conservative support. A moderate on national issues, Biaggi has recently tried a flanker move to the left by calling for the reimposition of rent controls. The political joke in New York is that Biaggi is the “Mafia candidate”, but this charge is very often met with the shrug: “Maybe New York needs a Mafioso mayor.” In fact, Biaggi’s appeal is enhanced by indications that he would be ultra-tough on street crime while at the same time looking the other way on such far less threatening and more entrepreneurial forms of “crime” as gambling. Furthermore, while Biaggi might be strong on the police, he has also shown himself to be anti-militarist, leading the drive to expose and reform brutality in Army camps. As such, Biaggi has been following a long-time tradition among American Italians. Furthermore, Biaggi’s appeal is strengthened by indications that he would gain Conservative Party endorsement, and perhaps even the Republican nomination, since Governor Rockefeller has been looking for a conservative “fusion” candidate that he could back for Mayor. Of course, now that Rockefeller’s hated enemy Lindsay is out of the race, the governor’s enthusiasm for fusion may well have cooled.

The picture in the other primaries is even cloudier at this writing, though not for the same reasons as the multi-candidate Democracy. Among the Republicans, the previous candidate, the powerful State Senator John Marchi, from highly conservative and quasi-rural Staten Island, is anxious to run again. But Marchi’s candidacy has many barriers to overcome. One is Rockefeller’s desire for fusion, since the chances are nil for Democratic endorsement of the Staten Island Republican. Furthermore, Marchi has lost much of his old Conservative Party support, since he has in recent years endorsed liberal plans for massive low-income housing developments in Staten Island, plans that are bitterly opposed by the conservative masses of that borough. To stop Marchi, Rockefeller might well endorse a patsy candidate, State Senator Roy Goodman, who, as a liberal Jewish Republican from the East Side of Manhattan, has almost no support among liberals, Jews, or Republicans, and therefore could be well calculated to be slaughtered by a Democrat-Conservative Biaggi in November.

And so the New York political stew muddies and thickens. Among the minor parties, the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party will undoubtedly run a candidate, and the Trotskyite splinter group, the Labor Committee movement, headed by the fanatically pro-“working class” theoretician L. Marcus, has already nominated one Tony Chaitkin for the Mayoralty. The Free Libertarian Party of New York is preparing to run a mayoral slate, and will nominate someone at its convention at the end of March. Right now there appear to be two candidates for the FLP nomination. Paul Streitz and Fran Youngstein, but at this writing we have not been able to determine the ideological differences between the two slates. More on FLP doings at a later date.

The Blackmailer As Villain

By Gary Greenberg

I would like to register a dissent from Water Block’s continuing series of articles in which degenerate scum and social vermin are the subject of articles entitled “— As Hero.” His article on the blackmailer as hero will serve as an example.

First, no heroic qualities are displayed by the characters depicted, as in the case of the blackmailer article. A hero is someone you admire, respect and would like to emulate due to the excellence of some desirable trait exhibited by the “hero.” The blackmailer is certainly not someone who exhibits any admirable traits. The stock and trade of the blackmailer is to withhold information, the release of which is calculated to bring a devastating blow to the existence of a human being. It is the fear of destruction of reputation, life, or freedom that is affected.

Let us concede for the moment (and I don’t in fact) that the blackmailer is engaged in legal activity. That certainly doesn’t justify him as a hero. Just because a person engages in acts that are rightfully considered vile, although legal by most humane people, doesn’t mean we have to admire the scoundrel. The one virtue alleged for the Blackmailer is that the truth shall make us free or some other such cliche. This ignores the fact that a frequent tactic of a blackmailer is to threaten to expose, false, fraudulent, framed or phony information, calculated to result in harm to an individual if released.

One of the problems of the Block series is to slide in his description of the alleged hero from the general conception of the actor to the specific aspects which Block wants to examine. The Blackmailer is not simply thought of as someone who just withholds information for a fee.

To illustrate my point, let’s look at some definitions of Blackmail.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines Blackmail as “The extortion of money by threats or overtures toward criminal prosecution or the destruction of a man’s reputation or social standing.” Webster’s New World Dictionary (paperback) defines blackmail as “payment extorted to prevent disclosure of information that could bring disgrace.” Notice both definitions use the term “extort” which implies the threat of violence or harm for failure to comply.

While some activities of a Blackmailer may be legitimate, much of his usual practice is not. A frequent target of blackmailers is the person who is guilty of victimless crimes. Our “Hero” then threatens to go to the police with the information. This I think is criminal. It is as wrong as taking money at the threat of shooting. The victim of the blackmailer would be justified in killing the blackmailer to prevent the “Hero” from making such disclosures.

One of the legitimate activities of a blackmailer is to withhold information about a person’s criminal activities (robbery, murder, stealing) in return for a fee. While there is no obligation to come forward with information of a crime, I certainly hope that no society of civilized people would knowingly extend friendship and society to such an individual. As to the hero, if the crook chooses to off him, or hurt him, I have little sympathy for him and few tears. The Hero knew with whom he was dealing and what kind of person he was. He choose to accept the risk. I choose not to aid him in seeking justice.

The blackmailer may be Walter Block’s type of hero, but he is certainly no hero for the Libertarian. I see little value in Libertarian publications holding him out as one.

The Blackmailer As Hero: A Reply

By Walter Block

Were it not for Mr. Greenberg’s justly earned and widely known reputation as a careful scholar, meticulous researcher, and courteous gentleman, I would be forced to conclude that he had not read my article at all, and was instead replying merely to its title. Let us review the evidence.

1. “No admirable traits?” In the article, I point out several. Blackmailers help reduce the rewards of crime by forcing the criminals to share with them; by tipping off the police about the criminals; and by reducing the scope of crime on the part of the criminals out of fear of possible blackmail by a member of the larger criminal group. Blackmailers help groups such as homosexuals by bringing this deviation out into the open.

2. “False, phony and fraudulent information?” I cover this case in “The slanderer and libeler as hero”. The blackmailer, qua blackmailer, deals only in the truth; if he lies or misrepresents, he is no longer a blackmailer, but a slanderer or libeler.

3. “Extortion? The threat of violence?” Greenberg avoids my definition of blackmail as a threat to do something completely legal and legitimate, such as to exercise one’s rights of free speech, or, in the case of the boycott (another form of blackmail) as a threat not to buy from someone. In the paper, I take special pains to point out that what is being threatened is not violence, but free speech.

4. “Harm?” It is my view that harming someone should not be proscribed by a libertarian law code since honest competition can harm the loser and this must be allowed. But in the paper I state that if the opponents of blackmail are worried about harm, they should oppose the gossip or blabbermouth even more forcefully, for the blackmailer can at least be bought off, while these others cannot be.

I do not mind that Mr. Greenberg and I do not see eye to eye on this matter; healthy dispute, after all, is good for the libertarian movement, and will hopefully bring us closer and closer to the truth. What I do object to, however, is that Mr. Greenberg chose to avoid practically all of my arguments in support of the blackmailer. Nothing worthwhile can come of a debate where one’s arguments are ignored. It is for this reason, as well as out of pique that Mr. Greenberg has stated that he sees “little value” in my article even being published in a libertarian magazine, that I state: I see little value in the publication of a very poorly written critique which does not even consider the reasons given in the original article.

But I hasten to reply to the substantive points raised by Mr. Greenberg, lest I be accused of violating my own strictures.

1. “Degenerate scum and social vermin” is merely name calling and does not deserve a reply.

2. There is nothing illegitimate about “bringing a devastating blow to the existence of a human being” provided that you do not violate his rights! The man who is jilted may be dealt a devastating blow, but since his rights are in no way violated, there is nothing vile going on. After all, the woman, being a free agent, has a perfect right to pick another suitor or none at all. In like manner, there can be nothing illegitimate or vile about the exercise of one’s rights of free speech, no matter what harm results.

3. “The stool pigeon.” A person who cooperates with the police in their illicit efforts to stamp out victimless crimes such as homosexuality is certainly acting illegitimately himself. But there is something very illogical indeed, in trying to link up this sort of behavior with honest blackmail.

In posing the dilemma for the advocate of the legitimacy of blackmail, Mr. Greenberg is likening the police who try to stamp out victimless crimes to a bunch of hoodlums. He then tries to link the illegitimacy of these hoodlum police to the blackmailer. I would be the first to admit that blackmail in this case is certainly illegitimate, but I must protest that this argument proves entirely too much. It proves that any legitimate activity is illegitimate, provided only that it can be used to aid those involved in aggression, like our police who suppress rights.

For example, the activities of typing, serving food, washing uniforms, cleaning guns, repairing cars, etc., can only be considered legitimate, and non-aggressive. But they are all utilized by coercive police. Are we then to conclude, as the logic of Greenberg’s argument would have us conclude for the case of the blackmailer, that all these activities are intrinsically evil? Hardly. We must rather conclude, I think, that otherwise legitimate activities (like typing, cleaning, etc., as well as blackmail) can be undertaken in the service of evil, and thereby become evil themselves, but only in these cases, not in all cases.

4. What are we to make of the contradictory sentiments expressed in the next to last paragraph where Greenberg first encourages the blackmailer not to withhold information about real crimes, and then praises the crook for “offering him” for doing that very thing? Either one favors blackmailers exposing real criminals, and then opposes the retaliation, or one opposes the exposed, and favors the retaliation, if one desires to be consistent. It is illogical to favor X, and then to turn around and favor punishing someone for doing X.

Mr. Greenberg calls them “degenerate scum and social vermin”, but I think that the accompanying list of scapegoats are rather unsung heroes of the economy, for they insist upon working at their chosen professions under the most adverse conditions. Bad publicity, abuse, name calling, and even physical violence at the hands of the police and “outraged” citizens” are the lot of these economic actors. Yet we have seen that their only function is to benefit their fellow man!

Although seemingly far fetched, one cannot help be reminded of Prometheus, the Greek god who took pity on the misery of mankind and stole fire from heaven for their benefit, and who was then punished for his heroic deed by being chained to a mountain where a vulture devoured his liver each day. Prometheus was reviled by the gods; the economic heroes are reviled by mankind. But both bring inestimable benefits to mankind.

It must be allowed that but for negative public opinion and the opposition of the law, there would be nothing heroic about any of these tasks. They only become heroic when performed under the most trying circumstances. But the same holds true for Prometheus! Surely there is nothing heroic about bringing fire; people strike matches every day, after all. What makes this deed heroic are the great odds which were overcome in the bringing of the fire. It is, then, in accordance with the odds which are overcome in each of the tasks performed by the economic actors, that we can consider them heroic.

It is tempting to say that if there are any “degenerate scum and social vermin” involved in this question,’ they are the people who cast aspersions on the economic heroes. Tempting, but incorrect. For we must remember that people who maliciously cast false aspersions on others (libelers and slanderers) are heroes themselves, who are merely expressing their rights of free speech.

Heroes And Scapegoats

By Walter Block

Editor’s Note: The following is the projected introduction of a book that Professor Block is writing on “Economic Scapegoats”, some of the chapters of which have appeared in the pages of the Lib. Forum. In it, Professor Block explains the general purpose of his “hero” series; appended is a comprehensive list of these much-reviled scapegoats, some of whom will receive extended treatment in Professor Block’s final manuscript.

In this book you will learn three things about the appended list of economic scapegoats: 1) They are guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever; 2) in virtually all cases, they are responsible for benefiting the rest of society; 3) that if we prohibit their activities, we do so at our own loss.

As the impetus for this book is firmly based on Libertarianism, it may well help to consider this philosophy in some detail.

The basic premise of libertarianism is that it is illegitimate to engage in aggression against non-aggressors. What is meant here by aggression is not argumentativeness, nor competitiveness, nor adventurousness, dynamism, quarrelsomeness, nor antagonism. What is meant by aggression is the use of violence such as that which takes place in murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, etc. What the libertarian philosophy prohibits is the initiation of such violence upon innocent people or their property; not necessarily pacifists, libertarianism does not forbid the use of violence in defense or in retaliation against the initiation of violence.

Now there is nothing untoward about such a view, nor even anything controversial about it. Most people would give it their whole-hearted support. Indeed, this sentiment is part and parcel of our Western civilization, enshrined in the law, in our Constitution, and in the natural law. There is nothing, then, about this basic premise of libertarianism that stands out in any way.

What is different about libertarianism is the way in which this basic premise is understood. The uniqueness of libertarianism consists of the rigorously consistent, not to say maniacally rigid manner in which this principle is developed. For example, most people do not see a contradiction between this principle (which they presumably support, or at least pay lip service to) and our system of taxation. Libertarians do.

Taxation is contrary to the basic principle and hence anathema to libertarianism because it involves aggression against non-aggressive citizens who refuse to pay (if you don’t believe it, try not paying your taxes, and see what happens). It makes not the slightest difference that the government offers goods and services in return for the tax money. What is all important and crucial is that the so called trade (of tax money for government services) is coerced. It is not a voluntary trade. The individual is not just as free to accept the offer of the trade as he is to reject it. Nor does it make one whit of difference that a majority of the citizens might be mustered out in support of this coercive taxation. Initiation of aggression is initiation of aggression no matter what are the views of the majority. For the libertarian, no tyranny which violates the basic premise can be acceptable, even if a majority supports it. Righteousness can only be found in consistency with the libertarian premise; it cannot be based on a poll.

Another difference between libertarians and the rest of the society is the obverse of the view that initiatory violence is evil. It is the view that anything not involving the initiation of violence cannot be evil! It is this difference that explains the first point mentioned above: that the economic scapegoats are guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever. They are completely guiltless because they do not initiate violence against non-aggressors, and for the libertarian, such actions are the only criminal or evil acts possible.

It is interesting in this connection to consider the types of people who are not included in this seeming greatest all-time list of villains. Made prominent by their absence in such a list of “bad guys” the murderer, the rapist, the arsonist, the thief, the trespasser, and all other criminals who aggress against innocent people and their property. These worthies are left off the list of economic scapegoats because they are pre-eminently not guilty of no wrongdoing whatsoever. On the contrary, they are guilty of the only wrongdoing possible (according to the libertarian basic postulate): the use of initiatory aggression.

Notice, also, that the fraudulent is not included on the list of people who are innocent of any wrongdoing, although the blackmailer, the slanderer, libeler, briber, and the liar are. The reason that the fraudulent is not considered innocent (and hence a scapegoat) is that fraud is identically equivalent to theft. In theft, the victim is relieved of his possessions without receiving anything he values as much in return. But the same thing happens in fraud! If a man buys a bag of what is misrepresented as potatoes, but which is actually filled with rocks, he is also relieved of his possessions (the money spent for the “potatoes”) without receiving anything he values as much.

Once it is realized that no one in this seeming rogues’ gallery is guilty of any wrongdoing, it is not so difficult to appreciate the possibility of the second point made above: that they are virtually all responsible for benefiting the rest of society. They must benefit the rest of society; for not using aggression, the only other alternative is trade. And voluntary trade must benefit the rest of society, since if it did not, the rest of society would simply refuse to trade with these scapegoats. Both parties must always feel they gain from a voluntary transaction. Given that they are free not to enter into the trade, the fact that they do decide to trade must prove to be a mutual benefit.

The third premise follows ineluctably from the second: given that trade (the only avenue open to those, such as our scapegoats, who have eschewed violence), must always benefit all parties, then it follows that the prohibition of these trades must harm all parties. In actual point of fact, a prohibition of the activities of the scapegoats is even more grave. In addition to harming all potential parties to a trade involving scapegoats, the prohibition can most seriously harm third parties. One blatant example is the prohibition of the activities of the heroin seller. In addition to harming the seller himself, as well as the customer-drug addict, prohibition of the sale of heroin is responsible for a high proportion of the crime committed in our society, for the police graft, and for the general break down of law and order so prevalent in our big city urban jungles.

But the chief point to bear in mind while dealing with these unsung heroes of the economy is the moral difference between the initiation of aggression, on the one hand, and all other displeasing acts, which do not involve such aggression, on the other. It is only the act of aggressive violence of a murderer, rapist, thief, kidnapper, etc., that violates man’s rights; since there is no economic scapegoat whose function it is to so violate the laws of morality, these unsung heroes, although much reviled by the media, cannot be considered illegitimate by libertarians.

Economic Scapegoats

Contents

I. Labor and Education

scab

rate buster

employer of child labor

truant

child seducer

sweatshop employer

monopsonist (in the labor
market)

low wage employer*

II. Free Speech
blackmailer*
slanderer, libeler*
heckler

denier of academic freedom*

pirate radio station

pornographer

person who yells “fire!”

(in a crowded theatre)*

advertiser*

III. Financial
pawnbroker, usurer,
loanshark*
moneylender*
hoarder, miser*
counterfeiter
inheritor*

person who refuses to
contribute to charity
non-tipper

IV. Sexual
pimp*
prostitute
madame

male chauvanist pig*
peeping tom, voyeur
sadist, sado-masochist
fetishist

public fornicator

V. Ecology
noise polluter*
strip miner*
litterbug* wastemaker*
(planned obsolesence)
billboard builder
cosmetician
grafitti writer
breeder

VI. Business and Trade
speculator* profiteer
middleman

peddler

inventor

undertaker

company town owner

price cutter

honest trillionaire

ghetto merchant

tenement landlord, slumlord,

rent-gouger*

reserve clause owner

old curmudgeon holdout*

cigarette manufacturer

monopolist

professional

exploiter

bargainer

importer

mercenary

VII. Medical

drug (heroin) merchant*
quack

unlicensed practitioner of

medicine

abortionist

dope addict

VIII. Racism
block buster
discriminator
bigot

IX. Outlaw

fence

black marketeer

vigilante

briber

bootlegger

draft evader

gypsy cab driver*

dishonest cop

numbers racketeer

gun runner, unlicensed gun

owner

gold owner

poacher

smuggler

pirate

ticket scalper*

mafia

scofflaw

gambler

tax evader

conspirator

(*already written)

Life vs. Death: The Final Barricade

By Jerome Tuccille

It used to be, when you talked about anti-life forces permeating the countryside, you were speaking in a figurative sense. Surely no one was literally anti-life. Anti-life was a calculated exaggeration for anti-reason or anti-freedom. It was an overstatement designed to make a lesser point. The English were the masters of the whimsical understatement which, when properly timed and delivered, exploded in one’s psyche with a delayed reaction. We Americans, with our customary immaturity and bulldog aggressiveness, believed in hammering a point home with a sledge hammer to make sure that somebody out there “got it.” We have never trusted subtlety.

Now, it seems, we have no choice.

The rapid acceleration of contemporary developments renders all attempts at overstatement a sheer impossibility. Make the claim that Walt Disney will rise from the dead and create Disneyland Utopias throughout the globe and, rest assured, the New York Times will publish a story two weeks later informing the world that Disney’s heirs — if not the old boy himself — already have that very concept on the drawing board. It is getting more and more difficult to be outrageous. H. L. Mencken and Evelyn Waugh would surely be pacing the floor night after night, denying themselves much-needed sleep, merely to keep their most fantastic satires from becoming grim reality. My own latest offering, Here Comes Immortality, seemed unduly fanciful while it was being written. Scarcely the ink is dry, and my most ironic projections of a year ago are assuming a conservative hue.

What we have finally come to is this: the term anti-life must now be taken in its literal sense.

Out there in this wide, variegated country of ours, a new movement is underway. It has not yet been labeled the Anti-Life Crusade or the Death on Roller Skates Regatta, but surely it ought to be if we are not to further bastardize the English language with cloying euphemisms. But euphemize we will, and consequently this movement I am speaking of has been given the fastidious name, Death With Dignity. The moving light (purple beam of sorrow would be more accurate) behind this latest cultural phenomenon to grip the land is a small, thin, tight-lipped lady doctor in the midwest, a European transplant, named Doctor Kubla-Ross. This lady has written a book (the title of which escapes me for the moment — hopefully, longer that that) claiming that all life is but a mere preparation for death. It is her theory, arrived at after many years in the service of melodramatic emotion, that death is a wondrous and beautiful thing which ought to be faced with resignation, even with yearning. Largely due to her inspiration, courses on death and dying are actually being taught in several colleges and high schools across the country, and Doctor Kubla-Ross will not be fully satisfied until her theories have been institutionalized on the early grammar school level.

(In one high school in the midwest, students are invited to lie down in coffins in the classroom to get the feel of death, so to speak. Dr. Kubla-Ross is all in favor of dragging young children off to wakes and cemeteries to familiarize them with decay and deterioration. She is horrified that Americans shield their youngsters from death, refusing to admit them to hospitals and other morbid institutions. She thinks this is an “unhealthy and selfish” attitude, believe it or not. Since one of my own childhood traumas involved being pushed toward a casket and urged to kiss my “sleeping Uncle Rocco” by some foul-smelling hag dressed in black. I beg to differ with the good doctor.)

More insidious, however, than Doctor Kubla-Ross’s attitudes toward death, are her attempts to change the euthanasia laws in the United States. At one time euthanasia had a libertarian basis to it. The idea than an individual should be able to end his own life (or urge someone else like a doctor to end it for him) can be argued from the standpoint of self-ownership. But Doctor K-R is giving us euthanasia with a twist. She wants the doctor or the next-of-kin to decide when to pull the plug, when to decide that a patient has become a vegetable and his or her life is no longer worth preserving. Let it be said loud and clear, Dr. K-R’s brand of euthanasia, no matter how she tries to dress it up with humanistic, moralistic sentimentality, is still murder. The taking of someone else’s life without his express consent, no matter how vegetative that life may be, is morally reprehensible and should never be legalized in any civilized society. Dr. K-R gives morality a complete, 180-degree twist by maintaining that a “vegetable on his death bed”, who insists on being kept alive, is not really in “his right mind” and, therefore, the doctor is better able to make the proper decision for him.

Used to be that anyone who asked to die was not considered to be in his or her “right mind.” Dr. K-R, though she would deny it to the hand-wringing, tear-streaked end, would have made a great medical experimenter in one of Hitler’s laboratories.

As if Dr. K-R were not enough, much more than enough, along comes a disciple of hers, a morbid young science editor named David Hendin, with a book of his own called (choke, gasp, argghh) Death As a Fact of Life. The title gives you a good idea of the “theme” of his book. A week or so prior to this writing, I had the dubious pleasure of debating Hendin, Dr. K-R, and some sleek black-suited undertaker (he would prefer the term mortuary scientist no doubt) on the Kup Show, a TV talk show out of Chicago hosted by columnist, Irv Kupeinet. This was literally a pro-life vs. pro-death lineup, and the forces of life as you see were a 3 to 1 underdog. Gives you some idea of the current cultural climate of this country.

Dr. K-R started off by expounding on her favorite theme: the beauty of death and the dignity of going to one’s final resting place with a smile of resignation plastered on his chalky face. Hendin was next, treating the multitudes to a description of his grandmother’s funeral that was plainly designed to squeeze the final droplets of tears from a statue and to melt a heart of marble. The scientist of mortuary affairs stared grimly ahead, clearly at home on his own turf.

Then it was time for someone to strike a blow for life, and this I gamely did, citing the fact that aging is merely one more disease we will soon know how to overcome, that already we are developing the technology to halt and eventually reverse the aging process with drugs, biofeedback, hibernation, diet and other techniques. Yes, I dared to make the statement that life is fun and pleasurable and something to be valued, that only a lunatic would look forward to death with anything except outrage. I ended by quoting Nietzsche:

“The only thing wrong with heaven is that all the interesting people are missing,”

and Dylan Thomas’ comments on death:

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

These, in my estimation, are two of the sanest statements ever uttered by man or beast.

When I finished, Dr. K-R was clearly in a snit. How could I be so selfish as to want to hang onto life so tenaciously, and refuse to step aside and make room for future generations? Young Hendin was irked because I apparently didn’t give a fiddler’s fart about his grandmother’s funeral, and our mortician friend glowered at this irreverent character who spoke so slightingly of his own stock in trade.

Irv Kupeinet patted my arm and thanked me for “livening things up a bit.” He wanted to know whether I had any youth pills to give away while “there was still time.” Sanity was not defeated yet.

“You!” wailed Dr. K-R, her dart-like chin leveled in my direction for a direct frontal assault. “Mr. Selfish over there. Don’t you think it’s a beautiful thing to face death with dignity after a full, satisfying life? To resign ourselves to nature and retire from this world with a clear mind?”

“A good thing for you, maybe. I go our furious — kicking and screaming all the way.”

“This American attitude is a very curious thing,” said Dr. K-R, almost to herself. “All this materialism and concentration on pleasure. It’s very unhealthy.

Yes, dear reader, something “unhealthy” is afoot in the land, but it is definitely not American “materialism” and the quest for extended youth and pleasure in life. Finally, after a couple hundred years of Puritanism and self-righteous Christian fundamentalism, the American mainstream is beginning to liberate itself. Lifestyles are changing and growing more fluid and open-ended; a morality based in denial, mortification of the flesh, and self-denial is being smashed to smithereens. Dr. K-R and her disciples, along with the Jesus Freak movement, the Hari Krishna mob, and the mind-destroying drug counterculture are representatives of a last-ditch attempt to preserve a death-centered social and political structure. But, like all aberrations in the human condition, they are destined to failure and final extinction.

Life, reason, sanity and liberty will have their day after centuries of darkness and bleak mysticism. Soon humanity will achieve physical life eternal and the divinity of the ancient gods.

Meanwhile we can all stand up and cry with Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

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The Rise Of Roy Ash

By Bill Evers

During November and December, the newspapers were full of news of the personnel shuffle being carried out by Nixon in the executive branch of the U.S. government. While many old names are now associated with different posts, a new name is that of Roy L. Ash. Ash was the president of Litton Industries and now is the newly-appointed head of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Ash’s appointment has a special significance. The post he has obtained and the reins of power which he now has gathered in his hands did not even exist four years ago. The Office of Management and Budget was created during an executive branch reorganization planned and designed by Ash himself at the time of Nixon’s election to his first term. Now Nixon talks about an “expanded role” for the post. To better understand the what Ash’s appointment means, it is necessary to examine the reorganization plans drawn up for Nixon by Ash’s task force and also to examine Ash’s own background as the accounting and financial expert in Litton, a company whose lifeblood is government contract money.

Realignment

A business leader like Ash has concrete reasons for desiring executive branch realignment. The scope and responsibility of the national government (especially its executive branch) have vastly expanded in the past half-century, beginning during Herbert Hoover’s administration. But some feel the structure of government has not kept pace. The existing governmental structure is deemed unsuitable for the activities many influential businessmen and other political decision-makers wish the government would undertake.

In the words of Charles M. Hardin of the Rockefeller Foundation, “Many of the political institutions, organization, and practices as well as much of the political ideology in the United States conspire to elevate local, special, separate, and ‘Pluralistic’ interests — despite the fact that national survival now depends upon the ability to fix political attention steadily upon national problems and interests.” Really, of course, in the name of abolishing special interests, a reorganization plan will allow some special interests to supplant others.

The task force headed by Ash is aimed at diminishing the influence wielded by small, parochial groups and “their” agencies within the governmental structure. Much of the “inefficient” patchwork quilt of boards, agencies, bureaus, etc. found in something like the Department of Agriculture has grown up in response to the desires of localized or functionally narrow interest groups. The present organizational jumble reflects the demands of these petty interests, terests.

Complicated Enterprise

Sen. John McClellan has aptly described the complexity of the government today: “The executive branch is now the largest and most complicated enterprise in the world, with more than 1400 domestic programs distributed among 150 separate departments, agencies, bureaus, and boards.”

Under the reorganization plan proposed by Ash, all domestic affairs would be run by a Domestic Council, parallel to the National Security Council in foreign affairs.

Drastic surgery would be performed on the seven domestic departments that are in operation now — Interior; Agriculture; Labor; Commerce; Treasury; Transportation; Housing and Urban Development; and Health, Education, and Welfare. They would be cut up and sewn together again to form a total of four departments — Natural Resources (to control the nation’s physical assets), Human Resources (to retrain the labor force and run the welfare system), Community Development (to build up the nation’s infrastructure and rebuild the cities), and Economic Affairs (to handle the currency, labor-management relations, and other business and farm matters).

Key Member

The key member of the Domestic Council would be the Office of Management and Budget, which would be the central fiscal planner for the economy. It would synchronize and coordinate all government domestic action.

Ash’s proposed regrouping enables the government in partnership with industry to come to grip with problems in a whole new fashion. If a policy proposal comes up, the budget can be looked at and the program added to it without danger of operating at cross-purposes with another part of the government.

In the Office of Management and Budget will be centralized the measurement of programs’ successes and the decisions on which programs work best as a package.

Program Budgeting

The Office of Management and Budget, with the help of the Brookings Institution, has increasingly since its inception been turning to a budgeting procedure known as program budgeting. When budgets are constructed on a program basis, decision-making is centralized and made by visible high-level officials rather than by the invisible subcommittees and lower echelon bureaucrats who tend to formulate budget requests under the item-by-item way of budgeting. Significantly, the lower levels of departments are more likely to reflect petty interests rather than nationally powerful ones like Ash’s own Litton Industries.

In fact, the whole idea of program budgeting lends itself to the contracting of government programs to firms (like Litton) outside the government. Program budgeting presents budget requests in terms of the final products, in terms of program packages, rather than in the traditional line-item form which emphasized categories like personnel, overhead, supplies, etc.

Under program budgeting, there is a special plausibility to contracting with a company like Litton to build a large integrated “weapons system” like the McNamara proposal for a worldwide fleet of floating military bases or to operate the War on Poverty’s Job Corps Center in Pleasanton, California. In fact, these were actual Litton contracts.

As Karl Hess wrote in the Jan. 15, 1969 issue of Politics newsletter, at the time of the initial publicity for Ash’s reorganization proposals, “Litton is an industrial conglomerate, one of the new breed of ‘capitalist’ cats which is created, head to foot, from government contacts and contracts. Lately (Litton) has branched out into what might be called the subcontracting of the business of government.”

Litton’s contract to run the Job Corps center was hailed by the late Lyle Spencer of IBM as a primary example of the growth and development of what Spencer called the “social-industrial complex,” an arrangement parallel to the military-industrial complex, but paying companies tax funds to work the welfare state side of the American system.

Ash’s former boss Charles B. Thornton, chairman of the board of Litton, has himself been an advocate of the social-industrial complex approach. Thornton headed an advisory panel to the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders. His panel, in its recommendations, used the analogy of the space program and defense spending in suggesting that the government’s strategy for urban areas be one of granting credits against taxes to business firms.

But Litton has by no means neglected the warfare state side of the American system. In fact, Ash once said about Litton that because “almost all new products have their first application in military uses, we always want at least 25 percent of our business in defense and space.”

Ash’s statement about the military sector prompted an incisive analysis from David Horowitz and Reese Erlich in Ramparts. They wrote, “In the old days, private corporations would develop technological innovations at their own expense, risking the outlay with a view to being rewarded by future returns from the competitive marketplace. This was the very essence of entrepreneurship . . . (But now the corporations) have become accustomed to getting the government to pick up the tab before they move. These corporations have grown economically lazy, in part because they really can live better on the largess of the so-called welfare state.”

The Ramparts writers added that “if the corporation is spending the government’s money, the government is spending the taxpayer’s. If he had a very clear idea of it, the taxpayer might frown on this happy arrangement and spoil all the fun . . .”

Now Litton threatens to become a further burden to the taxpayers. According to Sen. William Proxmire, Litton threatens “to become the Navy’s Lockheed,” Litton has maintained that the Navy should pay it $380 million for cancellation costs and design changes encountered in its building of five landing helicopter assault ships.

Last June, Proxmire wrote: “I now have reason to believe that because of cash shortages, Litton is confronted with a financial crisis of major proportions. I am informed that in order to extricate itself from its financial problems, the company is attempting to persuade the Navy to pay millions of dollars of worthless and inflated claims. Or, alternatively, to restructure the LHA (landing helicopter assault ship) contract or take other steps to solve Litton’s shipbuilding problems, including a Navy takeover of the Litton shipyards at Pascagoula.”

The appointment of Ash as head of the Office of Management and Budget indicates the continued importance both of the military-industrial complex and of the rising social-industrial complex and marks a heightened concern of these interests in the fiscal processes of taxation and government expenditure.

Furthermore, those people who do not like governmental aggrandizement, whether by way of subsidization or by way of repression, can only view negatively the rise of an efficiency expert like Ash. In the name of efficiency power is being transferred from some hands to others. And anyway, what’s so wonderful about bad things being done more efficiently?

Denial Of Protection

By Tibor R. Machan

My mail, like that of most of us, is cluttered with literature from all sources — well, perhaps “literature” isn’t the right term for it all. Most recently, for instance, I got one of those newsletters in the mail where one of the lesser heroes of the “movement” offered comments about the perennial problem of libertarian political theory — although maybe the problem isn’t really with us, after all, only the author hasn’t quite gotten away from it yet.

Those interested in the character of a free society often dispute about the means by which people might best reduce injustice, the violation of human rights, etc., and protect against such violations in the best possible way. That, after all, is the meat of political theory.

The author of the piece I read, however, does not wish to participate in this dispute or discussion or inquiry. Our contributor to mailboxes throughout this land offers, instead, as his version of the solution to this problem that there is no problem at all. Actually, he says, we needn’t concern ourselves with the issue since it is evident that whatever one wishes to protect, he alone is entitled to protect it. So, our author concludes, that to suggest that some people might volunteer to take on the job of protecting others (who would like to specialize in other aspects of our lives) is out of line and tantamount to entertain “superstitious beliefs”. Now there is something odd going on when one who values freedom finds it distasteful that others should choose to operate according to the principle of the division of labor — a rather familiar concomitant of the economic scene which explains the workings of markets in a free society.

To choose to delegate your authority of self-protection is no different from choosing to delegate your authority to tinker with your car, your stomach, your money — delegate it to automechanics, doctors and banks, for instance.

This frequent mailbox visitor maintains that the “Gordian knot” of which means will best serve the purpose of self-defense, or protection of one’s goods and investments, has been solved by “libertarian analysis” — his of course (since “libertarian analysis” solves nothing, people do, by offering it at its best). What kind of solution is it when one offers none? Well, no problem here.

I have worked on this matter myself and know that it ain’t a simple one to work out. After all, politics deals with one of man’s most complex, intricate, delicate and abstract tasks: figuring out what kind of human community suits us best. And none of the suggestions come close to being so weak: for it wipes out the very foundation of man’s political goal, namely the attainment of freedom to its maximum within the community of others, so as to enjoy the prospect of achieving their own goals in peaceful cooperation. For by denying the right to seek help in protection, this view denies the right to seek help in any other goal one might have, such as eating well. And that is called “libertarian” analysis? Oh, man we’re in trouble.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 4

APRIL, 1973

75¢

FLP Convenes:

PRESENT AT THE CREATION

On the weekend of March 30-April 1, the Free Libertarian Party of New York held its First state convention at the Williams Club in Manhattan, in the process transforming itself from a temporary structure into a permanent, organized political party. Ever since the national Libertarian Party and its state affiliates had been founded a year ago, the editor of the Lib. Forum, while tempted, had held aloof. But to this old political warhorse, the firebell of a Convention proved too much to resist. As the time for the Convention drew near, I made my decision, propitiated the Spirit of Robert LeFevre, and took the plunge: I joined the Party.

As the weekend drew near, I admit to trepidation about what the convention would bring. In the first place, it has been my usual experience that when more than five libertarians (or five anyone-else, for that matter) gather together to meet, it is high time to look for the nearest exit. There is something about any Meeting, or Crowd, that seems either to deaden the spirit or to lead to endless hassles and emotional wrangling. And then there were all the stories one heard about goings-on in various outer reaches of the libertarian movement: “rational bestiality”, for example. There were the memories of all the Crazies who had flooded into the first 1969 libertarian conference in New York. And, more concretely, there were stories of a severe and lengthy struggle over the FLP Platform, over attempts to ram an archist-Randian platform down the throats of the party, etc. When I opened this door of the libertarian arena on March 30, what joy and/or pain would this new turn bring?

To end the suspense, dear reader. I entered the Williams Club a hopeful skeptic and emerged, exhausted but enthusiastic, forty-eight hours later a celebrant. To my joyful surprise, here was a group of men and women almost all intelligent, dedicated, and knowledgeable about liberty. Here, despite a predictably wide spectrum of temperaments and ideologies, despite occasional emotional hassles, yes despite a twelve (or was it thirteen) hour session on amending the by-laws, here was a group of attractive and intelligent young people who almost literally exuded a spirit of warmth, love, and respect for each other and for the common cause. It was truly a sight to behold. At the risk of being maudlin, I affirm that it was indeed a privilege to be present at the creation of the Free Libertarian Party of New York.

As we shall see further below, the “instincts” of this rather large group of people (approximately 95) were remarkably sound: a blend of high libertarian principle and good common sense and mutual respect that is all too rare in or out of the Movement. And these were Real People; gone was the old predominance of hophead kids, stoned out of their minds and mumbling about “freedom”. These were young people with feet on the ground, who do things, who work in the world: scholars, engineers, television people, advertising men, civil servants. I would say that the typical FLP member is an ex-Objectivist with none of the unfortunate personality traits of the latter, who has been moving rapidly into, or on the edge of, anarcho-capitalism. But both the anarcho-capitalists and the sizable minority of limited archists (or “minarchists”, to use the happy phrase of Sam Konkin), showed a happy willingness to work together for the large spectrum of common ends.

And then, wonder of wonders to a veteran of the New York movement, there was actually a sizable number of girls at the Convention, ranging moreover from attractive to ravishing (and if this be Male Chauvinism, then make the most of it!) It was also a standing wry joke in the New York movement that the proportion of females ranged from zero to somewhere around one per cent: surely this new quantum leap is a fine omen for the growth and success of the movement. Furthermore, I had personally met no more than a dozen of the delegates before — and this in a movement whose members for a long while barely spilled over the confines of a small living room!

Skipping over the endless by-law amendments, the first major act of the convention was to adopt a set of by-laws with the following admirable set of principles, principles to which all factions and trends in the party could enthusiastically adhere:

“The Free Libertarian Party is a political organization which has as its primary objective the extension of human freedom to its furthest limits.

“To that end the Party affirms the following principles:

1. That each individual possesses the inalienable right to life and liberty and to justly acquired property.

2. That no person or institution, public or private, has the right to initiate the use of physical force against another.

3. That all individuals are entitled to choose their own life styles as long as they do not forcibly impose their values on others.

4. That the only moral basis of politics is the preservation and protection of human rights.

5. That the voluntary exchange of goods and services is fundamental to any socio-economic system which provides for the harmonious integration of divergent value systems.

“In recognition of the fact that the initiation of force by government has been the chief instrument for the expropriation of individual rights and freedom, the Free Libertarian Party enters the political arena for the avowed purpose of eliminating the intervention of government in moral, social and economic affairs.”

Bravo!

The first battle, and the first critical decision, of the Convention came on Saturday night, over the adoption of a state platform. By dint of various coincidences and circumstances, the first draft of a platform had been drawn up last summer by one Paul Hodgson, a Randian archist who presented the early sessions of the platform committee with a full-scale Randian archist platform. It did not quite begin with “Existence exists”, but there was definitely around the Hodgson draft the unmistakable aura of the philosophy club rather than the political platform. And in virtually every paragraph the Hodgson draft rubbed the anarchist noses in: “The proper function of government is . . . .” To offset the Hodgson forces, the anarchists on the split platform committee drew up a hastily composed “minority platform”. In contrast to Hodgson and his colleagues, there was scarcely a single anarcho-capitalist in the FLP that desired to commit the party to an outright anarchist program, let alone to rule out of court any libertarians who were also Christians, utilitarians, pacifists, or even whim-worshippers. To a man, the anarchists, along with many of the minarchists, wanted an “umbrella” platform that would not drive any of the various tendencies out of the party. But while the Minority Platform was a decided improvement over the Hodgson Platform, it still left much to be desired: and both programs, for example, insisted on taking a stand on the theory of crime and punishment even though this is one of the most disputed and least firmly established aspects of libertarian doctrine.

As the day of the convention neared, then, sentiment in the party grew apace for scrapping the platform altogether. More and more party members began to see that there was no great rush for a state platform: we had the excellent statement of principles, we had, if need be the national platform adopted last year. But, most interesting of all, sentiment grew, as best expressed by young Tom Avery of the Bronx, for avoiding any platform plank which could not — like the statement of principles — command unanimous consent from each party member. For, otherwise, party members would have to be represented by views and positions which they did not hold. More and more, the “minority” platform writers veered around to a no-platform position, while the few ultra-Randians abandoned the party in disgust.

On Saturday, the Hodgson platform was smashed, gathering only 4 votes (of which only two represented support for the draft in question), and the minority program received no greater shrift. The no-platform position won overwhelmingly. It was agreed, with great good — and libertarian — sense, that the various party candidates could only speak for themselves, for their own individual positions or for the special committees formed on their behalf. There would be no “party literature” as such.

Sunday was the day for choosing party officers and candidates. The elected officers managed to comprise a worthy cross-section of party activists. Chairwoman of the party (or “Chairperson” as they insist on calling it) is the vivacious Andrea Millen, a TV producer and a leader of the FLP from its inception. The two Vice-Chairmen are Howard Rich, another party founder and a leader and candidate in Rockland County; and Raymond Strong, leader of the Brooklyn party and a Ph.D. in mathematics. Secretary is Mike Nichols and Treasurer is the former Chairman, and a leading party founder, Jerry Klasman. After a spirited and very close election for the three posts of State Committeemen-at-large, elected were: Gary Greenberg, attorney, and head of the New York Libertarian Association; the redoubtable Samuel Edward Konkin III. Canadian, graduate student in Theoretical Chemistry at New York University, editor of the ever-improving New Libertarian Notes, and head of the party’s Radical Caucus: and Joe Castrovinci, graduate student in history at City College, CUNY, and early member of the Fordham Libertarian Alliance, the first libertarian student group on the Eastern seaboard.

Running for office is a remarkably full slate of determined candidates. For Mayor the party has nominated the lovely and articulate Francine Youngstein, instructor in sales for IBM; for President of the City Council, Bill Lawry of Queens; for Controller, Tom Avery of the Bronx. Also nominated are: Louis Sicilia for Borough President of Manhattan, Paul Streitz (who was given a good going over for his support of the school voucher scheme) for City Councilman-at-Large from Manhattan; Ray Goldfield for City Councilman from the Coney Island region of Brooklyn, and Spencer Pinney for City Councilman from Queens. Also, the dynamic young Sanford Cohen, of the Poughkeepsie region upstate, expressed his determination to begin running now for Rep. Fish’s Congressional office in 1974. All candidates were determined to succeed at the very difficult task, in New York, of actually getting on the ballot in November.

The final act of the convention underlined the good sense and even wisdom of the party membership. A proposal was made for the party to endorse legalized abortion. But while a large majority of the Party favors abortion-freedom, it decided by a 2-to-1 majority to respect the deeply held beliefs of those party members who are convinced that abortion is murder — a position which, for any libertarian, is not self-evidently absurd. In short, the FLP decided not to take a position on the abortion issue.

I submit that the Free Libertarian Party is off to a sparkling start; health, happiness, and long life to the new offspring!

Tax Rebellion

April is the cruellest month, certainly for the long-suffering taxpayer. As protests against crippling taxation rise and spread throughout the country, we must honor the heroic forces of tax rebellion; the new element in tax rebellion this year is the lead increasingly taken by the nation’s libertarians, the most knowledgeable and most dedicated of the tax rebels.

In its March 19 issue, TIME devoted a full page article (p.45), replete with pictures, of one of the most heroic groups of tax rebels, Henry “Hank” Hohenstein and the San Diego Ten. Remarkably, TIME’S account was fairly favorable to these libertarian rebels. What happened was that in May, 1972, the IRS presumed, dictatorially and without benefit of court order, to seize the building, trucks and office equipment of the small Heck Transfer and Storage Co. of San Diego, a moving and storage firm owned by John Heck. Jr. The seizure was for payment of some $10,000 in back taxes and penalties which the IRS claimed that Mr. Heck “owed” to the federal government. A few days later, a group of some 80 protestors gathered with Mr. Heck outside his seized office, and Heck, in order to enter, threw a stone through his own door. When a corps of [RS agents tried to interfere, there was some scuffling in the crowd.

The IRS proceeded to bring charges in court against ten of the demonstrators, charging them with “conspiracy to rescue seized property” (Ye Gods! What a “crime”!) and “conspiracy to assault or impede a federal officer.” The ten included libertarian real estate investor Hank Hohenstein, who had merely driven down to observe the proceedings.

Needless to say. Hank Hohenstein and the San Diego Ten did not receive the massive international publicity accorded only to Left civil libertarian causes. However, after the jury duly convicted, Judge Nielsen, worried about the murky status of conspiracy law, suspended the jail sentences of the Ten and declared a mistrial for Hohenstein. The latest news is that the government has dropped the charges against Hohenstein.

TIME summarizes the philosophy and outlook of some of the tax rebels: on Hohenstein: “who styles himself a fiscal conservative and strong civil libertarian, he claims to be acting in the tradition of Thoreau and Paine.” The freeing of Hohenstein is a welcome victory for liberty.

In the meantime, the Libertarian Tax Rebellion Committee, headed by Kenneth W. Kalcheim, has been doing yeoman work for the tax rebellion cause. The LRTC sells a tax kit for $10, which explains and supports their philosophy of tax rebellion: the LRTC proposal is to file the required April 15 return, but to fill it out, not with the taxpayer’s income and expenditure data, but rather with a battery of constitutional arguments against the entire income tax procedure. The tax kit can be obtained from the Libertarian Tax Rebellion Committee, 349 East 65th St., Apt. 5C, New York. N.Y. 10021.

Personal ‘Freedom’

Review of Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World (Macmillan. $7.95)

By R. A. Child’s, Jr.

(Editor’s Note: I would add only two points to Roy Childs’ excellent review of the new Browne book. One is the curious inner contradiction implicit in the book itself and in all the lectures that Harry Browne has been delivering on its major theme. And that is the fact that Browne keeps urging the rest of us not to care about the liberty of other persons: in short, that he is investing a considerable amount of personal energy and hence presumably cares deeply that we not care about others.

The second point is that it is considerably easier — if one is so inclined — to drop out of the State if one is like Browne, a best-selling free lance author than if, like most of us, one must work in some regular and visible capacity.)

This is a very mixed book. In substance, if not in intention, this is Harry Browne’s answer to Objectivism, his own personal philosophy of life. Like all books of that sort, it is a mixture of brilliant insights and shallow sophisms. At the outset, it should be stated that Browne is at his best giving certain types of concrete advice concerning what he calls “how you can be free”: he is at his worst when he attempts to theorize about things, and to place them in a wide semi-theoretical context.

The book consists of five sections. The Prologue and Epilogue both concern themselves with “freedom in an unfree world,” while the remainder of the book discusses “Why You are Not Free,” “How You Can Be Free.” and “A New Life.” There are a number of valuable things in all sections, but the first part, as far as I am concerned, is so monstrously simplistic and wrong-headed that I can barely tolerate it. What Browne does is to discuss thirteen “traps” or reasons why one is not “free.” First, of all his concept of freedom is unforgivable: “freedom is the opportunity to live your life as you want to live it.” With that one phrase. Browne takes three steps backwards from the semantic advances of the key libertarian philosophers, notably Rand and Rothbard, and obscures a vitally important issue: the distinction between freedom and ability or power. By defining freedom in terms of “opportunity,” Browne semantically enslaves all those who are struggling to get what they want, but who have not yet attained it, for it is precisely the concrete opportunity to get what they want that they are lacking. Unhappy? Perhaps. But unfree? Not true. Furthermore, are we to call the dictator and tyrant “free” if they have the opportunity to live their lives as they wish, i.e. in pursuit of power and control over others? Such a concept of “freedom” makes a free society impossible by definition, for people’s whims and impulses will always clash. One person will want to live his life in a way that involves the involuntary participation of another, ergo he is not free if that other person is free to turn him down and spurn his desires.

But secondly, and more importantly, the thirteen “traps” are an amalgam of truth and absurdity wherein Browne takes two cognitive steps forward, and three back — and then reverses himself. Some of the traps are well put, such as the “Identity Trap” (“1. The belief that you should be someone other than yourself; and 2. the assumption that others will do things the way that you would.”), the “Government Traps,” “Unselfishness Trap.” “Certainty Trap” and many others. Browne analyzes errors which prevent people from getting what they want, and (mostly later on in the book) shows them how to avoid such “traps.” But while much of what he says is commonsensical and valid, the rest is completely contused and wrongheaded.

One of his mistakes is an attempt to avoid technical philosophy, even in discussing such issues as those of morality and rights, which obviously require a philosophical perspective. The reader will be interested to learn, for instance, that for Browne both morality and rights are “traps.” and that “free societies’ are usually dreams in which the dreamer hopes to escape the simple prices required to live happily in the real world.”

His chapter on morality is intellectually disgraceful. Browne sets up three paradigms: (1) absolute morality. (2) universal morality, and (3) personal morality, this last being his own position. “Absolute morality” is roughly equivalent to a deontological morality, which subordinates happiness to duty. “Universal morality” is a morality based on objective principles which apply to all human beings. “Personal morality” Browne defines as “the attempt to consider all the relevant consequences of your actions.” for whatever that is worth qua definition.

Let us dismiss “absolute morality” and concentrate on the other two. What is a “universal morality”? A code based on man’s nature, which applies to all men. Browne maintains that there can be no such thing. Why? He isn’t clear, but it has something to do with the fact that people are different. Unfortunately, however, no one has ever denied this, and no one advocating a “universal morality” has ever told people to ignore differences. The principles of a “universal morality” do hot specify concretes, and are not intended to. The principles constitute a code of action, which is applied to widely varying concretes. Would Browne claim that mathematics is impossible, since all entities are concrete and different, making a relationship between mathematical principles and concrete quantities impossible? Only if one’s approach to “morality” is concrete-bound can one make the claims that Browne does about “universal morality.” Furthermore, Browne’s position, a variant of subjectivism in ethics, is self-refuting in the context of the book, for what he does constantly is to make the general recommendation for thought and action that there can be no valid general recommendations for thought and action. Browne properly counsels independence in choosing values, but independence cannot entail subjectivism — in fact the value of independence is derived from man’s nature. Browne also exhorts the reader to take his own feelings and values seriously; a good recommendation — but this too has nothing to do with his conclusions. Browne neither understands the function of morality as a normative integrator of evaluations and actions (performing normatively the same functions that logic and epistemology do cognitively), nor does he understand the relationship between principles and concretes. He almost makes it a principle to ignore principles in favor of concretes.

His view of natural rights is substantially the same as that of positivism. His claim here, in essence and spirit, is that since you cannot eat rights, and cannot use them to physically ward off criminals, that therefore they are useless. “Try forgetting about your rights,” he says in the book. “They didn’t bring you the good things you’ve achieved in your life. Why count on them in the future?” Similarly, he counsels political solipsism, claiming that political idealism is not practical, and that political issues and crises should never be dealt with on grounds of principled opposition, but rather on an individual level. His solipsism is even carried further when he claims (ignoring the fact that he earlier said that everything has a specific nature) “It’s hard to realize that you live in a world of your own — bounded by your own knowledge, your own perception, your own ways of reasoning, your own set of standards.” If this is true, then why is Browne bothering to give advice to other people, particularly since they live in a world of their own which is obviously not the same as his world?

But the response to all of these claims is the same in principle, and it amounts to a defense of philosophy in general, and of political philosophy and responsibility in particular: the reason why man needs political philosophy, a theory of rights, and political involvement is because men have the same basic natures and live in the same objective reality, the same world. He needs them because his life is not affected, for better or worse, by his own choices and actions alone, but by the society and political system in which he lives. Man needs to associate with other men in order to live and prosper, and he needs to choose and define the proper way of relating to men. Think of what Browne’s view of robbery would do if everyone accepted this basic attitude: “To say that I would never steal someone’s milk is to acknowledge that I’m different from many of the people in the world — and that I have my own way of trying to achieve happiness. But why should I expect someone else to use my way?” (p. 98) This means, by implication, that dictators and mass murderers merely have a difference of opinion with Browne, and that such a difference is on the same level as other differences between men. Nothing could be further from the truth. But all of this shows the flaws in Browne’s approach: man’s need of principles in the political realm is greater than in most other areas, for a political system has a lot to do with the choices and options open to one across the span of a lifetime, and the scope of political error or evil is much greater than in other areas.

No one has ever said that rights are enough to make anyone happy; they are rather a necessary but not sufficient condition for individual happiness and well being. And neither is the alternative either-or as Browne implies, i.e. either we rely on rights or we rely on insurance and individual action for protection, for instance. No advocate of natural rights has ever attacked the idea of insurance against theft, and for good reason: the two things are completely different, and have different purposes. Why then does Browne, the symbolic insurance man, have a need to attack natural rights? Obviously they do not defend or help people in the same way, but so what?

Finally, there are an enormous number of concrete suggestions and bits of advice here, some bad most fairly good-to-excellent. A large part of this has been said before, but it is good to have such a diversity of things under one cover. The distinguishing characteristic of HOW I FOUND FREEDOM is twofold: (a) Browne has more advice about more subjects, and (b) he attempts to put it into a theoretical framework. In the first respect, he is successful, in the latter, he is a dismal failure: I respect Browne’s intention, and many will claim that the theoretical aspects of the book are not its primary purpose or function. Fine — but then why aren’t they left out all together? Anyone who discusses the theoretical issues which Browne does in this book has certain epistemic obligations: namely, to make sense, to think his position out as far as his intelligence will take him, to resolve contradictions and, finally, to present a position which is true. In this respect, Browne’s book is a tragic failure. He gives advice while evading the responsibilities of giving such advice, that large-scale consistency and integration which philosophy alone makes possible. Browne has attempted not to supplement philosophy with concrete, journalistic advice, but to replace it with such advice.

There is nothing wrong with such advice, except when it does attempt to substitute itself for philosophy. Then the advice-give must learn the truth of Thomist philosopher Etinne Gilson’s quip: “PHILOSOPHY ALWAYS BURIES ITS UNDERTAKERS”

The I.B.M. Case:
A Comment

By Dr. D. T. Armentano
Associate Professor of Economics University of Hartford

Recently the IBM pretrial proceedings took a comic turn for the worse. Indeed, the situation was so sadly ludicrous that Ayn Rand might have written the scenario.

It seems that the government had again been the victim of the corporate paper shredder. Only this time instead of some trivial Dita Beard memos, what got vaporized was a valuable index to over 150,000 pages of IBM internal memoranda prepared for IBM’s recently concluded antitrust scuffle with the Control Data Corporation. As part of its settlement with IBM, Control Data had agreed to put down all the weapons of war including, apparently, the quiet destruction of that IBM index. Which of course left the government holding the confetti bag, since they had been counting on employing that very index to expedite their own antitrust suit against IBM. Fuming that IBM was not cooperating fully enough in its own corporate destruction, the government attorneys were at last report attempting to obtain a court order to require the computer giant to prepare yet another index! Now that, of course, is Truth. Justice and the American Way.

Actually when the antitrust suit finally goes to court (the case was the final statist shot from the fellows that brought you the Great Society), three important economic issues will be paramount: IBM’s market share, reported to be over 70 per cent; IBM’s policy of offering substantial price discriminations to some customers; and IBM’s attractively “high” rate of return on invested capital. To many economists and trustbusters, these three ingredients spell almost automatic illegal monopolization.

The government will allege — with much academic support, and enough court victories and corporate scalps to fill a substantial trophy case — that “competition” means competitively structured markets, that is, markets where no one firm has any significant market share, indeed, the structure of a market is so overwhelmingly significant in antitrust cases today that a defeat on the market share issue could well doom the entire IBM defense. IBM is apparently aware of this, and is already prepared to demonstrate that the computer market is larger than the government contends, and that their share of that market is, accordingly, closer to 40% and declining. This sort of eco-legal strategy was used successfully in the last classic Sherman Act monopoly case, the DuPont Cellophane case of 1956 and IBM doesn’t employ 110 lawyers for nothing.

Of course, market share ought to have nothing at all to do with illegal “monopolization”. A high market share can just as easily be attributed — in a free market — to buyer acceptance (and, over time, to continued buyer acceptance) as to anything else. And if simple market share is so indicative of “resource misallocation”, one wonders why prominent economists such as Samuelson and Friedman — who support antitrust — don’t advocate the “busting up” of textbook “monopolies” enjoyed by certain university professors.

Price discrimination means that some users pay lower rates than others for similar services. Without getting into the impossible issue of what services are ever precisely the same — and, therefore, whether real price discrimination ever exists — it might suffice to note that no one ought to get uptight over lower prices (no one but the competition that can’t match the prices, that is). To observe corporations being prosecuted for “restraint of trade” when they are lowering their prices always exposes the antitrust hoax in all its nakedness, though the Ralph Naders among us dare not peek.

No, the lower prices don’t come at the expense of the higher ones. And, no again, the lower prices need not necessarily relate directly to costs; costs don’t determine prices. Why should a firm have to automatically throw away profits from lower costs by lowering prices? Prices are lowered under certain circumstances because profits can be retained or increased under certain circumstances. Profit-oriented firms will always charge what the traffic will bear, and the traffic will always bear different prices in different situations. Corporations ought not, therefore, to have to defend price discrimination. It is a normal, natural, and completely beneficial practice for buyers as well as sellers in a free market.

And finally, what of IBM’s “exorbitant” rate of return? Firstly, the concept of normal profits without consideration of risk is totally absurd. A 17 per cent rate of return on capital might actually be “low” considering the risks of investing that capital in the computer industry. And, secondly, in the absence of plutocratic restraints on competition, one can simply attribute the return to excellent products, aggressive marketing, and high sustained managerial competence. Does the present culture so abhor individual (corporate) achievement that it must attribute all “success” to everything but individual (corporate) productivity?

Now all this is not to say that there are not any sticky libertarian difficulties with corporations such as IBM; alas, all is not sweetness and light. Patents and government contracts — to name but two issues — will always cloud what might be a super-clean analysis in IBM’s favor. Yet, and this is the point, the antitrust issues raised are unbridled nonsense, and it is to be hoped that these issues will be thoroughly discredited in open trial.

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Contra Psychological “Liberation”

For years now. I have been reading and hearing a mounting and cacophonous clamor for something called “psychological” or “personal” “liberation.” The clamor has been rising from an increasing number of people libertarians and non-libertarians alike. I confess that even after persistent and faithful reading of much of the Psy Lib literature and listening to a great deal of the caterwauling, I have still not been able to figure out what the shouting is all about. To paraphrase Mencken, even continuing diligence stopping only for sleep and prayer, has not been enlightened me on what all this fuss is supposed to signify.

At last, however, I think I have it. I think I know at last what all these people are about: and it’s not a pretty tale.

Let us take a useful paradigm: the beleaguered Scrabble player. Let us suppose that we have a man. Jim Jones, who is a devoted Scrabble player: but he finds that he is living in a community which hates and reviles Scrabble. If anyone should play Scrabble openly and thereby flaunt his detested desires his neighbors will then cut him on the street, he won’t get invited to the In parties, he might even lose his job. Confronted with this dilemma, what is Mr. Jones to do?

It seems to me that he has four alternatives open to him, each of them reasonable and viable, though some are admittedly more heroic than others.

1) He can be True to his Scrabble-Playing Self and choose to play Scrabble regardless of the consequences. He can say to the rest of the world: To hell with your narrow-minded prejudices, I shall not cater to them even at the price of loss of employment and social obloquy. He then plays Scrabble openly and he takes whatever consequences will follow. If any one may be said to be “psychologically liberated”, then Jones (1) surely is.

2) Instead, he can be cool and prudential about the choices that face him. He can say to himself: To hell with it: is Scrabble really that important to me so as to lose my friends, jobs, and generally pleasant relations with the community? Answering No, he abandons Scrabble on behalf of other values that he deems to be far more important.

It seems to me that Jones (2) is, in his own way, also “liberated.” Or at the very least, he has weighed the choices that reality offered him, and made his decision in accordance with his most important values. He, too, has no particular call to belly-ache endlessly about the need for “psychological liberation”. He could, after all, have chosen Route (1) but he judged the game not to be worth the candle. He has no grounds for continued caterwauling.

3) He can try to have it both ways: By pretending to give up or to abstain from Scrabble, thereby gaining the respect and affection of the community: while at the same time, in the dead of night. In the Closet, he secretly continues to play Scrabble. A Scrabble-Marrano.

What about Jones (3)? Is he justified in clamoring for “liberation”? Certainly not: he too could have chosen either the clear-cut paths of Routes (1) and (2): but he too made the conscious choice of trying to have his cake and eat it by paying the possible psychological price of secrecy. He is In the Closet by his own free choice: all he need do to Get Out of the Closet of his own making is to take Routes (1) and (2) (or, for that matter. Route 4). Let him set up no endless griping either; if he is unhappy with the Closet route, let him choose the others and shut up about it.

4) Finally, there is the fourth viable choice open to Jim Jones: to get the blazes out of this community which he finds oppressive, and to flee to some other more congenial community where Scrabble playing openly abounds. He too is certainly “liberated”: by changing his locale, he manages to play Scrabble openly and to keep the respect and friendship of his neighbors.

The point, then, is that whichever of the four horns of the dilemma Jones chooses to grasp, the very act of choice gets him out of the dilemma and ends any need to bleat endlessly for liberation. Whichever route he takes, in accordance with his own temperament and values, he has made his choice and can and should then shut up about the whole business and proceed with the other business of life. It seems to me, then, that the caterwaulers are people who refuse to make any of these choices, who confront the various paths and dither endlessly about adopting any of them. And then they inflict part of the price of that dithering on us by calling upon the rest of us to “liberate” them from their psychic bonds.

What they are trying to do, in short, is to gripe about the fact that reality, harshly and unfairly perhaps, presents them with this dilemma, or indeed with any dilemmas at all. Sure it would be nicer and more pleasant if the community in which Jones lives were more enthusiastic about Scrabble. But the fact is that they are not, and instead of haranguing and pestering them to admire and respect Scrabble or us to somehow make Jones’ neighbors change their attitudes, it behooves our unliberated brethren to confront their four choices clearly and honestly, to make their choice and thereby to liberate themselves, and thereby to leave us and everyone else free of the eternal blather about “liberation.” Let the unliberated proceed thus to quickly liberate themselves and go on to pursue more constructive concerns.

Jim Davidson And The Week That Was

On the week of April 2-6, the United States Senate took three notable libertarian actions. In the first place, by a vote of 68 to 23, the Senate, over determined opposition from the U.S. Treasury, voted to legalize the private ownership of gold for the first time in forty years. Since the vote was an amendment to the Administration-requested devaluation of the dollar to one-forty-second of a gold ounce, it is doubtful if the President will veto the entire bill should it pass the House.

Secondly, the Senate voted to prohibit governmental aid to North Vietnam without Congressional authorization. And third, the Senate passed a mandatory across-the-board budget-cut within an overall budget lower than the President’s request.

Each of these noteworthy actions is eloquent testimony to the quiet but remarkably effective work done by our one-man libertarian Washington lobbyist. James Davidson of the National Taxpayers Union. At the beginning of 1973. Davidson listed ten modest but important libertarian legislative goals for the year; not only were the above three actions on Davidson’s Ten Best list, but all of his other legislative objectives for the year are in good shape and none has been flatly rejected.

How does the young and handsome Davidson, operating with virtually no help and on a shoestring budget, do it? One way is by getting to know and influence key aides to key Senators, who in turn influence the rest of the Senate: and another of his crucial tactics is to do what the Marxists call “exploiting the contradictions within the ruling class.” In other words, to push a piece of libertarian legislation or to block a particularly egregious bit of statism, Davidson finds out which interests within the Establishment, not ordinarily libertarian, can be developed as allies on this particular issue. Thus, on the issue of gold legalization, Davidson realized that he could forge a “left-right” alliance on the issue between: conservative gold standard advocates, senators from mining states in the West, and such left-liberal Democrat ideologues as Rep. Reuss (D., Wise.) who favor the legalizing of gold as a symbol of treating gold as an ordinary non-monetary commodity like any other. Welding this alliance, and working with his eminent NTU colleague and thorn-in-the side of the military-industrial complex, A. Ernest Fitzgerald, Davidson was able to convert the powerful Senator William Proxmire (D., Wise.) to the cause of gold legalization. This conversion was aided by the fact of Fitzgerald’s being an aide to Proxmire’s Joint Economic Committee, which gives Congress its major cues on all economic legislation. With Proxmire on the right side, the Senate easily passed the amendment introduced by Senator McClure, conservative Republican from the mining state of Idaho. Another accomplishment of Davidson’s in this battle was to surprise and perturb the Nixon Administration by single-handedly inducing the Republican platform committee to include a call for gold legalization in the 1972 platform.

It is unfortunate in a way that the path of the successful lobbyist in Washington must be a quiet rather than a noisy one, for as a result Jim Davidson’s remarkable achievements for the cause have gone unsung within the libertarian movement. It was Davidson, who by converting Senator Harry Byrd (D., Va.) to the cause, managed to tip the scales against the SST. It was Davidson who, more than anyone else and working through Proxmire’s aides, managed to convince Senator Long (D., La.) to go all-out to block and thereby defeat the disastrous Family Assistance Plan — a plan which the President has now fortunately abandoned.

It behooves all libertarians to get behind Jim Davidson and the NTU in their lonely battle. Davidson reports, for example, that Congressmen receive remarkably little mail on any given issue, and therefore that a coordinated and well-timed letter-writing campaign by the nation’s libertarians could block or promote important pieces of legislation. One way to help Davidson’s efforts is to join the National Taxpayers Union and thus to receive his periodical newsletter Dollars and Sense (NTU, 319 5th St., S. E., Washington, D.C. 20003). By doing so, you will also be receiving important political information; for example, Dollars and Sense last fall predicted a 40% rise in meat prices this winter! The basis for Jim’s prediction was the new federal regulations banning the use of hormones in meat. Thus, by joining NTU you will not only be helping the cause but will help yourself find out more of what is really going on at the seat of government.

From The Halls Of Montezuma . . .

By Joseph R. Peden

Not too long ago, in the wake of the President’s visits to Peking and Moscow, and the winding down of the Vietnam war, political satirist Russell Baker reported a new crisis in the Pentagon — fear that America would soon suffer an “enemy gap”. But after extensive research, the strategic master planners discovered a suitable enemy for the ‘70’s — Denmark. While some Army officials were fearful of the morale effect upon the troops who would have to occupy vice-ridden Copenhagen, the missile men considered the challenge of dropping ICBM’s on Denmark without splashing any part of Sweden. Norway and Germany to be a useful challenge to their skills. What tipped the scales, however, was the fact that so many Americans had visited Denmark, that the U.S. was filled with people who were “soft on Danes”, thus providing the FBI, CIA and innumerable Congressional investigatory committees with years of profitable “work”.

But political satire in our age tends to lose its point by being overtaken by reality. National Review also must have been concerned about the enemy gap. While never for a moment supposing that Leviathan (Russia) and Behemoth (China) had been defeated by Richard Nixon, they felt obliged to point to the rise of a new enemy in the field — the Arab republic of Libya — and proposed that the United States should invade, conquer and annex it.

I almost wish this proposal was another one of NR’s spoofs, but there is every indication that in this instance they are not joking. In fact, from a certain point of view, it may be quite a reasonable suggestion.

First of all, as NR pointed out. Libya is an excellent base from which any imperial power can dominate the Middle East and Europe. The harbors at Tobruk and Tripoli are among the best along the north African coast; the climate is ideal for maintaining large military airbases; geographically Libya is at the center of the Mediterranean basin, and also has common frontiers with Egypt. Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Chad, and Niger. Traditionally, it has had intimate links with the Islamic peoples of west Africa, as well as with Egypt and Sudan to the East. And then, there is all that oil.

But is Libya a threat to the peace of the world? Is it under Communist tyranny? In what way hath it offended?

The Libyans greatest provocation is that they are not under the control of American or European imperialism. Unlike Egypt and Syria which have been forced into dependence upon the Soviet Union for military weapons to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, or Jordan which exists as a client state of the United States and its allies in the Arab world. Libya is geographically more remote from Israel and less subject to danger of invasion, and financially has been able through its enormous oil revenues to buy whatever military equipment it needs for cash. Thus, in its defenses, it is not dependent upon any one of the great powers for its survival. The independence, or arrogance as some would say, that such a situation creates was well illustrated recently when Libyan jet fighters tried to shoot down an American spy plane flying within a hundred miles of Tripoli over the high seas. The Libyans claim a 100 mile restricted zone around their capital city, and challenge any aircraft entering the zone without Libyan permission. When the United States protested this dastardly attack on an — you guessed it — unarmed C-130 transport plane, the Libyans ignored the American note for four days, and then coolly denied the incident had happened.

Nor is Libya ruled by Communists. Would that it were so. As Nixon has proven, you can always do business with Reds if you want to. But Libya is ruled by a small group of fanatic, zealous Moslems who despise infidels and are deeply humiliated by the present disunity in the Arab world, and the shame that has overtaken the Arab people at the hands of Israel and her European allies.

With much of the puritanical zeal of the century-old Senoussi order, a brotherhood dedicated to purifying Islam of all foreign influences and espousing a rigidly orthodox and mystical sense of Arab divine mission, the young military leaders who seized power and overthrew the pro-western monarchy in 1969 have managed to create a formidable moral as well as political force in the Moslem world. Devoted admirers of Gamal Abdel Nasser, they may yet succeed to his almost mystical power over the Arab masses. They are certainly the most bitter and uncompromising enemies of Israel — and hence of all her friends. This means that they cannot easily be bribed or bought or even scared by the imperialist powers.

But the most disturbing aspect of the Libyan regime is that its power vis-à-vis the Western powers is formidable and growing greater. Libya is the third largest producer of petroleum — only Kuwait and Iran are greater. And her potential reserves have been confirmed at 25 billion and estimated to be possibly 100 billion barrels. Despite the development of fields in the North Sea or the North Alaskan slope, the United States and Europe are becoming more and more dependent upon foreign oil. The first signs of the “energy crisis” — particularly in the heavily populated northeastern United States — have forced Nixon to temporarily suspend some of the import restrictions of fuel oils. But increased imports are unacceptable to the American government for several reasons. The cheaper foreign oil would further undercut the profitableness of domestic oil production, and thus increase dependence on foreign suppliers. But even more serious over the long run is the ever heavier drain on the balance of payments which can be expected as we become more dependent on foreign oil imports. A group of utility companies has recently combined to explore the continental shift off the northeastern United States to locate possible natural gas supplies. Their motive: “Our country faces financial bankruptcy if we have to depend too heavily on imports of natural gas and petroleum.”

The unfavorable balance of trade between the western industrial nations and the thinly populated Arab oil exporting states has already endangered the international monetary system. In the most recent monetary crisis, the gnomes of Zurich were replaced by the gnomes of Araby who began to dump billions of dollars into the European money markets — forcing them to close down for more than a week until the United States could be persuaded to devalue the dollar for the second time in six months. It is now clear that already the Arab states control sufficient reserves of European and American currency to create a monetary crisis whenever and wherever they choose. One suggestion has been to encourage the Arab states to invest directly in American industry, thus reducing their quickly convertible monetary reserves. But the vast amounts that are and will be available to the Arabs could produce a situation in which the Arabs would gain a significant control of some sectors of the American economy. Others are urging Washington to coordinate the energy policies of all the western powers to reduce the leverage of the Arab states in negotiating new oil concessions, and pricing and revenue demands. Arab spokesmen have rightly labeled this “common front.” approach a “declaration of war”. (It is not unreasonable to speculate that Nelson Rockefeller’s recent trip to an informal conference of Atlantic statesmen meeting in Holland may have been motivated by these concerns.)

Also alarming to Washington must be the increasing evidence that the Libyans are using their oil revenues to intervene in the affairs of other nations. The Libyans were the chief bankrollers and arms suppliers to the Islamic rebels in French-dominated Chad. De Gaulle had to send in French troops to help the non-Moslem government of Chad to survive a widespread uprising. Reportedly, the Libyans withdrew their support only after France agreed to sell them 100 French Mirage jets. The jets, paid for in cash, created a formidable air power, remote enough from Israel for safety, yet close enough to serve as a strategic reserve for the Egyptians.

The assassination of the American Ambassador to the Sudan and his aide was widely reported as having been financed by Libya which is also a generous supporter of the Palestinian Liberation Movement. The Libyans also showed unseemly, and as it developed unwarranted haste in cheering the aborted assassination of King Hassan of Morocco, and it was assumed that the Libyans may have had something to do with the attempted coup. An unsuccessful coup in the Sudan a year ago may also have been instigated by the Libyans, and the present Sudanese government has failed to participate in the new federal Arab republic engineered by the Libyans and Egyptians.

In Uganda. President Amin was believed to have expelled the Israeli military and civilian advisors from his country, not only because he couldn’t pay his debts, but because Libyan political and financial support was promised. The Libyans have been most aggressively establishing financial aid links with black African states who show themselves “loyal” on the Israeli question in the United Nations and elsewhere. Recently, in the midst of a firm refusal of Britain to pay higher rental fees for her naval bases in Malta, the Maltese Prime Minister coolly announced that Libya had offered to make up any financial losses Malta might suffer, if Malta permanently excluded all NATO forces from its soil. Negotiations renewed shortly after, and the Maltese got most of what they wanted. The New York Times has even reported that Philippine army officers are convinced that the Moslem rebels in Mindinao and the Sulu Islands have received arms and money through Libyan sources! One would not be surprised if the federal marshals found a burnoose and water-pipe left behind at Wounded Knee.

What then are the implications of Libya’s new found power? Clearly the Libyans can create all sorts of mischief.

With far fewer resources, the Barbary pirates, ancestors of the modern Libyans held all the states of Europe under tribute to ensure the safe passage of their ships through the Mediterranean Sea during the 16th through early 19th centuries. Even the United States paid almost a million dollars before sending a fleet to punish the pirates of Tripoli. When the Italians invaded the country in 1911 they suffered another of their humiliating military disasters until the collapse of the Turkish empire in 1918, and internal divisions among the Libyans, opened the way for an uneasy Italian occupation. The Libyans have shown themselves to be brave, cunning and formidable enemies, and there is no reason to suppose that they are less so now.

With their immense oil reserves and the revenues that continue to pile up the less than two million Libyans cast a large shadow in future world affairs. Their trump card is the enormous need for their oil by the western powers — cheap and convenient to the European or American markets. In this kind of situation. Israel might find itself with less sympathy and support in the West: especially if a monetary crisis were added to a cut off of fuel supplies. If there is still another Arab-Israeli war, it would not be surprising to read of a landing and occupation of Tobruk or Benghazi or Sirte by Israeli forces. In fact there might be some people in Washington who would be very pleased with such an operation. It might save them the trouble.

Monthly Index Of Liberty

In an off-the-record briefing for Congressmen, assistant secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, William Sullivan, asked to cite the constitutional authority for the President’s continued bombing of Cambodia, replied smilingly. “For now I’d just say the justification is the re-election of President Nixon”. Of course, Vox populi, vox Dei.

• • •

America’s Asian allies — those staunch defenders of freedom and democracy — are at it still. In the Philippines, where the Marcos regime is faced with a full-fledged guerrilla uprising among the Moslems of Mindinao and the Sulu islands, the army has a new “secret weapon” — Mosquitos. The rebel area is ridden by malaria. So the government has stopped spraying. “Sooner or later the rebels will be too weak to fight”. And presumably Marcos will have won the hearts and minds of the people. Meanwhile, in Cambodia, Marshal Lon Nol has arrested and jailed 55 of the nation’s top astrologers. It seems they were unanimous in predicting that his regime would not survive the end of April. We await the first of May with interest.

Libertarians have been among the few Americans who have taken a principled stand against the law of eminent domain — that relic of the English common law that views all landed property as belonging ultimately to the Crown. New Yorkers are watching with interest the confiscation of the homes of 90 families, all white working-class ethnics, by the City of New York. The reason? A private manufacturing corporation has threatened to leave the city unless it can expand its present plant facilities. The city government — to save some 500 jobs — has driven 90 families from their homes by confiscation under the law of eminent domain, and plans to turn the property over to the manufacturer.

Nor is this outrage surprising. Two years ago a consultant to the New York City planning commission urged the seizure of the 89 acre Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Brooklyn. Why? There is no nearby park facility with “a woodland at least sufficiently deep to camouflage lovers with no other alternatives for privacy”. While most citizens gagged on the notion of sexual rumbles on the graves of their loved ones, the ecologists and planners jumped in to urge the necessity of “doing something” about the selfish individuals who preferred to maintain their right to the proverbial plot of landed property which even the poorest American eventually thinks his due. The 4000 or so acres presently owned by New Yorkers as burial plots were depriving 200,000 living persons of decent housing sites, charged an outraged planner. At the very least the “tax-exempt” cemeteries might be put to “multiple uses” — as playgrounds, dog walks, or perhaps even garbage dumps. Of course the government might solve the problem by requiring cremation or dumping at sea instead of inhumation. But that would only arouse the environmental pollution nuts! In India, the Parsees expose the dead on tall stone towers where nature and the vultures harmoniously keep a natural ecological cycle and eliminate all problems of pollution. Come to think of it, do the city fathers realize the amount of space presently wasted, and untaxed, on the thousands of rooftops of New York’s skyscrapers?

• • •

Then there is that AP dispatch from London: Police arrested a young man prowling about London’s Highgate Cemetery with a flashlight, a crucifix and a sharp wooden stake. The culprit told the magistrate that he was hunting vampires. The judge found hunting vampires to be within the law and dismissed the case. It’s comforting to know that Englishmen still enjoy some liberties.

Recommended Reading

By Mr. First Nighter

Rent Controls.

Despite its importance, rent controls and their consequences have been little studied by economists. Now, the Swedish free-market economist Sven Rydenfelt expands his excellent critique of the unfortunate effects of post-World War II rent controls in Sweden, an early version of which he had published in the Mises Festschrift volume, Toward Liberty. See Rydenfelt, “Swedish Housing Policy, 1942-1972: History and Analysis”, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken Quarterly Review (1972, No. 3).

Urban Renewal.

Martin Anderson’s classic dissection of urban renewal, The Federal Bulldozer, had a blockbuster effect in bringing about disillusionment with the program, among Left and Right alike. But Anderson’s work is almost ten years old (1964), and there has long been a crying need for bringing it up to date. Now this task has been accomplished by the young Friedmanite economist, Prof. John Weicher, in his new booklet, Urban Renewal (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, Dec. 1972, $3.00). A fine contribution to the new “Evaluative Studies” series of the AEI, engaging in critical analysis of various government programs, and edited by Yale Brozen of the University of Chicago.

World War II Revisionism.

While Cold War Revisionism has flourished in recent years, World War II Revisionism has had to make its way against more deeply entrenched opposition. Yet it is growing, and now a leading young political scientist, with impeccable credentials in orthodox academic circles, has written an excellent brief summary of the Revisionist position. In scarcely more than 100 pages, Professor Russett lays both the “Hitler threat” and the “Japanese threat” to American security at rest once and for all. Probably the best brief introduction to World War II Revisionism.

Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II (Harper Torchbooks, paper, $1.95).

Those younger libertarians who have not yet broken free of the official mythology in American foreign policy can scarcely do better in beginning their re-education than to read the Russett book. As Russett says: “Participation in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of theology.” While Russett’s work does not presume to tell the entire story, it succeeds in the necessary task of desanctifying World War II.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 5

MAY, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

NOTES ON WATERGATE

No doubt about it: we were dead wrong in pooh-poohing the political significance of Watergate (Nov. 1972). In our defense, however, Watergate remained a minor caper of piddling proportions until James W. McCord, Jr., under the hammer blows of Judge “Maximum John” Sirica, broke and began to implicate the higher-ups.

Sub specie aeternetatis, one set of politicians spying upon and sabotaging another is hardly of cosmic significance. But oh the deliciousness as the whole sleazy, robotic crew, even unto the highest reaches of the White House, gets its comeuppance! Every morning’s news brings further revelations, further scandal, as the network of the corruption of power extends upward arid outward. One by one they topple, as the President becomes so short-handed that some have to double up on jobs. One thing is certain: it couldn’t have happened to a nicer or more deserving bunch of guys, or to a more deserving institution.

• • •

There are many interesting and even neglected facets to Watergate. We see the White House staff as the epitome of the Organization Man: people with one thought and one loyalty — not to truth, or justice, or honor, or even country, but to The President. The President becomes a quasi-divine figure in whose service any and all means may be employed.

And yet what happens when the crust of loyalty is broken, when the pressure is on? Then, The President is forgotten and it’s every man for himself, each rushing to try to clear himself and point the finger at his former colleagues. Truly an edifying spectacle of our rulers in action with their well-known devotion to the Public Interest and the Common Good. Come on, have at each other, fellows. Implicate, implicate!

Before the mad rush, of course, there was the Cover-Up. Here we see the inveterate instincts of the Bureaucracy to hush things up, to kick things under the rug, and never never let the long suffering citizen and taxpayer in on what is going on. So much for the “democratic process.”

• • •

And then there is all the wailing that Watergate is endangering the credibility, not merely of Mr. Nixon, but of “the office of the Presidency itself.” Oh no, surely not that! Here is one of the great consequences of Watergate: the demythologizing, the desanctification of the office of the Presidency that has taken on an increasingly sacral character in recent decades.

In this connection, it is highly instructive that Bill Buckley has finally revealed his cloven hoof. Conservatives are, at the very least, supposed to revere the American Constitution, and if the Constitution says anything it is that the people and not any branch of government, is sovereign. But let us forever note the reaction of America’s leading Conservative to Watergate and particularly to the increasing talk of impeaching Mr. Nixon. Said Buckley perfectly seriously:

“In America, the President is the emperor in addition to being the prime minister. He is no matter that his term as such is limited, the sovereign. When it is contemplated to execute the king, it is necessary to think first about the consequences on the people, rather than on the judicial poetry of the sentence . . . If Nixon were impeached, the punishment would be visited primarily on the state . . . it is necessary to remind oneself that the sovereign is unique: that the punishment of the whole of the state is never justified.” (New York Post, April 28).

There it is, brazen and blatant, from a man who sometimes likes to think of himself as a “libertarian.” The President is the king, the sovereign; and the king is the state, and is therefore above retribution. Louis XIV could not have said it better. William F. Buckley has revealed the quintessential nature of the American Conservative movement; it is not Constitutionalist, but monarchist, and absolute-monarchist at that. Bill Buckley is far better suited as a theoretician for George III than he is as an American citizen.

Happily, our publisher, Professor Peden, wrote a letter printed in the Post (May 2) that called Buckley to task. Peden wrote: “When William Buckley baldly states that the President is sovereign, that to punish him for malfeasance of high crimes is to punish ‘the whole of the state’ . . . Mr. Buckley is guilty of culpable ignorance. He apparently believes that the American Republic is monarchical in its Constitution. As almost any legal authority or political scientist will attest, and even the layman can read in the Constitution’s preamble, the American people are the sovereigns in this society . . . Neither the President, nor the Congress nor the Supreme Court are sovereign in any sense of the word. And it is either ignorance or dangerous mischief for Mr. Buckley to claim otherwise.”

• • •

“Impeachment”! What a glorious sound the word has! Until a few weeks ago, the very idea of impeaching the President, any President, would have been considered grotesque and absurd. It was only recently that former (another good word) Attorney-General Kleindienst arrogantly informed the Congress that if they didn’t like the President’s actions they could either vote down the budget or impeach him. Until a few weeks ago impeachment was thinking the unthinkable; yet now, even such Establishment Congressmen as Rep. Moss, and Goldwater and Thurmond, are seriously contemplating such action. And the general Congressional reaction to current calls for impeachment are not that they are lunatic or absurd, but only that they are “premature.” Use of such a word seems to imply that pretty soon the idea of impeachment may indeed mature.

And how many people really believe that Mr. Nixon knew nothing of the vast and extensive bugging-sabotage-espionage operations on the Democrats? When literally millions of dollars were being handed around under the table? And how many believe that he knew nothing of the gigantic and well-coordinated cover-up? Nixon, after all, is no boob like Grant or Harding; he has always been a shrewd and ruthless political operator, and he has always proclaimed the tightness of his political ship. Besides if he really takes “responsibility”, isn’t that enough to mete out proper punishment?

One of the demurrers on impeachment is that this would bring Spiro Agnew into the Presidency. Apart from the likelihood that Agnew would resign as well, would he really be that much worse then Nixon? Enough worse to give up the magnificent precedent that the use of the impeachment power would set? The precedent that would put every future President, and every American as well, on notice that it is possible to topple him, that the President is not an absolute dictator for four years, that something can be done, legally and without violence, to remove him forthwith from office.

• • •

And where are all the loud champions of “law and order” in all this? Not, it might be noted, with law and order. The President wistfully refers to the Watergate criminals as good men whose “zeal exceeded their judgement” in the righteous cause of getting him re-elected. Governor Reagan says that these men are not criminals because they were acting in a good cause (I thought it was only the bad old Communists who are always charged with believing that “the ends justify the means”).

• • •

One fascinating aspect of the Watergate has not been commented on in the media. It was the breaking of James W. McCord, Jr. that broke open the entire Watergate network. Crucial to McCord’s sudden decision to talk in addition to Judge Sirica’s stiff sentencing, was the advice of his new lawyer. Bernard Fensterwald. But who is Mr. Fensterwald, who played such a critical role in the Watergate revelations? Old Kennedy Assassination Revisionists know Fensterwald well: for he is the dedicated head of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, which for several years has been the major research organization investigating the critical political assassinations of our time: King, the two Kennedys, Malcolm X. etc. Undoubtedly, Fensterwald was intrigued by the Cuban emigre-CIA connections of most of the Watergate burglars, connections which also permeate the Oswald-JFK Assassination case. Perhaps he was hoping that blowing the lid off Watergate might also lead to further revelations on the assassination at Dallas. And who knows? maybe it will.

In this connection. President Nixon promises us that his investigation into Watergate will be “the most thorough investigation since the Warren Commission.” To old Kennedy Assassination buffs, this is surely the grisliest joke of the year.

• • •

Everyone. I suppose, has his own particular favorite among the storehouse of goodies unearthed by the Watergate case. My own is the cretinous behavior of the head of the FBI. L. Patrick Gray, Jr., in dumping crucial documents unread into the “burn bag.” Another happy result of Watergate as well as the entire tenure of Gray, is the rapid desanctification of our national secret police. Surely, it will never be the same again.

• • •

While we all chortle at Watergate and its ramifying consequences, we might also keep a wary eye on the future. A seminal article, “The World Behind Watergate”, by Kirkpatrick Sale, has recently been published in the New York Review of Books (May 3). Here is an article which should be read by everyone interested in the men behind and around Watergate and in the politico-economic roots of the Nixon Administration. Mr. Sale traces the intricate and extensive connections between all the powers in and around the administration. Taking off from Carl Oglesby’s trenchant distinction between the “cowboys” and the “yankees” among the power elite. Sale treats the Nixon (as well the Johnson) Administration as the embodiment of the relative accession to power of the nouveau riche “Southern rim” elite centered in Southern California, Texas, and Florida — as contrasted to the suaver, more sophisticated “older money” of the Eastern Establishment-corporate liberal elite. The Southern Rim tends to be blunter, more crass, more narrowly focussed and politically conservative, and more prone to short-range crookery; while the Eastern Establishment is smoother, more settled and cosmopolitan, more focussed on wider and long-range concerns, corporate-liberal, and more content to stay within the legal forms.

There is no question about the fact that the Watergate revelations are smashing the political power of the Southern rim clique, and perhaps that of their very own Southern Californian President along with it. But doesn’t this forebode a re-accession to power of the Eastern Establishment, which while smoother and less crudely obnoxious is in the long run more dangerous? After all, Rockefeller’s personal representative in government, Henry Kissinger, comes out smelling like a rose, as do Rockefeller-connected economic czars George Pratt Shultz and Arthur F. Burns. The suspicious observer may ask: is the Rockefeller-Eastern Establishment pushing the Watergate expose for its own ends? Is it connected with a possible Rockefeller run for the Presidency in 1976? Does the emergence of Boston Brahmin Eliot Richardson and New York liberal Leonard Garment embody a return to power of the Eastern Establishment? And is Texan John Connally riding in to head the Yankees off at the pass?

For A New Liberty

Reviewed By J. Neil Schulman

The prime axiom of Human Action is that men employ means to gain ends. Mr. Libertarian. Murray N. Rothbard, has just given us one hell of a means toward one of our most treasured ends — the creation of a free society.

No longer must the libertarian point to a succession of formidable-looking tomes on a myriad of complex subjects to initiate the uninitiated to the many joys of his favorite subject. No longer must we suggest books that spend half their space on the subject of Ayn Rand — either praising or demolishing her — or supposedly “libertarian” books that while admittedly comprehensive in scope, are “weak” on this question or that one.

Dr. Rothbard’s new book For A New Liberty is a work monumental in both scope of presentation and in the philosophical consistency of its content. It is complete without being verbose, and detailed without unnecessary complexity. Its every claim is based on easily verifiable truths, and it presents its case for human liberty starting with sound theoretical groundwork, proceeding to show concrete applications, and backing it all up with examples of historical precedent.

The book is divided into an introduction and three parts.

In his introduction. Dr. Rothbard gives a simple and beautifully-appealing history of the present libertarian movement — the “New Libertarianism.” as he calls it — and introduces the non-aggression doctrine as the defining agreement among all libertarians.

In Part I, the theoretical base of libertarianism is presented with a thorough discussion of how both civil and economic liberties are inseparable because both are based on property rights, and we are treated to frequent examples to back up each point.

The lengthiest portion of the book, Part II, is devoted to a complete picture of the chaos caused by State interventionism, and Dr. Rothbard presents a marvelously rational analysis of how the free market and other purely voluntary institutions could throw oil on troubled waters (and yes: pollution is discussed). There are chapters on involuntary servitude, personal liberty, education, welfare, the public sector, conservation, and war, and throughout Dr. Rothbard is radicalizing us by demonstrating that the draft is slavery, taxation robbery, public schools thinly-disguised compulsory mind control, and war a euphemism for mass murder. To read the injustice done to us daily by the State in such rapid succession is so overpowering that if any of these chapters were ever read to a large audience, it would be enough to have the speaker thrown in jail on charges of “inciting to riot.” an absurdity Dr. Rothbard also challenges in his discussion on freedom of speech. And it is also in this section that Dr Rothbard’s chapter on “Police. Law and the Courts” — already famous to readers of Reason Magazine — makes its first appearance in book form. It is the most persuasive case for natural law, private defense and voluntary arbitration ever set to paper, and is perhaps the most important essay — in its own right — since Lysander Spooner’s No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority.

In Part III. Dr. Rothbard wraps up with a brief discussion of strategy, how to get from our present coercive society to a free one. He discusses the need for both education and action, and stresses that we must keep our ultimate goal constantly in view even while working for reforms that may fall short of our hopes and expectations. It is a fitting dessert to a magnificently-prepared dinner and any libertarians who dare disagree with Chef Rothbard’s recipe are warned that they are pursuing a hazardous course indeed.

For A New Liberty is unlike Dr. Rothbard’s previous major works in that it is not aimed at the scholar already familiar with his subject, but is directed to the casual reader, albeit one in full focus. In its successful attempt at comprehensiveness (I can think of no major topic left undiscussed, or common fallacy about our position left unrefuted), it has made no compromise with either detailed accuracy, or the climate of popular opinion at the present time.

If this view has so far sounded like a sales pitch . . . it is. For A New Liberty is “hard core” and, in my opinion, the single most important book on libertarianism ever published, judging from its potential for converting the general public to our cause. Read it yourself; it will clarify your concepts: and recommend it to anyone with any leanings towards freedom; if he has any intelligence and integrity at all, this book must convince him. If the public gives For A New Liberty even half the attention it so richly deserves, we will be well on our way to a free society.

But then we “New Libertarians” suspected that from the beginning, didn’t we?

Floyd Arthur ‘Baldy’ Harper, RIP

On the evening of Saturday, April 21, Dr. F. A. “Baldy” Harper died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of 68. To say that Baldy’s death is an irreparable loss, personally and in every other way, to the libertarian movement, would be a masterpiece of understatement. Ever since he came to the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946 as its chief economist and theoretician, Baldy Harper, in a very real sense, has been the libertarian movement. For all these years, this gentle and lovable man, this wise and Socratic teacher, has been the heart and soul and nerve center of the libertarian cause.

I had the privilege of meeting Baldy in the winter of 1946-47, and from that first meeting, he became my first dear friend and mentor in the libertarian movement. And I was scarcely an isolated example. For years before and ever since, Baldy Harper carried on an enormous and inspiring correspondence, seeking out all promising libertarians, encouraging any signs of their productivity, by his wise teaching and example developing a large and devoted following of friends and students. The thought of never again receiving one of Baldy’s famous cryptic and allusive hand-written notes is almost enough to move one to tears. The last letter I had received from him, a brief week or two before his death, was typical: a glowing note about his discovery of a brilliant young mathematics professor who is anxious to move into the field of Austrian economics and to refute the fallacies of orthodox mathematical economics.

It was Baldy’s burden, which he bore with his usual uncomplaining grace, that he was a member of a veritable “lost generation” from the libertarian point of view. In the late 1940’s, there were some libertarians and free-market economists of the Ludwig von Mises generation or slightly younger: men then in their 60’s, such as Mises, Fred Fairchild, Willford I. King. And there were a few of us youngsters coming up. But in his vital “middle generation”, there was only Baldy: all of the other intellectuals of his day were leftists and statists. And so Baldy simply set out, in his quiet and gentle way, to create a body of students and followers. In those early days at FEE, for example, almost every staff member had been brought into the movement by Baldy: W. M. Curtiss, Paul Poirot. Ivan Bierly, Ellis Lamborn, all students of Baldy at Cornell. Baldy was indeed a notable inspiration and guide for young people, and his followers are now everywhere in the libertarian world. There were scarcely any of us touched by his special magic who did not come to love Baldy as a mentor and a friend.

Baldy and I came to anarcho-capitalism from laissez-faire at about the same time, driven by inexorable logic, in what for us was the memorable winter of 1949-50.1 vividly remember one time I was visiting him at FEE and he quietly pulled out a copy of Tolstoy’s anarchist Law of Love and the Law of Violence, which he confided that “some of us are now reading with great interest.”

Baldy in those days contributed some vital works to the libertarian literature; perhaps the most memorable was his great anti-war pamphlet. In Search of Peace, and his magnum opus, Liberty: A Path to its Recovery, which brought to libertarian theory an abiding concern for human variety and diversity which reflected Baldy’s lifelong interest in the “hard” and the biological sciences. But Baldy’s abiding passion was a deep concern for strategy, for the development of a strategic theory and practice for the libertarian cause. It was out of this concern for strategy that Baldy developed his lifelong dream, his vision of the course which libertarians must take for ultimate victory. He saw that the nub and the heart of libertarian strategy must be ideas and scholarship, that activism could never succeed unless informed by a body of ideas and research on the deepest and most advanced levels. Baldy’s great vision was to guide and develop a body of libertarian scholarship and research.

In pursuit of this dream, Baldy Harper moved in 1958 to the William Volker Fund of Burlingame, California, which had been engaged in the vital task of discovering and sponsoring libertarian and allied scholars in all related fields and disciplines, and in aiding and publishing their work as individuals, completely separate from their universities or from such Establishment-agencies as the Social Science Research Council. The Volker Fund concept: of discovering and aiding libertarian scholars, and of bringing them together in meetings and conferences, was an unsung task of enormous importance which developed and held together libertarian scholars during the lonely years of the 1940s and 50s. By the end of the 50s, Baldy saw the importance of establishing the Volker activities on a permanent, funded basis; and he moved to transfer the bulk of the Volker funds to a new Institute for Humane Studies, which would expand the Volker concept and would provide a permanent home for libertarian fellowships, scholarship, conferences, and publications. An endowed IHS would have been of inestimable and incalculable value for the libertarian cause, and the fulfillment of Baldy’s lifelong dream. Then, in 1962, just at the point of consummating the new IHS, for various personal and ideological reasons the Volker Fund collapsed, and its funds were forever lost to the cause of libertarian scholarship.

Faced with this shattering blow, Baldy Harper never faltered; with unswerving and inspiring integrity, he determined to build the Institute for Humane Studies even without its promised endowment. Painfully, and at cost of great personal sacrifice, Baldy patiently, step by step, built up the Institute. After nearly a decade of this slow and painfully wrought development, he was able to bring the IHS to the point where it could sponsor conferences, publish books and pamphlets, grant fellowships, and begin to fulfill the Harper dream of a center for libertarian ideas and scholarship.

If now, despite this grievous blow, we can continue to build the Institute and see that it flourishes, we can build a monument to Baldy which I am sure he would cherish more than any other. It cannot replace this wonderful friend and teacher of us all; but it would be of enormous and indispensable value to the cause of liberty which Baldy held so dear and to which he devoted his life.

McGovern vs. Rothbard

On November 17, 1972, your editor published a blistering attack on the Quota System, the leftist doctrine that every identifiable group, ethnic, racial, sexual, or whatever, should have its proportionate, pro rata share of all of life’s goodies, and that it is the function of the political arm to pressure or coerce that share into being. Our attack was in the form of a letter sent out by the Forum for Contemporary History (P.O. Box 127, Stearns Wharf, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93101), an organization that sends out bi-weekly four-page letters to its vast membership on controversial issues of the day. Recognizing its own built-in liberal leanings, by the way, the Forum is almost desperately eager to publish controversial non-liberal opinions, and libertarians will find a friendly reception from the staff of this new publication. Not only was yours truly invited to join the Forum’s Editorial Review Committee, but it has already published letters from libertarians Ernest Fitzgerald and Robert LeFevre. Non-members will be able to read the Rothbard letter in its reprinted form in the February, 1973 issue of Intellectual Digest, there entitled: “The Quota System, In Short, Must Be Repudiated Immediately”.

The letter attacked both the theory of the quota system, and its selective leftist application to a few favored and allegedly “oppressed” “minority groups”. Part of the attack was levelled against the McGovernite movement, and its insistence on overriding the freely elected choices of Democrats on behalf of imposing a non-elected but quotally pure oligarchy of delegates at the Convention.

Interestingly enough, one of the comments sent to the Forum on the Rothbard letter was by none other than Senator McGovern himself. The most interesting aspect of the McGovern comment is that he explicitly agreed with my strictures — on all aspects of society and the economy except the political party structure! Senator McGovern wrote:

“The central thesis of Professor Rothbard’s argument is that the quota system discriminates against people of ability. I accept that as a truism for most purposes . . . In sum, Professor Rothbard raises strong arguments against the quota system in general.” (McGovern to the Forum for Contemporary History, December 7, 1972).

The Senator’s attempt to exempt political parties from the argument was a specious and tortured one, based on the objective of widening “access to the voting booth.” McGovern added:

“Our objective in a democracy is to have leaders who are representative of the population as a whole, not just of those who have superior talent, intelligence, or energy. . . Simple common sense suggests that when we are talking about the electoral process, in which all can and should participate, the relevant arguments differ greatly from those which apply when the subject is upward mobility in the economic system, the right to hold a job, or the practice of a profession.”

Libertarian Forum readers might enjoy my reply, which follows in full:

“I am delighted to see that in his comment on my Forum letter. Senator McGovern joins me in repudiating the quota system for the entire economy and for our society, the only apparent exception being the political party structure. I venture to say that if the Senator had made his position explicit or better known to the electorate, he might well have garnered many more votes last November.

“Our only quarrel, then, seems to be over the electoral process. Senator McGovern is concerned about the widest possible participation in the electoral process; but surely, elections in America, both in primaries and in general elections, are now open to all Americans, regardless of race, sex, creed, color, or ethnic origin. In this concern, the Senator is pushing against an open door. But what of the fact that a few people often form slates of candidates? I fail to see anything wrong with that; the point Is that any ‘few’ who wish can form slates and present them to the electorate: why should not Richard Daley have the same privilege in slate-forming as the Rev. Jesse Jackson? And if Mr. Daley had chosen to nominate only one-eyed Scandinavian-Americans over 6 feet tall, why shouldn’t he have had that privilege? The point is that all Democrats of Illinois had the right to participate in the choice of delegates; whom they selected should certainly be up to them. (In point of fact, convention delegates are usually nominated by leaders on the basis of interest and loyalty in party activity, virtues which were scarcely conspicuous in the Jackson delegation.) Overriding the free choice of the electorate by imposing ethnic, etc. guidelines upon them is precisely the anti-democratic quota system which Senator McGovern agrees is bad in every other area of American life.

“One argument of Senator McGovern’s is a rather astounding one: that we should ‘have leaders who are representative of the population as a whole, not just of those who have superior talent, intelligence or energy.’ Does he really mean to endorse Senator Hruska’s famous assertion that the mediocre people are entitled to some of their own on the Supreme Court?”

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Slighter

Deliverance. dir. by John Boorman, written by James Dickey. With Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight.

Several libertarians have touted James Dickey’s Deliverance as one of the great libertarian novels of our time, and the recently revived New Banner (Feb. 4-18) has devoted over three full pages to a hagiographical celebration of the movie. I haven’t read the novel, but the central fact of the movie, written by Dickey himself, is that it is overwhelmingly boring. It is an attempted adventure movie so poisoned by the search for Significance that the adventure is only a few high spots in a morass of tedium. Boorman has adopted the oldest trick in the business: if you want a movie to seem Profound when you have nothing much to say, then draw out the action, make the camera dwell endlessly on each scene, and focus on the face of each actor as he struggles painfully to emit some inarticulate banality. In other words, if you make the film dull enough, it will trail clouds of Profundity for our gullible moviegoers — especially the gullible critics. Although this time it was not so much the critics but some of our libertarians and other intellectuals who were taken in.

The plot concerns four urban Southerners who set out for a weekend of “conquering nature” by canoeing down a river in the wild mountain country. They are goaded on by their surly macho leader, Burt Reynolds. The central theme of the movie, one that might have been interesting if developed properly, is that Reynolds’ much vaunted “nature” is filled with danger and primitive human evil, and that our protagonists are happy to return, half dead, to the arms of urban civilization. And further that the true hero who gets the group through is not the macho Reynolds but the shnooky Voight. But Reynolds conks out with scarcely a struggle, and Voight is simply too shnooky to capture our interest, or to wind up as an authentic hero. Incidentally, none of the four seems to have bothered to chart the river in advance, so that every rapids comes as a shattering surprise. What sort of schlemiehls are these? Furthermore, the brutality is too gratuitous to serve as more than an unintegrated shock to the audience. Perhaps if one of the great classical adventure directors had done the movie, something could have been salvaged from the debris. Certainly it would have been more interesting.

Shamus. dir. by Buzz Kulik. With Burt Reynolds, Giorgio Tozzi, and Dyan Cannon.

Shamus is one of the best and most exciting tough-guy detective movies in some time. The emphasis is as it should be, on fast and vigorous action, sparkling with odd-ball characters and situations. Reynolds does very well in the central role, and Dyan Cannon is her usual sophisticated and sultry self. It is true that the plot tends to be incoherent at times, but in a movie like this, who cares? Giorgio Tozzi leaves the opera boards for an excellent performance as a silky Godfather-type.

The Poseidon Adventure. dir. by Ronald Neame. With Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters.

A gripping adventure tale, propelled along by its sparkling central theme: a mighty ocean-liner’s capsizing in mid-sea, and the exciting efforts of a few of the passengers to escape by climbing upward to the bottom of the ship. Each step of the way is fraught with danger, and the movie well deserves its wide popularity at the box-office. The major problem with the film is the phony philosophy and the even more phony theology, all of which is emitted by the hero, the hip young priest Gene Hackman. The “philosophy” rests in undigested globules throughout the picture, capped by the insufferable “Christ-like” demise of Hackman at the end of the film. But the action is compelling enough to allow us to overlook the Message.

The Getaway, dir. by Sam Peckinpah. With Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw.

Sam Peckinpah is one of the most interesting directors functioning today. Most of his work is deeply flawed; one senses that he is trying to direct in the classic tradition of Hollywood adventure movies, but that he cannot arrive at a consistent style or point of view. Hence the erratic, unstable, and flawed nature of his oeuvre. And yet Peckinpah at his worst is still better than most of the directors active today. And his handling of violence is consistently brilliant, as even his worst detractors concede. The Wild Bunch was one of the great Westerns of all time; Straw Dogs was marred by the slowness of the buildup and the total miscasting of Dustin Hoffman; in a far different vein, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, starring Jason Robards, was a beautiful and lyrical evocation of the individualism of the Old West. It is, indeed, Peckinpah’s uncompromising individualism, and the readiness of his heroes to use violence to defend themselves against attack, that sticks in the craw of the left-intelligentsia.

The Getaway, unfortunately, is not one of Peckinpah’s better efforts. Its central theme — the caper-plus-getaway — is a fine one, and Peckinpah gets down to it well after an unsatisfactory beginning marred by fashionable avant-garde camera jumps in time and space. The scenes of violence are predictably excellent, especially the scene when the cornered McQueen shoots his way out with a shotgun purchased on the spot. But the film is fundamentally flawed by the grievous miscasting of the central protagonists. Once again, Peckinpah has fallen victim to faulty casting. Furthermore, Peckinpah does not have the ability of the great directors to wring superior performances from shoddy and third-rate actors; on the contrary, a poor actor will perform far worse under Peckinpah than he will with most directors. Steve McQueen has always been one of our poorest actors; his expression ranges from surly-and-quizzical to surly-and-quizzical. In Getaway, McQueen is given his head, and he drags down the picture with a stumbling, leaden, inarticulate, surly-quizzical performance.

Ali McGraw completes the acting debacle. Miss McGraw has never been able to act; but her previous directors have been able to enhance her beauty in a rosy glow and to wring at least a passable performance from her. Here, Miss McGraw is a disaster; her acting is abysmal, and she is leaden, chalk white, dead to the core. Peckinpah has never been good with women; his female characters have never been more than dumb and fickle tramps. Faced with the McGraw character as someone closer to heroine status, Peckinpah simply cannot handle the situation; hence her corpse-like quality. Furthermore, McQueen and McGraw are supposed to be in love, and romantic love is the one emotion that Peckinpah is least equipped to portray. Sado-masochistic sex he handles quite well, as in the minor sex interest of Getaway; but the two central “lovers” are stumbling, inarticulate, moribund, and totally unbelievable.

Noel Coward, RIP. The death of the great Noel Coward, almost the living embodiment of the best of the Old Culture, leaves a gap that cannot be filled. Coward’s genius as a playright, composer and actor managed to forge a blend of unabashed and moving romanticism with high and sparkling wit. A difficult feat at best, the great Coward leaves an aching void in a culture and a world from which both romance and wit have virtually disappeared. The only thing those of us left behind can do is to Keep trie Faith, to keep the torch of elegant wit and romance burning until a nobler and better time. But this is hardly a difficult task; for shall we ever be able to forget the great play Private Lives? (For a moving theatrical experience, rush out, buy, and listen to the Coward-Gertrude Lawrence recording of this play.) And can we ever forget such marvelously romantic songs as “I’ll See You Again”? Bless you, Noel Coward, and rest in peace. We shall not see your like again.

The Jockey Club Stakes. A play by William Douglas Home. With Wilfred Hyde White. Robert Coote, and Geoffrey Sumner. Broadway this season saw what can only characterize as assassination-by-criticism. The Jockey Club Stakes came to Broadway, a frothy, delightful, beautifully acted comedy in the wittiest British tradition. The witty spoof on the mores and maneuverings of the British Establishment was acted superbly by a trio of consummate artists who should be familiar to us from British movies, with Mr. Hyde White the central star. And yet this comedy was blasted off the boards by the venomous attacks of such leftists, serioso critics as Julius Novick in the Village Voice and John Simon in the New York Times; Simon lost his cool so far as to seriously call this play the embodiment of the “loss of the British Empire.” What incensed the Left was the obvious fact that the playwright, the brother of the former Tory Prime Minister of England, was delighted with the sly maneuverings of his Tory Establishment characters. All of a sudden, our critics, who hail every exercise in morbidity and degeneracy in the name of separating morality from art, forget all about art-for-art’s-sake when their own goose is O so elegantly cooked!

It is, unfortunately, not surprising that the Left was able to insure a brief run for this frothy and delightful comedy. The only humor that seems to succeed in these days of Broadway decay is the heavy-handed, New York-oriented ethnic schlock of Neil Simon. More’s the pity.

Fear Is the Key. Directed by Martin Tuchner, with Barry Newman. For years. Alastair MacLean has provided us with an exciting and tingling series of adventure-spy novels, novels more consistently gripping than the delightful James Bond series. The MacLean movies, while certainly to be recommended, have not done full justice to the author: though The Guns of Navarone was excellent and Puppet On A Chain had chilling and exciting moments. Fear Is the Key has the unmistakable stamp of low-budget tawdriness and the plot is often incoherent; but still and all, this is by far the most exciting movie of the season. And Barry Newman is magnificently tough in the central role.

Blaxploitation. One of the most important movie phenomena of the last few years has been what the Left-liberal and Establishment critics bitterly deride as “blaxploitation” movies. These are exciting, often delightful films where black private eyes and black gunmen star in black versions of this familiar white style of motion pictures. Of varying quality, such films as Shaft, Trouble Man, and Cotton Comes to Harlem almost all convey a sense of drama and a keen appreciation of black argot and ghetto “street smarts.” They are all, in short, fun pictures, and it is typical of the insufferably serioso left-critics to get on their neo-Puritan high horse and condemn them as “exploiting” black people by. . . what? By giving them pictures which they intensely enjoy. Anyone who has seen a blaxploitation film will attest to the enjoyment and enthusiasm for these pictures by the virtually all-black audience. The audience identifies with the characters, shouts at the screen, applauds and hisses.

But, you see, according to our left-liberals, blacks must somehow be shielded from the supposedly “degrading” nature of street-private eye-police culture. Black audiences have to be fed “ennobling”, if depressing and boring movies such as Sounder. How insufferably elitist can one get?

(On the humorless Neo-Puritanism of our current Left, see the interesting article by George H. Douglas, “The New Puritanism of the Youth Culture,” Modern Age (Spring, 1973).

High Plains Drifter. Dir. by and starring Clint Eastwood. Say it ain’t so, Clint. Are you being seduced by the avant-garde? Do you, too, yearn to be “significant”? Actually, High Plains Drifter is not that bad. Mostly, it is still in the great Eastwood tradition. Clint is magnificently tough, the action is fast, and the bad guys get their comeuppance (and how!) The problem is the pretentious suggestion that The Drifter is somehow the ghost of a town marshal who had been killed by the bad guys, and now comes back to wreak revenge. He is a peculiar kind of ghost, since he apparently does not resemble the martyred marshal, and he quasi-rapes several of the available females in a decidedly non-ghostly manner. But there is that annoying “symbolism”, with Eastwood painting the houses red, naming the town “Hell”, and killing the bad guys while the flames leap upward. The alert viewer can smell a rat at the very first sequence, when Clint rides slowly into town with the lighting so adjusted that we can’t see his face. Let’s hope that next time Clint drops the mystical symbolism and Comes Home.

John Koch Retrospective. John Koch is unquestionably, and far and away, the greatest painter the twentieth century has produced. A recent Koch retrospective at the New York City Cultural Center was a breathtaking delight. There were a few of the impressionist works from Koch’s early period (circa 1940) that fully matched the delightful works of Renoir. But the glory of John Koch was his mature and magnificent classicism, which was fully represented on two floors of the Cultural Center. At the last Koch show, Emily Genauer of the New York Post wrote that Koch was the greatest painter of this century, and the full equal of the old masters. There is no doubt about it. The precision and elegance of Koch’s classical realism, the incredible use of light that fully matches Vermeer, the play on perspectives that is the equal of Velasquez, the still lifes, the portraits, the genre scenes, one could go on and on.

Given Koch’s evident greatness, why O why has he been systematically ignored by the Art Establishment? Why do the critics patently dislike his work even as they grudgingly concede his “technical perfection”? The ugly explanation is all too clear in their writings. It is because John Koch is not only a realist, he is a painter, not of “ashcan” scenes, not of depressing pessimism, nor of ugliness, but of the elegant life that he clearly loves so well: himself, his friends, his beautifully furnished duplex on Central Park West. Every painting of John Koch rubs his critics’ noses in his decidedly unfashionable, aristocratic and optimistic view of life and the world. Andrew Wyeth, though a realistic artist far inferior to Koch, can be forgiven for his pessimism and near-despair; Koch’s elegant optimism cannot.

Anti-Tax Demonstration

By Kenneth W. Kalcheim

New York, April 14 — The Libertarian Alliance put on its first successful, major demonstration to exhibit its conviction that the power to tax is the power to destroy. There were about 25 individuals involved in the demonstration. The groups represented were the Free Libertarian Party radical caucus, the Libertarian Tax Rebellion Committee, the Student Libertarian Action Movement, the New York Libertarian Association, and the Free Libertarian Party Liberty Amendment Committee. It was a totally peaceful demonstration as one of the main principles of libertarianism is the non-initiation of force. The highlight of the demonstration took place at noon when Kenneth W. Kalcheim of the Libertarian Tax Rebellion Committee burned his IRS Summons (which he refused to answer or appear on), all his tax records, and his social security card as he also believes that social security is a fraudulent, confiscatory, coercive tax. After the burning, he set up a table with tax rebellion literature inside the front entrance of the building. He was told by a U.S. Treasury Agent to leave the building. He refused as he said he had as much right to be there as anybody else. When the police asked to see his identification, particularly his draft card, he refused to comply.

Meanwhile, outside, the demonstration was still going quite strong. The demonstrators continued to march up and back in front of the entrance to the building. They did not block the entrance or prevent anyone from entering the building. There were no arrests but it was touch and go for awhile. Four individuals were immediately singled by the police as troublemakers. They were Sam Konkin, J. Neil Schulman, John Pachak and Ken Kalcheim. The police advised Kalcheim that he had violated at least three of their laws but they never proceeded any further. Konkin and Schulman were advised that if they continued to “obstruct access to the entrance of the building” they would be arrested. They neither blocked the entrance nor prevented anyone from entering the building.

Subsequently, they were arrested. However due to the intervention of “radical minarchist” Howie Katz they were finally released. Considering that there was a large press turnout representing the major media in New York City, there seemingly was political pressure or censorship to bury the news item as nothing was reported by the press. Only WNEW, a minor, independent TV station, gave us about 15 seconds of reporting. Anything the government considers too radical, they immediately fear. As taxation is a major issue and there is mass dissatisfaction with it around the country, this is the issue the government most fears. This weekend again proves that we are losing more and more of our freedoms day by day. There is very little freedom of the press left, if any at all. The public, media and government might be interested in knowing that there is still a small number of free press left. The demonstration will be covered in many libertarian and leftist publications and newspapers. It will also be reported in these publications that the media has seemingly submitted to government coercion and therefore helped the government destroy our freedoms.

Hospers On Rothbard’s Rebuttal

The trouble with writing a letter responding to an author who is also editor of the same journal is that the editor always has the last word. Nevertheless, I welcome the opportunity to air the exchange of views; so I shall address a few remarks to the Libertarian Forum once again, much more briefly this time. If my last letter was a catalyst for getting Dr. Rothbard’s views on foreign policy on paper, it has been worth-while for that reason alone.

1. I admit at the outset that I am not a historian. I have read extensively (and written) in the areas of aesthetics, epistemology and ethics, but not history. And since the issue between us is admittedly an empirical one, about what happened and to whom, I cannot claim to a competence in it based on personal research. The fact is that I am not very happy about writings that give interpretations of historical events: some people find interpretation A more plausible and attack interpretation B; some find B more plausible or utterly convincing and attack A. And whether a person opts for A or for B seems in 99 cases out of 100, to depend on which one he wants to opt for, and which one conforms to his pre-existing prejudices. This leaves me in rather a state of mental paralysis when it comes to making a decision between two specialists who disagree with one another, each of whom has a greater knowledge of the field than I have. For example, I have read not only Quigley but Kolko; as far as my knowledge of the facts is concerned, either of them may be right; and thus far I am no more convinced by the one than by the other.

The historian I am most impressed by, and who has researched some aspects of the issue more than anyone I know, is Professor Anthony Sutton, whose three-volume work American Technology and Soviet Economic Development is a masterpiece of detailed research. Professor Sutton’s new book. Our National Suicide, will be published in a few months by Arlington House. Its main thesis is that the United States in the last half century has given, lent, or leased to Soviet Russia the technology which she did not have and would not have had without American help: that this technology, though classified as non-military (e.g., truck factories, ball-bearing plants), has enabled the Soviet Union to achieve the degree of military expertise which it now possesses — e.g., our ball bearings have made their missiles accurate any time they choose to use them on an American city. In other words, the United States as part of its own official policy has caused the Soviet Union to grow into a military giant, and kept that giant alive and in a position to attack us. According to this view, the Soviet Union does represent a military danger to the United States because of the United States’ own policy. Dr. Rothbard will be pleased to find data further blackening his least-favorite president. Woodrow Wilson; for it was Wilson who, at the behest of the power-behind-the-throne, Colonel House, attempted to keep all criticism of the Bolshevik regime out of the American press. (I have myself seen a microfilm copy of House’s urgent memo to Wilson to this effect, and he did what he could to “win over” the Bolsheviks.) Since that time, the history of United States-Soviet relations has been principally that of the self-defeating and perhaps suicidal policy of the nation A raising nation B into a position of strength from which B could threaten A. And yet, Dr. Rothbard says that B is no threat. Possibly; but if so, it is not for lack of attempt on the part of A to make it one. (See Prof. Sutton’s article in the Sept. 9. 1972 issue of Human Events, pp. 12-13.)

2. But on to non-historical matters. Dr. Rothbard wonders why I would be more worried about a Soviet attack immediately after the depoliticalization of the United States than now. For a plain economic reason: once the United States economy was freed, and it devoted all its efforts to expanding its economy, every nation in the world would be threatened — not militarily, but ideologically. There would be a brain-drain of such dimensions as would dwarf anything that has occurred in the past, with every enterprising person from every country wanting to get to the place where he could now make it on his own without the ball-and-chain of political control over his efforts. This would be such a threat to every statist nation, and particularly to the totally statist Soviet Union, that rather than risk the dramatic demonstration of the absurdity of their socialist ideas, they might well decide to attack the United States (or what was formerly the United States) while they still had the American technology with which to do it, especially now that there was no longer a nuclear defense against them.

3. I do believe that those libertarians who advocate total American disarmament would (if their efforts were successful) be leaving the inhabitants of this country open to any aggressor in any country that cared to throw a few nuclear missiles our way. I believe 1 would be less safe if these libertarians had their way. But of course. I am aware that those very same libertarians believe that I am advocating policies (preservation of national defense) which are dangerous to them. What is the way out of this impasse? Dr. Rothbard suggests that those who wish to defend their lives and property should do so, and those who do not wish to should not. And this is indeed a lovely libertarian precept, and I would accept it in a minute if I thought it would work.

Suppose that I place some machine-guns and even some anti-aircraft weapons in my back yard, and that you, my nextdoor neighbor, fear no foreign enemy and install no defense at all. And suppose that at this point some half-crazed leader of a new Arab or African dictatorship decides to put the fear of God into us by sending some missiles into our midst from an Atlantic submarine. Does anyone think for a moment that the missiles would be so aimed as to strike me rather than you, or vice versa? That’s the trouble with modern warfare: just as “the rain falls on the just as on the unjust.” so bombs and missiles would fall on those who tried individually to defend themselves as well as on those who did not. Weapons of modern war destroy miles of property and do not distinguish between back yards.

A nuclear offense, or offensive danger, requires a nuclear defense; and there is no way I know of for those who would pay for their own defense against nuclear powers to do so without defending everyone else at the same time (the problem of freeloaders again); and, what is far worse, there is no way for those who would not defend themselves from increasing danger to everyone else by thinning their defense efforts and jeopardizing the success of the defense. If I saw a satisfactory alternative to collective action in the matter of defense against nuclear weapons, I would be enormously grateful. Perhaps such an alternative has been thought of — a practical one, not one conceived in the heads of theorists who care nothing about practical applications — but if so, I would be most indebted to the Editor if he would explain to me what it is and how it works.

— John Hospers

Recommended Reading

Anti-Trust.

The economic literature on anti-trust and industrial organization has long been in sad shape indeed, since all factions have been committed to the evils of anti-trust policy. Now, professor Armentano has written the first book on anti-trust from an Austrian and therefore from a pure laissez-faire, perspective. Armentano’s The Myths of Antitrust (Arlington House, $11.95) is a breath of fresh air in the industrial organization quagmire. Armentano concentrates on the major antitrust cases, from the E. C. Knight Case (1895) to the present. Excellent and readable.

The Minerva Caper.

Peter C. Du Bois. “Utopia on the Rocks”, Barrons (March 26) is a thorough and entertaining history of the ill-fated Minerva venture, the attempt of libertarian and quasi-libertarian retreatists to found their own “republic” on a submerged coral reef in the far Pacific. The Minerva will o’ the wisp could be regarded as sheer farce, were it not for the tragic fact that libertarian capitalists sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into this wild and woolly scheme. This is a tragic waste of precious libertarian resources that we can ill afford. When will our libertarian capitalists invest their resources on behalf of liberty at home, and abandon the kooky quest for a libertarian Shangri-la?

Medical Freedom.

The most recent interview with the scintillating libertarian psychoanalyst. Dr. Thomas Szasz (“Medicine and the State: the First Amendment Violated”, The Humanist, March-April 1973) is Szasz at his sharp and charismatic best. Szasz here deals not only with his familiar opposition to involuntary commitment, but with the full range of medical despotism in this country. The entire interview is a gem, but here is Szasz after a blistering attack on monopolistic medical licensing, and after the editor asks: But doesn’t the public “need protection from incompetent medical practitioners?” Szasz answers: “Oh, I agree that people need protection — but not only from bad, stupid, inept, greedy, evil doctors; they also need protection from bad parents and children, husbands and wives, mothers-in-law, bureaucrats, teachers, politicians — the list is endless. And then, of course, they’ll need protection from the protectors! So the question of how people should be protected from incompetent medical practitioners is really a part of the larger question of how they should be protected from the countless hazards of life . . . The first line of protection for the public lies. I would say, in self-protection. People must grow up and learn to protect themselves — or suffer the consequences. There can be no freedom without risk and responsibility.”

Rothbardiana.

Rothbardiana continues apace. In the last couple of months, Rothbard has come out with the following: a Letter on the Quota System, by the Forum for Contemporary History (Nov. 17), reprinted in the Intellectual Digest (February, 1973); a two-part Interview in the Gold and Silver Newsletter of the Pacific Coast Coin Exchange (Nov. 30 & Dec, 31); a joint interview with Leonard Liggio on “The New Isolationism” in Reason (February), which has already drawn considerable blood from the Cold Warriors; a chapter on “Free Market Police, Courts, and Law” in Reason (March) taken from his forthcoming “the book” on Liberty; an article on “Libertarianism” for the 1972 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana; and the “Introduction” to the Garland Press reprint of Sidney Rogerson’s Propaganda for the Next War. Also articles for Outlook, and book reviews for Choice.

And coming very soon: Rothbard’s booklet, “The Essential Von Mises” for the revived “minibook” series, published by Oakley Bramble’s Constitutional Alliance.

Contra Utilitarianism.

There is nothing like a brutal, genocidal war to lead one to question the validity of the utilitarian approach to ethics, with its cool totting up of “social costs” and “social benefits” from policies imposing various “megadeaths” on society. The Vietnam War has come as a shock to the highest circles of modern philosophy, and is leading to a fundamental re-thinking, and a welcome shift, at long last, away from utilitarian amorality. One important development is the recent, highly-touted book by John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, which levels a vigorous critique of the collectivism inherent in the presumption to add and subtract “social costs” and “social benefits”. Rawls’ positive contribution, however, is an unsatisfactory return to a new form of Hobbesian “contract” theory. Now, the distinguished British philosopher Stuart Hampshire signals his break with utilitarianism in an excellent critique, “Morality and Pessimism”, New York Review of Books (Jan. 25, 1973). Hampshire charges that utilitarianism can simply not defend the individual’s overriding right to life, regardless of the alleged social benefits that may ensue from his murder. And, mirabile dictu, Hampshire declares that we must get back to “ancient philosophy,” to Aristotle and the theory of natural law, to arrive at an ethic that will be grounded in the right to life. This can be a truly significant breakthrough on the philosophic front, and may make the formidable task of our budding young neo-objectivist philosophers that much easier.

The Editor’s Final Rebuttal

I am going to spare the reader in this last of a series of rounds (Dec. 1972-Feb. 1973) by being mercifully brief.

1. I am sorry to see Dr. Hospers adopting the position of historiographical nihilism. If two historians differ, how can the reader come to a judgment? In basically the same way as when two economists differ, or two philosophers differ: by learning and reading more about the discipline of history and about the concrete areas under discussion. On the philosophy of history, in my view the most developed position is that of Ludwig von Mises’ grievously neglected Theory and History, with the proviso that I would add the moral dimension of the great Lord Acton. On the concretes, space requires me to be simply arbitrary and say here that there are good and sufficient reasons, totally apart from their political conclusions, why Gabriel Kolko is deeply respected as a scholar in the historical profession and Carroll Quigley is not. As for me personally, I did not begin with an emotional preference for the Kolko thesis; I began, many years ago, by adopting the Cold War historical mythology, and it was by learning more that I some years later changed my position.

2. I have not read Professor Sutton’s book, but from the reviews of its admirers I would conclude that his thesis is correct but trivial in importance. Not just the Soviet Union, but all late-developing countries borrow technology from the existing industrialized countries. In the nineteenth century, the United States borrowed technology, often illegally, from Great Britain. So what? The important point for economic development is not technology anyway, but the saving and investment of capital.

3. I’m afraid I cannot be pleased with Dr. Hospers’ interpretation of the Wilson policy or of the U.S. policy in general in the past half-century. As Arno J. Mayer has demonstrated in his monumental two-volume work (Political Origins of the New Diplomacy and The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking), crucial to Wilsonian imperialism was the coercive suppression of Bolshevism in Russia and in Eastern and Central Europe — the latter largely succeeding with the aid of the Social Democrats. As for Russia itself, Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to the Soviet Union and kept them there for several years, along with troops of the Allies, to try to crush Bolshevism in the bud. This is a “suicidal” buildup of Bolshevism?

4. Here I stand on my previous article: that what the Russians are frightened of are our missiles and nuclear weapons as employed by the American Leviathan State; they are not worried about our free-market ideology, because they are Marxist-Leninists and as such they are convinced (wrongly, of course) that their ideological victory is assured by the ineluctable laws of history. They consider us libertarians as harmless reactionary throwbacks to a “pre-imperialist form of capitalism”, and far less dangerous to them because we do not endorse or employ State imperialism.

5. I consider it immoral and criminal to force someone else to pay for my own defense. Period. I frankly don’t give a damn about the Friedmanite worries about the “free rider” and “external economies”. If it costs me more to defend myself because my neighbor is either a pacifist or a blind fool it is just too bad; I should either pay the resulting full cost of my defense or shut up about it.

As for Dr. Hospers’ complaint about modern warfare, that is precisely my position, and that is why I oppose any and all use of modern weapons that make it impossible for the rain to fall only on the unjust. As for nuclear weapons, for the present and the foreseeable future there is no defense against them: hence the very practical importance of getting rid of them altogether. A practical way of doing this was the American disarmament proposal which we withdrew as soon as the Russians finally accepted it, on May 10, 1955. The essence of the Russian proposal since that date has been for all nations to scrap all of their nuclear weapons, and then to allow any and all groups, private as well as public, to inspect all sites to see that this agreement is being carried out. Right now, of course, the existence of satellites makes the inspection problem easy one to solve, so that world disarmament of nuclear and others weapons of mass destruction is now more feasible than ever before. (Those interested in the Russians and May 10, 1955 should read the excellent account in Philip Noel-Baker’s paperback, The Arms Race.)

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO, 6

JUNE, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE MAYORAL CIRCUS, II

At the time of writing, New York’s wild and woolly mayoral extravaganza has just lurched to a new stage: the holding of the primary election. It is of no small importance to the meaning and the undercurrents of this election that the voting was held on a Monday, June 3—for the first time in living memory violating the New York and the American tradition of holding all elections on a Tuesday. It is very possible that the underwhelming size of the vote (only 25% of those eligible in the Democratic primary) was partially due to the strange and disorienting displacement from Tuesday to Monday. In a fighting speech attacking the massive Establishment conspiracy against him (more later), Rep. Mario Biaggi, a conservative Italian-American populist from the East Bronx, referred darkly to the peculiarity of the Monday vote. Why the sudden change? Because Tuesday sundown begins the Jewish holiday of Shevuoth. It is no wonder that many New Yorkers feel outraged that a traditional election day should be changed simply to accommodate a third-rate religious holiday. Where is the much-vaunted separation of Church and State? The Monday vote was simply one more brick in the mounting edifice of ethnic conflict which is increasingly the essence of New York politics. (On the ethnic nature of New York politics see the highly perceptive work of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970, particularly the Introduction to the 2nd Edition.)

In our previous installment of the New York saga (Lib. Forum, March, 1973), we saw a mayoral field crowded with a host of candidates. Since then, has come the inevitable shakeout. The weakest Democratic candidates went inevitably to the wall, withdrawing from the race with varying amounts of ill grace. The hopeless Jesse Gray bowed out, snarling at the lack of support by the bulk of the city’s black politicians. The left-center proved unviable, ground down by the millstones of Left and Right-Center, and so out went Jerome Kretchmer, Ed Koch, Robert Postel, and Mario Cuomo, whose only hope was support from erratic Queens Democrat leader Matthew Troy, Jr., who opted instead—for a while—for the Biaggi camp. The maverick Postel doggedly dropped down to run for controller, while the other pitiful left-centrist Sanford Garelik settled by trying to run for re-election to his current post as President of the city council. This left the Big 4: Herman Badillo and Albert Blumenthal on the Left, Abraham Beame on the Right-Center, and Mario Biaggi on the Right.

Everyone has complained that the candidates themselves and their public appearances got totally drowned out by the two great dramas of the campaign: both bizarre events brought into being by the Rockefeller-upper class WASP establishment in working control of New York politics. On the other hand, not seeing this crew in daily action was scarcely a loss to the New York citizen. The two dramas, in rapid succession, were the Wagner Caper, and the Biaggi Affair.

The Wagner Caper was generated by the insufferably arrogant decision of Governor Rockefeller to shove down the throats of the citizens of New York the old re-tread, has-been, former Mayor Robert F. Wagner. “Mayan Wagnah” (in his Old New York accent which has now disappeared from all New Yorkers under the age of 60) is scarcely a charismatic figure. His lengthy reign is remembered with no affection by New Yorkers, and furthermore he was whipped badly in his attempt at a comeback in the Democratic mayoral primary four years ago. The gall of Nelson Rockefeller was compounded by his decision to install this dilapidated Democrat-Liberal not as a Democrat but as a Republican-Liberal—despite his lengthy record of opposition to the Republican Party. The Liberal Party, a one-man fiefdom under the iron control of the powerful, aging Alex Rose, head of the Hatters Union, was delighted to go along with the scheme. After all, with the imminent departure of the universally reviled John Lindsay, Alex was about to lose his accustomed place at the public trough. The dark rumor was that the deal ran as follows: Rockefeller would pull all the stops to force the Republicans to nominate Wagner, in return for which Alex Rose would either endorse Rockefeller for governor next year or put up some patsy who would lose ingloriously and thereby not join with the Democrats in opposing Rocky.

While Wagner waited coyly in the wings, Rockefeller proceeded to try to ram his nomination down the throats of the Republican leaders. According to New York law, a majority of the executive committee of a city party has to give its approval to a non-party member’s entering its primary. Except for Vince Albano, the quintessential opportunist hack who runs the Manhattan party, the outraged Republican leaders balked at going along with the deal. Finally, most were persuaded to go along, but they were blocked by the heroic refusal of the Brooklyn party, led by young George Clark who had long been deeply miffed by Rockefeller’s long-standing playing footsy with powerful Brooklyn Democrat leader Meade Esposito. The stubborn refusal of the Brooklyn party, combined with the delightfully candid if imprudent expostulation by Bronx leader John Calandra that Wagner is a “moron”, greatly angered the former Mayor, who had presumably expected an easy time of it in Republican ranks. Hence, Wagner angrily refused to fight, and walked out of the mayoral race. New York was saved from the Rockefeller-Rose-Wagner threat. The Liberal Party then selected left-liberal Democrat Albert Blumenthal as its mayoral choice.

The favorite for the Democratic nomination was now Mario Biaggi, who was also chosen by the Conservative Party as its mayoral candidate. There next ensued an unprecedently savage assault upon Biaggi by the entire New York establishment, an alliance of upper class WASPS and Jews, of “corporate liberalism” at its most strident. The liberal New York press, in alliance with upper class Rockefeller-WASP U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour, dug up old grand jury minutes, supposedly sacred in their privacy, which were leaked to the press to embarrass Biaggi. A tragi-comedy ensued in which the emotional lower-class populist Biaggi, who had never gone to school to learn “grace under pressure”, was trapped into a series of lies and evasions. The result of this furious tempest in a teapot was a total discrediting of Biaggi, and the end of his chance to win the primary.

The assault on Biaggi was a reflection of the savage hatred and contempt for the Italian-American masses on the part of upper-class liberals. Of all the ethnic groups in New York and indeed in America, the Italians had never Made It in American society. Precious little prestige, wealth, or political or intellectual posts have accrued to the Italians; even within the Catholic Church, they have seen all the power accrue to the Irish who had preceded them. And now that their “turn” as immigrants had come, they had seen themselves elbowed aside and oppressed by an unholy alliance of upper class WASPS and Jews, with black and Puerto Rican “ghetto militants.” And yet, in contrast to many other groups that had never been particularly successful, the Italians did not react by destructiveness, violence, or the making of outrageous demands on the rest of society. Instead, they have worked hard, remained relatively poor, and have refused to go on welfare; all they ask of life is to preserve their neighborhoods, to walk safely in the streets, and to keep their taxes low. For this healthy “conservatism” they have only succeeded in being denounced by articulate comfortable upper class intellectuals as petty and “racist.”

And then there is the vexed question of “crime.” To the lower-class Italian, as to the libertarian, “crime” means assault on person and property; mugging, theft, loot. But to the upper-class WASP (and now Jewish) Establishment Reformer, the really ugly crime, the crime that he tries ever to crack down on, is “organized crime”, i.e. the entrepreneurial supplying of such goods and services as drugs, gambling, and prostitution (and formerly, liquor). The Italian sensibly sees nothing wrong with such “crimes” and therefore sees nothing wrong with paying politicians not to crack down upon such legitimate business activities. But the upper-class Reformer has, ever since the Progressive period and before, tried his best to outlaw and suppress these activities. Part of this is the Calvinist heritage of imposing one’s own moral principles and customs on everyone else by force. Part of it, too, is aesthetic: the fact that the upper-class can afford to indulge in sex, drugs, gambling, and liquor in more luxurious, decorous, and affluent ways. Thus, among the attempts to outlaw pornography, invariably the government cracks down much more harshly on those activities which are cheaper and therefore more accessible to the working-class. But much of it, too, is political; thus, in the Progressive period, the essence of upper-class-induced Reform was to destroy the political power of the ethnic neighborhood, usually centered in the saloon, and by destroying the saloon to centralize municipal power in their own “efficient”, decorous, and “businesslike” hands. (On organized crime and reform, see Mark H. Haller, “Urban Crime and Criminal Justice: The Chicago Case,” Journal of American History, December 1970.) In the case of the Italians, the situation is particularly piquant because “organized crime” has provided virtually the only vehicle for Italians to rise and acquire at least a modicum of wealth, prestige, and political influence. And for their pains, they are subjected to a continuing national propaganda assault which they, lacking intellectual savvy or clout, are helpless to answer. And so even this route to success is being taken away from them.

Furthermore, the Italians see that while they are generally reviled by the Establishment and the media as “criminals”, that real criminals—muggers, rapists, looters—are continually being coddled and “understood”, by this same upper-class liberal elite, and these genuine crimes invariably blamed on the victims: “society.” (See Glazer and Moynihan, p. lxvii.)

In the face of this systematic injustice, it is no wonder that the Italian masses of New York City are becoming restive, and moving toward insurgent “right-wing populism.” The only wonder is that the awakening has taken so long. The upsurge in recent years of such conservative Italian lower-class populists as Vito Battista, Mario Proccaccino, and now Mario Biaggi is the reflection of this discontent. After he won the Democratic mayoral primary four years ago, the emotional Mario Proccaccino was laughed out of the race by the contemptuous liberal media. But Biaggi could not similarly be dismissed as a clown; he had to be savaged out of the race.

Particularly instructive is the reaction of the Conservative Party to the crucifixion of Biaggi. Since its inception a decade ago, the Conservative Party had been run as a virtual fief by the Buckley family and their political satraps, the brothers-in-law Kieran O’Doherty and Daniel Mahoney. The ideology has been straight National Review-conservatism, which means an upper-crust Establishment pro-statism that frowns on any and all expressions of mass-oriented right-wing populism. Any-insurgent populists were promptly isolated and expelled from the party. But with its growth in numbers and power, populism advanced, particularly within the ranks of the New York City party. Very reluctantly, the Conservative leaders were induced by their rank-and-file to go along with the nomination of Biaggi for mayor. But with the grand jury caper, the Buckley clique moved openly to try to withdraw the nomination from Biaggi. They were able to mobilize most of the “stars”, the former Conservative candidates for state-wide office: including David Jaquith, Paul Adams, Ed Leonard, and Rosemary Gunning. But the second-rank party leaders stood firm, notably the Bronx leader Thomas F. Cronin (an aide on the Biaggi staff), Brooklyn leader Michael Long, and Manhattan leader Henry Mittendorf, and led by Conservative party vice-chairman Professor Henry Paolucci, political scientist from St. Johns University who once ran for Senate on the Conservative ticket. The Paolucci-led populists were able to resist the Buckleyite domination, and Mario Biaggi will run for mayor on the Conservative ticket in November. Not the Jeast important result of this bizarre mayoral race is the coming of democracy to the Conservative Party of New York.

And so the primary: it was won by right-centrist Abe Beame, supported by his mass base in increasingly conservative lower-income Brooklyn and Queens Jewry, aided by a split-off of disoriented Biaggi supporters. But Beame got only 34% of the small vote, and the new rule is that a vote of less than 40% requires a runoff on June 26 with the runner-up. Biaggi actually came in a respectable third, with 21% of the vote. The surprise is the runner-up, the most left-wing candidate, the Puerto Rican Rep. Herman Badillo of the Bronx (29%), who managed to destroy the picked candidate of the left-liberal reformers of the NDC, Al Blumenthal, who came in last with a measly 16% of the vote. Particularly surprising was Badillo’s beating out Blumenthal in the latter’s home district of the upper-class left-liberal Jewish West Side of Manhattan. Badillo took leftish Manhattan (upper class WASP and Jewish, and lower-class Negro and Puerto Rican), shrewdly with the help of “ghetto” numbers runners who of all people have a firm base in the community and were able to pull an unprecedented total of blacks and Puerto Ricans to the polls. Badillo was also able to parlay an even split between Beame and Biaggi to add to his Puerto Rican base and win in the Bronx. Beame, as expected, swept lower-class Brooklyn and Queens, but again his margin was diminished by Biaggi support in Italian areas. There is little doubt that Badillo’s strength over Blumenthal was due largely to his support by the powerful liberal press: the New York Times and the New York Post. Apparently, Blumenthal, in an attempt to broaden his base, had turned too hard on street crime for Establishment liberalism. There seems little doubt, also, that Beame, despite his advanced age, sobriety, and total lack of charisma, will pick up enough conservative Biaggi votes to defeat Badillo in the run-off.

What of the Republicans? With the Wagner scheme aborted, the Republicans turned to State Sen. John Marchi, of Staten Island, who had run for Mayor on the Republican and Conservative lines four years ago. The Buckley brothers’ clique among the Conservatives, reacting against Biaggi, is now openly supporting Marchi for Mayor. But how does their support square with our “Italian populist” analysis, and why didn’t the Conservatives back Marchi this year? Therein hangs a fascinating tale in the subtleties of ethnic politics. For Marchi, while thoughtful and intelligent, is not an “Italian” in the American ethnic sense. Whereas virtually all the Italian immigrants came from Southern Italy: Sicily and Calabria (as did, for example, the ancestors of Biaggi and Proccaccino), Marchi is of Northern Italian, Florestine descent. Not only are the Northern Italians anti-populist, it was the despotism of the Northern Italian government (differing culturally, economically, and racially), against which anti-governmental Southern Italian populism arose in the old country. True to his Establishmenty heritage, Marchi has been openly and bitterly anti-populist; his Conservatism has been statist and National-Reviewish, and hence the support of the Buckley clique is not an accident. The specific issue on which the mass of Conservatives broke with Marchi was his support—alone among Staten Island politicos—of the South Richmond Development Authority, a mammoth public housing project planned for Staten Island that would bulldoze countless homes and destroy the character of the area.

And so the November lineup will be: Beame or Badillo (Dem.), Marchi (Rep.), Blumenthal (Lib.), and Biaggi (Cons.)—almost a replay of the primary with a larger class of voters. And of course Youngstein (Free Libertarian.)

Blockian Ethics

By Roy Halliday

In an article entitled “Heroes and Scapegoats”, in the March 1973 issue of the Libertarian Forum, Professor Walter Block supplied his definition of libertarianism. According to the professor, there are two premises that define libertarianism:

(1)“The basic premise of libertarianism is that it is illegitimate to engage in aggression against non-aggressors.”

(2)“. . . anything not involving the initiation of violence cannot be evil.”

The first premise is widely accepted and Professor Block’s explanation of it is very good. However, the second premise in this definition alienates all people who have any ethical principles beyond prohibition of crime. It estranges people of all religions and excludes non-religious people like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard who believes in an objective code of ethics. Can a definition of libertarianism that excludes Murray Rothbard be valid?

Why must libertarians refrain from making personal judgments beyond separating criminals and non-criminals? Couldn’t a person accept the libertarian theory of justice and also be a Christian, Muslim, Objectivist, or Rothbardian? Despite what Professor Block may think, libertarianism is not a substitute for all religious and moral values. Libertarianism is not the alpha and the omega of life. It is simply the correct philosophy of justice and its only requirement should be the acceptance of Professor Block’s first premise. His second premise defines a certain type of libertarian, a Blockian. We need not all be singleminded Blockians.

Being a libertarian means that we recognize everyone’s right to be free from aggression. As individuals, we still may despise and regard as evil what some people do with their freedom. We do not have to approve all nonaggressive activities and pretend that mankind has learned nothing of life in all these centuries. Libertarianism does not mean that we must admire and regard as hero any social outcast who is not an aggressor. Only Blockian libertarians are so compelled.

Why has Professor Block chosen such a restrictive definition of libertarianism? It may be because he has misintrepreted or overextended the subjective theory of value. He has taken the subjective theory of value that explains how voluntary trade operates, and expanded its meaning to include that trade of any kind is morally good and objectively beneficial to society.

“Both parties must always feel they gain from a voluntary transaction. Given that they are free not to enter into the trade, the fact that they do decide to trade must prove to be a mutual benefit.”

If trade is objectively good, regardless of what is traded, and regardless of the motives of the traders, then any person who overcomes great obstacles and takes unusual risks in order to complete a trade is automatically a hero. If someone engages in a socially disapproved form of trade (even if it is disapproved for good reasons) that social outcast is a hero. Blockian libertarians always must recognize as heroes precisely those social outcasts who are the most hated and reviled traders in society, even though the public may have good reason for disliking these non-criminals. If libertarians were all Blockians, the libertarian movement would be doomed to be as unpopular as the most despised “professions” in society.

Fortunately, most libertarians reject the premise that all trade is objectively good. Although, at the time of the trade both parties feel that they will benefit, they may be wrong. They may not both benefit from the transaction when it is judged from an objective point of view, or even from their own point of view reconsidered. The subjective theory of value operated smoothly in economic theory because economics is, and should be, a value free science. Professor Block makes the mistake of trying to treat ethics as a value free science instead of as the science of values. He assumes that people do not make mistakes in judgment and that their subjective values are objectively correct. Life is not so uncomplicated. Praxeology cannot take the place of ethics.

Professor Block dismisses charges that in real life his “heroes” actually do commit acts of aggression, by saying that though the charge may be true in any particular case, it is not necessarily true of the social outcasts’ profession qua profession. Why, then, does he assume that anyone who hates and maligns his heroes is ipso facto opposed to the nonaggressive nature of the hero’s profession, and why does he assume that everyone who criticizes his heroes wants to initiate aggression against them? In short, why does Professor Block assume only the best about pimps, blackmailers, and dope peddlers while he assumes the worst about their critics? There is nothing intrinsically aggressive about criticizing, disapproving, maligning, not associating with, or even hating someone who is not a criminal.

Professor Block gives the false impression that libertarianism means approval of vice and blindness to all ethical considerations beyond the nonaggression principle. A person does not have to be morally obtuse to be a libertarian. One may be a libertarian not because he believes all values are subjective, but because he believes that objective human values can be achieved best in a free society.

Free trade is not the answer to all of life’s problems; instead, it is the framework within which we each can test ourselves against the inexorable forces of nature. If we defend the right of each to pursue peaceful activity, we have done our part. The natural consequences of vice will take their course. We do not have to regard drunkards, for example, as heroes. We must only defend their right to drink. We may still agree with William Graham Sumner that a drunkard lying in the gutter is exactly where he belongs.

In a stateless society, with no coercive means of enforcing mores, customs, propriety, and good taste, the role of social ostracism and other natural, voluntary means of keeping civilized values alive will become of paramount importance. Instead of joining the Blockians in defending the outcasts and dregs of society, the majority would disassociate themselves from despicable characters and, perhaps, even join the maligners of Professor Block’s unsung heroes.

By portraying these people as heroes, Professor Block is wasting his talents on unworthy causes. He should be satisfied if he can prove that they are not criminals and that some of them are scapegoats. His book, thus far, does not represent the thinking of most libertarians and, if published in its present form, it will be a disservice to the libertarian cause.

Blockian Ethics—A Reply

By Walter Block

The main contention between Mr. Halliday and myself seems to concern the ethical status of certain acts which are disapproved by various segments in our society. Acts such as masturbation, drunkenness, scrabble playing, suicide, heroin addiction, atheism, religious beliefs, homosexuality as well as the acts of my list of scapegoats (see the March issue). We both believe, I think, that such non-aggressive acts, or “victimless crimes” should not be considered illegal, as contrasted with aggressive acts such as murder, rape, theft, trespass, which should be considered illegal. We disagree, however, over my contention that “. . . anything not involving the initiation of violence (such as these non-aggressive acts) cannot be evil!”

I don’t know how to settle this controversy in such a limited space other than for me to say “Yes, yes” and for him to say “No, no.” I reserve the word “evil” for acts of violence against other persons, and Mr. Halliday uses the word in a less restrictive way. What I would like to do instead in this reply is to indicate why I think that all the criticisms of my forthcoming book that Mr. Halliday deduces from this disagreement simply do not follow.

1. The charge of exclusion. The Blockian Philosophy (heh, heh) does not exclude from libertarianism religious people, atheists like Ayn Rand, nor people like Murray Rothbard who believe in an objective code of ethics. On the contrary, I believe that the two premises quoted by Mr. Halliday constitute an objective code of ethics that has my full support. As for restrictiveness, I include both the followers of Miss Rand (atheists) as well as religious people as libertarians. (Many in each of these two groups, however, insist upon excluding members of the other group from the ranks of libertarianism.)

2. The charge that we must approve of these scapegoat heroes. I do not approve of many of the non-aggressive actions under consideration. Indeed, I abhor some. Especially scrabble playing. This is especially distasteful to me. I agree with William Graham Sumner that “a scrabble player lying in the gutter is exactly where he belongs.”—there is a slight misquote in Mr. Halliday’s version).

But when these acts, however abhorrent, are prohibited by law, banned, and universally scorned, and when a practitioner of any of them insists upon his rights to do as he pleases without committing aggression against other people, I, for one, cannot help feeling a certain grudging admiration for him. (Although I admit that this is hard to do in the case of the scrabble player.) Even this low level of grudging admiration is not necessary to consider these non-aggressors as heroes, however. All that is necessary, I would contend, for an act to be heroic is that it not be intrinsically in violation of other peoples’ rights, and that it be undertaken in an atmosphere of repression.

3. The subjective theory of value. I do not hold the view that all trade is “good”. For example, trade among members of a pillaging band of criminals which enables the hoodlums to pillage at a more efficient rate can by no stretch of the imagination be considered a “good”. I agree with Mr. Halliday that the subjective theory of value is beneficial in the sphere of value-free economics but not in the sphere of morality.

There is one thing though to object to in Mr. Halliday’s statement concerning the praxeological view of trade: the necessary benefits of trade only occur in the ex ante sense, at the time of the trade according to this view. It is therefore an invalid objection to the praxeological view to say that both parties to a trade need not benefit from it “from their own point of view reconsidered”. True, they need not. But the contrary was never asserted.

4. Mr. Halliday asserts that “There is nothing intrinsically aggressive about criticizing, disapproving, maligning, not associating with, or even hating someone who is not a criminal” (such as these non-aggressive “heroes”) as if this is something that I would not agree with. But in the last issue of LF I stated:

“It is tempting to say that if there are any ‘degenerate scum and social vermin’ involved in this question, they are the people who cast aspersions on the economic heroes. Tempting, but incorrect. For we must remember that people who maliciously cast false aspersions on others (libelers and slanderers) are heroes themselves, who are merely expressing their rights of free speech.”

5. The stateless society. Mr. Halliday holds that in a stateless society my support of socially unacceptable behavior would be especially pernicious because without coercive means of enforcing mores, social ostracism would be called upon to bear a greater share in maintaining civilized views. Again, I agree with Mr. Halliday.

But in a stateless society there would be no prohibitions on the activities of those Mr. Halliday is pleased to call “dregs” and “despicable”. And if there were no prohibitions on their acts, they could no longer be called heroes, according to my criteria! And if they were no longer heroes, and in need of protection from illegitimate prohibitions, there would no longer be any reason to defend them. After all, I have never, ever claimed that these acts are intrinsically heroic, or saintly. I have only claimed that these acts violate no libertarian codes of behavior, that they are prohibited nevertheless, that these people persevere under great duress, and that therefore they are heroic and ought to be defended.

The reactions of most libertarians to the series of “Scapegoats and Heroes” which have so far appeared in print have been most remarkable. They range from active acceptance to vigorous and sometimes even nasty rejection, with seemingly no middle ground. This is puzzling, to say the least. Also puzzling is that of Mr. Halliday’s five criticisms of my paper, I have found myself in agreement with four of them. I agreed with him that 2) we need not approve of all the acts of the heroes; 3) not all trade is “good”; 4) there is nothing wrong with criticizing the heroes; and 5) there would be no need for defense of these scapegoats in a stateless (non-repressive) society. I only disagreed with his first point that I am overly exclusionary. Perhaps the disagreements are not as serious as they appear at first glance.

My usual reaction to criticism from people whose intelligence I admire which seems to me to be wide of the mark is to assume that there is a severe lack of communication, either on my part or on theirs, or on the part of both. And this must be my reaction in this case. Perhaps future publication of the articles, with criticism and rebuttal, will clear up the problem. Perhaps Mr. Halliday’s reaction to this reply, and my reaction to his, may serve to clarify the situation. I am optimistic about this sort of outcome because, although in my own view all I am doing is tracing out the logical implications of libertarianism, I am fully aware that these deductions are taking some strange and new paths. Maybe all that is needed is time to get used to these new implications.

The Editor Comments

First, I would like to rise to a point of personal privilege and express my conviction that Mr. Halliday need not worry about my being read out of the libertarian movement by Professor Block. On the contrary, Walter Block’s “basic premise” is firmly non-exclusionist: it encompasses as libertarians all people who have arrived at the axiom of non-aggression, regardless of whether they have arrived at it as Christians, objectivists, emotivists, utilitarians, whim-worshippers, or from any other route. I agree with Professor Block’s non-exclusionism, although, I believe with Mr. Halliday in a wider system of objective ethics, and believe ultimately that libertarianism cannot be firmly established except as part of that wider ethic. Hence, I reserve the right to try to persuade other libertarians to that wider view.

How about Professor Block’s second premise, that evil is only the initiation of violence? Here I think it is possible to partially reconcile the Block and Halliday positions. It is a question of what context we are dealing with. I would agree with Block that, within the context of libertarian theory, evil must be confined to the initiation of violence. On the other hand, when we proceed from libertarianism to the question of wider social and personal ethics, then I would agree with Halliday that there are many other actions which should be considered as evil: lying, for example, or deliberately failing to fulfill one’s best potential. But these are not matters about which liberty—the problem of the proper scope of violence—has anything to say. In short, qua libertarian, there is nothing wrong or evil about breaking dates, being gratuitously nasty to one’s associates, or generally behaving like a cad; here not only do I join Professor Block, but I would expect Mr. Halliday and all other libertarians to do the same. On the other hand, qua general ethicist, I would join Mr. Halliday in denouncing such behavior, while Professor Block would not.

In general, I join Walter Block in being surprised at the high resistance which has excellent series on “Economic Scapegoats” has been meeting among libertarians. Essentially, what he is doing is sharpening and heightening libertarian consciousness by saying: “Here is activity X; it is voluntary and therefore perfectly permissible for the libertarian, and yet it is scorned and outlawed in our society. And therefore, since a hero is defined as any man who proceeds with licit activity even in the face of scorn and coercion, the person doing X is a hero.” What Block is simply doing is ringing the changes on this syllogism, applying it to the most shocking and seemingly outrageous cases he can find. And by doing so he drives home the essential libertarian lesson; considering the resistance he has been facing, even among dedicated libertarians, we see all the more the vital importance of Block’s projected book.

One important point that Professor Block underlines but apparently needs to be emphasized once more: these scapegoats, by virtue of being outlawed for their licit activity, are heroes but they are not saints. Neither they nor their activity possess any intrinsic superior morality: they are only heroic because of the obstacles that government has placed in their path. Those who wish to remove the tag of hero from the pimp, the blackmailer, etc. should advocate the speedy legalizing of these activities.

Harry Browne Replies

To the Editor:

I was pleased to see so much space devoted in your April issue to my new book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, through the medium of Roy Childs’ review.

Naturally, your reviewer was quite upset with what he considers to be my “wrongheaded” philosophy. The world is full of people like Roy Childs. They come in all philosophical labels—Objectivist, Christian, astrologist, Libertarian, whatever. The one thing they have in common is the unshakeable conviction that each possesses the final, absolute answers to questions of philosophy, morality, and freedom—even if those answers are different from those held a year earlier. What the moralist once accepted as a way of life for himself, he now labels “immoral” and “irrational” when done by someone else.

The point of my book is simple: how to get the Roy Childs’ of the world off your back. How to live as you want to—right now—with the knowledge you currently possess, without causing problems you may regret later when you acquire new knowledge. And without having to wait for the millennium in order to be free. I cite techniques for avoiding taxes, staying clear of the moralists, shaking off obligations and responsibilities that other people think you should have, making more money while working fewer hours, finding good relationships with like-minded people, and other related goals. Naturally, this won’t appeal to someone whose future depends upon everyone else conforming to his philosophy.

In the introduction to the review, the editor suggests what he thinks is a contradiction in “the fact that Browne keeps urging the rest of us not to care about the liberty of other persons: in short, that he is investing a considerable amount of personal energy and hence presumably cares deeply that we not care about others.” It seems strange that I should have to explain to a “libertarian” journal that I trade ideas for money. In three months, the book has sold over 45,000 copies; isn’t that a rather self-evident motivation for my interest in the subject?

The editor also suggests that it’s easier to avoid the state if one is in my position—that of a best-selling author. One of the points of my book is that you’re not likely to make the kind of money I make until you free yourself of taxes, unproductive relationships, and stifling occupations. That certainly has been the case in my own life: I was broke and in debt until I followed my own advice.

Again, thank you for the interest and space devoted to my book.

— Harry Browne

The Editor Rebuts

Mr. Browne’s comment is a fascinating revelation of his motivation, his view of the world, and his philosophical ignorance. It is indeed a curious view of the world that finds the important goal in life to “get the Roy Childs’ of the world” off our backs. I don’t see Roy Childs oppressing anybody; and I feel no need to get him off my back. If I did, all I’d have to do is to stop reading his stuff. It is a strange inversion of reality that finds the State no problem at all while worrying about the oppression exerted upon us by Roy Childs.

As to Mr. Browne’s philosophical ignorance: when he denounces “moralists”, what he is ineluctably and implicitly saying is: “Moralists are bad; avoid them”; but when he says that “moralists are bad” he is trapped in an inner contradiction, because that itself is a moral judgment, a moral statement. And so his book lays itself open to Mr. Childs’ acute moral analysis.

As for my suggested inner contradictions: that Mr. Browne cares deeply that we not care about the liberty of others, I of course had seen the way out—that Mr. Browne really doesn’t give a hoot, and that therefore his motive was purely mercenary—but I was too polite to mention it.

Feds And Rebs

By Kenneth W. Kalcheim

Five days after he led a protest against the Infernal Robbery Service (sic), Karl J. Bray and two of his friends, Francis (Sam) Goeltz and Robert Wrey, all of Salt Lake City, Utah, were arrested and held in the Salt Lake County jail without being charged with any criminal offense.

At about 9:30 P.M. on April 19, 1973, Mr. Bray, owner of The Rocky Mountain Mint, left his office at 1381 South Main Street. As he was approaching his automobile he was confronted with two FBI agents and one IRS special agent. The three agents threw him against his car and searched him. They then handcuffed him, put foot shackles on him and put him in their automobile and proceeded to take him to the county jail. Bray asked several times why he was being arrested and the agents refused to tell him what the charges were. Instead they only told him that he was “being held for the U.S. Attorney”. The agents did not have charges for his arrest, nor did they have a warrant. Bray asked repeatedly to know why he was being arrested and the agents failed to inform him of any charges.

The agents transported Bray to the county jail and he was booked. When Bray arrived at the jail he learned that two of his friends, who were at his office earlier that evening, had also been arrested and booked. His friends, Francis (Sam) Goeltz, an airlines flight engineer, and Robert Wrey, an accountant, had been arrested under similar circumstances and were being held without having any charges against them.

Mr. Bray said, “While being booked, the agents, who arrested me, along with about seven other IRS agents, took all of by belongings, including the keys to my office and automobile.” After they had taken the keys, one of the agents was overheard saying something to the effect that, “Now we have his keys, let’s go get the case.” The case he referred to, said Bray “was a briefcase which contained my personal papers and records and also $30,000 in cash.”

Bray was allowed to make one phone call and called a friend to handle some matters. One of these matters was to obtain the briefcase and secure the $30,000 in cash. Bray had left the case locked in his car at the time of the arrest. His friend arrived at his office about 11:45 P.M., about fifteen minutes after Bray had called. This was about one hour after the agents had taken the keys. The friend had an extra set of keys and looked in the automobile first for the briefcase but was unable to find it. She then went into the office, which Bray had left locked, and continued to look further for the briefcase. She was still unable to locate it. She then left the office and went to the county jail to see Mr. Bray. About 2:00 A.M., the friend again returned to the office. At this time she found the briefcase in a very conspicuous place. A place she had looked for it earlier. The $30,000 was gone.

The following morning, Mr. Bray’s associate, Grey Greggson, went to the office as usual. When he opened the office, he was confronted by three men who identified themselves as IRS special agents. These men were armed with a search warrant from the U.S. District Court and signed by a U.S. Magistrate, Daniel Alsup. They searched the offices for about three hours and were unable to find anything illegal. According to the warrant, they were looking for forms which contained an “illegal Internal Revenue Service insignia”. During their search they were unable to find any such forms.

At about 11:00 A.M. on April 20, 1973, Bray, Goeltz, and Wrey were transported to the Federal Building in Salt Lake City for a bail hearing. It was at this hearing that they first heard the charges for which they were being held. They were charged with illegal possession of an Internal Revenue Service insignia. This charge is a misdemeanor. After being charged, they were released on their own recognizance and the leg irons and chains were taken off.

Mr. Bray indicated that it was strange that all this should happen to him so soon after he had led a group of protesters in a peaceful demonstration against the IRS. Bray also had learned that a certain IRS agent who he preferred not to name at this time had been heard to say in a public meeting that he was personally “out to get that Karl Bray.” The only thing Bray could figure out about the $30,000 was that someone, who had his keys after his arrest, must have illegally entered his office and automobile between the time he was arrested and the time his friend went to the office, and then must have returned the briefcase before his friend returned at 2:00 A.M. Bray also said that one of the jailers at the county jail had told him that his keys had been taken.

Bray feels that the motive for this type of harassment is that the IRS is just trying to scare the citizens of the United States into submitting to the tyranny of the IRS. He said he “will resist tyrannical government wherever it is.”

Bray said he will file criminal charges and civil shits against certain government agents on four charges. He said that he has firm evidence that he was arrested illegally and without a warrant, that his office and automobile were illegally searched and that personal property was taken, and that the IRS has violated a restraining order that was issued by Federal District Judge Willis W. Ritter that ordered the IRS to refrain from harassing Mr. Bray.

The Need For A Movement And A Party

(Ed. Note: The following is the gist of an address delivered by the editor of the Lib. Forum to the opening session of the first convention of the Free Libertarian Party of New York, March 30.)

I want to deal tonight with three interrelated questions which confront us: (1) Why keep on as libertarians? Isn’t the cause of liberty hopeless? (2) Even if the cause of liberty is not hopeless, why have a “movement” anyway? Why not simply let libertarian ideas infiltrate and gradually permeate the” culture? And (3) Even if a movement is necessary, why have a libertarian political party? Why engage in political action? Can’t the job be done with informal or formal groups, and ad hoc organizations; in other words, can’t we continue with the same sort of libertarian movement that we had before the formation of the Libertarian Party in 1972?

I. Reasons for Optimism. It would, in my view, be tragic to abandon the libertarian cause now, just when, at long last, the movement is beginning to grow apace.

In the first place, the libertarian movement has accelerated greatly in the last four years. Until recently, there couldn’t have been a libertarian party; there were few libertarians, no magazines, and no ad hoc organizations. When I first began as a libertarian, twenty-five years ago, there were scarcely more than one or two libertarians in the entire New York City area. Obviously, the enormous growth of libertarian ideas and of the movement since then should in itself be great cause for optimism for the future.

But may not such growth be a flash in the pan? Is there an objective historical groundwork and basis for the flowering of libertarianism in the current historical epoch? I contend that such sturdy objective grounds for the growth of the movement do indeed exist; and, in fact, what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” for the growth of the movement have developed even faster than the libertarian movement itself.

The current development of these objective conditions for the victory of liberty were discerned and foreseen by Ludwig von Mises, with his usual prescience, in Human Action (1949). Mises called such conditions the “exhaustion of the reserve fund”, and we would do well to ponder and interpret such “exhaustion” in the broadest possible way. To put it concisely, Mises saw that statism, interventionism, and socialism cannot work in the industrial era, that statist measures and policies lead inevitably, in accordance with the ineluctable laws of cause and effect, to bad and disastrous consequences that are increasingly seen as disastrous by the general public. The problem for all these dark decades of statism is that these laws take time, decades, to work themselves out fully; to put it one way, it takes time for the consequences of statist looting and repression to wreck the economy and the living standards that relatively free-market capitalism had brought to us in the nineteenth century. What has happened in recent years is that the Effect has increasingly caught up with the cause, and that the consequences of modern liberalism and the corporate state have become increasingly evident to more and more people in our society.

In area after area, modern liberalism and statism has “exhausted its capital”, and hence has come increasingly into grave crisis, a crisis recognized at every hand. More and more, the American public, for example, is rebelling against high and crippling taxation, and galloping inflation; more and more we see the breakdown of statism in market dislocations, aggravated inefficiency of government activities and programs, in urban street crime and housing blight, in the crisis of the welfare system and compulsory racial integration. And we have seen the breakdown of liberalism in foreign affairs as well: from the grim failure of collective security liberalism in Vietnam to the growing revulsion against foreign aid and the military-industrial complex. In short, liberalism, the dominant ideology and institution in America during the twentieth century, is in a crisis of aggravated breakdown, and this breakdown is bound to intensify in the months and years ahead.

Outside of the United States, there is a similar exhaustion of the reserve fund. A particularly heartening development has taken place in the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, where, as the economies industrialized, socialist central planning broke down and collapsed; as a result of these increasingly evident failures, Eastern Europe, led by Yugoslavia, has been moving rapidly and inexorably from central planning to an ever freer market economy. And while Yugoslavia has led the process, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland have been following in its wake. And so the Law of Cause and Effect is catching up with socialism in the Communist countries as well.

But, if the breakdown of statism is inevitable and accelerating as I maintain, why was statism able to endure for thousands of years? Why was it the norm in most ancient civilizations? Couldn’t we in fact say that freedom has just been an interlude among centuries of state despotism? No, the reason for optimism here is that a qualitative and virtually irreversible leap occurred in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that changes the entire historical picture: the Industrial Revolution. For statism, while no less evil, can unfortunately last indefinitely in an agricultural, pre-industrial society. For in such a society, the hapless peasants can be exploited by the State, which can expropriate all of their surplus production above the bare subsistence level. But the advent of industrialism changes the story. For, as Mises and other free-market economists have shown since the time of Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte in the early nineteenth century, statism cannot work, cannot for long operate an industrial system. Virtually all groups and factions in society are now committed to maintaining an industrial economy, and given that commitment, the Law of Cause and Effect and the exhaustion of the reserve fund must do its irrefutable work. It is therefore the irreversible, universal commitment to industrialism that makes the breakdown of statism and hence the victory of liberty “inevitable.”

Victory, then, shall be ours. We should therefore adopt a firm policy of long-run optimism. Or, let’s put it this way: most of us have always believed it naive to hold that we will win simply because we are right. Why would truth necessarily win out in the “marketplace of ideas”? I say it will win out because of the Law of Cause and Effect. Because we are in tune with the deep structure, the ontological structure, of reality. And the Effect is now catching up with the Cause.

And finally, even if our cause is not hopeless, even if there are great grounds for optimism, why should we be concerned at all? Why should we bother? Why struggle in a long-range cause, even if we can make small short-term gains? Isn’t this being naively or wrongly “altruistic”? To get personal for a moment, when I became a libertarian, approximately twenty-five years ago, the thrill of discovery of this hidden truth, a truth as vital to mankind as the nature of liberty and justice, was so great that it was impossible for me to conceive—and still difficult for me to understand—how anyone, once perceiving this great truth, could possibly defect from or abandon it. There is great joy and satisfaction in committing oneself to such true and vitally important goals and principles. Being a committed libertarian is fun, a great and “happifying” activity.

II. Reasons for a Movement. OK, so even if the objective conditions are ripe, even if victory for libertarianism is inevitable, and even if we should bother, why have a movement? Why can’t libertarianism simply win its way in the world without a libertarian movement to propel it?

The answer is, that, as the Marxists would say, victory requires the fulfillment not only of the “objective” but also of the “subjective” conditions. By subjective conditions, they mean a dedicated self-conscious and aware group of people to carry the ideas forward. No idea, including liberty, can advance itself, as it were in a vacuum. To advance libertarian ideas, we need libertarians to do the advancing. As Thomas Kuhn has pointed out, in the history of science and scientific ideas, a bad, unworkable theory is never abandoned until a better one is offered. People have to have some ruling ideology. Or, in the words of the adage, “you can’t beat somebody with nobody.” Therefore, in order to administer the coup de grace to statism, we have to have people, libertarians, offering a better alternative.

All right, assuming that we need libertarians, why must we have an organized movement? Why can’t we just write and speak as individuals? The answer is that if we concede the need for people to spread ideas, self-conscious, dedicated, enthusiastic, knowledgeable libertarians to spread the idea of liberty, then we are already implying the need for a movement. For what is a “movement” anyway? A movement is libertarians finding each other, talking to and influencing each other, developing theory, checking each other’s errors, helping each other, placing each other in positions of influence, helping one another spread the word, etc. In short, a movement is a “cadre” of dedicated, “hard core” libertarians.

No ideas, whether ideological or scientific, in the history of mankind have spread by themselves in a vacuum; they have all needed dedicated “cadre” to spread them and to become influential and apply them in the world. Where would physics now be, for example, without physicists—not isolated but a dedicated group of interacting persons, communicating with each other, learning from each other, refuting errors, raising ideas, and helping each other’s work? Liberty needs a movement in the same sense that physics, or chess, or religions, or any ideas need a movement.

III. Reasons for a Party. All right, so libertarians must have a movement. But why a party? Why can’t we continue in the same informal, ad hoc, manner as we did before 1972?

The standard reason for the existence of a “third” party is that the public only listens to political ideas in the context of an electoral campaign, and that therefore a political campaign is a great educational device for the American public. This is true, but is only one among many reasons for the importance of a political party. For it is historically true, certainly for the United States, that a political party is the only viable form of organizing adults, certainly adults in the middle-class; in fact the only viable form of organizing anyone off the college campuses. Even the New Left in its heyday in the late 60’s, could never, try as it might, organize anyone outside the campuses; it could not even organize recent graduates. Ad hoc, single-issue, or even multi-issue, groups, have never had more than a very limited success. Until the advent of the Libertarian Party the Society for Individual Liberty was the only successful organization, and that remains confined to the college campuses. The rapid growth in the Libertarian Party throughout the country, even since the Presidential election, is effective testimony to this vital fact of reality.

A Libertarian Party, furthermore, provides a marvelous and indispensable way for libertarians, generally isolated in their own community, to find each other, to interact and learn from each other. It provides, moreover, a viable form of activity for libertarians. For a long time, innumerable people, once seeing the great truth of libertarianism, have asked me: “OK, I’m converted, what do I do now? What can I do to advance liberty?” This has always been a vital problem for libertarians. Only a few people, after all, will write treatises, or engage in libertarian scholarship. Until the Libertarian Party, there has been nothing, no activity, for most libertarians to undertake. I am convinced that this has been a major reason for the hopelessness that has led to defections from the libertarian cause. But now, with the Libertarian Party, we have a viable, continuing form of activity for all libertarians to participate in. Furthermore, as the FLP has shown, a libertarian party can also serve as a center, a nucleus, for special ancillary libertarian activity in specific party clubs.

OK, granted the need for a Libertarian Party, why must it run candidates? The answer is that it has to, because otherwise it would not be a party, but would devolve into another ad hoc organization. Losing a major reason for its existence, it would no longer be a political party, and would hence shortly disappear.

A political party, as everyone concedes, can educate a public who will only listen to political ideas during an electoral campaign; and it will be aided in this by the equal time that the media grant to political candidates. But public education is only one of the vital functions that a Libertarian Party can perform. It can, eventually, have real political influence, and even elect people to office. Only one or two Congressmen, for example, could have great political influence and leverage by serving as a ginger group, a vanguard for the repeal of oppressive legislation, the whittling down of crippling taxes, and for the general rollback of the State apparatus. We can organize mass public pressure from below against State tyranny.

For we must ask ourselves the vital question: how else can we roll back the oppressive State apparatus? How else can we repeal despotic laws and crippling taxes? How else than by pressuring the legislature to repeal them, and what better way than by electing persons dedicated to such repeal? To pressure Congress from below, to lobby, is fine, but scarcely enough. What better organizer of State-rollback than people who are part of a functioning, growing, and dedicated Libertarian Party?

The vital point is that our anti-Party libertarians can offer no alternative solution to the problem of repealing and rolling back the State. Libertarian education is great, but scarcely enough; we cannot place any strategic reliance on our rulers reading our books and pamphlets and then saying: “By God, they’re right. I resign.” Violent revolution, as the New Left demonstrated, is absurd in the American context. Mass civil disobedience, as in the case of Prohibition, is great, but is historically only sporadic and fitful; besides, even repeal of Prohibition required Congressmen willing to vote to end the horrors of Prohibition—a vote that would have been greatly speeded up by some Libertarians in their midst.

The point is that none of us libertarians sought out Politics. Politics has been thrust upon us by the State apparatus, and it is absurd for us not to use the political choices we are allowed to have, to help in the rollback and the eventual abolition of politics and political intervention in our lives.

The final charge of the anti-Party libertarians is that the Libertarian Party may eventually sell out to Power. Of course it may, and so might we all, whether in or out of a political Party. As long as we have free will, any of us might choose to sell out. So what? These are the ineluctable risks of life. As the old adage has it, the cure for this problem is eternal vigilance, the inevitable price of liberty. And even if the Party, after many successes, does sell out, we will be no worse off, and considerably better off, than we are now. The future, as I have tried to show, is with us. We have nothing to lose but our chains; we have a world to win. And we will win.

Rothbardiana

Rothbard’s For A New Liberty has now been published (Macmillan), and has garnered favorable reviews from Walter Grinder (Books for Libertarians), Roy Childs (BFL, and a forthcoming Reason), and Sharon Presley (Laissez-Faire Bookstore). Also favorable reviews in the general press from Richard Wilson (Cowles Pubs.), Victor Wilson (Newhouse Press), and two superb columns by Nicholas von Hoffman (Washington Post syndicate). The von Hoffman columns are “Back to Basics” (April 13), and “What if they Gave A Revolution and Nobody Came?” (April 16). Reason magazine included Rothbard’s anarchist chapter on “Free Market Police, Courts, and Law” in its March issue, followed by a debate between Rothbard and Hospers on that chapter (“Will Rothbard’s Free-Market Justice Suffice?”) in Reason’s May issue. Also, Rothbard plugged the book on the NBC-TV “Today” show, and on John Wingate’s all-night talk show on WOR-Radio in New York. Penthouse magazine is planning an article on “The New Libertarians”, featuring the libertarian books by Macmillan published this season by Rothbard, Harry Browne, and Robert Love on how to set up your own private school. The article will be by veteran libertarian writer Sam Blumenfeld.

Rothbard’s mini-book on the contributions of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School is now out: The Essential Von Mises (available from Oakley Bramble, Box 836, Bansing, Michigan 48904, for $1.00). It is also an intellectual biography and tribute to Mises; Henry Hazlitt will be reviewing it for the Freeman.

Rothbard has also published the following this Spring:

A reprint of What Has Government Done to Our Money? as an article in a new scholarly journal published by students at The Commerce School of Washington & Lee University, the Washington & Lee Commerce Review (Winter, 1973). This publication, and particularly the Rothbard article, has thrown the W&L Commerce Faculty into conniption fits; they don’t want the fair name of the school associated with such an “unscholarly” publication. One of Baldy Harper’s last deeds on earth was to recommend the piece to the W&L students, and thus to stir up this healthy hornet’s nest in “truth-seeking” academe.

“The Future of Capitalism”, an article in James Weaver, ed., Modern Political Economy (Allyn & Bacon, paper). This was a debate with a rather unintelligent (to put a very kindly face on it) chairman of the economics department at Smith College, Robert Averitt. The rest of this purported text is a slough of leftism, with the exception of a few articles here and there.

Rothbard is a co-author of a new book in the American Forum series, Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism (Schenckman, paper). Rothbard’s article on “Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez-Faire,” is a reprint of his article in A New History of Leviathan, but the book is interesting for its four views on Hoover (including the pro-Hoover Robert Himmelberg, the orthodox Liberal Gerald Nash, and the slightly revisionist Liberal Ellis Hawley), and for the rebuttal section where each of the authors gives a critique of the others. The rebuttal section gave Rothbard a chance to expose Hoover’s political-Machiavellian use of food in Europe during 1919—one of the unloveliest aspects of the unfortunate Hoover record.

Rothbard’s article, “The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique” is reprinted once again, this time in R. Carson, J. Ingles, and D. McLaud, eds., Government in the American Economy (Lex, Mass.: D.C. Heath, paper). The rest of the book, however, is largely a morass of leftism.

“Value Implications of Economic Theory,” The American Economist (Spring, 1973), is an article by Rothbard attacking various value-loaded pronouncements by economists in the guise of “value-freedom”, and maintaining that value-judgments, if made, require an ethical system.

Rothbard enters Human Events: a review of Henry Hazlitt’s new Conquest of Poverty (May 19), and a movie review of “Billy Jack” (April 28). The dark secret of the identity of “Mr. First Nighter” is thereby implicitly revealed!

Also: the Journal of the Forum for Contemporary History (May 7), has Rothbard’s reply to Senator McGovern’s comment of the former’s Forum letter on the Quota System.

“Libertarian Strategy: Reply to Mr. Katz”, New Libertarian Notes (May) is a discussion of strategy, left-right, alliances, etc.

On April 28, there was a highly successful testimonial dinner for Rothbard at the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel. About 125 people attended the affair, which was marked by speeches by Leonard Liggio, Walter Block, and Walter Grinder, deft MC-ing by Jim Davidson, a presentation of a surprise gift to Rothbard of the complete reprinted set of Tucker’s Liberty, the reading of messages from well-wishers, and a speech in reply by Rothbard. The entire proceedings are available on two cassette tapes from Audio-Forum, 422 First St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003; and they sell as No. 194 for $13.95. (106 minutes of goodies!)

The Old Curmudgeon

The Sixties Is Over Dept. John Lennon and Yoko Ono have moved from their Greenwich Village pad to The Dakota, an uptown luxurious and rambling old apartment house much beloved by the Hollywood glamour set. Welcome Home, babes.

Alliance With Left-Wing Anarchists? From time to time, and particularly during the bizarrerie of the late 60s, libertarians have linked themselves with left-wing, or communist anarchists. This has been the guiding principle of the Hunter College Libertarian Conferences of the last two years, as it was with the now defunct magazine Libertarian Analysis. The theory was: if we should ally ourselves with the New Left, why not with Communist Anarchists who are totally opposed to the State? This idea totally misconceives the theory of alliance for libertarians. The idea of alliance, whether with Left or with Right, is on ground of tactics rather than principle. We acquire multiple social leverage by allying ourselves on specific issues with differing groups with whom we agree on those particular issues: with Leftists opposed to the draft, or with Rightists opposed to the income tax, for example. But the danger always is thinking of these as principled, permanent linkages. If we look at left-wing anarchists, their absurd ideology and social philosophy, combined with their bizarre and dropout life style, makes their social leverage not only nil but negative. What can we possibly gain, either in theoretical understanding or in social effectiveness, by linking ourselves with the kooky Kropotkinites? No group, in content or in form, is better calculated to turn off middle-class Americans, and with good reason, than the left-wing anarchists. I can think of no group with whom an alliance, at any time, would be less fruitful.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 7

JULY, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

ECONOMIC MESS

If Watergate bids fair to bring down the Nixon Administration, Nixonomics is ever more raucously in the background, ready to administer an extra kick in the gut. For in no area has Mr. Nixon looked less like a strong and wise leader, in no area has he done more weaving, stumbling, and bumbling, than in the vital economic arena. Not only that: but Mr. Nixon’s economic sins are fast catching up with him; one of the important new facts about the economic world is that evil effects are now taking a lot less time to catch up with evil causes. In previous decades, when there was more “fat” in the capitalist economy, the sins of the fathers could only be visited upon the sons, or even the grandsons; but now chickens sent out by the President take hardly a few years to come home to roost. The sins of each President are now, more and more, visited upon himself.

President Nixon is now in a fearsome economic mess, at home and abroad, and the accelerating number of his gyrations and “phases” are not helping him in the slightest. They only push him wildly from one set of evils to another and back again, while correctly giving the public an image of a confused and bewildered Chief Executive.

Take the accelerating international monetary crisis. On the black day of August 15, 1971, Mr. Nixon scuttled the last of the Bretton Woods System. Under pressure by foreign central banks to redeem some of their huge accumulated stock of nearly $80 billion of dollars in gold which we were pledged to pay on demand but did not have, Nixon simply “shut the gold window” in an act of international bankruptcy and bad faith. By his act, Mr. Nixon replaced a bad system by an intolerable one, by a world without a money, a world of fluctuating fiat currencies each at the mercy of their (more or less inflationary) government, a world which threatened to degenerate into the currency blocs, competing devaluations, exchange control, economic warfare, and the shattering of international trade and investment that marked the 1930s. Struggling to recreate an international order with fixed exchange rates—but without gold or any other international money, Mr. Nixon drove into existence a new monetary system in the Smithsonian Agreement of December 18, 1971.

President Nixon has made many absurd statements since assuming office, but surely none was more absurd than his laughable hailing of the Smithsonian as “the greatest monetary agreement in the history of the world.” To anyone who knew anything about money, left, right, or center, it was clear that no system will break down faster or more thoroughly than fixed exchange rates without an international money. The fact that a wider zone of fluctuations than before was allowed around the exchange rates meant nothing. The “greatest monetary agreement” lasted hardly more than a year, and the great monetary crisis of February-March 1973 sent it smashing to smithereens. For the handwriting was on the wall from the very beginning for the absurdly overvalued dollar and the ditto British pound, overvalued in relation to the West German, Swiss, French, and Japanese currencies and in relation to gold. The loss of confidence in the ever more inflated dollar and other currencies sent the price of gold on the free market skyrocketing to $125 an ounce—almost a quadrupling of the gold price from the formerly sacred $35 figure. Finally, in February-March 1973, the pressure on the absurdly overvalued dollar and pound broke these currencies, and the Smithsonian along with them. Once again, market forces and economic law had proved far stronger than the will of governments.

Since March, we have been, on the international front, in a Friedmanite heaven. For exchange rates (except within the West European bloc) have been fluctuating, more or less freely. For a short while, bankers and economists spoke with surprise of how “well” the fluctuating system was working. But the rapid plunge of the dollar in early July has brought the American public up short. Good God! This means that the prices of foreign imports are now 50% higher than last year, it means that American tourists have to spend 50% more than even a few months ago, etc.! And not only do we face far higher prices for foreign products; the cheap American exports are now being snapped up by foreign countries, thereby lowering the supply of these goods at home and raising their prices in the U.S. Cheap exports “import inflation” from abroad. We are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Friedmanite Utopia of freely fluctuating exchange rates means in practice a bonanza for American export interests and for inefficient domestic producers, and suffering for everyone else. And since we have already been burdened by a host of policies subsidizing exports and hampering imports—from foreign aid to protective tariffs and import quotas—the shock of an additional push is rather too much to bear. If there is anything America does not need now, it is a massive dose of more export subsidies and import restrictions, which is what a depreciating dollar entails.

So now what? Undoubtedly, we will get frantic scrambles back and forth between fixed and fluctuating exchange rates, with neither policy working well as we try to escape one set of evils by embracing another. The frantic plunge of the dollar in early July was only checked by an announcement of more authority by the Federal Reserve to “swap” by borrowing hard currency in order to support the dollar in the exchange market. But this is obviously a temporary stopgap; the market won’t long be fooled by this kind of device. And while the world waffles back and forth between fixed and fluctuating rates, the dread spectre of the 1930s remains: in this case of Western Europe refusing to accept—and indeed dumping—their $80 billion stock of more and more useless dollars, the fruits of two decades of deficits in the U.S. balance of payments. At some point, the hard money countries of Western Europe will stop the hated flow of dollars by imposing exchange controls, and we will be back in the economic warfare of the 1930s—with a good chance of a world-wide depression to boot.

And neither Nixon nor any other Administration will get out of this mess until we return to the truly free-market system of the gold standard. It is the United States, above all other countries, that is resisting a return to gold to the uttermost, for the sake of preserving its inflationary system. And now that the free-market gold price is $125 an ounce, it would be easy to return to gold at this—or even a still higher—price. That would give the U.S. and all other currencies three times as much gold to back up their currencies as they have now.

On the domestic economic front, matters are certainly no better. Here we see the Nixon Administration waffling back and forth between innumerable “phases”: from tight to loose price-wage controls, to tight to loose again, ad infinitum. And each of these phases is working conspicuously less well than the one preceding. In the February 1973 Lib. Forum we wrote that the second Nixon term seemed to be moving away from controls, but that the “sticks were in the closet.” Well, they’re out of the closet now, of course, with the Draconian Second Freeze of Phase 3½ succeeding a partly tolerable Phase 3. Phase 3½ idiotically froze all prices, but not wages or unprocessed foods; the result was the very rapid development of food shortages, especially meat and margarine. Phase 4 promises to be Phase 2ish, and so on. But Phases 3½ and 4, as is recognized by virtually all economists, are going to break down much faster than Phases 1 and 2, since the economy is now bursting at the seams in an inflationary boom whereas in 1971 we were in a (less) inflationary recession with lots of slack in the economy. So that while it took over a year for Phases 1-2 to break down, the collapse will be considerably faster for the comparable Phases 3½-4. The point of the whole thing is that the Nixon Administration is now committed to price and wage controls, shifting wildly between tight and loose, while at the same time—and despite the publicity on the “tight money” of high interest rates—it continues to expand the money supply by 8-10% per year. It does not have the guts to stop this policy of inflating (money) while trying to hold down or break the inflation thermometer (prices) even though it knows that its policy is economic lunacy. For it does not have the guts to face the recession that is inevitable once the inflationary process has been stopped.

Even Milton Friedman, who has long held that a recession is not the inevitable consequence of an inflationary boom, now admits that a sharp recession is inevitable should the government stop inflating the money supply. It is curious, by the way, that Friedman reacted with far greater horror to Nixon’s second freeze than in his rather mild wrist-slapping of August 1971. Somehow he feels that the second freeze is Nixon’s real betrayal of free-market principles; but in our view the basic decision to dump the market for price controls was made in Phase 1: all the rest have been gyrations within that basic decision. But I suppose we should welcome Milton, even if belatedly, to the ranks of the indignant.

The prognosis on the domestic front is scarcely happier than on the foreign. Prices are now accelerating at a rapid rate, far more rapidly than in the previous administrations. But the will to stop inflating is clearly not there. And so we can expect a ratcheting series of price inflations, with the eventual super-catastrophe of runaway inflation and the “crack-up boom” looming ever closer on the horizon. Only an iron will of the Administration to stop inflating could reverse this prognosis, and there is no sign of that will anywhere in the Administration. The poor befuddled public, with its eye on price controls, doesn’t even begin to understand the problem, and so can be no help in putting pressure on our rulers. The only comfort for libertarians in this grim picture is that we should be able to convert many people to a libertarian, hard-money, free market position with an impressive catalog of “I-told-you-sos”.

On Man And Perfection

By Tibor Machan

A great many theories of government and social organization rest on consideration of man’s perfection. From the time of Plato, philosophers and political theorists have formulated much of their thinking about political communities in line with some view about the relationship between ideal man and actual people. Invariably actual people were declared to be “imperfect”, “flawed”, “lowly” and the like. In theological thinking matters were stated in terms of man’s original sin, his pride, or his passioned instead of spiritual inclinations.

What is the importance of such thinking for theorizing about the kind of political order mankind ought to institute? And what is the precise meaning of such claims as that man is “flawed” or “imperfect”? To understand what we face in trying to evaluate political alternatives, i.e., different solutions to the basic question of political theory, it is necessary that we become clear on these matters.

References to man’s flawed nature, his imperfection and the like, are not simple to understand. Ordinarily when we consider whether something is a flawed or perfect specimen of its kind, we refer to particular items. Thus some particular chair may be ill-designed, some table badly constructed, or some marriage perfect. Even when we consider groups of things, say a line of furniture designed by some firm’s team of engineers, we talk about that group’s failure to meet standards of excellence appropriate to what is being manufactured. Thus a particular line of furniture may be said to have been badly designed – with reference to certain known purposes chairs – all chairs – have. (Of course it is not easy to offer evaluations even of chairs. A lot depends on what purpose some variety of chair is to serve.) The same is true about, e.g., trees, not just human artifacts. Some, even if few, are perfect for use as Christmas trees, others as material for lumber yards, and yet others as models for artists. Still, when we know that some particular purpose someone has is unobjectionable on, say, moral grounds, then we are able to and will freely judge items which are intended to serve it in terms of the standard of how well they will satisfy that purpose. And then, even if rarely, we may judge something perfect.

When we come to evaluating human beings as such – Man – we meet with a number of difficulties. Does Man serve some purpose? Whose? Who is to judge how well He satisfies it? Very often the answer given is that Man serves God’s purposes. Yet there is much debate as to whether anyone of us could even know this much, not alone know what God’s purposes are. Generally it is wiser to leave religious questions out of political matters. This is because religion rests on human faith, a very personal, incommunicable matter whatever its nature. Politics, on the other hand, reaches out for clear understanding, rational solutions. We would be unwise to expect that matters of personal faith, including what any of us believes about God’s purposes and, therefore, man’s capacity to satisfy them, are suited for making political judgments. (Consider that for some religious faiths God has no purpose involving man; for others man’s existence, just as he does exist at any given time, satisfies God’s purpose; for yet others man cannot even fulfill the purpose for which he is created by God except after his life on earth.) With a realm so individual and inaccessible to common understanding as faith, it is wisest not to attempt to introduce it into areas where common understanding is the very cornerstone of reaching solutions.

Outside of a religious context what sense can we make of the idea that man has a purpose? That is, that mankind – the species itself – serves some purpose? Aristotle tried to make sense of this, albeit not with complete success. He believed that the purpose of man as of any other natural being is to fulfill its essence. This, applied to man, means that each of us as rational animals fulfills our purpose if he lives his life in accordance with our human nature, namely as fully rationally as we, with our individual capacities, can.

But Aristotle’s idea is not exactly that mankind as such has a purpose. It is that there is a purpose to the life of each member of mankind. This is generally describable as living according to human nature. Yet because each man is at once a member of the class of mankind and also an individual who differs from all others in important ways, that alone could not convey the meaning of “having a purpose for any given individual.” Before we can say what a given man’s specific purpose is, we must know something about him as an individual. We need to know what living according to his human nature, rationally, must mean for any given individual.

If we consider this approach carefully – and it is the only sensible discussion of purpose closely tied to political theory in all of man’s history – an interesting thing emerges. Whether a given individual is or is not perfect cannot be known ahead of time. And whether mankind is perfect is not even an intelligible question. It would be like asking if trees or roses or fish or the moon, etc., are perfect. But by what standard? To what must trees measure up to be identified as a perfect? The best we can answer is: to the purpose we have for trees in our own lives. But what of fish, moons and the millions of other kinds of entities in nature? To ask whether these are perfect makes little sense. Perfect by what standard, for what purpose?

With man the issue of perfection is a moral and personal issue. It has to do with man’s nature as a free and self-responsible being. He is free to cause his actions (although, of course, some people are too impaired either mentally or physically to be thought of this way). And he is responsible to choose those actions that will make his life a success. As Aristotle seems to have believed, and I do too, happiness, the successful state of human life, is each man’s moral purpose. (Ayn Rand spells this out in detail.) It is with reference to how well each does to satisfy this goal that anyone may be evaluated as either perfect, good, mediocre or downright evil. No other sense can be made of the idea of human perfection.

But what of the claims about man’s “flawed” and “imperfect” nature? Surely there must be something meant by these remarks. And indeed there appears to be something important to them. That is that no man has a guarantee for success. Moral excellence is not ensured for anyone ahead of time. Every person must make the effort to be good on his own — he cannot be made to be good.

But the idea that man is “flawed” is often interpreted so that we are given to understand that people cannot be good even if they do their best. Not that man is fallible but that he is necessarily a failure, flawed by his very nature. Yet this cannot be understood at all. How would anyone be knowledgeable enough to say such a thing? It would seem to be presumptuous to declare of all people, past, present and future, that they cannot live a morally good life, that they cannot achieve the best possible life for themselves, given their capacities and circumstances. This kind of a judgment is best characterized as prejudicial – it disregards the perfectly sensible judicial principle of the presumption of innocence. It confuses “free to do good or ill” with “must do ill”.

Believing that man is flawed, Marx, for example, thought that it was the inevitable result of revolutionary social conflicts to make him good. Marx did not believe in free will, so he did not take man’s “flawedness” to mean that the possibility of evil, as well as of good, is open to all people. He believed that – by virtue of institutional and similar elusive causes – man is necessarily flawed. Only when man had been made automatically good would the perfect society emerge.

Claiming that some equally elusive problem left man to believe in his own freedom. B. F. Skinner, too, asks us to accept that man can be made good by social control. And when one believes that there is something in human nature itself that makes us flawed, it is not unreasonable to try to wipe the flaw out, to make the necessary reparations. We do this, after all with faulty chairs, cars, cameras, and even human physical organs. So why not with mankind?

It is often this belief in the flawed nature of man that impels people, especially ambitious and impatient ones, toward social engineering. I believe that a clear grasp of what must be meant when we say that man is not perfect – namely that moral perfection is never guaranteed for anyone but must be earned by the individual himself through hard work – will reduce the inclination toward statism, paternalism and totalitarianism. We could then develop societies that assume neither man’s perfectability nor his imperfectability.

Such a system would make sure that those who aim to do well in their lives, who try for moral excellence, would not be disturbed by those who are not willing to try for it. Nor would anyone be ordered to live a morally decent life – all he will not be permitted to do is to prevent others from trying. This, I think, is the only nonutopian and yet optimistic approach to man’s goal of living in peace with his fellows.

Harper’s Last Article

Baldy Harper’s last published writing appeared, a week before his death, in the Santa Ana Register for April 13. It is characteristic that Baldy’s last writing was in celebration of a powerful tax rebellion movement that has recently appeared in Denmark. (The article is entitled, “Tax Rebel Shows Strong in Dane Poll”). The article writes of the great and rising popularity of Mr. Mogens Gilstrup and his new Progressive Party, the latest poll showing that if an election were now held in Denmark, the Progressives would win 33 out of the 179 seats in the Danish Parliament, making the new party second to the ruling Social Democrats.

Who is Gilstrup, and what is the Progressive Party program? Gilstrup is a tax lawyer and a tax rebel, who two years ago announced on television that had paid no income tax at all on a “very high income,” and that he did so through legal tax avoidance. His Progressive Party program is short and sweet: (1) abolish all income taxes over the next six years; (2) reduce the government bureaucracy by 90% (!); and (3) rewrite all the statutes so as to make them short and clear enough for everyone to understand.

Harper, with his keen appreciation of the clear-cut antithesis between the State and private property, concludes as follows:

“The time may fast be approaching when the tax-bowed citizens of western countries will face up to a clear choice between two views: (1) Taxes are part of the person’s income that is confiscated without his consent, or (2) persons are owned by the government, in essence, which means that these incomes were owned by the government before being taken as taxes.”

Liberty Or Order: 1970 Domestic Spying Plan

By Bill Evers

William F. Buckley’s National Review once said of Tom Charles Huston that “he radiates a primal personal integrity and conceals remarkable intellectual and political agility behind a facade of Hoosier folksiness. He is one of the young luminaries of American conservatism.”

Huston is the young lawyer and conservative political activist who, in the summer of 1970, as a White House aide drafted an expanded domestic intelligence plan for President Nixon. The plan involved spying, wiretapping, burglaries, and the interception and opening of mail.

How did it happen that Huston, a former national chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom student group, came to design a program for the systematic violation of civil liberties?

The answer to this puzzle lies in large part in the ideological concepts of “freedom” and of “order” that are held by men like Huston who are in the leadership of the organized conservative movement in America.

A profile of Huston in the May 24 New York Times quoted him as explaining that “repression is an inevitable result of disorder. Forced to choose between order and freedom, people will take order.”

The error in Houston’s reasoning is twofold. First, there is a philosophical error in not recognizing the difference between a societal “order” that is simply securing to citizens their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and a societal “order” that secures a governmental system, any governmental system in power.

Thus, the American Revolution in the eighteenth century is correctly seen both as a threat to the order of the British Empire and as a defense of the natural order of human liberty. There is always a dichotomy between governmental order per se and liberty. But there is perfect compatibility between total liberty and a natural order securing to all this same liberty.

Secondly, Huston made the practical error of defending not the natural order of full freedom for all, but governmental order. He has subsequently attempted to justify this by contending that at the time the voters were likely to endorse more extensive abrogation of civil liberties, if the Nixon plan was not successful.

But here we see the same opportunistic position that Huston found so distasteful in the Nixon administration’s other domestic programs. Borrowing the sort of domestic security program that one might anticipate from a George Wallace in order to avert his gaining electoral strength, is hardly acting in accord with any “philosophical view of what government ought to be doing.”

Embracing Only Rhetoric

If Huston had recognized that a free society was the proper environment for human activity, he would have held that a net subtraction of freedom is never justified. If Huston had fully belonged to the individualist political tradition, instead of merely partially embracing its rhetoric, liberty would have been his highest political goal, to which all others were subordinated.

However, Huston and the other adherents of the William Buckley circle of conservatives attempt to fuse a devotion to the prevailing traditional order with a devotion to liberty. In times of crisis, they most often come down on the side of the ruling order rather than liberty.

Huston himself is an admirer of the political thought of John C. Calhoun, whose portrait was on his office wall in his White House years. Calhoun’s influence no doubt added to Huston’s capacity to rationalize setting up the 1970 espionage program.

Calhoun was both a brilliant, original political theorist and an active politician in the period preceding the American Civil War. But Calhoun rejected the Jeffersonian doctrine that all human beings possessed natural and inalienable rights.

Calhoun argued in his Disquisition on Government that “it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty.”

“It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished of all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving, and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded, and vicious to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.”

Huston was inclined to believe with Calhoun that when liberty and governmental order came into conflict, liberty must yield to governmental power. Huston was therefore willing to devise a massive plan to control dissenters.

But Huston’s and Calhoun’s anti-libertarian approach is an attack upon the social conditions that are right for man. Only when it is generally recognized that, in Proudhon’s words, “liberty is not the daughter but the mother of order,” and when men are ready to defend such a natural order of liberty, will we have a free society, a society in which virtue can prosper.

Reprinted from the Stanford Daily, July 6, 1973.

Pareto on the Prospects for Liberty

Editor’s Note: One of the important but neglected resources for libertarians is the translation of libertarian works of the past that languish unread because of the great language barrier that afflicts even the most learned Americans. Here, Professor Ralph Raico, of the history department of the State University College at Buffalo, one of the notable translators of the movement who brought us the excellent English translation of Mises’ Liberalismus (The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth) now gives us, for the first time in English, a beautifully written letter by the great Pareto. Vilfredo Pareto, a great Italian libertarian theorist of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, began by the turn of the century to despair of the prospects for liberty. He had good reasons for his pessimism, as he saw libertarianism (or laissez-faire liberalism) ground down between the socialists on the one hand and the right-wing protectionist statists on the other. It was Pareto’s despair at the victory of emotional statist appeals that led him later to the sociological view that the persuasive power of reason was helpless in the grip of irrational motivations. The view, especially for that epoch, was understandable though unfortunate, since it neglects the possibility of libertarian appeals blending reason and emotion as contrasted to the merely emotional propaganda of its enemies. Pareto’s letter was originally published in Le monde economique of April 10, May 8, and June 5, 1897; and was then reprinted in his Oeuvres Completes, Vol. VI, Mythes et Ideologies (Geneva, 1956), pp. 113-16.

Letter to M. Brelay
by Vilfredo Pareto

translated by Ralph Raico

My dear colleague,

You are a stout-hearted fellow, you continue to fight for liberty, your writings and lectures are filled with practical good sense. But even you must have some doubts on the outcome of the battle. For myself, I am tempted to believe that the game is really just about lost, except in England and perhaps in Switzerland. As for the rest of Europe, it may be that the triumph of socialism is only a question of time. Besides, you will notice that by now the fight is already merely between different sects of socialists. In Germany, it is imperial and military socialism that fights it out with the socialism of the masses. In Italy and France, the latter is at grips with protectionist socialism. Do you happen to have any preferences for one or another of these sects? I myself don’t; and, in any case, it would not be the socialism of established governments that I would defend.

As for the liberals, I search for them in vain. There are, it is true, a few chiefs left, such as Herbert Spencer and our good friend, M. de Molinari. But as for the common soldiers—where are they? At each election, one sees the number of socialist deputies increase. It is true that the number of liberal deputies does not diminish, but that is for the excellent reason that for a long time now that number has been zero. The majority of young people whom I know in Italy and elsewhere are either opportunists or socialists; it isn’t necessary to tell you that I much prefer the latter, who may be deceiving themselves, but who at least have generous and decent intentions.

How does it happen that the liberal party, which, in the time of the Cobdens, the J.B. Says, the Bastiats, etc., appeared to be assured of a quick victory, now does not even exist anymore in most of the states of the European continent? This fact is due to a great number of causes, which it would take too much time to set forth; but there is one which, though secondary, seems to me rather important, and which I would like to converse with you about a bit.

The great error of the party of economic liberty, in my view, has been and still is today that it is not a political party. When one does pure science, one can and must do analysis; that is, one can and must separate one question from all others and study it apart. No one is more drawn to recognize this principle than myself; I have written a whole treatise on political economy in which I declared that I had no wish to resolve any practical question at all. But when one leaves theory and wishes to lay down rules for real life, it is necessary to make syntheses. What does it matter to me if free trade permits me gain ten francs, if this same amount is taken away from me again by raising taxes? The loveliest theories are worth nothing if the final result is bad: “I live from good soup, and not from beautiful language.” One may hope to make partisans for one’s cause by saying: Join us and you will pay thirty or forty centimes for sugar, as the English do, instead of paying one franc ten. But whom does one intend to persuade by saying: Take a lot of trouble, make sacrifices—you will continue, it is true, to pay one franc ten for your sugar, only you will have the satisfaction, the pleasure, the happiness of knowing that it will be because of a fiscal levy and not a protective levy. The point is that in theory this sort of distinction is useful and justified, but in practical politics it is absurd.

Not concerning itself with politics, the party of economic liberty had, it is true, the advantage of recruiting rather promptly a great number of adherents; but it lost in force and intensity of conviction what it gained in extension. It consoles itself agreeably enough by making fun of its enemies, as the Greeks, vanquished by the Romans, consoled themselves by counting up the grammatical mistakes their masters made. When the scandals break that are an inevitable consequence of state socialism, the liberals, far from profiting from the occasion to make the public aware of the advantages of their doctrine, modestly lower their eyes, keep still, hide and seem truly to fear nothing so much as having been too much in the right. In reality, most of the people who call themselves liberal are quite simply the defenders of the interests of the upper social classes. But these are far from rallying to liberal doctrines; they want more than and better than simply to preserve what belongs to them. They intend to enjoy all the benefits of bourgeois and protectionist socialism, and hardly concern themselves except with the people who can help them in appropriating the goods of others. They do not absolutely scorn the praises that so-called liberal economists bestow on the luxury of the rich. But frankly that is only meager meat in comparison with the good protective tariffs, the good manufacturing subsidies, with the privileges and monopolies of all kinds that they obtain from the right honorable politicians.

The pseudo-liberals have contributed not a little (aided by the socialists) to create the legend that makes of political economy the enemy of the working classes and reduces it to a kind of casuistry in the service of the rich. One is surprised and pained to see men of talent believing in such nonsense. Thus, an illustrious scholar, of whom I certainly shall only speak with the greatest respect, M. Berthelot,* in a recent speech, pronounced the following words: “Above all, far from us these egoistic doctrines of laissez-faire and laissez-passer, which would suppress any intervention of scientific laws in the direction of societies, as well as the fatal slogan once proclaimed from the height of the tribune as the supreme end of social life: Get rich!”**

What would M. Berthelot say if someone confused the phlogiston theory with modern atomic theory? Well, it is a similar confusion that he commits by mixing up the sometimes illusory speculations of the economists of the optimistic school with economic science.

He probably imagines that “laissez-faire, laissez-passer” is a kind of fetish adored by certain savages. He certainly is unaware that the theorem that proves that free competition leads to the maximum of well-being is quite as well demonstrated as any theorem in theoretical mechanics. He is unaware that the theorem that shows that every indirect transfer of wealth from certain individuals to certain others is accompanied by a destruction of wealth rests on proofs altogether as sure as those which serve to prove the second law of thermodynamics. If we then proceed to apply these theorems to the social aggregate, he cries out that we want to preclude the “scientific direction of societies.” It is as if one applied the principles of thermodynamics to steamengines and M. Berthelot complained that “one intends to exclude the science of the construction of these machines.” Isn’t it profoundly regrettable that a scientist who justifiably enjoys such a great authority talks in this way about such matters, without trying in the least to understand the precise meaning of the theories he condemns?

Then there is the egoism of “laissez-faire, laissez-passer”! Oh, yes, truly—it was through egoism that Bastiat demanded that the people not be plundered by means of tariffs, and it was through egoism that Cobden and his friends delivered the English people from the tribute that they paid the landlords. Hasn’t M. Berthelot ever gone to England, hasn’t he ever read a book dealing with economic conditions in that country? Is he therefore really unaware that it is because in England one “lets things pass”—wheat, meat, sugar—that the workers of that land enjoy much greater well-being than the workers of the European continent? In what part of the world did one find oneself when, in France, an entry-duty was placed on bread, in order to prevent workers from buying it in Belgium. M. Berthelot has only to read the excellent study of M. G. Francois, Thirty Years of Free Trade in England, and he will learn that “laissez-faire, laissez-passer” can, after all, do some good. Let M. Berthelot go to England and he will see the children of workers and farmers eating sweets. Let him then betake himself to Italy, and he will perceive that only the children of the rich may eat candy. Does he know why? Because in England sugar costs forty centimes a kilogram, and in Italy one franc eighty. Now, if M. Berthelot is ignorant of the reason for this difference in price I can let him know: it is that in England one “lets sugar pass” at the frontier, while in Italy it is stopped in order to enrich the right honorable manufacturers and refiners of sugar, who, it is true share With the politicians. We laissez-faire liberals prove our egoism because we demand a stop to this sort of plundering of the people. We prove our ignorance because we reject, for the direction of society, this “science” whose real name is the science of plunder, while the dear little saints who grow rich on the benefits of protectionism and state socialism are living examples of the purest love of neighbor!

As for the advice to “get rich,” one must distinguish. Does M. Berthelot really believe that an individual cannot become rich except by appropriating the goods of others? That would be going back, in political economy, even further than one would, in chemistry, in adopting the phlogiston theory! But there is another means of getting rich, which does no wrong to anyone and is extremely beneficial to all of society: it is by creating utilities. It is in this way that whole peoples grow rich. How could a people become rich if each individual of which it is composed became poorer? It is solely due to this growth of the wealth of peoples that progress has been possible; otherwise, we would still live like our cannibal ancestors. It is because they lack food that many savage people kill their aged; it is because we are not yet rich enough that we cannot assist all who are weak. Therefore we must still reiterate this advice to “get rich” (by honest means, of course), for if our societies were richer the question of a retirement pension for old people would be immediately solved.

But what is the use of proving to our adversaries that they are wrong? They still go along perpetually repeating propositions that are perpetually refuted. Have you ever seen them come to answer your speeches? Have they ever been able to deny the facts, refute the reasonings by which you expose the evils of protectionism? They are too prudent even to venture to try. They do suspect a little that neither experience nor logic are to be numbered among their allies, and it is to the passions that they appeal, not to reason. In any case, it’s probably because of that that they will triumph. Nothing proves that they will not succeed in reducing our societies to some state resembling that of ancient Peru. Our descendants are destined to see some fine things! As for me, I certainly don’t begrudge them their bliss.

• • •

* Pierre Eugene Marcelin Berthelot (1827-1907) was a French chemist and politician. His work was particularly notable in the field of thermochemistry.—trans. note

**The phrase “Enrichissez-vous” was supposed to have been spoken by Francois Guizot, French historian and premier under Louis Philippe (1840-48), in response to the query of how non-enfranchised citizens could ever hope to enjoy the right to vote, considering the existence of property qualifications for the franchise.—trans. note

Public Schools: the Counterattack Begins

By Joseph R. Peden

There is no doubt about the fact that one of the most influential centers of social thought and planning in the United States is the well financed Center for Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. Under the long time direction of Robert M. Hutchins, former President of the University of Chicago, the Center has become famous for perceiving a crisis before it becomes apparent to others, for setting about the task of creating a “brain trust” to study the various aspects of the crisis-to-be, and then “planning” for its resolution. But unlike so many academic “think-tanks” which send their results in sealed envelopes to appropriate corporate or governmental sponsors, the CDI gives the widest possible publicity to its deliberations and its findings, and often lobbies to get its schemes into being by exerting whatever pressures it can muster.

We have already described the role of the CDI in the creation of an oceanic regime designed to monopolize as much of the territories and resources of the open seas as it can (Lib. Forum, Aug. 1972). Under the direction of old New Deal brain-truster Rexford G. Tugwell, the Center scholars also had the temerity to write a new Constitution for the United States and sponsor dozens of regional conferences throughout the country to “discuss” Tugwell’s draft. The reception was so unfavorable in almost all quarters that the scheme seems to have been put in storage for the moment. But if Nixon or his successor ever wishes to formalize his Augustan principate by calling a Constitutional Convention—say in 1976—the Tugwell draft is there in the dust, like Richard III’s crown, waiting to be picked up.

The latest project of Hutchins and his proteges is an open admission that the public education establishment is under siege and in panic; and now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the “party”. Hutchins has announced that the CDI, in conjunction with the Center for Policy Study of the University of Chicago, will undertake an inquiry on public education. Why?

“The political community should be required to justify the prolonged detention of its citizens in an educational system. We need to enquire into the possibility of such justification. We need to answer the question whether public education is any longer useful. If so, on what terms? If not, what is the alternative?”

The questions raised certainly go to the heart of the issue and are a tribute to radical and libertarian critics of the past decade. The first four questions are almost certainly a plea for some intelligent reply to the criticisms of Ivan Illich (See rev. of Illich’s Deschooling Society by Len Liggio, Lib. Forum, Oct. 1971):

“Are universal literacy and numericity of sufficient importance in this decade to deserve the substantial share of educational funds and energies? How shall the terminal point of education be determined? How shall assessed national needs and individual aspirations and propensities be reconciled when they are incongruent? Are schools the appropriate institutions for career education? Job training? Shall maximizing the educability of the deprived, least schooled segments of our population be a matter of first priority?”

Other questions reflect the devastating impact on the public educationist establishment of the findings of Christopher Jencks and his associates (Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America, Basic Books 1972). As Christopher Lasch has so well said:

“Not only do they (Jencks’ findings) undermine the popular belief that schooling is an avenue of economic advancement, they also undermine the progressive version of this national mythology—namely that progressive education policies can be used to promote social justice and a new set of social values: cooperation, spontaneity and creativity. Jencks’ evidence strongly suggests that the school does not function in any direct and conscious way as the principal agency of indoctrination, discipline or social control . . .”.

This must have been the inspiration for Hutchins’ first series of questions:

“Should the primary concern of education be the creation of a political community? If so, how should the political community be conceived? As primarily economic, concerned mainly with the livelihoods of its members and the productivity of the whole, or as requiring additional dimensions?” Or elsewhere, “Should schools be concerned with the recast of values and loyalties and reformation of character? If so should the aim be one body of values, loyalties or character traits or should a diversity be sought? If this task is held to be inappropriate to public schools, should it be undertaken at all? If so, by what means?”

And as if in response to the challenge of the libertarian-oriented Center for Independent Education’s symposium on compulsory education, (held in Milwaukee in Nov. 1972) Hutchins asks: “What, if any community requirements justify compulsory attendance? To what age?”

For those who have asserted the right to an education determined by diverse ethnic, linguistic or religious preferences, (attacked as long ago as the 1950’s by former Harvard President Dr. James Conant as un-American because “divisive”), Hutchins includes the question: “Concerning a common language, history and culture: to what extent and in what form shall these be pursued? What degree and form of patriotism? How shall religion be treated?”.

The Hutchins study has rightly recognized the enemies of the public school system and properly is examining its defenses. Of course, it appears from a recent article by Hutchins that he has already reached a conclusion on the main issues (Robert Hutchins, “The Schools Must Stay”, Center Magazine, Jan./Feb. 1973):

“The purpose of the public schools is not accomplished by having them free, universal and compulsory. Schools are public because they are dedicated to the maintenance and improvement of the public thing, the res publica; they are the common schools of the commonwealth, the political community. They may do many things for the young; they may amuse them, comfort them, look after their health, keep them off the streets. But they are not public schools unless they start their pupils toward an understanding of what it means to be a self-governing citizen of a self-governing political community.”

Another prominent educationalist, Prof. R. Freeman Butts, Russell Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia, and long a leading public education ideological commissar, speaks more bluntly than Hutchins, making the same points. In his article “The Public School: Assault on A Great Idea”, (The Nation, April 30, 1973) Butts asserts that

“to achieve a sense of community is the essential purpose of public education. This work cannot be left to the vagaries of individual parents, or small groups of like-minded parents, or particular interest groups, or religious sects, or private enterprisers, or cultural specialties . . . I believe the chief end of American public education is the promotion of a new civism appropriate to the principles of a just society in the United States and a just world community . . . We require the renewal of a civic commitment that seeks to reverse and overcome the trend to segmented and disjunctive “alternatives” serving narrow or parochial or racist interests”.

Butts’ open totalitarianism, which has its intellectual roots in Plato and stretches down to the Papadapoulos regime of modern Greece, cuts through the liberal romanticism of Hutchins and lays bare the root purpose of public education. Yet Hutchins cries that “nobody has a kind word for the public school, the institution that only the other day was looked upon as the foundation of our freedom, the guaranty of our future, the cause of our prosperity and power, the bastion of our security, and the source of our enlightenment”.

It’s like being ungrateful to God!

Arts and Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Heartbreak Kid. dir. by Elaine May. With Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Jeannie Berlin, and Eddie Albert.

If, in the old adage, “it takes one to know one,” we can perhaps understand some of the brilliance with which the team of Nichols and May hilariously and acidulously satirized the typical conversation and thought-processes of New York-liberal-Jewish intellectuals in their great records of the 1950s and early 60s. Since then, Mike Nichols has gone on to ape the pretentiousness of the people he once satirized, leaving Elaine May to mine the comic vein alone. Her first movie, A New Leaf, was simply and happily hilarious, starring the great comedic talent of Walter Matthau, but lacked the old social bite of former days. In The Heartbreak Kid, Miss May returns to her old genre, and with the notable exception of Philip Roth, no one is as adept in exploring the cultural differences and conflicts between the Jewish and the goyishe worlds. Heartbreak Kid is a brilliantly crafted, intelligent, and often funny movie, but it lacks the hilarity of, say, Roth’s superb Portnoy’s Complaint (the book, not the abominable movie). Perhaps the main reason is that, in contrast to Portnoy, there is scarcely a character in Heartbreak with whom anyone can identify.

The central character, Charles Grodin, is unfortunately so empty, banal, and phony that no one really can care what happens to him (and his fate is left hanging in a highly unsatisfactory “ending”). The obligatory Jewish and WASP wedding scenes are marvelous, but Jeannie Berlin’s portrayal of a repellent slob is only countered by the beautiful Cybill Shepherd’s portrayal of the WASP girl as a kooky but totally inarticulate dum-dum. As one viewer noted, we are in a heck of a fix when the only admirable character in the picture is the sensible but inarticulate Eddie Albert, playing Cybill’s father.

The crucial point is that, to be truly memorable, satire must flow from a firmly held set of values, which the satirist indignantly sees are being violated by the society around him. This was true of such great satirists as Swift, Twain, Chesterton, Waugh, and Mencken. But alas, no positive values are discernible in Elaine May’s work and so the satire ultimately sours.

The Day of the Jackal. dir. by Fred Zinnemann. With Edward Fox.

A meticulous and exciting portrayal of the best-selling adventure thriller by Frederick Forsyth, building the step-by-step saga of an unsuccessful, fictional attempt to assassinate Charles deGaulle. The movie is a literal, line-by-line account of the book, which works fine since the novel was virtually written as a screen-play. Unfortunately, Edward Fox is too laconic as the assassin, and therefore his motives and reactions are never touched on, much less explored. The major failure of the movie is the ending, where for some reason Zinnemann unaccountably and for the first time rushes through a situation which requires the continued build-up of suspense. A few more minutes devoted to the ending would have made for a great adventure film.

Sleuth. dir by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With Sir Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine.

The great murder-thriller play faithfully transcribed to the screen, probably because author Anthony Shaffer wrote the screenplay. The play-and-movie is an exciting series of gambits and double-crosses which the two principals pull on each other. Olivier does extremely well (fortunately, he does not over-act, as he sometimes tends to do); Caine, while certainly adequate, is not up to Keith Baxter’s stage version. Still, a must for lovers of intelligent excitement on the screen.

Theater of Blood. With Vincent Price and Diana Rigg.

The horror-movie, when well done, is one of the cinema’s great genres, though it never receives its due from the avant-garde critics. Except when corrupted by camp humor or phony psychology, the horror genre consists of an exciting plot with heroes pitted against villains (and what villains!) Theater of Blood is a virtuoso tour de force for the great Price, who here gets his chance to ham it up as an essential theme of the plot itself. Scorned by the drama critics, Price, a Shakespearean actor, decides to bump off each of his critics in turn, using appropriate scenes from his Shakespearean repertoire. Price is ably assisted by his daughter, Diana Rigg, one of England’s finest actresses, who always projects a fascinating blend of beauty and high competence.

Live and Let Die. dir. by Guy Hamilton. With Roger Moore and Jane Seymour.

James Bond is back, and all’s well with the movie world. The Ian Fleming novels, and for the most part the movies in the Bond series, were the quintessence of the Old Culture: marvelous plot, exciting action, hero vs. villains, spy plots, crisp dialogue and the frank enjoyment of bourgeois luxury and fascinating technological gadgets. Some of the Bond series, notably From Russia With Love, were great film classics: can we ever forget the introduction of that excellent actor Robert Shaw to the screen, or the delightful movie menace embodied by GPU agent Lotte Lenya (“Rosa Klebb”) and her deadly boot?

For most of us, however, Sean Connery is James Bond, a superb blend of toughness and sophistication. But by the last few Bond movies, Connery was visibly aging, and this will not do for Bond. George Lazenby was a weak disaster for one Bond movie, and was quickly dropped. Who to replace the great Connery?

Live and Let Die introduces Roger Moore as the new Bond, fresh from the Saint series on television. Moore is properly suave and silky, but he is too slight and debonair to convey the toughness required for the part; Moore is adequate, but he is no Sean Connery. But, for all that, Live and Let Die is a great delight, one of the best of the Bond series: tough, witty, exciting, uncompromising. Guy Hamilton does a superb job of direction as we are vaulted from one danger and chase to another.

Another great thing about Live and Let Die is its unflinching integrity, its willingness to bring back the delightful old cliches of the action pictures of the 1930s and 40s, to follow the plot of the Fleming novel regardless of any temptation to soften the blow. For the villains are all Negro, and the plot postulates a giant Negro conspiracy covering taxi drivers in Harlem, funeral marchers in New Orleans, and voodoo priests in the Caribbean. It is particularly delightful that Live and Let Die brings back the old voodoo themes, with black natives menacing and torturing white captives and finally, after ritual dances, killing them with cobra bites. At the end of the film, Bond even rescues a white, quasi-virgin, expriestess of voodoo, from the dread cobra ritual. And the movie brings back the traditional scene of crocodile-alligator menace. Not only does the movie have the courage to follow the novel’s racial theme, it is also of course unabashedly “sexiest”, as, once again, James Bond converts female villains to the path of righteousness by the sheer macho power of his virility. And yet all this is done with such verve and style that there has not been a single yelp from black or women’s lib groups. What a corking good movie!

Shaft in Africa. dir. by John Guillermin. With Richard Roundtree.

The original Shaft was one of the best and toughest of the delightful “blaxploitation” genre. The acting of star Richard Roundtree was such as to make him a most credible tough black private eye despite his lack of the usual physical attributes of the tough hero. Hated by the black intelligentsia for being a rugged macho type instead of the embodiment of “noble suffering,” Shaft was the delight of black movie audiences. Shaft in Harlem, however, was a weak and flimsy sequel; the old black-white confrontation was gone, the movie had little to say, and the protest of black female groups had deprived Shaft of his original penchant for sleeping with white females.

But now, with Shaft in Africa, the Shaft series is back on the beam. Adding an international espionage flavor to the Harlem dude, the movie is the equal of the original Shaft. The action is swift and exciting, the dialogue is delightfully sassy, and the hero’s amatory activities are again inter-as well as intra-racial.

Newport Jazz Festival in New York-1973.

Classic jazz is magnificently Old Culture, an exciting blend of European melody and harmony with African rhythm, developed first in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. As such, it is as far from the mindless cacophony of modern acid rock as it is possible to get. Classic jazz always featured a small band, with drums, bass, banjo, or piano providing the rhythmic framework (and the latter the melody as well), the cornet or trumpet asserting the lead melody, the clarinet riding high above it and the trombone punching its way below. Classic jazz was creative improvisation around the lead melody, provided by the song being played. In classic jazz, risk, and challenge were high: for the challenge was for the musician to be creative and yet remain always within the framework of the written song, and also to blend in harmoniously with the other players. The danger is either to sink into non-creative banality on the one hand (as Chicago “Dixieland” jazz generally did to its New Orleans model), or, far worse, to abandon the melodic framework altogether and thereby get lost in musical solipsism and absurdity. Big-band swing of the late 1930’s tended to do both, losing the creativity of improvisation while getting lost in mindless riffs and solo showboating for its own sake (e.g. the endless drum solos of Krupa and Rich.) Finally, at the end of World War II, jazz lost its melody and harmony, and even its rhythm, altogether, and degenerated into “bebop” and ultimately the nihilism of contemporary or “modern” jazz.

Since great jazz requires great melodic songs at its base, the degeneration of jazz after World War II went hand in hand with the degeneration of the popular song, which finally descended into rock. Without the great melodies, how could jazz remain anchored to a melodic framework and thereby avoid descent into the anti-melodic abyss? Classic jazz, therefore, depended on playing “the great tunes, either such marvelous hymns as “Closer Walk to Thee” as with the New Orleans bands, or the superb show tunes of Porter or Rodgers-and-Hart. Hence, the inspired plan of the 1973 Newport-in-New York Jazz Festival to put on “A Jazz Salute to American Song” (July 3) which forced the numerous participants to return, at least in part, to their melodic roots and play classic jazz once more.

The “Jazz Salute” program was, inevitably, a mixed bag. It began with an excellent Dixieland band, headed by the fine cornetist Jimmy McPartland, and ably seconded by Art Hodes on the piano and Vic Dickenson on trombone; playing Irving Berlin tunes, McPartland’s band was particularly good in a rousing rendition of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” They were followed by the great jazz pianist, Earl “Fatha” Hines, looking remarkably young as he played notable tunes by Fats Waller, headed by Hines’ excellent jazz singing (of which there was alas too little at the concert) of Waller’s famous “Honeysuckle Rose.” Hines is not my favorite jazz pianist, since he plays not at all lyrically but in great blocks of sound, but he was extremely interesting nevertheless. A special lagniappe was a duet played by Hines and the marvelously breathy tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, of Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You.” (Blake, by the way, is a magnificent ragtime pianist and composer, still playing at the age of 90, and still far more powerful and forceful a ragtime and jazz pianist than several men one third his age put together.)

Cole Porter was terribly slighted at the concert, first disparaged stupidly by the promoter (who accused Porter of lacking “sentiment”—read cornball banality), and then raced through a few of his lesser tunes by Teddi King, a poor singer, and perfunctory piano by Ellis Larkins. Then came by far the worst set of the concert, in which the great Duke Ellington was butchered by the harsh screeching of R. Roland Kirk, who played the tenor sax, the monzella, and the clarinet simultaneously and badly; and by the tortured bellowing of Al Hibbler.

The evening was quickly set back on course, however, as the superb jazz pianist Barbara Carroll swung her way lightly and lyrically through such marvelous Harold Arlen tunes as “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “As Long as I Live”, and “Out of this World.” She was well assisted by singer Sylvia Sims (but where O where was Lee Wiley, who even now with voice partly gone is far and away the best female jazz singer extant? For heartbreaking and magical jazz singing at its best, go back and listen to Lee Wiley’s record, made twenty-odd years ago, singing Rodgers-and-Hart.) Miss Carroll is one of our finest jazz pianists, and it was good to see her return to the musical scene.

The famous jazz pianist Dave Brubeck then led his band through a rousing rendition of great songs by Jimmy Van Heusen, including “Someone in Love”, “Rainy Day”, and “It Could Happen to You.” Except for a tendency to lose the melody at times, there was happily little trace of Brubeck’s old modernism.

The Modern Jazz Quartet then played a set of Gershwin melodies. The MJQ was the best and most classical of early “bop” and “modern” jazz, and there they were constrained by the Gershwin melodic structure to play in their best manner of cool and sensuous elegance, a manner, insured by the playing of the famous Milt Jackson on the vibes. It’s too bad that the MJQ stuck to the corny Porgy and Bess, which is not really vintage Gershwin (where, for example, was the master’s magnificent “But Not for Me”?) And they could well scrap their harshly percussive drummer.

A highly interesting set was the playing of the great Rodgers and Hart (in the days before Rodgers was corrupted by the banal, left-liberal sentimentality of Oscar Hammerstein II), particularly two of the greatest pop songs and show tunes ever written, “My Romance” and “It Never Entered My Mind.” The band was excellent, headed by the creamy tenor sax of Stan Getz; unfortunately, the singer was Mabel Mercer, who has enjoyed cult status in the fashionable New York supper clubs, but has literally no voice at all, and simply talks her lines. Still, Getz and the band made the playing worthwhile.

The final set was an excellent one, with the delightful Marian McPartland at the piano and Gerry Mulligan playing a sinous and superb baritone sax, as they played Alec Wilder’s “It’s So Peaceful In the Country”, “When We’re Young”, and “I’ll be Around When He’s Gone.” All in all, an important reminder that jazz needs great melodies to make it viable.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 8

AUGUST, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

OIL AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

By John Hagel III

In October 1972 the first Libertarian Scholars Conference was held at the Williams Club in New York City. The sponsors of the conference planned to present as the main speakers a number of young libertarians who were still completing or had recently completed their doctoral studies. Comment was supplied by the older generation of libertarian scholars. The results were so successful that all present came away with renewed confidence that the libertarian movement was well on the way towards producing a splendid new generation of first-rate intellectual leaders. All agreed that the papers read ought to have a wider audience, but despite the efforts of the sponsors to secure financial support, publication of the excellent papers and discussion was not feasible. Under these circumstances, Libertarian Forum has undertaken to publish those papers which were in publishable form and which we deemed especially significant.

Among the young scholars we are proud to present to our readers is John Hagel III, a graduate of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Ct. and presently a graduate student at Oxford University. He began research on U.S. oil policy while a summer fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, Ca. and has continued his studies as a research intern with one of the largest oil corporations in the United States.

“All those who have studied the past from the standpoint of economics, and especially those who have studied economic geography, are aware that, from the material point of view, history is primarily the story of the increasing ability of man to reach and control energy.” — Allan Nevins, 1959

“It is even probable that the supremacy of nations may be determined by the possession of available petroleum and its products.” — President Calvin Coolidge

The current concern among American policy-makers over the so-called “energy crisis” serves to emphasize a continuing and more far-reaching objective of American foreign policy—the establishment of secure control over foreign sources of essential raw materials. American foreign policy planners have been acutely aware of the importance of guaranteeing reliable and relatively inexpensive supplies of key raw materials for domestic industry and, perhaps more importantly, for the military machine which ensures America’s predominance as a world power. One of the most essential raw materials within the context of modern industrial society and the military is crude oil.

American foreign policy planners have perceived control over adequate supplies of foreign crude oil as an indispensable objective of American foreign policy since the early 1920’s and, in order to achieve this goal, the government and the major international oil companies have developed a symbiotic relationship which neither now wish to terminate. Historically, the attainment of this objective has necessitated a long term diplomatic strategy designed to challenge the control of British oil interests over the massive crude oil reserves of the Middle East. This essay will cover the basic phases involved in this struggle but, due to limitations of space, this analysis will necessarily constitute only an outline of the subject.

By focusing the analysis on the importance of oil in the formulation of foreign policy, it is possible that this article unintentionally overemphasizes its role. It must therefore be reiterated that the role of oil can be understood fully only when it is examined within the total context of international economic policy. Second, in the interests of brevity, this article will not fully explore the disagreements which frequently divide the oil industry and which often affect its relationship with the state. The reader must be cautioned against the simplistic view of either the oil industry or the state as monolithic entities but at the same time it should be stressed that the disagreements which do emerge occur within a broadly defined consensus that inherently limits the scope of debate and ultimately provides a basis for minimizing the disruptive impact of the internal divisions.

Perhaps one of the most historically significant events in the development of the oil industry involved the decision by the U.S. Navy to convert its ships to fuel oil. Although initially reluctant to embark upon such a course as a result of uncertainty about available oil supplies in the future, the U.S. Navy Fuel Oil Board issued a report recommending conversion to oil in 1904 and, within ten years, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had announced that all naval battleships and destroyers were burning fuel. While the Navy remained the largest military consumer of fuel oil, the Army also became increasingly dependent upon oil since much of its new weaponry, tanks and trucks relied on petroleum products.

At a time when the U.S. was aggressively expanding overseas and relying increasingly on the Navy for support in these ventures, policy planners soon expressed concern over the possibility of inadequate domestic crude oil reserves. Thus, even prior to World War I, military planners and government officials were acutely aware of the extent to which the military had become dependent on petroleum products and, in response, sought to develop arrangements which would ensure reliable and inexpensive supplies. Throughout this period, naval planners acted closely with leading civilian conservation spokesmen within the government to oppose the leasing of federal lands containing crude oil reserves. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and others within the Department of the Navy even went so far as to publicly favor the nationalization of crude oil reserves and facilities to ensure security of supply for the Navy.[1]

British Oil Policies

The U.S. government was not alone in its recognition of the importance of crude oil supplies for military preparedness. Following the conversion of the British Royal Navy to fuel oil-burning ships, Winston Churchill announced in July 1913 that the British government had acquired a majority interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which held highly productive crude oil concessions in the Middle East. In justifying this move to Parliament, Churchill declared that it would permit the government to “draw our supply, so far as possible, from sources under British control or British influence, and along those . . . ocean routes which the Navy can most easily protect.”[2] It is not unlikely that American naval planners were carefully following British initiatives in this area and that their proposals for selective nationalization of petroleum reserves and facilities were at least partially inspired by the British model.

If the leading governments of Europe and the United States maintained any illusions regarding the importance of oil, they were quickly dispelled during World War I. France, in particular, experienced a dangerous shortage of petroleum supplies for its mechanized military. Within the U.S., World War I and the vastly greater demand for petroleum products provided a catalyst which transformed the relationship between the oil industry and the government. The government’s primary concern became the necessity of maximizing crude oil production and the resolution of unprecedented logistical problems involved in supplying Allied armies, the American military and wartime industry.

Oil and War

To accomplish these tasks, the administration solicited the assistance of A. C. Bedford, chairman of the board of directors of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Throughout the wartime years and into the post-war period, Standard Oil of New Jersey emerged as the primary intermediary between the government and the oil industry. Under its guidance, an extensive institutional framework was established to maximize government-industry cooperation in every phase of petroleum operations and at all levels of management. The network of advisory committees which subsequently evolved was dominated by the large, integrated oil companies and permitted them to stabilize the industry under their control to a degree which had been impossible on the free market. Oil company profits during the immediate post-war period soared to unprecedented levels, often tripling or quadrupling in value.

The business executives who guided the wartime experiment in industry-government cooperation were highly enthusiastic regarding its results and emerged as leaders in the formation of the American Petroleum Institute. At the organizational meeting of the API, three primary objectives were articulated which served as the basis of industry-government cooperation throughout the inter-war years: (1) the rationalization and integration of all phases of domestic oil industry operations; (2) the promotion of greater cooperation within the industry and with the government and (3) development of foreign crude oil sources and markets.[3]

The aggressive search by American oil interests for foreign oil concessions originally became a major factor in American foreign policy during the inter-war period. From the very beginning, the domestic oil industry had been oriented toward the export market. By the end of the Civil War, the value of exported petroleum products had reached $15.7 million and the oil industry ranked sixth in the U.S. export trade. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, net exports of crude oil and petroleum products were equivalent to at least 1/3 of domestic crude production and at times exceeded 3/4 of domestic production.[4] However, the role of the United States as the world’s largest crude oil producer during this period had contributed to a complacent attitude within the domestic industry regarding the necessity for exploration and production outside the United States. This attitude ultimately changed as U.S. crude oil production declined from 98.4% of the world total in 1860 to 42.7% in 1900.[5]

The major petroleum shortages experienced within the U.S. immediately following World War I precipitated the decision by industry leaders and government officials to seek concessions abroad. In 1919, the shortage of crude oil and consequent spiraling of prices prompted the Secretary of the Navy to revive earlier proposals for the nationalization of petroleum resources and to order officers to seize necessary fuel supplies if an acceptable price was not forthcoming.[6] The API denounced the commandeering policies of the Navy and, emphasizing the inadequacy of domestic oil reserves, proposed that the government assist the oil companies in obtaining foreign producing concessions as a long-term solution to the shortage of crude oil.

Once again, Standard Oil of New Jersey emerged in the vanguard of the industry following a major reorganization within the company. None of the members of Nersey’s board of directors had been involved in production and most were too old to provide the necessary enthusiasm for a major new venture. However, the badly-needed impetus was provided by a rising young executive, Walter Teagle, who had been placed in charge of the company’s foreign operations. One of Teagle’s aides summarized the new outlook which guided the company’s development during the following years:

It appears to me that the future of the Standard Oil Company, particularly the New Jersey company, lies outside the United States, rather than in it. This is due primarily to the fact that the New Jersey’s company’s business is largely outside the United States, its principal refineries are on tidewater, and it is also true that the trust laws of the United States and their present trend seems to preclude continued expansion in this country.[7]

The importance which the American government attached to the overseas ventures of American oil companies is evident in the following memorandum of August 16, 1919 distributed by the State Department to all its personnel abroad:

The vital importance of securing adequate supplies of mineral oil both for present and future needs of the United States has been forcibly brought to the attention of the Department. The development of proven fields and exploration of new areas is being aggressively conducted in many parts of the world by nationals of various countries, and concessions for mineral oil rights are being actively sought . . .

You are . . . instructed to lend all legitimate aid to reliable and responsible United States citizens or interests which are seeking mineral oil concessions or rights.[8]

The U.S. entered into the world arena at a relatively late date, discovering that British, French and Dutch oil interests controlled the known reserves overseas and operated in close cooperation with their home governments in their search for exploration concessions. British oil interests, represented primarily by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) and the Royal Dutch-Shell Oil Company, constituted the most formidable rival and their optimism was reflected in a statement by Sir Edward MacKay Edgar, a British petroleum banker, that

The British position is impregnable. All the known oil fields, all the likely or probable oil fields, outside the United States itself, are in British hands or under British management or control, or financed by British capital.[9]

Seeking to gain entry for U.S. oil companies into areas already dominated by European oil interests, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, the central architect of American foreign oil policy and later counsel for Standard Oil of New Jersey, vigorously’ championed the Open Door policy. The diplomatic offensive organized by the State Department on behalf of American oil interests focused on three major producing areas abroad—Latin America, the Dutch East Indies and the Middle East. Confronted by strongly entrenched oil interests and more experienced European diplomats, the performance of the State Department left much to be desired, although it did experience some success in promoting the entry of U.S. oil companies in Latin America, particularly Colombia and Venezuela. The complicated diplomatic intrigues accompanying U.S. and British competition for producing concessions in Mexico, however, provide ample evidence regarding the difficulties involved in challenging the predominant British position even directly across the border.[10]

In the Dutch East Indies, the Dutch government steadfastly refused to give American oil interests access to the extremely rich Djambi fields, despite repeated efforts by Secretary of State Hughes to invoke the Open Door policy. In its response to Hughes’ protests, the Dutch government cited the difficulties that Royal Dutch-Shell had experienced in obtaining oil leases in the United States as evidence of the double standard underlying the American protests.

The State Department experienced its greatest frustration in its efforts to gain entry into the major oil fields of the Middle East. Within weeks after the cessation of hostilities in this area, the British government denied access to all foreign companies seeking permission to explore and drill in the Palestine and Mesopotamia regions. The British further consolidated their position in this region by negotiating the San Remo Agreement in April 1920 with the French, effectively establishing a detente between the two major European oil interests. Overtly violating the Open Door principle, the Agreement granted the French a 25% share in the British-dominated Turkish Petroleum Company and sought to exclude the nationals from any other countries from engaging in petroleum operations within the Balkans and Near East. The U.S. State Department refused to acknowledge the legality of this arrangement but failed to obtain any concessions from either France or Great Britain.

Although State Department protests over British policies on the Middle East did not produce any immediate results, they did set the stage for an eventual solution to the competition between British and American oil interests. One of the most instrumental personalities in arranging this solution proved to be Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian oil magnate with a 5% interest in the Turkish Petroleum Company. Gulbenkian argued vigorously with the British Foreign Office for a more farsighted policy:

Personally from the inception of the American crisis, I had held the opinion, taking the broader view, that it was sounder and higher policy to admit the Americans into the Turkish Petroleum Company, instead of letting them loose to compete in Iraq for concessions when in reality the company had a very weak grip there. The oil groups are always tempted to seize what they see before them without looking ahead or following broader policies of collaboration.[11]

Gulbenkian’s arguments were persuasive and the British companies in the Turkish Petroleum Company initiated discussions with a consortium of American oil companies which culminated in an agreement in 1925 to grant the American consortium a share of the Turkish Petroleum Company. Under the leadership of Walter Teagle of Jersey. Standard, the American consortium insisted upon and received an equal share with the three other principal participants (Shell, Anglo-Persian and the French Compagnie Francaise des Petroles).

The agreement effectively integrated the American oil companies into an arrangement for the production of crude oil in the Middle East which preserved British dominance, yet avoided competition for concession agreements between American and British oil interests. It is particularly crucial because it established the model for a series of wide-reaching agreements among the major international oil companies during the late 1920’s that represent the first systematic effort to stabilize the oil industry on an international level and to eliminate the rivalry between American and British oil interests. Before considering these agreements, however, it is important to briefly outline the reason for this sudden reversal of previous trends within the international oil industry.

Control of Markets

Within the United States, a fundamental shift in orientation had occurred within the oil industry and government as a result of discoveries of extensive crude oil reserves both domestically and in foreign producing areas during the mid-1920’s. As increasingly large quantities of oil were brought into the market, the price index for petroleum products, which had been steadily rising over the previous decade, began to decline precipitously. The major oil companies sought to limit production through a variety of voluntary arrangements but, when it became evident that these had failed, the companies turned to the state to enforce compulsory pro-rationing schemes designed to stabilize prices by limiting the production of oil.

While this effort succeeded on a national level, the oil industry confronted rapidly expanding production from foreign concessions which seriously weakened the international price structure. In the absence of a world government capable of enforcing a global pro-rationing plan, the major international oil companies, representing both British and American interests, negotiated a system of voluntary agreements in 1928 which would stabilize the market. The Red Line Agreement in 1928 provided a basis for the controlled exploration and development of the massive oil fields believed to exist in the Middle East since it pledged the participants in the Turkish Petroleum Company consortium not to engage in oil exploration or production within the borders of the former Ottoman Empire without first consulting and obtaining the approval of all the other participants. A parallel agreement, known as the Achnacarry or “As Is” Agreement, contained provisions for preserving the existing shares of the international market held by the major oil companies and the pooling of refining and marketing facilities. One oil economist provided a perceptive description of the agreements which were formulated in 1928:

The international oil companies regarded the stabilization of international markets as an essential auxiliary to the domestic stabilization program they engineered with the help of both state and federal governments during the late 1920’s and in the 1930’s . . . In 1928, oilmen took steps to translate their common concern about price instability in international oil markets into a program of action . . . in the As Is Agreement we find the first evidence of a conspiratorial arrangement to perpetuate a pricing system that was breaking down under the impact of surplus world production and increasing competition.[12]

These agreements in 1928 provided the framework for the evolution of the international petroleum industry during the period preceding World War II, representing a temporary detente among the leading American, British and European oil interests. However, World War II, the substantial weakening of British imperial hegemony and the systematic challenge launched by American foreign policy planners to replace Britain as the predominant state-capitalist power in the Western world, ultimately doomed the international detente prevailing within the oil industry. On a more immediate level, the advent of World War II once again graphically demonstrated the indispensable role of oil in modern warfare. Its importance in the strategic thinking of the American government is illustrated in the statement by Charles Rayner, the Petroleum Advisor to the Department of State, that “World War II has been and is a war based on oil.”[13] While British and American oil interests cooperated closely during the war in supplying Allied war needs, renewed friction became evident in both Saudi Arabia and Iran, two of the major oil producing countries in the Middle East.[14]

American Hegemony

American foreign policy planners anticipated that the war would seriously weaken the British international position and prepared a comprehensive strategy designed to expand and consolidate the American position in the Middle East, believed to contain the highest concentration of crude oil reserves in the world and traditionally a British and French sphere of influence. John D. Lotfus, a prominent State Department official in 1945 prepared a memorandum entitled “Petroleum in International Relations” which outlined the foreign policy objectives of the American government:

Another major category of problems concerns the support given by the Department on behalf of the United States government to American nationals seeking to obtain or to retain rights to engage in petroleum development, transportation and processing abroad. This is the traditional function of the Department with respect to petroleum. It has continued to be significant, though of temporarily diminished importance, during the war period. As normal conditions return this function will come to be of very great importance . . . . there are . . . areas where after the war there is a genuine possibility of securing an amelioration of the unfavorable discriminatory conditions under which American nationals were able to obtain rights before the war.[15]

By 1947, an interdepartmental committee from the State, Interior, Commerce, Army and Navy Departments had prepared a confidential report outlining the strategy of the American government. The fundamental objective of American policy, according to this report, should be to “seek the removal or modification of existent barriers (legal, contractual or otherwise) to the expansion of American foreign oil operations and facilitate the entry or re-entry of private foreing capital into countries where the absence of such capital inhibits oil development.”[16] To implement and coordinate this policy, the State Department designated at least thirteen petroleum officers and attaches to key positions in American embassies around the world. Gabriel Kolko has, with characteristic insight, summarized the strategic importance of the Middle East which

encompassed all the critical challenges to American goals and power after World War II. There was pre-eminently, the question of Britain’s future in the region, and the unmistakable United States intention to circumscribe it in some fundamental fashion to re-allocate Western influence in the area.[17]

The formal end of the detente among oil interests in the Middle East occurred with the announcement of Jersey Standard in January 1946 that it had repudiated the Red Line Agreement of 1928. Standard Oil of New Jersey had sought to join the Arabian-American Oil Company producing consortium in Saudi Arabia and, upon encountering the opposition of its British and French partners in the Red Line Agreement, consulted with, and received the encouragement of, the State Department in its decision to dis-associate from the Agreement. Once again, Standard Oil of New Jersey performed a vital role as an intermediary between the American oil industry and the U.S. government, and other American participants in the Red Line Agreement soon announced their own decision to withdraw from the Agreement.

This agreement had represented the continued hegemony of British and European oil interests within the Middle East and, in the fundamentally new circumstances following the war, American oil interests no longer felt it necessary to accept the secondary role which had been assigned to them. In marked contrast to the diplomatic offensive launched by the U.S. State Department on behalf of American oil interests in the early 1920’s, however, this new offensive was not motivated by an urgent search for crude oil supplies to supplement inadequate domestic reserves. Instead, American foreign policy planners recognized the importance of controlling the Middle East oil reserves as one element in their strategy to weaken Britain’s international position and, in a more long-range perspective, sought to ensure secure supplies of crude oil and petroleum products for its allies in Western Europe.

The CIA and Iranian Oil

Following the immediate post-war period, the extensive Anglo-Persian concession in Iran, covering some of the most prolific oil fields in the world, represented the one area in the Middle East which remained under the exclusive control of British oil interests. The opportunity for U.S. oil interests to penetrate this last bastion of British supremacy arose when concession negotiations between the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Iranian government stalled in 1951 and Iran, under the leadership of Mohammed Mossadegh, announced the nationalization of all oil operations in the country. Most politically conscious Americans are aware of the role of the CIA in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government and installation of a new government more amenable to the oil companies. Yet the CIA coup proved to be merely the final act of a far more complicated situation, involving extensive preliminary negotiations between American oil interests and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

While these negotiations proceeded, the American government adopted a carefully neutral position in the nationalization controversy, advising the British to reconcile themselves to the loss of their assets in Iran. This attitude prompted widespread suspicion within the British Foreign Office that the Americans were maneuvering to replace the British oil interests in Iran. However, once the negotiators had produced an agreement which granted the American oil interests a 40% share in the Iranian producing concession, the CIA dispatched Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, to Iran to coordinate preparations for the coup. The coup succeeded, replacing Mossadegh with General Fazlollah Zahedi and negotiations were soon announced to establish the consortium of oil companies which would resume producing operations in the country. Several years later, Kermit Roosevelt left the CIA and joined Gulf Oil Company, one of the participants in the Iranian consortium, as government relations director and then, in 1960, as a vice-president.[18]

The Iranian nationalization represented the final step in the consolidation of the position of United States oil interests in the Middle East and, ultimately, in the world. The reversal of roles between American and British oil interests in this area is demonstrated by estimates of the crude oil reserves in the Middle East controlled by each group. In 1940, British interests controlled an estimated 72% of total crude oil reserves in the Middle East while American interests controlled a relatively minor 9.8%. In 1967, on the other hand, Britain’s share of the total had declined to 29.3% while American-controlled reserves had risen to 58.6%.[19]

Oil Policies Since 1950

This highly schematic history of the rivalry between British and American interests within the international petroleum industry provides a useful background for understanding the situation within the industry during the past few decades. However, developments in the period since 1950 have had significant implications for the future position of U.S. oil interests abroad and the American government is now in the process of formulating a comprehensive energy policy in response to these developments. To place these changes within the proper context it is necessary first to consider two aspects of the contemporary oil industry: the economic significance of foreign investment in petroleum facilities by U.S. companies and the strategic military significance of foreign crude oil reserves.

Briefly summarized, the international oil companies represent the most important single concentration of economic power in the U.S. The five major American international oil companies possess total combined assets of $40 billion, or 20% of the total assets of the 100 largest U.S. corporations. Overseas investments by American oil companies represent 30% of the total book value of American foreign direct investments and 40% of total U.S. investment in the developing countries. Moreover, this petroleum investment is highly profitable, representing 60% of total U.S. earnings in developing nations.

The profitability of petroleum investment explains its traditionally significant role in cushioning the unfavorable balance of payments experienced by the U.S. Michael Tanzer has estimated that, without the overseas affiliates of American oil companies, the balance of payments deficit of $2.8 billion in 1964 would have been 25% greater.[20] Most importantly, the contribution of the international oil companies to the balance of payments accounts occurs almost exclusively as a consequence of direct investments in producing operations.

Thus, while the U.S. remains the largest producer of oil in the world and, as a consequence, the developed nation least dependent on imports of foreign crude oil, foreign investments by American oil companies in crude oil production have acquired great economic significance, both in terms of profitability and contribution to an unfavorable balance of payments. Nor can the U.S. remain complacent regarding its leadership among oil producers. The geography of oil has shifted dramatically over the past fifteen years and future trends indicate increasing American dependence on foreign imports of crude oil. During the past decade, the U.S. share of world production of crude oil declined from 38% to 24% while the share of Africa and the Middle East rose from 23% to 40% over the same period. Even today, America’s production rate can only be sustained as a consequence of an elaborate system of subsidies and tax credits, further enforced by a quota system limiting foreign imports.

Currently, approximately 22% of the petroleum consumed in the United States originates outside the country. Virtually all oil imported into the U.S. is produced either in Venezuela or Canada; the U.S. relies only minimally on Middle Eastern oil. Nevertheless, Western Europe and Japan are almost entirely dependent on the Middle East and North Africa for their supplies of crude oil. In 1968, this area supplied 90% of the oil consumed in Japan, 70% of the oil consumed in Great Britain, 80% in France, 90% in West Germany and 95% in Italy.[21]

A report on foreign economic policy by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund discussed the implications of this situation:

Europe’s economic security today depends on two indispensable factors: (1) her own intellectual and technical vitality and economic enterprise; and (2) an international structure which will enable Europe to have access to foreign markets on fair terms and adequate supplies of materials, if Europe can offer reasonable value in return for them.

Nevertheless, the economic situation of the industrialized nations remains precarious. If Asia, Middle Eastern and African nationalism, exploited by the Soviety bloc, becomes a destructive force, European supplies of oil and other essential raw materials may be jeapordized.[22]

Walt Whitman Rostow, in testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee outlined the broader context:

The location, natural resources, and populations of the underdeveloped areas are such that, should they become attached to the Communist bloc, the United States would become the second power in the world . . . Indirectly, the evolution of the underdeveloped areas is likely to determine the fate of Western Europe and Japan and, therefore the effectiveness of those industrialized regions in the free world alliance we are committed to lead. If the underdeveloped areas fall under Communist domination, or if they move to fixed hostility to the West, the economic and military strength of Western Europe and Japan will be diminished, the British Commonwealth as it is now organized will disintegrate, and the Atlantic world will become, at best, an awkward alliance, incapable of exercising effective influence outside a limited orbit, with the balance of the world’s power lost to it. In short, our military security and our way of life as well as the fate of Western Europe and Japan are at stake in the evolution of the underdeveloped areas.[23]

One of the basic sources of American influence in the post-1945 period has been its indispensable role in ensuring adequate and reliable supplies of crude oil to its allies. The importance of this role has been most clearly demonstrated during periods of international crisis in which the flow of crude oil from the Middle East has been disrupted, i.e. the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 and the Six Day War in 1967. Thus, the U.S., at least indirectly, has a vital strategic interest in controlling the crude oil reserves located in the Middle East and North Africa.

Moreover, in studying the gross figures of crude oil imports to the U.S., it is possible to seriously underestimate the dependence of the American military on foreign crude oil sources. According to recent estimates, 53.2% of the total bulk fuel purchased by the military in 1968 came from foreign supplies.[24] Even more importantly, however, both NATO and the U.S. military forces in Southeast Asia are almost exclusively dependent on crude oil supplies from the Middle East.[25] These elementary facts are of major concern to American foreign policy planners as indicated by the following observation by Carl Vansant, an energy consultant for the Department of the Navy:

From a military point of view, it is important that the energy supplies for military forces be designed for, and maintained in, a secure posture. It is even more important, however, that national systems for energy supply be built on a secure foundation of political, technical and economic policy; for, in fact, it is the civil structure of energy systems that underlies and braces strategic security.[26]

Foreign crude oil reserves, and specifically those located in the Middle East, have therefore acquired direct strategic importance for American policy-makers in the past decade.

Future Needs

Once the full importance of foreign crude oil reserves for American economic and strategic strength has been recognized, it is possible to appreciate more clearly the implications of a number of current developments in the international oil industry. First, the large international oil companies, for a variety of reasons, have never been able to revive the proto-cartel arrangements which had broken down in the immediate post-World War II period. In fact, the past two decades have produced an unprecedented degree of competition within the international oil industry. This competition has dramatically weakened the position of the companies in their negotiations for concessions and tax agreements from the producing countries. The producing countries have further strengthened their own position by establishing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) which has successfully negotiated significant increases in tax rates and recently initiated a series of negotiations designed to establish government participation in all producing companies operating in OPEC countries. These developments have considerably reduced the profits previously received by the international oil companies from their producing operations and, in the longer run, raise the very likely possibility of total nationalization of producing operations by the OPEC governments.

A number of fundamental changes in the international oil industry can be reasonably projected as a consequence of these recent developments. Most immediately, the international oil companies will seek to raise prices on petroleum products to cushion the impact on their accounts of the higher production taxes. These price rises, and growing evidence of the weakness of the international oil companies in negotiations with OPEC, will further accelerate efforts by the major oil consuming countries in Western Europe and Japan to expand the operations of their own state-owned oil companies and, most importantly, to challenge the control over Middle Eastern crude oil reserves by American oil interests.

This trend must be understood within the broader context of the systematic challenge presented by these countries to America’s financial and economic position in the non-Communist world. European state-owned oil companies such as the French Compagnie Francaise des Petroles, the Italian Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI), the German Deminex and the Spanish Hispanoil have been increasingly aggressive in their competition with the established Anglo-Saxon oil companies for producing concessions in the Middle East. Discussions have also been initiated among the consuming governments of Western Europe and Japan regarding the possible formation of an Organization of Petroleum Importing Countries (OPIC) to by-pass the American and British international oil companies and enter directly into multilateral trade negotiations for crude oil from OPEC.

The short term strategy which the American government and the major oil companies will pursue in response to these recent developments will probably include a variety of elements. It is unlikely, barring a major crisis, that the United States will resort to direct intervention as a means for preserving the position of the American oil interests in the Middle East or other producing areas. Instead, emphasis will be placed on the development of formal partnerships between the oil companies and the host governments in the producing phase of the industry to forestall outright nationalization. Cooperation among the oil companies and coordination with the American government will receive an even higher priority than has been the case previously, as illustrated by the recent suspension of anti-trust laws to enable the oil companies to present a united bargaining team in negotiations with OPEC.

On a more long-term basis, fundamental transformations are envisaged which will result in an even closer relationship between the oil industry and the government in the U.S. An intensive and extensive search for additional crude oil reserves, preferably in politically “safe” areas has already been initiated and, increasingly, the search will focus on subsea exploration and production. While the discovery of crude oil reserves under the jurisdiction of hospitable governments would be optimal, the primary aim is to maximize the number of sources of crude oil to ensure against the disruptive effects which might be produced if one or several of the sources were simultaneously rendered inaccessible to American oil interests. It is only within this context that the significance of the Alaskan North Share discoveries and British North Sea exploration, and even the high level negotiations currently in process to seek American participation in the development of both Russian Siberian and Chinese off-shore oil reserves can be fully appreciated.

On another level, the pressures to minimize American dependence of foreign crude oil reserves are already resulting in the formulation of a comprehensive energy policy by the United States government which will avoid the narrow focus on petroleum as the primary energy source. The most tangible consequence of this new orientation will be the development of extensive, federally subsidized research and development programs by the oil companies to explore the potential of alternative energy sources. The major international oil companies have already quietly diversified into ownership of coal reserves, oil shale reserves and the development of nuclear technology.[27]

One further consequence of recent developments will be the conscious rationalization of energy consumption in the United States to eliminate unnecessary waste. The automobile represents the most inefficient means of surface transportation, in terms of energy consumption, currently in use, and the next few decades will witness the development of systematic, federally subsidized mass transit programs, not because of sudden moral indignation over the ecological damage caused by the automobile, but because of the desire to limit accelerating energy consumption in the U.S.

In summary, therefore, recent developments in the oil industry are likely to result in a much higher degree of sustained interaction between the international oil companies and the American government than the U.S. has ever before experienced. As Michael Tanzer, an oil economist, has pointed out:

the connection between the government and the international oil companies in the U.S. has generally never been as open nor as close as in Great Britain or France. This is partly because the existence of a large indigenous oil sector has historically made the role of international oil less crucial and also has generated conflicting interests between independent domestic oil companies and the internationals.[28]

While this observation may overlook the assistance received by American oil companies in their effort to challenge British control of the Middle East crude oil reserves, it does focus attention on a crucial advantage historically enjoyed by the United States. However, recent trends demonstrate the increasing dependence of the United States, and particularly the American military, upon crude oil reserves, reserves which have become dangerously concentrated in the politically unstable Middle East. To respond to these developments, the symbiotic relationship which has evolved between the oil industry and the government will become even more pronounced and, more than ever, this relationship will become one of mutual dependence.

101 Ways To Promote Libertarian Ideas

1. Be open, friendly and courteous in presenting your ideas. Avoid any taint of fanaticism or infallibility. Just because other people disagree with you, don’t put them down as stupid or evil. Libertarian ideas are radical and shocking when first encountered. It takes most people some time to digest them.

2. Is a friend studying a specific subject—political science, economics, psychology? Recommend a book giving a libertarian perspective on

3. If you have read a favorable review of a libertarian book, especially if in a professional journal, have copies xeroxed and distribute them to friends who might be interested in the review professionally.

4. Write a letter a week to some newspaper giving a libertarian viewpoint on some public issue. It will usually be published if short, topical and clearly not “cranky”. Keep it practical and to the point.

5. College libraries usually respond to faculty requests for new acquisitions. Regularly request libertarian titles, if you are on the faculty, or ask a friendly faculty member to do so, if you are a student.

6. Have you been assigned a term paper? Choose a topic that will allow you to read in libertarian sources, and develop a libertarian analysis of the topic.

7. Many libertarian books are now available in paperback editions. Give your local bookstore a list of titles and suggest he stock them. To encourage him, give him the publisher’s catalogue.

8. Remember Libertarians don’t have all the answers! You can learn by listening to others.

9. Most colleges have literary societies. If so inclined, join the society. You can then participate in its discussions, play a role in selecting guest speakers, and even contribute poems, short stories and critical reviews to its journal. Literary people are usually very sensitive to the need for true liberty and are a good audience for libertarian ideas.

10. In many colleges, the newspaper is not fully utilized by the student body. Editors are usually short of copy and welcome contributions of material. Send a review of your favorite libertarian book or movie or play. Do an analysis of some local problem from a libertarian perspective. Better yet, join the staff. You are bound to be promoted over a four year period.

11. Have you found a few sympathetic souls who are interested in further study of libertarian ideas? Form a campus study club. Work up a guest speakers’ program and apply for student activity funds.

12. Have you ever recommended a book to your teacher? Why not? He doesn’t hesitate to recommend them to you! Tell him you would like to discuss it with him after he has read it. Flattery will get you everywhere!

13. The trustees of most colleges usually read the student newspaper. Any strongly worded criticism is likely to catch their attention—and cause questions to be asked. If the economics department excludes free-market texts from its reading lists, ask why? Remember the national furor created in the Fifties by Bill Buckley’s God and Man at Yale?

14. A libertarian is not a book burner or witch hunter. But he is certainly entitled to know why a political science department ignores individualist anarchism in courses on political theory. Or Austrian economics in courses on economic theory. Or the contributions of Tucker, Warren, Spooner, Nock and Chodorov to American intellectual history. A letter of inquiry to the professor or department involved could change things.

15. Does your student government have a referendum procedure? Make imaginative use of it to spread libertarian ideas. Call for the abolition of the ROTC or compulsory student activity fees.

16. Is your college bookstore a local monopoly with high monopolistic prices? Open up a student cooperative bookstore; or sponsor a free-market used book exchange. And explain why you are doing it!

17. Is your college supposedly a “private institution”? Check it out. The likelihood is that it enjoys some government privilege or subsidy. And what price does it pay for this governmental support? Does it have its books audited by the State? Is it required to submit reports to the HEW on the number of women and ethnic minority members on its faculty? Do its courses and readings have to be submitted for State inspection? Are its records, or your personal records, open to inspection by government agencies? Prepare a report on the parameters of “freedom” at your college or university.

18. Who rules your university? Prepare a detailed report on the trustees and officers of your university. The corporate, governmental and personal relationships are frequently very interesting. At one local center of learning that we know, two trustees were forced to resign when a rather intimate business and personal relationship between them, the local sheriff and the “Mafia” was revealed as part of a student researched obituary notice in the campus paper. Elsewhere the trustees were involved in conflicts of interest in awarding construction contracts.

19. Do you know what is college policy, and practice, regarding student academic and medical records? Who has access, what is recorded, how long are the records kept? This is especially important if medical or psychological records are kept on students, as rather damaging information may appear in government records at a later time. Some schools in the Sixties kept records of campus political activities also. A civil libertarian might attract support by focusing on this issue.

20. Prepare alternate reading lists for required courses. Distribute them to all “captive” audiences.

21. Student “leaders” are frequently power freaks and even outright grafters. Quietly keep track of their votes, attendance at official meetings, and the number and costs of “official excursions”. A voter profile of the “Big Men” on campus might provide some laughs at the next student election.

22. Buy a subscription to your favorite libertarian journal and give a free subscription as a gift to your local library.

23. Buy and display libertarian posters. They are always an excellent way to start a political conversation.

24. Get yourself a libertarian calendar and celebrate libertarian anniversaries. Hold a birthday party for Max Stirner (Oct. 25) or Ludwig von Mises (Sept. 29) and give your guests some literature by the guest of honor. On election eve, Nov. 5, 1973, Britons will be celebrating Guy Fawkes failure to blow up Parliament in 1606. We could at least honor him for trying! Or what about a beer blast on Dec. 5—the day Prohibition ended in 1933. On Dec. 16, 1973 we ought to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

25. Does your college have a film society? If so, ask them to show films which would serve as a stimulus for discussion of libertarian viewpoints. If not, why don’t you form a film group and use it for libertarian purposes.

26. Many colleges have student-run lecture series, often with large sums to finance guests speakers. Try to get involved with the speakers bureau and promote the invitation of a libertarian guest lecturer.

27. If a guest lecturer is distinctly anti-libertarian, a socialist or behavioralist, for instance, study his published opinions beforehand, and prepare questions for him that will reveal the implications of his errors to the audience.

28. Try to establish a libertarian literature table or reading room on campus or nearby. Even if a student is not immediately receptive to your ideas, you will have made a personal contact that could in time mature into further conversation and thought.

29. Every season there is some issue that seems to arise and receive wide public discussion—the environmental crisis, the crisis of the family, crime, drugs, Watergate. Plan a public debate on the issue, with a libertarian among the speakers, and libertarian pamphlets available for distribution. Have a series of discussions. Many young people were initially attracted to libertarian ideas by a wide distribution of our ideas on the draft.

Recommended Reading

Truman Revisionism.

A concise essay on Truman Revisionism by an outstanding young New Left historian is Athan Theoharis, “Ignoring History,” Chicago Journalism Review (March. 1973). Spooner! Seven years ago. Pine Tree Press published one of the great libertarian masterworks of all time. Lysander Spooner’s No Treason, No. 6, along with the Master’s Letter to Thomas F. Bayard. Now Ralph Myles. Inc. has reissued this notable pamphlet, with an additional afterwork by Dr. James J. Martin. If you haven’t read it, you owe it to yourself to get this pamphlet. Available, for the bargain price of 85% from Ralph Myles. Inc., Box 1533. Colorado Springs, Colorado 80901.

News Notes

By Joseph R. Peden

In 1972 members of the Jewish Defense League planted a bomb in the New York offices of Sol Hurok, the impresario who has arranged for the performances of the Bolshoi Ballet and other Soviet cultural groups in the U.S. A secretary was killed. Five men were arrested and indicted for the fatal bombing. The Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals has now dismissed the case against two of the defendants on the ground that Attorney-General Mitchell had unlawfully tapped the telephones of the JDL and later destroyed the tapes. This was in specific violation of federal statutes. Moreover it was revealed that one of the defendants who participated in the bombing was at the time a Government informer. The court in its decision commented: “The problem of crime, particularly the diabolic crimes charged in the indictments here, is of great concern to us. But if we reflect carefully, it becomes abundantly clear that we can never acquiesce in a principle that condones lawlessness by law enforcers in the name of a just end”. Then the court quoted Justice Brandeis: “In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself: it invites ANARCHY.”

• • •

In the last-minute rush to complete its work, the New York State Assemblymen voted themselves a pay raise, by a vote of 94 to 59. Unfortunately this was three votes more than there are seats in the assembly. Also, three seats were vacant—two members having died and a third being hospitalized. When a question was raised by reporters, the clerk announced that a mistake had been made—the vote should have been 83 to 60. When the final record was issued it recorded a vote of 78-60. We wonder how many Assemblymen collect pay checks.

• • •

Bunker Hunt Oil Company has announced that Libya’s nationalization of its oil concessions has resulted in a loss to the company of 3.85 billion dollars, based on the value of its share in the Libyan Oil reserves. It also stated that it had invested $25 million in Libya since 1955. Under U.S. law. companies can claim compensation from the United States Treasury for losses due to nationalization by foreign governments. We wonder what this will cost the taxpayers.

• • •

The Brookings Institution has issued a report on “Economic Aspects of Television Regulation” which deserves attention. Brookings investigators found that in 1969 the profits before taxes of the television industry constituted a 70% return on tangible investment, sharply higher than the 20% average for all manufacturing industries. The reason? The television industry enjoys quasi-monopoly privileges which restricts competitive pricing of advertising allocations. Moreover, 87% of all stations are network affiliates and 85% of prime time is controlled by the three national networks. Brookings recommends that the number of networks could be doubled by the use of UHF channels 2 to 13, that subscription TV be legalized, full development of cable TV, listener-supported outlets, and several technical innovations which could bring cultural events of minority interest to all parts of the country by satellite to home broadcasting or video-cassettes. These would reduce the profits of the present monopoly-owners, but greatly increase competition in pricing, programming and ownership. They also recommend divesting the FCC of any responsibility for content and quality of programming, limiting them to allocation of signal channels\and other engineering details.

The Meaning of War

A suggestion from Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence and pioneer psychiatrist.

Signs of War

“In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign, which is placed over the door of the War Office.

1. An office for butchering the human species.

2. A widow and orphan making office.

3. A broken bone making office.

4. A wooden leg making office.

5. An office for creating public and private vices.

6. An office for creating a public debt.

7. An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.

8. An office for creating famine.

9. An office for creating pestilential diseases.

10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty and national happiness.

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any other object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.

Above this group of woeful figures, let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood: “National Glory.” The above is excerpted from Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagober D. Runes, published in 1947 by the Philosophical Library, Inc., New York, N.Y., with permission.

Footnotes

[1] Gerald Nash, United States Oil Policy, 1890-1964, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, 1968), pp. 18-19. For further details on naval petroleum policy, see John A. DeNovo, “Petroleum and the U.S. Navy Before World War I”, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XLI, March 1955.

[2] Quoted in Richard O’Connor, The Oil Barons, Little, Brown and Company (Boston, 1971), p. 189.

[3] An excellent historical account of this period in the domestic oil industry is available in Gerald Nash, United States Oil Policy, 1890-1964, op. cit., p. 28. Also, Murray Rothbard has written a highly informative article on the close cooperation which evolved between business interests and the government during World War I in Ronald Radosh and Murray Rothbard, eds., A New History of Leviathan, E. P. Dutton & Co. (New York, 1972).

[4] Sehurr, Netschert, et. al., Energy in the American Economy, 1850-1975, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, 1960), p. 100.

[5] Statistics from Petroleum Facts and Figures, 9th edition, 1950.

[6] Gerald Nash, United States Oil Policy, 1890-1964, op. cit., pp. 44-46.

[7] Quoted in Harvey O’Connor, World Crisis in Oil, Monthly Review Press (New York, 1962), p. 66.

[8] Quoted in ibid., pp. 71-72.

[9] Quoted in Ludwell Denny, We Fight for Oil, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, 1928), p. 18.

[10] For details regarding this episode see Ludwell Denny, We Fight for Oil, op. cit., pp. 45-95 and also for general background, see Peter Calvert, The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1914, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1968).

[11] Quoted in Richard O’Connor, The Oil Barons, op. cit., p. 232.

[12] George W. Stocking, Middle East Oil: A Study in Political and Economic Controversy, Vanderbilt University Press (Nashville, 1970), pp. 396-397.

[13] Quoted in Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War, Atheneum (New York 1972), p. 201.

[14] For further details, see Gabriel Kolko’s excellent discussion of the wartime tensions which developed over Middle Eastern oil reserves in The Politics of War, Random House (New York, 1968), pp. 294-313.

[15] Quoted in Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War, op. cit., p. 201.

[16] Quoted in Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power, Harper and Row (New York, 1972), p. 415.

[17] Ibid., p. 403.

[18] A highly perceptive muck-raking account of this episode is presented in Richard O’Connor, The Oil Barons, op. cit., pp. 366-382.

[19] Statistics presented in Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism, Modern Reader Paperbacks (New York, 1969), p. 43.

[20] These statistics are presented in an excellent analysis of the economic significance of foreign petroleum investments by Michael Tanzer, The Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries, Beacon Press (Boston, 1969), pp. 41-49.

[21] Business Week, September 26, 1970, p. 24.

[22] Quoted in Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism, op. cit., p. 53.

[23] Quoted in ibid., p. 55.

[24] Carl Vansant, Strategic Energy Supply and National Security, Praeger (New York, 1971), p. 51.

[25] Business Week, September 26, 1970, p. 24.

[26] Carl Vansant, Strategic Energy Supply and National Security, op, cit., p. 83.

[27] Gulf Oil Company has perhaps led in efforts to diversify out of petroleum operations and a recent account of their strategy is available in The Economist, June 10, 1972, pp. 68-69. It is interesting to note that, of the major international oil companies, Gulf Oil is one of the most dependent on Middle Eastern crude oil reserves.

[28] Michael Tanzer, The Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries, op. cit., p. 50.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 9

SEPTEMBER, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

American Monopoly Statism

By Joseph R. Stromberg

Joseph R. Stromberg is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and is presently a doctoreal candidate in American history at the University of Florida. The following paper was read at the Libertarian Scholars Conference in October 1972.

I. Introduction

“The most unprofitable of all commerce is that connected with foreign dominion. To a few individuals it may be beneficial, merely because it is commerce; but to the nation it is a loss. The expense of maintaining dominion more than absorbs the profits of any trade.” So wrote the great Anglo-American libertarian Thomas Paine in 1792.[1] Had she heeded such views, America could have avoided the bloodshed and crimes abroad and the bureaucratic tyranny at home which have accompanied the building of her own “informal” empire.

Unhappily, classical liberal ideas never prevailed fully anywhere, not even in England or the United States. Interest-conscious groups, from exporters and manufacturers to missionaries and militarists, utilized the power of the national state as often as fate allowed; their aims included glory, power, land and the engrossing of foreign markets judged essential to national prosperity.

From the inception of the Federal Government in 1789, an American gentry of Northern merchants and Southern planters actively developed an American form of mercantilism symbolized by the “commerce clause” and embracing tariffs, a National Bank and strong central authority. Their program, though not quite reducible to atavistic survivals of feudalism which Joseph Schumpeter saw as the fount of European imperialist expansion, was a conscious continuation of the British mercantilist outlook. James Madison, in particular, fashioned the rationale of the self-consciously imperial American state, reaffirming the basic expansionist axiom of the mercantilist worldview. Even Jefferson with his Physiocratic, laissez faire leanings was at best a left-wing mercantilist when in power.[2]

Despite this early statism, the Jacksonian “revolution” produced significant gains for free trade, including the destruction of the Bank and Taney’s decisions overthrowing certain forms of monopoly grant. Jacksonianism was in Hofstadter’s words “a phase in the expansion of liberated capitalism.”[3] But even in an age of relative liberalism, those interests were many who defined laissez faire as “help without responsibilities.”[4] Like the Cobdenites, the radical Jacksonians were unable to sweep away all existing privileges. The liberalism of the period was marred, in addition, by a major violation of Natural Right, chattel slavery, and by the imperialist war with Mexico, a prime instance of “manifestly destined” land-grabbing. Ultimately, sectional conflict over control of the area taken from Mexico brought on the War for Southern Independence.

II. The Decline of Laissez Faire

The Civil War was the occasion of a mammoth resurgence of Hamiltonian statism. First, by forever precluding secession, Northern victory utterly transformed the federal union and dealt a death blow to real decentralization, The invention out of whole cloth of far-reaching executive “war powers” by President Lincoln paved the way for the 20th-century Presidential Caesarism, just as conscription set a precedent for wartime, and later peacetime, militarization of American society. Civil liberties naturally suffered.[5]

With respect to the political economy, Civil War centralization was equally harmful. While the internationally free-trading South was out of the Union, The Republican Administration secured passage of a “National Bank Act, and unprecedented income tax, and a variety of excise taxes” verging on “a universal sales tax.”[6] The tariff, whose lowering had been forced in 1830 by the South, was jacked up to nearly 50 percent, with postwar rates going steadily higher. Wartime greenbacks set a precedent for future inflation.

Aside from protection and American manufactures, perhaps the most flagrant wartime and postwar subsidy consisted of funds loaned and “public” lands given to the railroads by the Federal Government to encourage their growth. In the period from 1862 to 1872, the railroads received from Congress some one hundred million acres of land. (For that matter, the bias in favor of farming written into homestead legislation may have encouraged an uneconomical expansion of agriculture.)[8]

Such was the famed but partly mythical “laissez faire” which one historian, with amusing lack of irony, sees as epitomized in the inflationary-protectionist program of a certain wing of Radical Republicans.[9] In truth, the Gilded Age witnessed a great state-supported “barbecue” rooted in the rampant statism of the war years, whose participants defended themselves with Spencerian rhetoric while grasping subsidies with both hands.[10] The beeves of this “Great” barbecue,” as Vernon Louis Parrington called it, were supplied as much by local governments competing for industry as by Washington.

III. Roots—and Rise—of Empire

According to historian William A. Williams, the major political struggles fought out by agrarian and metropolitan interests between 1865 and 1896 concerned providing and regulating a national transportation system; establishing a favorable monetary system; and finding foreign markets for agricultural surpluses. The agricultural businessmen of the West and South sought regulation of the railroads to insure their equitable operation; ultimately, their radical wing, the Populists, proposed nationalization to that end. Another agrarian goal was inflationary coinage of silver to provide easy money, and it was hoped, to enable the penetration of markets in countries on the sterling standard. Great Britain’s dominance of world trade could thus be broken.[11]

Above all, the farmers wanted foreign markets for their surplus crops. American farmers had in fact been export-conscious since the founding of the Republic; they continued to look for outlets after the Civil War. The severe depression that began in 1873 gave them added reason to look abroad.[12] But according to Williams, it was an “export bonanza” lasting from 1877 to 1881 and occasioned by natural disasters which incapacitated European agriculture which really underscored the possibilities of overseas markets held for American prosperity. The recovery of European agriculture and the end of the bonanza only reinforced American convictions about the necessity of overseas expansion.

Although some effort was made as far back as President Grant to open up new markets, on the whole the farmers justifiably felt that their concerns were not fully shared in government circles. Accordingly, their discontent and agitation could only grow.

The turning point came when certain metropolitan Republicans led by the adroit Governor William McKinley of Ohio adopted a significant portion of the agrarian program, thereby winning the crucial support of a good many farmers in 1896. McKinley’s advocacy of bimetallism held out the prospect of renewed silver inflation (which Cleveland had recently repudiated). A protectionist, McKinley nonetheless maintained a low profile on the tariff. Most important, McKinley and his colleagues took over completely the agrarians’ thesis of “overproduction,” generalizing it to the industrial sectors of the economy. Their combined platform of protectionism, bimetallism and reciprocity treaties to open up overseas markets proved very attractive; together with an upturn in wheat exports it carried the election of 1896 for the Republican expansionists.[13]

The expansionist consensus, of which McKinley’s policies were the finished expression, had been long developing. It embraced goldbugs and silverites, who agreed more on ends than means. Rooted in a felt need to dominate whole regions for markets, the new policies bespoke a fundamentally imperial conception of America’s world role. This conception was reinforced by a “frontier-expansionist” view of history articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner and Brooks Adams which saw the frontier as the source of American democracy and prosperity; with the close of the continental frontier, a “new frontier” must be found if American society was to remain unchanged. Adams and his followers, including Theodore Roosevelt, defined overseas empire as the substitute West for industrial America.[14]

The Panic of 1893 and the economic crisis flowing from it set the stage for the emergence of McKinley as the leader of an expansionist coalition. “From explaining (the Panic) as a consequence of dangerous or out-moded monetary theories and policies, (Americans) came to account for it in terms of overproduction and lack of markets”[15] The means to such markets were a modern navy, reciprocity and, when necessary, military intervention to sweep aside obstacles to American expansion. To that traditional American sphere of influence, Latin America, were to be added the markets of Asia—above all China—and the world.

Given the goal of opening up markets, United States policy makers sought to create political conditions favorable to trade and investment in every country regarded as a potential outlet for surpluses. A variety of tactics, from reciprocity treaties to armed intervention, were employed to eliminate or prevent policies adverse to American interests on the part of such countries. This noncolonial strategy of empire, relying on America’s preponderant power to achieve “supremacy over the whole region.” was remarkably like the British “imperialism of free trade” analyzed by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson.[16] That as free trade it was somewhat spurious is clear.

The Cuban revolt against Spanish authority presented President McKinley with the necessity of risking war to sustain the imperial program. Aside from protecting American investments and markets in Cuba from the consequences of continued instability, the Administration wished to clear up the mess in Cuba in order to concentrate on the overriding goal of penetrating Asian markets. Impatience led to war in 1898.

By going to war with Spain, America not only pacified Cuba but also gained a foothold in Asia by seizing the Philippines from her. The reluctance of “our little brown brothers” to accept American suzerainty brought on our first Vietnam, the Philippine Insurrection, whose suppression was vigorously opposed by such anti-imperialists as Edward Atkinson.

By asserting the right of Americans to trade as equal competitors in all of China in the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900, the United States sought to prevent or reverse the division of China (and the world) into economic spheres of influence by other, less sophisticated imperial powers. To realize the asserted right of Americans to trade as equals everywhere became the key strategy and the sole consistent theme of American foreign policy in the twentieth century. When rival powers staked out empires and when strong nationalist and communist movements arose in the underdeveloped countries, Open Door imperialism began to involve America in intervention and war.[17]

IV. Genteel Fascism at Home

The developments summarized above were not natural out-growths of capitalism proper; rather, they fit the pattern of export monopolism analysed by Joseph Schumpeter and others. Briefly, steep tariffs enabled a great many American firms to price their goods well above world market levels. At these prices the quantities produced could not be sold. But to take full advantage of economics of scale these quantities had to be produced. At this point, the cry went up for foreign markets for the unsold surplus.[18] Before pursuing this other artificial trends toward monopolization bear examination.

Historian Gabriel Kolko has recently shown that vigorous competition was the main drift at the turn of the century; this despite the ample statism we have surveyed. In the Merger Movement of 1897-1901 Big Business failed miserably to gain hegemony over the economy. Defeated by competition, Big Business reformers resorted to what Kolko calls “political capitalism.” Industry by industry, these corporate “liberals” sought federal legislation to 1) avoid populistic control in the states and 2) “rationalize”, i.e., cartelize, their sectors of the economy. Regulation of an industry was typically pioneered by its biggest firms, which controlled the regulatory bureau thus established, to the detriment of smaller competitors.[19]

Concurrently Americans began seeing themselves as members of producers’ blocs, not as consumers, and syndicalism (or corporatism) of a sort became the dominant outlook by 1918. The National Civic Federation, a corporate liberal policy group, played a central role in this intellectual transformation. NCF stressed cooperation with nonsocialist unions and opposition to business “anarchists” who took competition seriously.[20]

Not too surprisingly, given the inner unity of “stabilization” at home and abroad, most liberal reformers were expansionists and many expansionists were corporate liberals. As J. W. Burgess wrote in 1915, “the Jingoes and the Social Reformers have gotten together.”[21] The combination of paternalistic welfarism and gun-boat imperialism symbolized by Theodore Roosevelt provides a close parallel to British “social imperialism.”[22]

Equally important was the “war collectivism” of 1917-18, when Big Business, labor and government happily fixed prices and set quotas for the whole economy thru the War Industries Board. In later years, many corporate liberals agitated for a Peace Industries Board, or its equivalent, to plan the economy for the benefit of monopoly capitalists.[23]

Herbert Hoover was a major architect of peacetime corporatism. As Commerce Secretary he encouraged the cartelistic integration of trade associations with labor unions. As President, he pioneered most of the New Deal measures, which had the unexpected effect of prolonging a depression itself caused by governmental monetary policy.[24]

In the election of 1932, important Business liberals shifted their support to FDR when Hoover refused to go over to a fully fascist form of corporatism. By contrast, the Roosevelt Administration pushed through the National Recovery Act, which openly sanctioned the cartelizing activities of trade associations, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, cartelizing the farm sector.[25] The Wagner Act of 1935 integrated labor into the nascent system.[26] Although the Supreme Court outlawed the openly fascist NRA, the New Dealers nonetheless fastened the shackles of corporate statism on American society by imposing less systematic controls, quotas and virtual cartels.

From the Progressives to the present, the drive to statism could only foster more and more monopoly; and more and more surpluses looking for foreign markets. Further, the brake on innovation and the general inefficiency deriving from the suppression of competition came to seriously limit investment opportunities. Men of power, their pockets bursting with monopoly profits, found yet another surplus—one of capital—crying out for Open Doors abroad. At the same time, intellectuals, reformers, politicians and businessmen increasingly internalized the felt need for overseas expansion.

Already under President Wilson

Tax monies collected from individual citizens came to be used to provide private corporations with loans and other subsidies for overseas expansion, to create the power to protect those activities, and even to create reserve funds with which to make cash guarantees against losses.[27]

Wilson likewise supported the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918 “permitting cartels in the export trade.”[28] Small wonder that after 1937, when the inevitable failure of New Deal reformism became painfully obvious, the New Dealers with sure instinct turned to overseas expansion as the answer to the economic crisis. In the late ’30s this meant running up against other expansionist systems. Eventual involvement in another war for the Open Door grew out of “a decision in 1938 to eliminate Axis economic penetration of the (American) hemisphere”[29]

Later, when World War II shaded into Cold War, “defense of the Free World against communism” became the most potent slogan veiling imperial reality. It overlapped reality, since the triumph of revolutionary nationalists in the undeveloped countries could block the expansion allegedly so crucial to American wellbeing. The permanent garrison state erected after World War II further subsidized the corporate power elite through defense production and research contracts. Finally, foreign aid developed as another subsidy to American exporters paid for by the citizenry.[30]

V. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Statism

We have seen that neomercantilist inroads on a partly laissez faire economy, gave great impetus to monopoly in the sectors regulated. Originating with agrarians and taken up by industrialists, the cry of “overproduction” was raised to justify an aggressive export policy favorable to various interests. But in general the thesis of overproduction was either a rationalization for entrepreneurial error or an honest, but mistaken explanation of real trends actually rooted in state power.[31] These trends were initiated by protection and subsidies, and aggravated by cartelizing regulatory laws.

The fundamental reason for informal, Open Door Empire was explained in 1899 by Francis B. Thurber, President of the U.S. Export Association: “We must have a place to dump our surplus, which otherwise will constantly depress prices and compel the shutting down of our mills . . . and changing our profits into losses.”[32] The English liberal John A. Hobson put it differently:

The economic root of Imperialism is the desire of strong organized industrial and financial interests to secure and develop at the public expense and by the public force private markets for their surplus goods and their surplus capital. War, militarism, and a “spirited foreign policy” are the necessary means to this end.[33]

Joseph Schumpeter analysed this tendency to “export monopolism” and vividly underscored its precapitalist and anticapitalist character. The tariff made possible domestic monopoly prices well above a free market price; at the same time it created an artificial surplus since the full quantity produced of a good could not be sold at that price. But the full amount was produced in order to enjoy lower unit costs. The ensuing dilemma was resolved by selling or “dumping” the excess abroad “at a lower price, sometimes . . . below cost.”

Since existing “cartels successfully impede the founding of new enterprises,” foreign investment likewise becomes a necessary outlet. To implement the policy of export monopolism “the idea of military force readily suggests itself.” Empire (formal or otherwise) is the outcome.

Imperialism exploits the nation for the benefit of a few; since without it, prices in the home market would be lower. If a given firm could not survive at free market prices in the absence of empire, it was in Schumpeter’s words “expanded beyond economically justifiable limits,” and its factors of production could be better utilized elsewhere.

Thus, there was nothing inevitable or capitalist about imperialism. In truth, “the rise of trusts and cartels—a phenomenon quite different from the trend to large-scale production . . . can never be explained by the automatism of the competitive system.” On the contrary, monopoly is explained as arising from state interference in the economy.[34]

Another thorough student of imperialism, E. M. Winslow suggested that in part the monopolistic positions sought by business and labor (and which encouraged imperial expansion) were designed to protect them from the instability of the trade cycle. Understanding the connection between general depressions and credit expansion, Winslow recommended instead of privilege, “social control of the monetary aspects of the economic process.”[35] Certainly, the gains for statism occasioned by the 1929 depression indicate that an understandable desire for a minimum of stability can account for part of the drive to corporatism in modern America. Even here, the state must bear primary responsibility inasmuch as state fostered credit expansion is the cause of depressions. There is reason to believe that laissez faire banking would in itself provide the “social control” of the monetary process Winslow proposed.[36]

Murray Rothbard has recently argued powerfully that all government regulation of business promotes monopoly and inhibits innovation. Under the centralized corporate statism of modern America, innovation and the founding of new enterprises is sufficiently discouraged that in Jane Jacob’s words “there is nowhere to export the embarrassing superfluity of capital except abroad.”[37]

The monopoly structure of the economy by preventing innovation limits domestic investment and promotes aggressive capital export. Simultaneously, monopolistic pricing made possible by tariffs, quotas and all manner of regulations generates surpluses of goods to be sent abroad. Thus, we have traced monopoly and empire to the state and are in a position to see that imperialism is the highest stage of statism not of capitalism understood as the free market. It is the outcome of the interaction of the permanent state apparatus, whose chief asset is power, with interest groups that wish to utilize that power to exploit those less favored. In Schumpeter’s words: “The bourgeoisie seeks to win over the state for itself, and in return serves the state and state interests that are different from its own.”[38]

Empire may have wealth as one of its goals and justifications, but it is not a product of capitalism as such. It is not “determined” by purely economic facts as the Marxists would have it. On the contrary, the empire is the extension of the control and influence of a power elite which has already far too much power at home. Its fundamental causes are to be sought in the realm of the will-to-power, state aggrandizement, militarism, aggressive nationalism and other irrational precapitalist and noncapitalist features of the imperial society. In the words of Gustave de Molinari, “The sovereign power of governments over the life and property of the individual is, in fact, the sole fount and spring of militaryism, policy, and protection.”[39]

Libertarianism And Social Transformation

By Steve Halbrook

Libertarianism and Social Transformation

Elsewhere in this issue we pose the question “What must be done?”—what is to be the strategy by which we preserve what liberties we enjoy, and proceed to the ultimate libertarian goal—a stateless society. This was the question discussed by three young libertarian scholar-activists at the first Libertarian Scholars Conference in September 1972. Gary Greenberg, an attorney from New York City, and a candidate for Congress at the time on the Libertarian ticket (subsequently not allowed on the ballot), gave a classical defense of the use of the electoral method for libertarian tactical propagandizing. John Brotschol, a founding editor of Abolitionist/Outlook, presented a case study of the infiltration of an existing political movement by libertarian activists, and their impact on the organization’s policies and work. Dr. Stephen Halbrook of Tuskegee Institute then gave a stirring, intellectually challenging paper that became the focus of most of the later comment and discussion. We are delighted to be able to print Prof. Halbrook’s contribution. I have added some remarks of my own made at the time as one of the official commentators, especially as I summarized therein some of the points raised by Messrs. Greenberg and Brotschol whose papers we are not able to print due to space limitations.

(Signed)
J. R. Peden

Libertarianism and Social Transformation

Differing strategies proposed by libertarians tend to reflect differing conceptions of and commitments to libertarianism itself. It is assumed here that libertarianism implies absolute liberty for all groups and individuals from the use or threat of physical force. Liberty is total in this conception, and thus the goal of the libertarian is to achieve not a few crumbs of liberty thrown down from the table of the ruling class but total revolutionary transformation. The true libertarian is not an intellectual sportsman who merely spends his spare evenings babbling about demunicipalizing garbage collection; rather he is one who devotes the whole of his life to the cause of freedom and who takes seriously Patrick Henry’s words that the choice is liberty or death. The immediate concern of the libertarian is the most liberty for the most people, the end of which is complete liberty for all people. This immediate concern necessitates that he seek to abolish those aspects of State oppression which are greatest in quantity and quality. This is why he takes a mass point of view, i.e., is above all concerned with the liberation of the great masses of people of the whole world, and why he zeroes in on the worst oppressions; for instance, why he is concerned more with stopping the napalming of the Vietnamese than with rescuing the postal service from the clutches of the State.

Applying this conception of libertarianism to the concrete situation of today, the implication is that libertarians must acquire precisely what most of them lack: a Third World consciousness. Most libertarians are preoccupied with the problems of a very small minority of the world’s population—the people of the United States, especially those who are in the “mainstream” of American life—and are least concerned with the Third World peoples, who are the majority and are the most exploited people today. This First World consciousness is behind the fact that many are concerned with the temporary loss of liberty of the draftee but few imperialism. The State is identical with aggressive violence, and the major agency of aggressive violence is the US government. The US government holds millions of people in absolute slavery. Each year it kills, maims, tortures, and imprisons tens of thousands of people. Every objection the libertarian has to the State applies above all to the United States. Every week the American Leviathan burns dozens of babies and little children to death everywhere from Vietnam to “Portuguese” Guinea. Every day the Special Forces attempt to gun down freedom fighters in Angola, Guatemala, and Bolivia. US agents torture hundreds of men and women in every Third World capital from Saigon to Buenos Aires. Masses of peasants are herded into concentration camps in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam while in Brazil and Paraguay Indians are starved or shot, all so that a few US corporations can reap super profits. There is no crime to which the US imperialists will not stoop. The US is the International State, and its lackeys include the Soviet social-imperialists.

It is the revolutionaries of the Third World who are the libertarians in deed. The only massive forces combatting the most Statist institution in human history, US imperialism, are the Third World revolutionary movements. In this sense some of the most important Anarchists of this century include Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Amilcar Cabral; they are Anarchists without having to declare themselves so, in spite of the fact that they are not as doctrinairely pure in the strictest sense developed by First World “official” libertarian theoreticians. It is the national liberation parties of the underdeveloped countries such as the Viet Cong which are the fiercest enemies of the Modern State, i.e., US imperialism. Libertarians in the First World can have no real strategy without recognizing this and giving total support to the Viet Cong, the Tupamaros and the OPR33, the Bangla Desh Maoists, and the Ceylonese Guevarists. Furthermore, these are principled allies because their positive programs are basically libertarian. General Giap wants to give the land to the peasants; Raul Sendic is for workers’ control; Carlos Marighela wanted to smash the bureaucratic State and to replace it with the masses in arms; Cabral is even opposed to having a capital city.

It is a sad fact that the majority of people in the belly of the Monster benefit from the exploitation of the Third World. It is a sad fact that as long as US imperialism gives them more cars and cheaper TVs, those classes which could otherwise be revolutionary—the workers, small businessmen, intellectuals—will remain supporters of Statism. Though oppressed by the State monopoly capitalists, the so-called middle class in this country is bribed by imperialist spoils. Some day these classes may become revolutionary because some day these State privileges will no longer exist due to (1) many Vietnams and the liberation of the colonies from the economic intervention of the US government, or (2) from a crack up boom and depression. In the meantime there are only two classes in the US with which radical libertarians can make common cause. One of these is the student class. A minority of students have been idealistic enough to take the libertarian tradition of 1776 seriously and cast their lot with the oppressed peoples of the world. The other revolutionary class is the black lumpenproletariat. This class has been oppressed by the State more than any other class in US society. In the last century they were directly enslaved; in this century government intervention in the economy insures their unemployment. The anarchist Bakunin and today the neo-Bakuninist Eldridge Cleaver have recognized that the lumpenproletariat is an instrinctively revolutionary class; and indeed the only massive rebellions in the past decades in the US were all carried out in the ghetto. Libertarians must seek to understand the lumpenproletariat and to create an alliance between the lumpenproletariat and the students. If only these two classes are revolutionary before a (possibly far off) economic collapse in the US, then there can be no total revolution in the US—but they can act as a “fifth column” in support of the Third World. To those who deny the possibility of the lumpenproletariat supporting libertarianism, the reply is that this possibility exists due to the fact that libertarianism has more to offer the lumpenproletariat than does any other political program, including that of the orthodox Marxists. The reason is that the lumpenproletariat has lost more in life, liberty, and property than any other class and hence by strict libertarian principles this class should gain the most when stolen property is returned to its rightful owners.

In the coming years libertarians must look forward to the building of a Libertarian Revolutionary Party. No successful revolution has ever occurred without the spontaneous risings of the masses and a Party to insure that the revolution is not diverted from its path. Those who object to a Libertarian Revolutionary Party because they oppose “leadership” are fooling themselves; if there is no libertarian leadership, then there will be non-libertarian leadership, so that indirectly those who oppose organization are supporting the triumph of Statist organizations. “Spontaneity” gives you a Kerensky, a mere change in name and nothing else. Revolutionary organization gives you a Makhno or a Lenin, and that means a true revolution. A Libertarian Revolutionary Party would give a consistently libertarian Leninism, i.e., a well organized, steeled Party which would abolish the State and prevent other parties from “spontaneously” creating a new State. The pitfall of total reliance on spontaneity is that it takes leadership from those who are conscious and committed libertarians and gives it to those who are not, the surest guarantee that libertarianism will not triumph. Those who oppose revolutionary organization in the face of reactionary organizations are objectively agents of the ruling class. This is why resolute struggle must be waged against the present day exponents of Kropotkinite opportunism, the anti-Leninist, utopian “anarcho”-communists.

A Libertarian Revolutionary Party bears no resemblance to a State. The Party may be centralized so as to coordinate action on a wide scale—the centralization of the State necessitates this—but the Party is a voluntary organization, which one joins and quits voluntarily. Lenin often pointed this out about the Bolshevik Party, and if one reflects on the essence of Leninism it is easy to recognize that such figures as Samuel Adams, Bakunin, Sitting Bull, and Durruti were all great Leninists. Leninism merely means organized and coordinated action, action that is well planned. It does entail the acceptance of a general Party line, but there is nothing authoritarian about this; as Lenin pointed out, those who oppose the general line are free to withdraw from the Party. And what could be wrong with a general line which was a libertarian line? If a Libertarian Revolutionary Party existed, should Statists be allowed to join and to represent their views as Party views? Of course not. The Sons of Liberty never allowed the reconcilers to infiltrate and thus to pervert their party.

The first step toward the creation of a Libertarian Revolutionary Party is bringing together a number of people under a common libertarian ideology. There is strength only in union, which in this context means a libertarian vanguard, a group united under a single strategy for revolution. Some day this will necessitate an all-US Party newspaper which perhaps would initially resemble the old SDS paper New Left Notes. Revolutionary libertarians must also bring together a body of literature which would more explicitly set forth their aims and methods. Libertarianism must be popularized and translated into terms appealing to potential cadre. This necessitates a total revision of Austrian economic theory, which must be purged of its apologia for the old order and shown to be revolutionary. Instead of vindicating imperialism a la Mises, market economics must be applied to Third World development. It must be shown that the “right to property” means that the First World must repay via reparations to the Third World the massive loot it has grabbed over the past century. We must take a broader approach to revisionist history; we must be preoccupied less with the criminal deals of the big powers (especially the US and USSR decision making elites) and more with the revolutionary response. Only this can create a Third World consciousness among libertarians, not to mention the, fact that only by stressing the revolutionary and pro-Third World aspects of libertarianism can we recruit old New Left cadre and, someday, appeal to the class demands of the lumpenproletariat.

Libertarians must write more books and do so from a more revolutionary perspective. But that is not all. We must act. We must work with other groups, especially the anti-imperialist movement. What would libertarianism be today had libertarians taken the early initiative to build the anti-war movement? Perhaps we would have a strong national Party and tens of thousands of adherents. Everything now would be fundamentally different. Instead, many “libertarians,” especially in the sixties, spent their time condemning Ho’s “authoritarianism” and complaining about Viet Cong “terrorism.” Only a few libertarians (such as Leonard Liggio) took part in the early anti-war movement and for this were branded “Communist” by other so-called “libertarians.” At this point libertarians can at least save face by joining in the anti-imperialist movement, and possibly some day become respectable among radicals. It is not enough to write an article once a year denouncing the US aggression or to sign a petition; libertarians must act to bring the war home, i.e., to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. Only by becoming action-oriented can libertarianism expect to progress.

The possible alternatives for action to which libertarians may resort involve everything from those as legal as apple pie to those for which our friend the State might heartily scold us. Under the former falls the task of educating the public. The Libertarian Revolutionary Party must be a declasse organization of professional revolutionaries drawn from all parts of the population, and to form this Party as well as to gain fellow travellers and sympathizers there must be some form of education directed to the general public. Thus the need for scholarly books, newspapers, even participation in elections becomes clear. However, such activities as elections must be resorted to only when they may be used as platforms to air libertarian views; participation in elections, as should be learned from the reformist Marxists, may lead to opportunism and wasteful expenditure of resources, not to mention the fact that elections reinforce the fetishisms surrounding the State. As for wasting time using ballots to dump Nixon, it should be recalled that dumping Johnson only substituted one imperialist for another, whereas the libertarian task is to dump the whole State machine.

In 1902 Lenin wrote: “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!” Seventy years later, the libertarian watchword can only be: “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will defeat US imperialism!” The truly imperative educational tasks must be directed internally, i.e., for the instructing and steeling of libertarian cadre. Libertarian journals must seriously discuss imperialism and Statism—a joking or humor society we need not—and must deal in depth with revolutionary strategies. “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” as our friend said. Yet, far from developing a libertarian revolutionary theory, many libertarians have not even done empirical studies on past or present revolutionary movements. A permanent communications network must arise to provoke development of revolutionary theory.

But theory divorced from practice is not enough! “If you want to know the theory and method of revolution, you must take part in revolution,” as the modern Chinese proverb says. “All genuine knowledge originates in are really concerned with the bombing of the workers and peasants of Vietnam. What is so disastrous about this overemphasis on the middle class whites of the advanced industrial countries is that it prevents libertarians from focusing on where the real battle between the State and Anarchism is taking place, namely between US imperialism and Third World revolutionaries.

The highest embodiment of twentieth century Statism is US direct experience.” This means that libertarians in deed can only move toward direct action. While this paper refrains from advocating any specific deeds or normative propositions, history teaches us that revolutionary action can be anything from leafleting to urban guerrilla warfare. The point is that the time for phrase-mongering and endless speculation is OVER. Libertarians should begin concrete actions on the local level whenever possible. To those who, like the social democrats, pro-Moscow CPs, and mealey mouthed liberals, parrot infinitely that “conditions are not yet ripe” bla bla bla, one must respond with William Lloyd Garrison that “gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.” The rebirth of the Sons (and Daughters) of Liberty is long overdue.

Use Immunity: Let The Punishment Fit The Crime

Among the multivarious assaults on Constitutional rights perpetrated by the Nixon Administration in the name of law and order and national security was a new law, reputedly designed as a weapon against the Mafia, who are well known to have a deep-seated aversion to police informers or stool-pigeons. The law authorized the courts to grant what has come to be called “use immunity” to witnesses reluctant to cooperate by telling all they know about alleged criminal acts. It was designed to circumvent the Fifth Amendment privilege against being compelled to testify against oneself. It guaranteed to the reluctant witness that nothing which he revealed under threat of contempt of court (and which was not known previously to the prosecutor) could be “used” against him. However, it was expected that the prosecutors would use witness A to tell everything he knew about Mr. B, while Mr. B would be compelled to tell all he knew about Mr. A. In one way or another, A would help convict B, and B incriminate A. If they were uncooperative, they were jailed for contempt of the grand jury or the court. In either case, the Constitution was raped. While reputedly designed to destroy organized crime, the use immunity was (as we predicted in Lib. Forum, Jan. 15, 1970) soon directed against “ideological criminals”, as Mr. Kleindienst was wont to put it. Peace activists like the Camden Catholics, witnesses in the Berrigan conspiracy case, the Seattle radicals, and perhaps most infamously, the Ft. Worth 5, were subjected to contempt proceedings and jailed without right to either bail or formal trial. For instance, Ft. Worth 5 were five Irish-born American citizens from New York city, all married, with several children, working men whose only apparent connection with each other was that they had separately involved themselves in raising funds for their fellow Catholics in war-ravaged Northern Ireland. Quite suddenly, each was summoned to appear before a federal grand jury in Ft. Worth, Texas, to tell what they knew about gun-running to Ireland. The five first met each other in the federal court in Ft. Worth, where they were promptly sent to jail for refusing to testify despite the grant of “use immunity.” None had ever been anywhere near Texas in his life, no other witnesses were ever summoned, no specific information was ever given them about the gun plot—they were simply imprisoned more than 1000 miles from their homes, wives, children and friends, in a state never notable for its friendliness towards Irish Catholics. They remained there for 14 months—prisoners of John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst—until recently released by a local judge until the federal attorney takes further steps to pursue or drop the whole “Investigation”. The refusal of the five Irishmen to testify under use immunity was perfectly natural. The Irish, living for centuries under foreign oppression, have an utter detestation of “informers”—and no greater shame could befall an Irish family than to have one of its members “turn informer”. And so, instead of frightening off supporters of the IRA, the stupid persecution of the Ft. Worth 5 created new heroes and further swelled their ranks.

Now, with a fine sense of true justice, the fates have decided to savage the Nixon administration with its own weapon—use immunity. While the radicals, peaceniks and Irish have refused consistently to cooperate by submitting to use immunity, John Dean, Jeb Magruder, James McCord, Pat Gray, Howard Hunt and others have embraced it in testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee and the grand jury. Their reason is simple: the more they confess under use immunity, the less there is for which they can be indicted. They have every reason to volunteer information on every conceivable illegal act they perpetrated along with others, since their own voluntary statements on the subject preclude their future indictment for the offense. If the government has already obtained sufficient evidence against them for an act, they can still be prosecuted; if the government has no sufficient evidence, but might get it from other sources in the future, the perpetrator can foreclose future indictment by testifying to his own crime before anyone else “rats” on him. Thus we see the somewhat unedifying “confessions” of Dean, Magruder, Gray and others as soon as they perceived they might become “scapegoats”.

The most endangered victim of this “use immunity” truth serum is Spiro Agnew. Federal prosecutor George Beall began his investigation of corrupt practices in Baltimore County in hopes of indicting county executive Dale Anderson, a Democrat and possible candidate for the governorship of Maryland. Beall decided to put pressure on William Fornoff, a non-partisan administrator in the county offices since 1957. Fornoff, in exchange for a promise of leniency and under a grant of use immunity, began to tell the whole story of bribery and extortion in the office of the county executive, involving not only Anderson, but his immediate Republican predecessor—Spiro Agnew. The contractors who had to pay the bribes also took “use immunity” and told everything they knew — further involving the Vice-President. The fact that these contractors were also widely known as personal friends and political supporters of Agnew’s rapid rise to state and then national office, made their testimony against him all the more damning.

Thus the Nixon administration has become the principal victim of its own perversion of the Constitution’s protection against the abuse of justice that always has been associated with compelling persons to testify against themselves in courts of law.

(J.R.P.)

Comment

By Joseph R. Peden

Our three speakers have presented us with essentially three different recommendations as to how we libertarians should engage ourselves in the political process to attain our ends. As each involves the use of a political party structure, I will begin by discussing “third” parties in our political system.

Dissident political viewpoints have traditionally expressed themselves sooner or later through the political process. Usually, after receiving little or no response from the major political parties, the dissidents have undertaken to form third or fourth or fifth parties which then proceed to present their case directly to the electorate.

Third parties have taken one of three forms: (1) they are built around a single clear cut issue; (2) around several issues which express a variety of dissatisfactions; or (3) they offer a total ideological package which, once accepted, offers solution to every question.

The first type has been fairly common in American politics: the one issue party—i.e. the Greenback, Prohibitionist, Women’s Suffrage parties. Their aims were limited—they never offered themselves as an alternative government—they merely hoped to persuade the ruling parties to adopt their policies. Though none of our speakers suggests it, libertarians could use this model if an issue of sufficient importance and clarity presented itself. It might even take the form of presenting the electorate, with a clear cut choice of policies through the referendum or the recall processes—both much neglected means of political agitation and potential reform.

The second model of a third party structure is the multi-issue reformist party, which presents a broad spectrum of issues and political solutions to the electorate. While willing to take over governmental offices, their main aim is to institute reforms in law and administration, or persuade the major parties to do so by winning a sufficient electoral vote to make them crucial in determining which major party wins control of the government. To achieve their ends they adopt extremely flexible tactics, running their own candidates in some cases, endorsing major party candidates in others; always interested more in gaining acceptance for their political policies than in holding office. In the 19th century the Populist party fit this model and was very successful in having many of its policies implemented by the major parties. In New York we have seen similar success by both the Liberal and Conservative parties, and this was also the rationale of the George Wallace party in 1968. This is the strategy which Mr. Greenberg offers us through the national and local branches of the Libertarian party.

Historically these parties have had a fairly good record of success in getting their policies adopted by other parties, and there is in theory no reason why a Libertarian Party of a multi-issue, reformist character could not be quite successful in this sense also. But let us not kid ourselves. If the LP explicitly espouses anarcho-capitalism, it will no longer fit this second model; it will no longer be merely reformist; it will be explicitly revolutionary—seeking a totally new basis for our society. It will not easily persuade the other two ruling parties to just declare bankruptcy and liquidate the State. My own feeling—which I think Mr. Greenberg shares—is that this should not cause anarcho-capitalists to desert or avoid the LP. Every reform which is libertarian in direction expands the area of our freedom and deserves support from anarcho-capitalists; so long as we understand the reformist nature of the LP and its built-in limitations from an anarcho-capitalist viewpoint and act accordingly.

Prof. Halbrook has offered still a third model for our consideration: the elitist vanguard party, restrictive in membership, purist in dogma, disciplined, and dedicated to a total solution to our present social ills. He calls it Leninist, and indeed it fits the model of Marxist parties of various ideological sects better than, that of traditional American party structures. The Socialist Labor party and Progressive Labor parties presently serve as examples of this third type of party. While such parties have been very few in American history, not even the American Communist party fully fits this model (it has frequently supported major party candidates), they have all remained minuscule, unsuccessful at the polls, and especially vulnerable to the vices of sectarianism. Moreover, their influence on other parties has been nil.

At first sight, and given Professor Halbrook’s unfortunate use of the term Leninist to describe his concept of a Libertarian Party, the notion of a elitist vanguard cadre, exclusionist in membership, purist or orthodox in doctrine, disciplined (“centralized to coordinate action on a wide scale”) “a well organized, steeled Party which would abolish the State and prevent other parties from spontaneously creating a new State” sounds anything but libertarian in spirit or anarchist in conception.

Yet without formally designating themselves as a “party”, various libertarians have identified themselves as a “cadre”, have held private, invitation-only meetings where they proceeded to plan future movement strategy, have set up organizational structures, and applied ideological criteria by which to establish the orthodoxy of the vanguard cadre, and even extended their exclusionary standards to the audiences which are invited to their “open” functions. I doubt if Professor Halbrook’s notion of a Libertarian vanguard elitist party differs much in reality from the notion of an elitist vanguard cadre of certain other libertarian groups. Of course the rhetoric each uses may differ, but a rose by any other name stinks as sweetly.

I remain however very doubtful about the value of such an exclusionist, ideological vanguard party or cadre organization. Given our already high penchant for sectarian exclusionism, and intolerance of any deviation from our own particular vision of truth, such an organization would tend to freeze our intellectual development within the parameters of the initial cadre’s ideological framework, and drive dissident viewpoints into outer darkness with appropriate weeping and gnashing of teeth. Also, to continue the Biblical metaphor, we shall hardly win friends and influence people if many are called but few are chosen. Or once chosen, are then expelled.

Prof. Halbrook however understands that a LP of the kind espoused by Mr. Greenberg will never serve the ultimate interests of anarcho-capitalists which are incompatible with a reformist strategy at some as yet undefined point in time. Yet Prof. Halbrook does not rule out the use of the electoral process as a potential platform from which to air libertarian views. But like Mr. Brotschol he fears that electoral politics may lead to waste of resources—and libertarian resources are very scarce.

There is no reason why both party types could not co-exist; for the reform of the present system—the work of expanding liberty wherever opportunity presents itself—through the pragmatic approach of Mr. Greenberg’s LP need not preclude Prof. Halbrook’s exclusionist ideological party which would concentrate on expounding the pure doctrine and preparing for the apocalypse.

Prof. Halbrook’s passionate indignation at the crimes of American imperialism is admirable and greatly to his credit is the fact that he has so often and so ably forced libertarians to confront Leviathan in all the hideousness of its reality. We all know people who work themselves into a frenzy about labor union atrocities and hardly seem conscious of the daily genocidal destruction of Vietnamese society, or even endorse it as necessary to preserve “freedom”. But at one point in his analysis, his choice of words does a disservice to his cause by confusing anti-imperialism with libertarianism. Libertarianism is anti-imperialist, but it encompasses a great deal more than that. To call Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, etc. anarchists because they are zealous anti-imperialists or espouse the elimination of feudal land systems or decentralization is to misuse the term—at least in so far as we normally understand it in our own circle. There were people who once spoke of Richard Nixon as an anarchist because some of his positive programs were reputedly anarchist. To point out the espousal of anarchist principles and programs within the writings and policies of Chairman Mao or others is useful and valid, but Prof. Halbrook has overstated the case when he writes that, “these are principled allies because their positive programs are basically libertarian.” It is a rhetorical overkill; an exaggeration based on a failure to take a wider view of what libertarianism fully encompasses as a theory or ideology or societal model.

Prof. Halbrook has a host of other suggestions which I think deserve our thoughtful attention. He urges more attention be paid to the response of the victims of imperialism in revisionist history which has presently tended to concentrate on the imperialists and their ideas and tactics, and he suggests that this new emphasis would make us more conscious of the problems of third world peoples and in turn create sympathetic attitudes among them towards our wider societal conceptions. Like Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Brotschol, Prof. Halbrook explicitly endorses participation in the work of other groups whose policies are broadly compatible with our own—though based on different philosophic grounding. He mentions rightly the failure of most libertarians to get in on the ground floor of the antiwar movement and its fateful consequences for our movement. Most of all, he rightly places an emphasis on action as the essential ingredient in espousing revolutionary libertarianism. As he says—anything from handing out leaflets to urban guerrilla warfare may be appropriate; concrete actions on the local level whenever possible are needed and he includes the work of the scholar as revolutionary in so far as it contributes to the cause of liberty. Within this context we are urged to do what we can whenever we can; and this I take to be what he refers to elsewhere as becoming a “professional revolutionary” for libertarianism.

I have one other question and that is in reference to Prof. Halbrook’s conception of “class”, in the context of a revolutionary situation. I don’t think of students as a revolutionary class of any significance; they are too temporary in their status. As for Black lumpen-proletariat, or white, pink, red and yellow, my understanding of what makes them lumpen is precisely the fact that they are impervious to any efforts to awaken their class political consciousness. By definition their interest is elsewhere.

While John Brotschol has little confidence in the success of the LP, his grounds for doubt are pragmatic: lack of money and incompetent leadership. He has no theoretical opposition to the idea of using a third party of the reformist, multi-issue variety. But Mr. Brotschol has offered us still another model of the political process—one to which we ought to give very close attention. Here the strategy is to infiltrate existing organizations—organizations that are open to new ideas and new members and which already have some political leverage or power in our society. It is the approach of the Fabian Society, the Free Masons, the Illuminati, the Opus Dei and other small bands who have a common ideology which they quietly implement by being professionally competent, persuasive, working harder than their enemies, and gaining the esteem and friendship and confidence of the powerful. These tightly knit groups create a network of sympathetic contacts within existing institutions and agencies and over a period of time gain dominance over these levers of power in a society.

As I look around the audience here today I am struck by the sociological character of the group—we are predominantly what the Marxists call intellect workers—lawyers, teachers, writers, editors, publishers, artists of various kinds, economists, psychologists, students, physicians. For a movement which extols the virtues of business enterprise, we have surprisingly few honest-to-God entrepreneurs, and fewer blue collar workers, housewives, and farmers. To say nothing of Black lumpen proletarians.

This situation is both our strength and our weakness. It is our weakness because we can only impose our vision of the good society with the consent and understanding of the vast majority of our fellow humans who are never going to read Atlas Shrugged much less Man, Economy and State, and are to a great extent simply beyond our immediate area of contact. It is our strength because the general movement of civilization rests upon the ideas and actions of elites; and in the next century those elites will increasingly be drawn from the intellect workers who dominate the media of communications—press, TV and Radio, education—and are the masters of science and technology. If we can capture the imagination and support of these elites, the rest ought to follow suit. Thus Brotschol’s strategy of infiltration of seats of power—the think-tanks of the corporations, political parties or government itself—ought to receive much closer attention, and might even be a suitable theme for a separate panel at a future conference.

Mr. Robert Poole discussed this approach in considerable detail in Reason 3 (June 1971) in a superb article entitled “Leverage Points for Social Change”. His basic argument is implicit in each of the 3 papers we have heard today. “The existing coercive political and governmental structure, with its control over lives, is itself the primary problem which must be dealt with.

If coercive restraints began to be removed, the superiority of laissez faire would become increasingly obvious. If this be the case, then the primary task is to begin making the right kinds of changes in our institutions, leaving the changes in values and attitudes to follow as a result”. Poole quotes Archimedes, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”. We are offered here today at least three platforms on which to begin our movement—of the earth.

Footnotes

[1] Richard Emery Roberts (ed.), Selected Writings of Thomas Paine (New York, 1945), 328.

[2] On the Founding Fathers, see William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (Chicago, 1966), “The Age of Mercantilism: 1740-1828,” esp. 150-162 and 185-192.

[3] Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York, 1948), 56, 56-67.

[4] Williams, Contours, 212.

[5] Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York, 1969), 116-131.

[6] Ibid., 129.

7Ibid., 153-4.

[8] Ibid., Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market (Menlo Park, Calif., 1970), 203(57) and 210(54).

[9] Williams, Contours, 300-1.

[10] Ekirch, American Liberalism, Chapter 10, 147-170. For the radical individualist critique of such Spencerianism, see James J. Martin, Men Against the State (Colorado Springs, Colo., 1970), 239-241.

[11] William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York, 1969), 132-404.

[12] For brief but lucid “Austrian” accounts of the depressions of 1837, 1873 and 1893, see Richard W. Grant, The Incredible Bread Machine (CR R. Grant, 1966), 27-36.

[13] Williams, American Empire, 385-404.

[14] Williams, Contours, 364-5, and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire (Ithaca. New York. 1963), 62-101.

[15] William Appleman Williams, “The Acquitting Judge” in David W. Eakins and James Weinstein (eds), For A New America: Essays in History and Politics from ‘Studies on the Left’ 1959-1967 (New York, 1970), 44.

[16] John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” The Economic History Review, 2d Series, VI, 1 (1953), 3, 1-15. For a discussion that concedes much of what the foregoing says but distinguishes this spurious “free trade” from that supported by genuine liberals, see Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Ibid., 2d Series, XIV, 3 (April, 1962), 439-501.

[17] On the Spanish-American War, the Open Door Notes and informal empire, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1962), 16-50. On the war, see in addition, American Empire, 408-428.

[18] Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays (New York, 1955), 79-80, ff.

[19] Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservationism (Chicago, 1967) and Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 (Princeton, 1965). For a comparative study of liberal and fascist forms of corporatism, see Robert A. Brady, Business As A System of Power (New York, 1943).

[20] James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston, 1968). For broader treatments, see “Part I: American Corporate Liberalism, 1900-1948” in Eakins and Weinstein, For A New America, 37-193, and Ronald Rodash and Murray N. Rothbard (eds.), A New History of Leviathan (New York, 1972).

[21] Quoted in F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, I960), 406.

[22] Compare Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (New York, 1968), on England, with Ekirch, American Liberalism, Chapter 11, “The Progressives as Nationalists,” 171-194.

[23] See the pathbreaking new essay by Murray N. Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I” in Radosh and Rothbard, Leviathan, 66-110. See also Chapter 8, “War As Fulfillment” in Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, 214-254, and Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s 60 Families (New York, 1938), 133-148.

[24] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Hoover Myth” in Eakins and Weinstein, For A New America, 162-179, and “Herbert Hoover and the Myth of Laissez Faire” in Radosh and Rothbard, Leviathan, 111-145. On the monetary causes of the depression, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton, 1963), esp. 16-21. For an almost “Austrian” treatment, see John T. Flynn, Country Squire in the White House (Garden City. New York. 1940), 47-53.

[25] Rothbard, “The Hoover Myth”, 176-9. On the reactionary character of the NRA, see Flynn, Country Squire, 73-86.

[26] Williams, Contours, 445.

[27] Williams, Tragedy, 76.

[28] Martin J. Sklar, “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism” in Eakins and Weinstein, For A New America, 80.

[29] Williams, Contours, 449, 452-462.

[30] Charles E. Nathanson, “The Militarization of the American Economy” in David Horowitz (ed.), Corporations and the Cold War (New York, 1969), 205-235; David W. Eakins, “Business Planners and. America’s Postwar Expansion” in Ibid., 143-171.

[31] On “overproduction” as a rationalization, see Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom (S. Holland, Ill., 1962), 64-7.

[32] Quoted in Williams, American Empire, 439. Cf. the views of Andrew Carnegie cited in Contours, 326-7.

[33] J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), 106. Cf. his remarks on US imperialism in The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London, 1926), 262-3.

[34] Schumpeter, Imperialism, 79-90. On tariffs and related export policy, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Chicago, 1966), 365-8, and Omnipotent Government (New Haven, Conn., 1944), 66-72. On the impossibility of monopoly on the free market, see Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy and State, II (Los Angeles, 1970), 560-660.

[35] E. M. Winslow, The Pattern of Imperialism (New York, 1948), 193.

[36] On trade cycles, see Rothbard, Man, Economy and State, 850-877; on free banking, Rothbard, “What Has-Government Done to Our Money?”, Studies in Human Action, III, 1 (Winter, 1963), 19-26.

[37] Rothbard, Power and Market. Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York, 1969), 228-9.

[38] Murray N. Rothbard, “Anatomy of the State,” Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, I, 2 (Summer, 1965), 1-24; Power and Market. On the ruling elite, see G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1976). Schumpeter, Imperialism, 93.

[39] Gustave de Molinari, The Society of To-Morrow (New York, 1904), 36-7.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 10

OCTOBER, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

Hands Off The Middle East!

As this editorial is being written, the tinder box of the Middle East is threatening to burst into full-scale war. Whether this new scare fizzles or not, another round of warfare is someday inevitable, and another and another, until the fundamental deep-seated conflicts are at last resolved. The fundamental conflict is that the state of Israel has grabbed an enormous amount of Arab land and territory, in the process manufacturing over a million Palestinian refugees who live their lives in the destitution of refugee camps, and creating a subject population of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs on the west bank of the Jordan. Israel grabbed this land in two aggressive wars, in each case fueled by American arms and money, and backed by the implicit might of the United States in the wings: the UN partition edict and the ensuing war of 1948; and the war of 1967. (The Israeli attack of 1956 was forced back because, for once, Israel lacked American support.)

Whatever the strength of the Arab forces, they have at least one hand tied behind their backs because everyone with eyes to see knows darn well that, should the Israeli forces get into any sizable trouble, American troops, ships, and planes stand ready to bail them out. The reason is startlingly simple: there ain’t no Arab votes in the United States, or Arab groups possessed of political or economic power.

Libertarians have, at last, pretty much agreed upon “isolationism” on the refusal to intervene in foreign wars—as the proper libertarian foreign policy in a world in which nation-States continue to exist. This principle of isolationism, or “non-intervention”, has been increasingly accepted in recent years, among liberals and the Left. And perhaps this concept is still not dead among the Old Right, the isolationists of two and three decades ago. With the Vietnamese and Cambodian conflicts still going on, though with less visible American support, the danger now looms that imperial war and foreign intervention is looming for the U.S. once again, with all their attendant evils of mass murder, increased taxes and militarism, and perhaps conscription as well. It is time for the antiwar, anti-intervention forces to have the courage to apply their principles to the Middle East, and not to let their vital principles be overriden by the temptations of ethnic chauvinism. It is time to call upon the United States to get completely out of Middle Eastern politics, to stop sending aid to either side, and to let the contending parties slug it out in any war that may arise without a hint of interference on our part. And not the least of the beneficial results of such rigorous non-intervention will be to avoid any possibility of becoming enmeshed in a disastrous global conflict. Hands off the Middle East!

Libertarians And Culture:
A Challenge

By James D. Davidson

How many libertarians would it take to save America? There is a tricky question. I have no idea what the answer is, but I am sure that it is directly proportional to the quality of person involved. If every individual who now considers himself a “libertarian” were possessed of the brains, dedication, and winning personality of Professor Rothbard, then the task would long since have been complete. On the other hand, if libertarians were mostly an assortment of low-life bums, it would require about 150 million of them. I present this calculation to explain what might otherwise seem to be a gratuitous attack upon some of our friends who are “out of it” culturally.

Why be concerned with aspects of taste? Nothing is more basic to the libertarian credo than the right of any man to live like a slob if he does so peacefully. True enough. But as a question of strategy, even died-in-the-wool-slobs could be asked to forgo their immediate gratification as a short-term sacrifice. For example, if removing the plastic slipcovers from living room furniture would improve the rate of conversion in home meetings, then it might be worthwhile. When freedom is won, the plastic slipcovers could go back on, there to remain, day and night forever. The same is true of gaudy jewelry. No matter how fetching it seems to the wearer, he might take it off to help the cause. I have personally encountered individuals who showed great potential as libertarians, but who fell away from libertarian circles out of fear their backs were not strong enough to sport the mandatory ten pound gilded dollar sign.

Too many libertarians turn off potential converts by demonstrating retarded cultural awareness. While the veracity of economic arguments is in no way affected by cultural taste, sociology tells us that the rules of assortive mating apply to all voluntary associations. Well educated people, as a rule, do not prefer to associate with folks who applaud between movements of a symphony or drink from a finger bowl. Such behavior has down-home populist appeal. But the down-home populists are not the opinion leaders and intellectuals who must be convinced before freedom is accepted in our present society. If the stereotyped libertarian is a cultural clod, then severe inhibitions against advocating libertarian ideas will slow the progress of the movement.

The noticeable craze for “science fiction” in libertarian circles provides a good case in point. One can hardly hand a copy of a libertarian journal to a sophisticated reader without apologizing for the imitation Heinlein drivel which too often accompanies sound economic, philosophic and historical analyses. The literature of fantasy has a place somewhere but it need not be incorporated as an integral part of libertarian thought, (It is as if all libertarians were involved fanatically in the sport of metal detection. If jabber about metal detectors and treasure hunts filled libertarian publications the result would be enhanced satisfaction of a few readers, with the permanent alienation of everyone else.) More telling still is the fact that science fiction appeals invariably to individuals who have never studied serious literature. These are emphatically not the opinion molders and influential intellectuals who must be reached.

One can make a case that much of what passes for received culture is ridiculous. And so it may be. But in order to make that case effectively, one must know what received culture is. A passing acquaintance with the major literary figures is essential to any convincing case against them. When libertarians reveal their literary ignorance, as many do, their other opinions are discounted as well.

Much of the blame for identification of libertarianism with schlock culture must be laid upon Ayn Rand, a woman of undoubted intellect who is nevertheless flamboyantly ignorant of many areas of human achievement. As Professor Rothbard has trenchantly noted, Miss Rand’s cultural preferences, justified with elaborate mumbo-jumbo, boil down to nothing more than a fondness for the literature and music which were in vogue when she was growing up in Russia after the turn of the century. This is perfectly understandable nostalgia. But Ayn Rand’s girlhood memories hardly provide the basis for discerning persons interested in literature and music. Russia, after all, was and is a cultural backwater. The 18th century never happened in Russia. The 17th century, a time of great achievement in English literature, was still the Middle Ages east of Germany.

Libertarians who depend upon Miss Rand’s shaky cultural guidance, neglect the more plausible identity between libertarian principles and classical literature for an identification with the wooly excesses of Romanticism. The virtues of a John Milton, for example, a true libertarian, are downplayed on behalf of the sentimentalism of 19th Century French Romantics. This is in spite of the fact that almost all intellectual historians agree that the true significance of Romanticism was to further collectivism. Even conservative Romantics such as Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand, and de Bonald were enthusiastic advocates of absolute state authority and subordination of the individual. The irrational content common to all Romantic thinking has been thoroughly identified. Professor Stephen Tonsor, the eminent historian, has made the case that the philosophy of Karl Marx is best explained as an incorporation of typical Romantic attitudes. So why be blindly attached to Romanticism? Its philosophic appeal should be almost nil for a perceptive libertarian. Certainly, one ought not to feel that a consistent friend of freedom is obliged to like Romantic writers in order to keep his self-esteem intact.

A similar case could be made against Ayn Rand’s taste in music. She is fond of Romantic music, which has many appealing qualities. But Rand’s philosophizing about musicology is even more shaky than that of the Marxist critics who profess to identify bourgeois deviations on the basis of note intervals and sequences. The fact that the music which is popular in Communist Russia today is largely similar to that which Rand advances as ideal for libertarians ought to give one pause. For all but the most perceptive student of philosophy, music, has no literal meaning. Where scholars have attempted to demonstrate an objective content to music, as Deryck Cooke did in The Language of Music, the attempt in no way resembles Miss Rand’s arguments. More persuasive than the ideological explanations is the fact that Miss Rand and Russia’s present rulers grew up together, listening to more or less the same music.

The suggestion that it is any more rational to prefer Tchaikovsky to Bach is ludicrous. It is merely a preference. To dress it in psuedo-philosophic trappings is to invite ridicule. The spectacle of Randians drooling in unison over the same composers turns off disinterested observers. One could easily detest Chopin and admire Claude Gervaise, Thomas Morely, John Dowland, and William Byrd. This delectation would provide no clue to philosophic understanding. No one who thinks otherwise among libertarians is sufficiently educated to make the case which would be necessary to sustain his position.

There are other idiosyncrasies among libertarians which tend to limit their effectiveness in spreading ideas among the intellectual and opinion-molding class. Many libertarians dress in poor taste. This defies the predisposition of most persons to like others who are most like them. When libertarians who dress like engineers try to persuade an editor of their position, they have two strikes against them at the outset. In order to be acceptable to opinion makers, libertarians should be indistinguishable, by appearance, from the people one would find normally in association with opinion makers. The suggestion here is not that one ape fashion trends, but merely be aware of the dress of those he intends to influence. Chances are that dressing sensitively is more important than a half a dozen syllogisms.

Many similar complaints about bad taste among libertarians could be extended. But it would be futile to elaborate the argument further. Most persons do not value freedom, and have never thought about anything. When someone is an exception to those unhappy generalizations it is probably too much to hope that he will also have a sense for public relations. Even more futile is the hope that the average libertarian, in addition to having a winning personality, will have the dedication and brains to elaborate libertarian theory on his own. Few persons will ever be philosophers. In spite of the pretensions of Randians that man is a rational animal, even most Randians have never had an original thought in their lives. Their rationality in solving proximate problems does not contradict this. It can be likened to the actions of a cat avoiding a car in the street. The fact that they act and act rationally promises nothing about their capacity for philosophy. The vast majority of men, libertarians no less than others, enjoy a free ride because of the mental efforts of a few individuals.

It is useless to develop arguments in epistemology for persons of normal intelligence, regardless of their dedication to freedom. All they will ever understand is the fleeting highlights; the conclusions which are enough. Let those who are not philosophers leave philosophy in peace. Observation of the proven principle of the division of labor would suggest that good thinkers do the thinking and those who are not, but interested in promoting freedom, provide whatever their skills and disposition allow. If that means hustling for converts, it could also include casting off the cheap, schlock dollar sign jewelry, buying some new clothes, burying the plastic slip covers; turning from Mickey Spilane to John Milton, listening to Bach, and otherwise conducting oneself as fittingly as one can to strike up contacts among persons it would be important to convert.

Hopefully (from the point of view of hastening the day of ultimate success) many of the libertarians scattered through America, even those with the worst of taste, are persons of genuine intellectual potential. For those who can understand a philosophic argument well enough to make something of it, I have a suggestion whereby they could stick with the element of fantasy which they love in science fiction, while reaching an important and neglected group of intellectuals. Throw away the science fiction magazines and subscribe to The Journal of Theological Studies (c/o the Clarendon Press, Oxford) and The Harvard Theological Review. This is absolutely the best way of purging residual Randism. Reading these two journals, both of which boast works of superb scholarship, you will notice an amazing thing. There is just as much libertarian content in some religions fantasy as there is in Heinlein. But it is far better for you. The arguments of the theologians are still drawn out with Thomistic rigor, and scholarly skill. Since it is common knowledge that most theologians don’t believe in God, few of the arguments will be offensive to other than militant atheists. But even better than the fantasies of the science fiction writers, is the earnest and profound concern of the theologians for great issues: the well-being of the individual man in his ultimate geopolitical environment. This high moral concern is exactly what one needs to be a libertarian. The a priori mode of argument is a familiar one to those who have studied libertarian economics. The disposition, then, among theologians is not more unkind to the progress of libertarian thought than is the case among science fiction fans.

If more libertarians would fall in among theologians, the result could be a progress of pro-freedom arguments among that group with a still-considerable influence. And the theologians might do us the favor of introducing the narrowly educated libertarians to the broad outlines of Western culture. They might even hook a few Randians on Bach.

Send Money!

In the five years of existence of the Lib. Forum, we have not made a pitch for money for any cause or group, even for ourselves. But we now urge all libertarians or even quasi-libertarians to send as much money as they can spare, and right away, to the Youngstein for Mayor cause in New York City. For by dint of heroic efforts and operating on a shoestring, the intrepid workers of the Free Libertarian Party managed to amass over 20.000 signatures (!!) to put the entire mayoral slate on the ballot, including the Manhattan candidates headed by Gary Greenberg as the only opponent of the aging Frank Hogan for District Attorney.

This is it: this is what makes party activity worthwhile—the couple of months before Election Day when the party and its candidates can spread its message to an often willing electorate. An intelligent and lovely candidate. Fran Youngstein, has been waging a remarkably active campaign, and has won recognition and publicity on television, radio, in the press, and in public forums. Fran and the FLP already have earned at least recognition among broad masses of the public; so that many menin-the-street have heard the name and are at least vaguely familiar with our principles. There is no better time for a libertarian dollar to be contributed with more explosive effect. Furthermore, several outstanding advertising and other media people have joined the campaign, and they have already drafted a potential full-page ad in the prestigious New York Times which will be a knockout—if the campaign can raise the money, fast, to pay for the ad. We need $11,600 to put this sockeroo of an ad in the Times. How about it, libertarians; how about investing some money in your ideals and your lives and liberties?

Send your contributions, please, to the:

Youngstein for Mayor Committee.

Free Libertarian Party.

Suite 201.

15 West 38uth St.

New York. N.Y. 10018.

‘The Libertarian’: The Gospel According To LeFevre

Robert LeFevre has been silent—at least in print—for quite a while, and now he is back with a minibook, The Libertarian, which has been billed as a convenient and presumably objective introduction to libertarianism and the current libertarian movement. It is not; it is LeFevre riding his familiar hobby horses, with some further errors of fact thrown into the pot. Also added is the irritating habit of referring to his own views as “the moralist” position, so that he is the moralist and all the rest of us are, by implication, amoral pragmatists and sinners. Presumably, LeFevre has yet to learn that positions differing from his own may not only be within the dissident’s right to hold, but may be perfectly moral as well.

LeFevre’s peculiar variant of the libertarian position is that he holds defensive violence—the use of violence to defend one’s person or property against violent attack—to be just as immoral as aggressive violence itself. Defense against force is, for LeFevre, equally as immoral as the initiation of force against another. In short, to LeFevre, it is violence per se that is immoral (indeed, virtually the only immorality), and not the use that is made of it. The entire LeFevrian political philosophy is a logical derivation from this basic moral axiom. But I submit that this axiom is simply balderdash, derivable from nothing in the nature of man or the universe, an ad hoc precept imported from God knows where. It is not an accident that most people, libertarians and non-libertarians alike, regard this ultra-pacifist axiom as balderdash as well.

It is not that LeFevre is opposed to the rights of private property. On the contrary, he upholds them and denounces aggression against them. Fine; except that he equally denounces the use of force to repel such aggression. To be more precise, he divides up the defense function into several parts: “protection”, defense (in hot-encounters), retaliation, and punishment. The last three are all condemned by LeFevre as the immoral use of violence, which allows one only “protection”, a most attenuated concept which boils down to installing “a good bolt lock” on one’s door. For the rest, we are abjured to confine ourselves to attempting to reason with and persuade the aggressor as he is moving in on us. LeFevre on hot-encounters, e.g. being mugged on the street, reasons as follows:

“The pacifists and moralists (i.e. LeFevre), while admitting that they, too, might do anything at all under the pressure of expedience, contend that they should not violate the boundaries of an aggressor, and if they do in the excitement of the occasion, they would be in error and performing a wrongful act.” (LeFevre, p. 42).

LeFevre’s seeming concession about the pressure of the moment is, of course, irrelevant; the point is that he is condemning as evil and wrongful the “violation of the boundaries, of an aggressor.” As far as I am concerned—and presumably this also holds for most other libertarians—I don’t give a damn about violating an aggressor’s “boundaries.” In fact, the speedier and more effective such “violation” the better, in order to stop the aggression.

Conservatives often worry, and for good reason, about the “coddling of criminals” that goes on in our current society. But Robert LeFevre would elevate such coddling to the status of a high-flown axiom: beyond a stout lock and gentle persuasion, nothing can morally be done to stop a criminal in his aggression, to compel restitution or retribution for his crime, or to see to it that he doesn’t commit aggression again.

If I were addicted to ad hominem arguments. I could point out that a stout lock might do well in the peaceful climes of Orange County. California, but that it would hardly suffice against the predatory muggers of New York City or Washington. D.C. And in a hot encounter with a mugger. LeFevre may be content to try to “remotivate the aggressor by peaceful means” on the spot, but most of us are scarcely willing to rely on what will be, in that situation, a flimsy reed indeed.

But what about the stout lock? I submit that LeFevre, so enamoured of “boundary” arguments, cannot sustain the boundaries of his definition of “protection” with any proper precision. If a stout lock is OK for LeFevre. I presume that a fence would be too. But what about an electrified fence? Our precious criminal, trying to get over such a fence, is going to have his “boundaries” very much violated. Or, if a mildly electrified fence is OK with LeFevre, how about a severely electrified fence, which might well send our criminal to Kingdom Come? Or, how about a fence which, if violated automatically discharges a bullet into the offender? Or, going the other way, if LeFevre would condemn an electrified fence as immoral, how about a simple barbed wire fence? After all, the barbed wire might tear at our criminal’s bodily boundary. And even without the barbed wire, the poor criminal might hurt himself trying to climb the fence, or even in trying to pry open the lock.

The alternative, then, to LeFevre’s curious moral axiom is to hold, not that all violence is immoral, but that only aggressive violence deserves the label, and that defensive violence is perfectly moral, proper, and legitimate. Those of us, then, who are not absolute pacifists are not amoral pragmatists or believers in “situational ethics”, as LeFevre believes; it is simply that we hold a very different moral axiom for the libertarian creed.

In his anxiety to attack all defensive violence from whatever source. LeFevre goes so far as to make common cause with the statists in denying the workability of anarcho-capitalism, with its belief in private, competing defense agencies on the free market. Here he repeats the old statist canards about what would happen if A belongs to one agency and B another, and if A accuses B of a crime. Here his scenario, as usual, assumes that market defense agencies would be total fools ignorant of how arbitration and judicial service could be provided on the market or of how beneficial such agreed-upon services would be for their own profits. Here I would simply refer LeFevre to various accounts of how anarcho-capitalism could work that have been published in recent years: including my own. Wollstein. Perkins, and Friedman. Unfortunately, LeFevre writes as if none of this has been written or thought about.

Pressing on to attack the Libertarian Party or any political activity whatever among libertarians, LeFevre claims that the consistent libertarian must be “a-political”. Why? Because, the politically active libertarian is demanding a society “closed” to any but libertarian concepts.” In contrast, the “a-political” libertarian wants an “open” society in which anyone can believe anything he wishes. This is a curious position, since the “political” libertarian wants the same thing; but, asserts LeFevre, the “political” libertarian seeks to “impose his views (in support of liberty) upon others.” (p. 56).

This of course is a distortion of the “political” libertarian position. What we want is not to impose any “views” on anyone, but to combat and repress aggression against person and property. But there we have it, because that, too, according to LeFevrian axioms, is just as immoral as aggression itself. The “politics” turns out to be simply trying to use force to prevent forcible aggression, and we are back philosophically to what we do with the mugger in the hot-encounter. But the implications of the LeFevrian position are even more bizarre. For what he is saying is that any use of the political process (i.e. force) is as immoral as any other, and that therefore, for example, while voting for the draft is admittedly evil and immoral, voting to repeal the draft is equally immoral. For, then, you see, the proponents of the criminal draft are being deprived of what they would like to be doing; in a basic sense, they are being forced to leave the rest of us alone.

The important point here is that LeFevre’s dogmatic hostility to libertarian political action has really nothing to do with the qualms that all of us have in associating with the State apparatus. It really has nothing to do with widespread worries about capitulating to a lust for power. It stems clearly and single-mindedly from LeFevre’s basic axiom that defensive and aggressive force are equally evil and equally to be condemned. One can admire LeFevre for his consistency, but that cannot prevent us from a hard and critical look at the basic absurdity of his central axiom, an absurdity which makes the rest of his structure fall to the ground.

Given his political philosophy, there is little point in dwelling on the fact that LeFevre has no real strategy for the recovery of liberty and for the liquidation or even the whittling away of statism. Violent revolution, political action, anything that smacks of defensive force in any sense is equally condemned. All that leaves us with is to persuade the mugger, to persuade the State to resign and liquidate itself en masse. The rest of us can only wish LeFevre luck in this task, while also however employing other means (such as Libertarian Party activity) which we deem to be perfectly moral.

This brings me to LeFevre’s errors of fact about myself in this booklet. Describing me, he writes: “Rothbard has not always been predictable. He began with conservative economic leanings, then moved into the establishment of the left, attracting followers as he went. Disenchanted with this flirtation, he backed away and returned to a relatively pure libertarian position as an economist.” (p. 12) Sternly eschewing the temptation to delve into LeFevre’s own past peccadilloes and lapses from “predictability”, I must again state that this description of my activities is pure balderdash. My “conservative” or libertarian economic leanings—indeed my libertarian position as a whole,—have remained fixed and unchanging for approximately twenty-five years. My “flirtation” with some of the New Left in the 1960’s was simply a recognition of many libertarian elements that then existed in that movement. Indeed, a little later on. LeFevre himself engages in such “flirtation” by commending the libertarian contributions of former New Left leader Carl Oglesby (p. 19). Apparently what is sauce for the LeFevrian goose is not sauce for the gander.

Furthermore, fruitful collaboration with the sensible and quasi-libertarian elements and remnants of the New Left continues to the present-day. And not only with Carl Oglesby. Myself and many other libertarian scholars continue to have fruitful collaboration, for example, with such New Left historians and revisionists as Ronald Radosh, Lloyd Gardner, and Barton Bernstein, and New Left historian Gabriel Kolko’s great works have been used to good effect by Gary Allen and other Birch Society writers. Also I and other libertarians interested in combatting public schooling and compulsory education continue to collaborate fruitfully with such New Left educational theorists as John Holt, Joel Spring, and Ivan Illich. Ron Radosh and myself recently co-edited a book, A New History of Leviathan, which contained articles critical of twentieth-century American statism by both libertarian and New Left historians.

As for the rest of the New Left, it disappeared, in an orgy of Leninist sects and frenzied bomb-throwing, and few of us will mourn its demise.

But of course I do believe in the propriety (if not always the expediency) of defensive force against aggression, and therefore I seek always, as a “political activist”, to find ways and means to whittle down State power in any given historical period, and to form whatever alliances are called for in particular historical circumstances to carry forth this task (e.g. alliance with the Left against conscription in one period, with the Right against income taxes in the same or another period, etc.) Hence, what LeFevre chooses to see as “unpredictability” is really the employment of strategy in attempting to whittle down State power and to expand the area of human liberty. So be it; but let it be noted that for LeFevre, any libertarian believing in defensive force and wishing to do something to improve the prospects for liberty will reap a similar complaint. Through it all, of course, Bob LeFevre remains all too predictable, hurling his anathemas at anyone who does not share his peculiar moral axioms.

Revolution In Chile

It looked like the theorists of the Left had it all worked about Revolutions. Revolutions were admirable events in which the People rose up, in a series of strikes against the oppressive bourgeois State, building pressure from below until the final moment when armed struggle was used to deliver the coup de grace to the State apparatus. After the victory, retribution was to be meted out to the remnants of the old ruling class enemy, and the retributive process, while admittedly stern, was treated as either (a) giving the old ruling class its just deserts as well as guarding against the threat of a counter-revolution; and/or (b) the regrettable but insignificant excesses attendant on any required historical change. You can’t make an omelet, we were told long ago, without breaking some eggs. Furthermore, in a genuine revolution, organized women rise to the fore, rebelling thereby also against the super-exploitation meted out to their gender.

So then Revolution came to Chile. Acting against the oppression of Allende’s attempt to impose Marxian socialism, against intensified nationalization, against an inflation that tripled the price level over the last year, against a price control structure that caused widespread shortages of food and other commodities, against armed hordes of Marxist workers who seized factories with Allendist consent, the people rose up. For make no mistake, Chile was not just another Latin-American military coup by the armed forces, the Chilean armed forces had had a long tradition of not interfering in national politics, however distasteful. What they faced was a genuine revolutionary process rising spontaneously from below—rising, not from “outside agitators” as counter-revolutionaries always charge, but from the deeply felt grievances against the regime suffered by the people themselves. The spark was set off by the nation’s self-employed truckers, the heart of Chile’s entire transportation system; the truckers went out on strike in protest against impending Allendist nationalization. After weeks of heroic strike activity by the truckers, the rest of the oppressed middle class also went on strike: the professionals, the small shopkeepers, etc. And the super-exploited women rose up too; organized anti-socialist women played a large part in the revolutionary pressure and demonstrations. Then, as in the Left Revolutionary script, armed force was used as the final smashing blow to the Allendist state apparatus, after which a process of revolutionary retribution has ensued.

So fine; did, then, our Leftist theorists hail the Chilean Revolution as a shining new example of revolutionary success? You can bet your sweet life they did not. Not in a long while have we seen such a mass orgy of blubbering and hand-wringing as we have over the fallen Allendist collectivists. But fellows, how about the Inevitable Excesses of the Revolution? How about the necessity to prevent a counter-revolution? I guess it depends on whose ox is being gored. Because one vital lesson that the Left theorists of Revolution have failed to learn is that genuine grievances can and do occur under any State, including a Marxian State, and that therefore revolutions against Marxism can be just as genuine as revolutions on its behalf.

But what about all the weeping and wailing about the abolition of “Chilean democracy?” Well, in the first place, we all learned from the Revolutionaries about the use of the democratic form to camouflage the realities of State despotism. And we learned from Marcuse about the “repressive tolerance” in which democratic forms are used to fool the masses into accepting the State. And, furthermore, Allendism wasn’t all that democratic. Allende was elected by one third of the electorate, and his voting support never rose above 40%. And so The People, restricted by the formalistic trappings of the legal structure, brushed aside petty legalism to cast aside Allendist oppression. (And besides, Allende, scion of a wealthy family, looked and acted like a “bourgeois”, didn’t he?)

But weren’t the workers and peasants solidly behind Allende? Not really. The peasants had soured on the Allende regime when its land reform failed to grant the promised land to the individual peasants, and instead tried to force the peasants onto State farms: a fate even worse then feudal landlordism. Also, food prices were kept far below the free market levels by severe price control, and this led to widespread distress on the farms as well as food shortages in the cities. It is true that the urban workers, coddled by subsidies and by compulsory makework imposed by the regime, supported Allende, but that was scarcely enough.

So it turns out that the Left is narrowly selective in its support of People’s Revolutions; only Marxist People’s Revolutions will do. There is no question about the fact that the Allendist Marxists had brought Chile to the brink of economic and social disaster; in addition to the ruinous inflation, price controls, and shortages, the nationalized industries could produce very little under Marxian management. The Chilean economy was grinding to a halt, and the Revolution has now lanced the boil; the Revolutionaries have a glorious opportunity to set Chile on the road to freedom.

What will they do with this opportunity? The issue is still in doubt. Apparently, most of the nationalized industries have been returned to their private owners, and the State farms have been granted to the peasants. Foreign investment is being welcomed once again. And the regime has hired a team of bright young U.S.-trained economists who advise a return to a free market and open competition. This would mean not only elimination of price controls and of the special measures artificially holding down the price of food, but the eradication of the high protective tariffs behind which inefficient domestic manufactures have long sprouted. If the economists’ free market recommendations are heeded, that would be great, and prospects look favorable. But on the other hand, it looks certain that the Chilean State will hang on to its nationalized copper mines, with their drastic drop in output under State rule; and as long as they do that, how can the new regime claim to be pursuing a policy of free markets? And not only that, but the price controls still in effect are being upheld by the new regime’s shooting of people who sell goods at “black market” prices. The new revolutionary Chile claims to be dedicated to the “extermination of Marxism” and to the “extirpation of the Marxist cancer.” (What grand rhetoric! You don’t get to hardly hear any of that no more!) But how can a regime “extirpate the Marxist cancer” when it shoots black marketeers and hangs on to its nationalized copper mines?

One interesting side effect of the Chilean Revolution: We have heard for years the Social Democrat myth that there’s nothing wrong with Communism except the suppression of free elections, and that therefore no one would really object to a Communist regime if the Communists only eschewed violent revolution and stuck to “peaceful,” democratic forms. A corollary Social Democratic myth is that Communists or Marxist-Leninists have never risen to power via free elections. But first there was tiny San Marino, which freely elected a Communist government, after which Italy, which totally surrounds San Marino, blockaded the little country until the Communist regime was deposed. And then there was the freely elected Popular Front government of Guatemala, overthrown by an armed invasion fueled by the CIA. But now we have the clincher: a freely elected Marxist-Leninist government overthrown by popular armed struggle. The strategic possibility of a peaceful, democratic road to Marxism turns out to be virtually nil. And the real menace of Marxism is clearly not, the kind of route it adopts to try to gain power, whether violent or democratic: the real menace is the kind of State it imposes once it gets there.

Friedman’s Value-Free Value: Human Liberty

By Tibor R. Machan

In his exciting book The Machinery of Freedom — which deserves thorough study from those interested in how well a market system can solve problems most of us acknowledge require solution — David Friedman makes some by now familiar disclaimers about the usefulness of morality in political discourse and action. He tells us that “I have said almost nothing about rights, ethics, good and bad, right and wrong, although these are matters central to the ideas of most libertarians.” He goes on to explain that he has “couched (the) argument throughout in terms of practicality.”

Friedman expands on the decision to avoid moral questions by telling us that “I have found that it is much easier to persuade people with practical arguments than with ethical arguments.” And he ends the section which contains these disclaimers—a single page long, entitled “Postscript for perfectionists”—With the observation: “I have never met a socialist who wanted the kind of society that I think socialism would produce.” (p. 223)

For succinctness David Friedman must especially be commended. Of all the “value-free” defenses of human liberty—an odd notion right off—Friedman’s is the least cumbersome as well as the most revealing. I will not attend to anything but these remarks of his, mainly because they pertain most directly to the kind of work I consider valuable in the protection and preservation of liberty. Indeed the sorts of matters Friedman would consider less likely to succeed in efforts to establish greater liberty are considered by me “central.” Moreover, maybe due to my personal experiences that have been very different from Friedman’s. I venture to say there are socialists who want the kind of society socialism produces. I lived in such a society and indeed many around me wanted it badly enough to wipe out those who preferred otherwise. But these matters may be the result of Friedman’s not having met enough socialists.

To turn to this discussion by Friedman, let me say first that he does indeed say a lot about rights—he speaks of property rights throughout the book. And he says a great deal about good and bad, right and wrong—as when he tells us that “I have described what should be done, but not who should organize and control it.” (p. 220) The “should” is here surely something like the “should” of morality—Friedman then is describing the right sort of actions to be taken by us. What he does not tell us is, indeed—and to some deficiency of his thesis—why these are the right things to do. Perhaps he would answer: Because they will produce liberty. But it still needs to be learned why that is good. And here Friedman says he has only “practical arguments” to offer. Such arguments usually take the form of “If one’s purpose or goal is X, then, by reason of our familiarity with the better and worse ways to achieve X, one should do such and such.” Thus to become free, we should give up government or the state. Since the argument is conditional, one who does not have as his purpose to become free has the logical right to reject the advice offered.

Friedman may be right, to think that most people want to be free but just don’t know how to do it So not a political treatise but a manual for liberty will achieve enough to establish the required case. But then the case serves only those who already want freedom. The case for freedom is assumed, the audience is taken to have bought it prior to coming to Friedman’s advisory bureau.

That is why Friedman must spend some time persuading the reader that there are no socialists who really (deep in their hearts) want what socialism amounts to, lack of freedom, or slavery. But his efforts here are indeed meager to the task. They seem, although perhaps only facetiously to rest on Friedman’s having met a select class of socialists—those who don’t want socialism.

But this may not be fair. Don’t all people want freedom? In a sense most, at least, do—for themselves (although you will find hosts of them defending taxation, laws prohibiting hundreds of sorts of activities on their part). Taking it that most people want freedom, this usually amounts to wanting others off one’s back in areas of activities one wants to perform. But not in those one cares little about. So most people want a type of freedom that does not quite amount to the political liberty Friedman and other libertarians want: the freedom to do what they consider the right things, the freedom to act as one should act. But not the freedom to do what one should not do—never mind that these doings may have nothing to do with hurting others, enslaving them or the like. The kind of liberty, then, that most people want (implicitly—for few of them expound on it fully rationally) is what Professor John O. Nelson has called the continental conception (Hegelian or neo-Hegelian/Marxist type) of freedom. (Two sources should suffice to get one clear on this matter: Nelson’s own essay in my forthcoming anthology The Libertarian Alternative: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, to be out from Nelson-Hall Co., Chicago, in November 1973, and Andrew McLaughlin’s essay “Freedom versus Capitalism” in Dorothy James Outside Looking In, out from Harper and Row Publishers in Spring 1972.) Its basic feature is that freedom is the power to do the right thing, while slavery is the weakness or impotence that leads to doing wrong.

Surely Friedman does not have this sort of liberty in mind. Yet this is what most people want—judging by their actions and acquiescence concerning political and legal practices today. The unproven but assumed premise Friedman’s practical arguments require is not the one Friedman has succeeded in finding even among those socialists he has met. Their meaning of the concept “freedom” is totally alien to what I take to be Friedman’s.

None of this shows that the practical arguments have no value, only that they do not do the work Friedman asks of them—to show how we should get where “almost everyone” wants to get, to a free society. Nor does Friedman fail to give support to liberty with his able delineation of how its absence has produced all sorts of misery for people. What he hasn’t shown is why it is wrong to produce such misery. And do not say—well that is obvious. The lover of freedom is not hostile to the misery of those who would obstruct it. After all, thieves and murderers should be miserable in consequences of what they have done. A clear identification of why misery, through the absence of liberty in the lives of those who have not murdered and stolen, should not obtain is, then, not provided by Friedman.

Let me now touch on a very practical problem that arises by “couching arguments in terms of practicality.” Ralph Nader and David Friedman both agree that the Fed’s regulatory agents have done more harm than good for us all. But Nader advises that therefore we should make them more efficient, install better people, expand the powers of these people, etc., while David Friedman—as well as Milton Friedman and the entire Chicago crew—counsels that therefore we should get rid of these people, fire them, and leave people free to run their business in voluntary cooperation.

The source of the discrepancy in the face of such clear agreement should interest the value-free folks. Ralph Nader has values! Oh, he may be unable to demonstrate their validity, to justify them. But we might say that “these values are widely held by people.” They include a safe toy, harmless drug, lack of soot in the air, low prices, protection from nasty businessmen, the reduction of racial prejudice, etc., etc. These are the values Nader has in mind securing by way of improving the quality of regulation, by electing and appointing virtuous statists. These are the goods that he accepts, the ethical purposes for which he asks for the statist measures we all know well.

Without benefit of ethics Friedman can respond to Nader only by citing cost efficiency data. But Nader says: wait until I get the right folks in the driver’s seat, see if we cannot have the service for the cost and the efficiency of the performance to attain our goals. But, says Friedman, history speaks against that. Nader can then say: history hasn’t heard of me—and anyway, is there nothing new under the sun? Might it not happen this time? As a good empiricist, Friedman cannot resort to his kind of logic here. For indeed, as the high prince of empiricism, Hume, has told us, anything might happen so far as reason is concerned.

Yet this again might sound unfair. So, OK. Strict deductive logic does not prove the impossibility of Nader’s success. Surely good common sense militates against it, and that should be enough.

Unfortunately here Friedmanesque arguments cannot match the ethical ones. The plain fact is that where moral matters are involved we often do and should ignore cost and efficiency. Bad swimmers in expensive suits will jump to save drowning friends—the goal is so important that risk of failure and ultimate injury to self simply have no significance. Nader, then, would simply admit that, granted it isn’t likely that the Feds will do much to solve our problems, to achieve our values, our morally respectable—even commendable—goals, these are too important to give up in the face of minor matters such as cost and impending failure. So the drowning person may not be saved—it looks very unlikely from here that we can do much for the chap. But, dammit, trying itself is better than nothing, even at great risks. (You think up your own examples—there are lots.)

In short, in the face of values that have even the appearance of moral validity, efficiency, practicality and the host of so called value-free considerations are impotent. Yes, in the practical task of persuading people, just what Friedman is after!

To fight the argument that Nader and Co, offer one has to produce a moral argument that shows that doing what the Feds do—even cheaply and efficiently, not as they have done it thus far—is wrong. We need not even bother to show that what Nader wants to achieve is itself wrong—quite the contrary, we may have to accept that unsafe toys are bad, that dangerous drugs and vicious businessmen are all bad. The issue is whether it is good to deprive others of their liberty to prevent the occurrence of these bad things: not whether we at times—even most of the time—fail to achieve the goals Nader has in mind without incredible cost and inefficiency. That is to be expected when great things are at stake. No, we are concerned with whether Nader’s suggested cures, even when perfectly administered, at low cost, are not in fact worse for us than what he aims to avert with them.

Thus: imprisoning people because they might engage in “monopolistic” practices—is that not a violation of their human rights; does it not violate the principle “innocent until proven guilty” (not: proven capable of guilt); does forcing toymakers to produce this instead of that kind of toy because the latter might harm some child presume guilt before proof? Should people be deprived of honest earnings and acquisitions just so others’ safety and pleasure be achieved? In short, should force be used to achieve some admittedly admirable goals? And unless a moral argument can be produced, one that can stand the test of scrutiny, the Naders of our land have the better side of the argument—morality versus value-free liberty. (Just consider: valued purposes and goals versus value-free purposes and goals—how can they miss?)

But enough Friedman’s moral advice against offering moral advice lacks what much of his competent book lacks—moral justification. Yet the machinery of freedom needs just that.

Technology Forever[*]

By Jerome Tuccille

Technology and revolution. At first glance the words do not sit well together, and yet our “dehumanizing” technology may transform the dream of an open-ended, mass-market, “people’s” paradise into a living reality. Technology may well be the factor that brings the revolution to a close.

This is ironic, in a way, since the people with the greatest vested interest in revolutionary change have been the most vocal opponents of the new technology. The “professional” revolutionists among us have been strutting around the countryside wailing against our “love affair with machines.” our “obsession with growth and progress,” conjuring apocalyptic visions of a Doomsday Society over-peopled, over-polluted, over-mechanized, visions of a gutless humanity with the heart and brains bred out of it, capable only of stumbling trance-like into the future, hurtling mindlessly toward certain oblivion. By and large, our Doomsayers have been clamoring for a return to an idyllic past which never existed in reality, a green, halcyon, agricultural fairyland where everyone can play flutes under the trees, swim in rivers of May wine strewn with strawberries, and grab each other’s buttocks as they roll naked among the wildflowers. Strangely enough, these seventeenth-century wonderlands are always devoid of such tacky annoyances as red ants, poison ivy, snapping turtles, and coldspells. Nature is always kind, the month is always May, and the weather is always balmy in Dreamland. Somehow feudalism, poverty, disease, and hunger—all of which were rampant in the pre-industrial economy—have vanished into the Ether.

Well all this is very pretty, very romantic, and very unrealistic. If we are going to have our paradise on earth it will only be by harnessing our technology, by controlling it totally and making it subservient to our own desires—not by abandoning it to the Wasteland of history. For it is only technology which can tidy up the mess we have already made, provide us with the clean environment we all want, free us of the tyrannies of hunger, poverty, disease, and death, and deliver a genuine paradise on earth. Also, it is only technology that can remove one of the final barriers between us and the anarchic or democratic ideal: the tyranny of isolation, alienation, and provincialism.

Perhaps the greatest enemy of a universal Utopia is the distrust and intolerance of our fellow man bred by provincialism. Throughout history the human race has been sectioned off in hamlets, villages, towns, and nation-states. We have lived in little pockets of ignorance, each one surrounded by an iron wall of stupidity, suspicion, and superstition. Human ostriches, we buried our heads in the sterile sands of fear and security, and regarded everything different as a threat to our existence. Foreigners, communists, atheists, easterners, dwarfs, and one-eyed lepers were all prime candidates for the gas chamber. Better dead than red—or queer, or short, or swarthy—has been the warcry of every narrow-minded hick from the olive fields of ancient Greece to the flat and dreary cornfields of middle America.

And yes, nationalism is nothing more than provincialism run amuck.

My flag is brighter than yours, my skin lighter than yours, my God stronger than yours, my President nobler than yours, my town cleaner than yours, my tribe more sacred than yours, my country/town/village/tribe right or wrong. God, of course, is always on my side. The Old Fool is on everyone’s side—the Germans, Italians, Americans, Japanese, Outer Mongolians, and Tanzanians—even as they hack each other’s arms off and bomb an industrious citizenry somewhere back to the Stone Age.

(While behind the scenes of history the Billy Grahams of the world give the whole fiasco their blessings, tossing fuel onto an already raging inferno. How nice to snuggle warmly in the White House praying for the safety of one American emperor after another. It is much more sensible to prance about in double-knit suits and diamond pinky rings than to share a jailcell with a claque of unwashed subversives.)

(“So it goes,” said Kurt Vonnegut when he saw what was happening.)

Provincialism (nationalism on a smaller scale) is synonymous with ignorance, and the most dangerous thing about ignorance is that the damned condition is contagious. It breeds more fear, suspicion, petty (if not cowardly) heroics, and all this inevitably results in violence. Get them—hippies, commies, freaks, and un-Americans—before they get us. Before they sneak in our homes at night and rape our daughters, poison our sons with drugs and loud music, chop us up in our beds, and desecrate the American flag. Before they piss on the American dream. Hunter Thompson, Ken Kesey, and Fidel Castro all belong on the torture rack. Crucifixion is too good for them.

As long as this infectious condition exists (and it is a global disease; the American strain is only a bit more pronounced because of a certain native flamboyance), paradise will remain at best a distant dream; at worst we will usher in the Apocalypse instead, replete with man-made volcanos, faster-than-light warships, and a race of human gargoyles manufactured on demand in genetic engineering laboratories throughout the solar system.

But how to fight provincialism, isolation, and ignorance? Certainly not with guru chants, May wine, and love beads. And not by turning the earth into a global village, notwithstanding the worthy exhortations of Messers. McLuhan, Fuller, and Company. Herman Kahn is more on target when he speaks in terms of a global metropolis. In the past it has been in the cities where the civilized life has flourished, where the pristine hillbilly has been miraculously transformed into a tolerant, urbane, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan World Citizen. It is in the cities where provincialism (and ignorance) are beaten down and drummed out of existence. It is in the cities where music, literature, art, civility—all the worthwhile things of life—have found their voice, come into their own, and been rendered into magic.

How to end provincialism? By destroying the provinces and, with them, the provincial mentality. By making the earth a global city, a world metropolis, a universal seedbed of the civilized life, a paradise, a region of supreme felicity and delight.

A city is a state of consciousness, a condition of life. No proclamation or political act can make a village into, a city—except on paper. A city is a state of mind, and this is where technology comes in.

The cement that holds the city together, that gives it its status and identity, is the technology of communications. As this technology evolved from hand-scrawled, hand-delivered letters to the printing press, the telephone, the telegraph, radio and television, and now to global satellites, the cities also grew up, grew more efficient and sophisticated, and finally reached a point where they are ready to burst through their boundaries, explode and self-destruct with uncontrollable energy.

They can no longer be contained but, rather, need room to expand and flesh out the universe.

For the first time in human history we have the technology at hand to create our global metropolis, obliterate the provinces, and deliver paradise to the entire world. For something like six dollars and seventy-five cents on weekends and after eight o’clock in the evening, the most isolated rube in South Dakota can pick up his telephone and contact his counterpart in Samoa, Mozambique, and the Australian outback. There is still a language barrier, to be sure, and there will be for quite some time to come, but at least the physical barriers isolating one community from another (the westside of Manhattan from Ringoes, New Jersey for that matter) have been overcome.

These relatively inexpensive round-the-world telephone (falls are possible only if the telephones are working in the first place. Vandalism has transmogrified most of our public telephone booths—especially in the larger cities—into little more than urban outhouses, but Mother Bell is reportedly working on a system to change all that. In the near future we will be carrying portable telephones around with us. The phones will be activated when we step inside circular electromagnetic fields created by the telephone company, and the calls will be billed to credit cards or our home telephone numbers.

Hopefully the electromagnetic “phone booths” will continue to function no matter how many times they are urinated on.

Fantastic as this concept sounds, it is only the next step in a long string of advances Bell has in store for us. Also in the planning stage are cassette telephones for sending messages to many people simultaneously; self-dialing telephones that respond to a voice command; wristwatch telephones which will bring us another step beyond the Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio; home sentinel telephones which will inform us of fires, burglaries, and other extraordinary occurrences while we are away; picture phones, already being used commercially, for the home (the more advanced models will supply printed pictures of the screen image); credit phones allowing the caller to order merchandise and pay bills without leaving bed; and the list grows longer and longer even as we pause a moment to catch our breath. What all this translates into is the fact that instantaneous global communication grows more and more commonplace as time goes on; provincial barriers (and, hopefully, attitudes) are broken down as the world becomes a single, dynamic, interrelating community. Words such as foreign, alien, strange, different, and enemy lose their meaning when we are all citizens of the same global society.

Notwithstanding the dire predictions of Marshall McLuhan, the printed word is destined to play an even more important role in the Electronic Society than it does today. The book publishing industry will be modernized and wrenched out of the nineteenth century where it has been wallowing for the past one hundred and seventy-plus years. Through microfiching more than a hundred books can be imposed on a four-by-six inch plastic card. Instead of visiting mammoth bookstores with sturdy volumes toppling off the shelves—bookstores incapable of storing the forty-thousand books published in the United States alone each year—we will go to microfiching libraries capable of storing any number of printed words in a comparatively small area. If you want a certain book you simply visit the nearest library or “bookstore,” and computerized machines will print it out and bind it for you in minutes. This will save the publisher a boodle in production costs since he will no longer have to manufacture and distribute thousands of books beforehand (and worry about remainders afterward), and it relieves the bookseller of the guesswork regarding which book should be ordered and kept in stock.

(The only casualties under this system will be the authors, themselves, who glory at the sight of their own books prominently displayed near the cash register when they walk into Brentano’s. Perhaps advertising posters will provide the same balm for ruptured egos.)

Super phones and instant books. What else will our global cosmopolitan paradise have to offer? Well electronic newspapers are also on the horizon. Gone forever is (or will be soon) the sweaty romanticism of the Hunyonesque reporter, his filthy fedora jauntily angled on the back of his head, the constant cigarette working in the corner of his mouth as he taps out an “exclusive” on a typewriter built during the early years of the Middle Ages. Yes. Jimmy Breslin could be the last of a dying breed while the Tom Wolfes of the profession neatly make the transition into the razzle-dazzle kaleidescopic future. Video typewriters transmitting news stories directly to production via computerized phototypesetting equipment. Features written and edited electronically and transformed into newsprint without once having been tainted by human hands. The whole industry streamlined beyond recognition as newsrooms lose their cluttered hustle-bustle atmosphere and assume the aspects of a tile and chrome-plated, self-service cafeteria.

(Ah, nostalgia! You price the psyche with guilt-inducing memories. You fill the dismal past with romanticized fantasy. You distort reality. To hell with nostalgia! We are determined to plunge guiltlessly and ruthlessly into the future.)

Our paradise of instantaneous universal communications (hence, of the constant Here and Now; of the ubiquitous unifying Media) will also offer copier equipment, courtesy of Xerox, 3M, Hitachi, et al, designed to transcend even the time zones. Yes, Time the Tyrant may soon be emasculated and disemboweled as the newest telecopiers enable us to send printed matter, including photographs, around the earth by telephone in a matter of seconds. In living color yet!

The boob tube also promises to make communications easier with juke box or cable cassette TV bringing dozens—eventually hundreds—of programs into the home simply by dialing a number. Or, if you can’t wait until you get home, you will b« able to tune in Lawrence Welk on a wrist TV set, now technologically feasible with the development of tiny silicone circuit “picture tubes.”

(A nightmare filled with legions of lobotomized robots parading through the streets, their eyes forever glued to the image of the Beverly Hillbillies sparkling on their wrists? Or a paradise of peace, erudition, and urbanity through the magic of universal communication? A tricky dilemma. And a copout for this author who hypocritically lampoons the herd even as he urges it on toward the plastic, silicone, kandy-colored, tangerine-flake future.)

Yes I, too, will benefit in a paradise of talking textbooks. How comfortable to do one’s research from home by dialing the local library and having a computer read selected pages of books and magazines, and to store all sorts of irrelevant material in lithium niobate “filing cabinets” the size of a sugar cube. No more overflowing metal cabinets which threaten to drive the researcher from his apartment.

And so we humble ourselves before the altar of technology. Almighty Technology, deliver us from our sins and bring us to the Promised Land. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. On earth. Live and reign among us, in paradise on earth, forever and ever, amen.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Badge 373. dir. by Howard W. Koch, with Robert Duvall; written by Pete Hamill.

Badge 373 is a rough, exciting touch-cop picture, which could easily be named Son of French Connection. It is far inferior to its brilliantly directed, suspenseful ancestor, and is simply a minor sequel in the saga of touch narco cop Eddie Egan. The picture is chiefly remarkable for the attemps at censorship which have come down on its head, including picketing by the Puerto Rican Action Council because the villains happen to be part of a Puerto Rican political cum criminal gang. The Egan character is no more of an “ethnicist” than he was in French Connection, which called forth no protests from professional defenders of the clans. But for some reason Badge 373 has done it, as the world gets increasingly less tolerant about allowing any depiction whatever of sins committed by various ethnic groups. The whole hullaballoo is absurd and even dangerous; are we to arrive at a day when gangsters will have to have only WASP names in order to remain safe from the would-be censors? And if organized WASPS also start getting into the act, the criminals and villains in our movies won’t be allowed to have any names at all! The important thing is that the movie producers and exhibitors have the guts to say a quick and firm NO to the ethnic pests and pressure groups who are trying to keep us from seeing movies which they don’t like. Television is of course plagued with similar problems, as organized Jewish groups managed to help eliminate the harmless Bridget Loves Bernie series (does anyone remember the very similar play, Abie’s Irish Rose, which ran for years on Broadway with no protest whatever?), and organized Catholics tried to suppress two Maude episodes in which the leading actress decided to have an abortion. Again, guts are required in an increasingly ‘gutless’ media.

[*]A Chapter from Tuccille’s forthcoming book, Paradise Found: A Nonfiction Romance.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 11

NOVEMBER, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

Ludwig von Mises, RIP[*]

And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time’s decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.

— Shelley, Adonais

On October 10, Ludwig von Mises, well designated by the New York Times obituary as “one of the foremost economists of this century”, died in New York City, shortly after his 92nd birthday.

For those of us who have loved as well as revered this great and noble man, words cannot express our sense of loss: of this gracious, brilliant, and wonderful man; this man of unblemished integrity: this courageous and lifelong fighter for human freedom; this all-encompassing scholar; this noble inspiration to us all. And above all, this gentle and charming friend, this man who brought to the rest of us the living embodiment of the culture and the charm of pre-World War I Vienna. For Mises’ death takes away from us not only a deeply revered friend and mentor, but it tolls the bell for the end of an era: the last living mark of that more gracious, freer and far more civilized era of pre-1914 Europe.

Mises’ friends and students will know instinctively what I mean: for when I think of Ludwig Mises I think first of all of those landmark occasions when I had the privilege of afternoon tea at the Mises’: in a small apartment that virtually breathed the atmosphere of a long lost and far more civilized era. The graciousness of Mises’ devoted wife Margit; the precious volumes that were the remains of a superb home library destroyed by the Nazis: but above all, Mises himself, spinning in his inimitable way anecdotes of Old Vienna, tales of scholars past and present, brilliant insights into economics, politics, and social theory, and astute comments on the current scene.

Readers of Mises’ majestic, formidable and uncompromising works must have often been surprised to meet him in person. Perhaps they had formed the image of Ludwig Mises as cold, severe, austere, the logical scholar repelled by lesser mortals, bitter at the follies around him and at the long trail of wrongs and insults that he had suffered.

They couldn’t have been more wrong; for what they met was a mind of genius harmoniously blended with a personality of great sweetness and benevolence. Not once has any of us heard a harsh or bitter word escape from Mises’ lips. Unfailingly gentle and courteous, Ludwig Mises was always there to encourage even the slightest signs of productivity or intelligence in his friends and students; always there for warmth as well as for the mastery of logic and reason that his works have long proclaimed him.

And always there as an inspiration and as a constant star. For what a life this man lived! Until near the end Ludwig Mises led his life very much in the world, pouring forth a mighty stream of great and immortal works, a fountainhead of energy and productivity as he taught continually at a university until the age of 87, as he flew tirelessly around the world to give papers and lectures on behalf of the free market and of sound economic science—a mighty structure of coherence and logic to which he contributed so much of his own creation.

I am strongly reminded of perhaps the finest obituary in the history of economic thought—Joseph Schumpeter’s tribute to his and Mises” great mentor of the Austrian School. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. (J. A. Schumpeter. “Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. 1851-1914.” Ten Great Economists, Oxford University Press. 1951. pp. 143-90.) Much of Schumpeter’s eulogy applies to Mises as well:

“And now this great master has left us. No one who has been close to him both personally and scientifically would be able to describe the feeling that lies heavy on all of us. No words can express what he has been to us, and few of us if any will have yet resigned ourselves to the realization that from now on there is to be an impenetrable wall separating us from him, from his advice, his encouragement, his critical guidance—and that the road ahead will have to be traversed without him . . . .

“He was not only a creative mind but also a fighter—and to his last moments a live, effective force in our science. His work belongs not to one generation, not to one nation, but to mankind . . . .

“The silhouette of the man is everywhere the same—in all the fields comprehended by the wide orbit of his life, the intensive beat of his pulse left its mark. In all these fields we are met by the same brilliant personality, the same large and strong features—the statue appears cast of one metal at one pouring, no matter from what point we view it. . . .

“And in politics and scientific work the same character proved its mettle: the same self-control and intensiveness, the same high standard of duty which impressed itself on subordinates as well as on disciples, the same ability to see through men and things without the cold detachment of the pessimist, to fight without bitterness, to deny himself without weakness—to hold to a plan of life at once simple and grand. Thus his life was a completed whole, the expression of a personality at one with itself, never losing itself, everywhere proving its superiority by its own weight and without affectation—a work of art, its severe lines gilded by an infinite, tender, reserved, and highly personal-charm.

“Bohm-Bawerk’s (Mises’) scientific lifework forms a uniform whole. As in a good play each line furthers the plot, so with Bohm-Bawerk (Mises) every sentence is a cell in a living organism, written with a clearly outlined goal in mind. There is no waste of effort, no hesitation, no deviation, but a calm renunciation of secondary and merely momentary successes . . . . The full superiority of the man, motivated by a great task and full of living creative power, is here revealed to us; the superiority of the clear, self-possessed mind which from a feeling of intellectual duty renounced many a passing distraction. And this integrated plan was carried out in full. Completed and perfect, his lifework lies before us. There cannot be any doubt about the nature of his message.

“He knew as few did what he wanted to do, and this is why it is so easy to formulate. He was a theorist, born to see—and to explain—large relationships; to seize instinctively, but with a firm hand, on the threads of logical necessities; lo experience the most intimate joy of analytical work. At the same time he was a creator, an architect of thought, to whom even the most varied series of small tasks, such as the course of scientific life offers to any man, could never give satisfaction . . . .

“To say that his work is immortal is to express a triviality. For a long time to come, the memory of the great lighter will be colored by the contending parties’ hates and favors. But among the achievements of which our science can he proud his was one of the greatest. Whatever the future will do to it or make of it, the traces of his work will never perish.”

And yet in contrast to his celebrated teacher Bohm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises was made to suffer grievous neglect in the last four decades of his life Mises’ steadfastness and courage in the face of treatment that would have shattered lesser men, was a never-ending wonder to us all. Once the literal toast of both the economics profession and of the world’s leaders. Mises was to find, at the very height of his powers, his world shattered and betrayed. For as the world rushed headlong into the fallacies and evils of Keynesianism and statism. Mises’ great insights and contributions were neglected and scorned, and the large majority of his eminent and formerly devoted students chose to bend with the new breeze.

But shamefully neglected though he was coming to America to a second-rate post and deprived of the opportunity to gather the best students. Ludwig Mises never once complained or wavered. He simply hewed to his great purpose, to carve out and elaborate the mighty structure of economics and social science that he alone had had the genius to see as a coherent whole, and to stand four-square for the individualism and the freedom that he realized was required if the human race was to survive and prosper. He was indeed a constant star that could not be deflected one iota from the body of truth which he was the first to see and to present to those who would only listen.

And despite the odds, slowly but surely some of us began to gather around him, to learn and listen and derive sustenance from the glow of his person and his work. And in the last few years, as the ideas of liberty and the free market have begun to revive with increasing swiftness in America, his name and his ideas began to strike chords in us all and his greatness to become known to a new generation.

Optimistic as he always was. I am confident that Mises was heartened by these signs of a new awakening of freedom and of the sound economics which he had carved out and which was for so long forgotten. We could not, alas, recapture the spirit and the breadth and the erudition, the ineffable grace of Old Vienna. But I fervently hope that we were able to sweeten his days by at least a little.

Of all the marvelous anecdotes that Mises used to tell I remember this one the most clearly, and perhaps it will convey a little of the wit and the spirit of Ludwig Mises. Walking down the streets of Vienna with his friend, the great German philosopher Max Scheler, Scheler turned to Mises and asked, with some exasperation: “What is there in the climate of Vienna that breeds all these logical positivists (the dominant school of modern philosophy that Mises combatted all his life)?” With his characteristic shrug, Mises gently replied: “Well, after all, there are several million people living in Vienna, and among these there are only about a dozen logical positivists.”

But oh Mises, now you are gone, and we have lost our guide, our Nestor, our friend. How will we carry on without you? But we have to carry on, because anything less would be a shameful betrayal of all that you have taught us, by the example of your noble life as much as by your immortal works. Bless you, Ludwig von Mises, and our deepest love goes with you.

* A briefer version of this article appeared in Human Events, October 20 1973.

Libertarian Party

The elections of 1973 have come and gone, and the major result from our point of view has been the establishment of the Libertarian Party, and the Free Libertarian Party of New York in particular, as the central organizational force in the libertarian movement. And not only that: the fledgling FLP has now become a force to reckon with in New York politics.

The FLP campaign of Fran Youngstein for mayor provided a central focus for libertarians throughout the country. Libertarians all across the nation, even those with grave philosophical qualms about political activity, poured contributions into the Youngstein campaign, and enabled Fran and the FLP to gain an enormous amount of publicity and favorable recognition, and even endorsements from TV, radio, the press, columnists, and the public at large. Fran received approximately 9,000 votes for Mayor, far more than any minor party has received in New York City in many years, and FLP’s Gary Greenberg, as the only candidate running for District Attorney of Manhattan against the gravely ailing Frank Hogan, polled over 8.200 votes, approximately 4% of the total vote. Not only that: the FLP campaign has gained libertarianism a powerful recognition factor among New York City voters, so that a remarkable number of men-in-the-street, while scarcely converted, knew instantly who we were and roughly what we stood for. The publicity, the TV spots (a first for a minor party candidate in New York!) were done remarkably well, aided immeasurably by expert advertising and media people who joined the party and aided the campaign.

One exciting development highlighted by the campaign was the fulfilling of the strategic vision that many of us once had in the abstract: namely, that it theoretically should be just as easy to attract libertarian converts from the liberal Left as it is from the conservative Right. When this notion was first put forward, it appeared in a context in which the then existing libertarian population had come exclusively from the Right. But in the last couple of years, events have caught up with theory, and many of our most active libertarians had formerly been liberals, including Fran Youngstein herself. Indeed, the FLP message stressed our kinship with liberals on victimless crimes and civil liberties on the one hand, as well as with conservatives on property rights and the free market on the other. In fact, of course, only libertarianism can consistently fulfill both of these promised liberties, on which liberals and conservatives themselves fall down and lapse into inner contradictions. It is precisely this consistent fulfillment offered by libertarianism that draws liberals and conservatives alike into our ranks. Politically, this across-the-spectrum strength was embodied in the fact that Fran was quietly supported by various candidates and clubs in both the Conservative and Liberal parties in New York. The Youngstein campaign has vividly demonstrated the cross-spectrum pull that can make libertarians a vital political and ideological force in American life.

A word should be said here about the remarkable personal qualities which enabled Fran Youngstein, a political neophyte, to hold down a highly responsible and demanding job at IBM while still waging a notably vigorous and energetic campaign. Such intelligent and tireless dedication to the cause deserves the heartfelt gratitude of every libertarian.

The FLP has high hopes: presumably it plans now to take advantage of the momentum achieved by its electric burst into New York City politics, by running a full-scale ticket for Governor and Senator in 1974. For this it will need more manpower and more support by libertarians throughout the country. The point is this: if the FLP can win 50,000 votes for Governor next year, then it achieves a permanent line on the New York ballot, with none of the time-consuming hassle required to gain petitions to get, on the ballot for each year’s election. If we can achieve a permanent line on the ballot, stepping up to the status of the current four major parties, then the political clout and influence of the FLP throughout the state will accelerate enormously. This will enable us to achieve the balance of power, and even the victories, which the Liberal and Conservative parties have managed to achieve after gaining their permanent lines. The 1974 campaign will therefore be vital to the continued growth of the FLP.

As for the mayoralty election, apart from Fran and the FLP, it turned out to be dull as dishwater, by all agreement the dullest mayoralty campaign in decades. Only slightly over 40% of the eligible voters bothered to turn out to the polls. The reason was the universally-anticipated landslide victory of Democrat Abe Beame, a colorless but “safe” right-centrist, whose major asset was to offer a refreshing contrast to John Lindsay’s leftish charisma. Of his three major opponents. John Marchi’s Republican candidacy was undercut from the start by the almost savagely open support given to Beame by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, already tooling his forces for his (hopefully) final try at the Presidency in 1976. West Side liberal reformer Al Blumenthal’s Liberal campaign was made still more hopeless by the unseemly haste of his fellow Democrat reformers to leap on the Beame bandwagon, jostling each other for future patronage. As for poor old Biaggi, in addition to the desertion to the Marchi camp by the Buckley family and their powerful crew of Establishment Conservatives, Biaggi himself, savaged by the revelation of his lying about taking the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury, was rumored to have made a deal with the Democratic leaders to run a very, very quiet campaign. Having made no waves’, the right-centrist Democratic leaders will welcome Biaggi back into the fold. All in all, a campaign for snoozing, which increased the willingness of possible Biaggi and Blumenthal voters to vote their conscience and cast their ballots for Youngstein. With the outcome a dead certainty, the “lesser evil” argument cut no ice in any political camp.

It is appropriate at this point to take stock of the libertarian movement itself. Not only the Youngstein campaign, but also such successful activities as the Ohio party’s hosting of the Libertarian Party’s national conference this summer, as well as the forthcoming libertarian-feminist conference organized by the Kentucky party, make clear that the LP is currently the only flourishing vehicle for libertarian organizing. The LP is organized at last count in 34 states, and in each state the party is forming the nucleus for the ingathering of new converts, as well as the return to vigorous libertarian activity by those who had formerly become torpid or disenchanted, or who simply could not see any activist outlet for their libertarian impulses. No other libertarian organization is making a comparable record, which makes anti-party sentiment among libertarians look all the more sectarian and futile.

Looking at other libertarian activities, there has been a mixed record of retrogression in some areas and advances in others. On the East Coast, three important journals have folded. The monthly Outlook, founded in the high hopes of forming a vehicle and a locus of activity for the New York movement, has collapsed, partly due to personal feuds: the Outlook activists have either shifted their focus to the FLP or have dropped out altogether. The highly ambitious attempt to organize a biweekly tabloid. The New Banner, by the South Carolina movement has toppled in the midst of schisms and a police bust. The monthly Individualist, a Maryland publication of the Society for Individual Liberty, has also folded. SIL itself, however, now exclusively Philadelphia based, and headed by Don Ernsberger and Dave Walters, continues to be active as our only national campus organization. On November 17, SIL conducted a successful libertarian conference at Philadelphia. Energetic political lobbying continues to be conducted by the National Taxpayers Union, in Washington, and the National Committee to Legalize Gold, headquartered in New Orleans.

The collapse of several journals, however, has left the movement weak on the publication front. We are left with our one major “professional” magazine, the monthly Reason, published in southern California; a few newsletters: the mimeographed Libertarian Connection (also southern California); and the monthly New Libertarian Notes, published in New York by Sam Konkin and centering around his “radical caucus”. A particularly hopeful sign, however, is the growing prosperity of Bob Kephart’s monthly review Books for Libertarians, which has now absorbed the defunct Brandenian Academic Associates News, and may soon expand to a regular tabloid format. Furthermore, we are improving in book dissemination, the major sources now being Books for Libertarians, and New York’s Laissez-Faire Bookstore. Chuck Hamilton, of New York, is now launching a new publishing venture, which will begin by reprinting several libertarian classics, including: Nock’s Our Enemy the State, Flynn’s As We Go Marching, and Oppenheimer’s The State. All in all, a time of excitement, ferment, and the emergence of the Libertarian Party as our major organizational vehicle.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Psy Lib Once More. Our friends at Rampart College are apparently intending to push heavily on the Psy Lib front, attempting to integrate “humanist psychology” with libertarian politics, ethics, and economics. On the face of it, the Psy Libbers have a formidable task on their hands. Not only do they have to demonstrate that psychology is a scientific discipline somewhere significantly above the level of mumbo-jumbo and witch-doctory—a tough task in itself. But they also have to answer what might be called the “Davidson challenge” to science fiction and metal detection (“Libertarians and Culture,” Lib. Forum, October, 1973): namely, the relevance to libertarianism. One is reminded of the Libertarian Connection’s recent fascination with vitamin pills—an admirable devotion, no doubt, but rather, difficult to link up with libertarian concerns. Or, to put it another way, even if it were true, should libertarian journals allocate some of their preciously scarce space to the latest news on the technique of filling cavities?

From what I can gather, the Rampart answer to this challenge on relevance goes somewhat as follows: we have all had the experience of beaming our libertarian views at people and not seeing them converted. Since our ideas are correct, why do people not accept them? On this view, the answer must be “psychological hangups”, a failure to be humanistic, an uptightness about other people, an authoritarian personality or whatever. In short, people must be converted to the precepts and lifestyles of humanistic psychology before they can be ripe for conversion to the libertarian creed.

This argument strikes me as a mass of non sequiturs. In the first place, it is simply empirically wrong. I know lots of people with “hangups”, “authoritarian personalities,” etc, who are excellent libertarians. Similarly, there is no logical connection whatever. For example, let us postulate a typical Authoritarian Libertarian, worried about the loss of traditional morality, “uptight” about drugs, promiscuity, and bestiality; he may firmly believe that many people around him are doomed to Hell, either on earth and or in the nether regions, but he may also firmly believe that they have the right to do so, that everyone has the right to go to Hell in his own way, and that they and everyone else should be left alone. There is surely no contradiction here, and empirically such people have abounded in our great libertarian past, and even, mirabile dictu, are still around in our permissive present. Perhaps even our Rampart friends, as psy liberated as they are, may have a few qualms about heroin addiction, and yet this does not stop them or any other libertarian from advocating heroin freedom. In short, and this is surely an elementary libertarian lesson, one does not at all have to approve of something to advocate a person’s right to do it.

There is another consideration here: our liberated brethren are not so free of “hangups” or moral judgments themselves. What happens is that the moral and social pressure simply cuts the other way. What happens, for example, to the guy in a “non-judgmental”, “humanistic” encounter group who doesn’t want to be touched, who values his personal and emotional privacy, who wants to be “closed” rather than “open”, who wants to preserve his own principles rather than “flow with it”? In the old expression, what happens to him shouldn’t happen to a dog. Similarly, the inevitable thrust of a “libertarian-humanist” approach would be to cast into outer darkness all of those libertarians who are not and emphatically don’t want to be “liberated”, who are in short (name one: closed, private, authoritarian, uptight, morally principled).

Let us take even the extreme case of an Authoritarian Person who has what might be called a bureaucratic or a sado-masochistic personality, in short, someone who either feels a great need to obey orders and commands, and or feels a great need to hand out orders and commands and have them obeyed. Is such a person, at least, an inveterate enemy of libertarianism? Certainly not, for he might very well hold that all s-m activities must be strictly voluntary; in a free, libertarian society, then, lie can voluntarily join private s-m clubs, or voluntarily abase himself before a guru, a Perfect Master, or some other Authority, or gather around him willing subjects to whom his every wish will be their command. Certainly not a very healthy picture, but perfectly compatible with the freedom that libertarians are looking for, the freedom to form whatever interactions one wishes so long as they are voluntary.

We conclude, then, that if the drive for liberty has to be more or less suspended until everybody’s psyche is “liberated”, we will have to wait forever. Happily for our cause, liberty does not have to wait for everyone’, psyche to shape up in some way that we want: we don’t have to wait for a world of “humanists” or rationalists or traditional moralists. Libertarianism, the free society, is compatible with any psyche that holds firmly to the rights of person and property, whether for humanistic, traditionalist, or totally non-psychological reasons.

But what of the broader question? Why don’t we libertarians enjoy the instant conversion of everyone who hears our message? Here, the strategists of Marxism, who have cogitated on these matters for over a hundred years, have a lot more to say to us than the murky purveyors of psychological nostrums. We do not, as do the liberators and the Randians, have to hurl psychological anathemas at the unconverted. The basic problem is simply that most people are not really interested; every person is busy about his or her personal and everyday affairs, and certainly this kind of preoccupation with one’s daily life is not self-evidently irrational. The demands on their attention, on their thought, in their free time are enormous, and they are bombarded from every direction, from all manner of cults, groups, interest groups, activities, etc. On most of these matters, they simply cannot give thought or attention, and so they tend to absorb their views on matters of marginal concern from the world around them: parents, teachers, friends, the media. And since, in ideological matters, most of these influences tend to favor whatever status quo exists, their tendency is to go along with the current system. The fact that a few of us—happily growing in number—are fascinated by ideological concerns and devote a great deal of thought and care to them is splendid, but is not by itself enough to convince the busy and harassed citizen that he must go and do likewise.

So what does stir these people up, command their attention, cause them to devote themselves to political and ideological problems? As the Marxists point out, it is the occurrence of crisis situations, situations which call their attention to the evident fact of a breakdown in the existing system. Such breakdowns could be of many sorts: a losing war, a depression, a runaway inflation, a sudden “energy shortage.” Whatever they are, we libertarians know that statism will inevitably bring them about, and furthermore that they will come about with accelerating frequency in the months and years ahead. As these crises occur, more and more people will be induced to give attention and thought to these matters, and more and more of them will inevitably become libertarians. But they can’t do so if they don’t hear the message, or if they haven’t heard the message in the past, predicting the crises upon them. The task of dedicated, self-conscious libertarians (the “cadre”, in Marxist terminology) is to spread this message, to stand ready to do so, until, in crisis situations, our ranks are significantly swelled. As a matter of fact, it seems very plausible that the enormous increase in the number of libertarian cadre in the last few years is not unrelated to the accelerating number of such crisis, in domestic and foreign affairs.

Let us, then, not become so frustrated by the failure of instant mass conversion, by the failure to heed our message, that we start reaching for psychological smears with which to bombard the unconverted (either that they are “uptight” or that they are “loose-lipped evaders”, depending on one’s psychological theories). Let us treat the unconverted with the same respect with which we ourselves would like to be treated. Sometimes the Golden Rule is the best as well as the simplest guided

The Middle East

Let it not be thought that the current cease-fire in the Middle East is anything more than another interlude of uneasy peace in what is bound to be a protracted decades-long struggle, a struggle which will continue so long as the grievances of the Palestinian Arabs remain unsatisfied. The press does everyone a disservice by concentrating on the superficial maneuverings of the Sadat regime in Egypt, the Syrian government, most of the other Arab states, and even the “orthodox” Palestinian guerrilla movement headed by Al Fatah, whose basic objective of a rollback of Israel to the pre-1967 borders would leave the Palestinian Arab question still unresolved.

In this chronic and permanent crisis, the major task of American libertarians is to call for the elimination of American intervention in the Middle Fast. President Nixon’s frenetic world-wide alert is only one alarming indication of the lengths to which an unstable President with zero credibility at home is willing to go to recoup his political fortunes. The call for American “isolationism”, for non-intervention in the Middle Fast, is more than simply an application of libertarian political theory to one more foreign crisis: it is essential for American survival in a world suffering under the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction.

All this highlights the importance of the advertising campaign launched by the National Taxpayers Union in the midst of the recent crisis. The NTU placed a full-page ad in the Washington Star-News and other newspapers throughout the country, signed by Congressman Steven Symms (R., Id.), chairman of the newly-founded Taxpayers for Peace, and by the Executive Committee of the NTU (James D. Davidson, A. Ernest Fitzgerald. Robert D. Kephart, and Murray N. Rothbard.) The ad (e.g., Washington Star-News, October 21) began with the headline: “Do We Need Another War?” It continued with a marvelous quote from the grand old isolationist and conservative-libertarian Congressman H. R. Gross (R., Iowa). Gross, speaking on the floor of the House on October 17, asserted: “I do not know who is going to win the war in the Middle East, but I do know one thing for dead sure and certain—that I can name the loser. That will be the common, garden-variety citizen and taxpayer of the United States of America. He and she will be the losers, and mark this well. It is time this government tended to its own business and that is the welfare of the American people. It is time we stopped intervening in the affairs of others all over the world.”

The ad continued by calling for demands that Congress “deny funds which the Pentagon is seeking to pay for still greater Involvement in the Mideast.” It also urged a demand for “an immediate end to foreign aid,” in the Middle East and elsewhere. Attacking U.S. aid to Israel as well as to the Soviet Union, the ad continued: “You should insist that your representatives in Congress repudiate all ‘sweetheart’ deals with foreign dictators. Suspension of all taxpaper sponsored foreign credits and loan guarantees would also help prevent your money from financing wars.” Hitting hard at special interests using the government apparatus, the ad then urged that “this prohibition should extend to the operations of mischief-making international banks—which finance arms acquisitions with your money and credit. Remember that we have nothing to gain from this war no matter who wins. Remember also that powerful special interests are eager to use this war as an excuse to seize even more of your hard-earned money. When these special interests have had their way in the past, many Americans have died in foreign wars. This will happen again if we let it.” Revisionism reborn! The ad concludes by urging readers to join the Taxpayers for Peace. All interested parties should get in touch with the National Taxpayers Union. 325 Pennsylvania Ave., S. E., Washington. D.C. 20003.

Music: The Art No One Thinks About

By Kenneth LaFave

There is a classic and semi-humorous response to the question, “What do you know about art?” “What do I know?” comes the reply, “Well, I know what I like!” The exchange usually concerns the visual arts, but will here serve our purpose as the signpost to a discussion of music; for music is the art everyone “feels”, writes poetry about, and uses as a catalyst to magnificent fantasies. Music is the art no one thinks about.

“No one” is admittedly an overstatement, but only a small one. Musicians and the musically knowledgeable are always a little confused by otherwise scholarly folk who, when listening to music, invariably engage in reveries about their childhood or their first romance. To these people, music means nothing more than “association.” The “goodness” or “badness” of a piece of music depends on the place, time, or event associated with it. If you associate Bach with church, your attitude toward his work may well depend on what kind of experiences you’ve had with churches and religion. One way or the other. Bach loses, and so do you. Associating certain music with fond memories, of course, can be quite pleasurable, and I’m not entirely dismissing the purely associational value of my favorite art form. Yet most people go no further than to accept such patterns as criteria for “knowing what they like”, which is my thesis exactly.

Two questions should be raised here: 1) what is meant by “thinking about music”, and 2) what is the purpose of doing so. I shall begin by stating what I do not mean by “thinking about music.”

By “thinking about music” I do not mean reading and contemplating the lives of famous composers. This is strictly public school “music appreciation” stuff. One is presumably able to “hear” the composer’s life in his work: we “hear” Beethoven rage against his deafness in the Ninth Symphony; we “hear” Tchaikovsky’s loneliness and desolation in the “Pathetique” Symphony. This kind of nonsense is related to another elementary school trick—“painting” mental pictures to music. In other words, not thinking about the music, but about what the music reminds you of. Whether concerned with the composer’s emotions or your own visual imagination, these games are just two more forms of association, and give additional credence to my claim that people will do almost anything to keep from truly intellectualizing what they consider a mere emotional indulgence.

By “thinking about music” I also do not mean analyzing the emotional effects of music. To find out why people react in such-and-such a way to music is fine, but such is psychology, not aesthetics. Emotions are a product of music, not a part of it. Emotions may even be the purpose of music, but they are not music itself.

Music is sound organized along certain principles of acoustics. To “think about” it means to identify what a composer (the “organizer”) is doing in a certain piece—i.e., how he is structuring some harmonic progression, what form he is using, how he varies some melodic passage. It is also interesting to consider the nature of a given performance: how a performer interprets the music, how brilliant is John Doe’s technique, etc. But this is not the intellectual core of music, it’s not what music is about. The understanding of music does not consist of emoting over a Rachmaninoff prelude, or even playing one well. It consists of identifying how Rachmaninoff organized sound in terms of musical language.

That may sound simple, and even obvious, but we are immediately faced with a seemingly insurmountable barricade—for the key word in my last sentence is “language.” Music is not a language in the way that English. Chinese, or Dutch are languages. All of the latter have the power to denote: they all contain sounds and symbols which have reference to something in the “real” world. “Bird”, for instance, refers to a particular kind of thing that exists. But we cannot sing the pitch, “la” for a specific duration and mean the same thing as the word “bird”. (No doubt such a system could be devised, but it would not bear much if any relation to what we know as music.)

This classic and oft-noted point has several important ramifications. Primarily, it places music in a unique position among the major art forms. Both literature and the visual arts have the power of reference: the poet can write of a bird and the painter can paint his image on a canvas, but the composer cannot “compose” a bird, without the aid of words in the form of a title or program. Take away the title, and the programmatic “meaning” of Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale” is up for grabs. It could be “Song of the Sea”, if you wanted it to be that.

So music has no content, as such, and is more akin to architecture or chess than to poetry or painting. It is all style, and that will make our analysis of that Rachmaninoff a little more difficult. We will have to understand musical form, structure, counterpoint, harmony, etc. In short, we will have to learn the musical language. By this I do not mean a subset of English comprised of the above words, but the things to which those words refer. By “musical language” I mean the concepts and applications of counterpoint, harmony, etc. Perhaps the closest analogy to “musical language” is another “language” which defies translation into denotative words: the language of mathematics.

Ask a mathematician to explain a higher equation to you without understanding the concepts expressed in that equation and you’ll only walk away frustrated. And so it is with trying to understand a Bach fugue or even our Rachmaninoff prelude without knowing much about music. Again, this places music in a unique position among the arts. It is not necessary to have knowledge of meter or perspective in order to enjoy poetry or painting, though such knowledge does no doubt enhance one’s enjoyment, but it is impossible to really enjoy music beyond the merely associational or “cultural” (associational on a societal scale) level, without “speaking the language.”

Music, far from being the most subjective of the arts, is the most rigorously logical. Its objective basis is acoustics, the science of sound, and all good composers take that into account. Were I to make a case for the evaluation of music. I would base it on the degree of musical (contrapuntal, harmonic, etc.) interest a piece generates. Just as a difficult equation is of more interest than a simple arithmetical problem, so the Bach fugue is of more interest, objectively, than the Rachmaninoff prelude. But that is another essay, and a harder one.

Now it is time to consider the second question: why should we, why should anyone, “think about music.” What does the objective analysis of organized sound have to offer us that mathematics doesn’t? In order to sufficiently answer this. I hope the reader will excuse what may seem like a digression.

We are at an all-Beethoven concert of symphonic music. We have never heard Beethoven before, nor have we heard “live” symphonic music: it is a totally new experience for us. The major work on the program is the famous Fifth Symphony, and as we witness the performance, our first impression is a physical one—the sheer strength of the music, the massive power of the sound. We do not like the second movement much, as it doesn’t have the mere volume that was so physically exciting to experience in the first movement. The last movement proves to be our favorite: the physical sensation of sound waves striking our ear drums and our bodies is exhilarating.

We go home, forget about the concert for a few days, until, quite by accident, we hear Beethoven’s Fifth on the radio. We remember with delight our evening at the concert; the sensations we experienced come hack like a welcome dream. But over the radio, much of this physical dimension is lost, and as we listen a second time, we are struck with a vague sense of “something important is going on here”. It is not just a physical sensation anymore, it is a real intellectual observation, based On our ability to discern variations in amplitude, pitch, duration, etc. in same way as we might look at a building and say. “I don’t know a thing about architecture, but something about that building seems to deserve my investigation.” So we read a few books on music—Bernstein’s THE JOY OF MUSIC is great for beginners: buy a pocket dictionary of music (THE HARVARD BRIEF DICTIONARY OF MUSIC); and even learn to read music (it is not difficult for an intelligent adult) well enough to make sense out of the reader’s score of the Beethoven Fifth. All this takes some time and a little money. We could spend less time and a lot more money if we decided instead to build ourselves the greatest stereo in the world, but we’re intelligent and know that it’s much more important to understand what comes out of a pair of speakers than to worry about “marvelous tone”. That would be like pronouncing Chinese perfectly and not understanding a single word.

So, after some weeks of study, we buy a recording of the Fifth and give it a listen, following it, perhaps, with a copy of the score. What happens is amazing. The physical and associational aspects are there still, but they take a back seat to an entirely new dimension: understand. “Meaningless” notes now have meaning as part of the structural whole. And we are overwhelmed with a great sense of—emotion! Not physical “feeling”, not association, but emotion over the logic of the music. For music is like mathematics with a physical dimension: music is logic incarnate.

We have for the first time experienced emotion over the music itself, not over something we associate with it, not physical “feeling” devoid of understanding, but emotion. The experience of music, then, is on three levels; physical, “feeling”, association (good or bad) with extra-musical places or events, and emotion. The first two happen quite naturally, the last can only occur via knowledge of the art. Almost everyone stops on the second level.

I am not suggesting that everyone go out and buy books, take lessons, and spend the time necessary for the further enjoyment of music. Nor am I denying the validity of using music for purposes of association, relaxation, dancing or any one of a thousand other conceivable uses. My purpose is simply to make people aware of deeper musical dimensions available to them. It may also serve to make a few people aware of the appallingly low level of music criticism in this country, with the exceptions of a few major newspapers and here and there a journal. Music criticism in “popular” magazines and most newspapers is incredibly trashy, dwelling, as most of it does, on the “feeling” (a mere physical sensation) of the music.

A major mistake made by many well-meaning individuals, and particularly rampant among Rock musicians and critics, is the equation of “good music” with that which is technically performed well. But the playing of music is not music’s essence. Music is sound organized according to certain principles of acoustics. The essence of music is composition, not performance. But, thanks largely to this mistake, we have the spectacle of an entire musical culture (Rock) pretending to be “intellectual” because its members know a lot-about amplifiers and different kinds of guitars. That’s like claiming knowledge of literature because you know how to bind books.

There is no space within the confines of this or any other single essay to begin an adaquate discussion of musical theory. There are books on that subject. I only know there is more than coincidence to the poet’s analogy of romantic love to music; both sublimely combine the physical and the intellectual, and few people ever attain the real understanding of either

Roman History In A Paragraph

The Romans had many gifts, but statesmanship was not one of them. No major reform was ever carried out without civil war; the achievement of the Republic was to fill Rome with a pauperized rabble, to ruin Italy and provoke slave revolts, and to govern the Empire—or at least the richer parts—with a personal rapacity that an Oriental monarch would not have tolerated; while the achievement of the Principate was to accept the fact that political life was impossible, and to create, in its place, a machine.

H. D. F. Kitto in The Greeks (Penguin 1951).

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

A Touch of Class. dir. by Melvin Frank, with George Segal and Glenda Jackson.

One of the great movie genres was the sophisticated comedy of the 1930s, usually starring Cary Grant. Katherine Hepburn, or Carole Lombard. The scintillating wit, the high style, the sophisticated intelligence of both hero and heroine were a joy to behold. In these days, when intelligence and wit have been virtually expunged from the cinema, the “Cary Grant-type” comedies of the 1930’s seem as remote as a Golden Age of long, long ago. Not since such isolated and wondrous bursts of late glory as the Hepburn-Tracy movies of the 1950’s (“Pat and Mike”, “Adam’s Rib”) have we seen anything to compare with the classics of the thirties.

A Touch of Class is an interesting attempt to harken back to the great tradition. For most of the picture, the dialogue crackles, and the wit sparkles, until Frank felt that he had to end on a note of leaden moralism. Glenda Jackson is particularly good: there is even a trace of the great Hepburn in her intelligence and in her command of every situation. In her previous pictures furthermore. Miss Jackson had been generally cast in somehow decadent roles; here she hits her stride as a “classical” comedienne.

The major problem here is George Segal. Certainly a funny actor, Segal is far from the classic mould of intelligence and wit; instead, his is the humor of the self-deprecating schnook; the style might be called New York-Jewish. There is certainly a place for this brand of humor in movies: Segal himself was brilliantly cast in that hilarious movie about third-rate New York Jewish intellectuals, Bye, Bye Braverman (from the equally hilarious Wallace Markfield novel. To An Early Grave). But for attempting classical comedy. Segal, for all his amusing moments, is a fish out of water. Such is the dearth of wit in the movies, however, that it is difficult to suggest a replacement, barring the magic ability to make Cary Grant thirty-five years younger.

Paper Moon. dir. by Peter Bogdanovich. With Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal, and Madeline Kahn.

Peter Bogdanovich is perhaps the most interesting of our younger film directors. Bogdanovich is a brilliant neo-classicist, consciously moulding his movies in the classical, Old Culture form. His typical mode is to return to the classical cinema by casting his pictures in the period of the old movies, and then to make them in a similar manner. The Last Picture Show was Bogdanovich’s remarkable tribute to the culture and the world of the 1950’s, as well as the classical kind of movie of the pre-60’s era which he remakes in the current world. The Last Picture Show, however, was marred by a deeply pessimistic outlook, so that the movie was an elegy to a dying small town in the Southwest. But now, with Paper Moon, Bogdanovich has gone further back—to the world arid to the movies of the 1930’s—to make a delightful, heartwarming movie free of any taint of the bleak pessimism of his earlier work.

Paper Moon marvelously recreates the world of the 1930’s, its way of life, its pop culture. Like all great directors, Bogdanovich has always wrung superb performances from all of his actors, and he does it again here. Ryan O’Neal is plucked out of pretty-boy roles to turn in an excellent performance as a lovable, roving conman; little Tatum O’Neal steals the picture as a tough little kid with a heart of gold (or at least, silver.) Madeline Kahn is superb as a floozy with airs.

A lot of nonsense has been written about Tatum O’Neal being a conscious contrast to the simperingly sweet kid acting of such thirties’ stars as Shirley Temple. These critics forget that the thirties also had a lot of tough little urchins in the movies, including Jane Withers and the Dead End Kids; Tatum O’Neal is simply another jewel in a re-created tradition. With each movie of loving recreation of an older day, Peter Bogdanovich is raising a standard against the irrationality and morbidity of today’s avant-garde.

The Fall Of The Republic

One of the inevitable effects of the Watergate affair has been to compel a wide spectrum of public men to take cognizance of the transformation of our political institutions and practices during the last century. The claims of the Presidency in the last decade have established the legal setting for virtually unrestricted exercise of power by one man—the President. His claims have included the right to make war without effective congressional control or authorization; to wiretap, bug, and even burglarize any person or place without the due process of judicial warrant; to impound legislatively mandated expenditures at his will; to withhold information from the Congress and the courts, even when it clearly involves obstruction of justice; to deny that either the Congress or the courts have any power to restrict the President’s actions except through impeachment. In effect, as many now realize, the Presidency is changing before our eyes into a monarchical office of the type known to historians as an Augustan principate. While the tenure of the officeholder still remains limited in time, the powers of the office are monarchical in character.

Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have remarked when asked what kind of government he had helped to create, “A republic, sir, if you can keep it!”. He was not the only observer to be skeptical about the viability of the republican form of government. A century later, one of the most able and respected juriconsults of the age, Charles O’Conor of New York, a man considered by Benjamin Tucker to be one of those unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats who followed their premises logically into anarchism, held that the first American revolution had attempted to abolish both monarchy and aristocracy and create a democracy in which all citizens enjoyed equal rights under law. But it had failed to do so. The founding Fathers recognized the “necessity of repressing in the newly conceived system the most conspicuous abuses; standing armies were denounced as dangerous to liberty; wars for the extension of territory were regarded as unjust and foreign alliances as inexpedient; and public debt as mischievous; but strangely enough, no barriers were instituted against any of these practices . . . On the contrary, powers to introduce and foster the most dangerous of them were expressly delegated, in the name of the people, to their public agents . . . We have seen, accordingly, that whilst ostracizing monarchy, the founders of the American Union invested it with most of the powers by which the few had oppressed the many in all previous times” (Charles O’Conor, Democracy, N.Y. 1876.)

O’Conor identified two principal bulwarks of increasingly despotic governmental power: indirect taxation (excise and sales taxes, and all other taxes which are obscured from the immediate awareness of the taxpayer) and public debt. O’Conor believed that, if all taxes were collected directly from the pocket of each taxpayer, this experience would create a Vigilant and frugally-minded citizenry who would in their own interest deny the government all but the most obvious and needed expenditures.

As for public debt, he saw it as one of the principal means by which the State gratifies its penchant for war, waste and the creation of privilege. Moreover, public debt created a new aristocracy—the bond holders—whose personal financial interest it now became to encourage the state to further warfare, waste and increasing indebtedness. O’Conor called for constitutional barriers to the creation of any public indebtedness for any reason whatever. Also, he argued that the government should be prohibited from exercising any authority over coinage, and commercial paper, or from issuing its own paper for circulation as money. No revenue should be derived from lands in the public domain, and no gifts made therefrom to any but actual settlers.

We are now almost a century beyond Charles O’Conor’s analysis of what had happened. O’Conor frequently spoke of the need for a second American Revolution—a revolution that would fulfill the promise of 1776 and abolish all trace of monarchy and aristocracy forever, creating a democratic system by securing to all citizens the utmost measure of freedom. The task of reformers was, he believed, “to break the sceptre of the trading politician and thus, at last, to establish liberty on the only reliable basis—a popular censorship on democratic principles, perpetually stimulated to its duty by the simple operation of intelligent self-interest.”

The task set down by O’Conor was not accomplished. Today the forces of monarchy and aristocracy are infinitely stronger, more secure, and more prone to violence than a century ago. O’Conor witnessed the transformation of the Jeffersonian republic into the post-Civil War triumph of Hamiltonian mercantilism. We now have witnessed the further transformation through monopoly capitalism to corporate state capitalism exercising a world-wide imperium, and the institutional change from the republican simplicity of Washington and Jefferson as chief magistrates to the Caesarian principate of R. Milhous Nixon, Imperator Augustus.

Time is running out O’Conor and the Radical Democrats of the late 19th century fought bravely and resourcefully to retard the growth of Leviathan; Tucker and his circle did their best to clarify the issues even more plainly. Yet we must face the fact that they failed. We know who won; we know who won; we know what was lost, is being lost still: At the very least we must examine more carefully the failures of the libertarian forces of the past, and learn from their mistakes. We cannot combat the array of power which crushes and robs the bulk of the productive people of America unless we develop a grand strategy that will involve more than the few thousand readers of Lib. Forum, Reason and the few other publications espousing a libertarian ethic and political philosophy. Every day’s headlines press us more and more to answer Lenin’s famous question: What is to be done?

(J.R.P.)

Mr. First Nighter, Soft on the Enemy?

By H. Primae Noctis

Is “Mr. First Nighter” soft on avant-garde culture? Could it be that the apostle of rearguard is secretly soft on the enemy? Surely it isn’t so. But yet here is evidence. Along with an excellent series of capsulated reviews, Mr. First Nighter praises “Shamus,” starring Burt Reynolds. “Shamus?” Booh Mr. First Nighter! You’re giving in to the enemy. The incoherent plot of this movie betrays it for what it is—imitation arriere-garde. Hollywood should never be able to get away with it. We know they are watching, waiting for the good word. I say hold out. Don’t give your critical blessing to a flick that only has some of the trimmings of a good movie. Sure “Shamus” has some old-fashioned hard-hitting action. But it lacks old-fashioned coherence which made the movie upon which “Shamus” was modeled so much more interesting. “The Big Sleep,” starring Humphrey Bogart, did make sense. The meaning was there for the true detective fan to piece together. “Shamus,” on the other hand, doesn’t make it. Let’s demand that movie makers produce arriere-garde flicks, not just imitations which capture some of the trappings—but lack the essence of the old-fashioned action movie.

To this end, I suggest a more precise rating form in the future. Mr. First Nighter should use a scale of from 0 to 4 squares for each movie reviewed. Each square could stand for a favorable attribute. For example, if a film used sane camera techniques, but lacked any other redeeming virtue, it would be only a one square movie. If it had both good cinemagraphic technique and portrayed sane, real people, it would merit two squares. Three squares would be reserved for movies, which added to the aforementioned virtues, the element of a coherent plot. The final accolade, the fourth square, should be reserved for movies which toe the party line. Thus Mr. First Nighter’s fans could be sure of getting the straight scoop on cinema. The ratings could even be extended to other areas of cultural endeavor. Which brings me to my last point: the r.i.p. for Noel Coward may have gone too far. He was a delightful and talented man. But inspite of his fetching qualities he was only a three square playwright . . . a bit too weird to merit that last square.

• • •

MFN replies: It is always a pleasure to be attacked from a more extreme position than my own. And so I welcome Mr. Primae Noctis’ contribution; for, to paraphrase the old adage, “the price of a rational, classical aesthetic is eternal vigilance.”

For Conspiracy Theorists Only!

1. Air America Inc. is the well known CIA-owned air transport company operating chiefly in Indo-China. Its books are audited by Coopers and Lybrand Inc. The Southern Air Transport Co., whose most profitable asset has been a federal contract to fly charter freight to SE Asia, Africa and Latin America, has just been revealed to have been founded and owned by the CIA. It shared Washington offices with Air America, and had the firm of Coopers and Lybrand as its auditors. President Nixon has now published an accounting of his financial relations with Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp in the purchase of the Western White House at San Clemente. The auditors of this public accounting—Coopers and Lybrand!

2. New York’s muckraking weekly, The Village Voice, is running a series of articles detailing the friendship and business partnership of Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo, especially concentrating on the history of the Biscayne Bay land properties which are part of the Florida White House complex. It is a tale involving the alliance of Meyer Lansky and his “business” associates with Fulgencio Batista, late dictator of Cuba, and his friends, and the process by which money was “laundered” by passing through Cuba back into Florida where it was invested in real estate, banks and other enterprises in a series of complex sales, re-sales, mortgages, loans, and other gimmicks that would confuse and hide the real sources and ownership of the wealth. While Nixon claims his friendship with Rebozo dates from 1951, the Voice suspects otherwise. Nixon is known to have visited Cuba to investigate business opportunities in 1940 shortly after completing law studies at Duke University. By 1942 Bebe Rebozo was in the tire-recapping business in Florida—a business he financed through Frank Smathers, father of George Smathers, later Senator from Florida and close personal friend of Nixon. Nixon during this year was in Washington working in the Office for Price Administration. His particular unit was responsible for supervising the tire industry. George Smathers was at that same time an attorney for the tire interests of Standard Oil of Kansas which was allegedly routing American-made tires through Cuba to avoid American rationing controls. And Rebozo is reputed locally to have made the “seed money” of his fortune in the “grey market” of tire-rationed wartime Florida. Of course, this is possibly just a coincidental parallel of time, of men and interests. But clearly biographers (to say nothing of prosecutors) ought to examine the career of young Mr. Nixon more closely.

— J.R.P.

The ‘Final Solution’ To The Arab Problem

Freedom, the English anarchist weekly published a brief report entitled Israel: a Nazi State? (23 June, 1973) which contained several quotations of prominent Israeli generals made at a symposium on the problem of the occupied territories. General Yitzhak Rabin, recent Israeli ambassador to Washington, urged the view that “conditions should be brought about now, which, in the future years, would, quite naturally cause a drift of (Arab) population towards the east bank of the Jordan”. This would be accomplished “without resorting to force”. It is now reported in the New York Times that the ruling Labor party in Israel will undertake to sponsor and encourage the “purchase” of Arab-owned private land in the conquered Gaza strip, west bank of Jordan and Golan Heights. All purchases must be authorized by the Israeli government and priority will go to developers of new towns, factories and kibbutzim. In this way the most valuable properties will be transferred from Arab to Israeli ownership—encouraging the Arab property-owning class to liquidate its assets in Israeli-held territories, and migrate abroad.

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan summarized the Israeli government’s viewpoint thusly:

We have settled in this region essentially to create a Jewish State, and we will simply not allow the Arabs to control its frontiers. Had we wished to show any respect for the supremacy of the Arabs and their desires when they had occupied the country so extensively and for so long a period, it would have been impossible to create a Jewish State. They (the Arabs) no doubt believe themselves to be in the right, but if our aim is to fashion our own State, I do not see how we can avoid stepping on their toes. It is certain that Jews will come and establish themselves in the very areas which were formerly inhabited by the Arabs. The moment we accept the principle that we must ask permission of the Arabs in order to settle in regions where they themselves live, then we can say goodbye to our notion of a Jewish State.”

Perish vilely all that delight in monarchy or oligarchy in the State; for me name of liberty is worth all the world, and even if one have but little, he is deemed to have possessions.

— Euripides

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME V, NO. 12

DECEMBER, 1973

US-ISSN0047-4517

CONGRESS ’73

Mr. Eric Scott Royce has gone to the trouble of compiling the voting records of every Senator and Congressman for 1973, listing their votes on 25 key measures in each House, and judging and rating them from a libertarian point of view. Every libertarian interested in politics will want a copy (available for $1.50 from Libertarian Information Service, Box 31638, Aurora, Colo. 80011.) My major quarrel with Mr. Royce is that in his rating system based on the data he treats an absent vote as equivalent to a wrong vote from the libertarian point of view. My own rating system simply ignores absences and lists the number of favorable as against unfavorable votes. Mr. Royce’s methodology treats indifference or illness as equivalent to aggressive evil, which I can’t quite bring myself to do. (The only exception he makes is with poor old mugging victim Senator Stennis, who would otherwise have acquired a close to zero libertarian rating for being on a sickbed. But if Stennis is exempt, why not others?)

In my own rating system for Senators (leaving the House members to Mr. Royce), I have taken Royce’s 25 votes, and added to them a listing and judgment on an additional 13 votes. Seven were omitted from Mr. Royce’s tabulation (continuing the Rural Electrification loan program—libertarian vote is No; allowing the cities to use existing highway funds for mass transit—Yes; the rural environment assistance program—No; river and flood control program—No; airport development—No; allowing the Alaskan pipeline to be built—Yes; and lowering the minimum wage rate for teenagers—Yes); and five more came later than Mr. Royce’s July 31 cutoff date (the Trident program—No; overseas troop cuts—Yes; overriding Nixon’s veto of the war powers curtailment bill—Yes; the Emergency Energy Control Act—No; and government financing for Presidential campaigns—No). A special addition was a “negative vote” which I added for each of the ten benighted and addle-pated Senators who went to the White House to bend the knee to their liege lord and to swear eternal fealty to Richard Nixon on Watergate (the Tomfool Ten: Curtis, Cotton, Fannin, Helms, Young, Bartlett, Thurmond, Tower, Bennett, and Hansen, all Republicans.) My own 13 votes added to Royce’s 25, make a total of 38 votes for the Senate.

Instead of percentages, I have, in this Royce-Rothbard Report, grouped the Senators into categories, with their libertarian and anti-libertarian votes listed after each name. As compared to our ratings of the Senators in 1971-72 (Lib. Forum, Nov. 1972), we have, after poring over the voting charts, decided to add two categories to the list: “Fairly Good”, between “Good” and “Moderate”; and, for those whose evil is too great to be contained within the category “Excruciatingly Bad”, we have added the category “Super Bad.” Our list follows:

Very Good:

Scott (R., Va.) 24-10

Bartlett (R., Okla.) 26-12

Good:

Roth (R., Del.) 23-14

Byrd (D., Va.) 23-14

McClellan (D., Ark.) 21-13

Packwood (R., Ore.) 21-14

Hatfield (R., Ore.) 21-14

Fairly Good:

Fannin (R., Ariz.) 21-15

Bellmon (R., Okla.) 21-15

Buckley (R., N.Y.) 18-12

McClure (R., Id.) 21-16

Helms (R., N. C.) 21-16

Brock (R., Tenn.) 20-16

Ervin (D., N. C.) 20-17

Moderate:

Hansen (R., Wyo.) 20-18

Bennett (R., Ut.) 16-14

Nunn (D., Ga.) 19-17

Talmadge (D., Ga.) 19-18

Cranston (D., Calif.) 16-15

Goldwater (R., Ariz.) 11-11

Weicker (R., Conn.) 18-18

Curtis (R., Neb.) 19-19

Cotton (R., N. H.) 13-14

Hart (D., Mich.) 16-17

Hollings (D., S.C.) 18-19

Abourezk (D., S. D.) 16-17

Hruska (R., Neb.) 18-19

Bentsen (D., Tex.-) 18-19

Hughes (D., Io.) 16-18

Proxmire (D., Wise.) 18-20

Church (D., Id.) 17-19

Johnston (D., La.) 16-18

Bad:

Dominick (R., Col.) 16-19

Stennis (D., Miss.) 3-6

Domenici (R., N. M.) 17-20

Eastland (D., Miss.) 14-18

Gurney (R., Fla.) 16-20

Thurmond (R., S.C.) 17-21

Clark (D., Io.) 16-21

Chiles (D., Fla.) 16-21

Nelson (D., Wise.) 16-21

Haskell (D., Col.) 16-21

Taft (R., Oh.) 14-19

Griffin (R., Mich.) 16-20

Very Bad:

Mathias (R., Md.) 14-20

Saxbe (R., Oh.) 10-16

Mondale (D., Minn.) 13-20

Tunney (D., Calif.) 15-22

Case (R., N. J.) 15-22

Eagleton (D., Mo.) 13-20

Young (R., N. D.) 16-23

Bible (D., Nev.) 15-22

Beall (R., Md.) 15-22

Hathaway (D., Me.) 15-23

Stafford (R., Vt.) 13-21

Stevenson (D., Ill.) 15-23

Gravel (D., Alaska) 14-22

Bayh (D., Ind.) 13-21

Schweiker (R., Pa.) 15-23

Tower (R., Tex.) 14-22

Metcalf (D., Mont.) 15-24

Mansfield (D., Mont.) 13-22

Moss (D., Ut.) 15-24

Percy (R., Ill.) 14-23

Pell (D., R. I.) 15-24

Byrd (D., W. Va.) 15-24

Ribicoff (D., Conn.) 15-24

Kennedy (D., Mass.) 14-23

Aiken (R., Vt.) 14-23

Excruciatingly Bad:

Fulbright (D., Ark.) 9-19

Cannon (D., Nev.) 13-23

Dole (R., Kan.) 14-24

Symington (D., Mo.) 13-23

Huddleston (D., Ky.) 13-23

Burdick (D., N. D.) 13-24

Stevens (R., Alaska) 11-22

Randolph (D., W. Va.) 13-24

Fong (R., Haw.) 13-24

Inouye (D., Haw.) 13-24

Muskie (D., Me.) 11-22

Brooke (R., Mass.) 13-24

McGovern (D., S. D.) 13-24

Baker (R., Tenn.) 11-22

Biden (D., Del.) 10-22

Montoya (D., N. M.) 13-25

Williams (D., N. J.) 11-23

Javits (R., N.Y.) 12-24

Scott (R., Pa.) 12-24

Allen (D., Ala.) 12-25

Hartke (D., Ind.) 11-24

Magnuson (D., Wash.) 11-24

Sparkman (D., Ala.) 9-23

Pearson (R., Kan.) 10-24

Cook (R., Ky.) 9-26

Super Bad:

McGee (D., Wyo.) 4-25

Jackson (D., Wash.) 6-31

Long (D., La.) 11-25

Pastore (D., R. I.) 10-24

Humphrey (D., Minn.) 11-26

McIntyre (D., N. H.) 9-25

Grouping the parties and categories together, we have, for the Republicans: Very Good—2; Good—3; Fairly Good—6; Moderate—7; Bad—6; Very Bad—10; Excruciatingly Bad—9; Super Bad—0. Travelling from the Good to the Bad end of the spectrum, the Republicans start low and gradually increase to reach a peak of 10 Senators at Very Bad, and 9 at Excruciatingly Bad. This record is bad enough, but is topped a long way by the Democrats, whose score is as follows: Very Good—0; Good—2; Fairly Good—1; Moderate—11; Bad—6: Very Bad—15: Excruciatingly Bad—20; Super Bad—2. The Democrats begin very low at the Good end of the spectrum, reach a minor peak at Moderate, and then soar up to 20 at Excruciatingly Bad. We can get a further idea by lumping the Goods and the Bads together, which give us: Republicans: 11 Goodish, 7 Moderate, 25 Baddish; while the Democrats weigh in at: 3 Goodish, 11 Moderate, and no less than 43 Baddish. Lumping still further, we see the parlous state of the Senate by finding 14 Goodish Senators, 18 Moderates, and a whopping 68 Baddish.

How did the Senators fare as compared to the 1971-72 record? As a group, the Democrats scored about the same, and the Republicans did a bit better, raising their Goodish ranks from 8 to 11. Individually, the top spots changed hands, as our former heroes (?) Roth and Byrd (Va.) fell from the Very Good to the Good category, to be replaced by two freshmen: Bartlett and Scott (Va.) Of our current Goods, Hatfield raised himself from Moderate, while the two others in the Good ranks (Packwood and McClellan) managed to vault spectacularly up from the Very Bad. None of our former Goods fell that far, all dropping a bit into the ranks of the Fairly Good and the Moderate.

A particularly chilling note is the huge expansion of the very bottom end of the spectrum. In the last Congress, there were only 6 Excruciatingly Bad Senators; now there are 29 Excruciatingly Bad and 2 Excruciatingly Bad a truly appalling increase in the ranks of evil. Once again, of course, as last time, the absolutely worst Senator of all is Mr. State, Scoop Jackson.

Mr. Royce’s report is particularly useful in giving us the tools to analyze the voting record of our avowedly libertarian freshman Congressman, Steve Symms (R., Id.) Symms did not run on the Libertarian Party line, but he was endorsed by the Libertarian Party of Idaho, is perhaps himself a party member, and at the very least is anxious to be considered as a libertarian purist. We owe it, both to the cause and to the individual himself, to scrutinize the record of any libertarian who achieves public office with the utmost vigilance. If we are to remain enthusiastic about Libertarian Party activity, we must meet the challenge of the LeFevrians and the other critics of political party efforts by treating our successful candidates with a microscopic scrutiny to see to it that they indeed remain pure. Any deviations from purity must be denounced with the utmost vigor. For if we elect a Libertarian who proceeds to deviate from libertarian principle, he thereby gives the cause a black eye from which it will be difficult to recover. If a Libertarian “leaks” away from principle, how will our principles ever be taken seriously again? To safeguard principle, then, we must be alert to such sins and heresies and be prepared to denounce them without fear or favor.

Let us then examine Steve Symms’ voting record on the Royce Report’s 25 votes. We find, to our stunned horror, that Steve voted libertarian on only 18 measures, and voted anti-libertarian on no less than 7! What gives here? If we analyze the Seven Sins, we find that many of them fall into the broad category of the military-foreign policy-patriotic. The military-foreign-patriotic sphere is of course a grave and vital issue, here revealing that on the most important issue-area of our time, Steve is not a libertarian at all but an anti-libertarian Conservative. Let us list his deviant votes point by point:

1) Steve voted to continue appropriations for the bumbling, outrageously anti-civil libertarian House Internal Security Committee. For shame!

2) Steve voted to establish an American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration. Steve, are you really willing to force the taxpayers to pay for this boondoggle? Do you expect historical truth to emerge from the federal government? Has a misguided patriotism distorted your vision?

3) Steve voted to oppose the Gross proposal to cut off all federal funds for research and development into urban mass transportation. What gives here? What big cities are there in Idaho that require federal aid to mass transit; what votes would Symms have lost to oppose this piece of statism?

4) Steve voted for a federal research subsidy to the National Science Foundation. Steve, didn’t Baldy Harper send you literature against government subsidized and controlled science? What mighty science complex in Idaho requires bending principle here?

5) Steve voted against the bill to prohibit any further federal expenditure of funds for U.S. combat operations in Laos or Cambodia. Here is a crucial point; when the State sounds its blood-stained war trumpet, do we pack up libertarian principle for the “duration”?

6) Steve voted against a bill to place a maximum limit on federal farm subsidies to each farmer. Farm voters in Idaho are not enough to justify abandonment of principle.

7) Steve voted against placing a ceiling on American troops overseas. Once again, a vote for militarism and interventionist foreign policy over liberty and isolationism.

The example of Steven Symms should be a lesson to all Libertarian Party activists: namely, that tactical maneuvering that doesn’t violate principle is one thing, but betrayal of principle is quite another. Any betrayal of principle destroys the cause, for if we don’t uphold libertarian principle who will? The Symms case demonstrates the acute need for eternal vigilance over our own representatives in public office, as well as instant repudiation for any of their backsliding. If we don’t pledge ourselves to this, we may as well pack up political party activity right away, and go back to cheering for or against Republicans or Democrats who at least don’t claim to be libertarians.

Ironically. Steve Symms cannot even sustain the relativistic claim that at least he had the most libertarian record in the House in 1973. The following Congressmen, none of them official Libertarians, did as well or better than Symms’ 18-7 voting record: Blackburn (R., Ga.) 16-4; Crane (R., Ill.) 18-5; Gross (R., Io.) 21-3; Rarick (D., La.) 17-5; Huber (R., Mich.) 18-7: Camp (R., Okla.) 17-6: and Shuster (R., Pa.) 18-7. It is pleasant, in contrast, to take this opportunity to hail the Grand Old Man of the Old Right, libertarian-conservative-isolationist H. R. Gross of Iowa, a marvelous and flinty character almost out of the storybooks

Are We Another Rome?

By Joseph R. Peden

Recently, the New York Times’ house conservative, columnist William Safire, one time speech writer for Richard Nixon, who recently learned that his boss was tapping his telephone, wrote a marvelous Shakespearean parody. In it General Al Haig gave a funeral oration over the corpse of his dead leader, crying out: “Friends, liberals, civilians, lend me your ears! I come to bury Nixon, not to praise him. The good that Presidents do lives after them; the evil can be interred with their tapes”. And so on.

Safire is not the first commentator to turn his mind to the history of ancient Rome in a moment of great national stress and fear. Tom Wicker, his liberal counterpart on the Times opinion page, had earlier openly called attention to the new Caesarism that seemed to animate the Nixon White House. Arthur Schlesinger, after a lifetime of exalting the Executive has now published a new book on the “Imperial Presidency”, and prescient Senators in Washington have long since realized the emasculation of their body to be analogous to the fate of its Roman prototype. Perhaps then, it was not an accident that when General Haig called the deputy Attorney General with the Presidential order to fire Archibald Cox, he reminded the reluctant Mr. Ruckelshaus that this order came from his Commander-in-Chief. This incident suggests that the American Presidency is now operating on the basis of its military rather than civil authority—a characteristic feature of the Rorhan emperorship.

But is the use of Roman history in political rhetoric or for political analysis really useful or even justifiable?

The “grandeur that was Rome” has captivated the imagination of thoughtful men from the very days of the collapse of the Roman empire in the West during the fifth century. The very men who conquered Rome, the Germanic kings of the Franks and Ostrogoths and Vandals, etc. eagerly sought Roman titles and symbols of imperial dignity from the Roman emperors in Constantinople. Countless German kings, following the example of Charlemagne, sought the title of Emperor of the Romans, and wasted their lives and treasure, and those of their subjects, trying to give reality to the revered but illusory Roman empire of the middle ages. With the revival of the study of Roman law in the medieval universities in the 12th century, the kings and princes of Europe dreamt of the absolute power of Roman emperors, and insinuated whenever they could the principles and practices of Roman despotism into the laws and constitutions of their own feudalistic states.

But absolute monarchy in medieval times met three sources of vigorous resistance: first, from the Christian Church, especially under the vigorous leadership of such popes as Gregory VII, Innocent III and Boniface VIII. Ironically, it was the Papacy which resurrected the Roman imperial tradition when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in A. D. 800. But subsequent experience caused the Papacy to reverse its original support, and tenaciously to oppose all further tendencies towards monarchical despotism, seeing clearly that the liberty of the Church would not withstand such concentration of power. Secondly, the cumulative resistance of the forces of feudal society, based on a contractual and customary notion of rights and liberty, rather than rule by the arbitrary will of the prince, successfully prevented the development of absolute monarchy. The familiar story of the struggle between the evil king John and the barons and bishops of England climaxing with the publication of the Magna Carta has parallels throughout medieval Europe, and the later absolute monarchies which we associate with Louis XIV of France were possible only after the Christian Church had been rent asunder by the Protestant Reform, and kings were no longer dependent upon the feudal nobles for income and military services.

Thirdly, absolute monarchy and the Roman imperial tradition faced opposition from the newly emerging urban commercial class who established in Italy and elsewhere communal republics as an alternative to imperial and kingly dominion. These bourgeoisie looked to the traditions of Republican Rome, rather than to the Rome of the Caesars. This viewpoint began among the Florentines of the fifteenth century, quickly found a welcome response from the Venetians and other Italians living in communal republics, and spread throughout Europe wherever similar political institutions were developing. Tentative criticism of the Roman Caesarian tradition had first come from Petrarch. His Africa extolled the Carthaginians, and in a dream sequence, he mourned that Caesar had turned his “ever victorious hands against the flesh and blood of his own commonwealth, and stained his triumph over foreign enemies with the blood of citizens”. Yet in a biography of Caesar, Petrarch is openly in awe of the bloody dictator. But by 1440 a more common opinion among the Italian humanists is that of the Venetian Pieto del Monte who expressed his “frank detestation of Caesar, the infamous parricide, destroyer of Roman liberty and bitter enemy of his patria”. Hans Baron has brilliantly demonstrated the great significance of this Roman republican tradition in his masterpiece, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966). But by the year 1599, a humanist attached to the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany would argue that “Rome was never as free as at the time when she lost her liberty” by which he sought to soothe the feelings of the liberty-loving Florentines now subjects of Medici princes.

It is especially important for us to note that there is not just one Roman tradition to which one can appeal for a usable past. In fact there are at least three Roman themes which have attracted the attention of orators and political pundits: first, the grandeur and achievement of the Roman empire—a multi-national political entity stretching at its zenith from the Irish Sea to the Tigris and Euphrates; from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara and Sudan. This empire is traditionally justified as an agency for civilizing barbaric and unruly peoples, imposing upon them order and law—of world wide scope—the famous Pax Romana.

This tradition plays a continuing role in the consciousness of American leaders. In August 1965 the editors of Fortune—the house journal of America’s ruling elite—openly acknowledged that, while no one had planned it that way, America had indeed acquired a world empire. And that our characteristic idealism made us willing to bear the great sacrifices which our world mission would entail. Among these sacrifices was the need to bear any burden to ensure peace and order in Asia, (and Europe and everywhere else one assumes). With the ruling elites thus fortified for the great mission of empire. Fortune’s fellow editors at Life soon created a multi-issue illustrated history of the greatness of Imperial Rome—civilatrix of the ungrateful barbarian nations. The clear message of this popularly directed propaganda was that the American people were privileged to take up the burden of perpetual war for perpetual peace, as had the ancient Romans.

political rhetoric, the Pax Americana (Ronald Steel adopted this as a title of his excellent study of contemporary American foreign policy.)

How appropriate is this rhetoric in contemporary political propaganda?

First of all, many recent historians of Rome have little sympathy for those who boast of Rome’s civilizing mission. H.D.F. Kitto puts it very succinctly:

“The Romans had many gifts, but statesmanship was not one of them. No major reform was ever carried out by them without a civil war; the achievement of the Republic was to fill Rome with a pauperized rabble, to ruin Italy and provoke slave revolts, and to govern the empire with an open personal rapacity that an Oriental monarch would not have tolerated; the achievement of the Empire was to accept that political life was impossible, and to create, in its place, a machine.” (H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, (Penguin Books) p. 97)

As historians become more familiar through archaeological research with the remains of Roman ruins in the provinces, the sterility and sameness of Roman material culture stands out in marked contrast to the aborted but vigorous remains of pre-conquest local cultures. What is seldom considered is the tremendous loss that may have occurred through the cultural genocide perpetrated by Roman imperial conquests. Only an occasional voice has filtered through to speak of the feelings of the conquered races. Tacitus records one such voice, that of a Briton whose people are about to be vanquished by Roman arms:

“Brigands of the world, they (the Romans) have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. The wealth of an enemy excites their cupidity, his poverty their lust of power. East and West have failed to glut their maw. They are unique in being as violently tempted to attack the poor as the wealthy. Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desert and call it peace.” Tacitus, Agricola

Prof. Oscar Halecki, in his The Millennium of Europe (Notre Dame, 1963) rightly points out that the “Roman Peace” was an illusion, a myth.

“In addition to the permanent hostility with Persia, a source of endless conflicts, there was an equally permanent tension along the whole long European border. Even the reign of Augustus, which started with the closing of the temple of Janus and the dedication of the ara pacis in 9 B. C., was troubled in 9 A.D. by the disastrous defeat in the German war. . . . As conditions of life in subsequent centuries became much worse, and almost all parts of the once powerful empire suffered from uninterrupted warfare and destruction as a consequence of invasions and penetrations, (And I would add—uprisings and civil conflicts between armies of the empire) the bygone age of the Pax Romana seemed almost an ideal situation to which men would look back in times of even more troubles”.

Halecki goes on to point out that

“following Roman precedent, all conquerors of future ages who had established their dictatorial rule at home and tried to force it upon one foreign country after another, were to justify their imperialistic policies by pretending that they would create a new and better order, putting an end to the rivalries among the troublesome smaller states and unifying large areas to the economic advantage of the populations. That fallacy reached its climax in the days of Hitler, whose Third Reich wanted to continue for the next millennium the imperial tradition which the first German empire had inherited from Rome”.

As Halecki concludes:

Rome’s “unquestionable greatness and her amazing achievements in the first one or two centuries of the Christian era must not make us overlook the fact that the imperial tradition is the most questionable part of our Greco-Roman heritage, different from its highest, truly humanistic ideals, and that it is at the same time the part which is most difficult to reconcile with our Christian heritage.”

Halecki’s warning was echoed by the late Frank Meyer, one of the most thoughtful conservatives of our time. Meyer wrote an article in National Review in 1957 (Sept. 9) commenting upon Amaury de Riencourt’s widely discussed analysis of postwar Europe and America entitled The Coming Caesars. De Riencourt, as a European, saw America as the New Rome whose Caesars with their atomic armed legions would create a new world order ushering in universal peace and progress but at the expense of liberty. Americans were, like the Romans, “iron, soulless administrators” who had arisen in the late summer of a culture to preserve order and the civilized forms when the creative heart has gone out of the society.

Significantly, Meyer rejected the analogy between Rome and America. First of all, he identified America’s true political ideals more closely with the individualism and love of personal freedom of the Greeks rather than the collectivist penchant for order of the Romans. And he found one overwhelming defect in the Roman analogy: Western civilization is unlike that of Rome; it is essentially different since “it is based on the Christian vision of the innate value of the human person and of his freedom under God”. As Meyer concluded, “If the Caesars come, borne on the wave of mediocrity, it will not be because America imposed them on Europe, but because in neither continent have there been enough men dedicated to truth and freedom to resist them”.

It is disturbing to note that two of the most notable liberal critics of American foreign policy. Senators Fulbright and McCarthy, have failed to base their critiques on the firm basis suggested by Halecki or Meyer—the moral defect in any imperialist tradition. McCarthy’s book, The Limits of Power, and Fulbright’s collection of essays entitled The Arrogance of Power, center their argument on the pragmatic questioning of whether we have tried to exercise an imperial sway beyond the capacity of our resources. This argument is essentially a reflection of the great 18th century historian of Rome’s decline and fall, Edward Gibbon, who wrote:

“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; Prosperity ripened the principle of decay and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.”

Rome then was at the end reduced to “a pitiful helpless giant”—to borrow a current phrase.

Clearly this liberal critique of empire is doomed to failure. Who can say with assurance what the “limits of American power” are? Or how much greatness is immoderate? Does anyone publicly suggest that America become anything less than the greatest power on earth? Not if he wants to get elected to political office. An appeal to the fate of the fall of the Roman empire must fail also on the most obvious pragmatic ground. The Roman empire lasted for five centuries or so. And there is not a politician, soldier, stockholder, corporate executive or banker in the military-industrial complex that rules this society who wouldn’t settle for a fraction of that timespan for America’s empire.

A second tradition frequently used by those who look to Rome for their rhetorical analogies is that Rome “fell” because of moral decay brought on by luxury and vice. Here again Gibbon may be consulted for his view that “prosperity hastened the principle of decay”. This was also a favorite ploy of classical historians. It can be used in a variety of interesting ways according to the occasion. Puritans use it to denounce those who spend money in ways they disapprove; socialists denounce the maldistribution of wealth; conservatives complain about the Roman policy of “bread and circuses” for the masses as the very root of Rome’s destruction. All this is such nonsense that it was inevitable that it would capture the fervid imagination of Richard Nixon. Speaking to a group of 130 newspapermen in Kansas City in July 1971, our beloved Leader said that when he looks at the pseudo-classical architecture of Washington, “I think of seeing them in Greece and Rome and I think of what happened to the great civilizations of the past. As they became wealthy, as they lost their will to live, to improve, they became subject to the decadence that destroys a civilization. The United States is reaching that period.” It makes you wonder if Nixon isn’t trying to destroy the prosperity of the economy deliberately in order to save us from ourselves!

The third theme derived from Roman experience is the tradition of the Roman republic. It has been seen as a self-governing and liberty loving society. The Florentine humanists of the 15th century were the first to exploit the fully republican aristocratic tradition of Rome exemplified in the works of Cicero, Livy and Tacitus, much of whose work was unknown to previous generations. This republican tradition thrived on libertarian aspects of the Republican regime and compared its virtues and liberal values to the sterility and despotism of the later Roman imperial regime. To these Florentines, trying to preserve their communal republic from the tyranny of Renaissance despots, Brutus was the great hero of the last age of the Republic, and the Caesars were the villains. It was this tradition that animated some of the American revolutionaries like Patrick Henry who reminded his audience in the House of Burgesses that Caesar had his Brutus, and Charles I his Cromwell, and that George III might profit by their example.

The founding fathers of the American Republic were well educated men, and in that age that meant well educated in classical literature. A reading of the Federalist papers reveals the ease with which Hamilton, Jay and Madison summoned the events and personalities of ancient Greece and Rome to argue their case for the new constitution.

Madison, for instance, found that “the liberties of Rome were the final victims of her military triumphs” and warned that a standing army was as dangerous as it was possibly necessary. “On the smallest scale it has its inconveniences, on an extensive scale, its consequences may be fatal” as in the case of Rome’s Republic.

At first sight, the Republican tradition of Rome might appear to be a useful device against the trend towards Caesarism—which is a fourth Roman tradition which has beguiled all men who lusted for power over their fellow humans. But the republican tradition has its own inherent limitations for us. Sir Ronald Syme points out that

“In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade; and Roman history, republican or imperial, is the history of a governing class . . . Liberty and the laws are high sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interests.” (Sir Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution (Oxford 1939))

And it should be remembered that the civil wars which brought the downfall of the Roman republic were essentially a struggle for power and offices within the aristocracy. If the victors happened to be rhetorical champions of the “people”, they did not radically reorder the structure of Roman society. Human slavery remained a basic institution in society; the masses of citizens remained politically disenfranchised; the lower classes remained subject to the arbitrary will of the ruling aristocracy—occasionally renewed by fresh blood and hungry for the privileges that the rulers of Rome always enjoyed. After the fall of the Republic, the new senatorial aristocracy, lacking the pride and tradition of liberty of the old, kept their mouths shut and enjoyed the profits of their new-won power under the dictatorship of the Emperors.

I remain skeptical of the value of using any of the major themes of Roman history as political propaganda in, our contemporary situation. First, there is little in the history of the Roman empire’s long rule to convince any one that we should abandon our own imperial destiny. Pragmatically, from the point of view of the rulers of Rome, their empire was a success, not a failure. And most Americans would agree that it was a success—on a practical level. Rather than suggesting that America in the 20th century is a new Rome, we should do everything possible to destroy the notion that the two are in any way analogous in character, structure or circumstances. Frank Meyer is correct on this point. The existence of atomic weapons alone ought to make that perfectly clear. Moreover, as Halecki and Meyer both point out, the legacy of Christendom stands between us and the Romans. The concept of the personal dignity of man, his personal responsibility for his acts, the concept of natural rights, the dignity of labor, the Christian concepts of justice, love and mercy, ethics—all these make any analogy with Rome meaningless—unless one believes that ideas have no consequences. Our world is permeated with the ideology of liberty and the idea of the dignity of man—the product of two thousand years of historical development in the West. And its brightest achievements were most often made in the struggle to defeat the recurrent revival of Roman traditions of order and empire. Let us then concentrate on promoting these positive moral perceptions and ideals, for they are the only real alternatives to the abyss of a modern Pax Romana and of Caesarism.

As James Madison pointed out, many institutions and events in Roman history used as models in political debate are unfit for imitation or use as they are repugnant to “the genius of America”. Allowing due weight for the consideration that “there are many points of similarity which render these Roman examples not unworthy of our attention.” he urged “extreme circumspection” in reasoning from one case (Rome’s) to another (America’s).

That advice is even better today than when it was first uttered.

The Machinery Of Friedman

By Joseph Salerno

In The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman bases his apologia for anarcho-capitalism on solely “practical” considerations. In so doing, he eschews the bedrock foundation of the natural rights ethic and rests his theoretical structure on the dangerously shifting sands of utilitarianism. All this, we are told, to avert the popular disapprobation that attends ethical vis à vis practical concerns. Consequently, we find Mr. Friedman in chapter 34 equably discussing the production and utilization of retaliatory nuclear weapons in a free society, without recognition of the moral problem entailed in the very existence of weapons of indiscriminate mass annihilation. But this particular shortcoming bears an integral relation to an overriding general flaw in Friedman’s exposition.

In essaying to banish ethics from the purview of his analysis, Friedman has effected a monstrous bifurcation between anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. He posits an anarcho-capitalist society in a political and ethical vacuum, and then goes on to analyze law “production” in economic terms, blithely unaware of his transgression against the most elemental dictates of common sense. For it is absurd to assume the existence of the economic institutions of anarcho-capitalism outside the politico-ethical framework of libertarianism. An objective, libertarian legal code, predicated on the Spencer-Rothbard axiom of nonaggression, and its acceptance by a large proportion of the populace, is the sine qua non of the establishment of anarcho-capitalism. Viewed in this light, Friedman’s attempt in chapter 31 to adduce proof that anarcho-capitalism would be libertarian is at best supererogatory.

Friedman also commits a grave strategic error in refusing to argue his case on an ethical level. The enemies of the free society are conceded the eminently defensible ethical position by default, while libertarians myopically scurry about seeking evanescent victories in disjointed small scale skirmishes. This strategy will doom libertarians to long run failure as surely as it did their classical liberal kinsmen a century ago. Issue must also be taken with Friedman’s asseveration that the masses are impervious to argumentation along ethical lines. This leaves unexplained the tremendous popular appeal of socialism in its multitude of variations and transmogrifications, a doctrine with explicitly normative underpinnings. No doubt Friedman would even have us believe that the intense conflagration enveloping the abortion issue was ignited by arsonists bereft of moral convictions. So let us not decapitate the beauteous corpus of libertarian doctrine, but rather strengthen and purify her that she may better show up the hag of statism.

Let us now proceed to an examination of the substance of Friedman’s analysis. Here his errors are dishearteningly numerous and grievous. The first of three sections of the book is given over to a utilitarian defense of private property. In chapter 1 Friedman badly misconceives the true nature of “public property.” Unbelievably he does not controvert the proposition that the “public” in fact exercises control and disposition over such euphemistically denominated property. The government in his view acts as a surrogate for the public will in controlling and disposing of public properties, though it performs the task more inefficiently and with less regard to the wishes of the minority than the free market. But nowhere does Friedman admit the possibility that the government is employing public property as a means to achieve its own ends, and is not the benign though bumbling executor of the public will depicted in democratic mythology.

In chapter 3 Friedman misleadingly employs the term “power” in reference to a private property regime. An individual who owns the whole food supply, he asserts, is more “powerful” than one who exercises ownership over a smaller proportion of the food supply. But this example removes the discussion of power from its proper context of freedom vs coercion. Power implies the existence of coercive relationships among men. It is the ability of some individuals to effect the infringement or denial of the property rights of other individuals. Thus it is befuddling and unfelicitous at best to describe a person owning the total supply of a given good as “powerful”.

In two pages entitled “interlude.” Friedman entreats us to look to historical quasi-capitalist experiments in order to substantiate the viability of a free society. It is here that his nonethical apologia becomes subtly an antiethical one. He informs us that “human societies are far too complicated for us to have confidence in a priori predictions about how institutions that have never been tried would work.” Presumably if historical retrospection yielded us adverse evidence regarding the efficacy of capitalist institutions, the coup de grace will have been delivered to the case for liberty. But if workability is to be the sole criterion by which human societies are judged more or less desirable, all ethical concerns in the matter are rendered stiose.

In the second section. Friedman proffers us his pet solutions to the myriad of problems besetting a statist social order. Many are more than faintly redolent of the palliatives prescribed by the Chicago School of Economics for various social maladies. The presentation is unsystematic, one might say haphazard, as Friedman deftly avoids the confines of a comprehensive schema of reform. Not unpredictably, many of the solutions he propounds are a, halting steps in the direction of liberty which, if not augmented by longer, more forceful strides, will strand us far from our goal in a barren compromise and b, downright illibertarian.

In chapter 10, as a solution to the egregious problem of schooling in a politicized society, Friedman advocates the “voucher plan.” Under this plan the parents receive a certain sum of money, a voucher, from the government for the education of each school-aged child with the stipulation that it must be redeemed at a “qualified” school. Curiously, Friedman opposes the much more libertarian scheme of tax rebates, which calls for the return of a certain sum of tax monies to parents of school-aged children without the corresponding stipulation of expenditure enforced by state compulsion. This would signal an end to compulsory education laws. A system of tax rebates also averts the pernicious increase in the state’s power to control private schools, which occurs under the voucher system in the guise of the necessity to qualify the legitimate recipients of vouchers.

It is on this last point that Friedman overtly abandons libertarian doctrine. He contends that it is necessary for the state to obtrude into the educational system via the enforcement of standards of qualification, in order “to prevent parents from setting up fake schools in order to transfer the voucher money to their own pockets.” But why David shouldn’t parents set up fake schools and transfer money to their own pockets? Is it not simply reclaiming stolen money from a thief? Why should parents be compelled to send their offspring even to a gloriously competitive school system? Why not clamor for the state to cease forthwith and in toto its interventions in the educational process, surely a cause more worthy of libertarian time and effort than the implementation of the voucher plan? And why, David, is it necessary to confront you, a self-proclaimed libertarian, with such queries?

As for Friedman’s contention that the voucher system is preferable to a system of tax rebates because it provides the poor with greater benefits, one can only point out that it is based on egalitarian, and not libertarian considerations. One might also refer Mr. Friedman to the treatment that the question of the provision of goods and services to the poor in a competitive free economy has received in the works of various libertarian theorists e.g. Rothbard, Hospers, etc.

In chapter 12 and 13 Friedman argues that the present hierarchically-structured university will give way to radically decentralized, “free market” institutions and tutors in a free society. First of all, one must question whether it is proper to attempt to prognosticate the exact configuration of a given market i.e. the market for higher education. After all it depends to a great extent on the configuration of consumer demand, a scientifically unpredictable variable. If market participants desire a university where the board of trustees, alumni and faculty to varying degrees set policy and formulate the curriculum without student participation, institutions of this type will preponderate on the free market. The libertarian qua libertarian can say no more about it. This raises the question of the propriety of Friedman’s designation of the particular type of institution he favors as “free market.” This leaves us with the ridiculous inference that the presently constituted university, which as we saw above could subsist on a purely free market, is something other than a free market institution.

Chapter 14 is a rather mawkish entreaty for the abolition of immigration laws. What is astounding is Friedman’s solution to the potentially distorted influx of immigrants which could be caused by the relatively munificent welfare benefits provided by the American State. Instead of rectifying the problem by calling for an end to the whole kit and kaboodle, he suggests incorporating a fifteen year national residency requirement into the present welfare system. He also succeeds in obscuring the distinction between the libertarian position regarding government interdiction of immigration, and immigration itself. Libertarianism makes no judgement as to whether immigration per se is a good thing. In a free society it is conceivable that immigration would be restricted by private property owners e.g. road owners, stockholders or residents of private communities, ship companies etc.

In chapter 17 Friedman again deviates from libertarian principles by formulating a plan to decentralize local government and thereby ameliorate the inefficiency that has been plaguing it. Understandably, libertarians are in sympathy with any reduction in the size of a governmental unit, provided it is attended by a reduction in government power and control over the individual. Needless to say this does not imply that libertarians should favor the streamlining of government as an end in itself, especially if it results in a, a greater efficiency in government coercion e.g. tax reforms that provide the state with greater revenues and b, decreasing popular discontent with government. Thus it is disconcerting to find a libertarian outlining a blueprint for the more efficient functioning of local government, complete with a proposal for the most efficient method of setting tax rates and collecting revenues. This is repellent enough, but must he partake in the bureaucratic assault on linguistic integrity and aesthetics and serve us up the likes of “subcities” and “mini-mayors”?

In chapter 23 we encounter a cavalier dismissal of the 1968 Paris revolt as socialistic and comparable in motivation to the occupation of Prague by Soviet armor. Friedman exhibits a total lack of cognition of the issues involved. He ignores the gruesomely meticulous regulation of all aspects of economic and social life by the fascistic French government, and the stratified caste structure of French society, as well as the incipient anarchism of many of the student rebels. Further on in the chapter, Friedman’s egalitarian predilections again surface when he asserts that the greater the dispension of wealth in a given society, the better would its economy approximate a free enterprise economy. This is a fallacious proposition. Two societies, possessing widely differing distributions of wealth and income, could both theoretically qualify as purely free societies. The determining characteristic is the presence or absence of coercive relations among men. The fact that empirically societies with relatively free economies tend to possess a greater equality in the distribution of wealth and income does not comfute the theoretical conclusion.

The third section of the book is for the most part an exposition of the nature, form and viability of anarcho-capitalist institutions. The general lines of the analysis, which assumes the existence of anarcho-capitalist institutions outside a politico-ethical framework, have been criticized above. It remains for us to evaluate particular aspects of the positive analysis.

Friedman grounds his discussion of the problem of national defense on the spurious concept of a collective or public good. Here one can do no more than recommend Professor Rothbard’s brilliant and definitive demolition and interment of the collective good, and the closely related, external benefits fallacies in Man, Economy and State. Constraints of space do not permit that his argument be reconstructed here. Suffice it to say that crippled in its inception, Friedman’s analysis cannot but lead to lame conclusions. Our expectations are borne out when we are apprised that: 1. Neither government nor market can provide us with a “perfect” solution to the national defense problem. 2. As a matter of fact, there is a good chance that the market may perform more imperfectly than government, and lo and behold “by a freak of fate” a vestigial state may be “temporarily useful.” 3. Anyway he (David) would rather pay taxes to Washington than Moscow. And so the closet archist emerges.

On the subject of revolution, Friedman remonstrates libertarians to abjure the tactic of civil disruption. This is a fine position for a libertarian to take, but one must remember that it is a function of strategic and not moral considerations. The absolute moral right to defend oneself against aggression, whoever the perpetrators, is freely ceded to the individual by libertarian ethics. The decision to exercise this right, however, depends on many considerations, such as the available weapons, the enormity of the aggression, the strength of the aggressor, the long run prospects of success etc. These considerations apply to state as well as private aggression. Thus it is today that any defensive violence brought to bear against the American State without popular support, would surely be premature and result in a catastrophic setback to the movement and its goals. This is not to say that revolution may never be warranted on strategic grounds. Indeed the time may come when a great proportion of the populace has been imbued with libertarian ideas. Then it may be strategically and morally proper for libertarians to rise up and violently dislodge the proprietors of the state, for it is folly to assume that they can be induced to capitulate by nonviolent means. But to oppose revolution on moral grounds, as Friedman does, is to repudiate libertarian ethics. To counsel libertarians, again on moral grounds, to “(C)limb into a hole . . . and come out when people stop shooting each other,” is to advocate moral idiocy. What if, David, the people shooting each other were a Jewish shopowner and Nazi thugs? What if, David, the people shooting each other were the future heroes of a libertarian resistance and statist henchmen?

The bibliography would be comprehensive were it not for the glaring omission of the works of Murray Rothbard. It is inexcusable to exclude the contributions of a thinker of Rothbard’s stature from a general compendium of libertarian works, whether the author happens to enjoy intellectual solidarity with him or not.

Royal power is by nature the mother of injustice.

— Dionysius (432-367 B. C.)

The virtuous need but few laws; for it is not the law which determines their actions, but their actions which determine the law.

— Theophrastus (370-286 B. C.)

Maddox Attacks Revisionism

By Bill Evers

Robert James Maddox. The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 169 pages, $7.95.

Beginning earlier, but achieving increased recognition in the mid-1960’s, new “revisionist” interpretations of the origins of the Cold War have upset what had been the accepted account.

The essence of historical revisionism, whether on the First World War or Vietnam, and the source of its political impact is to be found in its close and critical examination of official accounts and official propaganda. Because all history situates us at the end of a chain of events, it provides us with a concrete, empirical basis on which to act in accord with our values. Thus new historical evidence and explanations which are in important disagreement with the official statements of decision-makers have direct political consequences.

After the Second World War the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations instituted a program of subsidized scholarship in order to head off the development of revisionism in the writings of the war’s history.

Knowing their record of interest in such matters, it is no surprise that similar influential groups are applauding and promoting this new anti-revisionist book by Robert James Maddox.

In appraising Maddox’s book as a piece of scholarship, two difficulties become immediately apparent. First, the book is not a full scale anti-revisionist account of the period like John Lewis Gaddis’ new and unsatisfactory United States and the Origins of the Cold War. Second, Maddox is not providing a critique of the casual theories of revisionists, as Robert W. Tucker does in his often excellent Radical Left and American Foreign Policy.

Footnotes

Instead, what Maddox provides is an examination of a few of the footnotes found on a few pages and covering the short time between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 in seven books by revisionist historians (William Appleman Williams, D.F. Fleming, Gar Alperovitz, David Horowitz, Gabriel Kolko, Diane Shaver Clemens, and Lloyd C. Gardner).

The conclusion which Maddox draws after checking these footnotes is “that these books without exception are based upon pervasive misusages of the source materials.”

To determine whether Maddox is right we can turn to published government documents and then compare Maddox’s description of them with the revisionists’. We can also read Alperovitz’s reply to Maddox in the March 1973 Journal of American History, the replies of the seven revisionists published in the June 17 New York Times Book Review, and the lengthy mimeographed replies obtainable on request from Kolko, Horowitz, and Gardner.

Not Pro-Moscow

The first type of error that Maddox makes is implying that Horowitz and Kolko are pro-Moscow. On the contrary, Horowitz has long been influenced by Issac Deutscher’s Trotskyist views, and Kolko considers the Soviet Union like Britain and the U.S. to be an imperial power “less concerned with democratic politics than friendly nations.”

In fact, the remarkable thing about Kolko’s chapter on Yalta is not what Maddox thinks he finds in it. It is rather, as Robert D. Schulzinger has noted, that Kolko’s description of the great powers’ cynical disregard of Yalta for the rights of the peoples of small nations is similar to the contemporary complaints of Robert Taft. John Bricker, and Westbrook Pegler about Yalta’s secret diplomacy.

A second sort of error that Maddox makes is in dropping the overall political context of American diplomacy. For example, in his treatment of Horowitz and Kolko on the Polish question, Maddox fails to weigh correctly the extent to which American decision-makers saw Poland in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations.

Finally. Maddox simply makes factual errors. He misconstrues the question of admitting Argentina to the United Nations in criticizing Horowitz. He distorts, in attacking Williams, Alperovitz. Kolko and Garder, the attitude of American policy-makers toward the conditions for foreign aid to Russia after World War II. He misrepresents the de facto situation on Poland’s western border in attacking Kolko.

But these are not new errors on Maddox’s part. They can be found in an exchange of letters in the May 18, 1972 New York Review of Books, in which Ronald Steel corrected Maddox’s mistakes.

Most important of all in assessing Maddox’s work is the question of whether he zeroes in on footnotes that materially damage the thesis of any book he is criticizing.

The first problem is that Maddox often misunderstands or distorts the thesis of a book when he is attacking it. He certainly does not accurately convey the central contention of William Appleman Williams about the Open Door ideology.

Maddox describes Horowitz as finding a radical dichotomy between the foreign policies of Roosevelt and Truman, whereas Horowitz’s considered such changes only stylistic. Horowitz’s real point was that the postwar power distribution left most important decisions in U.S. hands.

Key Point Not Faced

The second problem is that Maddox does not confront the revisionists by picking footnotes essential to their thesis. In the case of Alperovitz, for example. Maddox does not face Alperovitz’s key argument that the possession of the atomic bomb by the U.S. was the major reason for a policy shift toward Russia in the middle months of 1945.

Useful critiques of Alperovitz’s view can really only be found in the work of other revisionists like Kolko and Athan Theoharis.

Despite the obvious weakness of Maddox’s work, it has been promoted by historians like the late Herbert Feis (one-time State Department economic policy-maker). George Kennan (another State Department official and original formulator of the containment doctrine), Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. (adviser to President Kennedy), and Eugene V. Rostow (Under Secretary of State under Kennedy).

I think, however, that the only objective evaluation that one can make of Maddox’s book is that it is a poor job. Under close scrutiny, the book falls apart. Reconsidering the origins of the Cold War after having had the dubious benefit of Maddox’s contribution, one can only conclude that the revisionists have made an important and probably lasting contribution to our understanding of what really happened.

Reprinted from the Stanford Daily.

Rand On The Middle East

The neo-Randian weekly newspaper Ergo has given us a detailed account of Miss Rand’s answers during a question period following her annual Ford Hall Forum speech in Boston (Ergo, Oct. 31) Rand’s remarks on the Middle East are a chilling revelation of her lack of knowledge of the concrete facts of reality, as well as a grievous betrayal of her own oft-proclaimed libertarian moral principles.

Asked what the American people and the government should do about the Middle East war. Rand answered unhesitatingly: “Give every help possible to Israel.” Not American soldiers, she conceded; but military weapons. We need not stress here the assault on liberty involved when the U.S. government taxes Americans in order to send arms abroad; surely, this is as statist and immoral, though not to the same degree, as sending American soldiers to the Middle East. As for the American people, Miss Rand sounds for all the world like the United Jewish Appeal: “Give everything you can” (Give till it hurts?). Reaffirming her supposed and longtime opposition to altruism. Rand added that “this is the first time I have contributed” to public causes, but now apparently we have a vital exception.

Why? What is the overriding cause for which we must set aside libertarian principle, isolationist principle, and opposition to altruism; why is Israel’s “emergency” to be a claim on our hearts and pockets? Given Miss Rand’s militant atheism, it surely could not be the necessity for the reestablishment of the Temple, or the fulfillment of the old prayer, “next year in Jerusalem”; given her professed individualism, it surely could not be (one hopes) the Zionist call to blood, race, and soil. So what is it? Russia is of course dragged in, but even Miss Rand concedes that the Russian Threat is not the real issue here.

The real issue? Because “civilized men” are “fighting against savages”, and when that happens, says Rand, “then you have to be on the side of that civilized man no matter what he is.” The fact that Israel is socialistic, she adds, pales into insignificance before this great imperative.

There are two grave problems here: of the facts of reality, and of moral principle. Factually, what does Miss Rand mean by “savages”? Once work through the emotional connotations of the term, and the concept becomes a vague one. She explains that the Arabs are “primitive” and “nomads.” Here she betrays total ignorance of Palestine and its history. The only “nomads” in the region are not the Palestinian Arabs, who were driven out of their lands and homes by the Zionists, but the Jordanian Bedouins, who as hirelings of King Hussein are in effect anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel. Palestinian Arabs were not nomads but agriculturalists; long before Israel, they “made the desert bloom.” The “nomad” theory was convenient Zionist propaganda, and nothing more. Perhaps the Palestinian Arabs are “savages” because they live miserable lives in hovels on the desert; but they do so because—one and a half million of them—they were driven out of their homes and properties by the Zionists, and they remain in dire poverty as refugees. Miss Rand’s strictures are chillingly reminiscent of the English who drove the Irish out of their farms and lands by force, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then looked down their noses at the “wild, savage” Irishmen who unaccountably spent their lives wandering around the forests.

Miss Rand asks herself the question: why are the Arabs against Israel? Unbelievably, she answers that they resent Israel because they are “savages” who “just do not want to use their minds”; deliberately choosing not to use their minds, they resent the superior technology and civilization of the Zionists. Surely this is the oddest explanation for Arab resentment ever penned. For what Miss Rand omits from the discussion is the one-and-half million Palestinian Arabs driven out of their homes and lands by force, to which were latter added another half-million ruled by Zionist conquerors. A crucial omission indeed! Where is the Palestinian refugee problem in Miss Rand’s attempt at explanation? Blankout!

This brings us to the even more important moral question: namely, assuming that one can really define “savagery”, what’s wrong with being a “savage”? Isn’t a nomad or a savage, a person? Doesn’t he therefore possess inslianable rights? Isn’t he to be allowed to own his own person and his property? What happened to the great libertarian principle, to which Miss Rand presumably adheres, of no initiation of force against another person? If savages are people, what is the justification for initiating force against them? Or are we to amend the great libertarian axiom to read: No one is allowed to initiate force against the person or property of another, except if he be civilized and the other a savage? But then we are on murky and dangerous ground. What if Group A is a bit more “civilized”, and Group B a bit more “savage”; is it therefore legitimate and moral for A to attack and rob B? I am sorry to say that this is fascist ethical theory, and that therefore in this respect the many charges about Randianism being “fascist” seems to have a certain core of truth.

And yet Miss Rand says it; without going into the rights or wrongs of the case, of the aggression or the property rights or the liberty involved, she states flatly: “When you have civilized man fighting against savages, then you have to be on the side of that civilized man no matter what he is.” But surely, on any of her own apparent criteria, Soviet Russia, highly technically developed, is then far more “civilized” than, say, Mongolia. Does that mean that if Russia were to attack and sweep into Mongolia that we would all be honor bound to cheer for the Russians, and even to kick in our dollars for the great cause? And if not, why not?

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A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 1

JANUARY, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

ENERGY FASCISM

Two years ago, in response to the first freeze of Phase I of Nixon’s new economic policy, I wrote that “on August 15, 1971, fascism came to America.” Some critics felt that the label was overblown; but here we are, two years later, well into the next “phase” of the fascist logic upon which the Nixon Administration has embarked: totalitarian controls such as allocations and rationing. He who says A must say B, and the logic of price and wage controls is marching us straight into a totalitarian, collectivist state: in short, fascism.

The crucial point on the energy crisis is that the crisis is not, as the Administration and the Establishment would have us believe, a visitation from on high, the result of the actions of the Arab sheiks, or a consequence of “excessive greed” on the part of the American consumer or of the oil companies. The crisis is, pure and simple, the creature of the American government itself and its statist interventions into the economic system. And while the rest of us are placed into increasing subjection by the government, in the name of aiding or curing the energy crisis, the cause—government policy—continues on its merry way unchecked.

The major evil stems from the government’s policy of price controls below the free market level. There is one and only one possible cause of the phenomenon of a shortage, and that is government price control below the market. There are myriad actions of the government which have made energy fuels artificially scarce: but a shortage can only be caused by price control.

Economists define a “shortage” as a condition where consumers are not able to find the product. Regardless of how scarce the supply of a product may be, there is never any need for a shortage, for a disappearance of the product from the shelves. For on the free market, if a product becomes more scarce, the price rises until the market is “cleared”, i.e. until there is sufficient supply available for, those who wish to purchase the product at the market price. And so, if the free price system is permitted to operate, increased scarcity will cause a higher price, but not an outright disappearance, or “shortage”, of the product. Take Rembrandt paintings, for example. Here is a product that is mighty scarce indeed, in fact it is difficult to think of another product in shorter supply; furthermore, barring a perfect and undetectable forger, there is no prospect of the supply of Rembrandts ever increasing. And yet, there are no complaints or lamentations about a “Rembrandt shortage”. The reason is because there are no price controls on Rembrandts. As a result, if you have a couple of million dollars to spend, you will be able to find a Rembrandt to buy.

Shortages are solely the product of price controls, of not permitting the free market mechanism to function. The bigger the discrepancy between the government controlled price and the free market price, the bigger the shortage. Suppose, for example, that the government in its wisdom suddenly decreed that Wheaties may not be sold for more than a nickel a box. What would happen? After a brief flurry during which every kid and mother in the land would rush to the grocer to buy their bargain Wheaties, the Wheaties would disappear from the shelves never to return. We would be in the throes of a nationwide Wheaties “shortage”. Faced with the prospect of a swift revenue of a nickel a box, the Wheaties manufacturer would shift to corn flakes or go into some other line of business. Black marketeers would be beckoning consumers to buy “hot Wheaties” at a price far above the free market level (due to the cut in production, the inability to advertise an illegal transaction, the risk of being caught and arrested, and the cost of paying off the police to look the other way.) There is no need to conjure up Arab sheiks, “greedy profiteers”, or anyone else as the culprits for the shortage. We can have as much of a shortage of anything as we want; all we need is to push the control price far enough below the market price.

When the black day of August 15, 1971 arrived, we free-market economists predicted that shortages of all sorts of products would result from the price control, and that the shortages would develop increasingly after a period of time. On the day of the freeze, everything seems to be functioning smoothly, and so the general mood is one of euphoric success. What is generally overlooked is that, since prices on August 15 corresponded to free-market levels, the frozen prices the next day would naturally correspond to these levels in much the same way. Free-market prices don’t change that much in one day. But it was predictable that as weeks and months wore on, and as the government continued to inflate the money supply and hence free-market price levels, the gap would grow steadily worse and eventually lead to aggravated shortages of product after product.

The rise in free-market price levels was aggravated by the accelerating expansion of the money supply by the government and by the fact that the lingering recession of 1971 was soon succeeded by a boom, thus removing any slack in the economy. When Tricky Dick imposed Phase I in August, 1971, price inflation was proceeding at something like a rate of 4% per year. Now, after 4½ “phases” of varying degrees of price dictation, and continued monetary inflation by the government, we are suffering a price inflation rate of something like 10% per year; and prices rose in December, 1973 at an annual rate of approximately 26%. The rate of inflation is accelerating, and, apart from other evil consequences of this condition, the gap between the free and controlled prices of many goods continues to widen, and the shortages to emerge and grow steadily worse. It is not only natural gas and petroleum that have suffered aggravated shortages due to price control; it is also and increasingly such crucial commodities as paper, steel, and plastics.

Since we were probably due for a “normal” recession this year anyway, the shutdowns and layoffs that may flow from a disappearance of these crucial raw materials may well plunge the American economy into a severe depression. The same may more swiftly happen in Western Europe, where inflation and price controls are in some areas more severe than they are here. As price controls cause products and raw materials to disappear, plant shutdowns and layoffs could ensue, causing widespread drops in production and employment, i.e. a depression. We have already had a taste of this when the federal government, in its wisdom drastically cut its mandatory allocations of fuel oil from factories making private airplanes; after all, the bureaucrats reasoned, private planes are a luxury, so let’s slash their allocations. Since private airplane factories happen to be concentrated in Wichita, Kansas (Cessna, Lear), the nearly 60% cut decreed by the government caused immediate large-scale unemployment in that city, and only massive protest by the Wichita citizens succeeded in getting the ruling reversed. This is only a foretaste of things to come.

And so price controls, as was predicted, have led to shortages in industry after industry. If the price system is allowed to function, then the free market quickly wipes out any shortage as the price rises to “clear” supply and demand on the market. Shortages under price controls persist and get worse, there being no market mechanism to remove them. If prices are allowed to rise, then the price increase performs two important economic functions: (1) the “rationing” function, as buyers voluntarily restrict their purchases, in accordance with each individual buyer’s needs and abilities; and (2) the incentive function, the higher price stimulating increased production and supply over a period of time. Price control prevents both of these crucial functions from being performed, smoothly and voluntarily; instead, shortages persist and intensify.

In such a shortage situation, there must be some way of “rationing” the short supply. With prices not allowed to perform this task, other, arbitrary methods come into play: e.g. lining up for gas for several hours, or selling to favored purchasers. The next step, which has already occurred, is for the government to step in to ration by coercion, to allocate supplies in ways that it sees fit—ways that are always uneconomic and irrational as well as coercive and despotic. We already have gasoline rationing at earlier than retail levels: pace the government’s arbitrary shutting off of fuel to the private airplane industry. And even at the costlier and more complex retail level, gasoline, for example, is already being “rationed” by arbitrary restrictions, and by official rationing in several states (at this writing Hawaii, Oregon, New York, and New Jersey).

There are two major problems with all these rationing schemes: (a) they are arbitrary, irrational, and totalitarian, and (b) they freeze the shortage, since they fail to allow prices to rise to induce greater supplies of the product.

Take, for example, the arbitrary shutdown of filling stations on Sundays. All that this accomplishes is to cause a rush on gasoline on Saturdays, as well as levying great hardship on drivers who have to travel somewhere, say in a sudden emergency, on a Sunday. How many potential hospital patients have already been injured or even killed by the blunderbuss orders to shut down on Sundays? The next step taken by our all-wise rulers was to impose maximum limits on each individual purchase of gasoline. The result, as could have been foreseen, was an uneconomical inducement to stop at a whole slew of filling stations until the desired amount is purchased. Since Christmas, the New Jersey Turnpike has imposed lunatic maximum limits on each car’s purchase of gas: such that it is impossible to drive over more than a small fraction of the Turnpike. Each Turnpike ticket is stamped so that no more gas can be purchased. The result, of course, was that cars have been getting off and on the Turnpike repeatedly, picking up a new ticket along the way and getting the allotted amount at each turn. This absurd harassment is typical of the consequences of government intervention.

Furthermore, the gasoline scare—the fear that no filling stations may be open or available further down the road—has led everyone to keep their gas tanks as filled as possible, thus increasing the total purchase of gasoline as the average “inventory” of gas in the tank has risen. Now, the governments have reacted to this development by beginning to impose minimum limits on the amount (in gallons or dollars) of gasoline purchased, so that no one may keep his gasoline inventory high. But minimum limits, by their very existence, seem destined to lead, in their own right, to a higher consumption of gasoline. Moreover, to have both minimum and maximum limits on purchases begins to approach Alice-in-Wonderland; perhaps one day some clown in the bureaucracy will inadvertently set the minimum limits higher than the maximum: and then all of us gas consumers will go bughouse in response to this new and devilish form of “Catch-22”.

In contrast to these irrational and meat-axe measures, formal gasoline rationing would at least have the merit of allocating to each consumer his 30 or 40 gallons a month, and then allowing him to consume them in any pattern he wishes: on Sundays, on the Turnpikes, or whatever. A rationing system, however, would be highly costly, would require an army of unproductive bureaucrats to administer and enforce, and would be even more comprehensively totalitarian. It would also freeze the scarce supply and the shortage permanently.

The government is already confused about what sort of rationing system it is going to impose. There is the old and much reviled (justly so) World War II rationing system, in which no one was allowed to give away or sell his surplus ration tickets to anyone else. This prohibition made no sense at all. If the number of ration tickets matched the scarce supply (as it was supposed to), then if I (for example) sold my surplus anchovy tickets (as a non-anchovy eater) for someone else’s candy tickets (the other person being a dieter), then both of us would be better off. Why shouldn’t trading in ration tickets be allowed? Indeed, this was the entering wedge, in Henry Hazlitt’s excellent novel Time Will Run Back, to move from a Communist economy of the future to a free market; the first step was: why not allow people to exchange their ration tickets?

Since Nixon’s economic advisers claim that they favor the “free market”, they have been reportedly toying with various “freeish market” versions of rationing. One is to allow a “white market”, with people being allowed to buy and sell ration coupons; if I don’t use my car much or at all, I can sell my surplus coupons to those who wish to use more than their allotted 40 gallons. OK, this plan (apparently the brainchild of Secretary Shultz), is certainly an improvement on the “traditional” World War II system. But the very improvement points up the imbecility of the whole rationing scheme. Suppose, for example, that the current controlled price of gasoline is 50¢ a gallon. No one knows what the free market price would be (indeed it is impossible to know without letting the free market rip), but estimates have ranged from 58¢ to 80¢ or $1.00 a gallon. Suppose that the free market price is 80¢. Then the result of this curious white market, will be that the demands of the over-40 gallon buyers will drive the price up to approximately the 80¢ level. In other words, we would all be paying the 80¢ a gallon, and therefore there would be no further shortage; but the hitch is that the oil industry would be getting only 50¢ a gallon, while us under-users would be reaping the remaining 30¢. The moral issue is: why should I receive 30¢ a gallon for gasoline, I a non-producer? The economic issue is that the oil companies would still have no incentive to expand production and sales to the consumer market, so that we would be paying the higher free-market price without the benefit of inducing an increased supply. The idiocy of such a “solution” to the problem would be crystal-clear.

To complete the picture of rationing schemes, the above “extremist free market” proposal is countered by another variant, a “middle of the road” scheme in between World War II and Shultz. In this scheme, no one would be allowed to buy and sell ration tickets on their own and to each other; instead, the federal government would “nationalize” the ration ticket market. Everyone would have to sell their surplus stamps to the government, which in turn would resell them. In addition to getting its own unnecessary and uneconomic “cut” for these dubious monopoly services, the government would be making the fumbling attempt to find the market clearing price. This plan has all of the defects of the Shultz scheme plus many more; the government would clearly do a terrible job at trying to find the market price, a discovery job for which only the market itself is equipped.

Let us not despair completely, however; at least a partial salvation from this iniquity is already under way. It is an open secret that the heroic Mafiosi, always zealous at supplying goods and services that the State has declared to be illicit and illegal, have already revved up to print counterfeit ration tickets on a massive scale. Presumably, the Mafia is using sources of information inside the government to find out exactly what the tickets will look like. It has been estimated that fully 15% of the gasoline sold for ration coupons in World War II was sold for black-market, counterfeit coupons. And that was in the midst of a war supported with enthusiasm by most of the populace. If counterfeiting and black markets were so extensive in the midst of that patriotic fervor, what will it be now, when there is no popular war and the government is looked upon with healthy suspicion and hostility by the bulk of the American citizenry?

At first, of course, the Nixon Administration tried its best to rekindle the old wartime fervor. Establishment intellectuals, ever ready to call for sacrifice and scourging (of other people) wrote solemn if idiotic thinkpieces hailing the energy crisis as really, down-deep, a good thing. Why? Because we, the American public, have gotten too soft, too affluent, too personal in our concerns. But now, whoopee!, the energy crisis will rekindle that good old wartime (!) spirit of self-sacrifice, of hardship, of rallying behind our beloved President to fight another “war”, this time against the energy shortage. For a brief while, this hogwash seemed to work, as people always respond initially to calls for belt-tightening, self-sacrifice, national unity, etc. But, praise the Lord, it didn’t take very long for the good old spirit of American individualism and “selfishness” to surface once again. The lack of “credibility” of our government surely helped speed this process of public awakening. For when the shortage actually began to bite, when gasoline lines developed and filling stations closed, reason and individualism came bounding back. The public has been getting good and mad, and fist fights have been dotting the gasoline queues. The striking truckers, as wrong-headed as they were, were at least lashing out in an attitude of rebellion and pugnacity at the government-imposed system.

There are other hopeful signs. The Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the AFL-CIO, each of whom hailed Nixon’s Phase I with joyous hosannahs, are now each and all committed to an all-out fight against price-wage controls. Unfortunately, they do not have the guts and/or the insight to oppose the rationing and other despotic energy edicts, but at least they now oppose the control system which leads to the rationing schemes. It is particularly refreshing to see the NAM return home to an anti-control stand. The NAM was born, at the turn of this century, as a free-market, small business-oriented, opponent of the emerging corporate state system, for which they were lambasted by the corporate liberal National Civic Federation as “anarchists.” During the 1930’s and 40’s, the NAM played a vigorous free-market role. Then, during the 1960’s, the NAM changed its structure from rotating annual presidents to a full-time permanent president, W. P. Gullander, hailing from a corporation which would scarcely last a week without government contracts and subventions—General Dynamics. Under Gullander’s aegis, the NAM enthusiastically embraced the idea of “partnership between government and industry”, taking its place happily in the Welfare-Warfare Corporate State. But last year a revolution occurred within NAM, Gullander was sent packing, and the rotating presidency restored. Since then, the NAM has returned to a vigorous free-market position.

Other important anti-control sentiment has arisen. C. Jackson Grayson, head of the Cost of Living Council and boss of Phase II, and now back in private life, has recently delivered a blistering speech denouncing all price and wage controls. Perhaps in response to all this growing opposition, the Nixon Administration has announced the end of controls by April 30, thereby inaugurating Phase V. But there are several important clinkers in the scheme. One is that energy controls will be tighter than ever; another is that direct controls will be replaced by long-term “voluntary” agreements by industry not to raise prices and wages beyond a certain amount, these pledges to monitored by the government on threat of reimposing direct enforcement. And so direct controls will continue past May, but in another and phonier guise.

Meanwhile, on the energy front, the threat of government dictation looms ever larger. Economic insanity is running rampant in the Congress, with plans emerging to: impose a federal tax on gasoline, and/or a “rollback” of prices, and/or an excess profit tax on the oil industry, and/or anti-trust prosecution, and/or a new federal oil corporation to produce and sell oil, and/or outright nationalization of some or all of the oil corporations.

A federal excise tax on gasoline to raise prices to market-clearing levels, would have effects similar to the “white market” scheme (provided that the government in its wisdom can find the market-clearing price!) Except instead of myself and other “under-users” reaping the hypothetical 30¢ a gallon, the government would get it, increasing its tax revenues. Not only would there still be no incentive to increase oil production, but the government would increase its already crippling siphoning of resources from private to its own hands, aggravating the growing burden of parasitic statism on the private sector and on private production.

A “rollback” of prices—something never achieved even during World War II—would disastrously increase the gasoline and oil shortage. Antitrust prosecution would help to destroy a vitally essential industry, and would intensify the shortage instead of alleviating it. Nationalization or a federal corporation means a massive leap toward socialism, with all the inefficiencies, shortages, parasitism, and totalitarianism that such a leap entails.

An excess profits tax is a particularly bizarre form of government intervention. A shattering event occurs—the event may be a war, or an energy shortage. Imposing an excess profits tax necessarily requires defining what “excess” means, and invariably “excess” is defined as any profits greater than the base year before the event occurred. But since profits are earned in proportion to the speed and efficiency by which the business firms adapts to the new event, this means that corporations are penalized precisely in proportion to their success in adapting to the new conditions. A firm that meets the new conditions successfully earns profits and would be penalized by a severe tax; while the firm that sluggishly fails to adapt or to produce the newly-demanded product, suffers no penalizing tax at all. If the new event is an energy shortage, this means that firms successfully producing energy are penalized, while firms that inefficiently produce energy or don’t shift to the energy field are not penalized at all. No better way can be found to cripple the efficiency and flexibility of the free enterprise system than an excess profits tax.

Profits on the market are a measure of the efficiency and rapidity by which business firms meet the changing needs of the consumers. To denounce an oil company for making “windfall” profits from an energy shortage makes as much moral and economic sense as denouncing physicians for making extra incomes during an epidemic. We should all rejoice when a corporation or other business firm makes high profits, for that is an indicator of great usefulness to the consumers; we should reserve our scorn for the firms that make losses and thereby display their inept management and lack of entrepreneurial ability.

Even apart from the great social merit of high profits, the hysteria about high oil profits is a piece of statistical charlatanry. The United Stated suffered a recession in 1969-71, and so corporate profits in those years were abnormally low; price controls based on profit margins in these recession years imposed further burdens on corporations, even past late 1971. In the oil industry, for example, left liberals point the finger of hysterical alarm at “swollen” oil profits in 1973, and point to the huge percentage increase of those profits over 1972. But any increase of profits over an abnormally low base will yield a high and seemingly “excessive” percentage increase. Thus, if Oil Company A had a net profit of $1000 in 1972, and $1,000,000 in 1973, leftist critics can screech about a huge 1000% increase in profits; still better, if the company made zero profits in 1972, they could bleat about an infinite increase in profits. The point here is that the years 1969-72 were years of abnormally low profits for much of the oil industry, and that the higher profits in 1973 were bounce back to pre-1969 levels. Change the base year and you can make any set of figures seem excessive and unwarranted.

Thus, Business Week (Feb. 2) prints the profit statistics for the past decade of the 10 leading oil companies in the country. For four of these companies, the estimated 1973 profits are not yet available, but we have these estimated figures for the other six, which includes the top three (Exxon, Mobil, Texaco), and the fifth through the seventh ranking firms (Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil (Indiana), and Shell). Taking these figures, we have made the following calculations: the average rate of profit on invested capital of these six leading oil companies, for the average of the five pre-recession years, 1964-68, was 11.1%. Profits then dipped from 1969-72, and rose again in 1973. The average rate of profit for these firms in 1973 was 11.2%. In short, profit rates are now what they were in the pre-recession years. And so even ignoring the beneficial nature of profits and considering the issue solely on left-liberal terms, we find that the bleating about swollen and excessive oil profits is totally unwarranted, a piece of statistical legerdemain moulded to suit the ideological purposes of the critics. In the words of the old adage: “There’s three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statistics.”

Western Europe, as everyone knows, is in the throes of an energy shortage even more severe than ours. The reason, however, is not as well known: because the inflation and price controls are even more severe there than here. There is one exception to the European energy shortage, however: West Germany. How come, since an economy as industrialized as West Germany is highly dependent on oil? How come there have been no electric blackouts and no rationing there? A New York Times article provides the clear-cut answer: no price controls on petroleum products. (Craig R. Whitney, “West Germans, At a Price, Avoid Oil Crisis,” New York Times, Jan. 24). The article points out that West Germany has no price controls on gasoline, heating oil or other oil products—in contrast to Britain, Italy, Sweden, and the Netherlands, which are suffering from an oil shortage. The article quotes oil company officials as stating that, as a result, “it was always in their interest to keep supplying West Germany while it was sometimes not in their interest to keep supplying the other markets.” And West Germany has been far more dependent on Arab oil imports than the U.S.; yet the free market allowed a plentiful supply of oil to be imported and sold. The cost to the German car owner of keeping an ample supply of gasoline was a mere 10% increase in price.

Gerhard Hess, trade director of the German firm, Geisenberg Oil, noted that in contrast to West Germany, “in Italy there was a price limit of $30 a ton for heavy industrial oil. But now, Libyan crude oil costs $76 a ton at the port in Libya. For the companies, it just doesn’t make sense at those prices to deliver to Italy.” Hess trenchantly summed up the West German experience this winter: “The free-price system has proved itself so well, that only an idiot would say we should impose another system. Because we were not cut off from the free market, we got through this crisis.”

There is another great advantage to be reaped from allowing the free market to set the prices of oil. We hear a great deal about alternative potential sources of energy, from shale oil to solar energy to tropical oceans; whatever their technological status, they have not been tapped till now because they have been uneconomic—too expensive in relation to the more orthodox sources of energy. A rise in the price of oil on the market will induce greater production and technological innovation into alternative energy sources, which will become increasingly competitive with existing fuel. And even within existing energy sources, a rise in the price of oil will, say, stimulate increased production of coal, of which there is enough under ground in America to provide all of our heating requirements for many generations to come.

There are, in addition to the controls-created shortage, numerous ways in which the U.S. government has artificially restricted the supply of energy, thus making energy more scarce and artificially raising the free-market price. Indeed, it almost seems as if every step of the way in the energy industries, government has been there to restrict supply and hence to raise price. The abolition of these myriad interventions would allow a greatly increased production and supply of energy to the American consumer, at a lower market price. Some of these restrictions have been partially or wholly relaxed in recent months, but this easing has scarcely been enough as yet to overcome years, and sometimes decades of crippling restrictions on energy production. Here we can do little more than list some of the most glaring and important of these restrictions.

1) Most notorious have been the severe maximum price controls on natural gas, which have been imposed by the Federal Power Commission for two decades. As time went on, the gap between the low controlled price and the rising free market price became greater and greater, drying up the search for natural gas reserves, and leading to the current crippling shortage. Whatever natural gas remains is either sold intrastate, where the dead hand of the FBC cannot make itself felt, or else exported abroad. The latter is scarcely surprising, if we consider that the regulated price is approximately 25¢/1000 cu. ft., while natural gas can be sold for $1.00/1000 cu. ft. abroad.

Furthermore, when natural gas was made artificially cheap, it helped to put much of the coal industry out of business. In recent years, the shortage of natural gas has led to artificially increased demand for fuel oil, thus raising its market price.

Another consideration is that natural gas and crude oil are often found together. When the artificially low price of natural gas dried up exploration for new reserves, it also cut the supply of newly found reserves of crude oil, thereby lowering supply from what it would have been and raising the price.

Who was responsible for the economic insanity of the coerced low price for natural gas? As in so many other areas of government intervention, what we had was an Unholy Alliance of political pressure groups: left-liberal ideologues who generally favor government control and artificial rollbacks; along with public utility companies who wished to feast for a number of years on artificially cheap fuel. It is the all-too-common alliance of statist ideology and vested privilege.

2) The federal government is itself sitting on vast and virtually unused crude oil reserves of trillions of barrels, enough to last for many generations to come. It has been doing this sitting—and withholding of oil from the market, for many decades, thereby restricting oil supply and raising the price. These reserves are in the control of the U.S. Navy, and include the Elk Hills reserve in California, Teapot Dome in Wyoming, the North Slope in Alaska, and others. What is the Navy waiting for? Must we keep trillions of barrels unused, wasted forever, while the Navy waits until some battleship needs the oil in some unknown war of the future?

3) Similarly, the federal government, which owns outright the vast majority of all land in the Western states, owns almost all of the land in the Mountain States where enough shale oil exists to meet oil needs for the indefinite future. And yet the government has been holding this shale off the market, refusing to lease its land for purposes of developing the shale oil resource and producing the oil for the market.

4) For over forty years, the state governments, led by the Texas Railroad Commission, and with the blessing and coordination of the federal government, have levied maximum quotas on the drilling of crude oil. In this “prorationing” system, each state is assigned a maximum production of crude for the following month, and then each oil well receives its fractional quota of that maximum. The result has been to restrict production and raise price of crude and of all petroleum products.

5) As a corollary to the domestic cartellization of the above point, the federal government has levied, for two decades, oil import quotas, placing maximum limits, and quotas for each firm as a fraction of such limits, on the importation of foreign crude. The resulting price increases have ratified and made possible the price rises due to prorationing.

6) There have been a great many complaints about the “failure” of the oil companies to produce new refineries in recent years, especially on the Eastern seaboard. But since, on the market, need and demand will create profitable opportunities for investment, further inquiry should have been: why have such refineries been unprofitable? The recession and low profits from 1969 helped; but another factor was the oil import quotas, which restricted and made uncertain a steady supply of crude oil, especially on the East Coast. Another recent problem, for refineries and for many other areas of energy, has been the harassment and restrictions on building any new plants imposed by the government under pressure from the environmentalists. The environmentalists have two major gripes: air pollution, which may or may not be valid in particular cases, and “defacing the environment”, which imposes the environmentalists’ own particular and peculiar aesthetic values by force on the rest of the public. If the environmentalists feel that a new factory or refinery “defaces” the landscape, then let them buy the landscape and keep it undefiled, or forever hold their peace. Certainly it is unconscionable for them to force the rest of us to adhere to their esthetics, and to coercively prevent property owners from using their own property as they see fit.

7) The development of nuclear energy for peaceful uses has been held up for many years by the environmentalists.

8) The environmentalists have managed to delay the construction of the Alaskan pipeline for five years, including the importing from the north of Alaska of several million barrels of oil per day. The environmentalists were worried about two problems: (a) defacing the tundra (to these people, any man-made change in the environment, any alteration from pristine nature, is ipso facto “defacement.”) It is instructive to note that the Alaskans themselves, up there close to the tundra, have no wish whatever to preserve it forever undefiled. Their fondest wish is to reshape the tundra and achieve some jobs, income, and economic development. It is affluent, comfortable New York intellectuals, for example, who are busiest at trying to preserve someone else’s tundra. And (b) they worried about the migratory patterns of the caribou, who would not be able to walk across the pipeline. Even when the pipeline company, at considerable expense, agreed to build bridges over the pipeline so that the caribou could walk over them, the environmentalists continued to gripe about the fact that the caribou might still be reluctant to walk over a surface to which they were not accustomed. All right, it is about time that we take our choice Americans: who should win out, humans or the caribou? Whereas the noisy minority of environmentalists will choose the caribou (or any other species, for that matter) over man, we trust that enough sanity still prevails among the bulk of the population so that a resounding choice will be made for the human species. And if this be “human-chauvinism”, so be it!

9) There is lots of crude oil off our coasts. But off-shore drilling has been restricted and crippled by the self-same busybody environmentalists working as usual through government. Yes, you guessed it, the oil once in a while spills into the ocean, thus injuring the fish and other sea life. Choose America: humans or plankton!

10) The U.S. has an abundant supply of coal, as we have noted. But coal has suffered most from the dictates of government-environmentalism. Coal heating causes air pollution; but one might think that after centuries of such pollution we could struggle along for a few years more until antipollution devices were invented and installed on the chimneys. Instead, the meat-axe approach has bankrupted a lot of coal mines, disemployed many coal miners, and restricted our supply of heating fuel. Furthermore, the relatively new technology of strip mining is less polluting, less expensive, and avoids such classic problems of old-fashioned pit mining as black lung and mine caviens. There is lots of strip coal available in the Mountain States that remains untapped. But, once again, the environmentalists have come down especially hard on strip mining. Why? You guessed it: “defacing the environment.” If the incubus of the environmentalists is removed, and if the federal government unloads it strip coal resources into private hands, we could produce a great deal of fuel. Another boon is that the United Mine Workers, which have crippled the coal industry through pushing up wage rates, is weak in the Mountain States and could not succeed in blighting the coal industry there.

Thus, the federal government, and it alone, has created the energy mess in two sets of ways: (1) by a series of restrictions on production it has created artificial scarcities and thereby raised the free market price of energy sources; and (2) it has then greatly compounded the mess by imposing price controls below the free market price and creating the current shortages. The immediate cure for the shortage is simple: to abolish the price controls. The longer-range solution for the scarcities is to abolish all of its varied restrictions.

It is incumbent upon libertarians to take the lead in combatting the energy fascism being fastened upon this country. We must call for resistance to the totalitarian edicts telling us how much, what, and when we can use or purchase energy. We predicted the consequences of price controls: that controls would lead to shortages and then in turn to rationing and other acts of despotism. We must point out that government is not the cure for the energy shortage but the cause of the disease; and the disease can only be abolished by getting government completely out of the energy field, and especially out of price-wage controls. One disturbing point is that, even among conservatives and libertarians who have written and spoken soundly and correctly on the energy crisis, there has been a certain torpor, a certain measured sobriety of tone, that ill befits our proper reaction to the latest acceleration of tyranny. As citizens, even more as people with a passion for liberty and justice, we must respond with passion to the new crisis. So far no conservative or libertarian has matched the fiery and passionate instincts of left-liberal New York Post columnist Pete Hamill in his gut reaction to energy fascism. Totally lacking any understanding of the market economy and hence of the true causes, of the current crisis, Hamill yet saw unerringly the evil of government dictation that lay at the heart of the issue. In his Post column of Nov. 12 (“The Phony Crisis”), Hamill searingly wrote:

“Now they’ve even taken away our skyline. It had been ours since that day in 1945 when we all raced to the rooftops of Brooklyn to see those million lights blink on again, dazzling, joyous, triumphant and unbelievably beautiful, signalling to us that the war was over. I remember a woman crying on the rooftop that time, knowing that the long night of the Second World War was finished, that New York was blazing again with its electric beauty, that blackouts and dimouts were behind us, that the troopships would soon be home. The New York skyline: ours forever.

‘And now it’s gone again, Moving along the city’s highways, there is a joyless sense of defeat and loss in the town. It’s as if the malignant hand of Richard Nixon had reached out from the bunker in Camp David and pulled the lightswitch on all of us, spreading his personal darkness. The Empire State Building is a blinking red light in the dark. The great pile of downtown buildings, Turman Capote’s ‘diamond iceberg’, is a hole in the night sky . . . .

“It’s time to call their bluff. They might be able to fool a lot of farmers, but they shouldn’t get away with this hokey fraud in Our Town. We are overdue for a rebellion against the corrupt, criminal government in Washington, and now we have one opportunity to make that rebellion overt. Turn on all your lights. Drive 65 miles an hour (will Rockefeller order air strikes on the Thruway to stop us?) Refuse to turn down thermostats. Let Washington know we’ve made them again for liars. And lets get back our skyline.”

Mises And History

By Leonard P. Liggio

The death of Ludwig von Mises has brought forth numerous essays on his contribution to economics. It is equally in order to discuss his work in the historical sciences, as he called them. Having had the honor and pleasure of attending Mises’ graduate seminar during the years in which he wrote Theory and History and devoted his seminar to that subject, I had the rare opportunity of participating in the final formulation of his long-considered concepts of the historical sciences. But, before discussing that part of his contribution in another article, I shall indicate some of the substantive historical analyses which Mises made.

Faced with the rise of classical liberalism in the 19th century and its collapse since the first world war, Mises had very special motives for examining contemporary history. Mises emphasized that ideas are the base on which all social activity takes place. It is in the realm of ideas that the battle for civilization and progress takes place. Mises emphasized the fact and the necessity that classical liberalism had to be obstinate and uncompromising. Success of liberal ideas required the enlightenment of people who studied ideas who would convince the citizenry of their correctness. Mises advocated a revolution in ideas as the necessary step to the revolution of the practice of freedom. However, the advocates of classical liberalism in the 19th century were not obstinate and uncompromising. The English utilitarians, especially Ricardo, had incomplete and compromised notions leading succeeding liberals not to correct and complete them but to turn away to more compromises as in the case of John Stuart Mill.

One of the important causes of the decline of liberalism, Mises believed, was the illusion that society would necessarily continue to accept and perfect its ideas. Mises believed that as classical liberalism came closer to realization, it was necessary for its advocates not to rest, but to increase their activity and perfect the theoretical base of classical liberalism. Instead, liberalism was swept away by the emergence of parties speaking to special interests. For Mises liberalism meant the abolition of special privileges. In discussing class conflict, Mises emphasized: “Conflicts of interests can occur only in so far as restrictions on the owners’ free disposal of the means of production are imposed by the interventionist policy of the government or by interference on the part of other social forces armed with coercive power.” Coercive power, government intervention are the sole causes of war between interests. For Mises, the supporters of feudalism, privilege and status were clearly defeated by classical liberalism. The rise of the new challenge to classical liberalism came from within itself, from the failures of utilitarian economists. Mises said:

But in Ricardo’s system of catallactics one may find the point of departure for a new theory of the conflict of interests within the capitalist system. Ricardo believe that he could show how, in the course of progressive economic development, a shift takes place in the relations among the three forms of income in his system, viz., profit, rent, and wages. It was this that impelled a few English writers in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century to speak of the three classes of capitalists, landowners, and wage-laborers and to maintain that an irreconcilable antagonism exists among these groups. This line of thought was later taken up by Marx.

“In the Communist Manifesto, Marx still did not distinguish between caste and class. Only later, when he became acquainted in London with the writings of the forgotten pamphleteers of the twenties and thirties and, under their influence, began the study of Ricardo’s system, did he realize that the problem in this case was to show that even in a society without caste distinctions and privileges irreconcilable conflicts still exist. This antagonism of interests he deduced from Ricardo’s system by distinguishing among the three classes of capitalists, landowners, and workers . . . At no time, however, did Marx or any one of his many followers attempt in any way to define the concept and nature of classes. It is significant that the chapter entitled “The Classes” in the third volume of Capital breaks off after a few sentences. More than a generation elapsed from the appearance of the Communist Manifesto, in which Marx first makes class antagonism and class war the keystone of his entire doctrine, to the time of his death. During this entire period Marx wrote volume after volume, but he never came to the point of explaining what is to be understood by a “class.”

(Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (trans. by Ralph Raico; ed. by Arthur Goddard), Princeton, Van Nostrand Series in the Humane Studies, 1962, pp. 163-64.)

However, the wedge of Ricardian concepts of disharmony of interests in a perfect capitalist society, and the existence of special interest political parties in societies claiming to be capitalist, permitted the socialists to appear the champions of the abolition of privilege, of classless society resulting from the withering away of the state. Mises emphasized that in the absence of an uncompromisingly presented liberalism, socialism appeals to people who think more clearly and seek a serious solution to government by special interests. Through the dominant position socialism gained at the Universities, it was able, in Mises’ view, to gain the sincere, honest, and best minds among the youth. In many ways, the success of socialism was due to its ability to appear to be what liberalism actually is. Mises described the many ways that the parties of the special interest state have prevented the presentation and success of liberal ideas and, thus permitted the success of socialism. Mises insisted that liberals must emphasize the fact that since liberalism serves no special interest there is “no class that could champion liberalism for its own selfish interests.” For Mises liberalism could not be the special party of capitalists. Historical reality has demonstrated that the wealthy tend to support any other party except the liberals. Indeed, for capitalists to support liberalism, it is necessary for them to rise above their self-interest to the level of general principles. Mises noted:

The “have’s” do not have any more reason to support the institution of private ownership of the means of production than do the “have-not’s.” If their immediate special interests come into question, they are scarcely liberal. The notion that, if only capitalism is preserved, the propertied classes could remain forever in possession of their wealth stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of the capitalist economy, in which property is continually being shifted from the less efficient to the more efficient businessman. In a capitalist society one can hold on to one’s fortune only if one perpetually acquires it anew by investing it wisely. The rich, who are already in possession of wealth, have no special reason to desire the preservation of a system of unhampered competition open to all. . . . They do have a special interest in interventionism, which always has a tendency to preserve the existing division of wealth among those in possession of it. But they cannot hope for any special treatment from liberalism, a system in which no heed is paid to the time-honored claims of tradition advanced by the vested interests of established wealth. (Ibid., p. 186)

Mises deduced from history that all governments inherently recognize no limitations on power. Complete domination over property is the goal of all governments, and if they accept limitations it is merely tactical since the admission of any government control over property implies total control. Mises concluded:

“Thus, there has never been a political power that voluntarily desisted from impeding the free development and operation of the institution of private property of the means of production. Governments tolerate private property when they are compelled to do so, but they do not acknowledge it voluntarily in recognition of its necessity. Even liberal politicians, on gaining power, have usually relegated their principles more or less to the background. . . . A liberal government is a contradictio in adjecto. (Ibid., p. 68)”

Mises insisted that the concept of self-determination was the most logical derivation from liberalism. Self-determination made sense not as a collective concept, but as an individualist concept. “If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.” But, Mises considered individual self-determination to be technically impractical; however, as a matter of principle it was irrefutable that the individual must have the right to individual self-determination. In foreign policy, Mises applied this concept to self-determination consistently.

The right of individual self-determination was clearly applicable in the area of education. For Mises, compulsory education in any circumstances was a violation of this right. Compulsory education is a clearly political act. “There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.”

Mises made an important, if often unrecognized, analysis of imperialism, which is another aspect of the negation of the right self-determination. Mises indicated that the origins of imperialism can be found in the desire of states to create protected export “markets.” A desire to avoid the effects of competition, Mises said, led states

to the adoption of the policy of using import duties to protect domestic production operating under less favorable conditions against the superior competition of foreign industry, in the hope of thereby making the emigration of workers unnecessary. Indeed, in order to expand the protected market as far as possible, efforts are made to acquire even more territories that are not regarded as suitable for European settlement. We may date the beginning of modern imperialism from the late seventies of the last century, when the industrial countries of Europe started to abandon the policy of free trade and to engage in the race for colonial “markets” in Africa and Asia . . .

“The basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal, to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them. Attempts have been made to extenuate and gloss over the true motive of colonial policy with the excuse that its sole object was to make it possible for primitive peoples to share in the blessings of European civilization . . . . If, as we believe, European civilization really is superior to that of the primitive tribes of Africa or to the civilizations of Asia—estimable though the later may be in their own way—it should be able to prove its superiority by inspiring these peoples to adopt it of their own accord. Could there be a more doleful proof of the sterility of European civilization than that it can be spread by no other means than fire and sword? (Ibid., 123-25).”

Mises countered the argument that the liberal solution—immediate withdrawal of government (European colonial) and leaving the inhabitants alone—might lead to chaos or oppression. Since Europe exported the worst of its civilization under imperialism, it is not the fault of the natives that they may adopt all the evils taught them by the Europeans. Since imperialism is the negation of liberalism, there was no possibility for non-Europeans to come into contact with liberal concepts and practices. Imperialism itself was one of the means by which European politicians sought to escape from the logical necessity of completing the liberal revolution in Europe. Just as mercantilism was the overseas extension of feudalism, so imperialism was the overseas extension of neo-mercantilism.

For Mises none of the arguments in support of imperialism could have any basis in liberalism. Abolition of all forms of imperialism was alone consistent with liberalism. Mises felt that the evil consequences of imperialism would become evident only after the withdrawal of European troops and bureaucrats because only then would the full extent of the impact of European illiberalism flower. The longer the Europeans remained the more poisonous the blossoms. Thus, the immediate end of imperialism would reduce the effects, and its prolongation “in the interests of the natives” would intensify it. Mises added:

“If all that can be adduced in favor of the maintenance of European rule in the colonies is the supposed interest of the natives, then one must say that it would be better if this rule were brought to an end completely. No one has a right to thrust himself into the affairs of others in order to further their interest, and no one ought, when he has his own interests in view, to pretend that he is acting selflessly only in the interest of others. (Ibid., p. 127).”

Mises total commitment to classical liberalism, pure and uncompromised, made him an heir in history to the great 19th century classical liberals who dealt with history generally, such as Acton, or with contemporary history, such as Cobden and Bright. Mises was fearless, as were Acton, Cobden and Bright, in attacking the state in all its aspects, not the least in its more recent manifestation, imperialism. The Individual and the State are irreconcilable. History confirms what reason teaches us, that the State is the negation of the individual and his extension, private property, just as where the Individual and his property rightfully exist, that the State be abolished. It was because of the failure to pursue and achieve that freedom by 19th century liberals, that the current struggle is necessary. Mises has emphasized that it is by study of that failure that the lessons will be learned to achieve liberty. Those who dare not study history will be bound to repeat it.

Danish Delight

It takes a lot for the august and stately New York Times to lose its cool; sometimes one gets the impression that if Canada were suddenly to launch an atomic attack on the U.S. tomorrow, the Times would comment in low and measured tones. But the Times has lost its cool, and it has taken the sudden and magnificent emergence of libertarianism on the international scene to do it. And for the second coolest newspaper, the Washington Post, to suffer the same trauma.

The occasion was the Danish elections of December 5, when the ruling Social Democrats were decimated in the Parliament, while the old-style opposition suffered just as badly. Instead, leaping on to the scene was a brand new party, the Progress party, formed only recently, and corralling no less than 28 seats to make it the second largest party in the country.

The Progressives are led by their charismatic founder, Mogens Glistrup, a wealthy tax lawyer who has been stumping Denmark championing an all-out libertarian program. Boasting that he has managed to legally avoid payment of income tax for years, Glistrup promised a grievously tax-ridden public that he would abolish the income tax, beginning with all incomes less than $10,000 a year. He also called for drastic cuts in the government bureaucracy and in the welfare system, and magnificently called for changing the name of Prime Minister to Minister in Charge of Abolishing Government Activities. One of the problems with previous libertarian-style parties in Europe, from the nineteenth century to the present, has been the temptation to be patriotic: to abandon libertarian principle on behalf of militarism and war. But not Glistrup; instead he and the Progressives call for abolition of the Danish military. His foreign policy? An automated tape recorder on a hot line to Russia, saying “We surrender.”

The Washington Post so lost its vaunted “objectivity” that in its news headline it said “Clowns Win in Denmark”. The New York Times editorial (Dec. 6), succumbed to scarcely concealed hysteria. It noted in the Danish elections (and indeed in Norway and Sweden as well) “a disturbing tendency by voters to endorse the quack doctrines once hawked in France by Pierre Poujade.” (The editorial was entitled “Poujadism in Denmark”). It then weeped about “fragmentation” in Parliament, which “will make effective government exceedingly difficult” (Tsk! Tsk!). The Times went on:

“As the Norwegians and Swedes had done in September elections, the Danes rebelled in great numbers against the high taxes required by one of the most pervasive social security and welfare systems in the world. They rebelled so mindlessly as to elect 28 candidates of the Progress party, led by the cynical Copenhagen lawyer, Mogens Glistrup, a millionaire who boasts that he pays no income tax and advocates its abolition.”

The Times added that the word Progressives is “a misnomer if ever there was one”, and that the new party has “enormous scope for mischief and obstruction”.

So? Clowns; cynics; quacks; mindless; mischief and obstruction. Things look good when the noble Times so rants. Clearly what is happening is that the Third Way, the welfare state-quasi socialist Scandinavian experiment so beloved by our left-liberals, is falling apart, smashing on the rock of crippling taxation and topheavy bureaucracy. The fact that libertarianism is now politically strongest in one of the most socialistic countries in the West gives us hope, and supports our analysis of the case for optimism: that as statism continues to accelerate, it can no longer live off the fat of previous capitalism, and that therefore statist measures will increasingly create problems that will destroy it. The fact that the cutting edge of the revolt against statism is now in Scandinavia shows that even generations of statist culture and society cannot destroy the human love of freedom. Liberty lives!

Who was this Poujade that the New York Times enigmatically equates with the face of evil? Two decades ago, Poujade and his organized movement and party arose and achieved a great deal of support in France, particularly among peasants and small shopkeepers. Its aim: to slash and dismantle the taxing system that was crippling the French economy and society. Poujadism bid fair to achieve power, when it ran aground on the very issue mentioned above, the issue that has split so many classical liberal movements: militarism and foreign policy. Poujade himself was a hawk on the Algerian question, and it soon became clear that Poujadists who wished to exert maximum force against the Algerians could scarcely call for slashing taxes at home. And so Poujadism, sundered and deprived of its great purpose, dissolved and disappeared. A particularly cheering point about Glistrup and the Progressives is their irreverent and libertarian attitude toward the Danish military and their determinedly peaceful foreign policy.

All this bodes beautifully for the Progress party’s future. When will we form the first Libertarian International?

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Tough Cop. The tough cop genre is definitely coming into its own. On TV, the new Kojak series, starring the tough and cynical Telly Savales, has become one of the best shows on television. In the movies, it is particularly significant that two of the great Western heroes have recently shifted to the tough cop role. As urban crime has become the concern of ever greater numbers of Americans, the tough crime fighter—in this case John Wayne and Clint Eastwood—has doffed his horse and ten gallon hat for the Magnum and the police badge.

John Wayne moves into the role of tough cop hero in McQ, dir. by John Sturges. There is no such thing as a bad John Wayne picture, and it is good to have Big John, or Lt. McQ, on hand to carry on a one-man struggle against the rackets and against crooked colleagues. And yet, the picture is no better than workmanlike. It is surprisingly slow, for one thing, and the creaky action only highlights the age of Wayne and Eddie Albert. Also, the standard behavior of the females in falling all over the hero lacks a certain amount of credibility in the case of the aging Wayne. Al Lettieri makes a promising, shambling villain, but the female leads lend no help: Diana Muldaur seems to have only one expression: hangdog, while Colleen Dewhurst—billed on all sides as one of the great actresses of our epoch—croaks her way through a terrible performance. Warning to Warner Brothers: if McQ is going to stick around, you’d better come up with faster action and a better director.

The tough cop picture has done far better by Clint Eastwood. His first effort, in Dirty Harry, was one of the great films of the last several years. The leftist intellectuals virtually sputtered with fury over Dirty Harry, for here was Eastwood as Inspector Harry Callahan of San Francisco stalking a mad dog killer while being subverted and hobbled at every hand by liberals, politicians, and bleeding hearts. Dirty Harry, apart from being fast and exciting, was an explicitly right-wing, anti-criminal-coddling, movie, and thus drove the liberal critics to inchoate rage. But it was not only the movie and its theme that aggravated them; it was also Eastwood himself. For of all the heroes in movies, Eastwood is the most ruthless, the most implacable, in his battle for the right and against criminal aggression. The critics who scorn Eastwood for his “lack of acting ability” don’t understand the character that he is creating. For Eastwood’s implacable calm is the result of his decisiveness, his ability to make instant—and correct—decisions in the midst of drama and danger, to make what he knows are the right decisions without moping or agonizing. Hence, Clint Eastwood is the polar opposite of the whining modern anti-hero beloved by the avant-garde. In a sense, the left, intelligentsia were quite right in identifying Eastwood—or rather the Eastwood figure—as their deadly enemy. Hence their vituperation.

Now dirty Harry is back, in Magnum Force, dir. by Ted Post. Like its predecessor, it is fast, tough, and exciting, beginning with a dramatic shot of Harry Callahan’s Magnum revolver, and continuing to the final reel. If it is a bit less rightwing or less exciting than its predecessor, it remains one of the best movies of recent months.

The plot is particularly interesting in the light of the previous picture. At the end of Dirty Harry, Harry had tossed his badge into the river, the symbol of his disgust with the liberal, criminal-coddling System. At the beginning of Magnum Force, Harry is inexplicably back in the police force; early into the picture, he finds that the killers he seeks are a group of young police rookies organized into a paramilitary squad to wreak vengeance upon criminals whom the courts let loose. Harry rejects what seem to be youthful disciples of his own creed, and defends law and order against them. Why does he do so? Unfortunately, Harry doesn’t seem to be able to articulate his own position, confining himself to: “You guys misunderstood me”, and “I hate the System too, but you’ve got to stay within it until a better one comes along.” Has Harry gone liberal? I think we can reassure Harry fans that it ain’t so. If Harry could spell out his own position, perhaps he would say that he exacted vengeance on his own against a mad-dog monster, and not against mere racketeers; also his was an individual response, and not an organized gang—a gang, by the way, that committed unforgivable) excesses, including the murder of fellow policemen. No, Harry has not gone liberal; his is the optimum degree of “dirt”, neither bleeding-heart nor fascist. Long may he prosper.

The Sting, dir by George Roy Hill, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The Sting is a truly superior picture, a charming blend of 1930’s nostalgia, raffish con-men (a la Paper Moon), the caper picture, and the excellent acting of Newman and Redford, building on their success as a team in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Hill has directed the film with a deft, light, but exciting touch, as humor is neatly blended with a series of twists and surprises in the plot. Cons and super-cons are piled on each other in marvelous abandon, and the movie is filled with a richness of texture that marks the truly first-rate film. Certainly one of the best pictures of the year.

Sleeper, dir. and with Woody Allen.

Woody Allen is surely the outstanding comic in the films today, and Sleeper is one of his best efforts. Put simply, Sleeper is hilarious. One interesting facet of the movie is that it represents a partial shift from Allen’s previous emphasis on witty dialogue and on his persona as a New York shnook, that is not simply a loser, but a loser “in” psycholanalysis. The persona and the dialogue are still there, but in Sleeper they share the spotlight with a cinematic comic timing and action that hearken back to the great days of the silent film comedians of the 1920’s: especially Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. It is a pleasure to see that great and now dead tradition of visual and cinematic humor recreated, although it is still heresy to mention Woody Allen in the same bracket with the incomparable Keaton. But at least the attempt is there, even if at times the New York shnook and the Keatonesque figure don’t quite mesh. The point is that the ever-inventive Allen is moving in the right direction

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 2

FEBRUARY, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

Two Tiers Crumble

In March, 1968, the august authorities of the international monetary Establishment undertook a reform that would copper-rivet their rule and banish gold forevermore. Since World War II, the basis of the international monetary order had been the Bretton Woods system, in which every national currency was fixed in terms of the almighty dollar, and the dollar in turn was fixed in price at $35 an ounce of gold. The capstone of the system was the $35 an ounce gold system, which all the leading economists and bankers and bureaucrats assured us was written in tablets of stone. Never, never would an alteration of the magical $35 figure take place. The problem was that as American inflation continued and grew, the free markets of the world evaluated the dollar as ever less and less valuable in relation to the hard money, gold. Hence, the free gold markets of the world—notably London and Zurich—felt enormous pressure upward on the gold price from $35 an ounce. In order to maintain the price at $35, the United States Treasury kept dumping gold on the free market. But inflation and the subsequent acceleration of upward pressure, meant that the U.S. Treasury lost even more gold than continued to flow abroad from the ever-weakening dollar. Finally, a dollar panic on the free gold market in the spring of 1968 led the world Establishment to reconstitute the international monetary system: to end the pesky gold problem and eject it from the monetary order.

The countries decided to ignore the free gold market by sundering the gold market in two: from March, 1968 on, the monetary authorities would simply ignore the free gold market, would have nothing further, ever to do with it. Let it go to blazes! Instead, the Federal Reserve System would continue to redeem the dollar at the rate of $35 per ounce in gold, to any Central Banks that wished such redemption; and the Central Banks would continue to evaluate gold at this ordained price. There would now be “two-tiers” in the gold market, or rather, two “markets”; and the world Central Banks would simply go about their business, insulated from the free market. Gold would be cut off from the real business of the monetary authorities, and would remain as only an accounting device between governmental central banks. To maintain this, all the Central Banks pledged themselves never, ever to buy or sell gold again in the free market, or in any way outside their own cozy cabal.

It is instructive to remember how the whole raft of anti-gold economists, from Milton Friedman and Fritz Machlup on the right to the Samuelsons on the left, greeted this development. They all solemnly assured us that it was not gold that propped up, or gave backing to, the dollar. The truth was the other way round! Now cut off from its dollar moorings, they opined, gold would soon fall to its “proper”, nonmonetary price on the free gold markets: in short, to-somewhere around $10 an ounce. The wicked gold speculators and the evil South Africans (the largest suppliers of new gold) would at last get their comeuppance.

The rest is history. In the years since, not once did the free-market gold price fall below $35 an ounce; on the contrary, it has generally been considerably above that, and as accelerating inflation has weakened public confidence in the dollar and other fiat currencies (a process intensified by the U.S. abandoning all gold redemption in August, 1971), the price of gold has risen ever more sharply. Proposals of pro-gold economists to double the price of gold to $70 an ounce were, until very recently, greeted with ridicule by the anti-gold economic Establishment. A price of $70 was considered absurdly high and out of the question by almost all of the “experts.” And yet, at last reading, the price of gold on the free market had risen to no less than $150 an ounce, and the end is scarcely in sight. Once again, it is us “gold bugs” who have had the last laugh; gold has once again buried its would-be undertakers.

Now, at last, in November, 1973, in a little-heralded move, the U.S. and its allies in the monetary Establishment have thrown in the towel. The two-tier gold system, the lofty isolation of the Central Banks from the free gold market, is no more. The U.S. and the other nations announced that no longer would there be the two-tier isolation; from now on, any Central Bank would be free to buy or sell its gold at will.

Incredibly, the United States was able to save face on making the announcement by conning the media into claiming that here, once more, was the coup de grace to gold and to all the wicked speculators and “gold hoarders.” Fed Chairman Arthur Burns loftily announced that now Central Banks would be able to sell gold on the free market and thereby bring the price down. What Dr. Burns neglected to mention, of course, is that Central Banks would also be free to buy gold and dump some of their supply of excess and unwanted dollars. Whether gold was to be the winner or the loser from the liquidation of the two-tier system became obvious when no Central Bank was observed rushing to sell any of its precious stock of gold. And, indeed, they would have to be unusually dim-witted to do so. If you were a central banker, would you sell gold at $150 an ounce when all indications were that gold would keep rising in the future?

Another result of the crumbling of the two tiers is to render obviously and strikingly idiotic the “official” U.S. definition of the dollar as weighing 1/42 of a gold ounce (i.e. the official U.S. gold price of $42 an ounce). So long as the two tier system remained, we could preserve the fiction of $42 (embodying two tiny devaluations over the last few years from $35), because the Central Bank “market” was to be kept insulated from the unclean doings on the free gold market. But now that Central Bank isolation has been ended, the $42 an ounce price becomes so much hot air. In fact, every Central Bank, including even the fanatically anti-gold Federal Reserve Bank, will be increasingly and irresistibly tempted to upvalue their gold stocks from the phony $42 to the realistic free gold price. Any country that does so will find that, as if by magic, it will have nearly four times as much precious gold as it did before (i.e. their stock of gold ounces will be worth four times as much.) why should the U.S., for example, struggle along with a dwindling and puny gold stock of $11 billion when, by simply recognizing the facts of reality, it could jump instantaneously to something like $40 billion?

No, gold is alive and flourishing throughout the world. Its health, and its role, is better than it has been in decades, and its prognosis is terrific Natural law is once again winning the fight against the schemes of economic dictators.

Relevance?

The strictures of your editor and of James Davidson against irrelevance among libertarians (October and November issues of the Lib. Forum) have drawn more and louder comment than any articles in years. To the many readers who commented favorably, I can only say “God and/or Reason bless you”, and thank you for your sentiments. But particularly interesting here are the host of unfavorable critics, whose comments have ranged from dignified restraint to scarcely controlled hysteria, on behalf of their respective “irrelevant” causes, from science fiction to “humanistic” psychology to vitamin pills. Basically their arguments are twofold. – First, that their hobby-horses are “really” relevant (science fiction often presents models of a free or unfree society, vitamin pills “extend life” and libertarians surely favor the extension of life, etc.) And after all, liberty narrowly defined is certainly not the only concern of a libertarian! Second, is the tu quoque argument that even we ourselves are “inconsistent” with our own position by’ publishing movie reviews and occasional cultural articles.

Of course, if One is anxious to stretch the point, almost everything can be dragged in as in some remote way “relevant” to libertarian concerns. All truth, after all, is one and interconnected. Columns on chess could be justified as “training the mind”, and libertarians must use their minds, etc. A defense of Old Culture movies and a rational esthetic is part of the general theory of rational individualism of which libertarianism is a subset. But in a profound sense, it is the very vehemence of the reaction against our articles that most proves our point: i.e. the increasing emphasis away from liberty and in favor of all the other special hobby horses that pervade the movement. Clearly, it is scarcely a matter of high principle—comparable to the Non-Aggression Axiom—that no space whatever be accorded to these peripheral issues. The problem is one of proportion, of balance. Our argument is directed against the growing amount of energy and space that have been devoted to these peripheral matters, in contrast to the central issues and principles of libertarianism. What has been happening in all too many cases is that various groups and journals of libertarianism begin to stress not just liberty: but liberty-cum-science fiction or liberty-cum-“humanism” or whatever. Then, in a short while, like a creeping cancer, the science fiction or the “humanistic psychology” begins to take over, as the groups involved begin to feel that it is these special matters that are really important, while liberty itself becomes relegated to the edge of their concerns. New Libertarian Notes is now increasingly infected with the science-fiction bacillus. In its current, January 1974 issue, of the 20 pages of text, 14 are devoted to science fiction, 3 to neo-Tolkien fiction, 1 to a poem, and 2 to an attack on us for criticizing science fiction. A perfect score! And on the West Coast, “humanist psychology”, from “open relationships” to “touchie-feelie” encounter groups, is increasingly the major focus of many groups of libertarians. It’s as if the Lib. Forum were to devote its entire space to a defense of John Wayne over Antonioni (a far more relevant cause!)

In the current Libertarian Connection (Jan. 24), Miss Natalee Hall, Mr. Skye D’Aureous, and Mr. Ron Chusid make the point that, after all, liberty is not all of life, that libertarians must surely favor the extension of their lives, and that therefore information on vitamin pills, or, indeed, the filling of cavities, is a legitimate concern for a libertarian publication. The problem is that the last term of the syllogism does not really follow from the first two. What we have in this kind of argument is a flouting of the vital concept of the division of labor. There are, after all, an enormous number of available sources of information about vitamin pills, cavities, medicine, or, for that matter, science fiction or humanistic psychology. There are incomparably more sources of information about these topics than there are about libertarianism Unless we are to assume—God forbid—that our readers get all of their information about life and reality from our little magazines, it becomes a tragic waste of space to allocate so much of it to these tangential or irrelevant matters.

So, won’t you come home, Libertarians?

What Kind Of ‘Purity’?

Now that the Libertarian Party has grown more successful and has become the major organizational form for libertarians throughout the country, internal discussions have inevitably emerged about the Party’s future course.

At one extreme, the “pragmatists” argue that when, as, and if we elect anyone to public office, that official should be prepared to make the compromises required by his august position. A Libertarian Congressman, for example, should be able to logroll, and vote statist on some issues in return for cadging the votes of his colleagues on more vital concerns. I am not aware of any Libertarian who actually defends the Symms voting record in Congress, but it is clearly the “Symms model”, in a modified form, that attracts the pragmatist camp. If a Congressman comes for example, from a potato growing area, then the claim is that he should be allowed or encouraged to vote for potato subsidies for his constituents so that he can remain in office and fight for liberty on grander issues.

The pragmatist view, however, not only violates libertarian principle; it defeats the whole purpose of a Libertarian Party in the first place. The purpose of the Party is to advance the libertarian cause in the political and public arena; and any votes for statism whatsoever undercuts the pushing of the libertarian cause. Libertarianism is a seamless web; and pragmatic voting destroys that web and permanently prevents the voting public from grasping the theory and its ineluctable applications. If, moreover, our object is to get “from here to there” from the current mixed system to a world of pure liberty, then any violation by a libertarian of his own credo undercuts the goal itself, and virtually destroys any prospect of ever achieving it. The purpose of libertarians in general, and the Libertarian Party in particular, is, in the old motto, to uphold a standard to which the wise and honest will repair. Flouting our own principles destroys the standard itself. If the Libertarian Party is to be pragmatic in this sense, then it would be far better for the cause to scrap the Party altogether and confine our political activity to pressuring Republicans and Democrats; let these infidels do the logrolling and potato-mongering. Praise the Lord, then, that Steve Symms is a Republican and not a Libertarian Party Congressman. As a Republican he is tolerable; as a Libertarian he would be an unmitigated disaster.

Fortunately, there is no present prospect of the pragmatists being strong enough to take over, or even have much influence within, the Libertarian Party; and let us hope and make sure that the Party will remain that way.

At the other extreme, there are some Libertarians, now roughly confined within and around the “radical caucus” of the Free Libertarian Party of New York, who maintain that anarchist purity requires the virtual absence of any structure within the Party. Any move toward centralization of funds, toward any sort of efficient structure, indeed any move away from pure participatory democracy, is attacked by this faction as a violation of anarchist purity. It is necessary to remind this group that there is nothing whatever in anarchism or libertarianism that denies the value of organization, or structure, or even (voluntary!) centralization. There is no need whatever to conjoin liberty with any sort of “democracy”, participatory or otherwise.

Presumably (one hopes!) the “decentralist” faction does not oppose the existence of corporations or of the wage system. Yet corporations, or indeed any sort of employer-employee relationship, are ipso facto “hierarchical” and exclude participatory democracy. In return for a wage payment, the employer tells the employee the tasks he is expected to perform, and the employee agrees to these tasks in return for payment. There is no room here for “democracy” or, indeed, any sort of voting. If, as presumably even the decentralists and the “radical caucus” would agree, there is nothing inimical to liberty in corporations or wage contracts, then why the hysterical denunciations of any sort of structure—or division of labor—within the Libertarian Party itself?

In a sense, this entire issue has been obscured by the fact that the Party has so far been a strictly volunteer (i.e. unpaid) organization. But if the Party is to grow and expand, it will have to begin hiring professional, full-time organizers. And when that happens, it will be clear that there will be no room for “voting” by the paid organizers, let alone a need for “participatory democracy” by the paid staff. But once that reality principle occurs, once the necessarily hierarchical and “undemocratic” nature of this relationship becomes clear, then one hopes that the strident calls for participatory democracy within the Party as a whole will begin to wither away.

As the Marxists have long since informed us, what any ideological group or movement needs is rigidity in principle, but flexibility in tactics. How one votes in Congress, or what the content of Party platforms or resolutions may be, is a matter of high principle where no violations may be tolerated. What the form or structure of our organizations may be, however, is purely a matter of tactics, and hence of efficiency and practicality. In short, the proper realm of “pragmatism” is that realm where principle does not apply. Since there is nothing in libertarian principle which prescribes “democracy” or prohibits structure or hierarchy, it is precisely here where considerations of efficiency must prevail. Let us not cry “wolf” where no wolf does or can exist.

An Open Letter To Irving Kristol

Ed. Note: In September, 1972, at the biennial meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Montreux, Switzerland, Professor Irving Kristol of the City University of New York delivered a thoughtful and hard-hitting critique of the free-market, libertarian position. Since Professor Kristol delivered his sally at a meeting of an international group of allegedly free-market economists, I have been awaiting some response from a member of this august group in defense of their supposed position. But I have waited in vain. As their next biennial conference approaches, not only have there been no criticisms of Professor Kristol, but instead, his speech was universally hailed by the members as brilliant, seminal, and definitive, and was similarly greeted with hosannahs by conservative-“libertarian” John Chamberlain. As the conservative co-editor of The Public Interest, and as a powerful leader of the “New York intellectuals” who in a sense determine public consciousness, Professor Kristol had won what is by now the dubious distinction of being Richard Nixon’s favorite intellectual. Since no one has replied to Professor Kristol’s challenge, your editor has leaped into the breach. The following is slightly modified from an unanswered letter to Mr. Kristol (Kristol’s speech later appeared in his Public Interest.)

Dear Irving:

Your speech was the best presentation of the conservative, anti-libertarian case I have seen in a long time. Since no libertarian seems to have replied, I thought that I might enter the lists.

I agree that, in their presentation of the case for the libertarian, free society, free-market economists have generally been gravely deficient in ignoring the entire sphere of the moral order. But where I disagree with you is in your view that this defect is inherent in the libertarian position. Unfortunately what happened is that economics grew up at the same time, and conjoined with, utilitarianism. Hence economists—whether free-market oriented or not—have generally been utilitarians. Hence the idea that in order to be happy, all one has to do is to be free to pursue one’s own utility schedules—an idea that ignores the existence of an objective moral order and what the Thomists call the existence of a “science of happiness.”

But there is another tradition in economics, even in free-market economics. As we have learned in the last two decades, the scholastic philosophers were largely free-market oriented (Karl Marx was not, contra Tawney, the “last of the Schoolmen”), and Aristotelian philosophy always heavily influenced French and Italian economics, and later even the Austrian School, as Emil Kauder has demonstrated. In the present-day, Wilhelm Ropke has cleaved (roughly) to the free market and to objective moral principles. Outside the realm of professional economics, some conservative-libertarian thinkers have integrated a libertarian position with a firm belief in an objective moral order which is disobeyed at one’s peril. In the nineteenth century, I might cite Herbert Spencer, and in the present day, the late Frank Meyer.

Let me put it this way: I agree with you that utilitarians are wrong in believing that every person knows automatically what will make him happy. I have two basic comments on this—one as an economist and another as a Libertarian. As an economist, I don’t agree that economics assumes this (only the utilitarian excrescence on economics.) The free-market economist, as economist, only assumes that utility scales have been adopted in some way by each individual; all he need assume to pursue the science of economics is that every person has a set of utility scales. How he has arrived at them or whether or not they are morally valid is not the concern of the economist. It should, however, be the concern of the social philosopher, or the economist-as-social philosopher, and unfortunately economists-as-social philosophers have not recognized this. Also, as an economist I emphatically don’t agree that ascetic or quasi-ascetic or deeply religious communities can dispense with economics. There is nothing flouting of economics to contemplate a world that does not pursue material gain. As Mises and Hayek have shown, furthermore, an elite, including a religious elite, cannot calculate economically to rationally produce those goods they must have to survive; even the fiddlers on the roof need a price system to know what to produce and how to do so with any sort of efficiency. Otherwise, how are their fiddles going to be produced?

As a libertarian, I agree, as I’ve said, that we cannot assume that every individual knows a priori what will make him happy. I also agree that he must learn these principles from a set of elite “ethicists”, be they ministers or whatever, and then must apply these principles. But my position is that every individual has the right to be free to try to find his happiness, or even, as I think Spencer once wrote, to go to hell in his own way. (Of course, empirically I think you would agree that very often the elite know only the broad principles, and that each individual is a better expert over the specifics of his concrete circumstances, but my position does not rest on this.)

I would agree that the world is in dire need of moral instruction. But there are at least two grave flaws, it seems to me, in what I take to be your reliance on the State to provide such moral guardianship. One is the anomaly of relying on the organized coercion-wielders for such service. Sorokin once perceptively wrote of the high percentage of criminality (even as defined by non-libertarians) among State rulers (Sorokin and Lunden, Power and Morality), and this is readily explained in one of Hayek’s great chapters in the Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get to the Top.” Placing the State in charge of moral principles is equivalent to putting the proverbial fox in charge of the chicken coop.

Secondly, by coercing the moral act, which I take it you wish to do, you are paradoxically depriving the person of the chance of being moral. It seems to me that moral choices make no sense in the absence of freedom to choose, a freedom which is precisely the glory of the species man. If an individual is faced with alternatives A, 3 and C; and if we can agree that A is the moral alternative, then the individual is deprived of the chance to choose morally if alternatives B and C are made illegal.

I maintain, then, that every person has the right to be free to choose his moral principles, whether they be from the Church, his own whim, or, the Lord forbid, Marcuse or Charles Reich. But what, you ask, if he uses his freedom, as he has been doing increasingly, to choose “hippie nihilism”, which I agree contravenes the workings of any modern society, free or not?

In the first place, I would maintain—in contrast to many other libertarians—that every family has not only the right but the moral duty to instruct its children in the proper bourgeois virtues and the “Protestant ethic.” It is the failure of such instruction, under a misapplication of libertarian theory, that is responsible for much of the current madness. (For magnificently “conservative” educational pronouncements by libertarian thinkers, see the writings of Isabel Paterson and Albert Jay Nock.) But, in any case, what are we to do with the increasing number of nihilists that we suffer from?

There are two libertarian answers to this. One is that it is precisely when we have Big Government that the danger from hippie nihilists is the greatest; for once nihilists gain control of the governmental machinery, we have all had it. But, if government were minimal or non-existent, there would no channel of destructiveness open to nihilistic takeover. Secondly, in a free society, the objective moral order would be free to do its work, and the hippie nihilists would swiftly learn the law of cause and effect. This basic knowledge—what used to be called “Social Darwinism”—has unfortunately been forgotten by many current libertarians, but we find it beautifully spelled out in the writings of Spencer and Sumner. Let me put it this way: we know that hippie nihilism is dysfunctional for the individual and for society; in a free, libertarian society, without State and welfare palliatives, the hippie nihilists would find this out soon enough. Some years ago, when hippie communes were first sprouting and I was worried about them, one of my libertarian colleagues cheerfully set me straight: “Don’t worry, one hard winter will take care of them.” And he was right. Without the patina and cushion of welfare statism, one hard winter would work its constructive lessons. Already, the hippie phenomenon has receded considerably since its flood tide in the late 60’s, as the need for jobs and careers has become increasingly evident among the youth. Furthermore, even amidst the horrors of the drug culture, I understand that “Social Darwinism” has caused a considerable dropoff in the use of LSD—its destructiveness became all too clear and evident, even for the hippies.

In the free society, finally, where neighborhoods would be privately owned, the “straight” bourgeois residents could simply exclude hippies and other undesirables by not allowing them onto their privately-owned streets. It is because, I might point out, the streets are ail State-owned that we of the West Side of Manhattan have to put up with the monsters that infest us. In a free, privately owned society, the hippie nihilists would have to go into their own self-isolated areas, where they would not bother or wreak their ill effects on the rest of us, and where Social Darwinism would work all the more rapidly and correctively.

Libertarianism, in short, does not have to be morally mushy. It can be the hardest of hard-nosed.

Political Kidnapping

It would seem to be belaboring the obvious to denounce the monstrous and unconscionable kidnapping of Miss Patricia Hearst; that is not only the libertarian position, it is the position of every decent human being. But denunciation is necessary, since many elements of the Left seem to be taking a position that is at least ambivalent, and even friendly, toward the kidnapping.

Thus, in a New York Post interview with leading leftists in California (Feb. 13), one leading Berkeley radical described the rationale of the “Symbionese Libertarian Army” for the kidnapping as “very beautiful”; another stated that “you’ve got to admire them. They made some brilliant maneuvers.” Even leftists who opposed the move did so, not on the grounds of criminal immorality, but of strategy and tactics. One left-wing physician commented that: “personally, I don’t agree with what they did, since there was no mass base. But this is the most attention the movement has gotten in a long time.” The clear implication, of course, is that if the SLA had a “mass base”, then kidnapping of innocent people would be justifiable. As for “attention”, let us hope that the SLA will get the kind of “attention” it won’t like very much, such as being pulverized by the police. Less ambivalent but still amoral in their criticisms were Angela Davis of the Communist Party and Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, who attacked the SLA action as “adventuristic” and “delusionary”. True enough, but hardly addressed to the critical moral issue involved.

Even apart from the Left, there seems to be an unfortunate tendency to excuse or mitigate this crime by citing its political or idealogical rationale. Even Miss Hearst—although she is clearly under coercion and hardly responsible for her statements—stated that “these people have been very honest with me. . . . They are perfectly willing to die for what they do.” It should be affirmed, loud and clear, that the motives for a crime in no way mitigate the crime itself; kidnapping is kidnapping and evil, whatever the motivation. It makes no difference whether the kidnappers are bandits out for money, psychos out for “kicks”, or ideologues pushing some political cause, whether left, right, or center. They are monsters, and should be treated accordingly.

Rothbardiana

We have not been able to report on Rothbardiana since our June, 1973 issue, but since then, matters have proceeded apace. For A New Liberty was the recipient of two thoughtful, though wrong-headed critiques: in The Civil Liberties Review (Fall, 1973) by the eminent, quasi-Marxist political philosopher Christian Bay; and in The Christian Century (Nov. 7, 1973), by Professor James W. Woelfel of the University of Kansas. As might be expected, Professor Bay attacked FNL as too “bourgeois”, while Professor Woelfel attacked it as ignoring original sin (!). Plus ca change . . . . . or, as the saying goes, so what else is new?

Rampart College has just published (January, 1974), a second, revised, and updated edition of the long-selling What Has Government Done to our Money? (Available from Rampart College, Box 11407, Santa Ana, Calif. 92711, for $2.00). The new edition adds a twelve-page chapter on “The Monetary Breakdown of the West”, summarizing the breakdown of the international monetary system over the last century, and updating the advance of this decay until mid-1973.

Rothbard returns to praxeology! in a lengthy article summarizing the praxeological method in economics and outlining the embryonic use of this method by various classical economists of the nineteenth century. In “Praxeology as the Method of Economics”, in M. Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and the Social Sciences (Northwestern University Press 1973), Volume II.

Rothbard reviews Samuelson! In a review-article of the ninth Edition (Ye Gods!) of Samuelson’s infamous text. In the Wall Street Review of Books (December, 1973).

Also the following articles have appeared by Rothbard: “Interview: Rothbard Discusses Libertarianism,” Stanford Daily, June 5; “The Original Machine-Haters: Review of M. I. Thomis’ The Luddites,” Business and Society Review (Spring, 1973); Letter on the “Deschooling of Society,” Journal of Forum for Contemporary History, June 4; “Foreword to W. Block’s Economic Scapegoats,” New Libertarian Notes (October, 1973); “Revisionism and Libertarianism,” NLN (December, 1973); two columns in Reason: “Watergate, and the Argument from Knowledge,” (October, 1973), and “Privacy or the ‘Right to Know’?” (January, 1974). The following book reviews have appeared in Books for Libertarians: of Benjamin Tucker’s magazine Liberty (October, 1973); Days of H. L. Mencken (November, 1973); P. T. Bauer’s Dissent on Development (December, 1973); W. H. Hutt’s The Strike-Threat System (January, 1974); and the Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (February, 1974).

Finally, a slashing attack on egalitarianism, “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature,” originally delivered at a Conference on Human Differentiation in Gstaad, Switzerland, held by the Institute for Humane Studies, appeared in Modern Age (Fall, 1973). And, hot news!, this will be the leadoff essay in a collection of Rothbard essays now in press in book form, some unpublished and others appearing in obscure and now defunct periodicals. The title will be Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays, forthcoming soon from Books for Libertarians Press. Rothbard will have a new introduction to the essays, with a foreword by R. A. Childs.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Mel Brooks: An Appreciation

The appearance of what is unquestionably the funniest movie of the last several years (Blazing Saddles, dir. by and with Mel Brooks, and with Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little and Madeline Kahn), offers a welcome occasion for an appreciation of a man of prodigious and exhilarating comedic talent. Beginning—as did so many other leading humorists—as a writer for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950’s, Brooks burst on the entertainment scene with his justly famous hit record which he wrote and narrated, “The Two Thousand Year Old Man”. In that record, Brooks presented the trivial side of world history (In Yiddish accent, as nearly as I can remember: “Napoleon? Sure I remember him. Short fella, bad stomach.”)

Since then, Brooks has made all too few movies, but they have been outstanding. One, The Producers, made in 1968, still stands as the funniest movie of the last two decades. In that picture, the fabulous Zero Mostel, playing a sleazy, down-on-his luck New York Jewish theatrical producer, decides to fleece a group of backers by drastically over-selling shares in a new production: if it is a sure flop, then Mostel and Gene Wilder, a young accountant whom he inducts into the swindle, could skip town with the proceeds and no questions asked. Trying to insure a flop, Mostel and Wilder put on a pro-Nazi musical, “Springtime for Hitler”, written by an ex-Nazi soldier, marvelously played by Kenneth Mars. An inspired and hilarious movie, from first moment to last.

Blazing Saddles, while no Producers, also provides an occasion for a contrast and comparison of Brooks with Woody Allen, whose hilarious Sleeper also opened recently, and was reviewed in these pages. For both Brooks and Allen embody the best of two variants of what might be called “New York Jewish humor.” Allen’s has essentially been Jewish humor of the 1950’s: cerebral, quasi-intellectual, left-liberal, the Allen persona a worried, bumbling shnook obviously “in” and around psychoanalysis. The fact that Sleeper blends these long-standing features of Allen’s humor with the marvelously visual, cinematic Keaton-Lloyd tradition of 1920’s movie comedy doesn’t change Allen’s essential stance as a Man of the Fifties. Brooks, on the other hand, hearkens back to an older, healthier, and—as far as I am concerned—a far funnier tradition: Jewish humor of the 1930’s. The humor is absurdist, linguistic-cultural rather than political, emphasizing—particularly in Blazing Saddles—a series of dazzling and explosive “one-line” situations and gags rather than plot continuity. The Brooks persona, which appears far less often than Allen but of course shines through the material at all times—is far different from Allen’s: it is brash, self-confident, constantly on top of the situation rather than buffeted by life. In a profound sense, Brooks harks back to the great, superb tradition of the Marx Brothers pictures of the 1930’s: with the possible exceptions of the W. C. Fields canon, the funniest pictures ever made. With the Marx Brothers, too and even more so, not a moment was wasted: every millimeter of film was one of a series of dazzling and absurdist gags and situations. Of course, Blazing Saddles doesn’t compare to such great Marx Brothers’ epics as Duck Soup and Night at the Opera—but after all, what can? The Marx Brothers provided a harmonious and wondrous blend of visual and dialogue comedy, with Harpo basically providing the former and Groucho the latter. It is no accident that these great comedies were written by perhaps the finest liumcrist of the twentieth century, S. J. Perelman, whose essays provide us with a truly remarkable erudition in language and culture in the service of hilarious comedy. But it is not a small boon to have a film which at least harks back noticeably to the great Marx Brothers tradition.

Blazing Saddles, as did the Producers, also delights the viewer by wringing back one of the finest traditions of American comedy: ethnic and racial humor. Under the repressive hammer blows of serioso left-Liberalism, ethnic humor has virtually died out in America in this generation space the driving of Amos and Andy off the air). But Brooks realizes that, precisely because of this suppression, and now that hard-sore pornography can be seen everywhere, ethnic humor has become the last taboo in our culture, and therefore the best subject for comedic genius Blazing Saddles brings ethnic humor back with a bang.

This movie is the definitive spoof of the movie Western; every cliche scene and set is taken and put through the wringer of the inimitable Brooksian humor. Seeing Blazing Saddles is enough to reveal the inadequacy and feebleness of previous attempts at spoofing the Western (e.g. Cat Ballou or the older Buttons and Bows.) The movie opens with a typical scene of the Old West: workin’ on the railroad, the workers this time being Chinese (wearing coolie hats) and blacks. The white foremen ride up and demand that the Negroes “sing your nigger folk-songs . . . you know, your nigger work-songs.” The blacks look at each other in confusion (“nigger folk songs?”), and finally break into a rendition of Cole Porter’s “I Get A Kick Out of You”. The white cowboys are confused in their turn, and say: “No, No; you know, songs like ‘Camptown Races’”, after which, to illustrate, they break into a rendition of “Camptown Races” strongly reminiscent of the exaggerated writhing of the singing in the Marx Brothers’ films.

The movie continues in this vein of hilarity. There is, for example, a remarkable spoof of Marlene Dietrich Westerns (e.g. Destry Rides Again) as dumpy Madeline Kahn sings her way with a Germanic lisp, in a Western bar and dance hall, through a takeoff of “Falling in Love Again” (“Tired”), as the songstress “Lilli Von Shtupp”. To defeat the bad guys and save the town, the black sheriff, the protagonist of the film, builds an exact replica of the town overnight in order to confuse the bad guys and induce them to shoot up the replica instead of the town itself. Mel Brooks himself plays the brash, dopey looking, and crooked governor of the state.

Probably the funniest moment of the film comes as the black (and Ivy League-type) sheriff reminisces about his family’s move to the West. As they were bringing up the rear of a long and racially segregated wagon train, we see the train set upon and massacred by the mighty forces of the Sioux nation. The Sioux then gather round the wagon with the black family, and gaze at it in puzzlement. After a moment (and bearing in mind that there had been no Yiddish humor yet in the film), the Indian chief, Mel Brooks, dressed in Indian costume and looking solemn, bewildered, and even dopier than as the governor, exclaims: (in thick Yiddish accent): “Schwartzes!!” And then: “luz em geh (“let them go”), they’re darker then we are.”

Mel Brooks is possibly the funniest man around, and long may he wave. That he is personally hilarious was demonstrated a few years ago, when David Susskind put on a panel of six or eight Jewish comedians to discuss The Jewish Mother. In this impromptu program, Brooks, a constant stream of hilarious wit, simply walked off with the show. But he virtually Said It All when, early in the program, Susskind asked Brooks to describe his own Jewish Mother: “Fierce she was. Fierce . . . and short.”

The Paper Chase, dir. and written by James Bridges. With Timothy Bottoms. Lindsay Wagner, and John Houseman.

An interesting picture, with a new twist on academe; instead of hippies or rebels in college, this movie deals with the joys and terrors of law school (Harvard, to be precise.) The pressures of school, the love of learning, the problems of discipleship to a martinet teacher, the pure terror at exam time, all these are caught and portrayed well and sensitively. Unfortunately, the entire picture suffers from diffusion, meandering, lack of organization. Tight editing and the imposition of a firm directorial hand are almost desperately needed. As a consequence, the ending is weak and confused, as the movie, like so many other films these days, just dribbles to a halt, instead of having its problems or themes satisfactorily resolved. Particularly weak is the love interest, as Lindsay Wagner, the female lead, is given virtually no lines and leads–a shadowy and unmotivated existence.

The picture is not helped by Timothy Bottoms, as the central character, who wanders through the film with his gentle hippie air and distracting mannerisms belying his supposed sense of purpose. A shining light in the picture is the superb performance of John Houseman as the professor whose silky surface hardly conceals his iron and subtly sadistic character.

The Incomparable Perelman. Writing about Mel Brooks gives me the opportunity to celebrate the work of the incomparable S. J. Perelman, unquestionably the master wit and humorist of our time. Perelman as screen writer for the classic Marx Bros, movies is but an example of his output. In a sense, Perelman is the thinking man’s Groucho or Mel Brooks. An unequalled master of the English language, Perelman is the past-master of the inverted cliche; with dazzling virtuousity, he twists and bends one cliche after another into an amalgam of continuous hilarity.

The best work of Perelman was published in what we might call his “Middle Period”, in the 1930’s and 40’s. (His brief earlier period was simply feeling his oats). Since then, Perelman’s dazzling performance and consistent hilarity has unfortunately declined, beginning with his nostalgia series “Cloudland Revisited”; the cultural and linguistic erudition is still there, but a certain flat sobriety has taken over. But now, in paperback, Dell has emerged with the best of Perelman’s Middle Period, Crazy Like a Fox (published in 1947 Modern Library hardcover as The Best of S. J. Perelman).

Perelman was particularly master of the parody, and in this collection he combines his triumph over the cliche with a series of stunning literary parodies. The temptation to quote the whole book is almost irresistible. Particularly outstanding are his parodies of: science fiction (“Captain Future. Block that Kick!”); tough-guy detectives (“Somewhere a Roscoe” and “Farewell My Lovely Appetizer”); Maugham on Gauguin (“Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy”); stream-of-consciousness (“Pale Hands I Loathe”); Dostoievsky (“A Farewell to Omsk”); Dunsany (“The Idol’s Eye”); and Odets (“Waiting for Santy”); also his profiles of Arthur Kober and Vincente Minelli, and his own marvelous introduction under the name of Sidney Namlerep.”

Take, for example, Perelman’s parody of the left-wing New Yorkese blather of Clifford Odets. The scene of the playlet is the workshop of Santa Claus, an evil capitalist sweatshop employer, who exploits his seven gnomes “Rankin, Panken, Rivkin, Riskin, Ruskin, Briskin, and Praskin.” Rivkin, a young gnome, is in love with Stella Claus, Santa’s daughter.

Rivkin (to Stella): “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, that’s how I love you. You’re a double malted with two scoops of whipped cream; you’re the moon rising over Moshulu Parkway; you’re a two weeks’ vacation at Camp Nitgedaiget! I’d pull down the Chrysler Building to make a bobby pin for your hair!

Stella: I’ve got a stomach full of anguish. Oh, Rivvy, what’ll we do?

Panken (sympathetically): Here, try a piece fruit.

Rivkin (fiercely): Wax fruit—that’s been my whole life! Imitations! Substitutes!”

One more almost incredibly dazzling example of Perelmanian wit and I must reluctantly conclude. The following is the first paragraph, in its entirety, of Perelman’s profile of the playwright Arthur Kober:

“Picture to yourself a ruddy-cheeked, stocky sort of chap, dressed in loose but smelly tweeds, a stubby briar between his teeth (it has resisted the efforts of the best surgeons to extract it), with a firm yet humorous mouth, generous to a fault, ever-ready for a flagon of nut-brown ale with his cronies, possessing the courage of a lion, the tenderness of a florence Nightingale, and the conceit of a diva, an intellectual vagabond, a connoisseur of first editions, fine vintages, and beautiful women, well above six feet in height and distinguished for his pallor, a dweller in the world of books, his gray eye belying the sensual lip beneath, equally at home browsing through the bookstalls along Fourth Avenue and rubbing elbows (his own elbows) in the smart literary salons of 57th Street, a rigid abstainer and non-smoker who lives entirely on dehydrated fruits, cereals, and nuts, rarely leaving his monastic cell nowadays except to dine at the Salmagundi; an intimate of Cocteau, Picasso, Joyce and Lincoln Kerstein, a dead shot, a past master of the foils and the International Woodmen of the World, dictating his novels, plays, poems, short stories, commedias dell’arte, aphorisms and ripostes at lighting speed to a staff of underpaid secretaries, an expert judge of horseflesh, the owner of a model farm equipped with the most slovenly dairy devices—a man as sharp as a razor, as dull as a hoe, as clean as a whistle, as tough as nails, as white as snow, as black as the raven’s wing, as poor as Job, a man up with the lark, down on your toes, and gone with the wind. A man kind and captious, sweet and sour, fat and thin, tall and short, racked with fever, plagued by the locust, beset by witches, hagridden, cross-grained, fancy-free, a funloving, addle-pated dreamer, visionary, and slippered pantaloon. Picture to yourself such a man, I say, and you won’t have the faintest conception of Arthur Kober.”

The Way We Were. Dir. by Sydney Pollack from screenplay and novel by Arthur Laurents. With Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.

This has been touted as an old-fashioned and romantic “movie movie”, and to a certain extent it is. With this and nostalgia too, how could they go wrong? But the trouble is that old-fashioned is not always good, and what we have here is a throwback to the left-wing “message” movies of the 1940’s. That kind of old-fashioned we could do without. Furthermore, the potentially rich background drops away, often to the point of being incomprehensible, in order to focus on the banally overstated and repetitious confrontation of character and attitudes between the two leads.

As to the confrontation, the cards are outrageously stacked for the left-wing message. Barbra Streisand is a loud, pushy, aggressive, serious-about-her-values, caring, socially conscious, Communist New York Jewess—and therefore, so Messrs. Pollack and Laurents insist, lovable and great. The stereotypes proliferate. Robert Redford is a handsome, talented, socially unconscious, opportunistic, easygoing, smiling, and therefore at bottom unlovable wealthy WASP. Treated particularly outrageously by the film are the WASP girls: every one dumb, inarticulate, shallow, uncaring. The WASPS spend all their time telling silly jokes while serioso Barbra tells them off and fights for world peace, world war, civil liberties, you name it. If there were a WASP Anti-Defamation League, they would be justified in making an angry, caring, articulate, socially conscious protest. The entire picture is a blatant piece of ethnic chauvinism. As for the Communist Party, it is treated as basically right as rain, though perhaps a wee bit strident. Twists and turns of the party line? Mass murders by Stalin? You won’t find any of them in The Way We Were.

Redford does well as usual; as for Streisand, she is, as usual, Streisand. The next person who insists that “you know, she’s really beautiful”, deserves a punch in the nose. Fortunately, we were spared her caterwauling of the great pop songs. Let us count our blessings.

Background Of Middle East Conflict*

By Bill Evers

Suppose a war breaks out between Ruritania and Walldavia, two hypothetical states which we shall use for purposes of analysis. In determining war guilt, it is not enough to know merely who fired the first shot or who crossed what line first.

Instead an in-depth historical inquiry is necessary. If the Ruritanians have in the past conquered and subdued or dispossessed half of the Walldavian people, that does make a difference when one is trying to determine war guilt.

The political roots of the present-day conflict in the Middle East go back to the World War I era. At that time, officials of the British Empire promised in somewhat vague terms a homeland in Palestine for organized Zionism and promised national independence in the Middle East to Arab nationalist leaders.

Without in any way acknowledging the rightfulness of British imperialist meddling, we can distinguish between these promises by noting that the Arabs were struggling to throw off the foreign rule of the Ottoman Turks and to achieve national self-determination, whereas the Zionists were foreigners laying claim to the land the Arabs were living on.

Promises Never Kept

In any case, the British never fulfilled either promise. Britain and her allies divided up the land of the old Ottoman Empire, and Britain took control of Palestine.

Several surveys covering land tenure in British Palestine in the late 1940s just before the formation of the State of Israel show that Arabs owned 49 percent of the land in Palestine; Jews, six percent; government land and land owned in common by Arab and Jewish villages, six percent. The rest was desert, some of which was the regular pasturage of Bedouin tribes. Included in the category of government land by these surveys was territory claimed by Ottoman sultans and their successors, but occupied for generations by thousands of Arab peasants who claimed the equivalent of freehold tenure.

Of further importance is the fact that the Zionist Jews bought most of their land from feudal landlords, whose claims to the land originated in conquest, not in cultivation.

Large Landowners

A. Granott, an Israeli land expert whose writings are quoted by both Palestinians and Zionists, notes that “no less than 90.6 percent of all (Jewish) acquisitions were of land which formerly belonged to large landowners, while from fellaheen (Arab farmers) only 9.4 percent was purchased.”

The study “Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948,” published by the Office of the Premier of the State of Israel, also states that “most of the Jewish land purchases involved large tracts belonging to absentee-owners.”

Thus, an additional question of justice arises because of the feudal system in early twentieth-century Palestine. According to the libertarian theory of justice, a feudal landlord is not the legitimate owner of land; instead, the land belongs to his bondsman who has been homesteading it. Thus the Zionist settlers obtained a clear and just title only in cases in which previously unowned land was homesteaded or in which land was bought from native Palestinians.

Justifications

One of the justifications often given for Israeli seizure of Arab houses and farmlands after the formation of the State of Israel is that the Arabs fled after having been ordered to leave by the radio broadcasts of the Arab political leadership.

However, subsequent scholarly examination of the monitoring transcripts kept by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency shows no evidence that orders to leave were broadcast and shows that some exhortations not to evacuate were broadcast.

Apparently the confusion of battle and fear of the terrorism of some Zionist military organizations like the Irgun group prompted departures. Nonetheless, even if it could be shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Arab people of Palestine had been ordered to leave, this does not alter the legitimacy of their title to the land.

There is now some increased consciousness among Israeli intellectuals of the fact that they live on stolen land. During the summer of 1972, members of the literary intelligentsia argued that the Israeli government should permit the Arab inhabitants of the villages of Ikrit and Berem to return to the homes from which 25 years before they had been expelled, in a supposedly temporary evacuation.

Israeli Premier Golda Meir told these intellectuals that restoring the rights of these pro-Israeli Arabs would set a dangerous precedent. The New York Times said the Israeli press reported her fearing that all sorts of claims might be put forward, by hundreds of thousands of refugees of the 1948 war.

Although the territory controlled by the Israeli government has expanded considerably over the years, Israel’s might does not make her right. One can only hope that eventually justice will prevail and that the Palestinian Arab refugees will once again be masters in their own homes.

* Reprinted From The Stanford Daily, Oct. 10, 1973.

Save The Oil Industry!

Not even at the height of the left-wing climate of the 1930’s has there been such a savage anti-business assault by politicians and by the media as is now being levelled at the oil industry. An economically insane proposal to rollback crude oil prices, “excess” profits taxes on the oil industry, destructive compulsory allocations by the Federal Energy Office, a proposal for a “yardstick” oil company owned and operated by the federal government, and even the AFL-CIO proposal for nationalization of the oil industry. Two men for some curious reason beloved by the nation’s “conservatives” are at the center of this furore: George Meany, and Mr. State himself, Scoop Jackson. Energy fascism proceeds on the path of its grisly logic, pushing from one frenetic piece of government botch to another, with the government frantically attempting to add new interventions to rectify the miseries brought about by its previous aggressions. Full collectivism is around the corner unless these proposals are fought and fought hard. The fact that some of the oil majors have courted government subsidy and privilege in the past does not excuse the current social-fascist drive by one iota. Unless we all rally round to save the oil industry now we will go the path of Britain and, eventually, Russia.

New Associates

We wish to acknowledge with gratitude the advent of three new Libertarian Forum Associates. They are:

Dr. Walter Block

Mr. Hal Jindrich

Mr. Donald McKowen

The Home Front

Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph: The American People, 1939-1945 (New York: Coard, McCann, and Geoghegan). $10.00. 512 pp.

Reviewed By Justus D. Doenecke

Good social history is always difficult to write. Few efforts by nonprofessionals have been successful. Most soon become “source books,” from which the trained scholar can find the telling example or the revealing anecdote which supposedly “illuminates” an entire period. To what degree, for example, does our picture of the “lost generation” derive from Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday (1931) or our image of Harding’s leadership come from Mark Sullivan’s Our Times (5 vols.; 1926-1935)?

The author, himself born during World War II, combines graduate work in law with a varied career as a journalist, laborer, and even paratrooper. Readers who lived through the period will relish Perrett’s treatment of “Mairzy Doats.” Forever Amber, zoot suits, the Sinatra craze, the Jane Russell movie The Outlaw, Dr. Friedrich Hayek, Victory Girls, the Tanaka Memorial, Professor Sorokin, and the Curtiss-Wright scandal. One learns of the uncertainty of the 1940 defense boom, the panic among Americans after the fall of France, popular hostility towards European refugees, and the patronizing treatment offered American blacks. Telling points are made—sometimes almost in passing—concerning Roosevelt’s exploitation of the Kearny incident, increasing callousness towards the bombing of civilians, the strident nationalism behind supposedly “internationalist” rhetoric, and the wartime turn to the political right.

Amid this potpourri of wartime fads and foibles, some important demythologizing takes place. Perrett correctly takes the American Civil Liberties Union to task for boasting in 1943 that America possessed an almost flawless civil liberties record. He refuses to see the Nesei internments as an isolated case; rather it was characteristic of a hysteria that claimed over ten times as many victims as World War I and gave the United States the worst civil liberties record among English-speaking democracies. It should be an eye-opener to learn that conscientious objectors were often beaten; that the top pay for Japanese-American physicians was $19 a month; that black newspapers were harassed by the FBI; that bloody racial clashes at military bases were almost a daily occurrence; and that the arrests of such “subversives” as aviatrix Laura Ingalls and German-American propagandist George Sylvester Viereck were clearly ex post facto prosecutions.

American liberals were far more Jeffersonian in theory than in practice. Columnist Dorothy Thompson said that freedom of speech and assembly had doomed the Weimar Republic. Professor Carl Friedrich wanted people to monitor the political beliefs of their neighbors. Lewis Mumford called for compulsory labor service for all children. Walter Lippmann endorsed Roosevelt’s “concentration camps” (a word FDR liked to use) both for Japanese-Americans and for the Dies Committee. The very journals so self-consciously militant in propounding the ideology of democracy—such as The New Republic—fired isolationist columnists, called for the drafting of striking miners, and wanted the America First Committee investigated. Essayist Clifton Fadiman remarked. “The only way to make a German understand is to kill him,” while Senator J. William Fulbright boasted that the American way of life was “the only way worthy of a free man.” Even Hollywood got into the act, reviling actor Lew Ayres for registering as a conscientious objector. Roosevelt’s Supreme Court turned persecutor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, declaring that local government could curb religious freedom.

This book has many of the flaws of popular history. Footnoting is treated in a cavalier fashion. The bibliography lacks crucial items. Like the Civil War history of Bruce Catton, it is far better at capturing a mood than asking significant questions. Loaded and emotive language becloud many an issue (e.g. “From beginning to end (isolationism) was clogged by stodginess, silliness and faintheartedness”). Some writing is hackneyed (e.g. “Pepper enthused”), some is meaningless (e.g. “America triumphed over itself and its history”). Much of Perrett’s material is better covered elsewhere.

Yet, despite such obvious limitations, the book deserves a wide reading and a paperback edition. Despite columnist John Roche’s references to “the good war.” World War II can never again be seen through Star Spangled glasses.

101 Ways To Promote Libertarian Ideas

30. Hold a Libertarian Festival—a “teach-in on libertarian views on a dozen subjects.

31. Is your university giving an honorary degree to a prominent politician, soldier, or corporation executive? Prepare a research profile on his career from a libertarian perspective. To what extent has he contributed to the preservation and extension of liberty? Or has he used political power to restrict, destroy or subvert freedom? Has he plundered the taxpayers to enhance the profits of his corporation? Has he used state-power to avoid the risks of the free market? Has he supported violations of international laws on human rights? Publish your report. Petition for an alternate to be honored with a degree.

32. Libertarianism is not a cult in which one person or book has all the answers to one’s personal or the world’s problems. It is essentially a philosophic commitment to the ideas that voluntarism is the only legitimate ethical basis for human action. Beyond that, libertarians hold a variety of viewpoints on almost every subject. Some are atheists, others Christians; some are pacifists, others will defend their liberty to the death; some are Austrians, others Friedmanites; some anarchists, others liberal limited government advocates; some uphold natural law theory, others deny its validity. Libertarianism is a house with “many mansions” and this should always be made clear to those unfamiliar with the variety of libertarian thought.

33. Interested in radio? Use the college radio station for libertarian propaganda. Start an interview show, a telephone listener response program. Or offer to broadcast one of the taped series of lectures by Murray Rothbard and others available from Books for Libertarians, 422 First St., Washington, D.C. 20003.

34. Do you want some professional help in organizing a campus group? Contact The Society for Individual Liberty, RM 304 Empire Building, 13th and Chestnut Sts., Philadelphia, Pa. 19107.

35. Having trouble finding libertarian books in your local bookstore? Send for the catalogues of either Books for Libertarians, 422 First Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003 or to The Laissez-faire Bookstore, 208A Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 3

MARCH, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY??

Day by day, piece by piece, the Truth in all its majesty and inexorability is closing in on the Tricky One. Piece by piece, the high crimes, low crimes, and misdemeanors of Richard Nixon are becoming increasingly evident, even to the blindest Nixonite loyalist. The Nixon strategy—highlighted by the absurdities of the short-lived (and revealingly named) “Operation Candor”—is clearly shown to be a series of lies, evasions, and retreats to hastily prepared fallback positions. The only purpose is to cling to the power and perquisites of office as long as he possibly can.

Impeachment per se is beginning to look too good for the Monster Milhous. Somehow, even the courageous Leon Jaworski has discovered somewhere in the Constitution (?) that a sitting President cannot be indicted for any crime whatever. Why must the President be exempt from the common criminal law? Vice-President Agnew was not, and he was only able to escape the hoosegow by plea-bargaining for a simple resignation and reprimand. But at any rate, this means that Nixon must be impeached before he can be indicted, convicted, and punished for his numerous crimes, high and low. It is not only being booted out of office that now looms for Mr. Nixon, but beyond that, the spectre of the jailhouse door—a spectre which more imminently faces his former chief henchmen in the Administration. Perhaps that is why Mr. Nixon is fighting with such desperation.

But that very desperation, coupled with certain hints in his defense against impeachment, gives rise to some very scary possibilities for America’s future. If these Unthinkable Thoughts seem paranoid, remember that almost every seemingly crazy piece of Left-wing paranoia about Richard Nixon over the years has turned out to be all too true. What possibly may loom ahead is a blend of the Philip Roth scenario (in a hilarious but chilling parody of Nixon’s “speech on the day of his impeachment” published a year ago in the New York Review of Books) with Fletcher Knebel’s exciting portrayal of a military takeover in Seven Days in May.

Let us first consider one of Mr. Nixon’s major defenses against the impeachment proceedings: that the charges are too broad, that to be impeached he has to have committed (been convicted of?) actual crimes, major crimes at that, and furthermore crimes ancillary to his high office. (Presumably, income tax fraud is not enough ancillary to the office, misprision of a felony in not reporting the hush money plot to the Attorney-General is too “low” a crime, etc.) Historically, as an interpretation of the Constitution, Mr. Nixon’s argument is palpable nonsense, as any competent historian will attest. But is this just historical balderdash born out of delaying tactics? Or is something more sinister involved?

Suppose, as seems more and more likely, the House votes to impeach Mr. Nixon, and the great impeachment trial is launched in the U.S. Senate. At this point, there does not seem to be the two-thirds majority needed to convict in the Senate, but who knows what will happen when the facts pour out at the impeachment trial? Already, Senator James Buckley, in an eloquent speech calling for Nixon’s resignation, has virtually pinned the responsibility, and hence the blame, on Nixon for the admitted actions of his top subordinates; does this presage at long, long last, abandonment of Nixon’s cause by the Conservatives? Or are they really willing to walk the last mile and go down the tubes politically with Mr. Nixon? Suppose, then, that the Senate does vote Nixon guilty, by a vote just above two-thirds. The chilling speculation is; what happens then?

The general assumption is that Mr. Nixon would at that point, and at last, step down, though of course kicking and snarling as he went. But can we count on that? Suppose that the following happens; Mr. Nixon goes on the air, praises the Congress for performing its task as best it can, but then says that, according to his view of the Constitution, the impeachment vote is unconstitutional because his crimes were not sufficient to warrant the action. Suppose, then, that he refuses to leave the Presidential office. What happens next? Can we really be sure that this will not happen? If we couple the Nixonian claim about the charges being too broad with what Anthony Lewis has called his “L’Etat c’est Moi” attitude and with what we know of his character, then this scenario begins to appear all too realistic.

So: what happens then? Will they, in the marvelous metaphor of Martha Mitchell, “have to drag him out of the White House in chains?” And who will do it? Already, a Village Voice reporter went to several top Pentagon officials and posed for them this hypothetical situation. What would they do? To a man, they gave the now famous “Eichmann answer”, that their job in life is to obey all orders of their Commander-in-Chief without question; and they left no doubt that in that situation they would still consider Mr. Nixon as their Commander-in-Chief. So what happens then? Civil War? Backtracking by the Congress? Dragging out in chains? Will we ever be able to rid ourselves of Richard Nixon by constitutional means? Will the American Republic last long enough to be able to celebrate its Bicentennial? If Senator Buckley is worried about a “crisis of the regime”, to use his curiously Petainist phrase, there my countrymen would be, a crisis indeed.

European Politics

By Leonard P. Liggio

Just before the recent English elections took place, there was a radio program on the voters’ attitudes. It started with a man saying that it was necessary to end all the government controls and to allow the free play of economic forces. Later, when his interview was presented in full, it turned out he was not one of our English libertarians but was a Labourite attacking the Conservative government. Since the Conservatives, and not only in England, have become the leading advocates of strong state economic authority, including controls, it should not be surprising to find that other parties take up some kind of critique of controls. The recent elections gave the Conservatives a well deserved defeat without giving the Labour Party any mandate that it could turn into a push for more socialism. One commentator said: “Mr. Heath went to the country on the issue of who governs and the answer he got was nobody.” The New York Times declared that that had been “the worst possible result.” Who were the gainers? The Nationalists from the Celtic areas of Scotland, Wales, western England and Northern Ireland made important victories. Building on their first victory in 1970, the Scottish Nationalists won several by-elections last fall, and won seven seats in the early March general elections. The Welsh Plaid Cymru won two seats. The ultra Ulster Unionists, who call for a separate Protestant-controlled Northern Ireland, won eleven seats. The Liberals, who won fourteen seats, also reflect a nationalist feeling, especially in the Celtic western English counties. The large Liberal vote—six million—represented about twenty per cent of the total vote, and denied either major party its victory. Voting Liberal was a sound way of punishing the Conservatives without giving the Labourites a mandate. With that number of votes, the Liberals should have had ten times the number of seats they actually received in Parliament. Heath tried to get them into a coalition with the Conservatives but the Liberals (supported by the Manchester Guardian) rejected Heath’s continuing in power. The Liberals demand a reform of the election system as well as a separate Parliament for Scotland and something similar for Wales. The Liberals have attracted the youth vote on a program of support for capitalism against regulations or controls over economic or private life, support for the Common Market and the tradition of free trade, and for decentralization or “community polities.” The Liberals’ image is that of radical capitalism and decentralization. On Wilson’s new cabinet, the Liberals bitterly attacked it as “an old-fashioned Socialist government of the type which failed the country before.”

There is a possibility that the Labour government may be less inflationary than the Conservatives. The chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healy, favors floating exchange rates rather than controls. Harold Lever, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and key economic advisor to Wilson, strongly opposes increased taxes. But should the battle against inflation fail it has been suggested that Enoch Powell will benefit. Powell refused to run for Parliament in the election due to his opposition to wage and price controls and to the inflationary monetary policies of the Conservatives. This action places him once more in a serious political position instead of the dead end of opposition to the free movement of people and goods that he had been emphasizing. Powell called on his supporters to vote Labour to save the country from the Conservatives’ price-wage controls and inflation. The New Statesman declared: “Who would be the beneficiary? It could be Enoch Powell, who in my view has—so far from committing political suicide—played his cards adroitly by placing himself outside the party arena. To rise above the enmities of Right and Left, to ‘unite the nation’, is a well-tried but always potentially effective technique.” To whom has Powell been appealing? Powell has represented Birmingham which, according to Jane Jacobs, was the center of the flexibility and quick responses to the market which are the flower of capitalism. The Manchester Guardian commented on Powell’s new influence from concentrating on issues of controls and inflation (Powell had earlier contributed to England’s abandonment of imperialist positions around the world and to the reduction of defense spending): “The West Midlands is the home of independent capitalism. The typical voter is not a frightened bank clerk of Carshalton but a small businessman with three men working for him somewhere in Cradley Heath. He doesn’t like an incomes and prices policy.”

The developments in England reflect some changes that have been occurring in other parts of the Commonwealth. The Labour parties of Australia and New Zealand were victorious after long periods of opposition, mainly in response to Conservative inflations. Since coming to power, these Labour governments have had the courage to break with U.S. domination of their foreign policies and defense programs. In Canada, the Liberals have been ruling as a minority party from the increase a year and a half ago of the New Democratic party and the decline of the Social Creditists who also lost their strongholds as the provincial governments in Alberta and British Columbia. The only unifying element in Canadian politics appears to be a desire to stem the influence of American investments. That theme has been carried further in Quebec, where the French population would like to limit the role of English-speaking Canadians. Last fall in provincial elections the separatist Parti Quebecois, led by Rene Levesque, received 29% of the vote against 55% for the Liberals, with the rest going to the National Union and to the Creditistes.

In Holland and Scandinavia there have been important electoral developments. In Holland, a year and a half ago, the electorate polarized. The religious parties—a Catholic one and several Protestant ones, headed by the Anti-Revolutionary party (aimed against the classical liberalism and freedom of religion of the French Revolution)—lost their joint control of national politics. The Dutch voted against the traditionalist parties and their no-issues campaign and favored parties taking strong stands. The Dutch Liberals, with the Young Liberals in the vanguard, made strong gains among the youth vote opposed to inflation and to the repression of new culture. The Radical People’s Party similarly made gains as people have left the old religion-oriented culture for the new culture.

In Sweden last September the long dominant Social Democrats lost heavily, and now rule in a Parliament in which their coalition has only half the seats. The biggest Swedish gainer was the Center party which appealed to a “desire among many for the simple life that preceded industrial society.” The Center party seemed to represent the Sweden of the past before the shifts of population from country to city—“a nostalgia for the day when the people didn’t have to move to cities and work in factories.” At the same time in Norway the thirty years of Labor rule was maintained only barely. The growth of the opposition is somewhat similar to Sweden. Five per cent of the vote went to the “Anders Lange party for the sharp reduction of taxes, levies and public interference.” Anders Lange does not like taxes. A lot of people don’t include a lot of Danes. Last December Berkeley-trained Mogens Glistrup and his Progress party won 28 seats in Denmark’s Parliament. Glistrup seeks abolition of the income tax and burning of the papers of the revenue office, and wants to start budget cuts with defense. Glistrup declared: “I’m also against spending money on defense . . . If we had our own defense, we could last five hours, without it, five minutes. So who needs it?” This view represents the result of serious study by Europeans of defense problems and the economic advantage of peace and peace policy rather than defense spending. The New York Times went out of its mind when Glistrup received so many votes. The Times editorial was entitled: “Poujadism in Denmark.” Poujadism in mid-1950s France sought to organize tax resistance. At the time it attracted the attention of libertarians in America as a significant contribution to serious politics rather than to verbal exercises. However, both the National Review and Human Events rejected articles expounding the role of tax resistance in France and indicating its value for organizing a popular libertarian movement in America. No taxes, no warfare state!

In Germany the Free Democrats continue to make gains at the expense of the Socialists and Christian Democrats. The Free Democrats’ leader, Walter Scheel, the present foreign minister, seems likely to be elected the next president of Germany. When formed after the second world war, the Free Democrats united those opposed to the socialism of the Socialists and the dominance of religion in society of the Christian Democrats. They opposed high taxes, government interference with private lives and the pro-American foreign policy which they felt did not reflect a nationalist position between America and Russia. As radical capitalists the Free Democrats are to the left of the Socialists on many issues. This radicalism was reflected in their breaking with Ludwig Erhard in 1966 when he violated a pledge not to increase taxes as he bowed to U.S. demands that he increase contributions to defense. Under Scheel Germany has been engaged in a massive investment program in the Soviet Union, most recently a plan to build an over 1 billion dollar steel plant. Germany and the Soviet Union have agreed to set up joint companies to operate in third countries with mixed Soviet-German capital, management and production. The Free Democratic resurgence has been explained as the result of changes in German society away from traditionalist attitudes. Time has noted: “discipline is giving way to what sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who also happens to be the Free Democrats’ leading thinker, calls the individual search for happiness by people freed of the fetters of tradition and thrown into the affluent society.” Writes Dahrendorf in Society and Democracy in Germany: “Discipline, orderliness, subservience, cleanliness, industriousness, precision, and all the other virtues ascribed by many to the Germans as an echo of past splendor have already given way to a much less rigid set of values, among which economic success, a high income, the holiday trip, and the new car play a much larger part than the virtues of the past. Younger people especially display little of the much praised and much scorned respect for authority, and less of the disciplined virtues that for their fathers were allegedly sacred. A world of highly individual values has emerged, which puts the experienced happiness of the individual in first place and increasingly lets the so-called whole slip from sight.”

Scheel and the German government have been major targets during this March of Nixon and Kissinger. Nixon wants the Europeans to continue to underwrite the costs of American inflation; they refuse. Likewise, they do not wish to have America dominate Europe’s defenses. But, especially, they wish to have the freedom to operate in the world market to purchase raw materials, mainly oil, without the intrusions of American political demands. Kissinger has attacked Michel Jobert, French foreign minister, for seeking since last July to block U.S. European defense arrangements under NATO, as well as for opposing U.S. claims that there was a Soviet threat during the Middle East crisis.

However, the big blow-up came during the February Washington meeting that Kissinger had determined would present a solid, hard-line toward the Arab countries. Jobert presented a blistering critique of American policy and affirmed France’s independent policy toward the Arab world. Jobert’s standing in French public opinion has skyrocketed and he has become a leading contender to succeed to the French presidency. Even the very influential Le Monde, almost never having praised Gaullist attitudes, strongly attacked the American leaders and defended the French position of independence. President Nixon has giver dire warnings to the Europeans and threatens to unleash his secret weapon—i.e., he may not visit them this year. The Europeans may emerge from this situation stronger and more independent, which would be a plus for world peace as well as a check on the Nixon administration’s taste for super-run-away inflation.

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The British Elections

Given the unspeakable state of British politics and the economy, the results of the recent elections were the best that could be hoped for. The Labor Party is now gung ho socialist, and so a victory for Labor in the elections would have been an unmitigated disaster: Labor was pledged, for example, to the nationalization of a host of vital industries, as well as to the monstrous despotism of compulsory abolition of the private schools of Great Britain. Under former Prime Minister Edward Heath, however, the Conservatives were proceeding to wreck the British economy by the familiar combination of large-scale inflation of the money supply coupled with severe price and wage controls (Is Britain ten years further down the American road?) While we cannot condone the stranglehold of union monopoly in Britain, the immediate cause of the breakdown of the British economy and the miners’ strike was Mr. Heath’s stubborn insistence on keeping wage controls far below the free market level. Heath’s policy was particularly repellent for its Nixonian quality: masking collectivist policy in a cloak of free-enterprise rhetoric. A clear-cut victory for Heath, then, would simply have endorsed his disastrous economic policies.

Through the closeness of the vote, and still more by the large increase of votes for the minor parties, the British electorate has made sure that neither incubus of a major party could command a majority in Parliament. Furthermore, in the short run, Prime Minister Wilson was able to solve the economic crisis by in effect removing wage controls on the coal miners and thereby ending the strike. Labor’s minority status insures that Mr. Wilson will not be able to push through the gallopping collectivism of the full Labor program. Since both major parties are horrendous, a stalemate government blocking both party programs was the best that could be extracted from the situation.

But there are even more goodies in the British election. For the striking increase in the votes for the Liberals and for the Nationalists can only be beneficial in themselves. The Liberal Party is, alas!, very far from its libertarian Cobdenite origins. But while it is a confused, middle-of-the-road party, the Liberals are not prepared to go along with-the pet collectivist extremes of either the Laborites or the Tories. At least the Liberals will throw some sand in the collectivist machinery of either major party. Even healthier is the rise of the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, the former increasing their number of seats phenomenally from 2 to 7, amassing over one-fifth of the Scottish vote; while the latter, the Plaid Cymru, gained 2 seats in Parliament over their previous zero. Americans tend to think of all the inhabitants of the British Isles as “English”. Nothing could be further from the truth. For centuries, the Scottish and the Welsh, each with a totally separate language and culture, have been the victims of English imperialism and English oppression, and the rise of the Plaid Cymru and the “Scot Nats” presages a dramatic shift toward home rule for these minority nations. Furthermore, while the Scot Nats are hardly champions of the free market, they are at least staunchly opposed to the Labor program for the nationalization of the large new oilfields that have recently been discovered off the North Sea coast of Scotland.

It is characteristic of the growing adherence to the Establishment of Bill Buckley that he gave Heath and the Tories an all-out endorsement before the election. Or else it was a breakdown of his much-vaulted “strategic intelligence.” For Buckley explicitly rejected the only political strategy that carries hope for Britain in the foreseeable future: that of the dissident stormy petrel of British politics, Enoch Powell. For Powell, head of the “right wing” of the Tories, refused to stand for reelection to Parliament, and urged his supporters to break the Heath administration by voting Labor. Only in that way, only by turning the Tories out, was there hope for overturning Heath and thereby paving the way for a later ride of Enoch Powell to power. In fact, Powell’s defection was responsible for the loss of at least six Tory seats in the West Midlands, the major base of Powell’s political support.

Decades of horrific British policies have created a rigid, stratified, and cartellized economy, a set of frozen power blocs integrated with Big Government: namely, Big Business and Big Labor. Even the most cautious and gradualist of English libertarians now admit that only a radical political change can save England. Enoch Powell is the only man on the horizon who could be the sparkplug for such a change. It is true, of course, that for libertarians Enoch Powell has many deficiencies. For one thing he is an admitted High Tory who believes in the divine right of kings; for another, his immigration policy is the reverse of libertarian. But on the critical issues in these parlous times: on checking the inflationary rise in the money supply, and on scuttling the disastrous price and wage controls, Powell is by far the soundest politician in Britain. A sweep of Enoch Powell into power would hardly be ideal, but it offers the best existing hope for British freedom and survival.

Libertarianism And Humanist Psychology

By Martin Andrews
Department of Psychology
St. John’s University, Minnesota

In the last few years a new movement has grown up in psychology. This movement is variously designated as humanistic psychology, the “human potential” movement, existential psychology, or, perhaps most commonly, the “third force”. The phrase “third force” is used to distinguish this brand of psychology from the first two forces, psychoanalysis and behaviorism. This loosely organized group has its own professional society, the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and has more or less, been given the official seal of approval with the formation of Division 32 of the American Psychological Association, the Division for Humanistic Psychology. There are many different points of view among the various members of the movement, and some of these differences are quite significant, but there do seem to be large areas of agreement among them, in addition to their common opposition to behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Some of the characteristics of this new psychology can be seen in the following partial listing:

1. A belief in man’s free will and responsibility

2. An emphasis on experience as the basic datum of psychology

3. The idea that the person is or should be the main concern of psychologists

4. A commitment to the investigation of more meaningful problems than psychology has traditionally dealt with, even if this means a considerable loss of rigor

5. A belief in the moral necessity for the full development of human potential

6. A belief that man has considerable freedom from his past, and that much of his behaviour is determined by his plans and goals for the future

7. A belief in the natural goodness of man

8. The view that man is pre-eminently a social being, and can find fulfillment only through relatedness to others

9. The idea that values should be of great importance to psychologists

I take it as more or less axiomatic that libertarians have a valid interest in the views of psychologists. Since one’s views about the proper kind of society are presumably based on one’s view of human nature, and human nature is perhaps the chief professional interest of psychologists, it would be remarkable if libertarians, as social philosophers, did not have this interest. In any case, it would seem that libertarians have generally taken a positive view of the third force. A number of California libertarians, report has it, have become involved in the human potential movement. As another evidence of this, I note that the Laissez-faire Books catalog prominently features in its listings works on transactional analysis and gestalt therapy, both typical third force therapies, as well as the major works of Abraham Maslow, the father of the “third force.” In light of this interest, and in view of the importance of arriving at a reasonable psychology for any sort of social philosophy, it would perhaps be useful to offer some critical commentary on the humanistic movement.

A real grasp of the meaning of the third force can probably best be gained by a consideration of its historical genesis. As indicated above, this movement arose largely as a reaction against behaviorism and psychoanalysis, and this reaction is intimately related to both its good and its bad points. Since the humanists’ objections to behaviorism and psychoanalysis are rather different, it would probably be wise to examine these criticisms separately.

The criticisms directed against the behaviorists by the humanists seem to reduce to two. The first such objection is that behaviorism has trivialized psychology. By its rejection of such “mentalistic” categories as mind, reason, purpose, value, consciousness, and feeling, in the name of a spurious scientific objectivity, the humanists argue, the behaviorists have made impossible the study of any but trivial problems. The malign influence of behaviorism, they say, has forced psychologists to investigate only such phenomena as can be treated objectively, namely such inherently dull things as what influences the rate at which rats press a bar in a Skinner box. The study of more significant problems, they urge, is greatly needed. The second charge is that behaviorism views man as purely “reactive”. That is, behaviorists view all behavior as having its cause in either past or present stimulation. The recognition of man’s freedom and spontaneity, the humanists think, is needed in order to get a proper picture of the human person.

It is clear that one could hardly accuse psychoanalysis of being trivial, whatever its other sins may be. The charges against this doctrine, then, assume a somewhat different form. The psychoanalysts, the humanists say, paint a needlessly gloomy picture of human nature and its possibilities. If one might be permitted to caricature the psychoanalytic view of man, one might say that the analysts tend to see man as powerfully driven by anti-social sexual and aggressive needs kept in check only by the forces of repression and the necessities of social life, as a prisoner of his past, doomed to endlessly repeat the same neurotic script throughout his life, and that fundamentally there is very little that can be expected by way of alleviation of this unhappy situation. The humanists’ response to this is twofold. First, they assert, this view fails to recognize the potentiality for goodness possessed by mankind. Second, they say, the psychoanalysts make the same mistake the behaviorists do, when they argue that man is a prisoner of his past. This is to fail to realize that man is free and can change himself.

The basic question, of course, is what we are to make of this series of assertions put forth by the humanists. It is clear, I think, that much of what the humanists hold is justified. It seems to me to be unquestionably true that the behaviorists’ ruling out of “mentalistic” terms was a great mistake. The reasons for this, though, contrary to what many humanists seem to think, are for the most part scientific, rather than metaphysical or ethical. It is also true, I believe, that the study of values, and the explication of the concept of purpose are essential to any reasonable account of human behavior, just as the humanists assert. It is true, again, that the psychoanalysts’ world-view is deeply depressing, at least to anyone who takes it seriously. This, of course, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of the doctrine. Fortunately, though this is not the place to go into the subject, there is a great deal of evidence that the psychoanalysts were wrong about many things.

It seems to be the case, then, that the humanists have made a number of valid points at the expense of their opponents. Unfortunately, however, there are a number of places where the views of the humanists are open to severe criticism. I will here concentrate on four of them. These are: 1) the humanists’ idea of freedom; 2) their influence on psychological thinking; 3) the political implications of some of their doctrines; 4) their utter disregard for the value of privacy.

Turning first to the question of freedom, it would seem to the writer that it is important to make a distinction between political and economic freedom, in the sense of freedom from coercion, and metaphysical freedom, in the sense of freedom of the will. The two concepts are logically independent, and to confuse them, as I believe the humanists frequently do (so do some libertarians), is to risk getting mired in some philosophical quagmires. It is often felt, for example, that it is only on the premise of free will that it makes any sense to speak of responsibility. This would seem to be the reverse of the truth. If an act is truly free, it would seem to imply that it is uncaused or random. It is difficult to see in what sense it is reasonable to assign blame for a random act. It is peculiar to express moral outrage at the outcome of the toss of dice, and illogical to expect censure to affect the next toss. Responsibility, then, is more compatible with determinism than with free will, in the writer’s view.

A second, and in many ways more serious, difficulty with the doctrine of free will is that such a doctrine is ultimately inconsistent with any concept of human nature. If human beings operate under no constraints, save those of physical nature, then it is clear that they can make themselves into anything they want, and there is no obvious reason why one such choice should be better than another. Some of the existentially oriented writers seem to have seen this difficulty and more or less faced up to it. Sartre, for example, explicitly states that there is no such thing as human nature, and that we are free to make of ourselves what we will. The concept of the gratuitous, random act occurs in the writings of Gide, for another example. The concept of free will, I believe, is ultimately nihilistic, and therefore incompatible with any vision of social life, libertarian or otherwise. The point to be made here is that the “third force” has a considerable intellectual indebtedness to the existentialists, and are infected, to that extent, with the existentialists’ nihilism.

The second point of criticism of the third force is that their influence on psychological thinking has, in many ways, been bad. Because of their objections to the peculiar kind of rigor practiced by the behaviorists, they have all too often thrown out the concept of rigor altogether, and placed the highest value on subjectivity. Subjectivity, to be sure, has its place in science as in all other endeavors, but when one rejects the possibility of some kind of objectivity, there is clearly no way of settling disputes, and truth comes to be measured by intensity of conviction, the dangerousness of which, I assume, needs no elaboration. A related point is that the humanistic psychologists have tended to discourage the kind of analytic thinking that has been characteristic of experimental psychology at its best, in favor of what, for want of a better term, could be called synthetic intuitions. The chief point here is that analytical and rigorous thinking is, when all is said and done, a necessity for the life of the mind.

The humanists, as noted above, tend to believe in the natural goodness of man, his great potential for better things, and his freedom to achieve them. This aspect of humanism seems to be taken largely from the philosophy of Rousseau (as do several other aspects of humanism). The difficulty with a point of view of this type is that it tends to lead to Utopian expectations and extreme dissatisfaction with present institutions. Dissatisfaction with present institutions, especially the government, the libertarian would be sure to add, is wholly justified in this age, as in any other that we are aware of, but if all human unhappiness is to be attributed to social institutions, then the justification for violent revolution becomes clear, and the way is opened for all the suffering that this would entail. It is often said that utopianism is a vital part of the human spirit. I can only say that as science fiction or fantasy it is unobjectionable, but as thought, it stinks. Most libertarians, including this one, would favor revolution under some circumstances. However, it is clear to me that I would not support any of the revolutionary movements that seem to have any chance of success today. Ultimately I think the view of Nock and Mencken is a humane one, namely that when men are convinced of the need for liberty, it will be forthcoming with a minimum of bloodshed. This concludes our third point of criticism of humanistic psychology, its encouragement of Utopian thinking.

The last point, that of the humanists’ lack of regard for privacy, can perhaps best be made by an extract from an article in Psychology Today (September, 1969), written by a prominent philosophical psychologist, Sigmund Koch, and entitled, “Psychology cannot be a coherent science.” (I would add that I agree with Koch’s sentiments on humanistic psychology, but not necessarily with the major point of the article). In this article he discusses attending a symposium conducted by a humanistic psychologist, Paul Bindrim, the originator of “nude marathon group therapy”. The extract is as follows:

Bindrim’s methods, for the most part, are the standard devices of group therapy. He was enthusiastic at the symposium, however, about a therapeutic intervention of his own inspired coinage that he calls “crotch eyeballing”. The crotch, he notes, is the focus of many hang-ups. In particular, three classes: (1) aftermath difficulties of toilet training; (2) masturbation guilts; (3) stresses of adult sexuality. Why not blast all this pathology at once! Thus two group members aid in (as Bindrim says) the “spread-eagling” of a third member and the entire company is instructed to stare unrelentingly and for a good long interval at the offending target area. Each group member is given an opportunity to benefit from this refreshing psychic boost. Scientist that he is, Bindrim is unwilling to make a decisive assessment of the benefits until more data are in. But he is encouraged.

Admittedly, Bindrim’s is only one of many approaches in group therapy. But all these methods are based on one fundamental assumption: that total psychic transparency—total self-exposure—has therapeutic and growth-releasing potential . . . Every technique, manipulative gimmick, cherished and wielded by the lovable, shaggy workers in this field is selected for its efficacy to such an end . . .

The human potentialists . . . are saying in effect that a world of private stimulations is unhealthy . . . In no time at all (they) have achieved a conception of human nature so gross as to make behaviorism seem a form of Victorian sentimentality.

Koch, I believe, has made the point about as well as it can be made. It is certainly true that the humanists have concentrated most of their efforts on the development of methods of group therapy, and that the idea of the private person often appears repugnant to them, perhaps even immoral. While I like to look at crotches as well as the next man—indeed my taste for this sort of thing may even exceed the average man’s—it seems ridiculous to me to think that a viewing of “Deep Throat”, for example, is a powerful therapeutic experience. One thing that can be said about nudity is that it is a great equalizer. As the dean of a great university once said about his faculty, “In their underpants you can’t tell them from the students”. If you are a great believer in equality, then, perhaps nudity is the proper form of dress for psychotherapy. A related point is that this need to submerge oneself in the mass that seems to be so characteristic of group therapies would seem to be inconsistent with the kind of differentiation among individuals that libertarians presumably regard as a good thing. Again, the view of human nature that seems to be typical of the “third force” can probably be traced back to Rousseau.

At this point a brief summary would seem to be in order. It appears that much of the inspiration for humanistic psychology can be traced to Existentialism and to Rousseau. Thus, the representatives of the “third force” get into trouble when they discuss the nature of freedom. Their influence on psychology has probably been more bad than good. Their belief in the natural goodness of man is surely untenable, and their emphasis on group therapy and total self-disclosure often seems to disguise a desire to get into situations where no social distinctions are made and one can lose one’s identity in the mass. I would conclude, then, that Sartre and Rousseau are poor models for the libertarian, and that while the third force has made some valid points, the libertarian would be well advised to shop elsewhere for a psychology.

Ed. Note:

Professor Andrews’ welcome article needs, in my view, an important philosophical corrective—one, however, which does not injure the main thrust of his position. The random concept of freedom of the will which he is criticizing is faulty post-Cartesian version. What we need to return to is the classical Aristotelian-Thomist concept of free will as self-determination, and emphasizing the freedom to reason. Particularly welcome is Andrews’ critique of the fashionable and massive invasion of individual privacy in the name of “openness” and “humanism.”

The laws were most numerous when the State was in a condition of decay.

— Tacitus

Why No Oil Refineries?

One of the most severe indictments of the oil companies in the current crisis is that they have failed to build any new refineries on the East Coast in the last several years. Hence, the oil and gas shortage. On the face of it, this charge is economically ignorant. If there was indeed such a great social demand for new oil refineries, then this demand would have been reflected in high expected profits, and in response the oil companies would have leaped at the chance. The fact that no such onrush took place indicates to the economist that (a) either there was no such demand, or, in this case more likely (b) that the government was right in their doing something to discourage such building.

In early March an event took place which highlights the reasons for the dearth of new refineries. Aristotle Onassis and his Olympic Refineries have been planning to build a new giant $600,000,000 oil refinery on the coast of New Hampshire. Terrific, you say? Surely the good citizens of New Hampshire have welcomed this contribution to aid the energy crisis with open arms and hosannahs? You bet your sweet life they have not. On the contrary, the citizens of New Hampshire have been moving heaven and earth or rather various levels of government—to prohibit the new refinery. And this month various local town governments have voted to ban a new refinery; furthermore, despite the support for the refinery of conservative Governor Meldrin Thomson, the state legislature has voted to endorse the actions of the localities. And so, a giant and productive new refinery on the East Coast will not be built.

What were the objections? The usual environmentalist crazies were at work. Refineries by definition “deface” the unspoiled earth, mar the governmental beaches, and maybe even injure a few plankton while they’re about it. How much longer are we all going to continue to suffer hardship so that the environmentalists can impose their peculiar esthetics on the rest of us by governmental coercion?

And while we’re on the subject of the oil industry, we must alert ourselves to a new, horrendous bill introduced into the Senate by Adlai Stevenson (D., Ill.), and Warren Magnuson (D., Wash.) The Stevenson-Magnuson proposed “Consumer Energy Act of 1974”, reports Human Events (March 16), would do the following:

1) Instead of deregulating natural gas from the clutches of the FPC and thereby end the natural gas shortage in interstate commerce, the bill would extend FPC regulation to cover intrastate commerce as well—thereby effectively killing off the natural gas industry.

2) It would extend the same degree of federal regulation to petroleum as it has to natural gas.

3) It would create a socialistic Federal Oil and Gas Corporation, owned by the federal government, which would locate and develop oil and natural gas.

4) It would give power to the FPC to demand any information it wanted from any oil or gas company, and to make it public at its own discretion. But—and here is the zinger—should any owner, agent, or official of such a company “neglect or refuse” to answer any request made to him by the FPC or any of its agents, he would be liable to criminal penalties of a stiff fine and one to two years of imprisonment!

Hey, Liberals, what happened to the Fifth Amendment? What happened to the constitutional prohibition of self-incrimination? And what happened to the usual mushy-headed Liberal attitude toward punishment of crime? What the Liberal attitude apparently boils down to is this: for murderers, rapists, kidnappers, muggers, and bank robbers, a light slap on the wrist and heaps of “understanding” of their psyches and their environments; for productive citizens who sell above controlled prices or who neglect to answer questions directed at them by meddling bureaucrats, not one whit of “understanding”, and instead escalation of punishment. How about going all the way and restoring the death penalty only for businessmen who fail to answer questions or who sell above controlled prices? For those who think this question purely a facetious reductio ad absurdum, there is all too ample precedent, at least for the punishment meted out to businessmen: Roman Emperor Diocletian, the French Revolution, Chiang kai-Shek, Marshal Ky, and Soviety Russia, which only a few weeks ago executed a dozen people for the “economic crime” of selling in the black market.

How To Deal With Kidnapping

It looks very much as if we are in for a rash of “political” kidnappings, inspired by the evident success of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s kidnapping of Patricia Hearst. If we are not to suffer a reign of terror in this country from groups of thugs, we must nip this “movement” in the bud. Basically, there is only one way to do it, as rigorous and even “hardhearted” as it may seem. And that is for everyone to make up his mind, and to shout it loud and clear well in advance of any such crimes, that no one will collaborate in any way with the kidnappers’ demands: no money, no food to the starving masses, no free publicity, no “negotiations”, no nothing. If potential kidnappers are put on clear warning from the very start that no demands they make will be satisfied by one iota, then kidnappings will cease before they begin, and the lives of their victims and family will not be shattered. In the long-run, this is the least “hardhearted” position to take, in addition to clearly being the only one consonant with justice. Evil and crime must never be rewarded.

But isn’t this too morally rigorous a position to expect parents to take? Isn’t Randolph Hearst’s grovelling before the SLA monsters to be expected? Perhaps. But there is surely no need for anyone else besides the parents involved to follow their lead. If Mr. and Mrs. Hearst were not strong enough to avoid succumbing to the SLA outrage, then all the other collaborators involved should have been. In short, none of the friends, relatives, or business associates of Mr. Hearst should have collaborated one inch in providing the ransom money or food; if they had not done so, then the kidnappers would have learned clearly and emphatically that the failure to achieve their demands was not the fault of the Hearst parents. And certainly all future kidnappers would have gotten the message all the more clearly. Even more morally repellent has been the collaboration of the leftish welfare agencies in supplying the free food, as well as the media in treating the SLA with dignity and respect as some sort of legitimate ideological organization worthy of ever continuing dialogue. What the SLA kidnappers deserve is not dialogue but the business end of a machine gun.

This brings us to the punishment to be meted out to apprehended kidnappers. The U.S. Senate has been sensible and statesmanlike in voting to restore the death penalty for kidnappers who kill their victims. The idea that the death penalty never deters murder is almost self-evident hogwash. The abolition of the death penalty, was philosophic left-sentimentality, as well as juridical nonsense. Philosophically, a person who murders another forfeits his own right to life, on the principle that he who deprives others of rights deserves to lose his in proportion. Juridically, to say that the Constitutional prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibits the death penalty flies in the face of the common use of that penalty at the time the Constitution was written, and after it was established. No Founding Father issued a protest of alleged unconstitutionality. The Supreme Court argument that the death penalty is now “unusual” is purely a product of the success of left-wing jurists in recent years in stalling and blocking the use of capital punishment. Allow the death penalty to flow freely in cases of murder and the punishment would soon no longer be “unusual.”

On the other hand, the Senate acted well in not restoring the previous death penalty for kidnapping per se. Not only does such punishment go beyond the rule of proportionality; it also fails to deter the murder of a victim after he or she has been kidnapped. If passed, the present bill will help greatly in bringing the kidnapping era to a close before it gets underway. But more important is a determination by every person and group in society to give no quarter, and to yield to no demand, of any kidnappers.

On this topic, the farcical nature of the “right-wing” kidnapping is an apt commentary on the current political scene. For a short while it looked as if there were a right-wing terrorist group, the “American Revolutionary Army,” dedicated to kidnapping prominent liberals as part of a campaign for a right-wing coup. Yet, in this case, the authorities acted swiftly; the victim was speedily returned to his home and family; the ransom money was promptly recovered; and the existence of the ARA turned out to be a hoax. When will the day arrive when the leftist SLA, which is surely not a hoax, is treated with the same efficiency and dispatch? When will the media treat left-wing bandits with the same revulsion and contempt as they treat their real or alleged right-wing counterparts?

“Our purpose is the abolition, not only of all existing States, but of the State itself . . . And what is the State? It is not a thing that can be especially defined by Russia, Germany, Great Britain, or Massachusetts. The State is a principle, a philosophical error in social existence. The State is chaos, rioting under the guise of law, order, and morality. The State is a mob, posited on unscientific premises. We propose to supplant the mob by that true social order which is pivoted on the sovereignty of individualities associated for mutual well-being under the law of natural attraction and selection—Liberty.”

— Benjamin R. Tucker

“O Freedom, thou queen of Perfection,

Sweet nurse of the brave and the free,

The choice of our heart’s deep election,

We tender devotion to thee!

With Reason thy consort forever.

And Justice the law of thy realm,

Thy kingdom shall perish, O never,

No tyrant thy power shall o’erwhelm!”

— J. William Lloyd

Libertarian Songs—I

No ideological movement has ever gotten anywhere without songs: songs to express their ideology, their joy in the struggle, their hopes and expectations for ultimate victory. And yet the libertarian movement has been singularly unproductive in forging songs of freedom. (Of course, there are precious few songs in general, anymore, and this may have a lot to do with the dearth of songs in the libertarian movement.) At any rate, we hereby begin a series of songs that were composed by members of the old “Circle Bastiat”, the tiny group that virtually constituted the entire New York movement during the dark days of the 1950’s. In the old ideological tradition set by the IWW at the turn of the century, we took standard songs and composed new words to fit the new mood and ideology.

Note A: the hint of megalomania that permeates most of these songs was deliberate. It was of course on one level amusing and ironic for a literal handful of people, in a seemingly hopeless minority, to talk so confidently of imminent victory. On another level, however, it expressed our fond hopes for the future.

Note B: The “Circle” in these songs refers to our little group; in the present context, “movement” would supply the analogous meaning.

The Battle Hymn of Freedom

(sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”)

O’er these murky, troubled waters shines the Circle’s beacon light,

That brilliant guiding beam that draws men daily to the Right,

Oh, its glory is a refuge from the State’s inhuman might,

For Anarchy we fight.

Freedom, freedom, blessed freedom (repeat twice)

For Anarchy we fight.

In that free world of tomorrow which now rushes to the fore;

Man shall bow his noble head to neither gods nor caesars more;

And this shall end forever all the State’s communal lore,

For all shall know the truth.

Upward, upward go black banners (repeat twice)

For all shall know the truth.

Look up there, Circle brothers, see the black banners unfurled;

How they wave in expectation of a new and better world.

The lines are drawn, the ranks are firm, the challenge has been hurled,

The Circle marches on.

Vict’ry, vict’ry lies before us (repeat twice)

The Circle marches on.

All of freedom’s blessed martyrs are here marching by our side,

Ours the spirit, ours the cause for which they smiling bled and died.

With us now they cut the fetters which man’s mind and body tied,

Man will at last be free.

Nothing now will ever stop us (repeat twice)

Man will at last be free.

One by one the States are dying, see the age old monsters fall,

As the world resounds in answer to the Circle’s trumpet call.

We’ll not rest until all States are gone and men are freemen all,

And that day lies at hand.

Onward, onward Circle brothers (repeat twice)

For that day lies at hand.

Libertarian Songs—II

The State

(sung to the tune of “America the Beautiful”)

It’s yours to right the great wrong done

Ten thousand years ago,

The State, conceived in blood and hate,

Remains our only foe.

Oh, Circle brothers, Circle brothers,

Victory is nigh,

Come, meet your fate, destroy the State,

and raise your banners high.

Libertarian Dinner Club

Back in the winter of 1969, in retrospect the origins of the current movement, our publisher helped to organize a series of libertarian dinners in New York, featuring a speaker and social get-together. The dinners were so successful that we moved on to a libertarian conference in the fall, about which the veil of History may be mercifully draped. At any rate, the dinner club idea fell into the discard. Now, inspired by the growth of the New York movement and the successful, continuing Libertarian Supper Club in Los Angeles, young J. Neil Schulman has organized The Libertarian Circle to revive the old dinner series in New York, in a series which will hopefully gather regularly every month.

The first two dinners have already been scheduled, at the Roast Beef and Brew restaurant, Madison Ave. and 79th St., Manhattan. The first dinner will be on Tuesday evening, April 23rd, with Murray Rothbard speaking on the “Next Economic Crisis”; the second dinner will be on Tuesday, May 21st, with Jerome Tuccille speaking on “Libertarianism and the Future”. Price per dinner is $9.95. For information on reservations, write to The Libertarian Circle, 208A Mercer St., New York, N.Y. 10012.

Civil Liberties, Selective Style

How many millions of words have been poured out on behalf of the plight of Soviet Jewry? Surely, countless numbers, especially if we add in the deluge on behalf of Solzhenitsyn and other political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Countless intellectuals, right, left, and center, intellectuals devoted to civil liberties in general as well as those whose devotion seems confined either to Jews or to the inhabitants of the territory east of Leningrad and west of Vladivostok—all these have written, signed full page ads, poured forth their zeal without stint. As well they might.

But it looks very much as if this outpouring and this zeal for civil liberties is curiously selective, even among such staunch civil libertarians as Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff. For there is one State of all, one State alone whose violations of civil liberties—even of the civil liberties of Jews, if that detail should matter—never call forth any mass deluge of protest. No full page ads attacking its practices appear in the august pages of the New York Times or the Village Voice. The voices of civil libertarians with regard to this State are strangely stilled. We refer, of course, to that “little bastion of democracy” in the Middle East.

Thus, how many words have you read in the Establishment press, the Left press, or the Right press, about two flagrant cases of oppression and political imprisonment recently committed by the State of Israel? Both were against Jewish citizens. One was the case of Uri Davis, well-known Israeli writer and pacifist of long standing. Davis was forced to spend five months in an Israeli prison for the high crime of entering a “military zone” without a government permit. This “military zone” consisted of land which had been expropriated from its Arab owners and then converted by the State of Israel into an all-Jewish settlement from which all Arabs are excluded by law.

And then there is the case of another Jewish citizen of Israel, Rami Linveh. A few months ago Mr. Linveh was sentenced to ten years in prison for the crime of failing to report to the Israeli authorities meeting a Palestinian Arab alleged by the prosecution to be a “foreign agent.”

So: Nat Hentoff, Irving Kristol, Max Lerner, et al., where are those protests?

There is most wrongdoing where there are most laws.

— Arcesilaus (4th century B. C.)

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 4

APRIL, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

FIVE YEARS OLD!

Yes, dear reader, with this issue the Libertarian Forum celebrates its fifth anniversary. Anniversaries are traditionally a time for nostalgia and self-congratulations, but I believe that the latter is more justified here than is usually the case.

In the first place, we are spectacularly long-lived for a libertarian publication. Unlike all too many sister publications which have begun with pomp and fireworks and then have quickly gone kerplooey, we began with modest aims, and perhaps for that reason are still around and thriving more than ever. We did not aspire, for example, to become the counter-TIME or counter-National Review of the movement, or to provide staff positions for half of the movement.

Secondly, there are few if any ideological magazines – left, right, or center—that do not run on deficits, some of them spectacular. It is a source of pride that the Libertarian Forum has never in its history suffered a deficit. We have always either broken even or earned a modest profit, and we have grown steadily over the years to over double the original circulation. Not only that: for such was the rush of advance subscriptions after we announced our coming birth that we have never had to put a nickel of our own money into the magazine.

Thirdly, we have never suffered either from the financial debility or the faction fights that come with over-staffing. We have adhered strictly to individual responsibility and the division of labor, with yours truly in charge of the content and Joe Peden in charge of the business management of the magazine. As a result, we have enjoyed five years of smooth and felicitous harmony. Because of this strictly defined division of labor, the only instance of friction on the Forum had no effect on the content of the magazine as a whole. That was when Karl Hess, our original Washington editor, left us after a year because, in his rapid ideological course leftward, he could not remain on a journal which sharply criticized the Black Panthers. But since Karl, was only responsible for his own Washington column, this disagreement could have no effect on the rest of the contents of the Forum. Apart from Karl Hess our staff has consisted of two people, period.

Fourth and most important, we have been able to succeed in our aims when founding the magazine. What indeed were those aims? They of course included establishing a continuing libertarian periodical, which was virtually non-existent in early 1969. They included the hope—successful beyond our imaginings—of helping to launch a nationwide libertarian movement, then only a gleam in our and others’ eyes. And so we have celebrated and disseminated news and critiques of the movement. But above all we have wanted to provide an outlet for a continuing application of libertarian theory to the social and political events of the day. It is this function that was not only non-existent in 1969, but is still—after the great expansion of the libertarian movement in intervening years—virtually unique to the pages of the Libertarian Forum. There have been quite a number of periodicals willing to discourse at great length on “John Gait as Hero”, on whether A is or is not always A, or on “Concept and Percept in the Theory of Rational Bisexuality”. But where O where are the journals eager to discuss the energy crisis or Richard Nixon or the latest events in France or the Middle Fast from the point of view of libertarian analysis? Where else are the applications of libertarian doctrine to current events? I still don’t understand why we have no sister publications in this area, but we continue as we started as virtually the only periodical to perform this vital function.

Let us quote at some length from our first editorial in the preview issue of live years ago: apart from the fact that the movement has now become much larger and better organized, the statement of aim is as valid now as it was then:

“The need is acute for far more cohesion and inter-communication in the libertarian movement: in fact, it must become a movement and cease being merely an inchoate collection of diffuse and haphazard personal contacts . . .

“We believe that one of the greatest needs of the movement at this time is for a frequently appearing magazine that could act as a nucleus and communications center for libertarians across the country. We also believe that while many libertarians have thought long and hard about their ideal system, few of them have been able to rise above the merely sectarian exposition of the pure system to engage in a critique of the present state of affairs armed with the libertarian world-view. This kind of ‘critique’ is not merely ‘negative’, as many libertarian sectarians believe. For it is the kind of work that it is indispensable if we are ever to achieve victory, if we are ever to get our ideal system off the drawing board and applied to the real world. In order to change the present system we must be able to analyze and explore it, and to see in the concrete how our libertarian view can be applied to such analysis and to the prospects for social change.

“One would think that such a need would be obvious. No movement that has been successful has ever been without organs for carrying out this kind of analysis and critique. The key word here is ‘successful’: for a magazine like The Libertarian (Forum) is desperately needed only if we wish to unite theory and action, if we wish not only to elaborate an ideal system but to see how the current system may be transformed into the idea. In short, it is needed only if our aim is victory; those who conceive of liberty as only an intellectual parlor game, or as a method for generating investment tips, will, alas, find little here to interest them. But let us hope that The Libertarian (Forum) will be able to play a part in inspiring a truly dedicated movement on behalf of liberty.”

• • • • • • • •

To be specific, the Lib. Forum had its origin on a rainy automobile trip to Virginia undertaken in January. 1969 by your editor, his wife, and Joe Peden. It was on one of the boring turnpike stretches that Joe Peden first conceived—or at least launched—the idea of the Lib. Forum. It didn’t take much persuasion to talk me into it. Yours—and my—favorite magazine was born.

The background was particularly propitious for the new venture. In the first place. Joe and I, without as yet much concrete evidence, had sensed that the libertarian movement was beginning to grow rapidly in New York and throughout the country. In New York, it seemed that—for the first time in over twenty years—the movement was growing beyond the confines of one small living-room. How right we were was demonstrated far beyond our expectations when, on return from the trip, Joe and Jerry Woloz founded the Libertarian Forum dinners, a series of dinners and after-dinner talks among New York libertarians. It was at the first such dinner that the forthcoming launching of the Lib. Forum was first publicly announced. Sending out notices to a restricted mailing-list, we all expected about twenty-five guests to show up. When over sixty persons attended this initial dinner, some coming from as far away as Buffalo, Delaware, and South Carolina to attend the affair, it was clear that the movement was growing far more rapidly than we had believed.

At the same time that the movement was beginning to grow, there was a particular dearth of libertarian journalism. In 1965, at a time when the libertarian movement had dwindled almost to nothing from being trapped in a conservative movement that had virtually swallowed it up, Leonard Liggio and myself, as a desperation measure, had founded the three-times yearly journal Left and Right. The purpose was to find and mobilize the lingering libertarian elements that had been all but absorbed into the Conservative movement—a movement that had changed spectacularly from the quasi-libertarian movement that it has been from the late 1930’s to the mid-1950’s (the “Old Right”), to a Bill Buckley-dominated “New Right” that was driving in the profoundly statist and anti-libertarian direction of global war, repression of civil liberties and militarism at home, and a theocratic social philosophy. Leonard and I felt it vital to try to retrieve libertarians from the embrace of the New Right, to differentiate them and split them away from the Right-wing, to try to form a separated and self-conscious movement of our own. Secondly, and as a corollary to the process of weaning away the libertarian movement from the Right-wing, we sought to discover the libertarian elements of the then just emerging New Left and to make common cause with them against the Vietnam War, the draft, and military-industrial bureaucracy. Or, to put it briefly, we wanted to put an end to a situation where the only journal I could find to publish a critique of the deterioration from Old Right to New Right (in 1964) was an obscure Catholic theological quarterly.

Having founded Left and Right in 1965, and achieved considerable success in our aims, continuing deficits finally forced us to close its doors in 1968. Besides, we now felt that a periodical more directly oriented to the growing libertarian movement was more sharply necessary. The vacuum in libertarian journalism was accentuated by the collapse, around the same time, of the laissez-faire quarterly published at the University of Chicago, New Individualist Review, and of Rampart College’s Rampart Journal.

But there was also another concrete objective and reason for launching the Forum at that particular time. For the Nixon Administration was just beginning, and we could already see the onrush of Conservatives to worship at the new idol of Power. We didn’t want libertarians to be caught up once again in the Eisenhower-coddling that had helped to wreck the Old Right in the 1950’s. And so we conceived it to be one of our vital functions to expose and attack the new Nixon Administration: how important such a task was even we did not know at the time.

And so, ever since April 1969, first twice and then once every month—though sometimes late—we have proceeded on our allotted tasks. Even in our preview issue, we began our ceaseless criticisms of the then new Nixon Administration:

“Changeovers in Administration are always a disheartening time for any thoughtful observer of the political scene. The volume of treacle and pap rises to the heavens, as the wit and wisdom and the high statesmanship of both the outgoing and incoming rascals are trumpeted across the land. But this year things are even worse than ever. First we had to suffer the apotheosis of Lyndon Baines Johnson, before last November the most universally reviled President of modern times; but after November, suddenly lovable and wise. And now Richard Nixon has had his sharp edges dissolved and his whole Person made diffuse and mellow; he too has become uniquely lovable to all. How much longer must we suffer this tripe? It is bad enough that we have to live under a despotic government; must we also have our intelligence systematically defiled?”

In our first. April 1, 1969 issue, we warned of the ascendancy in the new Administration of Dr. Arthur F. Burns, “The Scientific Imperial Counsellor”. We noted that, despite his powerful government post, Burns still thought of himself as simply a scientific technician, in the service of society: “I’m not interested in power and influence, I’m interested in doing a job.” “Thus,” we commented, “Burns has become almost the caricature of modern American social science: a group of disciplines swarming with supposedly value-free technicians, self-proclaimed non-ideological workmen simply ‘doing a job’ in service to their masters of the State apparatus: that is, to their military-political-industrial overlords. For their ‘scientific’ and ‘value-free’ outlook turns out to be simply marginal wheeling and maneuvering within the broad frames of reference set by the American status quo . . .”

We then noted that—with high irony in the light of our present hindsight—Arthur Burns disclosed to Business Week that he felt his major task to be something spectacularly non-value-free: “For, Burns opines, the really important problem is that ‘a great many of our citizens have lost faith in our basic institutions . . . They have lost faith in the processes of the government itself.’ ‘The President keeps scratching his head,’ Burns goes on, ‘and I as his adviser keep scratching my head—trying to know how to build new institutions . . . to restore faith in government.’”

To “restore faith in government!” We then concluded our editorial:

“So that is what our new imperial Counsellor is up to. The aggressively ‘scientific’ statistician has become our purported faith-healer, our evangelical Witch Doctor, who has come to restore our faith in that monster Idol, the State. Let us hereby resolve, everyone, one and all, that Arthur is not going to get away with it.

“But soft, we must guard our flank, for there is a host of so-called libertarians’ and free-market advocates who swear up and down that Arthur Burns is God’s gift to a free-market economy. Which says a great deal about the quality of their devotion to liberty, as compared to their evident devotion to Power.”

No sooner had we been fairly launched, then we were able to play a major role in what is now the almost legendary beginning of the organized libertarian movement of today: the libertarian split from YAF in August 1969 at St. Louis. In our August 15 issue we wrote “Listen, YAF”, urging the strong libertarian minority within YAF to break away from antithetical conservatism and to break free into a new, separated, and self-conscious libertarian movement. Our small group of “radical libertarians” took thousands of extra copies of the “Listen, YAF” statement and bombarded the YAF delegates with the message. That, plus Karl Hess’s personal speech-making, and the hysterical overreaction of the YAF trads at one of our anarcho-capitalists burning (a facsimile of) his draft card on the floor of the convention, effected the great split which formed the modern movement. Jerry Tuccille’s exultant report on the YAF split. “Report from St. Louis: The Revolution Comes to YAF”, in our Sept. 15 issue, later reprinted in the first book of the new libertarian movement, Tuccille’s Radical Libertarianism, was to become the cherished and almost mythic account of the birth of the new movement.

The movement having grown spectacularly during the year, we in New York figured that the times were ripe for a Libertarian Conference, and issued a call for one over the Columbus Day weekend. The disasters as well as the triumphs of that conference were duly recorded in our November 1 issue, in what I must say was a strikingly honest piece of reporting in a world where ideological movements generally feel constrained to report their advances and to hide their setbacks. It was at that point that I realized that the necessary attacks on “right-wing deviationism” within the movement (devotion to YAF, an interventionist foreign policy, U.S. militarism) had left a weakness on our left flank, with the result that many of our people, especially in the New York-Washington area, had gone over to “ultra-left adventurism” in tactics and even communism in basic social philosophy. This Left tendency was fed by the final burst of left-adventurism during that winter of the expiring of the New Left in random violence. Consequently, we devoted much of the following year to a continuing attack on the Left tendency, finally succeeding. I believe, in isolating that tendency and separating it from the mainstream of the libertarian movement.

That separation was compounded by the wave of publicity, and the resulting accelerated growth, given to the libertarian movement in January and February of 1971. For if the August 1969 YAF convention was the birth of the modern movement, it was the events of early 1971 that catapulted it into nationwide publicity and thereby fed its accelerated growth. If, in short, 1969 was the beginning, early 1971 was the “takeoff”, a launching and an acceleration that continues unto the present day. (This launching was celebrated in the Lib. Forum in “Takeoff”, Feb. 1971 and “Takeoff II”, March 1971 issues.) The continuing nationwide publicity began with the article by Stan Lehr and Lou Rossetto, “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism”, in the New York Sunday Times Magazine section of January 10; Lehr and Rossetto had been discovered by the Times the previous fall as heads of a Columbia University group that had been called “libertarian” supporters of Buckley for Senate. After that came articles in the highly influential New York Times Op-Ed page by Jerry Tuccille and myself, with an attack by Bill Buckley; and the movement was off to the races.

• • • • • • • •

We stand today at the threshold of great new growth for the libertarian movement, and for the spread of the ideas of liberty throughout the country and indeed across the seas as well (pace the recent spectacular growth of libertarian-type parties in Norway and Denmark.) That growth will be further fueled by the accelerated inflation and the rest of the economic and social messes that statism will be getting us into. As in the past, the Lib. Forum stands ready to record and analyze these developments, and to be, as before, the shield of the valiant and the scourge of the evildoer. And so, to our long-suffering readers: Happy Fifth Anniversary!

FLP Convention: One Step Forward, One Step Back

They tell me that the other Libertarian Parties across the country, including the overall national party, work more or less like clockwork, that they are smoothly functioning and sensible organizations, that factions are at a minimum and that the Real People are firmly in control, with the lunatic fringe confined strictly to the fringe. Oh happy day! So what have they done right, and where has New York gone wrong? What we in New York badly need is a spiritual CARE package of advice from our sister parties.

It is a measure of the state of the Free Libertarian Party of New York that our marathon annual convention (March 29-31) was scarcely enough to finish the Party business. This despite a preceding Special Convention at which we wrangled over the party logo and chose delegates to the National Convention in Dallas in June, and despite the fact that the Convention began every morning promptly at 10:00 A.M. and lasted through special caucuses and post-mortems until after the bars closed at 3:00 A.M. Yet we concluded with no resolutions on issues and no platform, these being put back to yet another mini-convention at the end of April. Three conventions in two months begins to resemble the unfortunate and frenetic Peace and Freedom Party of 1968, which reached a crescendo of almost continuous conventioneering before its rapid demise.

The FLP had emerged the previous April from its founding convention with a superb statement of principles and with a remarkably intelligent and dedicated set of leaders over the embryonic internal Party structure. The accomplishment of the FLP under this leadership in 1973 was staggering: founding the party, maintaining and advancing it as a vital force with limited resources, and running a remarkably successful mayoralty campaign in New York City. For this dazzling success the best elements of this leadership were rewarded with repudiation at the 1974 convention. Internally, the FLP structure is now a shambles. Yet, the convention cannot be set down as an unmitigated disaster, because almost miraculously out of the rubble came an excellent slate of candidates for the 1974 elections in New York State. Whether the FLP can long continue with an internal party mess joined to fine prospects for “external” campaigning is problematic: but right now, all is not lost. Prospects for the future are a mixed bag.

• • • • • • • •

“The mob is easily led and may be moved by the smallest force, so that its agitations have a wonderful resemblance to those of the sea.”—Polybius.

“Every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them.”— I Samuel XXII, 2.

“Calumniate! Calumniate! Some of it will always stick.”—Beaumarchais.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”—H. L. Mencken.

What went wrong? Why was virtue rewarded with defeat? Such questions can never receive exact answers, but the best estimate may be encapsulated in the above four quotations. Part of the answer is wrapped up, also, in the question of time and energy available. The FLP leadership were almost all Real People, i.e. people who work in the world, who have jobs, whose grip on reality is of a high order. (In another sense, the question: “What or who are the Real People?” may be answered in Louis Armstrong’s famous reply to the question: “what is jazz?”: “If you have to ask, you won’t know the answer.”) Being busy and productive, the leadership had its hands full in running campaigns, and in keeping party affairs going; it did not have the time to engage in inner party squabbles, to hold the hands of those craving for attention, or to answer personal calumny that seemed to be ridiculous on its face—and which, so they thought, would fall of its own lack of weight. In short, it did not have the time to organize a “power” base or structure within the party. Looked at another way, the leadership put its trust in the innate intelligence and good sense of the FLP rank-and-file. There was its fatal error.

While it was thus busy attending brilliantly to important matters, the leadership of the FLP left a “power vacuum” within the party that others hastened to begin to fill. Malcontents. Luftmenschen, “people of the air and wind”, people with nothing better to do, began to gather together, to plan to seize power within the party. Malcontents—even of widely disparate views—found each other in a common cause to repudiate those in power and to substitute themselves. And certainly a vital part of this coalescing of forces was envy: envy of the manifest competence and intelligence of the leadership. It was, of course, ever thus: in the words of Thomas Middleton (our fifth quote),

“If on the sudden he begins to rise:
No man that lives can count his enemies.”

Three major groups came together in what the Marxists would call this “unprincipled coalition.” One was the Radical Caucus, which pushed the manifestly anti-libertarian and egalitarian idea that all party structure is evil, that all leadership is coercive and un-libertarian, and that true anarchism requires an abandonment of leadership and the division of labor within the Party on behalf of a participatory democracy in which everyone votes on virtually every decision. The Radical Caucus raised the cry of “decentralization”, forgetting that decentralization is only a sound policy in the area of government, precisely because we want government to be as ineffective, as limited and as powerless as possible. If we want any sort of effective libertarian organization, including a Libertarian Party, on the other hand, pushing for decentralization as a supposedly moral issue is simply madness. The only RC member who saw this clearly was its charismatic founder, Samuel Konkin, who explicitly avowed that he was pushing decentralization precisely in order to destroy the Libertarian Party. Yet, even though he made no bones about his objective, the other RC members somehow overlooked Konkin’s stated goals and adopted decentralism as a moral imperative for the party.

Why was Konkin out to wreck the FLP from within? Because he believed, along with LeFevrians and many other anarchists, that any political party whatever is per se aggressive and part of the State apparatus. Where Konkin differed from his colleagues, of course, is that they believed that the moral course was to have nothing to do with the LP. or to attack it from the outside. Employing demagogy from within was not their style. Day after day, then, in meetings and in the pages of his New Libertarian Notes. Konkin hammered away at the FLP leadership, denouncing them as the “Partyarchy”, and as cryptoarchists. Since the “Partyarchy” treated these charges as manifestly absurd, they went unanswered, and the charges, however absurd, began to stick.

The second bloc in the upsurge of the nihilist coalition was the Constitutional Coalition, formed by Howard S. Katz, who had previously abandoned a career as investment counselor to be a “professional libertarian writer.” In the FLP probably alone among the state parties, the believers in limited government (the “minarchists”) are in a minority, since both the RC and the Partyarchy were largely anarchists. Katz was thereby able to appeal to the disaffected minarchists in the party. Remarkably, the supposed polar extremes—the Katz clique, and the Radical Caucus—found themselves in close emotional and organizational affinity in their joint malcontent. Katz, too, was a radical decentralist at least when others were doing the centralizing; thereby the Katz clique took on the certainly unique posture of being at one and the same time pro-statist in content and anti-party-structure in form. Of the four possible permutations: pro-structure anarchist, anti-structure anarchist, pro-structure archist, and anti-structure archist, the latter Katzite position is certainly, whatever else one may say about it, the most bizarre.

Katz’s style was to bombard FLP members, day in and day out with lengthy letters attacking his enemies and setting forth his own position. Presumably he had nothing better to do with his time. Katz employed two major tactics. One was to find a Demon-figure and to hammer away, day after day, with personal attacks upon him. He found that figure in Gary Greenberg, manager of the Youngstein campaign, and who was also the major theoretician and strategist of the “centralist” or pro-structure wing of the leadership. Greenberg, for example, had concluded that the FLP was hamstrung by its excessively decentralized structure; not having any platform or resolutions, no one in the FLP leadership was empowered to make statements for the party, to issue press releases on vital issues of the day on its behalf, or to commit party funds to those ends. Greenberg therefore called for remedying this lack, for making the FLP effective by changing the by-laws to permit the State Chairman to make public statements on behalf of the party if they met with the approval of 2/3 of the State Committee. This sensible proposal, coupled with Greenberg’s being an easy visible target of attacks as a dedicated and highly effective campaign manager and as a person who does not suffer fools gladly, led to an unremitting campaign of personal calumny waged against him by Katz and by others in the party.

If one of Katz’s major tactics was to denounce Greenberg personally as morally evil and as a luster after power, his other tactic was to strike a pose as the moral conscience of the FLP. Greenberg and the rest of the Partyarchy were immoral pragmatists: the Radical Caucus, while lovable and moral, were sectarian and ineffective: only Katz stood aloft, a fuser of “soul” and body, an integrator of morality and practical effectiveness. Again, treating this pose as manifest nonsense, the leadership spent little time in rebutting the endless sermons sent through the mails by the Rev. Katz. Clearly, another big mistake.

The third group of malcontents were various members from outlying districts who felt that not enough attention was paid to their particular campaigns. Manhattan, in short, was tyrannizing over neglected Poughkeepsie where the real action lay. The Poughkeepsie bloc was led by Sanford Cohen, running for Congress from the area, who was euphemistically described by his campaign manager as “hard driving.”

The combustible ingredients were there, and they came together at the 1974 convention. Even so, however, the nihilist coalition might not have won were it not for a basic split within the leadership itself. For the leadership too was divided on the vexed “centralism” question. In the “hard nosed” camp were: Gary Greenberg; Fran Youngstein, the superb mayoralty, candidate; Howard Rich, a young businessman who served as a Vice Chairman of the party and as indefatigable leader of fund-raising and petition drives in the campaign; Leland Schubert; and the editor of the Lib. Forum. The “soft”, middle-of-the-road, quasi-decentralist camp was led by Andrea Millen, the highly effective State Chairwoman of the FLP; and it included Raymond Strong, mathematician and the other Vice Chairman of the party, and Secretary Michael Nichols. A unified opposition and a divided leadership had to spell defeat.

The convention itself was wild, woolly, and often bizarre. Two hours were consumed in wrangling over the party logo. Finally, the “open hand” won out over the “Libersign.” The “furthest-out” point of the convention came when young Michael Maslow, leader of the small “ultra” wing of the Radical Caucus, exuberantly and seriously proposed that the party logo consist of the Jewish Star of David with a swastika inside, thus presumably integrating the great Nazi and Jewish traditions. It was a measure of the convention that it was surprising that enough good sense remained to shout down the Maslow proposal. The high point came when, at the very end of the convention, the endorsement of candidates was nearing its close. One delegate then moved to rescind all previous endorsements in order to provide sexual and ethnic balance to the ticket. To which another exasperated delegate replied: “What this party needs is not ethnic balance but mental balance!”

The chairman-as-spokesman proposal went down to resounding defeat, by something like 35 to 12, backed as it was by only the hard-nosed wing of the party. Considering the mood of the convention, the vote was scarcely surprising. The big fight came the next day, Sunday, over the elections for party officers and the State Committee at Large. Gary Greenberg, as the focal target of the nihilist coalition, prudently decided not to run for any office whatever: a wise decision, but it meant that Katz and the RC had accomplished their purpose in driving him out of any leadership in the party. Howie Rich also decided not to run for party office. The Partyarchy including both the “moderate” and what we must unfortunately, for labelling purposes, call the “right wing”, agreed on a joint slate: for Chairman. Raymond Strong, a Millen disciple: for Vice-Chairmen. Fran Youngstein (right) and Mike Nichols (moderate); for secretary. Lee Schubert (right); for treasurer. Dolores Grande (moderate). The “left” (again, for want of a better term), ran Bill Lawry’ against Strong. With Sam Konkin, his work accomplished, on the way toward leaving the FLP altogether. Lawry had become head of the Radical Caucus. The united Right and Center managed to win a handy victory for Strong by a vote of 33 to 20, but Lawry was a harbinger of later events in accumulating the votes of the entire Nihilist Coalition: the Radical Caucus, the Katz clique, and the Cohen-Poughkeepsie forces.

The crucial vote then came on the two slots for Vice-Chairmen. The Left again ran Bill Lawry as well as Howie Katz; since there was general agreement on the moderate Nichols, the real fight was between Lawry and Youngstein. Incredibly. Youngstein was defeated—a substantive and symbolic victory for the nihilists of major proportions. Since Fran Youngstein almost manifestly deserved the post, and since the vote also amounted to a repudiation of the great mayoralty campaign, this vote amounted to a veritable Night of the Long Knives. The insult to Fran Youngstein was further compounded and made even more unbelievable by the fact that Katz tied Youngstein for third and fourth place in the voting. The long and persistent campaign of absurdities and defamations was, mirabile dictu, paying off. The votes were: Nichols 29, Lawry 28, Youngstein. 25, and Katz 25.

But more was yet to come. Next came elections for the posts of 5 State Committeemen at Large (Schubert and Grande ran unopposed.) Twelve entries began the complex voting procedure. Again, the result was a smashing victory for the Left, which won three of the five seats; the others went to Andrea Millen (the leader in the voting), and, yes, Fran Youngstein, who rejected the advice of some of her militant supporters to withdraw her sanction from the proceedings by not running for a State Committee post. The important point here, however, is that despite impassioned pleas by Millen and Strong to put at least one “rightist” on the State Committee and thus lend a bit of balance to that body. Fran picked up only three more votes in the State Committee balloting. As a symbolic and moral gesture to express our intense disapproval of the rebuff to Youngstein, some of us (Rich, Greenberg and myself) organized a bullet vote for Youngstein with four abstentions. The bullet-vote movement, in a bit of fresh air at the convention, managed to accumulate eight votes in only a few minutes of politicking.

Of the ten members of the new State Committee, the ideological breakdown may be set forth as follows:

Left-Nihilists: Lawry (Radical Caucus). Katz (Katz clique), Charles Blood (Katz clique). Ellen Davis (Cohen-Poughkeepsie)—4 votes.

Moderate-Millenites: Millen. Nichols. Grande, Strong—4 votes.

Rightists: Youngstein, Schubert—2 votes.

There is a strong possibility that the new County organizations will later be allowed representatives on the State Committee. In that case, the Left may well take over full control, what with prospective representatives from Poughkeepsie, Queens, Brooklyn, and Suffolk.

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, the other, quieter drama was in trying to run a full slate of candidates in the 1974 elections. Particularly important was running a strong candidate for governor, since the FLP, to win a permanent spot on the ballot, must gain 50,000 votes in the gubernatorial race. Fortunately, our old Forum contributor Jerome Tuccille was induced to shift from the Senate to the Governor race; Tuccille’s campaign manager will be the sound thinker and strategist Lee Schubert, who is also running for Attorney-General. For U.S. Senate, the Party endorsed Percy L. Greaves, Jr., veteran Republican politician and a distinguished free-market follower of Ludwig von Mises; the endorsement was a heroic act of rising above petty sectarianism to choose a man who will stress the vital economic issues of this era, and who is also a sound libertarian on civil liberties issues and a veteran isolationist in foreign policy. The heroic good sense came in endorsing a man who is not an anarchist, but who is a libertarian on all the crucial political issues of our time. How come such good sense from delegates who had, only hours before, shown a disposition to be petty, sectarian, and to tear up the pea patch in almost professional acts of troublemaking? Even the Radical Caucus and the Katz clique (with the exception, of course, of Katz himself) voted to endorse Percy Greaves. How come? Who knows? Perhaps it was good sense surfacing at last; perhaps it was a desire not to alienate the right-wing permanently and irrevocably. Furthermore, the Greaves race will be fortunate in having the veteran Republican politician and libertarian Gerry Cullen of Buffalo as campaign manager.

The other candidates on the state ticket also come from the sensible wing of the party: Louis Sicilia of Manhattan for Lieutenant Governor; Dr. Robert Flanzer of Brooklyn for Comptroller: and the aforesaid Lee Schubert for Attorney-General.

Not only were Tuccille. Greaves and the others endorsed virtually unanimously, but the convention was stirred to great enthusiasm by the rousing acceptance speeches of Greaves and Tuccille. Running a largely “middle-class” oriented campaign, furthermore, the ticket has a good chance of picking up disaffected Conservative Party votes in New York, disaffected from the Conservative endorsement of Republican hack Malcolm Wilson for Governor, and its apparent decision to put up an unknown patsy against the hated Jacob Javits. We may well have a good chance for the 50.000 votes!

In reciting the good points of the convention, we should not overlook the beautiful keynote address of Roger MacBride, our electoral voter from Virginia in 1972. MacBride linked libertarians with the radical wing—the Sam Adamses, the Tom Paines—of the American Revolution, which he properly called the “first libertarian revolution.” It was up to us, he declared, to make the second such “revolution”. Just as Patrick Henry exclaimed, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that “we are no longer Virginians but Americans”, so. Roger declared, the result of the “second libertarian revolution” will be to declare that “we are no longer Americans, or Britons, but libertarians.” MacBride for President in ’76?!

The lesson for the sensible folk in the FLP emerges clearly from the mixed results of the Convention, the internal structure of the party, already weak, is now and at least for the coming year, hopeless. The only hope there lies in long-range, patient organization and internal reeducation within the party, the neglect of which led directly to the present shambles. But even last year, the party structure, hobbled as it was, was unimportant: the real action, the chance at educating the “outside world” which is, after all our real purpose, lies with the candidates in a campaign. And we have, once again – as in previous years—an excellent slate of candidates to concentrate on.

All this leads, also, to some basic philosophical reflections on membership organizations per se. The market works, and works beautifully. And so do business firms within the market, where individual employers and employees contract for pay for the performance of certain tasks. There is no nonsense there about voting: there is a minimum faction fighting or waste of energy in trying to win majority consensus for every decision. Membership organizations with voting power are inherently wasteful and ineffective, especially since the assets of the organization are communally owned, with each member having one vote over the communal assets. Similarly, it is no accident that producers’ cooperatives, business firms with each worker having one vote over communally owned assets, have always and without exception been outcompeted in the free market by individually owned or corporate-owned firms. (In the latter, the only voting is per share voting by the stockholders in proportion to their ownership of assets.) Individually owned firms; partnerships; corporations, all work; voting cooperatives do not. Legally, there is no way to form a political party on a non-communal structure, on a structure that would not be subject to upheavals against the mighty principles of individual responsibility and the division of labor. The best that can be done with political parties is to try to inject as much individual responsibility and division of labor, as little participatory democracy, as possible and as necessary for efficiency.

But while the basic structure of political parties cannot be changed, non-party organizations can. It is possible to establish activist libertarian organizations that don’t mess with participatory egalitarianism. (Sam Konkin, for example, has now established his own New Libertarian Alliance which is totally subject to his personal control. No nonsense about “decentralization” there!) May it not be possible for a libertarian organization to be formed, nationwide, with no nonsense about voting, with professional, fulltime paid organizers that can create a mighty, mass activist organization of libertarians” We can only hope.

The Mysterious World Of The CLA

We have just received a press release from Miss Elizabeth Keathley, who describes herself as an “Anarchist Feminist Writer”, and as a “spokesperson for the California Libertarian Alliance”, announcing her candidacy for the nomination for governor of California on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. This is to be a primary race against one or more of what she concedes to be “socialist” candidates.

We must say that we are bemused. The California Libertarian Alliance, along with the Society for Individual Liberty, emerged as the result of the famous August 1969 split of libertarians from YAF. The “Libertarian Alliance” concept has always pushed the following: direct action of some sort as opposed to political action, an alliance of all wings of libertarians in such action, and (implicitly) a counter-culture lifestyle. In practice, the latter two motifs have led to stress on unity only with left-wing anarchists. Apparently, unity with such middle-class minarchists as John Hospers doesn’t carry the emotional satisfaction sought by the Alliance movement.

In the 1960’s alliance with the Left on such issues as Vietnam and the draft made a lot of sense: in the 1970’s alliance with conservatives on the crucial free-market economic issues makes an equal amount of sense. But in neither epoch does an alliance with left-wing anarchists make any sense at all. Left-wing anarchists (a) are befuddled of intellect to the point of mindlessness: (b) are emotionally and ideologically opposed more to private property and the free market than they are to coercion; and (c) their counter-culture lifestyle and emotional hostility to jobs and careers turn off not only the middle class but almost everyone else as well. Hence, the left-wing anarchists have no social leverage whatever: in fact, their social leverage is negative. One left-wing anarchist at libertarian gatherings will alienate two or more regular people from the libertarian ranks. Alliance with left-wing anarchists is therefore at all times pointless; if we want to read rousing anti-State passages from Bakunin, we don’t need these people to show us the way. Furthermore, to top it off, the sort of rootless Luftmenschen who enjoy close quarters with left-wing anarchists are also the sort of people for whom left egalitarianism seems to exert a fatal attraction. The complete leftward drift of the Hunter College libertarian “festivals” in New York is only the most recent example of the inherent failure of the Alliance concept.

A leading feature of the Alliance idea was always direct rather than political action. Which makes particularly puzzling the entry in force of the California Libertarian Alliance (CLA) into the Peace and Freedom Party. Why in blazes the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) rather than the Libertarian Party, which is particularly strong in California? Does the CLA feel closer to the admitted socialists in control of the PFP than they do to the LP? If so, then why? Those numerous libertarians who denounce all political action as sanctioning the State have a cogent, if in our view an erroneous, position. But if one does believe in political action, then why for heaven’s sake the Peace and Freedom Party? Even the idea of penetrating a major party in force. Democrat or Republican, makes a certain amount of sense. But the Peace and Freedom Party? The actions of the CLA passeth understanding. Could it be the emotional attraction of a counter-culture haven? Let us hope not.

Joining the PFP was a cogent position in 1968, when Vietnam and the draft were the critical issues, and when no Libertarian Party was in existence. But now? For us in New York, mention of the PFP is like an unwelcome voice from the past. The PFP, though a small party in New York (it had considerably fewer members than the Free Libertarian Party has today), was faction-ridden to the point of rapid demise. When launched in early 1968, it had no platform or socialist guidelines; it had only a two-point statement of principles to which every party member had to subscribe: the first was an innocuous plank about every individual and group controlling their own lives, to which even Richard Nixon could have adhered; the second was a call for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. It soon became apparent that the PFP, both in New York, and in California and in points in between, was under the total working control of the Draperite wing of the Trotskyite movement, that wing owing allegiance to one Hal Draper, a librarian at Berkeley. Although there were only a few hundred Draperites throughout the country, organized into the Independent Socialist League (now grandiosely called the International Socialists), every Draperite had been sent into the PFP and had early won all the positions of power, including all the paid organizing posts within and between each state. The Draperite straw boss of the New York party was one Sy Landy, and the Draperites, anxious for “minorities” within the party, had acquired Chicano cachet by booming the mysterious, charismatic figure of one Carlos Aponte as national organizer. In New York, the Draperites were able to keep control by securing the support of left-wing anarchists and assorted hippies and “artists”. Before the year was out, the New York party had died a mercifully swift death.

Right now, the Peace and Freedom Party is confined to its original California base. Whether the Draperites are still in control we know not, though it appears from Miss Keathley’s statement that socialists of one sort or another are still running the show. On the national scene, the PFP certainly has no future; it is an unwanted relic of the past, even on the Left. Why should libertarians get themselves tied to a dead end, and a socialist dead end to boot?

In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade .

Sir Ronald Syme in The Roman Revolution

Phillip H. Willkie, RIP

I see by the papers that Phil Willkie is dead, at the age of 54, in his home town of Rushville. Indiana. I knew Phil in the years just after World War II, when he was going to Columbia Law School and I was a graduate student there.

Phil was a leader in the Social Democratic wing of the American Veterans Committee, a short-lived leftish veterans group formed to offset the “reactionary” American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. He and others in that wing were locked in struggle with the Communists and their allies, who formed the left-wing of the AVC. About that particular struggle I couldn’t care less, then or now. But Phil Willkie was an interesting character. Here he was, beginning a law career as the only son of a man who had been catapulted to the Republican Presidential nomination only half a dozen years or so earlier—in as bizarre a nomination as we might ever hope to see in America. Wendell Willkie had been a literal public unknown a few short months before the nomination, an obscure utility magnate with no political experience whatsoever and even a Democratic party registration. Yet the powerful Eastern Establishment bankers and industrialists who financed the Republican party and who were intensely eager to enter World War II, were then bereft of a Presidential nominee: for the leading candidates, Robert A. Taft and Thomas E. Dewey, were at that time both isolationists and opponents of American entry into the war (Dewey was later, under the aegis of the Rockefeller-controlled Chase National Bank, to see the light.) And so the Eastern Establishment, using every dirty trick in the book and coining some new ones of their own, put across this unknown on the Republican convention. But one thing they did know about Willkie: he could be trusted to support the Roosevelt drive toward war. Which he did not only then but during the war, when he wrote an idiotic if highly touted little book called One World. But there is no question about the fact that Wendell Willkie looked like a President, with his leonine head and rugged good looks: also he was, indeed, an authentic Hoosier and could therefore be put across as a good Middle American.

And so here was Phil Willkie, much paler but otherwise looking remarkably like his old man, large head and all. Never have I met a man who was more purely a political animal, his every waking thought the staking out of a political career which he hoped, hoped, hoped would bring him to the Presidency. His leadership in the AVC was to be the opening gun of a campaign to inherit his father’s presumed leadership of the liberal internationalist wing of the Republican party. Phil even had, tagging along with him at all times, a self-appointed campaign manager and political adviser, a skinny kid eager to rise to the top along with his charge. And so the two of them would sit, hour after hour, plotting the measured drive to the brass ring. There was a lot of pathos about the whole business, even in those days. Wendell had never had any true base of support in the party, and so there was only the father’s name to inherit, and that name was bound to grow more shadowy over the years. Who knows of Wendell Willkie now? And then there was the fearful fate of the young Roosevelts, uppermost in Phil’s mind at the time: how to avoid their laughable role as jackanapes? I remember that at one point the kid adviser solemnly advised Phil to cultivate support among the conservative stalwarts of the Republican party by telling dirty jokes—in private, of course—about Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t remember Phil’s response, but I think he viewed it as a good idea.

I never saw Phil Willkie since those Columbia days, but once in a while I would see a little squib about Phil’s being a state legislator in Indiana. And now I will never know whether his remarkably restless and driven soul was able to make peace with the fact that he would clearly neyer catch that brass ring: not even State Senator much less President of the United States. I am sorry for Phil, though I must admit not for the rest of the country, that he never made it in politics; whether or not he found contentment in his life in Rushville, I hope that his soul will rest in peace.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Oscars. Most of the comment on the Oscars has been devoted to the always boring, bumbling, but somehow lovable Academy Awards dinner that ran an hour over on nationwide television. Far more important, however, was the content of the awards themselves, and in particular the titanic struggle that was waged between The Sting and The Exorcist for Academy honors.

The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill, was a charming, brilliantly directed, suspenseful, richly textured comedy about two lovable con-men and the con they pulled during the 1930’s on a leading gangster. It embodied the best of Old Culture film-making. The Exorcist, on the other hand, was the embodiment of all that is sick and degenerate in modern culture, pandering to the fashionable cult of the occult, to morbidity and irrationality, and to Pop religion at its most decayed. Particularly sickening, furthermore, was the central point of the film: the swinish degradation of a young girl. Where were the protests of the women’s libbers? The roping in of a spate of Jesuits as technical advisers secured the mass audience, defused the otherwise expected opposition of church groups, and gained a family rating when Triple X would have been a more cogent label. The thumping repudiation of this Friedkin-Blatty swill by the Academy members was a welcome sign that health still exists in American culture and in the film industry. This year’s Oscar award therefore had a special, and an exhilarating, significance.

Unfortunately, Blatty did win the award for the Exorcist screenplay. But Hill happily won as Best Director. The acting awards, too, displayed good sense by the membership. The only clinker was Jack Lemmon, hopelessly miscast in Save The Tiger as a depressed Jewish garment manufacturer; this award reflected the usual Academy sentimentality for comic actors who turn, once in a while, to a “serious” performance. But, happy day. Glenda Jackson won for her superior acting performance in A Touch of Class, beating out the impossible Streisand playing Streisand in The Way We Were. John Houseman certainly deserved the best supporting actor award for his brilliant performance as an arrogant law professor in The Paper Chase, as did the marvelous Tatum O’Neal for her tough, lovable urchin role in Paper Moon. (Though Tatum was scarcely a supporting actress, and should have been entered for the lead actress award.) Of the defeated nominees, we would like to see more of Marsha Mason, whose off-beat acting lent a special magic to a tawdry nothing called Cinderella Liberty and to its standard whore-with-heart of gold role.

Women in Movies. The cynical degradation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist lends point to the growing feminist charge that women have been treated badly in movies in recent years. No question about it, and the problem is not simply degradation, but the fact that women have been reduced to generally nothing roles. Actors rather than actresses are now the box-office draws, and get the juicy parts. Typical of female roles was the treatment of the leading girl in Paper Chase. The lead actress led a shadowy, unmotivated and peripheral existence, and the love interest in the film had about the same stature. Whatever the reason, it is not a centuries-old male conspiracy. For if we contrast the Golden Age of the 1930’s and 40’s, we see a rich and vital role for female actresses, ranging from intelligent, independent and sophisticated roles for the Katherine Hepburns. Carole Lombards, and Rosalind Russells, to the “sex object” roles, ranging from Sophia Loren to the Jean Harlows and Ann Sheridans. And even the Harlows and Sheridans were often sassy rather than purely passive types. I don’t know the full explanation for the decay of the female role in films, but I submit that one likely reason is the decay from Old to New Culture, from Hero to Anti-Hero in films. The Old Culture heros, the Gables and Tracys and Grants, were so strong and—yes, let’s say it—manly that they could afford to play opposite independent heroines, and both the film and the audience benefited thereby. But now in the age of the weak, purposeless, and snivelling anti-hero, the female lead has to be reduced to a virtual zero to lend the anti-hero any substance at all. So, while the New Culture seems to be more egalitarian, and lends rhetorical support to women’s lib, the upshot of the whole shebang is that women are given a raw deal. Which may have relevance not just for movies but for society as a whole.

Apologies!

Apologies are due our readers for delays in the last couple of issues. Much of the delay has been due to our printer’s problems with equipment, which are now hopefully remedied. Also, by an unfortunate juxtaposition in our March issue, it looked as if the poem by J. William Lloyd, follower of Benjamin Tucker in the late nineteenth century, was part of our “Libertarian Songs—II”. Actually, the two are unrelated, even though—to confuse the matter—Lloyd’s lyrics are obviously set to the tune of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean”.

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Review Of John T. Flynn, ‘As We Go Marching’

By William Stewart

Review of John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, Free Life Editions. 1973.

Modern day social science classes, when they bother to discuss fascism at all, take one of two highly questionable approaches. Either they view fascism as something peculiar to the German and Italian experiences (perhaps arising out of some flaw in the German and Italian cultures) and hence something that could never happen in America; or they tell us that America will definitely become fascist, unless we wise up and adopt the entire spectrum of socialist politics and culture. Now, with the reprinting of John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, there is a highly readable and marvelously informative work of the third general approach to fascism.

Unlike socio-cultural approaches. Flynn sees fascism as primarily arising out of economic phenomena. Unlike the Marxists and other socialists, these economic forces are not borne out of dialectical forces of history, but from the nature of the market economy and systematic intervention in the market. By attempting to regulate and manage the economy, the government sets in motion forces with which it cannot cope – except with further intervention. The internal logic of the development of a totally planned economy is remarkably similar to the analysis put forth by economist Ludwig von Mises in his famous article. “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism.” Like the Marxists, Flynn offers two alternatives: either continue down the road to fascism, or return to the more traditional American system of freedom and free enterprise.

To discover the nature of fascism. Flynn spends the first two-thirds of the book looking for the essential features of fascism in an historical analysis of Germany and Italy (the book is worth reading just for this historical analysis). He finds eight essential and defining features of fascism: (1) no restraint upon government powers, i.e., totalitarianism, (2) management of the government by a dictator—the leadership principle. (3) the government is organized to manage the capitalist economy under the leadership of an immense bureaucracy, (4) the economy is organized on the syndicalist model, i.e., producing groups are formed into craft and professional categories under the supervision of the state. (5) the society operates on the planned, autarchial principle. (6) the government holds itself responsible to provide the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing, (7) militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending, and (8) imperialism is included as a policy flowing from militarism and other elements of fascism. Other elements found in fascist societies, such as racism, are mere window dressing and not necessary to the fascist system. If we find a nation using all of these devices. Flynn states, we will know that it is a fascist nation.

In comparing these elements with America (this book was first published in 1943) Flynn finds all the necessary elements save dictatorship and full totalitarianism. In applying his framework to modern America, we find that most of these elements, especially in the management of the economy, more prevalent than ever. With conservative’ Richard Nixon announcing that he is a Keynesian and the abortive attempt at full wage and price controls, control of the economy and a spiraling public debt indicate that Flynn may indeed be correct: we are being drawn down the road to fascism. Moreover, the popularity of ‘energy self-sufficiency’ and neo-mercantalist economic theorizing, the autarchial principle is in full bloom.

Militarism is probably only temporarily kept under the table (a sudden revival of it after the post-Vietnam disallusionment dies down would not be surprising) and as for dictatorship—well, we have the John Birch Society warning of powerful executive orders which spell out the mechanism for a full takeover of the American society.

At the very least, As We Go Marching should be food for thought and an impetus to further scholarship into the nature of fascism and the forces operating behind the American political scene. The only shortcoming of this edition is that it lacks an updated bibliography to serve as a starting point for further reading by those not familiar with Flynn’s point of view, Flynn’s 1943 bibliography does not include Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and more recent analysis by authors such as Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand and James Martin would serve as a good starting point for anyone concerned with the erosion of individual and economic freedom in America.

A brief introduction by New Left historian Ronald Radosh places Flynn in his proper historical perspective. Flynn is probably best known for his anti-communist works in the McCarthyite era, but As We Go Marching is more representative of his consistent anti-militarist and, anti-imperialist (indeed, his pro-individualist) point of view. As We Go Marching is an indispensable work for anyone concerned with economic freedom and the contemporary American Scene.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 5

MAY, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

IMPEACH THE . . . (EXPLETIVE DELETED)

The net is closing in inexorably on the Tricky one, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy. The now famous transcripts released by Tricky Dick with an astonishing flourish of triumph, is the final straw that will do him in. Bowdlerized, deleted, meretricious as they are, they present a face of the President and his top aides calculated to send the most fawning Nixonite loyalist running desperately for cover. For one thing, they desanctify the Oval Office and the State itself far better and with greater punch than a thousand libertarian, broadsides. Here is the Face of the State, and of its most illustrious representative, the President, revealed to the world in all its ugly nakedness.

It is almost amusing to read the horror and disgust on the part of the readers of these transcripts. Where, for heaven’s sake, they ask, is any concern whatever, among all these conversations of the top rulers of the land, for moral principle, for right and wrong, for the “public interest” or the “general welfare”? Where are all the pious platitudes habitually emitted by politicians about their deep concern for the public weal? Take, for example, the eloquent editorial of William Randolph Hearst, Jr., who, until the day of the transcripts, was a down-the-line Nixon loyalist. In his evidently sincere anguish, Hearst writes that “I have never heard anything as ruthless, deplorable and ethically indefensible as the talk on those White House tapes.” Hearst calls the transcripts “incredible and sickening.” Even Senator Hugh Scott (R., Pa.) who all his life has been the leading toady for the national Republican machine (first for Dewey, and then for Nixon), lashed out at the “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral performances” by all the participants in the taped conversations. And when Scott goes, who will soon be left, except General Haig?

One very common social science myth has been totally exploded by the tapes: the myth cherished by economists and political scientists that, while ordinary citizens are wrapped up in their petty, short-run concerns, our wise, far-seeing government officials, and particularly the President and his aides, are able to take the long, far-sighted, view of events. While the rest of us grub from day-to-day the State rulers are free to plan for the next several generations, and even centuries. Bah! Humbug! Nixon and his cronies are clearly concerned, not just with the short-run, but with hour-by-hour gains, with the very next 6 o’clock news broadcast. The momentary concerns of the Tricky One and his crew make the rest of us seem like people devoted only to the 21st century. Speak of “high time-preference”, Nixon’s and his pals is almost infinite, which perhaps accounts for his monumental blunder in thinking only about his 24-hour propaganda coup from the fact of releasing the transcripts. “But, Mr. President, what happens when people start reading these transcripts”, we can see someone asking; “Bah, who cares about that? That’s far-off speculation about the future”—except that Tricky hardly seems able to formulate such a coherent sentence.

And then there is Bill Buckley, still in his off-beat way a defender of the President. Buckley, for example, deplores the invasion of Nixon’s privacy involved in the tapes and transcripts. Somehow Buckley seems to have forgotten the major point: that these tapes were played at the behest of Tricky Dick, and that no one else—except—Haldeman—knew of their existence. It seems to us that it is not Tricky’s privacy that has been invaded by the tapes, but that of the other poor suckers who thought that what they were saving was said in confidence.

Even the august New York Times has been moved, among other observers, to call Richard Nixon a “Godfather” on the evidence of the transcripts. That’s getting close, especially when we consider Nixon’s wistful wish at one point that he had the skills of the Mafia. But the smilie really smears the Mafia, because no Godfather worth his salt could be as ruthlessly disloyal to his own aides, to the loyalists who, in the immortal words of Chuck Colson, would “walk over their grandmother for Richard Nixon”. Whatever else they are, Godfathers are always loyal to their Families. Milhous wouldn’t have lasted a year among the Mafiosi.

In the final analysis, William Randolph Hearst, in his agonized editorial, said it all: “The voices on the tapes, even the censored parental guidance version, comes through like a gang of racketeers talking over strategy as they realize that the cops are closing in on them.” Precisely. A “gang of racketeers.” Let us cling to this powerful and illuminating glimpse that we have all had into the nature of the State apparatus and of our leading rulers. For once, we have seen the face of the State plain, stripped of all hogwash, phony rhetoric, and grandiloquent propaganda. We have for once been permitted to view the Emperor without his clothes. Let us ever hold to this knowledge in our hearts.

BFL Expands

With its April, 1974 issue, the monthly periodical Books for Libertarians has taken a giant leap forward on the way to becoming the outstanding libertarian magazine in the country. Its new expansion from eight to twelve pages per issue reflects a burgeoning prosperity and a great growth in its circulation. Twelve pages means that it can and does have longer book reviews, letters of comment to the editor, and longer “essay reviews” by scholars of interest to libertarians.

Among many other goodies, for example, the April issue of BFL has two contrasting reviews of two “anti-women’s lib” books by George Gilder and Steven Goldberg: one by yours truly and the other by Mrs. Riqui Leon. It also has its first essay-review of Brand Blanshard’s great anti-positivist work Reason and Analysis by the leading Aristotelian philosopher Henry Veatch, chairman of the philosophy department at Georgetown University. The excellent Veatch article is alone worth the price of admission.

Again among other fine reviews, the May issue of BFL has an excellent review of F. A. Hayek’s great work, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle by Walter Block, and an essay-review of James J. Martin’s monumental anti-interventionist two-volume work, American Liberalism and World Politics by the libertarian historian Arthur Ekirch.

Books for Libertarians is must reading for libertarians or for anyone else interested in the libertarian scene. Furthermore, it is available for the measly price of $6 a year from 422 First St., S.E., Washington D.C. 20003.

Uncle Miltie Rides Again

Economists used to have an instructive term for the man who comes up habitually with a single technocratic gimmick to solve deep and complex economic problems. Such a man used to be called a “crank.” If Professor Milton Friedman were not the august holder of a chair at the University of Chicago, the undisputed head of the powerful and influential Chicago School of Economics, the unofficial adviser to Presidents, and the commander of a comparatively astronomical income, that is precisely what he would have been called long before now. Yes, under cover of the free enterprise rhetoric, Uncle Miltie is a crank. Invariably, when the State has really been fouling things up, when its own created messes have brought insuperable problems that have threatened to bring much of the State system tumbling down, Milton Friedman has ridden to the State’s rescue with some crank scheme that has managed to befuddle the issue and to save the State’s bacon, at least for a good while. With friends and champions like that, the free market economy hardly needs any enemies.

Consider: when the State needed a huge increase in income tax to pay for World War II, but clearly could not collect the required lump sum on the Ides of March, it was Milton that came up with the withholding tax scheme—a “wartime emergency” measure that is now the linchpin of the entire monstrous income tax structure. More recently, when the clamor rose from Left, Right, and Center against the accelerating breakdown of the public school system, it was Milton that deflected discussion from dismantling that system into the crank “voucher scheme” for formidable government control of private schooling, a scheme that both Left and Right were able to latch onto and call their own. And then, when the welfare system threatened to break down and was attacked by Left and Right alike, and it looked as if we might be able to dismantle the entire welfare mess, it was Milton Friedman who came up with the disastrous prank scheme for the “negative income tax”, which might well wreck the economy in not too many years from now. Again, both Left and Right have rushed to embrace the negative income tax or its numerous variants as a way to save the essence of the welfare system.

And now, just when the State’s continuing and accelerating monetary expansion has brought us to the threshold of runaway inflation, and it looked as if public pressure might truly build up to force the government to stop its inflating, Milton has once again come to the rescue with an egregious gimmick that might well have the effect of taking the steam out of any public effort to stop the inflation. Milton has always been at his weakest in the area of money—and has typically spent most of his time and energy in this particular field. In the first place, he has always been soft on inflation, taking the position that: who cares about inflation so long as there are no price or wage controls to distort the allocation of resources? He has long sneered at gold as money, and has advocated the total control of the money supply by the central government, in the form of fiat paper. Then, after having ceded total control of money to the central government, he implores it to keep hands off exchange rates and to inflate the money supply by a fixed percentage (varying, depending on which Friedman article you read, from 3 to 5 percent per year,) thereby supposedly keeping a stable price level. A believer in the spurious positivist methodology that “science is prediction”, and that it doesn’t matter how false the assumptions of one’s theory so long as one can predict accurately, his predictions have been often grossly off the mark, e.g., his forecast that if gold were ever to be cut loose from the dollar, its price would fall to its “proper”, non-monetary level of something like $10 an ounce. The fact that, since gold was cut loose from the dollar in the spring of 1968 its free price has always been above the official rate (then $35 an ounce, now $42 an ounce), and has now risen to something like $170 an ounce, has not dented Milton’s air of infallibility in the slightest. He still denounces gold as an “overpriced”, speculative commodity.

And now the new Friedman gimmick to make inflation endurable and even harmless: everyone will have his monetary assets and income continually revaluated by some index of general prices; everyone will benefit by a floating “escalator clause”, and so inflation will have no terrors: we can all relax and enjoy it. If the price index doubles, then the worker making $10,000 a year will find his wages doubled; the creditor will find his return doubled, and so on.

While the Friedmanites have long held that the sting could be taken out of inflation—even runaway inflation—by a universal escalator clause, Friedman did not begin pushing his scheme until he visited Brazil for a few weeks earlier this year. Milton returned from Brazil starry-eyed about the “economic miracle” enjoyed under that dictatorial regime; perhaps the Brazilian bureaucrats fed him too much tequila. Adopting universal “escalator clause” or “monetary correction”, Friedman opines, Brazil has been able to bring down the annual rate of general price inflation from 30% to 15% since 1967. Hedging his bets a tiny bit, Friedman concedes that “The monetary correction is an accounting nuisance and it cannot be truly universal. A world of zero inflation would obviously be better.” But—and here comes the technocratic crank—“given the inevitable, if temporary, costs of reducing inflation rapidly without such a measure, the Brazilians have been extremely wise to adopt it. I believe that their miracle would have been impossible without the monetary correction”, and he even adds that “they may be able to succeed in gradually bringing inflation down to near zero . . . It is past time that the U.S. applied the lesson.” (Newsweek, Jan. 21.)

Unfortunately for Milton’s acumen, at the very time that someone in Brazil was handing him a snow job, the Brazilian “miracle” was in the process of turning sour. By early April, the London Economist was noting that price inflation for the first three months of this year in Brazil was running at an annual rate of 28% (the bad old pre-“miracle” rate!) (Economist, April 6). Furthermore, in contrast to Friedman’s assertion that Brazil had abolished price and wage controls, the economy was suffering from tight price controls, with all the attendant shortages and dislocations. Thus, as the New York Times reported (April 7): “As they face endless lines for milk and vegetable oils, shortages of rice and sugar and inaccessible prices for meat, many Brazilians have begun to ask, ‘what became of their miracle.’”

One of the numerous and insuperable problems with Friedman’s Index Scheme is: what “index”, and who produces it? If he knew anything about “Austrian” economic theory, for example, Friedman would know that there is no such thing as a single, scientific index of the movement of general prices. All such indexes are strictly arbitrary, and there are a huge number of possible indexes, all of which create insuperable economic distortions. The official U.S. government statistics, for example, denote at least three such indexes: the wholesale price index, the consumer cost of living index, and the broad-based “GNP deflator”, each of which differs widely from the others. Which one should be used? There is no non-arbitrary answer. Even if we confine ourselves to the cost-of-living index, the obstacles are insurmountable; whose cost-of-living, for example, do we measure: that of the classic Dayton, Ohio blue-collar housewife with two kids, or that of a bachelor professor in California? Every individual and group in the country experiences different cost-of-living “indexes” (the price of books, for example, will loom much larger in the cost of living of the professor), and any one overall index will fit none of the actual, living individuals concerned. And then there is the question of the timing of the adjustments: will they be annual? In that case, the person will suffer for eleven months, before he earns his “correction”. Daily? But then the practical difficulties of arriving at the index are again insurmountable. No, the entire scheme is an absurd chimera.

Neither have the index problems been conspicuously solved in Friedman’s beloved Brazil. Barron’s (April 15) reports that the index which, as everywhere, is under total control of government statisticians, is in Brazil based only on prices prevailing in the state of Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro), which notoriously lag behind the inflation in the rest of the country. Furthermore, the index, includes fictitious government-controlled prices in many instances. Also, the government has juggled the Index to make it look good; thus, “when the cost of milk and meat continued to surge, both products were abruptly stricken from the index.”

Furthermore, the escalator system has not worked with universal and harmonious smoothness in Brazil. On the contrary, the average worker has consistently lagged behind his “monetary correction”, so that the real wages (in terms of purchasing-power over goods and services) have in recent years been cut by over 30 per cent. Brazil has been able to get away with this expropriation of the working class because, under its dictatorial regime, labor unions are government-controlled and the press is strictly censored. In short, the escalator system has been used to mask an inflation that has redistributed wealth from the poorer to the wealthier classes; as Senor Bezerra de Mello, president of the Othon Hotels Corp. of Brazil, has conceded: “the Brazilian model has been good for businessmen, but labor has been punished.” (New York Times, April 14). Hence the wisdom of the warning of Chairman of U.S. Council of Economic Advisers Herbert Steiri—not usually the most astute of observers—that “Unless you have the economy perfectly indexed, somebody is bound to get stuck.” (Washington Post, April 11.)

Precisely—and if this monstrous scheme were to be instituted in the United States, we know darn well who is going to “get stuck”, whose escalator will fall behind in the mad scramble for the “monetary correction.” I can assure Milton, for example, that professors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York aren’t going to get any escalator clauses, nor will the local cleaning lady; but, on the other hand, we can rest assured that the Teamsters Union and Nelson Rockefeller’s multifarious enterprises and activities will be very early at the escalator trough.

One might ask Milton how in blazes his Universal Escalator is going to get instituted in the United States. If it is supposed to be voluntary, with all contracts, existing pensions, savings, etc. voluntarily adopting the “correction”, then the lags and the injustices will be simply enormous: pace, for example, the Polytechnic Institute of New York. Any idea that all assets and contracts will be simultaneously and universally corrected by voluntary action is to contemplate the fantasies of a Never-Never Land. How, then, make it universal and simultaneous? Obviously, the only way would be by totalitarian dictation of the entire economy by the government, with the government compulsorily dictating every minute area of correction. Such a system would make a total mockery of Friedmanite pretensions to advocacy of a “free market” economy. And, of course, even such a monstrous totalitarianism would not work, since the various indexes and corrections would be eternally subject to political pressures upon the bureaucracy.

Furthermore, Friedman’s notion that the universal escalator would make governmental tight money easier because politically less painful is clearly bizarre; instead, the scheme would help to lull people into accepting the evils of inflation by sowing the illusion that it can be made painless. The anti-inflationary ardor of the American public, just getting under way in earnest, would be gravely weakened. Inflation would be virtually institutionalized.

The left-liberal New York Post writes (April 15) that Friedman “is usually labelled a ‘conservative’, but in fact he is an unorthodox thinker (read “crank”) with a record of winning acceptance for his ideas.” It then quotes Friedman’s friend, former Treasury Secretary George Pratt Shultz that “Milton Friedman is always worth listening to”. Even Barron’s, in its otherwise trenchant critique of Friedman’s latest concoction, repeats the “always worth listening to” line. I submit that there is no surer way of generating an economic breakdown than listening to Milton a bit more often. A few more “positive proposals” from Friedman’s fertile imagination and we will all have to head for the caves.

Purity And The Libertarian Party

The vexed and troubled question of purity has again raised its head in the Libertarian Party. Such questions are inherent in the nature of a Party, precisely because a Party has to be something more than simply a philosophy club. If it were only such a club, with a purely educational function for ourselves and for the greater public, then keeping the message pure would be relatively simple. Even then, of course, neo-Randians and anarcho-capitalists, Christians and atheists, natural lawyers and Stirnerites, could well be at each other’s throats. But then there would always be a simple remedy—not really available to a political party—of splitting off, and having separate organizations for each of the doctrinal factions.

But for the Libertarian Party we want something else, something more than just a philosophical and educational instrument; we want to exert influence in the political arena, to take the lead in the vital and necessary process of rolling back and dismantling State power. To do so, we must begin by unity among the various factions, at least to the extent of remaining and working within the same overall Libertarian Party umbrella. Hence the strategic futility, among other problems, with the earlier LP tendency (happily, now presumably defunct) of beginning its platforms with every sectarian Objectivist clause from “A is A” down. We want all libertarian factions—from neo-Randian to Christian to feminist—in the Party, and therefore we must stress what unites us rather than alienate and divide our ranks with sectarian pronunciamentos. (This holds for official Party pronouncements; this does not mean that the various factions should not continue to polemicize other factions within our common ranks, and try to win them over. That is surely fair game.) Hence, statements of principles, resolutions, and platforms must be unexceptionably libertarian, and here, in the urgent quest for both purity and commonality, a lot of what outsiders might consider “nit-picking” is fully justified.

So far so good; but here we come to a much thornier and more difficult problem: how broad should our “libertarian” umbrella become? Even though I am a dedicated anarchist, I submit that this umbrella should include our cousins the laissez-faire liberals: the Mises-Read types who believe in a minimal government strictly limited to police and judicial protection of the rights of person and property. I submit that we are, in the first place, the heirs of these “classical liberals”; we are, to paraphrase the great Benjamin Tucker, “unterrified laissez-faire liberals” who believe in pushing laissez-faire, the free market, to its logical and moral conclusion in the service of protection and defense. But not only are we their heirs; we are the natural allies of the laissez-faire liberals. We would not be totally happy if Ludwig von Mises or Leonard Read were able to “push the button” and achieve their ideal world tomorrow; but surely we would be 95% happy. In this world of gallopping statism, of economic and social crisis at every hand, is now the time to get the knives out and repudiate the Iaissez-fairists forevermore? Sure, within the Libertarian Party umbrella, we should polemicize, show them the error of their ways, etc., but we still must regard them as allies as against the rest of the world. My contention is that we must, to use the Marxist terminology, form a “united front” with the laissez-faire liberals. Otherwise, we may as well call it the “Anarchist Party” outright and resign ourselves permanently to sectarian impotence in the real world. The very term “libertarian” has grown up as a concept that includes anarcho-capitalists, neo-Randians, and Mises-Read laissez-faire liberals; are we really ready to repudiate this very sensible concept?

The problem of purity has now arisen on two different fronts within the Libertarian Party; on the FLP’s nomination of Percy L. Greaves, Jr. for U.S. Senate from New York State; and on the battle between Edward H. Crane III and Eric Scott Royce for national chairman of the Libertarian Party, the issue to be resolved at the national conference in Dallas this June.

The nomination of Percy Greaves has occasioned a great deal of grumbling in LP ranks throughout the country, the most extreme being the resignation in high dudgeon from the Ohio LP of its Maximum Leader, Kay Harroff. The charge is basically twofold: that Percy believes in taxation, and that he favors the draft. On the tax question, yes of course he believes in taxation, since he is a laissez-faire liberal, and classical liberals have of course always believed in taxation. We come square against the question of whether we wish to include laissez-fairists in our ranks. I have already answered this question in general. But to be more specific: Percy Greaves is the living embodiment, in his politico-economic philosophy, of the late Ludwig von Mises. Does any LP member have the temerity to say that Mises, if he had wished it, should have been denied the nomination for U.S. Senate? Even to ask such a question is to see its grotesquerie. But then to gripe about Percy’s nomination is equally grotesque. Percy Greaves is a distinguished Misesian economist who will hit hard at the economic statism and crises of our time. It is true, yes, that he favors taxation; but the level of taxes that he would impose in a “Greavesian world” in which government is strictly limited to police and judicial protection, and to an isolationist foreign policy, would be so very much lower than what we have now that we would all heave a sigh of relief before we gird our loins to press on for full tax abolition. Is tax abolition such an immediately pressing issue that we cannot afford to endorse someone who merely calls for a drastic reduction of taxation?

In addition to his economic libertarianism, Percy Greaves, consistent with his laissez-faire stand, is in favor of civil liberties and against coerced morality and “victimless crime” laws. The fact that he refused the proferred Courage Party nomination for U.S. Senate because the party had an outlaw-abortion plank in its platform should be evidence enough of Percy’s principled libertarianism across-the-board. As for the draft, Percy only favors the draft specifically for defense against foreign invasion. Since foreign invasion of the U.S. is about as likely as immediate abolition of taxation, the draft problem with him is only a moot one for libertarians.

So much for our defense of the “impure” Percy Greaves, who, as a laissez-faire liberal, is pure on everything except anarchism. Having said this, we come now to the Crane-Royce fight, where we must come down on the side of the “pure” position. Is this inconsistent? Let us see.

Edward Crane, a bright young California lawyer, is running for national chairman. In the current issue of Reason, Crane has a letter in which he soberly but trenchantly criticizes Congressman Steve Symms (Rep., Idaho) for his substantial deviations from libertarian purity, both in his voting record and in his previous interview in Reason. 22-year-old Royce has decided to campaign for national chairman as a critic of the Crane letter, attacking Crane for sectarian purity and for injuring libertarian effectiveness with a Congressman as sympathetic to the cause as Symms. Why do we strongly side with Crane in this dispute?

For one thing, as far as I can determine, Ed Crane is not an anarchist, his “purity” therefore taking on the broader laissez-faire connotations which I have been calling for. His critique of Symms (as well as my own forays in the Lib. Forum) is not based on Steve’s deviations from anarchism, but from laissez-faire. Crane’s and my own criticisms of Symms are not necessarily related to anarchism; they would have been the same had I, for example, been a laissez-faire liberal. In my view, and presumably in Crane’s, it would be disastrous to apply the term “libertarian” or the Libertarian Party label to someone who is simply a conservative (or for that matter a New Left) sympathizer with much of the libertarian position. I would be happy to “work with” Symms in the sense of trying to influence him further in the direction of the libertarian position; but to call him a “libertarian Congressman”, or to refrain from criticizing his deviations from purity, is a very different story. For that is the point at which we begin to betray our libertarian principles which is the whole raison d’etre, the very purpose of the existence of a Libertarian Party. It is perhaps a fine line to draw, but it is a vital one nevertheless.

To his credit, Rep. Symms has never pretended to be a libertarian purist: a great fellow personally, he has instead been eager to learn and to apply the libertarian position as much as he can. The attack on Symms has not been so much directed at him as against elements in the Libertarian Party who are willing to abandon principle in order to cozy up to someone in political power. In the ticket of Ed Crane for national chairman and Andrea Millen of New York for vice-chairman, we have a slate of party officers dedicated to an uncompromising adherence to basic libertarian principle. The lines are clearly drawn. A Royce victory would be a long step toward the dissolution of the most promising vehicle for libertarian organizing and influence in the history of our fledgling movement.

There is another vital point to be made here; in applying standards of purity, it is far more important to be strict and unyielding toward, Libertarians in political office than it is toward candidates for such office. For a candidate in office has not yet sipped of the poisonous potion of public office. But a Libertarian in office has already become—from an anarchist viewpoint steeped in “sin”, while from a laissez-faire viewpoint he is at least surrounded by “occasions for sin.” To achieve ultimate libertarian victory, it will undoubtedly become necessary for Libertarians to attain political office, but they and we should be always and ever aware of the ever-present peril to their—if not lives and fortunes—at least to their sacred honor. In the old motto, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, and so unsparing criticism of any “deviations” by Libertarians in public office will not only be vitally necessary for the libertarian cause, but for their own souls as well.

The Growth Of Revisionism From The Centre: A Review Essay

By Chris R. Tame

In an earlier essay in Libertarian Forum (November 1972), I dealt with the phenomenon of what I termed “revisionism from the centre”—that is, the increasingly common appearance of works by historians who, while still remaining within the bounds of the “liberal” (i.e., statist) paradigm, were arriving at insights and analyses which confirm the historical interpretations of New Left and Libertarian scholars. The importance of this liberal or “centrist” revisionism, I argued, was a twofold one, arising not only from its inherent value and validity but also from its utility as an “unbiased” verification of an interpretation previously characterised by its obviously political motivations and implications.

In my original essay I reviewed the works of three particular expositors of revisionism from the centre, those of Stuart Morris, Robert Weibe, and Samuel P. Hays (1). However, there have been a number of other equally important contributions which I did not touch upon but which also deserve to be brought to the attention of those Libertarians who realize the importance of historical revisionism in the formation of a relevant and fully radical Libertarian ideology.

Perhaps one of the most notable works to appear in the wake, so to speak, of Gabriel Kolko’s seminal studies in economic and political history is K. Austin Kerr’s American Railroad Politics, 1914-1920: Rates Wages, Efficiency (Pittsburgh University Press, 1968). Especially interesting in the context of this essay is the fact that Kerr’s study was conducted with an awareness of the work of both New Left and liberal revisionists. His research was first begun in a seminar conducted by Samuel P. Hays at Iowa University in 1959, and continued at Pittsburgh University as a doctoral dissertation under Hays’ direction, while at the same time Kerr also received assistance from Kolko himself. While praising the latter’s work, however, Kerr does make the qualification that “because he (i.e., Kolko) analyzes railroad affairs primarily from the point of view of only one group, the railroads themselves, Kolko misses many of the complexities of railroad politics” (p. 236). This is indeed a valid point. Although Kolko was undoubtedly aware of the role of the clash of divergent business interests in the movement for regulation (2), his focus in Railroads and Regulation was certainly upon the views and actions of the railroads themselves. A broader approach can surely supply us with a lot more equally valuable material, and in this respect American Railroad Politics constitutes a valuable adjunct to Kolko’s volume. This should not be taken as any detraction from the latter’s achievement, however. Kolko was not only dealing with a more extensive period of time (the years 1877 to 1916, as compared with Kerr’s analysis of the years 1914 to 1920), but could hardly be expected to pursue in one volume every aspect of his basic subject. Kerr’s work, then, builds on that of Kolko but extends it to draw a more detailed portrait of the complexity of affairs in the business community. It consequently provides a useful corrective against seeing ‘business’ in terms of a monolithic entity and conspiracy, with Kerr’s view of the Progressive Era” (interpreting its) system of decision-making as one which satisfied the business community’s general desire for regulation but failed to grant consistently the ends sought by any one group” (p. 4). Kolko’s interpretation of the period as one of the rise of “political capitalism” finds ample confirmation by Kerr, however. As he puts it himself:

“Railroad regulation developed historically as a system of resolving differences among competing economic groups that had a common concern with transportation. At issue were freight rates, wages, profits, and operating efficiency . . . past studies have failed to analyze systematically the origins within American industrial society of arguments over railroad issues. There has been no explicit awareness of the contrasting, competing interests among the economic groups involved with transportation, and no cognizance of the changing bargaining relationships among them” (pp. 2, 3).

Kerr also launches into a heartwarming attack on liberal historiography, rejecting the orthodox liberal vision of the Progressive Era as a period of conflict between the “public” and the “interests” and of the post-World War I period as one of conservative reaction and “return to normalcy”. The purveyors of this mythology, as Kerr so incisively puts it,

“have for the most part overlooked the essentially pro-business nature of federal regulation in the Progressive Era. The rhetoric of railroad regulation during the pre-war period, to be sure, advocated public control of private interests. However, this rhetoric, if taken alone, seems only to obscure the significant practice. We must understand it in relation to the ends sought in the argumentation of issues. Primarily, these ends involved the desire of business groups to use governmental, public means to control—if not to solve—private economic problems. Although important transitory changes occurred during the war, both the rhetorical assumptions and the general goals of the business groups concerned with railroad policy remained strikingly similar throughout the period leading up to the Transportation Act of 1920. The war experience reinforced the prevailing prewar commitment to federal regulation as the most desirable way of resolving economic differences. This reinforcement of the basic assumptions underlying federal regulation stands out in retrospect as a bold continuity in American political history” (pp. 4-5).

And thus Kerr concludes,

“If we view the ideological rhetoric of these years as an expression of particular perceptions instead of adopting it as interpretive verity, we can observe a continuous political force functioning within American industrial society, wherein business was able to exploit governmental power in order to make capitalism a more viable system. This political force was a complex phenomenon involving a high degree of competitive rivalry between groupings within the business community” (p. 229)

Not surprisingly, the area in which the revisionism of Kolko and Weinstein has perhaps been hardest to disregard is that of economic and business history. The pages of the Business History Review, for example, have thus attested to the growing impact and influence of the revisionist perspective. Robert Asher’s “Business and Workers’ Welfare in the Progressive Era: Workmen’s Compensation Reform in Massachusetts, 1880-1911.” (Business History Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, Winter 1969) is a case in point. Citing the work of both New Leftists like Kolko and Weinstein and liberals like Weibe and Hays, Asher focuses on the less extensively analysed subject of the attitudes and role of business in reform at the state level. In the case of workmen’s compensation reform in Massachusetts in the period examined Asher confirms the basic revisionist account: reform, he states, “was supported by economic groups usually, and justifiably, considered conservative” (p. 453). Similarly, his description of the motivation of these businessmen also provides further detailed evidence of that vein of thought so aptly termed by the New Left as “corporate liberalism”.

“Workmen’s compensation legislation promised to rationalize the wasteful and pernicious defects employers observed in the existing liability-litigation system. Many employers thought: workmen’s compensation reform would conserve the stability of established social institutions by removing a major source of friction and antagonism between workers and employers. Workmen’s compensation reform also would help conserve the welfare of an important national resource: human labor. Thus . . . (it) appealed to enlightened, class-conscious employers . . . and to conservative, efficiency and cost-minded employers” (pp. 453-454).

However, Asher does make some critical comments on Weinstein’s seminal essay, “Big Business and the Origins of Workmen’s Compensation”, stating that his own research “in New York, Minnesota, and Massachusetts has shown that the model workmen’s compensation bill circulated by the National Civic Federation did not exert any impact on the course and final result of workmen’s compensation legislation” (p. 474). Moreover, he argues that not only does Weinstein overrate the role of the NCF in the movement for this particular reform, but that he “does not sufficiently emphasize the negative effects that the cost-conscious conservative employers had on compensation legislation. Unlike the work of the liberal employers of the Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Committee on Industrial Relations, the activities of conservative employers within the (NCF), in Massachusetts and elsewhere, delayed, the implementation of pioneering workmen’s compensation systems and reduced the quantity and quality of assistance extended to injured workers” (p. 474) In reply to these criticisms, it should be stressed that Weinstein never portrayed business as a monolithic entity and was fully cognizant of the complexities of motivation, the clashes of interest and ideas among businessmen. Whether he sufficiently emphasized the point Asher raises seems to me a rather nebulous matter, related more to the specific and subjective interest of the historian than to any question of substance. While Asher’s study does, then, provide material of interest regarding what occurred in one state, it does not, in my view even here constitute the final view. He does not really draw an adequate picture of the roots and development of corporate liberal ideology among the business elite nor perceive its central importance for our understanding of the period.

However, a rather more valuable contribution to the body of revisionist analysis is Mansel Griffiths Blackford’s essay “Businessmen and the Regulation of Railroads and Public Utilities in California during the Progressive Era” (Business History Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 3, Autumn 1970). Similarly citing the work of both Kolko and Weibe regarding the reform movement at the national level, Blackford focuses on the specific situation in California and provides a useful confirmation of the revisionist case. Regarding railroad and utilities regulation there he demonstrates that “(g)roups of businessmen were in the vanguard of both reforms” (p. 307). Like Kerr—and in contrast to Kolko—Blackford deals mainly not with the railroads themselves but with the other business interests which sought state regulation. These interests were primarily concerned with reducing competition between themselves and “stabilizing” business conditions—as in the case of the competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco for the trade of the San Joaquin Valley. While not emphasizing the views and activities of the railroads themselves, however, Blackford does observe that by 1911 the railroads offered no opposition at the public hearings over (Governor) Hiram Johnson’s regulatory bill. The cost of rebating to the railroads was indeed considerable, he notes, and undoubtedly disliked by them. In the case of the movement that resulted in the Public Utilities Act of 1912, however, it was the utilities themselves that sought regulation.

“The public utility companies, especially the larger ones, were in the vanguard of those clamoring for its (i.e., the 1912 Act) passage. They hoped that by the enactment of a law giving a state commission power over rates they could escape constant hassling with the often corrupt municipal and county authorities. Some also expected to use the commission to end competition among themselves. In addition, regulation was also favored as a means of enhancing the character and improving the market for public utility stock and bond issues” (p. 313). And the expectations of the utilities were in fact fulfilled. The railroad commission, in which was also vested the task of utility regulation, acted in both its areas of concern to prevent rate wars and restrict competition, arguing on the specious grounds that both railroads and utilities were “natural monopolies”, that “duplication of facilities” was a “wasteful inefficiency”, and that unregulated competition was self-destructive and led ultimately to monopoly and higher rates.

Like New Left revisionism, the focus of revisionism from the centre has generally been upon economic and political history. The examination of ideas and ideology in their own right, the perspective of the historian of ideas, has tended to take a back seat. Nevertheless, a number of works have appeared which add substantially to our understanding of the nature of American progressive, ‘liberal’, and reform thought—and whose observations fit nicely into the revisionist framework. Putting aside such questions as to what extent “purely” intellectual factors—beliefs and moral values—are a major causative factor independent of direct economic interest and motive, what we are concerned with here are those works which, in demonstrating the fundamentally conservative, authoritarian, and elitist character of most of the Left and “liberal” mainstream, render clear how the nefarious aims of the corporate power elite were able to find sanctification by the intellectuals—what the liberals really had in mind behind their grandiloquent rhetoric. Orthodox liberal historiography has, of course, always recognized the elements of conservatism and “moderation” within the tradition of liberal and progressive thought, but it has generally passed over their true significance and nature in a rather glib manner and preferred not to probe too deeply. Fortunately, however, a few have gone further. For example, William E. Leuchtenburg’s “Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916” (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XXXIX) stressed the commitment of the major Progressive politicians, publicists, and intellectuals to imperialism and nationalism, and argued that “this explains much about the basic character of the Progressive movement” (p. 507). Despite its frequently evangelical tone, Leuchtenburg characterized Progressivism as reformist rather than revolutionary, accepting traditional American values and ideals—including racist and authoritarian ones—and ultimately suffering from an inner tension “between humanistic values and nationalist aspirations” (p. 503). Similarly, John P. Diggins in his essay “Flirtation With Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy” (American Historical Review, Vol. LXXI, No. 2, Jan. 1966) and his longer study Mussolini and Fascism: The View From America (Princeton University Press, 1972) demonstrated how a large and important segment of liberals were attracted to European fascism and the corporate state. For such thinkers fascist corporatism seemed to embody the core of their ideals, those of “social engineering” and the creation of a scientifically and consciously ordered social system in which all class and group interests were represented and harmonized in the service of the higher national interest. Ironically, however, one of the most interesting re-examinations of liberal thought, Sidney Kaplan’s “Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals” (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XVII, No. 3, June 1956) received little attention at the time of its publication, Kaplan dealt primarily with the work of such major liberal thinkers as Dewey, Croly and Lippmann showing their commitment to a scientistic vision of the Good Society, one in which “organized social intelligence” was embodied in a “vanguard” elite of administrators. Class conflict was thus to be eradicated in a system characterized by efficiency, science and a competent, paternalistically humanitarian elite of scientists, “the new kind of businessman”, experts, and social administrators. World War I, while leading to disillusionment in some cases—most notably that of Randolph Bourne—had no such effect on others or even led to an enhancement of their conservative, antidemocratic temper (as in the case of Lippmann) or to the adoption of an equally conservative element of mystic religiosity (as in the case of Croly).

The process of critical re-examination of the liberal heritage by a contemporary liberal scholar has been taken furthest, however, by Charles Forcey in his The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (Oxford University Press, N.Y., 1961) Forcey’s study indeed starts on an auspicious and critical note. In his Preface he expresses some doubts about liberalism, recounting that, as an undergraduate, liberalism “was, of course, a good thing. But that only made it more difficult to explain the fearsome tragedies that had overtaken America and the world when liberals were in power” (p. iii). The less than totally satisfactory record of liberalism led Forcey, therefore, to ask “(w)ere there fatal flaws in liberalism itself?” (p. iii). It is to answer this question, then, that Forcey selected The New Republic and its founders as his subject, as a “convenient medium for exploring some of the dilemmas of liberalism” (p. iv).

The Crossroads of Liberalism in fact constitutes an excellent account of the ideas of Croly, Weyl and Lippmann, certainly three of the most influential exponents of statist liberalism. Forcey traces the development of their ideas (including some often most interesting doubts and dilemmas in their later years) against the background of political events, and those ideas emerge quite clearly in the garb of elitism, authoritarianism and nationalism. Unfortunately, however, while undoubtedly a useful intellectual portrait, Forcey’s book is grievously deficient in its evaluation. Although perceptively stressing “how dangerously ambiguous a focus nationalism was for the new liberalism” (p. 260) Forcey reveals again and again how irrevocably wedded he is to the dogmas of orthodox “liberalism”. His conception of “creative social change” is still nothing but “social democracy” and the extension of state power. While not totally blind to the dangers of executive power he still parrots such old saws as “(n)o one can deny the need for strong executives in a country where reformers are often hamstrung by constitutional restrictions and political anachronisms” (p. 311)! (Those who do maintain the presumptuous desire not to be ‘socially engineered’ by such enlightened and humanitarian liberals are well and truly consigned to a state of non-existence!) Moreover, apparently still adhering to the Hofstadter/status revolution interpretation of the Progressive movement, Forcey totally fails to realize that the business elite was immersed in the movement for reform, both politically and intellectually, and that the formulas of state regulation were quite to their taste. Taken in by the facile rhetoric of “social democracy”, he fails to see how the statist panaceas common to “scientific socialism” and “liberalism” have objectively served the interests of the corporate power elite. In all, he fails to grasp the significance of his own description of the liberalism of Croly and co., how their elitist and authoritarian ethos reflects so well the reality of “social democracy” in practice—how it constitutes in every sense of the term a corporate liberalism!

Yet if none of these re-examinations of the liberal heritage which we have described have gone far enough in their analysis, there are some signs that a truly radical revisionism is beginning to gain some academic ground. The most notable example of this is E. K. Hunt’s essay “A Neglected Aspect of the Economic Ideology of the Early New Deal” (Review of Social Economy, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Sept. 1971). Rejecting the orthodox liberal historiography in which a “progressive” government intervened in the economy to curb the power of big business, Hunt cites the revisionist analysis of both New Left and Libertarian scholars: “a smaller group of economists and historians”, he states, “with points of view as far apart as Gabriel Kolko and Murray Rothbard have shown that the twentieth century evolution of the interventionist state was accomplished only because it had the support of big business. In fact big businessmen have been the driving force in this evolution” (p. 180). Hunt, however, concentrates in this essay on the intellectual background of the rise of the corporate state and indeed provides a most useful (although by no means definitive) analysis of that background. Specifically, he makes the perceptive point that “(t)he active intervention of the government to create cartels and to promote industrial cooperation rather than competition seems to have paralleled closely the German experience of the late nineteenth century” (p. 180) and thus takes as his major theme the demonstration that “the apparent similarity between the philosophy underlying the New Deal and the philosophy underlying German cartellization in the late nineteenth century was not entirely accidental” (p. 180).

Hunt in fact selects as a key figure Simon N. Patten, whom he correctly describes as “one of the most influential teachers of economics in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (p. 182). What was significant was that Patten in fact studied for a period in Germany, in the intellectual atmosphere of the “Socialists of the Chair” of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. Indeed, Patten studied directly under many of the members of the Verein and became the portege of one of its founders. Professor Johannes Conrad. And thus Patten became thoroughly—nay, religiously, as he himself said—inbued with a world view which, while “anti-socialist”, was equally and militantly anti-laissez faire, urging a programme of vigorous interventionism, coercive cartellization, and welfare-statism. It was this creed that Patten embodied in his subsequent and voluminous works: an all-out attack on the “waste”, “inefficiency”, and “immorality” of the free-market. In the place of the market he advocated a new order of “corporate collectivism”, in which competition was eradicated and the “socialized capitalist”—united with a consevative labour unionism—administered an economy of abundance in the ‘public interest’.

It should be immediately pointed out that Hunt sees the rise of the corporate state by no means simply as the consequence of the nefarious influence of intellectuals like Patten. The enthusiasm of big business itself for corporate collectivism, especially after their experience of the War Industries Board, had not a little to do with the matter, as Hunt readily indicates! Nevertheless, the contribution of Patten and his disciples to the ideology and the creation of the present system is certainly significant. Indeed, it is especially worth noting that such New Dealers and architects of the NIRA as Frances Perkins and Rexford Tugwell were proteges and disciples of Patten. The case of Tugwell is also illuminating since, as Hunt points out, he “has been considered by many historians to represent the radical or left-wing element of Roosevelt’s brain trust” and since “the common assumption that New Deal reforms had a leftist orientation is often based on the belief that Tugwell was a spokesman for the left” (p. 186).

Hunt, then, vigorously indicts liberal historiography for its “myopic historical misinterpretation of the economic, social and political significance of the New Deal and post World War H American Corporate Liberalism” (p. 187) and for its failure to grasp the thoroughly conservative nature of “liberalism” and welfare-statism.

“While the dominant economic ideas and policies of ‘welfare-statism’ of late nineteenth century Germany are almost unanimously regarded as profoundly conservative, highly similar ideas and policies in the United States which were directly influenced by those from Germany are often treated as progressive or even radical” (p. 187). Hunt’s conclusion is both ringing and radical in its revisionism—and especially refreshing in its recognition of the singular inappropriateness of the appellation “conservative” when applied to libertarian and individualist critics of the status quo.

“The post World War II American ‘Corporate State’ appears to this writer to be based upon a profoundly conservative coalition of government, big business, conservative labor leaders and ‘liberal’ intellectuals. Kaiser Wilhelm I and Bismark would certainly smile approvingly on contemporary American capitalism. And yet most American economists insist on reserving the label ‘conservative’ for advocates of individualist liberalism many of whom are among the most thoroughgoing critics of contemporary American capitalism” (pp. 190-191).

The growth of revisionism from the centre is clearly a development to be welcomed by the Libertarian. Yet one major qualification must be especially stressed, and that is that there is nothing inherently radical in its revelations. As I showed in my earlier essay in Libertarian Forum, such liberal revisionists as Robert Weibe, for example, portrayed the role of business in the attainment of “reform” in no critical light but rather as a praiseworthy achievement! Similarly, Samuel P. Hays offered an interpretation of American history, a “social analysis”, which portrayed the growth of political and economic centralization as an inevitable consequence of industrialization, technology, and the “evolution from smaller to larger and larger systems”. In other words, while certainly describing the rise of our present corporate state in a more realistic manner, such liberal revisionist works also act simultaneously as its intellectual consecration, as a historiographical justification of the status quo. This apologetic role is also played by many of the works we have reviewed in this essay. Robert Asher, for example, in his essay on workmen’s conpensation, describes the various corporatist and interventionist policies as “great positive contributions to the rationalization and elimination of iniquitious social and economic practices and institutions” (Op. cit., p. 452) And Mansel Griffiths Blackford also completely embraces the specious anti-market arguments of the architects of corporate collectivism:

“(I)t is probably wrong to see too sharp a dichotomy between the best interests of business groups and the general public . . . all profited from the (railroad and utilities) commission’s policy on competition. By protecting public service corporations within their fields of operation, the commission both strengthened the financial positions of the utilities and prevented rate wars and the duplication of facilities, the costs of which, as the commissioners frequently pointed out, were ultimately borne by the public” (Op. cit., p. 319)

In fact, another recent essay in the Business History Review underlines our point regarding the ideological ambiguity of revisionism from the centre very well. In “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History” (Vol. XLIV, No. 3, Autumn, 1970), Professor Louis Galambos offers an interpretation of recent historiography in which the works of both New Left and liberal scholars are subsumed in a tendency which he terms the “organizational school of history” (p. 280). In essence, the common denominator of the works in this “organizational” category, as Galambos sees it, is their focus on the “important changes which have taken place in modern America (and which) have centered about a shift from small-scale, informal, locally or regionally oriented groups to large-scale, national, formal organizations. The new organizations are characterized by a bureaucratic structure of authority” (p. 280). Interestingly, Galambos himself perceives the ambiguous ideological implications of liberal organizational approaches. On the one hand, “(o)rganizational analysis could blend With New Left ideology to produce a synthesis which would appeal to those scholars who demand that history be ‘relevant’ in some precise and immediate way”, while on the other “some historians may find it impossible not to surrender their own judgment to the pragmatic and self-serving viewpoints expressed by their organizational subjects” (p. 289). Precisely! And we might justifiably add that Galambos’ own interpretation of the “emerging organizational synthesis” is actually insidiously conservative, due to its implicitly and explicitly economic and ‘organizational’ determinism. Such deterministic interpretations are indeed extremely convenient for the beneficiaries of the existing corporate collectivist system.

Whatever our satisfaction at the development of revisionism from the centre, and for that matter, New Left revisionism, our reading of both, however, surely underlines the importance of radical libertarians participating actively in such historical endeavours. For only such direct involvement can prevent the value of the revisionist perspective from being vitiated by either the conservative apologetics of the liberals or the barren and disastrous socialist dogmas of the New Left.

Notes

(1) The works I dealt with were, specifically: Stuart Morris, “The Wisconsin Idea and Business Progressivism”, Journal of American Studies, July 1970; Robert Weibe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (1962; Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1968); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1929 (Harvard University Press, 1959); “The Mythology of Conservation”, in H. Jarrett, ed., Perspectives on Conservation (Johns Hopkins Press, 1958); “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era”, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, October 1964; “The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880-1920”, Political Science Quarterly, Sept. 1965.

(2) See his comments regarding the conflict between the independent oil producers of the Petroleum Producers Union and Standard Oil, or the rivalry between the New York merchants and those of Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 (1965; W. W. Norton, N.Y., 1970) pp. 22-26.

Rhodesia—Unjust Land Seizure

By Bill Evers

“Reprinted from the Stanford Daily, April 11, 1974.”

The history of European conquest of and rule over African Rhodesians is a history of continual theft by Europeans of land belonging to Africans.

In addition to this massive land seizure, during the last 40 years there has been a fully developed system of racial segregation in land ownership, in which sections of the country are designated as for whites or for blacks.

In recent years, this policy of land assignment led to a dramatic confrontation between the Rhodesian government and African peasants who refused to leave the land they and their forefathers had occupied and cultivated.

Forcible Uprooting

In the late 1960s, the Rhodesian government had to use troops and police to expropriate the land of the Tangwena people in the Inyanga area. The Rhodesian government uprooted forcibly approximately 300 families (approximately 3000 people) in this removal operation.

The roots of this problem lie in the activities of some of the early European colonists in Rhodesia. Dr. Jim Jameson was an administrator for the British South Africa Company, a mercantilist entity created by Cecil Rhodes. Under Jameson’s rule in Rhodesia, large tracts and vast estates were granted to aristocratic young blades in England. These tracts became the holdings of absentee-landowning companies.

Jameson not only parcelled out these tracts in the manner of a feudal chieftain, he also paid no attention to whether such land was occupied by Africans, and happily shared in the looting of Ndebele cattle.

Injustices Recognized

By the turn of the century, some sentiment had developed in England that recognized that grave injustices were being done to the Africans in Rhodesia. But the attitude was one of paternalistically regarding the Africans as wards, rather than one of defending the African’s full rights and liberties. Some areas were provisionally set aside to cushion the effects of change on tribal life.

Dr. Robin Palmer notes that “by 1914 the Colonial Office (in London) was resigned to the fact that it could do little to prevent the eviction of Africans from European farms.” From this time on, one finds the informal policy of racial segregation of land areas. What had originally been an area temporarily designated as a tribal backwater, now became an area which was viewed as the only place Africans were to be given any privileges at all.

Although constitutionally an African in Rhodesia at this time was supposed to be able to “acquire, hold, encumber, and dispose of land on the same conditions” as a European, in fact the British South Africa Company refused to allow Africans to buy land.

European Rhodesian Fear

By the late 1920s, the self-governing European Rhodesians became afraid that middle-class African farmers interested in cash-crop agriculture would press to exercise their constitutional right to own land outside of the segregated tribal areas.

In response to these white attitudes, a Land Apportionment Act was passed in 1930 formally segregating land ownership in the country.

The Tangwena people and their chief Rekayi were among the last victims of this Land Apportionment Act.

In 1969, the Rhodesian government revised and revamped the system of possessory segregation. The parliament of Ian Smith’s government scrapped the old law and passed a Land Tenure Act and the Tribal Trust Land Development Act.

Intensive Development

Under the latter act a Tribal Trust Lands Development Corporation is authorized by the government to undertake intensive development of the Tribal Trust Land.

An August, 1973, publication of the African nationalist, Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union points out that “at no stage of the corporation’s future is it envisaged that freehold title will pass” to individual African peasants or to a group of African peasants.

An information booklet put out by the Rhodesian government emphasizes correctly the intensity of feeling about land: “Both here and abroad there is a tendency . . . to believe that Africans have had a raw deal over land. There is no doubt that this is one of their most deeply emotional grievances and agitators have used it to stir up opposition against the government.”

The trouble is not the agitators, but that the Rhodesian government has absolutely no intention of rectifying what the Africans rightly perceive as injustices.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 6

JUNE, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

REFLECTIONS ON THE MIDDLE EAST

1. And so we are to be subjected to a long round of rodomontade on the Kissinger “miracle” in the Middle East. President Tricky, a desperate man clutching at straws, is trying to save his neck by taking credit for Achieving a Lasting Peace in the Middle East. The Establishment press, which has always had a soft spot for Kissinger and is at any rate incapable of rising above superficiality in its foreign coverage, goes along with the hoopla. Besides, as inveterate pro-statists, they would love to say something good about the American government these days, and this is it. Politicians everywhere, their eyes fixed inveterately on the present and immediate future, shout hosannahs; and Arabs and Zionists alike kiss (literally!) and cosset Kissinger while lining up at the American trough. There hasn’t been such a lavish and repellent display of international adoration since Nixon’s trip to Peking.

2. And make no mistake about the lining up at the trough; for whatever short-run benefits Kissinger has achieved by the cease-fire agreements have been gained strictly at the expense of Uncle Sap, the American taxpayer. Already we hear of literally hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid that will be poured into the coffers of every state in the Middle East, Arabs and Israel alike. The most lucrative occupation in the world right now is to get yourself a sheikhdom somewhere in the Middle East and to get on line for American handouts. More ominous is Kissinger’s “secret” commitment to Israel (reported in the New York Times) to back her in any reprisals directed against Palestinian guerrilla activity.

3. The current political situation in the Middle East should put the quietus once and for all to the right-wing and Establishment line that the Arab governments are mere puppets of “Soviet expansionism.” In particular, Egypt and Syria have long been supposed to be Soviet puppets, so that the silly season is again here for the American press, which has actually been talking about the “miraculous” changeover of Egypt and Syria from Soviet puppetry to a “pro-American” stance. Yet the press doesn’t draw the obvious lesson that the notion of Egypt or Syria or any other Arab country as a “tool of Moscow” was always Cold War hogwash.

4. In fact, Soviet foreign policy, once again as for so many decades, has shown itself to be dedicated to one overriding goal: peace, or detente, with the United States at virtually any price; ever since the days of Stalin, the Soviets have been willing to sell any and every one of their allies down the river at the drop of a hat. They have done it to a roster of allies too long to cite: Yugoslavia and the Chinese Communists (the origin of their respective breaks with Moscow); the Greek Communists, the French and Italian Communists, and on and on. Reliable reports indicate that the reason for the final capitulation of Syrian president Hafez el-Assad to the cease-fire was that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, anxious to avoid endangering the detente by angering Kissinger, flatly told Syria that it would withdraw Russia’s support to the Syrian forces in any further conflict. And so Russia became a supine collaborator in its own replacement by the United States as the leading force in the Arab world.

5. To unravel the complex tangle of Middle East politics, and to understand what is going on, one must keep one’s eye on the central and leading issue: the rights of the dispossessed Palestinians. A brief history of the situation is in order to untangle the web. After Israel displaced and ejected the Palestinians in the 1948 war, the demoralized Palestinians relied upon the contiguous Arab states to accomplish their goal of recapturing their homes, lands, and properties. That reliance was aided by the characteristic braggadoccio of the Arab states, whose rulers talked frequently and grandiloquently about “driving the Zionists into the sea.” After a generation of nothing happening, the proof of the pudding was the 1967 war, in which Israel easily seized an enormous amount of Arab territory, including Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank of Palestine which had been grabbed by Jordan in 1948, the Gaza Strip of Palestine which had similarly been appropriated by Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, belonging to Egypt and Syria respectively. There thus emerged two sets of grievances: that of the Palestinians, including their original dispossession plus the further expulsions and military occupation by Israel; and the new grievances of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, which wanted back their pre-1967 territories.

The Palestinians now began to see that they could no longer rely on the other Arab states to advance their interests; and so there developed a variety of fedayeen, or Palestine guerrilla groups, devoted to final victory by carrying the war to Israel and the occupied zones. Since the Arab States now had grievances of their own, and since the fedayeen were highly popular throughout the Arab world, the Arab States formed a tentative and uneasy alliance with the Palestinians.

The goal of the Arab States was to get their pre-1967 land back. What was the political goal of the Palestinians? The political goal, as implied by the goal of allowing the displaced Palestinians to get their homes and lands back, was, to be sure, the liquidation of the state of Israel and its replacement by a state of Palestine, in which, all the Palestinian groups agree, all Jewish, Moslem, and Christian citizens would enjoy equal civil and religious liberty. Contrary to Zionist claims, the “destruction of the state of Israel” in the minds of the Palestinians does not imply the destruction of the individual Jews living in Israel. While the Palestinians all agree on the principle of equal civil rights, there is a split among these groups, for some of the militants advocate a transition period of “dezionizing” Palestine, which might imply placing the Jews of Palestine into a period of second-class tutelage. At any rate, even if the Jews were to attain immediate full citizenship in a new Palestine, the necessity of their giving up the seized lands would put them back into that tiny percentage of pre-1947 Palestinian territory which was purchased by the Zionists on a truly voluntary basis, and from the Arab peasants themselves and not their Turkish or other feudal overseers.

Unfortunately, as in the case of Northern Ireland, no group on either the Arab or Zionist side seems to have advocated a new partition, in which the state of Israel would be confined to its truly and voluntarily purchased land area. Certainly, at least at this point, there is no sign whatever of any group in Israel accepting such an arrangement.

At any rate, the Palestinian guerrilla groups grew into a formidable force until those fateful weeks in September, 1970, known from then on among the Arabs as “Black September”, when King Hussein of Jordan turned upon the fedayeen, who were mainly based in Jordanian territory, and massacred them wholesale. The fedayeen almost did not recover from the blow.

Here we must understand the unique role of Jordan in the Arab world. Ever since its creation after World War I, Jordan has been ruled by the Hashemite monarchy (first by King Abdullah, now by King Hussein), which was virtually a creature of British imperialism. The formidable Jordanian army, consisting of Bedouin nomads from eastern Jordan, was staffed, trained, and commanded by British officers. The majority of Jordanians are now urban and agricultural Palestinians, who, however, have no voice in the Hashemite dictatorship, whose army still consists of Bedouins from the Eastern desert. One of the earliest grounds for the splits among the fedayeen was the relationship of the Palestinian movement, first to Jordan and the Hashemite monarchy, and ultimately to the other Arab States. The leading guerrilla group, Al Fatah, headed by Yasir Arafat, took the seemingly sensible line that the only real fight was with Israel, and therefore that it was senseless to take on the Arab states as well. But while seemingly sensible, this ignored the major differences of goals and structures between the Arab States and especially Jordan on the one hand, and the Palestinians on the other. One would have thought that Black September would have taught Al Fatah a lesson, but it really did not; the only lesson was narrowly confined to total hostility to Jordan, which even Al Fatah agrees to. But Al Fatah continues to put its trust in “princes”, now especially Egypt and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union.

6. Why did Egypt launch the October War (which it did, by the way, without notifying Syria), and why did it gain great early victories, only to fumble and begin to lose? From his and Egypt’s point of view, Anwar el-Sadat’s launching of the war was a brilliant tactical masterstroke. The fedayeen, almost miraculously, had recovered from Black September and had begun to draw attention to its cause through dramatic incursions and “terror” tactics. But that cause could only win, at best, after a very long and protracted struggle. Meanwhile, nothing was happening on the Egyptian front. Israel was sitting on its 1967 conquests and showed no signs of budging. Indeed, why should it? So when was Egypt going to get its territory back, and when was it going to be able to reopen the Suez Canal? The UN was a hopeless debating club. Something dramatic had to be done to get the Middle East off dead center. Hence the launching of the war, which did indeed get the Middle East off dead center, gained foreign aid and the forthcoming Geneva conference, and pushed Israel a bit back from the Suez Canal. The gain in Arab morale, after a generation of unbroken and disastrous defeats, was of course enormous.

The surprise attack, and the massive weaponry, accounted for the early Egyptian victories; but why the later setbacks? The setback can be traced to the Egyptian decision to stop after the early gains and consolidate, instead of taking advantage of the early demoralization of the Israeli army by launching mobile and lightning thrusts deep into the Sinai. By stopping and holding, Egypt granted precious time to Israel to allow her to regroup, bring up reinforcements, and to engage in her own flexible and lightning tank tactics which had become famous in the 1967 war. Thus Israel could cross the Suez Canal, and surround large chunks of the Egyptian Army on the east bank of the Suez.

So we come then to the critical military puzzle: why did Egypt stop at the point of a massive victory, and allow Israel to recoup? There seem to be two answers. One is that Sadat was not interested in a massive victory; all he wanted was short-run gains, which could be used to force Israel into a peace conference. Second is the sort of strategy and tactics employed by Sadat throughout. We know that the massive Soviet air and military aid was almost all in defensive rather than offensive weapons, thus effectively preventing Egypt from undertaking an all-out offensive. But even more important is the fact, that under Soviet military advice, Sadat adopted the sort of military strategy and tactics that the Soviets had learned on the Eastern front in World War II: namely, massive and slow advance, covering territory and then consolidating that territory. It is the sort of strategy suitable for massive, ground-churning inter-State warfare. But to win militarily in the Middle Eastern situation, Sadat would have had to engage in very different strategy and tactics: i.e., in guerrilla warfare, which would have meant a kind of war suitable to insurrections by native populations against a State. Guerrilla warfare means (a) arming the native Arab population, so that the Arab populace could engage in massive aid to the soldiers, could have been—in the famous phrase of Che Guevara—the “water” in which the “fish” of the soldiery would have swum; (b) heavy reliance on Palestinian fedayeen to be that “fish” instead of on Egyptian State troops; and (c) emphasis on the tactics of mobility, flexibility, tank thrusts, and lightning-fast encirclement behind the Israeli lines. This strategy would have meant pressing on and encircling the demoralized Israeli troops in the early stages of the October war.

But to fight such a war, Sadat would have had to be prepared to fight a guerrilla war, for Palestinian aims. But Sadat’s attitude toward the Palestinians and their aims has always been one of wary distrust, for what he is interested in is not a Palestinian insurrection but the advance of the territorial aims of the Egyptian State. It is safe to conclude that Sadat would rather lose, or at least stalemate, an orthodox inter-State war, than win a Palestinian guerrilla war against Israel.

An orthodox military rebuttal to the idea of guerrilla tactics in the Sinai peninsula is that, in that uninhabited desert, there is no native Arab population to form the water for the soldierly fish. But what this rebuttal neglects are the great military lessons of the Montgomery-Rommel tank warfare in the North African desert in World War IV. For, in such a case, the desert itself can be the friendly “water”, and can be used as the base and medium for lightning fast tank raids and encirclements. Certainly there is no unfriendly population there to tip off the opposing army.

This guerrilla vs. inter-State theme is confirmed when we look at the Syrian theater of war. For how do we explain the fact that while Egypt fell into dire straits fairly soon, and hence was happy to conclude a ceasefire rather quickly, that Syria was never really defeated, and that while it lost some territory in the Mt. Hermon salient, it continued to fight on stubbornly until the June cease-fire? I think we can conclude that the basic reason was, that in contrast to the Egyptians having nothing militarily to do with the fedayeen, Syria rather heavily used and supported its own favored wing of the Palestinian guerrillas, the As Saiqa. Syria’s partial devotion to guerrilla warfare may well account for the military differences in the Syrian and Egyptian outcomes.

7. So what now? Syria, deserted by all the other Arab States (except for Libya, which is far from the scene, and Iraq, also not contiguous to Israel and which has its hands full in its massive counter-revolutionary war to suppress the Kurds), and pressured finally by Russia, at last agreed to a cease-fire. In doing so, el-Assad gained a short-run tactical victory, since Syria regained the Mt. Hermon salient, plus a wafer-thin slice of the Golan Heights, including (an empty gesture) the ghost town of El Quneitra. But for those gains, Syria, in another “secret” agreement undertook to suppress any Palestinian guerrilla activity emanating from Syrian territory. Once again, Palestinian interests were sacrificed for the territorial goals of the Syrian state.

All this has thrown the Palestinian movement into a mighty dither, and indeed their choices now are extremely difficult. The majority of the Palestinians, headed by the leading guerrilla group Al Fatha, but also including the Syrian-oriented As Saiqa and the Maoist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), headed by Nayef Hawatmeh, appear ready to accept a “mini”-Palestinian state in the pre-1967 areas of the West Bank of the Jordan and the Gaza Strip—and, in effect, to accept in return the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. The minority of Palestinian’ militants, including only the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), headed by Dr. George Habesh, and the tiny Iraq-oriented Arab Liberation Front, is opposed to any mini-Palestinian state as either implicitly or explicitly recognizing, for the first time, the legitimacy of the post-1947 State of Israel. At the June meeting of the Palestinian National Council, the overall Congress of the Palestinian movement, the majority view was ratified. This, of course, places the Palestinian majority in line with the interest of the Arab states, who also want restoration of the status quo ante 1967. The only exception is Jordan, which would lose the West Bank, but the other Arab States are prepared to jettison Jordanian territorial interests; no wing of the Palestinians would accept a return to Jordanian rule over the West Bank.

The road to a long-range peace agreement in the Middle East, however, is scarcely clear-cut, to say the least. For Israel has shown no signs of accepting the idea of a mini-State; in fact, it has not yet even recognized the existence of the Palestinians. The Geneva peace conference, originally intended for this summer, will not be convened before the end of this year, if then.

8. And yet, having said that, we must also note that Israel has just experienced its first significant political change since its inception in 1947. Since its founding, Israel has been governed by a coalition headed by the Labor (Mapai) Party, led first by David Ben-Gurion, then by Levi Eshkol, and lately by Golda Meir. The actual leadership of the Mapai, and hence of the Israeli government, however, has been for all these years in the hands of the Gush clique, headed by Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, and including the aforementioned premiers. Old-line and European-born, the Gush has always taken the position that the Palestinian Arabs do not exist, that they are either “South Syrians” or “West Jordanians” or just plain non-people. If we adopt the Israeli practice of considering the “left”-“right” spectrum of Israeli politics as signifying “dove”-“hawk” on the Arab question, then the Gush has always been strongly to the right of center, hard-line opponents of negotiations with the Arabs, and apt to adopt military solutions to political problems.

Over a decade ago, the Mapai, to maintain its rule, was forced to merge with several other parties, including the Mapam and the Achdut Avodah, forming the Labor Alignment Party which still governs Israel. But the old parties still exist as recognizable factions within the greater Labor Alignment. Both the Mapam and the Achdut Avodah were considerably more “dovish”, hence to the “left” of, the Mapai and the Gush. The Mapam, the erstwhile pro-Soviet party, however, and originally the major representative of the (voluntary) communist kibbutzim, has largely faded away, probably in accordance with the dwindling importance of the kibbutzim in Israeli life. This left the Achdut Avodah, headed by Vice-Premier Yigal Allon, as the major “left-wing” force within the Labor Alignment. Meanwhile, there grew up on the right-wing of the latter party the Rafi faction, a highly hawkish group led by the charismatic leader of the 1967 conquest, General Moshe Dayan. Also included in the Meir coalition along with the Labor Alignment, was the National Religious Party, the major party of Orthodox Jewry, which, because of its crucial balance-of-power role in the Parliament (Knesset) has been able to impose a rigid Orthodox theocracy on a largely non-Orthodox, if not atheist, country. In foreign affairs, the NRP advocates the maximum territorial extent of Biblical Judaism.

The seemingly eternal role of the Gush was shaken irretrievably by the enormous shock of the October war. For the first time, the Israeli military suffered severe losses, and the much vaunted Israeli intelligence services were taken completely by surprise. The Israeli arrogance and illusion of invincibility was shattered beyond repair by the initial losses. As Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan’s political goose was completely cooked, and Golda Meir, after hanging on desperately to power, was finally forced to retire and thereby to accept the responsibility for the quasi-defeat at the hands of the Arabs.

The crucial question of Israeli politics then became: who would succeed Mrs. Meir? There ensued a fierce and highly important struggle for succession between Shimon Peres, the Interior Minister under Meir, and the leader of the Rafi faction after Dayan; and General Yitzhak Rabin, a member of the Achdut Avodah faction. The fight was close and dirty, but Rabin finally won, helped by the fact that, as a late-comer to politics, he had not been an actual member of the Achdut Avodah party before the merger of the 1960’s. The result was the final defeat of the Gush, with not only Mrs. Meir, but also General Dayan, Pinhas Sapir, and Foreign Minister Abba Eban, leaving the Cabinet and retiring to the back benches. Israel is now under the control of the Rabin-Allon (still Deputy Premier and now Foreign Minister Achdut Avodah action.

On the “dove-hawk” spectrum, the Achdut Avodah faction may be termed “slightly to the left of center,” Mr. Rabin, Israel’s first native-born (sabra) Premier, at least recognizes the existence of the Palestinians, and his “dovish” hand is strengthened by the fact that the NRP is no longer in the governing coalition, being replaced by the much more dovish Civil Rights Party, headed by Mrs. Shulamit Aloni, who is anathema to the Gush and to the groups further right in Israel. But, in the traditional center-izing role of party politics, Mr. Rabin, with a wafer-thin majority in the Knesset, has been at least initially forced to take a line on the Arabs almost as hawkish as Mrs. Meir’s, in order to block any major right-wing defections from the Labor Alignment. Indeed, within the mainstream of Israeli politics, only Mrs. Aloni’s CRP calls clearly for the return of Israel to the 1967 borders—i.e. only the CRP takes a position which could lead to a general peace agreement. The only more dovish groups than the CRP in Israel are’ a few tiny anti-Zionist groupings, the major one being the Marxist party, the Matzpen.

Any dovishness within Israel would be further stifled by the fact that the major opposition to the Labor Alignment is the far more hawkish grouping, the Likud, headed by the fiery ultra-hawk, Menachem Beigin, long-time leader of the “extreme rightist” Herat party. The Herut, the dominant faction within the Likud, is the child of the long-time World Zionist-Revisionist movement, dedicated above all things to military conquest of the maximal territory of Biblical Jewry, “on both sides of the Jordan”. On domestic matters, Herut is state corporatist, in contrast to the laborite socialism of the Labor Alignment; thus, the predecessor of Beigin, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Zionist-Revisionism, expressed admiration for the corporate state of Mussolini. The other major faction within the Likud is the Liberal Party, oriented to the General Zionist movement within the United States, which is devoted to some form of free enterprise on domestic matters, but which is almost as anti-Arab as the Herut. There is unfortunately no faction within Israel that is both dovish and pro-free enterprise.

8. Finally, even in the unlikely event that Israel should come to accept the idea of a mini-Palestinian state, there would still be almost insuperable problems to solve. For the Palestinians would accept nothing less than a fully independent mini-Palestine State, whereas Israel would accept nothing more than a demilitarized Palestinian state (while Israel, of course, remained armed to the teeth) with UN supervision and Israeli right of inspection. And so, despite the hoopla, the confusion, and the considerable and significant political changes throughout the Middle East, the long-run prospect is still for protracted conflict with no end in sight.

Obit Note

The police have now disclosed that Phillip Willkie, subject of an RIP in our April issue, committed suicide.

European Politics

By Leonard P. Liggio

There has been a single theme in the foreign policy philosophy of the Nixon Administration; it was re-emphasized in a recent headline datelined Key Biscayne, Fla., May 27: NIXON FEARS NEW ISOLATIONISM. The immediate task of the president was to gain support for the most massive military budget yet put forward. The long-term aspect concerned America’s domination over Europe. This had been undermined by French president De Gaulle, and was not repaired during the term of Georges Pompidou. Pompidou had taken the lead in insisting that European unity could be based only upon opposition to United States domination of Europe. He expressed this strongly last December at the Common Market summit meeting in Copenhagen. It was restated by French foreign minister Michel Jobert in his strong exchange last February in Washington with Henry Kissinger. It was reexpressed that month when French finance minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing abruptly decided to float the franc—always a threat to American monetary policies—rather than borrow money from international sources in order to artificially maintain the franc. These policies had led Kissinger on March 21 to repeat Nixon’s constant warnings about the growth of neo-isolationism in America.

Thus, the recent presidential elections in France were of considerable importance to the Nixon administration. If there was a basic aspect to the election it might be said to have been the issue of principle. Giscard has a non-political image. He has been an economic expert, no more and no less. Mitterand, on the other hand, had a particularly political image. He became head of the Socialist party even though he had not been a member of that party, in order to run for president against De Gaulle in 1965 (he did better than expected with 45% of the vote). Mitterand had been the disciple in the 1950s, of Rene Pleven, a center politician and member of almost every cabinet, who always seemed to want what the U.S. wanted in military and foreign policy. Pleven and Mitterand fought against the program of the French right-wing which was for reconciliation with Russia. Mitterand served in many French cabinets of the Fourth Republic and his major disagreement with the Fifth Republic of De Gaulle was that he never again was called into the cabinet. Like so many of the center politicians, against who Gaullist politics was based, Mitterand has slept in more than one political bed. But, in politics as elsewhere, there is a large body of support for monogamy. Giscard benefited from not having been involved in the swapping of French parliamentary politics.

Giscard’s economic policies are not great. He invented the value-added tax; he has used price controls; he thinks in Keynesian terms; there is a bias in his politics toward inflation to aid business undertakings rather than toward the deflation favored by the saving population. Giscard was supported by the planners and reformers. Giscard appointed several of them to his new cabinet. In addition to the technocrats, he appointed four center party leaders to the cabinet, including Jean Lecanuet and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. One of Giscard’s objectives in appointing the centrists, in addition to their support for him in the election, is to try to create a more middle-of-the-road image. The election was one of the closest—Giscard, 50 plus percent; Mitterand, 49 plus. If Mitterand had relied only on Socialist and Communist support, there would have been no contest. The Fourth Republic had a six-sided politics—Communists, Socialists, Radicals, Catholics, Gaullists and the Independents (which was led by Giscard’s mentor, Antoine Pinay, a no-nonsense hard money advocate who initiated the sound financial base of the Gaullist period on which Giscard could play with his newer economic policies). De Gaulle’s majorities were based on the latter three groups plus many of the former voters for the Radicals. In the meantime, a lot of older voters had died and a lot of the newer voters without any memory of Mitterand’s earlier role as politician viewed him as the non-political candidate against those who have been in office for the past decade and a half, like Giscard.

Thus, in addition to the Socialist and Communist votes, Mitterand was supported by a lot of centrists. If he had been elected, Mitterand would have appointed the extreme centrist and pro-American mayor of Marseilles, Gaston Defferre, as prime minister. In fact, there might have been a lot of old politician faces of the pro-American heyday back in the cabinet had Mitterand won. Even the few possible Communist cabinet members might have fitted in by not being pro-Soviet. During the election, the Soviet ambassador made a public call on Giscard—no doubt to discuss some pressing aspect of French investment in the Soviet Union that could not wait the few days until the election was over. Doubtless it never crossed the Soviet ambassador’s mind that this highlighted the image of Giscard as a strong advocate of detente with the Soviet Union. However, the French Communist press denounced the action and protested the Soviet Union’s interference in French domestic politics. Once more, a local Communist movement was sacrificed to broader Soviet foreign policy objectives.

Giscard’s foreign policy is likely to be less publicly anti-American than Pompidou’s but more directed to building up France’s relations with Europe and Russia. The new foreign minister, Jean Sauvagnargues, was the recent ambassador to Germany, who in the nineteen thirties studied German culture “when there was a surge in French interest in German romanticism and a fascination with the rise of Hitler.” He entered the diplomatic service during the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain. He has had long experience in the Arab and African worlds. The new prime minister, Jacques Chirac, was a brain truster for Pompidou and then chief aide to Giscard at finance, and more recently, agriculture and interior minister; his father-in-law is the director general of the foreign ministry and major contributor to De Gaulle’s foreign policy. Chirac was a new Gaullist of the Pompidou variety rather than an old Gaullist. He will take a leading role in trying to split the new from the old Gaullists to form a new coalition around Giscard. The new finance minister, Jean-Pierre Fourcade had been an aide to Giscard at the finance ministry. The most important member of the cabinet will be the minister of state and interior minister (in charge of police), Michel Poniatowski, a leader of Giscard’s Independents and a cousin of Giscard’s wife. Poniatowski is a descendant of the family of the last king of Poland; one nephew of that king became a French marshal, dying at the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig in 1813, and another nephew, the grand treasurer of Lithuania, was the father of a senator of France under Napoleon III and was the ancestor of the present Michel.

Pompidou before his death was attempting to create a new political alignment of Giscard’s Independents, the younger Gaullists such as Chirac, and the reform center. Pompidou had removed Jacques Chaban-Delmas as prime minister so that he would not be the heir of Pompidou. Chaban-Delmas had led the Gaullists in the nineteen fifties during De Gaulle’s retirement and had been Gaullist speaker of the national assembly under De Gaulle. Chaban-Delmas has been mayor of Bordeaux for twenty-five years and was allied with the Gaullist party bosses led by Alexandre Sanguinetti. In the recent election, Chaban-Delmas received only about fifteen per cent of the vote. It was not surprising that Sanguinetti not only warned Chirac against causing defections in parliament from Gaullism, but pressed the new cabinet to push the Gaullist concept of worker participation in industrial management which was a major policy since De Gaulle issued his 1947 call. Sanguinetti said that the Gaullists would pay more attention to the workers and cause workers to press the unions toward Gaullist “corporatist” notions rather than socialist ones. The Gaullists did have voting support among the industrial workers, but in this election that disappeared. The Catholic labor federation supported Mitterand and joined the Socialist and Communist federations in the Cartel des Gauches. The industrial northeast, a stronghold of Gaullist worker votes, went over to Mitterand as early as the May 5 vote.

Pierre Gaxotte, in Le Figaro (May 11), recalled May 5 as the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Louis XV—the Well-Beloved (in many ways)—which ushered in the short-lived finance ministry of Turgot. However, May 5’s election (first round) represented the loss of the Gaullist strongholds—Paris and the north-east. The other old Gaullist centers—the East and the West—went for Giscard. Gaullist and general right-wing strength has been centered in the northern half of France; the agricultural south has tended to be left-wing-Socialist and Communist (the Communists have massive peasant support in France). Northern France was the old center of feudal law and administrative government; while southern France was the center of civil law and representative institutions. These divisions seemed to have continued in the present political situation.

Chaban-Delmas thus gained strength in the formerly non-Gaullist center, the south-west, around Chaban’s center of power, Bordeaux. But, in the second round election on May 19, this area shifted to the left again. Similarly, the votes of former cabinet member, Jean Royer, the mayor of Tours, shifted to Mitterand in the second round, even though Royer ran as an anti-inflation but even more as an anti-pornographic candidate representing the puritan wing of Catholicism. The poor showing of this campaign paralleled the events surrounding the vote to repeal the new law in Italy permitting divorce. The voters approved the new divorce law by a 3-2 vote. The new law was opposed by the Catholic hierarchy led by the Pope himself (including removal of Catholic spokesmen favoring non-church interference in civil matters such as the abbot of the historic monastery of St-Paul’s Outside the Walls). The Communists and Socialists were joined by the right-wing Italian Liberals and the center Republican’s in supporting the law while the Christian Democrats were allied with the new Fascist party. Italian senate president and former prime minister Fanfani led the Christian Democratic faction that wanted to repeal the law as a step to his returning to power. As he is left-wing on domestic matters and pro-American on foreign affairs his defeat is a major step to an improvement in Italy’s politics—strong anti-inflationary monetary policy which will reduce reliance on the U.S. economically and a more neutralist foreign policy. Italy’s long-standing favorable relations with the Arab oil countries and its mergence as a refining, storage and petro-chemical center increased Italy’s independence from the United States.

Portugal, which has been a keystone of American military power, experienced a total overturn in its politics which should cause it to end its special military ties with the United States and become part of the widening European bloc which Kissinger sees as defining itself in opposition to the United States. The revolution resulted directly from the desire of major elements of Portugal to direct its attentions to concentrating upon Europe, and to experience a modernization of the economy in a capitalist direction. Until now, Portugal has been a strong support for U.S. policy regarding NATO; Portugal’s main interest has been its wars to maintain colonialism in Africa and its alliance with South Africa. Like South Africa, Portuguese colonies had large numbers of European settlers who prefer to be bureaucrats ruling over millions of Africans rather than establishing themselves as a European state in the portions of Africa which they settled and which were not settled by African peoples. Instead of being satisfied with settlement of a small area which was totally European, they preferred rule over a huge native population. The colonialism and monopoly enterprises of the previous regime are being dismantled by the revolution which was led by General Antonio de Spinola, the new president, who was removed from the army in February for publishing, “Portugal and the Future,” in which he called for a Lusitanian Community of Portugal and its former colonies, similar to the British Commonwealth. The African revolts had started in December 1960 in Angola (inspired by the revolt and independence in the Congo in that summer in which the BaKongo people of the lower Congo and northern Angola had taken the lead), and in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. The guerilla war in Guinea was led by the late Amilcar Cabral who was assassinated last fall. The war was based on the stateless Balante people against the pro-Portuguese feudal Fula emirs. Cabral had advocated a future government which would be without a capital and without bureaucratic departments attempting to run people’s lives from a central government. Cabral in his book, Revolution in Guinea, challenged the established Marxist notions of revolution and of society in liberated Guinea. The Portuguese government is composed of liberals, socialists and Communists (a Communist party totally controlled by Moscow and thus extremely moderate; the Communist cabinet members’ role is to maintain low wage rates among the workers on the model of the Soviet Union.)

Outside of Europe, the revolution of the Kurds of northern Iraq is worthy of note. The revolt has been going on for about two decades, and at times was well covered by the New York Times Middle East correspondent who periodically would take a couple of months to cross through the Turkish mountains to reach Kurdistan. There are about two and a half million Kurds in Iraq and about six million in eastern Turkey and north-western Iran. The leader of the Kurds is Mullah Mustafa Barzani. The Kurds were promised independence by the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, one of the post-World War I peace treaties. This treaty gave public recognition to the secret Anglo-French Skyes-Picot Agreement of 1916 whereby France was to receive Syria and England Iraq, from the Ottoman Empire. The Agreement had to do with hoped for petroleum resources which had been feared would fall to German possession in 1914 through the Berlin to Bagdad concession. The important area, the vilayet of Mosul, was a known petroleum reserve and England wanted it. Although the war in Mesopotamia had ended in November 1918 with English forces (Indian troops) sixty miles south of Mosul, English forces gradually moved to and beyond the city. In 1923 as one of the seventeen agreements signed at Lausanne, Turkey agreed to what amounted to English control over Mosul while nothing was said about carrying out the treaty of Sevres’ provision for an independent Kurdistan (which would have included Mosul). Under the English imposed Hashemite family the Kurds’ struggle continued. After the establishment of the Iraq Ba’athist regime in the nineteen sixties, recognition of Kurdish autonomy seemed possible. The Ba’ath, which also rules in Syria, is a complex political philosophy founded by a Syrian Christian on the basis of French Catholic social theory. But, the Iraq Ba’ath did not live up to their agreements and the conflict continues in and around the petroleum center of Mosul. (For a really valuable explanation of Middle East politics and American policy in that area, read Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations; Copeland, a pr man in Cairo for decades, was involved in more crucial diplomatic activities than a thousand ordinary overseas ad men; it is a first-hand deep-cover overview).

Meanwhile, India has exploded an atomic weapon. A very strong criticism was issued by the Gandhi Peace Foundation secretary, Radha Krishna: “The economic costs of this program are unimaginable. There is also the likelihood of it adding to our monstrous inflation. When the country’s economic situation is one of great stress, on account of gross underutilization of industrial capacity and available resources including human resources, the search for a new source of energy of doubtful immediate use, does not exactly square up with our national priorities . . . Is prestige not synonymous with the assertion of our national ideals—no begging for food, our entire people sweating it out in the task of national reconstruction and very friendly relations between the countries in the subcontinent?” Asher Brynes, author of We Give To Conquer, dealing with foreign aid, noted in The Nation (June 8, 1974) that Nobel Peace Prize winner and Rockefeller Foundation spokesman, Dr. Norman Borlaug, had chewed out Indian bureaucrats. Echoing what Milton Friedman had said about foreign aid in India in the 1950’s, Borlaug demonstrated the complete failure of bureaucracy. Since foreign grain is either given by the U.S. to the Indian government when it behaves or is purchased by government agencies, there is no room for private enterprise. The government officials did not buy wheat for reserve stocks, and then flooded the American commodity markets on a panic basis driving up the price two or three times. No oil reserves were undertaken by the government monopolies so the grain regions of India will not be able to produce full yields due to absence of oil for the massive irrigation pump system and of synthetic fertilizers.

For Tuccille

By Roger Lea MacBride

I hear

That in New York this year

The Democrats will select Reid, Samuels or Carey

None of whom to us is the least bit scary.

Libertarians think them the absurdest.

I hear

That in New York this year

The Republicans will choose incumbent Malcolm Wilson

Who if re-elected promises the state to tilt some.

Libertarians’ greeting: a cold blast.

I hear

That in New York this year

The Conservative choice is a surprise: Wilson, Malcolm

Who to a majority may prove less than walcome.

Libertarians need a fistful of aspirin.

I hear

That in New York this year

The Marxist parties will struggle to get on the ballot

Some strange exemplar—maybe this time a shallot?

Libertarians would rather run up Mt. Everest.

When we put it all together, what have we got?
I submit to you a hell of a lot.

The absurdest: Too silly.

A cold blast: Too chilly.

A fistful of aspirin: Too pilly.

A run up Mt. Everest: Too hilly.

All four points agree, you see.
In 1974 it’s Jerome Tuccille!!

Note by Roger Lea MacBride:

The common law copyright in the above has been hastily assigned to Joey Rothbard. While of course I hope that large sums will flow into her coffers as a result of requests to reprint, candor prompts me to admit that the major motive was to protect myself from potentially damaging law suits.

Reply from Joey Rothbard:

Since my taste in poetry is as low as my taste in music, I am tickled to have the copyright, and am eagerly awaiting the large sums.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. dir. by Michael Cimino. With Clint Eastwood.

First, I have to report, as a dyed-in-the-wool Clint Eastwood fan, that this picture is a total disaster. It is not Clint Eastwood’s fault; he struggles manfully through the role. The fault is strictly Cimino’s, may he retire for the rest of his life to television. Eastwood is cast as the hero of a crime caper to recover buried loot, for which both another set of crooks and the police are chasing him. It sounds interesting, but it isn’t, largely because action disappears into the twin killers of any good action-suspense movie: a lot of witless horseplay, interspersed with much moping and “tragedy.”

Walking Tall. dir. by Phil Karlson, with Joe Don Baker.

Walking Tall, on the other hand, is an authentic hero picture, and a smashing success. For weeks, I was put off by news of its “underground” success, and ad comparisons to one of the turkeys of all time, Billy Jack. But the two, rest assured, are as different as day and night. Walking Tall is not only expertly directed and acted, but the plot is truly heroic, and is, as most everyone knows, the true story of Buford Pusser, first as citizen-farmer and then as sheriff, battling a passel of bad guys in rural Tennessee. Left-liberals who complain about Pusser’s “puritanism” ignore the fact that the bad guys’ gambling was crooked and that the hero and friend were nearly killed when they tried to get their money back; and that the moonshine was poisonous enough to kill a dozen customers. Joe Don Baker makes a great hero, in the classic tradition of an innocent who is victimized, and then fights back to conquer the victimizers. It’s great to see Phil Karlson back after many years, and let’s hope that he makes many more films.

Chosen Survivors, dir. by Sutton Roley. With Jackie Cooper.

A pleasant, though scarcely a great, politico-science fiction film, with — let us strongly note—an explicit libertarian content. The villain of the piece is the U.S. government, its computers, and its verdamte “behavioral scientist”; the government shanghais and drugs a group of people chosen by its computer to serve as unwilling guinea pigs in a behavioral science experiment. Shipped far underground to a “totally controlled environment”, the poor experimentees are told that nuclear war has just wiped out virtually everyone on earth, and that they are among the few chosen survivors, who would have to remain underground for years until radiation on the surface had disappeared. It’s all, however, a trick, for the good of “research.”

Interestingly enough, the capitalist in the group, well played by Jackie Cooper, is the only one to smell a rat and to keep agitating for the group to escape. Treated by everyone-as a greed-filled and selfish pariah, it turns out that the pesty capitalist was right all along. For this we can forgive Roley some of the crudities derived from his TV background.

Daisy Miller, dir. by Peter Bogdanovich. With Cybill Shepherd.

Written by Frederic Raphael, from the novel by Henry James.

Dare I say it? Dare I think the unthinkable? Namely, that I have always found Henry James b-o-r-i-n-g; is there anything quite so excruciatingly boring as the old gentleman’s endless, quibbling, and plotless stories? I have said before that Peter Bogdanovich is one of our best young directors, but here he is trapped by his own major leitmotif—his reverence and love for “classical” literature and cinema, his rejection of the avant-garde. For Bogdanovich is here trapped by his neo-classicism—usually a virtue of his—into a faithful translation of the original vapidity to the screen. For James, the most uncinematic of writers, such a faithful rendition may be of interest to antiquarians, but it is a film disaster. If one wants to translate James to the screen, he must be made cinematic; a literal rendition is a disaster, in this case Daisy Miller.

For one point, for those who like that sort of thing the charm of James is his endless filagree and subtlety of language; since all that has to drop out in any movie version, what we are left with is a plotless plot, and endless shots of the passive protagonist of the film standing around moping as he observes Daisy’s pointless antics. Another problem here is that Bogdanovich and Raphael, as sophisticated Americans of the 1970’s, seem incapable of understanding that James’ viewpoint of a century ago, in his endless novels and stories about crude Americans visiting aristocratic Europe, was pro-Europe and anti-American. In pitching the movie in precisely the opposite direction, Bogdanovich and Raphael have made hash of whatever point James was laboring to make.

To top off the whole stew, Bogdanovich fell into another trap, one that has been mentioned by most of the critics. Usually, he is a master at getting sterling performances from his actors; but here he cast the crucial role of Daisy with his current amour, Cybill Shepherd, who either can’t act at all or can’t do so under Bogdanovich’s direction. I suppose it’s something like the old motto that a lawyer should never argue his own case. At any rate, Miss Shepherd, who is supposed to be a charming flirt, rattles on in a machine-gun delivery, and with such an evident lack of even feigned, much less genuine, interest in any of her suitors, that the center of the film never has a chance to hold.

For Kurdistan

Why is it next to impossible for people to approach foreign affairs from the point of view of justice? This chronic difficulty has been fatally aggravated in the last thirty years by the exigencies of the Cold War. National liberation movements are evaluated, by the Establishment and by the Left alike, solely on the basis of their Cold War orientation (are hey “pro” or “anti”—“West”?) rather than on the actual merits or the concrete history or facts that are involved. The result is not only moral blindness, but a positive distortion, on both Right and Left, of what is actually going on in a large portion of the world.

Take, for example, the Kurds, a distinct nation of several million strong who, for literally several millennia, have been striving for independence from an endless series of imperial conquerors and occupiers. In contrast to the Leninist view that imperialism is a product of “finance capitalism”, this phenomenon has been around since one tribe or nation began to conquer and rule over another: in short, imperialism has been almost co-terminous with the existence of the State itself.

The Kurds are still striving for national independence, and they are still as far from ever from attaining it. “Kurdistan”, the once and future goal of the Kurdish people, is a distinct area encompassing northeastern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and southeastern Turkey, with a tiny area in the southern tip of the Soviet Caucasus and another tiny area in the northeastern tip of Syria. In short, Kurdistan is wholly occupied under the heel of three States, as well as two other minor carvers of the Kurdish pie. After World War I, the major thrust of Kurdish Rationalism was against Turkish rule, and Kurdish leader Sherif Pasha vainly presented the case for Kurdish independence from Turkey, at the Versailles conference. Since World War II, the major thrust of Kurdish aspirations has been in Iraq, and the great leader of the Kurdish movement in Iraq for the entire time has been General Mustafa Barzani.

But while the Kurdish national movement in Iraq under Barzani has been a constant force in the Middle East for thirty years, the interpretation and the attitudes toward Barzani and the Kurds have changed drastically with the winds of the Cold War and of the general conflicts in the Middle East. In the post-World War II years, the American Establishment press, headed by the New York Times, treated Barzani as a virtual Communist, and as a pawn of Russian imperial interests. In those days, the U.S. was allied with the Iraqi government, and so any disruption of the status quo was blindly considered subversive and an instrument of the Soviet Union. Actually, Barzani was in no sense a Communist; as a national liberation leader, he took the usual approach of accepting any aid from any quarter that wishes to give it—in much the came way as the American Revolutionaries gladly accepted aid from France, Spain, and other enemies of the British empire. In neither case were the revolutionaries “tools” of anyone; it was simply that they were willing to accept aid without dominance from any quarter in opposition to their imperial masters.

Three decades have passed; and General Barzani and the Kurds are still fighting the Iraqi government on behalf of national independence. In fact, they have been willing to settle for autonomy within Iraq, and have concluded several agreements over the years with the Iraqis. But in each and every case, the Iraq government has betrayed its agreement as soon as it has felt strong enough to resume the fighting against the Kurdish guerrillas. The latest agreement was made in 1970, and the latest betrayal was the refusal to grant the full autonomy to the Kurds that Iraq had pledged itself to grant by March of 1974. Hence, since this March, fighting between the Kurds and Iraq has again broken out: Oh a large scale.

But this time the shoe is on the other foot. The Iraq government is solidly anti-Israel and a staunch defender of the rights of the dispossessed Palestinian Arabs to return to their homes and lands. Hence, the Soviets are now, at least for the moment, pro-Iraq, and it is now the Left that regards the Kurds and poor Barzani as a “tool” of Western imperialism: and of the American allies in Turkey and Iran. True to his policy of accepting aid from any quarter against Iraqi rule, Barzani has indeed been accepting Western aid. Which makes him no more of a “tool of the West” now than he was a “Commie” thirty years ago. Where anyone stands vis à vis Israel or the Soviet Union is irrelevant to the Kurdish issue: that issue is simply the battle of the Kurdish people against age-old and continuing aggression by the imperial rule of the Iraqi State.

The two million Kurds of Iraq are now engaged in a classic national liberation-guerrilla confrontation with the Iraqi government. Once again, as in the armed Kurdish rebellion of the 1960’s, the 40,000-strong Kurdish guerrilla army does very well against Iraqi troops in the mountainous terrain of Kurdistan despite Iraqi use of napalm and once again, the major Iraqi weapon is the barbaric use of air raids and bombs against the civilian Kurdish population. Aid is coming across the Turkish and Iranian frontiers because the Iraq government has imposed a savage blockade on the movement of food into the Kurdish areas. Meanwhile, Iraq has executed nearly 100 leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Bagdad.

A complicating factor in the war is the fact that the great Iraqi oil center of Kirkuk is in Kurdish territory, and that is one area that the Iraqis are particularly reluctant to yield to Kurdish autonomy. So oil politics adds to the intensity of the conflict.

But an ever-constant factor in the shifting power struggles in the Middle East is the unfulfilled and legitimate aspirations of the Kurdish people. Some day, the Kurds will achieve their Kurdistan, and the sooner, Lelt, Right, and Center adjust to that fact, the better for ill concerned; certainly the better for the cause of justice.

The Hiss Case Revisited

It was on the famed perjury conviction of Alger Hiss that Richard Nixon built the formidable reputation that finally gained him the Presidency of the United States. Not only that: the Hiss Case provided the major bulwark of the Red-hunting crusade within the United States, the spy-hunt, the general fears of the “international Communist conspiracy”, and even much of the Cold War mythology itself.

The clinching evidence against Hiss arose from the allegation that the American government documents found in admitted Communist spy Whittaker Chambers’ famous pumpkin had been typed on Alger Hiss’ own typewriter, and that the Hiss defense itself had introduced into evidence the very typewriter that was then determined by experts to have typed these crucial Pumpkin Papers. Since the defense itself had introduced the typewriter as Hiss’ own, Hiss was then inevitably hoist on his own petard. The case was clinched.

Hiss could only feebly maintain that the FBI had committed “forgery by typewriter”, in short, had constructed a new typewriter to fit the typing on the documents, and then had led him to discover it in a Washington junk shop, masquerading as his own. Who could believe such a wild story? Who could believe that the then sainted FBI could do such a devious and foul deed of frameup?

In the light of the Watergate, we are all wiser now about what the U.S. government and the FBI are capable of doing. The first crack in the formidable government case came in the first edition of Richard Nixon’s famous book of self-congratulation, “My Six Crises”. In that work, Nixon stated that the FBI had “found” the typewriter. But since Alger Hiss himself had presumably discovered it in the junk shop, the implication was startling: for if the FBI had really “found” it, then it must have planted the typewriter in the shop as a decoy, and led Hiss to find it later; and, furthermore, what had the FBI done to the typewriter in the meantime? In the second edition of the Nixon book, the telling statement was changed to the opposite: that the FBI had not been able to find the typewriter. As the New York Times writes (May 3, 1974), “Mr. Nixon explained the change at the time by saying that it was an error by his researcher.”

Indeed! We are now all too familiar with Mr. Nixon’s “errors” and “explanations.” But now, in the already infamous Nixon transcripts, we find another cryptic and illuminating reference to the Hiss typewriter. In a conversation of Feb. 28, 1973, Nixon advises John Dean to study the Hiss case as a good example of how to get things done. Said the Tricky One: “We got the typewriter; we got the pumpkin papers.” So; “we” got the typewriter, eh? For almost twenty-five years, since his conviction in 1950, Alger Hiss has been trying to obtain the FBI files on his case; it is high time that these documents be released, and that the whole Hiss Case be re-examined.

From The Old Curmudgeon

What Price “Purity”? Sam Konkin’s New Libertarian Notes, which specializes in wrapping itself in the “purity” mantle and judging other libertarians thereby, has, in its May issue, an attack on the FLP for nominating the “impure” Percy Greaves for the U.S. Senate. And yet, in the very same “Christian Libertarian” issue, NLN contains an article by the Rev. Edmund Opitz, who is not only at least as impure as Greaves (to employ some Christian charity), but has spent a large part of his energy and output in the last couple of decades to attacking anarchism. So what price “purity” now? To mix our metaphors, I guess it all depends on whose “purity” is being gored. How did the Good Book say it: “Let him who is without impurity cast the first stone.”

Contra Federal Campaign Funding

By Bill Evers

Various proposals to limit campaign spending and to substitute in whole or in part money taken from the taxpayers are at present being debated in the halls of Congress and in the news media. These proposals are all direct attacks on the First Amendment rights of free speech and a free press.

Any limitation on an individual’s right to contribute infringes upon his right of free expression. The essence of freedom of speech is the prohibition of governmental interference with a man’s hiring a hall to say whatever he wants.

Similarly, the essence of freedom of the press is the prohibition of governmental interference with publishing.

If a person is prohibited from spending money to express his support for a political candidate, then that person’s liberties have been severely undermined. An election commission with tyrannical powers would be presiding over political expression.

Citizen’s Rights?

The proposal to have tax-supported election campaigns not only takes a citizen’s earnings, but puts that money in the pockets of men the citizen may very well oppose.

Michael Killian of the Chicago Tribune zeroed in on the issue involved: “Picture yourself as a South Side Chicago black who has just turned over a substantial portion of his income to the IRS and then turns on his television set to watch part of it being spent on a TV spot for George Wallace. Or a Vermont conservative watching a federally financed George McGovern talking about how this country needs more taxes.”

To add some parallel examples to Killian’s, imagine a New Leftist looking at a Nixon plug he has paid for, a feminist paying for an ad for an anti-abortion candidate, or an anarchist who doesn’t like any of the candidates he is paying to promote.

Anyone who has paid his federal income tax recently knows that the new “checkoff” program of federal financing pays only for the Presidential campaigns of the Establishment’s Republican and Democratic parties.

Choices Limited

When this program was launched, it was stated that those who participated could designate to which party they wished to have the tax money go. But the tax form does not allow this.

Supporters of the Peace & Freedom Party, the American Independent Party, the Libertarian Party, the Socialist Workers Party, and other groups are forced to pay for Republican and Democratic campaigns.

Most of the various campaign spending bills now in Congress require a government – sanctioned classification of groups into major parties and minor parties.

The groups designed as minor are effectively frozen into a situation in which uncertain prospects, little money, and stringent requirements paralyze them.

Status Quo Maintained

At a time when the public is dissatisfied with the large political parties, they are about to ensure their own wealthy and perpetual existence. In September 1973, a Gallup poll showed that one-third of the American public identifies with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats.

At a time when respect for politicians and trust in the government itself is at a low ebb, the established politicians are engineering a successful new raid on the taxpayers’ pocketbook.

At the same time, corporate liberal business figures (Miles Rubin, Daniel Noyes, Stanley Steinbaum, and Max Palevsky) are rallying behind the idea of tax-funded elections because they hope to re-stabilize a system shaken by the Watergate revelations.

In the November 10, 1973 issue of National Journal Reports, Mrs. Susan B. King, who runs the Center for Public Financing of Elections, is quoted on the large support the idea has received from the wealthy.

Big-Business Support

Business Week for September 15, 1973 reported that many business executives are strongly in favor of limiting campaign contributions and says that “many are willing to consider some government subsidy”

These corporate liberal leaders feel uncomfortable with the local interests who gain a voice through present-day election spending. Instead these corporate liberals, whose own activities are national in scope feel comfortable with the politicking of government-business planning groups like Nelson Rockefeller’s Critical Issues Commission or the Committee for Economic Development.

Reforms’ Loopholes

Under the proposed campaign reforms, we can expect simply that payments from large business and labor groups will no longer be in money form. Personnel will be donated, equipment will be loaned meeting sites will be made available at no cost.

Campaigns for programs that are linked in the public’s mind with a specific candidate will be promoted by “public interest” groupings of the candidate’s followers.

In sum, the proposed campaign financing laws are an assault on free political expression. As Yale professor Ralph Winter says “A law forbidding someone from spending a certain amount cannot be distinguished from a law forbidding speeches of over 10 minutes in public parks.” In addition, the law favors the incumbent politicians and those who like the American system as it is.

*Reprinted from The Stanford Daily, April 4, 1974.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 7

JULY, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

WORLD-WIDE INFLATION

It is no secret that virtually the entire world is now suffering from a severe “double-digit” inflation, and that we have all moved to a scary new plateau of inflationary acceleration. It is no comfort to us “Austrian” economists that we have predicted the current mess; it is still less comfort that very few people have taken the Austrian lessons to heart. It is true that the free gold market has finally begun to price gold realistically in relation to the depreciating currencies of the world; but the monetary authorities show no real disposition to do anything to halt the looming takeoff to worldwide currency destruction. Do the monetary authorities, the politicians, and the Establishment economists understand that the cause of the mess is a continuing expansion of the money supply in the various nations? Yes and no; many of them don’t know, while those who do understand, mumble about the “political realities” and go along with the accelerating destruction. The much-vaunted “tight money” policy of the Federal Reserve System is simply a grisly joke; money is not “tight” when the Fed still continues to increase the money supply at a rate of approximately 10% per annum. Really tight money doesn’t mean high and rising interest rates, which are inevitable in the later stages of an inflationary boom and reflect “inflation premiums” on the price of credit. Tight money means ceasing to inflate the money supply, period; or even decreasing it. That such truly tight money is scarcely in the offing was seen by the response of the Fed in pouring in $1 billion of new money to save the Franklin National Bank from the consequences of its own misdeeds.

The public is solidly opposed to inflation, as it increasingly hits their savings and their cost of living, and as they increasingly find that rising interest rates make stocks an extraordinarily bad hedge against inflation. Unfortunately, the public cannot be expected to understand the arcane processes by which the Fed and other central banks keep increasing the money supply and thereby bring about continuing and accelerating inflation. One thing the public knows—at least for the time being, while its memory is fresh: price and wage controls don’t work, in fact only aggravate the inflationary problem, and cause distortions, severe lags in real income, and shortages throughout the economy. One heartening sign of this public knowledge was the recent Canadian election, which was fought largely on the question of price and wage control for the severe Canadian inflation: the Progressive Conservatives called for price and wage control, while Trudeau and the Liberals countered by pointing to the acknowledged failure of such controls in the U.S. The result was a sweeping victory for the Liberals.

Unfortunately, the public is still ignorant of the cause of inflation: the expansion of the money supply by the Fed and the other central banks. Even some of the nation’s “gold bugs”, who oppose printing press paper money and call for a restoration of gold as money, are so ignorant of the processes of monetary expansion that they hold that the Fed cannot expand the money supply any further; hence, they are predicting a deflation—a fall in prices and the cost of living—at the very time when the inflation is accelerating dangerously. Unfortunately, now that the last vestiges of the gold standard are gone, the Fed has the power to create more money indefinitely; and so long as we continue to allow them to retain such power, they will continue to use it, with disastrous results.

The important point to realize is that the banking system, and particularly the Federal Reserve Banks, create money out of thin air. They are, in short, legalized counterfeiters. The Fed does this in two ways: one is simply printing cash, or Federal Reserve Notes, which are legal tender money. But more insidious, and more significant a way in the modern world, is the Fed’s creation out of thin air of “checkbook money”, or “demand deposits”, which are redeemable at any time in cash, and which serve as “high powered money”, as reserves for a sixfold pyramiding’ of “checkbook money” by the tightly controlled commercial banking system. The Fed creates this “high-powered money” by buying any asset on the “open market”, i.e. by buying an asset from some member of the public. In practice, these assets are always U.S. government securities, but they don’t have to be; buying them is simply a greater convenience for the Fed and for government as a whole. It is these “open market purchases” that the Fed is still, at this very moment, indulging in, week after week, to pump inflationary new money into the economy.

Thus, suppose that the Fed purchases a U.S. government bond now held by John Jones for $1000. It gets the bond and adds it to the asset column on its books. Where does the Fed “get” the $1000 with which to buy the bond? It gets it by creating a new $1000, in the form of a check on itself. John Jones can only use the check by depositing it in whatever bank he has an account. This adds to his money supply to the tune of $1000. But the important point is that his bank takes that check and deposits it with the Fed, with which each commercial bank has a checking account. This adds $1000 to the reserves of the banking system at the Fed, and the banks then can and do create new checkbook money of their own at a multiple of 6:1, so that $6000 of new checkbook money, or “demand deposits”, are quickly added to the economy. And so when the Fed buys $1 billion of government bonds from the public, it quickly causes the creation of $6 billion of new checkbook money in the economy, which adds fuel to the inflation.

The first necessary step to stopping the inflation is, then, simplicity itself, once we penetrate to the arcane processes of how the money supply expands: a command to the Fed to stop, forevermore, any purchases of assets; better yet, would be to gain credibility by forcing the Fed to sell some of its assets and thereby contract the swollen supply of checkbook money. Of course, longer-run measures would also be vital: including the separation of money and banking from the State by a return to the gold standard at a realistic gold “price”, and the abolition of the Federal Reserve System. But the first step would be a permanent command to the Fed to stop! its inflationary process. And the Fed will, of course, never do this unless it is compelled by mass public pressure from below. And to do that we need a massive public education in the cause of the inflationary disaster. Furthermore, similar public pressure on the other central banks of the world is also vitally necessary.

Destutt de Tracy: Early French Classical Liberal

By Leonard P. Liggio
Department of History, City College, CUNY

July 20 is the 220th anniversary of the birth of Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), a founder of the Ideologue school and a leading laissez-faire economist. He was raised by his mother and his grandmother, who was the grand-niece of the leader of Jansenism, Arnauld. He was a disciple of the Encyclopedists, and especially of Voltaire whom he visited at Ferney. He read and re-read the works of his hero of reason. He was elected in 1789 a deputy to the Nobles in the Estates-General, and with the Marquis de Lafayette, he led the assault on feudalism and government privileges which marked the French Revolution. He later retired to the suburb of Auteuil to the house of Mme. Helvetius, which served as a center for the last of the eighteenth century philosophes, Condorcet and Cabanis. Condorcet died in prison during the Terror and Destutt de Tracy barely escaped execution. He returned to Mme. Helvetius’ home and worked wtth the physician Cabanis who married Charlotte de Grouchy, the sister of Mme. Sophie de Condoreet, widow of the philosopher, and translator of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Mme. de Condorcet married the Irish general, O’Conor, and with Cabanis and Dominique Joseph Garat published the complete works of Condorcet, which became an intellectual support for the opposition to Napoleon. Along with the historians, Constantin Volney and Pierre Claude Daunou, and the editor, J.-B. Say, the Ideologues exercised a major intellectual influence during the period of the Directory (1795-99) and the Consulate (1799–1804). But, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, he denounced the Ideologues as his most dangerous opponents.

Destutt de Tracy’s major work, Elements of Ideology, included in its section on will his analysis of political economy. The major influences on his psychological thought were Locke and Condillac. Destutt de Tracy and Dupont de Nemours were the two Frenchmen who had the longest association and influence on Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson translated and published (in 1811) Destutt de Tracy’s Commentary on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (written in 1806 but not published in France until 1817). One of the few works on his thought is Jean Cruet, La Philosophie Morale & Sociale de Destutt de Tracy (1909), from whom the following quotations are taken:

“The social philosophy of Destutt de Tracy included a political part and an economic part. Such are very much in effect the two essential elements of the revolutionary ideal. The Revolution had been at the same time a political crisis and an economic crisis; it had been the protestation of the public conscience against the despotic regime; but it did on the other hand profoundly modify the economic regime of France. We find in the works of Destutt de Tracy the expression of this double tendency.

“One has often said that the great merit of the Revolution was to have founded its political ideal on a perfect knowledge of human nature. It had taken men as they are and not as they ought to be. It allowed a free field to human egoism. In giving as a foundation to his social philosophy a psychological study of men, Destutt de Tracy rested in the revolutionary tradition.” (pp. 40-41)

“Finally the political philosophy of Destutt de Tracy is an individualist philosophy. For the French Revolution had been—one cannot doubt it—unreservedly individualist. Destutt de Tracy had defended individual property, condemned the intervention of the State in the affairs of individuals, and declared on several occasions that communism was a “utopia” or an “aberration.” The economic system of competition, of freedom of labor, of wages, and of heredity, appeared to him the strong support of the political ideal of the Revolution . . . The socialists and the republicans (liberals) have, to our conception, the same political ideal founded on different economic principles. Is that not the secret of their conflicts, and also of their union against the parties of the Old Regime (conservatives)?” (pp. 165–66).

“The economic theories of Destutt de Tracy are today still those of the republican liberal party. Destutt de Tracy rejected, as equally contrary to the intimate nature of man, the Christian concept and the Communist concept of society. Destutt de Tracy is a utilitarian and an individualist: with that double title he is the type of republican without epithet. After having read the Elements of Ideology, one understands better the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” (1789), at once in its political part and in its economic part.” (p. 100)

“From the faculty of feeling and the faculty of willing is born the idea of personality; from the idea of personality is born-in its turn the idea of property. Property has its origin in a natural and necessary fact. Property was a fact, it does not depend on us to make it that or not to make it that. . . There is a fundamental property, anterior and superior to all institutions. In other terms, for Destutt de Tracy, the foundation of property is the psychological order. Man is born property-owner.” (pp. 52-53)

Destutt de Tracy considered government to be sterile at best, but generally a source of exploitation. He organized the deposition of Napoleon in 1814 (as he had sought to do for ten years) and was a source of support for public and secret opposition to the succeeding governments. CI

New Forum Policy

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Conservative Myths In History

LEFTISM: FROM DE SADE AND MARX TO HITLER AND MARCUSE, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974), 653 pp., $12.95.

reviewed by Ralph Raico
Department of History
State University College at Buffalo

An important part of the process of transforming the American right into an imitation of old-line European conservatism (a transformation which Murray Rothbard in particular has described very well in a number of places) has been the seeping into American rightist thinking of the philosophy of history that sees the germs of modern “decay” and “chaos” in the various critical movements of the past few centuries, especially the Enlightenment, but going back even to the Reformation and, beyond that, to certain medieval “heresies.” All modern ideologies are seen as anti-theologies, and God forbid that any significant historical change should be interpreted as the result of earthly, economic interests. The incorporation of elements of this Weltanschauung has given current American conservatism an air of profundity, old-world wisdom and downright “class” which is the main product retailed, for instance, by the “Intercollegiate Studies Institute” and by Modern Age, as well as by National Review in its more “philosophical” moments. When carried through by a genuine scholar like Eric Voegelin, this approach has a certain interest. The present work is an example of the approach at its very worst. So, with an eye to the possible impact of Leftism in reinforcing a fundamentally reactionary and anti-libertarian interpretation of the course of modern history among American rightists, I beg the reader’s indulgence to venture a lengthy and what could be termed spirited attempt at nipping that impact in the bud.

A comment is in order concerning Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s scholarliness: there is no doubt in my mind that the greater part of his renown within the American right is due to the circumstance that (as he says of himself in the Preface) he reads twenty languages and speaks eight. This, and the fact that he travels to interesting places, rather than his mediocre and derivative books or his remarkably uninformative column in National Review on continental affairs, account, I think, for what reputation he has in this country. Now, Leftism is filled with close to two hundred pages of back-of-the-book notes, demonstrating his knowledge of languages and his wide reading, and these are evident also in the text. (Some of the apercus that are supposed to be the fruit of this rich learning, though, I find ridiculous: to the pensee, for instance, that “socialism and the Jewish mind do not easily mix,” my reaction would be: Someone ought to tell them about it!) But the quality of K-L’s thought is so low, his power of reasoning so dim, that the rest just does not matter very much. Take a look at this try at linguistic fireworks, at the beginning of the chapter on “Right and Left”:

Right and left have been used in Western civilization from times immemorial with certain meanings: right (German rechts) had a positive, left a negative connotation. In all European languages (including the Slavic idioms and Hungarian) right is connected with “right” (ius), rightly, rightful, in German gerecht (just), the Russian pravo (law), pravda (truth), whereas in French gauche also means “awkward, clumsy,” (in Bulgar: Levitsharstvo). The Italian sinistro can mean left, unfortunate or calamitous. The English sinister can mean left or dark. The Hungarian word for “right” is jobb which also means “better,” while bal (left) is used in composite nouns in a negative sense: balsors is misfortune.

How this stuff is conceivably connected with the political terms “left” and “right”—which stem from the accident that radicals were seated to the left in the French National Assembly of 1789 and reactionaries to the right—will perhaps be made clear to us in the hereafter, when we no longer see as through a glass darkly. Meanwhile, I submit that we have here to do with an author whose sense of judgment is fundamentally spoiled and who is not above trying to show off (as another example of his corrupt judgment, there is the fact that he mentions Tom Paine four times in the book, never discussing his political ideas, but twice mentioning that he was the hero of a play by a certain Nazi playwright named Hanns Johst). All in all, I cannot recall ever coming across a case such as K-L’s, where a scholarly apparatus of similar magnitude was put to the service of such a low-grade intellectual effort. A few preliminary examples: the author is discussing the criminal code of the Soviet Union; he suggests that the very existence of punishment there contradicts the regime’s official philosophy: “since materialism rejects the notion of free will, why should there be punishment for anything?” This is all he says on the subject, so we are left to wonder: What does it profit a writer on social questions to read twenty languages and yet never to have heard of the deterrentist theory of punishment? In another place, K-L advances the claims of the neo-liberals, like Roepke, as against older liberals such as Mises, stating that the former “admitted curbs on mammothism and colossalism to preserve competition. They thought that the state had a right and then a duty to correct possible abuses of economic freedom—just as we give a mature person a driving license and the right to travel wherever he wants but still make him submit to traffic laws.” With grade-school stuff like this, just whom does K-L think he is writing for? Moreover, there are little gaps in his reading which tend to disqualify him from writing on the subjects he does: note fifty-two on page 482 shows that he probably has not even heard of the Clapham-Ashton-Hartwell view on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the British working-class or at least certainly has no idea of its significance.

K-L’s languages and life of reading allow him to make disdainful comments (justifiable, I suppose) about all kinds of ignorant, man-in-the-street Americans (it’s part of his indictment of democracy, you see); but, judged by the standards of the better sort of academic thinking prevalent here, he doesn’t begin to qualify as a serious intellectual.

In coming to grips with Leftism, we can leave aside the completely superficial discussions of key concepts in social thought, such as “liberty,” “equality,” “democracy,” etc., contained in the first few sections; the book is clearly no treatise on political philosophy. We ought to note, however, K-L’s petty sniping at such “leftist” concepts as equality before the law—as well as his sneaky rationalizations, sprinkled through the book, of such oppressive institutions as European serfdom and even Negro slavery (“In many cases the blacks could have been grateful to have ended as house slaves in Virginia rather than as human sacrifices in bloodcurdling ceremonies such as the Zenanyana, the ‘Evil Night’ in Dahomey”). And in his continuing attack on democracy, childish touches are not lacking: rape is referred to as “sexual democracy” and cannibalism as “nutritional democracy” (why not “aristocracy”?). On this level of analysis of concepts, however, his definitions of “right” and “left” deserve some examination, since they help determine the structure of the book. It is here that the mishmash begins in earnest.

How, the reader might wonder, does Hitler wind up on the left? The answer is simple: everything evil is identified with the left in K-L’s mind, just as everything good is identified with the right. Get these as unbiased definitions, meant to help us organize modern political ideas and developments: “The right stands for liberty, a free, unprejudiced form of thinking, a readiness to preserve traditional values (provided they are true values), a balanced view of the nature of man . . . but the left is the advocate of the opposite principles.” So that Hitler—even if he hadn’t been a believer in democracy (K-L’s interpretation) was necessarily a leftist. All methods of political repression are leftist, according to our author—for instance, censorship (hasn’t K-L ever heard of the Index of Probited Books?—or was this a “leftist” element in the Church of the Counter-Reformation?). For this reason, he claims that even Metternich’s system was partially leftist: “it assumed authoritarian features and aspects which must be called leftist, as for instance the elaborate police system based on espionage, informers, censorship and controls in every direction.” My own scholarship is, alas, quite modest; but even I have come across the fact that, among the penalties imposed on the Arians at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) was that all copies of Arius’s books had to be surrendered under pain of death; so that the history of the thin hand of the Church guiding the strong arm of the State in smashing heretics and intellectual deviants goes back at least as far as that. Informers were used by the various Inquisitions, of course, and part of the instrument of recantation which Galileo was forced to sign under threat of torture compelled him to inform on other Copernicans. (Naturally, the ecclesiastical powers have not been able to do much along these lines in more recent centuries, but then it has been a long while since the world belonged to them.) Guess for yourself the value and integrity of a work that starts with this fundamental distinction: “If we identify, in a rough way, the right with freedom, personality, and variety, and the left with slavery, collectivism, and uniformity, we are employing semantics that make sense.” Thus, the implication is that a sensible terminology would classify the Romanovs as leftists; and Jefferson and Paine, who are termed “mild leftists,” would have to be moderate supporters of collectivism.

The heart (and bulk) of this much too long book is constituted of a history—a history of “leftist” ideas in the modern period and of their working out in political developments. K-L’s presentation of key episodes in this continuing story is completely tendentious and largely worthless. To take one example in connection with early modern history: he cites the Anabaptist excesses at Muenster, but not the preceding attempts by both Lutherans and Catholics to annihilate, by the most brutal methods imaginable, peaceful Anabaptists who asked only for the right to ignore the State. His chapter on the French Revolution is a joke. He finds himself able to discuss the taking of the Bastille (and to conclude that the Marquis de Sade inspired the whole incident, as well as the brutality that accompanied it), without any reference to the fact that the activity in Paris was a response to a military coup put afoot by the Court. He describes in absurd detail various horrors committed during the Reign of Terror, but does not even mention the war going on at the time against most of Europe, nor does he inform the reader that the French perhaps had cause for panic in the circumstance that the King and Queen had betrayed them to an enemy who had publicly threatened to give the city of Paris over to military execution. Very significant is that K-L scrupulously ignores the rather well-known thesis of Tocqueville, that the Revolution (and Napoleon) basically simply continued the statist and centralizing tendencies of the monarchy: this is an interpretation which he, with his uncritical adulation of European monarchism and his hatred of the great Revolution of 1789 (a hatred which is nothing but Taine shorn of every shred of intelligence, or, better, Gaxotte shorn of all esprit and style), could not afford to consider.

The lengthy descriptions of leftist atrocities is a favorite pastime of K-L’s in this book. Meanwhile, massacres committed under the auspices of monarchy, imperialism, rightist regimes or especially his own Church are either sloughed off with an adjective such as “harsh” or consigned to utter oblivion. Thus, we look in vain for gory details when it is a question of the expulsion of the Spanish Jews in 1492, the activities of Franco’s Moorish troops during the Civil War, or the atrocities of Leopold II’s agents in the Congo (K-L foolishly talks about the Congo’s brutal exploitation by “private companies”—trying slyly to shift the debit from the side of imperialism and monarchism to the side of capitalism, by passing over the fact that these “private companies” were set up and largely owned by the King of the Belgians). As for any number of rivers of blood shed by the political and religious powers legitimized through tradition or by regimes defending the status quo there is not a word: not a word, for example, of what the Crusaders did when they captured Jerusalem in 1099, of what those who responded to Innocent Ill’s call did to the Albigensians, of what French Catholics did to the Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day, of what the Versailles soldiers did to the Communards in 1871 (they killed about twice as many people as were killed during the Reign of Terror). Since K-L is into dwelling on the interesting little physiological facets of political killings, he might have shared with his readers an example or two of how the kings of Europe for centuries put to death those they judged to be felons. A very good example would be Damiens, executed in 1759 for attempting to assassinate Louis XV. (The description is in Iwan Bloch’s biography of de Sade, which K-L cites.) It is possible that no other human being in the history of our race ever suffered as much in one day as did Damiens.

The snide remarks K-L permits himself in regard to leftists are totally inexcusable and shameful. “Demolition,” he asserts, “delights all leftists, fills them with diabolic glee” (including Kautsky, Bernstein and Jean Jaures?—or were these perhaps men of the right?). He refers to “the great leftist delight, i.e., the defiling of cemeteries” (look—I personally know two or three leftists who, I am morally certain, do not delight in defiling cemeteries!). This garbage is repeated again and again: “One should never forget: Sadism is the outstanding characteristic of the entire left.” He terms FDR “nearly insane” and says that “he could not be held morally responsible for many of his utterances and actions” (but the most he says about Hitler along these silly psychiatric lines is that he was “neurotic”). He piggishly calls American student demonstrators “screaming and shouting bearded spooks.” For the following, the reader (unless he or she has a copy of the book handy) must take my word that it appears in Leftism: “Nicolas Calas exhorted leftists with the words, ‘Comrades, be cruel!’ Hitler followed the call. Not in vain have we been told by Charles Fourier, grandfather of socialism, in his Theorie de l’unite universelle: ‘The office of the butcher is held in high esteem in Harmony.’” Just take in for a moment this thoroughly dishonest juxtaposition of statements! K-L is obviously making a desperate gamble on the ignorance of his readers, on their not being aware of what is probably the single best known of Fourier’s ideas: namely, that he wanted to make all socially-necessary work enjoyable; one method was through raising the social esteem of indispensable but dirty jobs, such as the butcher’s. To use this concept of Fourier’s in order to associate him somehow with political atrocities and Hitler is really as simple and direct a case of intellectual knavery as I have ever seen in print in my lifetime.

The section on Marx is filled with all sorts of personal nonsense about the great socialist. K-L writes of Marx’s “mad ambitions” as a young man, i.e., to make a name for himself as a poet (surely, every young man who had ideas of that kind must be mentally unbalanced!), and states that: “The non-fulfillment of his (artistic) dreams made him a revolutionary, and here we have a strong analogy with Hitler.” (Really, instead of irrelevantly footnoting articles in Hungarian in Munich reviews on the non-existence of serfdom in medieval Hungary, such an assertion as this one might be thought to require some substantiation—but none is furnished.) We have petty shots: “There is no doubt that Marx, initially at least, loved his wife, and daughters dearly . . .” (emphasis added), as well as large-scale silliness: “the dominant characteristic of Marx: self-hatred” (actually, his dominant characteristic was rebellion). K-L’s plain lack of intelligence comes out in his comment on Engels in his relationship to Marx: “This wealthy manufacturer from the Ruhr Valley also had sufficient funds to support the penurious cofounder of international socialism and communism. Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ thus existed long before Lenin.” Just what is this supposed to mean? The words say that Engels was a dupe, a kind of 1940’s Hollywood-type, maybe like Edward G. Robinson or John Garfield—but such an interpretation of Friedrich Engels’ role in the history of socialism would be . . . incorrect.

What to say about K-L’s treatment of classical liberalism? Well, first of all, there are incomprehensible stupidities: he thinks that the Manchester School was contemporaneous with Adam Smith, and he lists Bismarck (and Mazzini) as an “Old Liberal” along with Gladstone, Cobden (who evidently did not belong to the Manchester School) and Mises! Then, to smear German liberalism, he takes the National Liberals to be representative of it, never mentioning the truly liberal Freisinnige Partei and its great leader, Eugen Richter: the difference is that, where the former supported the laws against the socialists and Catholics, and protectionism, imperialism and militarism, the latter opposed these. Whatever K-L’s forte is, it is not analytical thought, so that it would not be worth our while to enter into an examination of his ideas as to the evolution of liberalism through various phases. As an anti-totalitarian Christian conservative, what he is trying to prove, of course (so what else is new?), is that classical liberalism somehow set the stage for totalitarianism and statism, in Germany and elsewhere. But, to prove anything, one must deal with coherent propositions. Now, K-L says that: “it is not surprising that old liberalism became illiberal. If one is solemnly convinced that all strong stands, all firm affirmations, all orthodoxy, all absolutes in thought are evil. . .” etc., etc. But he himself lists Mises and Gladstone (and one would suppose he would include writers like Spencer and de Molinari) as Old Liberals. Did these men not take strong stands, not make firm affirmations? What value as historical interpretation could we expect to find contained in such a collection of absurdities, distortions and self-contradictions as this?

The prime example of the bitter fruits of liberalism and “leftism” is, naturally, Nazism. It came into being because the Germans “divorced themselves from religion and willfully turned their backs on great traditions.” The old conservative song-and-dance. Yet what evidence is there that the majority of Germans who voted for the Nazis were not sincere Christians? K-L correctly points out that part of the Nazi vote came from voters who had previously supported the “liberal” parties (such as they were in Germany by then); but why not mention that the Enabling Act of March, 1933, the basis for the Nazi consolidation of power, was supported by the Catholic Center Party in the Reichstag? At times, Catholicism did offer some resistance to the Nazis, and deserves credit for it. On the other hand, there were instances such as the proclamation issued by Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna, speaking for the bishops of Austria, which celebrated the “extraordinary accomplishments of National Socialism in the sphere of voelkisch and economic reconstruction as well as social policy.” This was in 1938. Naturally, the complexity of this cluster of problems is not something that K-L could be expected to do justice to. More generally, as a brief response to this line of conservative interpretation, we would have to say: the maintenance of Christian faith cannot be the key to solving the problem of how to have a humane world, since Christian faith has historically been compatible with every manner of swinishness perpetrated on human beings, especially before humanism came to temper religious fanaticism and liberalism to limit its possibilities for doing harm. In any case, it is not for a member of that Church to lay the blame for massive diabolical mistreatment of human beings at the door of “leftism,” agnosticism and liberalism.

Although they do nothing to redress the balance, there are a few good points to be noted in Leftism: K-L has an attractive curiosity about and love of certain kinds of facts—facts about persons, places, tribes and nations and their traditions, and so on. Many of his judgments and values are commendable: he is a strong revisionist on the Paris Settlement of 1919; dislikes Wilson, Roosevelt and Churchill heartily; hates Eleanor (although he overestimates her importance); has contempt for American left-liberals and fellow-travellers; realizes that the war criminals of World War II included those who caused the ovens to be lit not only at Auschwitz and Dachau, but also in downtown Hamburg and Tokyo, in Dresden and Hiroshima. The author passes some friendly comments on anarchism and admits that he would not be reluctant to call himself a “Christian Conservative Anarchist” (but what could this amount to if he is, for example, a lover of the Franco regime? Probably not much more than a relish in “variety”). Occasionally, the quality of his thinking passes muster: Chapter 20, for instance, on some of the dilemmas historically faced by European conservative thought, is decent enough. But this is all in all as bad a book as has come to my notice in many years; and I believe I have given adequate grounds for this judgment. If the reader thinks I have been too “harsh” on K-L, let him or her recall his slanders, explicit and implied, on hundreds of thousands of socialist men and women, the class of people for whose intelligence and good intentions Hayek had enough respect to dedicate to them his Road to Serfdom.

In the minds of many of those who keep up with Buckley’s magazine and with the American conservative movement, there is, I think, the sense that writers like Russell Kirk and Kuehnelt-Leddihn are being presented as the conservative counterparts of libertarians like Mises and Hayek; the former are their big guns and deep scholars, some attempt at an answer to the obvious excellence of the latter. Actually, as symbolizing the relative intellectual power behind the two movements, this notion seems to me entirely correct.

Comment On The CLA

By Lynn Kinsky

I was just reading the April 1974 Forum and would like to take issue with your critique of the CLA. It would appear to me that you are falling into the same factionalist “bag” that Konkin and others are into, by insisting that there is one route to social change and one party line and we can’t have a movement unless we’re all doing the same thing. (For what it’s worth I think such insistence on conformity is a major cause of the FLP’s problems.)

In fact, American society is not a unity—it is composed of numerous sub-cultures, even within the middle class, which is hardly the only class (if one can define classes with any precision in the first place). As I see it one of the real strengths of the Southern California libertarian movement is that it implicitly realizes or takes into account this cultural pluralism. The question is not should we ally with the straights or with the freaks this year (which often seems to be the way you New Yorkers operate) but rather who feels most competent and comfortable working with which sector. People who are science fiction fans can work at bringing libertarianism to science fiction types (who have already been softened up by writers such as Heinlein and Anderson). Libertarians who are nudists can work with local free-beach groups to expand that area of civil liberties. Other libertarians can work with nuclear power plant opponents to work for the repeal of the very evil Price-Anderson Act; others can work for the repeal of laws discriminating against women, blacks, gays. People who are into conventional political action can do that, and can work with one or several parties depending on their evaluation of the situation. Meanwhile, people who are down on political action can get involved in the League of Non-Voters or some other group—I doubt if they ever change anyone’s mind about voting or not (most elections are doing good if 30% of the eligible citizens vote) but they do provide a rationale for people’s not voting that delegitimizes government in those people’s minds. People who are into changing society by creating alternative institutions should try their hand at that. What it comes down to is that each person’s interests and talents are different and it makes sense for them to advance libertarianism the best way they can—I think in business it’s called division of labor and diversified marketing.

(All of this is not to say that I think every method is equally effective—I’ve got my favorites and am doing graduate work in sociology specifically to expand my knowledge of social reality and the means of affecting it.)

On the specific issue of the CLA—I really don’t see where it’s a case of that or the Lib Party (in fact the CLA doesn’t even see it that way—they support LP candidates Susel, Taylor, Bergland, (and Jindrich) for PFP write-ins on the primary). The election coming up is a primary—with Keathley trying to get the Peace and Freedom nomination. It isn’t a case of supporting her or Hospers—the Libertarian Party, since it isn’t on the ballot (but PFP is) isn’t involved in the June 4 election at all except for Jindrich in a non-partisan race. If by some chance Keathley gets the nomination then we’re in the position of having a libertarian on the ballot (Keathley) and another as a write-in (Hospers) in November. Sure, then there’s a problem of who to push for and vote for but to my mind it isn’t insurmountable—I expect I would push Keathley among my friends over at school (who are mainly young Marxists and who would find Hospers hopelessly bourgeois) and Hospers among the rest of the people I know (who would consider Keathley too radical). As to my vote (and that of other movement libertarians) I would probably advocate writing in Hospers on the grounds that neither of them will win and so the votes should be used for the purpose of trying to get the LP qualified to be on the ballot in future elections.

And as to whether Keathley, Timko, etc should be in PFP in the first place—I expect it’s the one political party they can feel comfortable in, as long as they can feel they’re at all effective (and Timko has gotten coverage for libertarianism in media that the LP could never penetrate), since the other parties (including the LP) are made up of people with pretty conventional life-styles. I realize you see this as an indictment against Keathley et. al.—but I don’t see where the moral superiority of alcohol over pot, stockings and heels vs. blue jeans, bras vs. no-bra, selling hareware vs. selling incense, etc, has been established. To me it’s simply a matter of personal preference and goals, and I don’t think I’m alone—freak vs. straight just doesn’t seem to be an issue among SoCal libertarians.

The Editor Replies:

I, too, am all in favor of diversity. If there are, for example, any libertarians involved in the flourishing “backgammon movement”, let them by all means agitate among their backgammon colleagues, perhaps also showing (if true) that taxes and tariffs raise the price of backgammon boards. My quarrel with the Keathley forces is not so much their counter-cultural life-style, but, as Ms. Kinsky seems to concede, the fact that they make their political choices on the basis of which cultural political party “they can feel comfortable in”. It seems to me that choosing lifestyles over ideology is a damaging indictment of the CLA forces.

It is true that, since Ms. Kinsky wrote her letter, the Keathley ticket swept to victory in the June PFP primary, and is therefore on the ballot in November. On the national scene, however, the PFP remains at a hopeless dead end, and therefore this applies to the state level as well.

The Prophetic Vision Of Hilaire Belloc

by John P. McCarthy—Department of History, Fordham University

Late 18th, 19th, and early 20th century European thinkers are generally categorized as rightist or leftist; conservative or liberal. The left stressed human reason which formulated universal principles applicable to all men. The foremost of these was the value and priority of the individual. Social organizations, whether states, businesses, guilds, or fraternal groups, existed to serve the individual. The right, on the other hand, in reaction to the revolutions that grew from the application of leftist principles, deemphasized human rationality. In its place they stressed custom and tradition, which naturally varied greatly from place to place; hence, an abandonment of universality. The exaltation of localism prompted a subordination of the individual to the group, which was both the source and the product of custom. The individual was seen as being able to attain his full humanity only as part of the group. The extremes to which leftist and rightist thought could run were obviously anarchism on one side and nationalist totalitarianism on the other.

However, in the greater part of the 20th century, the prevailing pattern of politics in the West has not fitted either category. Instead, the left has accepted rightist social organicism as a rationale for social welfare programs and a controlled economy, while the established right has accepted leftist socio-economic reforms in return for the maintenance of power. Two successful 20th century political figures who personified this right-left amalgam were David Lloyd George, a one-time radical, Welsh nationalist, and anti-imperialist, who helped introduce the social welfare state to Britain and then went on to preside over a predominately Tory-Imperialist cabinet during World War One; and the American patrician, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who also fostered the social welfare state and commanded the nation in a global war. These modern Caesars came from opposite sides of the tracks socially, yet their programs-social welfare, controlled economy, and mass total war—completed the congealing of the modern state without revolution or the usurpation of an incumbent establishment. Significantly, both men transformed their own political parties away from their old liberal or individualist heritage (that is Gladstonian Liberalism in Britain and Jeffersonian Democracy in the United States).

A perceptive and prophetic observer of the pattern of Western political development in the 20th century was the English Catholic publicist, Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). Today, unfortunately, he is either forgotten, appreciated only as a poet, or inaccurately dismissed as a rightist, neo-medievalist romantic. This has been a consequence either of antipathy to some of his attitudes, such as his anti-Semitism and his Catholic apologetics, or a failure to understand, or more likely, to read his political and social writings. Actually, going by the right-left categories we mentioned, Belloc, because of his rationalism, his commitment to universal principles, and his individualism, would very definitely belong with the left.

His ancestry, especially on his mother’s side, would almost by itself give him radical credentials. A great, great, grandfather was Joseph Priestly, the philosopher-scientist whose library was burned by a Tory mob in Birmingham because of his support for the French Revolution. His grandfather was Joseph Parkes, the radical political agent and associate of James Mill and Francis Place who in 1832 sought to further the chances for the Reform Bill by threatening to format a revolution if it would not be passed. His mother, Bessie Rayner Parkes, was a feminist and a Unitarian-turned-Catholic. His French father’s family were republicans, and a great grandfather was an Irish Protestant exile who had served as a colonel in the Napoleonic armies.

Politically Belloc was a radical-liberal of the Bright-Cobden variety who regarded the key villain in British society to be the landed establishment—the beneficiary of state protection, perpetuation, and privilege. That class had ruled England since its triumph over the monarchy in the 17th century Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The standard “Whig History” of England saw this gentry and their climb to power as the key to British liberty because it meant parliamentarianism and the rule of law. But a radical like Belloc saw instead a privileged oligarchy ruling at the expense of the masses. Belloc’s Catholic historiography reinforced his radical hostility for the landed establishment when it is recalled that the landed class got its great leap forward by purchasing at bargain rates the monastic lands seized by Henry VIII in the 16th century as part of the break with the Church of Rome.

Belloc sought to specify the central principles of his radicalism in one of his first published works, a contribution to a collection entitled Essays in Liberalism. He claimed that the central aim in the liberal tradition had and ought to be “the representation of individuals rather than corporate bodies, ranks, or interests.”[1] Therefore, radical liberalism sought to tear down privilege and to create an open society. Victories in this cause had been the abolition of rotten boroughs, religious disestablishment, free trade, expansion of the franchise, a meritorious rather than elitist public service, and freedom of press and political association.

In the 1890’s, however, when Belloc was a student at Balliol College, Oxford, a “New Liberalism” was becoming fashionable. The new liberalism, which Belloc opposed, derided the “negativism” of the older liberalism—especially its preoccupation with government retrenchment and free trade. The new attitude drew inspiration from the neo-Hegelianism of the Oxford philosopher, T. H. Green, which radically departed from the empirical and individualist spirit of English philosophy by idealizing the state as man’s educator and guardian, as well as being the agency for human fulfillment. As a result many liberal political figures, like the Earl of Rosebery, H. H. Asquith, and Edward Grey called for the party to champion bold new state programs designed to improve the quality of life and civilization. Significantly, the same figures were calling for Liberals to take up the imperialist banner being so successfully exploited by the Conservatives and to drop the anti-imperialism or Little Englandism which had been a central radical attitude.

At the same time the Conservatives, in keeping with their traditional paternalistic rhetoric, could easily endorse a more active state that could be pictured as a domestic version of the civilizing mission undertaken in the overseas empire. To complete the circle, the Fabian Socialists, at heart elitists, were convinced that their hopes of reorganizing society and eliminating human idiosyncrasies and ignorance, could best be attained, not by mass political action, but by working through the existing establishments of both parties, Conservatives and Liberals. Significantly, many Fabians, like G. B. Shaw, endorsed the Boer War because the expansion of the more advanced British Empire over the primitively conservative Boers was seen as a civilizing step similar to the promotion of universal education. Consequently, there was developing a national consensus for strong imperialist policies abroad and extensive state control and regulation at home. Some called the consensus “National Efficiency,” others labeled it “Social Imperialism.” Many in both parties endorsed it as a means of putting aside the “dated” struggles over franchise extension, free trade, removal of privileges, and religious disestablishment. A fictional blueprint for the consensus was the political novel of the sometime Fabian and perennial Utopian, H. G. Wells, entitled The New Machiavelli. Significantly, the science of politics seemed to be prevailing over political principle.

Belloc has to be understood as an opponent of this spirit. After finishing at Oxford, he soon made a name for himself as a satirical poet and novelist (in addition to writing laudatory biographies of Robespierre and Danton). Examples of his literary efforts include Lambkin’s Remains, a satirical assault on the academic neo-Hegelians that is a tribute to an imaginary don whose philosophical theories were considered valid because they were “admitted by all European philosphers in Germany”[2]; “The Modern Traveller,” a mock Kiplingesque poetical account of imperialist exploits by a journalist from “The Daily Menace,” accompanied by “Commander Henry Sin,” a mercenary adventurer, and “William Blood,” a swindler[3]; and Emmanuel Burden, a novel in which the hero is an honest radical entrepreneur who made his fortune by production, not speculation nor state subsidization, and who combats a fraudulent imperialist commercial venture undertaken by bankrupt aristocrats, Jewish speculators, bankers, and journalist glorifiers of Empire.[4]

Belloc was especially annoyed at the Germanophilia that was strong in certain quarters in late Victorian England. The Germans were pictured as the pace setters for that type of modern efficient administrative state that ought to be emulated by inefficient and laissez-faire English society. It was argued that unless England did so and abandoned her “doctrinaire” anti-statism, she would fall behind in the international race (for what?). Are there not certain parallels in the fashionable attitudes in post-Sputnik America vis à vis the Soviet Union?

In 1906 Belloc was elected to parliament in a freakish overwhelming Liberal victory that was partly caused by a split in Conservative ranks following Joseph Chamberlain’s protectionist proposals. Entering parliament with a radical democratic naivete, he expected such an electoral mandate to be followed by the implementation of radical liberal programs. However, it was asking a little too much to expect a radical, anti-imperialist, government-retrenchment program from a ministry which included such Liberal Imperialists as Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, not to mention the political wizard (if not moralist) Lloyd George and the temporarily former Tory, Winston Churchill.

Belloc became so disillusioned that he left parliament in 1910. He had become convinced that the party struggle in parliament was really a sham battle between the two front benches who were the two teams into whom “the governing group is divided arbitrarily. . ., each of which is, by mutual understanding, entitled to its turn of office and emolument.” They raise periodically “a number of unreal issues, defined neither by the people nor by the Parliament, . . . to give a semblance of reality to their empty competition.” In reality, the front benches were identical in outlook and interest, and were beholden to pretty much the same financial backers. The rank and file MP’s, supposedly the spokesman of the electorate, were in reality only pawns in the game.[5]

Perhaps the thesis presented by Belloc and Cecil Chesterton in their book, The Party System, as well as in the weekly journal they edited, The Eye-Witness, was a bit overdrawn. Yet there is no doubt that Britain and the rest of the Western World was moving into the age of highly disciplined political parties and dominance of the executive over legislatures. The expanded activities of the state also weakened legislatures. For one thing the enabling legislation for the new programs gave great arbitrary power to the executives. Furthermore, that legislation was usually drafted by administrative experts and, because there was so much of it, there was little time for the calm and deliberate discussion of its value (or for supervision of its administration) by legislatures. Paradoxically, the independent MP of the type Belloc idealized, who would be responsible only to his constituents, seemed to have disappeared with the commencement of democracy. Democratic electorates tend to think primarily in terms of parties or leaders rather than local representatives. Hence, the latter are subordinated to the former, especially in matters of financing national campaigns and determining political platforms.

In 1911, a year after he left parliament, Belloc hit on an issue which seemed a classic example of party collusion (or what the establishment would call consensus). It was Britain’s original social insurance legislation which appealed to both the paternalism of the Tories and the active statism of the New Liberals. To Belloc, it was a fraud benefitting only the more highly skilled workers well able to provide their own insurance, and was offensive because it was compulsory, It was a cornerstone in a development that he would prophetically label the Servile State.

The Servile State was that society where individualism and the right of contract disappeared and were replaced by a situation “in which the mass of men shall be constrained by law to labour to the profit of a minority, but as a price of such constraint, shall enjoy a security which the old Capitalism did not give them.”[6] The various reforms then being proposed for the alleviation of the industrial proletariat, such as minimum wage laws, compulsory arbitration, compulsory social insurance, and nationalization or municipalization of industry, would really work to protect the wealthy from the consequences of the market and competition. The masses, on the other hand, under the cover of comfortable amenities, would become bound to a servile status.

Belloc emphasized that the projected society would not be socialism, that is the public ownership of the means of production (which he equally deplored), because the capitalist class would still really possess their wealth. However, it would satisfy many idealistic socialists because the laboring classes would be spared “the special evils of insecurity and insufficiency,” although at the price of “the destruction of freedom.” Also satisfied would be that type of socialist reformer like the Fabian for whom “the occupation most congenial. . . is the ‘running’ of men: as a machine is run.”[7] The working class would not oppose compulsory amenities which provide security and comfort, such as social insurance, minimum wage laws, and compulsory arbitration, even though they would ultimately lead to the elimination of their freedom of contract. The workers’ acceptance of this inevitability is because their bargaining position was not great to begin with, but also because they had “lost the tradition of property and freedom,” and were “most powerfully inclined” to accept the loss of freedom because of the positive benefits of security.[8] The resultant situation would be that

Society is recognized as no longer consisting of free men bargaining freely for their labour or any other commodity in their possession, but of two contrasting status, owners and non-owners.[9]

The ownership class would be delighted with the prospective developments also, for “Capitalism has seen to it that it shall be a winner not a loser by this form of sham socialism,”[10] as it also would be guaranteed a security non-existent in the free market. The explanation is that nationalization or municipalization would not be simple acts of confiscation nor would they be compensated by taxation. Rather they would be financed by loans made from the same original ownership class that would now be guaranteed both compensatory annuities usually exceeding the rate of profit when the enterprise had been in private directorates would be rehired by the public companies, but now at enlarged and guaranteed salaries. Furthermore, massive public works, ostensibly of a socially benevolent nature, whether schools, hospitals, or slum clearances, would tend to be financed not by taxation but by loans and would provide to the wealthy classes further forms of guaranteed income.[11]

In short, the capitalists would welcome and indeed promote most of the massive programs for state intervention and control of the economy. These reformist projects would serve to guarantee and enlarge their wealth and power and minimize their having to face the market.

Are not Belloc’s prophecies validated by the recent experiences in our country, where national price and wage controls have been implemented by a “pro-business,” Republican administration, and in our state (New York) where “pro-business,” Republican legislators proclaim the necessity for the state to guarantee with public monies (no doubt to be raised by bonds) the dividends of the monopoly utility, Con Edison? Furthermore, do not the Watergate revelations, with all the elements of business-political collaboration to guarantee prices and profits, cause one to give greater credence to Belloc’s insistence on the extensiveness of corruption in the politics of his time?

Revisionist Seminar

A seminar in World War II and Cold War Revisionism will be conducted by Dr. James J. Martin, August 30 through September 2 at Claremont Men’s College, Claremont, California. Tuition is $35. Some dorm space is available on first come, first served basis. Registration begins at 8:30 P.M., August 30, at Claremont Men’s College. For pre-registration and dorm space write: Revisionist Seminar, P.O. Box 2001, Ventura, Cal. 93001

New Rothbard Book

This year’s new Rothbard book is out! It is an inexpensive, handsomely bound paperback, published by the new Libertarian Review Press, a spinoff of Books for Libertarians, with a picture of the famous Deanne Hollinger poster of Rothbard on the front cover. The price is only $2.50!! Where can you get a book for that price nowadays?

The new book, Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays, is a collection of some of the best Rothbard essays, all of which have been either unpublished, or only published in obscure and now defunct journals. Now they are for the first time, not only in print but easily accessible. Rothbard has a spirited new introduction to the collection, which begins with the sentence: “Probably the most common question that has been hurled at me—in some exasperation—over the years is: ‘Why don’t you stick to economics?’” The remainder of the introduction answers that question and summarizes the contribution of each essay. A Foreword by R. A. Childs, Jr. asserts that Rothbard is the Karl Marx of the libertarian movement.

The following are the essays included in the new book:

“Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature”. (From Modern Age). Individual diversity vs. egalitarianism.

“Left and Right: the Prospects for Liberty” (From the famous first issue of Left and Right). A libertarian manifesto and world-view.

“The Anatomy of the State” (from Rampart Journal). The State as the enemy: how it arises and perpetuates itself.

“Justices and Property Rights” (unpublished; from Symposium on Origin and Development of Property Rights, University of San Francisco). philosophic theory of justice in property rights.

“War, Peace, and the State” (from The Standard). A libertarian theory of foreign policy.

“The Fallacy of the Public Sector” (from New Individualist Review). The fallacy of economists’ arguments for the legitimacy of the public sector.

“Kid Lib” (from Outlook). The theory of self-ownership and property rights as applied to children.

“The Great Women’s Lib Issue: Setting it Straight” (from the Individualist). Rothbard’s first writing on this currently explosive issue.

“Conservation and the Free Market” (from the Individualist). Application of free-market economics and libertarian property rights theory to the issues of conservation and ecology.

“The Meaning of Revolution” (from Libertarian Forum). What is “revolution”, and to what extent are libertarians “revolutionaries”?

“National Liberation” (from Libertarian Forum). The application of libertarianism to the concept of “national liberation”.

“Anarcho-Communism” (from Libertarian Forum). A critique of the communist wing of anarchism.

“The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: an Economist’s View” (from A Way Out). A critique of nineteenth century individualist anarchism from the free-market point of view.

“Ludwig von Mises and the Paradigm for Our Age” (from Modern Age). A tribute to von Mises’ contribution, and a philosophico-sociological explanation for his neglect in the current age.

“Why Be Libertarian?” (from Left and Right). A plea to adopt libertarianism on the basis of a passion for justice.

All this: 15 sparkling essays, plus an introduction, plus a foreword, for only $2.50. There are discounts for larger amounts purchased. Write to: Libertarian Review Press, 422 First St. S. E., Washington, D.C. 20003.

1., Hilaire Belloc, “The Liberal Tradition,” Essays in Liberalism (London: Cassell, 1897), p. 7.

2., Hilaire Belloc, Lambkin’s Remains (London: Duckworth, 1920 1st ed. 1900), p. 214.

3., Hilaire Belloc, “The Modern Traveler” (1st ed 1898), The Verse of Hilaire Belloc (Holland: The Nonesuch Press, 1954)

4., Hilaire Belloc, Emmanuel Burden (New York: Scribner’s, 1904).

5., Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System (London: Stephen Swift, 1911), pp 33–34.

6., Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (London: Constable, 1912) p. 116.

7., Ibid., p. 127.

8., Ibid., p. 144.

9., Ibid., p. 168.

10, Ibid., p. 182.

11., Ibid., pp. 145–152, 179–182.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO, 8

AUGUST, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

WHOOPEE!!

Away with all the solemn and hypocritical nonsense about the “anguish”, the infinite “sadness”, the terrible “tragedy” of this great event. Let joy be unconfined; let jubilation reign. We have brought down the Monster Milhous; never again will we have to watch his repellent visage or listen to his pious blather. We have brought down the tyrant, and dusted off the ancient and honorable weapon of impeachment, fallen almost into disuse, to check the spectre of unconfined Executive dictatorship.

Who would have thought it? Who would have thought that our country was still so unfrozen, still with so many options available, that Justice could so swiftly bring into the dock all the highest reaches of the White House, from the Vice President, two Attorneys-General, all of the President’s top aides, his personal lawyer, his two most powerful assistants, and even unto Him in the dread Oval Office itself? Who could have thought, when Agnew resigned in guilty disgrace not many months ago, that those of us who said, wistfully, “One down, and one to go”, would turn out to be right? Wow!!

Watergate was not simply “chicken thief” stuff, to use the disparaging Buckley phrase (and shouldn’t chicken thieves also be prosecuted to the full extent of the law?) With the admitted adoption of the monstrous Huston plan, of which the famous “plumbers” were only a spinoff, we came closer than ever before to a full-fledged police state. Much too close for comfort. The Huston plan for systematic bugging, wiretapping, and espionage upon critics of the Administration, was too much even for J. Edgar Hoover, and no record of its alleged “rescinding” has ever been found.

There are some minor, but still heartwarming corollaries to the fall of the Big Tyrant. No more will we have to suffer the lies of Ronald Ziegler, who, one hopes, will return to the Disneyland from whence he came. And no more will we have to suffer the hogwash of Nixon’s two favorite clerics: the egregious Rabbi Korff, who will presumably sink back into the obscurity from which he was plucked; and his kept Jesuit, Father McLaughlin (is he still intoning somewhere the claim that Nixon is “the greatest man of this third of the twentieth century”?)—will his order do the right thing and put him on bread and water for a few years of penance?

It is important to resist the prevailing motif that we must have “compassion” for the man, that he has “suffered enough” by losing his job, that “forgiveness” is noble, etc. This idea violates the very essence of the Christian concept of forgiveness. That concept rests ineluctably on genuine repentance, on full confession of moral wrongdoing, and on throwing oneself on the mercy of one’s previous victims. Milhous has confessed nothing, repented nothing. A vague and unspecified reference to a few “errors of judgment” means nothing, especially when self-righteously coupled with the unctuous claim that even they were all committed “in the national interest.”

The idea that he has “suffered enough” by losing his job is also sheer hogwash. Since when do criminals, in America or anywhere else, suffer only loss of employment? What are prisons for? Why should thousands of criminals go to jail and Milhous go scot free? Are we to send to jail only unemployed criminals, while everyone else gets off with loss of status and employment? Also, the point of the impeachment and attendant proceedings is that no man, from the king to the pauper, can be above the law; by granting immunity to Nixon we absolve the President and only the President from paying for his crimes. And when did Nixon show compassion for any criminal, except for the mass murderer Calley? How about his stern stand against all amnesty for “draft dodgers”, men whose only “crime” was to defend their liberty against the long arm of the State? For the arch-criminal Nixon there must be no special immunity, and no amnesty.

The final line of defense of the Nixon loyalists was that all politicians, all Presidents, do similar misdeeds. Why pick on Nixon? But that sort of defense of criminality is it to say that “everybody’s doing it?” Even if true, the proper response is not to condone and do nothing about the whole mess, but to begin somewhere, to begin to clean the Augean stables wherever one can. And what better place to begin than with Richard Nixon? Hopefully, we can never return to the naive innocence about the Presidency and about government of the pre-Watergate era; once the Pandora’s Box of true knowledge about the workings of government and of the Executive branch has been opened it can never be closed again. And once the dread unknown weapon of impeachment has been used, and we have not all been struck dead by lightning, we will all be far more ready to turn to the impeachment process again. All future successors of President Nixon are now eternally on notice; they will never rest easy again, secure in the belief that once the November elections are over they can get away with anything they like. Even a President, henceforth, can feel the strong arm of Justice.

Kennedy Marriage Revisionism

If, among the primal passions of Man, the Achilles Heel of Richard Nixon has been Money and Knowledge (of other people: tapes, bugging, breaking-in to psychiatrists’ offices), then surely the Achilles Heel of the Kennedy clan has been that ole debbil Sex. There is of course Chappaquiddick, and now veteran columnist Earl Wilson has detailed the torrid affairs of both Jack and Bobby Kennedy with Marilyn Monroe. It is intriguing that, among all the host of Camelotomanes, no one has disputed the accuracy of the Wilson account, which has either been studiously ignored or accused of “bad taste”. (As if politicians themselves are not bad taste!) That Jack had a plethora of extra-marital affairs while in the White House is now generally conceded. But amidst this spate of Kennedy Revisionism—which includes Richard J. Walton’s excellent reminders of Kennedy’s bellicose foreign policy which almost got us into the Last Nuclear War—one question, a sensation of the moment, has not yet been reevaluated: what we might call the First Kennedy Marriage Caper.

To understand the impact, we must hark back to the days of Camelot, when the media was having a universal and unrestricted love affair with the Kennedy Administration. JFK was the shining prince, leading us toward the New Frontier. It was in the midst of this atmosphere during 1961, that a friend of mine who was high up in conservative circles first told me about a fascinating entry in an obscure book published a few years earlier, “The Blauvelt Family Genealogy.” The entry in this family genealogy on one Durie Malcolm referred to Durie’s “third marriage” to “John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England.” If true, this was indeed a bombshell, as it would have made the Jack-Jackie marriage illegal according to Catholic doctrine.

Paul Krassner published the item in his iconclastic magazine The Realist, for March 1962. Kennedy Administration pressure kept the item out of the news media until the fall, when publication in Europe broke the voluntary censorship logjam in the American press. Durie Malcolm, admittedly a former girl friend of Kennedy, denied all and refused to see the press, the White House issued a curt denial, the compiler of the book, Louis Blauvelt, was dead, and the alleged supplier of the item, one Howard Durie, denied the whole thing. For lack of further confirmation, the story died down.

Now, however, Ron Rosenbaum, an intrepid “politician Revisionist” for the Village Voice, has revived the tale (July 4). What intrigued Rosenbaum was a cryptic passage between John Dean and Nixon in a Feb. 28 conversation on the famous Nixon transcripts. The passage was as follows:

“P. Did your friends tell you what Bobby did. . . Bobby was a (characterization deleted.) But the FBI does blatantly tell you that—or Sullivan told you about the New Jersey thing. He did use a bug up there for intelligence work (inaudible). D. Intelligence workers all over the property.”

There then follows some cryptic references to the FBI trying to talk a doctor into asserting that some “poor old gent” had a brain tumor.

Rosenbaum was intrigued by the “New Jersey thing” and mentioned it in a Voice story in late May. In response to the note, Rosenbaum was put into contact with an employee for a federal law enforcement agency, who claimed that he knew who the “old gentleman in New Jersey” was. Since he insisted on remaining anonymous, and in honor of the famous Bernstein-Woodward top informant on Watergate known as “Deep Throat”, Rosenbaum dubbed the informant, “Strep Throat.” Strep Throat claimed that “They went bananas over that thing at the White House. He hit the tree like this was an Ellsberg thing. He just put the FBI right onto that thing.”

Strep Throat went on to claim that the “old gent” in question was Howard Ira Durie, of Hillsdale, New Jersey, the alleged supplier of the Durie Malcolm marriage item. According to Strep Throat, the FBI put “a full court press” on Howard Durie, including a 24-hour surveillance, and seized all the records in the Durie home. Strep Throat asserted that when he himself called Durie at the time, Durie told him that “I can’t talk, I can’t talk, I’ve already discussed the matter with the FBI.” Strep Throat added that “I’ve never heard a man so scared in my life.” Rosenbaum adds, however, that his informant had no information on the “brain tumor” part of the story.

On doing further checking, Rosenbaum found that some of the Blauvelt family were convinced of the truth of the Durie Malcolm item. A New York Times story during the 1962 flurry reported that “an aide of the President” had gone up to the home of Louis Blauvelt’s son-in-law in New Jersey where the Blauvelt genealogical files were stored, and that he had found no supporting evidence in the Durie Malcolm file. But a Blauvelt from Saddle River, New Jersey, told Rosenbaum that incriminating evidence was removed from the file, because the genealogical card for the Malcolm file mentioned material that was missing-from the files themselves, and also mentioned that the material had been supplied by Howard Durie. A call from Rosenbaum to Durie himself drew fervent denials of any further or supporting evidence on the marriage story. However, while Durie denied any visits from the FBI; he did assert that the FBI had gone through the files of Blauvelt’s son-in-law, Mr. Smith, and that Smith “had been bothered by the FBI.” A call to Smith, however, elicited the response that the FBI had never bothered him, or gone through the files, and Smith also hotly denied the existence of any missing information.

There, so far, the story rests. Not a saga of vital importance, but an intriguing bit of Americana. As Rosenbaum concludes, “secret wedding or no secret wedding, something funny seems to have been going on between the Kennedys and the Blauvelts (and, he might add, the FBI) back in 1962.”

Libertarian Advance

As nearly every libertarian knows, the current libertarian movement was created in two great breakthroughs: the split from YAF in September 1969, and the media publicity of early 1971. Our antennae here at the Forum sense that the movement is now going through a third Great Leap Forward, a great advance in libertarianism and libertarian influence. The signs are everywhere: in the growing influence, for example, of libertarian ideas in the media, among investment advisers (a beleaguered group nowadays!), politicians, graduate students, and the general public. Libertarian publications are expanding in readership and influence. Thus, the monthly Reason, the leading general magazine in the field, has expanded to a phenomenal circulation of over 12,000.

Everywhere there is ferment. The current generation of YAF is—once again—bubbling with libertarian ideas; and the recent national convention of YAF in San Francisco crackled with libertarian enthusiasm. California YAF is reportedly led by libertarians, and the libertarian “hospitality suite” at the San Francisco convention was the major center of interest, as outside libertarian experts worked hard to push delegates and observers toward liberty. Libertarians in out of the California LP are working furiously on State Senator H. F. “Bill” Richardson, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, to widen his libertarian perspective from narrowly economic to civil libertarian concerns. In Los Angeles, the Libertarian Alternative has gained wide interest and respect from the media in its task of answering statist editorials on radio and TV.

But perhaps the most spectacular growth in the movement lies in two distinct directions: in the solid expansion of the Libertarian Party, and in the enormous and rapid growth in free-market, or “Austrian” economics.

The battle within the Libertarian Party, detailed in these pages, is now over, with the result a smashing victory for the forces of soundness and sanity in the party. We can all now rejoice and go forward with high hopes. At the national convention in Dallas in June, the sound, pure, and responsible ticket headed by the bright and able young investment counselor Edward H. Crane III, won a shattering victory over the disruptive Royce-Konkin coalition. Crane triumphed over Royce by a smashing 4–1 majority. With the excellent slate of Ed Crane and Andrea Millen in firm control of the national party, we can expect great things from the national party, which will now have its headquarters in San Francisco. The stage is now set for energetic expansion of the party with no compromise of principle. Furthermore, reliable reports have it that the national platform is greatly improved from its 1972 concessions to the State, with all references to “the proper function of government is . . .” at last expunged, and the platform confined to stating what the government should not be doing.

In California, Hal Jindrich, LP member running for the non-partisan post of State Superintendent of Instruction, gained the phenomenal total of 200,000 votes in the election. Now it is true that our California friends caution us that the votes are not meaningful, that Mickey Mouse would have gotten a similar number of votes just for being on the ballot. Still and all, it cannot be gainsaid that Jindrich, with virtually no money at his command, ran a pure race, calling for the absolute separation of education from the State, including abolition of compulsory attendance laws and of the public school system. And with this number of votes amassed, can’t we realistically estimate that a bang-up Presidential campaign in 1976 could pile up 1 million votes?

Central to our goal of 1 million LP votes in ’76 is getting on the permanent ballot in New York State. To achieve that goal, the New York gubernatorial candidate this year must earn 50,000 votes. 50,000 votes will make the FLP the fifth major party in New York State, and earn us major-party status and influence comparable to the Liberal and Conservative parties. 50,000 votes will make an enormous impact on the media, and let us never forget that New York City is the media capital of the world. If we achieve major party status in New York, the media will come a-courting and the influence of libertarian ideas in the country as a whole will expand beyond our wildest dreams.

Hence the central importance of our old friends and Forum contributor Jerry Tuccille’s campaign for governor of New York. Jerry is devoting all of his considerable energies and talents to the campaign. Furthermore, Jerry is too bright and realistic to mouth the usual campaign nonsense that he expects to win this year; what he is aiming for and expects to achieve this year is 50,000 votes. To help Jerry in this effort, New York libertarians have mounted a campaign of superb skill and professionalism, comprising men and women of great talent in media, publicity, and campaigning. Laura Wertheimer, a young conservative-libertarian professional campaign manager who has served in F. Clifton White’s notable campaigns, has taken on the task of being Jerry’s campaign manager, and is doing so with great professional skill. The enormously talented multi-media people of Ad Lib Communications, headed by John Doswell, are running the advertising and publicity of the Tuccille campaign. Ad Lib’s multi-media show on behalf of the Tuccille race was the undoubted and spectacular hit of the Dallas LP convention. The enthusiasm is high. Already, Roger MacBride, the libertarian Virginia lawyer who cast his electoral vote in 1972 for the Hospers-Nathan ticket, flew Tuccille in his private plane all over New York State, gaining widespread media coverage throughout the state, and sparking FLP and Tuccille campaign organization everywhere en route.

The able Tuccille strategists estimate that getting 50,000 votes for governor requires the raising of $165,000 in campaign contributions. To aid in this effort, Roger MacBride and myself have mailed a joint letter to libertarians throughout the country asking for contributions and explaining the unique importance of the Tuccille effort. It is important that we all set aside grousing and nit-picking to aid in this mighty effort, an effort which can succeed. Send your contributions to The Committee for 50,000 Votes, Suite 918, 225 West 34th St., New York, N.Y. 10001.

The Tuccille campaign will stress the appeal of libertarianism to the great middle class of this country, crippled and hag-ridden as they are by taxes, inflation, and government spending; Tuccille will also hammer away at rule by “idiocracy”, the idiocracy of countless schemes of government spending. Thus, a recent Tuccille handbill reads:

Free Libertarian Party

A message they can’t ignore

I’m fed up with seeing the taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars go to politicians who splurge it on headline-grabbing projects and countless welfare schemes.

Only the Free Libertarian Party is dedicated to reducing the size and budget of government, and 50,000 votes for me will put our party on the New York State ballot permanently.

If I can get 50,000 votes in November, they’ll listen.

50,000 votes can’t be ignored.

The Tuccille and other FLP campaigns are drawing considerable support from conservatives who are fed up with the Establishment power plays of the Conservative Party. New York YAF has invited Tuccille to address its convention, and Mary Jo Wanzer, running for Assembly on the FLP ticket, has received Conservative Party endorsement, with no watering down of her devotion to personal liberty.

The 50,000 vote goal is realistically grounded in the 9,000 votes that Fran Youngstein received in her race for Mayor of New York City last year. The Youngstein campaign organization has now published a beautifully mounted Yearbook of the campaign, including articles by Youngstein, Rothbard, Tuccille, Dave Nolan, Gary Greenberg and others, and replete with press clips and pictures of Fran. Available for only $3.50 from Ad Lib Communications, Hotel Empire, Bway. & 63rd N Y., N.Y.

Meanwhile, we can add another country to our list of organized libertarians. The fledgling Australian movement is now meeting to form a Libertarian Party in Australia. Good luck to Liberty in the Antipodes!

The other especially heartening development in the world of libertarianism is the extremely rapid growth of free-market, or “Austrian”, economics. Even though Austrianism has had to make its way painfully without a single graduate department to nurture and train young Austrians, and with zero, if not negative, prestige in the profession, the number of serious and able young Austrian professors and graduate students is multiplying by leaps and bounds. No doubt the total inability of the other, more orthodox (or even heterodox) schools of economic thought to explain or offer any solutions for the increasingly runaway inflation or for the inflationary recession has had a great deal to do with the increasing interest in the Austrians.

Business Week, August 3, has an excellent, and not really unfavorable article on the Austrian revival, entitled: “The Austrian School’s Advice: ‘Hands Off!’” Subtitle of the article is “Government interference as the source of all economic ills”. The article includes pictures of three leading “Austrians”: Profs. Israel Kirzner of New York University, Walter Grinder of Rutgers, and the Lib. Forum editor.

Business Week also mentions a Symposium on Austrian Economics that was held at Royalton College, Vermont, at the end of June. The week-long conference, sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies of Menlo Park, California, featured lectures by Kirzner, Rothbard, and Professor Ludwig M. Lachmann of the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and brought together over fifty bright young Austrians and quasi-Austrians from all over the country, including participants from England and Australia. Discussion was at a very high level, the science of Austrian economics was further developed, and, above all, everyone was immensely heartened to discover like-minded and knowledgeable colleagues whom they scarcely knew existed. The Royalton conference should mark a great takeoff point for the development and spread of the Austrian cause. Plans are now afoot for publishing not only the major lectures at the conference, but also some of the brilliant papers delivered by the younger participants. Look out, world of economics: the Austrians Are Coming!

As I write, the Wall St. Journal is scheduled to come out with an article of its own on Austrianism and the Royalton conference. Watch the Forum for a further report.

One heartening point about the rapid discovery of bright young Austrian School economists is the contrast with the situation of the libertarian movement five years ago. Five years ago, we were getting an influx of bright new kids into the movement, but they were all college kids, and a dishearteningly large proportion of them were soon to drop out into drugs, instability, caprice, or general decay. But now we are getting an influx of graduate students who are sober, able, hard-working and dedicated to both scholarship and freedom. We are emphatically building from a new and higher plateau. In the libertarian movement, as in the culture generally, the irrational nonsense and degeneracy of the late 60’s looks more and more like a flash in the pan fading away into the bad old past. What with recent advances and developments in the Libertarian Party, in Austrian economics, and elsewhere, the future has never looked brighter for the libertarian cause.

School Or Jail?

The Twelve Year Sentence: Radical Views of Compulsory Schooling, edited by William Rickenbacker, Open Court Publishing, La Salle, Illinois 1974. $6.95.

Reviewed by Joseph R. Peden

The title of this collection of essays succinctly summarizes its theme and point of view: that compulsory attendance in America’s public schools is equivalent to a 12 year sentence in “prison”. It is rather odd that in a society with such concern for liberating pornographers, sexual deviants, abortionists, mass murderers, convicted felons, bored housewives; and whatever other individuals who have run afoul of some oppressive law or contract, few have taken up the plight of the oppressed child, except such pioneer libertarians as Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich and our own good editor, Murray Rothbard. Goodman spoke out eloquently on the need for total freedom in the learning process throughout the sixties; Illich shook the educational establishment with his demand for “deschooling” society in the early seventies; and Murray Rothbard finally found a publisher for his Education: Free and Compulsory (Center for Independent Education, 197) a work written in the early fifties but considered unmarketable earlier. This delay underlines the great importance of the media breakthrough of left anarchists like Goodman and Illich in opening the way for wider public acceptance of individualist anarchist social critiques.

It was in this favorable climate that the Institute for Humane Studies and the Center for Independent Education co-sponsored a scholarly conference on compulsory schooling in Milwaukee in November 1972. The Twelve Year Sentence is a collection of the papers read at this Milwaukee conference.

The lead article by Murray Rothbard presents an historical analysis of the origins of compulsory schooling under the aegis of the great reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, who sought control of conscience through compulsory schooling of impressionable youth. Passive obedience to Church and State through schooling came to America with the Puritans, and in the 19th century became the hoped for means of Americanizing (and Protestantizing) the new non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants who poured into an America distrustful and distainful of the manners and morals of all foreigners. The Federalists had entered the field of battle in the early 19th century hoping to suppress Jacobin-Jeffersonian tendencies among the untutored masses by compelling their children to submit to their propaganda as to true morals and the duties of citizenship. In his usual brisk, pungent style, Rothbard traces the political and social context in which compulsory schooling became the great unchallenged good in American society.

The second essay by George Resch of the Institute for Humane Studies is a brilliant philosophic analysis of the most tenacious myth in American education—that the public school system and compulsory schooling are vital to the achievement of every American’s right to equality of opportunity. Resch traces much mischief to Thomas Jefferson’s ill chosen phrase, “all men are created equal”. Whether it was just a “noble lie” or a typical obscure phrasing of some more subtle 18th century philosophic idea, Resch pinpoints it as the origin and justification for a host of anti-libertarian policies, including the notion of compulsory schooling as the basis for assuring each citizen equality of opportunity. Like one holding and slowly turning a flashing prism, Resch calls forth an impressive variety of authorities who, each in his own words and with his special expertise, present their own flash of insight into human variation and individuality. The geneticist, biologist, psychologist, anatomist, neurosurgeon, biochemist, economist, historian and philosopher testify to the absurdity of egalitarianism, each illuminating the question from his own scientific perspective until Resch brings it all together in a compelling affirmation that “so long as individuals vary as they do, there can be no such thing as equality of opportunity. An unequal performance is exactly what we would expect from unequal individuals.” And so the case for compulsory schooling to ensure a mythic equality of opportunity is shattered.

The third essay by Joel Spring, author of the superb study of the role of the State in the schooling of the citizenry, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Beacon Press, paperback, Boston 1972) is by far the most controversial. The early part is a survey of the role of the state in shaping the education of the masses through compulsory schooling to serve the ends of the ruling elites. It is well done, if not here very elaborately documented, but is substantially documented in his other published works. He points to the dubious wisdom of the demand for government-subsidized day care centers, rightly fearing these would become a new instrument for social control of the lower classes. Yet he sees a complication here because day care centers are held to be a necessary factor in the further emancipation of women from the supposed slavery of family and household obligations. He also sees the end of compulsory education as helping to liberate women, weakening the power of the family, and even possibly eliminating marriage—all desirable in his view. He thinks that compulsory schooling has strengthened family power over children by prolonging their dependence upon parents for economic support. While Spring seems plausible in the latter specific instance, I am not certain that he is correct in his general linking of the end of compulsory schooling with women’s liberation or the disintegration of the family as now constituted in American society. These views are not elaborated upon; no authorities are cited, and perhaps their remarks are no more than “ruminations” as the title of the essay would suggest. But they do underline the fact that the end of compulsory schooling is inextricably linked with other institutional problems which may demand equally radical change. For instance, though Spring does not mention it, the child labor and minimum wage laws will almost certainly have to be modified if compulsory schooling ends. The welfare laws also presently discourage youths from seeking employment, and will have to be changed.

Spring is not, of course, a libertarian. But the extent of his conservatism on the question of ending compulsory schooling was a surprise. In fact, citing Jefferson’s view that every child in the republic should know how to read, write and calculate, Spring wants to reduce the “12 year sentence” to three! Why anyone should be compelled to learn the three R’s at all if he chooses otherwise, is left unexamined. While I do not advocate the fostering of illiteracy, though encountering it all too frequently among graduates of our contemporary public schools, I think a case can be made that such illiteracy does not do so much harm today as it may have in Jefferson’s day. Between pocket calculators, and the aural and visual sources of extensive information through radio, tapes, TV and film, even illiterates are probably better “educated” today than the literate but isolated farmers of the 18th century.

Even more distressing is the final paragraph of Spring’s ruminations where, considering the fundamental changes in all aspects of our society which the end of compulsory schooling might induce or require, Spring opines that “there may be little we can do” to achieve it until a total transformation of society occurs. And he leaves the implication that for the present all we can do is study the phenomenon as a physician studies cancer, without the immediate prospect of achieving any cure. This pessimism is unfortunate in a scholar who has already in so many ways contributed mightily to making the nature of compulsory schooling known to a wide audience, and thus setting the stage, for the first time in a century, for reversing public opinion on the issue.

The remaining three essays are all impressive and very informative. Libertarian lawyer Robert Baker reviews the issue of compulsory schooling as it is reflected in the statutes and court decisions of the several states: detailing in the concrete terms the oppressive, vindictive and vicious character of the compulsory school laws as they are enforced on isolated individuals. Attorney Gerrit Wormhoudt does the same for the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Both provide an excellent background for those interested in using law suits to extend diversity, freedom and the sovereignty of the family in the education of children. George Resch has added an extensive and superbly annotated bibliography which is not the least valuable part of this most valuable book. The last essay is an historical survey of the economic factors involved in the growth of compulsory schooling in the 19th century, especially in England, in which E. G. West concludes that the economic costs of universal compulsory schooling were “so severe as to outweigh the benefits”, while “selective compulsion can be a constructive, proper and humane provision in society”. Not being an economist, this reviewer will not attempt a critique of Prof. West’s argument on the economic utility of “selective compulsion” but further study of this aspect of his findings might yield other conclusions.

The participating scholars, the sponsors of the conference, the editor, the publisher and designers of this book deserve great praise for a singularly fascinating achievement, a book that will be wanted by every libertarian, and is needed by everyone interested in the future of American education.

J. R. Peden

From The Old Curmudgeon

Psychodrama. The other night I flipped on the Tomorrow show, and there was this young psychologist from L.A. (where else?) who had taken over the program for the occasion, conducting a massive group “psychodrama” on the “inter-generational problems of human sexuality” (presumably, the viewers weren’t ready for animals yet.) The young psychologist (to whom I naturally took an instant dislike) explained that various younger and older people would play the roles of children and parents, and that he would not try to lead the process in any way, but would let everybody flow with the occasion. He also swore up and down that he was not going to be judgmental, that everyone would make his or her own decisions, etc. Well, it took only a few minutes to find out how that was going to turn out. For this pest soon took a very active leading role, stepping in always to hype up the conversation, yelling as “parent” and as “child” when the action flagged. At one point, our non-judgmental leader yelled at the assemblage: “Come on, this is too much of a head trip, let’s get our feelings into it.” Off flipped the tube. So there we have it; no moral judgments are going to be made by the psychodramatist, except that “head trips” are verboten, and “feelings”, goddamit, are going to be expressed, even if the pyschodramatist does most of the prodding and feeling.

Illiterate Principals. How does one do parody if the world is becoming in itself a massive parody? It has just been discovered in New York City that half a dozen public school principals are illiterate, and the term is meant not metaphorically but literally (excuse the pun.) In short, they can scarcely read or write English. The literate principals are kind of concerned about this situation, as I hope are some of the parents and children; the critics, however, have been attacked as “racists”—the principals in question being either black or Puerto Rican. How does one comment on this idiocy? One point: can you imagine a private school appealing to parents by saying: “Hey, send your kids to our school and learn how not to read and write”? Anyone want to send in a paean to the glories of the public school system?

Men’s Lib. For years I’ve wanted to enjoy the benefits of being a member of an “oppressed minority group”, but being a white, English-speaking male, have not had much opportunity in recent years. But now I find out that I’m a member of an oppressed “minority” after all. . . men! We find in the New York Times (June 11) that men’s lib is a rapidly growing, if still small, movement. Who are men supposed to be liberated from, you might ask? Betty Friedan, Blondie, Gloria Steinem? No such thing, for men’s lib is a movement organized by the leading women’s lib organization, the National Organization for Women. So what’s going on here? Who we’re supposed to be liberated from remains unclear, but what we’re supposed to be liberated from is highly explicit in the article: namely, not having feelings, and—particularly—careers.

On the former, according to the men’s lib leaders, it turns out that men don’t have any feelings, and don’t talk to anybody, as one participant in the recent men’s lib conference plaintively put it, he came there because “I needed some men to talk to.” Now I don’t know what universe these guys come from, but I’ve never met any men who don’t talk and feel, and I bet they haven’t either.

The careers gambit is far more interesting. The idea is that men should be liberated from careers, in which they have become mere “success images”. From careers to what, one might ask? Here are some men’s lib suggestions: young men to drop out “into a journey of self-exploration” (What if they “journey” for years and find nothing there?); executives to drop out and “go back to school to start all over”; husbands to shift into housework; fathers to leave their jobs to raise their children; and—my own special favorite—“middle-aged men (to) chuck well-paying positions to go off and raise organic potatoes”.

The ploy on the part of NOW is almost blatantly obvious: at the same time that women are instructed in the joys of careers and the stultifying boredom of housework and raising children, the male enemy is instructed on “the boredom and dehumanization of their jobs”, and advised to drop out, change places, in short, to leave their careers to make room for the female aspirants. It is, I suppose, a shrewd strategy; if the men are really boobs enough to fall for it, they deserve their fate. Somehow I doubt it; while it is always hazardous to estimate highly the intelligence of the American public, I still can’t believe that men’s lib is going to advance beyond the few hundred asses who showed up for the conference.

My message to the Men’s libbers: hey, guys, where’s your militancy? How can I believe that you’re serious until you demand a 50% male quota in the top leadership positions of NOW and MS. magazine? And another thing: one of the most bizarre aspects of the women’s lib movement is that it is considered somehow treasonous to criticize in any way any fellow female, any “sister”. Do you remember the long dispute about whether or not, for example, Jackie Kennedy Onassis is equally as “oppressed” as ____________________ (fill in the blank?) (You should be so “oppressed”.) But one thing I can assure you; regardless of what social pressure you put upon me, I’m not going to start considering Richard Nixon as one of my “brothers”, who can’t be criticized in public. And one final promise: It will be a cold, cold day in Hell before I go off and grow organic potatoes. And if that’s Uncle Tomming my “male brothers”, you know (expletive deleted) well what you can do about it.

Recommended Reading

AEI Studies.

The American Enterprise Institute, which had long been marked by factual studies of the American economy with a mildly free-enterprise leaning, has in recent months taken a giant leap forward. Led by a series of excellent empirical “evaluation” studies edited by Professor Yale Brozen, of the University of Chicago, the AEI has now become the center of empirical economic studies from a largely free-market point of view. The following are some of the best of the recent AEI booklets (all obtainable from the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1150 Seventeenth St., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036). All are $3.00 each.

Edward J. Mitchell, U.S. Energy Policy: A primer

John Haldi, Postal Monopoly

D. Gale Johnson, The Sugar Program

Thomas Gale Moore, Freight Transportation Regulation

Sam Peltzman, Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation

Alvin Rabushka, The Changing Face of Hong Kong.
Professor Johnson’s study of the Sugar Program was apparently influential in the Congress’ almost miraculous decision to scrap the cartellizing Sugar Act, with which we have been saddled since the early days of the New Deal.

In Search Of The Old Curmudgeon

By James D. Davidson

Or the Importance of Laughing Down the Left

Readers of LIBERTARIAN FORUM used to be able to depend upon the Old Curmudgeon. He would sally forth with a certain indignation and much good humor to deflate the socio-political buncombe which is so widespread in America today. The Old Curmudgeon had good sense. And he understood the devastating power of the laugh, a power which he used to enforce Jacques Barzun’s point that intellect deteriorates with each surrender to folly. The Old Curmudgeon did his best to see that folly did not pass into us, but rather passed by us. In this respect, that irascible gentleman did us a favor. But whatever happened to him? Time passes; culture deteriorates, and we haven’t heard a peep from our stalwart. In his place we have Murray Rothbard, that ail-too respectable voice of moderation and scholarly detachment.

When Professor Rothbard wrote about the current kidnapping binge, for example, he made some valuable points in his own way. But he fell well short of what we might have expected from the Old Curmudgeon. My comments cannot fill the gap. My nature is too gentle and I am hardly old. Yet someone must speak out to put a little starch into the positions that Professor Rothbard has been ironing over with his scholarly detachment—hence this critique and plea that the Old Curmedgeon be brought out of retirement.

In the case of the Hearst Kidnapping, to which Professor Rothbard addressed a few passing comments, we have further proof of Albert J. Nock’s dictim that the worst sort of people read the papers. Patricia Hearst’s kidnappers and Patricia herself grew up on a steady diet of newspaper philosophy. If researchers in the Hearst case discover that all the principals read Hearst papers, that alone would explain the profound moral and ethical confusion which motivated their acts. It is little wonder, then, that Patricia apparently has nestled in with the preposterous world view of her captors. One can suppose that the morality that Patricia derived from her parents as a girl was of no more substance than the editorial policy of their newspaper. In that instance it probably boiled down, in addition to the perfuntory religion and welfare state civics, to something like “Don’t be late for dinner.”

Patricia was evidently ripe for the comic opera doctrines of the “Symbionese Liberation Army” precisely because she had never had anything sufficiently potent to believe. Bob Love says that no one of fair intelligence, who is taught both the socialist and free market philosophy in childhood could possibly become a socialist. Even if that is a bit of an exaggeration, can anyone imagine how a properly reared individual could be impressed with the SLA philosophy? Could anyone with walking-around sense, let alone an acquaintance with the classics of Western thought, believe that marriage and monogamy could be outlawed, as is proposed in the SLA platform?

Such preposterous positions and more abound in the canon of the SLA. If this represented no more than the rantings of a few psychotics it would be distressing enough. Yet we find, not surprisingly, that the young leftish terrorists are not alone in their opposition to all forms of “racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, individualism, possessiveness, (and) competitiveness.” The SLA merely takes up and exaggerates attitudes which are fast becoming cliches of contemporary culture. Distressingly, even persons who otherwise lay claims to libertarian disposition have proven weak marks when it comes to resisting some of the current assault upon human nature.

What is at stake is the understanding which T.S. Eliot aptly said is on the “pre-political” level. That is, “the stratum down to which any sound political thinking much push its roots, and from which it must derive its nourishment.” Somewhere along the line, the great mass of persons, including, unfortunately, many advocates of free market economics, has lost sight of the fundamental fact that man has a nature; that he is not merely silly putty to be re-shaped according to passing fad. So-called “racism, sexism, ageism, etc.” exist because, no matter how imperfectly, they incorporate certain truths about the human condition. It may well be, for instance, that there is a fundamental difference between male and female which explains the observable phenomena of all human cultures—that the male—as a rule—predominates. This does not mean, and no sensible person would claim otherwise—that all males will dominate and out-perform all females. Yet acknowledging that, how silly is it for women to be constantly badgering radio stations to give equal time to female composers? A station with a great library might then muster enough programming to stay on the air for an afternoon.

The same might well be said, although it is a lapse of taste, about the so-called “racist” issue. In a free society, knowledge that members of one race might tend to be less nimble mentally than members of another would be almost totally useless information. It would tell nothing about any given individual, just as it would be virtually useless to know that most short persons are of lower intelligence than those six feet tall or greater. Since there are always geniuses who are midgets as well as tall idiots, knowing that an individual was tall or short would tell you nothing. It is only in a statist society where recognition of such tendencies of nature becomes meaningful—precisely because a hue and cry is raised deploring “racism” or “shortism”, “ageism” or the like, whenever statistical analysis does not reveal a proportional representation among all groups in the higher income levels of society. When the issue is forced, it then becomes crucial to know, as many scholarly studies have suggested, that members of one race may indeed tend to be in certain ways less capable.

This line of reasoning could be elaborated to fine detail. But the point is clear. Anyone with insight should know that biological reality, and not “brainwashing” or environmental control, is the prime factor informing man’s existence. What must always be borne in mind, as Eliot said, is that no political philosophy can escape the right answer to this question: “What is Man? what is his misery and what his greatness? and what, finally, his destiny?” (See George A. Panichas, “T. S. Eliot and the Critique of Liberalism,” MODERN AGE, Spring, 1974)

The strength of the libertarian position is precisely that it is a philosophy which harmonizes with understanding of man’s basic nature. To work, it awaits no wonderful transformations. Man need be no stronger, wiser, finer than he is at present for free market economics to succeed, because the principles of the free market are deduced from axiomatic truths about reality. This is not to say, that man might not be at least wiser, if not finer and stronger, if a free market did exist. The masses could then see clearly evident the truth of libertarian positions, such as there is no reason to have a state monopoly post office and that public education is not the essential cornerstone of civilization. Man would become wiser in that he would simply be privy to revealed economic truths rather than being forced upon his own meagre logical resources to dope out the form of an economic system. The only other sense in which the free market might elevate man is that since it is more productive, it would afford greater leisure for contemplation. This might redound to the benefit of civilization.

Many libertarians, however, fail to understand this. They-reason, erroneously, that since the masses have been indoctrinated to believe that the free market will not work, that any and all other-opinions or values of the masses can be equally wrong. Thus, women’s liberationists do battle with “sexism” on the assumption that male/female sex roles are not essential components of the human experience, but rather cultural whimsy, of the same order as an opinion about agricultural price supports or foreign policy. Of course, sex roles are not opinions, nor are they matters of indoctrination. They are matters of hormonal chemistry. Because this is so emphatically the case, there is no grave danger of the women’s liberationists succeeding. The only mischief that they can do is bureaucratic. They can agitate for quotas and regulation of jobs and promotion by fiat. They may generate a bit of short term inequity by displacing more qualified persons (of either sex) from positions they might otherwise have held. They may cause confusion and unhappiness by causing young children to feel guilt over inclinations to follow normal sexual roles. But in the long run, so-called women’s liberation is bound to come to nothing because it is based on a profound misunderstanding of human nature. Short of wholesale chemical manipulation of the populace men will ever be men and women will be women.

The attack upon sexual stereotypes, of course, is valid to the extent that those stereotypes are false. But any individual, woman or man, who wished to defy the so-called sex roles could do so at any time. A man could always stay home to mind the kids. The woman could always work, except where legal impediments (which all libertarians oppose) bar the way. But the real thrust of women’s lib has not been an opposition to discriminatory laws, but rather a gripe against nature. What especially galls the women’s libbers is that being a woman has some decisive meaning which is distinct from being a man. In this sense, the women’s liberation movement is an extension of the tendency of modern life noted by Soren Kierkegaard, to “level” humankind to a mathematical equality in which no one would be afforded any individuality or access to novel pleasures. As the mere existence of distinct sexes stands in the path of such a philosophy, an assault has been aimed with particular relish at the main expression of human sexual nature—heterosexual love. The mounting militancy of homosexuals, especially in the women’s movement, testifies to this effort to reduce mankind to an indifferent, amorphous mass. The SLA membership, studed with dykes, has merely seized upon the essential content of women’s liberation by seeking to do away with all forms of individuality.

It is hardly likely that this or any like-minded revolutionary movement should succeed. Nature stands in the way of that. But the revolutionaries can and will make a botch out of society and culture if they are not treated to the widespread derision which is their rich desert. The SLA and its ilk should be despised for what they are—a congregation of lowlife ruffians, aided and abetted by some bored and humorless middle class brats. It should be the task of everyone concerned about the quality of life to laugh them back into the shadows rather than afford them the limelight and dignity which the media and liberal commentators extend to their “thought.” And not only should the terrorists and kidnappers be punished with the shame that their preposterous criminality deserves, but they should be dispatched to quick justice.

The underlying elements in the culture which nourish and give rise to left wing terrorism and destructive violence should also be singled out for attack. Thus libertarians should use the harshest rigors of logic to understand the ultimate consequences of such apparently harmless fads as “women’s lib” and other egalitarian movements. Aspects of those movements which have merit from a strictly libertarian position, such as opposition to political restrictions, should be supported. But never should libertarians join in the agitation against nature which is at the heart of most current “reform” movements. For if women’s lib, and its inevitable successor movements, such as “ageism”, “pansism,” “shortism” and the like prosper, the chief casualty will be culture. The turgid and graceless propaganda of the leftish groups gives fair warning of what their version of civilized living would be if they came to dominate society. There would be precious little humor. The dreadful seriousness needed to sustain the effort to change man would see to that. Instead of accepting human nature as it ultimately is, with literature and art directed toward elucidating man’s limitations and foibles, we’d have only such “truth” as would make the Russian version of “socialist realism” as flippant as Mother Goose. No one could laugh at anything.

Before we slip so low, there is still time to allow the power of laughter to save us. Let’s hear, then, from the Old Curmudgeon, while we still have the discretion to laugh out loud at the assault upon human differences. In its way, that could contribute as much as scholarly detachment to the evolution of “a more civilized world of dignity, reason and order” which we hopefully can find, without riding as Virgil’s hero did, in a rowboat through hell.

The Old Curmudgeon replies:

I’m still around, Jim; the Old Curmudgeon lives! But what a pleasure to see a young lad like Jim Davidson even more curmudgeonly than the Old Master; you can’t get hardly any of that from the Younger Generation these days. God bless ye, Jimmy; it’s a pleasure for this grizzled old-timer to know that after he hangs up his six-shooter for the last time, Jim Davidson will be around to ride point on behalf of the ontological order.

About Quotas

By William R. Havender

It is baffling to hear quotas still advocated as a serious remedy to the injustice caused by discrimination, since the philosophical case against them is straight-forward and definitive. There are, of course, no such things as “group” rights, for rights, and the related concept, justice, pertain only to single persons. It follows that injustice can be redressed only for the individual who suffered it, and retribution can justly be exacted only from those who caused it. Discrimination, in particular, is perpetrated by individuals upon individuals, not by groups upon groups. Hence this cannot be rectified by penalizing the offending group qua group, nor by giving preference to the offended group qua group, without imposing new injuries upon innocent persons.

It is most instructive to recall the precise nature of discrimination: that one person receives less favorable treatment than do others with the same assessable merit, because of extraneous factors such as race or sex. The right thereby transgressed is not one’s special “group” right as a woman or a black, but rather the individual right, common to us all, to be judged by the same standard of value as anyone else. The unfairness resides wholly in the departure from a uniform merit standard in the first place—in fact, it is fair to say that a quota already was in use. It should be stressed that the standard used to determine that discrimination has occurred is the merit standard itself; without the prior existence of ascertainable merit, the judgment of unfairness is without meaning.

It follows that only one way exists to counteract this unfairness, namely, to adhere strictly to merit. And what is meant by a merit standard is simply a performance requirement of credential, publicly announced in advance, which is equally applicable to all—the same attributes that a good law ought to have. The futility of quotas should be obvious, since, rather than eliminating inequity, they aim purely at changing its target. A notable advance. We can state this quantitatively: the degree to which a quota policy actually succeeds in admitting different persons than would enter under a merit standard accurately measures the extent to which it continues the old policy of unfairness to individuals. Hence, to talk of goals, timetables and good faith efforts as distinctly different from quotas is merely to miss the force of this criticism, which is against the use of numerical ratios of any sort that are not firmly grounded in measurable ability. And to consider it an improvement, as many do, if a previously sheltered group now has to bear a little of the discriminatory burden, is likewise a mistake: the individual nature of rights and of justice means that any departure from a policy of elevating persons according to a common performance yardstick necessarily results in the visitation of new injustices rather than the rectifying of old ones.

The use of quotas has often been advocated not as an ultimate end but merely as a temporary measure intended to “fade away” when no longer needed. But they will never simply fade away, for there are real factors, other than discrimination, that contribute to group differences. For example, most women have the option, closed to most men, of being financially supported in exchange for homemaking services. At any given level, let us say, that of awarded Ph.D.’s, a smaller proportion of women than of men would probably elect to advance to the next rung, simply because they have an additional alternative. In this instance, quotas to maintain “equal” representation would never disappear, since they would be in opposition to the natural, i.e., free choice, result. A second example is the “disproportionate” representation of Jews in the professions. When seen properly, that is, at the level of individuals, this representation is unquestionably a reflection of the true occurrence of talent among them: hence, a quota to “correct” this likewise would never end. Finally, even if proportionate numbers of the respective groups were hired, but for whatever reason (pregnancy, sickle cell anemia, etc.) one group intended to turn over more rapidly than another, than an employment survey at any given time would indeed reveal, Ecce, a disproportion; yet this, would in no way result from discriminatory hiring or promotion. Once again, the temporary quota would become a permanent fixture. There are doubtless many other nondiscriminatory influences preferentially affecting a given group (e.g., its recency of immigration to this country) which deserve proper attention by sociologists. But these examples suffice to illuminate the Procrustean nature of quotas.

A seldom recognized feature of the sociology of small group differences is the peculiar statistical behaviour of distributions about a mean, to wit; that a pair of such curves, differing only moderately in the position of their means, will differ dramatically at their extremes. In particular, a determinant shifting just slightly the mean of the employment profile of a given group will result in a whopping “disproportion” in the very worst and very best jobs. Hence, to assert that the surprisingly low numbers of women that are full professors at the best universities, or at the tippy top of any other professional ladder, “prove” pervasive discrimination, is eyewash; a substantial part of this, perhaps most, might well result from nondiscriminatory factors having rather slight overall effects. This leads us inescapably to the view that the usual tactic, of offering an employment breakdown displaying disproportionate group representation as prima facie proof of discrimination, is, unless qualified by an estimation of the magnitudes of the other contributing influences, a downright hornswoggle. That such influences are operative is suggested by the otherwise puzzling circumstance of why market forces have not functioned to break the monopoly of “white males” in good jobs; specifically, why have not second string institutions made use of the allegedly large pool of underutilized and bargain priced but top rate and eager talent in order to gain an advantage over competitors? A white male conspiracy, which is, in effect, the answer usually offered (the “old-boy” network) seems less than an adequate explanation of the observed group differences.

These considerations make clear that the proper focus of anti-discriminatory efforts must necessarily be the implementation of efficacious merit policies. Conversely, the idea of quotas can manifestly be seen to be antithetical to the true goal of a liberal society, namely, to maximize freedom of choice, such that a person electing any given occupation would not find that being a woman or a black bad any independent bearing on his or her chances. This proper goal is entirely compatible with there being wide variations in the group averages resulting from the exercise of free choice. While the rhetoric of quotas might at first sound plausible, given the mental inertia of an unfocused mind, a little critical effort shows the concept to be entirely nugatory in achieving the goal of fairness to all.

Arts And Movies

Death Wish. with Charles Bronson. dir. by Michael Winner.

Death Wish is a superb movie, the best hero-and-vengeance picture since Dirty Harry. Bronson, an architect whose young family has been destroyed by muggers, drops his namby-pamby left-liberalism, and begins, to pack a gun, defending himself brilliantly and uncompromisingly against a series of muggers who infest New York City. Yet he never kills the innocent, or commits excesses. Naturally, even though he is only defending himself against assault, the police, who have failed to go after the muggers and who acknowledge the fall in the crime rate due to Bronson’s activities, devote their resources to pursuing him instead of the criminals who terrorize New York. It is a great and heroic picture, a picture demonstrating one man’s successful fight for justice.

As might be expected, Death Wish has been subjected to hysterical attacks by the left-liberal critics who acknowledge the power and technical qualities of the picture, which they proceed to denounce for its “fascist ideology” (self-defense by victims against crime) and its “pornography of violence” (in a just cause.) Bronson is attacked for his “wooden acting”, although this is by far his best acting performance in years, far better than in The Mechanic, where the violence was hailed by the critics precisely because it was meaningless and not in defense against aggression. Don’t miss Death Wish; it says more about “the urban problem” than a dozen “message” documentaries, and it helps bring back heroism to the movies.

The Tamarind Seed, with Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif, dir. by Blake Edwards.

Tamarind Seed is a welcome breath of fresh air in the cinema, an unabashedly romantic movie, a “movie-movie” in the classical tradition. It combines suspense and espionage with a romantic theme, and integrates both love and espionage into the plot. Direction and acting are excellent. A delightful movie on every level. Once again, the left-liberal critics are generally hostile, largely because it flouts current convention to such an extent that Miss Andrews and Sharif do not hop into bed at the first opportunity. Love ripens first, and what could be more “reactionary” than that? Hooray for Reaction.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 9

SEPTEMBER, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

Natural Law, Or The Science Of Justice

By Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner has many great distinctions in the history of political thought. For one thing, he was undoubtedly the only constitutional lawyer in history to evolve into an individualist anarchist; for another, he became steadily and inexorably more radical as he grew older. From the time that Benjamin R. Tucker founded the scintillating periodical, Liberty, in 1881, Spooner and Tucker were the two great theoreticians of the flourishing individualist anarchist movement, and this continued until Spooner’s death in 1887, at the age of 79.

Spooner and the younger Tucker differed on one crucial point, though on that point alone: Tucker was strictly and defiantly a utilitarian, whereas Spooner grounded his belief in liberty on a philosophy of natural rights and natural law. Unfortunately, Spooner’s death left Tucker as the major influence on the movement, which quickly adopted the utilitarian creed while Spooner’s natural rights-anarchism faded into the background. The present-day followers of Spooner and Tucker, in the United States and England, have also forgotten the fundamental natural-rights grounding in Spooner and have rested on the far more shaky and tenuous Tuckerian base of egoistic utilitarianism.

Lysander Spooner published Natural Law, or the Science of Justice as a pamphlet in 1882”; the publisher was A. Williams & Co. of Boston. The pamphlet had considerable influence among American and European anarchists of the day, and was reprinted in three editions in the three years following publication. Spooner meant the pamphlet to be the introduction to a comprehensive masterwork on the natural law of liberty, and it is a great tragedy of the history of political thought that Spooner never lived to complete the projected treatise. But what we have retains enduring value from the fact that, of all the host of Lockean natural rights theorists, Lysander Spooner was the only one to push the theory to its logical—and infinitely radical—conclusion: individualist anarchism.

Those who are interested in delving further into Spooner’s exhilarating writings will be greatly rewarded by reading his No Treason and his Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, published together under the title No Treason by the Pine Tree Press, Box 158, Larkspur, Colorado, and available for $1.50.

The following is the complete and unabridged pamphlet by Spooner; his characteristic subtitle to the pamphlet was: A Treatise on Natural Law, Natural Justice, Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Society; Showing That All Legislation Whatsoever is an Absurdity, a Usurpation, and a Crime. Spooner also appended another characteristic note that: “The Author reserves his copyright in this pamphlet, believing that, on principles of natural law, authors and inventors have a right of perpetual property in their ideas.”

The Science Of Justice

I.

The science of mine and thine—the science of justice—is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is the science which alone can tell any man what he can, and cannot, do; what he can, and cannot have; what he can, and cannot, say, without infringing the rights of any other person.

It is the science of peace; and the only science of peace; since it is the science which alone can tell us on what conditions mankind can live in peace, or ought to live in peace, with each other.

These conditions are simply these: viz., first, that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do; as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another.

The second condition is, that each man shall abstain from doing to another, anything which justice forbids him to do; as, for example, that he shall abstain from committing theft, robbery, arson, murder, or any other crime against the person or property of another.

So long as these conditions are fulfilled, men are at peace, and ought to remain at peace, with each other. But when either of these conditions is violated, men are at war. And they must necessarily remain at war until justice is re-established.

Through all time, so far as history informs us, wherever mankind have attempted to live in peace with each other, both the natural instincts, and the collective wisdom of the human race, have acknowledged and prescribed, as an indispensable condition, obedience to this one only universal obligation: viz., that each should live honestly towards every other.

The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: “To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.”

This entire maxim is really expressed in the single words, to live honestly; since to live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every One his due.

II.

Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them. But of his legal duty—that is, of his duty to live honestly towards his fellow men—his fellow men not only may judge, but, for their own protection, must judge. And, if need be, they may rightfully compel him to perform it. They may do this, acting singly, or in concert. They may do it on the instant, as the necessity arises, or deliberately and systematically, if they prefer to do so, and the exigency will admit of it.

III.

Although it is the right of anybody and everybody—of any one man, or set of men, no less than another—to repel injustice, and compel justice, for themselves, and for all who may be wronged, yet to avoid the errors that are liable to result from haste and passion, and that everybody, who desires it, may rest secure in the assurance of protection, without a resort to force, it is evidently desirable that men should associate, so far as they freely and voluntarily can do so, for the maintenance of justice among themselves, and for mutual protection against other wrongdoers. It is also in the highest degree desirable that they should agree upon some plan or system of judicial proceedings, which, in the trial of causes, should secure caution, deliberation, thorough investigation, and, as far as possible, freedom from every influence but the simple desire to do justice.

Yet such associations can be rightful and desirable only in so far as they are purely voluntary. No man can rightfully be coerced into joining one, or supporting one, against his will. His own interest, his own judgement, and his own conscience alone must determine whether he will join this association, or that; or whether he will join any. If he chooses to depend, for the protection of his own rights, solely upon himself, and upon such voluntary assistance as other persons may freely offer to him when the necessity for it arises, he has a perfect right to do so. And this course would be a reasonably safe one for him to follow, so long as he himself should manifest the ordinary readiness of mankind, in like cases, to go to the assistance and defense of injured persons; and should also himself “live honestly, hurt no one, and give to every one his due.” For such a man is reasonably sure of always having friends and defenders enough in case of need, whether he shall have joined any association, or not.

Certainly no man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire. Nor can any man be reasonably or rightfully expected to join, or support, any association whose plans, or method of proceeding, he does not approve, as likely to accomplish its professed purpose of maintaining justice, and at the same time itself avoid doing injustice. To join, or support, one that would, in his opinion, be inefficient, would be absurd. To join or support one that, in his opinion, would itself do injustice, would be criminal. He must, therefore, be left at the same liberty to join, or not to join, an association for this purpose, as for any other, according as his own interest, discretion, or conscience shall dictate.

An association for mutual protection against injustice is like an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck. And there is no more right or reason in compelling any man to join or support one of these associations, against his will, his judgment, or his conscience, than there is in compelling him to join or support any other, whose benefits (if it offer any) he does not want, or whose purposes or methods he does not approve.

IV.

No objection can be made to these voluntary associations upon the ground that they would lack that knowledge of justice, as a science, which would be necessary to enable them to maintain justice, and themselves avoid doing injustice. Honesty, justice, natural law, is usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds. Those who desire to know what it is, in any particular case, seldom have to go far to find it. It is true, it must be learned, like any other science. But it is also true that it is very easily learned. Although as illimitable in its applications as the infinite relations and dealings of men with each other, it is, nevertheless, made up of a few simple elementary principles, of the truth and justice of which every ordinary mind has an almost intuitive perception. And almost all men have the same perceptions of what constitutes justice, or of what justice requires, when they understand alike the facts from which their inferences are to be drawn.

Men living in contact with each other, and having, intercourse together, cannot avoid learning natural law, to a very great extent, even if they would. The dealing of men with men, their separate possessions and their individual wants, and the disposition of every man to demand, and insist upon, whatever he believes to be his due, and to resent and resist all invasions of what he believes to be his rights, are continually forcing upon their minds the questions, Is this act just? or is it unjust? Is this thing mine? or is it his? And these are questions of natural law; questions which, in regard to the great mass of cases, are answered alike by the human mind everywhere.[*]

Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus they every early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike, or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs. These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten. Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.

It would be no extravagance to say that, in most cases, if not in all, mankind at large, young and old, learn this natural law long before they have learned the meanings of the words by which we describe it. In truth, it would be impossible to make them understand the real meanings of the words, if they did not first understand the nature of the thing itself. To make them understand the meanings of the words justice and injustice, before knowing the nature of the things themselves, would be to make them understand the meanings of the words heat and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, white and black, one and two, before knowing the nature of the things themselves. Men necessarily must know sentiments and ideas, no less than material things, before they can know the meanings of the words by which we describe them.

V.

If justice be not a natural principle, it is no principle at all. If it be not a natural principle, there is no such thing as justice. If it be not a natural principle, all that men have ever said or written about it, from time immemorial, has been said and written about that which had no existence. If it be not a natural principle, all the appeals for justice that have ever been heard, and all the struggles for justice that have ever been witnessed, have been appeals and struggles for a mere fantasy, a vagary of the imagination, and not for a reality.

If justice be not a natural principle, then there is no such thing as injustice; and all the crimes of which the world has been the scene, have been no crimes at all; but only simple events, like the falling of the rain, or the setting of the sun; events of which the victims had no more reason to complain than they had to complain of the running of the streams, or the growth of vegetation.

* Sir William Jones, an English judge in India, and one of the most learned judges that ever lived, learned in Asiatic as well as European law says: “It is pleasing to remark the similarity, or rather, the identity, of those conclusions which pure, unbiassed reason, in all ages and nations, seldom fails to draw, in such juridical inquiries as are not fettered and imanacled by positive institutions.” — Jones on Bailments, 133

He means here to say that, when no law has been made in violation of justice, judicial tribunals, “in all ages and nations,” have “seldom” failed to agree as to what justice is.

If justice be not a natural principle, governments (so-called) have no more right or reason to take cognizance of it, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance of it, than they have to take cognizance, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance, of any other nonentity; and all their professions of establishing justice, or of maintaining justice, or of regarding justice, are simply the mere gibberish of fools, or the frauds of imposters.

But if justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one-and can no more be changed—by any power inferior to that which established it—than can the law of gravitation, the laws of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any man or body of men—whether calling themselves governments, or by any other name—to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion in place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral laws of the universe.

VI.

If there be any such principle as justice, it is, of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of science, to be learned and applied like any other science. And to talk of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by legislation.

VII.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, nothing can be added to, or taken from, its supreme authority by all the legislation of which the entire human race united are capable. And all the attempts of the human race, or of any portion of it, to add to, or take from, the supreme authority of justice, in any case whatever, is of no more obligation upon any single human being than is the idle wind.

VIII.

If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.

On the other hand, if there be no such principle as justice, or natural law, then every human being came into the world utterly destitute of rights; and coming into the world destitute of rights, he must necessarily forever remain so. For if no one brings any rights with him into the world, clearly no one can ever have any rights of his own, or give any to another. And the consequence would be that mankind could never have any rights; and for them to talk of any such things as their rights, would be to talk of things that never had, never will have, and never can have existence.

IX.

If there be such a natural principle as justice, it is necessarily the highest, and consequently the only and universal, law for all those matters to which it is naturally applicable. And, of consequently, all human legislation is simply and always an assumption of authority and dominion, where no right of authority or dominion exists. It is, therefore, simply and always an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime

On the other hand, if there be no such natural principle as justice, there can be no such thing as injustice. If there be no such natural principle as honesty, there can be no such thing as dishonesty; and no possible act of either force or fraud, committed by one man against the person or property of another, can be said to be unjust or dishonest; or be complained of, or prohibited, or punished as such. In short, if there be no such principle as justice, there can be no such acts as crimes; and all the professions of governments, so called, that they exist, either in whole or in part, for the punishment or prevention of crimes, are professions that they exist for the punishment or prevention of what never existed, nor ever can exist. Such professions are therefore confessions that, so far as crimes are concerned, governments have no occasion to exist; that there is nothing for them to do, and that there is nothing that they can do. They are confessions that the governments exist for the punishment and prevention of acts that are, in their nature, simple impossibilities.

X.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, such a principle as honesty, such principles as we describe by the words mine and thine, such principles as men’s natural rights of person and property, then we have an immutable and universal law; a law that we can learn, as we learn any-other science; a law that is paramount to, and excludes, every thing that conflicts with it; a law that tells us what is just and what is unjust, what is honest and what is dishonest, what things are mine and what things are thine, what are my rights of person and property and what are your rights of person and property, and where Is the boundary between each and all of my rights of person and property. And this law is the paramount law, and the same law, over all the world, at all times, and for all peoples: and will be the same paramount and only law, at all times, and for all peoples, so long as man shall live upon, the earth.

But if, on the other hand, there be in nature no such principle as justice, no such principle as honesty, no such principle as men’s natural rights of person and property, then all such words as justice and injustice, honesty and dishonesty, all such words as mine and thine, all words that signify that one thing is one man’s property and that another thing is another man’s property, all words that are used to describe men’s natural rights of person or property, all such words as are used to describe injuries and crimes, should be struck out of all human languages as having no meanings; and it should be declared, at once and forever, that the greatest force and the greatest frauds, for the time being, are the supreme and only laws for governing the relations of men with each other; and that, from henceforth, all persons and combinations of persons—those that call themselves governments, as well as all others—are to be left free to practice upon each other all the force, and all the fraud, of which they are capable.

XI.

If there be no such science as justice, there can be no science of government; and all the rapacity and violence, by which, in all ages and nations, a few confederated villains have obtained the mastery over the rest of mankind, reduced them to poverty and slavery, and established what they called governments to keep them in subjection, have been as legitimate examples of government as any that the world is ever to see.

XII.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be. All the other so-called political principles, which men are in the habit of inventing, are not principles at all. They are either the mere conceits of simpletons, who imagine they have discovered something better than truth, and justice, and universal law; or they are mere devices and pretenses, to which selfish and knavish men resort as means to get fame, and power, and money.

XIII.

If there be, in nature, no such principle as justice, there is no moral standard, and never can be any moral standard, by which any controversy whatever, between two or more human beings, can be settled in a manner to be obligatory upon either; and the inevitable doom of the human race must consequently be to be forever at war; forever striving to plunder, enslave, and murder each other; with no instrumentalities but fraud and force to end the conflict.

XIV

If there be no such obligation as justice, there can certainly be no other moral obligation—truth, mercy, nor any other—resting upon mankind To deny the obligation of justice is, therefore, to deny the existence of any moral obligation whatever among men, in their relations to each other.

XV.

If there be no such principle as justice, the world is a mere abyss of moral darkness; with no sun, no light, no rule of duty, to guide men in their conduct towards each other. In short, if there be, in nature, no such principle as justice, man has no moral nature; and, consequently, can have no moral duty whatever.

Natural Law Contrasted With Legislation

I.

Natural law, natural justice, being a principle that is naturally applicable and adequate to the rightful settlement of every possible controversy that can arise among men; being, too, the only standard by which any controversy whatever, between man and man, can be rightfully settled; being a principle whose protection every man demands for himself, whether he is willing to accord it to others, or not; being also an immutable principle, one that is always and everywhere the same, in all ages and nations; being self-evidently necessary in all times and places; being so entirely impartial and equitable towards all; so indispensable to the peace of mankind everywhere; so vital to the safety and welfare of every human being: being, too, so easily learned, so generally known, and so easily maintained by such voluntary associations as all honest men can readily and rightfully form for that purpose—being such a principle as this, these questions arise, viz.: Why is it that it does not universally, or well nigh universally, prevail? Why is it that it has not, ages ago, been established throughout the world as the one only law that any man, or all men, could rightfully be compelled to obey? Why is it that any human being ever conceived that anything so self-evidently superfluous, false, absurd, and atrocious as all legislation necessarily must be, could be of any use to mankind, or have any place in human affairs?

II.

The answer is, that through all historic times, wherever any people have advanced beyond the savage state, and have learned to increase their means of subsistence by the cultivation of the soil, a greater or less number of them have associated and organized themselves as robbers, to plunder and enslave all others, who had either accumulated any property that could be seized, or had shown, by their labor, that they could be made id contribute to the support or pleasure of those who should enslave them.

These bands of robbers, small in number at first, have increased their power by uniting with each other, inventing warlike weapons, disciplining themselves, and perfecting their organizations as military forces, and dividing their plunder (including their captives) among themselves, either in such proportions as have been previously agreed on, or in such as their leaders (always desirous to increase the number of their followers) should prescribe.

The success of these bands of robbers was an easy thing, for the reason that those whom they plundered and enslaved were comparatively defenseless; being scattered thinly over the country; engaged wholly in trying, by rude implements and heavy labor, to extort a subsistence from the soil; having no weapons of war, other than sticks and stones; having no military discipline or organization, and no means of concentrating their forces, or acting in concert, when suddenly attacked. Under these circumstances, the only alternative left, them for saving even their lives, or the lives of their families, was to yield up not only the crops they had gathered; and the lands they had cultivated, but themselves and their families also as slaves.

Thenceforth their fate was as slaves, to cultivate for others the lands they had before cultivated for themselves. Being driven constantly to their labor, wealth slowly increased; but all went into the hands of their tyrants.

These tyrants, living solely on plunder, arid on the labor of their slaves, and applying all their energies to the seizure of still more plunder, and the enslavement of still other defenseless persons: increasing, too, their numbers, perfecting their Organizations, and multiplying their weapons of war, they extend their conquests until, in order to hold what they have already got, it becomes necessary for them to act systematically, and co-operate with each other in holding their slaves in subjection.

But all this they can do only by establishing what they call a government, and making what they call laws.

All the great governments of the world—those now existing, as well as those that have passed away—have been of this character. They have been mere bands of robbers, who have associated for purposes of plunder, conquest, and the enslavement of their fellow men. And their laws, as they have called them, have been only such agreements as they have found it necessary to enter into, in Order to maintain their organizations, and act together in plundering and enslaving others, and in securing to each his agreed share of the spoils.

All these laws have had no more real obligation than have the agreements which brigands, bandits, and pirates find it necessary to enter into with each other, for the more successful accomplishment of their crimes, and the more peaceable division of their spoils.

Thus substantially all the legislation of the world has had its origin in the desires of one class of persons to plunder and enslave others, and hold them as property.

III.

In process of time, the robber, or slave-holding, class—who had seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth—began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves, and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would hold So many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labor to the land-holding class—their former owners—for just what the latter might choose to give them.

Of course, these liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent subsistence, had no alternative—to save themselves from starvation—but to sell their labor to the landholders, in exchange only for the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that.

These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who had an interest to preserve his life. They were liable, at the caprice or interest of the land-holders, to be thrown out of home, employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their labor. They were, therefore, in large numbers, driven to the necessity of begging, stealing, or starving; and became, of course, dangerous to the property and quiet of their late masters.

The consequence was, that these late owners found it necessary, for their own safety and the safety of their property, to organize themselves more perfectly as a government, and make laws for keeping these dangerous people in subjection: that is, laws fixing the prices at which they should be compelled to labor, and also prescribing fearful punishments, even death itself, for such thefts and trespasses as they were driven to commit, as their only means of saving themselves from starvation.

These laws have continued in force for hundreds, and, in some countries, for thousands of years; and are in force today, in greater or less severity, in nearly all the countries on the globe.

The purpose and effect of these laws have been to maintain, in the hands of the robber, or slave-holding class, a monopoly of all lands, and, as far as possible, of all other means of creating wealth; and thus to keep the great body of laborers in such a state of poverty and dependence, as would compel them to sell their labor to their tyrants for the lowest prices at which life could be sustained.

The result of all this is, that the little: wealth there is in the world is all in the bands of a few—that is, in the hands of the law-making, slave-holding class who are now as much slave-holders in spirit as they ever were, but who accomplish their purposes by means of the laws they make for keeping the laborers in subjection and dependence, instead of each one’s owning his individual slaves as so many chattels.

Thus the whole business of legislation, which has now grown to such gigantic proportions, had its origin in the conspiracies, which have always existed among the few, for the purpose of holding the many in subjection, and extorting from them their labor, and all the profits of their labor.

And the real motives and spirit which lie at the foundation of all legislation—notwithstanding all the pretenses and disguises by which they attempt to hide themselves—are the same today as they always have been. The whole purpose of this legislation is simply to keep one class of men in subordination and servitude to another.

IV.

What, then, is legislation? It is ah assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they can subject to their power. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be. It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place. All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as human legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed.

Only One Heartbeat Away

As the Watergate revelations poured out in the last years, our esteemed publisher, Joe Peden, began to say, in some awe: “all the most flagrant ‘paranoia’ of the New Left turns out to be correct analysis!” Of course, he could have substituted or added the Birchers for the New Left. “Paranoia” lives! and after the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate revelations the fashionable sneering at the “conspiracy theory of history” will never sit quite so smugly again. The “conspiracy theory of history”—which is really only praxeology applied to human history, in assuming that men have motives on which they act—has never looked so good or so rational.

Being away in Europe at the time of the amazing, cataclysmic appointment of Nelson Rockefeller to the Vice-Presidency, I did not have a chance to observe the reactions of American opinion. But as far as I know, no one has pointed to the most important aspect of the appointment: that it provides a remarkable empirical confirmation of the leading “conspiracy thesis” about the Watergate Affair: the Oglesby-Sale, “Cowboy vs. Yankee” hypothesis. The appointment of the man who embodies the Big Business Corporate State, the living representative of the corporate statism that has grown like a cancer since the Progressive Period in America (after about 1900), to be the heir apparent, and a heartbeat away from the most powerful post in the world, is enough to give any American, let alone any libertarian, the heebie-jeebies. The accession of Nelson Rockefeller to total power would mean the final fusion of the most colossal aggregation of political and economic power that the world has ever seen. And the only groups that have warned us of this coming event have been the major groups totally outside the American power structure: the extreme left and the “extreme”, or Birchite, right, who in their different yet complementary ways have been writing unheeded about the menace of the “Rockefeller World Empire” and its drive for total dominion.

* * * * *

When Nelson Rockefeller first appeared on the electoral scene in his successful race for the New York governorship in 1958, Frank S. Meyer, the valiant leader of the quasi-libertarian wing of the National Review clique, denounced Rockefeller as “Caesar Augustus”, the destroyer of the American Republic. The feeble and perfunctory opposition that NR has put up to Rockefeller now (combined with its kept Conservative Party’s endorsement of Rocky’s stooge Malcolm Wilson) only indicates how far National Review has gone in its urge to join the ruling Establishment. In addition to Meyer, there emerged also an eccentric (to use a charitable term) eye doctor in New York named Dr. Emanuel M. Josephson, a conspiracy theorist to end all conspiracy theories, a “paranoid” among the paranoids. But while the good doctor’s historiographic methodology left a great deal to be desired (e.g. his idea that the Rockefellers run world Communism, plus many other aberrations), he was and probably still is the world’s outstanding “Rockefeller-batter”, an enthusiastic collector of any and all facts about the Rockefeller family. At any rate, Josephson sprang into action, declaring that the Rockefellers felt so secure of their political control of the country that they were now ready to reach for open (in contrast to their previously hidden) political power, in the shape of Nelson as President. Not only that: six years earlier, in 1952, Dr. Josephson had written, in his magnum opus, Rockefeller “Internationalist”: The Man Who Misrules the World, the following paragraph, which now seems remarkably prophetic:

“The pattern of his activities indicates that it is the objective of the Rockefellers to place Nelson Rockefeller in the White House by some means, whether direct, indirect or cataclysmic. Direct election as President is now possible with the sham ‘philanthropic’, ‘benevolent’ and ‘public-spirited’ build up he has had; but it is improbable. More probable would be his nomination as Vice-Presidential candidate on one of their ‘bipartisan’ or ‘omnipartisan’ tickets at the side of a Presidential candidate whom they know to be tottering at the edge of the grave, or who could be disposed of by some other of the methods of purging that have become so commonplace during the New and Fair Deals.” (p. 49)

* * * * *

Before proceeding to the Nelson appointment and its background, a brief but vitally important sketch is in order of what I believe to be a sound “conspiracy” analysis of the essence of twentieth century political and politico-economic history. By the late nineteenth century, the Democratic Party was largely in the control of the Morgan financial empire, and of its financial and industrial allies. Augustus Belmont, a Morgan ally, was the secretary of the national Democratic Party for decades, and an analysis of the Cleveland Administrations (the only Democratic regimes from the Civil War to Woodrow Wilson) shows Morgan partners and lawyers dominant in the key Cabinet positions By the latter years of the century, on the other hand, the Republican Party became more loosely under the control of the Rockefellers, through Rockefeller domination of the Ohio Republican Party (old John D’s original home and economic base was in Cleveland). Note that Ohio Republicans formed every Republican Administration since and including Benjamin Harrison (e.g. William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren G. Harding). While both the Morgans and the Rockefellers used their political power for subsidies and contracts, and for imperial expansion abroad, the roughly laissez-faire system meant that the evil effects on the country and the economy of these power plays were relatively limited. Then, around 1900, the Big Business interests, especially those grouped around Morgan, having failed dismally to achieve monopolies in each industry on the free market, decided to change the American system into a corporate state, into a neo-mercantilist Big Government which would cartellize the economy for their benefit. While Rockefeller did not fight this trend, the Morgans were far more assiduous in pushing the new system and the new theory.

The delicate political balance of power was broken with the assassination of Rockefeller’s man William McKinley, for, as a gesture to appease the Morgans, who had fought the McKinley nomination, the Republicans had chosen the young Morgan man, Theodore Roosevelt, for the seemingly harmless post of Vice-President. (The Morgans were forced to shift, at least temporarily, to the Republicans because of the capture of the Democratic machinery by the leftish populist William Jennings Bryan). As soon as Teddy Roosevelt became President by the accident of (Yes, another!) “lone nut”, he began to wield the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which had been a literal dead letter until then, as a political club. The club was used savagely to batter—guess who?—the Rockefellers, leading to the coerced dissolution of the Standard Oil combine by the federal government. It was at this point, Dr. Josephson speculates—probably correctly—that old John D. decided to beat his enemies at their own game, to become even more statist than they, to use every political and public relations weapon at his and his allies’ command. Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, an Ohio—and therefore Rockefeller—Republican, also wielded the anti-trust weapon, to try to dissolve some other “bad” trusts. And what were these trusts? Again, you guessed it: key flagships in the Morgan empire: U.S. Steel, and International Harvester. The war of the titans was on, masked as high devotion to the anti-trust ideal.

In retaliation for the Taft-Rockefeller policies, the Morgans and their numerous allies engineered the creation of the Progressive Party, which nominated Teddy Roosevelt for President for the successful purpose of destroying Taft. The Progressives, who not coincidentally had as their national chairman Morgan partner George W. Perkins, also served the ancillary goal of ideologically fostering the proto-New Deal system of the corporate state in America. The breaking of Taft swept into office Woodrow Wilson, who was also an ally of the Morgans, and who served to institute corporate state and Big Government policies in America, in both domestic institutions and in an interventionist and globalist foreign policy. By this time, the Morgans were losing ground in the competitive financial race to Kuhn-Loeb and the Jewish investment banking firms; but the Morgans were able to recoup by pushing the Wilson Administration into war with Germany, a war necessary to the Morgans because the latter were the financial agents of the British and French governments, and had loaned heavily to Britain and France. Furthermore, the Morgans and their allies were heavily invested in the American export industries which received a great shot in the arm from Allied purchases and government war contracts. Among big businessmen, only Rockefeller was hostile to the American entry into the war.

During the interwar years, with both financial groups converted to statism, the Morgans, still heavily invested in Britain and France, began to drive toward American war with Germany, which, with its bilateral economic agreements, remained stubbornly outside the Morgan financial ambit. On the other hand, the Rockefellers, with financial ties to I. G. Farben in Germany, were isolationists in Europe, with top Rockefeller ideologist (we’ll see why a bit later) John Foster Dulles—later the chief spokesman for pietistic global war—writing a realistic book, War, Peace, and Change, calling for peaceful revision of the Versailles Treaty to meet legitimate German territorial demands in Europe. On the other hand, the Rockefellers, with heavy investments and financial ties with China, were pushing for war with Japan, while the European-centered Morgans were in favor of peaceful coexistence in Asia (thus, virtually the only high State Department official opposing war with Japan was Ambassador to Japan. Joseph C. Grew, a Morgan partner.)

World War II, which ended any sort of neo-populist phase the New Deal may have had, and cemented the corporatist Big Business alliance with the Welfare-Warfare State, may be considered to be a deal between the Rockefellers and Morgans, with both getting a piece of the pie: the Morgans their war in Europe, and the Rockefellers their war in Asia.

Since World War II, American political history can no longer be analyzed in terms of a stark Morgan-Rockefeller conflict; instead, with of course shifting marginal influence, both groups have settled down into a happy joint “Eastern Establishment” rule over the United States, an “East” which more and more has included Chicago and the Old Middle West. In domestic affairs, this meant running an increasingly mighty Leviathan Corporate State; in foreign affairs, it meant global imperialism and the waging of counter-revolution and the Cold War throughout the globe. The final victory of this Eastern team was the literal stealing of the 1952 Republican nomination from Senator Taft (no longer a Rockefeller ally), by means of savage Wall St. banker pressure on the delegates who had been committed to the isolationist Taft.

One stark example of Rockefeller influence on American politics—particularly in the higher administrative positions—was the makeup of the Eisenhower Administration. The powerful Secretary of State and virtual maker of foreign policy was John Foster Dulles. Who was Dulles? A partner, in the first place, of the Rockefeller Wall St. law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell; but, in addition to that, and a little known fact, Dulles was married to Janet Pomeroy Avery, first cousin of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Thomas E. Dewey’s political mentor was Rockefeller kinsman, Winthrop W. Aldrich, head of the extremely powerful Chase National Bank (its successor, Chase Manhattan, is now of course openly headed by David Rockefeller.) Head of the extraordinarily powerful and secret CIA was Dulles’ brother Allen, and their sister Eleanor was at the Asian desk of the State Department. To top it all off, Under Secretary of State was Christian Herter, whose wife was a member of the Pratt family, which has been intimately associated with the Rockefellers since old John D. got his start a century ago.

Even the New York Times cottoned to the egregious nature of Nelson’s claim that his personal stockholdings give him no major control over large corporations. First, we must realize that the Rockefeller Family votes and acts together through their family corporation; when we add Nelson’s, David’s, Laurence’s, and John’s holdings, plus their family trusts, plus the enormous stock held by the numerous Rockefeller Foundations, plus their extremely powerful Chase Manhattan Bank, with its loans, holdings, and trust department, plus their long-time allied families (the Pratts, Flaglers, Whitneys, Bedfords, et al), plus their looser allies, plus the fact that working control of modern corporations does not need 51% of the stock, we get an idea of the enormous Rockefeller power. From a free-market point of view, of course, there is nothing wrong with economic “power” per se; but when we realize the intimate connection between the Rockefellers and the corporate State of the U.S. government, our view changes. This is not free market money but intimate government-business partnership and control. (For the most recent scholarly study of current Rockefeller financial control, see James C. Knowles, “The Rockefeller Financial Group,” in R. Andreano, ed., Superconcentration Supercorporation (Andover, Mass.: Warner Modular Publications, 1973).

* * * * *

This brings us to the great Nixon Caper. One of the glories of the market is that, even when greatly hobbled, competition and new wealth can break through. During the 1960’s, a loosely allied variety of new wealth and new industrial firms arose to challenge the dominance of the old Rockefeller-Morgan Eastern Establishment. The new money was centered in such new industries as plastics, computers, and electronics, defense firms such as aircraft, in real estate, and in Texas oil (hide-bound Standard Oil, originally centered in Cleveland and western Pennsylvania oilfields, had been slow to realize the potential of the newly discovered Texas and Oklahoma oil fields.) Geographically, the new wealth was centered in what Kirkpatrick Sale has called “the Southern Rim”: Texas, southern California, and Florida. Much of this new wealth was Texas-centered, and the political rise of Lyndon Johnson and John Connally was both fostered by and encouraged – the economic rise of the new wealth.

Carl Oglesby’s happy term for the two: new, conflicting groups was the Yankees” and the “Cowboys”. The fact of old vs. new wealth also engendered a difference in ideology, attitudes, and lifestyles between the two groups: The Eastern Establishment Yankees, entrenched for generations, was and is aristocratic, smooth, cosmopolitan, well educated, and highly sophisticated: able to mask their power and government loot behind a facade of intellectual apologetics, set forth by kept intellectuals, experts, and university professors. Being less hungry and more far-sighted, furthermore, the Yankees are typically willing to allow more dissent, civil liberties, and adherence to democratic forms, so long as their power remains essentially undamaged. The Southern Rim “Cowboys”, on the other hand, symbolized again by Johnson and Connally, take on the typical characteristics of the nouveau riche: hungrier, less sophisticated, more immediately grasping, and more willing to scuttle civil liberties in their thirst for power.

After Yankee Jack Kennedy was deposed by a “lone nut”, Cowboy Johnson was catapulted to power. What of the Nixon Administration? While Nixon himself was personally Cowboy (Southern California), his administration was clearly a Cowboy-Yankee coalition, with foreign policy wrapped up by the Rockefellers (Henry Kissinger was for years Nelson Rockefeller’s personal foreign policy adviser.) Economic policy was also basically Rockefeller, Arthur Burns having long been in the Dewey-Rockefeller ambit, and George Shultz being a member of the Pratt family (his middle name is Pratt). But the rest of the Administration was Cowboy, a designation that clearly applies to the West Coast and USC White House power boys, as well as Connally, and to Bebe Rebozo (Florida and Cuba: how Southern Rimmy can one get?)

The interesting focal question about the great media revelations on Watergate is: how come the powerful Establishment press (the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC) suddenly got honest? How come, that after years of supinely accepting federal government press handouts, they suddenly became demon investigative reporters in the great old, but forgotten, tradition? The point is not that the press was wrong and Nixon victimized about Watergate, but that how come the press suddenly got right? A conspiracy analysis provides the only plausible explanation: namely, that the press expose was the spearhead of a massive Eastern Establishment-Yankee counterrevolution to smash the Nixonite cowboys: almost all of whom are now banished, under indictment, or in jail. Why the Yankees concluded that they must take such drastic measures, even unto impeachment, is not completely clear: part of it was certainly the naked grab for power, the burgling and the espionage, on the part of the Nixon Cowboys. But another part centers on the still mysterious role of the CIA, which was strongly if muddily concerned with Watergate. The catalyst seems to have been Nixon’s appointment of James Schlesinger to head the CIA, after which Schlesinger began to purge the “Old Guard” of the CIA, which had always been thoroughly Yankee-Eastern Establishment. It is certainly possible that James McCord, who finally blew the whistle on the plot, was a double agent of his beloved Yankee-controlled CIA, in bringing down Nixon and his Plumbers.

At any rate, we come down to the great empirical test of the Yankee-Cowboy conspiracy analysis of the Watergate Struggle: if true, if the fight over Watergate was a massive counter-revolution engineered by the Rockefeller-Morgan Yankees, then who would be appointed Vice-President by the cipher Jerry Ford (who himself was a political disciple of Yankee-controlled Arthur Vandenberg?) If the conspiracy thesis were correct, then either Yankee Brahmin Eliot Richardson, or, even more blatantly. Nelson himself, would be appointed. And the rest is history. With Rockefeller receiving general hosannahs as heir-apparent, with Donald Rumsfeld now in and Kissinger still around, the Yankees have now taken over completely. Dr. Josephson’s seemingly paranoid analysis of twenty-two years ago has virtually come true; the man who could not have been nominated, let alone elected, on his own, is only a heartbeat away from total power, and is the front-runner for 1976.

As a corollary of this mammoth fusion of political and economic power, it is not surprising that Nelson Rockefeller, as much as Scoop Jackson, is Mr. State; in every policy field. Rockefeller opts for statism and Big Government. High taxes, high government spending, fiat paper over gold, jail for drug addicts, compulsory racial integration; military-industrial complex. Cold War and global intervention, you name it, Nelson Rockefeller is in the forefront of the drive for Leviathan State power. The monstrous choice of Nelson Rockefeller, and the confirming of the conspiracy thesis, does not of course mean that we libertarians should retract our hosannahs over the bringing down of the corrupt and tyrannical Nixon gang. No group of men have more richly deserved such a fate. But the State of course rolls oh, albeit under rather different management. The Yankees may be smoother and more civil libertarian, but they are in the long run more dangerous, and this especially applies to Nelson. Now that we have used the once rusty impeachment weapon so successfully; let us keep it revved up and at the ready. Boy are we going to need it.

The Non-Dismal Science

By Leonard P. Liggio

Percy L. Greaves, Jr., UNDERSTANDING THE DOLLAR CRISIS, with a foreword by Ludwig von Mises, Boston, Western Islands, 1973, 302 pp., $7.00.

Gottfried Haberler, ECONOMIC GROWTH & STABILITY, Los Angeles, Nash Publishing, 1974 (Principles of Freedom Series), 291 pp. $10.00.

“Economics is not a dry subject. It is not a dismal subject. It is not about statistics. It is about human life. It is about the ideas that motivate human beings. It is about how men act from birth to death. It is about the most important and interesting drama of all—human action.” Thus, Percy Greaves launched his very readable book concerned with explaining to the general reader economics in general and monetary matters in particular. The book is based on the lectures which Greaves presented to the Centro de Estudios sobre la Libertad in Buenos Aires at the invitation of Alberto Benegas Lynch. Greaves’ experience as an economic author began as a financial editor for the United States News. During World War II he was Research Director of the Republican National Committee until he resigned over the party’s shift to support for Federal aid to education, public housing, etc. During 1945-46 he was Chief of the Minority (Republican; Staff of the Joint Congressional Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, and in 1947 was a congressional expert in drafting the Taft-Hartley Law. For the past quarter century, Greaves has been a noted economic columnist and lecturer (Freedom School and Foundation for Economic Education), and Armstrong Professor of Economics at the University of Piano in association with Professor von Mises.

The first part of the work, concerned with general economics, presents a clear analysis of the misunderstanding of value by the classical economists, and the rectification by the Austrian School. Greaves’ fine summary of the position of mathematics in economics deserves quotation:

Mathematics in the field of economics is always statistics, and statistics are always history. Mathematics cannot and does not enter into measuring the ideas or values that determine human action. There are no constants in these. There is no equality in market transactions. Therefore, mathematics does not apply. The use of mathematics requires constants. Mathematics cannot be used in economic theory.

He notes a debate between Walter Heller and Milton Friedman which was described as “a readable exchange between two of the nation’s best-known economists who take contrasting views of government’s role in managing the national economy.” (Emphasis added by Greaves.) A fine critique is presented of the fallacies of Friedman’s monetary thought. As Greaves notes, Friedman is a good economist in areas such as labor economics, or foreign aid, but unfortunately he does not stick to matters that he understands, but dabbles in monetary theory. One may judge the correctness of one’s monetary theory by the distance of the economist from the President’s ear.

Basing himself on Boehm Bawerk and Mises, Greaves undertakes a thorough historical analysis of modern American monetary problems. He calls to mind the anti-inflation writings of Pelatiah Webster (1726-1795). The center of his attention is the monetary and banking policies of the 1910’s and 1920’s, and the special relationship of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and the Bank of England. Of special importance was Churchill’s 1925 blunder of overvaluing the English pound; it ranks along side his 1940 foreign policy as the Alpha and Omega of England’s total decline. Greaves details the role of foreign policy and war as the steps used by the New Deal to escape the consequences of its economic programs. War production and Lend-Lease to the Aillies was financed by increases in the money supply ($46.5 billion at the end of 1938, $64.5 billion at the end of 1941). Greaves also shows the very important relationship between inflation of the money supply after World War II and the Marshall Plan and foreign aid programs; this analysis is must reading.

Especially good is Greaves’ discussion of the “Effect of Wage Rate Intervention,” and his critique of publicly financed education.

Anyone who understands the benefits of competition must hold that the system that is best for producing what people want most through the market forces is also the best system for producing the best education.

The most valuable part of Gottfried Haberler’s book is the current analysis of the energy crisis, and the correct, market mechanisms for dealing with the energy crisis. His treatment of that topic alone makes the book worth reading. But, his discussion of business cycle, inflation, and the international monetary situation are valuable for the general reader and expert alike. He devotes much attention to the conflicts over monetary policies, for example, creeping inflation:

On these questions the line-up of different economists is curiously mixed, Some laissez-faire liberals like Milton Friedman and good Keynesians like Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow take a relaxed view of creeping inflation while others, such as F. A. Hayek and some adherents of the “New Economics” (in the 1967 controversy over the tax increase) take it much more seriously. . . . I made it clear earlier that I do not question that creeping inflation per se is by far a lesser evil than severe depressions. But this does not tell us how high the cost of creeping inflation actually is. Is it possible that creeping inflation, if allowed to continue for a long time, brings with it some delayed dangers? Furthermore, it is necessary to pay any price at all in the form of inflation for the kind of growth we had during the postwar period? In other words, is growth without inflation altogether impossible.?

Haberler offers in his discussions of each major topic the Keynesian and non-Keynesian explanations for the developments. His postscripts ending many chapters concern the immediate events of the crises of the winter of 1973-74, and underscore the earlier controversies on policies.

Correction

The article, “About Quotas,” in our August issue, was written by Professor William R. Havender of the Genetics Department, University of California, Berkeley. We apologize to our readers and to Dr. Havender for inadvertently omitting his name from the article.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 10

OCTOBER, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Ford In Our Present, Or Can Greenspan Save Us?

For the libertarian there is no period more nerveracking than the inevitable “honeymoon” that attends each new President’s inception in office. Of course one knows that each of these honeymoons is doomed, but in the meantime one has to grit one’s teeth and sweat it out: endure all the sickening adulation heaped on the Leader from left, right, center and all points of the political compass. Happily, in the case of President Ford the universal honeymoon was the shortest-lived in history, so much so that I was able to sail right through it while cut off from political news in Europe. Hardly had I a chance to suffer the “honeymoon” than the brief “nightmare” (to use a term wrongly applied to Watergate) was happily over. The egregious blanket pardon granted to our disgraced ex-President was enough to liquidate the honeymoon and bring us back to a healthy distrust of government and the Executive. Surely the best comment on the pardon was the hilarious headline in the English Guardian: “Ford Absolves Nixon of All His Sins”.

Fortunately, I was also able to escape most of the blather about the much-ballyhooed “economic summits”, properly dubbed by the New Left economists as a “charade” (though not for the right reasons.) In all the thousands of words of hogwash about the summits, by far the best was the excellent article by the increasingly libertarian columnist Nicholas von Hoffman (Washington Post, September 16). In his typically scintillating fashion, von Hoffman wrote that “the front page of the New York Times says the (summit) conference will represent almost the ‘entire spectrum’ of American economic thought, but it’s not so. The difference between John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman isn’t from A to Z but from A to B and that’s as wide a gap as will be turning up in Washington.” Von Hoffman goes on to pose the truly radical, “Austrian”-free-market alternative to the summitteers. As von Hoffman adds, “The Secretary of the Treasury will be able to slink off, as he recently did, to secret meetings with the heads of foreign central banking systems to enter into who knows what kind of horrendous agreements, while we are given Jerry Ford on television playing 20 questions with 20 professors rounded up by Nelson Rockefeller’s talent scouts from the softest centers of American erudition.”

But how about Greenspan? When I left for Europe in mid-August, Alan Greenspan, an Objectivist, had been chosen as head of the Council of Economic Advisors, to the hosannahs of many libertarians who felt that Greenspan would save us all from economic perdition. (My own early extreme skepticism about this prospect can be found in the October Reason.) At any rate, the first time I flipped on the TV after returning in early October, who did I see but Greenspan testifying before the Senate. Despite Ayn Rand’s having bestowed her avowed disciple with the accolade of “heroic”, Greenspan looked like anything but a Galtian hero. Not only was there no clear-eyed self-esteem, no 100-page speeches on epistemology or A is A or even natural rights, but there was only mumbled confusion, failure to answer questions, and the assertion that a tax cut had to be opposed unless it were made up by higher taxes somewhere else!

So this is our John Gait come to save us from statism, and his sole contribution is to oppose a tax cut!? What we have here is not simply the abject failure of the Randian Movement to come up with a Hero to come within a thousand miles of the Galtian model. What we have is the logical conclusion of the Randian theory of strategy, which, in contrast to the fine rhetoric about liberty, voluntarism, and the non-initiation of force as a matter of remote ideals, is in practice the servant of cautiously pragmatic gradualism. The great insight of William Lloyd Garrison that “gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice” is once again shown to be all too chillingly true. Alan Greenspan’s role as an apologist for our crippling level of taxation supplies the answer as to why the Establishment—and all of its economists, from left to right—were perfectly happy with the Greenspan appointment. The Establishment cares not a farthing about an official’s ultimate ideals—be they Buddhist or Randian—provided that those ideals do not affect or show up in the person’s concrete day-to-day proposals. Following the disastrous Randian strategic theory of gradualism, the result is that Greenspan—in practice—sounds no different from all of his failed predecessors: all the “free-market” servitors of Power from McCracken to Shultz to Stein.

None of these gentry seems to realize that to advocate high taxes in order to stop inflation is like advocating the guillotine as a cure for cancer. Regardless of how bad a high price is, say, for a loaf of bread, it is still better than a tax, for at least one can eat the bread, whereas a tax provides no service to the consumer whatsoever. In fact, of course, the situation is still worse, because a tax is only used to build up the coercive machinery of the Leviathan State. It is incumbent, then, on any libertarian or free-market economist worthy of the name, to advocate any tax cut anywhere, and thereby a cut in coercion and parasitic burdens on the economy. Greenspan’s advocacy of high taxes is eloquent testimony to the severe split between ideals and practice, or what Randians would call a “mind-body split”, that permeates Randian strategic theory.

Moreover, Greenspan’s gaffe is still further evidence of what had been clear from his public interviews earlier this summer: that he does not understand the cause of inflation in the government’s expansion of the supply of money. Instead, Greenspan is what might be called a “right-wing Keynesian”, placing the blame for inflation on budget deficits, which leads him to put first priority on balancing the budget—a priority even higher than reducing the burden of tax coercion and theft. In short, Greenspan does not understand the point agreed upon by both the Friedmanites and the Austrians: that the government and its central bank’s continuing expansion of the money supply—its legalized counterfeiting, to be blunt about it—is the only cause of inflation. Higher taxes, even in balancing the budget, will only redistribute money and income from private to governmental hands, and will not solve the cancerous problem of governmental money growth.

All of this also highlights another crucial strategic point which neither the Randians nor the Friedmanites understand: you cannot roll back or whittle away statism—whether it be the government’s inflation, its budget, or its numerous depredations and controls on the economy—by getting a few “good guys” in there to speak Truth to Mr. President. Elitist conversations behind closed doors will only provide conservative and “libertarian” blessings to the evil march of the Leviathan State. The government is going to keep expanding and legalized counterfeiting because it is in the economic interests of the government and its “ruling class” allies to do so. He who is given the power to counterfeit will do so unless stopped by counter-pressure. In the case of the State, the only thing that will roll back State power in any and all areas is the growth of a mass movement from below, i.e. among the public outside of and subjected to State power. Only a mass movement from below and outside: either by individual or organized actions, by ad hoc organizations, or by a Libertarian Party, or by all together, can hope to exert the pressure necessary to roll back the State. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner we will stop playing cozy games with Power and the sooner we will start to channel the increasing sentiment among all strata of the population for greater liberty into an effective force to reverse the statist tide. But to do so, we must have no more Greenspans or other collaborators in the seats of Power.

LP Platform

The official platform of the national Libertarian Party, as adopted in its June convention this year in Dallas, is an enormous improvement over the first, 1972 platform. The basic problem with the old platform is that it was neo-Randian, and therefore studded with such phrases as “the proper Junction of government is . . .” For those of us who believe that the only proper function of government is to disappear, such phrases were like red flags to a bull. They were a standing affront to the substantial body of anarchists in the Party. The new platform has happily expunged these provocative phrases and reworded its principles and planks to say: “the government may not do” X, Y, and Z. In that way, without explicitly calling for anarchism, the new platform provides a Commodious home which both anarcho-capitalists and laissez-faire limited statists can live with. For the new platform neither calls for abolition of the State nor does it explicitly endorse government; by confining itself to the negative function of attacking the depredations of government, it can be endorsed by all anarchists and laissez-faire liberals who do not wish to drive the members of the other camp out of the party.

As an example, instead of the old formulation: “We . . . hold that the sole function of government is the protection of the rights of each individual”, the new platform says, “We . . . hold that where governments exist, they must not violate the rights of any individual”. The anarchist insight that all governments necessarily violate the rights of the individual is left in abeyance, neither affirmed nor denied.

In addition to this heartening and basic change, the first section, on Individual Rights and Civil Order, has been greatly strengthened. Added is a clause stressing that the major purpose of criminal punishment is to force the criminal to make restitution to his victim. Furthermore, an excellent section has been added opposing any form of involuntary mental commitment. Added, too, is a clause attacking any discrimination violating equality of rights by the government, while also opposing any governmental attempts to regulate private discrimination. The “protection of privacy” clause has been notably strengthened as well. The old platform unaccountably waffled by saying that “electronic and other covert government surveillance of citizens should be restricted to activity which can be shown beforehand, under high, clearly defined standards of probable cause, to be criminal . . .” Shown to whom? And what “showing” can justify such clear invasion of the rights of person and property? The new platform clearly states that “the government should not use electronic or other covert surveillance of an individual’s actions on private property without the consent of that property owner.” Also, the previous very weak clause on the right of secession, which limited that right to one “supported by a majority within the political unit” (what “unit”?) and other qualifications, has been replaced by a clear “We support recognition of the right to political secession. Exercise of this right, like the exercise of all other rights, does not remove legal and moral obligations not to violate the rights of others.”

The only weak clause remaining in this section is the one on the “Volunteer Army”, which unfortunately goes beyond a simple call for abolition of the draft to positively hailing “a well paid volunteer army” as a “more effective means of national defense”. “Well paid”, of course, means at the expense of the taxpayers, especially since the clause does not call for a voluntarily financed army. Furthermore, there is still no recognition of the serfdom involved even in a “voluntary” army structure that does not allow voluntary resignation which all other jobs, including police, do allow. Furthermore, the call for unconditional amnesty is still limited to draftees and does not yet include non-draftee deserters.

The “Trade and the Economy” section is also strengthened by calling, as “immediate reforms”, for “drastic reduction” of taxes and government spending instead of the old, weak “reduction”. Furthermore, he old, weak-kneed “Those who have entered into . . . activities with promises of government subsidy will be forewarned by being given a cutoff date . . .” has fortunately been excised. The party of principle must stick to principle and not concede the immorality of “cutoff dates” for theft. The clause calling for “eventual repeal of all taxation” has been strengthened by support for constitutional challenges to taxation, and by opposition to the withholding and other compulsory tax collections as involuntary servitude. A timely clause has also been added opposing all government control of energy pricing and subsidies to energy research, as well immediate repeal of the egregious 55 m.p.h. speed limit. The major weakness here is still the failure to call for return to the gold standard, i.e. for return of the people’s gold confiscated by the federal government in 1933.

The “Domestic Ills” section has also been greatly strengthened. Naderite regulations are now specifically opposed, as well as compulsory “self-protection laws”, and drug regulations or prohibitions. There is a clear-cut call for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. The “Population” clause has been strengthened by attacking special tax burdens on single people or on the childless. Also, welcome clauses have been added: opposing all compulsory or tax-supported health insurance, attacking medical licensing and other interference with free medical choice, opposing all government control of land use, and demanding the repeal of the crippling OSHA.

The “Foreign Policy” section has also been greatly improved by eliminating the Wilsonian call for diplomatic recognition of only “legitimate” governments in the old platform, and substituting the genuine isolationist policy of non-intervention and de facto recognition to all other governments. However, the “currency exchange rates” clause is still unfortunately Friedmanite, in calling for freely floating exchange rates rather than currencies tied to a non-governmental, market commodity such as gold. But another excellent change is the elimination of the old platform’s call for U.S. military alliances with non-“despotic governments”, including even a “nuclear umbrella”. Instead, the new platform clearly states that “American foreign military policy must be directed toward avoiding involvement of the United States in war.” It also includes an eloquent attack on the horrors of aggressive war, with the mass murder and economic statism that such wars inevitably breed. Also, the previous call for “sufficient nuclear capacity” as a deterrent is eliminated, and replaced by a simple “we shall support the maintenance of a sufficient military force to defend the United States against aggression.” More needs to be done in calling for disarmament of nuclear and other weapons of mass slaughter, as well as a questioning of whether such threats of aggression against the United States actually exist. However, the condemnation of war and the call for its avoidance is a giant step forward in the new platform. Unfortunately, specific isolationist and anti-war clauses passed by the Platform Committee, including: withdrawal of foreign-based U.S. troops, the ending of U.S. alliances and foreign military aid, and strict neutrality in the Middle East, were stricken by the Hospers-Nathan neo-Randian forces on the floor of the convention.

All in all, however, the national LP platform, despite room for improvement, is now one which both anarchists and laissez-faire liberals should be able to accept and work with.

Austrian Economics On The Rise

By Richard M. Ebeling

During the week of June 15-22, 1974, the quaint and rustic Vermont village of South Royalton came alive in a way that it probably hasn’t since the Revolutionary War. Under the auspices of the Institute for Humane Studies, fifty professors and students from the United States, Australia and England, gathered for a Conference on Austrian Economics.

Slightly over 100 years ago the Austrian School of Economics was founded by Carl Menger. One of the pathfinders to break asunder the myth of the Labor Theory of Value that had dominated Economics from the time of Adam Smith, Menger developed the Subjective Theory of Value. The value of a good, Menger explained, was not determined by the input of labor into the product, but rather the labor was given value by the intensity felt for the product by the individual who would finally consume it. And since individuals valued things differently and by different scales, there was no way to objectively determine value other than relating it back to the individual valuer.

Menger was soon followed by two disciples who refined Austrian theory to such a point that it became a major force in the world of ideas. First, Friedrich von Wieser, who explained the Theory of Imputation and Opportunity Cost, by which is meant that supply is, in reality, indirect demand, for we value the resources necessary for making a product in relation to the forgone uses (demands) that cannot now be carried out with them. And second, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, who expounded on the Theory of Subjective Value and related them to the problems of Capital and Interest.

In this century, the Austrian approach was extended by Ludwig von Mises. Mises applied Subjective Value Theory to the area of money and out of this developed the Austrian (or Circulation Credit) Theory of the Trade Cycle. Government manipulation of bank credit and the money supply disturbed the rate of interest (which acts as the allocator of goods between those produced in the present and those in the future), thus, creating shifts in the ratio of consumer goods vs. capital goods and, therefore, causing the business cycle. Mises also showed that under Socialism, the elimination of money and private ownership of the means of production, would put insurmountable barriers in the way of rational economic calculation. And, finally, Mises developed the methodology of Praxeology, e.g., the science of human action. Praxeology declares that men carry out rational action to achieve ends through chosen means. Thus, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences have as their subject matter the purposeful action of reasoning individuals.

Further developments in Austrian theory were the product of the versatile mind of Friedrich von Hayek. Besides adding his own contributions to Business Cycle Theory, Methodology and Capital Theory, Hayek presented a radically different Theory of Competition. Market activity was seen, not as a disturbance to equilibrium, but, rather as a never ending discovery process for knowledge as men pursue their ends.

The Institute for Humane Studies brought to Vermont three of the leading Austrian theorists living today. Professor Murray Rothbard of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, author of Man, Economy and State, America’s Great Depression and Power and Market. Professor Israel Kirzner of New York University, author of The Economic Point of View, Market Theory and Price System and most recently Competition and Entrepreneurship. And, Professor Ludwig M. Lachmann, of the University of Witwaterstrand, South Africa, author of Capital and its Structure and Macro-economic Thinking and the Market Economy. Also among the Conference attendants were such notables as, Henry Hazlitt, W. H. Hutt, D. T. Armentano, Sudha R. Shenoy, Walter Block, Gary North and William Peterson.

The first day was highlighted by an opening evening banquet. In the late afternoon, Milton Friedman, who resides in Vermont, arrived at the South Royalton Inn, the site of the Conference. Surrounded by a multitude of people, he declared that the optimum government policy would be one to insure zero inflation. When someone asked if it wouldn’t be mere optimal for the money supply to be kept constant and allow prices to gently fall with greater productivity, Friedman grudgingly conceded that it probably would be the more optimal choice. Soon afterwards, Friedman led the group out to the hotel porch where he proceeded to wax eloquent over the merits of “indexing.” (For a critque of indexing, see “Uncle Miltie Rides Again,” Libertarian Forum, May, 1974). After listing economists from 1702 to the present who have supported an index program, someone asked if we can now see a pure application of the program in the military dictatorship of Brazil? To which Friedman conceded, yes. He was then asked if this verified what his son, David, said at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society, that he (Milton) had latent Fascist tendencies? Friedman muttered that he felt that David had been unfair.

At the dinner that evening, Henry Hazlitt reminisced about how he first met Ludwig von Mises in the 1940’s. W. H. Hutt talked about the contributions that Mises made to economics and Murray Rothbard related some of the anecdotes Mises told during his graduate seminars at NYU. When Milton Friedman was asked to make a few comments, he admitted that Mises had made a few contributions, but that he was much too “extreme.” And, besides which, Friedman added, there was no such thing as “Austrian Economics,” only good economics and bad economics. (A rather unusual statement, because just a few weeks before he had been on public television and spent several minutes explaining the special characteristics of “Chicago Economics”)

Starting the next day, a week of rigorous and incisive lectures began dealing with every facet of “Austrian” theory. Professors Rothbard and Kirzner laid the foundation by explaining the implications of Praxeology. The study, Rothbard pointed out, begins with the fundamental axiom that man acts, that conscious action is taken to achieve chosen goals. This also implies that all action is purposeful and rational from the point of view of the actor. All action, besides which, occurs through time. Action is taken now with the expected attainment of some result in the future. It also means that man acts without omniscience, for if an individual knew what the future would be, then his action to replace one state of affairs with another would be pointless. With a guaranteed and certain future, action becomes worthless, because nothing can be changed in that future.

The fact that action is purposeful, chosen and subjective, also means that any statistical or historical studies that attempt to measure or predict human activity must be seen as worthless. Professor Kirzner used the example of a man from Mars looking down at the earth through a telescope. The Martian observes that out of a box every day comes an object that enters another rectangular box that then moves away through a maze of canals and intersections. The Martian notices that on certain days the object that comes from the first box moves rapidly to catch up to the second, rectangular box. He then draws up a statistical study showing that 1 out of 10 times the object will move rapidly to reach the rectangular box and uses this for predictions of “earthly” activities. What has been totally overlooked by this method is that the first box happens to be an apartment building out of which comes an individual who goes to the street corner to catch the morning bus to work. The fact that on occasion the individual in question oversleeps and has to rapidly chase after the bus, so as not to miss it, does in no way guarantee that he may not get a better alarm clock, go to sleep earlier, or in the future, oversleep even more often. Nor does one individual’s actions determine how another individual will act in the same circumstances. Thus, to base ones understanding of Man on statistics and historical studies is to ignore that human action is volitional, purposeful and changeable, dependent on the goals and means of the acting individual.

The inability of the economics profession to grasp the mainsprings of human action has resulted from the adoption of economic models totally outside of reality. In the “models” put forth as an explanation of market phenomena, equilibrium, that point at which all market activities come to rest and all market participants possess perfect knowledge with unchanging tastes and preferences, has become the cornerstone of most economic theory.

Professor Lachmann, in an illuminating lecture, explained that the market is not a series of equilibrium points on a curve, but rather, it’s a constant process kept moving because the underlying currents of human action never rest. Men, lacking omniscience, integrate within their plans the information provided by a constant stream of knowledge, about changes in resource availabilities, the relevant action of other man and unexpected occurrences. But because each man’s perspective and interpretation of this stream of knowledge will be different, what seems relevant to one individual will be discarded as insignificant by another. The unknowableness of the future means that individuals draw conclusions based upon expectations of what will happen over time. Divergent expectations and unexpected change, therefore, results in potential inconsistency of interpersonal plans. And when errors become visible to individuals, each market participant will learn different lessons from the revised, available information. And, thus, we are again faced with the possibility of inconsistency of different market plans.

But, if the plans of market participants can never be expected to smoothly and automatically mesh, what forces in the market tend towards an equilibrating, or dovetailing of human action? At this point, Professor Kirzner’s follow-up lecture offered the clue. Acting man is not merely a blind “taker” of prices and resource offerings; rather, because of the fact that unexpected change occurs in an uncertain future, man is also “watchful.” Alertness to previously unseen opportunities serves as the key to the equilibrating market force. This human capacity for alertness, said Kirzner, is the entrepreneurial role. It is not merely the difficult task of knowing when to hire and where to place the worker. It’s a much more subtle and rarified knowledge; it’s the ability of knowing where to get knowledge, of picking up bits of information that others around you have passed up and seeing the value of it for bringing into consistency a human plan or plans that otherwise would have remained in disequilibrium. The chance to profit from information about market opportunities that others have failed to see acts as the incentive for people to keep their eyes open for inconsistencies in human plans.

This train of thought was continued the following day with lectures by Professors Lachmann and Kirzner on the Austrian Theory of Capital. Capital is the intermediate product used to produce a goods for consumption. Yet, the many attempts to measure and quantify “society’s” capital stock falls apart when we once again emphasize the nature of purposeful action. For a goods is seen as a production good only within the context of the human plan. That which is seen as a capital good in one instance may become totally worthless or shift to a consumer good dependent upon the subjective valuation of the actor. The elusiveness of market equilibrium often means, as well, that, as Lachmann pointed out, a tendency of structural integration of interpersonal plans may exist, but some combinations that are found not to fit within re-evaluated plans may result in a scrapping of certain goods and, therefore, are “not really capital,” in the eyes of the valuer. Kirzner continued the discussion with an excellent critique of John Hicks’ recent attempt to place all theorists either in the category of “materialists,” e.g., those who measure the quantity of physical “capital” objects, or as “fundists”, e.g., those who attempt to sum up market values to measure capital goods. Rather, pointed out Kirzner, capital is the complex of “half-baked cakes,” the interim form the resource takes in the process of a human plan.

Professor Rothbard delivered an interesting and comprehensive lecture on the Austrian Theory of Money. It was Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard pointed out, who first applied the principles of marginal utility to money, showing how money originated and how exchange values were established on the market. Professor Rothbard suggested three areas for possible future research: 1) How to separate the State from money; 2) The question of free banking vs. 100% gold dollars; and 3) The defining of the supply of money.

He followed up with a lecture on “New Light on the Pre-History of the Austrian School,” and showed the development of marginal utility theories through the Middle Ages in Spain and Italy.

Professor Lachmann finished his series of lectures with critiques of Macro-economics and the recent Neo-Ricardian Counter-Revolution. One of the errors, Lachmann suggested, was that macro-economics too often assumes a Walras-Paretian long-run equilibrium price structure. But, the basis of national income statistics is not long-run market outcomes but the output flows of “market-day equilibrium” prices. Prices that are affected by changing streams of knowledge and data that result in constantly shifting patterns of prices and equilibriums. The attempt to find consistent aggregate macro-variables is impossible.

The inability to successfully explain the workings of the economy from a macro foundation has resulted in a counter-revolution of “Ricardian” economists. A redevelopment of cost of production theories, a “methodological egalitarianism” which overlooks the entrepreneurial contribution and an ignoring of the nature of diversity and expectations are their main contributions. But, says Lachmann, the neo-classical establishment (e.g., Samuelson, Hicks, Halm, etc.) are unable to give a satisfactory response within the macro framework. Here is where the Austrians must step forward and present the micro-economic solution. The methodological individualism that will enable an understanding of how the economic process unfolds through human action. Lachmann offered the Conference participants the slogan of calling ourselves “Radical Subjectivists.”

On the last day of the Conference, Professors Kirzner and Rothbard summed up the Austrian approach within a consideration of the “Philosophical and Ethical Implications of Austrian Economic Theory.” Kirzner restated the principle of Wertfrei, value-free, economic analysis. As an economist, the Austrian theorist does not make judgements on ends chosen. Rather, following the lead of Mises, he says, suppose someone wishes to enhance the economic welfare of the community. The economist need take no stand on the end chosen, but he can say whether the means chosen for that end will be successful. And, thus, he can make a judgement of “good” or “bad” within the context of the goal chosen by the valuer.

While admitting this, Professor Rothbard wondered if the economist could be totally value-free in all instances. What if a politician has as his end the economic impoverishment of the nation so as to use demagoguery for gaining political power? Are we to tell him that this is a “good” means to achieve his end? Thus, Rothbard concluded, it may often be necessary to have certain value-laden principles to judge ends as well as means.

Some extremely interesting papers were delivered in informal sessions during the week by other conference participants as well. Edwin Dolan, S. Pejovich and E. Clayton discussed the changes from central planning to quasi-markets in socialist countries. Roger Garrison delivered an interesting paper on “Technique Reswitching and Capital Reversing.” In a very well received paper, Gerald O’Driscoll analyzed Austrian Theories of Competition and Business Cycles in a lecture on “F. A. Hayek and the Neo-Classical Synthesis.” Other topics included, “Empirical Testing of Austrian Models” by Art Carol, “Subjectivism, Marginal Utility and the Marginal Revolution,” by M. Rizzo and H. Young and a talk on the success of free trade in Hong Kong by Sudha R. Shenoy.

In 1892, Friedrich von Wieser stated that, “The actual calculation of the economic world constitutes an unsurpassable work of art in which nothing is isolated or unconnected, and it is not completely grasped by theory so long as anything in it seems to be without connection with other portions of the system.”

It is perhaps because Austrian theorists have always taken Wieser’s words to heart, that while other economists were gaining notoriety with “tracts for the times,” they were studiously building an edifice of economic theory to explain all human action.

While other economists were trying to find the origin of economic crises in sunspots and statistical comparisons, Austrian thinkers listened to Bohm-Bawerk that, “A theory of crises can never be an inquiry into just one single phase of economic phenomena. If it is to be more than an amateurish absurdity, such ah inquiry must be the last, or the next to last, chapter of a written or unwritten economic system. In other words, it is the final fruit of knowledge of all economic events and their interconnected relationships.” The result was the building of a theory of money and credit on the foundation of subjective marginal utility by Ludwig von Mises.

In the United States, the Austrians have been in a theoretical underworld in an environment dominated by Keynesianism. But as the structure of Establishment economics has fallen more and more into disrepute, individuals have discovered an alternative approach that explains more clearly the workings of reality. Building up momentum slowly, the Austrian School has silently been finding adherents around the country, as well as the world.

Sensing the Tightness of the times, the Conference on Austrian Economics was planned as a catalyst for expanding interest in the Praxeological approach. To this end, the Conference must be declared a resounding success. It opened up lines of communication among individuals who were developing ideas along similar lines but did not know of each other’s existence, let alone the work being done. It probably can safely be said that every participant, whether totally convinced of the Austrian method or not, went away desiring to give careful thought to this theoretical framework.

The Keynesian macro model has lost its credibility. Socialist economics has long ago proven itself defunct. Only the market economy can offer solutions to the economic problems the world faces. But its acceptance will be dependent on the case offered for its adoption. The Austrian framework offers such a case. Starting from the foundation of economic activity, the subjective choices of acting individuals, all economic phenomena cannot only be explained but easily comprehended. For all men act, all men choose, all men plan. It is a theoretical construction self evident to all thinking men.

As a further step in developing interest and understanding of Austrian theory, Percy L. Greaves has put together a comprehensive glossary of Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, entitled Mises Made Easier. As an added treat, an appendix has been included with a never-before-in-English critique by Mises of Bohm-Bawerk’s Time-Preference Theory. The volume is scheduled to be in print this fall.

Also, Bettina Bien Greaves, a senior staff member of the Foundation For Economic Education, has recently translated three works by Mises never before available in English.

The first of these translations, entitled Stabilization of the Monetary Unit-Considered from the Point of View of Theory, was published in 1923, shortly before the total collapse of the German currency. In this essay, Mises explains the redistributing effects of inflation to those who first receive the new money at the expense of the others who face higher prices before their incomes rise. Also, the fact that as the depreciation progresses, a “flight” from money becomes so general that “The monetary units available at the moment are not sufficient to pay the prices which correspond to the anticipated future demand for, and supply of, monetary units . . .” This “phenomena of advanced inflation . . . is the other side of the ‘crack-up boom’.” Mises dissects the “Balance of Payments” Doctrine and the “Inflationist Argument” that it is more painless to depreciate the currency than raise taxes. Finally, Mises declares that the “first condition of any monetary reform is to halt the printing presses” and “refrain from financing government deficits by issuing notes, directly or indirectly.” Inflation, Mises concludes, is always the “product of human action and man-made policy.” It is a part of the total politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas or our time. A sound monetary system must firmly be “grounded on a full and complete divorce of ideology from all imperialist, militarist, protectionist, statist and socialist ideas.”

The second essay is his 1928 work Monetary Stabilization and Cyclical Policy. Mises states the problem of the day as the attempt to stabilize the value of money, the attempt to preserve the “price level.” Mises explains at length that any goods that are the products of human action, like money, cannot have their value “fixed.” “There is no such thing as a stable purchasing power, and never can be . . . only an economy in the final state of rest, where all prices remained unchanged, could have a money with fixed purchasing power.” It also shows, says Mises, that measuring changes in purchasing power is impossible as well. Exchange ratios on the market are constantly subject to change and for a measurement “. . . we must imagine an unchanging man with never-changing values.” Mises then offers a critique of Fisher’s index number proposal for adjusting changes in purchasing power. Everything Mises says about Fisher’s idea can equally be said about Friedman’s Indexation plan. Since purchasing power cannot be scientifically measured, points out Mises, any index program would become a political issue. Governments would be pressured to index purchasing power favorable to some groups at the expense of others. Also, changes in money prices don’t affect all commodities at the same time and to the same extent. Only gradually does the change in purchasing power work its way through the economy. And because the price changes will bring shifts in income distribution, the exchange ratios will be different from what they started. Even if the indexing attempts to be “precise” by measuring on a narrow month to month basis, “the step-by-step emergence of changes in purchasing power” are accruing during the month. Thus, the “adjustment calculated at that time is based on the index number of the previous month when the full extent of that month’s monetary depreciation had not been felt because all prices had not yet been affected.”

Mises, in the second half of this essay, develops in complete detail his famous Trade Cycle Theory. He explains why price stabilization results in a “destabilizing” of price-ratios and brings about the imbalance of capital goods and consumer goods by credit expansion artificially lowering the rate of interest. And how the end result of such policies must be an eventual readjustment of the structure of production, representing the actual savings and consumption of market participants.

The third essay, entitled Causes of the Economic Crisis: an Address, was delivered by Mises in 1931 and represents his analysis of the causes and prolonging of the depression. He gives an incisive critique of the mass unemployment problem, “easy money” policies, price supports and tax policy. Mises concludes that the only lasting solution is to give “. . . up the pursuit of policies which seek to establish interest rates, wage rates and commodity prices, different from those the market indicates.”

The essays have been organized under the title Money, Inflation and the Trade Cycle: Three Theoretical Studies by Ludwig von Mises. Besides being translated by Bettina Bien Greaves, they have been edited by Percy L. Greaves and a special introduction to the volume is planned by him. Present plans are for the book to be published some time next year.

With a Conference on Austrian Economics and newly translated works by Ludwig von Mises soon to be available to the public, a turning point in the economics profession may be just before us.

Davidson And ‘Women’s Lib’

By Linda V. Seawright

I would like to comment on James Davidson’s article titled In Search of the Old Curmudgeon (August issue) with reference to his comments on women’s liberation.

I am not sure what Mr. Davidson’s motives are for taking the attitude that he does towards women’s liberation but there is nothing very unique in this approach as it has been going on for centuries.

He says that it may well be that there is a fundamental difference between male and female which explains the observable phenomena of all human cultures—that the males as a rule—predominate. As he does not go on to explain further here, he creates an impression that the more “privileged” role of the male is justified somehow or other.

Of course there is a difference and it is not so mysterious either. Until recently women have had little option but to be the child bearers. To-day the situation is still not what it might be, as this responsibility is not a shared one and methods of contraception fall short of the ideal. In addition, social attitudes lag behind the times and conditioning and social pressures play their part in sending women down this path. Maybe the child-bearing capacity is not necessarily inherently unfortunate but throughout history its practice has imposed obvious restrictions on freedom and has taken its toll in terms of life, health, energy and time. While paying rather hypocritical tribute to women as mother, society has not compensated for the drawbacks of this role but has in reality aggravated the drawbacks. Also it is a fact that on average men are stronger in terms of muscular strength. This has probably been a factor favouring the role they have traditionally played and gave them the edge in any situation that may have bordered on confrontation. Furthermore, I suspect that men are inherently somewhat more aggressive (the sex hormone testosterone increases aggression) but I think that this difference is magnified many times by a society that makes a virtue out of male aggression.

Mr. Davidson refers throughout his article to mysterious hormonal differences and attributes a great deal of weight to this, while dismissing the power of indoctrination. The only hormonal difference between the sexes that may have any significant effect on behaviour is the one I mentioned above, and while I do not dismiss this difference and think it may help explain the origins of sex-roles, I consider it much less important than indoctrination. Unfortunately most people are quite susceptible to the cultural indoctrination that is so prevalent, but they are often unaware of this. As much of this goes on in childhood and young adolescence, much of the information is absorbed in the subconscious and the individual is not aware of how much he has absorbed. I have known men who believe that they are enlightened about women and yet in their personal (and sometimes public) lives act out oppressive behaviour without dealing with the contradiction.

Mr. Davidson says that what especially galls the “women’s libbers” (a rather belittling term by the way) is that being a woman has some decisive meaning which is distinct from being a man. I think that if all cultural indoctrination and role-playing were removed the decisive meaning would evaporate into something less significant—but not completely. Gender difference is but one of many differences that may exist between individuals. It is possible that two suitably matched individuals of the opposite sex may, on occasion, have more in common from a hormonal point of view than with an unsuitably matched person of their own sex as sex hormones are only part of the hormonal picture (there may even be an overlap there on occasion).

I would also like to take issue with Mr. Davidson’s point that sex-roles help safeguard individuality in society. Indeed, I have always seen matters in the opposite light. It appears to me that sex roles interfere with individuality because they emphasize the sex difference over individuality and shape the members of the one group into one mold and the members of the other group into another mold. This helps to create difference, but not an individual one. This happens to men (who may be less aware of it) but even more so to many women. I consider one of the most unfortunate aspects of sex roles to be the confinements they attempt to place on a woman’s individuality. The less of an individual she is, the less she suffers under this system. While gender may be a part of identity, I consider that the most individualistic of all people are those whose identity is not formed and seen primarily in relation to the “opposite sex” but as a person—a human being. It is much more difficult to be a real person, with the courage that implies (especially in this society) than to take refuge under the umbrella of one’s sex-role.

It is rather distressing to see Mr. Davidson use principles of individuality to support a system which is opposed to those goals. I would have thought that libertarian philosophy would be compatible with the goal of the freedom to be human which is what the more enlightened women in this world are looking for.

I offer these comments in a spirit of goodwill and hope that they receive fair consideration and are not treated with derision.

Science And Human Liberty

By Tibor R. Machan
Department Of Philosophy, State University College, Fredonia, N.Y.

Many people who are thinking about political matters today assert that science has demonstrated the need for the planned society. Among these people we find economists, psychologists, sociologists and other members of the community of social scientists. Is there truth in this belief about the scientific displacement of freedom in favor of a planned, centrally organized, fully regimented political system?

From what I have said above it may seem that advocacy of the planned society has only recently begun to be based on so called scientific discoveries. Actually there have been many advocates of centralized political systems in past centuries equally enamoured of science. Such well known philosophers as Thomas Hobbes, August Comte, and, yes, Karl Marx defended their case for the collectivization of human affairs on what they believed were scientific grounds. But only recently did this case gain popular support—mainly because many people acknowledge the tremendous benefits of science and technology. Thus, for instance, Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard University starts his most recent book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, with the following statements:

In trying to solve the terrifying problems that face us in the world today, we naturally turn to the things we do best. We play from strength, and our strength is science and technology.

From this observation Dr. Skinner develops his case for a society governed by behavioral technologists. In the process of building the case for the centrally planned and governed society, Dr. Skinner, whose book was on the New York Times’ best seller list for several months, rejects human rights, the literature of freedom and dignity, and a host of other ideas that are central to the free society.

The question is, does a scientific approach to human affairs really contradict the values of freedom, dignity, human self-responsibility, and individualism in general? Before I answer this question I should mention that not everyone who respects science believes that it must lead to the abolition of human liberty. The philosopher Michael Polanyi, who acknowledges the enormous value of science and technology, is a staunch defender of the free society. Drs. Milton Friedman, Yale Brozen, Harold Demsetz, James Buchanan and others have been some of the most fervent advocates of liberty. Nevertheless, in other circles and in the population as a whole there lingers a strong belief about the basic antagonism between science and human liberty. So it would be worthwhile to explore the issue of whether such an antagonism is real or imaginary.

What is science? Such a question does not rest easy with many thinkers—no more than does the question “What is art?” or “What is philosophy?” Yet, based on what mankind has learned about these matters, and with the realization that developments in human knowledge may require the revision of our ideas, it is possible to answer such questions with a high degree of accuracy. Science is the systematic, rational, conscientious activity of investigating the nature and character of distinct and identifiable realms of reality. There are many sciences because there are many discernible realms of reality. Not all of these realms of reality have come under successful and mature scientific scrutiny, but many have. The question we are concerned with is whether the activity of science contradicts the ideas and ideals of a free human community. To answer, we must first find out what makes it appear that science opposes these ideas and ideals. If these appearances turn out to be correct, then we must assent to a rejection of beliefs in support of human freedom. But are they correct?

During the 17th and 18th centuries science and the physical sciences in particular began to grow at a tremendous rate. Physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology developed more rapidly than ever before. What produced this is not generally agreed upon, although ironically enough these were the times of human history when the ideas and ideals of human liberty captured the attention and imagination of mankind. So it is not unlikely that science developed in part, because of the greater freedom of investigation that was made possible by the lessening of state and church authority over the activities of people in general, and those curious about nature in particular.

With the rise of science a great many thinkers—not always scientists themselves—began to extrapolate from certain scientific findings to other areas of human interest. This meant that laws and principles discovered about some areas of nature, were extended to explain things and events in other, not yet fully investigated areas. Many people who were justifiably impressed by Sir Isaac Newton’s laws (that explained the behavior of physical objects) lifted these laws from the realm where they actually applied and imported them into other realms, making it appear that not just the behavior of physical objects but everything in nature conformed to these laws. In fact, even today many people believe that the laws of mechanics, although no longer fully adequate to explain the behavior of all of physical reality, suffice to explain everything that happens in all of reality.

Having achieved great success in the attempt to understand and explain the things and events of physical reality, many people believed that the same scientific principles that yielded this result should be used to understand and explain—even control—human affairs. Thus there were influential thinkers, among them the “father of sociology,” August Comte, who advocated that human action and the affairs of society be subjected to a scientific analysis. But at this point the term “scientific” changed its meaning considerably. Instead of taking a fresh and inquisitive look at human affairs, many believed that it would be enough simply to accept the laws of physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and impose them on a conception of human affairs.

The important idea here is that in imposing these principles and laws on a conception of human affairs, a crucial feature of the scientific approach to nature is violated. No longer is it accepted that scientists should discover principles and use them only to explain things within the realm in which the discoveries were made. Many thinkers have advocated the imposition of these principles on yet unexplored areas, including on human affairs. But this in fact was very unscientific. Lest the idea of science be taken to be virtually meaningless—as it would be if mere control, regulation, and organization of something were to be construed as sufficient to be scientific—it is important to realize that a scientific approach must be based on discovery, first and foremost. Yet today virtually anything that has a semblance of organization, control or the like seems to acquire the understandably honorific term “science.” We have “sciences” such as transcendental meditation, Scientology, psychiatry, and many more, all of which are highly controversial, lack precision and common standards of method, and admit members with extremely divergent views on what their fields imply, what their findings are, and what is included within their scope.

Underlying the proposal that science contradicts the ideals and ideas of human liberty we find the belief that science requires that everything in nature is made of physical matter and contain nothing different from what stones, rocks, metals and other physical materials contain. But this is not really a requirement of science as such. Despite what many thought, this belief has more to do with what some philosophers have assumed about the implications of science than about what science in fact has discovered. As mentioned before, following the successes in physics (and other sciences which studied the physical aspects of reality), many hopeful and ambitious thinkers advocated that these successes be utilized in human affairs. By exporting the principles of Newton and, others into meagerly examined realms of reality, they also exported some of the concrete findings of these special sciences. Since the laws of physics apply to physical reality, exporting these laws into human affairs without qualification leads to the view that human beings are no more than complicated constructions composed of physical materials. Thus by way of the imperialism of the special sciences, the general philosophy of materialism gained considerable prominence. Many began to think that everything in nature conformed only to laws that material objects conformed to.

By now it is clear what the answer to our question will be. Only if we allow mistaken ideas of science to flourish do we commit ourselves to the belief that science contradicts the idea of human liberty, of the freedom of the individual to choose, and of his moral responsibility to choose right over wrong. Science, as such, says nothing that contradicts the view that human beings can choose what they will do. Not unless one assumes, quite unscientifically, that human beings must conform in all respects to the laws that we have discovered about physical objects.

I have not tried here to develop a justification for human liberty. There is no room for that in a short comment. It is important, however, to dispel the widely held dogma that science stands in opposition to the ideas and ideals of the free society—especially its basic thesis that human beings are free and can be responsible. But it is worth noting that there are those in various sciences who have given support for the case of human liberty on scientific grounds. Several scientists in the fields of psychophysics, neurophsiology, psychobiology and biochemistry, have made discoveries that support the view that human beings, unlike inanimate objects or even plants and most animals, have capacities that justify the belief that man is a creative, active being, an agent of his conduct, and responsible, in the main, for what he does. What with the powerful philosophical defense of the idea of free will—including the idea that without the capacity to choose we could not tell the difference between truth and falsehood even in the sciences—it appears to be entirely consistent with science to advocate the free society. And so with the corresponding ideas and ideals of the freedom of the individual to govern his own life and be responsible for how well he brings off this task.

Hayek And The Nobel Prize

The grant of a 1974 Nobel Prize in Economic Science to the great Austrian free-market economist Dr. Friedrich A. von Hayek comes as a welcome and blockbuster surprise to his free-market admirers in this country and throughout the world. For, since the death last year of Hayek’s distinguished mentor, Ludwig von Mises, the 75-year-old Hayek ranks as the world’s most eminent free-market economist and advocate of the free society. The Nobel award comes as a surprise on two counts. Not only because all the previous Nobel prizes in economics have gone to left-liberals and opponents of the free market, but also because they have gone uniformly to economists who have transformed the discipline into a supposed “science” filled with mathematical jargon and unrealistic “models” which are then used to criticize the free enterprise system and to attempt to plan the economy by the central government. F. A. Hayek is not only the leading free-market economist; he has also led the way in attacking the mathematical models and the planning pretensions of the would be “scientists”, and in integrating economics into a wider libertarian social philosophy. Both concepts have so far been anathema to the Nobel Establishment.

We can only speculate on the motivations of the Nobel committee in this welcome, if overdue, tribute to Friedrich von Hayek. Perhaps one’ reason is the evident and gallopping breakdown of orthodox Keynesian “macroeconomics”, which leads even the most hidebound economists to at least consider alternative theories and solutions. Perhaps another reason was a desire to grant a co-Nobel Prize to the notorious left-wing socialist Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, and granting one to Hayek out of a recognized need for political “balance”. Thus, in granting prizes to these two polar opposites, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited both Hayek and Myrdal “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their pioneering analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”

At any rate, regardless of the motivations of the Nobel committee, we can only hail their richly deserved tribute to the towering contributions and achievements of Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek’s first monumental contribution to economics was his development of the “Austrian” theory of the business cycle, based on the pioneering outline of von Mises. Appearing in the late 1920’s, on the basis of which Mises and Hayek were among the very few economists in the world to predict the 1929 depression, Hayek’s two great works on the business cycle appeared in English as Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933) and the more technical Prices and Production (1931). During the early 1930’s, when Hayek had immigrated from Austria to teach at the London School of Economics, the Mises-Hayek theory of the business cycle began to be adopted widely in England and even in the United States as an explanation of the Great Depression; unfortunately, this Austrian Theory was swept aside in the jubilation of the Keynesian Revolution (1936) without being even considered, much less refuted by the statist Keynesians. Now that Keynesianism is crumbling both theoretically and empirically, the world of economics should be ripe to consider the Austrian theory seriously again, for the first time in forty years.

Briefly, the importance of the Hayek theory of the business cycle is that it puts the blame for the boom-bust cycle squarely on the shoulders of the government and its controlled banking system, and, for the first time since the classical economists of the nineteenth century, completely absolves the free-enterprise economy from the blame. When the government and its central bank encourages the expansion of bank credit, it not only causes price inflation, but it also causes increasing malinvestments, specifically unsound investments in capital goods and underproduction of consumer goods. Hence, the government-induced inflationary boom not only injures consumers by raising prices and the cost of living, but also distorts production, and creates unsound investments. The government is then faced repeatedly with two basic choices: either stop its monetary and bank credit inflation, which then will necessarily be followed by a recession which serves to liquidate the unsound investments and return to a genuinely free-market structure of investment and production; or continue inflating until a runaway inflation totally destroys the currency and brings about social and economic chaos. The relevance of the Hayek theory to the present-day should be glaringly obvious, as any hint of recession causes the government to panic and turn on the inflationary taps once again. The point is that, given any inflationary boom, a recession is painful but necessary, in order to return the economy to a sound state.

The political prescription that flows from the Hayekian theory is, of course, the diametric opposite of the Keynesian: stop the artificial inflationary boom, and allow the recession to proceed as fast as possible with its work of readjustment. Postponement and government attempts to stop or interfere with the recession process will only drag out and intensify the agony, and lead to our current and probably future turmoil of inflation combined with lengthy recession and depression. The Mises-Hayek analysis is not only the only cogent theory of the business cycle; it is the only comprehensive free-market answer to the Keynesian morass of government planning and “fine tuning” that we are suffering from today.

But F.A. Hayek did not stop with this monumental contribution to economics. In the 1940’s he widened his approach to the entire area of political economy. In his best-selling Road to Serfdom (1944) he challenged the pro-socialist and pro-Communist intellectual climate of the day, showing how socialist planning must inevitably lead to totalitarianism, and demonstrating examples in the way in which the socialistic Weimar Republic paved the way for Hitler. He also showed how the “Worst Always Get to the Top” in a statist society. In his brilliant series of essays in Individualism and the Economic Order (1948), Hayek pioneered in demonstrating how socialism cannot rationally calculate because it lacks a free market pricing system, particularly since the free market is uniquely equipped to transmit information from every individual to all other individuals. Lacking a genuine price system, socialism is necessarily devoid of such crucial information. Furthermore, in the same work, Hayek brilliantly dissected the unrealistic orthodox model of “perfect competition”, demonstrating that the real world of free competition is far superior to the absurd call for “perfection” by trust-busting lawyers and economics. As a corollary, Hayek in this work began a devastating series of attacks on the mathematical economists’ model of “general equilibrium”, showing how absurd and unrealistic such a criterion was with which to beat free enterprise over the head.

In 1952, Hayek published his superb Counter-Revolution of Science, which remains the best attack on the pretensions of would-be planners to run all of our lives in the name of “reason” and “science.” Two years later, in the very readable Capitalism and the Historians, Hayek contributed to and edited a series of essays which showed conclusively that the Industrial Revolution in England, spurred by a roughly free-market economy, enormously improved rather than crippled the standard of living of the average consumer and worker in England. In this way, Hayek led the way in shattering one of the most widespread socialist myths about the Industrial Revolution. Finally, in his Constitution of Liberty (1960), Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967), and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973), Hayek, among other notable contributions, upheld the forgotten ideal of the rule of law rather than men, and emphasized the unique value of the free market and the free society in creating a “spontaneous order” which can only emerge from freedom. As merely one of his achievements, his much anthologized article, “The Non-Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect’”, demolished J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society in pointing out that there is nothing wrong with individuals learning and absorbing values and consumer desires from one another. And in his scintillating essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism”, F. A. Hayek set forth the proper strategy for libertarians to follow: the importance of having the courage to follow the socialists in being consistent, in refusing to surrender to the short-run dictates of compromise and expediency; only in that way will we be able to roll back and defeat the collectivist tide.

We could go on and on. But enough has been said here to point to the great scope, erudition, and richness of F. A. Hayek’s contributions to economics and to political philosophy. Like his great mentor Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek has persisted with high courage in opposing the socialism and statism of our time. But not only has he unswervingly opposed the current fashions of Keynesianism, inflation, and socialism; he has, with nobility, courtesy, and great erudition, pursued his researches to provide us with the alternative concepts of the free economy and the free society. F. A. Hayek richly deserves, not only the Nobel Prize, but any honors which we can bestow upon him. But the greatest tribute we can make, to Hayek and to Mises, is to dedicate ourselves to rolling back the statist tide and proceeding onward to a society of freedom.

*This essay is reprinted from Human Events.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 11

NOVEMBER, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE ELECTIONS

1. The most important fact of the election was the evisceration of the Republican Party. The unrecognized great truth of American politics is that the Republican Party has been moribund for many years; it has been twenty years since the Republicans have controlled Congress, and there is no sign of resumed control in even the far distant future. Nixon’s landslide in 1972 was less important than the remarkable fact that the Democrats continued in total control of both houses of Congress, and have done so throughout the Nixon-Ford administrations. We have had a one-party system for twenty years, and there can be no healthy evolution in American politics until we all become aware of that fact. The massive repudiation of the Republican Party in 1974 should begin the healthy process of officially burying its moribund carcass.

2. The happily low participation in the vote (about 38% of eligible voters) is a clear sign that what the public was doing was not so much endorsing the Democrats as registering their disgusted repudiation of the Republicans. Indeed, the disgust with both parties was evident throughout the country. And why should the party of Watergate, of tyranny and corruption, of me-tooing the left-liberal big spending and statist policies of the Democrats, not have been repudiated? The Republicans stand for nothing except personal power, and the era of Watergate has made this stance crystal clear. As for the conservative wing of the Republican party, they discredited themselves forevermore by supinely forming the last loyalist bastion of the insufferable Nixon. One of the happy results of the election was the repudiation of the most visible Nixon loyalists: the thuggish Sandman, the numskull Maraziti, the obfuscating Dennis, the egregious Landgrebe who vowed to stay loyal to Nixon “if they have to take both of us out to be shot.”

3. One of the most interesting aftermaths of the election has been the continuing call by the conservative weekly Human Events for repudiating, at long last, the Republican Party, and for the formation of a Reagan third-party ticket in 1976. It has finally become clear to Human Events that whether or not there is “an emerging conservative majority among the public, there sure won’t be any “emerging Republican majority” (to quote the famous phrase of conservative strategist Kevin Phillips.)

A conservative third-party would have the healthy consequence of possibly completing the destruction of the discredited Republican party, and thereby forcing an ideological re-alignment of American politics comparable to the destruction of the Whigs and their replacement by the Republicans in the 1850’s.

A truly “Old Right” party, a renascent party of small government, drastic tax and budget cuts, and a free economy would be a truly pleasant development. Not only would its emergence be a healthy development in itself, but it would also form the “water” for a Libertarian Party to “swim in”, for the LP could continually point to the inevitable gap between the Old Right party’s libertarian rhetoric and its compromised reality, and thereby serve to push such a party in an ever more libertarian direction. Libertarian ideas could only advance in such a climate.

But the chances of such a genuinely limited government party emerging are small indeed. For the right-wing has suffered for two decades now under the thrall of the cunning and articulate statists of National Review, and it shows no signs of casting off this domination. In an age that evidently suffers from a swollen and aggrandized Executive, National Review now calls once more for an even stronger Presidency, a call implicitly supported by the actions of the moronic loyalists of the Nixon regime. Furthermore, under the National Review aegis, the right-wing continues to be the party of global war and intervention abroad, and of state big-business corporatism, the military-industrial complex, and coerced “morality” at home. A new “Old Right” party, to be credible to the American public, would have to be consistent: it would have to oppose, for example, government spending on warfare as well as on welfare. It would have to adopt a frankly “isolationist” policy of peace and non-intervention abroad, thereby appealing to a public sick of war scares and foreign giveaways. But to do so, it would have to engage in a true ideological “revolution” against the National Review and allied leadership, and this it shows no real signs of doing. Certainly, such a revolutionary change could be effected; but it would require both an intelligence and a will that shows no signs of forthcoming on the right-wing. Neither does Ronald Reagan evidence any desire to lead that sort of third-party movement.

4. There are, however, some encouraging results of the November election, of thrusts in a libertarian direction. Apart from the Libertarian Party (detailed further below), the most notable was the surprise victory of independent James B. Longley as governor of Maine, for the first time in decades a genuine independent beat both of the far-better known and organized Democrat and Republican candidates. Equally important was the reason for Longley’s candidacy and presumably his victory. Longley, a wealthy 50-year-old insurance executive who rose from the ranks of poverty, had been the head of a Maine Management and Cost Survey, which recommended a cut in the Maine budget of $24 million per year. When the politicians ignored the commission’s recommendations, Longley dropped out of the Democratic Party to run for governor on the cost-saving platform. In short, Longley ran and won purely on the crucial issue of cutting government taxation and spending.

Uncompromising and independent, Longley noted, after his victory, that “credibility of politicians was definitely an issue in this campaign. Too many politicians follow the strategy of going where the fish are and saying what the fish want to hear. I just refused to do that.” Also notable was the Longley campaign’s attraction for a large number of volunteer college students throughout the state. Furthermore, Longley sees the national significance of his victory: “This election is shining like that beacon off the coast of Maine. I can see other candidates all over the country doing what I did.” (On Longley, see Robert W. Merry, “Pols Scratch Heads Over Upset in Maine,” National Observer, Nov. 16; and the New York Times, Nov. 7.)

5. Which brings us to the campaigns of the Libertarian Party for this was the first election in which the fledgling LP fielded candidates in many parts of the country. In California, the California Libertarian Alliance, with the help of some LP members, accomplished the seemingly impossible by not only triumphing over the socialists in the Peace and Freedom Party primary, but also by winning control at the state party convention, and proceeding to adopt a platform that is, from all reports, even more libertarian than the LP platform. The new PFP platform calls for the abolition of taxation, and for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops and armed installations outside the territory of the U.S. Bravo! It also advances the principle of secession and decentralization by calling for the secession of California from the U.S. In the competition for purity of libertarian principle, can the LP remain behind?

In fact, the libertarians of California had a true embarasse de richesse this November, with two sets of state-wide slates, the Hospers ticket on the LP, and the Elizabeth Keathley ticket on the PFP. Unfortunately, the LP was not on the ballot, and from all accounts the Hospers write-in campaign did not garner very many votes. On the other hand, the Keathley slate obtained somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 votes; and one of its state-wide candidates managed to obtain the 2% of the total vote needed for the PFP to remain on the California ballot for the next four years. Huzzahs are in order, although I understand that the one candidate who accomplished this was one of the non-libertarians on the slate. The question remains: granting the splendid nature of the Keathley victory in the primary and at the state convention, and the success of the PFP in remaining on the ballot, will the libertarian forces be able to retain control in the face of an expected attempt at counter-revolution by the socialists? At any rate, the Keathley campaign garnered a great deal of media publicity, and, if the libertarians keep control, they may grant the Presidential ticket of the LP in 1976 a line on the ballot in a state that has more organized libertarians than any other.

In Ohio, Kathleen Harroff, formerly chairman of the Ohio LP, ran a determined and energetic campaign as an independent for the U.S. Senate (the nature of Ohio election laws precluded an LP race for the Senate.) She obtained the remarkable total of 79,000 votes, approximately 2.7% of the total vote.

In New York, Jerry Tuccille’s campaign for governor mustered the energy and enthusiasm of a large number of bright and able libertarians. It gained the quiet support of numerous important Conservatives disgruntled with the statist Buckleyite rule of the Conservative Party, and Free Libertarian Party candidates for state Assembly Mary Jo Wanzer and Virginia Lee Walker gained Conservative Party endorsement, the latter by defeating the CP. designee in the party primary. Mrs. Walker, by the way, garnered about 6.5% of the total vote for Assembly on the Conservative line (FLP votes have still not been reported by the laggard state officialdom.)

Perhaps the most important fruits of the Tuccille campaign were the attention and publicity it gained for libertarianism in the media. At least four favorable articles about the campaign were published in the New York Times, as well as in other newspapers in New York City and throughout the state. The Tuccille campaign, operating on a veritable shoestring, managed to buy TV-space with a splendid ad—a first for a minor party in the history of New York State. Furthermore, favorable national media attention was gained for the Tuccille campaign. George F. Will, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, endorsed Tuccille—an interesting defection from the Conservative ranks by National Review’s Washington editor. Furthermore, the increasingly libertarian Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman—in addition to several splendid articles on the national economy—endorsed the Tuccille campaign in a ringing column (Oct. 25). Noting that the Free Libertarians “have that peculiar buoyancy which comes from believing in what you’re doing and contrasts so strongly with the mainline politicians,” von Hoffman added that the FLP are the spiritual descendants of Locke and Mill. He hailed the FLP slogan, “Legalize Freedom”, which the Libertarians apply to gold as well as heroin, as well as to “dumping the Lockheeds, the Franklin National Banks and the Penn Central Railroads”. Von Hoffman also pointed out that the FLP has cast off the “status quo aroma” of former times, and attracts former liberals fully as well as former conservatives. Cheering rather than apologizing for libertarianism as a “middle-class movement”, von Hoffman pointed out that “that’s hardly surprising since our concepts of individual liberty were born with the middle class and have never thrived in societies which don’t have a large one.” Von Hoffman ringingly concluded that “for the overtaxed, overregulated, overburdened and underpowered millions of the American middle class”, the Libertarians “are the only people worth voting for.”

But the publicity coup of the campaign was a favorable article about libertarianism, centered around the Tuccille race, in Newsweek (Nov. 11). Considering the quickie nature of its research, the Newsweek writers did a fine job in summing up the ideas and the movement of libertarianism, summed up in Jerry Tuccille’s statement that “A libertarian is a conservative who believes in letting people have fun.”

National LP chairman Ed Crane, who has been doing a bang-up job since being installed this summer, promptly issued a Xeroxed flyer of the Newsweek and von Hoffman articles. In timely press releases, Crane has also denounced the Rockefeller nomination and called for attention to the neglected Austrian School of economics in handling the nation’s economic crisis.

Due to the sloth of our “public servants,” we still do not know at this writing whether or not Tuccille garnered the 50,000 votes needed to put the FLP permanently on the New York ballot. Rumors since that election have varied from optimistic to pessimistic, with the most recent rumors being rather gloomy. Early estimates by the campaign managers were that the FLP would have to raise $150,000 from contributions by libertarians across the country to amass the 50,000 votes. Considering that the most diligent efforts were only able to raise something like $60,000, it would not be surprising if the 50,000 vote goal was not attained. The fault for falling short of the goal, if this indeed happened, certainly does not lie with the FLP members or with the campaign staff, who have every reason to be proud of the enthusiasm, the dedication, and the ability with which the Tuccille campaign was conducted. Certainly, it is difficult to find another group of people who achieved a more widespread influence for the libertarian cause per dollar or per man-hour of energy expended. A heartfelt salute to all the dedicated men and women of the Tuccille campaign, from Jerry on down, should be accorded by everyone dedicated to the cause of liberty.

Voting And Politics

On the night before election, and again on the Today show on election morn. I appeared on nationwide NBC-TV, denouncing politics and declaring that I never vote. Despite the fact that the interview was a pure fluke, taken while minding my own business on a New Haven bus, that it was severely edited and truncated on TV to fit the anti-politics theme of mass sentiment as picked up by the reporters, I was immediately besieged by phone calls from libertarians throughout the country. Some LP people attacked me for not mentioning Tuccille and the LP, while the anti-politics forces hailed me for—at last—denouncing all politics and voting. Since I have been accused of inconsistency in being one of the few libertarians who favor both the Libertarian Party and Sy Leon’s League of Non-Voters, perhaps I can seize this occasion to make my views on the politics-voting question—I hope—crystal clear:

1. I am indeed opposed to the State and therefore to politics. If the State-and-politics disappeared tomorrow no one would be happier than myself.

2. The fewer people that vote in any election, therefore, the better. The fewer the votes, the greater the evident anti-politics sentiment throughout the country, and the greater the implicit repudiation of the entire political system. The fact that only 38% of the eligible voters cast their ballots in the 1974 election—the lowest voting percentage in three decades—is one of the most heartening results of the election. It is no coincidence that all politicians from President Ford on down begged the electorate to endorse the American Way by voting, voting for either party (“We don’t care who you vote for, but for God’s sake VOTE!”) Think of how glorious it would be if the next President were elected by a popular vote of five, to four for his opponent. The smaller the vote, the more ridiculous the claim for a “popular mandate” for the victor.

Unfortunately, politicians tend to interpret low voting as “apathy” instead of hostility to the political system (although that concept is now changing, pace the findings of NBC-TV that throughout the country people are disgusted with all politicians.) Hence the importance of the League of Non-Voters’ campaign to transform the alleged “apathy” of non-voters into an explicit repudiation of the political system.

3. I don’t vote, and haven’t done so in two decades, not because I believe voting itself to be immoral (as do the anti-LP libertarians), but because of the reasons in point No. 2, and because one person’s vote is of marginal importance, approaching zero. And for another and for me overriding reason: that the roll for compulsory jury slavery is taken from the voting lists. Compulsory jury duty differs only in degree, not in kind, from the slavery of conscription.

4. However, and unfortunately, neither politics nor voting are going to disappear overnight. Confronted with the fact that tens of millions of Americans are going to continue voting, what party should we support? Whom should we hope wins the elections? Does it make any difference who wins? I contend that it usually makes a great deal of difference. Jefferson was better than Hamilton, Jackson than Adams, Gladstone than Disraeli, Judge Parker than Teddy Roosevelt, etc. A fortiori, the Libertarian Party is infinitely better than any of the other contenders, for many important reasons: as an educational vehicle of unequalled force in influencing the public and the media; as a method of putting pressure on the other parties and on the government to curb their statist policies; and as an eventual conduit for rolling back the State. Of course, there are risks in the LP becoming corrupted if it becomes a major political force, but there are risks in any course of action or inaction. Life itself is a risk. The gripers who sit on the sidelines and carp about the LP have a responsibility, it seems to me, to come up with a course of action that will be at least as, if not more, effective than the LP in spreading the ideas and the influence of libertarianism. So far, the non-party ad hoc organizations have had only a minimal impact. The more impact that any tactical roads may have—be they the LP or any form of non-party organization—the better. This, the area of tactics, is one of the few cases where the pragmatic attitude is the proper one. Let a hundred libertarian flowers bloom. As far as I know, no one in the LP spends any time criticizing the various non-party individuals or organizations; why do the latter expend so much of their time criticizing the LP? Is it because the LP has been so successful?

After Rabat, What?

The inter-Arab conference at Rabat, Morocco, held at the end of October, was not just another conference: it was one of the most significant events in the modern history of the Middle East. Rabat changes the scene in the Middle East and will be affecting world history for many years to come. The significance of Rabat was that, for the first time, the Arab nations have forged an impressive unity on the vexed question of Palestine. Inspired by the Arab successes in the Yom Kippur War of last year, and by the substantial Arab unity in the world-wide oil crisis of last winter, Rabat has placed the endorsement of the entire Arab world on the Palestinian movement.

The most vital aspect of this endorsement was the demolition of the Jordanian roadblock. Ever since its artificial creation after World War I, the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan has been an obsequious ally of Western imperialism; and ever since its grab of the West Bank of Palestine after the 1948 conflict, it has been the major and determined Arab enemy of the national aspirations of the displaced and dispossessed Palestinian Arabs. Jordanian King Hussein’s sudden massacre of the Palestinian guerrillas in the “black September” of 1970 almost wrote finis to Palestinian aspirations. But now all that is ended; and King Hussein at Rabat once and for all liquidated all his claims to the West Bank on behalf of the Palestinians and their representatives in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hussein and Jordan will no longer form a major implicit support for the continued aggrandizement of the State of Israel. Even Egypt, which Hussein had counted on for support, joined the other Arab nations in support of Palestine, as did the conservative King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, motivated to a large extent by a desire to end the Zionist-Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, a city dear to the religions of Moslems as well as Christians and Jews. Hussein’s capitulation, indeed, was purchased by an annual subsidy of $300,000,000, contributed by the Arab states, and largely by King Faisal.

It was because of Rabat that the United Nations received Yasir Arafat, head of the PLO, as a conquering hero, with full honors of statehood. The recognition of the PLO has irrevocably shifted attention from the humanitarian problem of the Palestinian refugees to the political question of the national as well as the property rights of the Palestinians. Rabat made particularly absurd the reply to Arafat by Israeli UN delegate Yosef Tekoah, who reiterated the old Jordanian canard that the Palestinians do not need a state because they already have one in Jordan; Tekoah doggedly repeated the old Jordanian slogan that “Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.” Since Jordan had itself finally abandoned this absurdity at Rabat, Israel’s desperate attempt to resurrect this notion was grounded in air. As Jordanian UN delegate Abdul Hamid Sharaf rebutted to Tekoah, the Israeli position had “closed itself to right, to reality and to truth and had made itself a captive of its own dogmatism.”

Arafat’s appearance was treated with the usual incomprehension by the American media. On the lower levels, the media expressed surprise that the PLO delegates were cultured individuals and not inchoate “barbarians.” On the higher levels, the media expressed disappointment that Arafat had not been moderated by world politics to become “responsible” and “realistic.” Here, the American press showed itself unable to comprehend the politics of ideology, assuming as always that all nations’ politics are cast in the opportunistic, unprincipled mould of the contemporary United States. Arafat and the PLO are revolutionaries, and no revolutionaries are going to sound like Eric Sevareid or Evans and Novak, regardless of the hopes and dreams of American “moderation.” Reciting the history of Zionism and its conquest of Palestine, Arafat reaffirmed before a world audience the oft-expressed Palestinian ideal of a new, secular democratic state in Palestine, a land of full religious freedom “where Christian, Jew, and Muslim live in justice, equality, fraternity, and progress.”

What next, then, in the Middle East? First, it is all too clear that the Kissinger “miracle”, ballyhooed only a few months ago, lies in complete shambles, as the Lib. Forum predicted (“Reflections on the Middle East”, June. 1974). If Israel persists in its refusal to recognize or negotiate with the PLO, then the only sensible forecast is for another war in the Middle East. If such a “fifth round” develops, then the vital consideration for Americans, and even for the peace of the world, is that the United States stay the hell out, that it cease being the’ supplier’ of arms, aid and comfort for the State of Israel. Unfortunately, the chances of the U.S. remaining neutral are not very bright. In fact, they are made even dimmer by the disquieting saber-rattling going on in Washington, the muttering threats of a U.S. invasion of one or more Arab countries in order to grab their oil. It is indeed bizarre that American leaders should virtually ratify the Leninist theory of imperialism by asserting that we must go to war in order to seize natural resources. There is, of course, another way to obtain Arab oil—a method hallowed in American and Western tradition—by buying it. If the price is “too high” (whatever that may mean), then the Arabs will have to lower their price in order to sell their oil, or else we can proceed to develop oil or other energy sources elsewhere.

Already, in fact, market forces are beginning to lower the price of oil and oil products. Gasoline price wars are happily beginning to appear once again throughout the United States. Business Week (November 9) recently reports that the hysteria heard last year about an American oil refinery “shortage” has already disappeared, to be replaced, mirabile dictu, by a “surplus of capacity”. The “shortage” was removed by additions to refinery capacity, and especially by the American government’s removal, in the spring of 1973, of its disastrous 14-year program of restricting oil imports.

Furthermore, the much-touted theory that the increase in Arab oil prices is “responsible” for inflation is economic balderdash. An increase in one price does not “cause inflation”. On the contrary, the paying of higher prices for one product would ordinarily leave consumers with only one option: to cut their demand for other products, and thereby to lower other prices. The rise of prices in general cannot be caused by occurrences in one industry; they can only result from increases in consumer demand, which in turn can only come about from governmental increases in the supply of money—of dollars and of other world currencies. To blame the Arabs for American and Western accelerating inflation is but one more example of the age-old device of governments to find scapegoats for their own counterfeiting, their own continuing creation of new supplies of money. Throughout history, scapegoats for inflation have been found by governments among numerous unpopular groups: speculators, black marketeers, big businessmen, unions, greedy consumers, aliens, Jews . . . and now the Arabs. Meanwhile, government’s own inflationary activities go merrily on, as President Ford, in his “anti-inflation” speech, while abjuring us to clean our plates and sporting a numskull WIN button, hastens to assure us that the Federal Reserve Board will continue to pour out “adequate” amounts of new money.

Meanwhile, there is only one hope for Israel in the short run to avoid another round of war: to abandon its post-1967 conquests and to allow a “mini-Palestine” state organized by the PLO in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the likely event that Israel refuses to do so, it guarantees substantive unity between the PLO and the militant Palestinian forces that reject the entire idea of a transitional mini-state and insist on nothing less than an immediate establishment of the full “maxi” Palestine. Refusal to deal with Arafat and the PLO will force a confrontation with the ideas, if not the personnel, of Dr. George Habash and his “rejection front”, which may make Israel long for the days of Arafat just as it now longs for the days of King Hussein.

Economic Determinism, Ideology, And The American Revolution[*]

It is part of the inescapable condition of the historian that he must make estimates and judgments about human motivation even though he cannot ground his judgments in absolute and apodictic certainty. If, for example, we find that Nelson Rockefeller made a secret gift of $650,000 to Dr. William J. Ronan, we can choose to interpret Rockefeller’s motivation in one of at least two ways: we can conclude, as did that eminent student of contemporary politics Malcolm Wilson, that Nelson made this and similar gifts purely as “an act of love”; or we can conclude that some sort of political quid pro quo was involved in the transaction. In my view, the good historian (1) cannot escape making a judgment of motivation, and (2) will opt for the latter political judgment. Those historians who have made the realistic and what I hold to be the correct judgment have often been condemned as “materialists”, “economic determinists”, or even “Marxists”, but I contend that what they have simply done was to use their common sense, their correct apprehension of reality.

In some matters, where the causal chain of economic interest to action is simple and direct, almost no one denies the overriding motive of economic interest. Thus, when the steel industry lobbies for a tariff or an import quota, and despite the fact that their stated motivations will include every bit of blather about the “public interest” or the “national security” that they can think of (even “an act of love” if they thought they could get away with it), it would be a rash historian indeed who did not conclude that the prime motivation of the steel industry was to gain higher profits and restrict foreign competition. Similarly with Nelson’s “loving” largesse. There will be few charges of “Marxism” hurled in these situations. The problem comes when the actions involve longer and more complex causal chains: when, for example, we contemplate the reasons for the adoption of the American Constitution, or the Marshall Plan, or entry into World War I. It is in these matters that the focus on economic motives becomes somehow unpatriotic and disreputable.

And yet, the methodology in both sets of cases is the same. In each case, the actor himself tries his best to hide his economic motive and to trumpet his more abstract and ideological concerns. And, in each case, it is precisely because of the attempted cover-up (which, of course, is more successful in the longer causal chains) that the responsibility of the historian is to unearth the hidden motivations. There is no problem, for example, for the historian of the Marshall Plan to discover such ideological motivations as aid to the starving people of Europe or defense against Communism; these were trumpeted everywhere. But the goal of subsidizing American export industries was kept under wraps, and therefore requires more work by the historian in digging it up and spreading it on the record.

Neither is the Mises point that men are guided not by their economic interests but by ideas very helpful in discussing this problem: for the real question is what ideas are guiding them—ideas about their economic interests or ideas about religion, morality, or whatever? Ideas need not be a highly abstract level; it did not take profound familiarity with philosophy, for example, for the export manufacturers to realize that foreign aid would provide them a fat subsidy out of the pockets of the American taxpayer.

No “economic determinist” worth his salt, however, has ever held that economic motives are the sole or even always the dominant wellsprings of human action. Thus, no one who has ever studied the early Calvinists could ever deny that fiery devotion to their new religious creed was the overriding motivation for their conversion and even for their secular activities. Although even in the case of the Reformation, we cannot overlook the economic motivation, for example, for the German princes in siding with Luther or for Henry VIII’s confiscation of the wealth of the Roman Catholic monasteries. The point is in each case to give the economic motivation its due.

Can we, however, provide ourselves with a criterion, with a guide with which we can equip ourselves in at least our preliminary hypotheses about the weights of motivation? In short, can we formulate a theoretical guide which will indicate in advance whether or not an historical action will be predominantly for economic, or for ideological, motives? I think we can, although as far as I know we will be breaking new and untried ground.

Some years ago, an article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, in an attempt to score some points against the great “economic determinist” historian Charles A. Beard, charged that for Beard it was only his historical “bad guys” who were economically determined, whereas his “good guys” were governed largely by ideology. To the author, Beard’s supposed “inconsistency” in this matter was enough to demolish the Beardian method. But my contention here is that in a sense, Beard wasn’t so far wrong; and that, in fact, from the libertarian if not from the Beardian perspective, it is indeed true in a profound sense that the “bad guys” in history are largely economically motivated, and the “good guys” ideologically motivated. Note that the operative term here, of course, is “largely” rather than “exclusively”.

Let us see why this should be so. The essence of the State through history is that a minority of the population, who constitute a “ruling class”, govern, live off of, and exploit the majority, or the “ruled.” Since a majority cannot live parasitically off a minority without the economy and the system breaking down very quickly, and since the majority can never act permanently by itself but must always be governed by an oligarchy, every State will persist by plundering the majority on behalf of a ruling minority. A further or corollary reason for the inevitability of minority rule is the pervasive fact of the division of labor; the majority of the public must spend most of its time about the business of making a daily living. Hence the actual rule of the State must be left to full-time professionals who are necessarily a minority of the society.

Throughout history, then, the State has consisted of a minority plundering and tyrannizing over a majority. This brings us to the great question, the great mystery if you will, of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. From Etienne de La Boetie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises, political philosophers have shown that no State—no minority—can continue long in power unless supported, even if passively, by the majority. Why then do the majority continue to accept or support the State when they are clearly acquiescing in their own exploitation and subjection? Why do the majority continue to obey the minority?

Here we arrive at the age-old role of the intellectuals, the opinion-moulding groups in society. The ruling class—be they warlords, nobles, feudal landlords, or monopoly merchants, or a coalition of several of these groups—must employ intellectuals to convince the majority of the public that their rule is beneficent, inevitable, necessary, and even divine. The dominant role of the intellectual through history is that of the Court Intellectual, who in return for a share, a junior partnership, in the power and pelf offered by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologias for State rule with which to convince a deluded public. This is the age-old alliance of Church and State, of Throne and Altar, with the Church in modern times being largely replaced by “scientific” technocrats.

When the “bad guys” act, then, when they form a State or a centralizing Constitution, when they go to war or create a Marshall Plan or use and increase State power in any way, their primary motivation is economic: to increase their plunder at the expense of the subject and taxpayer. The ideology that they profess and that is formulated and spread through society by the Court Intellectuals is merely an elaborate rationalization for their venal economic interests. The ideology is the smokescreen for their loot, the fictitious clothes spun by the intellectuals to hide the naked plunder of the Emperor. The task of the historian, then, is to penetrate to the essence of the transaction, to strip the ideological garb from the Emperor State and to reveal the economic motive at the heart of the issue.

What then of the actions of the “good guys”, i.e., those unfortunately infrequent but vital situations in history when the subjects rise up to diminish, or whittle away, or abolish State power? What, in short, of such historical events as the American Revolution or the classical liberal movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? It goes without saying, of course, that the economic motive for diminishing or throwing off State power is a “good” one from the libertarian point of view, in contrast to the “bad” economic motives of the statists. Thus, a move by the ruling class on behalf of higher taxation is a bad economic motive, a motive to increase their confiscation of the property of the producers, whereas the economic motive against taxation is the good one of defending private property against such unjust depredations. That is true, but that is not the major point I am trying to make here. My contention is that, in the nature of the case, the major motive of the opposition, or the revolutionaries, will be ideological rather than economic.

The basic reason is that the ruling class, being small and largely specialized, is motivated to think about its economic interests twenty-four hours a day. The steel manufacturers seeking a tariff, the bankers seeking taxes to repay their government bonds, the rulers seeking a strong state from which to obtain subsidies, the bureaucrats wishing to expand their empire, are all professionals in statism. They are constantly at work trying to preserve and expand their privileges. Hence the primacy of the economic motive in their pernicious actions. But the majority has allowed itself to be deluded largely because its immediate interests are diffuse and hard to observe, and because they are not professional “anti-statists” but people going about their business of daily living. What can the average person know of the arcane processes of subsidy or taxation or bond issue? Generally he is too wrapped up in his daily life, too habituated to his lot after centuries of State-guided propaganda, to give any thought to his unfortunate fate. Hence, an opposition or revolutionary movement, or indeed any mass movement from below, cannot be primarily guided by ordinary economic motives. For such a mass movement to form, the masses must be fired up, must be aroused to a rare and uncommon pitch of fervor against the existing system. But the only way for that to happen is for the masses to be fired up by ideology. It is only ideology, guided either by a new religious conversion, or by a passion for justice, that can arouse the interest of the masses (in the current jargon to “raise their consciousness”) and lead them out of their morass of daily habit into an uncommon and militant activity in opposition to the State. This is not to say that an economic motive, a defense for example of their property, does not play an important role. But to form a mass movement in opposition means that they must shake off the habits, the daily mundane concerns of several lifetimes, and become politically aroused and determined as never before in their lives. Only a common and passionately believed in ideology can perform that role. Hence our strong hypothesis that such a mass movement as the American Revolution (or even in its sphere the Calvinist movement) must have been centrally motivated by a newly adopted and commonly shared ideology.

The turn now to the insight of such disparate political theorists as Marx and Mises, how do the masses of subjects acquire this guiding and determining ideology? By the very nature of the masses, it is impossible for them to arrive at such a revolutionary or opposition ideology on their own. Habituated as they are to their narrow and daily rounds, uninterested in ideology as they normally are, concerned with daily living, it is impossible for the masses to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps to hammer out an ideological movement in opposition to the existing State. Here we arrive at the vital role of the intellectuals. It is only intellectuals, the full-time professionals in ideas, who can have either the time, the ability, or the inclination to formulate the opposition ideology and then to spread the word to the mass of the subjects. In contrast to the statist Court Intellectual, whose role is a junior partner in rationalizing the economic interests of the ruling class, the radical or opposition intellectual’s role is the centrally guiding one of formulating the opposition or revolutionary ideology and then to spread the ideology to the masses, thereby welding them into a revolutionary movement.

An important corollary point: in weighing the motivations of the intellectuals themselves or even of the masses, it is generally true that setting oneself up in opposition to an existing State is a lonely, thorny, and often dangerous road. It would usually be to the direct economic interests of the radical intellectuals to allow themselves to “sell out”, to be coopted by the ruling State apparatus. Those intellectuals who choose the radical opposition path, then, can scarcely be dominated by economic motives; on the contrary, only a fiercely held ideology, centering on a passion for justice, can keep the intellectual to the rigorous path of truth. Hence, again, the inevitability of a dominant role for ideology in an opposition movement.

Thus, though perhaps not for Beardian reasons, it turns out to be true that the “bad guys”, the statists, are governed by economic motivation with ideology serving as a smokescreen for such motives, whereas the “good guys”, the libertarians or anti-statists, are ruled principally and centrally by ideology, with economic defense playing a subordinate role. Through this dichotomy we can at last resolve the age-old historiographical dispute over whether ideology or economic interests play the dominant role in historical motivation.

If it is the shame of the intellectuals that the Court Intellectual has been their dominant role over the course of world history, it is also the glory of the intellectuals that they played the central role in forming and guiding the mass movements of the modern world in opposition to the State: from the Calvinist upsurge of the Reformation to the classical liberal and radical movements of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

* * * * * * * * *

Let us now apply our framework to an analysis of the historiography of the American Revolution. In the long-standing controversy over the Beard-Becker economic determinist school of American history dominant in the 1920’s and 30’s, it has generally been assumed that one must either accept or reject this basic outlook wholesale, for each and every period of American history. Yet our framework explains why the Beard-Becker approach, so fruitful and penetrating when applied to the statist drive for power which brought about the U.S. Constitution, fails signally when applied to the great anti-statist events of the American Revolution.

The Beard-Becker approach sought to apply an economic determinist framework to the American Revolution, and specifically a framework of inherent conflict between various major economic classes. The vital flaws in the Beard-Becker model were twofold. First, they did not understand the primary role of ideas in guiding any revolutionary or opposition movement. Second, and this is an issue we have not had time to deal with, they did not understand that there are no inherent economic conflicts on the free market; without government intrusion, there is no reason for merchants, farmers, landlords, et al. to be at loggerheads. Conflict is only created between those classes which rule the State as against those which are exploited by the State. Not understanding this crucial point, the Beard-Becker historians framed their analysis in terms of the allegedly conflicting class interests of, in particular, merchants and farmers. Since the merchants clearly led the way in revolutionary agitation, the Beard-Becker approach was bound to conclude that the merchants, in agitating for revolution, were aggressively pushing their class interests at the expense of the deluded farmers.

But now the economic determinists were confronted with a basic problem: if indeed the revolution was against the class interests of the mass of the farmers, how come that the latter supported the revolutionary movement? To this key question, the determinists had two answers. One was the common view—based on a misreading of a letter by John Adams—that the Revolution was indeed supported by only a minority of the population; in the famous formulation, one-third of the populace was supposed to have supported the revolution, one-third opposed, and one-third were neutral. This view flies in the face of our analysis of opposition movements; for, it should be clear that any revolution, battling as it does the professional vested interest of the State, and needing to lift the mass of the people out of their accustomed inertia, must have the active support of a large majority of the population in order to succeed. As confirmation, it was one of the positive contributions of the later “consensus” school of American history of such scholars as John Alden and Edmund Morgan, to demonstrate conclusively that the Revolution had the active support of a large majority of the American public.

The Beard-Becker school had another answer to the puzzle of majority support of the Revolution: namely that the farmers were deluded into such support by the “propaganda” beamed at them by the upper classes. In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization of class interests from its proper use to explain State action to a fallacious use in trying to understand mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune theory of “propaganda” common in the 1920’s and 1930’s under the inspiration of Harold Lasswell: namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology, and that therefore no ideological statements whatever can be taken at face value, but must be considered only as insincere rhetoric for the purposes of “propaganda.” Again, the Beard-Becker school was trapped by its failure to give any primary role to ideas in history.

The economic determinists were succeeded by the “consensus” school of American history, as part of the general “American celebration” among intellectuals after World War II. At its best, the consensus historians, notably Edmund Morgan and Bernhard Knollenberg, were able to show that the American Revolution was a genuine multi-class movement supported by the great majority of the American public. Furthermore, the economic determinists, in their eagerness to show the upper merchant class as duping the farmers into supporting the Revolution, emerged—in a curious kind of left-right alliance with the pro-British “Imperial” historians—as hostile to the American Revolution. The consensus historians restored the older view that the colonists were rebelling against genuine invasions of their liberties and property by the British Empire: that their grievances were real and compelling, and not simply a figment of upper class propaganda.

At its worst, however, and under the aegis of such major consensus theoreticians as the “neo-conservatives” Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, the consensus school was moved to the truly absurd conclusion that the American Revolution, in contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not really a revolution at all, but a purely measured and the spell of the American celebration and of a Cold-War generated hostility to all modern revolutions, the consensus historians were constrained to deny any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic or ideological, and to absolve the American republic from the original sin of having been born via a revolution. Thus, the consensus historians were fully as hostile to ideology as a prime motive force in history as their enemies, the economic determinists. The difference is that where the determinists saw class conflict, the consensus school maintained that the genius of Americans has always been to be unfettered by abstract ideology, and that instead they have met every issue as ad hoc problem-solving pragmatists.

Thus, the consensus school, in its eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against State power are necessarily radical and hence “revolutionary” acts, and further that they must be genuine mass movements guided by an informed and radical ideology. Furthermore, as Robert A. Nisbet has recently pointed out in his scintillating pamphlet, The Social Impact of the Revolution, the consensus view overlooks the truly revolutionary and libertarian consequences of the American Revolution in diminishing the role of government, in dismantling church establishments and winning religious freedom, in bringing about bills of rights for the individual’s liberty and property, and in dismantling feudal land tenure in the colonies.

Nisbet’s stress on the revolutionary and libertarian nature and consequences of the American Revolution brings us to the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the Revolution: that of Professor Bernard Bailyn. Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Bailyn has managed, in scarcely a decade, to win his way through to become the leading interpretation of the Revolution. Bailyn’s great contribution was to discover for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolutionaries, and to stress that not only was the Revolution a genuine revolutionary and multi-class mass movement among the colonists, but that it was guided and impelled above all by the ideology of radical libertarianism; hence what Bailyn happily calls “the transforming libertarian radicalism of the Revolution.” In a sense, Bailyn was harking back to an older generation of historians at the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called “Constitutionalists”, who had also stressed the dominant role of ideas in the revolutionary movement. But Bailyn correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalists was in ascribing the central and guiding role to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the British Constitution, and, secondarily, to John Locke’s philosophy of natural rights and the right of revolution. Bailyn saw that the problem with this interpretation was to miss the major motive power of the Revolutionaries; Constitutional legalisms, as later critics pointed out, were dry-as-dust arguments that hardly stimulated the requisite revolutionary passions, and furthermore they neglected the important problem of economic depredations by Great Britain; while Locke’s philosophy, though ultimately important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.

Guided by the extensive research into English libertarian writers by Caroline Robbins, Bailyn found the missing and vital ingredient: in the transforming of Lockean natural rights theory into a radical and passionate, and explicitly political and libertarian framework. This task was accomplished by radical English journalists who, in contrast to Locke, were read very widely in the colonies: notably, the newspaper essays of Trenchard and Gordon written during the 1720’s. Trenchard and Gordon clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that Power—government—stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties of the individual. To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of Liberty by Power, the people must be ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies by the rulers to expand their power and aggress against their subjects. It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and which accounted for their “conspiracy view” of the English government. And while Bailyn himself, by concentrating solely on the ideology of the colonists, is ambivalent about whether such English conspiracies against liberty actually existed, the work of such historians as Bernhard Knollenberg has shown conclusively that the conspiracy was all too real, and that what some historians have derided as the “paranoia” of the colonists turned out to be an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists’ understanding of the very nature and essence of State power itself.

While Bernard Bailyn has not continued his studies beyond the Revolution, his students Gordon Wood and Pauline Maier have done so, with unfortunate results. For how can one apply the concept of a “transforming libertarian radicalism”, of a mass ideological hatred of the State and of the executive, to the movement for a Constitution which was the very antithesis of the libertarian and radical ideal? By trying to do so, Wood and Maier lose the idea of radical libertarianism altogether, and wind up in yet another form of consensus view of the Constitution. Yet the battle over the adoption of the Constitution was a fierce ideological and economic conflict; and in understanding that movement and that conflict we must turn to the neo-Beardian approach of such historians as Jackson Turner Main, E. James Ferguson, and Alfred Young, which stresses the economic and class interests behind this aggrandizement of a powerful central government. Furthermore, the Anti-Federalist resistance to the Constitution was fueled, not only by resistance to these economic depredations, but also and above all by the very ideology of Liberty versus Power that had sparked and guided the American Revolution. A glance at the eloquent speeches against the Constitution by Patrick Henry is enough to highlight the libertarian leitmotif of the anti-statist Revolution as well as the anti-statist resistance to the Constitution. Hence, the original insight of the Beardians was correct: that the Constitution was a reaction against the Revolution rather than its fulfillment.

The idea of economic motivation as the prime mover of statist actions through history, as contrasted to ideology as the major guide of anti-statist movements, is thus confirmed by analyzing the historiography of the American Revolution. Perhaps adoption of this basic framework will prove fruitful in the analysis of other important events and movements in human history.

[*] A paper delivered at the Libertarian Scholars Conference, Oct. 28, in New York City.

“All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.”

— H. L. Mencken

Report From Europe

The two parts of your editor’s European trip this summer of interest to libertarians were: the biennial meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society at Brussels, and sizing up the state of the libertarian movement and of the general political situation in Great Britain.

Mont Pelerin.

The Mont Pelerin Society is an international organization of several hundred people ostensibly devoted to the free market economy. Begun just after World War II by several distinguished economists, led by F. A. Hayek, the Society rapidly expanded during the fifties and sixties, at the same time substantially losing its character as a free-market organization. Many of the hundreds of economists, businessmen, and writers among the members are no closer to libertarian or free-market principles than a simple opposition to Communism. Many of the industrialist members are in intimate partnership with their respective governments, and must be set down as State Monopoly Capitalists rather than advocates of the free market. At any rate, fortunately for all of us, the Society is not empowered to pass any resolutions or to make any statements; its sole function is to hold pleasant annual (regional) and biennial (international) meetings, which serve as a center for social contacts. The formal sessions have become dull as dishwater, with endless repetition of the same arguments hashed over to no conclusion over the last twenty years: e.g. Are Unions or the Money Supply Responsible for Inflation? What Form Should Anti-Monopoly Policy Take? Mired down in what have become ritualistic discussions, the Society has not displayed the will either to move on to broader philosophical topics or even to apply free-market principles to newly discovered problems (e.g. ecology, or the cultivation of the oceans).

The social structure of the Mont Pelerin Society is now approximately as follows: there are a host of elderly members from Western Europe, often statist in outlook. Yet the Western Europeans do not seem to have been able to generate new, younger members. Of the younger members, most are from the United States, which is therefore bound to serve in the future as the center of gravity of the organization. Of the younger American members, there is now competition among three groups to seed members into the Society: the Friedmanites, the anarcho-capitalists, and the Buckleyite young conservatives.

Perhaps as a result of rising pressure by younger members, a new and restive spirit was evident at this year’s Brussels meeting. More and more, discontent with the fusty old topics have pressured the organizers into allowing meetings from below that had not been part of the official schedule. Thus, pressure from admirers of Ludwig von Mises induced the organizers to add an affecting memorial session in tribute to Mises.

An early sign of rising libertarian sentiment occurred midway during the week-long sessions. One of the organizers of the meeting asked me why I had not spoken more at the sessions. The answer, of course, was that I had scarcely attended any, since the informal conversations in the corridors and at the bar were a lot more enjoyable and instructive than the same old stuff at the formal sessions. “Oh no, Murray, you should talk. Five, ten years ago everyone regarded you as a nut, but now there’s increasing interest in your position.” Taking that as a cue, I and a few others decided to organize, as one of the now allowed, informal sessions, a meeting on “Anarchism and Capitalism”, with myself as official chairman and Roger MacBride as moderator. The response was fantastic, for at the meeting over 130 members and guests appeared, and the response at the meeting was interested and generally favorable. At the session—the first, of course, in the history of Mont Pelerin, on anarcho-capitalism—I first gave a brief, overall sketch of the philosophy, showing how it is the logical extension of free-market principles. Then, we had Reports from the Movements in various countries, most of which we hadn’t known existed until finding each other at Brussels. These reports not only served to inform each group of the existence of the others, but also to impress the newcomers with the rising tide of the libertarian movement in the various countries.

Thus, we heard from Michiel van Notten, dynamic young Dutch businessman who is forming an anarcho-capitalist group in Holland, consisting of about nine persons. We found out that a thriving movement of lawyers, economists, and businessmen has developed in Madrid, consisting of a Misesian circle of about 40 people who meet regularly, of whom from five to nine are anarcho-capitalists known as the “Rothbardaneros.” The Spanish group regularly translates Austrian economics and libertarian works into Spanish. The attorney Luis Reig reported from this group. From England we heard from the dynamic and indefatigable Pauline Russell, who has sparked a rapid growth of anarchist and quasi-anarchist libertarians in that country. Pauline as well as most of the English movement maybe best described as teetering somewhere between limited government and anarcho-capitalism, with national defense and an emotional attachment to the monarchy still posing some problems. Then Roger MacBride wound up the reportage with a description of the growth of the Libertarian Party in the U.S. and Canada. All in all, it was a great breakthrough for anarcho-capitalism in a setting that no one would have predicted a few years ago could ever be in the slightest degree hospitable. Will we have our own Libertarian International in a few years?

The British Situation.

Great Britain is clearly in a total economic mess, ten (twenty?) years ahead of the United States down the road to gallopping inflation, crippling controls, and stifling taxation. Controls are causing the usual haphazard succession of shortages, and, when we were in England, sugar and bottles were disappearing from the market. No one, but no one, invests in the, English stock market, which makes ours seem a picture of health and prosperity. While many politicians understand the monetary cause of inflation, there is no will to stop the process because of the phobia about recession and unemployment (sound familiar?) At any fate, British society seems to be polarizing very rapidly, what with the ever-present threat of general strikes by powerful left-wing unions, countered by the emergence of two sets of private armies dedicated to keeping industry going: a right-wing group under General Walker and a centrist, “non-political” one under Colonel Stirling. It is scary to watch the BBC and see impeccable Englishmen with bland understatement quietly discussing whether or not civil war will break out in the not too distant future.

Amidst this turmoil, the most heartening sign is the rapid growth of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists in a country that only a few years ago had virtually no one even as “extreme” as Milton Friedman. The major libertarian group is centered around Pauline Russell, and includes businessmen, journalists, economists, and others ranging from anarcho-capitalists to neo-Randians to the Selsdon Group, the free-market ginger group within the Conservative Party. Most of this group is friendly with the notable Enoch Powell, who of all the politicians in England is the only one with both the knowledge and the will to stop the monetary inflation and to put through a free market program and an end to wage and price controls. Powell, himself, despite his Tory devotion to the monarchy (which is seconded even by many of the English anarcho-capitalists), has grown increasingly libertarian. The Powell forces were working on a gusty strategy for the then forthcoming October elections: voting Labour in order to smash the statist leadership of Edward Heath. This strategy has already helped bring about the recent Labour victory, and it looks very much as if Ted Heath will happily be sent to the showers. Whether or not the third step in the strategy—the accession of Enoch Powell to the Tory leadership—will follow is certainly problematical, at least for the short run. Of the Tories now in the running to succeed Heath, the most free-market oriented is Sir Keith Joseph, who however suffers from the familiar syndrome of politicians in being far more libertarian out of power than he is in power. At any rate, Powell has cleverly found a new political base among the Ulster Unionists and is now back in Parliament after refusing to run on the Tory platform in the previous election.

In some ways, the small but growing English movement is a microcosm of the American. Split off from the Pauline Russell group is a smaller group of “hard core anarcho-capitalist purists”, who scorn any form of political action, or indeed any truck with non-purists, as a sellout of libertarian principle. This youthful group is led by Mark Brady and Chris Tame. The Russell wing, in the meanwhile, took the first tentative steps in the October election toward the formation of a Libertarian Party of Great Britain (in Britain, it is relatively easy and inexpensive for a new party to get on the ballot.) The libertarian businesswoman Mrs. Theresa Moore Gorman ran for Parliament as an “Independent Freedom” candidate from her home constituency of Streatham, an outlying suburb of London. We have not yet been able to find out how Teresa fared at the balloting.

Finally, just before leaving for Europe, we found out that the small but growing libertarian movement in Australia has decided to form the Libertarian Party of Australia. For the first time, libertarianism is bidding fair to become a genuine international-movement.

Note To Our Readers

From time to time, we hear from subscribers who have mysteriously stopped receiving the Lib. Forum. Since any minority movement is bound to suffer from incipient paranoia, many feel that they may have been “purged” from the rolls for some sort of “deviationism.” (A practice that certain other movement magazines have practiced in the past.) However, we hasten to assure all of our readers that no one has or will ever be purged from our subscription list. We welcome any and all subscribers, left, right, or center, and even our once and perhaps present CIA readers. If you haven’t received issues of the Lib. Forum and you are a subscriber, there are two possible reasons: (a) our own error, either manually or by our computer; or (b) because you failed to report your change of address. In a highly mobile movement, the latter is often the problem. So, in either case, please notify us promptly if you haven’t been receiving issues, or when you change your address. At any rate, we can assure you of one thing: you haven’t been “purged.”

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VI, NO. 12

DECEMBER, 1974

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE EMERGING CRISIS

The United States is now entering a period of what might well be the greatest crisis in its history. While all the lineaments of the crisis are as yet unclear, it very much looks as if we will be plunged into the Greatest Leap Forward into collectivism since the New Deal—in fact, that we may soon be looking back upon the New Deal as a relative haven of freedom and free enterprise. The signs are ominous and everywhere. And while this means that the failures of statism are rapidly multiplying the “objective conditions” for a libertarian victory, they might be pulling swiftly ahead of the “subjective conditions”—the rapid expansion of libertarian numbers and influence. If this prognosis is correct, we are in for dire times indeed.

The core of the crisis is economic: rooted in the abject failure of the Keynesian Establishment to foresee or to solve the accelerating inflation combined with the deepening recession/depression. 1974 saw the recession spreading and deepening to such an extent that even our economic and political Pollyannas have been forced to concede the gloomy picture. The Keynesian chickens have come home to roost—as forty years of expanding money supply, federal deficits, and government spending have finally brought us to our accelerating inflationary recession. The nation’s economists, after helping to foist this Keynesian mixed economy upon the country, are rapidly despairing of being able to understand or prescribe for what is going on. Briefly, the Keynesian nostrum of government budget surpluses to combat inflation, with deficits to offset a recession, have totally run aground in the face of an economy where both are happening at the same time. Even the Friedmanite quasi-Establishment has been discredited in also not being able to predict or explain the inflationary recession.

The economic Establishment, in short, is in despair. But does that mean that they are at least having the grace to keep quiet? Anyone who knows economists knows also the futility of such a hope. No indeed: ignorant and, or totally hostile to the Austrian School, laissez-faire, hard money alternative to the present system, and of its great record in both prediction and explanation of the current mess, the Establishment economists are rapidly turning to full-fledged collectivism as the way out. Some weeks ago for example, the New York Times published an article noting that most economists, as well as businessmen and politicians, are again turning to comprehensive wage-price controls as the remedy for the inflationary recession. How can they do this, asked the writer, when the various Phases of price-wage control were scrapped less than a year ago as a total failure (controls that rang all the changes on freezes, stiff controls, and loose controls)? How? Because, the Times writer admitted, they don’t know what else to do. Clearly, the simple maxim of doing nothing if one doesn’t know what to do is unacceptable to all of these “enlightened” groups. And so, and even though wage-price controls have always failed and have only caused widespread hardship and shortages, and even though collectivism itself has had a black economic record in this century, it looks as if we are going to get it, full blast. When the Keynesians led the way to the inflationary mixed economy in the 1930’s, they proclaimed that they were thereby “saving American capitalism”. Only a few free-market voices warned that they were, instead, digging capitalism’s grave. And now that this “salvation” hasn’t been working, they are ready to scrap the free-market economy altogether. Thus, as Soma Golden writes in a year-end economic survey in the New York Times (Dec. 29, 1974), “1975 shapes up as a critical year, one that could usher in a fundamental transformation of the American economy towards increased government planning and controls. For if the economy fails to show a marked improvement by the end of the year, in terms of both prices and unemployment, traditional economic policies will seem to have failed.” Golden quotes the prominent moderate Keynesian economist. Otto Eckstein of Harvard, as stating that “we either work our way out of this mess in 1975, or we are in real trouble. If policy does not meet the challenge next year, we’ll have to examine how to change the economic system.” Golden goes on: “Some economists think that frustration with inflation and recession could lead to the nationalization of major industries or the placement of government officials on private boards of directors. Others point out that this is already happening as the Government—without any prior plan—has stepped into emergency situations to bail out such enterprises as the Franklin National Bank and passenger railroads in financial trouble. A few economists, including Harvard’s Nobel Prize winner (and long-time left-Socialist) Wassily Leontief, say some form of national commitment to planning will be the ultimate solution.” Golden concludes the Times article. “If the convergence of painful economic events continues, the United States eventually might be forced into some form of planned economy. According to Professor Leontief of Harvard—who at 68 is still some years ahead of his profession—‘It’s only a matter of time.’

This horrendous but possibly accurate prognosis is bolstered by the significant changes that have been at the same time occurring in both major political parties. In both parties, the moderate statists centers of gravity have been drastically shifted in a leftward and collectivist direction. In the Democratic party, the mid-term national party conference in Kansas City this December was marked by a complete takeover of the national party by extreme-leftist McGovernite forces. The centrist, old New Deal faction headed by the AFL-CIO and its political operative Alexander Barkan, was virtually driven out of the party as the Left triumphed in both form and content. In the form of internal party machinery, the left-wing quota system for “oppressed minorities” was permanently enshrined. This institutionalizing of the quota system for delegates received so much publicity that the monstrous content of the mid-term conference economic platform was overlooked in the media. What was overlooked was the fact that the national Democratic party is now committed to a comprehensive leap into collectivism. For this economic platform features the following: (1) “an across-the-board system of economic controls, including prices, wages, executive compensation, profits and rents”, by the federal government. Also included is a provision for compulsory “wage catch-ups” and “price rollbacks”. The Nixon control program was criticized for ineffective enforcement, so we can look to a vast bureaucracy to administer, and a Gestapo to police, the program, (New York Times, Dec. 8, 1974). (2) a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation, to bail out inefficient and bankrupt businesses; (3) stepped-up trust-busting to penalize “monopolistic” and efficient businesses; (4) comprehensive national health insurance, i.e. socialized medicine: (5) compulsory energy “conservation”, energy self-sufficiency, and, “as a last resort,” rationing of gasoline and fuel oil: (6) expanded “public service employment” and unemployment compensation—i.e. socializing the job market in a new WPA, and subsidizing the creation and maintenance of unemployment in the private market.

How is this monstrosity being greeted by the Republican party, and by the Ford Administration? The Republican Establishment is reacting by trailing the Democrats by a few months or years. After the idiocy of the “voluntary” WIN program and other absurd attempts to “fight inflation” and to “conserve energy”, the Ford Administration is moving rapidly toward the same collectivist programs. The same forces which only a year ago kept the price of gasoline and fuel oil below the free market price, thereby generating an artificial “shortage”, and which then reluctantly allowed the market to work, leading to a consequent and seemingly miraculous disappearance of the “shortage”, are now taking the reverse tack. Where as last year they claimed that oil and gasoline prices could not be allowed to rise because the “poor” would be hurt, they now call stridently for a whopping gasoline tax in order to compel an artificial reduction of energy consumption, to create an artificial scarcity and an artificially high price. Oil is being cartellized further by government, as oil import restrictions are being imposed again, and the talk is of further controls and allocations, as well as possible rationing. The excuse for this price-raising policy of artificial scarcity, for this cartellizing and protectionism, is that if we don’t impose such “sacrifices” and achieve energy “self-sufficiency” now, then the evil Arabs might do the same thing at some time in the future. In short: to avoid the possibility that the Arabs might cut our throats in the future, let us do so now! National health insurance and a guaranteed minimum income arc being revived by the Ford Administration, as is the threat of wage-price controls in 1975.

Or shall we say, the Rockefeller Administration? For the essence of the dramatic change in the Republican party is the post-Watergate crushing of the Cowboys (opportunistic, despotic, more pro-war, more economically conservative) by the Rockefeller wing of the Yankee Establishment. Almost the entire Cowboy political leadership, from the Nixon-Agnew administration leaders to John Connally, are either banished, in jail, or under indictment. After long-time Rockefeller man George Beall (of Maryland) pulled the plug in the Justice Department of ex-Rockefeller man Agnew (of Maryland), the scene was set for the creation of two vacancies in the Presidency, and for the assumption of Rockefeller to total power. The dismal spectacle of both liberals and conservatives rolling over and playing dead for Nelson, despite the revelations of vast monetary payments by Rocky and of his massive politico-economic power, simply reveals the extent of Rockefeller power and political influence. Rockefeller has been openly named domestic czar, and with long-time Rockefeller flunky Henry Kissinger in total charge of foreign policy, the administration now belongs to Rockefeller root and branch, while Ford bumbles along the ski slopes. In contrast to the nitwit Ford. Rockefeller is smart and tough, and a corporate statist to the very core: the emerging cartellizing policy on gasoline and oil is but one reflection of the total Rocky takeover in the works. The tiny list of Republican conservatives in Congress that dared to rise up and oppose Nelson’s appointment is a list of men of courage who refused to be bought.

The victory of Rockefeller has been followed close:;’ by a purging of the remaining Cowboys in positions of power. Once again, the key is the mysterious and dangerous Central Intelligence Agency, where the remaining Cowboy war-mongers and repressors of domestic dissent, in particular the Angleton clique, have been purged from the CIA. A leading member of the Cowboy set in the CIA. of course, is E. Howard Hunt, who is headed for jail. Barry Goldwater’s outlandish expostulation that domestic break-ins and spying by the CIA are necessary to keep tabs on the Ellsbergs is the last gasp of the Cowboy mentality in Washington. Replacing it will be the Yankee policy of “repressive tolerance”, with free speech and cultural liberty being allowed so long as they do not endanger the seats of power. Furthermore, the sudden rash of Assassination Revisionism (in the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King cases) is an indication that the victorious Yankees are about to pull the plug openly on the possible assassination activities of the previously-ruling Cowboy forces.

The chances of a conservative third party to give voice to the right-wing populism of the large mass of all effectively disenfranchised populace remain dim—although this seems like the only short-run hope of putting some breaks on either the Rockefeller-corporate state or the left-Democrat forms of collectivism. While the conservative Human Events has been calling loudly for a third party, the veteran Judas Goats of National Review are split: with Bill Buckley clearly willing to accept the Rockefeller dispensation, and Senator Jim Buckley voting for the Nelson appointment: while Bill Rusher and George Will intensify their opposition to the new regime. In the meanwhile, the long-time National Review theoretician, statist James Burnham, has called for a $1.00 a gallon tax on gasoline to push for energy self-sufficiency, while “traditionalist” conservative Jeffrey Hart demands that all conservatives rally around the concept of a strong and mighty Presidency. While Ronald Reagan showed some signs of interest in leading a third party drive in ’76, this has been effectively undercut by his conservative financial backers in California, who are moving toward rapprochement with the Ford-Rockefeller team.

And speaking of Judas Goats, what has been the role of “libertarian”, top Randian Alan Greenspan in all of this? Unfortunately, Greenspan’s performance has more than confirmed the gloomy forecasts of the Lib. Forum editor. Two recent reports on Greenspan’s role: the New York Times noted that Greenspan has been active in trying to push a reluctant Jerry Ford into adopting a stiff gasoline tax; and now the authoritative Evans and Novak report that Greenspan opposed the heroic fight of Secretary of the Treasury William Simon against a huge expansion of government spending! In the fight of Simon against Roy Ash to limit the expansion of the federal budget, “Alan Greenspan, the President’s supposedly arch-conservative chief economic adviser, was considerably less ardent an economizer than Simon.” (Evans and Novak, Jan. 2, 1975). In consequence, the latest forecast is for a whopping $40 billion federal deficit. So much for our “Galtian” hero! And so much for Randian strategic theory and for the idea of Rand as a “libertarian”.

And so we libertarians are on our own. We cannot depend upon conservatives as allies, and we certainly cannot depend upon “divine” intervention from above: from “libertarians” enscouced in the cozy seats of Power. But in this gloomy picture there are a few rays of light; one of them being the truly revolutionary sentiment welling up among the masses in this country in opposition to the current public school system. In the mountain country of Kanawha County, West Virginia, a massive revolution from below is shaping up against liberal educationists trying to use the public school system to “lift up” the Fundamentalist, working class masses into the general American culture, to use the textbooks and public school teacher as a conscious “agent of social change.” In an article surprisingly sympathetic to the Fundamentalist revolutionaries, the left-liberal Paul Cowan (“A Fight Over America’s Future,” Village Voice. Dec. 9. 1974) points out that the fight against upper class liberals is in many respects a highly articulate and intelligent one. Cowan quotes the daughter of one Fundamentalist minister as saying: “We’re not asking that they teach Christianity in the schools. We’re just asking that they don’t insult our faith.” Where are the libertarians here? Why are there none lo aid in the battle and to point out the larger libertarian implications?

This lack, however, has been happily remedied in the other fierce struggle over the schools now raging in this country: in the fight of the Irish of South Boston against compulsory bussing. For one of the heroes of the South Bostonians in this battle has been the young libertarian (non-Irish) radio commentator Avi Nelson, whose radio program is alone in the media to support the people of South Boston in their opposition to bussing. Mass meetings in South Boston are ringing to the call of “Avi! Avi! Avi!” Indeed, it is possible that polarization around the public school system may become as explosive an issue throughout the country as the economic crisis; and in this set of issues, it is only the libertarians who have the answer that can cut through and resolve the numerous conflicts around bussing, textbooks, religion, sex, etc. that are rife in the public schools. And that answer, of course, is to abolish the public school system root and branch, and thereby to allow any groups of parents and students to have the schools, integrated or segregated, Fundamentalist or atheist, disciplined or permissive, that they respectively and individually prefer.

At any rate, the prospects ahead are grim, and it behooves all libertarians to rise up and redouble their efforts on behalf of their cause, their country, and their own liberties. For make no mistake: there is no place to hide. Your gold coins, your caves in the woods stocked with canned goods, your retreats to new islands, your Swiss bank accounts, are not going to be worth a tinker’s dam when the U.S.A. goes collectivist. If we stand up and oppose the trend, we might succeed in avoiding the holocaust, at the very least, we will be able to tell ourselves and our grandchildren that we did our best. If we do nothing but run to the cave, literally or metaphorically, we will deserve the scorn of present and future generations.

Libertarian Scholarship Advances

The year 1974 saw a notable acceleration of libertarian scholarship, with the burgeoning of high-level scholarly conferences and papers, and the finding and developing of a remarkable number of new young scholars in various libertarian fields. In June, the Institute for Humane Studies sponsored what was undoubtedly the first Austrian School economics conference since the days of old Austria, at Royalton College in Vermont. The conference brought together over fifty Austrians, most of them brilliant graduate students and younger professors, and the proceedings will probably be published in book form. (For a report on the conference, see Richard M. Ebeling. “Austrian Economics On the Rise”, Lib. Forum, October. 1974). A second Austrian School conference is now planned for the University of Hartford, for June, 1975, featuring papers by some of the best of the younger attendees at Royalton. One of these attendees, Dr. Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., recently completed his doctoral dissertation at UCLA, on “Economics as a Coordination Problem: the Contribution of Friedrich A. Hayek.”

Libertarianism has also been “invading” the regular scholarly associations, hitherto almost impervious to such incursions. The annual November 1974 meeting of the Southern Economic Association at Atlanta. Georgia included an excellent session of papers devoted to “The Contribution of Ludwig von Mises.” Organized by Dr. Laurence Moss, of the University of Virginia, the session, chaired by Mises’ old student Fritz Machlup of Princeton and New York Universities, included papers by: Moss on the monetary theory of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard on “Mises and Economic Calculation Under Socialism”, Professor Israel Kirzner of New York University on “Mises’ Theory of Capital and Interest”. Professor William P. Baumgarth of Wake Forest University on “Ludwig von Mises and the Theory of the Liberal Order,” and a commentary weaving together these varied themes by Professor Karen I. Vaughn of the University of Tennessee. It was truly a day to remember, and the session was one of the best attended at the meeting, even by several distinguished Friedmanites. The papers at the Mises session will hopefully be published in a separate volume. Also on the economics front in 1974, Murray Rothbard’s review of Israel Kirzner’s distinguished Misesian book, Competition and Entrepreneurship (University of Chicago Press) was published in the leading book review medium in the economics profession. The Journal of Economic Literature.

That libertarianism is truly in the scholarly air on a broad front is also shown by the fact that the prestigious American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy decided to devote its annual December meeting in Washington to the theme of “Anarchism.” Organized by Professor Robert Paul Wolff of the University of Massachusetts, whose book In Defense of Anarchism a few years ago made the topic respectable in the philosophy profession for the first time, the meeting was launched with a paper delivered by Murray Rothbard on “Society Without a State”. The session, organized in conjunction with the larger meeting of the American Philosophical Association, was filled to overflowing, as Rothbard defused some common anti-anarchist arguments, and went on to adumbrate how arbitration and the courts might work in an anarcho-capitalist society: comments on the paper were made by Christopher Stone, professor of law at the University of Southern California, and by David Wieck, of the philosophy department of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Wieck, a left-wing anarchist, burst into tears at the “hardheartedness” displayed by Rothbard in merely discussing the problem of murder in an anarchist society. The proceedings are scheduled to be published, in more elaborate form, by the ASPLP.

Interest among the philosophers present in the topic was keen, and the meeting and party afterward also brought together a host of brilliant young libertarians in the philosophy profession, ranging from limited-government to outright anarchist. Among the libertarian philosophers present were Professors John Hospers (USC) and Robert Nozick (Harvard) in the senior ranks, and, among the younger scholars (with dissertation topics, completed or pending, in parentheses), were: Professor Paul Sagal (Boston University), Dr. Eric Mack (Harvard University, natural rights). Dr. Jeffrey Paul (Univ. of Cincinnati, methodological individualism). Miss Bee Fletcher (USC. property rights). Roger Pilon (University of Chicago, negative freedom), and John T. Sanders (Boston University, anarcho-capitalism and the critique of arguments for government.)

Last but not least, the weekend of October 26-28 saw the convening of the Second Libertarian Scholars Conference in New York City. Organized by Professor Walter Grinder of the economics department of Rutgers University and Dr. Walter Block of Business Week, the conference drew several dozen invited scholars to hear a glittering array of papers in various fields of the libertarian discipline. Featured in particular was the first magnificent fruits of the researches of Professor Leonard Liggio, of the history department of City College, CUNY, into the origins of libertarian thought in nineteenth-century France, in particular the thought of J. B. Say. Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. Commenting were Murray Rothbard and a particular welcome and incisive paper by Professor Ralph Raico, of the history department of the State University College at Buffalo. Another highlight of the conference was the first fruits of the research of our publisher, Professor Joseph Peden of the history department of Baruch College, CUNY, into the life and thought of an important but neglected 19th century American libertarian, Charles O’Conor of the New York City bar.

Another session of the LSC was devoted to a fascinating debate on “Value-Freedom in Economics,” with contrasting papers put forth by Roy A. Childs, Jr. and Professor Israel Kirzner of NYU. Another highlight of the conference was the presentation of two chapters from a work in process by Walter Grinder and John Hagel III of Harvard Law School, applying Austrian economics and libertarian ruling class theory in a new and illuminating way to an analysis of the social reality of modern America. Bill Baumgarth of Wake Forest University department political science, delivered a paper on virtue, power and order, the historian Dr. R. Dale Grinder analyzed the role of the intellectuals in installing and perpetuating the hegemony of Power, and Murray Rothbard applied a theory of historical determination to the American Revolution (see Rothbard, “Economic Determinism, Ideology, and the American Revolution,” Lib. Forum, November, 1974).

With these inquiries into history of libertarian thought, political philosophy, philosophy of economics, history and sociology, a great time was had by all, and libertarian scholarship was greatly enriched by the papers and the meeting.

Women’s Lib: Goldberg Replies To Kinsky

By Steven Goldberg

Department of Sociology
City College, CUNY

(Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, the most heated controversies in the libertarian movement in the last few years have been generated by issues perhaps fascinating in themselves but only tangential to libertarianism: science fiction and women’s “liberation.” Let us hope that this does not mean that all too many libertarians are more interested in such peripheral matters than in liberty itself. At any rate, the current brouhaha began in April. 1974, when the Lib. Forum editor published a favorable review of a brilliant work by the young sociologist Steven Goldberg. The Inevitability of Patriarchy, in Books for Libertarians (now Libertarian Review.) Even though the BFL review was balanced by a negative review by Mrs. Riqui Leon in the same issue, a raft of hysterical letters bombarded the magazine, which then published the best of them, by Miss Julia White, along with my reply, in its June, 1974 issue. BFL then saw fit to publish two critical letters on my review and on the Goldberg book by Miss Lynn Kinsky, executive editor of Reason magazine. The first was in the same June issue, and the next, longer critique of my reply and of the book itself was in BFL’s August, 1974 issue. Since I felt I had had my say on the subject and could only repeat my rather lengthy June letter, I turned over the second Kinsky letter to Professor Goldberg, who is far more qualified than I on the subject, and deserves his chance to reply. Professor Goldberg’s reply was too long for Lib. Review’s space requirements, and so we are privileged to be able to publish it, in its entirety, below. I have just received a letter from a distinguished libertarian sociologist hailing the Goldberg book as a “sterling” work, and particularly admiring the “air of cold authority” with which he writes. That air is also a hallmark of the present article. I would also like to call our readers’ attention to the new paperback version of Goldberg’s The Inevitability of Patriarchy (William Morrow, 1974, $2.95), which includes over 60 additional pages, further explaining his theory and replying to the various critics of the hardcover original. David Gutmann, in his review of the original book in Commentary, hailed Goldberg as “at all times icily logical”, and there is no field of current controversy in which icy logic is more badly needed.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To the editor of BFL:

I have just come across Lynn Kinsky’s letter concerning my The Inevitability of Patriarchy (BFL, August). While Miss Kinsky’s criticisms are based on a most simplistic view of physiological dimorphism, it is a view that is held by many sociologists and I would be most grateful for the opportunity to respond.

At its most basic. Patriarchy argues that:

A. In all societies that exist or have existed males attain the overwhelming number of upper hierarchical positions (patriarchy), males perform those non-maternal roles and tasks—whichever they are in any given society—that are given highest status (male attainment), and dominance in male-female relationships—as evidenced in the emotions of males and females, the values and customs that reflect these emotional expectations, and the authority system in which nearly every woman comes under the authority of either her husband or brother—is associated with the male (male dominance).

B. The only explanation of this universality that is internally logical, concordant with the anthropological evidence, plausible, and inclusive of the physiological evidence is an explanation positing a physiological dimorphism that is such that males are more strongly motivated, by the environmental presence of a hierarchy or member of the other sex, to manifest whatever behavior is necessary in any given environmental setting to attain dominance in hierarchies and male-female relationships. It is irrelevant for our theoretical purposes whether one conceptualizes this emotional-behavioral differentiation in terms of a greater male “drive”, a lower male threshold for the release of dominance behavior, a greater male “need” of dominance, or even a weaker male ego that needs shoring up by attainment and dominance (just as it is unimportant whether one conceptualizes the physiologically-rooted motivating factors we loosely refer to as the “sex drive” as a “drive” or as a “need”).

C. We need not merely postulate the relevance of physiological dimorphism to emotional and behavioral differentiation (though the anthropological evidence and the requirements of parsimony would force us to do so even if there were no direct physiological evidence). The direct endocrinological study of humans and hundreds of controlled experiments on the effects of hormonal masculinization of female subjects of other mammalian species demonstrates beyond reasonable challenge that the testicularly-generated fetal hormonalization of the male central nervous system promotes early maturation of the brain structures that mediate between male hormones and outward behavior, thereby rendering the male hypersensitive to the later presence of the hormones that energize dominance behavior (“aggression”, as I use the term). Most of Patriarchy is concerned with the way in which socialization and institutions conform to, and exaggerate, the reality of the differentiated behavior that is rooted in dimorphism and that is observed by the population, but Miss Kinsky does not address this and I need not summarize that material here.

Miss Kinsky writes: “I am surprised at (Murray Rothbard) being so gullible as to believe Goldberg when he says there is such a thing as ‘status drive’ or ‘initiative’ able to be defined precisely and measured in such a way that a sociologist can say that this person has more of it than that person does or that this group has more of it than that group does—and that it can be shown to correlate with one and only one physical attribute. (And a nondichotomous one at that: both sexes produce both estrogen and testosterone with levels being roughly equal until puberty, and most men only draw slightly ahead of most women in testosterone production after age 18 or so!).

There is so much confusion and irrelevance in Miss Kinsky’s paragraph that it is impossible to straighten it out in just a few words. But I might make these points:

A. I do not use the term “status drive”, though I think that this term is satisfactory as a shorthand for the behavior that satisfies the “need” for attainment and dominance that is greater in the male and that is precondition for attainment and dominance. The important correlation is between testosterone and attainment (for the group of males as opposed to the group of females) and no one denies that this correlation is very high (i.e. upper hierarchical positions are attained almost exclusively by males in every society and in every society males have higher testosterone levels than females). The point at issue is not whether there is such a correlation, but whether there is the causal relationship I describe. (Incidentally, males have adult testosterone levels roughly twelve times those of females, not just “slightly” higher; a young adult woman with a testosterone level that would be normal for a male is in big medical trouble.)

B. More importantly, it is grossly simplistic to speak only of “hormone levels”. It is not merely the level of hormones, but the sensitivity of the CNS to the effects of testosterone—a sensitivity that is greater in males as a result of the fetal preparation of the male CNS by the testicularly-generated testosterone—that is relevant to dominance behavior.

C. Thus the fact that male and female testosterone levels are roughly equal before puberty does not demonstrate that the pre-pubertal male’s greater dominance behavior is owing only to socialization. (Moreover, even if dominance behavior were a function of only testosterone levels, this would still not indicate the irrelevance of dimorphism to children. Socialization reflects observation of adults and is preparation for adulthood. Adult males would be more “aggressive” even if only testosterone levels were relevant.)

D. It is quite true that both males and females have both testosterone and estrogen, but this no more demonstrates the irrelevance of hormones to dominance behavior than it demonstrates that women can grow beards (a male “ability” that derives from the male’s higher testosterone level). It is the ratio of testosterone and estrogen, and the sensitivity of the CNS, that is crucial.

E. Miss Kinsky makes the common, but fallacious, argument that it behooves me—if I am to argue for the determinativeness of physiological dimorphism to dominance behavior and to socialization relevant to dominance behavior—to demonstrate that hormone differences account for differing individuals’ dominance behavior. If Miss Kinsky means that it is incumbent upon me to show that males in upper hierarchical positions have higher testosterone levels than other males and that the physiological factor precedes the attainment, I would say that I think it not at all unlikely that males do vary in their physiologically-engendered propensity for dominance behavior, but that it is irrelevant to the theory advanced in Patriarchy whether they do or not. An analogy may make this clear: one can demonstrate the determinativeness of the male’s greater physical strength to the fact that all boxing champions are male (and to socialization of little girls away from boxing) without assuming that strength is determinative within the group of males. Indeed, boxing champions are not the strongest males; once the strength precondition is met, then other factors become relevant. Likewise, the emotional-behavioral differentiation of men and women that is observed by every population and that is reflected by, and exaggerated by, every social system, is sufficient to explain why every society is patriarchal. (Such a “sufficient” explanation is the purpose of Patriarchy.) Once the physiological precondition is met, as it is met by all hormonally-normal males, then other factors become determinative to dominance behavior. If Miss Kinsky is arguing that I must show a perfect correlation between maleness and dominance, then her argument is just silly. Obviously there are many exceptions (i.e. many women who manifest dominance behavior more strongly or more readily than many men). There are many exceptions even when we are considering characteristics that are almost purely physiologically-engendered (i.e. there are many women who are taller than many men). We should hardly be surprised to find exceptions when we consider a factor (dominance behavior) that is a result not only of physiological factors, but psychological, familial, and social factors as well. The theory presented in Patriarchy does not argue that every male is more aggressive than every female, but that, as a result of dimorphism and the emotional-behavioral differentiation it engenders, most males more strongly manifest dominance behavior and that this is observed by the population and is manifested in the socialization system and the society’s institutions.

Miss Kinsky does make an interesting point when she takes a behaviorist approach, but I do not find her arguments much more telling than her analyses of physiology. I have addressed the behaviorist criticisms at length in the paperback edition of Patriarchy and can here make only a few points:

Miss Kinsky argues that: (A) biologists consider dominance behavior only in terms of attack behavior, (B) we cannot invoke the presence of emotion in an explanation of animal behavior (because animals cannot report their feelings verbally), and (C) terms such as “male dominance” are operationally meaningless. (A) is simply incorrect. In the experimental studies hierarchy and dominance are the primary objects of study. Attack behavior is sometimes—but by no means always—the mode by which hierarchical position and dominance in male-female encounters is attained. (B) is the sort of argument that is invoked only when one dislikes the conclusions arrived at by an experiment. If the experimental animals were of a low order, then one might reasonably argue that the physiological factor is an instinct to fight and that emotion is an irrelevant consideration. But with non-human mammals—as with people—attack behavior (or other behavior leading to attainment or dominance) is not merely instinctive reaction, but action in the service of emotional predisposition (i.e. the “drive” or “need” discussed above). This predisposition is greater in males for the physiological reasons discussed above. Note that no one, least of all the feminist sociologist, denies the relevance of the emotional predisposition to dominance in human beings. Feminists describe at length the emotional and behavioral differentiation of males and females and then incorrectly, ascribe the causation of the emotional-behavioral differentiation primarily to social factors and socialization. This feminist “explanation” is no explanation at all, but merely a begging of the question: why does every society’s men and women associate dominance behavior with males, why does no society socialize its women towards dominance behavior, and why are the male and female emotions relevant to dominance not reversed in even one society? (C) is incorrect “Patriarchy” is defined in terms that would satisfy the most rigid behaviorist; one need merely count the numbers of men and women in hierarchies. “Male dominance” is identified by both the expressed expectations of men and women and by its manifestation in the authority system (relevant to male-female relationships); there is no society in which individuals’ emotions (as expressed in verbal accounts, proverbs, songs, legal expectations, etc.) fail to associate dominance with males and no society in which women do not come under the authority of a husband or brother (usually by law, always by social expectation). It is quite true that it is difficult to specify on a general level the actions that will lead to attainment and dominance in particular societies because—while willingness to sacrifice time, health, longevity, affection, familial life, and other sources of satisfaction will nearly always be relevant—the specific actions will be determined by the culture of the particular society. It is the underlying physiologically-generated need that is the motivational factor. This need finds its mode of satisfaction within the limits imposed by the particular culture. When fighting behavior leads to attainment, males will be more motivated to fight: when sacrificing one’s family to the corporation leads to attainment, then those individuals willing to make this sacrifice will mostly be men. Again: no feminist denies that such emotional differentiation exists; the feminist identifies such expectations and then attributes to them an etiology that ignores the one factor capable of explaining the universality of the emotional differentiation and the institutions that reflect them. (Miss Kinsky is incorrect in her implication that this analysis is tautological; it is falsifiable by the development or discovery of a single society in which the emotions of male dominance, and their manifestation in socialization and institution, are not present.)

Much of Miss Kinsky’s letter is an attack on sociological epistemology. I suspect that Miss Kinsky has not read Patriarchy and therefore believes that, because I am in a department of sociology, this attack somehow casts doubt on the book. In fact, Patriarchy is not “sociological” in any sense for which her epistemological criticisms would be relevant and I need not consider them here.

Boston Libertarian Dinners!

Two libertarian students at Harvard Law School have decided to organize a monthly dinner series to provide an opportunity for libertarians of all persuasions in the Boston area to meet on a regular basis. Following each dinner, a prominent libertarian will speak informally to the group, and field questions from the assembled guests.

The first dinner in the series has already been scheduled: on February 19 at 7:30 P.M. at the Hong Kong Restaurant, 1236 Massachusetts Ave, in Cambridge. Dr. Robert Nozick, professor of philosophy at Harvard University and author of the recently published work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, will be the featured speaker.

To attend, mail $2 per person cover charge to the Center for the Study of Social Systems, P.O. Box 920, Boston, Mass. 02103. Guests who show up at the door without reservations will be required to pay a $3.00 cover charge. Each guest will order dinner and pay for it individually on an a la carte basis. This is a non-profit venture, and the cover charge will be used to pay for organizing expenses in arranging the dinner series, and to help pay transportation expenses for out-of-town libertarian speakers.

Libertarians who are unable to attend this first dinner but who want to be placed on the mailing list for invitations to subsequent dinners, are urged to contact the Center at the above address. Also, please feel free to suggest additional names and addresses of people who might be interested in receiving future mailings on these dinners.

Henry Hazlitt Celebrates 80th Birthday

It is indeed a pleasure to have the opportunity to honor Henry Hazlitt on his 80th birthday (November 28). One of the most distinguished and productive economists, writers and intellectuals in this country, Hazlitt at 80 looks and acts a full 20 years younger. A remarkable combination of a brilliant and incisive mind, an unusually clear and lucid style, and an unfailingly cheerful, generous, and gentle soul, Henry Hazlitt continues to be a veritable fount of energy and productivity.

No one, moreover, can match Henry Hazlitt in blending great and broad erudition with a clarity and simplicity of style that makes him a joy to read. The great stylist H. L. Mencken’s tribute to Hazlitt 40 years ago that he was the only economist that could be understood by the general public remains true to this day.

Why, then, does Henry Hazlitt remain grievously neglected by the nation’s intelligentsia, by the self-proclaimed intellectual elite that moulds so much of “educated” public opinion? Why does Hazlitt, for example, never appear, either as writer or reviewed author, in the highly influential New York Review of Books?

There are several factors that contribute to this shameful neglect of one of the country’s outstanding writers and thinkers. They all add up to his being totally out of the intellectual fashion of our day.

In the first place, he lacks either a Ph.D. or an academic post—those twin passports to intellectual and academic respectability. For a scholar to discuss or footnote a book by Hazlitt—no matter how important or scholarly—would be to lose caste and Brownie points in the status-anxious-world of academe.

Secondly, in an age of hyper-specialization, when the fashion is to aspire to be the world’s foremost expert on some extremely narrow and trivial topic, Henry Hazlitt simply knows too darn much about an enormous range and variety of subjects. Surely, then, he must be unsound.

Thirdly, Hazlitt writes too clearly; surely, someone who writes so that he can be generally understood lacks the “profundity” that only obscurantist jargon can provide. One of the main reasons for the popularity of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes among intellectuals was precisely the staggering obscurity of their prose; only when a writer is obscure can a cult of followers gather around to serve as the semi-official interpreters and exegetes of the Master. Henry Hazlitt has always lacked that fog of incomprehensibility necessary to become celebrated as a Profound Thinker.

Fourthly, as an economist, Hazlitt has always been too honest to don the robes of soothsayer and prophet, to tell us precisely what the GNP or the unemployment rate is going to be in six or nine months.

Last but certainly not least, Henry Hazlitt has been totally outside the modern fashion in battling for many years as an uncompromising adherent of laissez-faire and the free market economy. If only Hazlitt had been a statist or Socialist, perhaps he would have been forgiven for his other intellectual sins. But not the greatest sin of all—of arguing, year in and out, for free-market capitalism.

In the course of his remarkably productive career, Henry Hazlitt has been distinguished as a journalist, editor, literary critic, philosopher, political scientist and, above all, economist. His major base has been in journalism.

Born in Philadelphia in 1894, young Hazlitt left college early to be a financial writer, successively for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Evening Post, and the Mechanics and Metals National Bank of New York. In 1921 he became financial editor for the New York Evening Mail. Then, during the 1920s, he expanded his horizons into the general editorial and literary fields, first as editorial writer for the New York Herald and the New York Sun, and then as literary editor for the Sun in the late 1920s, from which he went to the Nation as literary editor from 1930 to 1933. When H. L. Mencken left the editorship of the American Mercury in 1933, he was happy to select Hazlitt as his successor to that distinguished post.

After leaving the Mercury the following year. Hazlitt became an editorial writer for—mirabile dictu—the New York Times for the next dozen years. It was Hazlitt who largely accounted for whatever conservative tone the Times adopted during that era.

It was shortly after he joined the Times that an event occurred which would change and shape Hazlitt’s life from that point on. Reviewing the first English translation of Ludwig von Mises’ great work Socialism in 1936, Hazlitt was converted to a position of uncompromising adherence to free-market capitalism, and hostility to statism and socialism that would mark ail of his work from that time forward.

Hazlitt became a leading follower of the great Austrian, free-market economist, and was to become one of Mises’ closest friends and coworkers from the time that Mises emigrated to the United States during World War II.

It was as a leading “Misesian” that Hazlitt was to write the bulk of his more than a dozen books and countless journal and newspaper articles.

As the New York Times moved inexorably leftward, Henry Hazlitt departed to become weekly economic columnist for Newsweek magazine. There, for 20 years, from 1946-1966, Hazlitt, week in and week out, penned lucid and incisive defenses of the free market, private property rights, and the gold standard, as well as trenchant critiques of the evils of government intervention in the economy.

In countless radio and television debates, and on the lecture platform, Hazlitt carried on the battle against the growth of Big Government. Furthermore, he was co-editor-in-chief of the Freeman in its early years, 1950-53, when that magazine was a noble attempt to serve as a weekly periodical on behalf of the conservative-libertarian cause.

But it is his host of published books that will serve as an enduring monument to this great and much neglected man. The scope and merit are enormous: ranging from his first work on clear thinking, Thinking As a Science (1916, reissued in 1969), to literary criticism, The Anatomy of Criticism (1933).

Particularly important, both in quantity and quality, is his post-1936 or “Misesian” output. His first work in this period was a notable contribution to political science, A New Constitution Now (1942, and soon to be reissued; see HUMAN EVENTS, Nov. 16, 1974, page 10). This work, in which Hazlitt argued for the scrapping of the American Constitution on behalf of a European Parliamentary government, was not calculated to please Constitutionalist conservatives.

But whether or not one agrees fully with Hazlitt, he made an extremely important point which has taken on far more importance in these days of unbridled executive and presidential power. For he argued that the great defect of the American Constitution is that it permits runaway executive power, unchecked by Congress or the public.

A Parliamentary system could at least make the executive far more responsive to Congress, and serve as a check on executive tyranny. In the era of Watergate, there would have been no need for the clumsy impeachment process, since the President could have been removed far more easily and swiftly.

In 1946, Hazlitt published his most popular book, Economics in One Lesson, which remains to this day the best introductory primer to economic science. With his usual lucidity, Hazlitt set forth the merits of the free market, and the unfortunate consequences of all the major forms of government intervention, all of which continue to plague us today.

There is still no better introduction to free market economics than Economics in One Lesson. The “lesson” derives from the 19th Century libertarian French economist Frederic Bastiat, who was also distinguished for the clarity of his style: the difference between “what is seen” as a result of government intervention and “what is not seen.”

For example, if the government taxes the public to build housing, what is seen is the new housing, which may seem on the surface to be a net advance: what is not seen is what the public would have done if they had been allowed to keep their own money.

The following year, Hazlitt came out with his booklet, Will Dollars Save the World?, his dissection of the Marshall Plan and one of the first important critiques of the postwar foreign aid program. This was followed by his Illusions of Point Four (1950), on Truman’s boondoggle program of aid to what is now known as the “Third World.”

In 1951, Hazlitt turned to the novel form, publishing what is one of my own favorite parts of the Hazlitt canon, The Great Idea (1951, later reissued as Time Will Run Back, 1966). The Great Idea was roasted by critics as a novel, but I confess I enjoyed it thoroughly, and it has long been one of my favorite works of fiction. This despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it frankly cloaks sound economic theory in a readable, novelistic form.

For one thing, it is one of the best and most thorough discussions of the economic fallacies of socialism to be found anywhere. The plot is fascinating: by happenstance, an intelligent political innocent inherits the post of dictator of a future World Communist State.

Beginning simply as a search for ways of making the disastrous Communist economy work better, the dictator alters the economy, step by inexorable logical step, in the direction of freedom until he changes the world into a purely free market economy and free society.

Beginning with allowing citizens to exchange their ration tickets, the dictator comes to rediscover the forgotten free market, gold money, and the rights of private property. If the aesthetes are worried about the lack of avant-garde symbolism or of morbid psychologizing in The Great Idea, then so much the worse for them!

A few years later came a veritable labor of love. The Free Man’s Library (1956). Hazlitt’s annotated bibliography of libertarian and conservative books. It still serves as the only work of its kind, and an updating of this book would be one of the most useful projects to inspire and instruct a new generation of libertarians.

In 1959. Hazlitt published his greatest contribution to economic science, the massive, thorough The Failure of the New Economics, a step-by-step and page-by-page evisceration of Lord Keynes’ mischievous and enormously influential General Theory. Employing Misesian, “Austrian” economics in a masterful fashion, Hazlitt left not a shred standing of Keynes’ famous work. It was a superb exercise in economic demolition.

The massive neglect of Fallacies by the economics profession, which, when it deigned to consider the book at all, dismissed it as mere “pamphleteering,” is a shameful blot on the state of the economics profession. As a one-two punch to Keynesianism, Hazlitt followed up this work by collecting the best anti-Keynesian critiques by economists in his The Critics of Keynesian Economics (1960).

In the same year, Hazlitt wrote his searching critique of the inflationary policies of our time, warning of accelerating inflation and calling for a return to the gold standard in his What You Should Know About Inflation (1960, revised editions in 1965 and 1968). Happily, Hazlitt is now busily at work on a new book on this all too timely topic.

Not content with economics, political science, journalism and literary criticism. Hazlitt next turned to an important work on political and ethical philosophy, The Foundations of Morality (1964). In a work fully as neglected by the academic philosophers as his economic writings were ignored by the nation’s economists, Hazlitt argued for a utilitarian ethic and for the morality of free-market capitalism.

In his latest two books, Henry Hazlitt dealt with the vital problems of poverty and the welfare state: Man vs. the Welfare State (1970) and The Conquest of Poverty (1973). In these works, Hazlitt showed that only capitalism can conquer poverty and provide genuine welfare, and he demolished the fallacies of the welfare state. Also included is the best available refutation of the potentially disastrous Milton Friedman proposal for a “negative income tax.”

Thus, throughout his remarkably productive life, Henry Hazlitt has fought for freedom and a free-market economy with a unique combination of the erudition of a scholar and the lucidity and popular appeal of a lifelong writer and journalist. In a healthier cultural and intellectual climate, he would have honors heaped upon him by scholars and by the general public. As it is, we can only do our part by greeting this vibrant and gracious gentleman, this distinguished scholar and libertarian, and by looking forward to the many important books and articles which will doubtless flow from his pen in the years to come.

Reprinted from Human Events, Nov. 20, 1974.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Musicals: the Nostalgia Boom.

Two of my most delightful experiences in the arts this year were exercises in musical nostalgia: watching a revival of Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, with the 40’s singing and dancing star Ann Miller; and seeing the revival of the once-famous Andrews Sisters in their highly successful new Broadway hit, “Over Here!” Nostalgia was certainly a great part in the delight: How great Miss Miller looked! Not a day older than in her successful movie musicals of twenty and thirty years ago! And to see the cheerful Andrews Sisters once more (minus La Verne, who died some years ago), to hear their infectious and swinging renditions, was indeed, to return to a past that was at least culturally happier than today. Indeed, after the curtain fell on a remarkably good throwback by Richard and Robert Sherman, to 1930’s musicals, the wildly enthusiastic audience prompted Patty and Maxine Andrews to spend twenty minutes on the stage, singing the renditions of their fabulous hits of the past: each number punctuated by the cheers and “Bravos!” of the audience. In their famous “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time”, the audience could not refrain from singing along, and the stage-wise Andrews Sisters promptly brought the entire audience into the act: “What a WON-derful wedding it will be”, everyone belted out, knowing the renditions down to the last phrase.

But my main point here is that far more than simple nostalgia was involved. After all, there were a large number of kids and young people in the audience, to add their chorus of approval to the nostalgia of the middle-aged. Why did the young people love the show?

I submit that the reason is that the old musicals were far better than today, and that this fact is sensed by young and old alike. The good old days were better, at least in music and the popular arts. No better clue can be found to the cause than to read the brilliant critique of modern music, written two decades ago, by the eminent music critic Henry Pleasants. The Agony of Modern Music (Simon and Schuster, 1955). Pleasants’ work was a critique of modern “serious” music, and a demonstration of why that music has been in a state of decline and collapse since Wagner (and, in many respects, since Beethoven.) Briefly, in contrast to the heyday of classical music (roughly from Monteverdi and the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth), modern music had been marked by the destruction of melody, rhythm, and tonality. In the classical period, music had been marked by tuneful melody, and by a strong, regular rhythmic beat, to which a strictly tonal harmony had been subordinate. In contrast, modern music had destroyed melody by making it thematic and harmonic, and had wrecked the rhythmic beat by substituting vertical harmonies and varying rhythms. Melody and rhythm had been destroyed on behalf of harmony, which in turn had lost its strong tonality. One of the hallmarks of the classical symphony, for example, is that it was pianistic; and could readily be transcribed for the piano. In later, modern music, orchestration had taken command, and a conductor became needed to impose order on the players.

More relevant to our topic is what modern music did to the opera. Classical opera had been marked by the dominance of the singer and the song, the melodic song as delivered in arias, duets, etc. Modern music destroyed the opera by eliminating the melodic song, by subordinating the singer to the orchestra and by confining the singer to talky recitative; while pure music was transformed into the “tone poem.” The “integration” of music and the song into the orchestra and the dramatic text had succeeded only in destroying the opera form.

Mr. Pleasants went on to point out that twentieth century American jazz and popular music constituted a renaissance of the classical musical form, and therefore carried on the best traditions of “serious” music. Jazz and popular music restored the dominance of melody and rhythm, harmony was once again tonal and subordinate to the other elements. Even the seemingly new motifs of vocal and instrumental improvisation was a return to pre-nineteenth century vocalising and to such forms as the concerto grosso.

It struck me that the same kind of development that happened to opera had also happened within the popular musical, although not in nearly as destructive a way. Pleasants seemed to recognize this when he pointed out in passing that George Gershwin’s highly touted excursions into the semi-classical or quasi-symphonic or operatic form, such as Rhapsody in Blue or Porgy and Bess, were far inferior to his marvelous show tunes, such as “Embraceable You” or “But Not for Me.” Unfortunately, Gershwin, one of our great pop song composers, suffered from an inferiority complex vis à vis “serious” music, and so was ever trying to blend into what our intelligentsia persisted in defining as “legitimate” music. If such critics as Pleasants had been writing in the 1920’s and 30’s, the course of Gershwin’s career might have been very different.

The heyday of the popular song was the 1920’s and 30’s, led by such masters of the blending of sentiment and sophistication as Gershwin, Porter. Rodgers and Hart, Berlin, and Arlen. Their songs were built around the show tune, and the vehicle of the show tune was the Broadway musical—or what can now be described as the “old-fashioned” or pre-1940’s musical. One of the great delights, then, of seeing “Anything Goes” or the reminiscent “Over Here!” was being able to re-experience the true Broadway musical. Much derided now, the old-fashioned musical, like Pleasants’ criteria for the classical opera, strictly subordinated the drama and the plot to the song and the melodic tune. Yes, the plot of the old musical was a thin clothes-line on which to hang the lovely and melodic tunes, but so what? Nobody wanted any more; if people wanted plots, they could go to plays or motion pictures.

The destruction of the Broadway musical can be dated as precisely as the advent of the late Wagnerian operas, and indeed the course of their decline unconsciously recapitulated the post-Wagnerian decay of the opera. Specifically, the precipitous decline and fall began with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s famous 1940 musical “Oklahoma!” “Oklahoma!” was unfortunately hailed by the critics and the intellectuals for precisely the wrong reasons because it subordinated the song and the tune to the dramatic text, and integrated the songs into the drama. Starting with Rodgers and Hammerstein, furthermore, the musical composers (in a sense recapitulating Wagner) began to freight their drama with pretentious pseudo-“philosophical” messages, as exemplified by the fuzzy “brotherhood” themes in South Pacific and West Side Story. The older musical now looked hopelessly “old-fashioned”, and it took only a few years for the tunes to disappear altogether; how many years has it been since a truly memorable Broadway musical? Again, as in the classical symphony or opera, a hallmark of the decay has been the disappearance of the hummable or singable tune—the analog of the collapse of the aria or the pianistic symphony. Deprived of their major vehicle, the show tune, the great song composers—the Porters and Harts and Cowards—died out and there were none to take their place. By the 1950’s, the popular song had decayed to such an extent that rock-and-roll was able to rush in and fill the vacuum, and we must now be content with such second-rate song composers as Bert Bacharach.

The entering wedge to the decline and fall of the show tune and the musical, then, was the weakness of Richard Rodgers as a composer. For, in contrast to many other composers, the great Rodgers has always been dominated musically by his lyricist. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, Rodgers and the magnificent Lorenz Hart collaborated on some of the greatest songs in the history of popular music, a blend of melody and sophistication unmatched by anyone but the superb Cole Porter. Listen, for example, to one of the most affecting and magnificent of the female pop singers, Lee Wiley (in her heyday, twenty-odd years ago) singing such stunning songs as “Glad to Be Unhappy” and “It Never Entered My Mind”, for a recording of popular song–and singing–at its best. Unfortunately, after the death of Larry Hart, Rodgers began to collaborate with Oscar Hammerstein II, who promptly proceeded to impose a gushy and cornball over-sentimentality on Rodgers’ creative output, a sentimentality combined with vaguely leftish “messages”, that was to lead to the music-drama and the destruction of the genuine Broadway musical. Compare, for example, the Rodgers-Hammerstein “I’m as Corny as Kansas in August” to the earlier Rodgers-Hart tunes. Like the post-Wagnerians in relation to Wagner, Rodgers’ successors were devoid of his melodic genius and thereby swiftly brought about the destruction of the musical. In the post-Hammerstein music drama, only the great song writer Frank Loesser was able to preserve the first-rate melody, in his “Guys and Dolls.” The rest is Old Night.

The very same decline and fall, incidentally, also occurred in pop music’s cousin, jazz. Jazz had reached its summit in its earliest, or “classical”, period: New Orleans, from approximately 1900-1920. It was in New Orleans jazz, in its funeral marching bands, dance bands, and whorehouse pianists, that the classical period of “serious” music was most fully restored, and jazz reached its most inspired form of melodic improvisation within the rhythmic beat of the drum, the banjo, and the slap double-bass. As jazz moved north to Chicago in the “Dixieland” of the 1920’s, the power and inspiration cooled, and the music became lighter and more routinized. But the classic jazz form was still there. Jazz became further corrupted in the lush, monotonous “swing” of the big band era of the late 1930’s (Mahler, Bruckner?), but it was still at least dimly recognizable in the classical jazz tradition. The destruction of jazz came with the “bebop” and post-bebop eras after World War II (Schoenberg?), as jazz, too, lost its melody and rhythm, and turned to the dominance of harmonic variety that has marked modern “serious” music. Like modern music, jazz became “cerebral” and cut off from its emotive roots and popular audience. Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish between modern jazz and modern serious music, if one in fact cares enough about either to bother searching for the distinction. Both serious music and jazz have reached a dead end, although there are still enough viable elements left, in jazz and popular music at least, to permit a future renaissance.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII, NO. 1

JANUARY, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

GOVERNMENT AND THE ECONOMY

The Tax Cut.

The Ford Administration has clearly abandoned its feeble attempts to restrict its own inflationary policies, and has gone for broke—literally as well as metaphorically—in expansionist Keynesian policies to try to combat the deepening recession. The money supply is being inflated rapidly once again, to try to stay one step ahead of the “liquidity crunch” that is in the process of driving to the wall inefficient businesses which had overexpanded during the boom. But the major new policy is the Keynesian one of enormous government deficits, now estimated (probably conservatively) at $40 billion. Part of the deficit is to emerge from a substantial cut in income taxes. Immediately, however, the Ford Administration will find itself in a cleft stick; for the very severe nature of the liquidity crunch means that businesses are scrambling for capital in a tight market, and the pouring of $40 billion worth of government bonds onto such a market is going to clobber the private capital market, and greatly intensify the depression. The only way out of that bind will be for the Federal Reserve authorities to create approximately $40 billion of new money with which the banks will be able to buy the new bonds; and that will mean an enormous increase in the inflationary process.

The liberals are supporting an income tax for the wrong, inflationary reasons: the Keynesian theory that consumers will then spend more money, and help lift us out of the recession by their increased spending. In reality, if the deficit is financed through the Federal Reserve, it will, as we’ve just pointed out, accelerate the inflation. Because of their opposition to inflation, conservatives and many libertarians are opposing the income tax cut, the latter if the cut is not accompanied by an equivalent cut in government spending.

I submit that for libertarians to oppose the income tax cut is disastrous, both on principle and for strategic reasons. Strategically, we would then be supporting a high tax regime which the bulk of Americans hates and clamors against, and would be allowing the ordinarily high-tax liberals to run away with what is a libertarian issue par excellence. On principle, taxation is theft, and any reduction in taxation whatsoever must be welcomed as allowing producers and individuals to keep more of their own money. Furthermore, in the long run, this can only help the economy by shifting production toward the desires of private consumers. Even on the current recession, furthermore, an income tax cut will help by-shifting funds from wasteful government hands into the hands of private savers and investors, whose increased saving will help to ease and speed up the recession-adjustment process. To help the recession, the more the tax cut is geared to increasing saving and investment rather than consumption the better, but the point is that any tax cut will have a beneficial effect, morally and economically, in both the long and the short run.

Of course it would be still better if an X billion dollar tax cut were matched by an X billion dollar cut in government spending, but getting the government to cut its spending is politically, at this juncture, a Utopian dream. When was the last year that government spending was actually reduced? The answer is lost in antiquity. The point is that given the choices before us, we must take and welcome any reduction of government that we can get, anywhere down the line. If the liberals are proposing a large income tax cut, even for the wrong reasons, we should happily make use of this agitation for our own libertarian purposes. After we get the tax cut, we can then agitate for government either to cut its spending, or, at least, to finance its deficit in a non-inflationary manner. Furthermore, looking at the situation strategically, the only way that we might possibly get the government to cut its spending is to reduce taxes first, and then force it to trim its sails on the strength of the general horror at the mammoth size of the deficit. Let us remember Parkinson’s Law: expenditures rise to meet income. Then only hope, at this time, of getting government to cut or restrict its expenditures is to cut off its income. An income tax is a giant step in that direction. Libertarians must realize that we are in no position to plan an orderly retreat for government, even if that were desirable; government is the enemy, and therefore we must take whatever chunks out of that enemy that circumstances might permit. Hence: hooray for any tax cuts, anywhere, in any area!

Oil Policy.

In the meanwhile, the Ford Administration, seconded by the almost universal clamor of the media, is preparing to aggravate both the inflation and the recession by restricting the supply, and raising the price, of oil and oil products. Restricting the supply of oil will raise prices, and also depress the economy by cutting demand and investment in non-petroleum sectors of the economy. Furthermore, since the Administration proposes to effect the restriction by a massive tax on the import and domestic production of oil, this means that the increased tax revenue from oil will partially offset the good effects of the tax cut, and deepen the recession still further.

The current plan of the Administration is to impose a $3 per barrel tax on the importation of oil, which is supposed to fulfill the Kissinger-Ford goal of a compulsory cut of 1 million barrels per day in the importation of crude oil, a figure which Kissinger admits he chose purely for its dramatic effect.” In this way, the protectionist forces in the oil industry are able to return to their cherished policy, ended a couple of years ago by-Nixon during the dramatic and short-lived oil “shortage”, of restricting imports in order to raise oil prices. In short, while only a year ago we heard that gasoline prices must be kept below free-market levels by the government because “the poor” would be hurt by a price rise, we now hear that the government must artificially raise the price of gasoline (by something like 10¢ a gallon), and the poor are heard of no more.

One of the stated aims of, oil protectionism is to assure the United States “self-sufficiency” in energy. Such an aim is simply economic insanity. Why not a prohibitory tax on bananas to stimulate hot-house growth of bananas in Florida, and make the U.S. “self-sufficient in bananas”? It is best for all of us, in all countries of the world, to have each country and territorial area, and each of the individuals and firms within such areas, specialize in the production of what each is relatively most efficient at producing, and then selling those products in exchange for the most efficient products of other firms and countries. In short, it is best for all of us to allow the free market, and the international division of labor, to operate across international boundaries (“freedom of trade”). Furthermore, economics shows us that even if another country places artificial barriers on trade, it is still better for us as consumers to allow free trade; any sort of retaliatory tariffs, quotas, or enforced cartels only cut off our noses to spite our faces. Or rather, cut off the noses of American consumers in order to confer special privileges to various American businesses. A protective tariff on “widgets” not only injures foreign “widget” producers and foreign consumers; it also injures American consumers by preventing them from purchasing cheaper widgets, in short, from using their income and resources most efficiently. Furthermore, productive resources in the U.S. are kept by U.S. government coercion from leaving the industry at which they are inefficient (widgets) and moving to other industries where they are more competitive with foreign producers.

This analysis, of course, applies to oil as well as anything else. An import tax on oil (e.g. tariff), as well as import quotas, injures American consumers and the productivity and health of the American economy for the benefit of American oil producers who cannot compete with imported crude.

The Establishment asserts over and over again that the OPEC countries have artificially and sharply raised the price of crude oil, through a government created and enforced cartel. Granted, but so what? The Establishment concludes that the U.S. must restrict oil imports, thereby raising the price of oil and petroleum products still further. Does that make any sense; is the way to combat an artificially raised oil price, for the U.S. to increase oil prices still further? Of course, it does make sense, from one point of view: from the viewpoint of protectionist American oil interests who want to get in on the cartellizing and restrictionist gravy train.

It is also said that we must tighten our belts and cartelize, because if we don’t, the evil Arabs of OPEC might eventually place another embargo on oil. But does it make any sense to place our own “embargo” on oil permanently, for fear that the Arabs might temporarily do so some time in the future? Furthermore, if it’s really the Arabs we’re worried about, why are we going to place an equivalent $2 a barrel tax on domestic crude oil production? Clearly, the reason is for purposes of over-all cartellization, of government-coerced price-raising in the oil industry. What is more, the entire Arab scare is an Establishment-created bogeyman. For the U.S. does not import a very large amount of its oil from the Arab countries. It is, on the contrary, the countries of Western Europe that are almost totally dependent on Arab oil imports, and yet it is the U.S. and Henry Kissinger that are trying to induce the reluctant Europeans to go along with the tough anti-Arab oil policy. As Dr. Hollis Chenery correctly points out in the January issue of Foreign Affairs, Western Europe can better afford to pay the high price of Arab crude oil, than to “depress their economies by squeezing it out” and by following the Kissinger-Ford policy of anti-Arab-oil protectionism.

The Establishment also has the gall to assert that the higher tax on oil is a “market” policy, since the tax works by restricting supply, and raising price, on the market! It claims that the policy is necessary in order to “conserve” oil, and to stimulate the search for new energy sources in America. In the first place, the high-flown claim of “conservation” is the standard excuse for all monopolizing and cartellization. The free, tax-less market does precisely enough “conserving” of oil on its own; when the Arabs raised the price of crude oil to $10 a barrel, this automatically induced each oil user to cut his purchases, to “conserve” oil, in whatever way was best suited for him. The free price system stimulates precisely as much or as little “conservation” of any resource as is necessary. On the basis of the Establishment reasoning, why not slap a $100 per barrel tax on crude oil, and thereby drive up oil and gasoline prices astronomically? If it wants to, the U.S. government can “conserve” oil forever by making sure that none of it is ever bought and sold; what then would we be conserving the oil for? And as for new energy sources, once again the free market price calls forth the optimum amount of such research. The higher price of $10 a barrel will stimulate as much research as will be economically optimal; once again, how about a $100 a barrel tax which would really and wildly stimulate a search for new energy sources?

To search for an explanation for a seemingly loony policy, we can therefore forget about the argument that we must combat restricted oil supplies and a higher price, precisely by restricting and raising the price still further! A more cogent clue is a report in the New York Times to the effect that, far from the much-heralded oil “shortage”, we now have a welcome (to us consumers.) oil surplus! Thus, the Times (Dec. 19) notes: “A slowdown in world economic activity and continued conservation efforts—whether voluntary or induced by higher priced petroleum products—have combined to create a worldwide oil surplus. Stocks on hand of all three major petroleum products . . . are all considered by industry experts to be more than adequate in the United States and other industrial countries to meet the needs of this winter . . . Europe and Japan are virtually awash in supplies.” So here we have a vital clue: the new restrictions and cartellizing of the U.S. are an attempt to combat—not high oil prices—but the threat that market forces will break the OPEC cartel and bring about a sharp drop in oil prices. Once again, we are being conned by the Establishment, and both the Democratic and Republican parties are collaborating in the swindle.

Back to Gold.

Inexorably, and in the teeth of extreme reluctance and hostility by the U.S. authorities, gold is forcing its way, step by step, back into the central monetary role that it deserves. After cutting loose from the private gold market (in the “two-tier” system) in 1968, and after cutting the dollar completely from the gold standard in 1971, the Establishment was confident that gold was on the way to being banished forever, to be replaced by the dollar or by a new paper fiat unit, completely controllable by governments. Instead, gold has been forcing its way back, and at each step of the way the Administration has tried to “cover up” by claiming that gold was now one step further out of playing an important monetary role. More important even than the Treasury’s finally and grudgingly allowing the will of Congress to prevail and allowing the U.S. citizens to buy and own gold, was the December, 1974 agreement at Martinique between the U.S. and France. For decades, the U.S. has been trying to push gold out of the picture by forcing other nations to evaluate it at an absurdly and artificially low price, first $35 an ounce, and lately $42 an ounce. But the enormous rise in the free gold market price in the last few years, in response to the continuing depreciation of paper currencies, put irresistible pressure on all countries to re-evaluate their gold stock at the market price, and thereby to stave off impending financial bankruptcy. Finally, at Martinique, the U.S. made the crucial concession, that “It would be appropriate for any government which wished to do so to adopt current market prices as the basis for valuation of its gold holdings.” Typically, the U.S. covered its surrender by asserting, once again, that this was another step toward ending the monetary role of gold. Actually, of course, the step was quite the reverse: for now, as country after country upgrades its gold stock to evaluate it at the market price, the monetary role and importance of gold will enormously increase. Not only that: the re-valuation could pave the way for an eventual return to a full-fledged gold standard, i.e. the redeemability of dollars, and other currencies in gold, which would not have been possible at the artificially low price. This possible return to gold is precisely what the inflationist U.S. authorities were desperately anxious to prevent.

Following up the Martinique agreement, the French fulfilled the promise of the agreement on January 9 by officially revaluing their gold stock at the roughly market price of $170 an ounce. Can other countries be far behind?

“Libertarian” Economist Note.

Professor Milton Friedman, alleged “libertarian” economist, was asked to comment in a radio interview on President Ford’s address on January 13. Friedman endorsed the proposed tax on imported oil in order to put pressure on the OPEC countries. What happened to Friedman’s proclaimed belief in unilateral free trade? Devotion to what cause has led to Friedman’s abandonment of free trade-free market principles this time?

BOOKS AND TAPES

by

MURRAY M. ROTHBARD

CASSETTE TAPES

Basic Principles of Free Market Economics, Tapes 301-316, 16 hours/charts & binder, $137.50, or $150 in 3 installments of $50 each

The Case Against Wage and Price Controls, Tape 127/45 Min. $7.50

Claremont Conference—Defense Agencies, Tape 184, 2 tapes/115 Min. $12.95

Claremont Conference—Property Rights and Birth of The State, Tape 183/88 Min. $9.95

Economic Determinism and The Conspiratorial Theory of History, Tape 211/145 Min. $14.95

The Future of Libertarianism, Tape 216/85 Min. $9.95

The Individualist Anarchist Heritage In America, Tape 159/55 Min. $7.50

The Inflationary Boom of The 1920’s, Tape 214/132 Min. $14.95

The New Deal and Post-War International Monetary System, Tape 215/85 Min $9.95

The Old Right and The New Tape 157/42 Min. $7.50

The Progressive Era Triple Alliance: Government As Cartelizer, Tape 213/156 Min. $15.95

The Rise of Big Business: The Failure of Trusts and Cartels, Tape 212/110 Min. $14.95

Debate: Wage and Price Controls, Rothbard, Stein and Madden, Tape 126, 2 tapes/112 Min $12.95

Testimonial Dinner Honoring Murray N. Rothbard, Rothbard, Liggio, Grinder, Block, Davidson, Tape 194, 2 tapes/106 Min. $12.95

BOOKS

The Case For the 100% Gold Dollar, $2

America’s Great Depression, $4

The Essential von Mises, $1

Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor, $.50

Man, Economy and State, $30/$10

Power and Market, $6/53

What Has Government Done To Our Money?, $2

Education, Free and Compulsory, $1

A New History of Leviathan, with Ronald Radosh (eds.), $3.45

Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, $2.50

For A New Liberty, $7.95

The Libertarian Forum, (bound edition, Rothbard, ed.), $11

Society Without A State*

By Murray N. Rothbard

I

In attempting to outline how a “society without a State”—i.e. an anarchist society—might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the State back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the State as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. Any institution, not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a “State”. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual. Anarchists oppose the State because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Nor is our definition of the State arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be “States” throughout recorded history. The State, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-State institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the State. To be opposed to the State is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the State does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.

The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the State is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (a) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (b) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or prison to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the State can do so; only the State can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax-tribute. Therefore, only the State regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.

Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the A.P.A. is in some way “coercive”; there again, we can only be trapped in an endless semantic dispute. Apart from other rebuttals which cannot be considered here, I would simply say that anarchists are interested in the abolition of this type of action: e.g. aggressive physical violence against person and property, and that this is how we define “coercion”. Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion, and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof”, with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the State, i.e. to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.

It need hardly be added that the State habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society: ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, that the State, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.

The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good”, and that without the State no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the State a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess—and I do not believe that they are open to this charge—I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct, and the State is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime—theft, oppression, mass murder—on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.

A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether State or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man”, given the degree of goodness or badness at any point of time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the State, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.

We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the State, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the State, and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the State must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the State is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.

One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist, system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the State is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the State is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the State through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the State’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogs through the history of mankind.

This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo, and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us than solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. It that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the State. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the State but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.

A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874, and someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, etc.? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the State into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.

One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, e.g. in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.

II

Let us now turn to the problem of how disputes—in particular, disputes over alleged violations of person and property,—would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort, and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.

An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient, and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us are omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy, in short whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.

In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.

Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

“arbitration has grown to proportions that make the courts a secondary recourse in many areas and completely superfluous in others. The ancient fear of the courts that arbitration would ‘oust’ them of their jurisdiction has been fulfilled with a vengeance the common-law judges probably never anticipated. Insurance companies adjust over fifty thousand claims a year among themselves through arbitration, and the American Arbitration Association (AAA), with headquarters in New York and twenty-five regional offices across the country, last year conducted over twenty-two thousand arbitrations. Its twenty-three thousand associates available to serve as arbitrators may outnumber the total number of judicial personnel . . . in the United States . . . Add to this the unknown number of individuals who arbitrate disputes within particular industries or in particular localities, without formal AAA affiliation, and the quantitatively secondary role of official courts begins to be apparent.”*

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis à vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules . . . In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law”, has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has ceased to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties.” Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law . . .”[2]

It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.

How then did these private, “anarchistic”, and voluntary courts insure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement”, indeed, proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail. . . Nevertheless, it is apparent that . . . (their) decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place . . . Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows . . . proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”[3] Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times: Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the” courts,

“that arbitration caught on and developed a following in the American mercantile community. Its” popularity, “gained at a time when abiding by an agreement to arbitrate had to be as voluntary as the agreement itself, casts doubt on whether legal coercion was an essential adjunct to the settlement of most disputes. Cases of refusal to abide by an arbitrator’s award were rare; one founder of the American Arbitration Association could not recall a single example. Like their medieval forerunners, merchants in the Americas did not have to rely on any sanctions other than those they could collectively impose on each other. One who refused to pay up might find access to his association’s tribunal cut off in the future, or his name released to the membership of his trade association; these penalties were far more fearsome than the cost of the award with which he disagreed. Voluntary and private adjudications were voluntarily and privately adhered to, if not out of honor, out of the self-interest of businessmen who knew that the arbitral mode of dispute settlement would cease to be available to them very quickly if they ignored an award.”[4]

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.

How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients, and have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality, and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.

Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

“the advocates of government see initiated force (the legal force of government.) as the only solution to social disputes. According to them, if everyone in society were not forced to use the same court system . . . disputes would be insoluble. Apparently it doesn’t occur to them that disputing parties are capable of freely choosing their own arbiters . . . They have not realized that disputants would, in fact, be far better off if they could choose among competing arbitration agencies so that they could reap the benefits of competition and specialization. It should be obvious that a court system which has a monopoly guaranteed by the force of statutory law will not give as good quality service as will free-market arbitration agencies which must compete for their customers . . .

Perhaps the least tenable argument for government arbitration of disputes is the one which holds that governmental judges are more impartial because they operate outside the market and so have no vested interests.

owing political allegiance to government is certainly no guarantee of impartiality! A governmental judge is always impelled to be partial—in favor of the government, from whom he gets his pay and his power! On the other hand, an arbiter who sells his services in a free market knows that he must be as scrupulously honest, fair, and impartial as possible or no pair of disputants will buy his services to arbitrate their dispute. A free-market arbiter depends for his livelihood on his skill and fairness at settling disputes. A governmental judge depends on political pull.”[4]

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

“It would be more economical and in most cases quite sufficient to have only one arbitration agency to hear the case. But if the parties felt that a further appeal might he necessary and were willing to risk the extra expense, they could provide for a succession of two or even more arbitration agencies. The names of these agencies would be written into the contract in order from the ‘first court of appeal’ to the ‘last court of appeal’. It would be neither necessary nor desirable to have one single, final court of appeal for every person in the society, as we have today in the United States Supreme Court.”[5]

Arbitration, then poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market, anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract-breakers?

In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated”, for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime-insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards, and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.

Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court. Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refuses to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted Law Code of the anarchist society (on which see further below), is that this must end the matter, unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.

Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, either because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances pose very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he, then, goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted Law Code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.

Suppose, however, the most difficult case: That Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and reputation for efficiency, honesty and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally-established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as States now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty—unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.

No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cut-off point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.

If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decisions against guilty parties, does this not bring back the State in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force—force in defense of person and property—by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the State to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.

It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society”. Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.

What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since, under anarchism there can be no coercion of the non-criminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion. Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake, and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation—not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract-breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process since the name of the murderer is evident to all.

Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a State exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal, courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom the victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the. “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony checks and balances of a State system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a State, what is there to prevent a State from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the State? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a Power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the State provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax-theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the State, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the State that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the State, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.

Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the State is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the State are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the State has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns”, bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare”. And lacking such legitimacy, Prudential would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a State to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.

Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common Law Code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.[5] But in my view all would have to abide by the basic Law Code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society hold that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’ court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the State, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.

But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian Law Code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.

In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients e.g., the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, etc.

There are other problems of the basic Law Code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders—though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.[6] The basic point, however, is that the State is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the State, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed upon principles derived either from custom or reason.[7] The idea that the State is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the State is needed to supply postal or police service.

Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the State is not a necessary evil.

New Rothbard Books!

January 17 is the publication date of the first volume of Murray Rothbard’s projected multi-volume history of colonial America, Conceived in Liberty. Published by Arlington House and over 500 pages in length, Volume I covers the American colonies during the 17th century. Note: this is not an economic history, but a general history dealing with all aspects of the new American colonies: ideological, religious, social, and political, as well as economic. The general focus of the book is—surprise!—on liberty and voluntary social arrangements (“social power”) vs. the State. Price is $15.00

Why the need for so many pages on the colonial era? Despite the fact that American history textbooks dismiss the colonial era in 20 or so pages, this period covers almost 170 years, and more if we include the pre-colonial explorations. An enormous number of exciting and important events occurred during these years, and Conceived in Liberty brings us the full narrative flavor of the period, the actual events that occurred in their historical cause-and-effect sequence. Furthermore, while many standard textbook “heroes” are debunked and shown to have feet of clay, other, totally forgotten libertarian heroes are rediscovered.

****************

Also, the Libertarian Review Press (422 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003) has just reprinted, in booklet form, Murray Rothbard’s 1962 essay, “The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar”, which had appeared in a totally neglected book by L. Yeager, ed., In Search of a Monetary Constitution (Harvard University Press). Needless to say, the topic is far more timely now than it was 13 years ago. Copies of The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar may be obtained for $2.00 from the Libertarian Review Press.

“Herein, indeed, lies the chief merit of democracy, when all is said and done: it may be clumsy, it may be swinish, it may be unutterably incompetent and dishonest, but it is never dismal—its processes, even when they irritate, never actually bore.”

— H. L. Mencken

The Demise Of Fractional Reserve Banking?

By Karl E. Peterjohn

Fractional reserve banking is in trouble. Last year two major banks, Franklin National and I.D. Herstatt, collapsed. They left behind a trail of liabilities across the international banking system which are still being felt. The cause of these bank failures is likely to repeat itself, while banks taking action to correct their currently weak financial reserve positions may become the targets of scurrilous politicians.

When the Federal Reserve System (hereafter the Fed) expands credit (also known as counterfeiting), this expansion of the money stock takes place through the banking structure. New funds are now available for loans to firms and individuals from the banks. Interest rates decline due to increased funds being available. The banks, anxious to make a profit with these new funds, and following the government’s expansion-oriented economic policy, loan the funds to borrowers. Through the fractional reserve structure, an increase in bank deposits of $100 can be multiplied into loans worth many times that value.

Naturally when the credit expansion creates inflation, government policy changes. The Fed stops expanding credit to fight inflation. Since the increase in the supply of loanable funds came from the Fed’s money creation, rather than from market action, the supply of loanable funds contracts. Interest rates rise and a credit crunch occurs.

As interest rates rise, investors try to maximize the returns on their savings. Since the banks have loaned out funds for 10 or 20 years at the low interest rates created by the Fed’s credit expansion, the credit crunch would force the banks to raise interest rates to attract more savings or liquidate loans. The banks could be forced to pay higher interest rates for savings than the interest the bank is receiving on outstanding loans. To prevent this from happening, and to restrict competition, the banks convinced the Fed to enact Regulation “Q”, which limits the maximum interest rate savers can receive from banks.

As interest rates rise, savings flow from banks with their low interest rates to bonds, credit unions, loan companies, and other financial devices which offer higher interest rates for savers. Economists call this process disintermediation. To make sure that the banks can cover loans made at the low interest rate, the government has created a number of agencies, besides the Fed, which will prevent disintermediation from causing bank runs. The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, the Veterans Administration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development all provide funds to banks to protect low interest loans. In this manner any test of the financial soundness of the Financial Deposit Insurance Corporation is avoided.

As 1975 begins, we have been through the credit expansion-boom-inflation-credit crunch cycle four times in the last fifteen years. The U.S. fractional banking system can’t take much more of it. Inflation is consuming capital and the real value of savings at a tremendous pace. Since the returns on stocks are being clobbered by inflation and taxes, the only ready sources of investment funds for most firms are bank loans: However, the Fed’s credit expansion is the only new source Of loanable funds for the banks. Since the banks are the only ready source of investment funds, the banks are increasingly involved with the firms they make loans to. For this reason a number of superficial economists are pointing out how the banks are “taking over” control of a wide variety of non-financial corporations through loan arrangements. In Great Britain this government loan process has reached the point where the government is making loans outright to industry. Here the government has created the Fed, which uses the banks to make and oversee the loans to firms.

Since so many banks came close to collapse (even the ones not involved in foreign currency transactions) during the last credit expansion-boom-inflation-credit crunch cycle, the Fed issued orders that banks are supposed to increase their reserves. Banks will be less likely to flounder in our next credit cycle if substantial reserve assets are available to protect against the next credit crunch.

The Fed has in the last few weeks been expanding credit rapidly in a belated effort to stem our recession. As the new credit cycle begins with the renewed credit expansion, the banks will be faced with a difficult decision. If the banks go along with the Fed and lower their prime interest rate, lending out all available funds, the spectre of bank failure arises as soon as the Fed decides to switch gears and fight inflation by stopping the flow of new dollars. The resultant credit crunch, where interest rates rise to 15 to 20%, could bring down many banks that are overextended. If this happens, the banks will be blamed for overextending themselves and not following Fed policy.

However, if the banks try to protect themselves by not expanding credit and do keep substantial reserves, the banks are now going against government policy. Many firms unable to get loans, or to get loans at a “fair” interest rate, as well as irate consumers unable to purchase 8% home mortgages, will cry bank conspiracy. Politicians will be able to claim that the banks are thwarting the government’s economic policy and preventing economic recovery. The politicians will then have the perfect whipping boy. To prevent being crucified by the politicians, and unwilling to forego interest on loans, most banks will make loans and hope that the Fed will be able to protect them when the credit crunch arrives. It is, for the economy and for the banks a forlorn hope.

*A paper delivered before the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, Washington, D.C., on Dec. 28, 1974.

*William C. Wooldridge, Uncle Sam, the Monopoly Man (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1970), p. 101.

[2] Ibid., pp. 103-04.

[3] Ibid., pp. 95-96.

[4] Ibid., pp. 100-101.

[4] Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (Lansing, Michigan: privately printed, 1970), pp. 65-67.

[5] Ibid., p. 68.

[5] E.g. David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

[6] For an elaboration of these points, see Murray N. Rothbard, For A New Liberty (New York: Macmillan: 1973).

[7] Thus, see Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Princeton, N.J.: D, Van Nostrand Co., 1961).

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII, NO. 2

FEBRUARY, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

OIL WAR AND OIL IMPERIALISM

I. Revving Up For Oil War in the Middle East

It all began two years ago, when Bill Buckley’s National Review called for the American invasion of Libya. It was our esteemed publisher, Joe Peden, who first spotted this call as a harbinger of things to come, as the discovery of a brand new post-Vietnam “enemy”, rather than the aberrant saber-rattling with which most analysts dismissed the Buckley war-cry. (See Joseph R. Peden, “From the Halls of Montezuma . . .”, Lib. Forum, April 1973).

Now, of course, Kissinger and Ford are leading the well-orchestrated call for U.S. invasion of the Middle East. This phase began with a note circulated at a meeting of Ford’s energy advisers in mid-December 1974 at Camp David. The note read: “Let’s try the low-cost option—war”. (International Bulletin, Jan. 17, 1975.) This is typical economists’ jargon, that of course deliberately avoids the question: “low-cost” for whom? For the American boys who will fight and die? For the American taxpayer who will be forced to pay the bill? For the Arabs who get killed (or don’t they count?) For people of all countries who might get incinerated in a new world war? Or for the American oil companies who want to extract some of the cartel profits from the Arabs?

The call for invasion also provides an excellent and unwitting support for the Leninist theory of imperialism, and for those of us who (cynically? realistically?) attribute economic motives to American foreign policy in the past decades and generations. For the Leninists, Williamsites, and “economic determinists” have attributed U.S. wars and interventions to desires to grab economic loot, ranging from war contracts to the seizure of raw materials. But what is the Kissinger-Ford war threat in the Middle East but a blatant and outright economic imperialist grab, namely that certain American oil companies are trying to use force to grab oil rather than have to pay the current price asked by the Arab countries? This is in contrast to orthodox historians, who attribute wars to motives of national honor or military strategy. And yet, in the current crisis, it is the Pentagon that is reluctant to pursue the warmongering course. As Drew Middleton reported in the New York Times (Jan. 10), “Senior American and Western European military officers consider the seizure of selected Middle East oil fields militarily feasible but politically disastrous.” In contrast, as Jack Anderson reports in his column of Jan. 6, it is the civilian policymakers of the Ford Administration who “are calling for a showdown with the oil-producing countries before it is too late. They want President Ford to serve notice upon the oil potentates that present oil prices . . . constitute hostile action . . .”

While Drew Middleton reports that the Pentagon’s preferred site for a U.S. oil invasion is Libya, (shades of Buckley-Peden!), the most comprehensive plan for U.S. oil invasion was presented, as Joe Stromberg writes below, by “isolationist” Prof. Robert W. Tucker in Commentary (“Oil: The Issue of American Intervention,” Commentary, Jan. 1975). Tucker advocates American invasion of a “mostly shallow coastal strip” some 400 miles long on the Arabian peninsula fronting on the Persian Gulf. Seizure of such a strip, from Kuwait down Saudi Arabia to Qatar, would give the U.S. control of 40 percent of OPEC production and 50 percent of OPEC reserves. (This is “isolationism”?!) Tucker opines that “since it (the strip) has no substantial centers of population, and is without trees, its effective control does not bear even remote comparison with the experience of Vietnam.”

As I. F. Stone demonstrates in his brilliant critique of Tucker in the New York Review of Books (I. F. Stone, “War for Oil?”, New York Review of Books, Feb. 6, 1975), Tucker’s thesis, apart from its gross immorality, displays a buffoonish ignorance of the nature and the history of guerrilla warfare. Trees are not necessary; the very name “guerrilla” originated in the successful Spanish struggle against Napoleon by guerrilla bands in the arid and treeless mountains of northern Spain. And has Prof. Tucker never heard of T. E. Lawrence and his scintillating success in Arab guerrilla warfare against the Turks in the treeless deserts of the Middle East during World War I? Perhaps this is yet another indication that “political scientists” are ignorant of history. “Trees” indeed!

Tucker ignores the fact that Saudi Arabia has plenty of people and plenty of weapons—largely supplied by the U.S. itself. In the last two years, the U.S. and other Western countries have supplied $3 billion of military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the other Persian Gulf states, including the F-14 fighter, the harpoon anti-ship missile, and various SAM systems. It is, in fact, highly ironic that in precisely these states there are no Commies around for the U.S. to wax hysterical about—these states have been among the most reliable American allies. And, while the Pentagon in Middleton’s account worries about “political difficulties” in the U.S. and Western Europe, it ignores the important difficulties in the Arabian peninsula itself. For just as there are no Commies in these countries, so there are no reliable American puppets such as Thieu, Chiang, or Rhee. If we overthrow King Feisal or the Persian Gulf emirs, we will have no allies whatsoever in the population, whether among the ruling class or among the populace. Every man’s hand will be against us—a perfect requisite for successful guerrilla war.

As Stone points out, “The population is ample and trained enough for a fierce desert guerrilla campaign. The idea that you can slice away a coastal strip of a country’s territory, containing-most of its wealth, and just sit there, happily enjoying the fruits of occupation and shipping out the oil spurting from its wells, belongs in an anthology of military-political delusions.” Thus, after we take over the coastal strip, what will we do with Saudi Arabia’s capital city of Riyadh? It is only 200 miles from the coast. As Stone writes, “Do we seize it, or leave it as a center of resistance? What about a new capital further inland, or across the Peninsula in Mecca or Medina? How subdue the country without destroying its government and occupying the whole of it? This desert area is bigger than a dozen South Vietnams combined. And how do you protect American lives and property in the rest of the Arab world?”

And what of our client states, Japan and Western Europe? “How do we supply Western Europe and Japan with oil while we repair the blown-up Arabian wells, try to repel guerrilla attacks, and somehow placate the anger in the other oil-producing states? Can this be done quickly enough to prevent the gravest kind of social disorder and economic breakdown in the two areas we are presumed to be defending—Japan and Western Europe . . .?

And what of the Soviet Union? Even Tucker acknowledges that the Russians would probably move armed forces into Iraq to protect its leading Arab oil ally. His answer to this? That we should establish “a substantial American military presence in Kuwait” to confront the Russians in Iraq. Tucker and his colleagues are not “realists” but dangerous fanatics, playing with matches in a tinder-box that could set off World War III. They are “crackpot realists.” For what if the Russians misread the Kuwait occupation as an “offensive” instead of a “defensive” signal? As Stone points out, “No more need be said to suggest the dangers of an American invasion in an area so close to the Soviet Union. A comparable event geographically would be a Russian invasion of Venezuela or seizure of the oil refineries in the Dutch West Indies.

And even if World War III is avoided, what in the world would be the “costs” of such an invasion? As Stone concludes, “And while we are thus supposedly trying to save ourselves and our allies from high oil prices, what will be the cost of all these military measures? Vietnam has cost well over $100 billion and the end still is not in sight. This new episode in militarism might easily cost several times as much as the new price of oil.” But, of course, its cost will be to the hapless American soldiers and taxpayers, and not to the oil companies.

In the following articles, Joseph Stromberg presents an “Old Right” critique of the Tucker-Ford oil threats, and the great libertarian and isolationist Rep. Howard H. Buffett (R.-Neb.) is represented by a speech he delivered in Congress on March 2, 1944, attacking Harold Ickes’ imperialist proposal for an Arabian oil pipe line to be built by the U.S. government. Howard Buffett’s hard-hitting analysis is, of course, all too relevant today.

2. Oil on the Brain: An Old Right Critique

By Joseph R. Stromberg

As if to prove the adage that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Professor Robert Tucker of Johns Hopkins University, who obviously thinks big where possible waste of human life is concerned, has emerged in recent weeks in the vanguard of the “kill a wog for petrol” school of foreign policy. He has stolen a march on all but the most ardent Zionists by providing a rationale for US Middle East intervention in an essay published, appropriately enough, in Commentary (Jan., 1975). The National Observer has reprinted part of the Tucker piece (Jan. 25, 1975), presumably on the ground that such an inflammatory argument deserves wider readership. Most recently, Tucker appeared on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line, where he and the archinterventionist Buckley deplored the “pacifism” of “post-Vietnam” public opinion,[*] particularly among the young, and struck a blow for getting “force” back on center stage. To avoid being “asphyxiated” by the Arab nations, we have to be able to think the old unthinkable, even unto the sacred mushroom, putting aside the petty considerations of international law and mere humanity.

This would not seem nearly so bad but for the fact that until now many of us sincerely believed Prof. Tucker to be a true comrade in the cause of peaceful coexistence and isolationism. On the basis of his The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (Baltimore, 1971), which provided a useful and sympathetic corrective to New Left revisionist history, and The New Isolationism (New York, 1972), which ably refuted standard arguments for an American role as world gestapo, it was easy to regard Prof. Tucker as a near relation of libertarian and peace forces. Like the Rational Lady who backed the Crook, Tucker has found The Big “Emergency.” This emergency is supposed “strangulation” of the West by the great unbreakable oil cartel, which threatens to raise the price of fuel by a few cents. But as Tucker and Buckley explicitly agree, the real crime of the Arabs is that they wish to modify American foreign policy—using oil as a weapon (unlike Sen. Jackson, who would use trade as a weapon to influence another nation’s domestic policy). They unreasonably want America to cease being the main supply depot of their enemies. Briefly, they want America to abandon a policy she shouldn’t have in the first place. If Tucker can defect so quickly, one shudders to think who will be next: William Appleman Williams? Staughton Lynd? Murray Rothbard? Presumably not, but the present warlike climate leaves one a little shaky.

The anti-economic reasoning of the “strangulationists” has its obvious attractions. The authors of America’s new depression would like nothing better than to pawn their creation off on some unpopular foreign devils. The idea that increased petroleum prices can cause general price inflation is, of course, on a par with the conservative myth that trade unions cause general price inflation, and deserves no respect. Among recent commentators the respected socialist historian Geoffrey Barraclough has stated the case most clearly. Writing in The New York Review of Books (Jan. 23, 1975), he scorns the New York Times line of Arab guilt for the world economic crisis and revises the eco-freak hysteria about the impending shortage of everything. (So don’t rush out and buy The Last Whole Ramparts!) The crisis we are in is the logical outcome of advanced state monopoly capitalism. (Of course, Barraclough would abolish the market as the great cure.) Likewise the food crisis: Barraclough shows that there is simply no shortage of arable land in the famine-ridden Third World. Hence the food crisis has purely institutional causes: feudal land monopoly in those countries, and American dumping of agricultural surpluses on their markets (foreign aid—i.e., export subsidies paid by our taxes). The indicated solution, he says, is radical land reform—an eminently libertarian position.

Ironically, Tucker, who is a great critic of Gabriel Kolko, now behaves as if he subjectively believes in Kolko’s much disputed “raw materials” thesis, i.e., Kolko’s view that US foreign policy is largely determined by a felt need to control the sources of strategic raw materials. Having argued that US policy is not so determined, Tucker now argues that it should be! There is more irony in the fact that the impending “scarcity” of petroleum has been ballyhooed before, about as convincingly. In 1943-44 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes began prophesying a disastrous shortage—only a few years away—if Congress failed to appropriate funds for an Arabian oil pipeline. This would have been a whopping subsidy to the American oil companies involved, and a real soporific for uneasy rear admirals wondering where their fuel was to come from.

The place of oil in the bitter subsurface Anglo-American imperial rivalry has been brought out in lavish detail by Kolko in The Politics of War (New York, 1968), esp. pp. 294-313. Kolko shows how American oil firms and the American state sought to reduce the British to a subordinate role in Middle East economic imperialism. Fortunately, Secretary Ickes’ pipeline scheme, at least, was defeated. The libertarians of the day vigorously assailed the scheme. The Old Right anti-imperialist newsletter Human Events was quite vehement in its opposition. Writing in the Feb. 23, 1944 issue, Felix Morley commented that the proposal was symptomatic of a “strongly imperialistic” post-war policy. Such involvement in the Middle East would drag America into the middle of Russo-British rivalries in the region (Iran especially) as well as into potential conflict between Arab nationalism and Zionism in Palestine. It was no accident, Morley asserted, that permanent conscription was being urged upon the Congress simultaneously. He summarized a number of reasons advanced for the pipeline, including “the alleged exhaustion of our oil reserves.” Ickes was predicting total depletion of known reserves within fourteen years. (Sound familiar?) Another argument possible lack of fuel for the next major war. Morley wrote that he expected that possible “drastic gas rationing” would be advanced as another reason for the pipeline. Morley asked what the Secretary of the Interior was doing anyway, booming a project “as remote from the interior” of the US as geographically possible? He warned against becoming “permanently involved in the perils of this Middle East entanglement,” calling for Congressional determination of policy.

Congressman Howard Buffett, Republican of Omaha, likewise denounced both the specific pipeline proposal and Middle East intervention. Buffett was a fiery and uncompromising Old Right “isolationist.” and his remarks are reprinted here in full. Their timeliness speaks for itself.

(from the Appendix to the Congressional Record, Vol. 90, Fart 8, 78th Congress, 2nd Session, p. A1036.)

3. The People Should Choose Between Empire and Freedom

By Rep. Howard H. Buffett

(March 2, 1944)

Mr. Speaker, Secretary Ickes plans that the American government shall spend $165,000,000 or more on an Arabian pipe line. The objective is to provide substantial oil supplies to supplement America’s diminishing oil reserves.

This proposal presents squarely to the American people the issue of empire versus freedom. No, I am mistaken; the proposal does not present to the American people the issue of empire versus freedom. The people are having nothing to say about this gigantic long-distance venture into imperialism. Not even the representatives of the people, the Congress of the United States, are given the opportunity of passing on this issue of empire versus freedom. No, the people or their elected Congress are not consulted on this venture. Why not?

A few short years from now, the sovereign Government of the United States may conscript your boy and mine and send them to fight, bleed, and die on the trackless sands of Arabia to defend this pipe line. Why? Because then it will be the patriotic duty of that boy to defend the honor and the possessions of the United States, as represented by this investment. The fighting and the dying is always done by the people. Why, then, should not the fundamental decision on this fundamental issue be made by the people or their elected representatives?

I use the phrase, “empire versus freedom.” What does the term “freedom” have to do with empire? Simply this: That to defend this faraway imperialistic economic venture a volunteer army large enough could not be raised. This war has demonstrated that no modern government commands sufficient confidence of its people to depend on a volunteer army.

It is difficult to appraise properly the evil consequences of this scheme. Perhaps first a comparison would be helpful. Suppose that Russia made a deal with Mexico to finance and develop tremendous oil or other resources in Mexico? How would America regard such a scheme? The probabilities are fairly clear. It would arouse violent opposition in this country, sooner or later, and probably sooner. Similar results can be expected from a United States Government venture in Arabia.

This proposal is advocated on the basis of barrels of crude petroleum it will add to our own diminishing reserves. Against this hazardous addition to our oil reserves must be measured the many-sided effects of this imperialistic adventure on both America and the rest of the world.

The Arabian pipe line would mark a clear-cut change in American policy abroad. It is, of course, a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the Atlantic Charter.

It would terminate the inspiring period of America’s history as a great nation not resorting to intercontinental imperialism. This venture would end the influence exercised by the United States as a government not participating in the exploitation of small lands and countries.

These traditions are America’s greatest asset in international affairs. This venture will destroy them within and without. It would mark the elimination of the fundamentals of genuine morality in our foreign policy.

I am no expert on the economic or military value of this proposed venture. However, it is safe to say that militarily it would be at least as indefensible as the Philippines. From an economic standpoint there is no practical way to judge it because it would probably mean war sooner or later—and no one can measure by any finite standards the monetary and material costs of twentieth-century warfare.

This proposal either should be dropped or should be presented fairly and squarely to the American people or their Congress. Let the people decide.

It may be that the American people would rather forego the use of a questionable amount of gasoline at some time in the remote future rather than follow a foreign policy practically guaranteed to send many of their sons, if not their daughters, to die in faraway places in defense of the trade of Standard Oil or the international dreams of our one-world planners.

[*] akin, no doubt, to the “post-Watergate morality”!

Tax Rebellion In Willimantic

One of the most hopeful events on the current scene was the heroic tax rebellion in the city of Willimantic, Connecticut. Willimantic still has the old New England town meeting system in which any citizen can come and vote on the city budget. Last December 2, an unexpected and wondrous event occurred: the town meeting rejected the submitted budget of $2.6 million. The citizens insisted that the budget and the tax level was much too high. Twice more, last month, the citizens of Willimantic rejected a submitted budget, first a 37% tax cut, and next a cut of 7%. Then, at the end of December, they refused to grant the city permission to borrow money while trying to work out an acceptable budget. The officials of Willimantic were desperate; good God, the bureaucrats were in danger of remaining unpaid! Unfortunately, the city attorney found an obscure statute allowing for emergency borrowing even though permission had been refused by the public. But the sword of Damocles remained, to hang over the bureaucracy.

Finally, on January 15, the citizens of Willimantic approved a further reduced budget, this time with taxes cut by 9%. It was at least a partial victory for the rebels. Unfortunately, however, the citizens became scared to pursue the rebellion further; when one of the leaders, Richard M. Jackson, proposed a 50% budget cut, it was rejected overwhelmingly. But still, it was a healthy “message” beamed to the bureaucracy. As Mayor David Calchera stated, “there were people here who wanted more than a 50 per cent tax cut, they were so mad.”

What were they mad about? As far as we can tell, there were no libertarians in Willimantic to focus the dissatisfaction and to take leadership and intensify the rebellion. But even without that, the citizens were mad: suffering as they were from a high rate of unemployment (the major employer is the American Threat Company, which had to cut employment severely due to the recession), the lowest per capita income in the state, combined with a massively high tax rate, aggravated by the fact that the 17,000 residents of the city of Willimantic have to pay taxes twice: once to Willimantic and once to the town of Windham, in which the former is included. As a result, the harassed citizens of Willimantic had to pay a property tax rate of $81 for every $1,000 of assessed valuation, which compares to $73.50 paid by the residents of New York City. On top of all that, last fall the city’s inefficient and debt-ridden water company raised its water rates by 60%. Then came the great December budget revolt, which arrived even though the proposed budget called for no increase over 1973 levels.

A further prod to anger among the citizens was the fiasco of urban renewal in Willimantic. In 1967, the city began a massive urban renewal project which gutted over 13 acres of downtown land, and since then, has done nothing to replace the destroyed buildings. The downtown has of course since become a disaster area.

And so, the conditions in Willimantic were ripe for the spark of tax revolt. Surely, similar conditions exist throughout the country. Libertarians should be alert for such situations and take the lead wherever the opportunity appears.

(On the Willimantic case see the New York Times, Jan. 17, p. 35)

Foreign Affairs

By Leonard P. Liggio

Last May, the Danish Progress Party, the anti-tax party which was second largest in the parliament, averted a government crisis by supporting a sales tax. In January, 1975 the governing Liberal party called elections, and jumped from 22 seats to 42 seats. The largest party, the Social Democrats, gained seven seats to total 53. The Liberal premier, a former pastor, called the elections when he could not get support in parliament for wage and price freezes. His gains in the elections came at the expense of his supporters and was considered cannibalism by political commentators. The conservatives lost six seats, the Radical Liberals lost seven, and the Progress party lost four of the 28 seats gained in the December 1973 elections. Led by Mogens Glistrup, the Progress party can be the balance of power between the Socialist and the Liberal coalitions. But, can one be surprised that despite the good showing of 14 per cent the Progress party’s vote for increased taxes rather than abolition of taxes cast it some credibility? A few weeks after the election, the Liberal premier resigned after losing a vote of confidence by one vote.

Taxes and the economy have been the basis of the crisis which continues to befall Italy. The short-lived government of Mariano Rumor, composed of Christian Democrats, Republicans, Socialists and Social Democrats, had fallen over the need to reduce government spending. Last fall, the president of the Senate, former premier Amintore Fanfani, was called upon to form a government. Fanfani was a leading Catholic intellectual whose social ideas parallelled those of corporatism. He has been a strong supporter of NATO and the US, and follows the usual path of being very socialistic domestically and anti-communist internationally. He headed the first “Opening to the Left” government, and as foreign minister served as UN General Assembly president during the beginning of the US aggression in Vietnam and undercut efforts in the UN to end the aggression. Returning to Italy, he became secretary general of the increasingly failing Christian Democratic party. Fanfani led the attempt to end the newly passed divorce law; but despite the support of the Vatican, including the silencing of bishops and abbots opposed to changing the new divorce law, Fanfani’s efforts were defeated. This led to his inability to form a government last fall, and the calling on foreign minister Aldo Moro. Moro, in a previous stint as premier, had attempted to include the Communist party as part of the coalition, but was blocked by Fanfani. Moro is in favor of rigid economy in government, and balanced budgets, but is viewed as leader of the left-wing of the Christian Democrats because he is not a tool of the U.S. Moro, as foreign minister, greatly improved Italian-Soviet relations and created much good will among Middle Eastern nations. Moro succeeded in forming a new cabinet, which left out the socialists and the social democrats since he could not also include the communists. The Republican party is strongly opposed to increased taxes and to inflation, as well as committed to civil liberties. Its leader, Emilio Columbo, is Treasury minister.

Its earlier strong ties with Middle Eastern countries, based on its longstanding oil policy independent of US interests, is gaining the Moro regime investments from Iran and Saudi Arabia. Led by the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Guido Carli, a leading monetary expert, Italy is undertaking a severe criticism of US economic policies. Carli has been attacking the US for exporting its own inflation; the US’s exporting of its own Vietnam War-based inflation has generated anti-American feelings in Italy. Carli is able to build on a national reaction to increasing US interference in Italian domestic affairs. Carlo Donat-Cattin, a leader of the Christian Democratic party, quoted US ambassador John Volpe as pushing for an early election to create a coalition including the NATO-loving Liberals and excluding the Socialists who are united with the Communists in the trade union movement (the Catholic unions are also united with the Communist unions). Donat-Cattin detailed this in an interview in the Genoa daily, Secolo XIX Nuovo.

The New York Times has noted that Carli “is now opposing proposals by Secretary of State Kissinger on how to avoid further damage to the industrialized nations from the energy crisis on the grounds that they are inflationary. Mr. Carli also says that the situation and interests of the United States and Western Europe in the oil crisis are basically different and that interdependence between the two should be reduced rather than increased . . . Mr. Carli said that the Kissinger project was aimed at blocking all possible financial outlets so as to force oil producers to purchase United States Treasury bills with their dollar surpluses. If they did that. Mr. Carli observed, the oil-producing nations would pile up, ‘though in the form of dollars, pieces of scrap paper that they wouldn’t know how to spend whose future conversion into real resources is endangered by continuing inflation.’ ”

Similarly, in France, there has been increasing reaction to President Giscard d’Estaing’s apparent bowing to American pressure and abandoning of the independent foreign policy of the late Charles de Gaulle and the late Georges Pompidou. Furthermore, Premier Jacques Chirao surprisingly gained the post of secretary general of the Gaullist party. This is likely to modify that party’s healthy anti-Americanism. However, Michel Jobert, Pompidou’s foreign minister, is striving to set up an alternative for the supporters of an independent foreign policy. Jobert had engaged in the famous clash with Kissinger a year ago in Washington. Jobert’s Movement of Democrats has gained national support and is planning to run candidates in the next national elections.

Similarly, the US faces increased independence from Japan as a result of the election of Takeo Miki as prime minister. Miki has been a member of parliament since 1937, holding posts of foreign minister, minister of international trade and secretary general of the Liberal-Democratic party. The party was formed under the pressure of the United States out of a conservative party and a laissez-faire party, and the election of Miki prevented the break-up of the party. Miki had outspokenly broken with the past four prime ministers. Miki had demanded less reliance on the US and the recognition of China. He is an advocate of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, an opponent of large Japanese military forces, an opponent of sending Japanese armed forces abroad (as urged by the US during the Vietnam War), and a defender of the “no war” clause of the Japanese constitution. In addition to a strong supporter of diplomatic and trade relations with China, Miki is the Japanese leader closest to the Arab nations. In late 1973, he toured the Middle East to emphasize Japan’s friendliness to the Arab states upon whom Japan is totally reliant for oil.

The recent Kissinger outburst threatening US invasion of the Middle East sounds like the death rattle of a dying Empire. The very ability of the US to carry out the purely physical aspects of such an invasion is open to question. There are no allies between Long Island and the Suez (except Israel) where US planes carrying paratroops could land and re-fuel. Germany, France and Italy drew the line in October 1973; Greece and Turkey have done so since the Cyprus crisis. Spain and Portugal have said no. The only hope for US geopoliticians is the Soviet Union. Would it allow US use of its Black Sea airfields for an invasion of Araby? Despite the dependence of the Soviet Union on the US, it is unlikely to do that, but one can never rule out the willingness of the Soviet Union to serve the US. (US-Soviet relations might have been close even had the Soviets permitted Nixon and his cohorts a place of exile in Yalta!)

Drew Middleton, in the New York Times of January 10, presented the Pentagon’s assessment of Kissinger’s threats. The Arabs would have warning—from the Soviets—of impending US invasions, and could destroy the oil fields. But, the real problem for the military officers is–maintaining intervention once it had begun. The US does not have forces trained for desert warfare, and would face a Lawrence of Arabia guerrilla war. Western military leaders in NATO indicated that NATO would be destroyed by any American military action against Arab oil. The reaction of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two largest oil suppliers, would be violently anti-American. The US has been giving and selling billions of dollars of high efficiency hardware to these two countries as the most conservative in the Middle East. Yet, the threats of US aggression have caused Iran to move to an anti-US position. Iran is now giving financial and military aid to the Arab states. Although a Moslem country, Iran follows a different form of Islam. However, it has allied with Saudi Arabia’s desire to gain the independence of Moslem holy places in Jerusalem.

Until October 1973 Saudi Arabia had found a powerful Israel a barrier to radical Arab Nationalism. Saudi Arabia aided Syria and Egypt in October 1973 only after they had made unexpected gains. After the Six Day War of 1967. US Secretary of State William Rogers sought to implement UN Resolution 242 calling for immediate return to pre-1967 borders. But, with Black September 1970 and King Hussein’s massacre of the Palestinian guerrillas, and the elimination of Jordan as a major sector of their conflict with the Israeli regime, Rogers’ plan was dropped and Kissinger moved into the dominant position with a plan to recognize the 1967 conquests. Jewish settlements were introduced in the conquered lands and according to Abba Eban (New Republic, March 23, 1974), General Ari Sharon spoke of Israel conquering everything between Khartoum and Algeria, and Teheran and the Persian Gulf. After the Arab success in October 1973, Kissinger shifted to the Rogers plan, which is no longer operable, as indicated by the total recognition of the Palestinian cause at the Rabat conference.

Yet, the kind of “stability” that Kissinger is aiming for in the Middle East—one which gets the administration off the hook through the 1976 election—is likely to ensure the continuity of the conflict and more US dollars poured into the area. (There is almost no doubt that the Soviet Union was pleased to turn over the Egyptian situation to US funding as it would bankrupt the Soviet Union to try to supply arms and domestic development funds to Egypt; but the US taxpayer gladly takes on the task!). The mere creation of a Palestinian state on the basis of UN resolutions would only continue the path of conflict and confrontation. What we must do is go outside the current state of the question, which permits no solution. As the present state of the matter is illegal in international law as a violation of the initial UN trusteeship plans, it would be useful to go to the original plans as a starting point. This was the concept of a single Palestinian state, composed of two commonwealths or cantons based respectively on the European Jewish and Arab Jewish populations, and on the Christian Arab and Islamic Arab populations. Within the original concept of a single political entity, the growth of the Jewish homeland and of the Palestinian nation could follow the original expectations of the trusteeship and of the leaders of the respective communities.

Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor and moderate analyst of the Middle East problem, explained some of the basic issues in an article in the October, 1974 University Review:

If short-run stability is imposed, the most that the Palestinians can hope for is a mini-state subject to Israeli and Jordanian control. Israel will remain a Jewish state, that is, a state based on the principle of legal and institutional discrimination against non-Jews. . . Thus, more than ninety percent of the pre-1967 territory of Israel is, by law, owned in perpetuity by the Jewish people. Non-Jewish citizens may not lease, rent, or work on these lands. The Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews, and excludes Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes. All-Jewish settlement areas are developed, with no protest from liberal opinion; imagine the reaction if all-White settlement areas were designated by law in New York City . . . Internally, Israel can hardly avoid religious domination of social life, regardless of popular feelings about the matter, since some principled basis must be established for distinguishing the privileged majority from other citizens or from stateless Arabs in Israel—a growing category, since statelessness is inherited, contrary to standard practice in the Western democracies.

A relevant recent development regarding Palestine was the recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the establishment of an official representative by India. Although African, Asian and some European nations had PLO offices, the Indian government was the first non-Arab and non-Communist government to grant diplomatic status. The PLO emphasized the long tradition of Indian nationalist support for the rights of the Palestinians. The founder of Modern India, Mohandas Gandhi, published a famous dialogue on the insistence of Zionist organizations on establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, though already inhabited by another people. They did so rather than choose an uninhabited part of the world where they would neither be aggressors nor unwelcome, especially as several such offers had been made to Jewish organizations. Gandhi was anxious to avoid the great problem faced by India due to two different religious groups. For this he was criticized by Moslem extremists and assassinated by a Hindu extremist.

Gandhi’s point was well taken, as the attempts to set up a separate Moslem state of Indian Moslems have not succeeded. A hundred million Moslems have lived in India for a quarter-century; among those that selected to set up a Moslem state—Pakistan—the majority revolted, to set up their own state independent of the north-west Moslems. Bengal is a Moslem state closely allied to India, while Pakistan remains the tool of western imperialism for which it was created, first, by the British as they left India and now by the US. The PLO representative to India noted that Pakistan, as a religious, Moslem state, “will not solve the problems of Moslems,” and that “to establish a state on the basis of religion will not solve communal problems planted by other forces.” The PLO representative declared: “India can do a great deal for us in convincing Jews and world Jewry that a secular, democratic state in Palestine is the only solution. India has its own experience in creating this kind of state.” Regarding the Palestinian cause, he added: “This is not a struggle against Jews. It is a struggle against Israel.” However, the PLO delegate indicated that the PLO had not asked India to end the Israeli consulate in Bombay as demanded by members of Parliament and by the popular weekly Blitz. Indians are struck particularly by the refusal of Israel to accord the rights of Jews to many Indian Jews on the grounds that they can never be Jews according to the racial concepts of the Orthodox rabbis (who also exclude Conservative and Reform Judaism from Israel).

The partitions of India and Palestine by the British colonialists have had the same effects—conflict, division, continuity of political influence—that occurred in Ireland. Just as the Jordanian monarchy and its English-officered Arab Legion and the Pakistanian army were a means of maintenance of English imperial influence, so the partition of Ireland following the Irish Revolution attempted to use the different populations for English political purposes.

When the Republic of Ireland was created in 1922, it was composed of three of the four provinces of Ireland, plus three counties of the fourth province. Ulster. The remaining six counties of Ulster were included in a new entity—Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland contained a population which was 95% Catholic and five percent Church of Ireland (Episcopal or Anglican). The Church of Ireland was not only respected and supported, but members of it were given a majority on the Supreme Court and large representation in the Senate of the Irish Republic, in order to give a sense of security to the Anglican population. Recently, an Anglican, son of an IRA martyr, was elected president of the Irish Republic. Most of the counties of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry—west of the Bann River—have Catholic majorities with Church of Ireland minorities. Similarly, south Armagh and south Down, adjacent to the Irish Republic, have Catholic majorities. It would have been possible to have included these in the Irish Republic in 1922, leaving an overwhelming Presbyterian majority in Antrim (and Belfast), northern Armagh-Down, and northest Derry (around Coleraine). But, the English army demanded the western and southern areas as a defense in depth sector in case of invasion from the Irish Republic, so that the war could be fought in the Catholic areas of Northern Ireland. As Northern Ireland is divided by population into thirds—Catholic, Church of Ireland and Presbyterian—the Catholic demands for equal rights gained support among the Anglicans although opposed by the hard-core Calvinists. The introduction of the British army—for whatever motives—gave a boost to the Irish Republican Army faction led by the Provisional Sinn Fein Party (the Official Sinn Fein Party and its IRA have developed a nonviolent, political program of civil disobedience and political struggle) because the IRA alone defended Catholic urban neighborhoods against British army invasions. This defense by the IRA gave them a huge popular support which they otherwise would not have had.

However, this popular support for the IRA (Provisionals) was on the verge of being undercut last spring by the formation of a coalition government composed of the moderate Catholics and the Anglicans. It was made up of the Alliance party which combines Catholics and Anglicans, the Social Democratic Party of Northern Ireland which is the main Catholic political party, and the Anglicans in the Unionist Party (which used to be the dominant party under the system reducing the Catholic electorate). This coalition had every chance of gaining complete support from the Catholics and totally eliminating the IRA from popular support. It would have given the Catholics equality of rights in education, housing, employment, health, etc., within the Ulster entity. A paper formal conference system between the prime ministers of the Republic and of Ulster would provide for conferences between the two parts of Ireland. The extreme Presbyterians opposed this (moderate Protestant leaders in Belfast have been assassinated for supporting the coalition concept). However, the coalition found its real enemy in the officer corps of the British army in Ulster, and, through threats of mutiny among the officers, the coalition government in Ulster was overthrown in mid-1974. The most hopeful attempt to solve the Irish problem had failed. The result was to give popular strength to the Provisional IRA, so that, after the Christmas truce, the British representatives in Ulster, through the intermediary role of Irish Protestant clergy in both parts of Ireland, have had to recognize the political role of the IRA. During the Christmas ceasefire, the English leaders missed a major chance to end the violence by releasing a large number of the illegally jailed Catholics, but it freed only a few. In addition to freeing large numbers of jailed Catholics, Prime Minister Harold Wilson seems about to agree to further talks with the IRA for the gradual withdrawal of the almost 15,000 British occupation troops from Ulster.

The question of communal divisions continues to plague Yugoslavia. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was created by the Western Allies after World War I under the dominance of Serbia. The Serbian dynasty had come to the throne only after 1900, after assassinating the whole of the previous royal family, and then had expanded in the Balkans, under the auspices of Tsarist Russia, incorporating Macedonia before World War I. Then, it desired to expand to the sea by incorporating the non-Serbian Croatians and Slovenians who were Catholics and Latin cultured rather than Orthodox and Greek cultured like the Serbians. For this purpose, the Serbians assassinated the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and started World War I. The events leading up to this are well detailed in the work of the revisionist historians: Sidney B. Fay, Origins of the World War (2 vols.) and Harry Elmer Barnes, Genesis of the World War.

The dissident Yugoslav writer, Mihajlo Mihajlov, has an article in the February 3 issue of the Welfare-Warfare, socialist-militarist journal, The New Leader, entitled: Disentangling History—The Mihajlovich Tragedy. Mihajlov starts off on a bad foot to disentangle history by stating that the Kingdom of Montenegro, which was aggressively annexed by Serbia after World War I, had “fought on the Axis side during World War I.” Not only was there no Axis during World War I, since the Axis only came into existence in the late 1930’s, but Montenegro was an ally of Serbia, fighting on the side of Russia against Austria-Hungary. The royal family of Montenegro, which went back many centuries, was deposed in favor of the upstart Serbian dynasty.

But the major area of opposition to incorporation into the Allied-created Yugoslavia was Croatia. Croatia was the historic kingdom on the Adriatic Sea with a long and glorious cultural tradition tied to Italy, Austria and Western Europe. Although most Croatians were Catholics, many of those living in Bosnia were Islamic, as a result of conversion during the Turkish rule. Thus, in Bosnia a third of the people were Moslem while a quarter were Catholics and about forty-percent were Orthodox. Yugoslavia has a large Moslem population (about 15%), which facilitates relations with the Moslem world and gives Yugoslavia a leadership role of the non-aligned powers. In the total population. Orthodox account for about forty percent and Catholics about thirty-five percent. But, religion and nationality overlap—Catholic equalling Croatian and Slovenian and Orthodox equalling Serbian, Montenegrian, Macedonian and Albanian.

Mihajlov harkens back to the beginning of World War II. The Yugoslavian government was split between supporters of an alliance with Germany and its Balkan allies, and an alliance with England and its power in the Mediterranean. The pro-German group allied with the Germans and attempted to settle the deep nationalities crisis by setting up a Serbian and a Croatian state. The extreme Serbian royalists, led by Draja Mihajlovich, carried out a guerrilla war against the Serbian and Croatian governments allied with Germany. Mihajlovich’s Chetniks were lionized in the literature and movies of England and America. But, although strongly supported by England, the Chetniks were more interested in preparing for England’s victory and restoration of the Serbian domination; they carried out campaigns to destroy the Croatian nationalist movements. Josef Broz Tito, having fought in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, organized the Croatian resistance—the Partisans—under communist leadership. But, having an “internationalist” perspective, the communists also included anti-monarchical Serbs, Montenegrans and Macedonians. Since the Chetniks were tools of the English foreign office, the US gave its support to the Partisans and by December 1943 forced Churchill to support Tito too. Mihajlov correctly notes that this was not desired by Stalin, who distrusted Tito’s militant nationalism and who preferred his agreement with England. Stalin urged Tito to join with the English aligned forces led by King Peter and Mihajlovich. After the war, Tito continued his clearly anti-Soviet policies, and eventually established close ties with the US while formally calling himself non-aligned. In 1946, Mihajlovich was captured, tried and shot. Tito defeated him because he offered a modernizing, non-unitary approach to solve Yugoslavia’s nationality crisis in place of Mihajlovich’s Orthodox religious approach, his Serbian domination over the other nationalities, his massacres of Croatians and Moslems. Although there are many problems remaining in regard to the nationalities question in Yugoslavia, Tito eliminated the most serious and dangerous ones, as Mihajlov emphasized. Although Yugoslavia has made great strides toward a market economy, in the last few years brakes have been put on that development. Advocates of increased personal freedom in economic and cultural areas have been labelled “anarcho-liberals,” and “anarcho-liberalism” has been the major target of attack by the official press. The one hopeful development is the re-emergence of Edvard Kardelj, 64, as the heir apparent to Tito. Kardelj initiated the struggle against Soviet influences and the introduction of market approaches to economic problems, as well as general concepts of freedom in Yugoslavian politics. But, in recent years, it was thought he was losing influence as chief theoretician of the League of Yugoslav Communists. But, Kardelj has become the authoritative spokesman recently, and was elected the representative of the Republic of Slovenia to the collective presidency comprised of one member from each of the national republics. In place of Tito, he would be the natural leader of Yugoslavia.

The Day-Care ‘Shortage’

A few years ago, the new feminist movement began to raise the cry of a nationwide “shortage” of day-care centers, with a corollary clamor for government to sponsor, subsidize, or operate a fleet of such centers so that mothers could work in jobs and careers. To economists, the outcry was a peculiar one; the free market never suffers from shortages, as supply always rises to meet demand. The answer clearly was: either the demand for day-care centers was far less than the feminists claimed, or—more likely—that somewhere government was deliberately restricting the supply and thereby itself creating the shortage.

That the latter hunch is correct is made clear by a recent hysterical campaign by the New York City Health Department. The Health Department has now issued a frenzied statement that “illegal” private day-care centers are “spreading like a cancer throughout the city” (New York Sunday News, Jan. 26, 1975). Aha! Literally “hundreds” of such centers have appeared through the city, unlicensed, dedicated (horrors!) to the making of a profit. But never fear, the Health Department is in the process of cracking down on this rash of illegality.

In short: the numerous requirements imposed by the New York city government are so onerous and costly that the supply of day-care centers is severely restricted, and so black-market, illegal centers have had to appear in response to consumer demand. Some of these requirements are: licenses from the Health Department; certificates of occupancy from the Buildings Department; and passing inspection by the Fire Department. The paternal city authorities are worried both because the fees charged by the private centers are “too high” (the fees “can go sky high”) and also too low: they can make money “even if they only charge $25 a week.” (Tsk! Tsk!)

It is OK, for some reason, for mothers to hire private baby-sitters, or even to use a local neighbor as a personal day-care center. These, too, are of course unlicensed, and yet the authorities do not seem to worry here about licensing, health, safety, building codes, or the proper educational facilities. Yet, for private day-care centers, defined as an outfit that takes in more than five young children and meets more than 5 hours a week, somehow these often absurd and restrictive requirements become absolutely mandatory for the alleged safety and educational nurture of the children. As Edith Clute, of the Health Department, puts it, “Parents must look for the license in any center. If there is none, they should try to think of an alternative like family day care, or a grandmother to take care of the youngsters or a babysitter. Adequate care is more than health and safety. Qualified staff members who have expertise and understanding are very important.” Licenses, furthermore, are granted only after careful scrutiny by “department experts who are certified by the state as early childhood education consultants.”

So then, how come that babysitters, grandma, or Mrs. Jones down the block don’t have to be “qualified staff members”? Why is the consumer trusted to look out for her children in the former case, but not in the larger day-care centers? The answer should be clear: because the former do not compete directly with the licensed private centers. The licensed centers have been granted a monopolistic privilege by the city, and no direct competition is to be brooked from cheaper, and unlicensed competitors. The high prices and restricted supply granted to the monopolistic centers have to be protected by the coercive arm of government.

This “cynical” or realistic hypothesis may be checked by investigating the source of the current furore. It stemmed from a “rash of complaints”—some from grumbling parents, to be sure (who, however, could easily exercise their option of removing their children), but others from what a News reporter describes as “legitimate” centers. So here we have, in microcosm, the essence of the “welfare state”: privileged monopolists find their privileged income being reduced by free competition, and they call upon the friendly government authorities to use their coercive powers to outlaw the competition. The “welfare state” is the monopoly state. And it is a state that produces “shortages” wherever it goes.

“The artificial creation of expenses by those who deem a public debt a public blessing will easily suggest plausible pretenses for taxation, until every class is burdened to the utmost stretch of forbearance, and the great body of the people reduced to penury and slavery.”

— Mercy Warren, 1805

Sense On Oil—At Last!

Those of us who have combed the media for some sign of sense on the oil program have been prey to an aura of unreality. For, in the thousands of words on the subject, everyone has blithely assumed that we must cut oil imports into the U.S. by 1 million barrels per day. The bizarre problem is not simply that all the media are espousing some form of statist program; the really grotesque point is that no one has bothered even to defend the seemingly self-evident assumption that oil imports must be cut. Whatever dispute there is, has occurred only within that matrix: as the Ford administration takes the “market” view (ye gods!) that a high tariff and tax must be placed on oil imports and production, while the Democrats counter with the even more socialistic view that oil and gasoline use should be cut by a totalitarian scheme of rationing. As a result, the only alternatives placed before us are one or another form of statism.

In this blighted atmosphere, good sense has now come from a wholly unexpected quarter—from columnist Joseph Kraft, who has never been distinguished for clarity of thought or for libertarian acumen. And yet, Kraft’s column for February 3 (New York Post) is a searching and brilliant critique of the unexamined axiom of the million barrel a day cut in oil imports. Kraft begins his column by posing what he calls “the million-barrel question”: what do we gain, and what do we lose by trying to force a million-barrel cut in oil imports? Kraft answers that “the loss turns out to be staggering, both in its impact on this country and its allies.” On the other hand, the “gain”, which Kraft correctly sees as “totally foggy”, “seems to rest on some obscure foreign policy point bootlegged past the White House by Henry Kissinger.”

Kraft goes on to note that both Ford and the Democrats accept the million barrel axiom, Ford trying to attain the goal by oil tariffs and taxes, and the Democrats by rationing and a tax on gasoline. He then points out that Ford’s proposals involve a double burden: adding to inflation by raising prices of petroleum and petroleum products, and intensifying recession and unemployment by cutting production and demand for oil and for other products. To counterbalance these tangible losses of the Ford program, he then asks, what are supposed to be the gains? Kraft notes that “that question has not been systematically posed by the President’s domestic economic advisers.” In fact, “John Sawhill, the former Energy Administrator, testified the other day that he did not even know the basis of the million-barrel-per-day target.” Kraft then notes that the State Department has come up with a kind of rationale for the import cut: that this will spur oil independence in the United States, and especially in Western Europe and Japan. “But,” Kraft comments, “both of these points are subject to serious questions.” For one thing, “oil at present seems to be plentiful”—so why the hassle about the oil “shortage”?

We noted, in the January Lib. Forum, that oil has been rapidly becoming a “surplus” commodity. More evidence on this has been piling up. Reports in the oil press note that several countries—Kuwait, Saskatchewan, and Ecuador—have recently reduced oil production because of a paucity of demand at the current price. The oil tanker trade is also in the doldrums for the same reason. A recent Oil Daily reported that “with less oil being demanded and with more tankers around to carry it, the market has collapsed, pushing charter rates through the floor and leaving dozens of ships totally without work.” The article goes on to say that there are now four and a half million tons of tankers now awaiting oil cargo in the Persian Gulf. Furthermore, in recent months, new and large scale oil finds have been made: a huge strike in the North Sea off Norway, an important find off the coast of Brazil; discoveries in Mexico and off the China coast. All this highlights a speech last year by J. K. Jamieson, chairman of the board of Exxon Corporation. Jamieson predicted that oil consumption would decline by 2% over 1973, and that the decline would continue this year. This speech highlights the memorandum in the files of Standard Oil of California, discovered by Senate investigators in the late 1960’s. The memorandum warned of an “excess supply” of oil in the early 1970s unless something were done to curtail production. And, just the other day, a report was issued by the OECD (advanced Western countries), predicting a reduction of oil consumption in these countries by 1980.

And so we begin to see the true nature of the oil “crisis” and the new axioms of oil policy. We are suffering not from an oil “shortage”, which exists only in the fevered imagination of the media, but from an oil “surplus”, i.e. that the current OPEC cartel price of $10-$11 per barrel is too high. The Ford program is a program to intensify the cartel, to restrict the supply of oil further and to raise the price: short, to protect the oil cartellists from the powerful forces of market competition, to prevent any fall in oil prices, and to raise those prices still further by U.S. government coercion. And, of course, to cut the American oil companies into a larger share of the world cartel pie. All at the expense of the consumers, here and abroad. One important tipoff on this policy was President Ford’s bald-faced proposal to place a compulsory minimum floor on the price of oil. How stark a cartellizing program can we have?

The excuse, of course, is to protect alternative sources of energy from the competition of oil, when its prices will decline. In short, use government coercion to protect the oil cartel, and then include the alternative sources in on the cartel as well! The point should be clear: despite all the hoopla about alternative sources of energy, be they nuclear, solar, or hot water, they are still inefficient and uneconomic, even at the current high price of oil. Oil and coal are still the best sources of energy, and they will continue to be for a long time to come. Our policy should be a pro-consumer and pro-freedom policy: to encourage oil imports by eliminating all tariffs and quotas, and to encourage domestic oil production by abolishing proration laws and oil price controls, and by opening up the vast oil reserves on the government-owned public domain to private homesteading and private property rights—and therefore to private production. All the U.S. government has to do is to cease forthwith its various measures crippling the importation and production of oil, coal, and natural gas.

But back to Joe Kraft. Kraft goes on to cite a recent series of studies, by the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, and Morgan Guaranty Bank, debunking the widespread hysteria about the “recycling” of dollar assets accumulated by the oil producing countries. What will the Arabs do with all those dollars? Well, what can they do except buy American products or invest in American assets; so much for the “missing dollars”. Kraft notes that all these recent reports show “that the vast dollar assets accumulated in the past year by the petroleum producers are being distributed in normal and manageable ways on investment, consumption and foreign aid.” Therefore, he notes, “the danger of what Kissinger calls strangulation by the oil exporters seems very, very remote.” And what about Western Europe and Japan, whom we are supposedly “saving” from the Arabs? Kraft asks: Are they “hooked on the idea of an American lead in cutting oil consumption? Or wouldn’t they much prefer a healthy American economy where they can buy and sell with ease?” Absolutely! Kraft concludes on an excellent and challenging note:

“In any case, the basic question wants to be examined in a systematic way. It is not enough just to take it on Kissinger’s authority that the country ought to curtail consumption of oil by a million barrels a day in the next year. Given the weak state of the American economy and the dependence of foreign countries on U.S. prosperity and the current surplus of oil and the apparent manageability of the petrodollar problem, the burden of proof on the million-barrel question lies upon Kissinger and his men at the State Dept.”

The Morgan Guaranty Trust report, mentioned by Kraft and appearing in the January issue of its World Financial Markets, stresses the recent (11 reduction in the demand for oil from the OPEC countries, and (2) heavy buying of products by these oil producing countries from the industrial nations. While oil consumption has been declining, imports into the OPEC countries rose by 70-75% in 1974. Already, Algeria is heading for a balance of trade deficit, and Venezuela and Iran are heading rapidly in the same direction. So much for the “missing petrodollars”!

Of course, our strictures on the absurdity of the media do not apply to our favorite libertarian-ish columnist, Nicholas von Hoffman. In his January 28 column (New York Post), von Hoffman points out that the word “crisis” has been semantically redefined; once, it used to mean “an acutely painful or dangerous situation demanding immediate action.” In that ordinary language sense, “there is no energy crisis, although the White House proclaims it, the Congress debates it and the press accepts it. If we continue to buy foreign oil as we have been no catastrophe will befall us. There is no emergency.” Von Hoffman goes on to make the trenchant and crucial point that, for the first time in the history of the world, there is a great agitation for the rationing of a product (gasoline) which is in sense in short supply. As von Hoffman puts it, “if Senate majority leader Mansfield (D-Mont) and his liberal Republican allies get, their gas rationing law passed, it will be the first time since the days of the royal salt monopolies that the state will have attempted to ration a universally needed commodity available in abundance. For not only is there presently no oil shortage, but the large oversupply is bursting the rivets of the world’s storage tanks.” Von Hoffman concludes that “imperialist fantasies such as energy or raw material ‘independence’ aside, no reason exists either for the President’s oil import taxes or his opponents’ rationing schemes. The problem isn’t economic, but psychological.” Hooray!

“Let the history of the federal government instruct mankind that the mask of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of the people.”

— Benjamin Bache.

“The one bright moment in the Taft Administration, in fact, came when Dr. Taft was given his drubbing in November, 1912. Turning out such gross incompetents, to be sure, does very little practical good, for they are commonly followed by successors almost as bad, but it at least gives the voters a chance to register their disgust, and so it keeps them reasonably contented, and turns their thoughts away from the barricade and the bomb. Democracy, of course, does not work, but it is a capital anaesthetic.”

— H. L. Mencken

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII, NO. 3

MARCH, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

Inflationary Depression

When does a “recession” become a “depression”? Basically, the question is a matter of degree and therefore of semantics, and so the answer is in large part subjective. However, we are in an economy where industrial production has declined a whopping 10% from last September to this January, and where the unemployment rate heads inexorably up to 10%, and indeed has hit 10% in key industrial areas. In the face of these figures, as rough as they may be, it is absurd not to call the current situation a “depression.”

The only counter to this description by the optimists seems to be that the situation is not as bad as in the Great Depression of the 1930’s. (Thus, see Philip Shabecoff, in the New York Times, March 7): Happily true, but irrelevant, since the Great Depression was the worst depression in American history, and hardly the standard by which to gauge all other depressions. Indeed, before the 1930’s, all business cycle contractions were called depressions—some of which were mild, and some severe—and it was only after World War II that the word “depression”, now considered politically intolerable, was abolished and the milder sounding “recession” put in its place. But even considering that change, a 10% fall in production in six months, and 9-10% unemployment, is a “depression” in anybody’s book.

The liberals and Keynesians, anxious for a vast reviving up operation for monetary and fiscal expansion, are claiming that inflation is no longer a problem, and that only heartless reactionaries still worry about it. But while it is happily true that basic commodity and industrial raw material prices have fallen sharply since mid-1974 (the index of industrial raw material prices having fallen from about 240 in the spring of 1974 to about 180 in February, 1975), and while it is also true that the index of wholesale prices has declined slightly in the last couple of months, it is also and more importantly true that the cost of living index was still increasing at an annual rate of 8.5% at the end of the year. And it is consumer prices, the cost of living, that is the only gauge of whether or not we are still suffering from price inflation. 8.5% is of course better than 14%—our previous rate—and may bring us into the magic world of “single digit” rather than “double digit” inflation, but it is still a very large and ominous rate of inflation. We are, in short, in an inflationary depression.

As the Federal Reserve gears up for a massive injection of new money, and as it prepares to finance a big chunk of the huge prospective federal deficit for the next two years (now estimated in many quarters as well over $100 billion), the rate of inflation is bound to accelerate dangerously in the next two years.

What we have to realize, hard as it may be for liberals to swallow, is that the recession-depression has been the healthiest thing that has happened to the American economy in a decade. For once inflationary credit expansion has proceeded and accelerated as it has in the last decade, the distortions of investment and production make a depression healthy and necessary—necessary to liquidate unsound capital goods investments, and to bring about a healthy-free market structure of production, with less investment and resources going into capital goods and more into consumer goods production. As the “Austrian School” of economics teaches us, the faster the depression is allowed to do its work and the less government interferes with that work, the sooner it will be over, and the stage set for a healthy free-market recovery in the structure of investment and production.

Furthermore, only the Austrian School—and neither the Keynesians nor the Friedmanites—can explain the puzzling phenomenon which has hit us squarely and clearly in the current depression: how it is that industrial commodity prices can fall sharply, while wholesale prices remain stable, and yet consumer prices continue to rise rapidly. Contrary to the Left, the cause is not some sort of diabolical conspiracy of businesses or retailers. It is the fact that it is precisely through such diverse price movements that the market process of depression does its work, shifting resources from capital goods to consumer goods. In fact, recessions and depressions of the past have always lowered capital prices and raised consumer prices relative to each other. Thus, in the Great Depression of the 1930’s, industrial and commodity prices fell very sharply, while the cost of living fell considerably, but much less so than industrial prices. And so, after 1929, consumer prices, as in the case of the current economy, rose relatively to other prices. The big difference between then and now is that all prices fell sharply because of a healthy fall in the money supply (“deflation”). Since all prices fell, the consumers did not complain about the cost of living falling less than other prices. But, now, because of our far more inflationary money and banking system, the government has been able to keep inflating the money supply and thereby to prevent an overall deflation. Hence, the Keynesian policies of the federal government have stopped neither inflation nor depression, as the arrogant economic Establishment had promised for forty years; the only thing they succeeded in doing was to prevent deflation and hence to prevent consumers from enjoying the one thing that made past depressions palatable: a fall in the cost of living. Government tinkering with the economy has not cured business cycles; it has only brought us the new phenomenon of inflationary depression, of the worst of both worlds at the same time.

If the government doesn’t interfere too much in the depression process (a big “if” of course) the depression should be over in a year, just in time to receive a giant inflationary stimulus from the Fed financing of the gigantic federal deficits. In this situation, the most important single consideration is to stop the Fed from inflating the money supply. At this critical point, where do the Friedmanites stand? Long-time readers of the Lib. Forum should be able to guess: the Friedmanites are now attacking Burns and the Federal Reserve for not inflating enough, for not meeting Friedman’s arbitrary crystal-ball target of “optimum monetary growth” (i.e. optimum amount of inflationary counterfeiting) for the economy.

Libertarian apologists for Friedman who claim that the Friedmanites and the Austrians really have the same views on economic policy (e.g. the egregious Alan Reynolds of National Review) cite an esoteric journal article by Milton Friedman to the effect that the real, down-deep optimal growth of the money supply in the U.S. is not Friedman’s magic 3-5% per year, but zero, which would indeed make Friedman as hard-money oriented as the Austrians. But the vital point is that this article has had no influence whatever on concrete Friedmanite policy positions, which, for example, are now bitterly attacking the Fed for its “over-restrictive policy” in not inflating the money supply sufficiently.

For example: in the March 10 issue of Newsweek, Friedman attacks the Federal Reserve for not inflating the money supply enough since July 1974. It appears that from June 1974 to January 1975, the Fed has “only” increased M-1 (currency plus demand deposits) by the annual rate of 1%, while M-2 (M-1 plus time deposits at commercial banks) has “only” increased by 5%. Friedman attacks this as “over-restrictive” and “undesirably low.” As far as I and the Austrian School are concerned, this monetary growth is at least 5% too much. Where is the alleged Friedmanite goal of zero monetary growth now? Nowhere, as usual.

The fact must be faced once and for all, especially by libertarians, that the Friedmanites, for all their free-market rhetoric, are simply moderate statists and moderate inflationists, and that none of this moderation does the cause of the free market or of sound money any good whatsoever. The Friedmanites, especially on the money question, are Pied Pipers down the path of inflation and Big Government.

While we are at it, another article in Newsweek on Alan Greenspan (Feb. 24) illuminates the question of how Greenspan can square his high-sounding libertarian and Objectivist rhetoric, with his concrete role as statist compromiser and equivalent Pied Piper. At one point, Newsweek sees the problem: “Like Rand, Greenspan believes that government has no business meddling with free enterprise—yet here he is helping to make policy for an American government that intervenes in nearly every aspect of the economy.” The answer: “Greenspan rationalizes the seeming contradiction by arguing that since he cannot ‘prove beyond a doubt’ that his laissez-faire principles are right, it is possible for him to compromise.”

So there we have it. As our alleged. “libertarian” moves among the heady and corrupting atmosphere of Power, he asks himself, “What the hell? How do I know I’m really right . . .?” That’s John Galt? Never has Lord Acton’s great dictum about the corruption of Power been demonstrated more elegantly. Let all libertarians engrave this lesson on their hearts. And to Tibor Machan, who wrote an apologia for Greenspan recently in Reason magazine, are you listening?

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Godfather—Part II. dir. by Francis Ford Coppola, with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro.

Sequels, of course, are never quite touched with the glory of the originals, and Godfather II does not enjoy the tightly wrought magnificence of the first Godfather, one of the great films of our time. Still and all, Godfather II deserves this year’s Academy Award. It gets a bit draggy at times, as the camera lingers for long stretches on Al Pacino’s face, in an attempt to lend “psychological depth” to the story. Great as that face is, the tautness of the action suffers. Apparently, Coppola was stung by moralistic and left-liberal criticisms of the allegedly pro-Mafia stance of the original (actually, it was only in favor of the Corleone family within the Mafia); hence the phony “psychology”, and the depiction of more Corleone excesses than in the original. But these are only warts on a masterpiece. I still walked out at the end of the three-hour Godfather II hoping against hope for a Part in of equal length. The basic drama and the superb acting are still there.

Part II goes back and forth between the later story of Michael Corleone (Pacino), and his continuing triumph against enemies from within and without the family; and the early story of the original Brando-Godfather, played with equal brilliance by Robert DeNiro as he rises from a poor Sicilian boy on the run from the Mafia there to the establishment of his own family in New York (c. 1900-1920). I came to the movie prepared to resent the cutting back and forth between the two stories, but they are done very well, and there is no sense of discontinuity. There is still room for a Part III covering the middle years of Brando-DeNiro.

There is still plenty of exciting action in Part II, and Pacino remains triumphant. The inner logic of Part I prepares us for the betrayal of the weak brother Fredo, and for the punking out of Pacino’s wife Diane Keeton, who simply cannot stand the gaff. (Is the moral that Sicilians should beware in marrying WASPS?) Lee Strasberg, the notorious founder of the “method” acting of the Actor’s Studio, lends an excellent dimension to the story in his portrayal of a Meyer Lansky-type (Lansky is the famous Jewish Mafia leader). The Lansky type comes across as a steely and arresting figure, cloaking his post as leader of the rackets with the homilies of a Jewish patriarch (“the important thing, my son, is to have your health,” as he prepares to wipe the “son” out.)

There are, once more, some superb and striking scenes; the vengeance wreaked by DeNiro on the Sicilian Mafia leader who slaughtered his family; the Kefauver-type hearing when the Corleones bring the Valachi-type informer’s brother from Sicily to shame him out of being a stoolpigeon; the Batista-Mafia feast in Havana just before the Castro takeover.

On to Part III!

Young Frankenstein. dir. by Mel Brooks, with Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, and Cloris Leachman.

I am delighted to see that the media have now discovered Mel Brooks, pace the lengthy and hilarious interviews with our prime film humorist in Newsweek and Playboy. The problem is that the media, as usual, suffer from a cultural time lag, so that the attention that should have been showered on the zany and magnificent Blazing Saddles—Brooks’ previous film—has instead been directed at Young Frankenstein. The problem is that the public is being deluded into believing that Young Frankenstein is a film similar to Blazing Saddles. It is not. Despite Brooks’ stated creed of going always for the belly laugh, of aiming at leaving the audience helplessly on the floor with laughter (as Saddles did), Young Frankenstein is not that kind of film at all. In addition to being controlled rather than anarchic, Frankenstein is a film for chuckles rather than belly laughs. It is a sweet, affectionate tribute to the horror film, in particular of course the Frankenstein genre. It is, in essence, a revision and reconstruction of the Frankenstein story so as to bring about a happy ending, with the monster sweetly taking his place in human existence. The acting, as is usual for the Brooks repertory company, is excellent, with Wilder playing Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson who reluctantly finds himself sucked into following in his illustrious grandfather’s footsteps.

A fine picture, provided one remembers that it does not provide anywhere near the inspired hilarity of Saddles or of the phenomenal Brooks film, The Producers.

Murder on the Orient Express. dir. by Sidney Lumet, with Albert Finney and a host of others.

It was a fine idea to film the Agatha Christie mystery classic, which takes place on the exciting and luxurious Orient Express, the site of so many interwar espionage and mystery thrillers. Unfortunately, Sidney Lumet was the director, and Lumet’s pretentious and plodding direction virtually provided the kiss of death. Since there is not much action in this Hercule Poirot mystery, the film needed a director who is a master at building suspense out of small details—where O where was the great Hitchcock? Instead, Lumet drags it out—for example, there were what seemed like five minutes of external shots of the Orient Express leaving the station at Istanbul. The host of stars did well, but were gravely hampered by the Lumet framework. Finney is particularly good as the fussy Belgian detective, although all Poirot fans know that the great detective is supposed to be bald, rather than have slicked down straight hair.

Profits Regulation And Inflation

By Hartwell C. Herring III, Ph.D., CPA
And
Fred A. Jacobs, Ph.D., CPA
Dept. Of Accounting
The University Of Tennessee

The presence of persistent inflation that is showing signs of maintaining or increasing its momentum has given rise to a multitude of proposed solutions from almost every sector of society. Many popular proposals would encourage the use of governmental intervention in the private sector to control the activities of business and labor. These proposals have a significant political appeal, which has already resulted in the temporary establishment of wage and price controls accompanied by a regulatory board. Although by no means universally accepted, such controls do remain an alternative with considerable support among some economic interests. Furthermore, some rather influential labor leaders have flatly stated that they will not support any future wage and price control program without similar controls on corporate profits.[1]

We believe that there are some significant dysfunctional aspects of profits regulation which make such a policy ill-advised from a technical standpoint. The purpose of this article is to state these limitations and to draw conclusions regarding their implications for economic policy.

History of Profits Regulation

The history of profits regulation has been primarily that of imposing taxes on corporate income. Such taxes have been levied continuously in the United States since 1913.[2] The corporate income tax legislation required many years and much debate to formulate, primarily because of the traditional fear that the incentive to increase production would be reduced or eliminated. The income tax was, in fact, a compromise between proposals that would eliminate incentive and those that would reduce incentive.

Currently, the corporate income tax rate approaches fifty percent (twenty-two percent of the first $25,000 of profits and forty-eight percent for all profits over that amount.)[3] Literally, the corporation is allowed to keep about one-half of each additional dollar earned without limit. Therefore, it is apparent that the incentive to produce more goods and services is reduced, but it is not eliminated. In other words, the corporation can earn unlimited profits because the regulation is directed toward each additional dollar earned, i.e., the profits ceiling refers to a percentage rather than to an absolute dollar amount. Because of this characteristic, income taxes do not constitute profits-regulation in the strictest sense.

Profits-Regulation—Contemporary Proposals

Quantity-Limits

The simplest form of profits regulation is the placing of an absolute limit on the amount of annual profit that could be earned by a given corporation. Such a policy would require that individual consideration be given to the amount of profit allowed each single company being regulated.

There are four significant limitations to the quantity-limit approach. First, someone or some group must decide how much profit, in absolute dollars, a company is permitted to earn annually. This decision process is susceptible to various political influences through special interest lobbying that may not be in the best interest of the country. Second, a complex and costly administrative problem is created by the need to consider each corporation on an individual basis. Thirdly, disincentives to produce, to increase efficiency, and to increase employment would result if a company were not allowed to increase profits as its business expanded or as efficiencies were attained. Finally, successful companies may be encouraged to operate inefficiently and to “live-it-up” in order to increase expenses and thereby avoid excess profits when that company anticipates a good year. The result of these disadvantages is that each additional dollar, of profits earned by a firm, as it approaches the maximum limit, acts as an albatross around the neck of the earner and becomes something undesirable, something to contend with, and a potentially serious liability.

Rate-Factor Limits

A somewhat more feasible alternative to quantity-limits is the imposition of a maximum permitted rate-of-return on invested capital. Such methods are now used to regulate the rates charged to customers of public utility companies, which are government-sanctioned monopolies. This method has some conceptual merit in that it relates maximum allowed profits to the total amount of invested capital. The maximum profit allowed, then, is determined by multiplying the quantity of invested capital by a selected percentage. Regulatory difficulties have historically involved implementation controversies concerning the measurement of invested capital and the selection of an appropriate return factor. In view of the fact that this method has some theoretical appeal and that it has been used for many years in some industries, it is intuitively attractive as a viable policy. Therefore, it is relevant to examine the extent to which this method overcomes the disadvantages of the quantity-limits approach.

First, even though the rate-factor limits approach allows the maximum profits permitted a corporation to vary with the level of invested capital, a ceiling is effectively placed on profits since the amount of invested capital is relatively fixed in the short run. A commission or agency would be required, as with the quantity-limits approach, to determine that ceiling by selecting an acceptable rate of permitted profit. Lobbying effort directed toward influencing this commission would likely be primarily from industry groups, because of the rate-factor limits would tend to be industry-wide. The concentration of lobbying effort at industry level would indicate that considerable funds might be available to support this activity. We conclude that the use of rate-factor limits would create an even more undesirable situation regarding political pressure than would quantity-limits regulation of individual firms.

Second, rate-factor approaches to profits control would not appear to materially reduce the administrative problems associated with quantity-limit methods. The continuing need for public utility regulatory bodies provides ample evidence of this fact.

Finally, rate-factor methods create a ceiling profit in much the same manner as do quantity-limit approaches. Consequently, similar disincentives for efficiency and increased production exist for both alternatives.

In summary, the differences between rate-factor methods and quantity-limit methods of profit control appear to be more cosmetic than substantive. Additionally, the disadvantages of the above methods are made much more significant due to the lack of consensus in the financial community concerning the definition and computation of profit.

The Problem of Profit Definition

Contrary to popular belief, the determination of profit is an imperfect process. Many people, inside as well as outside government, believe that profit can be determined as exactly as one measures the height or weight of a child. This popular misconception has been caused, in part, by the fact that profit is easy to understand conceptually and easy to communicate at an abstract level. For instance, there is much agreement among economists that profit can be defined as:

“Pure surplus or excess of total receipts over all costs of production incurred by the firm.”[4]

The problem and disagreements result from attempts to apply the concept to a real-life situation. These pragmatic problems have been the source of much controversy in the financial community for many decades, resulting in numerous and continuing attempts by the accounting profession to establish generally accepted measurement standards. For example, the economists’ definition of profit requires capital appreciation to be recognized as income when the appreciation occurs. Tax law and accounting rules permit recognition of capital appreciation only when property is sold because a market transaction is required to precisely measure the profit. Nevertheless, failure to include capital appreciation in the income measurement process distorts it as a measure of economic reality. Similarly, the cost of a factor of production is considered by economists to be the equivalent of the benefits foregone from the most profitable alternative use of the factor.[5] As a practical matter, accounting rules and tax law define cost as the actual purchase price of the factor. In reality, the differences between the two measures may be significant. The latter approach has been adopted by the business community and by taxing authorities because it can be precisely computed in spite of the fact that it may constitute a significant distortion of economic reality.

Because of attributes such as capital appreciation and alternative use benefit cannot be precisely measured in many instances, the economists’ theoretical concept of profit cannot be practically implemented. Conversely, it is apparent that the approximations used in tax law and accounting have no substantive theoretical support—a factor which prevents either government or business from reaching a consensus about how profit should be measured.

One need only examine the Internal Revenue Code and the rather voluminous regulations and cases which interpret it to determine that the government has never resolved the problem of what constitutes taxable profit. Reference to Securities and Exchange Commission regulations (Accounting Series Releases) leads one to reach the same conclusion. The accounting profession has not been successful in establishing a uniform set of generally accepted accounting principles governing income measurement in spite of continuing efforts to do so for more than thirty years.[6]

Conclusion

It is, therefore, apparent that attempts to regulate profit as a tool for combating inflation is ill-advised simply because there is no generally accepted definition of how profit can be measured. This problem should certainly be resolved before one risks creating massive production and efficiency disincentives in the economic system that could result in economic chaos and increasing inflationary pressures due to curtailment of supply.

[1] Business Week (March 10, 1973), p. 40.

[2] Chatfield, Michael. A History of Accounting Thought (Hinsdale, HI.: The Dryden Press, 1974), p. 207.

[3] Internal Revenue Code, Sec. 11.

[4] Leftwich, Richard. The Price System and Resource Allocation (New York: Hold, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1966”), p. 168.

[5] Ibid., pp. 126-127.

[6] An analytical explanation of these issues is extremely technical and beyond the scope of this paper.

The Aliens Are Among Us

By J. Neil Schulman

They are here: invisible, silent, and fearsome. They drain away the lifeblood of hard-working Americans. They infiltrate our borders by several millions per year. They take jobs away from honest American workers. They are a curse, a plague, an invasion. They are the bane of our failing economy: to be hunted down, to be stopped at all costs.

And they don’t even pay income tax.

Clearly, aliens are a national pestilence and have been so for a number of years. Americans, however, are not insensitive to this grave national menace: in 1938 an Orson Welles radio drama about an alien invasion was enough to send thousands of patriotic Americans into the streets ready to do battle. (Curiously, that radio drama was broadcast also during one of this nation’s periodic, economic downturns.) Three years later fiction became fact as the United States went to war against aliens, and actually found a large number of them masquerading as native-born American citizens. Naturally, the alien imposters were immediately locked into prison camps for the duration of the war.

(Few Americans were thinking about the economy at that point. The aliens were a much more serious problem.)

It is most important to realize that oftentimes there is little or no difference in physical appearance between an alien and an American—“Star Trek” propaganda to the contrary. (Indeed, that television has been dominated by alien interests from its inception is virtually axiomatic; have you ever encountered a television receiver not linked to the telltale antennae?) Aliens do not necessarily have green skin—though other shades are quite fashionable—or antennae, or even pointed ears, for that matter. As an example, one alien, Clark Kent, was smuggled into the United States as a child, maintaining his cover throughout World War Two by serving with distinction. He was later deported because the immigration quota for Krypton was filled the year he entered.

Nevertheless, inasmuch as aliens precipitate panics, depressions, and wars, Americans have had good cause to feel alienated. We find ourselves again in another of our periodic, economic downturns, and there is sufficient evidence to once more place the blame where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of the aliens.

It can be clearly demonstrated that aliens have infiltrated our economy, taking welfare and jobs away from deserving American citizens. It is now more important than ever that we understand how these aliens have wormed their way into decent American society, and take drastic measures to dig them out.

To begin with, aliens are naturally lazy, untrained, unfamiliar with our business practices, sickly, and able to speak English only with great difficulty. These qualifications are used by aliens to obtain free medical and welfare benefits. As a stopgap measure, it is strongly advisable that patriotic Americans stage a slowdown, “call in sick,” and muddle their English. These are surefire tactics to win back our hard-earned benefits for ourselves.

Next, the aliens seduce jobs from greedy American employers by agreeing to work “off the books.” Inasmuch as the employer no longer must withhold income or social security taxes from that employee’s paycheck, the alien is able to walk away with the same pay as a citizen, while saving his employer a good deal of money. (These traitorous employers can be easily identified by their uncanny ability to undersell their competitors at a profit.) Here, particularly, is where immediate action is called for: until these aliens can be dealt with directly, it is the patriotic duty of every American to cease paying these taxes, to restore the competitive edge to those loyal employers who have stuck with American labor. It is unusual, of course, but it’s a matter of saving American jobs for American workers.

Most importantly, the aliens must not be allowed to reproduce. They must be stopped now before it’s too late. Several hundred years ago a relatively small group of aliens landed on this continent and systematically multiplied. For the results, ask any Indian. If you can find one.

Spooner Vs. Liberty

By Carl Watner

Recently our Editor has published an essay entitled “Justice and Property Rights.” The main theme of his article is first, to demonstrate that libertarians must have a means, independent of the State, to determine the Tightness or wrongness of property holdings, and secondly, to furnish us with such a theory of proprietary justice. His program is based on two fundamental premises: “(a) the absolute property right of each individual in his own person, his own body; this may be called the right of self-ownership; and (b) the absolute right in material property of the person who first finds an unused material resource and then in some way occupies or transforms that resource by the use of his personal energy. This might be called the homestead principle . . .”[1] These same premises, in one form or another, were bandied about by the 19th Century native American individualist anarchists. Since today’s libertarians are more or less their direct descendants, it will be enlightening to examine their disputes about the homesteading and self-ownership axioms.

Probably the two most famous of the American anarchists of the last half of the 19th Century were Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner. Fortunately for us, Spooner’s writings have been preserved and reprinted. Although Tucker was not a book writer, his thought has been carried down to us through his writings in his periodical LIBERTY (1881-1908). As we will see, some of their ideas are yet in accord with our contemporary libertarian thought. Although Murray Rothbard has seen fit to criticize Spooner and Tucker in his essay, “The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine from the Point of View of an Economist,” in fact, much of Spooner’s thinking on land titles was actually in accord with the program Dr. Rothbard advocates.[2]

Spooner defended unlimited private land ownership and grounded his support of this theory on the homesteading axiom: “The right of property in material wealth is acquired. . . . in one of these two ways, viz.: first, by simply taking possession of natural wealth, or the productions of nature; and, secondly by the artificial production of other wealth . . . The natural wealth of the world belongs to those who first take possession of it . . . There is no limit, fixed by the law of nature, to the amount of property one may acquire simply by taking possession of natural wealth, not already possessed, except the limit fixed by (a person’s) power or ability to take such possession, without doing violence to the person or property of others.”[3] Spooner would have definitely agreed with Rothbard, that “. . . once a piece of land passes justly into Mr. A’s ownership, he cannot be said to truly own that land unless he can convey or sell the title to Mr. B, and to prevent B from exercising his title simply because he doesn’t choose to use it himself but rather rents it out voluntarily to Mr. C, is an invasion of B’s freedom of contract and of his right to his justly-acquired private property.”[4]

Spooner had expressed his ideas on land ownership in his LAW OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (1855) and in his pamphlet, REVOLUTION: A REPLY TO ‘DUNRAVEN’ (1880). Tucker took him to task in LIBERTY: “I call Spooner’s work on ‘Intellectual Property’ positively foolish because it is fundamentally foolish,—because, that is to say, its discussion of the acquisition of property starts with a basic proposition that must be looked upon by all consistent Anarchists as obvious nonsense. I quote this basic proposition. ‘The natural wealth of the world belongs to those who first take possession of it . . . So much natural wealth, remaining unpossessed, as anyone can take possession of first, becomes absolutely his property.’”[5] Tucker charged Spooner with being a defender of unlimited land ownership since Spooner’s proposition would allow that”. . . a man may go to a piece of vacant land and fence it off; that he may then go to a second piece and fence that off; then to a third, and fence that off; then to a fourth, a fifth, a hundredth, a thousandth, fencing them all off; that, unable to fence off himself as many as he wishes, he may hire other men to do fencing for him; and that then he may stand back and bar all other men from using these lands, or admit them as tenants at such rental as he may choose to exact.”[6] In these circumstances, Tucker asked: “What becomes of the Anarchistic doctrine of occupancy and use as the basis and limit of land ownership?”[7]

Tucker was a great critic of the land ownership system existing in the 19th Century. Absentee land ownership presented a serious problem in Ireland. Due to the agitation of the “No-Rent Movement” and the Irish Land League and the publicity of the ideas of Henry George, the subject of land ownership was very much a topic of public concern. Tucker believed that the occupancy and use theory of land holding solved the problem of justice in land ownership. The essence of the theory was that only actual users Or possessors of the land (i.e., the Irish tenants) could be considered its owners. Occupancy and use as the basis for land ownership would free for use all land not actually being occupied by its owners. Thus landlords would cease to exist, as would all renting or leasing of real property, since the absentee landlord could claim no title or control over his unoccupied property. Spooner was quite critical of this doctrine: in fact he labelled it communism. The premise of any argument denying property rights in any form is communism. “. . . There is, therefore, no middle ground between absolute communism, on the one hand, which holds that a man has a right to lay his hands on any thing, which has no other man’s hands upon it, no matter who may have been the producer; and the principle of individual property, on the other hand, which says that each man has an absolute dominion, as against all other men, over the products and acquisitions of his own labor, whether he retains them in his actual possession or not.”[8]

Tucker believed that “a man cannot be allowed, merely by putting labor, to the limit of his capacity and beyond the limit of his personal use, into material of which there is a limited supply and the use of which is essential to the existence of other men, to withhold that material from other men’s uses; and any contract based upon or involving such withholding is as lacking in sanctity or legitimacy as a contract to deliver stolen goods.”[9] Under Tucker’s theory, if “a man exerts himself by erecting a building on land which afterward, by the principle of occupancy and use, rightfully becomes another’s, he must, upon demand of the subsequent occupant, remove from this land, the results of his self-exertion, or, failing to do so, sacrifice his property rights therein. The man who persists in storing his property on another’s premises is an invader and it is his crime that alienates control of this property. He is ‘fined one house,’ not for ‘building a house and then letting another man live in it,’ but for invading the premises of another.”[10] Thus Tucker admitted that homesteading, in the form of original possession or self-exertion furnished no basis for a continuing claim to land ownership, after the homesteader left the land. To further illustrate his differences with Spooner, Tucker related a conversation that he had with Spooner concerning the rightfulness of the Irish rebellion against absentee landlords: “Mr. Spooner bases his opposition to Irish and English landlords on the sole ground that they or their ancestors took their lands by the sword from the original holders. This he plainly stated,—so plainly that I took issue with Mr. Spooner on this point when he asked me to read the manuscript (REVOLUTION) before its publication. I then asked him whether if Dunraven (the absentee landlord) or his ancestors had found unoccupied the very lands that he now holds, and had fenced them off, he would have any objection to raise against Dunraven’s title and to leasing of these lands. He declared emphatically that he would not. Whereupon I protested that his pamphlet, powerful as it was within its scope, did not go to the bottom of the land question.”[11]

Much of Tucker’s concern with the land problem was based on his apprehension of the monopoly problem. He is well known for his four-pronged attack on monopolies: land, banking, tariff, and copyright and patent. Tucker feared that the right of contract would be carried to an illogical extreme: “. . . It would be possible (under a regime of unfettered freedom of contract in land) for an individual to acquire, and hold simultaneously, virtual titles to innumerable parcels of land, by the merest show of labor performed thereon; . . . (and) . . . we should be forced to consider. . . the virtual ownership of nearly the entire earth by a small fraction of its inhabitants . . .”[12] Analogous to his position on land ownership, Tucker also attacked the literary monopolization of ideas based on copyright. Spooner was a consistent defender of property in all forms and claimed for inventors and authors a perpetual copyright in their work. It is plain that neither could agree until their theories of ownership were harmonized, and both either adopted or rejected the homesteading principle.

The question over land ownership and the homesteading principle was not the only controversy carried on in the pages of LIBERTY. Equally interesting is the letter and editorial writing concerning the self-ownership axiom which took place under the guise of discussing the rights of parents and children. Originally the question began as whether parents should be legally responsible for abuse and neglect of their children. Tucker’s initial conclusion was that we must not interfere to prevent neglect of the child, but only to repress positive invasion.

However, Tucker, having reconsidered his opinion, resolved that “. . . the change then which my opinion has undergone consists simply in the substitution of certainty for doubt as to the non-invasive character of parental cruelty,—a substitution which involves the conclusion that parental cruelty is not to be prohibited . . .”[13] Tucker’s opinion is grounded on the fact that he views the child as the property of the mother. Children, in Tucker’s estimation, belong in the category of things to be owned, rather than as being owners of themselves. However he does note that the “child differs from all other parts of that category (of things to be owned) in the fact that there is steadily developing within him the power of self-emancipation, which at a certain point enables him to become an owner instead of remaining part of the owned.”[14] Tucker saw “. . . no clearer property title in the world than that of the mother to the fruit of her womb, unless she has otherwise disposed of it by contract. Certainly the mother’s title to the child while it remains in her womb will not be denied by any Anarchist. To deny this would be to deny the right of the mother to commit suicide during pregnancy, and I never knew an Anarchist to deny the right of suicide. If, then, the child is the mother’s while in the womb, by what consideration does title to it become vested in another than the mother on its emergence from the womb pending the day of its emancipation?”[15]

Tucker clearly refused to invoke the self-ownership axiom towards children, at least until they had reached the age of being able to contract and provide for themselves. In the meantime, he recognized the right of the mother to throw her property into the fire. “I answer that it is highly probable that I would interfere in such a case (as a mother throwing her infant into the flames). My interference no more invalidates the mother’s property right in the child than if I prevent the owner of a Titian painting from destroying it. If I interfere in either case, it is only as an invader and I would have to be prepared to suffer the consequences.”[16] According to his logic “the outsider who uses force upon the child invades, not the child, but its mother, and may be rightfully punished for doing so. The mother who uses force upon her child invades nobody . . . To be consistent, I must convict a man of murder in the first degree who kills a father in the act of killing his child.”[17]

One of Tucker’s critics realized that Tucker could not be attacked until the concept of contract as the ethical basis of anarchism was overthrown. Said this critic, “I do not accept contract as the ethical basis of Anarchism in the first place, and, in the second, do not regard children as the property of anybody . . . I base my anarchism on Natural Right . . . Perhaps no Anarchist will deny the right of the mother to commit suicide during pregnancy, but I do deny it after the embryo becomes a human being. The mother has a right to kill herself, but no one else.”[18] “In my category of the owners and the owned I state it thus: Each being owns himself = No human being owns another.”[19] Of course, we recognize this as a reformulation of the self-ownership axiom.

For Tucker, rights only begin as a social convention. Rights are liberties created by mutual agreement and contract. He defended his concept of self-emancipation by stating that “any child capable of declaring to the association’s (an anarchistic enforcement agency) officers its desire for release from its owner that it may thereafter either care for itself or entrust itself to the care of persons more agreeable to it thereby proves the presence in its mind of the idea of contract. . . From the moment that a child makes a deliberate declaration of this character it should cease to be property and should pass into the category of owners.”[20] Tucker refused to see any alternative to his own position. “If we take the other course and admitting, that the child has the possibilities of the man, declare that therefore it cannot be property, then we must also for the same reason, say that the ovum in the woman’s body is not her property, . . .” and thus being made to conceive when she is raped, she thereby loses her right to commit suicide.[21] Tucker failed to realize that no human “being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.”[22] He refused to view the fetus as a possible invader of the mother’s body, since it was already her property to do with as she pleased. Consequently any invasive treatment of the child was not wrong since it was the mother’s property.

The foregoing narrative of these two disputes, between Spooner and Tucker over land ownership, and between Tucker and his critics concerning property rights in children, should hold our strong interest. Here is one reason why a theory of justice in all forms of property is necessary. If libertarians cannot settle on such a theory of justice, a libertarian society will be disrupted by such disputes. Similarly, if no such theory of justice is arrived at, it will be impossible for libertarians to consistently attack our present governmental system.

Footnotes

[1] Murray N. Rothbard, EGALITARIANISM AS A REVOLT AGAINST NATURE AND OTHER ESSAYS, p. 58.

[2] Ibid., p. 128.

[3] Lysander Spooner, THE LAW OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, pp. 21-22.

[4] Rothbard, op. cit., p. 128.

[5] LIBERTY (March 21, 1891) Whole No. 180, p. 4.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Spooner, op. cit., p. 88.

[9] LIBERTY (January 25, 1896) Whole No. 331, p. 4.

[10] Ibid.

[11] LIBERTY (April 18, 1891) Whole No. 182, p. 6.

[12] LIBERTY (February 1897) Whole No. 350, p. 4.

[13] LIBERTY (August 24, 1895) Whole No. 320, p. 4.

[14] LIBERTY (June 29, 1895) Whole No. 316, p. 3.

[15] LIBERTY (August 24, 1895) Whole No. 320, p. 4.

[16] LIBERTY (September 7, 1895) Whole No. 321, p. 1.

[17] LIBERTY (September 21, 1895) Whole No. 322, pp. 5, 8.

[18] J. Wm. Lloyd, LIBERTY (September 21, 1895) Whole No. 322, p. 6.

[19] LIBERTY (November 2, 1895) Whole No. 325, p. 7.

[20] LIBERTY (November 2, 1895) Whole No. 325, p. 5.

[21] LIBERTY (December 14, 1895) Whole No. 328, p. 5.

[22] Murray N. Rothbard, FOR A NEW LIBERTY, p. 121.

“The state . . . in all kinds of countries, and in all kinds of forms,. . . is setting up shop as a universal savior. Its qualifications for that office, at first glance, look very impressive. It has power of an extremely papable and overt variety, flowing from the end of the policeman’s espantoon. It penetrates to every nook and fissure of the national life, and so takes on an appearance of omniscience. It is staffed by men who are, by definition, eminent, and in that character are heard politely, even when they talk nonsense. Most of all, there is something mystical about it, something transcendental and even supernatural, so that simple people, thinking of it, slip naturally into the moony ways of thought that they employ in thinking about the awful enigmas of Heaven and Hell.

Its real nature thus tends to be concealed, and, in the long run, forgotten. That real nature may be described briefly. The state . . . consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

— H. L. Mencken

WILL YOU SURVIVE ANARCHY?

Anarchist or not, you may have to, soon.

COUNTERCON II, Three-day Memorial Weekend Conference (May 23-26) at Camp Mowhawk in the Berkshires.

Seminars on Hyperinflationary Depression, Coming Mideast War, Tax Resistance, Alternative Enterprises, Self-Liberation.

Speakers: Robert LeFevre, Charles Curley, Dennis Turner, Sam Konkin, Abby Goldsmith, Kenneth Kalcheim.

$75 per person including room, board, snacks, parties, all camp recreational facilities. 10% off for registration with $35 deposit postmarked or received by May 9th.

Make checks payable and mail to-. J. NEIL SCHULMAN, 180 West End Ave., Apt. 7-C, New York, N.Y. 10023

‘Under’-Population?

It was bound to happen. We can almost formulate a sociological law: that social “problems”, real or alleged, get discovered and complained about only when they are beginning to fade away, and that, furthermore, the peak of belly-aching about them is reached after they have disappeared. Note, for example, the widespread wailing, largely unjustified, about the level of population. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, the falling birth rate led to sharply falling population growth. The cry went up then that the world was getting gravely underpopulated, and that we were on the way to “racial suicide.” Governments gave bounties for large families, and heavy propaganda was beamed at the public about the great and good virtues of large numbers of babies, the more the better. The major reason was a desire of the governments for more cannon fodder for future wars.

After World War II, the large-family movement paid off, aided and abetted by the desire of returning war veterans to put down roots and to produce new lives after their personal and international confrontation with death. The result was an unusual—and clearly temporary—reversal in the long-run secular pattern of declining population growth throughout the Western world. The post-war “baby boon” had arrived.

In the last half-dozen years, as we all know, hysteria about “overpopulation” has mounted to a fierce crescendo, replete with anti-baby propaganda, a strident call for Zero Population Growth and even no-child families. During and after World War II, the three great constants of general social sanctity in America were the flag, motherhood, and “Mom’s apple pie.” The flag has certainly received a severe—and long overdue—social setback. I don’t know how the country now feels about apple pie, but “motherhood” has certainly fallen from its recent high pedestal. The irony, however, is that the ZPG hysteria reached its peak precisely at a time when the rate of population growth in America had resumed its sharp pre-war downward trend, so that the goal of ZPG has now been nearly achieved as a result of natural social forces. The census of 1970 soon revealed the sharply declining birth rate, along with the rapid declines in absolute levels of population throughout the South and Middle West, as well as the slow declines in population levels in most of the inner cities of the country. (Only the suburbs experienced a sharp rise in population.)

A year or so ago, realistic social analysts began to realize that it was only a matter of time when the old hysteria about “under” population would rapidly begin to replace the worry about “over” population. The one constant motif in all the clamor, whichever contradictory form it may take, is that the natural, free market levels of population are undesirable, and that government control of some sort must supply a corrective. Sure enough, the cry of underpopulation has already begun to appear. It began as a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand with the results of the 1970 census. Since cities throughout the country receive federal subsidies per head of population, mayors and governors across the land began to have fits, shouting that the Census had underestimated their population, and desperately calling for recounts to beat the bushes to find more people, the more the better.

That clamor was so blatantly self-serving that few took it seriously. But it was a beginning. Now, Owen Moritz reports in alarm that the New York City metropolitan area is (Woe, O Woe!) “running out of people,” (?) (Owen Moritz, “Sub-Zero Population Growth,” New York Sunday News, January 26, 1975).

In the late 1930’s, Professor Alvin Hansen, the leading Keynesian economist in the United States, wailed that declining population growth was one of the major factors prolonging the Great Depression. (Presumably because not enough bassinets, etc. were being purchased.) Now, we hear the same theme again, as Moritz reports that the Mayor and Governor of New York are worried about “fewer babies, empty classrooms, more old people, a loss of middle-class whites, a falloff in black migration and a shrinking of the work force,” in the suburbs as well as in “the graying cities.” So—now we hear about the grave evils of a “shrinking work force” and the increased ratio of old people to kids, which everyone might have predicted would flow from declining population growth. Yet, these consequences seem to hit the Establishment as a bolt from the blue. The young people, wails the News reporter, are “disappearing” from New York. Doesn’t this at least help “overcrowding” and welfare breakdowns which had previously been held to be grave problems? No answer.

In suburban Nassau County, County Executive Ralph Caso delivered a county message complaining bitterly about the decline in the number of school kids, “raising the spector of empty classrooms.” The exuberant News writer even refers to school kids as an “endangered species”—killed off by fascistic macho hunters, no doubt. The Regional Plan Association has also raised the grave warning that the New York City region has “stopped growing” (Tsk! Tsk! Truly a ghost area!) The formerly much desired but apparently now dreaded ZPG has hit throughout the New York area, and young people are heading out to rural areas. The RPA concluded “sorrowfully”, that “benefits of no-growth are eluding us. Instead of reducing the need to control land-use, no-growth makes it even more urgent.” Of course; clearly, whatever happens, whether population rises, falls, or remains the same, the conclusion is always the same: more government control of population and land use. Clearly, the RPA and other Establishment planners would like to fix, not only the total level of population, but also the population, by age strata, in each particular land area. Freeze everybody where they are! They will never be happy until a form of serfdom has been re-instituted, with everyone tied to his or her geographic area, and other and even more sinister forms of population control established in each of the areas. Or, as the News puts it, “The aged population grows. What it means is that the tax-paying force is shrinking and threatens to shrivel more—and this . . . is the ominous thing.”

Yes, it looks as if hysteria about under-population will soon be with us, with a concern for more warm taxpaying bodies replacing the older concern for more cannon fodder. The logical implication of all this is fascist totalitarianism and a new serfdom. It is high time that we call for the size and shape of the population, urban, rural, or total, to be left alone, to be the result of voluntary action by all individuals in the society. It is high time, in short, that we forget about population and concentrate our worries on the numerous ways in which the government and its minions are seeking to place us all in a totalitarian prison-society.

Forthcoming Spring Books

We cannot, of course, recommend the following books (except for paperback reprints), since they have not yet appeared, but the following is a list of books to be published this spring which give promise of being of interest to libertarian readers.

Dr. Walter Block’s long-awaited “Hero” series, some of which have been published in the Lib. Forum, will be brought out in book form by Fleet Publishers. Walter Block, Defending the Undefendables: The Pimp, Prostitute, Scab, Slumlord, Libeler, Usurer, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogue’s Gallery of American Society, will be published on May 10. Walter Block is distinguished for being a fearless logician, and his “Hero” series has long served as the pons asinorum of one’s devotion to libertarianism. It is easy enough—and correct, too—to present libertarianism in the vaguely humanist form of the voluntary way, and of one’s right to control one’s own life. Fine enough; but how many of us are ready to defend, with equal relish, the pimp, the scab, the libeler, the slumlord, et al? In their notice on the book, Fleet asks: “Should deviant but non-aggressive behavior be permitted in a just society? Yes, says Dr. Walter Block in his rogue’s gallery depicting the life of ‘objects of universal revulsion’ . . .” A challenging work for all but the hardest of the hard core.

Long-time Lib. Forum contributor and noted author Jerome Tuccille’s next book, Who’s Afraid of 1984? will be published by Arlington House in May. It will present the fruit of his researches into the New Deal origins of the present system, as well as a critique, grounded on his profound social optimism, of leftish doomsayers.

Ex-rightwinger, ex-neo-Randian, ex-libertarian, ex-Lib. Forum contributor, Karl Hess, presents his odyssey from right to left in Dear America (William Morrow, May 7), which Morrow is slating for major publicity and distribution. It will presumably present his current left-syndicalist views, and whatever else we may say about it, will undoubtedly be very well-written.

We have not yet had a satisfactory political history of the origins of the American Revolution (Bernard Bailyn’s work is brilliant and indispensable, but it is an intellectual and not a political history.) By far the best work has been the superb volume by Bernhard Knollenberg, The Origin of the American Revolution, 1759-65. But we have not had the story for the crucial years between 1765 and the outbreak of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord. Now, the Free Press is publishing the final volume—unfortunately posthumous—of Knollenberg’s history: The Growth of the American Revolution, 1766-75 (April). Warning: judging from all of Knollenberg’s previous work, the book will not be stirringly or sparklingly written; but it will be definitive.

In contrast to the other books, John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: the View from America is a known quantity, since it has been out for some time in hard cover. Now, Professor Diggins’ excellent revisionist work is being published in paper this spring by Princeton University Press. Diggins shows the lure that Italian Fascism held, throughout the 1920’s and 30’s for both liberal intellectuals and businessmen in America, since it seemed to provide a harmonious, nationalistic “third way” between Communism and laissez-faire. Highly recommended.

Finis Farr’s Fair Enough (Arlington House, April) is a prominent conservative writer’s biography of the courageous right-wing muckraking journalist, Westbrook Pegler. The only extant biography of “Peg” is by the rather hysterical liberal Oliver Pilat, and Farr’s work is certain to do far more justice to this late, controversial figure.

Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right (Simon & Schuster)—which promises to be a scintillating study of “right-wing” isolationists and opponents of both World War II and the Cold War, is already driving Radosh’s Marxist colleagues up the wall. A co-editor with Murray Rothbard of A New History of Leviathan, Prof. Radosh presents what should be an important revisionist study of: Charles A. Beard, John T. Flynn, Robert A. Taft, Lawrence Dennis and Oswald Garrison Villard. Radosh has already contributed a notable and laudatory review of Wayne Cole’s revisionist study of Lindbergh, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II, to the New York Sunday Times Book Review.

“Dr. (John W.) Davis is a lawyer whose life has been devoted to protecting the great enterprises of Big Business. He used to work for J. Pierpont Morgan, and he has himself said that he is proud of the fact. Mr. Morgan is an international banker . . . (whose) operations are safeguarded for him by the manpower of the United States. He was one of the principal beneficiaries of the late war, and made millions out of it. The Government hospitals are now full of one-legged soldiers who gallantly protected his investments then, and the public schools are full of boys who will protect his investments tomorrow.”

— H. L. Mencken

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII, NO. 4

APRIL, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Death Of A State

What we are seeing these last weeks in Indochina is, for libertarians, a particularly exhilarating experience: the death of a State, or rather two States: Cambodia and South Vietnam, The exhilaration stems from the fact that here is not just another coup d’etat, in which the State apparatus remains virtually intact and only a few oligarchs are shuffled at the top. Here is the total and sudden collapse—the smashing—of an entire State apparatus, its accelerating and rapid disintegration. Of course, the process does not now usher in any sort of libertarian Nirvana, since another bloody State is in the process of taking over. But the disintegration remains, and offers us many instructive lessons.

One lesson is an illustration of the profound truth set forth by David Hume and Ludwig von Mises: that no matter how bloody or despotic any State may be, it rests for its existence in the long-run (and not-so-long run) on the consent of the majority of its subjects, on the “voluntary servitude” (as La Boetie first phrased it) of the bulk of its victims. This mass acceptance need not be active enthusiasm; it can be passive resignation; but the important thing is that it rests on the willingness of the masses to obey the orders and commands of the State apparatus—to accept the dictates of the oligarchy, to pay its taxes, to fight in its wars. What happened in South Vietnam, in particular, was what often happens after a long harrowing period of losing war: a sudden and infectious decision of the masses to say: Enough! We’ve had it: we quit. The supposedly mighty million-man South Vietnamese (ARVN) army, trained for decades by American commanders, armed to the teeth by the United States, praised as “little tigers” by the U.S. military, just quit and ran, leaving behind over $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer-financed arms.

The best description of this momentous event has been portrayed, not by one of our famous heavy-thinking pundits, but by the supposedly “light” San Francisco columnist Arthur Hoppe. (Arthur Hoppe, “The Land That Never Was,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 1975). Hoppe’s column is worth quoting at length:

“All last week we watched the Republic of South Vietnam fall apart. One day The Republic of South Vietnam was a sovereign nation. It had an army of a million men. It had an air force, tanks, artillery and tons of ammunition. It had a president and a vast bureaucracy of tax collectors, prosecutors and policemen. It had its own diplomats, its own currency, its own flag.

It had a population of 20 million people who, whether they favored it or not, believed that there was such a thing as The Republic of South Vietnam. It had, then, all that is required for an area delineated on a map to be termed a sovereign nation.

And yet, virtually overnight, this sovereign nation all but ceased to exist.

What happened? . . . Why didn’t the soldiers of this sovereign nation fight? Yet no rational soldier fights because he wants to fight. He fights because he is told by his sergeant who is told by his captain who is told by his general who is told by his president, who is the embodiment of the sovereign nation, to fight.

He and his fellow soldiers fight because they believe in the power of their sovereign nation to require them to fight. And they flee when they no longer believe in that power. So the soldiers fled because they lost faith in their officers and the power of the sovereign nation they represented. And the people and the bureaucrats fled in bloodshed and terror because they lost faith in the army and the power of the sovereign nation to defend them.

So this loss of faith spread in an ever-expanding chain reaction until the sovereign nation of The Republic of South Vietnam all but ceased to exist . . . .

In the way it rapidly fell apart in horror last week, it seemed to demonstrate that sovereign nations exist on faith alone. They are created in the minds of men. They exist only in the minds of men. They have power over their citizens solely because their citizens believe they have power. . . . And once that mystical, ephemeral faith that binds together the citizens of any sovereign nation is all but lost, that sovereign nation inevitably all but ceases to exist.”

Precisely! And whatever we may say of the myriad supporters of the PRG and of the North Vietnamese regime, they certainly have the faith. An essential reason for the loss of faith by the South Vietnamese soldiery and population is that the government had no real roots in popular support. The Saigon regime has for generations been a puppet of some outside imperialist power: first of the French, and then of the United States. Hence its supporters were mainly only that relative handful that either worked for the Americans or were the recipients of American largesse. If it were not for the might of France, all of Vietnam would have—almost did—gone Communist in 1945, and if not for the increasingly massive intervention of the U.S., would have done so in 1954 or any of the years since.

A corollary lesson of the collapse, then, is the long-run impossibility for an imperialist-dominated regime to survive, when opposed by guerilla warfare backed by the great majority of the population. And this despite the enormous advantage in firepower and in modern weaponry that the imperialist power, and then its puppets, initially enjoy. Where did the guerrillas manage to get their arms from? Not mainly, as U.S. mythology so long proclaimed, from the Russians, or down the so-called “Ho Chi Minh Trail.” Where they got it was from losing and defecting puppet forces themselves, who served as a conduit for American arms. The ARVN’s leaving behind of over $1 billion of American arms for the benefit of the PRG and North – Vietnam is only the most dramatic manifestation of this vital fact.

Imperialism, then, cannot win; and we have now learned this lesson after the Johnson-Nixon regimes managed to murder a million or more Vietnamese, North and South, along with over 50,000 American soldiers. All that blood and treasure just to postpone the inevitable!

But while the American public has apparently learned this cruel lesson, the egregious and absurd Ford Administration obviously has not. There they go, down with the ship, to the bitter end, mouthing the same tired old hooey: about “one more chance”, about the need for the U.S. to spend yet another $700 million to buy a few months’ time, about the old discredited “domino theory”, about the necessity of the U.S. taxpayer to “fight for freedom throughout the world” as Ford once again put it. For “freedom” read a bloody fascist dictatorship (of the Thieu clique in Vietnam, the Lon Nol-Long Baret clique in Cambodia); for “one more chance” read another billion dollars to be poured down the same old rathole in which we’ve already poured countless billions. And then, the final slice of baloney: the need to send in American troops once more, this time to “evacuate” those South Vietnamese “to whom we have a commitment” and who will suffer a “bloodbath” if we don’t rush in. Fortunately, praise the Lord!, Congress and the American people have apparently had enough themselves. Maybe they could be tricked into massive aid and another war somewhere else: but in Vietnam? Again? The left-liberal Democrats are militantly opposed, and even the Republicans seem, at long last, to be sick of the whole affair and eager to stay out. Fortunately, the 1973 Congressional prohibition against military intervention by the U.S. stands like a bulwark against the Ford-Kissinger itch to get into the fray once more. If they want to fight, let Ford, Kissinger and company outfit a boat or plane themselves with their own money, and set sail. Let us see how far they get without the American soldiers and the American taxpayers as suckers to pay the price. And good riddance! As for the wailing about the “bloodbath”, it comes with ill grace indeed from the very U.S. government which has caused rivers, oceans of innocent blood to be shed in Indochina. Enough!

And of course, through it all, the eternal leitmotif of U.S. imperialism is sounded once more by Ford and his crew: the attack on “isolationism.” Well, after several decades of bloody intervention everywhere, with nothing to show for it except murder, waste, militarism, and the continuing growth of indigenous Communist regimes, the collapse of interventionist imperialism should be evident to everyone. It is dawning increasingly on the American public, and even on the deluded liberals, that isolationism is precisely the only sane—much less libertarian—foreign policy for the United States. To paraphrase the late Harry Elmer Barnes, the chickens of the interventionists have come home to roost, and we are all absorbing the lesson. At the least the liberals are, and all that the conservatives need to get interred with the dodo bird is to continue their post-World War II enthusiasm for American global intervention. Knowing the mind-set of conservatives, that, of course, is probably exactly what they will do.

Fortunately, too, there has been in recent days a healthy backlash in the United States against the “baby hysteria”, which looks very much like a desperate, last-ditch ploy by the administration to get us involved in Vietnam by appealing to our humanitarian and sentimentalist instincts. Many knowledgeable Vietnamese-Americans have been pointing out that (a) the Communists are scarcely about to go around butchering babies, whatever their other faults; and (b) that there is grave grounds for suspicion that the American welfare agencies have been literally kidnapping many of the babies from the Vietnamese orphanages. Many of these babies are not really orphans at all, but parked there by parents for temporary safe-keeping, until the fighting is over. Apparently, the agencies have been deliberately stripping the babies of all papers and markings, and then spiriting them to the United States, so that their Vietnamese parents will never be able to recover them.

One of the abject failures now starkly revealed is the once-famous Nixon policy of “Vietnamization”. Remember that one? The Nixon theory was that we could withdraw American troops and planes, and leave a heavily armed and well-trained ARVN force to carry on: and we were assured of the success of this plan by the Pentagon until recent weeks. The howls about the North Vietnam and PRG “violation of the Paris agreements” come with peculiarly ill grace from an American-Saigon team which violated those agreements from the very beginning: egging the ARVN on to seize a large chunk of PRG territory at the precise time the cease-fire went into effect; refusing to carry out the agreement to allow Communist political parties to participate in free elections; leaving “civilian” advisers in Vietnam to carry on covert American intervention. The chickens of Vietnamization, too, are coming home to roost. As is the Nixionian intervention into Cambodia, which only prolonged and intensified the agony of the Phnom Penh regime, as the Cambodian ambassador has recently charged. And now, at the last minute, the pitiful goal of the U.S. to buy time so that the Communists will negotiate with Saigon and Phnom Penh. Why, after so many rebuffs, should the Communists negotiate now when they are at the point of victory? What boobs would they have to be to do so? And the even more pitiful covert requests by Washington to bring back Prince Norodom Sihanouk to try to cheat the Khmer Rouge out of their victory in Cambodia; and this after the U.S. engineered the right-wing coup against Sihanouk in the first place! What gall, and what stupidity!

And finally, the pitiful and egregious Ford is preparing, yet another “stab in the back” myth for his 1976 campaign. All would have been well, supposedly, if only Congress had agreed to one more intervention, one more dose of massive aid, one more military adventure. Does he think that the American public is that dumb?

More and more, the Ford administration is shaping up as the true legatee of the Nixon administration. Aside from personal style, and—an important difference—the abandonment of the budding Cowboy police state at home, it’s Nixon-Ford or Ford-Nixon all the way. The interventionist-imperialist foreign policy is the same, a Kissinger-Rockefeller policy; the wild-spending, interventionist economic policy under the cloak of free-market rhetoric is the same as well. Retiring Ford-Kissinger-Rockefeller to the showers begins to loom as one of the happy events to anticipate in 1976.

LP Convention—Come One, Come All!

The Libertarian Party is beginning to gear up for its greatest extravaganza to date: a mighty national convention in New York City this Labor Day weekend, August 28-31. At the convention, approximately 300 delegates will meet to choose a Presidential ticket for 1976, to give the LP plenty of time to get on as many state ballots as possible. But there will be place for 1,000 people in the auditorium, and so any and all interested observers are welcome to attend, at minimal cost. The party actively welcomes friends, sympathizers, and interested citizens to attend and see Libertarian Party people in action. Presumably, there will also be discussions or attempts to change the party platform. Further concrete details of time and place will be listed in the Lib. Forum. But think of it: the massed distillate of the leading LP members throughout the country will be gathering for the big event. Who can pass up such an opportunity?

Already, we have our first announced candidate for the Presidential nomination: Roger Lea MacBride, lawyer and author, who provided the LP ticket in 1972 with an electoral vote from Virginia. MacBride has formidable qualifications for the post. Bright, articulate, aristocratic, a purist libertarian who yet has a strong sense of reality, MacBride would furnish the LP ticket with a sparkling, full-time, extremely active and energetic campaign. Already, MacBride has been flying around the country (often in his own private plane) addressing LP groups and other meetings and organizations interested in the libertarian cause. In a MacBride race, we would have a candidate capable of mounting a newsmaking campaign that would yet remain sound in principle. MacBride would be shooting for a seemingly wildly remote goal: one million votes in ’76. But considering the candidate, and considering the breakdown of the major party system, of the economy, and of the old misplaced American faith in government, MacBride might just be able to do it. Surely here would be a campaign and a goal for which to work with enthusiasm.

Meanwhile. New York’s Free Libertarian Party has had its annual spring convention. Your editor is living in California for the spring, and so was not able to attend, but from all reports the convention was almost remarkably smooth and harmonious, free of the factionalism and of the barely suppressed hysteria of the year before. In a personal triumph, the able but formerly widely attacked Gary Greenberg has been elected state chairman. The National Office continues to be ably and dynamically run by national chairman Ed Crane; unfortunately, Ned Hutchinson, former Reagan appointments secretary and highly experienced political pro, died suddenly and tragically after joining the LP and becoming its full-time national director. He has been replaced by Robert Meier of Illinois, and by Toni Nathan, vice-presidential candidate in 1972.

All in all, the Libertarian Party continues to improve, both organizationally and in devotion to principle, year after year. Exciting times loom ahead.

The AIB Conference

From Scholarship To Political Activism
In Assassination Revisionism

By Alan Fairgate*

Libertarians who were active in the anti-draft and anti-war movements of the late 1960’s and who despaired over the wave of political apathy that accompanied the collapse of the New Left at the end of the decade, will undoubtedly be encouraged to learn that a new, and potentially very promising, effort is being made to organize a mass-based political movement. The first tentative steps in this direction were made at a three-day “Politics of Conspiracy” conference sponsored by the Assassination Information Bureau in Boston on January 31-February 2, 1975. Carl Oglesby, the former president of SDS and author of the eloquent book Containment and Change which called for an alliance between the New Left and the libertarian Right, has emerged as a leading organizer in this new movement and it has been largely his vision that has shaped its initial organizing efforts. The focus of this new movement is a broad-based campaign to challenge the credibility of the “official” theories which have been advanced to explain the constellation of political assassinations beginning with John F. Kennedy’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

The “Politics of Conspiracy” conference marked a major shift in strategy among the informal network of assassination researchers which has coalesced on a national level during the past five years. The earlier attitude among assassination researchers was typified by the activities of the Washington-based Committee to Investigate Assassinations, organized by James Earl Ray’s attorney, Bernard Fensterwald. During this early period, assassination research showed dangerous signs of degenerating into an intensely incestuous activity among a small “elite” of researchers who would periodically gather and exchange reports about the latest progress in the detailed probing of events and personalities surrounding the assassinations. While much of the work accomplished during this period, particularly in the form of legal suits to compel disclosure of government documents, proved extremely valuable, relatively little attention was devoted to the equally important task of publicizing the results of the research which had already been performed. The Assassination Information Bureau, which was formally established last September, emerged as the rallying point for those researchers who felt the time had come to consider the political implications of assassination research, and to develop a strategy for focusing public attention on the issues raised by the research already done.

As the position paper of the AIB makes clear: “the purpose of the AIB is to politicize the issue of the presidential assassinations.” The position paper, which was written by Carl Oglesby and distributed at the conference, argues that the question “Who Killed JFK?” serves as “the root political question of the current disorder” since the answer to that question necessarily requires considerable insight into the meaning, and shifting distribution, of power in contemporary American society. While stressing the critical importance of this question, the paper cautions that it will not be settled outside the courts and that any effort to formulate a preliminary answer must be carefully labelled as mere speculation. Even more cautiously, the paper suggests that there may be an underlying interconnection uniting the various assassinations of the past decade:

“. . . a sharp convergence of political and physical circumstances supports the view that to expose one of these conspiracies is to expose them all. We will abandon this hypothesis as coming evidence may dictate and certainly do not propose it as dogma. But on the face of the larger facts as they are currently discernible, the linked-conspiracy hypothesis illuminates better than rival theories the primary observable features of the situation three presidential assassinations and an attempted fourth (Wallace) have brought about.”

In a section devoted to political strategy, the paper proceeds to outline a broad platform which can serve as an “appeal for a movement beyond the customary political lines of left and right and opening up the possibility of new configurations:” Scrupulously avoiding refuge in Marxist categories or rhetoric, Oglesby appeals to the “three main ideological traditions in American politics”: democracy, republicanism and nonpartisanship. On the basis of these elementary values, Oglesby argues that all principled Americans will be able to unite in a movement dedicated to exposing the truth of Dallas. Such a movement, the paper proposes, will capitalize on the mass disillusionment precipitated by the Watergate revelations and the growing awareness of the need for “a new framework of political thought, a framework that coherently situates the seemingly random concatenation of murders in an overall perspective on the evolution of American politics during the Cold War.” In addition, the fortuitous coincidence of the Bicentennial Celebration and the 1976 presidential elections provides an opportunity for a two-pronged strategy emphasizing a return to the original constitutional values, and exposing the role of Gerald Ford as “one of the most aggressive members of the Warren Commission in ‘selling’ the lone-assassin theory”.

In a “tentative and experimental sketch” of the specific programs which might be launched to implement such a political strategy, the paper suggests: (1) structured discussions of organizing strategy. (2) inauguration of a newsletter service, (3) establishment of an information office in Washington to coordinate lobbying efforts, (4) the promotion of local organizing and educational programs, including the possibility of establishing week-long summer institutes to train educational cadre, and (5) continuation of national speaking tours and other programs for the systematic distribution of information in the form of books and tapes.

The conference itself was designed to gather the leading assassination researchers and political activists from around the country and to focus discussion on strategies for politicizing the assassination investigation issue as a basis for a mass-based political movement. Following a keynote speech by Mark Lane on Friday evening, Saturday was devoted to numerous workshops designed to introduce the participants to the latest developments in various areas of assassination research. These workshops covered the JFK, Martin Luther. King and RFK assassinations’, the Wallace shooting; the Chappaquidick incident; “organized crime and the economics of conspiracy”; domestic intelligence operations; and a presentation of Carl Oglesby’s Yankee/Cowboy model. Saturday evening was devoted to a panel discussion on the theme “Who Done It?”, which sought to summarize the results of a decade of research, and then a general session on Sunday afternoon focused on an open discussion of organizing strategy.

The participants in the conference represented a broad spectrum of researchers and included many of the leading people in the field. Mark Lane, an attorney and author of Rush to Judgment (the first book effectively to break the “blackout” imposed by the mass media on assassination research), emerged as the leading representative of the “moderate” faction, arguing for caution and restraint in presenting the evidence of the assassination researchers to the public. On the other hand, Sherman Skolnick joined with Mae Brussel in throwing caution to the wind and thereby straining the credulity of even many of the conference participants.

Skolnick is chairman of the Citizen’s Committee to Clean Up the Courts, a Chicago organization which has acquired considerable prestige for its investigative work resulting in the indictment and conviction of numerous prominent public officials on bribery and corruption charges. Largely by coincidence, involving another investigation on which he was working, Skolnick became interested in the crash of the United Airlines flight carrying E. Howard Hunt’s wife, Dorothy. Skolnick believes the plane was deliberately sabotaged as a means of frustrating an attempt by the Hunts to blackmail Nixon. While many researchers agree that Skolnick has uncovered persuasive evidence of sabotage in the airline crash, his credibility has been damaged by other allegations such as the charge that Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden were government agents planted in SDS as “agents provocateurs”.

Mae Brussel produces a nationally syndicated radio show entitled “Dialogue Conspiracy” and has written for the Realist magazine. She periodically boasts that she has read and cross-indexed all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report and, relying on the research she has accumulated. Brussel is willing to list by name everyone who was involved in the JFK assassination. Brussel rivals anyone in her ability to detect an all-pervasive conspiracy, involving such diverse elements as systematic climate control and an obscure global network of Croat terrorists known as the Eustasi which are based in Australia, Spain and California.

In contrast, Carl Oglesby emerged as the leading proponent of the need for a more systematic, and radical, analysis of the political system which spawned the assassinations. Several other conference participants approached the discussions from a radical perspective, including Peter Dale Scott who has undertaken a detailed study of the configurations of financial and political power in Texas and has attempted to integrate this research within the context of a national power structure. Tim Butz, a former Army Intelligence officer, represented the Fifth Estate, a Washington-based organization dedicated to researching the structure and activities of the domestic and military intelligence communities. Donald Freed, co-author of the book Executive Action and head of the Citizen’s Research and Investigation Committee in California, diligently sought throughout the weekend to foster unity among the conference participants and to minimize the disruptive impact of conflicting ideological positions and personal rivalries.

Finally, the conference participants included an extremely heterogeneous group of researchers which defied classification. Theodore Charach, a broadcast journalist and producer of the documentary “The Second Gun”, has been perhaps the most active investigator involved in the Robert F. Kennedy assassination. The Martin Luther King assassination has been the major focus of the work of Wayne Chastain, a Memphis newspaper reporter who will soon publish his book Who Really Killed Dr. King? Penn Jones, former editor of the Midlothian Mirror in Texas, has attracted considerable attention among assassination researchers for his work documenting the growing number of witnesses and investigators into the JFK assassination who have met sudden deaths, often under mysterious circumstances.

Robert Cutler, a Massachusetts architect, typifies the large number of researchers who have devoted their free time to this work in addition to pursuing their own careers in other fields. Cutler has privately published two studies of the Dallas assassination, and his latest work has focused on the unanswered questions surrounding the Chappaquidick incident. Some researchers have become highly specialized—Robert Groden, for example, is a professional photographer who has concentrated almost exclusively on an analysis of the photographic evidence of the JFK assassination, and his work on a “bootleg” copy of the Zapruder film has proved particularly important.

With such a diverse group of participants, it is a tribute to the organizers at the AIB that the conference proved highly successful in managing to avoid much of the factionalism that had hampered previous gatherings in this field. The weekend began on an auspicious note: an overflowing audience estimated at between 800-1,000 crowded into the Boston University auditorium where the opening session was held. Bob Katz of the AIB opened the session with a brief presentation outlining the history of the organization and the objectives of the conference in politicizing the assassination issue.

Katz then introduced Mark Lane, who provided the audience with a moving account of the difficulties confronting the early researchers into the JFK assassination. When the audience broke out into laughter following Lane’s description of the unbelievable path which the Warren Commission solemnly insisted one of the bullets allegedly fired by Oswald had followed, Lane reminded the audience: “the difference between then and now is that no one laughed then.” Lane particularly emphasized the role of Jerry Ford as a member of the Warren Commission and he charged that “Ford is guilty as an accessory after the fact in the murder of John F. Kennedy.”

Lane also described the harassment experienced by Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney who had undertaken the first attempt to submit to a jury the evidence suggesting that a conspiracy had been responsible for Kennedy’s assassination. He reminded the audience that the jury had found beyond a reasonable doubt that Oswald had not acted alone and was involved in a conspiracy, but that Garrison had been unable to convince the jury that Clay Shaw was involved in the conspiracy. The fatal flaw in Garrison’s case had been his inability to prove that Shaw was a member of the CIA as he had charged. Now, almost six years after Shaw’s original indictment and less than a year after Shaw’s death (under mysterious circumstances), Victor Marchetti, a former official of the CIA and co-author of the bestselling The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, has revealed that Clay Shaw was a high-level CIA operative in New Orleans and had been involved along with David W. Ferrie, E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Bernard Barker in preparations for the CIA’s Bay of Pigs venture.

After summarizing the growing body of evidence which had accumulated to undermine the credibility of the conclusions of the Warren Commission report, Lane interrupted his talk for a showing of a collage of films that had been assembled to provide a comprehensive photographic record of the events of Dealey Plaza. Using slow motion and blow-ups of particular frames and pinpointing specific details in the film, the narrator methodically challenged the underlying contention of the Warren Commission report: that all the bullets were fired in a period of 5.6 seconds from the sixth floor of the Book Depository above and behind President Kennedy. The audience was visibly affected by the graphic detail of a segment of the Zapruder film which showed the impact of a bullet hitting the right half of the top of Kennedy’s bead and clearly hurling him backward into the seat, strongly suggesting that the bullet was fired from the front rather than from behind.

Even more fascinating were the segments of another film which had been enlarged and which revealed the blurred figure of a man who seemed to be crouched in a classic military sniping position behind a barricade on the grassy knoll in front of the motorcade. Shortly after the shots were fired, another filmed view of this area reveals that this man had disappeared. The most dramatic moment in the film, however, involved the presentation of several computer-assisted blow-ups of frame No. 413 of the Zapruder film. During the enlargement process, the figures necessarily tend to become blurred, but these blow-ups reveal with sufficient detail the figure of a man hidden in a clump of bushes on the grassy knoll and pointing a rifle in the direction of the presidential limousine. This frame in the film occurs shortly after the fatal shots had been fired and it therefore had not been subjected to a detailed scrutiny until a few months ago. The photographic evidence of the presence of additional assassins provides strong corroboration to ballistics evidence and to the reports of a large number of witnesses who were convinced that they had heard shots from the grassy knoll area in front of the presidential limousine.

Following the film presentation, Lane shifted from a review of the progress of assassination research in recent years to focus on several themes which were to underlie many of the discussions during the following two days. First, he stressed the political importance of the assassination issue, since it involved not only an unsolved crime but also because it suggested the existence of a well-coordinated campaign to suppress the evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy—a campaign which involved both Kennedy’s successor as president and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Also, the assassination signalled the first stage of a virtual coup d’etat within the top levels of the executive branch, one which immediately preceded the sustained escalation of the war in Southeast Asia.

Secondly, Mark Lane argued that research into the Kennedy assassination had reached an impasse marking the culmination of an initial stage. Researchers had systematically probed the available evidence and demonstrated the inadequacy of the “lone assassin” theory. While speculative theories could be fashioned from the existing evidence to suggest the possible dimensions of the conspiracy responsible for the assassination, the ultimate truth would not be available without unrestricted access to government documents which have thus far remained confidential. Thus, efforts to uncover the conspiracy would have to shift from independent research work to a second stage of political organizing around the demand to re-open the official investigation of the Kennedy assassination and to de-classify all relevant government documents.

Lane pointed out that the Watergate episode had served an invaluable function in increasing the “credibility gap” between the government and the public and that, in a growing atmosphere of distrust, people were now far more willing to question “official” explanations of events than they had been a decade ago. Particularly now that there is a much more sophisticated awareness of the extent of the CIA’s role, both domestically and abroad, the public should prove more receptive to the suggestion of CIA involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. While characterizing the challenge to the Warren Commission report as “an idea whose time has come.” Lane warned the audience that it would not prevail by itself.

Lambasting the liberals for their failure of political will in challenging the Warren Commission whitewash, Lane called for mass organizing efforts which would be necessary to mobilize public opinion behind a demand for a new investigation. Without a sustained and broad-based movement to back up such a demand, politicians in Congress could not be relied upon to act on such a demand. Lane received a standing ovation as he finished his presentation with the exhortation that “they must hear from us and hear from us until finally they act for us.”

Following the dramatic opening of the conference on Friday evening, the conference participants settled down on Saturday to attend the various workshops devoted to a more detailed examination of the status of current research efforts. However, the most interesting workshop, and certainly one of the highlights of the entire conference, was devoted to Carl Oglesby’s presentation of his Yankee/Cowboy model. Speaking to a standing room only crowd of 300, Oglesby devoted more than two hours to an eloquent extemporaneous presentation of his model, tracing the historical evolution of an underlying tension within the American political elite from the transformation of the traditional North-South rivalries subsequent to the Civil War to the emergence of a well-defined Yankee-Cowboy split in the second half of the twentieth century. As he proceeded to set forth the outline of this evolution, Oglesby occasionally expressed the fear that perhaps he shouldn’t linger on such areas which were only tangentially related to the Kennedy assassination and, each time, he was met with cries from the appreciative audience: “Linger! Linger!”

While it is impossible to summarize adequately the elaborate detail supporting Oglesby’s model, it essentially contends that, within the political consensus that unites the members of the American political elite and that establishes the parameters of political decision-making, there is also a continuing tension stemming from two distinct and competing world-views which have deep economic and cultural roots. On the one hand, there are the Yankee members of the political and economic elite who are primarily concentrated in the old, established families of the Northeast and whose power is derived from their control of Wall Street financial firms and vast, multinational corporations. These are the people who direct the affairs of the vast network of interlocking institutions that comprise the “Eastern establishment”. Strongly Anglophile, the Yankees perceive the North Atlantic industrial community as the focus of their economic, political and cultural interests. The Rockefellers, Morgans, Harrimans and Dillons are some examples of Yankee families.

The Yankees captured control for the first time over the national executive in the struggle culminating in the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. In the following century, the traditional Southern planter aristocracy which had provided the core of Southern leadership prior to 1860, rapidly receded in importance as a consequence of the country’s westward expansion. In its place, a new political and economic configuration began to emerge along the entire “Southern rim” of the U.S., encompassing Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Originally based in independent oil companies, textile enterprises and the growth of agri-business, this constellation of Cowboy economic interests was decisively strengthened by the consolidation of a vast military-industrial complex throughout the South and West. Another, often overlooked, factor in the rise of the Cowboy faction was the cartellization of organized crime during the Prohibition era as individual “families” were progressively integrated into an institutional framework, and as the massive financial revenues generated through the production and distribution of illegal liquor were channeled into “legitimate” business. The result is a complex intertwining of “legitimate” and syndicate interests within the Cowboy axis. The Cowboy members of the political elite share a common cultural heritage, which is largely derived from the frontier heritage of the West and sharply distinguishes them from their Yankee associates. Unlike the Yankees, the Cowboys perceive the Pacific basin as the focus for their essential interests and tend to be far more doctrinairely anti-Communist.

Within this framework, Oglesby argues that the Kennedy assassination in 1963 represented a coup d’etat within the political elite, transferring leadership from the Yankee elements to the Cowboy elements represented by Johnson and Nixon. However, as the Yankee elements in the political elite became increasingly concerned over the profound domestic economic and political instability precipitated by American involvement in Southeast Asia and the growing domestic repression, they moved to reassert their control within the political elite. The Watergate investigation, carefully orchestrated by Yankee representatives to remove Nixon without revealing the full extent of covert activities by government agencies, is characterized by Oglesby as a second coup d’etat which neutralized three leading Cowboy challengers (Nixon, Agnew and Connally) while placing Nelson Rockefeller and his protege, Henry Kissinger, in virtual control of the executive branch. Oglesby finished his tour de force by quoting from Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and urging the audience to perceive power as our revolutionary forefathers did, as an “act of trespassing”, “grasping and tenacious, like a cancer.”

The Sunday session, featuring an open discussion of organizing strategy, unfortunately proved to be the most disappointing part of the conference. The AIB sponsors had decided that the creation of a national membership organization at this point would be premature, and they had scheduled the Sunday session simply to provide an opportunity to generate ideas for programs that the participants might begin to implement on a local level. The participants, on the other hand, seemed to have anticipated that a more detailed program of action would be presented, and several members of the audience expressed frustration over the lack of focus in the discussion. In fact, all the contradictions and tensions which characterize the assassination field seemed to surface during the “open mike” session.

Perhaps the most fundamental, and unresolved, tension which pervaded the entire conference involved the differing perspectives of the liberal and radical participants. Among a broad range of participants, an important motivating factor seems to have been a deep nostalgia for the liberal idealism which they believed Kennedy epitomized, and a sense of anger over the assassination. The natural response of this group tended to focus on traditional liberal reformist solutions: lobbying in Washington and seeking media coverage. There seemed to be relatively few hardcore radical veterans of the New Left present, but those who were there, and most notably Oglesby himself, persistently sought to discuss the assassination issue in terms of its role in radical social analysis, and viewed strategy in terms of mass-based organizing efforts to create the basis for a new radical movement. Even Oglesby, however, seemed at times to demonstrate a pronounced favoritism towards the Kennedy administration and the “liberal wing” of the Yankees generally.

This vague ambivalence among the participants assumed a more explicit form in the periodic debates addressing the relative role of facts and theory within the assassination research movement. While the more radical participants expressed profound appreciation for the patient investigative work of the assassination researchers, they criticized the tendency of many researchers to adopt the role of “sleuths”, focusing exclusively on the collection and collating of facts without engaging in the equally important task of synthesizing and integrating these facts within a systematic framework of social analysis.

Another division which threatened at times to disrupt the fragile unity among the conference participants paradoxically joined both liberals and radicals in an effort to keep the “crazies” under control. Both Lane and Oglesby stressed the need to distinguish carefully between hard forensic evidence of a conspiracy, and speculative, educated guesses which might be made on the basis of such evidence. In a blistering attack on the “ludicrous statements” and “irresponsible charges” of Mae Brussel and Sherman Skolnick, Lane cautioned that “to make statements which most reasonable Americans cannot accept will set back the movement so many years that it will be the twenty-first century before we find out the truth” and warned that “it must be (the Warren Commission’s) credibility that is in question, not ours.”

The AIB sponsors of the conference are aware of the unresolved contradictions which shaped much of the discussion at the conference, but they express the hope that a basic consensus is evolving which will prove strong enough to overcome any tendencies toward factionalism which might threaten the movement. For the moment, the AIB perceives its role as facilitating discussion within the movement to strengthen the existing consensus and to precipitate a sustained debate over the organizational forms which might be appropriate or necessary for the movement. There seems to be a pronounced reluctance to impose a formal organizational structure on the movement at this point, and instead the AIB prefers to serve as a “foco” for local organizing efforts.

This movement offers enormous potential for libertarian involvement. It has remained remarkably free from the rigid Marxist rhetoric and categories of analysis that marked the decline of the New Left, and the issues which it raises are naturally compatible with a libertarian perspective. It pinpoints a series of criminal conspiracies spawned within specific agencies of the state apparatus, conspiracies which have utilized murder as an instrument of political competition beneath the democratic facade of elections and which have been protected from exposure by the veil of secrecy which shrouds government operations. The exposure of these conspiracies would prove extremely valuable in de-legitimizing the state and focusing public attention on its underlying criminal character.

Furthermore, as several conference participants noted, the widespread public disillusionment with the government which has emerged as a consequence of the publicity surrounding the Watergate investigations, has created a particularly ripe opportunity for focusing attention once again on the Kennedy assassination. People who were once hostile to the anti-war and anti-draft movements and who scoffed at charges of domestic repression are now proving increasingly receptive to conspiracy theories and to attacks on the credibility of the government. A demand for re-opening the investigation into the Kennedy assassination that avoids Marxist rhetoric would also provide a potentially valuable organizing tool for reaching an increasingly alienated middle class constituency.

One of the greatest dangers confronting the movement that is beginning to emerge around this issue, is that it may repeat the old error of the New Left anti-war movement by becoming isolated within traditional liberal and youth strongholds and failing to establish an authentic grass-roots base. By formulating the options in terms of an either/or choice between two factions of the political elite, Oglesby’s Yankee/Cowboy model reveals an uncomfortable bias in favor of Yankee political interests and tends to reinforce the latent liberal sympathies of many participants in the movement. While the Yankee/Cowboy model provides an invaluable analytical tool in analyzing the dynamics of American political decisionmaking, this bias within the model must be corrected if the movement ever hopes to transcend the limitations of the earlier New Left organizing strategy. Perhaps an important step in this direction would be to integrate Oglesby’s Yankee/Cowboy model, which is largely restricted to a description of the tensions within the political elite, with Leonard Liggio’s highly perceptive analysis of the Redskin/Paleface conflict (originally published in Left and Right), which more broadly focuses on inter-class relations in the historical evolution of the U.S.

The essential problem that must be overcome in the development of a successful mass-based organizing strategy, is that the vast majority of the American population has been coopted into the Cowboy camp: their political champions are the Cowboy politicians, their heroes are Cowboy heroes and their culture is the Cowboy culture. These people have an instinctive hatred and suspicion of traditional Yankee power centers and politicians, and they will prove hostile to any movement which appears to threaten their Cowboy symbols while reinforcing Yankee hegemony.

Thus, the assassination investigation movement will have to be careful to avoid liberal reformist tendencies. Instead, it should concentrate on mobilizing an initial cadre with the analysis and understanding to perceive that both the Yankee and Cowboy factions are integral components of a national ruling class, a ruling class that must be dismantled, and then concentrate on an elaboration of grass-roots organizing strategies designed to appeal explicitly to the vast middle classes by de-mythologizing Cowboy symbols of authority and stressing that the Cowboy interests, like their Yankee rivals, parasitically rely on the political means to enrich themselves while impoverishing the American population.

The assassination investigation movement is still in its formative stages and, as a result, there is great potential for libertarians to become involved in the movement and to influence its development. Whether or not libertarians prove able to rise to this challenge and to respond constructively to one of the most promising movements to have emerged in recent years will provide a revealing indication of the level of their political consciousness.

(Libertarians who are interested in local organizing activities in this field should contact the AIB directly for information. The AIB address is: Assassination Information Bureau, 63 Inman Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. The AIB is currently preparing material to assist in organizing local teach-ins and conferences, and it also has teams of speakers available with copies of the Zapruder film to address local groups.)

*Mr. Fairgate is a graduate student in business administration and law at a prominent American university.

Nozick Award

We extend our warm congratulations to Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick for winning the prestigious National Book Award in Religion and Philosophy for his quasi-libertarian inquiry into political philosophy, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The book has performed the seemingly impossible feat of making the topic of libertarianism respectable in philosophic circles, and in making the doctrine something that philosophers have to study and conjure with. The book has therefore made it enormously easier for graduate students in philosophy to write dissertations on libertarian themes. Hence, it paves the way for libertarians to make great gains in the philosophy profession in the future. Professor Nozick has recently joined the Massachusetts Libertarian Party.

Assassination Revisionism Once More

Alan Fairgate’s article in this issue points up the growing importance of the Kennedy Assassination question in American politics. Indeed, since the AIB conference in early February, indeed in the last two weeks, assassination revisionism has finally burst through on television, for the first time in many years. Photographer Robert Groden’s careful analysis of the famous Zapruder film has hit the public consciousness; remarkably, the Warren Commission never even bothered viewing the film itself, contenting itself with viewing slides of fuzzy third-generation copies.

Assassination revisionism had been a tough row to hoe for a long time. It began immediately after the JFK assassination with Mark Lane’s penetrating questions to the authorities in the Guardian; over the years, it has developed a devoted cadre of semi-professional buffs, who have tracked down innumerable leads, and have battered at the government to release documents and evidence, much of which still remains under lock and key. And if Oswald was only a lone nut, why the sequestering of evidence?

Actually, there is not just one mysterious political assassination or attempted assassination since JFK, but a whole raft of them: of JFK, of Officer J. D. Tippit, of Lee Harvey Oswald himself, of RFK, of George Wallace, of Martin Luther King, of Malcolm X, and possibly of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. In each case, the culprit was immediately dismissed as a lone nut (in Jack Ruby’s case, one lone nut killing another), except for the Malcolm assassination which could not be treated that way, and so was blamed rather conveniently on the Black Muslims—even though the one non-Muslim assassin swears up and down that the Muslims had nothing to do with the slaying. In each case, impressive evidence contradicting the lone nut theory has been almost fiercely swept under the rug by the authorities. Since last year, in addition to the Groden film analysis, ex-Congressman Al Lowenstein has managed to reopen the Bobby Kennedy case (the contention being that other assassins than Sirhan Sirhan fired the fatal shots), and James Earl Ray’s attempt to reopen the King case—charging that his first lawyer flummoxed him into a guilty plea—has been denied by the courts.

But the major change in climate for revisionism comes from the post-Watergate climate. It is not simply that we now know that the FBI and the CIA are capable of vile deeds, including assassinations and association with Mafia gangsters—thereby lending credence to strong evidence of their involvement in at least the JFK murder. It is also that we now understand clearly the relationship between deed and “coverup”. For one of the anti-revisionist contentions ever since Dallas was the question: what? Are you saying that they’re all in on the assassination: Johnson, Warren, Gerry Ford, etc.? We now see that the bigshots in on the coverup don’t have to have been parties to the original assassination. It is now easy to visualize an immediate command decision: it’s got to be a lone nut, otherwise the public will . . . be panicked, will ask too many embarrassing questions about our secret police, will “endanger national security”, etc. And then, that line is fed to all the Establishment patriots, who go along with their seemingly patriotic obligations.

Now that the Congress is launching an investigation of our intelligence arms of government, a demand for opening the books, for unleashing the archives, for asking hard questions—at long last!—of everyone concerned, becomes a politically viable position for the first time in twelve years. The pressure in the media and of the AIB might well accomplish its purpose. There is no need, as Mr. Fairgate points out, for this agitation to be an exclusively leftish affair. Indeed, of all the old New Left, only the relatively libertarian Carl Oglesby is involved in the new drive, both organizationally and with his sparkling concept of the Cowboy-Yankee split among the power elite. Actually, the Marxists have long been hostile to this sort of power-elite muckraking, since they contend that such pinpointing of specific individuals and groups distracts the attention of the public from the “capitalist system” allegedly at fault. (It’s also a lot of work). But there is no such thing as an abstract “ruling class”, capitalist or otherwise: it does exist, but only as embodied in specific people, and an understanding of who they are, what alliances or splits they may be undergoing, is vital for anyone’s, and especially any libertarian’s, understanding of existent political reality. It is not enough to say simply that the State is shafting us; who are they? Which groups? Who’s on top now? are also vital questions.

Two excellent articles, presenting the most up-to-date material on JFK Assassination Revisionism, appear in the April 24, 1975 issue of Rolling Stone. One is a thorough and careful article by the aforesaid Robert Groden. “A New Look at the Zapruder Film”, a detailed analysis of the film, along with supporting pictures, which are impressive even though printed on the fuzzy paper of Rolling Stone. In summary, Groden demonstrates that there must have been at least four assassins, firing a total of six shots, plus one or two others firing a blank signal shot just before the assassination, and possibly two or three more (none being Oswald, by the way) at or near the famous window on the sixth floor of the Textbook Depository Building—but that none of the six shots were fired from this officially designated spot. Instead, Groden contends that one person fired two shots from the second floor of the TDB, another fired two shots from the western corner (rather than the official eastern end) of the sixth floor of the TDB, one fired a shot from in front on the grassy knoll, and that the fatal shot was fired by a fourth person from in front of JFK and behind a wall on the grassy knoll.

In the same issue of the magazine, Robert Blair Kaiser, in “The JFK Assassination: Why Congress Should Reopen the Investigation”, provides an excellent overall summary of the latest findings and lacunae, focussing among other points on newly discovered peccadilloes of the Warren Commission. Kaiser also reveals that a former staff member of the Warren Commission has now called for reopening the case—Burt W. Griffin, now a state judge in Cleveland. Judge Griffin states: “I don’t think some agencies were candid with us. I never thought the Dallas Police were telling us the entire truth. Neither was the FBI . . . We accepted the (FBI) answers we got, even though they were inadequate and didn’t carry the battle any further. To do so, we’d have had to challenge the integrity of the FBI and the CIA. Back in 1964, that was something we didn’t do.”

In the search for the truth, and for credibility in that search, it is important to be careful and scholarly. Hence, the importance, as Mr. Fairgate indicates, of repudiating the “crazies”, such a? Mae Brussel and Sherman Skolnick, whose confidently asserted theories have run light years ahead of the facts. In his article, Robert Kaiser, for example, performs a service by shooting down Dick Gregory’s photo hypothesis of two members of the Watergate conspiracy team—E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis—being the same as the famous “tramps” who were mysteriously arrested by the Dallas police just after the assassination, and released supposedly without finding out who they were. It remains true, however, that a lot of people happened, by odd coincidence, to be in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Frank Sturgis was one: so was James W. McCord: and so too was private citizen Richard M. Nixon, addressing a business group.

At any rate, libertarians do not have to commit themselves to any assassination theory to raise the cry of the importance of the public finding out the facts, of the closed archives and evidence being opened, and of hard and persistent questioning being directed to the government authorities.

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Oscars. From the beginning, it was clear that the Oscar race for best picture of 1974 was between two films: “Godfather, Part II” and “Chinatown.” As pointed out in these pages, (Lib. Forum, March, 1975), “Godfather”, a marvelous film, clearly deserved the award. In contrast, the morbid, cynical “Chinatown” (neatly skewered in Libertarian Review by Barbara Branden) was the darling of the avant-garde intellectuals, serving as it did as an “anti-hero” reversal of the great detective films of the 1940’s.

Part of the excitement of Oscar night is to watch the race between the top pictures build up as the minor awards are allocated. From the beginning of the night, it became clear that “Chinatown” was losing out, as it was defeated in one minor award after another. Unfortunately, this meant that the cool, subtle, and nuanced performance of the beautiful Faye Dunaway in “Chinatown” lost out to Ellen Burstyn’s hammy, tearful performance in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” as Best Actress, but the consolation was the clear meaning that “Chinatown” had had it. Sure enough, “Godfather, Part II” swept the boards, gaining its deserved triumph as Best Picture, and the directorial award for Francis Ford Coppola.

While justice triumphed splendidly in the Best Picture and Best Director awards, the splendid Al Pacino unfortunately lost out in the race for Best Actor; so too did the intellectuals, who were rooting for Jack Nicholson’s anti-hero detective in “Chinatown”. Instead, the old Hollywood penchant for boozy sentimentality won out, with old favorite Art Carney winning the award for the piece of fluff. Harry and Tonto. Fortunately, however, the expected sentimentality did not triumph for the Best Supporting Actor award. Fred Astaire, who has always been a poor actor, was particularly weak and even grotesque in a minor role in The Towering Inferno; but the scuttlebutt had it that he would win anyway, in an orgy of collective Hollywood guilt for not having given him an Oscar in the 1930’s for his glorious dancing in the famous Astaire movies of that era. However, justice again triumphed, as the award went to one of the finest young actors in recent years, Robert DeNiro’s “proto-Brando” young godfather in “Godfather, Part II.” Sentimentality did triumph in the award to Ingrid Bergman for Best Supporting Actress in “Murder on the Orient Express”, in expiation of Hollywood’s collective guilt for casting Miss Bergman into outer darkness thirty years ago for an act of personal “immorality” which would now be considered positively square and old-fashioned. However, in Miss Bergman’s case, there was no harm done, since hers was probably the best performance out of a rather poor lot.

And so, the classical aesthetic has won out over its avant-garde enemies for the third straight year: in the awards to “Godfather” in 1973, in “The Sting” exorcising “The Exorcist” last year, and now in the victory of “Part II.” With luck, maybe we can enter the lists with a “Part III” for 1977.

Shampoo, dir. by Harold Ashby, produced and co-written by Warren Beatty. With Warren Beatty. Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, and Jack Warden. This picture has been absurdly over-praised by the critics. It is in no sense a “profound” statement about our time. It is, instead, a modern (or “mod”) version of the old bedroom farce (Restoration-Moliere), with predatory males and females, and people hopping in and out of bed and closets (here replaced by bathrooms).

Since it is almost impossible to ruin a bedroom farce completely, on one level it is possible to flow with the action and get some enjoyment out of Shampoo. But oh the differences from the old farces! In the first place, of course. Shampoo is far more explicit than the Restoration playwrights, in keeping with our 1970’s culture. There is, I suppose, some shock value in the glorious Julie Christie bellowing out four-letter words on film. But there are much more profound differences as well. For one thing, the wit is gone: the dialogue generally gravitates between the banal and the inchoate. For another—and on a deeper level—the characters in Moliere and the other dramatits may have been caught in bewildering situations: but they at all times knew what they were doing. They were real people, with understandable purposes and motivations, even if they were busy juggling incompatible goals. The Beatty-Ashby characters are nothing if not machines out of a B.F. Skinner dream (or nightmare): they are mere stimulus-response mechanisms, with hardly a thought or a motive lasting more than fifteen minutes. They are scarcely people at all, but only flotsam and jetsam tossed around by the circumstance of the moment. Why does Warren Beatty pine for Goldie Hawn at one moment, and ten minutes later—and, apparently, with equal sincerity—propose to Julie Christie, whom he had only re-connected with the night before? Why does Jack Warden, with some justice, dismiss Miss Christie as a “whore”, only to marry her the next day? Who knows? And, more important, who cares? For it is impossible for the viewer to empathize with, or care about, any of these cretins. Who can give a darn about a stimulus-response machine?

The major interest is in Miss Christie, but for reasons that have little to do with the movie itself. It is not simply that she is a marvelous actress, and worth seeing even in a turkey. For the movie, because of Miss Christie, cannot help but evoke that outstanding herald of the mod age, Darling. That film of the early 60’s was both a portrayal of the new phenomenon of “swinging London”, and a harbinger of the new Western culture then being born. While its values were decadent. Darling was a superb evocation of what the mod world was coming to be, and Julie Christie was both its new star and its quintessence. In a sense, Shampoo is Miss Christie a decade later; older, coarser, jaded, dissipated, the swinging London chick has now landed in a millionaire’s pad in Hollywood. It is, indeed, a logical progression. I hope that some young director of the 1980’s doesn’t decide to show us the next step.

Jack Warden and Lee Grant are excellent as the older predators (Lee Grant, I am happy to say, is growing old quite disgracefully). I hope to see no more of Miss Hawn; Shampoo confirms my conviction that Miss Hawn comes over as a nitwit even when she is not trying (pace Cactus Flower). Young Carrie Fisher (offspring of the famous Fisher-Debbie Reynolds match) makes her debut in this film, and I hope it is also her farewell appearance. Warren Beatty is Warren Beatty.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII, NO. 5

MAY, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

MAYAGUEZ, BY JINGO

And so President Ford has seized his heaven-sent opportunity to flex the muscles of U.S. imperialism and his own macho muscles as Commander-in-Chief. Boy, we showed teeny Cambodia, didn’t we? After losing a disastrous and chronic war in Southeast Asia, we showed that we’ve got the Marines, by jingo, and the bombs, by God, and we can blast them! We dropped more bombs than ever before in history in Vietnam, and it didn’t do us any good, but give us a specific target, like one ship, and wow!

Or was the opportunity really heaven-sent, or was there a more sinister, man-made force involved? Was this, perhaps, another fraud like the Pueblo and Gulf-of-Tonkin capers, provoked or engineered by the U.S. to give imperialism a show of strength, and to unify the country—even the half-hearted peaceniks in Congress—behind a policy of bluster, jingoism, and violence? “Senior American officials” have already been reported as saying that the administration saw the Mayaguez incident as “an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate it will remain in Asia following the Indochina deoacles.” Of course, Ford and his stooge Ron Nessen deny this, but who in his right mind believes them?

In the course of his hysterical response to the Mayaguez incident, Ford managed to violate a host of treaties and agreements, and to commit multiple aggression—as well as to bring about the deaths of a hundred American Marines and numbers of Cambodians. In his haste to jump the gun and not wait for ordinary diplomacy to run its course, our “commander-in-chief” (a) took off from Okinawa without asking Japanese permission, thereby violating our agreement with Japan; (b) landed 1,100 Marines in Thailand against the express desire of the Thais, thereby violating our agreement with them and aggressing against Thai territory; (c) invaded a Cambodian island, bombed a few ships and perhaps sunk them, and killed an unknown number of Cambodians, and (d) after the deed was done, gratuitously flexed some more muscles by bombing the Cambodian mainland, for good measure so to speak. All this was done, moreover, after the Cambodians had agreed to release the ship and its crew, and in direct violation of several American laws absolutely prohibiting the use of American military force in Southeast Asia. Ford deserves impeachment on the latter ground alone, but of course there is no chance of that, with even the supposed peace forces in Congress rushing to hail the our newly “decisive” President. The violations of law are supposedly made to be superseded by the much-trumpeted “constitutional” powers of the Commander-in-Chief, which have been interpreted to provide a virtual blank check for Presidential commitments and actions in military affairs.

In addition to the numerous violations of law, treaty, and right committed by the Ford adventure in gunboat diplomacy, another vital point has been generally overlooked: namely that, according to well-accepted principles of international law, the Cambodians were right! The American contention that the Mayaguez was sailing on the high seas, in “international waters”, is an outright lie; even the Ford administration concedes that the Mayaguez was captured only eight miles from the Cambodian island of Poulo Wai; the Cambodians themselves say three miles, but no matter. Eight miles is enough to destroy the American case. For Cambodia has, for many years, claimed 12 miles as its territorial limit from its shores. The 12-mile limit was maintained, not only by the Sihanouk regime, but also be the American-supported Lon No1 clique. Furthermore, the 1975 Geneva conference on the Law of the Sea reached a general, tentative agreement on 12 miles as the territorial limit of each State, and the United States has openly supported this 12-mile agreement. And so, by the standards of the U.S. itself as well as by the Geneva agreements, the Mayaguez was invading Cambodian waters, and Cambodia had every right, under international law, to seize the ship and its crew for invading its territory. Far from Cambodia’s action being that of “piracy”, as the Ford administration charged, it was Ford and his Marines and bombers who were the pirates.

Furthermore, the Cambodians were certainly justified in being suspicious of the Mayaguez. The ship was reported in the U.S. press to be an “unarmed” merchantman; actually, it was under charter to the U.S. military. The Cambodian charge that “this ship came to violate our waters, conduct espionage and provoke incidents to create pretexts or mislead the opinion of the world people . . .” certainly has the ring of plausibility, and deserves careful investigation.

A clinching argument against the Ford adventure is the very different treatment that the Nixon-Ford administration has been handing out to the Ecuadorians. Ecuador has been claiming a territorial limit of, not 12 but 200 miles, out to sea, and has been seizing private fishing vessels and arresting their crew; and in the case of Ecuador, there seems to be no possibility of the ships being covers for CIA military or espionage operations. And yet, we have heard no hysterical denunciations of Ecuador, there have been no midnight bombings of Ecuador, nor commando landings by Marines to free the crews of the fishing vessels. When it came to Ecuador, the patient processes of diplomacy were allowed to work. Why the double standard, if all Ford was interested in was protection of American persons and property?

The general reaction in America was as disheartening as one might expect. The evil Kissinger boasted that “the President’s stroke demonstrated that a great power leads not so much by its words as by its actions, that initiative creates its own consensus.” In short, the old trick of conning the public to rally behind a war-making President. Unfortunately, it worked once more. The Conservatives were as bloodthirsty as one might expect. Senator Buckley called immediately for massive bombing of Cambodia and he got most of what he wanted; Senator Jesse Helms burbled that “I am proud of him (Ford) today”. The chicken-hearted liberals, with a few honorable exceptions such as Senator Nelson (D., Wisc.) tagged along in the new, but hopefully short-lived, “consensus”. Perhaps the most egregious statement was that of the always insufferable Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who exulted that Ford’s action “represents a much needed and timely affirmation of the freedom of the seas.” It is high time, indeed, to re-evaluate the hoary “freedom of the seas” doctrine. For centuries it was used by the English imperialists in the way that Ford-Schlesinger are using it now: to justify any and all encroachments by U.S. (English) vessels anywhere on the liquid surface of the globe. In the deeper philosophical sense, “freedom of the seas” really means “ocean communism”, i.e. a state of no-property in the ocean. While the ocean used to be a super-abundant resource, it is no longer so, particularly in the North Atlantic and along the continental shelves; the ocean is in these places a scarce resource, and it has been substantially kept out of productive use because “ocean communism” has been able to prevent private property in parts of the ocean. As a result, the ocean is under-utilized in the same way that land was in the centuries before private property was allowed in land. Only hunting and gathering (of fish, minerals) is allowed in the oceans now, just as only hunting and gathering was feasible in the days before private landed property. It was only private property in land that made agriculture (the transformation of the land by human energy) possible, thereby enormously increasing land productivity; and only private property in parts of the ocean will eventually make “aquaculture” feasible, and lead to a vast and mighty boom of resources and production in the vast ocean storehouse.

To return to the Mayaguez adventure, it points up several important lessons. One is a need to press forward with an isolationist and anti-imperialist foreign policy; it is clear that even the supposedly “anti-war” liberals, let alone everyone else, have not learned the real lessons of our debacle in Southeast Asia. Second is the need to press on with a call for the U.S. to get out of Asia; specifically, to get our troops completely out of their remaining bases in South Korea, Thailand, Japan, and Okinawa. At the very least, that would force Ford to take more time before his next plunge into war and violence. Moreover, it would keep us out of the next possible tinder-spot, South Korea, where the dictatorship of President Park Chung Hee has managed to alienate severely the bulk of the South Korean population. Third, it would be helpful to have a constitutional amendment stripping the President of his beloved “commander-in-chief” status. During the pre-Articles of Confederation days of the Revolutionary war (which we did, after all, manage to win), the Commander-in-Chief, George Washington, was strictly under the control of Congress, which appointed and could have fired him at will. Why not return to this sort of status, where at least Congress would have to deliberate a bit before plunging into war? It would scarcely be a panacea in itself, but it would at least strip the President of his principal excuse and weapon in his personal making of war.

FLASH! As we go to press, we find that the U.S. Coast Guard has just seized an unarmed Polish fishing ship, the Kalmar, charged with “violating U.S. territorial waters” off Monterey, California. (The San Francisco Examiner, May 18). The ship was hauled into San Francisco and its captain and crew arrested. The only high crime of the Kalmar was to fish at a point slightly over 10 miles from U.S. shores. The Coast Guard explained that, while the U.S. formally maintains a 3-mile limit as its territorial waters, it has international agreements that have established a 12-mile limit as its “contiguous fishing zone”.

Coming so soon after the Mayaguez incident, the Coast Guard was “concerned” that the parallels would be inevitable: how does the seizure of the Kalmar differ from that of the Mayaguez? The Coast Guard’s attempt to find a difference was both pathetic and revealing: “This was simply a violation of the U.S. contiguous fishing zone . . . It is a recognized international situation (recognized by the Soviets and us) . . . The Mayaguez was just a happenstance of Cambodia.” In short, the Soviets (and Poles?) recognize our 12-mile limit and usually don’t interfere with it, but we don’t give a hang about the Cambodian’s 12-mile limit. There is the much-vaunted U.S. “respect for international law” and “freedom of the seas.”

In truth, there is only one difference between the Kalmar and Mayaguez incidents: that the Kalmar was an innocent, productive fishing vessel, while the Mayaguez might well have been an espionage ship and a deliberate provocation to the Cambodians. The hypocrisy of IL S. foreign policy has never been more clearly exposed. Alright, President Ford, Senator Buckley, Senator Helms, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: should Poland now bomb California and land commandoes in San Francisco to free the kidnapped Poles? And if not, why not?

Peasants And Revolution: A Review Essay

By Joseph R. Stromberg•

Reviewing Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope in the June 1974 issue of Books for Libertarians, John Hospers remarked on Quigley’s view that income redistribution would solve nothing in Latin America unless people there learn to use excess incomes “constructively.” This attitude, which surely reflects some obtuseness, is quite widespread. One finds libertarians, e.g. the able economist Henry Hazlitt, who write of land reform as if it were communism. All we need, it seems, is “a good business climate” in Free World Despotism X, Y or Z, and, drip, drip, drip, prosperity will trickle down to the masses—someday.

At a time when libertarians need reminding of the radicalism of their Weltanschauung,* it is heartening to find a book on the agrarian question which thoroughly discredits the status quo and confirms one’s fondest prejudices in favor of change. Ernest Feder’s The Rape of the Peasantry: Latin America’s Landholding System (Garden City, NY, 1971) is such a book. Granting that mere “income inequality is not per se unjust,” Professor Feder delineates the unnatural concentration of land in the Americas and the corresponding destitution of the peasantry. Since the data is incomplete in this area, Feder deliberately errs on the conservative side throughout the book. Hence, the actual Latin American situation is probably much worse than the book indicates.

According to Feder, poverty, unemployment and productivity so low that agricultural countries import food are all rooted in “latifundismo,” or feudal land monopoly, dating from the Spanish conquest. The landed elite and their political henchmen exploit the peasants and maintain an agrarian reserve army of cheap and docile labor by means of one-sided sharecropping contracts, punitive evictions, feudal labor dues, fraud, inflation (which devours small savings), and ultimately armed violence by “vigilantes”* or the national army. (See Chapters 9-15.)

Small wonder, then, that the peasants display self-hatred and unambitious behavior which supposedly proves their stupidity. As Feder puts it, “they are forcefully shut off from the market mechanism.” The problem is hardly one of “scarce” land or even technological backwardness. Feder argues persuasively that the monopoly of good land creates gross inefficiency, waste, mismanagement and low productivity on the latifundia. A cluster of built-in disincentives discourage the peasants, who gain nothing from harder work. The large estates resemble islands of socialist “calculational chaos” (though Feder does not use this term), except that collective farmers probably eat better—provided they love Brezhnev. Far from reflecting economies of scale, the politically based latifundia are so overexpanded that often as much as one third of the work force is required to boss the other demoralized two thirds.

By contrast, poor people are actually capable of great economic rationality and capital accumulation. Feder finds that the small sector of family farms is much more land-intensive and productive than the better capitalized estate sector. Given the irrationalities of the feudal sector and the destitution of people who could be productive, Feder argues for land reform on grounds of simple justice. Against the charge that reform violates property, he properly replies that it actually “aim(s) at an expansion of private property.” For libertarians, both Lockean natural law arguments and utilitarian considerations make land reform imperative.

Feder sees spontaneous peasant “land invasions” (usually suppressed) as a hopeful sign. He exposes token official “reform,” financed in part by the Alliance for Progress, as marginal and deliberately irrelevant. (Bureaucratic rakeoff ran up to 50% of the funds.) A final chapter is devoted to the danger of “technocratic reform” from above. Feder hopes real “reformers” prevail. Knowing what we know about liberal reformism, libertarians should put their hopes on armed peasants and wish them good theory to guide their practice.

Parasitism and Subversion: The Case of Latin America (New York, 1966) is a broadly focused work by Stanislav Andreski, an unorthodox sociologist who deals with the land question and much more. The author sets out to account for the chief structural uniformities of Latin American societies. Where generalization fails for the whole continent, the book becomes classificatory as well. But iniformities abound, and Andreski presents a convincing survey of them.

Andreski believes that most of Latin America’s troubles stem from an inherited pattern of parasitism, or what we might call statist exploitation. Interestingly, he derives his conception of parasitism from the Traite de Legislation (1826), the major work of the French sociologist Charles Comte, whose importance as libertarian theorist has been discovered by Leonard Liggio. Parasitism, which severs work from reward, is a necessarily strong barrier to social progress.

An important form of parasitism is land monopoly, which restricts production and impoverishes the masses. (On this subject Andreski differs little from Feder.) Direct political appropriation of wealth by Latin American police, customs inspectors and the like is “enormous” according to Andreski. Although conditions vary from country to country, high tariffs, state loans, the license-and-bribery syndrome, government contracts, and even tax-farming (in Peru) contribute to the popular view that all governments are “merely bands of thieves.” (Hear, hear!) In Mexico, where state intervention is most extensive, pay-offs are naturally highest. Everywhere taxation falls mainly on the poorer classes. Militarism also wastes needed resources. Conscription exists in Latin America mainly to justify the bloated officer corps. Since Latin armies are too large for internal policing and too small for war, they are really huge bureaucracies which often intervene directly in politics. Their normal care, plus what they rake off when running a country, make their upkeep “the most important form of parasitism in Latin America.”

Latin America is thus cursed with “parasitic involution of capitalism,” which Andreski defines as “the tendency to seek profits and alter market conditions by political means in the widest sense.” Accordingly, the continent suffers from “hypertrophy of bureaucracy.” The middle classes mainly consist of bureaucrats and frustrated holders of diplomas who want state jobs. Many of them are drawn to state socialism and nationalization of foreign firms because of the Mandarin employment that would be created thereby. Parasitic appropriation of wealth, constricted markets (given peasant poverty), uneconomic welfare legislation to buy off the urban poor, and rapid inflation make for permanent economic stagnation. This condition in turn fosters permanent political instability. In general, the superimposing of democratic constitutions on seignorial, feudal economies has led to “constitutional oligarchy” or outright repression. Mexico is unique in having a stable bureaucratic regime.

A few more of Andreski’s conclusions are worth mentioning. In a region of high infant mortality the richer classes outbreed the poor. This has “whitened” the population. Although darker features correspond to poorer status, Andreski finds that racism is not the problem. A poor, defenseless person will be exploited regardless of color! In the realm of Latin values, disdain for work, a legacy of slavery, promotes parasitism, just as capricious and authoritarian child-rearing fosters machismo and irresponsible aggression in males. Further, economic parasitism reinforces the anticommercial bias of the culture, aiding communist movements. Andreski believes US imperialism has played a somewhat minor role in Latin difficulties—chiefly one of propping up local dictators. (Unhappily, he accepts the Pollyanna theory of JFK, the brush-fire-war imperialist.) On the other hand, he is mildly revisionist on the Cuban Revolution: Cuba is no more totalitarian than many a Free World despotism and Castro is personally honest—unlike most Latin leaders. (He does foresee bureaucratic degeneration in Cuba, however.) All in all, Parasitism and Subversion is an excellent place to begin the study of statist culture in its extreme form.

David Mitrany’s Marx Against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism (Chapel Hill, 1951) is a unique study of the great political paradox of the twentieth century. All successful modern-day revolutions have been made by peasant masses and have been opposed by orthodox Marxists. Leninists, including Maoists, have coopted, led, and in varying degrees betrayed these peasant revolutions. Mitrany treats both Marxian dogma on agriculture and the practical response of the peasant to their plight, showing how communist practice based on dogma clashed head-on with peasant practice (and emergent theory) based on experience.

Marx’s agrarian dogma derived from his belief in large-scale production. Small peasant proprietors were doomed to succumb to historical laws of accumulation. Peasants were dull and reactionary and the proletarian revolution would properly put them into huge farm brigades and curb their petty-bourgeois “property-owner fanaticism.” So ran Marx’s theory. As an urban Westerner, Marx generalized from western European experience; but even there, after 1895, statistics revealed the unexpected persistence of small farms. As Mitrany notes, the large estates in the West, partly destroyed wherever the antifeudal French Revolution reached, had never been the result of free competition but were political creations. Marx’s inferences were therefore quite unwarranted.

In preindustrial eastern Europe, including Russia, the role of politics was clear. There the politically powerful landed elite created enormous latifundia “in recent times.” To capitalize on new markets for cereals in the West, the lords dispossessed the peasants, retaining them as cheap labor. When World War I broke the power of the landed ruling class, the peasant masses rose up everywhere (with the exception of Hungary) and divided the great estates. Unable to do much else, the “liberal” semiparliamentary successor regimes in these countries “gave” the peasants the land. This revolutionary breakthrough, Mitrany states, finished the emancipatory process begun in France. The difference was that where peasants made the revolution they took all the land, whereas in the earlier western reforms urban liberals tended to preserve large estates and only freed the serfs to become landless workers.

In Russia, the Bolsheviks “led” the revolution, conceding land to the peasantry. After the failure of agricultural levies, Lenin “retreated” to the New Economic Policy, “a reversion to individualism.” Mitrany believes the NEP was solely a tactic and curiously ignores Bukharin’s role as a defender of the NEP free market and the “worker-peasant” alliance. In any event, after 1928, forced-draft industrialization proceeded under Stalin with all the murder and violence necessary to make the state the new landlord.

Outside Russia, peasant revolutionaries created peasant parties to protect their gains, and “peasantist” ideology flourished. It was too late, however, for their enemies regrouped everywhere under a program of neomercantilism or state capitalism. Like Preobrazhensky, Trotsky, and Stalin, the bourgeois “liberal” industrialists and politicians believed in building heavy industry on the backs of the masses. Indirect taxes, high tariffs, and subsidies put the burden on the people. The peasant parties responded with a relatively libertarian program for development which looked to the parallel evolution of agriculture and light industry.

I cannot summarize here Mitrany’s interesting discussion of peasantist ideology. He does call attention to the similar views of Proudhon. He cites evidence that family farms can survive or even outcompete large enterprises in a free market. Hence, there was nothing utopian about the peasantist program. In addition, peasantism, reflecting real love of the land, was a force for peace, since such love and murderous nationalism have nothing in common.

Unfortunately, the peasants’ organization and ideology lagged behind their seizure of the land. Their political opponents, generally including the socialists, crushed the peasant movement, overriding liberal constitutional forms. After World War II, with Communist parties thrust into power, development followed Stalinist lines. Everywhere, however, peasant resistance forced compromise. In Yugoslavia collectivization was virtually abandoned. A Yugoslav politician (quoted by Mitrany) asks what can you do with people who regarded five centuries of Turkish rule as “a stop-gap?”

You can do what peasants everywhere have asked for a very long time: Clear the ways and let them alone . . . but clear the ways!

*Now that numerous trendy conservatives are swiping our hard-won label.

•Mr. Stromberg is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Florida, and assistant editor of News of the Nation.

*We might say “local bullies and bad gentry.”

Hobbes And Liberalism

By Bill Evers*

Hobbes is often counted by modern political theorists as a liberal, and often as a liberal whose views reflect the needs of an entrepreneurial, market-oriented capitalism.[1]

This argument has two prongs. One is the contention that Hobbes’s society had already become bourgeois and that his theory was meant to provide stable ground rules for existing capitalist competition. The second is that Hobbes’s theory provides an ideological basis for liberal society—the society of property, individual rights, and the market.

The first contention is an empirical claim about the character of the society in which Hobbes lived. Recent studies have shown, however, that the institutions of liberal society were not dominant in Hobbes’s time (and are not dominant in the society that he describes in his books), and so it is not fruitful to pursue this prong of the argument here.[2]

Instead, we will take up the second prong of the argument, which contends that Hobbes’s theory was designed to sustain and was plausibly capable of sustaining a liberal society. We will scrutinize the claim that Hobbes’s theory was a doctrine of political individualism.[3]

Some problems of method come immediately to the fore. For example, “the market” itself is an abstract term that we use to designate the exchange by individuals of property titles. Because of the interdependence of the concepts involved, before one can adequately discuss whether the market is a prevalent institution in a society, one must first consider the nature and extent of individual self-ownership, of individual rights to property, and of governmental power.

Such inquiry into the character of rights and of governmental power is necessary because these matters are inextricably wrapped up in what we mean by a “liberal society.” It is not enough to know that in some society children are permitted to trade baseball cards, to call this trading “the market”, and then to call the whole society “liberal.” When we talk about a liberal society, therefore, we are very much concerned with the structure of rights.

Hobbes’s Doctrine

Hobbes viewed property as a useful violence-reducing mechanism that only existed because it was defined and authorized by the absolute sovereign.[4] There has been some scholarly discussion which questions this sort of summary of Hobbes’s property theory. This discussion has explored the possibility that Hobbes, like the Levellers and Locke, might have believed in property rights that antedate the institution of government.[5]

In several versions of his political thought, Hobbes contended that patriarchs and slaveholders would have control over some persons and possessions in the state of nature.[6] These patriarchs and slaveholders would be small-scale sovereigns in their own little kingdoms, all within the overall insecurity of the state of nature. In early versions of his theory, Hobbes also speaks of incorporating, as is, these successful patriarchal and servile holdings into the new social compact that establishes the state. For example, an unused draft of his Elements of Law included: “Men entering in peace, retain what they have acquired.”[7]

Hobbes decreases the possible strength that such a state-of-nature, family-sized unit might have from one version of his theory to the next. By the writing of Leviathan, the family group, when it confronts the sovereign power, is like a small band of soldiers that when surprised by an army must lay down its arms and beg to be spared.[8]

These patriarchal and servile holdings in the state of nature were property in the sense that they were effectively controlled by their owners. But they were not property in the sense of being derived from some principle of just original acquisition (as found in the writings of the Levellers and later in Locke). Nor were they property in the sense of being rights integrated into a non-contradictory network of rights and capable of being protected by legitimate force. Nor were they property in the sense of being rights that others outside the family were morally obliged to observe. Even as he is still talking about possessions and the transfer of possessions within the state of nature, Hobbes is saying that the laws of this state of nature oblige only in the court of conscience.[9]

Because this theory of property in the state of nature is radically different from the liberal view of the Levellers and Locke, it seems, extravagant to say, as Lopata does, that Hobbes’s early property doctrine contained the “seeds of a right of revolution,” and that Hobbes’s experience in the Civil War caused him to alter his doctrine.[10] There does not seem to be any radical break in Hobbes’s property theory. Even in his late work, the Dialogue on the Common Laws of England, Hobbes speaks of possession in the state of nature when he describes how landlords obtain their holdings.[11]

We may safely say that Hobbes in all his writings believes that the sovereign (or a small-scale sovereign, the head of the family) determines all property relations. He also believes in all his writings, even those written before the Civil War, that the claim of an absolute right to property is subversive of orderly society.[12] The radical-liberal Levellers, in contrast, maintained that an absolute right to property was the only secure foundation of an orderly and just society.

In sum, we may say that Hobbes has a consistently legal positivist view of property rights, emphasizing the command of the sovereign.[13] Indeed, some of Hobbes’s contemporary liberal critics like George Lawson and John Whitehall attacked him on precisely, this point.[14]

Whitehall, for example, says that Hobbes’s assignment of the property of the people to the sovereign will lead the people to rise up against the Hobbesian state and try to overthrow it, “that they may have something to be called their own.”[15] Furthermore, Whitehall asserts, according to Hobbes’s view it would have been perfectly all right for Cromwell’s New Model Army to have seized “all the property of the people of England” in 1651, when—depending on your point of view—either England had collapsed into a state of nature or the Army had become sovereign.[16]

Locke himself, though less radical a liberal than others, notes that giving the sovereign absolute power, leaves the sovereign in a state of war vis à vis his subjects. Now the individual subject, whenever his property in his person or goods is invaded at the command of the sovereign, is defenseless in the face of a ruler who wields the only armed might in the society. Men in a non-governmental condition would be idiots to turn over absolute authority and all weapons to some Jones family. “This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats, or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”[17]

Further examination of Hobbes’s arguments will give us additional reasons to believe that Hobbes’s contemporary liberal critics had a more accurate view of the character of his proposals than do present-day political theorists who call Hobbes a liberal. Additional insight can be gained by looking at Hobbes’s discussion of conquest, servitude, and the somewhat related matter of contracts agreed to under duress.

During the Civil War period, the radical-liberal Levellers denied that a conqueror or his heirs (either the recent conqueror Cromwell or the Stuarts as heirs of the Normans) had any claim upon the obedience of the people.[18] The liberal Levellers argued that only a government which secured man’s natural rights in his own person and in his goods was legitimate. In contrast, Hobbes, an absolute monarchist and a defender of the Stuart cause, taught that a subject is obliged to obey a conqueror.[19] Indeed, he basically equates the situation of someone who is enslaved in a state of nature by a stronger person, with the situation of a subject who adheres to a sovereign in international war, or via the social compact institution of a government, or in any other way.

As an example of a compact, Hobbes points to the situation of a captured man who is not kept constantly in chains. This privilege granted by his master that the slave not always be in chains, according to Hobbes, sets up a voluntary compact under which the slave is obliged to obey the absolute will of his master (who is here very like the governmental sovereign.) The slave is said by Hobbes to be enjoying a condition of liberty because he is not always in shackles and thus has some liberty of motion.[20]

The historian David Brion Davis zeroes in on the relationship of Hobbes’s doctrine on slavery to his doctrine on the state when he writes:

“There is no inherent reason that slavery should be incompatible with the ideal of a functional or utilitarian state. Indeed, for later champions of individual liberty, like William Lloyd Garrison and Mikhail Bakunin, all states were founded on the principle of slavery. For Thomas Hobbes, slavery was an inevitable part of the logic of power; the bondsman had no cause for complaint when he was provided with sustenance and security in exchange for being governed . . .[21]

This model of slave-making resembled in many respects Hobbes’s concept of the social compact. Hobbes stated quite explicitly that the only difference between the free subject and the ‘servant’ was that one served the city and the other served a fellow subject.”[22]

Honues makes the claim that the social compact and acquiescence in slavery are voluntary because he rejects the liberal doctrine that contracts made under duress are null and void.[23] Hobbes argues that a promise to pay ransom to a kidnapper or highwayman is a binding contract. This allows validity for the formation of governments by way of or in the face of threats against the people. It should be noted, however, that most moralists among Hobbes’s contemporaries, as well as Locke later on, rejected the validity of contracts made under duress.[24]

In addition, Hobbes’s equivocal and confusing usage of such terms as “voluntary” and “liberty” facilitates the cloaking of illiberal acts in the rhetoric of liberalism.[25] Since volition for Hobbes simply refers to a morally inconsequential part of the process of deliberation, and since all human acts have costs and inconveniences, situations which involve the coercion of some persons by others can be designated as voluntary relationships by Hobbes. In utilitarian fashion, he sees no radical dichotomy between coerced and uncoerced human activity. Similarly, since liberty for Hobbes refers to the absence of chains, if the kidnapper or the sovereign does not put you in chains or try to kill you, you are still free.

Considering Hobbes’s concepts of property, individual rights, contract, and sovereignty, it is difficult to term him an ideological liberal. Looking at his views on economic policy, we find additional confirmation that he is not a liberal. Hobbes favored sumptuary laws,[26] import licenses,[27] military conscription in emergencies,[28] compulsory poor relief,[29] and laws to encourage and subsidize fishing, farming, navigation skills, and education.[30] He believed in the unlimited right of the sovereign to tax the people.[31] He bitterly opposed wage labor in manufacturing industries.[32] While hardly the economic program of an advanced state socialist, neither is it a liberal program like that of the Levellers or that of Herbert Spencer.

In conclusion, it seems untenable to claim that Hobbes is a liberal. He differs drastically with the liberal political tradition on essential doctrinal matters, and for this reason was opposed to and opposed by the liberals of his own time.

Notes

1. For example, Laurence Berns writes: “To the extent that modern liberalism teaches that all social and political obligations are derived from and in the service of the individual rights of man, Hobbes may be regarded as the founder of modern liberalism.” Laurence Berns, “Thomas Hobbes,” in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds., History of Political Philosophy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972), p. 375. See also Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 181-82; C. B. Macpherson, “Hobbes: The Political Obligation of the Market,” in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 9-106; and C.B. Macpherson, “Natural Rights in Hobbes and Locke,” and “Hobbes’s Bourgeois Man,” in Democratic Theory (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 224-37 and 238-50.

2. Peter Laslett, “Market Society and Political Theory,” Historical Journal, vol. 7, no. 1 (1964), pp. 150-82; William Letwin, “The Economic Foundations of Hobbes’s Politics,” in Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters, eds., Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, L.I.: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 143-64; and Keith Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” in Keith Brown, ed., Hobbes Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 185-236.

3. Hobbes makes the individual the basic unit of political analysis throughout his writings, but this is not sufficient ground for calling him a proponent of political individualism. Hobbes was also an early adherent of a version of the subjective theory of value in political economy. See Elements of Law, in Richard S. Peters, ed., Body, Man, and Citizen (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 291; De Cive, chap. 3, art. 6, in English Works (1841; Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1966), vol. 2, p. 34; Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d.), chap. 10, p. 57. Again, this view in economic science does not make Hobbes an individualist in his assessment of proper political institutions. Cf. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, pp. 37-39, 63; “Hobbes’s Bourgeois Man,” p. 242.

4. On property as a violence-reducing mechanism, see De Cive, pp. vi-vii. For a modern restatement of the Hobbesian position, see James M. Buchanan, “Before Public Choice,” in Gordon Tullock, ed., Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy (Blacksburg, Va.: Center for the Study of Public Choice, 1973).

On the role of the sovereign in defining property rights, see Elements, p. 342; De Cive, chap. 6, art. 15, p. 84; Lev., chap. 24, pp. 161-62; Dialogue on the Common Law of England, in E.W., vol. 6, pp. 29-30.

5. M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 199;

Benjamin B. Lopata, “Property Theory in Hobbes,” Political Theory, vol. 1, no.2 (May 1973), pp. 203-18.

6. Elements, pp. 295-97; De Cive, chap. 6, art. 15, p. 84n; chap. 8, art. 1, p. 109; art. 8, p. 112; Lev., chap. 17, p. 109; chap. 20, pp. 129-36.

7. Goldsmith, p. 199n.

8. Lev., pp. 133-34.

9. De Cive, chap. 3, art. 18, p. 41; art. 27, pp. 45-46; chap. 5, art. 1, pp. 63-64.

10. Lopata, p. 211.

11. Dialogue, p. 147.

12. Elements, p. 371; De Cive, chap. 12, art. 7, p. 157; Lev., chap. 29, p. 213; chap. 30, p. 224; Behemoth, in E.W., vol. 6, pp. 168-69. Hobbes considered natural rights liberalism a major cause of the Civil War.

13. Compare Hobbes’s property theory to the similar legal positivist view of Cromwell’s son-in-law, Henry Ireton, See G.P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 138; H.N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), p. 281; Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, p. 139.

14. On the property theory of Locke’s precursor Lawson, see John Bowie, Hobbes and His Critics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), p. 99.

15. Bowie, p. 177.

16. Bowie, pp. 178.

17. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, rev. ed. (New York; Mentor, 1965), Second Treatise, pars. 91-93, pp. 370-72. The lions and foxes quotation is on p. 372. Laslett contends that Locke is criticizing not Hobbes but Filmer in these passages. For Hobbes’s reply to Locke’s sort of argument, see Dialogue, pp. 10-11, 20-21. For Locke’s contention that tyranny is worse than the state of nature, see Second Treatise, par. 225, pp. 463-64.

18. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (New York, Schocken, 1964) pp. 75-82.

19. On the property rights acquired by conquerors, see Lev., chap. 24, p. 163: Dialogue, p. 149. On the parallels between Hobbes’s doctrine of conquest and the obligation of the Cromwellian de facto theorists, see the writings of Quentin Skinner.

20. De Cive, chap. 8, art. 1-9, pp. 108-13; Lev., chap. 20, pp. 132-34.

21. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 263.

22. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 117.

23. Elements, p. 286; De Cive, chap. 2, art. 16, pp. 23-24: Lev., chap. 14, p. 91

24. Thomas, p. 233.

25. On Hobbes’s equivocal concept of liberty, see J. Roland Pennock, “Hobbes’s Confusing ‘Clarity’ The Case of ‘Liberty’ ”, in Brown, pp. 101-16, esp. p. 105; John Plamenatz, Man and Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), vol. 1, p. 139.

26. Elements, p. 381; De Cive, chap. 13, art. 14, p. 178; Lev., chap. 24. p. 163; chap. 30, p. 226; Thomas, p. 228.

27. Lev., chap. 24, pp. 163-64.

28. Lev., chap. 21, p. 143.

29. Lev., chap. 30, p. 227.

30. De Cive, chap. 13, art. 14, p. 177.

31. Elements, p. 342; Lev., chap. 30, pp. 162-83; Behemoth, pp. 168-69; Dialogue, pp. 29-30, 154.

32. Behemoth, pp. 320-21.

* Mr. Evers is a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford University.

Say’s Law Revisited

By Richard M. Ebeling*

Following the 1936 publication of John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, an intellectual deluge occurred that silenced almost all critical opinion. The movements of Macro-economic aggregates and the forces determining the nature of “effective demand” became the focal points of academic concern among economists.

Courageous was the individual who chose to move against the tide and question the “laws” of the New Economics. Professor W. H. Hutt, following John Stuart Mill’s dictum that “No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead,” has been one of those courageous souls.

For fifty years, he has not only defended the much disparaged “orthodox” Micro-economic approach, but added clarity and depth in his expositions, as well. Whether it be his critical analysis of compulsory unionism in the free society, The Theory of Collective Bargaining (1931) and The Strike-Threat System (1973) or his devastating critique of Keynesian economics, The Theory of Idle Resources (1939) and Keynesianism-Retrospect and Prospect (1963), his pen has always searched out the “inner contradictions” of incorrect theory that passes as the foundation of contemporary economic thought.

Now, in his latest book, A Rehabilitation of Say’s Law (Ohio University Press: Athens, 1974) $8.00, Professor Hutt has again returned to the attack. He postulates that, correctly understood, Say’s Law “is indispensable for an understanding of the true genesis of depression and of prosperity without inflation; that attempts at dynamic treatment of the economic system which ignore it are worthless . . .”

The present definition of Say’s Law, that “supply creates its own demand,” was coined by Keynes in The General Theory and is a distortion of the true meaning of the Law. Rather, what Say was attempting to formulate was the most obvious fact that “the source of demand for any particular input or output produced is the flow of inputs and outputs of all the things which do not compete with it; for some part of that flow is destined to be exchanged for it.” Thus, what we exchange are goods and services for goods and services. And that which we choose not to keep for ourselves out of our own production will be traded away for what we value more highly.

When the Keynesian theorist refers to excess aggregate supply and the weakness of “effective demand” to purchase that supply, he is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There could not be an “aggregate” excess of supply unless there was a super-abundance of all inputs and outputs such that they had no value (and, thus, would not be an economic good); what this does mean is that certain goods may be in relatively greater abundance than other goods that are in shorter supply. What is preventing their purchase is not “ineffective demand” on the part of purchasers, but ineffective pricing on the part of suppliers for the market to be “cleared.” For, in Hutt’s words, “no one can purchase unless someone else sells . . . every act of selling and buying requires that the would-be seller price his product to permit the sale and that the would-be buyer offer a price which the seller accepts.” If saving-preferences rise, demand for consumer goods will decrease and demand for capital goods will increase. Price relationships will shift, with the consumer offering a smaller supply of goods and services for consumer goods and a greater supply of goods and services for capital goods.

Indeed, it is in the unwillingness of resource owners to price their products or services at levels commensurate with consumer demand that Professor Hutt finds the cause of prolonged depressions. “Disco-ordination in one sector of the economy will, if there are price rigidities in other sectors, bring about these successively aggravating reactions, one decline in the flow of services inducing another.” Whenever “inappropriate pricing” results in the withholding of supplies, this will limit the demand for other goods and services the would-be supplier would have purchased.

Interestingly, Hutt develops an alternative to the accepted Keynesian theory of the Multiplier. In fact, it proves that, contrary to what Keynes believed, his theory depends on the validity of Say’s Law. Since the problem is disequilibrium pricing, the lowering of any price to its market-clearing level “will tend to initiate a positive ‘real multiplier’ effect—a cumulative rise in activity and real income . . .” The Keynesian notion of government-induced expenditures is really only a means of getting the release of withheld supplies (at prices acceptable to the supplier), so they, in turn, can generate demand at price levels high enough to entice the release of other withheld supplies. Thus, whether it is monetarists talking about an “adequate money supply” or Keynesians referring to an “adequate rate of spending,” they are “really envisioning the process under which ‘supplies’ (and hence ‘demands’) withheld through pricing can be restored” by unanticipated inflation.

In a series of important chapters, Professor Hutt dissects some of the most prominent post-Keynesians such as Harry Johnson, Leland Yeager, Robert Clower and Axel Leijonhufvud. All, in one form or another, fall under a veil of “money illusion.” For them, the use of money somehow changes the nature of the market experience. For instance, an increase in the demand for money held may place a dampener on the “effective demand” for finished output, thus, acting as a depressant on the economy. But this, says Hutt, is failing to see that money like any asset or commodity has a value in being held as well as traded. “An increase in the relative demand for money simply means that the aggregate real value of money rises relatively to the aggregate real value of non-money.” Adjustments in the price relationships would still enable the market to “clear.” We “do not say that some portion of the demand for rye is ‘ineffective’ because some former purchasers of it demand wheat instead.”

But some critics contend that even if the money wage-rate was the “correct” one, that the “excess” supply of labor still wouldn’t be absorbed. This is part of Leijonhufvud’s argument. In a case of barter where an over-seeing auctioneer could view the marginal values of different factors, supply would equal demand. But the contention is that because of faulty communications and market signals, business firms will fail to hire labor even if only labor’s marginal product is being asked for. In who’s eyes, asks Hutt, is that value of the marginal product? To an over-seeing auctioneer, maybe; but with imperfect knowledge it is the “prospective yield” from labor investment, from the standpoint of the entrepreneur, that will result in hiring. The wage-rates have not been lowered enough to represent the “marginal value” within the pessimistic perspective of the business firm. And “when wage offers have been sufficiently adjusted for entrepreneurs generally to accept them, each output expansion is contributing to a state of affairs in which, through dynamic reactions set going, higher marginal prospective labor products will generally emerge and higher money wage-rates will be forced by the market.”

Finally, Professor Hutt discusses the claim that the pre-Keynesian “orthodoxy” had no explanation of situations of less than full employment and what cures were necessary for alleviating the depression. Hutt quotes from Lavington’s 1922 book, The Trade Cycle, that “No entrepreneur can fully expand his output until others expand their output.” And Edwin Cannan’s 1933 words that “General unemployment appears when asking too much is a general phenomena.” Thus, showing the validity of Say’s Law that just as much as is supplied will generate an equivalent demand for non-competing resources. And in his earlier work Politically Impossible . . .? (Institute of Economic Affairs, London, 1971), Hutt quoted such “leftist” spokesmen as welfare economist A. C. Pigou, who told a government committee in 1931 that lower wage-rates “would employ more people,” and the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who called the Trade Union leaders “pigs” for sabotaging British employment levels by asking for excessive wage-rates.

Though Hutt doesn’t mention them, of all the economists and schools of thought who would be least guilty of this Keynesian accusation, the “Austrians” would have the best record. Starting in the 1920’s, they were not bedazzled by the promises of Irving Fisher’s Stabilized Price Level movement. For, as Schumpeter astutely observed “. . . the Austrian way of emphasizing the behavior and decision of individuals and of defining exchange value of money with respect to individual commodities rather than with respect to a price level of one kind or another has its merits, particularly in the analysis of an inflationary process.” Ludwig von Mises pointed out in 1928 that, “Exchange ratios on the market are constantly subject to change,” because they are the result of the Subjective valuations of market, participants; and “the idea of a general state of prices, a price level, which is raised or lowered uniformly is . . . fictitious . . .” In the same year Gottfried Haberler observe that business are influenced by prices relevant to its particular line of production rather than a “price level.” So, “a general index rather conceals and submerges than reveals and explains those price movements which characterize and signify the movement of the (business) cycle.” Based on this type of analysis, Friedrich von Hayek predicted the coming depression in the February, 1929 Monthly Report of the” Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research.

When the depression struck and employment figures remained at a low level, Mises pointed out, in 1931, “that unemployment, as a long-term phenomenon, is the consequence of the policy adopted by the unions of driving wage rates up.” Hayek, in the same year, stated that “absorption of the unemployed resources” could be achieved only “by the slow process of adapting the structure of production to the means available for capital purposes.” Which meant flexibility in money wages and prices. And, finally, as Fritz Machlup observed in 1935, “no interest policy can succeed in stimulating production when the maladjustment in cost-price relations persists; in other words, if the costs of labor and material fail to adjust themselves, low interest rates cannot do anything for creating investment.”

What Keynes was really criticizing, then, was not that the “orthodox” economists didn’t have an answer to the depression problem. Rather, it was that the reigning orthodoxy offered no solution that was acceptable to trade union monopolies that did not want to cut back from the money wages of the “prosperous” 1920’s. The Keynesian solution is inflation. For as Keynes explicitly admits in The General Theory, “a movement by employers to revise money-wage bargains downwards will be much more strongly resisted than a gradual and automatic lowering of real wages as a result of rising prices.” The whole New Economics becomes summed up as a particular case of Say’s Law. A case in which government monetary expansion and expenditure attempts to seduce the release of withheld supplies, at prices and wages desired by the privileged groups, so they, in turn, can demand the withheld supplies of others at higher prices.

Professor Hutt concisely and brilliantly explained the problem in the introduction to his Theory of Idle Resources: “Competition and capitalism are hated to-day because of their tendency to destroy poverty and privilege more rapidly than custom and the expectations established by protections can allow. We accordingly find private interests combining to curb this process and calling on the State to step in and do the same; and unless the resistance is expressed through monetary policy, the curbing takes the form of restrictions on production.”

*Mr. Ebeling is a student of economics at California State University at Sacramento.

Libertarian Ripoff Of The Month Dept.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine was visiting California for a scholarly conference. There he ran into a fellow who had in his possession a rare copy of an unpublished manuscript of someone on whom my friend was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation. The fellow told my friend that if he gave him $30 he would soon ship him a xerox of the manuscript. My friend was highly skeptical, but the call of dissertation—it is always heady and so my friend forked over the $30, fully expecting that this would be the last he would ever hear of either the $30 or the manuscript. Much was his astonishment when, a few weeks later, the promised xerox arrived in the mail. My friend was agog. “Jesus,” he told me, “that was the first time I ever had business dealings with a libertarian that I wasn’t ripped off.”

An exaggerated estimate, perhaps: but certainly an understandable one. There used to be a highly naive view widespread in the libertarian movement, that because someone was a libertarian, and therefore respected property rights, that one could always rely on libertarians to be honest and rational in their business dealings. Hah! I daresay that there are few ideological movements in recent times that have been beset by more frauds, shysters, and bunco artists than the libertarian movement. Why this should be so we will try to explore below.

The latest libertarian ripoff is on a massive scale and one that has, furthermore, hit the public headlines. Last fall I began to hear breathless comments about a new “libertarian car” (what the hell, one might have asked, is a libertarian car?) that a formidable, neo-Randian lady was in the process of building in California. The lady was going to set Detroit on its ear. The car was going to be made of some kind of new “Rearden metal”, it would be a three-wheeler that would go 70 miles on a gallon of gas, and would sell for less than $2,000. Wow! And, what’s more (nudge, nudge) the lady’s company was called “Twentieth Century Motors” (get it?).

The lady—Mrs. G. Elizabeth Carmichael—was indeed a heroine straight out of a Randian novel (albeit a bit earthier.) She gave interviews in which she proclaimed that she gave all the orders and made all the decisions in her company, and that her subordinate executives were simply yes-men carrying out her orders. She held forth with a parody of a Commodore Vanderbilt-Rand speech, announcing that she didn’t “give a s - - t about the public”, that all she cared about was Liz Carmichael, and for that reason she was going to produce a car, the Dale, that would “knock the hell” out of Detroit. As a Newsweek story reported afterwards, “A visitor to her Encino (Calif.) office recalls her as a big, stocky woman, at least 6 feet tall, thrusting out a large, beefy hand with pink nails and saying in a low, husky voice: ‘I am a genius.’” (Newsweek, Mar. 3, 1975). Plenty of “self-esteem” there! Scorning her subordinate executives, she declared that she had “more b - - - s than all of them put together.” Yes, truly a tough tycoon in the heroic mould.

Liz Carmichael’s financial methods were, to say the least, unorthodox, as she sold shares in her company to “countless” numbers of people. One gimmick that she used: she would take out Situation Wanted ads in the newspapers, and when the applicant applied for a job in Twentieth Century Motors, he wouldn’t get the job, but she would manage to sell him shares of stock. (Unorthodox, slightly shady financing, but unorthodox means “heroic” and innovative, right?)

The lady was flying high. Liz Carmichael claimed to have raised $30 million and swore that she would be producing 88,000 Dales by the end of 1975. But by early 1975, the shades of night began to close in. The highly respected Road and Track magazine analyzed the proclaimed car and subjected it to a withering critique, pointing out, for example, that its supposed 40 h.p. engine was considerably smaller than that of many motorcycles. No wonder it would get 70 miles per gallon! But would it get any speed on the road? More formidably, various arms of the law began to zero in on Twentieth Century Motors. In late January, the firm’s P.R. man, an ex-convict, was shot to death by another ex-con employee in the company’s offices. Investigations ensued. In early February, top officers of the firm were arrested, charged with conspiring to commit theft by selling dealerships and options based on false claims. Shortly afterward, a judge placed the company in receivership, and the sheriff of Dallas (where Liz Carmichael had moved the company) went looking for our entrepreneur. Liz skipped town, and there is now a warrant out for her arrest. And no one seems to know how much money was taken in, or where the money is (presumably with Liz Carmichael.) And presumably there isn’t any workable car either.

It soon turned out that nobody knew who Liz Carmichael was. The town where she claimed she was born never heard of her, and there was no record of her in the colleges she claimed to have attended. Her social-security number and driver’s license turned out to be fakes, and the earliest record anyone had of her was in 1971, when she was wanted for passing a bad check. There also seemed to be no record of the five children that had been living with her.

An even more bizarre note appeared when the police searched Mrs. Carmichael’s home, and found a substantial amount of curious clothing: including wigs, a waist cincher, and a crotch suppressor—standard transvestite fare. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle wittily concluded: it might turn out that Liz Carmichael’s boast that she had more b—s than all of her male executives put together was the only true statement “she” ever made.

The latest chapter in the Liz Carmichael saga are A.P. dispatches for April 8 and 14. The authorities have now identified and captured “Liz Carmichael” as one Jerry Dean Michael, 47, a federal fugitive since 1962 when he jumped bail on a counterfeiting charge. The Dallas D.A.’s office, furthermore, has charged that no plans ever existed to produce the Dale car.

And so there we have it: the latest “libertarian” ripoff, and a transvestite one at that. I have no idea how many wealthy and not-so-wealthy libertarians invested in this con-game, but knowing the movement and the record of its brief history, I have a strong hunch that the number of libertarian suckers is formidable.

We return to our original question: what is there in the libertarian makeup that makes us patsies for bunco artists (the motivation of the bunco artist himself is, of course, all too clear)? I have an answer that can only be speculative, but it seems to have a good deal of persuasive power. There is in all too many libertarians the Randian-Great Man theory of history, a mind-set that holds that history is constantly being turned upside down by heroic innovators who arrive on the scene out of left field, and proceed to make millions and affect the course of the world. They arrive out of the blue, they invent some sort of “Rearden metal,” and presto! the world is changed. Of course, once in a great while such innovators do arrive on the scene. But, in the first place, their inventions and innovations generally take a long while to make their way to fame and fortune. More importantly, for every Thomas Edison there are thousands of crackpot “innovators” whose new inventions don’t amount to a hill of beans, or who are frauds, con-men, and ripoff artists. Reciting a list of the Great Men who Made It is terribly misleading if we forget the far more numerous list of the cranks and screwballs who didn’t make it. And so, to the general gullibility of the public (best expressed in the immortal P. T. Barnum phrase, “there’s a sucker born every minute”) we add the Great Man mind-set of libertarians influenced by the Randian world-view.

What we desperately need, therefore, is a healthy skepticism about new and dramatic announcements of great new entrepreneurs that have just arrived on the scene. Particularly should we be skeptical of the luftmenschen with no visible credentials, who suddenly appear out of the blue to announce their great new thing. For there is a profound sense in which the mass of skeptics who grudgingly greet the news of all allegedly great innovations are right; for if it’s really going to be a new “Rearden metal”, it will eventually make its way in the marketplace. There is no need for libertarians to rush into the field With hooplas everytime somebody announces the greatness of their new invention or discovery. Otherwise, all we accomplish is a tragic waste of all-too-scarce libertarian resources.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII, NO. 6

JUNE, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM

Looking at the state of the country today, it is all too easy for the libertarian to fall prey to a profound pessimism. The crises which libertarians and Austrian economists have been predicting for years are now coming true, in area after area of government activity. A severe inflation combined with the biggest depression since the 1930’s; huge and ever-increasing federal deficits; virtual bankruptcy in New York City; the total collapse of American foreign policy; near-bankruptcy in New York City; violence over forced bussing; the crises brought about by Big and growing government are multiplying at every hand. It is easy, then, to despair and to look forward gloomily to a march into total collectivism. In some libertarians, the tendency is therefore to look for a personal cop-out, into one’s cave or onto one’s lonely island.

But this despair is the result of a linear, mechanistic view of the historical process; it is tragically one-sided, for it leaves out the essential dialectic—the action and reaction—of the historical process, an action-and-reaction that comes to a head in times of pervasive and systemic crisis such as the United States has now entered. By “dialectic”, I hasten to add, I am not referring to the Marxian “dialectical materialism”, but simply to the vital but complex action-and-reaction, cause-and-effect linkages in human affairs. It is precisely because we have entered a mighty systemic crisis, a crisis of the entire U.S. polity and political economy, that the outlook for the future of liberty in the United States has, in my view, never been brighter—at least for well over a century.

For the pervasive American crisis is precisely a crisis of the breakdown of statism. We libertarians have been preaching for years that statism, in addition to its gross immorality, doesn’t work, particularly in an industrial economy such as we have had for over a century. Until the last few years, our pronouncements have been whistling in the wind. No matter how sound or even persuasive our theory, the American economy and polity has seemed to be working, and working splendidly. In particular, the great post-World War II boom that only collapsed in 1973-74 seemed to be splendid and unending. In that sort of euphoric atmosphere, very few people were disposed to listen to us or to the libertarian message. Who cared about the growth of the State when, domestically, living standards were increasing, unemployment was low, and, in foreign affairs, America was seemingly the mightiest nation on earth? Unfortunately, especially in a pragmatic world, morality cuts very little ice so long as the system seems to be successful. We knew that the prosperity and the seeming world strength were false and hollow, but no one is disposed to listen to Jeremiah or Cassandra while apparent success has been achieved.

But in the last few years, and especially since 1973, statism has reached its permanent, systemic crisis; statism is collapsing on every hand, breaking down from its own inherent and grave inner contradictions. We have at last reached what Ludwig von Mises foresaw twenty-five years ago: in his terms, “the exhaustion of the reserve fund.” When the modern march toward statism and away from approximate laissez-faire began at the turn of the twentieth century, there was an enormous amount of “fat” in the economy, a fat created by a century of roughly laissez-faire capitalism. So great was the fat, or cushion, that government intervention and regulation seemed to have no ill effect. The ill effects, libertarians and laissez-faire liberals knew full well, were there all right, but they were hidden by the general prosperity created by the previous free economy, and by the remaining preponderance of the free market. And so the general public, intellectuals, businessmen, the media, could blithely hack away at the foundations of our prosperity and our freedom with total disregard or ignorance of the eventual unfortunate consequences.

Furthermore, the two major forms of twentieth-century statism were, at least in form, brand-new. One form was Marxian socialism, which claimed to be able to bring about the classical liberal ideals (peace, freedom, prosperity for the mass of the population) through old-style despotic and collectivistic means. Proletarian socialism was, indeed, a brand-new idea and system in world history, it presented what to many people were attractive features, and the Marxist call for their seemingly noble “social experiment” proved to be a seductive one in an age that had abandoned principle for a mindless pragmatism. Why not give it a chance? That chance has now manifestly failed. The other new system was the corporate state, essentially the present system, which began in the Progressive period, and flowered in many forms here and abroad: the Keynesian mixed economy, fascism, corporatism. While we knew that this was only the old discredited mercantilism in a new form, the rest of the world failed to see this; for the new mercantilists were able to cloak their system in the rhetoric of a Tory democracy, a welfare-warfare State seemingly tailored to the requirements of the new industrial era. In short, the neo-mercantilist conservatives, too, abandoned their devotion to old-style monarchy and the established Church, and refurbished their authoritarian statism to mould a new system of corporate industrialism cloaked in a democratic, demagogic form. This was the system that soon came to triumph in the United States and in the Western world, and this is the system that is now rapidly coming apart at the seams in the U.S. and in Western Europe, riven at long last on the ineluctable but heretofore hidden rock of its momentous inner contradictions.

And the great thing is that all over the country, people in all walks of life, among former liberals, intellectuals, the media, the general public, and even among confused and bewildered politicians, are realizing that it is precisely statism that is breaking down. In the Great Depression of the 1930’s, it was easy for socialists and corporatists to pin the blame for that breakdown on “laissez-faire”. Again, we knew that the cause was the inflationist interventionism of the Federal Reserve System and other central banks during the 1920’s: but it proved impossible to get this message across to intellectuals and to the general public; for they had all been under the impression that we had had a laissez-faire system during the 1920’s. Hence, laissez-faire got tagged with the blame for the Great Depression, and corporatist statism and collectivism could take an enormous leap forward into our present system.

But now, except for a few fringe Marxists who persist in blaming “capitalism”, it is more and more generally realized that it is the State and statism that are breaking down. Everyone knows, for example, that we have had an enormous amount of statism and government intervention, foreign and domestic, for forty years now; and so it is clear to virtually everyone that laissez-faire cannot take the blame this time. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that the major locus of failure is precisely in government, in the spheres of uniquely or preponderantly government activity or influence; government is now so clearly and manifestly to blame that more and more people, even former advocates of government and the Welfare-Warfare State, are jumping ship and are adopting libertarian or quasi-libertarian ideals.

In short, the “objective” conditions for the ending of statism and the triumph of liberty are now at hand in the overall, systemic crisis of the State; and the “subjective” conditions for victory are now rapidly arriving, in that more and more people, in all walks of life, are seeing and understanding that breakdown and hence shifting rapidly to libertarian positions. The “exhaustion of the reserve fund” means that every time government acts it creates an “instantaneous negative feedback”—so that the evil consequences of government, heretofore masked, are now glaringly evident to all. Statism is breaking down, people are more and more realizing that fact, and hence the triumph of liberty comes ever closer. Instead of being pessimistic, libertarians should rejoice, because the march of history is now ineluctably ours. We have turned the corner. We always knew that, in the long run, we would triumph because truth was on our side and because statism could not work in the industrial era; but now that long-run is at hand. We are at last entering the “long-run”.

And so it was perfectly legitimate for our libertarian forefathers at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the thirties and forties of this century, to despair. They knew, most of them, that in the long run we would probably triumph. But all they had to look forward to was decades, maybe generations, of the closing in of the dark night of statism and collectivism. They could only look back nostalgically to the nineteenth century as a Golden Age, and gird themselves to face mounting statism and despair. They had every right to despair, our forebears who suffered through the tragic growth of statism and collectivism on every hand, and who saw the devotees of liberty and the free market shrink to a tiny band who could only keep the flame for future generations. They were, as the great Albert Jay Nock despairingly wrote, only “the remnant”, though a glorious remnant they were. And so let us hail them and emphathize with their suffering and their courage in holding out against the world: Spencer, Pareto, Tucker, Ortega, Mencken, Nock, and all the others, who each in their way tried to fight a battle that seemed increasingly lost. But let us not become so mired in the despair of the past that we fail to recognize that we have turned the corner, and that the prognosis for liberty is now onward and upward into the glorious light of a new dawn. We have indeed reached the light at the end of our tunnel.

It is our good fortune that the breakdown of the American State is systemic and pervasive in every part: not just in economic policy, but in social and foreign policy as well. And in all these areas, more and more people are increasingly pinning the blame right where it belongs: on government itself, not just on “bad” leaders, but on the very system of government intervention. There is, for example, the pervasive and magnificent distrust of government per se, the healthy “post-Watergate” climate. Not in generations have the press and the media, and formerly liberal intellectuals, been so cynical about government per se. Never again will we have the blind pre-Watergate trust in our secret police: the FBI, CIA, etc. Never again will we regard the once sacred President as a quasi-divine monarch who is fated to lead the world and who can do no wrong. In the wake of Vietnam, never again will we have blind faith in the Wilson-FDR-etc. foreign policy of “collective security” and global meddling. Never again will we have blind faith in any politician.

On the economic front, there is of course the inflationary depression, which has put the boots to the arrogant pretensions of Establishment economists, to our faith in the Keynesian way. But not only that: the near bankruptcy of such a revered institution as the Social Security system has now led to a widespread disenchantment with that system. It is increasingly reported that to remain solvent in the future, social security taxes alone will have to rise to 40%, an intolerable level for the average American. The near-bankruptcy of New York City government is a glorious blessing; because it has brought home to everyone the truth that local and state governments cannot keep spending and borrowing indefinitely; that the day of reckoning is at hand, and that, since the public will not tolerate higher tax burdens, government budgets will have to be cut and cut sharply in the years ahead. The public is finally learning that you can’t have your cake and eat it, now that the “fat” on the cake (to mix our metaphors) is no longer there. Who would have thought ten, even five years ago that the day would ever come in our lifetime when the good, grey New York Times would spend a quarter-page debating the merits and demerits of New York City government defaulting on its bonds? And the very opposition to default highlights its libertarian merits: for once New York City defaults, not only will no one buy its bonds in the future, but all municipal bonds will be discredited hereafter, and all governments will have to cut back.

Furthermore, the breakdown of regulated industries—notably railroads and increasingly the airlines—is bringing home even to liberals that government regulation itself is the cause of the problem. More and more, in surprisingly high circles, the reasoned call is coming for the abolition of government regulatory agencies altogether. No less a high personage than Federal Trade Commission chairman Lewis Engman has called repeatedly for the abolition of the ICC, CAB, and other regulatory agencies. Even Senator Kennedy, of all people, is increasingly receptive to the idea of such abolition.

Another hopeful straw in the wind is the fact that Senator Edward Brooke (R., Mass.), heretofore a standard left-liberal, has just adopted the full Austrian theory of our current inflation, blaming our economic crisis on the “malinvestments” (Brooke even uses this uniquely Austrian term) brought about by the boom in inflationary bank credit. Brooke concludes that we should (a) stop monetizing government debt, (b) cut the government budget, and (c) lower taxes on private saving and investment. When someone like Senator Brooke becomes an Austrian economist surely our victory is at hand. (See the May 20 release from Senator Brooke, “Brooke Urges New Economic Policy”).

There are also hopeful developments in the sphere of concrete political action. New York State has just repealed its pernicious structure of “fair trade” laws, which for forty years has crippled retail competition and raised prices to consumers. The Federal Trade Commission is moving to abolish all state laws that, at the behest of the organized pharmacists, have prohibited pharmacies from advertising prescription drug prices, and have thereby kept drug prices unconscionably high and crippled competition among retail pharmacies. On the civil liberties front, California has just abolished laws prohibiting various sexual activities among consenting adults, at least in private.

Particularly heart-warming is the article by Larry Martz, “Say-Nay Politics”, in Newsweek, June 9. Martz writes soberly about the new, pervasive mood in America of distrust of government, and of moving to reduce the role of government in American life. Martz writes of a “current stirring in America”, a “new mood . . . running strong in the city halls, the statehouses and the talk of both major parties.” The mood he identifies as a “mistrust of government itself and a doubt approaching despair that the nation’s problems can be solved at all (by government)”. Martz estimates that the result “could be a change in American politics as basic as the upheaval of the Depression years . . . forcing both parties to campaign on a new set of issues.”

The most prominent embodiment of this new mood is the startling record of the new California governor, Jerry Brown. In his brief term in office, Brown, seemingly a standard left-liberal in the past, has “out-Reaganed Reagan” to embark on a systematic campaign of reducing government activity on every front. Brown has been preaching government austerity, has pared the budget, fired bureaucrats, and has denounced conservatives for inconsistently favoring Big Government in the military sphere, and civil libertarians for advocating Big Government in economics. Brown states that “people feel that things are being done to them, not for them. Sometimes non-action is better. Sometimes we need fewer programs, less planning, more space to live our lives.” Martz writes that, “since taking office in January, Brown has taken a 7 per cent cut in his own salary and asked his Cabinet to follow suit. His social attitudes are even tougher; as one example, he declares flatly that prisons are for punishment, not rehabilitation.” (The Szasz line?) On the other hand. Brown took the lead in pushing through the sexual victimless crime repeal. Martz also writes that Brown, “taking a populist leaf from Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s book, . . . governs as the gadfly of his own bureaucrats, deriding their attache cases, deploring their jargon and very nearly calling them pointy-headed.”

Furthermore, one of our leading libertarians recently had a three-hour conference with Gary Davis, Brown’s executive secretary and the leading theoretician of Brown’s administration, and was dumfounded to find Davis, on his own and without prompting, going on and on to propound fully libertarian positions and sentiments. Davis’s denunciation of government per se was startling to our libertarian friend, well-versed und skeptical as he is in the ways of politicians.

In Illinois, as Martz points out, Governor Daniel Walker has been pursuing a similar course for the last three years. Firing bureaucrats, calling for lower taxes, cutting the state budget, Walker has managed to anger all the politicians and vested interests in state government, but has solidified his popularity among the voters. Walker has managed, over intense opposition by the entrenched Illinois bureaucracy, to cut the number of state employees by 10 per cent, and to stop any increase in taxes.

Martz points to the following highly-placed politicians who are adopting variants of this new budget-cutting line: Governors Carey of New York, Apodaca of New Mexico. Longley of Maine, Boren of Oklahoma, and Lamm of Colorado, as well as mayors Bradley of Los Angeles and Young of Detroit. Furthermore, he notes that prominent Atlanta lawyer David Gambrell is now promoting a “Wait-a Damn Minute” movement, “aimed at fending off nearly all government action, with a nostalgic motif from Will Rogers: “There is good news from Washington today. The Congress is deadlocked and can’t act.”

Martz notes that the new anti-government mood is pervasive, particularly among the broad bulk of the nation’s middle class. But, he adds, “the disaffected stretch across the social spectrum, showing increasing resentment not only at the inadequacies of government but at its intrusion into their lives—whether in heavy-handed regulation of business, intervention in a community’s choice of school textbooks, forced busing to achieve integration or the maddening imposition of auto seat-belt interlocks (now happily repealed.)” Moreover, he recognizes the solid roots of this new mood in economic reality, particularly the inflationary erosion of the real incomes of the masses, as well as the growing whipsaw burden of the progressive income tax. Martz concludes that “Inflation and the growing burden of the Federal debt are finally breaking up the coalition of interests that has supported most government programs ever since the New Deal. ‘As long as the pie was expanding.’ said Atlanta educator (Dr. Lisle) Carter, ‘the deal was that you could have yours as long as I got mine. But that was very expensive, and the problem is you can’t keep expanding the pie indefinitely.’ ‘We’ve reached the limit of the national debt,’ said June Degnan, a Democratic contributor and fund raiser in San Francisco. ‘That’s what the liberals have learned. For every new dollar of spending, something is going to have to be cut. It’s exactly like dealing with a case of cancer—either amputate or die.” Precisely; the recognition of the exhaustion of the reserve fund!

And so, fellow libertarians, we stand at the threshold of the rollback of statism and the victory of liberty; the forces of statism are in rout at every hand, and libertarianism is popping up everywhere, even in the most surprising and unexpected places. The time for optimism is now; how can we fail to lift up our hearts and plunge with joyous enthusiasm into the ever-growing success of the libertarian cause?

From Crank-Up To Crack-Up

By Ludwig von Mises

(Ed. Note: The Libertarian Forum is proud to present, for the first time anywhere, an English translation of an article written by the great economist Ludwig von Mises in the depths of the great world depression, in 1933. In his essay, Mises warned against the popular attempts to “reflate” prices back up to 1929 levels, by means of inflationary credit expansion propelled by governments and their controlled banking system. His warning against supposedly “moderate” inflationism to combat depression is, of course, particularly relevant in today’s world. Mises’ article was entitled, “Der Stand und nachste Zukunft der Konjunkturforschung,” (“The Current State and Immediate Future of Trade Cycle Research”), and it appeared in the Festschrift fur Arthur Spiethoff (Munchen, Duncker & Kumblot, 1933). The translation is by Joseph R. Stromberg, doctoral candidate in history, University of Florida.)

People now and then have defended the view that an understanding of the causes which induce the trade cycle will lead to a smoothing out of these waves by means of economic measures designed to prevent crises. They would choke the boom off early, in order to mitigate the bust which must inevitably succeed it. Thus greater symmetry would appear in the course of economic life. Phenomena accompanying the boom, regarded by many as unwelcome, would disappear entirely in the future, or at least for the most part. Above all, we could severely limit or entirely avoid the sacrifices, which crisis and crackup exact, and which hardly anyone sees as other than negative.

Many have received this prospect with little joy, believing that the beneficent workings of the boom are worth the price of the losses of the depression. Not everything produced in the boom is the result of error, they say, nor must everything be sacrificed in the crises; there are also permanent fruits of the benign cycle, and economic progress cannot do without them. By contrast, the majority of economic policy advocates have termed the elimination of cyclical fluctuations desirable and necessary. Some have arrived at this position because they believe it will contribute to preserving the capitalist system, of which they approve, if the economy is spared the shudders of crises that recur every couple of years; still others have welcomed the coming age of no crises precisely because they believe that in an economy not endangered by cyclical variations no difficulties would arise from elimination of the entrepreneur, who in their eyes is the dispensable beneficiary of an odd sort of diligence.

All these writers, whether they looked with favor or disfavor on the smoothing out of cyclical waves, were of the opinion that deeper insight into the causes of the changing circumstances would bring us nearer to an age of smaller fluctuations. Were they correct?

Economic theory cannot answer this question. Here is a problem not of theory, but much more of economic policy, or more properly, economic history. In the future, will we again adopt measures which must lead from boom to crackup, even though the circles which give economic policy its direction are today better informed on the effects of the expansion of circulation credit—however mischievous their economic training may otherwise be—than was the case at least on the Continent of Europe, in other centuries?

Today we can consider the circulation credit theory (monetary theory) of the trade cycle as almost the reigning outlook. Even those who advance other doctrines feel constrained to make decisive concessions to the circulation credit theory. All proposals advanced for combatting the present economic crisis follow chains of reasoning which presuppose the circulation credit theory. Some wish to “crank up” the cycle through expansion of the quantity of fiduciary media because they demand a way out of monetary difficulties at any price—even that of a new crisis following the upswing; others forego these stimuli because they want to avoid the false idyll of a prosperity created by credit expansion and the inevitably succeeding crisis. Even the promoters of the “crank up” and pump-priming programs recognize, insofar as they do not belong to the class of completely hopeless dilettantes and ignoramuses, the certainty of the chain of reasoning of the circulation credit theory. They seek to parry the objections from the standpoint of this theory not at all by disputing its validity, but by hinting that they propose merely a “moderate” or “measured” credit expansion or “creation of money,” solely to arrest or weaken the further decline of prices. Even in the expression “re-deflation,” eagerly used in this connection of late, there is an admission of the circulation credit theory; that significant errors accompany this admission is of course indisputable.

The credit expansion which begins the boom is always undertaken in the belief that we must overcome stagnation through “easy” money. Some (of us) have fruitlessly sought to characterize this position as invalid. Only unfamiliarity with economic history and the political economic literature of the last generation can lead people to dispute that a permanently lower interest rate has appeared as the ideal of economic policy, just as hardly anyone ever has dared to defend the creditor’s view in which the formerly higher interest rate necessarily appears desirable.[1] The desire for easier credit has fostered creation by banks of fiduciary media and has required the continued lowering of the interest rate by them. All measures taken to prevent the “screwing up of bank rates” had as their root the notion that creation of credit for the economy must be made easier. As a rule no one noticed that the lowering of the interest rate through credit expansion must lead to higher prices. For if that had been realized, no one would have sought the policy of easy money.

In the area of price formation public opinion is not as firm as on the question of the interest rate. On this there have always been two opinions: on the one hand, the demand of producers for higher prices, and on the other hand, that of consumers for lower prices. Governments and political parties have declared both demands just—if not exactly at the same time—and have written now one, now the other slogan* on their banners – depending on their voting blocs, for whose favor they strive,** and depending on short-run movements of prices. As prices have risen, they have preached a crusade against the increasingly high cost of living. When prices have fallen, they have declared themselves ready to do everything to assure producers “reasonable” prices again. As a rule, they have acquiesced in measures to reduce prices which could not possibly have obtained the desired result; they have not adopted the only effective measure, the reduction of circulation credit, because they have not wished to drive interest rates back up.[2] On the other hand, in times of falling prices they have found it that much easier to adopt measures of credit expansion, since this expansion could only be realized through an already desired reduction of the interest rate.

Likewise, it is nothing new if today they seek to weaken scruples against circulation credit expansion by claiming that they only wish to reverse the price fall of the last few years or at least to hinder a further decline of prices. Similar arguments were used in the days of the bimetallist movement.

The knowledge that the economic consequences of altering the value of money (leaving aside the effects on the content of liabilities expressed in money terms) can only be ascribed to the fact that the changing value of money does not express itself simultaneously and equally in terms of all goods and services, i.e., that not all prices rise at the same time or to the same degree—this knowledge is hardly still disputed today. People misconstrue, although not as commonly as was still the case a few years ago, the fact that the great length of the present crisis is above all attributable to the way that wages, by means of trade union policy, and some prices, by various supports, have been held constant so that they conform to the downward movement of the prices of most goods, not at all or only with excessive delay. They grant, leaving aside all countervailing political checks, that continuing mass unemployment is a necessary consequence of the attempt, by intervention, to hold wages above the level they would reach on the unhampered market. Even so, they do not draw quite the correct conclusions for economic policy. Nearly all proposals for “cranking up” through credit expansion take it as self-evident that wages will not follow the rising movement of prices until their relative over-valuation has disappeared. People approve all manner of inflationary projects precisely because they do not dare to openly combat the wage policy of the trade unions, favored by public opinion, and its promotion by governments. But as long as the views prevalent today on the formation of wage rates and their implementation through interventionist measures persist, it is not justifiable to assume that in a period of rising prices, money wages can be held constant.

People misunderstand the causal relationships even more when they attach special expectations to proposals for limited credit expansion. Entrepreneurs are seduced by the plentiful and easier credit available, into busying themselves with ventures which did not appear profitable at the higher interest rate corresponding to the unhampered money market, provided they believe that the lower interest rates will persist indefinitely so that they can base their calculations on them. If it becomes widely known that the creation of extra credit is going to end, people will in due course become concerned and the expected effect will be lacking. No one will undertake new ventures when he knows in advance that they cannot be carried out profitably. The failure of the pump-priming attempts of recent times shows that people, with a view to the pronouncements of the authorities responsible for the policies of the banks of fiduciary media, must have realized that the period of easy money would soon come to an end. One cannot “crank-up” through credit expansion without speaking already of future contraction. That every credit expansion must finally end through suspension of further extra credit issue, and that this suspension must cause a change in the state of business, was known long ago to the economists, and a glance at the daily and weekly press during boom years since the middle of the last century shows that this realization was not limited to a small circle. But speculators, averse to all theory, did not know it and undertook new ventures. When, however, governments proclaim that the expansion of credit can only continue a short while, then (the truth) can escape no one.

People are quite prepared to overrate what has been accomplished in recent years towards understanding the trade cycle, and greatly to underrate the achievements of the Currency School. For practical cyclical policy we have not yet exhausted what can be learned from the doctrines of the old Currency theorists. Up to now, practice has hardly been able to learn anything from modern cycle theory that it could not have already learned from the Currency doctrine. Unfortunately, theory always leaves practice in the lurch just where advice is most urgent: in the understanding of declining prices. The general price decline was considered at all times unwelcome: today the downward rigidity of wages and many other cost factors upset any impartial treatment of the problem, more than previously. It is high time fundamentally to examine the effects of declining money prices and to consider the widespread viewpoint that declining prices and gradual enlargement of the social product, and also of wellbeing, are incompatible. This raises the question of whether it now follows that only inflationary processes make possible progressive capital formation and the shaping of the productive mechanism. As long as naive inflationary theories of progress are held, proposals to induce the boom through credit expansion will always be adopted. The Currency theory has already demonstrated the necessary connection between credit expansion and the course of fluctuations—if only in a chain of reasoning which merely considered credit expansion limited to a single nation and did not know how to judge correctly the case of uniform actions in all states, which, in an age of efforts toward cooperation between the (central) banks issuing fiduciary media are especially important. That, nonetheless, the banks of fiduciary media have always set out on the path of credit expansion is traceable to the view of the benefits of rising prices and their indispensability for “progress,” and to the belief that expansion of circulation credit is an appropriate means to keep the interest rate low. The relationship between the issue of fiduciary media and the formation of interest rates is today sufficiently clear, at least adequate to the immediate requirements of economic policy. The problem of falling prices remains to be resolved.

1. It was always so. Public opinion has always sided with debtors. (Cf. Bentham. Defence of Usury. Second Edition, London, 1790, p. 102 ff.) The idea has not been given up that the creditor is a rich, idle exploiter, hardheartedly insisting on his paper rights, while the debtor is a poor unfortunate victim of usury—even in this age of stocks and bonds and bank and savings deposits.

* Losung, which we translate here as “slogan”, has the same spelling as another German word which translates as “droppings.”

** Buhlen, which we translate as “strive”, has a secondary meaning of “have illicit intercourse.” Since Mises could have used a number of other German words for “strive” one concludes perforce that he is subtly smiting the enemy hip and thigh. This, of course, is the Cervantean method of attack. Translator’s Note.

2. A gross example: the discount policy of the German Reichsbank during the period of inflation. Cf. Graham. Exchange, Prices and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany, 1920-1923 (Princeton, 1930), pp. 65f.

The Bankruptcy Of Liberalism

The monthly magazine Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, is a distinguished journal of middle-of-the-road liberalism. In recent years, Commentary has published many trenchant attacks on left-egalitarianism. In its June, 1975 issue, contributing editor Milton Himmelfarb (brother of the eminent historian, the neo-conservative and anti-libertarian Gertrude Himmelfarb), turns his attention to a critique of Libertarianism (“Liberals & Libertarians”). Focussing on Robert Nozick’s recent book and mentioning your Lib. Forum editor in passing, Himmelfarb, in attempting to combat our “hypertrophy of the principle of liberty”, first flounders around a bit in confusion and flagrant disregard for logic. Thus, he quotes Nozick’s blistering attack on the typical/centrist defense of outlawing acts of consenting adults committed on public streets: “If the majority may determine the limits on detestable behavior in public (e.g., nudity or fornication or inter-racial handholding), may they, in addition to requiring that no one appear in public without clothing, also require that no one appear in public without wearing a badge certifying that he has contributed n per cent of his income to the needy during the year, on the grounds that they find it offensive to look at someone not wearing the badge? . . .” To this keen exercise in logic, Himmelfarb can only throw up his hands in horror and say that “this is the debater speaking, who wants to razzle-dazzle us into believing there is no ethical difference. . . .,” etc.

After a few pages of this sort of twaddle, Himmelfarb falls back on his ultimate—and really only—refusation of libertarianism, on which he expounds for the remainder of the article. His final defense is: no less than the religion of Orthodox Judaism. Chiding Nozick and (without naming him, Boston radio commentator Avi Nelson) for being untrue to the Orthodox Jewish tradition (Nelson is even a “rabbi’s son”—tsk, tsk!). Himmelfarb goes on to lengthy quotes from the Old Testament and other elements of the Orthodox rite. Himmelfarb, furthermore, thinks he has caught Nozick in a deep contradiction because Nozick repeatedly quotes Jews such as Martin Buber and I. B. Singer. He adds that he expects libertarianism to appeal more to “non-Jewish Jews” because libertarianism “seeks to break the chains of tradition and traditional community.”

There is no doubt about it; Himmelfarb is right; the God of Israel, the god responsible (according to his own acolytes) for countless mass murder, injustice, and theocratic despotism, is not a libertarian. Not hardly. But so what? Is the last defense of liberalism really to fall back upon a religion of theocracy, of tribalism, of rank superstition? So much the worse for liberalism; never has the bankruptcy of liberalism been more starkly revealed. Surely few people in the modern world are ready to abandon reason and enlightenment for the swamp of tribal superstition. Yes, Himmelfarb is right that libertarianism “seeks to break the chains of tradition and traditional community” when those chains, as in Orthodox Judaism, clamp fetters of theocracy and tribalism upon the reason and the freedom of the individual person. Yes, Himmelfarb, libertarian radicalism promises that “no more tradition’s chains shall bind us”; the dead hand of Orthodox Judaism disappeared with the emancipation of the Jews of the western world after the French Revolution, and no Humpty-Dumptys—even the last remnants of intellectual liberalism—can put it together again.

Recommended Reading: Hayek Interview

Hayek Interview. In the course of his current tour of the United States. Nobel Laureate in economics, and dean of the Austrian School, F. A. Hayek, has given an excellent and hard-hitting interview to the Gold & Silver Newsletter (June, 1975). In the interview. Hayek sets forth an uncompromising Austrian explanation of the length of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The significance of this is that Hayek, in the past, had sometimes given hostage to the Keynesian view that at least the length, though not the onset, of the Depression was caused by a non-Austrian “secondary deflation”, to be combatted by Keynesian methods. But in this interview, Hayek is firmly Austrian all the way. Thus, in explaining the length of the Depression of the 1930’s, Hayek states:

“Instead of allowing the market to correct the misdirections of labor and resources that occurred during the inflationary boom, the government believed they could cure the depression by keeping up wages. Hoover began the policy, but Roosevelt greatly expanded it. . . . Policies of government intervention in the economy led internationally to exchange controls, restrictions on foreign trade and other policies that only made matters worse.

The absence of a sound international monetary system was another factor that was responsible for the length of the depression. One of the single most important mistakes that unnecessarily prolonged the depression was Roosevelt’s decision to go off the gold standard.” (So much for Milton Friedman!)

The Gold & Silver Newsletter is available from Monex International, Ltd., 4910 Birch St., Newport Beach, Calif. 926600

On Income Differences

By William R. Havender
Dept. of Genetics
University of California, Berkeley

Recent articles in Commentary and other publications that have reviewed Christopher Jencks’ new book, “Inequality,” have debated what should be done to reduce income disparity. But at least two essential issues have largely been ignored in these discussions. The first is the means by which income inequalities arise. These come about differently in different social systems, and the moral case for their elimination, rather than being self-evident, depends critically upon the social context. In an aristocracy, the wealth of the elite is extracted by force from the common people in a sort of zero sum game, where the income of some must be lost by others. An egalitarian policy in this setting would undoubtedly serve the interests of morality, since the income distribution initially results from compulsion. This is not true of a market economy, where one’s income is set by the value placed upon the services one offers to others. Market-determined income is a return for rendered benefits, whose magnitude is specified in voluntary negotiation with one’s clients. Differences in income reflect different market valuations of these services, and great incomes are generated by supplying others with resources of great value or rarity. Felix Wankel, for example, will probably well be able to keep himself supplied with fine wines, if the extra value of his engine to each of millions of users turns out to be as much as one dollar. Since no one loses, income inequality in this case cannot so routinely be identified with inequity.

But such mutual benefit is on principle a property of every voluntary exchange. Income disparity arising in this context comes about solely from the specialization of labor, and from the fact that certain services are more desired, or are scarcer, than others. That is why it is not clear what is meant by the concept of a “just” distribution of income, as somehow distinct from that which results from the plebiscite of the market; the market’s verdict already is very just, in the sense that one’s income, and hence, one’s claim upon the limited resources of society, is proportional to the value of one’s services to others. Similarly off the mark is the assertion that “the people” object to and demand redress of income inequality, when, in fact, income differences originate in the first instance through the people’s casting of dollar votes in the marketplace; these differences, therefore, are the manifestation, over time, of the expressed will of the people in this regard. It is obvious, then, that those who oppose this do not speak for the majority.

Because of the voluntary nature of market exchanges, it is exceedingly difficult to justify the intrusion of third parties—such as sociologists, or politicians—into two party transactions, as for example when they attack the income profile which thereby results. Does one have an unconditional right to negotiate the terms under which one will exchange one’s services, or not? To argue that third parties do have standing to interfere simply diminishes the extent to which one’s work serves one’s own purposes, a view more usually associated with fascism than with actual income distribution in America reflects the impact of involuntary or nonmarket forces such as discrimination, fraud or government indulgences. And so it does. But these influences should be vigorously opposed precisely because they do cause a departure from the income allocation which otherwise would correspond to the people’s market wishes, and so cannot be used to buttress the much greater departure which the goal of income equality itself represents.

The second curiously omitted yet surpassingly important issue is this: immanent in any proposal to eliminate income inequality is the necessity of creating a much greater inequality of political power. In simple words, the right to determine the disposal of earned income will be transferred from a large number of moderately or very wealthy individuals to the small number of archons momentarily regnant in the offices of government. Whilst the money may well be passed to the poor, the power will remain with “them above”—the State. No matter what public purpose might superficially be served by this transfer, the essence of the political change will be a vast increase in the centralization of social control. And the ensuing inequality of political power—that between rulers and subjects—could not be rendered innocuous by the democratic process, since transitory majorities are as capable as monarchs of arbitrary tyranny against politically weak groups. More than likely, the grand increase in the stakes brought about by this increment in state authority would greatly intensify and embitter the political struggle for power, as has already occurred in those areas where the government has sought to control private economic power through regulatory agencies. This prospect is much more sinister than what, by contrast, appears to be the mild and diffuse inequality of power now accompanying existing income differences.

Since this aggrandizement of political inequality manifestly would be the paramount result of a policy of equalizing income, it is baffling that Christopher Jencks would offer, as one of the grounds for his income-flattening proposals a desire to ensure “that everyone exercise the same amount of political power.” Exactly the opposite is the likely consequence, should this intellectual frolic ever be adopted. Moreover, this authority must of necessity be used for more than mere redistribution. For, if a person will have the same level of living whatever he does, what will make him work? “If there is no carrot to encourage effort, there will have to be a stick. Enforced egalitarianism also means a slave state. It is a horrible, not an inspiring, vision.” (Milton Friedman, Newsweek, 2/28/72).

Income differences, then, are inescapable and unobjectionable in a society grounded in personal liberty. Here, as always, the attenuation of our political freedom has been gussied up with an obscuring veil of lofty but illusive objectives. Hence, one must scrutinize this bride, egalitarianism, with assiduous care before closing the purchase.

The Ethics Gap

The scientific revolution of the last decade in the fields of genetics and the life sciences has been more an affirmation of the imagination of science fiction novelists than of the expectations of the average citizen. In less than a decade, the transplanting of vital organs—heart, kidney, lungs, eyes—have become normal medical procedures; genetic engineering, gene therapy, cloning and in vitro fertilization open the way to human control of population and procreation almost beyond our psychic toleration; the breakdown in the traditional Judaeo-Christian reverence for life which prohibited abortion, sterilization, suicide and euthanasia is now manifest in our society, and ethical limitations on future scientific manipulation of our biological, neurological and behavioral systems are weak or non-existent. The scientific revolution has created the need for extensive ethical research to provide some moral framework for the scientists themselves, for physicians, law makers, and individual citizens faced with technological possibilities unknown to previous generations. Just the prolongation of ordinary life span threatens vast economic dislocations in a society unprepared for a population in which those over sixty may come to outnumber those under twenty; the social security system, the insurance industry, the public and private school systems and the various industries that have developed around the high birth rates of post-1945 America face severe economic crisis in the next quarter century. To what extent will the productive work force subsidize the non-productive: the aged, the sick, the incompetent, the insane, the early pensioner? If nothing else interposed itself, inflation alone would create an increasing proportion of the aged population who will be unable financially to support themselves until normal termination of life. Thus, the revolution in the life sciences is going to create within a few short years enormous strains upon the economy as it is now structured, and create problems of a social, political, legal and especially ethical dimension almost beyond our imagination.

In 1969 a research center was established in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, to study the ethical and socio-legal implications of the rapidly developing technologies of the biological, neurological and behavioral life sciences. Under the direction of Daniel Callahan, a distinguished theologian and philosopher, the Institute for Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences began publication of an annual Bibliography of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, an invaluable tool for anyone interested professionally in the problems raised in the field defined by the title; it also has published a series of special studies, and a 16-page Hastings Center Report (six issues annually) which contains specialized bibliographies, brief reports on special issues of concern, and a number of “case studies” followed by debate on the ethical or legal implications. Among the recent topics were: a study on the right to privacy (“The Psychiatrist as a Double Agent”); the use of behavioral modification techniques in prisons; use of the methodone treatment as an alternative to other methods: various incidents involving definitions of medical ethics, fetal research, abuses in sterilization practices; genetic screening; and the social implications of technology.

The Institute does not appear to have any particular ethical bias: it chiefly seeks to stimulate an awareness of the frequently ignored ethical implications of scientific and technological innovation. Thus, while not committed to a systematic libertarian analysis, by placing a stress on ethics and its relationship to the life sciences, the Institute encourages its contributors and audience to confront the human rights of individuals and I he full dimensions and demands of the concept of human dignity.

The work of the Institute should be of great interest to all libertarians, and I would highly recommend use of their publications, especially by those interested in legal, medical, ethical or scientific problems. Membership privileges include receipt of all publications. (Students, $10; others $15, Institutions, $25.) Write to: Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, 623 Warburton Avenue, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York 10706.

Burton K. Wheeler, Montana Isolationist, RIP

By Leonard P. Liggio

Several years ago the Merv Griffin Show featured Burton K. Wheeler, former Senator from Montana, and Earl Browder, former general secretary of the Communist Party USA. Both ancients had suffered purges by their respective parties, essentially for the same reason—their commitment to Americanism, Browder, Kansas-born, was in the tradition of native American radicalism, and had joined the CP as the heir to that tradition. His slogan that “communists were as American as apple-pie” brought perhaps millions to join the CP as the partner of Roosevelt’s New Deal. However, his pragmatism brought him into conflict with the Marxist ideologues who probably could not stand being associated with the masses that Browder recruited. The hard-line Hegelians came to the fore and Browder was purged for taking the capitalist road. (Philosophically, many American Marxists have come out of the Pragmatic tradition, typified by Dewey’s pupil, Sidney Hook, whose amalagm of Pragmatism and Hegelianism, made his positions the most diabolic in modern American philosophy.) Browder noted the anguish of the CP leadership at having to shift the line after the June, 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, for before that the Communists were a major force in the American isolationist movement. Wheeler centered his attention on that period because before June, 1941 his opposition to US entry into war was called Communists, while immediately afterwards his opposition was called Fascist; such has been the clear thinking in American politics.

Wheeler had been the leader of the investigation of the Teapot Dome oil grants and of the successful fight of the Senate to block FDR’s Supreme Court packing plan in 1937. Thus, he was approached in May 1940 by those military officers who opposed FDR’s plans to involve the US in war, to lead the opposition to those plans. In FDR’s May 16, 1940 defense message to Congress, he had warned that if Germany was victorious in Europe, it might gain control of Dakar in West Africa and the Cape Verde Islands, which would place it 1500 miles from Brazil from which vital American zones would be attacked and American cities bombed. The military pointed out to Wheeler that German did not have bombers with a range more than 500 miles and that Brazil was further from America than Berlin. FDR’s geopolitics was later demolished by Hanson Baldwin, in United We Stand (1941).

Wheeler immediately agreed to speak to a mass rally in Washington on June 7, 1940 attacking FDR’s geopolitics. On July 1, he addressed the Keep America Out of War Congress in Chicago, and was approached by students from several universities who wanted to organize a national anti-war movement. He sent them to General Robert Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck, and the America First Committee was formed. However, at the Democratic National Convention which nominated FDR to a Third Term, Wheeler encountered a run around end by FDR. FDR wanted the convention platform to call for forcing everyone in America into a government designated role during the emergency. Heroic Senator David I. Walsh of Mass. denounced it as totalitarianism, and Wheeler led the fight to throw it out. But, the interventionist forces were given direct access to the platform writing through the work of FDR’s agent Senator Jimmy Byrnes. Chicago Mayor Edward J. Kelly, one of the heroic but died-out breed of anti-war Chicago mayors, noted that none of his wards would vote for a president running on a war platform. Jimmy Byrnes cornered Kelly in the men’s room to pressure him; Wheeler went in and declared he would belt the convention if a war platform were adopted, and Kelly returned to continue his battle against the defense plank. Given the choice between FDR and Willkie, Wheeler voted the Socialist ticket, since Norman Thomas was opposed to war and was to justify Wheeler’s faith in the Socialist’s anti-war commitment by appearing with Wheeler at America First rallies despite the charge of sentimentalists and liberals that he was sharing the platform with capitalists and businessmen.

Wheeler realized that Secretary of State Hull was anxious to get the US involved in a war against Japan, and fought FDR’s scheme for Lend-lease. On “American Forum of the Air” (which along with “Town Meeting of the Air” were important lost parts of American politics; they were dropped because it would no longer be permitted to have two sides to any issues, there was only the official, Liberal Establishment side), Wheeler declared: “The lend-lease program is the New Deal’s triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” FDR went out of his mind, and Wheeler became the leading speaker, along with Lindbergh, at America First rallies. Joseph P. Kennedy, on returning from the ambassadorship to England, warned Wheeler that Neville Chamberlain had betrayed his Revisionist foreign policy and allowed England to go to war over the Polish boundary dispute with Germany because of “pressure from the United States.”

As Charles Tansill has shown in Back Door to War (Regnery), Roosevelt and Hull played a prominent role in bringing about the conflict in Europe in 1939. Wheeler noted that Roosevelt refused to act as mediator to bring an end to hostilities, as he was interested only in English victory at whatever cost to England and America. He criticized Hull for not seriously negotiating with Japan and recognizing its claims for markets and raw materials; Hull increased the pressure on Japan until Japan finally reacted, which satisfied Hull since he felt it was better to fight the Japanese earlier than later.

Wheeler was at the center of a major furor in the fall of 1941. Military friends gave Wheeler the top secret plan for American military intervention in Europe and Africa in order to save England from defeat. Wheeler gave it to that great journalist of the Chicago Tribune, Chesly Manly, who published the original expose of the August 1941 Atlantic Charter meeting of Churchill and FDR. This December 4, 1941 story was an immediate blockbuster, “the greatest scoop in the history of journalism”, according to Col. Robert R. McCormick, in whose Washington Times-Herald the article appeared As the tide of public opposition to the plan rose, the anti-interventionist movement was silenced by the beginning of war on December 7 1941. Much of the Chesly Manly scoop remains unknown.

“Dr. (John W.) Davis is a lawyer whose life has been devoted to protecting the great enterprises of Big Business. He used to work for J. Pierpont Morgan, and he has himself said that he is proud of the fact. Mr. Morgan is an international banker . . . (whose) operations are safeguarded for him by the manpower of the United States. He was one of the principal beneficiaries of the late war, and made millions out of it. The Government hospitals are now full of one-legged soldiers who gallantly protected his investments then, and the public schools are full of boys who will protect his investments tomorrow.”

H. L. Mencken

BOOKS AND TAPES

by

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

CASSETTE TAPES

Basic Principles of free Market Economics, Tapes 301-316, 16 hours/charts & binder, $137.50, or $150 in 3 installments of $50 each

The Case Against Wage and Price Controls, Tape 127/45 Min. $7.50

Claremont Conference—Defense Agencies, Tape 184, 2 tapes/115 Min. $12.95

Claremont Conference—Property Rights and Birth of The Slate, Tape 183/88 Min. $9.95

Economic Determinism and The Conspiratorial Theory of History, Tape 211/145 Min. $14.95

The Future of Libertarianism, Tape 216/85 Min. $9.95

The Individualist Anarchist Heritage In America, Tape 159/55 Min. $7.50

The Inflationary Boom of The 1920’s, Tape 214/132 Min. $14.95

The New Deal and Post-War international Monetary System, Tape 215/85 Min $9.95

The Old Right and The New. Tape 157/42 Min. $7.50

The Progressive Era Triple Alliance: Government As Cartelizer, Tape 213/156 Min. $15.95

The Rise of Big Business: The Failure of Trusts and Cartels, Tape 212/110 Min. $14.95 Debate: Wage and Price Controls, Rothbard, Stein and Madden, Tape 126, 2 tapes/112 Min. $12.95

Testimonial Dinner Honoring Murray N. Rothbard, Rothbard, Liggio, Grinder, Block, Davidson, Tape 194, 2 tapes/106 Min. $12.95

BOOKS

The Case For the 100% Gold Dollar, $2

America’s Great Depression, $4 The Essential von Mises, $1

Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor, $.50

Man, Economy and State, $30/$10

Power and Market, $6/$3

What Has Government Done To Our Money?, $2

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A New History of Leviathan, with Ronald Radosh (eds.), $3.45

Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, $2.50

For A New Liberty, $7.95

The Libertarian Forum, (bound edition, Rothbard, ed.), $11

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VII. NO. 7

JULY, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

DICTATORSHIPS

For sixty years, American foreign policy has been set on a course of global intervention, ostensibly on behalf of “making the world safe for democracy”, and of securing and expanding the “free world.” Now, sixty years later, the world—and the United States—manifestly far less free than when we began to launch our global Crusades; and dictatorships abound everywhere. Surely, at the very least, we must have been doing something wrong. Indeed, that wrong is the very policy of global intervention itself.

Three burgeoning dictatorships have been much in the news recently, and they provide instructive lessons for libertarians and for Americans generally. The most dramatic, of course, is the brutal takeover of India by Mrs. Indira Gandhi, jailing thousands of political opponents and imposing a drastic censorship on the press. Ever since World War II, the New York Times and the rest of the Establishment press have trumpeted the glories and virtues of India as the “world’s largest democracy”; massive amounts of foreign aid have been pumped into India by the U.S. on the strength of this rosy view of the Indian subcontinent. At the very least, the Establishment press, standing there with egg on its face, will have to mute its paeans to Indian “democracy” in the future. Predictably, American press reaction has been far more in sorrow than in anger, and replete with pitiful hopes that Mrs. Gandhi will revert to democracy soon.

But Indian “democracy”, let alone Indian liberty, has been a sham and a mockery from the beginning. Even in political form, India has suffered from its inception under the one-party rule of the Congress party, with other opposing political groupings shunted to the periphery to preserve democratic camouflage. More important, the Indian polity is one of the most thoroughly rotten in the world: a collectivist mass of statist activities, controls, subsidies, taxes, and monopolies, all superimposed upon a frozen caste system that governs in the rural villages in which most Indians continue to live. Considering this unholy mess, the savaging of the opposition by Mrs. Gandhi comes, not as a sudden and inexplicable act, as Americans tend to see it, but as merely the last link in a chain of statist despotism fastened upon that blighted land. When we discard the myths propagated by the American Establishment, we see that, rather than a source of wonder, Mrs. Gandhi’s takeover becomes all too explicable.

Portugal is another country in the news—as a land slipping rapidly into a military-Communist dictatorship, or rather, into a military despotism employing Communist ideology and the Communist Party as its only political ally. Once again, the American press has reacted to the dramatic events without asking the crucial question: How come? For here was Portugal, governed for fifty years by the fascist military dictatorship of Salazar (and, then, his successors.) So seemingly efficient was Salazar in suppressing dissent that the Birch Society, in its annual “scoreboard” of nations, regularly adjudged Portugal as somewhere around zero percent “Communist”. Much American aid had been poured into the Salazarean regime. And yet, scarcely more than a year after the bloodless Spinola “revolution of the roses”, here in Portugal, of all places, going Communist!

But it is precisely here that an important lesson lies. Far from being a “bulwark” against each other, we should realize that fascist and communist dictatorships are not only similar but easily transformed one into the other. Right-wing and left-wing military dictatorships are readily convertible; for each of them build up the collectivist institutions of statist rule, of big government domination of the economy and of society, of militarist and police repression of their subjects. And so, Salazarean fascist corporatism, with its network of monopolies, restrictions, and controls, its military rule, its apparatus of police terror, can be easily transformed into Communist military rule. The institutions of statism are there; and all that is needed is a reshuffling of the power elites and ruling groups at the top. In this way, the centrist collectivism of the Weimar Republic smoothly paved the way for Hitler’s National Socialism; and the Nazi occupation of Europe, in turn, paved the way for the near takeover by Communist-led Resistance forces after World War II. The important lesson is that it doesn’t really matter who controls the statist and collectivist institutions of Big Government; the important point is the existence of these institutions themselves.

Another crucial, and corollary, point is the non-existence, in these countries, of any classical liberal (let alone libertarian) tradition of ideology or of activist political movements. Classical liberal thought and opinion has been non-existent in India; and the same is true for Portugal. Whatever such movement might have arisen was stamped out in advance by a half-century of Salazarean repression. Portugal, too, is an anomaly within Western Europe. A Backward and still semi-feudal land, Portugal has never really joined the Industrial Revolution, nor has it has any tradition of classical liberal thought or activism. Joined to this was a special Portuguese problem: already dominant in a backward land, the Portuguese military had been swollen and overblown in order to fight an endless and losing colonial war to keep its possessions in Africa. The Portuguese army suffered from an aggravated and triple source of resentment: the losing counter-guerrilla war in Africa; the spectre of obsolescence and unemployment as Portugal liquidates its colonies in Africa and brings the troops back home; and relative loss of income and status to the emerging middle class who had begun to develop in the last decade or so with the beginnings of economic development. In France, the resentful army in Africa turned rightward after its losing war in Algeria; but the Portuguese army scarcely had that option, since it was impossible to become more rightist than Salazar. Furthermore, the imposition of a fully military-Communist regime promised a hefty increase in jobs and status for the now obsolescent and over-expanded army; in short, the Portuguese army could now turn its “imperial” power inward, upon its own economy and society. And as usual under fascist repression, only the disciplined Communist party managed to retain its underground cadres, and so could function as civilian allies. And so the Portuguese army went Left.

Whether military-Communism will succeed in ruling Portugal is still open to question. For the Portuguese Communist Party, headed by the hard-line fanatic Alvaro Cunhal, rests within the rather broad spectrum of world Communist opinion somewhere on the near-lunatic fringe. Cunhal almost makes Stalin look like Tolstoyan pacifist. And so, they might just blow it. But, at any rate, the crucial point is to see the interpenetrability of despotism, right and left, and the hopelessness of liberty in a land where no movement exists on behalf of even classical liberalism, let alone libertarianism.

In seeming contrast to Portugal’s left-wing military dictatorship, Chile’s right-wing military despotism was born, in the fall of 1973, in a revolutionary’ coup against Allende’s Marxist regime. Part of that overthrow was a genuine popular revolution—especially, the revolt of the self-employed truckers and other middle-class groups against the statism and runaway inflation suffered under Allende. But the major faction that engineered the coup—the armed forces, with the help, it now turns out, of the CIA—simply proceeded to continue all the worst features of the old regime, and to add to it a systematic use of massive torture against dissidents and political prisoners. After nearly two years in office, Chile still suffers from nationalization and controls—and from a staggering runaway inflation rate of nearly 400% per year. Unemployment ranges from 13 to over 26%, the armed forces enjoy nearly half the national budget, and foreign investments have not really materialized. Moreover, military officers are in charge of all high schools and colleges, the teaching of all “conflictive subjects” is prohibited, and a compulsory nightly curfew is still in effect.

As Professor Petras writes, even the New York bankers (especially the First National City Bank), the leading backers of the Chilean junta, have become disgusted and are unwilling to pour more good money after bad. As Petras writes, for the New York bankers, “the problem is the disintegrating state of the Chilean economy and the frightening spectacle of a 400 per cent inflation rate.” Chilean Finance Minister Jorge Cauas discovered at his meeting on May 8th with the bankers, that the latter are no longer satisfied with the new regime’s shifting of all the blame on Allende for the present crisis. For “U.S. bankers want to know how promises of cutbacks in public spending, credits and public employment can take place when the junta promises at the same time to reduce unemployment by financing massive public works programs.” (James Petras. “The Chilean Junta Besieged,” The Nation, June 28, 1975 pp. 784ff.)

The final irony is that Cauas is an avowed disciple of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, and has been busy using Friedmanite rhetoric as a cloak for the galloping statism and inflationism of the dictatorial regime. Thus, once again (as in Friedman’s misguided endorsement of the indexing policy of the Brazilian dictatorship), Friedmanism is being used as a free-market cloak for state despotism. Such is the tragedy that must result when “free-market” economists attempt to influence the State from above, and to become efficiency experts for despotism. (See Frank Maurovich, in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle July 13, 1975).

Again, the major lesson of the Chilean tragedy should be clear. Once again, a right-wing dictatorship has simply taken over the pernicious institutions created by a previous left-wing dictatorship. Right and left are brothers under the skin. Once again, massive U.S. foreign aid (supplemented this time by CIA) has only succeeded in strengthening the yoke of despotism upon a foreign land. And, finally, once again we see the absurdity of expecting victories for liberty in a land where no libertarians or classical liberals exist.

The lessons of India, Portugal, and Chile, in short, are the same lessons as those offered by the debacle of American policy in Southeast Asia. The United States must cease its interventions and meddling in foreign lands; interventionism is not only immoral and aggressive; it doesn’t work. We must regain liberty at home, end all interventions in other countries, and return to the historic, forgotten “foreign policy” of serving as an example and a beacon-light of liberty to the rest of the suffering and strifetorn world.

The Division of Labor And The Libertarian Movement

By Tom Palmer*

The Libertarian movement has grown to the point where there must either be a division of labor or a slow disintegration. That division is between the libertarian theorist, and what I choose to call the libertarian technician. Many libertarians fail to realize this basic truth, leaving them in the disastrous position of not practicing what they preach. There seems to be a constant striving on the part of these scholastic “purists” for the ideal “well rounded” libertarian who knows everything about anything, while at the same time scolding those who don’t fit their notion of the ubermensch.

We libertarians have a sound intellectual background and foundation we have the cause of truth, liberty and justice. But these do us no good unless they are promoted professionally. Don Ernsberger, writing in the SIL News, has made an especially unrealistic remark reflecting this dysfunctional strategy. Commenting on the small number of cadre members who attended the last Libertarian Scholars Conference, he petulantly asked “Where are the envelope stuffers now?” (referring to the Tuccille campaign). “Where are the petition circulators and literature distributors?” Obviously, they were elsewhere, pursuing their own utility . . . . doing what they enjoyed. With all due respect to the notable scholarship of Professor Liggio, not all libertarians are interested in the history of French anarchism. While a greater turnout would certainly have been cause of rejoicing, it is ridiculous to chide those who have no interest for not showing up. The envelope stuffers have shown their dedication to liberty, and should be thanked for their useful contribution, rather than the recipients of a backhanded attack.

Our movement has reached the point where we bid fair to become a mass movement against the state. Obviously, not every convert to the cause of liberty will be interested in reading Human Action or The Theory of Money and Credit. As pleasant as the thought of Professor Von Mises’ works standing among the top ten best sellers is, I’m not holding my breath.

We must learn to market our ideas, and to do so professionally. The Libertarian Party is a good vehicle, and an excellent training ground. There is no better way to learn how to market a product than actually to do so.

A little boning up beforehand helps, however. Several excellent books are available, and I suggest that the present or potential promoter of freedom check them out. They include How to be Heard: Making the Media Work For You by Ted Klein and Fred Danzig, You Can Make The Difference by Lee and Ann Edwards, and How To Win An Election by Steven Shadegg. Of these, the first is by far the best and most professional.

Classes at colleges and universities are often offered in public relations, and are generally worth taking. That, plus a good deal of common sense and experience are the ingredients of professionalism and success.

Don’t get the wrong idea, now. I’m not advocating that anyone halt the glorious and rewarding scholarship that marks our movement. Rather, I’m arguing that not to apply the principle of division of labor to ourselves is fatal. It ignores a basic fact of reality and tenet of libertarian individualism, that people are different.

*Mr. Palmer is a youth organizer for the Libertarian Party.

Fanfani’s Fall

By Leonard P. Liggio

Amintore Fanfani’s leadership of the Italian Christian Democratic Party abruptly but at long last has come to an end. Fanfani’s career began in the 1930’s when he wrote a book on Christian and socialist corporatism which paralleled the New Deal. American New Dealers saw him as one of the hopes of the post-New Order Italy, and with the defeat of Italy in World War II, Americans pushed Fanfani’s career. At the end of the Fascist regime in Italy, it was feared that the only successors would be the Communist party and its Socialist party ally. But, this was forestalled when the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ordered Gian Carlo Paccetta, leading Italian Communist advocate of armed struggle who has seized control of the administration of Milan and Lombardy, to turn power over to General Mark Clark. The Soviet Communist Party wished to respect the war-time agreements that western Europe would be the Anglo-American sphere and Eastern Europe the Soviet’s sphere. For over thirty years, the Italian Communist Party has been a strong minority in Italian politics, and with its alliance with the Italian Socialist party almost has a majority. In fact, in the recent provincial elections which contributed to Fanfani’s final fall, the Communist party gained control over half a dozen regional administrations in central and northern Italy—expanding the Red Belt that it dominates under the recently instituted Italian decentralization. In cities like Bologna, where the Communists had control for thirty year, the climate for business-expansion is very favorable. Not only is there not any corruption, but the Communists pride themselves on creating an atmosphere for business investment. In fact, many of the leading businessmen have become important members of the Communist party, enjoying the added dividend of no-strike pledges from the Communist-dominated unions (Christian unions tend to have a policy of refusing no-strike pledges, which is inconvenient for business planning). The Communist party has many kinds of organizations for various sectors of the economy-cooperatives for farmers and small businessmen and shopkeepers, etc.

Fifteen years ago the continued strength of the Communist party in the midst of the Italian economic miracle caused the Kennedy administration to suggest a new approach to Italian politics. The “Opening to the Left” was the answer: To detach the Socialist party from the Communist party and to make the former a partner in the government. Fanfani was the Christian Democratic leader chosen for that role over the other major candidate Aldo Moro. Moro was more moderate than Fanfani on domestic issues, but was less committed to NATO and America policy Communist participation in the coalition. Fanfani’s strong commitment to socialist philosophy, plus his support for NATO and America policy generally caused him to get the nod. His leadership as premier or foreign minister, however, did not bring the desired results. Instead, his policies led to inflation and a temporary setback to Italy’s economic miracle. Inflation meant increased support for the Communist party. The recent crisis of energy resources increased the pressure on Italy’s economy.

Energy resources have been an important determinant on Italy’s policies in the twentieth century. Italy entered World War I against its allies Germany and Austria, and on the side of England and France, on the promise of participation in the Allies’ control of energy resources. (The entry into the war caused the creation of the Italian Communist Party in protest.). The failure of the Allies to live up to their promises led to the rise of Fascism. In the 1930’s Britain attempted to gain Italy’s support by allowing Italy to seek development of oil resources in East Africa. But, when Britain reneged, and formed an opposition to Italy in the League of Nations, Italy was forced to ally itself with Germany, creating the foundations for World War II. The irony of the situation was that Italy already possessed a colony—Libya—under which was a reservoir of oil, yet unknown. In the 1950’s, under Enrico Mattel, Italy was able to develop access to oil resources outside of the market-dominating Seven Sisters of the international oil industry. Italy gained an independent position and very good relations with the Islamic world before the mysterious death of Mattel who, as a power in the Christian Democratic Party, favored a coalition with the Communist party. Italy’s tradition and increasing good relations with the Islamic world are the most likely barrier to Italy’s continued role in NATO.

Naples is the headquarters for the U.S. Sixth fleet, with its transports filled with thousands of American marines ready to repeat the assault on Tripoli, as well as the Southern command of NATO. Naples gives that command control of the western Mediterranean (west of Sicily) and easy access to the larger eastern Mediterranean. But, since the major objective of any American military operation in the Mediterranean is the Islamic world: Turkish; Arab or Iranian, Italy’s access to oil and its economic miracle will require a government willing to wish the Sixth fleet farewell and send it back to its rightful location—Norfolk, Virginia. It is most unlikely that Italy will withdraw from NATO. Although there are strong forces in the Christian Democratic, Republican and Socialist parties favoring Italy’s withdrawing from NATO, there is one party which, whatever its public statements, will not push for withdrawal: the Italian Communist party. The Italian Communist party, like its sister, the French Communist party, is the heir to the nationalism created by the French Revolution (Italy was second to France in the effect of the French Revolution and the emergence of a heroic, middle-class Jacobin tradition against church and state). In Italy, the Communists are the Italian nationalists which the Christian Democrats are the admitted agents of two internationalisms—the Vatican and the U.S. States Department. Millions vote Communist as the only viable and committed alternative to Vatican-State Department dominance of Italy. One of the issues on which the Communist Party of Italy, and the Vatican and State Department, differ is relations with the Soviet Union. The Italian Communist party is much less pro-Soviet than the current Vatican and State Department lines. The Italian Communist party in its domestic policy, such as pro-business and pro-consumer attitudes and its organizational policy of more democratic and less hierarchical approaches, differs greatly with the Soviet Union. But, since the vicious Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which received the blessing of the United States, the Italian Communist party (like the Chinese Communist party which opened a dialogue with the United States to protect itself from a similar fate) is anxious to have diplomatic space in which to move. The Italian Communist party, if it entered into a coalition government, would not push for withdrawal from NATO. Unlike the right-wing French regimes of De Gaulle, Pompidou and Giscard, which have received unbroken foreign policy support by the Communists against the US-backed centrist parties, which have de facto thrown out NATO, the Italian Communists would prefer a NATO presence in Naples to remind Soviet hardliners not to interfere with the bourgeois Communists of Italy. (The alternative explanation that the. Italian Communist party is taking these positions due to the large secret funds paid to it by American oil companies seems as likely as explaining current American culture on the basis of the large non-secret funds paid to the Public Broadcasting System in America.)

Fanfani’s recent removal by the national committee of the Italian Christian Democratic Party was due to his own steadfastness in his guiding concepts which permitted the Communists to make larger gains. Fanfani insisted on committing the Christian Democrats to repeal of the recently enacted liberal divorce law. The majority of voters supported the parties, led energetically by the Communists, who championed liberal divorce laws. At the same time, Italy was faced with an inflation caused by the economic policies which Fanfani had advocated. While the so-called free enterprise Liberal party spent all its energies supporting United States foreign policy, the small, Republican party demanded an end to inflation and forced the Christian Democrats to throw out their inflationary wing and appoint last year a new cabinet devoted to fighting inflation, headed by Aldo Moro. In ousting Fanfani, the factions now dominate in the Christian Democratic party gave a vote of confidence to Aldo Moro’s premiership, encouraging his policies of fighting inflation, increasing good will with the Islamic world, and working to gain a Coalition with the Communists on the basis of sound money and anti-inflation. As the president of the Bank of Italy, Guido Carli, has emphasized, Italy’s anti-inflation battle is a battle against the United States’ exporting its inflation to the rest of the free world and making countries like Italy bear the burden of the effects of America’s unsound monetary policies, deficit spending and Keynesianism. Fanfani’s downfall is another defeat for the overseas agents of American Keynesian imperialism.

The Second Austrian Conference

By Richard Ebeling*

The world economic crisis has brought a parallel crisis in economic theory. The “noble experiment” of socialist central planning has failed Having rediscovered the Miracle of Market, eastern European economists are writing tracts on the efficiency of the Price System The Keynesian Revolution that promised an end to the “vicious” boom-bust cycle has produced the worst of both worlds: simultaneous inflation and recession.

In the midst of the long-range consequences of short-range policies, economists have begun groping for a new theoretical paradigm to explain the facts. The “groping process” has resulted in renewed interest in the Austrian School of Economics. Founded by Carl Menger and Bohm-Bawerk in the latter nineteenth century, it has been developed in the twentieth by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. It has emphasized micro-economic analysis within a dynamic framework.

To feed this interest the Institute for Humane Studies (Menlo Park, Calif.) sponsored a Conference on Austrian Economics in June, 1974 at South Royalton, Vermont. The lectures, on the foundations and implications on Austrian analysis, were given by Professors Rothbard, Kirzner, and Ludwig M. Lachmann, with informal presentations given by other Conference participants (see Richard M. Ebeling, “Austrian Economics of the Rise,” Libertarian Forum, Oct., 1974)

Because of the enthusiastic response following the Vermont Conference, the Institute for Humane Studies, in conjunction with the University of Hartford, Connecticut, sponsored a Symposium on Austrian Economics during the week of June 22-28, 1975. Rather than having a series of lectures by the “senior” Austrian theorists again, the format was one of papers by “young” Austrians. The informal lectures at Vermont were so impressive that it was decided to ask some of the up and coming “Austrians” to deliver what came to a total of fifteen papers during the week at Hartford. Commentators on the papers included Professors Friedrich von Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Israel M. Kirzner Emil Kauder, Leland Yeager, Percy Greaves, W. H. Hutt D. T. Armentano and Lawrence Moss.

The week began with an opening evening banquet with a keynote address by Friedrich von Hayek. Professor Hayek gave his reflections and memories of the Austrian School. The founding of the School by Menger and he intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century what it was like to study in the seminar of Friedrich von Wieser; and the turbulent years of the inter-war period. He recalled that 40 years ago he would have hesitated to label himself an Austrian Economist. He and his fellow Viennese theorists took pride in the fact that what had been an “Austrian” tradition was swiftly becoming part of the standard economic orthodoxy.

But the Austrians, looking out from Vienna, were so thrilled by the seemingly “Austrian” twist that theory was taking in general, failed to notice that other trends were starting to develop, as well. In fact, Hayek confessed that “though I was publicly involved in the controversies of the day with Keynes, for a very long time I did not realize that the main difference between Keynes and myself was not over particular points of theory, but very really and ultimately over different approaches. Keynes had marked, in effect, as far as the public was concerned, a transition from microeconomics, with its methodological individualistic roots to a macroeconomics which looks for the forces behind events among observed causal connections between statistical magnitudes. It was just this development, very much to my regret and against all my wishes which has justified that we now again revive the name of Austrian Economics . . . I’m sure . . . that it will prosper and succeed.”

The papers at the Symposium covered topics as far ranging as methodology, the history of Austrian Economics, the theory of competition, international economics, problems concerning the trade cycle and Austrian analysis applied to contemporary problems. Space obviously, does not permit discussion of all the papers or the commentaries and debates that followed their presentation. Instead the present writer will offer an overview using some of the papers that seemed to catch the flavor and relevance of the contemporary Austrian revival.

John Blundell, a student at the London School of Economics, discussed some interpretations of “Carl Menger and the Founding of the Austrian School of Economics.” What is most striking, suggested Blundell, was the wide discrepancies in views over why and how the Austrian School came about. Some, such as Schumpeter, have seen Menger as an original thinker groping for “new principles of knowledge” to refute the already half discarded carcass of Classical Economic Thought. While Spiegel, on the other hand, sees the influence of Kant. His conclusion was that the Kantian notion of the human mind “creating” the forms of the external world made the environment ripe for a subjective theory of value. And, further, Spiegel wondered about the political motivations. The possibility of Menger developing a universal theory of human action so as to offer an intellectual foundation that would “fortify the multinational empire of the Hapsburgs.” Perhaps the most interesting charge that Mr. Blundell discussed was the accusation that Austrianism was meant to be a counter weight to a rising Socialism. For as Blundell pointed out, Menger was a Reformist Liberal who was often concerned about the “poor girl” who “has often only the choice between becoming a prostitute or a seamstress.” While Wieser believed that “In view of the helplessness of the individual, the slogan of the liberal school, ‘laissez faire’, becomes almost a mockery,” and that protective legislation was needed for workers and securing the public interests. While Philippovich Was a socialist who founded the “Vienna Fabians.” And Emil Sax presented the first argument for progressive income tax based on marginal utility theory.

In the twentieth century, the Austrian tradition had been carried forward by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Indeed, Hayek, during his 19 year stay at the London School of Economics beginning in 1931, not only saw the “great drama” of economic theory unfold, but was a central figure.

Gerald O’Driscoll, in his excellent paper, “Hayek and Keynes: A Retrospective Assessment,” discussed and contrasted the differences between the two main center stage actors of the years of high theory. The central error in Keynes’ approach was the attempt to analyze dynamic economic problems in a static equilibrium framework that implied the existence of stable macroeconomic relationships. The emphasis and search for aggregate relationships between such magnitudes as investment and consumption, investment and income, and consumption and income resulted in the total neglect of the microeconomic foundations of economic activity and, in particular, microeconomic relationships involving production decisions. The difficulty of Keynes’ analysis was multiplied by the ambiguity and contradictions in his use of concepts and his inability to distinguish between changes on the firm level as opposed to the economy as a whole.

The differences between Keynes and Hayek, are crystalized in their theories of investment. For Keynes, the effect of a lowering of the money rate of interest is to change the rate at which the prospective yield of fixed capital is capitalized. The result being that capital goods, seen merely as substitutes for each other, will have succeedingly small marginal yields because they merely repeat the work of existing capital.

But for Hayek, the investment process is not such a simple matter. Rather, as O’Driscoll observes, the rate of interest and capitalization are not cause and effect, but are, instead, both the result of the relative scarcity of “means” for investment. And that the scarce means are not an aggregate sum that can be represented as a simplistic downward sloping Marginal Efficiency of Capital curve.

Instead, investment goods are seen as a complementary pattern of interrelated stages of production involved in a dynamic process over time. Thus, changes in the rate of interest (which is supposed to be a reflection of consumer preference for consumption and savings, i.e., consumption in the future) will effect not only the value of new capital, but existing capital as well. Thus, the profitability for investment arising from changes in the interest rate will effect the choice of utilizing different forms of investment structures. The stages of production will become longer and more roundabout and will form a completed tapestry of a capital structure only if the resources needed to complete and sustain the more complex capital patterns are available. In Hayek’s words, from his Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J. M. Keynes, “Economica, Feb., 1932, “It seems never to have occurred to him (Keynes) that the artificial stimulus to investment, which makes it exceed current savings, may cause a dis-equilibrium in the real structure of production which, sooner or later, must lead to a reaction.”

The general theme of errors from investment decisions was discussed further by John B. Egger in his paper, “Information and Unemployment in the Trade Cycle.” In a state of equilibrium the idea of unemployment becomes meaningless, for it represents a state of affairs in which human plans have been made compatible through a meshing of the “means” chosen by a multitude of individual actors in the economy as a whole. The ex post situation is identical with the ex ante expectations in a state of equilibrium.

In the Austrian framework, however, the market process is seen not as a movement from one equilibrium state to another, but instead, as an on going discovery procedure. Individuals, having decided on ends to pursue, decide on what appear as appropriate means. But since in the market economy one’s own goals depend on the actions and intentions of others, the entire process is a “fluid” system where adjustments must, be constantly made. The adjustments are in response to both the changing plans of one’s own shifting value scale and in response to information about the actions of others that. The acquisition of knowledge requires revision in one’s own plans and expectations where the activities of others effect the achieving of one’s own goals. The fact that information about incorrect expectations will be learned by market participants and that this will almost always result in modification of plans means that the system will always have some amount of “slack,” or unemployment that represents the adjusting for erroneous past decisions.

The unemployment experienced during the trade cycle, Mr. Egger emphasized, is a symptom of a cluster or multiplication of errors and wrong expectations caused by faulty information in earlier periods of the cycle. Credit expansion through the banking system transmits market information signals that result in entrepreneurs rearranging production plans around capital intensive investments; labor invests in “human capital” skills which are found to be misdirected once the malinvestments of the “boom” become visible in the readjustment period brought about by the Ricardo Effect. The artificial stimulus of investment has brought about a series of “false prices” throughout the system. Expectations and plans have been drawn up by market actors that cannot be fulfilled. The period of unemployment and idleness of resources is the time when the errors are sorted out and plans begin realigning around the “real” economic facts.

In the theory of investment, as well as all other market activities, the Austrians, beginning with Menger, emphasized the importance of the concept of time. This was taken up by Roger W. Garrison in his paper “Reflections on Misesian Time Preference.” The essence of the Misesian theory is that time preference permeates all choices and actions of individuals. Every action implies a preferring of satisfaction of “felt uneasiness” in the nearer future than in the more distant future. But this preference should be seen in a slightly different light than the choosing of goods and services. While with goods, the act of choice implies a preference for more units of goods over less units of a goods, the choice of action in time is an either-or proposition. In Mises’ words, action “can never be affected at the same instant; they can only follow one another in more or less rapid succession.” Thus, each action is not one of a “marginal” preference for now over later, but one of the present over the future as such.

Mr. Garrison, after considering some of the earlier time preference theorists, contrasted Mises’ conception with that of Frank Knight. In the Knightian framework, a uniform or “base line” of consumption is postulated with this starting point referred to as zero time preference. If an individual consumes below this level, this shows negative time preference and consumption above this level demonstrates positive time preference. But as Garrison observes, this is a meaningless concept for it arbitrarily establishes a level of “uniform” consumption which is somehow viewed as ‘normal;’ deviations from this norm then determines whether time preference is high or low.

Garrison draws the analogy of measuring temperature. Under the Kelvin scale, a relationship is established between temperature and molecular motion. When molecular motion is non-existant, the point is defined as zero. Likewise, in the Misesian’ presentation of time preference the choice of non-action demonstrates zero time preference and all action by the individual shows a positive time preference for achieving a goal now rather than waiting for some future date. While under the Fahrenheit standard, an arbitrary point was chosen to designate zero and to measure changes in temperature. In Knight’s system, a “uniform pattern of consumption” is likewise arbitrarily chosen to measure changes in time preference. Thus, while Mises’ method of basing time preference oh the actions of men is grounded on the nature of human beings in the real world. Knight devises an artificial standard that bears’ little relationship to actual economic phenomena, and human action in general.

In an extremely interesting paper Joseph T. Salerno presented “The International Adjustment Process: An Austrian View.” Mr. Salerno first discussed the development of currency and exchange theories of the Classical economist and the different methods by which the older economists tried to explain the movement of money across borders and the “natural” tendencies that existed for self-correction; also the movement of the world economy, toward equalization of the value of money internationally and the equilibirating of prices for all commodities that are the “same.”

The Austrian contributions to the theory of international exchange not only clarified the many correct conclusions in Classical analysis, but integrated the problem into the subjective theory of value. Mr. Salerno elaborated on the Misesian theory of the purchasing power of money. There is no single market for money, and, therefore, no single price. Rather, money exists in a “state of barter” with every other goods and service, with a “unique set of exchange rates existing between money and all other commodities” at any moment in time. There tends to be an equality of purchasing power in the sense that relative prices adjust to reflect the particular value of different goods in relation to changes in the amount of the money commodity. There does not exist an aggregate purchasing power represented by a price level. When it is said that the standard of living is higher or lower in one country than another it is a failure to see the value of goods in the subjective sense. Coffee in Brazil is not “cheaper” than in New York. Because of the spatial component, they are not the same goods. Brazilian coffee is a production good that needs to be combined with the complementary transportation factors before it become the “same” consumer good in a New York supermarket.

For Mises the movement of money is the cause, not the effect, of trade imbalances. Each individual determines the marginal utility of money on his value scale and appropriately adjusts his cash balances, either increasing or decreasing it, in relation to other goods; the same applies to any increases in the quantity of money. Individuals first getting the new money either hold or spend it, based on the marginal value of the units to them. If this process passes over borders, then the international adjustment process “is nothing more nor less than the market process which effects the distribution of money among market participants in accordance with its marginal utility.”

If we realize that what is causing changes in trade balances is not a mere shifting of goods and services from country “A” to country “B”, but a dynamic microeconomic process our insight becomes that much clearer in comprehending catallactic phenomena. Mr. Salerno, using Hayek’s Monetary Nationalism and International Stability as a starting point, brilliantly emphasized that the process begins with individuals in country “A” changing the level of their cash balances. An array of particular prices decline. Individuals in country “B”, facing lower imported goods prices, in turn, adjust their cash balances in relation to the marginal value of money units. Money flows to country “A” which is received by particular individuals as income and which, again, results in changes in purchasing power and cash balances. This then tends, eventually, to reverse the process. But as individual incomes are effected, the process may work back and forth innumberable times. Also, while it may seem that the country getting the initial amount of additional goods because of lower import prices is the one better off, it may in, fact be the one that suffers the most loss of income during the process.

Perhaps the most original, as well as path-breaking, work in the Austrian framework was offered in two papers by John Hagel, “From Laissez Faire to Zwangswirtschaft: The Dynamics of Intervention,” and Walter E. Grinder, “The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle: Reflections on Some Socio-Economic Effects.”

Mr. Hagel presented a clear and closely reasoned analysis of the steps by which the economic system moves from a relatively free spontaneous Catallaxy (market order) to the overall planning of Single Economy’ (state control). Once the market order has been tampered with, the destablizing effects of interventionist programs move the system further towards a regressive collectivist program. The first part of the process sees the change from a “pure market system” to “political capitalism.” Political capitalism has three substages: the first stage being sporadic interventions represented by subsidies, state contracts and local monopolies; the second stage develops into a program for “rationalization” and “stabilization” of the economy and takes the form of regulatory agencies and government-assisted cartellization; in the third sub-stage of political capitalism, there emerges a “cohesive ruling class capable of defining its own interests within the context of a broader system of political intervention.” Finally, the stage of all-round planning, Zwangswirtschaft (compulsory economy), is reached. All the problems discussed by Mises and Hayek in reference to central planning and, economic calculation now come to the fore.

The mainspring of the growing intervention, Mr. Hagel pointed out, was war and inflation. War acts as a “pump priming” device to stimulate” “effective demand” in times of recession brought on by previous interventions. The banking system becomes a vital, link in the interventionist program since it facilitates the expenditure activities of the government.

It is the banking link in the interventionist program that Mr. Grinder discussed in his paper. Since Austrian monetary theory emphasizes the fact that increases of the medium of exchange do not effect all individuals and all places at the same time, but rather changes the economic position of some people before others, we can see the method by which class stratification is developed.

When the Federal Reserve System finances the government deficits, the State, itself, becomes the first gainer because it is able to obtain access to resources that previously had been beyond its reach. The, Banking System is the second major gainer because of the profit opportunities from additional loans from expansion of fiduciary media. The third group of gainers are the contractors of government projects. Further “gainers” from monetary expansion become hard to pinpoint without study of the particular cases in point, but obviously those firms who are able to borrow funds at the artificially lower interest rates obtain, at least temporarily, “forced savings.” The Banking System is the focal point for control of all major economic activities, both during the “crank-up” and “crack-up” phases of the trade cycle process. This segment of the economy, whose destiny is bound up with the perpetuation of interventionism, becomes the nucleus of the Statist class structure. And their position as one of the biggest net gainers from monetary manipulation means their interest and future becomes more and more tightly bound up with the maintenance and growth of political capitalism, right into the eventual establishment of Fascism and Zwangswirtschaft.

The other papers at the Symposium included Professor Armentano’s presentation of “Competition and Monopoly Theory: Some Austrian Perspectives,” Gary North’s “Three Critiques of Bureaucracy: Mises, Weber and the Counter Culture,” and J. Huston McCullough’s interpretation of “The Austrian Theory of the Marginal Use.” An additional problem was discussed in Sudha R. Shenoy’s paper, “The English Disease: An Austrian Analysis,” about the distortion in the capital structure caused by government interventionist programs in Great Britain since the Second World War.

During the evenings, a series of informal lectures were given by three of the senior commentators. Professor Kirzner shared “Some Thoughts on Austrianism in Contemporary Economics.” He discussed the recent revival of interest in the Austrian tradition, particularly in the works of Sir John Hicks and Erich Streissler (professor of economics at the University of Vienna). While seeing this as a favorable sign, Kirzner was not sure that the implications of Austrian analysis had been completely grasped in much of this recent work.

Professor Leland Yeager, who in conversation said that the greatest influence on his own thinking about monetary theory had been from reading Ludwig von Mises’ The Theory of Money and Credit, lectured on the disastrous consequences of government intervention in the economy. Using a Hayekian framework, he contrasted the spontaneous market order that utilized the millions of small bits of knowledge belonging to all market participants with the attempt by the government, through regulation and intervention, to organize market activities with the few minds (and, therefore, limited knowledge) of State planners.

The most interesting and controversial of the talks was the one given by Professor Murray Rothbard, “In Defense of Deflation.” Rothbard explained that the Chicago School notion of a stable price level was a spurious concept and not an acceptable substitute for the present policy of perpetual inflation. Instead, the inflation should be stopped and a deflationary process be allowed to run its course. Deflation would bring about the necessary “smashing” of downwardly rigid wages and prices, so the appropriate resource allocations could occur to help bring about sound long-term economic activity. Also, the consumer would benefit from falling prices as productivity and purchasing power increased.

A lively debate ensued between Rothbard and Hayek about the establishment of a Gold Standard to guarantee that government did not manipulate the money supply. While agreeing that the Gold Standard was the long term solution, Hayek said that he thought it would soon collapse again if established at the present time, because no government would be willing to see the falling of prices within its boundaries that adherence to the Standard would probably require. Rothbard insisted that the Gold Standard was necessary now to “smash” the Central Bank System which is the engine of world Inflation. Hayek replied that if Professor Rothbard was talking about an international Gold Standard that involved the elimination of the fractional reserve system, then he (Hayek) was for it completely. This was followed by a round of thunderous applause.

On the closing evening of the Symposium another banquet dinner was held. The sentiments of all participants were summed up in the dinner remarks of Sudha Shenoy, who has been nicknamed the Joan Robinson of the Vienna School. Addressing herself to Professor Hayek, she said that the new generation of Austrians “shall do all that is in our power to ensure that the economic mind of the age does move with relentless logic, with consistent consistency to the priori conclusions of the Austrian system . . . we shall always return to the charge against the forces of macro-darkness now threatening to overwhelm the world . . . I give you two toasts: to victory in the future, and to the last best legacy of Vienna to the world, Professor Hayek.”

The momentum that has been built up from these two Austrian Conferences is picking up even more. Regional Austrian Conferences are being planned for New York, Virginia, southern California and London, England, by the end of 1975. Plus, another annual Austrian Conference is already in the works for either June or July, 1976.

The Institute for Humane Studies is also sponsoring a new series of Austrian Economic works. The volumes, which start appearing this summer, will include reprints of Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View, an Essay in the History of Economic Thought and Menger’s Principles of Economics. Also among the volumes will be, the lectures by Rothbard, Kirzner and Lachmann given at the Vermont Austrian Conference and the papers delivered at a symposium in honor of Ludwig von Mises, held at the Southern Economics Association Convention in 1974, which was chaired’ by Fritz Machlup. Also, a number of new works including Gerald O’Driscoll’s dissertation on Economics as a Coordination Problem: The Contributions of Friedrich von Hayek. Plus, translations of never-before-in-English works by Austrian economists. The series is being published by Sheed and Ward (Kansas City and New York) in both hardcover and paperback editions.

On the last day of the Symposium, the present writer interviewed Professors Hayek and Kirzner. Excerpts are printed here:

Ebeling: Professor Hayek, let me begin by congratulating you on receiving your Nobel Prize for economics. The new interest in the Austrian approach seems to have developed more or less as a result of human action rather than human design. Individuals have come to the Austrian tradition because of the unsatisfactory state of present economic activity. Do you think the time is right for successful presentation of the Misesian-Hayekian framework to the profession?

Hayek: Well, it looks like it, although I have really no explanation except the evident failure of what has been the predominant view of the past twenty-five years, but even this isn’t an adequate explanation at the moment. Everybody seems to recognize that the Keynesian view has been wrong, because we have now got both inflation and unemployment. But the revival of interest in the Austrian tradition did start a little earlier than there was any evident external cause. It has been growing slowly, but with accelerating speed of the past three or four years.

E: In your banquet comments last Sunday night, you said that thirty years ago you would have resisted the use of the label “Austrianism” because the contributions of the school were basically being accepted but that with the rise of macro-economics it was now necessary to respond with a micro-economic counter-attack. If the term “Austrian Economics” is used to designate it, you have no objections. But there are those who work within the Austrian framework who feel that the orthodox micro-approach with its emphasis on perfect competition and comparative static models must be opposed as much as macro models. Do you agree?

H: I think you are right in this although this approach with emphasis on perfect competition is really in a sense through the influence of, at least, mathematical models which always tend a little toward macro-economics. Not necessarily through logical necessity but I think a great temptation for people who think in mathematical terms.

E: From the papers delivered and symposium discussions and personal conversations with the attendants here at the conference, do you feel that this Austrian revival is a sound one?

H: Yes, it’s certainly sound; it’s very promising—maybe very important. You ask me why—I mean—you never know why the truth is ultimately recognized, but to me it seems that’s what happened.

E: What do you see as the reason for the almost dogmatic refusal of the economics profession to even take under consideration different methodological approaches that might more successfully explain social phenomena?

H: Oh, very largely prejudices about what is “scientific”, which have been spread, which are essentially the same which I described thirty years ago in The Counter-Revolution of Science which is still very much operative, but I don’t think my description fits in exactly, but still is that belief that in order to be scientific, you have to measure.

E: Based on that answer, what do you think would be the most successful avenues for Austrians to explore and to try to influence the economics profession into different, more fruitful, directions?

H: To provide more plausible explanations for what is happening.

E: In America, the Chicago School of economic has received much attention and often presents the image of being a counterforce to Keynesianism; but a good number of Austrian School theorists feel that the Chicago economists use a methodological approach and a quantity theory of money that often fails to perceive the nature of the social sciences and the effects of monetary expansion on the economy. Would you please comment on how you see the differences between the Chicagoans and the Austrians on these two issues?

H: Well, you see, we are fighting on the same front, but the quantity theory which the Chicago School has revised is a very crude statement of an elementary truth; but which is helpful for gross problems like stopping inflation but can become misleading in detail. Forty years ago, in Prices and Production you’ll find this statement that while I think that the pure quantity theory to be oversimplified and often misleading, I pray that the public at large should never cease to believe in it, because only a simple explanation can persuade them that you must stop increasing the quantity of money. I rather regret that highly intelligent people like the Chicago School people do not use it merely as a means of proper explanation but are sometimes misled by it by taking it too literally.

E: And how do you view the difference—the methodological difference—between the Austrians and the Chicagoans, over such a thing as aggregate statistical studies?

H: Oh, it’s the same point we discussed before, that you have of course there, by scientific prejudices, a commitment to quantitative methods and the belief that unless you have statistical confirmation, the thing can not be adopted. It’s what I explained in my Nobel lecture, that sometimes the better theory’s been rejected and the inferior theory adopted because the better theory cannot be demonstrated statistically and the inferior theory has some, if very inadequate, statistical confirmation.

E: It’s well known that you are somewhat pessimistic about the economic and social future of Western Civilization. Do you see any optimism for thinking that the Austrians can be successful in changing the direction of the economics profession?

H: Well, this takes a long time, yes, I think if you think in terms of twenty or thirty years, certainly. When you say I’m pessimistic, I’m pessimistic of the next five or ten.

E: How do you feel about the renewed interest in your own earlier monetary and business cycle works?

H: Well, it’s pleasant but surprising in a way—oh—why it should have become so completely forgotten after the first period of intense discussion is still a puzzle to me as I have been watching it; but particularly what puzzles me most is that so long as Keynes was alive there was still the realization there were two views. The moment he died his views became the only ones which were recognized, the others forgotten. Perhaps it was that his pupils were much more dogmatic than he.

E: Thank you very much, Professor Hayek.

* * * *

Ebeling: Professor Kirzner, there have now been two conferences on Austrian Economics. In fact, these, have been the first Austrian conferences since the Mises circle in Vienna. Is this a serious attempt to revive the Austrian approach?

Kirzner: Yes. I think these represent two very promising steps toward reviving the Austrian approach. These two conferences were called in response to a wide-spread interest that has evidenced itself among many young scholars, graduate students, young professors, in the works of the recent Austrians, in particular those of von Mises and Hayek and Rothbard; in fact the latest conference as I understand it was forced to turn away many interested participants. All this augurs very well indeed for the future growth of interest in Austrian economics.

E: There seem to be two developing Austrian schools in the world today. Are the people who’ve attended the conferences in Vermont and Connecticut here and the “European” variant developing with such people as Sir John Hicks and Eric Streissler of the University of Vienna—are they incompatible, and on what points do they differ?

K: It is certainly true that there is a very sharp difference between those of us who’ve been coming to the Vermont and Hartford conferences on the one hand and others who have in one way or another associated themselves with Austrian or neo-Austrian positions. I think, to put the matter very simplistically, that the American version—if one wishes to call it that—of the Austrian school stems, primarily, from the influence of Mises; while others who to one extent or another call themselves Austrians do so for a variety of reasons . . . For example, Sir John Hicks’ Austrianism is based rather narrowly on the time structure of production introduced by Bohm-Bawerk. Streissler’s view of Austrianism, again, is rather different from most other views of Austrianism. In Streissler’s view any disaggregated work is essentially Austrian in character . . . I do not quite think that Hicks and Streissler constitute in any sense a well-knit group such as I think we see developing here in this country.

E: If this Austrian revival is a serious one, the important point then comes up as to what we can do to successfully get the methodology and theory across to the profession. What basically is the most strategic technique?

K: I think there’s no secret here, there’s no mysterious technique that has to be discovered. Straightforward intellectual steps are of course available to us. We have to show the profession that the Austrian approach is a fruitful, meaningful one. We can do this by pursuing the Austrian method to attack various economic problems, to elucidate difficult theoretical questions in economics, and by publishing our work, by having our work criticized, and having others see what we are doing. This is the time-honored and I think a perfectly sufficient method of spreading our position.

E: You’ve now written four books and your latest one, COMPETITION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP, was published by the University of Chicago Press. What feedback have you had, if any, about the interest this has sort of engendered in the Austrian approach?

K: I’ve been encouraged by the number of kind of reviews that have indicated interest and at least partial acceptance of the Austrian approach. I’ve been encouraged by the interest of individuals, undergraduates, graduates, and young professors who have written to me about the book and lead me to believe that it does fill a felt need in current theory. To the extent that this represents—is recognized as representing—an Austrian view, I think this can perhaps give some help in engendering a more receptive climate for Austrian views generally.

E: Now some have suggested that if the Austrians are to grow as a school of thought, and to be listened to and respected in the profession, it’s necessary to have a graduate department and thus to have a focal point for training people in the Austrian approach similar to the way the monetarists have used the University of Chicago. Will this be a future requirement, and if so, how can it be done?

K: I myself have some reservations about the advisability of establishing a specific graduate school. I recognize that years ago there was in fact nowhere where a graduate student interested in Austrian economics could receive a decent hearing and was able to have his work listened to and appreciated on its merits. I think the atmosphere has changed and there are a number of graduate schools where even non-Austrians recognize the worth of the Austrian tradition and are prepared to encourage students to proceed. Of course wherever an opportunity exists for an Austrian economist to gain a position in a graduate school where graduate students can be exposed to Austrian views, this would be a desirable intellectual development. I’m not sure that the advantages of specifically Austrian department might not be offset significantly by a sort of narrow, sectarian image that such a graduate school might generate.

E: Finally, Professor Kirzner, are you optimistic over the future of the Austrian School?

K: Yes, I certainly am. New recent developments in the past five years have been enormously encouraging. Ten or fifteen years ago, the number of people who would give Mises a respectful hearing in the academic community was very very small. We have seen drastic changes in this regard and I have no question in my mind that this trend will continue and expand in a very healthy intellectual and academic fashion.

E: Thank you. Professor Kirzner.

*Mr. Ebeling is a student of economics at Sacramento State University.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Parody is difficult in the modern world, for it is hard to reduce to absurdity ideas and movements which are continually skirting the edge of absurdity in the first place. So it is with “women’s liberation” and the quota system. In many cases, all we can do is to report the facts, and that is enough.

Thus: a committee of generals reported recently (New York Times, July 14) that women are discriminated against in the Army, and that this practice must stop forthwith. In what way? Because, “looks, figure and personality are considered when female personnel are nominated for assignment to high level staff.” The committee, the General Officers’ Steering Committee on Equal Opportunity, pontificated that this practice “discriminates against the individual who is not as physically attractive as others. Physical attributes are less important than proficiency.”

OK, so what is supposed to be done about this vile practice? How are we going to stamp out the natural tendency of army officers to select attractive instead of ugly females? Are we to set up a board to judge the physical attractiveness of each female, and are we to set up a quota system to insure that ugly females are promoted in proportion to their number in the . . . army? the population as a whole? Fixed numbers for various selected categories: beautiful, pretty, plain, and ugly, or what? And how are the standards going to be selected? And who is going to apply them? Are we going to have official representatives of the uglies, the plains, etc.? How about righting past wrongs by deliberately hiring only ugly females until the balance is redressed? The possibilities stagger the imagination. Are we to raise the cry, at long last, that “Ugly is Beautiful”? Or, shall we, once and for all, adopt the “solution” to this terrible discrimination envisioned by L. P. Hartley decades ago in his penetrating and prophetic?) novel, Facial Justice: namely, to have compulsory plastic surgery on all females so as to make both ugly and beautiful girls uniformly plain, so that pro-beautyism will be stamped out forevermore?

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VIII, NO. 8

AUGUST, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

WINSTON CHURCHILL:

AN APPRECIATION

BY RALPH RAICO

(Ed. Note: We do not ordinarily publish articles of this length in the Lib. Forum. But Professor Raico’s scintillating article is of such importance that we are waiving that rule in order to publish it in one piece. Winston Churchill’s reputation—fueled by massive propaganda machines in the West—is generally one of uncritical adulation, especially in conservative and even in libertarian circles. We venture to predict that, after Professor Raico’s article, that reputation will never be the same again.

We are also proud to announce that Dr. Raico plans to write a bimonthly column for us, “The Tory Watch”, which will keep a sharp and critical eye on the conservative movement in the United States. Dr. Raico is a professor of history at State University College at Buffalo.)

The Prime Minister . . . considered that we should wait till we had got Russia against Japan. We should then establish air bases near Vladivostok from which Japan could be bombed, and, according to him, we should then sing the “Ladybird Song” to the Japs: “Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, and children at home.”

— from the Diary of Field Marshall
Lord Alanbrook, April 22, 1943

Marching ever further on the way of interventionism, first Germany, then Great Britain and many other European countries have adopted central planning, the Hindenburg pattern of socialism. It is noteworthy that in Germany the deciding measures were not resorted to by the Nazis, but some time before Hitler seized power by Bruening. . . and in Great Britain not by the Labor Party but by the Tory Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill.

— Ludwig von Mises,
Human Action, p. 855

I

Winston Churchill, whose centennial occurred last year, is considered by many to be the Great Man of the Twentieth Century. He was, for instance, the first and so far only person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States (in the course of this . . . appreciation, we shall have occasion to examine the precise nature of the blood link between Churchill and the American people). Of all his idolaters, American neo-conservatives have been the most frenzied. James J. Martin, the revisionist authority, is probably correct in suggesting that this is due to “their urgent necessity to retain at least one towering figure in which they can vest their faith and verbal reflexes” (so inner-directed are they!) The “duel” between Churchill and Hitler fascinates them, as it does others, and is the foundation of Churchill’s “greatness” (This may well turn out to be the most enduring injury Hitler inflicted on humanity; that, besides causing the slaughter of so many, he permanently lowered the standards by which political conduct is judged, so that, compared to him, virtually any other mass-murderer—except maybe Stalin—is seen to be as white as the driven snow.) The facts about the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Soviet subjects to the USSR, to almost certain imprisonment or death, are just now becoming public knowledge: and Churchill’s crucial role in this process is probably causing many conservatives some uneasy moments. But those who had to await this to begin to suspect that all was not well with their hero simply know nothing of Churchill’s career. In fact, as I will try to show, he was, at best, a not particularly good specimen of his class and type, and, on the critical occasions when he held history-shaping power, by every rational definition and many times over a war criminal who badly wanted hanging.

Before we examine his political record in some detail, a few comments are in order regarding the general cast of Churchill’s character and mind. The word most often connected with his name, before 1940 at least, was “opportunist,” and with reason. He had, after all, changed party affiliation twice, from Conservative to Liberal and back again. As protege of Lloyd George, he opposed the call for increased armaments in 1909; after becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, he pushed for larger and larger budgets, spreading wild rumors of the strength of the German Navy (as, in the 1930s, he was to do in regard to the German Air Force). Just before the First World War he spoke but as a Cobdenite Free Trader, and was sympathetic even to the Ideas of Henry George; during the War he promoted war socialism in Britain, calling for nationalization of the railroads, and saying, in a speech at Dundee: “Our whole nation must be organized, must be socialized if you like the word.” He went in for faddish issues; for a number of years, for instance, he regularly attacked “the horrid liquor traffic” (an amusing bit of hypocrisy from someone who all his life was a controlled alcoholic).

Churchill’s opportunism continued throughout his career: after 1945, his speeches against the policies of the Labour Government echo The Road to Serfdom, while it had been Churchill himself who, in December, 1942, had accepted the Beveridge Plan as the basis for the postwar welfare state. Small wonder that Francis Neilson writes of him: “I cannot find in his own works or in the memoirs of his colleagues a single economic or political principle that he held steadfastly.” Churchill’s career spanned over fifty years—and yet, there is not the slightest reason to dissent from the judgment passed oh him already by 1914 by John Morley, the last of the great Manchester liberals, who knew him in the Asquith cabinet: “Winston has no principles.”

One might have thought that the one cause to which he would have remained true was anti-Bolshevism (he had called the Bolshevik leaders, quite rightly, “bloody baboons” and “the foul murderers of Moscow”). But then there is his record during World War II of instant and unconditional support of Stalin. This may be symbolized by the incident Fuller reports: “On 29th November (1943) at Teheran, Mr. Churchill, to the stains of the Internationale, presented Marshall Stalin with a Crusader’s sword:” (Conservatives concerned to define “obscenity” ought to meditate on the nature of that act.) Well, yes, there was one cause which claimed his loyalty throughout: the British Empire—that meaningless flash-in-the-pan (what price “Empress of India” now?) for which over the centuries so much human blood was shed. Better Englishmen than he have understood that Empire for the Aztec altar it was. The Empire is what Richard Cobden had in mind when he said: “We have been the most combative and aggressive community that has existed since the days of the Roman dominion,” and which led Lord Acton to state: “No Christian annals are as sanguinary as ours.” Imagine to yourself a person whose one true love was a world-wide military-bureaucratic despotism! With Churchill it was a case, as with Disraeli, of a self-intoxication and revelling in fantasies and empty symbols on the part of an alienated man who happened to have, on a vulgar level, a way with words.

This brings us to what one suspects has impressed American conservatives, Life magazine readers, Book of the Month Club members, etc., more than anything else about Churchill: his literary style. At times it could be close to charming (in describing his own early life and war experiences, for example), and he was always good at depicting battles and the rush of war. But whenever it came to writing about the larger issues involved in politics, whenever he had to try to cope with what might be enduring and really significant in human conflict, what he has to offer is something quite different: Whig rubbish, bombast at every remotely plausible point, a constant grabbing for the would-be spine-tingling symbol or metaphor, the product of a very poor man’s Macaulay, as “fine old British stuff” as, say, the Wilkinson Swordblade commercial (with its Churchillian “Balaclava, Omdurman . . .”). One tires of the Churchill style after the first couple of hundred pages—and there are many thousands more to come.

II.

Churchill was born into the ruling class of Britain in an age when it was also the ruling class of a quarter of the globe. The family name and fortune had been made by John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, the famous general in the wars against Louis XIV (he “humbled six marshals of France.” Macaulay wrote, in his corny way). After the wars had come to an end, Marlborough was censured by the House of Commons for corruption on a vast scale, and the Crown proceeded against him to try and recover some of the funds he had gained through graft from war contracts. Besides this sort of corruption—admitted to be such even by other members of the privileged orders of the time—he and Duchess held offices and pensions to the annual value of over 60,000 pounds. Marlborough and his descendants, in other words, belonged to the caste of aristocratic parasites who have, through most of human history, lived on the tribute exacted from working men and women. (After 1789, the French people opened the eyes of some of these parasites—rather forcefully—to certain important truths about social reality.) Later, Winston composed a four volume work in praise of his ancestor; even if he had not owed everything he had and was to Marlborough, he would most likely have found him a man completely to his taste anyway, for, as he says: “With all his faults, right or wrong, (Marlborough) was always for fighting: which is something.” More than anything else, Churchill inherited from his family the old aristocratic hereditary taint: the view that mankind is divided into two species, and that it is good that some are little, so that others may be great. Throughout his life, this was the way Churchill looked out on the world. Combine this with his love of war, and endow the combination with Power, and it was easy to foresee that the product would be no blessing to the human race.

In what follows, we shall be speaking practically incessantly of wars, of the plotting of them and of their conduct. The reader may come to find this tedious, but there is no help for it. We are dealing with a man whose life and career were intertwined with the wars waged by the British State since 1899. War, one may say, was the life of Winston Churchill. He himself traces his orientation back to his childhood, when he had an immense collection of toy soldiers (nearly 1500 of them) and played with them for years after most boys turn to other things. They were “all British,” he tells us, “and organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade.” He fought battles with his younger brother Jack, who “was only allowed to have coloured troops; and they were not allowed to have artillery.” His early fascination with the military led his father to choose Sandhurst,” the British military academy, for his higher education (there was in any case no alternative, since Winston had no Greek at all and used to crib his Latin translations from a fellow student at Harrow). Churchill later described his state of mind as a young man:

If it had only been 100 years earlier, what splendid times we should have had! Fancy being nineteen in 1793 with more than twenty years of war against Napoleon in front of one! Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples. There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes of the Soudan . . . There might even be a mutiny or a revolt in India.

So lustful for war was Churchill at one and twenty that, there temporarily being none in which Britain itself was involved, in 1895 he volunteered for the Spanish Army to fight the Cuban rebels, and it was at Las Villas that he first came under fire. H. G. Wells later insightfully compared him to D’Annunzio (adding dryly that “he is a great amateur and collector of texts upon Napoleon”). The comparison is apt. With both there is the view that life is worthless if not filled with great deeds in battle; a burning thirst for glory, together with a cruel lack of genius; and an almost effeminate habit of self-glorification.

During the next few years, England was “lucky” enough to become involved in a number of colonial wars, and Churchill was able to serve under his own flag. He saw action on the North West frontier and with Kitchener in the Sudan, and was captured by the Boers in South Africa; each of these times he acted also as a correspondent, sending back chauvinistic accounts of the engagements to the London press. His background and contacts helped get him into the House of Commons as a Tory, but in 1904, Churchill crossed the floor to the Liberal side on the issue of Free Trade.

After the Liberals returned to power in 1906, Churchill began to climb the conventional ladder of political success. As Home Secretary to 1910-11, his most famous exploit involved the police “battle” with a group of anarchists who had barricaded themselves in a house on Sidney Street, in London. Churchill showed up at the scene for no apparent reason, and “when the building caught fire and the fire brigade arrived he gave instructions to the fire-brigade officer on his authority as Home Secretary that he was to allow the building to bum.” (Emrys Hughes, Winston Churchill: British Bulldog, the best revisionist work on the subject.) Among the charred bodies that were recovered, however, there was missing that of the alleged leader, Peter the Painter. This evidently galled Churchill, for he continued the fight against this “wild beast” (his words), years afterwards writing that “rumor” had it that Peter the Painter had later turned up in Russia and become one of the Bolshevik leaders insanely bent on decimating that wretched country. That this was highly improbable on the face of it, since, historically, there have existed—shall we say—problems between anarchists and Marxists, was not something Churchill could be expected to know. For him, all the enemies of the established order of inherited privilege and Anglo-Saxon world hegemony were, and would always be, “wild beasts.” (Compare his exultant cry at the news of the murder of Mussolini: “Ah, the bloody beast is dead!”) There was no particular reason to make fine distinctions among the animals.

The position Churchill developed for himself around this time was that of “social imperialist,” perhaps the dominant political philosophy in most Western countries by the outbreak of the First World War. Masquerading as a form of radicalism, social imperialism essentially signified the paying out, inch by inch, of the system of competitive capitalism and private property—through social welfare legislation, occasional nationalizations, promotion of “responsible” trade unionism, subsidies of all kinds, etc.—in order to marshal the masses behind the imperialist policies of their respective rulers. It adored the national collective, and was fond of thinking with fictitious concepts such as “national energy” and “national resources” (intended to include the mental and physical abilities of the people). Its pose as the wave of the future was the most contemptible thing about it. Churchill at the time had no qualms about cashing in on that pose, however. He said, in a speech to his constituents: “I am on the side of those who think that a greater collective element should be introduced into the State and municipalities. I should like to see the State undertaking new functions, stepping into new spheres of activity. . .” A sample of Churchill as conservative philosopher: “No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone. He must be both an individualist and a collectivist. The nature of man is a dual nature. The character of the organization of human society is dual. Man is at once a unique being and a gregarious animal. For some purposes he must be a collectivist, for others he is, and he will for all time remain, an individualist.” Deep, deep. Actually, on the fundamental issues, Churchill never progressed beyond such stuff. It could not, obviously, stem the socialist tide. In any case, that wasn’t the point. As long as the masses could be persuaded that their government was “socially conscious,” and so kept in line for the next war, things might after all work out. The height of Churchill’s willingness to trade off what remained of an economically free society against his foreign policy aims came during World War II. Then, in order to calm socialist discontent and help unify the nation even more firmly behind the one important goal—the total destruction of Germany—Churchill announced his adherence to the welfare state: “You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.”

In 1911 Churchill abandoned the field of domestic concerns, for which he never had the slightest ability and very little Interest, and became First Lord of the Admiralty. Now, as head of one of the great branches of the British world-imperial machine, helping to make die grosse Politik along with all the other masters of men, he was in his element. Naturally, he quickly allied himself with the war party in the British government. At the time of the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911), he fanned the fires of war by sending a memorandum to Foreign Secretary Edward Grey suggesting that England prepare itself to ship an army to Belgium and be ready to put “extreme pressure” on the Dutch (the first example, I believe, of a continuing trait of Churchill’s: the propensity to bully small neutrals). The crisis passed, but by the next year, he, along with other key figures in the Asquith cabinet, were talking privately of the inevitable coming war with Germany and the preparations it would require. When the final crisis came, in July, 1914 (who can read about the accelerating plunge into war of those days without a sickening feeling? From that crisis was to come, directly, the deaths of some ten or twelve million men, and, indirectly, Bolshevism and Nazism, the age of perpetual war, and the slide towards a totally collectivist world; and all those responsible for that war died in their beds!—no, at least the Tsar received a just reward)—when the great crisis came, Churchill must have felt like a sadist with a dawning appreciation that he is about to be put in charge of a concentration camp. Of course, he frantically pushed for war. His own Prime Minister later wrote of him: “Nothing would do him but immediate mobilisation. . .Winston, who has got all his war paint on, is longing for a sea fight in the early hours of the morning to result to the sinking of the Goeben.” The mobilization of the British fleet (or, rather, the order not to disperse, since it had already been concentrated for “war games”) was given on July 26, two days before the first Russian general mobilization orders, and it encouraged the warmongers in Petersburg. On the afternoon of July 28, three days before the invasion of Belgium, Churchill ordered the British fleet—the greatest naval force ever assembled in the history of the world to that time-“to proceed during the night at high speed and without lights through the Straits of Dover from Portland to its fighting base at Scapa Flow” (Sidney Fay, The Origins of the World War). “Fearing to bring this order before the Cabinet, lest it should be considered a provocative action likely to damage the chances of peace (sic!), Mr. Churchill had only informed Mr. Asquith, who at once gave his approval.” Now, what Churchill could do to insure that England would not be left out of the Great War, he had done. There is no reason for surprise that, according to the other, relatively reluctant members of the British war party, was visibly thrilled and all smiles when the ultimatum to Germany expired without a satisfactory reply, and England was in the war.

III.

In regard to Churchill’s role during World War I, we will omit any discussion of his plan for a naval attack on the Dardanelles, which led to the fiasco of the Gallipoli campaign (a disaster which clung to Churchill’s name for many years to come). Instead, much more important for an understanding of Churchill is the story of a ship called the Lusitania.

The indispensable work on this subject is Colin Simpson’s recent intelligent and highly praised book, The Lusitania. The facts (uncontested) which Simpson presents have to appear incredible to anyone raised on the Churchill legend. Basically, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, from the first days of the war, pursued a policy deliberately conceived and designed to destroy all rules of warfare in the North Atlantic, with the aim of involving the United States in war with Germany. (Ultimately he was successful.) For example, masters of British merchant ships were instructed to attack surfaced U-boats; as Churchill himself wrote: “The first British countermove, made on my responsibility . . . was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British shipping and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.” Other orders included flying neutral flags on all British ships, killing captured U-boat survivors, and the startling: “In all action, white flags should be fired upon with prompitude.”

The reader interested in a truly fascinating account both of high and sinister politics and of war at sea should by all means read Simpson’s book, where he or she will be able to follow in detail the story of how the United States was “embroiled” with Germany from 1914-1917, and thus launched on the road to global responsibility. Here we can only focus on the strange doings in London in the first days of May, 1915, as the Lusitania, on its way to Liverpool and loaded with munitions of war, was nearing submarine-infested waters off the southern coast of Ireland. Colonel House was having the eerie experience, on two different occasions, of being asked suddenly and unaccountably, by Edward Grey and then by George V, what would happen if the Lusitania were sunk? To both he responded that that would certainly bring the United States into the war. Now the scene shifts to the Admiralty. In Simpson’s words: “Admiral Oliver drew Churchill’s attention to the fact that the Juno (originally intended to convoy the Lusitania) was unsuitable for exposure to submarine attack without escort, and suggested that elements of the destroyer flotilla from Milford Haven should be sent forthwith to her assistance. At this juncture, the Admiralty War Diary stops short, perhaps understandably, as it was here the decision was made that was to be the direct cause of the disaster. No one alive knows who made it, but Churchill and Fisher must share responsibility. Shortly after noon on May 5 the Admiralty signaled to the Juno to abandon her escort mission and return to Queenstown . . . The Lusitania was not informed that she was now alone, and closing every minute to the U-20 . . . . It was an incredible decision by any standards and can only be explained on two grounds: that both Churchill and Fisher were so pre-occupied with the Dardanelles and their personal problems that they failed to appreciate it (but the Lusitania was the most famous ship in the world, known by them to be in imminent danger of being sunk—rr); or that it was the pinnacle of Churchill’s higher strategy of embroiling the U-boats with a neutral power.”

For the student of the Pearl Harbor attack there are numerous ironic pre-echoes in the Lusitania affair: the fact that the German code had been broken by the British, so that they were aware of the position of the submarines in the path of the Lusitania (as the American government was aware of many facets of the “surprise” attack of December 7, likewise because of having broken the Japanese code); the mystifying overruling of a subordinate naval officer who proposes what, under the circumstances, is Standard Operating Procedure (as Admiral Stark overruled the officer who urged, on the morning of December 7, that the commanders at Pearl Harbor be Informed of the imminence of war); the attempt to set up the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner, as the fall guy (much as Kimmel and Short were set up for the role); Churchill’s abruptly leaving, after the decision had been make not to send an escort, for Paris and making himself incommunicado (as General Marshall was incommunicado the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack); and, of course, the official horror and wringing of hands at the unheard of atrocity by the enemy—in reality, the fruit of tireless planning on the part of Churchill and Roosevelt respectively, and the fulfillment of their heart’s desire.

Later in 1915, when the Cabinet was reorganized, Churchill was removed from the Admiralty as a condition of the Tories joining the government. The excitement of battle being temporarily withdrawn, he was utterly despondent (“the black dog” was his private name for the periodic fits of depression to which he was subject). To one visitor, Churchill said, pointing to the war maps which covered his office wall: “This is what I live for . . . Yes, I am finished in respect of all I care for the waging of war, the defeat of the Germans.” (For the critic looking to condemn Churchill out of his own mouth, there is truly an embarrassment of riches.)

Two items regarding Churchill in the immediate post-World War I period, when he was Minister of War and then Colonial Secretary, must be mentioned (many others, for instance his nearly involving England in another war with Turkey over the “Chanak incident” in 1922, and his “little wars” against colonial peoples, in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, simply cannot be dealt with here: Churchill’s life was just too “action-packed” for every warmongering action and initiative to be listed): the continuation of the British blockade of Germany for months after the Armistice, and the armed intervention against the Bolshevik Revolution.

In his capacity as Minister of War (incidentally, one can say of Churchill in this office what Tansill said of Stimson as Secretary of War—No one ever deserved the name more), he ceaselessly promoted a crusade against the new regime in Russia (in 1942, in Moscow, he asked Stalin—literally—whether he “forgave” him for this policy). Lloyd George said of him at this time: “The most formidable and irresponsible protagonist of an anti-Bolshevist war was Mr. Winston Churchill,” and added, with a shrewd guess as to part of the motivation: “His ducal blood revolted against the wholesale elimination of Grand Dukes in Russia.” The cost of armed British intervention was officially estimated at 100,000,000 pounds, and the attempt to strangle Communism “in its cradle” earned, naturally enough, the lasting enmity and suspicion of the Russian leaders. It is also possible, as Emrys Hughes suggests, that it helped consolidate nationalist-minded support behind them, and thus aided Lenin and Trotsky in winning the Civil War; in which case, one would have to add to the debit side of Churchill’s career a small item having to do with some fifty years of Red Terror in the Soviet Union.

The point of continuing the blockade was to increase the misery and privation of the Germans so that they would have no alternative to accepting the Carthaginian terms of the Paris Settlement. No one was in the dark as to what the blockade meant. Churchill himself told the House of Commons in March, 1919: “We are enforcing the blockade with rigour, and Germany is very near starvation. All the evidence I have received from officers sent by the War Office all over Germany show: firstly, the great privation which the German people are suffering; and, secondly, the danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition.”

Historians often write as if Hitler’s concept of “zoological warfare,” of war as aiming at the systematic weakening of an enemy people in the most basic physiological sense, came to him from reading a few murky, nutty Social Darwinist tracts in Vienna cafes. These are supposed to have sparked in his “sick!’ mind what a victorious Germany might feel justified in doing to a defeated Poland or Russia. I would suggest a different interpretation as a possibility: his experience of the actual behavior of the triumphant Entente after the First World War (especially the blockade and the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923). More generally, it seems to me that Hitler’s goals for Europe and the methods ho was prepared to achieve them, and his well-known admiration for the British Empire are two elements in his makeup that deserve to considered together. As evidence for this interpretation, there is his famous conversation with his military officers in 1940, reported by General Blumentritt: “He then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire . . . He remarked with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but ‘where there is planning, there are shavings flying.’ “Hitler, in other words, did not come out of a political vacuum, nor are the “roots” of National Socialism to be found in a few 19th century scribblers. Rather, the actual practice of Western imperialism, particularly by Britain, is a main source. After all, what did British imperialism mean but the “Master Race” idea applied to the colored races? The scandal came when Hitler made it clear that he intended to abolish the artificial distinction which Western imperialists had drawn between the white and colored races; that he meant to treat the Slavs, for instance, much as the Congolese and the Javanese had been treated. This enables us to understand the Nazi ideological nonsense about the non-contribution to “world civilization” of the non-civilized and thus, according to the rules accepted by all Western imperialists, making them fit objects of exploitation.) That in the end England and its Empire were to suffer greatly at the hands of a Hitler motivated by such notions, may suggest to some that there is an ironic justice in the moral economy of the world.

IV.

In 1924 Churchill rejoined the Conservative Party and was made Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position his father had held (Lord Randolph was noted, when he held the position, for having been puzzled by the decimals—what were those “damned dots”?). Although just the year before, as a Liberal, Churchill was still supporting Free Trade, he now included in his 1925 budget the protective McKenna duties, assisting Britain along the road to protectionism that it was to complete in 1932. Doubtless his most famous act as head of the Exchequer was to return England to the gold standards, but at the unrealistic pre-war parity, thus seriously harming the export trade and the economy at large, and ruining the good name of gold in the public’s mind. There would be scarcely anyone today who would argue with A. J. P. Taylor’s evaluation of Churchill’s action here: he “did not grasp the economic arguments one way or the other. What determined him was again a devotion to British greatness. The pound would once more ‘look the dollar in the face’; the days of Queen Victoria would be restored.” Lord Esher had said of him in 1917; “He handles great subjects in rhythmical language, and becomes quickly enslaved by his own phrases,” and whatever issue he put his mind to, in foreign or domestic affairs, this was the level on which his mind operated.

After the fall of the Baldwin government in 1929, Churchill was out of office. The question of India having become prominent, he soon distinguished himself as the head of the reactionary Tory clique in the House of Commons which insisted on a hard-line towards Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. Churchill’s ideas on this subject were pure Tory guff, and a good example of what Esher was referring to, e.g.: “The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of Life into History. From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.” Contrast to the alienated Churchill, who lived by a system of lovingly self-wrought pictures in his head—whose mind was constituted of such pictures—an Englishman with his feet on the ground, Richard Cobden, who in 1838 wrote: “It is customary. . . to hear our standing army and navy defended as necessary for the protection of our colonies, as though some other nation might otherwise seize them. Where is the enemy(?) that would be so good as to steal such property? We should consider it to be quite as necessary to arm in defence of our national debt!”

To the end, Churchill was virtually the stereotype of the Tory imperialist. In 1942, he had Gandhi and other Congress leaders arrested, and the government which less than a year before had signed the Atlantic Charter announced from Bombay an Emergency Whipping Order, permitting as many as “thirty strokes with a cane in the presence of a doctor.” Finally, of course, it was Churchill’s very policy of war with Germany to the bitter end that so weakened Britain economically and militarily as to make the loss of the Empire, including India, inevitable.

As the totalitarian States began to emerge from the 20s on, Churchill, the century’s great hero of liberal democracy, praised their leaders one after the other. The prime example of this is Mussolini; for whom Churchill expressed unstinting admiration right up until he became Hitler’s ally; as late as 1935 he referred to Mussolini as “so great a man and so wise a ruler.” But even Hitler did not escape Churchill’s verbal caresses; late in 1937, he stated: “One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations.” Here is a perfect example of Churchill’s value system in operation. Consider: by 1937 Hitler had imprisoned or executed some thousands of political opponents, legislated against the Jews, entirely dismantled the system of civil liberties, and was clearly set on erecting a totalitarian State with the annihilation of the individual which that implies. And yet, because he played the old game of nationalist politics—and played it very, very well—he could still command Churchill’s respect! The bother only came when Hitler was perceived as threatening England’s world position.

Similarly with the Russian Communist leaders. Lenin and Trotsky, with their concept of world revolution, were “bloody baboons”; Stalin, on the other hand, who appeared to be more concerned with socialism in one country, and was, in any case, an ally against Hitler, was an excellent candidate for the role of “great man.” Churchill’s comments after June, 1941, on Stalin and Stalinism are priceless: here’s an example, from May, 1944, which it would be hard to better from the lips of any fey fellow-traveller of the time: “Profound changes have taken place in Soviet Russia. The Trotzkyite form of communist has been completely wiped out (on oblique, favorable reference to the purges of the late 30s, which claimed some 700,000 lives!—rr). The victory of the Russian armies has been attended by a great rise in the strength of the Russian state and a, remarkable broadening of its views. The religious side of Russian life has had a wonderful rebirth,” etc., etc. To my mind, what we have in these almost unbelievable eulogies by Churchill is a case of that terrible-freemasonry of spirit among the high governing class, whereby each can empathize with and sympathetically understand the “problems” the other faces—Hitler’s shrug at the “shavings flying” in the wake of British imperialism—and which makes the much closer to one another in their outlook on life than to those on whose necks their feet are respectively planted.

From 1929 to the outbreak of war in 1939, Churchill was out of office, ostracized by the leaders of his own party, an unprecedented occurrence for someone who had filled the high positions which he had. A major reason is that he was known as a fomentor of wars (Herbert Morrison could casually call him a “fire-eater and a militarist” without raising eyebrows—this was simply the common view), and there was a strong pacifist tide running in Britain. After Hitler came to power, however, Churchill began to attract attention once more, as the head of the faction that favored a “firm” policy towards Germany. As he put it to General Robert E. Wood when they lunched together in November, 1936: “Germany is getting too strong and we must smash her.”

Churchill has covered his name with glory in the eyes of many for thus having been the leader of the war party in the middle and late 30s, and pushing for British “rearmament” (actually, Britain, like France and the French allies in East Central Europe, had never disarmed—they were, in fact, all armed to the teeth—and it had rejected every plan, put forward by successive German governments and even by Litvinov, for a general European disarmament). This he may be conceded. But what was his peace plan? In 1933 he had denounced Mussolini’s proposal for a Four-Power Pact to revise the Paris Settlement peacefully, as in 1938 he was to denounce the Munich Agreement. He never once, however, suggested an alternative course—except to increase British armaments even further and grimly resolve to defend Versailles by force. In this spirit he applauded Chamberlain’s lunatic unconditional guarantee to Poland in March, 1939 (pledging England to war if anything occurred that “clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces”). Afterwards Churchill himself criticized the guarantee in these terms: “Here was decision at last, taken on the worst possible grounds, which surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.”

The policy Churchill urged and which was ultimately adopted by the British Government, is understandable only on the basis of the establishment’s line: namely, that Hitler wanted to “conquer the world.” (Funny how easily that goal is imputed to those who happen to find themselves at odds with the British or American States: as if “conquering the world”—that is, defeating the various powers of Europe and Asia and garrisoning their territories, occupying Africa, sending armadas to attack and occupy North and South America, and so on—and all this without encountering any disheartening difficulties—were something that would quite naturally occur to the head of a country, like Germany, with some 25 million adult males, or the leaders of a country, like Japan, with 15% of the GNP of the United States—but then there is their well-known “insanity” to explain the astonishing lack of realism. Meanwhile, the fact that Britain had already conquered and was in possession of one-fourth of the world is accepted as a datum of the Cosmos.) A. J. P. Taylor has shown, though, that Hitler’s plans can much more adequately be explained as centering on a restoration of Brest-Litovsk—the settlement of 1918 between Germany and Russia which established German hegemony in Eastern Europe. Why anyone should feel that such a state of affairs threatened vital British interests is a mystery. In any case, it would surely be difficult to maintain that the final outcome of the Second Crusade—the hegemony over the eastern half of the Continent by a more formidable power—was vastly and obviously to be preferred.

At all events, in September, 1939, war came once more between the Western allies and Germany (the fixedness of the past gives the illusion that this was inevitable, but that is far from being the case). Churchill was immediately recalled to his old job as head of the Admiralty, and, in May, 1940, his life’s ambition was realized. He became Prime Minister.

V.

In directing the British war effort from 1940 to 1945, Churchill, the “great strategist,” was wrong much more often than he was right. (His overall expertise can be gathered from the fact that, in 1938, he referred to the French Army as “the most perfectly trained and faithful mobile force in Europe.”) The decision to send troops to North Africa was a wise one; the decision to send them to Greece, from which they were forced to withdraw in a second Dunkirk, was the opposite, and prevented finishing off the Italian North African forces before Rommel could arrive. His philosophy of the offensive in warfare helped hasten the fall of France (it would have been more sensible, according to Fuller, to try to hold the river-lines). Later, disastrously underestimating Japanese air power, Churchill sent the two great battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse to Singapore, to deter a Japanese attack. They were sunk by land-based bombers in the first days of the Pacific War, swinging the balance of naval power to Japan and destroying the morale of the forces at Singapore. Britain was saved from defeat in the Second World War not by Churchill’s military genius (he had none), but by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and by the circumstance that the White House was occupied by a man as boyishly eager as Churchill himself to bring war to his people.

More than any other of his acts in this war, Churchill’s plan (while he was was still at the Admiralty) to take over neutral Norway was a fiasco. Hitler, in early 1940, had declared himself satisfied with a genuinely neutral position for Norway, but on February 6, 1940, the British War Council approved the plan to seize Narvik and occupy northern Norway and Sweden by force, as well as the Swedish port of Lulea on the Baltic. As a preliminary to the attack, the British violated and then began mining Norwegian territorial waters, leading the Germans to forestall the British occupation by their own invasion of Norway (Denmark was taken on the way). What the Norwegians and Danes suffered in World War II, they owe to Winston Churchill.

A very important sidelight of this affair is that Churchill’s plan included sending an expeditionary force to help Finland against the Red Army (this was also to provide a pretext for the invasion of the neutral countries). Thus, in 1940, England came perilously close to war with both Russia and Germany. That Churchill was prepared to risk that shows mat the man lived in a dangerous fantasy-world much of the time. If England had faced what Germany did by 1945, there is little doubt that historians would now be recording much the same breakdown of mind and personality in Churchill’s case that the world knows so well in Hitler’s.

A famous incident in the early stages of the war, now mostly forgotten, was the treacherous attack ordered by Churchill on the French Mediterranean fleet, following the fall of France. Not trusting in his ally’s promise never to allow the fleet to come into German hands, Churchill ordered British commanders in the Mediterranean to demand the instantaneous surrender of French naval units, and in case of their ultimatum immediately to open fire. According to Liddel Hart, “all three admirals concerned—Cunningham, Somerville, and North at Gibralter—were horrified by Churchill’s orders.” At Alexandria, Cunningham disregarded the fanatic urgings of this ruthless man, and gained the end through patient negotiations. At Mers-el-Kebir (Oran), however, French ships were fired on, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of French sailors (just as, in the course of the liberation of France, there were to be nearly as many deaths of French civilians from British and American bombers as Britons killed by German bombers). What was left of the French fleet retired to Toulon, where, in 1942, when the Germans threatened to seize it, the French honored their word and scuttled their ships.

That Churchill could be a dangerous ally may well have been learned the hard way by the Poles also, although here the full facts will most probably never be known. What is certain is that General Wladyslaw Sikoriski, Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile in London, was seriously endangering Churchill’s policy of cooperation and accomodation with Stalin, by demanding that the truth about the Katyn Forest massacre be made public, and by insisting on Poland’s pre-1939 eastern frontier (he did not want most of the German territories which Churchill tried to palm off on him). Sikoriski was killed, along with his entourage, in an airplane crash shortly after take-off from Gibralter (the Czech pilot who had been provided him survived). This was the third “accident” in a row for Sikorski in a British aircraft; considering that he was the Head of State Of an allied power, a bit sloppy. MacFarlane, the Governor of Gibralter, afterwards said: “The Russians could not have done it,” and told Madame Sikorska: “It cannot have been an accident.” Still, it is possible that Sikorski’s death was due to mechanical failure of the airplane. The Polish exile community in London at the time, however, was convinced that he bad been killed pursuant to Churchill’s orders.

Concerning another, and much more significant plot, there was at one time a good deal of controversy, but would now be difficult in the extreme to dispute the main lines of the revisionist interpretation: that Churchill conspired with Roosevelt to involve the United States in war with Germany. There is no need to delve into details here; the interested reader may find the case summarized in Chapters V and VI of William Henry Chamberlin’s America’s Second Crusade, and elaborated in the works of Beard. Tansill and others. Here let us simply quote from The New York Times of January 2, 1972: “WAR-ENTRY PLANS LAID TO ROOSEVELT. Britain Releases Her Data on Talks with Churchill. London. Jan. 1 (AP)—Formerly top secret British Government papers made public today said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August, 1941, that he was looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. . . . On Aug. 19. Churchill reported to the War Cabinet in London on other aspects of the Newfoundland (Atlantic Charter) meeting that were not made public . . .‘He (Roosevelt) obviously was determined that they should come in. If he were to put the issue of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for months,’ the Cabinet minutes added. “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident.” By the end of the year, Churchill’s “higher strategy” had once again culminated in American involvement in a European war. He duly took credit for it, as well he might from his point of view; after the United States came into the war, Churchill said in a radio broadcast: “This is what I have dreamed of, animed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass.”

We are entering now on to the darkest passage in a life that could boast many: Churchill’s policy of the calculated terror bombing of the cities of Germany. First, let us note that, militarily, the policy was a foolish one: up until the end, it had nothing like the crushing effect on German morale that had been expected (the American bombing policy that was in operation through most of the war against Germany, of concentrating on certain industrial targets, especially oil refineries, was much more successful), and what A. J. P. Taylor calls “the British obsession with heavy bombers” led naturally, to scarcities in other areas—for instance, of fighter planes at Singapore and landing craft at Normandy.

But besides creating technical problems for the war effort of the Allied leaders, the program also had what could be called “a human angle.” About 800.000 German civilians were massacred from the air, according to the estimate of the West German government (other estimates are somewhat lower), and great cities, famous in the annals of science and art, turned into heaps of smouldering runs. Nothing is more certain than that air war far from the front lines, with the enemy’s civilians as the deliberate target, was begun after 1939 by the British, whose plans for this went back many years. In fact, high British Air Ministry officials after the war boasted of the boldness and originality of their government in pioneering this ingenious innovation. The story can be found set forth lucidly and in detail in F. J. P. Veal’s extremely important book, Advance to Barbarism.

The whole business is one of unremitting horror, but even within it there are high-points. Thus, in March, 1942, the British Cabinet accepted the plan proposed to it by Churchill’s friend and scientific advisor Professor Lindemann, whereby “top priority” in bombings was to go, not to middle-class areas, which tended to be somewhat spread out, but to working-class quarters, which were more compact and densely-populated. (Lindemann’s character is superbly captured in Rolf Hochhuth’s play about Churchill, Soldiers; here he is shown to be a repulsive ascetic, impassioned by little besides death, a brother to SS Dr. Mengele—he of the advanced medical experiments—and to Professors Frost and Wither of C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength: all devils incarnate.) Another nice twist is Anthony Eden’s whining complaint that his colleagues were ignoring the “claims” of the smaller German cities to be bombed. A famous milestone in the story is the attack, on July 27-28. 1943, on residential Hamburg. The bombing and the resulting firestorm killed 42,600 people and seriously injured 37,000 others. And so we come to Dresden.

Here the reader should consult David Irving’s definitive work, The Destruction of Dresden (Irving is by no means a thorough-going revisionist, but the facts speak for them selves). Towards the end of 1944, the British, under prodding from the Americans, had been shifting their air attacks to industrial targets. In January, 1945, however, Churchill sharply criticized his air commanders for having been unresponsive to his inquires as to “whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany should not now be considered especially attractive targets.” “The immediate result of this hard reply,” Irving writes, “was to stampede the Air Staff . . . into issuing an instruction to Sir Arthur Harris which would make it inevitable that the Eastern population centres, including Dresden” would now be subjected to saturation bombing. (Space is limited, I reluctantly admit, but still the reader has the right to know who Harris was: through most of the massacring of German civilians from the air, he was in charge of Bomber Command; he continually pushed for the killing of civilians, when others preferred more directly military targets; and his viewpoint on the ethics of the matter may be summed in Irving’s words: “the only international restriction which he considered to be binding on him and his Command. . . was an agreement dating back to the Franco-Prussian War, which prohibited the release Of explosive objects from gas-filled dirigibles; this restriction, as he pointed out, was rigidly complied with throughout the Second World War by Bomber Command”—here a whiff of the macabre humor about killing that marks the authentic sadist-murderer, reminiscent of Jacobin jokes about the guillotine. By the end of the war, Harris’s name so stank that he was the only Air Commander not made a peer by the “victory”-intoxicated British Government.)

Irving points out that, as with the inhabitants of Hiroshima, the people of Dresden were pawns in a larger game. “Clearly (Churchill) had secured his immediate aim: soon after the 4th February, at the climax of the Crimea conference (Yalta), he would be able to produce a dramatic strike on an. Eastern city which could hardly fail to impress the Soviet delegation” (if Dresden, why not Kiev?). As it happened, the attack had to be postponed because of weather conditions; but the Soviets doubtless got the message as the lesson of Hiroshima was also not lost on them. Americans simply have no conception of what a looming terror the Anglo-Saxon air forces have been to the peoples of the world.

To be brief: by February, 1945, Dresden contained well over one million inhabitants, including refugees. It was virtually defenseless, there being no flak batteries remaining in the city and the Luftwaffe fighter planes, being largely grounded for lack of fuel. It most likely came within the definition of an open city according to the Hague Convention of 1907. What minor industrial targets Dresden contained were not marked for attack by the RAF. The blow was aimed, rather, at the residential areas. It succeeded. Probably about 135,000 persons were killed. The city’s authorities has to give up hope of burying the dead and resorted to mass cremation. When the vultures escaped from the Dresden Zoo, there were some fine scenes to behold.

As the shock of horror spread in the neutral countries with access to the news (if not in New York and Washington, at least in Zurich and Stockholm, one had heard of a city named Dresden), Churchill started to panic. Cute is how he tried to get the air commanders to accept a memo implying that they had been solely responsible for the bombing (Irving, pp. 250-253; he refers there to the need to review the standing policy of “bombing German cities solely for the sake of increasing terror, though under other pretexts”—thus giving the whole game away). The memo was indignantly returned, the officers in question realizing that Churchill was using them in an attempt to clear his own name with history.

That attempt seems hopeless. The destruction of Dresden was, directly, the result of Churchill’s specific request to his air commanders, and, indirectly, the outcome of his whole attitude towards the war. He had, for example, told the House of Commons, in 1943: “To achieve the extirpation of the Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go.” And at the start of the war he had said of the Germans: “We will break their hearts.” Well, so he did. But we may hope that in partial recompense for his great triumph, the names of Churchill and Dresden will be licked in an embrace for so long as men remember, from time to time, what States have done to human beings.

Schlafen Sie wohl, Englaender. Schlafen Sie wohl.

VI.

There are other great massacres—realized, or only projected—for which Churchill must share responsibility, as he must for the catastrophic political decisions of World War n. Let us deal with the latter first.

Churchill’s admirers seem to assume that it is In the regular course of nature, a thing calling for no particular explanation, that a nation like Britain should gain its most complete military victory and simultaneously find itself in the most dangerous position In its history. But there exists by now a large body of evidence and expert opinion to the effect that the practical defeat of England in the Second World War is largely traceable to Churchill’s decisions. The root of the fateful error was Churchill’s famous “single-mindedness,” a not especially valuable trait in those dealing with complex issues, and certainly not in someone undertaking to shape world history. When his secretary questioned him, in June, 1941, on the decision to give all-out aid to Stalin, Churchill replied: “I have only one aim in life, the defeat of Hitler, and this makes things very simple for me.” In February, 1943, Franco transmitted to Churchill a memorandum warning of the dangerous spread of Russian power on the Continent. Churchill responded by ridiculing Franco’s fears, adding: “I venture to prophesy that, after the war, England will be the greatest military Power in Europe. I am sure that England’s influence will be stronger in Europe than it has ever been since the days of the fall of Napoleon.” This fantasy of perpetual and overweening British power, then, was the foundation of of Churchill’s wartime policies. As Liddell Hart has said: “Britain’s leader was too excited by the battle to look ahead, and see the inevitable consequence of the smashing victory for which he thirsted. It makes no sense.”

The most direct expression of the demand for total, smashing victory was Roosevelt’s policy, from early 1943 on, of exacting unconditional surrender from Germany, Italy and Japan (the demand was afterwards dropped in Italy’s case). When Roosevelt made the announcement at Casablanca, Churchill’s sycophantic reaction was to look thoughtful, grin and then say: “Perfect! And I can just see how Goebbels and the rest of ’em’ll squeal!” (In fact, Goebbels considered the slogan a godsend, since it identified the German State with the Nazi regime.) The doctrine of unconditional surrender necessarily led to Communist control of East Central Europe and the Balkans, and of Manchuria and North Korea. After it had begun to work its inevitable effects, Churchill desperately tried to block them—this, ironically, is another cause for his high repute among conservatives—by pushing for invasion by Anglo-American forces of the Balkans and the Danube basin (the famous “soft underbelly of Europe”—the Italian campaign showed that concept up for the idiocy it was). Really—through all the torrent of his self-serving rhetoric, and after all his glamorizing at the hands of Luce and the rest of the establishment press is done—just what value are we to place on the political sense of someone who simply did not comprehend that the extinction of Germany and Japan as powers entailed . . . certain consequences. Is it a Metternich or a Bismarck we are dealing with here? Or is this rather a case of a Woodrow Wilson redivivus, of another Prince of Fools?

To pose a fairly basic question: what actually did Churchill believe he was fighting against in the Second World War? Was it a crusade against the diabolical Hitler of the death-camps and the medical experiments? This later, more sophisticated view of what World War II was about played no role at all in Churchill’s winking. Instead, it was a question in his mind of a “gangster” regime threatening the “liberties of Europe” (that is, the right to rule of the various parasitic regimes in the individual countries), and, equally, of—Prussian militarism! “The core of Germany is Prussia. There is the source of the pestilence . . . . Nazi tyranny and Prussian militarism are the two main elements in German life which must be absolutely destroyed,” he proclaimed. The Allies were battling the same mad Junker dream of world conquest, he went on to say, which had “twice within our lifetime, and three times counting that of our fathers . . . plunged the world into their wars of expansion and aggression.”

This is a serious man? If his words are to be believed, Churchill’s interpretation of the great epic of World War II was the one ground out by some bored French press secretary in the Washington Embassy. Forget about a tyrant and “blood-stained usurper” (as John Stuart Mill called him) named Napoleon HI, who was, equally with Bismarck, responsible for the Franco-Prussian War. Forget about the Tsarist Russian imperialists and their French allies who, more than anyone else, brought about World War I. Wars are caused by Prussians, and this war is no different from any other. Thus, according to Churchill, the Second World War was no singular confrontation with the hair-raisingly demonic, as we have so often been told since, but—one can hardly grasp it—simply the third act of the old battle against the monsters of monocled arrogance who have all along been planning for the Day when Berlioz will be replaced by Brahms and we will all be forced to eat sauerkraut at the point of a bayonet! Even the old Third Republic politician, Paul Reynaud, had a less obsolete interpretation of what the war meant when he told his ministers in 1940: You think you have to do with Wilhelm II, but I tell you that you have to do with Ghenghis Khan. Churchill believed that fundamentally he had to do with Wilhelm II (or even Wilhelm I!), and total war, the exhaustion and eclipse of England, the plot to deceive the American people into entering the war, and all the rest—these were all justified by the burning need to—stop the Junkers!

Naturally, with this perspective, Churchill could have no sympathy with or appreciation for the heroes of the German opposition to Hitler. Even the Tory publicist, Constantine FitzGibbon, is compleased to say that, after the officers’ plot of July 20, 1944, “Churchill in the House of Commons exactly echoed Goebbels’s speech about the conspirators, describing them as a small clique of officers and expressing a certain satisfaction that ‘dog eat dog.’ “Churchill’s fanatical—really, brainless—anti-Germanism blinded him to the possibility that a Germany run by Beck and Goerdeler might conceivably be more desirable from a Western point of view than one controlled either by Hitler or Stalin. And as for Prussianism, let this be said: the Prussian officer class (those mad dogs, infinitely worse, of course, than the products of Sandhurst, St. Cyr and West Point) no longer exists, and Prussia—which, after all, was Humboldt as well as Hegel—now is not even a name on a map. But Prussianism’s final act was the attempt to kill Hitler and to salvage something of the honor of Germany—a not unworthy way to leave, for the last time, the stage of history. If we contrast these officers with others who were in a similar position, is it the Prussians who suffer from the comparison? It is by no means certain that Tukhachevsky and the other Red Army Marshals actually were contemplating killing Stalin; and as for Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill, there is no evidence at all that the idea ever entered the heads of their respective military subordinates.

The projected mass-murder in which Churchill bad a hand was, of course, the Morgenthau Plan to demolish German industry and mining after the war, in order to turn the Germans into a peaceable agricultural and pastoral people. At the Quebec Conference of 1944, Churchill, at first reluctant to agree to the Plan, was converted when “Morgenthau pointed out that the destruction of German productive capacity would free German overseas market areas for British trade, and . . . offered England postwar credit of $6.5 billion. The President agreed that the United States would impose no restrictions on the use of this credit” (Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender, p. 75). Now, the millions of deaths from starvation and cold (the Plan called for flooding the coal mines of the Ruhr!) which would have resulted from its implementation surely merit placing it in the same category with certain Nazi plans for the treatment of Russia after the war (one sign of how truly staggering the concept was, is that even Stimson was horrified by it). The diplomacy of the Second World War offers few scenes as fascinating for their quality of perfectly distilled evil as the US Secretary of the Treasury, in his choking hate, trying to bribe the Prime Minister of Great Britain to consent to the genocide of the German people—and the British Prime Minister, in his frenzied greed, accepting the bribe!

While the Morgenthau Plan was never carried out (although it indirectly guided Allied policy in Germany for a couple of years), Churchill’s agreement to the mass transfer of German populations westward from Pomerania, East Prussia, Silesia and Sudetenland—all German territories for many centuries—was, and it caused the deaths of some two or three millions. And we must record also that Churchill was an accomplice in Truman’s decision to begin the atom bombing of the cities of Japan, and to continue putting them out, one by one, until either Japan surrendered unconditionally or there were no more Japanese, whichever came first.

Let’s stop for a moment. Action said that we should judge the great actors in history by the final maxim that govern our own lives. On that basis, what do you think of someone who lived a life such that, in describing it, the fact that he was an accomplice in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a throw-away line?

In nailing Churchill with these crimes, we are not, the reader should note, judging from any novel or arcane standard of morality spun out of the brain of a ressentiment-filled Jacobin or “crazy” Russian anarchist. Nor is it the tithe of the tithe, of moral rectitude that we are insisting upon, and compared to which we just happen to find Churchill wanting. We are dealing, rather, with decisions and acts that led to the deaths of millions or would have led to the deaths of other millions. It appears to us self-evident that the least of these decisions and acts would—if justice ruled this world—in itself be enough to cause its perpetrator to be torn to pieces by a crowd.

In the midst of the Potsdam Conference, in 1945, Churchill was thrown out as Prime Minister by the British voters (he had never been popular in his own country except during the brief period of the Battle of Britain). While leader of the Opposition, his most celebrated act was helping to declare the Cold War with his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in March, 1946. Europe having been left a political shambles by his very own policies, he called upon the New World to redress the balance of the Old. Naturally, the interventionists in the United States made great capital out of his warnings; Churchill by this time was looked on as practically a professional sighter of attempts-to-conquer-the-world. Not coincidentally, his own England profited from the resulting anti-Russian hysteria: a $6 billion-plus loan in 1946, then more billions from the Marshall Plan, finally additional billions in military aid when NATO was established.

In 1951 Churchill became Prime Minister once more, with a small majority. And now the world saw what no one would have believed it could ever see: Churchill as peacemaker, Churchill warning against the dangers of another war and proposing a summit conference to work towards reconciliation between the Western powers and Russia! The key to what would otherwise be a maddening riddle lies in the fact that, shortly before, the American monopoly of nuclear weapons had been broken by the Soviet Union, and it was estimated by experts that it would require only eight hydrogen bombs to write finis to those Sceptered Isles; by the summer of 1954 Russia was thought to have more than that number. Future great wars, alas, would not be fought over the lands of Africans and Asians, nor by visiting death from the air on the peoples of the European continent. Russian technological advances made it inevitable that from now on any great war would result not in limited casualties for England (such as the 380 deaths that followed the German attack on Coventry), but in the virtual annihilation of the British race. Thus, the New Churchill. But many thought they could detect at least a touch of hypocrisy in his suggestion that the nuclear powers solemnly agree to use their weapons only against enemy troops in the field . . .and not against cities.

We will conclude this survey by observing that, in October, 1953, Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature, thus joining the Immortals such as Haldor K. Laxness and Juan Ramon Jimenez, other Nobel Laureates in Literature, and Pearl S. Buck (whose Prize for the pro-Chinese The Good Earth, had been as politically-motivated as Churchill’s own). Churchill was especially commended by the Nobel Committee for having “mobilized” the English language in time of war. It was reported, though, that he had had his heart set on the Nobel Prize for Peace. Well, why not? It had, after all, been awarded to Theodore Roosevelt (of whom Charles Beard said that he was probably the only high politician in American history who believed that war was good in itself), and afterwards it was to be bestowed on George Marshall and on Henry Kissinger. There is a school of modern literature, the Theatre of the Absurd, which would maintain—with more than a grain of truth, I think—that the world we are doomed to live in is precisely the sort of place where a Winston Churchill could receive the Nobel Price for Peace.

VII.

Finally, a word to the reader: if this essay has seemed to you one long tirade; if you have grown weary—as I must confess I at last have—of the endless recital of wars and bloodshed; if your mind is by now dazed from the simple repetition of the words massacre, murder, slaughter and kill—what can I tell you? It isn’t my fault; it’s not my life I’ve been relating. Did you really think that the British Empire was the kind of campy joke American conservatives have implied it was? “No Christian annals are as sanguinary as ours,” Acton said, in his cool and collected, deep-Christian way. After all, one acquires and maintains the most formidable Empire of any State in history in no other manner than by breaking human bodies and hearts. And our subject has been the Great Man who felt honored to be the humble servitor of the British State in the age of total war.

Let us try to sum up the career of this enormously influential man.

In Winston Churchill we have, above anything else, a militarist, one who yearned for even more wars than actually occurred, a jaundiced personality whose nose only began to twitch when there was bloody conflict afoot, a decadent who could refer to the years without war as “the bland skies of peace and platitude.” We have a schemer clever enough to have embroiled America in two world wars in defense of the British Empire (he used our people in his plans as he might have the Greeks and the Turks), and the great master of stomach-turning Anglo-Saxon cant, the apotheosis of the tradition of Palmerston and Edward Grey, of Wilson, Stimson and Roosevelt—but nonetheless a foolish and futile politician (even from his own standpoint), one of the main destroyers of the balance of power in Europe and East Asia, and the grave-digger of the Empire of the State he served. We have a Man of Blood, whose most characteristic acts were to arrange that the Lusitania would be sunk, and to send the planes winging to set Hamburg and Dresden on fire—perhaps the main architect of the system of total war which yet put an end to the human race. And we have, when all is said and done as far as his beloved country is concerned, a mere social imperialist and politico without principle, in the tacky line of those who have made the England of Gladstone’s time into what it is today.

Yes, truly, the Man of the Century.

For a fitting epitaph, there’s a choice: either the one that seems demanded: If you seek his monument, look around. Or the one I prefer:—

He was better than Hitler.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VIII, NO. 9

SEPTEMBER, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE LP CONVENTION

It was an exciting, gigantic, rip-roaring extravaganza—the greatest nationwide gathering of libertarians in modern times: the “Presidential Convention” on Labor Day week, at the Statler-Hilton Hotel, New York City. Fueled by the showmanship of the New York party and by the public relations knowhow of David Grant and Laura Wertheimer, the Libertarian Party came on like a real nationwide party, gaining unprecedently extensive (and favorable) media coverage, highlighted by several minutes on national CBS television. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was week of highs and lows, a cauldron of love and hate; but out of that cauldron emerged, at last, a great Presidential ticket (Roger MacBride of Charlottesville, Va. and David Bergland of Los Angeles, for President and Vice-President), a superb platform, and an excellent set of national officers dedicated to making an indelible Libertarian mark on American political life.

As I see it the vision animating the new L.P. leadership is a noble and exciting one: the expansion of the L.P. into a major force and influence on American life and on the American political scene. The point is that the L.P. motto, “The Party of Principle”, involves two vital and interrelated parts: refining and cleaving to pure libertarian principle, and the spreading of those principles through a competent, professional political party structure. The idea is to expand from local kaffeeklatsches and discussion clubs to a cohesive and coherent party structure that will be as competent and as professional as possible. Only if we expand from a small sect to a cohesive and nationwide political party can we expand our political and public influence and have a decisive impact on public policy. To be taken seriously we must begin to amass votes; increased votes will of course mean increased publicity and expanded impact on the political arena. This does not mean of course that discussions of philosophy and theory are not important; but simply that the main emphasis of a political party must be on running candidates and gaining votes and influence for those libertarian principles.

It is the correct perception of the MacBride team that such a mighty effort is not in the least quixotic: that, on the contrary, the time is ripe for such a great libertarian political effort as never before in this century. As we have repeatedly been asserting in the pages of the Lib. Forum, America is now mired in a multiple, systemic crisis of statism—a crisis, furthermore, which more and more people, from all ideologies and walks of life, are perceiving as the consequence of statism and Big Government. The crisis is systemic: in economics, civil liberties, foreign policy, and the moral attitudes (post-Watergate) toward government itself. Only libertarianism stands ready to provide a consistent, “radical” alternative to the system of policies that has brought us to this unfortunate pass. Already, all of us have seen the attraction that the libertarian ideology and alternative holds for the media, and for citizens in all walks of life. There are a large number of Americans who are yearning for a way out, for a plausible alternative to the present system, and who would flock to our standard if they were only able to learn of our existence. But to do so they must hear about us, and that can only be done in the context of a dedicated, extensive, professional kind of Presidential campaign, which the MacBride-Bergland ticket is prepared to undertake.

It is, furthermore, the perception of the MacBride team that libertarian ideology is a highly “radical” one—far outside the present political matrix. There are, of course, elements of libertarianism which will appeal to all parts of the ideological and occupational spectrum. But, since our political principles and program are radical, it would be folly indeed to couch those programs in a needlessly radical form. In short, it would needlessly alienate the voters and the public if the L.P. candidates came on like a bunch of “kooks”. There is nothing inherently “kooky” or nutty about the content of the libertarian position, radical though it may be; but the mass of the voters will not give us a considered hearing, will not give our ideology a fair chance, if it is needlessly clothed in a bizarre and kooky image. Hence, the great importance, for the libertarian cause, of running Real People as candidates, and of coming on like a real, seagoing political party. This twin policy may be encapsulated in the slogan: “radical in content, ‘conservative’ in form.” This is the only way to lift the L. P. out of the sect status and to make it a major force in American life.

It was a dim perception of, and fierce resistance to, this projected great leap forward of the L. P. that animated the emergence of what might be called—for want of a better term—a Left Opposition at the convention, an Opposition that provided an undercurrent of hostility to the MacBride candidacy, and then erupted in ferocity and hysteria shortly afterward, in opposition to MacBride’s endorsed running-mate, Manuel Klausner, publisher of Reason magazine. Whereas MacBride, clearly the superior candidate, won handily over two opponents on the first ballot (by 142 out of 244 votes cast), the Left Opposition arose to limit Klausner to 86 votes and to deadlock the convention. It was an emotional roller-coaster indeed! After the enthusiasm accorded to MacBride’s acceptance speech at noon on Saturday, August 30, hysteria and paranoia ran rampant for the remainder of that afternoon and all Saturday night, threatening to split the Party until Dave Bergland flew in from California at the last minute to become the overwhelmingly elected dark horse candidate for Vice-President.

As the Left Opposition arose and created the “firestorm” that Saturday, it animating principles and attitudes became all too clear, attitudes which echoed and expanded the outlook of the Left at the stormy FLP convention in New York, in the Spring of 1974. (For an account of that convention, see “FLP Convention: One Step Forward, One Step Back,” Lib. Forum, April, 1974). Let us examine some of these elements.

First, there was an undercurrent of opposition to MacBride, and later more vocally to Klausner, precisely because they are Real People. MacBride was opposed because he is wealthy—a peculiar position to take for supposed believers in laissez-faire capitalism! Both were reviled because of their obvious competence, articulateness, professionalism, and conservative life-style: the fact that they wear suits and ties. Clearly “un-libertarian” from the point of view of the Left Opposition! What this syndrome starkly reveals is a pervasive egalitarianism, an envy-soaked hatred and distrust of wealth, competence, and ability to function successfully in the real world. In short, what we see in the Left Opposition is some of the ugliest aspects of modern values and attitudes: envy and revulsion against the able and the successful.

Second, and allied to the first, is a bizarre notion of what “libertarian principle” is all about. This is the view that leadership, and exercising the functions of leadership—even in a voluntary organization—is somehow “anti-libertarian” and a “violation of libertarian principle.” Only among such a bizarre group would an endorsement of a Vice-Presidential candidate by the selected Presidential candidate of the party prove counter-productive, amidst hysterical charges of “dictatorship” and “rule by a Partyarchy.” Once again, this is rampant egalitarianism in action, and a failure to realize that no organization can function except by a division of labor, by selecting competent leaders who are allowed to exercise their leadership function. No organization can function along the lines of egalitarian “participatory democracy” so beloved by the Left Opposition. Such people do not belong in any organization, much less a political party.

Third, and again allied to the other two strands, is a rampant sectarianism that sniffs “abandonment of principle” in every use of strategic intelligence, in any attempt to put forward principle in application to the real world. As the Marxists have long ago discovered, all radical ideological or political movements are apt to suffer from two separate and contrasting grave strategic “deviations”: “right opportunism” and “left sectarianism.” The right opportunist is ever willing to surrender ideological principle on behalf of coalition with other and larger forces; there are, happily, very few such in the L.P., confined to a tiny handful who wished to coalesce with either the Republican party or with some new conservative third party. Our problem at this convention was with left sectarianism—the view that any use of strategy, any attempt to go beyond mere reiteration of principle among small groups of the already-converted, is somehow a “sellout” of basic principle. It is this group for example, which is incapable of grasping the concept of “radical in content, conservative in form.”

Fourth, and closely allied with the third, is another bizarre view by the Left Opposition of what “libertarian principle” is all about. Apart from hostility to the very function of leadership or the division of labor, the Left Opposition is vitally concerned with what it calls “living liberty”, or with picking candidates who “exemplify liberty.” Now I personally fail to understand what “living” or “exemplifying” liberty is supposed to mean; what it should mean is not being a murderer or a bank-robber, in short, not being an aggressor. Obviously, none of the proposed candidates were in that category. But, to the Left Opposition, “exemplifying liberty” means something else, from not wearing suits and ties to openly engaging in activities deemed illegal (unjustly) by the State. The idea that it is somehow the moral duty of the L.P. to select candidates who engage in such activities can only be considered absurd and bizarre—as is the idea that it somehow “violates libertarian principle” not to select candidates who would distract from libertarian ideology by alienating the public right off the bat. To push the Left Opposition thesis to its absurd—but logically consistent—conclusion, it is as if we say that, in order to prove our sincerity in advocating freedom to sell or ingest heroin, we must therefore nominate for President a junkie who shoots up on television!

Finally, the famous minarchist vs. anarcho-capitalist controversy is only dimly related to the struggle over the Left Opposition. Basically that controversy was happily settled at the Dallas convention in 1974 when it was decided that the L.P. platform should be purely and consistently libertarian, but that no stand should be taken one way or another on archy vs. anarchy, thus fostering a coalition which both sides can live with. Most of the anarchists in the party were not in the Left Opposition. On the other hand, it is true that most of the Left were anarchists with an important minority of minarchists.

The sort of confusion that cropped up on this issue was exemplified by two accusations hurled at me in the course of the convention. In the midst of pressing (successful) for expanding and radicalizing the L.P. platform (but consistent with both anarchism and laissez-faire) one of the conservative leaders accused me of using “salami tactics” (an old World War II-Cold War slogan) on behalf of committing the Party to anarchism. I replied: “Yes, I’m using salami tactics—to ge to laissez-faire!” On the other hand, a day or so later, a Left Opposition delegate accused me of betraying the anarchist cause by nominating for the Executive Committee someone who didn’t know what the black flag represented! I tried to reply that the point of the Party was an anarchist-laissez-faire coalition toward our vast range of common goals.

However, I do not mean to dwell excessively on the headaches and heartaches of the convention. The overwhelmingly important point is that the Left Opposition was roundly defeated, and that we have a superb team of national candidates and party officials who have the proper vision of an effective expanded Libertarian Party, and have the professionalism and the competence to achieve these great goals. We have a real Libertarian Party of and for Real People. The kooks, the sectarians, the egalitarians, are destined to fade into the background which they so richly deserve. It is their dim perception of just such a looming fate that undoubtedly accounts for the ferocity of what will turn out to be their Last Hurrah.

A final word about the Platform, which was improved and radicalized simply by applying common libertarian principles to specific and important political issues of the day. Notably, civil liberties provisions were greatly strengthened by an explicit section on repeal of victimless crimes, and by a call for abolition of the FBI and CIA. Isolationist principles were strengthened by urging withdrawal from NATO and all other military alliances, cessation of governmental intervention in the Middle East, and independence for America’s colonial possessions. The call for amnesty was expanded to deserters who had volunteered for the armed forces—with a slight weakening due to an erroneous theory of contracts which holds that voluntary slave contracts should be enforced, if only by paying damages (even to the State!)A mild but important plank calling for negotiations toward mutual and general nuclear disarmament was passed after a great deal of opposition. The right of taxpayers to learn about government activities was upheld, with an exception added from the floor for secrets defending the country against invasion. The right of victims to reclaim stolen property was—if rather vaguely,—upheld. And Friedmanite elements were eliminated from the platform on behalf of the Austrian, free-market, gold standard position. And a call was added for repeal of the parasitic civil service system, which entrenches a permanent bureaucracy upon the public. All in all, a magnificent platform on which to take our stand.

ALL FOUNDED

One of the important spinoffs of the L.P. convention was that it provided the occasion for the launching of a new and promising organization: the Association of Libertarian Lawyers. Organized by its President, Don Feder, ALL’s founding meeting included 30 attorneys and law students, and offers of support have already been received from 84 attorneys and law students in twenty states and Canada, with student contacts at 17 law schools. Law and politics are intimately related, and the opportunities for important work by libertarian lawyers are almost endless—from trial work to defense of libertarians to scholarly research to formulating a libertarian law code.

Officers of ALL are President Don Feder, an attorney in upstate New York; Vice-President Linda Abrams, a Los Angeles lawyer specializing in civil liberties cases; Secretary Dennis Schuman, a negligence lawyer in New York City; and Treasurer Dolores Grande, legal librarian at John Jay College, New York City.

ALL has decided to have two classes of members: voting members, which includes attorneys, law students, law graduates and legal professionals; and non-voting, associate member. ALL has already established several important standing committees.

Ralph Fucetola, a New Jersey lawyer and long-standing libertarian, heads the Constitution and By-Laws Committee, which will also formulate a statement of principles for the Association, setting forth its support of economic freedom and its opposition to victimless crime laws and to state monopolies in the practice of law. Linda Abrams is chairing a Litigation Committee, which plans to file amicus curiae brief in important cases, and to explore the use of the judicial system to expand individual liberty. Manuel Klausner, Los Angeles attorney and publisher of Reason magazine, heads the Law Review Committee, which hopes to begin publishing a libertarian law journal. Randy E. Barnett, a second year student at Harvard Law School, is chairman of the Law School Organizing Committee, which will organize law students. And Stanton Towne, a student at Columbia Law School, heads a Committee on Educational Conferences and Seminars. And last but not least, ALL is planning to publish a bi-monthly newsletter, to be edited by Dennis Schuman, to keep members informed about the Association’s activities.

The Lib. Forum extends heartiest best wishes to the new organization, and wishes it a long and successful life. All those interested in information or membership in the Association of Libertarian Lawyers should contact:

Don Feder, 102 W. 1st Avenue, Johnstown, N.Y. 12095.

DEPRESSION AND INFLATION

by

Richard M. Ebeling*

For decades the economics profession has craved recognition as a “true” science. It has desired to cast off the labels of being a “moral science” or a subject concerned with mere theory. Economists have striven to live up to the standard that Science is Measurement. Thus, all theories become only hypotheses that must be empirically tested; and even then they still remain suspect.

The error in this approach is the inability to understand the nature of the subject matter under study. The social sciences deal with complex phenomena involving the purposeful action of conscious entities. Only by gasping and comprehending the meaning of human action and human purpose can the regularity of social phenomena finally be put in a satisfactory paradigm. But this requires that a theory be developed and spun out from the axioms of human action and purpose before the “facts” of the social sciences can be made intelligible. Indeed, this was succinctly summed up by Goethe when he said, “It would be best of all to realize that all that is factual is already theory.”

Almost all twentieth century attempts to explain business cycles have used the “empirical” approach. Economists have believed that by gathering data on the movement of prices, outputs and employment levels in different sectors of the economy, as well as the economy as a whole, a pattern will miraculously appear and a theory will “pop out” from the facts.

In the 1920’s, one of these “theories” to emerge from the “facts” was the belief in a stable price level. If only the overall aggregate of all prices were not allowed to either rise or fall, then neither inflation nor depression would occur. The death toll of business cycles would finally be sounded. But the beautiful dream turned into a nightmare, when after a decade of monetary manipulation to keep the aggregate level of prices stable, the Great Depression struck in 1929.

Only a handful of economists had questioned the validity of this theory in the 1920’s. They were the economists of the Austrian School, in particular Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. An exposition of this theory and its application to explain the phenomena of the 1920’s and its aftermath is now once again available with the reprinting of Murray N. Rothbard’s definitive work on America’s Great Depression (Sheed and Ward, Kansas City and New York, 1975), $4.95 (paper) or $12.00 hard cover. The volume is the first in a series on Austrian Economics being sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies (Menlo Park, Ca.).

Monetary manipulation by central bank authorities is the key to an understanding of Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle. On the free market, a banking system acts as the equilibrator of the desires of savers and investors. The consumer decides how much of his income he wishes to spend on present consumption and how much he wishes to save for future consumption. That part which is saved is lent out to businessmen by bankers and “invested in a mighty structure of capital, in various orders of production.” This “mighty structure” is either longer or shorter depending on how much resources (i.e. how much savings) are available to build more and more complex investment projects able to produce larger quantities of consumer goods at some point in the future.

If, however, the banking system is able to expand credit without an equivalent amount of savings, then “Businessmen . . . are misled by the bank inflation into believing that the supply of saved funds is greater than it really is.” The availability of larger amounts of credit at a lower interest rate will induce producers to carry out new investment projects. They will use the money to bid for resources and labor. But as the new money is received as income, the recipients will most likely spend it in their “old consumption/investment proportions” and demand will shift back to consumer goods, thus raising their value and price in relation to capital goods industries. With the resources now bid away from them, businessmen will not be able to complete investment projects they have begun.

As Professor Rothbard concludes, “businessmen were misled by bank credit inflation to invest too much in . . . capital goods” and these investments “are seen to have been wasteful.” Thus, the “boom” “is. . .a period of wasteful investment . . . The ‘crisis’ arrives when the consumers . . . reestablish their desired consumption-savings patterns.” And “The ‘depression’ is . . . the process by which the economy adjusts to the wastes and errors of the boom.”

This, in fact, was the exact path the boom of the twenties took. In July, 1921, the money supply was $45.3 billion. By July, 1929 it had increased by $28.0 billion, or 61.8% over the eight year period. Since at the beginning of the period currency in circulation totalled $3.68 billion and at the end of the period totalled $3.64 billion, “The entire monetary expansion took place in money substitutes, which are products of credit expansion.” Between 1921 and 1925 alone the Federal Reserve allowed total bank reserves to expand by 35.6%. “Thus the prime factor in generating the inflation of the 1920’s was the increase in total bank reserves.” The mechanisms used by the Fed for this expansion were primarily the rediscount rate (the rate of interest at which member banks may borrow from the Fed) which was constantly kept below the going market interest rate during the period; Bills Bought (banker acceptances) through open-market operations; and, to a lesser extent, U.S. government securities, which were also manipulated through open-market purchases.

This was a relative inflation rather than an absolute one, for the price level, as measured by several prominent indexes of the day, remained relatively constant. As Professor Rothbard points out, “Federal Reserve credit expansion . . . managed to keep the price level stable in the face of an increasing productivity that would, in a free and unhampered market, have led to falling prices and spread of increased living standards for everyone . . .”

And, as expected from the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, the inflation induced a disproportionate increase in the capital goods industries. Rothbard shows that both wages and prices of the capital goods industries were bid up significantly in relation to other sectors of the economy during the boom. Once the bust set in, they were the prices to fall, not only absolutely, but relatively as well, in comparison with consumer goods industries. Thus, the Austrian analysis of boom-induced capital malinvestment was clearly shown.

Having stimulated a misdirection of resources that differed from actual demand. Austrian Theory would have the policy implication of allowing labor and capital to readjust as best it could, so a healthy recovery could begin. Instead, as Rothbard chronicles, the Hoover Administration immediately began sponsoring government-led programs to keep all wages and prices from falling to preserve purchasing power. Between 1929 to 1933, the index of durable (capital goods) manufactures fell 77% while nondurable (consumer goods) manufactures fell only 30%. But between 1929-1933, wages fell only 23%. “Therefore, real wage rates, for the workers still remaining employed, actually increased.” And this at a time when unemployment reached 25% in 1932-1933 and up to 47% in selected manufacturing industries. Professor Rothbard also relates the infusion of giant public works projects, state and Federal, and the notorious Reconstruction Finance Corporation used to prop up inefficient, bankrupt businesses that should have been liquidated following the boom. As Rothbard points out, “if we define ‘New Deal’ as an anti-depression program marked by extensive governmental economic planning and intervention . . . Hoover must be considered the founder of the New Deal in America.”

In a new introduction for the volume, Rothbard analyzes the present economic milieu and concludes, “The current inflationary depression has revealed to the nation’s economists that their cherished theories—adopted and applied since the 1930’s—are tragically and fundamentally incorrect.”

These “cherished theories” were developed by John Maynard Keynes and his followers during the Great Depression. The errors in the Keynesian-Macro approach are given a devastating critique by the leading Austrian Economist and 1974 Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek in a new three-essay booklet entitled Full Employment at Any Price? (Institute of Economic Affairs, London, July 1975), LI.00.

Two of the essays discuss “Inflation, the Misdirection of Labour, and Unemployment” and “No Escape: Unemployment Must Follow Inflation.” Professor Hayek explains that modern theories of what causes unemployment are totally wrong. That, the “true . . . explanation of extensive unemployment . . . (is) . . . a discrepancy between the distribution of labor (and the other factors of production) between industries (and localities) and the distribution of demand among their products.” Thus, if demand shifts for different goods and services and the relative prices and wages do not, in turn, adjust to reflect the new market conditions, then those resources (including labor) which attempt to demand prices and wages above their market value will become unemployed.

But rather than admit the true cause of the problem, the Keynesians have developed the theory “that unemployment is predominantly due to an insufficiency of aggregate demand compared with the total of wages which would have to be paid if all workers were to be employed at current rates.” But this is nothing but the businessman’s “age-old belief” that prosperity is dependent on keeping consumer demand high,” against which economic theory had been arguing for generations.”

The mistaken idea in this concept, made by both Keynesians and Monetarists, is to look only upon how monetary expansion affects the general price level for goods and services “and not to the effects on the structure of relative prices.” The expansion of money and credit leads to changes in the relative strength of demand for different goods and services and “these changes in relative demand must lead to further changes in relative prices and consequent changes in the direction of production and the allocation of the factors of production, including labor.” Once having been drawn into particular productive activities by this artificially created demand any “slowing down or cessation of the inflation” will result in the unemployment of these resources and labor. The choice is then not inflation or unemployment, but the realization that once inflation has misdirected economic factors of production, some of them will have to be temporarily unemployed when the inflation is ended. Professor Hayek pointed out that, “As had happened at the beginning of the period of modern finance we have again been seduced by another silver-tongued persuader into trying another inflationary bubble.” Now that the bubble has burst and the disastrous consequences of macro-oriented policy have become visible, the Keynesians, having “thoroughly discredited themselves . . . ought to do penance in sackcloth and ashes.”

The third essay is Professor Hayek’s Nobel Lecture on “The Pretence of Knowledge,” in which he elaborates further his now famous critique of “Scientism,” the misuse of certain scientific methods in the social sciences. In the natural sciences, Hayek points out, we deal with events which are “directly observable and measurable.” Our concern is centered around observed phenomena involving “comparatively few variables—either particular events or relative frequencies of events.” But in the social sciences, we attempt to formulate a “theory of complex phenomena” referring to “to a large number of particular facts,” all of which would have to be ascertained before predictions could be made. But social phenomena, being so complex and being concerned with purposive human action, can never be measured and quantitatively determined like natural phenomena. Hayek criticizes macro-economic theory for its attempt to guide policy based on the statistical relationship between monetary expenditure and employment. The Keynesians, always looking for measurable empirical relationships, fail to understand the micro-level misallocation of resources their policy brings about.

The “superiority of the market order” is precisely its ability to use “more of the knowledge of particular facts which exists only dispersed among uncounted persons, than any one person can possess.” And, Hayek concludes, if the “scientistic” approach is applied for social planning and policy, man “may well . . . destroy a civilization which no brain has designed, but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

ROTHBARDIANA

Several books and contributions to books by Murray N. Rothbard have recently been published. One is Conceived in Liberty, Volume II, subtitled “Salutary Neglect: The American Colonies in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.” (Arlington House, $12.95). This book brings the saga of American colonial history from approximately 1710 to the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. One of the highlights of the book is the beginning of Benjamin Franklin Revisionism, Rothbard regarding Franklin as one of the major monsters of the American colonial period.

Also, the 3rd Edition of America’s Great Depression has just been published by Sheed & Ward, including a new introduction by Rothbard—in hard cover ($12) and paperback editions ($4.95). (See the review by Richard Ebeling in this issue of the Lib. Forum.)

Moreover. Free Life Editions of New York City has done a great service to libertarian scholarship by reprinting the first libertarian essay in modern political thought: Etienne de La Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. (The title of this edition: The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude). The book is paperback at a price of $2.95. There is a lengthy introduction essay by Murray Rothbard, “The Political Thought of Etienne de La Boetie.”

Other recent contributions to published books are: “Gold vs. Fluctuating Fiat Exchange Rates”, in H. Sennholz, ed., Gold is Money (West port, Conn.: Greenwood Press), a critique of the Friedmanite policy of fluctuating fiat exchange rates. “Devotion to Truth”, Tribute to Mises (Kent, Eng.: Mont Pelerin Society), in a group of memorial tributes to Mises delivered at the Mont Pelerin meeting in Brussels, summer 1974.

ON THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION

OR

The Male Chauvinist Pig As Hero

by
Walter Block*

The women’s liberation movement is an amalgam of different types of programs; it is composed of very different kinds of people, many with very different purposes. It should occasion no surprise, therefore, that the discriminating intellect may accept only some of the aims, purposes, motivations, and programs of women’s liberation, and reject others. It can only be folly to treat as equivalent a whole host of different values and attitudes, merely because they have been packaged together. An enemy of women’s liberation in one area need not necessarily reject the contentions of the women’s movement in all areas. In this paper, I shall divide the views of the women’s liberation movement into three broad categories, each of which will be treated quite differently.

I. Coercive actions taken against women

Perhaps the most coercive action taken against women apart from murder is rape. Yet in this male dominated society of ours, rape is not even always illegal. For instance rape is not illegal when perpetrated upon a woman by her husband! Although rape is illegal outside of the “sanctity” of marriage, the way in which it is punished leaves much to be desired. For one thing, if there was any previous acquaintance between the rapist and his victim, the presumption of the court is that there was no rape. For another, it is necessary, in order to prove rape, that there have been a witness to the proceedings. Also, if the rapist can get several of his friends to swear that they have had sexual intercourse with the victim, so that the woman can be characterized as “immoral”, it is virtually impossible to obtain punishment. If the victim is a prostitute, it is just as impossible to obtain a conviction for rape. The reasoning behind the legal inability to rape a prostitute seems to be the ludicrous one that it is impossible to compel a person to do that which she (or he) does willingly (at other times). As if no one had ever forced a doctor or any other service professional to do that which he does willingly at other times!

The prevention of prostitution by the civil powers is another case of coercive action taken against women. It is a case of prohibiting trade between mutually consenting adult business partners. It is harmful to women in that it prevents them from earning an honest living. It is spiteful and discriminatory in that although prostitution is just as illegal for the customer as for the seller, it is a rare case indeed in which the male customer is also arrested, in addition to the female seller, for the “crime” of engaging in prostitution.

Abortion is another case in point. Although in this modern day and age inroads are finally being made on this age-long prohibition, abortion is still ringed in by compulsory rules. Outright prohibition of abortion and the present looser controls both deny the great moral principle of self-ownership. They are both a throwback to the old days of slavery, where barriers were put up between people and their complete and utter right of self ownership. If a woman fully owns her body (and what else is a complete denial of slavery?) then she owns her womb. This follows directly from the laws of logic once it is admitted that the womb is part of the body. But if she owns her womb, then she has the complete and full right to determine what shall live in it and what shall not, She has the complete right to decide which parasitical growths she shall allow to live there and which she shall not. And only she has this right. Since infringements upon abortion are a denial of this right, they amount to (partial) slavery.

Until very recently women did not have the same rights as men to own property or to engage in contracts; there are still laws on the books, however, that prevent married women, but not married men, from selling property or engaging in business without the permission of their spouses. Women must pass stiffer entrances requirements than men for some state universities. Then there is the infamous tracking system engendered by our public school system which shunts young boys into “male” activities like sports and shop and shunts young girls into the “female” roles of cooking and sewing. Perhaps the most embarrassing type of aggressive activity which women have to put up with is the pinches they meet with on the streets of our cities.

It is important to realize that the problems listed above all have two things in common; they are all instances of aggressive force being used against women; and they are all inextricably bound up with the apparatus of the state. Let us dwell on this point a bit, since except for the case of rape, it is by no means obvious to most people that this claim is true. This is easy to show in the case of prostitution. For it is the state that declares prostitution illegal and then proceeds to use force against those who peacefully go about the legitimate business of prostitution. And it is the state that uses the compulsion of the jail sentence in order to enforce its will. What does it mean to say that women do not have the right to abort, or to own property, or to set up businesses? It means no more and no less than that if women were to persist in their attempts to abort, own property, or set up businesses, then the state will step in with compulsions, fines, or jail sentences.

In order to see why discrimination by the state amounts to compulsion (as in higher entrance requirements for the state university, the tracking system in the public schools, etc.) we may compare this to private discrimination, which does not amount to compulsion. When a private individual discriminates, he (or she) does so with his (or her) own resources, in his (or her) own name. When the state discriminates, it does so with resources taken from all of us. It does so in the name of all of us. In the name and with the resources of those discriminated in favor of as well as those discriminated against. Now surely here is a crucial difference. It is one thing to discriminate against someone with your own resources, but it is quite another thing to discriminate against people with their own money. Moreover, if a private enterprise such as a school discriminates, it runs the real risk of losing money and going bankrupt. At least all people who oppose discrimination have the chance to withhold funds, and to not patronize the discriminating enterprise. When the state discriminates, it is altogether different. The state enterprise that discriminates runs no real risk of going bankrupt. If people who oppose its discrimination withhold their funds from it, i.e. do not patronize it as students as in the case of a state university, this will not force an end to the discrimination. The state enterprise can make up for the short-fall in voluntary funds with funds from tax revenues; and these must be paid under threat of compulsion.

Even the pinches that women must put up with are inextricably bound up with the state apparatus. We may see this point by contrasting two different cases of pinching: one that takes place within the confines of a private place like Macy’s Department Store and one that takes place outside—for instance, on the street, a block away from Macy’s. When a pinch takes place within the confines of a private place, the whole force of the profit-and-loss free enterprise system comes to bear to solve the problem. For it is always in some entrepreneur’s self interest to apprehend and discourage the pinching (on the assumption that women do not want to get pinched; for the case of masochistic women who enjoy being pinched, this program of protection against pinching will not be in the self interest of the entrepreneur). The reason that it is in the self interest of the entrepreneur to initiate a program to stop the pinching is that if he does not, and the pinching continues, he will lose customers to competitors. There will be a competition, as it were, on the part of all department stores, to provide this anti-pinching service. The ones that succeed in ridding their stores of this scourge to the greatest degree will tend to reap the greatest profits. The ones who fail, whether because they ignore the problem entirely, or are unsuccessful in implementing their programs, will tend to make the greatest losses. This is not guaranteed to end pinching once and for all time. There will always be some as long as people remain imperfectly moral. All this system will do is to encourage, by profits and losses, those who are most able to end pinching. While it is not a perfect system, (what human system can ever be perfect?), it would be folly to underestimate its effects, especially as time goes on.

Contrasted with what occurs in the public domain, however, this private system begins to look like perfection itself. For in the public domain, there is almost the complete absence of any incentive whatsoever to end the pinching. There is no one who automatically loses any paying customers whenever there is an outbreak of pinching. The city police are supposedly charged with ending this epidemic of pinching. But they must function without benefit of the automatic profit and loss incentive system. Their salaries, coming from taxation, are not tied to their performance. They suffer no financial loss from every pinch. Is it any wonder, then, that most of this type of harassment occurs on the streets and sidewalks of a city, and not within its shops and stores?

II. Non-coercive actions taken against women

Another type of pinching or sexual harassment is that between a secretary and her boss. Although to many people, and especially to many people in the women’s liberation movement, there is no real difference between this pinching and the pinching that occurs on the street, the fact is that the pinching that takes place between a secretary and her boss, while objectionable to many women, is not a coercive action. It is not a coercive action like the pinching that takes place in the public sphere because it is part of a package deal: the secretary agrees to all aspects of the job when she agrees to accept the job and especially when she agrees to keep the job. A woman walking along a public sidewalk, on the other hand, can by no means be considered to have given her permission, or tacitly agreed to begin pinched. The street is not the complete private property of the pincher, as is the office. On the contrary, if the myths of democracy are to be given any credence at all, the streets belong to the people. All the people. Even including women.

There is a serious problem with considering pinching or sexual molestation in a privately owned office or store to be coercive. If an action is really and truly coercive, it ought to be outlawed. But if pinching and sexual molestation are outlawed in private places, this violates the rights of those who voluntarily wish to engage in such practices. And there is certainly nothing coercive about any voluntary sex practices between consenting adults. The proof of the voluntary nature of an act in a private place is that the person endangered (the woman, in the cases we have been considering) has no claim whatsoever to the private place in question, the office or the store. If she continues to patronize or work at a place where she is molested, it can only be voluntary. But in a public place, no such presumption exists. As we have seen, according to accepted theory at least, the public domain is owned by all, women included. It would be just as illegitimate to assume that a woman gave tacit agreement to being molested on the public street because she was walking there as it would be to assume that she gave tacit agreement to an assault in her own house, because she happened to be there.

There are many other cases of actions taken against women that are not strictly speaking, coercive. Or more exactly, there are many other instances where many women feel put upon, but where there is no coercion at all involved: such as referring to women with sex organ-linked expletives: the sexual double standard mores; many rules of etiquette, such as the ones concern who proceeds whom out of the elevator: the encouragement of the mental capacity of boys and discouragement of girls; the societal opprobrium of women participating in “men’s” athletic activities; the pedestals that women are placed upon. There are two important points to be made with regard to these insults and other exacerbations which do not constitute coercion. 1) Although considered reprehensible by many, none of these actions actually constitute coercion; therefore it would be illegitimate to outlaw them. Any attempt to outlaw them would involve the mass violation of rights of gives us the right not to utter things that everyone agrees with—which do not need free speech protection in any case, but the right to utter reprehensible things, things in poor taste, boorish things. 2) To a much greater degree than realized by many, certainly to a much greater degree than realized by many who consider themselves advocates of women’s liberation, these reprehensible but non-coercive actions are engendered by reprehensible coercive activities. Were these coercive activities to cease, the free market would tend to rid us of many of these reprehensible but non-coercive acts.

Let us consider the case of bosses pinching secretaries and see how the market would tend to eliminate such unwanted activity, were the coercive and reprehensible activity of taxation to support government bureaucracy eliminated. In order to see this, we must first understand what the labor economist calls “compensating differentials”. A compensating differential is an amount of money just necessary to compensate an employee for the psychic losses that go with a job. For instance, consider two job opportunities. One is in an air-conditioned office, with a good view, with pleasant surroundings and pleasant companions: The other is in a damp, dank basement, surrounded by evil-smelling fellow workers. Now there is some wage differential large enough to attract most people into accepting the less pleasant job. This will vary for different people, depending upon their relative tastes for the working conditions in the two places. There might even be a negative compensating differential for those who prefer the basement job. They would be willing to take a salary cut rather than move to the office job.

The same analysis can be applied to the case of the office pincher. On the assumption that all women would prefer not to be pinched, and that bosses vary in their desires to so indulge, there will be a whole range of wage rates paid to otherwise equally productive secretaries, depending on the proclivity of their bosses to engage in sexual harassment. There will be a positive relationship between the amount of sexual harassment and the wage rate that the bosses find they must pay. But now contrast the boss of a private business with the boss in a government bureaucracy. Even on the assumption that both bosses on the average have the same proclivity to engage in sexual harassment, it is clear that the private boss will have to pay for his little gambols, while the public one will not. The secretaries of both private and public pinchers will have to earn more than the secretaries of the non-pinchers. The compensating differential. The main difference between the private and the public pincher is that the extra money comes out of tax monies for the latter and out of his own money for the former. Even in the case of a private boss-pincher who is not the ultimate owner of the business, the same applies, only now slightly more indirectly. The ultimate owner of the business, in addition to losing money if he himself is a pincher, also loses money if any of his executives are pinchers. So in addition to having a monetary incentive to cut down on his own pinching, he also has a monetary incentive to try to stop all the bosses in his company from so doing.

This might not seem like much of an incentive to stop pinching. But it is an improvement over the public case where these disincentives are completely lacking. This way of looking at the problem, however, has more merit than might be readily apparent. One reason pinching does not come to an abrupt end even in the private market is because many women are by no means unalterably opposed to being pinched, as we have been assuming. But the analysis can be applied to the more realistic cases where women are being harassed and mistreated and do object.

III. The male chauvinist pig as hero

In this section I wish to consider in some detail, several grievous errors committed by the adherents of women’s liberation. It is for his good sense in opposing these programs that the male chauvinist pig can be considered a hero.

1. Laws compelling “equal wages for equal work”. The klinker in this program, of course, is, How shall “equal work” be defined? If equal work means equal work in all senses, relative to the productivity that an employer can get out of an employee, in the short run as well as in the long run, taking account of psychic differentials, the discrimination of customers and other workers, of the ability of the worker to mesh in with the likes and dislikes, the foibles and the idiosyncrasies of the entrepreneur, in short, if equal work is exactly the same thing as equal profitability for the entrepreneur, then in the free market workers with such equal abilities will tend to earn equal wages. If equal workers in this sense were not paid equally, for instance, if women were paid less than men even though they were equally good workers in this sense, this would set up incentives on the part of entrepreneurs which, when carried to their conclusion, would ensure equal pay. How would this work? The entrepreneur would be able to make extra money by replacing male workers with female workers. By hypothesis, the employer will be able to pay the woman less than the man and yet earn just as much from her work as from the man’s work. The conclusion is inescapable. The employer will have a great incentive to fire men and hire women in their places.

Even supposing that there were employers who under no circumstances would hire women to do “men’s” work, and still other employers who would only do so if the wage differential rose to a certain amount (thus only ensuring that the wage differential between men and women could not rise above a certain figure) there will still be great forces pushing the free market toward equality between men’s and women’s wage rates. Even if there were only a very small percentage of entrepreneurs willing to supplant men with women, this would be the case. We must realize that every employer who substituted a woman for a man would have a competitive advantage over the ones who refused to do so. The profit maximizing employers would continually earn greater profits than would the discriminatory employers. The profit maximizers would be able to undersell the discriminators, take away their businesses, and, other things being equal, eventually drive them into bankruptcy.

We can have no guarantee that the wages of men and and women will ever actually come to exact equality. This process only guarantees that there will be enormous pressure exerted, day in and day out, pushing the economy toward this end. On the assumption, that is, of identically equal productivity.

In actual point of fact, however, the proponents of equal wages for equal work have no such strict equality in mind. What they seem to have in mind in their definition of equality is equal years of schooling equivalent college degrees, and perhaps similar scores on qualification tests. But people with vastly differing abilities to earn profits for employers can be virtually identical with respect to such criteria. For example, consider two workers, one male, one female, identical as far as test scores and college degrees are concerned. It is an indisputable fact that in the event of a pregnancy, it is far more likely for the woman to stay home and raise the child. Now we are not considering whether this is fair or not. Only whether it is factual or not. But if the woman stays at home, interrupting a career in midstream, she will be worth less to the employer’s likelihood of profitability. In this case, at any one moment in time, the workers might well be identical as far as profit criteria are concerned! But in the long run view, which counts very heavily in present wage considerations, it is the man who is more productive than the woman.

Paradoxically, many pieces of evidence supporting the view that supposedly equally productive men and women are not at all equal come from the womens lib movement itself. Several studies have shown that while it might be true that samples of women had higher innate abilities than given samples of men when the two groups were tested in isolation from each other, when the two groups were tested together’ or in competition with each other, the men invariably did relatively better than the woman, and in many cases did absolutely better than the women. Again, let it be emphasized that we are not here concerned with the fairness of such occurrences; but with the effects of such situations when coupled with laws compelling equal pay for “equal work”. The point is that in the world of work women will often find themselves in competition with men. If they constantly defer to the men, and cannot do their best in competition with men, they may well be of less help in procuring profits for the entrepreneur than men. And if women otherwise equal to men in test scores and such are really inferior to them when it comes to strict profit maximizing, then the equal pay for equal work law will prove disastrous for women.

It will prove disastrous to women because now the profit maximizing incentives will be all turned around. Instead of the market exerting a strong steady push toward firing men and hiring women in their place, which tends to drive the wages of women toward equality with men, the market will give incentives to employers to fire women and hire men in their place. This will have exactly the opposite effect on wage equality. The employer, required to pay men and women the same wages, will be able to increase profits to the degree that he can supplant the highly productive men (from who he can make a profit) for the lesser productive women (from whom he now cannot make a profit or as much of a profit). Just as in the other case, employers who refuse to go along with this, perhaps out of a desire not to pay women less than men for “equal work”, will tend to make lower profits and to be undersold and sent into bankruptcy by the other firms who stick to their profit maximimizing behavior. The end result will be that instead of unleashing forces toward the equalization of wages, the “equal pay for equal work” doctrine will cause instead the unemployment of women. To the extent that the male-chauvinist pig resists such a trend, he can only be counted a hero.

2. Laws compelling non-discrimination. McSorleys is a bar in New York City that used to cater exclusively to men. Until it was “liberated”, that is. Under the banner of the new anti-discrimination law in New York State, hordes of presumably thirsty women trooped in to be served for the first time in the history of the establishment. This event was hailed as a great progressive step forward by our liberal, progressive, and womens liberation factions. The basic philosophy behind the law and the attendant liberation of McSorleys seems to be that it shall be illegitimate to discriminate on a sexual basis when choosing customers or people to deal with.

If the problems with this philosophy are not readily apparent, they can be made so by considering several reductions ad absurdum. A strict application of the philosophy, for instance, would not allow separate bathrooms for men at “public” places; it would not allow men’s residence halls. More shockingly, at least to the “progressive” community, it would not even allow exclusive homosexuality. For in all these cases, there is discrimination with respect to women. Women are discriminated against. By not allowing women in men’s bathrooms. By not allowing women in men’s residence halls. By the male homosexual choosing only other males instead of females. This philosophy would not allow women to marry men, moreover. For, women who only consider marrying men discriminate just as assuredly as do homosexuals: they discriminate against other women whom they could have married, had they not been so hung up on men, and discriminatory. The philosophy thus also leads to compulsory lesbianism.

Of course all of these cases are “ridiculous”. Ridiculous in the sense that hardly any of the proponents of the liberation of McSorleys would go along with them. But for all that, these cases are fully consistent with the philosophy they are based on is ridiculous.

It is important to realize that all of human action implies discrimination in the only sensible definition of that much abused term: picking and choosing, out of all the alternatives available, that one which, in the chooser’s own opinion, best serves his interests. There is no action taken by human beings which fails to accord with this dictum. We discriminate when we choose a tooth paste, when we decide upon a means of transportation, when we decide to marry; the discrimination practiced by the gourmet or wine taster is and can only be the discrimination practiced by all human beings, although carried to a degree not attainable without much hard labor. Any attack upon discrimination, therefore, can only be interpreted as an attack upon the choice inherent in human action; as an attempt to restrict the options open to human beings.

But what of the choice on the part of women to drink at McSorleys that is closed off by discrimination? This is identical to the choice closed off to the man by the woman who rejects his sexual favors. The woman who refuses to date a man is no more guilty of violating his rights than is a group of men who wish to drink in the company of members of their own sex guilty of violating women’s rights. In neither case do these rights exist, because they are the rights of other people. It is only in a slave society that this is not so. It is only in a slave society that the master can compel the slave to do his bidding without closing off any of the options of the slave, because, by definition, the slave has no options. To the extent, then, that the antidiscriminatory forces succeed in foisting their philosophy upon the general public, they also succeed in foisting upon the general public the cloven hoof of slavery. And to the extent that the male chauvinist pig succeeds in holding back these forces of barbarism, he must again be counted as a hero.

* Walter Block is associate professor of economics at Rutgers University.

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RECOMMENDED READING

Hayekiana. An excellent, hard-hitting anti-Keynesian pamphlet recently published by Hayek which also sets forth the Austrian analysis of inflation and recession. F. A. Hayek, Full Employment at Any Price? (Reviewed by Richard Ebeling in this issue.)

Oppenheimer’s The State. Franz Oppenheimer’s great classic on the history and nature of the State has at last been handsomely reprinted in paperback by Free Life Editions, $3.95, with an excellent introduction by Chuck Hamilton. (Reviewed by Rothbard in Libertarian Review, Sept.)

Chomsky on Vietnam. An excellent summary of the Vietnam war, and a devastating critique of liberal apologetics for that war as an American “error” rather than as an act of criminal aggression by U.S. imperialism, appears in Noam Chomsky, “The remaking of History”, Ramparts (Aug./Sept., 1975), in Chomsky’s characteristic blend of erudition with hard-hitting and relentless logic.

Grinder Column. Walter Grinder has a new monthly column, “Libertarian Cross-Currents”, first appearing in Libertarian Review, Sept. The Grinder column bids fair to be an indispensable source of news and information on the libertarian movement, and especially on libertarian scholarship. Please send any information or announcements you may have to Walter E. Grinder, Libertarian Review, 410 First St., S. E., Washington, D.C. 20003.

Brozen and Competition. Professor Yale Brozen has compiled an excellent set of readings on the question of monopoly and competition. It is a paperback, Yale Brozen, ed., The Competitive Economy: Selected Readings (Morristown, N. J.: General Learning Press.)

“No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this car in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition.”

— Ludwig von Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VIII, NO. 10

OCTOBER, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE SINAI TRAP

Super-K is back, and the Sinai Pact has received all the adulation that the Establishment, from President Ford on down, can bestow. We are once again being told that “peace” has been virtually achieved in the Middle East. For a small chunk of Sinai territory given back by Israel to Egypt, the United States has surrendered a great deal. How much precisely is not known, amid the raft of “secret” and quasi-secret assurances being given by the U.S. to Israel. One certain loss is $3 billion of U.S. taxpayer aid in one year, most of it to Israel, along with some non-military aid to Egypt. According to Jack Anderson, however, secret agreements push up the bill to the staggering sum of $15 billion!

The risk of war in the Middle East is further accelerated by the multi-billion dollar American-financed buildup of the Israeli war machine. But even more ominous is the famous agreement by the U.S. to supply 200 “technicians” on the front line to monitor an attack from either side. The admitted fact that the “technicians” will be CIA and, other U.S. intelligence agents—and the ominous parallel with our CIA “technicians” in Vietnam is laughed off as of no consequence. On the contrary, it means that U.S. government agents will be front-line hostages to any war that breaks out, thus insuring American entry into the next conflict, and the menace of a new World III. All this for a small chunk of the Sinai desert!

The only hopeful sign in the expected Congressional endorsement of the Pact is the strong and cogent opposition that developed to the measure; for once, Congress was not totally supine to the combined lobbying of the Administration and organized Zionism. In fact, a new and hopeful left-right coalition came together in the Senate against the Pact, including such liberal Democrats as Joseph Binden of Delaware and Dick Clark, majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, and old Rightists Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska of Nebraska. A new isolationist coalition seems to be in the making. Thus, liberal Democrat Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota warned that “the days should be over when the Secretary of State and the President can be allowed to shoot dice under a blanket, where they are the only ones allowed to see the dice. That kind of policy has cost us far too much in the past.”

The most effective opposition in Washington against the Sinai Pact came from former Undersecretary of State George Ball, never known for any isolationist or pro-Arab proclivities. Ball warned that, far from a step toward Mid-East peace, the Pact would be interpreted by the other Arab countries (let alone the Palestinians) as a sell-out, would bring war on the part of Syria and the others closer, and would make Israel more intrasigent, relieved as it is from pressure from its strongest Arab opponent. Ball concluded that the Pact has frozen “a situation that is inherently unstable and explosive, while engaging America more deeply as a guarantor.” At least there is a possibility that the organized opposition will slow down further American involvement in the Middle East. (See, for example, the articles by Leslie Gelb and by Bernard Gwertzman in the New York Times for Sept. 21 and October 7.)

One part of George Ball’s forecast has already come true: the Arab unity forged at Rabat in October, 1974 has already been shattered by the Sinai Pact. Syria has already taken the unprecedented step of openly denouncing Egypt on the floor of the United Nations. And Egypt has silenced the Voice of Palestine radio station in Cairo, operated by the PLO, and substituted its own pro-Kissinger propaganda for the Palestinian attacks on the Sinai agreement.

In retrospect, in fact, it is clear that the Sinai Pact was only the final step in the shattering of the Spirit of Rabat, in which all the Arab countries united behind the Palestine Liberation Organization. The support for the PLO by its old enemy King Hussein of Jordan, had been literally purchased by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia; Faisal, a conservative and no particular friend of the Palestinians, was moved by his long-standing and ever-increasing desire to recover Jerusalem for the Moslem religion. The critical change came with the assassination last winter of King Faisal, by yet another “lone nut”. (See the excellent article by Russell Stetler, “Whatever Happened to Arab Unity?” International Bulletin, Oct. 10, 1975). In the name of continuing Faisal’s policies, his successors have dropped the old cry of “Liberate Jerusalem” and have put up hundreds of millions to up-grade Hussein’s war machine, including jets and missiles. In a three-cornered deal, the Ford Administration drove through Congress a $350 million supply of 14 anti-aircraft missile systems to Jordan, to be paid for by Saudi Arabia. When some of the pro-Israeli bloc in Congress objected, the Ford Administration let it be known that Jordan was going to be on the American-Israeli side. Indeed, Hussein, in his tour of the United States last August, repeatedly assured reporters that the Palestinian guerrillas “will never be allowed to enter this country again.”

What’s next in the Middle East? The next sticking-point is Syria, far harder-nosed than Egypt, and co-belligerent in the October War of 1973. Israel is still sitting on a large chunk of the strategic Syrian Golan Heights, where Israeli artillery is within range of the Syrian capital of Damascus. Kissinger’s next task is to try to pressure Syria into negotiations with Israel and to concluding its own agreement with Israel—thereby isolating the Palestinians. Syria, feeling isolated by the Egyptian separate peace, has refused to negotiate on Golan, and has rejected all “partial” solutions to the Middle East. For its part, Israel has declared that it will not surrender Golan, and Kissinger has had the brass to hint at a meaningless three-kilometer withdrawal of Israel from the Golan front (less than two miles!) Syria’s President Hafez Assad bluntly told the New York Times, Sept. 28, that “If I held a referendum for my people on a three-kilometer withdrawal, it wouldn’t get ten votes. We can do without the three kilometers till the time Israel withdraws from all of Golan.” Furthermore, Assad declared once again on October 6 that he would not enter into negotiations on Golan unless there were simultaneous negotiations between Israel and the PLO—which Israel has shown no signs whatever of doing.

The UN peacekeeping force on the Golan expires on November 30, which may well prove a danger date in the Middle East. A key question is: will Syria, now again at odds with Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, agree to abandon the PLO in exchange for a possible Kissinger-induced Israeli agreement to withdraw from the Golan? It will be a test of Syria’s mettle. If such an agreement does take place, there will be short-run peace on both military fronts in the Middle East, but a continuing festering of the most Important problem in the area: the problem of the Palestinians.

IS THE GRASS ANY GREENER . . .?

Review of The Australian Alternative; by Laura and Odie B. Faulk, Arlington House, New Rochelle, N.Y. 1975. $7.95.

In both libertarian and conservative circles, it is not uncommon to hear people express their frustration with the political and social ills of America by threatening to escape to some other more congenial land—a favorite being Australia. Few Americans have actually been there, its distance and the cost of reaching it being a great barrier to tourism. But we have become familiar with it through novels and films; the sheep ranches, rough and tumble mining towns, incomparable beaches and surf, strange flora and fauna, mysterious aborigines, and the colorfully different yet familiarly Anglo-Saxon language and cultural heritage.

Prof. Odie Faulk of the Oklahoma State University and his wife and children decided to spend three months of his sabbatical leave touring the various provinces of Australia with the particular goal in mind of assessing whether emigration to the “Land Down Under” was a solution to any American’s unhappiness with his own society. Faulk is a conservative politically, and to some extent culturally as well. He is smugly happy to hear that an Australian politician advocating a modification of Australia’s policy of racial exclusion of Asian immigrants has been defeated for re-election, and he ominously warns that the Japanese seem to be increasingly active in economic penetration of the Australian market. At the same time he seems unaware that the high prices of all household appliances and automobiles, of which he complains, could be materially reduced by allowing even greater importation of such goods from Japan, or that Japan is probably destined to be the principal market for Australia’s food and mineral exports which complement so well the needs of Japan.

Written in the form of a travel diary, Faulk’s book contains a great deal of trivial comment—Australian restaurants don’t serve water with meals—alongside quick descriptions of the towns, scenery and more obvious mores of the natives (an uncommon amount of heavy drinking, says this near teetotaling Oklahoman). He also complains of the penetration of “plastic” American culture in the form of omnipresent American TV shows and movies, Col. Sanders and MacDonalds, Coke (perth vintage), and many other products, as well as of certain American service industries like the Mafia. At the same time he complains about the poor quality of Australian hotels, central heating and coffee. In other words, he is a rather typical tourist.

The value of this book may lie in the fact that the Faulks attempted to find out why Americans emigrated to Australia by interviewing informally as many as they could find. They discovered that most wished to escape from the normal ills of American urban society—racial tensions, crime, drug cultures, pollution, and the economic “rat race”. Most came from large urban cities—and most settled in Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide where all the problems they sought to escape—except racial conflict—are also to be found. They have had to take a considerable drop in standard of living, capital accumulation is very difficult due to heavy taxation, and rampant inflation is above American levels. And racism is not entirely absent as both aborigines and other non-Caucasians are discriminated against in Australian society by either law or social custom. The Faulks found the little differences in Australian customs to be the most irritating: despite rumor to the contrary, Australians do not speak the same language as do most American. Faulk found that he was understood (the influence of TV) but could not always understand the local dialect. Despite the same nomenclature, Australian beef, milk, coffee, sausage, bologna and even water do not taste like their American namesakes; though he found Australian wines very palatable, he was stunned by the custom of serving spaghetti on toast for breakfast along with fried tomatoes.

The few Liberal American emigrants that Faulk found fled from the growing fascism of America, only to drop out of politics completely in their new homeland. Faulk makes no analysis of the Australian political scene other than to complain of lazy bureaucrats, high taxes, politicians’ antics, and the ominous presence of “bleeding heart liberals” who express concern over the government’s willingness to remove the aborigines from whatever lands suddenly attract the lust of business interests. But he is particularly bitter about the Australian’s lack of enthusiasm for hard work (farmers are excepted) and the evil power of unions in Australian society, a situation far worse than in the United States, and one which leads Faulk to predict that Australia will get more and more like England rather than like America in the future. Why an American college professor enjoying a sabbatical year off, in addition to the usual long vacation and short hours of that profession, should wax indignant over a common workingman’s desire for an annual month off and a forty hour week is something of a puzzle. But such attitudes are common among conservatives.

Prof. Faulk’s conclusion on Australia is that it may be a nice place to visit, but he wouldn’t want to live there. I think his conclusion is sound, that those wishing to escape the urban problems of America can do as well by simply moving into some smaller American city or more rural area. If they don’t like what they hear on TV each morning, shut it off. If they wish to escape the “rat race”, they can do so in greater comfort in many parts of the United States, and without the trauma of living in a foreign land and quite foreign culture. All the problems of America already exist in Australia; if their magnitude seems smaller, it is merely because they exist among 13 million rather than 220 million people Many of the new emigrants from America found no real solutions in Australia; many found only new problems; many carry problems around in their head. Though the Faulks were unaware of it, Australia has proven its right to be considered a society in the American pattern, not some provincial backwater. It has witnessed in the last year the founding of its first libertarian political party, The Workers’ Party, dedicated to the free mind, the free market and the free life – but not the free lunch. Any country needing a libertarian party, and spontaneously creating it, is not likely to be any better than our own, and may even be worse from a libertarian viewpoint. At least we Americans don’t pledge allegiance to a parasitical monarch, yet.

Any potential expatriates, or tourists will find this easy to read travelogue useful. But they should be warned that Prof. Faulk absolutely hated Hawaii, and therefore may just be extraordinarily hard to please.

Arab Wars

While attention in the Middle East continues to focus on Israel versus the Arabs, two little known inter-Arab conflicts are beginning to escalate into full-scale wars. At the western end of the Arab world, King Hassan II of Morocco has whipped up a bizarre “March of Conquest”, in which no less than 350,000 of his subjects are being mobilized to march southwestard into the Spanish Saharra, backed up by the Moroccan army. The Establishment press unsurprisingly misinterprets the Moroccan march as a nationalist grab for mere territory; as a New York Times correspondent puts it, the Moroccan “hearts appeared to be moved by a nationalist claim to a piece of territory, however barren and unpeopled.” (New York Times, Oct. 28, 1975).

The Sanish Sahara is not unpeopled (it has a population of 80,000), and it is certainly not “barren”; on the contrary, it has an enormous reserve of 1.7 billion tons of phosphates, so essential to the production of chemical fertilizers. If Morocco succeeds in grabbing the Spanish Sahara, it will then control over 80% of the world’s phosphates supply. The reason for Hassan’s haste at this time is that Spain has promised to leave its colony this year, and to hold a referendum among the populace. Most observers believe that three-quarters of the Spanish Saharans would vote for the territory’s independence movement, POLISARIO, a leftist movement whose guerrilla war has now forced Spain to abandon its colony. POLISARIO is allied to the Algerian government, a leftist regime, which, under Saharan independence, would be able to ship its iron ore directly from far western Algeria through the Spanish Sahara to the sea. This October, the World Court rejected Morocco’s dubious claim to the Spanish Sahara—hence the March. A war between Morocco on the one hand, and POLISARIO and Algeria on the other, is a distinct possibility.

In the meanwhile, at the other end of the Arab world, on the Arabian peninsula, Oman and neighboring South Yemen are virtually at war. Oman, a depsotic monarchy under the one-man rule of Sultan Qabus bin Said, has been unsucessfully trying to crush a leftist guerilla rebellion in its western province of Dhofar. The counter-guerrila war has been directed by a British general, with an officer corps of 200 members of Britain’s Green Beretish Special Air Services, and a few thousand Iranian “advisers”. Unable to stamp out the guerillas, Oman has begun to extend the war to the neighboring territory of leftist South Yemen, including an air strike on October 17. Particularly important is that Oman used TOW missiles against South Yemeni gun emplacments, the missiles having been delivered to Oman last February by good old Uncle Sam. Not only that: but the American squeeze against South Yemen has been increased by continuing negotiations with North Yemen to supply up to $100 million in arms, to be paid for by Saudi Arabia, in return for the termination of Soviet military contracts to the North Yemenis.

Favorable U.S. interest in Oman is due to its strategic location in control of the narrow strait of Hormuz, through which passes nearly half of the world’s oil; its hostile view of South Yemen, to its command of the Bab el-Mandeb straits entering the Red Sea.

(For information on the Spanish Sahara and Oman, see International Bulletin, Oct. 24, 1975. This excellent biweekly newsletter on foreign affairs can be obtained for only $8 a year, at P.O. Box 4400, Berkeley, Calif. 94704.)

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Encyclopedia of Pop Musfc and Jazz. At last—an encylopedia has been published that offers a storehouse of delight for a lifetime! It is Roger D. Kinkle, The Complete Encylcopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900-1950 (4 volume set, Arlington House, 2644 pp., $75.00). Aided by the enthusiasm and vast knowledge of the subject of Arlington House publisher Neal McCaffrey, Kinkle’s encyclopedia is the result of a vast amount of knowledge and research. As Kinkle admits, the title is in a sense a misnomer, since Kinkle’s work follows the careers of the composers and musicians and jazz and pop down to 1974, provided that their careers were launched before 1950. Because of the time framework, Kinkle covers the Golden Age of pop and jazz, and happily omits the disintegration after the 1940’s into trivia and then into rock and roll.

Volume I is a year-by-year chronology, listing the major songs, Hollywood and Broadway musicals, and records, each year. It is clear from the chronology that popular songs reached its apogee during the 1920’s and 30’s, and then began their precipitate decline during and after World War II, fueled by the death of the great composers the victory on radio recordings of BMI over the superior composers of ASCAP, and the musicians’ strike during the war which, combined with a tax on dance halls, that killed the big bands. Volumes II and III are a marvelously comprehensive biography, arranged alphabetically, including composers, musicians, and vocalists, Volume II covering A through K, and Volume III, L through Z. The leading songs and records of each performer or composer are listed in the individual biography. Volume IV is a set of indexes and appendices, including the complete list of jazz poll and Academy Award winners; a list of all the principal record labels, by consecutive number; and complete alphabetical indexes by name, by song, and by musical, for the previous three volumes.

One of the things that struck me about the encyclopedia is how high a proportion of the great popular songs were written by a relative handful of songwriters. We all know about the top-ranking ones: Porter, Rogers and Hart, Gershwin, Berlin, Arlen, and Kern. But a surprisingly large proportion of great songs were written by composers now relatively forgotten: the Tilzer brothers, Albert and Harry; J. Fred Coots, Harry Woods, Harry Warren, Ralph Rainger, and others.

There are undoubtedly errors in this work, as Kinkle concedes, since there must be such in a mammoth tome of this type; but I must report that a diligent search over many happy hours of reading failed to find any. Once, I thought that the book had omitted the song “Treasure Island” (Joe Burke and Edgar Leslie, 1935). But then I found that I was wrong, since the title was “On Treasure Island.” The old song “Winter Time” is omitted, but, who knows?, it may have been composed before 1900.

And so, rush out and buy this book—a fitting monument to a great and vanished era in popular music. Sure, the price is steep, but consider this: (a) all encyclopedias are expensive, (b) the price is cheap when we consider that it can be amortized over a lifetime of delighted reference and reading; and (c) best of all, that the price of the four-volume work is only $15 (yes, that’s right, fifteen) if one joins the Nostalgia Book Club. For information, write the Nostaligia Book Club, 525 Main St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801

Jaws. dir. by Steven Spielberg, with Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfus, and Roy Scheider.

Jaws is a good, scary movie, no doubt about that. But it is hardly the best movie of all time, or even the scariest. And so that film hardly warrants its runaway best-seller status, the long lines at movie theaters throughout the country, and its rapid climb to the biggest box-office draw of all time. It is what used to be called “good hot weather fare”, and no more than that.

In the recent disaster genre, Jaws is better than “The Towering Inferno”, and far better than the turkey “Earthquake”, and is happily free of the, phony moralism of the earlier pictures. The highly touted shark scenes are indeed terrific: (whether they overrate the shark menace or not I leave to the shark specialists.) One problem is that there are several important clinkers in the movie, including especially its idiotic ending, which violates both the letter and the spirit of the Peter Benchley novel. More important is the uniformly poor quality of the acting, a flaw which we can lay straight at the door of young Spielberg. Roy Scheider is patently miscast in the important role of the sheriff; what kind of credible sheriff walks around with a perpetually gentle, hangdog expression? Richard Dreyfuss is not as obnoxious as in his central role in “The Apprenticeship of Buddy Kravitz”, but neither does he begin to come across as a young New England aristocrat. Another example of grievous miscasting by Spielberg.

But particularly unfortunate is what happened to Robert Shaw, one of the finest actors in motion pictures. The central role of the fanatical shark-killer Quint, as should have been clear from the novel, should be played with quietly controlled force, punctuated by bursts of passion. Instead. Shaw hams it up from the very beginning, destroying much of the point by making Quint a garrulous old fool instead of the best shark-hunter in the business. Again, such a misconception of the role is at least as much the director’s fault as Shaw’s, especially since Shaw is not usually given to chewing the proverbial carpet.

Tom Wolfe Rides Again. Several years ago, the brilliant and scintillating social critic Tom Wolfe demonstrated the power of the pen by single-handedly demolishing the now famous (as dubbed by Wolfe himself) phenomenon of “radical chic”. Now, in a book that essentially reprints his lengthy article in the April Harper’s, The Painted Word, Wolfe, with equal hilarity and wit, does a superb demolition job on modern art. In the course of his book, Wolfe gives us a history and sociology of the development of modern art, and exposes the fact that the Modern Art Emperor has no clothes. Can he single-handedly destroy modern art as he did radical chic? It is not likely, but at least we can hope. Surely, the pretentious pomposities and absurdities of modern art will never quite be the same again.

The War Between the Tates. We usually do not discuss fiction in this column, but we must break the mold to sing the praises of Alison Lurie’s witty, perceptive, and extremely well-written novel, now out in paperback. From her inside perch as a professor at Cornell, Mrs. Lurie offers us a brilliant dissection of the academic world, its attitudes, pomposities, and values—as set in the era of conflicting values and standards of the late 1960’s and early 70’s. It is a comedy of manners in the classic sense. Particularly perceptive and hilarious is Mrs. Lurie’s description of a faculty department meeting, in political science; in a few pages, she manages to Say it All about an institution (faculty meetings) in which an enormous amount of pretentious blather is habitually expended on petty and bureaucratic issues. A must!

Randian estheticians will doubtless balk at the admittedly antiromantic motif of the novel. There is no question about the fact that there are no heroes or heroines in the novel; everyone is an ass. But there is an important role in fiction for the realistic novel. At its best, the novel can capture an age or a way of life far more accurately than can the most thorough and sober historian. Randians deride the realistic novel as “journalistic”, but the journalist, trapped in mountains of mere fact, cannot step outside of the given historical concretes to capture the essence of the way people feel, think, or act in any given historical setting. The novelist can, however; Galsworthy’s Forsythe Saga, for example, so superbly captured on television a few years ago, gives us a far better idea of the way people felt and acted in Edwardian England than any historian can hope to do. Mrs. Lurie’s novel is the subset of the realistic novel known as the “comedy of manners”, in which nothing very tragic occurs, and the characters are treated amusedly but gently Jin contrast to the savage modern genre of “black” or absurdist comedy.) All in all, a penetrating and delightful book.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Psychobabble.

One good thing about being an older, as opposed to a younger, curmudgeon is that one has the privilege of seeing cultural fads go as well as arrive. The “psychobabble” of my younger days was pop-Freudianism, and one had to suffer through cocktail conversation about “Oedipus Complexes”, “repression”, and “transference.” Happily, Freudianism, once so triumphant, has seen better days, only to be replaced by the modern, more mindless, but more pervasive psychobabble derived from the so-called “human potential” movement. (For a scintillating dissection of the current mode, as well as older trends, and for the name of the syndrome, see R. D. Rosen, “Psychobabble,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1975.)

The new psychobabble seems to be a blend of compulsive pshycho-confessionalism, “philosophical” hogwash, Eastern mysticism, pop psychojargon, and the reconstruction of one’s personality by an untrained but self-confident guru. It is particularly distressing to find so many libertarians, as well as the rest of society, falling for this irrational cretinism. In his humorous and astute article, Mr. Rosen indicates the difference from the older, Freudian pop-jargon: “The old Psychobabble, however, was really just the wholesale use of Freudian terms, less banter than a sort of intellectual one-upmanship. In post-World War H America, Freudian terminology was embraced by liberal magazines, novelists and enough of the middle class so that the growing demand for psychoanalysis easily outdistanced the supply of doctors.” In the new version, however, even the dubious intellectual content of Freudianism has disappeared, to be replaced by vague and ritualistic phrasemongering. Rosen tells the typical story of phychoanalyst confronting a patient engaged in the New Psychobabble. To every interpretation offered by the analyst, the patient responded “I hear you. I hear you.” The following dialogue ensued:

“‘I’m sorry,’ said the doctor. ‘I didn’t know you were a little deaf.’

‘I’m not. I hear you. It means I comprehend.’

‘Well, what do you comprehend?’

The patient paused. ‘Jesus,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know.’”

The psychobabble, as Rosen concludes, is a “set of repetitive verbal formalities” that “seem to free-float in some linguistic atmosphere.” They are also, one might add, close to gibberish. It is impossible, for example, to make any sense of most of the lucubrations of the latest super-guru, Werner Erhard, founder of Est, which has been lately sweeping the country and the libertarian movement. (See, for example, the expository and only mildly critical new book on all this by Adam Smith, and the refreshingly critical reporting of Esalen and Est by Annette Duffy in one of this summer’s issues of The Village Voice.) It is clear that amidst all the mindless concentration on one’s psyche—as filtered through the pseudo-philosophical jargon—the world of reality is left far behind. We are informed, for example, that “Werner hasn’t read anything in ten year”; apparently, facts, reality, knowledge of the world, only clutter up the psyche, which must be left free for the psychobabble.

Adam Smith tells us that Werner Erhard received the revelation for Est when it suddenly hit him one day that “Whatever is, is, and whatever isn’t, isn’t”. As Smith comments, “deep, deep.” One would think, indeed, that libertarians and ex-Randians have heard it all before: “Existence exists. A is A.” Indeed, in many ways Est and the other cults are a sort of village Randianism, that is, Randianism without its best aspect: systematic thought. What is left is the cult and the preferred panacea for all personal ills.

Hopefully, a reaction is setting in, as the Rosen and other articles attest. Particularly important is a devastating report on Est by an intrepid reporter who went through the entire Est training, including “graduate seminars”: Mark Brewer, “‘We’re Gonna Tear You Down and. Put You Back Together’”, Psychology Today (August, 1975). Mr. Brewer details the horrendous brainwashing techniques, accompanied, as usual, by severe sensory deprivation and authoritarian harassment, which results in “happy”, robotized subjects, ready to go – spout “philosophical” hogwash and to go out and gather more, unpaid volunteer-recruits for Est. The essence of the new message is that: “whatever you do is perfect, since you’re doing it”. Anything else is a “belief system” and therefore wrong. To “learn” this nonsense one has to be robotized and “ested”?! As Brewer concludes: “The use of brainwashing techniques, ostensibly to enhance people’s lives, becomes bizarre when the outcome is to create unpaid salesman. Smiling, they march out each week to share their brainwashed joys with friends, neighbors and coworkers, and they know that many will want to be sold. A friend of mine, an enthusiastic est graduate . . . until it all began to seem insidious, wistfully recalled the power of the training. They could’ve told me anything!’”

The horror is that so many libertarians could sit still long enough to be bulldozed in this manner, that they could submit themselves as fodder for authoritarian and brutal gurus.

Another important recent reaction to the psychobabble is a subtle, friendly but nonetheless devastating demolition of the quasi-Freudianism of Erik Erikson (the founder of the “identity crisis”) by Professor Frederick Crews (“American Prophet,” New York Review of Books, Oct. 16.) The backlash can come none too soon. More and more, it is becoming clear that these cults and fads can only sweep the country because most people lack a built-in b.s. detector or repellent (to paraphrase Hemingway.) A sufficient if not a necessary condition for such a repellent is a sense of humor, which is even more rare. Oh, H. L. Mencken, where are you now that we really need you? Can you imagine Mencken’s reaction, for example, to a new book by some cretinous adherent of the new movement, entitled, revealingly, It’s Me and I’m Here! Surely the proper response is something like: Who the hell cares?

Probably the screwiest of the new psycho-cults is “rolfing”—also used as an allied technique by many of the other cults—founded by one Ida Rolfe, in which the “therapist” punches, pummels, and generally hurts the patient, whose “life (but of course!) is changed” by “working through the pain.” Reminiscent, of course, of nothing so much as the old joke about a guy, when asked why he was hitting his head against a wall, replying: “because it feels so good when I stop.” What can anyone say about this lunacy except that it is better to be a rolfer than a rolfee? I can think, in fact, of a few people I would happily agree to “rolfe” for a very small fee.

In the meanwhile, lacking Mencken himself, we will have to peg along in his spirit, and hope that all this, too, shall pass. Mr. Rosen ends his article by pointing to the example of a friend of his, as a method of dealing with the hew psychobabble. When a girl asked him directly, “Are you getting your head together?” the friend replied: “Yes. I can feel it congealing.”

Class Analysis And Economic Systems

By David Osterfeld*

It is usually assumed that capitalism and socialism are diametrically opposed. This assumption is both true and false, for there are two mutually exclusive definitions of capitalism found in Marxist literature. On the one hand the term is used to denote production according to the dictates of the market, or in Marxist terminology, “commodity production.”[1] On the other, capitalism is defined in terms of class relations, i.e., ownership of the means of production by the “bourgeoisie” or ruling class. The former may be termed the economic definition and the latter the sociological definition. Marx apparently thought that the two were compatible and slides back and forth between the two without warning. However, if the economic definition is used, it follows that the less government control and manipulation of the market, the more capitalistic the society. This means that price controls, subsidies, licensing restrictions, etc., must be classified as anti-capitalistic since they constitute modifications or restrictions of the market. Since the state does not sell its services on the market, it is incompatible with the economic definition of capitalism. Not only is “state capitalism” a contradiction in terms, but it can readily be seen that taken to its logical extreme capitalism leads inexorably to anarchism.

But if the sociological definition is used, the state becomes perfectly compatible with capitalism, for whatever serves to entrency the bourgeois class, the owners of the means of production, in power is, ipso facto, “capitalistic.” Since Marx argued—however wrongly—that market competition would force the “rate of profit” to fall and ultimately to disappear altogether, the two definitions lead to mutually exclusive conclusions. Since the economic definition entails pure laissez faire, any government intervention to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie is anthema. But this is precisely the essential element when the sociological definition is used. Even though his economics may have been faulty, Marx saw that for the dominant economic class to entrench itself in power it must first be able to institutionalize its position, and this it can do only by obtaining control of the state. With the state behind them the bourgeoisie are then able to protect their positions from the threat of competition by establishing tariff barriers, licensing restrictions, and other statist measures. For Marx, the state is the principal instrument by which the dominant economic class is able to exploit the rest of society. Thus he writes that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Political power is defined as “the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” And even more clearly: “every class struggle is a political struggle.”[2] In short, while the state is incompatible with the economic definition, it is absolutely essential for the sociological one.

The inapplicability to the market of class analysis.

The utility of class analysis depends not only on a rigid social structure but, just as important, on whether the dominant class has obtained and/or is maintaining its position at the expense of, i.e., exploits, the other class(es) in the society. One conceivable socialist argument is that the two definitions may in fact be consistent if it can be shown that the operations of the market result in a stratified social structure where one class benefits itself at the expense of the other(s). Marx’s own economic analysis, however, precludes such an interpretation. Marx of course knew that for the capitalist to remain in business he must earn profit, or surplus value as he called it. But since all capitalists, he reasoned, are faced with the same task, they are forced by the laws of the market to compete against each other by lowering their prices and even, at times, by raising wages. The least efficient, usually the small-scale producers, are driven out of business. As Marx puts it, “one capitalist always kill many.” Capital becomes ever more centralized. The ranks of the proletariat swell from the increasing numbers of former bourgeoisie. Such is the process until finally, “this integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”[3]

Such is Marx’s analysis according to market criteria. The first thing to notice is that even according to Marx there is movement between classes, if only downward from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. While this in itself would be enough to question the rigidity of the class structure under the market, Marx ignored the fact that just as there is movement downward, so there is movement upward, as the Fords, Rockefellers and numerous others less famous indicates. In short, far from a socially stratified society, the market is characterized by the perpetual movement between classes.

Further, far from benefitting themselves at the expense of others, the bourgeoisie can only maintain its position in a market society by serving others better than can anyone else. This, in fact, is implicit in Marx’s analysis: those who are able to stay in business can only do so on the market by offering higher wages to get better workers and by lowering their prices to attract more consumers. This is exactly why Marx felt the “rate of profit” would have to fall. While this would seem to demonstrate the irrelevance of class analysis for the market, one final argument might be that two or more capitalists could band together to form a monopoly, thereby both institutionalizing their position and benefitting themselves at the expense of others. The fallacy in this charge lies in the failure to realize that the elimination of the external market thereby precludes economic calculation within the firm. Since the monopoly would no longer be in a position to rationally allocate its specific factors, it would suffer severe losses and break apart.[4]

From the above it can be seen that there is no overlap whatsoever between the economic and sociological definitions: the former is incompatible with the state, the latter requires it; the former is characterized by movement between classes, the latter by social stratification; the former is premised on exchange for mutual benefit, the latter on exploitation. While it is fruitless to engage in arid debates over which definition is the “correct” one, it should be pointed out that the sociological definition is practically identical to what libertarians refer to as mercantilism. It should therefore not be surprising to find that, while running directly counter to Marxian economics on the one hand, there are on the other significant parallels between Marxism and libertarianism in the areas of class analysis and its correlary, imperialism.

Class Analysis.

While there is disagreement between libertarians and Marxists concerning the origins of the state, and while Marx’s class analysis is partially vitiated by his ideological tendency to equate the “whole bourgeoisie” with the ruling class,[5] there is still much of value for libertarians—with the caveat that one is careful to distinguish between the two definitions of capitalism. What then emerges from the Marxian class analysis is an insightful dissection of traditional laissez-faire theory. Classical liberals had refrained from extending market analysis to its anarchist extreme and urged a “night watchman” state to maintain order and protect private property. But despite the shortcomings of Marxian economics, Marx realized that the position of the capitalist on the free market was always insecure. He also understood that since the first concern of the capitalist was to make money, he did not have any great attachment to the market as such. After all, freedom of competition meant that he could never relax. No sooner would he triumph over one competitor than he would be met by others intent upon cutting into his share of the market. Since this would force prices down, the capitalist could only preserve his profits by introducing new methods that would lower costs. But argued Marx, this would only temporarily preserve profits since all other competitors would soon follow suit. Hence. “this extra surplus-value vanishes so soon as the new method of production has become general . . . .”[6] Marx completely misunderstood the nature of both interest and profit, and therefore erroneously believed that they could (and would) eventually disappear. But what he did clearly understand, however, was that while the capitalist desired to realize a profit, the rigors of the market meant that this was a difficult and perpetual struggle for an ever elusive object. Hence Marx noted that it was only natural for the capitalist to turn to the state which, with its monopoly on the use of force, could institutionalize his profits by implementing various statist measures to keep out competition and hold down wage rates.[7] It is not surprising that the capitalists, as Marx notes, “all employ the powers of the State,” ranging from “brute force” to the granting of “exclusive monopolies,” for it is only by this means that they can “fix prices and plunder at will.” It is also quite understandable why Marx terms political power as “itself an economic power.”[8]

From this it can be seen that Marx did not succeed in demonstrating that wealth by itself confers power but the much different idea that wealth greatly facilitates the acquisition of power. The wealthy are able to use their wealth to obtain control of the state. Once in control, they are in a position to use the state to perpetuate their own position in the social hierarchy. Since he believed that the market would eliminate profit, it is the state, and not the market as assumed by most commentators, that is the principal vehicle for exploitation according to the logic of the Marxian system. Marx, in fact, is very clear on this point. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels define the state as “nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interest.” And in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx is severely critical of Hegel’s view of the bureaucracy as a universal class. For Marx the bureaucracy is, as Shlomo Avineri puts it, “an institutional license for sectional interests.” And in the 18th Brumaire Marx argues that the success of all previous revolutions depended on the acquisition of state power: “The parties that contended . . . for domination regarded the possession of this huge state ediface as the principal spoils of the victors.”[9] In short, while Marx’s analysis is often muddled due in large part to his failure to recognize the incompatibility of his two definitions of capitalism, what emerges from a close reading of Marx is rather surprising: while wealth on the free market confers no power, the alliance of wealth with the state does divide society into antagonistic classes and enables the wealthy strata to maintain its position via the exploitation of others.

In pointing out the natural affinity between wealth and political power Marx demonstrated the naivete of the classical liberal ideal of limited-government capitalism. Since the state is the only vehicle for the institutionalization of profits, the night-watchman state, even if attained, would soon transform itself into the mercantilist state, and Lenin’s “personal link-up” between the bankers and the government officials marks precisely this transition. The realization that wealth does not confer power but does facilitate its acquisition has significant import for libertarians, for it means that the problem of power in society can only be handled by striking at its source: the state. There is, in other words, no half-way point between anarchism and mercantilism. Either the state is eliminated altogether or it will grow.

Imperialism.

While libertarians might benefit from a careful and selective reading of Marx, socialists might just as well profit from a study of the libertarian analysis of imperialism. The elements of the Hilferding-Lenin-Bukharin theory of capitalism imperialism are well know. Since the role of the state in the securing and policing of the colonial system is central,” it is the sociological, and not the economic, definition of capitalism that is used. It is not too surprising therefore that the communist theory of “capitalist” imperialism bears a striking similarity to the capitalist theory of mercantilist imperialism, for in actuality the two are referring to the same thing. In fact, there is probably no severer indictment of imperialism than that found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith argues that under mercantilism, monopolistic privileges were granted to a few favored firms, permitting them to sell at exorbitant prices, while tariffs were enacted to keep out foreign competition. But if a nation were to eliminate imports it would have to have its own exclusive colonies in order to obtain raw materials. The power of the state, of course, was ideally suited to carve out and police the resulting colonial system.

Smith charged that the mercantilist system not only hurt those in the colonies but the workers in the mother country as well. Its only beneficiaries were “the rich and powerful.” Permitting the colonists to trade only with the mother-country enabled merchants to sell at monopoly prices in the colonies. The colonists, therefore, were unable to pay for the administration of colonial government as well, so the workers in the home-country were taxed to defray this cost, thereby perpetuating the profits of the merchants. Furthermore wages, said Smith, were kept low and prices high in the mother-country through the use of selective subsidies. The effect of mercantilism, said Smith was that “the interest of one little order of men in one country” was promoted at the expense of “the interest of all other orders of men in that country, and of all other orders of men in all other countries.”[10]

What Smith urged was the replacement of mercantilism by free trade. This, of course, would logically entail the abandonment of the entire colonial system and Smith doesn’t shrink from drawing that conclusion. One also finds similar statements in the writings of other proponents of the market such as Richard Cobden and John Bright as well as Herbert Spencer. Frederic Bastiat and others.[11]

While the leninist and libertarian solutions for imperialism are manifestly dissimilar there are, however, marked similarities between their respective critiques of imperialism. By being careful to distinguish between the two definitions of capitalism not only can libertarians find much of value in such works as Lenin’s Imperialism, Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy, and Magdoff’s Age of Imperialism, but socialists can just as well benefit from a reading of such libertarian works on the subject as Mises’ Omnipotent Government or Robbins’ The Economic Causes of War.

Conclusion.

Marx had two mutually exclusive definitions of capitalism: an economic and a sociological. The failure to realize that Marx’s sociological definition was tantamount to what libertarians refer to as mercantilism meant that the two groups often talked past each other when, in fact, they were in basic agreement. While I do not want to exaggerate the similarities between libertarianism and Marxism and believe that on balance the areas of disagreement far outweigh those of agreement, I do feel that a re-reading of Marx, untangling the economic from the sociological definitions, can prove worthwhile for libertarians. After all, it is pointless to throw out the wheat with the chaff.

Footnotes

[1] On the role of “commodity production” in Marxist literature see P. C. Roberts and M. Stephenson, Marx’s Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis (Stanford, 1973).

[2] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York, 1969), pp. 61, 73 and 95.

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (New York, 1906), pp. 836-7.

[4] Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Los Angeles, 1970), p. 585. For supporting empirical evidence see D. T. Armentano, The Myths of Antitrust (New Rochell, 1972), and A. S. Dewing, “A Statistical Test of the Success of Consolidation,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (1921), pp. 84-94.

[5] The “whole bourgeoisie” does not constitute the ruling class, but only that portion of it in a position to obtain economic benefits from the state. An obvious example is that while a tariff might benefit those in a business facing foreign competition, it would hurt those in the import-export businesses.

[6] Marx, Capital, p. 350.

[7] Note the similarity to A. J. Nock’s and F. Chodorov’s “law of parsimony.”

[8] Marx, Capital, pp. 823-5.

[9] First quote in Ralph Miliband, “Marx and the State,” Karl Marx Ed.: Tom Bottomore (Englewood Cliffs, 1973), p. 134, emphasis supplied; second quote from Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1972), p. 23; third quote in Miliband, p. 145.

[10] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Vol. II (New Rochelle, n.d.), pp. 207-62.

[11] Richard Cobden wrote in 1958 that “I am opposed to any armed intervention in the affairs of other countries. I am against any interference by the Government of one country in the affairs of another nation, even if it be confined to moral suasion. Nay, I go even further, and disapprove of the formation of a society or organization of any kind in England for the purpose of interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.” William Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy, (New York, 1927), p. 108. Dawson himself summarizes Cobden’s position by saying that “Had he had his way England would not have had so much as a back garden of a colony . . . .”; p. 203. In 1867 John Bright, in a speech on the British colonies, remarked: “For my share, I want the population of these Provinces to do that which they believe to be the best for their own interests—remain in this country if they like . . . or become independent States if they like.” In James Sturgis, John Bright and the Empire (London. 1969), p. 101. Herbert Spence wrote that “great as are the evils entailed by government colonization upon both parent State and settlers, they look insignificant when compared with those it inflicts on the aborigines of the conquered countries.” Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York, 1892), p. 196. And Frederic Bastiat wrote: “We see government everywhere greatly preoccupied either in giving exchange special favors or with restricting it. To carry it beyond its natural limits, they seek after’ new outlets and colonies . . . This intervention of force in human affairs is always accompanied by countless evils.” Frederic Bastiat, Economic Harmonies (Princeton, 1964), p. 80.

* Mr. Osterfeld is a doctoral candidate in Political Theory at the University of Cincinnati. He plans to write a dissertation on “The Antecedents of Anarcho-Capitalism.”

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“Libertarian” SCI FI

A Review of Commune 2000 A.D., by Mack Reynolds. Bantam 1974. (A novel.)

“Robert Owen lives!”. This is the code phrase identifying members of conspiratorial group trying to overthrow the well-ordered and prosperous utopia of United America in 2000 A.D. The new Utopia began with the establishment of the Guaranteed Annual Income for all citizens. The bulk of the population being technologically unemployable, work is done by those who are chosen annually by computer analysis which decides who shall work, where and at what, based on the Ability Quotient of each citizen. The rest are free to pursue their hobbies and obsessions, drawing money as needed from their GAI. Automated cars, roads and food service, books on home screens by tapping a central data bank, legal use of soft drugs (hard drugs are suppressed), disposable clothing, home delivery of new household goods or clothing by pneumatic chute, and sexual freedom, sex of all kinds, casual, guiltless, loveless, all are the bread and circuses of the masses.

The heart of the new utopia is a data bank which has absorbed all the census, social welfare, police, medical and other governmental information, and the data contained in the libraries of Congress and the British Museum. All this is available at the touch of a button, and by adding school and work records, the managers of the economy can pinpoint any citizen’s Ability Quotient and command his talents for the benefit of the whole society. But while most accept this conscription as a reasonable and even desirable burden, rumors of increasingly widespread work-evasion lead the managerial elites, who are more or less permanently tenured (because they have tampered with the computer selector-evaluator), to send aspiring academics into the communes to find out what is happening. The hero is an unemployed ethnologist who is suddenly told that he is to write his dissertation on life in the communes, reporting back to his mentors (police agents) what he finds. He discovers that the communes—each set up by affinity groups such as lesbians, Amish, nudists, Hellenophilic athletes, etc.—are harboring work-dropouts who live on the surplus GAI of their fellow communards, and that they also fail to file accurate data annually into the central computer bank. As historian William Marina would put it, they are living in the interstices of the computer society. In fact, the hero is horrified to learn that a conspiratorial core within the communal societies have espoused some antisocial philosophy called “Anarchism” or “Libertarianism”. Yes! Robert Owen lives!

The resolution of the novel suggests further adventures ahead for the hero. As is so often the case with novels of this kind, the plot is mechanistic. The characterization one dimensional at best, and the motivation is not quite convincing. But equally disturbing are the ideological inadequacies of this allegedly “libertarian” novel. Isaac Asimov, insists that in reviewing science fiction, one criterion which must be applied is that the science be at the very least accurate, within the realm of the possible. If we apply the same standard to this novel we find that it is premised upon the belief that, within 25 years, the problem of scarcity will have been all but eliminated, and massive unemployment will be tolerable due to the surplus Of capital or goods produced through automation. Such a situation within 25 years, if ever, is simply not credible, and since it is the major premise of the novel, it weakens it fatally. The author has probably been reading Murray Bookchin’s writings on post-scaracity anarchism and has failed to recognize the fictional quality of his Utopian projections. Ayn Rand has proven the tremendous power of fiction in the promotion of libertarian philosophical principles; but we must retain some sense of responsibility in accepting allegedly libertarian fiction. Is it credible on its premises? Is it accurate in its principles? Is it compelling as literature? Does it enlighten the mind or move the heart? For Commune 2000 A.D., the verdict is “Not guilty”!

Arthur McRory*

* Mr. McRory is a long-time observer of the fiction scene.

Friedman And The Liberals

By Tibor R. Machan*

In his October 6, 1975, Newsweek column Milton Friedman delivered a view point on politics that should be of considerable interest to all who have concluded that liberty is the prime political value in a human community. In this column Friedman addresses the problem of busing. After a brief introduction he poses the question: “What is wrong?” He answers as follows:

. . . I submit that the answer is intolerance—not intolerance of whites for blacks, which surely exists, but intolerance of liberal reformers who “know” what is good for other people are prepared to force it on them, intolerance of liberal reformers who can and mostly do exercise choice among schools for their own children—by living in affluent suburbs or sending them to private schools—but refuse to grant a similar freedom of choice to the less fortunate parents who at present have no alternative to the public school. . . .

Friedman then goes on to emphasize his opposition to intolerance in the following passage:

No doubt, the violent reaction of whites to compulsory integration via forced busing partly reflects racial intolerance. However, true tolerance requires tolerance of what we regard as intolerance. It requires us to persuade, not force, to set an example, not retire to our cozy segregated (by income) existence while sending out the police, the National Guard and Federal marshals to force on others not the values we actually live by but values we believe others should live by . . . .

It is not my intention to comment on the above ideas. What I wish to do is to provide a contrasting view, offered by the late professor Leo Strauss, a view that will, I think, provide food for thought concerning the problems advocates of liberty face when they select the arguments by which they will give support to liberty.

In his book Natural Right and History (1953), Strauss offers the following reflections:

. . . (G)enerous liberals view the abandonment of natural right not only with placidity but with relief. They appear to believe that our inability to acquire any genuine knowledge of what is intrinsically good or right compels us to be tolerant of every opinion about good or right or to recognize all preferences or all “civilizations” as equally respectable. Only unlimited tolerance is in accordance with reason. But this leads to the admission of a rational or natural right of every preference that is tolerant of other preferences or, negatively expressed, of a rational or natural right to reject or condemn all intolerant or all “absolutist” positions. The latter must be condemned because they are based on a demonstrably false premise, namely, that men can know what is good. At the bottom of the passionate rejection of all “absolutes,” we discern the recognition of a natural right or, more precisely, of that particular interpretation of natural right according to which the only thing needful is respect for diversity or individuality. But there is a tension between the respect for diversity or individuality and the recognition of natural right. When liberals became impatient of the absolute limits to diversity or individuality, they had to make a choice between natural right and the uninhibited cultivation individuality. They chose the latter. Once this step was taken, tolerance appeared as a value or ideal among many, and not intrinsically superior to its opposite. In other words, intolerance appeared as a value equal in dignity to tolerance. But it is practically impossible to leave it at the equality of all preferences or choices. If the unequal rank of choices cannot be traced to the unequal rank of their objectives, it must be traced to the unequal rank of the acts of choosing; and this means eventually that genuine choice, as distinguished from spurious or despicable choice, is nothing but resolute or deadly serious decision. Such a decision, however, is akin to intolerance rather than to tolerance. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance, (pp. 5-6)

I believe that Strauss shows in this passage that Milton Friedman and the modern liberals Friedman condemns start from a very similar point of view, namely skeptiscism about ethics (and values in general). Friedman happens to be a (classical) liberal and his preference lies with tolerance even of the intolerant. The supporters of busing, modern liberals, prefer other values. They are more intense, they focus on particular wrongs that are very difficult to deny, even while one is a skeptic on broader issues. So their choice is a “deadly serious” one, while Friedman’s is but a choice in support of abstract principle whose practical effects takes lengthy chains of reasoning to appreciate. The classical liberal confronted with the modern liberal ends condemned by the modern brother as callous. And if the classical liberal really has no better ground for his defense of liberty than his preference for tolerance, the intensity of the opposition from his brother will surely win within the realpolitik of a human community.

Intellectually, then, timidity in the defense of liberty is no virtue however much the practice of political tolerance requires support. That support is simply inadequate without a clear, unabashed affirmation of other, more basic values that can give such tolerance deadly serious backing.

* Dr. Machan teaches philosophy at State University College, Fredonia, N.Y., and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, Cal.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VIII, NO. 11

NOVEMBER, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

POLITICS: NOVEMBER ’75

During the “first week in November, two important political events in the United States hit the front pages: the 1975 elections, and President Ford’s “Halloween Massacre.” Amidst the spate of press interpretations of these two events, no one has presented what I believe to be the correct analysis: that both of these were significant victories for libertarianism.

1. Bond Issues.

The most heartening aspect of the election was the resounding and smashing defeat delivered by voters, across the country, to massive proposals for issues of government bonds. The voting was a great public protest against swollen government spending, as well as heavy taxation for taxation would eventually have been needed to pay for the principal and interest on the bonds. It was a resounding defeat to Big Government, made even more spectacular by the fact that, in most cases, all organized groups were ardent advocates of the bond issues: the politicians, the AFL-CIO, business groups, religious and “good government” groups, etc. In New Jersey, as one observer noted, “everyone was in favor of the bond issues except the people.” An upsurge in libertarian attitudes among the public is becoming manifest; how much more will come to life when the Libertarian Party becomes organized to give these strong but often inchoate public feelings a clear, organized, and institutional voice?.

Across the country, $6.3 billion in bond issues were put before the public this month; of these $5.9 billion, or 93 percent, were rejected at the polls! The biggest rejection was directed against the mammoth $4.5 billion bond issues proposed by the Ohio state government, of which nearly $3 billion were to go to capital improvement projects, and nearly $2 billion to transportation. The capital improvement bond issue was rejected by no less than 82% of the Ohio voters, and the transportation issue by 84%. All this despite Republican Governor Rhodes’ ardent support as a “blueprint for Ohio”, which would have been financed by increased sales and gasoline taxes. Ohio Democratic leaders were astute enough to oppose the bond issue, Lieutenant Governor Richard Celeste perceptively calling it a “blueprint for bankruptcy.”

The second largest state bond package was in New Jersey, where Democrat Governor Byrne, supported by most Republicans and all other organized groups in the state, submitted four bond issues, totalling $922 million, which were to go to water development, transportation ($600 million, to be split, half going to to mass transit lobby and half to the highway lobby), housing, and other institutions. All were turned down by substantial majorities, transportation, for example, losing by 960,000 to 580.000 votes.

The protest in New Jersey was also directed against Governor Byrne’s pet project of a state income tax, which he has not been able to ram through the state legislature (partly due to the noble opposition efforts of the New Jersey Federation of Taxpayers, which includes many libertarian members and activists.) As one New Jersey Assemblyman observed, “It means you can kiss goodbye any thought of an income tax and you have to start thinking about cuts, and more cuts after that.” The libertarian emphasis of the New Jersey voters was also shown by their discriminating selectivity on the state-proposals; for they approved, by, two to one, a proposition for tax deductions for elderly citizens. And so the public is willing to consider tax cuts, but not increases.

In New York State, the voters rejected by 700,000 votes a proposed $250 million bond issue that would have subsidized housing for the elderly. In the state of Washington, voters, by a margin of 2 to 1, turned down a proposed 12% tax on corporate profits to finance $200 million for the state’s schools.

All observers noted the chilling effect of New York City’s financial disaster. As well it might; for New York City should stand as a permanent warning bell against runaway government and profligate spending. Akron State Senator Oliver Ocasek’s plea against the bond issue: “We can’t afford to have Ohio become another New York City” should, and undoubtedly will, reflect sentiments in every state and municipality in the country.

2. Defeat for the ERA.

The voters of New York and New Jersey roundly defeated the Equal Rights Amendment for their respective states. Once again, organization, financing, and access to the media were heavily on the side of the fashionable ERA: politicians, business, labor, newspapers, religious and civic groups and of course the omnipresent NOW. In contrast, the opposition was haphazard and ad hoc, consisting largely of local housewives’ groups organized for the occasion. The smashing defeat of the ERA in New York, classic home of the Left, was particularly shattering to the ERA forces: the vote was 1.8 million to 1.4 million. And this despite an overwhelming 3-to-1 triumph of the ERA in the very home of Left-liberalism, New York County (Manhattan) where the vote was 131 to 41 thousand in favor. Particularly important was the embittered admission of the ERA forces that the defeat was brought about, not by the male chauvinist enemy, but by women themselves.

The blow to the national ERA also stems from the fact that this was the first time that ERA was put to an actual major test among the voters themselves. It is one thing to push the federal amendment through a complaisant state legislature, propelled by the propagandists of NOW. Then the feminists could plausibly claim to represent all of American womanhood. But now, in the vote to defeat ERA in New York and New Jersey, the “silent majority” of American women have at last spoken out. Presumably this writes finis to the ERA movement.

Libertarians have differed on ERA, but for me a stand in opposition to the amendment seems crystal-clear. In the first place, such vague terms as “equality of rights under the law” can be interpreted in almost any way by the courts. And, considering the way that the courts have been interpreting the laws in the last few decades, and considering also that almost all private activities have been ruled to be in some way “governmental”, an equal rights clause applying supposedly to government, or, even more vaguely to “the law”, will inevitably be held to apply to private firms and organizations as well. ERA would most probably be used to fasten a permanent, egalitarian and “anti-’ discrimination” tyranny upon private employers, clubs, and organizations.

The supposedly sophisticated proponents derided the grassroots opposition for “lies and misrepresentations” in holding that ERA might well mean the imposition of such things as compulsory unisex toilets. But why not? The opposition women had the good sense to realize that if government is given power, the power will be used and abused, and that given the rampant egalitarianism of our age,’ such rulings might well occur in the future. The fact that existing states with ERA have not so ruled, as the proponents kept rebutting, does not mean that such rulings would not be imposed in the future.

So that ERA should be opposed because it would mean aggravated government interference with private activity. But it should even be opposed if strictly confined to government itself. But shouldn’t government, at least, be prohibited from sex discrimination? Not necessarily. For, suppose that government oppresses Group A in some manner that does not apply to Group B. To order government not to discriminate between the two could mean one of two things: either that the special oppression is removed from Group A, or that equivalent oppression is now imposed on Group B. To libertarians the difference is Crucial. For it is better to impose oppression on A only, than to extend that oppression to both A and B.

An analogy may be drawn to the case of runaway slaves. Suppose that a portion of slaves are able to run away. If we react by insisting that all slaves be treated “equally before the law”, we could be saying that all should go free; But more likely we would be saying that the runaway slaves must be dragged back because it is “unfair” for them to be free while their brothers and sisters are in chains. But surely the latter course is worse than “discrimination.” Equality might well mean equality of all in slavery. Hence the very concept of “equality” is dangerous to liberty, and should be opposed.

If this is held to be a far-fetched example, then let us take the slavery of the draft. In our society, only males are drafted, and women are exempt. The national ERA would undoubtedly mean that women, too, would be subject to the draft—equality and non-discrimination in slavery! But surely it is monstrous, from the point of view of liberty, to correct the horrors of the draft by extending those horrors to the female sex. No, we should rejoice that women are exempt, and strive to extend that exemption to men as well.

And so libertarians should oppose ERA right down the line. Are the instincts of the masses more libertarian on this issue than the organized libertarian movement itself?

3. The “Halloween Massacre.”

If the election results should be the liking of libertarians, what about the much-reviled “Halloween Massacre” indulged in by President Ford? The “massacre” has had a very bad press, which has been ranting and raving about “dictatorship”, “weakness”, et al.

a. The Form of the “Massacre.”

The press has complained at length about the suddenness, the dictatorial nature of the “Massacre”, the bloodletting of our best and brightest, etc. ad nauseam. Dark comparisons have been made to Nixon’s infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” of Cox and Richardson. But this totally misses the point. The horror of the firing of Cox was that Cox was on special assignment to investigate despotism, corruption, and illegality within the White House itself, with Nixon himself under grave suspicion. Surely this does not apply to the firing of Schlesinger and Rockefeller. And surely, too, the President has the right to select his Cabinet. Every President has done so and has fired cabinet officers in mid-stream. Why the big fuss over this one?

b. Exit Schlesinger.

One reason for the fuss was the unceremonious dumping of Secretary of Defense Schlesinger. Well, should he have been dumped? Pipe-smoking, intelligent, and professorial he was, but what was the content of his beliefs? Surely that is more important than his IQ or his demeanor. Put bluntly, James Schlesinger was the single most dangerous man in the Administration. For it was Schlesinger who represented all the hawks, all the ultras in the Pentagon and in society at large. It was Schlesinger who fought bitterly against detente, against any cuts in military budgets, against any slight approach to nuclear disarmament, toward alleviating the terrible threat of the nuclear destruction of the human race. I am no fan of the balance-of-power politics of Henry Kissinger, but compared to Schlesinger, Super-K was the embodiment of peace and isolationism. Better balance-of-power maneuvering than hawkish drive toward nuclear war. Every friend of liberty and peace must rejoice at the speedy retirement of James Schlesinger to the private life that he so richly deserves.

By their friends ye may know them. Who, characteristically, was the very first politico to leap in with a denunciation of the Schlesinger ouster, to hint darkly that this was a sellout to the Russians? Why none other than Mr. State himself, Scoop Jackson, old friend of Schlesinger. And second and third were the ultra-hawks, Senator Jim Buckley and Ronald Reagan.

Along with the departure of Schlesinger, came a cleanout of the intelligence “community”, notably William Colby as head of the CIA and General Graham, hawk Schlesingerite, as head of the powerful, little-known, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

c. Exit Rocky.

The press couldn’t understand it: the ouster of Schlesinger angered the Republican Right, while the (virtual) ouster of Rockefeller angered the “moderates”. How interpret this puzzling phenomenon? To do so, one must go beyond the “left” and “right” categories to the realities of foreign and domestic policy. The ouster of Schlesinger was a blow against the right-wing hawks; the ouster of Rockefeller was a blow against statist fiscal policy, particularly against the powerful forces lobbying for Federal aid to New York City to prevent default, a fate that New York richly deserves. After showing a few signs of buckling under intense pressure by the New York bankers, media, and politicians (including Nelson), Ford, in a manly and noble speech, told New York off, exposed its profligate spending policies, and threatened a veto of any bail-out speech (a stand reportedly stiffened by gutsy Secretary of the Treasury William Simon.) It is true that Ford caved in a bit: promising Federal aid to “essential services” after a default, allowing new debt certificates after default that would take precedence over older bonds (but who would buy them?), and implying (through Arthur Burns) various forms of aid to New York City banks overloaded with near-worthless New York City debt. But at least Ford held firm on default.

By holding on default, President Ford was listening to the libertarian instincts of the mass of Americans, angry at the very idea of Federal aid to prevent a wild-spending New York City government from meeting at least a bit of its just desserts (Actually, as many critics have pointed out, if Beame, Lindsay, Rockefeller et al. had been running a private corporation instead of a government, they would all be in jail by now for doctoring the books.)

And so, by firing Schlesinger and Rockefeller, Ford was moving toward peace on the foreign front, and fiscal conservatism on the domestic front—both steps toward liberty.

And there is another point: the firing of Rockefeller itself is an important step, for it moves against a man who embodies the corporate-state, with its dangerous fusion of political and economic “power” . . .of government and business. Moving Rockefeller away from the Presidency is highly desirable in itself, apart from the New York problem. If Ford can manage to overcome his accident-prone nature until the end of 1976, and continue to avoid such people as Squeaky Fromme and FBI-informant Sara Moore, perhaps America will be free of the menace of a Rockefeller Presidency.

New Associates

The Libertarian Forum wishes to welcome to the ranks of Libertarian Forum Associates three new members:

Frederick Cox of Decatur, Ga.

Ronald S. Hertz of New York City

Charles Jefferson of Arlington, Va.

Their support is greatly appreciated.

Foreign Affairs Review

By Leonard P, Liggo*

“More Polish Workers Going Into Private Enterprise,” was the headline of an article by Malcolm Browne (New York Times, October 17). Capitalism has not only held on in Poland but it is continuing its renaissance in the non-agricultural sector. While there was strong collectivization in other East European countries, which had had more of a feudal tradition. Poland, with a recent period of de-feudalization, stopped collectivization after the 1956 revolt. About eighty percent of Polish agriculture is privately owned and a successful base for the Polish economy. Browne attributed the maintenance of capitalist attitudes to the strength of Catholic thought in Poland.

“The Government has tacitly acknowledged that many products and services can be provided better and more efficiently by private organizations than by Communist state enterprises. Under the present policy of putting a high priority on improving the quality of life for all Poles, the Government is encouraging private enterprise.

“By the end of last year, about 400,000 Poles were working for private organizations, with 62,000 others as apprentices. In 1960, there were 251,000.

“Meanwhile, artisans working in small private workshops have been steadily increasing the value of their output, adapting themselves to the general limits imposed by the system. Last year, the artisan sector did 15 percent more business than in 1973. Scores of interviews with Polish artisans disclosed wide agreement that really good craftsmanship resulted only from private enterprise, not from state factory product.

“There is also a general belief that craftsmanship now is threatened not only by the Communist economic system but by the changes in worker psychology it has brought about.

It is a simple, easily provable fact that Communism makes people lazy, a middle-aged machinist said.

“Most people don’t like to think about their work and under Communism they don’t have to. That’s why relatively few Poles want to be private artisans anymore, even though we are better paid than socialist-sector workers, even though we work shorter weeks and even though we get real pleasure out of our work. We have to think and put our hearts into what we do, and that is what most young people reject these days.”

England

Meanwhile, the English Conservative party has moved to economic liberalism or radical liberalism. Sir Keith Joseph, who has replaced Enoch Powell (gone off the deep end in support of Ulster oppression of Catholics) as chief spokesman for sound monetary policy and fighting inflation, was roundly applauded at the recent annual party conference for defending radicalism. Daphne Preston, chairman of the Conservative Political Center’s advisory committee, declared: “We must get the Government off our back.” Former cabinet minister Michael Heseltine said: “We are now the sole and embattled guardians of the rights of individuals and the family against the claims of a collectivist state. So let us state the position of our party in moral terms, and bring to the fight against sterile restrictions of Socialism the fervor and enthusiasm of a moral crusade.” Under Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Heath, the Conservative party held to traditional Tory opposition to the free market. After losing the election in February 1974. Heath was defeated for leadership by Mrs. Margaret Thatcher.

Mrs. Thatcher’s victory in the party was due to the work of libertarian-oriented young conservatives who are referred to as the Selsden Group, after an important program on which Heath was able to win his election to the prime ministership in 1970. Heath then abandoned the Selsden free market program for the “middle road.” Sir Keith Joseph, chief policy-maker for Mrs. Thatcher, attacked middle of the roadism. “The trouble with the middle ground is that we do not choose it or shape it. It is shaped for us by the extremists. The more extreme to the left, the more to the left is the middle ground. It is a will-of-the-wisp which we follow at our peril.” Part of this development can be attributed to Hayek’s receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics and the speeches and articles he has given in the last year in England. This fall, Hayek had two articles in the Daily Telegraph as well as a four page interview in its supplement. The only cloud on the horizon for the liberal revival in England is the traditional Tory imperialism. The Celtic peoples of the British Isles in Cornwall, Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland find Tory governments oppressive and unresponsive to their needs, while the Labour party’s strength is in the Celtic regions of western and northern British. If the Conservatives can disassociate themselves from Unionism in Ulster, and come out for decentralization in Wales and Scotland, there is a fair chance for classical liberalism to have a renaissance in England.

Norway

Like Scotland. Norway is becoming a major oil producer in its North Sea fields. It is on the verge of becoming one of the richest industrial nations in the world. “Norway is no longer a country of lumberjacks and fishermen.” said Per Ravne, a former ambassador to China and now special adviser for oil and energy in the Foreign Ministry. “We are highly industrialized. We are a nation of importance.” Norway has seen a rebirth of nationalism. It rejected membership in the Common Market in 1972.

The present policy is to limit oil production to 90 million tons, which will yield a revenue of 1 billion dollars. Radicals to the left of the dominant Labor party made substantial gains in the 1973 elections because of their strong nationalism. However, the conservatives are gaining strength due to their support for decentralization and preservation of small communities and limitation on industrial growth. The conservatives had emphasized development of industrial plants among the farmers and fisherman of the north: shipbuilding, chemicals, aluminum industries were built. But, oil production will draw workers to the south and upset the traditional balance of the northern communities and southern cities. A major policy, which contributed to the defeat of the Common Market, is to limit immigration. Common Market countries provide free immigration for citizens of former colonial areas. Other racial groups would bring their own social and cultural traditions, and the problems of immigrants of non-European background. AH parties seem committed to limiting industrial growth due to new oil production to the limits Of available Norwegian population growth. Could King Olav V’s visit to the United States have been a subtle attempt to lure the millions of descendants of Norwegian immigrants from Brooklyn, St. Paul, Fargo and San Francisco back to Norway?

Germany

Germany’s Social Democrats and Christian Democrats both fared badly in recent elections in the city-state of Bremen. The big winners were the Free Democratic party, winning 13 per cent of the vote (up from 7 per cent). They ran on an economy platform and demanded a fight against inflation. The New York Times in a lead editorial, “Bremen’s World Message.” declared that the rebuff to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt contained an important message for President Ford. The Times emphasized that the Free Democrats were the big winners in the protest vote due to their deeply anti-inflationary position.

German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt has been busy supporting the Socialists in Portugal. Germany, supported by the Low Countries’ and Scandinavian Socialists, poured money into the Socialist party (major rumors claim that the German Socialists have been conduits for CIA funds into Portugal: one must read the late Westbrook Pegler’s famous reports of U.S. union representatives overseas carrying CIA funds to support left-wing groups in Europe, to place the whole thing in perspective). France. Italy and England have not given support to the Socialists in Portugal because they would not be unhappy to see a Communist party victory in Portugal. A Communist victory would cause their electorates to support their middle-to-right wing governments against continental coalitions of socialists and communists who are on the verge of gaining electoral victory in Italy and France.

Portugal

The April, 1974 revolution in Portugal overthrew a fascist government of forty-eight years standing. In 1962 a strong call to the US was made by liberal opponents of the regime to support the overthrow of the dictatorship. Kennedy and Johnson opted for support of the fascist government over the unpredictability of liberalism. The consequences are a socialist rather than a liberal revolution, and an anti-capitalist, anti-feudal and anti-mercantilist revolution. For the last two decades the Portuguese army was involved in fighting anti-liberation wars in its African colonies and in Timor in the East Indies. India seized Goa in 1962 and China has been pleased to have the Portuguese possess Macao as a port of entry for prohibited western goods. In fighting the colonial wars, the army officers spent year after year studying Marx, Lenin and Mao in an attempt to understand and counter the successes of the anti-colonial liberation movements.

Thus, the army officers spent all their time studying socialist economics and the problems of underdeveloped, imperialist, mercantilist economies in Africa. They did not study market economics, the economic problems of the industrial Common Market, or of industrial countries. The legacy of the imperialist era is an elite which is trained to administer other countries with other kinds of economies than Portugal. After decades of administering African colonies, military administrators are trying to apply the same procedures to administering a European country.

Portugal emerged along the Atlantic Coast of the Iberian peninsula during the push in the eleventh century of the small Christian refugee states in the northern mountains to re-conquer central Iberia from Islam. While Castile and Leon pushed down the center and Aragon and Catalonia pushed down the Mediterranean coast, the Portuguese conquered as far as the Tagus River where Lisbon is located. As in Spain, the reconquest stopped for many centuries, with Islamic emirates controlling the southern territories. Thus, as in Spain, the northern provinces contain the private farms of individual peasants with a long tradition of autonomy. Such areas tend to be the strongholds of Catholicism. In Portugal, the area from Lisbon north is the area of rural homesteads, high population density, illiteracy and clericalism. Along the coast, Oporto, Coimbra, Lisbon, the large cities have become industrial centers, and the strongholds of the Portuguese Socialists. The south, the Alentejo and Algarve, were only conquered from Islam in the fifteenth century shortly before the voyages of discovery, which were continuations of these southward conquests by Portugal and Castile. The lands seized from the Moslems were granted to high nobles who established huge estates to support them at the court in Lisbon. Moslem serfs, and later landless migrant laborers were the basic populations. The voyages of discovery were seeking African slaves to work these huge estates, but with the seizure of Brazil it was more profitable to trade in slaves with the sugar plantations than with the wheat and olive estates of Portugal. Need it be said that the serf, tenant and day laborer population of the feudal south of Portugal are the mass base of the Communist party. Thus, the difference among the revolutionary movements in Portugal are rooted in whether the land system was private as in the north or socialist-fuedal as in the south. The state socialism of feudalism has created the massive crisis of Portugal. No party that does not recognized that all laws must be designed with double application can long retain leadership. For the north, there must be recognition of private property; in the south, there must be abolition of feudalism. If uniformity is tried, then the northerners will revolt in the name of liberty or the southerners will revolt in the name of liberty. Either one would be justified.

Spain

In Spain, a revolutionary situation is developing. The revolution goes back to the time of the French Revolution when the royalists, the liberals, and the supporters of a pro-French regime fought among themselves. The royalists defeated the liberals and Francophiles. The royalists’ strength were the Armies of the Faith composed of northern Spanish peasants. In the 1930’s, Spain again was divided: in the extreme north, the Basques of the industrial coastal region were radicals. Led by their revolutionary clergy, the Basques demanded autonomy as an independent, pre-Indo-European race. Today the Basques are the major force in the revolutionary movement against Franco. Still led by their bishops and priests, the Basques’ program is radicalism and self-determination. The rest of the north is the center of clerical, conservative politics, with the Kingdom of Christ as the objective of these soldiers of the Cross. The Carlists of Navarre represent that tradition.

The industrial east of Spain, along the Mediterranean, Catalonia and Aragon, were the centers of the anarchist movements and the life-force of the revolution until crushed by the Communist-allied central army. The central army officers preferred working with the disciplined, pragmatic Communists than with the decentralist, principled anarchists. In addition to the army officers, the Communists had a mass base among the tenants and agrarian workers of southern Spain, where again the lands conquered from the Moslem emirates were distributed to the great nobles rather than created into private property. Feudalism is the seedbed for Communism. The Socialists were supported by the white collar middle class of the cities and towns. Since the Catholic Church was treated like a great noble it received many large estates and was part of the feudal system. Thus, the conflict between the left, which wished to end feudalism including the economic base of the Church hierarchy, and the right which wished to maintain feudalism. The Catholic Church supported Franco in the Civil War. But, after the war Franco kept power rather than turning it over to Catholic-oriented politicals like Gil Robles. The result has been a unity of all the opposition from the Basques and Communists to the Catholics. The contradictions of the Church supporting war to maintain its feudal privileges weighed heavily on the younger clergy of that day. They are now bishops and cardinals and support radicalism among the clergy. The Francoists call the archbishop of Madrid the Red Cardinal. A bishop of Madrid was recently exiled to Rome to protect him from attack by Francoists. Things are likely to get worse if the radicals are led by a Red Cardinal, which means that in American Catholic terms he is the right of American bishops.

The Basque, and the Catalan (which, of course, is led by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Montserrat near Barcelona) self-determination movements are paralleled by similar movements in France and. Italy. The traditional independence movement in France is that of Celtic Brittany, which has increased in recent years. But, there was a blossoming of nationalism in southern France, Langue d’Oc, which had been conquered in the middle ages by the Franks of the north, and culturally ravished by educational centralization for the last two hundred years. The people of the Midi are not Franks, French, and they want everyone to know it. The Midi is now applied to the area bordering the Mediterranean while the Atlantic area of ancient Acquitaine is called Octian. But, the major center of self-determination activity is the island of Corsica. One problem is that when France ended its colonial empire it decided to plant its Foreign Legion in Corsica; this has led to much hostility to the French government. The militants are called the Action for the Renaissance of Corsica, and they claim that Corsica is treated as a colony. Policemen sent to Corsica are given an extra year’s seniority for each year served in Corsica. The French invasion by police has caused a hardening of support, since the gun battles involving hundreds of youths created solidarity against government repression by the close-knit clans. Recently there was a European-wide conference of colonized European peoples including the Basques, Catalonians, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Bretons, Octians, Corsicans, Sardinians and Sicilians.

Italy

The analysis of Italian political developments and American government attitudes about them which was presented this summer in the Libertarian Forum seems confirmed by recent events. The Council on Foreign Relations had invited Sergio Segre, director of the foreign section of the Italian Communist party, to confer with the Council’s members about US-Italian relations when the Communists have to be included in a future government coalition. This reflected the recognition by leading groups in the US that the Italian Communist party could be an ally of the US in foreign affairs—since the Italian Communists would not fight to get Italy out of NATO—as it is an ally of large Italian business. However, the Administration in Washington denied a visitors visa on the ground that it would publicly demonstrate US recognition of the Christian Democratic party’s weakness. In the US, the denial caused controversy because the US had just signed the Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union putting pressure on the Russians to permit freedom of travel while the US was denying freedom of travel. In Italy, the issue further strengthened the Communist party because the US embassy in Italy and the US state department had aided the visit recently of Giorgio Almirante, leader of Italian Fascism. He not only was greeted by members of Congress but met with two members of the National Security Council. This caused further fears in all parties in Italy that the Communists must be included in a coalition of all parties to preserve constitutionalism. The State Department’s control over visas is a violation of traditional American concepts.

Tom Wicker, in a recent article in the New York Times outlined the Italian Communist party’s program to “reprivatize” the economy. Forty-five per cent of Italian gross national product is produced by state-owned or state-partner industries. Wicker says: “The ironic fact is that the Communists are saying that their economic program might reduce the nationalization of private industry in Italy and even “reprivatize” some concerns that haven’t worked will under state control.” The Italian Communists do not see any possibility of maintaining a democratic regime and a socialist economy; since the elimination of the market prevents calculation and shortages are constant in the Eastern Bloc countries with socialist economies, the Italian Communists wish to maintain the market and private industry and to use the state budget to influence the economy. Since that is exactly what the US economy has been, and the results of such state capitalism are now clearly evident, the Italian Communists clearly have been trapped between admitting the validity of market economics or accepting the last vestige of socialism, the contemporary American economy. The Italian Communist economists, such as Lucinao Barca, are in a dilemma. “This approach is also influenced by what Mr. Barca sees as the failure of Keynesian economics to produce in any society a stable relationship between employment, the rate of inflation and the balance of payments. Italy, for example, has sharply improved its balance of payments—but only at the cost of a drastic cut in demand, brought on by declines in employment and production, now down to about 70 per cent of capacity.”

“The idea, Mr. Barca says, is to avoid development of “bureaucratic socialism,” with everything run by the state, but to influence entrepreneurs to choose the right options for the public good.” The Italian Communists point to state ownership of food industries as examples of the need for “reprivatizing.” Instead of farm subsidies which create crop surpluses in certain crops while others are constantly imported, food firms would develop long-term contracts with farmers to assure stable prices and purchases. The state-owned firms seem to the Communists to be drained by large excess bureaucracies which private firms would not have. Italian Communists appeal to those who wish to emphasize research and application of technology. Wicker adds: “All of this seems carefully designed to avoid any hint of the kind of heavy-handed socialization of most aspects of the economy that is to be found in Eastern [Europe and the Soviet Union. . .The Communists may be able to ‘get results’ even without power because businessmen and industrialists as well as workers are looking for new approaches to Italy’s problems; and because the regional and provincial governments are becoming more important in Italy, just as the Communists have greatly extended their power in those governments.”

Turkey

Recent elections in Turkey maintained the equal balance between the two major parties while weakening the smaller conservative parties. The conservative parties wish a return to strict Moslem observance enforced by law. The present government, run by the Justice party, lost seats in the voting although it increased its popular vote at the expense of the more conservative parties. The Justice party supports an Islamic point of view but does not want state support of Islam. It does try to maintain the traditional village culture and agrarian system rather than encourage industrial development,” with the result that large numbers of Turks unable to find either agricultural or industrial work in Turkey must migrate to Germany to work in industrial firms there. The Justice party is more pro-American bases and less inclined to embarrass the US over the Cyprus dispute.

Against these conservative parties stands the Republican party, which has the largest popular support in Turkey, about forty-five percent of the voters. The Republican party was established by the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Attaturk. It is a secular party which wishes to eliminate the Influence of religious thought in society and emphasizes science, industry and technology. As the modernizing party in Turkey, it wishes to encourage a climate of industrial expansion and investment and is critical of the taxing and spending policies of the present government. It opposes the present currency losses and large budget deficits. It is strongly supported in the cities and by educated and non-religious Turks. It is a nationalist party, strongly supported by the military officers who have been educated in modern concepts and is opposed to the control of Turkish foreign policy by US needs. It opposes US bases in Turkey and it carried out the Turkish occupation of the Turkish northern sectors of Cyprus when a pro-American right-wing Greek group attempted to oust Cyprus president, Archbishop Makarios, and attach Cyprus to the then military regime in Athens. The Turkish occupation led to the fall of the pro-American Greek dictatorship. Cyprus, Greece and Turkey have been the center of American interest in the eastern Mediterranean as bases for US influence in the oil regions of the Middle East. That was the reason the Sixth Fleet was stationed in the Mediterranean after World War II and why the Truman Doctrine launched the anti-communist crusade in March, 1947.

Israel

An interesting discussion of the Middle East appeared in the Social Democratic, pro-Zionist quarterly, Dissent. Henry Pachter’s “Who are the Palestinians?” raised very important questions for such a source as Dissent. Pachter described the Arab liberation of Syria (including Palestine and Jordan) and Iraq from Turkish control in return for a British promise of sovereignty and self-determination.

The British foreign secretary issued a declaration of support for a Jewish immigration to a home in Palestine (the foreign secretary in his Memoirs “wondered how anybody could have been misled into thinking that they meant anything.” On the eve of World War II, there were 1.1 million Moslems, 450,000 Jews and 150,000 Christians in Palestine. After World War II, the US refused to lift the immigration restrictions imposed after World War I mainly to keep Jews out of the US. Large numbers of Jews who wished to leave Europe and to go any place but Palestine could not find any place that would take them; once the traditional refuge for immigrants, the US, was closed, they had to go to Palestine. A UN Security Council resolution stated the terms on which a Jewish and an Arab state would each be created in Palestine. Three noncontinuous territories containing all Jews and an equal number of Arabs were created as a Jewish commonwealth, while the other half of the Moslem and Christian Palestinians were placed in the areas of an Arab commonwealth. The assumption was that the two commonwealths would form a single economic and social unit, while political and cultural life would be separate in each commonwealth. Arabs opposed being included-in the Jewish sectors. The Zionist leadership sought to create a Contiguous Jewish state and to expel the Arabs from their lands in those territories. The UN resolution is the only legitimate basis in law for the solution or the Palestine question; a restoration of the status quo to the terms of the UN resolution would stabilize the situation in Palestine.

Pachter explains: “Much has been made of the Histradruth’s (Jewish labor organization requiring high-wage Jewish labor instead of low-wage Arab labor) job policy. Obviously, in terms of Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Jewish business has not been guilty of exploiting cheap Arab labor; rather, Jewish colonists have been guilty of making Arabs jobless and driving them from their lands. I have to explain here a subtlety of feudal law: fellahim can be sold along with the land... jobless and driving them from their lands. I have to explain here a subtlety of feudal law: fellahim can be sold along with the land on which they have been sitting; but the land cannot be sold without them, pulling it away from under them. When the Jewish Agency, aware only of capitalist law, bought land from the callous effendis, it may honestly have thought that thereby it had acquired the right to expel the fellahim, settlers, who had naively begun to cultivate this ground (including kibbutzniks who did so in the name of “socialism”), wondered why the former owners or tenants of those grounds were firing at them from afar or staging surprise attacks on their innocent children: from the vantage of expelled Palestinians, the settlers were usurpers, colonizers, imperialists in person, not the tools of mysterious powers across the sea.”

Since the Arab peasants were the Lockean owners of the lands on which the effendis levied taxes and claimed to “own” under the Turkish regime, it is debatable that the Jewish Agency was operating under capitalist concepts of law. Pachter quotes George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (New York, Capricorn Books, 1965): “The revolt is largely manned by the peasantry, that is to say by the people whose life and livelihood are on the soil but who have no say whatever in its disposal; and their anger and violence are as much directed against the Arab landowners and brokers who have facilitated the sales as against the policy of the mandatory Power under whose aegis the transactions have taken place.” Pachter adds: “The Jewish leaders—except for the Communists, Martin Buber, and some Chalutzim—never thought of allying themselves with these victims of colonization.” Pachter also suggests that the Jewish armed groups initiated the terrorist approach to politics in Palestine. He adds: “But the Isrealis who justify their claim to the land by their tribal memory of 2,000 years obviously have no argument against people whose claim is based on tribal memories reaching back only 30 years. More than the expellees’ actual misery, the bitterness of the sacrifice that was imposed on them intensifies the hate that defines the Palestinians as a nation distinct from other Arabs.” Pachter recommends that the Palestinian Arabs be given a choice of compensation for lost land, residence or job, or returning to Palestine. Pachter does not say whether or not they should, if they return, be given their rightful land, residence or job, but obviously that is the only just solution. Of course, that would have to occur in the context of legal equality and the ending of special legal positions for Jews. Since the implementation of the 1947 UN security council resolution is the only international legal basis for ending the problem of Israel, these suggestions could be important contributions to the overall settlement. Pachter discusses the necessity to recognize the Arab commonwealth in Palestine as the basis for peace. He says: “There can be no settlement, no truce and no confidence between Arabs and Jews as long as their status is not determined equitably and as long as there is not international machinery to ascertain the will of the Palestinians themselves.” He adds: “Both these peoples are too primitive in their tribal instincts or top immature as nations to be reasonable on such questions where self-respect is at stake.” He thinks that the great powers have to impose solutions on the parties concerned. “In the beginning, a Palestinian state would probably make obstreperous noises at international gatherings, nor might it in other ways be the most desirable neighbor one would wish to have. Nevertheless, I believe that the nonsatisfied demand for a Palestinian state is now a major source of posturing, gesturing, and confrontation.” (For a discussion “of groups in Israel thinking about peaceful answers to Arab-Jewish relations, see Arthur Waskow’s article in Link, Sept., 1975, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, 1901 Q Street, Northwest Washington, D.C. 20009.)

*Mr. Liggio teaches history at SUNY, Old Westbury.

Recommended Reading

Compiled by Bill Evers

(Mr. Evers is a doctoral candidate in political science, Stanford University.)

Henry W. Berger, “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Truman Administration,” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1975. Discussion of Truman’s creation and manipulation of the notion of bipartisanship. Taft’s belief in foreign policy debate and his opposition to intervention abroad and to executive branch aggrandizement of foreign policy decision-making.

Barton J. Bernstein, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb: A Reinterpretation,” Political Science Quarterly, Spring 1975. Now the definitive revisionist account of the decision to drop the atom bomb. Supersedes Alperovitz and Kolko.

Leon G. Campbell, “Black Power in Colonial Peru: The 1779 Tax Rebellion in Lambayeque,” Black Academy Review, Spring-Summer 1972. (Issue sold for $4 by Black Academy Press, 135 University Ave., Buffalo, N.Y. 14214).

Walter Cohen, “Herbert Hoover: Some Food for Thought,” Pacific Research, November-December 1971. The politics of food aid at the conclusion of World War I.

Walter Cohen, “U.S. Foreign Policy—A Radical Study Guide,” Pacific Research, March-May 1972. Includes a thorough reader’s guide to “right-wing” and “left-wing” revisionist material on foreign policy. (May be obtained from Pacific Studies Center, 1963 University Ave., East Palo Alto, Calif. 94303, $.60 per back issue.)

Sime Djodan, “The Evolution of the Economic System of Yugoslavia and the Economic Position of Croatia,” Journal of Croatian Studies, 1972. Yugoslavian liberal Marxist economist criticizes bureaucratic socialism and the exploitation of Croatia. (Available for $8.00 from the Croatian Academy of America, P.O. Box 1767, Grand Central Sta., New York, N.Y. 10017.)

G. William Domhoff, ed., “New Directions in Power Structure Research,” Insurgent Sociologist, Spring 1975. Special issue of scholarly work on the Council on Foreign Relations, Advertising Council, the Industry Advisory Council to the Department of Defense, and other phenomena. (Issue available for $3.00 from Insurgent Sociologist, Dept. of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, Ore., 97403.)

Dan Feshbach and Less Shipnuck, “Corporate Regionalism in the United States,” Kapitalistate, May 1973. Study of regional government in the U.S.

“From Wall Street to Watergate: The Money Behind Nixon,” Latin America and Empire Report (North American Congress on Latin America), November 1973. A financial interest group interpretation of Watergate.

David M. Hunter, “Ohio’s Usury Laws and Their Effect upon the Home Mortgage Market,” Akron Law Review, Fall 1974.

Sabri Jiryis, “The Legal Structure for the Expropriation and Absorption of Arab Lands in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 1973. (Available for $3.00 from P.O. Box 329-A, R.D. No. 1, Oxford, Pennsylvania 19363).

Clark S. Knowlton, “Land-Grant Problems among the State’s Spanish-Americans,” New Mexico Business, June 1967. Detailed historical review that provides the background for the New Mexico landgrant struggles of 1967 led by Reies Lopez Tijerina. Published by the Bureau of Business Research, University of New Mexico, 1821 Roma Avenue, N.E., Albuquerque, New Mexico 87106.

Stephan Leibfried, “U.S. Central Government Reform of the Administrative Structure During the Ash Period (1968-1971),” Kapitalistate, Dec. 1973-Jan. 1974.

Michael Levin, “Marxism and Romanticism: Marx’s Debt to German Conservatism,” Political Studies, December, 1974 Shows that Marxism derives some of its important ideological views from the German conservative political tradition.

Jonathan Marshall, “Review of D. Borg and S. Okanoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History,” Pacific Research, March-April 1974.

Jonathan Marshall, “Southeast Asia and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1940-1941,” Pacific Research, March-April 1973. Marshall’s articles, based on new archival research, stress the desire of the American power elite to control access to S. E. Asian raw materials.

Charles W. McCurdy, “Justice Field and the Jurisprudence of Government-Business Relations: Some Parameters of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, 1863-1897,” Journal of American History, March 1975. A fair-minded exposition of the legal thought of a famous classical-liberal Supreme Court judge.

James O’Connor, “Political Economy of State Expenditures and Revenues: A Bibliography.” Kapitalistate, May 1973. Valuable bibliography on public finance.

Marc Pilisuk, International Conflict and Social Policy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972.) A power-elite analysis of foreign policymaking based on thorough knowledge of the social science literature. Includes as a chapter the famous 1965 article on the military-industrial complex which Pilisuk co-authored with Tom Hayden.

“Regionalism and the Bay Area,” Pacific Research, November-December 1972. An in-depth case study of metropolitan government.

D. I. Roussopoulos, ed., The Political Economy of the State (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1973.) A radical examination of who benefits from the government budget in Canada. (Available for $3.00 from Black Rose Books, 3934 rue St. Urbain, Montreal 131, Quebec, Canada.)

Larry Sawers and Howard M. Wachtel, “The Distributional Impact of Federal Government Subsidies in the United States,” Kapitalistate, Spring 1975. (Issues available for $2.50 from James O’Connor, Dept. of Economics, California State University. San Jose, Calif. 95114).

Harry N. Scheiber, “Property Law, Expropriation, and Resource Allocation by Government: the United States, 1789-1910,” Journal of Ecnomic History, March 1973. Includes important information on how businesses took land from private owners via the eminent domain process.

Harry N. Scheiber, “The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts,” Perspectives in American History, 1971. Extensive and detailed discussion of land confiscation via eminent domain.

“Southern Militarism,” Southern Exposure, 1973. (Published by the Institute for Southern Studies, 88 Walton St., N.W., Atlanta, Georgia 30303.) The military-industrial complex in the American South.

David Vogel, “Corporations and the Left,” Socialist Revolution, No. 20, April-June 1974. Examination of the doctrine of corporate responsibility. (Issue available from Agenda Publishing Co., 396 Sanchez St., San Francisco, Calif 94114, for $2.00).

Steve Weissman, ed., Big Brother and the Holding Company: The World Behind Watergate (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1974). $3.45. Significant New Left interpretations of the Watergate affair.

Is Dayan Just Another Rommel?

By Joseph R. Stromberg*

Review of The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism ed. Arie Bober (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1972).

This important and comprehensive work is a collection of historical and political essays written by members of the Israeli Socialist Organization. ISO is the only genuine anti-Zionist organization on the Israeli political spectrum; and it is a group which accepts Arabs as full members. Despite denunciation as “Fatah agents” and police harassment, ISO maintains a consistent line of national liberation and self-determination for all Middle Eastern peoples.

By recognizing and espousing the rights of the Palestinians to their homeland, as well as the rights of the new Israeli people to areas which individual Jews legitimately pioneered and peacefully settled before 1948, ISO directly attacks the foundations of the Zionist state. On the basis of uncompromising Marxist humanism ISO has arrived at essentially the same overall position on the Palestinian question that a libertarian would come to on the basis of his own natural law (or other) premises.[1]

The essays properly compare the Zionist establishment to the settler regime of the Boers in South Africa. Israel is thus a modern example of the original conquest-states described by the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer in his numerous works. Sir Ronald Storrs, first civil governor of Palestine under the British mandate, welcomed the Zionists as “a little loyal Jewish Ulster” in the midst of dangerous Arab nationalists. Like Ulster, which is a tool of British imperialism in Ireland, Israel continues to function as a tool of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Unlike many conquest states, however, “Zionist colonialism displaces and expels” instead of retaining the bulk of the former owners of the soil as cheap labor. The early colonizers bought huge tracts of land “owned” by reactionary Arab effendis and threw off the Arab tenants. The slogan of “Jewish labor only”, consistently followed since the beginnings of the Zionist enterprise, has even undercut the rational market option of hiring the cheapest labor; this “narrow” bourgeois alternative has always been largely defeated by the forces of Zionist nationalism and the Jewish labor bureaucracies.

A number of essays brings out Israeli expansionism, the repression of the darker Jews, native to the area, and the mistreatment of native populations. A reading of the evidence forever discredits the myth of the beleaguered little “democracy” fighting for its life. The “emergency regulations.” for example, a carry-over of British measures of 1936-39, allow instantaneous martial law, including arbitrary arrest, restrictions on freedom of movement, and confiscation and destruction of property, such as the punitive dynamiting of homes. Even worse, whole areas can be sealed off from the outside, leaving the inhabitants with a choice: get out or starve. No wonder the Palestinians “voluntarily” depart. Much land has been taken over since 1948 by selective application of these regulations. No Hayekian “rule of law” here! Indeed, for repression and tyranny Israeli officialdom can compete with just about any state in existence today.

An interesting chapter discusses the class structure of Israel. Israel emerges as a society in which European Jews lord over native Jews and Arabs, and which only survives because of massive outside infusions of capital from the United Jewish Appeal, the Bonn government (which accepts Israel as the institutional expression of the victims of Nazism and pays reparations to Israel), and, of course, the United States government. But this mass of capital does not go to the national bourgeoisie, but to the Israeli state, the quasi-state Jewish Agency and the labor party bureaucracies—especially the Histadrut, a national labor monopoly which must make George Meany grind his teeth in envy. Even the much touted glorious kibbutzim are completely subsidized by the state, private firms, and banks, and are living on stolen land.

Chapters on the Israeli Left and Borochovism reveal the built-in limitations of all factions which work within the Zionist framework: Even Uri Avnery, supposed left-wing statesman, appears to accept the Zionist status quo and attempts to evade the self-created problems of Zionism by speaking of “post-Zionist” politics and proposing a binational federation with the Palestinians. ISO regards the latter proposal as the equivalent of an Arab Bantustan.

Such left-wing Zionism, including Borochovism which claims to derive Zionism from Marxism, ignores the central contradiction within Zionism. Zionism as European Jewish nationalism had to oppress and displace the Palestinians, once it was determined that only Palestine would be considered for Zionist colonization. A number of essays, especially. “Zionism and Universal Ethics,” attack Zionism for rejecting traditional Jewish universalism and humanism. Taking anti-Semitism as a special Jewish problem. Zionism proposed a special solution and even cooperated with anti-Semites in bringing it about. Ethnocentric history and European Jewish chauvinism, which assumed that all non-Jews were the potential enemy, were central to Zionism.[2] Understandably, Hitler’s crimes made Zionism seem perfectly plausible.

While these ISO essays only hint at such an interpretation, they point directly at the deeply rooted fascist philosophical trend in Zionism. Zionist repudiation of universalism, humanism and transcendent values in favor of the politicized tribal community defined as the highest good, brings Zionism well within the philosophical definition of fasicism offered by Ernst Nolte, a contemporary German historian.[3] Thus “When Zionism had to choose between the Jews and the Jewish state, it unhesitantingly preferred the latter.”[4] Statis to the core, such” antitranscendence parallels the positions developed by Charles Maurras, the Italian socialist Mussolini, and—Adolf Hitler. It is clear from ISO’s evidence that Israeli ideology justifies all criminal (from the standpoint of universal ethics) acts of the “sovereign, martial, inwardly antagonistic racial community” (Nolte’s phrase for the fascist society). According to ISO, even such characteristically fascist rhetoric as “the eternity of war and the sanctity of blood” enjoys growing popularity within Israel[5]—a veritable revival of blood-and-soil nonsense.

The chapter on the background of the 1967 preemptive war brings out the importance of the “eternal enemy” theme in Israeli thought. Israel is a society completely militarized for the eternal struggle for illusory security—just one more crusade and we will be safe.[6] But, as Nolte demonstrates, a paranoiac conception of eternal wars for “self-defense” is at the heart of genuine fascism.[7] The fascist sincerely believes that his crimes are necessary to preserve the fragile, surrounded racial community and its incomparable culture. The interesting question of how far official statist Cold War nationalism has pushed American society down the fascist path of course deserves treatment at another time.[8]

ISO sees the solution in a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East in which the new Israeli people will become an autonomous community somehow linked to the regional socialist system. Despite its tying of constructive change to socialism and a certain weakness on the peasant issue, ISO’s Marxist universalism allows it to break out of Zionism and propose self-determination of all peoples—a position strikingly similar to that which Ludwig von Mises took in The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth on the basis of liberal universalism.

For ISO, socialism is necessary to eliminate all “alienation,” including all market relations. Yet the fact that socialist states behave as badly as other states ought to tell them something. Stalin is of course the classic case of a distinctly fascist leader utilizing an amalgam of Marxist and nationalist rhetoric, although his Bolshevik mind-set perhaps prevented him from deviating as far in words as that other nationalized Marxist, Benito Mussolini. ISO even terms nationalism a form of alienation. A libertarian would add that nationalism is part of the real problem itself: the state. In Bakunin’s words the state is “the negation of humanity.” Fascism in Israel or anywhere else is merely the most thorough affirmation of this alienating machine based on the atavistic fears it promotes among its subjects; fascism is the ideological affirmation of statist crime in the face of all transcendent values and institutions such as humanist ethics, natural law, universal religion, and the world marketplace.

Despite these criticisms, The Other Israel is a valuable and significant study, especially at a time when Henry Kissinger and Jerry Ford are committing American treasure and probably lives to the long-range” defense of its miniature Leviathan state, founded on the repudiation of the best in the Judaic heritage.[9]

FOOTNOTES

[1] For a libertarian exploration of the issue, see the brief essay by Imad-a-Din Ahmad, “The Right to Rule in the Middle East,” Abolitionist, I, 8, p. 8 and I, 9, pp. 3-4.

[2] Two radical analyses which touch on Jewish chauvinism (from a Jewish perspective) are Norman Fruchter, “Arendt’s Eichmann and Jewish Identity” reprinted in James Weinstein and David W. Eakins (eds.), For A New America: Essays in History and Politics from Studies on the Left, 1959-1967 (New York, 1970), pp. 423-454; and David Horowitz,’ “The Passion of the Jews,” Ramparts, XHI, 3 (October, 1974), pp. 21-8 and 5660. The latter essay is especially perceptive and compassionate.

[3] Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (New York, 1969). Nolte’s thought-provoking study deserves to be read in full.

[4] The Other Israel, p. 171.

[5] Ibid., p. 235.

[6] Garry Willis, whose National Review traditionalism and current Berrigan-style leftism appear to be products of a medieval Catholic outlook, actually defends Israel as a chivalric crusader kingdom in a recent issue of Esquire (July, 1975).

[7] Nolte, pp. 507-515.

[8] An interesting beginning of such an analysis is the editorial, “The Ultra-Right and Cold War Liberalism,” Studies on the Left, II, 1 (1962), pp. 3-8. For libertarians it would be especially important to investigate how far right-wing Objectivism, by internalizing Cold War American nationalism, has gone down the fascist path—a point to which I hope to return in a future essay. For an “economic determinist” approach to Zionism by a Bakuninist libertarian, see Stephen Halbrook, “The Philosophy of Zionism: A Materialist Interpretation”, in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod and Baha Abu-Laban (eds.), Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World: The Illusion of Permanence (Wilmette, III., 1974), pp. 20-30.

[9] For an early critique of Israel by a libertarian’s libertarian who stressed the opposition between Judaism and Zionism, see Frank Chodorov, “Some Blunt Truths About Israel,” American Mercury, LXXXIII, 390 (July, 1956), 55-9. This appeared, incidentally, long before the Mercury’s degeneration into a neo-Nazi organ.

* Mr. Stromberg is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VIII, NO. 12

DECEMBER, 1975

US-ISSN0047-4517

STOP REAGAN!

The newly burgeoning candidacy for President of Ronald Reagan is a grave danger and a menace to individual liberty, and libertarians should hope that he is knocked out of the box as quickly as possible. The Reagan candidacy is a menace on three levels: (a) the content of a future Reagan presidency; (b) the direction in which the Reagan movement will push the weak-kneed and centrist Ford administration in the coming months; and (c) the illusions that Reaganism will sow among libertarians and among instinctively libertarian voters throughout the country. The fact that this statement will shock and aggravate many libertarians is itself a sign of the gravity and the depth of the illusions that Reaganism has already sown among libertarians across the country.

What is Reagan and why is he a looming menace? In brief, because Reagan is, purely and simply, a conservative, with all that that label implies. Being a conservative, Reagan has consistently been an ultra-hawk on foreign policy, constantly pushing toward a war position across the globe; has shown himself to be weak—at the very best—on civil liberties; and has pledged a devotion to domestic and economic free-market policy which is all rhetoric and no action. The fact that Reagan likes to quote from Bastiat means little when ranged alongside his warmongering foreign policy and his lack of concrete action to roll back the State at home.

How long will it take libertarians to realize that, on the scale of important issues, war and foreign policy are far more important than domestic consideration? What benefit would come to liberty from a President who would cut welfare expenditures, but embroil us into a series of wars, or even into the holocaust of World War III? The biggest single enemy of liberty, the biggest threat to the life, liberty and property of Americans and of the entire human race is modern nuclear warfare. We need above all a President who would act to remove the menace of such world destruction from over our heads, and not one who would act to bring such devastation to pass. Yet Reagan is and has long been an ultra-hawk. Furthermore, in addition to the danger of war and military intervention abroad, Reagan, as a good conservative, consistently pushes for greater militarism at home: for increasing military expenditures, and for the grave threat to domestic liberty and to distortions of production and the American economy which such militarism entails.

Every significant leap away from liberty and into statism in the past century has come about as a result of American (and other countries’) entry into war, aggression, militarism, and empire. War has been the great killer of human liberty as well as human lives. Yet Reagan would not only bring war far closer but would rivet much further the yoke of militarism upon the lives, liberty, and property of all of us.

It should also be remembered that the power of the President in domestic affairs is strictly limited, limited by a Congress which will remain solidly in Democratic hands. Where the President’s power is frighteningly unlimited is in foreign affairs, and that is precisely where Reagan is at his most dangerous—this would-be “Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral”, as the British delegate to the U.N. spoke of the new conservative-Social Democratic hero, Pat Moynihan. Think: do you want Ronald Reagan’s finger on the nuclear button?

Reagan has been fully consistent with his hawk-conservative image. His was one of the first voices to protest at the alleged surrender to the Russians when the hawk Schlesinger was fortunately booted out of the Secretaryship of Defense. Reagan has opposed even the picayune SALT agreement to limit the arms race, and has consistently pressed for increases in the swollen boondoggle of military spending. On foreign affairs he has attacked detente—which at least has defused some of the most hazardous aspects of the Cold War—and has fought the idea of at least normalizing relations with Cuba and of abandoning our collectivist imperialism in the Panama Canal Zone (collectivist in that all the Americans there are employees of the U.S. Army occupation force.)

Neither has Reagan been a stalwart of civil liberties. Can we really trust Reagan to abolish victimless crimes to refrain from bugging and spying on American citizens? Reagan’s record in going down the pike with the tyrant Nixon until the very end is scarcely reassuring on his civil libertarian aims. Recently, Reagan has flatly refused to criticize the shameful actions of the FBI in harassing, spying upon, and blackmailing Martin Luther King.

So if Reagan is bad on foreign policy and bad on civil liberties, what’s he good on? The budget? But in California, during his eight years as governor Reagan doubled the size of the state budget, and strove to cement the current neo-mercantilist “partnership” between government and business. His free-market rhetoric is fine, but rhetoric divorced from action is not simply unfortunate; it is worse than useless, for it misleads everyone, supporters and opponents of the free economy alike, into believing that Reagan is really an economic libertarian. Four years of Reaganite statism will simply convince both sides that a truly substantial rollback of Big Government is impossible; for “even Reagan came out for . . .” will be the universal cry. By spouting libertarian rhetoric that he has no intention to put into reality, Reagan does grave disservice to the libertarian cause, not the least because he has duped many libertarians and quasi-libertarians into following his star.

Finally, even Reagan as contender, let alone as President, is a threat to peace and liberty, for the stronger the showing he makes, the more likely his candidacy will be to push the weak centrist Ford into more and more hawkish positions on foreign policy. What happens in 1975-76 is particularly important because the Ford administration has been stalling on implementing the SALT II “pre-agreement” that Ford and Brezhnev concluded at Vladivostok last year. For the major problem in an arms ceiling accord is the insistence of the U.S. in continuing work on a new “cruise” missile, tipped with nuclear warheads. The problem of the cruise missile is simply this: Russia’s greatest fear is that America may proceed to develop a “first strike capability”, enabling the U.S. to launch a nuclear war while fending off Soviet retaliatory missiles. Nothing is better calculated to drive the Russians into panicky military actions and arms escalations. . .Secondly, the best thing about the current nuclear “balance of terror” is that both sides are now able to inspect and verify arms agreements, and to find out what the other side is doing with its missiles. They are able to do this because both sides have satellites which can spot the deployment of all nuclear and other missiles and strategic bombers. The cruise missiles threaten to destroy that balance because they can be fired with great accuracy from ordinary planes and ordinary submarine torpedo tubes. A U.S. cruise missile would mean that the Soviets would have no way of knowing how many such missiles we had, how they were deployed, or whether we were readying them for a surprise first strike attack against Russia. One of the dangers of Schlesinger is that he was a firm supporter of cruise missile development, which might be ready for actual testing next year. Kissinger is less firmly committed to the cruise missile. The greater the Reagan strength in the primaries, the more the Ford administration will be pushed to proceeding on this menacing course for world peace and for any hope of limiting or eventually reversing the arms race.

And so, while some of the nation’s media persist in thinking of libertarians as some sort of ultra-wing of the Reaganite movement (and some libertarians unfortunately agree), libertarians should hope instead for a smashing defeat of Reagan as soon as-possible, and his ouster from the Presidential race.

On Nozick’s Anarchy, State, And Utopia—I

(Editor’s Note: Last Year, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia was published, gaining the prestigious National Book Award in 1975. This book by a Harvard professor of philosophy, defends the minimal, laissez-faire state and attempts to rebut the case for free-market anarchism. A complex work, it is fitting that the book be treated complexly, for the book has two kinds of importance, external and internal to the libertarian movement. Externally, the fame of the work has had great importance in making the topic of libertarianism and anarchism respectable for the first time in philosophy courses and facilities, and paving the way for libertarians to write term papers and dissertations in a previously verboten area. The book has also caused considerable shock and bewilderment in left-liberal intellectual circles. Precisely because the book is by a Harvard professor, it cannot be ignored, as it undoubtedly would had Nozick been a professor at Little Rock State Teachers. It was precisely the anguish at a Harvard man writing such a book that forms a central theme in the disgusting review of the book in the journal Political Theory by the eminent political philosopher Brian Barry.

While Nozick’s book has aided the libertarian cause externally, it plays no such role within the movement; for here Nozick’s main thrust has been to attack the anarchist position. Nozick’s anti-anarchism deserves a considered critique, which has already begun in a Reason (November, 1975) review by Professor Eric Mack. The Libertarian Forum plans to aid in this task by printing, one at a time (because of space considerations) the brilliant critiques of Nozick presented at the Third Libertarian Scholars Conference on October 25 at New York City.

This first essay in the series is by Mr. Randy E. Barnett, a student at Harvard Law School. Mr. Barnett wrote his bachelor’s honors thesis at Northwestern University on the philosophy of anarchism.)

Whither Anarchy? Has Robert Nozick Justified The State?

By Randy Barnett

One can appreciate Anarchy, State & Utopia on many levels. Its emphasis on individual freedom is a refreshing change of pace. It questions assumptions that have long been sacrosanct. It puts forth a theory of entitlement which is nothing short of remarkable in this day and age. And most importantly, it is being taken seriously by the press and, hopefully, the establishment philosophers as well.

But Professor Nozick has attempted more than this. He has attempted to refute the anarchist position. This is a rare endeavor. Few have taken the anarchist position seriously enough to refute it. Few understand it well enough to do it justice. Dr. Nozick displays an intimate knowledge of the anarchist position and yet he rejects it. His refutation is novel, intricate and many faceted. But does it succeed? In this paper I shall try to outline a few reasons why I think it does not.

Nozick begins by asserting that “Individuals have rights. . .” (ix).* The purpose of the first part of his book (the only part which we shall treat here) is to see if it is possible to evolve a state or “state-like entity” (118) without any violation of individual rights. He concludes that such a thing is possible and likely as well. I shall confine my examination to the possibility that a state might exist which does not violate individual rights ab initio.

“In a state of nature an individual may himself enforce his rights, defend himself, exact compensation, and punish.” (12) But an individual may also delegate this right to friends, relatives, or hirelings. A company which specialized in defense of its customers Nozick would call a protective association. (12) The protective association has no rights of action other than the sum of the rights delegated to it by its subscribers. (89) To this point the anarchist has no problem. At least he thinks he has no problem. He has yet to hear what Professor Nozick believes is the content of these individual rights.

Nozick analogizes rights to a sort of boundary which “circumscribes an area in moral space around an individual.” (57) What happens if one person does something which risks crossing the boundary of another? Nozick answers that you may prohibit the risky activity provided that “those who are disadvantaged by being forbidden to do actions that only might harm others must be compensated for these disadvantages foisted upon them in order to provide security for the others.” (83) This he calls the “principle of compensation.” It “requires that people be compensated for having certain risky activities prohibited to them.” (83)

It follows from this principle that an individual may be prohibited from using a procedure of enforcing his rights which is risky or unreliable, provided that the principle applies to this type of activity. Nozick gives two parallel justifications for applying the principle to dispute settlement.

Since he maintains that a protective association has no rights of action other than the sum of the rights delegated to it by its subscribers (89), Nozick first seeks to ground his justification on some right held by every individual. He turns hopefully to the notion of “procedural rights.” “Each person has a right to have his guilt determined by the least dangerous of the known procedures for ascertaining guilt, that is, by the one having the lowest probability of finding an innocent person guilty.” (96)The association’s right to prohibit risky procedures, therefore, derives directly from the individual’s procedural rights.

Secondly, Nozick insists that the prohibition of “unreliable” procedures is valid even if there were no procedural rights. He contends that epistemic considerations govern the use of retaliatory force. That is, you must know that an aggressor has violated someone’s rights before you may retaliate. Use of force on an aggressor without knowing that he is guilty is itself aggression. “If someone knows that doing act A would violate Q’s rights unless condition C obtained, he may not do A if he has not ascertained that C obtains through being in the best feasible position for ascertaining this.” (106)

On this analysis, a protective association may prohibit others from using procedures which fail to meet some standard of certainty since failure to meet this standard means that the enforcer lacks the requisite knowledge of guilt.

Once you swallow the principle of compensation and its applicability to dispute settlement, the introduction of the minimal state-like entity is all downhill. Nozick envisions one association coming to dominate the market. By his principles, this association would have the right to prohibit all competitors who in its opinion employed risky procedures (provided, of course, “compensation” was paid). Voila! We have a statelike entity which arises without violating anyone’s rights, right?

Everything hinges on whether Nozick has successfully outlined an “invisible hand” explanation of the state where no rights are violated in the process. Consequently, Nozick’s conception of rights and their basis becomes crucial here. Yet early in the book he apologizes for not presenting a theory of the moral basis of rights. (xiv) Still it is possible to discern a notion of rights being used here.

A right is a freedom to do something, that is, to use property which includes one’s body in a certain way unimpinged by external constraints (force or threat of force). The right of self-defense is contained within the concept of right itself. It is simply a means of exercising your right when someone is trying to prevent you from doing so. The fact you have a right of action means you may act in that way even if another attempts to prevent this. Self-defense, then, is implicit in the notion of rights.

Where do rights come from? How are they grounded? Nozick doesn’t say and I will not pretend to offer a final answer to this question. But it seems that since the concept of right carries within it the freedom to use property, rights are created along with property ownership. To my way of thinking this is what ownership means. Rights (to use property in a certain way), then, can be homesteaded, exchanged, or bestowed to employ the Lockean trichotomy.

Has Nozick’s minimal state violated individual rights? You remember that the reason the dominant protective association has a right to prohibit risky, unreliable enforcement methods is that its members, indeed all people have procedural rights. “Each person has the right to have his guilt determined by the least dangerous of the known procedures for ascertaining guilt, that is, by the one having the lowest probability of finding an innocent man guilty.” (96) “The principle is that a person may resist, in self-defense, if others try to apply to him an unreliable or unfair procedure of justice.” (102)

But where would such a right come from? Was it homesteaded, exchanged or received as a gift? And does this right of self-defense bear-any resemblance to the right of self-defense I discussed earlier? Nozick deals with none of these questions. He simply assumes the existence of procedural rights and then proceeds to speculate on what form they should take. This does not mean that Nozick is wrong. It means only that we have no reason to believe he’s right.

At the same time Nozick chides the natural-rights tradition which, he says, “offers little guidance on precisely what one’s procedural rights are in a state of nature, on how principles specifying how one is to act have knowledge built into their various clauses, and so on. Yet,” he continues, “persons within this tradition do not hold that one may not defend oneself against being handled by unreliable or unfair procedures.” (101)

I maintain that this is precisely what the natural rights tradition does hold or, at least, should hold: That there are no natural procedural rights. Let me briefly defend this claim.

In the state of nature one has the right to defend oneself against the wrongful use of force against person or property. But if you commit an aggressive act, the use of force by the victim to regain what was taken from him is not wrongful. If you have stolen a T.V., the rightful owner may come and take it back. You may rightfully resist only if you are innocent or have some legitimate defense. What are we then to make of procedural rights?

Though only the innocent party may rightfully use self-defense, it is often unclear to neutral observers and the parties involved just who is innocent. As a result there exists the practical problem of determining the facts of the case and then the respective rights of the disputants. But I must stress here that this is a practical question of epistemology not a moral question. The rights of the parties are governed by the objective fact situation. The problem is to discern what the objective facts are, or, in other words, to make our subjective understanding of the facts conform to the objective facts themselves.

The crucial issue is that rights are ontologically grounded, that is grounded in the objective situation. Any subjective mistake we make and enforce is a violation of the individual’s rights whether or not a reliable procedure was employed! The actual rights of the parties, then, are unaffected by the type of procedure, whether reliable or unreliable. They are only affected by the outcome of the procedure in that enforcement of an incorrect judgment violates the actual rights of the parties however reliable the procedure might be.

The point is that you have a right of self-defense if you are innocent but not if you are guilty. Only if a procedure finds an innocent man guilty and someone enforces that finding has anyone’s rights been violated. You have the right to defend yourself against all procedures if you are innocent, against no procedures if you are guilty. The reliability of the procedures is irrelevant. Unless an innocent person agrees to be bound by the outcome of a judicial proceedings, he retains his right of self defense even after a “reliable” procedure has erred against him.

The purpose of any procedure then, is to induce adherence to the decisions of the arbitrators. The parties and the community must be convinced that there is a good chance of a just decision before they will be willing to bind themselves to any possible outcome. In a culture which held that rights are based on the facts of the case, disputants would demand procedures suited to discover those facts. The better it worked, the more acceptable it would be. Thus procedures would and should be judged on the basis of utility.

Procedures, then, for discovering the fact situation are not to be confused with rights themselves. You only have a right to a procedure, like any other service, if someone, e.g. your protective association has contracted to provide you with it.

What then of Nozick’s second line of attack—the epistemic justification. “On this view, what a person may do is not limited by the rights of others. An unreliable punisher violates no right of the guilty person; but he still may not punish him.” (107) it is not enough that the guilty party is guilty. The punisher must know he is guilty. One is tempted to label this the ‘what you don’t know can hurt you’ approach.

This approach neatly avoids an assertion of procedural rights and, in addition, is a conscious effort to answer the objection that a guilty person may not defend himself against unreliable procedures and may not punish someone else for using them upon him. (103) Our attention is now shifted from the rights of guilty persons to the “morality” of protective associations. From the question of whether a guilty person can defend himself against his victim we now move to consider whether a third party can protect the guilty person if that third party isn’t sure of the client’s guilt. “But,” as Nozick asks, “does this difference in knowledge make the requisite difference?” (108)

He believes the epistemic problem at least allows the protective association to delay the imposition of penalties on its client until it can determine his guilt. This is provided they pay compensation for the delay if it turns out that his client is guilty. While I am unsure about the rightfulness of this delay, it does not appear to present a major difficulty. Nozick, however, goes on to assert that a person using an unreliable procedure “is in no position to know that the other deserves punishment; hence he has no right to punish him.” (106) It is one thing to assert that if a protective association delays sanctions against its guilty client it must compensate the victim for the delay. To claim that the association may rightfully prevent any punishment by an enforcer it deems unreliable is quite another matter.

I leave aside the question of whether anyone has the right to “punish” if by punish we mean something other than “make restitution to victims.” If punishment were limited to restitution, this might minimize Nozick’s visceral reaction against the actions of third parties. For clearly he fears the prospect of persons stealing from or hurting someone and then trying to dig up some past indiscretion by the victim in order to “justify” their aggression.

A restitutional standard would justify the actions of thieves who stole from someone who turned out himself to be a criminal only if the thieves had given their booty to the original victim. If the thieves kept the loot, the fact that the victim was himself a criminal would in no way justify their acts. This is hardly a carte blanche for indiscriminate “punishing.”

But Nozick’s epistemic justification is more than a gut reaction against loopholes for criminals. It sets forth a principle of morality. Unfortunately he doesn’t justify this principle beyond its deterrence value on enforcers using unreliable procedures. (105) And even on this point he concedes that “not anything that would aid in such deterrence may be inflicted;” but the true question is the (moral) legitimacy of “punishing after the fact the unreliable punisher of someone who turned out to be guilty.” (106)

But while this epistemic consideration may be relevant as a practical problem or even a moral problem, I question its relevance to issues of rights. (And I’m sure Dr. Nozick shares my contention that rights and morals are not co-extensive.) If the nature and moral foundation of rights are what I alluded to earlier—a freedom to use property, created along with property ownership—then epistemic considerations cannot create or alter rights. The right of self-defense we contend is a direct result of an infringement on a property right. Its purpose is to protect and restore what is rightfully owned. Since it is ontologically grounded this right exists against an aggressor independently of whether we know who the aggressor is. Consequently we are entitled to take compensation from the actual aggressor whether or not we are sure of his guilt. That is, the actual guilt or innocence of the suspect as opposed to our subjective knowledge of his guilt determines if taking restitution from him is justified.

Nozick’s epistemic considerations are relevant to whether one who indiscriminately takes restitution from people he’s not sure are aggressors (but happens by chance to be right) is a good man. This is a question of morality, not rights. Epistemic considerations are also relevant when we realize that we are likely to aggress against innocent people and be responsible to them if we aren’t careful about whom we “punish.” This is a practical question, not one of rights.

This analysis, like the analysis of procedural rights, highlights the crucial need for a theory of rights and the difficulties we face in political philosophy without such a theory. The fact is that in laying down my argument, I too fail to provide a detailed theory of the moral basis and nature of rights. The purpose of this treatment, however, is merely to show how essential such a theory is and how starkly divergent conclusions flow from even a slightly different conception of rights.

How then are we to properly view the relationship between procedural safeguards, epistemic considerations for enforcers and the right of self-defense? Perhaps Dr. Nozick’s intriguing distinction between moral constraints and moral goals would be of service here. “The side constraints view forbids you to violate these moral constraints in the pursuit of your goals; whereas the view whose objective is to minimize the violation of these rights allows you to violate the rights (the constraints) in order to lessen their total violation in the society.” (29) Let me briefly clarify this.

We may take as our moral goal or end a certain state of affairs. Anything which enhances this state of affairs we may do provided we don’t violate certain moral side constraints on our actions. Nozick correctly argues that the protection of rights is not a moral goal since this would allow us to violate the rights of a few in order to generally enhance the rights of the many. For example, one may not torture the innocent person to gain information which will prevent the explosion of a bomb even though this would generally enhance the goal of protecting people’s rights (in this case the rights of the potential victims). Rights of Individuals are moral side-constraints. We may strive to achieve our goals

in any way which does not violate an individual’s rights.

I would adapt this view to our discussion here. For practical and moral reasons, procedural fairness and knowledge by enforcers of the guilt of their suspects are moral goals to be striven for. Our efforts to achieve them, however, cannot violate the rights of any individual. To punish a victim for taking restitution from his actual aggressor just because he wasn’t sure it really was his aggressor is a violation of that victim’s right of self-defense and, therefore, a violation of our moral side-constrain. The right of self-defense, then, dictates that procedural fairness and epistemic certainty are goals, not constraints.

In this discussion, I’ve tried to show how Professor Nozick has failed to apply his “principle of compensation” to dispute-settlement situations, the lynch-pin of his justification of the ultra-minimal state. But what of this principle of compensation itself? I think Professor Nozick will agree that if it fails there can be no doubt that that the ultra-minimal state is unjustified.

“The principle of compensation requires that people be compensated for having certain risky activities prohibited to them.” (83) In other words it is okay for you to forcibly forbid another from engaging in a risky activity provided you compensate him for it. Nozick anticipates our response by pointing out that “it might be objected that either you have the right to forbid these people’s risky activities or you don’t. If you do, you needn’t compensate the people for doing to them what you have a right to do; and if you don’t, then rather than formulating a policy of compensating people for your unrightful forbidding, you ought to simply to stop it.” (83)

Nozick claims this dilemma is “too short” (83); that there is the middle ground of “prohibit so long as you compensate.” This middle ground, he says, is based on a distinction between “productive” exchange which you have a right to engage in and “non-productive” exchange which you do not. Since you have no right to non-productive exchange in the first place, the prohibition of such an exchange isn’t a violation of your rights.

In a productive exchange each party is better off than if the other party’s activity wasn’t done or the other party didn’t exist at all. (84) “Whereas if I pay you for not harming me, I gain nothing from you that I wouldn’t possess if either you didn’t exist at all or existed without having anything to do with me.” (84) The principle of compensation merely says that if the prohibition of a non-productive exchange causes you to forego some benefit (other than what you might have charged in the exchange) you are entitled to compensation.

Our concern in this discussion is not so much whether such a distinction exists, but whether such a distinction is relevant to political philosophy or, more particularly, to rights. What seems to have occurred here is an unfortunate mixing of economic explanation with moral imperatives. The concept of an ex ante increase in individual psychic utility as a result of exchanges was developed as an axiomatic explanation of why voluntary exchange occurs. It was never intended to serve as a moral or political justification of that exchange. Its use as such disregards the whole notion of title.

If something belongs to me what I own is the title to that object. I may do with it what I wish and that includes exchanging my title for other titles. The reason I exchange is to maximize my psychic utility but this says nothing about my right to make the exchange. In-Nozick’s example of a blackmailer it is true that the black mailed party would be better off if the blackmailer didn’t exist (as opposed to an auto purchaser who would not be better off if G.M. did not exist). But the reason why this is true is because the blackmailer is a free man who has the right to tell what he knows as we all do. Wouldn’t a businessman be better off without competition? If a rival company offered to leave the market for a price would the remaining company have the right to prohibit any further competition by the rival simply because the rival was offering a nonproductive exchange? I think not.

Nozick admits that even under his principle of compensation, the blackmailer may charge for what he foregoes which Nozick incorrectly assumes to be little or nothing. What the blackmailer foregoes is his right to use his body in any way which he sees fit, i.e. speech. This introduces the fallacy of a “just price.” There is no just price for this right or, more precisely, his title to use some property—the body—in a certain way. It has no intrinsic, objectively measurable value. Its only fair price is the freely bargained one. Anything less would mean a right of title has been taken by force from its owner. By definition this is a violation of the blackmailer’s rights.

This just price fallacy permeates the whole of Nozick’s discussion of “compensation”. It confuses the morally permissible exchange with the penalty for violating a right which is compensation. If someone violates another’s rights, the victim is entitled to compensation to make up for the transgression. This simply means he is entitled to what was taken from him. We don’t pretend that money is the equivalent or even “fair price” for the loss of life or limb. We say only that some attempt must be made to restore to that victim what was taken from him as far as humanly possible.

The crucial distinction here is while voluntarily paying a purchase price makes an exchange permissible, compensation does not make an aggression permissible or justified. It is not permissible to deprive you of free speech provided I “compensate” you. You would have the right to defend yourself. If you were unsuccessful, unable or unwilling to defend yourself, you would then, in addition, have a right to compensation. Put in more analytic terms, voluntariness is a necessary condition for a morally permissible exchange of values. Compensation is not a sufficient condition for justifying or permitting a violation of rights.

Contrary to Nozick’s principle of compensation, all violations of rights should be prohibited. That’s what right means. The only way rights are abdicated is by consent of the right holder. Nozick rejects this on the grounds that “some factor may prevent obtaining this prior consent or make it impossible to do so. (Some factor other than the victim’s refusing to agree)”. (71) To this one must reply, “so what?” Practical problems of obtaining consent sometimes can’t be avoided it’s true, but this doesn’t mean that consent is not required. Nor will an argument from utility suffice since utility we saw can only be applied to moral goals and not to rights which are moral side-constraints (to employ the Nozickian distinction). Nozick is too quick to reject the principle that rights violations are always prohibited.

Whither Anarchy?

Political reality dictates that the practical burden of proof falls on those who wish to make a radical change in society. Anarchists must face this burden. But it is those who seek to impose a state, those who wish to justify their use of force against the individual who face the moral burden of proof.

As I tried to emphasize at the beginning of this paper, there are many reasons why we should be grateful to Robert Nozick for writing this book. Not the least is that he has properly perceived the moral burden of proof. More than this, he has tried to meet that burden. I have tried to determine whether he has succeeded. Has Robert Nozick justified the state? I conclude that he has not, though not for want of an intricate and ingenious effort.

It is essential to his endeavor that he show that the rise of the state violates no individual rights. He has attempted to show this by implicitly redefining rights. The crucial step in this process is the principle of compensation and its application to dispute settlement. I believe that the application of the principle to dispute-settlement via procedural rights and epistemic considerations fails. The principle itself, I contend is grounded on a misguided economic-type explanation rather than a moral argument. Lastly I feel that Nozick’s own concepts of moral constraints and moral goals helps us to see where he falls short.

Nozick’s book neither claims to be nor succeeds in being the last word on the anarchist-minimal state controversy. For that matter, neither does this paper. I conclude simply that Nozick fails to meet his burden of proof. The state remains unjustified.

* All parenthetical numbers are from Anarchy, State & Utopia, Basic Books, 1974, Robert Nozick.

From The Old Curmudgeon

My New Year’s Wish For The Movement

I know it’s a hopeless fantasy, but I can dream, can’t I? My devout wish for the libertarian movement, and for the state of my own blood pressure, is for a whole year’s moratorium on the following:

On Survival. I am sick and tired of reading about how we should all stock up on a year’s supply of dried beans, and back-pack it to the hills. Fellas, I’ve got news for you: I ain’t eating any dried beans, and I ain’t back-packing it to the hills. I will stick to the market, crippled though it may be, and continue to dine in plush urban comfort on Pepsis, vodka martinis, and veal parmigiana. I have often wondered why our bean-eating back-packers don’t really head for the hills and leave the rest of us alone and blissfully outside of their consciousness. The horrible thing is that I have a dark suspicion that our tub-thumping survivalists are themselves spending their time in urban comfort guzzling martinis and wolfing down the aforesaid parmigiana.

On the New Libertarian Country. For over a decade now I have heard the drums beat for the new Eden, an island, natural or man-made, that would live in either anarchistic or Randian bliss. One would think that if man can really learn from experience, then the total and abject failure of each and every one of these cockamamie stunts should have sent all of their supporters a “message”; namely, to come back to the real world and fight for liberty at home. Come to think of it, I don’t see very many of the New Countryites shlepping out to Minerva, Abaco, Atlantis, and ocean platform, or a moon of Jupiter. Once again, I would love at least a year of these brethren removing themselves from the consciousness of the rest of us: either by remaining silent and returning to concerns nearer home, or, preferably, really hieing themselves posthaste to the New Atlantis and Randspeed to them.

On Psychobabble. Wouldn’t it be great? A whole year of nothing, not a word, not a peep, about “open relationships”, “growing as a person”, “getting in touch with your feelings”, “opening up a space”, “non-authoritarian relations”, “living free”, and all the rest of the malarkey. But, then, what in the world would all our psycholibertarians have to talk about? Well yes, that would be an interesting experiment indeed. Either they would have to painfully make their way to developing an interest in history, current affairs, economics, political philosophy—in short, the real world, or else they would have to descend into a blissful silence (blissful, that is, for the rest of us.)

On Griping from the Sidelines. It is easier, I suppose, to sit around and pick holes in the 85th word of the eighteenth paragraph of the fourth press release by Roger MacBride or of someone else who actually writes or does something to advance the cause of liberty, than actually to work for liberty yourself. That way, you have the luxury of hugging the mantle of “purity” tightly around your shoulders without having to do anything to move toward a libertarian society. But how about a year of concentrating on one’s own constructive action? Again, it would be interesting to see whether a year of abstinence from griping would really clear the decks for constructive work (And, come to think of it, the gripers and the psychobabblers are often one and the same.)

On Reading Science Fiction. There is nothing wrong with science fiction per se, but is has become all too clear that for many libertarians science fiction has taken on a cultic status. A year’s abstinence from sci-fi would clear the decks, and clear a lot of minds as well. But for what? What in the world is there to read if you are deprived of science fiction? Well, look around, and maybe a new world of other things to read will be revealed.

An impossible dream, this magnificent moratorium? Perhaps. But maybe if we wait till next year . . . .

Recommended Reading

Machan On The Kantian “Purists.” It was a pleasure to read Professor Tibor Machan’s essay in the December Reason, “Libertarianism: Has Its Time Really Arrived?” It is an excellent, lucid, and well-written defense of Roger MacBride and an attack on the arguments of the Left Opposition, whom Machan properly identifies as Kantian moralists: namely, people who “hold onto certain ‘intuitive’, purely formal moral principles and ask everyone to stick by them, come hell or high water”, regardless of consequences, in short the “deontological” view that “virtues could have nothing to do with the consequences of one’s conduct, only with the pure basis of its motivation.” Machan also correctly points out that these Kantians confuse moral principles with political theory. As Machan writes: “there is no a priori moral principle in terms of which no one with a record of tax avoidance should be denied a place on the (Libertarian) party’s ticket. Libertarianism is not an ethical system; it is a political theory . . . Libertarianism includes principles that should govern the administration of political or legal justice, not principles that should govern all private conduct.”

Machan further points out that representing the Libertarian Party in a campaign is itself not a political act but a private action, a private “business position.” “And for purposes of running a campaign so as to bring libertarian political philosophy to the attention of people, the proper and improper moves cannot be evaluated by reference to libertarian political principles. To attempt to do so is to commit an error some philosophers call the category mistake. Imposing the ethics of government on the conduct of private individuals is to confuse the issue very seriously indeed.”

More broadly, we might add that grave ethical errors are bound to set in when people divorce themselves from natural law ethics and natural rights political philosophy. Natural law ethics is an integrated system which combines attention to the essence of an act, to its grounding in the nature of man and the universe, and therefore to its natural law consequences. The tragedy of post-classical ethics has been to sunder ethical philosophy into two, equally fallacious and unsatisfactory parts: either utilitarianism, which abandons concern for the moral essence and nature of action to focus only on a “cost-benefit” analysis of its consequences; or into Kantianism or other forms of intuitive ethics, which plucks “absolute” moral principles out of the thin air and without grounding in natural law or regard to consequence. Free-market economists have been, almost entirely, utilitarians, and therefore all too willing to abandon libertarian principles at the drop of an ad hoc hat; and now we have our “purist” Kantians who see “moral principles” under every conceivable bed, and sniff “sellout of principle” at any attempt to set strategic priorities, and to act in the real world to bring about the libertarian ideal. In both cases, with both sets of fallacies, victory of liberty in the real world becomes impossible.

Hamill On The Counter-Culture. It is not often one finds something to recommend in the New York Sunday Times Book Review, so how much the more delightful to find Pete Hamill’s superb, trenchant, and hardhitting attack on two new books lauding the counter-culture (November 30)! (Books by Jim Hougan and Theodore Roszak.) Hamill laces into the mysticism, irrationality, solipsism, and flight from technology and reality of the counter-culture.

Attacking both books as examples of “Doomsday Chic”, Hamill points out that Hougan calls for “decadence” and Roszak for mystical religion as their “solutions” for current world problems. Hamill writes: “Theodore Roszak walks the street with the sandwich board that reads, ‘religious revival’; Jim Hougan offers ‘decadence’; both advocate a form of staring at the bellybutton. In their vision of the world someone else will have to pick up the garbage.”

What does Hougan mean by the “decadence” he wants to take over? Quoting from Hougan, “Its edges are defined by a preoccupation with the senses, an affection for the moment, and an insistence upon the supremacy or inconsequentiality of an individual’s existence or acts. Decadence takes place at the extremity of self-indulgence, but it is seldom, if ever, marred by self-importance.” Hamill’s gem of a comment: “Wonderful. Feel like raping a baby? How about driving a knife into the throat of a school teacher? Okay, as long as you have an ‘affection for the moment’ and your act isn’t ‘marred by self-importance.’” Hamill adds: “The counter-culture was really a supermarket, with counters labeled drugs, Marx, rock, Zen and love; the children of the middle class sampled them all frenetically, and now the ruined, demoralized remnants of the guitar army have headed for the woods, to play Nero (a Hougan hero) while the industrial Rome burns.”

Roszak sees and hails the advent of a “new”, “evolutionary” “shift of consciousness”, a “transformation of human personality.” As Hamill writes: “Roszak bases these fantastic claims on the revived interest in the occult, in Oriental religions, in disciplines such as Yoga . . . and all the other faddish examples of quackery, from the Reverend Moon to the Esalen Institute, that exist on the fringe of American Life . . . . In flight from the hard, tedious, boring work of truly changing the injustices of the real world, Roszak embraces the antirational with a fervent, hyperbolic, all-forgiving bear hug.” In particular, Roszak embraces “the Few”, gurus, shamans, “spiritual masters”, who, in Hamill’s terms “oppose history, technology and reason with myth, magic and mystery”. Roszak calls, in his own terms, for “an insurrection of the clowns and gurus, in behalf of their strange, beautiful, and transcendent sanity (sic) . . . .”

Hamill’s accurate and penetrating conclusion: “But if Hougan’s ‘Decadence’ is a smarmy rationalization for quitting, Roszak’s religious revival is infinitely more dangerous. Religion has led to an incredible history of slaughter and destruction; mysticism, with its insistence on passivity, has led millions down the road that ends on the diseased streets of Calcutta. Glib retreat, either to Nero’s balcony or the shaman’s mountaintop, is just another escape. These books are only additional items for the middle-class supermarket, placed somewhere between acid and zoroastry . . .” Hooray!

LP Literature

The national staff, surely one of the jewels of the Libertarian Party, has now published the first three of a projected series of very brief position papers in leaflet form. All are excellent in boiling down the libertarian position into a lucid and succinct form. The first position papers are Professor Ralph Raico’s Civil Liberties; Murray Rothbard’s Inflation: Its Cause and Cure; and R. A. Childs, Jr., Libertarianism. Roy Childs’ scintillating leaflet is particularly important in providing the best brief overall summary of the libertarian position to be found anywhere; all, and especially the Childs piece, are excellent for handing out to friends and acquaintances who are interested in finding out what libertarianism is all about. Single copies of each leaflet are available free, and 100 for $5, from Libertarian Party, National Headquarters, 1516 P Street, N. W., Washington D.C. 20005.

The superb 1975 L. P. Platform is now also available at the same address for 25¢, and lower prices for bulk quantities.

The national headquarters also publishes the periodical L. P. News, brilliantly edited by Bill Evers, which is undoubtedly the best libertarian news magazine. The September-October issue has the best and most judicious reportage available on the L. P. convention. In addition, the issue contains an excellent article by National Chairman Ed Crane pointing to and attacking conservative Kevin Phillips’ denunciation of libertarianism, and shows that Phillips, in the course of his polemic, nakedly reveals the cloven hoof beneath conservatism’s usual libertarian-sounding rhetoric: Phillips calls explicitly for “Caesarism”, for “order, authority and restraint”, and maintains that the answer to the world’s problems “lies in the power of sword and state.” Also: effective tips by LP youth leader Tom Palmer on how to organize Young Libertarian Alliance and Students for MacBride/Bergland chapters on campuses: the Childs’ position paper on libertarianism; news of the various state parties; Rothbard’s stirring banquet address to the L. P. convention: a summary of changes in the party platform; news on the media coverage of the convention; recommended reading for party activists: and an edited text of MacBride’s acceptance speech at the convention.

The Polish Question In Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Diplomacy

By Leonard P. Liggio*

Ralph Raico’s masterful “Winston Churchill: An Appreciation,” (Libertarian Forum, August 1975) makes some telling points regarding Britain’s relations with Poland. Recently released secret diplomatic papers have revealed that Ralph Raico’s suspicions about Churchillian foul-play in the death of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime minister of the exiled Polish regime in London, were on-target. Britain had broken the German secret codes, and knew of a number of successful German sabotagings of aircraft carrying important Allied officials. In order not to allow the Germans to know that the codes were broken, these people, including Sikorski, died in plane crashes.

What was to be gained by this death? What was the state of Allied relations with Polish officials in July, 1943? Ralph Raico has noted that, after numerous calls by European leaders for a revision of the criminal provisions of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, the British government began at Munich in September 1938 to take the first step toward revision. However, the British government during 1939 drew back from this realistic diplomacy, and, probably at the behest of the American president, gave a blank check to the Polish colonels who ruled the state created by the defeat of Germany and Russia in World War I. As Ralph Raico notes: “Afterwards Churchill himself criticized the guarantee in these terms: “Here was decision at last, taken on the worst possible grounds, which surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. “The British blank-check caused all the deaths of World War II, and without any ability to provide military support for the Poles. The British condemned the Poles to endless years of occupation. Having refused German requests for boundary rectification and extra-territorial railroad passage between Germany proper and East Prussia (divided by West Prussia which had been given to Poland by the World War I Allies), Poland found itself at war without any British aid, except fine words. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had chosen to re-establish the historic German-Russian entente which had maintained peace in Europe during the 19th century. The Russians took control of the non-Polish White Russian and Ukrainian provinces taken by Poland at the treaty of Riga (1921), by means of the German-Russian protocol of August 23, 1939 and the German-Russian treaty of September 28, 1939. This restoration of traditional diplomacy was broken by the irrational German attack on Russia on June 25, 1941.

Immediately, Russia became an ally of Britain (and its secret ally, the United States, which provided lend-lease to Russia). In Polish-Russian negotiations in July, 1941 between Sikorski, Polish foreign minister August Zaleski, and Soviet ambassador to London, Maisky, the Soviets renounced the treaty with Germany, and agreed to aid Poland’s re-establishment of its national frontiers, i.e., frontiers inhabited by Poles, but not areas inhabited by White Russians and Ukrainians formerly under Polish control.

When the U.S. formally entered the war on December 7, 1941, British foreign secretary Eden was in Moscow. U.S. secretary of state Hull wrote to U.S. ambassador to Britain, Winant, that Eden could not make commitments for a post-war settlement. Since that was on December 5, two days before U.S. entry into the war, one might wonder why Hull thought that a non-belligerent, like the U.S., could act as though it was a belligerent? Did Hull know something? In Moscow, Stalin told Eden that Russia hoped to keep the Ukrainian and White Russian areas, while Poland should receive East Prussia. (Eden reported this to Winant who reported to Hull who told Roosevelt by February 4, 1942.) Eden felt that Russia was stronger than the U.S. or Britain had thought, and telegraphed Churchill, who was in Washington, to accept the Russian plan.

Churchill rejected Eden’s proposal and said that after the war the U.S. and Britain would be powerful economically and militarily while Russia would be exhausted. Thus, Russia would have to accept peace plans drawn by Roosevelt and Churchill. Was this view something that Churchill picked up at the White House? It seemed to be the keystone to American wartime diplomacy. In May, 1942 Molotov negotiated in London with Eden and again asked recognition of the new borders. Hull wired his refusal, and the British declined. Molotov then flew to Washington where he dropped his border requests in return for an American promise that the U.S. and Britain would establish a second front in 1942, which would draw away at least forty German divisions from the eastern front. This did not take place and the Russians, after their victory at Stalingrad, felt that the U.S. and Britain would not invade Europe early enough to have any say in Eastern Europe. A “Union of Polish Patriots” was established in Russia in March, 1943, as the Polish army raised in Russia by General Anders had departed to Iran on its way to join the British in the Mediterranean. In April, 1943 the German government, retreating from Russia, announced that it had discovered a mass grave of thousands of Polish soldiers in the Katyn forest, apparently the work of retreating Soviet officials following the German invasion of June, 1941. The Polish government in exile demanded an international investigation, for which the Soviet Union broke off relations with the London Poles. The Russians then set up a Kosciuszko Division of Poles to fight alongside the Russian army. It was at this low point of relations with the London Poles that Sikorski was allowed to die by the Churchill government.

The new Polish exile prime minister, Mikolajczyk, the leader of the militant anti-feudal Peasant Party, held the view that the war would end with U.S. and Britain occupying Germany with 300-400 fresh divisions and a victorious air force, while an exhausted Soviet Union would be dependent on the U.S. for food and reconstruction, and would have to recognize Allied power in Europe. The U.S. at one time had plans for an army of that size, but had long since dropped them as disruptive of domestic support of the war effort, which was why there was no second front in 1942 or 1943. But, Mikolajczyk’s view seemed to have been shared by some segments of American policy-making up to that point, especially in the State Department. But, the State Department views were being replaced by those of the White House-Pentagon.

At the Teheran conference in November, 1943 it was agreed not to turn over the White Russian and Ukrainian areas to Poland, and to compensate Poland with German territories. If no Polish exile government would agree, then a Polish government in Poland would be created with a strong Communist component as an assurance of friendly relations with the Soviet Union. On January 2, 1944 Churchill told Mikolajczyk what Chamberlain had wisely told Czech president Benes and which Chamberlain should have told Polish foreign minister, Colonel Beck (which would have saved ten million lives): that the U.S. and Britain would not go to war over the borders of an eastern European country. Mikolajczyk was told that the Allies recognized the changed borders of Poland and was urged to make an agreement with the Soviet Union while he still had a chance. Instead, the Polish government in exile refused to reconstitute itself to exclude fascist elements whom the Allies opposed. The Russians responded by establishing in Lublin a Polish government to which was added Poles from the United States—Professor Oscar Lange, Fr. Orlemanski, and close contact with Leo Krzycki, of the American Clothing Workers’ Union and head of the American Slav Congress.

Roosevelt’s evasion of the implications of his low manpower military strategy, creating the dominant position of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe due to the geography of its military strength, caused ambiguities in American diplomacy toward Eastern European countries, especially Poland. Roosevelt’s promise to Molotov of a second front in Europe in 1942 meant that he was promising a second front manned by British troops, since American forces were not ready. Since the whole point of Britain’s wishing U.S. entry into the war was to spare British troops, the plan for a 1942 second front in Europe was dropped. As the late William L. Neumann. (“Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy Decisions, 1940-1945,” Modern Age”, Summer,” 1975) shows, U.S. inability to create a full military force due to domestic considerations, created many of the complexities of the wartime and postwar worlds. The original projection of a 400 division army had to be cut to 200 divisions, and finally to less than 100 divisions in the last year of the war.

Roosevelt delayed informing the Poles in London of his acceptance of boundary changes between Russia and Poland. Roosevelt’s attitude of evasion caused the London Poles to believe that the United States supported their resistance to serious negotiations with the Soviet Union, (n the end, the Soviet Union concluded that the London Poles opposed any attempt to find a basis for good Soviet-Polish relations. Finally, Roosevelt and Churchill became exasperated by the refusal of the London Poles to negotiate with Russia. They concluded that it was necessary for the Russians to form a Polish government friendly to the Soviet Union and willing to negotiate with it.

When Mikolajczyk visited Roosevelt on June 7, 1944, he was told that Poland might receive Silesia, East Prussia, Lvov and Tarnapol, if the London Poles negotiated with the Russians. Stalin wrote Roosevelt on June 24. 1944 that he would meet with Mikolajczyk if the Polish government in exile were reconstructed. At the end of July, the Soviet armies neared Warsaw. The commander of Polish forces in exile, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, opposed any Polish uprising against the Germans as a waste of Polish forces. But General Bor, commander of the Home Army, started an uprising on August 1, 1944. Mikolajczyk met with leaders of the Lublin government on August 6, with inconclusive results.

During the Churchill-Stalin talks of October, 1944, Churchill had Mikolajczyk return to Moscow. Churchill and Stalin demanded that the Polish London government accept the eastern border changes and called for a coalition of half London and half Lublin governments. Mikolajczyk refused, and was told by Churchill these words—which he should have said in 1939 when Chamberlain gave Poland a blank-check: “Because of quarrels between Poles we are not going to wreck the peace of Europe. In your obstinacy you do not see what is at stake. It is not in friendship that we shall part. We shall tell the world how unreasonable you are. You will start another war in which 25 million lives will be lost. But you don’t care.” In mid-November, 1944 Roosevelt wrote Mikolajczyk that U.S. accepted compensation for Poland in the west, and Mikolajczyk accepted the American decision about the borders. But he was outvoted by the London Polish government and he resigned.

Having been engaged in a vast miscalculation due to the duplicity of Churchill and Roosevelt, the London Poles refused to accept an accommodation with the Soviet Union, and were criticized as inflexible by Churchill and Roosevelt who made other arrangements during the Yalta Conference of February, 1945. The Lublin government became the dominant element because they accepted the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin requirement of friendship toward the Soviet Union.

*Mr. Liggio, teaches history at SUNY, Old Westbury, and was assistant author of Volumes I and II of M. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.

Right-Center Chic

The Village Voice (December 1) contains a hilarious and penetrating article by Alexander Cockburn and Jack Newfield, “Know Your Military-Intellectual Complex”, which lists the leading figures in the new intellectual fashion of “right-center chic.” The lists include the leaders of each of various departments of life and thought. The new right-center alliance is united on several basic political tenets: including admiration for the “new” Nixon of the mid-1960’s; opposition to detente and a peaceful foreign policy; anti-Communism; opposition to quota systems; and adherence to Zionism. Some members of the coalition, as the authors point out, “trace their ancestry back to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom.”

The hero of the group, who appears on almost every one of the lists, is the notorious hawk and “Left-Nixonian”, Patrick Moynihan. The right-center journalists include: (along with Moynihan) Robert Bartley (Wall St. Journal), Robert Bleiberg (Barron’s), Hobart Rowen (Wash. Post), Harry Schwartz (N.Y. Times), Martin Mayer, Dorthy Rabinowitz, Walter Goodman, Howard K. Smith, Hedley Donovan (Time), and William Safire, among others. “Hitmen” include Moynihan, John Lofton, Pat Buchanan, Kevin Phillips, Evans & Novak, Ralph de Toledano, Ben Wattenberg, Nancy Kissinger, and Albert Shanker. “Institutions” include Commentary, Public Interest, Wall St. Journal, National Review, and parts of the New York Times. And so on. I particularly liked the Cockburn-Newfield lists of “Bores” (Teddy White, Allan Drury, Norman Podhoretz, and Saturday Review); “Theoreticians” (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Nathan Glazer, Peter Drucker, Moynihan, and George Meany); “Economists” (Friedman, Greenspan, and Gary Becker); “Academics” (Edward Shils, Robert Tucker, S.I. Hayakawa, Robert Nisbet, S.M. Lipset, Richard Scammon, Ernest van den Haag, Buchanan & Tullock, and Moynihan); “Rabble” (Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon, Martin Abend, and Norman Podhoretz), and “Martyrs”, which include James Angle ton (CIA), James Schlesinger, and Max Schachtman (former right-wing Trotskyite who later moved to the pro-Cold War wing of the Socialist Party.) “Phobias” of the right-centrists include: Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, detente, Philip Roth, and LF. Stone, while its “Blind Spots” consist (in full) of the CIA, racism, anti-Communist dictatorships, and Elliot Richardson.

There is more, but everyone should see for themselves.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME VIII, NO. 13

JANUARY, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

U.S. Out Of Angola!

Vietnam, apparently, was not enough. The Ford Administration, driven by the need to save face for Henry Kissinger and perhaps by the looming threat of Ronald Reagan, is playing with fire and with the possibility of another Vietnam horror. This year’s candidate for counter-revolutionary bloodletting is Angola, an even more irrational area than Vietnam for the U.S. to intervene on behalf of the “free world.” To make a show of force for Ford-Kissinger, to prove their “decisiveness”, Kissinger is even willing to jeopardize his own tentative steps toward detente with the Soviets. In the course of heating up Angola, the egregious and monstrous Pat Moynihan, the thinking man’s Scoop Jackson, even trotted out the old Franklin Roosevelt canard about German (now Russian) “plans” to use Angola as a jumping-off point to invade Brazil, a hop-skip-and-jump across the Atlantic, and then, presumably, it’s on to Miami. (It is instructive that National Review has just endorsed Moynihan for the Democratic nomination for President — thus showing how high a value NR places on the free market when the trumpet sounds for international war.)

To understand the Angolan Caper, we must grasp the central political fact of the African Continent: namely, that none of the African countries are genuine “countries” at all. They were simply geographical districts carved out for the convenience of Western imperialism (British, French, Belgians, and Portuguese). Before the advent of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century, there were no such “countries” in Africa, or, rather, the national units coincided with the numerous and disparate African tribes, separate entities with nothing, certainly not nationality, in common. Western imperialism carved up Africa for its own convenience, and the colonies thus created paid no regard to tribal divisions or realities. Hence, a given “colony” would forcibly include a myriad of separate tribes, and also place artificial frontier barriers athwart the territory of a given tribe, thus artificially sundering tribal entities. Throughout the twentieth century, such areas as “Angola” were administered as one unit by the imperial power, but this scarcely sufficed to make them one genuine nation.

A complicating factor in this equation was the fact that the imperial power generally trained a small minority of African natives as a comprador elite to administer the country under the aegis of the imperial masters. Often, this native elite was trained in universities of the home country, and, Western universities being what they are, they there imbibed Fabian and Marxian socialist ideology. Superficially, one might think that this socialism would run counter to the interests of the imperial power, but that was only the case “externally”, i.e. as the native elite began to agitate for ouster of imperial rule. For internally, the socialist ideology coexisted very cozily with the imperialists’ desire to centralize the country, and to exploit the native population for the benefit of the administrative State authorities. Generally, this also meant the development in each country of the administrative center as a capital city, a “parasite city” in Lewis Mumford’s sense, devoted to coercing and exploiting the native rural peasantry for its own benefit. Such parasite cities, centers of administration and military rule such as Accra (or Washington, D.C.), contrast starkly with productive cities which rest on commerce, industry, and market exchange. In Africa, the parasite urban center lived off taxation and control of the powerless, uneducated but productive, native peasantry.

When the weakened Western empires began to withdraw from Africa after World War II, they naturally retained the artificial central government structure, and simply turned it over to the existing, educated, socialist native elite. Thus, imperialism’s parting legacy to Africa was to insure generations of exploitation of the native tribes by the new power elite in charge of the parasitic urban centers. Hence, the “smoothness” of the typical transition to native rule.

Thus, it is no wonder that the United States, neo-imperialist heir to Western imperialisms, and possessed of an abiding counter-revolutionary horror at any “instability” or “disintegration” in countries abroad, should place its overt and covert might behind any existing central state in Africa. In the Congo struggles, for example, the U.S., wielding the covert might of the CIA, fiercely combatted the tribally-based Katanga secession movement of Moise Tshombe, and assured the coming to power in an artificially centralized Congo (now Zaire) of the military dictator, General Mobutu. Neither could the U.S., in its zeal to abet the suppression of the Katanga secession movement, use the old alibi of “fighting Communism”, for the Katangese were undoubtedly the most devoted to free enterprise of any group in black Africa.

Before the departure of the Western empires, of course, the United States was wholeheartedly behind the maintenance of imperial rule. Such was the case in Portuguese Angola, where the U.S. aided Portugal in its vain attempt to suppress the various guerrilla struggles to oust Portuguese rule. Ironically, the earliest guerrilla war in Angola was conducted by Holden Roberto and his National Front (FNLA). Ironically, because while Roberto and the FNLA are now held up by American warhawks as “guardians of the free world”, it was not very long ago that the pages of National Review, Human Events, and other rightist organs were filled with indignant charges against Roberto and his legions as Commies and as rapists of fair white Portuguese women. The FNLA are just as “Communist” now as they ever were (not very much, except that they remain statists and militarists), and the rape presumably still continues, if there are any Portuguese left in Northern Angola. Autre temps, autre moeurs, for presumably all other considerations must go by the board in reviving up a confrontation with the Russians.

This time, in Angola, the imperial power was a Portugal whose new leftist government wanted out of its empire fast, and so the transition was not the usual smooth one, and three armed guerrilla movements are contending for power. It is no accident that FNLA power is exclusively in the North, for it is basically a tribal movement of the Bakongo tribe, the same ethnic group that populates western Zaire, and which now dominates and runs that country. In fact, Bakongo chief Roberto is the brother-in-law of the U.S.-CIA-allied dictator Mobutu, and Roberto himself, as well as his kinsman, has long been on the regular CIA payroll. Hence, Roberto’s sudden rise to “pro-American” and “free world” status in American eyes.

The FNLA, indeed, began as a strictly Bakongo tribal association in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa, Zaire), the UPNA (Union of Northern Angolan People) in the mid-1950’s. Trying hard for Angolan national status, it added a few neighboring tribes several years later, dropping the “Northern” from its name, and added a few more in 1962 to achieve its present title.

The following year, the FNLA, feeling its oats as the leading guerrilla movement in Angola, formed an exile government, the GRAE (the Revolutionary Government of Angola in Exile), which was recognized as the legitimate Angolan government by the other African countries. However, this idyll collapsed the next year, when Dr. Jonas Savimbi broke off from GRAE, perceptively accusing it of American connections. Savimbi, a colorful character whose trans-ideological guerrilla heroes are Che Guevara and General George Grivas (the late rightist head of the Cypriote guerrilla movement EOKA), soon formed another guerrilla movement, UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Savimbi’s movement was also tribal, based on the Ovimbundu tribe of southern Angola. It is again no accident that, in the post-Portuguese period, Savimbi and UNITA now control the southern portion of the country.

In the meanwhile, a third grouping had formed, based on urban-educated Africans (often in Marxist Portuguese universities) in the capital city of Luanda in north-central Angola. This was the MPLA (the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.) With its base only in Luanda, the MPLA launched an absurd urban uprising in 1961, which was quickly suppressed. Reorganized in the late 1960’s by Dr. Agostinho Neto, the MPLA became the dominant guerrilla group in 1974, as a result of the newly independent country of Zambia offering its territory as a base, and of the short-lived Tshombe regime in Zaire that same year taking revenge on the FNLA by depriving it temporarily of its traditional Zaire base.

According to the American press, the south is now controlled by a coalition of FNLA-UNITA forces, which seems to give the FNLA national rather than merely tribal status. But FNLA strength in the south is superficial, being the outgrowth of a breakaway from the MPLA in 1974 by a southern-based faction headed by Daniel Chipenda, whose forces now constitute a merely technical “FNLA” in the south.

Thus, if the U.S. had kept its hands off Angola, the country would probably have dissolved into its constituent tribal groupings, roughly consonant with the military position of the three forces now in the field. The north would be an FNLA-Bakongo territory, perhaps eventually uniting with its Zaire patrons; the south would be a territory under the control of the Savimbi-Chipenda forces based on the Ovimbundu; and probably the MPLA would be in control of Luanda and a narrow central strip stretching to the eastern border. And the three groups could have coexisted in relative peace.

Who, then, was responsible for the tragic heating up of a minor Angolan civil war into a global theatre for massive warfare and a possible general war? The U.S. has been aiding its preferred factions in Congo and Angola ever since the Congo crisis broke out in 1960, and it has recently been disclosed that Holden Roberto has been on a $10,000 annual retainer from the CIA since 1961 (New York Times, December 19, 1975). In response, the Soviets had supplied minimal aid to the MPLA. But who is primarily responsible for the massive 1975 buildup in Angola, launched after the Portuguese decision to withdraw come November 11? The Portuguese, riven between Communist and Socialist groups at home, declared neutrality between the Angolan factions. The United States has of course laid the blame on the Soviets for beginning massive aid to the MPLA in March and April of 1975. But it now turns out that it was the United States, in a secret meeting in January, 1975 of its supreme intelligence organ, the 40 Committee (headed by Kissinger), which first decided on massive aid to the FNLA and UNITA. In January, the 40 Committee decided to allow the CIA to give $300,000 secretly to Roberto. It was this decision that launched the present dangerous phase of international warfare inside Angola. As one high U.S. official admitted: “I think it’s very important. That money gave him (Roberto) a lot of extra muscle. He’d been sitting in Kinshasa for nearly ten years and all of a sudden he’s got a lot of bread — he’s beginning to do things.” (New York Times, Dec. 19).

As in most other things, the CIA is only “secret” from the American people, not from the Soviets, who have their own excellent intelligence network. Besides, the sudden accession of funds to Roberto was a clear enough signal. Hence, the Soviet airlift of arms to the MPLA in the spring, a response which in turn led to a massive American escalation of aid to the other factions, decided upon in a secret 40 Committee meeting on July 17. As a result, there occurred, in the latter half of 1975: a shipment of $14 million in cash to the U.S.-supported Angolan factions; additional cash payments by the CIA directly to Savimbi and Robert of $200,000 each per month; and a direct shipment by the CIA of arms to Angola worth $10 million — partially disguised by the CIA by being listed on the books as worth $5.4 million, and shipped indirectly through Zaire and Zambia (which had changed to support the American position.)

The massive American arms aid had an immediate impact on the Angolan fighting, and the FNLA-UNITA troops won significant gains after August. It was because of this intervention that the Soviets launched their massive airlift, and the Cubans sent thousands of troops, beginning at the end of October. A grubby and unimportant Angolan civil conflict had been escalated, thanks to U.S. intervention, into a massive international conflict with a potential for global war.

And that is by no means all. For the Ford administration has sworn that at least no American fighting men are or will be participating in the Angolan war, come what may. And yet, the respected and knowledgeable Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 2, 1976) has reported that the CIA is “recruiting American ex-servicemen, training them, dispatching them to southern Africa, contributing toward their pay (via funds for Zaire and Angola’s two pro-West factions), and providing them and the indigenous forces with light and heavy weaponry.” The Monitor added that “some 300 Americans are already operating within Angola”, largely with the UNITA forces in the south and that an equal number are ready to go as soon as the CIA provides the money, the latter troops including “American officers and men either or ‘indefinite leave’ from their special forces units in this country and the Panama Canal Zone or recently discharged under the ‘RIF’ (reduction in force) program . . .” Furthermore, over 150 of these men spent Christmas week “undergoing a refresher course at Ft. Benning, Georgia.”

On January 5, the Monitor reported that the U.S. training in this country of American veterans for mercenary operations in Angola had abruptly ceased, but that U.S. training had shifted to a European site, clearly less accessible to prying American reporters. To weaselly and guarded U.S. government denials, President Ford added his usual dumdum note: denying on January 3 that the U.S. was training any mercenaries in Angola; but of course no one had claimed that Angola was the site for training.

Finally, Senator Tunney (D., Cal.) charged on January 6 that American pilots, flying four or five missions a day, have been airlifting arms from Zaire into Angola in U.S.-built cargo planes.

Indeed, the most hopeful note in the Angolan mess is the determination of the Senate, led by Tunney, to cut off funds for American intervention. In particular, the notable Senate action of December 18 voted by 54–22 to cut off any new covert U.S. funds for military operations in Angola. The Senate action was galvanized by a decision of President Ford in December to authorize the CIA to ship a further $25 million of arms to Angola. Typically, Ford’s response to the vote was the usual interventionist blather about the “deep tragedy” this vote entailed for “all countries whose security depends on the United States” — as if the butchery of Angolans had not been greatly accelerated by U.S. intervention and escalation. Ford also added the further interventionist blather that the vote would “seriously damage the national interest of the United States.” (Just what is our “national interest” — if such a concept exists at all — in Angola?) Disturbed by indications that the Ford administration may try to evade the Senate resolution, even if passed by the House, Senators Dick Clark (D., Iowa) — who has matured greatly as an anti-interventionist leader on both Angola and the Middle East — and Clifford Case (R., N.J.) plan to introduce a resolution to cut off all money whatever from the U.S. government for any use in Angola.

The Senate resolve to oppose U.S. war machinations in Angola was stiffened greatly by the determined opposition within the State Department of its African experts — so much so that Nathaniel Davis resigned last August as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in protest against the July 17 decision. Davis and the other Africanists had urged the U.S. to avoid playing any active role in the Angolan civil war (New York Times, December 14, December 20, 1975).

One welcome feature of the Senate vote was that a few conservative Republicans broke ranks to vote in favor of the Tunney proposal: these were Garn (Utah), Helms (N.C.), Roth (Del.), and Scott (Va.)

Stung by the opposition to its covert machinations for war, the Ford administration, has come up with a diplomatic fallback line: the imposition of a coalition government of all three factions on all of Angola. Since coalition attempts have failed in the past, there is no reason to think that the U.S. will be any more successful than in the U.S. coalition attempts in Vietnam or, for that matter, in Laos — especially now that the war has escalated so gravely. The moral of this tangled tale is clear: for the U.S. to get out of Angola pronto, lock, stock, and barrel, and to abandon its secret decisions by an elite few that commit the entire country to war and intervention. To accomplish this, and for many other good and sufficient reasons, we should also abolish the CIA, root and branch.

FDR And The Isolationists

By Bruce Bartlett*

Recent revelations about the FBI’s misconduct over the long reign of J. Edgar Hoover, while clearly of interest to libertarians in general, have also cast much light on the pre-Pearl Harbor controversy over isolationism and interventionism. It seems that President Roosevelt used to have investigations run regularly on those who expressed opposition to entering World War II. This at last confirms the belief held all along by those who were the objects of interventionist smears, that the White House was involved.

We had already known, for example, that the President did not confine himself to public censure of isolationism, but brought his weight to bear in private as well. In 1939, Roosevelt wrote the following letter to Wilbur Cross, editor of the Yale Review:

Dear Wilbur:

Here is a personal protest against one of the most useful publications of our period — the Yale Review. It is based on the publication of articles by one John T. Flynn.

I love controversy — whether it be in literature, in economics, in sociology or in education. To us controversy is grand. You and I have reveled in it for many decades.

But it is your concept and mine, I think, that controversy is not merely a question of pro and con in any field of human endeavor.

Controversy, as I take it, concerns itself primarily with problems that call for answers. It is not controversy for one side to say in such a case, “I propose the following solution of the problem” and to have the other side say merely, “I am opposed to that solution.” I have watched John T. Flynn during these many years and the net answer in my mind is that he has always, with practically no exception, been destructive rather than a constructive force.

Therefore, Q.E.D., John T. Flynn should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine or national quarterly, such as the Yale Review.

Yours for construction, as ever yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It is not known what other measures Roosevelt took against Flynn. Perhaps he also had a hand in getting the New Republic’s not-so-liberal editors to unceremoniously end Flynn’s regular column, “Other People’s Money.”

What is known, and recently revealed in Wayne Cole’s heroic biography of Charles Lindbergh, is that Roosevelt went far beyond merely investigating isolationists or discouraging them from being published. He unleashed the whole apparatus of government up on them; with Lindbergh the prime target.

The nature of Roosevelt’s feeling was such that on May 20, 1940, he told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” The next day he wrote to Henry L. Stimson: “When I read Lindbergh’s speech I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.” It must be an irony of history that Roosevelt, of all people, should accuse someone else of favoring a fascist economy when he himself had done so much to implement one here.

By 1941, with the organization of America First, the administration’s slanders against noninterventionists became the official line. Roosevelt appointed Harold Ickes to head a special cabinet committee to combat isolationism. He kept a complete file, fully indexed, on all Lindbergh’s noninterventionist speeches. Ickes publicly spoke out as well; time and again calling Lindbergh and other isolationists Nazis and fellow-travellers. On April 13, 1941, for example, he said that Lindbergh was “the first American to raise aloft the standard of pro-Naziism:” that the America First Committee be renamed the “America Next” Committee; and that the committee was made up of “antidemocrats, appeasers, labor baiters, and anti-Semites.”

To their credit, the isolationists were able to maintain their integrity and even gain strength. By November, 1941, with the big fight over repeal of the Neutrality Acts in full swing and a probable isolationist victory in sight, Roosevelt asked the Attorney General “about the possibility of a Grand Jury investigation of the money sources behind the America First Committee.”

To his great relief, however, and perhaps even due to his scheming, Roosevelt welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor. It solved all his problems for him and smashed the noninterventionists. But Roosevelt could be petty and did not soon forget his enemies. When Lindbergh volunteered his services for the war Roosevelt personally made sure that they would not be accepted; in spite of the fact that Lindbergh was one of the world’s greatest aviators and experts on all aspects of aviation, a precious commodity in a war that was to be decided in the air. Roosevelt also made his petty vindictiveness felt against those of far less importance than Lindbergh in the infamous mass sedition trial. This was obviously intended as a warning to everyone that criticism of the administration’s interventionism would not be tolerated after the war either.

The isolationists made a brief revival when the truth about Pearl Harbor began to leak out and Congress launched a full investigation of the subject. However, President Truman had no desire or intention of allowing this to become a vehicle for the noninterventionists and made sure that numerous roadblocks were placed in the path of the committee. As he put it in a letter to Senator Harley Kilgore: “The objective of the isolationists still is to smear the Roosevelt Administration and, if possible, I am not going to let it happen.”

His fears were not really justified. With the defeat of such isolationist stalwarts as Senators Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye, the death of Hiram Johnson, and the reversal of Senator Vandenberg, the core of the isolationist movement in Congress was gone. Only Senator Taft was left with enough stature to effectively oppose intervention, and he proved to be a lone voice.

The pettiness continued long after complete victory by the interventionists had been won. Revisionist historians like Charles A. Beard were denied access to government archives while administration hacks like Herbert Feis were given full access. This policy continued for a quarter century and was only broken by the successive shocks of Vietnam, Watergate, and now, the CIA and FBI scandals. We should simply beware of thinking that these are unique or recent indiscretions. They are in the nature of big government and will never stop so long as it exists.

*Mr. Bartlett, a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies at Menlo Park, Calif., is a doctoral candidate in history at Georgetown University.

Right-Wing Libertarians
And The Cold War

By Joseph R. Stromberg*

America’s foreign policy of perpetual counterrevolutionary intervention began officially with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947. In a paradoxical reversal of common stereotypes initial opposition to that policy came from an amorphous coalition of Left and Right embracing Senators Claude Pepper (D., Fla.) and Robert Taft (R., Ohio). The left-wing critics are generally discounted as naive or Russophile Wallaceites, while the rightists are written off as nostalgic “isolationists” unable to come to terms with new realities. Only recently, with the rise of Cold War revisionism and the failure of “containment” in Indo-China, has there been much interest in what opponents of Cold War Liberal “realism” had to say.

The arguments of right-wing non-interventionists are in fact quite striking. At a time when prominent Liberals in government and the press were calling for universal military training and massive expenditures for unlimited foreign commitments, a number of right-wing Congressmen and writers vigorously opposed the Truman policies. Unimpressed with America’s new-found imperial “responsibilities,” they attacked intervention and executive supremacy, predicting perpetual war, centralization, inflation and a permanent war economy.

But this was not the only tendency on the Right. From the outset, the China Lobby supported the Cold War, only insisting that Chiang Kai-shek be given his due. Gradually, bellicose anticommunism triumphed over “isolationism,” and elements William G. Carleton has aptly termed “crypto-imperialist” came into their own. Accepting the Cold War Liberal premise of a monolithic communist menace, often quite eagerly, the Right ultimately exceeded the militancy of its mentors and demanded “total victory” over communism. By the mid-fifties “isolationism” was the position of an inconsequential minority, but reappeared in the sixties when the New Left raised the issue of US imperialism.

Nonetheless, the right-wing non-interventionists had much to say. Congressman Howard Buffett (R., Nebr.), for example, characterized a proposal for a government-sponsored Arabian oil pipeline as a “gigantic long-distance venture into imperialism” likely to cause American conscripts “to die in far-away places in defense of the trade of Standard Oil or the international dreams of our one-world planners.”[1] When the Administration requested funds for intervention in Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine, now that Britain was abandoning ah imperial role there, Buffett warned against American overextension: “we would soon be answering alarms like an international fireman, maintaining garrisons, and pouring out our resources.” Soon every program would be justified as anti-communist, and when the people protested against “continued militarism and inflation,” wartime controls could be reestablished “in the name of stopping communism at home.” Economic exhaustion, conscription, price control, a labor draft and the end of political opposition might follow imperial intervention. “Even if it were desirable,” Buffett said, “America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. . . .”[2]

Frank Chodorov, the most anarchistic of the right-wing noninterventionists, declared in the April, 1947 issue of his newsletter, Analysis, that “hopeless poverty” had made communism “the religion of Europe.” The solution was to allow “the people of Europe to produce and exchange,” not American intervention. If, unaided, they fell to the Soviets, they would still avoid another brutal war and the annihilation of European civilization. Chodorov feared the domestic consequences of the Cold War. A witchhunt for Reds was afoot and concentration camps were on the horizon. “Red” might come to “include every person who raises his voice against the going order.” When intervention at last brought war, liberty would be sacrificed to the exigencies of total warfare and “the vary thing we are presumably fighting to preserve will go by the board.” Our system would be identical to “all other forms of statism, from pharaoism to nazism.”[3]

Felix Morley, college president, author and journalist, was another noteworthy right-wing Cold War critic. A week before the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine he wrote in Human Events (which he co-edited) that America was about to make her most critical political decision since 1776: To remain a republic or to “become an empire by assuming responsibility for dependencies which Great Britain can no longer control.” Inflation, centralization, high taxes and conscription lay ahead if America chose empire.[4] A year later, Morley assessed the policies adopted. The Administration had only managed to “throw our weight around,” and was preparing “for another war in which there is much to indicate that we would be the aggressor.” Assailing conscription, he wrote that “The lives of our youth are not the property of the State, to throw on a rubbish heap in Korea or Yugoslavia as some brass hat may ordain.” The struggle with communism should take place “in the realm of mind and spirit, saving conscripted bodies as a last and forlorn hope.” Morley went on to indict Truman for “two cold-blooded atrocities”: Nagasaki and victors’ justice at Nuremberg.[5]

Congressman Frederick C. Smith (R., Ohio), arguing during the Greek-Turkish aid debate that we were being maneuvered into war, asserted: “It is wrong to say that the United States is not launching upon a program of imperialism . . . we have already done so.” Lawrence Smith (R., Wise.), another rightist, considered the Truman Doctrine “the certain course to imperialism and the imposition of permanent conscription upon our people.” It threatened the very nature of our society, and would lead to “an unbridled race for armaments,” making war “certain.” He called the Doctrine “an immoral proposition, advanced chiefly on the assumption that we can get away with,” and equated it with the views of James Burnham, who favored American “world empire.” Congressman George Bender (R., Ohio) termed the Greek government a “corrupt and venal monarchy” legitimized by a phony election. He asked if our government intended “to hire every dictator or king. . . who will scream ‘Stop communism?’” The new policy was “interventionism in Europe” based on “power politics.” Bender, suspicious that the Greek-Turkish bill was connected with American oil investments, favored making it clear that it was “not an international charter for unlimited oil imperialism.”[6]

Like other Congressional “isolationists”, Senator Taft was critical of the Greek-Turkish proposal (writing later of the Greek regime’s “strong reactionary tendencies”); but he voted for it, hoping the program would be of short duration. He likewise criticized but voted for the Marshall Plan. He was at his most non-interventionist in the fight over NATO. Speaking to the Senate on July 11, 1949, Taft stated that the treaty “will promote war in the world rather than peace.” It violated the spirit of the UN Charter, and put us “at the mercy of the foreign policies of 11 other nations,” by committing us to defend any NATO ally attacked by any power. Further, America would be obligated by Article III to arm western Europe. Taft preferred a simple warning that if Russia attacked western Europe we would go to war. Arming Europe would be both costly and provocative to Russia, and arms given to our allies might be used for “action which may be considered aggression in their colonies.”[7]

Two days after ratification, the Administration requested $1,450,000,000 for military aid to our new allies, substantiating Taft’s contention that NATO meant arming “half the world against the other half.” The request, he said, “demands that Congress . . . authorize the State and Defense Departments to make alliances throughout the world and involve us in any and all wars, civil or internal, going on anywhere in the world. ”[8]

Fear that America would constantly risk unnecessary wars by embarking upon a “futile crusade” was a major “isolationist” theme. Ex-Congressman Hamilton Fish (R., N.Y.) testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March, 1947, and characterized the Truman Doctrine as “a policy of global intervention and imperialism.” He added: “I doubt if the establishment of a cordon sanitaire by dollar imperialism can halt world communism short of war.” Congressman Buffett felt that “instead of restraining communism abroad” intervention would “shore up ruling politicians everywhere and actually promote the spread of communism.” A scramble for US aid would ensue, since every ruler “will claim . . . communism is most dangerous in his land.”[9]

In a major speech on January 5, 1951, Senator Taft expressed the “isolationist” view: “we must avoid war like poison, except when it is absolutely essential to protect our liberty.” Modern war, he asserted, injured victor nearly as much as vanquished and promoted totalitarianism. In February, 1953, the Senator warned an audience that “the very independence we are trying to protect may be destroyed by perpetual war, which has established many dictatorships in this century.” The garrison state was a real danger to Taft.[10]

To the novelist Louis Bromfield, writing in 1954, America’s “attempt to dominate and direct the whole course, not only of Asia but of the world, is a policy of insanity which can only cause war after war and the eventual ruin of this nation.” If in throwing off colonialism Asians chose “the disastrous experiment of Communism,” that was “Asia’s problem and none of our own.” By supporting Western colonialism in the name of anticommunism we were “stupidly attempting to surround and contain what cannot be contained . . . .”[11]

Frank Chodorov also raised his voice against useless wars. Writing in the Freeman in 1954, he urged that America “remove the tinder” of another war by withdrawing “our troops to the Western Hemisphere and (abandoning) our global military commitments.” We should let Europeans “go communist if they want to.” Soviet domination could not be worse than “a war in which their homes became the battlefield.”[12]

The desire to avoid war logically led the “isolationists” to protest executive supremacy and bipartisanship. Condemning the latter in 1951 as “a very dangerous fallacy,” Senator Taft averred that such “unity” would allow the adoption of disastrous policies by default. In debate over presidential power to deploy troops, Taft declared, “If the President has unlimited power to involve us in war, war is more likely.” He assailed as elitists those who “blithely dismiss all interest in the maintenance of popular government under the Constitution” because of their fear that the people “might oppose policies which seem to them to lead to war.” Felix Morley, too, later observed that bipartisanship implied that Americans should not be concerned with how they were governed, in which case they were “ripe for dictatorship.”[13]

“Isolationists” were as alarmed by the domestic consequences of imperial policy as by the risk of war. They regarded the draft as especially evil: Taft called it “essentially totalitarian.” Buffett asserted that Selective Service “would declare to the world that Hitler was right – that the threat of communism externally justified militarism and regimentation at home.” The bill was the product of “carefully created hysteria.” Conscription rested on “the totalitarian concept that the state owns the individual.” To Lawrence Smith, there would be “no Escape” from “economic controls, manpower controls, and the regimentation that goes with dictatorial power” if Selective Service passed.[14]

But conscription was only the most direct inroad of imperialism upon liberty. Writing in Human Events in January, 1951, Frank Chodorov foresaw “a new way of thinking and a new social order” with an economy “geared to military preparations for years to come.” Spending on education would “be with an eye to its contribution to war . . . .” The tendency would be “more and more toward totalitarianism.” Like Randolph Bourne, Chodorov considered war the health of the state.[15]

In a similar vein, Garet Garrett wrote in his 1952 pamphlet, “Rise of Empire,” that we were living in a “garrison state for perpetual war” characterized by “ascendancy of the military mind” and the intimidation of the civilian mind. Already, Congress could not get vital information — now “classified.”[16]

Louis Bromfield complained that nowhere did the military “have such an elaborate propaganda machinery . . . paid for by the taxpayers’ money” as in America. Cold War propaganda had nearly reduced Americans “to utter bovine subjection to a combination of big government, bureaucracy and militarism.”[17]

In A Foreign Policy for Americans Senator Taft cautioned his readers that “an indefinite surrender of liberty” to “an all-out war program in time of peace might mean the final and complete destruction of those liberties” supposedly saved by it. Inflation and a lower living standard would flow from such overpreparedness. In 1953, Taft warned of economic collapse from sky-rocketing defense costs.[18]

According to Felix Morley, centralization must accompany an imperial foreign policy. Our institutions, he observed in 1954, “rather than our imperial policy . . . will be modified.” Congress was becoming a mere rubber stamp for agencies operating in impenetrable secrecy like the CIA and AEC. In the summer of 1957, well after the Right had embraced the Cold War, Morley — sounding for all the world like C. Wright Mills — wrote in Modern Age that we were at a point where “we have a vested interest in preparation for war.” Defense spending on capital goods was a major prop of full employment, and we were dangerously addicted to it. Hence, US representatives did not talk seriously about disarmament. Given the contradiction between an imperial role and a republican system, our leaders bad to deceive public opinion continually. Imperial centralization in a formally federal structure meant that we were “losing the substance of self-government” to a rising “self-perpetuating managerial elite.” A New Left participatory democrat could not have put it better.[19]

The Korean War was at once a paradigm of the imperial policies right-wing libertarians opposed and an important circumstance in the decline of their views. The war found rightists in various postures of opposition. Senator Taft condemned President Truman’s commitment of American troops to combat as unconstitutional, saying, “it seems clear to me that the sending of troops without authorization by Congress,. . . as was done in Korea, is clearly prohibited.” The intervention was not even authorized by the United Nations as claimed by the executive, Taft stated, since the Security Council’s resolution was “only a recommendation.”[20]

Congressman Buffett wondered why no one knew how we entered the conflict. Actually, on June 25, 1950, when fighting began in Korea, the Security Council had called upon UN members to help effect a cease-fire. “Nothing,” Buffett observed, “was said about entering the conflict.” But at noon on June 27, President Truman ordered US air and sea forces into action in support of the South Koreans. Eleven hours later, the Security Council asked for assistance for the South. Hence, Buffett said, “Truman entered that war by his own act. . .” This is the verdict, incidentally, of a recent student of executive warmaking, Merlo J. Pusey, who writes that “the President plunged the United States into the war without a shred of authority from the Constitution or the laws or treaties and without so much as a request for military help from the United Nations.”[21]

Cold War Liberals argued that the war-making power of Congress was “obsolete.” But as Garet Garrett commented later, their reasoning was “puerile”: Congress could have reacted within hours, and had we been under attack, the President could have taken defensive measures before a formal declaration of war. Coming to the heart of the matter, Garrett asked, “If constitutional doctrine is moulded by necessity, what is a written Constitution for?” Usurpation had its inner logic, however. As former Senator R. F. Pettigrew of South Dakota wrote in 1922, “If there is to be an empire, there must be a dictator, so that he can move with rapidity; so that decisions can be made in a day and armies marched and ships moved where danger is seen.”[22]

Like the nation as a whole, the Right was divided by the war. One wing, whose spokesmen were Herbert Hoover and Joseph P. Kennedy, advocated immediate withdrawal from Korea and contraction of US defense perimeters to manageable dimensions (roughly, the Americas, Britain, Japan and Formosa). Speeches by Kennedy and Hoover in December, 1950, after Chinese forces had driven the US-UN army from North Korea, touched off a “Great Debate” in which “isolationism” went down to defeat at the hands of anguished Cold War Liberals. Hoover stated that a land war in Asia “would be a war without victory . . . .” Another wing adopted the crypto-imperialist position of General Douglas MacArthur. It included China Lobbyists, McCarthyites and sundry patriots confused by the official claim that the war was bound up with American survival — a claim contradicted by the actual limited character of the conflict. Believing the official rationale and seduced by the myth of American Omnipotence, this faction called for air strikes against Mainland China and the “unleashing” of Chiang’s Nationalist forces. Finally, a large portion of the Right, including Taft himself, alternated confusedly or opportunistically between the “isolationist” and crypto-imperialist positions. The latter viewpoint came to be typical of the American Right — hence Goldwaterism.[23]

Thus it came about that right-wing “isolationism,” increasingly marginal anyway, was superseded by the anti-communist crusading of Senators Knowland and Goldwater and the editors of National Review. The gulf between Old Right and New Right is symbolized by the incredible statement of Senator Goldwater that “the President, as Commander-in-Chief and the primary author of foreign policy, has both a duty and right to take military action at any time he feels danger for the country or its freedoms.”[24] Imagine Robert Taft saying that! The Senate vote on the “war powers” act on April 13, 1972, also throws light on the matter. Senators Buckley (C.-R., N.Y.), Fannin (R., Ariz.), Gurney (R., Fla.), Tower (R., Tex.), Thurmond (R., S.C.) and Dominick (R., Colo.), hard-core rightists all, voted against restraining presidential military adventures. These same men have been among the most stubborn supporters of the brutal war in Indo-China. Taft, by contrast, declared a month before his death that “I have never felt that we should send American soldiers to the Continent of Asia” — including Indo-China.[25]

The overlapping of old Right, and New Left positions is equally remarkable. We can perceive in American politics a non-interventionist tradition sometimes articulated by the Left or the Right, sometimes by elements of both. “Sooner or later,” Senator J. William Fulbright maintains, “war will lead to dictatorship.” It could as easily be Taft speaking. No wonder Carl Oglesby could state in 1967 that “In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.”[26]

When US foreign policy after World War II took the form of imperial intervention, right-wing libertarians protested. Empire implied what C. Wright Mills called a “military definition of reality,” and led logically to peacetime conscription, massive rearmament and a ring of bases around the world. This extension into peace time of the authoritarian fixtures of war time was the essence of the garrison state; and the Cold War, by blurring the distinction between war and peace, provided a fertile environment for such a cancerous growth. The “isolationists,” who were classical liberals in most respects, foresaw that imperialism, the highest stage of statism, would be utterly destructive of liberal values. Individualism, the free market, free speech and constitutional government could not exist in a garrison state — except in attenuated forms.

Regarding modern war with its senseless brutality and enormous destructiveness as almost the greatest evil conceivable, these critics were eager to restrain the executive and decried uncritical unity. To stay Caesar’s fallible hand, they sought to assert the rights of Congress and some of them supported measures like the Bricker Amendment. None of them wanted to isolate America, but all of them desired minimal or no military entanglements abroad.

The domestic consequences of empire were anathema to the libertarian Right. The draft they denounced as slavery — a European importation foreign to the American tradition. Buffett indirectly warned that conscription would destroy the patriotism of the young.[27] Buffett and Chodorov predicted witchhunts. Bromfield foresaw endless war in Asia, ending in ruin. Taft and Garrett feared the garrison state. Morley saw centralization and a permanent war economy.

Now that we have seen the results of interventionist policies — undeclared war in Indo-China, bipartisan irresponsibility in Congress, a crippled and shackled economy, Army spying on civilians, thousands of our countrymen in Canadian exile — we can forgive the “isolationists” if they sometimes exaggerated. In 1947, Buffett predicted a labor draft; instead, we got “channeling”: “the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.” Taft and Buffett foretold of economic disaster; instead, we got Seymour Melman’s “depleted society”: not much comfort in that. We have the inflation and controls they foresaw, and a surfeit of war. The “new social order” prophesied by Frank Chodorov did indeed emerge — though we know it as the Military-Industrial-University Complex — founded on the permanent war economy described by Garrett, Morley and John T. Flynn. Instead of the outright fascism Chodorov feared, we are living under something more like the “genteel fascism” Flynn saw coming in 1944. But whatever mistakes they may have made as to detail, the libertarian rightists were far more conscious of the main drift of imperial America than their Cold War corporate-liberal opponents or the gun-boat diplomats who took over the Right. The non-interventionists of Left and Right are indeed morally and politically coordinate.[28]

NOTES

*Mr. Stromberg is a doctoral student in history at the University of Florida.

[1] Congressional Record, March 2, 1944, A1036.

[2] Ibid., March 18, 1947, 2215–7.

[3] Frank Chodorov, “A Byzantine Empire of the West?” Analysis, April, 1947; Congressman Buffett placed this article in the Congressional Record, April 29, 1947, A2015–6.

[4] Felix Morley, “The Twilight of An Empire,” Human Events, IV, 10 (March 5, 1947), 1.

[5] Felix Morley, “Here Let Us Stop,” Ibid., V, 12 (March 24, 1948), 1–2.

[6] Cong. Rec., May 7, 1947, 4732; May 9, 1947, 4945; March 28, 1947, 2831–4; May 9, 1947, 4974.

[7] Ibid., July U, 1949, 9205–8.

[8] Quoted in Henry W. Berger, “Senator Taft Dissents from Military Escalation,” Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Cold War Critics (Chicago, 1971), 186.

[9] Cong. Rec., March 31, 1947, A1365–6; May 7, 1947, 4721–2.

[10] Robert A. Taft, “The Basis of American Foreign Policy” in Jay A. Sigler (ed.), The Conservative Tradition in American Thought (New York, 1969), 343–4; “Taft Calls Arming Threat To Liberty,” The New York Times, February 22, 1953, 29.

[11] Louis Bromfield, A New Pattern for a Tired World (New York, 1954), 235, 54–5.

[12] Frank Chodorov, “A War to Communize America,” The Freeman, V, 5 (November, 1954), 173–4.

[13] Taft, “Basis of American Foreign Policy,” 341; Cong. Rec., March 29, 1951, 2988–9; Felix Morley, “Conservatism and Foreign Policy,” Vital Speeches, XXI, 7 (January 15, 1955), 978.

[14] Robert A. Taft, “Compulsory Military Training in Peace Time Against Fundamental Policy of America,” Vital Speeches, XI, 18 (July 1, 1945), 557; Cong. Rec., June 15, 1948, 8363; Ibid., June 17, 1948, 8707.

[15] Frank Chodorov, “Warfare versus Welfare,” Human Events, VIII, 2 (January 10, 1951), 1–4.

[16] Garet Garrett, “Rise of Empire,” Part III of The People’s Pottage (Boston, 1965), 112–3. “Rise of Empire” was published first as a pamphlet in 1952.

[17] Bromfield, New Pattern, 11, 283–4.

[18] Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (Garden City, N.Y., 1951), 69; “Taft Calls Arming Threat,” 29.

[19] Felix Morley, “Conservatism and Foreign Policy,” 978; Idem, “American Republic or American Empire,” Modern Age, I, 1 (Summer, 1957), 20, 25, 29, 30.

[20] Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans, 33–4.

[21] Cong. Rec., May 21, 1951, A3760–1; Merlo J. Pusey, The Way We Go To War (Boston, 1969), 89.

[22] Garet Garrett, “Rise of Empire,” 124; R. F. Pettigrew, Imperial Washington (Chicago, 1922), 359.

[23] Herbert Hoover, “Our National Policies in this Crisis,” Vital Speeches, XVII, 6 (January 1, 1951), 165. On the divisions over the war within the Right, see especially Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse (New York, 1957), 448.

[24] Quoted in “War Power,” Commonweal, XCVI, 4 (March 31, 1972), 76.

[25] Quoted in Leonard P. Liggio, “Why the Futile Crusade?” Left and Right I (Spring, 1965), 60.

[26] On this non-interventionist coalition, see Robert J. Bresler, “The War-Making Machinery,” The Nation, CCXI, 17 (August 17, 1970), 109; John W. Finney, “Fulbright Warns of U.S. Decline Unless Foreign Policy Changes,” The New York Times, April 4, 1971; Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull, Containment and Change (New York, 1967), 167.

[27] Cong. Rec., April 7, 1952, 3649–50.

[28] On “channeling,” see the infamous Selective Service memo reprinted on Karl Hess and Thomas Reeves, An End to the Draft (New York, 1970), 193–200; on “genteel fascism,” see John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (Garden City, N.Y., 1944).

MacBRIDE VS. REAGAN

Any libertarian candidate is faced with the difficult choice of deciding which of the cornucopia of libertarian issues to stress in the course of his campaign. Priorities of importance must be established: obviously, for example, no candidate will give top priority to such a worthy cause as denationalization of lighthouses, lovable and correct though that issue may be. We at the Lib. Forum have long believed that an anti-war, anti-interventionist foreign policy is the most vital single issue for libertarian politics and for the country as a whole. Hence, our sounding the tocsin of warning against the candidacy of Ronald Reagan (“Stop Reagan!” Lib. Forum, December 1975).

We are therefore delighted to report that Roger MacBride, the L.P. Presidential candidate, has been laying heaviest stress in his campaign on the importance of a non-interventionist foreign policy and on the menace of Ronald Reagan. On January 12, at a news conference at the San Francisco Press Club launching a Western campaign swing, MacBride denounced Reagan’s notorious “eyeball” remarks on Angola: “the most irresponsible that any candidate for President has made to date.” MacBride stated that he was “astounded that a serious candidate for President should talk in terms of ‘eyeballing’ the Russians over the Angolan situation.” MacBride added that “The real world is not a class B movie, but Mr. Reagan talks about confronting the Russians — which inherently entails the risk of a nuclear holocaust — as if he were doing nothing more than suggesting a shoot-out at the OK Corral.” MacBride’s reference was to Reagan’s January 5 statement that the United States should “eyeball” the Russians on Angola, and tell them “Out — we’ll let them fight it out ourselves, or you’re going to have us to deal with.”

MacBride pointed out at the news conference that, at the very time when Americans were becoming more “isolationist” and rejecting U.S. intervention abroad, that the Presidential candidates were repeating the old and failed interventionist slogans. “I am the only candidate running for President,” MacBride noted,” who is in tune with the people of this nation in the area of foreign policy.” Reagan offers no alternative to the American people from the interventionist foreign policies of recent decades. MacBride pointed out that “It is obvious that Ronald Reagan would only continue the interventionist policies of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Rockefeller and Kissinger. I was worried that President Ford will turn the Mid-East situation into another Vietnam. Now it appears that Reagan would do the same over warring tribal factions in Angola.”

MacBride followed this hard-hitting position at a news conference in Los Angeles on January 14, in which he called for immediate U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East and from Angola. In fact, over the first weeks of his campaign, MacBride has particularly emphasized the need for “complete neutrality” in American relations with other nations. “Neutrality”, he reminded his listeners, is in the tradition of Washington and Jefferson and it is appropriate that we return to that tradition in this bicentennial year.” He has also pointed out that “non-intervention” is a better term than “isolationism” because Libertarians favor free international trade rather than nationalistic barriers to trade.

(See MacBride for President Committee News Releases, January 12, and January 14, 1976. From MacBride for President Committee, 1516 P St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005.)

Meanwhile, the November-December issue of the L.P. News, official organ of the national party, contains an excellent and devastating research piece on Ronald Reagan and his claim to be “libertarian.” (Bill Evers, “Reagan: Hubert Humphrey of the Right?”) The article is indispensable for anyone who still thinks of Reagan as a libertarian or who needs ammunition to rebut that claim. (Obtainable from Libertarian Party News, 1516 P St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005 for $3 for six issues, or $5 for 12 issues.)

The MacBride campaign is off to a rip-roaring start.

The ABM Slips Away

Six years ago the ABM (anti-ballistic missle) system was one of the hot political topics of the day. The conservatives made a big fuss over this measure, which they held to be vital to America’s “national security”, while the pro-peace forces warned that the ABM could not work, that no missiles could be built that would infallibly shoot down all incoming missiles, especially with multiple warheads, that the ABM would not only foster illusions but also prove to be an expensive boondoggle. The ABM was saved in the Senate by one vote, and the right-wing cheered. But the prophets of boondoggle proved correct, and until now only one ABM site has been built, near Grand Forks, N.D. Now, to cap this ignominious failure, the one ABM site will soon be quietly shut down, after an investment of nearly $6 billion.

And so, after considerable militarist hysteria and $6 billion waste of taxpayers’ money, the ABM will quietly be allowed to disappear. Are there any mea culpas coming forth from the hawk ultras at National Review or Human Events? Wanna bet? (See New York Times, Nov. 25. 1975).

Libertarian Bicentennial

The American Revolution was a largely libertarian revolution, and it therefore behooves libertarians to make use of the Bicentennial Year to spread the message, and to counteract both the banalities of the official, Bicentennial and the outrageous distortions of the People’s Bicentennial,’ which takes quotes out of context to try to make the American revolutionaries into prototypes of Karl Marx and Eugene Debs. Hence, it is welcome news that a Libertarian Bicentennial Center has been formed, to act as a contact and coordination center for libertarian Bicentennial activities. Those interested should contact: Phil Fellows, Libertarian Bicentennial Center, 2216 40th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007.

IMPORTANT NEWS

We Are Offering For Sale A Limited Number Of A Handsomely Bound Single Volume Edition Of

Libertarian Forum

Vols. 5-6 (1973-74)

WITH FRONT PIECE AND INDEX

Stock Is Extremely Limited. Only One To A Customer. It Will Be Sent Immediately And Postcard Notice Of Mailing Will Be Sent Also.

SEND A CHECK FOR $20.00 TO:

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Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

The Man Who Would Be King. dir. by John Huston. With Sean Connery and Michael Caine. This is the great Huston’s best movie in years, a real “movie movie”, a joyous romp artfully combining humor and melodrama, marred only by the unhappy ending. It is not in the same league as Huston’s Maltese Falcon, but, then, again, what is?

The setting is Kipling’s India, and, indeed, the movie is based on a short story by Kipling. Connery and Caine, two lovable rascals, decide to travel into the mountains to a land which no white men had ever seen. The purpose; to make their fortune. Introducing British Army methods into one of the warring tribes in the new land, Connery is mistaken for a god, the son of Alexander the Great, and enthroned as God-King by the priestly keepers of the Alexandrine flame. In charge of treasures untold, Caine sensibly wants to fulfill their purpose by getting out with the treasures while the getting is good. But Connery begins to “grow into his kingly role”, beginning himself to believe in his mystic destiny and maybe even that he is the “son of Alexander.” Connery finally gets his comeuppance when he decides to marry a native girl, not something a god is supposed to do. The priests get the girl to expose him as a mere mortal by biting his neck and demonstrating that he is only flesh and blood, and Connery is doomed.

There are many fascinating and understated elements to the film. Thus, the priests only accept Connery as god when they find that he possesses the Masonic emblem, which to them is the divine sign of Alexander. Masonry revealed! It is also hinted, though not elaborated, that the priests begin to turn against Connery when he builds a rope bridge across a ravine which had made the capital town barely accessible before. For when they kill Connery, the priests do so by slashing the rope bridge. Presumably, the priests hate the bridge because this technological advance was creating greater mobility of trade in the land, as well as the rise of a nascent bourgeoisie which would eventually have threatened the perpetuity of their priestly rule over the country.

Many critics have complained that the movie is “sexist”, since Connery’s downfall is brought about by a female. Apart from the fact that this view ignores the role of the priests, it really misses the major point of the film: namely, that Connery is ruined by acquiring the hubris of power. If he had not been seduced by the mystique of power, and Caine would have cut out with the treasure, and lived happily ever after. And so the film has a libertarian rather than a sexist moral.

The acting is splendid, clearly reflecting Huston’s master hand. Michael Caine has been happily induced to shed his usual smart-alec and sophisticated Cockney image, and Connery makes the graceful transition from romantic lead to character actor. Christopher Plummer is excellent in the catalytic role of Kipling himself.

Free Doug Kennell!

Libertarians have all favored amnesty for draft resisters, but the argument has lately been carried on in abstract terms: the draft, after all, is moribund (though not dead); no one has been drafted for a long time: and draft resisters, holed up in Canada and Sweden, have been largely drifting back and have been, in effect, freed by the authorities. If the draft is ended, and amnesty here in practical terms, why worry about draft prosecutions? But amnesty is not here for everyone, and this truth has just been dramatically driven home to all of us.

For on Wednesday, October 22, a young but long-time libertarian activist from California, Doug Kennell, was arrested by the FBI and charged with violation of the Selective Service Act, on the basis of an indictment for non-adherence to the draft issued in June’, 1971. A fugitive from “justice” for over four years, Mr. Kennell now faces the possibility of five years in prison and a $5000 fine on each of three counts.

Doug Kennell must be free. He has retained counsel, and is basing his defense on the 14th and particularly the 13th Amendment, which presumably abolished involuntary servitude in America. Anyone wo wishes to contribute to Doug Kennell’s legal defense fund, should send contributions to: The 13th Amendment Defense Fund; P.O. Box 1202; Free Venice, California 90291. Please make out checks to Mr. Shawn Steel.

Libertarian Environmentalists

A new nationwide association of libertarian environmentalists has just been formed: the Association for Rational Environmental Alternatives (AREA). Consisting of professionals interested in the environmental area, including planners, architects, engineers, attorneys, and officials, the aim of AREA is to “objectively investigate, develop, and advance alternatives stressing private and non-governmental solutions to urban and environmental problems.” AREA will particularly oppose growing government regulations and restrictions on private property rights in the field of urban affairs.

AREA has been in the process of organizing for the past year, and already includes professionals in two dozen states. President of AREA is Dick Bjornseth, and urban planner from Houston, Texas; other officers are: Vice President, Paul Bilzi, a geotechnical engineer from State College; Pa.; Secretary, Lawrence Dwyer, Jr., an architect from New Orleans: and Treasurer, Lynn Kinsky, social scientist and an editor of Reason magazine from Santa Barbara, Calif. We wish AREA well, and are happy to see it join ALL as another professional group in important fields of libertarianism. For further information on AREA, write to: Dick Bjornseth, 5915 Fondren No. 235; Houston, Texas 77036.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX, NO. 2

FEBRUARY, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE PRESIDENCY ’76
THE MORNING LINE

We are writing this article after the early caucuses but before the first primaries — a good time for an interim assessment of the Presidential sweepstakes. First, probably the most important issue that has arisen for libertarians is the sudden and rising counter-revolution the abortion question. Well-financed and raucous, using all the available propaganda techniques, the “Pro-Lifers” are clearly making this Presidential year the focal point of their counter-revolution: to overthrow the Supreme Court decision and to criminalize abortion once more. Cleverly, while the Catholic Church is of course the major force in this nationwide effort, the Catholics have managed to draw in fundamentalist Protestants and some Orthodox Jews in an effort to cast off the theological odor of their campaign.

Let us make ho mistake: Every woman has the absolute right to her own body. Outlawing abortion is a coercive invasion of that right; it is enslavement of women and compulsory baby-making. While the Supreme Court decision was not perfect, it must be rallied around to defend that vital natural human right. Yet where are the feminists now when they are needed for that defense? Here was one issue that the feminists were perfectly sound on; and yet now where are their voices? The feminists I have spoken to have declared themselves bored with the entire issue; wasn’t it won several years ago? Perhaps so, but that victory is now in grave doubt, unless the feminists begin a vigorous counter-agitation against the Pro-Lifers. Surely here is an issue more important than the ERA or “chairman” vs. “chairperson.”

Here, too, is an issue that the newly-formed Association of Libertarian Feminists can really take the lead on, and in the process advance the cause of abortion-freedom and of libertarianism in general. Here is a chance for libertarians to take the lead in a broad ideological alliance for human rights.

The Pro-Lifers have been using every bit of available demagogy: including showing repulsive movies of bloody fetuses. OK, we can show movies, too, if it comes to that: of women being butchered by illegal abortionists in back alleys, of the discrimination against the poor that the old law entailed, of the imposed poverty and misery of the families that the State forced upon the world. Let us resolve: They shall not bring back the days of illegal abortions!

Meanwhile, however, the criminalizers proceed without opposition. Ronald Reagan has adopted the full pro-Lifer creed, and the other candidates hedge and fuzz the issue, but move cravenly into the antiabortionist camp, including Ford’s absurd call for a states-rights abortion amendment, and Jimmy Carter’s typical fuzzy ambiguities. And, as the cutting edge of the criminalizing campaign, Ellen McCormack, young Catholic housewife from Long Island, is reaping a great deal of publicity from her race in the New Hampshire Democratic primary.

The big surprise of the Democratic race is the emergence of Georgia peanut merchant Jimmy Carter as the leader after the early caucuses. Carter is a menace; for he is a hoked-up, phony-“good ole boy” version of the statist monster, Scoop Jackson. But Scoop, fortunately for American liberty and world peace, has all the charisma of a dead mackerel, and so he has to depend on the bosses in the large states; Scoop cannot survive a campaign where he has to “press the flesh.” But “corn pone” Carter is the perfect flesh-presser, his ever-present smile masking the icy-blue eyes, his charisma remaining intact because of his constant and egregious waffling and evading of the issues. Until now, furthermore, Carter has been able to sucker the liberals, anxious to find a “good Southerner” to offset George Wallace. The liberal counter-attack against Carter has now begun, with a blistering critique by Steven Brill in the March Harper’s: “The Pathetic Lies of Jimmy Carter.” But will the counter-attack be in time?

I myself didn’t take Carter seriously until the end of December, when the New York Times (Dec. 28) published a list of the economists advising each of the Presidential contenders. Many were predictable: Reagan had Friedman and the Friedmanites, Scoop had the No. 1 Corporate State businessman Felix Rohatyn of the international banking firm of Lazard Freres, Fred Harris has the socialists and semi-socialists: Michael Harrington, Bob Lekachman, Nat Goldfinger of the AFL-CIO. But, lo and behold! it was Jimmy Carter that the all-star cast of top Establishment liberals: Lester Thurow of MIT, Lawrence Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, Joseph Pechman of Brookings, Richard Cooper of Yale. Ho ho, said I to myself, is the “fix” in for Jimmy Carter? Is it indeed? The Carter boom, in fact, was launched by Time magazine, the quintessence of the Establishment. And now we find that Carter’s top foreign policy adviser is none other than Columbia University’s Zbigniew Brzezinski, Hubert Humphrey’s top foreign policy strategist in the 1968 campaign. The centrist Brzezinski has long yearned to be Secretary of State, and now it looks as if he might get his wish.

As for Scoop, he is relying on the bosses: Mayor Daley of Chicago, and particularly the hack regulars of the New York Democracy. In New York, the up-state regulars, plus Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito (boss, also, of Mayor Abe Beame) and Queens Democrat leader Donald Manes, have declared openly for Scoop; in the meanwhile, Governor Hugh Carey and his minions (headed by state chairman and Bronx Democrat boss Pat Cunningham — now under a corruption cloud) are pushing their own “uncommitted” slate, which may well end up in the Jackson camp when the dust settles. The Democrat liberals in New York are at sixes and sevens — Bella Abzug and Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel have their own liberal uncommitted slate. In the meanwhile, in a particularly amusing note, the left-liberal reformers, headed by the “West-Side kids” who got their start in the Gene McCarthy movement of 1968, decided to push for Birch Bayh instead of the expected Fred Harris. The reason: “Bayh can win”. Except that Bayh hasn’t won much yet

The most amusing note of the Democratic sweepstakes so far, however, is former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford — once the favorite “good Southern” of the liberals. Getting no support anywhere for President, Standford dropped out; but, when asked if he will return the federal matching funds, he said no, because he might decide to re-enter later on! That’s it, Terry, whatever else happens, hang on to the money.

Meanwhile, the colorless, carefully comprising-liberal Mo Udall is hanging in there, hoping for lightning to strike in New Hampshire. Pennsylvania’s Governor Milton Shapp, though getting virtually no support so far, and himself under a corruption cloud, is not dropping out either. He has fallen back on his last line of defense: a deal for a bloc of convention delegates from the Wallaceite law-and-order cop and mayor of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, a former Nixon Democrat. Plus a hope of undercutting Scoop Jackson for Miami Beach’s Jewish votes in the Florida primary, on the frank appeal: “Isn’t it time that we had a President?”

The Democratic race, so far, is a dismal swamp of strong conservative statists (Jackson and Carter), and weak liberals. In the wings, there is the “unannounced” candidate, the gasbag centrist and Old New Dealer Hubert Humphrey, whose personal style alone would be an affliction on the American public. Most interesting are two dark horses so dark as to be really “unannounced”, from the new quasi-libertarian, anti-Big Government wing of the party, a wing growing in strength as a result of the increasing public revulsion against Big Government, the same revulsion which is misguidedly leading people into the camp of the warmonger Reagan. One, of coarse, is Governor Jerry Brown of California, who, in contrast to Reagan, is pro-peace and pro-civil liberties (especially the latter) as well as against Big Government domestically. His only hope rests with the California primary, the last one in the nation. The other is the original proto-Brown politico, Governor Dan Walker of Illinois. However, Walker toe original Democratic budget-cutter, faces a formidable foe not troubling Jerry Brown: the Mayor Daley machine, the eternal enemy of Walker. Daley’s candidate, the formidable Illinois Secretary of State Howlett, looked like a good bet ¿0 overthrow Walker in the Democratic primary for Governor, which of course would have ended any Presidential chances Walker might have had. But now, happily, Howlett has suddenly come under his own corruption cloud, so Walker might possibly pull through.

Meanwhile, in the Republican camp, Reagan remains the Number One menace, to American liberty and to the libertarian movement. It is vital to expose Reagan as the Pied Piper of the nationwide revolution against Big Government, the piper who would lead the increasingly libertarian masses into a statist world of militarism and nuclear war. When challenged in New Hampshire about why he is opposed to amnesty to Vietnam War resisters, especially in view of the fact that Vietnam was not a war declared by Congress, Reagan answered: “I still think it ought to have been a declared war, and I still think we ought to have won it.” (See A. Cockburn and J. Ridgeway, The Village Voice, Feb. 23, p. 15.) “We ought to have won it”: there stands the true thinking and instinct of Ronald Reagan and of the conservative movement. How many tons of bombs, how many American lives, how many Vietnamese lives, would such a “victory” have cost? Reagan is the leading political conservative, and conservatism thirsts for mass murder. The fact that Reagan wants increased tax credits for investment pales in importance besides this stark fact.

Furthermore, as could have been predicted, Reagan’s much vaunted and much-criticized “$90 Billion plan” turns out to be a phoney. It took very little for Reagan to retreat; he now claims that the federal government should keep collecting the $90 billion and then quickly turn the money over to the respective states on the spot. So much for the hope for drastic reductions in the federal income tax. Reagan has also expressly abandoned the idea of making Social Security voluntary. And when we realize, further, that Reagan wants massive increases in the military budget, we can full see the tinsel of Reagan’s and conservative promises of leading the assault on Big Government at home.

And what indeed of abortion? What kind of “hostility” to Big Government is it that envisions the resumption of police enforcement against millions of women and against physicians?

In short, Ronald Reagan and conservatism are not opposed to Big Government at all. All that they want is shift in the priorities for government activity and expenditure: a bit less welfare, a lot more militarism, coerced “morality”, and war overseas. Reagan must be stopped, and the sooner the better.

Meanwhile, the expected erosion of “libertarians” into the Reagan camp has begun, Dana Rohrabacher, the “troubadour” of the movement, and for many years an “anti-political” LeFevrian, has suddenly emerged as a top Reagan aide in New Hampshire. And several other leading LeFevrians are joining the Reagan camp as well. These defections are a fascinating example of how the two major, and seemingly diametrically, opposed “deviations” from, the proper, plumb-line libertarian strategy — “left sectarianism” and “right opportunism”, often complement and feed upon each other. For after several years of political inaction and hugging one’s libertarian “purity” to one’s bosom, despair tends to set in, and it becomes all too easy to yearn for some short-run gains — and hence the leap into right opportunism and to the evil of Reaganism. (The phenomenon works the other way too; many libertarians, disgusted with years of their own political opportunism on the right-wing, leap into the seemingly immaculate purity of left-sectarianism.)

Meanwhile, President Ford has been predictably waffling in the direction of Reaganism — notably in his clever device to “oversee” the monstrous, secret, and despotic CIA while proposing the crack down on the “leakers” who are at least trying to inform the American taxpayers on what these rascals are doing in our name; and in the Angolan fiasco, in which Kissinger obviously tried to prove that, at least in marginal areas, he can be as warlike as Schlesinger and the ultra-hawks. But — and this is no mean feat — the Ford Administration did have the guts to toss out the thuggish Pat Moynihan, who delighted the right-center Establishment by playing to the Zionist gallery. Moynihan now joins Schlesinger in leading the pro-war forces pressuring Ford-and-Kissinger from the right. It must be realized that, for all its numerous defects, the Kissinger balance-of-power imperial politics is far better than the war crusade of the right-wing; detente at least preserves a real if uneasy peace with the Soviet Union and preserves American lives and freedom from the holocaust of nuclear war. Meanwhile, Moynihan, returning to Harvard to help raise the next generation of the power elite, cranks up his unannounced campaign to gain the Democratic nomination for the Senate from New York — a campaign that has great attraction for the Old New Deal hack regulars who run the party in that state. For Moynihan is indeed a perfect reflection of the old FDR-Truman-Scoop Jackson mentality. A man who has had the intellectual — shall we call it, “flexibility” — to serve in top policy-making posts every President since Jack Kennedy, Moynihan is the Perfect Model of the Modern Social-Democrat: pro-statist at home, pro-Empire and pro-war abroad. Harvard is the perfect spot for him; given the alternatives, let us hope he remains there forever.

We Make The Media!

The Libertarian Forum has just been recognized by the media — a libertarian first! The lively liberal bi-weekly, The New Times (Feb. 20, 1976), devotes a paragraph to our December, 1975 editorial, “Stop Reagan!” Having evidently read our editorial carefully, editor Tony Schwartz quotes from our stressing the menace of Reagan’s pro-war foreign policy. Clearly, New Times believes this to be news because, as Schwartz puts it, “Ronald Reagan is facing strong opposition to his candidacy from a group in sympathy with many of his announced views.” I.e., libertarians.

This event holds several lessons for libertarians. In the first place, in a repeat of the first media publicity for libertarians in the winter of 1970—71, liberals tend to be delighted to find groups of “rightists” who are opposed to Conservatives. Fine; because, while liberals are happy to underscore splits in the “right wing”, the news of libertarianism itself gets disseminated to the public. And, finally, there is a happy coincidence here: for stopping Reagan is a vital task, and also happens to be a particularly newsworthy one. The more that we differentiate ourselves from conservatism and Reaganism the better — for we will be helping to save the country from war while disseminating libertarianism at the same time.

Revisionism And Libertarianism

Introductory Note

What’s happening at Reason? The long-awaited Revisionist issue of Reason finally appeared in February, 1976. There is good material there, particularly the excellent articles by William Marina (“U.S. Interventions: Aberrations or Empire?) and Alan Fairgate (“Non-Marxist Theories of Imperialism”). And yet — some references to Vietnam were cut out of the Marina article, mentions of the “ruling class” were excised from the Fairgate article, other commissioned articles on Cold War Revisionism were rejected, and my own eagerly commissioned overview for the Reason issue (which follows verbatim) was rejected by Messrs. Poole and Machan for three reasons: space, because they themselves disagreed that the U.S. is the major imperialist power, and because the article would be a shock to their readers. The latter is certainly true; judging from Reason readers’ reactions to my own columns on foreign policy, their readers in almost desperate need of education to steer them away from their National Review-Birchite knee-jerk responses on foreign affairs. A “shock treatment” may well do them a world of good.

As a toperoo, Tibor Machan moved his own Viewpoint column out of order so as to be able to attack Revisionism in the issue itself. Tibor’s argument is characteristic of a large number of right-wing libertarian views on foreign policy: the Argument from Ignorance. Tibor launches his article by conceding that “I am not an historian”, that he knows nothing about foreign affairs, and that even his opinions are “not often well founded”, after which he proceeds to give his opinions, including the “impressionistic viewpoint” that the “United States comes off better” than other countries in foreign affairs. Now come on, Tibor; would you ever say things like that in the area of philosophy?

As one might expect from that opening, the rest of Machan’s column needs no detailed critique. Except to offer two definitions of imperialism in response to his query: a short one — “The use of coercion by the State of one country against the citizens of another country”; and a more expanded definition to apply to current Western imperialism in the Third World, from Leonard Liggio’s brilliant article “Why the Futile Crusade?”, and quoted in the Fairgate article in Reason’s own Revisionist issue: “The imperialist power of the Western countries . . . imposed on the world’s peoples a double or reinforced system of exploitative imperialism — by which the power of the Western governments maintains the local ruling class in exchange for the opportunity to superimpose Western exploitation upon existing exploitation by the local ruling states.” After which, I call upon Messrs. Machan and Poole, plus the Reason readership, to read or reread the Fairgate article and all of the books and articles referred to therein. Perhaps then the ignorance of these and other right-wing libertarians will prove not to be “invincible” after all.

I do not mean to imply by all this that Reason is hopeless. On the contrary, as the libertarian movement’s largest magazine, it commands the interest and concern of us all. But with foreign policy, with questions of war and peace, being the single most important topic for libertarians and for all Americans, it is particularly important that right-wing libertarians heed the vitally important dictum of Brand Blanshard in his Reason and Belief: that it is profoundly immoral to let one’s opinions go beyond the range of one’s knowledge.

* * * * * * *

What has revisionism to do with libertarianism? Many libertarians see no connection. Steeped in the theory of the non-aggression axiom, and that the State has always been the major aggressor, these libertarians see no need to concern themselves with the grubby details of the misdeeds and interrelations between Germany, Russia, Britain, the United States, and other particular states. If all States are evil, why worry about the details?

The first answer is that theory is not enough in dealing with the concrete world of reality. If all States are evil, some are more evil than others, some particular States have engaged in enormously more aggression, both internally against their subjects, and externally against the citizens of other States. The State of Monaco has committed far less aggression than the State of Great Britain. If we libertarians are to understand the real world, and to try to bring about the victory of liberty in that world, we must understand the actual history of concrete, existent States. History provides the indispensable data by which we can understand and deal with our world, and by which we can assess the relative guilt, the relative degrees of aggression committed by the various states. Monaco, for example, is not one of our major problems in this world, but we can only learn this from knowledge of history, and not from a priori axioms. But of course to learn about concrete reality takes work, not only a substantial amount of reading, but also reading with the basic elements of revisionism in mind. Work that investigates the complexities of history, and that is not easily reducible to catch phrases and sloganeering.

Revisionism is an historical discipline made necessary by the fact that all States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative burden upon the rest of society. Since its rule is exploitative and parasitic, the State must purchase the alliance of a group of “Court Intellectuals”, whose task is to bamboozle the public into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State. The Court Intellectuals have their work cut out for them. In exchange for their continuing work of apologetics and bamboozlement, the Court Intellectuals win their place as junior partners in the power, prestige, and loot extracted by the State apparatus from the deluded public.

The noble task of Revisionism is to de-bamboozle: to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals, and to present to the public the true history of the motivation, the nature, and the consequences of State activity. By working past the fog of State deception to penetrate to the truth, to the reality behind the false appearances, the Revisionist works to delegitimate, to desanctify, the State in the eyes of the previously deceived public. By doing so, the Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally, performs a vitally important libertarian service. Hence, the Revisionist historian performs crucial libertarian tasks regardless of his own personal ideology. Since the State cannot function, cannot command majority support vital to its existence without imposing a network of deception, Revisionist history becomes a crucial part of the tasks of the libertarian movement. Crucial especially because Revisionism goes beyond pure theory to expose and reveal the specific lies and crimes of the State as it exists in concrete reality.

Revisionism can be “domestic”; thus, revisionist historians in recent years have shown that the growth of the American State in the twentieth century has come about, not in a “democratic” attempt to curb Big Business “monopoly”, but in the course of a conscious desire by certain elements of Big Business to use the State to fasten a cartellized and monopolized economy upon American society. Revisionist historians have further shown that the “welfare” State injures, rather than benefits, the very groups that such a State allegedly helps and succors. In short, that the Welfare State is designed to aid the ruling coalition of certain Big Business groups and technocratic, statist intellectuals, at the expense of the remainder of society. If the knowledge of such historical truth became widespread, it would be difficult indeed for modern Big Government to sustain itself in operation.

While historical Revisionism has performed important services on the domestic front, its major thrust has dealt with war and foreign policy. For over a century, war has been the major method by which the State has fastened its rule upon a deluded public. There has been much discussion over the years among libertarians and classical liberals on why classical liberalism, so dominant in the early and mid-nineteenth century in Western Europe and America, failed ignominiously by the time of the advent of the twentieth century. The major reason is now clear: the ability of the State to wield patriotism as a weapon, to mobilize the masses of the public behind the interventionist and war policies of the various powerful States. War and foreign intervention are crucial methods by which a State expands its power and exploitation, and also provide elements of danger for one State at the hands of another. Yet the State — every State — has been particularly successful in deluding its citizens that it fights wars and intervenes in other countries for their protection and benefit; when the reality is that war provides a golden opportunity for the State to bamboozle its citizens into gathering together to defend it and to advance its interests and its power. Since war and foreign policy provide the State with its easiest means of delusion and deception, Revisionist exposure on the foreign affairs front is the most important avenue of desanctification and delegitimation of the State apparatus and of State aggression.

In the Revisionist exposure of the truths about foreign affairs, one particular myth, strongly held by most Americans and even by most libertarians, has been of supreme importance: namely, the myth propagated by the arch-statist and interventionist Woodrow Wilson that domestic dictatorships are always hellbent on foreign war and aggression, while domestic democracies invariably conduct a peaceful and non-aggressive foreign policy. While this correlation between domestic dictatorship and foreign aggression has a superficial plausibility, it is simply not true on the factual, historical record. There have been many domestic dictatorships that have turned inward upon themselves and have therefore been pacific in foreign relations (e.g. Japan before its compulsory “opening up” in the mid-nineteenth century by the U.S. ’s Commodore Perry); and all too many domestic “democracies” that have conducted a warlike and aggressive foreign policy (e.g., Britain and the United States.) The existence of democratic voting, far from being a barrier against foreign aggression, simply means that the State must conduct its propaganda more intensively and more cleverly, in order to bamboozle the voters. Unfortunately, the State and its Court Intellectuals have been all too equal to this task.

In the history of foreign affairs, then, a priori history simply does riot work; there is nothing to be done but engage in a detailed and concrete historical inquiry into the detailed wars and aggressions of particular States, keeping in mind that the record of the foreign policy of “democracies” needs even more debamboozlement than the foreign conduct of dictatorships. There is no way to deduce relative degrees of guilt for war and imperialism from libertarian axioms or from the simple degree of internal dictatorship in any particular country. The degree of guilt for war or imperialism is a purely evidentiary question, and there is no escape from the task of looking hard at the evidence.

The result of such a cool-eyed empirical look at the evidence, at the history of particular States in the modern world, is bound to be a shock for Americans raised on the foreign affairs mythology propounded by the Court Intellectuals of the media and of our educational system. Namely, that the major aggressor, the major imperialist and war-monger, in the nineteenth and down through the first half of the twentieth century, was Great Britain; and, further, that the United States signed on, during World War I, as a junior partner of the British Empire, only to replace it as the major imperial and war-mongering power after World War II. The Wilsonian ideology is simply a pernicious myth, especially as applied to Britain and the United States in the twentieth century, and libertarians must simply gird themselves to unlearn that myth, and to bring themselves into tune with historical truth. Since libertarians have managed to unlearn many of the domestic myths promulgated by the American State, one hopes that they can find it in their hearts to unlearn the pervasive foreign policy myth as well. Only then will classical liberalism, let alone full libertarianism, be able to achieve a full Renaissance in the Western world, and especially within America.

The Greatest deception of the American (and the British) State, then, is its allegedly defensive and pacifistic foreign policy. When Revisionists maintain, therefore, that the major guilt for war and imperialism in the twentieth century belongs to the United States and to Great Britain, they are not necessarily maintaining that the various enemies of the United States have been domestically and internally less (dictatorial or aggressive than the United States government. Certainly, libertarian revisionists do not maintain this thesis. No libertarian would claim that the internal polity of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Nazi Germany, or even Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was less despotic than that of Britain or the United States. Quite the contrary. But what libertarian, as well as other. Revisionists, do maintain is that the U.S. and Great Britain were, as a matter of empirical fact, the major aggressors and war-mongers in each of these particular wars and conflicts. Such truths may be unpalatable to a priori “historians”, but they are facts of reality nevertheless.

Furthermore, as indicated above, it is precisely the use of war and war mythology that has led to the acceleration of domestic statism in the U.S. and in Great Britain in this century. In fact, every significant advance of American statism has come about in the course of one of its allegedly “defensive” wars. The Civil War crushed states’ rights and brought about an inflationary and statist banking system, a regime of high tariffs and subsidies to railroads, and income and federal excise taxation; World War I ushered in the modern planning and “New Deal” Welfare-Warfare State in America; and World War II and the Cold War completed that task and led to the current Big Government Leviathan that we suffer under today. It is highly relevant and vital to the understanding of the burgeoning American State that each of these consequences were not unfortunate accidents brought about by foreign “aggressors”, but the result of a conscious and deliberate aggressive and war-mongering policy indulged in by the American State.

Revisionism therefore reveals to us in all its starkness that the State Enemy in the United States is purely at home and not abroad. Foreign States have served merely as scapegoats for the aggrandizement of American State power at home and abroad, over domestic citizens and foreign peoples. The Enemy is not a foreign bogey, but here in our midst. Only full understanding of this truth by libertarians and other Americans can enable us to identify the problems we face and to proceed to insure the victory of liberty. Before we can overcome our enemies, we must know who they are.

To defend its depredations, the American State has been able, with the help of its Court Intellectuals, to employ a powerful propaganda weapon to silence its opponents and to further delude its public. Namely, to label the critics of its imperialist and war policies conscious or unconscious agents or sympathizers with the domestic policies of its various State enemies. And so, throughout this century, Revisionists, even libertarian Revisionists, have been continually accused of being tools or sympathizers of the Kaiser, of the Nazis, or of the Communists — sometimes all at once or seriatim. In this post-Wilsonian age, even a priori libertarians have been duped into tarring Revisionist libertarians with the same smear brush. Even the imbecility of thinking for one moment that a libertarian can really be a Nazi or a Communist has not deterred the bamboozled libertarians from smearing and denigrating their more clear-sighted colleagues. What is needed above all is to cast off the post-Wilsonian mythology and a priori history of twentieth century American propaganda, and to realize that the (American) Emperor really has no clothes. The penetrating truths of Revisionism are needed to de-bamboozle libertarians along with other Americans; hopefully, this issue of Reason will contribute to this vital task.

Center For
Libertarian Studies Formed!

The heart and soul of libertarianism is its ideas, and the success of liberty will be still-born if that body of ideas is not discussed, advanced, and disseminated to scholars and interested students of liberty. For libertarianism is itself a growing discipline, one that cuts across and integrates material from a host of other disciplines in the sciences of human action: including philosophy, law, economics, history, sociology, biology, and education. But in order for this libertarian discipline to grow and prosper, there must be communication between and encouragement for the increasing number of younger scholars in the separate “official” disciplines. Modern higher education fosters isolated specialization, with little or no communication between the various scholarly fields. And yet, the spirit of liberty within these highly promising younger discipline, is bound to fizzle out unless there is increasing communication between these scholars, fruitful interchange and advance of ideas, and ways to encourage their research (including an outlet for publishing their findings.) No task is more important for the permanent nurturing and advance of liberty, and no course of action will have such a high “payoff” per unit dollar “invested.” There are plenty of funds for other tasks with immediate returns; but this seemingly abstract and long-run development of the basic ideas and scholarship of liberty is a task of enormous importance that has so far been widely neglected.

Realizing the vital importance of building communication between libertarian scholars, especially the growing number of young thinkers and researchers, Professors Walter Grinder and Walter Block have held three annual fall Libertarian Scholars Conferences in the New York area. Operating with virtually no funds and under Spartan conditions, these conferences have nevertheless been outstanding successes: providing highly important papers and discussions in such areas as philosophy, history, sociology, economics, and law. Though with little hope of publication, the scholars nonetheless did outstanding work on papers that have still not seen the light of day.

Based on that experience, several of us in New York realized that the need for a center of libertarian scholarship is there, the people are there, and that now what we must do is to organize and appeal to a broad base of funding among the legion of those who would dearly like to see the discipline of libertarianism advance, and to foster and publish scholarly research in this vitally important area. And so, we have formed the Center for Libertarian Studies, and we hereby announce our existence and appeal for whatever funds you can spare.

Among the activities we are planning are the following: a periodical Journal of Libertarian Studies, filling at long last the need for a continuing libertarian journal on the highest scholarly level; Occasional Papers, pamphlets to be published by the Center; a Newsletter informing friends and donors of our activities; annual Libertarian Scholars Conferences, which will have enough support to bring in scholars from around the country; Special Conferences on particular scholarly themes; Fellowships to enable junior scholars across the country to come to New York to study with the resident scholars there; Lectures or Lecture Series by Center scholars.

Officers of the Center for Libertarian Studies are John Hagel III, President; Walter E. Grinder, Secretary and Executive Director; Walter Block, Treasurer; and Murray N. Rothbard, Editor, Journal of Libertarian Studies. Other members of the Executive Committee of the Center are: Williamson Evers, Dale Grinder, Chuck Hamilton, Robert D. Kephart, Leonard P. Liggio, Joseph R. Reden, Ralph Raico, and Joseph R. Stromberg. For our Board of Advisors for the Center and Journal we have been fortunate to obtain the following distinguished scholars: Friedrich A. Hayek, Nobel laureate in Economics; Yale Brozen, professor of economics, University of Chicago; Arthur A. Ekirch, professor of history, State University of New York, Albany; Jean-Pierre Hamilius, professor of economics, Luxembourg; Henry Hazlitt; John Hospers, professor of philosophy, University of Southern California; James J. Martin; Felix Morley; James A. Sadowsky, S. J., professor of philosophy, Fordham University; Louis M. Spadaro, professor of economics, Fordham University; Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, professor of psychiatry, Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, N.Y. And in view of our desire to carry forward the ideals of their late husbands, we are particularly honored to have on our Board of Advisors, Mrs. F. A. Harper and Mrs. Ludwig von Mises.

Donations to the Center are tax-deductible; checks should be made out to the Fund for New Educational Projects. Donors of $100 or over, who will constitute the “Friends of the Center”, will receive all of the Center’s publications gratis, as well as invitations to the Center’s by-invitation-only conferences. Inquiries or donations should be sent to the Center for Libertarian Studies, 200 West 58th St., Suite 5D, New York, N.Y. 10019.

Fuller, Law, And Anarchism

By Randy E. Barnett*

(Editor’s Note: Mr. Barnett’s article is of great importance for libertarian and anarchist legal philosophy. For what he shows is, that by taking the great natural law legal philosophy Lon Fuller’s concept of proper law, and applying it to substantive content of the law, one arrives at the remarkable conclusion that the State itself is illegal, by any intelligible formulation of legal forms. And so, not only are archists wrong in thinking that the State is necessary for the development of law, but the State Is in basic and inherent contradiction to law Itself!)

I

The Harvard Law School lecture hall was deafeningly still as Lon Fuller rose from his chair and slowly walked to the blackboard. Almost gracefully the old man drew a vertical line with an arrow at the bottom end. “This is how most people view the law,” he said. “They see it as a command from above.” Then he drew a horizontal line with arrows at both ends. “But this,” he continued, “is the way most law actually is. A way for people to order their lives by knowing what to expect of others.” As he continued his talk, focusing for a good deal of time on which side of the road we drive on and which side we pass on, one could almost feel the disappointment in the air. So that was all the great man had to say. Ah, it’s too bad that age has to dim the mind so. This at any rate was the look in people’s eyes.

I must confess to a similar feeling — that is, at first. I had been thinking along much the same lines, but I was hoping for much more in the way of an elaboration. Well, maybe I should re-read his book, I told myself. When I did I discovered to my surprise that what 1 was searching for was there and in brilliant form. I had read The Morality of Law several years earlier and, while I liked it at the time, I had either completely missed the crucial points or completely forgotten them (probably the former). Now I seized upon every argument with the passion.

Professor Fuller (Carter Professor of Jurisprudence, Emeritus, Harvard Law School) lays out a view of law as a purposive enterprise. He purpose which animates the law also determines in a general way the form a law should take. This internal dynamic Fuller calls the morality of law. It is a guideline to how one should make law if one wishes to make good law. Like Fuller’s talk, this approach sounds simple, deceivingly so. The implications of The Morality of Law are far reaching, perhaps, one might argue, even revolutionary. The purpose of this paper is to examine a few of these implications.

II

Before embarking on an analysis of Fuller’s views, it might be prudent to first spell them out in a bit more detail. Fuller argues that there are two sorts of morality: the morality of aspiration and the morality of duty. The morality of aspiration “is the morality of the Good Life, of excellence, of the fullest realization of human powers. . . (A) man might fail to realize his fullest capabilities . . . But in such a case he was condemned for failure, not for being recreant to duty; for shortcoming, not for wrongdoing.” (5) The morality of duty, on the other hand,

“lays down the basic rules without which an ordered society directed toward certain specific goals must fall short of its mark . . . It does not condemn men for failing to embrace opportunities for the fullest realization of their powers. Instead, it condemns them for failing to respect the basic requirements of social living.” (5, 6)

The substance of the law, argues Fuller, deals only with duty. It must act to enforce certain reciprocal understandings in order to avoid harm to the innocent. It cannot and should not “compel a man to live the life of reason. . . We can only create the conditions essential for rational human existence. These are the necessary, but not the sufficient conditions for the achievement of that end.” (9) Fuller sees three conditions for the optimum efficacy of the notion of duty.” (23) First, the duty must be created by the parties themselves. “The reciprocity out of which the duty arises must result from a voluntary agreement between the parties immediately affected.” (23) .

Second the performances required must be in some sense equal in value. Here I must disagree. Fuller searches for some measure of value to apply to things which are different in kind. Such a search will prove as fruitless as the medieval search for a “just price” and for the same reason. The subjective valuations of the parties (the only standard of relevance in a voluntary exchange) are incommensurable by virtue of their subjectivity. What Fuller may be searching for (as his later reliance on the concept of marginal utility reveals) is a notion of an ex ante desire of each party for that thing held by the other. Only if such a condition exists is a free exchange possible, else why exchange? Fuller points out that “we cannot speak of an exact identity, for it makes no sense at all to exchange, say a book or idea in return for exactly the same book or idea.” (23) We leave to the parties the determination of the “fairness” of the exchange. Surely this satisfies Fuller’s second condition of a situation which makes “a strong appeal to the sense of justice.” (23)

The third condition is that “the relationships within the society must be sufficiently fluid so that the same duty you owe me today I may owe you tomorrow — in other words, the relationship of duty must in theory and in practice be reversible.” (23)

Fuller feels that without this condition, as a practical matter, people will have no reason to honor their obligations and further, citing F. A. Hayek, that a society of free traders, capitalism, is the most conducive to the development of moral and legal duty.

The purpose of law, then, is to protect this requisite reciprocity thereby giving rise to duties. It operates “at the lower levels of human achievement where a defective performance can be recognized if care is taken, with comparative certainty and formal standards for judging it can be established.” (31) It does not reward virtuous acts. This is left to more subjective, intuitive, and largely informal procedures. The prime purpose of law is the discernment and enforcement of legal duties and nothing more. This is entirely consistent with the natural rights tradition. On this view, these requisite legal duties are what rights are and their very formulation depends on their objective necessity as a condition of rational human existence. The law, then, must enforce human rights and nothing more.

To confine the purpose of law to the enforcement of duties is not, however, to minimize either its importance or the difficulties involved. Fuller argues that it is this purpose, however difficult, that determines the nature of the legal enterprise. And he sees the law as exactly that: an enterprise. Those who see the law as essentially a command (such as H. L. A. Hart) are wrong. Law is no mere one-way street. It is as much a cooperative project as medicine or carpentry and as such it is governed by certain common sense rules. These rules are not arbitrary. They are and must be consistent with the goal of law: the determination of general rules of behavior to allow rational (or irrational for that matter) men to plan and act.

If these rules of lawmaking are not arbitrary, nor are they precise or absolute. The process of reaching the best possible law is, like all endeavors toward perfection, governed by the morality of aspiration, that is, they are more an art than a science. Fuller gives eight ways to fail to make a law, but he cannot, nor can anyone, say exactly when one factor should be given precedence over another. This decision must be made by the skillful practitioner based on the facts of each instance of lawmaking, just as a diagnosis of disease and a prescription for its cure can only be made well on an individual basis by a skilled physician.

Fuller lists eight roads to disaster:

“The first and most obvious lies in a failure to achieve rules at all, so that every issue must be decided on an ad hoc basis. The other routes are: (2) a failure to publicize, or at least to make available to the affected party, the rules he is expected to observe; (3) the abuse of retroactive legislation, which not only cannot itself guide action, but undercuts the integrity of rules prospective in effect, since it puts them under the threat of retrospective change; (4) a failure to make rules understandable; (5) the enactment of contradictory rules or (6) rules that require conduct beyond powers of the affected party; (7) introducing such frequent changes in the rules that the subject cannot orient his action by them; and, finally, (8) a failure of congruence between the rules as announced and their actual administration.” (39)

The thrust of Fuller’s anti-positivism is his contention that to the degree that a lawmaker fails to follow any one of these eight directions, he does not simply make “bad law”: he makes something that is not properly called law at all. (39) And while these eight routes to failure point to the indispensable conditions for law on its lowest level, they also serve as “eight kinds of legal excellence toward which a system of rules may strive.” (41) The law, then, “embraces a morality of duty and a morality of aspiration. It. . . confronts us with the problem of knowing where to draw the boundary below which men will be and above which they will be admired for success and at worst pitied for the lack of it.” (42)

III

This then is Fuller’s scheme. He sees in current legal thinking a persistent error. “This is the assumption that law should be viewed not as the product of an interplay of purposive orientations between the citizen and his government (or lawmaker) but as a one-way projection of authority, originating with government and imposing itself upon the citizen.” (204) He feels that theorists are wrong in identifying law with the nation-state. Law, he points out, is everywhere around us in forms not imposed from above. International law, tribal law, the rules of private organizations are all “horizontal” forms of law. It is only the vertical conception of law which prevents the identification of these systems as legal systems.

With examples of “reciprocal” or horizontal” law abundant in history and the world, Fuller is at a loss to figure why contemporary thinkers refuse to see the law in this light. I shall attempt to put forward an explanation for this phenomena. This explanation rests on Fuller’s internal morality of law, or, more precisely, on principle of legal excellence: that a lawmaker should itself obey the rules it sets up to govern its citizenry. We must, then, examine this, Fuller’s eighth principle, in more detail.

The question which gives the positivists the more trouble is, “How can a person, a family, a tribe, or a nation impose law on itself that will control its relations with other persons, families, tribes, or nations?” (233) The positivists view law as a thing which cannot be self-imposed; it must proceed from a higher authority. Fuller’s answer emphasizes his eighth principle: “Now I suggest that all these questions would require radical redefinition if we were to recognize one simple, basic reality, namely, that enacted law itself presupposes a commitment by the governing authority to abide by its own rules in dealing with its subjects.” (233)

What Fuller means by this is that the rule-maker must first make rules by which laws are to be passed. It must then abide by these rules because of the expectations of tie subjects that it will do so. The failure of the positivists to distinguish between the power of the State and the law is their failure to see that the law-maker is constrained by his own rules imposed from below by the expectations of the citizenry. Thus even a State legal system is a two-way system.

I maintain, however, that this does not adequately explain the positivists’ erroneous concept of law. Fuller fails in his attempt because he has not followed his own principle far enough. If he did, he would see that the state legal system does not conform to the principle of official congruence with its own rules. It is because the positivists see that the State inherently violates its own rules that they conclude, in a sense correctly that State-made law is sui generis. An elaboration is obviously called for.

First of all, what.do we mean when we speak of the “State”?

I have no quarrel with Weber’s definition as put forth in his book, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization:

“A compulsory political association with a continuous organization (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a “state” if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” (p. 154)

Furthermore, it is a central characteristic, if not an essential one of the State that it claims the power to tax.*

Fuller’s eighth requirement is that “the governing authority (must) abide by its own rules in dealing with its subjects.” (23) I accept this principle as stated by Fuller but would disagree with his interpretation of it. I take this principle to mean that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” or, more formally, the lawmaker must obey the substance of his own laws. Fuller errs in limiting the commitment of the lawmaker, not to follow all his own rules, but only those rules which govern how to make a law. Clearly our formulation of this principle is a far more reciprocal one. And actually Fuller gives no reason why he limits the principle in the way he does.

If we accept what Fuller says but not his narrow interpretation, it becomes obvious that the State by its nature must violate this commitment. For example, the State says that citizens may not take from another by force and against his will that which belongs to another. And yet the State through its power to tax “legitimately” does just that. (Any reason why the State taxes is irrelevant to this discussion since we are only dealing here with the fact that this action is incongruent with its own rules for its citizens) More essentially, the State says that the person may use force upon another only in self-defense, i.e. only as a defense against another who initiated the use of force. To go beyond one’s right of self-defense would be to aggress on the rights of others, a violation of one’s legal duty. And yet the State by its claimed monopoly forcibly imposes its jurisdiction on persons who may have done nothing wrong. By doing so it aggresses against the rights of its citizens, something which it rules say citizens may not do.

The State, in short, may steal where its subjects may not and it may aggress (initiate the use of force) against its subjects while prohibiting them from exercising the same right. It is to this that the positivists look when they say that the law (meaning State-made law) is a one-way, vertical process. It is this that belies any claim of true reciprocity.

Fuller’s principle is correct, but he is wrong in applying it only to the lawmaker’s obligation to follow his own procedure (which indeed it must). A lawmaker fails to act in congruence with its rules and, as a result, fails to achieve the aspiration of a legal system to the extent that it fails to follow all of its rules, procedural and substantive alike. To the degree that it does not and cannot do this it is not and cannot be a legal system and its acts are outside the law. The State qua state, therefore is an illegal system.

While Professor Fuller cannot be expected to agree with this analysis, it is quite plain that he would not be shocked by its conclusion. First, we do not contend that all State-made law is not law. It is a question of degree. Only when and to the degree that the State does not follow its own rules (as well as Fuller’s seven other requirements) is it acting illegally. True, a State must by its nature act illegally, but Fuller has no trouble envisioning a Stateless, non-monopolistic system of law.

The objectionable aspect inherent to the State is its coercively monopolistic element. The alternative would be a non-monopolistic or multiple system of law. That such a system is perfectly consistent with Fuller’s concept of law as a purposive enterprise says much for his concept. As he himself states, “A possible . . . objection to the view (of law) taken here is that it permits the existence of more than one legal system governing the same population. The answer is, of course, that such multiple systems do exist and have in history been more common than unitary systems.” (123)

Anarchists have long had trouble with the concept of law. Because they too have identified law with the institution that makes it, the State, many have rejected law altogether. Many critics of anarchism insist that without a state there can be no law. But Fuller has no such trouble. He argues that such theoretical difficulties “can arise only if theory has committed itself to the view that the concept of law requires a neatly defined hierarchy of authority with a supreme legislative power at the top that is free from legal restraints (emphasis added)” (124) Fuller’s whole purpose is, of course, to reject this vertical view of law.

As to the practical difficulties of such a system, Fuller points out that they “can arise when there is a real rub between systems because their boundaries of competence have not been and perhaps cannot be clearly defined.” (124) He points out that one possible solution, a constitutional arrangement, “is useful, but not in all cases indispensable. Historically dual and triple systems have functioned without serious friction, and when conflict has arisen it has been solved by some kind of voluntary accommodation.” (124)

IV

The Morality of Law, then, is truly a revolutionary document. Its view of law as an enterprise whose purpose it is to establish general rules of behavior distinguishes the rule of law from the rule of the State. And if one places on Fuller’s eighth principle what I contend is its proper construction, the State is shown to be as essentially illegal form of legal system. Then, almost as icing on the cake, Fuller tells us that not only is the alternative of a multiple legal system consistent with a proper view of law, it is practical and possible as well.

All this Lon Fuller simply and elegantly told his audience. However great their expectations may have been that night, it can now be seen that they were more than fulfilled. That his listeners came to hear something great, heard something great and yet were disappointed by what they heard must be termed ironic; more than that, it is also pathetic.

*Mr. Barnett is a student at Harvard Law School.

*I refuse, however, to become embroiled in a debate over the definition of the State. The inevitable result of such semantic disputes is either that one is urged to broaden the definition so that we see “states” everywhere or narrow it to show that there’s really no such thing as a State. Such entreaties are illegitimate. The State (unfortunately) exists so let’s define it so as to distinguish it from organizations which are not states by picking out its essential features and get on with our analysis.

“The considerations and objectives that have guided the colonial policy of the European powers since the age of the great discoveries stand in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism. The basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal, to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them . . . . If, as we believe, European civilization really is superior to that of the primitive tribes of Africa or to the civilizations of Asia—estimable though the latter may be in their own way—it should be able to prove its superiority by inspiring these peoples to adopt it of their own accord. Could there be a more doleful proof of the sterility of European civilization than that it can be spread by no other means than fire and sword?”

— Ludwig von Mises, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth.

“The one bright moment in the Taft Administration, in fact, came when Dr. Taft was given his drubbing in November, 1912. Turning out such gross incompetents, to be sure, does very little practical good, for they are commonly followed by successors almost as bad, but it at least gives the voters a chance to register their disgust, and so it keeps them reasonably contented, and turns their thoughts away from the barricade and the bomb. Democracy, of course, does not work, but it is a capital anaesthetic.”

— H. L. Mencken

Von Hoffman Versus Schlesinger

By this time, it is no news to libertarians that Nicholas von Hoffman is our outstanding sympathizer in the mass media. While not a consistent libertarian, von Hoffman has had the intellectual independence and breadth of vision to cast off left-liberal shackles to espouse libertarian positions on almost all the issues that count. He has endorsed every major Libertarian Party ticket in the last few years; and he is a living proof that libertarianism can attract converts and sympathizers from the New Left as well as the Old Right. In his syndicated column of February 19, von Hoffman has a brilliant and withering critique of that idol of all too many right-wing libertarians: the ultrahawk “martyr” James Schlesinger.

Von Hoffman notes that Fortune magazine for February is virtually given over to the apotheosis of Schlesinger: not only a lead article espousing his pro-war stance, but even a cover portrait of the brutal bureaucrathawk as Hero, done, as von Hoffman says,” in the brush strokes of capitalist realism.” Posing as a hard-nosed realist, the article reveals that Schlesinger, along with his colleagues and disciples is rather what C. Wright Mills once called a “crackpot realist”. For, writes von Hoffman, “what we have here, rather, is a sermon, a religious statement. The theme is dark and predestinarian.” God, working in history, has thrust upon America the role of policer and ruler of the world, “a painful role of sacrifice unending”, in von Hoffman’s words. Or, in Schlesinger’s own words, “the weight of responsibility placed on the United States will not disappear . . .” Placed by whom? As von Hoffman notes, “the essence of predestinarian Calvinist virtue was to understand the inevitable fate God has prepared and to cooperate with it.” And so, with a sober heart, we take up the painful but necessary weight of God’s burden to maintain and expand the American Empire in waging the fight against the Communist Devil.

But, says Schlesinger, there is a problem; for the United States has sinned, sinned in having a “faltering purpose.” In short, we have begun to chafe under the burden of God’s commandments. For the United States is “a nation apparently withdrawing from the burdens of leadership and power”. Why have we withdrawn from these burdens? Because we have not realized that interventionism and imperialism are not ours to choose but ordained commands. Again in Schlesinger’s words: “America’s involvement in the external world . . . has appeared to be a matter of simple choice reflecting nothing more fundamental than our tastes or moral preferences.”

And so, to quote von Hoffman: “Hence the practice of morality becomes the sin of sloth and gluttony, but there is a sacrament which revivifies, forgives, and puts us again as one with a gloomy destiny God has preordained for us. That sacrament is power. Power will overcome the loss of vision, or moral stamina, of national purpose . . . !”

The Devil, of course, makes no such mistake. As always in the theology of the anti-Communist crusaders, the Communist Devil is all-wise, all-seeing, free from error or fallibility, though of course totally evil. For, says Schlesinger, “By contrast, Soviet leaders have consistently valued power in general, aside from specific uses . . .” The Soviets, as von Hoffman notes, “appreciate the power of power, the sacrament for its own sake.”

And so we must take on the trappings and the majesty of Power; to fight the Communist Power, we must imitate it. Schlesinger even hacks away at the great Lord Acton’s dictum that “power corrupts”, for, says our apologist for Power, this “neglects an equally important truth. Weakness also corrupts . . .”

James Schlesinger is, indeed, as von Hoffman calls him, “Dr. Death.” In Schlesinger’s world-outlook we hear the echoes of the insane and infamous war-cry of Spanish fascism: “Long Live Death!” Schlesinger and his supporters have thrown down the gauntlet to all lovers of liberty; for they have consciously cast their lot with Power. The American revolutionaries knew the alternatives; for they knew that the basic and fateful choice for mankind was and always will be: “Liberty or Power”, and they knew that the two stand in fatal and unending confrontation. Power is always the enemy of liberty. In America, the Communist Party consists of a few aging hacks running Gus Hall for President; but James Schlesinger and his numerous and powerful followers stand very close to the levers of Power, including the nuclear button. For American liberty, for the peace of the world, for the lives and properties of all of us, James Schlesinger and all his cohorts: the Moynihans, the Reagans, the Buckleys, etc. are The Enemy. We believe that man does have the free will to choose, to choose liberty and reject Power now and forever.

And to those libertarians who are falling for the siren song of Schlesingerism, we beseech you to consider this: Why is it that you have not been taken in by the massive propaganda for domestic statism, for Social Security, for the minimum wage, for OSHA, or whatever; and yet you allow yourselves to swallow whole the massive propaganda for the essence of the brutal State: for war for militarism, and for Empire? For here is the very essence of the State, and yet here you parrot the Establishment line without question or cavil; here you fall for every foreign bogey that the State has devised. Don’t you know why classical liberalism, our forebears fell apart at the end of the nineteenth century? It is because so many of the Liberals, here and in Europe, fell for the siren song of war and empire. As England, the home of the great laissez-faire and anti-war and anti-imperialist liberals, Cobden and Bright, fell for the war calls of Palmerston and then of “Liberal Imperialism” and marched into disaster. We beseech you, in the bowels of Liberty, to stop your unthinking support of the war crusaders before it is too late, too late for liberty and even for the human race itself.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX, NO 3

MARCH, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Early Primaries

This editorial is being written after the last “early” primary: the North Carolina primary of March 23. Both Republican and Democratic races are becoming increasingly clear. On the Republican side, the Ford forces lost a golden opportunity, and an opportunity for world peace, by failing to put the kibash on Reagan in North Carolina. The collapsing Ford campaign had been saved and turned around by the shrewd public relations team of Stuart Spencer and William Roberts; before New Hampshire, Spencer and Roberts took the offensive to slam at Reagan, and expose his contradictions on the famous $90 billion scheme, and at unclear statements about Social Security. Reagan was forced on the defensive, his Social Security statements scared the bejabbers out of the elderly masses of the St. Petersburg area in Florida, and resulted in a smashing defeat of Reagan and the overthrow of Reagan’s quick-victory strategy. Another factor in the Ford victories was his slamming into Reagan personally, including his magnificent riposte to Reagan’s warhawk speeches that “a confrontation in our nuclear age is the path to disaster.” Unfortunately, after Florida, the Ford camp became overconfident, effectively pulled Spencer and Roberts out of the campaign, and stopped all attacks on Reagan’s personality or policies. As a result, Reagan was able to take the offensive, engage in a TV blitz, and win in North Carolina, keeping his hopes alive and — more important — since it is unlikely that Reagan will win the nomination, keeping up his demagogic war-mongering pressure on the weak-kneed Ford administration. That pressure will now continue until Kansas City this summer, and has already (see the article on Africa within) led to dangerous saber-rattling by Kissinger on the Cuban troops in Africa.

Reagan, for his part, has finally tossed away the quasi-libertarian smokescreen of his early campaign. Gone are all quotations from Bastiat or any obeisances to libertarianism; gone are his phony $90 billion scheme, and gone too are any hints at “tampering” with Social Security. Reagan has ripped away the veil, and his sole issue now is the only one that is really dear to the hearts of the conservative movement: a crusade for global war against Soviet Russia and against Communist rebellions. So fanatical has Reagan been in his anti-Soviet campaign that he actually accused Ford at one point of not being sufficiently friendly to Communist China! The old Chiang kai-Shek China Lobby must be spinning in its grave! But so hysterically anti-Soviet is the Conservative Movement that they are willing to cozy up to a social system (Red China) that makes Soviet Russia seem a haven of anarcho-capitalism by comparison. But the mask is now off; and there is no longer any excuse for libertarians to look benignly upon the Reagan campaign. Stopping Reagan is still a prime political priority for libertarians.

On the Democratic side, the peace liberals are in a grave quandary. They cannot continue their early post-New Hampshire campaign of all-out opposition to the slippery centrist Jimmy Carter, because to do so would throw the election to the all-out warhawk Scoop Jackson, who triumphed in Massachusetts on the backs of a union-Zionist coalition. A general shakeout has of course occurred, as Shriver, Bayh, et al. have bitten the dust, and Harris has gone nowhere. Birch Bayh, however, provided some of the laughs of the campaign by (1) getting hardly any more votes than “no preference” despite a sizable lineup and funds on his behalf; and (2) following the lead of Terry Sanford by “suspending” rather than withdrawing his candidacy, so that he can grab some more of those good old Federal matching funds. The only peace liberal with a chance is now Mo Udall, who suffers from a lack of charisma, and from an inability to appeal to any social groups except suburban liberals worried about preserving the coyotes and the caribou. It’s beginning to look like Carter, for the liberals will pick him over Jackson, and there has not really been a “brokered” convention for fifty years.

A Ford-Carter fight would have several advantages, both for the country and for the MacBride-Bergland LP ticket, which has been gathering steam, support, and publicity across the country. In the first place, the really dangerous warhawks — Reagan and Jackson — would be out of the picture, and we could all breathe a sigh of relief. Secondly, the differences between Ford and Carter would be minimal, so that many people could easily abandon the two major tickets to “vote their conscience” for MacBride; and this could include those with libertarian inclinations, disappointed conservatives, and disappointed liberals.

Libertarian Feminists Organize

The Association of Libertarian Feminists has recently been formed, with the important objective of countering the statists and socialists who have until now been monopolizing the feminist movement. The ALF held its first annual meeting at the Libertarian Party national convention in New York City last August, and adopted a statement of purposes, the most important one being “to provide a libertarian alternative to those aspects of the women’s movement which foster dependence and collectivism.” The ALF’s officers include Toni Nathan, President, and Sharon Presley, co-owner of the Laissez Faire Bookstore, as National Coordinator. The ALF publishes a sprightly newsletter, ALF News, the first issue of which has now appeared (February, 1976), and leaflets, the most important of which is Sharon Presley’s “Libertarianism and Feminism”, reprinted from Majority Report. The leaflets are available for 10¢. Annual dues for ALF membership are $5.00, which includes the newsletter; the newsletter alone may be purchased for $3.00 per year. Information may be obtained by writing to the Association of Libertarian Feminists, 206 Mercer St., New York, N.Y. 10012.

African Roundup

Africa has now entered the foreign affairs spotlight, and conditions in southern Africa are such as to keep that trouble-spot in the headlines for many years to come. The essence of the southern African scene is this: a small minority of whites has been suppressing the large majority of black Africans, particularly in Rhodesia and the Republic of South Africa. While the white minority has been able to impose racist, quasi-fascist regimes upon the black majority in these countries, by virtue of superior living standards and organization, those minority racist regimes are doomed in the long run. And, as the standard of living increases in these countries, and particularly as the blacks organize into a rising national consciousness, that doom is now approaching rapidly. For Americans the crucial question is: will the United States allow itself to get sucked in to expend men and treasure, as well as court the possibility of world war, in order to fasten racist regimes upon the black majority of southern Africa? Right now, that question is in doubt, and it is important for Americans to organize and put pressure upon our government to keep its hands off southern Africa, and to allow the Africans to decide their own fate without U.S. interference.

In the short run, the most vulnerable parts of racist southern Africa are Rhodesia and Namibia (South West Africa). In contrast to the Republic of South Africa, where whites are one-sixth of the population, in Rhodesia they amount to less than 5% of the total. Specifically, in Rhodesia 270,000 whites are foisting their rule on over 6 million black Africans. Rhodesian electoral law disqualifies virtually all the blacks, and insures that Parliament will be a white enclave: the whites have 50 members, while the blacks have 16 members, one half of whom are Quislings appointed by the white government. The oppression of the Rhodesian regime may be gauged by the Land Tenure Act, which allots half of the land to the 5% whites, and half to the 95% black population — with the whites, naturally, allotted the most fertile lands.

Rhodesia’s imminent collapse stems from the hard-line, fanatical right-wing militancy of the Ian Smith regime. When Britain tried to pressure its colony into allowing gradual transition to black rule, Smith led a rebellion against British rule in 1965 and declared Rhodesian independence — thereby permanently alienating any hope of support from Britain and Western Europe. When Portuguese fascism was toppled by a coup in 1974, the shrewd South African regime of Premier John Vorster saw the handwriting on the wall, especially seeing that Portuguese Mozambique, bordering Rhodesia on the east, would soon be in left-wing native hands. Hence, Vorster has been desperately pressuring the Smith regime into making at least token concessions to an eventual black majority rule in Rhodesia, and to do so by peaceful negotiations. But the blockheaded Smith regime has been adamant, Smith himself repeatedly proclaiming that black majority rule in Rhodesia would never come “in my lifetime.” Smith instead has opted for a war footing and outright fascist suppression. As a result, the majority of the leading black organization, the African National council, went into exile in Mozambique, and is now committed to armed overthrow of the Smith regime. A rump minority of the ANC, headed by Joshua Nkomo, remained in Rhodesia to try to negotiate peacefully, but, despite extreme pressure by Vorster, Smith has refused to make any meaningful concessions even to the ultra-moderate Nkomo faction. Finally, the negotiations have now been broken off, thus signalling inevitable all-out guerrilla rebellion in Rhodesia.

The majority ANC, now based in Mozambique, and leading the political struggle of the blacks, is an effective though odd religio-political coalition. Its president is Bishop Abel Muzorewa of the United Methodist Church, and its vice-president still resident in Rhodesia is an American-educated homeopathic physician, Dr. Elliott M. Gabella, who is also a theologian and patriarch of the African Orthodox Church in southern Africa. The black guerrilla forces proper are gathered into ZANLA (the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army). ZANLA is to the left of even the majority ANC, and is not subject to the latter’s control, having broken with ANC over its support for Zambia’s previous crackdown on ANC’s left-wing militants.

And so Rhodesia gears up for armed struggle and guerrilla war. To combat existing guerrilla war, the Smith regime has already herded 200,000 black Africans in the northeast into concentration camps called “protected villages”. This follows the pattern of oppression set by minority regimes to fight against guerrillas: to cut the guerrillas off from their peasant supporters. The Spaniards began this brutal policy when fighting against the Cuban rebels in the 1890’s; it was continued by the British in the Boer War, and by the U.S. in suppressing the Philippine rebellion at the turn of this century. And it was used again, of course, by the U.S. in South Vietnam. The peasants are driven away from their homes and properties, are placed behind barbed wire, and are systematically searched and forced to carry identity cards. No one is being allowed to return to their old village homes. This vicious tactic did not work in Vietnam and it will not work now.

And so the first minority racist regime to be toppled in southern Africa will be Rhodesia, and the fanatical stubbornness of the Smith regime insures that the overthrow will be at the point of a gun, by guerrilla war. Next to go will be Namibia (Southwest Africa), seized “illegally” (against UN edicts) by the Republic of South Africa. Namibia, too, has a thin layer of white rulers over a great majority of blacks. With Namibia bordering Angola on the south, the victory of the MPLA against the U.S. aided factions and against invading South African troops means that Angola can now serve as a base for guerrilla war against its rule in Namibia. The political and guerrilla resistance forces there are led by SWAPO (the South West African People’s Organization.) Realizing that its regime in South West Africa is doomed, the South African regime has been following the Vorster policy of trying to leave the land in the hands of puppet blacks; it has, for example, offered autonomy to Namibia, but has specifically excluded SWAPO, backed by the great majority of Namibians, from legal rule.

U.S. imperialism is in a tough spot in these coming battles; it would like to preserve “stable” and “pro-American” white rule in these countries, but it is officially committed to opposing the white racist regimes. Kissinger has therefore been making ambivalent and contradictory statements about a future U.S. role in the guerrilla struggles to come. Unfortunately, the warhawk Reagan campaign has already borne bitter fruit for the cause of international peace and U.S. non-intervention. For, goaded by all-out support for Reagan among the embittered Cuban emigres in Florida, the Ford-Kissinger regime has been moving toward a policy so bizarre and warlike that even the hysterically anti-Communist TV commentator, Dr. Martin Abend, has strongly criticized it for courting World War III. In short, the U.S. will keep hands off Rhodesia and Namibia provided that none of the Cuban troops in Angola will be used in the fray. The problem is that since the U.S. cannot intervene in southern Africa directly without openly siding with white racism, the threat is to retaliate with force against Cuba itself! Kissinger has hinted about a U.S. blockade around Cuba to retaliate against any use of Cuban troops in southern Africa. But this would mean that Russian ships and air transports would have to be destroyed, and World War III would then be upon us.

And so, to prove to the Republican right that it, too, is just as anti-Castro as anyone else, we are now in danger of World War III over what will be, indirectly but clearly, a defense of fascist and white racist regimes in southern Africa. This policy is a monstrosity that must be stopped; the quickest way to stop it is to dispose of Reagan as soon as possible in the coming primaries. The very existence of the human race is at stake.

There are trouble spots in other parts of Africa, but none with the grave implications of the southern Africa struggles. In Western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara), King Hassan II of Morocco was able to use his grandstanding “people’s march” to the border to induce the Spanish to leave and to allow Morocco and Mauritania to carve up Western Sahara against the express wishes of the Saharans, grouped into the political and guerrilla organization for national independence called POLISARIO (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguiat El-Hamra and Rio de Oro). Morocco’s aim was to grab the rich phosphate reserves of northern Western Sahara. Morocco’s despotic monarchical regime is — naturally — backed strongly by the United States, which uses its bases in Spain to funnel weapons to the Moroccan army.

The POLISARIO has already launched an effective guerrilla war against the imperial Morocco regime, and now controls the eastern desert; the capital city of Aiun has been virtually depopulated, as the Saharan people have fled to the independent zone. One weakness in the Moroccan occupation is the alliance with Mauritania, most of whose population support the Saharan independence movement, as does Algeria. Already, Morocco has grabbed the town of Daklah, supposedly allotted to Mauritania (in Rio de Oro, the southern half of Western Sahara) and a skirmish has already occurred between the troops of the two countries near Daklah. And yet, the Daddah regime in Mauritania continues to collaborate with the Moroccan imperialists, permitting Morocco to establish an air base, and to allow its army to be partly commanded by Moroccan (as well as French) “advisors.” In that way, the Mauritanian regime of Ould Daddah encourages the long-standing imperial Moroccan dreams of a “Greater Maghreb”, to include all of Western Sahara and Mauritania, as well as a significant chunk of western Algeria, under its sway. The Mauritanian alliance would disappear, however, if the Daddah regime were overthrown.

Meanwhile, in East Africa, France is finally preparing to leave its last imperial stronghold in Africa. Once called “French Somaliland”, the country now called “The Territory of the Afars and the Issas”, centers in the important port city of Djibouti, which commands a narrow southern neck of the Red Sea. The French changed the name some years ago, presumably to keep people from drawing the correct inference that the native population is ethnically linked with the Somali peoples of independent and anti-imperialist Somalia, bordering the French colony on the east.

As is typical of modern “neo-colonalism”, the French are planning to leave by installing a friendly puppet ruling elite in their place. In this case the elite is the minority tribe of Afars, who constitute 20,000 people out of the total population of 130,000. The French have relied on hand-picked Afars to run the territory since they annexed the land in 1862, and have rigged the electoral laws to give the Afars a comfortable majority in the colonial assembly. The French are preparing to turn over rule to their hand-picked Afar premier, Ali Aref.

The subject majority population is the Issa tribe, which spills over into the land of Somalia, whose cause is therefore backed by the Somalis. Most of the Afars live in the capital city of Djibouti, which is literally surrounded by mines and barbed wire, and guarded by the infamous French Foreign Legion, to keep out Issa “undesirables”; the barrier was erected after anti-French rebellions by the Issas in 1966. The French, not incidentally, expect to keep a substantial military presence in the country after they hand over “independence” to the Aref clique. Typical of Aref rule were the most recent colonial assembly elections in 1973, when Aref not only prevented Issas from running in the election, but also imported illegal Afar voters from Ethiopia, where about 200,000 Afars have their home.

Tension within the country is already coming to a boil. The main opposition party, the Popular African League for Independence, is led by the Issa Hassan Goulded; the PALI advocates total independence from France, and an end to the French military presence. Last December there was an attempted assassination of Aref, and a border clash between French Foreign Legion troops and Somali forces. A small Issa guerrilla force, the Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast, is operating out of Somalia bases.

A complicating factor is the role of Ethiopia. For many decades, the literal slave state of Ethiopia has been the main “pro-Western” country in East Africa. Even after the monstrous feudal despot Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown a few years ago, the secretive new “left-wing” military clique in charge of the country has continued to serve as a client state of the U.S. in the area. The basic reason is Ethiopian imperialism, since after World War II the victorious Allies enabled Ethiopia to seize and annex Arab Eritrea. Ethiopia has had its hands full in trying to suppress the guerrilla war of the Eritrean Liberation Front, and its attitude toward the Issas is much the same; for one thing, Ethiopia fears that if it does not aid Aref in putting down the Issas, that Aref would stimulate a rebellion among the Afar population of northern Ethiopia.

At any rate, one constant appears clear in the tangled web of conflicts throughout the African continent; in every case, the United States is hip-deep in intervention, and in every case on the wrong side, propping up minority elites and imperial rule.

The Lebanon Tragedy

We have received a letter from a friend and valued subscriber asking us to write on the terrible events in Lebanon; apparently, he has been getting flak from his archist friends blaming the calamity on — of all things — anarcho-capitalism. Well, rest assured; there is government in Lebanon, and how!, and indeed that government is the root of the problem that has festered for years and erupted last year in continuing and massive bloodshed.

The fault begins, as usual, with Western imperialism — in this case France and, partially, Britain. At war with Turkey and its Ottoman Empire in World War I, the British, to gain the support of the Arabs suffering under imperial Turkish rule, promised the various submerged Arab countries their independence after the war. Instead, Britain and France, in a quest for the domination of Middle East oil, carved out “mandate” colonies in the Middle East, with France seizing historic Syria and Britain grabbing Palestine. More fatefully, Syria itself was carved up, with the British violating their agreement with the French by grabbing southwestern Syria and annexing it to Palestine (now northern Israel), and the French carving a separate province of Lebanon out of the Syrian coast.

It is true that Lebanon had been a separate region under the Ottomans, reflecting its historic status as a refuge for Maronite Christians in a Moslem (and Druze) region, the refuge having been found in the caves and mountains of the coastal Lebanon range just north of the city of Beirut. Preserving historic Lebanon as a separate Christian entity made a great deal of sense, but a fateful decision was made by the French: to add to historic Lebanon Moslem areas of coastal Syria to the north and the south of the Beirut-mountain Christian preserve. For the French, this meant that their naval guns could dominate the entire ex-Syrian coast; and for the grasping Christians, this meant that their slim population majority over expanded Lebanon could permit them to dominate the Moslems politically and economically. The continuing intervention of Syria during the 1975 troubles is explained by the fact that Syrian regards northern and southern Lebanon (outside of the old north-central Christian enclave) as their own land.

In 1932, a census was held in the greater Lebanon, revealing a waferthin Christian majority. A key to the recent civil war is the fact that a later census has never been held, for the simple reason that all parties know full well that the Moslem population has grown to be a large majority of the country. In 1943, the French declared Lebanese independence, feeling their empire to be in retreat as a result of the war; but they managed to engineer a complex religio-political quota system throughout the Lebanese government, riveting the Maronite Christian minority into permanent political control over the now Moslem majority (a majority never detailed because of the French-Christian refusal to hold a later census.)

This system, fastening Maronite Christian political control upon the country, has continued to govern Lebanon ever since, and it is the festering protest of the growing Moslem majority that has led to the current and tragic Civil War.

The reader need have only one guess on which party the United States has been backing ever since World War II; that’s right — the militant ultra-right wing of the Maronite Christians, headed by the current Minister of Interior Camille Chamoun and the fascist para-military forces of the Christian Phalange, led by Pierre Gemayel. In fact, in 1958, the Eisenhower administration, absurdly scenting a “Soviet plot” to take over Lebanon, landed 15,000 American Marines on the Lebanese beaches to save the regime of then-President Chamoun from an insurrection against his uncontitutional attempt (even within the biassed pro-Christian constitution) to perpetuate himself in power.

Fortunately, however, good sense seems to have struck Washington in this particular area, and the United States steadfastly refused to intervene in the Lebanese civil war of 1975-76, and even restrained their pro-Maronite Israeli allies from doing so. As a result, there is at least a possibility that the current truce will last, and will not precipitate a global conflict. But the newly agreed upon reforms, granting the Moslems a bit more parity in the government, are scarcely enough to allay Moslem grievances, and so the future remains in doubt. After failing to win the civil war (to say the least) the Maronites began to call belatedly for partition in Lebanon (i.e. roughly for a return to the original Lebanese boundaries) but, unfortunately, it looks as if the Moslems, after decades of grievances and after so much bloodshed, will refuse to accept it. And so — as in the case of bleeding Northern Ireland — a partition reflecting religious realities, and putting an end to the tragedy, remains only in the realm of theory.

Capitalism, Socialism, And Bureaucratic Management

By Dave Osterfeld

It is commonly held that the unplanned “anarchic” nature of capitalist production necessitates bureaucratic regulation to prevent economic chaos. Thus the prominent Hungarian Marxist, Andras Hegedus, argues that bureaucracy is merely “the by-product of an administrative structure” that separates the workers from the actual management of the economy. Since the owners make the decisions everyone must ultimately take their orders from this small group. Since that would be impracticable in an industrial economy, the problem must be handled by a division of responsibility which in turn entails layers of bureaucracy. The capitalists make the decisions which are then filtered down the bureaucratic pyramid. This means that the workers must wait to be told what to do by their immediate superiors who in turn must wait for instructions from their superiors, etc.

It is important to realize that Hegedus believes that these bureaucratic features are a product of capitalism itself, rather than the nature of large-scale production. “Where capitalist property relations prevail,” he says, “it is futile to fight against bureaucracy . . . . To change the situation it is necessary first of all to eliminate private ownership of the means of production.” Bureaucracy, he continues, was the “inevitable consequence of the development of property relations at a given stage in the division of labor and in economic integration. Consequently, it is also inevitable . . . that at some point there will be no further need for an administrative apparatus separated from society, because subjective and objective conditions will be ripe for direct social self-administration.” In plain English Hegedus is saying that because capitalism separates the worker from the control of industry production would be uncoordinated and chaotic were there not some agency for the transmission of knowledge. This is the function performed by bureaucracy under capitalism. Since under socialism the workers will make all of the industrial decisions there will be no coordination problem in such a society. Bureaucracy will no longer be necessary and will be discarded. But, other than vague appeals to “democratize the administrative apparatus” and calls for a “healthy mobility in all areas of administration,” he is vague on just how socialism will accomplish this.[1] Since Hegedus’ views, particularly regarding the bureaucratic nature of capitalism, are not uncommon, it is time they be critically examined.

The Three Problems of Coordination.

Israel Kirzner notes that there are three problems of coordination that must be solved in any socio-economic system: (1) the problem of priorities, i.e., what goods and services should be produced; (2) the problem of efficiency, i.e., what combination of resources used in the production of a given commodity will leave the largest bundle of resources left over for the production of other goods and services; and (3) the problem of distribution, i.e., how to compensate each participant in the system for his contribution to the productive process.[2] The role of bureaucratic management can best be analyzed by seeing how both capitalism and socialism approach these problems as well as how well they can solve them.

Priorities. Within a market system priorities are set by the consumers’ buying and abstention from buying. Entrepreneurs, anxious to maximize their profits, will tend to produce those goods with the greatest discrepancy between price and cost. Since the consumers are willing to pay more for goods they desire most intensely, the prices of these goods, other things being equal, tend to be higher than those of the less intensely desired goods. Thus the goods that the members of society deem most important are the ones that, without the need for any conscious bureaucratic direction, are first and most plentifully produced in a capitalist system.

A common criticism of this type of reasoning is that there are many examples where the market cannot be said to reflect the priorities of the consumers. It is assumed, for example, that bread is more important than diamonds while it is noted that the price of diamonds is much greater than that of bread. The error in this criticism is that individuals are never confronted with a choice between diamonds in the abstract, and bread in the abstract. Instead, that choose between individual units of bread and diamonds. Since under normal conditions the quantity of bread greatly exceeds that of diamonds, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction caused by the addition or loss of any particular unit of bread, i.e., its marginal utility, is relatively low compared with that of any unit of diamonds. Were, by some quirk of fate, the quantity of bread greatly reduced or that of diamonds significantly increased, the marginal utility of the units of bread and diamonds would be altered causing the price of bread to rise and that of diamonds to fall. It can therefore be seen that the market does indeed reflect the priorities of the consumers and does so without the need for any bureaucratic direction. In fact, bureaucracy could only impede consumer satisfaction for, as Kirzner points out, “any non-market obstacles placed in the way of the pricing process thus necessarily interfere with the priority system that consumers have set up”[3]

Since socialism entails the elimination of the market, there is no mechanism by which priorities are established without conscious direction and control. Thus it is precisely socialism that cannot function without a burgeoning bureaucracy. A quick look at the planning process in the Soviet Union will clearly highlight the bureaucratic labyrinth endemic to even a moderately socialist economy.

In order to construct the plan for the coming year the planners must have as much data as possible on the state of the economy for the current year. This job is handled by the Central Statistical Administration, which alone employs several million people. This information is then conveyed to the State Planning Committee, or Gosplan. Priorities for the coming year are established by the Council of Ministers in conjunction with several other political agencies and communicated to Gosplan, which attempts to coordinate all of the priorities as well as balance the output targets for every industry in the economy with its estimate of the inputs required to produce them. The plan then travels down the planning hierarchy going first to the industrial ministries, then to the subministries, etc., down to the individual enterprises. In this way each firm is informed of the output levels that have been set for it, and the plan begins to ascend the planning hierarchy with each enterprise now in a position to calculate for itself the inputs necessary to produce the given level of output. As the plan travels upward both the input and output levels are adjusted according to a bargaining process between the enterprise manager and the central planners. The former attempts to underestimate his productive capacity and overestimate his resource requirements to make fulfillment of his part of the plan easier, while the latter does just the reverse. After finally reaching Gosplan the plan is surveyed in its entirety and the necessary corrections and adjustments are made. The plan is then sent back down the planning hierarchy with each enterprise being informed of its final production goals. And beyond this, of course, lie a host of government agencies required to insure compliance with the plan.[4]

Just what is this bureaucracy, which numbers into the tens of millions, able to accomplish? The first thing to notice is that despite the scientific jargon, its plans are in fact only guesses about what each individual consumer will want during the coming year. The estimates of the entrepreneur too, are guesses; however, there is a crucial difference: his are based on market data while those of the socialist planners, at least under pure socialism, are not. This means that the entrepreneur is not only in a better position to estimate consumer demand but, just as important, a wrong guess is immediately reflected on the market by a decline in sales. Since the loss of revenue prompts quick adjustments, any incorrect guess tends to be self-correcting. But under socialism, the plant manager need not worry about selling his product but only fulfilling his production quota. Consequently (1) quality tends to suffer since managers try to find the easiest and quickest way to fulfill their quotas, and (2) production continues, regardless of whether anyone wants the products, until the plan is altered by Gosplan. But if production of unneeded goods takes place in some areas, needs in others must remain unfulfilled. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Soviet Union is regularly plagued by gluts of some items and acute shortages of others. When quotas for the shoe and nail industries were set according to quantity, for example, production managers in the nail industry found that it was easiest to meet their quotas by producing only small nails, while those in the shoe industry made only small shoes. This meant gluts of small nails and children’s shoes and shortages of large nails and adults’ shoes. But setting quotas by weight meant the opposite: gluts of large fat nails and adults’ shoes. Similarly, since the dress-makers don’t have to sell their products they don’t have to worry about style preferences. The result is periodic warehouses full of unwanted dresses. And at another time the Soviet Union found itself in the embarrassing position of having only one size of men’s underwear — and that only in blue.[5]

Thus it is not surprising that the quality of consumer goods in the Soviet Union is notoriously low, the average standard of living is about one-quarter to one-third that of the United States, and so many goods are in short supply that one must stand in line three to four hours each day just to get basic necessities.[6] While capitalism can function with a minimum of bureaucracy, we have seen that socialism, far from eliminating it, requires a host of bureaucratic agencies. These are necessary in order to (1) collect the data for the construction of the plan, (2) formulate the plan, and (3) inspect the plants to insure that the plan is being carried out. The extent of this bureaucracy in the Soviet Union is indicated by a remark of a few years ago by the noted mathematician, V. M. Glushkov, that if it continued to expand at its current rate, by 1980 the planning bureaucracy would have to employ the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Moreover, an overview of bureaucratic management must call its performance into serious question.

Efficiency. Turning to production we find the same results. Under capitalism the problem of the efficient allocation of resources is solved in the same way that the problem of priorities was solved: the price system. To produce their goods the entrepreneurs must bid for the needed resources. They therefore stand in the same relation to the sellers of resources as the consumers do to the sellers of final goods. Thus prices for the various factors of production tend to reflect the demand for them by the entrepreneurs. Since what the entrepreneur is able to offer is limited by his expected yield on the final sale of his product, the factors of production are thereby channelled into the production of the most intensely desired goods. Those who best serve the consumers earn the greatest profits and, hence, can offer the highest bids for the resources they need.

In short, the market is a highly interdependent mechanism that, without any bureaucratic direction, is able to achieve exactly what Hegedus thought impossible: the transmission of knowledge to the relevant individuals. If, for example, steel should become more scarce, either because part of its supply has been depleted or a new use for it opened up, its price would rise. This would both (1) force the users of steel to cut back on their purchases, and (2) encourage the suppliers to increase their production. Not only are the actions of all market participants automatically coordinated by these price fluctuations, but the individuals involved do not even have to know why prices rise or fall. They need only observe the price fluctuations and act accordingly. As F. A. Hayek states, “The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates . . . . The marvel is that without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to . . . move in the right direction.”[7]

It is also important to point out that even within an enterprise bureaucracy is kept to a minimum. First, if a firm becomes bureaucratically top-heavy it will be undersold and, if reforms are not made, put out of business by less bureaucratically structured enterprises. And second, as Ludwig von Mises notes, “There is no need for the general manager to bother about the minor details of each section’s management . . . . The only directive that the general manager gives to the men whom he entrusts with the management of the various sections, departments, and branches is: Make as much profit as possible. And an examination of the accounts shows him how successful or unsuccessful they were in executing the directive.”[8]

But in a pure socialist economy the entire apparatus of the market would be absent. All decisions regarding the allocation of resources and economic coordination would have to be made manually by the planning board. In an economy like that of the Soviet Union, which has over 200,000 industrial enterprises, this means that the number of decisions that the planning board would have to make each year would number into the billions. This already Herculean task would be made infinitely more difficult by the fact that in the absence of market data they would have no basis to guide their decisions. This problem became evident in the only attempt to establish a pure socialist, i.e., non-market, economy: the “War Communism” period in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1921. By 1920, average productivity was only ten percent of the 1914 volume with that of iron ore and cast iron falling to 1.9 and 2.4 percent of their 1914 totals. In the early 1920’s “War Communism” was abandoned and since that time production has been guided by means of restricted domestic markets and by coopting the methods determined in the foreign Western markets.

The task of the Soviet planners is greatly simplified by the existence of these limited markets, but the fact that they are so limited means that the economy still operates inefficiently and suffers from two problems inherent in bureaucratic management: incessant bottlenecks and industrial autarchy.

Since it is simply impossible for one agency to be able to familiarize itself with every nuance and peculiarity of every plant in the entire economy, much less to be able to plan for every possible contingency for a year in advance, the planners are forced to make decisions based on summary reports. Further, they must established broad categories of classes which necessarily gloss over countless differences between firms. Consequently, every plan contains numerous imbalances which surface only while the plan is being implemented. Since there is no market, these surpluses and shortages cannot work themselves out automatically but can only be altered by plan adjustments made by Gosplan. Thus, shortage of good A cannot be rectified unless or until so ordered by the planning board. But plan adjustment in one area will have ramifications throughout the economy. To alleviate the shortage of good A, resources will have to be transferred from the production of good B. Since this will reduce the planned-for output of B, the output of those industries dependent upon B will likewise have to be re-evaluated, etc., in ever widening circles. Empirical evidence bears out the economic theory. Paul Craig Roberts notes that what goes under the pretentious claim of planning in the Soviet Union is merely “the forecasting of a target for a forthcoming few months by adding to the results of the previous months a percentage increase.” Yet, even this “plan” is “changed so often that it is not congruous to say that it controls the development of events in the economy.” The planning bureaucracy, he goes on to say, simply functions as “supply agents for enterprises in order to avoid free price formation and exchange on the market. . . .” While this appearance of central planning “satisfies the ideology,” the “result has been irrational signals for managerial interpretation, and the irrationality of production in the Soviet Union has been the consequence.”[9]

Thus the evidence indicates that the perennially disappointing Soviet grain harvests are far more a result of the system than the weather, for even in “peak planting and harvest seasons as many as one third of all machines in a district may be standing idle because there are no spare parts. Central planners are acutely aware of the need for spares . . . yet the management system seems unable to match up parts with machines that need them.”[10] The problem of bottlenecks is nothing new, as indicated by a report of some time ago: “the Byelorussian Tractor Factory, which has 227 suppliers, had its production line stopped 19 times in 1962 because of lack of rubber parts, 18 times because of ball bearings, and eight times because of transmission components.” The same writer notes that “the pattern of breakdowns continued in 1963.”[11] Perhaps the absurd lengths to which attempts at central planning can be carried is illustrated in an incident reported by Joseph Berliner. A plant inspector, with the job of seeing why a plant had fallen behind on its delivery of mining machines found that the “machines were piled up all over the place.” When he asked the manager why he didn’t ship them out he was told that according to the plan the machines were to be painted with red paint but the manager only had green and was afraid to alter the plan. Permission was granted to use green, but only after considerable delay since each layer of the bureaucracy was also afraid to authorize a plan change on its own and so sent the request to the next highest agency. Meanwhile, the mines had to shut down while the machines piled up in the warehouses.[12]

The problem of bottlenecks is closely connected with that of organizational autarchy. Plant managers are awarded according to whether or not they have fulfilled their production quotas. To avoid becoming a victim of a bottleneck, and thus not fulfilling the quota, the tendency emerged for each industry to control receipt of its own resources by producing them itself. “Each industry,” says David Granick. “was quite willing to pay the price of high-cost production in order to achieve independence.” In 1951 only 47 percent of all brick production was carried out under the Ministry of Industry and Construction Materials. And by 1957 116 of the 171 machine-tool plants were outside the appropriate industry, despite the fact that their production costs were in some cases up to 100 percent greater.[13] To combat this tendency Nikita Khrushchev re-organized the economy in 1957 by setting up 105 Regional Economic Councils to replace the industrial ministries. In the absence of other reforms, however, he merely succeeded in substituting “localism” for “departmentalism,” as each economic region endeavored to become self-sufficient. To counter this the economy was further centralized in 1963 but this only increased inefficiency by further rigidifying an already inflexible economy. Unable to find the key to efficient planning, 1965 marked yet another significant step toward a return to a market economy. These reforms not only introduced a limited profit system but also called for “a high degree of local autonomy for producers and suppliers. Detailed planning of every important aspect of production would disappear, to be replaced by minimal direct guidance from above.”[14]

Distribution. Turning to the final area we again find that capitalism is the enemy of bureaucracy. Under capitalism, production is for profit. Capital and labor constantly flow to where they can obtain the greatest return. As can be seen, there can be no separation between production and distribution, for those individuals who, in the eyes of the consumers, render the greatest services to “society” are precisely the ones who reap the greatest rewards.

Turning to socialism, it is difficult to say much in theoretical terms about the way in which wealth is distributed since there are a number of conceivable bases for distribution: equality, need, merit and services rendered to society. It should be obvious, however, that the implementation of any of these would require conscious bureaucratic direction. It should also be pointed out in this context that the attempts to establish strict equality have never been successful and probably never will be. This is so for two reasons. First, to spur output the Soviet Union, for example, has always had to rely heavily on a bonus system for its plant managers and the piece-rate system for workers. The saliency of the bonus system is seen in the fact that while in 1934 bonuses equalled about four percent of a manager’s salary, today it often reaches one-half, with bonuses in some industries comprising as much as eighty percent of income.[15] And second, in any society where the state controls all the essential facets of the economy there is a natural temptation for those in control of the government to use their political power to obtain economic privileges. Thus it is not surprising that the 1917 revolution, regardless of intentions, only resulted in the replacement of one privileged elite by another.[16] One example will illustrate this point. There are a host of “special shops” in the Soviet Union selling everything from food to jewelry. These stores, which are allegedly for the benefit of foreign tourists, have high quality merchandise at below cost prices in order to compensate the tourist for the government’s artificially high exchange rate for rubles. However, James Wallace points out that “high-ranking Government officials, senior military officials and upper ranks in the Communist Party are all privileged to shop in these stores as a fringe benefit of their jobs.” They are therefore able to buy “hard-to-get goods for a fraction of the prices their neighbors pay for often-lower-quality merchandise.”[17]

It is a revealing sidelight, and one that should be especially noted by those who condemn capitalism for its unequal “distribution” of wealth, that there is greater inequality of wealth in the more socialist countries like the Soviet Union than in the relatively more market-oriented economies such as the United States.[18] This, moreover, is not a historical accident but in conformity with economic theory. For under capitalism there is a natural tendency for capitalists to invest in areas with a low wage level, thereby forcing those rates up to a level commensurate with that of other areas doing the same work, while workers in low pay jobs tend to migrate to areas where pay is higher. Similarly, entrepreneurs invest in areas manifesting high profits. But the increased output forces prices and profits in those areas to fall. In short, while capitalism will never eliminate inequality, it does tend to reduce extremes of wealth and poverty.

Conclusion.

Under capitalism the price system performs the crucial function of transmitting knowledge throughout society and thereby eliminates the need for bureaucracy. But precisely because it eliminates the market, bureaucratic management is indispensable for a socialist economy. Furthermore, since there is an inverse relationship between central planning and the market, bureaucratic management is inherently contradictory. Its dilemma can best be summarized, perhaps, in the form of two planning paradoxes:

Paradox One: For central planning to be viable it needs market data to guide its decisions. But the greater the role of markets the less that of central planning. Conversely, the more extensive the area of central planning the more limited the market data, and hence the more inefficient must be the operation of the economy.

Paradox Two: If the planning board endeavors to maximize consumer satisfaction it merely does manually what the market does automatically. It is then just a wasteful, redundant entity. But if the planning agency plans operations that would not have been undertaken on the market, then that is an indication that the priorities set by the agency are in conflict with those of the consumers. It is clear that regardless of the course adopted by the agency the position of the consumers must be worse off than it would have been under a market economy .

References

[1] Andras Hegedus, “Marxist Theories of Leadership and Bureaucracy: A Marxist Analysis,” Political Leadership in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union Ed.: R. B. Farrell (Chicago, 1970), pp. 53-4.

[2] Israel Kirzner, Market Theory and the Price System (Princeton, 1963), pp. 36-8.

[3] Ibid., p. 39.

[4] For a good summary of this process see Herbert Levine, “Input-Output Analysis and Soviet Planning,” American Economic Review (May, 1962), pp. 128-31.

[5] See William Loucks and William Whitney, Comparative Economic Systems (New York, 1973), pp. 302-4; and Marshal Goldman, The Soviet Economy (Englewood Cliffs, 1968), pp. 92-4.

[6] Loucks and Whitney, pp. 322-26; and James Wallace, “In Classless Russia ‘Some Are More Equal Than Others,’” U.S. News and World Report (August 4, 1975), p. 35.

[7] F. A. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago, 1972), pp. 86-7.

[8] Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (New Rochelle, 1969), p. 33.

[9] Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy (Albuquerque, 1971), pp. 78-85.

[10] James Wallace, “Communist System’s Toll on Farms,” U.S. News and World Report (August 18, 1975), pp. 16-7.

[11] C. R. McConnell, “Some Fundamentals of Economic Planning in the Soviet Command Economy,” The Soviet Economy Ed.: Harry Shaffer (New York, 1968), p. 32.

[12] In David Granick, The Red Executive (New York, 1961), pp. 133-4.

[13] Ibid., p. 135.

[14] J. P. Hardt et al., “Institutional Stagnation and Changing Economic Strategy in the Soviet Union,” Man, State and Society in the Soviet Union Ed.: Joseph Nogee (New York, 1972), p. 183.

[15] Granick, p. 111.

[16] See Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York, 1968). Also see the interesting remarks on the Bolshevik Revolution by a Russian Anarcho-Syndicalist and contemporary of the Revolution, “M. Sergven,” in “The Paths of Revolution,” reprinted in Libertarian Analysis (Winter, 1970), pp. 9-12.

[17] Wallace, “Classless Russia,” p. 35.

[18] Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1969), p. 169.

*Mr. Osterfeld is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Cincinnati.

The State versus the Amish

By J.R.P

Review of:

Compulsory Education and the Amish: The Right Not to be Modern, edited by Albert N. Keim, Beacon Press, Boston 1975.

This work is another Valuable scholarly study of the hitherto sacred cow of compulsory education, an addendum to the superb papers published in 1974 under the title 12 Year Sentence: Radical Views on Compulsory Education, edited by William Rickenbacker, (Open Court Publishing Co.). This series of nine papers constitutes a case study of how compulsory education laws operate upon individuals and communities, demonstrating in vivid detail their power to harass parents and children, destroy family relationships, coerce whole communities into succumbing to majority cultural values or be jailed, persecuted or hounded into exile. Editor Albert Keim, himself raised in an Amish community, presents a cogent and sensitive explanation of the Amish world view and the practical consequences of that upon their daily life and values. He then traces briefly the series of clashes which the Amish began to have from the late 1920’s with various school authorities over compulsory schooling for their children, and presents the dangers seen by the Amish in such forced schooling. Prof. Donald Erickson undertook a personal investigation of three significant Amish cases in the 1960’s in Iowa and Kansas which he reports in great detail, showing the bureaucratic politics and local cultural prejudices which combined to crush the unpopular Amish under the whip of the compulsory school laws. The last four papers concern the landmark Supreme Court decision, Wisconsin vs. Yoder, in which, for the first time, a breach was made in the State’s absolute power to impose school attendance on all children regardless of the wishes or religious beliefs of their parents. Most important for libertarians is to consider why this case turned out differently from so many earlier ones; almost certainly the key to victory was the moral and financial support and broad media mobilization which was brought to bear in the Wisconsin case by a citizens’ committee composed of non-Amish clergymen, lawyers and civil libertarians who were able successfully to generate wide public sympathy for the Amish people’s right to be different. The last essay by Leo Pfeffer, a lawyer who is particularly sensitive to violations of separation of Church and State, is alone worth the price of the book. His analysis of the Wisconsin vs. Yoder decision explains how the Amish may have won at the expense of the court’s establishing special privileges for their Church to the exclusion of other religious people, weakening the so-called “wall of separation” and opening itself to all kinds of future difficulties. The appendix gives the complete text of this Supreme Court decision, itself a fascinating revelation of the tortured logic of the eminent jurists who decide what the rules of our society are to be. Any civil libertarian, anyone anxious to break the monopoly of public education, any student of our pluralistic society at work will want to add this stimulating work to his library. And those libertarians who hope that they can survive in what historian William Marina calls the “interstices” of a culturally hostile society will find provocative food for thought in this case study of the Old Order Amish.

Foreign Affairs

By Leonard P. Liggio*

UNITED STATES OF EUROPE?

April 1 is the beginning of discussions on increased union among the European states. The objective is to move toward an elected parliament of the European community. Especially in France there is opposition to a super-state and its parliament. The Communists and right-wing Gaullists oppose any infringement on France’s nationalism; while the Socialists oppose a parliament unless based on proportional representation. But elsewhere the Christian, Socialist and Liberal-Free Democratic parties are forming transnational political coalitions. The Free Democratic German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, wants a European foreign policy, as on Angola and Western Sahara, so as to have a unified foreign policy, mainly to back the US, but against it in the case of American cut-off of aid to Turkey. France opposes a common foreign, policy as a restriction on its nationalism, as in its opposition to the US on Angola, where it supported the MPLA.

The important decision will be selecting a new president for the European Economic Community, for the present president, F-X. Ortoli, is retiring to return to politics. Also, the industry minister of EEC, Altiero Spinelli, will retire due to age. Likely to remain as ministers are Carlo Scarascia Mugnozza, Wilhelm Haferkamp and Dr. Patrick Hillery, along with the classical liberals, Albert Borschette, minister of competition, and Hans-Dietrich Brunner, the research minister, who is expected to become external relations minister. The present external relations minister, former English ambassador to France, Sir Christopher Soames, son-in-law of Winston Churchill, is the prime candidate for president of EEC. He is supported by Harold Wilson and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, but not by James Callaghan. Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, conservative leader would like Soames to return to parliament as shadow foreign minister for a conservative government of the future. Instead of Soames, Thatcher would like to have former prime minister, Edward Heath, go to Brussels as EEC president. Too clever by half! Meanwhile, Labor chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, stole a march on the Tories by announcing the need for extreme budget cuts, less social spending and not pressing for further nationalized industry.

FRANCE AND ITALY

The big issue in French and Italian politics is the role of the Communist parties. In Paris, Nelson Rockefeller warned the French and Italians that the US will end its alliances with them if they allow Communist participation. This echoes Kissinger’s statements. In France, elections for the General Councils of the 95 departments showed a majority vote for the left-communists, 22.8%, socialists, 26.5%, and Radicals of the Left, 5%. President Giscard’s Independent Republicans gained, but his ally, the Gaullist party, lost. This points to a socialist-communist victory in parliamentary elections in 1978. The communists in France and Italy were strengthened by their outspoken independent line at the recent Moscow congress of the Soviet Communist party. President Giscard will have to continue the popular anti-US foreign policy to maintain a strong political initiative. The interior minister, Michel Poniatowski, has lost the administration much support over his handling of the Corsican self-determination movement, along with those of the Bretons, the southern French of the Midi and the Octians, of the Southwest. Also, Giscard’s economic ‘reforms’ will not gain support. The proposed capital gains tax would have fewer teeth than the British model, and they would be felt mainly by stockbrokers, antique dealers, art salesmen and auctioneers. But then the French are an acquisitive people, and it is not just the wealthy or conservative who loathe the concept of taxing capital gains. According to one opinion poll, 61% of even Communist voters are opposed to the bill. If American liberals and social democrats want to learn how to gain popularity they should learn from the French communists’ acquisitiveness and their opposition to capital gains taxes.

In Italy, events are moving to the Historical Compromise (compremesso storico) of a joint Communist-Christian Democratic cabinet. For the first time, the premier, Aldo Moro, held a ninety-minute talk with Communist party leader, Enrico Berlinguer. This was the result of the request by the leader of the highly respected Italian Republican party, Ugo La Malfa, that the Communists be included in the cabinet. Communist leader Giorgio Amendola declared that the Communists would carry out an extreme austerity program once they were included in the government. Although the Catholic trade unions are more radical, that would mean that the Communist-led unions, having the most members, would keep industrial peace. For that reason the leading industrialists have been urging Communist membership in the cabinet. As evidenced in Portugal, Communist commitment to central control and planning makes them excellent discipliners of worker demands. The strong Marxist hatred of inflation makes their concerns coincide with those of capital owners. Italian money markets, after closing for forty days, were opened with a major anti-inflation program of the government, but to get parliamentary approval and union discipline, the Communists are the basic ingredient. The Italian Socialist party — which was led into a coalition with the Christian Democrats a dozen years ago by Pietro Nenni — are demanding Communist inclusion before they will support austerity. This plan of their leader, Francesco De Martino, is challenged by left-wing socialists, led by Sr. Lombardi, which demands a government coalition of Socialists and Communists without the Christian Democrats. The Communists reject this. They want a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats so as to insure that there is strong popular support for difficult economic measures, so as to neutralize Vatican opposition, and to maintain continuity of government since the Christian Democrats have ruled for thirty years. Also the Christian Democrats have no moral credibility, especially as a result of the Lockheed bribes. The Communists would restore a moral cover to the government. The Communists have just joined the Socialists and the Social Democrats in a coalition regional government in Latium, whose capital is Rome. This is a result of a left-wing shift of the Social Democrats at their recent national congress.

But the Christian Democrats have the one thing the Communists need — a hegemonic position, the capacity for decision-making for a general public and not limited constituencies. The Christian Democrats have the tradition of ‘Consensus politics’ which the Communists need desperately to learn if they wish to be successful. Although a former leader, present defense minister, Arnaldo Forlani, an ally of the American puppet, Amantore Fanfani, is attempting to prevent the Historical Compromise, the party leader, pediatrician Benigno Zaccagnini, and premier Aldo Moro, require Communist participation in the austerity program. Although Communist rule in regional governments are giving them a sense of the attitudes required for decision-making, for hegemony, they still have a lot to learn. The Communists model themselves after technicians and business managers, because they mistakenly think that they are the decison-makers in a capitalist society. They are misguided by the entrepreneur fallacy, the belief that managers make decisions. In a capitalist society it is capitalists, owners of money, who make the decisions by their day-to-day investments, as the current monetary situation in Italy shows clearly. The decisions that a manager makes are far different than the considered judgment of the capital owner. Long study, care, restraint, abstinence from action as the highest form of action by the capitalist, are the real decisions. The Communists are just realizing that, but having trained themselves as technicians and managers, they have few if any real decision-makers, few if any capable of hegemonic leadership. While Communists are all ‘business’ with long-hours in their offices, the Christian Democrats at their March convention displayed the height of their hegemonic capacity — no lunch shorter than three hours. Important decisions are not made in offices, but in leisure, in study, in conversation. Real decisions take time, and in an atmosphere that reflects time. In Italy, important decisions cannot be taken in offices, only in a home, a club, and especially out of doors (walls have ears) during a leisurely stroll. When Moro and Berlinguer are known to have talked outside of an office, we will know that decisions were being made — and that the Communists are learning hegemonic leadership.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

Volume IX No. 4

April, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

FLP Split!

The big libertarian political news from New York is the defection from the Free Libertarian Party of nine of its leading members, including four of its former candidates for office, and two of its former chairmen. Of the nine, three have resigned from the FLP outright (Childs, Millen, and Rothbard), while the other six remain, in the words of the joint statement of the nine published below, “alienated, but continuing to do what they can for our cause . . . on their own.” All of them have “disengaged” from the FLP.

The walkout was precipitated by the events at the recent FLP annual convention (March 26-28) but the causes have been brewing for a long time. Basically, the recent convention demonstrated that what I have called the “left sectarian” faction in control of the FLP was determined on continuing and escalating its long-standing campaign of personal slander and abuse against ourselves and against the national LP leadership. The campaign, orchestrated by what the Statement calls “an absurd Robespierre (Howard S. Katz), suspecting treachery and lack of virtue everywhere”, has been conducted, as the Statement declares, “on the assumption, of course, that the victims would always be there, passively allowing themselves to be the butt of the ill-will of others.” The Statement announces that “this particular show has now folded in New York, because those who were cast as the antagonists of the People of Virtue have simply walked off the stage.”

The Statement speaks of anger and sorrow as two leading emotions held by those of us who have walked off the stage. My own dominant emotion is relief, relief at no longer having to be in a symbiotic relationship with those who control the FLP. For beyond the personal abuse, there is the vital point stressed by Roy Childs in his letter of resignation to the FLP, published below: that the FLP, in the hands of the sectarian faction, is a gross fraud, a fraud on those of its members who believed they were joining what the FLP purports to be: a political party. When I joined the FLP three years ago, there were flourishing clubs within the party that devoted themselves to studying and acting upon political issues. For that, after all, is what a libertarian political party is supposed to be doing: taking a public lead in applying libertarian principles to the vital, burning political issues of the day. But those clubs have long since evaporated, and in the last couple of years, the FLP has shown no interest whatever in any political issues. What did the FLP say or do about such leading political issues of 1975-76 as Angola or the New York City default crisis? The answer is Nothing, and the same is true about all the other vital issues. The FLP doesn’t even have a platform. Instead, under the control of the People of Virtue, they have devoted all of their energies to sniffing out alleged moral impurity in fellow libertarians.

I have used the term “sectarian” in analyzing this faction, but even this term gives them too much credit. Thus, when, recently, the Mid-Hudson chapter of the FLP egregiously violated libertarian principle to the extent of calling for a sales tax (!) — a resolution that was later overturned by the narrowest of margins — our “purists” indicated that they couldn’t care less. To them, the content of libertarian ideology is a secondary and unimportant matter, far less important than sniffing out alleged philosophical immorality among libertarians who have never violated the content of libertarian principle. It is truly a bizarre situation.

I say that “relief” is my own dominant emotion at resigning from the FLP because, quite simply, for a long time I have not in good conscience been able to advise new and budding libertarians to join the FLP — an organization that displays no interest in political issues but only in personal and insufferably self-righteous abuse of their colleagues. And so it dawned ever more clearly: why should I continue to belong to an organization that I cannot recommend anyone else to join? That inner contradiction is now happily resolved.

My parting words to the Katznik faction is this stanza from Bobbie Burns’ great poem, An Address to the Unco Guid:

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel’

Sae pious and sae holy,

Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell

Your neebour’s fauts and folly.

As the Statement makes clear, we nine defectors continue to support enthusiastically the MacBride-Bergland Presidential ticket — indeed, that is one of the key issues in the split. The three resigners continue to be national members of the Libertarian Party.

A STATEMENT

Concerned with the mischievous course which the Free Libertarian Party has come increasingly to pursue; mindful of the need to bring about a reappraisal and a redirection of the FLP; and attentive to the respect which we owe to ourselves, we the undersigned disengage ourselves, in varying degrees, from the FLP.

The causes which have led us to this action are many. In the case of some of us, we have been struggling against them — tediously, and at great emotional cost — for years. Others of us have only recently become aware of the deep problems which a certain faction continues to generate in our Party.

The faction whose conduct has occasioned our suspension of support has been guilty of harassment, of gossip-mongering, of character assassination and of the petty personal sniping that finally saps anyone’s will to persevere in any organization — even one dedicated to the noble ideals of the FLP. Acts of spite and irresponsible accusations go back a long time with members of this faction. Some of the more recent ones are as follows:

Our errors are presumed to have malicious intent, while theirs are merely “mistakes;” praise for good work, and acknowledgment of dedication to our cause is systematically withheld from some (including our presidential candidate) — rather we are constantly subjected to suspicion and malicious speculation as to our “real” motives; unguarded comments of some of us have been greedily seized upon and blown up to the proportions of the Dreyfus case; other comments, published in private newsletters, have for some reason been made into the official business of the FLP; an absurd Robespierre, suspecting treachery and lack of virtue everywhere, is permitted — even encouraged — to impugn the integrity of his moral and ideological betters; the FLP newsletter has been used to savage libertarians who dissent from the editorial line; indeed, and finally, for those with no more pressing Libertarian work to do casting doubts on the integrity of other FLP members has developed into a kind of pastime, on the assumption, of course, that the victims would always be there, passively allowing themselves to be the butt of the ill-will of others. We hereby announce that this particular show has now folded in New York, because those who were cast as the antagonists of the People of Virtue have simply walked off the stage.

In announcing our disengagement from the FLP, we feel not only anger, but also sorrow. Some of us have dedicated years of effort to the FLP. All of us have cherished the idea of working with an FLP that was a community of women and men working together for the highest things we know, and a friendly haven from a crazy world — where we have always supposed our real adversaries are to be found.

The implacable wrong-headedness and vindictiveness of a powerful faction in the FLP has made all this impossible. The apathy and “who am I to judge” attitude of an acquiescent membership has become intolerable. Some of us are resigning outright; others will remain in the FLP, alienated, but continuing to do what they can for our cause — above all for the MacBride-Bergland ticket — on their own.

Walter Block

Andrea Millen

Murray N. Rothbard

Roy Childs

Ralph Raico

Jerry Tuccille

Gary Greenberg

Howard Rich

Fran Youngstein

LETTER OF RESIGNATION

by Roy A. Childs, Jr.

It is with something akin to sadness that I have decided to resign my membership in the Free Libertarian Party of New York. This decision, far from being merely a personal response to personal events at the last FLP convention, and far from being impulsive, has been made only after weeks of careful thought and consideration. I should like to lay out my reasons for resigning, so that there can be no misunderstanding concerning my motives.

I feel quite frankly that I have been defrauded by the FLP, that my membership fee was in fact solicited under false pretenses, and that I have not gotten what I have paid for.

When I was solicited to join the FLP, I was told that I was joining a political party. Since it was an avowedly Libertarian political party, I thought that its purposes and functions were clear: it would be concerned with political issues, and with organizing a consistent, unified and effective Libertarian response to the issues of the day. It would, I supposed, run candidates where appropriate, endorse other candidates when that was appropriate, and address the burning political issues of our time, in terms of fundamentals, in terms of principles, and in terms of specifics. This last I held to be particularly important, for without a concern for facts, no discussion of concrete political issues is possible. When I joined the party, immediately after moving to New York City from California, I was very enthusiastic about the FLP; here in the den of statism. I thought, there was no lack of important issues to address. It would be both exciting and important to address them. The FLP, I thought, was just the institution to mount a concerted attack on the foibles and policies of the day. It was a vehicle whereby important issues could be identified and sorted out from unimportant issues. It was an institution which could above all organize libertarian responses to issues. I was very excited, in short, about the prospects for the FLP, and had high hopes in joining the party.

I was wrong to have had those hopes, for in the past year, every one of them has been frustrated and thwarted. As I watched issue after issue arise. I witnessed a nightmare: Libertarians, uninterested in political events, calling themselves a political party, showing political judgment which was at best naive, at worst astonishingly superficial and wrongheaded. But above all, I witnessed in the FLP what I had earlier witnessed in the Society for Individual Liberty: impotence. As in earlier cases of the decay and destruction of Libertarian institutions and organizations, I watched the gradual takeover of the party by a particular spirit, a peculiar animating vision which can best be compared to the Objectivist discussion group of years past. Sterility, boredom and personal abuse had all become central to the FLP. I watched members of a political party give no thought to making effective use of opportunities which could only be described as monumental. Not only was there no serious thought or discussion about what the party should be doing, there was not even serious thought or discussion over who would be best in what office or in what campaign. There was never any effective, well-conceived response to any political issue. Instead, some people, whose comparative advantage apparently consists in their dubious ability to dissect other people’s motives and hidden plans, to invent plots and posture as moral leaders whom it would be laughable to emulate, have systematically thwarted any attempt to grapple with the issues of the real world.

There was no protest from the FLP about the Mayaguez incident. There was no concern over U.S. intervention in, of all places, Angola. There has been no protest against U.S. involvement in the Middle East, despite the fact that most FLP members live in the city from which the push for such intervention has come.

Although there are in this city several brilliant and eloquent libertarian feminists, there has been no renewed response to the renewed push by the the so-called “pro-life” lobby to impose a theocracy on the people of the United States, through their campaign against legalized abortion. What this campaign amounts to is nothing less than the attempt to impose the peculiar moral tenets of the Roman Catholic Church on the people of America. But there has been no outcry, no opposition, from the FLP. We have seen several attempts by the municipal unions, in the case of the garbage collectors, the cops, the firemen, the transit workers, to blackmail the people of New York City, to fleece them through taxation for their own personal financial gain. There has been no opposition from the FLP. We are in the midst of continuing enforcement of the vicious Rockefeller Drug Law, the most monstrous consumer-rights law ever to be passed in this nation since prohibition, a law which daily destroys the lives and hopes of countless numbers of people, people who are not articulate enough to defend themselves. Organized crime and the city police work hand in hand to divide the profits from drugs, and oppress several hundred thousand drug users. There has been no outrage expressed at these injustices from the FLP.

A massive financial breakdown has occurred in this city, with no one pointing a way out of the city’s difficulties, no arguments for privatizing city services, no opposition to federal bailing out of the city government, a government run by irresponsible shell-game artists and downright hoodlums. The FLP, in short, remained silent. In fact, there is not a single current issue of any importance that the FLP has concerned itself with. Instead of organizing opposition to these and other vitally important political events, to the actions of the local, state and federal governments, we have seen incredible (and immoral) wasting of resources and time on petty personal squabbles, and on minor issues light-years away from anything which could be remotely conceived of as important. We have seen fruitless social gatherings, bitching and infighting, slander and moral denunciations, all designed, apparently, to make serious discussion of important political issues all but impossible, and to drive those who are concerned solely with political issues, out of the Free Libertarian Party. It has now become impossible to recommend membership in the FLP to those coming upon Libertarianism for the first time. One whiff of the poisonous atmosphere at an FLP meeting would, very likely, alienate them forever.

For discussion of political issues to be impossible within an organization which calls itself a political party, is obscene. I for one cannot any longer tolerate this fraud, and I cannot lend my name or support to such an organization, however painful such a decision may be to me personally.

In sharp contrast to the machinations and irrelevancies of the FLP, there is the national Libertarian Party and the MacBride for President campaign. In my view, these are magnificent-models of what a libertarian political effort should be. We had no right last August to hope that the MacBride campaign would be anywhere near as successful as it has proven to be. I have been astonished at the consistently good political judgment shown: MacBride’s immediate response to Reagan’s view that we should “eyeball” the Russians over Angola, for example, or the press conference called to attack the Supreme Court decision on gay rights. Most of all, perhaps, there has been the distribution of vast quantities of good, solid literature on issues from a Libertarian perspective. Again and again good sound judgment has been manifested by Roger MacBride and his co-workers in this campaign.

If there was a concern immediately after the national LP convention as to what course a MacBride campaign would take, that concern should have evaporated. If there was a concern about the candor and honesty used in addressing issues, that concern should have passed. If there was a concern about the effectiveness with which Roger MacBride would speak out on the hard, tough issues in public, that concern should have been set aside. If there was a concern, in fact, about any major element of the MacBride campaign, that concern should have rationally been transformed into white-hot enthusiasm for the MacBride for President campaign. But it has not, not within the FLP at least, and the FLP’s reluctance to support MacBride in this critically important election year with every available resource constitutes my gravest complaint against the FLP.

Should the day come when the FLP rejects its petty factionalism, its discussion-group-mentality, and turns instead to an authentic concern with political issues, with the cause of advancing Liberty in our time, I shall be happy to give it my enthusiastic support. But I do not expect this to happen in the near future, since recent events have shown precisely how members of the FLP are prepared to treat those who are concerned, passionately concerned, with political issues. When one stops to realize that the only resolution passed by the FLP at its recent convention was concerned, in its state-of-nature format, with attacking and slandering Murray Rothbard, Andrea Millen, and myself, the true concern of party members becomes evident. These are not my concerns. Indeed, when I brought this up to several members of the self-appointed “purist” faction, it was suggested to me, in so many words, that that’s what we were for: Walter Block, Gary Greenberg, Andrea Millen, Ralph Raico, Howard Rich, Murray Rothbard, Jerry Tuccille, Fran Youngstein and myself were expected to come up with the resolutions and proposals for addressing issues, while the rest of the party members would, apparently, concern themselves with our moral character. Surely the only proper response to such an openly exploitative and manipulative outlook is for the victims to head for the nearest exit.

I believe in a great Rothbardian principle: that of demonstrated preference. This principle holds that individuals reveal their actual values, their actual preferences, in action. From what I have seen, then, the values of the members of the FLP are greatly at odds with my own. I am interested in addressing the important political issues which confront us It is a paradox of the FLP that perhaps I can best pursue this end by not being a member. I have come to that conclusion with a great deal of reluctance, but nothing will be helped if I continue to play a role in sustaining the fundamental evasion and self-deception of the members of the Free Libertarian Party of New York: that they are a political party, that they are interested in political issues, that they are interested in promoting and advancing Liberty. I cannot allow myself to hope for changes any longer, I cannot allow myself to waste any more time with a political party which is not concerned with politics, which means: with the events of the real world.

It is therefore with great sadness and disillusionment that I resign my membership in the FLP, and turn instead to those political issues which are my first concern and my first love. I wish things could have been different, but unless FLP members listen to reason, they will never be any different. The only loser, unfortunately, will be Liberty, and therefore the human race itself.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE FREE LIBERTARIAN:

by Walter Block

I object to your decision to print the “Declaration On Tactics for the LP” in the Jan.-Feb. issue of the Free Libertarian. The F.L.P. is supposed to be a political party, or so I thought when I joined; and political parties do not encourage smears, innuendoes and mud-slinging by one faction of the party against another. Even the Republicans have an eleventh commandment: not be vicious and nasty to each other. And the Democrats certainly would have fired any official responsible for allowing such an attack on one sector of their party by another. Political parties concentrate on attracting new members, gaining votes, and spreading their philosophy.

I object even more to your headlining the “Declaration.” As I hope to show in the main body of this letter, the sentiments expressed in it are completely at variance with the libertarian philosophy.

But even more than printing it at all, and headlining it, I must object most strenuously to your decision not to offer at least an equal amount of space to someone willing to express an opposite point of view. Certainly Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, and Roy Childs, who are mentioned by name, in an out-of-context attack, might have been offered an opportunity to reply, in the same issue. As far as I know, however, they have not even yet been offered an opportunity to reply, even to this date.

I shall now reply to the specifics of the arguments made in “LP Declaration of Tactics”. I shall reply at greater length, one, on the ground that it takes more effort to combat falsehood than merely to state it, and two, in order to correct the already existing injustice outlined above.

In my humble opinion, the essence of libertarianism is that it is wrong, immoral, evil, for anyone to initiate or threaten force or fraud against any other person — or his property. Everyone should be free to do exactly what he or she wants, provided that they respect the equal liberty of everyone else to do the same.

Libertarianism, as I see it, is an extremely limited philosophy. It’s a political philosophy, not a philosophy of life. As a political philosophy, it states that people have the right to use physical violence only in response to those who break the libertarian code and initiate violence. It’s not a philosophy of life stating how one can live the good life, setting out in fine detail how one may act in every conceivable situation. Practically the sole concern of libertarianism is that everyone keep his mitts off everyone else, unless, of course, he has that person’s permission.

The beauty of this version of libertarianism is that it allows for an amazing diversity. Only libertarianism gathers together all who believe in this limited philosophy. We’ve all seen businessmen with suits, ties, and vests mingling with flower children. We’ve all seen teetotalers and alcohol drinkers at libertarian functions. We’ve all seen pot smokers, acid heads, drug freaks — together with Murray Rothbard, the straightest of them all. We’ve seen priests, monogamists, family men, as the fellow libertarians of the gays, the sado-masochists, the leather freaks, and those into what they call “rational bestiality.” As Ralph Raico Stated in his keynote address to the FLP state convention, only libertarianism could gather together the homosexual motorcycle gang, the acid dropper fascinated by the price of silver, and the Puerto Rican nationalist immersed in the Austrian School of economics.

At one time I thought that virtually all those calling themselves libertarians agreed with this limited view of libertarianism. Since then, I’ve learned differently. For example, according to the “Declaration on Tactics for the LP”’s definition, the libertarian must be honest and truthful. In extreme variations, people can even be condemned for secrecy or concealment.

Now this version of libertarianism is socialism. For, surely, knowledge is an economic good. It is no different to compel full disclosure than to compel giving away any other economic good. But in the case where someone is told to give away his goods — we libertarians have a name for it: theft. Yet, in the FLP of New York, Roger MacBride was roundly condemned, on supposedly libertarian grounds, for not telling all, for not letting it all hang out. We must reject the view that secrecy and privacy are incompatible with libertarianism.

But we must reject the more moderate view. Lying violates no libertarian principle. Certainly, we can lie to a thief who demands to know where our money is. Surely, as a representative of the Libertarian Party, we could lie to a reporter who asked what we thought of the assassination of a president or king: if we thought he was a dictator and immoral, and felt it was justified to kill him, we’d certainly be justified in lying, especially since such thoughts are illegal.

Even if asked what time it is, there is no libertarian principle that says we cannot lie. Remember, I am operating under the libertarian principle that forbids force and fraud against persons or property, a principle whose sole purpose is to answer the question: When may force be legitimately employed? and answers — Only when force or fraud were used previously.

Now it may not be nice to lie, it may not be admirable. The person we give the wrong time to may get into all sorts of difficulties because he believes us. That’s tough. But society is not justified in using force against the liar. For the liar has not first initiated force himself. He is not acting contrary to libertarian principle.

We must, of course, distinguish lying from fraud. In fraud, as opposed to mere lying, there is a contractual relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. Fraud is logically equivalent to theft. It makes no difference if you rob someone of $1000, or charge him $1000 for a bag of gold which turns out to be filled with worthless rocks.

If you have a contractual relationship to tell someone the correct time whenever he asks, and you lie to him, you are guilty of fraud. You are actually stealing money from him in that you are not giving him the services for which he has paid you.

Giving the correct time is a valuable economic service. If a beggar on the street asks you for the correct time, you have a right to ignore him and remain silent, and you have the right to make him a voluntary gift of something he has not asked for, namely the wrong time. It’s the same with the beggar who asks you for a dollar for a drink. You have the right to ignore him and give him nothing. Or you can make him a gift of something he hasn’t asked for, a “Get out of jail free” card, if you want.

Anyone who asks you a question is logically in the position of a beggar. He is asking you for something. You don’t owe him the truth unless he’s paid you for giving it.

Now of course in most cases, we usually find it in our self-interest to tell the truth. But it’s only a matter of self-interest, or pragmatism, not libertarian principle. That’s why the famous statement, “If lying helps, I say lie,” is justified. Usually it won’t help. But if it does, you are under no libertarian obligation to tell the truth. How else, for example, can a woman be justified in lying when asked for her phone number?

I come now to perhaps the most dangerous and vicious of all the mistaken definitions of libertarianism. The one that says that in order to be a libertarian, you have to “live the libertarian life”, or “live the life of a libertarian.”

Now at first glance this seems innocuous enough. After all, if libertarianism means that you cannot initiate force, leading a libertarian life would seem to mean that you actually have to live that way; that you have to take it seriously and really not do things like that.

But this is not at all what these “live libertarianism” people mean. Instead, they’ve got a whole bunch of things on their agenda. We either obey, or we’re accused of not being libertarians.

What are the specifics? Well, they vary according to which person you’ve spoken to last, but most of them seem to include the following: being nice, not discriminatory, being truthful and honest, not hating, not making sexual jokes, not making ethnic jokes, not leading a dissolute life, and so on.

The most well known example of this sentiment surfaced at the National LP convention in NYC last August. There, it was actually held by a sizable portion of the delegates that it was anti-libertarian to vote against or veto a person for high office on the grounds that he is a homosexual or a smuggler. Now, I have nothing but the highest regard for homosexuals and for smugglers. Some of my best friends are homosexuals and, for all I know, smugglers.

But it seems the most abject nonsense to say that people who oppose homosexuals and smugglers running for high office on the LP ticket are not acting in accordance with Libertarian principles. It’s not only nonsense, it’s vicious and unjust because it expels people from the ranks of libertarianism who adhere fully to the principle of non-aggression.

It’s dangerous to the vitality of our movement because it will sap our diversity, a scarce and vital resource. Look. If we define libertarianism narrowly, we can accept all as libertarians who agree to the limited premise that initiation of coercion may be forcibly stopped. But, as we add on proviso after priviso, we reject more and more people. Things have gotten to such a point in New York, that even people like Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, Andrea Millen, and Roy Childs have quit the FLP because they’ve been made to feel unwelcome by the “live libertarian” fanatics.

The “Declaration On Tactics for the LP” states that: “We do not contend that all, or necessarily any, of the tactics we oppose are in violation of libertarian principles. However, we believe there must be more to a viable movement than its disembodied ideology. There must also be a sort of animating ideal or spirit to give the movement a sense of purpose, direction, and identity. The modern libertarian movement was born of, and its steady growth sustained by, just such a spirit.”

Now let me make my point in the language of this Declaration. I am convinced that there must not be more to our libertarian movement, than its disembodied ideology — its non-aggression principle. Any sort of additional “animating ideal” or “spirit” will only needlessly, and unjustly, force true libertarians to leave; although they may agree with the non-initiation of force, they may not be in tune with this undefined, ineffable “spirit”. They may not even like “spirits.”

We libertarians will just have to learn to get our sense of purpose, direction and identity from the one and only defining characteristic of libertarian political philosophy — opposition to the initiation of force. If we can no longer become excited, exalted, invigorated, impassioned with this, the libertarian principle, if we no longer love it, if we no longer think of it as excruciatingly beautiful, we won’t get it from any other principles either — and still remain libertarians.

The modern libertarian movement has nothing at all to do with such non-libertarian “spirits”. If there is anything that the modern libertarian movement was born of, and its steady growth sustained by, it is the work of just one person, and you all know who that one person is; a person that has just quit the FLP.

If there is anything that is destructive of our fledgling libertarian movement, it is the tactic adopted by the “Declaration on Tactics”, of reading people out of the libertarian party, who, by your own admission, goddamn it, “are . . . not . . . in violation of libertarian principles.” It’s crazy. It’s incomprehensible. How can you attack people for not being consistently libertarian in the same declaration that you admit they are not in violation of libertarian principles?

Moreover, I cannot, for the life of me, understand how the signers of the “Declaration” can object to Prof. Rothbard’s statement: “Tactics are purely a matter . . . of efficiency and practicality. In short, the proper realm of ‘pragmatism’ is that realm where principle does not apply.” This doesn’t mean, as the “Declaration” asserts, “that questions of strategy and tactics are exempt from challenge on grounds of principle or morality.” All it means is that there are some decisions where libertarian principle does not, indeed cannot, apply. For example, the questions of what color ink, or kind of paper, should our Free Libertarian newsletter be printed on, is purely a matter of tactics, strategy, efficiency and pragmatism. Equally “pure” libertarians can hold different views on this burning question. Common sense? Sure. Yet Rothbard was taken to task for just such a small “evasion” and “distortion.”

Several signers of the Declaration have expressed themselves as willing, even eager, to discuss the issues raised by the document. I hereby offer myself as willing to speak, discuss and debate any and all issues raised here.

I’d like to end with a plea for tolerance.

I realize that much of what I have said is controversial. But I think it’s to all our benefit — ourselves, our movement, and the cause of liberty we love so much — not to read all those we don’t agree with out of the movement.

There must be room for all deviant but non-aggressive behavior in a truly libertarian society. And in a truly libertarian party.

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Combatting Conservatism

As the libertarian movement grows and develops, one of its most vital tasks is in distinguishing ourselves from conservatism — of making it crystal clear that we are not simply an “extreme” variant of the Conservative Movement. We are liable to make such an error because of the similarity of the free-market rhetoric — but the similarity is in rhetoric only, and there in only a segment of the economic realm. We are the “extreme” (read consistent) heirs, not of the Conservatives, but of their ancient enemies, the Classical Liberals. Classical Liberalism, with its devotion to individual liberty and a peaceful foreign policy, found itself from the beginning at the polar opposite from Conservatism, and this polarity continues today. Then as now. Conservatism has stood for Big Government and statism across the board; for militarism and repression of civil liberties at home, and for interventionism, imperialism and a warlike foreign policy abroad; for a reverence for the State and its Leader (whether King or President or some other Führer); and for a theocratically imposed “morality” in which the State imposes a religiously conceived behavior on its subjects. Libertarianism, as the heir of classical liberalism, stands, on the contrary, for individual liberty and the absence of government intervention at home or abroad. Our reverence is for the peaceful individual and our hostility goes out to the State apparatus. We hold religion and morality to be strictly the private concerns of each individual.

Contemporary Conservatism is very much in the mold of our long-standing Enemy. It still advocates militarism and imperialism, it still believes in a State-coerced morality, it still reverences the State and its Leader, it still represses dissent. It is our Conservatives who call for warlike confrontation with the Soviet Union, for American intervention everywhere, for ever greater appropriations for wasteful and dangerous Pentagon boondoggles; it is our Conservatives who hail the FBI and the CIA, despite their proven record of trampling on individual rights of person and property, despite their persistent use of burglary, wiretapping, and repression — or perhaps because of these secret police methods. And it was our Conservatives who went down the line and to the end in support of the tyrant Nixon and his approach to a police state in America. And as for the free market, conservative interest is minimal and declining; witness their willingness to retain a “moderate” welfare state so long as military appropriations continue to rise. No; we are not Conservatives; and the more this is made clear, to the public and to ourselves, the better.

Hence, we must particularly hail trenchant attacks on conservatism in recent issues of important libertarian periodicals. In the new expanded format of Libertarian Review, March-April, for example, Walter Grinder has an excellent attack on the “neo-conservatism” of Irving Kristol. Replying to a defense of Kristol by one Bruce Ramsey, Grinder rips into the Kristol “right of center chic clique” as “the most immediate, most dangerous, and most pressing enemy of libertarianism.” Grinder points out that the mission of the Kristol clique is to streamline the existing New Deal system to make it work more efficiently. As against Kristolite neo-conservatism, Grinder upholds Mill and especially Albert Jay Nock, and points out why he believes that the Kristol clique “are the first line defense of the American State, and of American statism, albeit a proposed more streamlined version.”

Also in the March-April issue of LR is an excellent defense of the Libertarian Party by national chairman Ed Crane against the “left sectarianism” of Sam Konkin and against the conservative hostility of Jim Toole. Florida LP Chairman. Crane rebuts Toole’s attack on the LP platform’s affirmation of an isolationist foreign policy and of its call for abolition of the FBI; as Crane writes, “The United States needs a national police force like Germany needed the Gestapo.”

Then, in the current, January-February issue of the LP News, Ralph Raico points out our anti-Conservative heritage in his scintillating article, “English Libertarians Battled War, Tariffs.” It is a fine tribute to the truly radical meaning of Cobden, Bright, and the Manchester School — the “extreme” wing of the British classical liberals. Finally, in the same issue of the LP News, there is a thoroughly researched article “Conservative Darling — Schlesinger: Spokesman of Interventionism” — in which James Schlesinger’s conservative and Reaganite foreign policy views are keenly dissected. The article shows that Schlesinger, like American imperialists before him, are Marxist-Leninists in reverse: i.e., that failing to comprehend the market economy, they believe that the U.S. must conquer natural resources abroad, and coerce the export of capital and goods in order to survive. The article also points out that “paradoxically, some Reagan conservatives who fear the closing out of U.S. trade (by Communist countries) also wish to prohibit East-West trade. The Libertarian Party, in contrast, favors the repeal of all prohibitions on individuals or firms contributing or selling goods and services to any foreign country or organization.” The LP News article also contrasts the extremely dangerous “limited” nuclear war-counterforce — first strike strategy of the Schlesingers, to the less fanatical but still dangerous Establishment strategy of deterrence via “mutually assured destruction” — to the LP third alternative: our platform’s “call for prudently negotiated nuclear disarmament.”

A Political Party, Once More

The March-April issue of the Libertarian Review has a three-cornered debate on the Libertarian Party, in which equally frenetic attacks appear from the Right by Jim Toole (likening the LP to the SLA and the Manson Family, no less!) and from the Left by Sam Konkin (calling the LP “Machiavellian hacks” who are a conscious “vehicle of an invasion from the State”). Ed Crane has an excellent reply to both of these irresponsible attacks, although it is curious that such a worthy and ecumenical organ as LR should give so much space to these wild-swinging and rabble-rousing charges.

The Konkin article gives rise once again to the now venerable problem of the morality of political action for anarchist libertarians. While this may be in the nature of beating a dead horse, perhaps a bit more can be said on this critical issue. In the first place, the anti-party libertarians never make it clear which of the following charges they are making: (a) the strong case — that all political action is immoral for libertarians per se because it sanctions the State; or (b) the weak case — that while not immoral per se, a libertarian party that seeks for and attains State power is bound to sell out.

Let us take the strong case first, best exemplified by the pure anarcho-pacifism of Bob LeFevre. LeFevre takes the certainly consistent position that, since defensive violence is just as immoral as aggressive violence, that therefore the use of the State to pass an unjust law (e.g. the draft) is no more unjust than using the State to repeal such a law. In short, that repeal of the draft, or price controls, or the income tax, is just as wrong as passing such measures, because those who want such measures are being “coerced.” A consistent position no doubt, but also an absurd one, and surely one that few libertarians will wish to adopt. As for myself, I have no compunction whatever about coercing criminals, either in using violence to repel their assaults, or in repealing criminal measures that some statists may wish to see enforced.

Failing pure LeFevranism, it is difficult to see what the philosophical groundwork of the Konkinites and the other strong anti-party types might be. Is it because a libertarian party necessarily takes part in State activity? No doubt, but so do we all when we decide to walk or drive on State-owned and operated streets and roads. In the modern world of pervasive State activity, the “purist” who wishes to avoid the State everywhere will soon die out. Surely morality requires, not cutting our own throats or self-flagellation, but in banding together to rollback or overthrow the State. We libertarians are not responsible for the existence of the State, nor for its pervasiver ess in modern life, and there is no reason for us to assume that guilt. Let us band together to try to abolish the State as rapidly and as effectively as we can.

Passing to the soft argument against the Libertarian Party, here the critics are on stronger ground. For surely the danger of an eventual sellout is always real, and must be guarded against; in the great Jeffersonian phrase, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But the fable of the boy who continually cried “Wolf” is very relevant here, for if the cry of “sellout” is directed toward every bit of trivium that anyone thinks, does, or might do, the serious issues of substance get overlooked.

But the crucial strategic point is this: what alternatives do our antiparty libertarians have to offer? How are we going to rollback or even abolish the State? It is all too easy to point to dangers in the strategy of political action; but where are the plausible alternatives? Let us examine whatever strategic alternatives have been all too sketchily offered. First, there is armed revolution. Konkin hints at this alternative when he writes that the “game of democracy” is to withhold violence but jockey for the use of acceptable, legitimized violence.” One point that can be made is that the danger of “sellout” by the armed rebels is at least as strong as that of a political party, but this is a minor issue. The major point is the historical truth that no successful armed revolution has ever taken place in a democratic country, i.e. a country of free elections. No matter that we know that democracy is a substitute of ballots for bullets, and that the democratic “game” scarcely confers moral legitimacy on the victors. But there is the overwhelming historical fact that every successful revolution has taken place against a dictatorial form of government. So unless and until the United States goes openly fascist and eliminates free elections, the hope of armed revolution in this country is a chimera, and a dangerous one at that. What happened to the New Left when it began to go over into armed violence should be a sober and instructive lesson for us all.

A second strategy is the LeFevrian one of converting all the State rulers to libertarianism and wait for them to resign. I think the inanity of such a strategy should be evident to anyone with a grasp of State reality, i.e. that the State benefits from exploiting the citizenry, and is not about to cheerfully or shamefacedly surrender those benefits upon reading libertarian literature.

A third strategy is a bundle of different alternatives that all boil down to ignoring the State and hoping that it goes away or leaves us alone. One variant is retreatism — running off to a cave or to a libertarian island, a new “Atlantis.” Again, an inane alternative that ignores State reality, that offers hope to only a few enthusiasts, and, what is more, gives up the market. For crippled and restricted that the market may be, it is still the only hope for man to survive: the only hope for massive capital equipment, and for a widespread division of labor. Forming our own “markets” or running off to our own caves, is not the answer, and reduces us to sterility, starvation, and utter defeat. The same strictures apply to the ignoble “Browneing-Out” variant of Harry Browne, that is, to forget the State, make a pile, and put it in Swiss bank accounts, caves, etc. Once again, not only does this immorally give up the cause of liberty, but it won’t even work, because the State will eventually find those bank accounts and sniff out the caves. Finally, there is the third Konkinite variant of the so-called “counter-econ”, in which libertarians build up their own “markets” separate from the market. But, once again, the counter-econ suffers from all the above failings; a puny “market” in which libertarians exchange beans, baseball cards, and bottle tops is just a game and leads nowhere, and ignores the dependence of all us on the market, crippled and controlled though it may be. The Konkin scheme is reminiscent of an older counter-econ variant in which it was held that libertarians should only hire or buy from other libertarians; the idea was that since libertarians are uniquely rational, they would make the best traders and employees. A libertarian metallurgist would automatically be a better metallurgist, for example, than a “straight” metallurgist; the history of our young movement should have put an end, once and for all, to this pleasant but idiotic fable. The record of incompetence and/or ripoffs among libertarians is too blatant to fall for that anymore.

And so this leaves us with one and only one practical route toward rolling back the State — political action, as full of pitfalls as this course might be. Between action within the older parties and trying to forge a pure Libertarian Party surely only one choice is possible. The new Libertarian Party has already introduced literally tens of millions to libertarian ideology and to the libertarian alternative. It has provided a focus for libertarian activity and a foco for spreading the principles to the media, the public, and to pressuring the older parties in a libertarian direction. And hopefully it may in the future grow to such an extent as to mobilize and articulate the anti-government mood among the public, and to become a viable conduit for dismantling the Monster State. In the face of the nobility of this course, in the face of the absence of strategic alternatives we can only bend our energies into making the attempt.

I know many worthy and excellent libertarians who have refused to join the Libertarian Party not on Konkinite or Toolean grounds, but for precisely the opposite reasons: namely that there are too many neo-Konkinites or neo-Tooleans in the Libertarian Party, too many left sectarians and conservative ideologues, for the Party to succeed. Perhaps they are right, although I don’t think so; strategy, after all, is an art and not an exact science. But surely the cause and the effort are noble enough for all of us to try our best. And we do have an excellent Presidential ticket and an excellent National Office to give us fine prospects for success, and for going forward with a high heart.

The ‘Defense Gap’ Mythology

It’s budget time at the Pentagon again, and this time the traditional and meretricious Pentagon scare propaganda is being reinforced by the menace of Schlesingerism and the Reagan-Jackson warhawks. The war crowd has trotted out the old imperial vainglory — That America must be “second to none” — combined with the old scare tactic that we are now “behind” the Russians. Reagan has been making all too effective use of this demagogy in his presidential campaign.

In the face of this propaganda barrage, there are several vital points that must be made. In the first place, there is no such thing as being “behind” on overkill. We have the capacity to annihilate all the Russians many times over, and they have a similar capacity to “overkill” us. With this sort of mutual deterrence, the concept of being “behind” no longer make any sense; if, for hypothetical example, we have the capacity to kill the Russians 800 times over, and they can kill us 900 times over, in what sense are we “behind”? Only in the sense of adding to the enormous military boondoggles of the Pentagon and its industrial allies. Only mutual nuclear disarmament would rid both countries, and the world as a whole, of the threat of nuclear annihilation that hangs over us all.

Secondly, even within this “mutually assured destruction” framework, there is no need any longer for bombers, surface vessels, or land-based missile sites. They could all be scrapped overnight, with no loss of American deterrent power. Our Polaris-Poseidon submarines are more than sufficient for this task. In twenty years, neither superpower has even begun to come up with a useful method for submarine detection, which makes these submarines invulnerable to a first missile strike. There is therefore no need for the Pentagon’s latest, hugely expensive submarine toy, the Trident, which permits hitting any part of the world from any ocean; the range of the existing Poseidon submarines from the northern hemisphere is more than enough.

Let us now turn to a narrower framework — the current Pentagon scare campaign. (Here see the excellent analyses of of Rep. Les Aspin (Dem., Wise.), a former Pentagon systems analyst, available in the current Foreign Policy magazine, and in the April 3 issue of the Nation, “Budget Time at the Pentagon”; and further analyzed in “The Great Defense Budget Debate,” International Bulletin, April 9.) First, there is the alleged “spending gap”. The Pentagon-CIA complain that the Soviets, in terms of the dollar, are spending 40–50% more on defense than the U.S.; specifically, that, in 1974 dollars, the U.S spent $80 billion in 1975 while the Russians spent $114 billion on defense. Scary? But the operative fallacy here is “in terms of dollars.” For the Russians don’t spend dollars, they spend rubles, and there is no free currency market, and hence no accepted rate of exchange between dollars and rubles. The “dollar” costs of Soviet defense are enormously inflated by the fact that a new U.S. soldier gets paid more than $83 a week, whereas a Soviet recruit gets less than a ruble a week. Computing Soviet army costs at American rates of pay therefore enormously inflates our computation of Soviet defense expenditures. As Rep. Aspin states, “By computing the payroll costs of the Soviet armed forces at U.S. military wage scales, we discover a $50 billion Soviet payroll that exists only in the Pentagon’s imagination.” If, on the other hand, we were to use ruble costs for both budgets, it would appear that the Russians spent far more on defense than the U.S. At the heart of the comparison problem is the fact that wages are low and technological equipment costly in the U.S.S.R. and the reverse is true in the U.S., so that the Soviet army is high in dollar cost, while American technology is very costly in ruble terms.

Another flaw in these Pentagon comparisons is that many of the advanced technologies of the U.S. are simply too costly for the Russians to produce; the Russians, for example, have no TV-homing bombs; the ruble costs for the Russians only show the old-fashioned iron bombs; if we add in the ruble costs for the American equipment the Russians do not have, the total ruble costs of American defense would be far greater than the Soviet military budget.

Furthermore, even using the fallacious dollar figures, the Pentagon figures leave out the spending of our NATO allies, which outspent Moscow’s Warsaw Pact allies last year by $61 billion to $8 billion; so that even using the dollar terms, the NATO countries outspent the Warsaw countries last year by $141 billion to $122 billion.

Another piece of alarmism widely circulated by the Pentagon are alleged gaps in specific weapons production. Thus, Pentagon charts show the Russians out-producing us in the number of tanks; average annual tank production from 1972-74 was 3,000 for the Soviets and 462 for us, a seemingly awesome 6.5-1 advantage. But these charts fail to show that: (a) the Pentagon itself felt it had enough tanks several years ago and advocated lower production; (b) the Pentagon then decided, after the October War in 1973 that it needed higher tank production to replace high losses in any possible future tank warfare; the Pentagon itself then requested a tripling of U.S. tank production by 1977, and Congress promptly agreed, (c) our NATO allies produced as many tanks as the U.S. did in these years, while the Soviet allies produced zero, (d) The huge total of 1250 Russian-made tanks were destroyed in the 1973 Middle East war. (e) Soviet tank production declined substantially in 1975. (f) the U.S. and NATO have substantial superiority in anti-tank weapons. All of this makes for a far different tank picture.

One of the big bugaboos, fueled by tireless speeches by retired U.S. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt (now trying to oust Senator Harry Byrd in Virginia as the Democratic nominee) is the alleged Russian lead in ship production over the U.S. It is true that the Russians outproduced the U.S. in ships in the 1972-74 period by 3.5 to 1, if we count every dinghy and rowboat. But if we concentrate on major combat ships, production was about equal. And if we take just those ships larger than 250 tons, total NATO production outpaced Warsaw Pact production by over one-third in 1972-74, and was double Warsaw Pact production in 1975. Thus, more subtle analysis transforms the Pentagon scare figure of a 3.5 to 1 Soviet advantage in ship production to a 2 to 1 Western advantage!

Another old standby in Pentagon scare tactics is the alleged “missile gap”, in which the Pentagon asserted that the Soviets led America in the number of missiles possessed, by 2,400 to 1,700. But, the important statistic is not the number of missiles but the number of warheads, in which we outpace the Russians, plus we have many more bombers. Altogether, the U.S. has 8,500 nuclear warheads, while the Russians have only 2,800; this is “second best”?

Furthermore, American tanks and naval vessels are far better in quality than Russian tanks and ships. American tanks can fire more rapidly and accurately, and have thicker steel armor; Soviet tanks are also extremely vulnerable to burning up from hits on their external fuel tanks. America’s huge aircraft carriers have enormously more fire power than the entire Soviet navy.

Another important point is that much of the Soviet armed forces are poised to fight, not the U.S. but Red China. The Russians have 500,000 men poised on the Chinese border, where they hardly threaten the United States: much of the Soviet arms buildup in the last few years is directed against what they increasingly perceive to be a likely war with China. Furthermore, about 430,000 Soviet soldiers are devoted to internal police, and 5 per cent of its officer corps are simply political commissars with no military role. Also, when we look at the comparative total numbers of Russian and American soldiers, we have to realize that construction and other supply and administrative tasks that America assigns to relatively highly paid civilians, the Russians assign to its soldiery.

Let us keep these sobering points in mind as the Pentagon creates bogeymen to scare the Congress, and as the right-wing hawks gear up for a rerun of old discredited scare tactics. It would be a major tragedy if the gloriously growing anti-Big Government mood in this country were derailed, as it has been so often in the past, by the scare propaganda of the militarists and the global crusaders.

Recommended Reading

compiled by Bill Evers

Les Aspin, “How to Look at the Soviet-American Balance,” Foreign Policy, (Spring, 1976.) A debunking of current alarmism on Soviet military spending, missile throw-weights, troop strength, and naval strength.

G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975). Documentary material on the first modern libertarians — the Levellers of the late 1640s. Includes Richard Overton’s “An Arrow Against All Tyrants,” and important pieces by John Lilburne. Excellent introduction, scholarly apparatus, and annotated bibliography. Published in a paperbound edition.

P.T. Bauer, “Western Guilt and Third World Poverty,” Commentary, Jan. 1976.

Index on Censorship. This quarterly provides thorough coverage, major documents, and in-depth analysis of the suppression of freedom of expression around the world. The spring 1976 issue, for example, treats the trial of Yugoslav social democrat Mihajlo Mihailov, torture in Iran, East German censorship, the trial of Ukrainian nationalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, South African censorship, and Senate Bill One in the United States. Each issue includes a country-by-country listing of censorship incidents. ($14 per year from Index on Censorship, Room 221, 156 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.)

Jere Cohen, Lawrence E. Hazelrigg, and Whitney Pope, “De-Parsonizing Weber: A Critique of Parsons’ Interpretation of Weber’s Sociology,” American Sociological Review, April 1975. Discussion of Talcott Parsons’ distortion of Max Weber’s notion of power. Weber talked of power as domination, as power over others. Parsons, in translating Weber and writing about his thought, transforms this into the functionalist notion of power as a resource.

CounterSpy. This quarterly provides analyses and information on the practices, organization, and objectives of U.S. intelligence agencies. The Winter 1976 issue contains articles on current plans to use the military and police in civil disorders in the U.S., and on the U.S. involvement in Angola. A one-year subscription to CounterSpy costs $6. Checks should be payable to the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, P.O. Box 647, Ben Franklin Station, Washington, D.C. 20004.

Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers (Cleveland, Oh.: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971.) Scholarly historical treatment of Progressive-Era engineers to promote social engineering and scientifically managed government intervention. Herbert Hoover is a central figure.

Karl Olivecrona, “Appropriation in the State of Nature: Locke on the Origin of Property,” Journal of the History of Ideas, April-June 1974.

Karl Olivecrona, “Locke’s Theory of Appropriation, “Philosophical Quarterly, July 1974.

A.F. Ringold, “The History of the Enactment of the Ninth Amendment and its Recent Development,” Tulsa Law Journal, Spring 1972. Argues that the forgotten Ninth Amendment, which recognized unenumerated rights retained by the people, can properly be used to attack the constitutionality of peacetime armies, suspensions of the laws and federally-imposed monopolies.

Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: the Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). Focuses on the anti-mercantilist thought of persons like the Christian humanist Fenelon and the early utilitarian Antoine Hotman (descendant of the famous Huguenot monarchomach Francois Hotman.) Published in a paperbound edition.

William Shawcross, “Cambodia Under Its New Rulers,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976. French-educated intellectuals are trying to impose a Rousseauan republic of virtue. They are depopulating the cities, impressing former city dwellers into the farm labor force, strictly enforcing victimless-crime laws, and exchanging gunfire with Cambodia’s more liberal neighbors in South Vietnam.

Wealth of Nations Bicentennial. The March 2 Times Literary Supplement from England contains a review by Donald Winch of the new University of Glasgow-commissioned edition of the Wealth of Nations and of a new volume of essays on Smith. The March issue of Encounter reprints William Letwin’s introduction to the new Everyman Library reissue of the Wealth of Nations, published by J. M. Dent. (This issue of Encounter also contains a short piece by Maurice Cranston on Hannah Arendt: “She repudiated the whole liberal conception of freedom as a private right of the individual to be preserved against the intrusion of other men, including men in authority. For Hannah Arendt. . . freedom is positive participation in the political life of one’s city.”)

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 5

MAY, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Zen Candidate:
Or, Browning Out In The Movement

H. L. Mencken once brilliantly wrote that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” Is this going to be true of the libertarian movement as well? We have already noted in these pages the curious tendency of many libertarians (especially in California) to leap from anti-political left sectarianism into ardent enthusiasm for the (to put it very kindly) right opportunism of the Reagan campaign. The latest manifestation of this peculiar tendency is the current enthusiasm of many former anti-political “purists” for the Presidential candidacy of Governor Jerry Brown of California. How is it possible to leap from sectarianism to opportunism without even a momentary touch down on the correct plumb line strategy of a candidly Libertarian presidential campaign (the MacBride-Bergland ticket)? As we have seen many times in the past, however, sectarianism and opportunism feed on each other; they are the other sides of the same coin: the avoidance of a rational, persistent strategy for changing reality on behalf of pure libertarian goals. It is all too easy for the sectarian “purist”, after spending years in futile spinning of wheels leading nowhere, to leap suddenly in the direction of supposed short-run gains, however illusory and however contradictory to the long run, pure libertarian ends.

It is one thing to hail the advent of Jerry Brown as a means of weakening the long-time statism of the Democratic party; it is quite another to hail Brown as a new libertarian Messiah. While content to remain governor of California, Brown’s nutty ascetic Zen style was fine insofar as it applied to asceticism for the government, from sleeping on a mattress on the floor to cutting the education budget. But Brown’s ideology and policies have been distressingly vague and formless, as befits a Zen disciple, and it behooved everyone to wait to hear Brown’s national policies before leaping wildly upon his presidential bandwagon. Caution in supporting any politician is always the first order for a libertarian; for a Zen screwball such caution is even more mandatory.

Well, now we know a bit more of Brown’s national policies, and this knowledge makes the pro-Brown libertarians even more incomprehensible than before. In the first place, Brown has elevated vagueness and Zen hogwash into high principle. When challenged about his fuzziness and lack of programs, Brown replied: “That’s part of the game. . . .Programs? What programs? You’re using words that have no meaning in my head. I’ll provide leadership.” (New York Times, May 14, So there we have it; the hell with ideology or programs; in short, the hell with tangible ideas; instead, we are to be provided with charismatic leadership. Haven’t we had enough of this kind of “leadership”, Haven’t we had enough of the Führer Principle in this century? What kind of leadership can we expect? Since Brown’s move toward his Presidential candidacy, he has, in swift succession, defended the FBI and CIA, come out for the disastrous Humphrey-Hawkins bill for the federal government as the employer of last resort, called for national health insurance, and come out against any cuts in the swollen military budget. This is a libertarian?

Let’s face it: Jerry Brown is nothing more nor less than a Zen statist; he is the young “intellectual’s” version of Hubert Humphrey. He dresses up his fuzzy statism with the fashionable trappings of Zen hooey. Thus, his replies to press questioning are typical; instead of answering the questions, we hear: “I don’t know. . . .I live in the moment. There is an old Jesuit saying, ‘age quod agis.’ Do what you’re doing.” When asked to offer specific ideas or policies, he comments: “I’m just trying to understand life and myself. There’s a saying that in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s very few. . . .Each experience is not separate, does not weigh you down first in one direction and then another. There’s a certain continuity of who you are. All of these things are just the process of unfolding. . . .There’s an organic, natural flow to things.” In short, thinking, reason, knowledge are deprecated; just “flow” with it. Which has to mean in practice: just flowing with the State.

Just flowing also with the political hacks of the Democratic party. For it is a high irony of the current libertarian interest in Jerry Brown that his candidacy is quite openly the stalking horse for a recrudescence of one of the most repellent statist figures in American politics: the gaseous Hubert Humphrey: It is no secret that Brown and Frank Church are not really serious candidates; that they are desperate attempts by the machine pols and the union bosses to stop Jimmy Carter and bring us the egregious Humphrey once more.

There is a phrase in the libertarian: “Browneing out” — following the lead of Harry Browne in abandoning political activity or moral concerns on behalf of short-run hedonism and making a fast buck. The new “Browning out” is a new variant of this copping-out from libertarian politics; except that the Brownian libertarians are absurdly making themselves into stalking horses for none other than Hubert Horatio Humphrey!

One of the odd and disturbing aspects of this Presidential campaign is the sudden infusion of religiosity into American politics. For many years, the American tradition has put religion into the background of a President’s personal life, with little or no direct connection to his politics. But now, particularly in the candidacies of Carter and Brown, religion has suddenly come to the forefront, along with a messianic style and a specially fuzzy, self-contradictory content devoid of ideology or program. For if a candidate be pure of heart, be touched by a divine and charismatic call, what need is there of specific ideas or programs? Or, as the pro-Nazi social philosopher Werner Sombart once wrote, the Führer gets his notions directly from God.

In this spurt of political religiosity, we see two very different styles at work, with two different sets of appeals. Jimmy Carter’s Southern Baptist evangelical style appeals to the rural American heartland; Jimmy Brown’s pseudo-profound Zen blather appeals to the half-educated “intellectuals” of the cities and the wealthy suburbs. For a rationalist it is difficult indeed to choose between the two; although, as far as I am concerned, Southern Baptism is more clear-cut and even more rational than Zen; at least it doesn’t pretend to intellectual profundity.

For libertarians the lesson is clear: to stop whoring after strange gods, and to get behind, with enthusiasm and dedication, the MacBride-Bergland ticket.

On Nozick’s Anarchy, State, And Utopia — II

(Editor’s Note: In our December, 1975 issue, we presented the first of a series of articles presenting the anarchist rebuttal to Robert Nozick’s critique of anarchism in Part I of his Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The following paper was presented by Roy Childs at the Third Libertarian, Scholars Conference last October. The significance of Childs’s title stems from Professor Nozick’s claim that a laissez faire State can rise by an “invisible hand” process out of a condition of free-market anarchism, a process that is not only spontaneous but in which no individual is aggressed against. In addition to refuting this claim, Childs turns Nozick on his head: demonstrating that, on the contrary, out of Nozick’s minimal State, free-market anarchism can reappear as an invisible process in which no one’s rights are violated!)

The Invisible Hand Strikes Back

By Roy A. Childs, Jr.

Surely one of the significant occurrences on the intellectual scene during the past few years has been the emergence of a Professor of philosophy at Harvard University as an eloquent and forceful spokesman for the doctrine of Libertarianism. Indeed, so much attention and praise has been lately showered upon the man, Robert Nozick, and his National Book-Award-winning treatise, ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA, that all who uphold the doctrine of human liberty have been cheered.

If they have been cheered by the reception given to the book, however, and to the new concern of portions of the intellectual establishment with Libertarianism, they have not been equally cheered by the content of the book itself. For amidst the book’s subtle and wide ranging critiques of doctrines such as Marx’s theory of exploitation, egalitarianism, and John Rawls’ theory of justice (so hailed by intellectuals in recent years), appears an argument so central to Nozick’s thinking that it dominates the first third of the treatise itself: a defense of the ’minimal State’ against the claims and arguments of anarchism.

Part of the consternation caused by this section is due to the fact that Nozick’s argument is of often brain-cracking complexity, using against the reader all of the techniques and tools of contemporary philosophy — with not a few other technical insights from other fields, such as economics, thrown in for good measure — giving the reader oftentimes the feeling of being on a merrygoround moving at a dizzying pace, changing speed and direction in unpredictable ways.

But part of the consternation is caused equally by the nature of the arguments themselves, with their seemingly anti-libertarian bent; arguments resting on notions such as the “compensation principle,” the principle of “risk,” and the alleged “right” to prohibit certain risky activities of others.

It is no accident, then, that ANARCHY, STATE AND UTOPIA has raised a storm of controversy in Libertarian circles. While the media and the intellectual world in general has focused, appropriately enough, on Nozick’s persuasive critiques of the conventional wisdom, particularly the section devoted to examining Rawls’ theory of justice, and Nozick’s defense of “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” Libertarians have focused more on Nozick’s frame of reference, the absence of a theory of rights (upon which much of the book tacitly rests its case), and the attack on anarchism.

It is obvious that any persuasive and comprehensive critique of this profound and complex work would have to be as long as the book itself. We aspire to no such grandiose heights here. What we shall do instead is to attempt to answer Nozick’s main argument in defense of the “minimal state.” Nozick begins with the Lockean “state-of-nature” to show how, by means of a series of “invisible hand” processes which violate the rights of no one, a legitimate “minimal state” may arise. We shall, on the contrary, maintain that, beginning with a “minimal state,” and moving through a series of stages (which process violates the rights of no one), we may properly arrive back at a state of anarchy. In short, we shall maintain that the only good minimal state is a dead minimal state, one which allows those processes to operate which would, if continued over a period of time, dissolve the minimal state into anarchism.

In clarifying this, we shall have to discuss Nozick’s concept of “risk,” his principle of “compensation,” and his view that the explanation offered for the origin of the state is an “invisible hand” explanation. We shall see that, on the contrary, there is instead a very visible hand: in fact, a veritable iron fist.

Prof. Nozick’s defense of the minimal state unfolds in three stages. Firstly, he argues that, “given” an anarchistic system of competing protective associations within a free market, one dominant agency will emerge, through market procedures and by economic necessity. This “dominant agency” will in turn “evolve” into an “ultraminimal state” by an invisible hand process in a morally permissible way which violates the rights of no one. This “ultraminimal state” differs from the dominant agency in that it maintains a monopoly on force in a given geographical area (except that necessary in immediate self-defense). It therefore “excludes private (or agency) retaliation for wrong and exaction of compensation; but it provides protection and enforcement services only to those who purchase its protection and enforcement policies.” Prof. Nozick then shows how this ultraminimal state evolves into a minimal state, which is “equivalent to the ultraminimal state conjoined with a (clearly redistributive) Friedmanesque voucher plan, financed from tax revenues. Under this plan all people, or some (for example, those in need) are given tax-funded vouchers that can be used only for their purchase of a protection policy from the ultraminimal state.” Prof. Nozick holds that “the operators of the ultraminimal state are morally obligated to produce the minimal state,” since “it would be morally impermissible for persons to maintain the monopoly in the ultraminimal state without providing protective services for all . . .”

(This last is, of course, especially interesting. The successful transformation of the ultraminimal state into the minimal state is dependent upon the ultraminimal state’s allegiance to Prof. Nozick’s principle of compensation. The ultraminimal state is obligated to “compensate” those whose risky activities they forcibly prohibit. Adequate compensation is taken to be, quite without reason, as we shall see, the provision of protective services. Prof. Nozick grants that the ultraminimal state “might fail to provide this compensation,” but he assumes that “generally people will do what they are morally required to do.” This assumption, unfortunately, is only made by Prof. Nozick in considering the actions of the state apparatus, not in pausing to consider the actions of competing protective associations. This naivete is charming indeed, but not very heartwarming, reassuring or realistic. That such an assumption should find its way to make a crucially important bridge in Prof. Nozick’s argument is, in many ways, symptomatic of the book, and of much of contemporary philosophical discussion of the state.)

Why must one “dominant agency” develop, within the free market system of competing protection agencies? “Initially,” Prof. Nozick writes, “several different protective associations or companies will offer their services in the same geographical area. What will happen when there is a conflict between clients of different agencies?” We learn that “only three possibilities are worth considering:”

1. In such situations the forces of the two agencies do battle. One of the agencies always wins such battles. Since the clients of the losing agency are ill protected in conflicts with clients of the winning agency, they leave their agency to do business with the winner.

2. One agency has its power centered in one geographical area, the other in another. Each wins the battles fought close to its center of power, with some gradient being established. People who deal with one agency but live under the power of the other either move closer to their own agency’s home headquarters or shift their patronage to the other protective agency . . .

3. The two agencies fight evenly and often. They win and lose about equally, and their interspersed members have frequent dealings and disputes with each other. Or perhaps without fighting or after only a few skirmishes the agencies realize that such battling will occur continually in the absence of preventive measures. In any case, to avoid frequent, costly and wasteful battles the two agencies, perhaps through their executives, agree to resolve peacefully those cases about which they reach differing judgments. They agree to set up, and abide by the decisions of some third judge or court to which they can turn when their respective judgments differ. (Or they might establish rules determining which agency has jurisdiction under which circumstances.) Thus emerges a system of appeals courts and agreed upon rules about jurisdiction, and the conflict of laws. Though different agencies operate, there is one unified federal judicial system of which they are all components.

What is the significance of this? “In each of these cases,” we are told, “all the persons in a geographical area are under some common system that judges between their competing claims and enforces their rights,”

“Out of anarchy, pressed by spontaneous groupings, mutual protection associations, division of labor, market pressures, economies of scale, and rational self-interest there arises something very much resembling a minimal state or a group of geographically distinct minimal states.”

According to Prof. Nozick, then if competing protection associations make arrangements between themselves to settle disputes we have a type of “federal judicial system,” a variant of government. This is surely metaphorical and unjustified. Surely, if we take all the protection devices in use in a given society and lump them together, then the total has what some might call a “monopoly” on protection. Similarly, all farmers taken collectively have a “monopoly” on growing food. But this is tautological.

The real point which Prof. Nozick wishes to make is that if either of these alternative courses result, then we have a “legal system” resulting. Now, no one has ever denied that there would indeed be a “legal” system under anarchism. Many prominent anarchists have claimed that they advocate that structures and processes (even content, in some cases), be separated from the state, and the state abolished entirely. If one is going to term any “legal system” in this broad sense a “state.” then there is little point in pursuing the matter

Discussion may proceed along more productive lines if we distinguish between two radically different types of legal systems: a “market legal system” and a “state legal system.” A “market legal system” could be designated as a system of rules and enforcement procedures which arises from the processes of the market economy: competition, bargaining, legal decisions, and so forth; a legal system whose order is “spontaneous” in the Hayekian sense. A “state legal system” on the other hand, could be designated as a system of rules and enforcement procedures which are designed by the state apparatus, as a result of political procedures, and imposed by force upon the rest of society.

In a society with a “market legal system,” the shape of the legal system is determined by the processes set in motion by the actions of a number of independent agencies whose plans may conflict, and therefore cause some adjustment in the means-ends structure of themselves and others. Independent agencies, then, can make agreements, reach decisions, set precedents, bargain and so forth, producing a legal “order” which is not designated by anyone. The resulting system is not a “federal system” in the traditional manner: We may have ad hoc decisions for individual disputes, procedures agreed upon in advance, such as drawing the names of arbitrators out of a hat, alternating arbitrators chosen by each agency, ad infinitum. We need not suppose that any permanent, distinct, appeals system has been erected. (If one had, it would not change our essential argument.)Anarchism, then, can have a legal system, a “market legal system” as opposed to a “state legal system.” The analogy is to the distinction drawn between state-economic systems and unhampered market economic systems. Both are systems, but not of the same sort; they are built on different processes altogether. What we shall conclude, then, is that if the third of Prof. Nozick’s three alternatives results, then there will not be a state apparatus as the result.

Several other objections to this reasoning arise here; Prof. Nozick’s arguments that “maximal competing protective services cannot coexist” lacks force, because he merely assumes that violent conflicts, between agencies will be the norm. Now, if such conflicts do begin to develop, economics gives us every reason to assume that it will be more in the interest of competing parties to develop a means of arbitrating disputes rather than to engage in violent actions. Finally, there is no reason to regard the concept of “protective services” with holistic awe. An infinite variety of institutions can develop in society, concerned with as many different aspects of protection. Some institutions may patrol the neighborhood block, some might focus on copyrights, some on violations of contracts, some merely on insuring against crime, rather than on apprehending criminals (for cases where customers in society do not think that retribution or punishment is justified or worthwhile). Here again, there is no reason to expect a single agency to dominate the field.

The “invisible hand” has indeed gotten itself entangled in a very strong web. Let us examine the process by which the “dominant agency” would evolve into an “ultraminimal state,” which is in turn morally obliged to become the “minimal state.”

“An ultraminimal state,” writes Nozick, “Maintains a monopoly over all use of force except that necessary in immediate self-defense, and so excludes private (or agency) retaliation for wrong and exaction of compensation; but it provides protection and enforcement services only to those who purchase its protection and enforcement policies.”

“The minimal (night watchman) state,” on the other hand is, as he writes, “equivalent to the ultraminimal state conjoined with a (clearly redistributive) Friedmanesque voucher plan, financed from tax revenues. Under this plan all people, or some (for example, those in need), are given tax-funded vouchers that can be used only for their purchase of a protection policy from the ultraminimal state.”

Prof. Nozick assumes the existence of a dominant protection agency in a field of competitors, and shows how it might evolve into the ultraminimal state, which is in turn morally obligated to become the minimal state. The key question to ask is: how may the dominant agency act towards independents? To answer this, we must briefly consider the notions of risk, prohibition, and the principle of compensation.

In Prof. Nozick’s view, one is morally justified in prohibiting certain acts, provided one compensates those who are so prohibited. What actions may be prohibited? In Anarchy, State and Utopia, there is no clear and unambiguous line drawn between classes of human actions which one may justifiably prohibit, and those which one may not. One class can be identified, however: we may prohibit certain risky actions, providing those so prohibited are compensated. Which risky actions? It is not too clear, but the answer seems to be: those presenting “too high” a probability of harm to others. The dominant agency may justifiably prohibit enforcement procedures of independent agencies, by this reasoning, since these risk harming others, whether by punishing wrongly, using unreliable procedures, or anything else. In asking the question “How may the dominant agency act?” or “What . . . may a dominant protective association forbid other individuals to do?” Prof. Nozick answers:

“The dominant protective association may reserve for itself the right to judge any procedure of justice to be applied to its clients. It may announce, and act on the announcement, that it will punish anyone who uses on one of its clients a procedure that it finds to be unreliable or unfair.”

This is based in turn on the notion of “procedural rights.” “The person who uses an unreliable procedure, acting upon its results,” he writes, “imposes risks upon others, whether or not his procedure misfires in a particular case.” Nozick articulates the general principle that “Everyone may defend himself against unknown or unreliable procedures and may punish those who use or attempt to use such procedures against him,” and does not in principle reserve this “right” to a monopoly agency. However:

“Since the dominant protective association judges its own procedures to be both reliable and fair, and believes this to be generally known, it will not allow anyone to defend against them; that is, it will punish anyone who does so. The dominant protective association will act freely on its own understanding of the situation, whereas no one else will be able to do so with impunity. Although no monopoly is claimed, the dominant agency does occupy a unique position by virtue of its power . . . . It is not merely that it happens to be the only exerciser of a right it grants that all possess; the nature of the right is such that once a dominant power emerges, it alone will actually exercise that right” (my emphasis)

Hence: a de facto monopoly. Ergo: the ultraminimal state.

It is at this point that the principle of compensation rears its ugly head.

Prof. Nozick has stated that one has a right to prohibit certain excessively risky actions of others provided they are compensated. What constitutes “compensation”?

“Something fully compensates a person for a loss if and only if it makes him no worse off than he otherwise would have been; it compensates person X for person Y’s action if is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A. (In the terminology of economics, something compensates X for Y’s act if receiving it leaves X on at least as high an indifference curve as he would have been on, without it, had Y not so acted.)”

Prof. Nozick then proceeds to “shamelessly” ignore certain key questions surrounding the central issues concerning the meaning of “compensation.” His final formulation is as follows:

“Y is required to raise X above his actual position (on a certain indifference curve I) by an amount equal to the difference between his position on I and his original position. Y compensates X for how much worse off Y’s action would have made a reasonably prudent acting X.”

This is the meaning, then, of “compensation”. “The principle of compensation requires that people be compensated for having certain risky activities prohibited to them.” What “risky” activities does Prof. Nozick wish to prohibit? The enforcement procedures of the nondominant protection agencies. That is, he wishes to prohibit us from turning to any of a number of competing agencies, other than the dominant protection agency.

What is he willing to offer us as compensation for being so prohibited? He is generous to a fault. He will give us nothing less than the State.

Should one wish to reject this admittedly generous offer, it would be responded that he cannot reject it. It is foist upon one whether one likes it or not, whether one is willing to accept the State as compensation or not. It is this which should give us pause, and lead us to think a bit. Let us consider the nature of Prof. Nozick’s State, and then consider a few of the weak links in the chain of arguments which will, in the end, bind us to the State. With a good yank or two, perhaps we can snap some of these weak links, and save ourselves from what some of us, at least, regard as certain doom. In the meantime, though, let it be realized that we have arrived at the minimal state. The ultraminimal state arose when nondominant agencies were prohibited from certain activities. The minimal state was reached when the ultraminimal state was combined with the extension of protective services to those who were so prohibited.

(We should note that the only thing binding the minimal state to pay such compensation is a moral principle. Prof. Nozick “assumes” in this case that they (those in the ultraminimal state) will act as they ought, even though they might not acknowledge this moral obligation.)

Consider the nature of the Nozickian state itself. The Randian “limited government” has a rather interesting economic form: it is in essence a consumer’s co-op, with all coming under its power being “consumers,” having the right to vote, and so on. Prof. Nozick’s State is private property. It was, one recalls, a private firm, an agency, which developed by a series of specifiable steps, into a State. It remains private property, then, since nothing was done to change matters. Since it was once upon a time ago a dominant agency, and got that way through the free market, one is justified in assuming that its owners, the board of directors, (stockholders or whatever) are aggressive businessmen, driving towards “expansion” of their business. There is no question of a constitution, of course, merely the contracts with its clients, which in case of conflicts, it alone can judge and interpret. There is no voting. There is no separation of powers, no checks and balances, and no longer any market checks and balances either. There is merely a private agency, now with a monopoly on power, on the use of physical force to attain its ends.

This, we are told, is an agency which is going to follow certain moral principles and (a) extend protection to those whose risky activities are prohibited (or whose agencies were prohibited from functioning), and (b) slop with the functions of a “minimal state.” What is to check its power? What happens in the event of its assuming even more powers? Since it has a monopoly, any disputes over its functions are solved exclusively by itself. Since careful prosecution procedures are costly, the ultra-minimal state may become careless without competition. Nevertheless, only the ultraminimal state may judge the legitimacy of its own procedures, as Prof. Nozick explicitly tells us.

One might find Nozick’s argument as to why this should be taken as a less “risky” situation than that of competing agencies, less than totally convincing. Let us take up some of those weak links in the chain of reasoning, and see if they can be snapped.

The fact that, as we saw, we cannot reject the State’s “protection” as justifiable “compensation” for being prohibited from patronizing competing agencies, should lead us to question Prof. Nozick’s view of compensation. A similar critical glance will lead us to reexamine his view of risk as well.

We are justified in prohibiting the actions of competing agencies because they are alleged to be “risky”. How “risky” does an action have to be before it can be prohibited? Prof. Nozick does not say. Nor does he give us any indication of how “risk” of the kind he deals with can be calculated. As Murray Rothbard wrote in Man, Economy and State:

“‘Risk’ occurs when an event is a member of a class of a large number of homogeneous events and there is fairly certain knowledge of the frequency of occurrence of this class of events.”

In his masterwork Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, Frank Knight uses the term “risk” to designate cases of measurable uncertainty. As applied to human action, this becomes very dubious indeed. In fact, it involves us in innumerable difficulties.

As Prof. Knight writes, “We live only by knowing something about the future: while the problems of life, or of conduct, at least, arise from the fact that we know so little.” This is why we cannot calculate the risks from future human actions. (We shall restrict the concept of “risk” to the cases of the probability of harm resulting from certain actions.) In dealing with questions of probability of consequences of human actions, our calculations must of necessity be vague and inexact. While in some cases, certainly, we can say that a probability is greater or less, a quantitative calculation is impossible. Not dealing with homogeneous units, or with accidents distributed throughout a large number of cases with some frequency, we lack the preconditions of quantitative calculations. This is particularly the case with such institutions as “competing protection agencies,” since they may differ vastly in scope of activities, procedures, or any number of other attributes. If Nozick provided a criterion of what degree of “risk” was permissible, and what not, then we might be able to separate those agencies which are “too risky” from those which are not, prohibiting only the former. No criterion is given, however. Moreover, Nozick is not even simply concerned with “harm,” but extends his concern to a much more subjective element, namely, fear. How much “fear” justifies what response is not discussed. It is very difficult, then, to see how one can arrive at any objective cut-off level. Not only can “fear” not be calculated or measured, it is so subjective that it cannot even be said to be a simple response to any one set of objective conditions. There may be psychological and ideological factors, as well. For instance, the person in question might at one time have had to live under a State apparatus, and that experience might have left deep fears in his subconscious.

Since man anticipates the future without knowing what will happen, since he modifies his plans and actions continually as new knowledge accumulates, how can anyone predict that competing agencies will automatically and inevitably supercede any given level of “risk” in society? Uncertainty and fear on some level seem to be an essential (or at least central) part of the human condition; Prof. Nozick has given us no reason to believe that any one category of uncertainty, such as the risk of unjustifiable punishment, or unreliable enforcement procedures, should morally lead us to establish one set of institutions over another. Why isn’t fear of tyranny an equally valid reason for prohibiting something? And who is to say that the procedures of the dominant protection agency are not among the most unreliable? Only given the assumption of reliability can we even begin to consider as “morally justifiable” any judgment and prohibition of the activities of others. Certainly a dominant agency whose procedures were among the least reliable would be in the same position as one with reliable procedures with respect to its power to prohibit other procedures and agencies. But we would not defend the moral permissibility of this prohibition. In the absence of criteria, Prof. Nozick has given us few guides here.

Moreover, while there is an extent to which people can correctly anticipate the future in human actions, including the risk of harm, there is no means of objectively discovering, in the present, which people will correctly anticipate the future, and which not. The best chance we have of picking those whose expectations are likely to be most in harmony with future reality, in the area of “risk of harm,” would be to look at objective tests. But in the realm of human action, the closest we can come is not any science of risk-calculation, but through market processes. Here, some participants show, through a record of profit-making, that their expectations have been historically more in harmony with reality than those of other market participants. Entrepreneurship is the general category of such risk-taking in the area of producing goods and services in society. But even in the case of entrepreneurs, there is no way of predicting that those whose abilities in forecasting the future have been historically more accurate, will be more accurate in the future.

If we are concerned with risk and uncertainty, there is therefore no reason to focus our attention on the political channel of attaining ends. If, in a free society, there were sufficient concern with the risk imposed by some actions of members of a market economy (or market processes or market institutions), institutions would be developed to deal with and alleviate the fear and the risk. The insurance firm is one such institution. We know from market analyses that prices are more stable in those areas where futures markets exist than when they do not. Now “prices” are merely exchange ratios between buyers and sellers of a given commodity. Thus, insurance markets, and futures markets in related fields, would in an unhampered market economy most probably provide the greatest stability of the level of risk in a society, that is: risk as seen through the eyes of a participant of the market economy. Moreover, an unhampered market economy would provide for the optimal degree of present provision for future risk in society. Any intervention by a minimal state would, therefore, increase risk, and lead to a sub-optimal allocation devoted to provision for risk. It would lead to a shift away from the optimum societal provision for risk. The minimal state would thus create discoordination of resources in the vitally important market of provision for risk.

What we have seen here is that risk-calculation cannot be quantitative, but only qualitative: indeed, even then the concept is vague when we deal with the possible consequence of precisely unknown future actions. Moreover, insofar as there can be calculation of risks, entrepreneurs and other market participants are the only ones we have a right to expect to be successful in their expectations. The unhampered market economy is the only means of setting institutions and processes in society free, to deal effectively with risk and fear. Any movement away from the purely free market, from the choices and decisions of market participants, each with limited knowledge, learning through market processes, is a shift away from an optimal situation in the area of expectations of and provision for risk of future harm. In short, in the very process of forming a network of competing market agencies, differentiating each from the other, risk would be provided for tacitly, by the preferences and choices of market participants.

All of this gives us reason to believe that any attempt to prohibit certain actions of independent agencies is not morally permissible, and cannot be motivated by any concern with risk or fear.

The problems with the principle of compensation are much more difficult.

Prof. Nozick’s notion of compensation rests upon the concept of an “indifference curve”. The “indifference curve” is one of the saddest plagues to hit economic science since the concept of “macro-economics” first reared its ugly head. Indifference curve analysis is based on interviewing people about their relative preferences between two or more alternatives. Points of “indifference” between different quantities of certain goods or services are placed on a “map”. When many such points of indifference are reached, all placed neatly on a map, the noble indifference curve analyst connects the points by a line, and applies the techniques of mathematics to analyzing varying things.

Very little of this has anything to do with reality. A person’s value scale is a constantly fluctuating thing, ranks shifting constantly, sometimes violently. Even if some useful information were imparted by interviewing people in this way, it could not be the basis of any action or expectation on our part. We need not go into this further. Prof. Nozick is a new Platonist or Rousseauean, and is really developing a new version of “real” or “rational” interests or values, to supplant our “actual” or concrete interests.

To “compensate” someone, we must place him, according to this view, at a point on his indifference curve at least as high as he would have been without any interference. The point should be made that we are talking about the individual’s own view of things, about his evaluations, not any objective state of affairs. It is therefore not possible to judge what would constitute full compensation merely by looking at such states of affairs. We must look at the value hierarchies of the individuals involved.

Prof. Nozick, however, does not look at the actual evaluations of individuals. Instead, he assumes that everyone prohibited from taking certain risky actions may be compensated in the same way, namely, by providing protective services for them through the minimal state. The basis for this assumption is hard to determine. Why does provision of protection constitute full compensation? Apparently, because Nozick thinks that it comes close to “copying” the initial situation (objective), where the oppressed victim of the minimal state could still buy alternative protection from independent agencies. But this is entirely unjustified.

What this actually amounts to is saying that we are to judge what makes a person “at least as well off,” rather than the person himself, through choosing and acting. But this is paternalism, which Prof. Nozick rejects elsewhere in Anarchy, State and Utopia.

If we take the point of view of the person whose actions are prohibited, then we can concern ourselves only with his own value scale. This places matters in a different light.

The only ways in which we could tell if someone was justly compensated then would be:

(1) If they will accept A in exchange for B, i.e., if they exchange one for the other on a free market. This exchange, if it occurs, tell us that A was worth at least as much as B to the relevant party. Obviously, this exchange needs to be made in the absence of force, violence, aggression, or threats of either.

(2) If, after the relevant agent has been aggressed against, he agrees to accept A as compensation from an aggressor or aggressor’s agent. Again, this acceptance must be in the absence of force, violence, aggression or the threats of them.

Apart from these, there are no objective means of measuring justifiable or “full” compensation. The minimal state however, makes both of these impossible, for it does threaten such violence or punishment. Moreover, the argument rests on a variant of the “just price” doctrine, applied to compensation. But this is not justified anywhere.

Let us see if we can arrive at the minimal state by some legitimate method of “compensation”. In a market society, anyone would have the right to approach anyone who is a client of an independent agency, and buy him off, strike some sort of a bargain with him. A certain number, no doubt, would go along with this. But what of those who will not? We may see the problem by looking at a supply and demand chart. In this case, let “S” represent the supply of a given service, namely, foregoing the use of independent agencies and accepting state protection instead. Let “D” represent the demand for this service. “Figure 1” is that portion of a supply-and-demand chart blown up above the point where exchanges of these sorts would occur. In this situation, there is no exchange. The suppliers (those who subscribe to independent agencies) are not willing to settle for anything the demanders (the dominant agency) are willing to offer. Ergo, there is no point of contact between them at which compensation would be both offered and accepted. Even in the absence of threats of force, there would be no settlement. Since there is nothing which the “S’s” would accept before prohibition, why should one assume that compensation is possible after prohibition? If the supply and demand curves have not shifted, the dominant agency cannot offer more (or the nondominant agencies accept less), than was offered before, and still there can be no meeting of the minds. How, then, can those whose risky activities are prohibited be compensated? How can they be raised to a situation equal in their eyes (on their own value scales) to that in which they would have found themselves without prohibition? It appears that we have reached a dead end.

(We should add that Prof. Nozick makes things no less difficult by talking about compensating only those “disadvantaged” by the prohibition. The problems of compensation remain, and there is, to boot, no theory of “disadvantage” offered in Anarchy, State and Utopia.)

There are, in addition, other arguments which might be made against the principle of compensation. Prof. Nozick does not deal with the problem of compensating those for whom the creation of the minimal state would be a vast moral and psychic trauma. What just compensation could be offered in this case? How could they be raised to a position equal to the situation they were in before the creation of the minimal state? Moreover, consider the case of the clients of the dominant agency, A. They may very well benefit (or perceive themselves as benefiting) from the existence of agencies B, C, D. . ., which they may perceive as a probable check on A’s activities, fearing that A might supercede its contractual functions in the absence of B, C, D. . . Must A, in the transition from dominant agency to minimal state, compensate its own clients after taking those actions which eliminate this benefit? If so, what compensation? If not, why not? Why aren’t they as “disadvantaged” as anyone else?

If we cannot assume that providing protection* to clients of independent agencies constitutes full compensation, but suppose instead that compensation can be arrived at, perhaps, through higher costs to the agency, then consider the chain of events which begins.

If the minimal state must protect everyone, even those who cannot pay, and if it must compensate those others for prohibiting their risky actions, then this must mean that it will charge its original customers more than it would have in the case of the ultraminimal state. But this would, ipso facto, increase the number of those who, because of their demand curves, would have chosen non-dominant agencies B, C, D. . . over dominant agency-turned ultraminimal state-turned minimal state. Must the minimal state then protect them (or subsidize them) at no charge, or compensate them for prohibiting them from turning to other agencies?

If so, then once again, it must either increase the cost of its service to its remaining customers, or decrease its services. In either case, this again produces those who, given the nature and shape of their demand curves, would have chosen the non-dominant agencies over the dominant agency. Must these then be compensated? If so, then the process leads on, to the point where no one but a few wealthy fanatics advocating a minimal state would be willing to pay for greatly reduced ‘services’ of government. If this happened, there is reason to believe that very soon the minimal state would be thrown into the invisible dustbin of history, which it would richly deserve.

What would more likely happen is that the state would turn instead to its old friend, robbery — otherwise known as “taxation” (which is, incidentally, treated altogether too slightly in Prof. Nozick’s tome). Hence, one sees the sinister invisible hand leading us from a defense agency. . .to a dominant agency. . .to an ultra-minimal state. . .to a minimal state. . .to the first trappings of tyranny. Moreover, it is a private tyranny, since the agency is privately owned. This being so, what can be our protection against a private company’s monopoly on force in society? Surely the objective risks here are immensely greater than those which led to the hesitant creation of the minimal state.

The compensation principle, then, as is presently formulated, leads us into difficulties. Let us then make our remaining points quickly.

Is the process which led to the creation of a minimal state an “invisible hand” process? We maintain that it is not. The reason is that while the state may not be intended as the end result, the state-like action of prohibiting compensation is still the outcome of a specific decision. The dominant agency must decide to prohibit the actions, and punish offenders. At each step lies an insidious but rather explicit decision. If this is an “invisible hand,” it nonetheless packs a mean wallop, threatening to crush liberty in its grasp.

Finally, before we turn the Professor’s argument around, what, in our view, is the dominant agency justified in doing? Nothing more than punishing those who can be shown to have initiated violence against its citizens or clients, and this only after the fact. Risks of harm in the case of human agencies cannot be calculated except by observing the actions of men (such as those who constitute competing protection agencies) over some considerable period of time. It is by means of their policies that we judge the reliability of their procedures, the threat that they do or do not constitute to innocent people, and thus decide how to respond to irresponsible or criminal agencies. There are difficult problems here, but there are more problems in assuming that a dominant agency is more virtuous, more reliable in its procedures or even, of all things, less threatening to the safety and liberty of the people than other agencies. Prof. Nozick cannot even prove that those agencies which employ reliable procedures should be prohibited from acting along with those which do not employ such procedures.

But if that is the case, then the invisible hand returns:

Assume the existence of the minimal state. An agency arises which copies the procedures of the minimal state, allows the state’s agents to sit in on its trials, proceedings, and so forth. Under this situation, it cannot be alleged that this agency is anymore “risky” than the state. If it is still too risky, then we are also justified in saying that the state is too risky, and in prohibiting its activities, providing we compensate those who are disadvantaged by such prohibition. If we follow this course, the result is anarchy.

If we do not, then the dominant agency-turned minimal state finds itself competing against an admittedly watched-over-competing agency.

But wait: the competing, legally subordinate, spied upon, oppressed second agency finds that it can charge a lower price for its services, since the minimal state is guaranteeing “risk” and has to compensate those who would have patronized agencies using risky procedures. It also has to pay the cost of spying on the new agency, which constitutes a greater capital expenditure.

Since it is only morally bound to provide such compensation, it is likely to cease doing so under competitive pressure. This sets two processes in motion: those formerly compensated because they would have chosen agencies other than the state, rush to subscribe to the maverick agency, thus partially reasserting their old preferences.

Alas, another fateful step has also been taken: the once proud minimal state, having ceased compensation, reverts to a mere ultraminimal state.

But the process cannot be stopped. The maverick agency must and does establish a good record, to win clients away from the mere ultraminimal state. It offers a greater variety of services, toys with different prices, and generally becomes a more attractive alternative, all the time letting the state spy on it, bugging its offices, checking its procedures, processes and decisions. Other noble entrepreneurs follow suit. Soon, the once mere ultraminimal state becomes a lowly dominant agency. It finds that the other agencies have established noteworthy records, with safe, non-risky procedures, and stops spying on them, preferring less expensive arrangements instead. Its executives have, alas, grown fat and placid without competition; their calculations of who to protect, how, by what allocation of resources to what ends (gathering information, courts, buildings, prisons, cops, etc.), are adversely affected, since they have taken themselves out of a truly competitive market price system. The dominant agency grows inefficient, when compared to the dynamic, new, improved agencies.

Soon — lo! and behold! — the lowly dominant protection agency becomes simply one agency among many in a market legal system, or disappears altogether. The sinister minimal state is reduced, by a series of morally permissible steps which violate the rights of no one, to at best merely one agency among many. The evil black State apparatus dissolves into the utopia of anarchy. In short, the invisible hand strikes back. Justice is triumphant, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I should like to end with one quotation, from Benjamin R. Tucker, and one paraphrase, from Karl Marx, which express most clearly my own attitudes toward the matters we have been discussing. Tucker pointed to the anarchist definition of the State as the “embodiment of the principle of aggression”:

“. . .we see,” he said, “that the State is antagonistic to society; and, society being essential to individual life and development, the conclusion leaps to the eyes that the relation of the State to the individual and of the individual to the State must be one of hostility, enduring till the State shall perish.”

And, paraphrasing Marx, we may say that “traditional political philosophers have sought only to explain and justify the State. The point, however, is to abolish it.”

*It is not clear whether this protection will be offered without cost or if the former customers will be forced to pay for it. My interpretation is that the “minimal state” can force clients to pay up to what they would have with another agency (what problems this raises in a world of shifting prices!). “Compensation” would then consist of picking up the tab for the difference between the cost with another agency and its own “price”.

Arts and Movies

Mr. First Nighter

Nashville. dir. by Robert Altman

Several friends of mine, one of them a professor of film, reacted to this picture with almost identical words: “I know this picture is significant, but I’m damned if I know what the significance is.” Before I even saw Nashville, then, I knew one thing: that the film was a failure, since it puzzled even intelligent and knowledgeable viewers, and that its chief success was in provoking discussion.

For those who care about movies, there must be esthetic and ideological war to the knife between the Old or Movie-Movie, and the New Movie, spawn of a culture in an advanced stage of decadence. The Old Movie, true to the classical esthetic of fiction and drama which ruled until the twentieth century, and which ruled in movies until recent decades, was marked by a strong plot and by central characters with whom the audience could identify and who developed through the action of the plot. The plot emerges logically and step-by-step from purposive action by the central characters, and from the conflicts which that action engenders. The New Movie, like twentieth century (once avant-garde) fiction, assumes that individuals have no purposes, are not self-motivated, but instead respond mechanically and randomly to events. But if the central characters have no purposes, there can be no plot and, furthermore, it is impossible for the audience or the reader to identify with them or to give a damn what happens to them. Who can care about random response mechanisms?

This sort of fiction tends to puzzle as well as bore the reader or viewer. For, along with his own indifference to the characters, the viewer perceives the author or director as himself being indifferent as well. And so the characters are depersonalized and distanced from creator as well as the audience. But in that case, the viewer will wonder, what in the world is the director or author getting at? And if the author is skillful enough at weaving a general air of portentousness and implicit significance, the viewer is apt to conclude that there must be profundity there, except that he is too dense or naive to capture the subtle point.

And so the New Movie. Boring as all getout, but reeking an atmosphere of pretentious pseudo-profundity. Robert Altman is one of the masters of the New Movie. In his celebrated Nashville, Altman’s contribution to the genre is to use New Movie distancing and depersonalization as a massive put down of a whole population and a whole culture. Using an effective pseudo-documentary technique, Altman accomplishes his distancing by fragmenting his characters; instead of one or few central characters, he creates a dozen or so, who necessarily appear on the screen for only a minute or two at a time. Being so fragmented, there is scarcely a chance that anyone in the audience will identify with any of them. To top it off, each of these characters is random and unmotivated, to an extreme far beyond most of his New Movie colleagues. In fact, each of the characters is a colossal jerk, ranging from nit witty to venal.

It is of course all too easy for a director to put down his characters, particularly if the movie is done in documentary style where no one person can possibly capture the empathy of the audience. Years ago, a non-fiction documentary film, I believe it was Naked City, managed to put down and ridicule all of the people in it by the crude but effective device of showing each of them in closeups doing everyday but unglamorous things like wolfing down popsicles. Altman gets away with, his device, without enraging much of his public, for several reasons. In the first place, there are a lot of funny bits. Odd ball and random behaving characters can be funny, particularly in the hands of a skilled director. There is, for example, the half-naked groupie who arrives at the airport in Nashville in order to visit her dying aunt in the hospital, but who never gets to the hospital or the funeral because she wanders off with every stud in sight. There is the dimwit BBC reporter, who thinks in pretentious cliches, is always on the prowl for celebrities, and misses the only newsy event — indeed, the only event at all — in the movie. There is much random sex with no emotion whatsoever.

A second reason Altman has not alienated the public is that he is, to give him credit, far more subtle in his massive put-down than are many other directors. Smile, a left-liberal assault on California beauty contests, for example, was a clumsy and preachy picture. Altman is more subtle and far funnier. But there is another and complex point about Nashville that makes it a far more important picture than an obvious turkey like Smile. For Altman is engaging in a massive put-down of an entire way of life and culture, specifically the combination of right-wing ideology and country music that permeates much of the American heartland. Yet, the largest part of the picture consists of filmed country music singing, with the occurrences — there is no real plot — weaving around the various musical sets. And yet, what with the subtlety plus the massive doses of country music, Altman has succeeded in out-finessing himself. For it is very easy to sit through the entire picture, enjoy the country music, and not see it as any put-down at all. Hence, while Altman has succeeded in holding his audience and not alienating them, he has failed in his purpose, since the put-down does not very readily come through. It does, of course, for liberal urban intellectuals, who are cued to join in smirks against country culture. And though I am informed by an expert on country music that this is bad country music and hence a put-down there too, this message does hot come through to the large number of Americans who are neither poised to attack right-wing mass culture nor are experts on this musical genre. For the largest group in the middle, Nashville will be seen as two hours of pleasant if undistinguished country music, punctuated with peculiar and sometimes funny characters. And perhaps this sort of reception is the best revenge that lovers of movie-movies can take on Robert Altman.

For the rest, as we have said, the “plot” is non-existent, as must be the case with purposeless and random characters. The only action of the film is a pointless assassination by a “lone nut” whose motivation — typically — is never explained or even hinted at. More fodder for those looking for deep-think in Nashville. Then, there is Altman’s much-heralded “innovation” of having several people talking at once. I didn’t find this device as annoying as I had expected. For one thing, since none of the people had anything important or interesting to say (typical in New Movies), not hearing the dialogue was just as well. Secondly, the device is scarcely new, since it was used — in that case brilliantly, to add to the suspense and the general air of menace — in that grand old movie, Citizen Kane. Come to think of it an Old Movie like Citizen Kane was a left-liberal messagy picture too, but it was done with brilliance and with power, with highly charged and purposeful, conflicting characters on a grand scale. But just the mere mention of Kane puts our entire discussion in its proper perspective; the grievous decline of the American cinema over the last thirty or forty years can be no more starkly revealed.

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Priced at $9.95, from Fleet Press Corp., New York City.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 6

JUNE, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4M7

Ford Vs. Carter?

At this writing, the long primary trail has just ended, and we can all heave a sigh of relief, for it looks as if (more tentatively, of course, on the Republican side) that the Presidential nominees will be Ford and Carter. Relief because that means that the most dangerous candidates in either party have been repudiated. Both Ford and Carter are fuzzy centrists, Carter being the most unknown quantity of any of the Presidential hopefuls; but, for the cause of liberty, better a fuzzy centrist than a fanatical warmonger, and the warmongering candidates are in the process of biting the dust.

On the Republican side, the most dangerous candidate of any party is Ronald Reagan, as the Lib. Forum has repeatedly warned. Fortunately, at the last minute the stumbling and wavering Ford campaign decided to go with the hard-core anti-Reaganites, and to pick up and hammer home on Reagan’s outrageous gaffe on giving cheery consideration to sending American troops to fight on behalf of white racist rule in Rhodesia. Reagan’s hasty retraction — a typical Reagan pattern on his more controversial statements — did not close the opening that his trigger-happy gaffe provided. And happily the Ford campaign decided to hammer this home in anti-Reagan TV spots, and in Ford’s own trenchant statements pointing to Reagan’s irresponsibility. Ford’s excellent phrase: “Governor Ronald Reagan couldn’t start a war, but President Ronald Reagan could”, said it all. The fact that this anti-Reagan-as-warmonger line had little or no effect in California is beside the point; for it undoubtedly did have an important effect on the Ohio voters, in the most important of the vital June 8 primaries. For Reagan was supposed to pick up about 25 delegates in Ohio, and only managed to acquire 6; and in a race as tight as this one, this differential should prove decisive.

The howls of outrage by the Reaganites at the anti-warmongering campaign is not just a question of wounded sensibilities — although why the Reaganites feel that they have a license to dish it out but not to take it is something of a mystery. For the purpose of the Reagan campaign was twofold: first, to try to gain the Presidency for their man; and second, to push the Ford administration in a war-mongering direction. They had accomplished the latter all during the spring, as Ford reacted passively to the Reagan hawk thrusts on detente, Africa, military spending, and the Panama Canal. The decision, at long last, to hammer away at Reagan as an irresponsible and trigger-happy warmonger not only will probably succeed in turning back the threat of a Reagan nomination; it also paves the way for Ford to move in a peaceward direction, to move “left” on foreign policy for the duration of the campaign. Hence, the hysterical attacks by the Reaganites.

Fortunately, Ronnie has shown the’ same self-destructive streak that Gold water did in 1964: making highly controversial comments in an offhand manner which he then quickly repudiates when criticism hits the tan. In doing so, he not only scares his natural opponents, but also confuses his supporters, since his rapid retractions indicate that yes, he Was being kooky and irresponsible. At every crucial turning-point of the primary campaign, Reagan managed to blow it with a particularly ill-directed gaffe. In New Hampshire, it was the $90 billion misunderstanding, seemingly carefully prepared but abandoned under fire. After that lost Reagan New Hampshire, airy comments about making social security voluntary managed to scare the bejesus out of the old-folk masses of St. Petersburg-Tampa, who, though right-wing on other issues, run like mad when their Social Security checks seem to be in danger. Exit Florida, since the defection of the old folks more than compensated for the fanatical enthusiasm for Ronnie among the Cuban fascist emigres. If Reagan had been either (a) smart and/or (b) libertarian, he could have explained to the old folks that Social Security was a gigantic swindle that was going bankrupt, and that they would fare better with a voluntary system. But, of course, Reagan was neither (a) nor (b) so he turned tail.

Then, just as it looked that Reagan would make it, shortly before the Tennessee and Kentucky primaries, he spoke airily about “selling the TVA”, which of course scared the bejesus out of the right-wing masses of eastern Tennessee and eastern Kentucky, whose right-wingism stops well short of their slavish devotion to the TVA mystique and its attendant subsidies. And, finally, American troops to Rhodesia helped scuttle his chances in Ohio.

The Ford strategy will now be to stress the argument that Ford is “electable” while Reagan is not; this is no argument to deter the right-wing militants, but it should work well enough among the uncommitted to get Ford the nomination.

In the Democratic race, the most dangerous candidate (second only to Reagan as a war-mongering menace) was, of course, Mr. State, Scoop Jackson, and fortunately, Scoop, with the charisma of a wet mackerel, faded fast. Next, there was the ever-looming problem of the old gasbag, HHH, who while not quite as bad as Scoop ideologically, was the No. 2 war threat among the Democrats, and was also undoubtedly the most repulsive esthetically of any of the candidates in either party. But the Lord was with Jimmy Carter, especially in Ohio, and the decisive victory in that northern industrial state wrapped it up for Carter. As this editorial is being written, the leading Democrats are engaging in an undignified scramble to climb aboard the Carter bandwagon, or, to adopt the current vivid metaphor, “to get aboard the ship before the gangplank goes up”.

And so the sigh of relief (provided, of course, that Ford beats Reagan). Instead of a savage Yankee vs. Cowboy contest, it looks as if we will have a pleasant and gentlemanly discussion on foreign policy between the Morgan candidate (Carter, Vance, Ball, Brzezinski) and the quasi-Rockefeller candidate (Ford, Kissinger, but a pro-peace Morgan policy on the Far East, signalled by Ford’s appointment of the top Morgan man in politico-economic life, Thomas Sovereign Gates, Jr., lately head of the Morgan Guaranty Bank, as ambassador to Red China. Gates was the original architect of the pro-peace policy with Red China). Neither candidate is of course ideal, but either Ford or Carter is about as propeacey as we are likely to get until Roger MacBride becomes President. So let us count our blessings.

As well as being good for the cause of peace, a Ford-Carter contest will also be very good for the MacBride-Bergland Libertarian Party ticket. A hot ideological contest (e.g. Reagan vs. Kennedy) would have enlisted all the conservative and liberal juices on their respective sides. But a Ford-Carter contest is not going to make more than a dime’s worth of difference on any policies, foreign and domestic. Nobody is going to be really exercised on which of these two is going to make it. This will leave a lot of people free to vote their conscience, which in many cases will mean the Libertarian Party ticket. Consider: there must be, among the host of fanatical Reaganites, some substantial number who are more interested in liberty than in blowing up the world; these, bitter and disgruntled at the Ford victory, and not really deeply worried about Carter, should vote in large numbers for Roger MacBride. Conversely, there must be a substantial number of pro-peace and pro-civil liberties liberals who, not really enthusiastic about Carter and not really scared, stiff of Ford, will also shift to Roger MacBride. So that Roger should gain a substantial protest or conscience vote from idealistic conservatives and idealistic liberals. If there’s not more than a dime’s worth of difference, why not vote MacBride?

Who’s Behind . . . . .?

Recently, Newsweek reported that an aide o! Jimmy Carter visited Moscow, and was immediately besieged by high Soviet officials asking the question: “Who’s behind Jimmy Carter?” Newsweek treated the question with a snide scoffing tone at the Russians’ alleged naivete. But it’s really a darn good question: who is behind Jimmy Carter? Or is he really just a Bible-thumping Georgia peanut-farmer with lots of charisma, and does that suffice to account for his meteoric rise? Well, for one thing we do know that Carter is a member of the secret and extremely powerful. “Trilateral Commission”, a group of top politicians and corporatists who meet regularly to decide on public policy. More specifically, we have a few other clues. Notably, that, at a recent fund-raising meeting for Carter in New York City, a leading role was taken by none other than Cyrus Vance, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, president of the New York City Bar Association, and with close ties to the powerful Wall Street investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers. The same firm houses a man who might well be Secretary of State in a Carter administration: George Ball. Moreover, Vance is a member of the Board of Directors of IBM, one of the most important corporations in the Morgan financial ambit. When we consider, too, that Georgia’s most powerful corporation, Coca-Cola, is also a Morgan firm, the pattern begins to fill out.

Jimmy Carter’s ties with the Morgan financial interests bring waves of nostalgia to veteran Washingtonologists. For it recalls the days when the giant Morgan and Rockefeller combines ran political parties and governments, usually clashing, sometimes in coalition. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pattern was usually: Morgan control of the Democratic Party, and Rockefeller control of the Republican Party. The latter was accomplished through Rockefeller’s domination of the Ohio Republican Party (Cleveland being John D.’s original home; and power base). Rockefeller’s school chum and lifelong friend and financial ally, Marcus Hanna, was for many years boss of both the Ohio and the national Republican parties. It is no accident that every Republican nominee for President from 1876 to 1920, with only a couple of exceptions, was an Ohio Republican, and therefore Rockefellerdominated: Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding. The only exceptions were Theodore Roosevelt, who came to power upon the assassination of McKinley by one of our earlier “lone nuts”, and Charles Evans Hughes, the 1916 nominee, who was enough of a Rockefeller man to be chief counsel for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and who had led a Baptist Bible class which included John D. himself.

On the other hand, the Cleveland and Wilson administrations were dominated by the House of Morgan; always bipartisan, especially after the maverick William Jennings Bryan came to power in the Democracy, the Morgans dominated even more heavily the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, both of whom rose to power by the accident of deaths in the Presidential office. 1924, by the way, was a blockbuster year for the Morgans, who controlled both Presidential candidates, since Democrat John W. Davis was an attorney for J. P. Morgan & Co.

Since World War II, the old Morgan vs. Rockefeller motifs have altered, with the Morgans and Rockefellers essentially joined in a “Yankee” coalition in the Northeast against the “Cowboy” coalition centered in the Southern Rim, or Sunbelt, states. But, if Carter and Ford are nominated this year, we will get the closest thing to a Morgan vs. Rockefeller contest since 1948, when Dewey tightly controlled by the Rockefellers, opposed Harry Truman, who was at least loosely allied to the Morgans and other Democratic Wall Street firms. For Jerry Ford, while certainly not in the Rockefeller camp to the same extent as Tom Dewey, is surely allied to the Rockefellers, as witness Nelson’s throwing the New York delegates into the Ford camp.

What about the other Republican hopeful, Ronald Reagan? Who’s behind him? Of course, the Southern Californian is a quintessential Cowboy, but that doesn’t help very much, since the Cowboys are a much looser and broader coalition than the YANKEES. But one important clue has surfaced: the close ties of Reagan with the State-created monopoly, the Pacific Telephone Company. (Interesting for a supposed advocate of laissez-faire and free competition!) When Reagan was governor of California, the man who coordinated the screening of all appointments to his administration was Reagan’s personal attorney, William French Smith, whose Los Angeles law firm does the legal work for the Pacific Telephone Company. Smith, a longtime friend of Reagan and a key political operative, is also a member of the board of Pacific Telephone, and a trustee of Reagan’s estate during his Presidential campaign.

Further: Reagan’s press secretary from 1967 to 1973 was Ed Gray, a former executive of Pacific Telephone; and the vice-chairman of his 1966 state campaign committee was Charles Ducommon, a director of Pacific Telephone.

Reagan was also close to the notorious San Diego corporate tycoon C. Arnholt Smith, the Nixon ally who himself served as a member of Reagan’s appointment screening committee, and who, along with his associates, pumped money into Reagan’s 1970 re-election campaign Another virtual scandal during the Reagan regime was the enormously costly boondoggle, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART). From its opening in early 1972, BART was plagued with safety defects, probably due to shoddy work by its corporate builders, who enjoyed munificent cost overruns from the pliant BART system. Two of the major prime contractors of BART, it so happened, had extremely close ties with the Reagan administration: Bechtel Corporation and Rohr Industries, both of which were charged in a subsequent BART board suit with providing unsafe equipment. Bechtel director Eugene Lippa served as assistant state finance chief of Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1970; Bechtel also gave generously to the Reagan campaign. Even closer to Reagan was Rohr Industries. Rohr’s legal work is handled by the law firm of none other than William French Smith. Rohr’s president, Burt Raynes, was a member of Reagan’s re-election steering committee in San Diego. Gordon Luce, a key figure in Reagan’s two statewide campaigns, and secretary of California Business and Transportation from 1967 to 1970, became a member of Rohr’s board of directors in the same year. And when Ed Meese, Reagan’s executive secretary, left California government with Reagan’s exit in 1975, he became vice-president of Rohr Industries. Furthermore, Luce and Raynes both served on Reagan’s appointment screening panels.

And so, apart from Reagan’s monstrous foreign and military policies, we must cease thinking of Reagan as any kind of classical liberal. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the record shows clearly that Reagan is a state corporatist, and ally of the burgeoning government-industrial complex that is wrecking America.

(On Reagan and California corporatism, see Joel Kotkin and Paul Grabowicz, “Who Got Rich With Reagan?” Village Voice, March 8, 1976, pp. 13-14. For more on C. Arnholt Smith, see Lowell Bergman and Maxwell Robach, “C. Arnholt Smith and the San Diego Connection,” in S. Weissman. ed., Big Brother And The Holding Company (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1974), pp. 185-204).

Secession, The Essence Of Anarchy: A Libertarian Perspective On The War For Southern Independence

By Joseph R. Stromberg[*]

Introduction

For the libertarian who reflects upon American history the War for Southern Independence presents vexing problems. For liberals, radicals, pacifists, and libertarians the war appeared to require a choice between fundamental values: self-determination for the South or freedom for Black Americans. This conflict was as difficult to resolve then as it is now. P.J. Proudhon, the French anarchist, supported the Confederacy, on balance, because he identified it with the cause of decentralization. (1) Michael Bakunin, founder of Russian anarchism, strongly favored the North because he saw slavery as the essential issue. (2) Marx, strongly anti-state at times, likewise desired Northern victory, which he regarded as historically necessary. (3)

On the American Left division also existed. Most abolitionists backed the war, hoping for emancipation as a by-product. A minority, which included Lysander Spooner, opposed it. Spooner, a natural law anarchist and revolutionary, believed that the war merely enslaved all Americans to the centralized state for the benefit of Yankee monopolists while hardly helping Black Americans at all. (4)

One circumstance in particular complicates any libertarian or anarchist assessment of the war. Between 1789 and 1860. Southern thinkers derived from social contract theory and constitutional law doctrines of nullification and secession; advanced though they were to defend the South’s social order, these ideas have much wider application. It is even possible that had the Richmond government been faithful to its official decentralist ideology, the outcome of the war might have been different for Southern independence and possibly for human liberty. (5)

A Radical Theory Developed By Conservatives

In his first inaugural address Abraham Lincoln stated that “Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” (6) How state-rights men created this “anarchistic” theory is an interesting study in American political thought. The secessionist theory, despite its inconsistency, does have clear anarchist implications.

In America, Law — as embodied by the Constitution — serves as a secular social cement and as a source of final authority. Lacking the kind of value base an established Church could provide, Americans have subscribed to a cult of the Constitution. (7) Hence Americans often make moral questions into constitutional ones, a habit their strong English legalism reinforces. Except for a few “higher law” advocates like William Lloyd Garrison, most American political activists have been eager to appear as good constitutionalists.

Thus when Southerners defended slavery and when they resolved on a separatist revolution, they argued as constitutional lawyers. When the South seceded, it possessed, a complete theory which legitimized the deed. Southern political thinkers from Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Caroline to Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens had elaborated this “state-rights” or “compact” theory of the Union, Nullification, obstruction of an unconstitutional federal law, and secession, withdrawal by a “sovereign state” from a federation voluntarily entered, were the devices the state-rights school put forth as bulwarks against majority tyranny.

Because legality and morality coincide so much in American thought, the constitutional rationale for an action is of no small importance. When war came, it was critical. As Chief Justice Chase admitted in Texas v. White (1869), if secession were constitutional, the struggle “must have (been) a war for conquest and subjugation.” (8) This was the view urged after 1865 by former Confederate President Davis and former Vice President Stephens. Seeking to win the postwar legal argument at least, they provided the final summary of received secessionist dogma. (9)

According to the mature theory, the Constitution was a compact between the states (including those formed later), each of which was fully sovereign. Since no common judge existed to decide constitutional questions — despite the Supreme Court’s claim of authority — each party had a residual right to exercise judgment. This right extended as far as nullification and secession if the Constitution were violated by the common agent of the states, the federal government, or by the other parties. These remedies were not to be undertaken lightly, but they were within the reserved rights of the states.

The compact theory was articulated at various times of crisis and gradually refined. It was first expressed in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison respectively. Although considerably watered down from Jefferson’s draft, the Kentucky Resolutions began with the ringing declaration that “the several states composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact. . . they . . delegated to (a general government) certain definite powers, reserving. . . the residuary mass of right to their own self-government. . . .” Each state “acceded as a State” to the Constitutional compact, and was “an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party. . . .” There being no common judge, each state had “an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.” (10)

The Resolutions called the Alien and Sedition Acts “altogether void and of no force.” Citing instances of the Federalist drift toward arbitrary power, the resolves warned that such acts “may tend to drive these States into revolution and blood. . . .”. Government by confidence was dangerous: for “free government is founded in jealousy. . . .” (11) The Resolutions were sent to the other states in the hope they too would protest.

The Virginia Resolutions attributed federal power to “the compact to which the States are parties. “When the general government exceeded its delegated powers, the states were “duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil.” The Virginia Assembly declared the Alien and Sedition Acts “unconstitutional” and called on the other states to act against them. (12)

Madison’s resolutions mentioned “interposition,” but the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799, drawn up by John Breckinridge, first introduced the term “nullification.” Asserting that the “sovereign and independent” parties to the federal compact possessed final judgment, Kentucky stated that “a nullification of those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under color of (the Constitution) is the rightful remedy.” (13)

Liberal historians, eager to claim Jefferson for the tradition of democratic nationalism, hesitate to admit he held “extreme” state-rights views. The resolutions which he, Madison, and Breckinridge authored are presented as “emergency” rhetoric inspired by concern for free expression. Although the immediate question was the Federalists’ attempted suppression of the Democratic Republican movement, the crisis went deeper. One historian observes that Hamilton’s circle “talked of marching into Virginia and dividing it into smaller states” while “Virginians openly considered secession.” (14)

John Taylor, the Jeffersonian theorist par excellence, was in the forefront of the disunionists. Jefferson resisted, but as matters worsened he became willing to contemplate secession. When Breckinridge hurriedly drew up the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799, he consulted Jefferson’s 1798 text, appropriating the word “nullification” from it.(15) Jefferson had written that “every State has a natural right in cases not within the compact. . .to nullify of their own authority all assumptions of power by others within their limits . . .” (16) Later, because of the other states’ unfavorable replies to the 1798 Resolutions, Jefferson favored a more radical protest. Writing to Madison on August 23, 1799, he suggested declaring that Kentucky and Virginia would “sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self-government which we have reserved . . .” (17) Clearly, nullification and secession were not inventions of later Southern “fire-eaters.” Madison’s Report on the Resolutions, written for the Virginia Assembly in 1800, affirmed that if the Constitution was a compact, states could determine what questions “required their interposition.” (18)

Once in power in Washington, the Jeffersonian Republicans found new merit in vigorous federal action, including the Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson admitted was unconstitutional. (19) By 1812 President Madison had the nation at war with England, a war very unpopular in New England. Of the old Republicans John Randolph battled almost alone for peace. The remnants of the Federalist party, particularly the “Young Federalists”, took up the position the Republicans had abandoned and displayed new interest in limited government. Massachusetts remained virtually neutral, supplying virtually no troops against the British. Disaffected Federalists met in convention at Hartford, Conn., in 1814 to protest the war. Some of them favored a separate New England confederacy. Before any drastic steps were taken, the war ended. The convention recommended several constitutional amendments, and adjourned.

The state-rights position was again put forward during the struggle over the protective tariff 1828-33. South Carolina became the focal point of Southern resentment at protection of Northern manufactures, and under the covert leadership of Vice President John C. Calhoun proceeded to reassert state interposition against unconstitutional laws. After South Carolina nullified the tariff in 1832 and prepared to arrest federal collection officers, President Andrew Jackson, who believed in military solutions to many problems, was ready to march troops in to reduce the defiant state. The Carolinians were resolved to resist with state forces. To avoid bloodshed, the state recinded its Nullification Ordinance; at the same time the tariff was lowered.

Calhoun, now Senator from South Carolina, led the state-rights faction. His rigidly logical mind was responsible for the first advances in state-rights theory since the time of Jefferson. In his Disquisition he sought to ground his conception of federalism in political philosophy. Paradoxically, he severed his position from its roots in natural law and Lockean liberalism, and yet attempted to vindicate minority rights with his notion of the “concurrent majority.” (20)

One innovation of South Carolina was to call a convention directly expressing the sovereignty of the people of the state to nullify the tariff and later the Force Bill. Like a constitutional convention, this body was deemed more qualified to pass on such matters than the state legislature, itself a creature of the people. In addition, the Nullification Ordinance directly threatened secession. (21).

State-rights ideas cut both ways. At the time of the Mexican War threats of secession were heard in New England. (22) In 1859, Wisconsin nullified a US Supreme Court decision based on the Fugitive Slave Act, quoting the Jeffersonian language of 1798. (23) Garrison advocated Northern secession, crying “No Union with slaveholders.” As the South became a “conscious minority,” more talk was heard there of leaving the Union! After 1850, proslavery radicals held conventions almost yearly; at these meetings “fire-eaters” like William Yancey and Robert Rhett agitated for a Southern confederacy. (24) In 1860, South Carolina led the way: the state seceded by simply repealing the act by which an earlier South Carolina convention had ratified the Constitution of the United States. (25)

The Historical Basis of the Theory

Was the secessionist case a sound one? In many ways it was, although it was not the only position to develop out of social contract and American law. The secessionist contention that the states were sovereign — subject to no higher final authority — during and after the Revolutionary War is strong indeed. Despite generations of Federalist propaganda and nationalist razzle-dazzle, it is clear that the thirteen colonies fought for their separate sovereignty and independence, albeit in loose concert.(26) During the war, the Continental Congress — in which nationalists spied the germ of national sovereignty — was a standing committee which coordinated the common struggle. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the colonies “Free and Independent States.” Twelve colonial delegations awaited instructions from home before consenting to it. Even then seven legislatures separately confirmed it: Connecticut, for example, announced that it was “a free and independent State.” (27)

The Declaration asserted that the new states could “levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances” and exercise all other sovereign powers. Virginia’s independent foreign policy activities illustrate state exercise of these powers. (28) By Articles of Confederation, which they took over three years to ratify, the states created “a firm league of friendship” and “confederacy.” Article II reserved to each state “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” Most of the revolutionists believed in the sovereignty of “the people organized as states.” (29) They were certainly not fighting to replace one strong central authority with another.

The right wing of the Revolution was appalled by democracy in the states and sought to curtail it. Crying up a “crisis” which existed primarily in their pocketbooks, a coalition of Northern merchants and Southern planters engineered the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia and secured ratification of a new constitution. (30) Even here prevailing opinion forced them to compromise with state sovereignty to get the new charter approved.

Because of this compromise the Constitution lent itself to a state-rights interpretation, especially since social contract was the common rhetoric of the men at Philadelphia. Gouverneur Morris, no friend of neighborhood control, wanted “to form a compact for the good of America.” (31) Elbridge Gerry protested the plan to let nine states establish the Constitution, saying “If nine out of thirteen can dissolve the compact, six out of nine will be just as able to dissolve the new one hereafter.” (32) References to Locke, Vattel, Priestley, and other writers abounded. (33) On the extremes, Luther Martin and Alexander Hamilton utilized Lockean terminology, clearly understanding it differently.

The nationalists thought they were making a proper, irrevocable Whig compact, a pure Lockean contract creating a new sovereign over the states. But during the adoption struggle Madison and Hamilton argued in the Federalist essays that the new Constitution — rather like the tribune God of the Creed — was at once federal and national. State-rights men or “Antifederalists” stressed the dangers, of a monarchical presidency, imperial consolidation, and the decline of the states (and were borne out by events). (34)

From the standpoint of state-rights theory, much of the argument at Philadelphia seems simply opportunist. State-rights men, wanting to retain the Articles, asserted that the Confederation could not be broken; hence the Articles must be honored. The Nationalists, contemplating a constitutional coup d’etat, had to claim that the Union could be dissolved and recreated by as few as nine states. Madison, Who then denied state sovereignty, argued that the Confederation was not a proper compact Precisely because a majority could not bind, the remainder; it was a “convention” and could be dissolved by any party. (35)

Given the need to reassure the states, Madison and even Hamilton Pitched-their arguments to the objections of state-rights men like Patrick Henry. Hamilton named the proposed system “a Confederate Republic,” defining it — after Montesquieu — as “an assemblage of societies.” Such a confederacy secured to its members the advantages of strength in foreign affairs without annihilating their individual characters. (36) Answering charges of consolidation, Madison stressed that ratification was “the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation”; otherwise, the majority of the whole could bind the rest. Each state was “a sovereign body” only “bound by its own voluntary act.” (37) Denying the new government was novel in operating directly on individuals, Madison remarked that the existing Confederation did so already. Hence, the new plan was merely “the expansion of principles which are found in the articles.” (38)

These admissions from the centralizing camp, founded in political reality, greatly assisted later state-rights men. Jefferson Davis could write that “a ‘more perfect union’ was accomplished by the organization of a government more complete in its various branches . . . and by the delegation . . . of certain additional powers . . . .” (39) The changes did not alter the principle of a federal compact. Accepting Madison’s terminology in his secessionist summa, Alexander Stephens, the foremost libertarian of the old South, called the American system “a pure Confederated Republic, upon the model of Montesquieu. . . .” The general government was “an entirely artificial or conventional State or Nation,” “a Political Corporation” created by a compact between states. (40) Externally, it appeared as a nation; in its metaphysical essence, however, it was a sort of political joint-stock venture, whose shareholders could withdraw for cause. (41) By this theoretical innovation secessionist thought almost transcended its liberal, Lockean origins.

Constitutional exegesis need not detain us long. In his celebrated “Reply to Hayne” in 1830 Daniel Webster denied that terms like “compact” and “accede” were in use at Philadelphia: state-rights men had invented them. Since these were typical eighteenth century terms, Webster was easily refuted. (42) As for “We the People” in the preamble, the original draft had begun “We the People of the States of New Hampshire,” etc. (43) Since as few as nine states could enact the Constitution “between” themselves, it would have been awkward to name them all. Most of the prohibitions on the states (Article I, Section 10), often cited as evidence of federal supremacy, existed in the old Articles which acknowledged state sovereignty. Finally, Rhode Island and North Carolina remained aloof from the Union in 1789-90 after eleven states had established the new government. This demonstrates beyond question that the people who ratified the Constitution were the people-as-states and not Americans in the aggregate! (44)

If the states were sovereign in some arguable sense before 1789, and if sovereignty cannot pass by implication — as Davis and Stephens emphasized — then they remained so under the Constitution. (45) Constitutional scholars are wont to lose sleep over the framers’ intentions in such matters. Although the potentially radical notion of the “consent of the Governed” is still an ideological prop of the system,[*] little attention is paid to the intentions of those who ratified the document. Ratification gave the Constitution all the “validity it ever had.” (46) The temper of the ratifying conventions in the states may be gauged by their words. Massachusetts, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia. North Carolina, and Rhode Island all called for an amendment closely modeled on the second Article of Confederation, expressly reserving to the states all powers not clearly “delegated” to the general government. South Carolina and Rhode Island mentioned state “sovereignty.” North Carolina and Virginia invoked natural rights, the latter listing the rights men retain when they form a “social compact.”

Most significantly, Virginia, New York and Rhode Island declared that “the powers of government” may be “resumed” or “reassumed” by the people when perverted or abused. (47) Since each convention spoke only for the people of its own state, Davis’ and Stephens’ idea that three states by this language reserved the right of secession in their very ratifications is not altogether unwarranted. In addition, New York and South Carolina declared all undelegated powers to be reserved; Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island stated that clauses restricting Congress were exceptions to delegated powers or inserted “for greater caution.” (48)

Given these sentiments, it is not surprising that ten amendments passed quickly, including the much neglected ninth and tenth. The ninth reserves all residual rights to the people, while the tenth reserves all powers not “delegated” to Congress to the states or the people.

Philosophical Roots And Outcome

Granting the possibility of state sovereignty, secession still required another philosophical postulate. This it inherited from radical Anglo-French liberalism. Even if the Constitution is a compact or a political joint-stock company, it must be shown that withdrawal is a right. According to Parrington, secession ultimately rests on “the doctrine which Paine and Jefferson derived from the French school, namely, that a constitutional compact is terminable.” (49) Paine argued, as against the Whig theory, that the people are always entitled to alter their government. (Strict Lockeanism holds that a people may only alter a government under the most extreme provocation, and then only if a substantial majority of them support the revolt.) In this, Paine agreed with Price and Priestley. (50) Jefferson; too, believed “No society can make a perpetual Constitution, or even a perpetual law.” (51)

If the people are sovereign-as-state, secession follows as a natural right if one accepts the radical version of the social contract. Parrington comments: ?

However deeply it might be covered over by constitutional lawyers and historians who defended the right of secession, the doctrine (of terminable compact) was there implicitly, and the southern cause would have been more effectively served if legal refinements had been subordinated to philosophical justification of this fundamental doctrine. (52)

Parrington has overstated only the French influence on Jeffersonian thought. There also existed an Angle-American radical natural law school whose ideas paralleled the French. (53) There was a real reason Southerners refrained from developing the philosophical side of the argument. The Virginia debate of 1850 was the last open discussion on freeing the slaves until 1865, when it was too late. Determined to preserve their “peculiar institution,” Southerners turned inward, resorting to repressive legislation and thought-control. Given their laager mentality and traditional legalism, Southerners naturally presented secession as a “civil.” “constitutional” right.

Uneasily aware that natural law liberalism had very dangerous potentials, Southerners shied away from libertarian arguments. A libertarian slaveholder is a contradiction in terms, and Calhoun epitomized the schizophrenic Southern mind. Having abandoned natural law in favor of force and hierarchy — a logical position for a slaveholder he smuggled back into his political theory the “compacts” and “ratifications” which make no sense apart from liberalism. As Louis Hartz notes, if minorities still have rights, why not the minorities within the minorities — until we are back in a state of nature. (54)

Only George Fitzhugh had the courage to really defend slavery, and he abandoned liberal contractualism for organic nationalism and universal authoritarianism a la Filmer. (55) One insincere solution was liberalism for whites coupled with a racist denial of Black Americans’ humanity. The South was trapped in a deep contradiction, denying and affirming its liberal origins, and espousing a “reactionary anarchism.”

Jeffersonianism ended in secessionist logic in the South. People-as-states were sovereign, subject to no higher law. In the North, such liberalism ended in radical abolitionism. Having no vested interest in slavery and hating all forms of compulsion, antislavery men like Stephen Pearl Andrews, Garrison, Spooner, and Henry David Thoreau soon pushed liberalism all the way into natural law anarchism. Parrington calls Thoreau’s position “individual compact” which “implied . . . individual nullification” or full anarchism. (56) Unlike Stephens who took the federal Union as a joint-stock operation, Thoreau took all states as artificial and asserted his right to secede.

Contractualism Succumbs in a War for Empire

If the South could not follow out its own logic for fear of admitting the natural rights of Black men, Unionists in 1860 would not admit any doctrine of revocable compact. On the “macro” level of social compact, where Southerners felt entitled to secede, Lincoln took a strict Lockean position: There was one society and only a majority of the states could agree to its dissolution. (57) On the analogous “micro” level, only the left-wing individuals asserted individual sovereignty and individual secession. At the micro or state level Southerners became Lockean Whigs once again.

Despite the inconsistencies of secessionist thinking, it is of no small interest today. In this age of imperial centralization the secessionist argument, if properly grounded in human rights, goes hand in hand with radical libertarianism. Abraham Lincoln fundamentally recognized the implications for the imperial state. Secession was a denial of majority rule, and to reject that rule was to “fly to anarchy or despotism.” Could not parts of the new Confederacy themselves secede, ad infinitum, he asked.(58) Between anarchy and despotism, Lincoln chose despotism and waged a brutal war solely to preserve an instrumentality of power based in Washington. (59) As Spooner remarked, if the Union had ever been based on consent the war changed all that. (60) Since the war was not defensive and did not free large numbers of people in any meaningful sense, a libertarian is inclined, at least, to sympathize with Spooner’s position. Spooner opposed the war as enslaving the people to the government and at the same time supported slave revolts. (61) But this is not really an adequate position. Libertarians were perplexed at the time. To properly assess the war and its results from a libertarian standpoint would require another essay.

J.W. Gough, an authority on social contract, writes that there was something to “the contractual theory of the federation.” (62) Much more than slavery and Davis’ government died in 1865. Parrington sees the great tragedy of American history in the fact that “local self-government should have been committed to the cause of slavery.” The division between Northern and Southern liberalism which this circumstance opened up was “disastrous to American democracy.” (63) The imperial government in Washington, having freed the slaves for the wrong reason, leaving them to starve, was able to pose as the friend of liberty while parcelling out the political economy to various privileged interests. The fostering of monopoly after the war under “laissez faire” statism, a free market in name only, was made possible largely because local self-government and genuine federalism had succumbed when the South, rightly or wrongly, lost the fight for its independence. With the death of local sovereignty and the crushing of secession, one more barrier to empire was gone.

Like the Constitution itself, state rights — the American variant of the social contract — was an attempt to provide a philosophical basis for the permanent limitation of government. However well intended, such liberal constitutionalism was doomed to long-run failure, for it asked that government not act like government. Washington could no more accept South Carolina’s secession than Massachusetts could accept Thoreau’s. At the extremes, Spooner and Fitzhugh understood this and rejected constitutionalsim — for opposed reasons. They knew that underneath the parchment guarantees, only temporarily held in check by them, was the imperial Leviathan “born in aggression and begotten of aggression.”

REFERENCES

(1) James Joll, THE ANARCHISTS (Grosset & Dunlop, 1964), p. 77.

(2) Sam Dolgoff (ed.), BAKUNIN ON ANARCHY (Random House, 1971), pp. 103 & 107.

(3) See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, THE CIVIL WAR IN THE UNITED STATES (International Publishers, 1961).

(4) Lysander Spooner, NO TREASON (Pine Tree Press, 1966), pp. 50-4.

(5) See Robert L. Kerby, “Why the Confederacy Lost,” REVIEW OF POLITICS, XXXV, 3 (July, 1973), pp. 326-45.

(6) In Henry Steele Commager (ed.), DOCUMENTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY (Appleton Century Crofts, 1949), p. 387.

(7) Hannah Arendt, ON REVOLUTION (Viking Press, 1965), esp. chapters 4 and 5.

(8) In Charles G. Fenwick (ed.), CASES ON INTERNATIONAL LAW (Callaghan & Co., 1951), p. 58.

(9) See Jefferson Davis, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT (Collier Books, 1961) and Alexander H. Stephens, A CONSTITUTIONAL VIEW OF THE LATE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES, 2 Vols. (National Publishing Co., 1868 and 1870), particularly Vol. 1. Stephens is probably one of our most brilliant and most neglected political thinkers.

(10) Commager, DOCUMENTS, pp. 178-9. Italics In original.

(11) Ibid., pp. 179-81.

(12) Ibid., pp. 182-3.

(13) Ibid., p. 184. “Of” is here equivalent to “by.”

(14) William Appleman Williams, THE CONTOURS AMERICAN HISTORY (Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 176.

(15) Merrill D. Peterson, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE NEW NATION (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 624.

(16) Nathan Schachtner, THOMAS JEFFERSON: A BIOGRAPHY (Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), p. 616. My italics.

(17) Ibid., p. 626. See also Peterson, JEFFERSON, p. 623.

(18) J.W. Gough, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 235.

(19) On the Jeffersonian sell-out see Arthur A. Ekirch, THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM (Longmans, Green & Co., 1955), pp. 55-72.

(20) See John C. Calhoun, A DISQUISITION ON GOVERNMENT, ed. R. K. Cralle (Peter Smith, 1943) and August O. Spain, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF JOHN C. CALHOUN (Octagon Books, 1968).

(21) For the Ordinance see Commager, DOCUMENTS, pp. 261-2

(22) Davis, RISE AND FALL, p. 59.

(23) Carl Brent Swisher, ROGER B. TANEY (Archon Books, 1961), pp. 526-33.

(24) On the “fire-eaters” see Ronald T. Takaki, A PRO-SLAVERY ARGUMENT (Free Press, 1971).

(25) For the Secession Ordinance see Commager, DOCUMENTS, p. 372.

(26) On this see Merrill Jensen, THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), esp. pp. 76, and Claude H. Van Tyne, “Sovereignty in the America Revolution.” AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, XII, 3 (April, 1907), pp. 529-45.

(27) Van Tyne, “Sovereignty,” p. 538.

(28) Ibid., p. 540.

(29) Jensen, THE ARTICLES, p. 165.

(30) For evidence that everything was not falling apart under the Confederation see Merrill Jensen, THE NEW NATION (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).

(31) Charles C. Tansill (ed.), DOCUMENTS ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE FORMATION OF THE UNION OF THE AMERICAN STATES (Government Printing Office, 1927), p. 364.

(32) Ibid., 698.

(33) See Luther Martin’s remarks in Ibid., pp. 815-5.

(34) See Jackson Turner Main, THE ANTIFEDERALISTS: CRITICS OF THE CONSTITUTION 1781-1788 (Universitv of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 119-67.

(35) Tansill, DOCUMENTS, pp. 226-7.

(36) THE FEDERALIST (Modem Library, 1937), pp. 50-3 (No. 9).

(37) Ibid., pp. 246-7 (No. 39).

(38) Ibid., 254-5 (No. 40).

(39) Davis, RISE AND FALL, 99.

(40) Stephens, CONSTITUTIONAL VIEW, I, p. 483. His italics.

(41) Ibid., p. 496. For the whole discussion see 167-70 and 477-522.

(42) See Davis RISE AND FALL, pp. 83-5.

(43) Tansill, DOCUMENTS, p. 471.

(44) Davis, RISE AND FALL, pp. 78-9.

(45) Ibid., pp. 100-1.

(46) Ibid., p. 73.

(47) Tansill, DOCUMENTS, pp. 1027, 1034-5, it 1052. John Locke speaks of the people’s “Right to resume their original Liberty” in TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT, ed. Peter Laslett (New American Library, 1963), p. 461.

(48) For the ratifications see Tansill, DOCUMENTS, pp. 1009-59.

(49) Vernon Louis Parrington, MAIN CURRENTS IN AMERICAN THOUGHT, II (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1954), p. 84.

(50) Parrington, MAIN CURRENTS, I, pp. 340-1.

(5l) Parrington, II, p. 11.

(52) Ibid., p. 12.

(53) See Stoughton Lynd, INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RADICALISM (Random House, 1969) and Jensen, THE ARTICLES, p. 165.

(54) Louis Hartz, THE LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICAN (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), pp. 158-62.

(55) See George Fitzhugh, CANNIBALS ALL! OR SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS (Belknap Press, 1960. “A constitution, strictly construed,” says Fitzhugh, “is absolutely inconsistent with permanent national existence” (p. 249).

(56) Parrington, MAIN CURRENTS, II, pp. 402-3. For the anarchism of the abolitionists see Lewis Perry, RADICAL ABOLITIONISM (Cornell University Press, 1973),

(57) First inaugural in Commager, DOCUMENTS, p. 385.

(58) Ibid., p. 387.

(59) Imperial ambition was a primary cause of the war. William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, dreamed of American world hegemony, which disunion endangered. See Ernest N. Paolino, THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE (Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 4-5. As a disciple of Henry Clay, Lincoln was himself an expansionist.

(60) NO TREASON, pp. 53-4. Spooner saw “control of the markets in the South” as a major Yankee goal (pp. 50-1).

(61) On Spooner see Perry, RADICAL ABOLITIONISM, pp. 282-3.

(62) Gough, SOCIAL CONTRACT, p. 242. It is worth noting that state-rights men could point to specific agreements, like ratifications, as parts of a social compact, thus giving it a real historical basis. Most social contract theory has rested on implication or on an entirely hypothetical pact.

(63) Parrington, MAIN CURRENTS, II, p. 88. For a summary of the moral and political costs of the war see Ekirch, DECLINE OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM, pp. 116-30.

AT LAST!

The long awaited book you’ll LOVE to HATE — UNLESS . . . You’re a consistent Libertarian!

Walter Block’s

Defending The Undefendable!

Block Defends . . . The Pimp, The Litterer, The Slumlord, The Blackmailer, The Dishonest Cop . . . and MANY OTHERS! With a Foreword by Murray N. Rothbard and a Commentary by F.A. Hayek.

Hayek likens the BLOCK BOOK to the “shock therapy” wrought on him 50 years ago, by Ludwig von Mises. Dr. Thomas Szasz calls this book “witty and illuminating!” Harry Browne says it’s “The most entertaining and one of the most instructive economics books I’ve read.” Roger MacBride calls it “magnificent, a trail-blazer.”

Can YOU Afford To Miss It?

Priced at $9.95, from Fleet Press Corp., New York City.

The Psycho-Presidency

One of the great and continuing benefits of the Watergate affair is the widespread demythologizing of politicians in general, and of the President in particular. The great turn-of-the century tradition of muckraking, and of the adversary relation between press and government — so long forgotten since the New Deal — has now been happily revived. Many people deplore the recent spate of revelations about the personal lives of our recent Presidents. But, despite the well-trodden cliches, we are a government of men rather than laws, and so what these men are like becomes very relevant to all of our lives. The press tradition of sweeping all the dirt about our rulers under the rug has only served to advance the dangerous mythologizing about the State — and especially about the President — in the minds of the public. The pre-Watergate media had abetted the task of raising the President to the status of a quasi-divine figure in the eyes of the American people; in the words of a new quasi-autobiography, by New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff, to her — and to countless other Americans of that era — Franklin D. Roosevelt was like a “sun god.” To say that this state of mind is dangerous for the sanity and the liberty of the American public is a masterpiece of understatement.

And dangerous for the idolized and adored Presidents as well. Lord Acton’s great aphorism: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is all too true; for it is now becoming clear that our last two Presidents at least, drunk with near-absolute power, were more than halfway round the bend. We all know about President Nixon’s conversing with the portraits of his predecessors; but now we know from Doris Kearns’ sympathetic biography that Lyndon Johnson used to talk to his deceased conferees as well. Nixon, in his final days, scared the pants off everyone in sight by wildly talking about his power to push the nuclear button; Johnson, after retiring to his ranch, tried to recreate the atmosphere of the Oval Office by treating his illiterate farm hands as if they were White House staff aides, and cursing his hens for not laying eggs up to the quota that the ex-President had set for them.

Even the amatory lives of our Presidents may have direct relevance for our political fortunes. The now revealed fact that President Kennedy had a long-term affair with a Mafia moll and friend of the late Chicago mobster Sam Giancana (patron of one Jack Ruby) may have direct relevance for the mysteries of the Kennedy Assassination. But, perhaps more important is the implications of some of these liaisons for the state of mind of the President-worshipping American public. Take, for example, the revelations of Dorothy Schiff (see New York Times, May 27, 1976), whose friendship with President Roosevelt was changed, under legal pressure, from earlier to later editions of the Times from “romance” and “affair” to “personal relationship.” Why did Mrs. Schiff, then married to Democratic activist George Backer, enter into this personal relationship with the President? Because, in addition to FDR’s “sun-god” quality, in Mrs. Schiff’s words, “I guess I stayed with him because . . . you don’t say no to the President of the United States.” There we have it: You don’t say no to the President of the United State — the political and social philosophy of the twentieth century. Adolf Eichmann couldn’t say no to his Führer; Halderman, Erlichman, Magruder and all the rest of the crew couldn’t say no to their President. And what, pray tell, was the attitude of Mr. Backer to all this? Let Mrs. Schiff tell the story: “George was overwhelmed by the President, and it was he who really sold me on him. George saw it all in a sort of droit de seigneur way, his wife being tapped by the Lord of the manor. He was proud of it, and it gave him tremendous prestige with his friends.”

Lord of the manor; droit de seigneur; sun-god; you don’t say no to the President of the United States. Sick, sick! We will never recapture our liberty until we have cast off this cancerous remnant of feudalism and Oriental despotism in our thinking and our attitudes. We must learn to say No, No, a thousand times No to the Presidents and despots of this world: it can only be that great Nay-saying that will topple our rulers from their exalted perches. La Boetie was right; we forge our own chains by our complicity in exalting these tinpot politicians to their sun-god status. And we can rectify this horror by casting out this idolatry, by standing tall and independent, and by saying Nay to the Emperors that we have created. Hopefully, Watergate has brought this Great Refusal far closer to reality.

Economic Scapegoats: Heroes Or Scoundrels?

Review of Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable, Fleet Press, $9.95

By Bill Evers*

Would you classify the following sorts of people as heroes or villains: loan sharks, litterbugs, misers, slanderers, libelers, pimps, counterfeiters, stripminers, drug pushers, ticket scalpers, prostitutes, scabs, blackmailers and slumlords?

If your intuitive inclination is to think of such people as scoundrels, you’ll find Walter Block’s new book mind-boggling. Block presents them as heroes and offers good reasons for doing so.

Previous popularly written introductions to political economy have suggested ending occupational licensure of doctors, legalizing marijuana or legalizing abortions. But no previous book in this genre has thoroughly dealt with the almost universally reviled practices and occupations discussed in Block’s book.

Block’s book is a startling, witty and eminently reasonable tour de force. The reader begins each chapter by thinking (as Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek did at first, according to his introduction to the book), “this is going too far.” But led by Block’s ingenious arguments, the readers are compelled (as Hayek was) to agree with Block.

Moreover, Block’s method has the special attraction of nonmathematically treating economics as a matter of logic of choice, while avoiding the all-too-common practice of relying on statistics.

An unexpected bonus in an economics book is the presence of illustrations for each chapter drawn by Rodrigues, whose cartoon studies of the demimonde are regular features in Playboy, Penthouse, and the National Lampoon.

All Block’s heroes have three characteristics in common. First, the practices in which they are engaged do not involve the initiation of aggression against others. Second, the demonstrated preferences of people and the logic of choice show that Block’s heroes are performing jobs that are of great value to other people. Third, these heroes are providing their services in the face of constant reproach from the public and outlawry by the state.

After reading Block’s book, we recognize the pimp as an honest broker and the uncorrupted cop as the Nuremberg defendant who always followed orders. We are reminded that stripmining of coal allows miners to escape black-lung disease and cave-ins, while creating what could be described as a stark, desert-like beauty.

Block gives the reader succinct yet penetrating criticisms of the Federal Reserve System and the Keynesian paradox of savings. His chapter on charity’ is the best modern defense of social Darwinism that I have ever read.

Perhaps Block’s finest chapter is the one on advertising. For example, Block shows how the use of advertising gimmicks to alert consumers to products is exactly parallel to a person’s attention to his personal appearance and grooming before a job interview.

Read this book for the intellectual delight (as well as the gain in knowledge) to be found in observing Block reason his way through extreme, shocking cases to a counterintuitive, but rigorously defended account of the just solutions to them.

* Reprinted from the Stanford Daily, April 30, 1976. Bill Evers is a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford University.

“In the absence of force, peace and liberty simply exist; they do not have to be created or supported. Capitalism had its beginnings in a condition under which no man can be dispossessed of what he has produced or discovered except with his own consent. In the absence of force, capitalism automatically exists in the same sense that peace and liberty automatically exist.”

— Thomas Nixon Carver (1925).

[*] JOSEPH R. STROMBERG is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Florida.

[*] like our “voluntary” donations to 1RS

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 7

July, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

MacBride’s New Book

Roger MacBride’s campaign paperback book, A New Dawn For America: The Libertarian Challenge (Ottawa, Illinois: Green Hill Publishers, June 1976), has now been published. Its major function is to serve as MacBride’s campaign statement of his ideology and policies, his “manifesto”, his “Conscience of a Libertarian”, in well-designed, highly readable, brief (97 pp.) and inexpensive (95¢) form. The book performs this vital task admirably. But it also performs two other, and at least equally vital, functions: (1) it should lay to rest, once and for all, the charge by libertarian skeptics and holier-than-thou “purists” that MacBride would compromise libertarian principles in his campaign; and (2) it fills a gap by providing an excellent and lucid introduction to what libertarianism is all about that we can distribute to interested neophytes. Despite the enormous growth in the literature of liberty in the last few years, there has been no one brief book that we could give to friends or acquaintances who have come brand new to an interest in our ideology — no one book that could provide a readable yet thorough overview of libertarianism, a book that could instruct the reader in the basics and stimulate interest in more detailed and advanced treatment. Roger MacBride’s A New Dawn For America now provides us with such a book. It deserves the widest possible distribution.

MacBride begins the book with a concise exposition of libertarian philosophy and an attack on the growth of government power in modern America. He then proceeds to apply and elaborate his views in four more specific chapters: on the economy, on politicizing America, on foreign policy, and on the criminal law. Libertarians will be interested to know that in his economics chapter MacBride adopts wholeheartedly the “Austrian School” position. He explains how government-propelled expansion of money and bank credit causes inflation and leads to the boom-bust business cycle; and to cure these ills, he calls for a return to a hard, free-market commodity money such as gold and the total separation of money from the State. The latter includes a call for abolition of the Federal Reserve System. MacBride also urges early repeal of the income tax, a drastic cut in taxation and expenditures at all levels of government, and a “look into the feasibility of creating a truly voluntaristic society in which all goods and services are provided on the free market.” (This is “compromising”?)

MacBride concludes his economics chapter with this ringing paragraph: “Contrary to the propaganda of expedience, there is no real conflict between the demands of moral principle and of pragmatic reality. There is no real conflict between the moral principles of individual liberty and private property on the one hand, and the requirements of economic health and prosperity on the other. Both require getting government out of our lives and out of our pockets.”

The Politicizing America chapter applies libertarian principle to various key problem areas of existing government intervention. MacBride calls for the elimination of the postal monopoly and the sale of the Postal Service to private investors; the total deregulation of transportation; the end of FDA regulation of drugs and vitamins; and an end to all “corporation coddling” by government, including “favors, subsidies, bailouts, tariffs, regulatory agencies, credits to exporters, loan guarantees, and so on.” On television and radio, MacBride shows how the FCC’s interference with freedom of speech is a direct and inherent result of the federal government’s nationalization of the airwaves fifty years ago; MacBride retorts with a call for the abolition of the FCC and all of its powers. On agriculture, MacBride not only supports a free-market for food products, but he demonstrates how, for example, the government-created milk cartel not only restricts competition and raises milk prices, but also established the conditions which led to the milk-corruption scandal during the Nixon administration. Finally, MacBride courageously tackles the famous Social Security question head-on, showing that Social Security is bankrupt and should be abolished, and comes up with an ingenious and consistently libertarian plan to ease the hardships on the citizens who have been suckered into support for this racketeering program: older citizens could be exempted from all taxation and all restrictions on earnings; younger citizens could be freed from all Social Security taxes and encouraged to invest in (far more productive and profitable) private retirement plans (perhaps through tax exemptions), and for the middle-aged groups remaining, the promised benefits could be paid for by the United States Government’s “systematic sale of all of its mammoth land and industrial holdings.” Thus, at one and the same time, the onerous and fraudulent Social Security system would be abolished, the promised recipients would be helped rather than harmed, and we would see the de-socialization of the U.S. Government’s vast holdings of land and other property!

Perhaps those libertarians who have suspected MacBride of “conservative deviationism” are still not impressed with his libertarian position on economics: what of civil liberties and foreign policy, where crypto-conservatives are much more likely to “lead”. Well, we are happy to report that MacBride takes an uncompromisingly “isolationist” or non-interventionist position, and one, furthermore, that is unabashedly “radical” and revisionist. MacBride begins his foreign policy chapter by praising the traditional American foreign policy of political neutrality, and economic and cultural freedom of trade and travel. He then blisteringly indicts Woodrow Wilson for sabotaging that policy by maneuvering the U.S. into a “purely European war”, over “the valiant opposition of such grand traditionalists as Senator ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette. . .” MacBride then states:

“We libertarians propose to reverse that vote and return to a strict policy of neutrality in other countries’ affairs, of non-intervention in other peoples’ wars, of free trade and travel throughout the world.” And again: “After sixty years of crippling and brutally destructive wars, commenced with the wish to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, to ‘end all wars’, to advance the ‘free world’, and to ‘spread freedom throughout the globe’, what has the U.S. accomplished? What kind of world was wrought at the cost of close to half a million American lives, of over a million Americans wounded, of hundreds of billions in American economic resources, of producing a swollen government at home at the expense of the liberties and the property of the individual citizen? What has the U.S. Government accomplished at the terrible price of engendering a vast military machine, of enforced military service for American youth, of crippling American productivity with taxes, inflation, and controls, of diverting so much American investment and scientific personnel from peaceful production to the machines of war? If we look about us, we see a world where dictatorship has never been stronger, where war has never been more threatening or fearful.”

MacBride then pinpoints not only the cost but the deceits that took America into each of its wars in this century. For each of these wars, MacBride adopts the revisionist position. Thus, on World War II: Roosevelt “had by intervention in the Sino-Japanese struggle maneuvered United States entry into a war with Japan and Germany.” On the Korean War, MacBride adopts the advanced revisionist position of I.F. Stone, pointing out that the start of the Korean War (and America’s later intervention into it) succeeded by only one week the prediction in Tokyo by Secretary of State Dulles of “positive action by the United States to preserve peace in the Far East.”

On the disastrous Vietnam intervention, MacBride’s radical revisionist position points to “the support given to these presidents (Johnson and Nixon) by American businessmen from Standard Oil, General Electric, Ford Motor Company and so on. Is it coincidental that they profited generously from the massive defense orders generated by the years of intervention in the name of peace, aptly called ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’.” Finally, MacBride blisteringly attacks President Ford’s last-minute attempt to intervene yet again to save the tottering South Vietnam regime, while reiterating all the discredited interventionist shibboleths that had gotten us into the mess in the first place.

In contrast, MacBride proposes to replace the disastrous policy of government intervention with a libertarian foreign policy: “We must stop the interventionist policy of wasting American blood and treasure in an attempt to dictate to people and to nations all over the globe. . . . We can see that the indispensable corollary of rolling back government at home is rolling back government abroad. Getting the government out of our affairs at home is part and parcel of getting it out of the affairs of other peoples.” Instead of conjuring up the spectre of foreign devils to justify such wars and interventions, “Libertarians argue that we need no more foreign devils, and the time has come to return home and get the politicians and bureaucrats off our backs.”

More specifically and magnificently, MacBride looks to replace the current disastrous system by a nation in which no foreign policy exists, in which “Foreign relations conducted by the State will be replaced by foreign relations by individuals, groups and voluntary associations in an atmosphere of voluntary mutual exchange with their foreign counterparts.” There will be a foreign policy of “strict nonintervention”, with a “defense force which will only respond to foreign aggression aimed at the geographical territory of the United States.” Furthermore, MacBride states that a Libertarian administration “would be alert for genuine possibilities for removing the spectre of nuclear confrontation through disarmament agreements” which would be consistent with maintaining such a geographical defense.

Moreover, a MacBride foreign policy would “quit meddling in the domestic politics of foreign governments and stop propping up foreign governments.” Diplomatic recognition would — in the great noninterventionist tradition — be granted to all de facto governments regardless of their political system. Free trade would be strictly adhered to, and Americans would be able to invest abroad where they wish “but at their own risk, unprotected by the U.S. Government.” All foreign aid, government-backed loans, and membership in international organizations, ranging from the UN to the International Monetary Fund, would be abolished. U.S. intelligence activities would be “limited to collection of signs of possible offensive action against the U.S.” All “collective security” alliances abroad would be terminated, including NATO and SEATO, as well as the Truman and Eisenhower Doctrines. Also abandoned would be Presidential “police actions”, CIA-funded wars, and secret executive agreements.

MacBride also attacks the powerful military-industrial complex, “the biggest lobby for intervention and unchecked Executive power”. MacBride points out: “Each year the Pentagon spends more than the annual income of every corporation in America. It spends funds upon twenty thousand business firms, which (with their employees) live off money taken from American taxpayers. The military-industrial complex is by no means a free-market phenomenon. Instead it resembles a royal court in which a king (the Pentagon) grants favors to his favorites (in the arms and military-support industries.)”

Again, MacBride transcends the old “conservative”-“liberal” tags: “Unless we realize that the Barry Goldwaters and the Hubert Humphreys of American politics agreed all along on the need for a strong national-security state we will be unable to begin the search for alternatives beyond the old ideological labels of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’”.

MacBride concludes his foreign policy chapter with these noble aims: “We will replace intervention by non-intervention. Militarism by voluntarism. State agreements by individual agreements. Coercive political action by voluntary mutual exchange. The power of the state will be diffused and foreign affairs will be reduced to the decentralized voluntary affairs of individuals in a free society.”

In his chapter on criminal law, MacBride comes out foursquare for the abolition of all victimless crime laws, of all laws restricting or prohibiting voluntary actions of consenting adults. Laws against prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, gambling, and drugs are attacked specifically and concretely. The crime problem arising from heroin is shown to emerge not from the addiction itself but from its prohibition, which makes the drug enormously expensive and leads the addict into crime to pay for his addiction.

Not the least charm of this book are the excellent quotes from libertarian writers and theorists that stud the book: quotes from H. L. Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, John Stuart Mill, P. J. Proudhon, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, Murray N. Rothbard, Robert Nozick, and others that also lead the reader into plumbing more of the libertarian literature. There are also ads in the back for worthy libertarian groups and publications: including the Libertarian Review, Reason, the Libertarian Forum, the Center for Libertarian Studies, Free Life Editions, the Libertarian Scholar, Laissez-Faire Books, the Libertarian Party, and the MacBride-Bergland campaign. There is also an ad for the Young Libertarian Alliance, a rapidly growing group of campus affiliates of the national Libertarian Party, headed by Tom Palmer. The YLA can be contacted at LP headquarters at 1516 P. St., N. W., Washington, D.C. 20005; it supplies organizing kits to campus chapters.

MacBride’s A New Dawn For America can be purchased, either for $.95 a single copy or at bulk discount rates, from the MacBride for President Committee at the above 1516 P. St. address.

Let the griping cease. A New Dawn For America is clear evidence that Roger MacBride has come, not to betray the great 1976 LP Platform but to fulfill it. He is libertarianism’s champion, our White Knight, in the political arena. May his impact and his votes multiply!

News From Spain

There are still many libertarians who think of America’s conservatives as “really on our side” if a bit more “practical”. For a long time there have been a couple of quick acid tests that one may use to find out the libertarian quotient of Buckleyite conservatives: what is your view of Rhodesia and South Africa, and what do you think of Franco’s Spain? The obvious love and admiration of conservatives for these fascist and racist regimes speaks volumes of just how libertarian these “libertarian conservatives” really are, of where their hearts really lie. It’s true, of course, that these regimes are “hard-line anti-Communists”, if that is one’s only test of political virtue; but, then, so again was Adolf Hitler. In fact, in a way Hitler can be summed up as a “premature anti-Communist” of the 1930’s. At any rate, this enthusiasm demonstrates — if such a demonstration is really necessary by this time — that the libertarian rhetoric of American conservatives is skin deep, and that their hearts lie elsewhere.

Libertarians, of course, can only rejoice at the loosening of the fascist dictatorship that Spain has seen since the death of Franco. Some of the fruits of the freer climate in Spain have just come to our attention. The Libertarian Spanish Group, which has translated and published over a hundred thousand copies of free-market books in Spain, now feels that with the new political climate they can translate and publish more of the philosophical and political aspects of libertarianism. Secondly, a new classical liberal, laissez-faire political group was formed this April: the Union Liberal Espansola, with hopes of becoming a political party. For forty years, the small band of Spanish classical liberals has been oppressed and ravaged by Left and Right; perhaps they will now be able to flourish.

But in stark contrast to the new freedom emerging in Spain, we have the very different view of Russian emigre Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom not only American conservatives but even some libertarians have raised to the status of guru and folk hero. Solzhenitsyn, who in time-honored emigre fashion has been trying to heat up the Cold War against his own homeland, spoke recently over Spanish television in praise of the late fascist dictator and against the loosening of Spain’s dictatorial bonds. The LP News (May-June 1976) reports:

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, darling of conservatives because of his Cold War rhetoric, appeared on government-run television in Spain and praised the regime of the late fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Solzhenitsyn also told the people of Spain not to press demands for freedom to strike because this would lead to establishment of a Communist dictatorship.”

It is one thing to hail Solzhenitsyn for his heroic battle against Soviet prison camps; it is quite another to think that this experience automatically qualifies him as a political philosopher or foreign affairs spokesman. In addition to the understandably warped perspective that all oppressed emigres have on foreign affairs, it is useful to remember that Solzhenitsyn is in no sense a libertarian. On the contrary, his perspective is that of an unreconstructed Czarist theocrat, and opponent of Western freedoms and Western technology alike. The LP News is to be hailed as virtually the only source, inside or out of the libertarian movement, where good sense can be found on the Solzhenitsyn question.

CLS Booms!

In our February, 1976 issue we announced the formation of the Center for Libertarian Studies (CLS). In the last few months, the CLS has grown with remarkable rapidity and intensity, attesting to: the enterprise and vigor of its organizers, and the enormous growth in recent years in the quantity and quality of scholars in the libertarian movement. Surely the formation of a center for libertarian research and scholarship, actively encouraging development and communication between libertarian scholars and intellectuals throughout the country, was an idea whose time has come. A new and handsomely professional publication — the Center for Libertarian Studies Newsletter — has now emerged with its first issue, Summer, 1976, detailing the present and forthcoming activities of the new Center. The Newsletter also reports on other scholarly libertarian activities across the country, thereby serving as “an informal communication network for libertarian scholars.” The Newsletter, edited by Peter J. Ferrara, Lawrence H. White, and Matthew Malkan, all of Harvard University, is sent gratis to Friends of the Center (those who have contributed at least $100 per year to the Center), and is available to all other interested people for $6 per year. The Newsletter is available at Box 220, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, or directly from the Center for Libertarian Studies, 200 West 58th St., Suite 5D, New York, N.Y. 10019.

The eight-page first issue of the Newsletter contains reports on two forthcoming conferences sponsored by the CLS, an article explaining the CLS concept and activities by Executive Director Walter Grinder, an article on Center fundraising by President John Hagel III, numerous news items on scholarly activities, including a report on the Austrian Economics Seminar held at New York University, and handsome profiles on two veteran libertarian intellectuals: Henry Hazlitt and Felix Morley, both members of the Board of Advisors of CLS. No one interested in the progress of intellectual and scholarly libertarian activities can afford to miss the CLS Newsletter.

One of the most desperate needs of the libertarian movement for many years has been a high-level scholarly journal, devoted to the advancement of the discipline of libertarianism — an inter-disciplinary body of thought that cuts across all the studies of human action: from political philosophy to economics to history to sociology to law to education to biology. Such a journal will now appear, under the auspices of the CLS, to be published by Pergamon Press, a distinguished publisher of scholarly journals, and to be edited by Murray N. Rothbard. The first issue of the new Journal of Libertarian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Review will appear in January, 1977. It will be a blockbuster, centering on several critiques of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, plus other goodies.

The annual Libertarian Scholars Conference has long been the cutting edge of developments in libertarian scholarship. From now on, many of its papers will be able to find a publishing outlet in the JLS. The Fourth Libertarian Scholars Conference, to be held jointly by the CLS and the Liberty Fund this October 22, 23, and 24 at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, will feature an intriguing program. One panel will feature papers on conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet’s latest work, The Twilight of Authority, by John P. McCarthy of the history department of Fordham University and Leonard P. Liggio of the history department of SUNY, Old Westbury. Robert Nisbet will be in attendance for a possible response. Another panel will discuss papers on “The Foundations of Libertarian Legal Theory” by Randy E. Barnett of Harvard Law School and Williamson M. Evers of Stanford University, with comments by Murray N. Rothbard and Roy A. Childs, Jr. Other panels will deal with “An Historical Inquiry into Nineteenth Century Libertarian Social Analysis”; “Liability, Economics and the Law — Two Problems: Pollution and Bankruptcy”, and “An Analysis of the ‘Southern Rim’ Thesis”. The banquet speech will be delivered by G. William Domhoff of University of California at Santa Cruz on “The Current State of Social Analysis in the United States.” Speakers and participants will include: Mark Weinburg of the University of Chicago; David Osterfield of the University of Cincinnati; Joseph T. Salerno of Rutgers University; R. Dale Grinder of the University of Kansas; Lawrence H. White of Harvard University; William Beach of the University of Missouri; Walter Block of Rutgers University; Jonathan Marshall of Stanford University; John Hagel III of Harvard Law and Business Schools; Larry Shoup of San Francisco State College; social analyst Carl Oglesby; Joseph Castrovinci of the University of Chicago; Eric Mack of Tulane University; William Marina of Florida Atlantic University; Karen Vaughn of Central Michigan University; and Harry Watson of the Council of Economic Advisors.

Next spring on March 5-7, the CLS and the Liberty Fund will hold another exciting conference on “Crime and Punishment: Restitution, Retribution, and Law” at Harvard Law School. Topics will be: “Objective Crime and Objective Punishment: the Illegitimacy of Psychiatric Reasons for Imprisonment”; “The Crisis in the Criminal Justice System: An Examination of Causes and Consequences”; “Time Preference and Crime”; “Restitution as an Alternative to Punishment”; “Retribution: the Ethics of Punishment”; and “Some Treatments of Crime in History.”

As if all this were not enough, the CLS is in the process of publishing two Occasional Papers, which should be out this summer, and which will be available to the public: Lawrence H. White’s “The Methodology of Austrian School Economics”, and a translation by Prof. J. Huston McCulloch of a classical gem by Gustave de Molinari, “The Production of Security” — the never-before translated essay by a prominent mid-ninteenth century French economist which was the first exposition and advocacy in all history of anarcho-capitalism!

Future plans include pamphlets and study kits on vital topics; so watch the Center for exciting developments, and, if possible, please contribute!

Democratic Convention Notes

Were you all impressed with the feast of Love at the Convention? Are you all sleeping better every night in the knowledge that Jimmy Carter loves each and every one of you? Apparently at least one convention delegate was, as witness a memorable TV shot of one Oriental-American with tears streaming down her face as Jimmy went on about love and unity. Of such stuff are these our rulers made.

Meantime, the Northern Liberals, so suspicious of Carter not so long ago, are scrambling to get on the crowded Carter bandwagon. Shirley Maclaine opined that she liked Carter because he’s a “man of the earth” (the Ecology note). Chi-chi hostesses all over town are serving peanuts at the In cocktail parties. . . .

Southern populism, however, still lives. In one interview, Cassie Mackin of NBC-TV asked young Hamilton Jordan, major architect of the Carter phenomenon, if she could “call him Ham.” “My friends call me Ham,” Jordan smugly retorted, “but you can call me Hamilton.” But Jimmy loves each and every one. . . .

The highlight of the convention, understandably under-reported by the media, was the seconding speech of Alexander Garshin of Massachusetts for the nomination of young anti-bussing candidate David Benoit for Vice-President. Garshin used the opportunity to make a blistering right-wing speech, mocked by the delegates. The climax came when Garshin began to denounce the Council for Foreign Relations and its Rockefeller control; when he got to the point of attacking David Rockefeller for being head of the CFR, he was cut off by the chairman, who cited an old 1870’s rule of Democratic conventions prohibiting any speaker from personally criticizing other nominated candidates. Unfortunately, in the brief flurry of excitement, neither Garshin nor anyone else had the wit to point out that David Rockefeller was certainly not being nominated for anything at the convention, and therefore that the rule could scarcely apply. But Garshin got off a few good cracks, such as “if this convention doesn’t want to hear the truth, it’s all right with me,” and “I apologize to this convention. . . for telling the truth.” Cutting off speech when Rockefeller and the CFR were attacked means, of course, that the Conspiracy Theory of History is alive and well . . . .

Since only the “extremes” of left and right are interested in ideas, the other high points of the convention were provided by the Left: by Ron Dellums’ attack on war and militarism, and by young Fritz Efaw, under indictment for draft resistance, pointing out the need for total amnesty for Vietnam War “deserters” and the less-than-honorably discharged . . . .

But there were some interesting nuances even in the Carter Center. There were the hosannas handed to Rep. Barbara Jordon, sounding for all the world like a basso Franklin Roosevelt, complete to the Groton accent and the whistled s’s, whose call for a “national community” was strongly reminiscent of Adolf Hitler, though Hitler, of course, had a lot more pizazz.

And then there was the unprecedented applause at Daddy King’s stem-winding benediction: “The Lord make his face to shine upon YOU!”, after which the assembled forces of left-liberalism clasped hands and swayed to the singing of “We Shall Overcome,” as Jimmy Carter kissed Coretta King. Good God, you don’t think that deep in their heart they really do believe? Let’s hope not . . . .

In a desperate attempt to whitewash New York’s image and in a grab for future federal funds, Mayor Abe Beame managed the enormous feat of turning Fun City into a Potemkin Villege for one solid week. A special one-week anti-prostitute law was passed, two night shifts of sanitation men worked round the clock in midtown, a special detail of 1500 very friendly cops were all over the place (presumably they had gotten special Niceness Training), and who knows? maybe the authorities sternly told the muggers and rapists to Cool It for one week. The Georgia delegation, naturally, got the red carpet treatment and purred that “Oh, New Yawk is such a friendly place”. Hah! Police even hailed cabs for delegates. Art Buchwald quipped that he had finally figured it out: all New Yorkers tad been shipped to special detention centers in Staten Island for a week, while all the alleged New Yorkers on the streets were really imported from the Middle West for the occasion . . . .

The biggest word of the convention was “compassion.” It is a strange use of the word, though of course standard for left-liberalism. It means that A is a compassionate person if he steals money from B to give it to C. Not only is B the Forgotten Person in this equation but A’s coercive behavior, along with a rakeoff for “handling” costs, hardly fits any sort of rational definition of compassionate. But it’s all right folks, because Jimmy loves each and every one of you . . . .

Arts And Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Two current hit movies, of very different genres, both identify the prime evil as resting in government, and they do so with excitement and panache; hence, they deserve to be seen by every libertarian. One is the famous All The President’s Men, superbly directed by Alan J. Pakula to provide the atmosphere and authenticity of the newsroom and of investigative journalism on the trail of the biggest story of our time, the Watergate. The uniformly excellent acting is a tribute to the direction; even Robert Redford is induced to forget his absorption in his own good looks to become Robert Woodward. Particularly good is Jason Robards’ performance as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee; Robards is able to convey irritation or elation in under-stated but finely crafted gestures. So absorbing and fast-paced is the action that the two-and-a-half hours seem like twenty minutes; and the abrupt and unsatisfactory ending leave the audience panting for More. Five hours would have been needed to bring out all the ramifications of Watergate; as it is, only the initial aspects of the story are developed. Perhaps there will be a sequel.

The other hit movie with libertarian implications, these totally neglected by the uniformly hostile critics, is The Omen, a fantasy horror movie starring Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. All too many horror films are so low-budget as to (correctly) seem to be made on some wood in the dead of night; produced with a lavish budget, The Omen can and does pull out all the stops to make a gripping and exciting picture. The theme is theological; and obviously the producers knew their Revelations. The picture is derived from Rosemary’s Baby; but The Omen is not cramped by the static, filmed-play aspect of the former picture. Put simply, the plot revolves around the birth of a baby Anti-Christ, and the gradual revelation of this fact to its stunned and oppressed adopting parents.

The libertarian aspect of the picture stems from the repeated theological prediction that the Anti-Christ would in some way stem from government, and that government would be the instrument by which he would wreak havoc upon the world. Sure enough, the evil kid winds up in the bosom of a Kennedyesque President of the United States.

Joyce Maynard, in a frenetic attack on The Omen in Newsweek, denounces it as an attack on children per se. In the first place, in a culture that is excessively and sentimentally child-centered, in which children are automatically considered good and any evil emanating from them blamed on their parents, it is a pleasure to see a correction of this one-sided picture. (Here The Omen follows in the honorable path of the The Bad Seed and Lord of the Flies.) And secondly, the whole point of fantasy fiction is to suspend disbelief in one crucial axiom; once that often bizarre axiom is accepted, the rest of the plot should follow logically. In The Omen that axiom is the Christian prediction of the birth of the Anti-Christ, which is here intimately intertwined with government. What better blend than fun and anti-State?

“It is reason that produces everything: virtue, genius, wit, talent, and taste. What is virtue? Reason in practice. Talent? Reason enveloped in glory. Wit? Reason which is chastely expressed. Taste is nothing else than reason delicately put in force, and genius is reason in its most sublime form.”

— M. J. de Chenier (1806).

Foreign Affairs

PALESTINE

By Leonard P. Liggio

Following the official visit to the UN of PLO leader Yasir Arafat, and the historic UN vote on Israel’s racism toward the Palestinians, Israel has made a monumental contribution to the victory of the PLO. There have been massive riots, with Israeli troops killing Palestinian students, in the past weeks. The result has been the resignations of the mayors and administrations of nine Palestinian cities in the Israeli-occupied areas in Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. These are traditionalist Palestinian leaders who have tried to cooperate with the Israeli occupiers. The younger generation has expressed its support for the PLO, and indicates the future direction of the politics of the Palestinians. If after 1967 the Israelis had returned the area to the other illegal occupier of Palestinian lands against the decisions of the UN, — the Jordanian monarchy, or set up the area as a Palestinian puppet under the traditional leaders, the PLO would have been very limited in its future. But Israel has planted colonies in the occupied lands and allowed “unofficial” colonies to be founded. The final blow has been the issue of the Haram es Sherif, the Temple Mount. This is the place that tradition says that Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac. Following the stateless epoch of the Hebrews, they sought the conquest of cities from the Philistines and the establishment of political power about which they were warned in the Book of Samuel. A temple was established on the hill of Jerusalem, which became the political capital. The temple was built by the great trading, building and artistic people, the Phoenicians (the ancestors of the Carthaginians of North Africa). The temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. Since the seventh century it has been the third most important religious site in Islam as the Prophet ascended to heaven from there, in addition to Islam’s veneration for Jesus and for Abraham, patriarch of Semites. During the Crusades it was a center of the Latin Kingdom and of the Knights Templar. Jewish rabbis forbade Jews to enter the Haram es Sherif as it was the site of the Holy of Holies which may be entered only by descendants of Aaron; for any other Jew to enter it is a desecration. However, Israeli secular nationalists entered the Haram es Sherif this year to sing pro-government songs. The Palestinian riots were the result.

The attempts to establish Israeli colonies in Arab areas and the issue of the Temple Mount coincided with Israel’s attempt to hold local elections in the Arab area. Israel was hoping to manage the election so that a more cooperative local leadership would result. However, the Israeli settlement attempts have unified support around the PLO. In Christian Arab Bethlehem, the university students ran up PLO flags on the university. Heretofore, Christian Arabs have been much less activist than the Moslems. In the March, 1976 UN debate, the PLO delegate was permitted to participate (despite the negative vote of William Scranton) in the role of a “UN member”. The PLO delegate compared the anti-Israel riots to “the glorious Warsaw ghetto uprising” against the Nazis in World War II. This reemphasized the fact that the problem of Israel is a creation of European peoples who forced Jews to go to Israel in the World War II period rather than permit them to settle in Europe or America! The previous participation of the PLO delegate in the Security Council was in January to discuss the resolution concerning Palestine. Based on the November 30, 1975 resolution, the UN affirmed: “(a) That the Palestinian people should be enabled to exercise its inalienable national right of self-determination, including the right to establish an independent state in Palestine in accordance with the charter of the United Nations; (b) The plight of the Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors and the right of those choosing not to return to receive compensation for property; (c) That Israel should withdraw from all Arab territories occupied since June 1967; (d) That appropriate arrangements should be established to guarantee, in accordance with the charter of the United Nations, the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence within secure and recognized boundaries of all states in the area.”

William Scranton in March UN debates called for the implementation of UN resolutions requiring an International Administration for Jerusalem, and noted that the Israeli colonizations were in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The debate was characterized by strong emphasis upon specific fulfillment of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution of November 29, 1947 (which is the legal basis for Israel’s existence) creating borders for the Israeli and for the Arab states in Palestine; Israel’s three decades’ violation of its basis for legal existence has been the basis of its outlaw status. Israel’s friends have been trying to end that outlaw status by immediate restoration of the conditions of the November 29, 1947 resolution.

The 1947 UN actions on Palestine were rooted in the conditions which had developed during the British occupation. George Antonius, in The Arab Awakening (1946) noted: “Zionist colonisation involved the actual wiping out of villages and the eviction of their peasantry; that the money which the Zionists brought and the resulting prosperity — if real prosperity there were — did not make up in Arab eyes for the loss of all that a peasant holds dear and sacred in his village surroundings; that the peasants were defenceless against the process of dispossession and the legalized but relentless pressure that went with it; that the sense of helplessness against the inexorable advance of Zionist colonisation had led to obviously unpremeditated outbreaks on the part of a population who are by nature peaceful and hospitable to strangers, and was bound, if allowed to continue, to cause unpredictable losses in lives and property. They learnt from actual experience that the policy they were carrying through by sheer force was, for all the optimism in ministerial speeches and official reports, a policy which was in effect laying in stores of dynamite.”

Antonius commented on the partition plan: “It runs counter to the lessons of history, the requirements of geography, the natural play of economic forces, and the ordinary laws of human behavior. It reproduces some of the most discredited and dangerous features of the Treaty of Versailles. It pays scant regard to the doctrine of consent. In drawing it up, the Commissioners appear to have overlooked that it is no more feasible to drive a peasantry from its soil than to impose an alien government upon an unwilling population, except by constant resort to force; and that the use of superior force to hold down a nationally-conscious people, while it may for a time achieve its immediate purpose, is bound sooner or later to defeat its own ends.

“One of the most prevalent misconceptions is that the trouble in Palestine is the result of an engineered agitation. It is variously attributed to the intrigues of the effendi class, to the political ambitions of the Grand Mufti, to the agents and subsidies of Italy and Germany, to Communist machinations; and the opinion is commonly expressed — and sometimes quite genuinely — that, had the Arab masses been left unmisguided to reap the full harvest of benefits brought to them by the mandate, there would have been no trouble. The blindness of that view is clear today. Former outbreaks have similarly been explained; but, after inquiry by one or other of the commissions appointed by the mandatory Power, the underlying causes had always been found to have lain in the profound attachment of the Arabs to their soil and their culture. The rebellion today is, to a greater extent that ever before, a revolt of villagers, and its immediate cause is the proposed scheme of Partition and, more particularly, that aspect of it which envisages that eventual displacement of a large Arab peasantry to make room for the immigrant citizens of the proposed Jewish state. The moving spirits in the revolt are not the nationalist leaders, most of whom are now in exile, but men of the working and agricultural classes who are risking their lives in what they believe to be the only way left to them of saving their homes and their villages. It is a delusion to regard it as the work of agitators, Arab or foreign. Political incitement can do much to fan the flames of discontent, but it can not keep a revolt active, month after month, in conditions of such violence and hardship.

“Far from its being engineered by the leaders, the revolt is in a very marked way a challenge to their authority and an indictment of their methods. The rebel chiefs lay the blame for the present plight of the peasantry on those Arab landowners who have sold their land, and they accuse the leaders of culpable neglect for failing to prevent the sales. The peasants have had no say in the great majority of the land transactions which have led to their eviction. The landowner who has the legal title disposes of the land at his discretion, and one of the provisions of the deed of sale is that the land is to be surrendered to the purchaser free from all occupants or rights of tenancy. The revolt is largely manned by the peasantry, that is to say by the people whose life and livelihood are on the soil but who have had no say whatever in its disposal; and their anger and violence are as much directed against the Arab landowners and brokers who have facilitated the sales as against the policy of the mandatory Power under whose aegis the transactions have taken place. The fact that some of these landowners have served on national Arab bodies makes them only more odious to the insurgent peasantry and has rendered it less amenable to the influence of the political leaders as a whole.

“In the first place, while it is true that Jewish capital and initiative have greatly contributed to the economic development of the country, to the enrichment of a number of Arab landowners and to a rise in the wages of Arab labour, it is also true that they have created new needs and new burdens. The public services called into being by the policy of the mandate — special services of public security, duplication rendered necessary by the imposition of Hebrew as an official language, swelling of the wages bill in public contracts solely in order to give employment to Jewish labour — have necessitated the setting up of an abnormally large and costly bureaucracy for such a small country, and the ear-marking of a considerable portion of the budget to unproductive expenditure. The establishment of Jewish industries, especially those which are artificial in the sense that they depend on raw materials imported from the outside, led to the imposition of protective tariffs and a consequent raise in the price of commodities. The rapid influx of population resulted in an abnormal rise in the cost of living everywhere, in the villages as well as in the towns. In the absence of full statistical data, it is impossible to tell to what extent the economic benefits have been offset by the corresponding burdens; but it is an undeniable fact, and one that is generally overlooked, that, save for the enrichment of a number of landowners and middlemen, the economic position of the Arab population as a whole, and more particularly that of the villages, is scarcely better or worse than it has been for generations.”

“In the second place, the economic aspect is overshadowed by the moral and political issues. To the Arabs the problem is now essentially one of self-preservation . . . The disturbances have since assumed the character of a rebellion in which the leading part is played by peasants and labourers who, in despair, have resorted to violence as the only means left to them of resisting Partition.” (George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, New York, Capricorn, 1965.)

The Education Grab

The public school establishment has fallen on hard times lately. First it was struck a body blow by the criticisms of its role as an instrument of racism, class stratification, capitalism, and bourgeois values; then it was hit from the opposite direction by Jencks and others claiming that schooling was ineffective in doing more than reinforcing existing socio-cultural values. Public education’s traditional purpose as an instrument of social, economic and cultural manipulation was documented by revisionist historians like Joel Spring, Michael Katz and even by more moderate scholars like Timothy Smith; while the radical libertarian Ivan Illich urged the “deschooling” of modern society. Then struck the greatest threat of all; the end of the gravy train. Inflation, recession, increasing resistance to ever expanding school taxes, the collapse of cheap credit through public bond issues, all of these were quite suddenly dovetailed with the ultimate result of the zero population craze — an absolute decline in the number of children of school age. The child-oriented industries faced an inelastic market in decline, and for the first time since World World War II, teachers at all levels of schooling began to feel the grim shadow of structural unemployment, a certainty for increasing numbers in the next decade.

The situation in New York State is likely to be a model for the rest of the nation. As each year passes, the enrollments have been declining in the lower levels; the decline is now rippling upward through the system, and will reach collegiate levels in the early 1980’s when the Regents of the State University predict a drop of perhaps 25% in college enrollments before 1984-85. Add to the natural decrease in births, the steady losses through emigration from the old Northeastern states, people seeking lower taxes, more jobs, better climate and more livable environment in the “sunbelt” region, and one can foresee an irreversible decline in the schooling industry in the Northeastern region. The near bankruptcy of New York City, and of the State as well, has already compelled unprecedented cuts in school budgets, mass cutbacks in personnel, and sudden decreases in the numbers of students training to enter the teaching field. For teachers, potential teachers, administrators, and college faculties in pedagogy, the crisis has one obvious and chilling meaning: actual or potential redundancy in mid-career.

While no one ought to rejoice over another’s troubles, libertarians will certainly feel little sympathy for the teaching profession’s response to the evolving crisis in New York. They have responded to their economic decline in much the same fashion as so many other industries — they have turned to the States to bail them out in every way conceivable, short of increasing the birth rate by act of the legislature.

The most subtle and devious proposal, because it seems to cost so little in immediate expenditures, has just been unveiled by the Task Force on Teacher Education and Certification. The Task Force was the brainchild of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the state-wide teacher’s union affiliated with the AFL-CIO and a tributary of the powerful and ambitious Albert Shanker, chief of the New York City United Federation of Teachers, the largest teachers’ local in the labor movement. NYSUT’s president, Thomas Hobart, reported to his constituents that fear that the State Regents might adopt the views of the national movement for “competency-based teacher education,” and apply them to teacher education in New York, caused NYSUT to intervene in opposition to such developments. Hobart summarized NYSUT’s successful intervention thus:

“One of the tenets of the original plan (for competency based teacher education) was to have life experience instead of a baccalaureate degree (as a qualification for certification). We were able to remove that. Another one was that a proficiency exam should be substituted for a baccalaureate degree. We were able to eliminate that. The evaluation of teacher competency was to be based on student performance, and we were able to eliminate that.”

Following this victory, NYSUT and other special interest groups persuaded State Commissioner of Education Ewald Nyquist to appoint the Task Force on Teacher Education and Certification composed of 21 persons, all members of the education establishment except the chairman, an attorney, Arnold Gardner, who was recommended for the position by NYSUT and was formerly president of the Buffalo School Board. Without the presence of anyone outside their own bailiwick, these educationists have now produced a preliminary report which has national implications.

If its recommendations are accepted by the New York State Regents and legislature, they will provide the needed model for similar action by educationists in other states.

What has been proposed? Nothing less than the creation of a system of licensing for teachers modelled on those of the other professions, law, medicine and accountancy. At the present time, the State department of education merely certifies teachers upon the recommendation of their various colleges and universities, based upon successful completion of specified courses of study and the granting of the baccalaureate degree. Though it still restricts hiring to those with the requisite degree, it is not particularly onerous as no further investigation is made into the potential teacher’s competency or his particular educational philosophy. Also, certification is required only for employees of the public schools, and does not even extend to those employed by the New York City public system which has more onerous requirements including written and oral examinations for certification.

The new plan for licensing would make teaching a licensed profession. In Hobart’s immortal words: “The greatest strength of a license is that in the licensed profession those who practice without a license go to jail.” He is quite frank about this. No “one will teach in New York without the permission of the profession’s licensing board. That extends the state’s power over public school teachers to those in private and parochial schools as well. It will also make it difficult for those coming from other states to qualify for employment in New York. It will inevitably restrict the potential supply of new teachers and thus support demands for higher wages and benefits. Under the guise of making a profession, the Task Force hopes to create a monopoly over labor supply.

Hopefully, this professionalization will create a new “criminal class” — the unlicensed teacher, restoring to us the historic days of 18th century Ireland where the penal laws forbade, under threat of deportation, any unlicensed teacher to instruct the children of Catholics. The Catholic response, the profession’s response, was the “hedge school master”, the man who risked his life and fortune to instruct children in the ditches and behind the hedges of rural Ireland, out of sight of the magistrate.

The new licensing will demand at least two requirements to be met: first, potential licensees must serve a one year’s internship in a public school under the tutelage of a master teacher, and be responsible for a restricted, small number of students. For this he will be paid a salary, and if his evaluation is satisfactory, he will presumably be granted a license. This doubles the time of the present internship, makes it mandatory for all, and shifts the cost from the intern to the taxpayer. But with increasing pressure for cost efficiency, how many schools will wish to take on the burden of such costly internships? Probably few, reducing’ the opportunity of potential teachers to fulfill the license requirements. As in the skilled trades, internships will probably become valued legacies from fathers to sons, or mothers to daughters. The politicalization of access to the profession is bound to become more flagrant.

A second requirement will be success in passing an examination in both pedagogy and subject matter. Hobart’s premise in demanding an examination in pedagogy is that it is “a body of knowledge which can be systematically categorized and learned.” But this claim is ludicrous! There is hardly any area of pedagogical theory which is not marked by the presence of conflicting paradigms. As a science, pedagogy is a shambles of contrary theories. As an art, it has successfully been practiced by many highly talented artisans, and even has known a few genuine geniuses. But the notion that one can categorize it for purposes of examination to test competency is likely to impose an orthodoxy unjustified by the nature of the art. The professionalization of teaching through examination makes as much sense as the professionalization of painting, sculpting, or salesmenship through qualifying examinations in these arts.

Finally, the Task Force has recommended the creation of a board to regulate the “practices” of the “profession,” analogous to such regulatory boards in other licensed professions. While just what practices of teachers might constitute malpractice is left very vague, the Task Force chairman has noted that the board would almost certainly require continuing in-service training for teachers to upgrade the quality of the profession. Thus, the license would not be permanent, but presumably subject to periodic renewal, with those teachers uncooperative in undergoing further “upgrading” subject to loss of employment. In addition to the tremendous monopoly of power, and the control over individual teachers such a board would exercise, teachers would become a captive market for the declining schools of education, thus providing a continuing job cushion for the faculties of graduate level education departments. Needless to say, the board would be composed solely of “professionals” nominated by specified categories of professional associations, and thus not subject to control by laymen or even public officials.

This plan is just the product of a preliminary report; in the fall further “reforms” will be forthcoming. Friends of liberty and lovers of learning will need to organize in every state at the first sign of the spread of this latest manifestation of monopoly and the unholy alliance of the special interest group and the State. It will be a difficult and crucial struggle. The issues are basic; the forces agitating for licensing are politically powerful and financially strong. What role will libertarians play in the ensuing battle?

J. R. P.

Russia!

By Justus D. Doenecke*

Review of: Robert G. Kaiser, Russia: The People and the Power

(New York: Atheneum, 1976, $12.95)

Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Quadrangle, 1976, $12.50)

In 1947 George F. Kennan wrote his famous “X” article, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” Here, in an essay mastered by generations of college students, the prominent diplomat claimed that Russia’s tradition of absolutism, along with the new and militant ideology of Marxism-Leninism, had created an intolerant and isolated society. Kennan predicted, however, that Western containment would eventually lead to “the break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” Because Russia’s “tired and dispirited population” worked “largely under the shadow of fear and compulsion”, their country remained economically vulnerable, and in some ways impotent.

One can now test Kennan’s analysis. Few correspondents are better able to describe today’s Russia than Hedrick Smith of the New York Times and Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post. Smith, co-editor of the Pentagon Papers, has won a Pulitzer for his Moscow coverage; Kaiser was given a correspondent’s award in 1974 by the Overseas Press Club. Their books are extremely well-written, although Smith falls into an occasional cliche (“sauce to season the dry intellectual noodles”) and Kaiser can jump too abruptly from one topic to another.

The authors pay few tributes to the planned society, at least to state planning as practiced in the USSR. The role of women are a case in point. Soviet boasting concerning female equality hides an oppression that would make the United States look like a NOW vision of utopia. Women in the USSR have the most low-paying and unskilled of all jobs, with many involved in physical labor.

Russian society frowns on candid discussion of sexuality, and the regime fosters marriage and large families. Many Russians, however, engage in pre-marital sex and find that budget and housing restrictions limit households to one child. Abortion is frequent, not because of any “liberation ethic,” but because the supply of birth-control devices is limited. The much vaunted state nurseries give infants less care than they would receive at home; even respected Soviet scholars are voicing misgivings about group upbringing.

Both authors pay few compliments to Russia’s centralized planning. The Five Year Plans, Smith and Kaiser admit, have modernized one of the most backward societies of the world, and have done so in less than five decades. Rigid adherence to longterm blueprints, however, has led to waste, featherbedding, doctored statistics, and lopsided development. The regime vigorously resists innovation, and one almost yearns for the economic world espoused by Milton Friedman, not to mention the more “hard core” Murray Rothbard, to whom the Friedmanian universe is like a timid sip of 3.2 beer.

Inefficiency is so great that even New Zealand and the Arab states rank ahead in per capita output. Goods are often too shabby to be sold on Western markets. Contrary to legend, laborers have little work ethic and take no pride in craftsmanship. Few Russians want to work in Siberia, a region rich in oil, gas, and other minerals; it is too bleak, too cold, too primitive for all but transient youth.

Collective farming is another sore point. Despite the rigorously collectivized agriculture, nearly 30 per cent of farm output is grown on private plots. Ironically, it is these free enterprise markets that help keep Russians alive. Crop yield is low, mechanization primitive, fertilizer and seeds poorly distributed. Much rural life remains shabby, drab, and isolated, with millions living at poverty level. The basic wages for collective farmers lag far behind those earned by factory workers.

Not all production problems lie in farm and industry, for science and technology reflect a most uneven development. The Soviet Union has more scientists than any other nation. Its physicists and mathematicians are among the world’s most brilliant, and Russians have done significant work in steelmaking, electronic generators, and magneto-hydrodynamics. However, they have made little contribution to such fields as organic chemistry and biology. Kaiser shows that their publicized space exploits draw attention from serious technological gaps: they never had the resources to fly to the moon, much less conduct extensive experiments outside the earth’s surface. Here again, it is the closed nature of Soviet society that prevents the Russians from having the freedom they need.

Education shows up the same gap, indeed chasm, between rhetoric and reality. True the USSR has moved close to full literacy, but even over half its adults still have not advanced beyond the seventh grade. At an early age, poorer students are shunted off to vocational schools, a device that often preserves the class structure of Soviet society. The Soviets stress rote-learning and drill, with much time devoted to “patriotism” and “Lenin-worship.” American scholars impressed with the “collective responsibility” Russian children take for each other merely betray their naivete, for the Soviet classroom has institutionalized a system of tattling.

The fact that many dissenters seek “real communism” and genuine “worker control” makes little difference: they want freedom of expression and hence constitute a threat to Russia’s leaders. Both authors have superb accounts of writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and scientist Andrei Sakharov, with Smith showing the provocative novelist as a man who hopes to restore Russia to its pre-industrial, Orthodox, isolated days.

The regime still fosters atheism, and does so aggressively. Some 30 million Russians, however, are believers — twice the number of Communist party members. True, religious observance can lead to professional setbacks and the Orthodox church faces many state restraints. In small towns, however, the priest is still a central figure and many members of the intelligentsia have turned to the church as a haven.

The status of some three million Soviet Jews remains in limbo. After the Revolution of 1917, Yiddish culture enjoyed a renaissance and some Jews, such as Trotsky, had extremely important positions. Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges gave way to a far milder but pervasive anti-Semitism, one that included quotas in schools and colleges and the professions, and Judaism as a religion is dying. Yet, even now, Jews have succeeded far out of proportion to their members, particularly in the creative arts, and Smith claims that the renewed sense of Jewish nationalism “seemed less a zealous devotion to Israel than a drive for self-affirmation in Soviet life after decades of self-denial.”

Smith and Kaiser devote much space to the ruling elite, a group that lives as a privileged class. The group can maintain substantial villas in the countryside, shop in special stores, watch foreign films forbidden to the rest of the population, and help their children get admitted to universities. If the ruling elite is not a monolithic group, it has still been able to maintain a united front. Cronyism, not ideological struggle, is the earmark of the leadership, and there are Russians who yearn for another Stalin to cut through the bureaucratic arrogance.

Ideology serves as a tool of the Kremlin’s power brokers, and an individual can ignore it so long as he presents no open challenge. The dream of a “new Soviet man”, unselfish and devoted, is contradicted daily publicized accounts of greed and scandal. “Don’t make waves” appears to be the earmark of the ambitious functionary or “apparatchik,” for promotion goes to the steady and unimaginative. Indeed, it is frequently the petty bureaucrats, self-appointed busybodies, who most erode the human spirit. Smith writes, “Soviet life often resembles living full time in the Army.” The system is designed to bring out the worst, not the best, in people. Reform would necessitate decentralization, which in turn would make party control of the nation most precarious.

Only Kaiser systematically discusses foreign policy. The West, he says, has continually exaggerated Russia’s military strength, while ignoring its economic and technological failings. He stresses that the USSR is still living under the same “siege mentality” it first experienced in 1917; hence it seeks not so much to advance the cause of communism as to protect its own autocracy. It realizes that it cannot compete economically with the Western powers for Third World allegiance and is now finding the Arab nations singularly ungrateful. Detente reduces arms competition with the West while legitimizing the Soviet empire.

The Washington Post correspondent warns that Russia is “anxious to do us ill” but claims that the United States has the resources to cope effectively. George F. Kennan’s prediction of Soviet decay appears farther away than ever; in the meantime, it is foolish to exaggerate Russian strength.

*Justus Doenecke is associate professor of history, New College of the University of South Florida.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 8

August, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

The State As An
Immoral Teacher

by Ouida

Editor’s Note: Marie Louise Ramé, who wrote under the penname of her lifelong nickname “Ouida”, was a prominent English writer of many romantic and sometimes scandalous novels in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most of her life she lived in her beloved Italy. It was little realized at the time, and certainly forgotten since, that Ouida was a hard-hitting and thoroughgoing libertarian; in middle-age, during the 1890’s, she wrote lucid libertarian articles, of which the following, published in the North American Review, Volume 153, pages 193-204, was one of her finest. In “The State as an Immoral Teacher” we find Ouida’s lucid and impassioned hatred of the State as the eternal oppressor of the individual, and her intertwined belief in both the civil liberty and the property rights of the individual is both clearly and nobly expressed. Her trenchant opposition to what most people concede to be a legitimate duty of the State — compulsory vaccination — takes on important modern overtones in these days of trumped up government hysteria over the “swine flu” scare. The one place where a modern libertarian would disagree is Ouida’s going so far as to defend a degree of parental child abuse, but this is surely a minor blot on Ouida’s libertarian escutcheon.

The tendency of the last years of the nineteenth century is toward increase in the powers of the state and decrease in the powers of the individual citizen. Whether the government of a country be at this moment nominally free, or whether it be avowedly despotic, whether it be an empire, a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or a self-governing and neutralized principality, the actual government is a substitution of state machinery for individual choice and individual liberty. In Servia, in Bulgaria, in France, in Germany, in England, in America, in Australia, anywhere you will, the outward forms of government differ widely, but beneath all there is the same interference of the state with personal volition, the same obligation for the individual to accept the dictum of the state in lieu of his own judgment. The only difference is that such a pretension is natural and excusable in an autocracy: in a constitutional or republican state it is an anomaly, even an absurdity. But whether it be considered admirable or accursed, the fact is conspicuous that every year adds to the pretensions and powers of the state, and every year diminishes the personal freedom of the man.

To whatever the fact be traceable, it is there; and it is probably due to the increase of a purely doctrinaire education, which with itself increases the number of persons who look upon humanity as a drill-sergeant looks upon battalions of conscripts: the battalions must learn to move mechanically in masses, and no single unit of them must be allowed to murmur or to fall out of the ranks. That this conscript or that may be in torture all the while matters nothing whatever to the drill-sergeant. That what would have been an excellent citizen makes a rebellious or inefficient conscript is not his business either: he only requires a battalion which moves with mechanical precision. The state is but a drill-sergeant on a large scale, with a whole nationality marched out on the parade-ground.

Whatever were in other respects the evils attendant on other ages that this, those ages were favorable to the development of individuality, and therefore of genius. The present age is opposed to such development; and the more the state manipulates the man, the more completely will individuality and originality be destroyed. The state requires a military machine in which there is no hitch, an exchequer in which there is never a deficit, and a public monotonous, obedient, colorless, spiritless, moving unanimously and humbly like a flock of sheep along a straight high road between two walls. That is the ideal of every bureaucracy; and what is the state except a crystallized bureaucracy? It is the habit of those who uphold the despotism of government to speak as though it were some impersonal entity, some unerring guide, some half-divine thing like the pillar of fire which the Israelites imagined conducted them in their exodus. In actual fact, the state is only the executive; representing the momentary decisions of a majority which is not even at all times a genuine majority, but is in frequent cases a fabricated and fictitious preponderance, artificially and arbitrarily produced. There can be nothing noble, sacred, or unerring in such a majority: in the right, it is fallible and fallacious; it may be in the right, it may be in the wrong; it may light by accident on wisdom, or it may plunge by panic into folly. There is nothing in its origin or its construction which can render it imposing in the sight of an intelligent and high-spirited man. But the mass of men are not intelligent and not high-spirited, and so the incubus which lies on them through it they support as the camel his burden, sweating beneath it at every pore. The state is the empty cap of Gessler, to which all but Tell consent to bow.

It has been made a reproach to the centuries preceding this one that in them privilege occupied the place of law; but, though privilege was capricious and often unjust, it was always elastic, sometimes benignant: law — civil law, such as the state frames and enforces — is never elastic and is never benignant. It is an engine which rolls on its own iron lines, and crushes what it finds opposed to it, without any regard to the excellence of what it may destroy.

The nation, like the child, becomes either brutalized by over-drilling, or emasculated by having all its actions and opinions continually prescribed for it. It is to be doubted whether any precautions or any system could compass what the state in many countries is now endeavoring to do, by regulation and prohibition, to prevent the spread of infectious maladies. But it is certain that the nervous terrors inspired by state laws and by-laws beget a malady of the mind more injurious than the bodily ills which so absorb the state. Whether Pasteur’s inoculation for rabies be a curse or a boon to mankind, there can be no question that the exaggerated ideas which it creates, the fictitious importance which it lends to what was previously a most rare malady, the nightmare horrors it invokes, and the lies which its propagandists, to justify its pretences, find themselves compelled to invent, produce a dementia and hysteria in the public mind which is a disease far more widespread and dangerous than mere rabies (unassisted by science and government) could ever have become.

The dissemination of cowardice is a greater evil than would be the increase of any physical ill whatever. To direct the minds of men in-nervous terror to their own bodies is to make of them a trembling and shivering pack of prostrate poltroons. The microbe may or may not exist; but the nervous terrors generated in the microbe’s name are worse evils than any bacillus. It is the physiologist’s trade to increase these terrors; he lives by them, and by them alone has his being; but when the state takes his crotchets and quackeries in earnest and forces them upon the public as law, the effect is physically and mentally disastrous. The cholera as a disease is bad enough; but worse than itself by far are the brutal egotism, the palsied terror, the convulsive agonies, with which it is met and which the state in all countries does so much to increase. Fear alone kills five-tenths of its victims, and during its latest visitation in the streets of Naples people would spring up from their seats, shriek that they had cholera, and fall dead in convulsions caused by sheer panic, whilst in many country places the villagers fired on railway trains which they imagined might carry the dreaded malady amongst them. This kind of panic cannot be entirely controlled by any state, but it might be mitigated by judicious moderation, instead of being, as it is, intensified and hounded on by the press, the physiologists, and the governments all over the known world.

The state has already passed its cold, hard, iron-plated arms between the parent and the offspring, and is daily dragging and forcing them asunder. The old moral law may say, “Honor your father and mother,” etc., etc., but the state says, on the contrary: “Leave your mother ill and untended whilst you attend to your own education; and summon your father to be fined and imprisoned if he dare lay a hand on you when you disgrace and deride him.” The other day a workingman in London was sentenced to a fortnight’s imprisonment with hard labor, because being justly angry with his little girl for disobeying his orders and staying out night after night in the streets, he struck her twice with a leathern strap, and she was “slightly bruised.” The man asked pertinently what was the world coming to if a parent might not correct his child as he thought fit. What can be the relations of this father and daughter when he leaves the prison to which she sent him? What authority can he have in her sight? What obedience will he be able to exact from her? The bruises from the strap would soon pass away, but the rupture, by the sentence of the tribunal, of parental and filial ties can never be healed. The moral injury done to the girl by this interference of the state is irreparable, ineffaceable. The state has practically told her that disobedience is no offense, and has allowed her to be the accuser and jailer of one who, by another canon of law, is said to be set in authority over her both by God and man.

The moral and the civil law alone decree and enforce the inviolability of property: anything which is the property of another, be it but of the value of a copper coin, cannot be taken by you without your becoming liable to punishment as a thief. This, by the general consent of mankind, has been esteemed correct, just, and necessary. But the state breaks this law, derides it, rides rough-shod over it, when for its own purposes it requires the property of a private person: it calls the process by various names — condemnation, expropriation, annexation, etc.; but it is seizure, violent seizure, and essentially seizure against the owner’s will. If a man enter your kitchen-garden and take a few onions or a few potatoes, you can seize, prosecute, and imprison him: the state takes the whole garden, and turns you out of it, and turns it into anything else which for the moment seems to the state excellent or advantageous, and against the impersonal robber you can do naught. The state considers it compensation enough to pay an arbitrary value; but not only are there many possessions, notably in land, for the loss of which no equivalent could reconcile us, but the state herein sets up a principle which is never accorded in law. If the man who steals the onions offers to pay their value, he is not allowed to do so, nor is the owner of the onions allowed to accept such compensation: it is called “compounding a felony.” The state alone may commit this felony with impunity.

The state continually tampers with and tramples on private property, taking for itself what and where and how it pleases: the example given to the public is profoundly immoral. The plea put forth in excuse for its action by the state is that of public benefit: the interests of the public cannot, it avers, be sacrificed to private interest or ownership or rights of any sort. But herein it sets up a dangerous precedent. The man who steals the potatoes might argue in his own justification that it is better in the interest of the public that one person should lose a few potatoes than that another person should starve for want of them, and so either in prison or in poorhouse become chargeable to the nation. If private rights and the sacredness of property can be set at naught by the state for its own purposes, they cannot be logically held to be sacred in its courts of law for any individual. The state claims immunity for theft on the score of convenience: so then may the individual.

If the civil law be in conflict with and contradiction of religious law, as had been shown elsewhere, * it is none the less in perpetual opposition to moral law and to all the finer and more generous instincts of the human soul. It preaches egotism as the first duty of man, and studiously inculcates cowardice as the highest wisdom. In its strenuous endeavor to cure physical ills it does not heed what infamies it may sow broadcast in the spiritual fields of the mind and heart. It treats altruism as criminal when altruism means indifference to the contagion of any infectious malady. The precautions enjoined in any such malady stripped bare of their pretences, really mean the naked selfishness of the sauve qui peut. The pole-axe used on the herd which has been in contact with another herd infected by pleuro-pneumonia or anthrax would be used on the human herd suffering from typhoid, or small-pox, or yellowfever, or diphtheria, if the state had the courage to follow out its own teachings to their logical conclusions. Who shall say that it will not be so used some day in the future, when increase of population shall have made mere numbers of trifling account, and the terrors excited by physiologists of ungovernable force?

We have gained little by the emancipation of human society from the tyranny of the churches if in its stead we substitute the tyranny of the state. One may as well be burned at the stake as compelled to submit to the prophylactic of Pasteur or the lymph of Koch. When once we admit that the law should compel vaccination for small-pox, there is no logical reason for refusing to admit that the law shall enforce any infusion or inoculation which its chemical and medical advisors may suggest to it.

On the first day of May, 1890, a French surgeon, M. Lannelongue, had a little imbecile child in his hospital; he fancied that he should like to try trepanning on the child as a cure for imbecility. In the words of the report:

“Il tailiait la suture sagittale et parallelement avec elle une longue et étroite incision cranienne depuls la suture frontale a la suture occipitale; il en resulta pour la partie osseusse une perte de substance longue de 9 centimetres et large de 6 millimetres, et il en resulta pour le cerveau un vértiable débridement.”

If this child live, and be no longer imbecile, the parents of all idiots will presumably be compelled by law to submit their children to this operation of trepanning and excision. Such a law would be the only logical issue of existing hygienic laws.

In the battlefield the state requires from its sons the most unflinching fortitude; but in civil life it allows them, even bids them, to be unblushing poltroons.

An officer, being sent out by the English War Office this year to fill a distinguished post in Hong Kong, was ordered to be vaccinated before going to it; and the vaccination was made a condition of the appointment. In this instance a man thirty years old was thought worthy of confidence and employment by the state, but such a fool or babe in his own affairs that he could not be trusted to look after his own health. You cannot make a human character fearful and nervous, and then call upon it for the highest qualities or resolve, or capacity, and of courage. You cannot coerce and torment a man, and then expect from him intrepidity, presence of mind, and ready invention in perilous moments.

A few years ago nobody thought it a matter of the slightest consequence to be bitten by a healthy dog; as a veterinary surgeon has justly said, a scratch from a rusty nail or the jagged tin of a sardine-box is much more truly dangerous than a dog’s tooth. Yet in the last five years the physiologists and the state, which in all countries protects them, have succeeded in so inoculating the public mind with senseless terrors that even the accidental touch of a puppy’s lips or the kindly lick of his tongue throws thousands of people into an insanity of fear. Dr. Bell has justly said: “Pasteur does not cure rabies; he creates it,” In like manner the state does not cure either folly or fear: it creates both.

The state is the enemy of all volition in the individual: hence it is the enemy of all manliness, of all force, of all independence, and of all originality. The exigencies of the state, from its monstrous taxation to its irritating by-laws, are in continual antagonism with all those who have character uncowed and vision unobscured. Under the terrorizing generic term of law, the state cunningly, and for its own purposes, confounds its own petty regulations and fiscal exactions with the genuine solemnity of moral and criminal laws. The latter any man who is not a criminal will feel bound to respect; the former no man who has an opinion and courage of his own will care to observe. Trumpery police and municipal regulations are merged by the ingenuity of the state into a nominal identity with genuine law; and for all its purposes, whether of social tyranny or of fiscal extortion, the union is to the state as useful as it is fictitious. The state has everywhere discovered that it is lucrative and imposing to worry and fleece the honest citizen; and everywhere it shapes its civil code, therefore, mercilessly and cunningly towards this end.

Under the incessant meddling of government and its offspring, bureaucracy, the man becomes poor of spirit and helpless. He is like a child who, never being permitted to have its own way, has no knowledge of taking care of itself or of avoiding accidents. As, here and there, a child is of rare and strong enough stuff to break his leading-strings, and grows, when recaptured, dogged and sullen, so are there men who resist the dogma and dictation of the state, and when coerced and chastised become rebels to its rules. The petty tyrannies of the state gall and fret them at every step; and the citizen who is law-abiding, so far as the greater moral code is concerned, is stung and whipped into continual contumacy by the impertinent interference of the civil code with his daily life.

Why should a man fill up a census-return, declare his income to a tax-gatherer, muzzle his dog, send his children to schools he disapproves, ask permission of the state to marry, or do perpetually what he dislikes or condemns, because the state wishes him to do these things? When a man is a criminal, the state has a right to lay hands on him; but whilst he is innocent of all crime his opinions and his objections should be respected. There may be many reasons — harmless or excellent reasons — why publicity about his life is offensive or injurious to him: what right has the state to pry into his privacy and force him to write its details in staring letters for all who run to read? The state only teaches him to lie.

“You ask me things that I have no right to tell you,” replied Jeanne d’Arc to her judges. So may the innocent man, tormented by the state, reply to the state, which has no business with his private life until he has made it forfeit by a crime.

The moment that the state leaves the broad lines of public affairs to meddle with the private interests and actions of its people, it is compelled to enlist in its service spies and informers. Without these it cannot make up its long lists of transgressions; it cannot know whom to summon and what to prosecute.

That duplicity which is in the Italian character, so universally ingrained there that the noblest natures are tainted by it, — a duplicity which makes entire confidence impossible, and secrecy an instinct strong as life, — can be philosophically trained to the influences which the constant dread of the sbirri and spie employed under their various governments for so many centuries has left upon their national temperament. Dissimulation, so long made necessary, has become part and parcel of the essence of their being. Such secretiveness is the inevitable product of domestic espionage and trivial interference from the state, as the imposition of a gate-tax makes the peasantry who pass the gate ingenious in concealment and in subterfuge.

The requisitions and regulations of-the state dress themselves vainly in the pomp of law; they set themselves up side by side with moral law; but they are not it, and cannot possess its impressiveness. Even a thief will acknowledge that “Thou shalt not steal” is a just and solemn commandment: but that to carry across a frontier, without declaring it, a roll of tobacco (which you honestly bought, and which is strictly your own) is also a heinous crime, both common-sense and conscience refuse to admit. The Irish peasant could never be brought to see why the private illicit whiskey-still was illicit, and as such was condemned and destroyed, and the convictions which followed its destruction were amongst the bitterest causes of Irish disaffection. A man caught in the act of taking his neighbor’s goods knows that his punishment is deserved; but a man punished for using or enjoying his own is filled with chafing rage against the injustice of his lot. Between a moral law and a fiscal or municipal or communal imposition or decree, there is as much difference as there is between a living body and a galvanized corpse. When in a great war a nation is urged by high appeal to sacrifice its last ounce of gold, its last shred of treasure, to save the country, the response is willingly made from patriotism; but when the revenue officer and the taxgatherer demand, threaten, fine, and seize, the contributor can only feel the irritating impoverishment of such a process, and yields his purse reluctantly. Electoral rights are considered to give him a compensating share in the control of public expenditure; but this is mere fiction: he may disapprove in every item the expenditure of the state; he cannot alter it.

Tolstoi has constantly affirmed that there is no necessity for any government anywhere: it is not a government, but all governments, on which he wages war. He considers that all are alike corrupt, tyrannical, and opposed to a fine and free ideal of life. It is certain that they are not “the control of the fittest” in any actual sense, for the whole aspect of public life tends every year more and more to alienate from it those whose capacity and character are higher than those of their fellows: it becomes more and more a routine, an engrenage, a trade.

From a military, as from a financial, point of view this result is of advantage to the government, whether it be imperial or republican; but it is hostile to the character of a nation, morally and aesthetically. In its best aspect, the state is like a parent who seeks to play Providence to his offspring, to foresee and ward off all accident and all evil, and to provide for all possible contingencies, bad and good. As the parent inevitably fails in doing this, so the state fails, and must fail, in such a task.

Strikes, with their concomitant evils, are only another form of tyranny; but they have this good in them — that they are opposed to the tyranny of the state, and tend to lessen it by the unpleasant shock which they give to its self-conceit and self-complacency. Trades-unions turn to their own purposes the lesson which the state has taught them — i.e., a brutal sacrifice of individual will and welfare to a despotic majority.

There is more or less truth and justification in all revolutions because they are protests against bureaucracy. When they are successful, they abjure their own origin and become in their turn the bureaucratic tyranny, sometimes modified, sometimes exaggerated, but always tending towards reproduction of that which they destroyed. And the bureaucratic influence is always immoral and unwholesome, were it only in the impatience which it excites in all courageous men and the apathy to which it reduces all those who are without courage. Its manifold and emasculating commands are to all real strength as the cords in which Gulliver was bound by the pygmies.

The state only aims at instilling those qualities in its public by which its demands are obeyed and its exchequer is filled. Its highest attainment is the reduction, of mankind to clockwork. In its atmosphere all those finer and more delicate liberties which require liberal treatment and spacious expansion inevitably dry up and perish. Take a homely instance. A poor, hard-working family found a little stray dog; they took it in, sheltered, fed it, and attached themselves to it; it was in one of the streets of London; the police after a time summoned them for keeping a dog without a license; the woman, who was a widow, pleaded that she had taken it out of pity, that they had tried to lose it, but that it always came back to them; she was ordered to pay the amount of the dog-tax and two guineas’ costs; i.e., the state said to her: “Charity is the costliest of indulgencies; you are poor; you have no right to be humane.” The lesson given by the state was the vilest and meanest which could be given. The woman’s children, growing up, will remember that she was ruined for being kind; they will harden their hearts, in accordance with the lesson; if they become brutal to animals and men, it is the state which will have made them so.

All the state’s edicts in all countries inculcate similar egotism; generosity is in its sight a lawless and unlawful thing: it is so busied in urging the use of disinfectants and ordering the destruction of buildings and of beasts, the exile of families and the closing of drains, that it never sees the logical issue of its injunctions, which is to leave the sick man alone and flee from his infected vicinity: it is so intent on insisting on the value of state education that it never perceives that it is enjoining on the child to advance itself at any cost and leave its procreators in their hovel. The virtues of self-sacrifice, of disinterested affection, of humanity, of self-effacement, are nothing to it; by its own form of organism it is debarred from even admiring them; they come in its way; they obstruct it; it destroys them.

Mr. Ruskin, in one of the papers of his Fors Clavigera, speaks of an acacia tree, young and beautiful, green as acacias only are green in Venice, where no dust ever is; it grew beside the water steps of the Academy of the Arts and was a morning and evening joy to him. One day he found a man belonging to the municipality cutting it down root and branch. “Why do you murder that tree?” he asked. The man replied “Per far pulizia” (to clean the place). The acacia and the municipality of Venice are an allegory of the human soul and its controller, the state. The acacia was a thing of grace and verdure, a sunrise and sunset pleasure to a great soul; it had fragrance in its white blossoms and shade in its fair branches; it fitly accompanied the steps which lead to the feasts of Carpaccio and the pageants of Gian. Bellini. But in the sight of the Venetian municipality it was irregular and unclean. So are all the graces and greenness of the human soul to the state, which merely requires a community taxpaying, decree-obeying, passionless, enduring as the ass, meek as the lamb, with neither will nor wishes; a featureless humanity practising the goose-step in eternal routine and obedience.

When the man has become a passive creature, with no will of his own, taking the military yoke unquestioningly, assigning his property, educating his family, holding his tenures, ordering his daily life, in strict accord with the regulations of the state, he will have his spirit and his individuality annihilated, and he will, in compensation to himself, be brutal to all those over whom he has power. The cowed conscript of Prussia becomes the hectoring bully of Alsace.*

“Libera chiesa-in libero stato” is the favorite stock phrase of Italian politicians; but it is an untruth — nay, an impossibility — not only in Italy, but in the whole world. The Church cannot be liberal because liberality stultifies itself; the state cannot be liberal because its whole existence is bound up with dominion. In all the political schemes which exist now, working themselves out in actuality, or proposed as a panacea to the world, there is no true liberality; there is only a choice between despotism and anarchy. In religious institutions it is the same: they are all egotisms in disguise. Socialism wants what it calls equality; but its idea of equality is to cut down all tall trees that the brushwood may not feel itself overtopped. Plutocracy, like its almost extinct predecessor, aristocracy, wishes, on the other hand, to keep all the brushwood low, so that it may grow above it at its’ own pace and liking. Which is the better of the two?

Civil liberty is the first quality of a truly free life; and in the present age the tendency of the state is everywhere to admit this in theory; but to deny it in practice. To be able to go through the comedy of the voting-urn is considered privilege enough to atone for the loss of civil and moral freedom in all other things. If it be true that a nation has the government which it deserves to have, then the merits of all the nations are small indeed. With some the state assumes the guise of a police officer, and in others of a cuirassier, and in others of an attorney; but in all it is a despot issuing its petty laws with the pomp of Jove; thrusting its truncheon, or its sword, or its quill into the heart of domestic life, and breaking the backbone of the man who has spirit enough to resist it. The views of the state are like those of the Venetian municipality concerning the acacia. Its one aim is a methodical, monotonous, mathematically-measured regularity: it admits of no expansion; it tolerates no exceptions; of beauty it has no consciousness; of any range beyond that covered by its own vision it is ignorant. It may work on a large scale,—even on an enormous scale,—but it cannot work on a great one. Greatness can be the offspring alone of volition and of genius: it is everywhere the continual effort of the state to coerce the one and to suffocate the other.

* See article “Has Christianity Failed?” — NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, February, 1891.

* Whoever may care to study the brutal treatment of conscripts and soldiers in Germany by their officers is referred to the revelations published this year by Kurt Abel and Captain Miller, both eye-witnesses of these tortures.

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Cold War Revisionism

by Walter E. Grinder

A REVIEW ESSAY Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy 1941-1949 by Lloyd C. Gardner (Quadrangle, 365 pp.) and The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy 1943-1945 by Gabriel Kolko (Random House, 685 pp.)

The interwoven dynamics of war, revolution and economic hegemony have been the supreme animating forces of Twentieth Century history. Unfortunately it is these very dynamics which are among the least understood by academics and laymen alike. A moment’s pause for reflection helps us to understand why it is so difficult, in general, to piece together the pattern of meaning which flows from these animating forces; and why, in particular, it has proven so difficult to grasp the significance of these dynamics in the post-World War II period.

Very simply, the answer lies in the veil of governmental secrecy, myth, and propaganda that surrounds all governmental war-making and counter-revolutionary activity. The task of the historian is to cut through this veil and to attempt to reconstruct the truth concerning how and why the pattern of events emerged as it did. The role of the historian is therefore at once both the most difficult and the most important of all the social disciplines. It is the historian upon whom we all must depend to stand as the cutting edge in the process of demystification, in the process of seeking out the truth.

In the post-Watergate, post-Pentagon Papers era, it should be evident why historians have had such difficulty finding and putting together the pieces. Because the Second World War and the immediate post-war activities were shrouded in almost total “national security” secrecy, it has been a particularly long and arduous task to get the truth out. But although the truth has emerged only haltingly, the bits and pieces slowly but convincingly have been fitted together over the past twenty years.

The capstone of these two decades of work can be found in these two impressive and complementary volumes — Architects of Illusion by Lloyd C. Gardner and The Politics of War by Gabriel Kolko. The years covered in these volumes — 1941-1949 — are the crucial years, the years which must be understood if one is to grasp the essential nature of the Cold War.

It is impossible to touch on all or even most of the important insights of these detailed works, but there are three major themes which tie these works together and on which we will focus our attention. Hopefully by doing this, we can get to the roots of their combined thesis without doing an injustice to either of these excellent works.

First, there was the desire of United States policy makers to build a stable world political-economic order. The United States’ attempt to dominate and maintain the economic system of a reconstructed “capitalist” order to be built out of the post-war rubble was to become on all-consuming passion of both wartime and post-war American policy.

Second, there were the galloping aspirations of the forces of change which emerged during the war. Most of these forces grew out of the Resistance against the various authoritarian regimes. They were the forces of the Left.

Third, the combustible truth was that the reality of the second rendered the wishes of the first both obsolescent and illusory from the very beginning. Plans, policies and institutions based on a vision of the world in which the United States was to dominate, even if not absolutely control, and which did not include the nationalist and liberationist aspirations of a changing world were bound to lead to endless friction and frustrated hopes and dreams.

II

The twin economic fears which haunted United States policy makers throughout the war years were (1) the continuing depression and (2) the deterioration of international trade that had taken place during the 1930’s. These policy makers were determined that the world economy must not fall back into the malaise of the 1930’s. In order to stave off such a recurrence, the United States leaders were convinced that they had to build an open world, i.e., a world congenial to American trade and investment. Only through increased foreign trade and investment could the United States insure itself and the world against continued depression. This Hobsonian belief was the determining economic premise which guided American political-economic policy both during and after the war.

After the breakdown of the 19th Century liberal order, a breakdown that occurred mainly due to World War I and the center of which was the collapse of the international gold standard, the international market fractured and ultimately divided into self-contained trading blocs. The co-Prosperity Sphere in Asia and the German domination of Central Europe were two such blocs which grew strong during the 1930’s. Both of these were to be eliminated by the defeat of Japan and Germany. Two others which grew out of the aftermath of the Great War were the Ottawa Preference System (the Sterling Bloc) i.e. “western Capitalism” minus the United States, and finally there was the closed Soviet Union. A crazy, inefficient world to be sure. More importantly though, it was an international “system” which had effectively frustrated the global aspirations of the American one-world planners from Woodrow Wilson onward.

After 1943, when it became apparent that Germany and Japan were going to be defeated, the United States political—economic leadership began planning in earnest for the restructuring of the post-war world. This included, among many other things, plans for toppling the Sterling Bloc and for debolshevizing the Soviet Union.

Under the direction of William L. Clayton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs – and not merely incidentally one of the country’s leading exporters as head of Clayton and Anderson Company, the post-war loan to England was calculated to take advantage of Great Britain’s distressed financial condition in order to achieve several specific goals. The first was to break down the exclusionist provisions against American trade participation within the Ottawa Preference System. The second was to offset the English drive for postwar exports, a drive which clearly competed with America’s own national goals. The third was to slow down the new Labour government’s plan for the “socialization” of the British economy. Clearly the United Sates was not going to permit such a precedent to be set which might serve as a model for other countries to imitate. To various degrees each of these goals was achieved, and the United States had effectively penetrated the British Empire. The United States became the senior partner and undisputed leader of the “free world.”

Even though the plan was eventually to be thwarted, the Morgenthau-White Plan (names for Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau and his assistant Harry Dexter White) for the economic penetration of the Soviet Union was even more ingenious than Clayton’s success with Great Britain. The plan was to dismember the German economy so that no reparations could come out of current production. Then, the Soviet Union, according to the plan, would become totally dependent on the United States for a line of credit for her post-war reconstruction. The negotiation for credit then could be tied to quid pro quo concessions on the part of the Soviet Union for further easing of restrictions against United States exports and investments. Of course, the hardening of the Cold War led Stalin to veto the whole program; but when seen as a plan to debolshevize and penetrate the Soviet market, the Morgenthau Plan makes a great deal of sense whereas taken out of context it could be seen only as blind revenge and pastoral madness.

Central to the post-war planning was the rebuilding of an international monetary system that would (1) end Great Britain’s international financial dominance and (2) solidify the United States control of that system into the indefinite future. Only the United States came out of the war relatively healthy. The United States was strongest, and clearly intended to stay strongest, by taking over the “burden of global leadership” which was “thrust” upon her. Only a monetary system which insured the continued dominance of the United States was acceptable to her leaders. Therefore, an international monetary system within which the dollar was the central pillar was constructed and driven through at Bretton Woods.

The destruction of the Sterling Bloc was thereby ultimately ensured. Because of the reserve status of the dollar, the United States would henceforth be able to export large portions of its excess inflation with economic impunity, at least in the short run. But finally and most importantly, the United States could construct a matrix of multilateral trade flows in which ready liquidity and markets for American exports would be available and for which United States financial institutions would become the principal banker. Hence American bankers and exporters were to be the principal beneficiaries of the newly constructed system, but United States policy makers were absolutely convinced that what was good for American exporters was good both for the nation and for the world. In fact, throughout this period, United States leaders were largely motivated by a mania for exports to keep the United States and the world from falling back into depression.

III

The Resistance movements of liberation which rose up during the war had not fought to overthrow old empires merely to have a new one come and take its place. Not only had the fascist empires been toppled, but the democratic empires of the western European nations were in a state of disarray. From the Balkans to Indo-China the Resistance forces emerged very strong, and they were not likely to give up their gains of national self-determination in order to fall into line with the wishes of some aspiring new empire builders, no matter how democratic and benevolent they might sound.

In the aftermath of World War I, the Versailles Conference, and the ensuing depression, there developed a steady decline in genuine international free trade and in the free society everywhere. The New Order was entirely statist oriented; only the form and degree varied. Whether authoritarian or democratic, statism was the hallmark of the 1930’s. Planning and intervention were the rule rather than the exception.

All statism by its very nature is necessarily, to one degree or another, status quo oriented, interested in maintaining its own power perquisites and the given institutional arrangements. To the degree that statism prevails in a society, it would seem, to that same degree the governing fabric of that society will be status quo oriented and conservative. Rightist, if you will; reactionary if you prefer. This, then, was the makeup of the world when the war broke out. A statist world which America’s leaders, when they got into the war, planned to open up and make safe for American economic penetration and control — a New Deal for a new world.

Against this background, the forces of Resistance emerged. The very process of resistance was necessarily anti-statist and liberationist, and by definition resistance was carried out by the Left. Grasping this one point takes one a long way towards understanding the parameters and nature of the Cold War that was to follow the Second World War. The terms “liberal” and “conservative” have only to do with marginal changes within the status quo itself: clearly such has increasingly become the case throughout the 20th Century. Only the terms Right and Left seem properly to distinguish between the status quo and the disloyal opposition, between statism and revolution, and between subjection and liberation.

IV

Perhaps the single most important misunderstanding (often seemingly contrived) of the Cold War was the American policy makers’ constant jumbling together of the Left and the Soviet Union as though they were somehow one and the same. No one, not even Churchill nor Truman, could outdo Stalin in his ruthless conservatism. The first real evidence of this came with America’s first confrontation with the Left.

As the Americans swept up through Italy, a precedent was set which loomed ominous for freedom fighters everywhere. First, the Russians who were member of the Allied Control Commission were given a say in the administration of the occupation of Italy. Stalin, who was wise in the ways of power and who was properly suspicious of Churchill and

Roosevelt’s delaying tactics on the issue of the second front, properly took all this as a signal that the actual conquerors should have absolute control within their respective spheres of influence. Second, in practically every case, members of the Resistance were overlooked and conservative members of the previous order were reinstated in governing positions. Those of the Resistance who held out and continued to fight were ruthlessly eliminated, considered to be just as dangerous to the Allies as were the retreating Germans.

When the Soviet forces began to rumble westward, Stalin obviously took his cue from the West and installed only those who were willing to subordinate themselves to Soviet hegemony and to the Soviet’s self-perceived defense needs. Just as in the Italian precedent, this policy precluded members of the genuine Left from participation.

A brief look at the Balkans and Greece is instructive. Stalin’s treatment of Tito’s partisans was viciously conservative and typical of his behaviour throughout the war and after. Stalin tried continually to force Tito both to merge his movement with Old Order conservatives and to submerge his own and his troops’ radicalism. When Tito refused, Stalin cut him off with no aid — even though there was seemingly a strong similarity of socialist ideology between the two. Socialist solidarity never seemed to mean much to Stalin whenever his would-be colleagues and comrades began to take revolutionary change seriously. The Partisans were forced to fend for themselves because Stalin saw their success as a threat to the Soviet Union’s own conservative hegemonic goals in Central Europe. Stalin’s interests never had been nor were they then in favor of revolutionary change; his interests were, rather, always oriented towards maintaining his personal power and towards shoring up the defensive position of the autarchic Soviet empire. To those who have carefully studied the history of Stalin’s reign, the incontrovertible conclusion emerges that these conservative aims motivated his actions throughout.

All of the “big three” — Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin — were militantly anti-revolutionary, anti-Left, from the beginning to the end. The 1944 agreements on Greece and Rumania show just how cynically conservative they were. In Greece the National Liberation Front (EAM), like Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia, was a tough, independent-minded Resistance movement. The Communists (KKE) make up a small but significant part of this movement. By late 1943 it appeared that the EAM would be in control of Greece after the Germans were defeated. Churchill, who was trying to reassert British hegemony in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, like Stalin, was sure that the successful example of the revolutionary EAM would spread and perhaps undermine England’s attempts to rebuild its empire in that area of the world. Churchill and Stalin, therefore, secretly agreed in 1944 that the Soviets should have control in Rumania in exchange for British control in Greece. Both Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull were edgy about the agreement because the U.S. wanted a world totally open to U.S. businesses’ penetration, but Roosevelt finally grudgingly agreed.

Immediately after the agreement was consummated, the British began a determined campaign to decimate the EAM and to assert British control. The slaughter was swift and savage, and once again Stalin kept his part of the bargain by failing to support the Greek Communists. Curiously, however, it is here that we find the origin of the myth assuming that the Left and the Soviet Union were synonymous: it is here, beginning with the turmoil in Greece, that both Churchill and later the Americans justified waging war against the Left (in this case against the Greek Resistance) on the grounds of containing Soviet influence, of containing Soviet Communist expansionism.

Then came Yalta. Conservatism, suspicion, and misunderstanding were the order of the meetings. All sides wanted to stop the seemingly ceaseless rising tide of the Left. Everyone, including Stalin himself, thought that Stalin had more control of the situation than he actually did. He promised to put the brake on the Left and indeed tried to do so. He attempted to pressure all of the Communist parties of the world. Where his control and influence reached, his will prevailed; and where his will prevailed, he was successful in blunting the cutting edge of revolution. In Italy and in France the Communist parties resumed their accustomed Social Democratic ways. They returned to trade union politics and tactics, and in many cases became moderating members of the various governments.

But in Yugoslavia, Tito again refused to fall in line. In China, Mao instead stepped up the revolution. Most of the Left had little contact with the Soviet Union. The genuine Left was invariably an indigenous movement, always a movement firmly rooted in local problems and offering specific local responses to those problems. Whenever the Left movements did find themselves in contact with the Soviet Union, they usually found the relationship uncongenial because the Soviets, being far away and concerned mainly with their own empire’s needs, had no knowledge of or empathy with the specific social problems that had given rise to the local Left in the first place. Soviet generalities about working-class solidarity and Soviet specifies about the need to mould all revolutionary movements to fit the needs of “building socialism in one nation.” (in the Soviet Union, that is) were viewed with derision by the true Left. Time and again, the Left’s leaders would attempt to narrow the scope of their contacts with the Soviet Union to curtail its leaden influence on their local movement; and time and again, the Left would be driven back into the arms of the Soviets by the mindlessness of the West’s equally anti-revolutionary policies.

Most of the misunderstandings about the Yalta agreements arose as a result of Stalin promising more than he could deliver. (Kolko’s exposition of the Polish question is superb but too involved to go into here.) First, Roosevelt and then Truman took Stalin’s inflated word at face value. They took it as both true and as readily dischargable. Whenever Stalin failed or proved unable to deliver, his inability was always interpreted as an unwillingness to deliver.

At Potsdam, Truman saw Stalin as an intractable foot-dragger who hail to be shown who was the boss. Truman was sure that he had the means to do just that. The atomic bomb was in a state of near readiness, and Truman was ready to use it as a “hammer” to “dictate our own terms at the end of the war” and to maneuver and perhaps break the unmanageable Stalin. The apparently unnecessary dropping of the bomb was carried out not primarily to defeat the Japanese, but rather, it seems clear, to impress Stalin.

Stalin was duly impressed, but rather than acquiesce he acted out the self-fulfilling prophecy of Truman and Averill Harriman’s earlier expectations. As Stalin was maneuvered and finally forced into a comer by the Americans, he really began to further tighten his grip on the Soviet sphere of influence; and the Cold War began in earnest.

Thereafter, since every international move was to be defined in simplistic Soviet Union versus the United States black and white terms, it was inevitable that American leaders would characterize each gesture of self-determination as being Soviet inspired and manipulated. By equating the Left with Soviet machinations, the way was cleared for the United States to devise a strong counter-revolutionary policy. Whereas in reality even a closed Soviet Union represented only a marginal obstacle to the achievement of U.S. global aspirations, the success of the Left, on the other hand, really could block such United States domination.

But how could a war-weary and generally isolationist American public be sold on an anti-self determination crusade? In order both to salve their own consciences and to enlist the support of the American people, the policy makers and their kept intellectuals had to package their plan to extirpate the Left as a crusade against a godless, Soviet-Communist international conspiracy. There was, indeed, an international revolution against imperial order throughout much of the globe, but it was being carried out by the Left and it was being undermined and thwarted every bit as much by the Soviets as by the Americans throughout the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s. In the 1970’s “detente” is an open agreement to squash movements of radical self-determination wherever and whenever they develop; or, if possible, “detente” is being used as a cover behind which the Soviet Union and the United States attempt to co-opt the movements, to rob them of their radical character, and to lure them into one or the other of the detente partner’s respective sphere of influence.

In order to understand American foreign policy during these all important years, it is necessary to delve deeply into the ideas, ideals, and vested interests, if any, of the major participants. It would be nice if we knew more about the minds and motivations of Soviet personnel; but the Soviet archives are not open to foreign historians, and therefore we do not yet understand the other side nearly as well as we might wish. We do, however, have in Gardner’s book a most helpful cataloging of ideas, wishes and events surrounding America’s decision-making personnel. These include among others:F.D.R., H.S.T., Will Clayton, George C. Marshall, Bernard M. Baruch, Dean Acheson and others. It is impossible to understand the origins of the Cold War without peering intently into the ideological framework and the international desires of these men.

V

Libertarians in particular are deeply indebted to both Kolko and Gardner, not simply because of their masterful setting straight of the record, but also because they help to provide us with a more libertarian interpretation of the dynamics of war, revolution, and economic hegemony. No historian can provide us with all of the answers, and Kolko and Gardner are not exceptions to this rule; however, they do clear away many of the statist apologetics of the “court historians” and give us a remarkably clear view of what really did take place. Perhaps even more importantly, they give us good understanding of why the events took place the way that they did.

If there has been one overriding weakness in the developing libertarian Weltanschauung, it has been and continues to be an extraordinarily peculiar inclination for many libertarians to accept, without much question, the United States’ orthodox propaganda concerning international affairs. A careful and honest look at the evidence leads one to realize that the United States is even far more statist (anti-freedom) abroad than it is at home. Massive amounts of money and energy of the United States for the past thirty years have gone to wipe out the aspirations of freedom around the globe in the name of stability, prosperity, and maintaining the “free world.”

Hopefully, libertarians will learn from a careful study of Kolko and Gardner to see that the United States’ intransigent demand for a world order that would be congenial to American business penetration and expansion was and continues to be perhaps the major and constant source of the Cold War. No nation is either more responsible or more culpable for the origination, the development, and the outcome of the Cold War than is the United States. On this the record is clear.

After libertarians carefully sift the evidence, it is furthermore hoped that they will conclude that to remain libertarian in judging, analyzing, and commenting on foreign affairs, one must side intellectually, emotionally, and morally with the revolutionary forces of liberation, with the forces of the Left; for the processes of revolution, the processes of liberation are of necessity moral and libertarian. Perhaps the most difficult reality of all to accept is that these forces of the Left are almost always, and properly so, anti-American. It really hurts to realize, as history is most likely to judge, that the United States is the chief counterrevolutionary — and therefore the most anti-self determination — force in the world, and that the United States will stop at practically nothing to protect, maintain, and extend its global empire.

Such support of the Left, of course, does not commit one to a pro-communist or pro-socialist position; for clearly the socio-economic system of socialism is but the total fulfillment of statism. As such, socialism or communism is always status quo oriented, rightist and anti-Left, the very antithesis of the libertarian social order. Neither, of course, does such support lead one to whitewash nor to apologize for the sins and hegemonic aspirations of the Soviet Union, but, then, this review is not meant to be a discussion of Soviet history.

At the very least, though, what such an identification with national liberation movements does commit one to, vis à vis the United States, is a total commitment against any and all U.S. foreign interventionist activities. It has become increasingly clear that practically all American foreign aid, whether military or economic, inevitably finds its way into the coffers of reactionary, “stability oriented” regimes. Thus, for over thirty years the United States government has led and supported the parties of reaction and counter-revolution, especially in the Third World. The record, beginning during W. W. II, clearly shows that the economic and military support policies conceived in Washington and implemented around the globe, as commentators as diverse in their views as Lawrence Dennis and Sidney Lens saw long ago, have done more to generate Interest in socialist Ideology, to multiply the number of the communist faithful, and to confirm the otherwise absurd predictions of socialist theories of imperialism than all of the time, effort, teaching, planning, propaganda, wishful thinking and so forth that has gone on in the Kremlin since 1917. United States foreign policy, especially since about 1942, has been the best Mend international communism ever had.

One’s commitment, then, to national liberation movements both in theory and in fact, in general; and to an anti-American global, interventionist policy, in particular; must surely lead one to adopt a political program which has as its object the forcing of United States’ military and political-economic legions to come home, to mind their own business, and, then, to allow the chip to fall where they will. This, after all, is what the devotion to freedom and the free market is all about. One simply cannot fight socialism with socialism (or militarism and fascism) and expect the result to be libertarian either abroad or at home. Yet, this has been precisely the policy pursued by the United States and boosted by both the social-democratic liberals and the conservatives alike now for over thirty years. This is the very policy that the conservatives and the neo-conservatives in the Commentary-National Review-Public Interest clique would have us redouble our efforts to pursue.This is the policy toward which libertarians must at long last stand up and say, “No more.”

Libertarians must help forgo ¿movement which will pressure the U.S. government to cease shoring up reactionary regimes and to cease attempts to force open closed doors. The U.S. government must do one thing only, and that is to get out of the way and to permit business to proceed where business Is wanted. And the United States government must under no circumstances be permitted to assume the risks for American enterprises doing business abroad. Even in our real world of social upheaval and political turmoil, this — no help, no hindrance — is what the doctrine of free trade must mean. Anything else is but a sham.

It will take several decades of such strict non-interference to convince those of the Third World and elsewhere that America’s international free-trade vocabulary is not simply a verbal cloak for a more sophisticated form of imperialism. It will take several decades to break down the walls of hate and distrust built up by the Cold Warrior empire builders. And it will likely take several decades of closed-door, socio-economic experiments before the emerging nations discover, that socialism, does not work. This may not make good textbook economic sense and it may be unfortunate for all concerned, but it will probably have to happen and the United States government will simply have to tolerate it. Only such a policy of non-intervention and tolerance will encourage the adoption of free trade policies among the developing countries. Only by adopting such a policy could the United States ever become a symbol of liberty and gain a measure of deserved International respect Only then will the ideas and ideals of free trade and their political corollary — individualism and political liberty — gain credence and adoption. Only such a policy of nonintervention can lead the world towards true international progress and true freedom. Just as the aggressive policy of United States global interventionism has caused a quantum leap in statism both abroad and at home, so too, a friendly policy of minding its own business will surely lead to a safer, freer and more productive world for all of us everywhere.

It is sad but true that the Ideology of most Left movements is wrapped in socialist rhetoric and interventionist policy. But his should not be cause for surprise. If, as it does, the United States carries oat its imperial policy counter-revolution under the guise of “free enterprise,” and If the United States continues its policy of buying off and exterminating Unwanted socio-economic agitation under the banner of “free trade,” then whenever We find someone who is shocked at the large doses of socialism and egalitarianism to be found In the rhetoric and actions of national liberation movements, we assuredly will have found one who has not very carefully thought the situation through. It seems dear that all too many libertarians have not carefully read the evidence and have not carefully thought the situation through.

In fact, one can reinforce one’s free market position by identifying with the Left For only the genuine free market is the fulfillment of all liberating processes. Only the genuine free market is truly anti-status-quo, anti-statist, anti-conservative — truly Left. Seeing the free market in this manner helps to place the implications of the free market philosophy in its wider and more nearly correct historics! and strategic perspective.

We must all remember that no nation-state can “build” a stable world order; it can attempt to do so only through the massive use of statist force both at home and abroad, and even then the stability gained is at best only short run stability. A genuinely stable order of the free market develops only out of free and voluntary exchange processes. To “build a free world” Is a contradiction in terms, and to persist in such a policy is at best to chase an illusion and must always lead to a perversion of the libertarian ideal.

Both Kolko and Gardner offer us a great deal of food for thought and understanding. We can hope that libertarians will not be so put off by some of their socialist views, especially on the part of Kolko, that they do not searchingly study and appreciate the evidence and analyses of these two magnificent books.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 9

SEPTEMBER, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

Education By Bribes And Coercion

by Auberon Herbert

Most libertarians are aware of the existence of a circle of American individualist anarchists who contributed to the famous newspaper Liberty, edited by Benjamin Tucker, in the late 19th century. Readers of James Martin’s Men Against The State (Ralph Myles Publishers, PO Box 1533, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80901 $2.50) are familiar with Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, Lysander Spooner, Victor Yarros, and the many other brilliant contributors to the philosophy of anarchism in its native American individualist form. Some of their writings have in recent years been republished, a few by Libertarian Forum. But few of us are aware of a circle of equally brilliant libertarians — they preferred to be called individualists or voluntarists rather than anarchists, a term ‘they associated rightly in its European context, with socialism and violence. These virtually unknown philosophers lived in late Victorian England were largely disciples of Mill and Spencer, but were men who were capable of taking their teachers’ ideas to their logical conclusion — the abolition of the coercive State. Perhaps the most important of the English voluntarists was Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) whose publication, The Free Life (1890-1901) fulfilled the same function among the English libertarians as Liberty did among their American colleagues.

Auberon Herbert was the scion of two of the most aristocratic families of England. His father was the Duke of Carnarvon, his mother the sister of the Duke of Norfolk, his wife the daughter of an earl. As a young man he began his career in the army, and in the 1860’s he travelled to Denmark and the United States to observe local wars, and witnessed the collapse of France at Sedan in 1870 and the violent days of the Commune in Paris. Originally entering politics as a conservative, he was elected to Parliament in 1870 as a Liberal, where his first speech was, characteristically against the bill establishing the English system of state education. By 1872 Herbert caused a commotion in the House by proclaiming himself a republican, and he retired from office in 1874.

Herbert had studied at Oxford after his military service, and taught history and jurisprudence for four years at St. John’s College, Oxford. His intellectual curiosity caused him to become an ardent disciple and lifelong friend of Herbert Spencer and a correspondent of J. S. Mill. By the 1880’s Herbert had come to believe that the principle of voluntarism was the only just basis of society. His own intellectual conversion was probably recorded in a fictionalized Socratic dialogue entitled: A Politician In Trouble About His Soul. This was serialized in the liberal Fortnightly Review, (1883-1884) and it was subsequently published by Benjamin Tucker in Liberty (1884, #48-50) in a revised version as A Politician In Sight Of Haven. To organize the propagation of his views he announced the formation of the Party of Individual Liberty and issued five pamphlets called the Anti-Force Papers to present his opinions on various subjects. The fifth Anti-Force Paper was an appeal to the English people to liberate themselves from the bondage of State directed education. It is our great pleasure to share this incisive work with our readers in this issue of Libertarian Forum.

For more than a century, the public education question has been largely confined to the criticisms of various “reformers”. But the basic issue — whether the State has any right at all to be involved in schooling has scarcely been discussed. Only recently, with the publication of the stimulating polemic by Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, has the general public turned its attention to the question of the very legitimacy of the school as an institution. But at least as important is the question of disestablishment of the schools, the abolition of state involvement in education. To our knowledge, no organization, no libertarians, have undertaken the radical task of seeking the absolute separation of School and State. Yet sooner or later this immense work must be begun. The libertarians of the 18th century disestablished the Church from the State; the libertarians of the 19th century smashed the State enforced enslavement of man by man; will the libertarians of the 20th century liberate education from the tyranny and perversion of the State?

As a contribution to the dialogue that must precede action, we commend to you the reading of Auberon Herbert’s essay, Education By Bribes And Coercion.

(J. R. P.)

THE PARTY OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY

An appeal to the English people against State education; against the driving of children to school by compulsion; against the persecution of parents; against officialdom in all its forms; against over-pressure, hurry and worry; against waste and extravagance; against a compulsory tax and a compulsory rate; against infallible wisdom and authority enthroned either at Whitehall or Victoria Embankment, or in any other part of town or province; and a plea for true voluntary work, apart from State funds and State direction, undertaken by the people in their own groups, according to their own wants and their own ideas, under their own control and supported by their own efforts and their own contributions.

Education By Bribes And Coercion

It is time that the English people-especially that part of it that lives in London-shook themselves free from certain time-old superstitions and saw things as they really are. What the State touches, that it destroys. Since the State has laid hands on education, it is fast becoming a curse instead of a blessing to them; an instrument of torture instead of a means of happiness and strength.

State education, State religion and State conscription are three children of the same evil family. They are three forms of bondage which nations in their worship of force have inflicted on themselves.

Let us look at the nature of one of these State-made things. See what education has grown into under the hands of a department. Two or three gentlemen sit at Whitehall and courageously undertake to think for a whole nation. From their central office they make rules and regulations, and spin codes like a new kind of industrious worm, spinning tape instead of silk. Under this system the whole nation is pressed into whatever mould happens to suit the fancies of these gentlemen; and in consequence, protected by the sleepy approval of Parliament, they have ousted the parents from all real control over the education of their children, and have taken possession of it into their own hands.

But the official gentlemen, spinning tape, are not the only people to blame. The parents themselves are equally to blame. Listening to the bad advice of the politicians they have let themselves be ousted. The politicians have said “We will make you a system, with buildings, offices, training-colleges, and school-houses, with managers, lawyers, surveyors and contractors, with superintendents and visitors, with every kind of official, big and little. There shall be taxes, there shall be rates, to pay for what we give you; and if you do not like paying any school-pence for your children, you shall not pay them. You shall dip your hands into your richer neighbor’s pocket for what you want; and we will tell your richer neighbor that to ask you to pay your own school-pence is an “abominable” thing, a “cruel” thing, an “unjust” thing. There is only one slight service in return that we need ask at your hands. Accept the system, as it is planned and arranged for you. Question nothing; doubt nothing; trouble not your own minds. Trust wholly to a paternal department in the first place; and to those of us who can get elected by your votes in the second place. Forget that your children belong to you and not to us, and banish all vain desires to keep any part of their control and management in your own incompetent hands.” It is ever in this way that the birth-rights of the people one after the other are sold.

Some day you will see that there is no man so truly disinherited, as the man who once takes a State-bribe. Now let us examine what kind of a system it is which the State has established. It is a system—arrogant as if invented by Supreme Wisdom—that dreads competition and endeavors to exclude all rivals; that respects no difference in your wants and your ideas; that treads free choice under its feet; that despises individual effort and individual conception; that has no patience with your infirmities; has no belief that the home possesses anything more sacred than its own pedantic rules; and treats millions of people as mere sheep in a flock, or oxen in a herd. It is a system built on those two most evil foundation-stones, coercion and State money; coercion to make the people tread in the paths, which by Supreme Wisdom are thought right for them; State-money to try to salve the hurt and gild the degradation of the people. Politicians love to speak of State-money as not being charity. There are many forms of charity, both good and bad. Of them all-State-money is the worst, for whilst it takes from others, it is ashamed to confess the fact and say “thank-you” openly, like an honest and well-mannered citizen.

Now let us look at some of the reasons why this State-system deserves hatred instead of gratitude. It is bad, just as all universal systems applied by officials to a whole nation are bad. It is bad

1. Because you cannot place hundred of thousands of persons under the same system, without repressing the differences that exist and ought to exist among them. Men and women, are not shilling pieces, so like in themselves that one should pass for another. In destroying these differences, you destroy all hope of progress; for progress is the child of difference. Compare the deadly uniformity of one official system with the life and movement that exist where there are many systems. Under one system it is most difficult to try experiments, for they disturb the smooth working of the vast machinery, and are unpleasant to the official mind. Where many systems exist, experiments try themselves, proving their own fitness, or unfitness, and resulting in continuous progress.

2. Because any universal system which rests on force and therefore is no longer exposed to competition, becomes stupid, brutal, and extravagant, in its methods.

3. Because any system which is built upon the foundation of public money, must have severe tests as regards the spending of this public money, and these tests react upon the system itself, making it rigid, mechanical and oppressive.

4. Because a universal system of education leads to an official class of schoolmasters, struggling with the State for their own interests. There is no class of men, which suffer more from being made into an official class. They specially require a constant flow of fresh and varied thought into their ranks.

5. Because any universal system, on account of all the prizes of influence, reputation and power that are attached to it, must always cause the most desperate political struggle as to who shall obtain the direction of it. It results in the formation of parties organized against each other, and in all the strategy, personal ambition, and unscrupulous promising, which are the persistent features of party organizations.

6. Because every universal system forces intolerance upon us all, making each man struggle to suppress forcibly the beliefs of his neighbour in his necessary effort to achieve success for his own.

7. Because what we call the religious question can never be separated from the higher subjects of education. A universal system either leads to a false truce between Catholic, Protestant, Theist, Agnostic, Atheist,—where we want active fighting and unfettered effort,—or to the suppression of some sects by other sects. Both denominational teaching and secular teaching are, if supported by State-force, equally unjust. That education should do its real work, the teacher must be free, whether he is Catholic, Protestant, Theist, Agnostic or Atheist. Otherwise he is but a one-armed and one-legged man, utterly unable to exert his full influence—a mere creature of ignoble compromise.

8. Because all universal systems lead to bureaucratic rule. Given an universal system of education, the central department must obtain the management. How can you decide the real education question at the hustings? Fancy one party advocating some special way of teaching arithmetic; another advocating some method of needlework; a third some special system of grammar, and yet these and their like, are the real education questions. You can only decide at the hustings questions that belong to the mere outside;—that are the husks of education. May schools give religious education? Shall it be gratuitous? Shall it be compulsory? Therefore if you build up a State system, you practically forbid the people to trouble their heads about the real education questions. The sure result is to produce an unthinking nation on the subject of one of its greatest interests. Why should any man at the present day think about education? He is powerless to give effect to any desire or conviction of his own. How can he move the immense machinery that he sees in front of him? Let him be content. It has become a departmental affair, wholly in the hands of the big clerks, and the little clerks; with some petty matters left for the elected members to wrangle over.

9. Because a state-system teaches the people the bad lesson of taking compulsorily from their richer neighbours purse for their own purposes. Let us all learn to help each other freely and by our own consent; But let no man,—rich or poor,—be ever made the mere instrument of another. Such a system degrades all concerned. It is not in this state-driven fashion that nations become inspired with life and energy and rise to the high levels of their existence. The soul of an administered nation is a poor dumb thing that just knows that it suffers but has hardly any other consciousness. See how our people suffer under the present oppressive system, and yet scarcely know in what the hurt consists. They have dim perceptions of pain and unrest, but they are in no real way responsible for the system, and therefore have no clear understanding of its workings. They do not see how their children are kept far too many hours in the school; how insufficient are the intervals given in one attendance that lasts three hours; how the children are hurried and driven through the standards; how by the system of money payments the master is obliged to overpress both himself and his pupils; how in consequence the education given is of a low mechanical order, feebly stirring the intelligence; how at the very beginning of life both body and mind are jaded; and how little those who direct the great education-machine are able or willing out of their office-windows to see the evils that exist. Nor do those who in their own persons are the most deeply interested, but whom by our system we have prevented from thinking and acting for themselves, perceive the cruelty and folly of setting up a system of official compulsion. In London, week after week, a pitiless persecution goes on. Like all official systems, the system is and must be worked with great harshness. It is easy to set ten thousand wheels to grind flesh and blood; it is not easy to grind without causing suffering. In all weather and under many difficulties parents lose a day’s work to attend the court to which they are summoned; homes are broken up; furniture sold; men thrown into prison; families dispersed, in some cases taking to a vagabond life in order to avoid the School-board officer. Occasionally some very arbitrary act finds its way into the public press, just for the moment startling those who happen to see, and who then forget it; as, to take any one of many instances, the case of a man, who was summoned notwithstanding the doctor’s certificate; which he had sent to the School board officer, and which the officer refused to return to him; occasionally some magistrate wisely stands between the pedantic zeal of the school-board officer and the wretched parent whom he is hunting down; but nothing checks the great machine, which like all other machines, goes relentlessly on, week by week, and month by month, without pause or rest, until the prosecutions are to be counted by tens of thousands, and the life of the poor is made considerably bitterer and harder than it was in the days when we had fewer politicians, philanthropists, educational pedants, and officials busy at their work of trying to spread education by fine and imprisonment. Truly we all are at this very hour faithful descendants of those zealous children of the Church who flogged and imprisoned and put on the rack their fellowmen in order to spread her doctrines and extend her empire.

And for what reason is this persecution? To get the children to school? As if persecution were the only instrument placed in our hands for carrying out a good work! By all means get them to school, but get them there by kindness, sympathy, persuasion, by the example of others, by the help which the friendly kindly-minded people are ever ready to give, where it is wanted, and where you leave them free to bring their help. Is not this one of the great works which fellow-men and fellow-women can do for each other, and are ready to do for each other, if you do not drive them away from such work by your official machinery. What sight would be nobler than to see one half of the nation persuading the other half to seek the advantages of education for their children; what sight viler than to see one half coercing the other half? And how, and from where, let me ask, did we get this precious right to persecute each other; to play the petty tyrant, the one over the other? We may choose to say in our wisdom that it is better for every child in the nation to be in one of these new fine buildings which we have put up with money collected by the tax gatherer’s machinery, than to help its mother, struggling with want, in her work, but who gave us authority to force this idea of ours, — be it a true or false idea, — upon others by the brotherly methods of fine and imprisonment? I deny this right of persecution; and I appeal to all those in the English nation, who have not yet fallen down before the State machine and worshipped it, to deny it and resist it. The cruelty of the method, the suffering it causes, the anger and bitterness that it is calling out, all point to the fact that the official pedants here, as always, are wrong, and that the right we claim to persecute others for the sake of your own ideas is a crime and a folly of which one day we shall be as much ashamed, as we now are of the whip, and the knife, and the branding-iron in which our equally enlightened forefathers so devoutly believed.

What is the true thing to be done? I answer “Break up this costly, this misdirected, this oppressive system. Let the parents resume their own control and management of their own children and of their education; understanding that they can only recover their lost rights by resolutely rejecting all the bribes that the State offers them. Rates, and taxes, gifts and grants from the State, by whatever name they are called, are always the instruments by which the management and control of the people’s interests pass into official hands. Let the parents open their eyes, and see that they need no rate, that they need no tax. If indeed their hearts desire fine buildings, State certificated teachers, armies of official inspectors, superintendents and visitors and every kind of degree of child-hunter, if they want infallible gentlemen sitting in Whitehall and infallible ladies and gentlemen sitting at the Victoria Embankment Theatre of all the Vanities, then they must be content to take gifts from Government, to depend upon taxes and rates, and to look on, whilst others—the political busy-bodies of the nation—jostle them aside and officiously manage the education of their children. But if they desire none of these things, if they are sick of this empty vain-glorious shew, and this pretentious and insolent officialism; if they are content to carry out in their own fashion, and according to their own wants and ideas, a far simpler but truer system, then let them combine in their own groups, and boldly undertake the work which never should have been taken out of their hands. They will soon find that neither rate nor tax are necessary. The combining faculties of the English people are great, and if left to themselves, neither harassed nor persecuted by officials, not made stupid by systems and codes, nor enervated by State-payments, there are few, if any, of the great wants of life that they could not fulfill with their own hands and brains; and in doing it make a great stride forward in civilization. It cannot too often be repeated that progress in civilization means the awakening of new desires, new thoughts, and feelings—the effort to give effect to these new feelings—the life, the movement, everywhere in society, as some for the first time struggle to help themselves, and some to help others, the new faculties of voluntary association, the new taking of each other’s hands, the unloosening in every direction of the great moral forces, that change not merely the external circumstances, but the inner beings of the man. Progress in civilization does not mean a people partly driven to fulfill a great duty like education by fine and imprisonment, partly bribed to do so by money taken from the pockets of the richer classes. This mingled bribery and coercion are merely one of the rank survivals of old and rotten forms of Government; they can find no place in that pure, simple, self-reliant democracy that we have yet, as our noble though difficult task, to found in this and in every other country.

I appeal then to the workmen of London and of every other part of the country, to take a higher view of this question and they have ever yet taken. Be masters of your own children, and don’t hand them over to any State machinery. Sanction no cruel persecution of the weaker and more ignorant. Leave all the good people of every church, sect, and opinion, to humanise and improve these fragments of society, instead of making their lives more wretched and their feelings more bitter by hunting them with your paid official bloodhounds. Look neither to tax nor rate; don’t accustom yourselves to depend upon the richer classes for what you want. If you do, then you are for ever at the mercy of the bribing politician. Money is not your first necessity, not even your second. If you want money, you have the right to see that the old revenues left to the use of the poor should be turned from their present uses and applied to education by which you can profit. Take them, if you think good. They are your right, which compulsory taxing of the richer classes to serve your own purpose is not. But take care that these revenues, when acquired, do not lead you astray from the great purpose and work in front of you. Your work is not to quarrel amongst yourselves over any public funds,—it would be better to cast them into the deeps of the sea—it is not to build up any one great system that shall pass out of your control; it is not to accept official views and to sacrifice your own individuality to these; but it is to understand your own power of combination, to unite in your group according to the views and convictions that are dearest to you, to put together bravely your slender resources, and to organize your own systems of education for your children, as your fathers and forefathers organized their religion. As you do this, you will gain in powers of self-help, of self-direction, of co-operation with your fellows, of knowledge of your own wants, of glorious power to fulfill them. Help, almost too much help, will come to you from outside sources, for the English were always a generous nation to help each other, until we began to weaken that generosity by our official systems and our ever increasing burdens of taxation. Of course the politician—who having to live by his trade, must ever magnify it—will tell you a nation can only be educated by means of the State and its machinery; will assure you that such a work of self-help should not be asked for at your hands. Leave him to whine as he will, he has his own trade to look after. Let him magnify it for the present to his heart’s content, preaching to you the sorry doctrine of his own importance, and your salvation by rates and taxes. The day will come when you will discover that you can do better without him than with him, that he has been only a fetter on your hands and a log to your feet in your struggle to better things, and then, like others worthier than himself, he will begin to look for a new and more useful occupation for his restless energies and ambitions. Meanwhile have confidence in yourselves. Have confidence in your own powers of association. Have confidence in the strength that will come to you when you once fairly plunge into the work. Have confidence in moral force as against all coercion, in free voluntary work as against all State-directed systems.

To sum up. Organise yourselves for liberty.

Destroy compulsion in every form and under every disguise.

Break up all connection between local education and the Whitehall Centre.

Change both tax and rate into voluntary payments. Give to no man the power of carrying out his own ideas at the expense of his neighbour. With voluntary tax and voluntary rate those who like best a central and uniform system can still help to maintain it; whilst those who believe in other systems, that express different convictions and different aspirations, can out of their means and their labour, allow experiments, that are yet untried, to struggle for existence.

For every man freedom of choice and freedom of action.

For none the degradation of using his neighbour, or being himself used, against his convictions.

Thinking About Revolution: Two Books Of Importance

In the August 1975 issue of the newsletter of the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL, Box 1147, Warminster, Pa. 18974), editor Don Ernsberger reviewed the means by which libertarians have been attempting to build “a free society”. Quickly passing over education, politics, tax resistance and escapism, he raised the interesting question of “the approach least often seriously studied, considered or undertaken-revolutionary violence”. While recognizing that the mere hint of revolutionary violence as a viable tactic would probably attract every psychopath in the vicinity to the movement, not to mention the paid provocateurs of the State, Ernsberger still raises a legitimate question: what tactics would be desirable or necessary if two possible situations came into existence – an outbreak of another Vietnam style intervention by the United States in Korea of the Middle East, or the outbreak within the country of urban guerrilla warfare, perhaps in the wake of economic collapse, or even prolonged unemployment? A third possibility, not raised but just as probable, would be the establishment of a presidential dictatorship through a suspension of civil liberties or massive evasion of the law as in the Nixon years, and earlier. Ernsberger concluded with the suggestion that in each situation outlined, “libertarian revolutionary action might be both rational, moral and practical”, and that more attention should be paid to this problem in libertarian periodicals and conferences.

Ernsberger is certainly correct in urging that libertarians give greater attention to the study of revolutionary theory, strategy and tactics. No tyrant ever has voluntarily restored freedom to his victims, and we are not likely to preserve those liberties we have without a conscious strategy of resistance to creeping or leaping statism. The events of the past decade amply demonstrate the tenuous character of constitutional liberty in American society in an age of rampant militarism, imperialism and corporate state capitalism.

Where does one start in planning a successful revolution or resistance to aggressive statism? Not, I think, by assessing one’s chances for dynamiting the local Society Security office or voting machine storage warehouse, which Ernsberger rather thoughtlessly implies. Certainly by now, after our experiences in Vietnam, we ought to understand the fundamental necessity of basing any revolutionary action on the objective of “winning the hearts and minds of people”. This was the central principle in the Chinese and Indo-Chinese revolutions, as it was in the American revolution two centuries ago. The failure of the Bolsheviks to adhere to this principle opened the way for the triumph of Stalinism and the tawdry tyranny of contemporary Soviet society. Any libertarian revolutionary actions must always be evaluated in the light of this same principle. Hopefully libertarians would understand the difference in affect in destroying Selective Service records and those of the millions of sick or elderly citizens dependent on the Social Security Administration for their survival. A careful analysis of the true enemy’s identity is crucial for any successful revolutionary movement.

Libertarians interested in thinking about the problem of planning successful revolution might begin by reading the newly published edition of a classic libertarian treatise, Etienne de la Boetie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire (published under the title The Politics of Obedience with an introduction by Murray N. Rothbard, Free Life Editions Inc., 41 Union Square, New York, N.Y. 10003. $2.95). Written in the sixteenth century by a perceptive French law student, it goes directly to the heart of the puzzling fact that men submit so passively to the tyranny of other men’s rule. La Boetie brilliantly analyzes the psychological foundations of the State and finds that tyrants rule because men consent to live in servitude. In effect, governments exist by the consent of the governed. If that seems platitudinous, it is not in La Boetie’s capable hand; rather he uses this insight to examine the fact and how it works; he then draws certain conclusions of radical significance. Liberation begins in the mind and will of the subject; self-liberation comes through the withdrawal of the subject’s consent to be ruled; the armaments of the tyrant are meaningless once his authority had dissolved in the hearts and minds of the people.

The richness of La Boetie’s historical analysis of the nature of tyranny and the characteristics of human behavior which nourish and sustain it will delight and impress the reader. Prof. Rothbard’s introduction, almost as long as the text itself, offers new light on La Boetie’s career and the significance of his work, and also explains the curious fact that the essay has been ignored or misinterpreted for centuries by almost everyone except anarchists.

A second work that ought to stimulate further libertarian study and discussion of revolutionary theory and tactics is by Paulo Freire, a distinguished Brazilian educator, most famous for his planning of a massive effort to eradicate illiteracy among the oppressed peasantry of northeastern Brazil, a project terminated by the military junta that ended democratic government in that country in 1964. Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (The Seabury Press, 815 Second Avenue, New York 10017) begins with a general analysis of the nature of tyranny, and, with less elegance of style than the French humanist La Boetie, reaches the same conclusion: that servitude exists in the minds of the oppressed and that liberation is, first and foremost, a process of self-realization of the full dimension of one’s dignity as a human being, and then the withdrawal of one’s consent to another’s claim of authority. But while La Boetie attributes the initial submission of the oppressed to another’s tyranny to fear of the tyrant, and his subsequent servility to the domination over the mind of habit, Freire presents a much more sophisticated psychological analysis. According to Freire, there are two classes in a non-libertarian society: the oppressors and the oppressed. (It should be noted that Freire rejects the Marxian class analysis in favor of one similar to Oppenheimer’s notion of the rulers and the ruled). Both classes exist in a state of dehumanization; both suffer from a distortion of man’s essential human vocation of becoming more fully human. By this he seems to mean man perfecting his nature, perhaps reflecting a notion of man as possessing a definitive nature to which he aspires to conform as in natural law theory, or even a notion of man’s nature as evolutionary in character, as in the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin. Freire believes that dehumanization is the result of an unjust social order that engenders dehumanizing violence in the oppressor which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed. The historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressed will not gain their liberation by chance, or by the benevolence of their oppressors; it will come only through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to struggle for it. As Freire so eloquently puts it:

“Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man: nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

What is it that keeps the oppressed from seeking freedom? La Boetie believed it to be fear of the tyrant and habit; Freire believes it to be fear of freedom itself. Even when the oppressed become conscious that without freedom they cannot live an authentic human life, they fear living outside a prescriptive order imposed by the oppressors. (This explains the common situation in which the rationality and morality of the anarchist position is granted, but anarchism itself is rejected as impractical). As Freire says:

“The oppressed are severely hindered in their effort to liberate themselves by several objective conditions within their psychological persona: they have a profound sense of inferiority vis-à-vis their oppressors which tends to make them emotionally dependent upon them; this in turn makes the oppressed prone to self destructive behavior, fatalism, hatred of self and their fellow oppressed, and even (generates) an admiration for the oppressors as superior creatures, yet hating them for what they are.”

Freire sees a kind of psychological dualism deeply rooted in the minds of the oppressed, so deeply that even when they gather enough courage to overthrow a concrete ruling regime, they tend to adopt the same consciousness as the deposed oppressors; hence, the rarity in history of a genuine sustained libertarian revolution, unmarred by a relapse into a new phase of statism.

How then can this depressing cycle of oppression be broken and a libertarian society not only be won but sustained? Freire believes that:

“The conflict (in the oppressed) lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education should take into account.”

Thus to Freire, liberation comes about through education — and the main burden of his argument in this book is to present his ideas on an effective pedagogy for the oppressed, as the title indicates. Merely perceiving the inner conflict in the consciousness of the oppressed and the reality of the objective condition in which they exist is not enough to transform them, to humanize them, to liberate them. The oppressed must act. Perception and action are distinct aspects of what Freire calls conscientization (conscientizacao in Portuguese)-learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements with the historic reality. Significantly, Freire does not contemplate the use of violent action; violence is the method of the oppressor, not the oppressed, and task of the oppressed is not only to liberate themselves, but also to liberate their oppressors, i.e. to help them to become more human. Violence would negate this goal and also make the oppressed oppressors.

How can the oppressed break out of the psychologically anti-human tendency to use violence as a means of liberation? Freire believes that the way to do so is through critical and liberating dialogue. The correct method for a libertarian leadership to create a revolution is not, I repeat, not “to employ libertarian propaganda, nor seek to implant in the oppressed an idea of freedom, thus thinking to win their trust.” The correct method is dialogue in which the oppressed are not treated as objects, but rather engage in co-intentional education in which:

“teachers and students (leaders and people) co-intent on understanding reality through reflection and action are both subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming together to know it critically, but also in recreating that reality in the light of their new critical knowledge. Thus the oppressed are involved in their own struggle for liberation not as pseudo-participants, but as fully committed and creative analysts and actors”.

Freire devotes about a quarter of his text to the teacher-student or leader-people relationship, condemning the essentially narrative character of most teaching or propaganda. The pedagogy of the oppressor-oppressed social is called the “banking concept of education” by Freire. It is one in which knowledge is bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable on those they consider ignorant. The ignorant are supposed to receive the “pearls of wisdom” and deposit them in the storehouse of their minds. The oppressor utilizes this system of education the more easily to shape the consciousness of the oppressed into accepting their role as subjects of the oppressor’s authority and objects of his paternal manipulation. Against this model Freire proposes the problem-posing or dialogic model in which through dialogue, acts of reflection and cognition jointly experienced, both teacher and student, or leader and people, now critical co-investigators of objective reality — come to see the world and their own role in it, not as static reality, but as reality in process, in transformation. “Problem-posing education affirms men as beings in the process of becoming-as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.” It is essentially individualistic and human in method and result, and revolutionary in a libertarian sense.

In another chapter Freire takes up the peculiar qualities required of the revolutionary teacher or leader. A basic a priori requirement for dialogic relations is absolute faith in the capability of the oppressed to liberate themselves through dialogue. “Trust the People,” as Chairman Mao has put it. The second fundamental requirement is love of the human race, or commitment to other men and their liberation. A third is hope, confidence in ultimate success. Optimism in the long-term achievement of humanization is necessary to sustain both the leader and the people in their continuing dialogue. Finally the dialogue cannot exist without humility infusing both parties.

Freire is extremely critical of those revolutionary leaders who, in their desire to obtain support of the people for revolutionary action, adopt the “banking concept of education” of planning the program content of the revolution from the top down. “They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not “to win the people over” to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressors. Moreover, such an approach constitutes a “cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” Thus “winning the hearts and minds of the people” is to be understood in the sense that “the prospective leader must identify himself with the people’s aspirations, not compel them to adhere to his own.” As Mao has put it, “we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly.” “The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people.”

I have just tapped the surface in this review of the incredible riches of this profound work. Fully half of the book deals with the methodology of dialogues in greater detail. But I wish to stress that this book is not useful just to those who by profession are teachers or propagandists of some kind: it is essential reading for anyone seriously committed to libertarianism as a philosophic approach to shaping social or personal reality. It is a handbook for true revolutionaries, rather than putschists. It is, along with that of La Boetie, required reading for anyone interested in the process by which liberty can be won and sustained. It ought to be subjected to the same dialogic method of study and critical analysis that it advocates. Hopefully, it will inspire some of the kinds of interest in libertarian revolutionary theory and tactics which Don Ernsberger called for us to develop.

(J. R. P.)

“In all ages, whatever the form and name of government-be it monarchy, public or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade: Roman history, republican or imperial, is the history of a governing class. . . Liberty and the laws are high sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interests”.

Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939.

The First Two Years Of W. W. II

BY J. P. McCarthy*

A review of John Lukacs’ The Last European War (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976), $15.00

On very few episodes in human history have moral judgements seemed so easy to be rendered as the Second World War. This was particularly so in the United States where, once the nation became a participant in the war, there existed universal support for the cause. The absolute or unconditional defeat of the enemy further enhanced the clear-cut crusade image. Consequently, a whole generation of Americans came to look upon the government that led the crusade as the paragon of virtues and decency and applauded any extension of that government’s mandate domestically or externally as further steps towards the attainment of universal righteousness. Because of this mental consequence of the Second World War any historical re-examination which can re-create the actual atmosphere and attitudes of the war period and not simply repeat the post-war self congratulations is to be applauded. Such revisionist history helps one to realize that there necessarily were great varieties of motives, moralities, and actions on all sides of so massive a human drama as the Second World War.

As valid and important as is revisionist history, one has to acknowledge that it is usually inspired by and prompted to serve an ideological cause. That is, it is an attempt to understand the past in order to prove a contemporary position. However, John Lukacs’ The Last European War, which covers the Second World War from its inception to the American entry, is a form of post-revisionist revisionism. He was not a participant in any of the controversies of the war period, nor is he an antagonist in: any contemporary ideological controversy. Consequently, his revisionism is not special pleading. At the same time his work remains revisionist in that he challenges both orthodox versions as well as some of the earlier revisionist views. His thorough scholarship and acquaintance with the personalities and events of the period would by itself make this a worthwhile book. His ability to combine that knowledge with remarkable insights that grant a new understanding of the events make his work the outstanding history of the early period of the war.

Very few ideological camps feel at home with Lukacs ever since his pioneering, revisionist History of the Cold War that he wrote in the early 1960’s. He personally is a conservative, but a conservative of a European and neo-liberal character. That is, he hails the bourgeois age and its domesticities-such as regard for family, security of possessions, and industriousness-and dreads mass politics, particularly when it calls for international crusades. The kind of American political figures with whom he would probably feel most at home are William Fulbright and Eugene McCarthy (at least in the Spring of 1968).

There are three prevailing schools of thought in America on the Second World War (that is, if one does not take into account that small group who actually hold that the right side lost the war). First, there is the orthodox establishment view of it as a struggle by Liberal Democracy-personified by F.D.R.-to destroy racist and reactionary Fascism and enable the world to move ahead towards international solidarity and the welfare State. Second, there is the right-wing revisionist view which holds that the United States ought have left the totalitarian powers Germany–and the Soviet Union–to slug it out and then, upon their mutual exhaustion, impose peace. Third, is left-wing revisionism which holds that the cynical capitalist powers, whose appeasement of Hitler as an anti-Communist ally had been short-changed by the shrewd Stalin-Hitler pact, later exploited the Soviet people as the main cannon fodder in the defeat of Hitlerism and then sought to monopolize for western capitalism all of the territory liberated from the Nazis.

An aspect of the orthodox view is a depreciation of Hitler’s talents and genius and the implication that he was his own worst enemy by taking on too much, especially in his decision to invade Russia in June 1941. Lukacs insists that Operation Barbarossa made a lot of sense from a military and diplomatic point of view. Hitler’s original pact with the Soviet Union had been an attempt to prompt the British to avoid fighting him over Poland. When that failed and when the possibility of invading Britain, which he never wanted to do, became increasingly remote, Hitler decided that the only way to bring the British to acquiesce in his claim for German ascendancy on the continent was to defeat the only other major independent power, Russia. Then the British and their still officially non-belligerent supporters, the Americans, would, in accord with realpolitik, acquiesce in the new German hegemony over the European continent.

There was a very great chance that he could have defeated the Russians. Indeed, the Russian regime was in such a state of disrepair, Lukacs suggests, that had Hitler let Stalin know in September of 1941 that he could be let off with the same terms as the French were in June of 1940 the Red dictator might have acquiesced. As it was, the population of Moscow throughout October were anticipating with much curiosity and fascination their imminent conquest by the Germans. The Russian Army was collapsing all around. Russian resistance and discipline were only restored when climatic elements halted the German march. At that point, Lukacs indicated, Hitler, in contrast to the usual image of him believing in the possibility of a German victory almost until 1945, became aware that the war could not be won and that the German strategy should be to fight on, as they were well able to, until their enemies would fall out among themselves and then a negotiated peace could be arrived at.

The other alleged over-extension of Hitler was his support for the Japanese in their war on the United States. Lukacs argues that Hitler did not declare war on the United States out of a blind and imprudent sense of loyalty to his Japanese ally (who, for their part, had shrewdly signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union). Rather, Hitler had all along urged the Japanese to war on the Americans with the hope that it would keep the Americans hamstrung from any European operations. Admittedly he should have urged the Japanese to expand northward towards Russia. He also miscalculated American strategy. However, some Americans, such as Douglas MacArthur, wanted to do just what Hitler hoped they would, that is, give first priority to fighting Japan.

One of the most intriguing and thoughtful sections of Lukacs’ book is his analysis of the “balance of power” implications of the origins, duration, and conclusion of the Second World War. Hitler, he asserts, although a fanatic ideologist, wanted a traditional foreign policy goal, that is, a new balance of power with German dominance of the continent (admittedly “a kind of near-absolute domination, and not some kind of Bismarckian preponderance”) to which he believed the British and ultimately the Americans would acquiesce. The master realpolitician, Stalin, most anxious for Hitler’s friendship, would accept that new balance of power including German dominance of Europe in return for the safety of the Russian state. Stalin hoped that Hitler’s dominance of Europe would allow Russian neutrality. If Russia had to be drawn into war he preferred an alliance with Hitler than with Britain. It was the traditionally realpolitical British and their supporters, the Americans, who rejected a modus vivendi solution. They were determined to get rid of Hitler rather then accept a new balance of power because “they felt that the very nature of Hitler’s regime stood in the way of any kind of a reasonable balance of power.” Convinced that the Anglo-American alliance with the Russians from mid-1941 on would have to eventually break apart, Hitler failed to understand that Britain and the United States would prefer Russian domination over half of Europe than German domination of all or most of it.

Lukacs is particularly contemptuous of the Left which he holds had become eclipsed as a political force in the early 1930’s as the major mass movements that “came out of the Depression were Fascist or Nationalist Socialist, rather than Communist.” The failure of the Left was in accord with the persistent inaccuracy of Marx’s political prophecies. The twentieth century has seen more of the dissolution of class differences than class warfare, more intensification of national consciousness than its lessening, and a “Marxist” revolution in Russia that was, unlike the French Revolution of 1789, more a by-product of another war and a localized event than the vanguard of the future. During the thirties in the advanced and industrialized West, the logical focus for the emerging classless society, the Marxist and Leftist leadership, seemed increasingly old and/or beset by desertions to the Right (Laval, MacDonald, Mussolini), while its mass following, especially in Central Europe, were most susceptible to the appeals of Nazism. As for the one established Marxist regime, the Soviet Union, not only was it at that stage an abysmal failure and a tyranny, but its leader, Stalin, was himself really more of a Nationalist Socialist than a Marxist, being contemptuous of the Western Leftists but having “a healthy respect for the men and forces of the Right.”

The European political struggles and the later military clashes of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s should, Lukacs acutely argues, be seen as a struggle between two Rights rather than Left and Right because the opponents of Hitler appealed to the sames impulses-duty, loyalty, tradition, patriotism-that Hitler and the collaborationist Right did. The most unyielding, although not always successful, enemies of domestic Nationalist Socialist movements or collaborationist tendencies were the conservative dictators, regents, and monarchs of Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Similarly, clerical and aristocratic forces were the strongest counterpoles to collaboration in Austria, Italy, and Spain. The Poles fought Hitler to the end – and beyond – unlike the democratic Czechs who collapsed before his threats.

Since the book deals with the period in which the Third Reich seemed in fact the wave of the future, Lukacs deals with the generally ignored (or deliberately forgotten) tendency of most people – particularly among the conquered – to accept the apparently inevitable. Part of the reason was the viability of National Socialism (as opposed to the exclusive German form, Nazism). National Socialism, that is the “conjunction of nationalism with socialism . . . may have been the principal political configuration of a century,” just as during the Nineteenth Century, “the principal political ideas in the Western world were a mixture of conservatism and liberalism.” What better label than National Socialist, Lukacs asks, could be applied to such different men as Castro, Mao, Peron, Nasser, Tito, and in a broader sense–“many of the leaders of the democracies of the second half of the twentieth century.”

Sympathy for or acceptance of Hitler by non-Germans sprang, Lukacs notes, from a variety of causes ranging from Nationalist Socialist ideological solidarity (naturally unreciprocated by Hitler who preferred opportunist thugs to fanatics as supporters in satellite countries) to Germanophilia. Another important facet of Hitler’s appeal was his anticommunism, a pre-occupation of certain conservatives and many Catholic churchmen which allowed them to excuse Hitler’s gross violations of their standards. Continental Anglophobia was another important factor. The Anglophobia of the Germans was a kind of inferiority complex, according to Lukacs. But he also sees it as a blatant assertion of the Germanic idealistic rejection of the positivism of the nineteenth century. Along the same lines Vichy apologists identified France’s democratic-liberal decadence with the Anglo-French alliance.

Lukacs devotes a whole chapter to the relations between nations, that is, the popular attitudes of nationalities towards each other – one of the many things of which the New York man in the street has been conscious long before most academicians. These attitudes manifested themselves in such things as mass spectator sports, and Hitler was particularly attuned to registering and evoking these impulses. Naturally the attitudes of nationalities towards each other often changed because of the war. Lukacs reasserts what had always been a pet peeve of Hilaire Belloc – that the English had suffered from a Germanophilia that was filled with racist implications, dating from Victorian times, and manifest in the ideas of Carlyle and the policies of Joseph and Neville Chamberlain. The war ended this, but the war also enabled the intellectual left and the press to whip up in the British an irrational Russophilia (a parallel to this was the mood in Hollywood during the war years).

Lukacs is most original in his discussion of the central criminality of Nazism-its genocidal anti-Semitism. He asserts that the universal liberal dogma “that Nazism was much more criminal than Communism, will stand only because of the Jewish issue.” If Hitler and company had not murdered the Jews a kind of pro-German apologia could easily have developed and have pointed out that the German people were much better off under Hitler than the Russians were under the Communists, that many of the Eastern Europeans suffered less under German occupation than they did under the Russians, and that in the early stages of the war there was an extraordinary degree of personal and political freedom within the Third Reich (For instance, full wartime mobilization was not proclaimed in Germany until 1942-three years after it had been in England!).

Hitler’s principal conviction throughout his life was his Judeophobia, that is, “To solve the Jewish problem.” His biological racism, to which he was inconsistent in view of his courting alliances with the Arabs and the Japanese, was secondary to his rigid and consistent Judeophobia. But while his Judeophobia was always central to him, the severity of his “solution” evolved in intensity. His earlier preference was expulsion rather than extermination of the Jews of Europe – a policy having many localized precedents in European history and with which many political leaders in Eastern and Southern Europe were agreeable. Indeed, if Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed in late 1941 to suspend the war and provide ships to transport the Jews out of Europe, Hitler, Lukacs insists, would have immediately agreed.

A central date suggesting a probable change in intensity of his anti-Semitic policy was January 30, 1939. In a speech responding to the increasing American encouragement of anti-Hitler figures and forces in Europe, Hitler, convinced of extraordinary Jewish influence on President Roosevelt, warned international Jewry that should they succeed in provoking a world war in opposition to German policy–that is, secure American intervention–the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.” Accordingly, the policy towards the Jews in territories under Hitler’s control up to 1939 was one of encouraging and/or forcing emigration. Then, from 1939 to January 1942, emigration remained the official policy, although the Jews in Poland were being concentrated into ghettoes and a half million Jews were being murdered by the Germans elsewhere in Eastern Europe, frequently with the help of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Rumanians (whose National Socialist Iron Guard movement possibly exceeded the SS in the intensity of their anti-Semitic barbarity). In January of 1942, coinciding with the total mobilization of the Reich, annihilation became the official and definite Third Reich policy towards the Jews. With the American entry into the war–a development which heartened millions of Jews throughout the world-Hitler’s solution of ridding Europe of Jews by sending them to America had become academic. Consequently, the logic of his perverse phobia required the dire “final solution”-a decision which once taken no longer attracted his interest or supervision.

The weakness of the book is paradoxically its wealth of information and insights. In other words, it is too much to digest. Each page could develop a theme for a monograph and, as a result, there tends to be an awkward type of organization. Footnotes, usually of paragraph length, which are at the bottom of pages rather than at the end of chapters or the book, distract the reader but in an intriguing way.

An interesting theme of the book which could lend itself to enormous study is the often ambiguous and frequently collaborationist attitude of religion with the horrors of the Third Reich. At the same time, Lukacs notes, religion was a major stimulant animating resistance movements and provided meaning for thoughtful people shocked by “not only the disasters of the war but also the disasters of the mass mind.” Out of the war would come a generation of Europeans “freeing their minds from allegiance to the state without, at the same time, becoming anti-religious.”

On the subject of religion and the Third Reich, Lukacs is critical of “saintly and sincere” Pius XII. Acknowledging that the Pontiff had no illusions about Hitler, Lukacs feels he allowed both his fear that a German defeat would be followed by a Communist victory all over Europe and his excessive caution in anticipating what Hitler might do to the German Catholics to impede his exercising true spiritual leadership by outrightly condemning Hitlerism. Another note, intriguing to Roman Catholics in particular, that Lukacs makes is that Cardinals Ottaviani and Tisserant were the most determined Vatican opponents of the Third Reich In addition Lukacs gives an embarrassing quotation, dated August 2, 1940, from the futurist Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin: “The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. . .Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world.”

Lukacs steps on other toes as well. He lumps Neville Chamberlain, Petain, and Robert A. Taft together as being so paralyzed by a fear of the Communist threat, despite its non-existence in their own nations, that they lacked realistic judgement in international affairs. On the other hand, he notes Roosevelt’s embarrassed inability to reply to the parallel Hitler drew in 1940 between the Third Reich’s European policy and the Monroe Doctrine. Lukacs also points out the anxiety shared by a few sensitive Europeans, like Bemanos and De Gaulle, as early as 1941 about a future American hegemony, particularly if it was propelled by the universalist ideology represented by the Roosevelts and proclaimed by the William Allen Whites and the Harold Ickes.

A review of The Last European War can be summed up only with the colorful conclusion of so many columns of a late New York ethnic journalist: FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

*Dr. McCarthy teaches modern European history at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York City.

“Rome’s unquestionable greatness and her amazing achievements in the first one or two centuries of the Christian era must not make us overlook the fact that the imperial tradition is the most questionable part of our Greco-Roman heritage, different from its highest, truly humanistic ideals, and it is at the same time the part which is most difficult to reconcile with our Christian heritage”.

Oscar Halecki, The Millennium of Europe, Notre Dame 1963.

“Brigands of the world, they (the Romans) have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. The wealth of an enemy excites their cupidity, his poverty their lust for power. East and West have failed to glut their maw. They are unique in being as violently tempted to attack the poor as the wealthy. Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desert and call it peace”.

Tacitus, Agricola.

AT LAST!

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Block Defends . . . The Pimp, The Litterer, The Slumlord, The Blackmailer, The Dishonest Cop . . . and MANY OTHERS! With a Foreword by Murray N. Rothbard and a Commentary by F.A. Hayek.

Hayek likens the BLOCK BOOK to the “shock therapy” wrought on him 50 years ago, by Ludwig von Mises. Dr. Thomas Szasz calls this book “witty and illuminating!” Harry Browne says it’s “The most entertaining and one of the most instructive economics books I’ve read.” Roger MacBride calls it “magnificent, a trail-blazer.”

Can YOU Afford To Miss It?

Priced at $9.95, from Fleet Press Corp.

160 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10010

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 10

OCTOBER, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4S17

To The Elections

The Reagan Defeat

By now, everyone knows, of course, that it will be Ford vs. Carter in November. It is instructive, however, to ponder the reasons for the narrow Reagan defeat, because it highlights the snares and pitfalls of “pragmatism” in politics. The essence of the Ford vs. Reagan struggle was that Reagan had the hearts of the delegates and Ford their pocketbooks: in short, that the hearts of most of the delegates lusted for hard-rock conservative principle which they thought to be embodied in Reagan; whereas the President inevitably wielded the lures and powers of patronage wielded by his office—a road here, a contract or a job there.

Reagan, in fact, was leading a veritable revolution—a bold attempt by the majority of party militants to overthrow a centrist sitting President, and to replace him by a supposed hard-core conservative. Yet, the thrust and meaning of that revolution was repeatedly blunted by Reagan, Sears, and their advisers, who wished to preserve the fiction that all Republicans were and are buddies together. To do so, Reagan-Sears engaged in a series of evasions and sellouts of conservative principle on behalf of seemingly “pragmatic” considerations. There is no more ignoble sight than men of supposed principle who sell their souls for victory . . . and then lose! So that neither their souls nor their objectives are obtained. It is not only that revolutions are never won by the faint of heart; it is also that since Reagan’s sole asset was his conservative ideology, his repeated sellouts weakened and confused enough of his supporters in the tight contest so as to ensure his defeat. Specifically, there was: (a) the decision not to wage any contest in the Northeastern states that were the heart of the Ford support—so as not to disturb the party: (b) the monumental blunder of picking Schweiker as the vice-presidential nominee; and (c) the decision to make the major fight at the convention, not on emotional conservative issues (e.g. abortion, detente, the Panama Canal), but on the silly 16c rule — a technicality rather than an issue — which even most Reaganites realized was on shaky ground. In particular, the Schweiker decision angered and saddened enough conservative militants to lose Reagan the critical Mississippi delegation. Bill Buckley’s defense of the Schweiker decision on pragmatic grounds was proved inane by the most pragmatic of results: that Schweiker gained no Northeasterners and lost Reagan more delegates than he gained. The most superficial political observer should have realized, for one thing, that Schweiker, considered a lightweight by all who know him, had no political clout in his home state. Notably, for example, as one disillusioned Reaganite told Newsweek, after Schweiker, “no one is going to break the law for Reagan”, i.e. no one was going to violate his state pledges to Ford in order to vote his heart for Reagan.

Some wag has said that World War II was a conflict between Left Hegelians (Russia) and Right Hegelians (Nazi Germany); in a more trivial way. it is possible to see the Ford vs. Reagan contest as one between Randians (Greenspan vs. Martin Anderson.) Newsweek reports that the ex-Randian and quasi-libertarian Anderson was, along with Sears, the most powerful influence in convincing the reluctant Reagan to choose Schweiker. One wonders: does Martin realize that he sold his soul for a mess of defeat? So far we have heard no mea culpas coming from Anderson or from self-styled “anarcho-pragmatist” Dana Rohrabacher, also high up in the Reagan camp.

Not, of course, that we at the Forum are mourning the Reagan defeat. On the contrary, we can all breathe easier at the sending of the dangerous war-monger Reagan and his cohorts back to private life. The conservative revolution was a revolution on behalf of war and militarism (as well as the outlawry of abortion and a crackdown on civil liberties), and so libertarians must all rejoice at the outcome. But the lesson on principles vs. compromise remains for all ideologists.

II The Rusher Defeat

Another cause for rejoicing, this time on a more comic level, was the well-deserved defeat of the attempt of Bill Rusher and other conservatives to capture the American Independent Party and to create a “respectable” New Majority conservative third party. If Rusher and Dick Viguerie had succeeded in their attempted coup, we might have been plagued with a growing “respectable” right-wing populist party of National Reviewish stripe which could have posed a long-term danger for peace and liberty. Rusher had proposed a mighty conservative Republican-Wallaceite coalition that would have jettisoned the rhetoric of the free-market and grounded its ideology on a coalition platform on behalf of war, militarism, and discreet racism. Instead, Rusher and his cohorts underestimated the shrewdness of Wallaceite William Shearer, head of the AIP, who beat off their challenge and nominated the blatantly un-respectable racist Lester Maddox for President. Thus, Rusher et al. were fortunately left without a political home. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving crew, especially in view of their media boasting that they would field a powerful third-party ticket this November.

III The MacBride Ticket

All this leaves the MacBride—Libertarian Party ticket in a happy position. The fuzzily centrist Carter and Ford nominations leave a great many unhappy ideologues in both parties. Furthermore, the differences between Ford and Carter are so marginal that unhappy liberal Democrats might well be moved to vote for a third-party candidate, knowing that Ford is fairly “safe”; while unhappy conservatives might be tempted to vote third-party in the knowledge that Carter is not a liberal ideologue like Humphrey or McGovern. Carter’s fuzzy record on peace and civil liberties might, in short, tempt many liberals to leave the Democrats and vote for MacBride who is consistent on these issues; while Ford’s lack of ardor toward a free-market might move conservatives to do likewise.

Liberals tempted to kick over the traces are faced with a choice between MacBride and the Eugene McCarthy independent ticket. But surely liberals should recognize a vital point: that McCarthy is purely a one-man movement; he represents no party and no ideological party structure—he doesn’t even have a Vice-President. A vote for McCarthy, therefore, is really “thrown away”, because it is purely ad hoc and one-shot; a vote for McCarthy builds nothing for the future.

Most conservatives will undoubtedly do as they have always done—swallow their pride and vote Republican. But those who don’t suffer from blind Republican loyalty have three options: Maddox, Tom Anderson of the Birch Society and the American Party, and MacBride. Racists and Birchers will of course be tempted to vote for their own. But surely there are some conservatives who believe their old free-market and anti-statist rhetoric and will vote Libertarian. How many will we see in November?

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party is winning spots on the ballot of state after state, at this writing in at least 31 states, and the welcome news has just arrived that the LP will be on the ballot in its two major areas of strength: New York and California—the latter the result of a loosening of the formerly impossible state election laws. Nationwide television spots, along with the LP convention in Washington in late September, will hopefully accelerate the visibility of the Presidential ticket. Due to the heroic efforts of MacBride, Bergland, the national office, the state parties, and roving petition-gatherers, the fledgling Libertarian Party is already the nation’s third largest party—a remarkable achievement, and one which could scarcely have been predicted a year ago.

The LP Convention

The 1976 Libertarian Party convention—held at the Statler-Hilton in Washington on the weekend of Sept. 24-26—was by far the best libertarian convention yet held, inside or outside of the Party. This was not only my unhesitating conclusion, but also the conclusion of many other observers, including veterans of Libertarian gatherings, as well as old friends who usually run in the other direction when more than four libertarians are contained in any one room.

The spirit at the convention was harmonious, joyful, and attentive; there was none of the faction-fighting, petty snarling, or ill will that has marred so many other libertarian gatherings. Of course, this harmony was aided by the fact that, as is always the case in even-numbered years, this was not a business meeting of the LP—but the spirit of harmony and solidarity went far beyond this purely mechanical fact.

The happy and welcome spirit of the convention can be attributed to two main sets of facts: the high quality of the speeches, panels, and workshops, and the high quality of the audience. As to the speeches, one distinguished academic at the convention marvelled at the unusually high quality of the talks (and of the questions from the audience as well), comparing it to a scholarly conference rather than a typical political party. Coupled with that admiration, was an equal praise for the consistency and integrated nature of the libertarian thought displayed. The speeches stressed the importance of a peaceful, isolationist foreign policy, of civil liberties as against the CIA and FBI as well as against victimless crime laws, of natural rights, of American revolutionary history, the history of the movement, of Austrian free-market economics, and of individualist psychology. To this observer, the most welcome stress was on the one area where most libertarians need the most firming up: on the overwhelming need for a non-interventionist foreign policy. Here the most important speeches were the masterful and moving pro-peace address of Roy Childs, and the solidly well-informed explanation of the implications of non-intervention by the one firm isolationist among American foreign policy experts: Professor Earl Ravenal of Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities. Also notable in the foreign affairs area was the panel on the emotionally explosive issue of the Middle East, in which three of the leading Middle Eastern experts in the libertarian movement: Professor Leonard Liggio of SUNY, Old Westbury, Dr. Steven Halbrook of Howard University and Georgetown Law School, and John Hagel III of Harvard Law and Business Schools and Oxford University, examined the tangled threads of Middle Eastern politics in a masterful and scholarly fashion. Particularly interesting to me were Halbrook’s point that the Lebanese “left” is Moslem and pro-capitalist rather than Marxist or socialist; and Liggio’s demonstration that U.S. support to the Zionist movement after World War I stemmed from a desire to provide a cover for the anti-Semitic immigration restrictions that the U.S. imposed during the same time. Liggio added that the intensified U.S. support for Zionism after World War II reflected a proportionately more intense U.S. guilt for immigration barriers to European Jews—a process of what Liggio termed the “exporting of guilt” from the U.S. to the Arabs of the Middle East.

Even more remarkable than the quality of the speeches and panels was the quality of the audience. The audience was knowledgeable and attentive—who, for example, could ever have foreseen several hundred well-informed and alert people at a panel on Austrian economic theory? Especially since virtually all non-economists regard economics as the dismal science? But even more, there seemed to be a new kind of audience in Washington, as witness the fact that so many were newcomers attending their first LP convention. Almost uniformly, this audience consisted of “real people”, people who work, think, and are active in the real world. Happily, the crazies seem to have disappeared-from whence they came. All in all, the L.P. convention was an inspiration and a joy.

Finally, the media coverage of the convention was splendid. The Washington Post covered the meeting in a lengthy article; NBC-TV gave in a lengthy article; NBC-TV gave it over three minutes on the evening news; and at least one lengthy UPI dispatch went over the wires—with all the coverage respectful and favorable.

Who can deny that the Libertarian Party is on the march?

Libertarianism For Profit? A Letter And Reply

Ed. Note: We have received the following interesting and challenging letter from a subscriber, Mr. Charles A. Jeffress, that deserves publication and a reply. The letter follows:

Dear Editor:

I subscribe to several libertarian publications and I think Libertarian Forum is the best. In my opinion it is the only consistently libertarian and intellectually respectable publication our “movement” has. Its pages are free of the Cold War jingoism, American flag idolatry, namby-pamby pacifism, petty sectarianism, and science fiction claptrap so often found in other libertarian publications.

However, I think there is something missing in libertarian strategy which Libertarian Forum has never discussed. That is, what does the libertarian movement have to offer its followers besides some future promise of freedom. Nicholas von Hoffman put it quite well in the latest Reason:

“. . . the damned politicians are always getting up and asking people to sacrifice for some large goal. This really goes against the fact of finite mortal existence. We just don’t want to sacrifice for some future goal, for our grandchildren, or for some horrendous abstraction, be it the socialist state or freedom or what have you. What we want, because we’re not going to be around that long, is something now.”

Of what benefit is libertarianism to us? The more altruistic and fanatical libertarians can sustain themselves with a long and unrewarded struggle for liberty, but most of us cannot.

Libertarians defend the free market because it works. It provides its followers with present benefits. I think a movement that promotes the free market should do the same. There’s a fair amount of truth in the H.L. Hunt quote:

“If the world’s worth saving, it’s worth saving at a profit.”

Charles A. Jeffress

Tulsa, Oklahoma

The Editor Replies:

The central error of Mr. Jeffress’ thoughtful letter is one made by many “profit-oriented” libertarians: a confusion of the concept of “profit” with mere monetary profit. Profit, indeed, is the aim of every market exchange, indeed of every human action; but it is psychic profit, that is, the advance of a person higher up on his value scale, the satisfaction of an otherwise unfulfilled want or goal. Chiding libertarians for not “making a profit” would only be correct if no psychic profit, no profit in terms of the individual libertarian’s own utilities, were being made.

But this would imply that every human action is made in order to obtain a monetary profit; but this of course would be an absurd claim. The entire range of consumption expenditures is made, clearly not to make money, but to earn psychic profit from the expenditure; a person goes to a concert, or buys food, etc. not to gain a monetary but a psychic profit. And since consumption expenditure is the ultimate aim of production and the making of monetary income, this demonstrates that non-monetary or psychic profit is the ultimate aim of even money-making activities. Ludwig von Mises used to scoff at Dickens’ capitalist character’s contention that he could not give money to his ailing grandmother because to do so would be to violate the contentions of economists that one must always buy in the cheaper market and sell in the dearer, i.e. make a monetary profit. Dickens’ charge was a caricature because it left out the entire range of consumer expenditures which lie at the base of money-making, and which are conducted to yield a psychic profit only.

To answer Mr. Jeffress’ contention, then: those of us who are “fanatical” libertarians, engaged in a lifelong battle on behalf of individual liberty, joyously earn a psychic profit in the course of the struggle. Why? Because our value-scales are such that we consider it of enormous psychic profit to us to participate in the battle for liberty, to fight for the most noble and glorious cause of all. We don’t consider that we are “sacrificing” either ourselves or our descendants. We consider that a commitment to participate as much as possible in the struggle for liberty gives joy and enrichment to our lives. If we feel that we are succeeding in bringing the glorious future day of total liberty closer by our efforts, then of course so much the better; but if our best efforts do not eventually succeed (which I do not believe), we in no sense will consider our efforts wasted—for we will consider ourselves happy and privileged to have fought for the glorious cause of individual liberty. That continuing and lasting psychic profit cannot be taken away from us.

Mr. Jeffress calls battling for the libertarian cause “altruistic”. Since we are continually making a great psychic profit from the struggle that term clearly does not apply. But there is more to be said about this common charge. I regard altruism as an absurd and self-contradictory philosophy, in flat contradiction to the nature of man. Consider the old cartoon: a father is instructing his child, rather sententiously: “Our purpose in life is to serve others”; to which the kid pipes up, to the considerable embarrassment of his parent: “What then is the purpose in life of the others?” To say that A should always serve the interests or at the dictates of B, C, etc. is to fail to resolve the problem of the fact that B, C, etc. won’t be able to dictate any action either, since still others will have to decide on their action. The result of consistent altruism, then, is that no one will be able to act at all. Of course, in practice, as Isabel Paterson said in her great work The God Of The Machine, the “altruist” — humanitarian acts and pushes people around on behalf of what he claims are their best interests.

Finally, the libertarian fights for the liberty of all men because he believes that justice requires such a world; since he holds the liberty of all very high on his value-scale, such liberty is to his own “psychic interest” as well as to the psychic interest of everyone. The libertarian fights for a world in which he would very much like to live, a world of justice where everyone’s rights (including of course his own) are upheld. He wants to exploit no one and no one to exploit him; to write off such a goal of justice for all as “altruism” is to misconceive both altruism and justice, and to posit that the world can only be a jungle in which each man lives either by trampling upon others, or by being trampled upon.

‘Benediction’ Speech At The LP Convention

The following speech was delivered by the editor of the Lib. Forum as the closing, or “benediction”, speech at the L.P. Convention in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, Sept. 26.

Friends and Fellow Libertarians:

I must admit to a bit of confusion when I saw that this speech was listed on the convention program as a “benediction”. As one of my friends said in disbelief: “Are you going to be praying for us?” Several years ago, when I argued in the Libertarian Forum against reading Christians out of the movement, I was charged in some of our more militant circles with having become a “Jesus freak.” I suppose that for some of our more humorless critics in the movement, the title “benediction” will be proof enough of this indictment.

But we can all rest assured. For I looked up the definition of “benediction” in Webster’s and here is what it said: “Act of blessing; a blessing; an expression of blessing, prayer, or kind wishes; a solemn or affectionate invocation of happiness.” And while I am not prepared to pray for our cause, I am more than willing to convey an expression of blessing, kind wishes, and an affectionate and even at times solemn invocation of happiness.

For we libertarians have a lot to be happy about. First, we should be happy about this convention, about the excellent and scholarly speeches and workshops built around the vital themes of liberty. It is impossible to recapitulate all of these speeches and lessons that we have heard here; but I would particularly like to commend the stress that has been placed here, and in the Presidential campaign, on the vital importance of a nonintervention foreign policy. And particularly on the primary stress that has been laid on the moral basis for a peaceful and non-interventionist foreign policy, on the moral imperative of avoiding mass murder, as Roy Childs has so eloquently reminded us. For it is elemental but sometimes forgotten that we cannot have liberty unless we have life.

Also we have something else to be happy about: We are reaching the end of the mightiest libertarian campaign in over a century, and the most explicitly libertarian campaign in all of human history; we have reached literally 70 million people with our libertarian message in clear and principled and uncompromising form — 70 million who have heard the words and the concepts of liberty for the first time in their lives. We have and will continue to beam our message over nationwide television; we have gotten coverage in the press and the media across the country which we could scarcely have imagined last year when the campaign began.

Of course none of this coverage and this dissemination would have been possible without the literally superhuman efforts of our Presidential candidate, Roger MacBride, who has been campaigning continuously since last year’s convention. How he did and is still doing it I don’t know; on Roger’s schedule I think most of us would have been in a rest home after a few weeks. I can only think that in addition to his natural stamina, that Roger is afire with the spirit of liberty, and that spirit must be sustaining him. And if that last sentence sounds just a teeny bit religious, I guess I’ll just have to answer to whatever, or whoever, is the atheist equivalent of St. Peter.

And let us not forget the heroic efforts — the energy and the dedication of the national office and of the state parties, state MacBride committees and roving petition-gatherers who got us on the ballot in over 31 states! Here we are, a brand-new party with a brand-new ideology, and we are already on more state ballots than any of the other minor parties! Isn’t that phenomenal?

To us libertarian veterans, the most remarkable aspect of the vast amount of media attention to our campaign is that the reports have ranged from favorable to neutral, with very few unfavorable comments. And no one has called Roger or the party a fascist, a crazy, or a Neanderthal — a refreshing change from the common epithets of two and three decades ago.

The quantity of media coverage is surely a response to the success of the campaign and the ballot drives. But how explain the good will and even the approval that we find in the media? I think it is clear that the media people themselves are surprised and attracted by this new-found libertarian ideology. For one thing: who else but Roger and the Libertarian Party can offer a coherent, systematic defense of Daniel Schorr? We have struck a chord that resounds in thoughtful people throughout the country, a chord that demonstrates that the time is now ripe for Americans to listen to and heed the libertarian message. Conservatives, as we know, tend to take an aggressive and paranoid attitude toward the media, to write them off as “all a bunch of blankety-blank liberals”, and of course the media people, being human, tend to respond in kind.

It is true that media people are similar to most intellectuals in being liberals. But let us examine the mind-set of the typical liberal, vintage 1976. He or she knows, down-deep, that something has gone very wrong with the liberal ideology and with the liberalism that we have all lived under for forty years. He knows that the entire idea that “we are the government”, that the government should regulate and control our lives and resources, has gone very sour. After forty years of liberal “fine-tuning” of the economy, he knows that all that has been accomplished is chronic and accelerating inflation combined with periodic recessions, the last one the deepest since World War II. He knows that we are all groaning under a burden of high taxation, taxes that injure and cripple the poor and the middle class as well as the wealthy. He sees that the formerly sacrosanct public school system is in deep trouble, barely teaching anyone and only serving an increasingly inefficient custodial and babysitting function for its charges. He sees that compulsory integration and forced bussing have aggravated rather than relieved racial tensions., He is getting fed up with the idea that the criminal is always to be pitied, while the victim of the crime is either neglected or somehow blamed for the actions of the criminal. Above all, as a civil libertarian, he sees that Big Government, even elected government, has become a tyrant and oppressor of civil liberties, of the freedom to dissent from the powers that be. He sees also that the liberal foreign policy of global intervention and collective security has only brought us endless war, mass murder, and great waste of resources. And since Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, he sees how an unchecked executive power in domestic and foreign affairs brought us close to a police state.

And so the thoughtful person, in or out of the media, has become increasingly disillusioned with liberalism and ripe for a fundamental change in political outlook. Until now, however, the only alternative to liberalism that seemed to be available was conservatism, and conservatism could still only repel the thoughtful liberal ready to become an ex-liberal. Devoted to peace and civil liberties, he sees conservatism as a frenetic call for still more militarism, global intervention and war, and for still more suppression of civil liberties — both in the form of political dissent and of personal activities, or victimless crimes, which the conservative deems to be immoral and therefore to be stamped out by the police. Devoted to the sturdy American principle of separation of church and state, our liberal is hardly likely to be attracted to the odor of theocracy and the Inquisition that permeates the conservative movement.

Given the repellent nature of conservatism, and given the propensity of human nature not to abandon an old belief until a new and better one comes along, our typical thoughtful liberal has generally remained one, in spite of himself — but ready to defect should a better political ideology come along. But that better ideology is libertarianism — and hence the surprising degree of favorable media interest. For only we are consistently opposed to coercive Big Government — in all aspects of American life: domestic and foreign, economic and personal, secular and religious. Only libertarianism brings back to American political life what has for so long been absent — a consistent and well-thought-out ideology, a seamless web on behalf of the liberty of the individual, on behalf of voluntary as opposed to coercive action in all spheres of life.

I have so far spoken of media people and intellectuals; but the mass of the public, too, is ripe for the libertarian message and for many of the same reasons. The public, too, is sick of Big Government and high taxes, of inflatic and of government coercion. The mass of the public is not interested in global crusades or nuclear incineration. Above all, the public has a healthy distrust of government and of politicians. There are many signs of this welcome and radical shift in the public mood, but perhaps the most important is that both the major party candidates feel it necessary to try to ride this mood by campaigning against “Washington.” Of course, their campaigns are empty, cynical, and devoid of issues or concrete content. Of course, they will continue to con the public a while longer. But this con job is getting more and more difficult and will only succeed for a while because most of the public sees no viable alternative to the two major parties.

But this lack of an alternative, this common idea that we are stuck with two evil parties of which we must at each election choose the lesser, is rapidly coming to an end. Because we Libertarians are now here to present the real anti-Washington alternative! An alternative that presents the issues clearly and consistently. No one can accuse us of being “fuzzy.” And as our message spreads, and as the public realizes that we are here and here to stay, they will turn more and more to the Libertarian alternative.

I would like to try to clarify some confusion that has arisen about the relationship of the Libertarian Party to the broad libertarian movement in this country. The libertarian movement consists of everyone who is active in trying to bring about complete individual liberty. It consists not only of the Libertarian Party, but of many other organizations and associations in all walks of life: including scholars’ movements within and cutting across numerous scholarly disciplines; tax-protest movements, such as the splendid mass demonstration in New Jersey last weekend in favor of repealing the state income tax and cutting the budget; organizations opposed to government fiat money, and many others too numerous to mention. It also includes the Libertarian Party, which is the political-action, or political-party, arm of the movement. I regard all of these worthy activities as complementary and indispensable, and not at all competitive. The Libertarian Party comes to put the libertarian ideal into practice in American political life.

Specifically on the Libertarian Party, I see the party as fulfilling four vital and interlocking functions. First, it has proved to be an indispensable method for building the libertarian movement. Political campaigns, in the first place, are vitally important methods for informing previously isolated libertarians about the existence of an organized party of fellow-libertarians, and thereby spurring the organization of previously fragmented libertarians in every state in the Union. Secondly, the party provides a channel for libertarians to gather together and engage in fruitful and rewarding libertarian activity. In the days before the party, I would often hear newly converted libertarians ask: “all right, now we believe in liberty, but what can we do about it?” Now that we have a Libertarian Party, no one need ask such a question any longer; as we all know, there is plenty to do. Already, in its brief existence, the Libertarian Party has been phenomenally successful, far more so than any and all other libertarian organizations, past and present, in building the libertarian movement, in gathering libertarians together and in providing them important and fruitful forms of continuing activity.

In addition to building the movement, the Libertarian Party has, as we all know, a vitally important educational function, in educating the media and the public in the libertarian ideology, in presenting that ideology, and then in changing the climate of opinion in a libertarian direction. I have already spoken of the fantastic fact that scores of millions of Americans have been exposed to uncompromising libertarian ideas for the first time in their lives — and this could only have been done in the context of a political, and particularly of a Presidential, campaign.

Building the movement and educating the public; these two functions are crucial enough and are more than enough to justify our efforts. But this is far from all that the party will be accomplishing in the months and years ahead. In the first place, as we gather in strength and influence and durability, we will find — in the classic pattern of third parties — that we will succeed more and more in pushing the major parties in a libertarian direction. Not, of course, because they will be converted to the cause, but, because, cynical vote-seekers that they are, they will have to bend under what they perceive as public pressure. Now, in 1976, they are content to give lip-service to the inchoate mood of being against “Washington”; in the years to come, they will be forced to adopt more and more of the specific stands on issues on which the Libertarian Party will be convincing the public.

Let us contemplate for a moment how great it would be, for example, if the Libertarian Party had a bloc of even a few Congressmen of our very own. By their speeches and above all by the consistency of all of their votes, they would show a first astonished and then delighted press and public what libertarianism in action really means. For most people, an ideology only comes alive if they can see its application in the concrete, and we could then show them plenty — even to voting, year after year, against the overall budget! Think of the great educative and pressure value of such an openly Libertarian bloc in Congress!

All of these functions: movement-building, public education, pressure on the major parties; are now within our grasp. But ultimately we cannot rely upon the statist parties to complete our vital task of rolling back the Leviathan State, of gaining a world of full individual liberty. To do so, we must aspire to be the eventual conduit, the channel, for that rollback of the State. We must aspire to become one of the major parties ourselves.

Of course there are risks involved; but we of all people can overcome them, because we know full well that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. We must take care never to compromise or water down our glorious libertarian principles which are the very point and the heart of our existence, as a party and as a movement. I am confident that we can and will do this, because our record so far shows that we are determined never to water down those principles! Moreover, those libertarians who are opposed to political action have failed dismally to come up with a single sensible alternative strategy for rolling back the State; the State is not going to disappear or fade away out of shame; it will have to be pressured into having its scope and its power whittled away. Who but a Libertarian Party is going to roll back the State and repeal all the statist measures that have been oppressing us?

Let us consider the experience of the ballot drives, the launching of active candidacies at the local level, the filming and showing of national TV spots. Let us consider these experiences in the light of our proud boast that we are the party of principles. All this hard work around the country has been inspired by the love of liberty and it has been work devoted to the cause of liberty. That is the cause that justifies our passionate efforts. That is the end that justifies our organizing a means of social transformation.

But we are not simply motivated by a passion for liberty. We are not only the party of principle; we are the party of principles. We are an organized, increasingly coherent political organization. The ballot drives, the TV spots, are all part of a professionally-run, integrated, disciplined, coordinated, purposive effort to advance the libertarian cause. Give us a coherent organization and, inspired by the love of Liberty, we will transform America.

We have a glorious opportunity now and in the future, to succeed in all these aims. For not only is the climate of opinion among intellectuals and the public ripe for libertarian ideas, but the two-party political system is breaking up before our very eyes. The Republican party has virtually disintegrated, a disintegration only masked by the fact that it is still viable on the Presidential level. But the Republicans have only a handful of governors, and not only have the Republicans not controlled either branch of Congress in twenty-two years, but there is no prospect of the Republican party doing so ever again. Surely this situation cannot continue indefinitely, and in a few years a fundamental realignment of parties will have to take place. Since we Libertarians are already, despite our infancy in terms of years, the largest of the minor parties, and since we stand for something in an age of cynical fuzziness and absence of ideology, the chances are excellent for us to arrive before long at major party status.

In this and in future elections, we have the potential to obtain, not only the votes of outright libertarians, but of two other large and important groups. We have the potential of attracting those liberals who place peace and civil liberties above federal spending on their list of priorities; and we have the potential of attracting those conservatives who place a free-market economy and minimal government higher than their devotion to theocratic suppression and global military intervention. Let us hope that these people are legion.

I have no idea how many votes we are going to get in November. Whatever the figure, it will be infinitely more than we could have dreamed or expected four, or even two, years ago. We are going to make a mighty impact in this election. We have already made a mighty impact. But we know, and the public should know, that this election is only the beginning. We are here to stay, and we are going to have ever greater influence in the months and years ahead. We are the party of the future. Just look around at us; I venture to say that I am by far the oldest person in this room, maybe in the entire Libertarian Party, and I am still not ready for the rocking chair. We are the party of youth, of youth and of hope. And we have the truth on our side, as well as a ripening disgust among the public at the old world of statism and tyranny. With all this going for us, how can we help but be the party of the future?

Storm Over The ‘Scum’:
Defending The Undefendable Block

I must confess to a degree of astonishment at the range and depth of the emotional hostility to Walter Block’s excellent new book, Defending the Undefendable—in libertarian circles. In his book, Block takes the libertarian position and applies it, with lucidity, logic, and wit, to the “hard” and extreme cases, thereby forcing the reader to widen and deepen his understanding of libertarian principles. After all, it doesn’t take any truly radical or consistent spirit for someone to favor legalizing the activities of the natural gas producer or the steel manufacturer, and to see why his activities, left unhampered by government, benefit the consumers. Anyone, even President Ford, can see why the airlines or railroads should be deregulated and left to the free market. But the blackmailer, the libeller, the dishonest cop, the pimp, the curmudgeon, etc? Here, support for their activities comes a lot harder. As I wrote in my introduction to the Block book:

“These case studies also have considerable shock value. By relentlessly taking up one ‘extreme’ case after another that is generally guaranteed to shock the sensibilities of the reader, Professor Block forces the reader to think, to rethink his initial knee-jerk emotional responses, and to gain a new and far sounder appreciation of economic theory and of the virtues and operations of the free market economy. Even many readers who now think they believe in a free market must now be prepared to grasp fully the logical implications of a belief in a free economy. This book will be an exciting and shocking adventure for most readers, even for those who believe that they are already converted to the merits of the free market economy.”

Judging from the outraged responses to the Block book in many libertarian quarters, apparently many of “our people” are not ready for this exciting and shocking adventure. Since libertarians are, or are supposed to be, on the forefront of thought, since their whole lives have been an intellectual adventure in many ways, the hostility to the Block book becomes even more mysterious. In contrast to so many of our radical and hard-core libertarians who balk at Block, let us consider the commentary on the book published in its pages by F. A. Hayek, a distinguished free-market economist who has never been known either as a flaming radical or as a daringly consistent libertarian. Hayek writes: “Looking through Defending the Undefendable made me feel that I was once more exposed to the shock therapy by which, more than fifty years ago, the late Ludwig von Mises converted me to a consistent free market position. Even now I am occasionally at first incredulous and feel that ‘this is going too far’, but usually find in the end that you (Block) are right. Some may find it too strong a medicine but it will do them good even if they hate it.” If F. A. Hayek can show himself willing to rethink his premises and apply libertarianism consistently and “extremely” in his late seventies, this points up even more starkly and ironically the stodgy and conservative (in the bad sense) habits of mind that seem to be endemic among libertarians who are less than half his age. Apparently, the young at heart is not a matter of chronology.

Before dealing with the specific critical reviews of the Block book by libertarians, we may treat two general themes that appear in them all, as well as in oral criticisms of the book. Why is Block defending, they want to know, what they often refer to as “the scum of the earth”? Apart from the general answer that the occupations that Block is treating (a) should be legal, as voluntary acts between consenting adults, and (b) provide productive services to the consumers on the market, we come to the highly loaded term “scum of the earth”. Are the prostitute, the pimp, the drug addict, the dishonest cop, etc. really the “scum of the earth”? This is a pretty drastic social label to apply to a whole category of occupations, and it seems to me incumbent on the “scum” labellers to prove these wild-swinging charges. Why are they the scum of the earth (if, indeed, this term itself can be rationally defined), and on what ethical theory are they so dismissed? So far, none of the Block critics has come up with any ethical theory to justify this label.

The other major cavil is at Block’s use “of the term “hero” to apply to these occupations. As Block, I believe makes clear in his book, he applies the term “hero” to these “scum” because (a) they are engaging in activities that supply desired services on the free market, activities which should be legal; and (b) they persist in doing so despite social obloquy and outlawry or suppression at the hands of the State. As Block writes in a letter defending his use of the “hero” concept: “there is nothing intrinsically heroic about the grocer who earns a profit. There are no popular songs extolling his virtues. Nor is the grocer the subject of any great epic poems. Nevertheless, when the totalitarian state prohibits ‘speculation’ in food, in cases of shortages or famines, it is easy to show that the ordinary profit-earning grocer can be a hero. . . .I admit that no one but a libertarian would consider the food speculator ‘heroic’. But this is not, I maintain, because of a misuse of the word. It is because only a libertarian could combine an economic analysis showing the beneficial effects of speculation with a moral analysis defending the full rights of voluntary free trade.”

And even if we turn to the non-libertarian Webster’s, we find one of its definitions of “hero” that is relevant to Block’s usage: “a person of distinguished valor or enterprise in danger, or fortitude in suffering” — which can surely apply to Block’s case studies, and which says nothing about the intrinsic nobility or epic nature of the enterprise itself.

I hasten to add that I am not at all opposed to sharp intellectual debate within the libertarian movement. On the contrary, one of the reasons for the moribund nature of the conservative movement is that conservative intellectuals have tended to engage in logrolling and back-slapping to the point where important intellectual differences are slurred and papered over, in the name of a phony “unity” against the foe — as a result, intellectual issues never get defined and theory never gets advanced. The rare importance of the late Frank Meyer to conservative intellectual circles for twenty years was the fact that he, almost alone, was willing to engage in such important debates, and often against close personal friends: hence, the fame of the Meyer-Burnham, Meyer-Bozell, Meyer-Kirk, etc. debates — debates that became famous partially because any intellectual argument has been so rare in conservative circles. So it is not the fact of the storm of criticism against the Block book that I deplore, but rather that the criticism is so wrong-headed.

There is, furthermore, a double-standard that is often at work in these attacks. For libertarians, too, have tended to log-roll and to “accentuate the positive” in book reviews — a very human tendency in an embattled movement, to be sure — so that sometimes one had the feeling that anyone who writes a book devoted to “freedom, man, is groovy”, is assured rave reviews in much of the libertarian media. But, all of a sudden, with the appearance of the Block book, standards are sharply raised, and every aspect is considered with a caustic eye.

Let us now turn to some of the detailed reviews in the libertarian press. Jim Davidson, in Libertarian Review (July-August, 1976) has three basic criticisms which he pursues at length. First is the hero definition, where Davidson asserts that classically “hero” meant “a man of superhuman strength of ability who was favored by the gods”, who even “was like a god.” Well, sure, but usage has changed since Homer’s day, and Block’s definition, as I have pointed out above, comes within the rubric of modern usage combined with libertarian and free-market economic insight. Surely, Block would agree that the pimp, etc. is not a Homeric hero.

Secondly, Davidson maintains that the Block book is not a “work of art”, does not come close, for example, to George Bernard Shaw. No doubt; but if we start applying such high stylistic standards to every libertarian book, or indeed to any book at all in this century, we would have to burn all the libraries. Block’s style is readable, lucid, and interesting; to demand any more in this day and age is to be Utopian in the unfortunate sense.

Thirdly, Davidson criticizes Block for not enriching his logic with examples, anecdotes, and a critique of modern and classical legal theories. Here, I think Davidson has also raised an unrealistic standard, and is really saying that if he had written the book, it would have been done differently. Walter Block’s forte is logical analysis rather than empirical anecdote; he is a formidable libertarian and economic theorist rather than an historian or legal critic. We can’t demand that everyone know everything for a book to be valuable. In a sense, it as if Mises’ Human Action is to be criticized for not having enough historical examples, for being pure theory. The book should be weighed on its own grounds, and logic and sound theory are surely not in such superabundant supply that we can dismiss it on this sort of grounds.

Laissez-Faire Books considered the Block book so controversial that two contrasting reviews are offered (Summer, 1976). Roy Childs’ favorable review is excellent, even though space considerations necessarily make it all too brief. Childs commends the book as “challenging, brilliant, relentlessly argued”, as “shocking, audacious, and awfully funny”; and as taking “seriously Ayn Rand’s dictum that one should be willing to defend the least attractive instance of a principle, and has done precisely that.” Childs, too, criticizes Block’s use of the term “heroic” because “what we mean by ‘heroic’ includes great or important values being at stake”. Again, not necessarily; it is certainly permissible to take as “heroic” the formal struggling for whatever a person’s goals may be, against great odds, and against State outlawry. Words do not have only one definition.

Sharon Presley’s con review in Laissez-Faire Books I must simply pass over as an embarrassment. In addition to the now familiar charges about the word “hero” and accusing Block of not being as witty as H. L. Mencken, Miss Presley engages in hysterical verbal overkill. For example, she repeatedly attacks the book as “an affront to human dignity”. Since Block is trying to rescue the dignity of his much-maligned “rogues”, the term is rationally incomprehensible as applied to the book.

We turn now to the most substantial critique of the Block book that has yet appeared, that of Walter E. Grinder in his column in Libertarian Review (September-October 1976). Grinder writes that he is “extremely ambivalent” about the book; he is in “full agreement” with Block’s basic thesis; the book is “ideologically sound”, and even highly “important” and “seminal.” And yet? Grinder has two basic objections. First, while he understands and even agrees with Block’s use of the term “hero”, that Block is defending “the very scum of the earth”. Again, Grinder offers no ethical theory in defense of this serious charge. Perhaps a clue is Grinder’s reference to “low-character, high-risk people who would likely fill any nonlegal. . .professions. . .” There is no question about the fact that non-legal occupations tend to attract a penumbra of what libertarians would consider real criminals: thieves, muggers, etc., since all have been placed unjustly in the same “criminal” boat by the State. But surely the way out of this is, as Grinder recognizes, to remove the stain of illegality, and thereby withdraw the criminal penumbra from all these useful but now illegal or suppressed activities. Besides, even unesthetic people can take on the character of “hero” if they determinedly and therefore heroically persist in legitimate activities that are treated as illegal by the State.

But Grinder’s basic objection, as he points out, is strategic. He is worried that “defending the dregs” of society is a “short-run strategic disaster” (a point that Presley also seems to be making.) In the long-run, however. Grinder is optimistic about the Block book, because even though “it will not play well in Peoria”, “it will surely lead other scholars to take up each point raised by Block and set it into legal and historical perspective.” But, for now, says Grinder, “this is the wrong book at the wrong time.” I think the problem here is Grinder’s evaluating a book as being strategic or un-strategic. Books are, or should be, timeless, and should be written for their truth value; the true writer or scholar should not give a damn whether his book will “play in Peoria.” Where strategy or tactics come in is the use any given individual makes of any book. Block’s book could possibly be used in a counter-productive strategic manner; but so also could any book, including Nock, Mises, Hayek, or what have you.

For example, suppose that someone comes to me who knows nothing at all of economics, and wants me to advise him what book to read first. For me to recommend Mises’ Human Action or Hayek’s Prices and Production would be strategic folly, because the person in question would undoubtedly be confused by the whole matter, and drop the subject for good and all. Instead, one recommends to the neophyte, say, Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and other elementary books, and then works one’s way up to the more advanced and complex material. This, indeed, is true of any course of study. Yet, if I were to recommend the “wrong book at the wrong time” to this person, the fault would not be Mises’ or Hayek’s but mine, for failing to gauge properly the level of comprehension of this person at the present time. To require that a book be strategic instead of an individual’s use of that book in any given situation, verges on thought control and the suppression of scholarship and is, to boot, itself a bad strategic mistake.

Furthermore, it is by no means always true that intellectual “shock treatment”, such as offered by the Block book, is counter-productive. It worked on Hayek, and it works on others as well. Block reports that he has had a far greater success in converting his students to libertarianism via Defending the Undefendable — via this seemingly counter-productive “shock treatment” — than he did in all of his previous years of teaching, and of recommending more cautious and sober libertarian works. Students, in particular, often admire consistency and “extremism” in the defense of any cause, including liberty. Extremism is not only consistent, it is also exciting, whereas more cautious and gradualist works may well put these eager, budding students to sleep. Liberty, after all, is and should be exciting, and not another typical academic exercise in boredom. In short, “shock treatment” will work for some, and not for others, and both approaches are fine, depending upon the individuals in question. In the 1930’s, many people were converted to Communism by the gradual route, through an escalating series of front groups; but others were converted all at once, by the seeming grandeur and consistency of the open Communist position. Are we to deny that rapid and exhilarating route to budding libertarians?

In a letter defending his book, Block points out that whether or not it will “play in Peoria”, the most hostile attacks on the book have so far come, not from “Peorians” but from libertarians. It is a fair comment. Strategy and tactics are important; but let us not become so concerned with the opinion of others, so other-directed, that we begin to discourage and stifle our best libertarian writing and scholarship in the name of how we think other people are going to react. The great glory of libertarianism is that we must follow our libertarian star and let the chips fall where they may; if we ever forget this primordial fact, we shall be in trouble indeed.

A Letter From Britain

Two centuries after the American people rejected the twin tyrannies of King and Parliament, the status of Liberty in the old “mother country” is still considerably worse than in the United States. The bright hopes engendered among all libertarians in the heyday of 19th century classical liberalism were dashed by the collapse of liberal England during World War I and the triumph of state socialism in the aftermath of World War II. The spectrum of English political life does not include any significant organized libertarian movement. The Conservative party includes a few outspoken advocates of the free market, but the party as a whole is interventionist when in office, chauvinist, imperialist, and overtly (Enoch Powell) and covertly (anti-Celtic, pro-South African) racist. It has been unable to escape its image as the enemy of the working class. The Socialist or Labour party is deeply divided between its Marxist left wing and democratic socialist right wing, retaining power largely by appealing to class envy and fear. The Liberal party has recently enjoyed a slight revival as several million middle class voters, disgusted with the Labor-Conservative incompetents, turned Liberal as a protest. The Liberals have survived as a minority party largely due to the loyalty of neglected minorities in the Celtic regions — Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and the far north of England. But the rise of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties may weaken the Liberals, as it has both other parties in the Celtic lands. However, as the Liberals have recently voted on two occasions to maintain the minority Labor party in office, at the next election it will have to justify these votes, and its support for the nationalization of Britain’s aircraft and shipbuilding industries. And if Wales and Scotland continue to support their growing nationalist parties, the Liberals and Laborites may both decline as the margin of their winning majorities traditionally come from the Celtic realms.

What is the state of Liberty in Britain in the summer of America’s Bicentennial of the Revolution? Let us look at one issue which was much in the news.

The Right To Work: A major effort is underway to impose the closed shop on British workers in both private and state-owned industries. Daily reports in the newspapers indicate that the trade union movement is becoming militant in demanding that private employers and the directors of nationalized industries consent to making union membership a contractual condition for all employees. Avoiding for the moment coercion through an act of Parliament, which might not succeed due to Labour’s minority status therein, the same ends can be achieved by administrative fiat or employer connivance. There is no law requiring secret balloting in union elections, and British workers are notoriously apathetic in participating in the internal governance of the unions. One result has been that the leadership of the unions has tended to fall into the hands of the more extreme Leftists, and outright Communists, who wield power wholly out of proportion to their numbers. But in any real crisis between labor and management or capital, the strong class character of British society rallies the blind loyalty of the workers to the trade union leadership. This class solidarity made democratic reform of the trade unions impossible when it was attempted by the Conservative government in 1974, and instigated the subsequent fall of that government and its loss of the general elections that year. A crucial difference between British and American societies is the different perception of social class. In England, unlike America, the ruling class is extremely visible and their presence and privilege a pervasive irritation to the self-respect of the lower classes. Historically, the working class has used a variety of social institutions to defend themselves against the arrogance and despotism of the ruling elites: the free churches, the trade unions, the old Liberal party, and more recently, the Labour party. The Conservative party has not been able to achieve credibility as a friend of the working class, or the poor. Thus, instead of the rather fuzzy and undetermined class character of American political parties the two major British parties have a hard core bitter class basis. The minor parties, the Liberals, the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and the Ulster Unionists, represent marginal forces in the total society, forces which have been largely ignored by the dominant Labour and Conservative parties until recently.

The only force that might turn the British away from further erosion of civil and economic liberty is the Conservative party now under the leadership of Mrs. Margaret Thatacher, whose rhetorical devotion to the free market is manifest. But in practice, the Tories are notoriously unprincipled and have invariably been more socialist in office than out of office. On the vital issue of the closed shop, the Tory shadow cabinet under Mrs. T’s leadership has decided to do nothing officially in the Parliament to protect the open shop by statute. Rather, the issue is to be avoided until public opinion can be aroused and changed. To their credit, a few Conservative and Liberal M. P.’s have protested this unprincipled stand and have joined with other civil libertarians in creating a new organization — the National Association for Freedom — to challenge the continued drift towards despotism. It has begun to publish a fortnightly newspaper—The Free Nation (87 Regent St. London W1A 2BU.5 pounds p.a.), established local branches and raise funds for legal action. NAFF hopes to take the case of dismissed employees, victims of the closed shop, to the European Court for Human Rights at Strasbourg and has begun making contact with other groups concerned with civil liberties, including doctors who are trying to prevent passage of a Labour party bill which would prohibit the use of hospital facilities by physicians in private practice or their patients. Since there are few private hospitals, the bill in effect would complete the socialization of medical care. NAFF also hopes to rally opposition to “incomes policies” — price and wage controls, further nationalization of industry, and new plans to make land tenancies virtually hereditary. Thus NAFF could be a rallying point for libertarian oriented activities in Britain, and perhaps give libertarian backbone to the Tory and Liberal politicians at Westminster Considering the past record of the Tory party, we are not too sanguine about the future of liberty in England, but the economic crisis is so great that it may provide the necessary radical solvent for a libertarian “great leap” forward. (J. R. P.)

Recommended Reading

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (Revised edition, paper, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, 118 pp., $1.95). In 1970, the hardcover edition of this book by a distinguished political philosopher not only pioneered on behalf of anarchism in academia but also made the entire topic, for the first time, academically respectable. Wolff’s slim book developed the case for anarchism from a grounding in the Kantian principle of the autonomy of the individual. This edition is far superior to the original, for it includes an excellent 30-page rebuttal by Wolff to the attack on his previous edition by Jeffrey H. Reiman, in his apologia for the state. In Defense of Political Philosophy: A Reply to Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism (Harper & Row, 1972). Must reading for the libertarian.

Carl Watner, Towards A Proprietary Theory of Justice (published by Carl Watner, 7250 Washington Boulevard, Baltimore, Maryland 21227, July 1976, 47 pp., $3.00). Watner’s pamphlet is an excellent introduction to the basic philosophy of libertarianism—to its axioms and corollaries, to the principles of self-ownership, homesteading, justice, and free exchange. Relies heavily on Rothbard and Spooner.

Joseph Stromberg, “Non-Intervention: Foreign Policy for Americans,” L. P. News (July-August, 1976), pp. 3, 9. If there is anything that the libertarian movement is weak on it is foreign policy, so this makes particularly welcome the scintillating article by Joe Stromberg which is also a Libertarian Party position paper for this campaign. Solidly anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist.

Rothbardiana. The biggest news on the Rothbardiana front is an interview with Rothbard in the October Penthouse, written by James Dale Davidson. There is also a picture (not the centerfold!) Thus, libertarianism gets beamed out to Penthouse’s five million or so readers. In the last few months, Murray Rothbard has authored one book, and contributed to three others. The new Rothbard book is Volume III of Conceived in Liberty, Advance to Revolution, 1760-1775 (Arlington House, 1976, $12.95, 373 pp.), which treats the origins of the American Revolution until the outbreak of actual war at Lexington and Concord.

Two of the other contributions are to books in the new Austrian economic series being published by Sheed & Ward. In E. Dolan, ed., The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics (Sheed & Ward, 1976, $12.00, 238 pp.), Rothbard contributes articles on: “On the Method of Austrian Economics,” “New Light on the Prehistory of the Austrian School,” “Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy,” and “The Austrian Theory of Money.” In L. Moss, ed., The Economics of Ludwig von Mises (Sheed & Ward, 1976, $12.00,129 pp.), Rothbard has an article on “Ludwig von Mises and Economic Calculation Under Socialism.”

The final contribution is a part of an excellent new collection of articles on New Deal foreign policy, edited by Leonard P. Liggio and James J. Martin, Watershed of Empire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy (Colorado Springs, Col.: Ralph Myles Pub., 1976, 219 pp., available in both hard cover and a $3.95 paperback.) Of an unusually high quality for a symposium, the book includes: a preface by Felix Morley, an introduction by Leonard Liggio, and the following articles: Robert J. Bresler, “The Ideology of the Executive State: Legacy of Liberal Internationalism;” Murray N. Rothbard, “The New Deal and the International Monetary System;” Robert Freeman Smith, “The Good Neighbor Policy: The Liberal Paradox in United States Relations with Latin America;” Lloyd C. Gardner, “New Deal Diplomacy: A View from the Seventies;” Justus D. Doenecke, “Power, Markets, and Ideology: The Isolationist Response to Roosevelt Policy, 1940-1941,” William L. Neumann, “Roosevelt’s Options and Evasions in Foreign Policy Decisions, 1940-1945;” and James T. Patterson, “Robert A. Taft and American Foreign Policy; 1939-1945.” A superb book!

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 11

NOVEMBER, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

The LP:
Retrospect and Prospect

The 1976 campaign is a landmark for our country: for it established the fledgling, newly-born Libertarian Party as the biggest “third party” in America. The LP is here to stay and to grow; and it will have to be taken seriously by the politicians and the media as an important force in American political life. This is a remarkable achievement for any new party, but particularly a party as radical, as uncompromising, as anti-State as the LP; its great success demonstrates that those of us who wanted the party to “go national”, to progress from isolated discussion circles to a real force in the country, were right.

At this writing, the detailed votes are fragmentary, but we know enough to assert that the MacBride-Bergland national total will be somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 votes, in the process beating Lester Maddox’s American Independent Party in the vote column. The media are already regretting their Election Day choice to report only the details for McCarthy and Maddox among the lesser tickets. Not only was our vote total third greatest, but in particular states we achieved that great aim of third parties: balance-of-power status between the major parties. We achieved it in the Ohio presidential race (i.e. MacBride received more votes than the difference between Carter and Ford) and almost achieved it in Hawaii. California, our largest state LP, achieved votes for MacBride; while the highest percentage for the national ticket was, as predicted, in Alaska, which ran from 5 to 6% for MacBride-Bergland, with the ticket reaching its height in Fairbanks, with a vote of 10% of the total.

Some of the state-wide races brought the LP a higher percentage, as the closeness of the Ford-Carter race shifted many would-be LP voters into one of the major camps. The LP candidate for corporation commissioner in Arizona garnered 25% of the vote, while a state senatorial candidate in Idaho gained 30%. To deduce from this, as a few have done, that the LP should concentrate on local rather than presidential races is absurdly short-sighted: for it ignores the fact that it was precisely the Presidential campaign that energized these local LP races in numerous parts of the country. The two are complementary, not competitive.

Moreover, the LP is the biggest third party for another important reason: it managed, by heroic effort, to get on the ballot in 32 states, more than any other lesser party—more even than Eugene McCarthy who was a one-man campaign rather than a spokesmen for a party).

Even more remarkable than the vote totals was the campaign itself—a campaign that should go down in song and story. In the first place, this campaign was unadulterated, consistent, uncompromising libertarianism—the most explicitly libertarian campaign in over a century and perhaps in all of history. The hard-core libertarian message was beamed to over 70 million Americans: in tireless personal campaigning for fifteen solid months by Roger MacBride, crisscrossing the country many times: in numerous objective or favorable articles in the local press throughout the land, and in numerous magazines and columns: and in several excellent, professionally done national TV spots. Roger MacBride’s lucid and hard-hitting campaign book, A New Dawn for America, was distributed to tens of thousands; Young Libertarian Alliance chapters were established on approximately 200 college campuses: and many excellent position papers, as well as the great 1976 LP platform, were distributed far and wide. Here we can only mention a few of the outstanding position papers: by Joe Stromberg on foreign policy; by Roy Childs on Libertarianism; by Ralph Raico on civil liberties and on gay rights; by Walter Grinder on government and business.

Without engaging in invidious comparisons or attempting to enumerate all the people worthy of commendation, I cannot refrain from handing out thanks and accolades to a few of the outstanding people who made this campaign the great event that it was. First, of course, to Roger MacBride, whose tireless dedication and superhuman energy in carrying out a continuous fifteen-month campaign was truly a wonder. Roger MacBride has now been established as our libertarian leader in the political arena, our paladin of liberty. To Ed Crane, whose phenomenal organizing of the LP campaign as national chairman was an indispensable key to its success. To Bob Meier, field organizer extraordinaire, who was the spark plug in putting us on the state ballots. To Bill Evers, whose LP News was the model for all other state newsletters to follow, and who was research director and convention organizer for the campaign. To Ralph Raico, who edited the position papers, and who organized the Scholars for MacBride. To youth leader Tom Palmer, who built up the 200 campus chapters of the YLA. To Linda Webb, scheduler, organizer, and administrative assistant extraordinaire. And, not the least, to state party leaders throughout the country, and to the roving bands of heroic petition-gatherers.

Not the least of the accomplishments of the MacBride campaign was to fulfill the Lib. Forum prediction of fifteen months ago—the eradication of the left sectarian forces within the libertarian movement: both the anti-party cliques outside the LP and the left opposition from within. As the LP campaign grew and burgeoned as its success became increasingly evident, the left sectarians within the party faded away into well-deserved oblivion, while the outside anti-party cliques saw their influence disappearing within the libertarian movement. The left sectarians are finished, kaput, they have missed the bus; they have managed to sweep themselves into the dustbin of history.

As the campaign proceeded, the “real people” poured into the campaign and the left sectarians faded out; and as they faded, their disgruntled thrashings about became increasingly shrill and ugly. In a sense, the only thing that left sectarians can ever accomplish in the real world is to hurl accusations of “immorality” at everyone else, and to wrap the cloak of “morality” around themselves as the parade passes them by. And that is what they did more and more; as the campaign progressed, the smears and calumny, the personal vilification by the sectarians grew ever louder and more fanatical in pitch. But these rabid personal smears merely turned more libertarians off, and increased and made permanent their isolation. The left sectarians are finished.

In a sense, the conquest over the left sectarians was inevitable. The earliest phase of any radical ideological movement is always that of small, local discussion groups, brought together by personal affinity—the “circles”. Circles are indispensable in this early phase; but as a movement grows in quantity, quality, and effectiveness, those who wish to put their ideals into practice—to change the real world in the direction of the ideal—begin to organize effectively across the country. It is this national, effective, coherent organization that the MacBride campaign determined to bring to the Libertarian Party, and it has succeeded. For those stuck in the affinity group—circle phase, resistance is inevitable, but in any healthy movement, it will be overcome. And it has.

At the root of the dissension between the left sectarians (any sectarians in any movement, not just the LP) and what we might call the “centrist” or “party building” approach, is a fundamental and basic difference in goals. What the centrists want, simply, is victory, the triumph of liberty in American political life. Refining the pure libertarian principles is great and indispensable; but it is not enough. For precisely because of the beauty and nobility of the libertarian goal, the centrists burn to bring about the victory of liberty in the real world as rapidly as humanly possible. That is our (the centrists’) strategic goal. The left sectarians, however, are not interested in victory (whether they think it is hopeless or for some other reason); rather, they are interested in bearing moral witness to their own alleged “purity”, and to bear equivalent witness in denouncing everyone else for their alleged “immorality”. To put it bluntly, the left sectarians get their kicks out of boasting of their own moral superiority to all others; whereas the centrists get theirs by working to achieve victory as rapidly as possible in the real world. It is no wonder that the sectarians are strategically doomed, and that sectarian dominance would drag down the libertarian (or any other) cause to permanent defeat and despair. Breaking out of the circle mentality and into a professionally run national campaign, then, was the way to slough off the incubus of sectarianism, and that is precisely what happened.

With the left sectarians routed, what are the prospects of the Libertarian Party in the coming historical period? They are excellent. The LP is here: we have a strong national base, in public attention, in media coverage, in party strength, and in a growing and optimistic party cadre. We can all look forward happily to strength, growth, and influence in the coming years. But the movement strategist’s work is never done, and a new menace now looms as a possible threat to libertarian success. This is the threat of that opposing deviation from correct centrist policy that has aptly been called “right opportunism.” Again, just as sectarianism was an inevitable product of the early “circle mentality”, so right opportunism is an inevitable product of the growing success of an ideological movement. When a movement is small and unknown, there is no room for an opportunist to play in, and so it is rare for this heresy to be a problem at that beginning stage. It is growing success that breeds the opportunist, the person who, in search of quick short-run gains, is willing to hide or scrap basic libertarian principle, the very libertarian goal itself, that is the heart, the glory, and the meaning of the libertarian movement (or whatever is the equivalent for any other ideological movement.)

Robert Poole’s Reason editorial, aptly criticized by Tom Palmer in these pages, might well be the opening gun of a new opportunist campaign that looms ahead. The idea is to “get elected”, not to get elected as libertarians. Predictably, there will be determined attempts by right-opportunists at next July’s LP convention to water down the hard-core 1976 platform, to make it allegedly palatable for diffuse blocs of voters. The watchword of opportunists ready to jettison our libertarian goals is “gradualism”, a gradual or “Fabian” approach to liberty. First, what the opportunists forget is that Fabianism worked fine when going with the State, by infiltrating the political parties and the bureaucracies and giving them a discreet push in the direction in which they wanted to go anyway; toward statism. A movement for liberty is necessarily anti-State, and therefore must uphold the basic principles loud and clear. Gradual whittling away of the State will probably have to be accepted in practice, for want of any other course; but it must never be embraced as part of libertarian principle, which must always be radical and uncompromising. For, as the great libertarian abolitionist of slavery William Lloyd Garrison brilliantly warned: “Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.” We must always be radical in theory, accept gradual advances grudgingly, and always press on as rapidly as possible toward ultimate victory. But that cannot and will not be done unless that ultimate goal is always held aloft by libertarians loud and clear. Otherwise, opportunism leads to surrender, and the opportunist course becomes just as fully self-defeating as the sectarian. For, each in his different way—the sectarian and the opportunist—abandons what should be the great and overriding goal of libertarian victory. Each abandons part of this vital concept: the sectarian abandons victory while the opportunist scraps libertarianism.

Garrison set the difference in wise words which cannot be overstressed: “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end (in fact, abolition would be sudden.) We have never said that slavery would lie overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”

Ironically enough, opportunism is often self-defeating even for making short-run gains—the great goal of the opportunist. For, even in the Realpolitik terms explicitly invoked by Mr. Poole, why in the world should a “gradual” Libertarian Party receive any media attention, corral any votes, or have any political influence? For a gradual party (e.g. cut taxes by 3%, weaken a few regulations, limit the future growth of government) will sound very much—to myself, let alone to the media or the public—as simply Reaganite Republicanism, and if that is the case, why in blazes should anyone vote for the new, untried LP when they could vote Reaganite Republican to begin with? In short, an LP that adopts the counsels of our right-wing opportunists will simply become an appendage of right-wing Republicanism, and fade rapidly into the woodwork. Neither the media nor the public nor the politicians will or should express any interest in a tiny appendage of the conservative movement or of Reagan Republicanism. Hence, even in Realpolitik terms, let alone on the basis of moral principle, opportunism is a counsel of rapid, cataclysmic defeat.

Continuing in Realpolitik terms, it is well-known in the business world that a new firm or brand must strive to differentiate its product from existing brands, to offer something new, different, and exciting. Consistent libertarianism, as offered so far by the LP, offers precisely this sort of new and exciting creed, different from all others, “extreme right” on some issues, “extreme left” on others, and yet consistent. Hence, the interest of media, intellectuals, and voters. Opportunism is not only thoroughly destructive of moral principle, it also fails, in our context, even to be successful as opportunism, that is, it fails even on the opportunists’ own terms. We already have an example in the brief history of the Libertarian Party. The FLP Tuccille campaign for governor of New York in 1974 followed, with high hopes, after the stunningly successful Youngstein campaign for mayor of New York City in 1973. Yet the Tuccille campaign got only 2,000 more votes statewide than Youngstein had gained the previous year within New York City. Surely, one basic reason was, that in contrast to the “hard-core” libertarian Youngstein campaign, the Tuccille campaign, by accident rather than design, came across as opportunist. That is, its major focus was that “taxes should be cut.” Since both major candidates also talked vaguely about the need for some sort of tax cut, the FLP failed to become significantly more libertarian that year than the two major parties—and that in a time of growing hostility to crippling taxation. Tins should serve as a lesson to all future LP campaigns, and to any who wish to take us down the debilitating road to opportunism.

Fortunately, we have at hand a superb means—a means at once highly principled and cannily strategic—to crush the looming menace of opportunism in the bud. For, in the context of the current libertarian movement, opportunism will inevitably be very close to conservatism. It will be creeping—or galloping-Reaganism. Therefore, the major strategic task of the Libertarian Party in the coming period is to distinguish ourselves, sharply and continually, day after day, from conservatism. We must set ourselves clearly and sharply against conservatism, rather than build any bridges toward it. We must hammer away, day after day, at the theocracy, the hostility to all civil liberties,—from free speech to personal morals,—the militarism, and the war-mongering of the conservative movement. This will become particularly important in the coming years, as we can expect a disintegration of the Republican Party and therefore a possible tendency of Reaganites to join the LP ranks. This call—to distinguish ourselves clearly and always from conservatism—is not only the strategic requisite for putting the quietus to right-wing opportunism, it is also a matter of high libertarian principle. For, as the Lib. Forum has reiterated again and again, war and militarism—the pet principles of the conservative movement—are in fact the major menace to liberty in today’s world. Combatting conservatism is therefore a requirement of principle and of strategy alike.

Happily, the LP leadership have clearly understood this need, as witness the blistering attacks on Reagan and Rusher during this campaign by Ed Crane and Bill Evers, and by MacBride’s staunch and unquestioning adherence to such hard-core libertarian (and anti-conservative) planks as: absolute civil liberties (including freedom to sell and use heroin); the abolition of the FBI and CIA; and an uncompromising non-interventionist foreign policy.

In this connection, there is a potential long-run problem which is not at all important in the near future, but which might arise in later years as the LP gains in strength. Namely, that people who are not just opportunists but are simply and explicitly non-libertarians (whether conservatives, Ku Kluxers, leftists, or just plain power-seekers) may try to join the LP in order to capture the organization for their ends. Requirements for joining state LPs are lax to the point of non-existence. And, of course, any party that has permanent ballot status is legally required to have totally open registration, and hence open voting in party primaries. I don’t have any clear solution to this; but it is a problem that may eventually require thought and study within the LP.

Interestingly enough, we have a clear demonstration, this fall, of the opportunist versus the radical strategies to a vital libertarian issue: taxes—and in this case totally outside of the LP framework. On the one hand, we have the gradualist and opportunist approach of the National Tax Limitation Committee (Rickenbacker-Friedman-Manion.) Fresh from their defeat in California, the well-financed NTLC worked long and hard for Proposal C in Michigan, bolstered by the determined stumping of Michigan by Milton Friedman. The proposal lost by 1.8 million to 1.4 million votes. What is this tax limitation proposal, for which we are all asked to work hard and contribute our dollars? Merely, to limit state taxes to their current share of the total personal income in the state—in the case of Michigan, 8.3%. Note, this does not mean that state taxes will remain fixed, let alone—God save the mark!—be cut! No, it is simply to allow state taxes to rise only in the same proportion as the total income of the public. Furthermore, to add to the almost ludicrous gradualism of this proposal, local taxes are to have no such limit; this is supposed to emphasize the sobriety and lack of radicalism of the proposal.

Let us see the grave problems of the NTLC approach. In the first place, who in blazes would go the barricades for 8.3%? Certainly, not I; I wouldn’t walk across the street, much less devote time, energy, and money, for the holy cause of 8.3%. In short, who cares? Secondly, the economic jargon (“personal income”, etc.) is too complex for the average voter to understand. After casting one’s eye over the complex and impenetrable jargon of the ballot proposal, the understandable voter response is either indifference or to vote No on general principles. Thirdly, the exemption of local taxation from the limit allows the liberal opponents to warn that local taxes would increase as a result of the measure—a plausible enough objection to ensure that tax opponents will be split on the measure. Reaganite opportunism to the hilt. Proposal C lost, and it deserves to lose, as a similar effort lost in Reagan’s California, and as it should lose until anti-tax forces come up with a limit that possesses teeth and excitement.

Far better, though not good enough, was the Colorado proposal, which also lost, sponsored by the Birchers, for an absolute current limit on all new taxes within the state at any level, state or local, except those voted by the public themselves in a referendum. This is far better surely, but still hardly good enough. What happened to the good old cause of tax cuts? Even the Bircher proposal, let alone the Friedmanite, allows for the current level of taxes, and thereby implicitly agrees that the current level is proper and legitimate. What happened to the old Liberty Amendment, for the outright repeal of the federal income tax? Or how about proposals for repeal of other existing taxes? Sure, they would lose at first, at the polls, but these other piddling and pusillanimous measures lost too; and at least a fight for more radical measures would serve to raise libertarian consciousness among the public, and build the libertarian and anti-tax movements for the future. At the most, the Friedmanite, etc. proposals build only for weak limits on future tax increases; they do nothing to reduce the State and whittle it away. Quite the contrary.

In contrast, let us look at a truly radical anti-tax protest this fall, led by libertarian activists. In New Jersey, after several years of determined resistance by libertarians and taxpayer groups, Democratic Governor Brendan Byrne succeeded in passing a state income tax. On September 18, a mighty mass rally, organized by long-time libertarian activist Ralph Fucetola III and by determined taxpayer groups, convened at Trenton to demand repeal of the income tax. The angry crowd, which garnered large-scale publicity throughout the state, totalled from 10 to 20,000; the crowd arrived in 90 buses and hundreds of private cars from all parts of the state. Furthermore, the organized taxpayers had already gathered 570.000 signatures of New Jerseyites for immediate repeal of the tax. Organizing around this clear-cut, radical, and libertarian central demand, the protesters determined to build an independent taxpayer political movement in New Jersey, and to picket the homes and businesses of legislators who voted for the tax. Frightened mainstream politicians were reduced to pleading with the organizers to allow them to speak at and endorse the rally. At the end of the rally, hundreds of protesters drove to Governor Byrne’s mansion in Princeton, where a crate of used tea bags was deposited (echoes of the anti-tax Boston Tea Party), and a call was made for Byrne’s immediate resignation.

Furthermore, in another echo of the American Revolution, effigies of Governor Byrne and pro-tax Assemblyman Littell were hung from a nearby tree. Signs such as “Brendan BURN” proliferated. In his speech at the rally, Fucetola took the occasion to escalate the demands: proposing that people refuse to pay November’s property tax bill, boycott the state lottery, do Christmas shopping out of state to avoid the state sales tax, join a general New Jersey strike on Dec. 15, and get on juries in order to acquit tax rebels. In addition to his more radical suggestions, Fucetola also called for a freeze on all local property taxes, and for no further taxes in the state without approval at a public referendum.

Already, the result of the anti-income tax protest was to make Governor Byrne so universally unpopular throughout New Jersey that Jimmy Carter cancelled his scheduled pre-election appearance with the Governor; which did not keep Carter from losing New Jersey by a substantial margin.

The anti-tax politics is an example of successful coalition politics built around a clear-cut central libertarian goal; it was a coalition of approximately 45 taxpayer and citizen groups, including the Federation of New Jersey Taxpayers, the National Taxpayers Union, and the Tax Revolt Association; Fucetola, in addition to being a leader of the Taxpayer Federation, is also a member of the Libertarian Party.

Note the contrast between the strategy and tactics of Friedman and Fucetola. In a sense, both are “gradualist”; since this was a coalition movement and not an explicitly libertarian conclave, Fucetola could scarcely have gotten up at the rally and called for abolition of all taxes. But Friedman’s gradualism was so piddling as to concede both the present level of taxation and even higher taxes in future; also Friedman’s movement was top-down, relying on a few prestigious names. Fucetola’s “gradualism” was radical and dramatic, calling for repeal, escalating demands, and using repeal as a central focus for keeping up and escalating pressure upon the state. And the protest was genuinely grassroots, from below, and directed against the political establishment. It is all too clear, moreover, that while the New Jersey movement is there to stay and grow in the future, the NTLC will now leave no movement behind in Michigan as they try to find some other state where they can make an impact.

The lesson for libertarians is clear: even on such issues as state and local taxation, where one might think we are close to Reaganite conservatism, conservatism must be forsworn. Even on local economic issues, conservatism is simply a more moderate branch of the statist Establishment. Conservatism is everywhere statist in principle, strategy, and tactics; libertarianism is radical and anti-statist. And never the twain shall meet.

Kuhn’s Paradigms

By Leonard P. Liggio

For more than a dozen years, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970) has been calling forth discussions and analyses. Initial response among a few libertarian scholars who saw the significance of Kuhn’s threats, such as the late F. A. Harper, were very positive. Kuhn’s work seemed to Dr. Harper to expand upon the analysis made by other 20th century thinkers; for example, he would quote the earlier writings of Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization: “But civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it, a tone of mind which will gradually win influence over the collective one, and in the end determine its character. It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals . . . A new public opinion must be created privately and unobtrusively. The existing one is maintained by the press, by propaganda, by organization, and by financial and other influences which are at its disposal.” Dr. Harper recognized that in the crisis emerging in America and the world, libertarian theory was a prime candidate to replace the dominant political and economic thought. However, the tasks necessary to build the foundations for a center (the Institute for Humane Studies) to explore such matters did not permit him to pursue in a more developed manner the implications of scientific revolutions for libertarian theory. The growth of libertarianism and the explosion of the contemporary crisis make the topic one that libertarians should address.

For that purpose. I thought that a non-original article presenting a summary view of Kuhn’s thesis might stimulate further articles and create an ongoing consideration of the topic and its relevance. I suspect that many libertarians could provide some implications of this thesis for their own areas or from their own consideration of the issues. Although I am not yet clear on the suitable analogy between scientific revolutions and libertarian theory, I imagine that philosophers and scientists have had the most opportunity to consider the Kuhn thesis and I hope that they will write to the broader intellectual audience rather than the specialist. My own philosophical training with John J. Toohey (he was almost ninety years old when I studied with him) emphasized common sense and ordinary language so that the general educated person could understand it.

Kuhn emphasized the role of the Paradigm which provides a model from which springs a particular coherent tradition of scientific research. A dominant paradigm will provide a consensus, because with the same model, research will not lead to open disagreement over fundamental questions. Paradigms define legitimate problems and methods of research because to become dominant it must be able to attract a lasting group of adherents from competing systems of thought or a previous paradigm, and it must be open-ended so that scholars may undertake to solve new problems. Although once the paradigm becomes established it is taken for granted, its necessary open-endedness leaves numbers of problems for solution. However, these problem solving activities create a more precise paradigm. Thus, the problems which the researchers face are: determination of significant fact, matching facts with theory, and explanation of the more precise theory.

However, a paradigm isolates those involved in research in a field from important problems not conceptualized by the paradigm. As problems increasingly become evident which cannot be solved by the paradigm, a crisis emerges which can force scholars to search for a new explanation. At times, the breakdown of the previous paradigm forces recognition on the people involved; or the crisis may merely blur the paradigm. Scholars may be able to ignore the crisis or set it aside for the future. But the crisis in itself will not lead to replacement of an established paradigm with a new one; the new paradigm must be there, must be articulated, so that it can be available to be selected after comparison with the old paradigm and any other competing candidates. The acceptance of a new paradigm occurs after conflict. The conflict of the old paradigm with the new ones and of the competing ones against each other is an important part of the development of new scientific thought. During the period of crisis there is an appearance of undefined and random searching, and the breakdown may be magnified, and the crisis made more striking. In the crisis, individuals become estranged from the established system and behave more and more eccentrically in terms of the established system, or else they leave the system entirely. Those who leave the system highlight the crisis and evidence its intensity. Those who opt to fight within the system face polarization and conflict, as persuasion and punishment are applied to maintain the existing system.

Kuhn seems to believe that the role of logical positivism has been to short-circuit the intellectual mechanism which signals the existence of crisis in the scientific world. It appears to involve too little theory and limits research on the precedents of past practice. The meaning of science is limited in the extreme to the single experiment. Thus, there is no pushing against scientific frontiers and no development. Without surprises or crisis there is no mechanism to tell scholars that fundamental change is occurring. This may help us explain the nature of the current crisis: it seems evident to everyone except the specialists in each field because, denying that they are operating on the basis of a theory, they deny the existence of the dominant paradigm, and they do not conceive of the crisis as anything more than a lack of information. It is possible that the contemporary crisis may become much more intense and the ordinary transference of allegiances within a profession from an old paradigm to a new one may be blocked by the refusal of scientists to acknowledge that they are working on the basis (if only implicitly) of a theory.

But one or more persons deeply immersed in the crisis itself will come up with a new way of viewing the data; the legitimacy of the established paradigm is challenged and new meanings are given to the established concepts. Kuhn notes that this usually occurs to someone when he first encounters the field as a profession or to someone who does not become caught up in the accepted ways of defining problems, i.e. the system of professional game playing with the professional rewards and punishments involved. During a crisis, scholars begin doing research as though the previous dominant theory or paradigm was not controlling. Individual scholars begin to change their world view; they adopt new ways of looking at things which they had previously looked at with the old ways. They begin to examine new things. As the change of world view expands, the scholar who is developing the new paradigm must reeducate himself. The new world view is very much at odds with the previous world view and with the intellectual world he previously inhabited.

In view of what seems to me a very important insight about contemporary science — the effect of logical positivism short-circuiting the mechanism signalling the existence of a crisis (which means that to many scholars the current crisis is invisible) — Kuhn’s chapter on “The Invisibility of Revolutions” (pp. 136-43) is especially significant. If contemporary science is less equipped than previous scientific epochs (Kuhn does not even raise the question of the role of government control of scholarship as a locking-in mechanism) to recognize crises of theoretical frameworks, this intensifies a problem which Kuhn highlights the tendency of scholars not to view revolutions in scholarship or science as revolutions at all but as mere additions to knowledge. Kuhn explained why “revolutions have proved to be so nearly invisible.” Scientists and laymen take their conception of science from an “authoritative source that systematically disguises — partly for important functional reasons — the existence and significance of scientific revolutions. Only when the nature of that authority is recognized and analyzed can one hope to make historical examples fully effective.” Kuhn makes the very grave point that science operates on the model of theology: textbooks act as a source of authority. Textbooks “record the stable outcome of past revolutions and thus display the basis of the current normal-scientific tradition.”

Textbooks “have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produce them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field.” (Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated.” (Scientists are not, of course, the only group that tends to see its discipline’s past as developing linearly toward its present vantage. The temptation to write history backward is both omnipresent and perennial. But scientists are more affected by the temptation to rewrite history, partly because the results of scientific research show no obvious dependence upon the historical context of the inquiry, and partly because, except during crisis and revolution, the scientist’s contemporary position seems so secure. More historical detail, whether of a science’s present or of its past, or more responsibility to the historical details that are presented, could only give artificial stature to human idiosyncracy, error, and confusion. Why dignify what science’s best and most persistent efforts have made it possible to discard? The depreciation of historical fact is deeply, and probably functionally, ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, the same profession that places the highest of all values upon factual details of other sorts.”

This aspect of Kuhn’s discussion was especially striking to me as it paralleled my discussion of it regarding history. In an article in the New Individualist Review (volume 1, no. 3, November, 1961) on Herbert Butterfield, the Cambridge historian, I sought to introduce to a conservative audience an isolationist approach to international relations. Butterfield was strongly critical of “official history,” which would be a paradigm which had strong artificial supports so that its displacement would be a more complex scientific revolution. Contributing to the 1984 atmosphere of resistance to non-official ideas in history, Butterfield noted generalization and abridgement in the writing of history texts. I believe that the common source for Kuhn’s discussion and for my own was indeed the writings of Herbert Butterfield-as Kuhn refers to Butterfield’s Origins of Modern Science (1949). To quote from my earlier article: “Unlike mathematics which begins with the simplest things and proceeds in turn to the more complex, history starts with the most complex things, of broad generalizations, with the result that the mere reading of history, the mere process of accumulating more information in this field, does not necessarily give training to a mind that was initially diffuse. Rather, it initiates all kinds of generalizations, formulas, nicknames, and analogies which answer to men’s wishful thinking; and these come into currency without having to be submitted to any very methodical kind of test. Wiese broad generalizations are the result of the abridgment of history . . . . Butterfield does not think that it is a coincidence that this abridgment has worked to the advantage of official history, since the total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce, a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present — all demonstrating throughout the ages the working of an obvious principle of progress. Abridgment tends to make our present political system or our country an absolute and imparts an impression of inevitability of the existing system or of a war, since it neglects the alternatives which exist at each point and which indicate the relativity of the existing political system or the foreign policy of our country.”

Not only does abridgment eliminate important parts of the historical reality (so far as known to the historian) but an implicit unilinear model of progression is introduced. Butterfield dealt with this issue first in his early work. The Whig Interpretation of History. That work showed how historians had written history as a kind of necessary progression toward increased freedom through the English parliamentary system. One of the consequences of that historical writing’s dominance was that classical liberals believed that, having discovered the truth about economics, it was only a matter of time through the process of education and democracy before society would create the free society: it was an historical necessity. Of course, the abridgment of history involved in the writing of such books meant that the reality of the conflicts which brought additions to freedom and the lost opportunities for even more freedom, among other things, was completely neglected. Worse, the revolutions which are important in history are neglected or misunderstood. The political revolutions with their violence force themselves upon the history textbook. But, the complexities of intellectual and industrial revolutions, the really important changes for mankind, remain undescribed, and for the most part, unexplored. The greatness of the potentials and the extent that they yet are lost both for the reader of history texts and for the historical scholar.

For science, according to Kuhn, “the result is a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear or cumulative, a tendency that even affects scientists looking back at their own research.” There is “a reconstruction of history that is regularly completed by post revolutionary science texts. But in that completion more is involved than a multiplication of the historical misconstructions illustrated above. Those misconstructions render revolutions invisible;-the arrangement of the still visible material in science texts implies a process that, if it existed, would deny revolutions a function.”

Scientists may create a crisis but not be prepared to resolve it. Kuhn notes that “scientific training is not well designed to produce the man who will easily discover a fresh approach.” The question to be posed: Is the rigidity which is described merely existent among the individual members of the scientific community and locked-in? Kuhn quotes Max Planck’s Scientific Autobiography: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” There is a resolution of the crisis and of the revolution it causes when a theory is conceived in the mind of one individual or a few individuals. “It is they who learn to see science and the world differently, and their ability to make the transition is facilitated by two circumstances that are not common to most other members of their profession. Invariably their attention had been intensely concentrated upon the crisis-provoking problems; usually, in addition, they are men so young or so new to the crisis-ridden field that practice had committed them less deeply than most of their contemporaries to the world view and rules determined by the old paradigm.”

Scientists, use of a single set of standards increase the efficiency of scientists, but it is a set judged only by members of the profession. Ultimately, poets, musicians and artists are more concerned with public approbation than scientists. In music, art and literature, original and classic works are the basis of education. In history, philosophy and social sciences, increased use is made of textbooks but they also use original sources, classics, and conflicting interpretations so that there is a certain awareness of competing solutions to problems. But, in science there is a very heavy reliance on textbooks: “Until the very last stages in the education of a scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that mad them possible.”

Scientific education may be such as to drastically distort the perception of the past: it proposes a straight line of progress. While one remains in the field there are no alternative theoretical frameworks permitted. Kuhn emphasized; “Inevitably, those remarks will suggest that the member of a mature scientific community is, like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984, the victim of a history rewritten by the powers that be. Furthermore, that suggestion is not altogether inappropriate. There are losses as well as gains in scientific revolutions, and scientists tend to be peculiarly blind to the former.”

The important issue of the relationship of scientific revolutions to fields other than the pure sciences raises issues relating to the nature of each discipline. Kuhn’s suggestive discussion on this deserves lengthy quotation: “No creative school recognizes a category of work that is, on the one hand, a creative success, but is not, on the other, an addition to the collective achievement of the group. If we doubt, as many do, that non-scientific fields make progress, that cannot be because individual schools make none. RATHER, IT MUST BE BECAUSE THERE ARE ALWAYS COMPETING SCHOOLS, EACH OF WHICH CONSTANTLY QUESTIONS THE VERY FOUNDATIONS OF THE OTHERS. The man who argues that philosophy, for example, had made no progress emphasizes that there are still Aristotelians, not that Aristetalianism has failed to progress . . . during periods of revolution when the fundamental tenets of a field are once more at issue, doubts are repeatedly expressed about the very possibility of continued progress if one or another of the opposed paradigms is adopted . . . . Scientific progress is not different in kind from progress in other fields, but the absence at most times of competing schools that question each other’s aims and standards makes the progress of a normal-scientific community far easier to see.” (pp. 162-63)

Libertarians must begin to precisely relate Kuhn’s insights to the paradigms which they propose to substitute for the dominant theories. It is a difficult task, but it can be done if step-by-step analyses are undertaken.

*This essay does not deal with certain epistemological implications of Kuhn’s work.

Toward a Libertarian Movement

Reason editor Robert Poole recently propounded a view of societal change (“Libertarian Realpolitik”, Reason, August 1976) which might be classified as the “Infinite Series of Small steps Toward Freedom” viewpoint. However, using the set of definitions originated and popularized by one of history’s greatest tacticians and social change theorists. V. I. Lenin, this view should be characterized as “Right Wing opportunism.”

While clearly no libertarian (Lenin was about as far from libertarianism as one could get, in fact) Lenin nevertheless conceived and propounded a theory of societal change which can only be regarded as brilliant. His views are cogently presented in “Left-Wing Communism An Infantile Disorder.” a tract written to clarify his position on matters of tactics and strategy and to steer the international Bolshevik movement toward the attainment of power. The ends of his Bolshevik party were clearly different from those of the Libertarian Party, yet the grand structure of means can be applied to the attainment of opposing ends. Lenin viewed the “victors” at any stage of a societal struggle as those who created the largest, most effective and highest quality movement. That is, those who ultimately succeeded were those who succeeded in bringing the highest number of influential people to their side, realizing of course, that the first factor (numbers) is difficult to define except as a “critical mass,” and the latter (quality) is essentially a subjective determination of those involved in the struggle.

While numerous Marxists would have simply sat back and waited for “the inevitable forces of history” to hand them their utopia on a silver platter. Lenin realized that no such thing would occur automatically. He was, of course, rationalizing this position to fit in with Marxist determinism, utilizing the lame excuse that it was the duty of the revolutionary to “midwife” for the birth of a revolution so as to “ease the pains” and thereby expedite the process. Lenin postulated three kinds of activism designed to change society, each having the same goals in mind but pursuing widely different means. Two of these, “Left-Sectarianism” and “Right-Opportunism,” were viewed as destructive of the ends to be attained, while his own position of “movement builder” (my designation) was viewed as the most efficacious for the attainment of revolutionary ends.

Left-Sectarianism, according to Lenin, is the view that no alliances, dialogues, etc. should ever be made with similarly inclined groups, as this would be a “compromise.” In their desire to remain purist this strategy would rule out any chance of ultimate success. An example of this viewpoint would be the libertarian who, when addressing a group of business people, rather than “sizing up” his audience and stating the case for liberty in as convincing a manner as possible, would, instead, declare that if you don’t want heroin in vending machines, you are an enemy of liberty and the hell with you. A Right-Opportunist, contrarily, would not mention the libertarian arguments for legalization of activities deemed worthy of restrictive legislation and would, instead, speak only to those issues on which he and the audience were in agreement, hoping to enlist their support for one project or another to roll back government. The most effective approach, I believe (following a “flexible” Leninist viewpoint), would run something as follows: government regulation of small business is bad: we should realize that government regulation of drug use is another manifestation of “Big Brotherism;” and if drug users and businesspeople wish to be free, they must adopt a policy of live and let live toward each other, etc.: thus going from specific cases to general principles and then applying these principles to areas which would at first have seemed absurd to those listening, giving empirical analyses of costs and benefits to back up the general principle enunciated by the speaker.

The problems inherent in Right-Opportunism and Left Sectarianism, the necessity for maintaining a proper balance between them and the maintenance of a proper means-end relationship, were questions to which Lenin frequently addressed himself. Libertarians would do well to address themselves to these vitally important issues as well. The problems inherent in Left-Sectarianism should be obvious, i.e., the ends are never attained due to the failure to attract adherents by convincing opponents (or those who are neutral) of the validity of libertarian views through a process of argumentation. The problems with the latter view are less obvious but equally pernicious. For if, as Mr. Poole suggests in his editorial, we take several of these small steps toward freedom, won’t we be freer? And, after all, isn’t that the goal of the libertarian qua libertarian? What is the error here, and why do I oppose it so?

If Mr. Poole were able to convince a local government to reduce taxes through application of “business like methods” to governmental action, or to decriminalize drug use (that is, to merely reduce the penalties and not abolish them), or to defuse a few regulatory agencies, or to withdraw a few troops from abroad, or to do any of the things on his short term agenda, each would seem to be laudable and worthy of praise as steps toward freedom. Yet what of long run goals? How do people tie these different steps together so as to establish a case for taking even more of these steps in the direction of liberty? Would it be simply because Mr. Poole would continue to pressure the state to do so? Surely, if Mr. Poole and company met with success of any kind he would immediately meet such concentrated opposition from entrenched parasitic interests (favored businesses and unions, bureaucrats, etc.) that his efforts would be themselves defused before they had any chance to advance further. An example of such failure is to be found in the voucher plans to move education toward the free market. Without extolling the efficacy of the free market and building up public support for “de-statizing” education, an attempt was made to introduce a limited form of competition in this field (somewhat analogous to Oscar Lange’s “market-socialism”). Immediately, teachers’ unions and bureaucrats led a successful counterattack which laid the voucher plan to rest permanently.

To reach our goal of liberty, we must establish in the “public mind” the validity of certain general rules. We must strive for acceptance of a theoretical super-structure which demonstrates that market mechanisms are not only preferable in one instance due to better administration by one gifted businessman, but that government botches everything because of the nature of government.

Recently, I conversed with a talented and intelligent economist who took a similar Right-Opportunist view as Mr. Poole. The economist was a libertarian (an anarch capitalist, in fact) and was arguing in front of a small group of persons that the efforts of the Libertarian Party were ultimately futile, and that the only viable alternative strategy for liberty is to demonstrate empirically that the state ruins whatever it touches. He stated that it was his goal to approach a “small Southern Board of Education” and apply for a grant to manage the schools on a “free market basis.” He was sure he and his co-entrepreneurs would run the schools so efficiently that they would then be awarded all of the contracts for public education in the surrounding areas, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the market (a non-sequitur, for being a private recipient of a state monopoly in no way demonstrates anything about the free market). Yet, assuming he was successful, how would the public tie this occurrence to other instances of government intervention without being presented a coherent body of theory or principles by an articulate and organized movement which would show this to be an instance of the application of a general principle?

If Mr. Poole pursues his strategy of “hiding” his libertarian principles, how will such a movement, capable of pointing out the general nature of state intervention, come into existence? Further, who would then seize the initiative and organize public opposition to the state and start the process of dismantling it? Many a critique of government intervention, both empirical (demonstrating specific cases of state mismanagement) and (presenting a theoretical framework for analysis of state coercion) has been penned, yet who is there to promote these views and organize opposition to the state? Will the “masses” automatically rally around the glorious banner of de-municipalizing sanitation services in Pittsburgh? Clearly they must be presented with a world view in which consistent ties between what in Mr. Poole’s strategy would be presented as isolated phenomena would be established, i.e., one which articulates general rules of human action.

Other criticisms which can be levelled against Mr. Poole’s Right-Opportunism include his views concerning the purpose of a (libertarian) political party. Mr. Poole states, “The purpose of a political party is to elect people to office. Those libertarians who find this unpalatable should leave parties to the politicians and start or support educational libertarian groups.” While I do not desire to question Mr. Poole’s ultimate libertarian ends, it must be pointed out that electing libertarians to office has a purpose (it is a means to an end) and, if it comes to be seen as an end in itself, will lead to the worst kind of opportunistic-power grabbing. While transitional programs are not being questioned here, I do maintain that one should not lose sight of, or stop enunciating, long term goals. The Libertarian Party platform is, in my view, one of the most dramatic and important projects undertaken by libertarians in recent years, for it is an attempt to apply the corpus of libertarian thought and theory to real world situations and come up with concrete policy conclusions. What long range impact would libertarians have if we were to dilute our policy aims and hide our ultimate goals?

Mr. Poole also states, after arguing for a gradualistic approach (repeal of only federal victimless crime laws, abolishing only some regulatory agencies, etc.), “Notice that the list does not include abolishing income taxes or welfare or the FDS — ideas whose time has yet to come, since people today cannot see how to do without these institutions. Until viable replacements can be researched, developed, and popularized, people’s needs and fears must be taken seriously if a candidate is serious about being elected.” Has Mr. Poole neglected the important point, enunciated as a major defense of the market by such a long line of libertarians, that the market provides a framework for the attainment of non-coercive ends and that the specific institutions which will arise to satisfy these demands cannot be predicted? One cannot “research, develop, and popularize” “viable replacements” to state institutions and then claim that this particular constellation of human relationships will be that adopted through the market.

In conclusion, I “attack this (Mr. Poole’s) approach as compromising or unprincipled” for a number of reasons. The points which Mr. Poole states we should keep in mind in no way compensate for the defects of his abandonment of principles (or at least of enunciating them publicly). The first point, “The purpose of a political party is to elect people to office..

“was attacked for the possibility of leading to opportunistic power-grabbing. The second, that “it is not compromising to face the necessity of evolutionary change and, therefore, to implement a long term plan a step at a time,” is a statement with which I am in general agreement but which in no way supports Mr. Poole’s particular viewpoint regarding tactics and strategy. The third, that “Libertarians are under no obligation to advertise their ultimate goals every time they make a public statement, so long as they don’t misrepresent or conceal their principles.

“is, to begin with, contradictory. Principles in this context presuppose goals and to enunciate your principles (that is, to not conceal them) in an understandable way is of necessity to advertise your goals. Further, it has been argued that this viewpoint in no way advances liberty, for this third point, if followed, would not lead to the most vital ingredient in any recipe for change in a libertarian direction, an articulate and organized libertarian movement.

Of course, all of the above should in no way be construed as a personal attack upon Mr. Poole (who has done a fine job editing Reason magazine, providing the libertarian movement with a forum for the exchange of ideas), nor as questioning his devotion to libertarian principles. Rather, my intense love of liberty and desire to see it realized one day lead to attack, with no quarter given, a strategy which I believe would lead to the emasculation of the libertarian movement and which would be its death sentence. Our promise is so great and our goal so noble that stepping on toes (non-coercively, of course!) doesn’t cause me a moment’s hesitation. For a more detailed discussion of these points, I refer the reader to the following works: The Intellectuals and Socialism reprinted in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics; Principles or Expediency in Toward Liberty: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises; and Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 56-59, by F. A. Hayek; Left-Wing. Communism: An Infantile Disorder and What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions Of Our Movement by V. I. Lenin: and historical works on Richard Cobden and John Bright, two of the world’s most radical and successful historical figures (leaders of the English radical-liberal free trade movement), particularly English Libertarians Battled War, Tariffs by Ralph Raico in LP NEWS issue 30, Jan.-Feb 1978.

* Mr. Palmer is head of the Young Libertarian Alliance.

Health and Liberty

Ivan Illich is a radical critic of modern bureaucratic statist society often described as a radical libertarian by critics within the liberal and left establishments. Yet he is still comparatively unknown among libertarians whose forebears were Tucker, Nock, Mises and Rand. The reason may be that Illich’s credentials do not seem promising to such libertarians: he is a Catholic priest, albeit not in the good graces of Rome: he is a Middle European critic of American materialist society; he rarely indicates any specialized knowledge in economics; he has been a missionary educator in Latin America; and as a sociologist and Christian he tends to see man holistically rather than as producer, consumer, owner, worker or partial actor. He does not indicate in his writings familiarity with the Old Right, objectivism or Austrian economics.

Yet Illich is often identified by his critics as one who “attacks even modest liberal strategies for change, such as national health insurance. . . .and nowhere does he argue for a major redistribution of resources or public control of the process of industrialization”. Illich is rightly accused of rejecting “political and economic solutions in favor of a sterile (sic!) individualism. These are the politics of life style and the economics of Milton Friedman”!

The same critic, reviewing Medical Nemesis in the NY Times, calls Illich the leading Luddite of the 20th century. Another critic, writing in the Nation, after echoing the Luddite theme, pinpoints the real evil of Illich: “it is the ‘recuperation of personal responsibility for health care’ — not society, not an equitable system, but personal responsibility he advocates. A very attractive theory for the libertarians and laissez faire proponents, to whom all social engineering of any kind is anathema. At the extreme end, the Illich panacea attacks the concept of man as a social animal capable of, needful of, planning and organizing efforts for mutual help and support”.

Pretty horrible, but there is worse yet. This monstrous Friedmanite, Luddite, libertarian priest is “intensely religious” and “celebrates suffering”. Proof? Illich says: “Man’s consciously lived fragility, individuality and relatedness make the experience of pain, sickness and death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health”. Yes, Illich believes in coping with reality face to face in manly and womanly fashion, retaining self-awareness, and self control, asserting to the end one’s self-esteem and autonomy as a free, rational and responsible human being.

In Medical Nemesis Illich argues that modern medical practice with its enormous investment in technology has reached a stage at which it becomes itself a menace to human health, a process he calls iatrogenesis; he denounces the imperialism of the medical monopolists in constantly medicalizing all sorts of social, personal and cultural problems with a consequent reduction of individuals to a new kind of dependency, a serfdom based on the control of one’s health by the medical lords. Finally, he points the way to liberation through destruction of the monopoly by abolishing state licensing, and personal reassertion of control of one’s health, personal autonomy over one’s body and mind, through the practice of self care.

Illich’s works are polemical, provocative, disturbing; they raise as many questions as they answer; they compel the reader to demand more clarity than is available: his style reminds one of Proudhon’s, often paradoxical, and tending to give special nuances to commonplace terminology. Illich challenges his readers to step aside and outside the normal intellectual channels. If you like mental exercise, read this book.

(J.R.P)

Metric Mania

One of the biggest rip-offs now in the making is the planned forced changeover to the metric system being engineered by a small group of elitists despite a century of opposition from Congress and the American public. If Congress goes along with their plans, every American will have to foot the bill for the changeover and will have to put up with the confusion and frustration of a dual system for the rest of his lifetime.

The “metrication” of the United States is a bizarre undertaking. There is no popular demand for a change in our system and there is much latent opposition that should be apparent to even the least prescient politician.

The culprits in this wasteful economic and social drama are a few professional engineer and educator groups. They are supported by tool makers, scale manufacturers and others who would profit immensely from a forced changeover.

Under a barrage of propaganda, some Congressmen have weakened and Congress has agreed to a study and to fund an “educational” campaign.

Proponents assert that the inch-pound-gallon system which is functioning so well for us is obsolete and that we ought to substitute the European metric system. They claim metrics is simple and logical, being built on blocks of 10, 100 and 1,000. In contrast, they say, our present English system is characterized by complexity and illogic.

Almost every news item and feature article on the alleged desirability of the metric system mentions the “drive” or “fight” to establish the system in the United States, presumably against some formidable opposition. Yet, there is nothing to stop anyone from using the metric system. It is not illegal. Congress legalized the use of metric measurements in 1866. But in the 110 years since, no major U.S. manufacturer has seen fit to standardize on the metric system—knowing that Americans don’t want it.

Since the 1866 legalization, more than 100 bills have been introduced in Congress to force a mandatory metric system on the United States. All have failed to pass. In 1968 Congress authorized a study. Later, a bill was passed that stated it was national policy to “go metric.” The bill authorized spending $10 million a year for four years to publicize the metric system. In 1975 Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act which was signed by the President. Under the Act, a U.S. Metric Board has been set up to “coordinate” efforts to convert the United States to the metric system during the ensuing ten years.

The proponents try to create the impression that all businessmen are for the metric change. Actually, large segments of American industry are opposed.

If the metric system had the benefits that proponents claim for it, it would have been adopted by American industry and business long ago. But it hasn’t. And, it would be used widely in world commerce. It isn’t. Just look in the business pages of your daily paper. You will see that the world of commerce uses measures that by and large originated in England.

World petroleum production is measured in U.S. barrels of 31-½ gallons—not in any metric liters. World gold and silver production and sale are measured in troy ounces—not in grams or kilograms. Copper, lead, zinc and tin are sold by the pound. World trade in lumber is carried on in board feet. (A board foot is a cubic measure, one foot square by one inch thick). Trade in wheat, corn and soybeans is in bushels. A bushel of wheat is 60 pounds. Live cattle and hogs are traded by the hundredweight. Shell eggs are marketed by the dozen.

Most of the world’s wines and liquors such as Scotch whiskey, Irish whiskey, and American whiskey (bourbon), are bottled in fifths—a fifth of a gallon. Occasionally quarts (quarter of a gallon) are used. Most domestic liqueurs (cordials) are put up in fancy bottles that are labeled by federal law “¾ quart”—or 24 ounces.

Foreign wines and liquors generally come in odd sizes ranging from 24 to 30 ounces. The non-metric sizes dominate the smallest as well as the largest containers. A “split,” holding 6 ounces is marketed as well as the “magnum” holding two quarts, or 64 ounces. There’s even a non-metric “jeroboam” (used mainly for champagne) that holds a hefty 7/10th of a gallon, or 90 ounces.

There is not a single industry that would not be adversely affected by a mandatory change to go metric. The building industry, for example, is based on the inch, pound, and pounds-per-square-inch system. Architects, engineers, building contractors, and building inspectors must all talk the same language. They do now, in the present English system.

The auto industry, despite announcements that nuts and bolts may go metric, will remain on the old system. The wheels will remain 13,14 or 15 inch because the entire world uses these non-metric sizes. Thus, you can buy tires to fit your car anywhere in the world.

Most Americans did not pay attention to the early efforts to saddle the country with a metric system because they didn’t believe that Congress would seriously consider such a move. But now that Congress has given the green light (another indication of the deterioration of Congress), opposition is mounting.

In all the torrent of words issuing from the proponents, nothing has been told to the average American what benefits the changeover will bring him. The reason is, there are no benefits to the homemaker, home owner or other citizen. Only confusion. John Rozmital, head of the National Viewpoint Society, says the promised benefits of bigger foreign trade are promises only and like promises of politicians, will not be actualized. “The only apparent gainers will be the makers of measuring equipment.” he says.

In a satirical denunciation of the efforts to “metricate” us, the critics say that the government that brought us Vietnam, the gasoline shortage of 1973-74 and Watergate, is now about to foist on us another disaster—the confusing and frustrating dual measurement system.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME IX NO. 12

DECEMBER, 1976

US-ISSN0047-4517

Carter & Co. — Back at the Old Stand

Nearly eight years ago, the Lib. Forum was founded, at the beginning of the first Nixon administration. One of the reasons for our birth was to combat rightist illusions about Nixon which permeated parts of the then embryonic libertarian movement. Now eight years of Republican rule are ended, and we are left, during this transition period, to examine the political signs and portents to try to discern the outlines of the new Carter regime. Such augury is all the more tempting because of the meteoric rise from nowhere of Jimmy Carter. So that everyone has been wondering: who is J. C. and what will his administration be like?

Well, we can stop wondering. We can put our uncertainties to rest: Carter will neither be a wild-eyed McGovernite leftist nor a southern war-monger. No, we are back at the old familiar stand, at the corporate liberalism and the centrist Democracy of the Johnson, and to some extent the Kennedy, administrations. For the Carter Cabinet has been chosen, and they are old Johnson-Kennedy warhorses, with a bit of admixture of Georgia cronies representing the corporate elite of Atlanta. And there is another key force, which will become clear as this article unfolds.

First, let us consider the appointment of good grey Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State. Vance is the living symbol of the Eastern Establishment, of the tight-knit foreign policy old-boy network known to the members themselves as “The Community.” So “in” is Vance that the knowledgeable Marxist muckraker Alexander Cockburn predicted his accession to the post in the Village Voice last February, long before anyone knew that Carter would gain the nomination.

Cyrus Vance was Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Johnson Administration, and as such supported Johnson’s Vietnam War—as did Carter’s new Secretary of Defense, Dr. Harold Brown, who was Secretary of Air in the Johnson Administration, and as such whooped it up for the massive bombing of North Vietnam. Does this mean another “Democrat war” in the near future? Perhaps, but probably not. For Vance and his Establishment allies seemed to have learned the lessons of Vietnam, at least as they extend to the perils of fighting a counter-guerrilla war in the Third World. At this press conference, Brown conceded that the Vietnam War was “catastrophic”, and that he has learned that “we must become more cautious about such interventions.”

Fortunately for the prospects of peace, Vance, Brown, and the “Community” are generally committed to the pro-peace detente line with the Soviet Union, which means a rough continuation of the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy. Most important, both Vance and Brown have already expressed themselves strongly in favor of the SALT talks with Russia, which must mean an agreement to scrap or restrain the highly dangerous American development of the cruise missile. The danger of the cruise missile is that it would upset the current balance of “mutually assured destruction” in which both superpowers confine themselves to overwhelming second-nuclear-strike capability against each other: for the cruise missile might give the U.S. a first-strike capability that would scare the Russians silly and thereby heat up the cold war again in a provocative and menacing manner.

Already, Carter has been sending messages to Moscow to the effect that he is eager to conclude a SALT II agreement limiting strategic arms. Carter informed Brezhnev that he would move “aggressively to get the SALT talks off dead center”; moreover, in a meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Nov. 23, Carter expressed his view that it was the United States that has stalled the SALT talks since last winter, “because of a disagreement between the Defense and the State departments (presumably because of the hawk Rumsfield), and because of the fact that this was an election year.” Carter also told Brezhnev that he shared the latter’s desire for peace, nuclear disarmament, and a reduction in conventional arms. Cyrus Vance has also expressed his belief in a reduction in conventional arms and limits on military spending as a vice-chairman of the United Nations Association’s American panel on conventional arms control.

So the prospects for peace, and therefore for a more libertarian foreign policy, look good for the new Administration. The key issue to watch was whether or not the leader of the American pro-war hawks, James Schlesinger, would be selected as Secretary of Defense. A furious struggle took place between the pro-peace liberal Democrats, including Anthony Lake, head of the Carter foreign policy transition team, and the conservative and Social Democrat hawks, the latter headed by AFL-CIO bosses George Meany and Lane Kirkland. The struggle took place over Schlesinger as possible Secretary of Defense. Schlesinger is not only the leading hawk, advocate of the cruise missile, and of ever-higher military spending, but he even went so far as to organize a pressure group designed to heat up the Cold War: the Committee on the Present Danger, including Kirkland, David Packard, Nixon’s deputy secretary of defense, Henry Fowler, Johnson’s secretary of the treasury, Paul Nitze, Eugene V. Rostow, Nixon’s CIA Chief William Colby, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and Generals Ridgeway, Lemnitzer, Goodpaster, and Taylor. Schlesinger made a deep personal impression on Carter (something that is apparently quite easy to do), but, fortunately, the centrist pro-peace forces finally won the upper hand. The final defeat of the drive for Schlesinger was signalled by comments made by former Johnson Defense Secretary Clark Clifford after a meeting with Carter on Dec. 9. Clifford told the press that Carter would choose a defense secretary and cabinet officials who would join with Cyrus Vance (the first cabinet member chosen) to carry out a policy of detente with Soviet Russia. Said Clifford: “I think there will be a general understanding that the country will maintain the necessary strength, but within that framework we will find a way to live at peace and with some equanimity with the Soviet Union.”

It now looks as if Schlesinger will be energy czar in the new administration. This may have a two-fold use. In the first place, Schlesinger has a quasi-Friedmanite economics background (he began his career as professor of economics at the University of Virginia), and so he might serve to decontrol energy a bit, a field that sorely needs it. And secondly, as a member of the cabinet, he would have to keep his mouth shut about foreign and military policy, this robbing the hawks of their leading spokesman.

The other cabinet appointments all spell oat “corporate liberal”, as well as Johnson and Kennedy. Secretary of Treasury Werner Michael Blumenthal, president of Bendix Corp., is a leading corporate liberal, and advocate of large-scale government spending. Rep. Brock Adams (D., Wash.). Secretary of Transportation, is a virtual tool of the railroad cartellists, consistently favoring cartellizing regulation and federal subsidies to the railroads and airlines. Secretary of HEW is purported to be Joseph Califano, a Johnson liberal. Rumored to be the new head of the CIA is Ted Sorensen (Kennedy). The Secretary of Labor was supposed to be Professor John T. Dunlop, the “first, second and last” choice of Meany and Kirkland, whose economic “conservatism” simply adds up to being a virtual tool of the construction unions; however, severe leftist pressure by pro-affirmative-action quota blacks and feminists blocked the appointment, which went instead to labor economist F. Ray Marshall. The black female appointee for head of HUD, Patricia Harris, a veteran Johnson Democrat, touches all bases by being the law partner of Sargent Shriver (Kennedy).

Then, of course, there is the inevitable quota of Georgia cronies of the President-elect. The point to be made here is that these cronies are not peanut farmer-populists, but leaders of the substantial Atlanta corporate community. Perhaps the most amusing appointment is Carter’s old friend, the banker Bert Lance, as head of the Office of Management and Budget, for the press blandly reported that Carter is personally into Lance’s bank for a loan of no less than $5 million! If Tricky Dick had made such an appointment, the legitimate cry of “corruption!” would have filled the land: but for the heavily pro-Carter media, no comment seemed necessary. Then, as Attorney-General, Judge Griffin Bell, partner of the top Atlanta law firm of King and Spalding, and partner at that firm of Charles Kirbo, Carter’s oldest friend and chief counsellor. Why Bell’s middle-of-the-road record should be a source of shock and amazement to leftists and blacks is a bit of a wonder; what in the world did they expect? As it was, the blacks showed considerable clout in the Carter appointments: Mrs. Harris, Rep. Andrew Young at the UN, and the blocking of Dunlop. More clout indeed than Meany and the AFL-CIO, who lost out on Dunlop and Schlesinger.

Another corporate Atlanta appointment is the new Deputy Secretary of Defense. Charles Duncan, Jr., a multi-millionaire holder of Coca-Cola stock, and former President of that company. Coca-Cola, of course, is the leading corporation in Georgia.

But there is another crucial element which we have promised to unravel: an element that penetrates and stands behind such concepts as “corporate liberalism”, the “Eastern Establishment”, and “The Community.” And that leitmotif is none other than the Rockefeller political—economic empire, headed by David Rockefeller, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and financial leader of the Rockefeller empire just as brother Nelson has been its political capo. Let us examine the threads.

The leading arm of David Rockefeller is the powerful, semi-secret group, the Trilateral Commission, founded by Rockefeller in 1973 to propose and coordinate policies for Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. The Commission was launched under the benign auspices of the more secret Bilderbergers, which have been meeting annually for thirty years, and which is headed by Dutch Prince Bernhard of Lockheed bribe fame. The fascinating point about the Trilateral Commission is that this organization of big businessmen, academics, union leaders, and politicians from the three regions contains a relatively small number of people, a few dozen from each region. And yet, the following prominent leaders, and prospective leaders, of the coming Carter administration are members of this exclusive Trilateral Commission:

Jimmy Carter himself, selected in 1973 as a rising politician of promise.

Vice-President Mondale, hand-picked by Carter.

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

Secretary of Defense Harold Brown.

National Security Adviser Prof. Zbigniew Brzezinski, of Columbia University. Brzezinski was, until recently, the executive director of the Trilateral Commission.

Paul Warnke, former Johnson official, and a leading dove, mentioned for Secretary of Defense.

J. Paul Austin, head of Coca-Cola.

Robert Roosa, who had been mentioned for the Treasury post, partner of the powerful investment banking firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman, and executive director of the pro-collectivist Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning.

Anthony Lake, head of Carter’s foreign policy transition team.

Henry Owen, formerly of State, now of the liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution.

Richard Cooper, economist from Yale, mentioned for a high post at State for economic affairs.

In addition to the Trilateral Commission, another influential arm of the Rockefellers is the Rockefeller Foundation. And we find that Cryus Vance is head of the executive committee of the Rockefeller Foundation, while W. Michael Blumenthal is also a member of the executive committee, as is also Mrs. Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, who was Carter’s first choice for Secretary of Commerce.

To those interested in the old Rockefeller-Morgan rivalry that used to play such a large role in American politics, there is a fascinating embodiment of the Rockefeller-Morgan alliance (with the former taking the lead) which has been active since World War II. For it turns out that Cyrus Vance’s father died when he was very young, and Cyrus was virtually brought up by his father’s close friend and cousin, “Uncle” John W. Davis, Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1924. A touching story no doubt, but made more interesting by the fact that John Davis was the lawyer for J.P. Morgan & Co.

And so we have it: a Rockefeller administration with a few Georgia corporate allies. Foreign policy has been shifted from Nelson Rockefeller’s personal foreign affairs advisor, Henry Kissinger, to David Rockefeller’s Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. So we can cease our puzzlement about Jimmy Carter. Plains, schmains; the Republic is in familiar hands.

Nobel Prize for Friedman

The granting of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976 to Milton Friedman, head of the Chicago School, is a happy portent; for this is the second Nobel prize to a free-market economist in the last three years (a 1974 prize having gone to F.A. Hayek, the living Dean of the “Austrian School”.) Coming from a Swedish prize committee that had consistently given its awards to left-liberal Keynesians, this must mean that the recent general failure of intellectual nerve among the Keynesians has penetrated to the Swedish committee. For the Keynesians, arrogantly dominant in economics for the last forty years, have been increasingly rocked by a series of theoretical and empirical blows that have left them uncertain and confused. Surely, the Swedish committee is hedging its intellectual bets. The Keynesian paradigm is in disarray, and the time is becoming ripe for new paradigms to assert themselves. Among the competing paradigms, the Chicago and the Austrian schools are the free-market ones, with the latter much more rigorously so. The future course of the economics profession is brighter than it has been since the inauguration of the Keynesian Dark Age.

Kropotkin’s Ethics and the Public Good

by Williamson M. Evers

(Editor’s Note: Oddly enough, even though the social philosophy of Communist Anarchism and its most distinguished theoretician, Prince Peter Kropotkin, have been around for a century, there has been little or no systematic critique of Kropotkin’s ethical theory, from individualist anarchists, libertarians, or anyone else. Williamson Evers’ article is of vital importance in finally providing us with that long-missing critique.)

Prince Peter Kropotkin, the communist-anarchist theorist, sought to place his political and ethical doctrine on a scientific basis. Specifically, Kropotkin sought to develop an ethics that was in accord with the theory of evolution and with the findings of biological science. Most important for Kropotkin was freeing ethics from the sanction of religion.[1] But he also adhered to the methods of natural science in wanting to base ethical law on empirical data gained from observation of the life and activities of humans, rather than basing it, as he contended Kant had, solely on abstract reasoning.[2]

In Kropotkin’s pamphlet on Anarchist Morality, he applauded the empiricist philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment for rejecting religious interpretations of human action and adopting an account that made the quest of pleasure and avoidance of pain the source of human motivation.[3] Kropotkin joined with Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Chernischevsky in affirming that the desire for pleasure was the true motive of all human action.[4] Kropotkin not only maintained that in their conscious, deliberative acts, human beings always seek out pleasure; he saw this motive operating throughout the organic world. Recognition of this truth, Kropotkin argued, placed ethics on a materialistic, naturalistic basis. Furthermore, Kropotkin thought reliance on the findings of science and on evolutionary theory gave to ethics a philosophical certitude, in contrast to the uncertain intuitionalism on which transcendental philosophers like Kant relied.[6]

Yet it should be noted that in Kropotkin’s final work Ethics, he wrote that Kant was correct to reject utility as a basis for ethics. Like Kant, Kropotkin pointed to the elevating character of morality.[7] In fact, Kropotkin came to argue that the Russian revolution had gone astray primarily because “the lofty social ideal” of the early Russian revolutionaries had been superseded by “teachings of economic materialism emanating from Germany.”[8]

Kropotkin located the source of morality in a natural attribute of all animals; the instinct of sociability and mutual aid within a species. He described this instinct as having arisen via the transmission to subsequent generations of a habit developed in animals and humans to cope with the changing environment in which each species lived.[9] Biologists today would almost unanimously reject Kropotkin’s Lamarckian notion of the heritability of acquired characteristics. But the instinct of sociability and mutual aid can be explained in terms of standard Darwinian natural selection. According to this view, mutual aid behavior contributes to the survival of a set of genes.[10]

The origin of moral sentiments then, according to Kropotkin, lies in the appearance of the instinct of mutual aid. From then on, moral sentiments can be said to be the product of a moral sense that operates like the sense of smell or touch.[11] Mutual aid becomes a permanent instinct, always present and developing in social animals (especially in humans) in the course of their evolution.[12]

In Kropotkin’s pamphlet Anarchist Morality, he seemed to blend the instinct of mutual aid (aimed at preservation of the species) with the feeling of sympathy. He contended that Adam Smith had discovered the true origin of moral sentiments in sympathy.[13]

However, in Kropotkin’s Ethics, he modified his stance after rereading Kant. Kropotkin did not throw out sympathy as a support for morality. But sympathy no longer had the decisive role it had in the theories of the Scottish moralists and in Kropotkin’s own earlier moral writings. In Ethics, Kropotkin agreed with Kant’s demonstration that morality cannot be based solely on sympathy.[14]

Instead, Kropotkin distinguished between sympathy and mutual aid. He described sympathy and mutual aid as elements in the moral make-up of human beings. But he recognized that even for a person with a well-developed sympathetic character, there would arise situations in which his sympathies were at war with his other natural tendencies.[15]

In case such conflicts arose, what course was a moral person obligated to follow? Kropotkin said that obligation derives its force from the recognition by instinct and reason of the course to follow.[16] Whereas Kropotkin says that Kant leaves his readers completely ignorant of the origin of the sense of duty, Kropotkin is able to point to the mutual aid instinct as the driving force behind the sense of duty. As social life gets more and more complex, reason plays an ever more important role in moral decision-making. But, for Kropotkin, reason is always in harness with instinct.[17]

One of the dictates of reason is the human conception of justice.[18] A sense of justice only develops once the foundations have been laid by the institutionalization of mutual aid in human society and the internalization of mutual aid (via Lamarckian processes) in human nature. The basic core of the concept of justice, according to Kropotkin, is equal rights or equality of self-restraint.[19]

The sense of obligation to uphold justice stems not so much directly from instinct as from the rational recognition of necessity. Kropotkin adopts Hume’s position that there are certain rules of action which are absolutely necessary, so long as one wishes to live in society.[20] Equal rights are necessary to social life.

But Kropotkin means by justice not simply political and civic equity, but also economic equality. Hence he applauds the appearance of egalitarian thinkers and philosophers at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.[21]

Kropotkin never provides a full-blown defense of equality as a political goal. However we can discern some slight indications of four possible arguments about equality in Kropotkin’s writings.

First, Kropotkin undertakes a criticism of religious morality of aspiration. Such morality begins by postulating human equality and brotherhood. But either natural inequalities or original sin make full equality unattainable.[22] It is still morally imperative that one share with the poor. But it is not possible to carry this to its logical conclusion. Such morality of aspiration rejects the rule of moral reasoning that ought implies can. One is left with a duty to be charitable that is based on reasoning that is acknowledged to be unsatisfactory by the proponents of the duty. Kropotkin is correct in pointing out the “deadly contradiction” here.[23] But he has not thereby established the possibility or desirability of equality.

As part of this discussion of charity, Kropotkin is arguing that mercy and beneficence are not enough.[24] Although he does not spell it out, Kropotkin is correct in saying that these sentiments are not enough to establish the justice of economic equality.

In a societal situation, mercy, charity, and generosity are dependent in practice (and dependent logically as concepts) upon the assignment of rights and entitlements. Mercy, for example, can only be the relinquishment to somebody of something to which one is justly entitled. One needs a rationally-defensible theory of justice in entitlements before one can say that some case is a case in which mercy could be exercised.

Since Kropotkin does not wish to develop a theory of entitlements more elaborate than the (incompatible) notions that everyone is entitled to equal shares and that everyone is entitled to his needs, Kropotkin does not dwell on charity or compassion.24a (Proudhon, who unlike Kropotkin is an individualist-anarchist, stresses charity and generosity and shows that communism is essentially opposed to them.)[25] When Kropotkin criticizes Herbert Spencer, Kropotkin does so not on the basis that Spencer opposes charity (which in fact Spencer considers a second-order duty). Kropotkin contends that thefts by the powerful and economic exploitation by the capitalists have taken from the poor what is due to them. Like Spencer, Kropotkin sees the validity of separating that which is rightfully due to people from that which may be given them out of beneficence. They simply disagree about what is due.

In a second discussion of equality, Kropotkin contends that we ourselves would want to be expropriated, if in some case we took material goods that fell like manna from heaven and used such goods for material gain:

We ourselves should ask to be dispossessed, if. . .we seized upon an inheritance, did it fall from on high, to use it for the exploitation of others.[27]

The problem with Kropotkin’s account is that goods do not fall like manna from heaven.[28] Instead goods have a history of relationships to human beings. Goods do not arrive magically on the scene. Instead goods were originally taken under someone’s control somehow and then, perhaps, transferred to others. Whether justice was adhered to in the original acquisition and in the subsequent exchange is something that deserves critical examination. But one cannot pretend that the case of the falling of economic goods from on high is a usual case. Hence it seems extravagant to argue from a case in which goods have no history of attachments to human beings (the case of goods falling from on high) to the usual case in which goods have a long history of attachments to human beings.

The notion of windfall gains which may be what Kropotkin is appealing to, is as misleading as the idea of goods falling from heaven. If an apple falls out of a farmer’s tree, it is still the farmer’s. To take what may be Kropotkin’s example, if a gift (or an inheritance, which is a kind of gift) is unexpected, that does not make it illegitimate. If the giver was entitled, to the goods and then transferred them, there is no reason to be found in the gift’s unexpectedness for dispossessing the recipient.

Perhaps the decisive point for Kropotkin is that the goods are to be used for the exploitation of others. Since Kropotkin’s notion of exploitation seems to rely on a neo-Ricardian labor theory of value, any claims that exploitation is taking place depend on the very questionable validity of that value theory.[29]

In a third discussion of equality, Kropotkin argues that the goods and services that we enjoy today are the product both of past generations and of present-day collective labor. Hence, according to Kropotkin, it is wrong that individuals benefit personally from what are in fact not their own creations.[30]

But there is nothing immoral about benefitting personally from things which one does not create. If one benefits personally from something one has been given as a gift (or even benefits personally from something one sees somewhere), one may be benefitting from something one has not created oneself, but there is nothing inherently immoral about it.

Things made in the past are either gifts or items received in just exchanges or stolen goods or items taken via fraudulent exchanges. In cases of thefts or fraud, there should be rectification. There is no other special problem about products made in the past.

In general Kropotkin believes that he has found a major flaw in the justification of property rights and economic inequality. What Kropotkin is focusing on is the somewhat muddled notion that one is entitled to the fruits of one’s labor. In more refined natural-rights liberal theory, one owns one’s own personal capacity to labor, one’s own energy. If one owns an article and transforms it further using labor on it, well, one still owns it. In addition, a prospective employee may make a contract in which an employer agrees to transfer money to the employee on the condition that the employee do certain work. In this case, the employee is working on articles that belong to the employer. What the employee is entitled to is not the transformed article that he worked on. That still belongs to the employer. The employee is entitled to the wage or salary that was contractually agreed upon. (It should be noted that the theory that one has a just claim to any article one works on seems to leave out service workers, like teachers, who do not work on physical products.) Labor contracts are made every day without the parties worrying about Kropotkin’s false problem of an indistinguishably collective product.[31]

The parties simply make a conditional contract: wages are transferred to the employee, if work is done for the employer.

In Kropotkin’s fourth commentary on equality, he says that communist anarchists will not “tolerate” persons using their natural assets and attributes (physical strength, mental acuity, beauty, and so forth) in any way that other persons would find annoying or upsetting to have such attributes used.[32] The idea of not tolerating persons’ making use of their own lives, bodies, and minds in ways they prefer implies either that some persons have rightful control over others or that all persons have rightful control over all persons.

Since Kropotkin is a self-proclaimed communist, we can assume that he rejects slaveholding, in which some persons own others. Since he is a self-proclaimed anarchist, we can assume that he rejects the state by which some people control others, or in effect own them. But the pure communist alternative in which by right all decisions about all acts of or pertaining to any person are made by all persons, is impossible to conceive of and impossible to put into practice.

Inevitably, decision-making power is delegated to others or others claim it has been delegated to them. What Michels called the “iron law of oligarchy” takes over in the life of organized activity in the communist society.[33] The core of the political state has then been reintroduced in the anarchist commune, and some persons again control others, or in effect own them.

The only other conceivable alternative is that of natural-rights liberalism, in which persons own themselves in the sense that women are said by feminists to own their own bodies.[34] Persons are entitled to their natural assets and attributes. These assets and attributes are not something that was stolen from someone else or obtained through some other illegitimate process.[35]

Kropotkin himself stated that the most important criterion in the evaluation of all modern ethical systems is the presence or absence of fetters on individual initiative. He explicitly ruled out fettering individual initiative for the welfare of the society or the species.[36] It seems at least likely that Kropotkin’s prohibition on communist grounds of persons making use of their natural assets in ways that others find upsetting will not survive scrutiny according to Kropotkin’s own standards for judging ethical systems.

In contending that justice is equal rights, that justice is necessary to social life, and that equity includes economic equality, Kropotkin was discussing what one was morally obliged to do. But like Spencer, Kropotkin distinguished between moral duty and supererogatory acts.[37]

While maintaining that recognition of equal rights is a duty and a necessity, Kropotkin also maintained that “if each man practiced merely the equity of a trader, taking care all day long not to give others anything more than he was receiving from them, society would die of it.”[38]

Packed away in this assertion of Kropotkin’s are two notions which deserve to be brought out and examined closely. First of all, Kropotkin assumes that in trade, equivalents are exchanged. But since the Marginalist Revolution of the late 19th century, economists have rejected objective value theories in favor of a subjective one in which each party to an exchange trades because he believes he will get something more valuable to him in return. In terms of each party’s own preferences, inequivalents are being exchanged.

Secondly, Kropotkin seems to be saying here that if all persons in a society traded with each other nonfraudulently, this would destroy society. Over the long run, nonfraudulent trade will lead to the suicide of society.

Let us try to spell out what Kropotkin may mean. According to Kropotkin’s objective theory of value, traders are exchanging only equivalents. Hence, no gain in welfare comes from trading. According to Kropotkin, society can make progress only when some persons magnanimously devote themselves to discovering new ideas, inventing new techniques, or helping others above and beyond the call of duty. If only honest trade occurs, society will die, for in the face of challenges from a changing environment, society can succeed, progress, and develop only through acts of self-sacrifice. However, Kropotkin never shows satisfactorily why economic development and the handling of new challenges cannot be accomplished in the marketplace, as they seem to have been historically.

We have seen that Kropotkin’s account of what constitutes the public good depends heavily on what the supposed instinct of sociability and mutual aid tells us, on the moral duty to institute equality across the board, and on the desirability of making sacrifices to meet the needs of or bring improvements to others. There are problems with each of these elements.

Kropotkin has trouble distinguishing between the role of reason and the role of instinct in ethical discourse. Also he tells us to look to instinct as the basis of obligation and for answers to what seem to be ethical dilemmas. In fact, the voice of instinct is not unambiguous on ethical questions. If it were crystal clear and compelling, we would not have the ethical problems we do.

Furthermore, Kropotkin’s ideas about man’s natural inclinations toward socially compatible and mutually co-operative behavior can support more than one ethical system. For example, laissez-faire liberals have made use of the same notions.

Modern-day classical liberal Ludwig von Mises writes:

The core of liberal social theory is the theory of the division of labor. . . .Society is the union of human beings for the better exploitation of the natural conditions of existence; in its very conception it abolishes the struggle between human beings and substitutes the mutual aid which provides the essential motive of all members united in an organism. Within the limits of society there is no struggle, only peace. Every struggle suspends, in effect, the social community. Society, as a whole, as organism, does fight a struggle for existence against forces inimical to it. But inside, as far as society has absorbed individuals completely, there is only collaboration. For society is nothing but collaboration. . . .The only theory which explains how peace is possible between individuals and how society grows out of individuals is the liberal social theory of the division of labor.[39]

Another modern-day classical liberal Murray N. Rothbard writes:

The free market. . .is precisely the diametric opposite of the “jungle” society. The jungle is characterized by the war of all against all. One man gains only at the expense of another, by seizure of the latter’s property. With all on a subsistence level, there is a true struggle for survival, with the stronger force crushing the weaker. In a free market, on the other hand, one man gains only through serving another, though he may also retire into self-sufficient production at a primitive level if he so desires.

It is precisely through the peaceful cooperation of the market that all men gain through the development of the division of labor and capital investment. To apply the principle of the “survival of the fittest” to both the jungle and the market is to ignore the basic question: Fitness for what? The “fit” in the jungle are those most adept at the exercise of brute force. The “fit” on the market are those most adept in the service of society. . .

The free market. . .transmutes the jungle’s destructive competition for meagre subsistence into a peaceful co-operative competition in the service of one’s self and others. In the jungle, some gain only at the expense of others. On the market, everyone gains. It is the market—the contractual society—that wrests order out of chaos, that subdues nature and eradicates the jungle, that permits the “weak” to live productively, or out of gifts from production, in a regal style compared to the life of the “strong” in the jungle.[40]

Not only are there alternative notions of what socially co-operative behavior is in man, but, as we have seen, there are major difficulties with Kropotkin’s sketchy discussion of equality. At times Kropotkin seems to believe that superabundance and the abolition of economic scarcity will solve the problem of remuneration of labor.[41] But prices have not yet fallen to zero so we know that resources are still scarce.[42]

Kropotkin wanted to build a stateless society on equality of possessions, mutual service, and a morality of increased self-sacrifice. But it can be argued that Kropotkin failed to be clear about the concepts he used and failed to avoid self-contradiction in his theory of communist-anarchism.

What can be said about the institutions of Kropotkin’s communist society? Kropotkin proposed a society of small-scale territorial communes. Yet Kropotkin’s goal of across-the-board equality may easily be undermined by separate decision-making in each township on distribution of goods.[43] Communes will be in different locations and find themselves with different assets. Do they have a property right, in some sense, to these assets? Kropotkin himself accepts temporary inequality between town and country after the revolution.[44] What is the proper territorial size for communes? What is the proper population size for communes? We receive no answer from Kropotkin.

We can only guess from Kropotkin’s admiration for the medieval city-states that he has something like them in mind when he talks about free communes.[45] But these medieval cities had governments. The guilds that Kropotkin admired and that dominated the commercial life of these cities were adjuncts of the governmental apparatus.[46]

Surely there is at least some danger that Kropotkin’s free communes will follow the iron law of oligarchy. The utopian dream of participatory decision-making by consensus seems unlikely to survive the harsh realities of organizational life. In short order, the commune, which has expropriated all land, factories, dwellings, food, and clothing, will be run in practice by a few persons.

This situation in which social ownership of all capital and goods is combined with oligarchical rule will turn the free communes into communist states. The illegitimacy of private property makes it very costly to secede and makes independent life outside a commune well nigh impossible. Perhaps at the point of transformation of free communes into communist states, the communist-anarchists will harken to the prophetic words of Proudhon’s critique of communism:

Private associations are sternly prohibited, in spite of the likes and dislikes of different natures, because to tolerate them would be to introduce small communities within the large one, and consequently private property; the strong work for the weak, although this ought to be left to benevolence, and not enforced, advised, or enjoined; the industrious work for the lazy, although this is unjust; the clever work for the foolish, although this is absurd; and finally, man—casting aside his personality, his spontaneity, his genius, and his affections—humbly annihilates himself at the feet of the majestic and inflexible Commune![47]

Appendix on the Libertarian Notion of the Public Good

Contemporary natural-rights liberals would begin any discussion of the public good with prior consideration of the highest good for man. The highest good (summum bonum) is an end which all men share in common. This end is leading a truly happy life. Real happiness can be a goal common to Robinson Crusoe shipwrecked on a desert island and to an inhabitant of London.

The public good is, according to natural-rights liberals, that which all men have as an end while they live in the company of others.[48] The highest good is happiness (Aristotle’s eudaemonia); in society, the primary public good is liberty. Liberty is below happiness in the hierarchy of values. But when one is living amongst other human beings, liberty is necessary to the achievement of happiness. Without liberty one cannot live virtuously, one cannot strive for the highest good. Natural-rights liberal Tibor Machan writes:

In so far as political liberty is something which is a universal condition (if it were to exist), it does seem to be common to all those within a social organization or community. Political liberty is the absence of interference with one’s efforts to lead one’s life in peace. It is not being free of interference when one is himself attacking others or otherwise violating their human rights to life, liberty, and property. Thus the claim really amounts to holding up freedom from aggression as something that is of value, benefit, and interest to every person, even to one who would rather not enjoy it. . . .

But, then, no one is claiming that political liberty is recognized as a universal, common, collective good; if it were so, the political systems throughout the world would be very different. The point is simply that, in fact, the appropriate condition of social existence is political liberty: it is something which can be secured for everyone without discrimination and all people have an implicit stake in it for purposes of running their lives. While bread and butter, or Cadillacs, or golf courses, or men’s clubs are not good for everyone—since not all people are interested in them or talented or situated so as to make use of them—political liberty is the condition which permits each member of society to pursue his own interests to the best of his will and ability. Political liberty is a real possibility because people can refrain from interfering with another’s life. It is the fact that people are ultimately free to choose their way of living (within physical limits) that makes political liberty more than just an empty ideal. It makes possible, when legally instituted, the flourishing of each man as a self-responsible being; this in turn renders it of value to everyone without exception.[49]

Other supposed public goods, such as conservation, simply do not have the universal character that liberty has.[50]

The only institutional arrangement which is appropriate to liberty is property in one’s own will, body, life, and honestly-acquired material goods. One’s liberty is based on one’s self-ownership and on property rights. Thus liberal James Tyrrell argued in the 17th century that there was no reason to believe that “a man either could, or ought to neglect his own preservation and true happiness.” The policy which Tyrrell then deemed necessary was the institution of property rights; “The constitution of a distinct property in things, in the labor of persons (was) the chief and necessary medium to the common good.”[51]

With the institution of property rights securing liberty, all attacks upon the public good manifest themselves as attacks on particular individual’s rights. Society is simply a relationship among persons. Society per se does not have an interest or a good. Relationships cannot possess interests.[52] Only persons (including persons in relationships) can possess interests, goods or rights. Liberty is the primary and overriding public good. No one can legitimately attempt to advance any other possible public or private good by violating liberty and property rights. Force can legitimately be used to defend liberty.

Hobbes argued that the public interest was best served by a monarch whose private interest lay in securing the public interest.[53] Individualist-anarchists, whose anarchism is derived from the natural-rights liberal tradition, argue that private law enforcement agencies have the unity of interest that Hobbes thought the king would have.

In brief, once the requisite critical mass of persons accepts libertarian ideas of justice, individual rights will be defended against those who would violate them. Persons will make use of the division of labor in protecting rights. Private law enforcement agencies will arise. These private agencies gain customers in proportion to their reputation for upholding the public good of liberty. Furthermore, there is a more direct link between the income of private law enforcement agencies and their performance than there is between the income of dynastic monarchs and their performance. Finally, kings may well gain from war against other kings, but private agencies are subject to the discipline of the market where violence and turmoil are considered bad business. Violence breaks up the socially cooperative network of market transactions. Thus private enforcement of public law is led as if by an invisible hand to strive for the peaceful resolution of disputes.

While this sketch by no means exhausts what could be said about the libertarian notion of the public good, it shows that there is available an approach to the public good which allows for the individual initiative that Kropotkin wants to preserve without falling prey to the contradictions in Kropotkin’s communistanarchism.

FOOTNOTES

1. Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1947), pp. 26-27, 333; Kropotkin, Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York: Dover, 1970), pp. 83-84.

2. Ethics, p. 214.

3. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 84.

4. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 84.

5. Ethics, p. 88.

6. Ethics, p. 20.

7. Ethics, p. 218.

8. Kropotkin, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: M. I. T. Press, 1970), p. 39-40; see also pp. 338-339.

9. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 96. Ethics, p. 164.

10. See Arthur Caplan, “Ethics, Evolution, and the Milk of Human Kindness: A Review of the Reviews of E. O. Wilson’s ‘Sociobiology’,” Hastings Center Report, vol. 6, no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 20-25.

11. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 98.

12. Ethics, p. 15 and 219.

13. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 94; Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington), pp. 5-24, 33-44, 52-65. See also Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1970), pp. 264ff; Rousseau, First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin’s, 1964), pp. 130ff; Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Appleton, 1878), pp. 114ff; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (London: Oxford University Press, 1888), pp. 575-581; Hobbes, “Human Nature,” in English Works, ed. by Molesworth (London: 1839-1854), vol. 4, p. 44; Nicholas Rescher, Unselfishness (1976).

14. Ethics, p. 218.

15. Ethics, pp. 218-219.

16. Ethics, p. 175.

17. Ethics, p. 234. See also p. 252.

18. Ethics, p. 146.

19. Ethics, p. 30. See also p. 221.

20. Ethics, p. 24 and p. 200.

21. Ethics, p. 266.

22. Ethics, pp. 26-27.

23. Ethics, p. 26.

24. Ethics, pp. 26, 218, 320.

24a. On the difference between equal shares and distribution according to needs, see Hugo Adam Bedau, “Egalitarianism and the Idea of Equality,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Nomos IX: Equality (New York; Atherton, 1967), pp. 11-12. At times, Kropotkin seems to believe that distribution according to needs would receive unanimous approval. See Selected Writings, p. 185. This unrealistic assumption allows him to neglect a detailed defense of this mode of distribution.

25. Proudhon, What is Property? (New York, Dover, 1970), p. 261.

26. Ethics, p. 320.

27. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 100.

28. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974), pp. 198, 219.

29. Nozick, pp. 253-262; George J. Stigler, “Ricardo and the 93 Per Cent Labor Theory of Value,” American Economic Review, vol. 48 (June 1958); Eugene von Boehm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of his System (New York: Kelley, 1949); Eugene von Boehm-Bawerk, “The Exploitation Theory,” in Capital and Interest (S. Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 241-321; Alfred Zauberman, “Revisionism in Soviet Economics,” in Leopold Labed, ed., Revisionism: Essays in the History of Marxist Ideas (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 268-280; Philip H. Wicksteed, The Alphabet of Economic Science (New York: Kelley & Millman, 1955), pp. 116-124; M. M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 182-199.

30. Ethics, p. 306.

31. On supposed joint social products from which no individual’s contribution can be disentangled, see Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market, (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), pp. 183-184; Nozick, pp. 187-188.

32. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 99.

33. Michels, Political Parties (New York: Dover, 1959).

34. Murray N. Rothbard, “Justice and Property Rights,” in Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review, 1974), pp. 58-60. For a similar division into three exclusive alternatives, see Brian Barry’s discussion of the law on assaults, in “The Public Interest,” in Anthony Quinton, ed., Political Philosophy (London: Oxford University, 1967), pp. 118-119.

35. Nozick, p. 225; Rothbard, Power and Market, p. 187.

36. Ethics, p. 27.

37. Ethics, pp. 102, 176-177, 278-279.

38. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 106.

39. Mises, Socialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 316, 318.

40. Rothbard, Power and Market, p. 168.

41. Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 172. Compare Selected Writings, pp. 183-184.

42. Rothbard, “Anarcho-Communism,” in Egalitarianism, p. 123.

43. Selected Writings, p. 187.

44. Selected Writings, p. 204.

45. Selected Writings, pp. 211-264.

46. Selected Writings, p. 239. Compare Ronda Larmour, “A Merchant Guild of Sixteenth-Century France: The Grocers of Paris,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. 20, no. 3 (1967), pp. 467-481; Charles Gross, The Gild Merchant (1890; London: Oxford University Press, 1964), chap. 3; Sylvia L. Thrupp, “The Gilds,” in M. M. Postan, ed., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe (London: Cambridge University Press, 1963), vol. 3, pp. 232, 233, 242; M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1975), pp. 241-242; Abbott Payson Usher, An Introduction to the Industrial History of England (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1920), pp. 78-79, 173.

47. Proudhon, pp. 260-261. Proudhon is talking about state communism here, but if all communist societies necessarily generate governmental rule, then Proudhon’s description applies to Kropotkin’s communism too.

48. For a similar view, see C. W. Cassinelli, “Some Reflections on the Concept of the Public Interest,” Ethics, vol. 69, no. 1 (October 1958), pp. 49-50.

49. Tibor R. Machan, “Some Considerations of the Common Good,” Journal of Human Relations (Fall 1970), pp. 989-990.

50. See Edwin G. Dolan, TANSTAAFL (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 85-96.

51. J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 289. Kropotkin writes. “When (Locke) attempted to define justice, he quite needlessly limited this conception, reducing it to the conception of property: ‘Where there is no property there is no injustice, is a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid.’” Ethics, p. 167.

52. Cassinelli, p. 50: Benjamin R. Tucker, quoted in James J. Martin, Men Against the State (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1970), p. 214.

53. Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, n.d.), pp. 122-123.

Going, Going. . . .

Every two years, the Lib. Forum binds its issues for those years in a handsome red cover, stamped with gold. Soon, the 1975-76 issue will be bound. Hurry, hurry, then, to get your copy of the 1973-74 book. Get your Libertarian Forums in permanent, book form. Some copies of the 1973-74 book are still available at the low price of $20.

From the Old Curmudgeon

Trivial Libertarian Controversy of the Month Dept.

In a recent issue of the Libertarian Review, Walter Grinder took some healthy swipes at the profession of philosophy, especially as that profession is often exercised in the libertarian movement. The burden of his charge was that philosophers are addicted to trivial nit-picking and semantic word-play, rather than focussing on real world issues. Humorless as always, Tibor Machan then rushed in to defend the honor of philosophy and to accuse Grinder—rather ludicrously—of being “anti-intellectual.” But there is an important point here, a point inherent in the sociology of the philosophy profession itself. All academic disciplines suffer from excesses of Ph.D-manship and the requirements of “publish or perish.” But the discipline of philosophy is in the worst shape of all. In contrast to other specific sciences or to history, there can be little genuine innovation in philosophy from one decade, or even century, to the next. Philosophy deals with eternal problems through rational discourse, and it cannot come up with new electronic gizmos every year or so. Moreover, genuine philosophy is only refined common sense, which is in no greater supply now than in ancient Greece. So there is nothing much new that philosophers can legitimately say; but yet, in contrast to previous centuries, philosophers are now invariably academics who must publish continually to get promoted and win brownie points in the profession. How can mere common sense fill the academic journals? As a result, the temptation is almost irresistible for the academic philosopher to abandon common sense posthaste, to write impenetrable jargon for its own sake, to nit-pick ad infinitum, and to fill the air with dazzling paradoxes and affronts to mere common sense. Unfortunately, libertarian philosophers have been at least as prone to these fallacious methodologies as any of their colleagues. Hence, the justice of the Grinder jibe.

There is no more striking example of the tendency of libertarian philosophers to pay rapt attention to worthless trivia than a discussion that fills the letters column of the November-December 1976 Libertarian Review. In the previous issue of LR, Roy A. Childs, Jr. had given short shrift to a privately published pamphlet by one Michael Emerling attempting to refute some tapes by one John Kiefer purporting to derive Christianity, or at least theism, from Objectivism. The main burden of Childs’ critics is that he dealt with the Emerling tome too brusquely, dismissing it without due attention to its sources, its wording, etc. The trouble is that Childs’ critics seem to have little appreciation of the problem of judgments of importance, judgments which necessarily govern how much time, energy, and printed space one should devote to any particular book. For not every book is worth a sober and detailed critique. I can think of few subjects of less intrinsic importance than the burning question of whether Christianity can be derived from objectivist premises—a question of approximately the same moment as the philosophic problem of how many John Galts can dance on the head of a pin. Rather than criticize Childs for devoting only 400 words to a review of this mighty question, one can raise the more transcendent issue of why this claptrap was reviewed at all. Grinder vindicated!

Sleeping on the Couch.

The New York Times (Dec. 17) carries a story from the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. It seems that there is a growing problem of patients falling asleep on the psycho-analytic couch. To orthodox psychoanalysts, practiced in jargon-filled smear and one-upmanship over their harassed clients, the “meaning” of this event is clear: the patient is “resisting” the great truths that the analyst is about to unearth. (The theory of “resistance” is a superb example of a question-begging non-falsifiable method for always putting the onus of failure on the poor patient.) The typical patient’s defense that he was “tired and bored” was quickly dismissed by the psychotherapeutic gurus. A couple of heretical analysts, however, conceded that falling asleep can mean that the patient had not “gotten enough sleep the night before”; moreover, one added that “what happens more oft» is that the analyst falls asleep.” Added another: “The one thing I’ve never heard of is both of them falling asleep.”

Well, why not? Think of the charming image this conjures up: both parties, the patient and his intrepid analyst» snoozing away in peaceful contentment in that office. For a moment one might be tempted to think in a at last, both analyst and “analysand” are even—Steven, all power-ploys forgotten: until we realize that the two are not fully at par. For while both snooze on, a tot of the Long Green is being transferred from the bank account of the patient to that of his “therapist.” But, after all, isn’t this simply casting aside the veil of what really goes on, of “letting it all hang out”? In that immortal phrase of “Deep Throat” in the Watergate saga, “keep your eye on the money.”

As a matter of fact, I have an excellent suggestion which will both increase the “productivity” and the income of the analyst, while saving both the time and trouble of coming to the office and the couch. Why not skip the office visits altogether and just have the “patients” mail their checks regularly to their analysts? Analysts will be even richer, and patients will be able to brag about lifelong analysis by their famous therapists indeed, far more could now be therapized by the big shots. And the bother of schlepping down to the office would be eliminated. Of course, there is another thing that the patients could do: save their money, and send some of it to the Libertarian Party. Maybe, if common sense should ever make a comeback.

New Libertarian
Scholarly Journal!

Libertarian scholarship and advances in libertarian theory have been proceeding apace in recent years, but there has long been a grievous lack of any scholarly libertarian journal which can serve as an outlet for longer articles on libertarianism. No scholarly discipline can really develop without such a journal, but now that grave defect will soon be remedied. The new Journal of Libertarian Studies, a scholarly quarterly edited by Murray N. Rothbard, will come off the presses in January or early February. How can you afford to be without the journal which will bring you the latest developments in libertarianism?

Here are some of the highlights of articles already in press for the first two issues:

A path-breaking work by Williamson Evers, “Toward a Reformulation of the Law of Contracts”, which sets forth the correct, libertarian “transfer-title” theory of what contracts should be enforceable under libertarian law, as contrasted to the conventional “expectations” and “promise” theories.

Four articles amounting to a devastating critique of Robert Nozick’s anti-anarchist section of his Anarchy, State, and Utopia: by Randy E. Barnett, Roy A. Childs, Jr. John T. Sanders, and Murray N. Rothbard.

The first published article of a new analysis by Walter Grinder and John Hagel, integrating Austrian analysis and libertarian class theory.

The best and most thorough presentation yet written of the “anarchist” nature of medieval Ireland, by Joseph R. Peden: “Property Rights in Medieval Ireland: Celtic Law versus Church and State”.

Two important critiques of mathematical economics, published for the first time in English: one by the late Ludwig von Mises, and a second by the Misesian political theorist Bruno Leoni and mathematician Engelilo Frola.

And many others! To subscribe, send $20 for one year’s subscription to: the Center for Libertarian Studies, 200 Park Avenue South, Suite 911, New York, N.Y. 10003.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X, NO. 1

JANUARY, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

LP Election Scoreboard

The election returns issue of LP News (Nov.-Dee. 1976) has now been published (bimonthly, available for $3 per year from Libertarian Party, 1516 P St., N. W. Washington, D.C. 20005). The issue includes MacBride returns from each state, and, with the help of the official election returns (e.g. in World Almanac, 1977), we are now able to present and analyze how well the ticket did in each state.

First, it’s official: we, indeed, are the largest third party in the nation. The MacBride-Bergland total across the nation was 183, 187, beating out the far better publicized Maddox-American Independent Party slate by over 12,000 votes.

The grand total number of votes, for all parties, major and minor, in the election, was 80.21 million; this makes the MacBride-LP percentage overall, 0.23% of the total vote. We shall be working from now on, however, with the total of all major parties plus McCarthy and Maddox votes, since these are the only ones readily available for each state in such sources as the World Almanac. The proportion, however, remains unchanged. The grand total for major party + McCarthy + Maddox in the nation was 79.64 million, which still leaves MacBride with 0.23% of the total.

The LP ticket, however, was only on the ballot in 32 states (including the District of Columbia). Clearly, it is unfair to gauge the support for the ticket for all 51 states, since no one could vote for the LP in the other 19. A more accurate comparison, then, is how the MacBride total compared with the total vote in those 32 states in which the LP was on the presidential ballot. The grand total for the major parties + McCarthy + Maddox in those states was 51.66 million, which gives the MacBride ticket 0.35% of the grand total.

There follows a tabulation for each state in which the LP presidential ticket was on the ballot. Where the letter “c” appears before the total, the figure is approximate, since the precise amount was not given in the LP News. In the case of two states, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, no information was given, either on the MacBride total or percentage of grand total for the state.

One conclusion that leaps at one from the table is that MacBride was right in his strategic estimate of the campaign: namely, that we would do far better in the Western states (Mountain and Far West) than in the states east of the Rockies. Perhaps, indeed, individualism is more ingrained in the far and mountain West. With the exception of New Mexico and Washington, each of these western states was way above the national average of 0.35%. The most phenomenal state was Alaska, where the MacBride ticket gained nearly 6% of the total. Our best major state was California, where the 55,000 votes gleaned by the LP’s largest and best organized party constituted over 0.7% of the total vote.

Outside of that, we did well in two Great Plains states contiguous to the Mountain states, and in which the LP was newly organized: Kansas, and surprisingly well in South Dakota. Apart from that, the only showing around the national average was in New Jersey, where the factionalism of previous years was overcome, and a united and vigorous party gained 9.999 votes and 0.34% of the total. There were passable showings in the Plains state of Nebraska, in Louisiana, and Virginia. Ohio’s 9.449 votes were only 0.23% of the total, but it was the “balance of power” in that state, since Carter only beat Ford by 7,500 votes in Ohio. And that was it.

The MacBride Vote, by State

All Votes (in millions)

MacBride Vote

% MacBride Vote

Total

51.66

183,187

0.35

Ala.

1.16

1,481

0.13

Alas.

0.62

c.3,700

c.6.00

Ariz.

0.73

7,647

1.05

Calif.

7.60

c.55,000

0.72

Col.

1.05

c.5,200

0.50

D.C.

0.16

274

0.17

Haw.

0.29

c.3,480

c.1.20

Id.

0.33

3,428

1.04

Ill.

4.59

8,095

0.18

Io.

1.27

1,452

0.11

Kan.

0.93

3,242

0.35

Ky.

1.15

814

0.07

La.

1.31

3,325

0.25

Mich.

3.62

6,462

0.18

Minn.

1.92

3,529

0.18

Miss.

0.74

2,787

0.38

Neb.

0.59

1,700

0.29

Nev.

0.19

c.1,330

c.0.70

N.H.

0.34

?

?

N.J.

2.94

9,999

0.34

N.M.

0.41

1,082

0.26

N.Y.

6.40

c.12,000

c.0.19

N.C.

1.66

2,219

0.13

N.D.

0.28

c.280

c.0.10

Oh.

4.06

9,449

0.23

R.I.

0.39

?

?

S.D.

0.30

1,619

0.54

Tenn.

1.46

c.1,460

c.0.10

Ut.

0.53

2,438

0.46

Va.

1.64

4,648

0.28

Wash.

1.36

5,042

0.37

Wisc.

2.04

3,100

0.16

MacBride’s largest percentage vote came in the city of Fairbanks, Alaska, where an active LP pursued a door-to-door campaign and gained a remarkable 10% of the vote.

In many of the states with a strong LP, local and state-wide candidates were often able to gain a large share of the total vote, undoubtedly reflecting an unwillingness of many pro-LP voters to “throw away” their votes in the very tight Presidential race. These local races are an extremely heartening portent of libertarian and LP strength. Thus, in Arizona, LP State Chairman Helen Stevens gained 15% of the total vote in a race for State Representative. In Congressional races in Arizona, Pat Harper received 6,001 votes (3.1%) in District 4, becoming the balance of power in a race won by a mere 700 votes; while Michael Emerling earned 4.309 votes (2.4%) in District 2.

In Idaho, local LP candidates racked up their mightiest percentages in the nation in several of their races. Champion was Larry Fullmer, who received 2,836 for State Senate in District 33, a phenomenal 30.21% of the vote! Also outstanding were Allen Dalton in Senate District 15,1,842 votes (21.16%): Pearl McEvoy, Senate District 11, 1,321 votes (15.99%); and Michael McEvoy, House District 11-A, 1,420 votes (18.54%).

In Illinois, Anne McCracken, running a state-wide race for Trustee of the University of Illinois, garnered a total of 44,472 votes, presumably about 1% of the total. In Michigan, Wilson Hurd, in his state-wide race for Supreme Court judge, gained 100,646 votes, approximately 3% of the total vote. The largest Michigan percentage was received by Martis Goodwin, who amassed 17,708 votes (20%) as the LP candidate for sheriff in Ingham County (Lansing). In Minnesota, several of the local candidates did well, especially George Hardenbergh, running for State House, District 65-A (4.5%), Dale Hemming, State House, District 46-B (3.8%), Terry Thomas, State House, District 57-B (2.5%), and Alice Larson, State Senate. District 50 (2.3%).

Nevada was an outstanding state for local LP candidates. LP candidates averaged about 6% of the vote. Leader was Susan Schreiber, State Assembly District 11, who garnered 15.6% of the vote; right behind was Gwen Bergland, mother of Vice Presidential candidate Dave Bergland, who gained about 15% of the vote in her State Assembly district. Other excellent races were: Carol Higgins, State Senate District 2 (12.4%), Ed McNair, Assembly District 21 (9.3%), Ray Fellows, Assembly District 9 (7.3%), and Linda West, with 6.5% in her race for the Clark County Commission; right behind Miss West were Dorotha Ames and Sally Larsen. Florence Fields received 6.6% of the vote in her Assembly race, and Dr. Robert W. Clark got 5.5% in his Commissioner’s race: both were the balances of power in their districts.

In New Jersey, LP candidate for the U.S. Senate, Hannibal Cundari, received 19,910 votes, 0.69% of the total. Richard Kenney received 19,373 votes (1.5%) for U.S. Senate in the state of Washington, while Karen Willey received 2.9% of the vote for State Representative in Washington’s District 32. Alan Gottlieb gained 4,230 votes (2.06%) in his race for U.S. Congress in Washington’s District 1.

High percentages were gained in local races in Oklahoma and Oregon, though they should not really count, since they were run as independents rather than as LP candidates, and therefore did not serve to build the libertarian name or the party. This is not a stricture against these candidates, since it was almost impossible to get on the ballot as a Libertarian in these states. Tonie Nathan gained almost 15,000 votes (5.8%) in her race for the U.S. Congress in Oregon, while Porter Davis gained 36.4% of the vote for State Representative. Davis, however, ran in many ways as a right-wing opportunist (a switch from his left-sectarian role the previous year!), distributing a leaflet with a picture of himself shaking hands with (ugh!) Ronald Reagan.

Thus, some of the states east of the Rockies were able to do quite well in local races. This leaves us with the truly disgraceful situation in New York’s Free Libertarian Party, where U.S. Senatorial candidate Martin Nixon did no better than MacBride’s poor 0.19%, and the tiny number of local candidates did even worse. Considering that the New York party is one of the largest and oldest LP’s, with several full-scale campaigns under its belt, this wretched record only highlights the disintegration of the FLP in recent years. In fact, the FLP has done progressively worse in each of its three campaigns, its percentage of the total vote steadily declining.

The deterioration of the FLP was particularly marked in New York City, where I understand that the total vote for MacBride was only about 2,500 votes. In New York City, indeed, the FLP vote has steadily declined not only percentage-wise, but even in absolute numbers. This crackup reflects, in particular, the disintegration of the FLP in Manhattan, the headquarters of the party in New York State, and once the liveliest region of the state party. For while the Buffalo and Rochester parties have been flourishing, and the always minuscule Brooklyn and Queens parties are in relatively sound shape, it is Manhattan—the central focus of the left-sectarian troublemakers in the FLP—where the rot is the greatest.

In brief, with the pullout of the sober forces from the Manhattan party last year, the sectarian mischief-makers, deprived of objects for their common and united hatred, began to turn cannibalistically upon each other, picking each other apart. The upshot of this dissolution of the FLP was that only a tiny handful in New York worked on the campaign, mainly those who had either been neutral in the intra-party struggles or who had only recently joined the party.

More on Carter & Co.

In our December, 1976 issue, we presented our analysis of the Carter administration as the old Johnson crew, but now fortunately dovish on foreign policy: more particularly, we analyzed the Carter appointments as almost glaringly dominated by David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission and Rockefeller Foundation, joined by a few Atlanta corporatists around Coca-Cola Co. Further information now available confirms our conclusion in spades.

Let us consider the State Department and allied appointments. Ambassador to the United Nations is Rep. Andrew Young (Trilateral Commission). Counselor of the State Department is Matthew Nimetz, of Secretary Cyrus Vance’s (Trilateral Commission, chairman of the executive committee of the Rockefeller Foundation) law firm. Pro-peace Anthony Lake (Trilateral Commission), former member of the National Security Council under Johnson and head of Carter’s foreign policy transition team, is the new head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Yale economist Richard Cooper (Trilateral Commission) is the new Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, while Columbia University law professor Richard N. Gardner (Trilateral Commission) is the coming Ambassador to Italy. The new Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs will probably be the influential Richard Holbrooke (Trilateral Commission), editor of the Establishment dovish Foreign Policy magazine. Paul C. Warnke (Trilateral Commission), a pro-peace former Pentagon official under Johnson, has been offered the key post of director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Ex-Johnson man Warren Christopher, a Los Angeles lawyer, is slated for a high post in the department, while Philip C. Habib, one of Henry Kissinger’s (Nelson Rockefeller) closest advisers, continues as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

More Rockefellerism: Mrs. Patricia Harris, Secretary of HUD, is a director of the Chase Manhattan Bank (David Rockefeller, chairman). And it turns out that Secretary of the Treasury Werner Michael Blumenthal (Bendix Corp., executive committee of the Rockefeller Foundation) is a founding member of the dangerous, corporate collectivist Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning.

And then there is the Coca-Cola connection. We have already mentioned that Charles Kirbo, Carter’s closest adviser, and Griffin Bell, the new Attorney-General, are both partners of the leading Atlanta law firm of King & Spalding, which has Coca-Cola as its leading client; and that Undersecretary of Defense Duncan is a former president of Coca-Cola who is also one of its major stockholders. But here is more. For the new Secretary of HEW, Joseph Califano, Jr., as a partner of a Washington law firm, also has Coke as one of his clients. Also, close Carter adviser J. Paul Austin (Trilateral Commission), chairman of the board of Coca-Cola, is also a member of the board of the California Institute of Technology, whose President, Dr. Harold Brown (Trilateral Commission), is the new Secretary of Defense.

This brings us to a fascinating behind-the-scenes octogenarian who is the real head of Coca-Cola: the powerful Robert Woodruff, chairman of the finance committee of Coke, whose family has controlled Coca-Cola for the last fifty years. It was Woodruff who has been rumored to be the major influence in persuading Dwight Eisenhower to run for the presidency: Woodruff was also a major background figure in the Truman administration, and a supporter of Jack Kennedy.

Coca-Cola’s prominence in the Morgan ambit is revealed by the fact that officers of the company sit on the board of directors of Morgan Guaranty bank and of General Electric, a corporation organized by Morgan.

Another corporation with strong connections in the Carter cabinet is IBM. Mrs. Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, Carter’s first choice for Secretary of Commerce, was a vice-president of IBM and is also a member of the executive committee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Other IBM directors in the Carter cabinet are: Cyrus Vance, Mrs. Patricia Harris, and, again, Dr. Harold Brown.

What of Mrs. Juanita Kreps, economist and Carter’s Secretary of Commerce? Mrs. Kreps is vice-president of Duke University, which has long been dominated by North Carolina’s R. J. Reynolds Company. Among her many corporate directorships, the most important is Mrs. Kreps’ membership on the board of R. J. Reynolds. Surely it is no coincidence that, twice since his election, President-elect Carter has vacationed at the St. Simon’s Island retreat of Reynolds heir, Smith Bagley.

A fascinating aspect of the Cabinet appointments is that several of them interlock with the most powerful and prestigious elements of the Establishment press. Cyrus Vance is a member of the board of directors of the New York Times; Joseph Califano is a lawyer for the Washington Post; while Harold Brown is a director of the Los Angeles Times.

Cyrus Vance as director of the New York Times brings to mind an old unsubstantiated rumor that the Rockefellers have long been partial owners of the Times. We may weigh in that light a recent announcement that the Times has named Professor Richard H. Ullman to be a member of its editorial board, the board that is responsible for framing and writing that paper’s editorial policies. Who is Ullman? Professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, formerly director of the graduate program of the prestigious and ur-Establishmenty Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, from which a large number of our foreign policy planners and technicians are derived, Ullman is now director of the “1980’s Project” for the powerful Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR has long been the foreign policy think-tank for the Rockefeller empire and their allies. What is the 1980’s Project? In the words of the Times (Jan. 5): “several hundred specialists in a three-year program to identify and analyze desirable international conditions in the next decade.” Ullman has also been on the staff of the National Security Council and on the Policy Planning and Arms Control agencies of the Defense Department.

All in all, any of our readers who may have been inclined to mourn the passing of Nelson from the political scene, need no longer worry. The Rockefellers, and still more corporate liberalism, live!

Life With Mises

by Richard M. Ebeling

I’m sure, like many other people, when I read the works of a particular author, I develop an image of the writer in my mind’s eye. I imagine what he looks like, what events or experiences might have shaped his ideas and what type of personality he would possess if I ever had the opportunity to meet him. In many instances such fantasizing remains mostly conjectural. Either the chance to meet the author never arises or the person is someone who lived in another era.

I never had the good fortune to meet Ludwig von Mises. Though I had already become interested in Mises’ works, and that of the other “Austrians,” in my ’teens when he was still alive and teaching, I lived in another part of the country and found it impossible to ever attempt to attend his famous seminar at New York University. But I had read a few, short accounts by others who knew Mises, including Haberler, Hayek, and Machlup who studied and worked with him in Vienna and by Rothbard, Hazlitt and Greaves who knew him here in America.

Their accounts reinforced many of the impressions I had drawn from reading Mises’ classic works, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Socialism, an Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922) and Human Action, a Treatise on Economics (1949), as well as many of his other important writings, among them, The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth (1927), Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933), Omnipotent Government (1944), Bureaucracy (1944), Theory and History (1957) and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962).

From his books, Mises always appeared as the unflinching proponent of the market economy; the uncompromising defender of methodological individualism; the brilliant, original thinker who challenged the socialists by demonstrating that economic calculation was impossible without a price system and private property; the developer of the Austrian Monetary Theory of the Trade Cycle on the foundations laid by Bohm-Bawerk in capital theory and by Wicksell in the theory of interest; and the perceptive social scientist and epistemologist who saw the unifying principle of social phenomena in the a priori character of human action and purpose.

From those who knew Mises it becomes clear that he lived the principles he espoused in print. For instance, F.A. von Hayek writes that while in Europe, “Mises was strongly attacked from the very beginning because of his relentless uncompromising attitude; he made enemies and, above all, did not find academic recognition until late.” Yet, the “unfaltering tenacity with which he pursued his reasoning to its utmost conclusions . . .” which even seemed extreme to some of his own students “proved right over and over again and eventually an everwidening circle came to appreciate the fundamental importance of his writings which ran counter to the mainstream of contemporary thought in nearly every respect.”

Now, slightly over three years after Ludwig von Mises passed away at the age of 92, an intimate look at the Austrian economist is presented to us by his widow, Margit von Mises, in My Years with Ludwig von Mises (Arlington House, New Rochelle, New York, 1976) 191 pp., iii, $9.95.

In his 1922 treatise, Socialism, Mises, in discussing the role and status of marriage in socialist and capitalist societies, considered the dilemma of the independent and original thinker, “Genius does not allow itself to be hindered by any consideration for the comfort of its fellows . . . The ties of marriage become intolerable bonds which the genius tries to cast off or at least to loosen so as to be able to move freely. Whoever wishes to go his own way must break away from it. Rarely indeed is he granted the happiness of finding a woman willing and able to go with him on his solitary path.”

It was this life that Ludwig von Mises had set out for himself. Professor Hayek recalls that “We, his old pupils of the Vienna days, used to regard him as a most brilliant but somewhat severe bachelor, who had organized his life in a most efficient routine, but who in the intensity of intellectual efforts was clearly burning the candle at both ends.”

It was into this “efficient routine” that Margit Sereny-Herzfeld stepped when she first, met Mises in the autumn of 1925. She recounts that he was a man divided in half. He had obviously fallen in love with her almost upon their first meeting, but he seemed unable to make the commitment that would involve a radical change in his life and activities. The personal letters that she received from Mises, and which are reproduced in the text, show a desperately lonely man, crying with despair over the uncertainty of her affection for him and reaching out for the romantic relationship that obviously he had always denied himself. She tells that for weeks at a time he wouldn’t come to see her, yet, she knew his feelings were intense as ever. “Sometimes I did not see him for weeks. But I knew very well that he was in town. At least twice daily the telephone rang, and when I answered it there was silence at the other end of the line—not a word was spoken. I knew it was Lu. He wanted to hear my voice . . . And finally—after a while, without any explanation—he came to see me again.” But even after she realized her own feelings for him and each had expressed them to each other, Mises held back from the final step. He continued to fight a battle within himself.

Throughout the late 1920’s and early 1930’s they saw each other constantly and took their holidays together. Then, in late 1934, Mises accepted a teaching position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. For the next four years their relationship became one of continuous letter writing and frequent journeys by him to Vienna so they could be together.

But the situation in Austria began to deteriorate rapidly. Brown shirts and gangs dominated the daily life of Vienna with, finally, the arrival of the Nazis in early 1938. Having a Hungarian passport (Margit’s first husband had been of that nationality), she hastily took her young daughter from her first marriage in hand, with what belongings she could gather together, obtained the required documents and boarded the train for Zurich. “Police officers, Gestapo agents, S.S. men,” she recounts, “one after the other, came into the compartments of our railway coach to inspect our passports and examine our documents. Only when the train moved out of the station and gathered speed could I breathe easy. We were free.”

By the time Margit arrived in Switzerland, Mises had settled the internal conflict and shortly after she came to Geneva they were married. Though the disintegration of European civilization that Mises had always feared with the rise of Fascist and Communist collectivism was happening all around them, the “neutral” atmosphere of Switzerland became a haven for the exiled. The Graduate Institute for International Studies became a magnet for some of the dispossessed intellectual giants of the period. Margit von Mises takes the reader on a tour to visit some of the most prominent figures of the inter-war period. We meet the famous economic historian “Professor Paul Mantoux, co-director of the Institute, whose son, Etienne, was Lu’s special favorite.” Wilhelm Roepke, who had the proud distinction of being one of the first professors Hitler removed from the German university system in 1933. William Rappard: Gottfried von Haberler; Hans Kelsen, professor of international law: Louis Baudin; and many others.

By mid-1940, the situation in Western Europe became critical. The Lowland countries had been overrun by the Wehrmacht and the Nazi armies had broken through into France, every day driving further south. The collapse of the French army changed the neutral atmosphere of Switzerland. Margit writes that Mises “loved Geneva, the freedom of teaching, the atmosphere Rappard had created within the institute, the steady friendly contact with the other professors.” In fact, until the French defeat became a certainty, Mises “believed the French would fight and could resist the German attacks...Lu’s judgement about France’s moral and combat strength was the only political error I ever knew him to make.”

So, in early July, 1940, Ludwig and Margit von Mises set out on a bus, crammed with other passengers, for the Spanish border. A harrowing journey through winding, back-country roads, constantly dodging German military columns, finally brought them to the French Mediterranean coast near the Spanish frontier. But their arrival was only frustrated by border guards imposing delay after delay and hasty trips from place to place to obtain visa renewals. Finally, the border was crossed, trains and planes were taken and Lisbon was reached. Further delays ensued as passage across the Atlantic was obtained. In August, a nine-day voyage brought them to their ultimate destination, America.

The reader is told about the first, difficult years in the United States, the search for a teaching position, the lecture tours around the country, the successful two-month lecture series in Mexico in 1942, his temporary appointment at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the famous twenty-one year, weekly seminar at New York University, from 1948 to 1969. Passing in procession through the pages as members of that seminar are some of the leading “Austrian” and Libertarian thinkers of the present day: Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner, Henry Hazlitt, Hans Sennholz, Percy Greaves, Ralph Raico, Louis Spadaro, even Ayn Rand made an appearance once.

After the successful publication of his Omnipotent Government and Bureaucracy in 1944 by Yale University Press, Mises set to work on translating and revising his 1940 volume Nationaloekonomie. And in 1949 it appeared as Human Action. The importance of the volume was succinctly summed up by Professor Rothbard,”...here at last was economics whole once more, once again an edifice. Not only that—here was a structure of economics with many of the components newly contributed by Professor Mises himself. . .little constructive work can be done in economics unless it starts from Human Action.” For, as Rothbard has pointed out, Human Action “...is economics whole, developed from sound praxeological axioms, based squarely on analysis of acting man, the purposive individual as he acts in the real world. It is economics developed as a deductive discipline, spinning out the logical implications of the existence of human action.”

However, Margit von Mises tells us, the quality of the publisher responsible for its publication, Yale University Press, did not consistently match the brilliance of the words on the pages (and she was extremely familiar with those words because she typed 890 pages of the manuscript). While the first edition of the book was handsomely produced, when a second revised edition was arranged, the Yale Press produced what Henry Hazlitt called a Mangled Masterpiece. The print appeared darker on some pages, creating the impression of bold-faced type: pages were printed twice; lines were omitted; and paragraphs were transposed. They even refused to send Mises page-proofs or even a complimentary copy upon its publication. In 1966, publishers were changed and a third revised edition was published by Henry Regnery Co. that once again equalled the printing excellence of the first edition.

Almost until the end of his life, Mises kept teaching at NYU and lecturing around the country. Only in the last couple of years did he finally retire. In the fall of 1973, he was taken to the hospital. “He was not allowed any visitors, but when Percy and Bettina (Greaves) came to see him on his ninty-second birthday, he asked me to let them enter. Bettina wished him a happy birthday, and he thanked her and kissed her hand. The Austrian gentleman had remembered the old Austrian custom. . .Lu’s mind was especially clear on the day before his death. He held my hand all day long, but he was very weak and his voice was barely audible when he told me in the evening, ‘You look so tired; you must go home now and get some rest’. . .Shortly afterward, Lu went into a coma and never woke up. He died at 8:30 in the morning of October 10, 1973.”

The delightfulness of the volume is enhanced by a fascinating selection of photographs and an appendix containing a tribute to Hayek by Mises and a tribute to Mises by Hayek.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

The Front, dir. by Martin Ritt, with Woody Allen and Zero Mostel.

I went perfectly prepared to like The Front: Woody Allen has always been funny, and the HUAC persecution of Hollywood Communists and fellow travelers was surely a despotic and unwarranted attack on freedom of the press. The howls of protest in the press by old Social Democrats I figured to be merely an unwarranted throwback to the old apologetics for the Red hunt. But I must report that The Front is the bomb of the year.

In the first place, it’s not funny at all. On the contrary, the picture, in the course of an absurdly crude defense of “the Hollywood Ten” et al. is precisely the sort of dreary, left-wing “message” movie we used to be plagued with in the 1930’s and 40’s — in short, the sort of movie the Hollywood Ten used to make. It’s fine to have good guys and bad guys in a film, but there must be subtlety, richness, in short art to make it palatable The Front, like its counterparts in the bad old days, is just the reverse: tendentious, crude, hokey, oversimplified, pretentious and sententious to the point where it must be, for any sensible observer, counterproductive. The good guys — the Communists — are so good, so noble, so sensitive, so protective of their friends, so sweet; while the bad guys are, to a man, evil, cold, robotic, out only for power and nothing else. (God forbid that the Communists were ever out for power!) And so, as the dreary junk rolled on, my old right-wing juices began to bubble up within me, and I began to mutter to myself: send the Commie whiners to jail. More to the point: let the picture stop!

There is also an ugly ethnic dimension to the tendentious bias of The Front—the same dimension that popped up in the equally left-wing but better crafted movie, The Way We Were. The good guy Communists are— to a man — Jews; with the exception of one token Communist Irishman who, as a friend of mine said, is so token that they could have hung a placard around his neck saying “Token good-guy Irishman.” The bad guys are — to a man — WASPS and Irishmen. To complete the caricature, the main bad guy, one Hennessey, has a wall full of photographs of right-wing heroes of the day: Dewey, MacArthur, Winchell, Pegler, Chiang-kai-Shek, and I think I caught sight of Adolphe Menjou, the leading Hollywood conservative of the epoch. How loaded can one get?

To top it off, there is Zero Mostel, a marvelous comedian, but in a serioso dramatic role such as he plays here, an insufferable ham chewing up the carpet and making a bad film even worse. The climactic moment when Woody Allen tells off HUAC, far from being a dramatic and heroic John Galt-type speech, is simply an inarticulate obscenity.

Let us express the fervent hope that Messrs. Ritt et al have now gotten their old spleen at HUAC out of their system, and can return to making real movies. If, on the other hand, The Front signals a new trend, I’ll be forced to hole up with The Sound of Music.

The Seven Best.

I have ceased compiling a “Ten Best list” of movies in recent years because the quality of films has been so dismal that the exercise seemed scarcely worth it. But there were enough good movies opening in 1976 for me to compile, if not a Ten Best, at least a Seven Best. Maybe someday Hollywood can work its way up to ten once more. The Seven Best follow, in alphabetical order:

All the President’s Men, with Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Robards.

A superb film, fully worthy of the “best movie” accolade of the New York Film Critics, and of its presumed Academy Award. Exciting, fastpaced, and a vivid portrayal of big-city newspaper at work. Despite its length, one is left at the end wishing for more, more about Watergate, which this movie only begins to unearth. All the acting is excellent, in particular Jason Robards’ finely chiselled performance as Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post.

Bad News Bears, with Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal.

A charming comedy, with Matthau in top form as an oafish, cynical manager of a lovable group of quasi-obscene Little League kids. Heartwarming, modern version. Tatum O’Neal is excellent as the team’s star pitcher.

Family Plot, with William Devane and Barbara Harris.

Hitchcock is back, and what could be better? This is a masterful blend of suspense and humor, as only the Master can do it. A joyous romp, marked by irony and an ingeniously interweaving plot. Also, a great car-careening-down-mountainside sequence. Marred slightly by the gawky Bruce Dem, one of my least favorite actors.

Pink Panther Strikes Again, with Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom.

Another in the fine Pink Panther series, and me of the best. Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau has now taken on an almost mythic status, his marvelous portrait of the bumbling idiot inspector who moves through his world in totally oblivious high seriousness being reminiscent of the great deadpan silent film comedian Buster Keaton.

Rocky, with Sylvester Stallone.

By this time, everyone knows the inspiring Horatio Alger saga of struggling young actor Sylvester Stallone, who wrote, acted the lead in, and virtually directed Rocky. Remarkable for taking an extremely grubby setting in the Philadelphia slums—a kind of blend of the settings of such naturalistic films as Marty and the post-war Italian neo-realist Shoe Shine—and infusing it and the hero with a touching vulnerability and sensitivity, with the inspiring values of a dramatic rise out of the depths through his heroism and determination. The carefully choreographed climactic ending is by far the most exciting fight sequence ever seen on film.

Silent Movie, with Mel Brooks and gang.

Another Mel Brooks triumph, a howlingly funny silent movie (but with noises and music) about a bumptious producer (Brooks) who plans to make a silent movie. Brooks manages to transmute his great verbal humor into the visual delights of the silent film.

The Enforcer, with Clint Eastwood.

The third of the great “Dirty Harry” series, like its predecessors a movie calculated to send every left-liberal into an apoplectic fit. Better than Magnum Force, though not quite as good as the original Dirty Harry, Inspector Harry Callahan is once again beset by mollycoddling and spineless police officials and leftist social workers, as he defends life and property with his usual straightforward clarity and decisiveness, with no thanks from anyone. As for Clint Eastwood, to use the current lingo, he is Dirty Harry.

The Great Jingles.

The lowly and much-scorned jingle has long been an important part of our pop consciousness, first on radio and now on TV. Since they are—Heavens to Betsy!—commercials, they have been anathema to our left-liberal intelligentsia. They are not great songs, to be sure, but they are catchy, sprightly, and lots of fun. Yet they have been totally neglected in the nostalgia boom. Now Peter and Craig Norback have had the happy idea of collecting the words and music of the Great Songs Of Madison Avenue (paper. Quadrangle, 1976, $7.95). One hundred and fifteen top jingles, from past to present, are included in this delightful volume. We find that the oldest known jingle—and still one of the best—is “Have You Tried Wheaties?” (1929), although the editors unfortunately did not include the “Jack Armstrong never tires of them” line from the popular radio show of the 1930’s.

One of the facts that shine through is that, by and large, the older jingles were better and more tuneful than the current ones, a not surprising reflection of the decline of pop music generally. Thus, the great “Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot” (1940) is far better than the vapid tune of “Pepsi’s Got A Lot to Give” (1969): the former jingle is also a sociological shock for the current reader: “Twice as much for a nickel too” indeed!

It’s too bad that someone—whether United Brands Co. or the editors—felt that they had to bowdlerize the famous “Chiquita Banana” jingle (1946): for many years we heard Chiquita propagandize us as follows: “Bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator; So you must never put bananas in the refrigerator, no, no, no, no!” But the line on bananas has changed since then, the refrigerator is now OK, and so these immortal words have been trundled down the memory hole. For shame!

Most of the great jingles are here. The “Aunt Jemima” (1939) is a revelation. But some are unaccountably missing. Where is one of the oldest jingles, of the 1930’s: “I’m nuts about ze Chateau Martin wine”, sung by the guy with the patently phony French accent? Where is Peter Pan’s “If you believe in peanut butter, clap your hands. . .” Where is the great oldie for Ralston, beginning “When it’s Ralston time in Texas . . . .”? And where is Mr. Clean? And “Bar-ba-sol”? And the old Fitch Shampoo commercial? And “Piel’s light beer of Broadway fame?” But these are minor blotches on the Norbacks’ work; may we hope for their inclusion in a second edition?

Going, Going. . . .

Every two years, the Lib. Forum binds its issues for those years in a handsome red cover, stamped with gold. Soon, the 1975-76 issue will be bound. Hurry, hurry, then, to get your copy of the 1973-74 book. Get your Libertarian Forums in permanent, book form. Some copies of the 1973-74 book are still available at the low price of $20.

Fair Trail vs. Free Press:
Court Decision Imperils Press*

by Bill Evers

The November-December issue of Columbia Journalism Review contains an excellent, thoughtful article by Columbia law professor Benno Schmidt on the June 30 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Nebraska gag order case.

While the Supreme Court decision in the case struck down the Nebraska gag order, the argument of Chief Justice Warren Burger, who wrote the opinion of the majority, is likely to have grave consequences for freedom of publishing.

Throughout his opinion, Burger rejects a literal, “absolutist” interpretation of the First Amendment—one that prohibits government interference with the press. In fact, Burger shies away from recognizing that any general rules should apply to freedom of publishing.

He prefers a particularistic, case-by-case approach that somehow balances smooth operation of the whole governmental system against instances of the exercise of individual rights.

Prior censorship

For largely historical reasons, legal doctrines on freedom of the press have emphasized prior censorship of publications. Burger’s opinion is no exception. But a sensible approach to freedom of the press would have to recognize that punishing persons afterwards for what they publish also deprives them of their liberty.

In any case. Burger is unwilling to rule out categorically prior censorship. He says that if it is highly likely that pretrial information would influence jurors and if all means short of prior censorship will not prevent that influence, then a judge may gag the press.

The test which Burger suggests that judges use in determining when to apply gag orders is one derived from the 1950 Dennis case in which political radicals were punished for having, in Justice Hugo Black’s words, “agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date.”

Measuring likelihood

The test, first set forth in the notorious Dennis case, is a formula which pretends to somehow measure the likelihood that some speech or publication will cause certain action (criminal violence, a threat of criminal violence, or a political revolution).

The notion that the setting forth of ideas by one person directly causes another person’s later actions is muddled and unjustified. It entirely neglects the judgment made by the actor and his responsibility for his acts. Here it is important to differentiate between orders to act given by an employer to his employees or by a leader in an organization to his subordinates and ideas that are merely set forth.

The test in Dennis, which was already based on a muddled and unjustified notion when applied to concrete actions, is transparently ridiculous when applied to prejudicial pretrial publicity. While the Dennis test was originally used to estimate somehow the likelihood that some act would occur, in the Nebraska gag order case Burger says it should be used to estimate the likelihood of much vaguer and more illusive creatures, namely influence and prejudice.

More repressive

Because influence is more elusive, much more would be repressed by the government in order to stop influence than would be repressed to stop acts. In his book The System of Freedom of Expression. Thomas Emerson addresses this problem:

“A publisher would have small chance of knowing in advance what the effect of his publication might turn out to be, and whether a prosecutor or court might consider it violated the law. Inevitably there would be only sporadic and perhaps discriminatory enforcement of the requirement, or the mere existence (of the prohibition of influential reporting) would effect a sweeping repression of the news media, or more likely both.”

Not only is prior censorship invited by Burger’s opinion, but his particular approach means that short-term censorship will often be instituted while a court decides whether longer censorship is warranted.

Gag others

In addition, Burger’s call for the use of measures short of prior censorship to control press reportage will gag others who have a right to speak.

Burger reaffirmed the legality of the gags on parties, lawyers, witnesses, and police (rather than on the press), suggested in the Supreme Court’s 1966 opinion in the Sam Sheppard murder case.

I agree with Emerson that “restriction on communication by government employees that is essential to performance of the job for which they are employed cannot be considered an ‘abridgement’ of freedom of expression.” Thus a court could properly restrict release of information by police, court officials, criminal prosecutors, and other governmental employees.

Full freedom

But witnesses, criminal defense counsel, criminal defendants, and both parties and attorneys in civil cases ought to enjoy full freedom of speech and be absolutely exempt from gag orders.

Such rules would, as Emerson notes, “put prosecuting officials under more stringent restrictions than those applied to private attorneys. But this seems inevitable in the nature of the situation.

“It is primarily governmental officials who are in a position to create prejudice by releasing information, and for them a broad rule of thumb is essential. Moreover, it should be remembered that protection of expression by government, is the main function of the first amendment.”

*reprinted from the Stanford Daily, Nov. 30, 1976.

Land Reform:
Portugal and Mexico

We at the Lib. Forum have long been advocates of land reform, but not, obviously, because we are socialists or egalitarians, or because we are simply pro-peasant or anti-landlord. “Land reform” is a portmanteau concept that covers a lot of sins and virtues, and so is a virtually meaningless term. What we favor, here as always, is justice and property rights, and we favor the return of stolen property to its rightful owners. In many areas of the world, arable land was stolen by conquest and government expropriation from the peasants and handed to a favored group of “feudal” landlords, and we consider it not only just but essential to restore this property to the rightful peasant owners. In these cases, the “rent” extracted by the unjust landlords is really a form of tax paid by the peasantry. This of course is not true of all peasants and all landlords, since in many cases the land was justly owned by the landlords and then rented out to the peasantry. How do we know which is which? Obviously, in the same way we know whether any property—a watch, a horse, or whatever—is justly or criminally owned by its current possessor: by engaging in a “historical” inquiry into the source of its current title. The proper analysis is not “peasant” vs. “landlord” but just vs. criminal possession of current property.

The contrasting cases of Portugal and Mexico, recently in the news, provide an instructive case study in very different attitudes that libertarians should have toward concrete landed property and land reform.

In Portugal, there is no land problem north of the Tagus River, where no land conquest or expropriations took place, and where the land is consequently marked by private peasant proprietors and there is no call for land reform. Southeast of the Tagus, however, is a land conquered centuries ago from the Moslems, with the peasants expropriated by State creation of large feudal estates. It is in southern Portugal, then, where land reform is a very live issue. It is not surprising, therefore, that southeastern Portugal, in the Alentejo district, was the major source of Communist strength during the 1974 revolution and since, for only the Communists came out strongly for seizure of the feudal estates.

The Communists, of course, are not really interested in peasant property; what they desire is their own confiscation of peasant estates and domination over these peasants on state-owned collective farms. In Portugal, the headstrong Communist party quickly proceeded to confiscate the large estates In 1975, and turned southern Portugal into a land of state-owned rather than feudally-owned estates. Now, however, with the blessing of the new Socialist regime, the disenchanted peasants are beginning to form their own voluntary cooperatives and to break away from the state-owned farms. In the words of the new Socialist Minister of Agriculture, Antonio Barreto, “Portugal has begun its second agrarian reform.” The main task, he asserted, is now to free the Alentejo district from its “new landlords, the Communist Party and its unions.” (Marvine Howe, New York Times, Dec. 27, 1976).

In contrast to Portugal, Mexico had its anti-feudal land reform in its Revolution sixty years ago. But instead of turning the land over to the peasants for them to do what they will, severe restrictions and prohibitions were placed on the existence of any farm larger than an arbitrary number of acres, and peasant owners are not allowed to merge or to rent their estates to each other. In short, natural market forces were not allowed to operate, and Mexican agriculture has remained fixed in a primitive, inefficient, and tyrannical compulsory small-holdings system. In addition to this chronic problem, the egalitarian nature of the Mexican land-reform and its ruling ideology, have encouraged landless peasants and agricultural workers to try to seize and partition privately-owned farms. In short, the current Mexican land reform movement is a criminal and egalitarian call for confiscation of legitimately private landed property. The title of the Washington Post’s lengthy article on this problem (John M. Goshko, “Land for Peasants: Mexican Revolution’s Unfulfilled Promise” Washington Post, January S, 1977) reveals the profound misunderstanding of the entire problem in the Establishment press. Such misunderstanding is inevitable so long as observers focus on the size of landed estates rather than on the upholding of just property rights.

Relaxation in China?

Significant hope for a loosening of the iron despotism that is Communist China occurred in a dramatic New Year’s Day editorial that appeared jointly in the leading Chinese Communist journals: the Communist party paper Jenmin Jih Pao, the Red Army paper Chieh-fang Chun Pao, and the party’s theoretical journal, Hung Chi. (See Fox Butterfield, New York Times, Jan. 2, 1977). The editorial pledged “to create a completely new situation in which there will be liveliness politically and prosperity economically, a hundred schools of thought will contend and a hundred flowers bloom in science and culture, and the people’s livelihood will steadily improve through expansion of production.” The editorial also widened the regime’s previous emphasis on workers and peasants to call for a “united front” with intellectuals, “patriotic democratic parties, (and) patriotic personages.”

Since Mao Tse-tung’s death last year, the Chinese regime has moved with remarkable swiftness, first to jail Mao’s wife Chiang Ching, leader of the powerful ultra-left, and her allied “gang of four”, and to purge their followers from all important posts throughout the country. And now this joint editiorial presages more important social changes to come; the link between the purge and the broader changes is seen in the passage from the editorial which avers that “we must not be kind-hearted but battle hard against this counter-revolutionary sinister gang.”

The phrase about the “hundred schools of thought” and the “hundred flowers bloom” is particularly significant, for it deliberately harks back to the identical phrase, used abortively in 1956 and 1957. Most Americans do not realize that Communist China did not impose its socialist despotism all at once. While it is true that the Communists slaughtered at least 800,000 anti-Communist Chinese in the six years after their takeover in 1949, it is still true that China remained as a mixed economy, somewhat similar to the quasi-market NEP regime of Soviet Russia during the 1920’s. In May, 1956, the “hundred flowers” phrase, with its promise of intellectual freedom, was used by then propaganda chief Lu Ting-yi. More importantly, it was instituted by Mao himself in February 1957. However, when the flowers indeed began to bloom, with-many criticisms directed toward the regime itself, Mao turned sharply in a few short months, and viciously cracked down on the critics, nipping the “flowers” in the bud. The whole incident gave rise to the suspicion that Mao allowed a short period of intellectual freedom in order to smoke out his critics and eradicate them.

The brief blooming of the hundred flowers was followed shortly thereafter by the Great Leap Forward, which was akin to Stalin’s evil collectivization campaign of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in fastening a tyrannical and thoroughgoing socialism upon China.

All this was operating in Stalin’s footsteps. But Mao departed from the Stalinist model in the mid and late 1960’s, the period when he launched the astounding “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in a massive overthrow of his own Communist party and state machinery. In the overthrow, Mao mobilized the army and mass formations, bringing China to the brink of full-scale civil war, and in which Premier Liu Shao-chi was purged as “taking China down the capitalist road.” Theoretician and inspiration for the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s wife Chiang Ching, abetted by her “gang of four.” Clearly, the aging Mao, seeing the militance of his revolution giving way inevitably to a kind of Brezhnevite routine, in an act of demonic heroism launched a mass-movement from below to try to stem the inevitable tide of history and to revive the old revolutionary fervor, even at the cost of toppling the old regime.

Since the Cultural Revolution was a Mao-led movement from below against Communist party and state bureaucratic rule, even some American libertarians were misled into hailing the action as a movement in the direction of libertarianism. The partly-Successful goal of the Cultural Revolution, however, was not liberty or anarchism, but the replacement of orthodox Stalin-Brezhnevism by a totalitarian despotism that involves the masses in every area of local life, a despotism in which every block and every acre is run by a local collective, guided and controlled by the central government at Peking, which dominates every single aspect of the individual’s existence. In short, Mao succeeded in establishing a regime which combines the worst features of Stalinism and left-wing anarchism, a totalitarian hell on earth which makes Stalin-Brezhnev Russia a paradise of liberty in comparison. For in Soviet Russia, precisely because it is bureaucratized and routinized, the individual is able to live a life of comparative freedom, getting around red tape through a massive system of bribery known as blat, and living a largely self-directed life. In addition to the totalitarian block-by-block control of each individual’s life, the Cultural Revolution also went a long way toward another monstrous ideal of left-wing anarchism and of communism: the coercive eradication of the division of labor and of economic activity. Students were shipped from school to become permanent farm workers on the frontier (so as to “remove the contradiction between intellectuals and laborers”); and the economic incentives toward production of the wage and price system, in force in Russia since the days of the NEP, were largely replaced by “moral incentives”. “Moral incentives” being, not increased pay but receiving the accolade of one’s comrades and avoiding their moral condemnation. The result has been a precipitate decline in production and in consumer living standards.

Despite the urgings of Chiang Ching and the utopian ultra-left, Mao was persuaded not to complete the Cultural Revolution, and the shrewd centrist Chou En-lai was able to take over as Premier. The deaths of both Mao and Chou last year meant that something new was bound to happen in China, and the swift drive against Chiang Ching and now the hundred flowers editorial by the new Hua Kuo-feng regime is a clear sign of the direction which China will now take. It means the destruction of the ur-communist ultra-left in China, and a rapid liberalization of the Chinese regime. For the starving and oppressed Chinese masses, it provides the first ray of hope in twenty years.

An extra bonus of the new turn will surely be the final disappearance of Maoism in America as a force on the Left The Left has been partial to the idea of all-out communism and egalitarianism, as seemingly embodied in the romantic victors of guerrilla war like Mao and Castro. It has never been attracted to more rational bureaucratic regimes like Brezhnev’s, or even less to free-marketish regimes like Tito’s, despite the fact that Tito’s credentials as a romantic victor of guerrilla war are as good as his ultra-left counterparts. Already, the new Left-wing weekly In These Times has deplored the assault on the gang of four. Maoism had already been in disarray for several years, split by the curious shift by the Chinese to an ultra-rightist, ultra-hawk foreign policy posture against the Soviet Union, in which the Chinese have hailed the Reagans and the Schlesingers in the U.S. Orthodox Maoists in the U.S. have aped this 180-degree foreign policy reversal, while such Maoists as the weekly Guardian have clung to the older anti-U.S. imperialist line. Already in grave disarray, the “right-turn” within China should now finish the Moaists both here and abroad.

Vive Le Quebec Libre

Who could forget that dramatic moment, about a decade ago, when General Charles de Gaulle, le grand Charlie, stood up in Montreal to send the cheering throng into ecstasy and the Canadian Establishment into conniption fits by intoning, in a French so stately and lucid that even I could understand it: “Vive le Canada! Vive le Quebec! Vive le Quebec. . . ..LIBRE!” And now that dream of a tree and independent Quebec, so remote and so seemingly Utopian a short while ago, has come close to reality with the smashing victory in the recent Quebec elections of the Parti Québécois.

The surprise landslide for the PQ, committed to Quebec independence, has sent the Canadian government, and the knee-jerk liberals and conservatives in the U.S. dedicated to Big Government, into another conniption fit. Conservatives and liberals, in the first place, are devoted to a big, centralized State, per se, as well as the status quo, whatever it may be; on both grounds, then, they fear and condemn any proposed breakup of Big Government into constituent parts. The various arguments levelled against Quebec independence by conservatives and liberals are all spurious. The charge that Quebec would be economically “unviable”, whatever that may mean, is rebutted by the fact that the PQ wants political independence, but an economic free-trade zone with Canada, which would eliminate any economic problems that might result from independence. The charge that PQ is in some way Commie is nonsense; M. Rene Levesque and the rest of the PQ leadership are simply mild Social Democrats, no more nor less statist than the rest of State-ridden Canada: Internal economic policy in a free Quebec is likely to be no better and no worse than in the rest of Canada.

The key to Quebec grievances is language, generally the touchstone of secessionist and anti-imperialist policy. The English-Canadian national government had long imposed the English language—as a language of the courts, the public schools, and the civil service—upon a Quebec that la overwhelmingly French-speaking. In the late 1960’s, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the Canadian Establishment were faced with an acute language crisis. There were two ways they could have moved: they could have granted Quebec to the French language, keeping English as the official language in the rest of Canada. That would have been the intelligent and reasonable course, and it would probably have defused the agitation for Quebec independence permanently. Instead, the Canadian government opted, not for the libertarian solution of English in the English-speaking provinces and French in Quebec, but for compulsory bilingualism everywhere. In short, Canada opted for the centralist, statist solution. The result was to polarise hatred and conflict between the French and English throughout Canada. The French still had not achieved dominance for French in Quebec, and all the other Anglo provinces faced the annoyance and provocation of having to learn French on all billboards and canned goods, etc. The result of this intensifying hatred and polarization was the present crisis.

There are two positive reasons for the libertarian to clear at the imminent achievement of Quebec independence. In the first place, secession–the breaking up of a State from within–is a great good in itself for any libertarian. It means that a giant central State has been broken up into constituent parts; it means greater competition between governments of different geographical areas, anything people of one State to zip across the border to relatively greater freedom more easily; and it exalts the mighty libertarian principle of secession, which we hope to extend on down from the region to the city to the block to the individual. And secondly, Quebec independence would at long last reverse the coercive verdict of two centuries ago—when British imperialism launched a war against-France and conquered French Canada, and dominated and oppressed the French Canadians ever since.

Vive le Quebec libre!

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NO. 2

FEBRUARY, 1977

US-ISS0047-4517

The War Over Foreign Policy

A titanic conflict is now raging over the soul of the Carter Administration in the vital realm of foreign and military policy. The outcome of that struggle will affect each and every one of our lives: for the consequence will either be aggravated militarism and a possible nuclear holocaust, or a cutback in militarism and a significant step toward international peace.

Since the Carter Administration is new and still unformed, it is understandable that a war for its soul is taking place at its very birth, to try to shape the course of the next four years. In effect, what is being attempted is a massive counter-revolution against the wise if halting steps toward detente (i.e. peace) taken by the Nixon-Ford administrations, a counter-revolution mounted by the right-wing in the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, Congress, and the intelligentsia, the latter focussed on the aggressive Social Democrats who form what Alexander Cockburn has trenchantly labelled “the military-intellectual complex:”

The assault began in force during the necessarily chaotic days of transition between administrations. The war-hawk assault suffered a setback when their hero, James Schlesinger, was defeated for the post of Secretary of Defense by the centrist Harold Brown. But then the war-crowd quickly regrouped with the deliberate leak to the press of the rabid “National Intelligence Estimate” led by one of its authors, the febrile outgoing head of Air Force Intelligence, Major General George Keegan. The NIE warns of current Soviet military “superiority” over the U.S.; the egregious Keegan, who has been predicting an imminent Soviet attack for many years within the corridors of power, then went public with an update of his old hysterical warnings. Keegan and the hawks had been able to outflank the moderate realists within the intelligence services by wangling an agreement to bring in a group of leading warhawks, the “B Team”, to write their own estimates and to override the moderates. The war-hawk B Team was able to bludgeon their way into framing the NIE.

The Keegan-NIE concerns are, to put it bluntly, dangerous hogwash. It is irrational to prate about nuclear “superiority” when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union have the invulnerable second-strike capability, guaranteed by existing nuclear submarines if nothing else, to destroy one another many times over (“overkill.”) The aims of the Keegan-NIE-warhawks are manifold and pernicious. One is to push for such wasteful and expensive military boondoggles as the pointless B-1 bomber. As Newsweek reports: “some extreme hard-liners in the Pentagon are talking of budget increases that could add up to nearly $40 billion a year.” Another aim is to sabotage any success of the SALT agreements in pursuing President Carter’s announced goal of reductions in nuclear and conventional arms. A final, and most pernicious goal of the war crowd is to prepare for the United States a “counterforce” first-strike nuclear capability, that is, a capability of launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. As the astute and knowledgeable International Bulletin puts it: “the hawks favor development by the U.S. of a credible counterforce capability to fight and win a limited or even all-out nuclear war. Such a capability would give the U.S. strategic superiority and thus the ability to use nuclear weapons for coercive, political purposes in a crisis—the very goal they attribute to the Soviet Union.” (International Bulletin, Jan. 14, 1977).

The fate being prepared for us and for all of humanity by the war-hawks is, thus, the insane goal of a nuclear holocaust. Contrast to that the rational views of such “doves” as Carter, Vance, and Brown: “that nuclear war is unwinnable—that both sides would sustain unacceptable damage—and that limited nuclear war would almost inevitably escalate to all-out war.” Former hawk Harold Brown joined the rational dove view in the early 1970’s: in a speech in Moscow in 1975, Brown called for both the U.S. and the U.S. S. R. “to reject counterforce strategy aimed at attaining the ability to win and fight a nuclear war or to use nuclear weapons for coercion in a crisis.” (Ibid.) It should be noted here that the United States has persistently refused to accept the Soviet proposal for both sides to refrain from being the first to use nuclear weapons in any crisis.

The war crowd achieved its first big victory with the virtual mugging of Theodore Sorensen as head of the CIA, in Carter’s ignoble and pusillanimous surrender to the right-wing smear campaign against his nominee. Sorensen’s record is hardly one of all-out devotion to liberty or peace, but the point is that the smear campaign was directed against Sorensen’s virtues not his vices: for the fact of his conscientious objection during the Korean War, his announced intention to dismantle the massive invasions of privacy and aggressions of the CIA, and his support for massive cuts in the military budget. The main hypocritical handle used by the smearbund was Sorensen’s affidavit in support of Daniel Ellsberg’s heroic disclosure of the Pentagon Papers to the public, and his admission that Sorensen used “classified” papers in preparing his biography of President Kennedy. The hypocrisy is manifold: particularly in the knowledge by the smearbund that every thing in government is “classified”, that countless ex-government employees have used such information in their memoirs without remark or censure, and that their own hero Keegan and his colleagues deliberately leaked their own classified NIE to the press in support of their war drive. The hypocrisy was compounded by Senators who expressed their deep concern for the “integrity” of an agency (the CIA) that has engaged in systematic invasions of liberty, ranging from wiretapping to assassinations to secret “experimental” plying of LSD to unsuspecting and innocent people. Particularly prominent in the smear campaign were the American Conservative Union and the Birchite Rep. Larry McDonald (D., Ga.), whose office has been the headquarters for the investigation and smearing of dissidents from the U.S. government military and foreign policy line. (A celebration of the right-wing campaign against Sorensen can be found in Human Events, Jan. 29). As the columnist Murray Kempton concludes, “And so Theodore Sorensen departs; followed by unresolved suspicions that his moral sensibilities are too tender to make him a fit director of the Central Intelligence Agency.” (New York Post, Jan. 18).

The next looming battle is over Carter’s selection of Paul C. Warnke, the most dovish of the foreign policy Establishment, as chief SALT negotiator and director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Warnke was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, as well chief counsel of the Defense Department, in the Johnson Administration, and was probably the leading opponent of the Vietnam War in the Johnson government. Warnke has been pressing hard for the abolition of all further nuclear testing, and for joint reduction in nuclear arms by the U.S. and Russia.

No sooner was the Warnke nomination announced (New York Times, Jan. 31) when the smear campaign began again, this time in the form of a widely circulated anonymous memo trying to link Warnke with the devil-figure George McGovern, and as a believer that “it is primarily American actions which have spurred the arms race.” (Tsk, tsk.) (AP dispatch, February 2).

The nefarious B Team included such prominent war hawks as Paul Nitze, former Deputy Secretary of Defense; Lt. General Daniel Graham, head of the powerful Defense Intelligence Agency until he was forced out along with his ally Schlesinger in late 1975; Thomas Wolfe of the RAND Corp.; and Harvard professor Richard Pipes. But behind the B Team is the newly reformed pro-war pressure group, the Committee on the Present Danger, three of whose members were on the B Team.

In an incisive analysis of the CPD, Alexander Cockburn (Village Voice, Jan. 31), points out that, of the 141 members of the committee, no less than 48 academics are affiliated with 22 universities which last year received a total of $170 million in defense contracts from the U.S. government. Fourteen other members are current or retired directors of arms-making companies. Thus, a CPD co-chairman is Henry Fowler, former Secretary of the Treasury, now a partner of the powerful investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs; another co-chairman is David Packard, head of Hewlett Packard and Nixon’s Under Secretary of Defense; still another is war-hawk union leader Lane Kirkland, heir apparent to George Meany as head of the AFL-CIO. Three of the corporations scheduled to do work on the B-1 bomber if the CPD’s goals are achieved are represented on the CPD: William McC. Martin, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is a director of IBM; John T. Connor, former Secretary of Commerce, is a director of General Motors; and Hobart Taylor, former director of the Export-Import Bank, and Karl Bendetsen, former Under Secretary of the Army, are both directors of Westinghouse. Also a member of the CPD is Harold Sweatt, honorary chairman of the board of Honeywell, which will help make the advanced ICBMs if their production should be approved.

Cockburn also writes: “Those cold-war intellectuals worried about the future of Israel are also represented: Saul Bellow, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter—all veterans of the military-intellectual complex.”

Also a key figure on the CPD is its treasurer and co-founder Charls Walker, Under Secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon-Ford cabinets. Walker, former chief Washington lobbyist for the banking industry, is now a powerful corporate lobbyist whose clients include Bechtel and the Ford Motor Company. Among his corporate clients who are also represented on the CPD are Eastern Airlines, Proctor and Gamble, and General Electric.

Such is the unholy alliance (what Cockburn calls “Dr. Strangelove’s Children”) of pro-war intellectuals and corporate and academic defense contractors who help to form the greatest single threat to all of our lives and liberties.

Flash: As we go to press, it turns out that the anonymous memo was written and the anti-Wamke smear campaign directed by Penn Kemble, executive director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, and by Joshua Muravchik, ex-CDM staffer and aide to Senator Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.), the thinking man’s Scoop Jackson (Mr. State). The CDM, which prominently includes the same Commentary crowd joined in the CPD, is a group of right-wing Social Democrats within the Democratic Party that aim to move the party in a Jackson-Moynihan direction.

Recommended Reading

Leonard Liggio, “English Origins of Early American Racism,” Radical History Review (Spring 1976). A lengthy and brilliant article, which traces early American racism and brutal treatment of the Indians to the English treatment of the Irish.

H. J. Eysenck, “The Case of Sir Cyril Burt,” Encounter (January 1977). A sober treatment of the late English psychologist, pointing out that he committed error rather than fraud, and that in any event the case for inheritability of IQ still stands.

The Freeman, December 1976 issue. This venerable monthly, which is generally confined to ultra-elementary articles on freedom, has three excellent brief articles in this issue: two on governmental responsibility for monopolies and cartels—Brian Summers, “Cartels:Conspiracies in Restraint of Trade,”; and David Osterfeld, “The Free Market and the ‘Tyranny of Wealth’,” and one by Henry Hazlitt on “Lessons of the German Inflation.”

Alan Crawford, “Richard Viguerie’s Bid for Power,” The Nation, Jan. 29. A chilling expose, by a pro-free market conservative, of the drive for power by the Viguerie-Phillips-Rusher clique, and its willingness to jettison the last remnants of the pro-freedom rhetoric of conservatism in the process.

Athan Theoharis, “The Origins of the Cold War: A Revisionist Interpretation,” Peace and Change. (Fall, 1976). A fine summation and bibliographical analysis of the origins of the Cold War by a leading Cold War revisionist scholar. While Theoharis is firmly in the revisionist camp, he probably errs by reverting to an earlier revisionist view that puts the blame on the Truman Administration, while letting FDR off the hook.

FOOTNOTES

1 The provos, short for provocateurs, are a group residing in Holland many of whom “own” white bicycles. These white bicycles, when not being used, are by common consent, left for anyone else’s use with the proviso that this secondary user, will, in turn, allow a third person to use it when he himself finishes.

2 For a discussion of why “non-used” things like inventory, vacant apartments, and “non-used” people such as frictionally unemployed people are not really wasteful, see Alchian and Allen, University Economics, pp. 496-503.

3 Always assuming that his property rights do not conflict with the equal property rights of others, e.g. he cannot shoot his gun anywhere he pleases.

4 External economies are said to exist when not all production costs must be met by the given producer: he is able to “shift” some of the costs onto others.

5 R. H. Coase’s work in the Journal of Law and Economics is a pleasant exception.

6 More exactly, he will choose the alternative that nets him the highest present discounted value: the most valuable future income stream in accordance with his time preference.

7 “Redwood trees” may be substituted for lakes. In this case the dispute would be between consumers who want to use redwoods for recreation and those who want to use redwoods as furniture, etc. It is not “rational” to completely prohibit either use. Clearly, an allocative mechanism must be found.

8 Although ineffective, indirect, slow-moving, political opposition to pollution is still possible. Political opposition, where the corporations, whose total incomes are at stake, find it profitable to bring overwhelming pressure to bear, and where the “recreationer” standing to lose only small conveniences, by comparison to the corporation, finds it hard to oppose the pollution.

9 My treatment is indebted to Milton Friedman’s essay question on page 284 of his “Price Theory”, Aldine Co. 1962, Chicago.

10 Substitute for books: magazines, newspapers, movies, records, paintings, pornography in whatever form.

Libertarianism and Property Rights

by Walter Block

I Objections To Property Rights

1. First, the “human rights versus property rights” bogey must be laid to rest. There is no real conflict between human rights and property rights. This is almost as silly as the “conflict” between people and cars that rages from time to time, centered around the assertion “Cities are for people, not cars”. Clearly, the conflict is between people (in cars) and people not in cars (pedestrians) as to access on roads. What type of beast, may one ask, do proponents of “people” and opponents of “cars” think inhabit cars, for goodness sake?

In like manner, what type of beast is thought of as having property rights, if not human beings! Clearly, again, the conflict is between different human beings, each pressing their own claims as to rightful ownership.

Historically, a conflict between “human rights and property rights” arose over unionization. The libertarian view on this fiasco is, briefly, that workers have every right to associate voluntarily together in order to bargain for better wages and to quit in unison as a tactic. Anti-trust legislation should not apply to unions (nor to business, or anyone else for that matter); any use of detective agencies like Pinkertons to aggressively bust up unions is clearly contrary to libertarian strictures against the initiation of force against non-initiators.

But workers, too, have no right to beat up other workers who are willing to work for the employer at wages equal to or less than the wages that the union has rejected. I refer to the quaint practice of “beating up scabs”. This, too, is in violation of libertarian prohibitions of aggression.

2. Secondly, let’s consider the “Property is theft” claim. If by this is meant that presently, property is theft, or that the present distribution of property has resulted (largely) from theft, conquest, etc., then this could be a perfectly legitimate claim. That theft and aggression have resulted in illegitimate property titles is a focal point in much libertarian writing. (There is some evidence that the statement “Property is theft”, made famous by Proudhon, was meant in exactly this way.)

But “Property is theft” might well (and ofttimes has) been interpreted as “Property, by its very nature, is theft” or “Property, of all kinds, always has been, is, and always will be, theft”. To this claim, two objections must be made:

Property rights give their holder the right to dispose of or use that which is owned: the property. If property rights are, by their very nature, theft, then mankind would be prohibited from using objects on this earth and would soon die. More unintelligibly, man would also seem to be prohibited from using his own body, since his body is his property, and he would presumably have to deliberately commit suicide even before he could starve so as not to use his body that he has “stolen” (from whom?) one second longer than necessary. But how could he commit suicide? He couldn’t use a rope or a gun because use of such property would be theft. He couldn’t even strangle himself because, in order to do so, he would have to use “his” fingers, and he has no right to do this!

This position cannot be saved by recourse to the following argument: “Mankind can use objects on this earth (and his own body as well) and this need involve no recourse to so-called property rights: use of objects (and one’s body) can be based on the need for survival, or the attainment and preservation of human life.”

But what this argument translates into is that property rights can be based on survival, human life, etc. This is because all that is meant by property rights is the right to use objects (and one’s body). Referring to property rights by any of its synonymous phrases like right to use objects does not and cannot invalidate this point. Property by any other name is still property.

Why this tie to the terminology of private property on the part of libertarianism? Surely there is nothing holy about the word “property” and maybe it would be better to drop it like “capitalism” seems to have been dropped. (With “friends” like the conservatives, these words haven’t needed enemies.) But “ownership” has a bad tinge of its own and “right to use objects” is rather awkward.

The second objection that must be made to interpreting “Property is theft” to mean that property, by its very nature, is theft, is that this interpretation involves the acceptance of a logical contradiction. For what is theft but the taking of something that is rightfully owned by another (another’s property)? It is not theft if what is taken is unowned or is owned by oneself! But if there is no such thing as a valid concept of rightfully owned property, then there cannot be a valid concept of theft, and property cannot be theft, because there cannot be any such thing as theft in the first place!!!

3. Let us now consider the view that private property is theft (or at least quite suspect) whereas commonly owned property is not theft (and is not even suspect). This view can be interpreted in a “weak” and in a “strong” sense. In the “weak” sense, this view merely voices concern as to whether communes, cooperatives, kibbutzes, or provo[1]-white-bicycle systems would be allowed to function under libertarianism. The answer is a very definite, yes. There is nothing in libertarianism inconsistent with any type of voluntary commune nor is there anything in libertarianism that gives preference to communal over individual forms of ownership. All that need be done is that each member of the commune contribute his own possessions with any (or no) agreement as to how the commune is to divide “its” property if or when “it” decides to break up. As long as no recalcitrant prospective member is forced to join or contribute, there is nothing about a commune inconsistent with libertarianism.

In the stronger sense, this view would hold that only communal ownership claims (and not private or individual ownership claims) can have validity. This group would thus allow all that follows from the property rights doctrine (exclusive right to use), but would substitute “communal” property rights for private property rights.

One argument against this doctrine is that it breaks down when human beings are considered as property. If only groups of two or more are allowed to determine people’s actions, instead of each person deciding what he himself shall do, all sorts of problems crop up. How would the commune consisting of Mr. A, Mr. B, and Mr. C decide what actions to take? It would seem that if Mr. A and Mr. B vote that Mr. C should commit suicide, Mr. C would be morally obligated to do so, since Mr. C, by himself, could have no property rights over his own person whatever.

If people can be owned “in common” but not by themselves then Mr. A can own Mr. B but not himself and likewise Mr. B can own Mr. A but not himself. There is a contradiction here because Mr. A, the owner of Mr. B, can order Mr. B to order himself (Mr. A) in a manner pleasing to himself. Mr. B can also do this. But then, except for the inconvenience of having to order one’s slave to tell one what one would have done in the first place anyway, each man really owns himself! So communal ownership breaks down into individual ownership.

There are troubles for “strong” communal ownership in the case of objects. By what magic can a group of “miserable” individuals, who separately cannot own the smallest thing of value, be transformed into a group, who can? A group, after all, is no more and no less than a mere collection of individuals. If no one in the group can have any property rights at all, how can the group have property rights?

Alternatively, consider a group of homesteaders who legitimately own the land, according to this doctrine. Suppose they decide to disband and divide their territory among the individuals comprising the group. They would be rudely shocked to learn this would not be permissible since “no individual or private ownership claims can have validity.” But if a group cannot give its property to whomever it pleases (themselves as individuals, in this case) in what sense can they be said to have really owned the property in the first place? Thus we see that strict communal ownership implies no ownership at all.

The value of private property is that it allows “rugged individualists” and hermits as well as the more socially or cooperatively minded to “do their own thing”: the “strong” communal property doctrine allows scepe only for those who wish to own property in common.

4. A doctrine which I have dubbed “the no hogging theory” allows for private property rights, but transforms the idea behind the provo white-bicycle system in an interesting way. The idea behind the provo white-bicycle system, it will be recalled, was that anyone else can use the white bicycle when the “owner” isn’t using it. The “no hogging” theorist transforms this into the view that no one can fully establish ownership rights in a piece of property because property rights were only established in the first place, as based on use of the piece of property in question, and no one can continuously use any piece of property, if for no other reason than that he must fall asleep eventually. In other words, private property rights are valid, all right: they are just of a very temporary nature. They last until the owner stops using the object and when he goes to sleep he loses all property (except perhaps his pajamas and his bed).

At this point the “no hogging theory” breaks into two schools of thought: According to the first all people can use the object when the owner is no longer using it, free of charge, of course, but they have to bring it back to the “owner” when he wants to use it again. This may be called the “no hogging but strong property rights” school. According to the second school, the “owner” completely loses his rights to an object when he ceases to use it and may only regain possession when others cease using it and his turn to reuse it comes around again. . .This may be called the “no hogging and weak property rights” school.

How will it be defended just which people are “next in line” to receive the soon to be unused property? Money prices could not be used to ration these scarce goods because no case can be made out for giving the money to third parties and, anyway, according to the “no hogging theory” the ex-user of the object is hardly entitled to financial renumeration (rent) for it.

It is easy to see that there would be little incentive to produce anything of lasting value under the “weak” school. If anyone could come along and take all one’s hard-earned possessions the minute one ceased continual use of them, it would be a miracle, indeed, if much were produced (and hence many people kept alive). The “strong” school fares little better. Suppose, under the “strong” school Mr. B used Mr. A’s property while Mr. A was not using it and damaged it before returning it to Mr. A. Would Mr. B have to pay for repairs? If no, then the “strong” school supplies no more incentive to produce than does the “weak” school. If yes, the whole “strong” system is unworkable, because every wronged “Mr. A” could always justifiably claim psychic income loss when his property was taken out of his possession. After all, physical, visible breakage of objects is not the only kind of damage that can be incurred by the aggrieved property owner. If the “strong, no hogging theorist” then claims that Yes, payment must be made, but that this is akin to a rental, the no hogging position is reduced to a rule that all unused property must be rented out (presumably to prevent wasteful[2] non-usage). What will the rental price be? If it is to be non-arbitrary it must be a rental price willingly agreed upon by both renter and rentee. But this is precisely what would occur under libertarianism, where “hogging” is allowed.

Another advantage of permanent private property rights over temporary private property rights is that under “permanent” property a group of people may voluntarily band together to try to apply the “temporary” property theory to whatever “permanent” property they may happen to own. Under “temporary property “a group of people could not voluntarily band together to try to apply the “permanent” property theory to whatever “temporary” property they may happen to “own”. They cannot do this with their “temporary” property because under “no hogging” or “temporary” theory, it can be taken from them when they cease to use it.

5. Some people might be disposed to agree with the libertarian concept of absolute property rights, so far, but would insist upon an exception for inheritance. Property rights are all right, according to this line of thought, but the right to dispose of property after death through inheritance ought not to be allowed. There are, commonly, two reasons given for this: inheritance leads to large concentrations of wealth; inheritance is unfair because those who receive it get as unfair “start” in life. There are two objections to this:

There are large concentrations of wealth and then there are large concentrations of wealth. Some men amass large fortunes because of munificent creativity. If the benefactor who brought the world the light bulb, the telephone, etc. or the benefactor who brought the world the automobile, or the benefactor who brought the world the airplane, became fabulously wealthy through production, trade and voluntary exchanges, the libertarian can do nought but wish him well and rejoice that such men make his life easier. Any attempt to relieve these men or their heirs of their fortunes would violate libertarian strictures against the initiation of violence against non-initiators.

The large fortunes of the Rockefellers, Morgans, Lyndon Johnsons, etc. stolen of, by and through government depredation, should be “taxed” away by an irate citizenry, even before there is a chance for them to be passed on to heirs.

Many large concentrations of wealth would be reduced in one fell swoop by the institution of the principles of libertarianism. All subsidies, tariffs and privileges, government supported monopolies and cartels would immediately cease. There would be much less concentration under libertarianism with no prohibitions of inheritance than presently with so called progressive taxation on income and inheritance.

There is a natural limitation in concentration due to production and trade that is absent under governmental “transfer” programs. Under production and trade a fortune can only be made when the mass of people become enriched—a positive sum game, in game theory terminology. The benefactor becomes very rich in absolute terms, but less so in percentage terms because the poor get richer too. Under archic depredation, fortunes can only be made at the cost of impoverishing the mass of people–a zero sum game. (If the costs of the transfers in terms of collection costs and inefficiencies imparted to the whole economy are counted—a negative sum game). The thief becomes very rich in absolute terms, but even richer in percentage terms because the poor becomes more impoverished.

Secondly, if we really took objections to unfair starts in life and “unearned” wealth seriously, we’d be involved in all sorts of unpleasantries. To begin with, some children are born with more happy dispositions, healthy bodies and better minds. Should the all-loving state step in and redistribute health, happiness and talent from those who have too much to those who do not have enough? A thoroughgoing opposition to unearned “wealth” would also include opposition to all gifts, not just gifts to heirs. Birthday presents, wedding and anniversary gifts, the whole bit. Also parents’ gifts of their time and love to their children (and to each other) would have to be prohibited out of “fairness” to those without loved ones.

II Incomplete Vestiture of Private Property Rights

Complete vestiture of property rights means that the property rights of the owner are absolute[3]: he can sell, lease, rent, his property at any mutually agreeable price; he can give his property away, or allow it to lie fallow, or completely destroy it, or make improvements in it. And at no time are there any “strings attached”, any governmental prohibitions or encouragements impinging on these privileges.

Incomplete vestiture of private property limits occurs when any or all of these privileges are abrogated; and whenever this occurs, grief is sure to follow. Conservation is a case in point. A hue and cry is frequently made about “our” polluted lakes and streams. Politicians make fiery speeches: conservation groups mobilize irate citizens; corporations who pollute lakes and streams with industrial waste tell of their efforts, economists give fancy names to the phenomena: external diseconomies[4]; Capitalism is blamed in all beautification projects; and hardly anywhere[5] is it realized that the cause of all the problem is not property. The cause is the lack of private property rights in bodies of water; the fact that “our” lakes are really no one’s lakes at all.

Let’s suppose that all lakes were privately owned in much the same way that much of the land mass is owned. The owner of the lake now has to make a choice: should he let his lake be used as a site for the dumping of industrial waste? Or should he save his lake for “recreational” uses: boating, fishing, swimming, etc.? He will, of course, choose that alternative which is most profitable to him; but he will realize that once a lake is polluted there is little possibility of conversion to recreational uses, while conversion from recreational to industrial uses is always open to him: that, in view of this, if his lake, presently, would be just slightly more profitable for industrial than for recreational uses, he might well be better off saving it for the latter use.[6]

The number of lakes saved for recreational purposes will depend on the valuations set on the alternative uses of the lake by consumers. A given lake[7] will be “saved” if more dollars are forthcoming from consumers interested in recreation than from consumers (indirectly, producers) interested in industrial products.

Under the present system, pollution of a lake is completely[8] free to the industry: a lake will be polluted if alternate methods of disposal cost as much as one cent even though recreational uses might be willing to pay far more. Producers are able to “push” the costs of disposal onto potential recreational users of lakes in the form of pollution. They do not have to pay for pollution, because no one owns the lake. If someone owned the lake and charged them for pollution they would have to bear all the costs of production. External diseconomies would disappear with the advent of property rights.

If lakes were owned, industry would have a cash incentive to explore alternative disposal methods such as land refill or conversion to fertilizers. Lakes would not be polluted at all, unless alternative methods proved more costly.

Let it not be objected that under private property in lakes, swimmers, boaters, etc., would have to pay for their use of the lake, whereas lakes were free before. To make this objection is to misunderstand the allocative function of prices. According to this objection it presumably would be better to have maximum prices of zero on food and housing, for instance. People would then be able to have these commodities for “free”. If this program were carried out in earnest very few resources indeed would be allocated to the production of food and housing. People would then starve and be homeless.

If land had a maximum price of zero, it could not be allocated in any rational way: and this, as we have seen, is exactly the problem associated with “free” lakes.

Another area of grief due to incomplete property rights is that vast wasteland, television[9]. “Owners” of T.V. stations are not allowed to charge anything to their customers, the viewers. They depend upon advertisements for their revenue. As a result T.V. programs are banal, dull and pitched to the lowest common denominator.

Suppose the ever-loving government were to decree that book[10] publishing follow this rule? That henceforth no price could be charged for a book? That all publications must depend upon advertising for their sole source of revenue?

Surely book publishing would come to resemble T.V. in its dedication to the lowest common denominator! The answer is not to emasculate property rights in these areas. The answer is to institute full absolute private property rights in the area of T.V.

One Man Against OSHA

There is no agency more despotic, more totalitarian, in the United States than OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration of the Department of Labor.) OSHA has been terrorizing small businesses throughout the country by conducting lightning raids without a search warrant to impose “safety” standards that are usually absurd and idiotic, and impose impossibly high costs on their small business victims. OSHA is bureaucratic regulation run rampant, implicitly aiding large business by imposing mammoth fixed costs on their smaller competitors. Moreover, by conducting these raids without a warrant, OSHA has been in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibitions against search and seizure without use of a court warrant.

Now one heroic small businessman has risen up to challenge the dread power of OSHA, and is so far succeeding! In September 1975, OSHA inspectors tried to enter the small plumbing-heating-electrical supply house of 61-year-old Ferrol “Bill” Barlow, of Pocatello, Idaho. Barlow refused to allow the OSHA gestapo to enter, whereupon, as usual, the Department of Labor brought suit against the resisting Barlow. But Barlow pulled a dramatic switch, filing a counter-suit in Federal court charging OSHA with violation of the Fourth Amendment.

On December 30, a three-judge federal court in Idaho stunned OSHA by finding in favor of Mr. Barlow, declaring that the warrantless inspections of OSHA are unconstitutional, that the inspection provisions of the OSHA law are null and void, and issued an injunction prohibiting the Secretary of Labor or any underling from sending an OSHA inspector to any business without a warrant. OSHA was particularly stunned at the ruling on constitutionality, since it had maintained that Barlow was obliged to admit the inspectors and then appeal through its own administrative processes for relief (Ha, ha!)

Barlow was aided in his fight by the fact that his fabricating shop has a spotless safety record, and by the admission of OSHA that its visit was a “routine” one and that it had no probable cause for complaint against Barlow’s business.

The reaction of the lawless OSHA is typical. Its lawyer declared that “We construe the order as applicable only in Idaho where that three judge court has jurisdiction”; and so OSHA will continue its gestapo tactics outside of Idaho while it appeals to the Supreme Court for a stay of the court injunction. And so the Supreme Court will now rule on the matter.

Meanwhile, we may hail, not only Mr. Barlow (on whose office there hangs a framed copy of the Bill of Rights), but also the decision of Judges Keolsch, Anderson, and McNichols, which declared: “Our only concern is the alleged affront to the Fourth Amendment . . . . Expediency is the argument of tyrants, it precedes the loss of every human liberty.”

(See the New York Times, Jan. 17).

From the
Old Curmudgeon

Solar Baloney. For some reason, it is now fashionable left-liberal faith to plump for solar power — as against the bad old oil, coal, gas, etc. sources of power. Maybe the solarites feel that they are then more in tune with mystic vibrations from On High. In his desire to swing with the fashion, President Carter ordered solar heating for his stand at the Inaugural — but, fortunately for his health, hedged his bets by adding a supplementary old-fashioned oil heater, just in case. The case happened, and the bitter cold and snow this winter routed the solar forces with ease.

Not being a technologist, I’m not going to take a stand for or against solar energy. But I do know that it is highly uneconomic in relation to other energy sources, and that its wide-eyed advocates are hoping for the blessings of federal aid to offset the disadvantage. Thus, a letter to the New York Times (Jan. 31) by Mr. Gerald M. Schaflander, president of Idaho Solar Power, Inc., lets the cat out of the bag. While claiming that his own version of solar power is better and more economic than the standard EFG-method, his solution is to call upon President Carter and other government agencies to “bite the bullet” and “back” his version of solar power. The case for the prosecution rests.

The Natural Gas Caper

As everyone knows, the bitter winter in the Northeast and Midwest has aggravated a grave “shortage” of natural gas in those parts, with attendant calls for government rationing and hysterical denunciations of the natural gas companies for allegedly deliberately creating a shortage and perversely refusing to sell oceans of natural gas. In actual fact, as virtually all economists have proclaimed, the “shortage” is a pure creation of Federal Power Commission maximum price controls, which have been in effect since 1954, and which have been increasingly below a free-market price that has been rising through general inflation in the decades since. The severe price controls have dried up incentives for natural gas producers to explore and discover new gas reserves. The culminating inanity is that since FPC controls inter-state shipments but not shipments within the major producing state of Texas, that it has become a losing proposition to ship the gas out of state.

Even the New York Times has recognized this fact; it points out the example of Antonio R. Sanchez, Jr., a Texas gas producer, who sits on an ocean of natural gas, but which is only sold to fellow Texas buyers. Why? Because Texas buyers are paying about $2 per thousand cubic feet for gas, the market price, while federal price controls prohibit out-of-state buyers from paying more than $1.42. As Sanchez states: “What amazes me is why people in the East cannot understand the simple economics of it. Why should I sell my gas out of state for $1.42 when Texas buyers are waiting in line to pay $2 for it? For $1.42,1 wouldn’t even go out and drill the holes. We wouldn’t even consider it. It’s simply not commercial. We’d divert our funds somewhere else.” (New York Times, Jan. 31)

In its fumbling attempts to deal with the problem, the Carter administration has indicated that the emergency is so great that it might be necessary to relax the price controls. Which, of course, is an implicit acknowledgement that the controls are the major culprit in creating the shortage. The controls themselves were imposed by an unholy alliance of left-liberal intellectuals and monopoly utility companies, who as buyers lobbied for government aid to give them cheap gas. They are now reaping the whirlwind.

It is usually under color of “emergency” that totalitarianism rears its ugly head. The most blatant example is the reaction of Governor Byrne of New Jersey to the natural gas shortage. From price controls comes shortage and then despotic rationing, and Byrne has decreed that all buildings, commercial and residential, must ration gas (and indeed, all other heat sources) by holding down their thermostats to 65 degrees by day and 60 at night. How is this universal decree to be enforced? While Byme and New Jersey officials claim that they will avoid such mass-gestapo tactics, their denials are scarcely convincing. Under the 1941 Federal Civil Defense and Disaster Control Act, and under Byrne’s declaration of a state of emergency, violators of the 60-degree mandate will be convicted as guilty of being “disorderly persons” and subject to fines of $175 and up to a year in jail. Already, state and local Jersey police have cruised neighborhoods in squad cars and knocked on doors to remind residents of the fines and jail sentences in store for those who prefer warmer homes. The governor’s office admitted that the police would make “spot checks” of homes and businesses to enforce the edict. When asked whether violators would be arrested, Robert Comstock, an aide to Byrne, replied, “damn right we’re going to arrest people.”

Defiance of the decree quickly built up across the state, especially among poorer people who can’t afford the extra warm clothing, and churchmen who balk at the decree that churches must lower their thermostats to 50 (!) degrees.

All this is reminiscent of the artificial meat shortage of 1946, created by federal maximum price controls on meat. Before removing the controls in the summer of 1946 (and thereby quickly ending the “shortage”), President Truman declared that he had seriously considered mobilizing the army and National Guard and going to the farms and seizing the livestock, but that “practical difficulties” forced him to abandon that plan, so that he was then forced to remove the controls. (Again, implicit acknowledgement that the controls were responsible in the first place.) No better example can be found of how we are always faced with a sharp alternative: free markets and abundance on the one hand, or shortages and totalitarian despotism on the other.

In the meantime, in an unrelated natural gas caper, Cockburn and Ridgeway (Village Voice, Jan. 31) have uncovered a mammoth taxpayer bailout-boondoggle granted to certain elements of the natural gas industry. Just before leaving office, outgoing Secretary of Commerce Elliot Richardson approved a $730 million U.S. government loan guarantee to the big defense contractor General Dynamics, to build a fleet of enormously expensive tankers to convey liquid natural gas from Indonesia to Japan. Of all U.S. corporations, General Dynamics is perhaps the most tied in with the government, and the least able to fend for itself on the free market. General Dynamics had been suffering severe losses in its shipbuilding operations, and now the $730 million U.S. guarantee of its loans enables it to go ahead with this uneconomic operation.

As in all government operations, we must ask cui bono: who benefits, at the expense of the taxpayers and of the economic use of resources on behalf of the consumers? First, of course, General Dynamics. Second, Elliot Richardson himself, for the shipyards are located at Quincy, Massachusetts, and this would be a talking point for his prospective race for governor of that state. Third, the British government, and its inefficient and uneconomic bailee, Burmah Oil. Burmah Oil, on the point of collapse, was saved two years ago by the British government, which stepped in to guarantee its heavy debts to American and foreign banks. Of these, no less than $500 million is in hard-to-come-by dollar loans. Burmah Oil will be using the ships constructed by GD to haul the liquid gas from Indonesia to Japan. Failure of the U.S. government to kick in the $730 million guarantee would have probably caused the bankruptcy of Burmah Oil and a default on its loans; and where would staggering, inflation and deficit-ridden Britain have found the $500 million to fulfill its guarantee? The British government and British banks, therefore, put intense pressure on the U.S. government to come across.

A fourth beneficiary of this deal (which totals $3 billion in all) is the corrupt, uneconomic state-owned Indonesian corporation, Pertamina, which could easily have gone under without its share of the swag. And finally, there is the huge Bechtel corporation, the American construction company which will build the Indonesian facilities to liquify the natural gas before shipment. Bechtel stands ready to make no less than $1 billion out of the transaction (General Dynamics get another billion, and the remainder goes to Japanese equipment companies.) Bechtel had close ties to the Nixon administration; its current president, George Shultz, was Secretary of Treasury under Nixon, and was highly touted as a “free market” economist.

To make the whole deal bipartisan, incipient Congressional resistance to the guarantee collapsed when Juanita Kreps, the new Secretary of Commerce, signified her agreement to the deal.

In addition to all this, liquid natural gas is apparently highly flammable: if any severe explosions occur, we can also chalk the human and property losses up to the same crew—the crew that so many libertarians like to think of as misguided “altruists.”

Going, Going. . . .

Every two years, the Lib. Forum binds its issues for those years in a handsome red cover, stamped with gold. Soon, the 1975-76 issue will be bound. Hurry, hurry, then, to get your copy of the 1973-74 book. Get your Libertarian Forums in permanent, book form. Some copies of the 1973-74 book are still available at the low price of $20.

Anarcho-Capitalism and
the Defense of the Nonstate

by Dave Osterfield

Anarcho-capitalists believe that it is possible to defend the non-state in the same way that they see other problems being handled: the market. Jarret Wollstein argues that private defense companies could raise capital by selling “defense bonds” and repaying the principle and interest from revenue obtained by the sale of either products or rights to invention resulting from technological spin-offs.[1] Even granting that private companies would operate more efficiently than governmentally operated defenses, it seems doubtful that the number of technological spin-offs would be enough to cover the required costs, much less to leave enough left over for profit. The same problem would probably apply to David Friedman’s suggestion that all or part of the costs of national defense be funded by such devices as tipping and charitable contributions.[2] Another proposal is that “Because of the close natural connection between insurance companies and defense agencies, it would probably be most feasible to sell defense against foreign aggression in the form of insurance policies.[3] The insurance company or companies would then provide for defense out of the proceeds from the sale of their policies. But the problem with this is, as David Friedman points out,

Since people living in the geographical area defended would be protected whether or not they were insured by the particular company, it would be in their interest either not to be insured or to be insured by a different company, one that did not have to bear the burden of paying for defenses and could therefore charge lower rates. The national defense insurance company would lose all its customers and go bankrupt, just as it would if it were simply selling national defense directly to individuals who would be defended whether or not they paid.[4]

The same problem exists in the proposal that national defense could be provided by the agreement of local police companies to pool part of their resources to finance the developments, for any agency concerning itself solely with local police protection could avoid the additional costs and force the other agencies out of business by charging lower rates. The fatal flaw in these proposals is that national defense is a collective good. It cannot be divided into marginal units and this, in turn, makes it difficult to see how it could be supplied by any of the market-oriented alternatives.

Moreover, the very concept of “national defense agencies” is difficult to reconcile with libertarian morality. Libertarians argue, of course, that these defense companies could never be used aggressively since “No army could grow beyond what the market would support, and the market would never support an army larger than was actually necessary for defense, because force is a non-productive expenditure of energy.”[6] Yet, as Murray Rothbard has pointed out, “the old cliche no longer holds that it is not the arms but the will to use them that is significant in judging matters of war and peace. For it is precisely the characteristic of modern weapons that they cannot be used selectively; cannot be used in a libertarian manner.”[7] Since the destruction wrought by modern weapons is so devastating that it could not be restricted to the aggressors, a national defense company would inevitably murder innocent individuals if it utilized such weaponry. But it would probably be unable to defend its clientele if it did not. Thus, national defense agencies are probably not only impracticable but just as immoral as the state. Would there be any means to defend the nonstate if the concept of national defense companies were abandoned?

Two means by which defense against invasion might be effected are nonviolent civilian defense and guerrilla warfare. Nonviolent civilian, or non-military, defense is defined as a strategy which “aims to defeat military aggression by using resistance by the civilian population as a whole to make it impossible for the enemy to establish and maintain political control over the country.”[8] As such it is not contingent upon the defense of physical terrain from enemy occupation but on passive resistance to enemy rule by the civilian population. It is based on the belief that all governmental power must ultimately come from the consent of the governed; that “so long as the citizens remain firm and refuse to cooperate and obey, the real power lies with them.”[9]

Gene Sharp points out that an invasion is not an end in itself but a means to a higher purpose. This purpose must be one of two things: (a) to eliminate the fear of invasion by striking first or (b) to occupy the invaded territory for economic or political purposes. Since it would be impossible to use the civilian defense for aggressive purposes, it would not only dissolve the belief by another nation that a country employing a civilian defense could constitute a threat, but it would also eliminate the possibility of a nation, desiring to wage an aggressive war against such a country, using the time-honored excuse of defending itself from an imminent attack by striking first. Consequently, any nation invading a country employing a civilian defense would brand itself as the clear aggressor for both its own citizens and all the world to see.

While a civilian defense would have no means to stop an invasion from taking place, it is designed to prevent the invader from obtaining the objective(s) for which the invasion was made. This would ostensibly be done by the refusal to cooperate with the invader and/or by the use of such obstructionist tactics as mass strikes in such occupations as communications and transportation, the blocking of highways and airports with thousands of abandoned automobiles, the refusal of police to make political arrests, etc.[10]

This would have a number of ramifications. First, it would force the invader either to abandon the invasion or to crack down on the resistance. If he chose the latter he would lose even more support in the world community. But more importantly, the increasing use of repression and violence against individuals who were clearly innocent and nonviolent could well provoke a moral and psychological disorientation among the invader’s soldiers charged with executing the repressions against the civilian population. This could not only cause the soldiers to question the justice of their cause and, ultimately, to refuse to carry out their orders, but also prompt others, perceiving the clear immorality of the invasion, to join the resistance. Second, the cost of the massive numbers of soldiers required to contain and crush the resistance could well outweigh the economic or political benefits of the invasion, particularly if the population refused to work for the invader. In such a case, the invader could be faced with no alternative but going home. This is not to suggest that nonviolent defense is easy. On the contrary, death tolls could be considerable, although no doubt well below those wrought by a conventional military defense. And the fact that all of the casualties would be suffered by the civilian population would no doubt take a heavy psychological toll on the members of the civilian defense. This is a problem unique to nonviolent defense and one that must be taken into account by any proponent of such measures. But, as Gene Sharp has noted:

There are many instances of effective non-violent action, including: the early resistance by American colonists, 1766-1775: Hungarian passive resistance vs. Austrian rule, especially 1850-1867; Finland’s disobedience and political noncooperation against Russia, 1898-1905; the Russian 1905 Revolution, and that of February 1917 (Before the October Bolshevik coup); The Korean nonviolent protest against Japanese rule, 1919-1922 (which failed); the Indian 1930-1931 independence campaign; German government-sponsored resistance to the Franco-Belgium occupation of the Ruhr in 1923.

Later examples include: resistance in several Nazi-occupied countries, especially Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark; governmental and popular measures to nullify anti-Jewish measures in several Nazi-allied and Nazi-occupied countries, such as Belgium, Italy, France, and Denmark; the toppling by popular noncooperation and defiance of the dictators of El Salvador and Guatemala in 1944: the 1963 and 1966 campaigns of the Buddhists against the Saigon regimes in South Vietnam.[11]

While civilian defense has no guarantee of success, it should not be cavalierly dismissed. It has, unfortunately, been given scant attention by the anarcho-capitalists although it could prove the most practical means of defending the nonstate, as well as the method most in accord with their moral principles.

A second possibility, guerrilla warfare, should also be considered. While guerrilla forces seldom win military battles they are capable of winning wars and ousting invaders, provided they are at least able to retain the support of the community. Guerrilla wars are not won militarily but, as Andrew Mack has observed, by means of the progressive attrition of their opponent’s political capacity to carry on the war.[12] This is accomplished by means of a protracted war, in which the insurgent’s goal is to provoke the invader into escalating his military commitment. As the war drags on and increases in cost, both human and material, the fact that the war would not only not provide any additional material benefit but could actually force cutbacks in the production of consumer goods at home, together with the fact that it was being fought against a country that posed no threat, could result in the emergence of political divisions in the invader’s home country. These political divisions could not only hamper the war effort but, in time, sap the invader’s will to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. The guerrilla has a fairly good chance of winning provided he is able to fight a protracted war for, as Henry Kissinger has aptly put it, “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it doesn’t win.”[13]

This too might prove to be a method for defense of the nonstate. While in contrast to civilian defense guerrilla warfare would employ violence, the fact that it would be limited and could be directed against the actual invaders would mean that it could be justified as self-defense and thus reconciled with the anarchists’ moral code.

Which of the two, if either, the anarcho-capitalist might choose to adopt would depend on their practicality, which in turn could vary from situation to situation. It seems unlikely, however, that the two could be combined. Nonviolent civilian defense is designed to sap the will of the invader by forcing him to use violence and other repressive measures against nonviolent and clearly innocent people, thereby unmasking the immorality of his actions. Guerrilla warfare, on the other hand, is designed to sap the will of the invader by dragging out the war and therefore making the accomplishment of his task seem hopeless. The attempt to combine the two would probably prove unsuccessful for assassinations, sabotage, and other guerrilla tactics would seem to provide just the excuse the invader would need to justify, at least to himself, his repressive measures against the population. Thus, on the surface at least, the two seem mutually exclusive.

The problem of national defense presents a most difficult problem for the anarcho-capitalist. The belief in some sort of national defense company is not only difficult to reconcile with the libertarian moral code but is also based on the misperception that national defense can, like any other good, be broken down into marginal units. Some hope does seem to lie in reliance on either nonviolent civilian defense and/or guerrilla warfare. But there is the additional problem of choosing and coordinating a defense policy in the absence of a state. Presumably, this could be handled prior to an invasion by such methods as community meetings, newspaper articles, and radio and television appearances by respected members of the community, and after an invasion by underground newspapers, wireless radios and the like. Whether either civilian defense or guerrilla warfare could provide a viable mechanism for defense of the nonstate is an area that requires additional research.

It is time that we came to grips with this serious issue and it is hoped that this article will help to stimulate that research.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Jarret Wollstein, “Society Without Coercion,” Society Without Government (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972), pp. 24-27.

[2] David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row. 1973, p. 192.

[3] Morris Tannehill and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (Lansing. Mich: Private Publisher, 1970), p. 128.

[4] Friedman, p. 192.

5 In Ibid., pp. 191-192.

[6] Tannehill and Tannehill, pp. 132-33.

[7] Murray Rothbard, “War, Peace and the State,” Egalitarianism, As a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays (Washington, D.C.: Libertarian Review Press. 1974), p. 73.

[8] Gene Sharp, “National Defense Without Armaments,” Peace and War, eds. Charles Beitz and Theodore Herman (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1973), p. 352.

[9] Gene Sharp, quoted in American Friends Service Committee, In Place of War (New York: Grossman, 1967), p. 44.

[10] Sharp, p. 352; also see Gene Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives (Boston. Porter Sargent, 1971), p. 64.

[11] Sharp. “National Defense Without Armaments,” pp. 354-55.

[12] See the excellent article by Andrew Mack, “How Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict,” World Politics (January. 1975), pp. 175-200.

[13] In ibid., p. 185.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon, dir. by Peter Bogdanovich, with Ryan and Tatum O’Neal and Burt Reynolds. Movie critics tend to run in packs, and critical approval or hostility in cycles. His personal arrogance, combined with such disastrous films as “At Long Last Love” where his infatuation with Cybill Shepherd overrode his critical judgment, has gained Bogdanovich the enmity of the movie world. And so Nickelodeon is duly roasted by one and all.

And yet, Nickelodeon is a fine, funny picture, keenly directed and fastpaced, a joy to behold. Yes, it is true that Bogdanovich is derivative, that his love for the classic movies of the 1920s and 1930s is far greater than his admiration for the far inferior culture and films of today. Nickelodeon is indeed evocative of The Sting and his own Paper Moon, and it is also true that Bogdanovich is hardly a tragedian. But so what? One can do worse things than emulate the motion pictures of the old days with a fine comic sense and a swift directorial pace. Nickelodeon, a story of the adventures of the early days of film-making, is a heart-warming and funny comic valentine to the original movie era.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NO. 3

MARCH, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

The New End of Ideology?

Back in the complacent 1950’s, many ex-radical intellectuals were busily and happily proclaiming the “end of ideology” in America. Led by such right-wing Social Democrats as Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, the “consensus intellectuals” were sure that hard-edged ideology, whether of right or left, would no longer appear in America, and that we would all move forward in a new consensus of piecemeal, ad hoc, pragmatists, all accepting the current Welfare-Warfare State consensus. Since the End of Ideology theory immediately preceded the remarkable eruption of the New Left and a decade of stormy ideology, the End of Ideology theorists had to quietly dump their wishful prophecies into the well-known dustbin of history.

Now, in the peaceful 1970’s however, a new form of the end of ideology—in practice this time—has emerged, both on the Right and the Left, and few analysts have described or examined this new trend. To sum up our analysis, both Right and Left are experiencing a scuttling of their ideologies, and a reversion to the Establishment Center.

On the Right, a process is being completed which began when Bill Buckley and National Review seized control of the Right-wing in the late 1950’s, and accelerated since the Goldwater defeat in 1964. In brief, from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, Buckley and N.R. ran a conservative movement that was militant and hard-edged: in favor of war and imperialism abroad, militarism and the repression of “subversives” at home, but also inconsistently combined with adherence to the free-market and to a limited libertarian rhetoric in social philosophy. Since the failure of Goldwaterism, however, Buckley and NR have accelerated their drive toward Establishment respectability, being more and more willing to jettison any trace of libertarian rhetoric, and to accept grave compromises on the question of a free-market economy.

While the Viguerie-Rusher-Phillips “New Majority” movement did not succeed last year in taking over the American Independent Party, and remain conservative Reaganite Republicans, the New Majority begins to appear more and more as point men for the direction that the conservative movement is going to take. Put briefly, it involves abandoning the free market and liberty completely, in order to put together a “right-wing populist” (read “neo-fascist”) coalition of Southern racists and urban Catholic “ethnics”, a coalition devoted to the following programs: militarism at home and war abroad, repression of dissent in the name of “anti-Communism” and “national security”, moderate repression of racial minorities, especially blacks, and State enforcement of “morality” in the form of the outlawry of drugs, prostitution, pornography, and abortion, and the support of prayer in the public schools. Inherent in the coalition is the frank acceptance of a permanent Welfare State, except that it be “moderate” and “efficient” (read: “the cutting of welfare aid to blacks.”)

That the New Majority may be the wave of the future for conservatism is indicated by the fact that, since the defeat of the Reagan movement, former Senator Buckley has already called publicly for the permanent acceptance of the New Deal welfare state. Already, in fact, there seems to be very little difference between the Buckleyites and the Right-wing social democrats who now call themselves “Neo-conservatives”—the Kristols, Glazers, Moynihans, et al.

In the meanwhile, a similar process of adaptation and self-emasculation has been occurring on the remnants of the old New Left. One of the best things about the New Left was its angry critique of the policies and strategies of the Old Left (symbolized by the Communist Party): namely, to function as the loyal left-wing of the Democratic Party, of modern liberalism—to push for ever more government spending, welfare measures, health insurance, minimum wages, etc. The New Left had presumably broken with all that; they levelled trenchant critiques of the Welfare State as State Capitalism oppressing the dependent masses, they attacked centralized bureaucracy, and called for radical opposition to the Welfare and Warfare States. They scorned coalition with Establishment Democrats as a “coalition with the Marines” (in Staughton Lynd’s felicitous phrase.) But now, after over a decade in the wilderness, the New Left “revolution” dead and gone, the remnants of the New Left have sheepishly found their way back into the Left-wing of the Democrat Party, calling once more for more government spending, welfare payments, health insurance, minimum wages, etc. The New Left, now physically older, has, to all intents and purposes, rejoined the Old Left. Former New Left firebrands are running for office in the Democratic Party, or have joined the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which is frankly in that party formerly scorned as hopelessly State Capitalist. The New Leftists assure us that they have not sold out, that times have changed, that their old opponents have now abandoned the Cold War, but it’s still the Old Left coalition with the Marines.

And so there is no distinguishable Right and Left anymore, no hard-edged ideology for either side; they now form the right and left wings of the Establishment, differing still, to be sure, on foreign policy and militarism, but really part of one overall, mish-mash consensus.

If the Right and Left are disappearing as ideological forces, what about the liberals, who still dominate academia, the media, and opinion-moulding groups? The liberals are, as they have been for a long time, in a state of total intellectual confusion. There have been no new liberal answers for a long time, and more and more liberals realize that their old ideologies have broken down, that they are not working. More and more liberals—as well as members of the public in general—are realizing that the system of statism has been breaking down. But, human nature being what it is, they will not give up their crumbling paradigm until a better one comes along to replace it. They have to see an attractive alternative.

All this provides an unusually favorable opportunity for libertarians. For we are functioning in an intellectual climate where there is no longer any real, determined, militant ideological competition. Ideological decay and confusion are everywhere. But, in this miasma, we libertarians have that alternative; we have a new and intellectually stimulating and fascinating ideological paradigm, and one that explains the collapse of modern statism better than anyone else. We have a new and systematic creed, and we are just about the only ones who still believe in our ideology. In contrast to the Left, Right, and Center, our ideology hasn’t ended; it is just beginning.

In Defense of Gradualism

by Robert Poole, Jr.

My REASON editorial, “Libertarian Realpolitick,” has generated controversy, most recently an article by Tom Palmer (Libertarian Forum, Nov. 1976). In what follows I would like to respond to my critics, especially Mr. Palmer, and in so doing perhaps make clearer what the original editorial was attempting to convey.

The argument concerns means, not ends. Both Palmer and I seek to achieve a libertarian society. The question is: how best to achieve this goal. Palmer appears to be arguing that the way to do it is to create a large-scale libertarian movement, “capable of pointing out the general nature of state intervention,” and that this can best or only be done by publicizing a radical, theoretical position. Palmer appears to believe that the “masses” will then rally around a world view “which articulates general rules of human action,” if presented to them by such a movement.

I totally disagree. Palmer’s view assumes a great deal more about people than appears warranted. Most people (probably even most academics) care very little for theory and don’t view the world in terms of general principles or integrated world views. They think in terms of here-and-now specifics and concrete, practical examples. It is for this reason that I think a gradualistic, empirical approach is essential. We need to give people case after case of actual instances in which freedom, decontrol, deregulation work, i.e., produce observable, positive results. Once such a set of empirical demonstrations exists, then we can tie them together and begin to teach people that it’s not just coincidence that freedom is the common element in each case.

Palmer takes me to task for urging that viable replacements for such institutions as income taxes, welfare, and the FDA must be “researched, developed, and popularized” before we can responsibly urge their abolition. He asks if I have “neglected the important point, enunciated as a major defense of the market by such a long line of libertarians, that the market provides a framework . . . and that the specific institutions which will arise . . . cannot be predicted?” I am not neglecting the point; on the contrary, I am taking it into account as a dangerously misleading cop-out, one that is responsible for the relative lack of success of much libertarian efforts to date.

A case in point: For about 25 years Paul Poirot of the Foundation for Economic Education, an adherent of Palmer’s view, has been writing articles attacking the Social Security system. Not once (to the best of my knowledge) has he suggested any kind of transition program for dealing humanely with the millions of people now dependent on Social Security and the millions who have paid into it for decades, expecting to receive benefits. His articles simply say that Social Security is morally wrong, economically inefficient, potentially bankrupt, and ought to be abolished. The market, “somehow,” will provide. But unless the “somehow” is dealt with seriously, people will not even consider abolition. And of course, over the past 25 years, they haven’t.

The same applies to taxation, welfare, the FDA, and a variety of other State institutions. Merely saying “The market will provide” is akin, for most of the public, to saying “Take it on faith.” The public will be swayed far more readily by specifics. It violates no principles of praxeology to do careful, detailed thinking about how the market could provide solutions to the problems of paying for and providing defense services, dealing with poverty, and protecting people against unsafe food and drugs. In doing so, one does not prescribe what must or will happen; one merely helps people to see what could happen, so they can accept the prospect of change without fear of chaos.

We simply cannot presuppose that the bulk of our listeners begin where we do, with a basic commitment to freedom and the principles of the market. They don’t, and giving them theory or “take it on faith” prescriptions is not going to change that. The only way I can see to give them a lasting appreciation of freedom is to (1) demonstrate it in action by accomplishing step-by-step reforms, (2) tie these together to illustrate general principles, and (3) work out extrapolations to new areas in terms of specific, practical illustrations of the probable market mechanisms that will develop.

It will take a strong libertarian movement to do all this, one with an appreciation of long-term, strategic thinking. Attracting and motivating the leaders of this movement requires, as Palmer, Rothbard, and others suggest, the fostering of radical libertarian principles and the ongoing development and refinement of theory. But I still maintain that developing this leadership is primarily a job for educational organizations—such as the Cato Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, Institute for Humane Studies, Society for Individual Liberty, etc.—and small, hard-core publications such as Libertarian Forum. Our broad-based political action arm, the Libertarian Party, must deal with “the masses” as they are. And for this task, I can see no viable alternative to the kind of gradualism I’ve outlined above.

The Fallacy of
Gradualism: A Reply

by Tom G. Palmer

“By the street of by and by, one arrives at the house of never.” —Cervantes

While I find the points raised in Poole’s rebuttal to my rebuttal more reasonable than those in his original editorial, I still believe them to be off the mark. Poole defends the use of examples of competitive free enterprise vs. State management as tools of persuasion for libertarians. I see nothing wrong with this, though I believe it inefficacious to give this tactic center stage in our arsenal of arguments, as Poole seems to want to do. If the “masses” won’t rally around a movement of principles, then Poolean opportunism certainly won’t rally them around anything.

It’s true that we can’t sell people simply on “theory” — we can’t ask someone to take it on faith that they should desire freedom. A reasonable man demands arguments, and we should be prepared to give them. Poole’s arguments however, would convince few people of the morality of freedom and would hardly motivate anyone to join a movement to end infringements upon freedom. It is absolutely necessary, when approaching the public, to keep one’s principles flying high, for therein lies our strength. If the efforts of movement activists and cadre were to be devoted to carrying out Poole’s game plan, then we could forget about exercising any kind of long term influence. After all, one of the most important steps toward our goal is to “Create” more libertarians. We must expand our ranks or be doomed to failure. How would this be brought about if our broad-based political arm, the Libertarian Party, were to be emasculated and reduced to proposing crank schemes for enlarging the diameter of government fire hoses (thereby saving taxpayer’s dollars) and turning government enterprises over to Bell Telephone via statist grants of monopoly? Not only does this have no relation to the market, but it will never get off the ground. How far did the cranky Friedmanite voucher plan, backed by forces considerably more powerful than the Libertarian Party, ever go? It was swiftly laid to rest, and justly so. Also, I would like to ask an embarrassing question. When has this scheme of creeping conservatism ever worked? Did the American revolutionaries demand private collection of English taxes? No. In fact, such tax collectors were the objects of intense popular hatred. Their homes were pulled down by patriots inflamed by a passion for liberty and a desire to escape the depredations of the English monarchy.

Poole contents himself with leaving development of leadership to such organizations as the Cato Institute and the Center for Libertarian Studies. Yet, from what field will they reap if the Libertarian Party is restrained from proselytizing and attempting to expand the ranks of libertarians? Further, what are these leaders to do if they have no movement to lead?

In a criticism of left-wing sectarianism aimed at the Bolsheviks of Europe, Lenin claimed that the political differences between the “Lloyd Georges and the Winston Churchills of the world” was immaterial during the developing stages of a movement (where we are now) and that these differences became important only after a movement had developed popular political muscle and a public constituency. At that point, differences and conflicts within the ruling political establishment become ripe for exploitation. Poole, on the other hand, wants to climb in the sack with the ruling class and the State before we have any power whatsoever to change its actions. To be successful, we must expand our influence with the public and “create” from the masses a constituency of “fellow travelers”. From these we draw out membership, and from our membership we draw the cadre. Poole seems to think we can increase the cadre without sowing and reaping among the public. His lack of understanding of the political process and the nature of “politicking” is monumental. Even “gradualistic” lobbying would meet with little success if it utilized Poole’s strategy, for the lobbyist who is neither rich nor the leader of a motivated public constituency will be swept into the dustbin of history. His influence, regardless of his intentions, will be zero.

As to Poole’s specific proposals, I refer the reader to my review of his Cut Local Taxes booklet (Libertarian Review, January 1977) for a view of what he has actually proposed. Coercive grants of monopoly and tips on how to run an efficient State comprise the bulk of Poole’s literally worthless opus. The last section is an uninspired chapter from an NTU organizer’s manual which is hardly worth the time to read. Poole seems to look upon the State as a benevolent institution which has “our” interests at heart. “We” really are the government. Show a politician or a bureaucrat how to run his “business” better and he will lower his “fee” for the service. In reality, his fee is coerced extortion and his “service” is to hound us from cradle to grave with one arbitrary edict after another.

Poole challenges me to come up with a “plan” to help those who have been bamboozled by the statist sleight of hand known as social security. Despite the fact that Poole himself offers no such plan, I accept his challenge. Roger MacBride’s campaign book, A New Dawn for America, proposed that government assets be sold off to compensate claim holders who have been robbed of their earnings (note that this is not financed through further State plunder) and that, as an immediate and (“non-negotiable”) minimal step, all persons 60 years of age or older be exempted from all taxes. If Poole can come up with another idea, I’d like to hear about it. As is typical of Poole’s shoddy and superficial research in other areas (e.g., tax rates in local communities) he has no understanding of the enormity of present social security liabilities. At the present time they stand at well over 3 trillion dollars. No plan, no matter how humanitarian we may be, there is nothing that can save the social security system (by this I mean fully compensate those who have been cheated and robbed). It is bankrupt financially as well as morally. If Poole thinks that a private company will want to take over a program with no assets and over $3 trillion in liabilities, I suggest that he read David Hume and J. S. Mill on miracles.

Poole’s rebuttal is a significantly more “soft core” defense of gradualism than his Reason editorial or his Cut Local Taxes. It is no less incorrect, however. If we follow Poole, we will go the route of the classical liberals, though with one important difference. For many years the best of the liberals kept their principles at the fore, and achieved remarkable success. It was when the gradualists gained ascendancy within liberalism that the liberal movement faltered and collapsed. Poole going further, would rob us of our principles before we had a chance to exert any appreciable influence at all. We would then become an insignificant oddity in the history of political movements. At best, our example would serve to warn libertarians of the distant future of the dangers of compromise.

I have not mentioned another difficulty inherent in Poole’s strategy. If we reduce our public platform to a series of “short term” cost-cutting programs and left our principles at home, what would halt the corruption and “take over” of the libertarian movement, specifically the Libertarian Party? If the LP becomes simply a short-term tool, and we welcome those who want to “go part way” as comrades, what will stop us from becoming simply a wing of another political ideology? After all, our stand against censorship is palatable to liberals, except that we go “too far.” If we just watered our stands down a bit, why, we could coopt them too. And so on with the conservatives, the anti-war (except for brave little Israel) crowd, etc. In fact, our greatest danger would come from the conservatives, for the liberals are already ensconced in power and need no political alliances.

In short, Poole has presented nothing new. It is warmed over Ford Republicanism and McGovern liberalism. If he can motivate people to support and work for such a compromising platform, then I might reconsider what he has to say. As it stands, his schemes have never worked, and I doubt that they ever will. Principled and radical in content — reasonable and palatable in form. This is the key to triumph over the State.

Human Rights at Home: the Flynt Case

While the Carter administration prates hypocritically, and conservative and Social Democrats point the finger, about human rights in lands where they can’t do anything about it, human rights here in the United States continue to dwindle, with none of these gentlemen raising a voice in protest. In particular, the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and of the press are endangered in a new wave of repression of pornographic freedom. While Mayor Beame of New York City tries to revive his happily sagging political fortunes in this election year by grandstanding and unconstitutional closing down of porno shops and massage parlors, Harry Reems is convicted for appearing in an obscene movie, and—in a direct attack on the freedom of the press—Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, is convicted in Cincinnati of pandering obscenity and “conspiring” to do so. For this crime, Flynt was—in a truly obscene sentence—sentenced to a total of 7 to 25 years in prison. In contrast to muggers, rapists, and thieves, no one was apparently worried about Mr. Flynt’s possible broken-home upbringing or his lack of playgrounds as a youth. In a superb full-page ad in the New York Times (Feb. 20), the Americans for a Free Press (40 West Gay St., Columbia, Ohio 43215) protested the Flynt conviction as an “infringement of Mr. Flynt’s rights under the First Amendment” and as a “threat to the right of all Americans.” The ad urged President Carter “to take a closer look at the restrictions of freedom of expression in America itself.” The writers who signed this ad constitute an honor roll on this issue, despite our disagreement with many of them on other ideological questions. Some of their names Follow:

Woody Allen, Michael Arlen, Noel Behn, Vincent Canby, Robert Christgau, Ramsey Clark, Harry Crews, Judith Crist, John Dean, Joan Didion, Daniel Ellsburg, Bruce Jay Friedman, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph Ginzburg, Herb Gold, Al Goldstein, Jim Goode, Gerald Green, Dan Greenburg, David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Hugh Hefner, Joseph Heller, Warren Hinckle, A.E. Hotchner, Arthur Knight, Paul Krassner, Arthur Kretchmer, John Leonard, J. Anthony Lukas, Peter Maas, Norman Mailer, Rudy Maxa, Federic Morton, Phillip Nobile, Eric Norden, Gerald Piel, Nicholas Pileggi, Dotson Rader, Rex Reed, Harold Robbins, Ned Rorem, Barney Rosset, Robert Sherrill, Geoffrey Stokes, Gay Talese, Gore Vidal, Nicholas Von Hoffman, Irving Wallace, Jann Wenner, Clark Whelton, Bruce Williamson, Sol Yurick.

These writers, at least, did not fall for the line snapped up by many others—that the First Amendment is all very well, but that Hustler was too much.

The New L.R.

Libertarian Review, the esteemed libertarian bimonthly, has been floundering for a long time. Beset by financial troubles, it has been on the point of closing its doors for quite a while. Its basic problem has been its original Books for Libertarians format, which was based on the idea of emulating the highly successful New York Review of Books. There were several grave flaws in such an admittedly noble attempt from the very outset. In the first place, the New York Review of Books was able to draw on several hundred of the finest left-liberal scholars in every conceivable field of expertise: secondly, it operated within a climate of dozens of left-liberal general magazines to instruct their readers in the political and intellectual issues of the day. Drawing on such a large resource and appealing to a readership made knowledgeable by other publications, NYRB could and did flourish. But the libertarian movement has been in a very different situation. For we have very few scholars to tap for articles, very few worthwhile books, and a readership which is not being instructed on the political issues by general-purpose magazines. That was and has been the basic problem with the “Books for Libertarians” concept. A second problem was that for many years BFL was tied to a book-selling operation, so that the reviews necessarily began to concentrate on the favorable aspects of what libertarians might like, rather than, as in the case of NYRB, on free-swinging critiques of all important books, good and bad. Attempts to shift out of the book-review format since the divesting of the book-selling service—the L.R. format—have been unsuccessful. As witness the current Jan.-Feb. issue of LR. which is almost completely a book-review issue. Thirdly, there has been the incongruity of the ads; NYRB, as befits a book-review publication, has all of its ads taken by book publishers; in the current issue of LR. by contrast, there is not a single ad by a book publisher. Finally, there has been a certain lack of strength and clarity of focus in LR, a lack of strong focus on what precisely the magazine is trying to accomplish.

We are happy to report, however, that these problems are in the process of being solved. Libertarian Review has now been purchased, and has received a considerable inflow of new funding. Its offices are being shifted from Washington to New York City. Its new editor, in charge of content, is Roy A. Childs, Jr., once an editor of the old Books for Libertarians. The new LR will not be a book-review publication but a regular general-purpose magazine, with book reviews and other arts material confined where they should be: in the “back of the book.” There will be editorials, general articles, the continuing “Libertarian Cross-Currents” column by Walter Grinder, and a regular column by the editor of the Lib. Forum. The focus of the new LR will be twofold: on ideas and activities within the libertarian movement, but, even more, on applying libertarian principles to the important events of the outside world: to vitally important domestic and foreign issues. In this way, the new LR will be instructing the libertarian movement, which tends to be relatively strong on libertarian theory but weak in its knowledge and insights into the facts of the real world, upon those real world events. There will be articles on such important issues as Angola, the Carter administration, and the defense budget, and. I venture to predict, precious few articles on how’ many John Gaits can dance on the head of a pin, or on how many packages of dried beans one would need to hole up in a retreatist cave. Articles on libertarianism will be focussed more on such questions as the proper strategy for the movement rather than on such burning issues as whether or not Objectivism implies the Trinity.

The format of the new LR, I am glad to say, will be magazine-magazine rather than either newsletter or the current tabloid quasi-newspaper size.

And perhaps best of all, the new LR will be able to pay a decent sum for articles and reviews, which automatically makes it a rare gem among libertarian publications.

Roy Childs is uniquely qualified to be the editor of a general-purpose libertarian magazine. At a very young age, Childs established a deserved reputation as a brilliant theoretician of the movement. His famous “Open Letter to Ayn Rand” did more to convert objectivists to anarcho-capitalism than any other single cause; a former instructor at Robert LeFevre’s Freedom School, Childs has converted more people out of LeFevrian ultra-pacifism than anyone else by forcing LeFevre to admit that he considers it immoral for a kidnapping victim to break the chains that bind him because it “violates the private property of the kidnapper.” Steeped in philosophy, Childs was almost unique among neo-Randian philosophers in coming early to the conclusion that, to achieve the victory of liberty and the dismantling of the State, such philosophic precepts as “A is A”, the reality of existence and consciousness, and even the libertarian non-aggression axiom are not enough: that it is necessary to learn about the historical and contemporary facts of the real world, to find out what the State has been doing and who has been doing it. Hence, Child’s passionate interest in history and in contemporary social and political issues. Well-versed in both theory and the facts of reality, and experienced in magazine editing, Roy Childs comes to his new and important post armed with all the qualifications for success; and, furthermore, he comes to his new post armed with a clear and determined focus and vision of what such a magazine needs to accomplish. But, in addition to all that, Childs, in his own writing as well as in the writing he seeks for the magazine, believes in articles that are clear, hard-hitting, and high-spirited. If it is anything, the struggle for liberty against the State should be dramatic and exciting, and never boring; a Childs magazine will never fall into the pitfall that other libertarian publications have slipped into: of being plonky and boring. In the Childs LR we can look forward to an excellent and exciting magazine.

A personal note may be in order here. Ours is a movement where the word “sacrifice” is often in bad odor. But it needs to be said that of all the libertarians I know, Roy Childs has, up to now, sacrificed more than anyone else, in income and status foregone, in his absolute determination to make a lifelong career as a professional libertarian. Until now, all that he has reaped for his pains has been a smear campaign of calumny and deceit unprecedented in our young movement, in which the anti-party sectarians have continually ripped a few words of his totally out of context as a stick with which to belabor the Libertarian Party. Childs’ new post as editor of an expanded Libertarian Review comes as a welcome vindication to one who deserves the gratitude, instead of the vilification, of every libertarian.

While we are celebrating the new L.R., we are happy and honored to pay tribute to Bob Kephart, the founder and publisher of Books for Libertarians and L.R., who has for years struggled valiantly, and against great odds, to keep the magazine afloat. Kephart has given unstintingly of time, money, energy, and his great entrepreneurial ability, to launch the magazine and to keep it going. Bob has paid a great price in ease and comfort for his intellectual conversion from conservative to libertarian; he has been a splendid and much-needed addition to our ranks. May he prosper and flourish!

A Black Writer’s View of ‘Roots’ *

by Anne Wortham

In a newspaper interview, Alex Haley recalls a moving incident at an autograph session in a Harlem church. An elderly woman was purchasing several copies of “Roots” but obviously needed the money to buy shoes. When Haley glanced at her shoes, she looked him in the eye and said: “Son, don’t mind. I’m not just buying books, I’m buying our history.”

Alex Haley is a historical novelist, a popularizer of history. He may qualify as a genealogist, perhaps, but he is not a social and political historian — no more than is James Michener, whose historical sagas, “Hawaii,” “The Source,” “and “Centennial,” have all been best-sellers. And I think Haley was less than responsible when he failed to point this out to the woman. He owed her a disclaimer: that “Roots” is not HER personal history, but the history of HIS ancestors seen through his eyes. He should have told her that if she wants her history, she’ll have to write it herself. And if she wants a history of Negroes, she should read John Hope Franklin’s “From Slavery to Freedom,” or Herbert G. Gutman’s “The Negro Family in Slavery and Freedom,” or Eugene D. Genovese’s “Roll Jordan Roll,” or Ira Berlin’s “Slaves Without Masters,’ and many more.

But no, Mr. Haley goes from one media interview and college lecture to another leaving the impression that he has given Negroes a great gift of history and racial identity. Americans of all races seem to have gulped down the dramatization of the novel as history as carelessly as they take “Final Days” as the factual account of the Watergate crisis, or “The Adams Chronicles” as the history of the young American nation. But the worst cases of the “Roots” fever are among those Negroes who have accepted the collective racial identity presented in “Roots” as a substitute for their own self-identity and those whites who feel compelled to apologize for the sins of their ancestors.

A black psychologist appearing on a panel analyzing “Roots” said: “‘Roots’ gave blacks roots from which to make a personal evaluation (of their identity).” To which I say: NOT THIS BLACK. Eric Sevareid said the audience for “Roots” had been waiting for it for 300 years. To which I say: NOT THIS BLACK. Haley has himself called the “rootlessness” of Americans an “affliction,” and his philosophy is expressed with conviction by the character Kizzy when she tells her son, Chicken George, why she would not marry the slave Sam: “Sam ain’t like us. Nobody ever told him where he come from so he didn’t have no idea about where he ought to be going.” To which I say” NOT SO FOR THIS ROOTLESS BLACK.

Apparently Alex Haley has a compelling need to base his self-identity on his cultural and racial ancestors. Thus, for this and other reasons, he has written an account of his family’s history and of the social times during which they lived. It is a singular, autonomous, unattached individual and so far it covers only 35 years. It is not my mother’s story which ended when I was 9; it isn’t even my sister’s story, who is only 3 years younger than me. I share certain aspects of my story with members of my family, peers and others, but its sum total belongs to me alone.

Unlike Alex Haley and other nationally-racially-or ethically-determined people, I stand not at the end of a tradition but in the midst of an exciting life-process that is my own. The social history of my ancestors does not flow through my psyche as a domesticated animal carrying the instincts of its ancestors in its genes. I am a person, and persons are self-determined individuals — even when they deny the fact and behave contrary to it. I am not some sociological construct that has stepped out of the last chapter of Alex Haley’s novel. I am me — myself — and I. There has been no one like me in existence before and there will be no one like me in the future. I am the sculptor of my soul’s spirit; I am the carpenter of my self-esteem; and that is my pride.

I accept that wretched chapter of American history smeared, most likely, by the blood, sweat and tears of my ancestors, but it cannot teach me how to deal with the present. I am not a slave, but a free individual. My white friends and associates are not my oppressors but also free and independent individuals. When we face each other we do not confront the souls of our ancestors. When we share our lives and times we do not consult the life and times of our forefathers. We are ourselves and it is ourselves that we present to one another — the selves each of us has created. Our love and comradeship are not a contrived vignette of “race relations” in microcosm. We are involved in friendship — that precious commodity of interpersonal relations that can be achieved only between individuals of like minds, values and purposes.

Entailed in man’s identity is the natural imperative that he shape his identity. And when he doesn’t, he goes against his nature. Slavery is immoral because it is unnatural; and collective identity is irrational because it is unnatural. Both defile man’s natural identity and negate the laws of reality. The only answer to slavery and discrimination is individualism, not Kunta Kinte’s tribalism, not Alex Haley’s familism.

In the end, it was not the tribalism of Kunta Kinte that enabled Haley’s family to triumph over slavery but the ingenuity, skill, tenacity, courage and sense of humor of Chicken George — an individual. And this is how it has always been. Individuals have kept man civilized — not races, tribes, nations, or families. But in their rush to stalk the graveyards of their genealogical past, Americans take flight from the present and from themselves, abandoning this hard-won moment in modern times to the primitivism of whatever ethnic gang manages to impose its will on the rest of us. It happens today when individuals are sacrificed to quotas and thus shaming everything the slaves — AND white abolitionists — struggled so hard for.

*Copyright, 1977, by TV KEY

A Great Day For Freedom

Usually the Lib. Forum does not believe in expending its energy agreeing with most of world opinion on a given ideological issue. But the recent smashing defeat to the evil Indira Gandhi dictatorship in India is such a red-letter day for world freedom that we must add our small voice to all the others. Obviously, Mrs. Gandhi had gravely miscalculated; confident that the submerged Indian masses did not care a hoot for free speech or free assembly, Mrs. Gandhi was sure that she could gain a large plebiscitary vote to perpetuate her monstrous regime. There were two leading motifs in the stunning electoral defeat for Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress Party, which had ruled India as a virtual one-party regime ever since Indian independence. One was the fact, as the New York Times correspondent put it, that the average Indian “likes to talk”, and didn’t like the government’s taking away that right. And second, was the truly monstrous compulsory sterilization program that the regime was beginning to implement, spearheaded by her son and heir-apparent, Sanjay Gandhi. Again, this invasion of the fundamental right to have children was deeply resented by Indians throughout the country.

But we should be clear about the major significance of the ouster of the Gandhis. The important fact is not that the new Desai government will be “pro-Western”, or even that the vote was a “vindication of democracy.” The important point is that human freedom against dictatorial statism has taken a mighty step forward.

We refuse to temper our joy about the ouster of the Gandhi regime by the knowledge that there will be a number of sectarian nitwits in the libertarian movement who will accuse us of “compromising libertarian principle” by our “endorsing” the new Desai regime. As the great Congreve once wrote, “I hear a great many of the fools are angry at me, and I am glad of it, for I write at them, not to them.”

From the Old Curmudgeon

The “Libertarian” Church

The latest fad in the Movement is the “Libertarian Church”, which originated and mainly flourishes in (guess where?) California. It started, I suppose, as a legal tax-avoidance gimmick, since church income and property are exempt from taxation. Taken strictly as a means of tax-avoidance, the scheme is unexceptionable, and it poses intriguing constitutional questions for the government. (How, for example, does the government go about proving that Religion A is a “false” or “pseudo” religion, which, in contrast to “real” religions, is not exempt from taxation? And how does it do so without violating the First Amendment?) All this granted, however, the “Libertarian” Church strikes me as a peculiarly silly way of going about tax-avoidance. If one really wishes to use a church as a tax-avoidance device, then the thing to do is to join a church with a neutral-sounding name (some of my best friends are ministers of the “Universal Life Church”) and then to shut up about the tax-gimmick. Using a political-ideological name, and then going around proclaiming the gimmick to one and all is precisely the way to ruin one’s proposed tax-exemption.

And so the Libertarian Church as a tax-gimmick is silly enough. Far worse is the fact that the California communicants are beginning to take the whole nonsense seriously, and are beginning to blather about libertarianism as “really” a “religion”. LC members are beginning to talk in hushed tones of reverence about “the church”, and are seriously intoning whatever “church” ritual has been cooked up. The human mind, as we all know, has an infinite capacity for insanity and folly, but the libertarian movement seems to have far more than its duly allotted share.

Reason magazine, has recently published an article from a “libertarian church” founder. (Richard Wood, “Why Not A Libertarian Church?” Reason (December, 1976). The Rev. Wood’s basic defense of the libertarian church concept is that libertarianism is more than a political or economic idea, “it is fundamentally an ethical concept.” Granted. But whatever the legal niceties, an ethical concept is scarcely enough to qualify philosophically as a “religion” and therefore as leading to a “church” organization. “Religion” requires an ontological affirmation of the existence of a certain type of supernatural Creator. Whatever ethical concepts may flow from such ontology, it is the ontological concept—the affirmation of the existence of a certain type of God—which must be dominant and axiomatic in the religious system. Since the libertarian ethic is not necessarily grounded in ontological supernaturalism, it is not a religion; furthermore, the “Libertarian Church” is silent on the ontological issue.

Apart from the invalidity of libertarianism-as-religion, the Libertarian Church is bound to be offensive to two broad groups of people, and to alienate them from the libertarian cause. These are, first, the atheists, who feel contaminated by any sort of inclusion in a “church” or “religion”; and, second, religious believers—whether Jews, Christians, Moslems, or whatever—who will be deeply offended by elevating an ethical concept into a competitive alternative to their own religious beliefs. Since most people are either theists or atheists, this means that the Libertarian Church starts out as needlessly alienating almost the entire population, and as reading out of the libertarian movement theists and atheists alike. Come on, gang, back to the old drawing board!

Kidnappers at Large

There are kidnappers at large, roaming throughout the land, and the government of the United States, or rather of the several states, has taken a very ambivalent position on their dastardly deeds—in some cases even aiding and abetting them! We are not talking about the despicable deeds of terrorists seizing hostages, for they are generally revised, and the government generally proceeds against them as best it can (despite repeated nonsense about how these gangsters are “gentle people” who are only trying to gain attention for their assorted grievances.) No, what we are talking about are professional kidnappers employed by parents who seize their children in order to “deprogram” them from a religious faith which they have adopted; since these religious cults are abhorrent to the parents, who are often repudiated by their offspring, and since the parents cannot persuade their children out of such religions, the parents have been turning to force and violence to kidnap and brainwash their children back into the “true” faith.

Sometimes, these despised cults are Christian sects; in other cases, they are Asian-inspired cults such as Hare Krishma or the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Whichever, the parents—often Christian—seem to have conveniently forgotten that Jesus called on his early followers to leave infidel friends and families in order to follow Him.

In any case, if children who leave their parents to make their own way in the world and to adopt their own values, are all to be kidnapped by force and coercively brainwashed back to their parents’ arms, we will have a lot of kidnapping and a lot of home-prisons for American youth. The path of personal independence and freedom for all men will be wiped out by a theocracy that has no place in a land founded in a dedication to religious freedom. Parents do not own their children, and this return to the idea of divine right of parents must be combatted by all Americans, let alone those of us who are dedicated libertarians.

Neither has the excuse been used that these errant children are underage, and therefore—in the eyes of the State—below the age of volition and consent. The kidnapped children are generally over the age of 18, sometimes even over 21, and therefore have full legal rights in this country—except, apparently, to join a religious group of which their parents disapprove.

At first the black Christian conservative, Ted Patrick, was hired by many parents for the task of kidnapping and coercive “deprogramming.” When Patrick ran into difficulties with the law, the parents formed the Freedom of Thought Foundation (grisly ironic title!) to use the courts to force their children back under their coercive control. While efforts in New York have not been successful, the Foundation has now succeeded in California, where a Superior Court judge ordered five adult members of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church into the “conservatorship” custody of their parents, to have them coercively “deprogrammed” for a full month. (New York Times, March 25, 1977).

The parental argument is that their offspring have been “brainwashed” by the Church into becoming “robots” believing in the Church authority. Yet in no case has any parent proven that his children have been coerced by the religious cult; the admission and training in the cult has in all cases been strictly voluntary. To apply the term “brainwashing”—as the parents have done—to this process is highly dangerous; for then, any conversion to any set of beliefs, whether Sun Moon or Randian, distasteful to one’s parents, could also be called “brainwashing”. If individuals have free will, as at least the Christians among the parents must believe, how dare any voluntary process be labelled as “brainwashing”, and the free convictions of the children dehumanized in this repellent manner?

But while the procedures of the various cults are all admittedly free and voluntary, the “deprogramming” procedures of the parents are all admittedly dependent on kidnapping, on force and violence. Hence it is the parents and their hirelings who are the “brainwashers”, and not the religious cults.

In the California ease, the lawyers for the young adult Moonies argued that conservatorship is an infringement on their freedom of speech and religion and denounced the procedure for what it is: legalized kidnapping and browbeating. The young Moonies also read poetry and performed music in an attempt to convince the court that their creativity had not been diminished by membership in the Church (as if judges are proper determiners of creativity!)

Yet, in a truly outrageous and monstrous decision handing the Moonies over to the violence of their parents, Judge S. Lee Vavuris ruled: “We are talking about the essence of civilization—mother, father and children. There’s nothing like it. I know of no greater love than parents for their children, and I am sure they would not admit their children to harm.” Vavuris added that “The child is the child even though a parent may be 90 and the child 60.”

And so we are back to the absolute rule of the parent—backed by the State—in a decision which even old Filmer (the theorist of the State-as-parent) might have balked at. Is everyone to be subjected to the absolute ownership of their parents, in the name of “love”, even unto the age of 60? We hold no belief for any of these cults; but the issues at stake are no less than the First Amendment, and personal liberty for every American.

America and ‘Human Rights’ — East Timor Division

The Carter administration’s widely trumpeted devotion to “human rights” may be gauged by its support for the conquest and oppression of the country of East Timor by the brutal “pro-American” dictatorship of Indonesia. After Portugal abandoned its former colony, it was invaded by Indonesia (read Java, which in the late 1940’s had coercively invaded and conquered the outlying islands). Since Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor in December, 1975, the Indonesians—in the course of suppressing the East Timorese desire for independence—have murdered 100,000 civilians, amounting to no less than 15% of the East Timor population. It is as if an external military force had invaded the United States and slaughtered 32 million Americans! A recent (Feb. 11) report on the East Timor situation, prepared for the Australian parliament by the former Australian consul in East Timor, calls Indonesia’s actions there “the most serious case of contravention of human rights facing the world at this time.”

The report points out that Indonesian soldiers have indiscriminately murdered civilians in the major towns, wiped out entire mountain villages, engaged in systematic raping and looting, regularly used torture to gain information, and bombed villages with napalm. This report, prepared by James Dunn, confirms a similar account gathered by the Indonesian Catholic Relief Agency operating in East Timor and smuggled into Australia last December.

In a shocked reaction to the Dunn report, Australian members of Parliament urged the U.S. Congress to hold hearings on these abominable actions by America’s ally and client state. Hearings have been held during March by Rep. Donald Fraser (D., Minn.) subcommittee on International Organizations and by Rep. Lester Wolff’s (D., N.Y.) subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, including testimony by Dunn himself.

Particularly interesting is the testimony of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert Oakley before the Wolff subcommittee in mid-March. Oakley revealed that the Ford administration had indeed suspended U.S. military aid to Indonesia after its invasion of East Timor (an invasion denounced by the UN, a vote on which the U.S. abstained), because its use of U.S. weapons contravened U.S. law. But, added Oakley, “in May or June, we reviewed the situation on the ground and found it was stable so we decided to resume military shipments to Indonesia.” Besides, said Oakley, East Timor “has effectively become part of Indonesia.” So, as long as the aggressor and butcher has become “effective” and “stable”, everything is OK; what price “human rights” now?

But, even on his facts, Oakley is wrong, for while Indonesia formally annexed East Timor last July, it still controls less than one-fifth of the land, and only half the population, the rest being controlled by Fretelin, the East Timor independence movement. And yet, as Oakley stated, the tacit support by the Ford administration for Indonesia’s conquests “is not being contested by this administration.” On the contrary, the Carter administration is asking for an increase in annual U.S. military aid to Indonesia from last year’s $40 million to over $58 million, along with another $148 million in economic aid. Oakley maintained that if Indonesia should now use U.S. military aid in East Timor it would be merely defending its “own” territory.

(See International Bulletin, March 28, 1977. An excellent bi-weekly newsletter on international affairs, available for $8 a year from P.O. Box 4400, Berkeley, Calif. 94704).

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

The Oscars. About the TV show, the less said the better. It was dull, grim, boring, ugly, the least cinematic of the Oscar award programs. One longed for good old Bob Hope and his repetitious one-liners. As to the awards themselves, they were a titanic struggle between Rocky and Network, so close that even the knowledgeable Sidney Skolsky flubbed on three of his six major predictions on the winners. If justice had triumphed, All the President’s Men—by far the best movie of 1976—would have won in a walk, and Alan J. Pakula would have won for his excellent direction. But the producers of APM had made the grave tactical error of opening the film at the beginning, instead of toward the end, of the year, and Hollywood forgets. As it is, we should be thankful that Jason Robards won the Best Supporting Actor award for his role as Ben Bradlee in APB, the most subtle acting performance of the year.

Given the freeze-out of APM, the victory for Rocky was something to be cheered, not only for the film’s own substantial merits, but also because a victory for the disorganized and unfocussed Network, would have been a disgrace. While Paddy Chayevsky’s dialogue was crisp and often funny, deserving of his Best Original Screenplay award, the picture was inchoate and disorganized—to the extent that the mad rantings of the Peter Finch character alternated between acknowledged lunacy and the supposed searing “truths” hurled at the audience by Chayevsky. Basically, Network was Old Liberal Chayevsky turned indiscriminate ranter against the contemporary world. Faye Dunaway, on the other hand, deserved the Best Actress award for a role that was cartoony and one-dimensional but still funny and abrasive, although Beatrice Straight’s victory as Best Supporting Actress for a nothing role in Network was only the triumph of a big propaganda campaign in the Hollywood trade journals. John Avildsen’s Director award for Rocky over Sidney Lumet for Network was certainly well-deserved, but the brief clips from some of Pandro Berman’s glorious films of a Hollywood long gone only highlighted the enormity of Hollywood’s decline in recent years.

Fun With Dick and Jane, dir. by Ted Kotcheff. With George Segal and Jane Fonda. The critics have been billing this as a comedy in the grand old Grant-Lombard-Hepburn tradition. The very idea is a desecration. This is witless rubbish, crude and unfunny, apparently redeemed in the eyes of left-liberal critics because it is yet another ham-handed attempt at satirizing bourgeois American values of thrift, success, and affluence. It starts as a sort of mildly funny Jack Lemmony comedy about an upper-middle class couple trapped by a sudden dismissal from employment, but it then deteriorates into a boring crime caper movie, with Segal & Fonda obtaining money through holdups. I guess the point is supposed to be that business and crime are really identical. Segal is kept under wraps by the director, which is all to the good, but Miss Fonda walks through the role with no distinction or flair—a long come-down from her excellent acting in Barbarella and Klute.

Zaire — Katanga Rises Again!

According to the American press, it’s another “Commie” invasion of a friendly “pro-Western” African country, Zaire, based in pro-Communist Angola, and led by Cuban “advisors”, making for Zaire’s southernmost, “copper-rich” province of Shaba, once called Katanga. True to the traditions of contemporary American imperialism, the Carter administration flew in $2 million of unauthorized “emergency” military aid—a rather odd request, considering that the U.S. has been giving the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire $30 million per year aid for the last several years.

But the story is, in truth, far more ironic. For these very “Commie” Katangese troops are the last holdouts of a great secessionist rebellion that was the darling of the American right-wing all during the 1960’s. How men forget!

In the first place, as in all of Africa, Zaire, formerly the Congo (Leopoldville), and formerly still the Belgian Congo, is not really a country in any sense, but a vast geographical region carved out as an administrative creation of Belgian imperialism in the late 19th Century. When Belgium was forced to vacate the Congo in 1960, various conflicting political forces stepped into the breach, both centralizing and secessionist. Most heroic was the Katanga secession movement, which carved out a tribal-based republic in that indeed “copper-rich” nation, headed by Moise Tshombe. The American right-wing, not usually prone to aiding secessionist movements (to say the least) latched on to Tshombe because the Tshombe regime was one of the very few authentic black nationalist movements in Africa that was pro-capitalist, being allied to the Belgian capitalists of Union Miniere, largest owners of Kantangan copper. The Communists and their allies latched on to the centralizer Patrice Lumumba, while the United States, the CIA, and its allies in the U.S. capitalist-Rockefeller ambit put its money, aid, and support on the centralizing forces of Joseph Kasavubu and particularly on the Congolese army commander, General Joseph Mobutu. It took many years of maneuver and heartache, but, finally, with the aid of the U.S.-run United Nations army, and—as has recently been revealed—putting General Mobutu on a long-term CIA payroll, United States imperialism finally won out, succeeding in murdering both Lumumba and Tshombe, crushing Katangan independence, and uniting the Congo (now called Zaire) under President Mobutu.

The heroic remnants of the Katangese legion, headed by their general M’Bumba, fled to Portuguese Angola, where they first fought—as rightists naturally would—against the left-wing rebels and alongside the Portuguese. But the Katangese, as is even more natural, were less interested in the murky regions of ideology, or in the U.S.-Russian Cold War, than they were in their continuing long-range goal: the redemption of Katanga. Their main enemy was and is always Mobutu’s “Angolan” brother-in-law Holden Roberto, also a long-term CIA agent, and head of what, in the 1975-76 civil war in Angola, became the “pro-American”, “free-world” National Front for the Liberation of Angola. The crushing defeat of Reberto was, for the Kantangese as well as the “Communist” Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, a great victory. The several-thousand man Kantangese army then proceeded on their next step—their goal of the last decade: the re-entry into “Shaba”, where they were, inevitably, greeted by the Katangese as liberators, and where they hoisted the old Katanga flag. Katanga has risen again!

But oh how men forget! Read the conservative press, and you will find not a peep of recognition, much less of justification of why the heroic Katangan “conservatives” are now supposed to be lackeys of Cuban communism. And we find that even Belgium—whose capitalists have long since integrated into the Rockefeller ambit—has rushed military aid to the corrupt dictator Mobutu, sitting a thousand miles away in the Zaire capital of Kinshasa.

And the Carter administration, so hypocritically vociferous about “human rights.”, when they happen to be violated by Russia, where does it stand on the admitted systematic invasions of those same rights by the CIA stooge, the dictator Mobutu? Silence, or rather, mumbling about U.S. “national interests”. And so the Cold War heats up once more, as the old Katanga cause goes down the right-wing Orwellian memory hole. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who admitted before Congress on March 16 that there was “no hard evidence” of Angolan or Cuban involvement in the Kantangese incursion, called the fighting “dangerous” because loss of the Katangan copper mines “would be a very serious blow to the government of Zaire.” No doubt; but the State Department spelled out the U.S. concern the next day by complaining that the Katangan fighting would “jeopardize nearly $1 billion in American mining investments.” Who said that there is no economic groundwork to contemporary U.S. imperialism?

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph E. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 4

APRIL, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

At The Summit

On the first weekend in May, the top leaders of the Western World, ranging from Carter to Giscard d’Estaing to Callahan, met in London for an “economic summit conference” that was supposed to cure all Western economic ills. The conference has been properly derived as a “nonsummit” or “non-conference”, with almost nothing accomplished except some more world-wide inflation and aid to undeveloped countries.

But an interesting note on the Conference was caught by Flora Lewis in the New York Times (May 9.) For the sum and substance of her article was that the Western leaders know darn well that the international economic and monetary order had collapsed, and that they haven’t the foggiest idea of what to do about it.

Miss Lewis begins her article by stating that the summit meeting was another step in what all the countries concede to be the “necessary reorganization of the world’s economic system.” Bold words; why “necessary”? Because, “slowly, painfully, the leading economic powers have begun a stage-by-stage effort to reconstruct what they concede is the shattered format of a generation of prosperity that had no precedent in history”. What she is referring to is the Bretton Woods format, imposed by the U.S. in 1944 and collapsed by the same U.S. in 1971.

Of course, the current international monetary system that Miss Lewis and the world’s leaders are referring to in such despondent terms is virtually the Friedmanite Valhalla: a world of absolutely fiat paper moneys issued by each nation-state, with no common international money such as gold, and with exchange rates of all the moneys fluctuating in relation to each other. If it is a Friedmanite Valhalla, and there are no longer balance of payments crises, why are the world leaders upset? Because, as Miss Lewis points out, “the government leaders recalled the 1930’s and the economic warfare provoked by the Depression, conflict that not only worsened that Depression’s effect for all countries but also brought the social and political upheavals that led to World War II.”

The government leaders are correct. The fluctuating exchange rates and national fiat money blocs of the 1930’s indeed led to economic warfare, to competing devaluations, to protective tariffs and quotas, to exchange controls, to regional blocs, that lead directly to World War II, in Europe and Asia. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull asserted as much shortly after. World War II began.

In the same vein, Miss Lewis adds that, mindful of the “long-term dangers of life in a world of economic disorder,” the government leaders “revealed how acutely aware they have grown of the need to replace a system that worked marvelously for nearly thirty years and then broke down.” Well, here the acumen of the leaders and Miss Lewis slips a bit. Surely, no system works marvelously and then suddenly collapses like the one-hoss shay; the seeds of any collapse must have been prepared before, from some major flaw in the workings of the system itself.

In addition to the breakdown of the monetary system, the leaders recognized that something has happened to invalidate the old Keynesian diagnosis and nostrums, particularly on inflation and unemployment. Contrary to the Keynesians, growth and employment are no longer correlated, and inflation is no longer a tradeoff for unemployment, permitting liberals to opt for more inflation as an alleged cure for unemployment. For the London summit meeting has learned one vital lesson—or rather happily unlearned a false lesson of orthodox macroeconomics “Inflation does not reduce unemployment,” the meeting’s communique said. “On the contrary, it is one of its major causes.” But if inflation is seen to cause unemployment rather than relieve it (a long-standing insight provided by “Austrian” economics), then the major excuse for the expansionary, inflationary activities of government is gone forever.

But, so long as the Friedmanite world of fiat paper moneys remains, there remains one great temptation if not excuse for monetary inflation: what was called in the 1930’s the “beggar my neighbor” policy of inflation accompanied by depreciating exchange rates, which can offset a major effect of inflation by stimulating a nation’s exports and injuring its imports.

While the summit leaders congratulated themselves on the absence of 1930’s economic warfare, Miss Lewis points out the “gathering pressures to do just that.” Increasingly, the governments—including the U.S.—have been pressured to black the flow of cheap, efficient imports through tariffs and import quotas: note, for example, the mass business—union pressure on the Carter administration to coercively restrict the imports of shoes, textiles, and TV sets from Japan and Taiwan. And, most ominous for the future is the program of the highly dangerous right-centrist French politician Jacques Chirac, the new Gaullist Mayor of Paris who has his own paramilitary force. As a supposed counter-weight to the Communist-Socialist left bloc, Chirac proposes to combat unemployment by inflating wildly, and then allowing the franc to devalue—in short, the very beggar-my-neighbor devaluations that so characterized the economic warfare on the 1930’s.

Miss Lewis concludes that the leaders have no idea about what to do about all this: “they have not yet been able to figure out the new institutional arrangements that could replace the worn-out system and assure renewed well-being and political stability. . . .Nobody has been able to devise a simple overall formula. So the leaders have taken to groping, experimenting with one measure at a time. . .”

While the bigwigs are groping, we can offer a solution, but of course no attention will be paid. The solution, of course, is a return to the pure gold standard, the cessation of government expansion of money, and purely free trade between nations. And that’s for openers.

The Death of General Hershey

The headline sprang out at me on the morning of May 21: “General Hershey Dead at 83”. Somehow I had thought he had died long ago, this man whom I have hated with a purple passion since I was a young lad. Let it be said right away that there will be in these pages no pious wish for a requiescat in pace for this monster in human form, this butcher, this mass murderer, this lifelong head of a mass kidnapping and enslaving organization.

Butcher? Mass murderer? Who was this man? Was he a Communist spy, or, perhaps, some old Croat or Latvian who was a guard at some Nazi concentration camp in World War H, pursued relentlessly by Simon Wiesenthal and Bella Abzug? No, dear reader, General Lewis Blaine Hershey was neither a Communist nor a Nazi; he was a 100% red-blooded American; so red-blooded that he served as head of the infamous Selective Service System for what seemed forever and ever—but was actually long enough: no less than thirty years.

My passionate hatred of Lewis Hershey remains to this day because justice was never served on this man; there was no catharsis, no Aristotelian purgation. No lightning ever struck the general as vengeance from on High; instead, he died peacefully in bed while about to attend graduation exercises in Indiana at his alma mater, Tri-State University.

It wasn’t just that Lewis Hershey served as the eternal head of the draft; it was that he loved it so. Hershey couldn’t have used the Eichmann excuse; the draft was clearly his life work, his monument. If, in all those three blood-stained decades (1941-1970), any murmur arose for a slight slackening of the rigors of the draft, Old Reliable Hershey could be depended upon to come roaring out, calling for what seemed to be the permanent draft of everyone, everywhere. The Hershey philosophy may be summed up quite simply as: “if it moves, draft it!” Or, we can take a look at one of Hershey’s own favorite statements, where he perceptively linked up the draft, the income tax, and statism in one pithy package: “Outside the income tax,” Hershey liked to say, “there aren’t many things to make the male citizen feel much responsibility to his Government any more. The Selective Service is one of them.”

Hershey’s reaction to the anti-war protestors during the Vietnam Era was all too predictable, in keeping with the man’s life work. His suggestion on how to deal with anti-war demonstrators: Draft ‘em! Hershey’s order to local draft boards for swift conscription of anti-war dissidents was too much for the American judicial system. The U.S. Court of Appeals called Hershey’s action a “declaration of war against anti-war demonstrators” having a “chilling effect on free speech”, which was a mild way of putting it.

But if the courts and anti-war dissidents were sometimes churlish in their appreciation of General Hershey, others were more forthcoming. President Truman awarded Hershey a medal for “administrative excellence during World War II”, and similar medals were conferred on our Kidnapper-in-Chief by the American Legion and by Governor George Wallace, which somehow seems appropriate. But it was all the Presidents during this long era that bear the responsibility for Hershey’s seemingly eternal place at the seat of Leviathan. Like his fellow tyrants and “conservatives”, J. Edgar Hoover, chief represser of dissent, and Harry Anslinger, chief persecutor of drug users, special dispensation was granted Hershey from the usual age requirement in government, so that he could just linger on, and on, and on.

Actually, Hershey’s career as Mr. Draft was even longer than thirty years. It began in 1936, when he was appointed to an Army-Navy war preparedness committee by an administration already yearning for war, and he was sent to travel round the world studying the draft in other countries (nothing like expertise, is there?) When the draft came in 1940, Hershey was named deputy director of SSS, and achieved his true niche as director the following year. Even after Hershey was finally relieved of command of the draft, cut down prematurely at the age of 76 in 1970, he lingered on still longer as adviser to President Nixon on— what else? — “manpower mobilization.” Finally, at long, long last, the American public was relieved of the “services” of General Lewis Hershey when he was retired in 1973 at the age of 79 to the tune of a 17-gun salute given him by the Pentagon. We are supposed to be admiring, I imagine, when his obit writer tells us that from that time to this, Hershey “spent most of his time at his Bethesda, Md. home, reading and writing about manpower questions. “And so there he was, active to the end, ringing the changes on his beloved lifelong theme: “if it moves, draft it!”

But I should not give the impression that there was only one facet to this man’s character, one string to his bow. For Hershey was also quick to try to anticipate war, and to fill the draft ranks accordingly. Thus, during the Berlin crisis of 1961, President Kennedy was surprised to find that old Hershey, without having to be told, on his own initiative had drafted a sizeable new group of men.

So what are we to say of a world where a Lewis Hershey is saluted, be-medalled, and enshrined in life-long power? Shall we join Homer and say that

Injustice swift, erect and unconfin’d,

Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples oe’r mankind.

The Great Felker Caper

Oh, such sobs, such wails, such gnashing of the teeth! From the barrage of curses and tears, you’d have thought that Manhattan had just been H-bombed, or that Joe McCarthy had risen from the dead, or even that Zabar’s, the gourmet delicatessen beloved of New York’s West Side intellectuals, had just padlocked its doors. I wouldn’t have thought that the Murdoch-Felker tempest in a teapot would interest our non-New York readers, but the affair made the covers of Time and Newsweek, and they must know something, right? Or perhaps they, too, were caught up by their New York environment that has made this the greatest cause celebre since John Lindsay failed to sweep up the snow in Queens.

First, the bare facts: in early January, Rupert Murdoch, Australian-born newspaper tycoon in his home country, England, and the U.S., fresh from his purchase of the New York Post (which, by the way, caused little comment), bought control of the New York Magazine Company (NYMC), publisher of New York, the Village Voice, and New West. The sale came over the opposition of Clay Felker, founder and editor of New York, and head of the NYMC.

Next, the interpretation of the hysterical left-liberal clique in New York: Rupert Murdoch, evil capitalist, ruthlessly and despicably ousted the noble Felker, hellbent to replace Felker’s sublime creation by tawdry and sensationalistic journals devoted to sex and violence. Cast in a Judas role for this transaction was left-liberal aristocrat Carter Burden, young Vanderbilt heir, whose sale of NYMC stock to Murdoch made the latter’s takeover possible. The curses and sobs were punctuated by a two-day strike at New York, and by indignant resignations from the magazine by Felker himself, managing editor Bryon Dobell, and several leading writers.

The true story is considerably different from the Felkerian Morality Play. Only a year ago, a similar event occurred with Felker cast in the role of “bad capitalist”, having purchased the Village Voice and ousted the seemingly beloved founders Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher. Indeed, Felker’s loss of support began when he acquired the Voice and publicly humiliated Bartle Bull, who had been publisher of the Voice, and who, as part of the purchase, was now a major stockholder in NYMC. The main significance of Felker’s arrogant treatment of Bull is that Bull was a close friend of Carter Burden, formerly the major owner of the Voice, who had now become the leading stockholder of NYMC. Bull and Burden had now become determined opponents of Clay Felker.

Furthermore, Felker compounded his problems by treating his own board members with disdain and contempt. But the underlying personal problems brought on by his nasty treatment of board members and stockholders was only the substratum; the main problem was Felker’s gross entrepreneurial error in sinking a lot of money in two losing propositions: a national edition of the Village Voice, and especially New West, a West-coast version of New York. Felker began New West last April with an authorization by the NYMC board to spend $1 million on getting it started; instead, Felker spent from $3 to $4 million, and compounded his sins by running up lavish expense accounts by himself and his staff, at which point Felker tried to obtain a raise in salary and added perks from his stunned board. To top it off, the harried “evil capitalists” on the NYMC board had seen their stock sin, in recent years from $10 to between $2 and $3 a share. Is it any wonder that they had had enough?

And yet, despite these provocations, it was Felker, anxious to get the board off his back, who initiated a search for a buyer for NYMC. He wanted the Washington Post to buy the company, but the Post was only willing to go as high as $7 a share, while Murdoch now came in to offer $8.25, something like three times its “true” worth. Is it any wonder that Burden, Bull, and the other shareholders were happy to accept Murdoch’s offer?

As for Murdoch’s allegedly despicable treatment of Felker, he offered to retain Felker as editor, but the latter angrily refused. Furthermore, after the hullaballoo, Felker walked off with a personal settlement from Murdoch of approximately $1.5 million—so that, in the immortal phrase, Felker was crying all the way to the bank.

Neither does the “journalistic integrity” argument against Murdoch cut much ice. Oohing and aahing about Murdoch’s journalistic propensity for sex and crime news sits badly from a New York magazine that has indulged in plenty of sex and crime stories, and a Village Voice that is far raunchier than any of Murdoch’s publications. Furthermore, the quality of articles at New York has sunk in the past year, for the previous New York-orientation of the magazine had been replaced by vague articles about the national scene—presumably a reflection of Felker’s new preoccupation with New West. As Pete Hamill writes, in one of the few sensible articles about the affair (“Clay Preached Power, Flunked Practice,” New York Daily News, Jan. 10): “In short, in the time of its decadence, New York Magazine had started to look as though it were edited in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

As for bad guy Murdoch, we don’t know what will happen to the magazines in the new situation. But one thing is clear: he was the only one to act calmly and sensibly, and to keep his cool in the whole kooky l’affaire Felker. And that’s saying a lot.

The Historians’ Betrayal

I: ROOTS

From the very beginning, Alex Haley’s “Roots” was a suspect work, for it was described by Haley himself as a “novelized amalgam” rather than accurate history. But to justify fundamental errors in the books as being a “historical novel” is to miss the major point: namely, that the enormous audience and millions of dollars reaped by Haley would not have been attracted by yet another historical novel on the slave question. For the point that caught the popular imagination was the alleged success of Haley’s search for his specific, concrete ancestors. If Kunta Kinte, Haley’s alleged African ancestor, turns out to be a myth, in whole and in its parts, then “Roots” achieved its great success on false (even if not deliberately false) pretences.

The backlash against the “Roots” myth has already begun. There are two authors of historical novels who claim extensive plagiarism. But, most important for the basic Kunta Kinte myth, the extensive researches of Mark Ottoway, of the Sunday Times of London, has effectively exploded the legend that Kunta Kinte, alleged ancestor of Mr. Haley, was seized by white slave traders in the remote African Eden of Juffure, while chopping wood. Briefly, Juffure was not a remote Eden but a white trading post near the coast; no African was enslaved in places like Juffure, and none was enslaved by whites; instead, the whites purchased slaves shipped to coastal villages from inland by African tribal chiefs, who had enslaved members of rival tribes; the Kunta Kinte who disappeared (not enslaved) from Juffure, must have done so later than 1767 and was therefore not Haley’s ancestor; and, in particular, Haley’s alleged “griot”, or native oral historian, did not tell him the story independently; the native had apparently heard Haley’s grandmother’s tale from a seminar of native tribal experts called together by the Gambian government. In short, the “griot” presumably told Haley what the latter wanted desperately to hear: allegedly “independent” confirmation of his grandmother’s story. And finally, the alleged griot was a “notoriously unreliable” character who apparently was not a griot at all.

The interesting part of this story is how it has been handled by America’s leading historians, supposedly committed above all to a search for historical truth. For “Roots” was, to most historians’ ideological perceptions, a “good” book, taking the pro-black, pro-slave side, and furnishing blacks with pride of ancestry. In a conflict between historical truth and partisan ideology, which would win out? Need we ask?

Thus, Harvard Professor Bernard Bailyn wrote, astonishingly, “I don’t think its importance rests on whether or not such and such a ship was in such and such a place. I don’t give a damn if they don’t find the ship he names. . . .This account is the author’s perception of the meaning of slavery, and the account is one of sensibility. I don’t think it turns on details. It turns on a state of mind. . . .” It is true that Bailyn tried to cover his tracks by stating that “Roots” “is a work of fiction”, but, as we’ve said, the public doesn’t so perceive it; and, furthermore, what in the world is the stuff of history but details? Bailyn’s statement comes dangerously close to saying that if the “sensibility” is good, then who cares about the facts?

And Yale Professor Edmund S. Morgan, after casually dismissing the problem by saying that historians always make errors, added that “errors about the location of the village are not very important—nobody will deny there was a slave trade.” But of course the point of Haley’s books, and his acquisition of millions, was not simply to point out that the slave trade existed. Again, as in the case of Bailyn, Morgan stated that “Roots” was someone’s “search for an identity”, which would retain a great deal of impact “no matter how many mistakes the man has made. In any genealogy there are bound to be a number of mistakes.”

A particularly interesting admission was made by both Morgan and allegedly “scientific” historian, Harvard Professor Robert Fogel. Morgan put it that even “if they can prove wilful mistakes in “Roots”), I guess I wouldn’t draw very many conclusions, because I don’t think the book will have a great impact on historians anyway.” Or, as Fogel put it, after stating astonishingly that it would be wrong “to diminish the book” by pointing out many errors, and asserting that “the burden of proof is on those who bring the charges(?)”, and admitting that there were many mistakes, concluded that “Roots” was a good historical novel, and that “I never applied to it the standards I would have if it had been written by (historians) C. Vann Woodward or Oscar Handlin.”

In short, what Morgan and Fogel are saying is simply this: “Roots” won’t influence historians, who know that the whole thing is a novel, so who gives a damn if the dumb public laps it up as accurate history?

Probably the most candid apologia for “Roots” in a triumph of ideology over truth came from Yale Professor David Brion Davis, who weighed in with the following:

“One could take almost any history and go over it with a fine-tooth comb and come up with errors or points that are debatable. To be scholarly or pedantic, you can make all kinds of qualifications. The problem is we all need certain myths about the past, and one must remember how much in the myths about the Pilgrims or the immigrants coming here has been reversed.”

Davis concluded with this shameful giveaway: that “Roots” had done much to redress the balance on people’s views of slavery. “If it’s on the right side. . . .”

(All quotes and statements from historians are to be found in the New York Times, April 10.)

To their credit, a few historians stand out from the mire of gross betrayal of the historian’s function. Harvard Professor Oscar Handlin sniffed at the Fogel-Morgan double standard: “A fraud’s a fraud.” Handlin added that:

“Most historians are cowardly about reviewing history books. The whole idea of being factual about material has gone out the window. Historians are reluctant—cowardly—about calling attention to factual errors when the general theme is in the right direction. That goes for foreign policy, for race and for this book. I think it’s a disgrace.”

More specifically on “Roots”, there have been honorable reviews by Professor Eric Foner in the leftist bi-weekly Seven Days, where Foner pointed out the prettified absurdity of “Roots” portrayal of African life. And, above all, Professor Willie Lee Rose, writing in the left-liberal New York Review of Books, demolished the errors of the African part of “Roots”, as well as such anomalies as Haley’s claiming that Kunta Kinte was sent to a cotton plantation in Spotsylvania County, Virginia at a time when there were no cotton plantations there (tobacco was the crop); and talking about wire fencing of the plantation when wire fence was not to be in use for a century. Professor Rose summed up these criticisms by pointing out that “these anachronisms are petty only in that they are details. They are too numerous and chip away at the verisimilitude of central matters in which it is important to have full faith.”

It is good to see that a few historians, at least, can still preserve their integrity even when lured by the blandishments of a good cause, and even when assured that “only” the public is in danger of being duped.

II: PROFESSOR ALBRO MARTIN, CONSERVATIVE

If one form of historians’ betrayal is to jettison the truth on behalf of ideology, another, equally shameful, form, is to discriminate against explicit ideological commitment on behalf of a spurious “objectivity.” Facts cannot present themselves. No historian can select or interpret facts without putting them in an interpretive framework which is implicitly ideological. Historians who scorn any ideology, and uphold the von Ranke goal of “writing history as it really was”, ignore the fact that, in that case, written history would have to be an endless chronicle of undigested events, in fact an unselective Andy Warhol-type filming of everything, which of course would take at least as long to present as the original events themselves. In actual fact, the “value-free” von Rankeans who proclaim their own lack of ideology really have an implicit one: namely, support for the whatever status quo is being studied.

All this emerges from the fact that Professor Albro Martin has just been made editor of the prestigious Business History Review, which under the editorship of Alfred Chandler and others has become by far the best scholarly journal in American economic history. Martin, while fiercely proclaiming his own alleged von Rankean “value-freedom”, is actually a pre-revisionist conservative, in other words, someone who believes that the railroads were badly regulated by interfering bureaucrats rather than cartellized by the railroads themselves through the use of government. Martin’s book on the railroads was eviscerated by the Friedmanite economic historian and expert on railroad history, Professor George W. Hilton.

Appearing at the recent annual convention of the Economic History Association, Professor Martin, in a workshop on the task of a business history journal, flexed his muscles. After saying that the Business History Review would be broad-based, Martin flatly declared that certain approaches would be “included out” of his scholarly journal. These comprised Marxist articles, and papers by “the Chicago School and the followers of Ayn Rand.” Clearly, for Martin, pursuing his alleged dream of von Rankean history, Marxists, Friedmanites, and Randians are to be censored a priori, because, as “extremists”, they violate the von Ranke criterion of valuelessness. On the other hand, it is apparent that, for Martin and his legion of colleagues, liberals and regular conservatives, being non-“extremists” and within the mainstream consensus, are by definition free of values (that is, of values that disturb the Establishment and the status quo).

In short, Professor Martin has brazenly and openly declared that, in the free and open marketplace of ideas, of the unfettered search for truth, certain approaches which stem from ideological frameworks with which he disagrees, are a priori verboten, regardless of what insights they may fruitfully deliver. Thus, despite his obeisances to von Ranke, Martin, in his own way, is eager to suppress historical truth on behalf of his own implicit ideological position.

In the discussion period, interestingly enough, one Mary Yeager felt “that it was unwise to rule out Marxist studies”. Apparently, no one was there to put in a good word for those other extreme ideologists, the quasi-libertarian Friedmanite or Randian approaches. And so, the search for historical truth marches on!

(For Martin’s views, see Glenn Porter, in the Journal Of Economic History, March 1977, pp. 236-237).

The Tuccille Defection

Every ideological movement, large or small, successful or unsuccessful, has had its share of defections, and so it should be no cause for alarm or dismay that libertarianism now has another one to chalk up on the historical record. Our latest defector is Jerome Tuccille, who has chosen to announce his renegacy in the pages of National Review (“The Failure of Libertarianism”, April 29)—roughly the moral equivalent of an ex-Communist announcing his defection in the pages of the self-same magazine.

In this brief, condescending, and poorly written article, Tuccile takes the line that libertarianism is “utopian” (a word repeated no less than eight times in a short piece) and fails to be “realistic” (also repeated eight times.) We are allegedly utopian and unrealistic in failing to embrace as well as accept the alleged permanence of the public school system, government fiat money, the income tax, and a pro-war foreign policy. We have failed because we are only a “utopian fringe group”.

A particularly odd feature of the new Tuccille position is that when he himself joined the libertarian movement eight years ago it was far more of a “failure” on his own terms than it is now. The movement consisted of a tiny handful of people, a small fraction of its present quantity and quality. What is more, the very institutions that he now wants us to embrace in the name of “realism” are in much shakier shape than they were when Tuccille first converted to the cause of liberty. The public schools, formerly sacrosanct in the eyes of almost everyone, are now under general and widespread criticism, even among liberals; the income tax is facing intensifying and diverse forms of tax rebellion, from outright and organized refusal to pay to turning down of school bond issues; the gold standard is finding far more adherents among economists and in the Western world as a result of the intensifying world-wide inflation since fiat money was totally established in 1971; and the pro-war foreign policy suffered a permanent wound from America’s loss of the war in Vietnam. And yet now, in 1977, at a moment when the statist institutions he now calls upon us to favor are in a more tottering shape than at any time in fifty years, and at a moment when the libertarian movement is stronger than at any point in a century, Tuccille wants us to scrap it all in the name of “realism.”

The most curious note of all is Tuccille’s insistent charge that we are all hopelessly “utopian”. The charge comes with peculiar ill-grace from a man who, only a couple of years ago, was writing books proclaiming that in a few years we would all be immortal, and that the whole world would soon be a vast Disneyland run by private corporations. Tuccille’s vaunted “realism” may be gauged by the fact that he is now returning to a movement (conservatism) which has few adherents under the age of sixty. We may also consider the realistic fate of the Ford-Buckley ticket which Tuccille publicly endorsed in a speech before YAF last November.

And so Tuccille returns to the bosom of a magazine whose editor he had denounced years ago as an “authoritarian” while Buckley had dismissed him as a “semi-literate gentleman.” Perhaps Tuccille and N. R. deserve each other, after all.

Meanwhile, the Tuccille case serves as a warning about the inner dynamic of right-wing opportunism. For beginning with a purely strategic difference, with an alternative way of arriving at shared libertarian goals, the right-wing opportunist all too often goes on to give up the principle as well, and ends up as. . .a writer for National Review.

Tuccille repeats throughout his article that libertarians denounce everyone who disagrees with them as simply “statists” and “collectivists”. This leads me to wonder whether Tuccille ever understood the subtlety of libertarian categories. Surely the above categories are too systematic and intellectualized to apply to Tuccille at this juncture. Rather the proper self-explanatory labels to apply to him are: “conservative”, and “sellout.”

Carter on Inflation

by Richard M. Ebeling

One of two conclusions can be drawn from President Carter’s anti-inflation program: either Carter’s economic advisors forged their credentials and have never opened an economics book in their entire lives or they have purposefully put together a plan that ignores the causes of inflation and unemployment for political motivations.

Both conjectures seem to gain easy substantiation from a simple analysis of the main proposals for combatting inflation. In his news conference of April 16th, Carter declared that his package of anti-inflation proposals “directly address the roots of inflation and at the same time permit us to have expansion in our economy and a simultaneous reduction in unemployment.”

What are the “roots of inflation” that his plan is to cure? Firstly, it is to see that the “combined total of private and public demands on the economy must not be allowed to exceed our productive capacity . . .” It seems difficult to understand how “private demands” can exceed the productive capacity of the economy. For every “private,” individual can only consume or invest what he himself has earned and acquired from productive activity, or what others are willing to lend out to him by foregoing present use of the resources themselves. It is only “public” individuals who have the ability, through the printing press, to increase the number of monetary claims to the existing amount of goods and services.

Carter appeared to perceive this by declaring “a firm commitment to have a balanced budget in a normal economy by . . . 1981 . . .” Why must a balancing of the budget wait until four years hence? Because the economy has been recovering, we are told, from the worst recession in 40 years and as “the recovery proceeds, the deficits must shrink and eventually disappear.”

This is, of course, the old Keynesian remedy. The solution to depressions is an increase in “effective demand” via government deficit spending sufficient to induce full employment, at which point the taxes received from a fully-employed work force will be enough to cover all governmental expenditures.

The fundamental error in this approach lies in the fact that the types of stimulus induced by the deficits lay the seed of future unemployment. The goal of the monetary expansion via the deficits, in the first place, is to increase demand for output, thereby raising the prices of goods offered on the market. The increase in prices, assuming the prevailing money wage and other costs remain constant, enlarges profit margins for producers, acts as incentive for hiring additional workers for expansion of output, and, hence, increases aggregate income and employment.

The error in the analysis comes forward once we ask, what demands and which prices will increase? The added monetary expenditure due to the deficit does not immediately affect all firms and all incomes in the economy. The increased demand is for the particular goods produced in particular sectors of the economy upon which the government has decided to spend the money. It is true the enlarged government expenditure increases the demand for certain products and also, possibly the prices of those goods right away. It is equally true that at the existing money wages earned by those workers will enable them to increase their demand for various goods and services and enhance employment opportunities for others who come then to produce them.

What must not be lost sight of, however, is the specific chain of causality. It is only for as long as the government-induced demand through monetary expansion continues at a sufficiently high level that the subsequent results are forthcoming. Once the government demand for these particular goods was to diminish, the demand for those goods would decrease, the profitability of producing them would decline and the workers drawn into their production would find themselves facing future unemployment. If, at this point, money-wages are rigid downwards, there would develop a decrease in earned income that would have its “multiplier” repercussions in decreasing demand and employment in other sectors of the economy after a certain amount of time.

If the government, after having drawn labor and other resources into particular productive activities through increasing the relative demand and price for that output, does not want these subsequent depression “symptoms” to develop, it must once more increase its spending for those products.

If the sector of the economy the government initially spent the deficit money upon had been experiencing unemployment and “idleness’ because consumer demand had slackened off for those products, but wage and price rigidity had prevented necessary adjustments, then the same situation will once again appear after the increase in the money supply has “percolated” through the economy. For as the incomes of consumers come step-by-step to be affected through the inflationary process, they will spend their higher money incomes in a manner that reflects their preferences for the relative amount of goods and services on the market. Though all prices will tend to be nominally higher due to the inflation, consumers will again demonstrate their preferences by buying relatively more of some things and relatively less of others. Thus, while temporarily, increased monetary expenditure by the government via a deficit could increase the demand for a product for which consumer demand had slackened off, once the additional money passes into the hands of the consumers as higher money income they will spend it in a way that reflects their choices and which will again show that some products are now evaluated lower than others. That is why inflationary expenditures, for those products that have come to be relatively less valued by consumers, would have to be increased if those sectors of the economy are not to suffer from unemployment in the face of rigid money wages.

Does the Carter plan incorporate an understanding that unemployment is caused by rigid money wages in the face of changes in consumer demand for alternative products on the market? Does it perceive that inflationary processes in the economy are caused by monetary expansion by the government and that the misdirection of resources do to the inflation only makes the unemployment problem later on even worse?

Not one word appears that even gives an inkling that the causes and consequences of inflation are understood.

What is offered is a beefing up of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, with the purpose of “providing detailed and timely analysis of economic conditions in those industries and markets which are important to price stabilization.” The Council will send “early warning” signals[1] about “emerging bottlenecks, capacity shortages and other problems that; if left unattended, would lead to significant effects on domestic supply.”

Changes in prices and wages due to monetary expansion must be seen not as the cause but as the effect of inflation. To provide “detailed and timely analysis” on the movement of prices and wages is to direct attention towards the symptoms of the problem alone. It indiscriminately lumps together those changes in prices due to monetary expansion with those that would have occurred anyway even without inflation because of changes in consumer preferences, and labels both as “inflation.” It also assumes away the extremely difficult problem of determining which of these two causes has brought about the observed change, when, in fact, both materialize as changes in money prices.

To have “significant effects” on the supply side, the Carter plan suggests the establishment of commodity reserves under the sponsorship of the government. “When prices of raw materials and food fluctuate upward, the effects tend to spread throughout the economy, raising prices and wages generally,” we are told. In periods of high production and low prices, commodity reserves would he expanded; then, at other times, when production was low they would be made available “as a means of providing a more stable supply of farm commodities.” There is a promise of a similar program for industrial raw materials and for negotiations to “stabilize” prices of internationally traded goods.

The belief that an increase in the price of a few goods must necessarily result in an increase in all prices is completely fallacious. With a fixed quantity of money in the economy, an increase in the price of a good and a consumer preference to maintain the same level of consumption of that good, simply means that demand for some other good declines and its price tends to fall. If the decrease in demand is not matched by a decrease in price and wage, unemployment would soon follow. What does cause a tendency for all prices to rise under these circumstances of price and wage rigidity is if the money supply is expanded so the fixed money wage can be paid.

Commodity reserve stocks are not a solution to inflation. Instead, they are a perpetuation of a particular vested interest. An increase in farm prices will be mitigated through the selling off of stocks but it doesn’t consider the basis of that price rise. If it is because the demand for food has gone up the price should be allowed to go up and act as an allocative signal for farmers. On the other hand, if the price increase is due to monetary expansion, the selling off of the reserves merely hides temporarily the monetary effects at work. But the intention of placing a floor on commodities, as well, means that the income of that group is to be protected from adverse changes. The purchase of commodities for reserves during periods of falling prices would have two consequences. Firstly, increases in productivity and harvests would not be reflected in cheaper products for consumers. Secondly, the cost of buying up the surplus would be borne by the taxpayers for the benefit of the farm population and producers of raw materials.

Two other proposals in Carter’s plan concern incentives for increased investment and expanded capacity and employment and manpower programs. The plan states “the rate of expansion of productive capacity must be stepped up to head off possible shortages.” This would be achieved through tax reforms. The real key to investment expansion is not whether to have investment per se, but rather to insure that the right kind of investment tends to be carried out. Tax breaks or reforms that subsidize or cut the cost of certain types of investment and plant expansions are not necessarily of the type that represents anticipations of what consumers will want at different points in the future. If taxing policies, instead of consumer preferences, guide investment activities the outcome will only tend to be distortions and misdirection of scarce resources.

Surely the same principle should apply to manpower programs as well. To say that we “can reduce both unemployment and inflation by measures which improve job skills, increase efficiency of the labor market and target job opportunities to groups suffering from very high unemployment rates” does not represent an awareness that what matters most is not job skills per se, not efficiency per se and not just jobs per se for those “groups suffering from very high unemployment rates.”

What is wanted are job programs and apprenticeship openings in those areas that would be most likely to offer a stable working opportunity. Yet, where these opportunities are cannot be known unless the market is allowed to operate and show where the most profitable situations lie. But a successful working of the market in this area would require an elimination of minimum-wage laws and union restrictions that limit the ability of non-members to compete on the labor market. The Carter plan does not suggest reforms along these lines.

One heartening section in the anti-inflation plan pertains to government regulatory policy. “In the past,” the Carter plan states, “Federal regulations have often done more to protect regulated industries than to promote efficiency and cost reductions . . . The redirection or elimination of regulations that no longer serve national needs can lower prices for consumers.”

No matter how pleasant one may find this possibility of movement towards at least some deregulation of the economy (assuming Carter actually means it and assuming those industries who would now have to face the cruel and harsh world of competition would not fight it), this has nothing to do with inflation. In fact, every one of Carter’s proposed actions has nothing to do with inflation.

This becomes “perfectly clear” when we come to consider the common denominator behind the entire program. It is seen in the proposed role for the Council on Wage and Price Stability, the plan for the commodity reserves, the push for investment activities and job training and in the call for deregulation of some industries. For the Carter administration, inflation simply means rising prices. Make workers more efficient and the cost influence on prices will be dampened; expand plant and equipment and supply will outpace or keep even with demand; collect food and raw material reserves to throw on the market when necessary and these prices will remain stable; deregulate industries and the new competition will keep a check on price increases in important sectors of the economy.

The central weakness of the whole argument is seen if we assume that all of Carter’s ideas have been implemented. What would be happening to prices if workers were as efficient as could be given the existing knowledge and technology, if investment were at its limit given the amount of savings available in the economy and if all regulatory restrictions on markets were eliminated, but there continued to be increase in the money supply, either to cover government deficits or merely from the Federal Reserve System continually expanding the monetary reserves available to the banking system? Surely, one of two things would be happening, depending upon the extent of the monetary increases: either prices would be prevented from falling to the level they would otherwise have reached due to the increases in productivity and output, or prices would be rising in absolute terms. In either case, it would be the monetary expansion, and that alone, which would have pushed prices to a level above what they otherwise would have been. All the Carter plan could ideally achieve would be to influence some of the effects of the monetary increases. And even these, as proposed, would only, most likely, intensify the misallocations and malinvestments already being created by the monetary influences themselves.

If this analysis of Carter’s program is correct, what purpose will be served by his call for industry-by-industry labor-management committees? What ends will the National Labor-Management Committee pursue when it meets secretly in Washington with its membership that includes George Meany of the AFL-CIO, Reginald H. Jones, chairman of General Electric, representatives of all the other major unions and executives from U.S. Steel, General Motors, Mobil Oil and Citicorp.? What will this “collaborative planning” between Labor, Business and Government bring about?

Well, perhaps, we should just remember how the Fascist Mario Palmieri explained the purpose behind Italian Corporativism:

“Within the Corporations the interests of producers and consumers, employers and employees, individuals and associations are interlocked and integrated in a unique and univocal way, while all types of interests are brought under the aegis of the State . . . through these corporations the State may at any time that it deems fit, or that the need requires, intervene within the economic life of the individual to let the supreme interests of the nation have precedence over his private, particular interests, even to the point where his work, his savings, his whole fortune may need to be pledged, and if absolutely necessary, sacrificed . . .”

Jesus and Marx

by Justus D. Doenecke

Review of Dale Vree, On Synthesizing Marxism and Christianity (New York: John Wiley, 1976; $14.95)

Supposedly, if rumors are accurate, Harvard’s most famous pop theologian, Harvey Cox, once had an audience with Pope Paul VI. The bearded and genial Cox was beaming, delighted to share his theology of joy with the Vatican. The Supreme Pontiff immediately scowled, looked up at Cox, and commented sardonically. “Young man. We have read your entire work and we are not amused.”

Neither, it seems, is Dale Vree. A Berkeley-trained political scientist, Vree is currently a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Hoover Institution. He is an extremely versatile scholar—a social theorist who grounds his methodology in Wittgenstein, an anti-communist who once sought the secular kingdom in East Germany, an Anglo-Catholic who reviews for Calvinist journals, a socialist (if a rather eclectic one) who finds God’s actions in secular history mysterious, and a man of compassion who is not afraid to claim that heresy—by distorting the Christian faith—imperils one’s salvation. His book not only is one of the most important political analyses of the decade; it is a work that, given our current foibles, absolutely had to have been written.

Why? Because some prominent Christian theologians not only search for points of agreement with Marxists; they baptize the class struggle and dialectical materialism as divine authority. Indeed, far more than the Marxists, Christians zestfully enter a “dialogue” that—because of its frequent one-sidedness—is really a monologue. Perhaps their seminary training has been deficient; perhaps they bear a sense of guilt for living in an affluent nation; perhaps they are acting out of the sheer hellish joy of it. For whatever reasons, they misconstrue the nature of their heritage and the tenets of the faith.

Of course we should not really be surprised. Christianity has often adopted the trapping of a culture-religion, and in our own time we have witnessed the ordination of lesbians, “God-is-dead” theologians, “freedom”-seders, and —that old standby—the power of positive thinking. Hence, in one sense, the Christian-Communist dialogue is more sober than much that goes under the name of religion, for the participants have to wrestle with some relatively sophisticated concepts. On another, however, it betrays Christianity at its deepest level.

Chesterton once wrote that “The Church is the only thing that saves us from the degrading slavery of becoming children of our time.” Vree strongly concurs, declaring that the radical Christians are more interested in listening to “modem man” than in proclaiming anything to him. These “o.k. believers.” involved in developing a religious form of radical chic, find God’s action in “progressive” secular events ranging from environmentalism to the integration of pro baseball, and at times it appears as if the mark of real prophecy is to continually condemn the military, university bureaucrats, and all entrepreneurs. As the orthodox Methodist theologian Paul Ramsey has caustically remarked, the work of a “true” prophet is to continually castigate the right wing.[2]

Such hip theology, Vree claims, is rooted in a variety of ancient heresies, although we moderns—if we be whimsical enough—might find some of the revived belief-systems rather charming. There are the confident Montanists, whose founder—one Montanus—regarded himself as the Paraclete, or Holy Spirit incarnate. There are the ardent Pelagians who conceive that man is unstained by original sin, and the learned Gnostics who find in hidden knowledge the liberation of good people from an evil world. There are such soothsayers as Joachim of Flora, the Cistercian monk from Calabria who heralded an age of perfect freedom, angelic perfection, and total bliss, and Thomas Muentzer, the Protestant reformer who established his own secret vanguard, the League of the Elect, to slaughter those who opposed his revolutionary ideas.

There heresies, so claims Vree, are merely updated in certain theologians prone to dialogue. To his credit, Vree does not attack such straw-men as William Coats’s God in Public: Political Theology Beyond Niebuhr (1974), in which an Episcopal priest proclaims that the Viet Cong was a “dynamic force in history” and one linked to the Word of God. ‘However, Vree’s treatment of far more formidable thinkers is so trenchant that the reader sometimes feels that the Mayo Clinic has been summoned to dissect a mouse.

Vree covers in detail the thought of the American Harvey Cox and the German Juergen Moltmann. He calls them both “modern Gnostics,” for they find revelation outside church and scripture, deny original sin, and see God’s Kingdom erected solely by human efforts. “The Coxian God,” as Vree calls him, always helps, and never constrains, people; he is “whatever it is within the vast spectacle of cosmic evolution which inspires and supports the endless struggle for liberation.” In fact, Cox’s diety is not “a presence” but “presence” (deep! deep!), and the Messiah is “always the one who will come” (equally deep). The true Christian, writes the Harvard scholar, finds out “what this politician-God is up to and moves in to work along with him.” Not only does this savant rejoice that God has become man’s “junior partner,” but he calls for a new appreciation of lunatics and deviants. “Some,” he writes, “may be full of God.” Little wonder that Vree writes with understatement, “Cox is profoundly confused.”

The thought of Moltmann, professor of systematic theology at Tuebingen, is equally unclear. Vree notes that his “theology of hope” reads like a New Left version of Norman Vincent Peale, for Moltmann’s God (if he exists, a point about which Moltmann is uncertain) lives only in the future. There is, however, one exception: God shows up wherever there is “godforsakenness” and remains so long as the “godforsakenness” is around.

It is hardly surprising that an editor of an Anglo-Catholic journal finds certain Christian theologians abandoning their heritage: what is astounding is that Vree sees some Marxists doing the same. For example, one revisionist Czech Marxists calls “reality a creative process for which people are responsible”—a rather un-Marxist notion. Another, the French Marxist Roger Garaudy, seeks a “capitalism that has human goals,” “a purposeful capitalism.” Most such revisionists either leave the party or are expelled; Garaudy, for example, was thrown out of the French Communist Party in 1970 because he protested against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Such apostate Marxists are far removed from the mainstream of the movement, and any dialogue that centers on them does authentic Marxism an injustice.

Vree is extremely perceptive in his analysis of contemporary theology. He correctly notes (along with Herbert Marcuse, by the way) that the two belief systems are incompatible, for both Christians and Marxists in dialogue place greater weight on concepts of human freedom than their ideologies can sustain. He sensibly comments that Christians can cooperate with Marxists in building a better society, indeed even become Marxists, provided that they do not proclaim that they are involved in redemptive activity by so doing. His sections on the young Marx, the Marxist revisionists, and the nature of revelation deserve wide reprinting.

Some of Vree’s historical comments could use reworking, although his observations here are not essential to his main points. The doctrine of the Apostolic Succession can be interpreted far more comprehensively than Vree attempts, as shown by the arguments of such diverse scholars as Daniel J. O’Hanlon, S.J. and Robert McAfee Brown. [4]It remains doubtful, the general comments of Franklin H. Littell notwithstanding, that it was theological liberalism, rather than class anxieties, that Nazified many German Protestants. [5]H. Richard Niebuhr’s Kingdom of God in America (1937) is hardly a “non-orthodox source.”[6]

Over-reliance on political theorist Eric Voegelin can present problems, both in Voegelin’s sweeping claim that “the essence of modernity is the growth of gnosticism” (emphasis mine), and in the attention given to Joachim of Flora, this peculiar twelfth-century monk who so influenced the Franciscans. Vree goes beyond any college survey of western civilization or of medieval history, in finding Joachim a “pivotal figure” in all Western thought, and even makes a parallel between his thought and that of Charles Reich—he of “greening of America” fame and Consciousness III.[7] One also wonders how central self-deification was to the teachings of Feuerbach, Pelagius, and Montanus, and the degree to which Vree turns minor themes into major ones. Yet these are all scholar’s quibbles. For the most part, Vree has done his homework and done it well.

The book is clearly written, with only a few lapses into jargon. One could still do without such terms as “dialogical phenomena,” “earthly futurity,” and “a fallacious immanentization of the Christian Eschaton.” Explaining the causes of this peculiar dialogue, and of the strange turn it has taken, still awaits us. One hopes too that Vree would work on formulating a Christian social ethic, or at least indicate the norms that go into developing one, for he is obviously well qualified to take up the task.

In the meantime, Vree has given us an able account; the “Christian Marxists” will be hard put to answer him.

Arts And Movies

by Mr. First Slighter

Defense of Dirty Harry. Andrew Sarris, in a review of The Enforcer in the Village Voice (Jan. 24), presents a fine, insightful defense of Clint Eastwood and his Dirty Harry persona. Sarris asks how it is that New York left-liberals, while exulting in films of violence starring such actors as Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro, balk loudly at the “violence” in the far less violent films of Clint Eastwood. There is, of course, the “right-wing individualism” of the Dirty Harry series, “directed both at vote-grubbing politicians and thrill-seeking punks.” (An ideology that Sarris disapproves of but is willing to overlook). But Sarris perceptively sees that there is something more going on: namely, that as an actor, Eastwood is a strong, decisive, private person, while in contrast the antiheroes of the films approved by the liberal intelligentsia exude their neuroses all over the screen. It is not that Eastwood “doesn’t act”, but that he acts brilliantly in the old heroic Cooper-Wayne tradition, only more so: by remaining firmly a private person, Eastwood as hero rises to the status of a truly heroic, almost mythic figure.

As Sarris writes: “The problem with his (Eastwood’s) personality on screen is that he always seems primed for trouble, without any plot contrivances. He thus operates, outside his genres, in a world in which one trusts neither institutions nor individuals. From time to time, he tries to reach out to people, but he is never truly vulnerable. He always withholds something of himself from potential betrayers. It is the way the world is and the way it has been since he has known it. . . . It could be said that the Hoffman. DeNiro . . . action characters appeal to Manhattanites because these characters evoke psychology whereas Eastwood evokes mythology. There is something intransigently irreducible in Eastwood, some corner of his soul that no shrink can ever penetrate. And there is in this sense of mystery a very exciting presence on the screen.”

What a great phrase: “some corner of his soul that no shrink can ever penetrate!” Into our neutotically “open”, psychology-ridden culture, Clint Eastwood comes riding as a glorious reminder of our pre-psychological era — both in movies and in the real world. Clint Eastwood is the Non-Psychological Man, a return to the days when “individualism” meant not only freedom, moral principles, and defense of property but also the guardianship of the individual’s precious moral right to emotional privacy. May his tribe increase!

Twilight’s Last Gleaming, dir. by Robert Aldrich. With Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark. As an old-time adventure movie buff, I expected this to be a suspenseful, action-packed movie melodrama. It isn’t Instead, it’s that well-known subspecie of a bad movie, an Unconsciously Funny picture. Burt Lancaster plays a nut, pro-peace general, who, along with two non-political things, breaks out of prison and takes over a missile base, Lancaster then threatens to blow up the world unless the U.S. government gives him $10 million (to satisfy his comrades), and reads over nationwide TV a secret document purporting to tell the truth about the war in Vietnam. Part of the unconscious humor of this film comes from the fact that the movie-makers, incredibly, are on Lancaster’s side, seem to regard his lunatic actions as the work of an Old Testament prophet redivivus. Aside from the fact that the much dreaded secret document (which launches the Vietnam War only for purposes of “credibility”) is hardly hot stuff compared with the real McCoy (e.g. the Pentagon Papers), as dedicated as I am to the cause of Vietnam War Revisionism it is scarcely worth threatening to blow up the world to advance the revisionist cause.

REFERENCES

1. For samples of Vree’s views and background, see “Prophecy, Providence, and Politics,” The Alternative, August/September 1975, pp. 13-17; “Ten Years After The Free Speech Movement: Reflections of a Participant,” Worldview, November 1974, pp. 25-30; “Reflections on Wittgenstein, Religion, and Politics,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 1975, pp. 113-133; and his frequent essays in the American Church News and the New Oxford Review.

2. For an excellent critique of ecumenical position papers, see Ramsey’s Who Speaks for the Church? (Nashville: Abington, 1967).

3. For the problems in Coat’s approach, see this reviewer’s critique in Living Church, November 10, 1974, pp. 4, 13.

4. Robert McAfee Brown and Daniel O’Hanlon, S.J., “The Ministry and Order of the Church,” in Reconsiderations: Roman Catholic/Presbyterian and Reformed Theological Conversations (New York: World Horizons, 1967), pp. 107-158.

5. J.R.C. Wright, “Above Parties:” The Political Attitudes of the German Protestant Church Leadership, 1918-1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

6. For a treatment of Niebuhr which stresses his implicit critique of any “Marxist Christianity,” see this reviewer’s “H. Richard Niebuhr: Critic of Political Theology,” Communio, Spring 1977, pp. 83-93.

7. For a less cosmic treatment of Joachim, see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophesy in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 5

MAY, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

Begin Begins

The recent Israeli election breaks all the tablets by changing the previous unbroken rule of Israeli politics since the inception of the state by the Labor party (or, more specifically, by the Mapai wing of the Labor party coalition). While Israel has a multi-party system and no one party has ever gained an electoral majority, Labor party rule came to seem almost eternal. That, at least, has been shattered.

It should first be pointed out that the election was no particular triumph for the Likud party and its probable new prime minister, Menahem Begin. There was no particular surge of votes for the Likud; rather, there was a collapse of Labor support, brought about no doubt by an accelerating annual inflation rate of 40%, extremely high taxes, and especially by a Watergatish rash of financial corruption in high Labor places. General disgust with Labor led to the formation of a new party, the Democratic Movement for Change, headed by the archaeologist Yigael Yadin. The DMC’s program is extremely cloudy, presenting an anti-corruption image, a push for a two-party type electoral system, and fuzz on the rest of the issues. The DMC took away enough votes from Labor to give the Likud the victory, though, once again, Begin will only be able to govern with coalition support.

The Likud is a coalition of parties, the heart of which is the Herut, headed from its inception by Mr. Begin. The Herut party is the successor of the Zionist terrorist organization, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, responsible for the massacre of Arab civilians at Deir Yassin and the dynamiting of the King David Hotel. To go back further, Begin is the heir of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder and lifelong leader of the Zionist Revisionist movement. Zionist Revisionism had two major planks: insistence on a Jewish State when official Zionism was still only committed to a Jewish “homeland” in Palestine; and insistence that the boundaries of that State be the maximal extent of Biblical Jewish territory—that is, on both sides of the Jordan, and roughly from the Euphrates to the Nile. Zionist Revisionism, then, is Jewish-exclusivist, militarist, and aggressively expansionist. That is the essence of the Herut program. It cares virtually nothing for domestic issues, and so it hopes for inter-class Jewish unity on some foundation while the eternal war against the Arabs is being pursued. Before World War II, Jabotinsky formed an alliance with Mussolini, and was enchanted with the class-collatorationist potential of the fascist corporate state.

The other major party in the Likud coalition is the Liberal party, which is also hawkish on Arab affairs (though not as fanatically as the Herut), and tends to be diluted free-marketish in economic affairs—perhaps the best simile to American affairs would be to call them Javits Republicans.

How hawkish in the concrete the Begin regime will be it is impossible to say, but the idea bruited about in the American press that Begin’s views will be “tempered by the responsibilities of power) seems to us like New York Times-ish pap which will not work for a dedicated ideologue like Begin. One thing is pretty clear: the major effect of the Begin regime will be to scuttle, for a long time to come, the dove plan that has been assiduously pushed by various elements in the State Department, by moderate anti-Zionists, moderate pro-Zionists, and moderate Arabs. Briefly, the dove plan is for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, with a Palestinian state to be established in the returned areas (the West Bank and the Gaza strip), in return for which the Palestinians would acknowledge the “right of the new Israel to exist”. Presumably, the borders would be guaranteed by the UN and/or United States. But in all the mixed public/private dickering on the dove plan, it became clear to us that the whole idea was a will o’ the wisp. There were too many ifs: thus, Israel would probably not give up all of the post-1967 territories, but would insist on military bases and retaining all of Jerusalem, and Israel, while remaining armed to the teeth, would insist that the Palestinian state be demilitarized. It is hard to believe that the Palestinians, even if they could bring themselves to swallow the recognition of Israel, would ever sit still for being demilitarized while abutting on a militarized foe.

Be that as it may, we will probably never know, since the Begin regime undoubtedly will not agree to the scheme. We can expect in future years, then, a polarization of politics both within Israel and between Israel and the Arabs. Internally, the accession of the Likud might lead to a breaking up of the Labor party, whose main strength, after all, was its perpetual status as ruler, and perhaps move the leadership of the Left over to the Mapam party, which is far more dovish than the centrist-hawkish Mapai. The fading of dove hopes in the 1967 plan will bring to the fore hawkier groups on both sides; and we may expect a growth in the Palestinian militants of the Rejection Front.

Meanwhile, the big movement news is that the incoming Liberal Finance Minister, Simha Ehrlich, has asked Milton Friedman to come to Israel to be his economic advisor, and that Friedman has accepted. My own view is that the chance of Israel adopting Friedmanite policies is somewhere near zero. At any rate, things should be lively in the Middle East for quite a while.

Liberty and the Drug Problem

by Roy Childs

In discussing anything as controversial as the legalization of the production, sale and use of certain drugs, it is important to determine just what the problem is in the first place. For in recent years, the so-called “drug problem” has gotten unprecedented publicity. We are told, by intellectual, medical and political leaders alike, that we are in the midst of a crisis situation, that a phenomenon they call “drug abuse” is, to quote one national authority, “spreading like a plague,” and that, therefore, it is incumbent upon us to take still further steps to stem the tide of rising drug use.

Few people in recent years have bothered to examine the problem down to its roots, and the result has been that few people—particularly those who determine national policy—are aware of the true nature and dimensions of the problem, let alone its all-important origin. The concept of a “drug problem,” of course, refers to several interrelated things. First, it stands for what some people do with certain disapproved substances. Secondly, it refers to what other people think about their actions, and what these other people try to do about it. Finally, it refers to what happens to the first group of drug-takers when this group of drug-prohibitors act, and how they respond.

We shall quickly take up these questions. But first, some facts about the severity of the problem, why it concerns us. We have taken a special interest in the “drug problem” since 1960, or thereabouts. Since then, our ancient anti-narcotics laws have been modified and made much more severe. Studies have been done. Publicity given to both the use of drugs and punishment of drug use has risen to mammoth proportions. Yet since 1960 the number of “drug addicts” (referring here to the number of heroin addicts) has increased from 54,000 to about half a million. (Last year nearly 450,000 persons were arrested on charges connected with marijuana alone.) In New York City today, several thousand “addicts” are serving prison terms for drug related offenses, several hundred of them serving potential life sentences under the Rockefeller Drug Law of 1973. There have been hundreds of drug-related deaths in the last few years. An increasing number of young women have been driven into prostitution to provide for a steady supply of drugs. Many young men, particularly blacks, are now professional criminals, stealing from $200 to $500 worth of merchandise every day, to maintain a $50 to $75 daily heroin habit. Billions of dollars are being spent yearly to cope with “drug abuse.” Over 85,000 people have, over time, been given at taxpayer’s expense, free methadone in a “maintenance” program.

Violent crime has risen incredibly; some experts estimate that at least 70% of violent crime, theft, muggings and the like, are drug-related. The United States government has become intricately involved in the internal politics of other nations, such as Turkey in addition to Southeast Asia and South America, to prevent the growth of one plant, which is seen as being at the root of the problem, namely, the poppy. Government corruption, particularly among police, has also skyrocketed, largely because huge bribes are offered by organized crime to allow traffic in “hard” drugs to continue. Our courts are clogged. Our city budgets are strained. Our streets are not safe, certainly not at night, and increasingly, not during the day, either.

All of this barely touches on the dimensions of the problem. It is no wonder, then, that the response of many people is to advocate harsher laws, to increase the punishment of those who use, or traffic in, drugs.

My contention is that this concern is unjustified, and the punishments unjust as well. To state my position plainly, there is no drug problem, which should cause political concern, except that created by the law. The only way to solve the existing problem is to abolish the drug laws, period. Indeed, every fact points in this direction.

There never was a valid reason to have had the drug laws in the first place, and there is no reason for continuing them. The only reason for their continuance which seems to make any sense at all is that the State is afraid to admit how wrong it has been, to face its victims squarely and honestly, and to turn away from a grievous error which has cost so many lives. The State, in short, has made our lives, and the lives of those who wish to use certain drugs, unnecessarily hard and trying, piling obstacle upon obstacle on the road to satisfaction and a content human life.

Long ago, we came to see that perpetual war between different religions would only lead to increasing pain and suffering for all concerned. The doctrine of religious toleration was born from that sorry experience. Today, tolerance of what different people choose to consume is next in line for re-examination. If only religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence could save us from religious wars, then only tolerance and peaceful coexistence between those who wish to ingest different substances can stop the drug war, a violent conflict between those who wish to use certain substances, no matter what obstacles are placed in their paths, and those who wish to prohibit their use of certain drugs, no matter what the cost.

To see why the problem has become as serious as it has, let us take a brief look at the evolution of our drug laws, and their connection with the problem.

In the 19th century, the century of individualism, individual responsibility, the century of great achievements and great personal liberty, there simply were no drug laws. And neither was there any drug problem. Indeed, as Edward Brecher writes in his comprehensive survey, LICIT AND ILLICIT DRUGS, “drugs (speaking here of the opiates, of opium, morphine and heroin) were not viewed as a menace to society and. . .they were not in fact a menace.” Drugs were “as freely accessible as aspirin is today.” Opium, of course, had been known for centuries. It was regarded as a virtual panacea, as was morphine, the chief ingredient of opium. In fact, the opium wars waged by Britain in the Far East in the mid-nineteenth century were waged to spread the marketing and use of opium.

In saying that opium and morphine were freely available during the 19th century, one is not exaggerating. They were sold over the counter in drug stores; dispensed directly by doctors, and with prescriptions; they were sold openly in grocery and general stores; they could be ordered by mail; and they were the ingredients for countless patent medicines, used for treatment of everything from diarrhea to dysentery, from “women’s problems (as they were called), to teething syrups for babies. “One wholesale drug house (alone),” writes Edward Brecher, “distributed more than 600 proprietary medicines and other products containing opiates.” Opiates were regularly used in most communities throughout America, and by some of the most prominent people—including noted temperance advocates, who fought the use of whiskey.

In England, for example, “Godfrey’s Cordial” was especially popular; it was a mixture of opium, molasses for sweetening, and sassafras for flavoring. Dr. C. Fraser Brockington reports that in mid 19th century Coventry, ten gallons of Godfrey’s Cordial—enough for 12,000 doses—were sold weekly, and it was administered to 3,000 infants under 2 years of age.

In America, it was much the same thing, with up to 1% of the members of small communities using opiates regularly; today, they would be called “addicts,” and imprisoned for several years. But there was no disruption of family life, or society, no crime because of the use, no pushers, and, far from making people indolent or lazy, as is so often charged, it apparently made it easier to work, to bear the stress and strain of everyday life.

Doctors favored opiates regularly. An 1880 textbook listed 54 diseases which could be treated by morphine. Doctors prescribed opium as a cure for alcohol addiction. As Dr. J. R. Black wrote, “It calms in place of exciting, the baser passions, and hence is less productive of acts of violence and crime; in short. . .the use of morphine in place of alcohol is but a choice of evils, and by far the lesser.”

It is interesting to note at this point a certain cycle which has developed. Alcoholism was viewed as the major “drug problem” in the 19th century, and opium was prescribed as a cure. Later, morphine was advocated by doctors as a cure for opium addiction. Still later, heroin was defended as a cure for morphine addiction. Today, of course, methadone is seen by everyone as a cure for heroin addiction, and an interesting thing has happened in recent years: in attempting to break out of methadone maintenance, many young blacks have turned instead to. . .alcohol.

But there was, in the 19th century, at any rate, essentially no problem. Today, with the dubious help of hindsight, people are fond of thinking that “they were all becoming hooked,” without knowing it. But this merely causes us to cast a suspicious gaze at the vague concept of “addiction,” which has never been adequately defined in the literature. Babies who used heroin and morphine in teething syrups did not become addicted, and there are too many cases of occasional users who did not become dependent, either. In our own time, qualified doctors insist that withdrawal, and therefore “breaking away” from heroin, is at least as much a psychological phenomenon as it is a physical one, and that many of the problems result from going “cold turkey,” in any case.

If the opiates—opium, morphine, and heroin (which was only synthesized from morphine in 1898)—were no problem in the 19th century, then why the laws?

There is a very interesting story here, one which we cannot, unfortunately, tell in any detail. Edward Brecher writes:

Opiates taken daily in large doses by addicts were not a social menace under 19th century conditions, and were not perceived as a menace. Opium, morphine and heroin could be legally purchased without a prescription, and there was little demand for opiate prohibition. But there was one exception to this general tolerance of the opiates. In 1875, the City of San Francisco adopted an ordinance prohibiting the smoking of opium in smoking-houses or “dens”.

The roots of this ordinance were racist rather than health-oriented, and were concerned with what is today knows as “life-style.” Opium smoking was introduced into the United States by tens of thousands of Chinese men and boys imported during the 1850’s and 1860’s to build the great Western railroads. The Chinese laborers then drifted into San Francisco and other cities, and accepted employment of various kinds at low wages-giving the rise to waves of anti-Chinese hostility.

Here, as elsewhere, we see the insidious effects of labor unions, as we do in the case of the first immigration laws. The unions wanted to inhibit competition and exclude Chinese altogether from emigrating to America. The 1875 San Francisco law failed to achieve its purpose. Instead, the habit was merely indulged in “underground,” less openly, in unsanitary conditions.

In 1883, in an attempt to discourage Chinese use of opium, Congress raised the tariff on opium from $6 to $10 a pound, but even this failed to curb the use of smoking opium. So in 1887, Congress prohibited the importation of smoking opium altogether, and prohibited the importation of any kind of opium by Chinese, but not by Americans. In 1890, it prohibited the manufacture of smoking opium by anyone who was not an American citizen.

The result, of course, was that massive smuggling developed, and that opium dens—favored by Orientals over the other ways of imbibing opiates favored by Americans, were driven gradually underground. From then until 1914, 27 states and cities had passed laws against opium smoking—but only smoking.

Thomas Szasz, in his magnificent work CEREMONIAL CHEMISTRY: THE RITUAL PERSECUTION OF DRUGS, ADDICTS AND PUSHERS, tells us a bit more about the racism and union-involvement in prohibiting smoking opium.

At its first meeting in 1881, the first act of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions was to condemn the Chinese cigarmakers of California and to urge that only union-label cigars be bought. Nor were the leaders of the Federation, which became the American Federation of Labor in 1886, content merely to sanction the movement against the Chinese. They became, in the words of Herbert Hill “the most articulate champions of the anti-Oriental cause in America.” The general who led this wave of the American working man against the Chinese coolie was Samuel Gompers, the president of the AFL except for a single year, from its founding in 1886 until his death in 1924. Although an immigrant jew who espoused socialist ideals and spouted the rhetoric of the solidarity of the toiling masses, he became a major spokesman in America for concepts of racial superiority, especially in labor.

In 1902, Gompers published a pamphlet, co-authored with Herman Gutstadt, another official of the AFL, entitled SOME REASONS FOR CHINESE EXCLUSION: MEAT VS RICE, AMERICAN MANHOOD AGAINST ASIATIC COOLIEISM — WHICH SHALL SURVIVE? The pamphlet was written at the behest of the Chinese Exclusion Convention of 1901, its purpose being to persuade Congress to renew the Act, which was due to expire the following year (it was renewed). In this document, Gompers declares that “the racial differences between American whites and Asiatics would never be overcome. The superior whites had to exclude the inferiour Asiatics by law, or, if necessary, by force of arms. . .The Yellow Man found it natural to lie, cheat and murder and 99 out of every 100 Chinese are gamblers.”

The opium issue was raised by Gompers in the service of his racist goals. He used it as a spectre to try to scare Americans into prohibiting Chinese immigration and competition for jobs. There is, in fact, no other reason for the passage of our major narcotics law than this.

Even though between the 1890’s and 1914, there was evidence of a decline in “opium addiction,” in 1914 Congress passed the infamous Harrison Narcotics Act, which established stiff government controls over the marketing of opiates, and which was, Edward Brecher tells us, subsequently interpreted in a prohibitionist fashion.

For the first time, we had a real narcotics problem, along with the first reports of crimes committed by “addicts,” to obtain the drugs.

The Harrison Act went into effect in 1915. Here are two medical journals describing its effects:

The really serious results of this legislation. . .will only appear gradually and will not always be recognized as such. These will be the failures of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes which will never be traced to their real cause, and the influx of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives, into hospitals for the mentally disordered.
(from NEW YORK MEDICAL JOURNAL, May 15, 1915)

This next quotation is from AMERICAN MEDICINE, November 1915:

Narcotic drug addiction is one of the gravest and most important questions confronting the medical profession today. Instead of improving conditions the laws recently passed have made the problem more complex.

(This report goes on to stress the breaks which occurred between addicts and their doctors, the crimes to which they would be forced to turn—including prostitution, in the case of women—to secure a supply of the drugs. It spoke of the types of places and people which the addicts would be forced to deal with, concluding, among other things, that “afflicted individuals are under the control of the worst elements of society”. All this in less than one year.)

The problems became so readily apparent that in 1918, the Secretary of the Treasury appointed a committee to look into the newly-created problem. To combat the numerous new “problems,” it called for sterner enforcement and recommended more state laws patterned after the Harrison Act. Congress responded by tightening up the Harrison Act. The importation of heroin was prohibited altogether, even for medical purposes. “This legislation,” writes Brecher, “grew out of the widespread misapprehension that, because of the deteriorating health, behavior and status of addicts following passage of the. Harrison Act and the subsequent conversion of addicts from morphine to heroin, heroin must be a much more damaging drug than opium or morphine.” The truth, of course, is that heroin morphine heated in the presence of acetic acid, and the body reconverts it back into morphine after it has been ingested. The deteriorating “health, behavior and status” of an addict should, then, be considered a consequence of the law, rather than of particular drugs. More, precisely it was and is a consequence of the habitual use of drugs in a particular legal-political-economic situation.

Another result of the Act was that by 1938, 25,000 physicians had been arraigned on narcotics charges, and 3,000 served prison sentences. This may very well have been what changed the mind of the medical profession on the opiates. For even as late as 1926, the Illinois Medical Journal said that:

The Harrison Narcotics law should never have been placed upon the stature books of the United States. . .As is the case with most prohibitive laws. . .this one fell far short of its mark. So far, in fact, that instead of stopping the traffic, those who deal in dope now make double their money from the poor unfortunates upon whom they prey. . .As to the Harrison Narcotics Act, it is as with prohibition (of alcohol) legislation. People are beginning to ask, “Who did that, anyway?”

As in the case of liquor prohibition, certain people fought very hard to prevent that question from being asked too often, too publicly. But by 1936, an outstanding police authority, August Vollmer, had, as Brecher points out, “reached the same conclusion.”

Stringent laws, spectacular police drives, vigorous prosecution, and imprisonment of addicts and peddlers have proved not only useless and enormously expensive as means of correcting this evil, but they are also unjustifiably and unbelievably cruel in their application to the unfortunate drug victims. Repression has driven this vice underground and produced the narcotic smugglers and supply agents, who have grown wealthy out of this evil practice and who, by devious methods, have stimulated traffic in drugs. Finally, and not the least of the evils associated with repression, the helpless addict had been forced to resort to crime in order to get money for the drug which is absolutely indispensable for his comfortable existence.

Nonetheless, by 1970, Congress had passed 55 federal laws to straighten out and strengthen the Harrison Act. The punishments were continually stiffened: in 1909, 2 years was the maximum for violation of any narcotics law: by 1914, it was 5 years; by 1922, 10 years. Subsequently, with state laws, the number grew from 20, 40, and 90 years; with the death penalty and life imprisonment coming in during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Minimum sentences, too, were continually raised. Every form of treatment has failed, including methadone maintenance. There are more problems today than ever before.

Surely, then, to have gone to such trouble, Congress must have had some profound insight into the harmful affects of heroin, morphine and opium. Nothing could be further from the truth. And one of the things which surprised me most in doing my research for this, was that I found it impossible to precisely identify any significantly harmful effects of the opiates per se. A 1962 decision of the Supreme Court maintained that:

To be a confirmed drug addict is to be one of the walking dead. . .The teeth have rotted out, the appetite is lost, and the stomach and intestines don’t function properly. The gall bladder becomes inflamed; eyes and skin turn a bilious yellow; in some cases membrances of the nose turn a flaming red; the partition separating the nostrils is eaten away — breathing is difficult. Oxygen in the blood decreases; bronchitus and tuberculosis develop. Good traits of character disappear and bad ones emerge. Sex organs become affected. Veins collapse and liver purplish scars remain. Boils and abseesses plague the skin, gnawing pain racks the body. Nerves snap; vicious twitching develops. Imaginary and fantastic fears blight the mind and sometimes complete insanity results. Oftentimes, too, death comes — much too early in life. . .Such is the torment of being a drug addict; such is the plague of being one of the walking dead.

Brecher concludes, however, that “the scientific basis for this opinion. . .is not easy to find.” He quotes a key study, that made by Dr. George H. Stevenson and his British Columbia Associates.

When we began this project, it was immediately apparent to us that the actual deleterious effects of addiction on the addict, and on society, should be clearly understood. . .To our surprise we have not been able to locate even one scientific study on the proved harmful effects of addiction.

They searched through THE TRAFFIC IN NARCOTICS, written by the United States Commissioner of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, who began his career as a prohibition agent. Yet that study only had one reference to the alleged harmful affects, a quote from another authority who referred to a “decrease in the potential social productivity of the addict.” But even this was not supported by any scientific evidence. So Stevenson and associates wrote to the key authorities in the field:

They indicated, in their reply, that there was no real evidence of brain damage or other serious organic disease resulting from the continued use of narcotics (morphine and related substances), but that there was undoubted psychological and social damage. However, they made no differentiation between such damage as might be caused by narcotics and that which might have been present before addiction, or might have been caused by other factors. Moreover, they were unable to direct us to any actual studies on the alleged harmful effects of narcotic drugs.

Neither the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs nor the Canadian Government’s Department of Health and Welfare were able to produce such studies, either. In fact, each seems to have taken the alleged harmful effects for granted, even though all the evidence points to one conclusion, and one conclusion alone: that nearly all of the deleterious effects which are attributed to opiates, such as heroin, indeed, as Brecher writes, “seem to be the effects of the narcotics laws instead.”

Hepatitis and other diseases were caused by the use of unsterile syringes in injecting heroin—a practice, incidentally, made necessary only because American heroin is only 3 or 4% pure. Diseases were transferred from addict to addict by the same method. Teeth were rotted, when they were, because of inadequate dental care, usually caused by the addicts’ spending their money on heroin, instead. Skin discoloration apparently is caused by the unsanitary surrounding of most addicts, and by malnutrition, which is again caused by the expensiveness of the habit. Addicts cannot usually hold jobs, because of the uncertainty of not knowing where the next fix is coming from. Similarly with the other claims. In rare cases when addicts have been able to obtain a regular supply, at modest prices, there are no apparent harmful effects.

Dr. William Halstead, for example, often called one of the fathers of American surgery, and a founder of the Johns Hopkins Medical Center, was a morphine addict throughout most of his adult life—more than thirty years. And yet, during this time, not only did no one, except a few close friends, know that he was an addict, he performed some of his most brilliant operations, dying only in his late 70’s. Similarly, with American soldiers in Vietnam, commanding officers could not tell who was addicted to heroin and who was not; it took a urine test to find out. The evidence is overwhelming: in the absence of scientific tests, or the familiar heroin “tracks”, it is virtually impossible to tell an addict from a non-addict in terms of physical appearance or behavior. Controlled tests have shown that there is no organic damage when opiates are used over a long time, and that there is no intellectual deterioration, either. Some cases, in fact, point to the opposite conclusion! Prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians—a great many people—have been addicts for most of their lives, with no impairment of functioning capacities.

As Edward Brecher concludes: “There is general agreement throughout the medical and psychiatric literature that the overall effects of opium, morphine, and heroin on the addict’s mind and body under conditions of low price and ready availability are on the whole amazingly bland.” These conditions are what our proposed remedy to the problem would allow to flourish.

The subject of price should be briefly taken up. In the 19th century, an “addict” paid an average of 2.5¢ per day for 2 or 3 grains of morphine. Until recently, because of the narcotics laws, a typical “bag” contains 10 milligrams, or 1/6 of a grain of heroin. The cost per day: $30-$50. But lately the prices have been rising. In England, last year, the pharmacy cost of heroin was 4¢ per grain (60 mg.), while in the U.S., because of the narcotics laws, the street price is $30 to $90 per grain.

This indeed shows us part of the reason why the narcotics traffic is not likely to be stopped. For the raw materials cost of a $5 bag of heroin is roughly a quarter of a cent. This is what it can be purchased for overseas. The markup is, of course, several thousand percent, all of which goes to importers, processors, wholesalers, cops, and pushers. It is big business indeed, amounting to several billion dollars a year. Moreover, import controls are completely ineffective. To supply half a million addicts with 40 milligrams apiece per day takes less than 50 pounds of heroin a day-less than ten tons a year. But, as Brecher notes, there are 100,000,000 tons of goods imported into the U.S. every year, and more than 200,000,000 people entering the U.S. through customs every year. Trying to find such a small amount is very improbable, indeed. Those who get caught are usually those outside of organized crime, who are informed on by competitors, who know every inch of the heroin market inside out.

Let’s summarize what we have seen so far. We have seen that opiates were no problem in the 19th century, and that the problem began with the drug laws; before the laws, opiates were freely available, over the counter, by mail, ad infinitum. Moreover, the first laws were racist in origin, which motivation was quickly forgotten. The laws created the problem with addicts and crime, and the response over the years to this problem has made matters still worse by escalating punishments.

We have seen that the drugs themselves are apparently not terribly physically harmful, and that people can function on them normally, without difficulty, when they have the drugs. On a free market, they would be readily available, and a habit could be maintained for probably less than 50¢ a day.

The problem with price comes when the drugs are illegal, which makes the drugs difficult to obtain, causing skyrocketing prices. This in turn disrupts the addict’s life, making it hard for him to function normally and, with the high prices, pushes the addict towards a life of crime, and even prostitution in the case of women. Because fencing stolen goods brings a return of only a fraction of the cost of goods, to support a $50 a day habit an addict must steal $200 worth of loot a day. The high risk caused by intensive legal penalties, leads to an increased possibility of violence, as does the addict’s fundamental anxiety and uncertainty about finding a way to obtain the drugs. This high risk in turn guarantees high profits for those who deal in drugs, and increases the probability of massive police corruption. The laws lead to both an increase in violent crime, and in the costs of maintaining a large police force.

Now when we combine all this with the widespread destruction of addicts’ lives, both in jail and out, one might think that we have a pretty good case for abolishing the drug laws. We have seen, after all, that it is probably unlikely that the drug traffic can be stopped; we know that the the attempt to stop it has entangled the American government, including the CIA, in the internal affairs of other nations; we know that all policies have merely made matters worse. But still some people are not convinced.

First, they tell us that we must stop it because the addicts are harming themselves. This an odd position; drugs harm people, we are told, but prison doesn’t? We are told that we must get pushers off the streets. But pushers are on the street acting like salesmen, only because of the incredible profits that are there to be made. Moreover, the biggest pusher in terms of the biggest advertiser of drugs, is certainly the U.S. government, which creates the illusion, with its frantic concern, of drugs being a “forbidden fruit.” Moreover, the media will continue to advertise drugs as long as they are illegal, by publicizing arrests, and thereby making people wonder “why would they risk so much just to use those drugs?” Ergo the laws provide two sources of free advertising. Free advertising, and enormous profits. . .

In discussing the issue so far, I have purposely steered clear of the major libertarian argument for legalization of drugs. That is because I wanted to look at the evidence, first. Now to the most basic question; what is the libertarian solution to the problem? It is, in brief, to legalize drugs, not merely the use, but the production and sale of drugs—all drugs, including heroin—without prescription, so long as they are correctly labelled. (And not to tax them, besides. There is something obscene about the government attempting to gain revenue by looting those whose lives it has made miserable in the first place, by prohibiting precisely those drugs which it now proposes to tax.) Libertarians advocate such a position for a reason having nothing to do with the effects of such drugs. For libertarians, every man owns his own body, and no man owns the body of any other man. Everyone, by this view, is a self-owner, and should be permitted to do whatever he wishes, so long as he does not use or threaten force against others. If a man owns his own body, then he has the right to put in it whatever he chooses, and must be held responsible for the results.

In the area of drugs, this is nothing more nor less than what Thomas Szasz calls the “right to self-medication.” If a person is harmed by a substance he chooses to consume, then at least that harm is the direct result and consequence of his choices and actions. This is part and parcel of a natural law ethic. To substitute the harm of the State for self-harm is grotesque, indeed. Everyone, then, has the right to use drugs, even though it may be unwise or unhealthy to do so. This, in brief, is the libertarian position. It is nothing more than laissez-faire capitalism in the realm of the production, exchange and use of chemical substances. It is fitting, therefore, to quote from the late Professor Ludwig von Mises, who wrote in his masterwork, HUMAN ACTION:

Self-styled “realistic” people fail to recognize the immense importance of the principles implied. They contend that they do not want to deal with the matter from what, they say, is a philosophic and academic point of view. Their approach is, they argue, exclusively guided by practical considerations. It is a fact, they say, that some people harm themselves and their innocent families by consuming narcotic drugs. Only doctrinaires could be so dogmatic as to object to the government’s regulation of the drug traffic. Its beneficent effects cannot be contested.

However, the case is not so simple as that. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. Any why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books, and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, than that done by narcotic drugs.

These fears are not merely imaginary spectres terrifying secluded doctrinaires. It is a fact that no paternal government, whether ancient or modern, ever shrank from regimenting its subjects’ minds, beliefs and opinions. If one abolishes man’s freedom to determine his own consumption, then one takes all freedoms away. The naive advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the case of censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters *

In short abolish the drug laws. Give Liberty her head. She will solve our problems aright if anything can.

* Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (3rd Rev. Ed.. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), pp. 733-734.

Power, Obedience and Education: a Review Essay

by Joseph R. Stromberg

Free Life Editions of New York has emerged to meet a growing interest in libertarian and anarchist literature, classic and contemporary. As shown by the three works reviewed below, Free Life is not guided by narrow, sectarian criteria of what is “libertarian.”

The State, the Negation of Humanity

The republication of Franz Oppenheimer’s The State makes an important study available to students of politics and history. In stark contrast to most imperial German scholarship Oppenheimer looked skeptically into the origins of the state itself. His approach shows the influence of the conflict school and that of Marx and Weber.

For Oppenheimer sociology clearly has the character of “universal lessons of history” (to use Ludwig von Mises’ phrase). His chief dictum is that every state originates in conquest—“begotten in and of aggression” as Spencer said. The state has never sprung up by free contract or to meet social needs; nor is it the quasi-divine means of holding anarchic “civil (bourgeois) society” together (after Hegel).

On the contrary, the state typically begins with the conquest of peaceful peasants by warlike nomads. The conquerors retain the tillers of the soil as serfs or slaves, parcel out the land amongst themselves, and become an aristocracy “sovereign” over the territory they control by arms. As a “materialist” student of history, Oppenheimer was a realist and no romancer of the “idea” the state supposedly embodies. He defines the state as a territorial institution for “the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors.” Every state is thus a class state. The state is the “organization” of the “political means” to wealth (seizure of what others have produced), fundamentally opposed to the peaceful “economic means” (production and exchange).

Oppenheimer carries forward a radical reading of the physiocratic and natural law distinction between “natural order” or “society” and “artificial order” or “state.” But unlike Locke, Smith, Turgot and Rousseau, whom he severely criticizes, Oppenheimer denies that modern society’s grossly unequal distribution of property, especially in land, could have come about through the “natural” working of economic laws. The Enlightenment thinkers had chosen to draw this unnecessary conclusion.

The “political means” disrupted and undercut liberal dreams of peace, freedom and prosperity since the state preceded liberalism and was only partly modified by the liberal Revolutions of 1776 and 1789. Extra-economic coercion, not some “primitive accumulation of capital,” led to the imperfect, monopolistic “capitalist” present. In so arguing Oppenheimer breaks with both “bourgeois” (Establishment) apologists and Marxists. The latter admit, even stress, the role of force in “primitive accumulation”–force which crucially altered the outcome of economic process–but save themselves by reducing force to a mere reflex of “economic” activity. To Oppenheimer, “economic” reductiontism is a dangerous half truth; his “sociological” interpretation distinguishes economic motives from economic means and reestablishes power as a major variable in human history. Here he is close to the anarchist critique of Marxism, especially Bakunin’s. Hegemonic bonds do forcibly alter economic evolution. (As Tom Paine put it “when the robber becomes the legislator he believes himself secure”.) Oppenheimer, a radical liberal, sought to eliminate coercion from civil society.

Using conjectural history, Oppenheimer establishes legal “scarcity” of arable land as the root of class society. Since enough good land has always existed to support mankind as free farmers, extreme inequality indicated political pre-emption of vast land areas. This he proves from the historical record.

Oppenheimer sees the state as normally passing through six stages, from pillage to bureaucracy. The modern stage rests on the urban money economy which made possible regular payment of functionaries; the monarch’s officials broke the territorial magnates and curtailed free cities which as market centers were the highest expression of the economic means. Oppenheimer’s treatment of feudal psychology, which approved “honest thievery,” helps explain why many of our contemporaries admire those brigands and murderers who commit crimes on a grand (state) scale.

Unfortunately, the remedies Oppenheimer offers us for the evil diagnosed by the Levellers, Paine, Thierry and Oppenheimer himself seem laughably weak; agrarian colonies (shades of John Denver) and faith that History is bringing on an epoch of well-behaved, (reformed) states. As Charles Hamilton notes in his able introduction to the new edition, Oppenheimer suddenly chooses to forget all he has taught us about states. Hamilton’s introduction catalogues the support for Oppenheimer’s theses in contemporary anthropological and political science literature.

Oppenheimer provides us with an important set of insights into political behavior and a corrective to the “economic” dogma of the Marxists. Oppenheimer was a radical liberal who sought fulfillment of the bourgeois Revolution towards individual liberty, free exchange and virtual statelessness, a Revolution temporarily arrested by liberal failure to criticize the state–the negation of humanity–with radical tools of analysis.

The Mystery of Civil Obedience

If the state is indeed the exploitative apparatus Oppenheimer describes, why do people put up with it? A classic answer is Etienne de la Boetie’s The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, reprinted as The Politics of Obedience. In a brilliant introduction Murray N. Rothbard, economist, historian, and theorist of free market anarchism, covers the background and place in political thought of La Boetie’s essay of 1552.

La Boetie asks, Why do men obey a tyrant? Clearly, force alone is not the answer since the citizens far out number the tyrant and his retinue. As posed by Rothbard the question is, Why do men obey a government? La Boetie’s modern-sounding conclusion is that habit, miseducation and the penetration of vested interests into the broader society render men blind to their physical superiority over the oppressors.

Thus all governments ultimately rest on tacit “consent”–or better, acquiescence. Rothbard observes that David Hume and Ludwig von Mises laid particular stress on “opinion” as the basis of government, including so-called “totalitarian” regimes. La Boetie, a political humanist and a libertarian Machiavelli, makes the point eloquently.

La Boetie’s remedy is radicalization of the masses by a cadre of those who retain the love of liberty and see through tyranny, followed by nonviolent civil disobedience. Because of this strategy some would claim La Boetie as an anarchist or Gandian. Rothbard cautiously suggests that the author does not take his logic as far as he could.

La Boetie writes that tyrants corrupt society so that “there are found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable.” This certainly applies to our own Keynesian welfare-warfare state (neo-mercantilism or state monopoly capitalism). We can hope with the author that God “has reserved, in a separate spot in Hell, some very special punishment for tyrants and their accomplices.”

Liberal contract theory holds that government does rest on voluntary agreement. Radical social contract after Paine, Jefferson and Alexander Stephens holds that when government doesn’t rest on true contract, revolution is justified. Natural law anarchism after Thoreau, Lysander Spooner and Stephen Pearl Andrews holds that since the state in principle cannot be contractual and voluntary it must go. La Boetie’s view, an age ahead of its time, hovers between the radical and anarchist positions. His universal, “abstract” radicalism looks forward to the bourgeois Revolution of liberty and equality; in reintroducing La Boetie, Rothbard looks forward-with Oppenheimer-to the completion of that Revolution in statelessness.

Revolutionary Smorgasbord

If miseducation reinforces the hegemony of the Leviathan state (even in the era of Vietnam, Watergate and CIA revelations), what can be done? Joel Spring’s A Primer of Libertarian Education is a provocative, broad and often irritating summary of radical approaches to education.

The author begins with the anarchist critique of public schooling. It was a major error of early liberals to think that substituting state schooling for haphazard private arrangements would promote a free society. William Godwin, the first thorough anarchist, emphasized the danger to peace and liberty from the state’s teaching of “patriotism” to naive children. Further, “laws” contrary to natural reason would be inculcated.

After Godwin, Spring touches on Francisco Ferrer and Ivan Illich. He dwells on Max Stirner, the anti-Hegel, who tried to show how individuals could become “self-owners” capable of criticizing and adopting ideas. This was the alternative to domination by “wheels in the head” and a “gendarme in the breast.”

Ivan Illich underscores the alienation of people “from their learning.” His colleague Paolo Freire, a Brazilian activist, links education directly with revolutionary praxis. As presented by Spring, Freire’s belief is that education can focus directly on the key contradictions between social forces, leading to change. Unfortunately, Freire appears to rely on Marx’s “materialist” reduction of ideas to the reflex of economic forces (despite a Leninist voluntarism in other respects). Both Freire and Spring seemingly overlook the ambiguities of how “man” acts, is conscious, and “makes” society in the Marxian view. Focusing on social forces doesn’t help if the wrong contradictions are isolated or if they are miconceived.*Here the work of Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek and British anarchist Colin Ward on spontaneous versus artificial order could provide a better way of getting at social forces and social change. **Otherwise, the legitimate humanist goal of fighting oppression subverts itself, and education linked to a misunderstood goal becomes propaganda (which has its place) and not libertarian education.

Spring proceeds to Wilhelm Reich’s theories of the connections of sexual frustration and fascism and the link between authoritarian family and authoritarian state. Stripped of Marxist accretions, there are some sensible ideas here (rigidity versus self-regulating character, armoring, self-reproduction of authoritarianism). Concerning a somewhat Reichian school in Moscow in the 1920’s, Spring writes that “embracing and kissing the child” were forbidden, lest adults “live out their own unsatisfied sexuality.” So Puritanism still reigns on the Left—even among sexual reformers! Spring’s discussion of A. S. Heill covers familiar ground, though the reader will learn a lot about Neill’s political naivite.

Spring summarizes Philippe Aries’ thesis that childhood itself is a relatively modern invention. He deals at length with the kibbutz since it was originally intended to free women through collective childrearing. Mercifully, he spares us any starry-eyed kibbutz propaganda, admitting that peer group pressures produce truly conformist individuals with little private experience and few emotions. Perhaps this supposed cure for the evils of the nuclear family is worse than the disease. (And perhaps private experience, as Proudhon said of property, is liberty.)

Spring’s final chapter is interesting but full of inconsistencies. He connects individual autonomy with individual “control of the social system,” another instance of Rousseauian social engineering attitudes or what F. A. Hayek calls “constructivist rationalism.” Many of Spring’s proposals conjure up a Chicagoite-hippie approach (picture comrade Friedman in long hair and a beard) and throughout Spring can’t even choose between state socialism and anarchism. Pursuing the late 19th century will o’ the wisp of unalienated labor, blurring the distinction between education and revolution (both of which have their uses), he soars above many issues raised by the state’s alienation of learning from individuals and voluntary associations. While the schools go on destroying learning, getting children ready for the next war-to-end-war, teaching nationalism, testing and drugging, the author worries about immediately guaranteeing the psychological wellbeing of every last individual. This quest, at once individualist (after Rousseau) and totalitarian, gets in the way of seeing what can be done: separation of education and state. (Especially, since the state is probably the most important source of the kinds of alienation that can be eliminated.) On two points it is easy to agree with Spring: he affirms “faith in individual actions” and suggests changes to allow children to take part in real life. On this path, from which he often get sidetracked, Spring might find himself in the company of some distinguished 18th and 19th century libertarians—Paine, Godwin, Spencer. Spencer’s natural law position on children’s rights is radical and relevant even today.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Nostalgia and the Big Bands. There are a lot of special junk record offerings on TV: “The Heart of Music” for only . . . brilliantly satirized by comedian Robert Klein as, “Every record ever made . . . for only $9.98.” So one might not be tempted to take very seriously Nostalgia Book Club’s offering of “Rare Big Bands Gems, 1932-1947”. But that would be a big mistake, for the big band gems are lovingly selected by Neil McCaffrey, head of Nostalgia Book Club, and one of the country’s great experts on jazz and big band recordings of the Golden Age.

Everyone who has the privilege of knowing Neil personally knows that one of his special delights is in uncovering rare, unknown records and songs that are truly first-rate; and in “Rare Big Band Gem”, McCaffrey performs this feat for you, the listener. Many of these 48 performances (on 6 LP sides) are previously unissued takes; many are unknown recording, often of unknown songs. But they are all a surprise and a delight.

Typical of McCaffrey’s creative approach is his offering of Benny Goodman’s band, who is represented more than any other. For most of the recordings are from the virtually unknown post-war Goodman period, and they are rare gems indeed. Listen, for example, to the previously unissued “That’s All That Matters to Me”, with vocal by Liza Morrow, or to the instrumental “Lucky”, or to “I Wish I Could Tell You”, with Miss Morrow again on the vocal. Marvellous! Then, there is the first of the great bands. Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra; the McCaffrey album offers us a brace of recordings from 1932-33. I particularly liked “Why Can’t This Night Go On Forever?”, with vocal by Kenny Sargent Particularly fine on these records is Pee Wee Hunt on trombone and Clarence Hutchenrider on clarinet, for the Glen Gray orchestra

Other splendid records feature Harry James, Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey, Gene Krupa, Artie Shaw, Will Bradley,, and Jack Teagarden. The James records, again, feature the almost unknown post-war band. My own favorites are such superb vocals by Mildred Bailey as “There’s a Lull in My Life,” “More Than Ever,” and “Have You Forgotten So Soon?”; Artie Shaw’s “Sugarfoot Stomp”, “Take Another Guess,” and “Goodnight, Angel”, and Will Bradley’s band with Will on trombone and Carlotta Dale on vocal in their rendition of that wonderful show tune, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance.”

A particularly remarkable aspect of these records is the acoustics. The clear and mellow sound would grace any recording; considering that these come from often tinny and scratchy old 78’s and masters, the feat is even more praiseworthy. For this we must thank Art Shifrin, the engineer, who is an expert on 78 sound recording.

On buying “Rare Big Band Gems” there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that this splendid album is priced at only $1.98. The bad news is that you can’t rush out and buy it; this album is not available except to Nostalgia Book Club members. If you’re not a member, the price is membership + $1.98; if you’re already a member, it’s $12.95. But, on second thought, that’s really not bad news at all; for joining the Nostalgia Book Club can only be a delight for anyone at all interested in the popular culture—the optimistic, rational, life-affirming culture—of the pre-World War II era.

So join the Nostalgia Book Club; for information write to them at 165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801. And happy reading and listening!

Who are the South Moluccans?

We are getting used to terrorists and kidnappers in this world; generally, it seems that they are Arab, or Commie, or Black Muslim. But who in hell are the South Moluccans? And if they want independence of the South Moluccan isles from Indonesia, then why in blazes are they harassing and terrorizing the Dutch?

Herein lies a fascinating tale. Like the Katangese, though a decade earlier, the South Moluccans were freedom-fighter heroes in the lexicon of the American Right; authentic, dark-shinned Asian heroes for their national liberation. Why did American conservatives, back in the 1950’s, take the South Moluccan fighters to their bosom? Because (1) the South Moluccans were battling against an imperialism that was Asian and darkskinned rather than European and white, and were therefore permissible; (2) the imperialists were Javanese expansionists who, after the Dutch were forced to leave, conquered all the other islands in the area and called them “Indonesia”, and, in those days, Java was pro-Communist; and (3) the South Moluccans, in contrast to the Muslims in the rest of the region, were authentic Christians, and therefore the good guys.

But of course that was yesterday, and now the Indonesians are governed by a fascistic military dictatorship, and are therefore now “bastions of the free world.” The noble cause of South Molucca, like that of Katanga, has, been allowed to drop down the right-wing memory hole. (For an older work on the South Moluccan cause, which takes the early anti-Communist line, see J. C. Bouman et al., The South Moluccas: Rebellious Province or Occupied State (Leyden, Holland: A. W. Sythoff, I960)).

Okay, so the South Moluccan cause has been forgotten by the world, and the young Moluccan hotheads, chafing for action, have scorned the advice of their conservative Christian elders and have taken the terror route as a method of getting attention for the cause. That much is all too familiar. But in this case, there is something wrong with the picture: Why are the South Moluccans harassing the Dutch, who pulled out of Indonesia a generation ago, instead of going after their real tormentors, the Indonesians?

And herein is a lesson for our time. It is true that the Moluccan terror actions make no sense whatever, even from their own point of view. But the Dutch were amiable enough to allow many emigre Moluccans to emigrate to Holland, as a haven from their oppressors. And there they sit, brooding about their homeland and about the cause of Moluccan independence. All well and good, from a libertarian point of view, but then—again—why pick on the Dutch? Why not leave Holland, go back to Indonesia? That’s what a serious national independence movement would do. But no: it is easier and more pleasant to lounge around a free Holland then to return to the Indonesian muck, and it is easier to pick on the tolerant Dutch than it is to tangle with a fascist dictatorship.

The lesson for all of us is that emigres are often poison to the host country that kindly takes them in. Regardless of how just the emigre cause may be—and nine times out of ten it is just indeed—there is still no excuse for the emigres trying to involve the host country in their battles, or for the host country to allow itself to become involved.

* You can understand all the social forces some of the time, you can understand some of the social forces all of the time, but you can't understand all the social forces all the time. I think Bob Dylan said that. See especially Gordon Leff, The Tyranny of Concepts and History and Social Theory.

** In Law, Legislation and Liberty and Anarchy in Action, respectively.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 6

JUNE, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Water ‘Shortage’

As everyone knows, the West, and especially northern California, has been suffering from a year-long drought, leading numerous statists and busybodies to leap in to control, ration, and ordain. The water “shortage” may not be exactly blamed on the private sector, but it is there, supposedly, and surely government must leap in to combat it—not, of course, by creating more water, but by mucking up the distribution of the greater scarcity.

The first thing to be said about this is that on the free market, regardless of the stringency of supply, there is never any “shortage”, that is, there is never a condition where a purchaser cannot find supplies available at the market price. On the free market, there is always enough supply available to satisfy demand. The clearing mechanism is fluctuations in price. If, for example, there is an orange blight, and the supply of oranges declines, there is then an increasing scarcity of oranges, and the scarcity, is “rationed” voluntarily to the purchasers by the uncoerced rise in price, a rise sufficient to equalize supply and demand. If, on the other hand, there is an improvement in the orange crop, the supply increases, oranges are relatively less scarce, and the price of oranges falls consumers are induced to purchase the increased supply.

Note that all goods and services are scarce, and the progress of the economy consists in rendering them relatively less scarce, so that their prices decline. Of course, some goods can never increase in supply. The supply of Rembrandts, for example, is exceedingly scarce, and can never be increased—barring the arrival of a Perfect Forger. The price of Rembrandts is high, of course, but no one has ever complained about a “Rembrandt shortage.” They have not, because the price of Rembrandts is allowed to fluctuate freely without interference from the iron hand of government. But suppose that the government, in its wisdom, should one day proclaim that no Rembrandts can be sold for less than $1000—severe maximum price control on the paintings. We can rest assured that, if the decree were taken seriously at all, a severe Rembrandt shortage would promptly develop, accompanied by black markets, bribery, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of price control.

If the water industry were free and competitive, the response to a drought would be very simple: water would rise in price. There would be griping about the increase in water prices, no doubt, but there would be no “shortage”, and no need or call for the usual baggage of patriotic hoopla, calls for conservation, altruistic pleas for sacrifice to the common good, and all the rest. But, of course, the water industry is scarcely free; on the contrary, water is almost everywhere in the U.S. the product and service of a governmental monopoly.

When the drought hit northern California, raising the price of water to the full extent would have been unthinkable; accusations would have been hurled of oppressing the poor, of selfishness, and all the rest. The result has been a crazy-quilt patchwork of compulsory water rationing, accompanied by a rash of patrioteering ecological exhortation: “Conserve! Conserve! Don’t water your lawns! Shower with a friend! Don’t flush the toilet!”

Well, the amusing aspect of all this is that these imbecile exhortations were as manna from heaven to the wealthy liberal elitist ecofreak population of the San Francisco Bay Area. The California water authorities were hoping and shooting for a decline of about 25% in 1977 water consumption as compared to 1976. But, lo and behold, in late June, the figures rolled in and it turned out that Bay Area communities had responded by voluntarily cutting their water consumption by 40-50%.

The “morality” of the Bay Area masses had exceeded everyone’s expectations. But what was the reaction to this onrush of patriotic altruism and self-sacrifice? Oddly enough, it was mixed and ambivalent—thereby pointing up in a most amusing way some of the inner contradictions of statism. For suddenly, many of the local governmental water districts, including San Francisco’s, realized that dammit! they were losing revenue! Now, water shortage is all well and good, but there is nothing more important to a bureaucrat and his organization than their income. And so the local California water districts began to scream: “No, no, you fools, you’ve ‘over-conserved.’” (To a veteran anti-ecologist such as myself, the coining of the new term “over-conserving” was music to my ears.) The water districts began to shout that people have conserved too much, and that they should spend more, for which they were sternly chastised by the state water authorities, who accused the municipal groups of “sabotaging” the water conservation program.

Meanwhile, other local ecologists and statists got into the act. They groused that the over-conservation had induced people not to water their lawns, which led to the “visual pollution” “unsightly” lawns, and also caused the dried leaves to become fire hazards, which is apparently another ecological no-no.

I can see it now: a debate within the wealthy liberal ecofreak community: Mr. A.: “Dammit, you’ve over-conserved water; your lawns are visual pollutants, and your dry leaves are endangering the environment through fire.” Mr. B.: “You’re a blankety-blank no-good sellout water waster. You guys have been urging me for years to conserve, and now I’m doing it and all I get is hassle.”

The culminating irony has been the reaction of the local water districts to the “threat” of “over-conservation” of water and the consequent loss of revenue to the governmental water districts. The response of the Bay Area districts was: “Sorry folks, we have to raise the price of water in order to maintain the beloved revenue of the water district (us.)” So, “over” conservation has led to an increase in the price of water. It is intriguing that raising the price of water in order to ration increased scarcity is universally considered to be reactionary, selfish, and Neanderthal, while raising the price of water in order to keep governmental water district revenues at their former level is considered perfectly legitimate, and barely worth commenting on. And so, the water price goes up anyway, though for the wrong reason and of course not in order to clear the market.

The most amusing aspect of this California water caper was the argument of a water district apologist on San Francisco television:

Q. But wouldn’t the poor be hurt by the water district raising its water prices?

A. No, for since everyone has cut their consumption of water, the total water bill of each poor person will not increase.

In short, the poor are not being hurt by the higher price because, being forced to cut their consumption, their total bill has not increased. Thus, a price rise by a private firm is always selfish and oppressive of poor people; but when a monopoly governmental agency increases its price, the poor do not suffer at all, since if they cut their purchases sufficiently in response to the higher price, their total dollar payments will not increase. It is this sort of nonsense that our statists and busybodies are now being reduced to.

Meanwhile, how is “libertarian” Milton Friedman, now resident in the San Francisco area, taking to the water crisis? Is he advocating privatization, free competition among private water companies? Is he at least advocating the setting of a market-clearing price by the government water company? The answer to all of these is, remarkably, no. In his Newsweek column, Friedman favored keeping government water rationing, but making it more efficient through a typically elaborate scheme for surcharges for consumption over a certain quota of water, to be financing rebates for consuming under the quota. Thus, once again Friedmanism descends to being an efficiency expert for statism.

The State and Education

By Austin W. Wright

(In our continuing efforts to present forgotten but excellent and relevant writings of the past, we are happy to reprint, for the first time since its original publication, Austin Wright’s “The State and Education”, which appeared in Benjamin Tucker’s great journal Liberty in January 1897. In contrast to the usual, more raffish contributors to anarchist publications, Austin W. Wright was a well-known businessman of Chicago. He was a provision broker and was considered one of the most daring speculators on the Chicago Board of Trade. Wright often spoke on the currency question, which dominated political debate in the 1890’s. He favored full financial liberty in banking and in coinage. Tucker, the leading individualist anarchist of the era, published several of Wright’s addresses on banking and currency problems in the middle and late 1890’s, as well as this essay on Education. He did not always endorse fully Wright’s opinions, but apparently he found them sufficiently sound.

In May 1899, Liberty reprinted an interview with Wright originally published in the Chicago Chronicle In it we find that Wright identifies himself explicitly as an anarchist— a very courageous act in Chicago at that period!) He states that his friends have known of his views for years but that the general run of citizens of Chicago knew him as a reputable citizen and not as an avowed anarchist.

Austin Wright’s true character was revealed when he was called for jury duty and, upon being examined by a judge, replied that he did not believe in laws made by men or in their enforcement, and that he would not take any oath to uphold or enforce them. He was so polite and obviously respectable that the judge dismissed him without penalty.

Wright is described in the interview as short—no more than 5 feet tall—, sturdily built, cool, nervy and imperturbable, plain spoken and dignified. He was at that time somewhat over so years old, a resident of Chicago for about twenty-five years, and a native-born American. Wright began his career in a hog market, weighing and buying for a large meat packing concern. Later in life he began speculating in commodities—and soon gave up his job and entered full time into commodity trading.. He was soon a millionaire but lost the bulk of his fortune in the “Cudahy corner.” But he remained prosperous and active in his business.

Wright began systematic reading in philosophy and political economy after his business reverse, and this reading broadened and deepened his anarchistic tendencies. Originally he had been active in Democratic politics, and his adoption of anarchist philosophy was a gradual process of mental development. He began by reading Herbert Spencer. As Wright stated: “I maintain that people which is least governed is the best governed. I don’t believe in laws made by men. There is only one kind of law, and that is the law of nature. All others are mere expressions of belief. Why they should bind me unless I accept-them I cannot conceive.” Wright added that he agreed neither with Tolstoy and his ultra-pacifist followers nor with Parsons, Sipes, and other violent so-called anarchists.—J.R.P.)

The State And Education

Since the time that we have had organized government in this country, our schools have been operated and controlled by State agencies. These conditions have so long obtained that it has become fashionable to speak of our public schools as the great bulward of American institutions, and most people look upon our public school system as the palladium of republican ideas. Therefore any criticism directed against our schools is heard with small patience, and serious opposition to the system always excites among those who hear it something akin to “conniption fits.”

Nevertheless there have been in the past numerous instances where popular opinion was as firmly fixed, and seemingly as securely entrenched, in a position subsequently proven erroneous, and from which it was easily dislodged, as it is now in the matter of public schools.

The principal reason for the strong hold that our public school system has upon the public is the fact of a popular misconception as to its character. We call it a free school system. It is the word free, and the apparent free intermingling of the children at school, that give the system its popular strength.

If it was denominated as its real character demands, and called what it is,—a compulsory school system,—it would not appeal so strongly to unthinking, but real, liberty-lovers.

Our public school system is wrong because its establishment and maintenance are an invasion of individual freedom. It takes away from parents the free exercise of rightful control over their children by obliging them to make use of school facilities which they do not approve, and to which they are opposed.

Parents are responsible for the existence of their children, and nothing should be done by the State that interferes with, or impairs, that natural responsibility. Therefore every parent should be left free to use such educational agencies and methods as are by him deemed fittest for the education of his children. No one should be encouraged in the belief, or practice, of the idea that, however many children he may bring into the world, society is bound to see to it that they shall be provided, at public cost, with an education. Personal independence should not be weakened by the cultivation of any such idea; every man should feel that the position of himself and family in society, and the education fitting them for proper occupancy of that position, are due solely to his own efforts, limited only by the natural independence incident to our social organization.

Love of offspring is the strongest affection with which we are endowed, and, if left free, its natural promptings will be sufficient incentive to impel the provision of better educational facilities than are possible in any other way. For instance, a child shows that it possesses faculties indicating a fitness for certain vocations; now these faculties need only cultivation to insure proficiency in certain special ways. The public school affords no opportunity for special training, and the enforced contributions exacted from parents in support of the public school so weaken the family resources that they are unable to expend their money in the direction that gives the best promise.

The very nature of the system limits opportunity in the public school to the established curriculum. With schools such as would naturally spring into existence everywhere is response to what was demanded, there would be opportunity to buy the kind of mental cultivation and training that was wanted; nor would time and money be wasted in the acquisition of knowledge not deemed needful by the recipients and those most interested in them. With free voluntary cooperation there would be great diversity in the kind and character of schools, and the competition and emulation incident to such a state of things would be conductive to a more rapid growth and a higher efficiency than are possible with the uniform conditions prevailing in our public schools.

No man should be deprived of that which he wants and to which he is justly entitled, by being obliged to expend his energy for things that he does not want or the use of which he cannot approve. There are millions of parents in this country obliged to contribute in the shape of taxes to the support of public, schools, who are thereby deprived of the pleasure incident to the exercise of the natural right of affording their children the kind of instruction that they deem most beneficial. Those of them who are able to send their children to other schools are unjustly made to pay their money in support of the public school, receiving therefrom absolutely no return whatever. The exercise of any power on the part of the State that is, in its operation, unjust to its citizens is not only indefensible, but should be utterly condemned.

All parents as individuals have an inalienable right to educate their children in accordance with the wishes and desires of the children and themselves, guided and inspired by indications of innate talent, limited only by the exercise of equal freedom on the part of every other parent and child. And, while society may have the power to limit and abridge that right, the exercise of such power cannot justly be defended, Every exaction imposed by society should be founded upon the idea that every member of society is entitled to equal freedom; no other rule can be defended, nor is any other rule justly entitled to observance.

Why should anybody be taxed, in order that somebody else may have and enjoy benefits at less than cost? How can there by any justification of the taxation of any individual in support of a system in the creation of which they had no choice or which they do not use.

The tendency of civilization is in the direction of homogeneity as pertaining to aggregations of individuals, and in that of a greater heterogeneity as pertaining to individuals themselves. Therefore the public school is entirely inadequate to, and wholly unfitted for, the proper education of those who are to become the citizens of the future. The public school can impart only one kind of education; all must be treated alike, as it would be manifestly improper to give any scholar a higher or more expensive form of education than others receive.

No partiality can be shown in a public school system; yet, because of the diversity of future vocation, and therefore diversity of want, the requirements of society demand different educational treatment, and different school facilities, for different individuals.

If the State has the right to establish schools in which our children are to be educated, it has also the right to compel attendance at those schools. More than that, the State has a right to say when they shall go, how long they shall stay, and what they shall study. The right of the State in this respect once acknowledged, all individual right to the exercise of education liberty is forever surrendered. The State never gives up power once exercised, except at the end of successful revolution. Is it possible by coercion to change the nature of an unwilling and unreceptive mind, so that it will receive and perceive? You can compel them to come to the educational font, but an unwilling recipient can hardly be obliged to partake. The idea of the usefulness of the mental discipline received in a stuffing process is greatly over estimated. The only discipline that is worth anything is such as acquired by experience in ways that enable the recipient to distinguish the useful from the useless; the mere memorizing and mechanical recitation of rules lacks the essential qualities of experience. Most children can attend school but a short time; the circumstances of their station in life are such that but a limited amount of education is necessary; because of the attempt on the part of the State to furnish everybody with more education than is wanted there has been a failure to furnish enough of the kind that is wanted. Supply will not create desire, but desire that is not satisfied by a supply will soon wither and die. Every scholar should receive the kind of education that he himself wants, subject to no influence other than parental. Any child that has an unquenchable desire for knowledge,—and without desire attainment is impossible—will be impelled to sufficient effort, and will incite the parental aid necessary, to enable him to satisfy that desire.

The arbitrary imposition of a fixed kind of education upon anybody by State agencies should not for a moment be permitted. A system of that kind is entirely out of harmony with the spirit of republican institutions. Institutions out of harmony with individual liberty tend to weaken and destroy those individual characteristics which are essential to the growth and development of a free people.

“Oh! But the poor,—what is to be done for them? They ought to be educated. How is it to be done? They cannot educate themselves. Surely, organized society ought to interfere here, and provide means to enable these people to lift themselves out of their present unfortunate condition.”

Well, grant that that is true; how far do you propose going in that direction, and where do you propose to stop? If it is the duty of the State to provide education, it is the duty of the State to furnish the means of getting an education. Of what use are school houses and school teachers without schoolbooks; those being provided, how can children go to school with empty stomachs and without clothes? How far are you willing to go in this direction? Where shall the line be drawn at which you will stop extending the State aid? There is no stopping place, and can be none, once you justify the idea that it is proper for the State to afford education to the poor.

Acceptance of, and action in accordance with, the idea that it is the duty of the State to furnish education to the poor, instead of being an aid to them, will have ultimately an opposite effect. It will encourage improvident marriages, thereby increasing the number to which aid must be extended, and it will lower the conception of parental obligation and duty.

Think of encouraging the preposterous idea that parents need give but little thought to the necessity of educating their offspring!

Think of encouraging citizens in the belief that the education of their own children is of small concern, but that the education of everybody else’s children is a matter of prime importance that can in no wise be neglected,—that is, that direct obligations to your own children are secondary to the indirect obligations to children in general!

And so people are to marry when they feel like it, and bring into the world as many children as they may, and society, not they, must assume the burden and accept the consequences! How far is it from this point to the place where the assertion comes in: “Society owes me a living; therefore I must have it.” As a matter of justice, why should plenty be taxed in order that want may have? Why should the thrifty and provident be taxed in order that the unthrifty and improvident may live? Is there any justification for the taking from the good for somethings and giving to the good for nothings, thereby impairing the usefulness of the good for somethings and making the good for nothings still more good for nothing?

Oh! they say, but something must be done in the name of, and for the sake of, humanity. Well, grant it. Can human sympathy be properly expressed through the operation of arbitrary law?

Society is not a matter of creation, but it has been, and is, a thing of growth; and its best growth and development are attained in an atmosphere of freedom. From the absence of compulsory measures it does not follow that no provision will be made for those who are worthy, but unfortunate.

Voluntary actions incited by the sympathy incident to the natural love of man for his fellows will and must be more effective than any coercive effort on the part of the State. Even if not, would the indiscriminate helping of everybody who is poor be a proper exercise of the best humanity?

Let us see. What we all desire is a society composed of strong, self reliant, self-supporting members; now, will that be soonest attained by obliging the self-supporting to carry the non supporting, in order that the latter may live and propagate their kind. Or will it hot rather come soonest by leaving unthrift and improvidence to suffer from the consequences of their imperfections, in order that the race may the more quickly reach conditions of perfection. The best humanity is action along the line that will achieve the largest and best ultimate outcome.

Conditions of perfection cannot be brought about by governmental regulations, because people must learn to perceive what is good for them because it is good for them; and they can do this only by being allowed opportunity for the free exercise of individual faculty. Experience is the only school, and experience is a thing that, in the very nature of things, must be acquired by personal action; it can in nowise be taught by rule or learned by rote. Do what you will and as much as you may, the pains and penalties incident to the thorough adaptation of man to conditions necessary to life must be gone through with;’so the highest and best humanity consists in asserting and insisting that every individual must be self-supporting and non-aggressive. Every action out of harmony with that idea only defers and makes more difficult the object to be attained; so, by helping incompetence at the expense of competence, in order that you may have the proximate seeming benefits, you are not only unjustly burdening the worthy, but you are defeating the very object sought.

Did it ever occur to any who favor aid to improvidence at the expense of providence that they propose exactly the thing that was the cause of the improvident’s present condition,—that is, sacrificing the ultimate good in order that present gratification may be enjoyed?

The best humanity does not consist in increasing the evil sought to be cured. Then there are those who say that “the interest and judgment of the people most interested are not sufficient guarantee of the goodness of the commodity.” That is to say, they do not know What they want; therefore, it is, and of right should be, given to those of us possessing-long heads and high foreheads to prescribe what is to be taken, and oblige the recipients to partake. Now, inasmuch as personal experience is a prime essential to the growth, and development of a discriminating intelligence, how long do you think it will be necessary for the self-resteemed few to act as mentors for the ignorant many before the latter become sufficiently intelligent to act and judge for themselves, but that you do, not know what you ought to have for yourselves, and should institute schools to their own liking and oblige you to support them and partake thereof—what would you think of the wisdom or justice of their action? Again: did it ever occur to those of you who believe in the teleological origin and disposition of things that there are millions of people we regard religion as of more importance than all other things put together? Suppose it was insisted that everybody should be obliged to partake of religious instruction and training in our schools,—would not the end justify whatever means might be adopted in enforcement therof? Is not something which concerns us for all time of more importance than anything that relates only to our limited stay upon earth? It is no answer to say that religious liberty must not be interfered with, for religious thought cannot justly be accorded exclusive privileges as to freedom. If it is right that men should have and enjoy religious freedom, it so right that they should have and enjoy educational freedom, If the best interests of society demand that men be left free to worship or not worship God, according to the dictates of their own consciences, the best interests of society also demand that men be left free to educate or not educate themselves according to the demands of their own innate desires. Still another thing: love of country and proper respect for its laws are not best subserved or conserved by arbitrarily obliging people who believe religious instruction necessary to support schools in which such instruction is not imparted.

Now, let us look in another direction. Man was not, nor is he, created, but, like everything else on earth, is a thing of growth; smoothing away the rough places and making things easy for him are not conducive to his best growth and highest development. He must learn by experience what is best for his growth and advancement; there is no other way of finding out. Physical nutrition is required, and mental nutrition is required; it is impossible to partake of the latter until the stomach is full; you cannot fill the head before you fill the belly. Now, if it is incumbent on the State to furnish mental nutrition, is it not a greater and more urgent duty that bodily nutriment shall be first supplied?

Without going further, it may well be asked now can the State supply a want that the people composing the State cannot supply? Whatever may be done must be done by the expenditure of energy. The State is without force, except as it gathers it from the people through the tax-gatherer; and, however much the State may gather, the force will always be subject to the loss incident to the collection and distribution thereof. The amount of force to be had can in nowise be increased; and for that reason, whenever government attempts to do too many things, or too much of anything, it fails to properly do the things that it is proper that government should do. We all desire as little government as possible; we may differ as to what is necessary, but we all desire—yes, more, we demand—that government shall be good. Government in this country is the expression of the will of the majority, and whether it is good or bad depends upon the character of the units of which it is composed. Now let us note the probable influence of our public schools citizens.

Strong, self-reliant, self-supporting citizens are essential to the best growth and highest development of society. The influence of the public school upon the early life of the individual at a time when character is being formed is inimical to the growth and development of the right kind of citizens. As children they have been supplied with an education by the State; their natural guardians and protectors have been lost sight of as factors in their education; therefore they do not feel, when they arrive at man’s estate, and themselves become parents, that it is incumbent on them to educate the children that have come to them. The State has assumed that duty; they were educated in schools furnished by the State, and their children will be so educated; and so they learn to look to and lean upon the State, which soon comes to be regarded as an entity possessing resources that can, and should, be applied to the alleviation of hardships, the removal of obstacles, and, finally, the providing of the means to satisfying ordinary human needs. People learn to expect things from the State that are impossible of attainment from that source,—things that can be had only as the result of exercise of individual faculty and effort,—a fact which they have been taught to ignore. They look to, and expect from, the State the supply; at first they are disappointed only; then come feelings of dissatisfaction, then murmors of discontent, then popular manifestations more or less lawless, such as found expression in the demonstration witnessed in 1894, which came to be known as Coxeyism. That affair was a logical sequence of the past exercise of paternal functions on the part of governmental agencies, and therefore an effect of the cultivation and growth of the idea not only that an exercise of functions of this kind is a governmental duty, but that the people have a right to expect, and demand, aid from the government whenever it to them seems necessary. Anything that aids the cultivation and growth of sentiment of this kind is wrong, and, if persisted in, can end in only one way,—that is, in the destruction and extinction of republican institution.

You cannot have a democratic republic without republicans. Republicans are always independent and self-reliant. Citizens of this character cannot be created; they must grow; and they can grow and develop only in an atmosphere of freedom. Artificial aid in the shape of compulsory schools, instead of being in harmony with what ought to be, and therefore useful, is not only unnecessary and useless, but actually repressive and harmful.

Here are young minds to be trained; how, and with what shall they be trained? Is there a teacher in the world that can tell? Is there an aggregation of teachers in the world, or can an aggregation of teachers be gotten together, that can tell what kind of training is wanted, and how best to supply it? A very wide diversity as to kind and quality is required; here are all kinds of faculty, and all degrees of the same kind of faculty, to be cultivated and trained; these faculties are in the possession of individuals no two of whom are alike; and it is expected that this vast heterogeneous number of youthful individuals can be best developed mentally by sending them to schools of uniform character, where the curriculum is fixed, and can be changed only be act of some legislative body. If a man had a horse to be broken, or a dog to be trained, he would hesitate long enough to look around before he sent it to a training school of the kind we have adopted for the education of our children.Compulsory support of the public schools ought to be no longer insisted upon. Oh! but they say, that would amount to the abolishment of the system. Well, if compulsory support is what sustains the system, it certainly ought to be abolished; anything that cannot stand by force of merit upon its own feet is unworthy of a place in a free country, and the sooner it is done away, with the better. Abolish schools! No, simply withdraw compulsory support. Open-mouthed astonishment immediately exclaims: “But what would you put in the place?” And, when the reply is, as it must be, “nothing,” they turn with a look of contemptuous disgust, as much as to say that it is not worth while to continue the discussion. But wait one moment; is it reasonable to expect that a want, though it may be known and universal,—a want that is not the same in any two individuals, and that by right is entitled to a supply as varied as is the want,—can be anticipated and supplied by a fixed plan. In the abandonment of the public-school system the only thing necessary is to stop right where you are; as soon as desire is left free to act, the ever-responsive faculties that enable us to supply all of our wants will assert themselves, and soon find and develop the best way.

Desire and exertion, not machinery and supply, create appetite. Without purpose on the part of the recipient education is impossible; there must be a will before there can be a way; gratuitous bestowal will avail nothing, and coercion is recognition of unacknowledged defeat. Education, to be appreciated, must not be made cheap and easy of attainment; it is the things striven for and won by force or merit that are esteemed and that become profitable.

The giving away of prized things destroys the incentive for their acquisition. Under such conditions there can be no conquest of opposing obstacles, at the end of which the conqueror may proudly turn to his fellows and enjoy the sweet feelings of satisfaction aroused by admiring approval.

Change is the natural order of things; everything by which we are surrounded and with which we have to do is ceaselessly changing.

Society has ever been, and is now, the result of countless imperceptible changes that have been going on for all times. Nothing is to day as it was yesterday; nothing will be tomorrow as it is to-day; and so it is that human life is simply a matter of adaptation and readaptation to the constantly changing conditions by which we are surrounded and with which we are confronted. A proper school system must be something that is in harmony with evolutionary law, and such a system is possible only when the people are left free to supply by voluntary cooperation whatever they themselves may feel that they need. Schools that fail to meet requirements will pass away, and their places will be taken by schools that meet and satisfy the demand. These orderly, because natural, changes will take place just as easily as the stage-lines and stage-coaches of a generation ago were superseded by the railroad. And just as the primitive railroad with its puny equipment has grown and developed into the great trunk lines of today, equipped with giant locomotives, immense freight trains, and sumptuous passenger coaches, so will schools, under conditions of freedom, come into existence, and, in harmony with an always pre-existing demand, grow and develop into the highest possible usefulness.

Inasmuch as we cannot under any circumstances create, we should allow the problem to solve itself, as it surely and rightly will, by natural means in natural ways.

The teacher, instead of being circumscribed by the hampering limitations of a rigid system fixed by arbitrary law, would be free to act in an original way, always in harmony with the demand expressed by those entrusted to his care, and, instead of being, as now, a mere part of, a huge machine, would, because of freedom of opportunity, become a real, living, forceful member of a noble profession with a power for good that under present conditions is impossible; for, instead of being constantly confined within the limits of prescribed rules, he would be free to adopt ‘hopeful suggestions that must, in the very nature of things, come to him from time to time. He would grow and develop therefore into an enlarged sphere of usefulness, and would be able ultimately to command a recognition fitting this noblest of human vocations.

The ‘Humane’ N-Bomb

Congress is now struggling over whether to adopt one of the pet weapons of American conservatives: the secret, hush-hush, new Neutron Bomb. Conservatives admire the weapon for two reasons. In the first place, as a precise nuclear weapon it tends to blur the vital line between the nuclear and the “conventional”. The blurring means that the U.S. might be tempted to use the weapon in some war while proclaiming it as “conventional”, only to have the war escalate into the nuclear range. The Congressional opponents of this blurring were trenchant. Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Ore.) pointed out that “because it is more precise, however, there is more temptation to use it. Once we introduce nuclear weaponry into conventional warfare, we’re on our way.” And Senator Dick Clark (D., Io.) added that “I find the concept of a ‘limited’ nuclear exchange extremely dubious. I think it is vitally important to retain the distinction between conventional and nuclear war. I think nations and leaders must be aware that when they go nuclear, they are introducing an entirely new dimension into the conflict.”

But the striking feature of the N-bomb, the one that seems to make it more “precise” and “limited”, and the one that really endears it to our conservatives, is that it—more or less—kills people without destroying property. Isn’t that a wonderful bomb, that “only” kills human beings?

Libertarians know that “human rights” and “property rights” cannot be kept distinct, that, in the fullest sense, neither can be protected and maintained without safeguarding the other. But conservatives are not libertarians, and the conservative penchant for attempting to favor property rights while scorning human rights has never been made so crystal-clear. The joy with which conservatives embrace a weapon of mass murder which will spare material property is damning enough. It also renders particularly grotesque the recent discovery by conservatives of “human rights”—provided, of course, that the prattling of human rights be safely confined to the Communist countries. And what of the human rights of those who will or might be N-bombed?

Senator Hatfield, apparently without irony, pointed out that the proponents of the N-bomb consider it “a more humane weapon because it is more precise in its target.” Since its precision consists solely in its confinement to human beings, one is sometimes tempted to question the sanity of our ruling elite. At any rate, at least one Senator, H. John Heinz (R., Pa.) was able to point out the obvious: that they were being asked “to approve a nuclear weapon that is even more repugnant than usual, which is literally dehumanizing . . . The neutron bomb, after all, singles out people for destruction, choosing to preserve buildings instead.”

Arts and Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Star Wars, dir. by George Lucas. With Alec Guinness and Carrie Fisher.

First came the hype. That Star Wars is going to be the biggest popular film success since Jaws means very little. So every season is going to have its oversold smash hit, so what? But the difference, the new.hype, with Star Wars was its overwhelming acclaim among the critics. Usually the masses whoop it up for a Jaws while the critics go ape over Bertolucii or Fassbinder. Yet here they were in joint huzzahs, with the critic from Time flipping his wig to such an extent as to call it the best movie of the year and making Star Wars the feature of that week’s issue.

But the oddest, the most peculiar part of it was what my fellow-critics were saying: “Hurrah, a fun movie-movie”; “good escape entertainment”; “a return to good guys vs. a happy ending again”; “movie fare for the entire family”; “like Flash Gordon” etc. Here were men and women who have spent the greater, part of their lives deriding these very virtues, attacking them as mindless, moralistic, unaesthetic, fodder for the Tired Businessman instead of the Sensitive Intellectual. And yet here were these same acidulous critics praising these mindless, reactionary verities. What in blazes was going on? Had all colleagues experienced a blinding miraculous conversion to Old Culture truths? While I do not deny the logical possibility of such a mass, instantaneous conversion from error, my experience of this wicked world has convinced me that it is empirically highly unlikely. So what gives?

The best thing about seeing Star Wars is that my curiosity was satisfied. The mystery explained! For it was indeed true that Star Wars returns to the good guy-bad guy, happy ending, and all the rest. But there is an important catch, and it is that catch that enables our critical intelligentsia to praise the movie and yet suffer no breach in their irrational and amoral critical perspective. The catch is embodied in the reference to Flash Gordon: namely, that this is such a silly, cartoony, comic-strip movie that no one can possibly take it seriously, even within its own context. No one, that is, over the age of 8. Hence, in contrast to Death Wish or Dirty Harry, where the viewer is necessarily caught up in the picture and must take the viewer is seriously, Star Wars is such kiddie hokum that the adult critics can let their hair down and enjoy it without having their aesthetic values threathened.

To put it another way, our critics, who are bitterly opposed to a moralistic and exciting plot, are scarcely challenged by the plot of Star Wars, which is so designedly imbecilic that the intelligentsia can relax, forget about the plot and enjoy the special effects, which the avant-garde always approves.

Even on the kiddie level, Star Wars doesn’t really work. It is peculiarly off-base. The hero, for example, is so young, wooden and callow that he doesn’t really come off as an authentic comic-strip hero. As a result, his older mercenary aide becomes a kind of co-hero, which throws off the balance of the story. The hero presumably doesn’t get the Fairy Princess in the end, either, although far worse is the casting of the Princess. For, Carrie Fisher is ugly and abrasive, and if one could care very much about the hero one would hope that nothing came of their proto-romance: Miss Fisher is the quintessence of the Anti-Princess, and this ruins whatever may have remained of interest of value in Star Wars. There are more problems; not only does wise Alec Guinness lose his mighty duel with his evil ex-disciple, but the whole duel is pointless and leads nowhere, even within the context of the plot.

Not only is this oversold turkey not the best movie of the year, it is not very good even within the sci-fi movie genre. Some of the critics have proclaimed Star Wars as even better than “2001”, but that would be no great feat, since there have been few movies of any genre that have been worse than that pretentious, mystical, boring, plotless piece of claptrap. But Star Wars doesn’t begin to compare with the science fiction greats of the past, e.g.: “The Thing”—the first post World War it sci-fi movie; “It Came from Outer Space”; “The Night of the Living Dead”, and, best of all, the incomparable “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”; None of these movies needed the razzle-dazzle of “special effects”; they did it on plot, theme, and characters. Back to them!

Open Door Imperialism

Review of William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Dell. 312 pp. and Williams, ed., From Colony to Empire, John Wiley. 506 pp. by Robert Dale Grinder.

By R. D. Grinder

The bicentennial has arrived. For the most part we have been enduring a celebration of America’s past. Do not be deceived. America’s past has not been that of “Man’s last best hope.” Our history is not so unique as we shall be told. There is an alternative way of looking at American history. People like Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes and Albert Jay Nock investigated America’s imperial thrust and its domestic class society. Their works, however, predated America’s last great celebration, consensus history. The phenomenon of the early Cold War years stressed America’s uniqueness, her mission, the lack of class conflict and how power was “thrust on America.”

And then came William Appleman Williams. Largely through his efforts, the celebration of America’s past suffered a severe setback. This he accomplished in three ways: through the publication of his own works (primarily The Tragedy and The Contours of American History) by developing a circle of dedicated students, many of whom became scholars in their own right, some of whom contributed pieces for From Colony To Empire; and by starting an avant-garde journal of radical history in the late 1950’s, Studies on the Left. One suspects too that Williams gained importance because he was behind the plow at the right time. Even in the early sixties, Williams was brushed aside as a “crazy” in the historical profession. To be sure, some of his articles made readings books, but they were among the straw men the liberal apologists knocked down. Then, by decade’s end, the Tragedy became the assigned reading in thousands of college classrooms. Why? Vietnam was what raised Williams to greater professional respect. It was an explanation of what had happened. If Williams is correct in arguing that the Pentagon Papers show that the American Empire did not “grow like Topsy,” the Tragedy offers a plausible explanation why.

The thesis of the Tragedy is simple, that American policy-makers have tried, from the 1890’s until the present, to build an empire without colonies, an informal Empire based on the Open Door Policy. The Open Door Policy failed because revolutionaries like the Mexicans, Russians and Vietnamese attempted to overhaul their own economies for their own national interest. Other nations, most notoriously Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, attempted to establish autarchic units like the “Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” America’s attempts to resolve the problems caused by nationalism, revolution and counterrevolution led to war and intervention. Our attempt to keep the door open to American goods likewise alienated many people. Williams points to Cuba, in the beginning, showing how America laid the groundwork for the ascendance of Fidel Castro.

The Open Door Policy was American policy-makers’ response to the Crisis of the Nineties, when it appeared that the frontier had closed, that the economy was in bad shape and that markets abroad needed to be exploited in order that America’s political and economic structure survive. Rightly or wrongly, these policymakers tied America’s health and well-being to expansion of markets. Any attempt to nationalize one’s economy or to create a political-economic “sphere of influence” was viewed as a threat to American security. Hence, the policy was conceived as a way to halt the various imperial powers from establishing “spheres” in China. They did not want China carved up by the various powers. Rather, they demanded equal entry everywhere. Although they gained a foothold in Asia (the Philippines) and helped to quash the Boxer Rebellion to insure that their wishes were honored, clearing the path to the “China market” was never easy—indeed, it led to war between America and Japan in the 1940’s. Likewise, American opposition to “spheres of influence” led to the quarrel with all of the Asia powers and to the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

There was, of course, one major exception to all of this—Latin America. This American “sphere” helped to shatter Woodrow Wilson’s dream of an institutionalized Open Door Policy, the League of Nations. It also marked the first point of conflict between America and Nazi Germany. Indeed, Latin America caused greater concern over Hitler’s moves to revise the Versailles Treaty in Europe (during the mid-thirties). Latin America also saw the greatest extent of American military intervention. The Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) sparked at least four major crises with her northern neighbor. Only World War II and the Cold War brought Mexico and America together. Wilson had nearly gone to war twice with the Mexican regime. Then the Mexican government moved against foreign corporations, primarily oil companies in 1924. Finally, in 1936, revolution pushed the law back on the books. America responded by cutting off loans. But that was more refined than sending in the Marines, last done for a sustained period in Nicaragua. It was to the credit of Herbert Hoover that he removed the troops and moved toward a Good Neighbor Policy. This was in stark contrast to the Wilsonian policy of teaching Latin Americans “to elect good men”—with the aid of the bayonet, in Haiti and Santo Domingo, while we were fighting the “great war” that would allow “self-determination.” Intervention did not stop with Hoover. FDR had gunships outside Havana harbor during the year that Grau San Martin held power in Cuba. LBJ sent Marines to the Dominican Republic in 1965. And the CIA participated in the ouster of Arbenz from Guatemala in 1954 and the aborted Bay of Pigs project in 1961.

Of course, intervention was not limited to Latin America. Americans helped to quell the Boxer Rebellion in China (1900); we landed troops in the Soviet Union during World War I; Hoover’s activities as “food czar” helped make certain the communists gained no strong foothold in Hungary or Germany. Finally, there was American intervention in all of Indochina, most notably Vietnam. The scale of that intervention was staggering. Attempting time and again to promote our notion of the liberal world order, we created hostile regimes which chose to fight against “open door imperialism.” The irony is that “open door imperialism” was based on the assumption that American markets must expand—and that such expansion could never take place in and atmosphere of war and hostility. The policy-makers desired peace and stability, yet the policy itself all too often led to war and revolution.

The policy of “open door imperialism” was by no means gushing American idealism, as critics like George Kennan charged. It was a realistic policy designed to serve the needs of corporate capitalism, as Williams has called our political-economic system. It was fed by the ideology of expansion that had permeated the republic since its inception. In fact, as Walter LaFeber pointed out in his essay on Franklin and Madison, it was pretty much the same argument that Madison used in confronting Montesquieu’s theory that a republic could not exist over a vast expanse. Madison argued quite the contrary, that a vast expanse was precisely what a republic needed. Thus the logic of expansion and the national interest were bound together. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, policy-makers reasoned that such expansion need not be territorial. This does not mean that such expansion was, as Williams implied, free-trade imperialism. The very concept is self-contradictory. Hence the argument by Crapol and Schonberger that the “free ships” alternative proposed by Cleveland and others in the 1880’s was just another variation of the expansionist theme is incorrect. It failed precisely because the dynamic was in the opposite direction. The dynamic was toward more governmental intervention to gain markets abroad.

Crapol and Schonberger likewise miss the mark when they attempt to bring the agrarian interests into the evolution of the policy of imperialism. Williams makes the same mistake, I believe. The quotes from the Populists and the analysis of the free silver issue from this light are interesting but not terribly important. It was the leaders from the industrial metropolitan East who formulated this policy and it was they who carried it out. Bryan’s anti-imperialist campaign of 1900 and his personal campaign to win the south and west for Wilson when the latter was the “peace” candidate (“He kept us out of war.”) show that he and his followers were in the anti-imperialist camp every bit as much as LaFollette, Norris and Debs. And where did they all come from but the “colonial” West? It might be argued that the same areas that opposed the plans for a national Federal Reserve System were the same areas that opposed entry into the war (prior to April 1917). Without a doubt, the architects of America’s imperial drive came predominantly from the industrial East: the Adamses, Hay, Roosevelt, Root, Lodge, Knox, Stimson, Morgan and Wilson. There was a drive for markets. It was spearheaded by an elite who sought presumed relief for a presumed problem of surplus goods. Agrarians may have called for relief also. But they never held power. They were not the decision-makers. They were not then part of the ruling class.

In spite of these issues of “free trade imperialism” and the role of the agrarians in policy-making, the work of Williams, his students, and of Richard Van Alstyne is valuable. It provides an excellent framework for analyzing territorial imperialism and the foreign policy of corporate capitalism. As much as leaders of the corporate establishment desired that government ensure stability and minimize risk at home, so they did abroad. And just as domestic intervention led to further intervention, so Williams and the others show that foreign intervention opened the door to further intervention. The attempt to hold the door open throughout the world involved the United States in conflict after conflict. And the United States intervened not for starry-eyed idealism, like saving the world for democracy or from communism. Those are merely code-words. Our policy-making elite desired that America prosper, and they believed that the prosperity of America was intimately tied to its ability to maintain peace and stability (and trade) throughout the world.

Lest the reader think that Williams has no heroes in the elite, he has heroes among the enlightened conservatives. These include Herbert Hoover. Dwight Eisenhower and J. William Fulbright. Each, in his own way, attempted to minimize the enlistment of troops to protect the American empire. Hoover initiated the Good Neighbor Policy and refused to engage in saber rattling when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. Eisenhower ended the Korean conflict, made the decision not to support France with men and nuclear hardware in Indochina, and managed to keep the United States out of significant combat during his presidency. Fulbright helped to focus national attention on American policy in Vietnam. Perhaps this is why he calls on the enlightened conservative to lead America to a new policy. But then we are dealing with Williams the philosopher, the communitarian nationalist, not the brilliant analyst of American foreign policy.

Racism or Sexism: Which Way?

It is always amusing to see their inner contradictions rise up to smite our strident and vociferous Marxoid left-liberals. Their basic view of the world is that there are the Oppressors, who are, inter alia, “racists” and “sexists”, and there are the Oppressed, the victims of this selfsame racism and sexism. More specifically, the Oppressors are whites (racists)—and—male (sexists), and the Oppressed are blacks—and—females. But what happens when these neat class divisions somehow get crossed and, for example, racially oppressed black males begin to oppress sexually oppressed white females? Which way does our left-liberal turn? If he sides with the females, he will stand accused by his peers of racism; and if he sides with the black males, he will equally stand accused of sexism. It is enough, comrades, to take to drink (if liquor has not been abjured as too bourgeois.)

Historically, of course, “racism” antedates “sexism” in the left-liberal’s catalogue of horrors. Left-liberals, in their long-standing horror of racism, coupled with their coddling-of-criminals ideology, have long been accustomed to excuse and whimper over criminals, be they muggers, bank robbers, murderers, or whatever. Criminals are never at fault; the fault is always “society’s” (whoever that is), for not providing high enough incomes, unbroken homes, unconditional love, adequate playgrounds, or whatever. Since “society”, in this peculiar usage, includes the victim but excludes the criminal, this means that the criminal is not at all responsible for his evil deeds, but that the victim (at least partially) is. From the stems left-liberal coddling of criminals. Now, in contemporary America there is the added fact that a high proportion of street crimes of violence are committed by black males (generally teen-agers). For left-liberals trained at sniffing out “racism”, this adds an extra motive for cooing over the criminals and for denouncing the victims (especially if the victims happen to be white.)

Now this has been standard fare for a long time and not much to remark upon. Except that in the last few years an extra element has been added: left-liberal attacks on “sexism”, especially in the ranks of white women. A part of the women’s movement has been a justifiably bitter opposition to rape as a violent sexual assault on women. I don’t know where left-wing feminists stand on the coddling of criminals generally, but they sure don’t want to coddle rapists; on the contrary, they have been talking of taking the “Inez Garcia” route private, maximal retaliation. So far, so good, except that given this new spirit, the conditions are set for the eruption of severe inner contradiction and conflicts among leftists.

It is no accident that this contradiction has emerged in one of the most left-wing communities of the nation, Madison, Wisconsin, home of the University of Wisconsin. On the county bench sits Judge Archie E. Simonson, long-standing left liberal and coddler of criminals, especially young blacks. This May 25 the judge was disposing of the cases of three teen-aged youths (black) who had raped a high school girl (white), and giving them the usual highly lenient sentences. In the course of the sentencing Judge Simonson delivered himself of some ad hoc remarks: to the effect, that males were being bombarded with lustful sexual images, including provacative female clothing, and so “should we punish a 15 or 16 year old who reacts to it normally?” The clear implication is that this sexy environment inflames males, and that therefore rape becomes a normal reaction, especially for teenagers searching for their identity.

Apparently the judge had not kept in touch with recent trends in left-liberal opinion, for a predictable fire-storm descended upon his head. Feminists have picketed, and are circulating petitions for a special election to recall Judge Simonson. Instead of apologizing, Simonson added fuel to the fire by reiterating that if women wanted to end the problem of rape they should stop “teasing” men.

We hold no brief for Judge Simonson. Quite the contrary, we hold that the feminists don’t seem to realize that the real problem is not the particular judge but the environmentalist-determinist ideology which they undoubtedly share with him—at least, on non-rape questions. For if a criminal is not responsible for his actions, which are determined not by his free choice but by his environment, well then, Simonson has a good case. Then, it becomes plausible to assert that porno, miniskirts, tight jeans, etc. generate lustful impulses and the therefore the rape victim—or at least the class of sexy females in general—is responsible for the rape, rather than the rapist. Instead of opting for free will, the feminists have apparently been trying to dispute Simonson on the facts, that is, to deny that scantily clad females are lust-inspiring sex objects. But since everyone knows that they are, the feminists might be able to win at the polls but not in the broader society.

The correct and libertarian line to take on rape and Simonson would be as follows: Yes, Simonson is right that our sexually drenched atmosphere can inspire lustful impulses in males. But, part of the necessary process of growing up is learning how to curb one’s aggressive impulses, to learn self-control (to use an Old Culture word.) He who can’t or won’t practice such self-control and becomes a criminal aggressor or rapist deserves to be socked with the full majesty of the law. Simonson’s implication that women should go back to the veil and the hoopskirt in order to make life easier for young proto-rapists simply won’t wash. Why should everyone else’s life be made gray and miserable for the sake of coddling proto-rapists? Self-control is their responsibility, not that of females who should be able to dress and act as sexily as they please, without fear of aggression wreaked upon them. If we really wanted to be Old Culture, we could give our young proto-rapists the stern injunction to go and take a cold shower.

Meantime, to return to Madison, the left-liberal community has been predictably sundered along racism/sexism lines. Thus, Mrs. Eloise Anderson-Addison, member of the board of the local Urban League and of the NAACP, complained that “black men were facing immense pressure”, including stiffer penalties for rape in the future, “as a result of the heightened tension and white women’s fear of rape.” Mrs. Anderson-Addison added that “the issue is more black-white than mere rape,” and that “my problem with the women’s movement is that white women can’t deal with their own racism. This is a classical example of that conflict.” The reply of the local feminist leader, Mrs. Anne Gaylor, was rather wishy-washy claiming that it’s a “controversy over sexism and not racism” because the protest over Simonson’s statement arose before the protestors knew that the rapists were black. The fact is that these ism labels only toss a lot of red herrings to a matter that should be looked at simply and clearly as a case of aggression, of coercive crimes against other persons.

(See New York Times, June 15, 1977.)

The FLP Goofs Again

The Free Libertarian Party of New York, whose peregrinations we have recorded from time to time in these pages, has pulled another lulu. Within the state party, the New York City party has been the worst (and has garnered a decline in absolute as well as relative number of votes in each succeeding election in the last four years.) And within the city party it is the Manhattan (New York County) party that has been the wackiest. Having taken the lead in challenging the moral purity and honesty of fellow libertarians a year and two years ago, the New York County party, assembled in its massed might of 17 members in the recent annual convention, has endorsed the Liberal Party incumbent for City Council At-large! By a vote of 10 to 4, with three abstentions, the FLP of New York County endorsed Henry Stern, after Mr. Stern had admonished them on the political realities: “your political strength is your line on the ballot. I’m not going to argue that I’m a pure libertarian—I’m not and . . . I don’t think I ever will be. But you have to decide whether you want to support the city councilman who is closest to you, or whether you want to insist on a level of ideological purity that rejects everyone not gathered in this room.” (Geoffrey Stokes, “Libertarian Endorsement: The 75 Per Cent Solution”, The Village Voice, June 6, 1977.) Duly instructed, the FLP voted to endorse. What price “purity” now?

Mr. Stern was right about one thing: the strength of the LP is indeed its line on the ballot. And what are we supposed to use that strength for? To endorse some cluck who is two millimeters better than some other cluck in an unimportant local election? This is the way to squander whatever strength we may possess; it is to make of organized libertarianism, in Nietzsche’s immortal words, “a laughingstock, a thing of shame.”

What in the world is the point to running candidates, to having a party, to getting on the ballot? Is it to register our running endorsements of the lesser of two or three evils? Is that what we are draining the energies of libertarians to achieve? This is pointless nonsense, but it is also far worse. For our strength, our only strength, is what makes us distinctive in the political realm, what distinguishes us from all the other colors in the political spectrum. That is our glorious principles, our consistent body of truths which we must hold aloft, apply to the important political issues, and thereby sway increasing numbers of people. But to go the cynical cross-endorsement route of the Liberal and Conservative parties will not only accomplish nothing of practical value for our small party it throws away our only strength, the very point to the whole enterprise. For part and parcel of holding a set of consistent principles is only giving our endorsement to candidates who also uphold those principles—that is only to Libertarians.

For the New York party to pull this stunt is even worse than for other Libertarian Parties. For other LP’s, national and state, at least have platforms where consistent libertarian principles and applications are set forth. The kooky FLP has never adopted a platform, confining itself to a few random resolutions. And what is more, in the FLP no party officials are allowed to say anything, since they might be infringing on the opinion of some party member, and there is no party platform to stand on. The result is that only the candidates in New York can have anything to say, which makes the quality of the candidates even more important in New York State than elsewhere in the country. And now the FLP has dared to endorse a Liberal Party councilman who favors, inter alia, licensing and rent control. For shame!

The FLP action points up the importance of the Libertarian Party, nationwide, coming to grips with the potential and now actual evils of sellout cross-endorsements (endorsements of members of other parties) by LPs. Let us hope that at this July’s convention at San Francisco, the LP will amend its rules to prohibit cross-endorsements by any constituent state parties. Let us nip this opportunist danger in the bud—right now!

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 7

JULY, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Key Question:

Do You Hate the State?

I have been ruminating recently on what are the crucial questions that divide libertarians. Some that have received a lot of attention in the last few years are: anarcho-capitalism vs. limited government, abolitionism vs. gradualism, natural rights vs. utilitarianism, and war vs. peace. But I have concluded that as important as these questions are, they don’t really cut to the nub of the issue, of the crucial dividing line between us.

Let us take, for example, two of the leading anarcho-capitalist works of the last few years: my own For a New Liberty and David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Superficially, the major differences between them are my own stand for natural rights and for a rational libertarian law code, in contrast to Friedman’s amoralist utilitarianism and call for logrolling and trade-offs between non-libertarian private police agencies. But the difference really cuts far deeper. There runs through For a New Liberty (and most of the rest of my work as well) a deep and pervasive hatred of the State and all of its works, based on the conviction that the State is the enemy of mankind. In contrast, it is evident that David does not hate the State at all; that he has merely arrived at the conviction that anarchism and competing private police forces are a better social and economic system than any other alternative. Or, more fully, that anarchism would be better than laissez-faire which in turn is better than the current system. Amidst the entire spectrum of political alternatives, David Friedman has decided that anarcho-capitalism is superior. But superior to an existing political structure which is pretty good too. In short, there is no sign that David Friedman in any sense hates the existing American State or the State per se, hates it deep in his belly as a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers. No, there is simply the cool conviction that anarchism would be the best of all possible worlds, but that our current set-up is pretty far up with it in desirability. For there is no sense in Friedman that the State—any State—is a predatory gang of criminals.

The same impression shines through the writing, say, of political philosopher Eric Mack. Mack is an anarcho-capitalist who believes in individual rights; but there is no sense in his writings of any passionate hatred of the State, or, a fortiori, of any sense that the State is a plundering and bestial enemy.

Perhaps the word that best defines our distinction is “radical”. Radical in the sense of being in total, root-and-branch opposition to the existing political system and to the State itself. Radical in the sense of having integrated intellectual opposition to the State with a gut hatred of its pervasive and organized system of crime and injustice. Radical in the sense of a deep commitment to the spirit of liberty and anti-statism that integrates reason and emotion, heart and soul.

Furthermore, in contrast to what seems to be true nowadays, you don’t have to be an anarchist to be radical in our sense, just as you can be an anarchist while missing the radical spark. I can think of hardly a single limited governmentalist of the present day who is radical—a truly amazing phenomenon, when we think of our classical liberal forbears who were genuinely radical, who hated statism and the States of their day with a beautifully integrated passion: the Levellers, Patrick Henry, Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, the Jacksonians, Richard Cobden, and on and on, a veritable roll call of the greats of the past. Tom Paine’s radical hatred of the State and statism was and is far more important to the cause of liberty than the fact that he never crossed the divide between laissez-faire and anarchism.

And closer to our own day, such early influences on me as Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, and Frank Chodorov were magnificently and superbly radical. Hatred of “Our Enemy, the State” (Nock’s title) and all of its works shone through all of their writings like a beacon star. So what if they never quite made it all the way to explicit anarchism? Far better one Albert Nock than a hundred anarchocapitalists who are all too comfortable with the existing status quo.

Where are the Paines and Cobdens and Nocks of today? Why are almost all of our laissez-faire limited governmentalists plonky conservatives and patriots? If the opposite of “radical” is “conservative”, where are our radical laissez-fairists? If our limited statists were truly radical, there would be virtually no splits between us. What divides the movement now, the true division, is not anarchist vs. minarchist, but radical vs. conservative. Lord, give us radicals, be they anarchists or no.

To carry our analysis further, radical anti-statists are extremely valuable even if they could scarcely be considered libertarians in any comprehensive sense. Thus, many people admire the work of columnists Mike Royko and Nick von Hoffman because they consider these men libertarian sympathizers and fellow-travellers. That they are, but this does not begin to comprehend their true importance. For throughout the writings of Royko and von Hoffman, as inconsistent as they undoubtedly are, there runs an all-pervasive hatred of the State, of all politicians, bureaucrats, and their clients which, in its genuine radicalism, is far truer to the underlying spirit of liberty than someone who will coolly go along with the letter of every syllogism and every lemma down to the “model” of competing courts.

Taking the concept of radical vs. conservative in our new sense, let us analyze the now famous “abolitionism” vs. “gradualism” debate. The latter jab comes in the August issue of Reason (a magazine every fibre of whose being exudes “conservatism”), in which editor Bob Poole asks Milton Friedman where he stands on this debate. Friedman takes the opportunity of denouncing the “intellectual cowardice” of failing to set forth “feasible” methods of getting “from here to there.” Poole and Friedman have between them managed to obfuscate the true issues. There is not a single abolitionist who would not grab a feasible method, or a gradual gain, if it came his way. The difference is that the abolitionist always holds high the banner of his ultimate goal, never hides his basic principles, and wishes to get to his goal as fast as humanly possible. Hence, while the abolitionist will accept a gradual step in the right direction if that is all that he can achieve, he always accepts it grudgingly, as merely a first step toward a goal which he always keeps blazingly clear. The abolitionist is a “button pusher” who would blister his thumb pushing a button that would abolish the State immediately, if such a button existed. But the abolitionist also knows that alas! Such a button does not exist, and that he will take a bit of the loaf if necessary—while always preferring the whole loaf if he can achieve it.

It should be noted here that many of Milton’s most famous “gradual” programs such as the voucher plan, the negative income tax, the withholding tax, fiat paper money—are gradual (or even not so gradual) steps in the wrong direction, away from liberty, and hence the militance of much libertarian opposition to these schemes.

His button pushing position stems from the abolitionist’s deep and abiding hatred of the State and its vast engine of crime and oppression. With such an integrated world-view, the radical libertarian could never dream of confronting either a magic button or any real-life problem with some arid cost-benefit calculation. He knows that the State must be diminished as fast and as completely as possible. Period.

And that is why the radical libertarian is not only an abolitionist, but also refuses to think in such terms as a Four Year Plan for some sort of stately and measured procedure for reducing the State. The radical—whether he be anarchist or laissez-faire—cannot think in such terms as, e.g.: Well, the first year, we’ll cut the income tax by 2%, abolish the ICC, and cut the minimum wage; the second year we’ll abolish the minimum wage, cut the income tax by another 2%, and reduce welfare payments by 3%, etc. The radical cannot think in such terms, because the radical regards the State as our mortal enemy, which must be hacked away at wherever and whenever we can. To the radical libertarian, we must take any and every opportunity to chop away at the State, whether it’s to reduce or abolish a tax, a budget appropriation, or a regulatory power. And the radical libertarian is insatiable in this appetite until the State has been abolished, or—for minarchists—dwindled down to a tiny, laissez-faire role.

Many people have wondered: Why should there be any important political disputes between anarchocapitalists and minarchists now? In this world of statism, where there is so much common ground, why can’t the two groups work in complete harmony until we shall have reached a Cobdenite world, after which we can air our disagreements? Why quarrel over courts, etc. now? The answer to this excellent question is that we could and would march hand-in-hand in this way if the minarchists were radicals, as they were from the birth of classical liberalism down to the 1940’s. Give us back the antistatist radicals, and harmony would indeed reign triumphant within the movement.

Should Abortion Be A Crime?

THE ABORTION QUESTION ONCE MORE

The abortion question continues to be a difficult one for many libertarians, and hence deserves some extended analysis. The vital point to focus on here, as in all other applications of libertarian theory to the legal system, is simply this: Should abortion be a crime? For at issue is not the morality or the aesthetics of abortion, which are matters of general moral or aesthetic theory or personal judgment. 1. To the libertarian, who must always separate legal from general moral theory, the crucial question is always: shall such and such an action be criminal, shall it be licit in the free society? There are numerous actions, for example, which a libertarian may or may not consider “immoral” (e.g. drinking alcohol or yelling at one’s neighbor) but does not consider criminal. The libertarian always concentrates on what is a crime, and for him, the conclusion depends on his general theory that crime (and therefore illegality) must be confined to acts of aggression upon the person or property of others.

The common pro-abortionist argument that anti-abortionists are trying to impose their religious (e.g. Catholic or Orthodox Jewish) values on other people therefore misses the mark. For if the anti-abortionists are right, and abortion is really “murder”, then the libertarian, who believes in outlawing murder as a crime, must join in the outlawry of abortion. The “religious” argument, therefore, misses the central point.

Much ink has been spilled on this issue trying to define the exact point at which human life begins. Birth, indeed, seems to be an event of some importance at which we can conveniently demarkate that “human life begins here”, but then the anti-abortionists are able to bog the argument down in biological technicalities, and the dispute can continue ad infinitum. As I have written elsewhere, the definition of the begging of human life is actually irrelevant to our central issue. For let us give the anti-abortionists their full argument: let us assume for the moment that human life begins at conception. Let us concede, for the sake of argument, that the fertilized egg, from the beginning, has all the rights of a full, adult human being.

But then, who will maintain that a full, adult human being has the legal, enforceable right to remain enclosed within the body of another human being without the latter’s consent? Surely, that is absurd. But if no adult human has such a legal right, then a fortiori, the fetus cannot have such a right either.

To put the case another way: It is axiomatic for the libertarian that every individual has the absolute right to own, to control, his or her own body. But, in that case, a woman has the right to eject any unwanted entity from within her own body, whether that entity be a fetus or a nonhuman parasite. Hence, a woman has the absolute right to commit an abortion, or, therefore, the right to hire someone to perform the abortion on her behalf.

Abortion, therefore, should be looked upon not as killing the fetus but as ejecting it from the mother’s body. The fact that the fetus might well die in the course of the ejection is incidental to the act of abortion. It might be objected, of course, that the fetus requires for its survival a continued lodging in the body of the mother. But this brings us to another fundamental libertarian axiom: that no human being, whether fetus, child, or adult, has the legal right to keep itself alive at someone else’s expense. No human being can have a legal claim up on someone else to perform any actions to keep it alive.

In short, the libertarian sees a fundamental difference between murdering someone, and failing to perform an act to keep that person alive. The former is a crime and an aggression, the latter is not and is therefore perfectly licit. For example, A sees B drowning in a pool; if A fails to jump in or perform other actions to save B, this may be morally reprehensible, but it is perfectly within A’s rights. Or if A sees B dying in the street, it is not a crime for A to ignore the situation and fail to take action to save him. The same applies to ignoring a baby who might have been abandoned in the street.

Consider, too, the implications of the contrary position. If any sick or helpless human is considered to have a legal claim to be kept alive, (a) upon whom can that claim be enforced? On the first person who comes along? On everyone? And (b) how many actions, how many resources, should the ill or helpless person be able to command? Suppose that an ill person can only be saved by the use of 2 trillion dollars worth of medical equipment, which would impoverish everyone. Does the legal claim extend this far, and if not, why not?

In her defense of the right of abortion, Professor Judith Thompson put the case very well:

“In some views having a right to live includes having a right to be given at least the bare minimum one needs for continued life. But suppose that what in fact is the bare minimum a man needs for continued life is something he has no right at all to be given? If I am sick unto death, and the only thing that will save my life is the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow, then all the same, I have no right to be given the touch of Henry Fonda’s cool hand on my fevered brow. It would be rightfully nice of him to fly in from the West Coast to provide it . . . But I have no right at all against anybody that he should do this for me.”

Professor Thomson continues: “having a right to life does not guarantee having either right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body—even if one needs it for life itself.”*

But, if no sick or helpless person, whether adult or baby, can have the right to coerce actions to keep it alive from the body or energy of another human being, if Judith Thompson cannot force Henry Fonda to save her, then, a fortiori, a fetus cannot have such a coercive right either. One person’s need, however dire, cannot be used to sustain any coercion over the body or energy or property of another human being. And so the requirements of the fetus cannot take precedence over the absolute right of the mother over her own body.

One suspects that the anti-abortionists have not thought through the logical implications of their own position. If, indeed, abortion is “murder” of the fetus, because the fetus needs the environment of its mother’s womb for its continued life, then what are the other obligations that we—can coerce upon the mother? For example, suppose that if the mother does not eat a balanced diet, or drinks liquor, or allows herself to get upset, the fetus will die, or, if not that, the fetus will be in some concrete way, injured? May we send in a Gestapo to coerce the proper diet, to coerce proper behavior, upon the mother? The “murder” thesis logically implies totalitarian control over pregnant women.

But suppose that technology has advanced to the point where the aborted fetus could be kept alive in a “test tube”. Should the mother or the parents have a legally enforceable obligation to keep the now separated fetus alive? But, once again, this brings us to the general problem of the sick or the helpless. How much resources are the parents to be coerced into committing in order to keep the fetus alive? Two trillion dollars? We are back, in short, to the important lesson of the Karen Quinlan case—that there can be no legal obligation (though there may be a moral one) to keep “the plug” in place: that is, in short, a vital philosophical distinction—and one particularly vital to libertarians—between murder, a violent act of aggression, and “pulling the plug”, that is, deciding not to commit resources—not to engage in further positive actions—to keep someone else alive. Murder is criminal, pulling the plug is licit. Even if, in cases as the fetus or Karen Quinlan, the distinction seems to make little difference to the dying person, it obviously makes a great deal of difference to the alleged “murderer.”

Since libertarians often suffer from contract fetishism, there is a peculiarly “libertarian” variant of the anti-abortion argument: that the mother (and the father?), by conceiving the fetus, has made a “contract” with the fetus obligating the mother to carry through with the pregnancy. There are a large number of flaws in this argument. In the first place, it conflicts with the “murder” argument, which it is intended to supplement. For if it can be clearly demonstrated that no “contract” is involved, then the anti-abortionist must approve the right to abort, and surrender completely the claim that abortion is murder. Thus, clearly no “contract” with a fetus was involved if the fetus was conceived by an act of rape; hence, these anti-abortionists will concede the legitimacy of aborting a fetus conceived by rape. Yet, if abortion is “murder”, isn’t it just as illegitimate to murder a rape-begotten fetus as a voluntarily begotten one?

Secondly, the anti-abortionists don’t seem to realize that more exceptions must then be granted than mere rape. What “contract” is involved, for example, in the case of a birth-control mistake? Such a fetus was also not deliberately conceived, but only arrived in error. So is such an abortion legitimate? But, in that case, the anti-abortionist is in bad practical shape, for how are the legal authorities supposed to decide whether a fetus was conceived because of a birth control mistake or whether it had been actively desired? Clearly, enforcement of this distinction is impossible, and our anti-abortionists would have to give up legal enforcement in practice, since the mother would only have to say that the fetus was a mistake, and it would be impossible to prove her wrong.

Thirdly, there are many grave flaws in the concept of “contract” involved in this argument. Surely, the fetus is scarcely a rational, willing entity, engaging consciously in a contractual relationship. Indeed, even the fetus was non-existent at the time when the alleged “contract” was made. And what obligations is the fetus supposed to be incurring in this contract? Any attribution of “implicit contracts” from human actions must be done with great care and circumspection; but here the “contract” is created hog wild, out of the whole cloth. But most important, this conception violates the proper, libertarian, property-rights, “title-transfer” theory of contract, the theory which declares (a) that a contract is only enforceable when it involves the transfer of a property title to another person, and (b) that a person’s will, his body, is inalienable and cannot be surrendered in an enforceable transaction. But there is no property transfer in the alleged contract with the future fetus; there is only an alleged enslavement of the mother’s body and will, an enslavement which cannot in fact and in right be made. In short, the mother, or anyone else for that matter, has the absolute right to change her mind with her own body and will, for the ownership of them cannot be surrendered. Even if the mother wanted the baby in the first place, she has the absolute right to change her mind, and the moment she does so, the fetus becomes an unwanted, invasive parasite upon the body of the mother..The right of abortion remains absolute.

* Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (Fall 1971), pp. 55–56.

Canadian Breakup

It seemed likely that the electoral success of the separatist Parti Quebecois would inspire other sections of Canada with the happy idea of breaking off from the swollen national Canadian government in Ottawa. Separatism, secessionism, feeds on and reinforces itself in a welcome type of “domino principle.”

Now it seems that we didn’t have long to wait. For the New York Times (itself violently anti-separatist on principle) reports (April 10) that advocates of an independent state in western Canada “have taken encouragement from the electoral victory of the separatist movement in Quebec Province.” The idea is for an independent western state to include the currently western Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, and the Northwestern Territories.

The major grievances of the west are not linguistic, but politico-economic. There is, for example, the fact that federal taxes are extracted from the comparatively wealthy western provinces and siphoned into welfare payments and other subsidies in the east. Thus, for fiscal year 1973–74, a net of $632 million was extracted by the national government from British Columbia. There is also a great deal of unhappiness with high federal tariffs, which confer privileges on inefficient eastern manufactured goods, making imports more expensive for western consumers. Nationalized freight rates keep the cost of transportation from west to east and back higher than they would be on the free market. And, finally, there is a minor but visible linguistic irritant in western Canada too: the fact that federal law compels bilingual signs on roads and in stores in an area where virtually no one speaks or understands French.

Who are the budding heroes of the western Canadian independence movement? There are three separatist organizations. One is the Committee for Western Independence, headed by a British Columbian, Douglas Christie. The Committee has 1,500 members, centered in British Columbia, a province which sells most of its mineral and forest products to the U.S. and Japan rather than to eastern Canada. Another such organization is the Western Canada Party, with 5,500 members in British Columbia, and led by Vancouver aircraft-parts salesman Edward G. Fleming. The Western Canada Party plans to field a full slate of candidates in the next provincial elections.

And, finally, further east in Alberta, there is the Western Independence Party, with 800 members, and led by Milton Harradance, former head of the Progressive Conservative Party in Alberta, and by Calgary oil man John Rudolph.

It should be pretty clear that, in the case of western independence, Canadian libertarians will not be able to use the Quebec excuse for not working with the movement that it Is “socialist.” The swollen nation-state of Canada is getting ripe for being toppled. Are Canada’s libertarians going to miss the bus of an exciting and fundamental libertarian issue by not aiding in this historic task?

Exciting New Magazine:
Inquiry

This fall there will be launched one of the most exciting new magazines in many years. It will be a bi-weekly, professional, real magazine-magazine, that will comment sharply and trenchantly on current political affairs. Its name is Inquiry. It will establish itself quickly as a rival of the Nation, New Republic, and National Review.

Politically, Inquiry will be non-sectarian, but that does not mean that the magazine will be value-free. On the contrary, Inquiry, as it says in its announcement, “will test all person and policies against the liberal and humanist values of peace, toleration and individual rights.” Part of the excitement of Inquiry is that, in addition to its major focus on analyzing the broader issues, it will also do investigative reporting, exposing the specific wrongs and oppressions being committed by the U.S. government. In short, Inquiry will be “revisionist.”

But, in addition to this, Inquiry will publish humor and political satire, and review books and the arts. In short, it will be broad-ranging enough to make a significant impact on the American scene, and on the opinion-moulders who will read it. A long list of contributors and contributing editors will include Nicholas von Hoffman, Robert Sherrill, Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, and the editor of the Libertarian Forum.

More importantly, the editors are distinguished libertarians. Editor is Williamson M. Evers, doctoral candidate in political science, Stanford University, until recently editor of the L. P. News, and member of the platform committee of the Libertarian Party. Senior Editor is Ralph Raico, on leave as professor of history, State University College at Buffalo. Raico edited the excellent pamphlet series published by the Libertarian Party in the 1976 campaign, and is also on the L. P. platform committee. Both Evers and Raico have been welcome contributors to the Libertarian Forum. Publisher of Inquiry is Edward H. Crane II, former investment counsellor and outgoing national chairman of the Libertarian Party who piloted the breakthrough campaign of 1976. Crane is publisher in his capacity as president of the Cato Institute, a non-profit public policy research foundation which will publish Inquiry.

For more information about Inquiry or about the numerous other activities in the works at Cato, write to the Cato Institute, 1700 Montgomery St., San Francisco, California 94111.

In Defense of Pirateering

by J. Michael Oliver

On the whole libertarianism has breached the traditional concepts of human social organization. It is a “clean” theory in that little or no effort has been made by libertarians to mold their ideas in such a way as to reflect socially acceptable political concepts and institutions.

However, in one area of libertarian discussion there does seem to be a conspicuous lapse of innovation. When discussing the defense of a free society from an aggressor state, anarchists have come up with a myriad of voluntarist alternatives to the present day armed forces—most modelled on existing and “acceptable” institutions. When asked by the curious how we would “defend the country” there is a tendency to quickly structure an institution along the lines of a voluntary armed forces, a large insurance company, community beach patrols, etc. There is another defense option which to my knowledge has not been discussed in libertarian circles. It differs from the above defense measures in two significant ways. The proposal does not rely on the financial support of the population which benefits from its activities, and the proposal will engender the initial negative response of “gangsterism.”

Before presenting this alternative let me make a disclaimer. Much of the debate over defense has been unnecessarily compartmentalized into national defense and individual defense. Libertarians have long recognized that the concepts “the people,” “public,” “nation,” etc. are nearly useless concepts at best. It is inconsequential whether my health or property is taken from me by an aggressor who crosses a “national” boundary to get to me or merely crosses the street. Such concrete matters as the size of the population to be defended, the size of the aggressor force and the geographic relationship of the victim(s) to the aggressor(s) are tactical matters—not significant theoretical issues. A discussion of how the non-state society can be defended should be seen solely as tactical speculation. Anarchist principles need not be validated by an endless string of answers to “what would you do” or “what if” questions. Libertarianism is best defended on a higher plane than that of concrete scenarios. Yet speculating about a prospective libertarian society can illuminate theoretical principles, and therein lies its chief value.

* * * * * * * * *

In his tightly reasoned essay No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870) Lysander Spooner makes the case that the Constitution, the U.S. government and “the people of the United States” are all illegitimate concepts from the point of view of law. A summation of his conclusions is worth repeating since it pertains to the issue of defense. (From Section X):

“It is obvious that, on general principles of law and reason, there exists no such thing as a government created by, or resting upon, any consent, compact, or agreement of ‘the people of the United States’ with each other; that the only visible, tangible, responsible government that exists, is that of a few individuals only, who act in concert, and call themselves by the several names of senators, representatives, presidents, judges, marshals, treasurers, collectors, generals, colonels, captains, etc., etc.

On general principles of law and reason, it is of no importance whatever that those few individuals profess to be the agents and representatives of ‘the people of the United States’; since they can show no credentials from the people themselves; they were never appointed as agents or representatives in any open, authentic manner; they do not themselves know, and have no means of knowing, and cannot prove, who their principals (as they call them) are individually; and consequently cannot, in law or reason, be said to have any principals at all.

“It is obvious, too, that if these alleged principals ever did appoint these pretended agents, or representatives, they appointed them secretly (by secret ballot), and in a way to avoid all personal responsibility for their acts; that, at most, these alleged principals put these pretended agents forward for the most criminal purposes, viz.: to plunder the people of their prosperity, and restrain them of their liberty; and that the only authority that these alleged principals have for so doing, is simply a tacit understanding among themselves that they will imprison, shoot or hang every man who resists the exactions and restrains which their agents or representatives may impose upon them.

“Thus it is obvious that the only visible, tangible government we have is made up of these professed agents or representatives or a secret band of robbers and murderers, who, to cover up, or gloss over, their robberies and murders, have taken to themselves the title of being ‘the people of the United States,’ assert their right to subject to their dominion, and to control and dispose of at their pleasure, all property and persons found in the United States.”

(To fully appreciate these observations the full essay should be read.)

We are aware of course that the state does exist. Its threat is as real as its guns and armies. But the point Spooner makes is that in a legal sense the state has no reality. In the case of the U.S. government, its operatives are ever changing, its alleged principals (“the people”) are a secret body which remains always undefined, and the contractual document which presumably stands as the legal basis of the state is of “no authority.”

This leaves us with a very interesting prospect—around which our discussion of defense will revolve. The property which has been expropriated by the state (which of necessity includes all government property) is “owned” by a legal nonentity. Spooner makes the following point about government property in No Treason when he writes that “this secret band of robbers and murderers . . . . have no corporate property . . . . They do indeed pretend to own large tracts of wild lands, lying between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and between the Gulf of Mexico and the North Pole. But, on general principles of law and reason, they might as well pretend to own the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans themselves; or the atmosphere and the sunlight . . . .” (from Section XVII). Thus if you take “government property,” you cannot be said to have stolen it since there is no legally definable entity called “government” and therefore no owner.

Some libertarians contend that government property is rightfully the property of those from whom it was taken (e.g., taxpayers) and that ownership remains with the victims. Perhaps the best known proponent of this view is Ragnar Danneskjold (Atlas Shrugged) whom you will recall seized government gold and returned it to Hank Reardon and others on the basis of their previous tax victimization. Ragnar’s assumption of course was that Reardon was entitled to only an amount equivalent to that which had been taken from him in the first place. There are problems with this restitutionist view.

1) The process of government expropriation extends over generations and centuries. Do I have a claim to my father’s tax victimization? He has willed his estate to me, and property stolen from him is still part of his estate, is it not? And if I have a right to his portion of “government property” does not everyone else have a similar right to his parents’ and even ancestors’ share?

2) Government expropriation takes many forms—income tax, sales tax, property tax, conscription, eminent domain, etc. My records only cover income tax losses at the hands of government. Do I thereby lose my right to properties stolen by other means? If not, how do I document and calculate what amount of value is to be restituted to me?

3) A large portion of the wealth taken by government is destroyed either directly as in wartime or through inefficiency. This means that if all claimants put in for reparations there wouldn’t be enough wealth in government hands to compensate its victims.

4) When an individual(s) is identified as an aggressor then responsibility can be assigned. Damages can be levied against him for his actions. In the case of government aggression, however, responsibility cannot be so easily assigned, if at all. As Spooner explains, government is a “secret band of robbers and murderers.” Government does not end with the first echelon of IRS agents, police, soldiers and Congressmen. There are also the rank and file government employees, those contracting to government, financiers of government (bondholders) and that invisible mob of voters and supporters. Only superficial responsibility can be assigned. In short we cannot define the aggressor.

The proponent of restitution is faced with the following circumstances. Wealth has been stolen or destroyed by government in so many ways over such a long period of time that any meaningful accounting is virtually impossible. Thus he cannot declare with any certainty how much has been stolen. Further, so many individuals and corporations have been robbed that a list of victims would encompass almost all citizens past and present as well as foreign victims of government wars. His final impossible problem will be to determine the amount of reparations due to the individual who has been both victim and aggressor (taxpayer and taxconsumer), a category which covers a greater number of people than one might at first suspect.

There is an alternative to the restitution theory. The “homestead” or “pirateering” theory holds that wealth in the hands of government is in an ownerless limbo. When stolen by the state it crosses the line from owned to unowned, and like all unowned wealth it is open to being claimed as property. “Government property” may be likened to a gold-laden Spanish galleon on the floor of the Caribbean. The original lines of ownership have been obliterated by time and circumstance. Just as there are individuals who will assume the risks and make the investment to retrieve the sunken gold, it is reasonable to assume that there will also be those who will take steps to claim government wealth. In the process these fortune hunters or pirates will do considerable damage to governments’ capabilities for aggression. Their activities will constitute an efficient and “free” defense service.

There is nothing particularly novel about people successfully challenging the power of the state for political or profit motives. Terrorists and guerillas of all political stripes have demonstrated countless times that government’s veneer of invincibility and permanence is only veneer. Conspirators in coup d’etats have often toppled regimes overnight through careful planning and timing. On the profit side consider the art thief who targets “national” or “public” (government) art galleries, bypassing electronic defenses, security forces and later government investigators.

International art thieves, insofar as they prey upon government collections, are excellent examples of free market pirates. They remove objects of value from the state and market them to the highest bidders. The risk is very high but apparently not so high as to curtail the profitability of their business.

Any significant emergence of free market pirateering would probably not occur until a market (stateless) society appeared somewhere on the globe. At that point at least one haven for them would exist, and the degree of risk hanging over their activities would diminish. Of course any favorable change in the risk-reward ratio would attract a great number of people to pirateering.

What possibilities for success would pirates have?

1) The unsettling effects accompanying the birth of a stateless society would do much to irritate conditions in political societies. Pirates would undoubtedly find ready-made alliances with radicals inside the unliberated countries, thereby increasing the chances of success for both participants.

2) The pirate’s objective is far more limited than that of a revolutionary. The pirate is not primarily concerned with dismantling, overthrowing or supplanting governmental power. He is not a “patriot.” His objective is highly limited and the time of contact between the pirate and the state will probably be equally limited. In contrast, the revolutionary, regardless of his techniques, is engaged in a protracted struggle to the death. His objective is to abolish or take over the state, not to pick its pocket; consequently his risks are far greater. Despite these risks we know that revolutionaries often accomplish their goals. Given the pirate’s more limited goals and exposure time we can assume a higher probability of success in the pirate’s case.

3) In addition, pirates are as subject to the forces of the marketplace as any business venture. Their operations are financed by investment capital and they must be successful if they are to remain in business. Their failures are not subsidized by a garrisoned population. The pressures for efficiency are very real. However, the governments which they attack are functioning on a typical level of inefficiency. The contest is between a small force(s) tempered to efficiency by market pressures and a large force relying on its size and brute strength.

In what manner does pirateering constitute a defense against state aggression? In the first place a pirate’s selection of targets will be relatively unaffected by his conception of whether a government is or is not a threat to a free society. His objective is the largest prize posing the least risk. To him, and to all libertarians, the state is aggressing against someone if it is breathing. There is no such thing as a non-aggressive government. He needs no further justification to seize government wealth than the arguments presented above. The only question which gives him pause is that of accessibility.

Certain government assets are more accessible than others, just as some governments are more vulnerable to attack than others. Idi Amin’s gold horde is a more likely target of pirate attack than the gold held by the U.S. government. Obviously the easier targets will be taken first. Pirates will concentrate on the less stable governments with particular focus on mobile and highly valued wealth—precious metals, foreign currencies, etc. News of the first few successful raids will attract many more people and corporations into pirateering. The vulnerability of government will have been demonstrated. As the easy targets fall by the wayside, the better prepared and bolder among the pirates (or pirate corporations) will begin to challenge the larger governments. The governments of the world will find themselves faced with a new type of opponent. Rather than dealing with the state on its own terms by confronting its soldiers and police, the pirate looks for the back way in. Unlike an opposing army or an internal revolutionary organization the pirate corporation is not a definable group. A conventional or a guerilla army must engage the forces of the state to achieve its goals. The first does this directly, usually on a large scale, while the latter is more selective and piecemeal; but both methods result in combat between the rank-and-file on both sides. Conventional and guerilla wars are usually drawn-out affairs involving the waste of lives, resources and time. Pirateering would function much along the lines of organized crime today (excluding of course organized crime’s propensity to occasionally be an aggressor). Profit is the objective, and a businesslike approach governs methods. Probably the major difference between pirateering as conceived here and the Mafia is that the Mafia seeks only to operate its black market activities and to avoid the state; the pirate goes after the state.

There are a few likely similarities however. The Mafia is global. Pirate corporations would undoubtedly seek to establish a global network as well. “Going international” would facilitate smuggling of personnel, materiel and booty in or out of various countries; it would lead to a readymade network of contacts and operatives; and it would better prepare the pirates to act on any unexpected opportunity which might arise in another country.

The Mafia has also been known to pay off government officials for favors or silence. A pirate corporation would also find it necessary to share profits and to offer an umbrella of protection and escape to any government insider who aided it in seizing government assets—such as a few guards and a banking official in the Bank of Uganda who guard or have access to Field Marshall Amin’s gold.

Shades of SPECTRE, Goldfinger, Mission Impossible and Ragnar Danneskjold? Is pirateering a far fetched idea? I think not. There is sufficient evidence that widespread pirateering could be successful if preceded by the emergence of at least one free society (and presumably that is the proverbial free society which we are asked “how will you defend it”).

From a libertarian perspective the methods of the pirate are not repugnant. He strikes at the heart of the state—its pocket and its undeserved reputation of omnipotence. He bleeds the state of its capability to aggress as well as its mystique. He strikes cleanly, avoiding physical combat as much as possible. (It is uneconomical). Can the same be said of conventional armies, nuclear weapons and guerilla warfare?

And finally he does not require financial support from the population—only a few willing investors.

The pirate is at once a businessman, a defender and a revolutionary. And if we live to see a trend toward libertarianism in the world it will be he who turns aside to pick apart the remains of the statist order—for profit of course.

Seeking the Political Kingdom: A Review Essay

by Justus D. Doenecke

Peter L. Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, eds., Against the World for the World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of American Religion (New York: Seabury, 1976)

Rene de Visme Williamson, Politics and Political Theology: An Interpretation of Tillich, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Brunner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976)

Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Touchstone, 1973).

The church was full, indeed jammed, as the young priest began celebrating his first mass in English. When the cleric came to the part of the liturgy where he said, “The Lord be with you,” one acolyte whispered to another, “He mean Dominus vobiscum.”

The problem of updating Christian social teachings is a perennial one, and there has scarcely been an era in which modernization and tradition, prophetic protest and classical doctrines have not been in tension. Such tension was much in evidence when, in January of 1975, a group of theologians met at Hartford Seminary, there to protest against themes in contemporary Christian thought they found both false and debilitating. They represented a variety of schools ranging from Roman Catholic to conservative evangelical, and they included in their numbers such prominent names as social activist William Sloane Coffin, Jr., sociologist Peter Berger, and theologian George H. Tavard.

Their manifesto is formally entitled “An Appeal for Theological Affirmation.” Informally it is called “the Hartford Appeal.” In direct and hard-hitting language, the signers explicitly denied that the world, and its concerns, could ever set the agenda for the Church. While admitting that institutions are often oppressive, the drafters wrote that “the modern pursuit of liberation from all social and historical restraints is finally dehumanizing.”

As the Hartford theologians continue their indictment, they challenge the claim that modern thought can ever be normative for the Christian faith, that God is humanity’s most noble creation, and that Jesus himself can only be understood in terms of today’s models of humanity. Sin, they assert, involves far more than the failure to realize potential, and salvation cannot be found apart from God. The Kingdom of God, after all, surpasses any conceivable utopia.

If the Hartford Appeal was long overdue in theological circles, it still made national headlines. The drafters received over a thousand personal letters. Some of the response was responsible, some was not, for the framers found themselves having to deny that they stood for a right-wing resurgence in the churches. The Berger-Neuhaus anthology is one effort to meet some of the more thoughtful criticism.

Berger launches this first-rate collection with an attack on secularity. Here the Rutgers sociologist calls upon the Christian community, both Protestant and Catholic, to avoid prostituting its tradition by adopting such fads as “human authenticity,” “personal fulfillment,” and psychological and political “liberation”. Rather it must return to a sense of transcendence, and to the concept of the supernatural, for only then can it radically criticize its society. George A. Lindbeck of Yale Divinity School develops this point, noting that the Appeal reaffirms the possibility of formulating creative theology—this at a time when right-wing Pentecostalists and leftist ecclesiastical technocrats have abandoned the theological quest.

Even that old bastion of orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, is no longer immune to forms of culture-religion, a point ably made by Avery Dulles, S. J. of Catholic University. Dulles challenges tenets advanced by the World Council of Churches and by “liberal Catholics,” while countering liberal critiques by stressing the Manifesto’s attack on racism, war, and economic exploitation. Carl J. Peters, also of Catholic University, covers Roman Catholic responses to the manifesto. Peters notes that while the Catholic press is quite positive, some theologians—such as Gregory Baum—are critical. He calls upon Catholic theologians to seek “a creative alienation,” one as rooted in faith and belief as in efforts to confront modernity on its own terms. Turning to Eastern Orthodoxy, Alexander Schmemann of St. Vladimir’s notes that orthodox rites and theology still remain dependent upon the classical patristic tradition. However, the day-to-day life of both priest and layman is so immersed in American civil religion as to make the Hartford indictment a most telling one.

Just in case anyone doubts who the drafters of the Appeal had in mind, George Wolfgang Forell of the University of Iowa lets the reader know, and know in no uncertain terms. Forell points to such weird phenomena as the “Gospel of Christian Athiesm,” comparisons between Jesus and Che Guevera, and endorsement of all left-wing revolutions. And, argues Forell, if the Church’s agenda is truly set by the world, the rightist culture-religion represented by Richard Nixon has as equal claim on the believer as the “hip” theology of Harvey Cox. Richard J. Mouw of Calvin College continues in this vein, showing how conservative Protestantism overstresses the subjective elements of belief, reduces religious language to mere human experience, identifies salvation with peace of mind, and preaches an “American way of life.” Little wonder that Richard John Neuhaus, editor of Worldview, calls for aiding the oppressed in a way that neither avoids political action nor baptizes one’s cause in a “partisan church.”

Since Augustine wrote The City of God, there have—of course—been efforts to build a positive political theology. Rene de Visme Williamson, a political scientist at Louisiana State University and Presbyterian layman, has recently attempted this task. Williamson draws upon four of the most influential theologians of our century—Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich—and then attempts his own political synthesis.

Barth, the Swiss theologian famous for stressing the gap between unredeemed man and a saving God, had a low opinion of the state. Indeed, it is Karl Barth, not Murray Rothbard, who called the state “a graceless order . . . in which human possibilities have been renounced.”

Similarly it is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the martyr resistant executed by the Nazis, and not the editorial board of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, who said, “The concept of the state is foreign to the New Testament. It has its origin in pagan antiquity.” Bonhoeffer continually called for a decentralized society, be the system called federalism, pluralism, or checks-and-balances. The present could only be transformed, he went on, by converted individuals, not by theological liberalism or social activism.

The strongest anti-state sentiments of all came from Emil Brunner, an underrated theologian long overshadowed by Barth. Brunner wrote that “Every State represents human sin on the large scale; in the growth of every State the most brutal, anti-divine forces have taken a share, to an extent unheard of the individual life, save in that of some prominent criminals.” In fact, it is Brunner, not Joseph Peden, who commented, “The true dominion of Christ, and what we call the State, are fundamentally opposed,” just as it is Brunner—not Leonard Liggio—who claimed that “without private property there is no free personal life.”

Even Tillich, the most unorthodox of Williamson’s four subjects (and the only one who lived much of his life in the United States) is no particular friend of civil authority. The German-born theologian found civil law subject to so much change, and so ambiguous, that it is of little use in formulating decisions. History itself, according to Tillich, “has no aim, either in time or in eternity.”

Yet, if Tillich deeply distrusted political institutions, Williamson shows that the positions of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Brunner were not quite so simple. Although Barth was no admirer of the state, he asserted that it “serves to protect man from the invasion of chaos;” even more, is “is ordained of God, so that those who try to evade or oppose it resist the ordinance of God and the kingly rule of His Son.” Barth’s thought is a curious mixture: he asserted that “all reformers are Pharisees” but saw real merit in democracy and socialism, and he denounced Nazism as a pagan religion but told East German pastors that taking an oath to their Communist government was permissible. Denying that we can do anything about any crisis except await a divine “command of the hour,” he declared confidently that God was in full control and would turn all evil into good.

Bonhoeffer, while claiming that there is no sovereign but God, reflected Lutheranism’s well-known passivity towards the state. In the 1930’s, he went so far as to assert that the German Reich was “justified in adopting new methods” in dealing with “the Jewish question,” and when World War II broke out, he joined the Abwehr, the military counterintelligence organization established by Admiral Canaris. (It was his participation in the Abwehr plot to assassinate Hitler that later led to his execution). Brunner declared that the state needed power over life and death; otherwise society “would become the plaything of those who by no means abrogate their desire to kill, and there are such in every nation.”

Williamson notes that the four theologians possessed one political doctrine in common: “a profound distrust of all ideological and political systems.” In addition, they proclaimed that the Christian, by his ability to stand outside his culture, can judiciously appraise the strengths and weaknesses of all ideologies and policies, be they racial segregation or participatory democracy. Specific Christian insights, writes Williamson, include vesting ultimate authority in God alone, supporting proposals for decentralization of power, backing constitutional restraints, recognizing that all human faculties are affected by sin, and denying that the good society can come through structural change alone. It is sound advice.

The Williamson work is most valuable, especially those parts showing why the four theologians usually avoided specific policy recommendations. Rather, as Williamson notes, they give us something more valuable, norms to be applied when concrete decisions are made. Williamson could have done more with Barth’s early Christian socialism, Tillich’s flirtation with Kenneth Leslie’s pro-Soviet magazine The Protestant Digest, and Bonhoeffer’s hope for an entire culture permeated by Christianity. While good comparisons are made to Calvin, far more could have been done with Augustine, Aguinas, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Only primary works are used, except for two Roman Catholic studies on Tillich that stress Tillich’s lack of kinship to the Christian faith. Because Williamson strongly concurs, and in the eyes of this reviewer somewhat unfairly, a closer look at Tillich’s general contribution is needed.

By examining Tillich’s lectures to students at Union and Chicago divinity schools, one finds a far more orthodox and political sophisticated mind at work. These lectures, now collected in his History of Christian Thought, compose one of the most significant works in intellectual history offered within the past quarter century. The work is not only essential to understanding Tillich’s thought, but it shows with eloquence how Christianity’s detractors often misunderstand the faith they attack. It is, in fact, most surprising that some historians still rely upon such superficial surveys as John Hermann Randall, Jr. and Crane Brinton when good and thoughtful writing is now easily available.

Although Tillich was long a Christian socialist, he denies that the Kingdom of God, or the classless society, could ever be established on earth. It is not accidental, Tillich noted, that the word “utopia” stems from the Greek ou-topos, or “no place.” Once finding that there is “no place” for the Kingdom in temporal time and space, people will curb their “fanatic will toward political revolution and the transformation of society” and hopefully seek reform on more realistic levels.

Moving to Tillich’s history, we soon see a master synthesizer at work. He begins by defending the concept of dogma, declaring that it is not “a suppressive power which produces dishonesty” but “a wonderful and profound expression of the actual life of the church.” He holds the classical doctrines of the sacraments, the Trinity, and Christ in high esteem, while challenging the conventional myth that the apostolic fathers simply superimposed sophisticated Greek categories upon a primitive New Testament gospel.

Few theologians in fact have a greater appreciation of patristics. Tillich praises Justin Martyr for showing the presence of the Logos, or God’s self-manifestation, beyond the boundaries of the Church. Origin for finding God as “being” itself (and here Tillich might be more careful), Dionysius the Areopagite for defining “the God above God,” and Augustine for refusing to see God as a mere object besides other objects. Like the drafters of the Hartford Appeal, Tillich warned against the continual recurrence of Pelagianism; despite the teachings of the British theologian, religion is not sheer morality.

The Middle Ages, Tillich claims, were not the “Dark Ages” and should not be treated with contempt. The medieval church was open to many philosophical directions, bearing little of the rigidity associated with post-Tridentine Catholicism. Tillich shows that mysticism and scholasticism (which he much respects) went hand in hand and that much insight was lost when the realist sense of universals (i.e. the nature of things, the essences) was lost to the nominalists. He praises a variety of figures: Abelard of Paris for contributing a dialectical method, Bernard of Clairvaux for noting that faith can only become real through experience, Nicholas of Cusa for seeing the presence of the infinite in everything finite, and St. Francis of Assisi—“the father of the renaissance”—for showing God as the Father of nature and of all beings.

Approaching the Reformation, Tillich stresses the contribution of Luther whose “experience of God” literally “transformed the surface of the earth.” The German reformer, Tillich writes entered into an “I-thou relationship” with God; Luther did not speak of intellectual justification by an absurd notion—but rather the openness to divine grace. Luther’s stress on total depravity, so Tillich notes, does not mean that there is nothing good in man, but that “man is distorted, or in conflict with himself, in the center of his professional life.” Attacking a stereotype still expounded by such writers as William L. Shirer, Tillich denied that Luther advocated an tribal or racial ideology, or was in any sense responsible for the rise of Nazism.

Going on to modern philosophy, Tillich lauds Kant for stressing the finitude of man, Schleiermacher for emphasizing man’s unconditional dependence. Hegel, says Tillich, is significant for his stress on God as the ground from which and to which all things exist; those philosophers and historians who stress the dialectic of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” do him an injustice. Contrary to myth, Hegel never envisioned a centralized economy and government as the culmination of history. Instead, so Tillich claims, he called for a city-state, a Greek polis, that united religion and culture and fostered democratic participation. Tillich praises Kierkegaard for showing the “leap” of faith but sees danger in the kind of rootless existentialism that tells “someone to jump without giving him the direction.”

Such a survey only samples the richness of Tillich’s thought, just as Williamson only indirectly covers the insights of the four theologians. If Tillich’s book has one drawback, it is this: Tillich turns many theologians of the past into progenitors of his own thought, and hence he must continually be checked against primary material. Relating the sacred and secular in ways that are neither glib nor incipid is a task still lying before us. Berger and Neuhaus indicate the problem, Williamson offers a method, and Tillich presents the heritage upon which to build.

LIBERTARIAN CLASSICS

“When fascism comes. . .it will appear in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism.”—John T. Flynn

Writing in the early 1940’s, Flynn analyzed German and Italian fascism and charged that America was developing domestic fascism through a growing dependence on militarism, a merging of economic and political power in the corporate state, and an imperialistic foreign policy. “One of the best and most readable analyses of fascism.” —Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. $3.45

La Boetie’s classic 16th century argument that tyranny depends on the consent of the ruled has profoundly influenced the tradition of civil disobedience. The introduction, by Murray N. Rothbard, provides a clear analysis of La Boetie’s political thought. “Ought to be one of the central documents in the library of anyone concerned with human liberty. “—Stanley Milgram $7.95, 2.95

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 8

AUGUST, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

Tax Rebellion in Illinois!

Shout hosannahs! Ring dem bells! A mighty property tax strike is now sweeping the northern suburbs of Chicago, and for once, the ideological and organizational leadership of the rebellion is being provided by libertarians rather than by Birchers or Cartoites.

It all began with a recent massive property reassessment conducted in the northern quadrant of Cook County, Illinois. The reassessments suddenly boosted property taxes by very large amounts; most raises were in the 50-65% range; other tax bills increased by as much as 300%.

When the property tax bills were sent out, the citizens of the North Shore reacted with shock and anger. At first the reaction was outraged but inchoate; phone calls bombarded the Cook County Assessors Office. Complaints also deluged the Chicago Tribune, which initiated public knowledge of the firestorm of grievance by printing some of the complaints in a front-page article. Many of the letters were a cry from the heart, asking, in effect, where is the leadership, where is the organization, that can organize and redress my grievances? Thus, one outraged taxpayer wrote; “I bitterly resent the government trying to steal my house from me, and that’s what they’re doing.” Another poured out his frustration in the Chicago Tribune article: “I just don’t know what to do. It’s frustrating as hell. I hear people talk about a revolution, but I don’t know how to revolt.”

As soon as the article was published, libertarian activists from the Libertarian Party of Illinois and the National Taxpayers United (the Illinois affiliate of the National Taxpayers Union) saw their opportunity and seized it. A meeting was arranged in Evanston between representatives from the LPI and NTU, and an Evanston resident quoted in the Tribune article. The meeting formed a Taxpayers Protest Committee, with Leonard Hartmann, the quoted Evanston resident, at its head. James L. Tobin, 31-year old economist and bank auditor and Illinois head of the NTU who was to become the principal leader of the tax rebellion, urged an outright tax strike; he was ably seconded by Milton Mueller, chairman of the Libertarian Party of Illinois.

The committee decided to call a “town hall” type meeting in Evanston to see if the property taxpayers would be willing to go along with an outright tax strike—a refusal to pay the assessed taxes. Notice of the meeting ran only in the early editions of the Chicago Tribune; largely, the organizers relied merely on word-of-mouth.

The committee expected about 50 people to appear at the meeting, which was held on the night of August 3 in the Evanston Public Library. Instead, 200 citizens showed up. Hartmann, without a libertarian background, argued for a legal protest: paying the taxes while protesting and appealing the assessments. But James Tobin far better expressed the radical spirit of the meeting by calling for an open tax strike. “We all know we’ve had big taxes thrown on our backs,” Tobin-charged. “And now it has come down to what we’re going to do about it. Are we going to let city hall control our lives, or are we going to make enough noise for them to listen to us.” It is particularly gratifying to the editor of the Lib. Forum that his Conceived in Liberty was brandished aloft by Tobin as he explained why it was not “unpatriotic” to refuse tax payments, giving examples from the book of early American tax revolts. Tobin asserted that “We’ve gotten to the point where we are afraid of our government, afraid of what it can do to us. It’s time somebody stood up and pointed the finger!”

Tobin also presented a well-thought out set of demands for the tax strike. The demands included: (a) extending the Aug. 15 deadline for property tax payments three months; (b) freezing assessments at the old rate, so that taxes do not go up along with government-created inflation; (c) no increase in tax rates without a publicly-announced referendum; (d) allowing small groups of taxpayers to obtain referenda for reducing tax rates; and (e) full amnesty for the tax strikers.

The sentiment of the crowd was overwhelmingly in favor of the tax strike, which was only opposed by two persons. Typical of the sentiment was the charge by a German immigrant in Evanston that when he attempted to challenge his increased assessment, the Assessors told him that he had to wait until he received his bill; but after he received the bill, the office told him that he would have had to challenge the assessment before the bill was sent. “These are Nazi tactics!” the man charged.

The organizers passed the hat at the meeting and raised over $400 for printing and for an advertisement in a local paper. More important was the excellent publicity generated by the meeting: a Tribune article, a page 3 article in the Chicago Daily News replete with pictures; and coverage by two TV stations and several radio stations.

Leafleting the rest of the North Shore, meetings burgeoned in other townships, such as Glenview, Palatine, and Wilmette. The New York Times gave full coverage, plus photograph, to a later meeting in Evanston, held on August 18 at the First United Methodist Church. The meeting of 350 homeowners “shouted their approval” as Jim Tobin charged that “Taxes are immoral.” (Indeed, nationwide TV coverage has shown “Taxation is Theft” placards being brandished at these Illinois tax protest meetings.) Tobin told the cheering throng that “You can never call a tax fair when you are forced to pay against your will. It’s immoral to force me to pay for educational facilities when I don’t have any children to send to school. It’s immoral to force the elderly and retired to pay for schools that are no use to them.” In this way, Tobin escalated the analysis, and raised the libertarian consciousness of his listeners by widening the attack to the public school system itself—the “consumer” of the bulk of all property taxes across the country.

In its August issue announcing the strike, the Illinois Libertarian, the newsletter of the LPL concludes its informative article by saying that “How effective the strike will be is dependent upon many unpredicatable things. But by any standard, our efforts thus far have been extremely rewarding, and if the politicians aren’t paying attention they’ll be sorry. The strike may not cripple the County government or even come near it, but even so, thousands of people have either taken actions or have been exposed to ideas which question the very legitimacy of government.”

But, in a sense, this thoughtful conclusion underestimates the impact of the Illinois tax strike. For the later New York Times article indicates clearly that the politicians have indeed been paying attention, and are scared stiff. The pattern of the New Jersey income tax protest movement of last year is repeating itself, with politicians scrambling to cover their flanks.

Thus, when Tobin and a throng of protestors showed up at the Governor’s office in Chicago to demand a special session of the Legislature to redress the grievances, the “discomforted” Governor James (“Big. Jim”) Thompson promised to consider the request, and “expressed sympathy with the group’s aims.” At the August 18 Evanston meeting, several government officials showed up to try to explain the tax increase. They were received with “jeers and boos”, but despite that, “the officials gave sympathetic responses and some concessions to the taxpayers’ demands.” Thus, George Dunne, chief executive officer of Cook County, pledged at the meeting to support a move in the Legislature to roll back property taxes. The same pledge was made by the counsel for Thomas M. Tully, the Cook County assessor. The counsel, Dan Pierce, agreed with the protestors that he doesn’t understand why the country’s budget is so high. “There’s no question that the taxes are too high”, Pierce conceded; he particularly didn’t understand why school district budgets had doubled in the last seven years in much of Cook County, at a time when school enrollments were declining.

Thus, libertarians have leaped in to discover and give voice to the anti-government and anti-war grievances of their fellow-citizens. Not only have they been mobilized for libertarian action and been educated in libertarian ideas (including opposition to the public schools) and in the idea that taxation is theft, but the politicians have begun to knuckle under to the vociferous demands and actions. Politicians, scared of their jobs and of the voters, will buckle under pressure, and this has already been demonstrated in Illinois. Finally, the tax rebellion shows the great importance of libertarian activists and organizations—such as the LPI and NTU—being already in place to take advantage of and take the lead in mass protests and mass movements against statism.

(See the Chicago Daily News, August 4; the New York Times, Aug. 20; the Illinois Libertarian August, 1977. The Illinois Libertarian may be obtained from LPI, P.O. Box 1776, Chicago, Ill. 60690. Anyone interested in obtaining information about the Illinois tax strike, may call 312-525-6231 or 312-763-5122 during the day, or 312-287-0969 in the evenings.

Panama Canal Question

The Panama Canal treaty looms as the hottest issue yet in the Carter administration. It is the issue on which Ronnie Reagan almost rode to glory last year. What are the issues at stake here?

In the first place, the Panama Canal question is a splendid way in which to look upon the face of the Right-wing, in all of its pristine purity. For here there are no phony Red Herrings, no anti-Communism, that can plausibly be dragged across the trail. There is no question here of a Soviet threat, no Gulags, there is just naked, unabashed American Imperialism. And yet, or rather, and therefore, here is truly an issue to make Conservative juices flow. Give up sovereignty over the Canal? “Never, sir!” proclaim our home-grown Colonel Blimps.

Not only does the Panama question strip away the anti-Communist camouflage; it also dispenses with anti-socialism and anti-statism as well. For defending the Panama Canal Zone is defending—and does the right-wing know this, I wonder?—an enclave of pure socialism within U.S. territory. In short, not only is the Canal Zone owned by the U.S. government, but virtually all citizens there are employees of the U.S. government-owned and operated Panama Canal Company. So the Conservatives want us to die to the last man not only for naked American imperialism and “sovereignty”, but also for an enclave of American state socialism. We should ask ourselves: why don’t the conservatives care about that? The answer evidently is that the conservatives are fashioned Imperialists who don’t give a hoot about libertarian or anti-statist concerns. One more striking example of the fact that Reaganite Conservatism is antithetical to liberty.

But isn’t the Canal Zone “rightfully” the U.S.’s? Didn’t we buy it or something? The answer is no, the U.S. stole it, in an egregious power grab by America’s first openly imperialist President, the evil Teddy Roosevelt. T. R. engineered a phony revolution in the Panama section of Colombia, a “revolution” fought and paid for by U.S. troops and employees, after which our new puppet regime sold us the rights to the Canal and the Zone. Teddy engineered the coup because the government of Colombia wanted a $10 million cut from the $40 million which the U.S. government had agreed to pay the old bankrupt French Panama Canal Co. for its rights to build the canal. The U.S. wanted the Panama Canal Co. to get the full $40 million. When T. R. made his massive intervention, he conned the American public into believing that he was saving the American taxpayers from an extra $10 million holdup by Colombia; instead, it was simply a question of division of the spoils.

Why was Teddy Roosevelt so worried about the income not going to the French Panama Canal Co.? Because it was no longer “French.” It had secretly been bought up by a coalition of Wall St. speculators, headed by J. P. Morgan, and including Teddy’s own brother-in-law, Douglas E. Robinson. The new canal company hired the eminent Wall St. lawyer, William N. Cromwell, to get the American money, and it was Cromwell, sitting in the White House itself, who wrote Roosevelt’s dispatches and engineered the entire operation. After the company got the $40 million, much of it was funnelled by Cromwell into the eager hands of the New York real-estate investments of Teddy’s kinsman Douglas Robinson. Is this the process that is supposed to sanctify U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal and the Zone until death do us part?

The Panamanians, understandably, are familiar with the history of the Panama grab even if we are not. Hence the continuing agitation, threat of uprising, etc. The libertarian policy on the Canal is clear and simple: to liquidate the U.S. government operation in the form of the Panama Canal Co., and to withdraw U.S. troops from the Zone and U.S. “sovereignty” over the zone. In short, to get the heck out, and the sooner the better.

The New Left weekly, In These Times, correctly taunts the Conservatives on the socialism of the Canal Zone:

“Right-wingers are lionizing President Theodore Roosevelt, who had no use for their neanderthal ‘free market’ ideology. . . . They are less vocal in noting that the Canal represents everything they denounce as ‘socialism’ and ‘welfare statism.’ The canal’s construction was and remains the largest single public works ever undertaken by the American government. . . . Private enterprise is prohibited from the Canal Zone; and the American residents benefit from subsidized housing, public transportation, publicly owned retail stores, and ‘socialized’ medicine: Success and a high standard of living without the profit motive. No wonder the American canal zone residents don’t want to come home to capitalist America, They’re very happy with their ‘socialist’ colony.”
(In These Times, August 24-30, 1977).

Of course, the shoe is also on the New Leftists’ foot; for according to their own ideology, these Zonians are imperialist and militarist—in short, socialist—exploiters of the American public as well as of the Panamanians. But we should all be able to agree: Get the Zonians off our backs!

In contrast to the Conservatives, the new Libertarian Party Platform for 1977-78 is clear and unequivocal—and libertarian—on the Panama Canal issue: “The United States should liquidate its government-run canal operation in Panama and withdraw all U.S. troops from the Canal Zone.” At the beginning of the new “Colonialism” plank in which this sentence appears, we now have: “United States colonialism has left a legacy of property confiscation, economic manipulation, and overextended defense boundaries. . . .Land seized by the U.S. government should be returned to its rightful owners.”

(Those interested in utilitarian arguments may ponder the following: even the Pentagon concedes that the Canal is not now vital to U.S. defense; only 7% of East Coast-West Coast trade passes through the Canal, and only 8% of U.S. foreign trade; and the largest U.S. warships and oil supertankers can’t pass through the Canal because of its small size.)

In the light of these principles, where should libertarians stand on the hot issue of the Carter treaty? Does it really “surrender” the canal and the Zone to the Panamanians?

Unfortunately, it does not. The treaty is a cunning and crafty way of adjusting imperialism to the current world, of preserving imperialism while recognizing “that continued naked American occupation of the Canal Zone and control of the canal serve as a festering sore, poisoning American diplomatic relations throughout Latin America.” (Michael Bauman, “The New Theft of the Panama Canal,” Intercontinental Press, August 29, 1977).

In fact, the only thing the U.S. gives up in the treaty is formal sovereignty over the Canal Zone and its seemingly perpetual ownership of the canal. The sovereignty over the Canal Zone the U.S. relinquishes in three years, it is true, but we still retain extra-territoriality in violation of international law: Americans retain U.S. legal rights in Panamanian courts, and Americans sentenced to jail terms will serve them in the U.S. Beyond this, we give up next to nothing. The U.S. gets to keep full control of the canal until the year 2000, and it gets to maintain its military force in Panama until the year 2000 as well. But, even after the year 2000, the U.S. retains the permanent right to intervene militarily in Panama to preserve the continued operation and the “neutrality” of the canal, and it gets to decide when that “neutrality” is threatened. It is important to realize that there are no limits in this treaty on the actions that the U.S. will be able to take after the year 2000 to preserve what it deems to be the Canal’s neutrality. And, furthermore, as part of what the treaty considers to be such “neutrality”, the treaty explicitly guarantees U.S. warships the permanent right to go through the canal without restriction and without conditions.

In short, the Panama treaty does not at all abandon U.S. imperialism; instead, this imperialism retreats from its naked and offensive older form, to a more sophisticated and hence more effective modern variety of “neo-imperialism”. The form of imperialism is abandoned, but the content remains as rabid as ever. To soften the blow to Panamanian dictator General Torrijos, the U.S. sweetens the pot by paying $50-$S0 million a year until 2000 A.D.—a big increase from the $2 million per annum we pay now; plus $300 million in U.S. government aids and credits, and the U.S. will “facilitate” $1 billion of U.S. investments and loans in Panama.

We hate to hand the right-wing any victories in foreign affairs, even if for totally wrong reasons: but we have to conclude reluctantly but firmly that the Panama treaty should be defeated. It is true that half a loaf is better than none; but this treaty would not be-half a loaf; it would not halfway dismantle American imperialism in Panama; it would simply be providing a figleaf (to mix a metaphor) for continued and even increased U.S. domination (note that we now get Panamanian agreement to the permanent U.S. right of military intervention in the canal.) The treaty, if ratified in both countries, would defuse mounting Latin American opposition to U.S. imperialism and dupe the anti-imperialist movement everywhere.

While it is true that the dumbright (as Lawrence Dennis aptly named it) scents treason in the treaty, let us note the very different responses from far more sophisticated imperialist circles. Thus, Henry Kissinger lauded the treaty and reported that General Brown and negotiator Ellsworth Bunker assured him that “the new treaty marks an improvement over the present situation” for “secure access” to the Panama Canal. (Washington Post, August 18). Negotiator Sol Linowitz hailed the treaty as a “good investment” which “enhances the national security interests of the United States.”

But most revealing of all is the editorial support for the Panama treaty by National Review. NR begins by hailing the history of the Canal, claiming that it was not imperialism because the Canal company did not make a profit (ignoring the big payment to the Morgan speculators and their quick resale of stock to the U.S. government at double the value of their investment:) It also salutes Conservatives’ pride in the history of American foreign policy. But then, NR says, we should realize that “our own military men support the treaty on the ground that the Canal can be better defended with the treaty than without it.” Why? Because Panama agrees to U.S. defense of the Canal first, by air and sea against any external attack. Moreover, the more important guerrilla attack from within Panama would now be less likely because such a defense “could be done far better together with Panama than without it; or worse, against it.” In short, the Panamanian government would now be ranged against such guerrillas rather than for them.

Just as we, as libertarians, should be worried about defusing anti-imperialist sentiments throughout the world on Panama should the treaty be ratified, National Review gives such very defusion as one of its major arguments for support of the treaty:

“Let us suppose that the treaty, is defeated in Congress—as well it might be. What then? We hardly need Ambassador Bunker to remind us of the predictable consequences in Panama, in Latin America, in the United Nations, in the world. Are we ready to hold the Canal against all possible assaults, political, military, in the guerrilla minefield, in the media, the OAS, and the UN?”

Given these realities, NR concludes that U.S. taking up arms instead of accepting the treaty is unnecessary:

“Based on the outline of the proposed treaty there seems to be no necessary reason to sound the call to arms. We retain what is essential until 2000 A. D. and even then will play an important part as well as some contingent defense role. . . .And what is most important, we would almost-surely be in a stronger position to act at some later time in response to an actual threat or violation of the treaty than we would be now in defense of our own refusal to ratify.” (National Review, September 2, 1977).

Once again, as it has done so many times in matters of military and foreign policy, National Review provides a kind of negative touchstone for libertarians. The Panama treaty should be rejected. Libertarians, in opposing the treaty, must of course make clear our diametrically opposed perspective to the Reaganites and Birchers: that we are worried about preserving U.S. imperialism while they are worried about getting rid of it.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Slighter

Annie Hall, dir. by Woody Allen. With Allen and Diane Keaton.

This is Woody Allen’s best film to date. I went to this movie on my guard because of my fellow critics’ “assurances” that Annie Hall, at long last, transcended “mere humor” to acute social significance. But don’t you believe it; Annie Hall is a constant stream of hilarious, scintillating wit. The movie is totally ethnic; it sparkles with “in” ethnic references and local references to New York. As a matter of fact, the best way to approach Annie Hall is to be a Jewish intellectual from the West Side of Manhattan. But Outlanders seem to enjoy the film, too, although one sometimes wonders how. New Yorkers will particularly enjoy Woody’s blistering rending of Los Angeles life and culture, and his enthusiasm for New York. Allen sums up the contrast between Jewish and Gentile family eating habits in a few hilarious moments, doing in a short space what it took Goodbye Columbus a couple of hours to convey. In sum, see Annie Hall by all means; you will find yourself repeating the humorous lines for days afterwards.

The Spy Who Loved Me. dir. by Lewis Gilbert. With Roger Moore and Barbara Bach. This is a marvelous new James Bond epic, close to the spirit and verve of the earlier Bond movies in contrast to some of the inferior later films. We are back to high and continuing action, superb gadgets, fascinating villains, and Bond triumphing coolly and elegantly through it all. There are many echoes and resonances of earlier Bond films, such as the great train sequence in From Russia With Love, which still ranks as unquestionably the best of the Bond movies. The initial precredits skiing sequence is superb and one of the best things in the movie.

Of course, for most of us Bond fans, Sean Connery, in the hokey language of the trade, is James Bond. But Connery was getting visibly over the hill in his last couple of Bond films. In the preceding Bond, Roger Moore had been a quasi-disaster; instead of the tough, competent Connery we had Moore the smirking dandy, who left Bond only with a rather foppish elegance. But this is remedied in The Spy Who Loves Me. Moore still does not come close to Connery, but his smirk is gone, and his face, older and a bit more weathered now, is far closer to a plausible Bond.

Unfortunately, Barbara Bach, in contrast to the other gorgeous females in the Bond series, can’t act worth a hoot, and wanders around with a peculiarly fixed and wooden expression. (The contrast with the marvelous Daniele Bianchi in From Russia With Love is a painful one.) However, Curt Jurgens makes a highly satisfactory villain, Moneypenny and M are back, and all’s right with the movie world—at least for now.

Convention Report

by Milton Mueller

(The National Convention of the Libertarian Party, held on July 14-17 at San Francisco, was the most successful LP convention to date. The convention attracted 1200 people, by far the largest libertarian gathering so far, and its proceedings were well and favorably reported by the local media. Unprecedented harmony and consensus reigned, and the LP platform was updated and improved amidst only distant shadows of the often bitter controversy of the past. In this issue we publish your editor’s Keynote Address for this convention. Below, we are happy to reprint with permission Milton Mueller’s intelligent and perceptive report on the convention which appeared in the August 1977 issue of the Illinois Libertarian, the newsletter of the Libertarian Party of Illinois. Mr. Mueller is state chairman of the Illinois party, and was a member of the 1977 national LP Platform Committee.—Ed. Note.)

Chicago had just decided to “declare war” on pornography. But the City Council was exceeded in its asininity by the weather, which was hot enough to make the entire city sluggish. For those of us able to go, the National Convention could not have come at a better time.

We flew into San Francisco on the midnight plane, for reasons of economy. The broken coastline around San Francisco is full of islands and peninsulas, such that our descent into the bay revealed an intricate web of lights floating over the dark ocean. The sight erased all thoughts of Chicago and its petty dictators.

National Conventions tend to do things like that: they pluck people out of political reality, and, for a few euphoric days, deceive them into experiencing libertarianism as the center of the political universe. However, I believe that this convention made that experience a little bit more justified than before.

For one thing, despite the important tasks of electing a new National Committee and Party officers; despite rewriting the platform, there were no big fights at this convention, and no lingering factions. Even more notable was the fact that with the exception of Nathaniel Branden, none of the featured speakers were libertarians. Eugene McCarthy, Timothy Leary, John Marks, Tony Sullivan, Margo St. James Earl Ravenal, even Ron Paul—all are significant figures from the “real world” who share our concern for individual freedom in certain areas, but are not Libertarians with-a-capital-L. Our ability to interact with such people is an important part of entering the political mainstream.

Libertarian Parnassus, or, the Platform Committee

The first part of the convention to actually convene was the platform committee. We libertarians are unique in the importance we attach to our platform. Since we are the only Party that really stands for anything, this is quite appropriate. However, work on the platform has been getting progressively shorter every business convention. This time, the platform committee actually finished on schedule, in contrast to the A.M. bickerings of 1974, and the post-midnight hassles of 1975. In addition, there were fewer proposals for changes than in any previous year. All this is indicative of a very important point: the platform proceedings have served as an excellent vehicle for arriving at a broad consensus as to what constitutes libertarianism. It is the Party’s “consciousness-raising” device: its positions, arrived at after long debate and approved by a 2/3 vote, are the Party’s most effective weapon against compromise and opportunism. I urge every Party member who was not at the Convention to obtain a copy of the new platform as soon as it is available—and to read every plank in it.

I served on the platform committee, along with LPI members Joe Cobb and David Theroux. There were big-name libertarians like Ralph Raico, Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs, as well as representatives from the ten states with the largest membership—who ought to be named as well, but we don’t have the space. The bulk of our work consisted of adding topical references, rewriting or expanding old planks, and making the language clearer in its implications.

There were only two areas of substantive disagreement. One was foreign policy, as expected. A number of people from the Florida LP criticized the foreign policy section of our platform for leaving doubts in their minds about the Libertarian Party’s commitment to a strong national defense. The LP platform, as everyone should know, calls for reducing the overall size and cost of our governmental defense establishment, withdrawal of American troops from around the world, negotiations toward nuclear disarmament, and independence for all colonial possessions, including the Panama Canal Zone.

These things tend to make many former conservatives rather nervous. And the foreign policy debate, far from being a serious challenge to the well-established libertarian policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs, simply reflected this nervousness. The critics’ testimony all followed a similar pattern: there were expressions of sober concern about the ability of the U.S. to survive, grave references to the Soviet Union, all leading to a request that the platform give “assurances” that the Libertarian Party believed that the U.S. military defense should be “unquestionably” adequate. When speaking in generalities, these critics of our foreign policy all sounded rather cold-warrish, making references as they did to Soviet dominance of the world, the “struggle between freedom and slavery,” and so on. However, when pinned to specifics by questions from members of the platform committee, they generally acquiesced to the logic of non-interventionism. Their rhetoric and, I think, their feelings, were conservative; their minds were libertarian. The only specific changes they proposed for the platform were 1) a plank condemning terrorism, which was unobjectionable if the label “terrorism” is not used to slander legitimate acts of rebellion; and 2) a plank calling upon the government to limit trade with an “enemy” in time of war if the government thought such trade would impair our capacity for defense, which clearly contradicts libertarian principles, and had little support on the floor. The conservative foreign policy rebellion turned out to be a real fizzler.

There was another area of substantive disagreement, one with far-reaching implications left unresolved by both the platform committee and the Convention as a whole. These arguments, which arose constantly, centered on applying libertarian logic within the totally non-libertarian context of the existing government. As Murray Rothbard put it; how do we de-Statize society, without violating property rights? Should we sell government property, or turn it over to the heirs of some ancient title-holder, or homestead it? Do Libertarian elected officials have a right to their tax-supported salaries?.

One proposal put forth by W. Evers and Rothbard exemplifies the knotty conceptual probelms involved in de-Statizing. They proposed a new platform plank on “Government Employees,” which would extend the Hatch Act (which prohibits federal employees from running for political office) to all state and local employees, and also advocated prohibiting government employees from lobbying—and voting—duo to the conflict of interest involved.

Now clearly, there is a conflict of interest when thousands of government employees vote for legislation which fattens their wallets at the taxpayers’ expense. Government employees have been instrumental, for example, in defeating tax limitation referenda. The problem is getting more pronounced as the proportion of public sector employees grows in proportion to the private sector. But the opponents of this measure asked: why stop with government employees? Any individual or group voting for a government program from which it will benefit should, by the same logic, be denied voting rights. But disenfranchisement of anyone is a very, very touchy subject, given the fact that votes can protect people’s rights as well as violate them. Whether justified or not, disenfranchisement has ominous, even fascist, overtones to many people; such a plank would be an easy target for a quote out of context seeking to smear the Party. The Convention tabled the issue, after an evenly divided platform committee sent it to the floor.

New Officers Run Unopposed

As far as dry, old convention business goes, things were changed, but none of the changes make good copy. For example, the country was divided up into new regions; Illinois’ new regional partners are Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin. David Bergland was elected our new national chairman, M. L. Hanson was elected vice-chair, Greg Clark was re-elected secretary, and Paul Allen was elected treasurer. They all ran unopposed.

Bob Meier, former Illinois resident, announced his retirement as Executive Director at the convention. The National Party’s loss is our gain, however; Bob plans to return to DeKalb and stay active as a speaker and lecturer.

But the question remains: how do we propose to get rid of the government, its property and its contracts and its power, without being (or appearing to be) as arbitrary and destructive as the government itself was when it grabbed it? Choosing a just and efficacious theory of de-statizing is not an academic question but a tactical one of extreme practical importance for the Party. This issue will have to be faced by libertarian thinkers and future platform committees.

The committee had its lighter moments, too. Some of the more humorous occurrences were not intended to be funny. One person testifying before the platform committee sincerely recommended putting a tribute to Ayn Rand on the first page of our platform. (Nobody would gag at the idea as much as Rand herself, I’m sure.) Bill Evers at one point proposed to replace the word (oysters” with the word “shellfish” in a section on the Law of The Sea. “This,” he said, “is my tribute to Ayn Rand—the Virtue of Shellfishness,” To top it off, one thoughtful fellow proposed a whole new platform plank—on extraterrestrials. While he was of course sincere in his concern for the rights of visitors from another planet, I think the libertarian platform is bizarre enough to many people already, without making it downright zany.

Keynote Address to the LP Convention

by M. Rothbard

I am honored and delighted to be here, and particularly happy that the theme of this convention is Turning Point, 1777/1977. For one thing, it means that the Libertarian Party is, to my knowledge, the only organization in the country that realizes that the Bicentennial does not merely apply to 1776/1976. The official governmental Bicentennial Commission has just shut up shop, convinced that its task is done. The left-wing People’s Bicentennial Commission has not been heard from for the entire year. It seems that only the Libertarian Party understands that the American Revolution did not end in 1776; in fact, the Revolution began a year before the official Bicentennial, in 1775, and it ended eight grueling years later, in 1783. We should be celebrating the bicentennial for eight years, and not just for a few months of hoopla.

But there is greater significance to the Libertarian commemoration of 1777 than the mere fact that we are better historians than everyone else. There is something unfortunately symbolic about confining one’s celebration to 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. For as noble, as exciting, as profoundly libertarian as the Declaration was, it was still the necessary but not sufficient first step in the victory of what we have correctly identified as the First Libertarian Revolution. The Declaration was the rhetoric, the ideology, that set the stage; but the American revolutionaries, our libertarian forefathers, were not only interested in setting forth a glorious set of principles; having done that, they were also interested in action, in putting these principles into practice in the real world, in transforming the real world to give those principles life. The American revolutionaries set themselves a goal: to transform reality so as to bring the rhetoric of the Declaration into living practice. The American Revolution was the process of struggle by which the revolutionaries pursued their goal and achieved their victory. It is only because of their dedicated actions that we, their descendants, can celebrate the 4th of July and the Declaration of Independence.

I have long been convinced that the process of becoming a libertarian—whether it happens gradually or in a blinding flash of conversion—is a twofold rather than a single process. If we may use a now familiar rhetoric, we might say that the true libertarian is “born again”, that is, that the process of conversion to liberty takes place in two distinct—though sometimes rapidly succeeding—stages. The first conversion is what we might call the “baptism of reason”—the moment or moments when the person becomes convinced that liberty is the best, and the only just, social system for mankind. He or she realizes that liberty is the true, the good, and the beautiful. But I have become increasingly convinced that this realization is only the first step to becoming a full-fledged libertarian. To be truly “born again”, the libertarian must experience what we might call a second baptism, the “baptism of will”. That is, he must be driven by his rational insight to dedicate himself to the mighty goal of bringing about the victory of liberty, of libertarian principles, in the real world. He must set out to transform reality in accordance with his ideal vision. In short, the truly complete libertarian, the “born again” libertarian, if you will, is not content with recognizing the truth of liberty as the best social system; he cannot and will not rest content until that system, that set of principles, has triumphed in the world of reality. Reason and will are thus fused in a mighty and unflinching determination to carry on the struggle until the victory of liberty over statism has been achieved. The American revolutionaries pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to their struggle for liberty and independence. They were not parlor libertarians; they were determined to settle for nothing less than victory, regardless of how long or how arduous the task. And one thing is certain: they never could have won without that iron determination; for otherwise, they would have wilted very early: after Long Island, or Fort Washington, or Valley Forge. The American revolutionaries would settle for nothing less than victory; can we fail to follow their florious example?

I am convinced that our primary task, now, as libertarians, is not to hassle with each other on the precise role of the courts or the police in the eventual free society, nor over die proper detailed strategy or tactics of achieving it. As important as these questions are, our most vital task is for each and every one of us to achieve the baptism of will, that is, to adopt and hold high—forever—the victory of liberty as our primary, overriding political goal. This is what we are all about, we libertarians. To paraphrase a very different ideologist, our task is not simply to understand the world but also to change it. And that is why we libertarians call ourselves a “movement”; Webster’s defines “movement” as a “connected and long continued series of acts and events tending toward some more or less definite and. . .as, the Tractarian movement; the prohibition movement”. Our common end, of course, is the victory of liberty over statism.

I used to think that adopting the victory of liberty as the overriding goal must be almost self-evident to all libertarians—until I began to find those who turned pale and fled when the word “victory” was mentioned. For there are all too many libertarians who apparently believe that the point of the whole enterprise is not triumph in the real world, but all sorts of other motivations, ranging from contemplating the beautiful intellectual edifice of the libertarian system to selling each other dried beans to bearing moral witness to the rightness or righteousness of the libertarian world-view. There is, I suppose, a certain satisfaction in knowing, or even proclaiming, that we are right and that everybody else is wrong and misguided. But, in the long run, this and the other motivations are only frivolous; they are simply not worthy of respect. They are not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the American revolutionaries who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause.

The major serious objection to holding victory as our goal is that such a goal can only be hopeless and absurd. The State, it is said, is mighty, pervasive, and all-powerful; and who are we but a tiny handful of men and women, dwarfed by the legions of the State? But this sort of thinking is impressionistic and superficial; geared to the range of the present moment, it overlooks the underlying trends of historical events. Here, in particular, we can take hope and inspiration from the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. For, I can assure you, to the observers of that day, the American cause looked totally hopeless. How could a handful of ragged, untrained soldiers hope to defeat the mightiest State, the mightiest Empire of the eighteenth century? To all knowledgeable people, the American cause seemed hopelessly quixotic and absurd, Utopian and unrealistic. For, think of it: In all of history there had never been a successful mass revolution from below against a strong ruling State. So how could this American rabble possibly succeed? And yet—we did it! We won! We performed the impossible.

The first libertarian revolution succeeded, and we can do the same—but we, too, must have the will to triumph, to accept nothing less than total victory.

Of course, in the immediate present, any existing State may look all-powerful, while opposition movements may seem small and puny. But, in a few short years, how the tables may be turned! State after State has seemed all-powerful almost to the day of its collapse and demise, while numerous successful ideological movements have flowered from a tiny handful to triumph a few short years later.

And no State has seemed more powerful than did the British Empire at the start of the American revolutionary war. It was easy to look superficially at the first two years of that war and conclude that all was inevitably lost. Washington’s Continental Army had almost been wiped out in New York; Howe’s army had conquered the American capital at Philadelphia. Washington’s forces froze and starved through the winter at Valley Forge, and St. Leger and Burgoyne were marching down from Canada to meet at Albany and then proceed to New York City and cut America in two.

As everyone knows, the turning point of the war came in late 1777, when Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne’s once mighty British army was surrounded and forced to surrender at Saratoga. But what were the factors that brought about this fateful turn and that carried the Americans through the rest of the lengthy conflict to victory?

There are many causal facts that we could mention, including the overweening self-confidence of the British, who contemptuously dismissed Americans as a militarily untrained rabble; there is also the determination and dedication of the Americans, civilian and military. But what I would like to concentrate on here is the fact that the American revolutionary leaders adopted and developed what would nowadays be called a “mass line”. That is, in contrast to conservatives, whether of 1777 or 1977, the American revolutionaries were not afraid of the mass of the American public. On the contrary, they realized that the great bulk of Americans were being oppressed by the British, and that the public could be brought to see this and to act upon that knowledge.

And sure enough, the great strength of the American armed forces is that they relied upon, indeed blended with, the civilian population. In a deep sense they were that population. The Americans were a people in arms, a mobile people that knew their particular terrain, and who were imbued with a deep sense of their rights and of the iniquity of the British invasion of those rights. When combatting Burgoyne, the Americans, led by British-born libertarian General Horatio Gates, shrewedly avoided, until the very end at Saratoga, direct confrontation with the superior firepower of the highly trained British invasion force. Instead, Gates, aided by influxes of armed civilians who joined the fray as their own counties and districts were being invaded, wore down the British forces by guerrilla harassment. An example particularly heart-warming to libertarians, is the case of General John Stark, who had resigned from the American army and retired to his native New Hampshire in pique at shabby treatment by his superiors. But when a troop sent out by Burgoyne invaded southwestern Vermont, Stark rose up, mobilized the militia and other volunteers from New Hampshire and Vermont, and clobbered the British troops at the Battle of Bennington.

Gates and Stark, and later the victor of the decisive final Southern campaign, General Nathaniel Greene, were following the theories and the vision of their mentor, the forgotten and unsung hero of the revolutionary war, General Charles Lee, second in command of the American army during the first years of the war. Lee was a fascinating character, an English military genius and soldier of fortune and a radical laissez-faire libertarian, who, as soon as he heard of the events leading up to the Boston Tea Party and the developing break with his native country, rushed to America to take part in the revolution. It was Lee who fused the political and the military together to develop the principles, strategies, and tactics of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, which he called “people’s war”. Every American military victory in the war was fought on people’s war, guerrilla principles; every defeat was suffered when America tried to play the age-old game of inter-State warfare between two disciplined State armies marching to meet each other in open frontal combat.

Thus, Lee and his disciples worked out and applied the military implications of a mass line, of a people rising up against the Leviathan State.

There were other vitally important features of this overall mass line. One of its important aspects was that the American revolutionaries blended all the arguments against British imperialism into a harmonious and integrated structure. Historians have argued whether the revolution’s thrust was economic, constitutional, moral, religious, political, or philosophic—without realizing that the revolutionaries’ libertarian perspective integrated them all. No vital aspect went neglected. The revolutionaries understood—and pointed out—that the British government was injuring the economic well-being of the Americans through taxes, regulations, and privileged monopolies; but they also knew that, in so doing, the British were aggressing against the natural rights of person and property enjoyed by Americans and by all men. For the American revolutionaries, there was no split, no disjunction, between the economic and the moral, between prosperity and rights.

As a corollary to their mass line, the American revolutionaries and their leaders were not afraid to be radical. In current rhetoric, they dared to struggle and dared to win. There were three features of that radicalism that I would like to explore today. First was their willingness, indeed their eagerness, to desanctify, to demythologize the State, to strip it of its ancient encrusted armor of justifications, alibis, and rationalizations. The last and vital remaining act of this process was desanctifying the King—a revered mystical symbol of State sovereignty which was fal more powerful, to Americans and to Britons, than Parliament or the unwritten British constitution. This final act was necessary to any outright American break for independence; it was first launched tentatively, very early in the revolutionary agitation, by Patrick Henry, but the mortal blow was delivered by the unknown, impecunious pamphleteer Tom Paine, another English-born laissez-faire radical who performed this feat in his runaway best-seller, Common Sense. Paine realized that this final act of demystification had to be couched radically, in no mincing or uncertain terms, thus cutting the final umbilical cord not only with Great Britain, but also with the age-old established principle of monarchy. And in so doing Paine also pointed out the piratic origins of the State itself. He referred to King George as “the royal brute of England”, and to kings in general as “crowned ruffians”, whose thrones had all been established by being heads of gangs of “armed banditti.”

The king, he wrote, was “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manners or preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers; and who by increasing in power and extending his depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless. . .”

Paine concluded his great work with these stirring words:

“O! Ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted around the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. 0! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”

I would like to underscore the importance of the line, “Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant. . .” For here Paine was referring to that two-step, double “baptism” process of which I spoke earlier. That it is splendid, but not enough, to come to the point of opposing tyranny in the abstract, as a general principle; but that it is of equally vital importance to press on to the second stage, to the concrete activism of engaging in struggle against the actual tyrant of whatever time and place we happen to live in.

This brings me to the second, interconnecting radicalism of the first libertarian revolution. It used to be thought that all Americans had read John Locke and were simply engaged in applying his concept of natural rights, of rights to liberty and property, and right of revolution against tyranny. But now we know that the process was not that simple. Even in those enlightened days not everyone was interested in or equipped to read abstract philosophy. What most Americans did read were intellectuals and libertarians, like Tom Paine, who took Locke’s abstract philosophy and radicalized it to apply to the conditions of their time. By far the most influential such writings throughout the eighteenth century were “Cato’s Letters”, written by two libertarian English journalists, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Trenchard and Gordon not only put Locke’s ideas into stirring and hard-hitting phrases; they took Locke’s “if. . .then” proposition: that is, if the government transgresses against rights of person and property, then it is proper to rebel against it, and added in effect this insight: “The if is always here.” In other words, they pointed out that it is the essence of Power, of government, to expand beyond its laissez-faire limits, that it is always conspiring and attempting to do so, and therefore that it is the task of the people to guard eternally against this process. That they must always regard their government with hostility and deep suspicion: in short, with what is now disparagingly called, “a conspiracy theory of history.” And so, when the British government, after the war with France was over in 1763, began their Grand Design to reduce the virtually independent American colonies to imperial subjection, the American colonists, without access to the memoranda and archives of the British government of the day, suspected the worst, and immediately roused themselves to determined resistance. Now, two hundred years later, we know that the colonists’ suspicions were correct; they could not know this, but they were armed with a “conspiracy theory” which always suspects governments of designs upon liberty. They had absorbed the lesson of Trenchard and Gordon in Cato’s Letters:

“We know, by infinite examples and experience, that men possessed of Power, rather than part with it, will do anything, even the worst and the blackest, to keep it (pace Richard Nixon); and scarce ever any man upon earth went out of it as long as he could carry everything his own way in it. . .This seems certain, that the good of the world, or of their people, was not one of their motives either for continuing in Power, or for quitting it.

It is the nature of Power to be ever encroaching, and converting every extraordinary Power, granted at particular times. . .into an ordinary power, to be used at all times

Alas! Power encroaches daily upon Liberty, with a success too evident. . .Tyranny has engrossed almost the whole earth, and striking at mankind root and branch, makes the world a slaughterhouse. . . .”

There is another critical point to make about the importance of such men, such best-sellers as Trenchard and Gordon or Tom Paine. At the last LP national convention in Washington, a friendly journalist, and many others, remarked that it seemed more like a scholars’ conference than a political party gathering. And one participant reported that everyone there seemed to be very smart, but if that’s the case, how in the world will we ever win the masses of the non-smart?

Well, the first answer is that yes, we are very different from other political party conventions. I don’t think that the crucial difference is that we’re smart and the others are dumb; after all, if we may let this secret out to the world, we’re not all that smart! We are a glorious movement to be sure, but we have hardly achieved perfection. The difference between us and the Democrats and Republicans is not that we are so much smarter than they are, but that we are deeply concerned with ideas, with principles, whereas they are simply concerned with getting their places at the public trough. We are interested in principles, they in Power; and, gloriously enough, our principle is that their power be dismantled.

But how can the masses understand ideas? Well, a quick answer is that they have done so before: notably in the American Revolution and for a hundred or so years afterwards: in America and in Europe. So if they didn’t read Locke they read Paine or Cato or their popularizers, or read their followers in the press or heard them in speeches and sermons.

The American revolutionary movement was a diverse and structured one, with different persons and institutions specializing in various aspects of the struggle. The same is and will be true of our movement. Just as not everyone had to read Locke to become a full-fledged American revolutionary, not everyone now has to read all of our flowering theoretical works in order to grasp the essence of libertarianism and to act upon it. The American revolutionaries never felt that every American had to grasp fully the fifth lemma of the third syllogism of the second chapter of Locke before they could take their place in the developing struggle; and the same should be true of our libertarians and our own theoretical works. Naturally, the more that everyone reads and understands the better; and it is hardly my point to deprecate the great importance of theory or of reading. My point is that not everyone has to know and agree to every nuance before we start moving, ingathering, and acting to transform the real world.

There is a third important aspect of the radicalism of the American revolutionaries, and this again underscores the importance of the mass line. In contrast to their polar enemies, the Conservatives, who strove to maintain traditional aristocratic and monarchical rule over the masses, the libertarian revolutionary leaders realized that the masses, as well as themselves, were the victims of the State, and hence they only needed to be educated and aroused to join the radical libertarian cause. The Conservatives knew full well that they were subsisting on privileges coerced from a deluded and oppressed public through their control of State power; hence they apprehended that the masses were their mortal enemy. The laissez-faire radicals, for their part, understood that same fact, and so from the Revolution down through most of the nineteenth century, here, in Great Britain and on the continent of Europe, these libertarians led the mass of the public against traditional conservative statism. Where the conservatives rested their case on traditional privileges sanctified by mystical divine command, the laissez-faire radicals held aloft the banner of reason and individual rights for all people.

Here again is a profound lesson for us today. Too many libertarians have absorbed the negative and elitist Conservative world-view to the effect that our enemy today is the poor, who are robbing the rich; the blacks, who are robbing the whites; or the masses, who are robbing heroes and businessmen. In fact, it is the State that is robbing all classes, rich and poor, black and white, worker and businessman alike; it is the State that is ripping us all off; it is the State that is the common enemy of mankind. And who is the State? It is any group who manages to seize control of the State’s coercive machinery of theft and privilege. Of course these ruling groups have differed in composition through history, from kings and nobles to privileged merchants to Communist parties to the Trilateral Commission. But whoever they are, they can only be a small minority of the population, ruling and robbing the rest of us for their power and wealth. And since they are a small minority, the State rulers can only be kept in power by deluding us about the wisdom or necessity of their rule. Hence, it is our major task to oppose and desanctify their entrenched rule, in the same spirit that the first libertarian revolutionaries opposed and desanctified their rulers two hundred years ago. We must strip the mystical veil of sanctity from our rulers just as Tom Paine stripped the sanctity from King George III. And in this task we libertarians are not the spokesmen for any ethnic or economic class; we are the spokesmen for all classes, for all of the public; we strive to see all of these groups united, hand-in-hand, in opposition to the plundering and privileged minority that constitutes the rulers of the State.

It is this task, this march toward liberty, that the libertarian movement has undertaken. That movement was born only a little while ago, and in a few short years it has grown and expanded enormously, in numbers, in the depth of understanding of its members, and in the influence it has been exerting on the outside world. It has grown amazingly far beyond the dreams of its tiny handful of original members. The libertarian movement extends beyond the Libertarian Party, and consists of a broad number of people and organizations, ranging from scholarly centers and magazines to lobbying groups to supper clubs to tax rebels. But while the Libertarian Party is not the whole movement, it is a vital part of that movement. We are the institution that garners the publicity, that brings to enormous numbers of people their first knowledge of libertarianism and of the libertarian movement, that educated and ingathers the broad public and attracts and nurtures present and future libertarian activists and cadres. And, on top of all this, we are the only libertarian organization that can use the established institutions of the ballot box and the political party structure to roll back the Leviathan State, to pressure from below for repeal of statist measures, decrees, and institutions.

Our national convention is a time for stock-taking, for judging how well we have been succeeding at our task. Well, let’s take a look: since our last convention, we have mounted our first nationwide presidential campaign. We were on the ballot—despite enormous legal handicaps—in almost two-thirds of the states, and we have vaulted into becoming the nation’s third largest political party. Now how’s that for a party that only began a half dozen years ago? I say that’s terrific, and shows that we are truly the wave of the future.

And so we have splendidly achieved Phase I of the hoped for growth and expansion of the Libertarian Party. Phase I was the establishment of our party as the leading nationwide third party, a feat accomplished by the 1976 presidential campaign. Phase II, our task for the near future, our turning point, is to use the 1976 results as a springboard for widening and deepening the grass roots strength of the Party throughout the states: over this year and next to develop local and state-wide chapters and candidates. Then, if we perform that task well, we will be ready for a great leap forward in the 1980 presidential campaign to make this party into a true mass party at the head of a mighty movement, a movement to complete the original American revolution and to bring liberty to our land.

We hereby put everyone on notice: We are libertarians of the will as well as the intellect, of activity as well as theory, of real world struggle as well as idealistic vision. We are a serious movement. Our goal is nothing less than the victory of liberty over the Leviathan State, and we shall not be deflected, we shall not be diverted, we shall not be suborned, from achieving that goal. The odds against us are no greater than the odds that faced our forefathers at Concord, at Saratoga, or at Valley Forge. Secure in the knowledge that we are in the right, inspired by the vision, determination and courage of our forbears, we dedicate ourselves to the noblest cause of all, the old American cause, of individual Liberty. With such dedication and with such a goal, how can we help but win?

Recommended Reading

Cyra McFadden, The Serial (Random House). Hilarious, savagely satiric novel on life and manners in Marin County, the cutting edge for California. Ultimately depressing, because chillingly accurate account of how these upper-middle class liberal boobs refract all the experience of their lives through the haze of meaningless, pop-psychology jargon. The women come off much worse in Mrs. McFadden’s portrayal, probably because they can devote all their time to this nonsense.

Thomas Szasz, Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors (Louisiana State Univ. Press, $9.95). One of Szasz’ best works, a rediscovery (including his own translation) of the witty, Menckenesque, classical liberal Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, and Kraus’s accurate and bitter attacks on Freud and psychonalysis. This brief book contains Szasz’s most blistering and hard-hitting attacks on psychoanalysis, its “verbal lynching” of people who disagree.

Boris Souvarine, “Solzhenitsyn and Lenin,” Dissent (Summer 1977), pp. 324-36. For many years, anti-Soviet writers have propounded the myth that Lenin was a “German agent” whose victory was fuelled by “German gold.” A subsidiary myth was that Lenin was spirited across Europe by the Germans in a “sealed train.” One of the most recent propounders of this mythology was Stefan T. Possony, in his biography of Lenin. Possony went so far as to bring back reliance on the notorious forgeries known as the Sisson documents. Now, in response to Solzhenitsyn’s purveying of similar stuff, the Grand Old Man of Sovietologists, Boris Souvarine, engages in an elegant dissection and evisceration of the myth in the impeccably anti-Soviet journal Dissent.

Francis Russell, “The End of the Myth,” National Review (August 19, 1977), pp. 938-41. Francis Russell, whose Tragedy at Dedham and subsequent writings have put the boots to the legend of Sacco and Vanzetti as innocent martyrs, here polishes off a long-standing myth of the defense that secret FBI files showed collusion with prosecution witnesses and other hanky-panky of the FBI. Having extracted the files under the Freedom of Information Act, Russell shows that the FBI, for once, did nothing of the sort.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 9

SEPTEMBER, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Bakke Case

Everybody and his brother is getting into the act on the Bakke case. No less than 146 special-interest groups have filed 58 amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court which is now pondering Bakke—the largest number of such briefs in Supreme Court history. Generally, leftists are “anti-Bakke” while conservatives are “pro-Bakke”, with liberals split down the middle depending on whether they are black or other “minority” (see Devil’s Glossary below)-oriented (anti-Bakke) or Jewish oriented (pro-Bakke.) “Ethnics” (also see Glossary) are sturdily pro-Bakke.

Briefly, Allan Bakke applied for admission to medical school at the University of California, Davis, but was denied admission because of slots allotted to members of “minority” groups who were admittedly less qualified. If the 14th Amendment requires that governmental bodies be “race-blind” and not discriminate for or against particular races or groups, and if for that reason segregation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court, it is hard to see how the left, which wants government discrimination on behalf of “minorities”, can have a constitutional leg to stand on. Indeed, the left is shivering in its boots on Bakke, since the special slots for minorities in this case seems to be particularly glaring in its unconstitutionality. They are hoping against hope that Bakke is decided very narrowly by the Supreme Court. For a broad, consistent decision for Bakke would strike down all of the affirmative action edicts and pressures of government that have been so dear to the hearts of the left over the past two decades. (For an anguished cry by a leftist that the Court construe Bakke narrowly, see Nat Hentoff, “Which Side Are You On?” Village Voice, Oct. 17, 1977.)

The argument of the left that “affirmative action” does not imply “reverse discrimination” or “racial quotas” is simply silly and puerile. Suppose one investigates the problem and finds that only 3% of physicians are members of Race X, which has 20% of the population. To say that action must be taken (clearly by lowering standards for admission) to bring Race X up to its quotal 20% must automatically push other races and ethnic groups down, and must discriminate against individuals of such groups on grounds that they do not belong to the “right” race or group. Furthermore, pushing up one group to its presumably deserved quota of the population, means that other groups, who are “represented” more numerously than their quotal norm, must of necessity be pushed down to that norm. We are back, then to the notorious governmental discriminatory quota systems of the Central Europe of the 1930’s. Is that what we are supposed to be doing in the name of humanism and progress?

Turning from the Constitution to more specifically libertarian concerns, where should libertarians stand on the Bakke case? It should be clear, from many points of view, that we should be solidly pro-Bakke. Libertarians are individualists, and believe that candidates for employment or admission to schools or whatever should be judged strictly on the individuals’ own merits or demerits. Libertarians believe that government should have no role in coercing private institutions on who to hire, promote, or admit, and therefore we must stand foursquare against the mammoth affirmative action program that government has been pushing for many years. And libertarians believe that governmental institutions, such as schools, where they (unfortunately) exist, should not be able to discriminate for or against one or another group of taxpayers. On all these grounds, libertarians should be firmly pro-Bakke and opposed to affirmative action. With this caveat: that a private firm or college should be able to discriminate or not on any criterion (rational or irrational) that it wishes, without being coerced by government. If Firm A or College X, for some reason, wants to hire or admit only Masons or blonde-haired Albanians, it should have the right to do so. The Bakke case, of course, deals with a governmental medical school.

The peculiar reparations argument of the left deserves some further scrutiny. Professing to be uncomfortable with quota systems, the proponents declare that they are needed temporarily to compensate for the disadvantages (say of slavery) which the racial group’s ancestors may have suffered a century or more ago. (This, of course, refers to the blacks, a major constituent of “minorities”—see Glossary—but how it could apply to the various groups of “Latinos, none of whose ancestors had been enslaved, passeth understanding.)

The flaws in this argument should be glaringly obvious. Why shouldn’t Ukrainians or Poles be compensated for the “disadvantage” of their ancestors having suffered under serfdom—and for a longer period than the blacks had been enslaved? If the reply be that Americans hadn’t enserfed the Poles whereas they had enslaved blacks, we come to an (insupportable theory of collective guilt. For, in the first place, what about Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, etc., whose ancestors came to this country well after the Civil War and who therefore can’t be stained with any sort of retrospective racial guilt for slavery? Why should they be disadvantaged now? The logic of the leftist case is to place some sort of disability—be it maximum quota or special tax—on descendants of WASPS whose ancestors lived here at the time. Apart from the grotesquerie of this position, how can we place such a burden when the particular ancestor might have been an abolitionist? And even if we could identify current descendants from an authentic slave trader or holder, by what principle can we justify placing collective guilt unto the umpteenth generation, with the sins of the fathers visited upon the sons and daughters? Hobbling a contemporary WASP or Polish-American, furthermore, will in no way right injustice meted out to a black of a century or two ago. This will be particularly clear if we-adjure the monstrosity of collective guilts and merits.

Finally, the left has never come up with an answer on how long this compensatory affirmative-and-negative action is supposed to go on before we can all get back to individual merit. How long are we supposed to be punished for the sins of other people’s fathers? The left can offer no criterion for a judgment, because there is no criterion available, no way that it can rationally say, OK, enough is enough.

No, it is we who must say enough is enough, and the time is now.

The Devil’s Glossary

“Minorities”. A code word for blacks and Latinos (Chicanos and Puerto Ricans.) Even though there are lots of minorities, and virtually everyone is a member of one (e.g. blond-haired Albanian-Americans), and even though WASPS are minorities too, only blacks and Latinos can achieve this much-coveted status. Sometimes, oddly enough, women are considered “a minority”, even though women are actually in the majority. Chinese-Americans, not being poor enough, are not considered to be a “minority”. Indeed, they have been officially designated as “whites.”

“Ethnics.” A code word for any group which believes in the Real Presence, that is various groups of Catholics and Greek and Russian Orthodox. The ethnics are the conservatives’ answer to the leftists’ favoritism to the minorities.

“Jews”. Neither minority nor ethnic, Jews, like Chinese-Americans, have been relegated to the status of “honorary WASPS.”

Higher Education: The View of Insiders

by Justus D. Doenecke

A Review Essay

John R. Thelin, The Cultivation of Ivy: A Saga of the College in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1976.

Simon O’Toole, Confessions of an American Scholar. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970.

Hazard Adams, The Academic Tribes. New York: Liveright, 1976.

Walter Kaufmann, The Future of the Humanities. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1977.

How long has it been since anyone, any single one of us, has read an author who celebrates American higher education?

Indeed can we find one serious alumnus from one serious college who can boast that the education his alma mater is offering today is superior to the one gained ten, twenty—even thirty years ago?

To listen to administrators, and to read the promotional blurbs, one would think the opposite. One sees on every hand a veritable galaxy of new research libraries, open-ended seminars, sophisticated computers, dorms designed to bring faculty and students together, and chamber orchestras. One can find in the catalogs such pedagogical “innovations” as pass-fail courses that relieve anxieties over grades, contractual registration which permits total self-direction for the student (and which permits him to pass three courses while dropping four), independent study periods (in which an entire institution practically adjourns for a month and a half) when all pursue knowledge without inhibition. Add student-taught courses, free-floating, do-it-yourself majors, three year B.A. programs, and off-campus study groups that range from Hoboken to Nepal, and old Siwash U. is suddenly turned into a microcosm of Plato’s Republic. The very title of one journal of higher education, Change, celebrates the innovative mood; change, as they said in 1066 and All That, is “a good thing.”

Coupled with all this comes a bit more informality. Faculties are at times addressed by their first names and listed in nebulous pamphlets called “human resource guides.” Students enter baccalaureate orals with wine and cheese. It is all, as one Mormon apologist would say, “a marvelous work and a wonder.”[1]

Yet, despite the richness in our facilities and the freedom offered in planning courses of study, higher education is in sorry shape indeed, so sorry that many doubt whether it can survive with integrity. The problems go far beyond unbalanced budgets and low endowments. We are admitting students who cannot write clearly and coherently, who have never read a play of Shakespeare or an essay of Emerson, who cannot place the century in which Oliver Cromwell lived, who are unable to identify Ho Chi Minh, and who have not mastered sufficient math to complete a college course in the natural sciences. We listen daily to students who, when unable to express a simple thought articulately, nod their heads and mutter, “You know. . . .You know. . . .” We read senior theses by students who have never submitted a paper in college and hence know not the meaning of a paragraph. We assume, falsely in most cases, that a seventeen year old, just out of high school, is able to plan an academic program free of all requirements. We deplore the “impersonality” of objective tests, find the giving of blue book exams “oppressive,” scoff at deadlines, and pass an embarrassingly large number of students in order to keep enrollments high.

True, Aristotle once said that “All men by nature desire to know,” but now we can only wonder. Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham and one of the greatest minds England produced, observed that the majority are more apt at passing things through their minds than at thinking about them. But today we have reached the point where some collegiate minds have very little, if anything, even passing through.[2]

In our despair, we seldom realize that, for American higher education, there was never a golden age. Essayist Albert Jay Nock, whom the ignorant would call a snob, noted that no one of informed opinion was ever well-satisfied with our educational system. In 1926 philosopher Everett Dean Martin observed that our schools had all too often become agents of propaganda. “It is much easier,” he wrote, “to appeal to authority than to experiment, to command assent than to awaken curiosity, to tell the student what he must believe than to wait for the maturing of his judgment.” In 1941 columnist Walter Lippmann deplored the fact that modern education had abandoned all efforts to transmit the religious and classical culture of the West. Rather than training the student to “look upon himself as an inviolable person because he is made in the image of God,” it had “reduced reason to the role of servant of man’s appetites.” In 1948 the British novelist Dorothy L. Sayers called for returning to the type of learning embodied in the medieval Trivium,—that is, to grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. “We have lost the tools of learning,” she said, “the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane that were so adoptable to all tasks.”[3]

Even the much-vaunted heritage of the Ivy League is based on myth, a point stressed in the revealing book by John R. Thelin. Thelin points out that there was little unity among Ivy schools until the 1920’s, when the concept of a distinctive group was formulated by two obscure researchers.[4] Sportswriter Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune first used the term “Ivy League” in the thirties, although not all the constituent schools then played each other and although a genuine athletic league was not organized until 1954.

Most people today do not know that the Ivy League is still an athletic—not an educational—organization. Though Thelin does not mention it, Woodward denied that the term necessarily connoted either excellence or academic purity. Some varieties of ivy, he said, were poisonous, other potted.[5] Indeed, the prestige and affluence we associate with the Ivys would have amazed people a century ago. In the 1890’s, for example, Harvard Law and Dartmouth’s medical school were havens for “jocks,” while Yale stressed “muscular Christianity” over academic achievement.

Blame for our current plight is placed in many places: the ever present-and-perennial TV set, accused of anesthetizing two generations of the nation’s young; indulgent parents (and teachers) trying to recover their youth by totally identifying with children; progressive education, which reaches such absurdities that a student may go through high school without taking one examination.

Some of the problems, of course, lie in university governance. No one really has complete power to do anything. In the past few years, the power of the formal governing body, the trustees, has shrunk markedly, with its role in private institutions often relegated to writing checks University presidents are seldom chosen for their educational vision—John William Ward of Amherst stands out as an almost lone exception—but rather because of their fund-raising talents. If a skilled president can, at some time, impose his will on the faculty, he must use such power sparingly, for he has little control over faculty selection of course content. Academic power deteriorates from the administrator’s first act, for any decision involving money and staffing is bound to offend someone. Some of the current breed of administrators attempt to adjust by adopting the qualities of an “o.k. guy”—accomplished perhaps by playing the clarinet, dressing in jeans, and using an earthy student argot when talking to undergraduates.

The State acts increasingly destructively in such matters. It realizes that “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” and some of the notes bellowing forth are ruinous indeed. Under the guise of “affirmative action” and “open admissions,” it imposes reverse discrimination and institutionalizes mediocrity. Some private institutions welcomed supplemental federal funds in the 1960’s, undoubtedly hoping for a second lease on life. If today they have second thoughts, it is too late and significant autonomy has often disappeared.

One cannot blame the State for everything. The faculty too must share the responsibility, for it is given direct charge of the curriculum. Hence it is not surprising that three of the books under consideration deal primarily with its role.

O’Toole’s Confessions is the most cynical, although the indictment is telling enough to forewarn every graduate student in English. O’Toole is a pseudonym for a well-published professor of English (and a leading scholar on the obscure poet Ian McPherson) who has taught at a variety of schools—black and white, public and private, red brick and Ivy League.

The author began his undergraduate studies with the highest of ideals. “Wide-eyed youngster,” he calls himself, for he was a college student who genuinely liked literature. Two years in the service, a year of teaching, and a half-year of manual labor paved the way for graduate study. Here he met his first real disillusionment, as he faced the pedantry of “the morose, dull, and empty-headed men who cut Spenser, Pope, Coleridge, and many others down to their own size.” The college classroom soon convinced O’Toole that Oscar Wilde was correct when he said: “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worthwhile can be taught.”

It is in the realm of research, however, that O’Toole begins to blow the whistle. He found that the more formal scholarship was brought to a literary work, the less sense he could make out of it. Admitting that PMLA is “utterly dull,” he writes amusing exposes of his ventures into editing letters and producing textbooks. (The verb “producing” is chosen deliberately). Nor is “pure” investigation much better. “Short of proving Milton was a Frenchman from Savannah, Georgia,” he writes, “I think the American literary scholar can demonstrate anything he wants to.”

Little wonder that from O’Toole’s vantage point, American higher education is a low-grade farce.” We can count the bitter and dreary years of our own lives, but help to push through the new Ph.D. program at our small college. We know that nine-tenths of our colleagues cannot read five lines of Shakespeare with half the expression of an English schoolboy, and yet it is fine to think of all those folios and quartos at the Folger Library. We dream of leaving our dreadful university, and never imagine that Swarthmore, Claremont, and Harvard are just as dreadful” (p. 107).

O’Toole’s solution is Nockean: “less education instead of more, less education in the interest of more civilization.” (Nock was more exclusive, writing that “relatively very few are educable, very few indeed.”[6]) O’Toole would radically revise graduate study in English, limiting requirements to the completion of two major papers (one of which would serve as the dissertation) and a single exam stressing literature and not criticism. Anyone hired by an institution would be slated to become a permanent member of the staff, that is “barring insanity, wickedness, or desire to move on.” Promotion would be automatic, normally depending on age.

Such a remedy might be naive, even whimsical; but he has a point. Some of the most conservative of our faculty realize that tenure competition can be vicious, particularly when several people are competing for a single slot. Also graduate education can be pedantic, particularly if a seminar is restricted to the professor’s current research.

The Academic Tribes is more subdued, but it still has a strong bite. In fact, because it is less shrill, its critique is stronger. Adams too is a respected English professor who also served a hitch as administrator at the Irvine campus of the University of California. He confronts academe as a novice anthropologist writing up his first field notes on the aborigines.

Adams knows the rules of the game all too well. Hence he realizes that the fundamental allegiance of the faculty member is to the smallest unit to which he can belong, which is usually the department; at the very outset, the professor possesses the most parochial of loyalties. Therefore, if a dean has no broad intellectual perspective on which to base his decisions, he is subject to cannibalization. In addition, debates over requirements rapidly deteriorate from the level of educational principle to the level of expediency, for any such principle is only good as long as it does not interfere with a departmental program. “To debate an intellectual issue,” writes Adams, “might well lead actually to arguing against one’s own shorter-term budgetary interests—an appalling prospect to any dean or chairman.” An iron law of specialization, apparent even on some small campuses, encourages social sciences to deny social responsibility, humanities departments to act in unhumanistic fashion, and natural sciences to behave most unscientifically. W. H. Auden’s recommendation—“Thou shalt not sit/With statisticians nor commit/A social science”—has one fervent follower, a man who found that coping with federal bureaucracies would be enough to turn him into a right-wing Republican.

Some of Adam’s most telling points need more emphasis. Massive student participation on faculty committees is silly, for undergraduates are wasting precious learning time on matters that do not contribute to serious education. Some students have spent the bulk of their college experience in much work, imitating those professors who find committee tasks their major academic involvement.

We could all listen to Edward Kirkland, the prominent economic historian and the epitome of a New England gentleman, who said that professors who ignore research become—for practical purposes—one of the undergraduates. We still have individuals who have taught their whole career without writing as much as one book review, others who volunteer—without training—to teach the bulk of their work outside their discipline. Faculty members have long offered a series of excuses for abandoning the academic quest, ranging from superior “teaching” to becoming a “generalist”; thusly do both boredom and laziness become effectively hidden. Some fifteen years ago, an historian boasted to me that he had read no revisionist (or any other kind of history) in a decade: “Did you ever think,” he said as his eyes peered through the cherry glass, “that with each revision we are getting farther from the truth?”

Adams finds current jeremiads against “publish-or-perish” shrill. “A faculty of committed research scholars and creative artists is my ideal of the most desirable university. I have yet to hear,” he continues, “of a better way to see that an academic institution is intellectually alive than to assume that such activities go on.” (p. 142).

The distinguished economic historian Jack Hexter has some particularly telling points along this line. In an essay reprinted in his Doing History (1971), Hexter makes short work of those who compare “gifted teaching” with “grinding out research.” He noted the abundance of researchers who teach ably in the classroom. More importantly he defines the teaching role to include the sharing of one’s research Via print. Conversely, he describes the classroom sage, enthralling to us as undergraduates, whom we later discover to be “a pretentious faker or a mere clown—vox et praeterea nihil.” He then goes on to tell of “colleagues who published nothing, not because of their devotion to teaching, but because of their wholehearted dedication to birdwatching, to billiards, to Old Overholt, to squalid in-fighting on the lower rungs of academic politics, or simply to providing their backsides with facilities for acquiring an appropriate middle-aged spread.” Where lies the culprit for propounding the “dedicated teacher” canard. In “the shady academic demimonde inhabited by educationalists whose dim view of research and scholarship is doubtless an undistorted reflection of the quality of their own professional efforts along those lines” (pp. 89-90).

It is one thing for a professor to play the role of eccentric, offering both “gut” courses and sheer entertainment in one package. (One professor I knew, for example, had all his students dress for class in bedsheets. “Come on down,” he said to a colleague, “We’ve got the Roman senate gathering this morning.” Imagine the whole Colgate forward line as Cicero and Cato the Elder.) It is quite a different thing to scrap formal requirements on the grounds that “coercion” of any kind is wrong. Nock aptly called such behavior “a counsel of desperation.” No serious professional school—law, business, medicine—could exist with such a philosophy; yet, for the equally important liberal arts education, we bless such practices as both “innovative” and “good.”

At one time, for example, the core program at Colgate made sure that each student was confronted with some of the great heritage of the past. Freshmen read Plato’s Republic, the Gospel of Mark, Aquinas, Luther, and Kant; sophomores listened to Beethoven, read Oedipus Rex and War and Peace, and examined works by Rembrandt, Klee, and Picasso. Juniors knew Locke and Tocqueville, while seniors mastered George F. Kennan and Louis Halle. Columbia’s course in contemporary civilization was a classic as were Social Sciences I and II at Chicago. Now it is a rare college that requires either Western Civilization or Freshman English. If a student does not know the meaning of an adjective, much less its function, and confuses “two” with “too”, well—it is not a matter of concern but an amusing anecdote to pass around during faculty coffee break.

To Adams, the humanities lie at the core of learning. They should be regarded as the mode of study by which we maintain the culture in which we live, “the preservation of those verbal shapes of the past that retain the power to generate anew.” He finds the study of language particularly crucial, as the power of the media to manipulate people by manipulating their mother tongue grows daily. Only by insisting that students write throughout their entire academic career, and only by examining such writing critically, can humanistic education be continually provided. The faculty, says Adams, must finally decide whether or not a humanities education is important. If it deems it important, it must devise ways of sustaining it throughout a student’s whole college experience.

But is today’s academe able to heed such advice? True, the most profound thinkers in the “practical” disciplines—take Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek of the Austrian school of economics—were people of humanistic learning. But the future of formal liberal inquiry is uncertain at best. Without an immediate “payoff,” the most ignorant of the bureaucrats find humane studies close to expendable. Terrell H. Bell, U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1975, claimed that the college that devotes itself “totally and unequivocally to the liberal arts today is just kidding itself.” He continued, “To send young men and women into today’s world armed only with Aristotle, Freud and Hemingway is like sending a lamb into a lion’s den.” It is, he maintains, “salable skills,” those that offer a means of earning a living, that are most important.

Of course, all this can be seen quite differently. Robert A. Goldwin of the American Enterprise Institute likes to tell a story concerning Euclid. One time the great mathematician was explaining the first theorem of geometry, the construction of an equilateral triangle, to a young man. After Euclid had finished his exposition, the youth queried, “But Euclid, what shall I gain by learning such things?”

Euclid might have replied that such knowledge eventually leads to the Pythagorean theorem, and that one could use this theorem to design a bridge that could withstand the weight of chariots. And it is this theorem that gives you the basis of trigonometry, and one could use it to survey the next real estate speculation But Euclid did not say this. Rather, he snapped, “Give this man a coin since he must show a profit for everything he learns.”

Skills can be salable or unsalable as the economy or technology changes, thereby proving Dewey’s adage that “Theory is, in the end, the most practical of all things.” Ask any engineer caught in the cutbacks of space technology and forced suddenly to master the act of cab driving. But to learn how to learn—how to think clearly, how to cut beneath the sham and pretense, is particularly essential when, as Goldwin notes, “the foundations of western civilization are being challenged.” It is, as he says, “a matter of life and death—and if that seems to say too much, there is certainly a matter of our political liberty, which should be as dear to us as our lives” (emphasis mine).[9]

Our very survival, in other words, depends on the educated person, the person who—as Plato pointed out long, long ago—can “see things as they are,” that is see things free of the “shadow worlds” of convention, illusion, irrational authoritarianism, hope of advantage.

If such preachments as Goldwin fail to convince, Walter Kaufmann’s book should. The Princeton philosopher communicates with a sense of urgency. Without able teaching of the liberal arts, he says, humanity’s chances for survival are about nil.

Kaufmann is a realist. He knows, for example, that it is almost hopeless for young people with a doctorate in the humanities to find a teaching job. On February 4, 1976, the New York Times reported that 79,600 doctoral graduates were competing for 15,700 openings. More than four out of five, therefore, would find formal graduate training of relatively little vocational use.

Even worse, the humanities themselves are adrift. Like O’Toole, he notes that much research is trivial and that professors delight in playing intellectual games. Furthermore, the “scholastics,” those professors who see themselves as carriers, of a sacred tradition, stifle the “visionaries,” those alienated folk who develop new paradigms of thought.[10] Since World War II, he says, our faculties have become increasingly scholastic, so much so that genuine Socratic questioning is stifled.

For example, in Kaufmann’s own discipline, training is so narrow that most faculty do not feel competent to teach survey courses in ancient philosophy or in the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Kant. In literature, he observes, imagery and diction are taught, not the worldview of the novelist and poet or their trenchant criticisms of their society. In other disciplines as well, professors have come to eschew the study of humanity and the critical examination of our values, faith, and moral motives.” He asks if Plato’s Republic, or any single work by Soren Kierkegaard, be acceptable by any doctoral committee. (Can’t one just imagine a “Dear John” letter from a publisher reading: “Dear Mr. Weber. Your manuscript on Protestantism and capitalism, though possessing some genuine insights, lacks the empirical rigor. . . ..”)

Kaufmann’s favorite horror story concerns the scholar who began his career with a book on the relevance of the Hebrew prophets but who kept on getting juicy grants for the study of Biblical weights and measures. “Not to seethe forest for the trees in it became a virtue.” he writes, “and the study of a single leaf came to be thought of as superior skill” (p. 36).

It is hardly surprising that Kaufmann calls for a return to requirements and is not afraid to use the noun “discipline” (though he does not go as far as Aristotle who said that all real education involves pain.) Kaufmann thinks that all college students should show some competence in math, in the art of reading and writing simple lucid prose, and in knowing comparative religion. He offers some provocative model syllabi for the last item, including a course based just on Genesis and various myths of creation. Good teaching, he claims, is demanding teaching. While it might be fine to tell children how wonderful their sketches are, or how wise any particular hunch might be, a real teacher knows that even a child will cease getting satisfaction unless he can trace improvement against an objective standard. To be indulgent is always to be popular with the mindless, and now we are coming upon the occasional professor who gives credit for sheer class “participation.” (Kaufman cynically notes that the very faculty who adopt the “hip” student culture and play the “guru” role would be the most likely to become learned technocrats once the academic winds changed).

This is not to say that professors are not in a quandary but it is a very different one. Their dissertations are often trivial, yet they insist on recruiting colleagues who share their expertise and enthusiasm for such crucial research fields as the brain of a leech! As with O’Toole, he speaks of faculty members so arrogant that they “patronize authors whom they might more fittingly read on their knees.”

Yet if some scholarship is too esoteric, and if some teachers neglect their students, it is not in anyone’s interest—student included—for the faculty to halt all research. It is, as Kaufmann notes, often appalling what a professor can get away with saying in class, and it is essential that he receive criticism from other scholars.

To elaborate on such advice can be both banal and pretentious. Perhaps the main task is to see what problems exist and to face up to the fact that we do have these problems. As Nock wrote, “Even when. . .diagnosis. . .reveals the case as hopeless in any one circumstance, it affords at least the melancholy satisfaction of knowing just where one stands.”[11]

How to overcome the cynicism of O’Toole and the follies portrayed by Adams and Kaufmann? Genuine commitment, and a recovery of a sense of calling, cannot be inculcated by others, least of all by ringing declarations calling for a return to either “standards” or to the “humanistic tradition.” Nock, in the long run (and for Nock this meant over the centuries), was optimistic. Society he said, simply cannot go on living without returning to the Great Tradition of humanistic education. He wrote in 1931, “Whole societies may disallow it and set it at nought, as ours has done; they may try to live by ways of their own, by bread alone, by bread and buncombe, by riches and power, by economic exploitation, by intensive industrialism, quantity-production, by what you please; but in the end they will find, as so many societies have already found, that they must return and seek the regenerative power of the Great Tradition, or lapse into decay and death.”[12]

From the vantage point of the 1970’s; all seems futile. Yet a few islands of sanity and civility, of questioning and the humane life, can usually be preserved in a nation, in a region, in an institution. In the past such isolated learning communities as Iona and Monte Cassino, and such isolated scholars as Jerome and Augustine, left the West with a heritage to which it still must respond. If all else fails, an “inner monasticism” and the rigorous tutoring of a handful of serious students must be our task—and it is not without some genuine joy.

NOTES

[1] LeGrand Richards, A Marvellous Work And A Wonder (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1973).

[2] The now-neglected anthology, The Case for Basic Education (James D. Koerner, ed; Boston: Little Brown, 1959), deplored the currucular erosion in secondary school; the model syllabi within this work present the student with an education superior to that offered in some universities today. Albert Jay Nock, of course, saw Latin, Greek, and mathematics as the staples of a good secondary education. In college one covered the classics in their mother tongue, math up through the differential calculus, formal logic, and the formation and growth of the English language. A mind so trained, he said, could deal with any problems from the vantage point of centuries. Nock also wrote that “a just care for words, a reasonable precision in nomenclature, is of great help in maintaining one’s intellectual integrity,” and he questioned the very use of the term “college” and “university” for institutions (including all American ones) that had abdicated teaching of the Great Tradition of the humanities for mere instrumental and vocation training. See The Theory of Education in the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), pp. 51, 61, 120.

[3] Nock, p. 5; Everett Dean Martin, “Liberal Education vs. Propaganda” (orig. 1926; Wichita: Center for Independent Education, 1977), p. 5; Walter Lippmann, “Education vs. Western Civilization” (orig. 1941; Wichita: CIE, 1976); Dorothy L. Sabers, “The Lost Tools of Learning” (orig. 1948; Wichita: CIE, 1977).

[4] Cornelius Howard Patton and Walter Taylor Field, Eight O’Clock Chapel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927).

[5] Paul Woodring, The Higher Learning in America: A Reassessment (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 38.

[6] Nock, p. 55.

7 Ibid., p. 78.

8 Core programs, if genuinely interdisciplinary, convey more than a body of information. They teach students how to relate disciplines to each other, thus showing the essential unity of learning. Extended over four years of student life, and most students need a full four years of college, they can draw upon the increasing intellectual maturity expected of upperclassmen. They therefore dispel the silly notion that general education is something to get over with so that one can begin the “real business” of majoring in a specialty. (In some institutions a major is still expected). Faculty can educate each other on things more significant than calendar reform and trade union demands. What historian, for instance, who teaches provocative works in sociology, economics, and political science can fail to have a better understanding of his own subject? See James A. Storing, “A Modem Design for a General and Liberal Education on a College Campus,” Journal of General Education Vol. 18 (Oct. 1966), 155-162.

[9] For Goldwin’s writing, see “The Future of Liberal Education,” Educational Record (1976). 111-115, and such unpublished speeches as “Address at a Celebration of the New, New College,” February 2, 1975; “Commencement Address to New College of the University of South Florida,” June 11, 1977; and “Commencement Address to Virginia Wesleyan College,” May 21, 1977. The quotations from Bell and Goldwin and the Euclid story are from the 1975 address.

[10] Kaufmann tries not to stack the deck: he admits that “many visionaries have fixed ideas that are not particularly fruitful; and many scholastics are by no means unimaginative drudges but perform tasks that are badly needed.” See Future, p. 8.

[11] Nock, p. 4.

[12] Ibid., p. 157.

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Defending the Defendable

by Gary Greenberg

Walter Block has written a book, DEFENDING THE UNDEFENDABLE (Fleet Press). To read the Libertarian Press, one would think the sky is falling. Moralistic Chicken Littles churn out didactic book reviews as the steam from the letters columns leave many a publication limp and clammy.

What is it about this book? One quasi-libertarian fellow traveler, triggered, by Walter’s book, felt compelled to publicly announce his resignation from the Libertarian Movement. A heavy weight libertarian scholar and award winning philosopher, fresh from a ringing speech at the LP National Convention, in which he chided the membership for rejecting a gay candidate just because he could be controversial, is reported to have said in a less public assemblage, that Walter’s book was too controversial to permit him to be an LP veep candidate. Anti-Libertarian Party types who think the LP compromises its principles by downplaying unpopular positions, attack the book on the ground that it brings up unpopular libertarian positions.

This reaction, by the way, is in response to a book that has been warmly received by Hayek, Rothbard, Browne and a host of Libertarian heroes (no joke intended.)

Portions of Walter’s book have appeared, prior to its publication, as a series of essays in various libertarian journals. In one of its prepublication incarnations, The Blackmailer as Hero, I wrote a critical response in the Libertarian Forum. The theme of Block’s book is that there are many people whose heroism consists of persevering in activities which, though they do not initiate force or fraud against anyone, are in violation of harsh and oppressive laws. Persons at home in this category include pimps, loansharks, slumlords, blackmailers and male chauvinst pigs.

For reasons apparently rooted in objectivist aesthetics, Mickey Spillane aside, Walter’s greatest sin was to label the above individuals as “heroes”. I’m sure Walter doesn’t believe the denizens of his Dark Impulse Disneyland are heroes either. But even if he does, so what? Calling these people “heroes” was merely poetic license designed to stimulate the reading and discussion of his work. As a tactic it was certainly successful. It is one of the most talked about books in libertarian circles and reportedly selling well. I daresay that if not for this one gimmick, the book would have burst onto the market with all the obscurity it so richly deserves.

That is not to say that much of what’s in the book isn’t worth reading. Block is an extremely competent and incisive economist. Though his style is poor his examples are rich. He knows how to get at the nub of a problem and skillfully apply libertarian principles and economic analysis.

Unfortunately, there are important problems with Block’s book. The major criticism of his work would have to be his definitions of various ‘characters. Block defines his characters in terms of their nonaggressive characteristics, while blotting out the criminal elements of his subjects. (This isn’t true of all the characters, just several of them.)

Consider for example the slumlord. By means of this device Block provides useful analysis of the benefits of low cost—low quality housing. But the term Slumlord would encompass someone who refuses to live up to the terms of a lease requiring heat and hot water. Block would deny that the latter act constitutes a Slumlord action, because it is an initiation of force.

In point of fact, Block fails to deliver on the promise of the title. The book defends the defendable. He does not demonstrate that the slumlord’ is good, he merely demonstrates that not all landlords should be classified as slumlords. This is an important achievement. Just as Block fails to recognize the negative, the public fails to recognize the positive.

Many of Block’s assumptions are also in error and some of his reviewers make equally erroneous assumptions as a response. Consider the section on the right of an employer to pinch his secretary’s fanny. Block says it is implicit in the contract that the boss can pinch the fanny. The feminist reviewer, indignant at such a demeaning situation, counters that there is no basis for saying that the boss has such a right. Both are wrong.

The boss has hired an employee. Surely the boss can request the right to pinch his secretary’s fanny when he hires her. It might even be an item of negotiation. But in most employment situations, the peripheries of the job definitions are left undefined and handled in an ad hoc manner. In Block’s example, there was a failure to have a meeting of the minds. This occurred because neither assumed that the other had a different and incompatible definition of the job. However, at the first pinch the issue will be resolved. Either the boss yields to the secretary’s desires or the secretary has to choose whether to stay or leave. If she stays, pinching is part of the job, if she leaves then her secretarial duties do not include fanny pinching. But there will be no position available to her with this employer because she does not have the requisites required by the employer.

A major objection raised against this book is that it gives libertarianism a bad name. I cannot accept this argument.

In the first place, this book is no Atlas Shrugged or Human Action. At best, it is only an extremely minor work in the libertarian library. Secondly, amid the huge number of books published by Libertarians, no one book, however bad or inadequate, is going to break the movement. And thirdly, in the improbable event that this book has any kind of substantial recognition outside the libertarian movement it can only help.

Books don’t sell well unless people find them interesting. If Block’s book is dismissed, it is merely his book that is dismissed, not the movement. To the extent that people reject the ideas in Block’s book they are rejecting Libertarianism.

The bottom line of libertarianism must be defined and made available to the curious, and thus, while some would confine his book to the pits, Block has established the bottom line loud and clear. One cannot come away from Block’s book without knowing the true implications of libertarian theory. If the great unwashed reject Libertarianism because of Block’s book, then they weren’t libertarian prospects in the first place and it’s a good thing that Walter Block has told them the truth.

Block’s book is essentially a litmus test. The movement cannot survive if its mass rejects the essential message of Defending the Undefendable.

Toward a Libertarian Theory of Abortion

by Walter Block

There are, perhaps, more serious problems than abortion facing our society. But there are none which raise such grave philosophical problems—nor which so greatly threaten to tear our society apart.

In all other cases—war, inflation, unemployment, nuclear proliferation, pollution—we all agree at least to the extent of opposing the threat. There may be little agreement as to the best means of eliminating the danger, or of the proper trade off between one evil and another, but at least there is no support for the menace itself. Where are the proponents of war, sickness, disaster?

The situation with respect to abortion is different. Here, two groups are arrayed against each other, with irreconcilable positions on ends, not just means. Each takes an explicitly ethical stand and holds the other guilty of severe criminality.

On one hand are those who would legalize abortion, on the ground that women have the right to control what grows in their bodies. On the other hand are the anti-abortionists, who consider the practice to be first degree, premeditated murder. One would have to go back to the days of the pro and anti-slavery moments in the first half of the 19th century to find a public issue even remotely as vexing. And we all know the result of that controversy. It therefore behooves us to search mightily for ways to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable positions.

What is the best way to approach the bewildering maze of arguments in which the philosophical controversy is shrouded? The answer is: from a perspective which is consistently based on human rights, justice and liberty—the libertarian philosophy. In what is to follow, then, I intend to state the fundamental axiom of libertarianism, set forth several obvious facts about abortion, and deduce from these few premises the libertarian theory of abortion.

The basic libertarian postulate is that it is improper to threaten or commit violence against a person or his property, unless he himself is an initiator of such violence. In other words, one may legitimately use force only defensively, or in retaliation, but not otherwise. Human rights to one’s own person, and to one’s own property (property rights) are sacrosanct. They are, or rather ought to be, free from any and all interference.

Bearing these basic postulates in mind, let us consider the following points:

1. The foetus is a human life.

The foetus is alive. If cut, it bleeds. If bludgeoned it dies. If left unmolested, it takes in oxygen, imbibes food, defecates, urinates, and performs all other bodily functions. It satisfies every existing criteria for “life”.

And surely, the foetus is human. Well, it’s not a chipmunk, or a raccoon or a giraffe, is it? What else could it be if not human? The conclusion is clear: the foetus is an alive human being. Killing a foetus is therefore murder.

What of the position, held by many pro-abortionists, that the foetus is a potential, but not an actual, human being? This is a view easier to state than to defend. If it is claimed that something is a potential x, as opposed to an actual x, it must be shown why, and in what way, the thing is not an x now. This the proponents of the position have not done. Indeed they cannot.

Is the foetus only a potential human being because it is helpless and unconscious? But then sick or comatose adults could not be considered human beings either. Is the foetus only a potential human being because it is small, frail and weak? But then midgets could not be considered human beings either. Is it because the foetus is a “parasite” completely dependent on its “host” for sustenance? But the same can be said for many hospital patients, who are obviously alive. Is it because the foetus is inside, and completely dependent upon an “artificial” (what could be more natural) environment? Then what of all the people who could not exist outside and apart from oxygen tents, kidney machine hook-ups, etc? And what about premature babies and hemophiliac children who cannot live outside of their especially constructed environments?

No. The foetus is not a potential human being, it’s an actual one. This goes for the foetus right before birth, six months before, three months before, three weeks before, and, if cognizance be taken of logic, the foetus is human life, a human being, immediately after fertilization, in the two cell stage of development!! (before this, of course, there is no human life; there are only two separate cells, the egg and the sperm. This is why contraception is not equivalent to killing a human being).

2. The foetus which issues from rape has the same rights as any other foetus.

In discussions about abortion exceptions are commonly made for rape cases. Thus, it is claimed that when pregnancy takes place as the result of forced intercourse, abortion is justified.

This line of argument entirely misconstrues the problem. The question of abortion is entirely one of settling the seemingly conflicting rights between the mother and the foetus. The father is entirely irrelevant! It does not matter one whit how the baby was conceived, voluntarily or involuntarily: every foetus, no matter how created, is a living human being.

There is no rational or humane way to distinguish between them, allowing some to live and others to be killed. The foetus conceived in rape is as human or as alive as any other foetus.

Logic, then, compels us to conclude that it has as many (or as few) rights as any other. A correct view of abortion must consider the rights of all foetuses as equal.

3. The foetus may be a trespasser.

Suppose a Karen Anne Quinlan suddenly materializes in someone’s living room comatose and helpless. All the “authorities” are called but no one is willing to take her away. What rights, duties, obligations, responsibilities fall upon the host?

In the libertarian view, the host has no positive obligations to come to her aid. Now it may be nice, it may be “the only decent thing to do”, but the host is not duty bound to provide sustenance. This is, because, in the libertarian philosophy, each person is sovereign, owing nothing not voluntarily agreed to (except, of course, for the obligation not to initiate violence, which applies to each of us whether or not we have consented).

This might seem excessively cruel. After all, Ms. Quinlan is in need of help. Nevertheless the host has no obligation to help her. If anything, the host should be the least liable member of society; for he has already made a contribution: his house has sheltered her and is continuing to do so while a decision is being made about what to do with her; no one else has contributed anything (except perhaps griping that the owner of the house should continue to support her.) Suppose the comatose person clings to life for decades. Would the host have to feed and care for her until she dies a natural death? Suppose he can’t afford the expense. Is he a criminal? No. However important human life is in the libertarian world view, no one may be incarcerated for failing to come to the aid of the helpless. One may only be jailed for attacking innocent people.

So what should the host do? He is not obligated to care for the stricken person. But neither may he kill her. If other people are willing to accept responsibility for the victim, the host may notify them. If there is an equivalent of the “church steps” or the public meeting place where unwanted were commonly left for people to pick them up, our home owner may carry the victim there. May he tie her to his car, and drag her along the road? Is he allowed to stab her, or slit her throat? No. Even though the victim is dying and may not survive the trip in any case the host may do none of these things, for they are murder, and murder is not permitted under the libertarian code. What he can do, is transport her to the “church steps” or the modern equivalent, in as gentle a manner as possible. He is not required to keep her alive, but he may not kill her.

Notice that our argument is not based in any way on the so-called right to life. The victim has no such right; nor does anyone else. There are rights to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness, but there is no “right to life” itself. A Robinson Crusoe who has the misfortune to be shipwrecked alone on a desert island, and starves to death there, has not had any of his rights violated. He had no right to life in the first place. If he did, and was accidentally shipwrecked and starved to death, than all the rest of us are guilty of murder. For every right implies an obligation. If anyone has a right to life, then everyone else has an obligation to keep that person, alive. If we do not do so—if he dies, for any reason, including old age—we are guilty of violating his right, i.e., we are guilty of murder.

What does all this have to do with abortion? The foetus, if uninvited and unwelcome, is to the pregnant woman what Karen Ann Quinlan would be to the home-owner: a trespasser, If the home owner and the pregnant woman volunteer themselves as ongoing caretakers and as hosts, then Quinlan and the foetus are treasured guests, but if unwelcome they are both trespassers.

Now many people might accept this characterization when applied to an adult Karen Ann Quinlan. Although unfortunate, she is an unwelcome guest, especially if she just materializes in someone’s living room. But the foetus, it will be objected, is different. Let us consider the following criticism: “O.K. I agree. There are no positive obligations incumbent upon people that are not first voluntarily agreed to. There are no rights to life. Fine. But goddammit, didn’t the woman who voluntarily engaged in sexual intercourse explicitly, or at least implicitly, agree to bear the child, at least for the term of pregnancy? How can the foetus be a trespasser, for goodness sakes, when the woman invited it into her womb, by voluntarily taking part in the sex act, and knowing that one of the likely effects of such activities is pregnancy?”

This objection will not stand up, for it introduces a double standard that is insupportable, a standard based on considerations extrinsic to the foetus itself. The morality of abortion must be decided on the basis of the nature of the foetus, not on the basis of how it came into being. We have, shown that all foetuses are, morally speaking, on the same level. Regardless of the circumstances of their conception, they are all alive and human. Therefore, they have the same rights. Thus a view which claims that a foetus conceived by rape may be killed while a foetus conceived by voluntary sex may not is moral nonsense.

No, we will stand by our position. Since foetuses are dependent on the owner of the womb in which they reside, they derive their status from that owner’s attitude toward them. If the owner (mother) does not want them, they are trespassers; it doesn’t matter whether or not they were invited in the first place. The woman, like the homeowner, has the final say and is not obliged to provide a long term sanctuary. A guest may be asked to leave. A foetus may be removed.

This does not mean that a person may invite someone out for an airplane ride and then, while 10,000 feet up in the air, say “Oh, by the way, the invitation was for 5 minutes only; and guess what? The 5 minutes are up right . . .now . . .So out you go. Toodle-oo, Cheerio.” No, this would be fraud at an almost ludicrous level. On the other hand, a dinner guest has no right to insist upon a nine month visit! Even if voluntary pregnancy is interpreted as an “invitation” to the foetus, the mother is not compelled to stretch out the invitation for the full term.

Moreover, there are grave problems with the view that the women engaging in voluntary sexual intercourse makes an implicit contract (of invitation) with the foetus.

When A (the woman) agrees with B (the man) to an act that produces C (the foetus), this cannot be construed as an agreement with C, who doesn’t even exist at the time of the agreement between A and B. A person cannot enter into a contract with someone who doesn’t exist. How do we know that the non-existing person, C, agrees to the contract? A person cannot agree to be given birth to!

Abortion then is justified because if the foetus is unwelcome it then becomes a trespasser inside the mother’s body. Since slavery is improper, the mother cannot legitimately be made a slave of the foetus and forced to accept its unwelcome trespass within her. Abortion is justified because continued unwilling pregnancy is a violation of the mother’s rights to her own body.

4. The life boat situation.

As a trespasser, the foetus may be removed, or aborted. But, as in the Quinlan case, the trespasser must be removed with as much care and gentleness as possible. It is extremely unfortunate that due to the proper exercise of rights, a death will occur. (Given the state of the medical arts, there is, at present, no known way to abort the foetus, however careful, that will still maintain its life.) The foetus will die. A unique individual HUMAN BEING, a potential Mozart, Einstein or Mises, precious to all mankind, will have died. This is a terrible tragedy, not something to be lightly considered. The death of every human being diminishes us all if only in view of potential contributions gone forever. Nevertheless, the reasoning is clear, and we must follow wherever it takes us.

I suggest that the abortion question gives our society so much trouble because it has not been recognized as a classical “life boat” situation. In cases of this sort, as the name implies, there exist the means to save the lives of only some of the people involved. Thus, we are necessarily faced with unappealing alternatives.

The cases which fit the life-boat model are those in which mother and ? foetus cannot both survive. To save the mother’s life, the foetus must die. To save the foetus, the mother must die. Clearly even if we believe in the “right to life”, that belief would not help us decide what to do. For abortion would be as pro-life as non-abortion. Fortunately, the “right to life” argument is an unnecessary as it is unhelpful.

All foetuses, despite the manner in which they were conceived, or the consequences of their existence for their mothers, have identically equal rights and equal status. In all cases,* the foetus is a dependent guest and ?may be expelled at the discretion of the mother. If the mother’s life is threatened, she may abort the foetus. But she may also have an abortion for any other reason which seems compelling to her.

* voluntary, healthy pregnancy, rape-induced pregnancy, medically contra-indicated pregnancy

5. The trespassing foetus should be removed in the gentlest manner possible.

So far, though we started with the seemingly anti-abortion premise that the foetus is HUMAN LIFE, we have come to pro-abortion conclusions. But this is not the end of the matter. We must reverse field once again. Our conclusion may be unwelcome to pro-abortionists and anti-abortionists alike.

If and when medical science devises a method of abortion which does not kill the foetus (this has already come to pass in some limited cases) then it would be murder to abort in any other way. It would be murder, and it would have to be punished as infanticide. One would be no more justified in aborting in a death-causing manner than in slitting the throat of a Karen Ann Quinlan.

If the life-preserving method cost appreciably more than the life-destroying one, and the mother was unwilling or unable to take on the additional expense, she would have no positive obligation to preserve the foetus’ life. But she would have to determine, by reasonable public notice, whether anyone else was willing to put up the necessary funds. If they were, and she refused, she would again be guilty of murder. It is only if no one else was willing to pay the additional amount of money that the baby might legitimately be killed.

If the method could be used only at a certain state of pregnancy, the woman would not be required to maintain the foetus until then. She would have the right to remove the trespassing foetus immediately, just as she does now. Only if the life-saving method could be used at the time the woman wishes to have an abortion, would she be obliged to use it.

This conclusion may present problems for the victims of rape, incest, etc., as well as for women who simply change their minds. The rape victim may see it as particularly onerous to have to give life to the progeny of the hated rapist. But it is not a matter of choice for her! Just as a woman may not properly kill an infant child of a man she has come to hate, so a woman may not properly kill the offspring of a rapist, if there is a technique of abortion that can preserve its life. She would not be obliged to maintain it, of course, but neither would she have the right to kill it, if it could be removed alive. Child of rape, incest, both or neither, the foetus would have its chance to live.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 10

OCTOBER, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

The New York Mayoralty

I: THE KOCH VICTORY

There are several important points to be made about the victory of Representative Ed Koch as the new Mayor of New York (“Fun”) City. First is the joy in our hearts at the results—the almost incredible results—of the first Democratic primary on September 8. It was that primary that decisively knocked out of the race the two truly insufferable, intolerable candidates for Mayor: the aged, incompetent if not crooked incumbent Abe Beame; and the raging monster Bella Abzug. Since these were precisely the two candidates favored to win and enter the succeeding runoff, the defeat of Beame and Abzug was like a reprieve, a breath of fresh air in an increasingly decaying city.

Part of the victory was ideological. From someone who was barely known in his own Congressional district and not at all outside of it, Koch was thrust into the voters’ consciousness by a TV blitz masterminded by Dave Garth, the Little Napoleon of political campaigns. From an ordinary and colorless liberal Democrat, Koch, impelled by Garth, suddenly moved rightward to capture the burning and increasing interest of the New York masses in the two Big Issues in New York City: crime, and the permanent fiscal crisis and decay in services resulting from it. Crime boiled down to the usual rampant mugging, aggravated this summer by Son of Sam and by the massive looting during one of New York’s traditional lengthy blackouts. The fact that the police were instructed to look the other way while “the ‘hungry’ community” rolled up in cars to heist cameras, TV sets, et al. left a searing mark on the public consciousness. Beame was implicated both in this decision and in the fiscal crisis, a legacy of many years of Beame as Controller of the city’s finances.

Cleverly, Koch came down hard with a libertarian-leaning position on the two big issues. On crime, Koch called for the restoration of capital punishment for murder, and stated that the National Guard should have been mobilized to shoot the looters. In this, Koch gladdened the hearts of countless New Yorkers, who have been cowed and beaten in by criminals for much too long. When asked how these positions squared with his liberalism, Koch got off the best line of the campaign: “I’ve never equated liberalism with insanity.” On the fiscal crisis, also, Koch had the courage to come down hard on one of the major continuing culprits: the municipal employees unions whose demands are partly responsible for the swollen government spending. Here again, the public, disgusted with unionism and especially with high-pay, no-service government employee unions, responded with enthusiasm.

Abe Beame sobbed and sighed at the outcome—but in the immortal phrase that Liberace has donated to our culture, he went crying all the way to the bank. It turns out that Abe will start collecting his lifelong pension, which will be higher than his current salary. Which demonstrates that it is now impossible for the voters to get any politician off their backs—hell, they just shift to the lucrative pension rolls. The abolition of pensions for politicians should be a high-priority item, not just for libertarians, but for any people of good sense who don’t relish being ripped off forever.

Unfortunately, the smashing of Bella, even coming after her loss in the Democratic primary for Senate last year, has not ended the Abzug threat for very long. Bella now threatens to run for Koch’s seat in Congress next year; the fact that she doesn’t live in the district is not the sort of thing to feaze her. Since the district is a stronghold of wealthy WASPS (in the old days it used to be called the “silk-stocking district”) Bella, whose style is geared toward left-wing Jews, cannot be considered a shoo-in.

This brings us to the ethnic factor, which was the most decisive single element in the mayoral race. Until the 1950’s, there was a peculiar disjunction in political reportage in this country, a disjunction between what everyone in his right mind knew about voting patterns, and what everyone was allowed to write (despite the First Amendment.) Namely, everyone knew that crucial to politics was ethnic voting: a “Jewish vote”, an “Italian vote”, a “Negro vote”, etc. As a result, at least in the days before open primaries, state and local tickets were carefully balanced among the leading ethnic groups. But it was considered an unbreachable no-no for anyone to even mention these ethnic voting patterns, because anyone who did so was considered—horrors—a “racist”. And so political writers had to preserve the fiction of each individual voter carefully sitting down to research and sift all the critical issues before casting his vote. Or even if the voter was considered frivolous and influenced by the personality of the candidate, the ethnic nature of such candidate and such voter could never be specified.

This taboo was courageously broken in the 1950’s by the astute political commentator Samuel Lubell, who started writing quite candidly about the ethnic vote. Lubell’s being Jewish might have helped him break the barrier; if he had been a WASP, it is doubtful that he would have gotten away with it.

At any rate, ethnic lives! because the ethnic factor loomed remarkably large in this mayoral campaign. If one analyzes the voting districts carried by the numerous candidates in the Democratic primary, there is a one-to-one correlation between the ethnic composition of the candidate and of his winning districts. Thus: Mario Cuomo (Italian) carried all the Italian districts (and Irish districts, to the extent that there are any left in New York City—that is, Cuomo carried the white-Catholic districts); Herman Badillo (Puerto Rico), carried all the Puerto Rican districts; Percy Sutton (black) carried all the black areas; the other candidates in the race (all Jews) divided the Jewish districts, as follows: Beame (an elderly Brooklyn Jew) carried all the elderly Brooklyn Jewish districts’ and their moral equivalents in the other boroughs; Koch (a middle-class Jewish professional) carried all the middle-class Jewish professional districts, notably Forest Hills in Queens, and Riverdale in the Bronx; and Abzug, (a far-left Jewess from the West Side of Manhattan—a Jewish-dominated area that is one of the most left-wing districts in the nation) carried the West Side of Manhattan. It all hung together.

If one asks how come there are so many Jewish voting districts in New York, far out of proportion to the Jewish percentage of the population, the answer—well-known to all political observers in the city—is simply this: Jews vote in remarkably high proportions, in Democratic primaries as well as elections. On the other hand, Negroes and Puerto Ricans have a very low voting turnout, particularly in primaries, whose significance they have not yet seemed to grasp.

The triumph of ethnic over ideology was starkly revealed in the second, runoff primary between Koch and Cuomo, which turned out to be a straight down the line, Jewish vs. white-Christian contest. Every Jewish district went for Koch, including not only Beame’s but even Abzug’s; they voted solidly for Koch, even though they were presumably leftists and were shifting to the man generally perceived as the most right-wing of the Democratic contestants. Ethnic lived. As for the black and Puerto Rican districts, they too went pretty much (though not as solidly) for Koch, largely because of deals made by black and Puerto Rican leaders during the intense political maneuvering that went on in the eleven days between the two primaries. So blatant was the ethnic nature of the battle that Cuomo —the hand-picked candidate of the Establishment—repeatedly deplored the Jewish vs. Christian character of the contest.

Another quasi-subterranean element in the mayoral campaign was sex. Rumors were widespread that lifelong bachelor Koch is a homosexual, to the extent that one Cuomo slogan in the conservative areas of Queens county was: “vote for Cuomo, not the homo.” It was largely to counteract these rumors that Koch had well-known consumerite Bess Meyerson constantly at his side during the campaign, and why he certainly never discouraged rumors that he and Bess would soon be married (we’ll see what happens after the election.) Miss Meyerson, it should be added, has a special place in the hearts of New York Jewry as being the only Jewish Miss America in the history of that contest.

That Koch’s quasi-libertarian stance might not survive his election is indicated by the political jockeying before and since the runoff. It had been originally planned that former Tammany leader Edward Costikyan—who ran for Mayor himself early in the campaign and then dropped out to become Koch’s main political advisor—would become First Deputy Mayor in the new Koch administration. In his brief campaign, Costikyan had delivered himself of views that were by far the most libertarian of any of the candidates in the major parties. Now, however, Costikyan’s post has been demoted to one of several Deputy Mayors, with the result that Costikyan has withdrawn, leaving the field to another Deputy Mayor, former candidate Herman Badillo—whose left-wing proclivities take a back seat only to those of Bella Abzug.

II: THE FLIP FLOP

There is one aspect of the New York mayoral campaign that is not nearly as amusing as the contest between the biggies. And that is the downright grisly showing of the Free Libertarian Party mayoralty candidate. Four years ago, in the 1973 mayoral race, Fran Youngstein vaulted the new Libertarian Party to national prominence (considering the media importance of New York City) by garnering 8,800 votes for the first important race ever run by a Libertarian candidate. The 8,800 votes for this brand-new, unknown party were more than the votes for all the other minor parties combined—parties which had all been around a long time.

Since then, as we have detailed in these pages, the strength of the FLP in New York City—in contrast to the Libertarian Party nationally, or even in upstate New York—has been going steadily downhill, declining both relatively and absolutely in each succeeding election. This year, however, the FLP has hit rock bottom; William F. Lawry, its mayoral candidate, compiled 1,068 votes, a virtually non-existent seven-hundredths of one percent of the total vote. Instead of outpolling all the other minor parties combined, Lawry came in next to last among six minor parties, even losing to something called the City Independent party.

This is a truly disgraceful showing, reflecting the degeneration of the FLP in recent years. Reports are that Lawry, whose campaign was scarcely in evidence, said virtually nothing and scarcely seemed’ libertarian when he did appear. Certainly, he flubbed his golden opportunity, given all minor party candidates, to say his piece on the highly influential New York Times Op-Ed page. Here there was not only little that was identifiably libertarian, but not a word was said about the two major issues for New Yorkers: crime, and the fiscal crisis. Instead, Lawry wrote vaguely about power to the neighborhoods—an issue that has been non-existent in the city for almost a decade.

Let’s face it: the FLP has become an embarrassment, an albatross to the rest of the libertarian movement. The best thing it can do now is to commit hara-kiri, to disappear, to fold its tent and silently steal away. The FLP is already dead; it is high time for it to grasp that fact and act accordingly.

Do You Love Liberty?

by David F. Nolan

In the July issue of Libertarian Forum, Murray Rothbard has let forth with a ringing pronouncement that the “key question” of the day is whether or not one Hates the State.

Those libertarians—anarchist and minarchist alike—whose writings do not seethe with anti-Statist rhetoric are belittled as “amoralist utilitarians” and “plonky conservatives,” while such quasi-libertarians as Mike Royko and Nicholas Von Hoffman are lauded for their “pervasive hatred of the State, of all politicians, bureaucrats, and their clients.”

I understand what Murray is trying to say. At least, I think I do. And it is that the degree of passion one shows in one’s commitment to “the cause” is more important than which side of an ideological hairline one cleaves to.

So far, so good. It is not surprising that Murray should take the side of the ravers—and I mean this with no disrespect, being one myself a fair portion of the time—but I feel that several of his contentions are misplaced.

More specifically, I will submit that the touchstone which distinguishes the True Brethren (and Sistren) from the amoralists and plonks is not hatred of the State, but love of liberty. And this is not as trivial a difference as it might at first seem.

In a way, it seems odd that I should have to point this out. Our “movement,” after all, is identified—by us and by others—as libertarian (pro-liberty), and not simply as anti-state. The reason for this is that there are lots of anti-Statists in the world (e.g. Royko, Von Hoffman, et. al.) and not all of them share our goals—even in a general sense.

The communists, when they are out of power, are self-proclaimed anti-statists they will rant as passionately as any libertarian about causing the state to “wither away.” But that doesn’t mean that they are our philosophical soulmates. The same point can be made about leaders of religious sects in communist-ruled countries, certain black militants, and a whole panoply of bomb-throwers and hijackers. All may use anti-statist rhetoric to equal Sam Konkin’s best—and they may even be sincere in their hatred for the State, at least in its present form. But that doesn’t mean that they’re our comrades in the battle for individual liberty.

Perhaps I am belaboring the point, but I think it needs to be made, and made clearly: We must not fall into the trap of valuing rhetoric over philosophy.

Enough. Let us move onward to other observations prompted by the Good Doctor’s essay.

One: The State, predatory band of criminals though it may be, is not the only source of oppression in the world. Throughout much of Western history, the primary oppressor has been the Church. Specifically, the Roman Catholic Church—often acting through the State, to be sure. And anyone who truly burns with the “spirit of liberty” will oppose oppression from that source—or any other—as strongly as he or she opposes oppression by the State.

The thing which sets libertarians apart from other partisans is a deep, uncompromising commitment to the idea of individual liberty as a natural right—and a fierce determination to combat its foes, from whatever quarter they arise. To make anti-statism (or anti-churchism) per se the litmus test for inclusion in the fellowship of “good guys” is to miss the point and muddy the water.

Two: All other considerations aside, I see nothing to be gained by identifying ourselves as people motivated primarily by hate. Hatemongers, of any stripe, are usually a fairly despicable lot; let us not cast our lot among them. Let us instead hold high the banner of liberty and proclaim our allegiance to our principles. Let’s not be ashamed to say that we love liberty, and make this our rallying cry.

Three: In the same vein, I see no useful purpose in making snide references to patriots. Patriotism means nothing more than love for one’s land and its people, and there is no conflict between libertarianism and patriotism. Patriotism is not love for the State, and the truest patriots are usually those who decry government’s plunder of the people and their land. Let’s make it clear that we understand this distinction!

Hopefully, I have made my point. It may seem like nit-picking to some, but it is my firm belief that our success in the marketplace of ideas will depend largely on how we package our product. And it is to this end that I have made these observations.

The Editor Replies:

I appreciate Dave Nolan’s comments, and he is surely one of that hardy band of laissez-faire radicals that I have been calling for. I don’t see any disjunction, however, between his position and mine. Hate, of course, has had a bad press for a long time, but hatred of the bad is only the other side of the coin of love for the good. Indeed, how can one truly love the good if he does not also, and for the same reason, hate the evil? Libertarians, it seems to me, properly hate the State precisely because they love liberty, and to the same extent.

There are, of course, other aggressors and invaders of liberty than the State: muggers, bank robbers, terrorists, etc. Libertarians don’t particularly focus on these oppressors, however, for two basic reasons: (1) because there is no need—everyone, not just libertarians, opposes and “hates” these aggressors, so there is no special reason for us to pay them much heed; (2) but, on the other hand, only libertarians recognize the State as evil aggressors. To everyone else, the State’s actions have legitimacy and are not recognized as aggression; it is up to us to point out that the State has no clothes. And (3) the State is the major aggressor; random individuals may mug or rob banks; only the State threatens and uses missiles and hydrogen bombs.

I must take issue with Dave, however, on the historical role of the Catholic Church. The Church was never able to commit any oppression except through its influence in using State power; in that sense, it is similar to any other group: business, unions, professional associations etc. which are harmless or beneficial in their private capacity but become oppressors and exploiters when they are able to operate through the State. Moreover, I would venture to say that, on the whole, the Protestant churches have been far more oppressive in the use Of State power than the Roman Catholic. The reason why so many of us tend to think otherwise is that England and America have been infected for centuries by unremitting anti-Catholic propaganda wielded by Protestant moulders of opinion.

I agree wholeheartedly with Dave on his point about patriotism. True patriotism—love of one’s land, culture, etc.—is totally at odds with the phony patriotism, of love for the State; once again, as in so many other cases, a term which was originally libertarian was taken over and perverted for directly opposite purposes.

As for the problems of marketing our ideas, how we package them depends on the audience we are trying to reach with the particular item. The hard-core readership of the Lib. Forum can take the unvarnished truth a lot more easily than, say, the readers of the Chicago Tribune or the watchers of Johnny Carson. And if not in the pages of the Lib. Forum, then where?

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Recently I saw two movies that presented a remarkable contrast. They are not at all similar in theme; but in structure and meaning they embody two diametrically opposed concepts of film-making, indeed of art itself. One is the currently made French turkey, La Grande Bourgeoise— the epitome of the art film, vintage 1977. For an hour and a half, Giancarlo Giannini mopes, Catherine Deneuve looks wooden (which is about all she can do in any case), and several other characters mope. The camera lingers lovingly on closeups of their respective moping. Then there is a brief second or two of action (Giannini murdering the evil husband of his sister Deneuve), and then everybody mopes in spades for another hour or so. While all this is going on, one’s eyes glaze over, and boredom grows and seeps through one’s bones. By the time the so-called climax of the movie creeps into focus, the viewer doesn’t give a tinker’s dam whether or not Deneuve and other assorted atheist-socialist-aristocrats are convicted of aiding and abetting the murder by their reactionary Catholic persecutors. All one cares about is that the picture terminate as quickly and mercifully as possible.

In short, the picture has one point, and nothing is done with it, or rather, the point is repeated endlessly. Minutes drag on and on through an ocean of wasted film and wasted time. To top it all off, the movie was photographed through some sort of haze, presumably to underscore its so-called profundity.

In contrast, I also had the unalloyed pleasure of seeing for the ninth time one of the greatest movies ever made: Pygmalion, vintage Great Britain of the late 1930’s. Instead of hitting the audience over the head at length with one point, Pygmalion was chock-full of points, and spent the minimal possible time on each. As in all other great movies, there was not a wasted second, not a wasted centimeter, in Pygmalion. Every moment was meaningful, and every moment led to the next in an integrated and coherent whole. This sort of movie fascinates rather than bores, and it is eternal. For it bears seeing time and time again, as new insights and nuances are gleaned, and as cherished moments are recognized and remembered by the viewer.

Pygmalion bears comparison, too, to the later musical version of the same play, My Fair Lady. My Fair Lady is a pleasant and enjoyable picture, the music is excellent, the sets and color are sumptuous, but yet it suffers by comparison with Pygmalion. In contrast to the latter’s swift pace and tight structure, Lady was looser and rather flatulent, and considerably longer than Pygmalion’s hour and a half. Despite not being nearly as pretty as Audrey Hepburn, Wendy Hiller’s Liza in the earlier movie was the work of a far superior actress. In particular contrast was the acting in the central role of the film, the linguist Professor Henry Higgins. Rex Harrison, of Lady, is one of the superior movie actors of the last three decades, and his work in this picture did not belie that status. But Leslie Howard’s Henry Higgins was simply magnificent; every gesture, every inflection was inspired and flawless. To use the current jargon, Howard was Henry Higgins: brilliant, scholarly, quirky, abrupt, ill-mannered, blindly tactless while thinking himself the very model of tact, and lovable to the very core. There, dear reader, was acting at its most transcendent, in a picture that—in blazing contrast to the “art film”—is the very model of a great work of art. We must weep for the loss, for the fact that this sort of picture apparently cannot be made or even conceived in today’s world—while we exult in the fact that movies like Pygmalion are immortalized on film.

That Noble Dream

by Justus D. Doenecke

Review of Anne Husted Burleigh, ed., Education in a Free Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1973)

Perhaps, just perhaps, you once dreamed of cutting loose from the present educational system and starting one of your own. If so, would your vision go so far as to include planning of faculty, financing, curriculum, and buildings? .

In 1971, the Liberty Fund of Indianapolis sponsored a seminar that centered on just this topic. Participants included an Indiana industrialist, a midwestern economist, a law professor, a historian, and the education columnist for National Review. Burleigh’s anthology contains their position papers, but not the ensuing debate, and adds an essay by Dorothy Sayers, noted novelist and theologian.

The discussion was sharp, as Burleigh notes in her lengthy introduction. Although all contributors shared a common belief in the free-market approach to education, there was much disagreement on other matters. Definitions of the “free society,” “education,” even “understanding” all differed, as did opinions on ethical neutrality, university governance, tenure, and the elective system. Some participants were mainly concerned with economic issues and believed that genuine liberal education could only come with total private support. Others focussed on syllabi and administration, and called for a return to classic academic goals.

“Education is something that happens within an individual. No matter how formally educational the setting or the process, if nothing happens to the supposed learner, nothing educational has taken place.” So wrote Benjamin A. Rogge, Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at Wabash College, and Pierre F. Goodrich, late Chairman of the Board of Ayrshire Collieries Corporation. A college, in other words, should turn the students “upside down,” forcing them to critique all that encompasses conventional wisdom.

The two authors readily admit that the “educated man” is not necessarily the “virtuous man,” a statement that need only receive confirmation by academicians themselves. Yet there is bad education and good education, with the latter—so claim Rogge and Goodrich—fostered by liberal arts institutions in which faculty is selected for teaching skill, no degrees (“meaningless relics from the current system”) or grades are bestowed, and participation is made the key to classroom life.

At the beginning of each term, the college would publish a list of seminars and lectures. The student, having once determined on a course load, would begin by doing some required reading, then enter into small Socratic discussions. Then it’s more reading and more discussion, after which the student would be prepared to listen to a lecture intelligently. Then more discussion, more reading, an the cycle goes on. The thrust here is obvious: to teach is not to manipulate passive minds—or what C. Wright Mills called “happy robots”—but to engage continually in questioning.

Gottfried Dietze, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins, addresses himself to a different issue, for he is grappling with nothing less than the meaning of the modern university. Dietze looks at contemporary education and has the courage to find much of it bad. He opposes student participation in educational policy. Why, he asks, give “those with less knowledge and, therefore, less ability to advance the truth, the same power as those who possess a greater knowledge and ability to do so?” To put “men who have proved their excellence on a par with those who still must, and perhaps never will, prove it” can only “topple the very tenets of education.” (Dietze’s suggestion that instructors should have only one vote in faculty meetings to four for full professors is less wise. How often have young, well-trained instructors been under the control of “old boys” who admit—even boast—that since graduate school they have read little and written less?)

Throughout history, Dietze goes on to note, universities have been manipulated by governments—for “reasons of state”—and he finds that a mindless majoritarianism still threatens the integrity of the academy. He observes how both faculty and students betray academic freedom by intimidation and violence. (He might better note that if violators today usually come from the left, they could spring from the right tomorrow. As Carol Gruber notes in her excellent Mars and Minerva (1975), the pro-war “patriotic” professor of World War I had much to do with originally politicizing the campus.) Students acting illegally, he claims, should be held responsible for damages under civil law, and administrators should never suffer interference with the regular processes of learning. To Dietze, the university exists in order to pursue the truth, a non-political value that can only survive by creating continual barriers against politicization.

Russell Kirk, unquestionably the ablest regular columnist that National Review, offers a model for a revitalized college. In an essay that deserves much reprinting, Kirk posits that a true college exists not to impart skills but “to seek after Wisdom—and through Wisdom, for Truth.” If we might deem his proposals too costly and “visionary” for immediate implementation, they still deserve our respect, for Kirk, like John Henry Newman, is one of the few commentators in any age who has some inkling of what real education is all about. The collective irresponsibility of our colleges, particularly those that ignore curriculum, make Kirk’s points all the more telling.

Newman, in his classic Idea of a University, called liberal discipline “a habit of mind . . . which lasts throughout life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom, or what. . . I have ventured to call the philosophical habit.” (One wonders what Newman would make of the modern faculty meeting). Real education, he said, aims at “the clear, calm, accurate vision and; comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its place, and its own characteristic upon it.” What Newman here is referring to is the capacity to see relationships between things, the capacity to perceive that reality in which particular parts have their full meaning. Kirk concurs, writing what by helping to confer this wise vision, education enables “a man to order his own soul and, thereby, come to a condition of moral worth.”

Of course, Newman made it clear that higher learning improves intellects, not consciences. “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man.” Kirk too distinguishes between knowledge and virtue; yet he affirms with Socrates that right reason can support the cause of virtue. The college, argues Kirk, can give the student the tools for self-instruction, “the enduring truths that govern our being,” principles of self-control, and an ethical consciousness. To use already overused cliches, it can convey the improvement of mind and character.

There is, naturally, quite a different sense in which the university should be ethical, and should be in fact a deeply moral enterprise. It goes far beyond the “Wisdom” and “Truth” Kirk would impart, for it concerns the very process by which one arrives at positions of value. This moral commitment involves lack of exploitation, the absence of coercion, and mutual respect for the positions of others—in other words, a tradition of civility our institutions so often lack.

How best can an institution offer the values Kirk seeks? By returning—he says—to a traditional curriculum, one emphasizing moral philosophy, humane letters (to develop critical powers and not merely “appreciation”), rhetoric, political economy, physics, higher mathematics, biological science (also philosophically considered), classical and modern languages, history, logic, and music and the visual arts stressing history and theory, not craft). By abolishing amorphous survey and general education courses. By abandoning any attempt to reproduce those specialized studies that are the proper province of the graduate school. By keeping the size of the student body within reasonable limits. By reducing electives to a minimum. (“One of the college’s principal strengths was formerly its recognition of order and hierarchy in the higher learning, and the undergraduate is ordinarily not yet capable of judging with discretion what his course of studies ought to be.”) By inculcating “a sense of gratitude toward the generations that have preceded us in time and a sense of obligation toward the generations yet to be born.” (“We moderns,” he writes, “are only dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.”)

Such a school would stress methods of approach, not the gathering of information. Mechanisms include a three year bachelor’s program, thorough and severe testing at (and only at) the end of the academic year, tutorials, private programs of reading and paper-writing, and well-prepared formal lectures that go far beyond the textbook. Each faculty member would have much freedom, “it being clearly understood that he is to teach an intellectual discipline, not some impassioned private doxa.”

Kirk’s concept of education contains much wisdom, for he realizes that serious education involves more than a proliferation of courses according to the interests of the faculty. (One can get many good courses this way but it is a by-product of faculty, not the effect of educational policy), but surely Kirk’s vision is not sufficient, for genuine learning must involve more than the transmission of accumulated wisdom and traditional values. Historian John William Ward likes to cite the time when Erik Erikson was asked what it meant to be a good analyst. “He must be willing to be surprised,” Erikson answered; that is, to be able to cope ;with the unfamiliar. Erikson used to call himself a “systematic participant” in dealing with the lives he observed. Both words are significant; “systematic” means being critical and self-aware, and finally passing responsible judgment on what one at first does pot presume to judge; “participant” means to identify imaginatively with the other. To have both the imaginative identification and systematic criticism is full maturity, or what Erikson called “ego integrity.” For Ward, “it is no less than the condition of being a humane and intelligent person.”

Next in the Burleigh anthology is Henry G. Manne, law professor at the University of Rochester, who deals with university governance. Manne notes the power shift from trustees and presidents to faculty, with results not always beneficial. Since faculty is not held accountable under market pressures, it can pursue research at the expense of teaching, recruit only from similar schools of thought within a discipline, and demand the admission of unqualified members of minorities whom they have no intention of ever teaching. Quite often, students have a legitimate complaint: “A lot of what passes as modern permissiveness at the university level would more accurately be characterized as utter disinterest. Today this is being reflected in such matters as parietal rules, grading policy, so-called bulletin board courses, no attendance requirements, pass-fail grading, and many other devices passed off as innovations.” Manne offers an intriguing solution, but one that needs more explanation: elimination of government operation, state tuition vouchers for any institution of the student’s choice, and de facto ownership by the faculty who would possess share interests in the new university corporation.

Similar concerns with university control come from Stephen J. Tonsor, historian at the University of Michigan and one of the most thoughtful of that highly mixed bag known as conservative intellectuals. Tonsor argues that the university belongs to the whole of society; it is not the property of students, faculty, or any pressure group “that happens to feel a call to revolution or a prophetic mission.” Nor is it, he writes, “a general-purpose social institution. It is not suited to the solution of social problems, the amelioration of misery and misfortune, the reformation of character, or the transformation of culture.” In short, it is neither a center for community organizing, YMCA, T-group, or sanitarium.

Yet, as Tonsor notes, the university has lost its roots, indeed its very reason for being. Hiring practices discriminate against conservatives and Roman Catholics, and such humanistic disciplines as religion are often excluded from the curriculum. Presidents act not like educational statesmen (and indeed many would not know the meaning of either the adjective or the noun) but rather serve as “technicians of adjustment,” playing the kind of broker politics that Theodore Lowi so cogently sees as “the end of liberalism.”

Tonsor’s indictment, perceptive though it is, has a wider application. In the fifties, the Russians launched Sputnik, and schools beefed up science and math; in the sixties people complained of the “unheavenly city” and ruination of the environment, and the academy responded with urban and environmental studies. Demands by black and women’s groups are only the last in a long series. Seldom do institutions ask what role all these areas should play in general education, or what significance such fields have for humane learning. To do so would take some work, and more important, some thinking. It is far easier to give in to an immediate demand on the terms of those who speak the loudest.

Faculty, he notes, realize that rewards lie outside the classroom and no longer take teaching seriously. Their meetings, which resemble nothing so much as the old parliament of Poland, foolishly attempt to legislate in matters of conduct, budget, and administration. Students, though “remarkably ill-prepared to judge or pass on policy,” demand to determine course offerings, pass on questions of academic discipline, and judge appointments, salary increases, and tenure. Tonsor is particularly, and correctly, harsh on the alliance between student activists and administrators: “Both love committee meetings, both place power above principle, and both are deeply anti-intellectual.” The university, Tonsor says, must return to its role as teacher, with research necessary but ancillary to it.

Tonsor’s remedy? Require the student to pay full tuition (accompanied by a generous loan program). Students, having to pay the cost of their education, will appreciate it more; furthermore, they will force—and rightly so—professors to teach three-hour courses per semester and to introduce more relevant courses. In brief, all concerned will become accountable.

It is surprising when a mystery writer has ideas on education, and even more surprising when that writer is a lay theologian. Dorothy L. Sayers, she of “Lord Peter Winsey” fame, calls for a return to the “lost tools of learning.” “For the last 300 years,” she says, “we have been living on our educational capital.” Sayers wrote her essay in 1948 and hence she could declare that students “learn everything except the art of learning.” (Would that we had such anxieties today).

To Sayers, the medieval Trivium offers the correct model, for it teaches pupils how to learn before they start applying themselves to “subjects.” We begin with Grammar, which is best applied to students at the earliest stage of learning, the “Poll-Parrot” stage usually involving years nine to eleven. During this period, memorization is both easy and pleasurable. The best grounding for all education, she claims, is the Latin grammar, and this for several reasons: it is the key to the vocabulary of all the Romance languages, to the structure of the Teutonic languages, and to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences. In addition, it cuts down the labor and pains of learning other subjects by at least fifty per cent.

At this stage, English verse and prose, lyric and narrative, classical myth and English legend should be learned by heart, with recitation practiced aloud. Also history, with stress on dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities; geography, with maps, natural features, and visual presentation of flora and fauna; science, which includes the identifying and naming of specifics (“to be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat not a bird”); mathematics, which begin with the multiplication table and the grouping of numbers; and theology, that “mistress-science,” in which both the Old and New Testaments are presented as parts of single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption.

We move on to the second stage of learning, the “Pert Age of answering back” and “catching one’s elders out” in interminable argument. Here, from ages twelve to fourteen, it is formal logic, fine demonstration, and well-turned arguments that are crucial, the lynchpin to what the medieval mind referred to as Dialectic. For language, this means syntax, analysis (i.e. the logical construction of speech), and the history of language; for readings, essays, arguments, criticism, and debate; for mathematics, algebra and geometry, both of which should be seen as subdepartments of logic; for history, constitutional history and debates on ethical aims of statesmen; for theology, argument concerning dogma, conduct, and morals.

At some point in the pupil’s development, perhaps around age fourteen, the students will find that their knowledge and experience are not sufficient, and they will enter that even more difficult stage known as the “Poetic Age.” If they now realize that logic and reason have their limits, they find their imagination awakened and they are prepared to study Rhetoric. What was learned by rote through Grammar is now seen in new contexts; what was cold analysis is now brought together in a new synthesis. A certain freedom is allowed, but it must be one that manifests the unity of all branches of learning. Students may specialize, drop certain disciplines, and prepare to specialize in one or two areas. Those who want to go on have the university ahead, and students prepared in this manner should “disconcert” the universities—and do so at age sixteen.

Anyone who has ever met a class might differ with specific recommendations of all of the authors. Financing, curriculum, administrative power, faculty prerogative—all have long been the subject of debate. Sayer might be too rigid, Manne too impractical. Kirk’s model curriculum could—if one were not careful—lead simply to producing people of smug if learned gentility. (Kirk claims to welcome residential fraternities, those twentieth century microcosms of Pierre Boule’s “planet of the apes.” Yet these weird repositories of “higher scholarship” are not always the best device for achieving the radical transformation sought by Rogge and Goodrich.) Academe, like many other institutions, reflects its society, and one cannot restore order to the self, much less to the university, if it is absent in the general society. Order for order’s sake is folly at any rate; it is the process of finding order that is so crucial, and that shows that one is educated.

What is common and significant to all contributors is the sense that education is a vocation, what Luther referred to as a “calling”, and that institutions that lose this sense do so at their peril. The authors offer ways through which they think this sense of vocation can be recovered. Education in America, if it is to survive, needs more academics who share their enthusiasm for learning, and their integrity and courage in approaching the task. In a very real sense, they have kept the faith.

Public Parks: the New York City Case

by Walter Block

Everyone knows that the system of public parks in New York City is a mess. Our city parks have become havens for muggers and junkies, unsafe for honest citizens except perhaps in broad daylight on summer weekends. With the exception of Central Park, virtually all the city parks are spread around the periphery of Manhattan, where they are all but impossible to reach. Tourists on the Circle Line boat cruise are likely to conclude that virtually all of Manhattan is composed of parks; but we occupants of the barren inland know better, unfortunately. As for the pitifully few inland “vest pocket parks”, they are in danger of becoming obsolete.

In Tudor City, a group of elderly people have formed the Save Our Parks Committee, to stop Tudor City’s owner, the Helmsley Spear real estate firm, from erecting a 52 story residential and office building on the site of two small parks on East 42nd Street near the U.N. Predictably, the politicians of the area have rallied to the cause of saving the park, and have criticized the greedy profit-seeking landlord. The problem with the facile answer of supporting the park however is that on the one hand, we also have a housing shortage and perhaps the park should be replaced by housing. On the other hand, it may indeed be true that the park shortage is even greater than the housing shortage, and then we should not only save these small parks, but should replace some housing with parks. The real problem of the park system in New York City is not whether we should save these two small parks, important as that may be. The real problem is that we lack a mechanism by which these and all similar problems can be solved automatically.

When the problem of how to allocate our scarce resources among competing ends arises in other areas, we have an answer that has served us well. It has served us so well, in fact, that it can only be folly to ignore its application to the present problem. I speak, of course, of the price system. If there were ever to arise a problem of allocating scare resources between shoes and wheat of the sort that has arisen between parks and housing, where there a “shoes faction” opposed a “wheat fraction”, the price system would solve this problem in short order. (Indeed, the very ludicrousness of the example strongly suggests that the price system does not even allow such problems to arise in the first place.) For the good in relatively short supply would rise in price as unsatisfied demanders bid for it. If wheat were more scarce, the price of wheat would rise relative to shoes. Then wheat producers would be able to bid land and labor and other scarce factors of production away from the shoe producers.

How would the price system work in the case of parks? The City government would denationalize the park industry. It would sell off all its park lands to private entrepreneurs who would have the option of maintaining the land in the form of a park or converting it to some other use. These entrepreneurs would charge prices for the use of parks just as is done in the form of single entry admissions, season tickets, or any other plan amenable to both park owner and customer.

The advantages of the plan would be immediate. No longer would the park-using public have to fear for its very life. What would solve the problem of crime in the parks would not be simply more police or better lighting or any of the other specific measures often proposed by the bureaucrats in charge of parks. What will solve the problem is rather a system which will automatically reward those entrepreneurs who are able to rid the parks of crime by whatever methods they adopt, and a system which will automatically penalize those entrepreneurs who are unable to rid the parks of crime. The profit and loss system, or the price system, will give rise to a whole host of park owners, each free to use his own methods. Those who succeed will be rewarded by the patronage of the customers, will prosper, and will be able to spread their enlightened methods to other parks. Those who fail will lose customer support, will lose money and go bankrupt, and will no longer be in position to mismanage parks. It is in this way that the price system will improve the safety of parks.

The same analysis holds true for other facets of park operation; the location of the park in the first place, the other services provided by park managers, etc.: those entrepreneurs who please the customers will prosper, and those who do not will fail. It is in this way, and this way alone, that we are likely to have the parks relocated to where they are more accessible, that we are likely to see the parks open at night, etc.

The radical thing about this proposal is not the use of the price system itself, which is used in all aspects of our economic life, but rather the application of it to an area in which it had never been used before. Unfortunately, we are such slaves to the past that it is extremely difficult to imagine alternative ways of doing things, where the alternatives would replace institutions that have been with us for many years. Objection to new ways arise which would never occur to us but for their newness. For example, if the government had been in the business of providing shoes and wheat in much the same way that it is now in the business of providing parks, fire protection, postal service, etc., and if someone were to come forward with a proposal to turn the production of shoes and wheat over to private enterprise, all sorts of objections would probably arise which from our present vantage point of experience would appear to be frivolous: “How would the farmers bring the wheat to market?”, “Who would sew the soles and shoe tops together?”, “How would the merchants be able to charge for the shoes?”, “Who would bake the bread?”, “How would we decide on the proportion of wheat allocated to bread and to cake?”, and especially, “But the poor would be forced to go without shoes!”. From the vantage point of experience, we know all these’ objections about shoes and wheat to be baseless. But they are very potent indeed with regard to the de-nationalization of parks, an action where we have no experience to guide us.

Let us consider in some detail the claim that the poor would be forced to go without the use of parks, since we have dealt with the other objections with regard to parks, at least briefly. It is true that poor people and poor children (along with everyone else) will be forced to pay for the park services they consume under a system of private ownership of the parks, just as they are now forced to pay for the shoes and wheat they consume. But it by no means follows that the poor will not be able to enjoy the use of parks, or even that they will be forced to curtail their use of parks! If anything, the de-nationalization of our parks will probably mean more park use by the poor, not less.

For ons thing, the poor, along with everyone else, will be able to make better use of private parks because they will tend to be run more efficiently under the price system. No longer will the parks be out of service because of uncontrolled crime, improper lighting, or defective equipment. Government bureaucratic park managers receive their salary regardless of consumer satisfaction; entrepreneurs do not. But more importantly, we must realize that the effect of the present system of nationalized parks is to divert recreational funds away from poor people and toward rich people. Therefore, denationalizing the park industry will have the effect of increasing, not decreasing, the amount of park services that go to the poor!

Although it is true that the New York City government does spend some thousands of dollars on building and maintaining asphalt playgrounds and swimming pools used mainly by the poor, it severely taxes recreations mainly attended by the poor, such as professional baseball, football, and basketball games, bowling alleys and pool halls, etc. The city government then takes these and other tax funds and subsidizes recreational activities mainly patronized by the rich to the tune of literally billions of dollars. The priceless art treasures in our museums and art galleries, the millions of dollars that go into our libraries, ballet and opera companies, symphony orchestras, Shakespeare Festivals, etc., all represent recreational money taken away from the poor and given to the rich. Can it then be seriously maintained that stopping this process by getting the government out of the recreation business will actually be detrimental to the poor? Hardly.

No. The answer to the physical and spiritual decay of our nationalized recreational industry can only be a separation of recreation and state akin to the separation of church and state mandated by the constitution. And such a separation can only help the poor, the greatest victims of state depredations.

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Abortion: An Exchange

To the Editor of the Lib. Forum:

I found your arguments on abortion (Lib. Forum, July 1977) cogent and well structured. I can agree with what you say. However, you did not address the aspect of abortion which causes me the greatest concern.

Actions have consequences which, to my mind, must be accepted going in, especially when they are clear and certain. One of the potential consequences of sexual intercourse is pregnancy. If the participants voluntarily enter into this action with a knowledge of the possible consequences, I think they must accept them. If the act is involuntary, they need not.

Whether one can speak of a “contract” (an obligation resulting from a known consequence would be more appropriate) between mother and fetus hinges on whether the action was voluntary. Further, since the action has possible consequences, a “birth control mistake” is one of the possibilities which needs to be considered. Finally, if it is voluntary, why should a person not be permitted to surrender his body “in an enforceable transaction,” even to sell himself into slavery for a specified time, if he wishes.

R. B. Peirce

The Editor Replies:

Thanks for your thoughtful letter. I confess that I cannot understand your point about “accepting” all the consequences of one’s voluntary actions. Where is it written that one “must accept” such consequences? Suppose that A attends a meeting at which B has a bad cold, and, further, that A entered into the meeting with the full knowledge that B had such a cold. Must we say that A “must accept” the possible cold because he entered into the meeting voluntarily? Does this mean that A can’t take aspirin, Vitamin C, or whatever in an attempt to fend off the unwelcome consequences of an action which he otherwise benefited from or enjoyed? This strikes me as a bizarre position indeed, and the hangover from a Puritan ethic that one must accept uncomplainingly the bitter with the batter. Why? Why can’t one take a second action which will annul the unpleasant consequences of a first action? Why can’t one take Vitamin C to annul cold germs?

Another example: A gets drunk one night, gets a hangover the next ?morning. Is it morally impermissible for him to take some hangover remedy, because then A is not “accepting the consequences” of his own voluntary action? Why is it impermissible—apart from the Puritan position that pain must accompany every enjoyment? Yet Mr. Peirce and his fellow-thinkers would precisely have to take such bizarre positions.

Professor Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her brilliant defense of abortion cited in our July issue, deals with such arguments by posing the cause of a person who leaves his window open, thereby facilitating the entrance of a burglar into the house and the theft of his valuables. Does this mean that the houseowner had no right to open the window, or that he was in some way “responsible” for the burglar’s invasion, and that therefore the homeowner has the right to do whatever he wishes with his own property. It is monstrous to say that he is in some way responsible for the theft, thereby taking the burglar off the hook, because the burglar’s task thereby became easier. There is no moral obligation for an innocent homeowner to live in a fortress. In the same way, it is as absurd to blame the mother for a birth control mistake as it is to blame the homeowner for the “open window mistake.” The burglar was the invader; in the same way, with a birth control mistake, the fetus is the invader. In neither case, can we get the invader off the hook because of some arbitrary theory that an innocent person “must accept all the consequences of his voluntary actions”—from leaving a window open to using a non-fool-proof contraceptive.

Similar to arguments attempting to blame the homeowner were the repugnant commercials a few years ago blaming the car-owner for the theft of his car if he had left his keys in the car. In some way, then, the car-owner, instead of righteous innocence, is supposed to feel guilty for leading the poor teen-age criminal astray. I say “balderdash!”

As for your point on voluntary slavery, I can only reiterate my previous article. There is nothing wrong with “surrendering one’s body” voluntarily, but that is not the issue. The issue is, after the person changes his mind, the enslavement is no longer voluntary; it then becomes compulsory. Now what?

The Sadat Hype

The media, of course, loved the trip–as well they might, since it was virtually designed as a media event. The trip was heavy on the symbolism and on the pictorials: the president of Egypt flying into Israel, laying Israeli as well as Egyptian wreath at soldiers’ graves, speaking before the Israeli Knesset on world-wide satellite television. All over the world, the hearts of millions of the hoodwinked leaped at the thought of a lasting peace in the Middle East.

The gentlemen cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. Even on the level of the trip itself, and of immediate Israeli-Egypt relations, it is hard to see what the Sadat excursion accomplished. A few phone lines were opened between the two countries, but so what? Sadat reiterated the traditional Egyptian demands, both sides talked of peace, peace but Israeli concessions were non-existent. The strange thing is that, in a normal dramatic trip of this sort, important concessions and agreements would have been worked out secretly in advance, so that the public would be conned into believing that the trip itself generated the dramatic agreement announced at the climactic conclusion of the journey. But in the case of the Sadat trip, there was no dramatic relations between the two countries, was all show and flash and no substance. One would think that the media would have caught on, but perhaps that’s too much to expect.

Hints in the press about possible secret but unspecified concessions made by Israel are hardly convincing. If there are such concessions, why weren’t they worked out before the trip, and announced as its supposedly successful climax?

There is even a deeper flaw with all the hoopla over the Sadat trip. And that is that nothing in the long run, nothing in solving the deeper problems in the Middle East, can be accomplished by Egypt and Israel alone. Even if Sadat and Begin danced the hora all over Tel Aviv, the great problem of the Middle East—what to do about the rights of the Palestinians—would be no closer to a solution. For neither the Egyptian government nor any other government in the Middle East—whether Arab or not—is qualified to speak for and negotiate for the Palestinian people. Only Palestinians are so qualified, and Israel continues to refuse even to meet with their representatives. And that, of course, means real Palestinians, as overwhelmingly embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization, and not a couple of Palestinian-American university professors who represent only themselves, as one trial balloon floated by Sadat has proposed. Of course, simply meeting with the Palestinians will scarcely serve to bring about peace, but such continuing meeting is at least the necessary condition for such a settlement. And there is no sign whatever that such a meeting is one iota closer than before Sadat’s grandstand journey.

In fact, paradoxically, the long-run consequences of the Sadat visit may be the diametric opposite of what the world media have been proclaiming. Predictably, the conservative Arab states such as Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and the influential Saudi Arabia and its client states—governments who have never displayed much interest in the rights of the Palestinians—have come to support the Sadat visit. Predictably, also, the radical “rejectionist” Arab states such as Iraq and Libya have condemned the trip with great passion, calling for “spilling the blood of the traitor Sadat” and for the overthrow of the Sadat regime. But more important is the reaction of the centrist bloc of Arab states, headed by Syria. It was Syria’s violent rightward turn against the Lebanese Left which dealt a body blow to the PLO and to the Palestinian guerrillas inside Lebanon. But now Syria and the centrist states have been radicalized leftward by their outrage at the Sadat trip, and Syria is in the process of mobilizing a far wider “rejection front” than anyone would have thought possible a few scant months ago.

The rejection front began with the dissident Palestinian guerrillas who had broken with Fateh (the dominant force within the PLO). These guerrillas were led by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, headed by Dr. George Habash, and were supported by Libya and Iraq, who, however, happen to be geographically far from the Israeli fighting front. Fateh and the majority of the PLO were willing to go along with the solution to the Middle East cooked up by the U.S. State Department doves—abandonment by Israel of its post-1967 conquests, and the creation of a mini-Palestine state in the newly abandoned areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in return for which the new mini-State would pledge never to try to acquire the remainder of Palestinian territory under Israeli dominion, a pledge to be guaranteed by the Great Powers, the United Nations or whatever. With this “1967 solution” looking increasingly dim, especially with the hard-line hawk Menachem Begin in in command of Israel, a new and far stronger “rejection front” seems to be looming—this time including the PLO, Syria and the centrist Arab states.

All this does not mean, however, any imminent resumption of full-scale, conflict. On the contrary, the current uneasy condition of no war-no peace is likely to continue indefinitely and considerably into the future. For the Palestinians and their Arab allies might now be nudged into doing some reexamining of another Habash “rejection front” tenet that they had’ brusquely dismissed as defeatist and as taking too much time: namely, that Israel cannot be vanquished nor Palestinian rights achieved until such conservative Arab governments as that of Egypt and Jordan are: overthrown and replaced by pro-Palestinian radicals. In short, that from the point of view of the Palestinians, their main strategic enemy in the current historical period is not Israel, but within the Arab world.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 11

NOVEMBER, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

Two Exits

I: HHH

And still, it is not over—the endless preoccupation with HHH and his final illness. Just as it is now the imbecile fashion not only for a father to “parent” (a hideous neologism) but also to feel and enjoy the mother’s labor pains, so we were all taken step-by-step through every loving detail and nuance of Hubert Horatio Humphrey’s terminal illness, and through his interminable series of funerals. Surely, if they could have gotten away with a funeral in every town in America, they would have done so. Even now, when Humphrey is laid to rest, we shall be receiving indefinitely Hubert’s Messages from On High as relayed through the widow Muriel, slated to succeed him in the United States Senate. Already, we are being abjured—precisely in the spirit of “Win It for the Gipper”—to go out and pass the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill for the Hump.

There has been no such massive outpouring of hooey since the death of Harry S. Truman, when all of his former enemies rushed to nominate and elect him to sainthood. But that, at least, was a one-shot deal; the man died, was elevated, and that was that. Mercifully, we were spared every detail of Truman’s final illness. But now, as my friend Ronald Hamowy likes to say, we were to be spared nothing.

What are we to say of all this? First, in the interest of truth and of public common sense, we must right the historical record. The maxim nil nisi bonum was always pretty silly anyway, and certainly is intolerable for a government official, where the doctrine can be and is habitually used to whitewash not only the politician in question but, by extension, all politicians. Jimmy Carter’s absurd declamation that “Hubert Humphrey was the most beloved by all Americans” will be met by many of us with the immortal Sam Goldwynism: “Kindly include me out.” Hubert Humphrey was the very model of a modern Social Democrat, his only solution for all social problems the vast expenditure of federal funds. He was an enthusiastic and ardent champion of Big Government all the way, in domestic and foreign affairs, not only whooping it up for all American wars, hot and cold, but also a leading enthusiast, at the height of the Cold War, for packing alleged subversives away in a concentration camp. Always an opportunist, Humphrey reached the acme of this trait in his consistently sycophantic behavior as Vice President, that is, his absolute subservience to Power. Have we all forgotten so soon? Among his fellow opportunists and Social Democrats, he was distinguished largely for his unquenchable garrulity, for being the Motor Mouth of our epoch—a trait which people did not find nearly so lovable when he was in full vigor as they do now in retrospect.

Secondly, we must cry out against this culmination of the current tendency to expose every celebrity’s running sores to an avid, lipsmacking public. The moment when a President’s body became public property can be precisely pointed: Ike Eisenhower’s ileitis attack in the mid-1950’s. It was a disease which had not hit the public eye before or since, but every symptom was served up to the panting public in excruciating detail. Then came Ike’s heart attack, LBJ’s heart attack and abdominal operation, etc. With the apotheosis of HHH, we now have this practice brought down to other ranks of politicians. In these days of encounter groups, touchee-feelee, and Instant Intimacy, it might seem a lost cause to call for a return to the precious value of privacy, of the closed rather than the open, but it must be done nevertheless.

Another important lesson is the multi-partisan nature of the Humphrey love feast. For what do we see in the encomiums to a Humphrey or a Truman by such seemingly bitter former enemies as a William Buckley or a Richard Nixon? What we see in this ingathering of politicians is the lesson: all of us politicians really agree, we are really one—in short, they are all in it together at the public trough. In a crunch, they are as one: Republocrat, Demopublican, left, right, or center, the whole marauding gang; in the final analysis, it is them versus us. In the immortal phrase of Dos Passos: “all right, we are two nations.”

Lest all this seem too harsh, let us keep in mind that countless millions of people—most of them far more deserving of accolades then HHH—have died, unwept, unhonored, and unsung, and that many of them have died of cancer. Even a large number of politicians have died, and a considerable number have died of cancer. Yet this is the first time such a brouhaha has been made, such an extended fuss as to dwarf even the Super Bowl.

II: Arthur F. Burns

In its own muted way, the hoopla surrounding the potential and then actual ouster of Arthur F. Bums as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board was full of as much hokum as the fuss over HHH. Knowing that Burns’s terms as the powerful boss of America’s money-creating factory was up in January, the right-center, that is, the right wing of the Establishment, put on a quietly hysterical campaign for several months to pressure President Carter to reappoint Arthur Burns.

On the face of it, it was difficult to see why Carter should reappoint Burns. After all, a new President likes to have his own team around him, the head of the Fed is a crucial policy-making post, so why in blazes should Carter have continued this veteran Republican, this Eisenhower-Nixon-Ford retread, in high office? The carefully orchestrated campaign, headed by ex-Republican Council of Economic Advisors’ members Paul McCraken (in the Wall St. Journal) and Herb Stein (in the New York Times), stressed the politics of fear. The hype went as follows: Arthur Burns was the only person, the indispensable man, in the fight against inflation; this septuagenarian was the only man in America who could be trusted to battle inflation and whom businessmen here and throughout the world would trust to combat this menace. As a lagniappe in this campaign, the right-centrists trotted out the old saw about the importance of keeping the Federal Reserve “independent” from the government, of keeping the Fed “out of politics”—a status that would supposedly be endangered if the beloved Burns were not kept in a kind of lifetime spot as czar of the money supply. In short, the right-centrists were trying to do for Burns what their ancestors had once successfully done for J. Edgar Hoover, Harry Anslinger, and Frances Knight (of the immigration office)—lifetime “bipartisan” satraps unchecked by popular will.

This, of course, is all a shuck. The Federal Reserve is not some sort of mystical entity separate and apart from the government of the United States; on the contrary, it is a vital part of that government. It has never been “apart” from politics, but necessarily hip deep in political decisions. Arthur Burns, as I have said above, is a veteran of every Republican administration since World War II. The very idea of insulating “government” from “politics” only makes sense as a means of insulating dictatorial rule from any kind of popular check or influence.

But what of the most important issue: Arthur Burns as beloved battler against inflation? This is true if we consider only rhetoric and never substance. Burns has been outstanding, it is true, at rhetorical attacks on inflation; but his concrete actions have been to generate not only inflation, but the biggest and most deadly peacetime inflation in the country’s history. He did it by generating unprecedented and continuing creation of new money, money which then enters the economy and drives prices upward. As James Dale Davidson writes in a recent Penthouse, Burns has been “constantly denouncing inflation at the same time that he personally supervises its creation.” (James Davidson, “The Inflationists,” Penthouse, February, 1978, p. 51.) And yet, I suppose that in an America that pays attention to rhetoric rather than substance, it should not be surprising that an Arthur Burns should gain a reputation as an enemy, rather than a creator, of inflation.

And then there were the curious events surrounding Bums’ ultimate ouster. After months of a press campaign to the effect that hysteria would hit the corporate boardrooms of the world should Arthur Burns be let go, what happened, you might ask, when the pilot was finally dropped—when it was announced to the world that Burns would be succeeded by the unknown businessman, G. William Miller? Were there howls, and wails, and much gnashing of teeth? Did corporations crumble from California to the Elbe? To the contrary. There were virtually no complaints at all, certainly not from the business or banking world. Everybody rushed to compliment the President on this wise and wonderful choice, and nobody fussed, including Bums himself. Irving Shapiro of DuPont and Raymond James of General Electric rushed to applaud, and even to take credit for, the selection of Miller.

Arts And Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

The Eagle Had Landed, dir. by John Sturges. With Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, and Jenny Agutter. At last! A rip-roaring, exciting adventure-spy yarn, replete with suspense and excitement. John Sturges has done an excellent job in filming the splendid spy-novel by Jack Higgins of the same title. A team of German commandos lands heroically in East Angelia during World War II to try to kidnap and/or assassinate Winston Churchill. It is a marvelous spy-caper story, with the reader/viewer’s sympathies neatly enlisted in behalf of the commando team (helped by the of course inevitable fact that German hero Steiner (Michael Caine) is authentically anti-Nazi.) Caine’s partner, a great character, is a stalwart of the Irish Republican Army (Donald Sutherland.) Particularly remarkable in Sturges’ direction is his ability to take such incurable hams as Caine and Sutherland and getting them to restrain their natural propensities for overacting. As a result, Caine and Sutherand give their finest, most subtle performances. Jenny Agutter is delightful as the East Anglia girl who falls for Sutherland.

As admirable as the movie is, it is not quite as good as the book. The sins are one of omission: the book’s marvelous love story between the East Anglia girl and the Irish agent is badly truncated in the movie; and there is very little of the book’s detailed and suspenseful buildup (a la The Jackal) showing how the Irishman accumulates his illegal materials for the assassination attempt. In other words, the movie should have been about half an hour longer. But nevertheless, the picture is highly recommended.

There are many lessons in this story. One, to put it very mildly, is not to believe everything you read. Two, is to heed the spectacle of all the luminaries: in business, banking, politics, the media, rushing to cozy up to the seat of Power, regardless of who happens to sit in it. If an Arthur Burns holds the top monetary power for umpteen years, he becomes, by virtue of that fact, wise, beloved, and indispensable. Any criticisms of him will be muted and behind the arras, because every one and every group wants to be a favorite of Power, and in this important case, wants to be close to the new greenbacks as they roll forth from the Fed’s printing presses (both literally and in the sense of checkbook money.) And when the current Power-holder is inevitably and irretrievably removed, well then the next guy, whoever he is—a Bill Miller or a Joe Zilch—will be automatically and instantly wise and beloved, and, after a decent interval, will himself be dubbed indispensable.

As for Miller’s actual policies, we can be sure, from his sponsorship and his few pronouncements over the years, of more of the same: inflation with a conservative face. What his rhetoric will be is a matter of personal style, but there is no reason to expect any change in substance.

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Rent Control: the New York City Case

by Walter Block

One of the clearest violations of the free market philosophy in the housing area is rent control. It amounts to a denial of the widely accepted view that consenting adults have the right to make contractual arrangements without outside interference. It is of the utmost importance to subject this law to critical analysis.

The problem with discussing rent control, however, is that many people are likely to have very strong opinions on the matter. If the proponents and opponents of rent control have one thing in common, it is the strength and certainty with which they hold their opinions on the subject. This is indeed unfortunate. For any subject which affects virtually the whole housing supply of a city would be far better dealt with in a dispassionate, logical and calm manner, one able to shed light rather than heat on the subject.

I shall nevertheless venture out onto these troubled waters because I think it important to demonstrate that rent control, and indeed any law which interferes with the right of consenting adults to make bargains among themselves, must inevitably lead to poor results. It is my opinion that rent control causes slums, that it causes discrimination in housing, both overcrowding and underutilization of housing, and that it interferes with mobility. But these things have been amply documented. In this paper I shall therefore discuss something not quite so fully documented: the question of who benefits and who loses from rent control.

If there is one thing that many of the proponents and the opponents of rent control have in common, apart from their strong views on the subject, it is the belief that rent control must benefit all tenants and harm all landlords. This could not be further from the truth, however. For what rent control actually accomplishes in its attempt to keep rents down is to raise the price of non-rent controlled apartments higher than they would have been in the absence of rent control. It does this by discouraging the construction of new residential buildings, as these new owners come to fear the imposition of rent control on their own buildings. (This fear will occur even when rent control does not apply to dwellings built in the future.) And anything that decreases the supply of housing, elementary supply and demand analysis tells us, will raise the price of housing. So the tenants of non-rent controlled apartments are made worse off by rent control.

What of the tenants of rent-controlled apartments? Surely they gain from rent control? Not necessarily. Although some few tenants of rent-controlled apartments can benefit from rent control, the overwhelming majority will not. The majority of rent-controlled tenants will pay lower rents than otherwise because of rent control, all right, but the quality, services, care, and upkeep of the apartment will decrease more than proportionately, so that even though they will pay less rent, they will be worse off. The quality of the apartment will decrease (compared to what it would have been in the absence of rent control) because the landlord will have virtually no financial incentive to maintain it. In the semi free market society that we live in, people do not provide services out of altruism. The butcher, baker and candlestick-maker provide us with top quality services, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because we pay them a competitive price to do so. If we refuse to pay them adequately, or are not allowed to pay them adequately, they will no longer provide us with the same quality of service. We cannot maim the goose and expect the same quality of eggs.

It is the same with landlords. The quality of apartment services will inexorably decrease. One, because financial incentives to maintain the property will have been stripped from the landlord; and two, because even if there were some landlords who out of a sense of duty, obligation, altruism, or whatever, maintained their buildings in the pro-rent control style, they would soon suffer grave losses, and either be forced into bankruptcy, or else held back from expanding their scope of real estate activity. In either case, under rent control, the market would penalize those landlords who attempted to maintain the quality of their buildings.

The quality of the apartment will decrease more than proportionately to the fall in rent because this decrease in maintenance will ignite the well known “vicious circle” of decay: the decay of each apartment and each building will feed on and encourage the decay of every other apartment and building on the block and in the neighborhood. Services which were taken for granted before the advent of rent control will now have to be performed by amateur “block associations”, “tenant groups”, etc. But these part-time associations will never be able to insure the degree of sanitation services, police and fire protection, building code enforcement, etc., that associations of professional landlords with strong financial incentives in quality dwellings would be able to maintain. Let there be price controls in the restaurants of our city analogous in scope and severity to the rent controls the landlords have had to put up with, and all the amateur, part-time “restaurant associations”, “food cooperatives,” etc., will never be able to match the quality of service that our restauranteurs, with strong financial incentives in providing quality food and service, have been able to maintain. So the tenants of rent-controlled apartments will also be made worse off by rent control, as the entire neighborhood deteriorates, suffering fear of criminals, dirty streets, rampant garbage and vermin.

Not all tenants of rent-controlled buildings are made worse off by rent control. Some few are benefited. The key to understanding why some tenants are benefited while most are made worse off is the financial incentive to maintain his building that the landlord may have under rent control. The landlord will still have a financial incentive to maintain his building even under rent control in several cases. One, if he expects an end to rent control and his building is in a high rent district. Then he will be able to raise his rents to a high level after decontrol. Here, the whole neighborhood is not likely to fall pray to the vicious circle of housing decay that rent control engenders. (If the owner of such a building does not expect rent control to end, his incentives to maintain the building will be very low indeed; he will have a much greater financial incentive to hasten the building into disrepair, so that he can demolish it, and build a new non-controlled one instead). Secondly, the landlord will have a financial incentive to maintain a rent-controlled building if there are at least several decontrolled apartments within the building and/or the prospects of some more to come. Once again, the building will have to be in a high rent, luxury area, otherwise there is no sense investing in the maintenance of a building, waiting for decontrolled apartments which will not be worth much when they arrive.

In these cases, the dwellers in rent-controlled apartments are likely to benefit from great bargains. But in virtually all of these cases, the tenants will be rich and perhaps old people who have been living there for many years. And the few cases where the lucky tenants are not rich old people who have been living in luxury areas all their lives are likely to be government bureaucrats, especially housing and rent control bureaucrats who have taken advantage of their positions to obtain 12-room apartments with river views in some of the finest older apartment houses in Manhattan. These limousine liberals can sometimes obtain these apartments for less than $100 per month.

What of the landlords? Is it true that they all lose from the imposition of rent control? Again, not necessarily. The landlords who have continuously owned their buildings since 1941, the year that rent control began, most assuredly do lose out because of rent control. Hundreds of millions of dollars of housing value have been lost by these landlords; and some of the landlords whose buildings have been subject to the vicious circle of housing decay may have lost their total housing values.

Some people have argued that it is entirely unfair to force a small part of the population, landlords, to subsidize the poor via rent control; that if the poor are to be subsidized, they should be subsidized by the entire population, not by a small persecuted minority. And this argument, as far as it goes, is correct. Indeed, if the poor are to be subsidized, it would be particularly unfair to expect a small group of people to bear the full burden. But the argument does not go far enough. The actual case is even worse. It is bad enough to single out the landlords and force them to subsidize the poor; but the truth of the matter, as we have seen, is that the poor almost certainly do not benefit from rent control! So the landlords end up subsidizing rich people and government housing bureaucrats. And this is certainly unfair, since in many cases the rich tenants may even be richer than the landlords. Unfortunately, even this argument does not go far enough. The actual case is even worse yet. It is bad enough to force the landlords to subsidize rich tenants; at least someone gains from the theft from the landlords in this case. But in actual point of fact, many of these millions of dollars of housing values lost by the landlords do not go to anyone, not even rich people. They are what the economist calls “dead weight loss”: losses to the society as a whole that do not accrue to anyone.

The dead weight loss takes place whenever the landlord loses more than the tenant gains. This difference, the dead weight loss, accrues to no one at all. Let us illustrate how the dead weight loss of rent control arises with a numerical example. Suppose that $250 per month was the precontrolled rent and that the controlled rent is now $100. (Rent control works somewhat differently in practice. Instead of lowering the rent, rent control freezes the rent at a given level, and then allows inflation to lower the real value of the dollar level rent. Our supposition is for simplicity only, and does not alter the facts of the case.) The landlord clearly loses the $150 differential between the free market price in the absence of rent control ($250) and the controlled rent ($100).

How much does the tenant gain? In order to find out how much the tenant gains from rent control we must know how much the apartment is worth to the tenant; e.g., how much the tenant would have been willing to pay for the apartment in the absence of rent control. Since we can have no way of knowing this, we must consider all the possibilities.

If the tenant would only have been willing to pay less than $100, he would not now be occupying the apartment, since it would be costing him more than it was worth to him. So we can ignore this case.

If the tenant would have been willing to pay just $100, then he gains virtually nothing from rent control. True, he sees some benefit, otherwise he would not stay. But he may not regard it as much of a bargain, even though the most willing renters would be willing to pay $250 per month. Since the landlord loses a monthly $150, and the tenants’ gains are minimal, virtually all of the landlord’s loss is frittered away, benefitting no one.

If the tenant would have been willing to pay anything in between $100 and $250, he gains the difference between that amount and $100. Thus, if he would have paid $175, he gains $75. If he gains $75 while the landlord loses $150, the landlord subsidizes the tenant to the tune of $75, while there is $75 of dead weight loss that benefits no one. It is only in the case that the tenant would have paid $250 or more that there is no dead weight loss. Here, the full $150 that the landlord is forced to give up accrues to someone—but probably a rich person, or a bureaucrat, as we have seen.

Paradoxically, however, most landlords do not lose money because of rent control. Those who have bought their buildings after the imposition of rent control need not have lost any money at all because of rent control! For the effect of rent control in decreasing the rents charged by the landlord is to lower the value of the entire building. This is because the value of the building is closely tied to the level of rents that may be charged. At the lower sale price, the building, even though rent controlled, must be, in the mind of the purchaser, at least as attractive as any other investment that might be made. If the sale price of the rent-controlled building did not make it as attractive as any alternative investment, the rent-controlled building could not be sold. Since we know that in fact—rent controlled buildings, like other buildings, do get sold, we know, then, that the buildings get sold at prices that tend to reflect the losses due to rent control, and that therefore the new owners of rent- controlled buildings are not at a disadvantage compared to alternative investments they might have made. The only time a landlord will lose from the purchase of a rent-controlled building is when he underestimates the losses that rent control will cause in the future (as all too many landlords have done.)

The Critique of Interventionism

by Richard M. Ebeling

We live in the Age of Crises. The energy “crisis,” with the threat of oil rationing; the inflation “crisis,” with the threat of wage and price controls; the equal opportunity “crisis,” with the threat of racial job quotas; the moral “crisis,” with the threat of diminished civil liberties; and the “crisis” of national security, with the threat of foreign war abroad and State secrecy at home.

But this Age of Crises is only the outer symptom of the more fundamental malady, the Crisis of Interventionism. The energy “crisis” is the consequence of regulating domestic oil production and foreign imports; the inflation “crisis” is the effect of Central Bank monetary expansion to finance budget deficits and “guarantee” full employment; the equal opportunity “crisis” is the culmination of State actions on behalf of ethnic collectivism; the moral “crisis” is the product of State-supported ethical authortarianism; and the national security “crisis” is the result of aggressive moral and economic imperialism.

While various perspectives on the politico-economic spectrum might very well agree that the existing crises are a result of the failure of interventionism, not all would see that failure in the same light.

One popularizer of the “left,” Robert Lekachman, insists that, “Inflation, like unemployment and income distribution, is rooted in concentration of power and power relationships. A cure of inflation, consistent with high employment, requires the limitation of private discretion and substitution of public for corporate discretion.”

Another popularizer and academic advocate of the “right,” George Stigler, insists, “The defense of competition . . . has . . . been too theoretical; elegant economic theory which describes a competitive system has received entirely too little statistical elaboration . . A modern economist has no professional right to advise the federal government to regulate or deregulate the railroads unless he has evidence of the effects of these policies.”

Lekachman sees the crisis of interventionism in the unwillingness of those who must enforce the decrees to show the courage to overcome “concentrations of power and power relationships”—i.e., a weakness of the will to resist self-interests in defense of the “public interest.” Stigler, believing that “the past is the only source of knowledge of the future,” wishes the “facts” to guide the interventionists—and considers the failure to use the “facts” of the past as the explanation for the failure of interventionism. But, we might ask, what is to guide the interventionists when a control is being considered that had not been tried before? And when has enough time elapsed to make a “fair” assessment of “the facts?” As the English classical economist Walter Bagehot saw clearly over a hundred years ago, “If we wait to reason till the ‘facts’ are complete we shall wait till the human race has expired.”

What is amazing about these interpretations of the interventionist crisis is not their diversity, but rather how little they have changed in the past century—and how close their implicit premises really are to each other. What is equally as amazing is the almost total neglect of the “Austrian” analysis of interventionist policies. What in the early 1930’s Lionel Robbins had referred to as the “Kritik des Interventionismus” by Ludwig von Mises remained completely ignored by the economics profession, even after Professor Mises began presenting his analyses in his English-language books. Now, those original essays penned almost fifty years ago are finally available to the American reader as A Critique of Interventionism (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1977; 164pp) $8.95.

As Professor Mises explains, the classical economists “learned that prices are not set arbitrarily, but are determined within narrow limits by the market situation . . . that the laws of the market draw entrepreneurs and owners of the means of production into the service of consumers, and that their economic actions do not result from arbitrariness, but from the necessary adjustment to given conditions.”

In the free market economy, each participant demonstrates his relative valuation for various goods and services on the market. Consumers demonstrate their preferences by the prices they are willing to pay for finished products. In turn, producers are guided in deciding what costs to incur in a production process by the anticipated value of the finished product. And costs—ultimately—are the market-determined prices for various factors of production, based on their expected value in satisfying consumer demand. The market economy, then, is an integrated process in which consumers adjust their expenditures to their respective preference patterns and producers adjust their activities and costs to reflect those demonstrated patterns.

Professor Mises’ analysis of interventionist policies can be divided into two parts: firstly, the purely economic consequences of interventionism; secondly, the political-economic causes and effects of the rise of the interventionist state.

Mises shows, in the essays entitled “Interventionism,” “The Hampered Market Economy”, and the “Theory of Price Controls”, that isolated encroachments upon the market economy create an untenable position. If the authorities, for example, decide that the price of a product on the market is too high, a regulation may be imposed that the good be sold at a lower price (and that all the existing stock be sold at the newly imposed lower price). But since the costs in producing the product are still the same, the lower selling price acts as a disincentive for future production, thus making the product even more scarce, with resources flowing to those areas where profitable opportunities still exist and are greater Sian in the regulated industry.

If government would like production to continue, it must force the producers to continue, and it must also control the prices of raw materials, semifinished products and wages . . . The controls must encompass all branches of production, the prices of all goods and all wages, and the economic actions of all entrepreneurs, capitalists, landowners and workers. If any industry should remain free, capital and labor will move to it and thus frustrate the purpose of government’s earlier intervention.

The logical sequence of events, if the interventionists were committed to securing the desired quantity of the product at the imposed lower price, would require the controls to be extended further and further through the economy until all market activities had been placed under the guidance of the state apparatus.

What the “facts”—which Professor Stigler wishes us to be so carefully attuned to—can tell us is the forms the interventions take, e.g., minimum wage laws, maximum prices, import and exchange controls. And the joining of economic theory with the historical data would enable an extended analysis of the actual consequences of the interventionist act. A priori, the theory could not give a quantitative prediction of the effects forthcoming from a state encroachment upon the market. It would enable a statement of general principles, however, that all interventions that bring about a deviation of prices from those that would have existed through the free play of the market will set in motion distortive factors in the economy.

In the essays on “Social Liberalism” and “Anti-Marxism,” Professor Mises discusses the politico-economic elements in interventionism. His discussion, of course, revolves around the arguments and positions advocated by the German Historical School, still so dominant and so influential in the 1920’s. Their defense of interventionist activities usually took the form of denying any general economic theory that could show the detrimental results of state actions. Mises quotes one member of the Historical School who stated, “Schmoller did not care to see his road to scientific justification of social policy blocked by the concept of an external economic regularity independent of man.” Since the mid-1930’s, the interventionists have argued their case through the theoretical framework of Keynesian economics.

Regardless of the choice of tactics, the purpose has been to establish or defend the privileges of particular groups in the market. Among the “social liberals,” the debates have been over to whom the benefits of state actions were to redound and upon whom the economic burdens would fall. And in “Anti-Marxism,”—an analysis that brilliantly anticipates the development of German Nazism and the resultant consequences that would befall Germany and Europe—Mises forcefully argues that the true distinction and clash between classical liberalism and collectivism is being totally ignored as the variants of socialism, e.g., Marxism, nationalism and racism, take over center-stage and battle with each other over control of society.

As Professor Mises, perhaps most concisely put it in his 1932 article, “The Myth of the Failure of Capitalism”*:

In the interventionist state . . . it is much more important that one has “good relations” with the controlling political factions, that the interventions redound to the advantage and not the disadvantage of the enterprise. . . . It is much more important to have “connections” than to produce well and cheaply. Consequently the men who reach the top of such enterprises are . . . men who know how to get along with the press and with the political parties . . . men . . . who deal more with federal dignitaries and party leaders than with those from whom they buy or to whom they sell.

Robert Lekachman believes the failure of interventionism comes from weak polices failing to resist “concentrations of power and power relationships,” The problem is, however, that power relationships are the heart of the interventionist ideology. Interventionism is the political means to achieve economic ends, in defiance of market forces.

For men such as Lekachman and Stigler, the issue is not over interventionism as a policy; both accept and, in fact, desire it. Their disagreements over interventionism are purely ones of preferences and efficiencies. Implicitly and explicitly, they both accept the concept of State intervention—the concept that the State is to act as the servant of some and the master of others.

Professor Mises points out that the Historical School of turn-of-the-century Germany had two wings: the followers of Brentano, who favored equalization of income, and the followers of Schmoller, who favored a “class” arrangement of privileges.

Similarly, there are those like Lekachman who wish to use the Interventionist State to achieve egalitarianism. Others, like Stigler, wish only to use the Interventionist State to bring about an “efficient” redistribution of wealth and benefits to various groups and sectors of the economy.

The “Austrian” analysis of interventionism—starting with individuals and the interactions of individuals in the market-place—sees that market forces and “laws” do exist; and that every State intervention must disturb and distort the voluntary choices and plans of market actors. Interventionism, therefore, must always involve infringements of liberty and property rights, so some might gain by force what others would not voluntarily give or exchange away.

Though originally published in 1929, Ludwig von Mises’ Critique of Interventionism is one of the most relevant and important works for grasping the underlying principles causing the crises of our age.

*To be published in a forthcoming Occasional Paper of the Center for Libertarian Studies, entitled “The Clash of Group Interests and other essays” by Ludwig von Mises.

Rendering Unto Caesar: Those Preachers Again

by Justus D. Doenecke

Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms. Rev. ed. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald, 1969.

George Q. Flynn, American Catholics and the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932-1936. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968.

George Q. Flynn, Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937-1945. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976.

Hertzel Fishman, American Protestantism and a Jewish State. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973.

Among the variety of protesters against the Vietnam War, the clergy were both vocal and visible. For every clergyman who sided with Cardinal Francis Spellman in seeing the conflict as “one for civilization,” there were ten, perhaps fifteen, who denied his claim and who occasionally took to the streets in support of their position. Such dissent, however, has not always taken place, and we now have studies showing how religion, in the not too distant past, has fostered state power and cultural uniformity, and has served as “guardian spirits” of professional warriors.

The first of these works is the most biting. Less than a decade ago, Ray H. Abrams, retired sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, updated his classic Preachers Present Arms (1933). Most of the book still deals with what a former generation called “the Great War,” although it now contains minor material on World War II and Vietnam.

The quotation on the frontispiece from Miles Standish betrays Abram’s theme: “War is a terrible trade;/But in the cause that is righteous/Sweet is the smell of powder.” Beginning with the erosion of peace sentiment in 1915, Abram’s describes how clergy called for avenging the Lusitania and marched in preparedness parades. Although the Episcopal Church was always in the forefront of such activity, other churches of English origin—ranging from Presbyterian to Unitarian—were markedly pro-British.

And once the United States entered the war, rare was the clergyman who dissented. The president of Oberlin College called the struggle “a truly Holy War”; the Superior of the New York Apostolic Fathers claimed that “The man who is disloyal to the flag is disloyal to Christianity”; and a Liberty Bond ad in Christian Work bore the slogan KILL THE HUN/KILL HIS HOPE. One Baptist pastor looked upon enlistment with the same fervor as “the departure of a missionary for Burma.” The American Tract Society published a soldier’s prayer that began, “My God and Father, I rejoice that Thou art the God of battle.” Theological learnings meant little. If the Unitarian Christian Register asserted that Jesus “would take the bayonet and bomb and rifle and do the work of deadliness,” the Reverend Billy Sunday declared, “If you turn hell upside down, you will find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.”

There were, of course, some convenient conversions. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who had traversed the Middle West to fight Wilson’ preparedness tour, led —says Abrams—in the cry for “slaughter of the Boche.” In 1915 Cardinal James Gibbons warned against the “sacrifice” of “thousands of young men”; two years later he called upon “Catholic young men” to “step up and take their place in the front rank.” Frederick Lynch, a founder of the Church Peace Union, had recommended the “excommunication” of “every man that takes up the sword.” Yet once in the fray, Lynch called the Germans “baby-killers” and did so with gusto. The Advocate of Peace, journal of the American Peace Society, opposed retaliation after the Lusitania incident; by May 1917, however, it wrote, “We must aid in the starvation and emaciation of a German baby in order that he, or at least his more sturdy playmate, may grow up to inherit a different sort of government from that for which his father died.”

In a thousand and one ways, religious groups contributed to the hysteria. Both interdenominational Christian Century and the Northwestern Christian Advocate (Methodist) published gory atrocity stories, the latter journal informing the pious how Germans sprayed prisoners with burning oil. (For the Wilson administration, the most useful atrocity tales dealt with sex, since—before pornography was legalized—one had to satisfy such prurient interests indirectly). The pastor of Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church hoped to shoot any person “who buys an article in Germany for the next hundred years.” The leader of Chicago’s Ethical Culture Society told readers of the Atlantic Monthly of the “Duty of Hatred.”

Civil liberties, of course, went by the boards. Father John A. Ryan claimed that authorities were justified in “preventing obstructive criticism,” while Cardinal John Farley called criticism of the government “little short of treason.” New York’s Episcopal Bishop William Manning protested against the German-born Karl Muck directing the Boston symphony. Rabbi Wise branded the pacifist People’s Council (of which Rabbi Judah Magnes was a sponsor) as socialism of the “basement and cellar type.” Clergy found the anti-war posture of the Society of Friends particularly galling. The Episcopal Living Church said that “Quakerism is sixteen hundred years too late to be entitled to the epiteth Christian,” and the Methodist Zion’s Herald referred to “Quakers and men of Quaking disposition.”

Religious agencies strongly backed the war effort, with the YMCA taking the lead. One “Y” director even published a manual on hand-to-hand fighting. (“Never miss an opportunity to destroy the eyes of the enemy,” it read.) The Federal Council of Churches passed a resolution calling for the protection of conscientious objectors; however, when their rights were obviously violated, and when they experienced torture in prison, it refused to intervene. In addition, the FCC turned down a bid of Swedish churches to aid in securing a truce, while its president, Frank Mason North, proclaimed, “The war for righteousness will be won. Let the Church do her part.” The Episcopal House of Bishops welcomed the resignation of one of its own members, Paul Jones of Utah, believing that his pacifism had “impaired” his “usefulness.” The American Unitarian Association, a group in which former President Taft was prominent, threatened to withhold aid from any congregation what employed a minister who was not an “outspoken supporter of the United States.”

Abrams claims to be writing a value-free study, one that eliminates “moral praise and blame.” Yet he is as much of a “preacher” as anyone he describes, and we have a highly colored, if helpful, account of religion at war. No attempt is made at balanced sampling, at weighing intensity of opinion, and at discerning influence. The author just lists one horrible quotation after another in expose fashion and lets it go at that. He does touch on one significant theme, namely that the clergy might well have welcomed war to bolster religious faith and traditional values, but we do not have the background needed to illuminate this point.

The real questions go unanswered, and perhaps remain so to this day. Otis Graham, Jr.’s Great Crusades—And After (1974) attempts to link progressivism and war fervor, and systematic work on the churches could develop this tie. Did the clergy believe that wartime service might enhance their personal status, something that had long been threatened by increasing security? To what degree did Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, and Mormons see wholehearted support of the military as a way of proving their “loyalty” to the wider community? Did the Social Gospel, with its stress on reconstructing society, naturally spill over into international “crusades” against “evil,” and does this explain why such theological liberals as members of Ethical Culture and Unitarians supported global Wilsonianism?

Later decades are dealt with by George Q. Flynn, historian at Texas Tech. In a well-researched, clearly written, and balanced study, Flynn covers the most numerous of America’s religious denominations, Roman Catholicism. His findings lay to rest many stereotypes, particularly concerning the New Deal.

Early in the thirties, Catholic anti-capitalist rhetoric was strong. The Reverend James L. Gillis, editor of the Catholic World, accused management of treating labor worse than animals, and Father Wilfred Parsons, S.J. of America found the nation’s economy producing nothing but “unlimited opportunity for avarice and greed.” In the 1932 election, the vast majority of American Catholics supported FDR at the polls, although they voted less as Catholics than as uncertain Americans, many of lower middle-class status, who hoped that a new administration could end the depression. Fervent Catholic support for the President was soon coming, with the denominational press continually presenting the New Deal as the American version of papal encyclicals.

True, the good fathers greatly exaggerated the influence of Quadragesimo Anno while ignoring the influence of the Protestant Social Gospel. However, could Roosevelt fail to be heartened by the claim that “Almighty God raised up FDR—the Apostle of the New Deal” (the Most Reverend W.D. O’Brien), or that Roosevelt’s every action was “motivated by a Christian philosophy which moves forward in the right direction” (Brooklyn Tablet)? Archbishop John T. McNicholas of Cinncinnati told Catholics to buy only from shops displaying the “blue eagle”; James I. Corrigan, S.J. assured listeners of the Catholic Truth Hour that Henry Wallace’s farm program “served agriculture.” To Father John A. Ryan, new of the National Catholic Welfare Conference NCWC), the Wagner Act was “probably the most just. . .piece of labor legislation ever enacted in the United States.” And to the Denver Catholic Register, there was a “real chance” for large-scale federal relief as “Al Smith is the power behind the throne and Al Smith has the Catholic slant.”

Obviously politics played a role. Roosevelt appointed two Catholics to his cabinet, gave Catholics one out of every four judicial appointments, and named numerous priests to regulatory boards.

Some Catholic spokesmen dissented on certain issues. If the Knights of Columbus backed the National Recovery Act, and if president Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. of Georgetown called it democracy’s last stand, Central-Blatt and Social Justice claimed that the measure would destroy America’s middle class, and the San Francisco Monitor found parallels to Marxism and “Kantism.” Most prominent clergy opposed federal child labor legislation, claiming that it gave Congress the right to regulate American youth. Care should be used in noting Catholic support for labor, as such backing was always qualified by fear of violence, opposition to strikes, and respect for private property.

Recognition of Russia met with the unanimous opposition of the Catholic press, although it finally and naively accepted Roosevelt’s meaningless assurance that Americans there would have religious freedom. “Leave everything to me, Father,” Roosevelt said to Georgetown’s Walsh. “I am a good horse trader.” The President, of course, could not deliver on persecutions—any more than can Jimmy Carter today. But the Church remained content with symbolic gestures, and Roosevelt, as usual with such pressure groups, had his own way.

Even greater Catholic pressure came when FDR attempted to reach an accord with Mexico, a nation that had passed much anti-clerical legislation during the 1920’s. Catholic spokesmen, including the liberal Commonweal, sought the dismissal of Ambassador Josephus Daniels, whom they unjustly accused of endorsing aethistic education. Through Senator David I. Walsh, the Knight of Columbus got Senator William E. Borah to advocate a Senate investigation “into the persecution of Christians . . . now being practiced in Mexico.” (The Supreme Knight, Martin H. Carmody, was a lifelong Republican and might well have wanted to embarrass the Administration). Although Roosevelt squelched Borah’s resolution, Congressman John P. Higgins got 242 members of the House to back a similar demand. However, a more moderate policy in Mexico, and support for Roosevelt’s Mexican policies from such prominent Catholics as Bishop Spellman of Boston, alleviated the crisis. In 1936 Catholics voted overwhelmingly for FDR, again doing so on economic—not religious—grounds. Such prominent prelates as Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago and Father John A. Ryan of Washington openly backed the President and, often acting in an orchestrated manner, the hierarchy attempted to squelch Catholic support for the Union Party, a populist group led by Father Charles E. Coughlin.

Flynn’s second work deals with foreign policy, and it is crucial for anyone hoping to understand isolationism. American Catholics were originally strong backers of the isolationist movement, with memories of World War I, distrust of European allies, Anglophobia, and—most important of all—fear of communism serving as factors. Hence they welcomed the Nye Committee and endorsed the neutrality acts. Archbishop McNicholas went so far as to urge Catholics to consider forming “a mighty league of conscientious noncombatants.”

The Spanish Civil War, of course, only bolstered such sentiments. Flynn acknowledges that “Catholic concern with the advance of atheistic communism at times bordered on the neurotic,” but asks if liberals were any the less simplistic in portraying the struggle as “Loyalist-democratic” versus “Nationalist-fascist.” Scholars later might claim that Loyalist murders of priests, a major source of Catholic alarm, were exaggerated, and that the Spanish church was a political institution. However, Catholic bitterness was quite understandable.

Flynn presents a more subtle picture than most historians: after Michael Williams left Commonweal, it shifted from a pro-Franco position to a neutralist one (a stance that caused it to lose sales and face banning by some bishops); public opinion polls showed only four of every ten Catholics backing the Nationalists; the decision to retain the embargo on both sides was made by the State Department. Although Catholic opinion strongly supported the Administration, one should beware—so Flynn argues—of endowing “Americans Catholicism with a reputation for political power it did not deserve.”

The author makes an equal contribution in showing how Catholic opinion became more interventionist. Once what John Lukacs calls the “last European war” broke out, the Church was strongly isolationist. Father Gillis saw the conflict as merely an attempt to rearrange the British empire, an “impossible organization” to begin with; Archbishop Spellman told the American Legion that our democratic system was not transportable; and the Reverend Robert Gannon, S.J., president of Fordham, stressed that Germany had a right to “its economic existence.” In 1940 many Catholic spokesmen opposed conscription, with the Commonweal for once lined up alongside the Brooklyn Tablet. When FDR proposed lend-lease, Father John LaFarge, S.J. saw it heralding the end of popular sovereignty, and the Reverend Joseph Thoming, S.J. demanded that the British stop persecuting Ireland before receiving aid. The Roosevelt government soon sought to undermine such attitudes. In 1939 it promoted such Catholic advocates of neutrality repeal as Al Smith, Cardinal Mundelein, Father Ryan, and Chicago’s auxiliary bishop Bernard J. Sheil. It sent steel magnate Myron Taylor as the President’s personal emissary to the Vatican, pressed Pope Pius XII to keep Mussolini neutral, and sought to get curia endorsement of aid to Russia. If most of the hierarchy remained uncommitted, Roosevelt kept the intervention debate from becoming a “Catholic” one. With each piece of legislation, the number of pro-Administration Catholics kept increasing—and the names of such Catholic intellectuals as Michael Williams, Carleton J.H. Hayes, Harry J. Carman, and Ross J.S. Hoffman appeared on more and more interventionist petitions. If McNicholas and Dubuque’s archbishop Francis J.L. Beckman backed the America First Committee, Spellman and Monsignor Michael J. Ready of the NCWC made sure that most Church opinion reflected the national consensus. To historian Flynn, Catholic leadership feared alienation from the wider mainstream, particularly after the Spanish Civil War. Hence, “Catholic leaders were desperate to reassert their place in the community”, and World War II gave them this opportunity. Even when it came to the touchy question of aid to Russia, Roosevelt was able to have the Vatican pressure those prelates who criticized his policy.

After Pearl Harbor, the Roman Catholic Church enlisted for the duration. The Denver Catholic Register claimed that “any half-hearted or inimical attitude toward national leaders is treason.” The Bishop of Fargo wrote, “When a government speaks with the voice of authority, it speaks with the voice of God.” The Southwest Courier rejoiced that the declaration of war came on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, for the Blessed Mother was America’s own patron. Father Gannon publicly admitted that he was wrong to oppose Roosevelt’s interventionism, while Father Ryan, who prided himself on membership in the ACLU, wanted the government to suspend mailing privileges for the Brooklyn Tablet and Catholic World. In 1943 the president of the Catholic Historical Association claimed that prevention of an isolationist resurgence was a professional duty.

Except for a few dissenters (the Catholic Worker movement, the Sign magazine, the undergraduate newspaper at DePaul), Catholic enthusiasm for the war was unreserved. Church spokesmen endorsed unconditional surrender and total victory, with Spellman telling troops they were “sacred institutions” in a modern crusade. Flynn writes, “The way Catholic leaders adopted the dubious garb of moral cheerleaders for the United States . . . led to an atrophy of their ethical feelings.” True, the Church did balk at certain policies, for it opposed the Morgenthau plan, the bombing of Rome, and the use of atomic weapons. For the most part, however, until Russia began to occupy eastern Europe, the faith that prided itself on its internationalism was among the most nationalistic of groups.

Fishman’s book lacks the detatchment of Flynn’s works. The author, who currently serves as advisor to the Israel Minister of Education, uses the apparatus of scholarship to present an indictment, one that accuses American liberal Protestantism of consistently fighting “against Jewish national and ethnic interests.” Heroes include such spokesmen as Reinhold Niebuhr who saw “Jewish peoplehood in theological terms as a legitimate component on the divine plan,” villains include editor Charles Clayton Morrison of the Christian Century who long opposed Jewish nationalism.

Since the book reads like a lawyer’s brief, it is best to begin by looking at the author’s assumptions. Fishman claims that Jews are a nationality as well as a religion (though he prefers the term “a people”) and that the land of Israel is central to Judaism. In short, the author is a strong Zionist, although some of his findings—if read with care—could aid inquirers more sympathetic to various Arab positions.

The scenario is as follows: liberal Protestants, as represented by the Christian Century, long opposed cultural pluralism, and in particular the concept of Jewish nationalism. In 1937, the Century claimed that it was “Jewish nationalism,” which it juxtaposed to “Jews as Jews”, that crucified Christ, for Jesus’ plan for Jews “ran counter to the cherished nationalism of Israel’s leaders—political and priestly.” Eight years later, it asserted that Jews should decide “whether they are an integral part of the nation in which they live or members of a Levantine nation dwelling in exile.”

Given this general position, it is hardly surprising that the Christian Century saw the Balfour declaration as simply another example of Britain’s policy of “divide and rule,” particularly as its promises to Jews “could not be realized consistently with justice to other elements of the population.” Yet the Century in 1938 opposed letting “an appreciable number of Jews” settle in the United States; such lowering of immigration bars, it said, at a time when millions of native Americans were already unemployed would only increase anti-Semitism. As time went on, the Century—and the Protestant liberals for whom it often spoke—opposed the establishment of the nation-state of Israel, continually sought to reduce its borders, and refused to support Israel in the 1967 war.

The Century was not alone. In 1947 Henry Sloane Coffin, president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary, protested that politicians were alienating 300 million Arabs “in order to fish for votes.” Denying that the Bible promised Palestine to today’s Jews, the theologian found such promises conditional on obedience to the divine law. And in 1967 the National Council of Churches, while calling on Arab nations to recognize Israel, stressed Israeli responsibility for the Arab refugee problem, took the Jewish state to task for not yielding conquered territory, and sought internationalization of Jerusalem.

Fishman finds, however, a Protestant minority that, in his words, realized “the absence of any realistic alternative for Jewish refugees” and therefore backed the Zionist movement. Within this minority, views varied. Unitarian cleric John Haynes Holmes, for example, combined his enthusiasm for Jewish settlement in Palestine with the warning that “it were better that she (Jewish society) perish utterly than by such survival bring mockery to a sublime tradition.” Niebuhr told the Zionists to stop claiming that their demands entailed no injustice to the Arabs, although he did claim that the people now called Palestinians could move to “a vast hinterland in the Middle East.” Were Fishman updating his book, he could point to the ardently pro-Israel books written by Congressman Robert Drinan, S.J., Temple University theologian Franklin H. Littell, and Lehigh religon professor A. Roy Eckardt. In addition, he could note the resurgency of Zionism among fundamentalists ranging from extreme rightist Carl McIntire (who calls the Palestinians “Descendants of Esau . . . claiming Jacob’s land”) to the more moderate Billy Graham.

Christian groups supporting Zionism, Fishman writes, “did not arise spontaneously” but “were deliberately cultivated and even channelled organizationally by American Zionists.” In his research into the archives of the pro-Zionist American Christian Palestine Committee, he notes heavy Zionist financing (and claims CIA funding for the pro-Arab American Friends of the Middle East). Again, were Fishman updating this volume, he could note that a Jewish leader who wishes to remain anonymous “advanced” the cost of an ad signed by prominent fundamentalists proclaiming “Israel’s divine right to the land.” (See Christianity Today, November 18, 1977, p. 50).

The book has some positive features. It reveals the cultural arrogance implicit in the Christian Century’s opposition to ethnic pluralism. (The magazine’s position, however, is more complex and humane than Fishman has it appear. It stressed Jesus as Jew and claimed that Judaism bore a witness to which Christianity should lay heed). It contains valuable material on such missionaries and educators as Harold and Daniel Bliss, Garland Hopkins, and Bayard Dodge. It shows the naivete of the Century in regards to news of Nazi persecutions (though skepticism concerning atrocity accounts is more understandable when one realizes—via the Abrams book—how badly it was burned in World War I).

The scholar, however, should use this work with extreme care. There has long been a need for a thorough and balanced study of Christian reactions to Zionism. Unfortunately, despite the imprimatur of a university press, the need still remains.

Part of the problem lies in over-reliance on two sources, Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis. Fisher defends his selectivity on the grounds that no major Protestant body took issue with Century views. Yet it remains doubtful whether the Century’s reformism and pacifism any more reflected the views of rank and file Protestants (and the clergy as well) than do the editorials of the New York Daily News reflect the attitudes of most New Yorkers. One wonders if other Protestant journals were really silent, including the fundamentalist Moody Monthly and Our Hope (the latter founded by a converted Jew), the Unitarian Christian Register, the various Methodist Christian Advocates, the Anglican Living Church and Churchman, and various Quaker periodicals. As Protestant reaction to such an event as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was intense it is hard to believe that other journals commented seldom on Middle East events. Given the present strong support of some evangelicals for Israel, one needs to trace how such fever came about. (Incidentally, a study is needed on the general shift in rightist and conservative circles concerning Israel over the past thirty-five years).

What is more disturbing is Fishman’s tendency to enter into a running debate with the historical actors of whom he disapproves. For example, he attacks the Century’s acquiescence in the British White Paper of 1939 (but takes uncritically A. Roy Eckardt’s talk of “the Christian death wish for Jews.”) There are related problems, often stemming from his choice of words. He describes the Irgun as “the major Palestinian dissident underground group” while asserting that Arabs in 1936 launched a “campaign of terror.” Protestant prayers for alleviation of Jewish suffering are mere “lip-service sympathy” and “formal piety” if linked with opposition to Zionism. Rabbi Morris S. Lazeron is “obsessed by his anti-Zionist attitudes” whereas Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver simply adopts “the militant Zionist position.” Those Reform-rabbis who oppose Zionism are said to fight “the concept of Judaism denoting anything more than a religion,” but the rationale of such opposition is even more neglected than that of their Protestant counterparts. Fishman brands Christian Century features stressing the power of Israeli’s Orthodox rabbinate and the condition of Arabs in Israel as “carping,” “stressing the negative,” and “blatantly and consistently prejudicial to Israel’s public image and national image.” When Wayne Cowan writes critically in Christianity and Crisis in May of 1970 about Israeli expansion and Israel’s denial of Palestinian nationality, he is “vehemently anti-Israel”—even though the essay scolds Arabs for ignoring Israeli moderates and recognizes Israel’s anxieties over security. Fishman misunderstands the universalistic pacifism of Charles Clayton Morrison, outlined in his book The Outlawry of War (1924), and incorrectly accuses the Century editor of advocating “isolationist nationalism.”

Such loading of the dice is not necessary. Urbane and responsible models that show empathy for their subjects include Samuel Halperin, The Political World of American Zionism (1961); Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (1972); and Melvin Urofsky’s American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (1975). Nor should students neglect the valuable (and more pro-Arab) work of Fred J. Khouri, The Arab-Israeli Conflict (rev. ed., 1976).

All in all, the four books reviewed reveal a most instrumental use of religion. Caesar is indeed being rendered unto—and with a vengeance. From the days of Billy Sunday to those of Billy Graham, the secular is continually being confused with the sacred. And given the type of pietism we now have represented on the Potomac, we cannot look upon the future with optimism.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden; Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME X NUMBER 12

DECEMBER, 1977

US-ISSN0047-4517

L’Affaire Efron

People from all over the country are asking me what my response is to Edith Efron’s wild and free-swinging attack on the libertarian movement in general and on me personally in her Viewpoint column in the February Reason. Well, to give you an idea, dear reader, consider how you would feel if you were well-known in your community, and a prominent writer published several dramatic untruths that you had allegedly told her, in order to discredit you and your activities. That’s about the way I feel.

Everything that Miss Efron wrote about my alleged disclosures to her is untrue: they are either lies or fabrications emerging from her own paranoid fantasies. To be specific: I never tried to “take over” any party of which Eldridge Cleaver was the head (a pretty idiotic thing for me to have attempted); in working with leftists against the draft and the Vietnam War I never had the absurd notion of converting them to capitalism, either sneakily (as Miss Efron would have it) or in any other way.

And, above all, on her most dramatic point which virtually forms the leitmotif of her article, no one has ever pulled a gun on me, in the ribs or in any other way. Nor, of course, did I ever tell her any of this rubbish; it is all preposterous nonsense, every word of it.

Miss Efron needed the “gun in the ribs” gambit as a major theme in order to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that all leftists are thugs, and that a gun in the ribs is always the result of any dealings with them. Apparently, her pals in the Pentagon are devoid of any lethal weaponry.

But the outrage I feel is the general frustration of a victim who has been falsely accused in the public prints. Miss Efron makes a dramatic statement about me; I deny it; what is the average reader to think? Or, how am I to tell? Especially if they are not personal friends of either one. Personal friends of mine have no trouble figuring out which one to believe. As one of them has said, I’m not the sort of person to hoard stories, and it is inconceivable that I would have told a saga as dramatic as the “gun-in-the-ribs” only to someone like Miss Efron who has merely been a slight acquaintance. Surely, they would have heard it many times over. The reason they haven’t, of course, is that Miss Efron has created it out of the whole cloth.

It is monstrous that a malicious falsehood carries equal weight with readers as an outraged rebuttal from the victim. What can a reader do in these circumstances? The only moral path is to believe nothing about anyone without supporting evidence, and Miss Efron of course has only offered her own unsupported word—a word which I, for one, shall not take seriously ever again.

As for the rest of Miss Efron’s article, it is about on a par with her statements about me: a farrago of gross ignorance and malice that is simply and literally not to be believed. There is scarcely a sentence that has any contact with truth or reality. For Miss Efron, who has not had anything to do with the libertarian movement in ten years, who from the testimony of her own article is scarcely a libertarian at all, for her to presume to read people out of libertarianism is unparalleled chutzpah. It’s as if I should write an article attempting to dictate theology and ritual to the Greek Orthodox Church, telling it whom it should expel for heresy and whom it should revere.

Apparently, Miss Efron had no desire whatever to remedy her appalling ignorance of the libertarian movement before writing about it; instead of doing research, she seems to have relied for facts on her own febrile imagination. What can we say, for example, of an alleged reporter who presumes to denounce the magazine Inquiry without having read any of it—even though she was offered a gift of the two issues that had already appeared when she wrote her calumny? Apparently, in penning her diatribe she didn’t want to be confused by the facts.

Miss Efron’s charge that libertarians such as myself ally ourselves only with the Left is ignorant hogwash; we believe in allying ourselves with whoever has a libertarian position on issues important to us. We hail a Nat Hentoff on civil liberties and a Henry Hazlitt on economics. This is not inconsistent; on the contrary, it means that we consistently welcome people for the libertarian positions they hold on particular Issues, a welcome which in no sense means that we endorse their stand on every conceivable question. But to libertarians, this is nothing new. Most of us have known for a long time that our position cuts across the conventional left-right spectrum, that we agree with liberals on some issues and with conservatives on others. That is because we are consistent upholders of liberty, and they of course are not.

Miss Efron’s charge that we libertarians are lax in saluting the greatness and importance of free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek is an obscenity; how many times has she hailed them in print as compared to myself? Her Implication that we have Joined the Left in “evad(ing) mass murder in Cambodia” is false on two important counts. First, because much of the information that we have, and that she can self-righteously refer to, on the monstrosity that is Cambodia comes to us from Leftists who staunchly opposed the war in Indochina: from James Forest, Jean Lacouture, Father Ponchaud, etc. And second, because while I myself, as she well knows, wrote a blistering attack on the Cambodian regime in Libertarian Review, where and when did Miss Efron ever write on the subject before she penned her broadside attack?

Miss Efron’s appalling ignorance of the libertarian movement is revealed by her lament that the limited government people have struck some sort of “deal” with anarcho-capitalists never to engage in discussion or debate over their ultimate ideological differences. Miss Efron has apparently not been reading, not only Libertarian Toma, or the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which has published numerous anarchist critiques of Robert Nozick, but not even Reason itself, where John Hospers and I have squared off. The debate continues; it is only the activists in the Libertarian Party who wisely concluded that they would get nowhere facing concrete political issues if they spent their energies on such theoretical questions. These disputes, while ultimately, important, are hardly relevant to contesting the next election. The Libertarian Party is not the entire movement

Sometimes her article is relieved by some (unconscious) humor; thus, Miss Efron expresses horror that a “distinguished laissez-faire economist”, Roger LeRoy Miller, was asked to write a review of a book on the political economy of whorehouses. What she fails to realise is that Professor Miller has precisely written on such topics as whorehouses, as has the emminent free-market economist George W. Hilton, who has even spoken at a convention of COYOTE, an organization of prostitutes defending their right to do business.

But this gaffe is of a piece with Miss Efron’s moral horror at libertarians’ concern for the freedom of speech and voluntary activities of all people, even the most disreputable. From her sneering at such freedom, it is obvious that her devotion to civil liberties is minimal. This conclusion is reinforced by her affinity for Irving Kristol, a “libertarian” who advocates increased censorship and a theocratic enforcement of religious values. Miss Efron employs the usual conservative trick of linking civil libertarians with the life-styles of those whose rights they are defending. If one defends the rights of prostitutes or drug-takers, why this makes one a drug-taker, too. Attacking people such as myself for being hippies and blind adherents of all aspects of every liberation movement can only reap a horselaugh from anyone in the least familiar with my own views over the years.

Sometimes, Miss Efron’s ignorance turns positively malignant. There are some smears which should not be allowed to go unchallenged. Timothy Leary, for all his peccadilloes, has not been “drag-soaked” for a long while; in fact, he now strongly, opposes drugs. To call either Marcus Raskin or Kart Hess “Maoists” is breathtaking in its malevolent absurdity; an absurdity topped only by her gall in asserting that Hass “now calls himself” a Maoist.

What, then, is Miss Efron? From the evidence of her loathsome article, she is certainly a “news twister” par excellence. But when have we seen this before, this amalgam of hysterical smears and Red-baiting, joined to an ideology that scorns civil liberties and calls for love and “reverence” for the State? There are not many laissez-faire thinkers of the past who, though upholding limited government, have actually loved and revered it. On the contrary. For them, as for modern libertarians, love and reverence has been reserved for such values as liberty and human dignity, and even for one’s land, culture, and country but not, ye gods, for the State, which, even in the limited government lexicon, is at best simply a policeman and not something to be revered and worshipped. But then, despite Miss Efron’s ritualistic invocation of the Founding Fathers, it is clear that she knows next to nothing about American history. If she did, she would realize that most of those Fathers were far closer to our position than to has; what they had reverence for, and fought a revolution to maintain, was liberty, and definitely not the State.

Where have we seen these tantrums, this hopped-up and wild-swinging disregard for accuracy, combined with an ideology that reveres not only the American State, but even more the State of Israel? We have seen them in the fever swamps of the tar Right, most specifically of the Randian variety.

Is this the “love”, the “reverence,” these old paranoid bones of the. 1960’s, that the libertarian movement is supposed to crawl back to? Certainly not, and not at the behest of someone as profoundly anti-libertarian as Miss Efron. We are an adult movement now, and we can put away the childish tantrums and bickering of isolated sects. We are making an impact on the mainstream of American life, and we have just begun.

To Our Readers

You have all noticed that the issues of the Lib. Forum have been falling ever more disgracefully behind. In a profound sense, our problems have been problems of success—the great expanding success of the libertarian movement in the last year or two. The demands on the time of the Editor, as well as the outlets for his writing, have expanded greatly. These outlets have also increased proportionately for those who would ordinarily be contributing articles to the Lib. Forum.

And yet we do not want to yield to the pressure of events and abandon the Lib. Forum. We feel that despite the many worthy magazines and journals now competing for your attention, there is still nothing quite like: the hard-hitting and knowledgeable commentary we give to news events, foreign and domestic, our sometimes acerbic coverage of the libertarian movement, our discussions of libertarian theory, the raising high the banner of the Old Culture by Mr. First Nighter, or even the occasional rap across the knuckles of our young whippersnappers by the Old Curmudgeon. We frankly feel that the libertarian movement would be the poorer for our absence from the scene.

And so, we have decided to continue as ever—with one exception: that we will appear every other month instead of monthly. Every subscriber will still receive the same NUMBER of issues as before, but they will now stretch out over twice the period of time, thus, the basic subscription will still be 8 dollars for 12 issues—but now the twelve issues will appear over a two-year period. Notice, too, that our subscription price will continue at $8.00 per twelve issues (now amounting to $4.00 per year), which is surely one of the great bargains in the libertarian movement. Even if we are not the best of all the magazines, we are certainly one of the least expensive.

We will begin the new policy with our next issue, which will be January/February 1978, to be followed by March/April 1978, and so on. The size and spirit of each issue will remain the same.

Truth On the Scaffold

by Justus D. Doenecke

Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1970.

Philip Knightley, The First Casualty; From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

John Morton Blum, Politics and American Culture During World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

When James Russell Lowell wrote of truth being on the scaffold, doing so in his poem, “The Impending Crisis,” he was referring to the Mexican War. We have long known, however, that such observations are not just limited to the Polk administration, or even to the presidency as an institution. Rather, truth is betrayed whenever massive groups are in conflict, and often the betrayers are the most able of intellectuals acting from the noblest of motives.

What was once called the Great War epitomizes what happens when professors are called to the colors, and Carol Gruber of William Paterson College tells the story well. When World War I came to America, the modern university was barely in its adolescence. Administered by bureaucratic hierarchies and beset with a specialized curriculum, it lacked a clear identity, much less a sense of purpose. True, it was vaguely committed to the ideal of national service, but the disciplines themselves were defined amorphously and the faculty perceived as employees of the administration. In the background was the Progressive movement, with its cloudy longing for unity of knowledge and the restoration of community.

The outbreak of the European war found a few intellectuals pro-German. Political scientist John W. Burgess, retired from Columbia, claimed that the Reich was a peaceloving, democratic nation. It was, he continued, Allied imperialism exclusively that had caused the conflict: Russia sought the Balkans, France Alsace-Lorraine, and Britain had long been jealous of Germany’s political and economic power. Several other professors—historians William R. Shepherd of Columbia and Preserved Smith, economist Simon Patten of Pennsylvania—expressed sympathy for the German position, while Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas said that such a thickly settled country must sometimes sacrifice individual freedom for collective welfare.

Yet, from the very beginning, most of the professoriate favored the Allied cause. George B. Adams, historian at Yale, found England holding no interest in the war not shared by the United States. Johns Hopkins philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy saw any weakening of Britain threatening the moral as well as the material interest of the United States. Wisconsin economist Richard T. Ely hoped that after the war America and Britain could unite in “an intellectual and spiritual Empire.” Illinois political scientist James W. Garner called the destruction of the University of Louvain the most heinous crime “since the burning of the library of Alexandria.” It was the historians in particular who attacked the Kaiser, with Chicago’s Andrew D. McLaughlin referring to “Little Will,” Claude H. Van Tyne of Michigan writing of the “International ‘Bugaboo Bill,’” and Chicago’s William E. Dodd labelling the man “a menace to mankind.”

Such labels were the beginning, not the end, of abuse. Historian Albert Bushnell Hart demanded that a Harvard colleague of German-American background prove his loyalty by publicly denouncing the entire German people. His colleague Ralph Barton Perry, a prominent philosopher, attempted to rationalize such irrational hatred, declaring that “In moral matters there is no judging without feeling.” At times an early version of the domino theory was articulated, with Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner claiming, “If we will not fight for free seas, we will not, fight a (German) coaling station in Mexico, or a revolution of the German colony in Brazil, or a German protectorate over Columbia (sic).” When Wilson armed American merchant vessels early in 1917, Columbia political scientist Charles A. Beard called for “more drastic action,” one that would “help eliminate Prussianism from the earth.”

True, for many of these scholars, such as Hart and archeologist James Henry Breasted, there was an initial period of doubt. Once, however, the United States entered the war, all misgivings were over. Gruber writes that “Not to join with the call for victory, when the life of the nation is threatened and its blood and treasure are committed to the battlefield, is an invitation to charges of lack of patriotism, if not of treason.”

This is not to say that university faculties were at all reluctant. John Dewey welcomed the conflict, believing that it would lead to permanent socialization and international organization. Perry, Ely, Breasted, Minnesota historian William Stearns Davis, Yale historian Charles Seymour—all regretted not being able to serve in the armed forces, not yet realizing that some of them would be called to man the brigades of the typewriters. In the meantime, Columbia’s departments of mechanical and electrical engineering placed themselves entirely at the disposal of the Navy Department. Harvard organized a committee on military affairs, giving it the task of coordinating all university plans with the government. Fifty scientists at the University of Chicago volunteered their personal services, while offering to turn over their laboratories to the state.

For professors not tapped for war propaganda (see below), staffing the Students’ Army Training Corps (SATC) offered employment of the most patriotic kind. War had created heavy losses of students, faculty, and administrative personnel. With functions seriously impaired, standards declining, and financial crisis threatening, the turning over of entire institutions to the War Department was a godsend. For every student-soldier enrolled, a school was guaranteed tuition, room, and board, and reimbursed for administrative expenses and use of university facilities as well. In addition, so Gruber writes, the SATC “offered an unmatched opportunity for the institutions of higher learning to demonstrate their usefulness and, by implication, to lay the ghost of ivory-towerism that haunted them.” In fact, well before the United States entered the war, Princeton was sponsoring rifle practice, and Yale had formed four student artillery corps.

Only when the universities became transformed into military camps did the faculties begin to object, but by then it was too late. English courses were devoted to the drafting of military reports, fine arts to military sketching, modern languages to military terminology. SATC students marched to and from class, and stood at attention while reciting. To enter campus buildings, faculty had to show passes to military guards. Complained political scientist Edward S. Corwin, “Princeton. . .is not Princeton just now—only a cog of the military machine, and we professors are cogs within cogs.”

Part of the SATC program involved a War Issues Course, one that would reveal “the supreme importance to civilization of the cause for which we are fighting.” By and large, professors welcomed the idea The course broke down departmental jealousies, laid the ground for basic education, and showed the direct relevance of the undergraduate curriculum to the day’s problems. When Columbia’s course in contemporary civilization was introduced in 1919, it was promoted as a bulwark against radicalism, thereby betraying its origins in the War Issues Course. Since each institution had autonomy in developing syllabi, content varied considerably. In a lecture at the University of Michigan, historian William A. Frayer found Bolshevism more dangerous than Prussianism, remarked that a “surprising number” of revolutionists were Jews, and warned students that Communist sympathizers “are everywhere—in Germany, in France . . . in Italy, in Holland, in England, in the United States— they are on the campus of the University of Michigan.”

Gruber’s comments are scathing. She writes, “Even prowar professors might have concluded that the most valuable service they had to offer as professors was to maintain the critical intellect and the institution of higher learning as citadels of sanity in the inevitable madness of war, in order to protect, and promote the very values and freedoms in whose name the fight was being waged. Instead, they made themselves servants of the state’s pursuit of victory and became implicated in all the compromises and concessions unavoidably involved in that pursuit. When Richard T. Ely delivered a patriotic address that deliberately stimulated a mindless revulsion against Germans as a people and when John R. Commons worked to defeat the socialist Victor Berger’s senatorial bid in 1918 by crudely implicating Berger in treason, they donated their intellectual talents in a way that clearly compromised the standards of their profession” (emphasis Gruber).

Edward Potts Cheyney, historian at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the few dissenters. He wrote a colleague in August of 1917, “I feel that the most patriotic man is the one who clings most firmly to the highest ideals of his nation, not the one who ‘goes along’ more ardently at war any more than when she is at peace.” Yet Cheyney, whose son had been committed to a federal penitentiary (apparently in connection with pacifist activities), felt so ostracized by his associates that he did not attend the historical retreat that fall in Branford, Connecticut.

The indictment is bolstered by Gruber’s discoveries concerning academic freedom, for she finds that the profession at large bent willingly to majority pressures. One would have thought that the American Association of University Professors, organized in 1915 to foster “professional vigilance and redress,” would have aided dissenting academicians. However, in 1917 AAUP president Frank Thilly called for tolerance of those “scholars who are loyal at heart”; loyalty, in short, was seen as relevant to an academic post. Administrators, Thilly hoped, would let the faculty draw the line “between the allowable and unallowable in speech and conduct,” thereby implicitly asserting that certain views were “unallowable.”

The AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom in Wartime turned the screws even tighter, and in so doing reneged on a principled commitment to unconditional free inquiry. Professors, it said early in 1917, could be dismissed for “disobedience to any statute or lawful executive order relating to the war.” They could also be fired for engaging in “propaganda designed, or unmistakably leading, to cause others to resist or evade compulsory service law or the regulations of the military authorities.” As examples of valid grounds for dismissal, the report mentioned claims that all war participation was immoral, that payment of taxes was unjust, or that deserters from the Russian army deserved commendation.

There was more to the report. Interference with the purchase of liberty bonds or support for war charities was “dangerous to the public security” and “irreconcilable with good citizenship”; hence, these activities too were cause for dismissal. Professors of German and Austro-Hungarian background should show, by “utterances” and “associations,” that they supported American efforts. Indeed, they “should refrain from public discussion of the war; and in their private intercourse with their neighbors, colleagues and students. . .(should) avoid all hostile or offensive expressions concerning the United States or its government” (all emphasis Gruber’s). For this minority, only actual thought control could serve as a more effective proscription. Gruber writes most aptly, “In effect, the AAUP was opening the floodgates of repression, or at least was stepping aside, when it might have been expected to make every effort to hold back the waters.”

Given such attitudes by the only professional group in a position to protect academic freedom, it is hardly surprising that purges of suspect faculty took place at Wisconsin, Oregon, Virginia, Michigan, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wellesley, and Toledo. Columbia fired psychologist James McKeen Catell and English professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. Contrary to myth, most of the Columbia faculty, including the relevant faculty committee, thought the action warranted; objections centered on President Nicholas Murray Butler’s method of execution.

There were other forms of biogotry. Richard T. Ely, president of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin Loyalty League, joined with fellow progressive John R. Commons and historian Carl Russell Fish in an effort to purge the state of Robert M. LaFollette. Drafting a round-robin signed by over ninety per cent of the faculty, as well as by the university president and deans, they accused the anti-war senator of having “given aid and comfort to Germany and her allies in the present war,” and of having failed “loyally to support the government in the prosecution of the war.”

Little wonder that Gruber finds the professors betraying their calling. Rather than remaining independent of “sources of economic and political power, whose objectives are remote from, if not inimical to, the search for truth,” they enlisted for the duration. “Service to society” she finds “a mutually beneficial goal”; “service to the state,” however, “contained the danger of becoming servitude.” Julien Benda’s phrase trahison des clercs, or “treason of the intellectuals,” has no more telling example. American faculties never came to grips with the carnage of the conflict. Instead, she notes, scholars luxuriated in indicting a “guilty people.” conveniently ignoring the harsh tactics used by British and Belgians against “backward” populations.

Gruber, however, is not content with moralizing, but ably analyzes the prowar fervor. Strongly influenced by her mentor Richard Hofstadter, with whom she studied at Columbia, she explains such behavior in the light of prewar alienation. Before 1917, the academy was uncertain about its role and purpose, and it desired to belong to a wider social world; in short, it was floundering. The war, in a sense, served as a “legitimizer,” wherein professors could “demonstrate their worth to themselves and to the public upon which they depended for support.” By the same token, in an all-too-brief discussion of Ray Abrams’s Preachers Present Arms (see Libertarian Forum, November, 1977, pp. 5-6), she surmises that the clergy found in war a rapprochement with the state, increased prestige, and renewal of the pulpit.

George T. Blakey, a member of the Eastern Indiana Center at Earlham College, focusses on a more narrow topic, but one equally damning to the academy: the historian as propagandist. By the time World War I broke out, the historical guild was becoming more professionalized—thanks to the German concept of “scientific history,” the influence of Johns Hopkins University, the initiation of graduate programs, and the seminar method of studying source material. Both the American Historical Association (AHA) and the American Historical Review (AHR) became staffed with trained scholars, and such gifted “amateurs” as Henry Adams and James Ford Rhodes gave way to such German-trained “professionals” as Albert Bushnell Hart and William E. Dodd.

Once war broke out, some historians went directly into war work. Civil War specialist James G. Randall, for example, took a leave of absence from Roanoke College to join the United States Shipping Board. Slavery expert Ulrich B. Phillips left the University of Michigan to become educational secretary of YMCA Camp Gordon in Georgia. The work, Phillips said, was “the most inspiring thing I have ever experienced.”

Soon more appropriate tasks were in store. Columbia’s James T. Shotwell, Princeton’s Dana C. Munro, Illinois’s Evarts B. Greene, and the AHR editors J. Franklin Jameson and Waldo G. Leland all fostered, indeed led, the National Board for Historical Service (NBHS), a body that distributed pamphlets, arranged speaking tours, revised school curricula, and investigated government projects. A second propaganda body, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), sponsored a Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation, with Minnesota’s Guy Stanton Ford as director. This body subsidized massive amounts of court history, enrolling several historians in its ranks.

A third organization was the National Security League (NSL), a group that had backed compulsory military training and opposed antiwar politicians before the United States entered the conflict. When America declared war, the NSL established a Committee on Patriotism Through Education, with tasks similar to those of the CPI and the NBHS. The chairmanship was first given to Albert Bushnell Hart, then to Princeton’s Robert M. McElroy. Hart had been president of both the AHA and the American Political Science Association. During the war “Bushy” denied that Germany possessed any “eminent professors of history”; indeed, the only thing the Reich had of value was its beer. McElroy’s professional record was far less distinguished, but his fervor—if anything—exceeded Hart’s.

During the war, the CPI and the NBHS distributed some 33 million pamphlets, with the press serializing some items, (There is no record of NSL outreach although it must have been considerable). Minnesota’s William Stearns Davis, author of European history surveys and historical novels, edited a pamphlet containing Wilson’s war message; his footnotes supplied historical justification for US belligerency. (John Latane of Johns Hopkins, himself with the NSL, called Davis’s effort “so full of errors of fact and inference that it is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”) McElroy lined pacific quotations of Wilson alongside belligerent comments by Nietzsche, Treitschke, and Frederick the Great. The German soul, said the Princeton man, was “a soul perverted, and black as hell itself.”

Other pamphlets continued in the same vein. Van Tyne warned against anti-British accounts of the American Revolution. Carl Becker compared America’s “ideal of democracy” to “the German ideal of a world empire established by ruthless aggression.” Wallace K. Notestein of Minnesota offered 160 pages of warlike German statements. (Notestein’s original edition had several antiwar references, but the CPI editors deleted these; they might—so the CPI maintained—blunt the impact of the pamphlet, besides calling attention to Notestein’s German name). Earl E. Sperry of Syracuse wrote a leaflet entitled “The Tentacles of the German Octopus in America,” in which German-American newspapers, schools, and clubs were “exposed” as appendages of the German government.

Perhaps most ambitious of all was the CPI’s War Cyclopedia. This volume, subtitled A Handbook for Ready References on the Great War, was edited by Frederick L. Paxson of the University of Wisconsin. Princeton’s Corwin and Bernadotte E. Schmitt of Western Reserve served on the staff. Beard was slated for essays on “Atrocities”, “Frightfulness,” “Rheims,” and “Belgian violations;” Becker for articles on “Scraps of Paper,” “Poilu,” “Tommy,” “Boch,” and “Italia Irridenta;” Sidney Bradshaw Fay wrote on “Berlin to Bagdad,” “Place in the Sun,” and “Bernardi;” and Chicago’s Andrew C. McLaughlin discussed “Edith Cavell,” “Blacklist,” and “Louvain.” According to such entries, the Central Powers were the wickedest of the wicked, the Allies the purest of the pure.

Historians carried such fervor to the lecture podium. Ford described the German destruction of churches and convents to a capacity audience at the Mormon Tabernacle. Hart accused a Wilson critic of “outright treason,” doing so at a forum held at New York’s Church of the Ascension. Jameson drew up “lantern slides” that confronted audiences with Bismarck, the Krupp works, and a Zeppelin raid on England.

Sometimes efforts backfired. For example, in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin, McElroy noted the apathy of some cadets in the audience, forced to listen to the patriotic speeches for three hours in pouring rain. “By God, I believe you are traitors,” he snapped, thereby subjecting himself and the NSL to severe criticism.

Part of the historians’ task involved censorship. Columbia’s James Harvey Robinson, with the aid of colleague James T. Shotwell, altered a text to meet criticism from the Justice Department and Theodore Roosevelt. Whereas the 1916 edition of Medieval and Modern Times divided war guilt among all belligerents, the 1919 edition condemned Germany alone. Ford and his assistant Samuel B. Harding of Indiana University supervised the translating of CPI pamphlets into German, working in the hope that these new materials would replace traditional texts in German language classes. Historians monitored the foreign language press, reporting their findings to the Creel Committee. Bernadotte E. Schmitt covered Cleveland; George Sabine, Missouri; Solon J. Buck, Minnesqta. Charles Altschul, an Anglophile businessman, and Harry Elmer Barnes surveyed a hundred textbooks, after which they wrote the report The American Revolution in Our School Textbooks. Both men urged all authors to stress the common heritage of the English-speaking peoples.

The controversy over the Sisson Documents offers a prime example of such historical prostitution. In March 1918, Edgar Sisson, former editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, was serving as a CPI representative in Russia. He obtained documents purporting to prove that the Bolshevik regime was a puppet of the German general staff. The State Department doubted the authenticity of these materials, but Sisson and Creel convinced Wilson that they were genuine. The President in turn suggested the CPI publicize the Sisson Documents. When Creel gladly complied, much of the American press began claiming that they were fraudulent. The NBHS appointed AHR editor of J. Franklin Jameson and Samuel N. Harper, professor of Russian language at Chicago to “investigate.” Jameson knew little Russian; Harper had been vocal in his opposition to the Soviet regime and had already committed himself in print to their authenticity. After less than a week of study, but under heavy CPI pressure to confirm to its verdict, the two historians testified to their veracity. In fact, they wrote a 300 page report on it all, The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, which appeared just before the armistice. Soviet authority George F. Kennan, researching the issue decades later, asks how American experts could have possibly arrived at such a judgement, for any serious examination would have revealed the papers as forgeries.

Historians also attempted to propagandize the classrooms directly. The AHA sponsored the History Teacher’s Magazine, which claimed to offer “The common ground on which history and patriotism meet.” In its pages, Breasted showed how ancient showed how ancient Egypt’s desire for empire had contemporary parallels, and William D. Gray of Smith indicated how “ancient Caesarism and imperialism are living forces in Germany today.” (Both societies, Gray argued, had “pompous and arrogant speeches” and “grandiose and brutal triumphal monuments.”) Charles H. McIlwain found America the legal descendant of medieval England. Becker described the Monroe Doctrine in a folksy manner; the United States, he said, could no longer adopt a Little Jack Homer attitude in defending its interests. Both World War I and the American Civil War, said Middle Period expert Carl Russell Fish of Wisconsin, involved restriction of the press and suppression of some legal rights; however, such measures were justified in efforts to free subject peoples.

Only when the war ended did the historians come under attack. H. L. Mencken labelled them “Star Spangled Men.” The Sage of Baltimore proposed a decoration: The Grand Cross of the Order would be composed of “a gold badge in polychrome enamel and stained glass, a baldric of the national colors, a violet plug hat with a sunburst on the side.” In addition, the historians would receive a pension for prostituting professional ethics. Soon Harry Elmer Barnes repented of his propaganda efforts, encouraging his protege C. Hartely Grattan in 1927 to write a biting expose for the American Mercury.

Yet most historians remained unaffected by their wartime role. As Blakey writes, “For the most part they regarded their extraordinary venture into patriotic service as an aberrant chapter in their lives, an atypical departure from scholarship necessitated by the national crisis and obviating judgement by professional standards. Their lives and careers would return to normal with the armistice in the same way as military, scientific, and medical participants in the war effort would resume prewar activities, overcoming the brief but troublesome disruption caused by the international conflict.” Ford, Munro, and Greene all became president of the AHA; Ford served as editor of the AHR from 1941 to 1953. Hart was widely recognized as an authority on George Washington. Van Tyne’s War of Independence (1929) won a Pulitzer Prize, as did McLaughlin’s Constitutional History of the United States (1935). Shotwell took time out from editing 400 volumes on the war to advise various projects for international organization. Jameson directed the Library of Congress’s manuscripts division. Notestein wrote the widely respected English Peoples on the Eve of Colonization (1954). Only Harding and McElroy fell into relative obscurity, with the former editing children’s books, the latter lecturing at British universities.

Despite the breach of professional ethics, intellectuals found it appropriate to make themselves available as government servants. The basic conviction—that the highest professional obligation was to provide useful service to the state—was not challenged. Revisionists such as Beard and Bicker, so Carol Gruber argues, changed their minds about the particular cause which they had promoted, but they never reevaluated the fundamental social role.

If professors—individuals whose vocation involves upholding truth at all cost—are guilty of distortion, it is hardly surprising to find journalists often lacking objectivity. Philip Knightley, an independent writer, offers an account based primarily on memoirs and secondary sources. His title comes from a comment made by California senator Hiram Johnson, who said in 1917 that “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” It is an apt title, for Knightley’s account spares no one, including such sacrosanct newspapers as the New York Times, New Statesman, Times of London, and Manchester Guardian.

Knightley begins his account with stories of journalistic bungling in such conflicts as the Crimean, American Civil, Franco-Prussian, and Boer Wars. He devotes several chapters to World War I, a conflict in which censorship of battle losses was combined with frentic propaganda efforts. Much attention is given to the British propaganda organization, which, writes Knightley, was so masterful that Goebbels later used it as his model. It was, in fact, Allied correspondents who first invented tales of German Corpse factories and Belgian babies without hands, while Rudyard Kipling wrote, “There are only two divisions in the world today, human beings and Germans.”

True, the Germans also circulated atrocity stories, such as the rumor that Gurkha and Sikh troops would sneak across the lines at night, slit German throats, and drink blood. However, they bungled the Edith Cavell incident, in which a British nurse working in a Brussels hospital was executed for helping Allied prisoners escape. The French, after all, had already shot one woman for exactly the same offense, and they would shoot eight more for similar transgressions before the war ended.

In the meantime, the real combat accounts were stifled. At first Lord Kitchener refused to allow correspondents in France (“Out of my way, you drunken swabs,” he had bellowed in the Sudan), and several were imprisoned. British war illustrators were forbidden to draw corpses. “We must be our own censors,” said George Bernard Shaw, while H. G. Wells, who like Shaw visited the front, hoped that witnessing death would not turn him into “a mere useless gibbering stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist.” News of the Mons defeat and the German victory at Tannenberg was suppressed and the Battle of the Frontiers, in which the Germans wiped out some 300,000 French soldiers in August 1914, remained unreported until the war was over. The British and French people did not know the full extent of their casualties until victory; in 1916 the German military had begun to falsify losses.

Given such limitations, the truth concerning Russia was particularly long in coming. During the Tsarist regime, censors kept the public from reading dispatches dealing with the incompetence of Russian forces or the shortcomings of her aristocracy. British and French correspondents refused to contemplate the impact of a possible Russian defeat on the Western Front, and—besides—one could not attack an ally in a war portrayed as a struggle between good and evil. The Times of London ignored accounts critical of the Russian effort while carrying such headlines as RUSSIA FIRM AND UNITED. Except for John Reed of The Masses and Philip Price of the Manchester Guardian, correspondents refused to take the growing Bolshevik movement seriously.

Once the Communists assumed power, The New York Times kept predicting imminent defeat. Within two years, the August newspaper had Lenin and Trotsky planning flight (four times) and already fleeing (twice), with Lenin alone planning retirement (twice), killed (once), and in prison (three times). Ever hopeful that Russia might stay in the war, it featured the headline BOLSHEVIKI MAY HELP ALLIES BEST. Stories of the Allied intervention were underplayed, and few in the West knew of the severe drubbing taken by White armies. Little wonder that diplomat John Cudahy wrote years after the American intervention in Siberia, “When the last battalion set sail from Archangel, not a soldier knew, not even vaguely, why he had fought or why he was going now, and why his comrades were left behind, so many of them beneath wooden crosses.”

Coverage of Mussolini’s war against Ethiopia was little better. Journalists, confined to Addis Ababa and usually pro-Abbyssinian, fell prey to Haile Selassie’s handouts predicting brilliant guerrilla campaigns and quick victories. New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews, who admired the fascists, was almost a lone exception. Matthews warned that the Abbyssinians could not withstand Italy’s forces, but his comments went unheeded.

In the Spanish Civil War journalistic partisanship was even more extreme, in fact quite destructive. Ernest Hemingway, who represented the North American Newspaper Alliance, had been chairman of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy and aided in drilling International Brigades. Louis Fischer of the Nation took it upon himself to advise the Soviet ambassador to Spain and served as quartermaster of the International Brigade depot in Albacete. Arthur Koestler, correspondent for the London New Chronicle, worked undercover for the Comintern. His Spanish Testament, which pretended to be an eye-witness account of Spanish atrocities, was composed in Paris, not Madrid, and written under the direction of German Communist Willi Muenzenberg.

Such sentiment soon led to gross naivete, with only an occasional dissenter, such as George Orwell, standing aloof. When Orwell correctly claimed that Stalin was more concerned with eliminating the left than with fighting Franco, the New Statesman refused to print his disptaches. Then left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz turned down Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, of which only 600 copies were sold in Orwell’s lifetime.

Hemingway might have been the chief offender. He predicted Republican victory six months before Franco won, basing his optimisro on glowing reports from the Pravda and Isvestia correspondent. Even more irresponsibly, he failed to report that the Communists were summarily executing “untrustworthy” Republican elements, although he certainly knew of such behavior. Had the prominent novelist shared his knowledge, argues Knightley, he might have prevented further horrors. In passing, Knightley claims that the Guernica raid—contrary to myth—was a legitimate military objective; the German attack was not levelled primarily to demoralize civilians. Similarly, he questions the authenticity of Robert Capa’s “Moment of Death,” the famous photograph of a Republican militiaman falling backwards on Spanish soil.

World War II, of course, brought about one journalistic snafu after another. Take the British. After the Russians invaded Finland, such journalists as Virginia Cowles so exaggerated early Finnish successes that the West was surprised to learn that Russia had won the war. Skillful propaganda turned the evacuation at Dunkirk into a moral victory. Only now do we learn that reports of merciless bombing were highly exaggerated, that some survivors had no desire to return, that troop behavior before and during the embarcation was by no means exemplary, that the British deliberately underplayed France’s significant role in delaying the Germans, and that indeed the whole retreat was unnecessary.

There is more. Churchill personally ordered a blackout on all news concerning the sinking of British ships on the Atlantic, causing even the pro-British Edward R. Murrow to complain bitterly. British correspondents boasted that Singapore was invincible (“ready for anything,” said Leonard Mosely of the Daily Sketch) weeks before its fall, while exaggerating the minor and costly operations of guerrilla leader Orde Wingate in Burma.

Knightley offers a revisionist account of the Battle of Britain. While acknowledging “amazing acts of bravery,” he notes that Britain was never the underdog, that numbers of German losses were exaggerated to maintain morale, and that the Blitz was not a great social leveller. Protection for a rich Londoner was quite different from protection for a poor one, and many parents who could afford to send their children overseas did so. (By the way, it was Hurricanes, not Spitfires, that were the RAF’s major weapon.) Contrary to popular myth, Knightley finds Coventry a legitimate military target, as it contained several motor, piston ring, and aircraft engine factories.

The Soviets in particular sought to shut out news of defeat. Nothing, they believed, should be told the Russian people, much less the world, that might damage morale. American journalists soon suffered the censor’s pen, and only later—claims Knightley—was it realized how poorly planned the German invasion was. (Example: Germany entered Russia with 3,200 tanks; the Soviets had 20,000, more than the rest of the world put together). Knightley also notes how the battle of Kursk, which he finds the real military turning point of the war, went unreported in the excitement over Stalingrad. The Western public remained unaware of the mass exile of over 300,000 Crimean Tartars who collaborated with the Germans, and it took the Soviet account of the; Katyn massacres at face value.

The record of the United States was not unspotted, particularly in regards to the Pacific War. When Secretary of the Navy Frank-Knox deliberately underestimated the damage at Pearl Harbor, the press took his appraisal at face value. Correspondents to the Asian mainland boosted Chiang’s cause, doing so in the full knowledge that the Generalissimo’s forces were refusing to engage in serious fighting. Chinese Nationalist leaders would show travelling US correspondents the same batch of captured equipment and prisoners of war again and again, moving the POW’s and booty from one place to another before the Americans arrived. (One correspondent proved it by scratching his initials on a helmet). Leland Stowe soon found the Chicago Daily News suppressing his reports of Chiang’s corruption, and Theodore White saw Time doctoring his reports of Koumintang profiteering. The American press presented the Battle of the Coral Seas as a major victory, one that involved the saving of Australia; in reality it was a draw and the Japanese were not capable of major invasion. Censors curbed reports of kamikaze raids and kept the public from learning that 9,300 Japanese balloons, each carrying anti-personnel bombs, had drifted across the Pacific. Nor did Americans learn of trouble between GIs and Australian forces, with tensions so severe that a pitched battle took place in Queensland.

A nation seldom reveals its own atrocities, and the United States was no exception. For example, official communiques claimed that American planes bombed only military objectives in Tokyo, and bombed them with “pinpoint accuracy.” In reality, as we now know, Tokyo bombings were indiscriminate fire raids, causing more casualties than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. (One raid killed 140,000 and left a million homeless). For a month after Hiroshima, MacArthur kept all southern Japan “off-limits” to the press. When Wilfred Burchett of the London Daily Express described the resulting radiation sickness, he was challenged by Major General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. In short, many of the scandals connected with Viet Nam—the attempted silencing of David Halberstam, the longtime ignorance of the conflict in Cambodia, the efforts to suppress news of My Lai—have quite a long ancestry.

Much of Knightley’s material is invaluable; however, he could have done far more with it. The important questions remain unanswered, undoubtedly because the book lacks any analytical framework. We do not know how typical his examples are, or how the press as an institution has changed over time. Surely more could have been done with the ideology of reporters, the ownership of journals, the politics of censors, the general policy-making proclivities of the fourth estate. Indeed, is objectivity ever possible, particularly in wartime? Should reporters make their biases explicit, as so many of the “new journalists” appear to be doing? In short, is a more responsible journalism possible, and if so, have we any positive models of it? What Knightley gives us in exposes; what we should be getting is analysis.

Such analysis is found in two treatments of American government propaganda during World War II. (Although Blum’s book has valuable material on blacks, the economy, and political maneuverings, this essay will only deal with his treatment of propaganda.) Blum and Winkler, both Yale historians, describe the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), and the Office of War Information (OWI), two efforts to mobilize sentiment on behalf of the war. The agencies were directed by liberal interventionists, including poet Archibald MacLeish, playwright Robert E. Sherwood, and broadcaster Elmer Davis.

However, despite the ambitious goals of the OFF and OWI, their efforts were often weak, and neither agency had the impact of the Creel Committee. If their pamphlets ranged from the need for doctors to Negro employment in war industries, definition of war aims was often banal. For example, one character in an OFF radio drama proclaims that the war was “about all young people like us. About love and gettin’ hitched, and havin’ a home and some kids, and breathin’ fresh air out in the suburbs. . .about livin’ an’ workin’ decent, like free people.”

Some propagandists, of course, wanted headier wine, and Blum describes some of their thoughts. Harold Lasswell, propaganda expert and a major OFF figure, believed that propaganda needed “a large element of fake in it. . .That only truthful statements should be used. . .seems. . .an impractical maxim.” Sherman H. Dryer, a critic of radio, said, “The strategy of truth. . .is a handicap. . .Truth. . .will enhance the integrity of our officialdom, but it is a moot question whether it will enhance either the efficiency or the effectiveness of our efforts to elicit concerned action from the public.” Archer Oboler, a writer for OFF staffer Norman Corwin, called for “hate on the air,” at which point MacLeish claimed that OFF stood in the Christian tradition of hating the sin but loving; the sinner. The German and Japanese people should not be hated, MacLeish commented; only their evil deeds. Blum writes at this point, “But that admirable distinction, as MacLeish must have realized, was beyond the grasp of many of those engaged in selling the war and most of those whom they were trying to reach.”

FDR eliminated MacLeish’s OFF in the spring of 1942, and soon Davis’s OWI was in charge of major propaganda efforts. However, the OWI was soon beset with factionalism—struggles between those who sought to make new policy and those who sought to interpret existing policy, between liberals promoting a global New Deal and professional advertisers engaged in boosterism for its own sake. One OWI poster, designed by a former advertising manager for Coca Cola, displayed a Coke bottle wrapped in an American flag. The legend below read, “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms. It’s a refreshing war.”

Because of such antics, a host of writers, including journalist Henry Pringle and historian Arhtur M. Schlesinger, Jr., resigned. “As we see it,” their statement read, “the activities of the OWI on the home front are dominated by high-pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information. . .They are turning this Office of War Information into an Office of War Bally-hoo.”

Some OWI propaganda was censored. For example, as Winkler notes, the State Department found a pamphlet on the four Freedoms unsuitable for India as “it might incite the Indians against the British.” Nor could the OWI make any criticism of the Chiang regime or the Darlan deal. If American policy was vague or ambiguous, OWI attempted to patch over the points of contention and indicate that solutions were underway.

Though neither author mentions it, some 2,000 writers worked for a variety of government agencies. Included were such luminaries as the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, humorist Alexander Woolcott, novelist John P. Marquand—and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The Writers’ War Board was headed by mystery writer Rex Stout, who boasted, “I hate Germans, and am not ashamed of it.” Critic Clifton Fadiman concurred: “The only way to make a German understand is to kill him, and even then he doesn’t get the point.”

Although Blum mentions neither Stout nor Fadiman, he offers a strong indictment. The War production Board, he notes, approved an ad calling for the extermination of Japanese “rats,” comic strips portrayed the Japanese with ape-like characteristics, and even quasi-scholarly treatment of Japanese culture stressed an inherent warrior ethic. Fiction writers Helen Maclnnes, Glenway Wescott, and Nevil Shute found brutality an essentially German trait, while Upton Sinclair’s globetrotting hero Lanny Budd preached that there was nothing to do but to kill.

Blum writes aptly, “Sinclair’s point was simplistic. His war was waged between Americans and Germans, Roosevelt and Hitler, absolute good and absolute evil. That was the kind of war in which many Americans came to believe. Missing from the picture of the enemy that the novelists painted was the gentle conviction of Archibald MacLeish, his reminder to his countrymen that Christian doctrine called upon man to hate the sin but to forgive the sinner.”

Stripping the enemy of all humanity might have made for greater unity, and for increased war production as well, but it did little to prepare Americans for the complexities of the postwar world. And when the international stability promised after the war was not forthcoming, public attitudes—as any student of the Truman period knows—were rife with apathy and cynicism. After the conflict, as Blum points out, a different set of novels was written—Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Irwin Shaw’s Young Lions. Such works, as well as the poems of Randall Jerrell, indict oppressive militarism, and a closed and brutal social system. Indeed for the authors, the war was a pointless one.

John Hersey, so Blum notes, went full circle. In Men of Bataan, Hersey wrote that the American people “adored their MacArthur as if he were a young genius who had just flown across the dim Atlantic. . .or as if he were a big and perfect slugger. . .or. . .some new shiek of the silver screen.” MacArthur’s men were “wonderfully brave. . .they encompass the highest human values.” By the time he wrote A Bell for Adano, as he wrote later, he realized that “the American hero. . .might be a dangerous shit.” In The Wall, a novel dealing with life in the Warsaw ghetto, he has one Jewish resistant say, “nationalism can be as frightful in a Jew as in a German.” “Or an American,” adds Blum, “or any other man who permitted his concern for the unit—the platoon, the country—to eclipse his concern for mankind.”

War fervor, followed by war cynicism, is no isolated occurrence in American history, and as Knightley shows, even some of the more prominent Vietnam doves were once hawks, Wrote David Halberstam, author of the damning Best and the Brightest, “We would have liked nothing better than to believe that the war was going well, and that it would eventually be won.” Neil Sheehan, who broke the story of the Ellsbery-Pentagon Papers, hoped as late at 1966 for an American victory. Charles Mohr, who protested Time’s distortion of his pessimistic dispatches, said, “Everyone thought I left (Time) because I was against the war. I just thought it wasn’t working. I didn’t come to think of it as immoral until the very end.” Mohr, in fact, was so hawkish that, when he returned to Vietnam as a New York Times correspondent, he carried an M-16 and participated in the American retaking of Hue Citadel.

Further war, or crises of any sort, will doubtless bring more journalistic and academic distortion. It seems to be in the nature of the human beast. Today it is primarily the left that is calling for professional “engagement” on a number of issues, ranging from demands for “anti-racist” history to calls to aid Third World revolution. The left, of course, is not alone, as witness the prominent academics enlisted in various Cold War lobbies. Howard Becker once asked his colleagues at the American Sociological Society, “Whose side are you on?” It can be a dangerous question.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Good Movies! In the past weeks, we have seen several excellent films—a remarkable statement from our ordinarily jaundiced perspective. Three of them have been comedies, and unusually fine ones. One of the best, and surely the least heralded, was Semi-Tough, Michael Ritchie, dir., with Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh, Kris Kristofferson, and Bert Convy, and Lotte Lenya. Semi-Tough is, first and foremost, extremely funny, featuring on-target and acidulous satires of Est (“Beat”), Rolfing (“Pelfing”), Gravity Therapy and all the other modern psycho-lunacies. In fact, its major theme is a satiric look at the whole psycho-babble culture. Lotte Lenya is superb as Clara Pelf (“You can only learn through . . . Pain!” she declaims in her thick mittel-Europeanaccent, as she digs her elbow into Burt Reynolds’ chest.) Bert Convy is excellent and incisive as the smarmy Werner Erhard look-alike, and Kris Kristofferson is properly drippy as the Est-head: (“You’re perfect; I’m perfect”). Burt Reynolds is at his finest in his usual pleasantly mocking role. And the audience lets out a great cheer when Bert Convy emits one “That’s beautiful, too,” too many, and gets a well-deserved and hilarious punch in the face.

But the remarkable thing about Semi-Tough is that is is not confined to one theme, as so many Hollywood comedies are. In its richness of texture, in its mosaic of funny bits and themes, Semi-Gough, more than any film in a long, long time, takes on the quality of the marvelous old Hollywood comedies of the thirties—the Cary Grant-Claudette Colbert-Katharine Hepburn glories of long ago. For whereas the typical Hollywood comedy takes one joke and repeats and underlines it for twenty minutes, until the veriest moron in the audience has to get the point, Semi-Tough has many interesting and funny things going on at the same time. Semi-Tough is the sort of picture that will repay many sittings with fresh nuances and insights. The leitmotif of dollar poker played repeatedly by Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh is just one of the examples. Of course, there is an important difference between Semi-Tough and the old comedies: the addition of the obligatory doses of obscenity. But the thirties flavor is retained nevertheless.

This leaves perhaps the best for last: for Jill Clayburgh is a marvel as the daffy, intelligent, independent, and spontaneously expressive heroine. Her personality and style are strongly reminiscent of Claudette Colbert’s, and what greater compliment could she receive? Much of the thirties flavor in the movie is her doing.

It is unfortunate that Semi-Tough was not even even nominated for an Academy Award, and neither were any of the actors. They deserved top consideration.

It has been the fashion to disparage Neil Simon, but his The Goodbye Girl is an excellent comedy, and one of his best efforts in a long time. Simon has been denounced for his one-liners, but if one-liners are funny, why shouldn’t a comedy have them? And particularly when, in Goodbye Girl, the one-liners are embedded in a plot and characterizations that are interesting and hold together well. Make no mistake: Goodbye Girl with only one Theme, is not nearly as good a movie, as well directed or as funny, as Semi-Tough; but it is good nevertheless. If Semi-Tough harks back to the thirties comedies, Goodbye Girl is in the spirit of the forties wartime comedies where several people are forced to crowd together in one small apartment. The rest almost writes itself, but there are Simon’s superior one-liners. Not only that: Simon has drawn excellent performances from the actors. Indeed, he has performed one of the great feats of the year: making Richard Dreyfuss into a likable comic actor. If Dreyfuss abandons his former pushy persona and sticks to comedy, he can become a new, Jewish Jack Lemmon. Quinn Cummings, as the hip yet vulnerable young daughter of Marsha Mason, is outstanding and deserves the Academy Awayd for best supporting actress.

The only slightly sour spot in the casting is The Goodbye Girl herself, Marsha Mason, who, after making every allowance, simply comes off as harsh and rather unattractive. Since Miss Mason was unusually appealing in Cinderella Liberty not too many years ago, the fault here must be chalked up to her husband, Neil Simon.

Similar in many ways to the Goodbye Girl is the brand-new House Calls, which opened to reviews far more negative than it deserves. Directed by Howard Zieff, and, more importantly, written by the veteran comic writer Max Shulman, House Calls features the marvelous comic talents of sardonic, stoop-shouldered, slobby, middle-aged Walter Matthau, who also helped write his own part. Matthau plays a recently widower, a surgeon now enthusiastically indulging in the bachelor life; Glenda Jackson resembles Miss Mason as the short-haired, flinty foil to Matthau. Except that Miss Jackson is both flintier and more intelligent. The predictable love story between the two is the plot line for hanging a myriad of laughs. Another funny situation is the down-at-the-heels-hospital, run ineptly and a bit malevolently by an overaged Art Carney. The surprising thing about House Calls is that the critics rated it so far below Goodbye Girl; they are about on a par, which is good enough. Perhaps the reason is that Simon is better known and far more popular than Shulman in the entertainment industry.

Another excellent film, this time in the suspense field, is Michael Crichton’s Coma, which deals with a more malevolent hospital than the one in House Calls. With Coma, one must ignore the schlock ads, which imply a Grade Z cross between Jaws and The Exorcist. Also, some of the reviews charged that Coma is filled with excessive gore, which it most emphatically is not (contrast most of the early Hammer Films from Britain, or even those of Sam Peckinpah.) On the contrary, Coma is taunt, suspenseful, exciting, just what an adventure film should be. It has the best kind of suspense plot: an innocent, brave young hero (in this case, heroine) drawn slowly but inexorably into a network of events where everyone—superficial good guys and bad guys alike—seems to be in on the evil plot. The picture gains immeasurably from author Crichton’s medical knowledge (an ex-medical student, Crichton has written the Andromeda Strain and other medical-suspense classics.)

Coma is not only suspenseful, but it is also libertarian. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but the bad guys are essentially the government-medical complex and its fascinating machinations. (This is not a picture to see before going into a hospital!)

Direction and acting are excellent, marred only by the casting of Genevieve Bujold in the central role. Miss Bujold is simply not good enough to sustain a role that requires being onscreen almost the entire picture; for one thing, it is difficult to accept someone who looks like a young fifteen year-old in the role of a brilliant young physician. But this is only a minor flaw: see Coma!

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XI NUMBER 1

JAN.-FEB., 1978

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Last Word on Efronia

Edith Efron’s false and loathsome attack on myself and on the libertarian movement in her column in the February Reason has, predictably, stirred up a storm of response within and around the movement. My own reply appeared in last month’s Lib. Forum (“L’Affaire Efron”.) The April issue of Libertarian Review includes an editorial reply plus an excellent critique of Efron by David Ramsay Steele, in which Steele applies Efron’s own criterion of “news twisting” which she had used to attack CBS, and demonstrates, point-by-point, how Miss Efron employs the very devices which she denounces so indignantly when used by people she doesn’t like.

Reason’s May issue now publishes a selection of what its editors presumably consider the best comments of both sides of the Efron affair. I would urge Lib. Forum readers to read all the letters and judge for themselves the quality of the insight, knowledge, and analysis displayed by the writers on each side of the question. I don’t think I am being merely biassed when I say that, in my judgement, the anti-Efron writers display almost invariably a high level of knowledge and acumen on the libertarian movement and on all the theoretical and factual issues at stake; whereas the pro-Efron writers are almost invariably dumb and boobish. Perhaps in this very fact lies a clue as to why, as several of the writers point out, the anarcho-capitalists won hands down the famous “anarchist-minarchist” debate.

Let us make a brief survey of the Reason letters. On the anti-Efron side, my own letter simply rebuts the egregious falsehoods “reported” about me by Miss Efron. Karl Hess justly rebuts Efron’s vicious smear that Karl “now calls himself a Maoist.” Karl and I have our political disagreements, but to assert that he is a “Maoist”, much less that he “calls himself” one (where, Ms. intrepid reporter?) is an irresponsible calumny that can only be found, as he deftly points out, “in the intelligence files of the FBI, parts of which I (and perhaps Miss Efron) have recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” Karl states that he regards Efron’s charge as an “actual libel” and that, “if actionable, I shall certainly take the advantage of Miss Efron’s own ethics and seek redress from state law.” Touche!”

Other letters, all of them first rate, are written by Thomas Avery, David J. Dawson, Jule R. Herbert, Jr., Aaron Leonard, Tom G. Palmer, Ann Kotell, George H. Smith, and James L. Burns. Tom Avery points out that, contrary to the smears of Efron, libertarian feminists and libertarians for gay rights have always made clear that they were not endorsing the coercive aspects of those movements. David Dawson, as limited government and as “constitutional Republican” as Efron could wish, points out the necessity and success of himself and other anti-draft activists working with the Left against conscription in the late ‘60’s Apparently no one pulled any mythical guns on Dawson!

Aaron Leonard’s effective letter quotes Efron against herself: citing her own previous Reason column (November, 1977) defending alliances with “fellow travellers”. He also points out that “As Michael Emerling reminds us, the reason the debate was discontinued in the first place was that the anarchists won! If Ms. Efron would like, I am sure any number of anarchists are willing to refresh her memory on that point.” Jule Herbert’s hard-hitting letter defends Inquiry and takes a neat swipe at Reason by saying that “One would have hoped that she (Efron) would have at least waited until . . . (Inquiry) had appeared before reading it out of the movement. The first five of its issues . . . have not had anything as distasteful as, say, an interview with Bill Simon in which he tells us that government policy on gold has nothing to do with inflation or that ‘obviously’ government has a responsibility to help those people who cannot help themselves.” Concluding with a comparison of Libertarian Review and Reason, Herbert notes: “The difference is this: While Reason is telling us that non-zoning is great in Houston (at least as long as strict building codes are maintained), Childs is exhorting us to throw the tea in the harbor. I can stand both, but I can not help feeling that some self-styled libertarians would be happier with Reagan’s Citizens for the Republic.”

Ann Kotell denounces the Efron article as unworthy of Reason, and states that “Efron’s reasoning errors were easy to take compared to her tone, the name calling, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, unbacked assertions, discussions of other people’s discriminatory faculties, motivations and emotions . . .” Implicitly recalling Efron’s past in the Objectivist movement, Miss Kotell points to the Objectivists’ failure to make more headway as a function of their propensity to condemn anyone who disagreed with their position. George Smith’s letter is a personal defense of myself which is too embarrassingly favorable for me to summarize in any more detail.

James L. Burns points out that, contrary to Efron’s righteous indignation, the United States government was a mass murderer of both Americans and Vietnamese in Vietnam. He also attacks her “libertarian” affirmation of a “national culture” as collectivist. Burns’ most effective point is to cite the fact that the very Timothy Leary, whom Efron inaccurately smeared as “drug-soaked” was interviewed by Reason itself last year. “Does this mean that Reason has crawled into bed with the New Left?” Burns might have added that, if so, why did Efron leave Reason out of her collection of libertarian hate objects?

Bill Birmingham gets in a couple of characteristic rapier-like thrusts at Miss Efron. First, that he is “grateful to Ms. Efron for proving that there is no such thing as unprintable rubbish”. Second, in his own lively “Brickbats” column in the same issue, Birmingham points to the falsehood involved in the common right-wing smear against Counterspy Magazine in the affair of the murder of Greek CIA station chief Richard Welch. He concludes that “Reason was one of those (publications) manipulated (by the CIA). Edith Efron regurgitated the Counterspy myth whole in February, 1978, the better to revile (sight unseen) Inquiry magazine.”

We come now to the proponents of the Efron piece (Tom Palmer’s anti-Efron letter will be further discussed below.) Most of them are of the “God (or Rand) bless you, Miss Efron, for uncovering the dangerous anarchists-Communists” variety, and I shall not mention their names in order to protect the guilty. (This must be my month for charity rather than retribution). They lack only in explicitness the general world outlook satirically portrayed by Estelle Epstein (see below), except that they are all too serious.

That leaves us very little to discuss. Mark Tier unfortunately swallows Efron’s disgraceful distortions of my own views, but he’s an anarchist, and therefore does not make a very comfortable ally for her. Valerie Valrejean also accepts all of Efron’s malicious fantasies about myself, from the gun-in-the-ribs hokum to the idiotic idea that I somehow counsel libertarians to ally themselves always with the Left, regardless of circumstances. When she exhorts libertarians to “concentrate on building our own principled, vocal and aggressive” movement, she is unwittingly repeating my own views. If such a movement is being “obstructed” by anyone, it is not by Ms. Valrejean’s mythical “group of pragmatic anarchists”, but by the likes of Miss Efron, who would subordinate the movement to statists like Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, et al. That’s being principled?

Mrs. Shirley Gottlieb’s letter really belongs in the “Rand bless you, Miss Efron” category, but she does make a few points that are inadvertently worth commenting on. By whining about the defeats suffered within the Libertarian Party by John Hospers, William Westmiller and their minarchist faction, Mrs. Gottlieb unwittingly gives the lie to the Efron charge that all debate has ceased within the libertarian monolith. Unconsciously humorous in her Nixonian inveighing on a mythical “silent majority” within the Libertarian Party, Mrs. Gottlieb misses the whole point by petulantly urging the anarcho-capitalists within the LP to change its name to the “Anarchist Party”. No one in the LP has ever had the intention of converting the party into an anarchist party. The LP is a coalition of anarchists and minarchists who aim to roll back the State, as quickly as we can, to the minarchists’ own idea of a truly minimal, laissez-faire government. Once we get to that demi-Paradise, the LP can then have it out fiercely within its own ranks as to whether or not to press on to the full Paradisaical condition. Why the minarchists, if they are truly such, and if they are not simply Birchites or Reaganites in sheep’s clothing, should gripe so bitterly about this situation passeth my understanding.

Paul Beaird’s letter is a centimeter above his “Rand bless you, Miss Efron” colleagues, but that is more than compensated by an hysterical tone that almost matches Efron herself. His approving summary that “You (Efron) accuse Rothbard and associates (?) of not being open with us about their cooperation with the New Left, whom they intend to take over,” neatly capsulizes at least three major errors in a single sentence, which even La Efron, at her best, is hard put to match. First, neither myself nor any of my so-called associates have engaged in any secret activity, much less some kind of secret deals with the New Left; second, there is no more New Left, and hasn’t been for about seven years; and third, if there were any New Left, nobody has ever intended to “take them over”, whatever in hell that may mean. Nor, if there were a New Left, would my goal be, as Mr. Beaird puts it, “Persuading the New Left to libertarianism.” If such were my objective, it would indeed be folly.

To put it for what seems like the 785th time: the primary objective of any libertarian alliance with any non-libertarian group—be it New Left, Old Left, New Old Left, Right, Center, None of the Above, or whatever— is to exert maximum leverage in advancing specific goals that happen to be common to both libertarians and the group in question (e.g. repeal of the draft, abolition of a property tax, abolition of a drug law). That’s it. If any member of such group,—Right, Left, Center, or whatever—should also get converted wholly or partially to libertarianism by working with libertarians and seeing the consistency of our position, why that’s great. And certainly no opportunities in that direction should be passed up. But the primary goal is leverage for common aims. Also, there is nothing at all covert or sneaky about this alliance process. I must confess a growing impatience here; it seems to me that my proposed strategy is such simple common sense that I find it increasingly difficult to regard such outpourings as Beaird’s and Efron’s as honest misunderstandings of my position.

Beaird then drifts off into an irrelevant calling attention to his pro-government article in Option. He seems to think that he has scored a significant point against anarcho-capitalists by triumphantly demonstrating that they don’t believe that a criminal’s consent should be required in order to punish him for a crime. Actually, this argument is even irrelevant to the archism-anarchism debate. Do you have to be an anarchist to conclude that a murderer can be punished without having to obtain his consent to the process? Fortunately, there are very few archists whom maintain Beaird’s position.

Beaird concludes characteristically by exhorting the reader to study both minarchism and anarchism “with your own mind”. Can you do it with someone else’s mind? Is that what I am supposed to be advocating?

But Beaird, too, willy nilly gives the lie to the Efron charge that the anarchist-minarchist debate has been stifled within the movement. He does so by citing, not only his own article, but also the replies to it by Roy Childs in Option and by Bill Evers in the Journal for Libertarian Studies.

Finally we have Tibor Machan’s missive. While it is true that Machan hails Efron’s “stirring” and “crucial” contribution, he characteristically spends most of his letter tooting his own horn, citing his various writings to show that the famous debate had not died. The rest of his letter exhorts Efron and her fellow thinkers to print their stuff in the mainstream magazines. Yeah, right; I can just see the countless millions of readers of TV Guide flipping through its pages, and stopping, fascinated, to read La Efron’s smears against myself or Roy Childs.

There were a number of other excellent letters sent in reply to Efron, but which Reason did not see fit to print. Some of them also came into our hands, and we are publishing a selection of them below. With this selection, we close the books on the Efron Affair, with the hope that Miss Efron will confine herself to her more general inaccuracies in the future, and that her career of personal vilification of libertarians is now at an end.

A word on a couple of the letters printed below. Tom Palmer’s letter was published in Reason with two important concluding paragraphs omitted. We are publishing the missing paragraphs. In the published parts of his letter, Palmer attacked Efron’s “outpouring of invective” as a “very poor and shoddy display of professional ethics”, in attacking a magazine, Inquiry, that she had never seen; Palmer also denounces Efron’s “lengthy distortion of facts” and “unsupported innuendoes.” More specifically, Palmer makes an important corrective point to Efron’s broadside charges: namely that Inquiry “does not purport to be a libertarian magazine, though libertarians are involved with it in various ways.” Rather, Inquiry is a magazine that should be of great interest to libertarians, as “it has the potential to be one of America’s finest forums for investigative journalism, maintaining a probing and iconoclastic view of government machinations.” Palmer points out that the early issues of Inquiry contained “truly searching and revealing analyses” of Soviet and American psychiatry, gun control, the Panama Canal controversy “the need to deregulate the professions”, etc. I might add that every one of the positions taken in these articles has been either explicitly libertarian or consistent with the libertarian position. Palmer adds that “Ms. Efron was right in maintaining that Inquiry is far from ‘reverent’ about the CIA, FBI, IRS, Pentagon et al., but for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers. As a journalist, Ms. Efron should understand better how a magazine works. To list someone on a brochure as a writer does not imply that he exercises editorial control. Ms. Efron’s partially inaccurate and unfair blasts at Marcus Raskin seem to have little relevance to what I have seen of Inquiry so far.”

I would add this comment: In her attack on Inquiry, Efron engaged in a typical right-wing tactic by confining her critique to the people who might be writing for the magazine, and not at all to the contents of the articles therein. There are only two explanations for such base conduct: (a) to enable the writer to engage in free-swinging guilt-by-association charges that make Joe McCarthy seem like a careful and cautious historian; and/or (b) that Efron and her fellow-right wingers are not competent to judge or assess the content of such articles, and that they know darn well that that is the case. I suspect that in La Efron’s case, it’s a combination of both.

The letters below, not published in Reason, by the Misses Estelle Epstein and Letitia Grant are satires. But, it should be noted that the paranoid views of the world held in jest by Epstein and Grant are only slightly more absurd than the outlook, seriously held, by Efron and by many of her supporters.

From . . . Monica Swift
The State the Enemy

I must defend Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs and Williamson Evers against the unjust attacks made by Edith Efron in your Viewpoint.

A Libertarian anarchist believes in his right to his private property, which includes his body and life. A Libertarian’s resentment and “lack of reverence” toward the State has been created by the State itself by its continuous interference with this right.

Has not the State confiscated our monies and sacrificed lives to create a powerful USSR, which Ms. Efron so abhors? Was the State’s attitude similar to those of the French under Hitler, who saw any alliance acceptable, provided the goal is to destroy the (another) State? These are Ms. Efron’s words and are Orwellian in concept.

It is after all this State which actually uses everyday force against the individual – not the leftists, the pathetic Timothy Learys, Hustler magazine or even Mao Tse-Tung’s followers.

Would Ms. Efron approve of a limited government or mini-State that can dictate an interventionist foreign policy and back it up with a military might and enforce that policy at home and abroad? No doubt she would approve of a law that would confiscate her fellow citizens’ monies to subsidize the neutron bomb, thus sparing property, but destroying the State’s enemy, whoever he may be at the time; or making it a national policy to finance Israel’s economy and military expansion and leave the Arabs to tender Israeli mercies.

The above are just some of the many reasons why a Libertarian cannot show “outraged love” for the State.

My suggestion to Ms. Efron is to experiment with the concepts “free market”, “voluntarism” and “non-intervention”, the back-bones of Libertarian thought, and refrain from attacking individuals dedicated to Liberty.

Tempe, Arizona

From . . . Joseph R. Peden
Nation Not State

The provocative and ill-informed attack by Edith Efron on anarchist libertarians will undoubtedly elicit much spirited debate. As the editor of the Libertarian Forum was identified specifically and linked with many different charges against the anarchists, may I be permitted to challenge and disavow at least one of these accusations.

In several places Ms. Efron says that the anarchist libertarians hate the nation and the State. We do indeed hate the State, with just cause, we believe. But, speaking for the anarchists associated with the Libertarian Forum, edited by Dr. Murray Rothbard, whom Ms. Efron names as leader of the offending anarchists, I deny categorically that any fairminded reader of our publication could say we hate any nation.

Nations are natural communities based upon the sharing consciously, by individuals of a variety of common attributes or experiences which they prize and which serve to create an affectionate social bond among them. Such shared attributes may include a common language, folkways, geographical setting, historical experiences, spiritual, intellectual or social values. In all instances, by habit or conscious choice, nations are born, live, die and are even resurrected. Nations exist prior to the State, apart from the State, and have only an accidental, not a necessary relationship to the State. It is true that nations, especially in the last two centuries, have more and more turned to the formation of a State structure as a means of protecting their nationhood from the cultural aggressiveness of imperial States. This has been more often than not an act of desperation in the face of policies of national genocide by more powerful, aggressive and Statist nationalities.

Now the Libertarian Forum has been a consistent champion of the rights of nations to be free of persecution by other nations or imperial States. We have expressed editorially our sympathy with the aspirations of the French Canadians, the Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Biafrans, Bengalis, Welsh, Scots and Irish, Bretons and Corsicans, Basques and Catalans, for national independence and rights to free cultural expression. Nor have we been intimidated to exclude the Palestinian Arabs from our sympathy for their rights to their own lands and cultural and political freedom. We wish them the same rights and national freedom enjoyed by the Israelis. While we always question the wisdom and morality of nations seeking to establish State structures, we do not believe it any more sinful for one nation to seek such ends than another.

But if the case for the anarchist position on nation has been distorted, as I contend Ms. Efron has done, her attack on anarchists as unpatriotic deserves some elucidation also.

Leaving aside the old truism that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels”, I believe that anarchists generally are great patriots in the sense that patriotism is an emotional commitment to those attributes or settings consciously perceived as valuable by those who compose the nation. Now any familiarity with living anarchists ought to tell Ms. Efron that they are just as patriotic as others, but the object of their patriotism may be more local—the village, the town or city, the region and its particular dialect, customs and artifacts. Anarchists hate the forces of standardizations and centralization and any kind of collective which submerges the particular and eccentric. The nation-State thus represents to them the destruction of all the diversity which the anarchist cherishes. Thus he can never be a patriot of the nation-State variety who usually gets his emotional kicks by contemplating the destruction of individuality and diversity in the interest of the unity and power of a single nation-State. Like Belloc who called himself a Sussex patriot, or Thoreau whose emotional loyalty found fulfillment at Walden Pond, the anarchist has a local patriotism as does any man of sensibility. We contemporary anarchists are patriots of natural communities, not worshippers of abstract, amoral, unnatural entities called States.

From . . . Tom G. Palmer
Hoopla over Israel

. . . . . . Besides Irving Kristol, who has penned some excellent attacks on egalitarianism as well as numerous dismal attacks on statism, who else among Ms. Efron’s new-conservative friends would she include among the friends of liberty? Surely not the “queer-baiting” Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, the foremost neo-conservative journal, who recently blamed World War Two on the English being “homosexual” and who has consistently defended statism, albeit a more “efficient” version of the welfare-warfare state. The neo-conservatives hold a hodgepodge of pro and anti-liberty views, and I suspect that the primary reason that Ms. Efron embraces them with such loud hosannahs is their mutual hoopla over the socialist, militarist, religious state of Israel. If Ms. Efron wants to send money to defend a theocratic state (how quaint for an advocate of “reason, science, technology, individualism,” etc.) she should be free to do so, but her stance is hardly appropriate to one sincerely interested in liberty.

Ms. Efron’s defense of a “serious metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical base” is rather misplaced, along with her “reopen the anarchist-minarchist debate”, I’m afraid. While such matters are important to libertarians and libertarianism, they have no place in a political context. Specifically, in the Libertarian Party to denounce someone as “slovenly” or “gutter-like” because he does not wholeheartedly embrace Ms. Efron’s metaphysical Weltanschauung and is, say, a Kantian in epistemology, would be ridiculous. Such matters as these, along with the “anarchists-minarchist debate” should be threshed out in journals and magazines, not in the manner Ms. Efron imperiously hands down from on high (hate mail to libertarian patrons, denunciations, etc.) . . . . .

St. John’s College Annapolis, Maryland

From . . . Danny Shapiro
Apologize!

It would probably take a ten-page essay to straighten out fully all the errors in Edith Efron’s column, so I will limit my remarks to three major points: the attack on Libertarian Review, the attack on the anarchists in the movement, and the question of our putative neo-conservative allies.

Ms. Efron claims that since Roy Childs took over as editor of Libertarian Review it has become dependent upon the counter-culture for its social themes, and contains a heavy dose of “leftist” articles which are designed to “expose industry as corrupt and to render America militarily impotent.” They are also, according to her, brimming with hatred. Ms. Efron gives only one piece of concrete evidence for her claims, namely Walter Grinder’s alleged endorsement of the works of historian Sidney Lens, an anti-capitalist leftist; but this evidence can easily be shown to be no evidence at all. First, Grinder recommends one book, not the works of Lens. Second, Efron conveniently forgets to quote Grinder who says, referring to the revisionist works he is recommending: “most of these works have been written by historians who have . . . . . . leftist biases,” Grinder calls for free-market historians to take the facts uncovered by the revisionists and interpret them in the light of libertarian ideology, a process he calls “revising the revisionists.” Grinder does not recommend Lens’ book because he is a left-winger opposed to capitalism and hostile to the United States; he recommends it because he believes it contains a great deal of historical truth. Unless Ms. Efron plans to assert some competence in judging Lens’ work to be lacking in historical truth, then we must apply her own strictures to herself! Ms. Efron admits that we should “acknowledge truths if they are spoken by the Left.” If so, why can’t he do the same??

Not only does Ms. Efron’s one piece of evidence not make her case against L. R., but a survey of L. R.’s articles conclusively demonstrates that Efron’s belief that a hateful, counter-culture anti-American leftism is creeping into L. R. is totally without foundation. Let us examine the first five issues of L. R. under Childs’ reign (July through November 1997). There have been a total of 24 articles in those issues, 18 of which would have to be considered unequivocally libertarian in content or concern. These are:the Rothbard article attacking Carter’s energy proposals; an article by Roger MacBride outlining how controversial political ideas are repressed in America by federal campaign laws and other devices; a brief critique by Ralph Raico of historian Henry Steele Commager’s love of statist Presidents; Charles Koch’s case for a free market in energy; an interview with Friedrich Hayek; Rothbard’s demolition of the myth of democratic socialism; John Kennedy Taylor’s discussion of the attack on the First Amendment under the guise of fighting pornography; Roy Childs’ slashing critique of Kevin Phillips’ program for censorship of the media; Lawrence White’s analysis of how the city government killed New York City; Don Lavoie’s examination of socialism’s retreat from radicalism; Henry Ferns’ plea for a new radicalism in Britain to combat socialism; Tom Palmer and Tom Avery’s summary of the 1977 LP convention; Jeff Riggenbach on why libertarianism so rarely appears in the media; Murray Rothbard on the tax revolt in Illinois; and David Brudnoy’s expose of the American Spectator’s obsession with attacking homosexuals.

This leaves a grand total of six articles in five issues which could possibly have raised Efron’s fire: Joan Kennedy Taylor’s piece on feminism; Seymour Melman (of SANE) on the war economy; Earl Ravenal on the relationship between liberty and “national security”; Joseph Stromberg’s case for a non-interventionist foreign policy; Richard Barnet’s dissection of the Committee on the Present Danger; and Murray Rothbard’s attack on Reason’s defense issue of July 1977.

Taylor’s piece gives qualified praise to the feminist movement a la Betty Friedan for articulating the libertarian value of the individual leading his/her own life; this could hardly be considered a sop to leftist counter-culturists.

Melman’s piece explains how the US has been transformed from a private capitalist economy to a war economy, that the latter is largely responsible for America’s growing economic inefficiencies and capital formation problems, and its justification derives from erroneous Keynesian economics. This is a profoundly libertarian piece; rather than being an attack on business it demonstrates how state intervention, whether for “domestic” or “foreign” purposes, distorts genuine capitalism. This analysis can be used to show liberals that their dislike of military spending is inconsistent with their Keynesianism, and to show conservatives that their love of such spending is inconsistent with their alleged commitment to the free market.

Ravenal’s article explains how the US government’s obsession with national security and controlling the destinies of other nations leads to assaults on liberty; once again, a libertarian, not a hatefilled or crudely “leftist” analysis.

Stromberg’s article explains how libertarianism implies non-interventionism, and that the latter is part of the America tradition— sounds real real counter-culture, hate-oriented, anti-American, doesn’t it?

The Barnet article soberly evaluates the unfounded claims of the Committee on the Present Danger and shows no evidence of a careening hatred for America; rather it is motivated by a desire to deflate the scare tactics which could precipitate nuclear war. Of course Barnet committed the apparently ultimate sin of being a co-founder of the left-wing think-tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, but again we must cite Efron’s statement that a leftist may very well speak the truth.

Lastly. Rothbard’s piece argues that non-interventionism is a logical outgrowth of libertarianism; the only “leftist” statement I could find within it was the historical claim that the USA, not the USSR, is the major nuclear threat today. Unless Ms. Efron plans to give historical evidence that Rothbard is wrong, she should realize it is the height of chutzpah to claim that a denunciation of America’s foreign policy is motivated by hate and designed to sap America’s military strength.

Thus, after a thorough analysis of the first five issues of Childs’ editorship, we find no evidence whatsoever (!!!) for Ms. Efron’s vitriolic claims. We must sadly conclude that she is guilty of falsehoods and distortions; whether this was intentional or not one cannot be sure. However, since presumably Efron read L. R. before writing her article, one is tempted to believe that her campaign of falsification is in part a device to make libertarians shy away from engaging in radical anti-interventionist critiques of America’s foreign policy, then one must protest that this is not reverence but a mind closed to the un-libertarian nature of America’s foreign interventionism.

Efron’s anti-anarchist polemic is on a par with her attack on L. R.: inaccurate and unfair. Rather than a huge gulf separating anarchists and limited governmentalists—the former, according to Efron, being motivated by a burning desire to destroy everything American—the differences between the two sides are quite small. Tibor Machan, in a reply to a letter to the editor in the September 1977 issue of Reason, noted that “my own and Rothbard’s position (on government) aren’t that different,” and this statement is merely a specific instance of the general state of the debate. In fact, in a recent debate between Professors Jeffrey Paul and Eric Mack on this issue at the American Association for the Philosophical Study of Society, it was hard to tell if the two sides really disagreed!

It is ridiculous to think that the small differences separating anarchists from minarchists would be such that the former were committed to a virulent anti-Americanism; if this were so, why are there Objective anarchists? I urge all open-minded readers of Reason to examine the writings of leading anarchists like Rothbard and Childs to see if they are simplistic, sympathetic with the counter-culture, and hostile to all aspects of American culture, as Efron claims. Even a cursory reading will show such claims to be laughable.

Ms. Efron’s commitment to misreading and distorting facts apparently doesn’t apply only to libertarians she disagrees with; it extends also to the neo-conservatives, whom she hasn’t read very well. There is no way Kristol et al. could be considered our allies, but since I have an article analyzing and critiquing their views in the February and March issues of L. R.—an article I urge Ms. Efron to read, should she deign to pick up that journal—I will limit myself to three brief points. (1) Kristol supports censorship on the grounds that our “quality of life” needs improving, and has applauded the Prohibitionist movement for having a good conscience. (See On the Democratic Idea in America). In short, Kristol is one of those on the Right who believe that the State should help to inculcate virtue. That’s an ally? (2) Kristol and other neo-conservatives are committed to welfare statism: they want the welfare state to be efficient and fiscally sound, but they have no objection to unemployment insurance, national health care, welfare and social security. (see American Spectator, November 1977). (3) Most important, the neo-conservatives are not fighters for capitalism and liberty. Their emphasis is on “practicality” not justice. Thus, they almost never invoke individual rights and their qualified support of capitalism is not based on moral grounds. Their main interest is not in expanding liberty so much as opposing extreme forms of statism like affirmative action or the push for “equality of result.”

In conclusion, I call upon Ms. Efron to apologize to Childs and the other libertarians she has smeared; this way we can erase from the record the most vicious piece I have ever seen in a libertarian journal since I became a libertarian five years ago.

Department of Philosophy
University of Minnesota

From . . . Joan Kennedy Taylor
L. R. Not Leftist

I quarrel with the implication at the end of Edith Efron’s Viewpoint (February, 1978) that Libertarian Review hides its libertarian values and alliances, does not wish to publish articles by those who support a limited-government libertarian position, or wishes to make an alliance with the Left. Any publication with the word “Libertarian” in its title is hardly hiding its light under a bushel, and the values of both civil liberties and economic freedom are constantly being reiterated and explained in LR’s pages.

For those not familiar with the magazine, I would like to mention that the first four issues under Roy Childs’ editorship contain not one but two negative analyses of democratic socialism, an interview with F. A. Hayek (a constitutional republican, in Miss Efron’s words), an article by Roger MacBride (a constitutional republican), a twentieth-anniversary tribute to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (a constitutional republican) written by John Hospers (a constitutional republican). And a favorable review of Affirmative Discrimination by Nathan Glazer (a “neoliberal” I written by me (a constitutional republican).

There are also articles and editorials advocating such “conservative” positions as a free market in oil, the abolition of the minimum wage, the legalization of Laetrile, and the study of Austrian economics, all of which, for all I know, may have been written by anarchists, but certainly not with an eye toward conciliating the Left.

Since it is the articles on “social themes” as distinguished from “economic and political content” that Miss Efron feels to be “dependent upon the counter-culture” in these first few issues, and since I am the author of the only such articles in these first few issues, I would like to put forth my view of constitutional republicanism.

I happen to be a limited-government libertarian who is primarily interested in the study of the Constitution of the United States as it actually exists and is interpreted. Some Reason readers may have read an article of mine on the constitutional compromise over slavery, in Tibor Machan’s The Libertarian Alternative. For the first three issues of the new LR. I have written articles on feminism, pornography, and affirmative action—counter-culture issues all—or are they?

My feminism piece was an analysis of Betty Friedan’s growing awareness, as she chronicled it in her latest book, that Marxists and Maoists are against what she considers to be true feminism, that is, individualism and social freedom for both men and women; and her discovery that she is (in Miss Efron’s words) a “reverent revolutionary.” My piece on pornography was a discussion of the way in which the First Amendment has been interpreted by recent Supreme Courts and a defense of the absolutist position regarding it: this is the only constitutional right supported in absolute terms by members of the legal community today. My review of Nathan Glazer reported his brilliant legal analysis of what is wrong with affirmative action in busing, jobs, and housing, and his conclusion that “group rights” do not exist.

I consider that the most important point that I, as a constitutional republican, can make is that rights are an absolute that should limit government power in a Constitution. The next most important point is the libertarian corollary that human beings have both personal and economic rights. Unfortunately, a student of the American Constitution finds little in it to support absolute economic rights, and can only point out what should exist in the area. Therefore, discussions of rights as they exist in the Constitution tend to seem to be left wing. This may also explain why there are no voices today on the conservative side of the legal spectrum for absolute restraints on government power. Conservatives in law tend to support strict Construction, states rights, and a “balancing test” in which individual rights are weighed against compelling government interests.

Rights are absolute and indivisible; libertarians cannot afford to sanction such a balancing test, or the liberal-conservative split that says the right to run a business is only a right-wing right, while the right to view pornography or take drugs is only a left-wing right. This view allows each side to advocate curtailing other people’s rights for the “good” of society.

I do not claim that a fascination with legal issues is a necessary hallmark of constitutional republicanism; this is my particular view. But the fact that I am not only published in LR but have been made an associate editor should reassure your readers that there is no hostility toward the advocates of limited government in the editorial policy there. Roy Childs is an excellent editor who refuses to be identified exclusively with either the left or the right, and I think he deserves the support of all libertarians. So I would urge everyone who reads this to disobey Miss Efron and both buy and contribute to Libertarian Review.

New York City

From . . . Ross Levatter
Without Having Read . . .

I do not want my motives for writing this to be misunderstood. I’m as free-market as they come. I’ll square off against Edith Efron any day of the week in explaining the function of the pricing system and private property ownership in allocating scarce resources to their most value-productive ends, as well as detailing both the immorality and impracticality of a centralized economic system. I wax ecstatic over the virtues of the market-place every chance I get. I hate socialism — if pressed I will even assert it’s anti-man and anti-life. But, even with so much in common with Ms. Efron, I do not understand her justification in writing, or Reason’s justification for publishing, the issue of falsehood, non-sequiters, and overgeneralizations that comprised her February Viewpoint.

Let’s set the record straight:

1) According to Dr. Rothbard, that amusing anecdote that starts off her article and constitutes her theme of rampant “non-compromise” is simply not true. Murray’s never had a gun stuck in his ribs. This was certainly easy enough to check—have Reason’s professional standards fallen so low that they make not even the feeblest attempt to confirm the claims they print?

2) The idea that Ralph Raico, Bill Evers, Roy Childs, Murray Rothbard. Leonard Liggio, etc., are deluded, blind followers of leftist revisionist historians is laughable. Virtually all of these people (all libertarians possessing high intelligence and integrity) are professional historians themselves, and even those who aren’t, I suspect, have studied history far more carefully than Ms. Efron, who is forced to spend so much of her time watching television.

As Ms. Efron herself admitted, the issue is indeed contextual. None of these people have accepted leftist historical interpretations, they have only agreed with leftist-discovered facts, facts which are documented in far too much first-hand detail to deny. Is Ms. Efron totally unaware of the above people’s contributions to libertarian revisionist history—of Child’s pioneering work in historical methodology, of Rothbard’s thesis on the relationship between history and ideology, or of Liggio’s demonstration that Marxian social class theory is a stolen and distorted version of an earlier libertarian version of class analysis advanced by Nineteenth century French libertarians (e.g. C. Comte, C. Dunoyer, J. B. Say, A. Thierry), or of the Grinder/Hagel model of state capitalism? Does she really want to call this “blindly supporting” leftist historians?

And just what specific claims of her opponents does Ms. Efron object to? Does she think that third world citizens struggling to regain land taken from them by their government, are violating rights? Does she think that America should send aid to Israel, or risk nuclear war with’ Russia protecting it? Is Ralph Raico’s pamphlet on gay-lib an example of anti-libertarian pandering to a statist collective? Is Murray Rothbard’s “classic work” on Women’s Lib an example of blindness to the coercive egalitarianism of that movement? Does Ms. Efron think that the CIA, FBI and Pentagon have not been violating individual rights or that dope addicts and pornographers are not worthy of having their rights respected? Does she still believe that Big Business is America’s most persecuted minority?

3) Efron’s claim that this ultimate evil of collaborating with the left logically stems from the “constitutional republicans” giving up the debate with the anarchists on the limited government question is overly bizarre. This is so obviously a strategic question, with archists and anarchists on both sides of the deal-with-the-left issue, that one almost marvels at Efron’s ability to tie her particular pet hatred in with anything she happens to be writing on. Surely Reason’s editors knew there was no necessary entailment in the anarchocapitalist position to deal with the left (at least one of the editors is a professional philosopher, supposedly trained in logic.) This merely confirms the growing suspicion that at least some Reason editors have lost all objectivity on the government question, and are willing to print anything as long as it is anti-anarchist.

And as for the “constitutional republicans” giving up—they did not give up; they were defeated. Where has there not been (pace Machan’s denial) a defense of the minimal state that was not either replied to several times over (e.g. Nozick) or manifestly not worth replying to (e.g. Paul Beaird). On the other hand, for almost a decade there has yet to be an adequate response to the Childsean dilemma, outlined in Roy’s now classic open letter to Ayn Rand. But, should they wish to, the “constitutional republicans” are welcome to reopen the debate—it’s always good for a few more Ph.D. theses on the foibles of lesser minds. The differences between archist and anarchist intellectual defenses are well displayed in Efron’s article: while Childs demonstrates from a logical paradigm that a government must necessarily violate rights, while Evers analyzes the adequacy of a title-transfer conception on contracts, while Rothbard grapples with the possibility of market defense and judicial services, Efron talks vaguely of “the value of nation, the necessity of a national culture,” and the reverence of the limited government position. I’m truly surprised she left out hearth and home, motherhood and apple pie, etc. ad nauseam.

4) The fact that Efron’s attack on Inquiry was based merely on prepublication notes, and that she had not read any issues of Inquiry, would have led one to expect such a seasoned professional journalist to tone down her condemnation somewhat, in the name of objectivity, if not good manners. And lest anyone think that Inquiry remained unread simply because Efron couldn’t obtain copies, let it be known that Roy Childs offered to bring her the first two issues and she simply refused to read them. (How reminiscent of Rand’s condemnation of both Rawls’ and Nozick’s works without having read either of them!) How far need we look for an explanation of Reason’s willingness to print an expanded Viewpoint condemning its two major competitors, written before one of them had even hit the stands?

5) Let’s just look at the evidence and see how anti-libertarian the articles printed by Inquiry and Libertarian Review are (keeping in mind that Inquiry never advertised as a libertarian publication, and therefore cannot be said to misrepresent the libertarian viewpoint.) L. R. has denounced Carter’s energy policy as fascism, bemoaned the turning of America’s private capitalist economy into a perpetual war economy, advocated foreign non-interventionism, argued that “national security” claims and liberty don’t mix, laughed at the power-hunger of recent Presidents, argued for a free market in energy, published Roger MacBride’s piece on political repression of ideas, interviewed F. A. Hayek, claimed that socialism leads to brutality, detailed the bureaucratic killing of New York City, and brought sanity back to the question of U.S.-Soviet military balance. Inquiry has detailed several of Carter’s misdeeds and special favors, discussed the tie-in between the CIA and the big banks, printed several columns by Thomas Szasz, argued against expanded defense spending, federal intervention in schooling and government subsidies to business, published a detailed analysis of the story behind the Panama Canal treaty (better than Reason’s coverage), given us brilliant arguments against gun control and regulation of professions, and given us non-hysterical analyses of the extent of Russia’s threat to America. All in all, some excellent investigative journalism. And not terribly anti-libertarian, either. Condemnation of big government interfering with the voluntary lives of individuals—and yet, surprisingly not even the hint that armed revolution is the answer, or that the solution, is to have the government pass restrictions more to our liking. Just what part of this program rubs Ms. Efron’s constitutional republicans the wrong way?

And as long as we’re comparing articles, let’s not forget these libertarian favorites, courtesy of Reason: R. J. Rummel’s piece suggesting that American defense spending be increased; Kizer’s article claiming that when we drag unwilling “mental patients” away, kicking and screaming, for “treatment” we’re not really violating their rights because they’re “sick” and don’t know any better, a piece written by two engineers who, in their off hours, discovered that those natural rights really aren’t. And to continue the comparison, what are we to say of the libertarianism evinced by those writers of TV Guide’s “News Watch” whom Ms. Efron is willing to collaborate with?

University of Cincinnati
Medical School

From . . . Estelle Epstein
Kill the Hate-filled Anarchists!

Edith Efron is right. Thank God that she has called all of us true libertarians to arms, to destroy the anarchists scum that has organized and run the libertarian movement for the last twenty years that we have looked the other way.

Look at what these accursed anarchists have done, ye gods! in the name of liberty. They have subverted our national culture and our deep love for the concept of the nation-State, and, I might add, of its sovereign Leader, the President. They have objected to the noble libertarian work of the CIA in bugging, wiretapping, and assassinating enemies of the American State. They have opposed the libertarian program of trying to bring freedom to Vietnam by destroying a large part of the population: in the great words of General Curtis LeMay, by “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” These Commie-loving anarchists have even dared to oppose the draft, so necessary to preserve freedom and security to America. Hippies to the core, they have opposed the community consensus in outlawing drugs, pornography, and kinky s-x, all in the name of precious Liberty. Only anarchists and perverts could argue for such license; Miss Efron is dead right that no Constitutional Republican would ever do so! It is wonderful to see Miss Efron rehabilitate that genuine libertarian leader, Irving Kristol; she might also have added that Mister Kristol is a staunch advocate of both the draft and expanding censorship of immorality in literature and the arts.

I am also glad that Miss Efron zeroed in on the overwhelming importance of defending and nurturing the State of Israel—a task even more important for libertarians than exalting the American State. The key point is that rights to life, liberty, and property belong only to civilized men and women, that the Jews are eminently and superbly civilized, and the Arabs, being savages along with the rest of the dumb goyim, have no rights. QED.

I am delighted that Miss Efron did not allow any namby-pamby sense of privacy or ethics to prevent her from saving the Republic by disclosing private conversations by these anarchists. I, too, have heard such disclosures, and, inspired by Miss Efron’s example, I am now willing to tell all. Murray Rothbard and Roy Childs have told me, in the strictest confidence, that they have personally murdered eighty-five Constitutional Republicans in their mad design to seize power over the libertarian, movement, and then over the country. And they told me confidentially that their final aim was to take power and throw open the gates of America to the Cambodian Communists, whose first act would be to rape fair American womanhood!

Fellow Constitutional Republican libertarians! We must act, and act now, to destroy the anarchist incubus in our midst! My one disagreement with Miss Efron’s perceptive article is that her suggested measures are much too wishy-washy. Her prescriptions lack the high courage of her analysis. Boycotts and hate mail indeed! We must take up arms, and physically annihilate these monsters before it is too late! That is the true libertarian path, the path of a Constitutional Republican. Anyone who balks at such measures vital to our national security as unlibertarian damns himself immediately as one of the anarchist haters—and we know what to do to them! In the spirit of Edith Efron, I say happy hunting—with love and reverence, of course.

San Francisco, California

From . . . Letitia Grant
A Trotskyite Dupe

Edith Efron is either projecting, or deliberately hiding the truth. As Edith has told me in private conversation, it is Irving Kristol who stuck a gun in her ribs, to force her to go along with the neo-conservative line. Let us never forget that Mr. Kristol is a self-admitted “ex” Trotskyite Communist, and all true anti-Communists know that once a Trotskyite always a Trotskyite. Danny Bell, Marty Lipset, Nat Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Milton Himmelfarb an all the rest are “ex” Trotskyites too. Edith has revealed to me that Mr. Kristol is the head of a sinister Trotskyite conspiracy to develop a phony “neo-conservatism” in order to split and demoralize the libertarian movement. It is unfortunate that, governed by fear and terror, Edith is allowing herself to become a conscious dupe and tool of Trotskyite Communist neo-conservatism.

Sacramento, California

Market Prospects for Nuclear Power

by Patrick L. Lilly

The ongoing debate over the future of nuclear-generated electrical power is a good example of how traditional political ideas obscure real political issues and lead to the erroneous conclusion that there are no acceptable solutions to our problems. Conservatives would have us believe that failure to go ahead with our existing nuclear plans will inevitably lead to virtual unavailability of electricity and a takeover by the Communists in the near future. From the left, we are told that unless we totally ban the development and use of nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs and reactor accidents will just as quickly render the world completely uninhabitable. Now, it should be clear that both these positions are extreme. What is less clear is that they both fail to address the real issues that the past quarter-century of nuclear development present us with. So let’s look at the possibilities for nuclear development—or non-development—in terms of voluntarism and the free market for energy.

The problems we now have with nuclear energy technology can be traced directly back to the fact that from the very start, atom-splitting was an activity carried out only under the aegis of the federal government. Because of its close tie-in to that traditional statist bugaboo—“national security”—this monopoly was only slightly modified when research relevant to atomic power for peaceful uses was begun in the 1950’s. As a result, through fiscal 1974, the government provided over $8.25 billion, according to its own figures[1], to directly subsidize research on and development of nuclear power stations—almost 47% of the total investment made in those stations. In 1975, the industry spent less of its own money to generate power from nuclear energy than the government did to support it[2].

Yet, when a state law was proposed in 1976 giving the Colorado legislature veto power over the construction of nuclear plants which were deemed to be inadequately secured against various mishaps, these same companies and their sympathizers complained that this was unwarranted government interference with energy development. We were given the impression that valiant entrepreneurs were being frustrated by illogical regulations in their attempts to do us all a big favor. Nothing, of course could be further from the truth. The “valiant entrepreneurs” expected their schemes to be heavily subsidized, and their future profits absolutely guaranteed by the public, but declined to give that same public any role in the decisions to be made along the way.

It is not hard to see why the subsidization is necessary to nuclear development as we know it. As late as October, 1975, White House sources were parroting the same short-sighted drivel that we once heard about oil technology—that nuclear plants were “too. . .economically risky to be financed by the private sector alone”[3]. Pursuing that notion, the federal government has spent 25 years forcibly frustrating not only all alternative modes of developing usable nuclear energy, but all alternative sources of energy—such as solar—as well. This despite the fact that, in 1974, a federally-authorized task force concluded that by the year 2000, solar technologies could provide four times as much energy as the most optimistic estimates of energy to be derived from nuclear fission, and that, at the most, the cost of development would be the same[4].

As a result of these policies, the expected time when the enormous tax investment in nuclear power would begin to be repaid with cheap, abundantly available energy has been steadily pushed back, the yearly government outlay has steadily increased, and the unsolved problems associated with nuclear technology have steadily proliferated. Costs have risen astronomically not because of the emergence of requirements that nuclear developers refrain from polluting the world with their wastes (which have never been strictly enforced, anyway), but, rather, as a direct result of the government’s tunnel-vision approach to the problem—and the inefficiency-encouraging “we can always get more money” attitude that it fosters.

It should be clear from the basic scientific considerations that nuclear reactors are at least theoretically capable of generating power with far less resource consumption than petroleum technology. But it is also clear from economic considerations that if nuclear power development were stripped of its subsidies tomorrow, it would come to a screeching halt the day after. How can we reconcile these facts? The answer is that by forcing nuclear research and development through the cumbersome process of “pilot studies”, certification requirements, “demonstration plants”, etc., the government and its monopoly-oriented cronies in big business have prevented nuclear technology from developing in a flexible way commensurate with people’s changing needs and wants—that is, they have subverted the market. By requiring the taxpayers to take the developers’ risks, the government has inhibited innovators from making investments—recoverable in the market—that would lead to safe and efficient nuclear power stations being built when and where needed.

Furthermore, despite this massive spoon-feeding of dollars from the public treasury, the companies and agencies who tell us that we “need” their version of nuclear power are actually further from finding economical ways to build nuclear plants and dispose of their wastes than they were 25 years ago. The ERDA spent almost $88 million last year to try to find a way to get rid of the wastes that commercial plants are already producing[5], although nuclear energy still supplies only about 1% of all our electricity, and no end to the waste disposal problem is even in sight.

In short, the existing nuclear industry is nothing but an economic creation of the federal government. That is why it has failed to produce the energy we need, and that is why it has produced dangerous wastes we don’t need without any way to get ride of them. Ignoring the Randian maxim that “government research” is a contradiction in terms, the government has not only directly subsidized nuclear development, but has also enacted the infamous Price-Anderson Act, limiting the liability of plant operators for any damage that escaped radiation, fires, or explosions might cause. A more complete deviation from market principles of research and implementation of new technologies could scarcely be imagined. Insurance companies quite sensibly refuse to insure nuclear developers at affordable rates because of the almost unlimited damage that their careless and short-sighted schemes could easily cause. The response of the industry was to transfer the risk, by statute, to the taxpayers, while keeping the (guaranteed) profits for themselves, all the while bemoaning regulatory interference with “energy independence”.

Given the current high price of nuclear power plants—about $1100 per kilowatt-hour of capacity for a light water reactor[6]—the size of known petroleum reserves, and the unknown potential of solar technologies, it seems unlikely that Americans will feel any “need” to turn, voluntarily, to nuclear energy as a major source of power anytime in the near future. Given the level of government involvement, it seems equally unlikely that they will be able to turn to nuclear energy should the need arise.

All that is needed for real energy independence is free world-wide trade to make the resources of the world available to the whole world. Remember here that we—America—still have the lion’s share of the world’s purchasing power. All that is needed for the rapid development of domestically-supplied, energy technologies is to stop forcing the taxpayers to subsidize that schemes of Westinghouse and GE instead. The federal task force mentioned earlier concluded that solar collectors, developed for less then we plan to spend on nuclear plants, could provide electricity for about force cents per kilowatt-hour by 1995 for a total installation cost of less that $2,500 per home. And, finally, all that is needed to make nuclear energy available when and if we do need it, in a form that is safe and at a price that people will be willing to pay, is to remove the security state’s monopoly on the possession of the materials and information needed to carry out innovative and responsible development plans subject to the give-and-take of the free market.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Donnelly, W. H. “Federal Expenditures Related to Civil Nuclear Power, Fiscal Years 1948-74” (Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress manuscript of 22 June, 1973)

[2] Welch, B. L. “Let the Dinosaur Die” CHEMTECH, May 1977

[3] Office of the White House Secretary “Fact Sheet: Energy Independence Authority” (U.S. White House, 10 October, 1975)

[4] Federal Energy Administration “Project Independence Blueprint, Final Task Force Report: Solar Energy” (U.S. Government Printing office 1974).

[5] Controller, U.S Energy Research and Development Administration

[6] Eng News Record, 1976

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VOLUME XI NUMBER 2

MARCH-APRIL, 1978

US-ISSN0047-4517

Strengthening the LP

National conventions and electoral campaigns are surely the most dramatic things about the Libertarian Party (or about any political party). But sometimes quiet and undramatic work in committee is of equal or greater significance. This is particularly true of the L.P., which, in contrast to other parties, is not merely interested in vote-getting or electing people to office. It is vitally concerned with transforming its ideas into political issues and hence into reality: hence the enormous importance of the L.P. platform. But it is also interested in a third endeavor: forging itself into a coherent instrument by which to effect libertarian social change.

The biennial national convention decides on the L.P. platform; local candidates are decided by each state, while Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates are chosen every four years at the convention; but it is the task of the national committee to decide upon and implement strategy for the party to achieve the aims set down by its platform and basic statement of principles. The national committee is chosen at every convention, half at large and the other half by regional groups of states. For its two-year term, the national committee is the democratically chosen voice of the Libertarian Party throughout the country.

Last summer, I had the honor of being elected as one of the at-large members of the national committee. This has given me a unique chance to report on the vitally important measures that the National Committee has taken to build a coherent party organization and to develop a strategic vision of how the party should go about effecting our common aims.

In the first place, the committee decided, at considerable cost in time and resources of its members, to double its number of meetings per year. We are now far more of an active and working committee. Secondly, and partly emerging as a result of more frequent meetings, we have developed a tradition which began at our Denver meeting in October 1977, of combining each meeting with speeches and workshops delivered at regional meetings of the LP held at the same time. In that way, national committee members can aid in improving party cohesion and spurring activism by members and sympathizers in the region of the meeting. So far, this had been done successfully at Denver, Atlanta, and Seattle.

Thirdly, the regional reps began to deliver reports on state activity in their region, thus giving national—and the other states and regions— important information on how each state party is doing and how it can be strengthened.

If the regional reps were to report on their particular regions, what work would there be for the at-large members to do? Carol Cunningham, an at-large member, decided to get the at-large members together before the October meeting at Denver to see what they might do. Out of that meeting emerged a new concept for the national committee: the adoption of a statement of purposes and strategy to guide the committee and the party in the pursuit of libertarian goals. After lengthy discussion, the nat com adopted a slightly amended version.

And so the national committee now has a superb statement of purposes and strategy, a guideline for it to follow.

The following is the purposes and strategy resolution, in full:

PURPOSES OF NATIONAL LP

I. To Educate

a. To introduce the public to libertarian ideas and programs.

b. To attract to our movement the type of intelligent, energetic, dedicated individuals who are capable of changing society.

c. To educate our own members in developing their libertarian commitment and in applying libertarian principles to real world problems.

II. To Provide Political Activity for Libertarians

a. To provide the means for useful and important political activity for libertarians to advance their cause in the real world.

b. To reinforce libertarians’ commitment by finding other libertarians in each area and helping them work together.

III. To Roll Back The State

a. By influencing people, media, voters, opinion-molders.

b. By pressuring politicians and other parties in a libertarian direction.

c. By getting ourselves elected in order to be in a position to dismantle the State.

STRATEGY FOR NATIONAL LP

I. We must hold high the banner of pure principle, and never compromise our goal—a world embodying the LP Statement of Principles. We must work to achieve our pure goal. The moral imperative of libertarian principle demands that tyranny, injustice, the absence of full liberty, and violation of rights continue no longer.

Any intermediate demand must be treated, as it is in the LP platform, as pending achievement of the pure goal and inferior to it. Therefore, any such demand should be presented as leading toward our ultimate goal, not as an end in itself.

Holding high our principles means avoiding completely the quagmire of self-imposed, obligatory gradualism: We must avoid the view that, in the name of fairness, abating suffering, or fulfilling expectations, we must temporize and stall on the road to liberty. Achieving liberty must be our overriding goal.

II. We must not commit ourselves to any particular order of destatization, for that would be construed as our endorsing the continuation of statism and the violation of rights. Since we must never be in the position of advocating the continuation of tyranny, we should accept any and all destatizing measures wherever and whenever we can.

III. The goal of liberty must always be the important consideration, not organizations or activities themselves. In short, the means must never be allowed to become ends in themselves.

IV. Since our goals and principles are radical enough, we should avoid any extra alienation of people by the form of our presentation or by our image. In short, our content should be embodied in an image appropriate to our status as a national party aiming to become a new majority. We must bear in mind, however, that we must always distinguish ourselves from the conservative movement and emphasize that we are not on the left-right political spectrum.

V. There should be no endorsement of candidates who are not libertarians.

VI. A detailed study should be made of setting up guidelines for LP candidates who will be elected to administrative or legislative offices. Should they accept salaries, should they vote consistently on every measure, etc?

The statement of purpose is straight forward: the party’s aims are to educate itself and the public, to apply libertarian principles to real problems, to provide useful political activity, and to roll back and dismantle the State.

The statement of strategy deserves to be underscored. We are now committed to pure principle, and to our consistent goal as our overriding objective. In presenting any intermediate demands, we must always be clear that these are only way-stations to the ultimate goal. Above, all, the Libertarian Party is now committed firmly and squarely against “obligatory gradualism,” against the corrupting view that we should prefer a more gradual rather than a more rapid pace toward liberty. To repeat the LP nat corn’s statement of purposes: “We must avoid the view that, in the name of fairness, abating suffering, or fulfilling expectations, we must temporize and stall on the road to liberty. Achieving liberty must be our overriding goal.” In keeping with this perspective, we then go on to conclude that “we must not commit ourselves to any particular order of destatization,”—to any four-year plan—“for that would be construed as our endorsing the continuation of statism and the violation of rights.” In contrast to such a plan of ordered gradualism, and “since we must never be in the position of advocating the continuation of tyranny, we should accept any and all destatizing measures wherever and whenever we can.”

With this statement, the LP now sets itself firmly against all forms of preferential or obligatory gradualism, against the sort of surrender of principle which says that we should not cut Tax A by more than X%, or that we should not repeal statist measure B until we can repeal C. Similarly, it sets itself against any sort of “alternative budget”, in which libertarians declare how much each organ of government should be spending in the coming years. For if we name a particular figure, the implication is that this would be better than any alternative lower figure, which of course undercuts and contradicts libertarian principles. We will seek and accept reductions of statism wherever and whenever we can, and we will never endorse its continuation in any area.

The rest of the statement presents a cautionary reminder that liberty is the goal, and that no organization, however worthy (including the LP itself), can ever be allowed to become ends in themselves to the neglect of our primary goal. It also points out that since our principles are radical, it is senseless—in view of our task of becoming the majority party—to add extra alienation by presenting a needlessly wild image.

Last fall, I submitted a paper “On Coalitions and Alignments” to the national committee for its consideration. After being printed in LP News and being subject to discussion and consideration for several months, the resolution was passed by the National Committee this May. (For the full text, see LP News, Jan.-Feb. 1978).

The resolution “On Coalitions and Alignments” begins by reiterating that libertarians must cleave to pure principles, while still acting effectively in the real world, and that it attempts to apply such a strategic policy to the question of coalitions.

In sum, the resolution says as follows: coalitions with non-libertarians are right and proper, provided they are on specific issues that will advance libertarian positions. Such coalitions must never be permanent organizational alignments. “We should always remember, then, that coalitions are for limited purposes, and that we should never extend uncritical support to groups who happen to be our allies on particular issues.” Next, the resolution states that it is legitimate for LP organizers and activists to join, as individuals, non-libertarian organizations with whom we have ad hoc, specific issue coalitions. But there is a prudential proviso: that the LP activist should not join an organization that is so out of public favor that such membership would be counter-productive for the movement (e.g., joining the Ku Klux Klan, even if it happens to be libertarian on one or two issues.)

Should the LP accept monetary contributions regardless of source? Yes, but with two provisos, one moral and one prudential. The moral: that we accept no money from the State, whether it be the CIA or the federal elections machinery. The prudential: that we do not accept the money if it would seriously embarrass us in the goal of becoming a majority movement in America (e.g., from the Ku Klux Klan.)

With whom should we form coalitions? Whether we form them left, right, or center on specific issues, it is always important to remember that the coalition be against the State, and not with it. Says the nat com resolution: “As an example of coalitions not to form, many conservative libertarians, in the late 1960’s, allied themselves with the police and with government-run and financed universities, and against the student rebels against the statist institutions.”

The resolution goes on to say that the potential libertarian constituency in America is all net taxpayers. It adds that as statism continues to founder and collapse, we can expect that even many government employees will become libertarians. Our policy on them: “These government employees should be welcomed in the libertarian movement, but we must always realize that the abstract convictions of these members continually cut against their own personal economic interests.” We must beware when people’s economic interests are for more government and therefore greater tax revenue.

The resolution proceeds to point out that while ad hoc coalitions on specific issues may be formed across the political spectrum, that “we must be far more wary of coalitions with conservatives than with other groups.” Why this extra problem with conservatives? Because: “(1) most of the media and the public perceive us as being a variant of ‘extreme conservatism’ . . . (2) . . . the media and intellectuals tend to be anti-conservative, often for good reasons (because of conservative positions on civil liberties and foreign policy). (3) In fact, the greatest single threat to American liberty is the pro-war foreign policy of the conservative movement.” I think it extremely heartening that the national committee of the Libertarian Party has gone on record as identifying pro-war foreign policy as the greatest single threat to American liberty.

The resolution then proceeds to an attack on “unprincipled ‘logrolling’”. That is, neither the LP nor its elected legislators may ever wage in log-rolling, e.g. backing statist measure A because some other person or group will back our anti-statist measure B. It is vitally important that a libertarian legislator, for example, vote perfectly consistently libertarian straight down the line. He or she must be nothing less than 100% libertarian.

The resolution next reiterates that the Libertarian Party, if it is to be built as a libertarian organization, must not endorse non-libertarian candidates. But the “Coalitions and Alignments” resolution goes on to flesh out this simple assertion of the Strategy Statement: namely, “we should not endorse any candidates who are not libertarians, i.e. who fail to endorse our national Statement of Principles.” This should be non-controversial within the LP; after all, the Statement of Principles is enshrined in our platform as not being amendable except by a 7/8 vote of all delegates registered at a national convention. And the resolution continues: that LP officials and members should not also be members of rival, statist political parties.

The resolution concludes with this brief paragraph: “It should be noted that by looking for this exclusivity of membership, of political commitment, we are not cutting against our approval of ad hoc coalitions. On the contrary, this is all part of a consistent strategic outlook for the LP; namely, that we form coalitions with non-libertarian groups on specific issues where our goals and principles are being fostered; but that we ourselves concentrate on building our own party of libertarians, who do not endorse non-libertarians for political office.”

This is not all: the May meeting of the national committee also addressed itself to a question of principle that has vexed many libertarians: how can members of the LP, the Party of Principle, accept tax-looted salaries once they get elected to office? It is a question, as our Strategy Statement indicated, that needs study. At the May meeting, I introduced a resolution proposing that LP commit itself to attempting to pay all salaries of its elected officials through a blind trust, consisting of voluntary contributions to the LP by individuals not known to the official. I also proposed that, instead of simply tearing up his salary check and thereby leaving the money in the hands of the State, the official, should, with all appropriate fanfare, announce that he is distributing the money in small checks at random to voters in his constituency. He will then explain to each of the recipients the point of the whole thing— that, in contrast to other, ripoff political parties, the LP, instead of living off the taxpayer, is committed to returning his funds. We can then ask the same taxpayer to contribute his “dividend” voluntarily to an LP blind trust. The blind trust resolution concludes: “The blind trust method, then, will satisfy our libertarian consciences, demonstrate to one and all, potential supporters, media, etc. that we are uniquely the party of principle, and also score a propaganda coup which the party and our candidates can use effectively.”

The blind trust resolution was passed unanimously. In it, the Libertarian Party “commit(s) itself to attempting to pay the salaries of our elected officials through a blind trust or other voluntary means,” and appoints a sub-committee to work our the details.

The LP national committee has done several other great things since last fall:

(1) It has formally joined the Campaign to Stop Government Spying, a coalition of many diverse groups and organizations dedicated to one vital issue: the abolition of government spying on political dissidents.

(2) It has established a finance committee, to raise funds on a serious and systematic basis. Ray Cunningham, now of Connecticut, is chairman of the committee.

(3) It adopted unanimously a resolution on “Assistance to State Parties,” committing the national LP to assisting state parties in setting up a newsletter, press release programs, funding programs, membership programs, Young Libertarian Alliances, etc. When we can afford it, we will employ a Field Coordinator for the task; in the meanwhile, the regional reps to the national committee will bear primary responsibility in assisting state parties in their region. In a follow-up resolution, the national committee particularly stressed the importance of a regular newsletter as at least a necessary condition of a seriously functioning party.

Through its national committee, The Libertarian Party has taken giant steps forward in forming itself into a coherent organization, in forging a strategic vision of how it will implement its ultimate goals. On the Labor Day weekend, September 6-9, 1979, we will have another mighty extravaganza, our next Presidential nominating convention at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. When we consider our next Presidential ticket, we must take care to pick candidates who adhere, not only to our Statement of Principles and our national platform, bur also to the strategic vision that has been hammered out these past months.

Block and the Rights of the Father

by Jocelyn Maxwell*

In working towards a libertarian view of abortion, Walter Block developed some excellent arguments. Nevertheless, although he covered wide ground, I believe he overlooked some aspects of the rights of the various parties involved.

Because of the complexity of the issues relating to abortion I shall concentrate on a single facet only. I shall seek to establish the proposition that the foetus possesses no rights which it is entitled to assert against the mother.

My argument will be based on libertarian principles. These are that the individual possesses the right to self-ownership, including the ownership of his own body, his own labour and the fruits thereof. No one has the right to interfere coercively with the rights of any other. A person may voluntarily enter into contracts with others involving the use of his body, his labour and/or any other property rightfully acquired. All parties to contracts voluntarily entered into are morally obligated to abide by the terms of the contract.

I shall not attempt to argue whether or not the foetus is human. In order to do that it would be necessary to establish the attributes required to satisfy the definition of a human being. This approach is unsatisfactory, mainly because the attributes required to satisfy the definition can be disputed endlessly, but also because the attributes possessed by the foetus change with time. The difficulty in trying to establish the rights of an entity based on its attributes in this case is due to the fact that one would be discussing different entities at different stages of development.

In strict medical terminology the egg after conception, as it develops, is called a zygote, an embryo and finally a foetus. For the sake of brevity and also in order to maximize the status of the entity discussed, I have promoted the in-womb creature to foetus for the remainder of the discussion.

I shall assume that the foetus is a separate entity. If it is not, if it is simply a part of the woman, this argument ends forthwith for the part can, claim no rights over the whole.

The basic difference between the status of the woman and the status of the foetus is that the woman’s status is that of an independent being whilst the status of the foetus is that of a parasite. What is a parasite and what does it do? The Oxford Dictionary defines a parasite as an animal or plant living in or upon another and drawing nutriment directly from it. This describes concisely the actions of a foetus. A foetus lives within a woman and draws nourishment from her bloodstream.

To emphasize the nature of parasitism it is important to distinguish it from what it is not. It is the antithesis of independence. In its relationship to the host it is not therapeutic and not symbiotic (relating to the permanent union between organisms each of which depends for its existence on the other).

In fact a major characteristic of a parasite is that its existence is hostile to the well-being and health of the host. This must be so as the parasite takes nourishment which would otherwise go to protect, repair or fuel the body of the host. The parasite and therefore the foetus acts as an aggressor. It does not wait to be fed as does a baby or a child. It takes, even if by taking, deficiencies are created in the body of the woman. It therefore violates the property rights, i.e., the body and food input of the woman.

Because the actions of the parasite are inimical to the well-being of the host, the parasite has developed certain survival techniques that ensure it will not be expelled or ejected from the body of the host until its own needs have been met. These techniques may be listed as deception, invulnerability and persuasion.

Deception occurs where the host is unaware he or she is carrying any other creature. Therefore any actions towards expulsion will not occur. In the early stages of pregnancy it could be argued that the foetus uses deception to its advantage as it does not herald its existence in any conspicuous manner. With regard to the use of deception until the point of birth of a human baby, such cases today are rare but still do occur.

Invulnerability becomes a survival technique for a parasite when the host becomes aware of its existence but is unable to rid itself of the parasite without causing death to the host. Until about a hundred years ago this was the major survival technique of the foetus. There was no way a woman could rid herself of it without seriously endangering her own life.

Persuasion is also possible. Thus even with an unplanned pregnancy, the existence of the foetus may be persuasive enough to convince a woman she desires a child, and the pregnancy becomes a source of pleasure both present and anticipated. Today when technology has advanced to the stage where an abortion poses relatively little danger to the woman, persuasion is the only technique the foetus can rely upon.

By stating that the foetus acts as an aggressor in taking nutriment from the woman, this is not to state that the actions of the foetus are “irrational”. Quite the contrary. It is bound to act the way it does because it has no other means of survival. If the woman wishes to bear a child she will, for the sake of both herself and the child, use every care to ensure that her own diet is adequate to the task of both maintaining her own body and building up the tissues of the foetus. To be adequate this diet will need to be more generous than before pregnancy, particularly in proteins and those vitamins which act as catalysts in tissue building. The assault on her own body should not be underestimated if through ignorance or lack of money she does not or cannot eat adequately. There are a whole host of ailments, some of them permanent, all resulting from food deficiencies, which will afflict her if she fails. The most severe of these is toxemia which can lead to eclampsia, convulsions and death. Toxemia can develop late in pregnancy and is generally acknowledged to be the result of multiple deficiencies. It is a condition associated only with pregnancy.

Thus the aggressive role of the foetus should not be underestimated. I am therefore bound to say that Walter Block’s description of the foetus as a trespasser or an unwelcome guest (where the foetus is not wanted) is too mild by far. Those words conjure up the picture of a creature merely taking up room on property when it is not wanted. A ruthless raider of the larder would be a more apt description, for this is what a foetus does at the same time that it is enjoying shelter.

Because of the aggressive actions of the foetus it cannot claim the right to remain undisturbed within the womb until birth. To argue otherwise, to argue that the foetus does have this right, is to argue that because of its very existence, the mother must be slave to the foetus. Slavery is never justified, whether it be slavery for a lifetime, a number of years, nine months or nine seconds. We do not condone slavery on the grounds that the slave will be freed after an allotted time has passed.

There can be no question of contractual commitment to the foetus. As Walter Block has pointed out, a person cannot enter into a contract with someone who doesn’t exist. One cannot contract with a nonexistent x that x be brought into existence.

The argument for equality of rights of foetuses is also a valid refutation of the theory that the woman has an obligation to the foetus because of her own voluntary acts.

This argument is as follows. The rights of all foetuses are equal. For it cannot be argued that the rights of the foetus conceived in rape are less than the rights of the foetus conceived as the result of a voluntary action. A woman is under no obligation to a foetus conceived in rape on the grounds of her own voluntary actions. But the rights of all foetuses are equal. Therefore a woman is under no obligation to a foetus however conceived. This will be so even if her own actions preceding pregnancy involved gross negligence.

Those who are concerned that a person acts responsibly at all times and bears the consequences of his or her own actions, and this surely includes ail libertarians, often express a sense of injustice on occasions where women have appeared to act thoughtlessly, have become pregnant and have then, sought an abortion. They argue that she is attempting to escape the consequences of her own voluntary actions. But she is not doing so unless she gets the state to finance her abortion. The pregnancy is the consequence of her actions as well as the attendant necessity to seek an abortion with all the expense, pain and inconvenience involved. If I stupidly risk life and limb by climbing a tree which is beyond my capabilities to climb, and I fall and break my leg, the principle that one must bear the consequence of one’s own actions does not require me to drag myself around for the rest of my life with a broken, unset leg. I am entitled, surely, to seek medical aid, providing I am willing to pay for it.

Of course, if a woman participates in sexual activity when stranded on a desert island where there are no medical facilities, the consequence could well be carrying the pregnancy through to term, provided she can survive up to that point. But these are not the circumstances in which most women find themselves.

As I have stated previously, to argue that the woman has no right to expel the foetus from her body is to argue that the woman should be slave to the foetus.

No doubt there will be many that argue that because the act of expelling brings about death, because the foetus cannot live outside the body, slavery is justified because it is the alternative to death of the foetus. But would these people argue similarly in other circumstances? Let me draw an analogy.

If there is a right to stay, there is a right to enter, or to re-enter a place once vacated. Suppose a technique which overcame the problem of changed breathing methods could be developed whereby a premature baby, battling to live, had a better chance of survival if re-inserted in the womb. Would any one argue it should be so returned despite objections of the mother?

If a dialysis machine were not available and a technique had been developed whereby dialysis of one person’s blood by another could be achieved by a linking of bloodstreams for a few hours every day, should the mother (or father) of the person whose kidneys had failed be forced, if they were not willing, to undergo this procedure?

A very simple analogy of a case where one person makes use of part of another’s body is a blood transfusion. Blood transfusions in many instances are life saving, but the contributing of blood is voluntary, not compulsory.

If the foetus has no rights on the grounds of its parasitism, no right to resist expulsion from the womb, does it then follow that the question of whether it should stay or go rest entirely with the mother?

Here, unfortunately, the rights of another party must be introduced. I say unfortunately because this admission of the rights of another adds greatly to the complexity of the whole issue, and makes the justice or otherwise of an act of abortion all the more difficult to determine. If only it were not so. But the heads-in-the-sand attitude of a large number of pro-abortionists on this matter does I believe undermine the strength of their own case.

If the foetus has no right of self-ownership on the grounds of parasitism, it is then the property of someone else. It is the property of the mother if she has been the victim of rape, if the man involved has expressly stated his disinterest in having children or has negated any rights he might have by his subsequent disregard for the woman once pregnant.

In all other cases the foetus is the joint property of the parents, and the question of whether pregnancy is to be terminated should be one for them to decide.

The grounds for the man concerned to have a say in the matter stem from the rights of an investor in a joint project. It would be difficult for a woman to argue that when fatherhood was voluntary and not forced, the foetus was not the property of the father as well as the mother. Are his time and his energy worth nothing, not to mention the contribution of his sperm? In fact there is no way the foetus can be brought into existence without his participation. It may seem strange how seldom we hear men asserting their rights to be fathers. The reason of course is that those men who have campaigned most vigorously against abortion have nearly always done so in the name of the right of the foetus. In doing so they have virtually negated the right of the mother. Thus they cannot in logic assert that the father has rights. To concoct a principle whereby the father and the foetus are united to enslave the mother would be too much even for the most ardent male chauvinist to embrace. Therefore, ironically, it must be left to those who are basically pro-abortion in their beliefs to assert the principle that the father does have rights.

In the case of joint-ownership of foetus, problems arise when one parent puts a negative value on the foetus and the other parent values it positively.

To digress here, the different roles of the sexes and the nature of the sex act make possible a type of victimisation which is specific for each sex. These types of victimisation stem from the fact that rape is possible, pregnancy resulting from rape is possible, rape in all except rare instances is impossible to prove and fatherhood resulting from either rape or voluntary participation is impossible to prove.

If a woman is raped she is the victim of an injustice. She is the victim of an even greater injustice if she becomes pregnant as a result of rape.

A man becomes the victim of an injustice, if, following an agreement with a woman that she will bear his child, that woman on becoming pregnant has an abortion.

Sadly these injustices, even when acknowledged, have been accompanied by very little compassion from either sex when dealing with the other. This may be due to the fact that it is difficult to comprehend the horror of something that could never physically happen to oneself. There may be good practical reasons for dwelling on a horror that could happen, if for no other reason than it helps to ensure that steps will be taken to avoid it. But to dwell on something unpleasant that is either impossible or so unlikely as to be beyond the realms of possibility is normally a fruitless exercise. For this reason how many women are aware of the intensity of the sense of loss a man can feel in cases where a foetus he has fathered has been aborted, even in cases where that particular pregnancy was unplanned? Horrors which are specific to a woman are, in addition to rape, being forced to undergo a pregnancy she does not want and losing, through accident, a foetus she does not want to lose. The event of losing a foetus that is precious to her not through accident but human design i.e. abortion, is, because in the realms of science fiction, inconceivable to a woman. Yet this, in essence, is what can happen to a man. Similarly, because it is an impossible event for them how many men are completely oblivious to the horrors of an unwanted pregnancy? Startling evidence of the latter was offered in Karl Pflock’s article entitled “It’s a Matter of Life and Death” in “Reason”, April, 1978. (“A normal pregnancy requires no extraordinary action on the part of existence, something any sensible person does anyway. She is not required to sacrifice herself to benefit another.”)

To deal with these injustices which are specific for each sex, each has sought remedies through the law to strengthen their own position. Women demand that the law act more strongly against rapists. Men have sought to outlaw abortion. But it is because of the difficulty of proof of the actual circumstances surrounding the sex act that the law is an inappropriate vehicle for remedying the various injustices perpetrated by a member of one sex against a member of the other.

It is because of this, because of the possibility that the woman’s participation in the sex act was not voluntary, that the law has no place in prohibiting abortion and should leave the question entirely to the woman. It goes without saying, of course, that if she wishes to terminate a pregnancy she will require the voluntary co-operation of a medical practitioner. Few doctors will consent to terminate late in a pregnancy.

What of a hypothetical case when a man secures a woman’s written agreement to bear his child and the woman subsequently seeks an abortion? Should the law then grant an injunction preventing it? Depending on the terms of the contract, an injunction could well be justified. Certainly in the case of a written agreement the man would be justified in seeking damages if the abortion were carried out.

The determining of rights in cases of joint property ownership is always complex, and I do not wish to go beyond this point.

I merely wish to demonstrate that on the question of abortion, on moral grounds there are the rights of the two parties to be considered, the man and the woman. There is no one else.

On legal grounds, except in cases where there is a written agreement stipulating otherwise, the question of abortion should be one for the woman alone to decide.

The Editor Replies:

Jocelyn Maxwell’s cogent and hard-hitting article regards the fetus as not simply a parasitic aggressor and trespasser, but also as a ruthless and rapacious killer. This goes a little further than I would in characterizing the fetus, but it is an interesting and even charming contribution to the ever-growing libertarian dialogue on abortion.

Maxwell’s stress on the rights of the father does indeed raise a neglected and interesting point, but I think the point is totally mistaken. In the first place, Maxwell suffers from an erroneous theory of contract, so that a purely written promise, one that does not transfer title to property, is held to give the father some sort of property right in the mother’s body.

On the contrary, I believe that the mother’s right to her own body is inalienable, so that any previous surrender of such right can be revocable at will. Neither does the father have any sort of “moral right” to the fetus, as Maxwell believes he does even in the absence of an agreement. It seems to me monstrous that the father’s donation of sperm should give him some sort of title to the internal organs and processes of the mother’s body. Again, this violates the basic libertarian axiom of self-ownership, and each person’s absolute ownership of his or her own body.

What about the baby after birth? Who, the father, the mother, or both jointly, should have the right of trustee-ownership, or guardianship, over the baby? It seems to me that, legally, the mother should have the sole trusteeship right to the baby (though, morally, there may be a good case for jointly-shared responsibility). This sole right of the mother rests on two points. First, the mother is the only evident and clear parent. Biologically, her parentage is the only one that is clear-cut; who the father is, is doubtful and murky, and surely does not have the evidential certainty of motherhood. In some cases, even the mother doesn’t know for sure. But let us assume that blood tests or whatever can some day tell with certainty who the father is. In that case, second, the ownership of the baby should still rest with the mother alone. For, on homesteading principles, the mother is the first “occupier” of the fetus. Or, to employ a bad pun, on Lockean principles the mother and not the father “mixed her labor” with the fetus. Legally, then, the mother should have the sole right to trustee ownership of the baby.

* Jacelyn Maxwell is Education Director of the Progress Party of Queensland, Australia,. Maxwell writes that the article expresses “my personal beliefs and are not necessarily the beliefs of the Progress Party, which is split on the issue of abortion.”

Assassination Revisionism

I: LARRY FLYNT: OR, A LONE NUT STRIKES AGAIN

Someone has, indubitably, shot and almost assassinated Larry Flynt, creator and publisher of Hustler and other publications. Why did he do it? The Establishment theory is that a lone nut Christian did it, and indeed they picked up an authentic Christian at the scene of the crime, only to find that he was not the assassin.

Let us examine the alternative possible theories: (1) the Lone Nut Christian. But why would the lone Christian, however nutty, try to kill Larry Flynt shortly after he had converted from pornography to Jesus? Maybe before, but after Larry saw the light? Why would a Christian kill a newly found brother? Of course, he might have his doubts, as we all may, about the sincerity of Brother Flynt’s conversion. But this way madness lies, for surely we can’t kill all suspect newcomers to a proselytizing Church. And if someone like Chuck Colson remains unscathed, why pick on poor Flynt? And so soon? (2) Flynt might have been shot by a fellow pornographer, sore at Larry’s desertion of their common cause to that of Christianity. Dubious, for after all pornographers tend to be more interested in moolah than in ideology or solidarity, and so any pornographer would probably bid good riddance to a formidable competitor. And that leaves (3), the fascinating hypothesis, somehow neglected in press speculation, that Flynt’s shooting may have nothing whatever to do with Christianity, but is rather related to the fact that only a few days previously, Larry Flynt had taken out ads all over the country, offering no less than $1,000,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in the planning or execution of President Kennedy’s murder, or for information which makes it possible for the truth to come out.” Oho! The Kennedy Assassination redivivus! In fact, Flynt had become such an Assassination buff that he had recently purchased the L. A. Free Press, and made the veteran revisionist Mark Lane the major editor of a new supplement, or Special Reports, on the Kennedy murder. The first supplement had just appeared on the stands. There have been so many murders, and mysterious deaths, surrounding the assassination of Kennedy and Oswald (and of Officer Tippitt), that we would have to go with this unsung hypothesis as at least a likely explanation.

The press has hinted at a fourth explanation for those who cannot quite swallow the Lone Nut Christian theory: (4) that the Mafia gunned down Flynt for interfering with their magazine distribution monopoly. But the very raising of the point about the Mafia is dangerous for the Establishment, because there is much evidence that the Mafia was hip-deep in the Kennedy Assassination itself. So that is not likely to be a well-publicized theory.

Larry Flynt adds one more name to a growing roster of mysterious and unsatisfactorily explained political assassinations and quasi-assassinations in recent years:

John F. Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald; John Connally; and Officer J. D. Tippitt—all killed or wounded on or around Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas. Robert F. Kennedy; Martin Luther King; George C. Wallace; and Malcolm X. All of these were ostensibly killed or wounded by lone nuts, with the exception of Malcolm, where the top “conspirator” claims that his fellow convicts had nothing to do with the murder. And then, on the possibly political level, there are the murders of Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, both supposed to be purely gangland killings of undetermined and trivial origin.

II. THE HOUSE COMMITTEE

How goes the House Select Committee on Assassinations? The answer, unsurprisingly, is: not very well. It looks as if the well-orchestrated ouster of Richard Sprague early last year has drawn the Committee’s teeth and assures yet another governmental whitewash of the KennedyOswald and King killings.

The L.A. Free Press Special Report Number One, co-edited by Assassination Revisionist Mark Lane, reports that, when Rep. Thomas Downing (D., Va.) established the Committee, another leading revisionist, Washington lawyer Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., was offered the key post of chief counsel. Fensterwald allegedly told Lane that the CIA had levelled a death threat at Fensterwald if he should take the post, and that three other attorneys had been similarly warned off. After Fensterwald then turned down the post, it went to the abrasive, dynamic Richard Sprague, the successful prosecutor of the famous Yablonski murder case at the United Mine Workers.

After Sprague showed signs of taking the job seriously, he was subjected to an unprecedented, and seemingly coordinated smear-campaign in the press, after which he was fired by the new Committee chairman, Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D., Tex.) after almost hysterical personal attacks directed by the Congressman against Sprague. Was there any “old boy” Texas influence working on Gonzalez?

Since then, the Committee has been quiet, which L. A. Free Press hopes is a sign that the Committee is doing effective work behind the scenes. But the signs are not good, if we can credit the report in the Feb. 20 issue of New Times. For, apparently, the new chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, has been so low-key that he has returned almost half a million dollars to the Treasury as unneeded. Many staff members have complained that Blakey’s action has pulled punches in the investigation and has crippled its effectiveness.

There are more sinister aspects to Blakey’s behavior than simple penny-pinching. For as soon as he took over the post, Blakey cracked down on his staff, required them to sign agreements that they would not acknowledge their jobs at the committee without permission. Violation will bring instant dismissal and a $5,000 fine.

More troubling than the mere martinet aspects of the Blakey regime is its attitude toward the CIA, the self-same agency that allegedly threatened Fensterwald. For Blakey has refused to allow access to classified material to any staff member who cannot get CIA clearance. Not only that: any staff members who do read CIA documents must submit any notes they make to the Agency for review! Blakey’s refusal to call former CIA director and admitted perjurer Richard Helms before his committee, is of a piece with a statement he once made about U.S. intelligence agencies: “You don’t think they’d lie to me, do you? I’ve been working with those people for twenty years.” Hmmm.

There is also an ambivalence in Blakey’s attitude toward organized crime—which possibly had important links to the assassination (pace Giancana, Roselli, and, especially, Jack Ruby). After building a reputation as a crusader against racketeers, including a stint as Special Prosecutor in Bobby Kennedy’s organized crime strike force, Blakey weighed in with an anti-free press affidavit supporting La Costa Ranch in its libel suit against Penthouse Magazine in the winter of 1976. Things get curiouser and curiouser.

At any rate, we may now judge that another Warrengate is in the works, that the Committee may eventually peter out with yet another rubber-stamp of the Oswald-Ruby-lone nuts thesis. So what else is new?

Block on Abortion

by Roger E. Bissell

In his article in the September 1977 Libertarian Forum, Walter Block correctly argues that the foetus is a human life—i.e., that it is alive and is human—and not merely a potential, but an actual human life (even from the two-cell stage of development, immediately after conception). He further demonstrates that “the foetus conceived in rape has many (or as few) rights as any other,” that all foetuses are created equal, giving mothers of such foetuses no special right to abortion not possessed by other pregnant mothers.

Mr. Block wisely distinguishes normal, healthy pregnancy from “medically contra-indicated pregnancy,” in which the mother’s life is in danger. The latter, he shows, is a true “life-boat situation,” where only one of them (at best) can survive. The mother is justified in having an abortion by her right to self-defense, to the preservation of her life in the face of the mortal threat (which continuing to carry the foetus would pose).

If only Mr, Block had stopped at this point, all would be well. But he goes on to say that a woman may have an abortion for any reason which seems compelling to her, any strong desire not to carry the foetus, not merely the fear of death. Interestingly, part of his preceding discussion provides a clue to just where his argument went off course and how it can be corrected.

Arguing from the analogy between a homeowner or host and the pregnant mother, Mr. Block claims that “if the foetus is unwelcome, it than becomes a trespasser inside the mother’s body.” What does one do with trespassers? By right, one can ask them to leave, or can otherwise remove them; for they cannot insist on a long-term sanctuary, nor is one obliged to provide it.

What of the helpless individual? The host, while not obligated to care for him, is certainly not entitled to kill him either. “What he can do,” says Block, “is transport (him) to the ‘church steps’ or the modern equivalent, in as gentle a manner as possible.” The homeowner may carry him to some “public meeting place where unwanted (are) commonly left for people to pick them up . . . .”

It now seems reasonable to ask: Why not extend this argument to the case of the foetus and the pregnant mother? Presumably because the length of time required is considerably greater for the pregnant mother to transport the nine-month dinner guest (her foetus) to the ‘church steps,’ than for other hosts with already physically separate individuals trespassing on their property.

Let’s explore this facet of Mr. Block’s argument some more. He claims that “a dinner guest has no right to insist upon a nine-month visit.” Yet, if you invite a person out for an airplane ride, according to Block, your guest does have the right to be transported back to the ground (or at least given a parachute), and not to be evicted from the plane at an altitude of 10,000 feet simply because one desires that he no longer remain in one’s property.

True, plane rides are relatively short, but what of extended ocean voyages of several days or weeks, with no life preservers or lifeboats, through shark-infested waters? What of space voyages of several weeks, months or years? Is one any less entitled to have transport back to safety, rather than immediate eviction as a “trespasser,” regardless of the consequences, merely because the required period of time to do so is longer?

It should be clear that the length of time one is morally obligated to spend in transporting an unwanted guest to the “church steps” is the minimum necessary time to do so. There is no arbitrary cutoff point beyond which one is no longer obligated to make an effort.

Naturally, as technology progresses, this minimum necessary period of time will be drastically shortened. As Mr. Block points out, life-preserving methods of removing foetuses will allow the unwilling mother to make the trip to the “church steps” relatively swiftly.

Even at present, it should be recognized that full-term pregnancy could be a lower-cost option of discharging one’s unwanted guest, than is abortion, were one only permitted to sell one’s guardianship rights over the baby on an open market. Here, then, is yet another example of state intervention creating a victimless crime, distorting and limiting the options open to individuals, while not only permitting the murder of nonlife-threatening foetuses to go unpunished, but sanctioning such murder as well.

The Editor Replies: In his critique of Block’s article on abortion, Mr. Bissell continues Block’s point about the unwanted dinner guest, and escalates it to a ship or space voyage. Actually, the proper analogy would not be a dinner guest or an invited traveller who outstays his welcome, but a stowaway who aggresses against the ship or plane owner from the very beginning. But the important point is something else that needs saying: It may well seem like overkill, even if punctiliously correct from the point of view of libertarian law, to toss a stowaway overboard. But just as it is a far greater crime to murder or assault someone than to steal his property, so it is a far graver trespass against someone to invade his or her body than it is to stow away on his property. The fetus is an invader of, an aggressor against, a woman’s body, and hence insisting on immediate ejection does not carry the same bizarre connotation as tossing a stowaway overboard. A woman should have the right to eject an unwanted parasite within her body as rapidly as possible—whether or not the parasite is considered “human”.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

High Anxiety. Dir. by Mel Brooks, with Mel Brooks and the gang. There is no such thing as a bad or a dull Mel Brooks movie. His films are either blockbusters in their consistent hilarity (The Producers, Blazing Saddles), or else merely first-rate, quieter and with a consistent charm (Twelve Chairs, Young Frankenstein). Brooks’ latest, High Anxiety, is merely first-rate. It is a charming valentine and tribute to Brooks’ cinematic hero, Alfred Hitchcock, and the comic-suspense plot is chock-full of familiar references to Hitchcockian touches (in Vertigo, Psycho, Foreign Correspondent, etc.) Brooks plays a prominent psychiatrist (a funny situation in itself) who takes over the shady Institute for the Very, Very Nervous in California.

The usual Brooks crew is on hand, ably seconded by Cloris Leachman as the new-Nurse Fletcher, and the charming Howard Morris as Brooks’ psychiatric mentor. One of the great bits in the movie is Morris providing an instant psychoanlytic cure for Brooks’ height phobia. The undoubted high point of the film, however, is Brooks’ splendid imitation of Frank Sinatra singing the title song, High Anxiety. Brooks provides the definitive comic imitation of Sinatra, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Julia. Dir. by Fred Zinnemann. With Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards. Being left-wing does automatically disqualify a movie from being a superior film. Z and the Battle for Algiers are cases in point. But such a picture, since it is a “message movie”, has to be lucid and skillfully directed.

Julia is just the opposite. It is not only left-wing; it is an abysmal movie, which has only ridden to fame and fortune by virtue of its fuzzy leftist credentials.

The problem with Julia is that it is all shot from the point of view of the Lillian Heilman character (Jane Fonda). And while the film is directed with extreme and almost sickening reverence for La Heilman—with constant boasting by her about her own brilliance, sensitivity, great writing,, and social consciousness—it is clear from the evidence of the film that Heilman was nothing less than a nitwit. Fonda-Hellman wanders through the murk of Europe without knowing a thing about European politics, except for being vaguely anti-Nazi and in favor of “workers”. The problem is that, four decades later, Heilman seems to know no more than she did at the time, and so the audience doesn’t know what’s going on either. Who was the mysterious man who paid for Heilman’s hotel room in Vienna, and why did he do it? What happened to Maximilian Schell? What happened to Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter? Who knows, and who cares?

For no one can really care about any of these people, since they are only shadowy reflections of Fonda-Hellman, and of her silly and ignorant outlook on the world. Everyone else is there only as pale wraiths reacting to the narcissistic Heilman, and this includes, not only Robards-Dashiell Hammett, but even the eponymous Julia, who is on screen only a small portion of the time, and is confined to smiling a proletarian, anti-Nazi grin and looking fragilely heroic. The leftists in Julia are all good, insufferably good people, while the vaguely limned right-wingers are scoundrels who don’t love their children, are interested only in money, and are the sort of people (indeed are the people) who sleep with their sisters. “Loaded” hardly suffices to summarize this drivel.

In addition, to all this, Julia is a slow, draggy, incredibly pretentious picture. As a veteran moviegoer, I could spot the way the whole movie was going to go from the very first murky and pretentious scene, where Fonda sits on a rowboat in a lake, while her voice utters sappy platitudes (If she doesn’t exactly say “life is a river”, she just as well could have).

Strip away the current Heilman cult, strip away the fuzzy leftism and the fact that Heilman was a Stalinist when it counted, and Julia would never have left the studio. If anyone should have the misfortune of finding himself seeing this movie, he might inject some interest into the proceedings by pretending that Heilman was pro-facist and then contemplate whether this turkey ever would have been produced.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XI NUMBER 3

MAY-JUNE, 1978

US-ISSN0047-4517

Victory for Tax Revolt!

For several years I have been going up and down the country addressing libertarian gatherings, and preaching the good news that the time of “long-run” victory for liberty is now fast approaching, that we are at long last seeing the light at the end of the dark tunnel of statism. In a movement that for decades has been suffused with the spirit of doom-and-gloom, my message has been regarded—to the extent that it has not been dismissed as insincere pep-talk—as optimism of an almost incredible naivete. Not seldom I have encountered libertarians who even get hot under the collar at the good news of imminent salvation. (A curious reaction indeed!)

Now, this optimism has been vindicated, and in spades. Who would have thought a year, even six months ago, that the national media would be falling all over themselves to proclaim the strength and the might of a new tax revolt, and even to depict it in favorable terms? But that is what has been happening, even over at CBS and NBC, ever since the great day of June 6, 1978, a day which should go down in song and story, the day when Proposition 13 (“Jarvis-Gann”), mandating a drastic cut in property taxes and providing rigorous safeguards against any compensatory rise in taxes, swept to victory in California by a mammoth 2:1 majority.

Jarvis-Gann won after an unremitting smear campaign using all the media, in which day after day the voters of California were informed that the police, the firemen, even the streets would disappear on June 7 if the dread Prop. 13 should possibly win. This hysteria has won time and again before; it was a time-tested method of beating back voter sentiment for tax cuts. Not only did the teachers and the government employee unions keep up a drumfire of attack on Prop. 13, but so did the entire establishment, ranging from the politicians to big business; one of the major financial opponents of Prop. 13 was the mammoth Bank of America. The Jarvis-Gann forces had no money and less organization; how could they hope to combat the entire array of the government-media-business-union complex lined up against them.

But this time it was different; this time something wondrous happened. This time, as the usual liberal hysteria mounted, it proved to be counterproductive. This time the voters defied the blackmail threats, the vindictive bureaucracy, and the media hype, and determined more than ever to drive through the tax cut. And they did it, by the millions, in a landslide victory.

By doing this, we sent a message to politicians and the Establishment all over the country, a message saying that this time the masses are rising up angry, and will not be denied. Government is going to be slashed, even with a “meat axe” that will cut deep. That the politicians are trembling in their boots is clear by the obscene haste by which, from the night of June 6 on, they have been scrambling with each other trying to claim that they indeed love Prop. 13 and that, as in the case of the egregious Governor Jerry Brown, who fought Prop. 13 tooth and nail, he even originated the idea.

For, just as we knew it would, the landslide victory for Prop. 13 has sparked a mighty wave of similar tax cutting and tax rebellion movements throughout the country. The public is transformed as, at last, they can take hope, and rouse themselves out of the lethargy which, in the old motto, equated “death and taxes” as equally inevitable. The New York Daily News and even the old liberal New York Post hailed the tax rebellion, and the News for several days printed coupons for their readers to send in and express themselves on the tax question. Remarkably, hundreds of thousands of readers swamped the News, all of them calling for drastic cuts in property, sales, and income taxes.

And not only did Jarvis-Gann win, but voters in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio voted down school-bond issues even though they were told that the public schools would have to close this fall as a result.

The tax rebellion is here, and we must seize this great opportunity to ride the wave. Above all, libertarians must lead, and never tail behind, the tax revolt. That is, we must never find ourselves being more conservative, more cautious, than the masses in our eagerness to slash taxes and government spending. We should not, I suppose, begrudge crusty old antitax fighter Howard Jarvis his day in the sun after twenty lone years in the political wilderness, but still it was disheartening to find Jarvis willing to be embraced by the same politicians he had rightly been calling “liars” and “fools” a few days earlier.

But more disquieting is the possibility that conservative moderates might seize control of the nationwide antitax movement that is building and deflect it into “safe” and therefore innocuous and losing paths. The main danger is the National Tax Limitation Committee, the group which includes Bill Rickenbacker, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. What they want is not a direct and outright tax cut, but rather a complex constitutional amendment, on the state or federal level, limiting the rate of future growth of government spending. Thus, if government spending is now 8% of the total state product, then the amendment would limit future spending to the same percentage. In this way, government would not only not be cut, but would continue to grow and to increase taxes. It would be tragic if the Tax Limitation people should be able to seize control of the movement. They may have the money, but they don’t have the guts or the vision, and they cannot excite the masses, for their plan would confer no actual cuts and therefore no direct and tangible benefits upon the public.

We must not deflect or tail behind the masses.We must, in every state and on the federal level, push constitutional amendments that will cut and slash taxes here, there, and everywhere. We must have the courage to be radical, to extend the courageous and anti-establishment spirit of Jarvis-Gann across the country. We must push for property tax cuts, for sales tax cuts, for income tax cuts, for cuts everywhere, and then, to copper-rivet the slashes by pushing for balanced budget amendments to cut government spending. (A balanced budget amendment without mandated slashes in taxes will bring about disastrous tax raises, and thereby increase statism.)

An example of these contrasting approaches to the tax revolt is the two constitutional amendments on the Michigan ballot for next November. The radical measure is the Tisch amendment, named for its originator Robert Tisch, which would cut property taxes in half, limit the state income tax, and forbid deficit spending for any new local programs. The conservative measure is the Headlee amendment, named for its leader, Richard H. Headlee, which would simply freeze total state and local taxes at their present percentage level of total personal income in Michigan (9.7%), which of course would raise future taxes as inflation and economic growth raise income levels. The Headlee amendment is typical of the tax limitation approach: a measure that obfuscates and deflects the antitax momentum, that badly misleads the antitax masses. It is far better for the cause if the people vote Yes on Tisch, and No on Headlee, to show the world and the Establishment that they cannot be deflected by conservative tricks: that they mean to cut taxes, and cut them now.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party across the country can take pride in the role of libertarians in general and the LP in particular in the fight for Prop. 13. The LP was the only political party grouping that was totally dedicated to Jarvis-Gann, and it was better organized than the Jarvis-Gann forces themselves in most areas. Libertarians spoke long and hard for Prop. 13, and the only San Francisco victory celebration on the night of June 6 took place in the Libertarian Review offices. It was a historic moment, and enjoyed by one and all.

Following is the text of a speech that the editor of the Lib. Forum delivered at the final pro-Prop. 13 rally, on June 4, in the East Bay area, put on by the Jarvis-Gann forces of Contra Costa and Alameda counties. The speech, happily, proved to be prophetic.

SPEECH FOR PROP. 13

This is a great day—for me and for all of us. I am honored and delighted to be here, to speak at this historic rally—because I know that on Tuesday we re going to win! On Tuesday we’re going to send them a message that will make them tremble—not just in California, but all across the country.

For all over this nation there is a rebellion going on against oppressive and crippling taxation. Property taxes are forcing people out of their homes who have worked for these homes all of their lives. Last summer, in Cook County, Illinois, the assessors doubled people’s tax bills, and one taxpayer wrote to the local paper: “I bitterly resent the government trying to steal my house from me, and that’s what they’re doing.” In Cook County, the property owners got so mad that they organized a tax strike, and this forced the bureaucrats to lower their assessments.

Rebellion against taxes is an old American tradition. All during the colonial period Americans rose in revolt against the age-old desire of government to keep increasing taxes. When King George said that every transaction in America had to have a high-priced British stamp on it, Americans rose up against the hated Stamp Tax, shouting “Liberty, Property, and No Stamps!” And we all know that the American Revolution began when, in the Boston Tea Party, the people rebelled against the tax and threw the tea into the Boston harbor.

Well, now the eyes of the whole country are on California, and on Tuesday we will have a California tea party. We are going to pass Proposition 13.

We are going to do it, even though we have been subjected, day after day, to an unprecedented and unremitting campaign of scare and smear against Proposition 13. All the Establishment groups—you name them— are against us. But on Tuesday we will show them that, yes, everyone is against Jarvis-Gann—everyone except the people!

Let us look closely at our opponents: who are the enemies of Proposition 13? Invariably, they are the vested interests. They are the politicians of both parties and the bureaucrats, those leeches who have lived too long and too high off our hard-earned tax dollars. It is bad enough that they have oppressed us for so long with outrageous taxes. Now they are adding insult to injury by using those same taxes to try to scare us, to try to blackmail us out of voting for Proposition 13.

For make no mistake: that is what they are trying to do. They’re telling us that if we dare to keep a little more of our own money in our own pockets, they are going to pay us back and make us suffer. But we’re going to show them on Tuesday that we’re not going to fall for their scheme, and we’re not going to pay their blackmail.

We all know enough by now never to trust or believe politicians’ promises. So why should we believe their threats?

They tell us that if we pass Jarvis-Gann, there will be no more policemen and no more firemen, that the library books will all go up in a puff of smoke, that the streets and roads will disappear. Well, I’m here to tell you that I come from New York City—where we’ve gotten along for years with no real police, no firemen, and no streets. But seriously, the total state and local government budget in California will only be cut by a moderate fifteen percent if Jarvis-Gann wins. Is anybody going to tell me seriously that there isn’t fifteen percent of fat, of waste in the government budget in California? Are we going to believe that? Frankly, I wish we were going to cut the budget by fifty percent! But that’s all right—because Proposition 13 is a great start in the right direction—the direction of bringing runaway government to a halt.

Believe me, the most that will happen after next Tuesday is that some bureaucrats will be set free to seek honest employment in the private sector, where they can submit to paying some taxes for a change instead of living off them.

To get back to us and to our opponents—we are the taxpayers, the people of California and the rest of the country. They are the ones who live off taxes—first the politicians and the bureaucrats, and next their allies in the Establishment: for example, the banks and the bond dealers who live off tax-supported municipal bonds.

The smear artists have been saying that the supporters of Proposition are the rich—a peculiar notion when we realize that the Bank of America is on their side. On Tuesday, we are going to show them how many we are. Millions of people, young and old, from all walks of life, from all over California, are going to the polls and carry Jarvis-Gann to a landslide victory!

Solidarity — But Not Forever

by Justus D. Doenecke

James Weinstein, Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics. New York: New Viewpoints, 1975.

W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. New York: Scribners, 1976.

Frank A. Warren, An Alternative Vision: The Socialist Party in the 1930’s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974.

Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977.

James Burkhart Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America. New York: Wiley, 1968.

David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment. New York: MacMillan, 1973.

Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972.

Since at least the 1930’s, it has usually been the domestic left—not the sight—that has engaged the attention of historians. For every Ronald Lora or George Nash, there are ten Melvyn Duboskys or Irving Howes who chronicle Marxist movements. What graduate student today wants to tell the story of the Committee for Constitutional Government, Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, or Congressman George Bender when there is yet another trade union local or another radical newsletter to explore? However, amid such abundant research, there is much revisionism, and new material highlights the self-destructive tendencies among individuals once so supremely confident about the coming utopia.

James Weinstein, former editor of Socialist Revolution, offers a provocative and occasionally idiosyncratic overview. He begins at the turn of the century, when American socialism had real power. Before the Great War, over 340 cities had elected some 1,200 Socialist Party members to office. Among them were mayors of seventy-three cities and towns, including Milwaukee, Schenectady, and Berkeley. In addition, Socialists controlled such important unions as the Machinists, Western Federation of Miners, and Brewery Workers, and were influential in such unions as the United Mine Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Control of the state federations of labor in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri only added to their influence in the American Federation of Labor. Socialists also spearheaded the birth control movement, contributed to several woman suffrage victories (including New York and California), and helped establish the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Socialist Party was the only political organization to oppose American participation in World War I, and for years after the war, the party’s wartime resistance remained its greatest asset. Yet the conflict took its toll, for the SP was so harassed that some 1,500 locals in the rural South and Midwest were destroyed. In addition, its membership often lost faith in any international brotherhood of workers, and government reforms undercut the Industrial Workers of the World. (The AFL supported the war, with one of its organizers, William Z. Foster, making dozens of speeches for Liberty Bonds. The IWW tried to ignore the conflict, with its leader “Big Bill” Haywood, fearful of state repression, claiming that it was “of small importance compared to the great class war.”)

At first, almost all Socialists welcomed the Bolshevik revolution, and the SP applied for membership in the Third International. (International president Gregory Zinoviev, in turning down the application, insisted that he was not running “a hotel”!) The freshly organized Communists saw the United States ripe for insurrection, and split from the more skeptical Socialists in 1919. In so doing, the pro-Bolshevik groups established centralized cadres, military discipline, and preparation for “merciless civil war.” Even when the Communists emerged from the underground in 1921, their major asset remained identification with Soviet Union, a nation beginning to move towards industrialization. (The Communist Workers Party platform was simply a rehash of Socialist demands of 1918 and 1920.) However, they became so involved with the bitter factionalism overseas that they ignored developments in their own country. The Socialist Party, by now bitterly anti-Soviet, squandered resources on the La Follette movement of 1924, the year both movements reached a dead end.

During the famous Third Period, lasting from 1924 to 1935, the Communists did not seriously attempt to capture political power, but rather focused upon trade union work. Why did Communists neglect the ballot box, which Weinstein finds “the only avenue to power available to working people”? Because they believed that the factory would increasingly be the center of American society. Party emphasis was always on “workers as workers,” not “workers as potentially self-governing citizens.” The CP severed its short-lived alliances with Farmer-Labor groups, formed independent unions (in a process called “dual unionism”), and became increasingly isolated from other Socialist and left-liberal groups. Yet only in the fur industry, where Ben Gold gained power, did the Communists exert control. Weinstein finds party activity during the Third Period “horrendous,” for the comrades blindly assumed that capitalism was collapsing, and that Russia, not yet an industrialized power, was nevertheless the model for American emulation.

Such an orientation was disastrous. True, in the thirties the CP’s syndicalist orientation, and experience in organizing independent Communist unions, proved helpful in launching the Congress of Industrial Organizations. However, in the long run—so Weinstein claims—it did itself much harm. Again, why? Because it emphasized industrial workers as an interest group, indeed a vanguard class, doing so “at the expense of the working class as a whole.” In the CP model, workers would not—and’ party leader William Z. Foster made this clear—really organize production, but only defend their immediate interests; social priorities would be left to newly-created Communist bureaus. “At best,” writes Weinstein, Communist rule would mean a benevolent paternalism, in which the workers would be infantalized,” and in which dictatorship would be of the party, not the proletariat. Yet the CP’s accomplishments, even immediately after the crash of 1929, were sparse, in fact substantially less than the Socialists before World War I.

Strength is one thing, insight another, and Weinstein finds “partial truth” in the Communist charge that Roosevelt’s National Recovery and Agricultural Adjustment acts were “fascist legislation.” In both measures, he writes, “various class interests were balanced within the framework of preserving corporate capitalism.” In fact, both the NRA and AAA were “similar to the corporate statist ideas of Italian fascism.” Weinstein further claims, in a point that needs elaboration, that “in many ways the Republicans represented no greater threat to constitutional government in the United States than did New Dealers—indeed, in many ways the Roosevelt administration had more contempt for democratic procedure than did their Republican predecessors.”

The Communists radically shifted their position in 1935, becoming part of the Popular Front established in Western democracies to defend Russia and check German power. Hence, as Weinstein notes, they backed New Deal efforts to “smear” Huey Long as a “fascist” and worked to pin the label of “economic royalists” on FDR’s opponents. Abandoning dual unionism, Communists labored to build up CIO unions, with their influence greatest in the ILGWU and National Maritime Union. (To obtain office in the latter union, one had to serve the CP). They were one of several important factions in the United Electrical Workers and the United Automobile Workers, and at times played a most moderate role. (In 1939, for example, Communists, acting under direct orders of party secretary Earl Browder, backed the union’s centrist candidate for UAW president, not the one self-proclaimed leftist). However, Communists had little power in such bodies as the UMW and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. An in the United Steel Workers, they served as “hired hands” of Philip Murray.

As the CP became part of the mainstream of mass unionism, and as it subordinated socialism to New Deal liberalism, it abandoned all pretense of seeking an independent class politics. The Communists, so Weinstein claims, generally represented the interests of rank-and-file union members, but often acted undemocratically. “Socialism,” he continues, “did not emerge as an issue because the Communists never put forth a serious socialist position for which to argue as an alternative to the New Deal.” They did not—the author keeps stressing—attempt to organize a popular party for socialism; instead, they sought only to gain control of union bureaucracies. Playing the game of “interest group politics” to the hilt, they were co-opted by “the corporate liberals of the New Deal.” The Corporate capitalists, in turn, writes Weinstein, found New unions valuable “to the degree that they stabilize the work force, help discipline the workers, and limit themselves to bargaining over wages and working conditions.”

Weinstein claims that there were genuine alternatives. Rather than back Labor’s Non-Partisan League and the American Labor Party of New York, both simply devices to get more votes for Roosevelt, the Communists could have fought as socialists in the electoral arena. They could, in short, have abandoned the Democrats and set up labor-socialist alliances, and thereby have built “a popular socialist movement among millions of workers and unemployed.”

All this, however, is what might have been. During World War II, the Communists stood firm with the forces of order. They opposed trade union militancy, fought A. Philip Randolph’s plans for a black protest march on Washington, advocated no-strike agreements, and endorsed Roosevelt’s prosecution of Trotskyist teamsters under the Smith Act. Even after 1945, according to Weinstein, the party subordinated socialism to a liberal capitalist program, acting in the hope of maintaining the pro-Soviet coalition with liberals that had lasted throughout the war. Such a tactic explains Communist backing for the Progressive Party of 1948, but after the failure of Henry Wallace’s “Gideon’s Army,” the CP lost all sense of direction. By the 1940’s, its organizing talents were no longer needed, and closeness to CIO leadership was not sufficient to keep it in power there. With the Cold War emerging, the label “Communist” took on decidedly “anti-patriotic” overtones. Philip Murray of the USW and Walter Reuther of the UAW wasted little time in dumping the left, while Joe Curran of the NMU and Michael Quill (“Red Mike”) abandoned fellow-travelling.

The Communist Party, says Weinstein, never possessed an authentic vision of a socialist America; Soviet life was its sole model. Only in the 1960’s, with the rise of the New Left, was there a revival of genuine radicalism, but this diffuse body stupidly shunned workers, ignored the aged and farmers, abandoned theory, and often adopted a “politics of despair and adventurism.” The need to build a new socialist movement, writes Weinstein, still remains, although we have the political base to construct it.

Weinstein’s book is most valuable in its analysis of Communist expediency, far less helpful in comments concerning other aspects of American life. Does America really possess “the potential of building a substantial mass movement for socialism,” for example then there are historical questions. Did the Third International really focus national attention on “the Negro Question”? Did Foster’s opposition to “American postwar expansionism” really reflect “world realities” more than did Earl Browder? Could an independent left party have taken millions of votes from the New Deal? Could the Communists have ever prevented “business unionism” from taking over the CIO? Is there such a thing as “the world capitalist empire” and “the world class”? Does “corporate capitalism” possess an “inhuman nature”? How much white support for black civil rights resulted from the need “to rationalize and integrate the labor market”? If a Marxist analysis illuminates some areas of the past, it hides others, and Weinstein’s book shows both tendencies at work.

Given the partisan nature of Weinstein’s survey, better understanding might be reached by concentrating on certain figures and movements. And without doubt the leading Socialist for some forty years—from the twenties though the sixties—was Norman Thomas, the subject of W.A. Swanberg’s book. As Swanberg’s biography is sprawling and undisciplined (not a new feature in his writing), it is really a kind of source book, but one that contains fine portraits of many Socialist leaders. The subtitle (“the last idealist”) is no misnomer, and such old friends as Ella Wolfe and Sidney Hook still testify to Thomas’s intelligence and integrity.

Unlike many reformers, Thomas came from the middle class, not patrician wealth, for he was the son of a rigorously orthodox clergyman in Marion, Ohio. He studied at Bucknell, Princeton, and Union Theological Seminary, after which he became a Presbyterian minister, and there are those who say that he never really left this vocation. (This essayist heard Thomas speak several times; the nature of the man’s fervor was as appropriate to the pulpit as to the podium). Pastorates in Harlem made him a Socialist, World War I turned him into a pacifist—a conviction strengthened by the imprisonment of his brother. However, even when he joined the Socialist Party in 1918, he confessed “a profound fear of the undue exaltation of the State,” voiced opposition to “any sort of coercion whatever,” and said that a party’s only justification lay in winning liberty for men and women.”

Although a candidate for many public offices, including the Presidency, his major work lay in reform. He was never a doctrinaire Marxist, for he rejected both economic determinism and dialetical materialism. Always he stressed his belief in egalitarianism, doing so in such a way that, as one Socialist quipped, “Any Rotarian can understand him.” In a sense, Thomas was an oldtime progressive, downplaying immediate nationalization of basic resources in an effort to tap middle class liberals. His wife possesed independent means and he was at home with those corporate leaders represented by his Princeton classmates. As Swanberg writes, “To people who equated Socialism with rioting in the streets, he was the gentleman personified, the man you would be proud to have living next door, soft-pedaling Marxism and making nationalization sound eminently reasonable.”

Yet, even given the man’s grace, leading such a movement was not easy. Recruited by Morris Hillquit (who, writes Swanberg, saw Thomas as a means of bringing more Gentiles into the overwhelmingly Jewish New York party), Thomas soon broke with the SP’s Old Guard. He attacked Hillquit for serving as legal counsel for Standard Oil and Vacuum Oil, two companies striving to regain petroleum lands nationalized by the Soviet Union. To the Old Guard, Thomas was unaware of Communist duplicity; to Thomas, who was not yet bitterly anti-Soviet, the Old Guard’s loathing for Communism was not based on principle, but rather on the competition the Socialist unions in the AFL were getting from Communist ones.

Taking on the Old Guard pitted Thomas against a formidable machinery, for the Old Guard controlled the New Leader, the Jewish Daily Forward, the needle-trades unions, the Rand School, and radio station WEVD (the last three call letters standing for Eugene Victor Debs). The issue came to the fore at the party convention of 1934, when the Militant faction of the SP pushed through a Declaration of Principles. The Declaration, though drafted by pacifist Devere Allen, feared a fascist coup. It spoke in terms of meeting fascist violence by seizing command of the nation’s resources, crushing “the reckless forces of reaction,” and replacing “the bogus democracy of capitalist parliamentarianism by a genuine worker’s democracy.” In addition, it would meet any declaration of war with “massive war resistance,” including a general strike. All this, of course, was quite a tall order, particularly for a party claiming only 23,000 workers and not all of these in good health. Thomas wanted to tone the statement down, but the Old Guard first prevented its modification, then condemned it. Other issues causing fissure included the Old Guard’s doctrinal rigidity (all the more ironic in light of its apathy towards Arkansas sharecroppers) and co-optation of leading SP members in New Deal administrations. By the fall of 1935, the Old Guard had barred Thomas from speaking to groups under its control.

The Militants fought back. They established the weekly Call, formed a rump New York party, and admitted some 300 Trotskyists (the latter done through the mediation of philosopher Sidney Hook). The Old Guard in turn retaliated by establishing the Social Democratic Federation, a group that Thomas called “neither Socialist, democratic or a federation but merely a halfway port to Tammany Hall.” It also helped form the American Labor Party of New York, a New Deal mechanism for bypassing the regular Democratic machine in securing the labor vote. (Ironically, it was through the Old Guard’s protege, the ALP, that the Communists became so powerful in New York politics.)

Thomas kept denying what Roosevelt’s rightist opponents had long argued—namely that the New Deal had stolen Thomas’s thunder, leaving the Socialist leader without a real following. FDR, said Thomas, had not nationalized the banks; his social security program was a pale imitation of Socialist demands; the NRA stabilized capitalism while the AAA subsidized scarcity. “Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform,” Thomas quipped, “unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

By the 1936 elections, the Socialist Party lay in ruins, and subsequent events helped little. The stormy expulsion of the Trotskyists led to the exodus of much Socialist youth and to the death of the California SP as well. A new faction, the Clarity group, controlled the Call, and it bucked Thomas by wanting to limit the party to an elite of revolutionary cadres. Then Thomas’s effort to recruit a Eugene V. Debs column for the Spanish Loyalists antagonized such militant pacifists as A.J. Muste. “By what right,” asked the Socialist clergyman John Haynes Holmes, “does any Socialist today profane the sacred name of Debs by using it to designate a regiment of soldiers enlisted for the work of human slaughter?”

And if all this were not enough, Thomas faced more party defections and personal slander for his isolationism. In 1938 he helped organize the Keep America Out of War Congress so as to rally support for traditional neutrality. However, realizing that this group was impoverished, in 1941 he gladly cooperated with the far wealthier America First Committee. After Pearl Harbor, Thomas opposed internment of the Japanese-Americans and was furious when the American Civil Liberties Union refused to fight vigorously on their behalf. Furthermore, he debated feeding children under German occupation with Dr. Frank Kingdon, a clergyman who defended starvation with quotations from Scripture. Movies such as “Little Tokyo” and songs such as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” aroused his ire, as did Jim Crow in the army and in his beloved Princeton. He found “obliteration” bombing utterly unnecessary, leaned toward the belief that Roosevelt had deliberately goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, was outraged by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and saw Dumbarton Oaks as “as dangerous attempt to underwrite a temporary and unstable cartel of empires.”

In his later years, he became more and more anti-Soviet, and he favored the Marshall Plan, Atlantic Pact, and American participation in the Korean War. In addition, he used CIA money (unknowingly, says Swanberg) to promote the Institute for International Labor Research, of which he was chairman.

However, he sided with Walter Lippmann’s critique of containment, while voicing suspicion of Lippmann’s call for balance-of-power diplomacy. He criticized the Truman Doctrine, fearing that “American intervention in Turkey (will) become more and more imperialistic, more and more tied to the politics of petroleum.” Thomas attacked the Mundt-Nixon Communist Control bill and House Committee on Un-American Activities. He briefly joined the American Friends of Vietnam, a front for the Diem regime, but balked at the Indochina conflict. When Reuther and the UAW endorsed the conflict, Thomas wrote him, “President Johnson and the Chamber of Commerce must be glad to know that they can always trust labor when it comes to policing the world with bombs.”

Thomas spoke on other things as well, and sometimes quite sharply. The former clergyman opposed Zionism for linking religion to a nation-state; peace to the Palestine area, he said, would never come until displaced Arabs could return to a federated homeland. When he visited Israel in 1957, he raised the question of Israeli expansion Golda Meir— much to her discomfort. His faith in all-out socialism slipped, and not only because of the Russian experience. Mass collectivism, and the inevitable bureaucracy it bred, could always kill individual freedom. By J951, he was allowing a large sphere for private ownership, with nationalization limited to the “commanding heights” of the economy.

A more learned defense of Thomas comes from Frank A. Warren of Queens College, who debates such “realist” critiques of American socialism as Daniel Bell, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Bemarc Johnpoll. The “realists” find Thomas so staunch in support of “absolute” goals that he failed to realize that politics was always “the art of the possible.” Socialists in general, such scholars argue, are too wedded to ideology, too optimistic concerning man and history, too unable to comprehend the workingman’s bread-and-butter aspirations—in short, Socialists are too impractical. Unable to reconcile the tension between millennialism and immediate demands, they cannot not get things done”, and are hence irrelevant to American politics.

Warren dissents on all counts. The Socialists of the thirties, he writes, kept alive “a resistance to oppression and an intransigence against the forces of state and industry that can overwhelm us.” On the other hand, the SP of the 1960’s, by backing such “pragmatists” as Johnson and Humphrey, betrayed its birthright.

The author begins by challenging the “realists” philosophically. Socialists, he says, offer solutions that lie at the root of the nation’s problems, doing so not in any doctrinaire manner but in the spirit of pragmatism offered by John Dewey. Mainstream American politics, on the other hand, offered superficial remedies that merely looked pragmatic. The Militants, writes Warren, were correct in attacking Old Guard ties to the AFL, for the American Federation of Labor had within its ranks groups guilty of racketeering, red-baiting, and strong hostility towards industrial unionism. Cooperation with the American Labor Party and the CIO simply meant co-operation, with radicals becoming transformed into liberal reformers. It is those like the “realist” theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who assumed that the Democratic Party would be the instrument of meaningful social change, who were the truly “naive” ones, not the Socialists with their stress on ethical imperatives based on a more rigorous standard of justice.

Thomas, claims Warren, was no narrow sectarian, for he did all he could to gain a broad base for his party. In fact, he did more nationwide proselytizing among workers than did the Old Guard. In addition, Thomas attacked Russian atrocities before the Old Guard ever did. And unlike certain liberal apologists, the Thomas Socialists were among the first Americans to analyze the bureaucratization of Stalin’s terror. Freedom, they believed, meant genuine control, certainly not the practice of the Soviet state.

Warren also praises Thomas’s critique of the New Deal. Roosevelt’s domestic policies, the historian argues, combined “a welfare program for the masses and a domesticated unionism with a maintenance of the essential power relations of society,” and Thomas saw this. Not only did Thomas find New Deal social programs inadequate, but he was disturbed by centralization of power in the Presidency and warned against incorporating unions in the structure of government. Furthermore, the Socialist saw the New Deal creating, not socialism, but state capitalism, in which government intervenes to preserve the prevailing profit system.

In his chapter on World War n, Warren faults Thomas for working with America First and for exaggerating the danger of domestic fascism. Warren himself does not support Thomas’s opposition of aid to the Allies. Yet Warren opposes the temptation of historians to “put down” isolationist intellectuals, while applauding liberal ones. (He denies that Thomas was an isolationist, in fact, finding Thomas’s willingness to defend the Spanish republic a healthy contrast to the international feebleness of the “capitalist New Deal.”)

It is the interventionists, writes Warren, who did much to poison American culture. Poet Archibald MacLeish’s attack on “irresponsible” anti-war intellectuals implied that artists and writers should serve as adherents of the state. Critic Louis Mumford claimed in 1940 that the conflict resembled “the armies of the Christians and the Saracens when they met on the battlefield of Tours,” thereby speaking in the arrogant language of Pax Americana. The New Leader was no real friend of democracy when, in January 1941, it criticized the ACLU for attacking legislation aimed at Communists and Bundits. Nor was it any real friend of tolerance when, in 1942, it published an article entitled “Scratch a Jap, and You’ll Find a Fanatical Shinto Priest—An Essay in Nipponese Psychology.”

On the other hand, Warren finds Thomas and his followers genuine prophets. They saw that the New Deal, “bankrupt in ideas and drive,” was increasingly relying upon “armament economics,” and that this trend would remain a permanent fixture of American life. They opposed conscription as a totalitarian device, one that—once entrenched—would be difficult to alter. Unlike a whole herd of silent liberals, they fought apathy towards Jewish refugees and opposed the fire bombings of Dresden. If Popular Front liberals wanted to share nuclear power with Russia, only the Socialists addressed themselves to the moral issue of the actual use of the bomb. Warren is particularly scathing on Civil liberties during the New Deal, and he goes so far as to write, “German Bundists were tried on vague charges, with very little protest and some applause, from pro-war Socialists and liberals. The government policy during the war was not enlightened on civil liberties; there simply was not much opposition to the war.”

Radicals of the thirties are given a different look in monographs by Constance Ashton Myers and James Burkhart Gilbert. Myers, a professor at the University of South Carolina, tells the story of American Trotskyists. The movement, of course, was founded in 1928 when James Cannon, former general secretary of the IWW and chairman of the Workers (Communist) Party, attended the Sixth Comintern Congress in Moscow. Expelled from the party he had help to found, he established a new party that went under various names—The Workers (Communist) Party, Left Opposition; the Communist League of America (Opposition); the Workers Party; and the Socialist Workers Party. Under all these labels, one thing was clear; the new group would be as intolerant of dissent as the old. As Myers notes, “leaders demanded docility in their ‘revolutionary’ followers—a dangerous demand for a radical party, because inevitably comes a weaker and less creative critique of capitalist values.” Yet, “to question Trotsky’s analysis of world events, to disagree in the tiniest detail, was to court expulsion or denied membership.”

What was the Gospel according to Trotsky? Well, it involved a series of tenets: Leon Trotsky as the as the sole authentic heir to Marx and Lenin; the need for “permanent revolution,” as no state can remain socialist in a capitalist world; “boring from within” established trade unions and united action groups; and opposition to pacifism and class collaborationist” farmer-labor movements. What was its greatest asset? The prophet exile himself, drafting manifestoes to his followers as he moved from one place to another. And almost in passing, Myers notes that Stalin had not abandoned permanent revolution any more than Trotsky suddenly advocated “counter-revolution.” “The plain truth,” she writes, “was that a dynamic and influential figure like Trotsky posed too formidable a threat to the monolithic regime Stalin thought necessary to bring industrial technology quickly to a technically and socially medieval land.”

In 1935, Trotskyists co-opted A. J. Muste’s American Workers, with the new group totally abandoning Muste’s pacifism. (Pacifism, said Trotskyist James Burnham, was a “subtle and dangerous enemy” that “socialists must oppose”). Soon afterwards, Trotskyists entered the Socialist Party, acting in order to fulfill a specific Trotskyist strategy called “enterism.” This union was short-lived, although when Trotsky’s followers were expelled, they took some 1,000 Socialists with them. All this time, the party was recruiting a number of intellectuals, including Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Saul Bellow, and Bert Cochran. (Later a large number of youthful Trotskyists would make their mark on the discipline of sociology, wrestling with the concept of bureaucracy that they found so glaring in Stalinism and in their own movement).

The coming of World War II created more splintering. In 1937 Burnham claimed that American involvement in war was inevitable, for United States ties to the world market system were strong and its commitment to uphold world capitalism firm. When in September 1939, conflict broke out over Danzig, Burnham and Max Shachtman, eidtors of New International, wanted no support for Russia, calling her an “imperialist” power. Cannon, however, sought “unconditional defense” of the Soviet Union. Having Trotsky on his side, he used the party machinery to purge the more extreme antiwar faction. (Shachtman and Burnham forged a new Workers Party which lasted eight years. Burnham himself renounced Marxism and left the group within a month).

During the war, some twenty-eight Trotskyist leaders in Minneapolis were convicted under the Smith Act, an action strongly supported by the Communist Party. Roosevelt, Myers implies, was repaying Dan Tobin, general president of the AFL teamsters union and a strong interventionist on the war question. Tobin had long been in conflict with powerful Trotskyist locals, particularly the 4,000 member Local 544 of Minneapolis. The presiding judge compared the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party to the Nazis: “Hitler once ran around in a greasy old overcoat and was belittled for his efforts.” FDR’s action, Myers writes coyly, “illuminates a less familiar facet of the Roosevelt years and reveals that the president followed a pattern his predecessors established when beset by similar problems.”

Particularly fascinating is Myers’s account of Trotsky’s death, an event that took place on August 20, 1940. She notes how deeply American Trotskyists were involved in the “prophet’s” coterie in Mexico, with one follower an unwitting accomplice of the assassin’s. Trotsky, she argues, was killed by Stalin simply because “he knew,” and was going to share much of this knowledge with J.B. Matthews, investigator for the Dies Committee.

To the very end Trotsky was spirited. When a representative of the newly-founded Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace met with the exile, Trotsky commented, “A fine name. The war capitalist imperialism, the social revolution rising out of the war, and the lasting peace that will follow.” The Institution representative merely responded, “I doubt if Mr. Hoover would approve of that interpretation” (Stanford Daily, April 30, 1940, p. 1). Without Trotsky, the movement would never have held together, and once he died, it had even less impact on American life than it did before.

Yet one should not judge things too fast, and it is the strength of Gilbert’s book that he shows the wide influence a group of Trotskyists had through the Partisan Review. (The work has helpful chapters on early Greenwich Village culture, and on the literary revolt of the twenties, but its real contribution lies in its material on the late thirties). The Partisan, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, was far from the standard Marxist journal. T.S. Eliot used it to publish “East Coker” and “Cry Salvages,” and in the Partisan first appeared Franz Kafka’s “Penal Colony.” Other contributors included Allen Tate, Gertrude Stein, Lionel Trilling, Ignazio Silone, and Mary McCarthy.

Unlike the Communists, who attempted to merge socialist realism with the American past, Rahv and Phillips denied that Marxism had much to do with the American tradition (The magazine did present several “realists,” such as John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, but both men were unpopular in CP circles). Objects of particular scorn included Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and Malcolm Cowley, with the former in particular claiming that old American forms of collectivism lay at the root of her civilization. Brooks’s focus dovetailed nicely with the new Communist position, for by 1937 the CP was no longer supporting “revolutionary” culture; rather it was paying homage to FDR, traditional liberalism and democratic ideals.

The Trotskyists, on the other hand, demanded a culture based upon European—not American—experience, and were not afraid to flirt with existentialism. Rahv found the politically “reactionary” Dostoevski, for example, offering more insight into the nature of Stalin than any contemporary writer. Trotsky himself, incidentally, was dubious about the Partisan Review, for he did not believe it struck out sharply enough at the Communists.

Undoubtedly, the Partisan’s most able editor was Dwight MacDonald, former staff writer for the New Yorker and Fortune. (MacDonald’s wartime essays in Politics are matched in their bite only by Milton Mayer’s articles in the Progressive). Half-anarchist, half-aristocrat, MacDonald found Trotskyism appealing “because—“he wrote”—“it was founded by Trotsky, whose career showed that intellectuals, too, could make history.” Trotsky, said MacDonald, was “a father to many of us in the sense that he taught us our political alphabet and first defined for us the problems to be solved, so that even when, in the manner of sons, we came to reject the parental ideas, our very rejection was in the terms he taught us.” MacDonald’s own rejection came about quickly indeed, for his first article in New International was a bristling attack on Trotsky’s role in the Kronstadt rebellion. Always a foe of American intervention, MacDonald soon found such pro war luminaries as Henry Wallace and Henry Luce in fundamental agreement: both men linked liberalism and imperialism together, seeking to refashion the world in America’s image.

Many of the attitudes opposed by the Partisan Review are ably described in David Caute’s work on fellow-travellers. Caute destroys the myth that the fellow-traveller is merely a watered-down Communist who lacks the courage of his convictions: rather, Caute sees the fellowtraveller as a true child of the Enlightenment, one who “heartily welcomed the torments and upheavals inflicted on the Russian peasantry during collectivization, arguing that only by such drastic social engineering could these backward illiterates be herded, feet first, into the modern world. Neither an orthodox Marxist or a revolutionary, the fellow-traveller is less radical, and hence less disillusioned with Western society, than the Communist. He retains partial faith in the parliamentary system and civil liberties. In fact, fellow-travellers disliked Trotsky for one simple reason: he wanted world revolution and they didn’t. In effect, the fellow-traveller finds Bolshevism (as they say in 1066 and All That) “good thing—but always for someone else!”

Conducted tours of the Soviet Union encouraged many intellectuals to become its defenders. Theodore Dreiser approved of Russia’s easy divorce system; in the Soviet Union, he saw “the only sane treatment of the sex questions I have ever encountered.” George Bernard Shaw described Stalin as “simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at ten minutes’ notice if he does not give satisfaction.” To Shaw’s fellow Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, “There are ends more important than additional food supplies for immediate consumption,” an opinion undoubtedly not shared by starving kulaks. Historian G.D.H. Cole could think of no other way to “socialize” the minds of peasants than a “forced march” approach, while novelist Upton Sinclair noted that starvation was, after all, a Russian tradition. Commentator Maurice Hindus reflected a whole generation of fellow-travellers in remaining silent about slave labor; Siberia, he said, was simply, “a new world for a new humanity.” Journalist Alexander Werth admitted in 1967 that he pulled his punches about what is now called the Gulag, since he feared the truth would agitate Cold War tensions. Jean-Paul Sartre commented to Albert Camus in 1952, “Yes, Camus, like you I find these camps inadmissible, but equally inadmissible is the use which the so-called, bourgeois press makes of them every day.”

Stalin, of course, was almost canonized. Historian Bernard Pares, speaking of the Russian dictator, said, “He has shown that his heart is in his own country, that he has set his reputation on a purely practical object of vast scope, (Russia’s) radical transformation for the benefit of all.” Caute could only comment, “For that was Stalin’s appeal: pipe-smoking back-room boy; did his homework; prodigious worker, up all night, mastering the statistics; listened to others, took his time, but once his decision was made he never flinched.” This, for many fellow-travellers, was Stalin in a nut-shell; he was the Man of Steel who symbolized social engineering, who epitomized the ability to master one’s environment.

The intellectual price was a high one. As George Orwell wrote, “The sin of nearly all left-winger’s is that they have wanted to be anti-fascist without being anti-totalitarian.” Or as Trotsky commented, “The ‘left’ intelligencia of the West has gone down on its knees before the Soviet bureaucracy.” Neither man was exaggerating.

Caute draws some skillful portraits, including those of Bertold Brecht, Julien Benda (whose Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1928) had condemned all such partisanship), Anatole France, Harold Laski, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. The book also has some wonderful phrasing. Journalist Anna Louise Strong, who grew up in Protestant Pietism, had “fallen in love with the biggest Sunday School of them all.” Laski’s praise of Soviet courts, published in 1935 after his lecture tour there, “was very much like writing a study of justice for the blacks of the Southern States without mentioning the Ku Klux Klan.” British publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club was “a Popular Front in microcosm.” W.H. Auden’s poem “Spain,” so Caute writes, “proves that you don’t have to feel deeply about something to write about it well.” (But then Orwell called Auden “a gutless Kipling”!) Occasionally the reader comes across a splendid anecdote, such as the embarrassment Hewlett Johnson (“the Red Dean of Canterbury”) faced when the prelate was awarded more lines in the Soviet Encyclopedia than Jesus Christ.

Knowledge of the actual workings of Communist parties might have curbed such naivete, though one should not count on it. Joseph Starobin’s history of the postwar American CP, written by a veteran of the movement, reveals bitter internal rivalries, so bitter that they eventually broke up the party. Unlike Weinstein, who sees a hollow shell, Starobin finds a dynamic and broadly based group. By the middle of World War II, so he claims, American Communism had recruited about 100,000 members, with an influence far exceeding this numerical strength. Unlike the 1920’s, its base was no longer foreign born and working class; rather, it recruited heavily from professionals and businessmen of Anglo-Saxon and Nordic background. Although half the members lived in New York State, comparatively large blocs dwelled in the industrial East and Midwest, Minnesota, and the Pacific Coast. “It was not unusual,” writes Starobin, “for Communist Pary legislative directors or state secretaries to be given cordial attention in the offices of senators, congressmen, mayors, governors, and intermediaries of the White House.” One-third of the CIO leadership, representing over a million workers and perhaps a third of the CIO, were identifiably of the left.

On the surface, General Secretary Earl Browder, born in Kansas and the son of Populists, set the tone. Heading the party “doves,” Browder claimed that “Marxism was never a series of dogmas and formulas.” America, he continued, was not really headed for socialism. Indeed, efforts to push collectivism within the United States “would divide and weaken precisely the democratic and progressive camp, while they would unite and strengthen the most reactionary forces.” Browder downplayed any search for Communist votes, hoping instead to make CP an indispensable bulwark of the New Deal.

As part of his strategy, Browder favored the securing of foreign markets. U.S. participation in the world economy, he maintained, would not only result in absorption of American goods; it would help revive a war-shattered world. And in so doing, it could easily serve as a vehicle for cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Opposing what he called the “explosion of class conflict,” Browder discouraged strikes. He criticized strike threats made by UAW’s Reuther and, in the spring of 1945, sided with Murray and Hillman in their effort to reach a detente with the US Chamber of Commerce. Similarly, in 1944, the CP did not back Hillman and Murray, when the two CIO leaders favored Wallace as Democratic nominee for Vice President. Rather, it backed “the man from independence,” acting in the belief that Truman, a less controversial figure than Wallace, would promote coexistence with Russia more skillfully.

Browder’s tenets were challenged by William Z. Foster, a man whose background—in some ways—was quite similar to his own. Both men started out as Socialists; both were leaders of the Trade Union Educational League, with Foster its chairman and Browder editor of its Labor Herald. Unlike Browder, however, Foster saw the war creating “the crisis of world capitalism.” It was, in fact, this impending economic crisis that would make American imperialism a most aggressive force. “Comrade Browder,” Foster commented, “goes too far when he says that world capitalism and world Socialism have learned to live peacefully together.” A fundamental critique of capitalism, he continued, was needed, not just talk of “structural reform.” The Communist Party, said Foster, must not trail after the decisive sections of capital,” but “rally the popular masses of people and resist the forces of big capital now.” While Browder saw the Roosevelt government as expressing the will of “intelligent capitalists,” Foster found it a type of Popular Front. And as capitalism—in Foster’s eyes—could not be anything but reactionary, American-Soviet confrontation was inevitable.

In April 1945, French CP leader Jacques Duclos challenged Browder’s views, doing so in the Comintern journal Cahiers du Communisme. The concept of “peaceful coexistence” was opposed in the hardest possible terms, with Browder accused of engaging in “notorious revision of Marxism.” (Ironically, at the very time he was writing his attack, Dudos’s own French party was consciously collaborating with a bourgeois government). The National Committee of the American CP must have agreed, for when matter came to a vote, Browder stood alone. “Outwardly the exponents of the brotherhood of man, they had all been living in a jungle”—so comments Starobin.

Browder would not recant, and the party soon became immersed in “near-hysteria,” victimized by its own irrelevance and by a steady exodus of the faithful. By 1947, the party—according to Starobin—had “lost its way.” Ties to Russia were its “Achilles heel,” for its own desires were “neither reciprocated nor respected by Moscow.” In fact, the Soviets saw the American CP as expendable. Yet to recover influence, Foster first toyed with the idea of winning the Democratic Party to a “progressive” presidential candidate, then turned back to the notion of a third party. Such a movement, so Foster maintained, would be led by “the workers,” with “the poorer farmers, the Negro people, . . . the bulk of the veterans (entering in joint political action against the common enemy, monopoly capital.” In this strategy lay the seeds for Communist backing of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party.

All, however, ended in a fiasco. The CIO refused to endorse the Wallace movement, and even left-leaning Michael Quill refused to split the CIO over the issue. Progressives could not recruit one single major labor leader or one single city or state labor federation, and Wallace himself feared the “Communist” stigma all through the campaign.

After Wallace’s defeat, Communists engaged in internal purges, and their own “McCarthyism” equalled that of the Senator from Wisconsin. Not only were “Browderites” and “Titoists” ferreted out, but a crusade against “white chauvinism” was carried to an absurd length. Some party leaders were deposed, words like “whitewash” were banned, and novelist Howard Fast, something of a Communist showpiece, apologized for some “racist” dialect that, in reality, was quite appropriate to his narrative. Beginning in 1949, the party proclaimed that “the vanguard of the battle against imperialism was no longer the working class as a whole but the black component of it” (emphasis Starobin’s). As whites could not “understand” blacks, much less work in the same organization with them, Negroes had to take over leadership roles.

By the time Khruschev gave his Twentieth Party address of 1956, the party was in shambles. But then American CP efforts to keep in step with the international movement was always a sort of “international Coueism,” for it never really knew what was expected of it. “Moscow gave little advice,” writes Starobin, “basically because it had no advice to give.”

Starobin’s book has received kudos from such varied commentators as David A. Shannon, Theodore Draper, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. However, one should treat parts with care, for the author greatly exaggerates Communist strength. It is difficult to see the Communists of the thirties establishing the strongest, most influential radical movement in American history,” or the Communists of the forties building “something approaching a mass movement.” Claims that Communists grappled with the concept of “black power” since the 1920’s are vastly overdrawn, and one looks for evidence that it was the sports editor of the Daily Worker who persuaded Branch Rickey to hire black baseball players for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

As we have seen, the history of American left, as with the history of many other mass movements, offers classic cases of cannibalization. In fact, the smaller the stakes—and left movements were often quite weak—the greater the bitterness. One finds heroism to be sure, and the names of Dwight MacDonald and Norman Thomas come most quickly to mind. But the heroism remains that of solitary individuals, people who were able to rise above the dogmatism and expediency that so often surrounded them. As for the movements themselves, one must ask why people ever fought so bitterly in order to recover a heritage and a community that, in reality, had never existed.

Arts And Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

An Unmarried Woman. Dir. and written by Paul Mazursky. With Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates. Speaking of tedium, ideology, and narcissism with a female focus, if Julia qualifies as one of the worst big movies of 1977, then surely Unmarried Woman takes the prize for 1978, at least so far.

Unmarried Woman comes with raves and hosannahs from the critics; which should put one on guard right away. Sure enough, this film is tedium and boredom unrelieved. A longish film anyway, it seems at least twice as long as it really is. The critics were presumably trying to push its feminist ideology, since the film deals with the movement towards independence of its herione, Jill Clayburgh. But, ye gods, there were hundreds of films of the Old Culture that portrayed women who were ten times as independent and a hundred times as intelligent as the drip Erica, portrayed by Jill Clayburgh. Think of all the movies with Katharine Hepburn. Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, etc! Clayburgh, whether at the end of the film or at the beginning, has no ideas, no wit, no career, no nothing.

The movie has virtually no plot, no dialogue worth mentioning, no insights. Erica is a soft-focus woolly-head who drifts from one scene to another. As in Julia, the other characters are in no way believable; they are there as shadowy reflections of the ideas (none) and interests (men) of the heroine. Most of the film is soft-core (very soft) porno, with Clayburgh wandering around various apartments, including her own, in her underwear. But the pomo qua porno is almost worse than any other aspect of the picture, so don’t expect any entertainment there. The movie is almost insufferably tasteless: witness a lengthy and gratuitous monologue by Clayburgh (to her “psychotherapist”, natch) about how she felt on her menstral day.

The movie is also insufferably trendy: everything about Erica and her lifestyle is “in”, from psychotherapist to jogging to modern art to places where she hangs out (East Side, Washington Square, SoHo). In many ways, An Unmarried Woman is exactly the sort of life and attitudes so brilliantly satirized in Semi-Tough, ironically enough Jill Clayburgh’s previous picture. What should be satirized however, is taken by director and writer Mazursky with the utmost seriousness. Particularly obnoxious is the “psychotherapist”, an ugly, ungainly six-foot female, who emits idiotic and trendy platitudes in a dimwit manner. (The publicity assures us that, not being able to find an actor or actress to play a shrink in a realistic enough manner, Mazursky turned to a real psychotherapist— which adds a grisly, Grand Guignol aspect to the film.) The shrink’s deep insights consist of a lisped: ‘It’s OK to feel lonely; it’s OK to feel rage; it’s OK to feel emotions.” The only emotion not OK in “Tania’s” world outlook is guilt: “Take a week’s vacation from guilt.” And, insipidly: “I just get livid when people tell me they feel guilty.”

To top off the general tastelessness, obscenity is rife throughout the picture. But, in contrast to Semi-Tough, where the obscenity was pointed and funny, it is here as pointless and flat as the entire picture.

The ambience is as trendy and false as the rest of the picture. Mazursky’s intent is to celebrate New York, and he tries to load the dice by photographing only the most glamorous parts of the city. But even so, and without dumdum Mazursky’s realizing it, the essence of New York manages to shine through: dirty, crowded, hectic, littered, ugly, unpleasant.

There is another important aspect of this picture which no critic has mentioned, either because the critics are too inured or too polite to point it out. This is a very Jewishy picture. Aside from Clayburgh and her husband, virtually all the characters are Jewish, either in name or in fact. At a restaurant, Jewishy characters eat grossly and yell at the waiter (note, however, that in contrast to Goodbye, Columbus and many other satirical films, these people are treated favorably—not only favorably, but as if this is simply what life is!) Alan Bates is Jewish “Saul Kaplan”, presumably because Mazursky could not conceive of a Sensitive Male who is not Jewish. When Clayburgh is not flouncing around in her underwear or yakking with her psychotherapist, she is eating lunch with “the club”, a group of girlfriends who are clearly all Jewish and who spend their time bitching about men and talking about how unhappy they are. (Is it any wonder that Clayburgh finds them a teeny bit wanting?) In this totally Jewish world, Jill Clayburgh sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps Mazursky should have gone all the way, and starred Barbra Striesand. Then our cup truly would have runneth over.

Does this turkey have no redeeming feature? Yes it does, but is only lasts about 60 blissful seconds, after which we’re back in Dullsville. In one of the interminable soft-core underwear scenes, suddenly, an old Billie Holliday record appears on the sound-track. So, if you happen to find yourself trapped in this awful picture, when Billie’s record comes on, for God’s sake close your eyes and listen to that marvelous voice: because that’s all there’s gonna be.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XI NUMBER 4

JULY-AUGUST, 1978

US-ISSN0047-4517

Camp David and After

Now that the hoopla and the hosannahs from Camp David have died down, we are in a position to evaluate what actually happened there, and what the agreements portend for the future of the Middle East.

One thing we are certain did not happen: peace for all time and justice for all peoples in a spirit of mutual concessions were not achieved. For the true meaning of Camp David has become increasingly clear: Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, in betrayal of his long-time commitments to the other Arab nations and to the Palestinian people, has made a separate peace with Israel. What Sadat accomplished was solely in the interest of the Egyptian State: the return of Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai, and the removal of the Zionist settlements there. And even that sovereignty will be limited; for the Sinai will be virtually demilitarized, and there will be a permanent stationing of United Nations troops in the. Sinai near the Israeli border. To top it off, Jimmy Carter has sweetened the deal even further for Israeli Prime Minister Begin by agreeing to build two air bases for Israel near the Sinai border at a cost to the American taxpayer of $500 million.

Israel’s gain from Camp David is enormous. In addition to preserving the Sinai as a buffer zone against any possible Egyptian attack, with the help of the US and the UN, Israel’s major gain is simply the separate peace. For Egypt is the strongest Arab military power, and the peace treaty means that Egypt has abandoned the Arab struggle, making another conventional war virtually out of the question for the Arab states.

In return for these inestimable gains, all Begin had to give up was the Zionist settlements in the Sinai. This he accomplished very cleverly by throwing the problem open to the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament), and letting “democracy” decide. As the leader of the ultra-Zionist bloc in the Knesset, Begin was able to cover himself with his own party and to throw the onus for abandoning the settlements on all the political parties in Israel.

It is no accident that clearly the happiest men at the televised proceedings at Camp David were Begin and Carter. Begin has knocked Egypt out of the war. Carter has revived his flagging popularity, restored his image as a strong statesman, and has brought back Zionist funding sources for his reelection campaign.

Sadat, on the other hand, is in much shakier shape. Sadat’s own Foreign Minister, Mohammed Ibrahim Kamel, thanked by Begin for his part in negotiations, resigned immediately in protest at the agreements. But just as Carter desperately needed an agreement—any agreement—at Camp David to restore his political fortunes, so Sadat needed some positive conclusion from his quixotic gamble in flying to Israel last November and returning empty-handed. To save his face, Sadat, too, needed an agreement. While Begin, sitting pretty on Israeli conquests, could afford to bide his time. Hence, Begin was able to wait and pick up all the marbles.

But Sadat desperately needed some way to cover himself in Arab public opinion, both for the betrayal of the Palestinians and for the betrayal of his allies. The consequent widely trumpeted “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” is, simply, a grisly hoax. The Framework is merely a warmed-over version of the Begin plan for localized autonomy for the West Bank which Sadat had angrily rejected last December. Briefly, there is no assurance whatever that Israeli troops will ever leave the West Bank, or that the Zionist settlements there will not be expanded in the next five years, much less dismantled. Begin reaffirms his attention to assert eternal sovereignty over the West Bank, and only agrees to negotiate. Who the negotiators on behalf of the Palestinians will be, or who will represent them in the local government accorded them for the next five years, will depend on the veto of Israel. This means, of course, no role for the major Palestinian group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, as well as no role for the millions of Palestinians exiled from both the West Bank and from Israel proper. They will not even be represented, much less assured the right to return to the homes, lands, and properties seized from them by the state of Israel.

As for the other Arab nations, not a word is said in the “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” about Israel’s returning the Golan Heights to Syria, or about restoring the holy Muslim places of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Jordan is merely allotted the thankless role of supervising the Palestinian “representatives”. Despite its long-standing pro-United States and anti-PLO role, Jordan, the bulk of whose citizens are Palestinians, cannot afford to seem too eager to jettison Palestinian interests. Moreover, Jordan’s financial and political mentor, Saudi Arabia, devoutly Muslim, has been angered by the failure of the Framework to resolve the problem of East Jerusalem. As a result, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have so far firmly though not very heatedly rejected the Camp David accords. Without Jordanian collaboration, it is doubtful that Egypt alone would try to implement the phony provisions for Palestinian autonomy. As a result, the “Framework” is probably destined to remain a dead letter although still providing Begin with a coverup to assuage American opinion, and Sadat with an even flimsier coverup for the Arab world.

In the short-run, the state of Israel is now in an excellent strategic position. Egypt, the strongest Arab power, has been taken out of the war and effectively neutralized, leaving Israel free to take an even tougher line with the other Arab states. Jordan on Israel’s eastern flank, has always been militarily passive, and there are no PLO guerrillas based there ever since “Black September” of 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan turned savagely upon the PLO camps and massacred them. The PLO are mobilized only in Lebanon, but Lebanon, too, has been neutralized by this winter’s invasion by Israel. Southern Lebanon is now occupied, partly by UN troops, and partly by anti-Palestinian Christian fanatics in an army organized by the fascistic Phalange and subsidized and equipped by Israel. Both serve as a buffer against any PLO incursion in force into Israel. This leaves only Syria, effectively in control of civil war-torn Lebanon and confronting Israel at the Golan Heights. But Syria is only one nation, far weaker than Israel. Moreover, rumor has it that Syria’s President, Hafez el-Assad, who has played a vacillating centrist role in the Middle East, may be mortally ill. If so, Syria will be weakened still further, at least for a while.

In addition to all that, it is true that such radical Arab states as Iraq, Algeria, and Libya remain fiercely anti-Zionist, but they can do little about it, since they are not front-line or “confrontation” states contiguous with Israel. They can offer financial aid and moral support to the Palestinians, but little else. Camp David has put the quietus, once and for all, to what might be called the official “dove” peace plan, sponsored by doves in the U.S. State Department and by various “soft” Zionists and the peace movement within Israel. The dove plan entailed Israel’s withdrawal from all its 1967 and post-1967 conquests, including the West Bank, and the establishment of a genuinely independent Palestinian state in that area, in return for which the new Palestine would pledge to recognize Israel’s post-1948 borders and presumably not serve as a base for further assertion of Palestinian rights to the remainder of Israel. The dove plan is now dead, buried by Camp David; and the Israeli peace movement seems perfectly content with the Begin-Sadat-Carter agreement.

In the long-run, however, Israel’s situation is not that favorable. Instead, Israel is sitting on top of a cauldron of Palestinian rights to their property, homeland, and national self-determination which have been trampled on and remain as remote as ever. For the major burning question in the Middle East, the rights of the Palestinians, remains unresolved. The most hopeful development of the past decade for the Palestinians has been their resolution to rely, not on the weak reed of Arab nation-states, wedded to their own state interests, but rather on themselves alone, on their national spirit and popular unmilitancy. Until 1967, the Palestinians were content to have their interests fought for by the Arab nations, and the result was a tragic series of expulsions and defeats. After the 1967 rout, the Palestinians developed their own national consciousness, and the PLO emerged as the internationally acknowledged representative for the millions of Palestinians at home and in exile. It is the PLO’s struggle, based on the widespread support of the Palestinian people, which offers the only long-term hope for vindication of their rights.

In the last few years, a grave split has occurred within the PLO and between it and other Palestinian political and guerrilla organizations. The PLO “moderates,” headed by charismatic leader Yassir Arafat, are willing to accept the pre-1967 solution propounded by the State Department doves. The radicals have angrily spumed that solution as a sellout of the ultimate Palestinian aim: the restoration of the rights and properties of all Palestinians, and a consequent secular, democratic state (with freedom for all religions) in all of Palestine. In the last few years, conflict between the moderates and the radicals has led to armed clashes and the recent assassination of leading moderate PLO diplomats in Western Europe.

We can expect that Camp David, by putting an end to the dove proposal, will serve to unify the PLO and other Palestinians around the more radical program—at least until events might revive the old pre-1967 proposal. But there is another, less heralded but still important, reason for the split among the Palestinians, and this problem is not so easily resolved. For the Arafat wing believes that all Arab nations can be mobilized to aid the PLO in its struggle, that the Arab states can serve as a healthy rear zone to enable the Palestinians to concentrate their political and armed struggles against the Israeli enemy. But many of the radicals, particularly the “rejection front” headed by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and its leader Dr. George Habash, are far more pessimistic about any reliance upon the Arab nations, at least those in the front lines against Israel. They cite, in addition to the current sellout by Egypt, the Jordanian actions of Black September, and the Syrian crushing of the PLO-and-Lebanese Left during the recent civil war in Lebanon. The radicals hold that the quickest way toward victory for the Palestinians over Israel is actually the roundabout way: through safeguarding the Palestinian rear by first promoting the overthrow of the conservative, pro-U.S. governments of the Arab confrontation states, and their replacement by radical regimes which would be thoroughly anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. How this question will be resolved it is far too early to tell.

At any rate, regardless how the dispute over the Arab regimes eventually turns out, the PLO is bound to be unified and strengthened by the agreements at Camp David, and Arab support for it is bound to increase. Neither Begin nor Carter has heard the last of the PLO. As a PLO official in Beirut commented on Camp David: “It’s true there can be no war without Egypt. But there can be no peace without the PLO.”

Abortion and Rights of the Child

by James Sadowsky, S.J.

Both Murray Rothbard and Walter Block have written articles in this review to the effect that abortion never violates the rights of the unborn child. The womb, being the sole property of the mother, the child becomes a trespasser by the very fact that the mother no longer desires his continued presence. Like any trespasser, they continue, he may be dislodged at the pleasure of the owner. The subsequent death is not intentional (desired as an end or a means) but merely an unintentional byproduct of his expulsion. That this is so is highlighted by Walter when he says that where possible a life-preserving means of expulsion must be used: if this is not done, we are confronted not with just knowingly causing death but with murder. I trust that this is an accurate summary of their position.

My first comment is that the majority of abortions do not fit the above description. What is wanted in most cases is precisely the death of the child. Most of those seeking abortions would be horrified at the thought that the child might survive his expulsion. Just ask your friends if all they are after is simply a premature birth. The recent trial of Dr. Waddil is a good indication of the pro-abortion mentality. He is on trial for the intentional killing of a child who had survived the termination of pregnancy. In a remark attributed to him he expresses his puzzlement about the fact that the same act is acceptable when the foetus is in the womb and is reprobated as infanticide as soon as it is outside. I must say that I share this puzzlement. All of this illustrates the fact that in the eyes of most people abortion is intentional killing although many of those who procure abortions do not realize that what they intend to kill are in fact human beings. Surely the above norms would rule out abortions for eugenic reasons as well as those obtained in order to “destroy the evidence”?

Nonetheless, adherence to Murray’s norms would allow for some abortions. A woman might simply wish not to be bothered with going through a pregnancy. On the other hand she may not care whether the child lives or dies. In this case the death would not be intentional: the mother is interested only in ejecting the “trespasser.”

Let us grant for the moment that the child is indeed a trespasser. Does this of itself justify the draconian response that Murray and Walter permit? Does the mere fact that a man is a stowaway justify our throwing him out of the aircraft? Ought we not in the absence of overriding reasons to wait until the aircraft lands? Both traditional natural law theory and the common law have it that our response to aggression should be proportionate to our need to resist and the nature of the attack. Suppose that the inflicting of a lethal wound is the only way to recover a stolen nickel. Is that enough to justify such an act? Of course, one might say: “So much the worse for traditional natural law theory and the common law.” But I should think that the burden of proof rests on him that would depart so far from what seems a commonsensical intuition.

At least the stowaway leaves the aircraft in the condition in which he arrived. If the abortion is successful, it is not a living, healthy child that leaves the womb. It is a corpse. Is this any way to treat even an unwanted house guest? While the death of the child may not be intended, this can hardly be said of the lethal and brutal attack on his body. That attack is the means whereby the expulsion takes place; the foetus does not die as the result of the mother’s failure to extend the means of life—it dies of the attack itself. This assault lies altogether too much in the background of the two articles I am criticizing; it is treated as if it were something that took place en passant. Clearly this is not the case. If with Murray and Walter you grant that what gets aborted is a child, a living human being; you must then ask yourself what conduct on the part of a human outside the woman would justify the response that occurs when an abortion takes place. It seems to me the one’s trespassing must cause us the loss of something of enormous value if we are going to respond to it with a violence that is similar to that inflicted upon the foetus. Does mere annoyance, the loss of comfort justify such an attack on a trespasser? I think not. So even if we accept the trespasser theory, the only permissible abortion would be that which was required to preserve the mother’s health. Perhaps, therefore, Sharon Presley is right in her contention that the position we have been discussing is fundamentally an anti-abortion one.

But is the infant a trespasser the moment his presence in the womb is no longer desired! Does he have no right to be there? Murray and Walter simply assume that the infant has no right to be in the womb. Yet it is by no means evident that their answer is the correct one. To say that x is trespassing is to say that he is somewhere where he ought not to be. But where should a foetus be if not in its mother’s womb? This is its natural habitat. Surely people have a right to the means of life that nature gives them? If the home in which the infant grew were outside the mother’s body, we should all see that to expel him from that home would be to deprive him of the nature-given means of life. Why should the fact that his nature-given home lies within a woman’s body change the situation? What is a woman’s womb for except to house the infant’s body? It is nature that gives the child this home, this means of life. It is from his home that the helpless child is being expelled. When we cast him out, we are depriving him of that which nature gave him. To do this is to violate his rights.

The Editor Replies:

In the first place, to correct a misunderstanding, while Walter Block and I agree on many things, we are not a monolith. In contrast to Walter, who agrees that the foetus is human, I simply made the assumption for the sake of argument, in order to grant the anti-abortionists their best case. In fact, if I had to “vote” on the issue, I would probably say that the foetus only acquires the status of human upon the act of birth. If so, then of course the foetus has no rights, and the thorny abortion question would be eliminated forever. It seems to me that the problem with the Block-Sadowsky thesis of asserting the foetus to be human is that that act of birth, which I had always naively assumed to be an event of considerable importance in everyone’s life, now takes on hardly more stature than the onset of adolescence or of one’s “mid-life crisis.” Does birth really confer no rights?

As for the womb being the foetus’s natural habitat, no doubt, but so is the body of the host the natural habitat of the parasite. Their two natures conflict, and so it would be impossible, even if the two beings could understand language and abstract thought, for either to agree to the natural rights of the other. If vampires existed, theirs and our natures would be in irreconcilable conflict, and we could not grant vampires any natural rights status. Similarly, when unwanted, the foetus simply becomes a parasite whose needs and interests are in irreconcilable conflict with the mother. And even if the foetus is considered to be human, no human has the right to reside unwanted within the body of another. If anyone has any rights at all, as Jim Sadowsky has acknowledged elsewhere, then each person must have the absolute right to own one’s own body. If the foetus is unwanted, then it is violating that right, and, nature or no, the mother has the right to eject it posthaste. Even if a woman’s womb is “for” the housing of an infant, human beings have, and ought to enjoy, absolute freedom of individual choice. We all have the capacity to do and be many things that we may not choose to undertake. I may have the capacity to jog every morning but I have the right to choose not to do so. A woman has the absolute right to choose not to bring her womb into use.

Jim Sadowsky is worried about ejecting a stowaway on an airplane. Yes, I suppose that that would be “overkill”, to coin a pun. But the point here is that, just as an assault on someone’s body is a more heinous crime than the theft of his property, so the trespassing on or within a person’s body is a far more heinous trespass that merely strolling on his land or stowing away on an aircraft. For the crime of trespassing within a person’s body, any means necessary to evict the trespasser should be legitimate.

Jim Sadowsky asks what conduct, of a human outside the woman would justify the response similar to the brutality of abortion. Judith Jarvis Thomson trenchantly offers an analogous case. Suppose that you are kidnapped and find yourself hooked up via a kidney machine to a pianist who needs continuous infusion from your kidneys in order to live (his “nature”). Furthermore, to complete the analogy, he only will need your kidneys for nine months, after which he will be unhooked, and there is no danger to your own kidneys or health in the meantime. I say that you would have the right, not merely to unplug yourself from his kidneys, but to be damned “brutal” about it if necessary to get your body out of its enslavement, even if it kills the pianist in the process. Would Father Sadowsky say differently?

Jim Sadowsky stresses the point that most mothers who commit abortion in fact desire not only the ejection, but also the death of the foetus (or, as he persists in referring to it, of the “child.”) Here I don’t think the intention of the parent makes any difference. If the objective act itself—the ejection of the foetus—is licit and not an act of aggression, then the subjective intentions of the parent make no difference.

Jim writes that “if the home in which the infant grew were outside the mother’s body, we should all see that to expel him from that home would be to deprive him of the nature-given means of life”. I’m not sure I know what “expel” would mean in this context. But in the relevant possible future case of a “test-tube” foetus, grown of course in a man-made means of life, it surely would not be “murder” to pull the plug, to cease investing resources in keeping the foetus alive.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Echoes of the Thirties. In our May, 1977 issue, I reviewed “Rare Big Band Gems, 1932-1947”, 6 LP sides issued by the Nostalgia Book Club, and available only to book club members. This marvelous set was selected by one of the country’s leading experts on jazz and pop recordings of the era, Neil McCaffrey, until very recently head of the Nostalgia Book Club. Now, another set of records, “Echoes of the Thirties”, has been selected by McCaffrey and issued by the Nostalgia Book Club on the same basis. Only membership in the club can give you access to these recordings.

“Echoes of the Thirties” is an even more mammoth contribution: here are ten LP sides, the recording arranged chronologically from January 1930 to December 1939. Once again, McCaffrey has selected good but obscure and forgotten contributions characteristic of the era. This time, however, McCaffrey has attempted, not so much to cull the forgotten bests of the great bands, but to convey to the listener a representative panorama of the pop music of the Thirties. He has succeeded admirably; but, as a result, there are several novelty and kitsch recordings which can well be skipped on rehearing. I think particularly of such well-deserved obscurities as: Smith Ballew and his “Sing, You Sinners”; the California Ramblers “The Peanut Vendor”; Connee Boswell-Glen Gray and “Washboard Blues”; the always execrable Phil Harris and “How’s About It?”; Raymond Scott’s “Twilight in Turkey”; and Slim and Slam’s “Flat Foot Floogies” (and the floy, floy!) But if we count up these and other turkeys, they make up only 14 out of the 70 records in this set. (Unfortunately, the first two sides have a high proportion of the turkeys, so the listener may be well advised to start with the third side and work back to the first two after he has heard the treasures they contain).

Apart from these novelty tunes, the rest of the records are fine and some are outstanding. It is, overall, an excellent and worthy collection. Some of my particular favorites: The Dorsey Brothers’ “Home” (1931), featuring Wes Vaughn on the vocal, Tommy Dorsey on the trombone and Charlie Margulis on trumpet; the marvelous Ruth Etting’s vocal on “When We’re Alone” (1932), with the great Joe Venuti on violin; Eddie Cantor’s “Look What You’ve Done” (1932); Gertrude Niesen’s vocal, “You’re Mine, You” (1933); the superb and underrated vocalist Russ Colombo’s “Let’s Pretend There’s A Moon” (1934); Benny Goodman’s “When Love Comes Swinging Along” (1934), with Benny on clarinet and Peter Cantor on vocal; Red Allen’s “I’ll Never Say ‘Never Again’ Again” (1935), with Red on trumpet and vocal and Dickie Wells on trombone; Mildred Bailey-Red Norvo’s “Little Joe” (1937), with the marvelous Mildred vocal; Duke Ellington’s “Lambeth Walk” (1938), with Cootie Williams outstanding on trumpet and Lawrence Brown on trombone; and Benny again in “Rendezvous Time in Paree” (1939).

But I must give special mention to several records by artists of whom I had never heard, and who turned out to be real revelations. Greta Keller’s vocal on “I Wake Up Smiling” (1933) was one such revelation; as were Midge Williams and her Jazz Jesters, “Love is Like Whiskey” (1938), featuring Midge on vocal and Pete Brown on alto sax; and, another surprise, Jerry Kruger and her Orchestra, “Summertime” (1939), with Jerry on vocal, and the great Buck Clayton on trumpet.

My Number One favorite, and revelation, from this stellar collection was a vocal by Carl Brisson, on a song I had never heard of, “Be Careful, Young Lady” (1935). Sung with what appears to be a slight but marked German accent, Brisson delivers a masterful blend of melody and lyric:

Be careful, young lady,

This is the only heart I own,

Be careful, young lady,

Your’re stepping in the danger zone

Your eyes are saying

Things you know are indiscreet,

Why start in playing

Games you’ll never dare cx-nplete?

Be careful, young lady,

The moon is dangerous and bright,

I’m warning you, lady,

I’m not responsible tonight

Watch out where you’re heading

It’s slippery ground you’re treading,

Be careful, young lady,

Before it’s too late.

(The Nostalgia Book Club can be reached at 165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, New York 10801.)

Slaves Contracts and the Inalienable Will

by Sheldon Richman

In his letter to Thomas F. Bayard in 1882, Lysander Spooner, the individualist-anarchist and constitutional lawyer, wrote, “No man can delegate, or give to another, any right of arbitrary dominion over himself; for that would be giving himself away as a slave. And this no one can do. Any contract to do so is necessarily an absurd one, and has no validity.”

I wish to argue here that Spooner is correct; that so-called slave contracts can have no rational legal standing.

At first blush, it may seem that the issue is of no importance outside the ivory tower. After all, how many people seek to become slaves? But I believe this issue is crucial for two reasons. First, it is of abstract philosophical importance because our solution will shed light on our conception of self-ownership and the right to life. Secondly, it is of concrete importance because our answer will determine our solution to such problems as military desertion, breach of personal service contracts, etc. If slave contracts are invalid, it shouldn’t matter if the contract is for life or for a shorter period of time.

Spooner’s statement may stop some natural-rights advocates short. If you can’t “give yourself away as a slave,” isn’t this a severe limit on individual liberty? And if this limit can be demonstrated, why not others? In short, isn’t this point of view profoundly anti-libertarian? Shouldn’t one be free to give up freedom?

Stated this way the issue is obscure. Surely no one would argue that one has no right to work for another person under mutually agreeable terms. And those terms could conceivably RESEMBLE slavery in that A could agree to do whatever B commands. But as we shall see, the agreement, by logical necessity, is a qualified one. In other words, I intend to demonstrate, as others have, that the logical qualification to the agreement is “as long as A wants to.”

Why is this so? The reason comes into view after a careful look at what a slave contract would mean. A slave is one who belongs—mind and body—to his master, one who doesn’t own, i.e. possess the right of use and disposal of, his will and person. It is important to realize that all slavery entails the subordination of one will to another. The necessity of using the possessive “his” despite the slave’s status indicates the contradiction involved.

A slave contract would mean the willful giving up of one’s will. The contradiction shows its face further.

How can one give up one’s will? The will, after all, is the thing that makes a person a person. It is the self. It is that about a person which is aware, which intends, which values, which feels, which OWNS. Can one give up ownership to that about him which owns? What is giving up what? If the will is being given up, what’s doing the giving? If the will is doing the giving, what is it giving up? To say the will is giving itself away seems a peculiar, if not an absurd’, statement.

This becomes clearer when coupled with the fact that a person can never transfer control of his inseparable will. It is impossible for anyone to directly control another will. A will can only control itself and no other. If Jones commands Smith to perform an action, the action will be performed only if Smith wills it. Threats of force notwithstanding, Smith has to exercise his will to perform the action. Jones cannot exercise it for him.

(This by no means undermines the moral evaluation of coercive interaction. To say that an action is involuntary or “against one’s will” doesn’t mean that the aggressor exercised the victim’s will. It means that the victim would not have exercised it in that particular way were it not for the threat of force. In this sense, all actions are voluntary.)

This has devastating logical implications for slave contracts. If you can’t give up your will, how can you give up your right to exercise it? The right of contract is built on the foundation of the free and sovereign will. But if that’s so, there can be no contractual obligation where there IS no free and sovereign will. To invoke such an obligation is to be guilty of a logical contradiction or, as the Objectivists say, of the fallacy of the stolen concept.

This means that an unfree and unsovereign will—if there were such a thing—could have no obligation to obey its master.

We can take this one step further. Not only is there no obligation to obey, but an act of obedience would violate the contract because the slave would have to assume control, i.e. ownership, of the will. It may be objected that the master, in giving a command, is giving the slave permission to resume control of his former will for a specific purpose, just as you could give someone permission to borrow the car you just purchased for him.

But this objection doesn’t hold. Because in order to give the slave permission to “borrow” his will, the slave would first have to exercise it to listen to and grasp the nature of the permission. But how could he legally exercise a will to which he has no right before being granted permission? He would first have to get permission to use the will for the purpose of getting permission to perform the action.

But that obviously leads to an infinite regress of permission-granting.

To sum up, if slave contracts are somehow construed as valid, the slave has no obligation to honor his master and, indeed, has an obligation to refrain from honoring his master.

That which makes the contract legally binding—the necessity of a sovereign will—is what makes it invalid.

The whole contractual structure collapses in ludicrous contradiction because the philosophical rug has been pulled out from under it.

It conjures up the helpful and clever image used by Williamson Evers in his article, “Toward a reformulation of the law of contracts” (The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Winter 1977). Writes Evers, “Using a piece of equipment mounted on the upper stories of a building to knock out the foundation of the same building will do nothing but bring down the entire edifice.” (I recommend Evers’ article and Murray N. Rothbard’s “Man, Economy and State” for full discussion of the responsibility for certain damages when labor contracts are broken.)

The upshot is that one may not be forced to perform services regardless of promises made. Most important here is the absolute moral right to quit the armed forces even—or should I say especially—during war.

The Street Peddler

by Walter Block

The street peddler has always come under criticism. He is uncontrolled, unlicensed, under foot. He takes unfair advantage of the local merchants who have to pay rent. He cannot be easily taxed, so the city loses revenue. He clutters up the sidewalk, making it difficult for pedestrians to pass by. The street peddler is likened to the fly-by-night businessman who, having no permanent address, is able to cheat customers without risk of being caught.

The peddler is a convenient target for those who wish to rail against non-uniformity. When a Congressman, Ed Koch (D. N.Y.) seemingly based his entire re-election campaign on an anti-street peddler platform. He went out of his way to lecture the street peddlers (in front of the television cameras, of course), berating them for their supposed lack of respect for pedestrians, their greediness, their refusal to comply with the anti-peddler laws.

In spite of this sniping at the peddler, or perhaps rather because of it, we would do well to consider the case in favor of the street peddler. For we can never go far wrong on the principle that if a prominent politician is attacking a group, there must be something good about it. And in this case, as we shall see, there is much merit in the principle. For not “only” are there many beneficial effects of street peddling that have been overlooked, but it is also easy to show that the street peddler has as much right to be on the street as anyone else; certainly more right to be on the street than other groups who could be mentioned, such as the politicians who are so busy attacking them.

One good effect of the street peddler is that he serves as a natural inhibition of street crime. The street peddler has an interest in the prevention of crime because he is one of its principal victims. One of the great inhibitors of street crime, as Jane Jacobs has demonstrated in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is the presence of many “eyes on the street”. No one, it seems, is very comfortable committing a crime while being watched by other people. But the street peddler’s self-interest keeps his eyes firmly focussed on the street looking for customers, thereby contributing to the stifling of crime. And yet it is the self-same politico who complains most bitterly about the street peddler for violating the commercial law, that is also a staunch advocate of law and order. We cannot have it both ways. Either we defend the right of the peddler to transact business and to hell with the lost city tax revenues, or we defend the “right” of the city to its tax revenues, and to hell with the safety and comfort of the people. One is either for the people or for the city government, and it is clear where the self-interest of the big politicoes lies.

Another good effect of street peddling is that it imparts a sense of festival to our city streets. There is perhaps nothing that livens up 8th street in the Village, or 125th street in Harlem, more than its many peddlers, hawking their varied wares, putting on impromptu concerts, and generally entertaining the passers-by. Every time the police break up a steel band performance, or a jazz recital, or entertainment by a solo violinist, they earn the rightful enmity of the crowds and disrupt just a bit of the carnival atmosphere New York City so desperately needs. It is the bureaucratic impulse to control, control, control, that underlies city ordinances which limit such concerts to a very few restricted areas and completely stifle it elsewhere.

We have in New York City a severe unemployment problem and skyrocketing welfare rolls. Yet the reaction of the “responsible” politicos to the spectre of people taking the initiative to start their own businesses is one of repression. Instead of applauding the ambition, the pioneer spirit, the protestant ethic exhibited by the street peddlers, the full force of law is ready to swoop down and repress.

The option of going into business by renting a store is not really open to many poor people. One must pay sometimes up to six months rent in advance as security for a lease on a store. Surely a great obstacle to free enterprise. When we look at the pictures of New York City street life at the turn of the century, we are impressed with the omnipresence of the pushcart peddlers. What would be the fortunes of many of our present day store merchants had their parents suffered under the same repressive ordinances that burden the economic “outs” of today? Not very good at all. It is therefore the grossest hypocrisy for these benificiaries of an earlier free enterprise system to complain about a later generation of free marketeers.

The argument that street peddlers take unfair advantage of the store merchants is likewise without merit. It is the duty and unique ability of the entrepreneur to bring to the customer the product at the lowest price possible. If the peddler can take advantage of cost savings to sell the product cheaper and take business away from competitors, that is all to the good. Efficiency and cost cutting best serve the public. It is no more unfair for the peddler to take business from the department store than it was for the supermarket to take business away from the grocery store. In each case a better product and better service was enjoyed by the public.

The origin of the problem, of course, is that there is no clearly defined owner of the streets and sidewalks. To say that they are publicly owned is really no answer at all, because if we all own it, no one really owns it at all.

Why Free Schools are not Free

by Frank Chodorov

Ed. Note: Frank Chodorov was one of the giants of libertarianism in the 1940’s and ‘50’s, someone whose courage, genuine individualism, consistency of thought, and felicity of style were an inspiration to us all. Chodorov was Albert Jay Nock’s leading disciple, and brought Nockianism to us after Nock himself had passed from the scene. It is a shame that Chodorov is unknown to the current generation of libertarians. His collections of essays and other volumes, published during the nadir of libertarianism and scarcely read even then, are out of print and forgotten today. This essay, we hope, will do a little to bring back Chodorov from obscurity. It is reprinted from his marvelous one-man monthly broadsheet, analysis, October, 1948.

* * *

DIXON is an obscure mountain village in New Mexico; population 1,200. Its obscurity is presently disturbed by a problem of democracy: the divorcement of secular and religious training in tax-supported schools. Reports have it that the Catholic citizenry, who seem to be politically in the ascendancy in New Mexico, have got hold of the management of the Dixon school system, introducing their catechism into the curriculum and putting the teaching nuns on the payroll. The Protestant minority vehemently denounce this as an abuse of democratic principle, as well as a misuse of public funds, and have brought the matter to law. Non-Catholic elements outside New Mexico have come to their support, and thus the contention becomes national in scope. Dixon is no longer a village; it is a new battleground in the old war between ecclesiasticism and secularism in education.

The issue will not be settled in the court of law, which can come up with only a temporary compromise, for involved is the larger question as to whether schooling is a proper function of the State. If we admit that it is, then we must also admit that the subject matter of education will be decided by those in control of the political machinery and will vary with the incidence of control. It is silly to think otherwise. The notion that a political institution can be divorced from politics is typical American jabberwocky.

Right now the group most concerned with getting control of tax-supported schools are the theologians. Catholics are particularly active in this effort—for reasons inherent in their faith—but that they have the support of other creeds was shown in the fight for “released time” in New York. Practically the entire clerical fraternity (except Jews, whose religious classes are conducted in the evening) joined in demanding that time be set aside for out-of-school religious education. Suppose the children prefer to devote this time to play, rather than the designated purpose, suppose they are encouraged to do so by their non-religious parents, will not the clericals carry on? Will they not strive to put religious training into the regular curriculum? In the matter of “released time,” and in the demand that public funds be used to convey children to parochial schools, the clericals have shown that they can throw their political weight around. How can they be prevented from asking that their teachers be permitted to give religious instruction in the school buildings? Or, perhaps, that these teachers be put on the public payrolls?

Let us extend the doctrine of “separation” to other than religious subjects. Large gobs of Socialistic doctrine have seeped into our school text books and teachers of that persuasion are its protagonists. While Socialism is not organized along church lines, the element of faith in it gives the ideology a religious tinge, and the attitude of Socialists toward nonbelievers as sinful and wicked suggests a further similarity. Well, how did Socialism creep into the school curriculum if not by the political power acquired by its devotees? The outlawing of the teaching of evolution by the anti-Darwinians is another case in point. Then again, because the Constitutionalists were in the ascendancy in the beginning of our country, the Federalist point of view never got into our history books. How can it be otherwise? As long as schooling is a function of the State, the dominant political group will determine what and how the children will be trained. And for good reason.

* * *

The business of education is the transmission of ideas from those who have them to those who are lacking; that is, from elders to youngsters. But, all ideas acquire value, and those which carry the greatest weight with the elders are the ones which the pupils will be exposed to. Education, therefore, can never be free from the prejudice and preconceptions of elders; even if the teacher enjoys “academic freedom” he is not free from the values he has built up in his mind. Objectivity is impossible save with a mind that is incapable of weighing facts. A transcendentalist will somehow drag in the concept of “natural laws” even in teaching physics, and the pragmatist will go out of his way to denounce it; a collectivist cannot help insinuating that Jefferson’s “natural rights” is an archaism, nor from extolling the modernism of Hamilton’s centralization idea. Can the free-trader avoid berating protectionist history?

It is because of this value-emphasis that private schools are established and endowed. The parent selects for his son a classical school or a military school because he puts a higher value on that kind of education; he believes his son is deserving of what he considers better, even if “better” is mere ostentation. One may question the judgment of the parent, but one does not question his right; it is his son and his money.

When we get into adult education the heterogeneity of values is most confusing. There are schools for the teaching of anarchism, the mystic religions, existentialism, decentralism, every shade of Marxism, the ideas of Mary Baker Eddy, of Henry George—schools without end, to say nothing of purely vocational schools. Every enthusiasm has its discipline, and so as long as private opinion and private property are not outlawed there will be institutions designed to propagate it. Society is none the worse for this practice; in fact, it can be socially beneficial, so long as it remains a private purpose, for the more values flying around in the cultural air the less likelihood of its being fouled up with a uniformity.

The tax-supported school cannot permit such free flight to intellectual enthusiasm. By right of ownership every citizen feels that his values should be included in the curriculum, but by the same right others press their values and in the end somebody must be cheated. The monopolist objects because his line of business is disparaged in the economics course, the chauvinist denounces the history teacher for debunking national heroes, the classicist decries the emphasis on modernism, and—above all—the secularization made necessary by a diversity of creeds satisfies nobody except the irreligious. The tax-supported school is adomination to somebody, no matter what or how it teaches.

The State as teacher tries to keep to the middle road, which is a denial of all values and satisfies nobody. But, even as a compromiser the State is A failure, for it is compelled by political considerations to favor the values of dominant elements in the community. The Texas school reader glamorizes the oil industry, trade unionism must be treated gingerly in industrial centers, and in the South “white supremacy” is intimated even by the fact of segregation. Furthermore, the attempt to find a compromise is abandoned and bias reigns supreme when the State grinds its own axe in the schoolroom. In mentioning our fiscal system can the tax-paid teacher even hint at the immorality of taxation? Can he void the glorification of political scoundrels in the school books? And now that we have gone in for State-capitalism in a big way, how can he question the correctness of TVA, public housing or the monopoly of the mails?

* * *

The private school—the school in which you pay for what you want—would be ideal if it were truly private. But, as in all human affairs, the tentacles of the State reach out into this sphere of education and create disturbance and iniquity. Escape from political interference is impossible as long as men use political means to advance their private purposes.

In pushing their claim for tax-paid transportation for parochial school pupils, the Catholics maintained that under our fiscal system they were paying double for the education of their children; they taxed themselves for the kind of education they deemed desirable and were levied upon for the maintenance of secular schools. Though the transportation issue was finally decided by the weight of the Catholic vote, not by reason, there is an enticing plausibility in this argument; but, when you extend it you come to disturbing questions. Since the general taxpayer provides books and lunches and equipment for the public school pupil, as well as transportation, why not spread this largesse? Should not the private school teacher be put on the public payroll? On the other hand, if the tax-payer contributes anything to the maintenance of the private school why should he not have some say in the subject manner taught?

Furthermore, private schools forfeit their right to complete privacy by asking and getting tax-favors; exemption of their real estate from local levies for one thing. Not only is the property they use for educational purposes untaxed, but in some localities even the property they rent out to commercial institutions is similarly favored. The exemption amounts to a subsidy. For, the values of these properties, frequently located in city centers, are enhanced by the conveniences provided by the taxpayers; the amount of this subsidy is sometimes considerable, as can be ascertained when a school, or a church, disposes of its old site.

There are other tax-favors which make the private school beholden to the State. Where sales taxes obtain, its purchases are frequently excused. If it carries on any commercial venture in connection with its educational business, such as publishing, that venture pays no tax profits. Then, of course, there is the big advantage of being able to advertise that under its “charter” contributions to its treasury are deductible in computing personal and corporation income taxes.

Thus, the private school sacrifices its integrity on the altar of special privilege. It cannot claim immunity for its values simply because it regularly sells out its immunity. Under the circumstances, “academic freedom”—vis-à-vis the State—is a specious assertion; no private school is likely to jeopardize its privileges by teaching what the State may consider “subversive,” and should the State decide to make use of the school’s facilities (including the faculty and the curriculum) for its own purposes it would be entirely within its rights.

In the full sense of the word, a free school is one that has no truck with the State, via its taxing powers. The more subsidized it is the less free it is. What is known as “free education” is the least free of all, for it is a State-owned institution; it is socialized education—just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office—and cannot possibly be separated from political control. As for being “free” in the sense of being without cost, that is one of those impostor terms we like to use to hide ugly facts from ourselves; our public education is fully paid for, with all its deficiencies and inadequacies. And it is paid for mainly by the poor, not the rich, because the poor in the aggregate constitute the largest segment of society and therefore pay the most in taxes. It would be an interesting, though useless, exercise to compute the number of private schools that could be maintained with the total amount exacted from us, locally and nationally, for politicalized education.

* * *

The root-question raised by the Dixon affair is not the separation of the church from the school; it is the separation of the school from the State. The channelling of education along religious lines is a consequence of socialization. These days we associate the effort to introduce ecclesiasticism into the schoolroom with the Catholic church. But, the fact is that in the early history of our country the Protestant denominations fought bitterly against the secularization of all American institutions, including the school, and their lack of success was due mainly to their rivalries; wherever any sect was in the saddle its particular catechism was obligatory education. Even in the lifetime of the present writer, the reading of the New Testament in the daily school assembly was objected to by the Jews, who were promptly rebuffed with the assertion that this is a “Christian country.” It should be recalled that only the agnostic leanings of several Constitutional Fathers prevented the official designation of the new nation as a “Christian country”—which, by a strange twist of bigotry, meant an anti-Catholic country; there were few Jews and fewer Mohammedans in the colonies.

If we start with the premise that education is a proper function of the State we must be prepared to accept the corollary; that the kind of education the State dispenses will be that which those in control consider desirable. For the State is not an impersonal or impartial deity; it is a committee of persons, replete with desires, prejudices, values. To the Catholic the highest values are embraced in the sacraments of his church—enjoying divine sanction—and his conscience impels him to promote acceptance of these values. For a thousand years, therefore, he has been preeminently a teacher. When the opportunity falls into his hands, as it has in Dixon, to use political power to advance his cause, he would indeed be lacking in integrity if he failed to take advantage of it. Would it be any different if a Hindu, a Baptist, an atheist or a communist fell heir to political power?

This wrangling over ecclesiasticism in education is a tweedledee-tweedledum argument. If we would reform our educational system basically we must de-socialize it. We must put it back where it belongs, in the hands of parents. Theirs is the responsibility for the breeding of children, and theirs is the responsibility for the upbringing. The first error of public schooling is the shifting of this responsibility, the transformation of the children of men into wards of the State. All the other evils follow from that.

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The ABM Rises from the Grave

by Bill Birmingham

Picking the greatest Pentagon boondoggle of all time would be a difficult task—considering the competition (the B-1, Condor, C-5A, Matador/Regulus/Snark, TFX, Skybolt, the “atomic airplane”, and so on according to the taste and stamina of the reader)—but the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) would surely head a lot of lists. In the late 60s the conservatives made support for ABM a litmus test of one’s devotion to “national security”, and proposed to spend as much as $50 billion on it. Objections that no ABM system could be perfect, and that even a perfect system could be “saturated” by a sufficiently heavy attack, left them unmoved. But anti-militarist forces prevailed, and the proposed “thick” ABM system was scaled down to the “thin” Safeguard system.

Then came SALT I, and the US and the Soviet Union (whose own ABM efforts, such as they were, were naturally billed as proof positive of aggressive intentions) limited themselves by treaty to just two ABM sites each, one protecting each nation’s ICBM’s and one its capital city, with no more than 100 missiles at each site. However, someone noticed that Washington could not be defended by an ABM. Its coastal location meant that there would be almost no warning of a submarine-launched missile (SLBM) attack. The incoming SLBM could only be destroyed, if at all, at such a low altitude that Washington would be wiped out by the ABM’s own nuclear warhead—a prospect that hardly pleased our rulers. So a new treaty reduced the US and USSR to one ABM site apiece with only 64 missiles—coincidentally the exact number the Soviets had at their one site guarding Moscow. (The conservatives, of course, have never given the Soviets any credit for this unilateral concession on their part.) The only American ABM site was built near Grand Rapids, N.D., at a cost of over $6 billion. Eventually even the most rabid warhawks admitted that the 1054 American ICBMs couldn’t be protected with 64 ABM missiles, and the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on ABM in 1975. (See “The AMB Slips Away”, Lib. Forum, January 1976.)

Or So we thought! For according to the prestigious Aviation Week and Space Technology (“Quickened Pace Sought in Missile Defense”, May 22, 1978), the Pentagon is hard at work trying to breathe life into the ABM’s mouldering corpse. The Army (who is responsible for the ABM as part of its “air defense” function) is presently investigating new concepts for an “improved” ABM; and if you thought the old Safeguard system was a boondoggle, read on and see what the new ABM may be like.

Safeguard used a “layered defense”; the long-range Spartan missile (tipped, by the way, with an enhanced radiation warhead—a “neutron bomb”) was to destroy incoming missiles above the atmosphere, while the short-range Sprint took care of those that got by Spartan. The new ABM is to be “layered” also. But under the Spartan/Sprint-type layer(s) may be such things as:

—A “single-silo intercept” system. The Army thinks that some of its current anti-aircraft missiles (Hawk, Hercules, etc.) can be “upgraded” so that they are capable of hitting incoming ICBMs. Just give the contractors enough money. That also seems to be the reasoning behind:

—“Aimed projectile” concepts. Such items as “Porcupine” (lots of steel darts),’ light gas guns” (a glorified air rifle. Perhaps Daisy will get the contract), and “salvo guns” are under consideration. Existing air defense guns (perhaps firing “depleted-uranium projectiles”), cannon firing atomic shells, and terminally-guided artillery shells such as the Martin-Marietta “Copperhead” may also find a place in a new ABM system. True, shooting down a rocket with artillery is now thought to be impossible, but for $X billion maybe some automatic fire-control system can be built to do the job. If not, there are still:

—Barriers”. “Lollipop, an “unguided nuclear missile” (and wouldn’t it be fun to live next to that?), will detonate at a preset altitude to blast anything that happens to be up there. Closer in, nuclear “rockpiles”, atomic bombs buried like landmines, could throw up enough dirt and gravel (it says here) to destroy enemy missiles on the shrapnel principle. (Lots of fallout for the folks downwind, but c’est la guerre.) And for really close in defense, the Army is seriously considering “a bed of nails concept with 5-7 ft. steel rods deployed in ICBM fields to impale reentry vehicles before impact and detonation.” (I swear by Rand, Branden, and to be Holy Galt that I am not making this up. You can read it for yourself in AW&ST.)

You think it’s funny, comrades? Well, maybe you’ll stop laughing when I tell you that the Army will spend $355.1 million in fiscal 1979 to study these things. Or when I tell you that they have the support of the House Armed Services Committee, which wants them ready for testing by 1981, two years ahead of the Pentagon’s schedule. Or that “In some cases,” as AW&ST puts it in the aerospace industry’s spavined prose, “the ABM treaty . . . will have to be amended or abrogated to enable a deployment decision.” And, to the best of my knowledge, the general media have yet to notice any of this.

Why is the ABM making a comeback? According to AW&ST, it’s to counter that ever-popular bogey, the “Soviet first-strike capability.” Supposedly, by 1985 or so the number and accuracy of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missile warheads will enable her to destroy virtually ail (“90%”) of the United States’ Minuteman ICBMs in a surprise attack. You or I might not think this very important (see “The ‘Defense Gap’ Mythology”, Lib. Forum, April 1976), since the US would still have some 5000 nuclear warheads left on her SLBMs alone. Still, REASON’S House Warmonger, the egregious R. J. Rummel, has said that “no American president” would use them to retaliate in the event of a Soviet firsts strike. Alas, I don’t know why Rummel said this, and can only quote ? Demeunier: “It is clear that this is nonsense and one is not able to give a reason for nonsense.” Which, in the last analysis, is also all one can say about the new ABM.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XI NUMBER 5

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1978

US-ISSN0047-4517

Lessons of People’s Temple

It is less important to wallow in the horrible and bizarre details of People’s Temple than to draw lessons from the terrible event for ourselves and for the future.

Lesson No. 1. Shun as the plague all cults and gurus; if you find yourself getting drawn into one, run, don’t walk, to the nearest exit. It is unfortunately not enough to claim that libertarians, with their devotion to the independence of the individual, are immune from the temptations of cults. Inconsistent it may be, but we all know better. While our most rabid cult died a decade ago, libertarians are still too often prone to cultic seizures.

How do you know if the group you’re in is a cult? Much has been written of this subject since the charnel-house at Jonestown, but a few of the symptoms are particularly important:

(a) Beware of any group that places one man—or woman—on a pedestal, so that this person becomes the ultimate decider of all questions, and loyalty to him or her becomes the highest good. Loyalty to one person must never be allowed to supersede an individual’s independent judgment. In short, shun the Cult of Personality.

(b) Beware of any group that tries to mould and dictate every aspect of each member’s life and personality. That is, shun totalitarianism—the total commitment and subordination of one’s being to any group.

(c) Watch out for any group that uses degradation of the individual to recruit and maintain his or her membership. Invasion of privacy, dictation, insults, “punishments”, assuming control of a member’s life—any use of such tactics should be enough to hurry one out the door, and pronto.

In short, you don’t have to be the State to be a totalitarian monster, although, of course, it helps.

Lesson No. 2. The washing of hands, the haste to justify their at best criminally negligent actions, makes the responses of many of our left-liberal politicians even more repellent than usual. For the Rev. Jones was quite the darling of left-liberalism in San Francisco and elsewhere. Even after the People’s Temple in California was exposed in a prescient and courageous article by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy in New West in July 1977, such liberal Democratic politicians as California Assembly Speaker Agnos and Lt. Gov. Mervyn Dymally angrily defended the People’s Temple from the article’s charges. The defense that these politicians didn’t know any better just won’t wash. Certainly after the charges and even before, it was the responsibility of these politicos to investigate the People’s Temple a bit before leaping to its defense.

One thing everyone should surely learn from this episode: pay no attention to the fulsome encomiums that one politician lavishes on another. We now find that all of this is just routine.

Lesson No. 2 also demonstrates how to acquire influence over left-liberal politicians: sound nice and bring out the troops in campaigns. The blend of “altruism” and self-interest becomes irresistible.

Lesson No. 3 can emerge by examining two pro-Jonesian lines that have emerged on the liberal-left to try to justify their previous support to the Rev. Jones and People’s Temple.

One variant we might call the naive pro-Jonesian line. The naive pro-Jonesians sigh that Jones created a beautiful “paradise” in the jungle by “helping” people, building “community”, etc., until, tragically and suddenly—maybe due to drugs or fever—the Rev. Jones “went mad.” But this fable simply won’t wash. All the lineaments of the cult—the physical beatings, the tortures, the totalitarian control, the sexual oppression—had been going on for years, and ex-victims had been trying to warn the authorities in vain.

More significant is the sophisticated pro-Jonesian line: that the Jones cult always had two schizoid sides: “the beautiful side” in which Jones helped people, fed the poor, constructed farms, etc., and the “dark side” in which he exercised brutal power and control over his subjects. The fatal flaw in this view is that it ignores the inextricable linkage: for both are two sides to the same monstrous coin. The “beautiful help” was the means by which Jones achieved total power over his deluded subjects. It was the bait to lure the suckers.

Moreover, if we examine the “help”, we find that it too was phony. For the’ upshot of the free lunches and the rest was that the cult members were induced to strip themselves bare to donate their life’s savings and assets to the Rev. Jones. We must never forget that Jones not only amassed total power over his cultists; he also piled up millions from their contributions to his welfare.

That’s another point about cults that one must always watch out for: the flow of funds (as well as labor services). Invariably, the flow goes rapidly upward: from the deluded member up to the guru and his minions.

Jones, his wife, and their crew, by the way, all sounded like walking villains straight out of the Fountainhead. Old friends and acquaintances of Jim and Marcelline, even back to childhood, kept saying about them after the carnage: “All Jim (or Marcelline) wanted to do was to help others.” The kind of “help,” of course, which led inexorably to the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown.

Let us take the opportunity to examine Jones’s alleged “madness.” Let us skip over for a moment the paranoid fantasies which, very much like the Weathermen at the end of the 1960’s, saw American society and the American public as so hopelessly evil that drastic measures had to be taken to remove the cult from American society—and eventually from the world itself. Let us instead consider that Jonesian cult structure before the filial cataclysm. Was Jones’s totalitarian behavior truly “mad”? But Jones was getting out of all this huge amounts of three of mankind’s deepest and most pervasive goals: money, sex, and power. However repellent he was, Jones was getting it all, and it seems to me that he was in fact crazy like a fox. The people, the motivations that I can’t understand are Jones’s followers—the suckers who were contributing money, sex, and power to Jones and who were so obedient to their guru that most of them were willing to commit suicide at his command.

Oh, I’ve heard the explanations: fear of freedom, search for community, wish to make someone else responsible for one’s choices, and all the rest. But even if these are correct, I regard them as descriptions and not causal explanations for the behavior of the cult members. To me their psyche remains as inexplicable as that of some Martian or of members of the giant multi-organism that “took over” people in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Lesson No. 4 can be summed up in the black humorous note of a friend of ours: “The blend of Christianity and Marxism leads to insanity.” And Jones was both; in fact, he claimed to be the living reincarnations of both Jesus and Lenin.

But socialism has a lot to answer for, and there is evidence that the Christianity and mysticism were a shuck to cover the Rev. Jones’s Marxist aims. In a profound sense, Jonestown was socialism in microcosm: the “helping”, communal living, and racial integration as a cover for elitism, brutality, totalitarian control, and economic exploitation of the masses by the ruling elite.

For their part, most socialists have been quick to disown the Rev. Jones, as they have tried to disown brutal socialist societies in the past and present as “not really” socialism. They have claimed that the Rev. Jones was not a genuine socialist because, instead of trying to achieve power in the U.S., he moved out of America altogether into a retreatist utopian community.

Of all the socialists, we have to hail the weekly In These Times for being honorable enough to avoid this easy way out. In a soul-searching article from Guyana, David Moberg mournfully admits that the Rev. Jones “did bring his agricultural colony in Jonestown, Guyana, close to—perhaps several steps beyond in some ways—the most die-hard anti-communist vision of a socialist future.” (David Moberg, “‘Revolutionary Suicide’, 1978”, In These Times, Dec. 6-12, 1978, p. 3). Moberg admits that it is easy to dismiss Jonestown as lunatic or as an example of religious cultism, but that “the dark side of Jonestown was a perverted product of the left as well.”

Moberg adds:

“Jim Jones spun out paranoid fantasies of CIA machinations. He caught himself up in the dilemma of secretly being a socialist while publicly appearing a religious crusader. He exaggerated the political oppressiveness of American society to the point that he saw no hope for change. He justified ruthless authoritarianism as ‘proletarian dictatorship.’

He wrote off the majority of Americans as inevitably reactionary and believed anything was legitimate to pursue his goal of socialism. These political tendencies were not incidental to the deaths at Jonestown; they were directly connected with them.

‘I heard Jim Jones say so many times, “The end justifies the means” ’, said Harold Cordell, 42, follower of Jones from Indianapolis for the past 24 years . . . “You can imprison large numbers of people. You could kill thousands to make things better for others.’ ”

Jones, Moberg explains, was influenced by the bizarre concept of “revolutionary suicide”, a contribution to social thought provided by Black Panther leader Huey Newton. The author concedes that Jones was a socialist from his early days, and that “to the very end, he maintained his support of the Soviet Union as the vanguard of world revolution.” One of his aides explained that socialism in American has limited appeal, whereas “as a preacher you could get a large audience.” Let Moberg tell the story of the cult structure:

“Jones focused all attention on himself. He tried to maintain distrust among followers, even while he encouraged general communal warmth. He doled out secret information among various loyal associates, on a ‘need to know’ basis. He discouraged close family ties . . .

He tried to separate members from anyone on the outside of the People’s Temple . . . His paranoia and megalomania set upon each other in a deadly spiral. Having elevated himself so high, having shown the hubris to challenge the gods and claim perfection, Jones could tolerate no deviation from his desires, and apparently came to see the whole world revolving around him. Thus, every disagreement, every infraction of a rule, every question from outside, became part of a conspiracy to bring him down. No criticism was ever permitted.

His closed services . . . began to include more discipline, more embarrassment, more punishment. He picked up from Synanon and other groups ideas about ‘confrontation therapy.’ . . . But as the effort to solidify the community under his control increased, so did the threat that came with anyone’s departure.”

In a second, follow-up article, Moberg analyzes the meaning of Jonestown, an encampment that various prominent California leftists referred to as “paradise” or “the future.” (Moberg, “Prison Camp of the Mind,” In These Times, Dec. 13-19, 1978, pp. 11 ff.) To this “prison camp of the mind”, Jones had attracted disciples with talk of community, love and security, and yet “his practices were designed to destroy them as individuals and to eradicate their sense of judgment, independent confirmation of reality, personal needs and self-esteem. He dictated a new reality that concentrated all power in his hands. . . . He turned the desire for collectivity into the service of tyranny. He turned the desire for a humane moral order into an amoral terrorism.”

An “extreme ideology of service and sacrifice” was used by Jones to “make members feel guilty about satisfying any needs of their own” (a weapon that did not apply, of course, to Jones himself.) If the inhabitants of Jonestown suffered from “the sin of being ‘ruled by food’”—that is, if they wanted a decent meal—they were hit by the oldest ploy in the world: How dare you! Think of the starving blacks in South Africa!

Any sense of individual identity or self-esteem among the members was rooted out by Jones as evil “elitism”, selfishness, and “capitalism.” Anyone who balked to the slightest degree at the totalitarian “structure” of the People’s Temple was called a “selfish, inconsiderate capitalist”, and—worst of all, an “anarchist.” As one former inmate of Jonestown reported, “Being called an anarchist was the worst thing that could happen.”

Moberg cites an authority on cults as summing up the tactics used to cement cult control: “creation of a group identity that supercedes and eliminates individual identity, isolation from family and friends . . ., exhaustion, repetition of extreme and pervasive threats and the humiliation and shaming of members.”

In a sober and searching editorial, In These Times (Dec. 13-19) engages in exemplary “self-criticism” of socialism itself:

“Too often those of us on the socialist left will support movements, such as the People’s Temple, and overlook their undemocratic behavior, because we feel ‘they are on our side’. . . . But in so doing, we abandon our principles of democracy and our view of the social relations we believe a socialist movement should be seeking to develop, for the sake of short-term advantages. . . .

A democratic society requires strong individuality, exercises in people’s freedom of association and thought. Or, as Lewis Mumford once put it, a strong community requires strong egos. A ‘community’ of conformist, unthinking people is what Marx referred to as a false community. . . .

Leftist support for authoritarian or cult-like tendencies . . . reflects and nourishes the all too frequent adoption of authoritarian values and cult-like habits within socialist organizations.”

The ITT editorial then goes on to detail the disturbing parallels between the cults and socialist groups past and present. One is “fascination with organizational technique (structure) at the sacrifice of clearly stated and publicly debated principles.” Another is “deification of a doctrine as an eternal canon, to which the ‘sinful’ world must adjust or be damned, and reducing thought to sloganeering and static formulas, cutting it off from studying the historical world.” A third is “segregation of members from the ‘outside’ world, instilling fear and distrust of ‘outsiders’.” A fourth is “idealization and exclusive identification with imagined ‘allies’ external to one’s own people (the Third World”, China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, etc.)”

A fourth is “perversion of ‘collectivism’ and ‘self-criticism’ from true collegiality based on the honest exchange of views and the encouragement of diversity in gaining greater knowledge, into a bludgeon for smothering the individual’s critical judgment. . . and for enforcing conformity and a blind faith in a leader (or leaders.)” And the final “perversion of our virtues” (the title to the editorial): “perversion of the idea that ‘the personal is the political’ from a reasonable observation: of the social character of personality, into an authoritarian weapon against privacy, dissent, variability, personal judgment, and critical thought.”

The ITT editorial concludes that all these characteristics are to be found among socialists, that socialists must therefore hold their “virtues” up “continually to critical judgment.” For if they don’t: “if we don’t grasp the implications of the People’s Temple horror as signifying the need to quicken those critical efforts, we may consign ourselves to the treadmill of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’,” and Guyana’s jungle may be closer than we think to the streets of America.”

To these noble sentiments we would simply plead that thoughtful socialists examine the view that the “perversions” of the socialist ideal are inherent in the implications of those ideals themselves; that the “personal as political” inevitably leads to totalitarianism and that a collectivized community will necessarily lead to the horrors which In These Times so eloquently rejects. The very fact that everyone of the socialist models—from Stalin to Hitler to Cambodia to Jonestown—has done so should particularly give democratic socialists considerable pause.

Lesson 5. It is difficult to end a grisly topic of this sort on a humorous note, but oddly enough Jonestown has coughed up a bizarre example. I refer, of course, to the incredible role of the egregious Mark Lane. Jonestown, in fact, seems to have stripped many people and institutions to their bare essence. Socialism and cultism appeared, at last, naked in their full totalitarian horror. And Mark Lane, too, became a sort of quintessential Lane: leaping from one strongly held position to another in a matter of days and hours; jumping from one paranoid thesis to another contradictory one; but always, manically hogging the spotlight. Lane did courageous and important work as first Kennedy Assassination revisionist. But he can’t hope to rest in the public esteem on that one act. One particular deed, shortly after the massacre was uncovered, strikes one as perhaps the most tasteless and exhibitionistic of Lane’s performances: expounding at length and with some gusto on TV on the details of the Rev. Jones’ sexual peccadilloes. It seems to me that whatever remaining shreds of good taste remain in American culture require that we all resolve to tune out Mark Lane from now on. If we can’t solve the major problems of our time very quickly, we can at least get rid of this minor irritant.

Bring Back Belloc

by Tom Palmer

Review of The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc, Indianapolis, Liberty Classics, 1977, 201 pages, $8.00 for hb, $2.00 for pb.

It is often true that social commentators, while proceeding from a fundamentally non-libertarian foundation, manage to make important contributions to libertarian analysis. Such is the case, for instance, in various Marxist critiques of slavery in the Old South, in works like Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism, and in many studies of the Welfare/Warfare State and its supporters, e.g., the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-lateral Commission, emanating from the New Left socialist writers. Unfortunately, such is not the case with Hilaire Belloc, whose major political tome, The Servile State, has just been re-issued by Liberty Classics Press.

Belloc states the central thesis of his book thus: “The capitalist state breeds a collectivist theory which in action produces something utterly different from collectivism (that is “pure” collectivism): to wit, the servile state.” Belloc defines the servile state as “that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor.” The insight that the impact of socialist ideology over the past few hundred years has been to entrench the rule of “state capitalism” is certainly neither brilliant nor new, though, to be fair, it may have been somewhat more novel when advanced by Belloc in 1912.

Belloc begins with a rather pedantic series of definitions which manage to set the tone for the whole book. While rigor is always appreciated, there is a certain attitude toward it which narrows the work by so defining matters as to leave out many important questions; lamentably, this is the attitude which Belloc demonstrates throughout.

After establishing definitions, Belloc begins the substance of his work with the assertion, correct in my view, that the roots of western politics lie in the servile state. Belloc focuses on the institution of chattel slavery in the Roman agricultural villa which preceded the feudalism of the dark ages; this is, he maintains, the basic productive/organization of ancient society. His treatment of this subject is brief and fails to address the underlying basis of slavery in classical antiquity. DeCoulange’s classic The Ancient City, whose depth is nowhere approached by Belloc, creates a much more complete picture of the roots of western society, but it is not my purpose to harp on such a shortcoming in so short a book as The Servile State. Also, Belloc does not take account of the fact that the Roman villa did not survive in England through the Saxon invasion, and hence his historical analysis does not apply in this case.

Belloc then proceeds to outline the change in the status of the chattel slave through the Dark Ages and the Medieval period into that of the serf and eventually to peasantry and what he calls the “distributive system” of small freeholders and “cooperative associations.” He lays this change at the door of the Catholic Church and Christian dogma. Nowhere does he support this important claim, which he reiterates at the end of the book. He claims that a change in the status of the slave came about after 1,000 years or so of church dominance, but the reader is left to himself to supply a post hoc ergo propter hoc line of reasoning to account for the change: the change came about during the rise of the church; therefore it came about because of the church. Belloc’s unsupported assertions are in sharp contrast to those in The History of Freedom in Christianity by Catholic Liberal Lord Acton, which eloquently makes the case that, by establishing a transcendental standard of right, Christianity placed a severe limit upon the actions of rulers of until the Reformation. In any case, Belloc offers no reasons to support this vital claim.

Belloc characterizes the conditions of Tudor England as the peak of western freedom. In this society, he claims, property was widely dispersed over a large segment of the population and labor and capital “cooperated” through restrictive guilds, common lands, and such institutions. Upon Henry VIII’s seizure of church property (some 30% of English land) and subsequent loss of it to the privileged aristocracy came, Belloc asserts, the decline of the “distributive state” and western freedom. Later in the book he treats this setback for the organized church as though it were solely a spiritual decline among Englishmen which then led to those evils he maintains are inherent in industrial capitalism. His thesis regarding the role of the church is muddy and poorly defended, here as earlier.

This concentration of land in the hands of the aristocracy led to the further dispossession of the small landowner (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, etc.) and, coupled with the mass production of the Industrial Revolution, led to the creation of a large and permanently propertyless proletariat. He dismisses the Industrial Revolution as simply a coincidental series of inventions which were seized upon by the wealthy aristocracy as a means to advance their own profit. Further, and this seems to me one of the main blunders of the book, he claims, “It was in England that the industrial system arose. It was in England that all its tradition and habits were formed; and because the England in which it arose was already a capitalistic England (that is, in Belloc’s terms, most of the property was in the hands of a few), modern industrialism, wherever you see it at work today, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the capitalist model.” That is, an arrangement of society which arises independently in many different nations is necessarily influenced, not by local conditions, but by the conditions of the first place where it arises. Hence, the industrialism of America, though arising in a society where feudalism had never taken root (outside of the nonindustrial south), was necessarily determined in form by the decaying feudal conditions of England. This seems to me, to quote Belloc’s own critique of the views of this opponents, “not only unintelligent, but false.”

Once the capitalist system is established, being based on the distinction between a small propertied class and a large unpropertied class it is beset by numerous crises which necessitate a fundamental change. This unstable system cries out for a replacement, which must be either the servile state, in which, in exchange for security, the proletariat submits to compulsory labor; the collectivist state, in which all property is seized by the state and operated “for the benefit of the community”; or a return to the “distributivist state,” whose virtues Belloc extols. The often repeated claim that the capitalism of 1912 was “in crises” is nowhere explained, save by cavalier statements to the effect that its dilapidated state is obvious to all and by stale and absurd socialist cliches that under such a system the entire proletariat starves to death, leaving no one to run the machinery. This is another case of shallow argumentation and further distracts from the book’s slight value.

In any case, Belloc claims that, in order to obtain security from starvation for the proletarian mass, certain measures are taken by the state, under the pressure of socialist reformers, to institute minimum wages, compulsory state-run insurance, state welfare program-, and all the other trappings of the oppressive welfare state. In so claiming, Belloc fails to take any great account of the individual motivations that lead state capitalists to adopt such programs. His dialogues between imaginary socialist reformers, proletarians, and capitalists are highly improbable and most unconvincing.

Laying aside these objections, however, we may proceed to Belloc’s establishment of the truly servile state. With such supposed benefits being ladled out to the proletariat, in reality paid for out of their own toil, though Belloc seems to think otherwise, come various positive requirements imposed by the state. These begin, of course, with such “minor” invasions of privacy as registration of workers, required reporting of one’s whereabouts, licensing (in fact, a return to the restrictive guild socialism which Belloc so highly praises), state/inspections, regulation of living habits and the like. He who pays the piper, Belloc affirms, calls the tune. While the ultimate source of funds is the proletarian qua exploited taxpayer, the immediate distributor is the state, and it is the state which calls the tune. This is strikingly evident in so-called welfare reforms,” wherein a close watch is kept on welfare recipients and numerous strings are attached to the receipt of state funds. The call by Reaganites and others for compulsory work on state labor farms by welfare recipients would of course, if implemented, be one such major step toward the servile state.

The conclusion, that the impact of socialist ideology on state capitalism simply leads to more entrenched statism in the interests of the ruling class, is sound. The process by which Belloc arrives at this notion, however, is as wrong-headed as can be. Belloc bases his entire theory of exploitation, so central to his argument, on the labor theory of value, wherein surplus values are expropriated by non-productive capitalists who lie (as it were) by a kind of economic vampirism. This fallacy has been dealt with so many times that it is tiresome to rehash the matter. A brief treatment, however, is in order.

Each party to a voluntary exchange clearly expects to benefit, else he (or she) would not have embarked on the exchange in the first place. That is, each party expects to end up after the exchange in a more highly valued position then if he had not made the exchange. Further, the value of a good is determined, not by the “amount of labor” extended to produce it, but by the valuer and his goals; no good will have precisely the same value to all men, because men differ in one respect or another. Specifically, the exchange of valued goods between a capitalist and a laborer in a market economy (that is, in a situation wherein neither violence nor fraud resorted to by either party) leaves both in a more highly valued condition. In such a competitive market, the worker tends to earn his marginal value product (or contribution to the finished good) discounted by the rate of interest, that is, by the fact that he is paid money by the capitalist in advance of the scale of the good and the realization of income by the capitalist. Both parties benefit, unless the state intervenes to subsidize selected interests, as in the modern corporate state.

The support given to Belloc’s thesis by a theory of exploitation would have been greater had he based it on the privileged position under statism enjoyed by state-capitalists (and their associates in the powerful established unions), but nowhere does he make this narrower claim; instead, he rests his case on the spurious wider doctrine of surplus value. In short, his important thesis remains, to a large extent, in the unenviable position of resting on a mass of hackneyed socialist cliches and misconceptions which fall to the first rational analysis.

Among the other shortcomings of Belloc’s work are his defense of a near-feudal condition of society, in which one’s social position is determined at birth, namely, the closed society of guild socialism; his defense of lands held “in common,” a system in which an individual owner is unable to capture the full capital value of his assets and hence overutiltizes or mismanages it; and his constant maintenance of a methodological collectivism (he states, “society can do anything to itself;” hence, I suppose, “society” could kill off half of “itself” and be morally justified as an individual can morally justify causing physical damage to himself in pursuit of a higher end). Further, Belloc treats the case for collectivism or complete socialism in a most respectful manner, failing to recognize that socialist states, like all states, have rulers too, who will seek to maintain their rule at the expense of the productive classes.

To conclude, Belloc has presented an idea, neither new nor overly brilliant, which be manages to rest on a foundation as solid as that underlying phrenology. Socialist or “anti-business” ideologues, often supported by business interests, serve only to entrench the rule of state capitalism (through outright subsidies and socialization of entrepreneurial cost and risk). They do this providing an intellectual cover for the rulers and beneficiaries of the state. One tragi-comic historical example of this process is that of the pathetic self-styled “progressives” and anti-trusters who prattled on about the evils of the trusts while they pushed for the very laws which created and nurtured monopolies by shielding them from the rigors of competition and guaranteeing a profitable return. Still worse, these deluded crusaders were powerful all the while being subsidized by financial interests. That such ideologues think that they will ever reign in the seats of power (something which most of them wish for, at least secretly) is one of the greatest jokes of all time. They are dupes, not, as the fever-swamp rightwingers would have it, of the “communists,” but of the beneficiaries and rulers of the corporate-state, the state-capitalists. The born-again socialist, the true believer, remains, however, completely impervious to any such criticism. His thick armor of closed dialectic or muddle-headedness or both protects him from reason while he seeks his goal of a society characterized by magical production, wherein, with the capitalists “exploiters” gone (whether of the state-capitalist or market-capitalist variety, a distinction most socialists are unable to make), the worker will be blissfully cared for by a benevolent state. Such a scenario is never actualized, of course, and in its place his beloved new super-state will exploit him to an extent never before imagined, for the benefit of the state, which is often comprised of the former state-capitalists. The conflicts of state capitalism are resolved not by the statism and slavery of socialism, nor by Belloc’s restrictive feudalism with its society of status, but by the peaceful operation of the stateless free market.

Shall the State Educate the People?

by Thomas Hodgskin

(Ed. Note—Thomas Hodgskin was a fascinating personality and a brilliant political philosopher and writer of early and mid-nineteenth century England. A radical Lockean and individualist anarchist, Hodgskin has unfortunately been enshrined in histories of economic thought as a “Ricardian socialist.” For several years in the late 1840’s, Hodgskin was an associate editor of The Economist (London), then a dedicated laissez-faire journal. During those years he took in hand a promising young assistant on The Economist staff, and converted him to laissez-faire and quasi-anarchism. The young neophyte was Herbert Spencer, and out of that conversion came the path-breaking and magnificent Social Statics. The following piece—abridged by us—was an unsigned editorial that Hodgskin wrote for The Economist, attacking the idea of State education. (The editorial appeared in the issue of April 3, 1847. England at that time did not have compulsory attendance or an extensive system of government schooling, but agitation for such a system had already begun. We are indebted for the article to George H. Smith.)

There are two questions, on which there is a universal concurrence of opinion; one is, that our present parochial and common schools are as bad as can be; the other is, education ought to be extended and improved. We fully share these opinions. We differ, however, from our contemporaries as to the best means of educating the people; and our present purpose is to explain our reasons for objecting to that being undertaken by the State.

To form a correct opinion, we must look at what the State has already effected. That the protectionist party, irreclaimably given up to the delusion that the State can regulate wages, settle profits, and increase production, still smarting from their overthrow in one of their strongest positions (the Corn Laws—ed.), and threatened in others, should seek to extend their principles in another direction and, essay to control, by education, that knowledge which is so adverse to their doctrines, seems quite natural. We give them credit for much sagacity in the undertaking. We have long seen that their present devotion to social improvement is the offspring of apprehension. The case is different with the free trade party. They have just practically established the great doctrine that the State cannot beneficially control wages, profits, or production, and invariably does mischief by meddling with them. That those who embrace the principles of free trade should all at once, as to education, adopt the protectionist principle, and claim the interference of the State with education, does not convert us to their creed, but makes us infer that they do not fully appreciate the principles on which they have been induced to act. Before they can with with propriety ask the State to extend its interference with education, they ought to prove that its interference with trade has been beneficial. But they know, and therefore it is not necessary for us to illustrate the point at great length, that the State never has interfered with trade but to derange, paralyse, and destroy it.

The State has, for example, at various times undertaken, with the best intention, to promote the manufacture of linen, the catching and curing of fish, the increase of shipping, the extension of agriculture, and it has, to attain these ends, given bounties, established monopolies, and devised elaborate schemes of navigation and corn laws. But every one of these schemes has in the end turned out failures. No man can point out, either in this or any other country, a single branch of trade or industry, born of state regulations, and nourished by them into healthy, profitable, and vigorous existence, Not only has the State everywhere failed to promote, by its regulations, the material wealth of the people—failed to encourage fisheries by bounties, and trade by monopolies—failed to beget abundance of ships and corn, but it has been continually compelled, in order to make room for the advancing wealth of society, and not further to damage the public welfare, to put down bounties, abolish monopolies, gradually to relax, and finally to suspend, because they could not be sustained, the navigation and corn laws. The natural progress of population, carrying with it extended knowledge, new arts, a further and further division of labour, and more and more rapid communication, has obliged our Legislature, after withstanding the progress, after shirking its demands, and stopping it or shoving it aside by one pretext and one inquiry after another, as long as possible, to give up as erroneous, a great party of its most elaborate and best devised schemes for increasing the national wealth. If ever we could deduce a law of nature from many successive facts, the necessary and continual abolition, in modern times, under all parties, before as well as since Parliament was reformed, of the most highly prized regulations for the encouragement of trade have clearly established the existence of a law of nature which is hostile to the State regulating the trade and the industry of the people. That law of nature is the law of free trade, and being thorough free traders, we believe that law is as applicable to education as to the manufacture of cotton cloth or the supply of corn.

If the State, meaning well, have been unable to advance, by its regulations, the material wealth of the people, is it likely that it can advance their mental power or immaterial wealth? The mode of increasing the quantity of corn is far better known than the mode of increasing useful knowledge. It is easier successfully to cultivate the ground than the mind. All the means of increasing material wealth are tangible; they almost fall within common arithmetic. The means of increasing knowledge, exciting proper motives, and regulating the mind, are not visible nor tangible; and, at the very least, the State is more likely to mistake the means of advancing the moral than the material improvement of the people. From the failure of the State, therefore, in its attempts to augment wealth, we infer the certain failure of its present schemes to improve education, and therefore we object to its attempting to educate the people.

We regard its past exertions in that direction as failures. By its means and its power the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge) are endowed and maintained; and there is no doubt that their revenues might be much more beneficially applied to the promotion of useful education than at present. Were those revenues, and the other funds set apart by the piety of our ancestors for the religious and moral education of the people, now properly applied, no further calls for this purpose would be requisite on the public purse. But the State sanctions and ordains the present improper application of those funds, and what reason have we to suppose that it will not also, after a short time, sanction some improper application of the funds now proposed to be applied to education? The application of the funds for education to purposes hostile to useful education, leads to the erection of an erroneous standard of scholastic acquirements. Education is neglected or perverted throughout the country, and generally ill understood, because it has long been misapplied and perverted at Oxford and Cambridge. To the men educated there, who have long been the general teachers, the present condition of education in England is mainly to be attributed. They have fastened upon us forms for substance—false grammar for good sense—and heathen ignorance for modern science. The funds intended for the teachers of Latin, Greek, and Theology, a completely false appreciation has got abroad of the money-value of scholastic acquirements; and while schoolmasters on the Continent are at once highly respectable, zealous teachers, and very moderately paid, here they are, in the main, greedy after great emoluments, comparatively uninformed, and zealous chiefly to rival in outward splendour the Master of Westminster, the Provost of Eton, or the Heads of Houses.

Our contemporaries justly condemn our common schools. But surely there is no nation in Europe where the State has devoted larger funds for the education of the people. Most carefully has it preserved all the old institution to that end. Very much, too, has it increased their endowments. During the last thirty years it has never ceased to foster education, and the result is, according to the Times, that “The children came out of school as incapable, as giftless, as mere parrots as they went in.” The bulk of this system of education has been in the hands, and under the control of men educated at the two national universities, which are preserved in all their rich endowments by the State. The State has meddled with them only to protect them from needful reform. The people are now, in fact, State educated; and what the Times describes is State education; and from that we conclude that the State is quite as incapable of promoting good education as profitable trade. If these be not conclusive arguments against the State meddling further with education, as least they inculcate great caution, and warrant great mistrust.

TRUTH

The unwelcome landlord
Who arrives
To demand the rent
From a politician

* * * *

— Agustin De Mello

One of our correspondents asks us, whether the State should not educate the people, in order to prevent the crimes which it is obliged to punish. That leads us to reply, that the State has been equally unsuccessful in preventing crime and in promoting trade. Within a short time it has had to avow that its scheme of transportation is a failure. The other schemes of silent and solitary punishments, its hulks, its goals, have all been failures. The gibbet, in spite of the State, has almost been abolished, because it was a failure. From these facts, and many similar facts, we cannot do otherwise than suspect that the State is quite as incapable by its acts—except as it may protect property and person, its proper and its only functions—of promoting the mental as the material improvements of the people. At the same time, every one of its acts involves considerable cost—some restriction—some additional paid officers—some more visits of the tax-gatherer; and being the zealous advocates of laissez-faire, of trusting to the people, we object to every system of which the good, like that of the State education, is doubtful, while the cost is certain.

We have another objection on principle, and we state our opinions freely, because we know that they are extensively canvassed, and not very gently criticised. Whether for good or for evil, they do not fall on barren ground. Education is of less importance to the community than subsistence. Without subsistence there will be no people to educate. Vain, too, will be the best education to prevent or repress crime unless subsistence be abundant. If it be the duty of the State to provide education for the people, it must a fortiori be its duty to provide them with plenty of food. If it be the duty of the State, as proposed by the minute of Privy Council, to rear good schoolmasters and pension them, it must a fortiori be its duty to perform the more important part of rearing good cultivators of the soil, and securing them a proper payment. It has attempted that, but egregiously failed. If it undertake to pay schoolmasters, it must undertake to pay farmers and all other useful labourers. It must, as it is now by some persons required to do, feed the people, and it must in spite of the laws of nature, in seasons of dearth or famine like the present, secure, as well as at every other time, to every man in the community, as well as to the schoolmaster, a fair day’s wages for his work. But, as all reasonable men admit the utter impossibility of the State undertaking the major and more important duties which are implied in its undertaking the minor, we conclude, on principle, contrary we know to the present set of the popular current, that it ought not to undertake to teach the people, and has no business to rear, and pension, and reward schoolmasters.

We are at the same time perfectly convinced that our present system of school education is as bad as possible. But we are also convinced that our system of cookery is far from good in England. It is extremely wasteful. The people generally speaking are ignorant of the chemical properties of food, and ignorant of the art of making it at once tasteful and nutritive. We are of opinion, too, in common we believe with many other persons, that the means of subsistence are unfairly distributed. We are sensible of the existence of many evils in other parts of society as in education, but as we do not conclude that the Government should equalise the means of subsistence, and reform the national cookery; neither can we agree with those who affirm that it should provide education for the people. We reprobate its interference with education, because we do not see how it can then object to equalising the means of subsistence and reforming our cookery. Now, we are convinced, that from calling on the State to educate the people, to calling on it to equalise property, the stages are few and short.

We value education too highly not to be anxious that it should not be brought into discredit. The State certainly has the art of contaminating that which it touches. The numerous prohibitions against importing and exporting various commodities, carry with them a conviction that the thing prohibited is essentially advantageous, and smuggling is stimulated both by that and the desire of profit. The converse of the rule equally holds good; and when the State undertakes to promote any object, by bounties and encouragements, it implies that there are difficulties to be overcome or pain to be endured. The schemes of education involve compulsory taxation. Our Government, from administering and controlling which a large part of the people is excluded, is necessarily unpopular, and for the State to meddle with education, is to bring education somewhat into discredit. In many cases it now happens that the people, instead of regarding school education as beneficial to them, regard it as the contrary, and reluctantly send their children to school, as a favour to their masters and employers.

We are not surprised at such a result. Education is, with much parade, provided by one class for another; after many years of schooling, the children have learnt little more than their catechism, and, perhaps, some little contempt for their less-instructed parents. After leaving school, it is a chance whether they ever find any use or advantage from what they have been taught. Were education left untouched by the State, its own beauties and inherent advantages are so great that the people would be as naturally attracted to its as they are to high wages, and would be as eager to obtain it as they are to get plenty of fine clothing and wholesome food. We advocate laissez-faire in education, therefore, as in trade, because our firm conviction is, that it is the best, and, indeed, the only means of ensuring that improved and extended education which we all desire.

We must take leave to say, that we doubt the frankness and sincerity of many of those who now advocate State education. Individuals of both parties appear to us to entertain an ulterior and unavowed purpose. The hidden thought of the lower classes is, “Let us get knowledge, and we shall know how to use it. Let the Government, or the State, or the middle classes, teach us and our children—let us get from them all we can—and then we shall be able to help ourselves in opposition to them.” The unavowed thought of State, or the upper classes is, “The people are getting intelligence for themselves—they are becoming powerful through their acquirements as well as by their numbers—and if we do not direct their progress, they will escape altogether from our control.” Some promote education, then, with a view to preserve power; others, in towns at least, willingly accept it as the means of destroying the superiority of the class which promotes education. We see clearly that this mode of proceeding must increase the expectations and power of both parties to do mischief, till it ends not in the gradual subversion of what is false, but in a hostile collision. Were the people left to educate themselves, real knowledge—not theories and systematised errors—would continually be evolved in both classes, and both would gradually learn to get rid of false expectations, and abate reciprocal pretensions.

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Newsletters of Libertarian Interest

From time to time, we like to recommend reading materials of libertarian interest which have come to our attention, but for one reason or another are not well-known generally. The following fall into that category:

1.Growing Without Schooling: 308 Boylston Street, Boston, Ma. 02116. $10 for six issues. Editor, John Holt, performs a vital service in bringing together ideas, information and personal witnessing for the hardy but small band of deschoolers—parents who have totally withdrawn their children from both public and private schools, and are struggling to educate children in the home. Includes such valuable features as a directory of names, tips on books and teaching aids, Holt’s own advice on methodology; battle reports from the legal firing lines, letters from parent-teachers. A sample copy costs $.50. 8 pages. A unique contribution to radical alternatives in education. Issue number six has just been published.

2.Private School Monitor: Center for Research on Private Education, University of San Francisco, Ca. 94117. Editor, Prof. Donald A. Erickson. The first issue, Spring 1978, is intended as a journal of abstracts of articles appearing in scholarly journals focused on private education, normally ignored in the public school-oriented professional journals. A valuable tool for all who wish to keep abreast of the current research in the field, statistical data and trends. 10 pages. Write for a copy.

3.Inform: Center for Independent Education, 1177 University Drive, Menlo Park, Ca. 94025. Editor, William Johnson. Six issues annually. Free on request. 4 pages. News of scholarly research, conferences, fellowships, publications, events in the field of private or non-public education. Lively and useful for those who wish to be kept up to date on the work of CIE and of scholars working in research on private schooling.

4.The Private Elementary and Secondary School Outlook: Council for American Private Education, 1625 Eye Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006. Editor, Barbara Blaes. Free on request. Four page monthly report largely reflecting current trends in legislative and administrative policies which will have an impact on private schooling. Excellent watchdog over the courts, the department of HEW, trends in organizing support for private school interests. Unfortunately, it reveals a tendency for private schools to want a slice of the tax payer’s money, and even stronger aggressiveness of private school lobbying in Washington and the state legislatures.

5.Liberty: 6840 Eastern Avenue NW, Washington D.C. 20012. Six issues a year. $3.75. Published by the Religious Liberty Association, this fine 34 page magazine reports on national and international events and issues impinging on the right of freedom of religion. It is firmly anti-statist on this issue, though reflecting a largely sympathetic Judeo-Christian perspective. Libertarians will find most articles informed and exceptionally useful and scholarly in content, though directed at a non-scholarly audience. A recent issue on “Civil Disobedience” had a triple color portrait on Grandhi, Thoreau and King.

6.Galatians Seven. Edited by Lee Shubert. 10 Harwich Rd. Morristown, N.J. 07960. Free on request. A four page newsletter of a fellowship of Christians who are members of the Libertarian Party. Its object is to alert the libertarian movement to matters of concern in the field of Church-State relations and to bear witness to the compatibility of Christian belief and libertarian philosophy. Hopefully, the libertarian movement will not repeat the folly of the 19th century liberals whose anti-clericalism doomed them to minority status in continental, Christian Europe, or of the libertarians who identified their libertarianism with militant atheism, and thus severely restricted their political growth and impact.

— J.R.P.

Towards Freedom of Choice in Education

by Joseph R. Peden

For libertarians, the breaking down of the public school monopoly has a very high priority in our strategy of destatizing American society. Education was one of the first major areas of our economy to be socialized. Public schools, along with the post office, now show themselves to be the most unpopular government enterprise among the general public, and the most likely to succumb to a determined libertarian assault.

But the question remains. How can we undermine this enormous bureaucratic Leviathan which employs directly and indirectly millions of people, and feeds a host of other corporations, universities, unions and other socio-economic institutions and interests? Apart from a constitutional prohibition of State activity in the field of education—a strategy suggested by Prof. Stephen Arons’ analysis in his essay The Separation of School and State: Pierce Reconsidered (Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, Ca. 1977)—two other approaches offer some hope of amelioration of the present statist monopoly: the voucher system and tuition tax credits.

The voucher system is increasingly popular with a wide range of the public, and even among some public school educators. While several plans have been offered differing in detail, by Milton Friedman, by E.G. West, and most recently by John E. Coons and Stephen Sugarman in Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Berkeley 1978), many libertarians are not convinced that the voucher system would be a real step forward. Several serious objections come to mind: first, it is very unlikely that the courts would approve a voucher for religious schools for constitutional reasons. But the most widespread complaint of parents about public education is its inability to provide an education which strengthens the religious values of the child and family. Nor do courses in “values clarification” or “moral education” appear an adequate substitute. On the contrary, such government sponsored “moral education” is perceived as even more dangerous than no formal moral education at all! Secondly, the voucher system opens the door to an increasing amount of state supervision and regulation over those private schools licensed to receive voucher funds. The situation in England, where acceptance of state aid by private schools has undermined thoroughly their freedom from government interference, suggests that bureaucratic dynamism would shortly assert itself against the autonomy of the private school management. Efforts presented underway by the IRS to impose “affirmative action” policies on private and religious schools through the threat of lifting their tax-exempt status indicate the lengths to which the state bureaucracy will go to impose its will. If the private schools were already heavily dependent on state financing through the voucher system, can anyone doubt their inability to resist any state directives?

Libertarian doubts about the efficacy of the voucher system in advancing freedom of choice are well founded. The voucher fails to deter the opportunity for state control, and excludes aid to parents preferring religious school.

Tuition tax credits have recently gained strong support. Unlike the voucher, the tax credit scheme offers no problem for those who wish to make use of church-related schools. The principle of tax exemptions for contributions to churches and religious foundations is well-established in law and custom, and has not the likelihood of attracting serious constitutional challenge. Thus a major constituency of support is guaranteed for such a program: all those who favor religious education, and oppose the present discrimination in the tax law against parents choosing such alternative schooling. (The so-called double tax argument). Another point in its favor is that, as the money never leaves the hands of the taxpayer, unlike the voucher system, there is virtually no extra cost to its use, no bureaucratic process beyond that already established for other tax credits in the internal revenue procedures. HEW would be virtually excluded from glutting its maw with new bureaus, inspectorates, auditing and dispersing bureaucracies.

But a question remains? What about the poor? The taxpayer who is so underpaid or has so many other exemptions that he pays no net taxes on income? Will the children of the poor be left destitute of an education through lack of family earnings? This presents a major problem for any scheme built around the system of family tax credits.

In a remarkable policy statement issued October 13, 1978 by Ed Clark, Libertarian candidate for Governor of California, I think we may find a breakthrough on the problem of the parent with too little tax liability to allow for a meaningful tax credit for educating his children. Clark proposes instituting a direct, dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $800 per student for parents who choose to send their children to private schools. To care for those without sufficient resources, or net tax liability, he proposes to give the $800 tax credit to any taxpayer for tuition paid by him for a student not related to him by parental ties. In effect, allowing anyone to transfer title to their tax payments from the state to a needy student! Further he would allow California corporations to take tax credits against their tax liability for tuition paid by them for students (up to $800 per student or 25% of the corporations tax liability). Clark estimates these corporate grants would finance as many as 750,000 students per year!

While the details require further study and research, Clark’s plan marks a significant improvement over the voucher and earlier tuition tax credit schemes limited to parent taxpayers. It is to be hoped that the plan will not die with the particular election which gave it birth. Between now and the next Libertarian Party convention, the plan should be thoroughly researched and discussed in preparation for its possible adoption by the National Party convention next year. But more importantly, this plan is extremely attractive to a wide audience of citizens seeking some way out from under the dead hand of state schooling. It should appeal to the rich, as a painless extension of their philanthropy, and to the middle class and the poor who will win a freedom of choice in education that is meaningful. Here is not charade in which such choice is made free of financial penalty, but in which the bureaucratic power of the state is enhanced rather than annihilated.

The Clark plan needs to be refined, “packaged” for public consideration, and a national drive instituted to press for its adoption. Also, the implications of Clark’s approach ought to be explored. What he had proposed is that the tax payer select the recipient of his tax obligation directly, rather than through the mediation of the legislator or bureaucrat! It is direct democracy of a special kind seldom seen before. While all taxation is theft, it would certainly be a less bitter experience if the one robbed could select the robber or beneficiary of the theft.

Rub-a-dub-dub Three Men in a Tub

by Sheldon Richman

Advocates of the non-aggression ethic seem capable of coining up with infinite variation of the lifeboat situation. Newcomers to the libertarian philosophy especially spend a great deal of time wondering who has the right to do what in a sinking raft or on an island of shipwreck victims.

To the extent that these long and often tedious arguments are for the purpose of probing the perimeters of natural law, they may be fruitful. But this can go too far. Indeed, one clue to when that point is reached is when we are so busy sorting out “raft rights” we perhaps forget that it is the state that is responsible for most of the common disasters—war, unemployment, depression.

Persons becoming interested in the liberty ethic often insist on a simple, quick response to what could be called “rub-a-dub-dub three men in a tub” situations. It is as if an unsatisfactory answer topples the entire ethical and social structure built up from the non-aggression foundation: Clearly, this is not the case.

First of all, no other ethical system has anything to contribute to such debates.

The utilitarian would have to maintain that the three men in the tub (where only one can survive) must decide whose survival would be of maximum utility to society. Assuming utilities could be measured and computed, which of course they cannot, by the time the calculations were completed, all three would have perished in the foamy brine.

The altruist ethic is no more helpful, since all three would have to jump overboard while insisting that one of the others stay. (Which one would be a hopeless dilemma.)

Even hedonism, taking note of the need for consistency, fails to lead us out of the wilderness.

That such situations produce, at best, fuzzy and only partially satisfactory resolutions shouldn’t be any surprise. Rights are derived from man’s nature as a rational and social being. Because of that nature, his interests and ends can potentially be brought into harmony with those of his fellows. The market is the result. But by assumption, the ends and interests of three men in a tub CANNOT be brought into harmony. If all of life was a sinking, overcrowded lifeboat the subjects of rights and liberty would not arise, just as the solitary Robinson Crusoe need not be concerned with the non-aggression ethic.

Fortunately, life is not as these situations describe.

Ethical principles must be derived from and judged by the normal conditions of man’s existence. Emergencies, by definition, are abnormal.

Curiosity about this is understandable and admirable. But it might be more fruitful to devote more time to probing the ethical value of free exchange and the ethical monstrosity of the state.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XI NUMBER 6

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1978

US-ISSN0047-4517

LP Breakthrough

1978 was the breakthrough year—for the Libertarian Party and for libertarian politics generally.

It was like magic. It began in the middle of May, when the now-famous property tax slash, California’s Proposition 13, was even in the polls. Then came the typical smears of the state’s political, business, bureaucratic, media and labor establishment, threatening dire calamities if Prop. 13 should pass. This scare tactic had always worked before. But this time something new and wondrous happened. The terror tactics of the Establishment proved counter-productive; the more they poured it on, the more the voters rose up in anger and disgust, until, on June 6, Prop. 13 smashed through the solid front of “respectable” opposition by a margin of 2:1.

The tax revolt soon spread across the country, and this time the politicians of all parties were scared. Many, such as California’s shrewd Governor, Jerry Brown, quickly bent to the new wind. “Fiscal responsibility” filled the air. The face of American politics was sharply changed.

Then, in the November elections, the Libertarian Party vaulted toward major-party status. In 1976, Roger MacBride has gained 173,000 votes in 32 states (including the District of Columbia), amounting to 0.33% of the total vote in those states. The typical LP candidate across the country received somewhere around 1 to 2% of the votes. Now, in 1978, the story was very different. Of the 176 LP candidates for whom voting percentages are available, the average LP vote was a remarkable 6.0%.

Of all the LP races, two stand out above all the rest. One is the victory of Dick Randolph, 42-year-old insurance man from Fairbanks, Alaska, for the State House of Representatives. A former Republican state legislator, Randolph was elected for one of the six at-large seats with 35.3% of the vote. Libertarian Bruce Boyd was just beaten out for another at-large post. We have a Libertarian state legislator! The Randolph victory was presaged in the MacBride race, when MacBride gained 12% of the vote in Fairbanks, by far his best showing in the country.

But especially remarkable was the showing of Ed Clark, 48-year old Los Angeles attorney, in his Libertarian race for governor of California. Clark, founding chairman of the New York Free Libertarian Party, had moved to California, and was elected in 1977 to the LP national committee. Now Clark, in a phenomenal performance, corralled no less than 374,000 votes, amounting to 5.5% of the vote in the nation’s largest and pace-setting state. It was the largest number of votes an LP candidate had ever received. Clark obtained 15% of the vote of the Republican candidate Evelle Younger, and in the San Francisco Bay Area Clark garnered a scintillating 25% of the Younger vote. We have arrived!

It began when Clark became the first LP candidate ever to show up as a separate line in the polls, with 2% in September. He rose to 3% in October. The trend was up! Cabdrivers, strangers at non-political cocktail parties, random bumper-stickers, began to announce that they were voting for Clark. But even your editor, a veteran optimist, underestimated the actual Clark vote by about 50%.

How did Clark do it? It was with money, for his vote per dollar ratio was about 1.5:1, considered remarkably cost-effective for a “minor” party candidate. He did it, as the San Francisco Examiner put it the day before the election, by “captivating the media.” Clark was clearly a highly intelligent and articulate candidate, he had stature and presence, and his low-key approach went over very well in his TV appearances. The contrast between Clark and the cretinous American Independent Party and Peace and Freedom Party candidates was striking, as was his obvious superiority in intelligence to Evelle Younger. Moreover, Clark had the rare ability to cleave to radical and principled positions, while coming forth with transition programs consistent with principle that sounded cogent and reasonable to the media. The media then began to cover him favorably and at length. Long and favorable articles began to appear about Clark in virtually all the major newspapers of the state. The Bakersfield Californian, a daily newspaper serving a metropolitan area of 200,000 people, endorsed Clark, calling him and his ideas “the wave of the future”, a phrase echoed by CBS-TV commentators on election night. With Clark showing well on TV, radio, and in the press, the public then caught the Clark fever, and we were on the way to the 374,000 votes.

Who voted for Clark? A private survey of voters in the Los Angeles area revealed the startling statistic that 70% of the Clark voters had not voted since 1971, in contrast to the Brown and Younger non-voters, which totalled only 5%. In short, the Clark campaign made significant inroads into the growing legion of independent voters who, disgusted with politics and government, identify with neither major party. Here is a rich field for the LP to tap far more extensively.

Roger MacBride received 56,000 votes in California, out of a total vote of 7.6 million; Ed Clark gained 374,000 votes out of a total of 6.8 million. If we convert these votes to the presidential total, and multiply by the same ratio that the total U.S. MacBride vote displayed to his California vote, we get a projected total vote for an L.P. Presidential candidate of 1.26 million votes. And since the L.P. Presidential ticket will undoubtedly be on many more state ballots this time, 1.5 million votes seems almost probable. And much more if the breaks are right.

But for this, for the Libertarian Party’s arrival as a major party about to reshape American political life, we must prove to be a mature, responsible party, interested in real world political concerns. The convention committee has scheduled a superb theme for the national Presidential nominating convention next September 6-9, at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The theme is: “Toward a-Three Party System”, and all the speeches and workshops are built around national political developments in the light of the imminent entry of the Libertarian Party into the mainstream of American political life. We must endorse this theme, and repudiate the last-ditch efforts of “futurists”, fantasts and space cadets to deflect the convention to the contemplation of the lotus-land of their looney fantasies. And, above all, we must select a Presidential candidate with great care. We must select someone who will look like a credible Presidential candidate, who will make fine showing on national television, and who is knowledgeable about all the important political issues of our time. The LP presidential candidate must be a man of stature and not a showman. He must be able to “captivate the media” on a nationwide scale.

The choice of Presidential candidate is one of the most important decisions we shall ever make. If Roger MacBride had not been nominated in 1976, the Libertarian Party would have collapsed and never reached its current stature. Now our choice will determine whether we are to burst forth into a major party or remain waiting in the wings. We must make our decision, not on the basis of factions or personal resentments, but after giving a long and objective look at which candidate is best equipped to bring the Libertarian Party into the mainstream of American life.

And Gladly Teach: Power and the Professors

by Justus D. Doenecke

Richard D. Mandell. The Professor Game. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977.

Professor X. This Beats Working for a Living: The Dark Secrets of a College Professor. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1973.

Russell Kirk. Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning. South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1978.

Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, and Miro Todorovich, eds. The Philosophy of the Curriculum: The Need for General Education. Buffalo: Prometheus, 1975.

Sidney Hook. Education and the Taming of Power. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1973.

“As with our colleges, so with a hundred ‘modern improvements’; there is an illusion about them.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Few areas in American life are so often criticized as higher education. After decades of celebration, the tone has changed markedly, with one book after another presenting indictments. From the calibre of the student admitted to college to the folkways of the professoriat, academe is under hostile scrutiny. And to cap things off, there are relatively few suggestions for reform, and many of these are either offered in a moment of whimsy or incapable of mass adoption. Hence today’s writing often takes on a sardonic tone, with an author’s indictment hiding a sense of desperation.

Mandell’s book is typical of this genre. A historian at the University of South Carolina, Mandell deals with many aspects of faculty life, including tenure, sabbaticals, and publication. The bulk of the book is perceptive, although the work is marred by an almost unrelieved cynicism and obsession with sex. In his fictionalized profiles of faculty “ideal-types,” Mandell shows signs of becoming a Grace Metalious when we need a Nathanael West.

Never a Golden Age

From 1762, the year Rousseau wrote his Emile, the academy—Mandell notes—was based upon certain liberal premises: that man is essentially good; that environment either fosters or perverts this goodness: and that learning should be pleasant and natural. In America, we have the notion that all “real” campuses should take the form of well-tended parks, for bucolic surroundings are bound to generate both discipline and wisdom.

Yet Mandell denies that there was ever a golden age in higher education, correctly stating that relatively few American students have ever been genuinely interested in their courses. Until the 1950’s, Ivy League students could get by with studying ten to fifteen hours a week; at many other institutions, the pace was even less, and the “honest grind” was a social pariah. Graduation, in fact, was difficult to avoid. (When this reviewer went to college, a straight-A average made any student an object of curiosity; only participation in contact sports and frequent use of latrine language permitted admission to some of the more prestigious fraternities.)

Mandell, of course, could trace ignorance much further back. In 1845, Thoreau wrote, “Even the college-bred and so called liberally educated men . . . have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts any where made to become acquainted with them”

Even now, so Mandell notes, many institutions are dominated by a loose anti-intellectual atmosphere, where students sleep often, professors act like genial buffoons, and administrators assume a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude towards all who come their way. It is ironic that a leading Shakespeare scholar has to defend standards against the very administrators that should be supporting them. For Ronald S. Berman goes even further than Mandell, writing that “The sooner that pass-fail options, late withdrawals from courses, incompletes, and other practices that evoke sympathy but do little for productivity are dismissed, the sooner intellectual work will find its natural relationship to standards of performance.” (“Teaching and Academic Life,” Imprimis, Jan. 1979).

The Lost Bonanza

There are, of course, occasional periods of bonanza. During the 1960’s for example, our government was so eager to sink billions into a general crash program that we had branches of state universities built in practically every county. During the middle of the decade, for example, community colleges were opening at the rate of one per week. Amid such scare rhetoric as “disastrous shortage,” “major national scandal,” and “frightening gap,” any decent Ph.D. candidate could choose among several juicy positions. In a seller’s market, candidates were bribed by competitive salaries, lowered teaching loads, and generous research grants. In the better universities, the number of teaching hours was cut in half, while salaries increased at rates faster than the cost of living.

One example tells the story. A public college that did not even have a sociology department in 1962 might hire a chairman in ’63. This chairman, the following year, would attend the national sociological meetings, where—on the spot—he was authorized to hire two full professors, three at the associate level, three assistants, and two instructors.

Parsons Writ Large

Only in the late sixties did the job market dry up, and campuses begin the retrenchment we know today. A declining birthrate, soaring inflation, and disgruntled state legislatures soon took their toll, and now even some well-published scholars find permanent employment difficult. Perhaps a third of our students put in their time at institutions inferior to that of the now-defunct center of learning and scholarship, Parsons College of Parsons, Iowa. “One can almost assume this,” writes Mandell, “of the black colleges and the financially strapped private and (to a lesser extent) public colleges that admit and cherish anybody who might be called ‘a student.’ The trained attendants who staff these colleges are called professors, but they are usually demoralized opportunists incapable of doing other work at anything like the same pay.”

By now, Mandell claims, much of the university has become hopelessly corrupt. Tenure, originally designed to protect academic freedom, is “often used as a shield for indifference.” Grade inflation goes hand in hand with lower performance, and both have permeated the best of institutions. In June 1975, seventy per cent of Harvard’s graduates made Phi Beta Kappa, and in the same year 49 per cent of the grades given by the history department at Northwestern were A’s. Such courses as “communication skills” have high enrollments, while the numbers of students in French and German steadily drop. (Incidentally, Mandell notes that the greatness of a graduate department can be measured by its hard line on the language requirement).

The outlook is bleak. Student judgements of faculty are usually so kind, Mandell argues, as to draw little line between good instruction and bad. If earnings remain good, faculty salaries have not kept pace with inflation. Because of the job crunch, the median age of professors in 1990 will be 48, and one can only wonder how many of these people will keep up in their fields.

Class, Caste, and Status

Mandell does much with the institutional rankings made by the professors themselves. You have ten universities at the top (e.g. Harvard—really in a class by itself, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley), twenty-five in the category of “great”: (e.g. the Big Ten, Cornell, Duke). Two minor points: less than one-fifth of the professoriat are in these two groups, and faculty here pride themselves on being called “Mister,” not “Doctor.”

Private colleges are in a different category. We begin with a small number of outstanding ones (e.g. Swarthmore, Reed, Oberlin, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Williams) where professors “have considerable self-respect, but they are a little aside from the usual pyramid of prestige. Once accustomed to these pleasant places, the teacher tends to stay in the league, for the demands on one’s time and a quiet prejudice against outside fame are such as to work against his or her establishment of a reputation (i.e. publication) in the discipline-oriented national mainstreams” (emphasis his).

Immediately below, one finds about a hundred respectable colleges and universities (e.g. Wayne State, Notre Dame, most of the state campuses of the California and New York systems). Mandell defines “respect” in a charming way: when you go to a convention, you don’t have to explain where the place is located. Perhaps a thi

Class, Caste, and Status

Mandell does much with the institutional rankings made by the professors themselves. You have ten universities at the top (e.g. Harvard—really in a class by itself, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley), twenty-five in the category of “great”: (e.g. the Big Ten, Cornell, Duke). Two minor points: less than one-fifth of the professoriat are in these two groups, and faculty here pride themselves on being called “Mister,” not “Doctor.”

Private colleges are in a different category. We begin with a small number of outstanding ones (e.g. Swarthmore, Reed, Oberlin, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Williams) where professors “have considerable self-respect, but they are a little aside from the usual pyramid of prestige. Once accustomed to these pleasant places, the teacher tends to stay in the league, for the demands on one’s time and a quiet prejudice against outside fame are such as to work against his or her establishment of a reputation (i.e. publication) in the discipline-oriented national mainstreams” (emphasis his).

Immediately below, one finds about a hundred respectable colleges and universities (e.g. Wayne State, Notre Dame, most of the state campuses of the California and New York systems). Mandell defines “respect” in a charming way: when you go to a convention, you don’t have to explain where the place is located. Perhaps a third of the professors work here.

But beneath all, there is “academic Siberia”—the under-endowed church-related college, the regional branches of many middle-ranked state schools, those black colleges emphasizing social life, certain experimental schools, the many private women’s college that are really finishing schools. (Mandell suggests that Alaska might be a more accurate term than Siberia, for Siberia “undoubtedly has many institutions of superior quality.”) Such places keep those enrolled out of the employment agencies and offer “some sort” of education, but they continually demoralize the competent teacher, who wants to leave.

This reviewer notes that professors here are almost always called “Doctor” (or lovingly “Doc”), and if they never receive the Ph.D., there is no fear. At some time in their career, their students (who will never be corrected) will bestow the degree upon them. Some faculty even list “Doctor” in phone books or put it on stationery envelopes, and more than one professor has signed his name “Howard Jones, Ph.D.”

The Disciplinary Pecking Order

Professors, however, not only rank institutions but disciplines as well. Historians and political scientists rate highly, for they dress conservatively and intrigue with skill. Philosophers are just as articulate but often stay out of power struggles. Sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists rank low, possessing coarse manners, wearing acrylic knits, seducing coeds, and sweating under the arms. English professors are of high to middling prestige, being “apt to develop tics, to fight like sopranos, and to carry grudges for years.” Foreign language faculty rate low in the hierarchy, for they are “likely to dress like tropical birds and are even whackier.” (Their departments, says Mandell, are often called “zoos.”) Scientists possess high prestige, although “they are rarely able to sound convincing when they explain just what they teach or how they do research.”

The lowest of the low are the professors of education, and Mandell’s description is a classic: “These isolated and scorned souls are bewildered in committee meetings, where they tend quietly to grind their teeth and to blink their eyes slowly. When challenged or otherwise required to say something, their mouths go dry. They speak as they write, in passive voice with added filler words of ‘situation,’ ‘process,’ ‘meaningful,’ and ceaseless ‘y’know’s.’” Among this group the title “Doctor”—usually an education degree, not the Ph.D.—knows no bounds, and educationalists “glow appreciatively when they hear it.”

An Overpaid Profession?

But prestige is not the only factor that makes people prefer university teaching to working for Sears or Three M. “For what they do,” argues Mandell as he looks at salaries on an hourly basis, “professors are very well paid and they have great amounts of time to dispose of exactly as they please” (emphasis his). The academic year is short and, in large institutions, teaching assistants do much of the grading. (In many schools, both large and small, many teachers give only perfunctory attention to term papers, which are returned to students without any comment at all—only a letter grade).

The busiest professors subscribe most enthusiastically to “academic self-government,” fritting away their lives on issues really decided elsewhere. (A Brockport economist aptly calls them “whirling dervishes.”) The committee system is a bane, unless some needed lobbying is in order. Indeed, according to Mandell, disillusioned professors write “so much about silliness in committees because only at these times do they see in action those of their colleagues who are not close friends.”

Publish or Perish: A Major Myth

To Mandell, the phrase “publish or perish” might be a myth, indeed a paper tiger. One would hope, he writes, that “the professor’s self-respect as an intellectual, a scientist, a professional, or a worker” would induce him to “think hard and creatively,” but such is seldom the case.

He offers some damning statistics to prove his claim. “Roughly half of the professors now in place,” he observes, “have never published anything—not even a two-page book review, a pasted-together chapter in a textbook, an edited document, an anecdote for a genealogical journal. Another twenty-five per cent never publish anything of substance that was not originally in their doctoral dissertations. Roughly 15 per cent of the professors labor along perhaps publishing a second book (or its equivalent in a nonbook field) requiring ten or more years of work. Fewer than 5 per cent of the professors who have been on the job five or more years are indeed strenuously engaged in scholarly work.” In short, about three-forths of our faculties publish little or nothing.

True, some twenty to thirty leading universities set such guidelines as an article a year, a book every five. (If an article is twenty pages and a book 400, we have a total of 500 pages in five years, a figure that equals a hundred pages a year or two pages a week. Many professors certainly expect more than an average of two pages a week from students requested to submit term papers.). However, due to tenure, this rule is impossible to enforce anywhere, and it is little wonder that less than five per cent of the Ph.D.’s in history maintain this pace.

One Scholar’s Claim

Historian Thomas C. Reeves, an able and rigorous scholar (and, as this reviewer can testify, a most generous one), gave his interpretation as to why. He writes, “The great majority of us toil in obscure institutions that passively if not actively discourage the labor related to research and publication. Rewards are distributed to those who, regardless of means, win student popularity and maintain high enrollments. Moreover, college teaching is much less demanding than the production of articles and books—as any honest professor will admit. To be increasingly rewarded for doing little is almost irresistibly attractive.”

To Mandell, many such individuals are just plain lazy. They will “just not think hard and consecutively, pull their chairs up to their desks, return to their quiet laboratories after supper or during the summer vacation. Nor do many of them read with care the newer journals in their fields or attend scholarly congresses for the purpose of finding out where the exciting problems in their fields are likely to be in the years ahead.” Mandell here makes some telling points, for many a student has witnessed seminars led with no preparation and has heard really “in” professors continually claim that leading journals were worthless. The facts never change, the pseudo-scholar, will pontificate, as he boasts that he has read little in his discipline in ten, fifteen, even twenty years.

The Case of the Adored Amateur

One can only elaborate on this point. Books get unwritten, then unread, and we end up boasting about it all. Often, incidentally, such flippancy is combined with ex cathedra prounouncements on everything from Brueghel paintings to the quantum theory, or a desire to teach advanced courses in at least five different, and quite diverse, disciplines. One distinguished historian of the American Civil War refuses to read seminar papers not grounded in primary sources, remarking that “Any one who has not done the required work has no right to any conclusions.” Now, so it seems, formal ignorance denotes an intuitive wisdom, and no Transcendentalist of Emerson’s day celebrated the untutored spirit with greater fervor.

One is reminded of the comment of historian John Lukacs: “There are many symptoms which suggest that the dangers of professional intellectualism are now the opposite from what people thought: instead of pedantry, sloppiness; instead of the narrow burrowning of the parochial bookworm, the sleazy superficiality of the professional intellectual.”

An Academic Jonathan Swift

Mandell’s remedies are desperate, perhaps serving as a kind of counterpart of Swift’s “modest proposal.” Making employment conditions less attractive will cut into recruitment, thereby alleviating the job glut. For example, one could increase teaching loads by one third, and demand an eleven month working year and a thirty hour week. Technical education would be shunted to community and junior colleges. All but elite institutions would abolish attendance requirements and credit, and professors would be required to engage in a variety of tasks, ranging from ushering at rock concerts to clinical counseling. Tenure would be available to those willing to accept a one-third cut in salary; for others, successive three year contracts would be the norm.

Mandell, however, is not the only cynic. “Professor X,” evidently a professor in Western history at a Great Plains institution, offers a short, emotional indictment based upon personal experience. Much of his book is impressionistic, bordering on the shallow and sensationalist; it should be seen as a gossipy, occasionally amusing tirade. Permeating the volume is a political conservatism, not surprising in a man who backed Nixon in 1968 and who deplores a “my-country-may-it-always-be-wrong” attitude he finds pervading the campus.

To X, the Ph.D. has become “a license to steal, inasmuch as the position of college instructor demands little work, less intelligence, and no courage.” Writing as one who has just discovered sin, he berates his colleagues for pomposity, elitism, and obsession with power at the expense of truth.

The Slothful Scholar

Sloth, X finds, is the greatest academic sin. “The professor,” he writes, “spends very little energy revising his lectures or grading or researching or writing—or even reading. Especially not reading in his own field of specialty.” X quotes the distinguished frontier scholar Walter Prescott Webb, who said, “When you publish, never expect understanding and appreciation from the people you most normally would expect it from, your own colleagues. They will make fun of your efforts, carry tales about you, belittle you. This they did to me—until I became president of the American Historical Association. Then they were glad to drop my name.”

On several items, X is particularly perceptive. The first deals with committees. Contrary to myth, so he claims, administrators encourage these peculiar institutions. Why? Because they realize that committees provide excellent therapy, give participants the illusion of power, and allow faculty to plead business when questions concerning productivity are raised. He writes, “Any professor who has a gripe, legitimate or otherwise, can be referred to a committee where his proposal will be buried under an avalanche of words, or procrastination, of debate. And should his proposal get favorable action in one committee, it can always be referred to yet another one. By the time a solution or change is recommended, the passage of time has lessened to such an extent that no action is needed. Thus the committee becomes a means of keeping faculty discontent at a minimum.”

X also calls the shots correctly when he defends publishing. His claim that the producing scholar is also the best lecturer” is quite overdrawn, for many distinguished scholars cannot keep an audience awake for five minutes. However, X is on firm ground when he asserts that “Without any exception the professor who would do well in the classroom must continue to research. Advancements in every discipline make it necessary for the professor to research constantly, else he will become hopelessly outdated (emphasis his)”

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Indeed, to elaborate on X, those very faculty who are the most behind boast the most that they have long ago mastered the fundamentals of the discipline; such people now claim to be engaged in more cosmic issues, ranging from the rise and fall of the West to the food service in the college cafeteria. We all seem to forget Chaucer’s classic description of the scholar in the Canterbury Tales, with his phrase “and gladly teach” prefaced by “and gladly would he learn.” Real teaching, of course, is always dependent upon continual learning.

Models Needed

We all, of course, have our cynical anecdotes that could match any by Mandell or X. And we can all produce some damning statistics. But if higher education is ever to change, models are needed. Some of us have had the privilege of attending lectures in which the material is updated to the very moment of delivery. (Here the names of such historians as David Herbert Donald, Wesley Frank Craven, and Arno J. Mayer come to mind). Or we have had research rigorously criticized page by page, paragraph by paragraph, line by line by professors who saw painstaking rigor as integral to their vocation as scholars. (One thinks of a host of individuals—Arthur S. Link, David Herbert Donald, Forrest McDonald, James T. Patterson, Alan Peskin, Thomas Reeves). One pious academic, writing in another age, called rigorous criticism of his own quite distinguished work “an art of grace.” Now the slogan is second-the-motion, no matter how deep the ignorance, and even the pointing to grammatical faults can be grounds for bitter enmity.

Perhaps those of us who studied under a curriculum that stressed a common corpus of humanistic learning will always remain dissatisfied. This reviewer found the core program of Colgate University crucial to his intellectual growth; his wife had a similar experience with the University of Chicago’s extension curriculum required of all students attending the Art Institute of Chicago.

Most memorable of all were those faculty who saw their vocation in humanistic terms. This reviewer will never forget Earl Daniels, literature professor at Colgate, who once snapped, “You know, in the Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad, doesn’t give a damn about racial problems!” Or Jonathan Kistler’s empathic treatment of Eliot’s “Gift of the Magi”, Or Rodney L. Mott’s expositon of Marbury vs. Madison, Or M. Holmes Hartshorne on Dostoyevski’s “Grand Inquisitor”.

Secondary schools too had their greats, perhaps more of them. One thinks of Walter Clark and Miles Kastendieck at Brooklyn’s Poly Prep, Pierson Curtis and D. Bruce Lockerbie of Stony Brook School. Then there are such headmasters as Allan B. Healy of Lawrenceville, Lewis Perry and William Saltonstall of Exeter, the late Rowland Cox of Groton, Claude M. Fuess of Andover, and George Van Santvoord of Hotchkiss. They had a range of learning, a degree of personal integrity, and an ease in communication that put many of our college administrators today to shame. In a very real sense they were eighteenth century men, men of broad diffuse culture; now it is a rare administrator who writes without jargon, much less draws upon the cultural traditions of the past.

Enter Russell Kirk

Of the few Americans perpetuating this great tradition, the name of Russell Kirk is foremost. Those who celebrate the joys of traditional, humanistic learning should find his book the most helpful. It is Kirk who addresses himself time and again to the curriculum, and who even offers models of what good education should be.

“One the whole—to express myself mildy—the higher learning in America is a disgrace,” he says. “A great many are schooled; very few are educated.” His indictment is legion, and with much of it we are familiar: the “open” curriculum, the swelling empire of the educationalist, quasi-professional sports, giantism of all sorts at Behemoth U. Today’s college, he writes, has something for everybody—except for the student concerned with wisdom and virtue and the professor who adheres to some coherent body of knowledge.

Porn Queens and Thurgood Marshall

But if his is a story that has long been told Kirk still tells it well, and some of his revelations are “marvelous” in the generic sense of the term. His brief sketch of Goddard College, or of the porn queen who enrolled at Michigan State, can match anything Mandell or X can offer. And outside of Dwight MacDonald, few could offer the kind of damning critique given to insipid high school English anthologies. One editor, Marjorie B. Smiley, not only filed her collection with absolute trivia but modestly included one of her own poems as well. “A judge is a man/is where he’s come from/is what he’s done/is/where he aims to go,” the latter the concluding lines of “Mr. Justice Marshall.” (Deep, deep). “For my part,” replies Kirk, “I’d rather not be judged by a magistrate who ‘is where he aims to go’; I’d prefer one with knowledge of law.”

For Kirk, World War II began it all. At that time, many intellectuals abdicated their professional responsibilities to serve uncritically the patriotic cause. Said philosopher George Boas of Johns Hopkins, for example, concerning the soldier, “All the learning of the world is not worth the experience he will gain from his military career; and if he is killed, at least he will not have asked some one else to die for him.” John Erskine, who pioneered in general education at Columbia, claimed not to dread the blows the war struck at humane letters.

John Hannah and George Eliot

To Kirk, it was in 1953 that deterioration really began to set in, for many administrators sought increased enrollment at any cost. Symbolizing this surge was John Hannah, president of Michigan State and a booster worthy of Sinclair Lewis’s Gideon Plantis. Although he only possessed one earned degree, a B.S. in poultry husbandry, he bore proudly an honorary doctorate conferred by MSU when he became its head. He had married the daughter of the former president.) Not a man of particular learning, he would for example, refer to “that great man” George Eliot. Under Hannah’s aegis, writes Kirk, “MSU’s fat catalogue offered curricula for every taste except refined taste.” (To read Kirk’s essays in the fifties, one would not think there was a worse administrator in the nation. There were some, and there still are).

By the sixties, higher education was experiencing a great barbecue, with bonanzas offered to private and public schools alike. Who pays the piper calls the tune, of course, and soon the price was to be paid. And now administrations who were so eager for the abundant soft money are facing federal regulations that make serious faculty recruitment, not to mention decent teaching, more and more difficult.

Recently state interference has taken some particularly grotesque forms. To receive money from New York State, Roman Catholic institutions must rid themselves of required chapel services or theology courses, remove any religious statement of purpose from university publications, eliminate hierarchy officials as trustees, and permit Protestant theologians to examine libraries and interview faculty. One almost wishes for the none-too-benign influence of Cardinal Spellman, who at least would not back off from a fight.

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The Myth of Relevance

Kirk’s comments on student demands are equally telling, particularly the demand for relevance. “In the long run,” he writes, “the sort of education which most profoundly affects the civil social order is that education which lifts the student above the confusion of the hour’s quarrels. The function of the college is not to gratify material desires, but to introduce students to long views. The function of the college is not to rouse the young to revolt against the nature of things, but to acquaint them with the wisdom of their ancestors. The function of the college is not to promulgate an extravagant ideal of human perfectibility, but to teach us the joy and the tragedy of the human condition. The function of the college is not inflame the passions, but to lead us toward right reason.”

Hence, to Kirk “the calm analysis of Tocqueville was more relevant to 1968 than the burning of draft-cards or the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington; Virgil’s advocacy of labor, pietas, fatum had more meaning for 1968 than the black flag waving above the Sorbonne.” No authors are more relevant to our predicament than Augustine or Plato. Confucius remains more significant than Mao, Aristotle than Sartre.

Kirk’s remarks on academic freedom are particularly telling. “Every right is married to a duty,” he asserts. “The duty which corresponds to the right of academic freedom is that the scholar must be dedicated to the conservation and the advancement of truth. He must be the guardian who reconciles permanence and change, and the active thinker who remembers the wisdom of our ancestors . . . He must be a temperate man of intellect, in short; and though he ought to hold steadfastly by his principles and ought not to be a mere trimmer to the breezes of the hour, still he ought to remember that, by his vocation, he has forsworn the lust after power. If he wishes to be an ideologue or a sophist, he should take himself out of the academy into the market place.”

Demythologizing the Past

Nothing if not an iconoclast, Kirk challenges the prevailing notion that the great universities of the past were governed only by undergraduates. Ordinarily they were religious institutions, subject to ecclesiastical authority with students as acolytes. Jumping ahead several hundred years, Kirk denies that any McCarthyite reign of terror took place in the 1950’s. And on quite a different point, Kirk—like Mandell—sees no Golden Age in the fifties. In 1955, the dean of Columbia Law School suggested that many liberal arts colleges teach next to nothing. Their graduates were not only ignorant of literature and American history; they did not know how to use a dictionary, much less read with dexterity.

Many of academe’s woes, claims Kirk in an argument that goes back as least as far as Albert Jay Nock, are rooted in over-enrollment. Too much of the student body is a purposeless mass, a bewildered and bored Lonely Crowd that would be better off in vocational training. Just before the intense activism of the late sixties, Christopher Jencks estimated that only one per cent of the student body sought to master a serious intellectual discipline, two per cent a more general education, and perhaps five per cent an introduction to middle-brow culture. (Except for a relatively few institutions, one doubts if the ratio has increased today).

Yet for a man so conservative, Kirk has some surprising notions, He by no means endorses promiscuity, but concedes that in loco parentis has been interpreted too strictly. He recognizes that teaching and research assistants have long been exploited. And he praises anarchist writer Paul Goodman, finding Goodman’s attacks on Philistine administrators particularly valid.

A Model Institution

Kirk takes much time outlining what an ideal institution should not be. It should avoid building more physical plant, drop out of quasi-professional athletics and vocation training, refuse to admit substandard students, and prohibit permissiveness. His ideal college would not engage in depth psychiatry. Students with serious emotional problems, he says, “should be transferred to another sort of institution: despite its recognition of moral worth, this model college should be engaged in the improvement of intellects, not the curing of psychoses.” A school of business administration might be the greatest snare. Denying that a business degree means anything to today’s employers, he writes, “! declare it a very odd concept that in a time when junior executives stand by the thousands in the unemployment-compensation queues, we ought to turn out more of the breed by forced draft, at the expense of liberal learning.”

But a school is better defined by what it is than what it is not, and here Kirk justly stresses the curriculum. In his model curriculum, he calls for study of the nation’s past, claiming that a people uninterested in its history might cease to be a people. Political theory he finds equally crucial, and here he gets quite specific. Names are named, and students would have a working familiarity with Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Gregory the Great, Burke, and Adam Smith. Although a Roman Catholic, he includes both Luther and Calvin. Grecian glory, Roman virtue, Christian wisdom, the growth of European order, the Reformation, British constitutionalism, those movements in our own time that stress “authority and freedom, the inner order of the soul and the outer order of the commonwealth, the complementary character of permanence and change”—all would be essential to the curriculum.

Community: Cliche or Reality?

Kirk is at his best in redefining that much over-worked word “community.” Genuine community, he notes, is knit together by certain enduring norms. Without these, people pursue only selfishness or hedonism, and the weak innocents (to use the words of Shaw) “stand by in helpless horror.”

To foster a sense of true community in the academy, the basic disciplines—literary, philosophical, and mathematical—must lie at the core. The study of literature would encompass both classical and modern languages, with the philosophical meaning of great works stressed. Much history would be subsumed under literature. Philosophy would be equally sweeping, as it would include metaphysics, ethics, and politics. As sociological knowledge is “the crown of social studies, not the footing,” it—and psychology—would be treated as aspects of philosophy. Economics would stress the great economists and their theories, biology the philosophical understanding of organic life. All the arts would be taught philosophically as aesthetics; there would be no studio work. Such “practical” courses as public administration, technical engineering, or education would go by the boards. Instead, the effort throughout would focus on the development of young people who want to cultivate intellect and conscience, and who are willing to give up immediate specialization in order to do so.

Kirk even outlines an ideal high school literature program, one that includes study of St. Paul, Shakespeare, Milton, Twain, Melville, Dickens, Eliot, Conrad, and Swift. (This reviewer would not have eliminated Beowulf, some short Anglo-Saxon poems, Everyman, the Second Shepherd’s Tale, the Canterbury Tales, and Hardy.) Noting the decline in reading proficiency, Kirk comments that “all the Xhosa children in the autonomous republic of the Transkei, in South Africa, study Macbeth and Hamlet, by the way; but that is too much to expect of New York Children.”

Such concern with literature at all levels of schooling reveals one of Kirk’s major concerns: that is that genuine relevance is related to things that are permanent, not to the potential issues of the moment. We are dealing, he continually maintains, with nothing less than the splendor and tragedy of the human condition. “When images of Dante are rejected, the images of LeRoi Jones will be applauded,” and political order—not just the cultural one—will become nihilistic.

Great Programs and Great Books

Kirk praises certain educational programs and institutions: the Integrated Humanities Program of the University of Kansas, International College in Los Angeles, St. John’s College, Cardinal Newman College, Thomas Aquinas College, St. Mary’s of northern California. Yet he is not totally uncritical, even of these. For example, he finds that the Great Books program of St. John’s can neglect historical continuity, not include enough imaginative literature, omit such conservatives as Burke and Newman, and employ its methods a trifle pedantically. Thomas Aquinas College, which Kirk sees as the best college in the nation, does not do enough with history and humane letters, too much with metaphysics.

Most helpful of all, in some ways, is Kirk’s recommended reading. On the purpose of liberal education, C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man; Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge; William Oliver Martin, Order and Integration of Knowledge; and T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture; On religion and education, Alexander Miller, Faith and Learning; Robert Elliott Fitch, Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self; Denis Baly, Academic Illusion; and Philip Pheniz, Education and the Common Good. On able pedagogy, Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching. On syllabi, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Reading. Indeed, one may safely say that Kirk’s reading suggestions are an education in themselves.

Where the Reviewer Differs

There are some claims with which this reviewer differs. Small colleges can be just as much of a wasteland as Behemoth U. and many are. Michigan State, Kirk’s whipping boy, has harbored some distinguished scholars—Russell B. Nye, Paul A. Varg, and Warren I Cohen come to mind—and has pioneered in the concept of an honors college. Research need not be a retreat for a scholar but integral to serious intellectual development—and to teaching. The John Dewey attacked by Kirk bears little resemblance to the man of disciplined intelligence eulogized by Sidney Hook. Kirk may rarely have heard a union official “speak of wisdom and virtue,” but one wonders what wisdom and virtue lie in the bureaucratic fight. Not all intergrative courses substitute facile generalization for serious knowledge; some pursue selected topics intensely and with rigor.

A more fundamental difference concerns the whole role of skepticism. Some doubt of established verities is crucial to growth, for the intellectual life—at its heart—involves the asking of questions. A reading of Hume’s “Inquiry into Human Understanding,” or Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship,” or John Dewey’s “A Common Faith,” or Sidney Hook’s “The New Failure of Nerve” can lead to far more religious and philosophical maturity than exposure alone to Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther. (See also my comments concerning Kirk in “That Noble Dream,” Libertarian Forum, Oct. 1977.

But more than any other educational critic, Kirk has shown us the way. We are permanently in his debt.

This is not to say that there are not other efforts, and some are quite perceptive. The president of Amherst College, addressing the opening convocation in September, 1977, said, “Name any decent college or university in the United States these days, and you will find a committee on the curriculum at work.” The Hook anthology testified to this observation, made by John William Ward, and it is a work that should be continually consulted. The volume is based on a conference held by the University Center for Rational Alternatives at Rockefeller University, New York, in September 1973.

Student Irrationality

The present picture, as many of the contributors note, is a dismal one, and fault in part lies with the students. Many are doctrinaire ideologies, suffering—not from an overdose of skepticism—but from a total lack of it. Others tend to celebrate the private, personal, and mystical to such an extent that they hold conventional rationality in contempt. All too often, so the contributors argue, young intellectuals take their own personal experiences, not reason or tradition, as the sole touchstone of truth. Such sages as Charles Reich, for example, advocate a Consciousness III that stresses what is vaguely called “the total experience of life” at the expense of logic and analysis. (One college president was so enthusiastic about Reich’s work that he bought multiple copies for faculty reading).

If a college responds to the interests of certain vocal students, the curriculum cannot help but be distorted. As Nathan Glazer of Harvard writes, “In the social sciences unfortunately it is possible—and even respectable, to respond to students’ interests by changing what one teaches: to give up Max Weber for Frantz Fanon or a pluralistic approach to American society and culture for a Marxist one; to replace Western civilization with Eastern or African studies.” Such foolish pandering reaches absurd lengths when, as noted by Brooklyn College sociologist Ernest Gross, excellent New York City institutions advertised courses in astrology and pornography.

Faculty Irresponsibility

Yet professors too are at fault, and Hook—now with the Hoover Institution—makes no more telling point than his comment that many academicians do not believe in the validity of what they are doing. (To push the point even further than Hook, academe provides a haven for those who find their own businesses, the stock market, pro football, deep-sea diving, and social activism their true calling). Far too often, professors see their role as the training of apprentices only, not novice students, and communicate in a technical language understood only by the initiated. As the Columbia economist Charles Issawi notes, “We social scientists excel at producing turgid, flatulent, pretentious paragraphs, full of jargon that, at least four times out of five, is quite unnecessary.”

And even bookstore owners are not immune. Physicist Gerald Holton of Harvard notes that students who wander through the Harvard Coop “will find the whole category ‘Science’ is banished to one distant set of five-foot shelves, largely devoted to ecology, Issac Asimov, gardening, Immanuel Velikovsky, and manuals on the care of cats and dogs. To reach that section, in this and most similar stores, one must take care lest one gets lost in labyrinthine spaces given over to what really seems to sell today—the occult, sci-fi, transcendental musings, handbooks on shamanism or mushrooms, and the achievement of joy through various types of athletics.”

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Experiment: Encounter Group over Augustine

Many experimental programs only compound the problem. “In the name of all that is new and relevant,” claims Herbert I. London of NYU’s University Without Walls, “Plato and Confucius become the flotsam and jetsam of history and Malcolm X and Hermann Hesse the only heroes. In the name of egalitarianism, academics ignore their roles and let students decide what is worth reading. And in the name of self-actualization, an encounter session leads to personal growth while an evening reading The City of God is considered an exercise in Futility.”

Traditional expectations, such as research papers, are lost, and students receive credit for irrelevant life experience. Non-directed field work is defined per se as possessing a learning experience, ignoring the adage of George Bernard Shaw that “You can take an ass around the world and he won’t become a horse.” Sometimes students spend so much time deciding what to do that they never get around to mastering specific material of any sort. The comment of Andie Gide, “Art is born of discipline and dies of freedom,” would find few adherents among some devotees of experiment, including those young people who deny the possibility of objective standards. When London asked a group of them how to make professional judgments, one replied, “Man, you know, you just know.”

The Need for Requirements

To assure a serious education, requirements are necessary. Hook aptly comments, “The proposition that most students, upon immediate entry, know what their genuine educational needs are seems to me quite dubious. As a rule, they no more know what their educational needs are than they know their medical needs.” The prominent philosopher continues, “The notion that the generality of students . . . can make an informed and intelligent decision about their abiding educational needs before being exposed to the great subject matters and disciplines of the liberal tradition is highly questionable.” For an administration to say this, of course, and to prescribe minimal requirements, takes courage.

LOST CAUSE

Sixty thousand men
Laid down their only lives
For the Johnsons
And the Nixons
Who made them
Take their ride

Whoever will remember
Their futile bloody gore
When the history books
Are opened
In fifty years
Or more

* * * *

— Agustin De Mello

For Hook, essential to liberal education is the need to communicate clearly, to possess knowledge of one’s body and mind and of the world of nature, to have historical perspective, to be aware of contemporary conflicts of value, to master principles of inquiry, and to be familiar with the artistic and cultural legacies of civilization. Such mastery, Hook argues, involves mastery of fact as well as method, and it is the whole concept of fact that is too often on the defensive. Such goals might appear utopian in today’s peculiar environment, but they are truly indispensable to serious pedagogy. Stress on “intuitive knowledge” and “residual concepts,” this reviewer argues, irresponsibly downplays mastery of substance, cheapening the entire academic enterprise.

Hook makes another point. It is, in Hook’s eyes, particularly mastery of scientific principles that permits one to be “truly sane,” for some knowledge of our place in “an orderly, noncapricious cosmos” is needed for survival. Unfortunately, he notes, there are more students enrolled in astrology than in astrophysics.

Hook fortunately is not alone. Philosopher Ernest Nagel of Columbia concurs: knowledge of natural science method is essential: for centuries, it has been regarded as “the most effective way men have yet devised for acquiring competent knowledge of the nature of things.” Ronald Berman, in a different but equally valid insight, stresses that “education means access to the best of what is thought and said” (emphasis his), and here he notes Milton and Shakespeare. If a student does not know why he is a Western man, asks Aldo S. Bernardo of Verazzano College, can be ever expect to realize what it means to be a non-Western one?

History: The Shame and the Glory

Several contributors stress historical consciousness. As Wm. Theodore de Bary, provost at Columbia, notes, “If the past should not be sacrificed to the present, neither should the present be sacrificed to the past.” Conscious neglect of the remote and unfamiliar, writes Frederick A. Olafson, philosopher at UC-San Diego, ends up ultimately with the only voice heard being our own. On the other hand, as Issawi notes, history shows how people actually behave—not how the utopian theorist or the amateur politician says they do.

Even history, however, can be taught irresponsibly, as Gertrude Himmelfarb of CUNY tells us. True, most historians cannot compete with the president of the Modern Language Association, who declared the study of all literature (or was it only Milton?) obsolete. Yet, a form of historical relativism—stressing the “interesting” nature of an interpretation at the expense of its truth—is dangerous. So is the claim that the psychic character of the historian necessarily enters into the history he writes. And so too is the assertion that “only Black historians are competent to write the history of Blacks, and women historians the history of women.”

Several of the contributors would differ with Russell Kirk, or at least modify his classic and Christian emphasis. Hook, for example, warns against attempting to derive the curriculum from some overall view of “first and last things,” claiming that no consensus on such matters is possible. M.H. Abrams, professor of English at Cornell, warns against converting disciplines into dogmas: “the humanistic search for truth,” he writes, “is always in process and is never finished.” Paul Kurtz, editor of the Humanist, repudiates obedience to what he calls “dicta or law”, but stresses that freedom from authority and tradition need not lead to anarchy or promiscuity. One’s own experience and reflection, he argues, can lead to responsible moral judgments, an inescapable ingredient of any serious education.

The Problems Within

Such position papers often suffer from a surfeit of rhetoric. It is easy to invoke the muses, more difficult to plan concrete programs. One wishes for more concrete examples, more model syllabi, of the type that Kirk provides.

Then there are some confessions of weakness. Glazer, for example, confesses to a general foundering among the social sciences. He admits that “We are well past the enthusiasm for social planning and engineering of the New Deal period, past our self-confidence about reshaping a democratic and productive world with the aid of the social sciences in the post-World-War-II world.” However, he finds no principle for determining what social theories should be put aside, what ones should become the basis for serious work. And if the fellows at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences are fragmented, what hope is there for the average college curriculum committee? To UCLA economist Thomas Sowell, many general education courses encourage diffuseness and dilettantism, with those in the social sciences particularly prone to misinformation and low standards. Arguing for depth, not breath, he claims that “a course devoted solely to William James has more chance of success than a course that sweeps across the centuries in a semester.” (This reviewer must dissent here. A thorough introductory course is often a much-needed guide into an area. Otherwise, how would the student know where James stood vis à vis Plato, Kant, Hempel, and Ryle?)

The Taming of Power

Hook elaborates on his ideas in his own 1973 anthology, a collection that encompasses essays written from 1939 to 1972. Here again, we have Hook’s long-standing opposition to politicization of the campus, and his equally longstanding defense of John Dewey, Hook’s mentor and a much misunderstood man.

If Hook opposed a totally fixed curriculum, he finds that demands for “relevance” are often politically inspired or the product of a narrow utilitarianism. “Relevant to what?,” he asks, noting that Einstein’s theory of relativity—when first propagated—had no practical use. Moving to the problem of tenure, he stresses that tenure should be “considered an accolade to the earned” (emphasis his), not a right automatically conferred. “Where there is doubt, the answer should be ‘no’,” he writes. Indeed, administrators who seek to give everyone tenure will only destroy the system, thereby placing everyone’s job in jeopardy.

Two Vocations?

Hook deals with many other subjects, but my remarks will now remain limited to his comments on the teaching vocation. He distinguishes between teaching on the graduate and undergraduate levels. Graduate teaching, he notes, focusses upon primary research, with the instructor operating on the frontiers of knowledge and leading and inspiring coworkers. The undergraduate teacher, on the other hand, has quite a different task. “He must try to develop persons who are intellectually sensitive, emotionally mature, and methodologically sophisticated at the same time he helps them to find themselves and to make the choices of calling and career that are so decisive in their lives. The good teacher at the college level must be not only a schoolmaster but, as Karl Mannheim put it, a lifemaster, by which he means not merely a purveyor of knowledge but a directing, inspiring, correcting force in the life of those he teaches.” But Hook continues that no one starts out to be primarily a good college teacher: “He resigns himself to it only when he surrenders his hopes to make a distinctive or creative contribution to his field.”

This reviewer concurs with the thrust of Hook’s distinction, but makes one qualification. The college teacher must engage in some research, that is some primary investigation, even if this research does not always read to publication. Otherwise, he can fall into the role of a genial “Mr. Chips,” regurgitating old material year after year in a way that—no matter how dynamically or cleverly presented—can only mislead students. Eloquent testimony to “lifemasters”, in short, can apply to some excellent classroom teachers who have never published a line in their lives. But it can, and often does, hide a multitude of sins, permitting the incompetent and the banal to justify sheer laziness. Sociologist Robert Nisbet stated the case eloquently when he said that the most able pedagogues from Abelard to Marcuse were listened to not because they were “great teachers”; rather it was because they had something to say.

In conclusion, there are probably as many different philosophies of education as there are educators. The followers of Kirk will always seek a different kind of education than the followers of Hook. This reviewer finds both thrusts necessary: stress on the scientific method can only supplement the classical tradition, and vice versa. The important thing is not to fall into the kind of cynicism engendered by the findings of Mandell and X. For no matter how many disappointments we face, and no matter how many times we have been subject to exploitation, there is hope so long as such people as Kirk, Hook, Berman, and Nagel continue to articulate educational philosophy and plan programs.

One line in Frost reads “One could do more than be a swinger of birches.” Perhaps the poet was talking about more than trees.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XII NUMBER 1

JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1979

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Space War

Something has happened to the Libertarian Party on the way to glory. Right now, it is too soon to say whether this is merely an ephemeral and temporary zag on the inevitable zig-zag road that every growing ideological movement must travel. We don’t know whether these are just growing pains that will be swiftly overcome. Let us hope, or for some of us in the movement, let us pray.

As I wrote in last issue’s editorial (“LP Breakthrough,” November-December 1978), the LP is moving rapidly toward its great Presidential nomination convention this September 6-9 (or, for those who want to catch the platform committee hearings, Sept. 4-9) at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The theme of the convention is slated to be “Toward a Three Party System”, and the speeches and workshops are to be built around national political concerns, in the light of the imminent breakthrough of the LP into the mainstream of American politics. The eyes of all the media, of three TV networks, will be on us, and we should act as if we are indeed about to be a third major party in America. That does not mean, of course, any watering down of our glorious principles, which are the whole point of our enterprise. But it means acting like adults, in the real world, like “real people”, to use a provocative but correct formulation of my own over the years.

When Ed Crane, chairman of the convention committee, presented this theme and program to the national committee of the LP meeting in Las Vegas on January 14, everything hit the fan. There ensued a highly illuminating debate on the nat.comm. The opponents of the theme began to whine: “This program is all about politics;” “politics is a downer;” “Who cares if we become one of the major parties” And, “none of this motivates people.” I was astonished: how could an LP national committee member fail to become ecstatic over the prospect of us actually becoming a major party, over moulding real-world politics in the direction of freedom? And if they are not so motivated, why in blazes are they in the Libertarian Party at all? It turns out that what the opposition wants, in varying degrees, is not real-world politics but the contemplation of various space fantasies of what a libertarian future would presumably look like. To them, the real world is equated with gloom; optimism they only equate with technocratic fancies and millennial dreams of the alleged future. Not freedom, but these visions, are their motivation.

My own reaction to this may be found in the February issue of Libertarian Review (“The Menace of the Space Cult”). I have found, over the weeks since, that friends whom I’ve told about the controversy think that I’m exaggerating the problem, until I send them the various documents that have piled up since the Jan. 14 meeting. For shortly after the meeting, L. Richard White, regional nat.comm. representative from Nevada, kicked off a series of hot and heavy letters that have been circulating within the national committee. There is White’s first letter; replies by myself and be Ed Crane, followed by a pro “futurist” letter by Tonie Nathan, regional rep. from Oregon and Vice-Presidential candidate for the LP in 1972. Followed next by White’s second letter and by my reply to Nathan. Some of the material is basically procedural maneuvering (e.g. discussion of the nat.comm. “veto” over local party conventions), but the important material—the sharply clashing philosophical and strategic views held by the two different camps—shines through and is well worth reading. There are other letters, some written from outside the nat.comm. and some within, but these are the major documents in the dispute. They deserve to be read by all libertarians and LP members and not just by nat.comm. members, and so the Lib. Forum presents these documents, completely unedited, as a public service to the movement and to the party—and maybe, to future historians. Let everyone make up his or her own mind!

An amusing footnote to this affair: The monthly frontlines, the movement’s own National Enquirer published by the Reason clique, wrote up the Vegas committee meeting with nary a mention of the space dispute (Feb. 1979 issue). So much for the intrepid “reporting” so typical of frontlines (or shall we call it backbites?) Perhaps the reason for the oversight is that frontlines was too busy trumpeting the majesty and greatness of one Michael Emerling, Bill Hunscher’s campaign manager in the contest for the LP Presidential nomination. At any rate, in their March issue, frontlines made up for this lack by publishing an edited version of only one side of the space dispute: Tonie Nathan’s manifesto. The new version, for example, omits Ms. Nathan’s statement that “Freedom is not necessary for grub eaters.” So much for frontlines’ much vaunted “objectivity” and claim to be above all factions!

At any rate, there now follows, in sequence, the documents in the great space war dispute. Happy reading!

by Rick White

January 17, 1979

Dear Natcom member,

Before proceeding to the real meat of this letter, I would like to address another issue. In the discussion at the Las Vegas Natcom meeting, there was never any question of using veto power, at least not in my mind. In fact, according to the new rules, if I am not mistaken, only Dave Bergland has this power.

Since Dave does have the veto power in this particular case, it was unquestionably a sound tactical move to include him on the ’79 convention program committee. He is much less likely to veto something he has had, to all appearances, a direct hand in. Though from another viewpoint Dave has iron-handed control over the program, should he choose to exercise it, since any aspect he doesn’t like is subject to immediate veto. It must be pointed out in this context that Dave resisted intense pressure to use the veto in the past, and in fact is one of the few people I know of in whose hands this perilous power does not make me overly nervous.

During the whole Natcom discussion, I was thinking in terms of input and “moral suasion.” These are not veto power. What I believe is desirable here is a positive change of attitude which will lead to a different emphasis in the entire philosophy of the program. Obviously the veto, a negative measure, is entirely helpless to accomplish this. However, since the new veto rule was suggested and passed at the behest of, among others, Ed Crane, it is difficult for me to see what objections he could possibly raise if this power were indeed leveled against him.

Now to the meat. The political process is only part of other large processes, not the least of these being the mental processes that motivate those individuals participating in it. Why do libertarians choose to become politically active? Undoubtedly, there are those in the movement to whom the lure of political activity and power per se are sufficient motivation to keep them spending inordinate amounts of time and money pursuing their goals. They of course do have their place in the movement. I would suggest, however, that they are and should remain in the minority. I would further suggest that for the majority of libertarians, it is a vibrant, glowing, free vision of the future which most effectively motivates us to spend inordinate amounts of time and money, not visions of press release writing and petition circulating!!

It might be argued that all those attending Libertarian Party conventions are already so motivated and don’t need further encouragement. If this were indeed a valid point, then salesmen, who have the strongest motivation around, namely a quick buck, wouldn’t need a sales manager and constant pep-talks. And speaking as a rather strongly motivated “hard-core” libertarian, I would like to say that I can always use a little more motivation myself. Besides, people don’t become instant Libertarians (or for that matter, instant anything). It’s a gradual process. Many, if not most, of those attending the ’79 convention will be somewhere on this road. For them, the motivational aspects of the convention will be by far the most important aspects. It will be these aspects which encourage them to willingly attend the “nuts and bolts” political action workshops which are also an indispensable part of the convention. They will attend not because there isn’t anything else available, but because they have been motivated and actually, wonder of wonders, WANT to be there.

In this context, it is not entirely irrelevant to note that probably the main problem with public education is that the majority of students don’t WANT to be involved, and so don’t take an active part in the learning process—and so don’t learn!! In fact, if the program doesn’t offer anything other than “nuts and bolts,” many people who would otherwise attend and be further exposed to our philosophy and positive view of life and man—won’t! If we wish to be bored to death by “nuts and bolts” politics alone, we might just as well become Democrats or Republicans. We already know that’s all they have to offer.

I believe the preceding to be a pivotal issue in the future of the Libertarian Party, and I believe that because of its self-evident nature it will eventually be accepted. If so, why not now?

In summation, I would strongly urge a reevaluation of the ’79 convention/proposal and theme to incorporate less limited and more motivational viewpoints than that of isolated political action alone. I would strongly suggest motivational aspects, vivid and concrete views of an expressly libertarian future, be built into the convention as individual events (specific speakers and topics, or possibly panels (it might be helpful to consult Neil Smith and/or Tom Laurent for specific suggestions)). Motivational themes should also be consciously woven into the fabric of every event, no matter how “nuts and boltsy,” and indeed, into the very fabric of the convention itself. An appropriate theme for such a convention might be something like “WHAT THE COMING LIBERTARIAN SOCIETY WILL BE LIKE AND HOW THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY WILL BRING IT ABOUT!!”

P.S. If you agree with this analysis, at least in general, please let the members of the program committee know. No vetoes, please! The members of the committee are: Ed Crane, Dave Bergland, Bill Webster, and Ed Clark. Write to them NOW, while you’re still thinking about it!!

by Murray Rothbard

Jan. 20, 1979

Dear Fellow National Committee Member:

Rick White’s letter of the 17th performs an important service in drawing the lines of disagreement and in confirming my view of the extreme importance of the debate within the committee on Jan. 14.

The L.P. stands at a crossroads, and the Raleigh meeting may well be the most important one we have ever had. It is no accident that just at this time, just when libertarianism and the Libertarian Party stand on the verge of making a major impact on American political life, that the anti-politics forces within the Party should make a last-ditch stand to block that progress and to deflect us toward the contemplation of space fantasy and science fiction.

As someone who has battled for liberty for over thirty years and who has seen the movement grow from a literal handful to near-major party status, I may be pardoned for becoming emotional over this issue. I for one am interested in fighting for liberty in the real world of politics. I have zero, indeed negative, interest in being part of a space fantasy cult. To me the choice is clear. And the great puzzle is: what are those people opposed to politics and political action doing in a political party

by Ed Crane

January 22, 1979

Dear National Committee Member,

Rick White’s letter of January 17 raises several important points to which I would like to respond. Before addressing the more substantive issues I’d like to see if you agree with my assessment of the first three paragraphs of his letter. Am I wrong or is Rick trying to cloak himself in the purity of being opposed to the “perilous power” of the veto while at the same time encouraging Dave Bergland to invoke it? Rick’s right, I did argue in favor of giving the National Chair that power over the program director—and I’m perfectly willing to have it used against me. I would not want to be hypocritical. But what about Rick? Although he clearly favored the program that was being put together in Boston he argued against the veto, we were told at the Seattle meeting, not because he favored the program but because as a self-described “radical decentralist” he was opposed to the veto on principle. Now it seems his principles move him to suggest that some kind of poetic justice would be served if the veto were to be used against me. Certainly the last sentence of his third paragraph seems to indicate that he would experience something less than moral revulsion if the veto were invoked as a means of implementing his ideas instead of mine. But perhaps I’ve simply misinterpreted what Rick was getting at.

Less ambiguous is what Rick refers to as the “meat” of his letter. Although there are no names named, it is clear that Rick has divided the movement into two groups: there are those futurists like Rick White who believe in a “vibrant, glowing, free vision of the future”; and there are those like Ed Crane and his ilk who are motivated by the “lure of political activity and power per se.” As I say, there is no ambiguity here. Now, for one libertarian to accuse another of lusting after political power is a very serious matter. I believe Rick has unjustly insulted some very committed libertarians—including myself—with this specious and irresponsible analysis of what “motivates” a libertarian. I hope you agree with me that Rick owes most members of the National Committee an apology.

But on the main issue. Why do we have a Libertarian Party? Because we seek Liberty. Period. The Libertarian Party has proven to be the most effective vehicle for spreading the ideals of a free society in two centuries. Its potential for actually rolling back the power of the state has grown immeasurably as a result of the recent elections. The media has developed a solid respect for our ideas and our potential. In short, we stand on the threshold of creating—with our very own hands and against overwhelming odds—a three party system in America.

It has been suggested that such a development would not be very exciting, that it would merely be “political” and, hence, a “downer”. I beg to differ. Think for a moment what the emergence of the Libertarian Party as the third major party means. It means our ideas and philosophy will at last have an opportunity to compete on equal footing with the statist parties. It means people will come to understand that there exists a consistent alternative to the status quo which places their rights as individuals above all else. Are there any among us who don’t believe that we will prevail under those circumstances?

But we will achieve none of this unless we devote every ounce of our energy to the task of building the LP organizationally, learning the issues, electing the candidates and ultimately returning to the people the right to run their own lives. That, I suppose, is political. It’s also what the LP is all about. Our job is to throw off the chains of the state and put an end to its disruptive, oppressive and sometimes devastating activities. It is to set men and women free to choose their own future—not to tell them what that future may be. For one thing, a simple understanding of economics tells us that we have no way of knowing what the future holds. For another, what’s an appealing and appropriate goal for one person is unappealing and inappropriate for another. Rick White’s cup of tea probably ain’t mine. It is simply wrong-headed to claim to know what a future “libertarian” society “ought” to be. Such visions are for fortunetellers, not libertarians. As Hayek puts it, “A free society is a pluralistic society without a common hierarchy of particular ends”. I say, laissez-faire to the future.

And why can’t a convention devoted to the “real world” of politics be exciting? What does it take to charge people’s batteries—spaceships or freedom? Were the American revolutionaries driven by a vision of horseless carriages in their future or by a passion for liberty? Was Thomas Paine fighting for the chance to see television one day or for the dignity of free men and women?

We live in a society that oppresses people with divergent lifestyles and interests. We can end the oppression and for me that’s exciting. We live in a world constantly threatened with a nuclear holocaust. We can decrease and even end that threat and to me that’s exciting. We live in a society that systematically robs men and women through taxation and inflation. We can end that robbery and to me that’s exciting. The list is endless and, I fear, hopelessly “political.” But goddammit that’s why we started the Libertarian Party: To engage in political activity in order to roll back the state. Let’s not blow it just when people are starting to listen.

by Tonie Nathan

Jan. 19, 1979

Towards a free Society

Politics has been defined by some as the “art of the possible.” Traditionally, political organizations survey and document voters’ views, then plot strategy catering to those views. Occasionally, in some creative instances, political party leaders attempt to move voters towards new positions. Such actions require much money, highly skilled promotional help and persuasive leaders who are visible and charismatic. Then, slowly, after being bombarded with media clout, the voting public begins to react, rejecting or accepting the change aimed in its direction.

Obviously, this is what the 1979 LP Convention Committee had in mind when it adopted the theme, “Toward a Three Party System.” “We should attempt to tie the LP into the ‘real world’ of major party politics,” says Edward H. Crane, III, convention director. “The program should emphasize politics and not philosophical/social/business concerns.” This may be what the LP wishes to do, but I am disappointed.

As one of the party’s founders, I believe the LP’s appeal has been to those who are sick of “politics as usual.” Yet here we are, joining the club. . . On convention stationery, the theme bleats forth its self-conscious status in sallow green and is so conspicuously “me-tooism” that it almost obliterates any distinction the LP may have justifiably won in the past.

Look! the logo seems to say. Another party has arrived on the scene. Move over, tweedle dee and tweedle dum—here comes tweedle doo! See? We, too, can play the game . . .

Strange, I thought we had spent the last six years carefully explaining that we did not belong on the same political spectrum with the other political parties in this country and that we were practicing a different kind of politics. Everywhere I spoke, my emphasis was on the uniqueness of the LP. We were a party of principle, I said. We were not just seeking votes or political power. First, we wanted to educate, to change minds, to change society. The votes would come when people recognized that freedom, justice and individual rights were moral absolutes that could not be watered down to pour into a politically expedient vase labelled, “Third Party.” Our political activity was necessary in order to carry our ideas effectively to the public. Running candidates was one way of spreading ideas. But electing Libertarians would be meaningless unless the electorate was committed to the concept of a voluntary society. People had to understand why freedom (and therefore, the Libertarian Party,) was necessary.

Well, why are freedom and the Libertarian Party necessary? Here one finds some revealing differences of opinion. Some Libertarian leaders say we need a free society so each of us can do our own thing. “Some people may want to live in trees and eat grubs,” Murray Rothbard says. “Who knows what a Libertarian society will be.”

I agree that no one can know the shape of the future and that, indeed, some may want to live in trees and eat grubs. But this is not a cogent nor inspiring argument for liberty. Mr. Rothbard then says he has become emotional over the issue of “fighting for liberty in the ‘real world’ of politics” and asks, “What are those opposed to politics doing in a political party?”

Personally, I have never believed that politics, as currently practiced, is the “real world.” Further, I have never considered the LP merely another political party, but primarily, an educational party. In the “real world,” as Ayn Rand points out in her powerful novel, Atlas Shrugged, the battle is ideological, not political. It is ideas, not votes, that ultimately solve social problems.

It is not a three party system that Libertarians desire, but a free society. It is not recognition of the LP as a third member of the non-real political system that we desire, but recognition of the principles of Libertarianism. And I certainly hope it is not a powerful party we are building, but a powerful political philosophy. Perhaps we can do both. Perhaps we can engage in political action without acting like other parties. There are several reasons why we should do this.

Access to the media is one obvious reason for playing the conventional political game. Most of us who have been engaged in building the Libertarian Party have recognized all along that political action is one of the quickest ways of getting our ideas before the public. It is also an excellent way of influencing those in office who see the logic of Libertarian rhetoric.

But now that we have established some degree of influence and visibility, it is no time to divorce the means from the ends. We need not let the unfortunate choice of convention theme set the tone of the convention. Instead, we should focus on the difference between rational politics based on Libertarian ideology and the irrational self-defeating politics of other parties.

In outlook and practice, the LP is not like other parties and should not attempt to be. Activists in other parties want political solutions enforced by law; we want political freedom unrestricted by law. They want politicians to make decisions for them; we want politicians to allow us to make our own decisions.

Among other political parties, politics is simulated war. Political conventions are training grounds for the troops where they learn nonviolent ways of subjugating the people. Activists vie for the unearned spoils their leaders plan to confer after winning power. All the hoopla, speeches and publicity surrounding such events are the positionings of factions within opposing camps that seek control over their party. Each party’s leaders win allegiance in proportion to the favors they can bestow on their supporting delegations or constituency. “Who will rule?” is the question the Reprocats ask of each other.

Is this what we want at the LP convention—power brokering? I think not. Libertarians seek something different. Libertarian delegates seek leaders worthy of their ideals—leaders who use ideas, not favors, to woo their supporters. Instead of money or power, libertarians are more attracted by clarity of thought, hard truth and inspirational personality.

Libertarians attend LP functions hoping to find objective evidence of the workings of a free society—hoping to experience an atmosphere of creative thought, of new horizons. Libertarians sniff out new lines of reasoning new solutions to old problems and new products or services with market potential.

In contrast to other political groups. Libertarians do not look for provider patrons or authoritarian decision makers. Instead they seek ideologues who project moral fervor into the arguments for liberty. Libertarians look for inspiration, not directives.

Perhaps the major difference between Libertarians and other party activists is genuine optimism, idealism and a positive view of human nature. We Libertarians have a boundless faith in a beautiful, productive and fruitful future because we know what a free society can produce. We tend to believe most persons who are introduced to our vision of a free society will produce, not people who live in trees, but people who can travel to stars—people who aspire to new experiences, new delights, new challenges and independent thinking. If this is not what attracts Libertarians, why else seek freedom? Freedom is not necessary for grub eaters. Freedom is necessary for creative persons who want to put their ideas into action.

Looking back, historians and economists can explain why freedom is good in the aggregate. They can see the results the invisible hand has produced. Historians and economists can explain business, artistic and scientific successes after the fact. But they cannot document or analyze what is yet to be. They cannot know beforehand what special circumstances will motivate individuals to produce the goods, services and ideas that enrich human life. It is the artists, poets and writers who paint the future and inspire action. Their dreams, their imagination, their inquiries, light fires in the brains of inventors, entrepreneurs and workers. And the human spirit, unquenchable in its search for new values, soars forth crystallizing dreams into attainable goals.

I do not believe grub eaters dream; Grub eaters look for grubs. Grub eaters are the natural constituency of other political parties that promise grubs.

But Libertarians dream. And because they dream, they create.

Let us, therefore, lace our Libertarian Convention with dreams. Let us interface our politics with imagination and project the future for those who want a vision of something worth striving for. We need not offer a non-contestable plan or mandatory goal. Nor need we produce fiction or fantasy. But we can suggest possibilities and rewards, non-existant under the present repressive society, that can become available in a free society. Let us explore the shape of the future.

What is the shape of the the future? No one knows. But show me your vision and I will show you mine. To reach a star, I will willingly follow a path untred by others, even if, at last, I end up alone in a strange world. But I suspect I will not be alone, but in a Libertarian society. For Libertarians are motivated—not by security and an ample supply of grubs, but by challenge, opportunity and a vision of a better life. We act, not on behalf of a system, but on behalf of ourselves. Our loyalty is not to our party, but to our principles and ideals.

Encourage us to dream at our convention. Stimulate our minds, whet our appetites and show us a vision of future freedom. Achievement and growth will come, and they will be our own.

by Rick White

Feb. 9, 1979

Dear NATCOM member,

I was quite surprised at all the furor surrounding my last letter. There are many possible reasons for the furor; I prefer to think it’s mostly a matter of misunderstanding.

Apparently I had better begin by indicating what I’m NOT doing here first. First, I am NOT touting science fiction or fantasy. Just as Murray, I have negative interest in being part of a “space fantasy cult.” Nor am I speaking here for the Prometheus Award.

Secondly, I am NOT putting down Libertarian political action or activists. At the time I wrote about “power per se” libertarians, I was creating a straw man to help me make my point. I’m truly sorry if Ed or any other libertarian took it personally. (The veto thing however is another matter.) It is in fact because I am dedicated to effective Libertarian political action that I am writing.

There was only one important issue in my last letter. It is the same one I wish to address in this one. It involves no personalities, no institutions, but only ideas. That issue is the program theme of the ’79’ convention.

The present theme reflects a conscious decision on the part of the program committee to emphasize political action at the 1979 convention. Unfortunately ¡.he committee seems to believe that to emphasize politics, something else equally important must be de-emphasized, perhaps even excluded, from the convention program. Political action, yes; but political action in what context?

It is in fact ironic that the very thing which is presently marked for de-emphasis in favor of politics is the most potent political tool ever known. That element marked for de-emphasis is a positive, inspiring vision of the near future, in this case, a Libertarian future! It is I believe, this vision, this dream of a multiplicity of non-conflicting individualized futures and a world with a minimum of need and a maximum of pleasure which not only motivates us as Libertarians, but which is also our strongest political weapon. — If we will only begin to use it!! DREAMS SELL!!

What’s wrong with the Libertarian dream? An often asked question is, “What would things be like if you Libertarians got elected?” The stock Libertarian answer is, “Well, I don’t really know.” The only proper response to that is something like, “Well, if you’re crazy enough to try to change the world into something else, but don’t know what that something else will be like, don’t expect me to waste my time with you. I’ve got more important things to do—like sleep and watch cartoons on TV.”

As Tonie Nathan pointed out in her article, “It is the artists, poets and writers who paint the future and inspire action.” Too corny? Not “real world” enough? Please consider: Individuals have consistently had notable success from just the rhetoric of the vision, the talk of the dream. John Kennedy sold his presidency on the “Dream of Camelot.” Meaningless? Perhaps—but effective! It’s well known that Martin Luther King “Had a dream.” Bobby Kennedy often used this quotation; “Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I dream dreams that have never been and ask ‘Why not?’” All three were successful political leaders. It was not an accident that the dream/vision was a central element of each style. Indeed, dreams do sell!

But those dreams were somehow dishonest, and besides people are diverse and we don’t want to dictate how they will live? About that vision of the future; there are probably as many as there are libertarians—and people—to dream them. And, strangely enough, in a libertarian society they can ALL come true. We are the only group around that can speak of such dreams and make them believable in the real world. That’s because we know the incredible power of the free market to satisfy not only diverse needs, but desires, whims, yes, and perhaps even a fantasy here and there. WE CAN DELIVER!! So where’s the harm in painting some of these futures for others to see? Ed’s vision of the future comes through in the last paragraph of his last letter. And Murray paints an optimistic and beguiling picture with his “Future of Freedom” talk. I think they’re both great—and should sell like hotcakes at a sausage dinner! Practical politics? The Libertarian dream IS practical politics! Come on fellas, don’t ditch our most potent weapons—cultivate them!

There’s nothing really magic about the kind of dreams we’re talking about here, only about their results. Dave Nolan had a dream of a Libertarian Party and, lo, it came to pass. THE RIGHT DREAMS WORK!! Dreams, the type we’re discussing here, serve simple and indispensable functions. Let’s put this on a simpler scale. Suppose you have a pile of wood and you want to build a table. Before you can do anything meaningful to build that table, you have to have a picture in your mind, and preferably on paper, of just what you want that table to look like. This isn’t to say that the picture can’t be changed and modified as you proceed. However, the picture, vision, or dream of what you want to accomplish is the primary requirement. It is only after you have this vision firmly in mind that the project can begin in earnest. The best tools in the world won’t help you if you don’t have your vision, your goal, to guide you.

THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY IS A TOOL, NOT AN END IN ITSELF. We might look at it as a special jig we need to help us build the table of a libertarian society. Our ultimate goal IS a libertarian society is it not? And while the construction of the jig does require special attention, this only makes sense in the context of the table it is designed to build. This is especially true when the construction of the tool requires aid. If we focus merely on the building of the tool, those we recruit to aid us will just naturally tend to think of the tool as an end in itself. And those people, should they take over the project, may decide to use it for things other than building the table. We may indeed gradually evolve into just another political party, but please, let’s not hasten the process.

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing for the exclusion of political action from the convention. Quite the contrary. DREAMS AREN’T PREDICTIONS OF WHAT THINGS OVER WHICH WE HAVE NO CONTROL WILL BE LIKE; THEY ARE SPECIFICATIONS FOR WHAT WE WILL MAKE HAPPEN. We need tools and techniques to make the dreams happen. We can’t build the table without tools anymore than we can use the tools without a design! It is the tools and techniques Department where most dreams break down in fact.

In terms of the convention and its theme, this means we need BOTH our vision of the future AND “nuts and bolts” politics. It is because I believe both aspects must be strongly bound that I suggested as a possible alternative theme “WHAT THE COMING LIBERTARIAN SOCIETY WILL BE LIKE (a vision of the (near) future) AND HOW THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY WILL BRING IT ABOUT!! (That’s the political action part.) Either half is useless without the other. If we fail to emphasize either, we cannot hope to succeed as quickly, or perhaps, not at all. It is simply NOT a matter of either political action or visions of a libertarian future. It is more a matter of BOTH—or nothing at all.

And it is clear from the choice of theme and Ed’s explicit mind-set that at present, the program is leaning dangerously to the “nothing-at-all” side. It is true that some of the speakers are inspirational, and also true that, on occasion, Ed himself lets a Libertarian dream or two slip out, but the theme itself makes absolutely no mention or implication of the Libertarian dream. And the theme is very important because it, more than any other single factor, influences the atmosphere of the convention, the actual verbal content of the talks and workshops, the convention’s effect on Libertarians, and the overall perception by outsiders and the press of just what the Libertarian Party’s all about. Do we wish to appear to the press as just another third party? Because without constant explicit exhibition of what it is we are working for, that is exactly how we will appear.

At a time when the other two major parties are grabbing at least the rhetoric of every politically advantageous Libertarian issue from deregulation to balancing the federal budget, the one thing we have that sets us apart, the one thing they can’t grab, is the Libertarian Dream. And they can’t field any convincing dreams of their own—the only dreams they have are of more power for them and higher taxes for everyone else. If you doubt they can offer no dreams, listen to Jerry Brown. So, in the present political atmosphere, we have one of the few remaining natural monopolies. Let’s not burn our stock.

We can’t even take it for granted that every “Libertarian” knows just what it is we are working for, unless we tell them, any more than we can assume everyone knows how to do political action. Partly because of our permanent ballot status here in Nevada we have had a large influx of new members who know little or nothing concerning what we are really about; some of them will be attending, others will be delegates. Especially at this point in our history, when we can expect explosive growth and a great influx of neophytes, the vision aspect of the libertarian movement must be made as explicit as the advice on how to form a campus organization, raise money, or write a press release.

If indeed we must err in the balance between dream and politics, and I hope we won’t, it would be far better to err on the side of the dream. Political savvy can be obtained better through direct experience than through a convention. It can also be found in books and learned from P.R. firms and politicians. If people are motivated enough, they will get this knowledge there as well as from the convention. The motivation which comes from dreams is much harder to come by. One of the few places from which it is obtainable is at a gathering of other libertarians—like for example, at a convention!

One final observation on dreams. Some of us have been rather good at using negative dreams about the Libertarian future. You know “There will be a greatly reduced danger of nuclear holocaust, you won’t be mugged as much, etc.” That’s good. But positive dreams are even better! If we really want to super-charge our success, I suggest we master something I’ve just been getting the knack of recently. That something is the POSITIVE dream. Things like “You’ll have twice the spendable income, you’ll be able to travel at only half the present cost, etc.” So, if it’s decided to maintain the present “politics only” theme, might I suggest one a bit more positive. It appeared on Colorado stationary. It said. “THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM IS NOW A THREE PARTY SYSTEM.” IS NOW A THREE PARTY SYSTEM” Why not claim we’ve arrived? I think we have. And, as Thomas Szasz says “Define or be defined.”

I’m quite sure this will leave some Libertarians still feeling ill-at-ease with dreams, and preferring to deal with the “real world.” May I respectfully suggest that the “real world” of today was yesterday’s dream. And if we don’t dream the dream that becomes tomorrow’s “real world.” we can be sure someone else will. And dreaming isn’t enough — the blueprint must always be available for everyone to see.

by Murray Rothbard

Feb. 7, 1979

To Fellow Members of the National Committee:

I have no desire to prolong this debate ad infinitum, but Tonie Nathan’s paper “Towards a Free Society” articulates some of the ideas that animate the “pro-space” wing of the committee. It is surely an unfortunate presentation.

Ms. Nathan writes that “freedom is not necessary for grub eaters. Freedom is necessary for creative persons . . . .” Later, she writes that “grub eaters are the natural constituency of other political parties . . .” We, apparently, are supposed to rely on the creative “artists, poets and writers.” Ms. Nathan’s doctrine is shockingly elitist. The whole point of liberty, of individual rights, is that they belong to everyone, regardless of how plodding or how creative. The grub-eaters as well as the visionaries. It is no wonder that Ms. Nathan appears to believe that accepting the votes of the public is somehow deplorable; for she would restrict the constituency of liberty to a handful of creative artists, in which case, of course, the LP would deserve to be doomed.

Ms. Nathan denounces the professionalism of the convention presentation (including the green color) because, she asserts, we are thereby “joining the club” and being just like the other political parties. The remarkable thing is that Ms. Nathan omits the distinctive feature of the LP: that we are the only political party that consistently and uncompromisingly upholds the idea of liberty and applies it to the political arena. That she seems not to care one iota for this distinction belies her claim that she is especially interested in the idea of liberty. Instead, the convention proposal adheres to Point IV of the National Committee’s Strategy statement passed in October 1977: that “Since our goals and principles are radical enough, we should avoid any extra alienation of people by the form of our presentation or by our image. In short, our content should be embodied in an image appropriate to our status as a national party aiming to become a new majority.” But, of course, if Ms. Nathan wants to turn away the voters, and restrict the LP to a party of creative artists, then her approach makes sense.

Ms. Nathan states that the LP should not be “merely another political party, but, primarily, an educational party . . . It is ideas, not votes, that ultimately solve social problems.” But the LP can only educate to the extent that we obtain votes, and therefore make the media and the voters sit up and take notice. Seeking votes is what a political party is supposed to be doing, and that is what the LP should do so long as we set forth and do not compromise our libertarian principles. Moreover, ideas per se never accomplish anything; ideas do not float by themselves in a vacuum. They must be adopted and carried forward by people, and by people working in institutional structures. The Libertarian Party is the institutional embodiment of the ideas of libertarianism in the political realm.

Let us then, while holding high our libertarian principles, advance, as rapidly and professionally as possible and without shame or apology, into the political arena. First as a third major party and eventually as the majority party. Let us proceed, not only to educate, but roll back the Leviathan State.

An Anarchist Without Adjectives

by Wendy Grosscup

To Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre was “the greatest woman Anarchist in America.” But because most of her influence was through unrecorded lectures and articles now buried in obscure journals, she herself is obscure. This is an oversight that Paul Avrich has corrected in his excellent biography of Voltairine de Cleyre, An American Anarchist. Drawing from previously unknown or unused documents, and using what first hand accounts still exist, Avrich provides what libertarianism so sadly lacks—a sense of its own history.

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) lived through and influenced the most turbulent period of American Anarchism: the Haymarket hangings (1887), the Homestead strike (1892), McKinley’s assassination (1901), and the Mexican Revolution (1911). She was broader, in many ways, than her contemporaries and more fully reflected the radical spirit of the late 1800’s. She became a freethinker at nineteen and shortly thereafter declared herself a socialist—a position which proved to be only a way-station on her road to anarchism. De Cleyre ran the anarchist continuum: beginning as a Tuckerite individualist, she evolved into mutualism and finally came to advocate “anarchism without adjectives”. “I am an Anarchist,” she told Emma Goldman, “without economic labels attached . . .” (She was not, as commonly believed, a Communist; she explicitly rejected that title.) As an ardent feminist, she demanded equal liberty for women while recognizing that the State—as the common enemy of men and women—must never be used as a tool of enlightenment. She was, moreover, a poet and an artist who deeply regretted her failure to achieve recognition in literature.

In spite of this diversity, Voltairine de Cleyre represents important trends within the early anarchist movement, such as the shift from pacifism to the condonation or advocacy of violence. At the time of the Haymarket explosion—in which the deaths of several policemen were blamed on a group of demonstrably innocent anarchists—Voltairine was nineteen. Four of the anarchists were hanged and Voltairine de Cleyre became an anarchist. She did not become so radical, however, as to sanction the violent inclinations of her mentor, Dyer D. Lum. “I see no end to retaliation, unless some one ceases to retaliate,” she declared—a Tolstoyan stance for which Lum labelled her “Moraline” and “Gusherine”. Nevertheless, she believed it was “not the business of Anarchists to preach . . . acts of violence. For truly Anarchism has nothing in common with violence, and can never come about save through the conquest of men’s minds.” Although not approving of their actions, Voltairine de Cleyre, a few years later, came to the defense of those who used discriminatory violence; she viewed their acts as inevitable responses to the greater violence of the State. Her defense of Czolgosz, President McKinley’s assassin, solidified this shift away from pacifism. She previously maintained that to admit resistance “is at once to

admit—the State.” But she now wrote of the State:
“These creatures who drill men in the science of killing, who put guns and clubs in hands they train to shoot and strike, who hail with delight the latest inventions in explosives, who exult in the machine that can kill the most with the least expenditure of energy . . . who ravish, and burn, and garrote, and guillotine, and hang, and electrocute, they have the impertinence to talk about the unrighteousness of force!”

She became the loudest American advocate of the Mexican Revolution. The last year and one-half of her life was devoted to publicizing and collecting funds for this cause. With the Mexican Revolution, Voltairine de Cleyre shed the last vestige of pacifism.

Another trend de Cleyre exemplified is expressed by the label “anarchist without adjectives”. “Anarchy without adjectives” was coined by the Spanish anarchist Fernando Tarrida del Marmol to designate that Anarchism is the axiom compared to which economic systems are, at best, secondary. This was in contrast with the individualists who maintained that anarchism could not be divorced from economics, that one’s view of compulsion rested on one’s view of property rights. Voltairine de Cleyre’s adoption and advocacy of this term was perhaps due to her inability to find an economic system that fit her conception of liberty. For “Socialism and Communism would beget more regulation than is consistent with ideal Anarchism,” and “Individualism and Mutualism . . . involve a development of the private policemen not at all compatible with my notions of freedom.” Moreover, she was distressed by the in-fighting, typified by Benjamin Tucker, which splintered the movement into groups more willing to fight than to cooperate. Along with such prominent anarchists as Malatesta, Reclus, and Nettlau, de Cleyre attempted to unite anarchism under one title, an attempt foredestined to fail.

There were many ways in which Voltairine differed from her fellow American anarchists. She took little part in international anarchism; she condemned prison systems of any sort; she refused to substitute the word “liberation” for “anarchist”; and, unlike Emma Goldman, she accepted no money for her activities. In many ways, she resembled the European anarchists for whom she had so much admiration: Kropotkin, Proudhon, Louise Michel, Tarrida del Marmol. When a former student attempted to kill her, she followed the example of Louise Michel and refused to testify against him, preferring instead to collect funds for his defense and to appeal for his release. Like Rudolph Rocker, she lived and worked among Jews—in her case, the Russian immigrant population of Philadelphia. She tutored them and in the process developed such respect for their independence that she learned Yiddish and contributed often to Fraye Arbeter Shtime, the leading Jewish anarchist paper. Like Kropotkin, her ideal society was a rural one of farmers and craftsmen.

Paul Avrich has done a remarkable job of original research in An American Anarchist, the first in his projected biographies of American anarchists. His clear and entertaining style makes this densely-written book a delight to read. Unlike so many biographers, Avrich does not psychologize or interject his own opinion. He gives a balanced, scholarly account of a woman totally dedicated to liberty. His knowledge of Voltairine de Cleyre and of her context is both comprehensive and detailed. Of particular interest is his account of the Jewish immigrant influence in the anarchist movement. He reports, for example, that at one time there were 400 to 500 anarchists in Philadelphia, of whom 145 were active. Fully 75 of these activists were Russian Jews.

The one disagreement I have with Avrich is his high assessment of Voltairine de Cleyre’s artistic ability. “She possessed a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist . . to this statement, and similar ones, I must object. Thoreau was a far better writer. In fact, having examined the prose and poetry in Voltairine de Cleyre’s Selected Works (Mother Earth, 1914), I find her to be a competent essayist and a poor poet. Her poetry is so overwhelmed by exclamation marks, flowery adjectives and the-moral-of-it-all that it resembles an actor badly overplaying his part. There is no subtlety and little technique. Carried away by excesses of language, she never manages to tame it.

But this criticism is a small matter beside Voltairine de Cleyre herself, as a radical and as the sensitive human being revealed in An American Anarchist.

To neglect a heritage is almost to disown it. Libertarian history is rich with individuals who cared deeply about the future of mankind. We are their future. The least we can do is to care about them.

The Political Economy Of Inflation:Government and Money

by Tom G. Palmer

The relationship between government and money is of a more complex nature than that between government and other commodities because of the special role played by money in an exchange economy. When the state redistributes goods by means of open violence, e.g., by forcibly seizing A’s house and awarding it to his neighbor B, the effect is obvious; B had benefited at the expense of A. Hence, regulatory activity by the state (to take one example) benefits some, typically those with political power, at the expense of others, usually those whose pecuniary interests are not sufficiently concentrated to make counter-action in the political arena cast-effective. Because of the unique function of money as a facilitator of exchange, as an intermediary good between the exchange of one commodity for another, the situation becomes more complex and hence less easy to analyze in terms applicable to other state actions. Nevertheless, despite difficulties of understanding, the fundamental relationship remains the same; wealth is transferred to one group of people, usually those able to exert political influence, from another group. The former are beneficiaries of the latter’s victimization.

MONEY: DISSEMINATOR OF INFORMATION

Complicating the fundamental gain/loss relationship basic to governmental economic policy, monetary or otherwise, is the fact that prices, the exchange ratios between particular goods and money (the most marketable of all goods insofar as it is capable of having exchange ratios with nearly all other commodities), are the means by which knowledge, held by numerous and diverse market participants, is disseminated to investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers. This “division of knowledge is no less fundamental to an advanced economy than the more often cited division of labor. In an advanced market economy, a printer need not know the specific facts about timber production all around the world in order to allocate his limited funds for paper products. All of this information is “encapsulated” in the prices for such products presented to him as a buyer. If there is a shortage of wood due to a shortage of labor arising from plague conditions in Brazil, all of this information is presented in the prices charged by 1) laborers (now in short supply due to the sick workers’ absence), and 2) wood dealers (some of whom are forced out of the market by rising costs), faced with an unchanged demand, who charge a higher price for a smaller output in order to maximize their income (and thus “clear the market”). The printer then allocates his resources to his most highly valued ends based on the higher prices presented to him, that is the say (other things being equal) he conserves his paper, e.g., by printing more words per page.

This complex and “spontaneously evolved” system for the dissemination of knowledge is hindered by government interference. In certain circumstances this intervention results in incorrect information being presented to market participants, that is, in prices which do not reflect the real conditions underlying economic activity. We shall investigate this more thoroughly later.

RISE IN PRICES

One of the central problems in current public debate over governmental “monetary policy” is: what constitutes inflation? For members of the general public, the most obvious thing one can say about inflation is that it is a condition of “ever-rising prices.” The complexities arising from money’s position as an intermediary good lead many to lay the blame for inflation on businesses (“after all, they’re the ones charging the higher prices”), unions (“they’re always demanding higher wages”), or “piggish consumers” (“they’re the ones who consistently pay the higher prices”). Such views are subject to criticism and rejection on logical and empirical grounds. First, one need not have read Book V of Euclid’s Elements to know that if a ratio is increased while the consequent term remains constant (or itself increases), the increase in the ratio must be due to a relative increase in the antecedent term. While “goods in general” (the consequent term in the ratio) remain constant, yet “prices in general” (the cumulative expression of the ratio between money and other goods) rise, it must be due to a relative increase in the antecedent term, money. In the market, if the price of one good rises, then the purchaser retains less money to spend on other goods (assuming that the same amount was still purchased, or at least that the reduction in purchases amounted to less than the rise in price, both cases resulting in greater expenditures on the now more expensive good), and the demand for those other goods falls, leading to lower prices for such other goods. Hence, without an increase in the money stock (and/or stock of money substitutes) there can be no “general” rise in prices. Second, the view that unions or businesses are responsible for inflation (in this view, defined in terms of ever-rising prices) is founded on the fallacy that sellers can “pass on” all of their costs to buyers. If this were so, then sellers could incur infinite costs and hence charge infinite prices without experiencing a loss of sales. As prices are not infinite, we must conclude that sellers do not simply “pass on” their costs to purchasers; such a one-dimensional view only incorporates the supply side of the transaction, leaving out the unwillingness of purchasers to buy at prices which they deem to be too high. (The commonly held notion that increased costs, e.g., new taxes, are “passed on” to the consumer is not altogether unfounded, in as much as consumers do in fact bear the burden of new “business taxes.” This is effected through a reduction in the number of suppliers, not through a “passing on” of costs. The increase in costs results in the elimination of marginal competitors, now faced with a diminished cost-price differential; this decreased supply of good leads to a higher marginal utility per commodity unit, and hence to higher prices.)

MONETARY INCREASE AND INCOME REDISTRIBUTION

The general rise in prices then, in the absence of a decrease in the quantity of goods (a case that need not be considered here), must be attributed to an increase in the stock of money and money substitutes. As this new money enters the market, some people are awarded a larger monetary fund and are therefore able to bid away goods from others by offering to pay higher prices. The important word in the foregoing sentence is some. New money must enter the economy somewhere; there is no “helicopter effect” to distribute money evenly over all sectors of the economy and to all market participants. Milton Friedman, a noted proponent of the “helicopter effect” view, is correct when he remarks that poor people and people on fixed incomes are harmed most by inflation of the money supply, but this is in direct contradiction to the “helicopter effect” hypothesis which states that there are no distribution effects to monetary inflation. It does make a difference who gets the new money first, for by this means the exploitative relationship central to government policy is effected. If A receives a windfall of one million dollars in new fiat money from the government, his increased purchasing power comes at the expense of B, C, D, E,. . ., etc. For when A enters the market to purchase goods he is able, by means of his new money, to bid goods away from others. A enters the market before the prices of goods in general have risen due to the monetary increase. When he buys a good from R, it is at a higher price than R was able to get from his other customers. R now has an increased stock of money before prices in general have gone up. He purchases a good from Z, etc. By the time B and C, e.g., recipients of relatively fixed incomes, receive a portion of the new funds, the prices of goods have already gone up relative to their incomes. There has been a net transfer of buying power from B to and C to A.

MONEY AND THE BUSINESS CYCLE

Further complicating the whole procedure is the manner in which a great deal of the new money enters the economy. Rarely is it in the form of outright one-time grants of counterfeit cash, printed up by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and then handed out to political favorites (though this has not been unknown to happen). Rather, much of the new money enters the economic system in the form of expanded bank credit, either through central bank creation of paper assets (“open market operations”) or through a lowering of reserve requirements within a fractional reserve system. The former creates credit (loanable funds) out of whole cloth and then makes it available to investors and other borrowers. The latter allows banks to engage in what would be condemned as fraud in any other enterprise, namely, to loan out more funds than they actually have on hand. In both cases the rate of interest is depressed below its market level where the plans of savers and investors are coordinated such that the sum of funds saved tends to equal the sum invested.

It is in this manner, namely a lowering of the interest rate, that the pricing system, whereby information is disseminated throughout the market, is distorted. Such a distortion of interest rates (viewed by the entrepreneur as the “price of loanable funds”) leads to an amount of investment greater than the amount of planned savings. Hence, the real conditions of the market are misrepresented to entrepreneurs, who over-invest in “production goods” (distinguished from “consumer goods” because they are not immediately consumed; “production goods” serve to produce goods which produce goods . . . which produce goods which are consumed). Such malinvestments must eventually be liquidated as consumers reassert their desired ratio of savings to consumption after receiving in turn the “fiat credit” as wages, rents, and other income. Such a liquidation of assets means a reallocation of capital goods and labor which, being heterogeneous and at least to some extent specific in their productive capacity, remain unemployed during the process of adjustment. These hardships go under the name of depression, another charming aspect of governmental policy.

Hence, we see that it is government action which must be blamed not only for ever-rising prices (which impose so many hardships on so many people), but also for the disruptive crises into which interventionist “political capitalism” is periodically thrown. In contrast, increases in the money supply on the free market (e.g., an increase in the stock of gold specie) do not lead to such hardships because, while admittedly causing a relative increase in the prices of goods (or a decrease in the price of money expressed in terms of goods), such an increase in the stock of money does not redistribute goods or purchasing power in a manner different from other voluntary market transactions, where goods are traded between transactors in order for more favorable states of affairs to be realized by each one. This is so because the “rate of return” on gold production will tend to be equilibrated with the “rates of return” in other industries. In short, such market increases in specie do not constitute a veiled form of theft or fraud. Also, increases in specie do not lead to the malinvestment and subsequent dislocation of the trade cycle of “boom and bust” outlined above. Specie increases, when loaned out or placed in banks by their holders, do lead to increased investment through a lower interest rate. However, such increases in loanable funds, unlike increases in “fiat credit,” do represent a real increase in the ratio of savings to consumption because the new gold-holder did, in fact, save his new money holdings rather than spend them on consumption. Hence, in a market economy planned savings will tend to equal planned investment, and no capital or labor reallocation will be necessary at a later date beyond those due to everyday self-correcting entrepreneurial error.

MACRO AND MICRO

In any analysis of complex economic phenomena, it is the task of the analyst to reduce “macro-economic” movements to their “microeconomic” foundations, that is, to explain aggregate states of affairs (mass unemployment, depression, etc.) in terms of the goals, plans, and actions of consumers, investors, entrepreneurs, and other market participants. The problem with orthodox analysis (including the “Keynesian” and “Friedmanite” versions) is that it focuses on phenomena which are not considered by market participants. The general price level, for example, is not relevant to the actions of entrepreneurs; they are concerned with the relative prices presented to them when making decisions to allocate resources among various opportunities. Such relative prices are distorted by monetary manipulation, leading entrepreneurs to make mistakes on the basis of incorrect information. This explains why it is that, while entrepreneurs are constantly making mistakes (and experiencing the consequences, thus providing incentives for self-correcting behavior) large numbers of such mistakes often come in great clusters, namely as widespread economic dislocation (i.e., depression, recession, side-wise movements, panics, etc.). Entrepreneurs do not act on the basis of a mythical price-level (in any case an arbitrary collection of averaged prices which is often misleading with respect to the real conditions of production, trade, and consumption) but on the basis of a system of relative prices; when governmental credit expansion distorts this system of relative prices incorrect information is transmitted and the coordinative mechanism of the market is thwarted, leading to painful consequences.

CUI BONO?

Further, when investigating governmental policy entailing net beneficiaries and net victims, it should be a goal of the conscientious policy analyst to ask the time-honored question, who benefits? Governmental inflation of the supply of money and credit entails a massive transferral of income from one group to another. Who are the beneficiaries, and is it possible to draw a clear link between their political power and the governmental policies which benefit them? Such links can be drawn (and have, in fact, been drawn by others in the past), but it is beyond the scope of the present inquiry to do so. The matter of identifying the beneficiaries, proponents, and opponents of inflationary policies is of great relevance to a satisfactory solution to the problem in political terms.

A WAY OUT

Is there a way out of this system of monetary manipulation and exploitation? Happily, the answer is yes. The solution is obvious and simple. Remove government entirely from any and all control over money. In Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek’s terms, “de-nationalize” money. Money is too important a commodity, incorporating all of the important functions described above, to allow its supply and allocation to be determined by political means. Money is a commodity and can be and has been provided on the market, where it is responsive to and serves the needs of voluntary transactions rather than those of political manipulation and fraud.

The practical problems involved in disengaging the state from control over this vital commodity are great but are not insurmountable. As in any political strategy, the beneficiaries and “behind-the-scenes” proponents of a particular policy must be identified and assessed (the victims, in this case the bulk of the population, are not hard to identify). Unfortunately, in “political-capitalism” mere economic interest is often insufficient to provide a motive for reduction or elimination of state involvement while, on the other hand, it provides motives in plenty for increasing such involvement. The interests of the recipients of state largesse and privilege are “concentrated;” the benefits accruing to them as individuals are typically far greater than the individual losses to very large numbers of people victimized by the particular state intervention in question. Hence, in addition to the economic interests of the victimized masses of the population, a great campaign, an “ideology,” must be set forth which will reveal and condemn interventionism as immoral and unjust. The motivating ideology of the American and classical liberal revolutions must be resurrected to once again bring down a system whereby power preys on man and society.

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph E. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XII NUMBER 2

MARCH-APRIL, 1979

US-ISSN0047-4517

Ten Years Old!

That’s right, your own dear Libertarian Forum now celebrates its tenth (10th!) anniversary. In a movement of short-lived flashes in the pan, in a period where libertarian — or other ideological — publications don’t even last as long as the average marriage, the Lib. Forum continues to survive and flourish.

The idea of the Lib. Forum was conceived in the winter of 1968 on a rainy trip down the New Jersey Turnpike by our soon-to-be publisher, Joe Peden. It was announced at the first of a series of Libertarian Dinners in New York City in January. The dinners were launched because we perceived that the movement seemed, oddly enough, to be growing a bit larger than could continue to be housed in our living room. As I remember it, we thought that about thirty friends and acquaintances would attend the first dinner; we got about eighty, most of whom we didn’t know, and many from far out of town.

Although the libertarian movement was then teeny and clearly, to any rational person, no threat to anyone, we were subject to intensive police surveillance from the very first dinner. A friend of ours who was then big in New York State YAF and a friend of certain police elements, would tell us on Sunday mornings virtually word for word what our speaker had said at the previous night’s dinner and who had attended. We hope that the members of the Red Squad who attended were edified by the often arcane disquisitions on political theory that they heard at these dinners.

Presumably this — at the very least — egregious waste of the taxpayers’ money was a spillover from the growing police and intelligence agency confrontation with the New Left during that period. Undaunted, we decided that the growth of the movement warranted a general libertarian meeting, to which we issued a call to all and sundry in the Lib. Forum, to take place at the Hotel Diplomat over Columbus Day weekend in 1969.

Let’s face it, the meeting was pretty much of a shambles. Expecting about a hundred, we had once more underestimated the turnout, which was several hundred. But what a melange! An inchoate mixture had poured in from the Midwest, the South, seemingly from everywhere, containing every movement tendency from Randian silver-coin dealers with dollar signs to revolutionary anarchists from Michigan sporting black leather gloves (?) By the third day, the meeting had virtually dissolved under the impetus of about half the attendees, who quixotically persuaded themselves to abandon discussions of libertarian theory and strategy in order to launch immediate physical struggle against Fort Dix, New Jersey. Needless to say, Fort Dix managed to stand the test. The task of disruption, begun by these left-adventurists, was completed by the polizei, who had moved from quiet surveillance to evident and swaggering harassment.

So it was back to the old drawing board, and in a sense back to the living room. It seemed clear that a general call to one and all could only lead to a shambles that would be counterproductive in building any sort of viable libertarian movement. A corollary problem during 1969-70 was the burgeoning of Left Deviationism, within the New York movement, tending not only toward adventurist armed struggle but also toward becoming leftists, that is socialists, themselves. The problem with Left Deviationism in that era was that even though the idea of a coalition with the New Left against the draft and the Vietnam War was strategically correct, tactically libertarians proved too weak, unorganized, and miniscule themselves to survive such alliance without becoming absorbed. So the spring of 1970 was largely spent in the Lib. Forum denouncing the flaws and dangers of Left Deviationism. We were also among the first to announce the death of the New Left in the early summer of that year, a death which was generally acknowledged by the fall term on campus.

But meanwhile, during the summer of 1969, an event had occurred which marked the first organizational stirrings of the modern libertarian movement. In the spring of 1969, we found that a strong Libertarian Caucus had developed within the bowels of the Young Americans for Freedom, managing to control the California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia chapters. The draft was the big issue on campus in those days, and the libertarians within YAF fought not only against the draft but in favor of draft resistance, a stance which was of course anathema to the dominant forces in YAF. Partially inspired by our special Lib. Forum anti-YAF issue, “Listen, YAF”, the Libertarian Caucus, spurred on by the more radical Anarchist Caucus, broke dramatically from YAF at its biennial August, 1969 convention at St. Louis. The dramatic issue that brought the split to a head was the public burning by one of the Libertarians of his draft card.

The expelled Libertarian Caucus combined with the small, Maryland-based Society of Rational Individualists to form the Society for Individual Liberty, based in Philadelphia, which for years was the only libertarian presence on campus; while the California Libertarian Caucus members formed the California Libertarian Alliance, which put on several meetings for a couple of years in Los Angeles.

These organizational and developments of the 1969-70 period were indispensable to the later creation of a healthy, viable, consistent and self-subsistent libertarian movement. For the danger of the Left Deviationism of 1969-70 was that libertarians would remain a miniscule group tied to, and eventually absorbed by, the Left. The danger of continuing as part of YAF was that libertarians, as they had done for fifteen years before, would remain a miniscule group tied to, and eventually absorbed by, the Right. But the death of the New Left and the dramatic break from YAF meant that libertarians, small though they still were, would remain on their own, cleaving to their own consistent and well-thought-out principles, subordinate neither to conservatives nor leftists, making only ad hoc alliances on specific libertarian issues with any or all other groups. The libertarian movement was now on its own, ready for whatever growth might accrue to its ranks.

The movement was still very small, and had had no recognition in the mass media. The big media breakthrough came in early 1971. Just before the Senatorial election of 1979, the New York Times went looking for some political action to the campus of Columbia University, not long before the site of notorious and extensive riots and sit-ins by the New Left. But now there was nothing; the New Left was dead. Not only that, but lo and behold! the only active political group on campus was an odd outfit called “The Freedom Conspiracy,” consisting of clearly hippieish and radical types, but arguing in favor of Jim Buckley for Senate. This odd phenomenon led to a news article, and then, early next year, to a front-cover article in the prestigious New York Sunday Times Magazine by the two leaders of that libertarian campus group, Stan Lehr and Lou Rossetto.

The New York Times article led to the first wave of national media interest in libertarianism and the libertarian movement, in organs ranging from the New York Times Daily Op-Ed page to Newsweek to the Lib. Forum articles as “Takeoff” and “Takeoff II”. In a sense, of course, the media created as well as observed the new movement, as the publicity sparked new adherents throughout the country.

There is no doubt that the organizational vehicle largely responsible for the enormous growth of libertarianism and of the libertarian movement in recent years was the emergence of the Libertarian Party. This imaginative effort was begun by a literal handful of people in Dave Nolan’s living room in Colorado, with meetings during the latter part of 1971, culminating in the first national convention in Denver in June 1972 and a Presidential race that year. Perhaps stung by the abortive attempt at a mass movement at the Hotel Diplomat, the idea of an LP and such an early Presidential race seemed quixotic to us at first. Happily, we were wrong, and Nolan was right, and the LP began to take off in every respect.

For soon it became clear that the Libertarian Party performed several vital functions at once. It provided hope and a means of activity to numerous veteran libertarians who had abandoned all hope of ever doing anything to advance the cause of liberty in the United States, in the real world. The forum of election campaigns provided vital education in libertarian principles to the public, and brought more libertarians into our organized ranks. And it provided a way, in fact the only possible way, to actually roll back the Leviathan State.

We are not going to bore our readers by reciting once again the great story of the triumphal and accelerating growth of the Libertarian Party and of other ancillary scholarly and educational and political groups in the libertarian movement. Libertarianism is now a powerful force, and it is clear that the Libertarian Presidential candidate will gamer many millions of votes in 1980. Despite inevitable disagreements and faction fights, and quarrels over ideology and tactics, the Libertarian Party platform has gotten purer and more consistent each year along with its phenomenal growth, and has suffered none of the schisms and splits that have plagued other ideological parties. There are still problems, of course, and undoubtedly always will be. The L.P. has a very high turnover, and we will have to try to find ways to reduce the number of people leaving or “burned out.” With new members constantly filling our ranks, we will have to find better ways of internal education in libertarian principles and issues, more than can possibly be done every four years in debates on the platform. We have to guard always against that inevitable parasite on growth and success: right-wing opportunism, the siren temptation of watering down or hiding our principles in order to gain votes and electoral victory. We have to guard against the view that libertarianism is only a form of “extreme” conservatism, or that we are merely, in the words of one ex-libertarian-turned-conservative, “conservatives who have fun.” But these are problems we should be able to surmount. We can face the future with high hopes and a high heart.

That libertarianism is now a powerful movement can be seen in the June 8 issue of National Review. Virtually the entire issue, from the cover to two articles totalling 12 pages, is devoted to an hysterical smear of libertarianism and the libertarian movement, prominently featuring your editor.

Having been read out of the conservative movement (with my consent) by National Review twenty years ago, it is amusing to be read out, with considerably more fanfare and bluster, yet again. Not only is every knock by the enemy a boost, not only does this bluster demonstrate the power of the libertarian movement, but also the National Review anathema will have the useful effect of once again dramatizing and emphasizing our basic separation from conservatism, and of insuring against our being swamped by conservative adherents who don’t understand this vital and basic difference.

The National Review hatchet-job only emphasizes the growing coalition between the liberal and the conservative wings of the establishment on behalf of the State. Only shortly before, libertarianism and Inquiry magazine were attacked by both Commonweal and the Nation for its dangerous anti-governmental tendencies. Now, National Review, supposedly at opposite poles, has openly joined the pro-government pack. But that’s all right, Messrs. Left and Right. Because the people are turning against Big Government in all its forms, left, right, and center. The people are rising up angry, and they are rising up libertarian.

Abraham Lincoln

by Lance Lamberton

From time to time American historians are polled by newspapers to give their judgment as to whom they regard as the greatest of American presidents. Invariably the presidents who rate the highest are those who are alleged to have accomplished the most in the service of their country; men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt and of course Abraham Lincoln. In most of these polls Lincoln is found to be the most popular and thus the greatest of all the presidents. Yet with the possible exception of Jefferson what these alleged “great” presidents had in common was either their ability or the amount of effort they put into expanding the power of the executive—and not merely at the expense of the legislative and judiciary—but at the expense of the liberties of the American people.

The very conducting of these polls, and the results that accrue from the, are indicative of a collectivist and statist mind-set that permeates the thinking of the American public and the historical profession. Collectivist in that the newspapers who conduct these polls hope their readers will judge their findings as a definitive determination of truth. That by deferring to the consensus of historians—men and women who should after all “know” these things—the reader of these polls will also come to know who were the greatest American presidents. The reason this whole process of evaluating greatness is erroneous is because although an historian has more knowledge of historical facts than the layman, he by no means necessarily has a better set of values, and if one is to critically judge the choices most historians have made in these polls, one can readily claim that their values are inferior to that of the layman. Yet the layman often allows himself to be sucked into presuming that consensus among scholars can be equated with truth, without even knowing the political biases of the resulting consensus. By a process of deference the layman accepts the view of the majority and relinquishes his independent judgment. That is why I call the conducting of these polls as dependent upon a collectivist mind set.

Be that as it may, the results of these polls are most interesting in showing how deeply our interpreters of the American past are imbued with statist ideals. By their choices they have equated greatness with the expansion of state power. And being consistent in their statism they have chosen the most virulent of statist presidents to be considered the greatest.

It is a sad and depressing commentary on the American people and the ideals that most Americans espouse that they have chosen to venerate that American who was most successful in oppressing them. A quick review of the actions and policies of this pragmatic politician will show that the rosy portrait drawn of him by such slavish admirers as Carl Sandburg have little basis in fact.

A libertarian critique of Lincoln must start from the assumption that secession is an inviolate right of any people, and any government which attempts to impose its authority on those who have voluntarily chosen to no longer sanction that governments’ authority, is initiating force. This Lincoln did, and in a cunning manner which was to become the hallmark of this “practical politician.” He was determined to bring the South back into the Union and was convinced by April of 1861 that force would be necessary to accomplish this. Not wanting to alienate the wavering border states, he had to make it appear that the South was the aggressor. Lincoln was a genius in the use of ambiguous language, so on April 6, 1681 he had a note sent by messenger to Governor Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina which read, “I am directed by the president of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the fort.”

To southerners this note carried the threat that Sumter was going to be provisioned so it could hold out and, if resistance was even attempted, arms, men, and ammunition were going to be supplied. To northerners he could claim (and did) that he was trying to save gallant men from starvation, and that he was giving the South fair warning of his benevolent but nonetheless firm intentions to hold Fort Sumter against Confederate assaults. So by the art of ambiguous language Lincoln succeeded in throwing upon the South the seeming blame of firing the first gun. But in the words of Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, “The aggressor in a war is not the first who uses force but the first who renders force necessary.”[1]

Lincoln’s abrogations of human rights during the Civil War were in many cases first precedents. He did more to remove America from our libertarian heritage than any president before or since. He enforced conscription of soldiers for the first time in American history; he suspended the writ of habeas corpus; he refused Confederate offers of prisoner exchanges despite the horrendous conditions of the war prisons on both sides; he sanctioned the wanton destruction of civilian lives and property by Sherman’s army in its notorious march through Georgia and other parts of the nearly defenseless South; He stifled freedom of speech and press throughout the North. He closed down anti-administration papers and had a certain Congressman Valandigham arrested and then exiled to the South for making a speech critical of the Administration. Lincoln’s cold blooded and ruthless execution of the war was exemplary of the philosophy which he lived by but seldom preached—that unjust means justify allegedly desirable ends. If the ends were justified Lincoln might be conditionally forgiven his excesses; but that clearly was not the case. Like any tyrant Lincoln used brute military force to subjugate a weaker foe.

In today’s context, the most unpalatable aspect of the Lincoln legacy, aside from the dangerous precedents he established, is that he is held up as an example of American greatness. Ignorance as well as deliberate distortion for the Lincoln myth. School children are fed a Carl Sandburgian version of Lincoln as the great emancipator; as one who wanted only peaceful reconciliation with the South; as the great man who held our country together; as a loving husband and father; as a man of enormous compassion who wrote touching letters to bereaved parents; and of course the most absurd distortion of all—the honesty of Abe. Yet even in his role as emancipator the underlying motivations were to keep England out of the war, to encourage the development of a 5th column resistance force within the Confederacy, and to give the war a moral purpose since anti-war sentiment was growing rapidly in the North by 1863. With the exception of perhaps being a loving father and husband there is little to recommend Lincoln for admiration.

It is not surprising that Lincoln is hero-worshipped as much as he is considering the amount of propaganda used to promote his image. The question to be asked it: why so much propaganda on his behalf? What is to be gained in deifying him? A terse answer would be “For Reasons of State.” It serves the interests of those who seek to enlarge the powers of the state to deify a man who was so instrumental towards that end.

In the process of attempting to de-mythologize Lincoln, we should recognize that people have a profound need to be proud of at least some aspects of their national or cultural heritage, and the accomplishments of the United States in the realm of political science is impressive by any standard. There are a number of men whose words and actions are worthy of high praise, and as libertarians we should in the process of debunking the Roosevelts and Lincolns of our past, point to worthy substitutes who sought to circumscribe state power. We have men such as Paine, Jefferson, Calhoun, John Taylor of Caroline, John Randolph of Roanoke whom we can offer as true examples of American greatness. It is timely and no less than imperative that we resurrect the anti-statists of our past and bury those who for too long have been regarded as the opposite of what they in fact were.

[1] In his book, The Late War.

The Thatcher Myth

by David Ramsay Steele

It now seems overwhelmingly likely that by the time you read this, Margaret Thatcher will be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Until a couple of months ago her chances appeared slim. Opinion polls showed Labour and Conservative alternating with very slender majorities — not auspicious for the Conservatives in view of the common tendency for support to swing towards the government just before an election. Furthermore, Callaghan’s personal popularity with voters was consistently much greater than Thatcher’s

Race — simmering

A year ago Thatcher made a “tough” speech about immigration, which immediately boosted her support, but the boost lasted no more than a few days. It probably dawned on voters that Thatcher was not prepared to spell out any really severe measures against immigrants, especially as she found it necessary to backtrack almost immediately with a speech assuring blacks that the Conservative Party meant them well.

Britain’s racial heterogeneity is a product almost entirely of the postwar period. There is a strong undercurrent of resentment against blacks, especially among blue-collar workers, and since the black influx is comparatively recent and sudden, it is not fantastic to contemplate sending blacks back where they came from (the West Indies, Pakistan and Bangladesh), either by compulsory repatriation (advocated by the minor racist party, the National Front) or by irresistibly generous cash inducements (proposed by maverick ex-Conservative Enoch Powell).

However, the major leaders of opinion, Conservative, Labour and Liberal, have expelled any such proposals from the realm of decent discussion. Any major party which committed itself to them would find it had bought the loyalty of a substantial anti-black opinion at the price of furious opposition from most “decent” (respectable and articulate) people, including, for example, virtually all the Christian churches. An astute politician like Thatcher is well aware that such a course would probably spell the end of the Conservative Party as a contender for power, for decades to come.

Thus, despite widespread strong feelings about race (and in some districts, daily physical attacks on Asians by gangs of young white thugs), it cannot be a serious electoral issue between Labour and Conservative parties under present conditions. After an alarmingly rapid growth, the National Front has recently declined. Only a very great increase in the severity of the economic crisis could change this situation in the near future. Thatcher’s attempt to play the race card was no more than an opportunistic peace of speculative vote-catching. The public support it received from none other than F.A. Hayek was as ill-informed and maladroit as it was unprincipled. Her remarks did, however, serve to confirm her image among the progressive-minded as an ugly throwback to pre-Neanderthal days.

Nostrils filled with the heady scent of power, Thatcher went through all the shrill and undignified capers of the vote-grubbing politician, but it seemed fruitless. It began to look as though the Labourites had firm possession of the mantle of “natural party of government”, that they had acquired the enviable reputation held by the Conservatives in the fifties, of being, however bad, so much safer than the dangerous crackpots in the other party.

The strike wave

Screaming abuse at the Conservatives for being monetarist doctrinaires who would bring back the unemployment levels of the thirties, the Labour government has been quietly practising gradual but firm “monetary restraint”, i.e. reducing the rate of growth of the money stock from its spectacular magnitude under the previous Conservative administration. Partly in order to disguise the significance of this fact from their socialist supporters, and partly out of mere confusion and ignorance, Labour has accompanied it with an “incomes policy”. Not a “statutory” policy, in which the mailed fist of the state is used to compel wage settlements below a specified percentage per annum, but a supposedly “voluntary” policy, based on agreement with the trade unions, and (it was thought) to be enforced by the threat of “sanctions”: those firms granting “excessive” pay rises would be penalized by cancellation of government contracts.

Last year the percentage “norm” for wage rises was 10 per cent, largely window-dressing since many workers wouldn’t have obtained 10 per cent even without a norm. But all those who settled for less than 10 per cent could be claimed as a “success” for the government’s policy, rather as a witch-doctor might claim that his technique of skull-rattling and wailing incantations had “succeeded” because the sun did rise next morning. Those workers who obtained more than 10 per cent could be averaged with the others, and since the average rate of increase wasn’t much above 10 per cent, this showed the government’s policy had been broadly successful.

The policy was not wholly decorative, as there is among trade unionists a fear of the “union-bashing” Conservatives, and the unions will go to some lengths to co-operate with Labour on the grounds that Tory rule would be worse. But insofar as the unions held back their wage demands through loyalty to Labour and the “national interest”, they expected that before long they would be able to recoup these losses. Why should they be penalized for their patriotic self-sacrifice? They could be heard muttering that a genuine socialist incomes policy, in which all wages were centrally controlled and all prices fixed at will by the state, would of course be paradise on earth, and they would be only too pleased to go along with it. But as long as the capitalist law of the jungle prevailed, why should they suffer more than others?

The 10 per cent norm expired and the government had to decide what to do next. Some Conservatives, and many trade unionists, urged an immediate return to “free collective bargaining”. More timid souls spoke of “an orderly return to free and responsible collective bargaining”. A few Conservative MPs pointed out that the Conservative Party now had the same wages policy as the Trades Union Congress — no state interference!

At this point, Callaghan’s crew made the fateful decision which may have doomed them. Our 10 per cent policy, they said, has been very largely successful. The rate of inflation (they meant price rises) has fallen. Now we must make further progress. For the coming year, the norm is five per cent! Meanwhile the money supply and price index were still rising at around 10 per cent, the unions were deciding it was time to recoup their losses, and workers were being rapidly dragged into higher tax categories where their nominal (and much quoted) rises were being whittled down to almost nothing.

There was a big strike at the Ford car plant. Ford’s gave in and granted a wage rise considerably in excess of five per cent. The government tried to impose sanctions against Ford’s but none of the smaller parties in the House of Commons would support the government in this, so the sanctions could not be implemented. The government’s much-vaunted pay policy was in ruins.

None of this in itself would have seriously injured the government’s electoral chances. There is a widespread sentiment in Britain that the unions have far too much power, but that nothing should be done about it. The Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970-74) tried to tame the unions in the only way which people could understand: government licensing and regulations, followed by a head-on collision. In 1974 during the big miners’ strike, Heath spitefully imposed a three-day week on industry, and shortly afterwards called an election. Instead of the voters’ anger at the unions giving Heath a bigger majority, the hostility was (justly) directed at Heath, who lost power to Labour.

Since then the Conservatives have been associated with strife, confrontation and class war. Many people would dearly love to see the unions’ power reduced, if this could be done painlessly, at the touch of a switch. But they do not want the serenity of their day-to-day lives to be rudely interrupted by strikes, power cuts, three-day weeks and the like.

The Labour government has played on this fear, and told the people: “We have a special understanding with the unions. The Tories want to get tough with them, but this will only cause trouble and upset. We can keep the unions quiet.” And the people believed it. They grumbled every day about the over-powerful unions, but preferred to go on grumbling rather than have their daily routine violently disturbed.

When it became clear that Callaghan’s five per cent was finished, that did not automatically lead to the government’s being discredited. There were even signs that the government could turn the collapse of their pay policy into a positive advantage. Was it not the Conservatives who favoured free collective bargaining, non-interference by the state, and therefore objectively supported the rising wave of union militancy? The Labour Party consisted of civilized, reasonable people who hoped to bring some order into industry. The Conservatives had wrecked Labour’s well-intentioned scheme, and favoured a tooth-and-claw struggle of each against all.

Now all this has changed. A deluge of strikes descended, which might have been calculated to lose Labour the election. There was a national lorry (truck) drivers’ strike accompanied by “secondary picketing” on a vast scale. Trade union committees became a sort of second Customs and Excise service, solemnly deliberating which goods they would magnanimously allow to be transported from any one place to another.

Then, there were strikes by “public service workers”, low-paid government employees of all sorts, their living standards severely eroded by inflation. The dustmen (garbage collectors) struck, so bags of rubbish piled up in the streets, and there were rumours of rats. (Why, if this continued much longer, the streets would be almost as disgusting as New York City’s.)

The British passion for grumbling ineffectually about the unions has always been eagerly fanned by the press, which gives an enormously exaggerated account of the impact of strikes. But now they certainly had material to work on. Almost every hour brought a fresh atrocity more hateful than the last. In some areas, we were told to boil our water because of the threat of typhoid. Hospital workers and ambulance drivers struck, permitting only what they considered life-and-death services. Their criteria of life-and-death were in all cases less rigorous than those of medically qualified people. Angry arguments were conducted in public between physicians and strikers, with one doctor allegedly retaliating by refusing to treat trade union members. A hospitalized woman, knowing she had at most a few weeks more to live, pleaded publicly to be allowed to die with some remaining dignity, which was impossible because of the closing-down of “inessential” hospital services, such as laundries. Ambulance drivers “working to rule” discovered that an injured man was just outside the border of their territory, and returned to base leaving him to die in the street. The gravediggers went on strike, so corpses piled up in the freezers. It was planned to dump them in the sea, and some irate bereaved announced they would go and dig the graves themselves.

The public reaction was decisive: a furious lurch to the Conservatives. For the first time, the personal popularity of prim and posh Mrs. Thatcher exceeded that of jovial farmer Jim Callaghan. The voters were prepared to forgive a Labour government a lot, but they were witnessing exactly what a Labour government was supposed to avoid. People had voted Labour to placate the robber unions, in exchange for peace and quiet. Now, it appeared, Callaghan had grovelled to the unions, the unions had walked all over him, yet still peace and quiet had fled.

Taken aback, Labour politicians tried to play down what was happening, but as one strike followed another, they appeared ridiculous. They retreated from five per cent to the magically discovered figure of 8.8 (eight point eight) per cent, but the unions smashed through this equally brusquely, with well-publicized rises of up to 35 per cent.

The Conservatives were as confused in their propaganda triumph as the Labourites were in humiliation. Conservative MPs swore loudly that none of them had ever breathed so much as a word in his sleep about free collective bargaining, or keeping the state out of industry. They had always been in favour of “responsible” collective bargaining, not (perish the thought) “free” collective bargaining. They evaded the question of exactly what they would do if the unions simply failed to be responsible, but although Labour tried to blame the Tories, this cut little ice. The current disaster could only be blamed on the party in power, and everyone knew the Conservatives were union-bashers at heart.

Most people in Britain see the situation in crude terms. Rising prices are due to union militancy; union militancy is due to grasping avarice. The solution is for unions to be less selfish, more responsible. Failing that, the government has to get tough with them.

The idea that a complicated latticework of privileges and entrenched attitudes has given the trade unions their awesome power, buttressed by the rigidity of a largely statified industry, and further encouraged by government incomes policies, is far too subtle for most people to grasp quickly.

One of Thatcher’s specific proposals illustrates this perfectly. She has suggested that trade unions be compelled to hold a secret ballot of all members before calling a strike. (The usual practice is for unions to decide on strikes by public show of hands at a mass meeting). This proposal, if implemented, will do nothing to reduce industrial strife. The idea, fondly cherished by many Tories, that union members are all terrorized into going on strike by a few Communists is sheer fantasy. Those who ballot and then strike will have been given an additional political weapon. The unions will, however, rightly feel persecuted by the state, which feeling, if it does anything, will put them in more of a fighting mood.

It would be idle to tell Conservatives that unions should be voluntary associations, left free to conduct their internal affairs as democratically or undemocratically as they please, and that compulsory secret ballots are merely another small step on the road to a totalitarian dictatorship. Most Tory politicians would be quite unable to understand such an argument, but even if they could, they would be unable to sell it to the voters. Either there is unbridled greed, free-for-all, anarchy, law of the jungle — or the government must regulate, curb, control, suppress. This is the way most people view the alternatives. Thus Thatcher’s proposal is seen as salutary, because it is a symbolic gesture that the government can take a big stick to the unions.

The government falls

In the British system, there is a maximum of five years between general elections, but an election may occur at any time. This is normally decided by the Prime Minister, with a view to his party’s electoral chances. An election must also be called if the government fails to command a majority in the House of Commons on a vote of confidence, usually unlikely if the governing party has a majority. But the Labour government was a minority government, dependent for every measure on attracting support from one of the smaller parties: Liberals, Scottish Nationalists, Welsh Nationalists or Ulster Unionists.

Callaghan clung to office for as long as possible, first by means of a “Liberal-Labour Pact”, then by the support of the Ulster Unionists, bought with increased representation for Northern Ireland in the House of Commons.

The government also bought support from the Scottish and Welsh Nationalist Parties, by dangling the carrot of “devolution”, i.e. home rule for Wales and Scotland. Scottish and Welsh Nationalism are both nine-days’ wonders, like bra-burning or skateboarding. Only a miniscule proportion of Scots or Welsh want either complete national separation or a federal Britain. Both Welsh and Scottish Nationalists built up their strength rapidly in recent elections, but it is certain that they will be slaughtered next month. Conservative and Labour parties have both moved to buy off Nationalist support by offering “devolution”, but it has gradually occurred to everyone that in the absence of national separation or federation, devolution Is a lot of nonsense. The fad for devolution lasted only so long as no one was sure what it meant. Now everyone knows it means a “national assembly”, i.e. an additional army of bureaucrats and petty politicians superimposed on the existing structure. This is still supported by the leaders of the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, who see it as a first step to separation, but those who voted for them have no wish to leave Britain, so the bubble has burst.

The Labour government gave the Welsh and Scots referenda on devolution, pledging itself to introduce national assemblies if the results were affirmative. The Welsh voted overwhelmingly against their own national assembly. The Scots voted very narrowly in favour — but this did not mean that Scotland wanted devolution. Afraid that devolution might be introduced because of a low turn-out in the referenda, the government had made a stipulation that, as well as an absolute majority for a national assembly, there had to be 40 per cent of the electorate voting in favour. Some time before the vote it became clear that, whichever way it went, there would be no 40 per cent in favour, and this fact was known to all potential voters. The “Yes” campaigners all insisted loudly that abstention was tantamount to a vote against. On the day, there was an enormous abstention, and the 40 per cent was missed by a wide margin. The Scottish Nationalists immediately changed their tune: abstentions were irrelevant. (Doubtless they will assiduously cultivate for years to come the myth that Scotland voted for independence and was swindled by the English.) Furthermore, Scottish Nationalism, like Welsh Nationalism, reached a peak, and then rapidly plunged. The Scots were only a little behind the Welsh: if the Scottish referendum had been held a few weeks later, the result would have been negative.

Callaghan still hoped to push Scottish devolution through Parliament, but it soon became clear that Labour MPs had had enough. Callaghan could now offer the Scottish Nationalists nothing, and they announced that they would support the Conservatives to kick the government out. The Ulster Unionists had extracted from Callaghan all he could give them, and their traditional Conservative connections re-asserted themselves. On March 28th, the government was defeated in the House by a single vote. (By last-minute political trading, Callaghan had made his numbers up, but one Labour MP was sick and could not be there to vote.) The general election will be held on May 3rd.

The real Thatcher

It is widely expected that a Thatcher government will abruptly change the whole course of political evolution in Britain since the war, that it will introduce something fearsome called “monetarism”, withdraw state handouts to ailing companies, foster self-reliance and (as Conservative politicians are wont to put it) the bracing winds of competition. During the election campaign, Labourites will certainly contend that Thatcher is the most reactionary Tory politician since Attila the Hun, that she wants to send little children up the chimneys and starve the old-age pensioners. Some Conservative MPs will employ a sprinkling of libertarian rhetoric, and gut libertarians up and down the country will find themselves tempted not only to vote Conservative, but to do so nursing the wild hope that something is about to be done to get the state off their backs. In the U.S., both Libertarian Review and Reason have suggested that there may be a substantial benefit from a Conservative government.

It is as well to put it on record at the outset: a Thatcher government will continue to maintain and operate the corporate state, very much as it would be operated by Labour. The only important qualification is that Thatcher may provoke a ruinous general strike.

It is true that Thatcher has come under the influence of Sir Keith Joseph, who has come under the influence of Hayek. It is true that there is an articulate “monetarist” and broadly free market wing of the Conservative Party. But like all major parties, the Conservatives are a coalition of factions and interest groups, and most of them are far from even the dubious and diluted libertarianism of Joseph.

When Edward Heath was elected in 1970, his rhetoric was more resolutely laissez-faire than Thatcher’s today. We heard all about the bracing winds of competition. Heath said he would stop giving handouts to “lame duck” industries, never introduce a compulsory incomes policy, and cure inflation “at a stroke”. The Heath government nationalized Rolls-Royce (when it was found to be bankrupt), introduced by far the most draconian peacetime incomes policy since the seventeenth century, and did more to debauch the currency than any Labour government before or since.

The annual increase in the money stock was three per cent in 1969 (under a Labour government). It had risen to 27 per cent by 1973. Britain’s inflationary problems are still largely the responsibility of the last Conservative government, though the Keynesian Labour politicians have been incapable of pointing this out. It has been pointed out by Enoch Powell, the most charismatic and popular of British politicians. He has strongly urged Britons to vote Labour in the last two elections, and will probably do so again. Powell, who is intimately acquainted with the Conservative Party, has also predicted that a Thatcher government will introduce a compulsory incomes policy.

There is certainly more intellectual substances behind Thatcher’s present policies than there was behind Heath’s in 1970. But there has been a “monetarist” shift right across the political spectrum, and this has affected the Labour Party too. The Labour government has made cuts in state spending which would have been unthinkable for any government a few years ago. On the other hand most Conservatives are still committed to state planning. They interpret the Heath years by saying that the free market was “tried”, then the government was forced to take account of the realities of the modern world, etc. They are only waiting for the first few difficulties facing a Thatcher administration, to start howling that we must learn to live in the modern world, i.e. enthusiastically operate the fascist-style corporate state.

Many of Thatcher’s speeches, prepared for her by Joseph’s think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, contain excellent libertarian analysis, in very general terms. The mere suspicion that a Tory leader could reveal some sort of worked-out ideology has startled many people, used to the Conservatives’ inane anti-intellectualism. What has generally escaped notice is the modesty of her concrete commitments. In 1970 Heath made it clear that he ruled out compulsory wage and price controls. Thatcher has gone out her way not to rule them out, and has volunteered the opinion that they are necessary in certain emergency situations. In 1970 Heath made it clear that in his view unprofitable companies should be allowed to die, without state aid. Thatcher has gone to great pains to emphasize that this is not her policy, that instead “the lame ducks should be given a chance to fly”, i.e. that she fully supports government subsidies to “save jobs”, and merely upbraids Labour for continuing to give transfusions of cash for too long to hopeless cases. All the leading Conservatives have carefully avoided saying that they will abolish the National Enterprise Board (which “invests” the taxpayers’ money in unprofitable firms). Thatcher has evaded the question of where her promised cuts in state spending will occur, but has shown no reluctance in saying where she promises considerable increases (mainly the police and armed forces).

This is not to deny that the growth of Hayekian thought in Britain will have immense political repercussions, and may transform the Conservative Party, but we should look ahead 20 years for that. Nor is it to deny that a Thatcher government will make some small improvements. They will make it easier for council tenants to buy their homes. (More than a third of the population live in subsidized public housing, called “council housing”). They will slightly loosen the crippling nation-wide rent control. They may cut off some of the funds to Labour’s pet industrial money-losing projects. They may cut taxes a bit — though they cannot do this without increasing inflation, or making cuts more painful than they have shown any stomach for. (Probably they will not reduce the tax burden at all, but shift from direct to indirect taxation, in the belief that the latter permits more “incentive”).

Against these little improvements we must set the negative features. They are more deeply committed than Labour to the European Common Market. They are pledged to make substantial increases in spending on “defence”. They are tougher on immigrants. After a year or two of “monetarism”, they will probably swing into a massive confrontation with the unions.

It would be as foolish to blame a Thatcher government for being corporatist as it would be to blame the distilleries for drunkenness. They respond to the demand. Thatcher is a wily and ruthless politician, or if you prefer it, a highly competent entrepreneur in the political market. The state of opinion in Britain, and in the Conservative Party does not permit much progress towards liberty at present.

In Defense of Free Immigration

by Richard Ebeling

Right at this moment hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Vietnamese are in the South China Sea. Some of them are heading for Hong Kong, others are heading for the Philippines or Malaysia or Singapore. But regardless of their destination, everyone of those Vietnamese has made a choice. They have chosen to leave the land of their birth, their culture, their heritage and make a new start. They have decided that their homeland has become intolerable for themselves and their children. They hope and pray for a better life than the one they leave behind under the choking hand of socialist statism.

It is estimated that hundreds of these Vietnamese will never see land again. Faulty navigation, lack of food and fresh water or disease will bring them to their death. Many probably could be saved. Ships will pass them by that could have taken them aboard and landed them in safety, but will not. The ship captains and owners are reluctant to give shelter and assistance because they know that at whatever port at which they land they will be quarantined, inspected and detained, for none of the Asian countries are willing to give free entrance to these new citizens of the world.

But even those Vietnamese who languish in detention camps in Malaysia or the Philippines are still better off than those countless people in Cambodia who had no chance of escape and were consumed in that human bonfire that served the ends of collectivist purity and so-called people’s justice.

The Vietnamese refugees are not unique in their experience, either in facing oppression at home or in their decision to emigrate. Countless millions of others in the last two hundred years faced similar despotisms and chose to make a new life in a freer land.

What is different is that for most of those two hundred years there was at least one country that was open to those escaping from economic destitution, political oppression or social rigidity. Today there no longer exists any nation whose gates are spread wide welcoming newcomers. Today the gates are closed and only political pressure or public shock and indignation can push them ajar for a fortunate handful.

The inscription on the Statue of Liberty may still read: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . I lift my lamp beside the golden door,” but it stands there as a cruel joke to those who see the “golden door” barred to their entrance.

Almost no other country on the face of the earth has had its history so closely tied with and dependent upon the free movement of men and women as has the United States.

In the Declaration of Independence, one of the stated grievances against the British Crown was governmental barriers to freedom of movement. The King “has endeavored to prevent the population of these States,” charged the signers of the Declaration. They accused the British government of “obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass (laws) to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

Not long after the Declaration was signed, the principle was generalized when Thomas Jefferson wrote of “. . . the natural right which all men have of relinquishing the country in which birth or other accident may have thrown them, and seeking subsistence and happiness wheresoever they may be able, or hope to find them.”

Since the first English settlers reached America in 1607, almost 50 million people have migrated to the United States.

A good many of those 50 million came to America to escape from persecution, oppression and the control of the State. In the 19th century, four million Insn came across the Atlantic, leaving behind potato famines and British imperialism. Between 1850 and 1900, five million Germans found a new home in America, many of them escaping from the convulsions and high conscription rates caused by Bismarck’s wars of the 1860’s and early 1870’s. Well over one million Poles arrived before World War I, leaving behind acute poverty in territory controlled by Russia and the suppression of Polish culture and nationality in the portions of Poland under German domination. The same story can be repeated in the case of almost every other national group that contributed an ingredient to the American melting pot.

For every immigrant, America offered a new beginning, a second chance without the oppressive air of privilege and power. A Swedish immigrant wrote home in the 1880’s that his “cap (is not) worn out from lifting it in the presence of gentlemen. There is no class distinction between high and low, rich and poor, no make-believe, no ‘title-sickness’ or artificial ceremonies . . . Everybody lives in-peace nd prosperity.”

In the 19th century, it was mostly young men who would first arrive from another country, attempt to make a living and send money back home. For example, of the Italians who came to the United States 78 percent were male and in the case of the Greeks, 95 percent of the immigrants were male. In the 1850’s Irish immigrants were sending over one million dollars a year to friends and relatives in Ireland, with half of that amount being sent in the form of prepaid tickets to assist others in coming to America. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the estimate is that 25 to 75 percent of all immigrants coming to America did so with money sent from compatriots already in the United States. Almost every one of these immigrant groups tended to start at the bottom of the economic ladder, taking the jobs considered undignified or undesirable by others. And almost every immigrant usually began his start in America by settling in that section of the city predominantly occupied by members of the same nationality, culture and language.

Those who wish to immigrate to the United States today are fundamentally no different from those who came to America a hundred years ago. The Mexican who slips into the United States and resides here as an “illegal alien” tends to be a young adult male looking for work; when he finds a job he sends a good portion of his earnings back to his family in Mexico. He usually has had no more than five years of schooling and probably speaks little or no English. The “aliens” tend to gravitate to the lowest paying occupations that others prefer to turn down, and it’s estimated that twenty percent of them make below the minimum wage. They live in various Mexican-American communities around the country and except for work come into very little contact with “Anglo” Americans.

But there is a unique difference between the 19th century immigrant and the 20th century “illegal” immigrant. The earlier immigrants worked in a relatively free and open society and could expect in a generation or two to advance themselves economically and socially compared to the living standards in the “old country” as well as to when they first began to live and work in America.

The 20th century illegal immigrants have no similar future to look forward to. They have only the present, and it is a present that yields nothing but fear and uncertainty; uncertainty that at any moment they may be discovered by the immigration authorities and deported, and the fear that any resistance or refusal to accept the terms set for them by their employers may result in their being turned in to the authorities.

However, the really fundamental difference between the 19th century and 20th century immigrants concerns the ideological undercurrents present then and now. In the 19th century, freedom of movement was generally seen as an integral part of a philosophy and policy of free trade. Just as the free movement of goods across frontiers was seen as the method by which individuals of the respective countries of the world could benefit from their comparative productive advantages, free movement of people was seen as the method by which individuals—each pursuing their own personal interests—could assure that labor would come to be distributed among the various geographical areas in the pattern that was most conducive to private and social prosperity.

The same economic influences that enticed owners of capital to shift their factors of production from one use to another, tended to operate on those who supplied labor services as well. Those countries that suffered from low productivity and low wages would “export” workers to other parts of the globe where wages were relatively higher and productive prospects were likely to raise the income positions of those who moved into the higher wage areas.

The advantages from the transfer of workers would tend to benefit everyone. In the case of the workers who immigrated, it offered the opportunity to compete in an alternative labor market where their relative income share could be larger. Free immigration benefited those who remained in the home country; the shrinkage of the domestic labor force due to the emigration of others, made labor a relatively more scarce resource in the market and tended to raise the level of wages in the home country.

The country into which the immigrants flowed benefited from the move, as well. The increase in the work force diminished the scarcity of labor services in various lines of production. The lowering of costs and the availability of more hands for production activities meant an intensification of the division of labor, a general increase in productivity and the opportunity for the production of totally new goods and services that had been beyond the reach of consumers in the past because of the lack of manpower to provide them.

The economic and social principles of laissez faire and laissez passer were intertwined and inseparable. The advantage that necessarily followed from the unhampered exchange of goods across the borders of different countries, could not attain their maximum potential unless the free movement of goods was matched by the free movement of labor and capital to where the greatest economic advantage was anticipated.

The advantages of laissez faire and laissez passer, however, require not only freedom of movement, but flexibility of wages and prices that enables an adjustment to change and progress. Need for adjustment can arise either from the demand side or the supply side.

If the pattern of relative consumer demand were to change, some^1 industries would find their profitability enhanced, while other firms and industries would see their profitability diminished. A successful adaptation to the new circumstances would require a shifting of resources—including labor—from those areas where profitability had declined to those areas where it had increased. Resistance to lower wages, or reluctance to change occupations when the relative demand for a product declines, can only result in unemployment, a decline in output and income, and a general fall in the economic well-being of the country as a whole. The unwillingness of a few to adapt to new market circumstances rebounds to the disadvantage of all.

An increase in the availability of scarce resources necessitates shifts in the relative distribution of labor among industries as well. Labor is not a homogeneous glob; there are different types and degrees of labor skills, just as there are different types of capital goods and consumer goods. The arrival of new workers through the process of immigration means that in particular lines of employment, the increased labor supply will put downward pressure on some wages. To remain employed in their present occupation established workers would have to accept a lower rate of remuneration. If they find this unacceptable, then they may have to shift into other lines of work. While this job shift takes place, wages in the industries into which the older workers move may be lowered as well. This, in turn, may mean that existing workers in these other industries have to accept lower wages.

But regardless of the particular types of changes and ramifications an increase in the labor force brings about, the general long-run outcome will reflect itself in greater output and, through an intensification of the division of labor, a widening of choices and opportunities for all individuals, both as consumers and producers.

The expansion of rigidities through government-bestowed privilege and monopoly conflicts by its very nature with the free flow of men and material. To the extent that the protection of particular groups becomes the goal of the state, restriction on the potential competition of newcomers must be imposed and enforced.

In the libertarian society, national borders—to the extent that governments may still exist—would merely be administrative boundaries designating areas of responsibility for the protection of life and property. In the Interventionist State, boundaries become lines of demarcation designating respective areas of privilege and power. As Wilhelm Ropke vividly expressed it, in the present era of nationalism and interventionism, “national frontiers have been changed into barbed wire fences.”

When the welfare and employment of specially privileged groups becomes the duty of the State, protectionist quotas and tariff walls are soon joined by barriers to immigration. The arguments often used to support immigration controls easily bear this out. It is often said that if there were unrestricted immigration, welfare rolls would climb, neighborhoods would no longer maintain their present identities and qualities, and jobs would be stolen from American labor.

The fear of a swarm of immigrant welfare addicts is the logical terror of those who either operate or live off the dole. A crushing load of additional welfare recipients could easily arouse the wrath of the taxpayers and bring about the end of the welfare system. This is the logical fear of those who envisage the collapse of an economic privilege if too many other people should clamor for the same benefits. In fact, historically, the immigrant has usually been a young, hard working individual who has requested nothing more than a chance to make his own way. For example, in a recent investigation of 9132 welfare cases in San Diego County, only ten illegal immigrants were found on the rolls.

Neither neighborhoods nor their qualities can be eternally preserved. Values, preferences and personalities all change over time. Some land and property values grow and others decline, but regardless of which it is, this is the natural result of the free choices of acting individuals. It is as illusory to think that cities and neighborhoods can be frozen and maintained in their present form as it would have been to try to prevent natural forces from turning bustling western boom towns into decaying ghost towns. Those who attempt to use immigration barriers and other methods to resist change are not only fighting against the future, but the present, as well.

The fears of labor unions that a flood of immigrants will cause economic misery and mass unemployment is totally illusory as well. In a country such as the United States, more hands will almost always tend to mean more production and prosperity. Unemployment follows in the wake of an increased labor force only if rigidity and privilege prevents the changes in relative prices, wages, and employment that must occur if the benefits of immigration are to be reaped.

The most detrimental consequence of immigration barriers, it should always be remembered, is the personal tragedy, the economic misery and political despair, of those who find themselves locked into oppressive societies with no chance of escape. Wilhelm Ropke has suggested that “modern nationalism and collectivism have, by the restriction of migration, perhaps come nearest to the ‘servile state’. . . Man can hardly be reduced more to a mere wheel in the clockwork of the national collectivist state than by being deprived of his freedom to move . . . Feeling that he belongs now to his nation, body and soul, he will be more easily subdued to the obedient state serf which nationalist and collectivist governments demand.”

We can only hope the Ropke’s deep pessimism is ill-founded, that the spirit of freedom will never be extinguished no matter how confining and all encompassing the power of the nation state. But how much more glorious if the motto on the Statue of Liberty once again embodied truth rather than hypocrisy—if America once again said to every nation; “Give me your tired, your poor,, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Private School Monitor: a quarterly scholarly abstracting reference work on books, articles and chapters relating to the private schools and their interests. Published in behalf of Associates for Research on Private Education at the Center for Research on Private Education, University of San Francisco. Ca. 94117. Write for information.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XII NUMBER 3

MAY-JUNE, 1979

US-ISSN0047-4517

Listen Again, YAF

Ten years ago this very month, YAF unwittingly played a vital and historic role for our times: it brought into being the modern, rapidly growing libertarian movement. YAF had attracted a large number of libertarians to its membership and its leadership—men and women who had been seduced by the occasional libertarian rhetoric of YAF and of conservatism into thinking that these were at least quasi-libertarian institutions. At the 1969 YAF convention at St. Louis the libertarians and the conservatives came to a dramatic showdown—a showdown at least partly helped by my first open letter, “Listen YAF”, published in the Libertarian Forum, August 15, 1969.

I addressed that open letter not to YAF as a whole, but to the libertarians within YAF, to those who didn’t realize that the conservatives never take their occasional rhetoric about liberty and free enterprise at all seriously. Every generation of YAF develops libertarians within it, and so it is again time to address you, and to urge you to leave YAF and join your libertarian colleagues outside the stifling and malevolent confines of the conservative movement. Ten years ago, the libertarian movement was just a hope and a prayer. Now it lives, and it grows stronger every day. Take a look at any conservative rally outside of YAF. Do you see anyone under 60? Then go to any Libertarian meeting; you will find it hard put to find anyone over 40. Libertarianism is a young and developing movement. The future is with us. Conservatives, who worship the past, are doomed to fade away into that past.

The issue that precipitated the YAF showdown in 1969 was the draft—the issue on which conservatives are mealy-mouthed and speak at best in terms of efficiency for the military. Libertarians know that there can be no compromise on the draft: that the draft is slavery, and that it must be combatted as an ultimate immorality. When the libertarians in YAF insisted on organizing to take a militant and principled stand against the draft, their leadership was summarily kicked out of YAF, and the libertarians all walked out to form the beginning of the current libertarian movement—to set up the Society for Individual Liberty and the California Libertarian Alliance.

The vital importance of the 1969 split is that libertarians at long last realized that they were not simply “more extreme” allies of conservatives, but that they are a separate and distinct ideological movement, and that in fact conservatism is one of their major enemies.

Conservatives are theocrats and compulsory moralizers, who want to use the police power to force their own version of religion and morality down everyone else’s throat. Conservatives want to outlaw nearly everything: marijuana, pornography, prostitution, homosexuality.

At a confrontation that top libertarians and conservatives had at a Philadelphia Society meeting in Chicago this spring, the conservatives made their position all too clear: that the State is the overriding moral teacher in society. Libertarians don’t believe in ever taking moral lessons from the State; we believe that the only proper moral teachers are individuals and voluntary groups such as private schools, families, and churches.

Conservatives are opponents of personal liberty: they are eager to continue the snooping, prying, harassment and invasions of liberty and privacy of the FBI and CIA.

Conservatives are militarists and war-mongers. They believe that the bigger the military budget, and the military distortions imposed on the economy, the better. They favor American military and economic intervention everywhere, wherever and whenever they can cause trouble.

Libertarians are opposed to mass murder, and so believe in a peaceful foreign policy, a policy designed to defend America only, and not to meddle in the affairs of every country around the globe.

Conservatives claim to believe in a free-market economy, but they only give it lip-service. More and more, conservatives are sounding exactly like neo-conservatives and social democrats. When have you last seen any substantive differences, say, among Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, Senator Moynihan, and Sidney Hook? When did you last see conservatives take a really strong free-market position? The conservatives now form a cozy part of the American welfare-warfare-liberal-conservative State Establishment. If you really want a choice not an echo, join the Libertarians.

And now, irony, of ironies, the issue of the draft is back again. Congress is getting ready to reimpose compulsory registration, as the first step in bringing back the draft. Have you seen YAF leaping in to oppose this grave threat to the liberty of all young people? That’ll be the day! No, it is the Libertarians who have rushed in to oppose with all their might any recurrence of the draft; such groups as the Students for a Libertarian Society and the Young Libertarian Alliance are in the forefront of the new anti-draft struggle. Which side will YAF be on?

So rapidly have we been growing in recent months that statists of all breeds, left, right, and center, have been banding together to stop what they see as a threat to the power of their beloved State. The liberal Catholic Commonweal entitled its lead editorial in the March 16 issue, “In Defense of Government.” There Commonweal complained that not for generations “have there been so many intelligent people bent upon proclaiming that the state is the enemy.” It deplores what it sees as an anti-government movement led by “doctrinaire libertarians.” Shortly afterward came a two-part article by Phillip Green, a member of the editorial board of the leftist Nation. In his Nation article, “Two Cheers for the State”, Green chided libertarians for their “selfishness” and instead trumpeted the slogan, “the common good precedes the individual good.” Cheering for the State, Green warned that “Weaken the state and it is almost certainly the collective capacity of self-defense against the powerful that will be most gravely weakened.”

But the most scurrilous, hysterical, and frenetic attack on libertarianism and the libertarian movement came in the June 8 (followed by the August 3) issue of National Review. Twenty years ago, Bill Buckley and NR read us out of the conservative movement with considerably less fanfare and a lot more condescension. Now, apparently, we are a threat, and so Ernest van den Haag, who has not a single libertarian bone in his body, was assigned that task of chief hatchet-man. In the course of his diatribe, we find the true face of conservatism revealed. For van den Haag, an ultra-Keynesian and champion of the welfare-state, attacks Mises, Hayek, and Austrian free-market economics; denounces the gold standard as a “mystical article of faith”; strongly attacks any belief in natural rights, or the application of principles to politics; denounces libertarians for being rationalists who ignore the alleged centrality of tradition and of original sin; and opposes to libertarianism the doctrine of the French theorist of absolutism Jean Bodin that the State must be sovereign and above the law.

But the National Review articles, as can be seen from this summary, were scarcely high in intellectual content. But what could we expect from van den Haag, the last defender of Richard Nixon? In any case, we can scarcely expect profound content from a movement that tries to hide its theocratic authoritarianism in the tattered cloak of free-enterprise rhetoric. What NR really brought to this argument was a recrudescence of the discredited McCarthyite mud-slinging of the early post-war years. It seems, according to these imbecilic smears, that myself and other libertarians are some kind of Communists or Soviet agents. Because we favor liberty? Or because we oppose war and foreign meddling?

If you want to find out what Libertarians are all about, pay no attention to the desperate smears of liberty’s frightened enemies. Read our own literature and our own statements. What are libertarians? Some of us are free-market anarchists, others are minimal statists. But we all believe that government must not stray beyond the strict confines of the defense of each individual’s rights to liberty and property. We favor personal and economic liberty. And we believe in minimal government at home and abroad; we oppose government intervention in the domestic economy or in the affairs of other nations. We are not pacifists; we want to confine the U.S. government to protecting its own citizens while aggressing against no one else.

If you wish to learn of the Libertarian approach to foreign policy, take a look at the platform of the national Libertarian Party, a platform which I helped draw up and fully endorse. The preamble to the Foreign Policy section states:

“American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world and the defense—against attack from abroad—of the lives, liberty and property of the American people. Provision of such defense must respect the individual rights of people everywhere.

The principle of non-intervention should guide relationships between governments. We should return to the historic libertarian tradition of avoiding entagling alliances, abstaining totally from foreign quarrels and imperialist adventures, and recognizing the right to unrestricted trade, travel, and immigration.”

Commie? Stalinist? Only in the minds of desperate liars, out to use any weapon they can muster to stop the advance of libertarianism and the libertarian movement. The longer you stay in the conservative movement, the more you give countenance to the lies and calumnies of the enemies of liberty and individual rights. Come, break now with the old rubbish, and join us in the noble fresh air of freedom. We are not going to be stopped, least of all by the men who formed the last praetorian guard around Richard Milhous Nixon.

Yours in liberty, Murray N. Rothbard

John C. Calhoun

Lance Lamberton

It has been readily agreed by most observers of the contemporary scene that our nation is sadly devoid of leadership that does not serve the self-interest of the politicians who wield power within government. The cynical statement by E.E. Cummings that, “A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man,” has received approval from observers on all sides of the political spectrum.

Recognizing the shallowness of today’s politicians, some have harkened back to America’s political heritage, where they hope to find a pleasing contrast to the present. Depending on the political predisposition of the observer, various men have been put forth as moral exemplars whom it would be wise for us to follow; men such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Webster, Lincoln, and Calhoun. Yet all of these men have, in varying degrees, sacrificed principle to political expediency at one time or another when the two have come into conflict. In my view it is inevitable that this should be so within any political system, and that to maintain and further a political career requires that one either sacrifice or alter principle to satisfy the requirements of one’s political ambition. Therefore, in order to minimize or eliminate the harm to society which the self-seeking politician can impose upon it, it is necessary to limit the power which politicians have at their disposal, rather than seek persons who will wield enormous political power in an enlightened and disinterested manner. To attempt the latter is to have one’s efforts end in dismal failure.

John C. Calhoun’s more favorable biographers were disinclined to see him as a pragmatic and ambitious politician, (as all serious aspirants to the presidency must be) but rather as a vigorous and consistent defender of minority rights threatened by the tyranny of the majority. Professor Wiltse found him, “The supreme champion of minority rights and interests everywhere.”[1]

Calhoun’s more critical biographers, although not denying his valuable contributions to political theory, see him as a man whose words and actions were primarily designed to further his political ambition and the interest of his class and section, rather than the protection of minority rights.

Calhoun’s political career can be somewhat neatly divided between his early nationalist period, and his later sectionalist period. In nearly all the major political issues which confronted him, the young Calhoun stood diametrically opposed to the views of the mature Calhoun. If such an about-face were to occur in the intellectual life of a scholar, it would be greeted with some surprise and would probably be attributed to some genuine and heartfelt change in values. But with a scholar it can be safely assumed (in most cases) that internal restructuring of values leads to an altered view of the external world. With a politician such as Calhoun, it was changes in the external world which led to a restructuring of internal values.

In order to verify this contention it is necessary to look at the positions Calhoun took during his nationalist period. In keeping with the fiercely nationalistic and patriotic sentiment endemic in the Carolina upcountry on Calhoun’s entrance into Congress in 1811, Calhoun desired a strong and vigorous national government that could help catapult the young nation into power and wealth that would rival the great nations of Europe. He championed war with England, a protective tariff, internal improvements, a broad interpretation of the Constitution, and a national bank. Considering the prevailing sentiments of his constituents, it is not at all surprising that he should have held such positions. Gerald Capers has written that, “In view of his later reversals it should be emphasized that the Carolinian, in his high federalism of the postwar era, was a political pragmatist.”[2]

Some may be skeptical as to whether Calhoun was truly in favor of a broad interpretation of the Constitution in his early career, especially considering that he was an early supporter and lifelong admirer of Thomas Jefferson, who was ostensibly the most renowned advocate of strict construction. However Capers answers this criticism rather tellingly by writing, “A statesman who believed that the Federal Government had the power to draft citizens into the army, to charter a national bank, and to build national roads where it willed, necessarily placed a broad construction upon the Constitution.”[3]

In regard to Calhoun’s latter views on the Constitution, and his esteem for logical analysis, it is almost startling to read the following quote from him where he is arguing for federal monies to be used for internal improvements.

“I am no advocate for refined arguments on the Constitution. The instrument was not intended as a thesis for the logician to exercise his ingenuity on. It ought to be construed with plain good sense.”[4]

The reason Calhoun’s constituents favored the nationalistic policies which he advocated is because they were still a mobile and economically expansionist frontier people, desirous of internal improvements to expand trade into the interior; wanting to enlarge the nation’s borders so that their prodigy would have to grow; and supporting the tariff of 1816 since it seemed at that time that South Carolina could also look forward to developing manufacturers in their state. Changing economic circumstances caused South Carolina to radically alter its political outlook, and Calhoun was forced, rather reluctantly, to follow the sentiments of his constituents and become their spokesman.

It was the Tariff of Abominations in 1828 which became the watershed of Calhoun’s political career. By 1828 South Carolina no longer had any hopes of becoming an industrial state, and the economy had become rigidly tied to plantation agriculture. A tariff could only be seen as detrimental to Carolina’s economy.

Prior to the passage of the tariff, Calhoun’s political horizons seemed unlimited. He was Vice Presidential candidate with the immensely popular Andrew Jackson, and thought himself to be in line for the succession. His past positions on the tariff and internal improvements had made him popular in the North and had not yet worked against him in the South. The tariff crises forced him to take a stand for or against, and neither choice was palatable. Richard N. Current puts it succinctly when he writes, “Calhoun had to keep the State’s support if he was to remain in politics. He needed Jackson’s friendship and northern backing if he was to succeed Jackson as President. He could not do this if he joined the Carolina Revolutionaries. He could do still less if he defied them.”[5]

Calhoun did indeed choose to remain in politics, and by so doing made a 180 degree turn on the major issues of the day. On the tariff he wrote, “The power itself is highly dangerous and may be perverted to purposes most unjust and oppressive.”[6]

In 1837 he “admitted that when a young man and at the entrance upon political life, he had been inclined to that interpretation of the Constitution which favored a latitude of powers, but experience, observation, and reflection had wrought a great change in his views.”[7]

So from 1828 until his death in 1850, Calhoun was to represent the minority interests of his state and section, and as so often happens to spokesmen of the minority, he was to advocate a limitation of federal power, rather than its expansion, as he had done when he spoke for the majority interests of the nation during his nationalist period.

Since political survival required Calhoun to defend the status quo of the South, he assumed his new political role with prodigious vigor, which perhaps can give us an inkling of the enormous personal commitment Calhoun gave to his political career, aside from his sincere convictions on the correctness of his ideas.

Prior to 1828, and before slavery became a major issue in the country, Calhoun did not speak in its defense. In fact he made the following remarks on the Constitution permitting the slave trade until 1808:

“It covers me with confusion to name it here . . . . I feel ashamed of such a tolerance, and take a large part of the disgrace, as I represent a part of the Union by whose influence it might be supposed to have been introduced.”[8]

Contrast this with his latter views, when it became politically advantageous for him to defend slavery:

“There has never yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of another.”[9]

So unbending was his defense of slavery that Gerald Capers has commented that, “he defended it (slavery) without reservation as a positive good, adding the farfetched assertion that the bondage of the black man was the ideal base for the development of free institutions.”[10]

Such vigorous defense of slavery is not at all surprising from a man who saw the expansion of slavery as the expansion of his political base, and its restriction, or the enlargement of the number of free soil states, as the reduction of his political power and a lessening of his political influence. Thus his political actions were geared to enlarge the Slaveocracy, such as his extra-constitutional measure as Secretary of State to have Texas annexed into the Union by joint resolution of both houses rather than by treaty, which requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

His opposition to the War with Mexico, apart from his conviction that Mexico was a non-belligerent in the conflict was also based on the fear that land won from Mexico would be admitted as free states.

Calhoun’s uncompromising defense of his class and section sometimes led him to ideological inconsistencies, such as the Texas annexation, and the federal enforcement of the fugitive slave law. On this issue he wrote:

“But how stands the profession of devotion to the Union by our assailants, when brought to the test? Have they abstained from violating the Constitution? Let the many acts passed by the Northern States to set aside and annul the clause of the Constitution for the delivery up of fugitive slaves answer.”[11]

When Calhoun sought to nullify laws detrimental to his state, he used a state’s rights doctrine to justify it, but when Northern States applied the same kind of nullification doctrine to the return of fugitive slaves, he invoked the Constitution in much the same manner as those advocating a high tariff interpreted the Constitution to allow them to do so.

In defending southern agrarianism and the slavery upon which it rested, it became necessary for Calhoun to make fundamental departures from some of the ideals upon which the United States was founded. These departures followed, and did not precede, Calhoun’s pragmatic desire to unite the South and West against the industrial North; a unification which, if successful, could have resulted in Calhoun’s ascendance to the Presidency.

The natural rights doctrine which declared all men to be free and equal was attacked by Calhoun in the following manner:

“There never was such a state as the so-called, state of nature, and never can be. It follows, that man, instead of being born in it, are born in the social and political state; and of course, instead of being born free and equal, are born subject to the laws and institutions of the country where born.”[12]

Calhoun saw the institution of slavery as a positive good in large part because upon it his political power and career rested. He thus employed the rationale that freedom is a condition bestowed upon the individual as the result of the cultural achievements of thousands of years of political evolution by one’s ancestors and one’s race. He expressed this view in his Disquisition on Government, where he writes:

“Liberty when forced upon a people unfit for it, would instead of a blessing, be a curse; as it would in its reaction, lead directly to Anarchy,-the greatest of all curses. No people indeed, can long enjoy more liberty than that which their situation and advanced intelligence and morals fairly entitle them.”[13]

Slavery, being an inherently unfree institution, requires the suppression of other freedoms in order to maintain it. The pragmatic requirements on the part of Calhoun to defend slavery called upon him to advocate the suppression of abolitionist literature through the U.S. Mails, as well as the refusal of Congress to receive abolitionist petitions, even though the Constitution stipulates that the people have a right to petition their government for a redress of grievances. In light of this, his statement that “the bondage of the black man was the ideal base for the development of free institutions,” must be seen as the result of a strong commitment to political pragmatism. Else how can a man so dedicated to logic be so illogical?

Calhoun was a man who forever desired to become President, but fate narrowed his base of support to the South, and so to that section, and the interests of its ruling class he was to remain loyal. He indulged in idelogical inconsistency if it might serve the interests of the South and his political career. At the Memphis Convention of 1847, he advocated internal improvements to link southern and western trade and economic interest, Such a notion dismayed many of this admirers in the South who clearly saw such a program as a contradiction to the strict constructionist interpretation.

Calhoun used logic to support a conclusion already established in his mind, rather than to arrive at a conclusion. He used the power of his mind primarily to serve a political purpose, rather than to serve the interests of truth in the manner that we would hope most scholars would do. A prime example of this is his exposition on the nature of state sovereignty, where he declares:

“It is the supreme power of the State, and we might as well speak of half a square, or half a triangle, as half a sovereignty.”[14]

In this he sees sovereignty as static and unchanging regardless of changing political circumstances. However sovereignty over the 13 colonies rested with the British Crown, and when they became independent, passed into 13 separate pieces. Furthermore, in regard to new states admitted to the Union, if at first they were not blessed with sovereignty, how could they have made their own constitution?

Another example of Calhoun’s failure as a logician because his power of mind were circumscribed by narrow political interest, has been pointed out by Richard Current on Calhoun’s nullification doctrine. Current states, “Each interest group is composed of other minorities. If Calhoun’s veto principle were carried to its logical conclusion, the minority within any group could nullify the decisions of the majority within that group . . . . the result would be Anarchy.”[15]

Although this may be a desirable goal for some, and may be good reason for having Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification taught to future generations, it was hardly his intention to advocate Anarchy, which he regarded as the greatest of all curses.

In studying the thought of any great political figure in American history, it is more fruitful to evaluate his political philosophy with a skeptical eye; to ask the question “what political purpose and advantage could have been derived by this individual by espousing what he does”? To look into America’s past in the hope of finding statesmen who rose above political pragmatism to serve a loftier ideal is often to search in vain. This is not to say that politicians never spoke or acted in such a way as to put a deeply held moral conviction before a pragmatic consideration, but that tends to be more the exception than the rule.

Calhoun has sometimes been regarded as the quintessence of principled statesmanship, and this outlook has been fostered by Calhoun’s impeccable conduct of his personal life, and the honorable and honest way in which he conducted his personal finances. Also it was evident that Calhoun was sincere and convinced of his own political arguments, and may have been unaware to some degree how his convictions were shaped by his political ambition. But Calhoun must be seen in the main as a political opportunist, who through the power of his intellect also happened to be a political philosopher.

In contrasting the political figures of today, and those of ante-bellum America, the dissimilarities are not that the Calhouns and Websters were less opportunistic, but rather that they spoke up to, instead of down to, their constituents. They took it for granted that the public expected intelligence from their political leaders, and considered it their duty to perform on the highest level of intellectual discourse. In this respect we have much for which we can be nostalgic in the statesmanship of the past. In he words of one of his biographers, Calhoun was “A brilliant if narrow dialectician, probably the last American statesman to do any primary political thinking.”[16]

I can only surmise that if Calhoun had chosen not to be a statesman, but had remained a planter and devoted his spare time to the writing of political philosophy, it would have substantially differed from the one by which history knows him. —LF

[1] Charles M. Wiltse, Vol II. John C. Calhoun, Nullifier 1829-1839, page 31.

[2] Gerald Capers. J. C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal, pub. 1960, page 58.

[3] Ibid. p. 55.

[4] Speech of February 4, 1817, Papers I, page 403.

[5] Richard N. Current, John C. Calhoun, page 13.

[6] Letter to brother in law, Summer of 1827.

[7]Congressional Debates, XIII Part I, page 866.

[8]Works, II, page 133.

[9]Ibid., page 631-32.

[10] Gerald Capers, J. C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal, p. 224.

[11] “Speech on Henrhmnvlay’s mcvompromise Resolutions.” March 4, 1850.

[12]Disquisition on Government, page 66.

[13]I bid., page 63.

[14] “Speech on the Force Bill.” 1833.

[15] Richard N. Current, John C. Calhoun, page 116.

[16] Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, “John C. Calhoun. The Marx of the Master Class.” page 69.

Libertarians on the Battlements

There used to be a set of jokes called “thinnies” — that is, alleged books that would be very, very thin (such as “The Wit and Wisdom of Richard Nixon.”) Unfortunately, we now have another thinnie: heroic, determined, or even merely decent libertarian defenses against the hysterical smears and calumnies against myself, the Cato Institute, and the libertarian movement in the June 8 issue of National Review. The August 3 issue of NR has letters by libertarians and alleged libertarians in reply to these smears. And what do they say? Most of them take the tack: “Me! Me! Why didn’t the van den Haag article talk about me? I’m a libertarian and I’m not a Commie like Rothbard and the Cato Institute crowd.” It was not the libertarian movement’s finest hour.

A part from the repellent narcissism and pusallinimity of the whole affair, there is a serious strategic lesson here. Any movement that is worth its salt, that is going to get anywhere, rallies around when one or more of its prominent members gets attacked and vilified by the enemy. A movement that scuttles and runs, a movement that knifes one another when under attack, is a movement that is doomed to lose.

There are, of course, a few honorable exceptions. In its wisdom, National Review chose not to publish a couple of embarrassing letters. One was Professor Earl Ravenal’s defense against NR’s calumnies. Another was Jule Herbert’s letter pointing out how van den Haag maliciously distorted a quote from an unpublished paper of mine on strategy so as to reverse the actual meaning, and to make it appear that I endorsed murder committed by Communists. For those interested in the correction of this loathsome misrepresentation, see the July 1979 issue of The Alabama Libertarian, an estimable newsletter edited by Jule Herbert. Address is P.O. Box 5549, University, AL 35486, Since van den Haag chose to discuss a paper that is unpublished, readers will not of course be able to check out the meaning for themselves.

As a kind of a comic counterpoint to the ignoble scuttle-and-run response of the movement, the august Central Committee of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, meeting in solemn conclave, decided to order any LP functionaries within their reach to desist forevermore from referring to anyone as “Mister Libertarian,” because such a designation might open up the LP to ad hominem, attack. (Tsk! Tsk!) (This is a label that various kind folk have placed upon my brow in the last few years.) There was no hint in the Los Angeles resolution, of course, of whom they might possibly be talking about. And what about the title Ms. Libertarian, O base Angelenos? Are you revealing your blatant inner sexism ? Don’t you care if someone, under your nose, walks off with the Ms. Libertarian label?

–LF

’S Wonderful, ’S Marvelous

by Mr. First Nighter

Manhattan, dir. by and with Woody Allen

It is fittingly symbolic that I should be reviewing this superb film in the tenth anniversary issue of the Lib. Forum. My favorite movie critic, Andrew Sarris, says flatly that Manhattan is the greatest movie of the 1970’s, and I agree. But more than that, as we shall see below: for, though no critic has noted it, Woody Allen is an embattled and devoted champion of the Old Culture, and I myself and the Lib. Forum have been weighing in on behalf of the Old Culture since the founding of the magazine.

First, and foremost, let me lay one myth to rest: the film is magnificently, marvelously funny. My fellow critics, most of whom scorn comedy anyway, have hastened to write, in their praise of Manhattan, that Woody has transcended “one-liners”, that this movie — perish the thought — is not howlingly funny, that it simply draws appreciative smiles and maybe a few chuckles arising from the situation itself. Now it is true that this is a superbly integrated film: that humor, situation, and soundtrack all fit in wondrous ways. And it is true, specifically, that the humor arises from the situation. But there are dozens of simply hilarious one-liners; this is not only Allen’s best film to date by far, it is also his funniest. Let us make no mistake about that.

In his previous films but one, Annie Hall, Allen, a veteran New Yorker, turned his satiric guns on contemporary Los Angeles culture, and raked it fore and aft. Phony Hollywood values, rock music, the fashionable snorting of cocaine, the excessive reliance on the automobile, all got their lumps. In Manhattan, while making clear in his witty narrative introduction and elsewhere that he remains committed to New York (as a paradigmatic New Yorker with “coiled sexual power”), Allen here turns upon New York culture itself, and blasts it with equal and far more telling satiric fervor.

Allen’s Manhattan is the New York of its supposedly best and brightest, the upper-crust, literary, intellectual scene. It is the world of Madison Ave. art galleries, MOMA, and TV, with a few forays into West Side gourmet delicatessens like Zabar’s. It is, by the same token, a world of aggressive pseudo-intellectuals, epitomized by Diane Keaton. One critic has perceptively written that the Keaton character in Manhattan is the Keaton of Annie Hall, psychoanalyzed out of her sweet shyness and become determined and aggressive, though surely no less screwed up. The first meeting of Allen and Keaton in Manhattan is simply hilarious; they run into each other at a fashionable art gallery, with Keaton on the arm of Allen’s best friend, Michael Murphy. Looking for something polite to say, Allen says that he liked the photographs downstairs in the gallery. Keaton goes swiftly onto the attack: “I didn’t like them; they’re derivative of Diane Arbus.” Then, as the three of them walk down the street, Keaton laughs with Murphy about their candidates for the “Academy of the Overrated” — and she rattles off a bunch of names of supposedly overrated culture heroes: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mailer, and a host of others. Allen becomes indignant: “I like all of those people. How about Mozart? Why don’t you include Mozart in your list?” Later, after going to a party of Keaton’s fashionable but weirdo friends, Allen justly remarks: “they’re all Fellini characters.”

Avant-garde movies, too, come under Allen’s fire. We can forgive Woody his aberrant admiration for Bergman, as he and Keaton leave a theater in the Village showing obscure Danish and Japanese art films. We can see Woody expostulating in pantomime, throwing his arms up in the air, with Keaton obviously trying to explain to him why the films were really good. Finally, Woody’s voice appears petulantly on the soundtrack: “I like W. C. Fields. That’s the kind of movies I like.”

Allen’s championing of the Old Culture is multi-faceted, on many levels. There is a blistering attack on television — TV culture being the epitome of contemporary values. He resigns his highly paid TV-writing job in an absolutely hilarious speech in the control room, denouncing his totally unmoved producers and directors. They had just begun a talk show, in which a woman was introduced by the host, “and here is Mary Ellen Smith, a catatonic.” Allen protests that the TV producers only think this stuff is funny because “for thirty years the gamma rays have come out of the TV screens and destroyed the white cells in your brains.” And further, there is the addiction of his colleagues to currently fashionable drugs. “Dammit, this whole place (the control room) is like a medicine cabinet. You’ve been dropping ‘ludes so much you think anything is funny.”

On a deeper level, the inevitable focus on Allen’s love life has matured. As one critic remarked, “Ten years ago, the Allen character was trying to get laid. Now he’s looking for stable relationships.” It is all too true that he is scarcely more successful in his current quest. But there is no question where he stands: as he tells his 17-year old girl friend, Mariel Hemingway, “I’m in favor of lifelong monogamy, like pigeons and Catholics.” Even though she’s portrayed as the best, or at least the purest and most innocent of her generation, the puzzled Miss Hemingway replies: “No, I’m in favor of serial monogomy.”

Old and new cultures clash also in different styles of psychotherapy. Allen is dumfounded that Keaton refers to her shrink as “Donnie”; as Allen says, “unless I call my shrink Dr. Chomsky, he raps me on the knuckles with a ruler.” While he offers no stirring defense of the good doctor, there is no doubt how Allen feels about the new, swinging, “humanist” therapists: “Your Donnie calls you up at 3 A.M. weeping.” Donnie makes his final off-screen appearance when Keaton announces that her shrink can’t help in her current crisis “because he’s in a coma from a bad acid trip.”

The mature Allen is emphatically and defiantly a romantic, and romanticism is at the heart of the Old Culture. Only a romantic seeks stable and even lifelong love, and only a romantic frankly moralizes in personal relationships. In a revealing as well as hilarious interchange, when Allen denounces Murphy for systematically lying to his wife and himself, Murphy cries out in the typical contemporary anguish of the anti-moral, “Who do you think you are, God?” To which Allen replies, “I have to have someone to model myself after.”

And romantic to the hilt too, in the music — O such magnificent music! — that pours forth from the soundtrack throughout the film: the witty, sophisticated, heartbreaking songs of George Gershwin. Gershwin songs, like the songs of Porter and Rodgers and Hart, were the very essence of the Old Culture, the American scene of the 1920’s and 30’s and early 40’s. By making the entire soundtrack a medley of Gershwin scores, Allen not only celebrates the romanticism, the elegance, the ideals and values of the Old Culture, he also celebrates the Old New York, the true, the vanished Manhattan, the Manhattan that, in its great skyline at the beginning and the end of the movie, rises above the dry rot in the city below. And, in doing this, Woody makes an implicit but trenchant denunciation of the junk, the alleged music that has polluted the pop scene since the 1950’s. This, Allen seems to be saying, this, you turkeys, this is the real music, the real Manhattan.

The music is marvelously integrated with the plot, without losing the beauty of each individual song. In that hushed and stunning moment when Allen loses Keaton, the soundtrack breaks into the magnificent “But Not for Me”, one of Gershwin’s greatest songs. When he realizes, in a moment of great poignancy, and probably too late, that Mariel Hemingway is his true love, the soundtrack swells into the romantic “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The emphasis on the clashing cultures in pop and jazz music is no accident. Every Monday night, Woody leads an excellent Dixieland jazz band on the clarinet at Michael’s Pub in New York. Dixieland jazz, Gershwin, and the rest, all were integrated in the Old Culture: the best of the Old Culture were jazz singers and musicians playing the great popular songs of Gershwin and the other masters. Get a Lee Wiley record — preferably an original pressing — of this splendid and heartbreaking artist singing Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin, with a small jazz band behind her, and you will see what I mean. And mourn, as Woody does, for a lost world.

INFORM: Newsletter of the Center for Independent Education. Keep on top of the latest news on the issues of freedom and education. Free copies available by writing to Institute for Humane Studies. 1177 University Drive, Menlo Park, Ca. 94025.

The great satirists, from Swift to Chesterton to Mencken — and now to Woody Allen — have always and necessarily been cultural conservatives and reactionaries. They look about them at a meretricious world, at phoniness, pretension, and corruption of values, and they mourn for a purer and more honest age of the past, and mourn even more for the grandeur that mankind could again achieve in the future, if only it had the will. But the satirist does not sit around moping; the satirist is a fighter, an Old Testament prophet thundering against the corrupt folly of the age. But mere thundering is not only tendentious but also boring, often to the prophet himself as well as his listeners. Besides, his task of overthrowing an entire culture cannot hope to be accomplished in sober or even bitter essays. By transmuting his rage and the sadness of nostalgia into the bracing and liberating joy of wit and laughter, the satirist not only liberates his own psyche: he can have momentous social effect, until — as in the height and the wonder of reading Swift or Mencken or in watching Manhattan — it almost seems that the walls of Jericho can indeed come a-tumblin’ down, and that one lone man can change the culture. And in many ways he can and has.

But note that satire is never avant-garde, but rather a prophetic call to return to the truer values of the past; it is not revolutionary, but counterrevolutionary. For satire assumes that the folly of the age can be laughed at by calling up a common cultural stance that has previously lain buried among the public; by reading or watching or hearing the satire, the audience laughs because it experiences the shock of contrasting a current folly with the dimly remembered but now vividly recalled values of an earlier age.

The sweet, deeply moving, and very funny climactic scene in Manhattan embodies all of these concerns. Bereft of both his lady loves, depressed, Woody lies on his couch, dictating his novel (a book about a New York writer and his Jewish mother, entitled The Castrating Zionist). He is trying to figure out why life might be worth living. He has been dictating: “And so he thought of the things that make life worth living . . .” Woody stops. What is there? The screen is silent, as Woody wrestles with this vital question. Finally, the first words “. . . Groucho Marx.” And then, slowly, other loves of Woody’s: “the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony”, scallops at a certain New York restaurant. Then finally, as he free associates, the things that make life worth living come faster — a novel by Flaubert, Louis Armstrong, all, all Old Culture. And finally: Mariel Hemingway’s face, the moment when he realizes whom he really loves, after which he leaps up and races through the streets of New York to her side, while “Rhapsody in Blue” fills the theater.

Romance, Old Culture, the use of laughter to make a cultural statement, all are here. Many critics have claimed that Manhattan is all bleak desolation, compared to the more optimistic charm of Annie Hall. I disagree. It is true that Manhattan is a far more profound picture, engaging in comprehensive cultural warfare across the board. But in Annie Hall, Woody ends up losing the girl irrevocably, first to Los Angeles and then totally; in Manhattan, the Allen character ends with at least a fighting chance. As Miss Hemingway tells him before flying to London for six months, “not all of us become corrupted.” In a deep sense, here is the tag line for this decade’s greatest film and for Woody’s embattled view of our culture. Not all of us become corrupted. To insure us against such corruption, we now will always have with us, immortalized on film, this lovely Manhattan, this wondrous testament to what the mind of man can achieve.

— LF

Sharing

A quiet family meeting
Became a noisy din
As elephants and donkeys
Debated hard to win

Objectives sought and won
The parties changed their spots
As elephants and donkeys
Cast up their bargained lots

The White House has new tenants
But old politics remain
The elephants are donkeys
And donkeys play the game

Now those who wait their turn
For places high in state
Have sent most of our gold
To Swiss banks there to wait

— Agustin De Mello

LP Radical Caucus Formed

One of the healthiest and most inspiring developments in the Libertarian Party in a long time has been the formation and growth of its Radical Caucus. The Radical caucus, which will receive its permanent form at the September convention, is designed not to split the LP, but to unify the party around radical and hardcore libertarian programs. Founded and so far centered in San Francisco, the Radical Caucus is in the process of forming chapters throughout the country.

Founder of the Radical Caucus is San Francisco activist Justin Raimondo, an official of the Students for a Libertarian Society, who edits the exciting and professionally put together tabloid organ of the Caucus, the Libertarian Vanguard. The Vanguard is published nine times a year by the Radical Caucus. The Libertarian Vanguard can be subscribed to for $7 a year, or $4 for six months. Membership in the Radical Caucus is limited to members of the LP, and ranges from $5 for six months or $10 for a year up to $100 for a Founding Member or $10 per month for a “Sugar Daddy” member. Contributions are welcomed. Address all subscriptions, membership applications, or correspondence to: The LPRC, 199 Dolores St., No. 7, San Francisco, CA 94114.

Governing body of the LPRC is its Central Committee, which now consists of Raimondo; Robert Costello, executive director of the California Libertarian Party; Eric Garris, an official of SLS and LP vice-chairman for Northern California; Jonnie Gilman, head of Gilman Graphics; Bill Evers, editor of Inquiry Magazine; free-lance economic writer Christopher Weber; and Murray N. Rothbard.

The Central Committee has agreed upon 10 Points as the basic set of principles which it will urge the Libertarian Party to adopt, maintain, and push forward. The Statement of 10 Points follows:

The Radical Caucus of the Libertarian Party is dedicated to building the Libertarian Party by emphasizing the following ten points:

1.Principled Mass Party — The Libertarian Party should be a mass-participation party operating in the electoral arena and elsewhere, devoted to consistent libertarian principle, and committed to liberty and justice for all.

2.Resistance & the Oppressed — The Libertarian Party should make a special effort to recruit members from groups most oppressed by the government so that the indignation of those who experience oppression is joined to that of those who oppose oppression in principle. The Libertarian Party should never approve of the initiation of force, nor should it rule out self-defense and resistance to tyranny.

3.Anti-State Coalition — The Radical Caucus agrees to the view, adopted by the Libertarian Party at its 1974 Dallas convention, that for purposes of party programs and activities the issue of the ultimate legitimacy of government per se is not relevant. We oppose all efforts to exclude either anarchists or minimal statists from party life.

4.Populism — The Libertarian Party should trust in and rely on the people to welcome a program of liberty and justice. The Libertarian Party should always aim strategically at convincing the bulk of the people of the soundness of libertarian doctrine.

5.No Compromise — The Radical Caucus insists that all reforms advocated by the Libertarian Party must diminish governmental power and that no such reforms are to contradict the goal of a totally free society. Holding high our principles means avoiding completely the quagmire of self-imposed, obligatory gradualism: We must avoid the view that, in the name of fairness, abating suffering, or fulfilling expectations, we must temporize and stall on the road to liberty.

6.Anti-Imperialism and Centrality of Foreign Policy — Because the United States government aspires to world-wide control of events, foreign policy is always potentially the most important issue of our time. The Libertarian Party should bring to the public the truth about the U.S. government’s major responsibility for the cold war and the continuing threat to world peace posed by U.S. foreign policy. No one should be deceived by the notion that any government, like the American, which has a relatively benign domestic policy, therefore has a relatively benign foreign policy. Our goal is to build an international revolutionary libertarian movement, and our task is to hold up the banner of liberty so that all the world’s peoples and races can rally around it.

7.Mutual Disarmament — The Libertarian Party should support general, joint, and complete disarmament down to police levels. The Libertarian Party should be in the forefront of efforts to end policies that prepare for mass murder.

8.Rights Are Primary — The central commitment of the Libertarian Party must be to individual liberty on the basis of rights and moral principle, and not on the basis of economic cost-benefit estimates.

9.Power Elite Analysis — American society is divided into a government-oppressed class and a government-privileged class and is ruled by a power elite. Libertarian Party strategy and pronouncements should reflect these facts.

10.Land Reform — Because of past land theft and original claims not based on homesteading, many landholdings in America are illegitimate. The Libertarian Party in cases of theft (for example, from the Native Americans and chicanos) should support restoration to the victims or their heirs and in cases of invalid claims should advocate reopening the land for homesteading.

As to the status of these points in the Party at this juncture, some points are now in force and need, in varying degree to be fought for and maintained. Party practice includes Point 1. The strategically vital Point 3 detente between the anarchists and minimal statists has been in force since 1974. Probably most of the party would back Point 4, but it needs to be consciously held, Point 5 has been adopted by the National Committee of the LP, but this of course does not mean that it had totally conquered the party. Opportunism, especially as we get stronger, is bound to rear its ugly head time and again. Point 7 has been in the platform for two years, but needs to be fought for to be retained. Most LPers are undoubtedly committed to Point 8. Point 10 is partially in the platform now.

The rest of the land reform-homesteading plank needs to be incorporated into the LP platform and policy. Point 2 greatly needs implementation. While the LP has pretty thoroughly adopted a non-interventionist foreign policy, it is a long way from adopting Point 6’s emphasis on the major responsibility of the U.S. for the cold war, or the centrality of nonintervention and anti-imperialism as political issues for libertarians. Also, the LP is a long way from incorporating libertarian class analysis into its mode of thinking.

All in all, a pretty good showing for the LP, and this — along with the formation of the Radical Caucus — is good reason for optimism as we approach, at this writing, the mammoth convention in September.

— LF

Crime and Sacrifice

Walter Block

There is a wrinkle on crime theory which is worthy of some consideration. According to what can be labelled “The net sacrifice theory of crime,” an act cannot legitimately be a crime unless the victim loses thereby. The definitional paradigm of the net sacrifice view is as follows: “A man buys a house next to a busy airport. If the house were located practically anywhere else, it is of such high quality that it would sell for As it is, with all the airport noise lowering its value, it sells for only $5,000. As soon as the man moves in, however, although he knew full well of the accompanying noise (indeed, he was only able to purchase the house at such a low price because of the noise) he bitterly complains about it. ‘The airport is violating my rights’, he will say, as he tries to take them to court to make them stop. Yet, for all his complaining, he paid only $5,000, and he gets his full $5,000 worth. He is not forced to undergo a penny’s worth of net sacrifice, other than the illusory kind that can be said of every situation: “Oh, if only things were different, then I would be better off.” Of course he would be better off if the airport would stop the noise. But he paid only for a noisy house, not a quiet one. For that matter, he would certainly be better off if the airport management built him a free new garage next to his house. But if they refuse to make the gift, he is not forced to sacrifice anything, and the airport management is guilty of no crime.

I think this view of crime is fundamentally mistaken. I think that were it put into practice on a consistent basis, it would be incompatible with the free, peaceful, lawful and orderly society its advocates say they desire. In order to show this, we will consider two reductios ad absurdum, cases exactly analogous to the airport case, but where all advocates of “law and order” will presumably be forced to admit that crime has taken place, even in the absence of “net sacrifice”.

1. Let us consider a building housing a store in a high crime neighborhood where the chances of robbery, malicious mischief, mayhem, arson, murder and riots etc., abound. Now, the sale price of such a building will have to reflect the higher costs of doing business there and the attendant personal disadvantages. Let us suppose that the building sells for $5,000, even though, were it located in a safe area, it is of such quality that it would sell for $100,000. When the new owner moves in, he is heard to complain loud and and bitterly about the rampant crime, the lack of “respect for law and order”. It is of course true that the store owner does not, on net balance, lose from this crime. This was figured in the low sale price of the store. But to say that the muggers, holdup men, and thieves that daily plunder the store keeper are not guilty of criminal activity, and therefore ought not to be stopped, is surely to contradict every basic tenet of law and order ever conceived!

2. Sometimes political activity is conceived in economic terms. The political parties are conceived as firms which undergo costs of electioneering—in order to make a sale (win the office at stake). (I shall later argue the wrongheadedness and positive evil of this conception; but for now, let us accept it for arguments’ sake). Let us now consider the effect of the presence of a revolutionary group like the Black Panthers which hopes to “deny office” to whichever party wins the election. This will have much the same effect as the airport or the thieves The Black Panthers will lower the probability of enjoying the fruits of the election, or at least raise the cost of “doing business” (i.e., governing). This will make the prospect of winning the election less attractive than otherwise and lower its sale price (the political parties will expend less time, effort and money on the less attractive prize). Now for the paradoxical conclusion: the winner of the election will have no more right to complain of the Black Panther Party than did the homeowner near the airport or the storekeeper in the crime-ridden area. After all, we can say to him, “You knew full well of the existence of the BPP before the election. Indeed, it was because of their existence that you were able to “purchase” the election so cheaply.” This of course is nonsense. There is nothing as diametrically opposite to the “lawnorder” advocate’s world view than a revolution by the BPP. But this example adheres fully to the logic of the net sacrifice theory of crime, i.e., that the BPP cannot be criminal because the elected official, like the storekeeper and the homeowner, is not a victim who loses anything.

The reason I think that the net sacrifice theory of punishment is even worthy of consideration in spite of its logical shortcomings, is because it is the only argument I have heard which even superficially counters that of Lysander Spooner in No Treason: the Constitution of no Authority. Consider the following dialogue which might take place between two economists, one conservative, one libertarian:

Conservative: Law and order is the most important thing. We cannot have people running around committing violence. The whole social fabric will decay. Tyranny and chaos will result.

Libertarian: Yes, yes, of course.

C: What, you agree?

L: Yes, but it must be stipulated that the State is the single most important violator of law and order, the one whose violations overshadow all others. Even overlooking the murders, kidnappings and enslavements perpetrated by the state in the names of war, the draft, and jailings, the narrowly economic crimes of tax theft, land grabs under eminent domain laws, and counterfeiting under the guise of the Federal Reserve System would reserve for the State the oppobrium of chief violator of law and order. Take eminent domain laws for example. I defy you to define them in a way other than which includes theft; for they both involve the involuntary transfer of wealth. The only difference is the superficial one that the state declares its theft to be “legal” and declares all other theft to be “illegal”.

C: No. People buy their land with the full knowledge that it is subject to the eminent domain laws of the state. They can buy it at a cheaper price because it is subject to eminent domain laws. In other words, they are not really buying all the rights to the land. They are buying only those rights consistent with eminent domain laws. So when and if the state seizes a piece of property (at a price less than what the owner would have willingly sold it) there is no theft involved. The people did not have the full rights to the land to begin with. The same analysis can be applied to land taxes, and by extension, to all taxes. The people occupy the land, work at their jobs, and consume with the full understanding that all these activities are subject to taxes of various sorts. The market capitalizes this datum into all prices in such a way to reflect the onerousness of taxes.

Let us now apply the analysis used at the beginning of the paper in attacking the net sacrifice theory of crime, for it is this theory which underlies the conservative’s argument. I hope we have there demonstrated that just because people acting in a market take into account the likelihood of violence being perpetrated upon their property, this does not prove the violence to be in any way legitimate. An act of violence against private property is violent none the less in spite of its predictability, even in spite of the fact that the owner bought the property at a price reflecting the possibility of such violence in the future. Violation of private property rights is violation of private property rights. A is A. A is A even when it is the state that is violating private property rights. When a robber gang or a state (Is there a difference other than good public relations) swoops into a peaceful valley, seizes the property of the people, that is theft! It is theft even if they do it once a year, as regular as clockwork. It is theft even if their regularity can be predicted and the market values of the things they seize fall in consequence.

What does one buy when one buys a store in a crime-ridden area? Or some land subject to eminent domain? Or a house that is noise-polluted (assuming that the airport did not originally homestead the rights of noise disposal)? Unless there is a stipulation to the contrary in the contract, this was a total sale of the property in question. This means that if the perpetrators of violence are somehow removed, it is the buyer who benefits^1. He buys the full rights to the property including (and indeed, mainly) the right to enjoy it unmolested. The “right” of the thief to any value in the property, be his molestations ever so regular and predictable, is a contradiction in terms. And if after the sale is made the value of the property rises from $5000 to $100,000 upon the cessation of theft, the original owner has no right to any part of the $95,000 increase in value. Any other conclusion allows some aura of legitimacy to the thief.

We are now able to see the wrongheadedness in the analogy that tries to show similarities between the economic and political spheres. We have seen the political to be the sphere of theft and plunder; we have seen the politicians to be the greatest violators of the law and order that supposedly protects the interests of the people what of the economic sphere? (When we talk of the economic sphere, we refer to laissez-faire capitalism, not liberal-corporate-monopoly-state capitalism, which is and can only be part of the political sphere). The paradigm of the economic sphere is voluntary, uncoerced trade, trade agreed upon by all parties concerned. The failure to distinguish between these two concepts is perhaps the strongest indictment of this argument in particular and of conservative political-economic theorizing in general.

One last point. The argument of the conservative plays havoc with another argument of times used to justify statist depredations: social contract theory. According to social contract theory, the people originally owned the land. They set up a state to better protect their private property rights in their land. The people came first; the state came second! The people then, did not buy their land subject to regular inundations of the state, as the conservative alleges. So the conservative must either give up the sacrifice theory of crime, or he must give up social contact theory. (For the most brilliant critique of social contract theory ever penned, see NO TREASON by Lysander Spooner.)

The writer wishes to express a debt of gratitude to the following people for conversation on the above subjects Robert Baker, Gray Greenberg, Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, and Michael Shaw.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Special Convention Issue

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XII NUMBER 4

July-August 1979

US-ISSSN0047-4517

Nuclear Power Crisis

There is a nuclear power crisis in America today. But the crisis is not what you might think: it is not a crisis of the nuclear power industry. The crisis is here, at this convention. This crisis is caused by the fact that powerful forces within the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement are prepared to scuttle libertarian, free-market principles in the field of nuclear energy. The nuclear power industry, we can all readily agree, is now totally regulated, subsidized, controlled, and hobbled by the federal government and its Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Its insurance liabilities for any possible accidents are arbitrarily limited and partially underwritten by the federal government itself, through the Price-Anderson Act. The obvious libertarian solution, already enshrined in the current national Libertarian platform in a plank that sailed through in 1977 without opposition, is to privatize the nuclear power industry. The nuclear power industry, like all other industries, should be deregulated, decontrolled, denationalized. It should be set free to meet the test of the free market. Period. But now, suddenly, the Libertarian Review—Students for a Libertarian Society (LR-SLS) forces, all headquartered at 1620 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, have suddenly come up with an ominously changed perspective: what they want to do is to Shut Down the Nuclear Power Industry.

Why are the LR-SLS clique suddenly no longer content with the clear-cut libertarian, free market position on nuclear energy? For, as we demonstrate below (pp. 3-5), the leaders in this new turn not so long ago were taking the proper libertarian position on this issue. Milton Mueller, head of SLS and an architect of this new strategy, took an excellent position less than two years ago in the Illinois Libertarian. Roy Childs, editor of LR and the other principal designer of the anti-nuclear turn, took a typically perfervid and hopped-up stand five years ago that even went beyond nuclear neutrality to a neo-conservative position. Note the characteristic Childsian rhetoric. The popularly written pro-nuclear, anti-environmentalist book, The Disaster Lobby, became for Childs “the single most important book on current affairs that I have read within the last two years” (in January 1974). Childs attacked the “hysterical campaign” by the “press and left-wing intellectuals” against DDT and “other life-saving pesticides.” Childs warned that “the people who once littered the streets on ‘earth day’” had invaded government, “attempting to seize control of business and technology and to shackle our economic system with controls destined to arrest progress.” “Lies about air and water pollution were spread,” said the Childs of 1974, including “distortions of facts used to stop industries from producing more oil — or to develop nuclear power. . .” (Emphasis added.) Childs concluded his panegyric with this rather inflated estimate: The Disaster Lobby “is a journalistic masterpiece. . . . It deserves a vast audience; it desperately needs readers and defenders.” And finally: “I cannot be more blunt, or more enthusiastic: The Disaster Lobby is a classic, a heroic achievement, magnificent on every level.”

One of the passages in The Disaster Lobby, this book “magnificent on every level,” is a blistering attack on Dr. John Gofman (see p. 5 below), one of the very few nuclear scientists critical of the alleged health hazards of nuclear power. Gofman is the person now touted and hailed as the last word on the subject by Childs and Mueller.

Why this sudden turn against libertarian principle? The answer is all too clear. It is because, in seeking allies and recruits from leftists and liberals on college campuses, SLS has found that a free market position, a stance neither for nor against nuclear power, is not a “politically potent” position, as one SLS leader admitted. Yes, it is often not politically sexy to be in favor of freedom, instead of subsidizing something on the one hand or prohibiting it on the other. But freedom is what we are all about. And sometimes, if explained well enough, it can become politically powerful. In his Illinois Libertarian article, published before Mueller helped found SLS, he writes wisely: “There is little to be gained from cooperating with the left in their anti-nuclear crusade. They are against nuclear power per se, not government promotion of it. . . . We must establish a libertarian alternative in the political debate.” Why then has Mueller abandoned that alternative? Furthermore, he writes that: “The Libertarian Party’s Stand on Nuclear Power is a Crucial Litmus Test of its Members’ Understanding of the Revolutionary Nature of Free-Market Economics.” Yes, indeed, it is! But now Mueller flunks his own test. Has he forgotten so soon? At any rate, it is clear that SLS and its spiritual mentors at LR have decided to fuzz over and dilute libertarian principle in order to follow after left-liberals on campus. To which we can only say, Shame!

Late Bulletin: SLS Makes Threats!

Just as we go to press, we have been informed that Milton Mueller, head of SLS, has threatened platform committee member Bill Evers with using his SLS minions to defeat Evers for the national committee, if Evers should dare to oppose the SLS plank on nuclear power. Now we know what the LR-SLS clique and their mentors think about honest and open debate within the Libertarian Party. They are willing to use threats to suppress any dissent from their political line. When you vote this weekend, remember this threat. Vote FOR Unity through Honest and Open Debate. Vote AGAINST bureaucratic maneuvers to suppress debate. Vote AGAINST the old machine politics!

One disturbing tendency of the LR-SLS group, in declaiming on this subject, is to shift back and fourth wildly between two arguments for their anti-nuclear power stance, and then, when finally clobbered on both arguments, to regroup and retreat to yet a third. This reminds one uncomfortably of the standard behavior of left-liberal intellectuals when specific charges against the free-market are patiently rebutted. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter brilliantly put it: “. . . capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”

The first two arguments of the LR-SLS in their campaign to shut down the nuclear industry are (1) that the industry was created by and wrapped up in government, and (2) that nuclear power presents a high degree of risk to the public. Both arguments, however, prove far too much. On the first, many goods and services have been created by and wrapped up in government. Should our policy then be to Shut Them Down, or to privatize them? For example, should we shut down all electricity plants because the electric utility industry has been subsidized, controlled, and regulated by government — or should we deregulate and privatize the industry? Better yet, streets and roads have been created by government for centuries. Should we privatize these roads, or campaign on a platform of Shutting Them Down? There’s a real winner. But if the object is to fawn on left-liberal youth, then maybe the LR-SLS group’s proposal to shut down nuclear power plants is a winner. But is the policy libertarian?

The other view — to outlaw risky activities — has chilling and devastating implications. For nuclear scientists and engineers have demonstrated that nuclear power plants are far less risky than: dams, tall buildings, airplanes, automobiles, or, for that matter, knives and guns. Are we supposed to outlaw all of these industries and activities in a mad quest for the prohibition of all risk in the world, for being coddled in a government-made cocoon from cradle to grave? Whatever happened to the Roy Childs of 1975 who fearlessly proclaimed that risk was “an essential part of the human condition”? Well, he has now repudiated those remarks in order to clamber on the anti-nuclear bandwagon. Again, for shame! Now a risk-free society is the goal pushed in several articles and advertisements in the infamous July-August energy issue of Libertarian Review.

After being pummelled and defeated on these two issues, the LR-SLS clique regrouped, and came up with yet a third, and very different approach: pollution. They alleged that nuclear radiation pollutes the air and commits, in the phrase of the SLS platform plank (see p. 6) “random murder,” a phrase that deliberately confuses accidents with murder. But nuclear scientists, medical physicists, and engineers have repeatedly shown that low-level radiation from nuclear power plants is so negligible that it cannot be distinguished from natural “background” radiation from rocks, soil, and outer space, including cosmic rays. Furthermore, there is no proof whatsoever that any of this low-level radiation is at all harmful, much less committing “random murder.”

We must realize this: that the amount of radiation a person absorbs from a single plane flight from New York to Los Angeles is 1700 times the radiation he or she receives every year from all the nuclear power plants in the United States. And the amount he absorbs from his color TV set every year is about 340 times the amount he gets from nuclear plants. Moreover, the radiation emitted per year from the granite in Grand Central Station is more than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission permits to nuclear reactors! And yet, as all too often in our movement, it is very difficult to us reductios ad absurdum, because so many people embrace the absurd. For the reaction of one member of the SLS clique was that therefore Grand Central Station should be pulled down!

And are we also to compel the total evacuation of Denver, Colorado because every resident, because of the city’s altitude, absorbs 20 times more radiation every year than the NRC permits at the boundary of a nuclear plant? Are we going to join the notorious Pol Pot in forcing everyone out of disapproved-of cities?

The central libertarian point on pollution is as follows: Nothing maybe prohibited by arbitrary statute or decree. To prove that one person has harmfully polluted the air of another, the victim or victims must go into court, like all alleged victims of invasion of person or property, and prove invasion of rights beyond a reasonable doubt. Not only have the anti-nuclear forces, including LR-SLS, failed to meet this test of proof, but the preponderance of evidence is very much the other way.

The current LP national platform in the planks covering energy, pollution, and utilities, as very slightly amended in a proposal by Bill Evers and myself, is published below (see p. 6). Next to it, is the SLS proposed plank on energy, with its trendy emphasis on a decentralized, “soft” energy path. You will note that the current platform is eminently libertarian in all of its parts, and indeed it sailed through the 1977 convention without a dissenting voice — but that, of course, was before powerful forces within our party decided to abandon principle in order to cozy up to left-liberals on campus.

In the first place, the SLS plank is poorly drawn, cutting across and duplicating as it does two other existing separate platform planks (pollution and utilities). More substantively, it fails to recognize that the “windfall profits tax” is not a profits tax at all but a graduated excise tax on crude oil production. As a result, it doesn’t explain the mechanism by which the tax would cripple oil production. Likewise it leaves out discussion of important policies and proposals like cargo preference, coal conversion, and yardstick corporations.

On nuclear power, the SLS plank erroneously maintains that nuclear power has so-called “health hazards,” and its if-then clause on radiation hardly succeeds in camouflaging its statement that “prominent physicists” (who except Gofman?) and the NRC (where?) speak of “random murder.”

In addition, SLS retains its preoccupation with the fact that nuclear power is a government-created industry. This indeed is a historical truth. But we must not assume, as SLS does, that history dictates that this must always be so. Libertarians can make history by denationalizing the nuclear industry.

Finally, there is not a word in the SLS plank about the concept of privatizing the nuclear power industry. Why not? Is the SLS afraid of acknowledging that privatizing is a good thing? Are they against privatizing TVA dams and power plants? Would such concepts upset leftists on campus?

Late Bulletin: LR Suppresses Free and Open Debate on Nuclear Power!

As we go to press, we have just learned (August 22) that the September issue of Libertarian Review has failed to carry a joint letter on the nuclear power controversy, signed by 19 distinguished members of the libertarian movement. The letter protested the repeated attacks on nuclear power per se that permeated the issue (the government and risk arguments discussed in our lead editorial).

We don’t know if LR intends to suppress the letter indefinitely, or whether it will publish the letter in the October issue. We do know that whichever choice it makes, it will have kept the letter from the delegates, alternates and visitors to this LP convention. We do know, also, that LR had plenty of time to publish the letter in the September issue if it had so wished. This is part of a growing and distressing pattern of keeping important issues and discussions from the members of the Libertarian Party and movement. In the interest of free and open discussion on vital issues, we hereby print the letter with its list of signatories. The signers range from “left” to “right” within the libertarian spectrum. But they all unite as one in devotion to the free market. Can we say the same for the LR-SLS clique?

The protest letter follows:

Editor, Libertarian Review:

We are deeply distressed to see a libertarian publication take a political stand on a technological process as Libertarian Review did in its July-August issue by calling for government to oppose nuclear power and promote solar power.

First, LR published an unpaid advertisement on its inside cover that argued that because of the risks associated with nuclear reactors this mode of generating power should be banned. In addition, LR published Patrick Lilly’s article in which, although he says he would be willing to let the free market decide such matters, nonetheless he insists that risky endeavors that might prove disastrous should be banned — especially in the case of nuclear power. He did not bother to add that his policy proposal could be extended to banning the airline industry, the sea travel industry, the construction of dams, the construction of tall buildings, etc.

Second, Milton Mueller’s article argues that the nuclear power industry is a quasi-nationalized industry and that the decision-makers who made it this sort of industry did so for what they considered important reasons. These reasons are important enough to them for “national security” claims to be made and for them to want to hold onto control of nuclear power. Hence, libertarians, instead of calling for denationalization, should oppose nuclear power per se. On the contrary, it seems to us that libertarians should call for denationalization, an end to subsidies, and the bearing of the risks of accidents by the companies involved. To take the course Mueller suggests would lead to opposing mail service and highways rather than calling for their privatization.

Third, Wilson Clark, a self-described libertarian — a description nowhere challenged by LR interviewer Jeff Riggenbach — advocates an excess profits tax designed to channel the investments of oil companies in certain directions: namely, “alternative energy sources, increased production from conventional sources or conservation.”. The tax is designed to prohibit diversification of the companies into non-energy-related fields. Clark also proposes government-sponsored invention contests and a multimillion-dollar joint private-public energy development fund at the state level. Clark deplores the fact that no one is making what he regards as the necessary social transition of a “massive commitment” to windpower or solar energy. Clark claims that private firms will not explore viable energy alternatives because they are “mature” companies, too tired to innovate.

Clark’s putatively libertarian views are not libertarian at all — they call for massive tax funding that would deprive people of their earnings; they promise special government grants of privilege to the solar and windpower industries; and they propose to curtail the liberties of businesses to make investment decisions on their own. In fact, on the open market, Clark’s “mature” companies would have to innovate to survive.

Clark’s views seem to be basically in accord with the “Big Oil” cartoon published in LR’s May issue. In that cartoon a businessman identified as “Big Oil” is gloating over the fact that oil companies own most of the alternative resources from which energy could be drawn while he maintains that solar power should not be looked into because it is unfeasible. This cartoon deliberately suggests that oil companies have sought to monopolize energy production, that private ownership of energy resources is inappropriate, that oil companies should be forced to divest their holdings in other energy sources, and that oil companies have deceived the public on the feasibility of solar power. The position espoused by the cartoon run in LR is, in its facts, inaccurate, and in the policy it suggests, unlibertarian. Solar power should stand on its own merits in the free market. Its promotion should be a business matter — not a political one, especially not a political cause backed by a libertarian magazine.

George Smith, Los Angeles
Bill Evers, Palo Alto, Calif.
Sara Baase, San Diego
David Gordon, Los Angeles
Wendy Grosscup, Los Angeles
Ronald Hamowy, San Francisco
John Hospers, Los Angeles
Joe Kalt, Cambridge, Mass.
Leonard Liggio, San Francisco
Tibor Machan, Santa Barbara, Calif.

Jonathan Marshall, San Francisco
Gerald O’Driscoll, New York
Joe Peden, New York
Ron Paul, Washington, D.C.
Robert Poole, Santa Barbara, Calif.
Murray Rothbard, Palo Alto, Calif.
James Sadowsky, New York
David Theroux, Oakland, Calif.
Marty Zupan, Santa Barbara, Calif.

Nuclear Power:

Beyond ‘For’ or ‘Against’

By the earlier Milton Mueller

Nuclear power, I believe, is going to be the new “Vietnam War”: an issue with far-reaching ideological and economic implications around which a major political movement and countermovement will be generated. Opposition to nuclear power may be the central focus on which the Left will galvanize their opposition to the American economic system. Just as the war could have been the ideal issue with which to turn this country away from foreign interventionism, so nuclear power could be the ideal issue with which to reveal the follies of economic interventionism. Tragically, however, the Left is exclusively concerned about the “corporate” side of the corporate state, and the Right is so busy apologizing for business interests that they can scarcely be counted on to consistently fight government involvement in the nuclear industry.

Are you for or against nuclear power? This is the question proccupying the media, the opinion-makers and, as we shall see, some libertarians. But this is the wrong question, and no libertarian position can be arrived at as long as it serves as the basis of discussion. The real issue is: can any industry develop safely and economically with massive government subsidies and intervention? Of course, the answer is no.

The nuclear power industry serves as an ugly reminder that America is neither “going capitalist” nor “going socialist”; the real America is a corporate state, with massive doses of government and business “partnership” in key areas of the economy. Everyone knows that nuclear technology sprang from the war machine of the federal government after World War II, but fewer know the full extent of government involvement in the “peaceful” uses of nuclear power since then. Here are some of the most significant elements of the government/business alliance in the nuclear industry:

—For years, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) has been set up with the express purpose of subsidizing and promoting the use of nuclear power, with taxpayers’ money. Indeed, government regulation of the industry is sharply distinguished from regulation of other energy industries in that government promotion has more to do with the existence of nuclear power than commercial demand or economic feasibility.

—In 1957, and again in 1965 and 1975, Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which limits the liability of power companies for a nuclear accident up to $560 million. Of this $560 million, the power companies would pay only $127 million, while taxpayers would be forced to make up the difference. And if damages exceed $560 million in any nuclear accident in the future, it’s tough luck for the victims. This moral obscenity was rationalized by industry lobbyists on the grounds that without it, insurance costs would make building nuclear power plants prohibitively expensive.

—Recently, the Feds have decided to subsidize another aspect of the industry: Nuclear waste disposal. Nuclear wastes have become a serious burden on many nuclear power plants, since thousands of tons are stored at the reactor sites. Unless new disposal or storage facilities are found, “as many as 23 nuclear power plants may have to begin closing by 1979” (Richard Pollock, director of Critical Mass). Thus, Jimmy Carter announced October 18, 1977 that the Federal government will accept and take title to all spent nuclear fuel and store it in government-owned storage sites, for a ridiculously low price that in no way reflects the true costs of the service. The government has therefore relieved the nuclear power industry of the risk and much of the cost of waste management.

The cases of government subsidization of the nuclear industry provide classic examples of how uneconomical businesses use government to relieve themselves of the true cost of doing business. Added together, they amount to literally billions of dollars worth of subsidies; significantly, they also erase legitimate, free-market impediments to the development of nuclear power: the problem of obtaining insurance and the problem of waste disposal. I came up with these examples after only a quick survey of magazine articles; there is still much to be said about the extent of government involvement. What about the role of the State in the acquisition of plant sites? In funding the construction of power plants through guaranteed loans? These questions remain. But more importantly, where is the libertarian literature analyzing the role of government in the nuclear power industry? And where are the libertarian voices crying out against this dangerous and expensive government intervention?

I suspect that libertarian reticence is explained by the fact that many of us have started out by asking the wrong question — whether we are for or against nuclear power — and have therefore come up with irrelevant answers. Petr Beckmann is a case in point. In the September issue of Reason, he spends most of his time defending the feasibility of breeder reactors (The Great Plutonium Scare, Reason, Sept. 1977). As libertarians, the verdict of the free market is more important to us than the verdict of any expert, including Mr. Beckmann. Therefore the primary issue becomes the political one of keeping the market free. Yet Beckmann never addresses himself to the legislation favoring the nuclear power industry, except obliquely in this stunningly irrational paragraph:

“The fact that (a nuclear power plant in South Carolina) is seeking government support not only has nothing to do with technical feasibility but is, above all, a result of the uncertain climate surrounding nuclear ventures (and, indeed, all large-scale energy projects), which makes investors reluctant to finance them. To attack the process on economic grounds is, as so often with nuclear issues, the tactic of the parenticide who asks the court for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan.”

With one sweeping gesture, Beckmann dismisses any attempt to bring up the only issue relevant to libertarians: government intervention in the industry. While it is true that the effects of regulation in other areas of energy, such as oil, coal and natural gas, have mainly been stifling, with nuclear power the case is not so simple. Government has been literally promoting nuclear power for years, and doing everything within its (un)lawful power to improve the “investment climate.” Beckmann condemns the intrusion but is deafeningly silent about the collusion. This makes me suspicious.

Conservative aberrations are nothing new to Reason magazine, of course, but it is disturbing to see even worse examples in the official organs of state Libertarian Parties. In an article in the Delaware newsletter, Freedom’s Voice, for example, the writer took as his starting point the irrelevant question, for or against nuclear power, and cheerfully endorsed it. He was aware (who could fail to be?) that nuclear technology was created by the federal government; these, he said, are “sunk costs” that we cannot recover. Yet the writer showed no knowledge of the government subsidies which are not “sunk” and should be terminated immediately. The writer’s failure to even mention the Price-Anderson Act is inexcusable, since he borrowed the term “sunk costs” from a Reason editorial condemning the Price-Anderson Act!

Why make such a big deal about what may be simply ignorance and inconsistency on the part of some libertarians? There is more to this than mere conservative-baiting. I believe that the Libertarian Party’s stand on nuclear power is a crucial litmus test of its members understanding of the revolutionary character of free-market economics. If we are ever going to raise the banner of the free market as an idealistic alternative to the rotting economic status quo, we must be prepared to condemn the powerful business interests that feed on government power, without hesitation. The intellectual consequences of waffling of the nuclear power issue are severe:

— Socialists say, “Capitalism is incapable of long-range investment decisions; we need government planning.” And businessmen, masquerading as advocates of the free market, say, “Yes, that’s right, let’s go get some government support for our energy enterprises. The climate is too uncertain for private investment.”

— The corporate statists say, “Government intervention in the economy stimulates growth and makes socially important projects more attractive to investors.” And the businessmen, with an eye toward protecting their unsound investments, say “Yes, that’s right, if government takes the risk out of nuclear power by limiting liability and taking care of waste disposal, nuclear power will develop faster than it would privately.”

—The Marxists say, “Capitalism is characterized by cynical service of business interests. “And the businessmen wink, count their government bailout money, and talk about the virtues of free enterprise.

What can people be expected to think of “capitalism” when presented with statements such as these? Yet this is what all too many “capitalists” are saying, not with their mouths, but with their actions. This kind of situation, in many industries, has weighted down the ideology of the free market with associations of reaction, exploitation, and cynicism. In fact, a free economy is the best protection there is against such plunder and privilege, and the nuclear power industry is a perfect example. Why don’t we start telling people this?

There is little to be gained from cooperating with the left in their anti-nuclear crusade. They are against nuclear power per se, not government promotion of it. And of course, the Right supports nuclear power, and sees nothing wrong with government subsidization of it. We must establish a libertarian alternative in the political debate.

To those who have legitimate fears about the costs and dangers of nuclear power, we can say, “Government intervention in the economy has robbed us of the natural economic checks and balances against irresponsible technology that exist in a free economy. We must end government subsidies so that these free market checks and balances are brought back into play. We must also limit government’s ability to intervene in the economy so that special interests can never again profit at the expense of public money and safety.” To those who sincerely believe in the safety and economy of nuclear power, we can say, “If nuclear power can survive without government subsidies and favoritist legislation, then we will be all for letting the industry develop. Besides, if nuclear power is feasible, in the long run such government involvement will prove to be more of an impediment than a boon. If the industry has ‘sold out’ to the government, they become subject to more political pressures and regulation than private companies. Furthermore, the special favors handed to the industry undermine public confidence in the safety and economy of nuclear power. If nuclear power was a fully insured, self-sustaining industry the anti-nuclear movement would have little to work with.”

In this way we should attempt to make government intervention in the economy the issue, rather than nuclear power as such. If we succeed, we can successfully appeal to reasonable people on both sides. (Illinois Libertarian, Jan. 1978)

Technological Facts on Nuclear Energy

1. “Nuclear” doesn’t have to mean “bomb.” Many people, left and right alike, have knee-jerk reactions to the word “nuclear,” which they associate with the bomb. Nuclear power plants are not the same as nuclear bombs. A nuclear reactor, for example, cannot explode. Bombs require almost pure U-235, whereas fuel in nuclear plants is only 3 percent U-235.

2. The risk of severe nuclear accident is slight. The worst that could possibly happen with nuclear plants is a complete fuel meltdown. Contrary to “China Syndrome” propaganda, a meltdown would not penetrate through the earth to China; it would melt down only ten to fifty feet, and there would be little or no problem of ground water contamination. The best estimate is that such a meltdown in a light-water reactor would only occur once in 17,000 years of nuclear reactor operation. Nine out of ten of such extremely improbable meltdowns would cause less than ten deaths through radiation sickness. The worst possible such meltdown would kill 2,300 from acute radiation sickness but would occur no more than once in one billion years.

3. No provable damage from low-level radiation. There is no provable damage to humans from radiation below a dose of 100 rems. Yet we are talking about processes that emit enormously less radiation than this: for example, the maximum level of radiation permitted at the boundary of a nuclear reactor per year by the NRC is only one twenty-thousandth that amount. Alleged problems with doses of radiation below 100 rems are simply straight-line extrapolations with no proof whatsoever. The NRC has adopted the straight-line as an ultra-conservative approach, even though there is considerable evidence that the body can fight off all effects of small doses of radiation. There is evidence that tissue slightly damaged by low doses of radiation will heal itself, evidence bolstered by controlled experiments on animals.

An indication that anti-nuclear activists are not sincerely anti-pollution but simply anti-nuclear in sounding their false alarm about low-level radiation comes from the facts about coal. Aside from the obvious visible pollution, under normal conditions coal-burning plants emit more radiation than nuclear power plants. Yet where is there a massive, impassioned campaign against this coal radiation?

4. Radiation is radiation is radiation. In rebuttal, the anti-nuclear people claim that, regardless of the degree of millirems or rems of radiation, nuclear radiation is of different and worse kind. This is false. The very definition of millirem consists of a given amount of biological effect on human tissue by radiation. As far as effect goes, then, a millirem is a millirem is a millirem. Period.

5. Plutonium has caused no cancer. Despite much anti-plutonium hysteria, not a single human cancer has ever been positively associated with plutonium. In the early years of the nuclear industry, exposures to plutonium were far above levels now permitted by the NRC. Yet not one of 17,000 plutonium workers in the early industry has died of plutonium-caused health problems. This includes 25 plutonium workers at Los Alamos during World War II who received twenty-five times the currently permitted maximum of plutonium in their lungs. Yet not one of these has developed lung cancer and all in fact are in good health.

6. The nuclear waste disposal problem, trivial at worst, has been solved. Nuclear waste is a bogey. At worst, there is far less problem of nuclear waste than from the air pollution generated by coal-fired plants. The nuclear waste disposal problem has now been solved; nuclear wastes can be “vitrified” — converted into glass-like substances insoluble in water and buried in salt beds. France began operating a vitrification plant in the summer of 1978.

7. Is John Gofinan really a libertarian? The Childs-Mueller clique is touting Gofinan as one anti-nuclear scientist who is really a libertarian. But just how libertarian is John Gofinan? Here is Gofman on the free market in his recent “libertarian” book, An Irreverent Guide: “The only criterion (in our economy) is that what is manufactured be saleable at a profit. . . . Better still are those products which, through built-in obsolescence, can insure that the purchaser becomes locked into the system of dependence.” Gofman also says that we are providing “slave labor for our multinational corporations, while at the same time the corporations throw an ever-increasing segment of the American labor force on the junk heap of human castaways.” He also believes that individuals should not by law be free to choose the alleged risks of working in a nuclear power plant. Gofman claims such prohibition is justified to prevent the supposed genetic damage workers’ descendants will receive, for the descendants “did not choose to participate.” It is difficult, of course, to get our future descendants to “participate” in any of our activities.

Review of The Disaster Lobby

By the earlier Roy Childs

If I were to name the single most important book on current affairs that I have read within the last two years, The Disaster Lobby would be that book, and there would be no close competitors. Written by the former Vice President and the former Publisher of Look Magazine, it is an indepth journalistic study of the decade stretching from the early 1960’s to the early 1970’s, which the authors call “The Age of Unreason,” and the movement that Ayn Rand has called “the Anti-Industrial Revolution.” It is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise polluted intellectual atmosphere.

The Disaster Lobby dates the beginning of “The Age of Unreason” from 1961 with the publication of “the book that killed”: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an unscientific attack on pesticides (particularly DDT) and in defense of the rights of weeds and mosquitos over the rights of man.

With the development of DDT and its first widespread use after World War II, DDT saved — during the first eight years of its use — at least five million lives and prevented over 100 million illnesses. For DDT, the penicillin of pesticides, was the principal chemical used to control “the insect vectors of yellow fever, typhus . . . bubonic plague, cholera, sleeping sickness and dysentery” — without harming humans or domestic animals. On the island of Ceylon, for example, the use of DDT had brought malaria under control for the first time in history. By 1961, there were only 110 cases of malaria reported here, and — for the first time in history — no malaria deaths.

Then Silent Spring was published, and the press and left-wing intellectuals joined forces under its banner to wage an hysterical campaign against the use of DDT and other life-saving pesticides. Ceylon was only one case where the campaign was successful. “Then, in 1968, seven years later, there were two and a half million cases of malaria in Ceylon, and more than 10,000 malaria deaths.”

Yet no one raised an outcry. No one defended the victims of this outrage.

But “the Age of Unreason” had only begun. The Disaster Lobby chronicles its “progress” during the decade which was to follow. The battle flag had been raised: business, technology, science and man himself were declared to be the enemies of “nature.” The people who once littered the streets on “earth day” had invaded the halls of congress and critically important government agencies, attempting to seize control of business and technology and to shackle our economic system with controls destined to arrest progress. The Alaska pipeline was blocked for years, lies about air and water pollution were spread, industrialists were slandered and advertising was censored. And, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, academics such as John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to have a quota system forced on all areas of American life — except academia.

And, as if that were not enough, we now have the energy crisis upon us, a crisis caused by the state and its intellectual henchmen, and have been offered a coercively-imposed “austerity program” to solve the problems which these same people have helped to cause.

The Disaster Lobby pinpoints evasions such as these by the dozens. Did you know about the deaths which resulted from the banning of the use of hexachloraphine in hospitals? About the “population explosion” which doesn’t exist? About the fraudulent campaigns against saccharin and cyclamates? About the distortions of facts used to stop industries from producing more oil — or to develop nuclear power and other sources of energy? About the vicious campaign to remove phosphates from laundry detergents — phosphates which are in fact fertilizers, not pollutants — in favor of chemical cleaning agents which are dangerous to human beings? That the quality of the air over major cities — including New York and Los Angeles — has been getting measurably better over the last few decades? You will learn these facts and more in this book.

The Disaster Lobby is more than a startling revelation of suppressed facts; it is a journalistic masterpiece, the kind of rational “muckraking” which doesn’t make headlines. It deserves a vast audience; it desperately needs readers and defenders. It is the kind of work which Libertarians and Objectivists hunger for — concrete confirmation of their theories.

I cannot be more blunt, or more enthusiastic: The Disaster Lobby is a classic, a heroic achievement, magnificent on every level. Buy it and see for yourself. (Books for Libertarians, Jan. 1974)

Excerpt from The Disaster Lobby

By Melvin J. Grayson and Thomas R. Shepard, Jr.

The article that emerged from this one-sided research was what might have been expected. Entitled “The Nuclear Threat Inside America” and featured in the Look issue of December 15, 1970, it took the position that money-hungry private corporations had teamed up with power-hungry Atomic Energy Commission members to construct and operate nuclear plants that, as a result of comer-cutting to save a few dollars, posed a grave threat to the health of the American public.

A key source of Shepherd’s data was Dr. John Gofman of the AEC’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, California. His hatred of the AEC was of such magnitude that he seemed to lose all sense of balance in describing its members. As quoted in the Shepherd article, Gofman made this incredible statement about those who served on the Commission: “There is no morality . . . not a shred of honesty in any one of them — none. I can assure you, from every bit of dealing I’ve had . . . there is absolute duplicity, lies at every turn, falsehood in every way, about you personally and your motives.”

And this was the man, this Gofman who could find no morality, honesty or truth in an entire government agency, who imagined himself the victim of lies and persecution, upon whom Look Senior Editor Jack Shepherd relied for much of the material that went into his article.

SLS Proposal

By Milton Mueller

ENERGY

We favor bold and decisive steps to create a free market in energy. This can only be done by wresting control of energy planning, research, development, production and distribution out of the hands of the state apparatus. In particular, we view the federal military-industrial power elite, and the increasing centralization of the energy industry in their hands, as the greatest menace to freedom and prosperity facing the American economy.

Price control

Only free, unregulated prices can spur a wise use of energy resources and provide the incentive to discover alternative forms of energy. We advocate unconditional decontrol of oil, gasoline, and natural gas prices, on both the state and the federal level. We oppose the “windfall profits” tax as a windfall for the power elite which would put millions of dollars in their hands while crippling the discovery and production of oil and squeezing smaller producers out of business.

Utilities

We call for a free market in the distribution of electricity and other forms of power. State Public Utility Commissions should be abolished, and their grants of monopoly power to utilities ended. We support the right of homes and businesses to generate their own power or to buy power from competing sources.

Nuclear power

We recognize the nuclear power industry as one wholly created, promoted and imposed by the federal government. Its systematic control of the nuclear fuel cycle has led to subsidized inefficiency, health hazards and centralization; that control should be ended regardless of whether the industry is viable without it.

Government control of uranium resources should be ended. Uranium resources on lands stolen from Native Americans and others should be returned to their full control. All government leases of public lands to uranium mining and exploration corporations should be repudiated, and any new contracts left to voluntary agreements between the companies and the rightful owners.

We call for the abolition of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission along with its powers of licensing and setting radiation emission standards. The protection of individual rights, not government bureaucracies with a vested interest in the industry, should regulate nuclear power. If radiation pollution, as charged by prominent physicists and admitted by the NRC, does in fact commit random murder, it should be stopped regardless of government licensing and politically determined radiation standards.

We call for an end to tax-supported, government-owned uranium enrichment plants, and an end to the subsidization of nuclear waste disposal. The Price-Anderson Act must be repealed to force the nuclear industry to bear its own insurance costs and to be fully liable for whatever damage it might cause. We support the efforts of individual states to repudiate the legitimacy of Price-Anderson within their own borders.

Oil

We favor the creation of a free market in oil by instituting a system of full property rights in underground oil and by the repeal of all price controls, regulations and subsidies governing the oil industry. We condemn nationalization of oil as an authoritarian nightmare that would magnify, not end, the current energy problems.

We call for the immediate decontrol of gasoline prices, and an end to the chaotic and futile attempt of the government to control regional allocation.

We demand that the government lift its control over oil imports. We oppose the “strategic storage” program, any attempt to compel national self-sufficiency in oil, and the scapegoating of OPEC as irrational steps that contribute to international tensions and can lead to war. We condemn as utterly immoral and impractical any threat or attempt to take over Mideast oil fields through military intervention.

We oppose all efforts to break up vertically and horizontally integrated energy companies or to force them to divest their pipelines.

The Federal Energy Bureaucracy

We deplore the growing tendency to centralize control of energy in the hands of federal agencies and the privileged interests which are connected to them. The Department of Energy should be abolished, and its dictatorial powers of price control, regulation, allocation and research and development taken out of the government’s hands.

We oppose any federal subsidies to develop expensive and commercially unviable synthetic fuels. Such a program constitutes a massive boondoggle for privileged oil companies at the expense of the overburdened American taxpayer. We are equally opposed to an Energy Mobilization Board that would concentrate federal power in the hands of an agency capable of ignoring legal processes and riding roughshod over businesses and state and local governments.

All attempts to regulate the thermostat settings in private homes and businesses are an insult to the intelligence of the American people, and should be stopped.

We oppose gasoline rationing as unworkable, unnecessary and despotic.

Expanding government control over energy research and development threatens the very foundations of free enterprise, and must be stopped. Such control directs all innovation into those areas desired by the government instead of the people, such as weapons research. Such control also screens out new energy entrepreneurs, fostering centralization and economic privilege.

Alternative energy

The government should keep its hands off solar and other emerging forms of alternative energy, neither subsidizing them nor handicapping them. All energy technology should compete in a free market.

To help overcome the effects of past government intervention in energy, we support a homeowners tax credit for the purchase and installation of energy producing or conserving devices. We support the repeal of all fire codes, building codes and zoning laws which limit the right of property owners to best meet their energy needs.

Current LP Planks

Slightly amended by Bill Evers and Murray N. Rothbard

ENERGY

We recognize the great mischief that a host of government interferences have caused in the energy industry, and the even greater mischief — amounting to a total regimentation of the American economy and society — that is threatened by recent and proposed interventions.

We oppose all government control of energy pricing, allocation, and production, such as that imposed by the Federal Power Commission, the Department of Energy, state public utility commissions, and state pro-rationing agencies. Thus, we advocate decontrol of the prices of oil, petroleum products, and natural gas. We call for the immediate decontrol of gasoline prices, and elimination of the federal allocation program for crude oil and gasoline. We condemn the proposed “windfall profits tax” which is really a graduated excise tax on the production of crude oil, and which would cripple the discovery and production of oil. We oppose all government subsidies for energy research, development, and operation. We oppose a subsidized federal Energy Security Corporation, which would develop expensive and commercially unviablesynthetic fuels. We also oppose its financing via the issue of small denomination bonds, which would rapidly lose their value in an era of inflation. We also oppose government subsidies to a solar development bank for solar energy.

We favor the privatization of the nuclear energy industry. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should be abolished. Since the nuclear industry, like other industries, has its risks, the Price-Anderson Act, through which the government limits private liability for nuclear accidents, and furnishes partial payment at taxpayer expense, should be repealed. The nuclear power industry, like other industries, should be set free to meet the test of the free market.

We oppose the proposed federal Energy Mobilization Board, which would wield dictatorial powers in order to override normal legal processes. We oppose all government conservation schemes through the use of taxes, subsidies, and regulations, as well as the dictated conversion of utilities and other industries to coal. We denounce all temperature level regulations as despotic and oppressive. We oppose any attempt to give the federal government a monopoly over the importation of oil, or to develop a subsidized government energy corporation whose privileged status would be used as a yardstick for condemning private enterprise. We oppose the “strategic storage” program, any attempts to compel national self-sufficiency in oil, any extension of the cargo preference law to imports, and any attempt to raise oil tariffs or impose oil import quotas. We oppose all efforts to nationalize energy companies or break up vertically and horizontally integrated energy companies or force them to divest their pipelines.

We favor the creation of a free market in oil by instituting a system of full property rights in underground oil and by repeal of all federal and state controls over price and output in the petroleum industry. All government-owned energy resources should be turned over to private ownership.

We consider all attempts to impose an operating or standby program of gasoline rationing as unworkable, unnecessary, and tyrannical.

PUBLIC UTILITIES

We advocate the termination of government-created franchise privileges and governmental monopolies for such services as garbage collection, electricity, natural gas, telephone, or water supplies. Furthermore, all rate regulation in these industries should be abolished. The right to offer such services on the market should not be curtailed by law.

POLLUTION

We support the development of an objective system defining individual property rights to air and water. We hold that ambiguities in the area of these rights (e.g. the concept of “public property”) are a primary cause of our deteriorating environment. Present legal principles which allow the violation of individual rights by polluters must be reversed. The laws of nuisance and tort injury should be modified to cover damage done by air, water, and noise pollution. While we maintain that no one has the right to violate the legitimate property rights of others by polluting, we strenuously oppose all attempts to transform the defense of such rights into any restriction of the efforts of individuals to advance technology, to expand production, or to use their property peacefully. We therefore support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XII NUMBER 5

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1979

US-ISSN0047—4517

The Iran Threat

The threat in Iran is grave, even potentially cataclysmic. But that threat is only secondarily the danger to the 62, now 49, American embassy employees imprisoned in Teheran. The main danger is a disastrous war, to be launched by a furious and petulant United States against the people of Iran. For the really scary thing about the still continuing Iranian crisis is not the Shiite zealots led by the venerable Ayatollah Khomeini; it is the barbarous emotions welling up in the breasts of the American people.

For it seems that civilization is only skin-deep, after all, in these United States; let the American eagle be tweaked a bit and savage bellows for war and destruction thunder across the land. If the Ayatollah and his colleagues are “fanatics” and “madmen”, what then are the countless American demonstrators who joyfully burn Iranian flags, chant “Nuke the Iranians” or “Camel Jockeys, Go Home” or, in the case of an anti-Iranian rally at Houston, burn an Iranian flag while grotesquely singing “America the Beautiful”? College campuses which once rocked with a fervent anti-war spirit are now calling for the expulsion and deportation of harmless Iranian students. A war fever is raging in the United States, and for once we cannot say that the Establishment is dragging a peaceful public into war; the war pressure is coming upward from the grass roots.

But neither can we say that the Carter Administration is blameless in instigating this affair. We already know that the Administration had been warned by its own experts that admitting the Shah into the U.S. would likely trigger Iranian reprisal against our embassy there; yet, not only did we admit the Shah but we did not even beef up security at the Teheran embassy. Bumbling, or a deliberate whipping up of crisis? Of course, with Carter’s record as stumblebum extraordinaire, even conspiracy-minded analysts will have to give considerable credence to the bumble hypothesis.

We do know, also, that the Administration was reluctant to admit the Shah, but that it was successfully pressured into this fateful step by none other than Henry Kissinger and his mentor David Rockefeller. Once again, Kissinger has worked his foreign policy evil; is there no way of getting rid of this man’s malign influence? What happened to the idea of the people choosing at the polls? Wasn’t Kissinger repudiated in 1976? And—conspiracy analysis again—we shouldn’t forget that we have a David Rockefeller-Trilateral Commission-dominated foreign policy Administration, and also that the Shah is personally a multi-billion dollar client at Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank.

One libertarian of our acquaintances has a charming solution to the hostage crisis: send the Iranians Kissinger and Rockefeller in return for the hostages. There is in this solution a certain unique and piquant charm.

Is the Shah really dying, or is he really ill at all? Many physicians profess themselves puzzled at unusual features of the Shah’s therapy. One wonders, too, if he couldn’t have surgery or chemotherapy in Mexico; are there no medical facilities there? Certainly, with his $12 billion or so smackers, he has the wherewithal to fly down top specialists on his behalf. Surely, too, the Shah would solve a lot of world problems by corking off pronto from natural causes.

At any rate, whether or to what extent the Shah is ill, he is certainly at this writing very much alive, and kicking, and therefore must be treated as such. His case raises many fascinating and in advanced applied libertarian theory. Thus, forgetting about his alleged illness, what would we do, or more to the point, what should we do, if Hitler suddenly found himself alive and ill at New York Hospital? Should we defend his right to asylum, or send him back to Germany for trial?

Whatever we answer in the Hitler or Eichmann case, we must answer for the Shah also. The Shah, too, murdered 60,000 of his subjects, and tortured countless others at the hands of the dread SAVAK, the secret police, causing Amnesty International to call his bloody reign the worst torture regime in the world. And the Shah is a thief on a mammoth scale. The Shah’s plundering, by the way, is a paradigm example of land theft and of the proper libertarian analysis of this “feudal” act. For the Shah’s father, only fifty years ago, was a bandit who assumed the throne of Iran by conquest, and proceeded to literally steal half the land area of the country and place it into his “private” ownership, mulcting the peasant owners of “rents” to their new feudal overlord. The present Shah simply systematized and expanded his father’s speculations, and converted them from land to dollar wealth. When radical libertarians speak of justice and land reform, they are always confronted with the rebuttal that land thefts are lost in antiquity, and that titles are so fuzzy that no clear-cut justice can be done. But in the case of Iran none of that is true; the robberies were quite recent, in the memory of many now alive, and the record is all too clear.

Furthermore, the surging hatred of the United States in Iran is all too understandable. For a generation, it was the United States government that propped up the Shah on a massive scale, pouring literally billions in military and economic aid into his coffers. For years, the Shah was considered America’s geopolitical ally and satrap in the Middle East. And when, in the early 1950’s, the Iranians revolted and kicked out the hated Shah, the CIA rushed in to reinstall him in 1953—an action that Americans may have forgotten, but that Iranians have bitterly remembered. The Shah and the United States, the Shah, Kissinger and Rockefeller—all these have been closely linked, not only in the perception of Iranian “fanatics”, but also in reality.

Given all this—should we send the Shah back to Iran to be tried for his crimes? Should we have sent Hitler back? The answer in both cases must be no. For while a people may surely try their own rulers or exrulers for high crimes, governments should be bound by the concept of asylum. Governments should” not be able to extradite political dissidents to the tender mercies of another regime. This is because governments, being governments, being coercive monopolies of force in a given territorial area, should be held to different standards than would free-market anarchist defense institutions. So long as these territorial monopolies of force exist, they should be held strictly to the boundaries of their own territorial areas. Once let them try to extend their jurisdiction to other areas, and only perpetual wars can ensue—wars such as minarchists are always bellyaching about when contemplating anarchism. For we live right now in an “international anarchy” in the worst sense; there are gangs of coercive states which are not under any one world government (And why, by the way, don’t minarchists pursue the logic of their own beliefs and advocate world government?) Whether we are anarchists or minarchists, we must try to limit these governments at least to their territorial area, to reduce government intervention to a minimum at home and abroad. Part of such a policy is for governments to take no sides in the internal quarrels of other nations, and to allow asylum once a foreign national and political dissident reaches its shores. So, despite their patcut crimes, the U.S. government should deport neither the Shah nor a hypothetical Hitler back to the land of their sins.

But, of course, there is surely no positive injunction upon the U.S. government to devote a great deal of taxpayers’ resources to guarding the life of the Shah or any other imported monster. Did the U.S. taxpayer have to spend millions, and tie up virtually the entire police department of New York City, to guard the butcher Castro for nearly a week? Surely not. And neither does it have to knock itself out defending the Shah; surely, it is bizarre to think that the Shah, Castro, or our putative Hitler should have vastly more tax-resources spring to his defense, than for the defense of any one peaceful and put-upon citizen on the streets of New York, So let the U.S. government take all the guards away from New York Hospital. It is true that the Shah has his private guards at the hospital; but perhaps some of the revolutionary Iranian people could work their just will despite that hazard. Let the Shah take his chances, like everyone else, in the Big Apple. So the Shah is a criminal and the United States, as usual, is hip deep in blame, though we can’t countenance outright betrayal of the right of asylum. What then should the United States do in this predicament? Acknowledge its previous guilt, surely. Support the idea of an international tribunal to try the Shah—why not? Outside of that, try patient and quiet diplomacy, using as best we can respected private persons and groups, such as the constructive role already played by the Irishman Sean MacBride and conservative Congressman George Hansen (R.Idaho), who, in his private search for peaceful solutions with the Iranians, is a marvelously refreshing change from the usual bluster xenophobia, and war hysteria on the Right. And that is all; there must be no use of military force by the United States. Military measures would not only be costly and threaten wider war, they would also injure innocent civilians in Iran as well as Americans. Already, the American freeze of Iranian bank deposits and cutoff of oil imports are petulant and coercive, and they accomplish nothing except financial disarray at home and abroad. They free no hostages and are only expensive and aggressive ways for the U.S. government to save face—a concept we have attributed exclusively to inscrutable Orientals.

But what about force? Defense? Punishment? The right of every American citizen to be protected? And what of the inviolability of the “sovereignty” of the American embassy?

Once again, because we are living in a world of coercive nation-states, with each attaining a monopoly over its territorial area, and because in the modern world any war between states necessarily commits the civilians of each country to the war regardless of their wishes, it is vital for each state to confine its use of violence strictly to its own area. So, in such a world, it is the responsibility of the American government to protect the lives and properties of its subjects— but only those who inhabit the territorial area of the country. We must therefore conclude that American citizens abroad must take their chances—that it is not worth embroiling all other Americans in a war on their behalf should they stray beyond U.S. jurisdiction.

To put the plight of the unfortunate Americans in Teheran in perspective: No one forced these people to stray outside the borders of the U.S. Moreover, they knew darned well, as did the rest of us, that Iran was an explosive trouble spot, and that therefore they were taking a considerable risk in remaining there. The U.S. government was delinquent in not reminding them of this risk, and, in fact, for encouraging them to stay. They took their chances. And, after all, they were, voluntarily, U.S. government and U.S. embassy employees, and therefore they voluntarily took on the coloration of U.S. imperialist policy in Iran. In a sense, then, they all shared in the guilt of U.S. foreign policy, and their seizure by the Iranian students, while unfortunate, does not seem quite so irrational.

There is another important point here, illustrative of a double standard and a jingo blood thirst at work. Every year, indeed every day, many Americans lose their lives and property to domestic criminals within the United States. People are here shot, killed, and kidnapped all the time; no one applauds these deeds, but why are there no blood cries for all-out vengeance when the criminals are here at home? Is it only because the prestige of the U.S. government has been damaged long ago, by numerous actions of the U.S. government itself, but those actions never worried out superpatriots by one whit.

But isn’t the embassy sacred American soil, and therefore wasn’t the attack on our embassy an act of war? But surely the “sovereignty” of an enclave of one house and an acre or two is only a pleasant fiction, not a serious reality. Surely it is not a moral problem for Americans to fight, die, and kill over. The inviolability of a nation’s embassy is an important pragmatic principle of international relations, since if embassies and diplomats are habitually aggressed against, very little international dealings or peaceful negotiations would-ever take place. But this principle is important to every nation-state, not just to the U.S., and they all realize this fact. Once again, this is a matter for quiet international diplomacy, and not for acts of moral outrage and coercive saber-rattling by the United States.

But shouldn’t the kidnappers be punished? Here the pro-war theorists liken such a military thrust as equivalent to a domestic “police action.” But there are vital differences. First, as we have reiterated, on foreign soil there is no American monopoly of force, and therefore “punishment” is no longer a police action, but an act of military intervention and war. Furthermore, punishing the guilty, important though it be, is far less important for a libertarian than another principle: protecting the innocent. The innocent may not be injured or murdered in order to apprehend the guilty. Suppose, for example, that police are chasing a robber or even a murderer fleeing down a crowded street. May the police, in order to catch the fugitive, spray the street with machine-guns and mortar fire, killing many innocent people along with the criminal? Certainly not, and police never do such a thing. But, in the same way, it is morally impermissible for any government, including the American, to launch a military offensive to punish the students, the Ayatollah, or whatever. For countless innocent civilians would be injured or killed by such an action.

But isn’t it immoral to deal with kidnappers? WHY? Is it immoral for parents to pay ransom to kidnappers to buy back their children? What peculiar moral theory could possibly be at work here?

And what of the Iranian students in the U.S.? The cry for their incarceration and deportation, and the steps in that direction already taken, are a monstrous imposition of collective guilt, a concept which properly horrified Americans when the Nazis employed it against the Czech town of Lidice. Just because we don’t like what some Iranian students did at Teheran, gives us no warrant to proceed with a force against other Iranian students in this country.

To conclude: the U.S. should pursue the delicate and threatening Iranian crisis with quiet diplomacy, and eschew all acts of force or saber-rattling threats of force. Another war threatens all of us in the Iranian crisis, and it behooved libertarians to be in the forefront of today’s and tomorrow’s anti-war movement. So far, the first libertarian organ to leap into the fray is Sam Konkin’s New Libertarian Strategy, whose “Stop the Presses” December issue has an excellent revisionist analysis of the Iranian crisis. We have had many differences with Konkin’s anti-L.P. “Movement of the Libertarian Left” tendency, but Konkin deserves great commendation for being the first libertarian periodical or institution to take a strong stand on the Iranian crisis. (Available at $10.00 a year from New Libertarian Enterprises, Box 1748, Long Beach CA 90801). Libertarians must put as much pressure as we can upon the Administration to stop the war, pressure that is desperately needed to offset the war fever, and, if necessary, to build a longer-range anti-war movement. If we needed any further reminders, the Iranian crisis shows us and everyone else, once again, that libertarians are NOT” conservatives”; we are for nonintervention and antiwar.

Zionism As It Sees Itself

by Elmer Berger

Review of Melvin I. Urofsky, We Are One, Anchor/Doubleday, $10.95, 536 PP.
by Elmer Berger
(Rabbi Berger is a veteran critic of Zionist tribalism, is the author of many books, and is the head of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism.)

Abandon hope of understanding either the Palestine problem or the so-called “Jewish problem”, all ye who enter here! The author, of course, may protest he did not aspire to contribute understanding to the central, political controversy in the Middle East. Indeed, Urofsky cannily states his parameters. In his Introduction he says he attempted “To tell . . . the relations of American Jewry to Israel . . . from the vantage point of American Jewry — its attitudes, its achievements, its problems, and its changing conditions”. With some justification he asserts that

From 1942 to 1948, American Zionism and its leaders did occupy the center stage in the fight to create an autonomous Jewish homeland in Palestine, to establish a refuge for that pitifully small number who escaped the destruction of the Holocaust.

So be it! But if this historian set out to record on the film of American Jewry every internal Zionist intrigue, every political battle of the Zionists with Washington and the United Nations, the reaction of the Arabs, the military achievements and economic tribulations of the “doughty little Middle East Davidstate” it is legitimate to ask why the “vantage point of American Jewry” is so cluttered with — to be charitable — so many half truths.

There are, for example, sixteen references to the Balour Declaration in the Index. But nowhere does Urofsky state the full text — or any accurate paraphrase — of the celebrated document. He repetitiously upbraids the British for “retreat from the Balfour pledge” (p. 7). But nowhere does he state or refer to two conditions which the British attached to their promise to use their “best endeavors” to “facilitate . . . the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. More explicit and precise language than that used in the “best endeavors” promise was employed to guarantee it was

Clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

(Emphasis supplied)

The difference in language emphasized the fact that the rights of the Palestinian Arabs and of Jews in countries other than Palestine who rejected Zionism’s functional nationality rights for “the Jewish people” to build a national home were existing rights. They were not to be impaired — or even prejudiced — by any “best endeavors” on the part of Britain or by Zionism’s arrogation of the role of spokesman for something called “the Jewish people”.

Urofsky’s omission of these fundamental legal/political facts from all of his sixteen references to the Declaration might be forgiven as an oversight if consistent omission of these identical facts were not the hallmark of Zionist propaganda. There is no law against writing still another Zionist propaganda tome. Fortunately, there is also no law compelling equating Zionist propaganda with either accurate reporting or serious, insightful scholarship.

Ignoring the guarantees of the rights of the two other parties inscribed on the face of the Balfour Declaration has contributed to the cosmetic image of Zionism and its Middle East state as crowd-pleasers and facilitated the Carter/Begin/Sadat try at substituting obliteration of these rights for merely ignoring them. It also simplifies Rafshooning Begin into a philanthropic statesman for conceding territories and rights which were not his to concede except as “acquired by war”. The resultant “pragmatic” solutions, of which Camp David is not the first and will not be the last — not surprisingly outraging the still deprived Palestinians and leaving without proper legal challenge Israel’s Zionist claim to be “the sovereign state of the Jewish people*” rather than of its own Jewish and Moslem/Christian Arab citizens — continue to add uninformed credence to such punditry as Urofsky’s claim the Zionists were victimized by

Traditional Muslim teachings, based upon the Koran, which have always held Jews to be an inferior people, whose downfall is inevitable “because they misbelieve the revelation of Allah and slew the prophets wrongly” (p 204).

It is obvious that like Scripture, the devil can quote the Koran.

Urofsky makes it easy on himself to denigrate both Jewish and Arab anti-Zionists by avoiding, throughout the book, any definition of Zionism or at least the Zionism institutionalized by law and practice in the State of Israel. Nowhere does he inform American Jews — or suggest they already know — the infra-structure they support in Israel is juridically linked to the conventionally recognized Israeli government by a Knesset enactment of 1952, commonly known as the “Status Law”. Nowhere does he disclose that this Zionist infra-structure subsidizes “Jewish” housing, “Jewish” agriculture, “Jewish” education, “Jewish” labor and, of course, “Jewish” immigration. In no way does he help American Jews to any rational comprehension of the resentment of the Arab minority in Israel — and of Arabs generally — because

In the “sovereign state of the Jewish people” there is little hope that Arabs will gain equal rights . . . Arabs have no place in the Jewish state, except as a tolerated but essentially foreign element . . . In part, the discriminatory structure of the state of Israel is embedded in law and institutions. In part, it is based upon administrative practice. There is no substantial segment of Israeli society that opposes or seriously questions the fundamental principle of discrimination, nor is it an issue within World Zionism. As for American “supporters of Israel”, they resort to the simplest and most familiar of all techniques: to deny the facts.**

That is the judgement of Noam Chomsky who, not so by-the-way, Urofsky attempts to deprecate to his uninformed American Jewry with the label, “one of the intellectual gurus of the New Left.” (p. 372). To use some of Urofsky’s Yiddishkeit seasoning, “What’s a chutzpah!”

Urofsky’s nonfeasance as a historian in matters pertaining to the diplomacy, law, Zionist racism, and military campaigns which are at the heart of the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian/Arab nationalism may, perhaps, be forgiven because he admits that American Jewry — his acknowledged “vantage point” — “remained oblivious to this dilemma”, (p. 207). It is more difficult to find excuses for some of his pronouncements about this American Jewry itself. Where, for example, did he find any appreciable number of these Americans who would subscribe to his assertion (p. 450) that

Undoubtedly the greatest problem facing American Jewry results from its successful acceptance into American society.

If ever an ex cathedra pronouncement stood logic and the laws of nature on their heads this one does it. There are certainly Jews who believe their “successful acceptance” has proceeded too slowly. And there are those who, ignoring all history, fear that Judaism in the freedom of America, cannot accommodate itself to this civilization’s changing patterns as Judaism has done to so many civilizations of the past. To accommodate to these individual predilections, Judaism has developed denominations in the United States. The diversity is officially suppressed in Israel — to the considerable embarrassment of American Reform and Conservative rabbis who beat the drums for Zionism but are prohibited from performing a number of clerical services by their politically ensconced colleagues of Orthodox persuasion in the Zionist state. But in the United States, to assert most American Jews — from Senators, to Governors, to business tycoons, to doctors, lawyers, beggar-men and thieves — fear “successful acceptance” rather than aspiring to it is surely a laboratory specimen of hallucination.

Urofsky and many of his Zionist peers fear that “a separation” may develop “between ethnicity and religion”. Zionism’s puritanical antidote to this perceived threat has been aliyah, immigration to Israel, “the ingathering of the exiles”, the “central task of the state”. But in the United States the recruitment of immigrants has been a frost. American “Zionism” has exemplified the old crack that “a Zionist is one Jew who gives money to another Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine”. At one of the periods of greatest Zionist ecstasy, during the three-year period following the 1967 war, 2700 Americans “declared themselves as immigrants” to Israel (p. 361).

So, Urofsky and his “Jewish” nationalist colleagues have had to settle for the hope that the kind of vicarious Zionism practiced by an American Jewry “oblivious” to most of Zionism’s dilemmas will be the antidote to acculturation. But even this hope is qualified by some facts which the historian Urofsky apparently compels the Zionist Urofsky to admit.

In one paragraph, written with less “constructive ambiguity” than most of the rest of the book, and which should be inscribed in bold Spencerian on enduring parchment and delivered to members of the House, the Senate and the political savants around the Oval Office who season foreign policy with a domestic ear-to-the-ground mix, Urofsky reveals a few of the facts about the diversity of American Jews which add to his apprehensions over this “successful acceptance” into American society.

Although the phrases “American Jewry” and “the American Jewish community” are widespread in use, there is a certain irony inherent in them. They seem to imply (by design, he might have added) that the Jews of the United States form an organized, coherent and unified corporate body, when this is in fact far from the truth . . . Some politicians (and Jewish bureaucrats, he might have added) claim that a Jewish bloc vote exists. American Jewish leaders, on the other hand, while publicly asserting the unity and power of the community, privately smile at such naivete and say “halevi” (were it only so!) (p. 220)

What Urofsky is really writing about is the fear of the professional managers, the bureaucrats of a maze of 200 national Jewish organizations (p. 221) on the one hand, and the political cowardice and ignorance about American Jews on the part of “our leaders”, on the other hand. On the Jewish side, big stakes are involved. Salaries in some of those managerial jobs run to the $50,000 $100,000 a year brackets. And the collective “take” handled by these suffering servants of the Lord” runs to the hundreds-of-millions a year. In years that were not among the best 1946–1962 — “American Jews raised $2.29 billion (emphasis in original) . . . of which more than half went to the United Jewish Appeal” (p. 227). So, there is gold in them thar’ Israeli hills, a fair amount of which is panned out by the management of the infra-structure which conceives and orchestrates the annual “crises” and slogans which extract the tax-deductible dollars.

These significant sums are an unreliable index of conscientious commitment to the establishment. “No one dared not to give”, Urofsky writes (p. 227) with only slightly more justification about those in the garment industry than in other economic pursuits or social stratifications. Perhaps only those in “the Jewish community” can appreciate the pressures exerted golf clubs, bridge games, car pools, businesses and professions. Urofsky lets at least one cat out of the bag on p. 451 when he says, “if the Middle East is about to enter a prolonged period of reduced tensions, what kind of ties will bind the two (Israel and American Jews) together? It is this question which concerns more and more Jewish leaders, both in Israel and in the United States.” There are those cynical enough to surmise that uncertainty of the answer to this question is not one of the least important considerations accounting for the tough Israeli postures toward all peace formulas and the alacrity with which the bureaucratic managers of the American Zionist infra-structure play Charlie McCarthy to Israeli puppet masters.

So, there is a good deal of bravado in Urofsky’s title, “We Are One”. The lack of hard substance to his argumentation may explain why he required 450 theology, half-told history, psychology, philosophy, economics and military gobble-de-gook. Like King Canute he must entertain grave doubt that his vision of ethnic/nationalistic “Jewish peoplehood” can surmount the steady erosion by the relentless tide of American acculteration which threatens the Urofskys with the hope of some renewal of religious expression with diminishing over-lays of ethnicity. And so, “Bye Bye Zionism”.

For those who are uptight about their ethnicity being threatened by “successful acceptance” into American life, Urofsky offers a few, inexpensive highs. If it is your bag, on page 409 you can learn that in Israeli Hebrew, “Things taste better with Coke” is Yoter tov im Koka Kola. With a couple of floating Israeli pounds that may get you a “pause that refreshes” in Begin’s Zion. Or, for less mundane ethnic edification, a collection of photographs following page 344 contains a picture of the proper Mr. Eban decked out in an American Indian blanket — but no headgear with feathers. The accompanying text conveys the startling information that the Israeli approximation of Churchill is being “inducted as an honorary chief of the Oklahoma Otoe Indian tribe and received the name of Na-hi-ra-sa-ha”. The picture is funnier than it sounds here. In what may be intended as an example of cultural exchange, the same collection of photos contains one of Nelson Rockefeller wearing a yarmulke while attending a New York synagogue during a celebration of Israel’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Of this stuff, no doubt, is Urofsky’s dream of “Zionism . . . as the chief instrument of communication and mediation between Israel and American Jewry” made (p. 451).

Beyond such intellectual bric-a-brac and a pretentiously long, undiscriminating compilation of quotations from a roster of sources of greatly disparate degrees of wisdom and authority, it is difficult to explain why a serious scholar bothered to write this ponderous book; or why a reputable publisher issued it. Today, public manifestations of Zionism are raising questions about the erroneously labeled “Jewish lobby”. The expansionist, manifest-destiny and apartheid-like character of Zionism is more dramatically than ever confirming the fears of Arabs, particularly of the most victimised Palestinians whose unrequited claims on justice have, for more than thirty years, been the root cause of the Middle East’s most stubborn problem. In this contemporary context it is tempting to say that Urofsky’s melange of amorphous, private and very often unauthoritative ruminations about and apoligias for Zionism is the wrong book, at the wrong time about the wrong subject. It reminded this reviewer of about 1001 nights with a Jewish Walter Cronkite pompously over-viewing the world through a moth-hole in Begin’s skull cap instead of the ubiquitous CBS eye. Urofsky’ sign-off is an old cliche, offered as another lesson in his crash course for teaching Hebrew. Kol Yisrael arevim (sic) zeh lahzeh, “All Jews are brothers, one to the other”, he avers, instead of “That’s the way it is”. The knowledgeable reader is likely to say, “O yeah!” to the Urofsky version as the sophisticated viewer is likely to say “But how is it?” to the more familiar signature to banality.

*This language is from the Judgment handed down by the Israeli Supreme Court in the case of Adolph Eichmann.

**Noam Chomsky, Foreward To The Arabs In Israel, by Sabri Jiryis, New York and London, Monthly Review Press, 1976, p. x.

The Duelist

by Walter Block

The common view on dueling is that it is a relic of a bygone era: an uncivilized, primitive, savage bygone era. All modern, progressive, forward-looking societies now prohibit dueling. And for good reason, it is alleged. For with dueling, the strong would kill off the weak, big bully types would run over everyone else, the meek would never live long enough to inherit the earth.

We shall prove, however, that this widely accepted view is nothing but a tissue of fallacies. We shall show that the critiques of dueling are without substance, and that there are great benefits of dueling which have been ignored.

The first thing to be made clear about dueling, though, is that it is an offer, not a threat. It is a request (do you want to duel with me?); it is not a demand (I insist that you duel with me). For a duel to take place, both parties must agree. In other words, a duel can only take place between consenting adults, and, as such, should command the tolerance that men of good will give to all actions solely concerning consenting adults.

In order to prove this, let us consider the case where A says to B: “If you don’t voluntarily duel with me, I’m going to kick your ass anyway.” Now this statement is clearly a threat. As such, it would be prohibited by the libertarian legal code. There is no real difference, in effect, between this supposed “offer” of a duel, and an out-and-out threat. The first part of the threat, “If you don’t voluntarily duel with me”, actually adds nothing to the sentence. The actual import is “I’m going to kick your ass” whether or not the first part of the sentence is kept in, i.e., whether or not you “agree” to the procedure.

An offer is something you are just as free to accept as to reject: no force or threat of force will be applied to you if you reject the offer. Thus, in the case of an offer of a duel, if the invited person refuses to participate, that is the end of the matter. The offerer of the duel cannot persist. If the offerer of the duel does persist, this only shows that the original “offer” of the duel was no such thing. This shows that the “offer” was really a threat; that the “request” was really a demand. As long as the offer was a bonafide offer, a mere refusal is an end to the matter.

If Mr. B. refuses an “offered” duel, and then Mr. A starts using or threatening violence against him, thus showing up the original “offer” for the threat that it was, Mr. A is just as guilty of aggressive behavior in the present system which outlaws voluntary dueling as he would be in a system which allowed voluntary dueling. We must therefore reject one of the claims against legalizing voluntary dueling. We must reject the claim that anyone would be forced into doing something against his will.

Of course, if you refuse a duel, you may be subjected to all sorts of non-aggressive, non-violent sanctions. You may be called a coward. Strictly speaking, however, this can in no way violate anyone’s rights. Sticks and stones can surely break your bones, and violate your rights, but mere name calling can do neither.

It is true of course that being called a coward can cause psychological harm, but whether it does or not is to a very great degree under the control of each individual person. This is under the control of the individual to a greater degree than ever before thought possible. And thanks to the pioneering work of Dr. Albert Ellis, the possibility of the individual averting harm from himself in situations such as these is becoming more and more widely known.

Dr. Albert Ellis is a twentieth century follower of Epictetus, a philosopher of the first century A. D. At the core of the philosophy of Epictetus is the view that “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them.” Thus it is that Dr. Ellis holds that psychological harm would be caused not so much from being called a coward, but from the view you take about such name calling.

If you take an irrational view about being called a coward you will be harmed. (You will harm yourself). If you take a rational view about it, you will not be harmed. (You will not harm yourself.) The point that cannot be stressed too strongly is that the choice of which view to take is completely up to the individual! In other words, it is completely up to the individual to choose whether or not to be psychologically harmed by being called a coward.

An irrational view would be the following. “Oh horrors, it’s awful to be called a coward. This shouldn’t be. It’s unfair. It’s horrible. I’ll never be able to face people. They’ll hate me. They’ll despise me. And that will even be more awful. I’ll have to keep hidden. But how will I even be able to face myself. I’ll have to commit suicide. Thinking thoughts such as these will lead straight to psychological harm.

On the other hand, one could choose to take a more sane approach. One could choose to say something like: “It is true that I will have to pay a penalty for refusing to duel. When the duelist calls me a coward for refusing to duel with him, there will be several people who will refuse to have anything to do with me. This is unfortunate, regrettable and a pain in the ass. But life is full of just such occurrences. And even though I won’t like it, I will be able to stand it. Actually, I could tolerate much worse, should it come to that. Limiting though these penalties may be, I have judged, in a calm rational mood, that it would be still worse to risk death by dueling. So I’ll accept the penalties attached to refusing to duel. I won’t like them, but I’ll make the best of them.”

It is, of course, true that it is no mean task to be able to really mean it, when one takes the rational approach. It is all too easy to merely mouth the rational words. And this is what Dr. Ellis’ rational therapy is all about: through much practice, and a sort of Socratic dialogue with the therapist, really internalizing the rational view, and then learning how to apply it to all sorts of situations.

We have so far said that dueling is a legitimate activity that should be legalized; that the offer of a duel cannot hurt anyone (except in a psychological way); that the demand for a duel should be illegal, just as it now is. Let us conclude our case for legalized dueling by considering dueling from one more perspective, and then by dealing with a criticism of our case.

The other perspective is from the vantage point of the masochist. We have seen in several other chapters (for example, the case of the person who cries (“Fire!” in a crowded theatre) that all to often the rights of the masochist are completely ignored by those who pillory the heroic figures we deal with in this book. The case of dueling is no exception. As the law stands now, with dueling prohibited, the masochist is completely stripped of his rights to engage in a duel. It is, of course, true that the motivation of the masochist in entering a duel is virtually the opposite of most people. Instead of aiming to wound or kill his protagonist, it is the aim of the masochist to be himself killed or wounded. This should make no difference, however, as far as the rights or wrongs of the case are concerned. If we but grant the right of suicide to the masochist, and it is hard to see how we cannot, then his right to be killed in a duel would seem to follow logically. The right to commit suicide, it will be remembered, follows directly from the self-ownership we each have in our own persons. Once the right of self-ownership granted, suicide, and thus dueling follow directly thereafter. In other words, the masochist, too, has, or rather, should have, the rights of all adults to do anything whatsoever, provided mutual consent is involved, and provided that the action concerns only those consenting adults involved.

The criticism of our case concerns the claim that any such masochistic action necessarily concerns “only one person”. Suppose, it is criticized, that the masochist who duels is a father and husband who has a wife and children dependent upon him. In this case, it would be illegitimate for the person to duel. And since almost everyone has someone dependent upon him for support, then it would be wrong for almost everyone to duel (or unnecessarily risk his life). Therefore the prohibition of dueling can be justified.

There are several things wrong with this criticism. First of all, it flies in the face of the doctrine of self-ownership. If a person cannot risk his life, duel, or whatever, because there are people dependent upon him, then to that extent he is not the owner of himself. But if he is not the owner of himself, then those who are dependent of him are his owners, or slave masters, since they control him. So this criticism of dueling involves the advocacy of slavery.

Moreover, if the family is dependent upon the breadwinner, he is also dependent upon them. (How else can we explain his willingness to abide by their decisions as to what vocations to enter, and what risks to take.) But if he is dependent upon them, then for the same reasons that he has to follow their orders about risky behavior, they have to follow his views on risky behavior. In other words, if he can be construed as a slave of theirs, then they can with equal logic (or lack of logic) be construed as slaves of his.

And if they are truly slaves of his, then he can order them to allow him to do the risky thing they feared. They must obey this order of his to allow him to duel, otherwise they would be disobedient slaves, and that would never do. But by the same token, they could order him not to give them the order to allow him to duel. And so on. The point here is that it is an entirely illogical situation for one person to be both a slave and a owner of another person. And that this illogic is logically derivable from the criticism of voluntary dueling on the ground that the potential dueler has “responsibilities”.

Prose in the Social Sciences: Problems and Remedies

by Justus D. Doenecke

(Mr. Doenecke is professor of history at New College of the University of South Florida. He is the author of Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era and The Literature of Isolationism, and has written over twenty articles on various aspects of American diplomatic history. He also contributed to various political and theological journals)

Although we have more writing today in the social sciences than ever before, very little of it can be called good. That is, it is seldom that we read prose that—on its own merits—wants to keep us reading. Often we read to master specific material and argument, and if the writing is poor, the reading process is a painful one.

Yet scholarly writing need be neither dull nor pedantic. In history, one can readily look at the works of David Herbert Donald, Edmund Morgan, Carl Becker, and Robert R. Palmer. Similarly, in political thought, one can draw from Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, Milton Mayer, and Felix Morley.

The following suggestions are aimed at individuals who have mastered most basic skills but who see the need for genuine improvement. In other words, they know what a sentence is, can identify the parts of speech, and have learned how to form a paragraph. However, they still have trouble with focus, or find their prose too verbose, or cannot resist lapses into jargon. The following suggestions, then, are for individuals who know how to write but who want to write better. They should not be followed slavishly. However, they might well make the difference between good prose and mediocre writing.

1—Write frequently. One learns, as with any other skill, by doing. Ability can only come with practice, and even good writers can lose their skill through neglect. Many authors are at a blank page for hours hoping some inspiration will come. It seldom does. Better to get your material down on paper, even if you realize it is far from perfection, and then be able to work on your draft.

2—Begin writing before all your facts are in. Do not wait until all your information is collected before you start. The facts are never complete. Many books and thesis remain unwritten, and essays and term papers never finished, because the author insists upon waiting until all data is gathered. A good rule of thumb: write as soon as you find that your sources are beginning to repeat themselves, or in a sense when you cease being surprised. The sheer act of writing forces you to focus, to know better what to investigate (and what needs no more investigation), and to raise more intelligent questions of your material.

3—Keep going. Once you start writing, keep it up. Don’t verify every fact if such verification forces you to change pace. Just write “look up” in margin and continue writing.

4—Use pencil. It is far better to write in pencil than with a ballpoint pen. The reason: a pencil is erasable, and that eraser should be used often. Any sort of ink involves various crossouts, arrows, and awkward marginal annotations. Pretty soon the page becomes unworkable.

5—Note the three line rule for sentences. If a sentence involves three typed lines without punctuation, there is an excellent chance that the sentence is carrying too much. In other words, more often than not, it means trouble for the reader as well as yourself. Very rarely do such sentences read smoothly. As Eric F. Goldman, a prominent historian and master of English prose, once said in seminar, “A sentence should be a beautiful thing.”

6—Avoid tired expressions. Metaphors can often sound tired, and the last thing you want is tired prose. Delete such phrases as “toss hat in the ring,” “hits the nail on the head,” “food for thought,” “sheds light” on,” “last but not least,” and “gone but not forgotten.”

7—Avoid efforts to be either clever or “literary.” Style best comes when you try to write simple. Be yourself.

8—Be alert to jargon. In some of the social sciences, it is considered “in” to speak in the most convoluted way possible. Take, for example, a sentence that reads: “The process of representational guidance is essentially the same as response learning under conditions where a person behaviorally follows an externally depicted pattern or is directed through a series of instructions to enact novel response sequences.” It sounds horrible to you, but even some textbooks have sentences that read little better.

Some words are particularly susceptible to jargonlike prose. Take such words as’ basic, concept, context, parameter, and motivation. The same goes for such advertiser’s verbs as: accent, climax, contact, finalize, highlight, personalize, pinpoint, and slant. Then there are the journalese words, such as: approach (noun), crucial, drastic, bitter, exciting, factors, fascinating, key (adjective), meaningful, picture (situation), and stimulating.

9—Show restraint. Such words as marvelous, fantastic, fabulous, and terrific sound worn-out almost immediately.

10—Avoid vague intensifiers. Words like very, actually, really and awfully are not precise. Nor are such timid qualifiers as a bit, rather, and somewhat.

11—Know what words mean. There is a difference between disinterested and uninterested, imply and infer, affect and effect, fewer and less, and ambiguous and ambivalent. The same goes for like and as, media and medium, militate and mitigate, regardless and irrespective, between and among.

12—Avoid “Tom Swifties.” There are unnecessary adverbs that can clog up a sentence. “Yes,” he said, “hurriedly.” “Certainly,” she replied, “breathlessly.” “He knocked on the door, expectantly.” Leave such writing to the potboiler, be the author Horatio Alger or Mickey Spillane.

13—Avoid pretentious words. Some neo-conservatives attempt to show their erudition by using such terms “immanentization of the eschaton,” or “the advent of teleological gnosticism.” They end up confusing us all. When a simple word will work, use it.

14—Vary your words as much as possible. Rather than use the noun “Carter” continually, try the president, the chief executive, the nation’s leader. The same holds true for verbs. So often in the social sciences, one finds “he said that” used repeatedly before a quotation.

15—Use as few words as possible. Don’t be afraid to cut, cut some more, and cut again. You might find the process painful, but it is usually necessary. There are few essays—indeed few sentences—that cannot stand some trimming. Make your motto: “simple and direct.” The amateur avoids cutting, thinking each word priceless. Professionals-in-the-making can’t afford such luxury.

16—Vary your sentence structure. Too often we have one simple sentence after another. It is the Dick-and-Jane readers writ large. “Spot is a fine dog. He has not sired many pups. His owner is disappointed.” Make your paragraph readable by using different kinds of sentences with it. Hence, you need skillful use of such words as although, however, but, therefore, and nevertheless. Of course, don’t have every sentence beginning with a preposition and keep your “however” and “moreover” to a minimum, avoid beginning sentences with “however”. A short sentence sometimes can make a world of difference in attracting reader attention. Try it out.

17—Be alert to passive voice. Compare the two sentences: “Edinburgh was captured by Cromwell”; “Cromwell captured Edinburgh.” The first sentence is weak and roundabout, the second strong, straightforward, and clear. Make your motto here’ “concrete nouns and active verbs.” There is only one time when passive voice is justified. It is when we don’t know who performed an act. “The science lab was burned”; “A million dollars was donated”. (By the same token, avoid infinitives—e.g. to be, to show, to perform, as much as possible).

18—Don’t confuse the tools of punctuation. A semicolon balances two independent clauses (e.g. “I never understood what he saw in her; she never understood what he saw in me”). It is also used to distinguish items that contain internal commas (e.g. “Three isolationists participated: Frederick J. Libby, the Quaker pacifist leader; Robert A. Taft, the Ohio senator; and Garet Garrett, the publisher”). A colon is a kind of trumpet blast for what follows. It introduces a list, series quotation, and statement (e.g. “The train makes three stops: Trenton, Princeton, and New Brunswick”; “Peterson had this warning: NATO meant war”).

19—Master the dash. Dashes should be used sparingly, but they can be a lifesaver. They are best used within a subordinate clause. (“Jonathan Swift, believing—as we know—in toleration, made his Tale of a Tub an impassioned indictment of bigotry.”)

20—Avoid frequent underlining. Let yourself communicate emphasis through your prose, not through often pointless markings.

21—Note the thirty line rule for paragraphs. If a paragraph is over thirty lines, you are likely to be in trouble. See if any typewritten, double spaced paragraph is over a page long. If it is, try to rework it. It might even be wise to have a one line paragraph occasionally.

22—Avoid too many direct quotations. Many undergraduates, and many professors as well, quote too much. Sometimes an essay or chapter is just one quotation after another, strung out—as one said of President Harding’s prose—like a series of wet sponges in search of an idea. Far more often than not, your own words are better—or at least just as good. Indent block quotations for all direct references that comprise three sentences or more. And use quotations only when the wording is particularly colorful or striking, or when you are going to comment directly on terms and phrases within the block quotation.

23—Read your work out loud to yourself, going quite slowly. This technique is one of the best possible for getting a good sense of pace and rhythm. It is also one good way of proofreading and few of us proofread sufficiently. Also be alert to good poetry, and to such prose as found in the King James Version of the Bible, Chaucer’s preface to the Canterbury Tales, or Lord Jim.

24—Have friends read your work. This is the greatest favor one can do for another. Others can catch redundancies you miss. They can tell you when something is unclear. And, by the way, if anyone is forced to reread a sentence more than once to follow your meaning, there is often something wrong with your writing. Painstaking writing for you often means painless reading for your audience.

25—Set plenty of time aside. You write best when you are neither worried nor interrupted. For some, the morning is the best time. Others work best late at night. Be able to work alone and aim for the same hours each day. Try to get a routine established. Have a pocket dictionary and thesaurus next to you at all times.

26—“What is it about?”. This is the question you’ve got to keep asking. Be it a book or thesis, an article or term paper, a chapter or a paragraph, keep asking yourself about the point of it all. If material does not focus on your point, save it for elsewhere in you project or keep it for another project.

27—Tips for organizing a book or thesis. When a young student was working on a major manuscript, he was aided by a prominent historian of American business, Forrest McDonald. McDonald’s advice can be used for all students working on a book or thesis:

Begin by numbering, in the margin, each paragraph. Then make a topic sentence for each paragraph, numbering each sentence to correspond to the paragraph number. The topic sentence should summarize in one brief sentence the essence of that paragraph. The topic sentence should be inferred from the paragraph, and should indicate what the paragraph actually says, not what you intended for it to say.

The topic sentence outline tells you just what you have said in the chapter. You have a small outline of the chapter in two or three pages.

The next phase of the operation is to determine whether you have said what you intended to say, whether you have done so in a logical, coherent fashion, and so on. The analysis begins with a question: What is this chapter about? Answering it is not always easy; you should wrestle with it until you can state the meaning of the chapter in one sentence.

Then ask yourself, well, what about it? What do I have to say about it? Try to expand on this, but in no more than two or three sentences. When you have completed the task, you are ready to proceed with the next step, which is gathering the paragraphs into groups. You will find that a few deal with this aspect of the subject, a few with another, and so on. You will also find that some don’t have anything to do with the subject as you have defined it. Take those out; they may belong in footnotes, they may belong in another chapter, they may belong in another book or article; they don’t belong in the chapter you are working on.

Now, of those that do belong, you have grouped them in bunches; these bunches form the sections (sort of super-paragraphs) that constitute the chapter. What remains is to make sure that they’ are internally in order, inside sections, and that the sections follow properly from one another.

In determining the proper arrangement of paragraphs and sections, several principles will guide you. The first is to bear in mind at all times your formulation of what the chapter is about, and the points you want to make about the subject. Otherwise, at least in writing history, the rule of thumb is a combination of the logical with the chronological. In general, the chronological is preferable except when that approach violates logic; when you resort to logical sequence rather than chronological, tip the reader off that it was necessary at that point to jump ahead or move back in time. Then resume chronology as soon as it is convenient to do so.

Next, once you have worked out the proper order (still working with topic sentences), you note the sequence by renumbering paragraphs to correspond to your new, more logical outline. Now you employ scissors and scotch tape to rearrange the actual copy to accord with the revised outline.

Finally, you edit the scissors-and paste job. This entails (1) writing all necessary introductions to chapters and sections (2) writing or rewriting openers of paragraphs and sections, to make the transitions work; and (3) carefully checking the interior of each paragraph to make sure it develops the single point of the paragraph and nothing else. (If you have any questions, see the material on paragraphs in William Strunk and E. B. White. Jr., The Element of Style). When that is done, you have a chapter. Each succeeding chapter, of course, must pick up where the last one left off, providing appropriate bridges between them; each should also open with a set of general observations that set the sentence to each paragraph normally states the general proposition developed in the paragraphs as a whole). Each chapter should end with some similar kind of general conclusions—not woodenly stated as conclusions, as in a doctoral dissertation, but as general propositions. The conclusions too should set the reader up for the next chapter.

The adoption of any single rule, or any combination, does not guarantee good writing. Fallowing certain priorities, however, can help you considerably. Remember that few writers are born gifted. For most, the process of writing involves hard work. Often what appears effortless to read is the product of seven, eight—perhaps ten drafts. The main thing now is to be alert to obvious errors, and to be able to correct them yourself. If you can do this, you have taken the first step towards literacy.

Deflation: The Time Is Now

by Robert L. Formaini
Cato Institute

One of the great myths of our time is that inflation is good for an economy and deflation is bad. The bias of Keynesian theories points to inflation as a cure for “stagnation” and “recession”. Unemployment is allegedly alleviated through a continuing inflationary policy. Virtually all businessmen, bankers, economists and government officials are united in their fear of deflations. Deflation, as a consequence of depression, has been held to be a primary cause of downward turns in economic activity. People will not buy or sell, the argument goes, if next month prices will be lower. Interest rates will turn negative and social chaos will become the order of the day during deflationary periods.

All of this is, of course, nonsense. Empirically, it can be shown that the American economy functioned quite well during long periods of gradual price deflation. Indeed, the free market tends to produce just such results as capital accumulates, production expands, and product quality improves over time. There is no justification for tampering with the money supply or tax rates in the vain hope of achieving some such shibboleth or “stability”. Economic stability is everywhere the policy of those afraid of the results that occur on free markets. “Stability” is the rallying cry of people who wish to preserve the “status quo”, and think they can somehow legislate certainty in an uncertain world. The past few decades are a monument to the irrationality of these arguments and policies. Ever increasing inflation rates, along with increasing unemployment and economic dislocation, have put an end to the alleged validity the arguments of the “stabilizers” once commanded.

It is due to the public awakening on this issue that a series of proposals are being considered to deal with the failures of American economic policy making. These proposals are ingenious, ranging from a new constitutional convention to assist the federal budgetary process, and calls for a “Balanced Budget Amendment”, to clever statistical proposals that tie the federal budget to a constant percentage of the Gross National Product. All of these proposals will fail in their attempt to chain the growing omnivorous bureaucracy. Why? Because either they are open-ended in their plans, as the balanced budget idea is, in that it sees a tax increase to balance the budget as perfectly acceptable, or because they tie their goals to government-manipulated statistics and hope that the state will be honest in compiling them. None of these proposals attacks the root cause of inflation, namely, the vested interest of central governments to inflate.

There is no longer any debate concerning this point. Both theoretical and empirical results show unmistakenly that governments always inflate the currency given the existing structure of taxation and central banking. In order to deal with the problem of inflation and unemployment, it is necessary to radically alter the incentives with which the government operates. Given that no simple solution can be imposed overnight, i.e., that the state is not going to be dismantled by congress or any president elected in the foreseeable future, what can be done to alter the present incentive system?

If tax revenues depend on the size of the GNP, then two things necessarily follow: first, the state will inflate the dollar amount of the GNP as much as possible to obtain more revenue; it already does this indirectly, as people are pushed into higher and higher tax brackets through inflation. Second, as mentioned earlier, statistics on GNP compiled by the state will be worth as much as their money. The incentive to lie is just too great. And who will argue with the data? Who else has the vast, compulsory data collection operatus the government has?

A simple, and radical, solution to this problem is available: freeze the nominal dollar amount of expenditures by the government at the 1980 level! It now becomes the interest of the government to increase the value of its money, since in real terms that is the only way it can spend more. Under this deflationary system, as time goes on, the comparative size of government will decline, and eventually it will cease to be a drag on economic production and wealth creation. Even if the real value of the government’s nominal income (taxes) increases, it cannot increase faster than the wealth in private hands.

Thus, the public interest is automatically served by the state’s attempts to increase the real value of its tax resources. If the government, on the other hand, refuses to stop inflating, then its real share of national wealth will decrease as it devalues its currency. How the state handles its now finite resources should be a matter of little concern to citizens, provided no new infringements on individual rights occur. If it freezes hiring, or lowers salaries, or cuts waste . . . all to the good. If it doesn’t, then it will be in violation of the law, and those bureaucrats who spend more than is budgeted will be prosecuted. It is here that the will of the tax-payers must be irresolute. Once the law or amendment is passed, bureaucrats who break their budgets are thieves who should be tried and incarcerated and/or fined.

The federal government, being the engine of inflation, is the prime target of this proposed policy, but the state and local governments can be held to their 1980 budgets as well. Such a policy would prevent “shifting” of expenditures and tax burdens. Yet another advantage of the proposal is that it can be implemented at any time in the future, regardless of economic conditions, since it will improve any economic situation we happen to be experiencing.

It is idle to argue that it will be unlikely for government to prosecute violators, for if that is the case, then why bother with such things as balanced budget amendments? We must assume that laws mean something. If they cease to mean anything, then all democratic attempts to control government are foredoomed, and armed rebellion is the only answer. That may come to pass, but until such a time arrives, a much simpler solution would be merely to implement this one modest reform. No bureaucrat need be fired immediately, nor any program cut off at once. The change will be gradual and beneficial to all. Deflation is not something that can be legislated away; it is coming, even as these lines are written. We need to put deflation to work for us before inflation destroys our entire economy by means of a destructive hyper-inflation.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XII NUMBER 6

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER, 1979

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Menace of Opportunism

1. The Growing Threat

Every ideological movement, as it grows in number and influence, is subject to the increasing temptations of opportunism, that is, to slur over, compromise, and eventually betray basic principle on behalf of a quest for short-run advantage. By definition, ideological movements are radical, divergent from and clashing with the mainstream of opinion. So, as the movement grows, temptations accelerate to fuzz over principle on behalf of quick acceptance by the mainstream: in the form of money, respectability, votes, or power. The only way to guard against such temptation is to have an increasing and ever-vigilant cadre of knowledgeable, dedicated, and principled militants to guard over the movement and to blow the whistle long and hard over any signs of opportunist sellout. And the rest of the movement must heed that whistle. For opportunism is like a cancer; once it begins, it feeds on itself, and eventually principle is lost — even supposed short-run advantage is lost — and the movement sinks into innocuousness and sterility.

Sellout does not occur all at once. In our world, the Devil does not take you to the mountaintop and offer you the kingdoms of this world in exchange for your soul. Perhaps it happened to Jesus, but not to the rest of us. Nobody comes and offers you $10 million to betray your principles. Sellout comes as a gradual corruption of the soul, in a series of small but important steps that lead to total betrayal.

Opportunism is usually “right-wing”, since respectability, votes, and money are generally in a conservative direction; but it can also be “left-wing”, for these temptations can exist there as well. In the final analysis, it doesn’t really matter whether the opportunist betrayal is right-wing, left-wing, or even both at the same time. In any case, the result is the same: the loss of the whole point of the libertarian enterprise — the libertarian principles themselves. Jefferson’s famous phrase, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, does not apply merely to government; it applies just as critically to libertarian movements themselves.

And so now that the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party are at the peak of their strength and influence in this century, and now that the LP is getting set to launch what promises to be its most important campaign to date, we can expect the danger of opportunism to be that much greater. And so it is. Already, signs are multiplying of a growing opportunism in both the movement and the Party. Only time will tell whether this mounting trend can and will be stopped.

2. The LR-SLS Clique

Most conspicuous has been the hankering after the support of campus leftists by the Students for a Libertarian Society and its close allies of Libertarian Review — all of whom occupy the same offices at 1620 Montgomery St., San Francisco. In particular, the LR-SLS clique has advocated the abolition of nuclear power per se, objecting violently to the libertarian doctrine of privatizing and deregulating nuclear power and then allowing it to take its chances on a free market. Ail this has fortunately been aired in many organs of the libertarian movement, and the problem constituted the entire July-August, special convention, issue of the Lib. Forum. SLS devoted all of its energies at the LP convention to trying to change the LP nuclear power plank to its desires. A titanic struggle ensued, with the anti-anti-nuclear power forces, led by Bill Evers and myself, finally trouncing the SLS clique after an exhausting battle, first on the platform committee and then on the floor.

A hallmark of opportunists is their desire to suppress open disagreement from their views, to win their points by bureaucratic maneuvering rather than by honest discussion and open debate. The SLS and its allied institutions have repeatedly used the power of firing and threats of firing to keep dissident SLSers and others in line. All of this, plus the latest on the nuclear power issue, can be found in the superb coverage of the LP convention in the December issue of Libertarian Vanguard (Available for 254 from Libertarian Vanguard. 3570-17th St., San Francisco, CA 94114.) Only in the Vanguard, the organ of the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, does one find realistic coverage of the convention, in contrast to the puffery and flackery in all the other libertarian publications. Particularly recommended are the excellent articles by Justin Raimondo, “An Open Letter to the Movement”, an exposure of the long-term maneuvering in SLS and allied institutions; the Vanguard editor’s “Convention ’79”; and two articles on the nuclear power issue, Eric O’Keefe’s “Privatize Nuclear Power,” and “Political Report” by an anonymous Member of the LPRC Central Committee. One trenchant paragraph of the Member of the Central Committee’s article is particularly relevant to our broader concerns about opportunism:

“Mueller and Lipson (of SLS) and their compatriots are clambering on the bandwagon of an ongoing mass movement (the student Left) while jettisoning as so much excess baggage the distinctive libertarian view on nuclear power.

Moreover, their . . . breed of opportunism has lately flourished on other issues, such as the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment), in some libertarian circles. This variety of opportunism might be called “over-intellectualized me-tooism.” We all know what me-tooism means when we talk about the Republican party. It means that the Republicans say that they too accept the New Deal, but unlike the Democrats can deliver New Deal programs more efficiently, using business-like methods. Now, libertarians don’t have the kind of veterans of political life and government work who could claim to deliver “public services” more efficiently. But there are in libertarian ranks some persons of intellectual dexterity. The ploy that me-too opportunists wish to try is this: Take the unlibertarian goals of the left or the right that have some mass appeal and hitch these goals to libertarian sounding rationales. In other words, we libertarians may not have votes to deliver, may not have promises of government effectiveness to deliver, but boy can we offer some convoluted reasoning. In pursuit of the footsoldiers of the anti-nuclear movement, these opportunists are eager to turn libertarian principle into a pale imitation of those held by the counter-cultural left . . . . Even though the opportunists’ tortuous justifications are unlikely to make any impact on the anti-nuclear movement, opportunism as a habit of mind threatens to corrupt the life of the libertarian movement. Libertarians who stand by commitment to principle must expose these opportunist ventures and prevent any further inroads on the integrity of our movement . . .”

Undaunted by their defeat at the convention, the LR-SLS clique have continued and intensified their left-opportunism, virtually turning recent issues of LR into virtual organs for the dissemination of the views of the “libertarian” anti-nuclear scientist John Gofman. In the current (December) issue, LR goes so far as to flirt with the infamous boycott of Nestle for presuming to sell milk formula to Third World mothers who persist in mixing that formula with contaminated water. So what next, LR? There are three issues that the campus left has been pounding the drums on for the last several years’, banning nuclear power, boycotting Nestle, and boycotting private investments in South Africa. When are you going to adopt the last plank? And while you’re at it, why not try to find a “libertarian” rationale for coming out in favor of rent control; surely that would capture the urban masses, and convert them to libertarianism. Right?

3. The Situation in the Libertarian Party

The situation in the LP is more complex than the simple opportunist course on which the LR-SLS clique have embarked. Superficially, things seem fine; the platform, in particular, has become stronger and more radical with each passing convention. But this seeming strength masks important and growing structural weaknesses.

The major structural weakness in the LP is that its members are largely inattentive and uncaring about ideological concerns. The only time that ideological and political issues get discussed is two days every two years, during platform committee battles at national conventions. The rest of the time there is silence. There are no institutions in the LP whose job it is to educate party members on ideology or to promote discussion of the issues of the day. The LP News and state party newsletters are limited to news of the party and optimistic puffery — important services, to be sure, but then the vital matter of internal party education is lacking. (And those few state newsletters which do promote discussion confine themselves to unproductive personal bickering rather than intelligent discussion of the issues.) State and local parties do not meet regularly, and when they do, ideological and political issues are rarely discussed.

For Democratic or Republican parties to avoid discussion and hammering out of political viewpoints is perfectly legitimate; for they are not ideological parties, but simply cynical organizations for the obtaining and retaining of public office. But the Libertarian Party is an ideological party, a party devoted not to the mere attainment of office but to the spread of deeply held political principles and the rollback of the State on behalf of individual liberty. But what kind of an ideological party is it that shows little interest in subtle but important ideological or political issues? And indeed even exhibits irritation at the very mention of ideological problems? That is the kind of party which, unless the situation is remedied, is doomed to rapid and certain extinction as a force for ideological principle.

This situation is necessarily getting worse in proportion as the LP grows in money, votes, influence, and media attention. For if its cadre — its principled and knowledgeable activists — is not fostered, nourished, and intensified, then that cadre will inevitably be spread more and more thin in proportion to the growing number of LP members, voters, and sympathizers. In short, as the number of voters and members grows, and the cadre get weaker and certainly not larger, the vital cadre/member or cadre/voter ratio will inevitably fall — which will spell disaster for the LP as an instrument for the achievement of liberty.

So, as the LP grows, it becomes ever more vital to strengthen and increase the cadre of dedicated, knowledgeable libertarians. And yet, this is not happening at all; for the LP has shown no interest in this vital problem. It seems to think that money, ballot drives, and media hype will suffice for the victory of liberty. But that is the path to oblivion.

More specifically: the menace of opportunism comes now from two sources — external and internal. If the party grows substantially to become, as we have been promised, the third major party in the 1980 elections, then we can expect an influx of charlatans and political opportunists who will see a good thing and try to latch on to it to achieve office. Either assorted individuals and their followers will be joining the party, or organized political groups will join us specifically to take us over. Right now, there are no restrictions on LP membership except the payment of nominal dues and the signing of a general non-initiation-of force pledge. And don’t forget: insofar as we achieve permanent ballot status in the various states, we will not be able to restrict party membership at all. Anyone will be able to register as an LP member and to vote in the LP primary.

In order to combat such inevitable influxes we must promote the development of cadre — of a self-conscious, knowledgeable group of libertarians who know, not only that A is A and that self-esteem is good and that we are against aggression, but also know about the nuances of our ideology and can apply it in detail to the vital political issues of our day. And yet there are no LP institutions attempting to generate cadre and no interest in doing so. In fact, the cadre-building approach has been rejected under the smear term “Leninist.”

In addition to the menace of external opportunism, there is also the inevitable temptation to internal opportunism — to sellout from within our own ranks. Already, this temptation has appeared, and has begun to be taken up. The temptations is to hide, blur over, and compromise on principle in order to attain: media respectability, votes, business support, support on campus, or whatever.

The first step of this dry rot has already taken hold — facilitated, as we have said, by the lack of cadre-building institutions in the LP. This step has been structural — the conscious decision to play down and bury ideological differences and, instead, to seize the levers of power within the party. There are two basic ways to push one’s particular ideological or political “line” within a party. One is by open airing of differences, and, through persuasion and conviction, to build up a cadre of people within the party dedicated to one’s own viewpoint. The other is to operate in secret and behind closed doors, to paper over differences, and to build up a bureaucratic political machine dedicated to the achievement and perpetuation of one’s political power. The victory, then, comes not from persuasion and argument, but by bureaucratic maneuvering and manipulation, and by opportunistic power ploys. And if the first method, that of cadre-building, can be smeared as “Leninist,” then the second may far more justly be termed “Stalinist.” This Stalinist method of bureaucratic maneuvering is the built-in method of opportunism, and is the first basic step toward later sellouts of fundamental principle.

Speaking of Stalin, we should all heed the lessons of the fall of Nikolai Bukharin, Lenin’s favorite theoretician in the Bolshevik Party, and the head of its quasi-free-market wing in the 1920’s. There were three major forces in the Bolshevik party after Lenin’s death in the mid-1920’s. Bukharin was the leader of the Right, who wanted to push forward to a quasi-free market economy something like present-day Yugoslavia. Leader of the Left was Trotsky, who wanted to press on from the mixed economy of the 1920’s to full collectivization and central planning. And in the Center there was Stalin. In contrast to the brilliant theoreticians on his Left and Right, Stalin was little interested in ideology or principle but highly competent in the operation of bureaucratic power. Stalin at first sided with Bukharin; then, after Stalin knocked off Trotsky, he was able to cement his dictatorial rule and liquidate Bukharin. Bukharin was much better liked than Stalin even in the Communist Party and certainly in the country; why did he lose out? Basically, for two reasons: First, he was seduced by the view that all disputes must be ironed out behind closed doors, amongst the leadership of the Bolshevik party. Therefore, he failed to take issues to the public, where he could have won, and played the game on Stalin’s own turf — the bureaucrats in the top layers of the party, who considered Bukharin a brilliant but impractical theorist. Secondly, Bukharin failed to realize that just because Stalin was apparently closer to him in ideology than to Trotsky did not stop Stalin from being the main danger. Bukharin should have formed a Left-Right coalition against the main menace, Stalin, but he failed to do so until it was too late. What he failed to see is that sometimes the main danger is not a person of opposing ideology but those who care little or nothing for ideology at all, and who simply wish to seize the levers of power.

Libertarians should heed the vital lessons of the fate of Bukharin. We do not have any Gulags in our society or party, but the lesson of the main menace of the rise of bureaucratic opportunism within an ideological party cannot be absorbed too strongly.

4. The Radical Caucus — the Last Best Hope

None of these gloomy but realistic considerations negates my well-known and repeated speeches and writings on The Case for Optimism over the last few years. The case for optimism still exists, but it is, as always, confined to two parts: the objective conditions of our society, which provide us the best opportunity in a century for the rapid triumph of liberty; and the growth in influence and media attention of the Libertarian Party and of libertarian ideas and institutions offering us a way out of our chronic crisis of statism. But one point has always been left out — one vital hole in the case for optimism, in the hopes that that hole would soon close. But instead, this flaw has been widening rapidly — namely, the continuing sharp decline in the relative strength of libertarian cadre, both in the movement in general and especially in the LP. Despite the growth in money and influence and votes, it is doubtful whether actual cadre has grown in numbers at all over the past several years. Cadre has been stretched thinner and thinner, and, unless this situation is rectified soon, the result will be the collapse of libertarian principle in the midst of apparent success: a famine of libertarianism itself amidst the growing hoopla of prosperity, votes, and media hype.

Is there a way out? The only real hope is the fledgling Radical Caucus of the L. P. For the Radical Caucus is the only institution in the Libertarian Party dedicated to development and nourishing of cadre, to the strengthening of and the continued, never-ending stress on consistent principle. The Radical Caucus is brand-new, enjoying virtually no funding, and struggling to get organized on a nationwide basis. But even in this early formative stage, the Radical Caucus has held a successful and well-attended meeting at the LP Convention, and, largely through the truly heroic efforts of its editor, Justin Raimondo, has managed to put out the monthly Libertarian Vanguard, as an excellent and indispensable vehicle of analysis, education, and organization. The Radical Caucus is the only institution developing cadre, and it provides by far the best, if not the only, hope of stopping opportunism in its tracks before it has a chance to triumph completely.

The Radical Caucus has been subjected to a considerable amount of criticism, largely because of the flamboyance of much of its style and rhetoric. There is, for example, the title: isn’t it needlessly provocative? There is a sense in which the critics of the title are correct. For perhaps a better title would be “The Libertarian Caucus” of the Libertarian Party. But apart from sowing confusion everywhere, such a title would, of course, be even more provocative than the current one. But it would be accurate: for the Radical Caucus is nothing if not a determined and ongoing call for the centrality of ideology and libertarian principle in the Libertarian Party a central concern which is in danger of being lost in the glitter of more glamorous if ephemeral baubles and tinsels. And besides: the term “Radical” is particularly apt, for “radical” means at the root, and the RC sticks always to the root of all libertarian concerns: concentration on basic principle and its triumph in the world.

There have also been passing criticisms of the sometimes flamboyant rhetoric of Libertarian Vanguard. Well, there is room for sobriety and also for flamboyance, and in a well-functioning movement there will be plenty of both. These are minor matters, and undue stress on matters of style and rhetoric will eventually come to be seen as cloaks for real though hidden differences in substance; that is, for substantive disagreements with a principled, militant libertarian position. The important point is that Justin Raimondo deserves to be honored rather than denounced. In addition to launching the Vanguard and keeping it functioning and challenging and of high quality in the face of great odds, he has also always been intelligent, principled, and honest. After a lifetime in the libertarian movement, I have found these qualities to be pearls without price.

In a profound sense, then, the health of the Libertarian Party is a direct function of the status within it of the Radical Caucus. The winning Clark-Koch ticket was supported by the RC as clearly superior to its alternatives. Fine, but if we look at the directorate of the Clark campaign, we see a different and rather disquieting story. The campaign directorate consists of four people: Raymond Cunningham, ex-of San Francisco now of Connecticut, as campaign director; Edward H. Crane III, on leave from the presidency of the San Francisco-based Cato Institute, as “external” director, in charge of media and public relations; Chris Hocker, ex of the San Francisco area and ex-national director, as “internal” director, in charge of LP member activities; and an unnamed finance director, in charge of fund-raising. While Cunningham is nominally in charge, he is only parttime while residing and continuing to work in Connecticut, while Crane, Hocker, and the fund-raiser will be full-time in Washington, and therefore in operating charge of the campaign. Over these four is a Steering Committee of eight, who themselves of course are not full-time and who meet periodically in different cities to set overall policy. These eight are Cunningham, Crane, and Hocker; Raymond’s wife Carol, formerly co-chairman with her husband of the Clark for President Committee; Dallas Cooley, M. D., of Virginia, national treasurer of the LP and head of the Libertarian Health Association; Howie Rich of New York, in charge of ballot drives and floor manager for the Clark forces at the Los Angeles convention: Dave Nolan of Colorado, founder of the LP and first national chairman; and John Hilberg of Boston and New Hampshire. Of the eight, seven were Clark supporters before Los Angeles, with Hilberg being the sole Hunscher supporter; four hail from the same wing of the LP in San Francisco.

The important point here is that of the four directors and eight Steering Committee members, there is not a single member of the Radical Caucus. Originally, Clark himself and his managers had promised that Bill Evers, member of the Central Committee of the RC, would be on the Steering Committee; but, very shortly afterward, upon strong pressure from Ed Crane, Evers was bumped from the Steering Committee.

When we consider the national officers and the national committee of the LP, we also find not a single national officer or at-large member from the Radical Caucus; and of the members of the NatComm elected from the regions, there is only one RC member: Eric O’Keefe from Wisconsin. RC representation on the NatCom has been reduced from two to one.

This does not mean that all non-members of the RC constitute a monolith. Indeed, the NatCom is divided approximately 50-50 between the Crane-Koch “pro-professional” forces, and the Hunscher-Emerling “decentralists.” More important during 1980 and perhaps for the future, is the fact that the Clark campaign structure is almost exclusively dominated by the Crane forces. But most important is that the RC has virtually no leading role in either the Clark campaign or the party structure.

But there is a cheery side of the coin in all this. Namely, that the RC is in an especially independent position; while backing the ticket, we are peculiarly free to call the shots as we see them, to warn, to point to trends, and, above all, to rally the party and the movement against the menace of opportunism, a menace which may well take concrete and disturbing form in the months and years ahead.

Above all, the important task ahead is to build the Radical Caucus, to make it as strong, as knowledgeable, and as extensive as we can. The real future of libertarianism as a political movement is wrapped up in the fate of the RC. As far as the campaign goes, we must realize, then, that the campaign is in their (non-RC) hands. They have their desired ticket and their desired control, a control which we have been assured is the leadership of the Best and the Brightest in the Libertarian Party, of the most competent, of the real professionals. OK. So it is now up to them to deliver on their promises to the rank-and-file of the Libertarian Party and to the libertarian movement. In essence, that promise is two-fold: to bring us a campaign that is (1) dedicated to and fully consistent with libertarian principle; and (2) will reap us several million votes in 1980, moving us to the status of third major party. That is what we voted for in L. A. and what we have been promised: a high-flying, genuinely libertarian campaign that will reap, let us say, 3-5 million votes.

I hope they do it. But if the campaign falls short in either department, then, after the 1980 election, there will have to be a mighty and thoroughgoing reassessment, in the immortal phrase of John Foster Dulles, an “agonizing reappraisal” of the Libertarian Party and where it has gone. Let us hope that such a reappraisal will not be necessary.

Appendix: RC Votes for National Committee

The at-large members of the NatCom were elected under the ludicrous and chaotic “cumulative voting” system, in which each delegate can vote for seven choices for the seven at-large seats, or can cast all seven votes for one person, or any combination in between. In short, each delegate could cast seven votes in any combination among the eighteen people running for the spot. Libertarian Forum has obtained the detailed, state-by-state voting for NatCom members, and from this we have constructed a tabulation of the total percentage of each state’s votes that went to the three candidates from the Radical Caucus (Evers, Raimondo, and Rothbard). In this way, we are able to gauge the extent of RC support in each state, and compare it to the national average.

State

Radical Caucus

Alabama

17.1

Alaska

10.1

Arizona

7.9

Arkansas

0

California

15.5

Colorado

10.2

Connecticut

16.7

Delaware

47.6

D.C.

21.4

Florida

20.0

Georgia

22.4

Hawaii

25.0

Idaho

64.3

Illinois

7.5

Indiana

10.7

Iowa

2.6

Kansas

11.9

Kentucky

9.5

Louisiana

12.2

Maryland

8.6

Massachusetts

0

Michigan

34.3

Minnesota

10.2

Mississippi

0

Missouri

10.7

Montana

38.1

Nebraska

0

Nevada

1.0

New Hampshire

0

New Jersey

19.0

New Mexico

0.7

New York

8.9

North Carolina

23.2

Ohio

14.3

Oklahoma

0

Oregon

4.1

Pennsylvania

8.2

Rhode Island

0

South Carolina

17.1

Tennessee

2.4

Texas

1.9

Utah

25.7

Vermont

0

Virginia

8.6

Washington

5.4

Wisconsin

6.6

United States

11.6

Law in Anarchy

Charles B. Olson

The libertarian movement upholds human rights, individual rights, as absolute. Libertarians believe that the individual has the right to live his (his/her)life and use his property as he chooses so long as he does not initiate the use or the threat of physical force against the person or property of anyone else. Law deals with the conflicts between men which arise when the above nonaggression axiom is violated.

Libertarians argue a great deal about how court/protection agencies (henceforth “courts”) would operate in an anarchy: who chooses the court, what if anything determines the law, how many times can a person appeal, does a person have a right to trial by jury, etc. . Libertarian analyses in a wide variety of disciplines are characterized by methodological individualism: the analysis centers on the individual—his rights, his goals, his desires. The following analysis of law and justice centers on the victim and is based on a much ignored human right.

Not only does the individual have the right to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, and the right to defend himself and his justly-acquired property; he also has the right to bring about justice when any of his above rights have been violated. He is not required to have witnesses or to prove his case to anyone besides himself. If his rights have been violated, and he uses force against the aggressor to bring justice, then his actions are legitimate. Clearly if his actions are in excess of what is justified by the original crime, then he has not acted according to justice and has aggressed and should himself be brought to justice.

Justice

What is justice? Justice is an absolute. Judges, courts and scholars discuss justice, argue about it in specific cases, and try to approximate it in the real world; however there is only one justice: justice is what is fair. To go beyond this, one must distinguish between two very different types of crime: restitutable crime and nonrestitutable crime.

In restitutable crime, justice is restitution: restoring the victim to his former status. For example, in the case of theft, restitution is-not only returning the stolen property, but also compensating the victim for the time and the cost of obtaining justice and for the mental anguish caused by the crime. Due to the “mental anguish” involved, restitution is not a simple matter. As a general approximation of restitution, Walter Block’s rule of “two teeth for a tooth” works well. For example, if a man steals $1000, he must return the original $1000 plus an additional $1000. Note the desirable trait of proportionality; note also that this rule is meant to approximate restitution and thus can and should be overruled for various specific cases.

Justice in the case of nonrestitutable crime if very difficult. It is proposed that the victim can rightly penalize the aggressor by an amount equivalent to the aggression which he has suffered. Thus in the case of murder, the victim can rightly demand (presumably in his will) that the murderer be executed. Similarly the victim of torture (of which rape is a special case) can demand that the torturer be tortured. Note that an externally equivalent amount of bodily harm or torture inflicted on the aggressor would not be equivalent to what was suffered by the victim. For while the aggressor is suffering punishment in return for a crime, the victim suffered an injustice, which he did not deserve. So once again as an approximation of justice, the “two teeth for a tooth” rule is called upon. Thus the victim of torture could torture the torturer for twice as long as the victim was tortured, and the victim of murder could request that his murderer die two deaths, or rather be tortured and then executed (or that the murderer forfeit his property to the victim’s heirs, in addition to being executed).

The proposed sanction of retributive torture in a civilized society requires comment. We are primarily discussing the rights of victims: victims cannot be restituted. The question is: “Are these victims entitled to penalize their aggressors by an equivalent amount?”. Though this is a matter for great discussion, I think that it is their right to do so. Note that no one is compelled to carry out the victim’s wishes in these regards, and that the victim and only the victim may pardon the aggressor. Note that “torture” is not necessarily bodily torture: it could include confiscation of property.

Third Parties

When a victim uses force against an alleged aggressor to bring about justice, this use of force is rightly viewed with skepticism by all uninformed third parties. Do uninformed third parties have the right to defend an alleged aggressor? Yes, so long as they do not know that the alleged victim’s claim is legitimate. A third party who intentionally shields an aggressor from justice is a willing accomplice.

Courts

The right to bring about justice does not reside in a court: it rests fully and irrevocably with the victim. Courts may use force only insofar as they act on behalf of victims.

Courts have two functions: 1. to examine the evidence in a particular case and make a decision concerning the legitimacy of an alleged victim’s claim; and 2. to use force to bring about justice on behalf of victims. Indeed each man is potentially a court. He sees the facts of a particular case, judges, and if he decides that the victim’s claim is just, he may offer his help to the victim in obtaining justice. For his (or a court’s) use of force to be legitimate, it must be on behalf of a legitimate claim, and in accordance with the victim’s wishes. One small step brings us to a full-fledged court: someone who offers his services on behalf of justice professionally.

One may ask why an individual would pay for court services if he could get justice for free by his own use of force. Undoubtedly some would opt to use force directly. This has great disadvantages, however: 1. the victim must most likely face his former aggressor who may aggress against him again, especially if it seems that the victim is trying to enforce his claim with no aid or witnesses; 2. the victim is far more likely to overreach justice and thus incur liability than is a third party not involved in the crime; 3. the facts of the case will not be made public unless the victim does so himself, and so he will not only be losing a lot of potential allies, but he may also encounter uninformed third parties who defend the aggressor from him.

These three disadvantages are avoided by relying on a professional court. As pointed out above, anyone may call himself a court and act as a court. One may ask, “Would there be any courts of superior quality in such a system?”. To answer this question, one must consider two cases: 1. the court as a cover for criminal activity; and 2. the court as a legitimate business. The first type of court is no more than a criminal gang, and it must be treated as such. Surely there would be courts of that nature, but before we deal with them further, let us consider the second case.

There would indeed be courts which would attempt to be legitimate businesses. By the very nature of the business, the court must strive to approximate justice as closely as possible so as to avoid liability. To do this, written law and learned judges are tremendous assets. Note that courtesy and efficiency are also assets; and that a court depends entirely on its reputation for its livelihood.

One may protest that multi-billion dollar companies (or wealthy individuals) could own courts and give them the firepower to enforce whatever they like. They might do criminal acts, but the shroud of legitimacy is tremendously powerful and it would not be there. Compare what they might do with today’s world; Would inefficient sugar producers in the South be willing or able to police every port and border to keep individuals from importing sugar? Who would launch (or even imagine) the ambitious scheme of forcing everyone in a certain locality to hire electricians of guild X when building houses? Who would try to enforce the monopolies of electricity, water, phone, and postal service? Ambitious crooks indeed. Would they succeed in taking 40% of the gross national income? Who would dare dictate what peaceful acts you may or may not do in your own home? Who would force the entire country to pay for the slaughter of the people of Southeast Asia? If you are afraid of arbitrary and absolute power, the choice is clear. Rip away the shroud of legitimacy. Aggression is aggression.

*

Rational men, who desire a just and peaceful resolution to their conflict, will find it in this system. A man who aggresses, who will not listen to reason, who lives by force, may find he can initially intimidate others and aggress against them for his own profit; however, this system, anarchy, gives him no shroud of legitimacy to hide in, and thus with his story being known and understood, he will find that his only potential allies are criminals like him, who cannot be trusted, and united against him he will find all good men who wish neither to aggress nor to be aggressed against.

Opportunism Revisited

The following previously unpublished, satirical warnings against opportunism were written by the editor of the Lib. Forum during the dark days of libertarianism in the early 1960’s, when it seemed that (a) there were only a handful of libertarians in the country, and (b) one of the most important libertarians was leading us toward an egregious opportunist sellout. Both of these articles were cris de coeur against the sellout, “A Fable For Our Times” being written in May, 1961, and “A Modest Proposal . . . being written in January, 1962. They were not published because there was then no conceivable outlet that might have published them. It is perhaps a telling lesson that the perpetrator of “positive” and “voluntary” opportunism is now long gone from the libertarian movement and has no current influence in social or ideological concerns; in a sense, he has cast himself permanently into the dustbin of history. But while he is gone, and while the particular cause of these satires is therefore no longer a problem for any of us, his case illustrates the essential nature of opportunism, and the contemporary reader may find an important resonance with the problems of today. Opportunism has many faces, but in a profound sense it is always the same. The “Fable” and the “Modest Proposal,” therefore, may have relevance to our time and to the fate of libertarianism in the future. The fact that the person who gave rise to these responses is no longer a social force may also give us hope for the eventual triumph of liberty. — Ed. Note.

A. A Fable For Our Times

I

Once Upon A Time there was a peaceful valley. The people were happy in this valley; they worked, and they traded, and they laughed together. No man exerted force upon his neighbor, and ail lived and prospered.

One day there came to this valley a roaming band of marauders, led by a gang leader, whom we shall call Hector. This band came with machine guns, and, as was their custom, they raped and looted at will among the people of the valley. As they were preparing, as usual, to put the whole valley to the torch (“for kicks,” as one of Hector’s Gang put it succinctly), one of their number, a brilliant young intellectual whom we shall call Iago, stopped them. “Look chief,” said lago. “Why don’t we change our modus operandi? I’m getting pretty sick of all this roaming around, looking always for the next mark, the next victims, always on the run. This is an isolated spot, a beautiful spot. Let’s settle down here, and run these people’s lives. Then, we can milk them all the time, instead of killing them all and moving on.” Hector was a shrewd gang chief, and he saw the wisdom of the idea. The gang settled down.

And so the robbery and the pillage became chronic instead of acute. Annual tribute was levied on the people, the Gang exercised power and dictation over them, and the Gang strutted around in uniforms, issuing orders. There was a great deal of resentment at first, the valley people muttered, and they began to form a People’s Resistance.

Iago, the chief theoretician of Hector’s Gang, explained to the chief that another great change in their methods was due, to fit the changed conditions. “These people outnumber us, chief. Even though they have no guns now, they could one day throw us out, and we’d lose the best deal we ever had. What we’ve got to do is to make them like it.” Making them like it was the great task of Iago and his group of fellow-theoreticians, and Hector and his boys marvelled at the results. Iago fed to the people arguments like the following: “This isn’t tribute, it’s ‘protection’. We have to protect you for your own good. Otherwise, you’d start killing and looting each other.”

“That’s right, he’s right,” the people muttered. “Hector and his gang may be a bunch of rowdies, but at least he’s protecting us from ourselves.” For the memories of the people are short.

And Iago went on: “This isn’t tribute, it’s ‘protection’. We must protect you from those butcher-birds on the other side of the mountain.” And these words took on a plausibility, for Hector’s Gang, ever eager for loot, began to send probing parties to the other side of the mountain, and fighting periodically ensued. The people listened, and they agreed. “That’s right. Hector and his boys might be a bad lot. But at least they’re ours. They’re not a bunch of foreigners like those people on the other side of the mountain. We need protection from them.” The people forgot that there had been no trouble with the people on the other side of the mountain before. For the memories of the people are short.

“This is great, chief, but we need more measures and more theories to keep these suckers contented,” said Iago. And Hector and Iago began to propagandize that all the people’s children must be educated in schools owned and operated by Hector, Iago and their Gang. They called these schools “Valley Schools”; the “people’s schools.” “Anyone who doesn’t educate his kid in a Valley School is undemocratic. He’s anti-social and hates the people. In fact, he’s Un-Valley.” Iago’s scholarly-inclined henchmen, calling themselves “economists” (“It’s got a good Greek sound, chief,”) preached that “everyone really benefits from being forced to pay for and attend Hector’s Valley Schools because if A is educated, then B is better off, and therefore B should be forced to be educated, and A too . . . .” And the people listened, and nodded their heads; and the scholarly-inclined among them listened and nodded their heads too; and pretty soon they became members of Hector’s Gang, Scholarly Division.

What wonders were achieved by Making Them Like It! Hector and his original gang sent for all their relatives for hundreds of miles around; and they all came and joined Hector’s Gang, and lived off the fat of the land. The rate of tribute kept increasing, and so did the numbers of the Gang. As the “take” kept going up, the People began to grumble again. Iago and his men exhorted and admonished the grumblers: “You are all selfish,” they said, “because you don’t want to contribute and serve your brothers.” (The “brothers” were, of course, largely members of Hector’s Gang). And the people, especially the moralists among them, nodded their heads and agreed. They agreed that anyone who kept opposing Hector and his Gang was “selfish, anti-social, and out for his own gain and greed.”

And Hector and his Gang conscripted much of the valley people into a giant labor force to build the Gang a gigantic palace on top of the Valley’s leading hill. It was a beautiful and imposing palace, so everyone said. A few people grumbled at this coercion and waste. Iago and his men thundered: “You miserable creatures! Here is a great monument that we have built, a monument to the glory and destiny and grandeur of Our Valley. And you, slackers and penny-pinchers, would deny Our Valley its monument.” “He’s right,” the people said, glaring angrily at the grumblers. “This valley has the biggest palace of any valley in the land.”

Periodically, Hector and his Gang would go fight the people on the other side of the mountain, to extend their territory and their area of loot. At these times, they needed more men to fight, and so they would again conscript valley people into their Gang. The conscripts, and all the people, were taught that any resistance to this conscription would not only be met with stern measures, but was also dire “treason” against the Valley and its rightful government, Hector’s Gang. The old battle standard that Hector and his men used to raise before going into the next town, Hector and his Iago transformed into the “Valley’s Sacred Flag”; anyone who did not bow down to that flag — or sing the old chanty that Hector and his Gang had always sung before going of for a fight — was also branded a “traitor” and dealt with accordingly.

Brilliant indeed were some of the theories that Iago and his men wove in the service of Hector and his Gang. For example, when an isolated Resister would point to the process of theft that was now organized and continuing, Iago’s men said: “You know, you may have been right for the previous historical era. Nowadays, times have changed, and our thinking must change to suit the modern age. In the pre-Hector Era, this process was indeed robbery. Nowadays, it is cooperation for the common good and the welfare of the people of the Valley.” And one of the more brilliant of Iago’s Economists said: “You people don’t realize that the money taken from you by Hector and his men benefit you all enormously. For Hector and his men spend their money — do they not? — in your shops and your markets. By this spending they give you employment, they circulate the money supply, they keep up mass purchasing-power, which is vital to the Valley Economy, and they provide “built-in stability’ for the economic system of the Valley.” The people listened, and they marvelled at the wisdom. And Iago’s men put the theory into complex mathematical symbols; and the people marvelled, and Hector was overjoyed, and the more scholarly among the people listened, and they soon joined Iago’s Division of Scholars.

We could go on indefinitely to delineate the fascinating social structure of this remarkable and surely unique valley. But the important point to note is that, by the marvel wrought by Iago’s propaganda, the status of Hector and His Gang had completely changed from the old and almost-forgotten days. Where once Hector and His Gang skulked like criminals, were regarded by everyone with great contempt and hatred as criminals, and were perpetually on the run, now a revolution had truly occurred. Hector, Iago and the rest were not criminals but the Most Respected people in the land. Not only were they rich from their chronic annual loot; they were feted by all, loved and feared and honored by the people of the valley. Honors were heaped upon them all. And ail because their theft had become regularized, openly proclaimed, and sweetly defended. Lolling on their divans, Hector contentedly said to Iago, “Boy, we never had it so good.” Clapping Hector on the back, Iago said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And, in the meanwhile, Iago’s men were speaking on the hustings before the people: “Our times call for great sacrifices, for the willingness to give.” And the people listened, and they nodded their heads.

II

Generally, people agreed, or resigned themselves, to the rule of Hector. Those few people, here and there, not swayed by Iagoan propaganda, were taken care of by the Gang. If they became too adamant, they were politely taken out and shot . . . as traitors to the Valley. “It’s too bad,” said the people, “and I thought I knew Jim. Of course, who could have known that he was a traitor?” Everyone agreed that stern times called for stern measures.

Meanwhile, what had happened to the remnant of the People’s Resistance? They had no guns, the Resisters, but they fought on in the realm of ideas. “The spirit, the idea, of liberty must be kept alive,” they said. And so they circulated among themselves their love for liberty and their recognition of who Hector and Iago and their men were and what they were doing. And the thing that gave them most sustenance was their shared credo: “Never forget. Hector is a thief. Hector is a murderer. Hector and his gang are crooks and tyrants, and, one day they shall be kicked out of this Valley.” “Hector is a thief and murderer.” And what is Iago? Iago the Resisters held in greater horror even than Hector. “For Iago,” they pointed out, is a man of intellect; his is a uniquely moral failure. And Iago is keeping the regime alive by prostituting his intellect in the service of himself and Hector, by duping the people into acceptance.” “Never forget about Hector and Iago,” they told each other. “Never forget.”

One day there arose among the Resisters a leader; he was young and strong and highly intelligent — a man of the truly heroic virtues. Affectionately, the Resisters called him The Leader. The Leader scorned the counsel of the Old Ones among the Resisters: the Old Ones had advised the Resisters to write and speak against tyranny only in the abstract; never to “get specific,” never to mention Hector or Iago or any of their deeds. “The hell with that,” the Leader thundered before a meeting of the Resisters. “No wonder the old ones are getting nowhere. We must write on the walls: Hector is a thief; Hector is a murderer; Iago is a prostitute and a consort of thieves and murderers. We shall drive them out!” The Resisters cheered this young man in a thunderous ovation. Their hearts were joyful; they had found their Leader.

The Resistance movement now grew and prospered. In their palace, Hector and Iago and their men were getting a little worried. “This damned Leader,” they muttered. “He knows us too well. And when we call him a traitor, he throws the word right back in our teeth. He really hates us.”

I have said before that Hector and Iago had effected a social revolution in the Valley. Before they had been criminals; now they were the most respectable and honored men of the Valley. Now, on the contrary, it was the Resisters who were the social outcasts, who were branded criminals and traitors, who achieved no respectability at all. Now it was the Resisters who had to lead a furtive existence.

III

One day, the Leader had a Revelation. He was struck by a New Concept. He was still young, but now he felt he had Matured. He called the Resistance together to explain: “I want you to know,” he proclaimed, “that I will never abandon the Resistance. Our end — complete liberty shall always remain unchanged. (Cheers.) But these are new times and they require new concepts and new methods to achieve our common goal. (Puzzled Murmurings.) We have been repeating, again and again, the old slogans; Hector is a thief, Hector is a tyrant, and so forth. These slogans have become tired cliches; everybody knows them. (Murmurings: Everybody? Who but the Resisters have listened to them?) Furthermore, we can never convince anyone by remaining negative and always appearing to oppose change. Hector and Iago were in a sense right when they accused us of being sour and negative. From now on we must accent the positive! What we must do is show them: to show Hector and Iago and all the rest that our way is better than theirs. That we can achieve more good more efficiently by voluntary methods than they can by coercion. Let us abandon sterile and negative slogans, and let us show them by our actions and our deeds that the voluntary way is the better way.”

The Leader was, as always, eloquent, and it was easy to sway the bulk of the Resisters. “Let’s at least give it a try,” said the bulk of these hungry, weary, and embattled men. And so the leader went up and down the valley, preaching the new gospel of the Positive. Soon he found that, where once he was treated as an outcast among the Best People, he now found doors flung open wide in greeting. “You’re right,” said more and more of the wealthy and the respected; “In the old days, when you and the others were going around denouncing Hector and Iago, you were just a bunch of radical crackpots. Now, by God, you’re doing something constructive. And you’re not making people mad by attacking folks and institutions that they respect.” Funds and support poured into the Leader’s New Resistance movement. The emphasis of the New Resistance was on the positive, voluntary way. “Hector and Iago claim that theirs is the best way to promote social welfare,” the Leader thundered in a speech. “Hector and Iago claim that compulsion is needed, for example, for the worthy goal of feeding and housing Hector’s relatives. But we know that the voluntary methods of private people can do that job better and more efficiently. Let us show them!” The crowd cheered, and soon funds poured in for such projects as the voluntary care and feeding of the relatives of Hector. “Never attack the high rates of tribute,” the Leader warned his men of the New Resistance; “if we show the whole Valley that we can do the job by voluntary means, if we feed and clothe and house Hector’s relatives, for example, then Hector will eventually lower the rates of tribute. Let us be up and moving!”

And so the money poured in . . . from Resistance men and others, voluntarily swelling the coffers of Hector and his Gang. The old Resistance men abandoned their old negative preaching, and got down to the hard, practical task of raising money for voluntary gifts for Hector’s pet projects — to show Hector and all the rest the superiority of the Voluntary Way. And what was the reaction of Hector and Iago and the rest? They sat at their periodic board meeting of the Gang, reviewing the new stance of the Leader and the Resistance, and they did only one they thing: they laughed, and they laughed, and they laughed. And finally Iago recovered a bit, and he said: “So, the sheep themselves have supplied us with their own Judas goat!”, and they all roared again with laughter.

It was not long before the Leader was wined and dined by Hector, Iago and the rest, was asked to serve on consulting committees, was asked to demonstrate ever more in action how the voluntary way could add to the Gang’s coffers. At a great annual convention of the Gang, with many Resistance men this time invited, Iago, in his speech, turned to The Leader, now seated also at the dais, and he said: “Let us never forget, my friend, that our ends remain always the same. It is only our means that differ. Let us employ both yours and our means, and then let us achieve our common goal in the best way.” (Resounding cheers from everyone.)

And so, what even Iago, with all his wiles, had been unable to quite achieve, was now achieved; and peace and harmony had been fully restored to the valley. The Resisters were now loyal, positive, and generous, and their former bitterness and hatred had been transmuted into friendly and willing cooperation with Hector and His Gang.

Of course, there are always a few malcontents in every society, a few rotten apples in every barrel. A couple of the Resisters began to mutter “The Leader said tribute would go down, if we voluntarily supplied the rest; but, instead, tribute has gone up.” (“There are new needs for a troubled time,” said Iago’s men; “Patience, we shall demonstrate . . .” said the Leader’s men.) One malcontent Resister said to another. “At least in the time of the Old Ones we could attack robbery and tyranny in the abstract; now we can’t even do that.” And, secretly, covertly, in the dead of the night, tiny groups of dissenting Resisters met, and told one another “Hector is a thief. Hector is a murderer . . . . .”

And one day a wondrous thing came to pass. As the Leader strode confidently to a meeting with Hector and the others in Hector’s splendid palace, he chanced to look into one of the fine mirrors in the hall. Truly, a miracle had been wrought; for when the Leader looked into the mirror, the face he saw was the face of Iago.

B. A Modest Proposal to the XYZ Foundation for the Advancement of Individual Liberty

by Mefistofele, Jr.
(with apologies to C. S. Lewis)

Dear Sirs:

I know that for several years you have devoted your efforts to advancing individual liberty and rolling back the tide of statism in America. I believe I can make an important contribution to the dialogue now under way about the proper strategy toward advancing our Cause.

I cannot agree more with those who say that all doctrinaires and “purist” libertarians be avoided like the plague. This is surely the most important plank in any strategy platform. Those people who are totally opposed to statism and totally favor liberty are highly dangerous . . . or, rather, highly embarrassing and inconvenient people. That their influence is nil is proven by their obvious status as a tiny minority. Surely such extremists, with their constant and tiresome ranting about “principle” and “consistency,” can only be excess baggage for the cause; surely also they can never gain that respectability which is so necessary for maximum influence. The important thing is not pie-in-the-sky principle but here-and-now influence on the citizen and voter. Furthermore, these doctrinaire “purists,” by their very commitment to principle and logic, demonstrate not only their lack of good breeding but also their abandonment of true intellectuality; genuine intellectuality, non-commitment, from non-dedication, from that form of the “open mind” which is always ready to “adjust” to any type of measure, however despotic, that is enacted. Any other way is both anti-intellectual and unrealistically doctrinaire. Only that type of mind can really advance the libertarian cause we all hold dear.

While, gentlemen, you have been pursuing many aspects of this program, you have not, I believe, done it with enough consistency (which in this case is needed.) Certainly Milton Friedman is infinitely preferable to Ludwig von Mises, and A. F. Burns to Friedman but by the same token, Arthur Schiesinger, Jr., Paul Samuelson, and J. Kenneth Galbraith are still more preferable. They have even greater influence and respectability. A program of heavy support for such leaders of opinion as Galbraith, Schiesinger, etc. will have far greater impact than any other we could imagine. Such a program would also have another prime advantage: it would not be doctrinaire libertarian, and it would confuse the statist opposition, because no one would ever be able to detect that you were anti-socialist and anti-statist! Think of the advantages that that would bring! Remember, you must always conduct yourselves in such a way that no one could suspect you might have any libertarian inclinations. It is only in this way that the libertarian cause can finally be victorious.

There is also another thing that the purists forget. The real enemy of liberty is not the State, but a particular type of statism — those evil and secret plotters who form the International Communist Conspiracy. Let us keep our concentration on this menace, and use all powers of the State to fight it on every front; thus we keep our liberty secure, and we achieve the aim of liberty without using utopian doctrinaire means. Let us not forget then that such thinkers as Schiesinger, Jr., Galbraith and Samuelson are dedicated anti-Communists and are therefore perfectly deserving of libertarian support and gratitude.

It is important, then, that these troublesome “purists” be induced to keep their mouths shut about liberty and the State. Let us hew to more moderate, more practical, and realistic courses. Let us above all show our good will by never attacking the government; Americans are positive-minded people, and don’t like negative carping against government. Let’s show the leftists that we can do their programs better if they only give us a chance.

One example and I must conclude. The tiresome purists are always ranting against conscription. Let us place our emphasis more positively; let us rather say that we shall inaugurate a program of educating the American people to such an extent that they will wish to enlist in large numbers in the armed forces (let us show them how rewarding an army career can be, spiritually as well as economically) so that, eventually, conscription can be de-emphasized. If we work hard enough, then everyone will want to offer themselves as slaves . . . 1 mean, patriots . . . so that conscription wilt only be necessary as a last resort for the few recalcitrants.

I see great days ahead, gentlemen of the XYZ Foundation, as we go on to implement this program. One thing more, however it will be necessary to form some sort of “general staff’ of conservative and libertarian groups to see to it that these troublesome purists are properly supp . . . that is, coordinated. Then there will really be smooth sailing on the Road to Liberty, which should be achieved by about . . . 1984, don’t you think?

Ever yours,

Mefistofele, Jr.

Billboards

by Walter Block

The anti-billboard mania is alive and well. It is all too easy to blame the garishness and even presence of billboards for practically all the evils facing mankind: traffic accidents, ill temper, bad manners, commercialization, etc. But before falling in with the view that billboards should be prevented at all costs, we must take a long and careful look at this doctrine.

One important thing to realize is that there are costs to the prevention of billboards and other types of transportation advertising. For these advertisers are ready, willing, and able to pay for this advertising outlet; and the more they pay, the less the travelers must pay. This is true for both public and private modes of transit. In the case of public transit, this is easy to see. If the public transit authority obtains more from advertisers, it will need less of our money in the form of taxes, other things being equal. (Bureaucrats, of course, being bureaucrats, are heavily subject to Parkinson’s famous Law, which predicts that bureaucratic expenditures will always rise to meet the amount of money available, no matter how high.) It is a little less easy to see in the case of private transportation, but it is the more certain for all of that.

Profits, it is well known, always tend toward equality in different industries, given the factor of risk. Any inequality in profit returns over industries sets up pressures to disinvest in the highly profitable industry, thus driving its rate of return down, and to invest in the less profitable industries, thus driving up the rate of profit there. With the profit rates falling in the profitable industries, and rising in the less profitable industries, this tendency toward equality is assured.

Traveling costs would fall in the private transportation industry if advertising were introduced, but not because the entrepreneurs would public-spiritedly pass along the advertising revenues to the travelers,. Oh, NO! The entrepreneur is not in business to save money for the traveling public. He is in business to make profits, large profits. The reason that traveling costs would fall is because everyone else is also in business to maximize profits. If revenues suddenly increased because of advertising, without any decrease in other revenues of increase in other costs (I assume that the advertiser pays for his own billboards), then profits in that industry must rise. But if profits in the industry rise, then other entrepreneurs will enter to take advantage of the lucrative prospects in the transit industry. And when others enter with their investments, this causes a fall in prices to the consumer, so that profits can fall. If prices do not fall, or do not fall enough so as to bring the rate of profit in the transit industry back toward equality with the other industries, then more entry will take place and prices will continue to fall until equality is approached.

One can only speculate, but it seems reasonable to suppose that if the anti-billboard contingent declared how much extra fares would be required if billboards were prohibited, or alternatively how much of an increased fare present advertising is forestalling, they would enjoy much less support for their anti-billboard message.

The second ground for support of billboards is that far from causing accidents, they are an important part of the arsenal supporting traffic safety. One of the greatest causes of traffic accidents is boredom. Boredom allows the driver to lose the sharp edge of caution; it allows his thought to wander far afield; it robs him of the attentiveness (even if subconscious) he needs for safe driving. One of the greatest antidotes to boredom, as it happens, is billboard advertising. Especially the garish, attention-demanding, stark, sharp, showy, ostentatious, flashy billboards, the kind most hated by the forces of reaction — the would be billboard-banishers.

The aesthetic issue is closely intertwined with the question of boredom. For a boring landscape can hardly be characterized as aesthetically pleasing. Most aestheticians extol the beauties of the untrammeled landscape. But we must seriously question a theory of aesthetics that takes no account of boredom. Mother Nature may be beautiful to view for landscape painters who may have no need for the pop art that billboards can provide: but for the travel-weary motorist, whizzing along at 65 miles per hour, the nuanced contrast of nature may not be readily apparent. Often, all that is perceivable at that speed is a blur. At 65, it is almost true of nature that “if you have seen one mountain, you have seen them all”, except perhaps for the most garish, stark, sharp, showy, ostentatious, and flashy mountains. At that speed, a billboard can provide the contrast necessary for aesthetic appreciation, to say nothing of sanity. But the builders of modern highways go even further. Not only do the not allow billboards; in seeming horror at anything man-made, they have virtually banished everything of interest from view: houses, stores, farms, farm buildings, anything. Thus, the traveler on the modern highway is treated to a view of continuous road landscaping, courtesy of the highway planners. He is deprived of any inkling of how the people in an area live or work seemingly in fear that the traveler may learn something, or become interested in anything other than what the planner has decided he shall see.

Perhaps most important, the placing of billboards at prominent places along our highways allows for the dissemination of information, the introduction of new products to the consumer, and even more, for the exhortation to consumers to try new things. These values have been derided by the planning mentality, which brooks no changes except those it had wrought itself. But the general public need not fear signposts along the road with the maniacal devotion shown by the billboard banners. There is nothing to fear except fear itself.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XIII NUMBER I

JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1980

US-ISSN0047-4517

And Now Afghanistan

These are grim times for those of us who yearn for a peaceful American foreign policy, for a foreign policy emulating the ideals of Thomas Paine, who exhorted America to interfere with the affairs of no other nations, and to serve instead as a beacon-light of liberty by her example. The lessons of the Vietnam intervention have been shuffled off with obscene haste, by masses and by intellectuals alike, by campus kids and by veterans of the antiwar movement of the 1960’s. It started with Iran, with bloody calls for war, for punishment, for “nuking ’em”, for, as so many graffiti across the land have been putting it: “nuking ’em till they glow”.

But just as we have been whipping ourselves up to nuking Muslims and to declaring war against “fanatical” Islam per se, we are ready to turn on a dime and sing the praises of no-longer fanatical Muslims who are willing to fight Russian tanks with their bare hands: the heroic freedom fighters of Afghanistan. All of a sudden President Carter has gone bananas: declaring himself shocked and stunned by the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, mobilizing the United Nations in stunned horror, levying embargoes (my how this peanut salesman loves embargoes!), and threatening the Olympics so dear to sports fans around the globe.

It’s all very scary. There is the phony proclamation of personal betrayal — Brezhnev not coming clean on the Hot Line — all too reminiscent of the late unlamented King of Camelot before he almost got us into a nuclear holocaust over a few puny Russian missiles in Cuba. There is the same macho insistence on regarding every foreign affairs crisis as a duel with six-shooters at high noon, and trying to prove that good old Uncle Sam still has the fastest draw.

To set the record straight from the first: Yes, it is deplorable that Russia saw fit to move troops into Afghanistan. It will, we can readily predict, be a disaster for the Soviets themselves, for tens of thousands of troops will be tied down, Vietnam-fashion, in a country where they are universally hated and reviled, and where they will be able to command only the cities and the main roads, and those in the daytime. But deplorable as the Soviet action is, it is neither surprising nor shocking: it is in line with Soviet, indeed with all Russian actions since the late 19th century — an insistence on dominating countries on its borders. While unfortunate, this follows the line of Czarist imperialism; it is old-fashioned Great Power politics, and presages neither the “fall” of Southwest Asia nor an immediate armed strike upon our shores.

Indeed, the righteous horror of the U.S. and the UN at Soviet actions in Afghanistan takes on an ironic perspective when we consider the massive use of military force wielded not very long ago by the United States against Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic. Indeed, the ground for Soviet invasion: the backing of one side in another country’s civil war, was precisely the groundwork for the massive and disastrous U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. In Vietnam, too, we intervened on the side of an unpopular repressive regime in a civil war against a popular revolution; and now the Soviets are doing the exact same thing. So why the selective moral indignation wielded by: Carter, the UN, the war hawk conservatives, the Social Democrats, the liberals, the media, etc? Hypocrisy has become rife in America.

There are two crucial differences between America’s and Russia’s “Vietnam” in Afghanistan. One, that Russia will be slaughtering far fewer Afghans than we did Vietnamese. And two, that Afghanistan is, after all, on Russia’s borders while we launched our intervention in Vietnam half the globe away from our shores. And Afghanistan, of course, is even further away than Vietnam. The whole thing is ludicrous and absurd. Is Afghanistan now supposed to have been part of the “free world”? Afghanistan has no resources, has no treaties with the U.S., no historic ties, there are none of the flimsy but popular excuses that we have used for over a century to throw our weight around across the earth. But here we go, intervening anyway, loudly proclaiming that Russia’s actions in Afghanistan are “unacceptable”, and for which we are ready to scrap SALT, detente, and the feeble past attempts of the Carter administration to shuck off the Cold War and to establish some sort of modus vivendi with Russia. The conservatives, the Pentagon, the Social Democrats, the neo-conservatives, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority — all the worst scoundrels in American life — have been yearning to smash detente, and to accelerate an already swollen arms budget and heat up the Cold War. And now Carter has done it — to such an extent that such conservative organs as Human Events are even finding Carter foreign policy to be better in some respects than that of its hero Reagan.

The idiocy of the sudden wailing and hand-wringing over Afghanistan may be gauged by the fact that that land-locked and barren land had been a Russian client state since the late nineteenth century, when clashes of British and Russian (Czarist) imperialism came to draw the Afghan-Indian border where it is today. (An unfortunate situation, since northwest and western Pakistan is ethnically Pushtu — the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, while southwestern Pakistan is ethnically Baluchi: the same group that populates southern Afghanistan and southeastern Iran.) Ever since, the King of Afghanistan has always been a Russian tool, first Czarist then Soviet — to the tune of no bleats of outrage from the United States. Then, in 1973, the King was overthrown by a coup led by Prince Mohammed Daud. After a few years, Daud began to lead the Afghan government into the Western, pro-U.S. camp. More specifically, he came under the financial spell (i.e. the payroll) of the Shah of Iran, the very man much in the news of late. Feeling that they could not tolerate a pro-U.S. anti-Soviet regime on it borders, the Russians then moved to depose Daud and replace him with the Communist Nur Taraki, in April 1978. Ever since then, Afghanistan has been under the heel of one Communist ruler or another; yet nobody complained, and no American president threatened mayhem. The reason for the latest Soviet invasion is simple but ironic in our world of corn-fed slogans. For the problem with Hafizullah Amin, the prime minister before the Soviet incursion, was that he was too Commie for the Russians. As a fanatical left-Communist, Amin carried out a brutal program of nationalizing the peasantry and torturing opponents, a policy of collectivism and repression that fanned the flames of guerrilla war against him. Seeing Afghanistan about to slip under to the West once again, the Soviets felt impelled to go in to depose Amin and replace him with an Afghan Communist, Babrak Karmal, who is much more moderate a Communist and therefore a faithful follower of the Soviet line. There are undoubtedly countless conservatives and Social Democrats who still find it impossible to conceive of Soviet tools who are more moderate than other Communists, but it is high time they caught up with several decades of worldwide experience.

I deplore the Soviet invasion; I hope for victory of the Afghan masses; and I expect that eventually, as in Vietnam, the oppressed masses will triumph over the Soviet invaders and their puppet regime. The Afghans will win. But that is no reason whatever for other nations, including the United States, to leap into the fray. We must not die for Kabul!

The crocodile tears shed for the Afghans point up once again the disastrous concept of “collective security” which has provided the basis for U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson and is the very heart and soul of the United Nations. Collective security means that any border skirmish anywhere, any territorial rectification, any troubles of any pipsqueak country, necessarily provides the sparkplug for a general holocaust, for a world war “against aggression”. The world does not have one government, and so international war is not a “police action”, despite the successful attempt of the warmonger Harry Truman to place that seemingly innocuous label on his military invasion of Korea. U.S. hysteria over Afghanistan is the bitter fruit of the doctrine of collective security. If we are to avoid nuclear holocaust, if we are to prevent World War III, we must bury the doctrine of collective security once and for all, we must end the idea of the United States as God’s appointed champion of justice throughout the world. We must pursue, in the immortal words of classical liberal Sydney Smith, quoted in this issue, “apathy, selfishness, common sense, arithmetic.” But we can’t be apathetic in this pursuit, because time’s a wastin’. American officials are ominously spreading the word that the Afghan crisis is the most threatening foreign affairs situation since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, or even since World War II. No doubt; but only because the Carter administration and the war hawks have made it so.

Libertarians must mobilize to Stop the War, and to stop it now! We must stop the embargo (Carter’s favorite foreign policy tactic), which is both criminal and counterproductive. Criminal because it aggresses against the rights of private property and free exchange. Criminal because it represses trade and thereby injures both the American public and the innocent civilian public of both Iran and Afghanistan. Counterproductive because, while hurting innocent civilians, embargoes do nothing to injure the power elites of either side. Emborgoes will only unify the people of Iran or Afghanistan behind their regimes, which they will identify as defending them and their food supply against the aggressor Carter. We must stop the war; ever since Kennedy abandoned his feeble attempt to talk sense on Iran because of the war hysteria that poured over him, there is no peace candidate on the American scene. The Libertarian party, if it has the will to do so, and to follow its own clear platform, can be the peace party in this terribly troubled time. If it raises a loud and clear call for peace and for opposition to the war hysteria, it can earn the gratitude of all Americans who cherish peace and freedom, and of future generations of Americans who will, one hopes, emerge from the bloody century-long miasma of nationalist chauvinism to see their way clear at long last for the truly American and the genuinely libertarian policy of nonintervention and peace.

Notes on Iran, Afghanistan, etc.

by The Old Curmudgeon

There are many odd, fascinating, and amusing aspects of the Iranian, etc. crisis which have not even been pointed out, much less discussed by the media — despite the grave and newsworthy nature of the crises. The following are some of them — in no particular order.

1. Good and Bad Muslims. We have heard a lot, much sound and fury signifying little, on Islam and its troubles. But if the Muslim militants are terrible “fanatics” in Iran, how come that they are heroic freedom fighters in Afghanistan, not very far away? Is it because the latter are “our” fanatics, while the Iranians are . . . their own?

2. Not Only Commies are Bad Guys. We were promised, by conservatives and liberals alike, that they too are opposed to American imperialism and expansionism (that is, the sophisticates who admit these bad things exist) but that the ideal of non-interventionism has to be shelved for the duration of the “international Communist conspiracy”, the overwhelming diabolism of which requires this ideal to be overridden. But no one except a few right-wing crazies has maintained that the Ayatollah and his forces are Commies or tools of the Kremlin. So why the high tide of hysteria for intervention and war against Iran? Could it be old-fashioned national chauvinism and American imperial pique?

3. Not Every American Gets Picked Up In Iran. In the hysteria over the hostages, it has been forgotten that not every American in Iran has been detained by the militants. Many Americans, including TV personnel, have been roaming around Iran, filming demonstrations, and remaining unharmed. Why have the militants focused on U.S. embassy personnel? Is it because the latter are tainted with support for two decades of American intervention on behalf of the hated Shah? The worst that happened to Marvin Kalb, when he leaked the Ghotbzadeh attack on the Ayatollah, was that his broadcast facilities got cut off.

4. Not Every Hostage Generates Hysteria in the U.S. The taking of hostages is a rotten and deplorable act. But how come indignation over hostage-taking is so selective? Nobody raised a peep when left-wing militants held an American woman hostage for two weeks in El Salvador recently. And no one has denounced the Azerbaijaini militants for holding nine emissaries of Khomeini hostage in Tabriz.

5. Not All Private Diplomacy is Bad. Ultraconservative Rep. George Hansen (R. Id.) in a courageous and rather lovable attempt at doing something to free or at least to observe the hostages, flew to Teheran on his own and was the First American to get in to see the hostages; it was Hansen, furthermore, who raised what may well turn out to be the solution to the mess: for the U.S. to investigate its own aid to the Shah as well as the Shah’s tyrannical regime. For his pains, Hansen was denounced by nearly everyone, left, right, and center, for having the gall to engage in “private diplomacy”. And yet when the Rev. William Sloane Coffin and two other clergymen visited the hostages in Teheran, everyone applauded and no one denounced them. Is there a double standard at work?

6. Who Are The Hostages? Confusion has arisen over how many American hostages there are in Teheran. Is it 50? Or less? Yet how can the State Department expect to clear up the confusion unless it names names, and tells us who the hostages are supposed to be. Yet it refuses to do so, darkly hinting that there are good and sufficient reasons. But the State Department agitates for the Iranians to disclose their names. Huh?

7. Who in Hell are the “Students”? We’ve been hearing about the now-famous “students” who have been holding the hostages in the American embassy. Yet who in hell are they? What are their names? We have found out the names of Khomeini’s cabinet, and of the ruling Revolutionary Council; yet the pestiferous students go on in secret. Why does no one even express befuddlement that there are no names? And, furthermore, when and what do they “study”? And where? When do they go to class, take exams, get grades?

8. Who are the Fanatics? When the hostage crisis began, there rose to seemingly great power as No. 2 man in Iran, and its Foreign Minister, the “economist” Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, an engaging young lad who looked like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and the young Trotsky. We were assured, across a spectrum ranging from State Department files to the left-wing Italian interviewer Oriana Fallaci, that Bani-Sadr was a dangerous “fanatic” and extremist, that he was a rabid Pol Potnik who wanted to drive everyone out of Teheran and other cities and into small handicraft villages in the countryside. Very quickly, however, it turned out that Bani-Sadr was a “moderate”, that he wanted to make a face-saving deal to release the hostages, and in a couple of weeks he was out, consigned to media oblivion, a victim of his own sober moderation. He was replaced as Foreign Minister by Propaganda Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who we were assured in turn was really a fanatic and extremist, having driven out the “moderate” Bani-Sadr. But at present writing it looks as if Ghotbzadeh is not much more for this world — at least as a statesman — since he too is a “moderate” who wants to release the hostages. After the driving off of Kurt Waldheim from Teheran (as an old anti-UN person I must admit the act had a certain amount of charm), the startled Ghotbzadeh confided to Marvin Kalb that he thought that the Ayatollah was out of touch with reality and unfit to rule. Wow!

So who in blazes are the extremists? For a while, extremist-watchers were pinning their hopes on the sinister-looking Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, head of the Revolutionary Tribunal and known lovingly in Iran as the “hanging judge”, who had executed hundreds of the Shah’s aides and was in charge of the world-wide execution teams sent abroad to wreak justice upon the ex-ruler. And yet Khalkhali too proved disappointing; for at one point he blurted out that the American hostages were “guests” of Iran and should be treated as such and sent home.

So where are the extremists and who are they, apart from the persistently anonymous “students”?

9. Are The Commies The Fanatics? Nope, much as this will disappoint the conservatives who see Reds under every bed. The Tudeh Party, the Communist party in Iran, while part of the Khomeini coalition, is, as are CP’s everywhere, sober, cautious, and rather bourgeois. They probably consider the “students” bonkers, if they indeed know who they are.

10. Must We Die For Kabul? And now there is trumped-up Afghanistan crisis. This is probably even more bizarre than the Iranian caper. Can we tolerate Soviet expansion into Afghanistan? Well, in the first place, they already did it. To be precise, in April 1978, a pro-Soviet coup installed a pro-Communist regime in Kabul. And nobody made a fuss. And why, indeed, should they? Afghanistan, after all, is right on the Soviet border. Soviet intervention into Afghanistan, deplorable as it is, is old hat — part of its long-standing concern, stretching back to Czarist days, over “spheres of influence” on its borders. No domino has toppled since April, 1978. U.S. intervention into Vietnam, or Afghanistan or Pakistan, is not on our borders, but half the globe away. Secondly, as we have said, there has been a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul since the spring of 1978; the current third dictator has won out over two other Reds. Hafizullah Amin, shot by the Soviets and/or the new Kabral regime, was too Commie for the Russians, that is, he precipitated the Muslim guerrilla revolt by radical land nationalization, angering the peasants and tribesmen. The shrewder and more cautious Russians wanted the Afghan Commies to move more slowly.

So must Americans sweat, be expropriated, fight and maybe die to avenge the more Commie dictator? I hope that the Muslim guerrillas will eventually win, and I think they will; I believe that Afghanistan will wind up as Soviet Russia’s Vietnam. But let, for heaven’s sake, the U.S. stay the hell out; let the Afghans struggle over their own fate. In addition to the high immorality of dragging Americans to pay, die, and kill for Kabul it will strategically ruin the black eye that Russia will receive throughout the world for its own intervention, and will mitigate the anti-imperialist natured of the eventual Afghan guerrilla victory.

In the late 1930’s the French non-interventionists raised the slogan: Pourquoi mourir pour Danzig? (Why die for Danzig?) Let us raise the comparable question: why die for Kabul? Even strategically and geo-politically, Afghanistan has no resoures, no oil, no nuttin’.

11. The Sydney Smith Quote. Upon the Afghan crisis, it is time again to resurrect the wise and marvelous quote from Canon Sydney Smith, the great classical liberal and anti-interventionist in early nineteenth century England. When Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, was moving toward a foreign war, Sydney Smith wrote the following letter to Lady Grey, in 1832:“For God’s sake, do not drag me into another war! I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself. I am sorry for the Spaniards — I am sorry for the Greeks — I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Baghdad is oppressed; I do not like the present state of the Delta; Tibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy? We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid the consequence will be, that we shall cut each other’s throats. No war, dear Lady Grey! — No eloquence; but apathy, selfishness, common sense, arithmetic! I beseech you, secure Lord Grey’s swords and pistols, as the housekeeper did Don Quixote’s armour. If there is another war, life will not be worth having.

‘May the vengeance of Heaven’ overtake the Legitimates of Verona! but, in the present state of rent and taxes, they must be left to the vengeance of Heaven. I allow fighting in such a cause to be a luxury; but the business of a prudent, sensible man is to guard against luxury.

There is no such thing as a just war, or at least, as a wise war.”

12. No, No, Embargoes. The Carter schemes for various boycotts and embargoes on Iran, and now the Soviet Union, are immoral, dangerous, and counterproductive. They are immoral because they coercively prohibit trade whether it be sales of grain or purchases of oil, which are the proper province of each person’s control over his own money and property, and not of the U.S. government. They also prohibit exchanges which are beneficial to us as well as the Bad Guys, as trade always is. To the extent individual Americans go along with the boycott, we are cutting off our noses to spite our face; to the extent they don’t, we are criminally aggressing against their rights of property. Embargoes are counterproductive because they don’t work; one bushel of grain looks like any other bushel; one barrel of crude oil looks like any other (only God can distinguish “Communist” or “fanatical Muslim” barrels from all others). Therefore, third parties in other nations, heroically seeing opportunities for profit, will inevitably arise to break the boycott and/or embargo: To sell grain to Russia or oil to the U.S. through middlemen and third parties. That is why the embargo against Rhodesia never worked. Finally, embargoes are dangerous because they step up tension in the direction of a devastating world war.

13. Save the Olympics! And now, Carter, in a fit of punishing the Russians over our historic ties with Afghanistan (Huh? Wha?) wants to destroy the Olympics, to boycott it because it is taking place in Moscow. Goddamn it, is there no area of life that can escape the blight of politicization? Isn’t it enough that we are taxed, conscripted, propagandized, killed in war? Can’t we at least enjoy our sports in peace? Olympic committees are private, and they are financed, mainly (though unfortunately not exclusively) privately in the U.S. and the West. Furthermore, the Olympic ideal has always been to keep sports out of politics: to have an international comity of sports and athletes apart from government. It is vital that governments keep their mitts out of the Olympics. It is already unfortunate that South African athletes have been discriminated against in past Olympics because of the policies of their government. Let us not compound this with Carter’s petulant and irrelevant assault upon sports fans throughout the globe. For shame!

4. Who Seized the Grand Mosque? The Khartoum Connection. To get back to the bizarraries of the Middle East. Who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca? It took a long time to clear out the “fanatics” who took over this most sacred shrine in all of Islam. Were they Shiite Khomeini-ites as the U.S. believed? Commies, Russian agents, as the American right suspected? Agents of the CIA, as Khomeini charged? No one fully knows, but best reports indicate none of the above. Apparently, this was a small “fanatical” Sunni sect, in which a young lad proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the Expected One, the Messiah.

As far as I can piece it out, the Sunni Mahdi can pop up anywhere. The Shiite Mahdi, if such this young lad was, is the Twelfth, or Hidden Imam. The Shiites believe that there were Eleven Imams, each descended in turn from the Prophet Mohammed, his son-in-law Ali, and the latter’s son, the martyr Hussein. After eleven of these descendants, the Twelfth Imam, I believe in the late 11th century, retired to some cave, where he remains hidden — and of, course, alive — until he returns to the panting world as the Mahdi. The Sunnis, on the other hand, don’t hold with this line of descent, and pick Imams spontaneously from mass — or, in a sense, free market, or free society — approval. Except, of course, for the Ottoman Caliphs, but they have been gone for a century or so.

How can the faithful tell when the Mahdi arrives? It is a rum question, indeed, otherwise any schmuck can pop up and call himself the Mahdi. The Shiite Hidden Imam I suppose has certain signs, perhaps cave dirt. But those of who saw that grand old turkey of a movie, Khartoum, know the score. And I’ll say this, we know more about the Mahdi than do faithful readers of the New York Times. Khartoum, with Charlton Heston playing the crazed British nationalist General Gordon, portrays the last great Sunni Mahdi, who popped up in the Sudan in the early 1880’s and killed General Gordon at Khartoum. In the pictures, one great scene, Laurence Olivier, in blackface, rolling his eyes and hamming it up outrageously as the Mahdi, tells Gordon of his significance and his plans for the future: “I am de Mahdi, de Expected One,” he says. “I have de signs: I have de gap in de tooth, I have de mole”, and then another sign which I forget. And then: “I shall enter de mosque at Khartoum; then I shall enter de mosque at Cairo . . .” “Entering the mosque” was patently a Mahdian euphemism. It didn’t mean simply walking into the mosque as a penitent; it meant entering with thousands of his troops, slaughtering all in his path. He proceeded to outline his path of conquest, up to and including “entering de mosque” at Constantinople. I am surprised the movie didn’t attribute to him plans for world conquest, and that we’d better fight him in Khartoum or else fight him in the streets of New York. At any rate, obviously he didn’t make it; in fact, he never got beyond Khartoum.

And just as obviously the current would-be Mahdi didn’t get very far either. But Mahdi-watchers can always hope.

15. Gut Fears of Islam; the 1930’s Movie Connection. In all the hysteria about Muslim Fanaticism there is a touch of old movie. Perhaps there has been an almost neo-Jungian penetration of deep anti-Muslim symbols and fears into the American psyche. Maybe from seeing too many Gary Cooper-French Foreign Legion — Evil and Crazed Arab pictures. Surely you know what 1 mean. A dozen heroic French Foreign Legionaires, led by Gary Cooper and ably seconded by Victor McLaglen, are riding across the trackless wastes of the Sahara Desert. There they are surrounded, at the ruins of some old fort, by hundreds of fanatical, hopped up, kamikaze-type Arabs, who are willing to die for their crazed beliefs; one by one the heroic white men get picked off, until zero or one or two are rescued (depending on whether it is an Optimistic or Pessimistic picture). Usually the Arab charges are led by whirling dervishes and other such sinister madmen.

Come on now, fellow Americans! This is not 1933, and you are not Gary Cooper, and we are not hot and thirsty on the Sahara, surrounded by hundreds of fanatical Arabs/Muslims. We’re home and safe, in our comfy armchairs, drinking beer watching the Super Bowl. And Jung is dead.

16. The Persian Imperium. We have seen a lot about unrest in Iran among the Baluchis, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, et al. But the significance of this unrest has not really penetrated to the media and the American public. It seems pretty clear that Iran is a swollen empire, with the ethnic Persians, in the central core of the country, constituting about half the Iranian population, holding sway over a whole bunch of nationalities on the periphery: The Turkomans in the northeast, the Baluchis in the southeast, Arabs in the southwest, Fars ditto, Kurds in the northwest, and Azerbaijanis in the far northwest. All of these are nations in their own right, and have been oppressed for decades by Persian central control, first under the Shah, and now under Khomeini. One happy result of the Iranian revolution may be to dismember the swollen Persian empire.

How did the empire get this way? How did Persian boundaries extend to include all these minority nationalities? When? Why doesn’t the New York Times tell us?

17. You Can’t Know the Ayatollahs Without a Scorecard. The Iranian crisis has brought to the fore a whole unfamiliar hierarchy of Shiites in Iran, melded in as yet unclear ways into a theocracy over the country. From what we can piece together, here is a tentative reader’s guide to all the hierarchs. In the first place, as we mentioned earlier, no one picks or appoints Ayatollahs or any other hierarch. They are picked from below, by public approval of their learning, wisdom, whatever — in a free-market manner. Ayatollahs are selected by the faithful in much the same way as judges would be picked in an anarcho-capitalist society, or were picked under older tribal or common law: those who were considered the ablest, wisest, most learned, etc.

On the lowest level, there is the mullah, the local preacher. There are thousands of mullahs throughout Iran, and these indeed constituted the main organization for the revolution. Ulemas are teaching mullahs, comparable to professors. Above the mullahs are the ayatollahs, of whom there are many dozens throughout Iran. And above them, selected by the same process of veneration by the faithful, are the Grand Ayatollahs, of which there are six in Iran. Khomeini is one of the Grand Ayatollahs. Of the six, two are inactive somewhere in the boonies, and one of the four actives is quite ill. Khomeini has, of course, acquired supreme political leadership, first of the revolution and now of Iran, and hence is considered the Imam. (That is why some? all? of the militant “students” call themselves Followers of the Imam’s Line.) Khomeini is considered, or at least used to be considered, only the second ranking Grand Ayatollah in terms of wisdom and holiness. First ranking was always the Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari (of whom more below). Shariat-Madari was originally the leader of the anti-Shah revolution, but he proved too moderate, staying at home instead of leaving into exile, and willing to give the neo-Shah puppet premier Shahpur Bakhtiar a chance. Hence, allowing Khomeini to seize leadership. Shariat-Madari is now heading an Azerbajaini rebellion against Khomeini because he objects to Khomeini’s new constitution for Iran proclaiming himself Faghi for life. Faghi is absolute ruler, and I guess could be considered an Imam with political muscle. All clear now?

18. Old Curmudgeons in Iran. For us Old Curmudgeons, there is a particularly lovable aspect to the current Iranian regime. They are, first of all, as Old Curmudgeonly as they come. In fact, if TIME can name the Ayatollah Khomeini Man of the Year, then surely he is even more the Old Curmudgeon of the Decade. (I hasten to add, to cover my flanks in the movement, that the Ayatollah is most emphatically not a Libertarian. But he is definitely an Old Curmudgeon extraordinaire.)

But there is a more detailed point to make. For another charming aspect of the Iranian regime is the veneration for age. For one of the reasons that the Grand Ayatollah Shariat-Madari has broken angrily with Khomeini is — in addition to the totalitarian and centralizing nature of the regime — because Shariat-Madari, formerly the mentor of Khomeini, considers Khomeini a young pup of 79. Shariat-Madari, you see, is all of 81. As us Old Curmudgeons get inexorably older, facing an American culture that is slap-happy over youth, the attractions of a reverence for elder Ayatollahs grow greater.

“Revolutionary” Fascism
A Review of Jorge Edwards’, Persona Non Grata

by Alfred C. Cuzan
Department of Government
New Mexico State University

No American interested in the state of human rights and welfare in Castro’s “revolutionary” Cuba should miss reading Persona Non Grata, by Jorge Edwards. It is available in English from Pomerica Press, although I read the Spanish original.1

Edwards effectively demolishes three myths about Castro’s Cuba: First, that it is a humanitarian society; second, that it has improved the welfare of its people; and third, that it is egalitarian. What Edwards found was a ruthless police state at the service of an absolute dictator who rules despotically over an impoverished people.

Edwards was no ordinary visitor. He was the first charge d’affairs appointed by the Chilean government to Cuba when the two countries reestablished relations after seven years of hostility following the inauguration of Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1970. Edwards’ appointment was a historic event, a symbol of a new relationship between two socialist governments.

Edwards was in Cuba during the first three months of the Allende administration, when the seeds of later conflict were being planted. From Cuba he went to the Chilean embassy in Paris to work for the famous communist poet Pablo Neruda, who encouraged him to tell the story. The book assumes that the reader knows about the tragic death of Allende’s Unidad Popular administration and the resurrection of fascism in Chile. What Edwards tells us is about the other fascism—the “revolutionary” kind.

At the time of his appointment, Edwards was a career diplomat assigned to Chile’s embassy in Lima, Peru. A leftist writer and intellectual, Edwards is a poor relative of one of Chile’s wealthiest families. Ironically, Edwards’ uncle had been Chile’s last ambassador to Havana before the break in diplomatic relations in the early sixties. A “liberation socialist,” Edwards had publicly supported his friend Allende’s earlier tries for the presidency. Edwards had also written stories for Cuba’s state-controlled literary magazine and had even visited the country in 1968 to serve as one of three judges at a “cultural congress” sponsored by Castro’s government. This was a time when Chilean-Cuban relations were at an all time low due to Castro’s public attacks on Chile’s President Eduardo Frei, under whose administration Edwards worked.

Edwards’ appointment as charge d’affairs to Cuba was temporary, designed to lay the logistical groundwork until an ambassador was appointed and confirmed by the Chilean Senate, a process that was expected to take only a matter of weeks. After that, he would go to Paris. Given Edwards’ “leftist” credentials, his friends assured him that he would be treated very well by the Cuban government. Despite some unexplainable misgivings, he himself expected cordial relations with Cuban officials and pleasant get-togethers with the friends he had made at the “cultural congress” two years earlier. But it did not take Edwards very long to realize how wrong these expectations had been.

From the moment of his arrival at Havana’s airport until he departed as a persona non grata about three months later, Edwards was subjected to systematic humiliations, surveillance, and harassment by the Foreign Ministry and the secret police. There was no diplomatic reception to greet him, a calculated snub he at first interpreted as an innocent (though painful) oversight. As the days and weeks wore on, however, he came to realize that the government was intent on destroying his career and reputation for reasons that he found difficult to understand.

Throughout his brief tenure as Chile’s charge d’affairs, Edwards was forced to live and carry out his official duties in two rooms at the Havana Riviera hotel, where the walls contained microphones and the police searched his papers at will. The government assigned him a car chauffeured by three different drivers who Edwards suspected were working for the state police. He was sexually baited with attractive, intelligent women who worked as undercover agents. Even friends and acquaintances whom he had made during the “cultural congress” were used to try to entrap Edwards into doing something that could be branded as “counter-revolutionary.” The police monitored Edwards’ every move including his “off-duty,” private visits to the now disgraced intellectuals and writers who had enjoyed so many official favors only two years before during the “cultural congress.”

It finally dawned on Edwards that the very credentials as leftist intellectual which he thought would be an asset in Cuba were a liability in a country where intellectuals were no longer useful. He recalled that at the “cultural congress” he had joined a second judge from Argentina in a vote to award the first prize to a young Cuban journalist and story-teller, Jose N. Fuentes. Fuentes had written a book of sensitive stories about the effect of war on Castro’s soldiers and anti-Castro guerrillas who fought in the Escambray mountains in the sixties. The third member of the jury, a representative of the Cuban government, objected vigorously to the decision, but could not deprive Fuentes of the prize.

Unfortunately for Fuentes, this was the end of his literary career. Shortly after the closure of the congress he was denounced in Verdo Olivo (Olive Green), the journal of the Armed Forces, and denied any more opportunities to express ideas which the regime regarded as lacking the proper “revolutionary” fervor.

At the time, Edwards had naively interpreted the judge’s behavior as reflecting purely literary differences. It wasn’t until later that he understood the political ramifications of the event. Upon his return to Cuba as a diplomat he realized that, in the eyes of the government, he had sinned and the “revolution” does not treat sinners lightly. They must burn for their “bourgeois” transgressions.

Edwards soon learned that the “cultural congress” had been Castro’s last flirtation with the international “left set” of Marxist and “revolutionary” writers and artists. Shortly after the congress closed, all the country’s intellectuals were put on notice to support the “revolution” unconditionally or else. Those who insisted on maintaining an independent posture, even within the narrow parameters of Marxism or “leftism,” were branded “bourgeois intellectuals” to be silenced, intimidated and ostracized by a government which had no use for criticism, however devout and inoffensive. “In Cuba we don’t need critics. It is easy to criticize . . . What we need are builders of society.” the Chancellor of the University of Havana told Edwards near the end of his stay.

Unaware of the regime’s anti-intellectualism at first, Edwards sought out the literary friends and acquaintances he had made in the sixties. He found practically all of them demoralized, fearful, resentful and unhappy. Only Heberto Padilla, the internationally known poet, was still riding high and under the illusion that his friends in the “left set” could protect his independence from the government. While Edwards was still in Cuba, Padilla even read a series of poems mildly critical of Castro’s militarism to a small crowd of mostly enthusiastic young listeners. Even the Soviet ambassador was present and offered his congratulations to the poet.

Several weeks later, when Edwards was no longer in Cuba, Padilla was arrested. Shortly after that, Padilla and his friends publicly recanted their “counter-revolutionary” heresies and denounced all those in the “left set” who had protested their arrest from abroad.

Edwards’ book is much more than a tale of “revolutionary” oppression, however. It also is a vivid account of hierarchical privilege and elite riches in a country impoverished by “socialism.”

Edwards arrived in the midst of the most serious economic crisis in the history of the “revolution.” This was the time when the wreckage of the “ten-million ton sugar harvest” that wasn’t, had become painfully evident to all. The harvest had been the latest in a long series of economic disasters caused by reckless campaigns to shape the island’s economy to the likes of Castro and his government.

The first big disaster was Guevara’s failure to industrialize the country in one massive stroke upon coming to power. As Minister of Industry, he wasted preciously scarce resources in large purchases of factories and machinery from the “socialist bloc.” It was only later that he discovered that the finished goods could be obtained in the world market at a price which was lower than the cost of the raw materials required to put the factories to work. Cuba could simply not violate the economic law of comparative advantage.

Guevara’s failure as an economist may have been the reason why he sought “revolutionary” martyrdom in Bolivia. For his part, Castro wasted no time in reversing his policies. He turned the economy around and with characteristic arrogance launched his preposterous “ten million ton sugar harvest” (the record “pre-revolutionary” harvest had been around 7 million tons.) Advisers and counselors who objected or tried to explain to Castro that it wouldn’t work were banished to the cane fields to do penance for their “defeatism.”

The harvest was given first economic priority, overriding all other claims to resources by competing lines of production. The country was mobilized as if for war. It didn’t work. Unfortunately but predictably, the defeat against nature and economics was not confined to the cane fields. The economic dislocations wrecked Cuba’s productive capacities. Characteristically, Castro confessed his “mistakes” and imposed even greater sacrifices on a population already suffering from ten years of “revolutionary” deprivation. Even harsher police state measures were imposed to forestall any possible popular uprisings like the ones that had shaken Poland a short time before. Edwards was unable to find out if the inprudent advisors who had argued against the zafra (harvest) had been rehabilitated.

Edwards’ book presents additional confirmation (as if any more were needed) that Castro’s centralized and personalistic management of the economy has impoverished the Cuban people. Of course, anyone who has any respect for facts would have no trouble interpreting World Bank statistics which show that between 1960 and 1976, Cuba’s per capita income actually declined at an average annual rate of-.4 per cent, the only country in Latin America to suffer a drop in living standards during the period.2 Several communist diplomats from Europe whispered to Edwards that the Cuban economy was a failure and that Chile should avoid copying Castro’s “socialist model,” Castro and his apologists cannot excuse away the dismal economic record of the “revolution” by blaming it on the U.S. trade “blockade.” In the first place, Marxist dependencia (dependency) theory, which Castro himself has popularized, holds that American “monopoly capitalism” exploits the third world when it exchanges industrial goods for raw materials. Logically, then, the result of the blockade should have been the rapid development of the Cuban economy now that it was free at last from capitalist shackles.

Secondly, French Marxist economist Rene Dumont has carefully documented that most of Cuba’s economic failures have domestic causes, primarily Castro’s penchant for running the economy as if it were his own personal estate. Dumont visited Cuba five times during the sixties, the last time as Castro’s personal guest. In his studies of the Cuban economy, Dumont found an extreme centralization of economic decision-making and the allocation of vast resources to purely arbitrary goals established by Castro himself. Dumont recommended the de-personalization, decentralization, de-bureaucratization and democratization of Cuba’s economy. He also urged the adoption of quasi-capitalist measures to improve efficiency, such as the charging of interest and rent to state enterprises, the use of markets to determine commodity prices and the application of material incentives to induce higher productivity among the workers. He did this in reports to government agencies, personal encounters with Castro and in two books, Cuba: Socialism and Developments3 and Is Cuba Socialist?4 The second book was written after the last visit and is much more critical of Castro’s policies than the first; it contends that Cuba is not socialist but a personal dictatorship. Castro later denounced Dumont as a CIA agent.

For those who like to romanticize “revolutionary” poverty, Edwards provides vivid imagery of the miseries which the Cuban people have had to endure on account of Castro’s economic adventurism. Among them are the tyranny of the ration card, which chains the population to interminable queues in order to obtain a meager subsistence allowance; the empty store shelves; the worthlessness of paper money with which the workers are paid; the forced “voluntary” labor which is not paid but “celebrated”; the deterioration of Havana, once one of Latin America’s most modern cities, now a shell of its former self; and the shortages of just about everything, except promises and propaganda.

Edwards, too, blames the economic failure on poor planning, on “giantism,” on useless projects with which Castro becomes infatuated, like the making of exotic cheeses and the building of huge parks. Edwards observed expensive rows of rusting agricultural machinery left idle for weeks; the dusty remnants of a “green belt” which was to surround Havana with orchards and farms; and Castro’s personal dairy where he blends exquisite milk; and he could not help but contrast this “socialist waste” with the efficiency of capitalist management in rural Chile.

The last myth demolished by Edwards is that Castro’s Cuba is an “egalitarian” society. Edwards describes a system in which a ruling military elite headed by the two Castro brothers lives in splendid luxury with seemingly inexhaustible resources at its command, totally unencumbered by ration cards or other economic restrictions under which the rest of the population has to live.

Edwards was able to observe Castro’s imperial living style at close range on several occasions. A particularly revealing event was Castro’s visit to a Chilean navy ship, the Esmeralda, which visited Havana’s harbor for a few days while Edwards was still the Chilean representative in Cuba. From the moment he arrived with great fanfare at the docks and boarded the ship with a contingent of armed bodyguards against the explicit instructions of the Chilean captain, Castro behaved like a spoiled emperor whose every wish must be satisfied and every joke laughingly appreciated. At one time during the visit, Castro lectured the captain about the great historic importance of his life for the survival of the “revolutionary process.” This was his way of apologizing for bringing armed men aboard the ship.

Making “revolution” has been more than a mystical experience for its creators. They have actually profited materially from their enterprise. Imported cars, historic buildings, sumptuous accommodations, quality liquor and cigars, exotic delicacies, royal entourages, retinues of obsequious servants and aides, armed guards, a huge personal army . . . these constitute the income which a former flunky from the University of Havana, a petty student gangster, now earns as “messiah of the revolution.” Edwards records that when Castro visits a village, dozens of young girls rush to hold his hands. Edwards calls him a Neptune, a god. I would call him Napoleon IV, Emperor of the Third World.

If there is a major flaw in Edwards’ book, it is that his conclusions are not comprehensive enough. Despite the “revolutionary” fascism which he found in Castro’s Cuba, Edwards still holds out hope for a libertarian socialism, for a “revolution” without the police state.

Edwards fails to realize that socialism on the scale practiced in Cuba is simply incompatible with individual freedom and human rights. Liberty is meaningless without private property.5 Where most of society’s resources are “collectivized,” control over them is monopolized by a ruling elite, which uses this power to perpetuate itself in office. Dissent becomes a “counter-revolutionary,” “reactionary” or “anti-social” activity.

It is only where resources can be owned by individuals independent of the government that freedom and human rights can be defended. Where individuals own houses and lease apartments, the police cannot enter at will; where individuals own newspapers and other forms of mass communication, intellectual expression cannot be stifled. But wherever government treats everything under its domain as “public property” subject to its control, dissent is impossible. How can a writer, for example, express dissenting views in a country where all the paper, the printing presses, the publishing houses and the media are owned and managed by the government as is true in Cuba under Castro? A “libertarian socialism” is a Utopia. Only private property can safeguard human rights and freedom.

NOTES

1 Jorge Edwards, Persona Non Grata (New York: Pomerica Press, 1977). The Spanish version was published in 1976 by Ediciones Grijalbo, S. A., Deu y Mata, 98, Barcelona, 14, Spain. It is available at Libros Espanoles, S. A., 1898 S. W. 8th St., Miami, Florida 33135.

2 World Development Report (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1978) pp. 76–77.

3 New York; Grove Press, 1970.

4 New York; Viking Press, 1974.

5 On the relationship between private property and individual freedom see Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962) and Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty (New York: Collier Books, 1978).

The Ruling Class: Kolko and Domhoff

by Lance Lamberton

Reading Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism alongside, or in conjunction with Domhoffs Who Rules America? can be very illuminating, because Kolko’s book describes how the ruling class attained its prominence during the Progressive Era, and Domhoffs book describes the ruling class today, and how it functions and maintains its hegemony. The Triumph of Conservatism is a political history, and Who Rules America? is a social study. The themes of the two books are supportive of one another and should be read together if possible, since Kolko’s book answers questions that must invariably crop up in the mind of the reader of who Rules America? How, when, and why did the social upper class become a ruling class or power elite in America, so that the interests of big business and big government are subservient and mutually protective of each other?

If one is to accept Domhoff’s basic premise that the social upper class is the ruling class in America, then the answer to the question of how and when this class relationship came about can be open to a variety of interpretations. Once can maintain that this class relationship was transplanted intact from class stratified 17th century England, and simply underwent evolutionary modifications to suit a new political environment. Or one can argue on the opposite extreme that the current power structure is largely the result of changes that occurred in the American polity from the post World War II period.

It is plausible to assert that everything rests on historical antecedents going back to the beginning of Colonial America, and from there to the beginning of human civilization. Kolko claims that the basic structure of what he would call contemporary political capitalism owes its origins to the political changes that occurred during the Progressive Era: 1900-1916. In making this that consensus historians give to this era, and thus aptly calls his book, “A reinterpretation of American History.”

What, in brief summary, is the difference between the consensus and Kolko’s interpretation of this era? Consensus historians claim that progressivism was a popular response to the growth of big business through the establishment of trusts, mergers, and consolidations, which threatened to grow to the point where all major industries would become monopolies in the hands of one, or at the most a handful, of giant corporations. Such a development would eliminate competition within the economy, and the public would be at the mercy of corporations which could then dictate consumer prices, labor costs, and quality of service at their arbitrary whim, with the general public having no recourse through the mechanism of market competition. Therefore, the government had to step in and break up trusts which threatened to become monopolies, and set up regulatory agencies which would assure that big business would not gouge the public.

Kolko counters this interpretation by stating that most of the largest corporations attempted merger and consolidation between 1896-1901, with a view towards reducing or eliminating what they considered ruinous and cutthroat competition from rapidly emerging smaller competitors. This merger movement proved to be largely unsuccessful, with the merged corporations controlling progressively less and less of the market, and their profit margins beginning to shrink. This failure to acquire monopoly control was the result of a variety of free market factors, which must of necessity prevent the existence of monopolies, except with the protection of the government. These factors were:

1.) A rapidly expanding market which the large corporations could not keep up with.

2.) The diseconomy of scale: when corporations exceed a certain optimum size for that industry, they become less efficient producers.

3.) The basic conservatism of most large corporations to not take dangerous risks which their smaller competitors were willing to take since they had less to lose.*

4.) The smaller companies were far more innovative in the area of technological advancement. In fact, many companies owed their origin to the development of more efficient technological processes.

5.) Attempts to minimize competitive threats by mutual cooperation through trade associations and gentlemen’s agreements were miserable failures. There was always some non-conforming company which would violate any cartel arrangement as soon as a competitive advantage could be exploited.

6.) “Creation of mergers . . . led to the availability of funds in the hands of capitalists which often ended . . . in the creation of competing firms.” (p. 20) This was accomplished by promoters and stock brokers offering stock on newly merged companies worth generally 50% more overall than the capital value of the companies merged. This additional capital on the stock market and in the banks was used to create new firms.

For these, and other minor reasons, the efforts towards consolidation and merger failed.

It was then that big business went to the federal government to clamor for regulation to reduce competition and provide stability. Kolko offers a detailed narrative of the events and personalities which led to the creation of the I. C. C., the F. T. C., and the Federal Reserve Board.9 It is Kolko’s contention that there was an identification of class and social values

1.) A prime example is the failure of Standard Oil to purchase and invest to any substantial degree in the newly discovered oil reserves of Texas and California. When greater demand for oil occurred with the development of the automobile, it was the small, new oil companies that were able to meet the demand, and not Standard Oil. By the time Standard Oil was broken up by Roosevelt’s Anti-Trust suit in 1911, Standard was already on a ten year decline in the percentage of the market it controlled.

2.) Kolko’s account of the establishment of the I. C. C. is covered in his book, Railroads & Regulation, and is therefore not taken up in any detail in Triumph of Conservatism.

between key political and business leaders, without which the emergence of political capitalism would have been impossible.

Consensus historians contend that federal regulation was fiercely resisted by a business community which desired no obstruction to their sinister end of monopolization and control over the national economy. In contrast, Kolko claims that big business needed the coercive power of government, through regulation guided by business, in order to accomplish the goals which the merger movement intended, but which could not be accomplished in a truly free market. The conventional historian would look askance at Kolko’s thesis, not understanding how government regulation and big business interests are of necessity harmonious within the framework of the American polity.

The primary means by which regulation would serve the interests of the status quo are as follows:

1.) Comprehensive federal regulation would eliminate troublesome state regulation, especially for the large corporations which were national in scope. Within this context it is important to remember that the preeminent business and political leaders on the national level were from the same social upper class. Hence big business could shape the nature of federal regulation, but could not do so as effectively on the local and state level, where the upper class exercised less power and influence. State regulation was also troublesome because it was extremely complicated and costly to satisfy many different regulations, as opposed to satisfying the requirements of one regulatory agency.

2.) Regulation served as a buffer zone to deflect public antagonism against big business. The establishment of the I. C. C. and the F. T. C., to give two major examples, led the public to believe that they were being protected from the avarice of business.

3.) Regulation made it possible for “trade associations to stabilize, for the first time, prices within their industries, and make effective oligopoly a new phase of the economy.” (p. 268) The was the basic function of the F. T. C. It could restrict entry into various industries, fix prices, and give prior approval to any merger agreement. This last function served to protect business from anti-trust litigation by giving prior sanction. In essence it formalized the institution of detente between business and government.

4.) The primary purpose of the Federal Reserve Board was to arrest the growing decentralization within the banking community, as the power and influence of the national banking establishment was being undermined by the growth of state chartered commercial and savings banks. The F. R. B. was successful in its goal of centralizing control of credit and currency, and the New York banking establishment regained its former dominance which it had lost due to the free market forces leading to increased competition and decentralization.

Kolko’s detailed (even tedious) accounts of the personalities and events which led to extensive federal regulation are impressive, and invariably lead to only one possible conclusion: that the largest, and most powerful companies within any specific industry worked diligently to influence the upper echelons of the Federal Government to impose federal regulations. His exhaustive analysis includes the meat packing industry, the steel industry, the oil industry, the tobacco industry, insurance, banking, and the railroads. He repeatedly states that these efforts, and the specific form in which the regulations took, was because, “business and political elites of the Progressive Era had largely identical social ties and origins.” (p. 59) By making this claim he provides the historical framework for the theme of Domhoff’s volume.

ARMY

Politician’s pride
Dictator’s machine
The octopus
That extends
Its tentacles
Of destruction
In order
To survive

— Augustin De Mello

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XIII NUMBER 2

MARCH-APRIL, 1980

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Presidential Campaign: The Need For Radicalism

(The following is adapted from a speech given by the editor at the convention of the Free Libertarian Party of New York, in Albany, N.Y. on March 29.)

The first and most important task of a Libertarian Presidential campaign is to cleave to, and be proud of, libertarian principle throughout the campaign. Second, we must select the most important political issues of the day on which to campaign. Thus, at one point, before I became a Communist monster in their eyes, the conservative Buckley-clique thought of me as a lovable nut who put first and foremost a call for denationalization of lighthouses. Much as I hate to disappoint them, and much as I am devoted to private lighthouses, I must admit that this plank should not be a top priority for us during this presidential campaign.

We cannot discuss the issues which should have top priority in 1980, without also discussing the candidates whom Ed Clark will be likely to face. Until now, with nearly a dozen major party candidates in the race, we have all been properly giving equal weight to attacking each one. But now things are different. Most of the dozen turkeys have dropped out. It looks certain that Reagan will be the Republican, and probable that Carter will be the Democratic nominee.

I’m therefore going to make a daring statement: the No. 1 threat, the big threat, to the liberty of Americans in this campaign is Ronald Reagan.

There are two basic reasons for this statement: (1) fundamental principle, and (2) the proper strategy for the LP Presidential campaign. Both principle and strategy, as they should, mesh together.

First, on the question of basic principle. The No. 1 priority for libertarians must always be foreign policy, a policy of peace, of militant opposition to war and foreign intervention. Many libertarians are unfortunately uncomfortable with foreign policy as the top priority, or even as any sort of priority at all. For one thing, they often don’t know anything about foreign policy; and they don’t see how libertarian principles apply in that arena. They can understand full well why we should oppose price controls, but they don’t understand why we should be against intervention in the Persian Gulf or Afghanistan, or oppose nuclear war.

But the explanation for top priority for non-intervention is really pretty simple. For the incineration of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear war — in a mass murder unparalled in human history — is a worse violation of human liberty even than price-wage controls or the latest regulations by OSHA. Murder — a fortiori mass murder — is a greater violation of a person’s liberty than theft or dictatorial control.

Secondly, war has always been the occasion for a huge, catastrophic leap into statism, a leap that occurs during the war and lasts as a permanent legacy afterwards. As the great libertarian Randolph Bourne warned, as we entered the disaster of World War I, “war is the health of the state.” Time and again, war and foreign intervention destroyed our ancestors — the classical liberal movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In England, Germany, France, and the United States, this tragedy repeatedly took place. In the United States, the big leaps into statism came with war: the War of 1812, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War.

So — opposition to war and foreign intervention must be our top priority in this campaign. This is particularly true as the Carter administration has moved sharply away from detente, and as the entire Establishment has expressed its joy in abandoning the troublesome lessons of Vietnam — the lessons of the unforeseen length, the butchery, the counter-productives of war.

With the primary importance of war and peace as our guide, therefore, we must conclude that the No. 1 threat to our liberties is Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement from which he springs. Reagan’s calm and superficially reassuring personality — a calm and a reassurance that stems partly from slow-wittedness — is beside the point: for Ronald Reagan is a sincere ideologue of the conservative movement. And for the last twenty-five years, conservatism has been above all and if it has not been anything else, a policy of all-out global anti-Soviet crusade, a policy hellbent for a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union.

That is why a Reagan presidency would likely bring about that showdown, and the consequent virtual incineration of the human race. At every crisis point in the last three decades, the conservatives were there, whooping it up for more and more war: in Korea, at the Berlin Wall, in Cuba, in Vietnam. Only recently Reagan called for a “vast” (his word) increase in military spending this when we already have enough missiles to destroy Russia many times over in a second nuclear strike. Reagan calls for intervention everywhere, in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan, and demands the blockade of Cuba in alleged retaliation for the incursion into Afghanistan. And what is more, in the service of this policy of global war and militarism, Reagan would totally “unleash” the FBI and CIA, to do again their foul deeds of harassing political dissent, or invasion of privacy, or espionage and assassination.

Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement are confident that, in one or in a series of hard-line confrontations, in a continuing game of “chicken” with the Soviets, they could keep forcing Russia to back down. But if they should happen to make just one miscalculation along the way, and we all get destroyed in a nuclear war, the conservatives would not be particularly dismayed. They would take this result as final proof that the Russians are monsters, and they would be all too content that, though the world be destroyed, our immortal souls will have been preserved.

To say that such a foreign policy is dangerous and catastrophic grossly underestimates the point. The property, the lives, the very survival of all of us depend on slamming the door on Reagan and Reaganism, on keeping the itchy fingers of Ronald Reagan and his Dr. Strangelove colleagues far, far away from that nuclear button.

This is not to say, of course, that Carter is a great pro-peace candidate. To the contrary, in a political climate where the only voices of opposition are from the pro-war right wing, Carter, whose only principle has been to stay in office, is moving rapidly in a Reaganite direction.

The scrapping of detente, the hysteria over the Russian moves in Afghanistan, — a country that even conservatives had never put in the U.S. defense perimeter, the placing of theater nuclear missiles in Western Europe, the stepping up of military spending, have all been very dangerous moves. But they have occurred not because Carter is a principled warmonger — thank goodness — but because we have been existing in a pro-war vacuum, with no room for contrasting opinion.

Even the pseudo-opposition candidates, Kennedy and Anderson, have confined their few and scattered remarks on foreign policy to attacking Carter’s weakness and vacillation: On Afghanistan, on Cuba, on the grain embargo. Having said these few words, they are relieved to return to their favorite themes: Kennedy in calling for a wage-price freeze, and Anderson in trumpeting his own courage in calling for a grain embargo and a high gasoline tax.

No — there is only one peace candidate in 1980, and thank God he is in the campaign — and that is Ed Clark!

Clark has a golden opportunity to make war and the threat of war the major issue in this campaign. In the process, he can demonstrate to conservative-minded people that we can’t have cuts in government spending — and we can’t have effective cuts in taxes — while military spending goes through the roof. And that we can’t avoid controls and regulations in a war economy — if indeed there is any economy for people at all left to worry about if war comes.

So those are the principled reasons for stressing war and peace as the No. I issue of this presidential campaign. The other basic reason is strategic. For as it stands now, Ronald Reagan is going to take away a lot of Clark votes. A lot of people I have met around the country simply regard Libertarians and the LP as “extreme Reaganites”, as “purist conservatives.” And so they say: “I agree with you Libertarians, but you’re impractical. I know that Reagan isn’t as pure as Clark, but Reagan can get elected and Clark can’t, so why don’t you abandon all this starry-eyed naivete and get behind Ronnie?”

We’ve got to let these people and all libertarian-inclined folk know, and make it clear to everyone else for that matter: that if they were right, that if we were really just extreme conservatives or ultra-Reaganites, they would then have a darned good point. But the vital point is this: we are not repeat not extreme conservatives; we are not Reaganites. We regard Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement as our No. 1 enemy — for they carry with them at all times the stench of nuclear annihilation.

It is the failure, the widespread failure, of all too many libertarians to stress foreign policy that generates this confusion. So if we do stress foreign policy, if we hammer again and again at the war question and at Reaganism, we will demonstrate to all the unbridgeable chasm that lies between us and the conservative movement. And, as we do that, as we show this clear and dramatic cleavage, we will stop losing votes to Reagan, and we will gain votes from the confused who see little distinction and from people who are opposed above all else to foreign intervention and to war.

Both principle and strategy, therefore, dictate making the war question our top priority for the 1980 campaign.

There are, in addition, other crucial issues for 1980. One is the draft and registration. I don’t have to elaborate on the importance of this battle. For all libertarians, at whatever part of our spectrum, are united in intense opposition to the draft. But I should underline one key point. It is politically — though not conceptually — impossible to be opposed to war and yet favor the draft. Opposition to cold and hot war takes the last prop away from the drive to reinstate the draft.

Then there is taxes — surely our key domestic issue should be to offer drastic, that means drastic, cuts in taxes. Here again, principle and strategy fuse together. Taxes are a uniquely libertarian issue. And the nation has seen a growing tax rebellion in the last few years. This year, California may pass “Son of Jarvis”, Proposition 9 cutting the state income tax in half. It would be criminal for the LP to fall behind the growing anti-tax sentiment throughout the nation. We must lead the sentiment for tax cuts, not tail it.

This brings me to a vital general point, which applies not only to taxes but also to our positions on all the other issues: that on all of them, we must have the principle and the courage to be radical — to hold high the banner of libertarian principle, to urge the principles as well as the detailed political applications in our great platform, to call for dramatic and radical advances toward these principles, and, finally, to state our case boldly, clearly, and dramatically.

There are two basic reasons for taking this radical stance: once again, they are both basic principle and correct strategy. On the question of principle, as the LP gets stronger and more influential, and gets an influx of more money, votes, and media attention, the temptation inevitably arises to waffle, to hide our principles, to get deliberately fuzzy, to seek “respectability” rather than principle. We must shun this temptation to opportunism as the very plague.

For we are, and must always be, what we proudly proclaim ourselves: The party of principle. Our principles are the whole point of what we’re doing, and why we’re all here today. If we hide, fuzz over, or betray these principles, we have no reason for our existence. And we would then do better to shut up shop altogether. For if we don’t hold our own principles aloft, who will?

These principles and their applications to political issues are all embodied in our superb national platform. Our platform should be something to stand on, to display proudly, not to hide in embarrassment in some dark corner.

And so, on taxes, we should reiterate our goal to get rid of this engine of organized theft and oppression. In the meantime, let us propose tax cuts that are really “drastic” (to quote from the platform). In particular, it is vital that we keep our proposals simple, clear, and dramatic. The public is not interested in a four-year Plan, or in a careful and complex structure that loses the real point in a morass of subordinate clauses.

The public is concerned, and rightly so, about income taxes. We must propose income tax cuts that are so drastic as to make the Reagan-Kemp-Roth 30% cut seem as puny as it really is. Anything that fails to make a dramatic difference between us and Kemp-Roth would be both a betrayal of principle and totally counterproductive. And, as long as we are talking about a drastic tax cut, how about following our platform and proposing, for openers, repeat of the 16th Amendment and therefore of the income tax?

In fact, how’s this for a tax plan with both principle and punch? I offer it to Ed Clark. Often our Presidential candidates are asked: but how could you get anything accomplished as President without a Libertarian Congress? Here’s one way. The President has unlimited power to pardon, as we saw in the notorious Ford-Nixon ploy. That power cannot be overridden by the legislature or the courts. Our candidate should announce that when elected President, his first act would be to issue a declaration pardoning all past, present, and future perpetrators of victimless crimes — and that one such non-crime is non-payment of income taxes. At one stroke, federal taxes would be made voluntary, at least for the duration of the Clark presidency. Why shouldn’t Clark make and stress such a pronouncement? The heck with the “Anderson” or “Anacin” difference; then we would have a Clark difference that would catch everyone’s attention!

Next, on the strategic reasons for a radical stance. For apart from principle, good strategy dictates that we take a radical position in this campaign, and nowhere more so than on the income tax.

For we are a brand-new party. We are urging voters to cast off the habits of a lifetime and vote, not Democrat or Republican, but for the Libertarian Party. But to do this, we must shake the people up, we must offer them a sharp, radical alternative to the existing parties. For if we sound like them, why in blazes should anyone vote for us? To use economic jargon, as a new firm we must differentiate our product. A couple of months ago, a writer in Chic magazine counseled us to “take on the responsibilities of growth” by getting rid of these restrictive, constraining principles of ours. But 1 say that if we do this or anything like it, we will lose both our principles and our growth. We will collapse, and we will deserve to collapse.

So, both principle and strategy dictate a radical campaign to go hand in hand with our already radical platform and statement of principles.

Let me give an example of the strategy I propose. At his first official press conference kicking off his campaign in Washington D.C. on January 20, Ed Clark was asked, in the question period, what his ultimate goals might be. Clark did not evade, he did not equivocate. He answered as befits the spokesman of the party of principle. Let me quote from the New York Times report:

“Most Presidential candidates this year are talking about reducing the cost of government. Many are talking about reducing government itself. Edward E. Clark is different. He is talking about eliminating government altogether.

The elimination would be accomplished gradually as the public school system was replaced with private facilities, the courts eliminated in favor of private fee-charging arbitration companies, the antitrust laws abolished and all political boundaries between states and localities wiped out . . .

Ultimately, the Libertarian said at a news conference here today, we believe in the complete privatization of society, with a vastly restricted government and a corresponding huge reduction in the taxes that finance that government.

Mr. Clark told a questioner that eventually he advocated returning highway and street systems to private ownership, the way they used to be under Colonial tollroad practices.”

This is the kind of campaign we should be running throughout. Ed Clark did not evade or equivocate or hide his and our principles: he stuck to his guns.

But there are powerful voices in our party who counsel otherwise, who have forgotten that our objective in this campaign is not repeat not to get millions of votes, but to get the maximum number of votes for libertarian principle. We are not interested in votes per se; if we were, we should have stuck to the Democrat or Republican parties. But there are those in our party who counsel evasion and deceit, who would have Ed fuzz over and betray his and our principles.

And there is another point, which may seem trivial by comparison, but is actually very important.

There are powerful voices in our party who counsel that our campaign statements, while sticking to principle, should be so bland and judicious in tone that they emerge as almost boring. It is quite a feat to take our splendid and exciting principles and make them boring, but it has been done before and it can be done again. But once again: the whole point of our effort is to hold aloft our great principles and spread them far and wide. We have a golden opportunity to do this by means of a mighty campaign, a campaign which can reach millions of people. We must not lose this opportunity; we must not blow it. We must reach the people and fire them up with the exciting message of liberty. For our ideas are exciting and dramatic, and to treat them as anything less, to make them bland and have them blend into the political landscape, betrays those principles and also loses the votes. Once again, both principle and correct strategy dictate a rousing campaign, not a tepid one.

To sum up: We must avoid any temptation to run anything that so much as smacks of a “Rose Garden” campaign. The “Rose Garden” strategy almost lost the nomination for Ronald Reagan and he, let’s not forget, was the frontrunner, a position that at least makes such a strategy plausible. Unfortunately, Ed Clark is not the frontrunner. His strategy must be the opposite of the Rose-Garden: it must be to stick to and be proud of libertarian principle: to hold it aloft and then to select the most vital issues of this campaign, and to deliver the message with all the drama and excitement that these issues deserve. This drama will attract to the Clark banner those who are inclined to libertarianism but have not yet heard the message, and also those who are so vitally concerned with one or more of the key issues that they will vote for Clark even if they differ on his other policies. And the Clark campaign must slam with all possible intensity and passion against Reagan and the conservative movement as the great danger that faces all of us, indeed all Americans, today.

If we do all of these things, we should emerge from this campaign as a major force in American politics: not only that, we will never again hear the canard that liberty is just an extreme version of conservatism. Liberty will then be standing on its own feet, proud of its principles and its inherent drama, a vital, independent and growing force in American life.

Ballad of the IRS

No man who earns a dollar
Is safe from probing eyes
He fills out many forms
And pays until he dies

When a man lies in his grave
The tax men take his home
And plague his family members
Until they weep and moan

No bandits in this country
Have ever stolen more
Than infernal tax collectors
Who thrive on rich and poor

— Agustin De Mello

The Nuclear Issue Once More

In our special July-August 1979 LP Convention issue, we published a letter to Libertarian Review by nineteen prominent and long-time libertarians protesting the one-sided opposition to nuclear energy in LR’s July-August issue. After failing to publish the letter in its September issue, LR finally carried it the following month, along with hysterical and vituperative replies; more than that, LR affixed to the names of each of the signers distorted designations to try to bolster the idiotic contention of Roy Childs and his cronies that Inquiry and Reason (two journals not exactly in cozy symbiosis) had engaged in a dire conspiracy against Libertarian Review. George Smith, one of the signers of the letter of nineteen, wrote a letter to LR protesting this shabby treatment, and Wendy McElroy (Grosscup), another signer, speared some of LR’s distortions.

Childs & Co. claim that they are interested in an open discussion of the entire nuclear issue. How genuine that claim is may be gauged by the fact that LR refused to publish either the Smith or the McElroy letters, which we are bringing to you below.

Before the usual misunderstanding pops up, let it be made clear that Childs has every legal right to publish or not to publish anything he wants in his own publication. True. But so do we, or anyone else, have the legal right to call his moral character or his probity into question for suppressing letters which expose his own distortions.

All this points up the danger of having the libertarian movement monopolized by one magazine. Libertarian Review is becoming dangerously bloated and swollen, its editors puffed by hubris into thinking that they are the libertarian movement. We have been highly critical of Reason in the past, but we must all be thankful that Reason and frontlines are there, offering an independent voice and diverse “lines” in the libertarian spectrum. The same is to be said

for the resurgent New Libertarian.

The suppressed Smith and Elroys letters follow.

From George H. Smith

THE EDITOR
Libertarian Review
1620 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94111

To The Editor:

Readers of Libertarian Review who labor under the misapprehension that its Editor is conducting the nuclear power debate with editorial integrity and responsibility should be made aware of a few points concerning the October, 1979 issue.

First, the nineteen signers of the letter protesting the previous “anti-nuclear” issue of LR were not submitted in the same order as they appear in the letters column, nor were they submitted with affiliations to Inquiry and Reason attached. Roy Childs, in an effort to concoct a “Reason-Inquiry clique” (which must have the staffs of both magazines in switches), decided to score editorial points by altering the original letter.

As it was my idea to write the letter, my name appeared first, followed by Bill Evers, who had a major hand in its drafting. The other seventeen names were listed in alphabetical order. For Milton Mueller to refer to the “Rothbard-Evers letter,” when Rothbard had no knowledge of the letter until after it was written and signed by others, is irresponsible and dishonest.

Secondly, the credits assigned to the first nine signers are deceptive. Murray Rothbard is listed as a Contributing Editor of Inquiry, but he is also a Contributing Editor of LR. Why was this omitted, if credits are deemed so essential by Mr. Childs? Another signer, Leonard Liggio, is listed without affiliation, but he is an Associate Editor of LR. Such credits would have made the nuclear controversy appear to be a split within the ranks of LR itself, rather than a conspiracy of Inquiry and Reason against LR.

So anxious was Roy Childs to manufacture an Inquiry clique, that he falsely lists David Gordon as an Associate Editor of Inquiry. At the time the letter was written, and until well after it was received by LR. David Gordon had no affiliation whatever with enquiry Roy knows this. To make matters worse, although David Gordon presently works on the staff on Inquiry, he is not an Associate Editor even now. The title was manufactured to buttress a specious conspiracy theory.

If Roy Childs has a theory about a Reason-Inquiry axis, then he has a perfect right to launch his trial balloon in the pages of LR. however harebrained his theory may appear to others. But to manipulate a letter without the permission of its drafters — indeed, in the face of their strong objections — is another matter. Bill Evers and I objected in advance to the manipulation of signatures, but our protest fell on deaf ears. The best we could get was an assurance that a note would follow the letter explaining the editorial change. No such explanation appeared.

Why was Roy Childs so willing to throw editorial fairplay to the wind? In a conversation he made it clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that he considered the letter to be an “Evers plot,” and that he was determined to communicate this to the readers of LR. When I pointed out that it was my idea to write the letter in the first place and even Roy didn’t have the nerve to suggest that I was part of an Inquiry clique — I was told by the omniscient Editor that I was being “used” by Bill Evers in a nefarious scheme to discredit LR.

No outside help is needed to discredit Roy Childs; he does an admirable job all by himself. The letter signed by nineteen prominent libertarians and the letters by Eric Mack and Walter Block were calm and to the point. They should have been answered in a similar vein, instead of by immature hysterics — e.g., references to “silly claims,” “the gang of nineteen” (Childs), “unthinking nuclear reactionaries,” and the insulting quip that Bill Evers is a “clone” of Murray Rothbard (Mueller). Then there is the childish ad in the classified section that typifies the intellectual level at which Roy Childs chooses to conduct this debate.

Some of the issues raised in LR concerning nuclear power are significant and need to be considered by libertarians. I disagree with LR’s cause, but it is an important one. I only hope that it will find individuals with integrity to lead it.

From Wendy McElroy (Grosscup)

Dear Sir:

In response to a straightforward letter criticizing LR’s apparent nuclear energy position, Mr. Childs’ unmasks the letter as an “attack” by the “Reason-Inquiry clique” (a fact hitherto unknown to its signatories) and shows up some of the most prominent and scholarly of libertarians for what they really are — “a gang of nineteen”. A similar letter from Eric Mack is similarly refuted by pointing to Eric’s alleged lack of humor and to his griping attitude. I congratulate Mr. Childs on meeting the nuclear power question head-on with such dignity and such desire for honest debate.

He appeals to the readers of LR to “consider who is at fault: LR for raising such issues so strongly, or the major leaders of the libertarian movement, for not having done so before.” Putting aside this strange concept of fault/innocence as a matter of timing, Mr. Childs must know that it is the content and not the strength of his presentation which is in question. The content, then and now, appears to be that nuclear power is so dangerous it should be banned rather than privatized. I say this despite Mr. Childs’ protest to the contrary, for the protest also seems contrary to facts of the matter.

An unpaid ad on the inside cover of LR July/Aug. pictures a tombstone inscribed “Nuclear power is a terrible way to go”, but Mr. Childs protests that this free ad does not argue anything. The same issue contains cartoons highlighting the danger of nuclear power through captions such as “Hurry dear, your soup is getting contaminated.” But, he protests, the cartoons are not anti-nuclear per se; moreover, anyone who questions their implications is dismissed as a humorless griper. When you add to this particular issue of LR an article by Milton Mueller, who calls not for denationalizing but for “stopping” nuclear power, an interview with Wilson Clark, a strong anti-nuclear industry politico who advocates an excess profit tax on oil companies to finance solar energy and an article by Patrick Lilly who by implication, suggests banning nuclear energy because of its high risks, it is difficult to accept Mr. Childs’ ad hominem protest of being misunderstood by the world. It is difficult to accept his statement: “nowhere did we (LR) oppose nuclear power per se.”

Much has been made of this phrase “nuclear power per se”. The whole of LR seems bewildered as to what it could possibly mean even though its meaning — particularly in the context of the “gang of nineteen” a/k/a “Rothbard-Evers” a/k/a “Reason-Inquiry clique” letter — is quite clear. It means: nuclear energy at the present level of technology but without government involvement. Of course, to Milton Mueller who clairvoyantly sees no distinction between denationalizing the industry and simply eliminating it, there is no nuclear energy per se and thus no area of discussion. Those of us who cannot predict the course of the free market, to whom it seems at least conceivable that nuclear energy could be privately used and so wish to investigate that possibility, are “unthinking nuclear reactionaries” and need to be considered no further.

I sympathize with Mr. Childs’ stated desire for open, honest debate on this subject, although I am struck by the incongruity of this appeal coming, as it does, at the end of an ad hominem editorial response. If Mr. Childs sincerely wants an intelligent exchange (similar to that which Patrick Lilly offered), I would suggest: that he deal with the issues as stated and not with personalities or his analysis of motives; that he acknowledge LR’s obvious slant on nuclear power: that he abandon the guise of not understanding objections raised; that he clearly answer the question “If the nuclear industry as it technologically exists today were privatized, would you advocate banning it?”; and that he remain consistent?

Some people are so mentally constructed that they cannot refrain from impugning the motives of others in order to compensate for weakness in their own arguments. 1 prefer not to believe this of LR and I wait for this letter to be answered with the thoughtfulness of which the staff is capable.

Quebec: Province or Nation?

by Leonard P. Liggio

For the first half of Canadian history, Quebec was Canada. Quebec was founded in the early 1600’s at the same time that the English settled at Jamestown and the Dutch at Manhattan. In 1759-60 Quebec was conquered by England, which granted recognition of the customs of the Quebecois. In their satisfaction, the Quebecois declined to join the American Revolution, and were rewarded for their loyalty by having imposed upon them tens of thousands of the Tories who opposed the American Revolution. Since the more reactionary elements in America tended to be Tories, the potential for an enlightened English-Quebecois relationship was not very great.

During the early nineteenth century, the Quebec leaders were increasingly influenced by nationalism and modernism. From 1815, when he became speaker of the Quebec assembly, Louis Joseph Papineau was the leader of the Patriot party. In 1837 Papineau and his party sought to gain Quebec independence by armed action and were defeated. The Patriot party lacked popular rural support in this endeavor due to the dominant role of the Catholic clergy in the villages. The Catholic clergy stood with the English government and was rewarded by that government with a free hand in the running of local affairs. Meanwhile, Quebec and Ontario were united under a single parliament with the aim of the Anglicization of Quebec. This goal was not achieved because, while the rural people were in the hands of the ordinary clergy, the French-educated class was formed by a strongly international higher education system conducted by the Jesuits. Thus, while the Quebecois masses were the most provincial in Canada, the Quebec leadership was the most sophisticated.

In 1867 Canada became a confederation of provinces, and two national political parties emerged. The conservatives, protectionist, anti-American, oriented to England, were rooted in the English Protestant provinces. The Liberals, free traders, not anti-American or oriented to England, had their strongest base in Catholic Quebec. For 32 years the national Liberal leader was Wilfrid Laurier. Laurier’s fifteen years as prime minister occurred in the midst of an important conflict over the rights of French parents to have their children instructed in French in provinces other than Quebec. Teaching in French had been outlawed in Nova Scotia. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In 1890 Manitoba outlawed Catholic schools and the teaching of French, in conflict with its own provincial constitution. Laurier insisted on supporting the provincial autonomy of Manitoba, and set the stage for restrictions in what became Alberta and Sasktchewan (reaffirmed in 1905), in Ontario in 1915 and culminating in a Saskatchewan law in prohibiting the teaching of French outside school hours.

An additional area of English-Quebec conflict concerned the rise of English imperialism. The Quebecois have no interest in England’s wars, while the English supported very actively England’s conquest of the Boer Republics in South Africa. The Canadian government was pressured by England and the English in Canada to develop a national military establishment. Henri Bourassa, grandson of Papineau, and editor of Le Devior, began a strong anti-imperialist and anti-militarist campaign in Quebec. During World War I, he led a major campaign against conscription which, along with the prohibition of French in the schools, led the Quebec assembly to consider withdrawal from the confederation.

In this context it is easy to understand why the Liberals dominated Quebec politics and why the Conservatives represented an almost nonexistent opposition. However, the Liberals’ leading role in national politics undermined their support in Quebec and there emerged in the mid-1930’s the Union nationale. The Union nationale, which dominated the Quebec assembly until 1960, represented the rural population and the village clergy. Although encouraging investment and economic development of Quebec’s rich resources, the Union nationale pursued a highly regressive policy on cultural matters. While articulating the strong Quebecois opposition to conscription and involvement in World War II, it prohibited and repressed new cultural and intellectual directions. As Pierre Lemieux has noted, it was in the context of this anti-cultural regime that modern Quebec intellectuals have developed, and the only alternative many recognized was the association of intellectual freedom and socialist politics.

Leon Dion, in Nationalismes et Politiqes au Quebec (1975), emphasizes that Quebec ha never experienced the intellectual contributions of laissez-faire individualism. Whenever liberalism is mentioned, it has been in the context of apologies for the status quo. Thus, the intellectuals around Cite libre—Trudeau, Pelletier, etc.—looked to the “dirigiste” philosophy of French bureaucracy, to be accompanied by cultural freedom. This spirit infused the Liberal party at the point that it reemerged in 1960 to assume leadership in Quebec.

However, this local reemergence followed the huge Liberal losses in the 1958 federal elections. In that year, the conservatives out-polled the Liberals and won 50 of the 75 Quebec seats. In the next federal election, 1962, for the first time a third party made important gains in Quebec. The Social Credit party, which dominated some western provinces, emerged in Quebec as the Ralliement des Creditistes under Real Caouette. The Creditistes gained over a quarter of the vote and 25 seats in the federal parliament. Except for its ‘funny money’ plank, Social Credit has been a major conservative force in Canada, combining balanced budgets with cultural repression. Viewing private property and private management as crucial, it opposes centralization, bureaucratization and public ownership. Using television, Caouette was able to mobilize former non-voters and introduce this new element into Quebec politics. Maurice Pinard, The Rise of a Third Party, A Study in Crisis Politics (1975).

Meanwhile, the Liberals in Quebec, after 1960, embarked on a “Quiet Revolution” in an attempt to modernize and develop the economy. Marcel Rioux, in Quebec in Question (1978) calls this a mental liberation.

“What was this quiet revolution? Who but Quebeckers could dream up such an idea, or carry on such a thing as a quiet revolution? The concept unites the hot with the cold and makes them work together. Our people, in fact, have a “hot” culture, i.e., a Dionysian culture that has been repressed, historically, by the domination of rigid influences (the French metropolis, the British, the Americans, Jansenism and religious rigidity). How strange, then, after centuries of subjection, that enough “hot” elements have survived to make us refer to a simple reform movement and a climate of change as “revolutionary.” . . . The alternation between hot and cool plays an important part in the collective psychology of Quebeckers, not only because of the climate but because of two cultures of which one is renowned for its cool, understated character.

Marshall McLuhan believes that Quebec has jumped from the seventeenth to the twentieth century while the English are still living in the nineteenth century.

The leading figure in the Liberals’ Quebec cabinet was the former TV personality, Rene Levesque. When the Liberals regained power on the federal level, Trudeau and others joined the federal cabinet, while the Liberals in Quebec lost control to the Union nationale. Under its auspices. President Charles de Gaulle visited Quebec and called for an independent Quebec. Rene Levesque was ousted by the Liberals from party membership to satisfy Trudeau and the Liberal cabinet. Levesque in 1968 formed a new party, The parti quehecois. The t2parti quebecois was fundamentally an ideological party. It’s advantage was a nationalism that had deep roots in Quebec and had now come to the fore, and an economic program based on the tradition of the two major parties, planning and state investment. In the 1970 Quebec elections, the PQ received 23% of the vote and seven seats in the assembly to the Liberals 42% and seventy-two seats: Union nationale 20% and seventeen seats, and the Creditistes 11% and twelve seats.

The crisis of October, 1970, when a secret nationalist group kidnapped a cabinet member and businessman, led to the federal government’s imposing martial law. The general reaction of the Quebec population was that such an extreme overreaction and denial of civil liberties would be directed at Quebecois only — because of their being viewed as second class citizens of Canada. The parti quehecois was able to gain strong Quebec-wide support for its vigorous condemnation of the government’s repression while emphasizing the electoral road to sovereignty-association: Quebec sovereignty in economic association with the other parts of Canada with common currency and trade policies. (Andre Bernard, What Does Quebec Want? (1978)

In answer to the left’s charge that the PQ was only a more modern version of the Liberals, the PQ leaders adopted a traditional political position in Quebec — attack both socialism and capitalism: “It is obvious that doctrinaire socialism and suffocating state hegemony have not managed, any more than grandfather’s capitalism in its various modes, primitive or refurbished as practised up to now, to bring into being a paradise on earth or even decently to eliminate the most unjust abuses and inequalities.” As John Saywell, The Rise of the Parti Quebecois. 1967-1976 (1977), shows, the 1973 provincial elections confirmed the PQ as the alternative party in Quebec. While the Liberals swept to almost ninety percent dominance in Assembly seats, the PQ gained more than 30% of the popular vote, while the Creditistes received less than ten and the Union nationale less than 5%.

In 1974 the PQ leadership established a daily newspaper in Montreal, Le Jour. It gained a circulation of thirty thousand, the same as the influential Le Devoir, at the cost of losing about per month.

By 1976, the value of the daily paper became evident, as the Liberal government faced a major crisis over language education in the schools. In 1968, the school board of the heavily Italian suburb of St. Leonard-de-Port-Maurice decided that all classes in first grade be taught in French. The Union nationale and the liberal governments attempted to foster French instruction without violating the rights of parents to determine the education of their children. Fuller understanding of the national differences in Canada is possible only by recognizing that the English and the French populations constitute merely two-thirds of the population and that the other one-third is roughly divided between East European descendants in the English provinces (Polish, Ukrainian and Hungarian) similar to their cousins along the U.S. Great Lakes, and the mainly Italian (but including Portuguese and Greek) settlers in Montreal (similar to Atlantic Seaboard cities in the U.S.) The Italian Canadians of Montreal recognize the English language standards imposed by the large corporations and banks in the city and necessarily opt to educate their children in the language of the mobile sector of the economy. Thus, a perceptive cartoon showed a Colonel Blimp and a Union Jack leading the Italian Canadian-based constituency for English against the French who are told that if the French had given them good reason to be with them they would have won the issue.

By 1976, the Liberals attempted to impose French on the Italian Canadians. In protest, the principals of the English language schools in St. Leonard admitted thousands of students that the government had decided must attend French schools. Parents in other areas refused to accept government decisions and thousands of Italian Canadian parents demonstrated against the Liberal Quebec prime minister. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s federal government attempts to impose bilingualism on the rest of Canada received new rebuffs. Non-Quebec liberals revolted and Quebec liberals resigned from the cabinet protesting the temporizing. But these notables’ participation in the November 1976 Liberal reelection only contributed to the disaster. The Liberals lost the support of the Italian-Canadians only receiving 34% and 26 seats. The Union nationale, gaining the former Liberal voters, received 18% and eleven seats. The Creditistes lost half their vote, receiving less than 57 and gaining one seat only — the Creditiste accusations that all their opponents were godless communists hardly helped. Some of their vote went to the Popular National Party which opposed “statism, syndicalism and separatism” and advocated freeing the individual of heavy taxes, the state of heavy budgets and the economy of strikes. This preaching of economic liberalism had no traditions in Quebec on which to place a foundation.

The PQ received over 41% of the vote and seventy-one seats in the assembly; Levesque became the Quebec premier. He immediately went to New York to indicate to investors that he would pursue financial orthodoxy. His first two budgets were reductions on a significant scale. The PQ has been stronger in resisting subsidies in order to create an improved investment climate. In addition, Quebec, being blessed with many natural resources, is a major economic growth area. This growth will be fueled by Quebec’s massive hydroelectric capacity. Quebec is the Saudi Arabia of electricity. By 1985 Quebec will add another 18 million kilowatts with an additional potential of 25 million. Quebec Hydro sells power to the Power Authority of New York State, and since Quebec’s peak demands are in winter, it frees electricity for the summer in New York almost 1400 miles from the James Bay complex.

A major contribution to the PQ victory in 1976 was the editorials in Le Devoir of Claude Ryan. Ryan had been consistently critical of the failures of the federal and provincial cabinets to address the fundamental realities of Quebecois demands. He noted that each time the nationalists failed to win an election, the older parties put the crucial issues on the shelf. Ryan held the PQ defeat of the Liberals would force the Liberals to review their leadership and their goals. The PQ defeat of the Liberals did force a review and in 1978 Claude Ryan became the leader of the Liberals. It is likely that he will present a clear alternative to the PQ at the next elections, within the context of their common acceptance of the realities of Quebec nationalism.

Canadian Separatism: the Second Front

by Samuel E. Konkin II

Even the most anti-political libertarian has to admit elections do change things, even if only because they are believed and acted upon. The most striking example in the democratic enclave of Western society may well be the two Canadian federal elections within the past year. And the most recent results could well portend strong gains for objective libertarianism, grist for the activist’s mill.

After 16 long years of Liberal (pro-U.S. centrist party, like unto U.S. Democrats with right and left wings) Party rule, eleven of them under the Gallic Kennedy-type, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, the West, Maritimes, and English-speaking East-Central of Canada voted for Alberta’s Joe Clark and his Progressive Conservative (mildly anti-U.S., centre-right Party, like unto mix of British Tories and French Gaullists with a smattering of American Liberal Republicanism) Party. Since Quebec stubbornly supported Trudeau’s Liberals and the Social Credit (pro-U.S., radical right party, similar to a mixture of Birchers and populists), Clark could only muster a minority government, though only four seats short of a majority. The Creditistes had five seats, well, six originally until one was bought out by the Tories (as the P.C.’s are known, the Liberals are called “Grits”), and the assumption by most pundits in the Canadian press was that fiery Fabien Roy and his Creditistes would prop up their ideological near-kinsmen.

Such was not to be. Although Trudeau was berated for his arrogance, it was nothing compared to that displayed by Clark & Co. to the Social Credit Party.* After dragging out the calling of Parliament after the election to a record four months, Clark presented a budget calling for higher taxes and more controls and assumed the free-enterprise Creditistes had nowhere else to go and support him. In the greatest act of political moral suicide since Gilles Gregoire blocked the House of Commons single-handedly to begin Social-Credit Separatism and paralyse the federal government, the Creditistes refused to vote for the budget. The Liberals, smelling blood, swam back from their scattered constituencies, parties (cocktail variety), and homes to join the social-democrat New Democrat Party (NDP) into narrowly defeating the budget. In any heir of British Parliamentary tradition, that constitutes the strongest possible vote of non-confidence, and Clark promptly resigned, calling for an election.

The winter election, coming just eight months after the last one, was manifestly unpopular, and Cjark’s 18-cent gas tax even less so. The Liberals regained seats in the Maritimes and Ontario, and wiped out the Creditistes in Quebec (so much for the rewards of morality in the political arena); the NDP further cut into the Tories in the West. Worst of all, from a libertarian political viewpoint, Trudeau won an absolute majority of seats and remains safe from non-confidence motions (and elections) for the full five-year maximum term. Ironically, Trudeau was about to step down in disgrace when the election suddenly happened, and the Liberals had been gearing up for the bruising leadership convention. Maclean’s (the Time-Newsweek of Canada) called his return on the cover of its election issue: “The Second Coming.”

From a Fabian political libertarian viewpoint, the February 1980 (“Valentine’s Day”) election could be considered a gain for statism, with the loss of the proto-libertarian Creditistes and a majority government. Furthermore, Trudeau is the champion of strong, central government, and will be using his prime ministry to battle Rene Levesque’s Parti Quebec (commonly called pequistes) in the coming referendum on “Quebec sovereignty.” This concept, by the way, requires some twisted unraveling, thanks to Leveque’s continued weaseling and selling out of Separatism, but it basically allows the voters of Quebec to vote for “separatism” without actually getting it; it’s taken as a bargaining ploy by most of the media pundits to give Levesque a stronger hand in bargaining with Trudeau for Provincial v? federal rights and powers.

Before dealing with this crucial libertarian issue of separatism, or as the Yanks (especially the Yankees from Mississippi) like to call the concept, secession, there was one direct blow for libertarianism in the election. No, the very conservative Canadian Libertarian Party (overwhelmingly minarchist, anti-communist in foreign policy, and worst of all, anti-separatist because the strongest faction in the PQ is socialist-liberal) got not only zero seats, but failed to get any significant mention in the press. At least the CBC election coverage mentioned only the four parties above and “Others:” Maclean’s also made no mention of the CLP before, during or after the election. Ah, but the Rhinoceros Party, a Canadian variant of the “Nobody for President” campaign, received mention on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, government-owned and largest TV network) and fully a third-page in Maclean’s. More importantly, quoting from Maclean’s. “While all other parties watched their slim Quebec footholds trampled under the Liberal thumping, the Rhinocerotics saw their total vote almost double to 110,000. “But we weren’t worried,” confides Rhino heavy Charles McKenzie. ‘We took the precaution of doubling our number of candidates.’ One bitter Quebec Tory candidate, Clark aide Andre Payette, appearing on the provincially owned TV network, Radio-Quebec, after its election centre had been invaded by a Rhino band, confessed to having alot in common with Rhino star Sonia (Tickle) Cote — such as roughly the same number of votes. Sonia, perched beside him in her clown outfit and hanging over her accordion, could only look up and blush coyly from under her single forehorn.

“Meanwhile, back at their east-end Montreal rent-a-hall, the Rhino machine — basically a hippi revival, complete with construction boots, giggling kids and barking dogs — danced drunkenly around a giant TV screen, celebrating the 1,000-plus votes won by a horned cousin in Calgary.”

Calgary, brings us to the point of this article. The second largest and second most conservative city in Alberta (and the most Americanized, with its own John Birch Society chapter) after Edmonton, the capital, is probably the most libertarian in the sense most Americans would think of it, with a thriving anti-tax movement winning plebiscites just like Howard Jarvis. All Alberta, like British Columbia and Saskatchewan on either side, voted in zero Liberals, and while BC and Saskatchewan voted in many NDPs, Alberta went solidly PC, showing those Eastern bandits what it thought of those who would steal its precious oil. Calgary also is the home of provincial premier Peter Lougheed, himself a Kennedy-esque type who ousted the Alberta Social Credit Party in 1972 and remained in power since. Lougheed has bloated the Alberta Heritage Fund with oil royalties to the point where he could probably buy the entire Canadian army should it ever be used to invade a seceding Alberta. Would ultra-right, tax-free, regulation-loose, anti-union Alberta secede? Undoubtedly the most bigoted anti-frog (French equivalent of “nigger”) area in Canada, would Alberta go separatist? Maclean’s seems to think so.

Back when this author was the firebrand Social Credit leader at the University of Alberta (1964-1968), he had to look long and hard for another secessionist, even those who liked the idea but not the French Canadians. Then a report about five years ago mentioned that an Alberta separatist party had been started and 500 members had joined. Maclean’s reported, in the issue after its election special, “For Albertans, it was back to the barricades, back to their traditional sense of grievance and isolation. Having felt themselves a part of the federal government for the first time since John Diefenbaker’s days, the shock of being on the outside looking east again have shoved some toward separatism. At the Canada West Foundation, the think tank devoted to forging a new Canada within Confederation, the telephone was ringing at 8:15 the morning after. ‘I picked it up and someone said, “I feel totally disenfranchised today,” ’ says administration officer Nancy Sanford. ‘Every five minutes since, there has been another call. A quarter of the callers are looking for a separatist party, which we aren’t. The rest are saying they feel totally sick and they want to voice their frustration to someone.”

How serious is this possibility of Alberta separatism taken? Of course, short of shipping oil by pipeline to Montana, land-locked Alberta has the Pacific coastline — and an equally strong separatist pull. Again, from Maclean’s, “BC IN POLITICAL ISOLATION. And it is Perrault ((Liberal senator from BC)) who is reminding Trudeau of events such as last week’s radio survey that showed six out of every 10 callers in favor of separation from the rest of Canada. ‘But usually it’s just the dissidents who call these shows,’ he philosophizes.”

The quote comes from the lead article in Maclean’s, along with a cartoon showing Trudeau facing a battery of microphones, with an array of knives, arrows, tomahawks and darts protruding from his backside “. . . and I am reminded that while we face the threat of separatism in Quebec, we must not turn our backs on the alienation of the West . . .” Yes, the threat of Western separatism is taken seriously.

Even though the other two Western Provinces elected only two Liberals total (from urban Manitoba) giving an Alberta – British Columbia “Rocky Mountain Republic” a nice buffer zone, the battle will be fought economically, not on the battlefield. The fact that Alberta is rich and economically free, and the rest of Canada is suffering under austerity budgets and heavy government regulation and taxation is the key. And it’s also the problem because there is no firm ideological leadership in the West. Lougheed is simply a conservative who is following the political dynamics of the situation which leads him to the coming confrontation with Ottawa (the federal capital) over oil controls. But he’s not fighting for Alberta non-regulation of petroleum vs federal regulation, rather they’re arguing how the plunder should be divided. This could kill any principled rally against the central state..

And, finally, the link between Quebec and Western separatists must be established. Again, Lougheed is not the medium, a symbol of a (relatively sophisticated, to be sure) anti-frog mentality, and not likely to win Levesque’s support. The old Social Credit Party, strong precisely in Alberta, Quebec (and still the provincial government in British Columbia) would have been the perfect vehicle — but it’s at a new low in strength, most of its old supporters supporting the pequistes in Quebec and the PCs in Alberta.

The potential for libertarian organization is obvious.

* Apologies for name-dropping, but Prime Minister Clark was a PM at the University of Alberta when this writer, in his pre-libertarian days, sat as Social Credit whip in model parliament and remembered his arrogance well toward the SC Party, then the dominant one in Alberta politics.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XIII NUMBER 3

MAY-JUNE, 1980

US-ISSN0047-4517

Opportunism, Nukes, and the Clark Campaign

OK folks, this is it. For several issues of the Lib. Forum I have been a Jeremiah warning of the structural and power conditions within the LP and particularly within the upper strata of the Clark campaign which make them ripe for opportunist betrayal of libertarian principle. This supposedly groundless warning was, indeed, a crucial reason for Hie purging of my “Plumb Line” column from Libertarian Review (See inside, “Fired from LR”). Now, unfortunately, this warning is coming true.

The crunch came, as luck would have it, with the famous nuclear energy issue. From its inception, the Clark campaign established a five-man publications review committee, a broad spectrum within the movement, consisting of myself, Dave Bergland (national chairman), John Hospers, Bill Evers, and Bob Poole. All Clark campaign communications with the outside world: brochures, releases, scripts, whatever, were supposed to be cleared in advance with the review committee, which could veto any statements which deviated from libertarian principle.

For several months, communications (under the direction of Ed Crane) were issued, but the review committee never saw them — even after, much less before, publication. Much apologies were delivered by the campaign director, Ray Cunningham, with the explanation that the computer wasn’t working yet. After several months, the releases arrived — after publication — with the assurance that from now on, we on the committee would receive all publications of any importance to be cleared in advance.

Nothing arrived, but presumably that was because the campaign was still in early stages. The previous literature turned out to be all right, with some minor problems. The Publications Review Committee awaited the turn to play its supposedly appointed role.

Then, we heard, over the grapevine, that the Clark campaign has issued an anti-nuclear brochure. Not only wasn’t this brochure cleared with the committee, as far as I know none of the committee has officially gotten the pamphlet. The communications people sent the leaflet to campus groups, who of course are nothing if not anti-nuclear, and, we find, also to press kits of state parties where Clark is to speak. As of this writing, none of the committee has been officially sent the brochure; my own copy is a Xerox sent by another committee member who in turn got it informally.

Not only does the anti-nuclear Clark brochure violate solemnly agreed-upon procedures — in short, violates a solemn contract by the Clark campaign people. But the committee made known to the Clark campaign as early as last fall our unanimous decision that anti-nuclear sentiments, the anti-nuke propagandist John Gofman, and support or attack on any energy forms per se, must have no part in the Clark campaign. This was agreed by the campaign director, who repeated his assurances both on the anti-nuke content and the procedural clearance with our committee at the California LP convention a few weeks ago. Furthermore, Clark himself joined in these assurances.

But now the Clark campaign has violated all of these solemnly pledged guidelines, in procedure and in content. The brochure glorifies Gofman, quotes his anti-nuclear views (with picture yet), and then these views are seconded at length by Clark himself.

Gofman’s quote is headed by the proclamation that “a founding father of the anti-nuclear movement” endorses Clark. Gofman proclaims also that “aggression is integral to the nuclear power industry”, and that he supports Clark because the latter’s fundamental beliefs are in accord with Gofman’s position. There then follows, like a roll of the drums, all of Gofman’s titles, including such of his books as “Poisoned Power: the Case Against Nuclear Power Plants.”

There then follows a page of quotations from Ed Clark. Clark begins with what he thinks a crucial point: “The nuclear industry is lock, stock and barrel a creation of government, and it depends to this day on massive government subsidies.” The Mueller-creation of government-line is totally irrelevant; radar was a creation of government, but that does not mean that any private use of it from then on is somehow morally tainted and illegitimate. Modern roads and highways are a creation of government, and were built and are maintained on massive government subsidies. But that does not mean that highways should be shut down or destroyed; they should instead be privatized.

And while Clark is perfectly correct in calling for an end to government subsidies to nuclear energy, he fails to recognize that the federal Nuclear Commission cripples and restricts, as well as subsidizes, nuclear energy. Federal regulations have raised nuclear costs, created inefficiencies, and delayed the construction of nuclear power plants. Libertarians should recognize that the government both restricts and subsidizes nuclear energy, and that all aspects of regulation should be abolished. Which is empirically more important — the subsidizing or the restrictions? We won’t know for sure, until they are all abolished, and the nuclear power industry is set free to achieve whatever level it can on the free market. Which, of course, is precisely what Libertarians should be calling for, no more and no less.

Clark then goes on to say that he favors an end to all restrictions on the development of alternative energy sources, such as solar power. Implicit in his discussion is that solar power, which from all indications is inefficient and uneconomic — certainly for the generation of electricity — is somehow better than nuclear or other forms of energy. If not, then there should be some recognition that nuclear power is restricted as well as subsidized by government. Also, there should have been mention by Clark of other forms of energy than solar; for example, what about coal and oil? Why are they not mentioned, as well as a call for their liberation from government control?

Furthermore, in his discussion, Clark indicates that he buys the unproven Gofman line that nuclear energy is unsafe. He first twits the government for stating that nuclear radiation is safe, and then talks about “when the dangers of nuclear power became known . . .” Clark concludes that the “Libertarian position” is to “forbid aggression against innocent bystanders through the release of harmful radiation.” This smear that nuclear power radiation is harmful is precisely the point at issue; it is unproven and is repudiated by almost all people knowledgeable in nuclear physics, engineering, or medicine.

Among all the nuclear physicists and engineers, most of whom work and live, along with their families, near nuclear power plants, Gofman is one of a tiny handful that claims that nuclear radiation is unsafe, and his methodology is based on unsound extrapolations from the admitted dangers of high-level radiation to the supposed dangers of far lower levels. It’s as if Scientist A points out that drinking ten gallons of milk at once will kill you, and Scientist B then extrapolates this downward to the assertion that one glass of milk will cause you considerable damage.

The effect of the entire brochure, then, is to adopt the Gofman-Mueller-Childs-Crane line attacking nuclear and favoring solar energy. This is a betrayal of libertarian and free-market principles in a transparent and cynical attempt to suck in liberals (especially in the media) and leftists (especially on the campus) to support the LP and the Clark ticket. It is an attempt to play on the moronic counter-cultural attitude that “artificial” (nuclear) is BAD while “natural” (solar) is GOOD. This attempt must be repudiated forthwith, and in no uncertain terms.

The publications review committee has already launched this repudiation, and unanimously so. The committee has demanded the immediate withdrawal of this reprehensible brochure, along with a written guarantee from the campaign director that this highhanded violation of clearing procedures with the committee will never be repeated, and that we will review in advance all future communications by the Clark campaign with the public. We also demand an investigation into what went wrong here, and how this gross violation could occur. The committee has decided to go public with this protest, and we are unanimously determined to stick to our guns, and to refuse to serve as window-dressing or to give our sanction to violations of agreed-upon procedure and of libertarian principle.

Already, the Executive Committee of the California LP has voted unanimously to back this stand, to demand immediate recall of the brochure, and to turn investigation of this violation to the Judicial Committee of the party. Let us hope that other state parties, and the National Committee, will follow suit. We must make it crystal clear that we tolerate no further violations of principle or procedure from the Clark campaign and its power elite.

Fired from LR

As has been disclosed in frontlines, I was fired by Roy Childs from my supposedly valued “Plumb Line” column in Libertarian Review. The column suppressed by Childs, and which precipitated the firing, is presented to our readers below (“Following the Leader”). Childs indicts both the style and the content of the article as “terrible” (a rather cheeky denunciation of style considering the source). The “terrible” content from my “outrageous and destructive” claim that there are powerful forces in the Libertarian Party who are trying to attack or suppress any criticism of the LP structure or the Clark campaign. Ironically, of course, Childs’ suppression of this and all future of my columns is proof positive that the charge in my article is correct.

And so, continuing our policy of pursuing truth without fear or favor, we hereby publish the suppressed column and allow the readers to make up their own mind. Do all of you also believe that this column was so subversive that it should not have been run?

I must admit, however, that I do not regret no longer being associated with Libertarian Review. In addition to its various peccadilloes that we have detailed in our pages, LR has, in recent months, become windy, flatulent, and boring. It is beginning to reach the exalted status in my eyes of flipping through a new copy to see if I am attacked, and then tossing it in the nearest wastebasket.

LR is a perfect example of a problem which has gotten more and more out of hand in recent years in the libertarian movement: of institutions where money and personnel have far outstripped the talent available.

The offending column follows:,

FOLLOWING THE LEADER

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Iranian crisis has been the alacrity with which Americans of all stripes have rushed to Follow the Leader — to unite behind the President and to follow sheeplike wherever he may lead. We are told at every hand that there must be Unity in this crisis — as we have been told in every foreign policy crisis in this century. Unity, of course, means following loyally and uncritically behind our constituted Leaders; any other option is shouted down immediately as being divisive, disloyal, trouble-making, and counterproductive. Gone and forgotten are the foreign policy disasters as recently as Vietnam, that followed from Trusting the Experts and obeying the President uncritically.

Already, at the time of writing, there is much in Carter’s policy open to severe criticism if such were to become once more part of acceptable discourse. For example: the attempt to deport innocent Iranian students in America, over a third of whom are opponents of the Khomeini regime and none of whom is guilty of any crime; the confiscatory freezing of Iranian deposits in American banks; the threatened embargo of trade with Iran; and the even direr threats of naval or military warfare, which could only inflict murder and aggression on innocent Iranian civilians, endanger innocent American civilians, and would not even do a thing to get the hostages back — in fact, would endanger their lives. The bank freeze also involves a possibly sinister Rockefeller connection with the Administration. First, David Rockefeller and his satrap Kissinger pressure Carter to admit the Shah into the U.S.; then, after the hostages are seized, the confiscatory freeze is followed by Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank declaring its loan to Iran to be in default (since the freeze conveniently prevented Iran from paying interest), enabling Chase to confiscate Iranian assets under its control.

Yet, the unity hoopla has prevented these questions from getting any sort of full airing; even when Kennedy simply stated the truth in attacking the depredations of the Shah, he was hooted down by everyone and fell drastically in the polls.

But it is not simply that following the leader allows him to take us on a gravely wrong path. There are even worse consequences. Stifling criticisms means that freedom of thought and expression are crippled, and that the healthy debate needed for both a free society and for a democratic polity is suppressed. Foreign policy then slips back to being what it was before Vietnam, “bi-partisan”, deadly and therefore potentially disastrous because operating without the check of a vibrant public opinion.

These strictures against following the leader in the name of a stifling unity apply not only to government, but also to the libertarian movement itself. There is great danger that, amidst the euphoria of the exciting 1980 presidential campaign, everyone in the Libertarian Party will submerge his or her independent critical judgment in the name of a simple-minded and oppressive “unity.” Already there are voices denouncing any attempt at criticism of the LP structure or the campaign as being divisive, disloyal, trouble-making, and counterproductive. And if these voices are heeded, we will have a legion of contented followers ready to follow their leaders into whatever grave errors or compromise of libertarian principle the leaders might find expedient. And since not even the best of men are infallible and all of us are bound to make errors, a lack of critical vigilance will mean that error will be compounded, and libertarian principle might fall prey to the temptations that opportunism and surrender of principle always brings to a party on the brink of seeming success.

Besides, one would hope that libertarians, of all people, are individualists and would never surrender their independent judgment to any person or group. If we should abandon our hard-won personal independence of State propaganda only to fall prey to the same sheeplike syndrome within our own party, then the cause of liberty would be in sad shape indeed — despite the golden opportunities that the real world now offers to liberty as never before in this century.

Evers for Congress

One of the most exciting and important Libertarian political races in this country has not — oddly enough — gotten any play from national party headquarters. Bill Evers, that rare combination of a brilliant theoretician and effective activist and organizer, is running for Congress on the LP ticket from his long-time home base in Palo Alto, California. Taking off from his lengthy career as student activist at Stanford, Evers has gained formidable media attention and considerable aid and interest for his campaign. The campaign is at one and the same time wedded to hard-core principle and focussed effectively on the vital political interests of the time and place. Tactics are effective and on target, but always subsumed under consistent libertarian principle. Libertarians throughout the country should take heart: Evers won’t sell out.

Recently, Bill Evers was fired from Libertarian Review’s sister — or cousin — publication, Inquiry. Under Evers’ leadership, Inquiry has become by far the best political magazine in the country, of any ideological bent. In appreciation for these services, Evers was unceremoniously dumped. He will, in the long run or even in the short run, be better off. He will be at liberty to pursue his doctorate in political theory, and is also now free to plunge fulltime into his Congressional campaign. Sometimes, too, unemployment can liberate the soul. At any rate, one prediction we can make flatly and with absolute certainty: Inquiry Magazine will suffer far more than Bill Evers from his enforced departure.

At any rate, Evers has a golden opportunity to make hay for Libertarianism in this campaign. The incumbent Congressman is Pete McCloskey, a leader of the vanishing breed of liberal Republican. In addition to that, the handsome McCloskey is one of the leading advocates of the draft in Congress. Two years ago, McCloskey got a whopping 75% of the vote against his wimpy Democratic opponent Kristen Olsen. Olsen is running again this year, which means that the Democrats will be swamped once more. Here is a splendid opportunity for the formidable Evers to come in second to McCloskey. Evers is expected to attract three large groups: Stanford students opposed to the draft; Democrats who are disgusted with the mediocre quality of Ms. Olsen; and conservative Republicans eager to dump the hated McCloskey.

We would like to urge our readers across the country to contribute what they can to the Evers for Congress campaign. For four basic reasons: because here is a marvelous opportunity to win votes and support for the LP; because it would support a model campaign fusing correct principle and strategy; because Bill Evers stands as a rock for libertarian principle and against the rising tide of opportunist betrayal in the Libertarian Party; and, finally, as an expression of personal support for a man whom these same opportunist forces have been doing their best to lay low and oust from any leadership role in the party or the movement.

Send your checks to:

Bill Evers for Congress Committee

1357 Pitman Avenue

Palo Alto, CA 94301

Some Thoughts on Supply-Side Economics

by Richard M. Ebeling

When Keynes’ General Theory was published in 1936 there was no reason to believe that it would soon serve as the framework for 40 years of economic theory and policy. Almost to a man, every important economist of that era condemned the book and its message as confused, inconsistent and dangerous. Joseph Schumpeter compared Keynes’ proposals with the types of economic policies pursued by France’s Louis XV, which lead to the bloodshed of the French Revolution.[1] Friedrich Hayek angrily insisted that Keynes was asking us to abandon 200 years of economic theory and return to the crude and naive idea that somehow the more money you create the wealthier you become.[2] And Kenneth Boulding declared that, “Mr. Keynes’ economics of surprise, like Hitler’s, may be admirable in producing spectacular immediate success. But we need Puritan economists like Dr. Hayek to point out the future penalties of spendthrift pleasures and to dangle us over the hell-fire of the long-run.”[3]

Yet, by 1946, only 10 years after the appearance of The General Theory, all that had changed. Keynesian economics had swept the field and those who refused to accept the new vision were considered as-out-of-date and antiquated as those who still believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Paul Samuelson could prayerfully give thanks that Keynesian system had given economists, “a Gospel, a Scripture, a Prophet.”[4] And Gottfried Haberler, who had once been one of Ludwig von Mises’ most promising students in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, could insist that, “Only a dullard or a narrow-minded fanatic could fail to be moved to admiration by Keynes’ genius.”[5]

Promising price stability, Keynesian monetary policy produced 30 years of ever worsening inflation; pledging an era of full employment, Keynesian contra-cyclical manipulations created severe fluctuations and distortions in employment and output, particularly in the last 10 years; and assuring the public that the secret to ever greater investment and productivity lies in the government’s fiscal ability to stimulate aggregate demand, the last 20 years has seen productivity increases falling rapidly and capital investment become ever more erratic.

With such a widening margin between promise and performance, a revolt against the Keynesian system was inevitable. The first step in this revolution was the rediscovery of the quantity theory of money. Both Austrian and Chicago economists hammered away at the public and their fellow economists that a prolonged and accelerating rise in prices could never happen without an ever increasing expansion of the supply of money and credit.

How successfully has this truth been learned? James Meade, a leading British Keynesian and Nobel Laureate, gave a lecture in Vienna last year in which he said that a “system of uncontrolled [trade union] monopoly power” combined with a “Keynesian governmental undertaking that, whatever happens to the level of money wages, demand will be stimulated sufficiently to avoid any General Unemployment”, has created a “set of institutions which might well have been expressly designed to set in motion and maintain [a] process of explosive inflation . . .”[6] When one of the leading intellectual advocates of the British Welfare State and the Keynesian system begins to show such grave doubts, we can hope that the era of naive but highly dangerous rationalizations for monetary expansion may be coming to an end.

Another major blow against the Keynesian paradigm is now being leveled by those who call themselves the “supply-side” economists. Pointing to the low rate of savings in the United States (approximately 3%), and the low rate of (real) investment and productivity increases, the “supply-siders” have lifted from a bookshelf long neglected by the Keynesians, the old 19th century classical works that had so cogently argued that only that which has been produced can be consumed and only that which has been saved is available to be invested. With great articulation they have helped bring back to Say’s Law the respect it always deserved and should never have been denied.

All exchange has as its purpose the fulfillment of human wants and desires. We offer to trade something we possess for something held by another because we believe that that which the other person presently has title to would give us greater satisfaction than that which we presently own. Yet, unless we have been the beneficiary of a magnanimous gift-giver, the only way to acquire what we want is first to produce or participate in the production of something that other individuals might possibly desire.

That too much of one thing and too little of another might be produced is almost inevitable in a world where the future is uncertain and present production must be guided by anticipations of future wants. But through the process of profit and loss, incentives are always being created for producers to supply greater quantities of some goods and less of others. Thus, while a perfect balancing of supply and demand may never exist at any moment in time, that is the tendency that is at least always at work in the system.

The “supply-side” economists have not only repeated these arguments but have also attempted to analyze under what conditions it is worthwhile to trade or not to trade, work or not to work and save or not to save Individuals, they point out, must compare the relative advantages of doing one thing rather than another and the alternative that offers the highest anticipated gain will be the one chosen.

In the market place, relative advantages come to be expressed in terms of prices. We enter the supermarket and, given our income, we allocate our expenditures so as to maximize utility or achieve the highest level of satisfaction possible. If the relative prices of some goods change, we reevaluate our estimations of them and most people will tend to buy a relatively or achieve the highest level of satisfaction possible. If the relative prices of some goods change, we reevaluate our estimations of them and most people will tend to buy a relatively smaller amount of the products that have risen in price and a relatively larger amount of those which have gone down in price. Relative prices, and any changes in them therefore, influence and guide the allocation of income on the part of consumers and the allocation of production activities on the part of producers.

The same tools of analysis, the “supply-siders” argue, can also be applied to a study of fiscal policy. Tax rates, for example, represent some of the relative prices that an individual has to take into consideration when making a decision. If an individual is considering working additional hours or is contemplating a new investment or a new device for improving productivity, he must compare the additional revenue or gain that he would receive from carrying out this plan with the additional costs — including taxes — involved. Thus, they conclude, progressively rising marginal tax rates that take a greater and greater proportion of one’s income will tend to dissuade work, create incentives to move into barter or cash transactions that can avoid the leering eye of the tax collector, and diminish the incentive for saving and investment.

How could work, productivity, saving, investment and greater division of labor be stimulated? By lowering the marginal tax rates, so that at every level of income the proportion remaining in the hands of workers and producers would be larger. Then the relative cost of making a work or saving or investing decision would have fallen and these activities over time would probably be expanded.[7]

Now, if the “supply-side” argument was left at that, the main thrust of their argument could be considered unobjectionable in its general outline, with few grounds for major disagreement. They would have only more or less supplied the basic tools of price theory to some aspects of fiscal policy.[8]

An additional ingredient in the tool kit of some “supply-side” theoreticians, however, is the concept of the “Laffer Curve,” named after Arthur Laffer, a USC economist. Laffer argues that there are two possible tax rates that will generate the same level of government revenue. If taxes are zero, government revenue is zero and the people retain 100% of their income. If taxes are 100%, government revenue would again be zero because, Laffer says, nobody would bother to work if they were not allowed to keep any of what they had earned and produced. If the rate of taxation is lowered from 100%, individuals would have an incentive to work, since they could now keep some of what they had produced and government revenue would rise from zero to some positive number. Every lowering of the tax rate would continue to induce more and productivity, with greater government revenue besides. Greater government revenue, that is, until some point at which any further lowering of the tax rate would, in fact, generate less of a government take rather than more. Hence, the “Laffer Curve.”

What, then, is the goal to which economists and politicians should direct their efforts? In The Way The World Works, Jude Wanniski, one of the leading gurus of the “supply-side” school of economics, gives as an answer, the discovery of the actual shape of the “Laffer Curve.” That part of “The Curve” at which government revenue is maximized should be pinpointed and fiscal policy implemented to assure that the economy is moved to that point without further delay.[9]

The obvious question is, how do we ever find out the actual shape of “The Curve” and where we are on it? If, for sake of the argument, we accept that such a “Curve” exists somewhere out there, it is important to realize that it would be nothing more than the cumulative subjective estimations of a multitude of individuals about the relative advantages of work vs. leisure, consumption vs. savings, etc. “The Curve” would be no more fixed or stable than the expectations and preferences of the individuals in a particular community. Changes in people’s valuations, revisions in expectations about the political, social or economic climate and new discoveries of cost-saving production techniques would all work to make any hypothecated “Laffer Curve” a shifting, shadowy entity whose position and shape would be as fluid and erratic as the imaginative minds of the individuals who comprise the elements living under “The Curve”

But even more important than the theoretical difficulties of determining the position and shape of “The Curve” is the assumption that the goal of fiscal policy should be the maximizing of governmental revenues. The primary trade-off is not seen as that between income kept and income seized via taxation from the public. That analysis is incidental to the main purpose of discovering the tax structure that generates the most revenues for the State coffers, i.e., the incentive structure that entices and induces the slaves to produce the output that assures the maximum booty for the slave-masters and their lacky underlings. Indeed, the in-fighting and emotional hysteria in Congress over the Kemp-Roth Bill is nothing more than the politicians and the special interests arguing over whether the proposed tax cut will or will not supply the government with ever greater sums to dole out to the friends and favorites of the political court.[10]

“Supply-side Economics,” as it has developed over the last few years and as it is usually presented when its case is being made, is not a vehicle for diminishing the size of government or expanding the economic liberty of the general public.

Having reached a dead-end in attempts to stimulate the economy on the side of “aggregate demand,” the macroeconomic manipulators have now discovered there is a new set of economic equations that can be massaged on the “aggregate supply” side as well. Already the economic model-builders are busy at work revising their equations and adding more variables. Michael Evans, the designer of two of the leading Keynesian econometric models, has changed over to the “supply-side” school. Having opened a new economic forecasting business, he is designing a new “supply-side” model and is already estimating how much of a percentage cut in tax rates will produce what percentage increase in savings and work effort.[11] and after having slowly been shown the light, the economic forecasters working for Congress are licking their chops calculating what tax levers should be pulled, and by how much, to generate revenue and production where the government considers it worthwhile.

Rather than a means for freeing the economy from the fiscal tax burdens of the State, “supply-side” economics may very well serve as the vehicle for what in France has long been called “indicative planning.” Instead of directly ordering the movement of labor and resources from one area of the economy to another, indicative planning operates through a system of tax incentives and subsidy programs to entice business enterprises into certain parts of France and into certain lines of production that the government considers “socially desirable.”[12]

Supply-side economics could open the door for systematic government manipulation of tax rates as a means to assure the “socially desirable” level of saving and investment and the “socially desirable” combination of work and leisure. Just as the old Keynesian macroeconomics has been a mechanism for distorting the economy through “aggregate demand” tools, the new “supply-side” macroeconomics will almost certainly result in economic distortions through the use of “aggregate supply” tools.

Tax cuts and lowering of tax rates are desirable. But they are desirable because they would allow those who have earned the income the right to keep and spend it as they see fit. Would savings and investment be greater if personal and corporate tax levels were lower? Probably they would, since existing fiscal actions have set up disincentives for both activities.

But individuals, themselves, should be left free to decide how much to work or not and how much to consume and save. And equally important, entrepreneurial and business activities should be free from regulations and fiscal gimmickry so production can be organized and resources can be allocated to reflect the preferences and desires of income earners in their role as consumers.

There is no “socially desirable” level of work or of saving and investment other than what individuals freely choose as desirable. And unless the case for “supply-side” economic reform is modified to reflect an argument for individual freedom, it may very well serve as a means for even greater State control over the economy and not less.

FOOTNOTES,

1. Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Review of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes,” Journal of the American Statistical Association (Dec., 1936), p. 794.

2. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Pure Theory of Capital (London: MacMillan ⅔ Co., Ltd., 1941), pp. 409-410.

3. Kenneth E. Boulding, “Review of The Pure Theory of Capital by Friedrich A. Hayek,” Journal of Political Economy (Feb., 1942), p. 131.

4. Paul Samuelson, “The General Theory”, in The New Economics ed. by Seymour E. Harris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 147.

5. Gottfried Haberler, “The General Theory,” in The New Economics, ibid., p. 161.

6. James E. Meade, “Stagflation in The United Kingdom,” Atlantic Economic Journal (Dec., 1979), p. 6.

7. Jack Kemp, An American Renaissance, A Strategy for the 1980’s (New York: Harper ? Row, 1979), pp. 32-76.

8. See Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970) pp. 63-123, who draws similar conclusions, though with important qualifications.

9. Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 97-115.

10. Arthur B. Laffer ? Jan P. Seymour, eds., the Economics of the Tax Revolt (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1979), pp. 45-68.

11. Michael E. Evans, “The Bankruptcy of Keynesian Econometric Models,” Challenge Magazine (Jan.-Feb., 1980) pp. 13-19.

12. Vera Lutz, Central Planning for the Market Economy, An Analysis of the French Theory and Experience (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1969).

Abortion and Self-Ownership: A Comment

by George H. Smith

The Right to Abortion: A Libertarian Defense, co-authored Sharon Presley and Robert Cooke, was published recently as a Discussion Paper for the Association of Libertarian Feminists. In most respects it is one of the most persuasive defenses of the right to abortion yet to appear. But it contains a rather peculiar twist: the monograph criticizes not only libertarian anti-abortionists, but also pro-abortion libertarians, such as Murray Rothbard, who defend a woman’s right to abortion on the ground of self-ownership (i.e., the argument that a woman has a right to dispose of her body as she pleases). I wish to comment briefly on this aspect of the paper, pointing out, first, the misunderstanding by Presley and Cooke of the self-ownership model[1]; and, secondly the serious inadequacy of their proposed alternative.

Presley and Cooke write:

(W)e have found that serious problems arise out of the propertarian model. In particular, the question of abortion does not resolve itself unambiguously under the “self-ownership” model.

. . . For instance, we recognize that any kind of physical property — be it animal, vegetable, or mineral is a thing, not a person . . . Yet, the Lockean theory of rights holds that we are, in fact, property. To be sure, we each own ourselves; this still leaves us with the curious equation that self-slavery equals liberty.
This seems a small matter practically, only a detail to be cleared up, or ignored. But. . . a few such loose ends may be more than the theory of self-ownership can tolerate.

. . . (P)roponents of the Lockean theory have clearly meant “self-ownership” literally. But why create such a concept in the first place? The physical body, after all, is not separate from the psychological self; they are both aspects of the same entity, the same process of existence. And if there is no discrete “self” owning a separate body — and short of the supernatural, there cannot be — then the concept of self-ownership dissolves in to the absurdity of a “self’ owned by the same self, ad infinitum. We find it simpler to accept the idea of a whole person, who acts and who is not reducible to smaller selves.

After indicating that self-ownership is a plausible, if somewhat inadequate, notion (“To be sure,’ we each own ourselves . . . .”), Presley and Cooke abruptly turn about-face and declare that the concept of self-ownership “dissolves into (an) absurdity.” Self-ownership, we are told, entails a bifurcation of human nature into the owner and the owned, a distinction not in accord with the integrated human being.

This objection is a common one[2], but it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the so-called Lockean tradition. The term “property” was used in various ways by seventeenth and eighteenth century political theorists. It usually referred, not to property in the narrow sense as an object or thing that is owned, but rather to moral jurisdiction over something. Thus, as Locke put it, “every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.”[3]

The phrasing is significant. Locke speaks of property in one’s person, not of a person as property in the narrow sense. This permits him to include “Lives, Liberties and Estates” within the general category of property.[4]

Several decades prior to Locke we find a similar sentiment in the writing of Richard Overton:

To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for every one as he is himself, so he hath a self-propriety . . . and on this no second may presume to deprive any of, without manifest violation . . . of the rules of equity and justice between man and man.[5]

Willium Wollaston, writing in 1722, left no doubt as to the meaning of “property” in the broad sense:

To have the property of any thing and to have the sole right of using and disposing of it are the same thing: they are equipollent expressions.[6]

To have property in one’s person is to have moral jurisdiction over one’s mind, body, faculties, labor, and the fruits thereof. Perhaps “self-proprietorship” better captures the meaning of this idea than “self-ownership,” but in neither case is there an implication that one aspect of the person “owns” another aspect of the person, as Presley and Cooke suggest. Self-ownership simply means that one’s consent is a necessary condition for the use or disposal of one’s body, labor, etc. Auberon Herbert, a great champion of the self-ownership concept, made this point well:

What is a self-owner? He is a man who retains the power of consenting, as regards the disposal of himself and of his property. The man who is not a self-owner has lost this power of consenting. Consent is the distinguishing mark of the self-owner.[7]

To base the right of abortion on self-ownership is to argue that the use of a woman’s body falls within her own moral jurisdiction. For another person to contravene the woman’s decision in this matter thus constitutes a moral transgression. It may require some argument to convince a nonlibertarian of this, but I fail to see why Presley and Cooke find it so troublesome.

Presley and Cooke offer another objection to self-ownership:

Furthermore, if rights are property, then inalienability may mean only that a person must consent to any disposal of his or her rights. As property can be alienated (in the legal sense) by consent, so may rights be when defined as property. (Many natural-rights theorists, from Hugo Grotius onward, have supported this argument.) The proposition that a person can enter slavery by voluntary agreement, though utterly repugnant to us, is not easily — if at all refutable within this frame. This, as David B. Davis concluded (in The Problem of Slavery), “was the fatal flaw in the traditional theories of natural rights.”

This paragraph extends the confusion of earlier passages. One cannot alienate or transfer one’s moral jurisdiction. One cannot, for example, “give” oneself to another person, commit murder, and then offer the defense that because one is the property of another person, it is that “owner”, and not oneself, who is morally responsible. Moral rights and responsibilities do not derive from an act of choice, and they cannot be alienated. One cannot transfer one’s will and faculties to another person. Neither, therefore, can one transfer the moral rights and responsibilities that devolve from one’s will and faculties.

Presley and Cooke exaggerate the problem that voluntary slavery has caused for the natural rights/self-ownership tradition. (The two traditions, incidentally, are not coextensive, and the reference to Grotius is beside the point. Grotius was not a self-ownership advocate.) Self-ownership was the moral premise on which most anti-slavery agitators and abolitionists based their attack. Slavery the ownership of one person by another — brought its’ fundamental alternative of self-ownership into clear relief. Slaveholders were condemned as “man-stealers” because they expropriated from the slave that which was properly his own: his person, his labor, and his freedom. Just as “the true owner has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold,” argued Thomas Paine, “so the slave, who is the proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.”[8] The antislavery activist William Channing argued that “The right of property in outward things is as nothing compared with our right to ourselves”; and “if there be property in anything, it is that of a man in his own person, mind, and strength.”[9]

The radical abolitionists were even more emphatic about self-ownership. The basis of all abolitionist organization, wrote William Lloyd Garrison, was “the right of the slave to himself as paramount to every other claim.”[10] The abolitionist Stephen Foster echoed the same theme:

(E)very man (has) an inalienable right to himself— a right of which no conceivable circumstance of birth, or forms of law, can divest him; and he who interferes with the free and unrestricted exercise of that right, who, not content with the proprietorship of his own body, claims the body of his neighbor, is a manstealer.

So obvious was the incompatibility of self-ownership and slavery that many Southern defenders of slavery did not even attempt to reconcile the two. Slavery apologists “usually conceded that it was of course true that man . . . could not be the property of another person.” Instead, they resorted to the lame argument that one could “own another person’s service or labor.”[12]

We see that, contrary to Presley and Cooke, it is quite simple to refute the argument for voluntary slavery based on self-ownership. Moreover, the historical defenders of self-ownership almost unanimously defended its inalienability; this was not a “fatal flaw” in their theory. Finally, it was the self-ownership advocate who comprised the anti-slavery vanguard.

What do Presley and Cooke offer in place of self-ownership?

A contrasting view of natural rights defines them as the protectors of individual conscience rather than of property. Human beings are free moral agents and their liberties derive from the right of self-determination. Such rights, once we grant their existence, are not by nature transferable. This was the liberty of conscience of the English Dissenters, the ‘inner light’ of the Quakers, the ‘individual sovereignty’ of Josiah Warren, the ‘moral accountability’ of the abolitionists, and was, far more than property, a motive behind social and religious revolt from the Middle Ages onward. A person is a moral agent by virtue of having and being aware of the possibility of choice (that is, the capacity to choose and act). The whole person is the self and the actor.”

Space prevents me from commenting on the fast and loose survey of intellectual history contained in this passage. I shall simply repeat an earlier point: The self-ownership theorists did not split the individual; they, too, talked about the “whole person.” Indeed, the “self-determination” model outlined here is merely a variant of the self-ownership model. Liberty of conscience was viewed as a subset of self-proprietorship. “Self-determination” could easily be substituted for “self-proprietorship.”

Unfortunately, the version of “self-determination” defended by Presley and Cooke is fuzzy around the edges. Granted, they do not attempt to elaborate or defend their view at length; nonetheless, there are serious problems with the summary contained in the final paragraph:

Rights, we repeat, are human artifices. Justice and morality are at best provisional constructions that attempt to summarize the wisdom gained from human experience and insight. But the results of behavioral codes are very real and final without appeal; we must have, then, the right to judge laws and morals by their results and correlatively the right to reject principles that in practice result — however noble their intent — in human misery. No authority for any ethic exists beyond self-determination or individual sovereignty; the creation of prescriptions and proscriptions is within the capacity of each person as a free moral agent. To establish any moral authority antecedent to human conscience — be it the law of identity, God, or Marx — is to lay the foundation for despotism.

Frankly, I find it difficult to decipher this muddle. Earlier in their paper Presley and Cooke defend “A contrasting view of natural rights” based on the capacity for moral choice; now they inform us that rights are “human artifices,” and that justice and morality are “provisional constructions.” Let’s get this straight. Is their defense of the right to an abortion, based on self-determination, a moral defense? Yes, or so it seems. But now, in virtue of their final statement, their own argument is reduced to an artifice or provisional construction. Then, as their article proceeds to self-destruct, they confuse things even more by maintaining “the right (?!) to judge laws and morals by their results and correlatively the right (?!) to reject principles that in practice result . . . in human misery.” This appeal to concrete results is offered as an alternative to the artificial and constructivist nature of rights and justice — which makes the “right to judge” and the “right to reject” in this context bizarre, to say the least.

Presley and Cooke reject “any moral authority antecedent to human conscience” — including the law of identity! (Presumably this is to prevent reality from ruling over one’s life.) The appeal to the sovereignty of conscience makes good copy but little sense. What if my conscience tells me to prevent women from having abortions? Legalized abortion, as we know, causes a good deal of anguish and misery for those who regard it as murder. So, exercising my sovereign “right to judge laws and morals by their results and correlatively the right to reject principles that in practice result . . . in human misery,” I decide to eliminate the misery I perceive by bumping off all abortionists. Perhaps it will be argued that I do not have the right to violate the sovereignty of other individuals. Need I remind Presley and Cooke that, as they put it, “to establish any moral authority antecedent to human conscience . . . is to lay the foundation for despotism”? My conscience tells me to kill abortionists, and that’s that.

Obviously, moral principles — specifically, rights — are needed in order to sketch the boundaries of human interaction. Rights define the moral sphere in which the individual is sovereign; they map out the area in which one’s convience is indeed supreme. Moreover, there is no way coherently to evaluate concrete results without moral principles. Simply to appeal to human misery is to resort to a subjective and indefinable standard. I suspect that Presley and Cooke understand this, as indicated elsewhere in their essay. Their final paragraph is therefore even more bewildering.

NOTES

1. I shall not speculate on the degree to which Murray Rothbard, a major target of Presley and Cooke, agrees with my interpretation of the self-ownership tradition. I have concentrated instead on the classical self-ownership tradition, beginning with the Levellers in the seventeenth century.

2. See the criticism of Auberon Herbert’s theory of self-ownership by J. M. Robertson in The National Reformer (July 19, 1891). “The phrase ‘I own my mind and body’ is meaningless,” argued Robertson; “I am my mind and body.” Herbert’s response, it should be noted, was less than satisfactory.

3. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 328.

4. BID., p. 395.

5. Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants (1646), in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 68. I have modernized the spelling in the quoted passage.

6. William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London, 1726), p. 136.

7. The Free Life (April, 1897), p. 29.

8. Thomas Paine, “African Slavery in America,” in The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. by Moncure D. Conway (New York: Putnam’s/I906), Vol. 1, p. 5. Cf. the discussion in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 267 ff.

9. William Channing, “Slavery,” in The Works of William E. Channing, D. D. (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1890), p. 704 and p. 694.

10. William Lloyd Garrison, The “Infidelity” of Abolitionism, in The Antislavery Argument, ed. by William and Jane Pease Indianapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 131.

11. Stephen S. Foster, The Brotherhood of Thieves, or A True Picture of the American Church and Clergy, in Pease, op. cit., p. 138.

12. H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, But . . .: Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-1910 (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1972), p. 138.

Free Market Revisionism: A Comment

by Robert L. Formaini

This short note is not concerned with economic historians, many of whom have demonstrated the fallacies surrounding regulation, anti-trust laws, licensing, and the government’s role in promoting depressions. Rather, I am concerned over a recurring argument that seems to have been invented solely to discredit the Cato Institute. In their recent attack on Cato, National Review’s Lawrence Cott made what was, at that time, a rather unique argument concerning what is, and is not, proper and moral on a free market. Cato is bad because it is subsidized. By implication, Cato is hypocritical in its endorsing free markets and free enterprise because it is not “on the market.”

At the time, I thought this was merely the ravings of a conservative lightweight, a mere aberration. Yet this “argument” has been picked up and repeated by many libertarians who oppose one or more of Cato’s program’s or personnel. The final straw, for me, came at the American Economic Association meetings in Atlanta last month when one of America’s leading “free market economists” informed me that Cato “didn’t believe in the market because we gave away books.”

The hypocrisy of being criticized by National Review, whose subscribers are yearly dunned with a William F. Buckley direct mail plea for contributions, was actually surpassed by the gentleman in Atlanta, who works for a vast state-supported educational institution! What in the world is going on here? What sort of newspeak is this?

In a superficial sense, all money made in this economy is subject to, and in many cases profits by, government involvement. But surely there is a difference between private individuals contributing to private organizations, whether it be in the form of money or time or books, and taxation? Cato wears a white gown compared to our economist friend, for it receives no money taken by force from people.

Are we to condemn National Review because it can’t pay all its bills with subscription monies? Are we to condemn private institutions that give things away? The Salvation Army is surely not doing the devil’s work is it? And the injustice of it all! My economist friend may not know it, but it’s a violation of 1RS regulations to sell anything at conventions held by non-profit institutions! In his haste to attack Cato, God knoweth why, he simply overlooked both logic and fact.

It is time to remind many conservatives, and libertarians, that private money can be spent in private ways with no one’s rights being violated and no harm to the market. Free market theory does not maintain that one must make a profit to be moral, unless one is an extreme Randian. There is simply no way to maintain the opposite, and leave the market intact.

The economist tried with the following: if you opened a steel mill, you wouldn’t be giving anything away, and you would have to have “faith in the market.” Is this to be believed? No wonder the market is losing adherents. The analysis neglects several key facts of free market life:

(a) No matter what is started, there is no guarantee of success. All original capital invested is a subsidy offered in the hope of making a profit.

(b) There is a period when all businesses expect to operate in the red. There is a break-even point that is always in the future when a business starts up. It may not be reached, but that is not a violation of the free market.

(c) Consumer utility is independent of the financial position of the organization supplying the goods and services people buy. Who cares if Chrysler is in the red or black? As long as they have cars to sell, people can profit by buying them. Is it valid to say that they have been subsidized by the shareholders? That they are free market violators? I say no, up to the point they ask for favors from the state.

(d) The fact that goods and services will often trade at a zero price is not a violation of the market. The fact that new enterprises offer “get acquainted” gifts and benefits is not a violation of the free market.

(e) All this goes double for non-profit organizations.

(f) All monies made in the market can be spent any way the owner chooses so long as he does so within the laws.

(g) Some things may make a profit. . . some may not. This is not, at any given point in time, a test of their relative “quality.” Quality is subjective, and resides in the mind of the consumer. So is value. Free market economic theory is objective, and fortunately, contradicts the new revisionists.

If subsidies by private individuals are “bad”, then everyone’s bull is gored at some point. Those who propagate spurious arguments will, some day, be haunted by their own creations.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XIII, NUMBER 4

JULY-AUGUST, 1980

US-ISSN0047-4517

Ethnic Politics In New York

Life being what it is, time and the political campaign move faster than the Libertarian Forum. So I am writing this during the campaign while you are probably reading it after the election is over. Nevertheless, the defeat of Jacob K.. Javits in the Republican primary — whether or not he manages the unlikely feat of pulling out the election on the Liberal line — is a cataclysmic event in New York politics. The good, grey Javits, the epitome of Rockefeller Republicanism, unbeaten in countless elections and seemingly unbeatable — what in the world has happened? Has New York swung dramatically rightward? Not likely in view of the victory of Liz Holtzman in the Democratic primary. No, the Javits defeat, as well as the Holtzman victory, can only be understood — as is the case of New York politics in general — in the light of ethnic-political analysis.

Let us begin with certain constants, In the first place. New York City Jews dominate every statewide, much less citywide. Democratic primary. Why is that? Because ethnic realities are such in New York that (a) all WASPS are Republican; (b) all Jews are Democrats; (c) most Italians are Republican; and (d) Irish, what is left of them, are split between the two parties. But what of blacks and Hispanics who are also all Democrats? (Individualists will undoubtedly bristle at the use of the word “all” in this paragraph. But “all” means statistically significant votes.) Ahh, herein lies the rub. For one of the notorious facts about New York politics is that enormous proportions of eligible Jews turn out at the polls not only in general elections but also in primaries, whereas blacks and Hispanics barely bother to vote in elections, much less in the seemingly unimportant primary balloting. Ergo, Jews dominate Democratic primaries.

Since there are very few WASPS in New York City (a group virtually limited to Park Avenue millionaires, corporate executives, and actors). Mayoralty elections are invariably won by Democrats. On die other hand, since there is a paucity of Jews, blacks and Hispanics outside the city, and since upstate and suburban New York is largely WASP, we are left with a rough balance between the parties on the statewide level.

Since Jews dominate every statewide Democratic primary, this means that if the Jews will it, every statewide candidate will be Jewish. But in that case, care has to be taken that the candidate not be too leftish, for then all the other ethnic groups will be alienated, and the Republican will win. In short, if the Democratic candidate for Governor or Senator is Jewish and — or too leftish, he or she will lose.

During the old days of the “brokered” conventions, political leaders, schooled deeply in the intricacies of ethnic reality, made sure that the statewide ticket was “balanced”, i.e. that each major ethnic group had its share of the political pie. But now that “reform” has won out, and primaries have taken over for every post, disaster can easily occur, because there is no human mechanism to assure balance. Thus, a few years ago, for the five major statewide posts the Democratic primary system nominated four Jews and a black (a ticket unkindly known by New York politicos as “four Jews and a jig.”) Every one of them went down to ignominious defeat in the general election.

On the other hand, God must have been looking out for the Democrats in the 1976 primary, when Daniel Patrick (“Pat”) Moynihan narrowly defeated the redoubtable Bella Abzug. For Bella, ultra-left and Jewish to boot, would have been smashed in the election. But how did Moynihan manage to win? Because he was able to put together enough Irish and other “ethnic” (i.e. Catholic) Democratic votes, plus attract enough Jewish support to win. Part of the split in the Jewish vote came because of the palpable shift to the right among many Jews in recent years. Another part because Moynihan is the political embodiment of neo-conservatism, a trend launched and virtually consisting of New York Jewish (usually ex-Trotskyite) intellectuals. But, third, the defection from Bella was not simply a question of ideological content. It was more a matter of style, of esthetics. For Bella is the last of the raucous, shrewish, fishwife generation of the 1930s; many male Jews fled from Bella at the ballot as they have fled from other embodiments of the generation in real life.

What then of 1980? Since there are very few Jewish Republicans, it is difficult if not impossible for a Jew to win a statewide Republican primary. But, once accomplished, as Javits did as a loyal Dewey-Rockefeller liberal Republican, once a tradition of Republican victory is established, then the liberal Jew will capture half the Democratic vote at the election, and ease in to victory in a landslide. This is precisely what happened to Javits. Tradition and the Rockefeller machine saw to it that there were no sharp primary challenges to Javits; and then, commanding the Republican vote plus a huge chunk of the Democrats, Javits was able to win by a huge margin every time.

This year, the aging Javits launched his campaign with bold self-confidence, admitting frankly that he suffered from motor neuron, a progressively debilitating disease. His only opponent was the unknown Alfonse D’Amato, the supervisor of the town of Hempstead, in suburban Nassau County. It looked like another Javits walkover. But D’Amato launched a vigorous and bitter TV campaign, hammering away constantly at Javits’ age and infirmity. It is generally a myth that this kind of “negative” campaign creates an overcompensating sympathy backlash. Certainly it did not in Javits case. For the facts were incontrovertible, and D’Amato led an exultant group of rising Italian Republican voters, who voted not only as conservatives but also as Italian-Americans embittered at the thin political pickings that always have been accorded to their ethnic group. Liberal Jews were not there to save him, because they do not register Republican; and the Rockefeller machine is no more. And so, in the most stunning upset of 1980, in an overall light turnout, Alfonse D’Amato trounced Senator Javits, carrying every borough in New York City except Manhattan.

The Democratic primary was equally fascinating, and equally dominated by ethnic considerations. The two leading candidates embodied two generations of Jews. There was Bess Myerson, only a few years younger than Bella, but a woman of the 1940s and 50s rather than 30s. Bess represented the upwardly mobile Jews of post World War II, the Jews who made it in business, industry, and the arts. That Bess was the first and last Jewish Miss America — that she was able to crack at least for a while that great citadel of wholesome heartland WASPdom — all this meant an enormous amount to this generation of Jews.

Bess is also representative of her generation in that she is basically non-ideological; her entire campaign rested on her personality, on her looks and charm, on her persona, on the fact that she has Made It. Her political ideas were almost non-existent. Except on two related points: one, an increasing hawkishness that led her to be one of the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger, and a corollary intense devotion to the interests of the State of Israel. As Miss Neo-Conservative, Bess was enthusiastically endorsed by Mayor Koch and Senator Moynihan. She also acquired the formidable media talents of the supposedly unbeatable David Garth. And she waged a highly expensive TV campaign.

Her leading opponent was the Representative Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn. If Bess Myerson embodies the Jewish generation of the 40s and 50s, Liz Holtzman represents the activist, antiwar generation of the 1960s. Tough, unsmiling, dour, Miss Holtzman is hardly anyone’s image of a jovial politico. But she won her spurs on television as the sharpest opponent of Nixon on the House impeachment committee, and she has been popular in her Brooklyn Congressional district, thereby overcoming the rightward shift of many Brooklyn Jews in recent years.

Miss Holtzman is one of the most antiwar members of Congress, a theme which Myerson chose to hammer away at day after day; for if Miss Holtzman consistently refuses to vote for increased military budgets, how will the United States be able to rush to the defense of beloved Israel in any conceivable emergency? Fortunately, New York Jewish voters proved able to rise above this patent demagogy.

What about the two others in the race? They had no chance from the beginning. One was former Mayor John Lindsay, whom I suppose many non-New Yorkers thought had a good chance to win. The handsome Lindsay ended his term in office universally hated by all New Yorkers (with the exception of blacks) regardless of ethnicity, creed, or occupation: by the end, Lindsay could not have been elected to the proverbial post of dogcatcher. He therefore had only two constituencies for this primary: blacks, who don’t vote: and upstate WASPS, almost none of whom are Democrats. Upstate WASP county chairmen came out for Lindsay, but in the Democratic party they don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Queens District Attorney Joseph Santucci was a last-minute entrant into the campaign. On the surface, Santucci was the Democrat D’Amato, proclaiming himself the champion of middle-class conservatism. But there are few Italian Democrats, so Santucci never had a chance. More conspiratorial analysts charged that the Santucci race was a ploy of Queens Democratic leader Donald Manes, who supported Holtzman, in a sneaky effort to take conservative votes away from Myerson and elect the Congresswoman.

In any event, Elizabeth Holtzman surprised observers by the strength and depth of her victory; not only did she overcome the Myerson media blitz, but she carried every New York borough except Manhattan.

The election is still anyone’s guess. Javits is still hanging in there, on the Liberal party line (the Liberals are a fading party of aging Jewish social democrat trade unionists): and it is possible that he and Holtzman will split the Jewish-and-liberal vote enough to allow victory for the obscure D’Amato.

The Boston Anarchists and the Haymarket Incident

by Wendy McElroy (Grosscup)

One of the effects of the Haymarket incident was to polarize the American anarchist movement of the late 1880s into the “Boston” and the “Chicago” factions. This incident occurred in Chicago on May 4th, 1886. As a peaceful street meeting — organized to promote an eight-hour day — was breaking up due to rain, a squad of policemen charged down the street toward the crowd demanding that it disperse. From somewhere within the crowd, a bomb was thrown among the policemen, killing several and inciting the rest to fire randomly into the assembly. Several people died and many were injured.

Although he was demonstrably innocent, A. R. Parsons, one of the speakers and a prominent local anarchist, was accused of tossing the bomb. In the subsequent outburst of anti-anarchist hatred and hysteria, seven other anarchists were arrested and subjected to a sham trial that resulted in the hanging of four of them. (Parsons escaped this fate by committing suicide in his cell.) The other three were given lengthy imprisonments. The extent to which justice was satirized is shown by the fact that one of the three, Oscar Neebe, was not even present at the street meeting and had no part in its planning; he was arrested solely for being on the premises of the Alarm, A. R. Parsons’ paper, when it was raided.

The catalyst for this split between the Boston and Chicago anarchists was the issue of force. The Boston anarchists (so named by Burnette Haskell’s San Francisco Truth, although most of them did not live in Boston) considered force to be the last resort of a civilized man, even when it was morally justified. This position was best exemplified by Benjamin R. Tucker, editor and publisher of the individualist-anarchist journal. Liberty. The Chicago anarchists were basically communist and had a history of advocating force as a means of societal change. They were best exemplified by Dyer D. Lum, a compatriot of the condemned men, who assumed the editorship of the Alarm after A. R. Parsons’s imprisonment and suicide.

Although Tucker was far from a pacifist, he was outraged by the Chicago anarchists’ promotion of force. The editors of the Chicago Arbeiter Zeitung, for example, were said to keep sticks of dynamite on hand solely to impress outside reporters with the true meaning of anarchism. Theoretically stated, the issue was: at what point, if any, does force become a valid means of expression, or resistance? Both factions acknowledged the morality of direct defensive force, for, as Tucker stated in Liberty of May 22, 1886: “The Right to resist oppression by violence is beyond doubt . . .” The dispute centered around his further statements: “In Liberty’s view but one thing can justify its (force’s) exercise on any large scale — namely the denial of free thought, free speech, and a free press.” And: “. . . force settles nothing, and no question is ever settled until it is settled right.”

In that same issue, Henry Appleton, writing under the pseudonym of ‘X’, stirred up the waters by saying: “One of these days Communism will be weeded out of Anarchism, and then thinking people will begin to recognize that the Boston anarchists are the only school of modern sociologists who are in the line of true peace, progress, and good order.”

It is more difficult to directly quote the Chicago anarchists. The Alarm, the Budoucnost, the Vorbote, and the Arbeiter Zeitung, major voices of Communist-anarchism published in Chicago, were suppressed and their editors were imprisoned as Haymarket conspirators. The most direct response was from Dyer D. Lum, who championed their cause. In the next issue of Liberty, he wrote: “The question is not . . . whether ‘The Boston anarchists are ready to denounce the savage Communists of Chicago,’ as ‘X’ puts it, but whether they are ready to calmly philosophize and leave these men to their fate.”

This, of course, was the common charge — that the Boston faction were “philosophical anarchists.” They discussed their beliefs while others fought for them. This accusation was absurd on several levels. It completely ignored the history and the pugnacious nature of Benjamin Tucker, who once risked jail by publishing Walt Whitman’s suppressed Leaves of Grass. It ignored Liberty’s clear, bitter denunciation of the injustice with which the Haymarket martyrs were handled. Moreover, it was a far too convenient way to avoid Tucker’s clear, cogent criticisms: “The Chicago Communists have chosen the violent course, and the result is to be foreseen. Their predicament is due to a resort to methods that Liberty emphatically disapproves . . . Liberty cannot work with them or devote much energy to their defense. If this be “timeserving cowardness,” so be it. Mr. Lum must make the most of it. But he should remember that this is not a question of faith without works. It is a question of difference of faith.”

Victor Yarros, in his article “The ‘Philosophical Anarchists’,” hastened to agree but changed the emphasis: “. . . the Anarchist should make it clear to the oppressor that he knows how to discriminate between a bitter foe, to whom no mercy is to be shown and no quarter given, and a friend, whom we do not cease to love and honor despite severe reproof and censure we may be compelled to pass upon his hasty and irrational actions.” The oppressor, of course, was the police system that imprisoned the Haymarket eight and the judicial system that condemned them. The oppressor was the state.

Tucker shared this view and was not without admiration for these men who were willing to die for beliefs so similar to his own. In response to Yarros, he said: “. . . the Chicago Communists I look upon as brave and earnest men and women. That does not prevent them from being . . . mistaken.”

To many in the radical community, the Haymarket martyrs became saints and a rallying point. Benjamin Tucker’s refusal to accept them as such or to excuse the violence they advocated made him an object of some scorn and suspicion. Nevertheless, he stood sternly by the conviction that force is the last of all possible means that a civilized man can employ.

Is It Legal To Treat Sick Birds?

In October, 1978, Arnold Werschky, M.D., of Mill Valley, California, decided to have some fun with the state medical authorities. He wrote to the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, asking if it were in any way illegal for him to prescribe medicine for someone to treat his sick birds. The birds might well have died before the Board sent its reply: for it took no less than ten months for the improbably named Foone Louie, Staff Counsel, to construct his reply. It is clear from Mr. Louie’s response that the birds would have to die anyway, for the help they could legally get from Dr. Werschky. For, as one might have guessed, they were out of luck. Dr. Werschky’s attempt at saving the birds would be illegal, Foone Louie sternly warned, on two counts: 1) it is unprofessional and illegal for any physician to prescribe or administer dangerous drugs without a “prior good faith examination” of the person? bird? in question. And secondly, how dare Dr. Werschky poach on the territory of the state’s licensed veterinarians? But this priceless correspondence is reproduced below in full. — Ed. Note.

October 4, 1978

Board of Medical Quality Assurance
1430 Howe Avenue
Sacramento, California 95825
Gentlemen:

I have been asked to supply the following medicines: Garamycin Injectable, Garamycin Ointment, Ampicillin Injectable, and Chloramphenicol Injectable, to a person for the intended purpose of caring for and treating his sick birds.

I am wondering, that, if I should supply such medicines and/or drugs, would I in fact be in violation of any law, regulation, directive, desire or inclination, in as much as I am certain of the current law (s) or perhaps your interpretation of the law, I am requesting your direction.

Sincerely,

A. G. Werschky II, M.D.

August 9, 1979

A. G. Werschky II, M. D.
279 Miller Avenue
Mill Valley, California 94941
Dear Dr. Werschky:

You’ve been asked to supply certain drugs to a person for his sick birds. You want to know what laws, if any, might be violated if you did this.

I can think of two, offhand.

It’s unprofessional conduct for a physician to prescribe, dispense or administer dangerous drugs without a prior good faith examination and medical indication therefore. (Section 2399.5, Business and Professions Code.) Drugs requiring a prescription are generally designated dangerous drugs. (B&P 4211) The fact your friend wants the drugs for sick birds is not a legitimate medical reason under B&P 2399.5

On the other hand, it would probably be a technical violation of the state veterinary laws for an M.D. to be in the business of treating sick animals or birds — other than his own pets.

Sincerely,

FOONE LOUIE

Staff Counsel

“Free-Market” Congressman In Action?

When Professor Dr. W. Phillip Gramm, an eloquent and hardhitting champion of free-market economics, was elected to Congress from the 6th district of Texas, many people thought that Congressman “Phil” Gramm (as he was promptly renamed) would he a mighty force for liberty and the rollback of the State. But this seems to be the season for libertarian sellout, and Representative Gramm has been anything but. When Gramm managed to gut a powerful drive for railroad deregulation in order to subsidize Texas coal producers, a young Texas businessman, Austrian economist, and libertarian, Robert Bradley, Jr., took him to task. There followed the full reply of Congressman Gramm and the eloquent rebuttal of Rob Bradley. One of the most interesting aspects of Congressman Gramm’s self-serving reply is that he is taking the now standard line of libertarian sellout: “I of course am for complete liberty, but. . .” The “but” in this case, as in most others, is that some people and some businesses might have to suffer in the short-run if liberty, or in this case total railroad deregulation is to be achieved. Those people living off the public trough, living off the taxpayers and consumers, are going to be temporarily discomfited. The question then is? Are we going to postpone getting liberty into the indefinite future so that these people can continue living parasitically in the style to which they have been accustomed? Or are we going to press on for the cause of liberty and prosperity regardless of inconveniences? Liberty is not always a rose garden — especially for the existing ruling class and those living off the State. The political temptation is to forget principles, and this is what Congressman Gramm has done, perhaps helping to scuttle railroad deregulation altogether. These are the eternal temptations of politics: to abandon principle for the politically expedient: that is, to continue the politicians own perks in office.

Ed. Note

Mr. Robert Lee Bradley, Jr.
1201 McDuffie, No. 150
Houston, Texas 77019

Dear Mr. Bradley:

Thank you for writing to let me know of your dissatisfaction with my vote in support of Congressman Eckhardt’s amendment to the Rail Act of 1980.

As an economist who is firmly committed to competition and free trade, I can understand your view that Congressman Eckhardt’s proposed amendment would be anti-competitive and would continue the federal over-regulation of the railroad industry that has crippled that industry. However, the Rail Act raises questions that are more complex than simply whether regulation is desirable or undesirable, a question about which you and I would have few disagreements.

The present condition of this nation’s railroads results from market forces and government regulations that have their roots in the 1920’s when mass production of automobiles first began to threaten the railroads’ domination of transportation in this country. If we are to again have a vital rail industry, as I believe we must, Congress must act carefully to begin reintroducing competition in the railroad industry while preventing cold water shock treatments that could cause destructive market perturbations. In particular, the coal producers in Texas and neighboring states have become dependent of rail transportation provided at artificially low rates. Many of these producers have no options other than to ship coal on a single available rail line because competition exists neither from other rail lines nor from other modes of transportation. To give the railroads excessive freedom to raise rail rates to such “captive” shippers would create massive dislocations in the coal industry, dislocations that would reverberate throughout the economy of Texas and the economies of slates that depend on Texas coal. I supported Congressman Eckhardt’s amendment and I will support similar efforts that may be introduced when the House reconvenes July 21 because I believe these efforts provide constructive progress toward complete deregulation of the railroad industry while preventing short-term problems that would benefit neither the railroads nor the shippers who depend on the railroads. I appreciate having the opportunity to represent you and other Texans in Congress. If I can be of service to you, please contact me.

Yours respectfully,
Phil Gramm
Member of Congress

Dr. Phillip Gramm
Congress of the United States
House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Dr. Gramm:

I thank you for the explanatory letter dated July 16. Your letter certainly had a better tone than mine, but I am very sensitive about economists-turned-politicians, i.e., those who know better, selling out the market in favor of personal goals. Perhaps you can avoid this criticism since the “Chicago School” brand of market economics, from the writings of its founder, Henry Simons, to its doyen, Milton Friedman, has stressed instances of “market failure” and government “correction” as you claim is the case concerning railroad deregulation. However, many economists of this persuasion — Harold Demsetz for one[1] — have in recent years abandoned this textbook view in favor of the unhampered market. Some of the cogent arguments that have, changed their minds I will attempt to present below.

As I understand your position, you wish to avoid the “cold water shock treatments” of total deregulation of the railroads by retaining the Interstate Commerce Commission’s power to regulate rail rates. This stance has your support since “coal producers in Texas and neighboring states have become dependent on rail transportation provided at artificially low rates” as have the electric utilities and their consumers, and to allow a location monopolist rate freedom would “create massive dislocations” for both the producers and ultimate consumers of the coal. Further, I have learned from a recent Houston Post article that you, along with fellow Representative Jim Wright, are proposing government loan guarantees for a new railroad to operate in the Powder River Basin to “increase” competition.[2]

Before I embark on a critique of the regulation you support, I ask how you can boast of “constructive progress toward complete deregulation” when the basic business decision of rate setting is left in the hands of bureaucrats? According to the Post article cited above, proponents of deregulation see your amendment as so restrictive that the entire deregulation bill will have to be “gutted”. And certainly, if you wish to launch a “private” railroad with government subsidy, the entire industry will that much more be in the hands of the State.

A number of eminent free market economists have brought forth an impressive case against government regulation of “natural monopolies” which I bring to your attention.

First of all, there exists no scientific procedure of discovering what the “right” price should be. Or in Kirzner’ words: “. . . what is the likelihood that government officials, with the best of intentions, will know what imposed prices, say, might evoke the ‘correct’ desired actions by market participants?”[3] After all what is “right” for the railroad company, given its costs, capital requirements and risk, may not be “right” for the producers and consumers of the coal. For, conceding the subjective nature of value, only the market process can balance — in a non-haphazard manner — the forces of supply and demand. Summarizes Mises:

Prices are a market phenomenon. They are generated by the market process and are the pith of the market economy. There is no such thing as prices outside of the market. Prices cannot be constructed synthetically, as it were. They are the resultant of a certain constellation of market data, of actions and reactions of the members of a market society.[4]

Therefore, if the “right” price cannot be found, then the decided upon price from a market standpoint is either too high — thus punishing the consumers and producers of coal or too low — thus undermining the capital requirements of the railroad, in the latter case, this could mean higher future railroad rates from capital disrepair.

Computing an “average rate of return” for the railroad to add to its cost is not an escape in this regard. There is nothing normal about the disequilibrium phenomenon of profits and nothing homogeneous about returns industry to industry and firm to firm within industries. And the cost side of the “cost plus” equation is not objective but subjective as James Buchanan has recently taught the profession, further muddling the government allowable price calculation.[5]

But let us step back and realize that Godlike creatures and value-free econometricians are not in charge of such price determination, as if they could find the “best” price in the situation. The forces at work are bureaucrats and special interest lobbyists — persons having judgment-distorting elements such as personal biases, emotional tendencies, political favoritism, career biases and corruption avenues. And certainly the entire lobbying and testimonial effort is a cost for all parties involved, parties who believe they can costlessly cheapen the market price of railroad services.

So, in all, not only do we see that scientifically a bureaucracy cannot find the “right” price, but that the worst forces will be at work to decide such a price. So much for the textbook correction of market “failure”, in spite of the history of bureaucratic and ICC pricing.

Another line of argument against your position has been receiving wide attention in recent years, specifically since Kirzner’s 1975 Competition and Entrepreneurship. His argument demonstrates the fundamental weakness of equilibrium neoclassical theory in judging market “failure” or “imperfection” — from which your textbook reasoning is derived. The argument is that the government regulation of prices retards the consumer benefits that in the absence of such regulation would accrue from uninhibited entrepreneurship. (In equilibrium, of course, the entrepreneur does not exist.) This is true since, as Kirzner puts it, “nothing in the course of the regulatory process suggests a tendency for as yet unperceived opportunities of resource allocation improvement to be discovered.”[6] To be more specific, in any “cost plus” regulatory environment, entrepreneurial alertness to new methods to minimize costs and service innovations to maximize revenue is stifled though, of course, not entirely eliminated as under socialism. This is very much a cost for the coal parties that economists cannot ignore.

The third line of argument is one you have undoubtedly taught many times in your academic career: the problem of non-market pricing on resource allocation in general. The “artificially low price” you admit exists creates an overutilization of coal and underutilization of coal and transportation substitutes (such as nuclear power and pipeline fuels). These are further costs of your regulatory stand.

In all, the above drawbacks of regulation counter the supposed “massive relocations” of deregulation. In sum, they offer a supportable case for the free market unless (1) an economist rests his case on the first approximations of equilibrium theory to the exclusion of the real world of disequilibrium and bureaucratic realities or (2) a politician rests his case on the special interests of his district. But utilitarian arguments pro and con aside, are you, Dr. Gramm, a true lover of liberty? Do you support the market only when you are convinced it will produce “umpteen more bathtubs”, as Murray Rothbard puts it?

To end this open letter, unless you can convince me that:

(1) bureaucratic pricing is “costless” and a better alternative to market pricing:

(2) entrepreneurship — particularly in the cost minimization sense is not inhibited by price regulation;

(3) resource allocation is satisfactory with an “artificially low” price:

(4) ultimate deregulation, your alleged goal, is helped by continued regulation: and

(5) the market and individual freedom to exchange on non-coercive terms are not to be valued for their own sake; then

I — and all true free market economists and libertarians, many of whom will read this letter — call on you to renounce your claim as “an economist who is firmly committed to competition and free trade”. Having repudiated this noble claim, you, I am sure, will continue to do fine in the political arena. However, future historians will remember you as not only destroying legislation that would have been a rare victory for the market in this day and age, but as one of the many who destroyed the market economy in the twentieth century. Revise your stand immediately and use your influence to tilt the close vote toward passage! The legislature, after all, is still in session. And please, write me such a letter if I were to ever put politics and personal gain over liberty!

Sincerely yours,
Rob Bradley, Jr.

Footnotes

1) For example, see his “Why Regulate Utilities?” in Yale Brozen, ed.. The Competitive Economy (Morristown, J. J.: General Learning Press. 1975) for sophisticated arguments explaining competition with so-called location monopoly instances.

2) “House’s OK of rail decontrol amendment may spell end of measure for this session”, The Houston Post, July 25, 1980, 1-A.

3) Kirzner, “The Perils of Regulation: A Market-Process Approach”. Law and Economics Center Occasional Paper, The University of Miami (1978), p. 15.

4) Mises, Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1949), p. 395.

5) See Buchanan’s Cost and Choice (Chicago: Markham, 1969).

6) Kirzner. op. cit., p. 16.

Bloated and Swollen

We are always glad to allocate credit (or blame) where due, and so we are happy to publish Mr. Riggenbach’s letter claiming responsibility for some of the peccadilloes of Libertarian Review. But we must reiterate that Roy Childs, as the proclaimed “The Editor”, must take responsibility for the ultimate decisions that constitute the magazine. But Riggenbach’s letter raises an interesting point: Just how much time does “The Editor” spend on his cherished periodical? Is anyone minding the store at LR? Or is “The Editor” using his post as a sinecure from which to politic endlessly around the country, and to exercise his alleged talents as a demogogice rabble-rouser?

Editor Note.

Dear Editor:

As one of the “bloated and swollen” editors of The Libertarian Review. I must protest the shabby misrepresentation of me (or, rather, non representation of me) which appeared in your March-April issue. I not only conceive myself to be at least one-half of the libertarian movement (though there are those who argue that as only one of four editors at LR. I can at most conceive of myself as one-fourth of the movement); I am also so “puffed with hubris” that I resent seeing others receive credit for what were in fact my accomplishments. I was the LR editor who chose the famous prosolar, anti-“Big Oil” cartoon by Mike Peters. I was the creator of the “childish ad in the classified section” which George Smith so sactimoniously informed your readers “typifies the intellectual level at which Roy Childs chooses to conduct this debate.” I demand credit for my own hard won childishness and intellectual insignificance! They are, after all, my bread and butter. Let Roy Childs be content with receiving proper credit for his own “dishonest.” “irresponsible,” “harebrained,” and “unfair” work. He doesn’t need credit for mine as well.

Jeff Riggenbach
Executive Editor
The Libertarian Review

Isolationiam Reconsidered

by Barry D. Riccio

NOT TO THE SWIFT, Justus Doenecke, Bucknell University Press, 1980, 289 pages, $8.95

For libertarians and pacifists alike, 1980 will prove to be a rather depressing year. No more so, perhaps, than any other election year, but nonetheless there is a special reason for despair this autumn. We are told repeatedly by both major-party candidates that the choice is real and the ideological contrast stark. Yet, really, is there all that much difference between the Scylla of Mr. Reagan’s Pentagon capitalism (to borrow Seymour Melman’s term) and the Charybdis of President Carter’s guns-and-butter liberalism? To be sure, Mr. Carter and his cohorts are not as strident in their rhetoric as are the Reaganite reactionaries, but there is now palpable evidence that at least in some matters (e.g., the grain embargo, the Olympic boycott, and draft registration) the President has attempted to out-Reagan Reagan, and has done a rather successful job of it, to boot. And the Republicans? With that former denizen of Hollywood at their helm, they proffer us the laudable objective of slashing our taxes at home along with drastically increasing our commitments abroad. At one and the same time they deliver pious bromides on the virtues of a balanced budget. One need not be schooled in the nuances of formal logic to perceive a glaring contradiction gnawing at the heart of Republican Party policy, and more significantly, conservative ideology in general. Murray Rothbard put it well in the pages of Inquiry not so long ago:

How can we reconcile the plea for individual liberty, the free market, and the minimizing of government with the call for global confrontation and increased power to the FBI and the Pentagon? How can an economy be free of government control when an ever greater share is to be deflected to military use? How can a free market be reconciled with an aggrandized military-industrial complex?

There are many of my generation who would indeed be surprised (nay, shocked) to learn that there once was a sizeable number of conservatives (and especially Republicans) who not only recognized the contradictions pointed out above but also did much to oppose the militaristic tendencies of both parties. In criticizing the aggressive foreign policy adventurism of the Truman Administration, these conservative gadflies often dissented from what many revisionist historians have dubbed “the Cold War consensus”. (This consensus stretched so widely that it could later include a Barry Goldwater on its right fringe and a Norman Thomas on its left fringe.) To be sure, a good many of the critics of the early Cold War were leftists and socialists, but the non-interventionism of the right wing had recent history on its side. After all, the vast majority of those who opposed U.S. entry into the Second World War were of the right. In part their opposition to that war stemmed from their intense dislike for “That Man”, alias Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a politician about whom we’ve been hearing quite a bit lately (from Democrats, Republicans, and partisans of National Unity alike). But it would be unfair to these, gentlemen of the right to indulge in such simplistic monocausationism. For their hostility towards Roosevelt was both part and parcel of their hostility towards Big Government in general. And today’s Governor Reagan notwithstanding, these men realized that Washington could be the biggest beneficiary of a bellicose foreign policy.

It is the story of these men that is told in Justus Doenecke’s Not to the Swift. Close students of American pacifism and non-interventionism probably are familiar with Doenecke’s extended bibliographical essay, The Literature of Isolationsim. His most recent work is marked by that same judiciousness of temperament that has so distinguished all his earlier writings. Thoroughly researched, carefully organized, and extremely well-written, Dr. Doenecke’s book is a treat to read. Where else could one learn that Frank Lloyd Wright and Sinclair Lewis were non-interventionists in 1940 (save, perhaps, in biographies of those individuals) and that young Gerald Ford contributed to the coffers of the America First Committee? True, all students of isolationism have benefited greatly from Wayne Cole’s America First, but Doenecke provides us with an exhaustive treatment of these selfsame isolationists discussed in Cole’s work (and then some) throughout the entire early Cold War period. By no means, however, can Not to the Swift be labeled a sequel, for Doenecke does not confine himself to any one organization. His is an account of “the isolationist impulse” (to use a term coined in Selig Adler’s book of the same name, a rather snide and sneering account of our isolationist heritage). However, Doenecke casts a wider net than did revisionist Ronald Radosh in the truly pathbreaking Prophets on the Right.

Doenecke eschews any narrowly reductionist approach to his subject. Thus he finds fault with all of the single-factor hypotheses which have been invoked to explain (and oftentimes explain away) the roots of isolationism. Certainly, Doenecke admits, there was an ethnic dimension to American isolationism. This dimension found expression to some extent in both Oswald Garrison Villard and Henry Regnery (both of whom were either German-educated or virtually Germanophile) and to a much greater extent in Senator William Langer, who represented a largely German (and rural) constituency. But, avers Doenecke, in an implicit rebuttal to Sam Lubell’s The Future of American Politics, an exclusively ethnic interpretation of isolationism will hardly suffice, as the overwhelming majority of isolationists were WASPS. Emphasis upon the geographical sources of American isolationism has also been misleading, Doenecke contends. While in large part accepting Reinhold Niebuhr’s dichotomy of the eastern internationalist financier and the midwestern isolationist manufacturer (the latter of whom was not nearly as dependent upon experts as the former), Doenecke points out that the Mississippi Valley had at the turn of the century been as congenial to expansionism as it later was to non-intervention. So much for geographical determinism.

What about economics? Surely there must have been some relationship between one’s economic status and his stance on foreign policy issues, as hinted at by the Niebuhr example above. There damn well was according to Doenecke, and in this connection cites the support given the Marshall Plan by both the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. But the economic aspect of isolationism (not unlike its geographical aspect) was closely intertwined with yet another, namely the rural-urban divisions in American society. As a rule, right-wing isolationists were far more suspicious of the city than were either conservative or liberal interventionists. Regarding this there is that unforgettable quote from Louis Taber, a man who was at once a luminary of America First and a National Grange master. Taber defined cities as places “where there were slums and dirt, and noise, and filth and corruption and saloons and prostitutes”. Yet another “explanation” of isolationism (popular during World War pointed primarily to anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Both of these found expression in Representatives Clare Hoffman and John Rankin, but, as Doenecke takes pains to point out, these men were a minority within a minority.

What makes Doenecke’s interpretation a refreshing one is the author’s ability to take ideas and attitudes seriously and on their own terms, rather than as reflexes of, say, class, race, or ethnicity. For Doenecke American isolationism was first and foremost an ideology, and an ideology deeply embedded in the American experience. Puritan theology, the American wilderness and physical separation from the Old World all conjoined to make American isolationism what it was — a distinctive blend of moralism, nationalism, and individualism. This was also an ideology that had roots in the writings of the eighteenth-century Commonwealth men and the American War for Independence. And it was an ideology that slowly began crumbling under severe social, economic, and international stresses with the advent of what Henry Luce once labeled the American century. According to most commentators, its swan song was sung with the defeat of the Bricker Amendment in the mid-1950’s.

Yet “a funny thing happened on the way to” Indochina a decade later. It was now becoming acceptable, almost fashionable, in fact, in certain left-liberal circles to sound like an isolationist even if one would never apply that opprobrious term to oneself. Of course, to mainstream Republicans who had long ago repudiated the “provincial” wing of their party (Richard Nixon, for example) the word “isolationism” was still an epithet. Now, though, the politics of our foreign policy had come full circle. During the Nixon Administration conservatives found themselves not only supporting an imperial presidency (long an object of their) but also a futile, costly, and vicious war in Southeast Asia. At the same time many liberals began heeding the admonitions of the Taft conservatives of a generation earlier. Dr. Doenecke puts us in his service by documenting the close affinities between what the isolationists of yesteryear were saying and what the neo-isolationists of my generation have been articulating. Not only did the “old” or “veteran” isolationists warn of the dangers of a bloated bureaucracy and profligate government spending; they also waged a veritable verbal holy war on imperialism. Senator Taft did not hesitate to attack the foreign policy of the Truman Administration as “imperialistic”, while the Chicago Tribune waxed eloquent in its fierce denunciations of both British and French colonialism. The Chicago industrial magnate Sterling Morton went so far as to compare Vietminh nationalists to the American revolutionaries. One of the most stalwart of the old isolationists actually perceived the Truman Doctrine as an example of “petro-diplomacy” and even had some words of sympathy for the Communist-supported Greek rebels. This same individual, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, accused the United States government of adhering to a double standard. How, Johnson asked, could our government defend its own right to control Panama on the one hand, and, on the other hand, deny the Soviets the right to control the Dardanelles? Not only were the isolationists of the early Cold War era harbingers of the neo-isolationist critique of the sixties and seventies; certain aspects of their own critique of U.S. foreign policy were not all that far removed from those of George Kennan and Walter Lippmann.

The above examples go a long way toward suggesting that many of the isolationists were by no means head-in-the-sand ostriches, completely ignorant of foreign affairs and insensitive to the plight of other nations. (Their fervent indictment of our government’s “rape” of Germany bears out this point even further.) And at least a few of the old isolationists (Felix Morley and Edwin Borchard, to name the most eminent) had been quite active in internationalist endeavors prior to World War II. It is a rather sad commentary on political semantics, though, that it should be that former isolationist-turned interventionist Arthur Vandenberg who comes real and—or was in large part a function of which party was in

Not to Professor Doenecke’s mind, however. To many a superannuated isolationist, I am sure, Doenecke’s description of Vandenberg alone is worth the price of this book. For the Sarasota academician paints an acid-etched portrait of the Michigan Senator as an opportunist par excellence, with one eye out for the Polish vote and another eye out for the Detroit auto manufacturers. In the eyes of many a Vandenberg foe, the Senator was so vain that “he could strut sitting down”. Doenecke also repeats the rumor of non-candidate Vandenberg carrying an acceptance speech in his pocket during the 1948 Presidential Convention. The upshot of Doenecke’s discussion of Vandenberg, however, is not to cast aspersions on the Senator’s character. Rather, it is to demonstrate that throughout his career and on a myriad of issues, ranging from Yalta to NATO to intervention in Asia, Senator Vandenberg concealed a neo-nationalist fist behind his internationalist glove. In fact, Doenecke asseverates, “internationalism” more often than not was simply a smokescreen for unilateral military action overseas.

Ironies abound in this masterful magnum opus. Who would have imagined that the conservative industrialist Robert R. Young and the ultra-rightist broadcaster Upton Close actually anticipated the “Alperovitz thesis” of atomic diplomacy? Or that Frank Hanighen of Human Events forecasted the, Sino-Soviet split? Or that crusty old Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune was an inveterate critic of Open Door diplomacy long before William Appleman Williams even attained maturity? Perhaps the most delicious irony of all, however, is the case of Lawrence Dennis. Dennis was a self-proclaimed “fascist” who proved to be the most consistent (and persistent) critic of Cold War militarism. In fact, the anti-war utterances of a Fulbright or a Church in the late sixties pale in comparison to those of Dennis.

Is that so astonishing, though? In the wake of the Iranian crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the phantom Soviet brigade in Cuba, many if not most congressional liberals have demonstrated their commitment to the cause of non-interventionism to be lukewarm at best. And who could expect otherwise? As Doenecke makes clear in a number of passages throughout his book, it is the liberals who must bear a major responsibility for not only the debacle in Vietnam but also for the thrust of our entire Cold War policy. Concurring with the judgments of historian Stephen Ambrose, Doenecke declares unequivocally that the Cold War was, for the most part, the liberals’ war. True, most conservatives were far from innocent bystanders or reluctant participants, but it was the liberals who seized the initiative and defined the terms. And what of the much vaunted American liberal devotion to tolerance? As Doenecke’s account reveals, any number could play the baneful game of red-baiting. The New Republic went so far as to speak seriously of “the Stalinist caucus in the Tribune tower (that) would bring out in triumph the first Communist edition of the Chicago Tribune”. Senator Robert Taft was repeatedly accused of being an “appeaser” of the Soviets, as were other even more intransigent isolationists. And so on, and so on. Whether the onus for this state of affairs should be placed on liberalism as ideology as well as on liberalism in practice is to many a problematic issue. To the more radical critics of U.S. foreign policy, however, to refuse to condemn the philosophy while indicting the public policy is merely Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.

In all fairness, though, liberalism cannot and should not be made the scapegoat for our foreign policy sins. Doenecke not only realizes this but does justice to the complexity of his subject by refusing to engage in special pleading, “One can no more responsibly isolate elements in the isolationist world view,” he states, “pulling out the favorable and dismissing the rest, than one can selectively clip a person’s thought in the middle of a sentence.” It is to Doenecke’s credit that he recognizes the old isolationists were often weak in their insights, unsound in their judgments, and inconsistent in their proclamations.

In fact, on the basis of the evidence supplied in Doenecke’s book alone, one could make a plausible case that American isolationism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. To be sure, we cannot ignore (and Doenecke emphatically does not) the importance of exogenous factors behind the waning of isolationism. For one, the advent of increasing industrialization and urbanization served to erode that ideology’s largely rural base. For another, there was the simple matter of attrition. Death, illness, and defeat at the polls robbed the isolationists of many of their more preeminent spokesmen. There is also the interpretation put forward by Eric Goldman in The Crucial Decade: 1949 was indeed a “year of shocks”, what with the explosion of an atom bomb in Russia, the coming to power of Mao Tse-Tung in mainland China, and the Alger Hiss trial. Under drastically altered circumstances it is hardly surprising that many a World War II isolationist gradually began marching to the tune of a different drummer. And one cannot neglect the impact that the liberals’ smear campaign against the isolationists during World War II must have had. Should we be surprised, then, that right-wing isolationists of the Cold War era became increasingly strident in tone, bitter in spirit, and intolerant in action? Of course all of this rendered them even more ineffective.

Yet we romanticize these “prophets on the right” at our own peril. For we simply cannot afford to overlook the sundry flies in the isolationist ointment. There is first of all the question of sincerity, a problem before which the courageous Doenecke does not flinch. For some isolationists (e.g. Congressman George Bender) devotion to non-interventionism was more rhetorical than real and—or was in large part a function of which party was in power. Thus the force behind much of the isolationist impulse was greatly attenuated by the election of Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and an impeccable conservative, although by no means an isolationist. Doenecke also questions just how genuine many of the isolationists were in their praise of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations. After blasting the U.N. for its alleged cynicism, several isolationists actually went so far as to suggest that the powers of the General Assembly be strengthened when such a suggestion proved to be to their political advantage.

And then there is the issue of nationalism. If the isolationists occasionally could sound as libertarian as Thoreau, at other times they could sing the praises of the military ethic as lyrically as could any four-star general. In fact, many isolationists themselves had military backgrounds. The careers of both General Wood of Sears Roebuck and Colonel McCormick of the Tribune offered cold comfort indeed to a real pacifist. And the response of most isolationists to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, at least as far as the moral issue goes, a rather cavalier one. That many of them could rally as readily as they did behind the banner of the perniciously pompous General Douglas MacArthur is yet another index of how much they had mired themselves in the muck of militarism. There is irony here 100, for the General was far from an isolationist, both during and after World War H. Nor was Senator Joseph McCarthy much of an isolationist either, however, that hardly precluded most isolationists from enlisting in his service. For McCarthy was a nationalist, albeit of a rather crude sort, and his opponents had long been the opponents of isolationism. The isolationists’ logic was similar to that of the conservative commentator Morrie Ryskind who, during the Watergate affair, argued tirelessly that all true believers in conservatism should defend the President because his detractors were invariably of the liberal persuasion. Moreover, a good many isolationists perceived McCarthyism as a cheaper and more viable way of combatting Communism than intervention overseas; by concentrating on the “red menace” at home, the American government could be far more effective than if it pursued “pinkos” in distant lands.

Ah, yes, distant lands. Many a scholar would argue that it was precisely the isolationists’ devotion to a distant land that did them in. It is not a far-fetched claim to say that “Asialationism” was the Achilles heel of American isolationism. Somehow, and in some way, all of the trenchant arguments that the isolationists had advanced against intervention in Europe were conveniently forgotten when the subject of China and Taiwan (and to a lesser extent. South Korea) came up. As Doenecke points out, virtually all of their telling criticisms of the Truman Doctrine applied even more so to the case of Asia. Yet it was the Asialationists who became exponents of the domino theory long before it became fashionable in the circle of the best and the brightest. (The erstwhile isolationist William Henry Chamberlin went so far as to propose a Marshall Plan for Asia to check Communist aggression.) At times it was difficult to tell which was the more isolationist, the Truman Administration or its isolationist critics. After all, it was the latter group which, along with General MacArthur, wished to broaden the Korean conflict. Logic, though, was not the forte of the Asialationists. (Hubert Humphrey facetiously proposed that Senator Taft be given a “doctor of laws in inconsistency” for his stance on Asia.) Those isolationists who took a “tough” position on Asian questions could not see that their own charge of inconsistency leveled at the Truman Administration might well prove to be a double-edged sword. For the price they might have to pay for increased commitment to, say, China, could well be even greater intervention in Europe. The China Lobby realized this, even if our isolationist friends did not.

It is an ambiguous legacy, then, that American isolationism has bequeathed to us. On the one hand, we can only benefit from its astute criticisms of the abuses of power and the follies of foreign aid. On the other hand, there were certain glaring deficiencies in the isolationist ideology that cannot be wished away. And it is the least lovely aspects of that heritage that are coming to the fore as American political conservatives launch their way into the eighties. With historian Manfred Jonas, Doenecke notes that a belief in unilateral military action has been a persistent thread running throughout America’s right wing, in the past, though, we could be consoled that this nationalistic strain of American conservatism would be tempered by at least a modicum of libertarianism and pacifism. Today, alas, we can have no such consolation.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter
—— Special Election Double Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. XIII, NUMBERS 5-6

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER, 1980

US-ISSN0047-4S17

The Clark Campaign: Never Again

“O Liberty! O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”

— Madame Roland

The proper epitaph for the Clark campaign is this: “And they didn’t even get the votes.” Libertarian principle was betrayed, the LP platform ignored and traduced, our message diluted beyond recognition, the media fawned upon — all for the goal of getting “millions” (2-3, 3-5 or whatever) of votes. And they didn’t even do that. All they got for their pains was a measly 1% of the vote.[1] They sold their souls — ours, unfortunately, along with it — for a mess of pottage, and they didn’t even get the pottage. Maybe they’ll demand a recount. Extrapolating from the Clark gubernatorial campaign of 1978 — as they liked to do last winter — they in effect promised us 4.6 million votes. (5.5% of the total). They got less than a million.

The Clark/Koch campaign was a fourfold disaster, on the following counts: betrayal of principle; failure to educate or build cadre; fiscal irresponsibility; and lack of votes.

Betrayal of principle is of course the most important, as well as the most extensive, category. The campaign was marked throughout, in strategy and in tactics, by deception and duplicity. The platform was ignored, the message distorted. Basic principles were evaded and buried. The Clark defenders maintain that, in many of the instances of betrayal, he took a good stand from time to time — generally not in front of the media but before small libertarian audiences. My reply to all these feeble defenses is simply this: It’s a helluva note when all we have to fall back on is the inconsistency of our candidate.

1. Back To Camelot

The Back To Camelot theme, arguably the single most odious aspect of the Clark campaign, reached its apogee on the ABC-TV national Nightline program (11:30 P.M. EST) a few days before the election. Commoner and Clark were each invited to give a brief, one-minute summary of their respective programs. Commoner, with his usual forthrightness, summed up his platform as a governmental assault on the corporations. And Clark? Here was the entire libertarian position of the man whom Libertarian Review has had the chutzpah to refer to as “Mr. President”: We want to get back to the tax and spending and inflation levels of the Kennedy administration. When the puzzled interviewer asked for clarification, Ed Clark reiterated the theme: “We want to get back to the kind of government that President Kennedy had in the early 1960’s.” At this point, the rather bewildered interviewer, thinking naturally that Libertarians were some species of left-wing Democrat, wanted to know why we didn’t end it all by merging with the Citizens Party. To which Clark replied no, they are believers in centralized power whereas we are in favor of decentralization.

So no wonder that Tom Wicker and all the rest of the liberal media loved Clark during the campaign! And here I had thought for two decades that Kennedy was one of the Bad Guys! Live and learn!

But of course in the Clark campaign there were no Bad Guys. One of the mendacious aspects of the campaign was the hiding, the distortion of our platform and our principles. Another was the strong impression given by the Clark commercials that there are no Bad Guys and no conflict. Every American is going to join Clark in celebrating “A New Beginning, Amer-i-ca”; there will be no pain, for anyone, not even briefly, as we all march into the new dawn. No bureaucrats will lose their jobs, no specially privileged will be kicked out of the public trough. All sweetness and light and jingles. The Clark generation.

But of course this is all pap and nonsense. The advent of liberty will immeasurably benefit most Americans. But some will lose — those who have been exploiting us and feeding at the public trough. And these special interests and ruling elites will not surrender their ill-gotten gains so readily. They will fight like hell to keep it. Libertarianism is not a message of treacle and Camelot; it is a message of struggle. What will happen to those who have joined up thinking that all they have to do is sing and pull a lever to achieve victory? Won’t they be the first summer soldiers to fade away when the going gets a little tough? How are these supposed new recruits to be prepared, for a protracted struggle against the State?

The Kennedy theme was a leitmotif throughout the campaign. The infamous Clark White Paper on Taxing And Spending Reduction which the campaign played up heavily and took out big ads listing the endorsers, was repugnant partly because it assured the readers that the projected budget cuts in the first year of the Clark administration should not be thought of as radical. After all, they would only return us to the budget, in real terms, of the Kennedy regime of 1962. Which was one of the things wrong with it.

And then there were subliminal messages: there was the Clark brochure with our candidate standing in front of a picture of Jack Kennedy; and there was the Clark TV commercial promise that he was “bringing a message of hope” to the American people. There was the graceless imitation of the jabbing Kennedy finger of the right hand in the anti-draft commercial; and the Clark hair in the late commercial that seemed uncannily made up to look like Jack Kennedy’s.

So it’s to be Camelot again. And, gentlemen, who is going to be dunked in the White House pool? (To mix our Presidents, we all know who is slated to be the new Haldeman)

It was almost enough to make one vote for Jimmy Carter. After all, inept as he was, he did manage to whup some Kennedy ass.

2. Low-Tax Liberalism

Meshing neatly with the Camelot theme was Clark’s oft-reiterated favorite summary slogan of libertarianism: “low-tax liberalism.” We are of course not, repeat not, “low tax liberals.” We are no-tax libertarians. The “low tax liberal” scam was clearly designed to suck in the media, who were seen, not very incorrectly, as being moderate liberals. How better to get favorable media attention than to pretend to be just one more moderate liberal? And, the calculation went, if we get media attention, we will get more votes, and votes are the name of the game, right?

Wrong. The purpose of an LP electoral campaign is not to get as many votes as possible. If that were the objective, then the place to go for votes is the Democratic or Republican parties. The purpose of any campaign is, in the short-run, twofold: to educate the electorate in libertarian principles, and to find more libertarians and bring them into the party (“party-building” or “cadre building”). The third, long-run, objective is to get into office so as to roll back the State.

But the evident strategy of Clark, his campaign chief Edward H. Crane III, and the other handlers was to maximize the number of votes, so as to fool the media and the public and the politicians into thinking that we really have millions of dedicated libertarians. In short, their purpose was not to build cadre, or to start the march for the long haul, but to reap a quick success by use of mirrors: using lots of money and slick media commercials to con everyone into thinking we are really a mammoth movement. Libscam!

Many of the specific deviations and horror stories committed by the Clark campaign were denied by the handlers, attributing them all to bumbles, misprints, typos, et al. But not only did too many of these alleged bumbles pile up, they all slanted in one direction. How come that all of the “bumbles” pointed one way: to creating a media image of libertarianism as “low tax liberalism”, that is, as approximately the same ideology as the readers — and more importantly the writers — of the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS News, etc.? In short, that we are a likeable, nonthreatening group who believe in slightly lower taxes, in a more efficient version of the welfare state, in moderate civil liberties, and in a moderately dovish stance abroad. Sort of a Jerry Brown Democrat. That we achieved this part of our objective can be seen in the fact that Tom Wicker and a whole bunch of other media people liked us. But did they vote for us?

3. Keeping the Welfare State

A genuine libertarian stance, like our platform, must be abolitionist; that is, we must not ourselves embrace gradualism as in some way better than an immediate achievement of the libertarian goal. Because, if we do so, this means that we are holding something else to be more important than the achievement of liberty. And that means that we are no longer libertarians. In the words of the great Strategy Statement, adopted by the National Committee of the L.P. several years ago, and the forgotten stepchild of the Clark campaign: “Holding high our principles means avoiding completely the quagmire of self-imposed, obligatory gradualism: we must avoid the view that, in the name of fairness, abating suffering, or fulfilling expectations, we must temporize and stall on the road to liberty. Achieving liberty must be our overriding goal.”

And this means, too, that Libertarians must not commit themselves to any particular order of destatization. We must not present a four-year plan, saying we will Cut Tax X by a certain percent. Cut Budget Y by a certain figure, etc. in the first year, then a bit more in the second year, etc. For this would imply that any greater tax cut or budget cut in any of these areas is bad, would be combatted by a Libertarian President. We must never act so as to close the door on more and more destatization, wherever and whenever we could achieve it. The relevant question is this: If President Clark introduced his 30% tax cut scheme in next year’s Congress, and some principled Libertarian Congressman amended the bill to repeal the infamous income tax altogether, would President Clark veto it?

Again, the Strategy Statement says: “We must not commit ourselves to any particular order of destatization, for that would be construed as our endorsing the continuation of statism and the violation of rights. Since we must never be in the position of advocating the continuation of tyranny, we should accept any and all destatizing measures wherever and whenever we can.”

But the Clark campaign did just the opposite. From the beginning, Clark expressly stated that we must cut all subsidies to business before we can even conceive of slashing the welfare state. In his first formulation, Clark vowed not to cut welfare until private charity voluntarily assumed that burden (fat chance!), or, next formulation, until “full employment” is achieved. So it is not only back to Kennedy, but also back to Keynes! Are we to pick up on these two gentlemen just when they are finally being repudiated by one and all? There is no such thing as “full employment”. Employment depends on wage rates, and, must I point this out to a libertarian reader?, welfare payments reduce the net wage a person can earn by working. Hence, the higher the welfare payments, the more the unemployment. Are we to repudiate elementary economics as well as libertarianism?

In Clark’s odious White Paper on Spending and Taxation, welfare is kept virtually intact. And Clark manages to find a way out of having to advocate even eventual abolition of welfare: in his neo-Lafferite vision, one year’s thirty percent budget cut (only returning us to Kennedy!) would so enormously increase jobs, production, and prosperity that no one would be on welfare anyway. Thus we see a typical example of Clark’s evading the necessity of making hard choices or statements that might lose some votes; worse yet, the supposed new converts among the public are not being prepared for the nasty fact that the budget cut would not eliminate welfare clientele because the incentive to remain on welfare — free handouts — would remain unbreached.

But we cannot eliminate welfare until we reach neo-Lafferite heaven, Clark is strongly implying, because of the suffering of those removed from the welfare rolls. But what happens to the libertarian insight that welfare is bad for its clients, not helpful; and what happened to the Strategy Statement? Blankout.

4. The Order of Destatization

Despite the Strategy Statement, the Clark White Paper commits us to a specific and detailed order of destatization in the first year of the Clark administration. No other candidate bothers with such a detailed program. Why must we? To look “Presidential”. To look “respectable.” Like a low-tax liberal. There are some gratifying abolitions and cuts, but there are some mysterious omissions. Why isn’t the Department of Agriculture abolished? Or the Federal Reserve? Or the FBI? And who can shout hosannahs for Back to Kennedy, anyway?

Moreover, the White Paper is far worse than a Four Year Plan. For it only commits Clark to one year’s worth of cuts. And that’s it. This is far worse than mere “gradualism”. For the ultimate goal is not simply downplayed, but drops out altogether. Which makes Clark seem like a slightly more libertarian John Anderson (or Jack Kennedy?) rather than a genuine Libertarian. Another crucial part of the Strategy Statement is here violated: “Any intermediate demand must be treated, as it is in the LP platform, as pending achievement of the pure goal and inferior to it. Therefore, any such demand should be presented as leading toward our ultimate goal, not as an end in itself.” But the Clark White Paper merely points to the first year program, and then says, wildly, that these cuts will be so beneficial, will lead to so much prosperity, etc. that the public will raise a clamor for further budget and tax cuts, after which President Clark would be happy in’ taking the lead to achieve them. I should hope he would at least tail after public opinion. But we are supposed to be the vanguard of libertarian opinion; what is the Party except leading the way to liberty?

Moreover, how long is it supposed to take for the public clamor to arise? Instantaneously, as in Laffer’s increased revenue from tax cuts? How many years? And in the meantime, before the clamor, it is clearly implied that President Clark would sit on his laurels and do nothing further to achieve liberty.

5. The Tax Cut

Libertarians are nothing if not anti-taxation, and it is therefore our duty to take the lead in pushing for “drastic” (as the platform calls it) cuts in taxation, pointing toward its eventual abolition. It therefore behooves us never to allow ourselves to be outflanked by other groups; never to allow any other group to be more libertarian than the LP on taxation. And yet, the Liberty Amendment people, calling for the repeal of the 16th Amendment and abolition of the income tax, have been toiling in the vineyard for many years. We owe it to truth and justice and liberty not to fall behind the Liberty Amendment people. Instead, Clark calls for a piddling 30% tax cut. Shortly after his nomination, Clark appeared at a press conference in Denver, at which he expressly repudiated the Liberty Amendment as “too radical.” For shame!

Defending his piddling cut, Clark, in an interview with the L.A. Times, said that we could not cut the corporate income tax at this time. Like hell we couldn’t! But I suppose that this would be considered too radical, too extreme, by Tom Wicker and our other buddies at the New York Times.

Clark has devoted a great deal of time to showing that the Reagan proposed Kemp-Roth 30% tax cut (at least before Reagan’s shift to the center) is really much less than his 30% cut. Frankly, I’m not much interested, and I don’t think the voters were either. It is absurd and shameful for a libertarian candidate to run up and down demonstrating in detail that our tax cut is greater than the Republican proposal. We shouldn’t have to spend a lot of energy on such demonstrations. Our anti-tax superiority should be crystal-clear to all. For example, if we called for repeal of the income tax. Not only the Liberty Amendment people, but even John Rarick, the American Independent Party candidate for President this year, called for repeal of the income tax. How dare we be less libertarian than they?

Suppose they ask us what specific budget cuts we would make? But apart from calling for abolition of a bunch of departments, we don’t have to spell out our budget in detail. And we wouldn’t, if we weren’t captivated by the idea of looking “Presidential.” We could simply say. “That’s their (the bureaucrats), headache. We’ll cut their budget by say 90 percent, and let them figure out where to allocate it.”

And while we’re at it, while up in Wyoming, Clark endorsed the controversial state tax on coal, which is beloved of Wyoming citizens of all political persuasions because they are thereby mulcting the national coal corporations. Clark is quoted as endorsing the tax because “coal is a non-renewable resource.” So what? The Clark handlers have intimated that this was a bumble or misquote, but if that is the case, why was the press clipping on this sent out as part of the official Clark literature? Even “free-market” Senator Wallop supports the tax, so perhaps this gained Clark a few votes in Wyoming.

6. Social Security

The Social Security system is not only coercive; it is the biggest single racket of all the welfare state programs. It is also bankrupt, and many people now understand this fact. Instead of taking the bull by the horns, following the platform and calling for the abolition of this system, Clark calls for a 35-year phase-out (there’s “gradualism”, with a vengeance!), while in the meantime, everyone 40 and over must stay in the program and can mulct other taxpayers for the rest of their lives. Even the Clarkian “ideal” or “ultimate” program is scarcely ideal; it involves a network of tax exemptions for individual retirement funds. There is nothing wrong with tax credits and exemptions as a step toward the ideal of no taxes, but it is a betrayal of principle to term this an “ideal.” Tax credits, after all, distort the economy, and will continue to do so until the day of tax abolition. Furthermore, in the Clark White Paper on Social Security, even the “ideal” and “ultimate” explicitly includes retaining the welfare system. Except that, again in Clark’s neo-Lafferite buncombe, “increasingly, as Libertarian administration frees the economy and produces economic growth”, in which case “voluntary, charitable institutions” would be allowed to take over the welfare functions (Clark, White Paper on Social Security Reform).

Once again, a more efficient, more streamlined, welfare state is the Clark program.

And what happened to our platform, which demands that Social Security be abolished forthwith, and that payments to meet expectations be met by selling off government land and other property? Too extreme, of course.

7. Money and Inflation

Clark and his handlers know damned well that the cause of inflation — America’s No. 1 economic problem and the No. 1 issue of the 1980 campaign is the Federal Reserve’s continued expansion of the money supply. They also know that the only cure for this is to stop the Fed, in short to abolish it and return to a market commodity money like gold. And yet Clark persisted throughout the campaign in falsely identifying federal deficits as the cause of inflation. In his infamous White Paper on Spending and Taxation the major Clark showpiece of the campaign for which they obtained extensive ads and support — there was not a mention of Fed responsibility. Quite the contrary. The public was assured that if the Clark 30% budget and revenue cut were put into effect, this would end inflation.

What is more, the detailed Clark budget made no mention whatever of the Fed, of whether it would be cut or not. Presumably it would not be abolished, again despite the clear-cut call of the LP platform.

So base and mendacious was the Clark campaign that when Clark kicked off his White Paper at the American Economic Council meeting in Los Angeles — a gold standard, anti-Fed, outfit — he failed to mention either the Fed or gold, giving his standard balanced budget (i.e. Keynesian) line. Even when asked pointblank by one of the libertarian gold advocates at the press conference where he stood on the gold standard, Clark ducked it, and finally stated lamely that he favored a “gradual return to the gold standard.”

Anyone who knows anything about gold or money knows that there ain’t no such thing as a “gradual return”; either one is on gold or off it. A gradual return to gold makes as much sense as someone being “gradually pregnant.” Gradualism gone berserk!

When Clark came a cropper at the gold standard group’s press conference, Ed Crane’s characteristic way of handling the situation was to denounce the libertarian gold-bug for raising the issue and thus hurting the Clark fund-raising. Typically, the manipulator blames the person who reveals the truth.

Later in the campaign, under severe pressure by outraged libertarian economists, Clark did, at various points, endorse the gold standard, as well as issue a paper by myself on the causes and remedies for inflation., But all this was grudging and low-key. The real, upfront discussion was balanced budget all the way.

Now, why is this? There can be only one answer. Because John Anderson-type, New York Times-type liberals all favor a balanced budget (who doesn’t, at least in theory?) but they get edgy and nervous when they hear about gold or the Federal Reserve. To them, this sounds crackpotty and “right-wingy”, and God forbid that Clark and Crane should ever be caught dead sounding like that!

8. Education

The Clark idea of educational tax credits is a fine first step, but one wonders why his maximum limit of $1200 per student? This is substantially below most private school annual tuition; why not provide tax credits for full tuition, whatever that may be?

But there are two disquieting aspects to the tax credit idea. One is that there is no clear-cut statement by Clark that this is only a transition demand, and that, in fact all tax credits distort the economy by pushing people in the direction of spending toward which the government would like them to go (the same criticism applies to the elaborate retirement tax credit scheme of the Clark Social Security scheme.) Still, tax credits are excellent, but only insofar as they lower taxes; our ultimate objective should clearly be to eliminate taxation altogether. The Clark proposal should have been made in the context of the nineteenth century speech of President William F. Warren of Boston University to the university’s approving trustees; “Tax Exemption the Road to Tax Abolition!” Instead, all we get from Clark’s White Paper on Education are cloudy phrases about how great it would be if someday government were completely divorced from education.

But nowhere does Clark spell out in the concrete what this really means; for example, abolition of the monstrous public school system, and of compulsory attendance laws. To the contrary, Clark has stated during the campaign that the objective of his tax credit proposal is to “improve” the public school system. That should not be our objective; our goal should be abolition. Similarly, Clark angered Southern California party members early in the campaign by sidestepping a question by a reporter about his stand on compulsory attendance laws. That, Clark evaded, is not “a Presidential issue.”

Well, well! Not a Presidential issue indeed! No one says that Clark should have made abolition of compulsory attendance laws a key feature of his speeches or pronouncements. But when asked the question, he had the moral obligation and the obligation to libertarianism and to his fellow Party members, to answer and to answer truthfully! We call for the abolition of compulsory attendance laws! And be damned whether Tom Wicker likes it or not! Instead, we got Libscam!

It is important to realize that Clark was not simply his own person, running for office. By getting our nomination, he put himself into a moral obligation to carry forth our principles and our platform, to truly represent us in the political arena. He failed that test time and again, consistently and grossly, Always, he and his handlers acted with total arrogance toward the Party and its members; the members’ job was to gather signatures, get us on the ballot, contribute funds, and keep their mouths shut; the job of Clark, Crane, et al. was to run the campaign, and to brook no interference.

9. Answering Questions Truthfully

While we are on the issue of answering questions truthfully, Clark, to be sure, did it and did it very well — but only once. In his kickoff January press conference in Washington, D.C., he was asked about the ultimate objectives of the Libertarian Party. What about the streets, the courts, etc? And Clark answered it well: that our ultimate objective was to privatize all of society, to turn all governmental operations over to private enterprise. It was a great and shining moment for Clark, but it was to be his last. Edward Crane was livid at this disclosure of truth to the media and to the public; how can they be conned into liking us if they know our real views? And because of Crane’s pressure, Clark was never allowed — or perhaps never even felt tempted — to stand up for basic libertarian principles ever again.

Many of us have been hammering away at Clark on these matters since early last winter. All we got for our pains was lots of soft soap and mendacity. The object: to baby us along and keep us quiet so that they could get on with their unprincipled and sellout campaign. For example, after the hard-hitting criticisms of the Clark campaign by the Radical Caucus this summer (notably, my own “Libertarianism versus ‘Low Tax Liberalism’ ”, Cadre, July/August, and Justin Raimondo’s “A Matter of Principle,” Cadre Supplement), Clark let it be known that his soft approach was all a design. His Grand Strategy was that, after August, with the media already softened up by his low-tax liberal approach, the Clark campaign would become feisty and hard-core. Well, of course, it was all a scam. Libscam! If anything, the Clark campaign got worse as it kept going, and the deviations and betrayals accelerated, especially whenever the precious media were in attendance. Babying along the critics was a key leitmotif of the Clark-Crane campaign. How many more times are we going to permit ourselves to be fooled?

10. Unions

Let us press on. What did Clark say about unions during the campaign, either in person, in literature, or in white papers? Not a damn thing. Even though the government-union comple is a key part of our economy and our society, and even though labor law reform is a direct and immediate political issue. Correction: he did say one thing, and only one. In his Village Voice interview with Cockburn and Ridgeway, Clark said that there is nothing wrong with unions. Period.

Again: well, well! It is true that in a free society, provided that unions don’t use coercion against strikebreakers (a big proviso!), there is nothing un-libertarian about voluntary unions. But this is not a free society, as our “realists” never fail to remind us, and unions are now specially privileged, almost a creature of, the State. Yet nowhere in the Clark literature is there a hint of our platform position: the repeal of all this special privilege, notably including the Wagner Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Act.

Why no mention of removing special privileges to unions? Again, the answer is obvious: N.Y. Times liberals wouldn’t like it, and Tom Wicker might not like us anymore. Tsk, tsk!

11. Immigration

Immigration provided probably the greatest (or perhaps the second greatest) single scandal of the Clark campaign. New York Times liberals, you see, love Mexicans but only in Mexico; they are not too keen on Mexicans emigrating to the United States. And so the Clark position, which not only betrayed the libertarian principle of free and open immigration, but also froze immigration restrictions in with the welfare system. Clark’s position on immigration, detailed in an interview with the English-language newspaper La Prensa, published for San Diego’s Mexican-Americans, was stated as follows:

As President I would move to increase substantially the immigration quotas from Mexico and Latin America. . . I believe absolutely in free immigration! In a perfect society people would be allowed to move freely anywhere. Today’s realities, however, make it difficult. In the United States we have a welfare system that precludes that. The level of maintenance for U.S. citizens is so high that it would induce individuals to come here to live only on welfare. . . I would support a legal contract system of labor to bring in people from Mexico (two to three million) to come for six months at a time to work then return . . .” (see A Matter Of Principle, pp. 2-3.)

The Clark position on immigration manages, at one and the same time, to betray principle and to be factually and economically incorrect. Undocumented aliens, including Mexicans, have not gone on welfare for the simple reason that they would have exposed themselves to arrest and deportation. These “illegal” aliens, as in the case of most immigrants of the past, have proved themselves to be among the most productive, hard-working members of society. Clark kicks them in the teeth, and unjustly.

Later, on nationwide television, Clark managed to retain his position but to put it less baldly. When asked where he stood on foreign trade and immigration, he said, craftily, that he favored free and open trade, and increased immigration (not free and open.) This is holding high the banner of freedom? This is the lamp beside the golden door?

Moreover, as Raimondo points out, Clark’s endorsement of the hated bracero program (the six months-and-then-return) would return to a policy that locked the Mexicans into their cheap-labor status, and which kept Mexican-American wages below the free market level. The Clark-bracero program, Raimondo properly concludes, is “nothing but government-sanctioned-and-enforced exploitation on a massive scale.”

Note, also, how Clark has been brought to this shameful point by having locked himself into a measured, prepared order of destatization. He has already asserted that we can’t slash the welfare state until we have achieved “full employment”; he now adds that we can’t have free and open immigration until we eliminate the welfare state. And so it goes; the “gradualists” lock us permanently into the status quo of statism. As the great libertarian abolitionist of slavery William Lloyd Garrison prophetically warned: “Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.”

There is another grotesque feature of the Clark stand on immigration. He adds, in the La Prensa interview:

I would say that in an ideal society there is little or no need for a Border Patrol. I don’t believe the Border Patrol should be involved in violence. Their role is administrative. Individuals should not be killed just because they are trying to cross the border to work.

Well, bully for you Ed! So if the Border Patrol is not supposed to shoot to kill, what are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to administer the quotas on Mexican immigration? Maybe a bit of clubbing? Or tranquilizer guns, such as are used on animals?

Clark’s position on immigration is akin to his position on virtually the entire spectrum of political issues. It always takes the form: “Of course, I am a libertarian, but . . .” Pick any issue, and you can fill in the blanks yourself. “As a libertarian, I am of course in favor of ............................ However, we must understand that we are living in the real world. In such a world, ............................ would be too extreme, would cause problems, suffering, and fail to fulfill expectations. Therefore, much as I favor ............................ in the abstract, in the meantime we must advocate ...............................” and here comes the sellout. The sellout, “realistic” position turns out to be more or less what everyone else says, more precisely like a middle-class liberal.

12. Nuclear Power and the Environment

I have already spelled out the nuclear power controversy at great length in the Lib. Forum. Suffice it to elaborate here on two aspects of this controversy: (a) the treachery and duplicity of the Clark/Crane forces vis à vis the Publications Review Committee; and (b) that nuclear power is only the tip of the environmentalist iceberg.

First, to carry the story to its conclusion since our May-June 1980 issue (“Opportunism, Nukes, and the Clark Campaign.”) When we left our story, Crane, communications director for the Clark campaign, had issued an infamous anti-nuclear brochure in which Clark endorsed the notorious anti-nuke propagandist Gofman, and vice versa. This brochure had been issued despite the fact that it had never been submitted to the campaign’s Publications Review Committee, which was supposed to clear all publications in advance. Furthermore, the brochure was issued in defiance of the express unanimous directive of the Committee not to issue any anti-nuke or Gofmanite propaganda, and despite the repeated assurances of the campaign’s nominal director, Ray Cunningham, and of Clark himself, that such a brochure would never be issued!

After the brochure was issued, intense pressure zeroed in on Clark, fortified by the fact that frontlines broke the issue open (frontlines has been the major force for truth in the libertarian movement). At that point, Crane and his catspaw, Chris Hocker, the virtual co-director of the campaign, gave one and all assurances that the offending brochure was being withdrawn. Victory appeared to be ours, but one of our members, highly knowledgeable in the ways of Crane et al., sardonically commented: “I won’t believe they’ve withdrawn the brochures until I see them burned at the Washington office.”

Our cynical associate turned out, of course, to be right. For lo and behold! at the August Students for a Libertarian Society convention in October, what should turn up but our old friend the anti-nuke pamphlet, being happily distributed by the SLS ruling clique at the Commoner-Clark debate? In short, in the old but now we see to be highly revealing phrase, if lying helps . . .

Clark’s handlers declared in their defense that “we couldn’t write letters to every group withdrawing the pamphlet.” Why not?

In a massive bit of rewriting of history (to put it at its kindliest), the Clark people now maintain that the Publications Review Committee was not supposed to have the final say on Clark literature, that we were only supposed to be advisory, to express our input.

Who is right? Or who is lying? Or, more charitably, who is “misspeaking”, to use a word that came back from obsolescence under the Nixon-Agnew regime? Well, the decisive point is that none of us would have joined such a committee if we had thought it was going to be in a purely advisory role. This has not been publicly revealed before, but the whole point of forming the committee is that some of us, at the August 1979 convention, were worried about Crane’s potential for dominating the campaign, and distorting libertarian principles in the course of that control. It was to mollify, to soft-soap us, that Clark and his handlers set up the Publications Review Committee, which was explicitly designed to have the same role as the similarly named committee long in force at the National Committee: namely, decision-making rather than advisory. The members of the Committee were many of the same people who had expressed such concerns about a future Crane-dominated campaign. We would therefore never have accepted a purely advisory role. But of course now we know, as the more realistic of us suspected all along, that the function of the PRC was to soft-soap us and baby us along until the election. To which we must all resolve: Never Again!

Secondly, the nuclear power issue is only the tip of the environmentalist heresy that Crane, Childs, Mueller and Co. have been toying with for a couple of years. Not just nuclear radiation, but any radiation, indeed anything which someone might think to be “pollution”, is to be outlawed. All this, even at best, violates the fundamental libertarian rule laid down a century ago by Benjamin R. Tucker: When in doubt about whether some activity is aggressive, the answer is laissez-faire. Let the person alone! Or, to apply venerable Anglo-Saxon law, nothing should be considered aggressive or criminal or tortious unless proven so beyond a reasonable doubt. Every person must be assumed innocent until proven guilty.[2]

Furthermore, the Cranian imposition of environmental tyranny goes grotesquely much farther than even the weak “preponderance of evidence” rule. Sometimes, it seems that if A’s action could conceivably or possibly harm B, then it should be outlawed. This, of course, would outlaw the human race. Every person, for example, emits radiation; from radiation, some other person might get a random cancer, etc.

Yet Clark has hinted that he, too, would go to the grotesque extremes of the Childs/Mueller clique. In his Village Voice interview, Clark spoke with great favor of the Environmental Protection Agency, asserting that it was engaged in establishing property rights! Even if, some day, libertarian courts might establish property rights in this area, it is absurd and outlandish to claim that the current EPA is doing anything of the kind. What it has been doing is crippling production, raising costs, and imposing the life-style of upper-class liberals on the rest of society.

Moreover, in his White Paper on Spending and Taxation, Clark keeps EPA and OSHA, the tyrannical agency engaged in crippling small businesses everywhere through idiotic regulations in the name of “safety.” Again, Clark, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, indicated that he would keep EPA and OSHA, and even went so far as to suggest that any action that might eventually give some one cancer should be outlawed. Like smoking? Like going out in the sun? Like living?

OSHA is perhaps the single most hated governmental agency across the country, certainly among small business people. We could have picked up a lot of votes, as well as followed libertarian principle, by launching a blistering and radical attack on OSHA. Why didn’t we do it? Indeed, why have we succumbed to the worst excesses of environmentalism? Clearly, because middle-class N.Y. Times liberals love environmentalism above all else, and we must suck up to them, mustn’t we?

13. The ERA

If environmentalism and anti-nuke agitation are the liberals’ first love, ERA comes in a close second. So naturally, ever attentive to their concerns, and to the putative votes of N.Y. Times liberal females, Clark has strongly supported ERA throughout the campaign.

It is ironic that, in a campaign in which basic principles, and a term like “rights” were to drop out completely from the Clark vocabulary, the only place where “rights” was stressed was in an anti-libertarian manner. The ERA is anti-libertarian for two basic reasons: (a) because “equal rights” can just as well be equal tyranny as equal liberty; and (b) because the courts would not construe such wording as “public” or “government” action the way we would; and so they would enforce this equal tyranny upon private groups and employers as well as the government. The pro-ERA libertarians answer the first count that “we” will fight to see that equality is equal liberty and not tyranny. But that evades the point. The basic point is this: if there is a draft, should women be drafted as well as men? The answer must be no for every libertarian; just because half the youth population is enslaved, is no reason for us (though it may be for egalitarians) to call for enslaving the other half. It is no answer to say, with the ERA advocates, that we’re against the draft altogether and must fight against it. For this evades the crucial point: If there is a draft of males, should women also be drafted? The ERA would impose a Yes answer, that is, would impose female slavery. All genuine libertarians must say No.

The pro-ERA reply to the charge that in our present context public or governmental would be construed to include private citizens, either denies this outright or says that we must go only by how we would construe the phrase. But this is absurd. As George Smith has pointed out: Suppose that this were 1850, and some Senator introduces a Constitutional amendment calling for the government to protect the absolute rights of private property. Should we have shouted hosannahs, because the phrases looked great? Certainly not, because if we were alert people, we would realize that the courts would have interpreted such an amendment by hauling back fugitive slaves from the North, since slaves were then considered as “private property”. The analogy holds.

Bill Evers, myself, and others wasted a great many man-hours last year arguing with the Crane-Childs-Mueller clique about the principled libertarian stand on nuclear power and ERA. We needn’t have wasted the time. What we should have realized is that these gentry did not have the slightest interest in discovering the libertarian position on any particular issue and then upholding it. What they were interested in was finding libertarian-sounding rationales for positions already held by what they conceived to be “our constituency”: middle-class New York Times-type liberals. Libscam!

14. Civil Liberties

We might recall that in the dear dead days of the MacBride campaign of 1976, Roger stuck closely to the triad of libertarian principles: free market economy, civil liberties, non-intervention abroad. The Crane clique might have been right that Roger showed less than full enthusiasm for applying these libertarian principles to the gamut of specific issues, but by God he never sold out on the principles themselves.

One of those fundamental principles was civil liberties. What did Clark, in contrast, have to say about civil liberties this year? The answer is Zilch. Nada. Hardly once did civil liberties ever get mentioned. Perhaps the Clark handlers will say that civil liberties are not “Presidential”. Like hell. Like wiretapping, like rooting out “subversives”, like COINTELPRO? At any rate, civil liberties dropped out of the campaign. When asked about drugs — and of course the Federal government plays a large role in drug enforcement — Clark would reply that he is in favor of legalizing “soft” drugs: i.e. marijuana. Here, again, was “gradualism” with a vengeance, for this sort of answer directly implied that “hard” drugs, e.g. heroin, should remain outlawed. Thereby not only abandoning principle, but failing to point out a major cause of urban crime.

The problem here for the Clark/Crane clique was simply this: everyone, even middle-class liberals, is in favor of legalizing marijuana; hell, most of them smoke it themselves. But heroin is a very different story; it has the aura of the poor, the blacks, the ghetto, and so heroin continues to be a definitely “out” rather than “in” drug at the good grey New York Times. So therefore, we cannot come out for its legalization. How embarrassing when Clark is trying to be so Presidential!

Clark finally resolved the heroin problem to his own satisfaction on nationwide television: for heroin, we should adopt the British system. Sounds good, because heroin there is legal, right? Wrong. Heroin is dispensed gratis by licensed, socialized doctors to their certified addicts; in every other situation, heroin, marijuana and all other drugs are ruthlessly stamped out by the police.

So this is Clark’s odious “libertarian” solution to the heroin question: the taxpayer has to be coerced into paying for free heroin shots for some addicts, while everyone else is heroin-freedom ruthlessly stamped out! Another cause of Clark-Crane “gradualism” in action!

15. The Draft

But how about the draft, you might ask? Surely libertarians are solidly against the draft, and Clark was adamant on this issue? Surely? Well, yes and no. We can excuse the fact that it took a while in the campaign for Clark to attack the draft as “slavery”; he finally did so. We can also excuse his caution in not taking the possibly illegal step of advocating resistance to the draft (although some ACLU lawyers were bold enough to do so.) But then, like a bolt from the blue, there was the incident of the lengthy Clark interview in Penthouse November 1980. Here was unquestionably the strangest incident of the campaign.

In the course of a lengthy interview (in which precious little was said about libertarian principle), Clark declared that, as a libertarian, he would of course be against the draft if this were a perfectly free world. However, since we live in a non-libertarian world (here it comes again!) and since Russia has the draft, we have to be content with a “gradual dismantling” of the draft.

The Clark handlers have been claiming that it’s all a misprint. But look at the offending passage carefully. It sure doesn’t read like a misprint, and if “draft” were a typo for “defense” the passage wouldn’t have made any sense. So, it doesn’t read like a misprint. Furthermore, they can’t claim that the interviewer was hostile. The interviewer was long-time libertarian Jim Davidson, who certainly wouldn’t have deliberately distorted Clark’s words in a nonlibertarian direction. And besides, why didn’t Clark complain when the interview was in galleys? No, if they want to convince us that some grisly error occurred, let them get a copy of the taped interview and play it for us . . . and make sure that there’s no 18-minute gap.

The concept of gradual dismantling, a gradual “phase-out” (a favorite Clark term throughout) of the draft, of course requires that the draft be imposed now and then be phased out over how long? How about 35 years, the same arbitrary numbers game as in the Social Security scheme?

16. Foreign Policy

Most libertarians are under the impression that, at least on foreign policy, Clark stuck to the LP platform position of nonintervention. It is true that the sellout here was proportionately less than in other areas; but the reason, of course, is that New York Times liberals are pretty dovish themselves. But very, very moderately dovish. And therein lies the rub.

For Clark’s policy pronouncements, supported by his White Paper on Foreign and Military Policy, abandoned a principled policy of non-intervention. There is nowhere a hint that the reason for our policy of non-intervention is to avoid the high crime of mass murder; principles, rights, mass murder all dropped out here just as they did in the rest of the Clark campaign. Instead, we had a tough, “realistic” Ravenalian analysis (not a coincidence, since Professor Earl Ravenal was the author of the White Paper) which reads like a left-liberal counterpart of the Hudson Institute; the discussion is all on throwweights, triads, diads, etc., and the reason given for a foreign policy of non-intervention is that nowadays West Germany and Japan are strong enough to pay for their own defense, so why should we pay for it? All this is fine and correct, as far as it goes, but for a Libertarian presidential campaign, it scarcely goes far enough. Non-intervention is a principled position deriving from the nature of States and the avoidance of mass murder; whether or not West Germany or Japan are strong is irrelevant to the principle. Thus, the Clark/Ravenal position implies, say, that in the 1940s and 1950s, when West Germany and Japan were weak, the United States should have then paid for their defense. Indeed, Clark has said as much during the campaign. Thus, the search for utility and “practicality”, what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism”, abandons libertarian principle and undermines the policy of non-intervention.

Furthermore, Clark, during the campaign. Thus, the search for utility and “practicality”, what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism”, abandons libertarian principle and undermines the policy of non-intervention.

Furthermore, Clark, during the campaign, had the gall to suddenly expand the American defense perimeter to include Canada and Mexico. As Clark demagogically put it, “We shouldn’t wait for them to get to Toronto before we defend Detroit.” So if we are to abandon a principles policy of non-intervention on behalf of the domino theory, why stop at Toronto? Why not Saigon? And are we to defend Mexico despite itself, yet not admit Mexicans into the U.S.?

And even this utilitarian non-intervention is, like everything else, to be “phased in” gradually. We are only to pull our troops out of NATO gradually.

On the Iran question, Clark was no more steadfast or principled than the major politicos. Denying the right of asylum, he first declared that the Shah should not have been admitted into the country; later, however, Clark opined that the crackpot Iran rescue mission was within the “outer limits” of permissible intervention!

Furthermore, Clark, in summing up his military policy, used the phrase: “a strong national defense.” This phrase is, of course, a code word for the militarists and the war hawks, and should not have been used. What’s wrong with “adequate” national defense, such as is used in our platform? Also, Clark was silent on another key plank in our military platform: the search for mutual complete and general disarmament down to police levels. The nuclear threat hangs over the human race; why didn’t Clark launch a great crusade to try to remove that threat? Instead, it’s “strong national defense,” and West Germany and Japan are strong enough to pay for their own defense. It is to such a dismal status that the noble policy of anti-war, anti-foreign intervention, and anti-militarism has been reduced!

17. Gradualism Versus Principle

Throughout the Clark campaign, libertarian principle was traduced and abandoned in a quest for media respectability and votes. Thus, Clark repeatedly defined libertarianism as a belief that everyone should be allowed to keep “more” of their own money. Well, well! How much more? By what standard? How about all of their own money, Ed? As Jarret Wollstein records, the worst single example of this sellout gradualism was David Koch’s definition of the three “great principles” of liberalism at the disastrous Alternative ‘80 telethon (for more, see below): “lower taxes, less intervention into the affairs of other countries, and less interference with people’s personal lives.” (Jarret B. Wollstein, “The Clark Campaign” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, Individual Liberty, November 1980, p. 4.) The three great principles are, of course: no taxes, no intervention, and no interference. In this way, as Wollstein puts it, we are presented with an “ugly and dishonest trivialization of radical and revolutionary principles of libertarianism.” Wollstein concludes his analysis: “Clark has in fact succeeded in running a campaign under the banner of the ‘Party of Principle’, without clearly enunciating a single fundamental principle. He gives lip services to liberty, but never mentions the concept of inalienable individual rights. He talks about ‘non-interventionist foreign policy,’ but never defines just what this consists of. He opposes ‘high taxes,’ but never identifies taxation as theft.”

Wollstein concludes: “In the long run the battle for liberty will be won or lost based on the strength of our principles and the courage of those who advocate them. It is both philosophically dishonest and tactically mistaken for professed advocates of libertarian to abandon forthright statement of principles in the name of pragmatism.” (Wollstein, pp. 4-6.)

18. Where Reagan Was Better

A minimal responsibility of any Libertarian candidate is not to let himself be outflanked by any other group or candidate; he should be ahead of, not behind, any other group in his libertarianism. We saw above that we should never have been outflanked on taxes by the Liberty Amendment people. Similarly, Clark should never have been behind any of the other presidential candidates. Yet there were several significant issues in which moderate Conservative Ronald Reagan was substantially more libertarian than Clark. (And this is not to deny the massive sellout that occurred during the campaign of Reagan’s own commitment to the free-market.) Let us set aside the tax cut, in which Clark certainly did not place himself as perceivably more radical than Reagan. And let us set aside Clark’s astounding “gradual dismantling of the draft” position — in contrast to Reagan’s seeming opposition to the draft — as some sort of unexplained fluke. There are several other significant areas where Reagan was more libertarian than Clark.

(a). Clark was ardently in favor of the statist ERA; Reagan, in an unexceptionable statement, said he was for equal rights for women, but against government as the enforcement arm of such rights, (b) Clark was in favor of outlawing nuclear energy per se. Reagan was not. (c) Clark was in favor of restricting Mexican immigration; Reagan called for a Common Market with Mexico and Canada, which, at least presumptively, seems to call for unrestricted immigration, (d) Clark was against welfare cuts until we have achieved “full employment.” Reagan at least favored eliminating the “welfare cheats” from the rolls, (e) Clark timidly came out in favor of the promising idea of a “freeport” or “urban enterprise zone” for Miami only; Reagan favored it for “several” inner cities.

19. George Smith’s Prophetic Satire

George H. Smith, a brilliant young philosopher and a leader of the anti-party libertarians, wrote a satire during the 1976 campaign that was published by anti-party leader Sam Konkin. (George H. Smith, “Victory Speech of the Libertarian Party President-Elect, 1984” New Libertarian Weekly Supplement (October 31, 1976, pp. 3 ff.) As a pro-party person, I have to admit that Smith’s projected “Victory Speech” is a chilling and dazzlingly prophetic portrayal of the Clark campaign. It deserves quoting at length.

The victorious LP President is making his 1984 victory speech. He begins his sellout thus: “I appear before you this evening to tell you of my vision for this country and to unfold my plan for liberty. . . But let us not forget that we live in the real world. We live in a world of brute facts that cares nothing for our ideals, we must face the fact that the devastation caused by political meddling has created an extremely complicated situation. Many of our citizens depend entirely on government jobs and handouts. As much as we desire liberty, we cannot sacrifice these innocent people in a blind repeal of laws.” The President goes on to say that the coercive laws can only be whittled away gradually.

“. . . there are those who criticize our gradualism. Some of our former comrades who, before the purge of 1980, also referred to themselves as ‘libertarians’, continue vociferously to campaign for the immediate and total repeal of all unjust laws. In upholding gradual repeal, they say, the Party must necessarily defend and enforce those unjust laws that remain. This is true. . . So many people have become dependent on government money and services, that to abolish them outright would clearly lead to disorder, rioting, and starvation. The good of society requires that such laws be phased out in increments, step by step, while we prepare the country for freedom. This is the wisdom of gradualism.

“But still we are assailed by reckless visionaries who scream for the immediate abolition of taxation — the root, they say, of most government evil. Now, taxation is wrong, of course; but to repeal all taxation would lead to the collapse of national defense, police services, welfare, and many other essential services. Thousands, perhaps millions, would die. We are unwilling to sacrifice lives to the tyranny of false freedom, in a country where people cannot as yet handle their freedom in a proper manner.

“Indeed, it was policy of gradualism that led to our massive support by the American people.”

Smith’s “President” then goes on to point out how various groups of voters were convinced to vote Libertarian: because they were told that all of their privileges: Social Security; welfare; union privileges; taxi monopolies; victimless crime law enforcement; whatever, that all of these would “be chiseled away in painless steps”. To abolish such privileges would be “only a long-term objective.”

The rest of the satire is even more chilling, for then the “President” goes on to say that any libertarian purists who insist on disobeying these unjust laws or in not paying taxes must be cracked down on by the “libertarian” government; otherwise that government would be discredited in the eyes of the public. The “President” urges the libertarians in his audience: “Become a model law abiding citizen for the sake of gradualism, even if you personally disagree with many of the current laws. Above all do not cheat on your taxes. Remember that your tax dollars will now go for the cause of freedom . . .”

We are going to have to have a mighty and thoroughgoing transformation of the Libertarian Party if we are going to demonstrate that George Smith and his fellow anti-party libertarians were not right in their qualms about Libertarian political action. So far, their warnings have been all too correct.

20. Fooling The Media

So much for the grievous and systemic betrayals of principle. What was the point? The goal was to maximize votes; the larger the vote totals, the greater the “success” of the campaign was to be defined. How were votes to be maximized? By getting the media to like us, to pay attention to us, to give us wide and favorable coverage. Who are the media? As everyone knows, they are moderate liberals, New York Times — CBS liberals. If, then, we pretended to be New York Times-type liberals, we would get favorable attention,

What was the point of whoring after maximum votes? The idea was that if we got a lot of votes, this would fool the media into thinking that we were really a mighty mass movement, with several million dedicated libertarians. Of course, we are not a mass movement; essentially what we were in 1980 was half a dozen guys at the National Offices, lots of money, and slick, Pepsi-type TV commercials. But a movement cannot be created by trickery, cannot be achieved with mirrors.

Once again, the entire Grand Strategy of the campaign rested on lies and duplicity: fooling the media, fooling the party members, fooling the public. But a solid movement cannot be built on duplicity; it can only be built by honesty and by educating the public in our libertarian principles.

To an extent, the narrow tactic worked: surely we got more national media attention than we have ever gotten before. (Although, as Dave Nolan points out, we did not get to tap the crucial national media.) But so what? For to the extent that we fooled the media into giving us attention we didn’t deserve, they will not be fooled again. To some extent, the media fell for our campaign propaganda that we would get “several million” votes, become a major third party in 1980, etc. But when the piddling vote totals came in, the media learned the truth. The tipoff was Walter Cronkite’s contemptuous dismissal of us on election night: “The libertarians thought they’d get millions of votes, but they’re doing nothing.” Come 1984, and the media will remember the floperoo of 1980; we can predict that media attention will be much less in 1984. Even on whoring after the media, we muffed it.

But suppose we had gotten 2, 3, 5, 10 million votes. So what? What would these votes have meant? Would any of the media have believed for one moment that these millions of votes were votes for libertarian principles? How, if these principles were carefully buried throughout the campaign? What’s the point of getting millions of votes, for low-tax liberalism, for some vague replica of Jack Kennedy? How does that build the libertarian movement or spread the ideas of libertarianism?

How the media regard us may be seen in the flap over the notorious Hocker TV commercial, in which a bunch of national office employees and volunteers pretended to be “men-in-the-street” coming out for Clark. Apart from the general meretriciousness of the commercial, former National LP Director Chris Hocker, the No. 2 man of the Clark campaign, is pictured behind the wheel of his car, saying: “I used to be for Anderson, but now I’m for Clark . . .”

This bald-faced lie is defended by the Cranians as mere use of advertising techniques, as simply doing what other parties have done. But most advertising people I know believe in truthful advertising, and would consider such an ad mendacious and unethical. But apart from that, it’s tacky. Let’s put it this way: Crane and his henchmen have always prided themselves as being “professionals”; in contrast to the rest of us bumbling amateurs, they are bringing us competence, and major-party professionalism. But what professional party would have, say Jody Powell, acting as a “man-in-the-street” pretending to be converted from Reagan to Carter?

For all its slickness, the Hocker-commercial demonstrates that the Clark campaign was tacky and sleazy, rather than professional. It also demonstrates that there are damned few libertarians around, that we are not a mass movement, or anything like it.

Hocker’s defense of the commercial is that the media didn’t care about the duplicitous tactic. But that is just the point! The media would have roasted Jody Powell and the Carter campaign if they had pulled such a stunt. Why didn’t they roast us? Precisely because they didn’t care, they didn’t care about us at all. We were at best a pleasant diversion, and no real threat to anyone, much less the major parties. And because they didn’t care, they didn’t bother to investigate.

The media liked us; we sucked up to them enough for that. But what reason did we give them, or other New York Times liberals, to vote for us? If they wanted “low tax liberalism,” they could support John Anderson, or the major parties; at least they had a chance to win. By aping the “respectable” parties and candidates, Clark offered no real alternative; he didn’t give anyone a reason to vote from him. If you’ve got no chance to win, you should at least offer the voter a sharp alternative to their other, more realistic choices. Clark failed to do so, and therefore his entire whoring-after-the liberal-media strategy was a disaster, qua strategy, and apart from the gross betrayal of principle throughout the campaign.

Actually, the most charming media articles on the LP during the campaign were in two Marxist weeklies: In These Times, and the Guardian. They were charming because, being Marxists, they took ideology seriously and proceeded to engage in a fairly objective, though naturally critical, depiction of Libertarian ideology and its variants. The Guardian’s article (Sam Zuckerman, “Anarchy for the Rich”, October 29, 1980, p. 9) was particularly heart-warming because it stressed our platform, and therefore thought that our campaign was much more hard-core than it actually turned out to be.

21. Education and Party-Building

The major purpose of a political campaign by a Libertarian Party is surely not to get into office or to amass votes; the major purpose is to educate the public in libertarian principles, and in that way to build the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party as our spearhead in the political realm. But the Clark campaign did not educate; it mis-educated. Hiding and burying libertarian principle, it instructed the voters that “libertarianism” was some sort of Jack Kennedyish movement.

Even if we had gotten several million votes, and even if these millions had joined the LP, it would not have built the LP as a libertarian party; for we would simply have been swamped by millions of Kennedyish liberals, and Libertarianism would have been crushed in the party.

At least we don’t have to worry about that; for there is no evidence that the 900,000 LP voters are going to join the LP or become libertarians. The number of new LP voters are going to join LP members or libertarians discovered by this large and highly expensive campaign is minuscule; essentially, we have the same number of activists we had before. After Clark’s famous 377,000 votes for governor of California, for example, nothing at all was done to recruit these voters into the movement or Party; in fact, nothing was done with the 90,000-odd registration signatures we gathered to get us permanently on the California ballot. It is doubtful, in fact, that the Clark/Crane forces are particularly interested in building the Party or the movement. Party members vote, and are therefore troublesome, because they might vote “incorrectly”; how much easier to employ half a dozen people and millions of dollars! They are far easier to control. If you get more than a handful of people, they might not be willing, in one of Crane’s favorite phrases, “to go along with the program.”

To educate the voters in libertarianism, you must run a principled campaign; to build libertarian cadre, you must run a principled campaign. An unprincipled campaign might get votes, it might fool people temporarily, but it will mis-educate, and it will not build a movement. There is no substitute for honest education and for patient, long-range building of a movement and of a party. There are no short-cuts to victory. That way lies only betrayal and defeat.

22. Fiscal Irresponsibility

In addition to everything else, the Clark campaign was run wildly, with all-out spending and ineffective fund-raising (except of course from David Koch.) After they had proclaimed loudly and repeatedly that the campaign would not run up any debt, we now find that Clark/Hocker et al have run up the gigantic debt of $300,000 some of which, furthermore, they are trying to get the National Committee to assume.

In a magnificent piece of truth-telling and investigative reporting, frontlines (November, 1980) reports on the debt and the mismanagement of the campaign. It reports that Dr. Dallas Cooley, Treasurer of the LP and a high official of the Clark campaign, is worried about the $200,000 deficit, which is 60 percent of the entire LP operating budget for one year. “The LP is in trouble,” said Cooley,” and we could have accomplished just about the same thing without going into debt at all.”

Particularly disastrous was the highly touted Alternative ‘80, a fund-raising telethon put on at Los Angeles and distributed across the country, frontlines quotes many hype comments at the event, such as Roy Childs’ trumpeting that “with the kind of enthusiasm we see here, we could raise a hell of a lot of money.” Indeed, the Clark campaign put out a whopper of a press release the day after the telethon (Sept. 29), proclaiming that it had raised 5247,000. Mendacity, mendacity! In actuality, the telethon cost us no less than $100,000.

frontlines reports that the finance director of the Clark campaign, Dale Hogue, later resigned his post, partly in disgust at Crane’s mismanagement. Hogue points out that the telethon, as he originally had planned it, would have raised a considerable amount of money, perhaps up to $150,000, but that Crane had insisted on turning the telethon into a costly “entertainment and media event.” The result: financial disaster.

Again, in real, professional political parties, campaign committees are responsible for their own debt; they can’t stick the Party with liability for that debt. If the National Committee has any spunk or sense of fairness, they will tell the Cranians to go clean up their own mess, to pay for their own fiscal irresponsibility. And all libertarians should tell them the same thing.

23. And They Didn’t Even Get The Votes

After promising “several million” votes, after trumpeting imminent major party status, after a campaign of lies, evasions, and mendacity, the Clark/Crane campaign fell flat on its face. They got only 1% of the vote.

What has the C/C response been to the vote totals? Predictably, by rewriting history, and by claiming that the campaign was, after all, a big success.

Part of the success claim rests on the smug assertion that this is what the Cranians had expected all along. Perhaps so: and their prescience is supported by my information that the national campaign office put on a betting pool, in which no one was more than several hundred thousand votes off the mark! But that hardly gets the Cranians off the hook. Quite the contrary. For it means that at the same time they lied to the media to hype them, while they lied to the party workers to fire up their enthusiasm and get financial support, they knew all along that they would get less than a million votes!

And, what is more, both Clark and Crane said many times publicly that less than a million votes would mean failure. On their own terms, then, they failed, and failed miserably.

It might be said that, after all, we got more than four times the MacBride vote. Sure, but at enormous financial expense. Furthermore, we slipped badly in our strong states, such as California. Clark’s 1.7% of the vote is a miserable flop compared to the 5.5% he got for governor in 1978. In Alaska, we were promised that we would come in second, and add three or four more state representatives. We added only one, and garnered only 12% of the presidential vote. None of the other races amounted to a hill of beans. The “victory” of Mary Shell as Mayor of Bakersfield, California had better be soft-pedalled; for this was a non-partisan race, and Miss Shell, though an LP member, is in favor of outlawing marijuana and a hawkish foreign policy.

One repellent aspect of the campaign was the way that financial supporters were conned. For example, the hype had it that Roberta Rhinehart had a “good chance to win” a seat in the State Assembly of California from Los Angeles; and on that basis, many California libertarians were induced to kick in funds at the last minute. In reality, Ms. Rhinehart got only 17% of the vote.

We must face up to the hard facts: We are not going to be a third major party, now or in the foreseeable future. The Cranians wailed that Anderson spiked our guns, that he had, in the words of Cranian Youth Leader Jeff Friedman in Libertarian Review, “stolen our constituency.” But Anderson’s “constituency” is ours only if we try absurdly to be more “low tax liberal” than he; as libertarians, our constituency is not confined to New York Times liberals, but to anyone and everyone ripped off and exploited by the State. Furthermore, the Cranians had better reevaluate the future, because Anderson is going to be around for a long time; he is already threatening to build a real party and run again in 1984. And then there is Barry Commoner’s Citizens Party. It is true that we beat him four to one, but on the other hand, for an initial race, Commoner did better than MacBride in 1976. He is not going to disappear either.

No, we had better not try to barter principle for a lot of votes, for Quick Victory. We’re not going to get all that many votes, and There Ain’t No Such Thing as Quick Victory. (TANSTAQV).

24. Conclusion: What Is To Be Done?

During the campaign, the Cranians and most of the Partyarchy tried to silence all criticisms of the campaign. The excuse was that the unity of the campaign must not breached, that we need maximum votes, and that it would be disloyal to the candidates to launch any public criticism; that should wait until after the campaign. Now that the campaign is over, however, the Cranians take a new tack: the campaign is all ancient history, we did pretty well, so let’s forget the whole thing and go onward and upward into the light.

No! That must not be permitted to happen! Many party members throughout the country, fed nothing but pap from a puff press, don’t even know what went on. They must be informed, and right away. We must have a mighty campaign of analysis, and of protest, throughout the country. The party members must be aroused before it is too late, and before our souls have been lost. We must not permit this infamy to happen ever again. Honest libertarians will not stand for another Presidential campaign like the one we have been through. Once was a tragic mistake, twice would be intolerable.

We must expose and denounce, not only to right the record of 1979-80, but also that we may escape a similar fate in the future. We must form a mighty popular coalition throughout the Party to make the necessary changes. For this is not a question of “right” or “left”, “liberal” or “conservative.” This is a fundamental question that cuts right to the heart of our movement: of honesty versus duplicity, of principle versus betrayal.

We must resolve Never Again, and to do this we must make fundamental changes in our Party. There must be structural changes, so that candidates will no longer be able to get away with murder, and betray us and the platform; all candidates must be accountable, day by day, to the Party structure and the Party platform. State candidates must be accountable to state parties, and national candidates to the national party and its National Committee. And since opportunists are real persons, and the betrayal was engineered by persons, we must see to it that those persons are never again in a position to run and to ruin a presidential campaign. In short, we must resolve: Never Again Clark, Never Again Crane.

Carter’s Administration

Humiliation
Fabrication
Tribulation
Consternation
Inflation
Devastation

— Agustin De Mello

1. If reports are correct, David Koch spent $2.1 million of his own money to achieve 1% of the total vote. But to achieve victory, surely he would have to spent at least as much per vote as did Jay Rockefeller procuring his re-election victory in West Virginia this year: a mere $50 per vote. At that rate, we figure that for a measly $2 billion of his personal fortune, David could buy us victory in 1984!

2. Some of our fuddy-duddy libertarian lawyers are horrified at this proposal. They point out that the “reasonable doubt” standard only applies to criminal law; in civil cases, in cases of torts, the weaker “preponderance of the evidence” rule has applied. But there is no reason that libertarians should advocate current legal rules when they are incorrect, since we believe in fusing crimes and torts anyway, we should apply the innocent-until-guilty rule to tort as well as criminal cases.

“If we get less than a million votes, we blew it.”

– Ed Clark, November, 1979

CLARK
PRESIDENT

A Campaign Critique

Copyright © 1980
By David F. Nolan

“Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.”

–George Santayana

INTRODUCTION

The Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, September 8, 1979: Ed Clark, newly-nominated presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, stood before a crowd of 2,000 cheering supporters and spoke stirringly of building a three-party system in the United States.

The campaign’s goal, he stated, was to produce “several million votes,” and thereby propel the Libertarian Party to major-party status.

And, he assured the assembled multitude, this would be a hardcore campaign, with no compromise on libertarian principles. The loudest cheers came when Clark spoke of abolishing the IRS; his rhetoric left little doubt in listeners’ minds that this would be a campaign we could be proud of.

* * *

Fourteen months later, the cheering had faded into a stunned silence. On Election Day, Ed Clark and David Koch polled only 900,000 votes nationwide — a far cry from the oft-referred-to “several million”.

Worse yet, the campaign had not been hard-core. Instead, it had been a campaign of principles betrayed and promises broken. The abolitionist rhetoric of 1979 had given way to liberal reform proposals; the basic issue of individual rights versus state power had been obscured by a fog of amiable-sounding platitudes about benevolence and hope.

Only one percent of the electorate had cast their votes for Clark’s “new beginning”. What portion — if any — of that vote was cast for libertarian principles, and what portion for “low-tax liberalism”, will never be known.

In the following pages, we will examine the record of the Clark campaign in some detail. The first section compares the campaign’s stated goals with its achieved results. Following sections deal with the conduct of the campaign itself, focusing on the questions of Strategy, Purity, Management and Ethics. The final section offers a summary and conclusions.

Your comments are solicited.

GOALS AND RESULTS

The announced goal of the Clark campaign was to make significant progress toward establishing a three-party system in the United States — to get “several million votes”, achieve a “balance of power” position, and create a new “mass alternative party”. A top priority was to gain inclusion in the presidential debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters; another was to generate significant, continuing coverage by the major mass media. And it was all to be done without compromising principles.

Judged by any of these criteria, the campaign was a disappointment. Although the term “several million” was never defined publicly, most Libertarians took it to mean somewhere in the region of three to five million votes. At an early Steering Committee meeting, campaign mastermind Ed Crane spoke confidently of getting 4% of the vote, and produced a writeup by one political analyst citing this as a realistic possibility. The most commonly mentioned figure (in private) was three million votes, and when I publicly ventured a projection of two million, I was chided for being “negative”. Both Clark and Crane readily acknowledged that anything under one million would be “a failure”.

The actual result — 900,000 votes, or just over 1% — was thus only one-third to one-fourth of the announced goal, and less than half of my “pessimistic” estimate. As to whether a showing of 1% can be described as evidence of a “mass alternative party”, and the beginning of a “three-party system”, an examination of political history quickly shows that it is not.

Since 1900, no less than nineteen third-party and independent presidential candidates have done better than Ed Clark did in 1980. Seven of these were men who broke away from one of the existing major parties, and thus not directly comparable. Setting these aside, however, we are still faced with the fact that Clark’s showing was bettered by the Socialists on six occasions (top showing; 6% in 1912), the Prohibitionists on five (top performance: 1.9% in 1904), and the crypto-fascist Union Party with just under 2% in 1946. As far as I know, none of these is generally considered a “mass alternative party”, but perhaps I’ve missed something.

The term “balance of power” is of course subject to debate. Obviously, in any presidential election, there will be a few states where the outcome is decided by a margin of 1% or 2%. And in this year’s election, the presence of John Anderson makes it difficult to say where — or if — our votes “made the difference”. But to suggest that a 1% showing has the GOP or Democrats quaking in their boots or established the LP as roughly equal to the two major parties in anyone’s mind is patently absurd.

So we didn’t achieve major-party status, or anything remotely like it, with the Clark campaign. Still, Clark’s 900,000 votes represent a substantial gain over past showings, and show that we’re still gaining momentum . . . don’t they?

No, not really. At first glance, Clark’s performance appears to be a solid step forward from MacBride’s 175,000 in 1976 — an increase of better than five to one, and surely a healthy sign. But on closer examination, even this achievement is not all that it seems.

First, it must be noted that about one-quarter of Clark’s vote came from states where MacBride was not on the ballot four years ago — which means that in states where a direct comparison is possible, the average gain drops to less than four to one. And even that figure is deceptive. For when you look at the results on a state-by-state basis, some disturbing facts emerge.

By and large, Clark’s largest gains over MacBride’s showing came in states where our ‘76 showing was very feeble indeed — 0.1% to 0.2%. Starting from a base this small, large relative gains are easy to make.

Our gains in areas of previous strength were far smaller. In the nine states where MacBride polled 0.5% or better in 1976, our gains were far less encouraging. Our percentage in Alaska barely doubled, as did those in Arizona and Idaho. Clark’s showing in California was little more than 2 ½ times MacBride’s total four years ago — and was 60% less than Clark’s own performance there in 1978, despite a 23% increase in total vote cast!

The same “low gain” pattern holds true for most of the other “high base” states. In fact, there is only one state — Colorado — which was able to quadruple its vote total starting from a base of 0.5% or better in 1976! (The actual gain in Colorado was the only high-base, high-gain state.)

These results suggest that the Clark campaign failed, almost completely, to capitalize on our existing strengths — despite having spent over three million dollars. The cost per vote received works out to an almost unbelieveable three and one half dollars. In contrast, many of our state and local candidates — such as David Bergland, running for U.S. Senate in California — spent only ten or twenty cents per vote. Clearly, the Clark campaign was a horrible failure from a cost-effectiveness standpoint.

The burning question to be answered, of course, is “Why?” Why did Clark’s campaign fail so abysmally at gaining public acceptance, and moving the Libertarian Party toward “mass alternative party” status? What went wrong?

The answer that will be put forth by those who managed (or, more accurately, mismanaged) the Clark effort will be “Anderson”. But this explanation (or excuse) fails on two counts.

First, it should be remembered that all through the campaign, up until the last month or so, the crew at Clark Headquarters in Washington was staunchly maintaining that Anderson’s presence in the race would actually help Clark. Their argument was that by breaking the “two-party mindset”, Anderson would increase people’s receptiveness to alternative choices. At one point, Crane even gleefully referred to Anderson as “our stalking-horse”.

More significantly, historical evidence indicates that this hypothesis should be correct. The one and only time during the twentieth century that an ideological third-party candidate got more than 3½% of the vote was in 1912, when Socialist Eugene Debs received 6% — about double the usual showing for the Socialists in that era.

The only plausible explanation for this sudden upsurge is that 1912 was the year when a major “breakaway” candidate — Teddy Roosevelt — was also in the running. Roosevelt’s presence in the race did in fact “break open the system”, and as a result, people were more willing to vote for a radical alternative.

Given the temper of the electorate in 1980, and the widespread dissatisfaction with the establishment party candidates, a similar phenomenon should have occurred this time. Clark should have done far better than he did, Anderson or no Anderson. And any attempt to pin Clark’s failure on Anderson’s candidacy is thus nothing more than a cheap attempt to weasel out of accepting the blame for a showing that — by Clark’s own definition — was a failure.

The real reasons for the failure of the Clark campaign lie in its misconceived strategy and poor management. And the greatest share of the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of Communications Directer Ed Crane, who — despite a promise to the contrary by Ed Clark — was given almost total control over the campaign.

With this in mind, let us now turn to an examination of the campaign’s strategy.

STRATEGY

Murray Rothbard has described the essential strategy of the Clark campaign as “trying to create a movement with mirrors — fostering the illusion that a new mass party already existed, and getting the media to cover it, in the hope that the reality would materialize as a result.”

Inevitably, this strategy necessitated a fair amount of deception: pretending to be something we aren’t, and disguising what we really stand for. (Elsewhere, I have referred to this tactic — somewhat indelicately — as “whoring after the media”. After reading this report, you can judge for yourself whether this description is accurate.)

Questions of principles and ethics aside for the moment, it should now be obvious that this strategy was misconceived; the major media simply didn’t fall for the trick.

To be sure, the Clark campaign generated feature articles in 15 or 20 general-circulation or special-interest magazines with a combined total circulation of about 15-20 million.* Most of these articles were unbiased or mildly favorable in content; one or two were very favorable; two were quite hostile. In terms of reaching the voters, the most significant piece was probably the interview in Penthouse (circulation 4.7 million).

Unfortunately, magazines like Penthouse do not play a major role in shaping political opinion or setting the social agenda in this country. Most people’s perception of who is — and who is not — a “real and significant” presidential candidate is shaped largely by a small handful of news media: the two leading wire services, two or three prominent newspapers, the three major weekly newsmagazines, and, most important of all, the three television networks. (Uncle Walter reaches more people, on any given evening, than the readership of all those magazine articles combined.)

And these are precisely the media which paid little or no attention to the Clark campaign.

Of the hundreds of hours spent on the presidential campaign by the three TV networks, Clark received a grand total of perhaps two hours; three minutes here, eight minutes there — with much of it devoted to describing him as “the unknown candidate”, and/or pairing him with Barry Commoner.

Likewise, while Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News each spend about 200 pages, over the year, on the presidential election, their coverage of Clark was almost nil: one short piece in Newsweek; the same in U.S. News, nothing at all in Time.

It is reasonable, of course, to ask why this happened. Why did the key national media so resolutely ignore the Clark campaign? And the answer, I will submit, rests on two points.

First, it should be noted, the people in the media are not stupid. And they resent any attempts to trick them into covering things on false premises.

A simple check with the Federal Election Commission would reveal that the Clark campaign was not, in fact, a “mass alternative” phenomenon — that two-thirds of its funds were coming from one man. And the fact that Clark, Crane and company were not telling the truth about this point could only serve to anger any ethical professional journalist. (Clark even went so far as to state, on Issues and Answers, that Koch’s contributions were “not a very large proportion” of the campaign funds — hardly a move calculated to win the respect of the media.)

But there is a deeper, more fundamental reason why Crane’s “media-oriented” strategy failed. And it is simply that the major, opinion-molding national news media organizations are an integral part of the power structure we are seeking to dismantle. They are fundamentally hostile to our goals; and no matter how much the Clark campaign tried to disguise us as a liberal reform movement (“low-tax liberals”, if you will), that fundamental hostility remained. The controlled national media were not about to help us topple the corporate-state power structure in this country!

If anything, the slick, soft-sell approach backfired on us. By pretending to be something other than what we really are, we gave the media the ammunition to say, “Not only are these guys really radicals; they’re dishonest, too.” This was precisely the position taken by People magazine in its sneering, sarcastic article on Clark. People, it should be remembered, is part of the Time empire.

The worst aspect of Crane’s “media” strategy, however, was that it caused the Clark campaign to make serious compromises on principle. The next section of this report deals with that point.

PURITY

In hopes of attaining massive media coverage for the Clark campaign, Crane and his cohorts adopted what has come to be known as the Low-Tax Liberal ploy. This involved two basic elements:

First, positioning Clark as a “liberal reformer” — presenting proposals in the context of making the existing system more humane and benevolent, while avoiding “controversial” statements (i.e., references to absolute principles) at all costs.

Second, wrapping this watered-down version of libertarianism in a “mod” package — giving Clark a Kennedyesque hairdo, adopting a vapid campaign slogan, and setting the whole thing to music, in the form of a cute, sing-songy jingle.

The first sign of The Shape of Things To Come appeared in November of 1979, when The New York Times quoted Clark as describing himself as a “low-tax liberal”. This aroused considerable ire in the libertarian community, and the unfortunate phrase was eventually abandoned . . . but the idea it represented lingered on through the campaign.

The next major indication that the Clark campaign was going to pull its punches came in February, when Clark’s reply to Carter’s State of the Union Message was published (as an ad, three weeks after the fact) in the Times. The ad was devoted almost entirely to foreign policy, and spoke out against Carter’s plans for draft registration . . . but somehow, in its 1800 words, never got around to mentioning that Libertarians are opposed to the draft on principle.

Tibor Machan, writing in frontlines, summed up the ad’s basic flaw very accurately: “In opposing draft registration, the advertisement frets a lot about the consequences of war but nowhere mentions that conscription is evil in principle, even if no war resulted from it. The idea that individuals have an unalienable right to life is crucial in this discussion, but the ad sacrifices this in favor of an appeal to the liberal, Vietnam War-fearing readers of the Times. A party of principle has no justification for this kind of slanted presentation of its views, not on such a basic issue!”*

Was this ad just an isolated fluke? Or was it part of a carefully-planned attempt to create misimpressions as to what libertarianism is all about?

A look at the Clark campaign’s treatment of several major issues leads to the conclusion that the latter is the case. As Murray Rothbard observed toward the end of the campaign, “Libertarian principles and the LP platform have been diluted and contradicted in order to tailor the Clark campaign to middle-class liberals of the sort who read and write for The New York Times.”

Murray is generally regarded as representing the radical wing of the party; Tibor is usually viewed as one of our most conservative spokesmen. Yet they both have made essentially the same observation. My views fall somewhere close to midway between Murray’s and Tibor’s — and I, too, have made the same change. Are all of us off-target? I think not.

Let’s look at the record.

On the subject of foreign policy, Clark was at his best: resolutely non-interventionist, willing to take the pure position even on the tough one, Israel. No quarrels here.

On defense, he waffled, trying to cut it both ways. After receiving some heat from pro-defense forces within the party, he adopted pro-defense rhetoric in his speeches. But the White Paper on Foreign Policy and Defense came out against every single proposed new defense system, and offered no alternatives. Still, given the disagreements within the party on this issue, he can’t really be seriously faulted for his performance here, either.

That’s the good news. Now for the bad parts . . .

On taxes, the Clark campaign equivocated mightily. To be sure, Clark’s position on taxes was far superior to Carter’s or Reagan’s, but it wasn’t the libertarian position. Clark continuously stated that taxes were much too high; that people should “be allowed” to keep “more” of their earnings. The libertarian position, of course, is that taxation — like conscription — is wrong on principle, and that people are entitled to keep all of their earnings. Yet if you read through the little green campaign book, or even the White Paper on Taxes and Spending, you will not find one word to indicate that we oppose taxation on principle.

(Please note: I am not saying that Clark should have proposed immediate abolition of all taxes. But to do everything possible to hide the fact that abolition is our eventual goal is, in my opinion, a severe violation of principle.)

Regarding Social Security, Clark significantly reversed himself from 1979 to 1980. Speaking at the Colorado LP state convention in April of ’79, Clark stated that Social Security should be made voluntary, and that future obligations should be paid, in part, by selling off Federally-held lands. In 1980, he called for allowing people under 40 to drop out of the system; those over 40 would be forced to remain.

Since when do people lose their individual rights when they turn 40? The only acceptable position for a libertarian to take on Social Security is that participation should be completely voluntary, for anyone and everyone!

Regarding welfare, Clark stated at a news conference in San Francisco on July 10 that he would not get rid of welfare programs until his tax-cut policies had produced a “full-employment economy”. Again, hardly the plumb-line libertarian position. Who defines “full employment”? And what happens if it isn’t achieved? Are we stuck with tax-financed welfare programs forever?

On nuclear power, the Clark campaign was perhaps more brazenly opportunistic than on any other issue. In a blatant attempt to woo student anti-nuclear activists, Crane issued a flyer which did everything possible — short of directly lying about the LP position on nuclear power — to create the impression that libertarians are anti-nuclear per se. Despite earlier promises to the contrary, the flyer prominently featured a photo of, and quote from, anti-nuclear leader John Gofman. This brochure (like most of the Clark campaign material) was not submitted to the campaign’s Review Committee — because, as Crane admitted, he knew they wouldn’t approve it!

But all of these transgressions pale in significance when compared to the final act of betrayal.

On Thursday, October 30, ABC Nightline interviewed Ed Clark (along with Barry Commoner) and asked him to explain to their viewers what the Libertarian Party was all about. Clark’s reply was as follows (verbatim transcript):

“We want to get back immediately to the kind of government that President Kennedy had back in the early 1960’s, which I think was much more benevolent. . . had much lower inflation, much higher growth rates, much lower levels of taxes.”

The interviewer, apparently somewhat confused, pointed out that John F. Kennedy was a Democrat, not a Libertarian, and then asked whether Clark was saying that the LP in 1980 was roughly equivalent to the Democrats of 1960. Clark’s reply (again verbatim) was as follows:

“No, I’m saying that we want to get back to the size of government that we had in 1960, right away. That is our immediate program. The Libertarian Party, of course, is not the Democratic Party; we’re a new party, and we’re several years away from doing what the Democrats did.”

There was no hint that Libertarians might have visions beyond that “immediate program”. Even though asked to clarify himself, Clark did not choose to say, “That is our immediate program, but of course it’s only a first step; in the long run, we seek to reduce government far below that level. Our ultimate aim is a completely voluntary society.”

Instead, he chose to identify himself with one of the most explicitly statist Presidents in modern times: the man who said, “Ask what you can do for your country”, who gave us the tyrannical Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General, who gave us the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis and the beginning of the big buildup in Vietnam.

(Was this strange silence about Libertarian principles and implied endorsement of the Kennedy regime simply an accident? Or was it part of a plan to create what John Mason jokingly referred to as “The Camelot Consensus”? In retrospect, the Kennedy-style hairdo and the widely-disseminated photo of Clark artfully posed in front of a picture of JFK do begin to assume a new significance — but perhaps not. Coincidences do happen, after all.)

Listening to Clark that night, I was stunned. For that, we labored fourteen months? By any standard, those minutes must stand as a low point in the history of the libertarian movement; a grotesque mockery of everything we have fought for and believe in.

One can only ask: how many of us would have gone out petitioning and doorbelling for Clark contributing our hard-earned cash and talking him up to our friends, if we had known that he would do what he did that night?

Just as important, how can we now claim that Clark’s 900,000 votes really stand for anything at all? How many of the people who voted for Clark were voting for anything that any of us would even vaguely recognize as libertarian principles — and how many were voting for a Return to Camelot?

MANAGEMENT

There is a myth, widely accepted in Libertarian circles, that Ed Crane is a “uniquely competent” person. “He may be arrogant and exclusionist,” the argument goes, “but he gets results.”

It is time that this myth is put to rest, once and for all. Hopefully, we have already shown that Crane is a poor strategist. But what about his skills as a manager?

If strategy is the art of devising plans for attaining goals, management is the art of implementing those plans. An effective manager is a good organizer, minimizes problems through planning and foresight, has good “people skills”, and is fiscally responsible. A poor manager has the opposite qualities.

With these points in mind, let’s look at Crane’s record, starting with the 1979 Presidential Nominating Convention.

Crane managed to get himself appointed Convention Director on the basis of his alleged “professionalism” and a glittering proposal which showed the party making a bundle off the event. In his dealings with The Convention Connection, he repeatedly told Dave Galland to plan on the basis of 4,000 attendees. Convention package prices where set at far too high a level (to cover the cost of dozens of speakers, most of them of marginal interest) and promotion to Libertarians in the Los Angeles area was neglected.

As a result, only 2,000 people showed up — many of them for only a small portion of the scheduled events — and the convention lost $35,000, which had to be made up by the Clark for President Committee. Still, we were told, the convention was a great success because it got us lots of media coverage — only fourteen months before the election — and launched the Clark campaign to a flying start.

The selection of a campaign theme, for consistent use throughout the year, provides another illustration of Crane’s managerial talents. As any communications professional will attest, continuity is a key to successful recognition-building, especially on a limited budget. And yet, incredibly, the Clark campaign changed its theme three times.

The first theme was “Toward A Three-Party System”. This was replaced with “Free Up The System”, and then with “America: Freedom Was The Original Idea”. None of these is a particularly great slogan, but at least the latter two give some indication of what the LP is all about. And you’d think that by July of 1980 (ten months into the campaign) one or another of these themes would have long been settled on.

You might think that. But you’d be wrong. In July, for no discernable reason, another campaign theme was unveiled: “A New Beginning for America”. In terms of content, this one was weaker than any of its predecessors — so bland and vapid that anyone, from a Communist to a conservative Republican, could use it with equal facility.

In fact, the conservative Republicans were using it! The same week that the first Clark spot using this theme was aired, millions of Americans sat in front of their TV sets and watched the Republican national convention — whose podium was emblazoned with the words “Together, A New Beginning”. Sound, smart planning pays off again!

The next Crane triumph was Alternative ‘80! Originally planned as a relatively low-cost, low-key fund-raiser, it was transformed at Crane’s insistence into a “media event” with guest appearances by various “celebrities”. Laanched with far too little lead time, it was a dismal flop. The “big names” who participated included Howard Jarvis (who explained that he was supporting Reagan) and Gene McCarthy (who soon thereafter also came out for Reagan). The media ignored it almost completely. And instead of raising $250,000 (the announced goal), the event lost $190,000. Never one to let the truth stand in his way, Crane nonetheless sent out a press release stating that Alternative ‘80! had generated a net profit of $245,000.

The generally inept management of the Clark campaign was not confined to the Big Events, however. They dropped the ball on the little things, too.

A good example was the production and distribution of the White Papers. In Colorado, we first learned about the release of the White Paper on Taxes and Spending when a hostile write-up on it appeared in The Rocky Mountain News. Colorado LP State Chairman John Mason — also a Congressional candidate — was asked for comments, and could only grin sheepishly, as he had not been sent a copy. Neither, as it turned out, had any of our other candidates. The same thing happened again, a few weeks later, when the Foreign Policy Paper was released. (In fact, even after repeated assurances by the campaign, none of Colorado’s Congressional candidates ever received a full set of the White Papers, issue papers or fact sheets.)

But perhaps the worst example of managerial ineptitude in the Clark campaign was in the area of fund-raising and financial responsibility. Despite David Koch’s generous contribution of $2 million, the campaign raised only $1 million from other sources. (I think if I were David Koch, I’d feel that I’d been taken for a ride by Fast Eddie.) And, at last report, the final deficit for the campaign was in the area of $200,000.

Of course, one reason for the financial problems is that the campaign didn’t have a professional fund-raiser on board until it was half over. Then, finally, Dale and Carolyn Hogue — experienced professionals — were persuaded to take on the responsibility for raising money. After a few months, they quit, because they couldn’t stand working with Crane — and at last report were suing the campaign organization for money owed them. (One sign of a good manager is his ability to attract and hold good people.)

This litany of mismanagement could be continued ad nauseam. But hopefully, a pattern has been made clear. Crane’s standard operating procedure is to make grandiose promises, fail to deliver, and then belligerently maintain that the failure was in fact a success.

It’s time we stopped falling for this routine.

ETHICS

Political cooperation depends, more than anything else, on the participants’ willingness and ability to negotiate in good faith.

Differences in ideology or strategic vision can be overcome, if those who seek to work together can reach an accommodation with one another, and honor their agreements. Conversely, no real cooperation between ethical and unethical individuals is possible. Liars and honest men cannot be allies for long.

And the ugly truth is that throughout the Clark campaign, people were lied to — regularly and deliberately.

On Wednesday, September 5, 1979, a group of prominent Libertarians — including myself, David Bergland, M. L. Hanson, Murray Rothbard, John Hospers, Bob Poole, and others — met with Ed Clark in the Bonaventure Hotel on the eve of the presidential nominating convention. Several of us expressed great concern that his campaign be open and accessible to a full range of Libertarian viewpoints, and fear that unless adequate safeguards were established, the campaign might stray from Libertarian principles.

After some negotiations, we agreed to support Clark in return for three promises: that Ed Crane not be in charge of the campaign, that a Steering Committee consisting of certain individuals be established to formulate campaign strategy and policy, and that a Review Committee be established to pass judgement on all campaign materials before they were issued. One of the people Clark agreed to have on the Steering Committee was Bill Evers.

All three promises were broken.

Ed Crane was in charge of the campaign; by early Spring, all pretense that Ray Cunningham was really in charge had been dropped.

The Steering Committee was formed, but virtually ignored. Bill Evers was excluded from the group, blackballed by Crane, who stated that he found Evers “impossible to work with”.

Very little of the material released by the Clark campaign was submitted to the Review Committee; virtually none was submitted in advance of its actual release. (Given the content of much of that material, it’s easy to see why!)

In sum, our pre-convention fears proved all too accurate. The campaign did become a virtual “one-man show”, and principles were abandoned. In addition to the Big Lies noted immediately above and the waffling on principle documented earlier, the campaign began, increasingly, to indulge in what might be called Nasty Little Lies as well. Some examples:

*In late December of 1979, Ballot Drive Co-Ordinator Howie Rich told Colorado LP Chairman John Mason that it was absolutely imperative that Colorado complete its ballot drive by December 31, because “Colorado will be the 30th state, and it’s really important that we make it in 30 by the end of the year”. The same day he said this to Mason, he told Paul Grant — then a National Committee member — that the drive had been completed in only 21 states!

*As previously noted, Clark and Crane regularly told the news media that “most of our funding is coming from small contributors”, when in fact David Koch was providing about two-thirds of the money.

*On October 3, 1980, Boulder businessman Binx Selby called the Clark Headquarters in Washington and requested copies of the White Papers. Selby was told that the Foreign Policy Paper was out of print, but that the other would be sent immediately. A few minutes later, Ruth Bennett, office manager for the Colorado Libertarian Party, called and also asked for the White Papers. The same person Selby had talked to told her that they were “unavailable”.

*Throughout Clark’s campaign literature, it was stated that the Libertarian Party was founded in 1972. In actuality, the party was founded in 1971; this fact is widely stated in party literature, and both Clark and Crane know it. Yet they chose to deliberately falsify historical fact. Why? (Hint: Clark and Crane first became involved in 1972.)

To be sure, none of these latter examples is overwhelming in its significance. But taken cumulatively, and added to the previously-cited prevarications, they point almost inescapably to one conclusion: that the Clark campaign was a fundamentally unethical, unprincipled, and opportunistic operation.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

In this writer’s opinion, the evidence presented in this report proves all but conclusively that the management of the Clark campaign was neither competent nor honest.

One more campaign like this will, quite literally, kill the party; nobody in his right mind will stick around for another round of lies, abuse, and betrayal of principle like the one Ed Crane engineered in 1980.

The question is — what do we do about it? How do we learn from our mistakes, and assure that they are not repeated in the future?

In my belief, the first thing we must do is enact changes in the LP Constitution and By-Laws, firmly establishing the National Committee’s control over all future presidential campaigns. This will go a long way toward solving the problem.

The other thing that must be done is that Ed Crane and the cheap opportunism he represents must be repudiated, once and for all, by the honest and competent men and women who make up the vast majority of the Libertarian Party. If we are to consort, politically, with liars and opportunists, let us go back to being Democrats and Republicans. They, at least, are liars and opportunists who win elections!

Each of us must stand up and be counted. Whatever your beliefs, now is the time to make your feelings known.

*Assuming that each copy of each magazine was read by two people, chances are that one of them actually read the piece on Clark. Thus, the combined effect of these articles was to reach about 10% of the voting-age population, one time apiece. If half of those who read the articles actually voted, we’re looking at about 8 or 9 million, or about 10% of the voters.

*To be fair, after some haranguing, Clark eventually did take the hard-core position on the draft, calling it by its rightful name — slavery — and stating that Libertarians oppose it on principle.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

To the thousands of letters and telegrams that have been pouring in asking for me (Wanna bet?), I reply that I have not disappeared; it’s just that the movie situation has been getting increasingly intolerable. Since I do not, like my confreres, enjoy freebies to the preview room, I have been facing accelerating opportunity costs for going to the films. Movie prices have been skyrocketing ($5 for a single feature at the neighborhoods is not outlandish), and — typical of inflationary situations — the quality of theatre service has been plummeting: fewer ushers, popcorn strewn over the floors and seats, etc. To top it all, the quality of new movies has been getting worse and worse, so that, taken all in all, it now becomes far more attractive to say to hell with it and watch an old Cary Grant movie on the tube. Lousy movies mean far less work for Mr. First Nighter.

Private Benjamin, directed by Howard Zieff. With Goldie Hawn. This movie illustrates the miasma that faces movie-goers today. It’s not an outrageously bad movie, just a piece of fluff that, in the good old days, would have rated as an inoffensive B picture: what used to be called, in the days when only movies were air-conditioned, “good hot-weather fare.” And yet, the chilling fact is that Private Benjamin is the runaway smash hit of the season! So far comedies, and movies in general, sunk.

Private Benjamin is an extended one-liner, a one-note variation on the old Danny Kaye-type GI movies, in which a sheltered hothouse plant “is made a man of” by the U.S. Army. Except this time it’s a female who gets the treatment (the Feminist motif.) At best, therefore, it’s a well-worn theme, and the female-GI business can only get you so far in laughs. Another problem that the dialogue shows virtually no comic ability or invention, and that Goldie Hawn, for all her “dumb-blonde” abilities, ain’t no Danny Kaye. The only laughs come in the first part, helped by Miss Hawn being a Jewish Princess, and there is some keen ethnic insight at the beginning (although not nearly as scintillating as in Goodbye Columbus or Annie Halt). But after a while, the whole thing becomes merely tedious, and we are treated to endless and unfunny feminist preaching, to the effect that (a) Isn’t it great that a female can become a Good Soldier, and (b) that a female can leave a two-timing lover and pursue an independent course, even though he is uniquely able to bring her sexual fulfillment. I agree with (b), although we could have been spared the details, and am not so sure that I favor anyone, of either sex, being a Good Soldier. But the point is that the humor gets lost in the preaching, something that the Danny Kay films were never, never guilty of. Verdict; good hot weather fare, or, if your boiler gets broken in cold weather.

Stardust Memories, directed by and with Woody Allen.

I have never seen any important film-maker get a roasting as savage as Woody received for this picture. All the critics who loved Manhattan felt they had to atone for this admiration by eviscerating Stardust Memories. Their behavior is ironic, however, because it bears out the thesis of this picture which they have so bitterly condemned: namely, that adoring fans of Superstars can be treacherous, boring, and selfish, and can turn savagely on their idol when he or she fails to live up to their fantasy-expectations. Again and again, the critics, sensing all too well that Woody considers them as part of the problem, have denounced him for treating his fans in this film in cranky and mean-spirited fashion. His fans depicted boorish, ugly, etc. What none of the critics has bothered to ask is; is Woody right? I suspect that he is.

It is true that this is scarcely a great Allen film, and that, not quite as badly as in Private Benjamin, the wit and humor tend to get lost in the point of view. But not all together, and it is grotesque that the same critics who like Private Benjamin should treat Stardust Memories so harshly. There are still funny, even though bitter, moments and scenes in the film, such as when a group-of adoring fans greet Allen at his weekend at a Borscht Belt hotel. One presses in to the car, and says, “Oh, Mr. ........, I love all your movies, especially your early funny ones.” Only fans can manage to insult while they think they’re showering with compliments.

It’s true, too, that Allen’s copying of Fellini’s confusion of reality and dream sequences is annoying. But it is far less annoying than in Fellini, for since the picture has no plot it doesn’t really make any difference anyway.

Stardust Memories is no masterpiece, but it is still worth seeing; it has fine moments of humor, and provides a rare insight into the fan-idol relationship from the idol’s point of view, for a change.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter
—— Special Conflict Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. XIV, NUMBERS 1-2

JANUARY-APRIL, 1981

US-ISSN0047-4517

Purged From Cato!

It Usually Ends With Ed Crane

On Black Friday, March 27, 1981, at 9:00 A.M. in San Francisco, the “libertarian” power elite of the Cato Institute, consisting of President Edward H. Crane III and Other Shareholder Charles G. Koch, revealed its true nature and its cloven hoof. Crane, aided and abetted by Koch, ordered me to leave Cato’s regular quarterly board meeting, even though I am a shareholder and a founding board member of the Cato Institute. The Crane/Koch action was not only iniquitous and high-handed but also illegal, as my attorneys informed them before and during the meeting. They didn’t care. What’s more, as will be explained shortly, in order to accomplish this foul deed to their own satisfaction, Crane/Koch literally appropriated and confiscated the shares which I had naively left in the Cato Wichita office for “safekeeping”, an act clearly in violation of our agreement as well as contrary to every tenet of libertarian principle.

1. The Road to Black Friday

The saga began a scant three weeks earlier, when Crane sent me two letters, one from himself and one through his secretary (March 5), airily informing me of the “desire” of the majority of Cato shareholders (the shareholders consist of myself, Crane, Koch, and another person, who works in the Koch offices in Wichita) that I yield my Cato shares to Crane & Co. The ground for my abrupt dismissal was a “deep-seated” personal antagonism by myself toward Crane. Evidence cited by Crane for this antagonism was twofold: (a) various conversations by myself as relayed by unnamed informers. Hardly sufficient evidence for this grave action. After all, I could have been jesting to people who didn’t understand the joke; or, I could have been using the good old muddy Randian concept of “underscoring” my deep-seated admiration toward E.H. (b) the only serious evidence cited by Crane was my Libertarian Forum article of Sept.-Dec. 1980 (“The Clark Campaign: Never Again”). Crane concluded that, because of this alleged antagonism, “we believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, for you to objectively evaluate ongoing and future Cato projects as a Board member.” In other words, disagreement with Crane automatically robs one of “objectivity”; unfailing agreement and lickspittle fawning upon Crane is the only way to make sure that you are superbly and consistently “objective.”

Due to the vagaries of the Post Office, it took until March 11 for me to receive these startling missives. I replied that same day, registering astonishment at the proceedings. I pointed out that for shareholders to have a meeting, due notice (usually 10 days) of such meeting must be sent in advance to every shareholder. But I had had no notice whatever of any meeting, and therefore the alleged “desire” expressed by the shareholders was illegal, and null and void.

I also pointed out various oddities of the Crane/secretary letters. In the first place, the Lib. Forum article dealt only with the disputes I had had with Crane within the Libertarian Party. There was no mention of Cato or Cato activities in the article. Furthermore, Crane had resigned from the NatComm of the LP, in accordance with a Cato Board resolution last November barring senior officers from any partisan political activity. So since the Cato Institute, as a tax-exempt institution under Section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code, is not supposed to have anything to do with partisan politics, how dare Crane make my stand within the LP a criterion for my continued shareholder or board membership at Cato?

To quote from my letter:

“I am also fascinated that the only concrete evidence you have for this alleged lack of competence is my article . . . ., where my criticisms of yourself had nothing to do with the Cato Institute, but were solely directed toward your activities in the Libertarian Party, a period when you were on leave from the Cato Institute. I have spent a long time trying to disassociate the Cato Institute from the Libertarian Party . . . . And yet you dare to judge my competence as a Cato board member solely on the basis of a strictly partisan political dispute between us! Since you are now supposedly out of politics, I would expect that the entire question had become moot. The critics of the Cato Institute have been saying for a long time that we are merely a front for the Libertarian Party. Are you proposing to prove them right?”

Secondly, I pointed out that usually when a personal dispute arises between a President and a Board member, if anyone is fired, it’s the President. Who ever heard of firing a board member?

In my letter to Crane of March 11, I also demanded that he send me, as a board member, all the governing documents of the Cato Institute. Despite repeated requests from myself and my attorneys, Crane persistently failed to send the full set of documents I requested.

I concluded my letter to Crane by expressing my intention to appear at the March 27 board meeting and propose various long-needed actions by the Board: e.g., the naming of a chairman, which had never been done at Cato, so that Crane informally but regularly would preside over an “objective” review and evaluation of his own record at Cato. Also, I expressed my intention for once to have regular notes taken and minutes sent to every board member, as in most organizations, shortly after the meeting; I was going to raise the point of various anomalies and seeming misstatements that Crane had already sent to the board about the November meeting. I had for a couple of months been illegitimately cut off by Crane from monthly reports and financial statements that he had sent to the other board members; and repeated requests failed to get me a copy of the November minutes. In fact, Crane was overheard ordering his secretary not to send me the minutes.

On March 19, my attorney wrote to Crane, setting forth the legal infirmities in Crane’s stance. Crane’s case, as expressed in his brusque and totally unresponsive letters of March 16 and 24, was simple to the point of inanity. His March 16 letter merely sent me a copy of the Shareholders Agreement and rested his case on that agreement. Crane’s March 24 letter, in reply to my lawyer’s letter of the 19th, answered none of his arguments, and simply reiterated that I was off the board already and that this action was in accordance with the Shareholders Agreement and state law, and that he had consulted unnamed attorneys who agreed with his position. Period.

My attorney’s letter of March 19, however, which in effect remained unanswered, pointed out several pertinent and clinching facts. First, the Crane letters could scarcely be taken as written evidence of the “desire” of the majority shareholders. For (1) I was not given due notice of any shareholders meeting, which was therefore illegal if held, and (2) There was no written evidence of any expressed desires by the other shareholders. Was I supposed to take Crane’s word for their “desire”? And why? This point can now be strengthened, for in the Restated Bylaws of the Cato Institute, introduced by Crane himself at the Black Friday board meeting, Article III, Section IV specifically states that; “A written or printed notice of each shareholders’ meeting, stating the place, day, and hour of the meeting and . . . the purpose or purposes of the meeting shall be given . . . to each shareholder . . . . This notice shall be sent at least ten days before the date named for the meeting to each shareholder . . . ..” But I had received no notice whatsoever of the shareholders’ “meeting”, let alone a notice of 10 days! Therefore, any such meeting, on Crane’s own terms, was illegal.

Moreover, according to Cato’s own Restated Bylaws, as well as the laws of Kansas under which Cato was incorporated, the shareholders are required to hold annual meetings on the second Tuesday of every January; yet no shareholders’ meetings at all had ever been held until the unheralded “desire” to kick me out as shareholder had been communicated in some fashion to Ed Crane.

Finally, and what would turn out to be particularly important, my attorney replied to the Crane demand that I send my shares to Cato with the statement that my shares had probably been left in the Wichita office of the Cato Institute for safekeeping. He based this insight on a letter to all the shareholders in my files from Cato’s Wichita office, dated March 29, 1977, which said; “please advise whether you wish to hold the stock certificate or if you prefer that I give the certificate to Florence Johnson for safe keeping.” My attorney pointed out to Crane that “it would be necessary for the Cato Institute’s Wichita office to forward the certificate to Professor Rothbard before he could comply with any properly made request under the Shareholders Agreement.”

In short, I remain unalterably a shareholder and therefore a board member of Cato until (a) I receive a majority request to yield the shares after a proper shareholders meeting is held for that purpose, with everyone, including myself, getting 10 days notice of the meeting; and (b) I endorse the Cato shares over to Crane & Co. Cato would, at long last, have to hold a proper and legal shareholders meeting, after which the Wichita office would have to send me the shares, and then I would have had to endorse them over, before I could be removed as shareholder and board member.

Furthermore, that I remain as shareholder and therefore board member until I endorse the Cato shares is clear from Crane’s own basic case, the Shareholders Agreement, and also from the Restated Cato Bylaws, which Crane whipped out at the Black Friday board meeting. (When asked by my San Francisco attorney when these Restated Bylaws had been filed, Crane airily dismissed the question with “some time in the past.”) Article VII, Section 3 of the Restated Bylaws, which Crane pointed to in support of his position that I was off the Board, states specifically that “Shares of the Corporation (Cato) shall only be transferred on its books upon the surrender to the Corporation of the share certificates duly endorsed or accompanied by proper evidence of succession, assignment, or authority to transfer. In that event, the surrendered certificates shall be canceled . . .” But I had not endorsed the shares; for one thing, I had never had them in my possession, since they were being kept in Wichita. Secondly, I had never assigned or made over any authority to transfer.

In addition, Article VII, Section 3 goes on to insist that “no shares of the Corporation shall be transferred . . . except upon a showing of strict compliance with the restrictions on transfer imposed by the provisions set out in that certain Shareholders Agreement dated January 26, 1977 . . . .” What are these restrictions? As set forth in Section 6, they are that, after the majority shareholders make clear their desire, the shares shall be sent to them “duly endorsed for transfer.” In short, until they are so endorsed, I remain ineluctably a shareholder of the Cato Institute.

Time was now a-fleeting, and it was clear that it would be impossible for Crane/Koch to comply with Cato’s own internal requirements for kicking me out as shareholder and board member before the March 27 meeting. Regardless of what might come later on, I was legally entitled to function at this meeting as a director of the Cato Institute. It was important for me to do so, both to protect my rights against the high-handed and vindictive actions of Crane & Co., and also because I intended to raise searching questions at this meeting about regularizing Cato board procedures, and about the competence of Ed Crane as president of the Institute. For example, it was learned, as my attorney wrote to Crane on March 19, that Cato has been illegal in the state of California since March 1, 1979. Crane’s dimwitted failure to comply with California law could needlessly subject the Cato Institute to considerable fines. All in all, if the board had been willing to ask searching questions about Crane’s conduct as president — something that had never been done before — several employees of Cato were ready to spill the beans. And so I decided to go to San Francisco, at my own expense (since Crane insisted on denying me my right as a board member for reimbursement) to press my case at the March 27 meeting.

The stage was set for the ultimate confrontation. Of the seven board members of Cato, three of us had managed to wring concessions from Crane at the previous board meeting last November, including passage in amended form of my resolution that Crane must abstain from any partisan political activity while functioning as president of the Cato Institute.

II. Black Friday

We had heard from the grapevine that Crane would try to stonewall it, and would pull some stunt or other to prevent me from taking part in the board meeting. I armed myself with a San Francisco lawyer in advance, and the two of us walked into the Cato conference room at 8:45, fifteen minutes early, so as to be able to sit in the room before the meeting began. The purpose of bringing my attorney was to inform Crane and the rest of the board of my rights as a board member.

On Crane’s invitation, my attorney again set forth my case on my right to function as a board member. When Koch informed us that “the shareholders” (i.e. Crane and Koch) had met the previous night and exercised their right to dissolve and reconstitute the board without me on it, I pointed out that this was not legal procedure, since I had never been informed of the meeting (certainly not with 10 days notice!) Koch replied that I was no longer a shareholder. (Catch 22!) Why not? At this point, Crane pulled out the “Restated Bylaws”, and pointed to Article VII, Section 3 as his definitive case. When my attorney and myself pointed out that this article precisely supported my case rather than his, Crane (see above) brusquely dismissed my case as a “legal technicality.” So, Crane, is that what property rights are in your eyes, just a “legal technicality”? Apparently so, for at that point Crane informed my dumfounded attorney that they had taken my Cato shares, held only for “safekeeping” at Wichita, and simply “cancelled” them, and so that was the end of that! My shares were only in Wichita for safekeeping, and so Crane & Co. had violated the clear requirement in their own agreement and bylaws that I had to endorse the shares over to them before I was off the shareholders. But the fact that they had clearly violated my property rights in my shares was just a “legal technicality”! The blackguards had grabbed my shares!

In short, Crane was arrogantly informing me and my attorney that my property, held for “safekeeping” in Wichita, had been seized by Crane and his confederates and used for their own purposes. For if they had bothered preserving my property rights and sent me the shares for endorsement, there would not have been time to keep me from serving at this March meeting. So determined were they to exercise their power that they were willing and eager to perpetrate this outrage.

When Crane refused to listen to any legal protests and demanded that we leave, my stunned attorney looked around the conference room and asked: “Doesn’t anyone else have anything to say?” (Crane and Koch had done all the talking among the board members.) Not a word, not a peep from anyone. We walked out, with me announcing that “this action is illegal, and that therefore any further decisions taken at this meeting are illegal.”

All this leads me to ruminate on something I have been pondering for a long time. Let each and every one of you, dear readers, consider this crucial question: How many fellow libertarians would you trust to guard your back in an ambush? How many would you trust? As a friend and long-time libertarian observed in reply: “Ambush, hell. How many libertarians would you allow in the same room with you and trust not to poison your food?”

There are several morals to this little story. One is: “Don’t leave anything for safekeeping in Wichita, whether it be a stick of bubblegum or your precious soul.” Another is: Just because someone says he’s a “libertarian”, doesn’t mean he won’t rob you blind if he has the chance.

Crane & Co. must be made to understand that the libertarian movement is after all an ideological movement. And so there must be at least some libertarians who hold their ideology dear, who will not be bought, who will not bend the knee to a new set of Masters even if they don’t yet call themselves the State. If there is any justice left on this earth, the libertarian movement cannot and will not be run like a giant corporation. We will brook no “chain of command” that rides roughshod over rights and even over human decency. The movement is too big for any set of power-hungry villains to control.

III. The Background: the Cato Institute

When Cato was first founded in 1976, transformed from what previously was the Charles Koch Foundation, I accepted a post as a founding board member with enthusiasm. Here was what the libertarian movement seemed to need — a well-funded organization that would gather to itself the Best and the Brightest in the movement, find new and able libertarians, and then advance sound and radical libertarian principles and their applications in the real world.

But that, alas, was only the theory. For while Cato has done many good things, the reality of the Cato Institute was unfortunately all too different. And much of that difference can be laid squarely at the door of its President, Ed Crane.

It has been well said that, after a while, the feel and spirit of any organization takes on the coloration of its head. Since I worked at Cato in San Francisco for virtually the first two and a half years of its existence, I was able to confirm this insight first-hand at Cato, and also to find out what the Cato spirit might be. After the first few months, it became all too clear that the dominant spirit at the Cato Institute was one of paranoia, intense hatred, back-stabbing, and endless crises. At first, the crises, all revolving around personal relations between Crane and other Cato executives, occurred only once every few months. But soon the frequency accelerated, until crises occurred once a week, and then every day or two. I have noted for a long time that the logo of the Cato Institute should be the closing door, because if you talk to anyone at Cato about anything except the weather, he or she will say, “Wait a minute, let me close the door.”

The atmosphere at Cato is reminiscent of nothing so much as the last days of the Nixon White House. Everything is covered over with layers of secrecy; one of Crane’s favorite phrases is an angry, “Who told you that?” (Such is the mania at Cato that a large part of the time the “who” was Crane himself.) Usually, there is at least one hate-object for Crane among his top executives. Crane and the executive will stop talking to each other for many months, even years, and, while the executive in question twists slowly, slowly in the wind (to use a favorite Watergateism), Crane will organize hate sessions against the unfortunate victim among his coterie of fawning toadies. All this is all too reminiscent of the “hate Emanuel Goldstein” sessions in Orwell’s 1984, in which Goldstein’s face is flashed on the screen and everyone is expected to heap abuse upon his image.

Finally, after many tense and excruciating months, the victim-hate object is fired or pressured out, and Crane soon finds another victim. For Crane, repeated firings of the “disloyal” has several important uses. One is that he can then blame all the incredible mismanagement and foulups at Cato on the unfortunate hate-object; sometimes, in fact, the victim is blamed for misdeeds committed months, even years after he has been booted out of Cato. Their evil, apparently, lives after them, trailing endless clouds of alibis for Ed Crane. Not only were they disloyal; they apparently engaged in endless plots against the Master. What neither Crane nor his mentors seem to understand is that if you treat everyone as if they are eternally plotting against you, pretty soon by God they will start such plotting. And so paranoia acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In a magnificent burst of speaking truth to power, a top executive of Cato recently resigned (on a matter unconnected with Black Friday), and wrote to Crane (on March 13, 1981): “In a movement filled with backbiting, I have seldom encountered anyone quite as ruthless or as consistently unprofessional as you. It is simply impossible for me to continue to work under someone whose greatest glory is humiliating, punishing, or purging his enemies, real or imagined, or ‘getting even’ with his own organization. You do not seem to realize that if you treat someone as an enemy, he soon becomes one, or how easy it would have been to win the loyalty of so many of those people who now justifiably regard you with suspicion.” Bravo!

Take a list of top Cato executives of the past and you will find some of the truly best and brightest people in the libertarian movement. It is a veritable drumroll:

Roger Lea MacBride, board member and shareholder
David Theroux, vice president
Leonard P. Liggio, vice president
Williamson M. Evers, vice president and editor of
Inquiry
Ronald Hamowy, editor of Inquiry.

I will now add myself to what is really a roll of honor.

Where they now? They are most emphatically not at Cato.

Why? Because of one man and one man alone, Edward H. Crane III. We must put the blame on Crane, for that is precisely where it belongs.

There are only two choices here. Either Crane is a John Galt figure, a giant among lesser pygmies, envied and therefore plotted against by all the rest of us creeps and low-lifes. Or else: it is Crane who is out of step, and not the rest of the world. There is no middle way, no wimpy way out of the horns of this dilemma. Either all the rest of us are Bad Guys, or Crane is the Bad Guy. The movement must choose.

And furthermore, if Crane is the Good Guy, how come he had the rotten judgment to select as his top executives all these people who turned out, on his own account, to be Bad Guys? What kind of top manager is that?

OK, let’s stipulate that personnel relations at Cato are a walking disaster. What about other aspects of the Crane Presidency? One important function of the president of a non-profit organization is to raise funds. But Crane has shown no aptitude whatsoever in fund-raising except from one man, The Donor. Direct mail fundraising hasn’t worked, as one might expect from an ideological organization. Only personal fund-raising by the President can work, and, considering what we can very kindly call. Crane’s “abrasive” personality, this is not a live option at Cato. How much longer will the Donor be willing to put up with this bizarre state of affairs? Who knows? But whatever happens, it remains an odd situation for an organization like Cato to have a President who can’t fund-raise his way out of a paper bag.

Another function of a President is to keep costs down and preside over a tight budget. But even Crane’s most fervent supporters admit that cost management is not his forte and that, instead, he spends money as if there is no tomorrow. It was only in the year that Crane was on leave to run the Clark campaign that Cato managed to live within its budget. If I had been allowed to be at the board meeting I would have raised a question, for example, about $15,000 that Crane reportedly spent on a cocktail party in Washington to herald the Ferrara Social Security book, a party that brought in virtually no book orders, but presumably enhanced whatever image Cato may have among the movers and shakers of the Reagan administration.

Veteran Crane-watchers, even those favorable to him, will stipulate all of this: that he is a disaster in personal relations, a nothing fund-raiser, and heedless of costs or budgets. Furthermore, they will concede another important point: that Eddie gets bored with any existing programs, and that therefore he is a lousy manager of any continuing institutions within Cato. It is this deep-seated boredom, they feel, that accounts for Crane’s fascination with presidential campaigns, which are short-lived, one-shot, and exciting over their brief span.

If Crane is a disastrous manager of existing programs, he is in still other ways singularly unequipped to be the head of a libertarian public policy institute. When I first got to Cato in 1977, I was told by a top Cato officer and Crane crony that Crane despised intellectuals and libertarian theorists and that he read practically nothing, whether books, magazines, or newspapers. At first I resisted this charge, but it turned out to be all too true. The heads of other public policy think tanks may not be writers or theorists themselves, but they are often genuinely fond of scholarship and of ideas and are therefore well equipped preside over efforts to translate them into more practical applications or more readable form. Libertarian institutions deserve no less, but clearly Crane is not the man for the job.

So — going down this grisly roll call of Crane failings, what in the world is supposed to be his forte? Why is he still in a job which, by any sensible criterion, he is so little qualified to hold? This question has wasted countless man-hours over lunch, drinks, and office chitchat at the Cato Institute. Why is this man there? All of us may guess, but none knows the answer. However, we might as well consider the one favorable item which Crane-watchers have come up with: that he’s a “good idea man”, that he comes up with fruitful ideas for new projects. In short, he may not be able to run an existing institution or program, but he can come up with fruitful new ones; in a large corporation, he might have been Vice President in Charge of Development or whatever.

But even this does not really hold water. There has scarcely been a creative new idea at Cato since its first year; old programs, such as Inquiry and the Cato Seminars, have simply continued in place. And Crane has never made a positive contribution to the contents of Inquiry. The best recent program, the quarterly Cato Journal, was not Crane’s idea at all, and was instituted when he was away on leave. And the best new idea hatched at Cato in years, the concept of a Cato think tank at some university — with fellowships, resident scholars and publishing the Cato Journal— was shot down angrily by Crane when he returned from his campaign leave. Probably the greatest single need of the movement right now is for a scholarly university think tank to foster interdisciplinary libertarian ideas. But Crane, in his deep contempt for the human mind, squashed the idea and instead denounced those who drew it up as plotters against his reign. So much for Crane the man of ideas.

So we are left with the puzzle: why is this man there?

We come now to the final bone of contention: the interpenetration of the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party. When I first got to Cato, I was told by several top Cato officers that the Cato Institute had turned out to be primarily a “front” for the Libertarian Party, an organization designed to funnel material and personnel into LP campaigns, and to provide a resting place for Crane in between presidential races. I told them that this was ridiculous, that I was a founding board member of Cato, and that there was a key difference (which many non- or quasi-libertarians fail to understand) between libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. That Cato had nothing to do with the party — as indeed it was legally bound as a tax-exempt organization — but was simply founded to spread libertarian ideas. They smiled back knowingly and insisted they were right.

Though my own rift with Crane began in the spring of 1979, no effort was made to remove me from the Cato board until this spring.. To me it is clear that the real cause was not the Lib. Forum article but the success which I and others had at the November board meeting in beginning to call Crane to account. I had been a one-man needier of Crane’s management at Cato board meetings for a year or more; until last November, I could be ignored as having only nuisance value, since I was just one lone voice tolerated on the board. But last November, suddenly, I had two allies, almost a majority of the Cato board. Over Crane’s initial opposition, I managed to carry the board resolution barring all senior Cato officers from partisan political activity, which helped insure Cato’s continued non-profit tax-exempt status. Also at the board meeting we managed to set up a Salary Review Committee, to review the salaries of all the top executives — a commonplace for most boards but unheard of at Cato, where Crane prefers to run everything out of his hip pocket. It was because of this success that I had to go, and go quickly.

While all the above failings of Crane certainly played a large cumulative role, my own break with Crane came sharply in the spring of 1979. Typically, it came over matters that involved not only the Cato Institute but also the Libertarian Party and the movement as a whole.

The Sarajevo of the Cato Institute was a seemingly simple act: the hiring by Crane of Dr. David Henderson as his policy analyst and economist. The hiring of Henderson came as a thunderclap at Cato. Why was he hired? The firestorm of opposition to Henderson that broke out among all the Cato executives was based not so much on personal hostility as on the fact that the Cato Institute was supposed to be deeply committed to Austrian economics. Yet Henderson was not only not an Austrian but strongly hostile. So why was he hired? Especially since all those at Cato with economic backgrounds were bitterly opposed to the appointment.

Henderson is long gone, as his appointment turned out to be yet another Crane mistake, this time admitted as such by all concerned. Yet we never did find out precisely why Henderson was hired, apart for being a way from Crane to impose his will against almost unanimous advice. But in the course of inquiry into the Henderson Affair, we discovered several fascinating and horrifying festering sores underneath the surface of Cranedom. A mighty can of worms was now uncovered.

First, we all found to our astonishment that the only person strongly advising Crane to hire Henderson was Roy A. Childs, Jr. Not only did Childs have no official post at Cato but Childs knew zilch about economics. So how did he come to be picking Cato’s economists? What was going on here? What was the Crane/Childs connection?

Deeper trauma ensued. For at this point we heard the following incredible story from a top member of the Crane/Childs cabal who suddenly defected and was promptly removed from Cato:

The essence of the story was this. Crane, and Childs as his Court Intellectual and apologist, began to discover a rising tide of hatred of Cato emerging within the Libertarian Party. Crane had finally succeeded, by early February, in inducing Ed Clark to run for President, and the mighty Clark vs. Hunscher race was now underway. But how could Clark win and, more important, how could Crane run his campaign, if Hunscher could run successfully as the anti-Cato candidate within the Party? A scapegoat would have to be found.

In addition, and more importantly, Crane/Childs had decided on a critical paradigm shift for the Libertarian Party and for the movement as a whole. Crane and his institutions — Libertarian Review and Students for a Libertarian Society — had previously been committed to pure, radical libertarian principle. This would now have to be diluted and scrapped, and a paradigm shift made to water down principle and sell out in behalf of big numbers: money, media influence, and votes. The Clark campaign, once he was successfully nominated, would be the embodiment of the new sellout opportunism within the Party.

The first fruits of the new Cranian opportunism was a shift in the line of LR and SLS on nuclear power in the summer of ‘79, which was not an isolated issue but the beginning of the end of Cranian adherence to libertarianism. Or rather, the real beginning was the Henderson appointment, which, according to the Cranian defector, was a move away from Austrianism and laissez-faire and toward the more respectable Friedmanite economics. In one case Friedmanism, in the other low-tax liberalism! All parts of the new paradigm would hang together.

Also, said our defector, the planned scapegoat for Crane/Childs was myself and particularly Bill Evers. Personal friction had arisen between Crane and Evers the previous year. As publisher of Inquiry, Crane was responsible for the business end of the magazine. When Inquiry began to face mounting deficits due to Crane’s mismanagement, he conveniently placed the blame on Evers, who as editor had no responsibility for the magazine’s budget and was not even shown a copy. In the meanwhile, Childs had conceived a deep personal antipathy to Evers for a long time, to the extent of chanting publicly as well as privately “Death to Evers” at every opportunity. There seemed to be no objective reason for Childs’ malevolent obsession with Evers, and here we are in the murky area of psychopathology. The best judgment of objective observers put the blame on a deep-seated envy of Evers: the two were the same age and both had been libertarians for a long time.

The friction and antagonism were there, and to top it off, Evers and myself were, no doubt about it, theoretical purists, quick to denounce deviations from libertarian principle. So we, and particularly Evers, were to be selected as scapegoats. According to our defector, Childs was deputized by Crane to spend virtually full time calling up LP members across the country and denouncing Evers and myself as doctrinaire purists, thereby deflecting anti-Cato fire to ourselves, and also paving the way for future sellouts.

That, said our intrepid defector, was the plan, and it was being carried out. Evers would eventually be kicked out, and I would be quietly shifted from any decision-making role to being exploited as a resource-person and general totem. True, all too true, with the exception that I didn’t go quietly.

This story hit me like a sledgehammer. I couldn’t believe it. Surely it couldn’t be true! Surely my informant had cracked under what would eventually become the well-known Cato syndrome? I knew about the Evers/Crane friction, but Crane and I had always gotten along and Childs had been one of my closest friends for many years. I thought: Say it ain’t true, Roy! So I proceeded to ask around. Did such a cabal exist? The more I found out the more our defector’s story was confirmed. The moment of truth came when I confronted Childs and asked him point-blank. Childs, who had begun to affect a steely-eyed look, presumably adopted from his mentor, in essence confirmed the defector’s story. Childs’ odious pronouncement ended the conversation: “The trouble with you is you’re too loyal to your friends, (i.e. Evers).”

The great Cato Rift had begun.

Epilogue: It Usually Ends . . . .

So that’s it. Another Crane dissenter has become his victim and been purged from Cato. But how many Pyrrhic victories will this man be able to sustain? How long will this be permitted to go on?

The last word on all this was recently sent to me by an old friend and ex-Cato bigwig. He wrote: “Murray, when you write your book or article on the history of the libertarian movement of the 1980’s why don’t you entitle it: It Usually Ends With Ed Crane?”

Television 1981

A magnet
That attracts
All those
Awaiting —
Anticipating —
Hoping —
For news
Of relief
From inflation,
Taxes.
And politics.

* * *

— Agustin De Mello

The War for the Soul of the Party

The war for the soul of the Libertarian Party has begun. Across the country, a host of LP members have responded to our call in the Sept.-Dec. issue (“The Clark Campaign: Never Again”) for a mighty coalition to restore the party to its basic and oft-proclaimed principles. A new organization has been formed, its nature and purposes set forth in its title: The Coalition for a Party of Principle. The Coalition is exactly that: a united front of all principled LP members, “radical”, “conservative” and in-between, who feel deeply that the Libertarian Party must return forthwith to its original role as keeper of libertarian principle and as the missionary of those principles to the rest of the country and the world. We did not form and join the Libertarian Party in order to scuttle those principles and whore after votes, money, and media influence. If we wanted that, we would have stayed in the Democratic or Republican parties. We don’t want ruthless would-be politicos to corrupt us from within.

No one likes faction fights. No one enjoys having the Libertarian Party, to which we have devoted so much, become the battleground of contending forces. But, like it or not, that is the grim reality. The Crane Machine — the organized forces of opportunism and betrayal — have been able to dominate the presidential campaigns and much of the party machinery. The Coalition recognizes that only organization — dedicated, committed organization — can take back the party from its ruthless betrayal by the Crane Machine.

I. The Coalition for a Party of Principle

The Coalition has been formed to act as a caucus within the Libertarian Party. That is, we shall decide among ourselves on candidates and measures to support or oppose within the LP. Eventually, we hope to organize as a fully functioning membership organization. In the meanwhile, Temporary Chairman of the Coalition is John Mason, chairman of the Colorado LP.

The Coalition has already agreed to support Mason for chairman of the Libertarian Party at the August, 1981 convention. If this seems premature to anyone, then all LP members should realize that, months earlier, the far-sighted Crane Machine had already handpicked their own candidate: Kent Guida, and managed to secure Guida a visible post in the national party headquarters about the time he was being kicked out as chairman of the Maryland LP. The Crane Machine has already selected a campaign manager for Guida, the redoubtable Howie Rich.

In short: Stop Guida, and Elect Mason.

In addition to his impeccable credentials in the anti-Crane Machine movement, John Mason has other superb qualifications for national chair: as chairman of the Colorado party, he has performed yeoman work in building up the party even at the expense of his own professional career; he has run several times for office on the LP ticket; and, last but not least, he is universally and correctly recognized as a great person, as a warm and kind man, qualities to be cherished in the upper strata of the Libertarian Party.

The chairmanship fight is particularly important because if the Crane forces can obtain the post of chairman, they will very likely control the Presidential nominating convention in 1983 or 84. This must not be allowed to happen. Stop Guida; elect Mason.

In the meanwhile, things are looking bright for the new Coalition. Mason’s campaign manager is the formidable Williamson Evers, member of the ExecComm of the Coalition and one of the most knowledgeable opponents of the Crane machine. In February, Evers was elected by a landslide to the Chairmanship of the LP of California, the largest and best organized LP in the country.

The tide is rolling for libertarian principle and against the Crane Machine.

Other members of the Coalition’s ExecComm, now in process of formation, in addition to Mason and Evers, are: M.L. Hanson, National Vice-Chair; Dave Nolan of Colorado, co-founder of the national LP; Paul Grant, formerly a leader of the Louisiana LP now in Colorado; Bob Poole, editor of Reason and frontlines; and Tyler Olson, chairman of the Arizona LP. Already on the Board of Advisers of the Coalition are John Hospers, first LP Presidential candidate in 1972; and Fred Esser of the Arizona LP.

II. The Clark/Crane Defenses

The defenders of the Clark/Crane record have begun to weigh in, in reaction to the tidal wave of criticism across the country and to the many favorable responses to the Lib. Forum issue and the formation of the Coalition. The defenders are actually in a state of some embarrassment. In the first place, bureaucratic opportunists and unprincipled technicians and would-be technicians find it difficult to engage in any sort of reasoned argument. Argument means principle, and principle is precisely what opportunists are always weak on. Stalin could never out-argue Trotsky or Bukharin; he just had the bureaucracy with him, which, unfortunately, turned out to be enough. What bureaucrats and power elites always want is for the opposition to shut up and go away, to obey orders, to accept their assigned tasks, to — in a favorite Cranian phrase — “go along with the program.” The last thing they want is widespread discussion within the LP.

Another embarrassing point — also typical of power elites — is that so far they have not found a single person to defend them who is not a part-time or full-time hireling of the Crane Machine — that is, of Crane-dominated or associated institutions. Arguments, of course, must stand on their own merits or demerits regardless of who expounds them, but still there is something ineffably sleazy about Crane hirelings prattling on about his unique competence and greatness. The smell of the sycophant is never pretty.

With all this in mind, let us now examine the various arguments that the Crane Machine has put forward in defense of the Clark campaign and, by implication, of all future campaigns which they may come to dominate.

1. Trivializing and Evading the Issues

Since opportunists have no real arguments in defense of their record, they typically flee from such discussions as from the very plague. There has not been the slightest attempt to rebut the detailed record of sellout that myself, Dave Nolan, Justin Raimondo and others have been making. In print, the Crane Machine and its apologists have generally confined themselves to reciting the record of their campaign’s alleged accomplishments. Their real “defenses” are verbal and word-of-mouth; and these turn out to be no real arguments at all.

Their basic oral “defense” is to evade and trivialize the issues by reducing it all to a personality squabble or a mere power struggle. There are many variants of this ploy: Crane and myself are personally at odds; Nolan and Crane are at odds, etc. (It is strange how many people are personally at odds with Ed Crane.) Or, that it’s all a power struggle, either because the Coalition is “jealous” of the Crane Machine’s power or accomplishments (sic) and want in; or, wonder of wonders, even the notion that we of the Coalition are trying to “protect our power” from the Cranians. There is only one way to get past this smokescreen, this evasive tactic, which should be obvious to everyone but apparently is not. And that is to stipulate: OK, everyone, let’s assume for the sake of argument that we’re all Bad Guys, that the Coalition is just as “bad” as the Crane Machine, that we’re merely engaged in a power struggle, etc. So what? This might make for exciting reading or gossip, but it is totally irrelevant to what should be the concern of every Libertarian. What each and every Libertarian should concentrate on is one simple question: who is standing on libertarian principles, who is sticking to the Libertarian platform, and who is betraying them? That’s the only issue that anyone need worry about: Who is for principle, and who is betraying it? That question and that alone should be every Libertarian Party member’s only concern. I am confident that if this is so, if Libertarians keep their eye on that central issue, there can be only one outcome: the Coalition will win in a walk, and the Crane Machine will be roundly defeated.

Another related verbal smokescreen set up by adherents of the Crane Machine: why is the Coalition so negative? Why are we stressing our opposition to the Clark campaign and the Crane Machine? Why can’t we be “positive”?

The first response to this charge is that it is oddly all too familiar: for this is precisely the attack that statists and non-libertarians have always levelled against libertarians. Why are you so “negative”? Why are you always so opposed to the government? Can’t you ever offer positive measures? The answer to this bit of hokum is precisely the same now as it was before: We are strongly opposed to the State to the extent that we love liberty. We positively favor liberty and libertarianism, and it is precisely for that reason that we are so negatively opposed to those who would trample upon liberty or on the principles of libertarianism. Indeed, how could we love liberty strongly and passionately if we did not oppose its enemies with equal fervor?

Another Cranian smokescreen device is as old as the hills: “You’re another!” The line now is that Bill Evers, in his notable campaign for Congress warmly endorsed by myself, was just as false to libertarian principle as was the Clark campaign. In the first place, this is hogwash, as anyone who cares to examine both campaigns objectively will attest. But that is not the important point. The important consideration is: even if true, this reply is totally irrelevant. Even if true, this would provide no excuse whatever for the misdeeds of Clark/Crane. If the charge were true, then both Evers and Clark/Crane should be condemned. This malarkey, of course, is the stock reply of all criminals who are caught red-handed: “But everyone’s doing it.” Once again, we must not allow ourselves to trivialize the vital issues at stake. Nobody should “do it.”

Let us now thankfully turn away from the smokescreens and the evasions to the actual and concrete arguments that the Crane Machine has been making in defense of the Clark/Crane record.

2. Everyone Makes Mistakes

The most common defense of the Clark campaign is simply that: no one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and therefore all doers are bound to make mistakes. Ergo, they who have gone out and dared to do, must not be criticized for their inevitable errors.

Several points must be noted in reply:

First, this kind of argument can be used to whitewash any and every incompetent in any activity or organization. Using this kind of rationale, along with the companion “we’re on a learning curve”, no one, however incompetent, would ever get fired from any position whatsoever. The argument proves far too much, and is therefore sheer blather. The purpose of the argument is to shut critics up, so that the Crane Machine can attempt to run everything without hindrance from people whom they regard as the peanut gallery (i.e. all non-Machine members.)

Second, it is absurd to excuse people who make mistakes unless they demonstrate that they have indeed learned from them. Despite vague generalities about “learning curves” there is no evidence whatever that these gentry have learned a thing from their errors. On the contrary, their references to “mistakes” are momentary and purely ritualistic; from their writings, it is clear they think everything went simply great. Certainly they did nothing wrong and took no basically wrong strategic or tactical line. There is not the slightest hint that Crane et al. admit to the evils of opportunism or propose to correct their ways in the future. Quite the contrary. The Judeo-Christian heritage is quite correct in refusing to forgive a sinner until he convincingly demonstrates that he has repented his evil ways. Crane and Company remain arrogantly unrepentant. To use the Nixon lingo, they are “stonewalling” it. They must be treated accordingly.

(For the leading Cranian effusions on the campaign, see Tom Palmer, “What the Clark Campaign Achieved: An Insider’s View,” frontlines (Dec. 1980-Jan. 1981); and Ed Crane, “A New Beginning. . . .”, Caliber (Feb. 1981).

3. Never Criticize Another Libertarian

This line, which has been offered by sincere independents as well as by conscious and dedicated tools of the Crane Machine and used to much effect, is simply: Never Criticize Another Libertarian — the Libertarian version of the famous “Eleventh Commandment” of the Republican Party. Criticism is not nice, it’s low-type, it’s less than purely philosophic, and, above all, it’s not fraternal. All libertarians are our Brothers (or Sisters), are they not?

A variant of this creed runs: Criticize the Sin, but not the Sinner, the Mistake but not the Person making the mistake.

Granted that life is more pleasant following this tack, but alas, it misses the crucial point. Also, it is unpleasantly reminiscent of the tactic of all ruling classes in history: criticize inflation, but never the inflators; price controls, but never the people doing the controlling, etc. The point is that sins, errors, evils, etc. are not just floating abstractions; they are committed by real persons in the real world, and therefore they cannot be combatted unless people know what is going on in the concrete and who is doing it. Who is inflating and regulating, and for what purpose? It is at that point that we realize that not just abstract error but conscious evil is being perpetrated for the sake of ill-gotten money and power.

Well, unfortunately, the libertarian movement, brothers and sisters though they may be, is composed of frail human beings. Libertarians are not perfect (do we need to make this statement after so many years of experience?). They are subject to all the temptations of human nature: including betrayal for greed, power lust, etc. The difference is that in libertarians, because of their professed high ideals and principles, it is infinitely more disgusting. If we must choose between cynical politicos who call themselves Democrats or Republicans, and unprincipled renegades who call themselves Libertarians, I’ll take the former any day in the week.

Those who say Never Criticize Another Libertarian are treating our movement and our party like a social club, an Elks or Kiwanis. If Libertarianism were just a social club, and I couldn’t stomach the people running it, I wouldn’t make a big fuss, I’d simply quit and join another club across the street. I much prefer the joys of scholarship and friendship to running around causing trouble.

But Libertarianism is a wonderful and precious creed, and the Party is supposed to be its political arm. If I see it taken over by power-hungry rascals and sellout artists, I cannot remain silent. I cannot sit still and see thirty-four years of devotion to the name and the concept of libertarianism tossed down the drain by a bunch of turncoats. We have tried to criticize them from within and get them to mend their ways; all we got for our pains were lies and soft-soap. If we lose the name “libertarian” like our forefathers lost the word “liberal” a century ago, by what name shall we then call ourselves?

I don’t believe that such critics of the LP as George Smith and Sam Konkin are right that any political party that runs candidates for office is inherently betraying principle by joining and sanctioning the State. But while I don’t agree that Libertarian politicians sin necessarily, I do believe that they are always in a position that Catholic theologians call “occasions for sin.” The Libertarian Party member and the candidate for office is veritably surrounded by temptation, by occasions for sin, for betrayal of a creed that is fundamentally and inherently anti-politics. So that even if a Libertarian politico must not necessarily betray principle, he or she may well do so empirically. The history of the 1980 Presidential campaign gives us pro-party people no comfort; in fact, we must all recognize that we in the Libertarian Party are going to have to work like hell from now on to try to prove that Smith and Konkin have been wrong.

But for us to do so, the opportunist ruling clique in our party, the Crane Machine that has been able to dominate the party machinery and particularly the presidential campaigns, must be denounced and defeated. In his excellent critique of the Clark campaign, Justin Raimondo, after pointing to the ignominious defeat of the Cranian Quick Victory Model, writes that in the Lib. Forum I “speculated” that the opportunists will henceforth “leave us alone and return to the major parties.” No Justin; I have no expectation that they will do so and leave us alone to our cherished principles; that was only a fond but vain hope. I agree totally with Raimondo that the “fight against opportunism in our movement. . . is not yet over. In fact, it has hardly begun.” (Justin Raimondo, “. . . . . . Or a Rude Awakening?” Caliber (February 1981). The purpose of forming the Coalition is to wage that very struggle.

4. The Crane/Palmer Articles

The Crane and Palmer articles noted above are the major apologias in print for the Clark campaign. They are largely uninteresting from our point of view, because they are the usual hype-drumroll of alleged successes, favorable media responses, etc., and there is no attempt whatever to defend the Clark campaign against the volley of concrete criticisms. Crane Machine members are praised to the skies (e.g. Palmer’s apotheosis of the legendary Guida, the Machine candidate for national Chair), and Machine critics subtly denigrated (e.g. Palmer’s dismissal of some of Dave Nolan’s criticisms as “politically motivated”. Since the LP is a political party, it is a little difficult to derive any coherent meaning from this particular accusation.) There is the usual buck-passing; what went wrong with Alternative ’80 was the work of unnamed members of the “finance department”; the modicum of good in it was the result, once more, of the Great Guida.

The most interesting part of either article was the finale of Crane’s piece, an address given at the Libertarian Supper Club of Orange County, California. Here he sets forth the explicit doctrine — in violation of the LP Platform and of the NatComm Strategy Statement — that the Libertarian Party is not really supposed to be libertarian at all! It is supposed to be engaged in “outreach” (or, as Crane ungrammatically puts it: the “Libertarian Party is an outreach.”) The LP is supposed to be “the vehicle to bring people into the Libertarian movement”, where “there are other institutions whose job it is to radicalize them.” The LP, in short, is the wishy-washy front group that brings people into the movement, where other institutions stand ready to radicalize them, that is train them in the correct doctrine. But where are these “other institutions”? The answer is that they don’t exist. There are no radicalizing institutions on any decent scale, and those that do exist (e.g. the Radical Caucus, the Libertarian Forum) are tiny organizations struggling on with short (or even zero) shrift from the likes of Crane or Crane-dominated institutions. All the Cranian institutions are busily engaged in “outreach.” There is no attempt by Crane or anyone else to devote any substantial resources to “inreach,” or radicalization. If millions of dollars and lots of personnel are devoted to dishwater “outreach”, and peanuts to the dissemination of libertarian principle, what in the world does anyone think is going to happen? The inevitable result will be the swamping and the disappearance of principle, and the use of the great name “libertarian” as a cover for milk-and-water statist pap, whether “low tax liberalism” or “low tax conservatism” or whatever else is expected to draw in the big numbers at the moment. No, far far better to get a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand votes, for genuine uncompromising libertarian principles and programs, than “millions” for a candidate who appears to the public to be only slightly more libertarian than John Anderson or Ronald Reagan. When our candidate is truly a Candidate of Principle, then we will know that whatever votes he or she gets is for our principles; but if he is like everyone else, then his votes will merely be for something much like the Democrats or Republicans we are supposed to be against.

5. Childs’ Comments

Roy Childs is the Court Intellectual, Lord save us, of the Crane Machine, and is indeed what Dave Nolan kindly calls him: the Machine’s “chief apologist.” Childs, in response to frontlines questions about his views of the Coalition (March 1981), has three lines of argument.

One is a rather curious attack on the Coalition, which he calls a “very unprincipled coalition”, because it contains a wide variety of tendencies within the Libertarian Party, from myself and Bill Evers to John Hospers. According to Childs, it is “unscrupulous in the extreme” because these people have no “principles in common.” There are several points to be made in reply. One is that Childs is consciously or unconsciously parroting the very charges made by Jim Burnham in National Review in the early 1970s, denouncing the alliance that the libertarians of the time had made with the New Left in opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War. Does Childs now think that the coalition between libertarians and the New Left against the draft and the war was “unprincipled” and therefore should not have been made? Does he therefore repudiate the current coalition which his pals in the Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS) have been making with leftists who are opposed to the draft? If so, I would like to hear it. If not, why not? Does Childs really think that I have less in common with John Hospers than, say, Milton Mueller has with some Trotskyite sect?

In actuality, there is nothing unprincipled about the anti-draft coalitior), so long as it remains a coalition only on points where libertarian and leftist concerns intersect. It is not unprincipled to be against the draft, even together with people who are not libertarian on other issues, just as it is not unprincipled to join, say, with the Liberty Amendment people to attempt to repeal the income tax. And secondly, though Childs in his own disregard for LP principles and the LP platform may not see it, I do have a lot in common with all the other Coalition members, including the dreaded John Hospers. What we all have in common, oddly enough, is the Libertarian Party Statement of Principles and its Platform. All members of the Coalition agree on basic libertarian principles, although we might quarrel about some of the detailed applications.

Childs’ second line of attack on the Coalition is that while he admires most of us and considers us “intellectually brilliant”, we simply don’t understand “political activism.” Here is a brand new Childs that has suddenly been trotted out: Roy the hip politico. Roy Childs, like all of us, has his virtues and his defects; but I have never thought that savvy politician was one of them. I dare to suggest, furthermore, that knowledge about politics is at least as abundant within the Coalition as in the Crane Machine. What is more, it doesn’t take either intellectual brilliance or political savvy to be able to smell betrayal. How much of a political expert do you have to be to know a sellout when you see one?

How savvy is the new Childs? A little story should sum it all up. A few of us had a little betting pool on the Clark vote at the last election. Shortly before the election, Childs insisted to a mutual friend that Clark would definitely get “at least two million votes”, and heaped scorn upon this young libertarian because he “didn’t know anything about politics.” The punch line: the mutual friend won our betting pool with a guess that was right on the nose: 925,000. What price political acumen now?

The above two lines of argument by Childs were by way of counter-attacking the Coalition, arguments which, as I have pointed out above, are merely evasions to camouflage the odious record of the Clark campaign. But what did Childs say in actual defense of that campaign? His third line: passing the buck. Whatever wrong might have happened, it was not Crane’s fault; Clark, not Crane, was responsible at least for “low tax liberalism” and for the repellent stance on immigration. (Childs then continued with a “you’re another” on Evers, which we have dealt with above).

The buck stops here; in the case of the Clark campaign, it must stop with Clark himself and with his master strategist and communications head: Ed Crane. I am not interested in sorting out the nuances of which particular Clark bigwig was responsible for which particular evil: the point is that they, and particularly Clark/Crane, were all in it together and must take joint responsibility. If Crane really opposed some of the sellout — a dubious proposition considering the awful brochures, White Papers, etc. for which he was clearly responsible — then it was his responsibility to say so publicly at the time. Otherwise, he cannot be allowed to get away with passing the buck. At the very least, Crane should be repudiating these Clarkian positions loud and clear right now: something which he is most conspicuously not doing. The sinner must himself confess and repent; having his flunkies make buck-passing excuses for him simply will not do.

At best, pinning all the blame on Clark is going to be very embarrassing for the Crane Machine when they try to run Clark in 1984, as they probably will do.

6. Neil Smith and the Third Camp

In frontlines and in a widely distributed letter of Feb. 17, veteran Colorado libertarian activist and science fiction writer L. Neil Smith has delivered a stern barrage against both the Crane Machine and Coalition, calling both factions “bad guys” and power seekers. A leader of the decentralist faction within the Party, Smith calls for radical decentralizing reforms, such as abolishing all national officers and replacing the NatComm with a council of state LP chairs.

My reply to Neil Smith was largely indicated above. OK, let us stipulate for a moment that both factions are Bad Guys lusting after power. But what issues are at stake? As I have written to Smith, there are only three goals that I have for the Libertarian Party (not necessarily in this order) (1) keeping the Platform pure; (2) a structural reform that severely binds national candidates to the party and to the platform; and (3) defeat of the Crane Machine. All these three goals are part and parcel of what it means to return the LP to being the Party of Principle. But since Neil Smith agrees strongly with all three goals, this makes him and other third-campers like him, willy-nilly and despite themselves, members of the Coalition in spirit. Surely then, it would be more effective, for Smith’s own purposes, to unite with us and join the Coalition in fact. I do not agree with his ultra-decentralism, but I consider that question of minor importance compared to the above three overriding goals. The question that Neil Smith and other third-campers must answer for themselves is: If his structural proposals fail, and the post of national chairman still exists, who will Smith vote for, Mason or Guida?

7. Clark and Update

There has recently come to our attention the first issue of the new newsletter Update, Libertarian Review’s spinoff and Answer to the rival frontlines. In this March-April issue, there is a lengthy interview with Ed Clark in which he attempts to defend his campaign and answer Nolan’s and my criticisms. It is a feeble performance indeed.

Most of the interview is devoted to Clark’s trotting out the usual line which we have already seen from the Crane/Clark apologists: it was a super campaign, no one could have done it better, everyone who does anything makes mistakes, and all the rest of the hokum. The only thing that Clark adds to this aspect of the Stonewall Defense is his sly little aphorism, “I think that the people who don’t make mistakes are the people who don’t do anything,” which ranks in fatuity with Nancy Reagan’s famous mot that “I notice that all the people who favor abortion have already been born.” So determined is Clark to concede nothing that when Update concludes by asking him, “What was your campaign’s biggest drawback?”, Clark in effect refuses to answer, muttering some balderdash about tripling our crowds in 1984. Everyone makes mistakes, but not Clark & Company, right? Clark even sees nothing wrong in the hype predictions of “several million votes” that he and his crew persisted in making down to the very end of the campaign.

On the specifics of the Clarkian sellout, on the low-tax liberalism and the defense of the welfare state, etc., there is not a peep in the interview. Clark, of course, as one might expect, insists that he did not “sell out” principle. The only specific denial, however, is that he made himself up to look like Jack Kennedy, a fairly minor aspect of the Nolan/Rothbard indictments.

There are some interesting aspects to the Clark interview, however. He implicitly charges me with believing that an LP candidate should confine himself to saying: “I own my body and the fruits of my labor, taxation is therefore theft, and so smash the State”, or words to that effect. This is a straw-man smear, pure and simple. No, Ed, there is a strategy in-between merely reciting pure basic principle on the one hand, and advocating low-tax liberalism and no cuts in welfare on the other. There should be no mystery about that Third Force strategy: it is, old boy, the LP Platform. Or maybe you consulted it so rarely during your campaign that you have forgotten its very existence. That is precisely what the LP Platform has done over the years: applying basic libertarian principles to all the important issues of the day, and coming up with solutions that LP members and candidates are supposed to uphold. The platform is our issue commitment beyond the strictly philosophic.

In forging our hard-core radical platform over the years, the LP has many times made and reinforced its strategic commitment, one which Clark now wants to reconsider. It was a commitment systematized in the LP NatComm Strategy Statement, and it said that we pledge ourselves unswervingly to principle, both in basics and in application to political issues. Contrary to the Clark/Crane charges, none of us wants to neglect interim demands short of the full libertarian goal. What we say is this: (a) the ultimate goal of full and complete liberty must never be forgotten; the candidates must repeatedly uphold it as the ultimate ideal; (b) interim demands must also be truly radical and substantive; and (c) none of them must contradict the ultimate goal — as, for example, Clark/Crane did in promising to keep the welfare system intact until “full employment” is achieved. Clark’s feeble defense of his “order of destatization” also violates the Strategy Statement, which explicitly bars such an order as being destructive of libertarian principles and goals.

When asked whether the party or the candidate should plan a campaign, Clark, again expectedly, comes out in favor of the candidate being able to ride herd over the campaign. It is not surprising that a runaway candidate should urge us to allow such runaways forevermore. No, he says, the only party control over the candidate should be “to participate fully in the nominating process”, which sounds for all the world like the usual argument for “all power to the President:” that the role of the public should be only to participate in the voting for President; after that, the public’s role is to shut up and obey the orders of whoever is elected. This plea for plebiscitary dictatorship is scarcely softened by Clark’s statement that the Presidential candidate should ask for advice from a broad cross-section of the party. Yeah, like 1980, Ed? When one big part of the cross-section was systematically lied to and betrayed?

Clark’s one new proposal is that LP members should insist on detailed campaign projections from candidates before they are chosen at conventions. Fine, but this should be done in addition to reforming the bylaws to make candidates accountable to the party and its principles and platform. For what if our next Presidential candidate makes detailed promises and then, after nomination, conveniently forgets them, like you did, Ed? How is the party to bring this person to account?

The point that Clark and his cohorts conveniently forget is that the LP Platform is our contract that we make with each other and with the voting public. It is a solemn pledge, and betrayals of the platform by our candidates are equivalent to the breaking of a contract and a pledge. Such action must be dealt with severely. If there is no mechanism for doing so, if we must all suffer at the hands of runaway candidates, then we should seriously rethink our policy of running candidates and consider whether we should transform ourselves into a political action group like the ADA or Common Cause. We must never again tolerate runaway candidates.

There is, of course, the obligatory coy refusal by Clark to rule himself out of the race in 1984. In addition to the disaster of the 1980 campaign, there is another powerful reason for never nominating any Presidential candidate, however good he may have been, twice in a row. For we would then fall prey to the “Norman Thomas” syndrome. One thing which helped wreck the Socialist Party earlier in this century was that it habitually ran Thomas for President, so that soon the public and the media thought of it as the “Thomas” party and forgot about the party’s principles. We must never, ever succumb to any cult of personality. As far as I was concerned, this was the major factor in making me hesitant about Roger MacBride’s running again in 1980, a factor which of course would not preclude support for MacBride in the next election.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the Clark interview is his hint about putting his mitts on our glorious platform. What he is really saying through the fog is that the platform should be weakened so as to attract wimpy sympathizers into the party who would then be radicalized after they became members. We must not permit the opportunists to weaken and destroy our great platform. It is bad enough for our presidential candidate to sell out, it is unforgivable for him to try then to move in and liquidate our platform of principle.

Here, Clark makes an interesting gloss on the Cranian hooey about radicalizing LP members after the campaign and after they have joined the party. Crane refers loftily to unnamed “other institutions” which would do the work of radicalization, institutions which I pointed out above do not really exist. But Clark has the answer: the LP itself will perform the radicalizing task. Well, bully. But when has the LP ever done the work of education and radicalization? There is only one institution within the LP doing such work on any systematic scale, and it is a maverick with virtually no money or support from LP bigwigs — certainly none from the likes of Clark, Crane or their affiliated institutions. I refer, of course, to the intrepid Radical Caucus of the LP. Typically, and with a few honorable exceptions, the LP only discusses issues, principles, and strategies for two days every other year in convention consideration of the party platform. And even then, discussions are often overridden by the excitement of selecting candidates or officers. And how will the “radicalization” process be helped if Clark eventually succeeds in emasculating even the platform?

There is no point in running candidates and trying to gain votes unless the campaign is used to educate a broader public in libertarian principles and programs and thereby to convert and attract other libertarians. If some people want to run “attractive”, soft-core campaigns that are only one centimeter more libertarian than John Anderson or Ronald Reagan, then they should run those campaigns within the Democratic or Republican party, or even as a third party “Independent.” After all, the two major parties already have lots of built-in votes, money, and media coverage which they needn’t build up from scratch. If Clark had run his presidential campaign as a Democrat or Republican or on his own Andersontype “Independent” party, and not called himself a “Libertarian”, I would have had no particular quarrel with his campaign. A softcore major or minor party might even help the general climate of political opinion. But the horror is that Clark/Crane et al persist in calling their program “libertarian” and thereby corrupt everything the rest of us and the Libertarian Party stand for. If they want to try to infiltrate non-libertarians and seduce them gently and gradually, they should leave us alone and go infiltrate the Democrats and Republicans; as it is, they are only infiltrating and demoralizing and corrupting us.

Any notion, by the way, that Update is any sort of objective newsletter of the movement can be dispelled by merely reading its first issue. In addition to spending half its space on the glorification of Clark, it purports to present an objective rundown on the various candidates for National Chair of the LP, including positive and negative comments on each one. Now watch this: On Mason, the negative comments are: hasn’t done anything on the National Committee, and “too tied in with the Rothbard faction.” On Kent Guida, negative comments are: “Don’t know anything about him” and ‘He’s too short.”

“He’s too short.” Gee, fellas on Update, is that the only negative comment you could really find on Guida? As a founder of the Short People’s Liberation Front, I want to assure one and all that I have never attacked Kent Guida for being too short; I am not and shall never be a Heightist. My negative comment is very different and far more a propos: that Guida is the handpicked creature of the Crane Machine. Now how come the Updateniks never thought of that? Could it be because Update itself is a leading Crane-run institution? Or is that being too cynical?

7. The Crane Machine

There abounds in the Libertarian Party an almost wilful failure to realize that we are confronting not just one man, Ed Crane, or one candidate, Ed Clark, but a small but powerful’ political machine which Crane has assiduously built up over the years. Political organizations tend to be run by tightly-knit machines, and Libertarians must wake up to the fact that they are members of a political party and are subject to the same organizational pressures as any party. Political organizations are not run by shareholder-owners or commanders-in-chief but by member-voters, and hence it becomes almost inevitable for ruling coalitions and groups to form around common personal, ideological, or tactical views.

Most political activists are trained to think in terms of party machinery, coalitions, and bosses, and to figure out where the power in their organization lies. Libertarians, who have had little or no experience in party politics, tend to look at each individual as a separate atom, to be judged or voted on for his or her own sake. One reason that the Crane Machine has managed to rule party machinery, and particularly presidential campaigns, for many years is that few Libertarians realize that there is a Machine and that all its members must be evaluated as a joint package.

The Crane Machine is small in number, but it is tightly knit, takes orders from one man, and consists of fairly able people. It is also kept permanently in place between campaigns by Crane finding niches for them in various Cranian-run institutions: Libertarian Review, Students for a Libertarian Society, Cato Institute, and (to some extent) the National Office of the LP. There they enjoy permanent jobs as professional libertarians, which enormously expands their influence in the movement and the Party, and permits them to be wheeled into position for the next Presidential campaign. The Crane Machine resembles a miniature multi-national corporation, with members being slotted back and forth in whatever niche they can best fill at the moment.

And so we have, in the Party, a Crane Machine which is small but tightly knit and enjoying paid positions, confronting an opposition which is far larger but paid little if at all as libertarians. Hence, the Crane Machine can work full time at its task, whereas the larger opposition can only work part-time at the task of opposing the Machine and educating the rest of the party about the danger it poses. Also, the opposition is necessarily diverse, whereas the Machine, funded from one source and dominated by one man, is cohesive and tightly organized. And then, in the middle, the vast majority of the Party, good folk who would be staunchly for principle and against the conscious opportunism and betrayal of the Crane Machine if they only knew what was going on. It is precisely the major task of the Coalition for a Party of Principle to educate the Libertarian Party and the movement as a whole about the danger of the Crane Machine in its midst.

In a sense, battling the Crane Machine within the movement is like battling the State in the larger society: In both cases, a small well-organized group of fully-paid professionals and bureaucrats dominate the larger society of unorganized citizens who are not professionals in politics and who are unaware of the way they have been conned and betrayed.

An important warning: We must begin to think in terms of the Machine rather than the personal qualities of its individual members. Because of his abrasive personality, disliking Crane is as easy as falling off a log. But we must realize that his personal style is not the important problem: The vital problem is the opportunist course to which Crane and his subservient Machine are totally dedicated. Some members of the Crane Machine are highly likable people whom I regard as good friends; they have simply drifted into a course of action that, if allowed to triumph, would be disastrous for the Libertarian Party and for libertarianism as a whole. They are not irredeemable, and I trust that they will come to see the error of their ways and abandon the Machine.

8. Summing Up: the Themes

John Mason has chosen a splendid theme for his campaign for national chair: “Principle First.” There we have the objectives of the Coalition put in a concise nutshell. My own contribution to Coalition watchwords, of course, is “Never Again”. And there we have it: the “positive” and “negative”, hand-in-hand, indissoluble, as we go forward to the struggles of 1981, pointing to the climactic 1984 Presidential nominating convention. For putting Principle First means Never Again.

George Jacob Holyoake, Libertarian Agitator

By Richard A. Cooper

Nineteenth century Britain could be described as a cockpit of change. From a rural society it became the premier industrial power of the world, setting forces in motion that inspired new modes of thought and action. Many of the contemporary political and social movements of the Western world were born and nurtured there. These movements contained many interesting figures. George Jacob Holyoake was one such personality. He described himself as an “Agitator” and was proud to be one. Over the course of a long life (1817-1906) he was an active supporter of many social, political, and philosophical movements. His activities on behalf of liberty deserve our attention today.

In his autobiography, Sixty Years of An Agitator’s Life (1891) and his two volumes of remembrances in a similar vein, Bygones Worth Remembering (1905), Holyoake displayed his great ability as a raconteur. The many personalities and movements with which he has been associated are recalled in a vigorous style. Holyoake was a friend of the heroes of American liberty of his time: Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave abolitionist; Wendell Phillips, anti-slavery journalist; and Colonel Robert Ingersoll, abolitionist and Freethought leader. But his attentions were not confined to the English-speaking world; rather his agitation was cosmopolitan. The heroes of 1848 were his friends: Louis Kossuth, the hero of Hungary; Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the founders of Italy; and more besides.

It is fitting that such an exemplary of the social movements of industrial Britain should have begun his agitiator’s life and career in Birmingham, one of the great centers of the Industrial Revolution. At the age of thirteen he went to work in a metal foundry, where he nearly lost his life after becoming caught in some machinery. His desire for knowledge led him to attend the Mechanics’ Institute at night, in an era of twelve hour work-days, to study mathematics and physics. Studies of the world led him into politics and philosophy and he began his career as an agitator.

Was Holyoake a libertarian? A workingman, Holyoake was a friend of trade unionism of the sort known as “Old Model” to distinguish it from the class-oriented “New Model” unionism exemplified by the massive London dock-workers strike of 1890. In addition, he was an Owenite socialist and a leader of the cooperative movement (Holyoake wrote The History of Cooperation about the Rochdale pioneers). Furthermore, he was an active “Moral Force” Chartist, struggling for the workingman’s right to vote. The foregoing might lead a superficial observer to describe him as a socialist, but a close examination of his views show the contrary. Holyoake was strongly opposed to the Marxists (as a member of radical circles he was acquainted with, detested, and was detested by Karl Marx) and the Independent Labour Party. He had no wish to impose Owen’s views on anyone, and simply felt that cooperative (not state) ownership would have beneficial social effects (especially the reduction of class antagonism). Significantly, his stress was on cooperation and self-help, and he was not opposed to competition. Statism, however, was entirely suspect to him.

Holyoake was no “Sunshine Patriot.” He fought for liberty in bad times and good at personal risk to himself. For a lecture on atheism he was confined for six months to Gloucester gaol (during which time his daughter Madeline died). At the risk of Bonapartist, Hapsburg, and Tsarist spies, he aided European freedom fighters from France, Hungary, and Italy, with funds, with his printing press, and with places of refuge including his own lodgings. His story in Sixty Years of An Agitator’s Life recounts his testing of bombs meant for the assassination of Louis Napoleon in an episode ideal for a television comedy plot, combining daring and humor.

Holyoake was a great friend of General Garibaldi and Joseph Mazzini and rendered yeoman service as a fundraiser and propagandist for the cause of Italian liberation. In fact, he was a prime mover in a British Legion of volunteers sent to aid General Garibaldi in the reduction of the Kingdom of Naples. The Legion suffered from the usual serio-comic mishaps a clandestine operation is heir to but somehow made its way out of Britain. Holyoake’s private enterprise and venture in self-help was, strictly speaking, contrary to international law (the mounting of an expedition against a state with which the British Crown maintained diplomatic relations), but the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, blinked a benevolent eye upon the venture in the spirit of Elizabeth’s tolerance of Sir Francis Drake singeing the Spaniard’s beard. Unfortunately, the Legion arrived too late to make a contribution to Garibaldi’s campaign. Its only casualty was the result of an argument.

Chartism was a movement on behalf of democracy in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Chartists presented enormous numbers of signatures on behalf of the “People’s Charter,” which demanded the extension of the franchise to workingmen. The Chartist leaders were divided into two groups: the “Moral Force” Chartists, who favored mass demonstrations and petitions, and the “Physical Force” Chartists who wished to counter the Government’s use of repressive measure with their own force. George Jacob Holyoake and his brother Austen were “Moral Force” Chartists.

The Chartist leaders emerge in a new light in Holyoake’s account as the recipients of Tory gold. The Tories and the Chartists roundly detested each other but shared a common bete noire in the Liberals, particularly the speakers on behalf of the Anti-Corn Law League. The Tories were the Protectionist Party (a name which they operated under after Sir Robert Peel broke ranks and carried the repeal of the Corn Laws), and were in general, the party of privilege in Church and State. They hated the Anti-Corn Law League and laissez-faire because the free trade victory would upset the aristocratic land monopoly’s protectionist bastion, the Corn Laws on the importation of grain. The Chartists hated the Leaguers because it was dominated by manufacturers, and its leaders, Richard Cobden, M.P. for Manchester, and John Bright, M. P. for Birmingham, were strong opponents of the Ten Hours Act and the Factory Acts for the limitation of hours of work and the inspection of factories. They also feared that the Free Trade struggle would divert attention from the struggle for universal suffage, although Cobden and Bright supported the workingman’s ballot. The Tories hired the “Physical Force” Chartists to break up rallies of the Anti-Corn Law League and to heckle League lecturers. Holyoake is able to offer a unique perspective in his dual capacity as a “Moral Force” Chartist and a member of the Anti-Corn Law League.

Holyoake was a leading atheist lecturer and writer, and spoke widely on the subject in England, despite the harassments of Church, state, and mob. As a publisher and journalist for this and other causes, he was hampered by the newspaper stamp tax, first imposed by Queen Anne as a two-headed monster, with one head devouring revenue and the other head devouring independent opinion. It was the attempt of Lord North’s government to extend the already old tax to America which prompted the revolutionary generation’s resistance to the Stamp Act in 1765. Flush from the victory of the Anti-Corn Law League, Holyoake and other Free Traders formed the Committee for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, with C.D. Collett as Secretary (Collett wrote the movement’s history, History Of The Taxes On Knowledge), and Bright, Cobden, and Spencer among the membership. Within seven years of the 1844 repeal of the Corn Laws, their imitation of the League’s methods was crowned by success.

Holyoake’s books are well-written and offer the reflections of a man whose lifetime spanned most of the nineteenth century and the entire Victorian Age. They richly deserve republication and the attention of libertarians. Holyoake was a stout friend of freedom, individualism, and the oppressed. He participated as a lecturer, author, and fund-raiser on behalf of Free Trade, Free Thought, Anti-Imperialism, European independence, and the abolition of Slavery. In fact, Holyoake served as the Vice-President of The Personal Rights Association (formed in 1871, it still exists in England).

Let me close this sketch of George Jacob Holyoake with an appraisal by a man who knew him, the famous nineteenth-century English libertarian philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who was his friend for many years. Spencer supported Holyoake’s cooperative movements and allowed the latter’s Rationalist Press Association to reprint Spencer’s First Principles in an edition within the means of a workingman. The occasion for Spencer’s tribute to Holyoake was a testimonial given in honor of Holyoake’s eighty-sixth birthday in 1903 by the Ethical Society of South Place Chapel, the oldest Freethought organization in London. Spencer was in his last illness at the time but dispatched a letter (March 28, 1903) which Holyoake quoted with pride in his own tribute to Spencer in Bygones Worth Remembering:

. . . I can do nothing more than express my warm feeling of concurrence. Not dwelling upon his intellectual capacity, which is high, I would emphasize my appreciation of his courage, sincerity, truthfulness, philanthropy, and unwearied perseverance, Such a combination of these qualities, it will, I think, be difficult to find mean.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOL. XV, NUMBERS 3-4

JUNE-JULY, 1981

US-ISSN0047-4517

In Two Parts

Crane/Cato Once More

Part I

An Open Letter To The Crane Machine

Dear Friends:

And I mean friends, for most of you have been and even still are my friends. Some of us have been good friends for many years, and we have fought many joyous battles together, arm-in-arm. Why are we now on opposite sides of the barricades? Why? I can assure you that fighting against you now is not at all joyous, but a very painful experience, as I presume that it is for you. Why? Why have we forsaken each other?

I know what your motivations were for entering the Crane Machine, and they were not power-lust or opportunism. You joined the Crane Machine for the same reason I once did, because you burned with a passion for human liberty, and because you wanted to spend your lives, 24 hours a day, in a noble struggle for the libertarian cause. Having realized that liberty was the only just system for mankind you were not content to remain as parlor libertarians. You wanted to do something, to put your considerable talents and energies to work, full-time, to try to achieve the triumph of liberty. You wanted to become “professional libertarians”, and when you saw the prospect of jobs and careers opening up as lifelong libertarians, you jumped at the chance.

I don’t blame you for that; on the contrary, your motive, was a noble one, and probably remains so today. Let us hope that someday there will by a myriad of opportunities and institutions so that all of you can work full time in the libertarian cause.

But, my dear friends, dear brothers and sisters and (alas) former comrades, you forgot the pitfalls. In the heady excitement of working full-time as libertarians, as part of a cohesive and well-integrated team, it was easy for you to forget, to lose hold of the larger picture amidst the exciting day-to-day details of working for liberty. As able technicians, it was easy for you to get so wrapped up in the daily technique, the process at work, that the ultimate goals and principles began to grow kind of hazy. Didn’t they? So that little by little, day by day, the means — the razzle-dazzle, the jobs, the excitement, the intake of funds and the output of product, began to be transmuted into the ends themselves. Didn’t they? Your daily lives, your daily work became the reality, while the reason you entered the whole thing, the very reason for your existence as libertarians in the first place, became ever more remote and ethereal didn’t it?

And so, when Boss Crane, either impelled or followed by his Donor, gave the signal in the spring of ’79 to downplay all those now remote principles and go for the big numbers, you went along, didn’t you? I wasn’t surprised that you made the shift and went along, but I tell you frankly one thing that still shocks and hurts: That you shifted your gears so damned easily and smoothly, apparently without a second thought or a backward glance. Was it really that easy to surrender, my old and dear friends? Didn’t you at least have some pricks of conscience, some moments of doubt, some second thoughts? Some qualms in the middle of the night, or when you looked at yourselves in the mirror?

I know that most of you are not doing it for the money, because you and I know that, contrary to myth, pay in the the Crane Machine is crummy. I know that it is the action that keeps you there, the heady wine of working full-time on behalf of liberty.

But, oh my friends, what good is the action if it has become corrupt? What good is the means if it contradicts and sells out the ends, the goals which once brought you and me together? What good is the process, be it ever so exciting, if it is betraying everything we have long sought to accomplish?

Please, I beseech you in the name of liberty and of all we once meant to each other, to think that you may be mistaken. I plead with you to take off a few days and rethink your present course — in the good old Randian phrase, to “check your premises.” To think that you may have allowed yourself to be manipulated by a ruthless politico to betray the cause of liberty rather than advance it. Consider for a moment: surely you must know in your heart that your Boss has total contempt for you just as he has for the entire human race. That he values you only as pawns that he can use to advance his power and his will. Do you think he would spare you for a single moment if it became in his interest to toss you down the tubes? Do you think he is ever moved by a single iota of sentiment, of reverence, of friendship, of love?

And even if you are still blinded by all other considerations, dear technicians, you should at least wake up to the fact that, in the long run, you are on a sinking ship. Eventually, you are going to lose, and I’ll tell you why. I don’t care if your Boss is backed by a billion dollars. The libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party are not a corporation or a military machine. They are not for sale. Except for the handful of Crane Machine members, we are every one of us independent people. We are all men and women of principle, and we are all passionately devoted to the cause of liberty: And in the LP, every single one of us has a vote. Once they have wakened up fully to what the Crane Machine has been doing, and they are in the process of waking up, believe me, the LP will overthrow the Crane Machine, and all the action that has lured and kept you in its clutches will be over, gone, kaput.

And the reason for your defeat is not only that your Machine has been systematically betraying principle. It is because your Boss, the man who aspires to be the leader of a political party, lacks the most important qualification for that post. To be leader of a political machine, one must be well liked and trusted by his own constituents, his party members. Mayor Daley was loved and trusted by his organization, because he clearly liked them, and because he always kept his word. And so with Jim Farley, and with all other successful political bosses. They commanded loyalty because their organization liked and trusted them. But Boss Crane is cordially and fiercely detested by almost all LP members who know him. He has a reputation for almost never keeping his word. Honestly, do you think he would keep his word to you if he saw some advantage in not doing so? And Crane is not smart enough to even try to mask his contempt for his fellow libertarians or LP members, so that people cotton to him very quickly. How can a person like that succeed in politics?

Consider: the Crane Machine is in a small minority, and it gets smaller by the minute as more and more LPers wake up to the truth and join the ranks of its opponents. The rising, swelling opposition, my friends, is at the gates.

But do not despair, because as the movement grows, the Crane Machine will no longer be the sole means of employment as professional libertarians. Other libertarians, other institutions, other jobs, even other Donors, will spring up, and provide healthy competition at long last for libertarian careers. More and more, the action will be elsewhere. The Death of the Crane Machine will not be the end of the libertarian movement; on the contrary, the movement will be far healthier and stronger as this blight is removed from its midst.

And so, dear old friends, I beseech you, I entreat you, I plead with you, to leave the dank and fetid air of the Crane Machine, to abandon the sweet smell of corruption, to quit the foul Corridors of Power. Come out, get out, and join me in the clean fresh air of freedom. If you leave, I will rejoice, and embrace you, and then once again we can fight for liberty together, arm in arm, as true comrades. My dear lost friends, let us find each other again, so we can sing once more the sweet songs of freedom.

— Murray.

Part II

Catogate: Who’s the Mole (Or Moles) At Cato?

They seek him here

They seek him there

Cato seeks him everywhere.

Is it a man, a woman, a band, or . . .?

That damned, elusive Friend of Candor.

— with apologies to The Scarlet Pimpernel

In this world we must take our fun where we may. In the titanic struggle now taking place within the LP and the libertarian movement, the struggle over Crane and his Machine and his institutions, there is a fun aspect which we should not overlook. A few days before my own confrontation with Crane and the Cato power elite (see “It Usually Ends with Ed Crane,” Lib. Forum, Jan.-April 1981), many Cato board members and libertarian periodicals received a missive from a certain anonymous “Friend of Candor” detailing a power struggle within Cato between Crane and Cato Vice-President Bob Formaini. The important point is that F of C Obviously had access to top-secret Cato memoranda supposedly seen only by Crane and Formaini themselves. Typical of Cato, paranoia struck, and suspicion fell feverishly on one and all. Such is the atmosphere at Cato that one bigwig half seriously set forth the thesis that Crane himself was the Friend of Candor, since the revelation of a Crane/Formaini split served to solidify the Cato board against an “outside” or public enemy, thereby strengthening Crane’s hand against my own case. Well, who knows? It is not a hypothesis that can be ruled out of court a priori.

But the Friend of Candor letter, apparently, was only Phase I of the underground war. For now Libertarian Vanguard has emerged, June 1981 issue, with a veritable battery of revelations about not only Cato, but other Cranian institutions: Libertarian Review and SLS. Everyone owes it to himself or herself to rush out and buy this sensational issue. (50¢ from Libertarian Vanguard, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102).

The issue contains not only an article based on the Friend of Candor letter, but also other articles grounded on damaging secret memoranda from Chris Hocker about LR, and from Crane to Glenn Garvin attempting to impose a more right-wing line on Inquiry. I also base much of my own critique of the Craniac SLS power elite on a number of secret SLS memoranda.

The most fun aspect of the Mole Question so far is that the day Lib. Vanguard came out, a copy was found on the desk of each and every Cato staff member when he or she arrived in the morning. Knowing the aggravated paranoia which infects the atmosphere of Cato at even normal times, it would have been great fun to have been a fly on the wall at Cato when Crane & Co., astonished, saw and read this damaging and subversive publication in their very offices. Who did it? Who is the mole or moles at Cato? Frankly, I have no idea. What will Crane do? There was serious talk of changing the locks at Cato, but apparently cooler heads prevailed.

But the moles may be everywhere. For on that same morning every SLS national officer and libertarian biggie in Washington found a copy of Vanguard on his office or at his doorstep. A case can be made that there are moles everywhere, at SLS, at LR in Washington, even at Mother Wichita itself.

Who is/ are the Friend of Candor?

Hallmarks of a Free Society

By David Nolan

To the extent that the following conditions are approached in any given society, the people of that society are free. To the extent that these conditions are absent, the people are oppressed.

No Conscription.
No Taxation.
No Censorship.
No Spying.
No Restraint of Trade.
No Registration
of Citizens.
No Travel Restrictions.
No Laws Against
Victimless Acts.
A Hard Currency.
Citizens Have the Right
to Keep and Bear Arms.

The Moral Foundations Of Property Rights

By Brian Summers*

Property rights are human rights. They do not belong to property; they belong to people who hold them with respect to property.

Property rights include a person’s rights of possession — the rights to peacefully use property, alter it, consume it, and exclude others. They further include the right to transfer possession by any peaceful means an owner sees fit — to sell, trade, mortgage, let, give, and bequeath. Taken together, these constitute the rights of full private ownership.

Why should anyone have such rights? Why should some people enjoy the possession and use of property at the seeming expense of others? These are questions on which the great debate between capitalism and socialism ultimately turns. Let us examine the answers offered by the defenders of private property.

Some defenders of property appeal to First Amendment rights. They ask, for example, how can the press be free if the government owns all the newsprint, presses, and distribution systems? How can religion be free if the government prints all the books and owns all the buildings? Similar arguments apply to freedom of speech and the right to assemble.

Such arguments, as far as they go, are compelling. But private ownership involves a lot more than the free exercise of First Amendment rights.

Other defenders of property go beyond First Amendment arguments to the assertion that property rights are essential to freedom itself. They contend that freedom — the absence of coercive intervention in peaceful activities — is impossible without private ownership.

But full private ownership is not a prerequisite for many peaceful activities. For some activities, such as swimming at a public beach, the right to use property is often sufficient. The rights to alter, consume, exclude others, sell, trade, mortgage, let, give, or bequeath the beach are usually not required for such peaceful use.

Of course, one can ask whether people should be free to do such things with respect to a beach. But this is merely to rephrase our original question: why should anyone have such property rights?

A few defenders of property base their defense on the right to life. They point out that a person cannot eat without at least implicitly establishing property rights over the food he consumes. Similarly, a person would have trouble keeping warm without some property rights with respect to clothing and shelter.

Here again is an argument that, as far as it goes, is compelling. But certainly a person can eat without the rights to sell, trade, mortgage, let, give away, or bequeath his food. In addition this argument, on the surface at least, applies only to consumer goods. What about the main concern of socialists — the raw materials and capital goods which constitute the means of production? Why should anyone own them?

Economic Approach: Incentives

Economics provides a comprehensive answer. When the means of production are privately owned in a market economy, businessmen seek to earn profits by cutting costs through the prudent use of scarce resources. The businessman who conserves the most resources, while giving consumers the most for their money, earns the greatest profits. Private ownership fosters efficient production.

Consider, for example, the operation of a privately owned bus company. If the operator has full private ownership — if he is free to choose his routes, adjust his fares in response to market conditions, and bargain with anyone who wishes to work for him — he has every incentive to provide cheap, efficient service. Free market competition, and the possible entry of potential competitors, supplies all the incentives needed to improve service and cut costs through conservation.

The bus owner also has every incentive to maintain his capital stock. If he ever wants to sell his company — or bequeath it to his children — he will maintain his buses in good working order.

The same incentives apply to the professional managers of a company owned by stockholders. If the managers fail to maintain the buses, the price of the company’s stock will fall and the management will be replaced by stockholder vote or a corporate takeover — unless, of course, the management is bailed out by government subsidies or the takeover is prevented by threats of antitrust action.

Wasteful Management

Compare this with the operation of city-run buses. The routes and fares of city-run buses are determined by political pressure. The revenues (and subsidies) are devoured by union monopolies which threaten violence against nonunion workers. With no profit motive, and no need to keep the buses rolling past the next election, deficits soar while the buses fall into disrepair.

Incentives are the key to understanding why “publicly owned” transportation is in constant need of repair, despite huge subsidies. Similarly, incentives explain why collective farms are vastly outproduced by privately owned plots; why unowned air, land, and water are often polluted; why unowned timber, wildlife, fisheries, and grazing lands are rapidly depleted (often to extinction); and why private timber companies plant millions of saplings to try to maintain the productivity (and thus the value) of their land.

But the economic case for private property goes beyond an analysis of incentives. Economics proves that private ownership is a prerequisite for rational economic planning.

Economic Approach: Calculation

In any advanced society, knowledge is divided among millions of individuals, with no one knowing more than a tiny part. Because of this division of knowledge, scarce resources are misallocated — inadvertently used in ways that fail to contribute the most to consumer welfare. A manufacturer may be unaware that a resource could contribute more if used elsewhere. Those who know of other uses may be unaware of the availability of a resource, or even of its existence.

To correct these misallocations of scarce resources, we need a system that (1) provides a means of discovering misallocations, (2) stimulates people to use the means of discovery, (3) encourages people to transfer control of resources to entrepreneurs who have discovered misallocations, and (4) rewards the correction of misallocations.

All this is accomplished by the free market profit and loss system. Any infringement on property rights reduces this system’s efficiency. In particular, “public” ownership of the means of production prevents businessmen from competitively bidding for scarce resources. Without competitive bids, the “prices” of scarce resources become arbitrary, so that no one can calculate the true costs of any project.

Freedom and the Right to Life

These economic arguments relate to our previous comments about the right to life. We previously saw that human survival requires at least some property rights in consumer goods. We now see that human survival — at least as we know it — requires economic calculation based on private ownership of the means of production. Economics shows how property rights can, indeed, be based on the right to life.

Economics also sheds further light on the relationship between private property and freedom. Freedom — the absence of coercive intervention in peaceful activities — refers to the range of options (alternatives) a person may peacefully pursue. At any particular time in a market economy, this range is pretty much the same for all people. Of course some people, especially the wealthy, have a greater ability to attain options (goods, services, jobs). But, in general, these options are available for all to pursue.

Thus, as a person accumulates wealth, he doesn’t, as a general rule, gain more freedom. But, in a market economy, as other people pursue wealth by offering the consumer more goods and services, the consumer’s range of options expands. In terms of options, the consumer finds that he has more freedom of choice in a modern shopping center than his grandparents had in a general store.

The Claiming of Natural Resources

Economics provides compelling arguments for the free market private property system — based on the efficiency of the system itself. But we must still consider the justice of original claims to previously unowned natural resources. If these original claims cannot be justified, the free market will forever be plagued with charges of immorality.

Original claims to property are sometimes defended with a finder-keeper approach. According to this argument, the discoverer of say, an oil field, is its rightful owner.

But if this approach applies to oil fields, it should also apply to the discovery of a continent, planet, or galaxy. Merely being the first to observe something — or putting up the capital that leads to a discovery — seems to be insufficient grounds for full private ownership.

Other claims to property are based on first occupancy. By this argument, the first person to occupy a piece of land is its rightful owner. But merely being the first to set foot on say, Mars, doesn’t seem to create a moral claim to the entire planet.

Lockean Approach

But if the “first occupancy” takes the form of settling and working the land, a strong case can be made for private ownership. In the famous words of John Locke (Second Treatise of Government, paragraph 27):

“Though the earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided, and left it in, he has mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it has by this labor something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.”

The Lockean idea of acquiring property by mixing labor with unowned resources has been enormously influential, and has spawned many compelling defenses of property rights.

Self-Ownership

However, the Lockean approach is not without difficulties. For one, it includes the troublesome concept of self-ownership. Full self-ownership would imply that an individual has a complete set of property rights with respect to himself. Some such property rights are difficult to deny, such as the right to peacefully use our own faculties. But how can we consume ourselves or transfer possession?

Fortunately, the Lockean approach is more firmly based on the concept of people owning their own labor. But what does it mean to “mix one’s labor” with natural resources? This metaphor has led to considerable confusion.

For instance, it is sometimes asserted that if an individual “mixes” what he owns (his labor) with what no one owns (an unowned natural resource), it doesn’t necessarily follow that he owns the resource. An equally plausible conclusion, it is contended, is that he has simply “discarded” his labor — like a sailor pouring his coffee into the unowned sea.

But “he owns the resource” and “he has discarded his labor” are not the only possible conclusions. We can also conclude that because a person has mixed his labor L with an unowned resource R, he has created the “mix” LR. Thus, if he is entitled to what he has created, we can conclude that he owns LR. But the concept “LR” is, at best, vague.

The Lockean Proviso

Another difficulty with the Lockean approach is the proviso that private ownership is justified only to the point “where there is enough and as good left in common for others.” This proviso, carried to its extremes, reduces to an absurdity.

For example, if oil companies must leave “enough and as good oil in the ground for others,” where should they stop? If the last barrel of oil must be left in the ground for our children, then our children must leave the last barrel for their children, and so on. No one may ever take the last barrel. But if the last barrel is permanently off limits, then anyone taking the next to last barrel would not be leaving “enough and as good in common for others.” No one may ever take the next to last barrel. Similarly with all other barrels of oil. Pushed to its limits, the Lockean proviso prohibits anyone from ever taking any nonrenewable scarce natural resource.

Compensating the “Victims”

Many interpreters of the Lockean proviso don’t go this far. However, they often demand that a first appropriator (such as an oil company) be forced to compensate all the “victims” who could have, but didn’t, appropriate a given resource.

But who are the victims? Anyone with an oil rig? Anyone who could have invested in exploration? And how much are they being “hurt”? By any amount they say?

More important, is anyone actually being hurt by the first appropriator? I, for one, am glad when someone else discovers oil. I know that, in a free market, it will eventually mean more gas for my car. In the long run, we all benefit from such competitive market processes.

Even in the short run, a potential competitor who doesn’t get to the oil first is not being physically coerced by the driller who does. By what right does he demand compensation from an explorer peacefully going about his own affairs?

Some adherents to the Lockean proviso assert that private ownership is fine in principle, but as a practical matter, the “enough and as good” proviso is needed to prevent all resources from falling into private hands. Anyone coming along later, they contend, would effectively be locked out.

But as a practical matter, it is immigration laws, apartheid edicts, tariffs, and other government restrictions that lock people out. It is precisely because private owners are eager to sell and let their property that regulations are imposed by those who wish to prevent such transactions.

Creation-Tranformation Approach

These difficulties with the Lockean approach are overcome by (1) dropping the Lockean proviso and (2) replacing the “mixing” metaphor with the principle that an individual owns whatever he (or his agent) creates from an unowned resource. In this approach, the justification for first ownership is not based on the owner’s, labor, or on the pain and sacrifice associated with his labor. The justification for first ownership is based on the creation brought forth by the first owner.

But who creates property? In the case of physical resources, at least, no one. But to “mix labor” with an unowned resource is to transform it — to create a transformation. Any person who transforms an unowned resource owns what he creates — he owns the transformation.

Thus, the first person to transform an unowned field into a farm, owns the farm. But plowing (transforming) land doesn’t, in this approach, give the farmer ownership of oil lying beneath the land. Only if he pumps the oil to the surface, or creates another transformation in the oil, can he claim to own the transformation — and thus claim full private ownership over the oil he has transformed.

If an individual owns whatever he creates from an unowned resource, he clearly owns whatever he (or his employee) creates from his property. For example, if a farmer pays an employee to transform his oranges into juice, the farmer owns the juice.

Who Owns the Profits?

And he may sell the juice for whatever price the market will bear. If this price yields a profit, the profit belongs to him because (1) he owns the juice and (2) his decision to transform the oranges created the opportunity to discover the profit.

This last argument may appear to be nothing more than the finder-keeper approach. Our farmer-entrepreneur, after all, discovers the profit (or loss) which results from his decisions — much as an explorer discovers lands as a result of his decisions. They both create their own opportunities to make discoveries.

But there is a fundamental difference. The lands exist whether or not the explorer decides to look for them. The farmer’s profit doesn’t exist without his decision to transform the oranges. His employee is needed to make the juice, but the farmer’s entreprenueurial decisions make the difference between profit and loss.

As a practical matter, the creation-transformation approach assigns property rights in much the same manner as the Lockean approach (without the “enough and as good” proviso). But there is at least one basic difference. Some people interpret the Lockean approach to mean that once labor has been “mixed” with an unowned resource, that resource forever belongs to the “mixer” and his heirs. For someone else to take the resource, he would have to “take” the mixer’s “stored up labor.” Thus, an abandoned, overgrown farm would forever belong to the farmer’s heirs.

The creation-transformation approach, however, assigns property rights only as long as a transformation exists. Our farmer acquires previously unowned land by transforming (clearing and plowing) a field. If he abandons the field and lets it revert to a state of nature, his transformation gradually disappears. When his transformation has completely vanished, his property rights with respect to the field would also vanish.

The Justice of Current Property Holdings

What do the arguments for private ownership say about the justice of current property holdings? Do they endorse the status quo? Or do they call for a massive transfer (“redistribution”) of property rights?

The economic argument supports private ownership as an institution. Economics tells us that private property, free trade, and peaceful cooperation promote economic efficiency and enhance human welfare. Thus, the economic approach endorses any property holding that came into being through peaceful means. Property holdings acquired through violence, however, receive no such endorsement because coercion — legal or illegal — disrupts the market process.

But economics says little about the justice of original claims to property — the holdings of those who first claim property from previously unowned resources. For this we must turn to the Lockean and creation-transformation approaches.

These two approaches provide ethical guidelines for acquiring property from a state of nature — guidelines for, in effect, creating property rights. As a corollary, they endorse voluntary transfers of justly acquired property.

But these arguments do not endorse property acquired by immoral means. Violence, conquest, and coercion may create legal “rights” to property, but they do not create moral rights.

To what extent are such immoral means the basis of current property holdings? A detailed answer is beyond the scope of this paper. There are, however, two facts we should bear in mind.

1. The original inhabitants of a territory did not necessarily have a moral claim to all its resources. First occupancy is an insufficient claim to first ownership. Claims to original ownership must be based on creatively transforming (“mixing labor with”) natural resources.

2. Most current property holdings are not in the form of raw land. Most of what we own has been produced since the advent of capitalism. Even if a native has a valid moral claim to the land on which a skyscraper stands, he cannot claim to have created (and thus own) the skyscraper.

Thus, in general, property holdings arising out of capitalistic (free market) activities are morally justified. And violations of these property rights are to be condemned.

Legal Plunder

In particular, our arguments condemn the morality of all government transfer programs — subsidies, welfare, and the like. Such programs are nothing more than the indiscriminate legal plundering of property that has been justly acquired through peaceful, mutually beneficial, market transactions.

Our arguments further condemn all interference with the peaceful exercise of justly held property rights. By what right does anyone dictate’ how much rent a landlord may ask for his apartment? Or how much an oil dealer may ask for his oil? Or what a farmer may grow on his land?

And our arguments condemn the seizure (“locking up”) of millions of acres of land by various government agencies. By what right does anyone prevent people from peacefully transforming unowned resources? By what right do government officials — who haven’t creatively transformed an acre of wilderness — claim property rights over this land?

Are We Being Practical?

Such ethical considerations, of course, receive little attention from men of practical affairs. Real world decisions, it is widely believed, should be made on practical grounds — with ethical arguments best left to the moral philosopher.

On practical grounds, however, those concerned with the future of the free society place themselves at a serious disadvantage by ignoring ethical arguments. The opponents of freedom can always conjure up expedient grounds for further government intervention, confident in the public’s ignorance of the economic and historic arguments against such intervention. Unless such expediency is met with compelling moral arguments against the violation of property rights, the would-be controllers will usually have their way

* Mr Summers is a member of the staff of The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

Against The ERA

By Wendy McElroy

As an individualist-feminist, I find it necessary to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA begins “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and it appeals to the government, by means of a constitutional amendment, to solve social injustice.

My objections to the ERA are twofold: moral and strategic. Morally, the problem with this reasonable-sounding amendment is that equality under the law cannot be advocated without examining what laws would be extended and what is meant by the word “equality”. In a libertarian system of natural law equality would be not only desirable but necessary, since the basis of natural rights is that all individuals have the same claim to their life, liberty and property. But this is not the context of the ERA. Equality under government law means equality under laws that are overwhelmingly unjust in content and totally indefensible in their means of enforcement, i.e. taxation. Such equality would mean that, instead of fifty percent of the people being abused under law, one hundred percent would be abused. In other words, the ERA ensures equal slavery, not equal freedom. The libertarian position must clearly be that no one should be subject to any unjust law, not that unjust laws should be applied equally.

The concept of equality is also a stumbling block. In the days of Jefferson and Paine, equality clearly meant political equality, or the equality of rights. But with the dominance of socialism — and the predominant political philosophy of feminism is socialist — equality has come to mean social and economic equality. Even if it were possible to ignore that it is largely this second form of equality that is being advocated, it must be emphatically stated that individualist-feminism is not for equality under the law, but for the equal protection of individual rights. These are not identical positions. Historically, they have been antagonistic since most laws have violated rather than protected individual rights. As Rosalie Nichols commented in the ALF Discussion Paper Are Feminists Capitalistic?: “As long as there were equal numbers of female and male overseers supervising the female and male slaves dragging their blocks side by side lip the escalating Great Pyramid of Statism, then all would be right with ‘feminists’ in the glorious ‘feminist’ world according to the socio-economic-equality definition.”

To say that equality today means protection of individual rights as it did in the days of the founding fathers is comparable to saying that the word “liberal” today means the same as it did when applied to John Stuart Mill.

Because I believe in individual liberty, I must reject the current notion of equality. Because I am opposed to the government, I cannot act to extend its authority.

But assuming — for the sake of argument — that I did not have these moral objections, I would still oppose the ERA on strategic grounds.

One of the claims of pro-ERA libertarians is that the amendment would not extend unjust laws such as the draft, forced alimony and protective labor legislation. My initial reaction to this statement is incredulity that anyone could believe the government would use a law or constitutional amendment to limit rather than to extend itself; but since my incredulity is not an effective argument, let me quote legal opinions on the matter.

Regarding the draft, the Yale Law Journal (April, 1971) reports: “Under the Equal Rights Amendment, the draft law will not be invalidated. Recognizing the concern of Congress with maintaining the armed forces, courts would construe the amendment to erase the word ‘male’ from the two main sections of the act, dealing with registration and induction, thereby subjecting all citizens to these duties.” American feminists and ERA proponents have, in fact, often been eager to have conscription of various forms imposed on women. A major target of indignation of the ERA proponents used to be the Supreme Court decision in Hoyt v. Florida which allowed exemption of women from jury conscription. [368. U.S. 37 (1961)] Expressly overruled in Taylor v. Louisiana [419, U.S. 522 (1975)].

As to alimony, Senator Birch Bayh declared: “. . . child support, alimony — strike them down? Ridiculous. This [the ERA] would require not that we eliminate child custody or alimony, but that any judge would have to consider the case on its merits.” The Yale Law Journal [April, 1971] concurred

As to protective labor legislation, a Majority Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee declared: “. . . those laws which confer a special benefit, which offer real protection will, it is expected, be extended to protect both men and women. Examples of laws which may be expanded include laws providing for rest periods, or minimum wage benefits or health and safety protections.” In the 1920’s there was conflict among feminists over protective labor laws. It was the opinion of the originators and chief proponents of the ERA (the National Woman’s Party) that the ERA would extend protective legislation to both sexes.

Another claim of pro-ERA libertarians is that the law will not be used in the private sector. However, it is a longstanding rule of judicial interpretation that “state action” means both governmental activities and numerous private sector activities that are legally treated as though they were governmental. When a private activity is involved with government through some form of license or subsidy (such as all schools, public or private) it would be subject to treatment as if it were governmental. For example, under the HEW rules interpreting Title IX (of the Education Amendment of 1972) federally assisted colleges could not aid, house or cooperate with educationally any single-sex social, recreational, or fraternal associations. In 1974, Congress had to specifically exempt fraternities, sororities and clubs in the HEW appropriations bill. The ERA permits no such exemption.

Moreover, when a private enterprise takes responsibility for a function which the law considers public, that business is subject to government law. Senator John Stennis suggests that religious institutions would be subject to the ERA as well.

There have been many court cases contributing to the blurring of state and private action. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court held that obtaining court aid in carrying out a private activity (a restrictive covenant, a zoning matter) converts such private action into a state action. In Lombard v. Louisiana (1963), Douglas argued that because a restaurant served the public, it had “no aura of constitutionally protected privacy about it.” In Marsh v. Alabama (1946), the Supreme Court held that states can require owners of private shopping malls to provide access to members of the public who wish to circulate petitions, although there is no federal requirement that states follow this course. The court held that, because a shopping center is open to the public, a right of speech and petitioning granted in a state constitution could override federal protections for property rights. The court also rejected the shopping center’s libertarian claim that it had a first amendment right not to be compelled to turn its property into a forum for view with which it disagreed.

Court cases and legal opinions continue, but the conclusion that emerges is that virtually all private activity would be liable to assault under the E.R.A.

One of the problems libertarians have with the ERA is that the wording sounds good. In a libertarian society, equality under the law would not be abridged on account of sex, race or religion. But we are not listening to the ERA in a vacuum. In the time of slavery, Southern delegates were fond of using the libertarian-sounding accusation that Northern delegates were immoral to interfere with a Southerner’s right to use and disposal of his own property. But these words were not in a vacuum; the property referred to was slaves, other human beings. And to have agreed with this libertarian-sounding argument would have been immoral.

What I suggest as an alternative to the ERA is the repeal of specific unjust laws or simply the advocacy of civil disobedience of those laws. In many states, women convicted of a crime receive a stiffer sentence that men convicted of the same crime. Women should repeal those laws. A girl of fifteen can be sent to reform school for intercourse with a boy of fifteen even though the boy incurs no penalty. Age of consent laws should be repealed. The slogan of individualist-feminism should be “Repeal, repeal, repeal!” If one-half of the energy and money that has been thrown into the ERA had been used to repeal specific laws that oppress women on a state-by-state, perhaps city-by-city level, freedom would have been substantially increased. And it would have been increased by a means that takes power away from government, rather than extending it.

This last statement is the quintessence of individualist-feminism.

Contra Reason

Reviewed By Richard A. Cooper

Arianna Stassinopoulos, After Reason, Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.:
Stein and Day, 1978. $10.00.

Arianna Stassinopoulos is a bell-ringer. She sounds the tocsin of our contemporary civilization and its future rebirth. Her somber tones describe the excesses of the reigning collectivism in the West, remind us of the totalitarian threat from the East, and question the paralysis of parliamentary democracy. Interspersed among her doleful reflections are some dulcet tones, cheerful and even humorous. She closes with a soaring cadenza of hope.

After Reason brings a critical eye to bear on the decline of political leadership in the West and the rise of collectivist statism. In sharp contrast to many contemporary observers, she perceives a connection between collectivism and the souring of the parliamentary ideal. Similarly, the “Fin de Siecle” period before the First World War saw, an increased irritation with parliamentary democracy and the corruption which went in tandem with interventionism. This anti-parliamentary feeling was one of the streams which fed fascism in Italy, France, Germany, and Spain. The parliamentary question was a major point of contention between the factions who would break up the Socialist International into Communists and Socialists (i.e., between revolutionists and evolutionists). The necessary slowness of debate runs contrary to the fascist cult of action for its own sake, and even to many contemporary Americans who bemoan our “laggard Congress.” Energy is the particular problem where action is demanded without thought at the present time. Those who do not care what is done so long as something is done are false friends of democracy and liberty.

The author goes beyond the assertion of a connection between collectivism and the deterioration of democracy by tracing its origins to the growth of statism and bureaucracy. It is the politicization of society which collectivist statism has brought about that has deflated the stock in trade of political authority. Robert Nisbet, whom I studied with, has reflected upon these problems in his book The Twilight of Authority. Nisbet believes the solution lies in what he calls “. . . a new laissez-faire,” based upon communities and associations, rather than upon individuals.

The aggrandizement of society by the State was not unforeseen. Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, and Ludwig von Mises, to name but a few, warned us of the total state of the planners. In 1959, Frank Chodorov wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of Society which held that social power (autonomous and voluntary) was in an inverse proportion with state power (autocratic and coercive). Chodorov drew on insights of Herbert Spencer’s distinction between militant societies (characterized by coercion) and industrial societies (characterized by voluntarism) to show the destruction of social vitality and morality wrought by statism with examples drawn from the establishment of Saul’s monarchy and America’s welfare state. The American sociologist William Graham Sumner in an 1899 essay, The Conquest of the United States by Spain predicted that the Spanish-American War would advance statism in America. Auberon Herbert reflected upon the moral type suited to statism and the very decline of parliamentary institutions which troubles Arianna Stassinopoulos. She neglects what these gentlemen realized: the crucial connection between militarism and the rise of statism.

The totalitarian threat provokes Arianna Stassinopoulos to ring a message of alarm. She castigates Communism in no uncertain terms for its physical horrors and moral emptiness. For her, as for Bernard-Henri Levy (Barbarism With A Human Face) and Jean Francois Revel (The Totalitarian Temptation), the point was made with special force by the testimony of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The horrifying face behind the humanitarian mask is revealed by chilling quotations from the ex-Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, and Dr. Lawrence Kolb of the New York State Mental Hygiene Department. Both look upon the welfare state as an instrument for control of persons to obtain “desirable” behavior. Their emphasis upon control and manipulation exposes them to be not humanitarians, but “brutalitarians,” as their predecessors in Germany, Russia, and Jonestown have demonstrated with pools of blood.

Aside from the gloom and doom, the author provides some rather amusing examples of the ridiculous statements which politicians are prone to emit. Politicians remind me of the blowfish which expands with water to raise its spines so that it can slip out of ticklish situations and then slink away in its normal diminuitive size. Americans can take perverse satisfaction in knowing that the British are afflicted with as absurd politicoes as we are. Stassinopoulos lacks the Menckenian touch, but her subjects are damned sufficiently as loutish clowns by their own words.

Our author intended to move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Instead, she flung herself off solid ground and into a swamp. I refer to her dedication to mysticism and to her identification of collectivism with rationalism. Let me state forthrightly that I do not share in the least any affection for religion nor theistic belief. Unfortunately, I cannot do justice to this particular clash of ideas in the space available. Therefore, I shall deal with her propositions in strictly logical terms which will command assent, I think, from those who share her religious faith.

First, let us examine her identification of collectivism with rationalism. I presume that she does so because the socialists proclaim themselves the party of reason, science, and truth. She attacks Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Sir Keith Joseph for materialism and rationalism. Now, just because the socialists claim to be the party of reason hardly makes them such. After all, they arrogate to themselves the title of the party of the “people,” of “democracy,” of “freedom,” and of “peace.”

Furthermore, collectivists have not always even made a pretense to be the party of reason. The fascists certainly did not, and the New Left has paid obeisance to the same cult of primitivism, intuition, and direct action. In fact, a careful historical analysis of collectivists reveals that their attitude towards reason tends to run along the lines of the prevailing mood. Thus, since we live in an era of antirational counterrevolution, the collectivists pay tribute to feelings, intuitions, emotion, and mystical notions (especially of unity) generally.

The reader is perplexed by the declaration that no one is an atheist nor can be. I would like to use the same reasoning and eliminate all opposition to my ideas with a single, bold stroke of the pen. I suspect that her proposition has something to do with her definition, of more precisely, her lack of a definition of the spiritual. Ideas, morals, and reason all are spiritual: everything she approves, including nature’s beauty is spiritual. Given this position, arguments with her will be as unprofitable as those with Freudians and Marxists: all take your very opposition to them and turn it upside down.

Since everything appears to be spiritual there is no great wonder that she perceives a spiritual rebirth of the West. She is very generous, and specifies no particular brand of religion as necessary to the Western rebirth. The importation of Oriental mysticism heartens her, the interest in psychic phenomena particularly cheers her, and she points to the latter as support for her claims of the limitations of reason. Once could interpret these developments as a part of the continuing flight from reason taught by the churches, schools, and popular culture, including cinema and television. True spirituality is quite elusive and so is the determination of what Arianna Stassinopoulos means by spiritual and the spiritual rebirth of the West.

Arianna Stassinoupoulos’s After Reason offers great promise but it is a promise that goes unfulfilled. The clarity of her insights into the decline of democracy is obscured by the occult veil she draws over her remarks upon rationalism and spiritualism. While an interesting effort by a gifted writer, After Reason misses the mark.

For a New Liberty Back

After allowing Rothbard’s For a New Liberty to go out of print early in 1980, Collier-Macmillan, without informing the author, has finally put a new paper edition back into print. (The bookstores knew, not the author.) While this is officially a new printing rather than a full-fledged new edition, there are a few subtle changes (One change, inevitably, is that the price is up, from $5.95 to $6.95.) Most of the changes are simple updating (Warning note: the author was asked to submit his changes in the summer of ’79; in the year and a half since, some of the updating looks rather outdated.) “Libertarianologists,” those fascinated by the complex ins-and-outs of the development of the libertarian movement, will be particularly interested in changes in the Appendix, which gives an annotated list of libertarian institutions. Reason Magazine and frontlines are listed in the Rothbard appendix for the first time; on the other hand, the citation for Libertarian Review is considerably less effusive than before. Tune in here for any other developments.

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter
Special Final Multi-Month Issue

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

VOLUME XV, NUMBERS 5-6

AUGUST 1981-JANUARY 1982

US-ISSN0047-4517

Big News! Lib. Forum Reorganized!

Dear Faithful Readers:

After twelve years of sizzling, persistent, and faithful (even if not constant) publication, the Libertarian Forum is delighted to announce a big and welcome change for the better. Starting next issue (Feb. 1982). Not to worry: the Lib. Forum will still be in the sole control of your faithful editor, who will continue to send off sparks and make enemies right and left as he analyzes politics, economics, the “real world”, the libertarian movement, and the culture of our day.

The difference is:

We will be regular.
We will appear monthly, and on time.
We will become a professional, or at least far more professional, publication.
We’re going onward and upward.

Your editor will still be in there, free-wheeling, free-swinging, independent, calling all shots as he sees them. But with more system. By popular demand, for example, Mr. First Nighter will be back with a regular, or at least, quasi-regular column lashing out at the avant-garde and the pretentious in movies and other arts, and standing solidly and foursquare for classical values and aesthetic reaction. There will be a more systematic Horror File about the Movement, perhaps entitled This Is the Movement You Have Chosen, (see inside.) We might even be able to persuade the greatly feared Old Curmudgeon to come out of retirement.

Why are we doing all this? Basically, for two important reasons. First, the libertarian movement is very different from what it was when we first launched the Lib. Forum, back in the antediluvian days of the spring of 1969. It was very small then, before we began to hail the publicity wave that wafted the libertarian movement to media attention and to prominence in 1971, and before the founding of the LP in 1972. The movement was small then, and libertarians read a lot more per capita, but still — as always — there were deviations popping up all around us. One reason we launched the Lib. Forum was the tendency of many libertarians to regard the then embryonic Nixon Administration as the fulfillment of the libertarian dream. (Come to think of it, things are not much different now, with Reagan getting the palm, for we are being told by the right-wing of our movement that We Are Being Too Beastly to the Gipper.)

At this point, the Party and the movement have grown relatively large, and are beginning to be a force on the national scene. But growth has caused many problems. For one thing, all signs indicate that the amount of reading of libertarian books and articles, let alone the depth of knowledge of libertarian principles and issues, is declining, certainly relatively and maybe even absolutely. The continuation of a mass of deeply ignorant and even uninterested libertarians must spell disaster for our movement. In 1969, virtually all libertarians had recently emerged from the Randian Movement, and we had to cope with their spiritual shellshock, and either excessive Randianism or else overreaction against reason and principle. But the basic problem now is that for most new libertarians Rand is as remote as John Locke, and as little read. At least the Randians had a respect for intellect and for principle which many newcomers totally lack.

All thinking people and all factions in the movement agree that Internal Education is desperately needed. But, just at this critical juncture, we have fewer publications commenting on and judging the real world and the movement, fewer organs of internal education, than over the past decade. Just as the need has become crying, the supply of educational publications has punked out. Libertarian Review, the major organ of our movement, has just been killed, (See inside). Everyone else is busily engaged in “outreach”, that is, in ignoring movement concerns and movement ideology. Reason and Inquiry, our most professional magazines, are strictly outreach publications. Reason rarely mentions the movement or presumes to educate or guide it, and Inquiry never does do. (This does not mean that these publications are not worthwhile, just that they are not performing movement-education tasks.) Frontlines is a highly valuable movement publication, but it strives always to be “objective” and neutral; further, it provides movement news but little ideological analysis. The same can be said for the inferior Update. Several LP state newsletters — notably Caliber (Cal), Free Texas and Colorado Liberty are outstanding for what they do, but they are necessarily constrained by being official newsletters of their state parties (And Free Texas arguably the best of them, is in danger of going under.) Apart from the estimable Libertarian Vanguard — the organ of the LP Radical Caucus — and Sam Konkin’s publications there is virtually nothing going on, only a big, looming ideological news and opinion vacuum.

In this dire situation, Libertarian Forum steps into the breach, accepting its moral responsibilities. We shall not be neutral, nor namby-pamby. And while everyone else is whoring after “outreach”, we opt for /«reach, for a frankly and boldly libertarian perspective, let deviationists of all stripes bellyache though they may. Nature and the Lib. Forum abhor a vacuum, and we propose to fill it.

There is a second reason, too, for going regular and professional. You, our heroic and ever-constant readers, deserve a break at long last. Being a Lib. Forum subscriber has for too long been a sheer act of faith, a shot in the dark, a saga of grit, determination, and hope. Of faith, hope, and charity. Will the Lib. Forum come out again? When will it come out? Too many times has our cockamamie computer bumped some subscriber’s name or lost his renewal. Too many times has the lament wafted in: “I sent my check in three years ago. Why did I only receive one copy?” Too many times have we had to explain: “No, I can assure you, you were not bumped for deviationism; our Computer goofed again!”

Too long, in sum, has it been very very tough to be a Lib. Forum subscriber; from now on, we’re going to make it easy, maybe even a pleasure. Bless you all!

And so the demands of opportunity and of justice required this Great Leap Forward; but we also needed new resources and new blood. And so we are delighted to announce that we have secured the services of a real, honest-to-God professional publisher — a man who is, mirabile dictu, both a veteran (though young) and dedicated libertarian and a supremely competent and brilliant self-made businessman and newsletter publisher. He is my old friend Daniel Rosenthal, who was one of the first and leading student libertarian activists in the nation, and thin became a notably successful businessman.

While at Berkeley, Rosenthal was the leader of the Students for Goldwater in the 1964 campaign, and of its successor group, the Cal Conservatives for Political Action, as well as the libertarian Moise Tshombe chapter of YAF and the Alliance of Libertarian Activists at Berkeley. A doctoral student in mathematics, Rosenthal left Berkeley in 1967, to launch his business career. Moving East, he founded an innovative arid highly successful advertising agency. Eight years later, Danny moved into the newsletter field, launching the now widely circulated Silver and Gold Report. We are elated that he has agreed to become our publisher and assist in our expansion and regularization.

This means that our heroic and publisher, Joe Peden, is at last freed to perform his myriad of other tasks and responsibilities. Joe has done a marvelous job, and is now delighted to be relieved of his burden. (Note to Forumologists and Future Historians: Joe is not being bumped or purged for any deviations. No one is happier than he at this change, and Joe will continue to be our Contributing Editor and resident wise counselor and statesman.)

Of course, and here’s the touch of bad news with all the good, expansion and regularity means money, and the stern realities of inflation and cost require that we raise our subscription price. But now you will be getting a regular monthly magazine, on top of the news, on top of events, lashing out at the numerous enemies of liberty on the spot. Actually, subscription rates will not be stratospheric under our new regime of rational capitalism. They will be: $13 per year, $12 for students, and $27 for two years. But if you renew your sub now, before the monthly Forum appears, you can renew at the old $10 rate. So hurry, get in on the bargain! And tell all libertarians and sympathizers on your block, that the New Improved, or rather, the Old Improved Forum will be coming your! way. Come one come all, subscribers are welcome, and no one will be purged for deviations!

Murray N. Rothbard

LP/10: A Mixed Bag

LP/10, the 10th anniversary convention of the Libertarian Party at Denver in late August, was not the cataclysmic showdown that many of us expected. It was a mixed bag, with many complex elements and results which need detailed study and evaluation by principled people in the Party. Nothing much was resolved at Denver, but changing alignments at and since the convention spell complex and in some ways different forms of struggle in the coming period, that is from now until the Presidential convention of 1983.

I Program and Facilities

Before getting to the substantive events at the convention, let it be said that the program and facilities were an emphatic triumph. Paul Grant and Ruth Bennett (Chair, Colorado LP), directors of the convention, and the other Coloradans deserve the highest accolades for the entire affair. This is the first small state that has put: on a national convention, and they did a great job. Not only that: they actually made a profit, an historic event for the LP, and this contrasts starkly with the $30,000 lost by Ed Crane at the 1979 extravaganza at Los Angeles, a loss which the Clark campaign was generous enough to bail out. It also contrasts with the curious sentiment of various leading Craniacs in the party, who are reported to believe that making a profit at conventions is evil because it “exploits” libertarians (Huh?) (Shows that any argument will be used to justify Craniac positions, in this case their propensity for wild spending and for sticking others with the tab.)

II The Race For National Chair

The race for national chair was, of course, the single most important and most dramatic struggle at the convention. The Crane Machine had displayed their arrogance and contempt for the party by handpicking an unknown and uncharismatic candidate, Kent Guida, who had been deposed this year as chairman of the Maryland party, and then was promptly given a visible post at the Machine-dominated national LP headquarters. His campaign manager was the formidable assistant head of the Crane Machine, Howie Rich.

The Coalition for a Party of Principle coalesced around John Mason of Colorado, with the dynamic Williamson Evers, head of the California party, as campaign manager.

Originally, there was a third candidate in the race, Dr. Dallas Cooley of Virginia, Treasurer of the national LP, and at least nominal director of the Clark campaign in its later stages. For a while, it looked as if Cooley were leading, when he suffered a minor heart attack and dropped out of the race. Upon recovering, he announced for Vice-Chair.

About the time of the Cooley dropout, a third candidate entered the chairmanship race: Mrs. Alicia Clark, wife of presidential candidate Ed Clark. Campaign manager for Alicia was the knowledgeable and good-humored political veteran, Emil Franzi of Arizona.

A tight three-way race is always very difficult to call, and coming down to the convention all reports held the contest to be a threeway tie with lots of undecideds. My own private prediction, made just before the convention began, was that Alicia would win, and I turned out to be right.

Alicia had no real organizational structure, what she had was lots of money, a gracious and glamorous candidate willing and able to travel, an excellent delegate-counter and manager in Franzi and another leader in National Committee member Michael Emerling (Nev.) But there was no organizational structure underneath that. Also, the Alicia camp had no real political line beyond a sentiment for unity and a commitment to decentralism in organization.

But that was enough. For Alicia resourcefully campaigned as a candidate bringing “unity” to the party, a candidate somehow transcending all factions and uniquely capable of bringing these pesky factions together. There are two fallacies with this approach. One, of course, is that a group calling for unity of the other factions is itself necessarily a faction, like it or not. More important, the Guida and Mason factions were not playing games, but were and still are divided by serious ideological, strategic, and tactical differences. There is no way to bring real unity among these and other factions except through genuine and shared agreement on these crucial issues: agreement which comes about through discussion and conviction and not through simply invoking unity. Recent events on the National Committee, however (see below), indicate that the Alicia Clark forces are gratifyingly learning through struggle about the iniquity and arrogance of the Crane Machine.

One interesting aspect of the convention was the organizational decentralism that was the hallmark of the Clark forces, a decentralism which tried unsuccessfully to abolish the At-Large seats on NatComm or even to transform the NatComm itself into a large and unwieldy Council of State Chairs. The extreme wing of decentralists actually formed a “None of the Above” caucus, with NOTA buttons, reaching a height of 35 votes for Chair, and 80 votes for NatComm member at large. It cannot be denied that the NOTA forces displayed a vast degree of organizational infantilism, giving one furiously to wonder why they joined any organization at all. However, the more moderate decentralists had and do have a point, which should not be glossed over. What they were reacting to was years of arrogance and centralized dominance by the Crane Machine. This anti-Eastern Establishment instinct by the Clarkian populists is a healthy one, and deserves respect.

I would like to take this opportunity to admit my previous error in calling for an ultra-centralist model for the LP. Several years in the Crane Machine have soured me on centralism permanently. Putting the rule of the Party, or of the movement as a whole, into the hands of one man or of one tight group is a recipe for disaster. First, it means that if a few people sell out to opportunism, the rest of the movement is dragged along with it. But second, and more generally, even if the Machiners were a bunch of wonderful people, since they are not omniscient they are bound, as are all of us to make mistakes. And just as the mistakes of a governmentcontrolled economy can ruin a nation, scathe inevitable mistakes of a tight ruling clique can ruin a party or a movement. It therefore becomes important to have strict internal checks and balances on any ruling group in the LP.

I still think it absurd to think of decentralism as “the libertarian” form of organization. How we organize is not a matter of libertarian principle, so long as we do not violate the non-aggression axiom. But it appears that neither radial decentralism nor ultracentralism will work in any organization, and certainly not in a democratic organization like the Libertarian Party. Though I hate to say it, moderation and balance should be our organizational mode.

And since, in the coming period, there is great danger of Crane Machine control of the National Office and of NatComm, and no danger at all of its controlling most of the state parties, a tilt toward decentralism is the indicated organizational line especially for the next two years.

Getting back to the chair race, the Guida/Crane camp, of course, had a formidable campaign structure of full-time hirelings, lots of money, and a conscious political line. The money was, as usual, a great attraction for opportunists.

The Mason camp had only about a third of the money of each of the other factions, no hirelings, a coherent political line but only a slim structure of volunteers. Considering these problems, the Mason forces did very well. Our greatest victory was the beating out and bumping out of Guida on the second ballot. It was only by four votes, with Alicia considerably ahead, but it was a sweet victory indeed.

It was our only victory over the Crane Machine for the week, but it was a victory to be savored.

As expected, Alicia’s strength was concentrated in the Sun Belt: Arizona, Texas, and southern California, plus considerable support in Nevada, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Florida. Guida’s support was concentrated solely in the Northeast quadrant of the country; in fact he carried all the northeastern states except Michigan and Pennsylvania, Particular Guida support came from the District of Columbia, the home of Washington lobbyists and of LP National Headquarters; the Greenberg Machine in New York; and the Leslie Key Machine in Wisconsin and neighboring states to the south and east. The only significant Guida votes outside the northeast quadrant came from the Randolph fiefdom in Alaska and the minor Koch satrapy in Kansas. While the other two candidacies were in many ways regional in tone (Sun Belt vs. Northeast), Mason’s strength was well distributed throughout the country, with; special support from California and the Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Colorado).

Particularly idiotic as well as mendacious was the analysis of the Convention appearing in the swansong November-December issue of Libertarian Review. In one of his usual bloated and pretentious pieces, would-be aesthetician Jeff Riggenbach, writing as if from Mars, touted the Guida forces, sneered at the Mason purists, and analyzed the Mason camp as being Colorado mountain men resenting the dynamic California culture represented by the Crane Machine. Idiotic because the Machine had nothing to do with California. California cast 46 votes for Mason on the first ballot, 33 votes for Clark, and only 9 votes for Guida. Guida’s support, as we have said, was concentrated almost solely in the Northeast quadrant, among Preppie Yankees. Mendacious because Riggenbach gave no clue to his bemused reader that he himself is a top employee of Crane and therefore in the Crane Machine. Surely the unwary reader needs such evidence to evaluate Riggenbach’s alleged critical objectivity in analyzing the convention.

The question that now faced the Convention was: with Guida gone, whom would the Machine throw its votes to? In an odd and ephemeral gesture, the Machine decided to hold its collective nose and go for Mason. (Our reports are that Crane had originally wanted to go for Alicia as second choice, but was overruled by “higher authority.”) The problem is that the Machine could only deliver its top cadre, i.e. its hirelings, but not its rank-and-file, which went for Alicia. Particularly repellent was the action of the Greenberg Machine, which managed to put the ranks of the New York party in the wrong column on every important question at the convention. In a rare split with his friends the Riches, Greenberg and his coterie of youthful toadies went for Clark.

And so Alicia won on the next ballot (really the second, but technically the third, after the dropping out of a stalking horse candidate), by a margin of 45 votes.

The fact that the top Craniacs went for Mason on the third ballot demonstrates the error of the Sam Konkin thesis that Alicia’s candidacy was simply a Kochtopus “tails I win-heads you lose” maneuver. It is clear that the Alicia race emerged out of a deep and growing rift between the Clarks and the Crane Machine which had run the Clark campaign.

What benefits emerged from our losing chairmanship race? The beating, even if narrowly, of Guida, and the growth and development of the Radical Caucus and its allies in the Coalition for a Party of Principle. Hopefully, the Coalition will thereby be strengthened for the struggle that unfortunately lies ahead. Not the least gain is the esp spirit de corps we all developed from fighting in common for the best cause that there is — libertarian principle.

Here I would like to thank and hail publicly the small handful of marvelous people who worked and struggled so hard, day after day, and with all their strength, for the Mason cause. There was, not the least of course, John Mason himself, a great guy who was an inspiration to all of us. In a just world and a just Party, Mason would have won by a landslide.

Next, the architect of the campaign, who worked with fierce zeal and determination virtually single-handed for six months: the magnificent Bill Evers. One big mistake of the Craniacs (who were arrogantly predicting up to the convention that Mason would come in a distant third, is that they underestimated Evers. Doubtless they dismissed him as merely a brilliant scholar and theoretician. What they didn’t realize is that he is also a dynamo of an organizer, putting heart, soul, brains, and 48 hours a day into the cause. Unfortunately, since he is not a sports fan he won’t get the analogy, but to me Bill Evers is the Dave Cowens of the libertarian movement. Cowens, center for the Boston Celtics, was my favorite pro basketball player. Even though shorter than many 7-footish centers, Cowens was not only a great shooter, but an incredible all-around triple or quadruple threat. A host unto himself, Cowens would be great at shooting, muscling and rebounding under the offensive boards, then rushing back to defend and, in addition, playmaking and directing overall court strategy and tactics. Bill Evers was a host unto himself all year. At least until the convention itself, Evers virtually was the Mason campaign, and he continued to direct it all-out down to the very end.

Others too deserve to be lauded. Linda Kaiser of Colorado was a superb and devoted floor manager for Mason, managing Evers and sweetly ordering all of us to “go out and convert two people an hour for Mason” (By the last night it was up to 20). Scott Olmsted of Stanford University worked all day and night, in sickness and in health, putting out the daily Mason Newsletter, objective news with a point. Mary Gingell of California, a youthful and perky railroad tycoon, and recent but convent to the Mason cause, assisted splendidly on floor managing and delegate conversion. Youthful and studious Kevin Dye of California did great work in Southern California and overall, and Tom Laurent of Oklahoma did nobly in a region not very hospitable to the Mason cause. Rod Colver, chairman of the Washington party, did fine work in the Northwest, Eric Garris, organizer for the Radical Caucus, did his usual excellent job among the radical constituency in the party.

There are others whom I necessarily have to slight, and must apologize for not mentioning, But these were the small but marvelous cadre that constituted the Mason campaign and which helped make the whole effort, despite the disappointing loss, worthwhile. Bless them all! They help sustain one’s hope for the future of the LP and of the libertarian movement.

III Exit Accountability

In the single worst vote of the convention, the Craniac and Clark forces combined to shout down any attempt to make the party’s presidential candidates accountable to the National Committee or to the platform. The Constitution and ByLaws Committee, after two days of concentrated effort, had agreed on a compromise accountability rule. While far weaker than the original tough Evers proposal, this was a structured pattern of accountability which all of us who wanted a principled presidential candidate could live with. Ed Clark himself, to his great credit, vocally supported the compromise plank. But still the accountability proposal was hooted down by the combined Guida/Alicia Clark forces. Apparently, the two camps had different motives for their common position. The Craniacs, expecting to dominate the 1984 Presidential Campaign as they have done all the others, wanted a free hand to sell out. The Alicia Clark forces, as decentralists, presumably don’t want any party institution — say the presidential candidate — to be accountable to any other, say NatComm. But I’m afraid the result was to play into Craniac hands, setting up a party where the Presidential candidate can safely ignore the platform which expresses our principles as applied to the political issues of the day. It should be noted that the New York party and the Greenberg Machine eagerly took the lead in this unfortunate vote.

IV Stymieing a More Radical Platform

While the platform was improved and updated, the magnificently radical planks proposed by the platform committee were stymied by a shameful display of parliamentary stalling tactics from the floor. It is one thing to take such challenging radical planks as spelling out children’s rights, calling for repudiation of the public debt, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, discuss them, and vote them up or down. It is quite another to stall consideration of these planks until the convention was out of time. Many people from various factions probably participated in this stall, but taking the lead was Mike Kessler of the execrable New York party.

V The Other Races

After Alicia was elected, the Vice-Chair race presented a confused picture. None of the three candidates could be called a strictly factional candidate. I nominated Sheldon Richman of D.C., who, though having close personal ties to the Crane Machine, is a clearly independent person as well as an excellent scholar and principled activist. Craig Franklin of North Carolina had close ties to the Alicia Clark faction. Dallas Cooley of Virginia was remote from any faction. Cooley came in a poor third on the first ballot, and Richman beat out Franklin on the next ballot by 29 votes.

Analyzing the voting pattern, we see that Richman was generally backed by the Guida and Mason forces, leading to victory. Perhaps the oddest result of the convention was the total repudiation of Dallas Cooley. Perhaps the leading candidate for Chair before his illness, Dallas was roundly defeated for Vice-Chair and then lost by a large amount in his race for seven at large seats on the NatComm. I frankly don’t know the reason for this repeated rejection of Dr. Cooley, whose persona is the very model of calm and judiciousness. Perhaps calm was not “in” this year, or perhaps Cooley fell victim to not being associated with any faction in the party. If one is remote from all factions, one can gain by being beloved by all and voted for by most, or one can lose by falling through the cracks and not having any group vote for you. Perhaps the latter is what happened to Cooley, whose only real bloc of votes was in California and New York.

On the National Committee votes, both At Large and Regional, things did not turn out nearly as well. The well-organized and well-heeled Crane Machine was able to concentrate on NatComm votes as well as on the Chairmanship fight. The Clark forces, brilliantly organized for the Chair race, goofed on the NatComm votes, especially on the regional races. The Mason camp was too thin on the, ground to be able to concentrate on the NatComm races. The result was a near disaster: almost working control of the NatComm by the Machine.

For the seven At Large seats, the Crane Machine put up and voted en bloc for five candidates, of whom four won: Randolph (Alaska), Andrea Rich (N.Y.), Hocker (D.C), and Guida (Md.). The only loss was Jule Herbert (D.C.), of whom it was said at the convention that “even those who think there is no Crane Machine believe that Jule is a member.” The Radical Caucus put up three candidates (Garris, Evers, and Rothbard) of whom only Rothbard triumphed. The broader Coalition put up, in effect, the last three plus Bubb (Pa.), M. L . Hanson (Colo.), Baase (Cal.), and White (Cal.) of whom only Hanson, outgoing Vice-Chair, was a winner. This made four Machiners and two Coalition members; the other At Large winner was Michael Emerling (Nev.), of the Clark forces.

We hereby present a list of states, and the percentage of votes that they gave (a) to the three Radical Caucus candidates, and (b) to the seven Coalition candidates, which include the previous three. Each list is presented according to rank, and the two lists will give a pretty good idea of which state parties are top notch and which are in a state of putrefaction.

FIGURE 1

Per Cent of Votes Going to Radical Caucus, By Rank.

1 — Hawaii

45%

2— Utah

33

3 — Idaho

32

4 — Georgia

31

5 — Kentucky

29

6-7 — Minnesota

26

6-7 — Pennsylvania

26

8 — Arizona

24

9-10 — California

20

9-10 — Arkansas

20

11 — Colorado

19

12-13 — New Jersey

18

12-13 — Washington

18

14-15 — Ohio

17

*14-15 — Delaware

17

16-17 — Michigan

16

16-17 — Oklahoma

16

18 — Illinois

15

19-20 — Virginia

14

*19-20 — S. Dakota

14

21 — N. Mexico

13

22 — Oregon

12

23-24-25 — Florida

11

23-24-25 — Iowa

11

23-24-25 — Wyoming

11

26-27 — N. Carolina

10

26-27 — Tennessee

10

*28 — Alabama

8

29-30-31 — Missouri

7

29-30-31 — Texas

7

29-30-31 — Montana

7

32 — New York

6

33 — Louisana

5

34 — Wisconsin

5

35-36 — Alaska

3

35-36 — S. Carolina

3

37 — D.C.

2

*38-44 — Conn.

0

38-44 — Kansas

0

38-44 — Maryland

0

38-44 — Mass.

0

*38-44 — Miss.

0

38-44 — Nev.

0

*38-44 — R.I.

0

In analyzing the above states, we can toss out the following for having too few total votes for any percentage to be meaningful: Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi, and South Dakota, which cast only one vote each for NatComm; and Alabama and Rhode Island, which cast only two votes each. In the above tables, these states are marked with an asterisk.

From the two tables, Hawaii takes first rank as the best state party. Utah and Idaho trail right behind, and other “good guy” parties include: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Colorado and California. Massachusetts takes the booby prize as the all-around worst party, trailed closely by Maryland and the District of Columbia. Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Alaska are close behind in bad-guy status, as are Nevada, Louisiana, North Carolina, and New York. Note that of the best states, all but Pennsylvania are from the West, whereas of the worst states, all are from the Northeast quadrant except the Carolinas, Louisiana, Nevada, and the two fiefdoms of Alaska and Kansas.

When the returns from the election of regional representatives to the NatComm came in, the exultant Crane Machine forces believed that they would rule the roost and dominate the NatComm for the next two years. As they swept in to steamroller votes at the first meeting just after the convention adjourned in Denver, it looked as if this grim prophecy would come true. But at the second NatComm meeting at Bethesda, Maryland on November 7-8, the Clark and Mason forces regrouped, and moved toward effective unity to block outrageous attempts at takeovers by the Machine. It is a close struggle on NatComm, but it looks as if a Greater Coalition will begin to curb the unbridled power of the arrogant Crane Machine.

VI The First NatComm, August 30, Denver.

A Machine steamroller operated against a demoralized, and — at least in one case — very hungry opposition (there had been no break for lunch or dinner at the convention.) One particularly repellent practice was that of Howie Rich (N.Y.), the Gauleiter for the Crane Machine on NatComm, breaking in before the Chair could say “all those in favor . . .” to say “Yea” or “Nay”, so that his stooges would know how to vote. When Evers (Cal.) moved to suspend the rules to commend Arkansas LP Chair Paul Jacob for his current draft resistance, the Crane Machine incredibly voted against it, defeating the motion by 9-9-3. At that point, Crane Machiner Milton Mueller, who had given the anti-draft resolution to Dale Pratt (Haw.) (who in turn asked Evers to make the motion), shouted out “Howie!”, and rushed to whisper in Rich’s ear. At that point, seeing that the Machine had gotten its signals crossed, Rich moved for reconsideration, and the whole Machine gang dutifully goosestepped and voted for the resolution.

FIGURE 2

Per Cent of Votes Going to Coalition, By Rank

*1 — Delaware

67%

2 — Hawaii

65

3-4 — Colorado

62

3-4 — Pennsylvania

62

5 — California

50

6 — Tennessee

43

7 — Utah

41

8 — Idaho

40

9 — Arizona

39

10-11-12 — Iowa

38

*10-11-12 — Alabama

38

10-11-12 — Washington

38

13 — Oregon

36

14-15 — New Mexico

33

14-15 — Ohio

33

16-17 — Georgia

31

16-17 — Michigan

31

18-19 — Minnesota

30

18-19 — Texas

30

20-21 — Kentucky

29

*20-21 — S. Dakota

29

22-23 — Illinois

26

22-23 — N. Jersey

26

24-25 — Florida

24

24-25 — Montana

24

26-27 — Arkansas

23

26-27 — Oklahoma

23

28-29-30 — New York

19

28-29-30 — Nevada

19

28-29-30 — Virginia

19

31 — Wyoming

18

32 — Alaska

16

33 — Missouri

15

*34 — Conn.

14

35-36 — Louisiana

12

35-36 — N. Carolina

12

37 — Kansas

10

38 — S. Carolina

6

39 — Wisconsin

4

40-41 — D.C.

2

40-41 — Maryland

2

42-43-44 — Mass.

0

*42-43-44 — R.I.

0

*42-43-44 — Miss.

0

Andrea Rich’s proposal for the NatComm to continue to give $800 a month to the Machine-dominated Speakers Bureau passed, as did the Randolph/Hocker proposal to authorize the National Director, Eric O’Keefe, to spend the whopping sum of $10,000 a month on state ballot drives at his own discretion.

None of these votes, unfortunately, was subjected to a roll-call, but over the objection of Assistant Gauleiter Hocker and other Machiners, the NatComm fortunately did agree to allow a roll-call whenever three members should ask for it. It should be clear to everyone that there is only one reason to stubbornly resist roll-call votes: a high-and-mighty ruling clique not wishing the party rank-and-file to know how they are voting. The issue on roll-call votes is clear; shall the LP members have a right to know how their NatComm representatives are voting or shall they not? Only a bureaucratic cadre with total contempt for the membership can say no.

There was only one important roll call vote. Paul Grant (Col.) had heard that the New York Party, in signing an agreement with the Sheraton Centre hotel for the fall 1983 national convention, had outrageously committed the New York Party (or the National Party?) to a liability of $90,000 in case of forfeiture. Bill Evers then moved that the NatComm not be liable for any debt incurred through forfeiture of the New York convention. This motion was voted down by 10-14, thereby setting up the unprecedented and outrageous possibility that New York can commit and spend, and National will have to pay. (This is of course fits into the Craniac pattern: we spend like drunken sailors, and you pay.) The following, is an analysis of the roll-call vote, with a + after a name meaning the right vote, and a – signifying the wrong vote. (In this, as in all subsequent rollcall analyses, of course, my own vote gets an automatic + since I am the one doing the rating.)

On Evers’ Motion to Reject Any LNC Liability

Brazier (Mont.)

+

Burch (Va.)

-

Burns (Oh.)

-

Crussel (Okla.)

+

Eddy (Md.)

+

Emerling (Nev.)

+

Evers (Calif.)

+

Grant (Col.)

+

Guida (Md.)

-

Hanson (Col.)

+

Hocker (D.C.)

.

Hodge (Fla.)

-

Johnston (Ill.)

-

Key (Wisc.)

-

Lindsay (Ark.)

-

Palm (Mont.)

-

Pratt (Haw.)

+

Randolph (Alas.)

-

A. Rich (N.Y.)

-

H. Rich (N.Y.)

-

Rothbard (N.Y.)

+

Vandersiice (AZ)

+

Vernon (Cal.)

-

Webber (Mass.)

-

VII Post-Convention: The Second NatComm, Nov. 7-8, Bethesda, Md.

The Second NatComm was a very different story, with several significant votes being wrested from Crane Machine domination by an increasingly effective Greater Coalition being forged between the old Clark and Mason camps.

The first great battle occurred at the very beginning. Two people claimed to be the regional rep from Region 15 (Maryland, D.C., and West Virginia). These two were Jule Herbert (D.C.), a top Crane Machiner, and I. Dean Ahmad (Md.), a Clark supporter. Clearly, the Machine was ready to go to the mat on this one. I submitted a resolution, one that seemed eminently sensible to me, that a 3-man Credentials Committee be appointed by the Chair to consider the confusing claims of both parties, and then to report back at the next meeting. Much to my surprise, the resolution passed by 14-9 (unfortunately no one insisting on a roll call.) The first defeat for the Machine! Also, the committee appointed by Alicia is a fine one (Crussel, A. Rich, Monroe).

Unfortunately, Chris Hocker (D.C.) partially recouped for the Machine by moving an amendment imposing pro-Jule Herbert restrictions on the Committee’s deliberations, and the Hocker Amendment, though absurdly contradictory to the very idea of a credentials committee, passed narrowly by a vote of 14 to 13. And so the Herbert/Ahmad question is still in a state of confusion. (Motion 1 in the roll call table below.)

Next, Evers moved to suspend the rules to restore the old NatComm rule, on the books since 1972, barring Presidential candidates from invoking the equal access, fairness doctrine, or other coercive FCC rules to obtain broadcast time. This rule, wholly in keeping with libertarian principle and the LP Platform (old as well as new), was violated in secret by Crane, Hocker, and Herbert during the Clark campaign of 1980. When their abhorrent action was considered by the old NatComm at the beginning of the convention, it merely noted the violation, and then shamefully proceeded to revoke the rule. Evers’ motion to consider restoring the rule was defeated by a vote of 13-15. (Motion 2 in the table below). Rest assured; the LP and the NatComm has not heard the end of this key question of principle. It will be raised again and again and again.

Pratt (Haw.) and Monroe (Tex.) moved to require roll call votes on all main motions. The motion lost by a vote of 11 to 14, with 2 abstentions. (Motion 3 in the table below.) Some of those failing to support this motion felt that requiring all roll call votes would be too onerous a task, but this objection was belied by Secretary Eddy’s assurance that this would pose no problem. At any rate, it is firmly set that three NatComm members can always require a roll call.

While it was generally agreed to send NatComm minutes to all state chairs, the proposal to send them to state newsletter editors failed by 7 to 21, some of the opposition using the absurd argument that the FBI, IRS or other government agency might then see them (Heavens! is the LP now underground?) Once again, keeping the party members ignorant seems to be the major point. (Motion 4 below.)

Unfortunately, Eric O’Keefe was again granted his absolute power over $10,000 a month to distribute to state parties for ballot status. The motion to rescind that power lost by 9 to 16, with 3 abstentions. (Motion 5 below). Then, even Dave Bergland (Cal.)’s mild motion to require O’Keefe to submit periodic written reports on his actions lost by 8 to 18 with 1 abstention. (Motion 6 below).

In considering the Howie Rich (Crane Machine)-dominated Libertarian Congressional Committee, Evers moved to require the LCC to follow various cogent guidelines for candidate support developed by LCC member Carolyn Felton, and also to hold open meetings publicized at least two weeks in advance. These criteria were so reasonable that even Rich & Co., accepted them with the single exception of Jim Johnston (III.), who showed himself all weekend to be a fanatical Craniac ultra, more royalist than the King. Johnston also persisted in lone obstructionism in absurdly trying to maintain that the NatComm could not legally require roll call votes because of Roberts’ Rules of Order. (Johnston, senior economist for Standard Oil of Indiana, was formerly a Law of the Sea negotiator for the Nixon/Ford administration, and is now affiliated with the Kochian Council for Competitive Economy.) (Motion 7 below.)

Evers then tried for what seemed like hours to ask three questions of Rich on the LCC. After finally being permitted to ask them Evers’ questions turned out to be incisive and revealing, for Rich was forced to admit that he had not done several things he had promised in previous agreed upon plans for the LCC.

This ended the Saturday session; it is true that the Machine had won all the votes but one, but that one — blocking the immediate seating of J. Herbent — was significant, and at least promised some light at the end of a dim, dark tunnel. That night, further unity was cemented among the Mason and Clark forces, leading to several crucial triumphs the following day.

The first, and highly significant Sunday triumph was blocking the granting of carte blanche to the New York Party to run the 1983 convention as it wishes. Instead, Paul Grant’s motion was approved by 17-10 to set up a committee to negotiate a contract with the New York Party, and to continue afterward as an oversight committee for the convention. Unfortunately, there was no roll call on this one. But particularly significant was the breaking away of Dick Randolph (Alaska) from his usual Craniac stance, and agreeing to a negotiating committee, with Grant as chairman. In fact, it was Randolph who worked out the specifics on who would be the members of this committee.

NatComm proceeded to slip back by abjectly agreeing to buying a film on libertarianism produced by the Riches and at their imposed terms. Dave Walter (Pa.), however, did succeed in his motion to inquire into the costs of changing the film to improve the historical sections.

Returning to discussion of the LCC, I moved to substitute on that committee one of its two original founders, Jorge Amador (Pa.), for a new addition proposed by Rich, Ross Levatter (Oh.) The motion lost by a vote of 6 to 16, 5 abstaining. (Motion 8 below.)

Next, Evers won on proposing a public opinion poll to see how people regard the LP, and, then, unfortunately, it was generally agreed that NatComm pay the Clark campaign debt of about $30,000. Even the decentralists decided they could justify this assumption of debt on the ground that NatComm was really buying the valuable asset of the Clark campaign mailing lists. Perhaps; but it sets up a dangerous precedent nevertheless, for future presidential candidates might conclude that any debt incurred will automatically be assumed by the Party. Clearly, further thought must go into this, including the question: by what right do candidates keep their own mailing list from the Party in the first place?

We now come to the most dramatic and single most important ballot of the weekend: the vote on the naked power grab attempted by Leslie Key (Wisc.), a top Craniac, and Finance Committee chair, to seize control of the crucially important Mailing List Committee of NatComm. This blatant power play in effect would have removed the power of Alicia Clark to appoint subcommittees of NatComm as well as placing the crucial power lever into Crane Machine hands. It must be understood that control of the mailing list is the vital power lever in all ideological, indeed all non-profit, organizations. The crucial vote came on Mike Hall (Calif.)’s substitute motion empowering Alicia to name the Mailing List Committee. On this vital ballot, the vote was a 13 to 13 tie with 1 abstention, at which point Alicia broke the tie by voting Yea on the Hall motion. (Motion 9 below.) Whoopee! The crucial vote had been carried, albeit narrowly. Taking the two critical votes on Sunday: rejection of a walkover by the New York Party, and repudiation of the power grab by Leslie Key, things had gone surprisingly well. It looks as if the Machine’s power has peaked, and is beginning to wane, perhaps from now on.

Not only that: but Alicia displayed grit and determination when she named the Mailing List Committee a few days later: the new Committee is a fine one, and La Key is conspicuous by her absence. Sometimes justice, even poetic justice, does prevail.

The next two roll calls were satisfying, narrowly defeating a last-ditch desperate attempt to suspend the rules to overthrow the Key defeat, losing 16 to 9 (it needed 2/3 to win); (Motion 10 below); and confirming Alicia’s previous selection of John Mason as Chairman of the critical Internal Education Committee to advance the education of Party members in our principles and programs. Even the Crane Machine graciously conceded here, and voted for Mason, except for a few of their fanatic ultras: the inevitable Johnston, the loquacious Lindsay (Ark.), and La Key, the Madame De Farge of the Party. Michael Burch abstained. (Motion 11 below.)

VIII Conclusion: What Now?

I left Bethesda in good cheer, especially as contrasted to the post Denver gloom at the prospect of facing two full years of an abominable Crane Machine steamroller. The steamroller has faltered and sputtered, a particularly sweet development in light of post-Denver boasting by the Machine of their iron control of Nat Comm. Not so! The Clark and Mason forces are moving toward friendship and unity on every level. It is perhaps not premature to envision a future unity forged on commitment to the leading themes of the two camps before Denver: consistent ideological principle, and grass roots organization. In this way, a mighty front could be forged against the twin hallmarks of the Crane Machine: opportunist sellout and arrogant central dictation.

As one of the most genial and perceptive observers of the LP scene assured me after Bethesda: “Murray, it’s the Battle of Iwo Jima. They’re (the Machine) the Japs. They have the island, the pillboxes. But we have secured the airfield, and we’ve planted the flag. And I hope they have plenty of rice and saki stored away, because they ain’t getting any more supplies. All the freighters offshore are ours. So we can expect a lot of fighting and a lot of Banzai! charges, but they’re going to lose. They’re history.”

Indeed, we can expect to see their support on NatComm fade. For the nature of opportunists is to go with the winner, and as the smell of defeat begins to curl around the heads of the Crane Machine, we can expect one, two, many defectors.

For the first time in a long while, the future of the LP is beginning to look good once more.

IX: Appendix: Roll Call Votes at Bethesda

Following is an analysis and rating of all the roll call votes at Bethesda. Good and correct votes are rated with a +, bad and incorrect votes with a -. Abstainers receive a 0, and those who were simply not in the room are not marked at all.

A Guide to the Motions below:

1 — Hocker Amendment to hobble the credentials committee. No is good.

2 — Evers motion to consider restoring the rule banning presidential candidates from using the FCC to force broadcast time upon the networks. Yes is good.

3 — Motion to require roll calls on all main motions. Yes is good.

4 — Motion to send NatComm minutes to state newsletters editors. Yes is good.

5 — Motion to rescind the absolute power of O’Keefe to distribute $10,000 a month to state parties for ballot status. Yes is good.

6 — Motion to require O’Keefe to submit periodic reports. Yes is good.

7 — Motion to require LCC to follow guidelines and open meetings. Yes is good.

8 — Motion to include founder Jorge Amador on LCC. Yes is good.

9 — Hall’s substitute to stop Leslie Key from controlling the Mailing List Committee, and having Alicia appoint the committee. Yes is good.

10 — Motion to suspend rules to reconsider Mason as chair. No is good.

11 — Approving John Mason as Chair of Internal Education Committee. Yes is good.

Analysis of the lineup shows that Rothbard (by definition) and Pratt have perfect scores, Bergland almost so followed by Monroe, Crussel, Franzi, Evers, Brazier, Hall, and Grant. Others in the good-guy column are Walter, and Eddy. Three swing vote independents are Baures, Lewis, and Richman.

Crane Machine voters, with 2-9, are Burns, DeLisio, Guida, Key, Hocker, Hodge and H. Rich. A. Rich also makes it, with but one minor defection. Palm and Randolph display a few deviations. Particularly fascinating in this Machine lineup are the rabid ultras, more Craniac than the Machine, including Burch, Lindsay, especially Johnston, who walks off with the consistent booby prize.

The Kochtopus: Convulsions and Contractions

1981 has been a year of massive upheavals and contractions in the Kochtopus, setting Kochologists aflutter in trying to analyze the new situation. First, the brute facts:

1) Libertarian Review, the star movement jewel in the Koch/Crane diadem, has been killed. (Officially, it has been merged into Inquiry, the distinguished soft-core semi-monthly.) This means that there is no Crane Machine organ to set the line for the libertarian movement, since Inquiry is not a movement publication. Roy A. Childs, Jr., editor of LR, has been “warehoused” to become a “foreign policy analyst” for Crane’s Cato Institute.

2) Students for a Libertarian Society, the Koch/Crane youth arm, has been cast adrift, its budget cut back from luxurious munificence to near-nothing. Note: in its first year, SLS had a Kochian income of $400,000 — heady wine for the dozen or so twerps and flunkies attached to the new battleship; the following year, Kochian contributions were cut to $100,000 and this year, its contributions were cut back to all of $10,000. In short, the Kochs have cast SLS adrift, and former SLS leader Milton Mueller has been warehoused with a Kochian grant for an alleged book on something or other. The Machine takes care of its loyal tools.

SLS, however, now in the hands of highly independent Kathy Jacob, promises to be a purer if poorer organization, now that it is no longer under Machine control.

3) Inquiry remains, under Hocker as publisher, but it is now cast adrift from Cato; it takes over old LR headquarters in Washington. But this means that, while its allowed deficit remains the same, it no longer enjoys the some $150,000 annual subsidy it received from Cato’s paying its rent and other office amenities. The question then is: Will Inquiry be able to survive its new setup? Betting pools are already being organized to guess the date of Inquiry’s final issue, with the smart money betting on December, 1982.

4) Cato moves to Washington, with no staff left except Dave Boaz. Its own budget is reportedly increased, but what will it do with the money, especially now that its only resident intellectual, Bob Formaini, has quit and joined the Center for Libertarian Studies as Vice President for Research and Programs? Who will now set up and direct the Cato conferences, or edit the Cato Journal, which were all excellent under the Formaini regime? Best guess is that Cato will now concentrate on little squibs to try to horn in on the current popularity of various free-market Reaganoid institutes.

5) The only organ left to try to direct the libertarian movement is the monthly newsletter Update (called Upchuck by many in the movement), now to be edited by the Madame de Farge of the Crane Machine, Leslie Key. But newsletters do not give guidance to a movement.

Why, why? Well, one thing is sure: the Kochtopus is contracting; really there is now only Cato left for the Crane Machine to work with, albeit the Washington location is conveniently close to its numerous stooges at the National Office of the LP. It looks as if the glory days of riding high on the hog are over.

Meanwhile, as a final Machine note, the Jule Herbert-directed Washington, D.C. tax credit initiative for private schools (i.e. by the National Taxpayers Legal Foundation) was a total and unbelievable floperoo. The tax credit lost by an incredible 8:1 margin. Is this what we can expect from the Best and the Brightest, from the tough cool young “professionals” of the Crane Machine?

Hayek’s Denationalized Money

In the seven years since he received the Nobel prize in economics, F. A. Hayek, the Austrian who is the dean of free market economists, has returned from political philosophy to economics with a gratifying vigor and enthusiasm. Not only that: he has shown a new willingness, remarkable for a man in his 80’s, for seeking out different and radical free-market solutions to the problems of our time.

In particular, appalled by the continuing rampant inflation of our age, Hayek, in two pamphlets published in England (Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money), advocates what he has variously called “denationalized” or “free enterprise” money. Where he goes beyond most free-market economists of the last two centuries is to challenge the generally unquestioned government monopoly in the creation and production of money. Not only that: he also challenges the government’s presuming to define any given currency as money. In a world racked by chronic and accelerating inflation, Hayek’s proposal is gaining increasing attention.

Let us see how Hayek goes about his wholly admirable task of getting the government completely out of the money business, of arriving at a society where money truly emerges from the free market and from there alone. Hayek advocates that any bank, group, or person be allowed to issue its own money, that is, not “dollars” or “pounds” but completely new monetary units created by these banks or persons themselves. In short, Hayek would be allowed to print “Hayeks”, I would be allowed to print “Rothbards”, etc. Legal tender laws, which force creditors to take “dollars” or “pounds” rather than these other currencies, would be abolished, so that we would at last have truly free competition in these various currencies and moneys.

Note that the Hayek, Rothbard “banks”, etc. could never go bankrupt, since their liabilities are only to pay “Hayeks” or “Rothbards”, and they could print unlimited quantities if they so chose. But if the Rothbard Bank, for example, printed too many “Rothbards”, prices in terms of “Rothbards” would start inflating, and, with the purchasing power of “Rothbards” declining, fewer and fewer people would be using these tickets as money. And so, Hayek envisions that the competition of the market would result in only a few competing moneys circulating in any given geographical area; and that the inflationary banks would disappear as the result of market forces.

Hayek’s plan really consists of two very different elements: (a) his call for freedom in the creation of new currencies; and (b) his advocating that his proposed banks so act as to keep prices in terms of “Hayeks” or “Rothbards” constant. The latter does not at all follow from his insight that inflationary banks would tend to disappear on the market. For prices tend to fall in an unhampered, uninflated free-market economy, as productivity and supplies of goods increase. The proposed Hayek bank would have to keep inflating the supply of “Hayeks” in order to keep Hayek prices constant. But why keep them constant at all? Wouldn’t a harder money bank which refused to keep inflating its currency, which kept its supply of currency constant and allowed prices to fall, wouldn’t it be outcompeting the more inflationary Hayek bank, for the same reason that Hayek shows that the latter would outcompete its wildly inflationary competitors? In short, Hayek still unfortunately clings to the constant price level notions of the Chicago school and of the “commodity dollar” (which he endorsed a generation ago.) Not only would the proposed Hayek bank fall by the wayside in his own free-market money world, but his proposal to inflate currency to keep prices constant flatly contradicts his own business cycle insight of a half century ago: That such inflation will bring about malinvestments and the boom-bust cycle.

Suppose, then, that we give up part (b) — the constant price level part — of Hayek’s scheme? How sound is his part (a) — the freedom of anyone to issue new money units — as a solution to the inflation and monetary tyranny of our times? The sad answer is that Hayek’s proposal, even in the unlikely event it were adopted, is so irrelevant to our current monetary problems as to take on the aspect of a crank scheme. Suppose, for example, that the American government magnanimously allowed Hayek to issue “Hayeks”, me to issue “Rothbards”, our publisher “Pedens”, etc. The problem, as Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises used to point out, is that we might issue these notes to our heart’s content, but that nobody (except perhaps a few misguided friends or relatives) would take them. They would become curisa for collectors, if not a laughingstock. For, this competition in moneys, contrary to Hayek’s seeming assumption, would not begin in a vacuum. We would begin in a world in which the public has become accustomed, for centuries, to using only “dollars”, “pounds”, etc. as monetary units. As Mises demonstrated decades ago in his “regression theorem”, people adopt certain units as money because they are confident that most other people will be using them as money. In short, the arrival of a thing or a name as money occurs only after a lengthy process of custom and habituation to its use. If we issue “Hayeks” and “Rothbards”, no one will have been habituated to their use; and no one would either trust us to be efficient money issuers or have any confidence that anyone else would begin to use it as money. In fact, most people on the market, if they noticed the presumed “Hayeks” or “Rothbards” at all, would consider them jokes in questionable taste.

In fact, Hayek’s plan ignores the most fundamental part of Mises’ regression theorem: that nothing ever becomes money out of the blue; that it can only emerge as money as a unit of weight of a useful market-produced commodity: almost always either gold or silver. Once the public becomes accustomed to the dollar or pound as a unit of weight of gold, then the government can sever the accustomed name from its base in the market-produced commodity, and seize the monopoly of supplying it as a flat currency — with results that we know all too well in the 20th century.

This latter point highlights the major flaw in Hayek’s scheme: Not just that no one would pay any attention to these currencies, but that the scheme leaves the really important current moneys: dollars, pounds, etc., in the hands of monopoly government. Hayek’s “denationalized” money may allow for freedom to produce such trivial paper tickets as “Hayeks” and “Rothbards”, but it would disastrously leave real money: dollars, pounds, etc. safely nationalized and monopolized in the hands of government. And so inflation would proceed unchecked upon its way.

In the final analysis, then, the gravest flaw in Hayek’s scheme is that it diverts free-market-oriented people from their most urgent monetary task: getting the dollar, pound, etc. out of the hands of government and into the hands of the people and the free market. In short, we must denationalize the dollar; we must get the government out of the dollar business. And that can only be done by restoring the status of the dollar (and the pound, franc, etc.) to its original role as a unit of weight of gold. Only a return to the dollar as a unit of gold can denationalize the dollar and other contemporary currencies and return their supply and regulation to the private market, to the mining of gold. What we really need now is not so much the denationalization of a non-existent “Hayek”, but the denationalization of an all too existent dollar.

Arts and Movies

Mr. First Nighter

Rich and Famous, dir. by George Cukor, with Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen.

This is one of the most odious and repellent movies I have seen in many a moon. It’s not that there are not even worse films out there, it’s just that a sixth sense and good fortune have allowed me to avoid them. I was lured into the theater by a dimwit critic who assured her readers that this was a true movie-movie in the style of the great romantic films of the 1930’s. And, after all, here was the octogenerian George Cukor directing a remake of that corny but marvelous old Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins pictures, Old Acquaintance. Poor Cukor! Poor Bette! Poor audience! If it were not a remake, this misbegotten film would not be so hard to bear.

It’s not that the acting of the two female leads is so bad. Candice Bergen is good as a screechy and obnoxious Jackie Susann-type, and Bisset tries gamely, if hopelessly, to base herself on Bette Davis. Unfortunately for Bisset, the memory of Bette Davis is eternal, and nothing could match the wondrousness of Davis’s characteristically taut, high-strung, subtle and beautifully modulated performance. Bisset’s one-note moroseness is light-years away from Bette Davis. With Davis, we can see in her eyes and her acting the deep affection she has for Hopkins, an affection without which the bond between her and the insufferable Hopkinstype becomes incomprehensible. But Bisset is incapable of that sort of acting; all she can do is announce from time to time how fond she is of Bergen — but we don’t see it except for an occasional hug. So why does she stick around?

But the real problem is the direction, the conception, and the execrable dialogue (or lack of it) contributed by Gerald Ayres. One thing above all separates old-time movies from the contemporary cinema: in the old days there was dialogue, and plenty of it: crisp, often witty, delineating characters. Now, the dialogue is sparse and very sappy. Inarticulateness is virtually the hallmark of the modern film. In Old Culture movies, for example, when a couple meet and fall in love, we know why: because they talk to each other, they discover common interests and attitudes. We understand why each finds the other lovable. But now, any kind of meaningful talk is missing, and so when they fall into a clinch, we can’t understand why.

In Rich and Famous this anti-dialogue trend has reached its nadir, so that now the succession of lovers — Miss Bisset and all comers — say virtually nothing at all. For the focus of Old Acquaintance has been totally changed. In the earlier movie, solid and sturdy George Brent (a much underrated actor) was the peg of the eternal triangle. His part gave the two women the focus, along with their writing, around which the plot — the competition and love-hate relationship between them — could focus and develop. But the Brent part — now played as an inarticulate boob — drops out after the first third or so of the film, and the rest of the picture is devoted to an endless succession of the most tedious and joyless sex scenes in the contemporary cinema. Time that should have been taken up in dialogue, plot, and character development and interchange is instead devoted to a dreary succession of sex scenes between La Bisset and one silent male cretin after another. For Rich and Famous has achieved the anti-romantic ultimate: the males say nothing whatever, and confine their execrable pretense at “acting” to a perpetual leer. “Dialogue” consists of Bisset chattering on nervously, obviously in heat, with the men leering silently, until she can hop into bed.

Even worse, as usual, is Hollywood’s idea of how an intellectual acts and talks, which to Hollywood writers and directors seems to be about as foreign as the knowledge of the habits and customs of the Kwakiutl Indians. Every once in a while, Bisset must throw in a quote from Yeats, presumably to establish her intellectual credentials to the audience. Poor Yeats gets a big workout, since he tends to pop up everywhere, even in the midst of the sex scenes. (Though come to think of it, the sex is so boring that even a quote from Yeats relieves a bit of the tedium.) Even when Bisset is given a Big Speech with which to denounce Bergen’s first novel, all she can really say is something about Proust. Even the supposed good-guy male figure, a young reporter from the Rolling Stone, who can hardly talk either, is given to mumbling something about Yeats from time to time, though most of their feeble attempts at conversation seem to be confined to words like “orgasm.”

And of course, something else has been added to compensate for all that has been taken out of Old Acquaintance. The obligatory four-letter words come rolling gratuitously out of the two ladies’ mouths. I guess this is supposed to shock the bourgeoisie. But this is 1981, and surely the long-suffering audience has already “matured” and heard quite enough by this time. Or is the old boy (Cukor) trying to impress us with how young and hip he really is?

And the dreary and tiresome sex! For the latter two-thirds of this picture is essentially soft-core porn. In a world where hard-core porn—the real thing — is readily available, any soft-core variety is necessarily boring and tiresome anyway. But surely someone could have done better than this dull and anti-erotic schlock. Perhaps adding some female nudity to what seems to be the obligatory male nudity nowadays might have helped a bit, but I strongly doubt it. Cukor should leave the porn to his tietters in that department, like Meyer or Damiano.

But the most abhorrent aspect of this picture is its moral values. For this, dear reader, is a Morality Play of sorts; it is what used to be called a Message Picture, except that its message is not the glories of Socialism or the New Deal. The message is that all of us, or at least all females should get with it, cast off the monogamy that has presumably warped Miss Bergen, and join La Bisset in her eternal pressing of the flesh. For Miss Bisset, to put it bluntly, sleeps with everything in pants (and “thing” is said advisedly). At one point, in their climactic confrontation, Bergen calls Bisset a “slut”, which for some reason angers Miss Bisset. Why she should be angry is a mystery, for the word “slut” has no meaning if we cannot apply it to the Bisset character. But the Bisset role is held up as the exemplar, the role model, for all females.

Hence the complete change in the ending. In the original movie, Davis and Hopkins, after George Brent has left the scene, are ruefully left with each other in a superb bittersweet denouement to their mutual love and conflict. But here, with the various idiot males finally out of the picture, the movie ends with Bisset converting Bergen to sluthood as a way of life. In the final frames, Bisset and Bergen clink glasses as they toast their coming year-long move to the Greek islands, where they are determined to sleep with anyone in pants, the only restriction being that he must not know any words of English. Well, there we have it, the ultimate in the zipless bleep, since there will be no danger of words or ideas passing between them.

For a heady moment at the last, I was in hopes that perhaps the movie would really go modern and Bisset and Bergen would fall into each other’s arms. At least a lesbian scene would have relieved a bit of the monotony. But no, Bisset only wants to “press some flesh” at New Years’ Eve, and the ladies are off to the Greek islands and the Nirvana of the zipless.

But they will have to go without this writer, who is immediately disqualified by being cursed with knowledge of the English language as well as being a male. But La Bisset can hardly serve as a role model for the female half of our population. For if she is supposed to be the standard-bearer for the New Hedonism, why is she so glum and morose all the time? Why is there no sense of joy, of zest for life, in bed or out? Why does not even a smile break through her countenance? One could, of course, try to credit Cukor with being deep indeed, demonstrating to the viewer the emptiness and the misery of the hedonic quest for pleasure. But no, I’m afraid that this instructive lesson is purely the unintended consequence of bad acting, writing, and directing. The lesson that the zipless is the joyless is something that comes across to the viewer despite, not because of, the efforts of Messrs. Cukor and Ayres. And, believe me, it ain’t worth the five bucks and the two hours that seem like forever.

Madcap Comedy Redivivus.

Hollywood seems at last to have cottoned to the fact that the world lost something precious and wonderful with the disappearance of the madcap comedies of the thirties and forties: all the ones with the Grants, the Tracys, the Hepburns, and the Lombards. So there have been recent attempts to revive the genre.

Probably the most successful is SOB, dir. by Blake Edwards. SOB is not exactly madcap, but harks back more to the visual, slapstick world of the great farce-comedies. Indeed, this curiously erratic movie works best in the slapstick scenes. In slapstick farce, timing is everything, and here the timing is impeccable, as Edwards puts a not-too-distinguished cast through its paces. Funniest is Robert Preston as a Hollywood Dr. Feelgood, eternally and cynically slipping one and all the needle to put them under. But away from the mass scenes, with Preston wielding the needle and orgiasts collapsing to the floor below, the film drifts off into a confused mishmash of absurdist sentimentality and the by now famous revenge of Edwards against his Hollywood tormentors. By the end, unfortunately, the slapstick deteriorates to various scenes of excretion, at a level well below old burlesque routines.

Arthur, dir. by Steve Gordon, is a more conscious attempt to revive the old madcap comedy. Unfortunately, such a comedy needs witty dialogue above all, and Arthur simply doesn’t have it. Also, Dudley Moore has an unfortunate tendency to overact when given his head, and here he is uncontrolled, hamming it up interminably as a repellent drunk whom we are supposed to love for his allegedly overwhelming charm. Whatever Liza Minelli is cut out for, it is not to play intelligent screwballs like Jean Arthur or Carole Lombard. And so with zilch dialogue and highly inadequate acting, Arthur can do no more than stumble through. Too much has been made of John Gielgud in the Eric Blore-butler role. He is certainly good, but really no better than Blore, and his role is a fairly small one.

Continental Divide is the closest approximation of the three to a thirties’ romantic comedy, and so pleases just by offering second-degree nostalgia. There are certainly funny parts, but compared to a true comedy of the thirties, everyone goes through their paces far too mechanically. Blair Brown is at least vaguely reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn, but John Belushi is a disaster in the Spencer Tracy role. In the magnificent Pat and Mike, Tracy was a sturdy and shrewd man of the people, but never a shambling and cretinous slob like Belushi.

In all these films, Hollywood approaches the madcap comedy almost as if it were examining some strange and alien culture. It is all mechanistic, from the outside, by rote. It’s as if Hollywood has recaptured the formulas of the old days, but never the spirit or the essence. Recently, I was privileged to see a revival of two superb films of the 30’s: Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth and Frank Capra’s wondrous You Can’t Take It With You. It was a great afternoon, but it highlighted all too vividly the contrast between the real thing and the paltry imitation. Those movies had everything: comedy, dialogue, great acting, slapstick, romance, all woven together with great pace and a taut economy that is pure delight. There was not one wasted moment in the great comedies of the 30s. As a result, seeing them literally dozens of times scarcely diminishes their freshness, their impact, or the new richness of insight that one can find at each viewing. In contrast, it is difficult to imagine anyone seeing the current remakes over again. Once is more than enough!

Against a Government Space Program

Thomas M. Coughlin

I strongly support the development of outer space for the enrichment and benefit of humanity. Yet to me the means by which one gets into space are as important as getting there. In particular one should examine the funding sources of one’s space program.

I oppose government monopolization and control of space transportation for the following reasons:

1) Government funds come from two sources. The first source is taxation. Financing the exploration and development of outer space through taxes is THEFT! This is an act of coercion. People who totally oppose or have no interest in outer space would be forced to support that development. Such force is to me immoral. The second source of government funding is deficit spending. This is also immoral, for it is only a more subtle form of THEFT — (under the guise of inflation).

2) The very nature of government is to use force. Government exists to provide military and legal force against its enemies. Any activity of a government then by its very nature implies coercion. Expropriation of the wealth of taxpayers is only one facet of this coercion. Still more insidious is the government’s tendency to employ technology for military purposes. I believe that the outcome of a government space to live and produce goods for all of humanity. The government space program will expand the highly expensive and extraordinary dangerous arms race. The space shuttle is a joint NASA/DOD project and will carry a large number of military missions into outer space.

3) Government control will prevent the development of free enterprise in space. Private carriers will be discouraged or prohibited due to government fear that they might undermine military advantages in space.

4) The cost of space transportation will increase, and the quality of goods manufactured there decrease as a result of protective government monopolies. The space shuttle cost far beyond its projected budget and was subject to numerous delays due errors in its design. Should we expect more from future government ventures?

NASA is not necessary, sufficient, or in my opinion, even good for the peaceful development of outer space. The development of outer space does not require the bleeding of taxpayers by parasites with dreams but no vision.

OUTER SPACE WILL PAY FOR ITSELF!

There is a vast quantity of wealth in space. It will be acquired by those with a vision, not by thieves. Free men and women need not be coerced into benefiting themselves. They can decide for themselves to go into space and if freed of the onerous burden of taxation, their hard work and imagination will achieve their goal.

Consolation for Activists

Now that many principled LPers are dropping out of the Party and even out of the movement, and there is general despair and lamentation about many of the people and groups in it, now when thinking people increasingly ask, “What am I doing here?”, an old friend of mine has come up with a hilarious if dubious consolation.

Some months ago, while I was lamenting about the state of the movement, the old friend reminded me of the scintillating scene in that great movie, Godfather, Part II. The Meyer Lansky character (Lee Strasberg), was dispensing Jewish homilies (“So long as you have your health!”) in a summit meeting with Al Pacino. (He was later to try to murder Pacino shortly after the detente agreement at the summit.) Referring to the murder by Pacino of Strasberg’s long-term lieutenant in Las Vegas, Moe Green, Strasberg opined:

“When Moe Green was killed, did I try to find out who did it? Did I ask any questions? No . . . because I said to myself, This is the business we have chosen.

“And so Murray,” my friend counselled, “Remember: This is the business (alternatively the movement) we have chosen: libertarianism.”

This uproarious consolation can become dubious because most of us, after all, didn’t choose the movement (that is, the people in it) when we became libertarians: we chose the ideology, the idea of a good, beautiful, true, and just system.

There is an addendum: as one libertarian activist lamented when I told him this little tale, “But I can’t make any money at this ‘business.’” “Ah,” I replied, “But that is one of the essential features of this particular business.”

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 1

February, 1982

ARE WE BEING BEASTLY TO THE GIPPER?
PART I

One of the reasons we launched the Libertarian Forum way back in 1969 was that a number of “libertarians” had eagerly formed themselves into a (largely unpaid) intellectual bodyguard for the new president, Richard Nixon, and were given to trumpeting the President’s allegedly libertarian concerns and designs. Well, we know all too well what happened to that theory. But, lo and behold, plus ca change, and here we are, one year into the new Reagan Administration, and still more libertarians are now heralding the Gipper as the Libertarian Messiah. If the Gipper is truly our Redeemer, then of course churls such as myself have to be attacked for strenuously resisting the New Dispensation and presuming to claim that the Gip really has no clothes.

Sure enough, the right-wing of our movement, some of whom have quasi-cushy jobs in and around the Administration, have been doing a great deal of such trumpeting and alibiing. Robert Poole, Toni Nathan, David Friedman, David Henderson (now comfortably ensconced in the Labor Department,) and Bruce Bartlett (deputy head of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress) have weighed into the lists, defending the poor old Gipper from the alleged calumny of myself and other unreconstructed libertarians, such as CCE’s Sheldon Richman. If the others merely Deplore Our Negativism and frankly urge “critical support” for the Reagan Administration, it remains for one Lance Lamberton to take off the gloves and denounce us purists for sniping at the greatest libertarian of our century (Ronnie Reagan, natch), and to resort to psychosmearing to “explain” our churlish resistance to the New Order (“Give the Gipper a Break,” Frontlines, October 1981). In addition to the usual statist claims that we are negativists and ridden with envy at our Leader’s accomplishments, Lamberton asserts that we are all suffering from an “identity crisis” because we insist on clinging to the view that there is something wrong with the State itself. Well, gee whilleckers! Where did we get that notion from, I wonder?

Methinks that if anyone is suffering from an “identity crisis” it is Lamberton himself, who persists — or has the chutzpah — in calling himself a “libertarian” even while he smears and besmirches the ideas and the movement. At least when Jerome Tuccille deserted the movement a few years ago he frankly called himself a “conservative”; it would be nice if Lance were to follow suit. Nice but not to be expected.

Meanwhile, there is no need to employ psychobabble to explain the new course of Mr. Lamberton. The last time I saw Lance Lamberton he was a pure but impoverished young lad, working at the stronghold of libertarian radicalism, the Laissez Faire Bookstore. Now Lamberton has come up in the world, employed as a lobbyist in the Bowels of the Beast (Washington, D.C.) for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Might his 180-degree change of outlook be in some way related to his new-found prosperity as a conservative flack?

We are now one year into the Reagan Administration, so let us now examine the libertarian status of the Reagan record. Have we really been beastly to the Gipper? Or have we scarcely begun to rip open the veil of sanctity that our “libertarian” conservatives have assiduously tried to wrap around the President?

We will start at the Gip’s allegedly strongest point — his economic record — since even Lamberton does not muster the temerity to claim that Reagan’s foreign, military, and social policies are pristinely libertarian. Let us first tackle the Gip on Reaganomics.

1. Macro Reaganomics: The Budget

We begin with the famous Reagan budget victories in Congress last summer — widely heralded by the Reagan Administration and by the media as “massive” and “historic” budget and tax cuts, cuts that significantly turned around the decades-long trend toward Bigger and Bigger government in the United States.

Okay, let’s look at the “historic budget cut” effected by the Reagan Administration, a cut punctuated almost daily by pathetic TV interviews with various bozos supposedly suffering from the cuts. In fiscal 1980, the last full year of the Carter regime, he of Big Spending and modern liberalism, total federal government spending was $579 billion.

Originally, the Reagan projection of his own spending in the first full year of his regime, fiscal 1982, was $695 billion — thus keeping federal spending below the magic $700 billion mark. This “massive” and “historic” spending cut, dear reader, amounted to a 10% annual increase over the budget in the last days of the Bad Old Carter regime. (We can now omit the intervening year, fiscal 1981, as a year of mixed Carter/Reagan; its actual budget was in between, at $661 — $665 billion.)

This egregious fraud, this hoax, this “massive cut”, this 10.0% annual increase in the budget, contrasts vividly to mild old Ike Eisenhower, who no one, including himself, thought of as a conservative or economic libertarian militant. Ike, in his first full fiscal year in office from 1953 to 1954, actually cut the budget (cut-cut) by a fairly hefty 8.7%.

But that is scarcely all. For in the space of a few short months, the Reaganite estimates of its own spending this year (fiscal 1982) have already risen from $695 billion to $705 billion, and now up to $735 billion! So, with the fiscal year hardly begun (it ends every year on Sept. 30), we now have an estimated per annum increase from the last full Carter budget to the first full Reagan budget of no less than 13%! And Lord knows how high the spending will get to when we finally finish the current fiscal year.

So what are these so-called “cuts”, and where did this balderdash come from? Because, in Jimmy Carter’s January budget proposals, his suggested 1982 spending was a whopping $739 billion. Hence, in their original enthusiastic estimates, the Reagan $695 billion for 1982 was going to be a 6.0% cut from Carter’s proposed 1982 budget, not from the actual spending in the last days of Jimmy the Peanut.

But all this is hokum on several different levels. In the first place, a sinister semantic trick is being performed here. In the old days, the days of my youth, a “budget cut” meant precisely that. If this is the year 1954, and if the 1954 budget comes in at less than the previous year, then that is a “cut”. Simple and straight-forward enough. But now, the meaning of the term “cut” has been subtly changed. No sophisticated observer expects a cut-cut any more; no one thinks that the budget will actually be less next year. What “cut” now means is a reduction from the pie-in-sky blather emitted by a previous President, with no connection to any real budgetary process. Hell, I could do that, too. I could issue “projections” of a $1 trillion budget for this year and then hail Reagan for his “massive cut” of $265 billion from this non-existent hokum figure. No, if we are to keep the meaning of language, a cut must mean a cut from the previous year. After all, it’s not inconceivable. Moderate old Ike did it in his first two years in office.

And finally, as Reagan spending bloats and balloons upward, projected spending for this year is already almost even with the Carter estimate, and so there is not even a “cut” in this sense. There might well be a whopping increase before the year is out.

Perhaps we might salvage the “cut” hoax by saying that Reagan only wants to cut the rate of growth of government spending rather than spending itself. But first, that would be a monumental betrayal of Reagan’s professed objective of rolling back Big Government. If we have two political parties, a liberal party committed to advancing government, and a conservative party committed only to slowing down the rate of increase, then the inevitable long-run trend will be . . . full-scale collectivism. For when, in that case, are we going to get to roll government back?

But even on these absurdly reduced terms, the Reagan record is an abysmal one. For if we compare the first full year of the Reagan term with the first full year of the Carter regime, we find that the increase per annum of the first full year of the Carter budget over the last full year of the Ford budget was 11.7%, a striking contrast to what is already projected as a 13.5% annual increase for Reagan. So, comparing the first years of Reagan with those of Carter, we find an increase in the rate of growth of spending.

David Friedman, David Henderson, and other “libertarian” apologists for Reaganism have protested that such an attack is unfair since inflation can reduce the “real” level of government spending, as corrected for inflation. But while it is perfectly valid to correct yours and my incomes for inflation to see how well off we really are, it is impermissible to do this for the federal government, which, by its printing of counterfeit money, is itself responsible for the inflation. It is truly bizarre to try to excuse the growth of Reagan spending by pointing to inflation’s reducing the “real” level of spending, for in that case, we should hope for an enormous amount of inflation and hail Reagan’s spending “reductions” if such hyperinflation came about. To take a deliberately extreme example to highlight the point: Suppose that the Reagan Administration suddenly doubled the money supply, thereby doubling or tripling the price level next year. Should we then hail Reagan for “cutting” “real” government spending by one-half or two-thirds? How grotesque can the Reagan apologists get?

It is true that a tiny handful of obnoxious agencies got cut-cut, and one or two actually got eliminated. But all this amounted to very little, and, as we have seen, was more than offset by massive increases.

Notice what I am not saying. I am not, as a well-known radical, denouncing Ronald Reagan for being too moderate, too gradualist, in the right direction of cutting Big Government. If this were 1954, I would have said that about Ike. I am saying something very different: that Ronald Reagan is moving us further ahead, and not very gradually or moderately either, in the direction of Big Government and collectivism. He is not moving gradually in the right direction, but at a smart clip in the wrong direction. He has not turned the country around, except in the mistaken notions and fantasies of the media, of deluded rank-and-file conservatives, and of our right-wing libertarians. Only his rhetoric, not his actions, can be called libertarian in any sense. In an age of hype, Reagan’s public-relations success was — very temporarily — astounding. But, as we shall see in the case of the deficit, the chickens are already coming home to roost.

2. Macro Reaganomics: The Deficit

The deficit turned out to be the Achilles heel of Reaganomics. Reagan, during his campaign and in the early weeks of his Presidency, pledged a balanced budget. No more Bad Old Keynesianism, but fiscal sobriety. In his budget estimates during 1981, Reagan persistently forecast a $43 billion deficit this year, and finally, a balanced budget in 1984. Then suddenly, in the fall of 1981, the President threw in the towel, and abandoned his solemn pledge. The balanced budget is kaput even in promise, and has gone the way of the Carter “balanced budget” of 1976. And suddenly, Administration forecasts of its own 1982 deficit have zoomed alarmingly, already hitting the enormous total of $109 billion.

And so, to add to the biggest budget in American history, President Reagan proposes to give us the biggest deficit in our history.

The great Reagan macro-hoax, the non-existent budget and tax “cuts” (on taxes, see part II), emerged from a game plan: the phony cuts would give heart to the market, and inflationary expectations would reverse sharply, bringing down interest rates from their historic highs. The interest drop and reversal of inflationary expectations, went the theory, would give a “breathing space” for the monetarists at the Treasury and the Fed to do their work: i.e., very, very gradually reduce the rate of counterfeiting, so as to lower inflation in slow, painless degrees. Pain, and a severe recession, would thereby be avoided, and we could, for the first time, gradually end inflation with no severe corrections, dislocations, or recessions.

Well, it was too late for all that. Inflationary expectations are ingrained in the American psyche. No one trusts the government anymore. No one trusts the Fed. And so, sensing the hoax, and seeing the deficit rise rather than fall, Wall Street’s inflationary expectations — and therefore interest rates — remained at their embarrassing highs. The confident prediction of the Friedmanite monetarists in charge of Reaganomics: that interest rates would fall swiftly because inflation had “abated”, was knocked by reality into a cocked hat.

The first, shameful and panicky reaction by the Administration was to start hectoring Wall Street. Senator Baker and Representative Michel — the Republican leaders in Congress — yelled at Wall Street and, like King Canute, ordered bond prices to rise. If they didn’t, the Congressional leaders threatened Wall Street with dire consequences: credit controls, extra taxes on interest, even wage-price controls. None of this received any denial or repudiation by the Administration. Indeed, Secretary of the Treasury Regan added his own hectoring, chastising Wall Street for not having enough faith in America (thereby taking his own old Merrill Lynch TV commercials seriously).

In the last months of 1981, interest rates finally fell, though not spectacularly, but Reaganites took little comfort, since the cause was not the disappearance of inflation but a severe recession that hit in the fall. With unemployment rising sharply, production falling, and inflation still at near double-digit levels, the ever-zooming deficit has left the Reaganites panicky, on the ropes, reduced to praying, like Mr. Micawber, that “something will turn up.”

Perhaps the most shameful Reaganite reaction to the accelerating deficit came from the Administration’s three top economists, members of the Council of Economic Advisers, Weidenbaum, Jordan, and Niskanen, all of whom have been advising us that deficits are really not so bad, and that therefore We Should Relax and Enjoy It. Surely the ghost of Lord Keynes is smiling now! The single most disgraceful message that We Should Learn to Love Deficits came from my old friend, “libertarian” Bill Niskanen. Niskanen opined (a) that, after all, the “real” public debt — oops, there we go again! — is declining, and (b) that government assets are growing too, so that an accelerating increase in the debt is not that bad.

The point of the “real” public debt gambit is that, as the government prints more money and creates inflation, the value of its public debt in real terms goes down. No doubt, but this is hardly something to cheer about. When the German government created runaway inflation in the early 1920s, one of its reasons was to wipe out its public (especially its foreign) debt. It succeeded all too well. Are we supposed to cheer, Bill, because the government suckers its citizens into buying its debt and then creates inflation to wipe out its “real” debt burden?

The second shameful argument of Niskanen’s is that government “assets” too, are growing. As the New York Times paraphrased him, “if the borrowed money were invested constructively — not just spent for immediate consumption — the deficit financing might be laudatory.” Infamy! Government “investments” are “laudatory?” Since when is government spending anything but unproductive and parasitic “consumption” expenditures by politicians, bureaucrats, and their confederates? Here we see the reductio ad absurdum of our “free market” public choice economists (of whom Bill Niskanen is a distinguished member) who treat government as if it were just another — albeit largely inefficient — business firm, making investments, piling up assets, weighing asset and debt, etc. No, the government is not just another business firm; it is not a business firm at all. It is our enemy; it is Leviathan. As the Wall Street Journal mildly noted in response to Niskanen, some conservative economists “weren’t happy with the picture of a steadily growing government, preferring to see government shrink.” How old-fashioned of them!

Niskanen is relatively far-out in his service to the State. Other, less repellent, Reaganite arguments on Why We Should Learn to Love Deficits are those of the dominant monetarists, and the fringy but scrappy and voluble supply-siders or Lafferites. To the monetarists, deficits are not inflationary unless they are financed by new money created by the Fed, and since the monetarists propose to order the Fed not to do so, then there is no problem. But, while this is technically true, no one who knows anything about politics or the way the Fed works believes that it will refrain from “monetizing” $109 billion and even higher deficits. Of course much of the deficits will be financed by new money. Already, Secretary Regan has been exhorting the Fed to create more and more money. So, in practice huge deficits will be inflationary; Wall Street’s apprehensions are right and the arrogantly confident monetarists are wrong.

But furthermore, even deficits not at all monetized will have a baleful effect. For they will mean that precious and scarce private savings will be siphoned off into unproductive government boondoggles. Growth rates, already alarmingly low, will sink further because government spending will “crowd out” private investment from the capital markets. Interest rates will therefore be driven upward. But the major problem is not the rise in interest, but the crippling effect on private investment, productivity, and economic growth. Deficits Do Matter!

The other set of Reaganite deficit-apologists are the Supply-Siders. First, they don’t care about deficits, for they want only tax cuts, and they favor keeping spending levels high. The supply-siders are interventionists and not free-market advocates; they simply want different kinds of intervention. But they agree with liberals and Keynesians that spending levels should be kept high, largely because that is what they think the public wants. Professor Arthur Laffer, in his extreme Laffer Curve variant of supply-side, claims that cuts in tax rates, particularly income-taxes, will almost instantaneously raise tax revenue so much (because of increased work, thrift, and production), that this will achieve a balanced budget painlessly. Like the monetarists, the Lafferites demagogically promise painless economic adjustment; spending levels (and therefore all the goodies from Papa Government) can be kept up; tax rates can be sharply cut; and yet we can achieve a balanced budget through a rise in revenues.

But the vaunted “massive” income tax cut has already led, not to a balanced budget, but to unprecedented and enormous deficits. And so Lafferism has been politically discredited — actually unfairly since, as we shall see later, taxes were not really “cut” at all. A crackpot theory has been unfairly discredited, but eventual discredit was inevitable. It was just a matter of time.

The Reagan Administration, however, has done something about the deficit problem. It has aggravated deficits, but it has managed to get the conservative Republicans in Congress off an embarrassing hook. In the good old days, we had a statutory debt limit, and every year or so the Administration would come to Congress and induce it to up the limit. One of President Reagan’s first acts was to come to Congress and ask it to raise the debt limit once again, to over $i trillion. Veteran conservative Republican Congressmen, who had voted against rises in the debt limit all their lives, changed their stance with tears in their eyes. They justified their change of stance because now a good conservative was in the White House, and they all trusted Reagan to fulfill his balanced budget pledge. Well, that pledge is now out the window. But the conservative Republicans in Congress don’t have to worry any more. They are off the hook. For, unbeknownst to practically everyone, the Administration managed to change budget procedures last summer so that the debt limit never again will have to be raised officially. The debt “limit” now automatically increases whenever Congress votes a deficit. Some “limit”!

The Reagan Administration of course benefits from this bit of deception. The conservative Republicans are no longer embarrassed in front of their constituents. Only the American people are the losers.

Look for Part II in the next issue of Libertarian Forum.

THIS IS THE MOVEMENT YOU HAVE CHOSEN

(a new regular column on the Movement)
by The Old Curmudgeon

Representative Dick Randolph (Alaska) has been the jewel in the LP diadem ever since he won his seat in the State House from Fairbanks. But how many of us know anything about the Alaska Party or about Dick’s voting record? Few of us from the Lower 48 know or bother to find out anything about Alaskan affairs. But one indisputable and important fact has received peculiarly little publicity (in fact, zero publicity) in the Movement: namely, that since early 1981, Randolph and Ken Fanning, his new fellow Libertarian in the State House, have been in an official coalition with the Republicans in that legislative body. Isn’t this a sellout of principle and independence in order to get some choice committee posts?

But perhaps the Alaskan Party doesn’t care a whit about principle. Thus, the Washington Post (November 7, 1981), in a favorable article on the Alaska Party, interviews Ken Fanning, a big, bearded professional trapper and wilderness guide, who “warns the party against entangling itself in long philosophical debates over difficult issues such as whether supporting abortion fits the Libertarian principle.” A following quote from Fanning is priceless:

“‘To the extent that we keep offering a philosophical diversion for Ph.Ds and intellectuals, we’re in trouble,’ Fanning said. The party’s followers ‘see individualism in a very specific way, cutting wood tonight as opposed to waiting a week to cut wood’ because of some government regulation.”

Well, there you have it: the Fanning vision for the Libertarian Party. No need for Ph.Ds and intellectuals and their long boring debates. Let’s just capsulize libertarianism into one stirring slogan: Chop Wood Now!

Big Fella, I’ve got news for you. Chopping Wood Now might be the grabber up there amongst the reindeer and the tundra, but down in the Lower 48, nobody really gives that much of a damn about wood while abortion is a very hot issue. And there is no way that rough and ready Folk Wisdom is going to solve that very “difficult” but also very important issue. I’m afraid that for that, Big Guy, we might have to keep some intellectuals around and even, you should excuse the expression, Ph.Ds.

ARTS AND MOVIES

by Mr. First Nighter

True Confessions, directed by Ulu Grosbard, written by John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, with Robert Duvall and Robert DeNiro.

I approached this picture with apprehension, set on edge by critical raves about Miss Didion’s characteristic air of downbeat malaise, by the repeated warnings that this is not a murder mystery, and at the use of such avant-garde devices as making much of the dialogue inaudible. (Presumably this last gimmick is to mimic “real life”; but most of the dialogue I hear is audible!) I found to my delighted surprise that while all this is true, True Confessions is still a fine, subtle and altogether splendid motion picture.

The centerpiece of the film is of course the acting, with Duvall and DeNiro superb as Irish Catholic brothers caught in a web of general and Churchly corruption. The interplay between the two gives us some of the finest acting and character resonance in the contemporary cinema. Those of you who liked DeNiro in Raging Bull, however, those of you think that acting means chewing the carpet, won’t like this film. (One dimwit reviewer actually called DeNiro’s acting “catatonic.”) For DeNiro gives a marvelously and subtly modulated performance; a brief meaningful glance of his says it all.

The fate of DeNiro, and the subtly expressed love between the brothers, make this a deeply touching picture as well. The dialogue is splendid: in turn moving and witty, the screenplay as well as the direction and photography brilliantly evoke the murky world of detectives and prostitutes in the Los Angeles of the late 1940s. Even more, the dialogue and the picture as a whole brilliantly and wittily capture much of the essence of the Catholic Church in the modern world. John Gregory Dunne, who wrote the original story from which this film was adapted, knows his Irishmen and his Church, and so we see the great Cyril Cusack as a cynical Cardinal, Charles Durning as a splendid villain — a real estate crook who receives the Catholic Laymen Award from the Archdiocese just before he gets dumped by the Church, and Burgess Meredith as an aging priest with a true priestly vocation. And of course DeNiro, who begins the picture as a sleek, suave, powerful young Monsignor, the Cardinal’s hatchet-man, involved in real estate deals rather than in theology or loving God, and ends humbled and transformed. There hasn’t been such a subtle character change on film since Al Pacino did the reverse shift in Godfather.

So forget the downbeat and the avant-garde touches; True Confessions transcends them all and leaves us with a truly memorable motion picture.

Beads on One Rosary

Every year, the New York Film Festival, like its sister Festivals in Cannes and elsewhere, brings us a host of new movies each more detestable than the last, each a monument to the incoherent, the morbid, the irrational — in short, to the avant-garde. Festival is avant-garde run rampant, for then directors can indulge their fancies with little or no bows to the average viewer. The hits in the avant-garde world then return to plague us for many months. But every once in a great while, a true jewel emerges, and this is one I was privileged to see: the new Polish picture, Beads on One Rosary. It is charming, extraordinarily lovable, gut libertarian, splendid in every way; so naturally, it played only once at the Festival, got no critical raves among the esthetes, and will probably not be heard from again. It is far better than the sturdy but scarcely scintillating Russian picture Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, but unfortunately this does not seem to have helped.

This film features an elderly Polish coal miner and his wife, a remarkably charming couple. For his heroic coal production in the days of his youth, the miner was given his own crude shack, a house which he loves. Now all the miners have been ordered out of their homes and into a modern high-rise public housing development, which they all detest. This miner, however, stubbornly refuses to move. There is a great confrontation between the miner and the smooth, suave head of the mine, who tries to talk the miner into moving. When he says that Marxism requires moving for the sake of progress, the old miner says, with a twinkle in his eyes: “Yes, I know what Marx says about fellows like you who live off the product of the workers.” Finally, the mine boss denounces the miner as an “anarchist”, the miner goes to the dictionary to look up the word, and orders the boss out of his house.

It requires little stretch of the imagination to realize that Beads on One Rosary is a metaphor for the current struggle between the Polish masses (workers and Catholics above all) and the Communist State. But the metaphor is only implicit, this is no heavy-handed “message” picture. It is a marvelous gem in every way, and if it ever shows up in the United States again, see it!

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 2

March, 1982

ARE WE BEING BEASTLY TO THE GIPPER? — PART II

3. Macro/Reaganomics: Taxes

If Deficits Do Matter, this does not in any sense mean that they should be rectified by tax increases. Taxes should never be raised under any circumstances. They should always be cut, anywhere and everywhere. Why? First and foremost, because taxation is theft, and the more people are allowed to keep their own money the better. Second, because a price, no matter how high, is always better than a tax. Consumers paying high prices, no matter how distraught by inflation, are at least getting some goods and services for their inflated money. But the taxpayer gets nothing from his coerced payment except grief and the buildup of an oppressive State Leviathan. Taxes are never justifiable. And third, strategically, as Milton Friedman often points out, the only way the government can be forced to reduce its spending is by cutting off its water and lowering taxes.

Deficits, therefore, should be eliminated by drastic slashes of government spending. But where and how? The answer: anywhere and everywhere. There is no mystery about it. Just slash with a hefty meat axe. Go down, for example, the Eisenhower budget and reduce every item back to it. Or better yet, the Roosevelt budget of the 1930s. Still better, the Grover Cleveland budget. Still better yet, return to the average annual budget of the Federalist period of the 1790s: $5.8 million dollars. If that was good enough for the statist Alexander Hamilton, it should be good enough for our “libertarian” Reagan Administration.

Of course, my most preferred position is that the United States budget go back, or rather go forward, to a nice round Zero. But, to demonstrate my devotion to moderation, I could live with a transitional level of $5.8 million for a year or two.

At any rate, none of this needs a young blow-dried Whiz Kid with a magical facility with “the numbers.” All we’d need to effect this program is a genuine devotion to liberty and a modicum of guts.

Getting down to cases, shouldn’t we be hailing, at least as a first giant step down the road to a taxless society, the “massive” and “historic” Kemp-Roth income tax cut we are all now enjoying, plus the other cuts in business and capital gains taxes? The answer is: We should if there were such a thing, but the problem is that there is no income tax cut. The “tax cut,” like the non-existent “budget cut,” is a gigantic hoax.

Forget that the original 30% cut in three years was postponed, and reduced to 25%. The important point is that the income tax “cut” for 1982, which is supposed to spur work, thrift, and investment, is not a cut but an increase. Projected tax revenue for 1982 is about $50 billion higher than 1981, reflecting not Lafferite voodoo but an increase in income tax rates far offsetting the puny but extravagantly publicized “cuts.” For two massive increases in rates every year consist in (a) a programmed increase in Social Security tax rates; and (b) “bracket creep.” Social Security is an admitted sacred cow of the Reagan Administration, even though all sides admit that the Social Security program is bankrupt, and will have to be drastically amended in years to come. But tax rates for this fraudulent program (undoubtedly the biggest single racket imposed by the New Deal) continue to rise every year.

“Bracket creep” is the sinister process by which the federal government gives a devastating one-two punch to the average American. The first punch is the Federal Reserve printing more money every year, thereby driving up prices and extracting more resources from the private and productive sector. The second punch comes as Fed-created inflation raises prices and incomes across-the-board. For as it does so, the average person is wafted up into a higher tax bracket, and has to pay a higher percentage of his income in taxes.

Thus, suppose that a number of years ago, the average American was earning $10,000, and that now he is earning $20,000 but that prices have more or less doubled since then. In “real” terms, he is no better off, since the purchasing power of his income is the same as before. Everyone now understands this sad fact. But what is still not fully recognized is that he is now in a higher tax bracket, and will be socked a considerably higher percentage of his income in taxes. He is worse off than he was before.

It is estimated, then, even by the Administration, that the average person will be paying considerably higher income taxes in 1982 than he did last year. Misled by Administration and media hype about alluring tax “cuts”, he will deservedly be bellowing with rage at the government when he finds out that his tax bill is going to rise not fall.

But this is not all. For the increased taxes will fall exclusively on the poor and the middle class, while the wealthy will enjoy a hefty tax cut. Why? Because (a) the Social Security tax is a regressive tax, so that the wealthy pay a lower proportion of their income to Social Security than the poor or middle class. And (b) because bracket creep of course cannot affect the highest bracket, since that bracket cannot rise with inflation. When we also consider that the Reagan tax package lowered the top-bracket income tax on dividends and interest as well as on wages from 70 to 50 percent, and also liberalized depreciation requirements and cut the capital gains tax, we see that the wealthy and business received substantial tax goodies, while the rest of the population has been squeezed further. Not only is this unjust, it is clearly political suicide for the Reagan Administration.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favor of drastic tax cuts for business and the wealthy, the more the better. But it is both unjust and politically moronic to couple that with tax increases for everyone else. The only way to get the public to agree to tax cuts for the wealthy is to give them hefty tax cuts as well. In this way, there would be sizable tax-cut goodies for everyone, and we could build a coalition for freedom, a coalition based on morality as well as self-interest for all the coalescing groups. Thus, we could “buy” votes for freedom instead of for statism. But if, instead, the average American is socked still further, the result can only be political disaster.

In an illuminating article in the Business Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Stephen A. Meyer and Robert J. Rossana estimate the tax impact of the Reagan program on various income groups, conservatively assuming an 8% inflation rate this year. On this assumption, they demonstrate that marginal income tax rates at the $13,000 level (in 1978 dollars) remain about where they were — about 24%, while households with incomes from $13,000 to $40,000 (the broad middle class) will suffer rising marginal tax rates. Thus, families earning $22,500 who itemize deductions will suffer a rise in marginal tax rates from 24% to 35% in 1983. Those who itemize deductions will suffer a jump in the marginal tax rate from 32% to 40%. Families who take the standard deduction earning $40,000 will find marginal taxes rising from 39% to 49%, while those who itemize will remain the same at about 43%. However, very high income families will enjoy a substantial drop in their marginal tax rates.

The only really important tax cut in the Reagan tax package passed in 1981 was forced upon the Administration by the Southern Democrats (the “boll weevils”) in Congress. That was to index income taxes for inflation so as to eliminate bracket creep. Unfortunately, however, indexing is only slated to begin in 1985, based on 1984 income and tax levels, and hence so far off it is just pie-in-the-sky promised for the future. The way things are going, I would not bet my life savings that the indexing provision will still be there when 1985 rolls around.

The media, led by supply-siders Evans & Novak, are now filled with the saga of the heroic President Reagan manfully resisting the urgings of all his top advisers to raise taxes. “I will seek no tax increases this year”, proclaimed the President in his 1982 State of the Union message on January 26. But the President lied. He is seeking tax increases, to the tune of $32 billion over the next two years, and his tax raises are more pernicious than mere figures indicate. It is true that the President decided not to follow the full Thatcher route immediately, as his advisers urged, and therefore not to recommend the doubling of excise taxes on liquor and tobacco, or an increased 4 cents a gallon tax on gasoline. Neither has he succumbed to Senator Baker’s monstrous proposal for a national sales tax.

Reagan tries to cover up his lie by semantic trickery, calling his proposed tax increase “revenue enhancement,” and merely “closing loopholes.” Under this camouflage, Reagan has decided to recommend: acceleration of business and corporate tax payments, cutting back tax exemptions on industrial development bonds, and the elimination of energy tax credits for businesses. Moreover, the President proposes substantial increases in the minimum tax paid by corporations, and he urges delay of corporate writer offs of interest and taxes incurred for construction of commercial buildings. All these tax increases will cripple business recovery and economic growth. Already, furthermore, the excise tax on coal has been doubled at the behest of the Administration.

The pernicious concept of “closing loopholes” echoes the old liberal notion that any amount of one’s earnings that the government graciously allows one to keep is a “loophole” which deserves to be “closed” by Uncle Sam. Ludwig von Mises pointed this out decades ago, and one would expect the President, who claims to be a devoted student of Mises’ writings, to be aware of this fact, (see A. Director, ed., Defense, Controls, and Inflation, University of Chicago Press, 1952, pp. 151-152).

Another noxious device of the 1982 Reagan budget is to raise taxes but to call them “user fees.” In some cases they are simply taxes outright. Others might not be called taxes, but they have the same effect of shifting money from private producers to the State apparatus, raising charges for services monopolized by the government. Thus, while the Administration abstained from an increased gasoline tax, it proposes a savage multi-level assault on an airline industry in deep recession by (a) increasing the federal tax on airline tickets from 5% to 8%; (b) tripling the four-cent-a gallon tax on general aviation gasoline, then raising it by another two cents a year for four more years; (c) imposing a new 5% freight waybill tax; and (d) a new $3 international departure tax.

In addition, navigation and boat and yacht fees are supposed to raise an additional revenue of almost $2 billion in the next two years. Nuclear waste fees are to be imposed on electric utilities, to the tune of $800 million in two years. Passport fees on the public are to be doubled, and immigrant visa fees to be quadrupled; this is supposed to raise $100 million a year. Fees are to be levied for various mediation and arbitration “services” provided in labor disputes by federal mediation agencies. And worst of all, the commodity futures market is to be forced to pay a user fee of 25¢ per contract to pay for its own regulation by the government.

But the most malignant aspect of Reagan’s revised “non-increase” tax package for 1982 is his idea that the federal government launch a withholding tax of 5% on interest and dividends. This evil notion was suggested by President Carter, but was fortunately defeated by the lobbying of the elderly, who get a large proportion of their income from capital and endowment income.

Officially, of course, the withholding tax involves no tax increase, but everyone knows, in fact, that the monstrous withholding provision (put in during World War II as a “wartime emergency” measure, the details of which were worked out by Milton Friedman, then in the Treasury Department) is the key to the success of the income tax plunder. In practice, the withholding tax on interest and dividends will not only be costly in terms of red tape, but will also cripple savings by greatly increasing the tax burden on savers. What price supply-side now?

Monstrous as this is, it should not be a surprise to anyone, for it was the self-same “libertarian” Gipper who, as governor of California, imposed the withholding system for the state income tax.

If Reagan had any libertarian instincts, the very least he could do about the income tax would be to weaken the IRS, by drastically lowering its budget and its personnel. But what is our Gipper doing? Quite the contrary: he is proposing adding 5,000 employees to the IRS bureaucracy so that more taxes can be collected. This is not only raising taxes, it is doing so with a vengeance.

It is, finally, characteristic of this Administration that the only hope for its proposing decontrol of natural gas prices is if it can be coupled with a whopping “windfall profits” tax (in fact, a graduated excise tax at the wellhead) on natural gas.

Look for Part III in the next issue of Libertarian Forum.

ERRATA

Several typos need correction from our August 1981-January 1982 issue. First, as was indicated in our annotated Roll Call appendix, the attempt to suspend the rules in Motion 10 at the Bethesda meeting was to try to block the appointment of John Mason as Chair of the Internal Education Committee. Motion 10 was not, as stated in the text of the article, to “overthrow the (Leslie) Key defeat.”

Second, a couple of typos in the vote tabulation at Bethesda. There were 11 votes, so that Leslie Key’s score was, of course, not 12-9, but 2-9. Also, the perfect scorers, myself and Dale Pratt (Hawaii), should have gotten an 11-0, not a 12-0 score. It was not intended, as one wag inquired, to give the two of us a “bonus” vote for getting a 100% rating.

Finally, the ebullient Mary Gingell was not a “recent but convent” but rather a “recent convert” to the Mason cause. As far as I know, Mary has never had anything to do with a convent.

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

Campaign Memoirs Spring/Summer 1981

by Emil Franzi

The advice of J. Paul Getty on how to become a billionaire — “inherit a lot of money and invest it wisely” — is applicable to those who run political campaigns. Pick the best possible candidate and have them name you campaign manager. In the case of the Alicia Clark race for National Chair of the Libertarian Party, this was essentially the basic component.

A. PRE-CONVENTION

There were three candidates running when Alicia Clark finalized her decision in April of this year. All three, John Mason, Kent Guida, and Dallas Cooley, had been running for several months. None of them had emerged as a front-runner among delegates or potential delegates. Most were unknown to the average Libertarian who would become a delegate. Further, it looked to many like Mason and Guida would wage a divisive campaign over whose supporters would “control” the LP, a situation further accented by Cooley’s withdrawal at almost the same time as Alicia’s entry. The situation at that time boded well for Alicia’s candidacy based on the following suppositions, almost all of which were borne out by further developments:

(1) While almost the entire leadership of the NatCom and the intellectual leadership of the party was, or would, support either Guida or Mason, most of them would be incapable of delivering the votes of the average Libertarian delegate at a National Convention. Libertarians make up their own minds, one at a time. While the others felt they had a great advantage, they only had as big a lead as their “big name” supporters had in their own delegate badges, no more no less.

(2) Alicia’s non-divisive ecumenical approach to the entire campaign was much closer to where the average Libertarian was than Mason’s “purity” or Guida’s elitism.

(3) Alicia’s grass-roots decentralism was similarly far more identifiable to most Libertarians — an area both the Mason and Guida campaigns spent much time attempting to adapt themselves to.

(4) Alicia never pretended to be what she wasn’t and she made clear that she wanted people to vote for ideas and not for personalities.

(5) Alicia would be able to outwork both opponents in sheer energy and time, and was clearly the best-liked person. Guida and Mason ended up working much harder at being candidates than either would have had they only faced each other, and both had to re-adjust their plans to keep up with her. It should be mentioned that both Mason and Guida, particularly Mason, improved greatly as the campaign went on.

(6) Most Libertarians respected Ed Clark, even though they had various degrees of problems with those who ran his campaign. This simple fact, assumed by us going in, was totally mis-read by both opposition camps until far too late.

(7) It was evident that Alicia would have to start immediately proving to the entire country that she was more than Ed Clark’s wife — something already known in those areas she had previously visited. As she had already visited during 1980 more states than Mason and Guida combined, she had a residual group of friends among those who would become delegates that was underrated by her opposition.

(8) The campaign hierarchy was quite simple — originally Alicia and myself. We both trusted each other’s instincts and judgment. When we disagreed, or honestly felt unsure, we test-marketed our ideas on close friends until we found a consensus. We also paid heed to diverse field reports, gathered by Alicia in person and me and others by phone. Having no hierarchy enabled us to communicate directly with those who would do the voting without the built-in information filters long-established networks suffer from. As a result of this lack of hierarchy, our campaign intelligence was probably the most accurate of any camp.

(9) Our direct mail program was more intense than either opponent. Mason sent one early mailer, Guida one early mailer and one late Alaska endorsement. We sent a total of four pieces — Alicia’s announcement letter and bio, the Buck Crouch cover letter with brochure and miscellaneous, the Alicia Clark program book, and the Ed Clark endorsement, plus a separate piece to State Chairs on decentralization. All of these brought us in somebody before the Convention, making convention structure easier. All five matters stressed the same things — decentralization, administrative competence, and party unity. Libertarians like to read and should be given sufficient time to do so. Long tomes like the Guida blueprint handed out at the Convention are superficially impressive for about half a day, but nobody at a convention has time to read them. They should be mailed (expensive, but more effective) at least three weeks before the Convention opens.

B. CONVENTION

(1) Psychology. Past history indicates that if a candidate has 100 hard commitments going into the first day, 25 of them will not show up, 10 of them will bail out to another candidate, and 15 more will waffle. We expected this and were not panicked. I’m not sure others can say the same.

(2) Hierarchy. Again, hardly any. Most of our key players were picked at the convention as many of those with pre-assignments didn’t show up. Again, we expected it and adapted. Our structure was simple — Ed and Alicia talking to delegates and constantly being fed information; myself working the floor through key people in each state while first Mimi Esser and then Kathy Franzi handled the detail logistics such as getting the printing done, setting up the party, etc.; yeoman service by folks like Tyler Olson and others. This kept the external folks — Ed, Alicia, myself, and each state coordinator — able to concentrate on their primary role: getting votes and talking to delegates.

(3) Meetings. We had our first meeting on Wednesday, August 26th at 9 pm. We had our last meeting on Wednesday, August 26th at 9 pm. Meetings waste time, encourage pontification, ego-gratification, and the “Chicken Little” syndrome. Their two primary uses are communicative: receiving data and making assignments. Both of the latter can be accomplished without meetings IF (and it is an important IF) someone is willing to assume the role of data gatherer and distributor to all who need to know and perform this role completely, a role I assumed. Floor personnel and others must be able to both talk and listen. They don’t need a room full of each other to do so.

(4) Use of Suite. Suites are expensive but necessary adjuncts to convention campaigning. They need to be almost constantly open and serve two vital functions besides a place for meetings and parties. They are a communications center and supply depot, and they are an excellent gathering spot for stray delegates who have no place else to go at odd hours, or who want to rap about whatever. They should always be wide open to anyone who comes by, and not closed up for “secret meetings.”

(5) Use of Printed Materials. Most of our hand-outs were written, and some printed, before the convention. We located a Copy-Boy three blocks from the Hotel prior to our arrival, rented an IBM Selectric for the entire week, and were prepared to issue as many more one-page flyers as were necessary. We rotated colors so that each piece was obviously different from the others, to differentiate somewhat from the reams of paper being disgorged upon the multitudes from various sources. It turned out we needed little more, but were prepared if it became necessary.

(6) Use of Buttons. As most of the members of our tight-knit clique didn’t know each other prior to the convention, we used three colors of buttons: yellow for supporters; green for floor leaders and state coordinators; and gold for those working literature distribution, HQ duty, etc. This was somewhat complicated by my color-blindness, but it did simplify internal communications.

(7) Hotel’s Physical Layout. In reviewing the hotel plans prior to the convention, it appeared that everything was vertically stacked, making movement easy. I verified this by walking the hotel Monday night with a stop watch. Other hotels are not so easy, and things need to be planned based on time. Fortunately, the Denver Hilton was a piece of cake.

(8) Summary — Strategic Rigidity/Tactical Flexibility. All of the following strategic decisions were made well before the convention and strictly adhered to:

(a) That the campaign would stress grass-roots decentralism.

(b) That the campaign would be positive and never attack either candidate.

(c) That the campaign would stress Alicia’s administrative competence and personal, non-LP track record.

(d) That Alicia would write most of her own material and speeches and that they would only be edited by Ed Clark and myself (emphasis important).

(e) That Ed and Alicia would talk to as many delegates as possible one on one, as opposed to groups and caucuses.

(f) That we would go for “second choice commitments” from as many Mason and Guida delegates as possible.

(g) That geography was to our advantage, Guida clearly being weak in the West, Mason less so in the East and South, Alicia with no inherent geographical problems.

(h) That uncommitted delegates were the prime target, delegates committed to Guida or Mason secondary for the second ballot.

(i) That our main theme of party unity would carry us far enough on the first ballot to pick up a majority on the second ballot.

(j) That we would not run a complete “slate” for the other offices, but would support some candidates who supported us and some who didn’t support us, allowing the NatCom to become representative of all factions and personalities.

(k) That Libertarians are the supreme individualists and that we would treat all of them with respect and go for each vote as an individual vote. (See e.)

All of the above left a great deal of room for tactical shifts such as timing and use of different personnel in different ways.

(9) Guida Camp Mistakes. Going into the convention, we felt Guida was the strongest opponent for several reasons. His campaign was apparently well-organized and staffed by experienced people. He had what appeared to be a tight geographic base in the Mid-West and North East. And his campaign inherited most of the structure that nominated Ed Clark two years before. This lead collapsed for several reasons, and by Friday, Guida appeared to be running third because:

(a) The Guida campaign was unable to read the mood of the delegates. This was clearly displayed the first day with a kamikaze attempt to move the election from Sunday back to Saturday, but manifested itself elsewhere in various ways.

(b) Guida’s leadership was presumptuous. See above. Some key Guida folks absolutely reeked with an elitist attitude of “we know best.” Many delegates perceived this and were turned off by it.

(c) Guida’s organization was not well-administered. Example: While the Guida campaign spent many hours tracking each delegate’s arrival through credentials, they missed the golden opportunity to add three de facto proxies in Alabama. All they had to do was produce four bodies. They produced one. Likewise, they had other opportunities for “alternate packing” which they blew. Why bother to paper up Rhode Island with five out-of-state residents before the convention, and only have two of them voting in the election? Apparently the Guida campaign had no bodies to spare from any place (a serious pre-convention mistake) or else they missed several opportunities through sloppy work. This alone cost them more than the margin between themselves and Mason.

(d) Guida’s campaign never understood Regionalism. Libertarians are as regionally bigoted as any other group. Westerners, and to a lesser degree Mid-Westerners and Southerners, dislike and distrust people with East Coast (and sometimes West Coast) mannerisms.

(e) The biggest one of all — The Guida campaign completely underrated their opposition. They underrated Alicia’s campaign for too long because they were hierarchically oriented and Alicia’s campaign had little “big name” support. They totally underrated the ability of Bill Evers to run Mason’s campaign until too late. When the dawn of realization finally broke upon some of them, it caused both panic and demoralization, something that was evident throughout the Convention. They began making desperate moves such as the phony Guida “announcement” on Friday, which compounded the problem, caused many delegates to feel their intelligence was insulted, and lost them votes.

(10) Mason Camp Mistakes. It must be mentioned that along with Guida, we too underrated Bill Evers. Bill is that rare commodity — a bona fide intellectual with real political instincts who can play in either ball park. If there was any doubt, his handling of the Mason campaign flushed it for good. Nonetheless, the Mason effort had some problems, namely:

(a) The campaign started on a big negative and, although it shifted later to a more positive note, the negative image of Mason was never completely shed. I believe Evers understood this and did much to counteract it, but not enough.

(b) Despite the constant discussion of “principle,” Mason never really specified what all his principles were. Anarchist or minarchist? In the LP context, hawk or dove? Decentralist or centralist? He was long on stressing experience, but vague on specific proposals. He was the only candidate who did not spell out his program. This both got him votes and lost him votes.

(c) The Mason Campaign, while more adaptable than Guida’s, needed more tactical flexibility.

(d) They ground too hard for votes. Some delegates, particularly older people, need a low-key sell. Mason and Guida both pressured too many people and turned them off. Too many people in both camps confused Libertarian delegates with fraternity rushees and tried too hard to put the pledge pin on. It lost both groups votes.

(e) They, like Guida, missed shots at filling up friendly delegations. They had plenty of Colorado people available, so bodies were no problem. There were vacancies in solid Mason states — specifically Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. Why weren’t these filled up?

(f) Mason waffled on Eric O’Keefe. Both Alicia and Kent Guida announced he would be retained by them. Mason made no such clear statement. When Guida dropped out, Eric was an issue with many of his friends who may have otherwise voted for Mason.

While the Alicia Clark Campaign also made some mistakes, I will graciously not mention them and hope that others will point them out on their own. Noblesse oblige and the privileges of the victor.

C. SUMMARY

Alicia Clark won because people trusted and liked her, because she was closest to the most delegates on the most issues, because she was consistent, because her campaign laid out a broad game plan and stuck to it, because she never panicked, because she was never negative about anything, because she treated everyone with respect, and lastly because she was much more than Ed Clark’s wife. Among other things, she was Ed Clark’s candidate. If anyone has earned the support of most Libertarians in this country, it is clearly Ed Clark. The 1981 LP/10 Convention in a variety of ways was a vote of confidence in his leadership.

*Mr. Franzi, NatComm representative from Arizona, was Alicia Clark’s campaign manger in the race for National Chair.

THIS IS THE MOVEMENT YOU HAVE CHOSEN

by The Old Curmudgeon

In my last column, I cast the spotlight on Big Ken Fanning, our newly-elected Alaska State Representative. But the great Hero of the Alaska Party, and of much of the LP in general, is State Rep. Dick Randolph, our first elected LP member. Dick is running hard for Governor this year, and recently conducted a fund-raising tour in the Lower 48. Until very recently, Randolph’s campaign outside of Alaska was totally Craniac-run, and for a while it looked as if it would be run similarly within Alaska during next summer and fall. The Craniacs have been talking grandiosely about Randolph’s campaign as being “winnable,” which in my book means a “good chance of being won.” One more Craniac shuck: is anyone prepared to make a substantial bet, even-money, on Randolph’s alleged victory?

At any rate, in the course of his triumphal tour, Randolph gave an extensive interview to Free Texas. The interview, published in the Winter, 1981 issue, is unremarkable enough. Far more interesting are the suppressed portions of the Randolph interview, which have come into our hands. Let it be pointed out straightaway that editor Mike Grossberg was not responsible for the suppression, which was insisted on by the Randolph camp. Unlike Grossberg, however, the Lib. Forum is not bound by any contractual obligations to Randolph.

It is no wonder that Randolph suppressed parts of the Free Texas interview, because they are quite revealing. First, he asserts that there should be little or no relationship between libertarianism and libertarian principle on the one hand, and the Libertarian Party on the other. When asked about Jeffrey Hummel’s brilliant article advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament, for example, Randolph replies: “I believe there are at least two parts to libertarianism. There are the philosophical positions that we are all coming from and then there is the Libertarian political party. I think that much of what was in the article was very appropriate for libertarians and libertarianism but I don’t think it’s appropriate for a political party . . . So while I think that the article is apt and accurate for libertarianism, I don’t believe it’s realistic at all for a political party, which the Libertarian Party is.” [Chalk yet another one up for George Smith/Sam Konkin!]

When asked about the Lib. Forum editor’s concept of libertarian strategy, Randolph’s answer displays a contempt for the intellect similar to that of his legislative colleague: “I don’t know if Rothbard has planned out a structure of how we will get there or not. What I understand of his thinking on how we’re going to get there — I think there’s no chance of us getting there that way. I haven’t spent a great deal of time philosophizing on how we are going to maintain a libertarian world or how we’re going to get to a libertarian world. [Evidently!] I have spent a great deal of time trying to deal with specific issues in the political arena in which I find myself, to try to get that area to a far more libertarian society than it presently is.”

One of the problems with Libertarians elected to office is that they will be taking tax-stolen funds as government officials. This is a grave problem for Libertarians; Randolph himself was appointed to a NatComm subcommittee to look into ways of voluntarily funding officials elected on the Libertarian ticket. What we found out was that such voluntary funding is illegal under the monstrous and fascistic “election reform” laws. But when asked about this crucial problem, instead of pointing this out and calling for an LP drive to repeal such laws, Randolph was flip indeed: “I think you have to realize that you’re in the world you’re in. [Thanks for that instruction, Dick.] There’s no way that you’re going to get in a position where you’re going to be able to do anything about anything if you tie your hands behind you and blindfold yourself and cut your tongue out. I think you are where you are.”

And again, after conceding that taxes are compulsory and pernicious, Randolph fell back on LP “Gallup Polling”: “I have talked to literally hundreds of Libertarians and neither of these issues [taking tax-supported salaries and taking an oath of office] ever come up. [One of the things very wrong with the Party!] There are a few people, the ivory tower philosophers who worry about these things a lot and they spend a lot of time writing and putting what they’re thinking into newspapers and party publications. [Here we go again; how come he didn’t attack Ph.D’s, too?] I believe that their thoughts and the controversies that their thoughts keep on the surface are not widespread concerns of 90% of the people who consider themselves Libertarian Party members. I have never gotten the feeling at national conventions or the various state party conventions that I have been at that anyone, with the exception of a very small handful of people, is the least bit concerned about whether a Libertarian takes his salary or not. [Me neither.] I think that most Libertarians involved in the political party understand the realities of where they are.”

Again, Randolph wrapped up his point about political party versus principle: “There’s nothing wrong with having a libertarian educational organization or a philosophical debating society or whatever you want to call it [Well, thanks a lot, Dick!] but we are a political party and we have to exist within reality.”

When asked about the LP platform, Randolph sneered at the platform committee as a “relatively small group of folks who I think had a different orientation. [True, indeed!] Certain folks try real hard to get on the platform committee and I think it’s obvious that the platform committee did not reflect what the body in general thought.” When pressed about the platform itself, Randolph did not exactly repudiate it, but he warned that the platform and the committee must begin to “mirror the broad spectrum of Libertarian thinking,” else the platform will “begin to be used to discredit . . . to at least defeat Libertarian candidates . . . the platform ought to be couched in palatable terminology.”

Randolph’s vision of the future of the LP, not surprisingly, is that we have to begin electing people. For “one elected official in a state will do more to educate the people in a month than has been done by all the philosophers in a long long time.” But “educate” them to what, Dick? To Chop Wood Now?

This whole thing — this blatant and cynical call for opportunism and for the ditching of principle — reads like a hilarious George Smithian parody. Unfortunately, it’s all too true. Is it becoming impossible to parody the Movement? And after this performance by our premier “winnable” candidate, fellow libertarians, how many shekels do you want to kick in for the noble cause of Randolph for Governor? What I want to know is, who are the other candidates in the race?

Politics: the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
— Ambrose Bierce

EXIT MARTY ANDERSON

The sudden departure of my old friend Martin Anderson as top domestic policy adviser at the White House should put paid to the flirtation with Reaganism on the right-wing of our movement. A conservative libertarian, Marty was, to the extent that anyone could ever be, Our Man in the White House, and probably responsible for the handful of libertarians and quasi-libertarians that now reside there.

A calm, thoughtful, studious man, Anderson’s exit could never be attributed to personal abrasiveness or, as in the case of ultra-hawk Richard Allen, the public embarrassing of Queen Nancy. A foreign policy hawk like his colleagues, Anderson never faced the problem of working within a foreign affairs matrix which he detested. A keen analyst of movement strategy, Marty was the quintessential theorist and practitioner of gradualism. He saw and embraced a broad conservative-libertarian movement, all working together for a common objective, with libertarians as radical point-men aiding conservatives in a common gradual rollback of the State. Even anarcho-capitalists had their place in his movement. (You wouldn’t believe who have been offered jobs in the Reagan White House!)

But now it’s all over. Even though a top Reagan aide in the 1976 and 1980 campaigns, stories began to appear in the press that he “lacked clout,” and pretty soon he was gone. As White House aide in the unlamented Nixon Administration, Marty had plenty of clout, being largely responsible for the end of the draft and the blocking of the pernicious Moynihan Family Assistance Program. But now, despite his characteristic care in picking his spots for battle, Marty indeed lacked clout. Despite what I am sure were his valiant efforts, he failed to persuade Reagan to follow his campaign promises and abolish the infamous draft-registration program. Until near the end, his only accomplishment was to block a Reaganaut proposal for forcing ID cards on every immigrant alien. Then, it was reported that, among the top White House advisers, only Anderson opposed raising income taxes in 1982. And then, despite his victory on this point, Anderson was suddenly gone.

With the departure of Martin Anderson, we should hear the last in our movement, not only of any Reaganite yearnings but also of all impulses to gradualism and to ecumenical embrace of the right-wing. With the enforced disappearance of the master of gradualism, all hopes for a gradualist strategy must now be seen as a snare and a delusion.

MOVEMENT JABS

Knit One, Purl Two. Leslie Key, the Madame DeFarge of the libertarian movement, stung to the quick by our analysis of LP/10 in the August-January issue, has penned a lengthy critique of little over a page of the Lib. Forum issue. This samizdat of seven single-spaced pages, sent out to her penpals, is a farrago compounded of equal parts of hysteria, distorted serioso pedantry, and billingsgate. Tut, tut, Madame, you are about to lose your legendary cool. Watch out, you’ll drop a stitch!

Only one point of ironic interest in this kitchen-midden: That La Key, editor of the Craniac smear sheet UpChuck, the National Enquirer of the libertarian movement, presumes to instruct us in journalistic punctilio.

ARTS AND MOVIES

by Mr. First Nighter

Absence of Malice. Dir. by Sydney Pollack, with Paul Newman and Sally Field.

This tough, well-crafted movie has raised a storm in liberal circles. The liberal media have come down hard on this movie, claiming that it constitutes a Reaganite smear of our free press; the shades of Spiro Agnew are conjured up to horrify the reader. In reply, the redoubtable and consistent civil libertarian Nat Hentoff has waged a campaign of vindication of Absence of Malice, pointing out the civil libertarian stance of the picture, and chiding liberals for seeming to maintain that the press is supposed to be above criticism, even if they use unethical and despotic methods.

It is easy to see why Absence of Malice is goring some left-liberal oxen. The press is shown to be dumb, callous, unethical, heedless of the lives they damage — and, in this case, in league with a vicious “crusading” FBI man willing to persecute an innocent man to try to find the goods on a Mafia chieftain. And so this tough, trenchant movie is outspokenly pro-civil libertarian, anti-FBI, anti-muckraking press, and at least mildly pro-Mafia.

Even more pointedly, the movie is frankly and boldly anti-feminist, as the naive, suckered female reporter is constantly and arrogantly put down for her sexual aggressiveness. The splendid irony for liberals to follow is that the leading pro-civil libertarian, pro-Mafia anti-feminist is none other than Paul Newman, long-time darling of left-liberalism. So it is not as if these frankly male chauvinist attitudes (“I’m old fashioned; I like to do the asking”) are being expressed by some latter-day John Wayne. Paul Newman yet! It’s all made worse for our poor liberals when impeccably liberal Sally Field succumbs (“You do the asking”.)

Aside from the point of view, this is one of the better pictures of the year: lean, hard-bitten, suspenseful. The seamy side of the press is shown up, and Paul Newman is at his splendid best.

The reception given to Absence of Malice reveals, too, the increasingly thin-skinned nature of our society and the decline of genuine wit and perspective on one’s foibles. It was not always considered a mortal sin to criticize the peccadilloes of the press. Forty years ago, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell said it all in the magnificent and hilarious His Girl Friday, a remake of the savage but accurate Hecht-MacArthur satire of the Chicago press of the 1920s, Front Page. The cynicism and callousness of the press was brilliantly shown up then, and no self-protective howls of indignation rose to high Heaven.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 3

April, 1982

TO THE GOLD COMMISSION

(On November 12, 1981, your editor testified before the U.S. Gold Commission on the topic of the gold standard. Unlike other gold standard witnesses, who felt that at the first whiff of possible influence on Power it was important to moderate their views, I figured I might as well make my one chance at Congressional testimony an opportunity to present my all-out position. While the Gold Commission was hopelessly stacked from the very beginning in a Friedmanite anti/gold position, these views might find themselves embedded in the Minority Report to the Commission. This testimony was presented as part of a panel of experts, and in the question period afterward, many Commissioners were bemused at this radical, hard-core approach. The most heartwarming reaction was that of the notorious Edward Bernstein, for decades the doyen of Keynesian experts on international money. The elderly Bernstein kept bouncing up and down in his chair, shouting, in his thick Germanic accent: “It vouldn’t vork! It vouldn’t vork!” — Ed. Note)

The most important aspect of the gold problem is how we answer this seemingly simple but vital question: Whom do we trust, the people or the government?

In recent years, economists and other analysts have come more and more to see the errors and fallacies of government control and central planning, and the great importance of maintaining the rights of private property and of free markets and free enterprise. But while the economics of free market and property right has been extended in recent decades, there is one glaring gap: the crucial area of money. Why are we ready to accept freedom and private property, why are we ready, in short, to trust the people in all their economic affairs — and yet make a glaring exception in the case of money? Why do we favor freedom in many areas, and yet advocate total control over the supply and lending of money in the hands of the central government? For if we leave it up to the federal government to control the issue of dollars and demand liabilities to dollars, we are granting it this vital power. Money is relevant to the lives of every American. And yet we are willing to put our lives and our fortunes, if not perhaps our sacred honor, in the hands of the Federal Reserve, the monopoly creator and controller of all dollar issues.

It might be well for us to ponder how perhaps the most despotic regime of this century — Pol Pot’s Cambodia — was able to exercise its genocidal policies over the Cambodian people. It did so by abolishing all use of money, so that no one could use money to purchase goods, and everyone had to go to the central government to receive their meagre rations of food or clothing. The point here is not that I think that the Federal Reserve policies rank with Pol Pot’s — only to underscore the vital importance to everyone’s life of the people directing the control of their nation’s money rather than the government.

Yet in the field of money we have allowed the U.S. government to confiscate everyone’s gold in 1933, supposedly for the duration of the depression emergency. But here we are, nearly half a century later, and the people’s gold, seized from them, still remains buried at Fort Knox. If we truly believe in free markets, free people, and private property, we must proceed to denationalize gold, and let the people take back their gold property which was, in effect, stolen from them in 1933 and never returned.

But let us go back to our central question: do we trust the people or the government? I would like to submit that it is precisely the area of money — an area nationalized throughout the world — where we cannot trust government at all, and even less so than in other areas of the economy. For government operation using taxpayer money rather than voluntary investment or payments from consumers always tends to be unsatisfactory and hopelessly inefficient. But in the area of money there is another vital factor, which causes the government to be inherently inflationary. Most economists will now concede that the major, if not the sole, cause of our chronic and ever accelerating inflation is the excessive creation of new money. But there is only one institution to blame for this, because there is only one institution that we all recognize to be the sole issuer and controller of dollars: the federal government and particularly the Federal Reserve. But if, as I maintain, government is inherently inflationary, then putting the Fed or any other government institution in charge of the supply of money is equivalent to letting the proverbial fox guard the chicken coop.

Why do I say that government is inherently inflationary? Simply because government, like many of the rest of us, is chronically short of funds — that is, it would like to spend more than it can take in in taxes without stirring up too much political unrest. To pay for the remainder, it can borrow from the public, or better yet, it can create new money and use it to finance its ever-larger deficits. The point is that economically, if not legally, the federal government — now the Federal Reserve — enjoys the monopoly of legalized counterfeiting, of creating new money out of thin air, or out of paper and ink. I submit that any institution, no matter how noble its possible motives, will use any power that it has, especially the power to counterfeit. By creating new money, the government can finance its deficits, and subsidize favored political and economic groups by supplying cheaper credit than they would otherwise enjoy. Since the government, as monopoly issuer of fiat money, has the power and the ability to counterfeit, it will tend to keep using such power.

If we look at the record of governments throughout history, we see a dismal story of such counterfeiting — of fiat money, of runaway inflation that wiped out entire classes of people as well as destroying the value of the nation’s currency. There is no economic holocaust — no recession or depression — that can touch the widespread and intense agony of runaway inflation. And if we continue our present course of trusting government rather than the people or the market, we will eventually have such hyper-inflation in America. Let us not forget that two of the notable runaway inflations in the twentieth century had disastrous political consequences: the German inflation of 1923 destroyed the middle class and paved the way for Hitler; and the Chinese inflation of the 1940s was instrumental in the loss of China to the Communists.

It is also unassailably true that the Western world enjoyed far greater price stability under the gold standard than we have had since. If we take the period since the founding of the American Republic, prices were far more stable than they have been since we were taken off gold in 1933. This is still more true if we realize that two of the major inflationary episodes occurred when the federal government issued fiat dollars inconvertible into gold — i.e. when we were off the gold standard — the War of 1812, when the government allowed the banks to issue dollars and not redeem them; and the Civil War, when North and South alike issued irredeemable greenbacks. And the situation improves still more if we take the pre-Federal Reserve era before 1913 and compare it with later periods, for an unmanaged gold standard with free or semi-free banking works much better and more stably than a gold standard managed — and therefore distorted and crippled — by a central bank such as the Federal Reserve.

It is possible, though not easy, to write off this historical record of the virtues of gold and the vices of fiat paper by attributing it to coincidence and various special features in the past. But if we understand that government, as legalized monopoly counterfeiter, is inherently inflationary, then we will see that the historical record is not a problem or puzzle, but simply confirms and illustrates our basic insight.

If we must denationalize gold, then, we must also and at the same time denationalize the dollar — taking the issuance of dollars out of the hands of the government or the central bank. To eliminate and exorcise the spectre of inflation, we must see to it that gold, dollar, and money are in the hands of the people, of the free market, rather than the central bank.

How can this be done? How can we establish freedom and private property in money, while denationalizing gold and the dollar? Only by restoring the concept of the “dollar”, not as an independent entity, but what it was before 1933: simply a unit of weight of gold. That is what a “gold standard” means. But in order for the dollar to truly be a certain weight of gold, it must be redeemable on demand at that weight. Only if the average person can redeem his dollars at a fixed weight of gold coin can a true gold standard exist or perform its important functions.

This means that nothing less will do. A return to something like the Bretton Woods system, where the dollar was supposedly fixed in terms of gold but where only foreign central banks could redeem in gold, would be a sham and would only end in the same sort of disaster as did Bretton Woods in 1971. The dollar must be redeemable in gold not just to foreign governments but to everyone, Americans and foreign citizens alike. Only in this way can the dollar be tied firmly to the stable level of gold. Also it is important that gold be redeemable in coin and not merely bullion. For redeemability in bullion, such as existed in England during the 1920s and the United States from 1933 to 1971, might benefit wealthy businessmen and international operators, but it deprives the average person of the right to keep his property in gold rather than paper or deposit dollars.

It is furthermore important not to introduce escape clauses into the gold standard or to provide for changes in the definition of gold weight. A gold standard with an escape clause is useless, for it simply signals everyone that we don’t really mean it, that the gold discipline to guard us from inflation won’t really be enforced. Similarly with changes in definition. The gold standard is unfortunately commonly talked of as “fixing the price of gold.” The gold standard however, does not fix the price of gold in terms of dollars; rather it defines the dollar in terms of a weight of gold. Changing that definition makes as little sense, and is even more pernicious, than changing the definition of a pound from 16 to 14 ounces. Just as an “ounce” or “pound” is each a unit of weight and therefore fixed in relation to each other, so should be the dollar and a weight of gold.

But just as “pound” and “ounce” are initially arbitrary definitions and, once chosen, should remain fixed, so the initial definition of a dollar in terms of gold is also arbitrary. No one takes seriously the current statutory definition of the dollar as approximately $42 per ounce, because there is no real way in which the dollar and gold are related. We should pick the most convenient initial definition and stick to it from then on.

I suggest that the most convenient definition would be one that would truly embody the dollar as a unit of weight of gold: a 100% reserve of the gold stock to the dollars — paper money and demand deposits — outstanding. This would be at approximately $1600 an ounce. This high price — or rather low weight — of gold would not be inflationary, if, as should be done, reserve requirements are 100% from that point on. In no case should higher value of the gold stock be used to pyramid more inflationary dollars on top of gold. Furthermore, this sort of 100% gold dollar would enable the rapid liquidation of the Federal Reserve System and the establishment of sound uninflated free banking.

There are several common criticisms of the idea of a return to the gold standard. One is that we would be relying on the fluctuations of the supply of gold production on the market. We are fortunate, however, that gold is such a durable commodity that annual production can only be a small proportion of the total stock, and will therefore have little impact on prices. This is in contrast to paper money, which can be increased at will and nearly costlessly by the central government. No one says that gold is an abstractly “perfect” money, whatever that may be. It is far more trustworthy, however, than government.

Secondly, gold has often been blamed for the severity and extent of the Great Depression of 1929 and the 1930s. We should turn that charge around and point out that the New Deal could not get us out of the depression despite taking us off the gold standard in 1933. But more important, the crash of 1929 was caused, not by the gold standard but by the unsound management of the gold standard by the Federal Reserve System. Throughout the 1920s, the Fed unwisely kept pumping inflationary money and credit into the economy in order to help Great Britain to try to get out of the severe economic problems it had gotten itself into in the 1920s. Britain had gone back to gold at an overvalued pound in the 1920s, and tried to offset the resulting deflation and inability to export by getting other countries to inflate and to return to a phony “gold exchange” standard pyramiding money on top of the English pound. The United States was induced to inflate its own money and credit in order to keep Britain from losing gold to America. The tragic result was the 1929 crash and all countries going off gold.

At the onset of the crash, President Hoover, later followed by Roosevelt, prolonged the depression indefinitely by a host of “New Deal” measures: inducing businesses to keep wage rates at pre-1929 boom levels; vast loans to near-bankrupt businesses; public works expenditures; farm price supports; budget deficits; and the rest of the by now familiar apparatus of New Deal measures.

Another criticism of gold is that the two countries most benefiting from a gold standard would be particularly unpalatable politically: South Africa and the Soviet Union, the two leading gold producing countries. But we have never balked at purchasing oil, minerals, or other important goods from politically repellent nations. Why stop at gold? Furthermore, if the United States becomes healthier economically and defeats inflation by adopting a gold standard, this would help us far more than we would be hurt from Russia’s gain from a higher price of gold.

A fourth complaint is that, while an international gold standard would be acceptable, the United States could never successfully go back to gold on its own. Lengthy international negotiations and numerous conferences would need to be held before a gold standard could return. But I see no reason why the U.S. could not return to gold immediately on its own. The resulting stability and end to inflation would set a superb example for foreign nations. I am sure that such hard money countries as Switzerland, France, and West Germany would be delighted to embrace the gold standard should the U.S., now the leading fiat money country, take the lead. But even if they do not, there is no harm done, for a gold dollar would, like the current paper dollar, be freely fluctuating in relation to other fiat paper currencies. A gold standard in the U.S. alone need provide no international monetary shock to other nations.

In addition, it is often said that we cannot go back to gold unless we first adopt monetary and fiscal stability, but if we can do that, why bother about gold? The answer is that governments need a leash, a tight rein, in order to cease their counterfeiting and inflationary activities. The same argument, after all, could be used against a Bill of Rights, a constitution, or any other restraint on government. The point is that we always need a checkrein on government, in all areas. In the monetary area, the best checkrein is one wielded not by government itself but by the people themselves through being able to redeem their dollars whenever they wish in gold coin.

This does not mean that gold is a panacea for all our ills, and we must avoid the danger of overselling gold and thereby raising false hopes that would soon be dashed. Gold would not be an instant cure or quick fix for recession, sluggish growth, or high interest rates. It is indispensable for checking inflation, but the Fed could still inflate or mismanage in the short run even under the gold standard if it is determined to do so. But not for long, for it would be subjected to gold discipline, which it would have to heed. Eventually, as I have noted, we should consider liquidating the Federal Reserve System and returning to a world of unmanaged free banking under the gold standard. Short of that, I would like to see, in addition to the gold standard, a law preventing the Fed from purchasing any further assets (that are not gold), and thereby stopping the continual creation of new reserves for the commercial banks.

But I would urge that if a gold standard is adopted, it be a genuine gold standard, one where the public can redeem their dollars at will at a fixed weight in gold. While even such a gold standard would not be a panacea, it is indispensable for ending inflation and returning to sound money. Anything else would be merely a sham, and would only wrap the prestige of gold around a program of permanent inflation. Such a hoax is bound to fail; it would be worse than nothing, because then the gold standard would be unfairly discredited along with the ever shrinking dollar. The American public deserves a gold standard in reality and not just in name.

ROOSEVELT AND DISSENT

by Justus D. Doenecke

Review of George T. Eggleston, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the World War II Opposition: A Revisionist Autobiography (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1979)

In 1979, the autobiography of George T. Eggleston was published. For anyone interested in the history of the American press, the anti-interventionist movement before Pearl Harbor, and the state of civil liberties under the Roosevelt Administration, this book is most significant. Before he was twenty-five, Eggleston was editor-in-chief of the “old” Life magazine, a humor weekly somewhat similar to the British Punch and associated with such names as Charles Dana Gibson and Robert E. Sherwood. In 1936, he was on the first board of editors of Henry R. Luce’s famous picture weekly, also called Life. In 1940 and 1941, he edited Scribner’s Commentator, an anti-interventionist monthly, and from 1941 to 1957, he was an associate editor of the Reader’s Digest. Since his retirement, he has written several books on the culture and history of the Caribbean.

Eggleston began his writing career as an undergraduate at the University of California, where he edited the college humor magazine The Pelikan. After graduation, he went to College Humor and then to the “old” Life. In describing Luce’s purchase of Life, Eggleston notes how anxious the old editorial board was. “We of the about-to-be dissolved magazine felt much the way a group of manacled slaves must have as their new owner came by on an inspection trip prior to sending them down the river,” he writes. Yet Eggleston soon became in charge of color features for Luce’s magazine, in the course of which he worked with such figures as John Shaw Billings, Alfred Eisenstadt, and Luce himself. In 1937, he travelled through the South Seas, after which he worked for Conde Nast publications.

At least half the book is taken up with the intervention controversy, and in particular with Eggleston’s role as editor of Scribner’s Commentator. It is particularly valuable on this topic, for we have few anti-interventionist memoirs that delve into this crucial period in any detail. The memoirs of Herbert Hoover (who incidentally was a friend of Eggleston’s) end with the presidency. The diaries of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh are quite thorough, but Charles’s Autobiography of Values (1978) is much less so. Autobiographies of such figures as Philip F. La Follette, Burton K. Wheeler, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Chester Bowles are disappointing.

The story of Scribner’s Commentator began early in 1940, when Eggleston met with Charles S. Payson, a prominent financier and lawyer then in his forties. Tall, slim, and athletic, Payson was a Yale graduate, prominent in steel and sugar refining, and the husband of Joan Whitney, heiress to the prominent Whitney fortune. Payson was then the publisher of Scribner’s Commentator, a New York monthly founded in January 1937 as The Commentator. It was first designed to carry original articles by radio commentators, and the broadcaster Lowell Thomas was its first editor. By November 1939, The Commentator had acquired the name of Scribner’s, a distinguished monthly known for its literary excellence, and it changed its name to Scribner’s Commentator. Like Eggleston, Payson was highly critical of Roosevelt’s interventionism. Both men believed that Payson’s journal could play a vital role in keeping the United States out of World War II.

Eggleston and Payson then met with Douglas MacCollum Stewart. (Stewart should not be confused with R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., a student at Yale Law School and national director of the America First Committee). The Harvard-educated Stewart owned a market analysis service. About the same age as Payson, he was stocky, bald, mustachioed, and — in Eggleston’s words — looked like nothing so much as a successful banker. Stewart shared Eggleston’s opposition to Roosevelt and got the financial backing of his cousin Jeremiah Milbank, once treasurer of the Republican party.

After a series of conferences involving Eggleston, Payson, Stewart, and Milbank, the P. and S. publishing house was formed, with Payson as president, Stewart vice-president, and Eggleston editor of the journal. Strongly anti-interventionist, the statement of principles began with a call to national defense. It said, “WE BELIEVE: That America should concentrate on defending America with all the might, skill, and resources that make the United States the greatest nation on earth. With sanity, unselfish efficiency, and concentration on our own preparedness now we can stop any nation that is foolish enough to think it can launch a 3,000-mile attack on us.” Today Eggleston stresses that he was far from being a pacifist, having served in the ROTC in high school and earning a lieutenant’s commission in the Army Air Force Reserve. Stewart had served in the navy in World War I.

The journal statement also stressed opposition to “all foreign isms antagonistic to democracy, whether they be communism, nazism, fascism, or socialism.” In his own memoir, Eggleston notes that as editor of the “old” Life, “We were the first U.S. publication to brand Hitler for what he was.” After condemning Hitler’s conscription in 1935, Eggleston’s magazine was banned in Germany. Similarly, after Life denounced Mussolini for invading Ethiopia, it was forbidden in Italy. At the same time, it endorsed the neutrality acts, and in Eggleston’s words, called for “the observance of a strict neutrality so that we might be peacemakers to the world.”

Once under Eggleston’s direction, Scribner’s Commentator continually stressed anti-interventionism. It usually featured a prominent anti-interventionist on the cover, with a feature story on that person within. Inside were editorials, cartoons (drawn by Eggleston himself), letters-to-the-editor, radio speeches, movie reviews, and quizzes. Book reviews were written by the prominent libertarian essayist Albert Jay Nock. Stories pointed to America’s anti-interventionist tradition, criticized prominent interventionists and groups, and called for the renunciation of Roosevelt’s foreign policy.

In this memoir, Eggleston offers some personal impressions of various anti-interventionists and in so doing gives us some surprises. He notes how Henry Ford personally told him that he abhorred (in Eggleston’s words) “the diabolical Hitler persecution of the Jews and the Stalin purges of the peasant farmers.” He found Charles Lindbergh “anything but the stiff-necked man with the mechanical heart so often depicted by his detractors.” Indeed, the prominent aviator had a warm sense of humor. He notes that W. Stuart Symington, later President Truman’s Secretary for Air and Democratic senator from Missouri, was an avid fan of Scribner’s Commentator, even buying it for associates.

In looking back upon this period, Eggleston finds the interventionist press so anxious to back Roosevelt’s foreign policy that it deliberately exaggerated German dangers to the United States. He is particularly critical of his former boss, Henry Luce, in this regard. It was Luce who immediately coined the phrase “World War II” when the conflict broke out in September 1939, doing so — Eggleston infers — to create a sense of alarm. It was Luce who, early in 1940, issued a confidential memo to senior executives defining what he called “journalist duty.” The memo read: “1. To continue to sound the danger signal in all aspects — Danger to the Sovereign U.S.A. 2. To cultivate the Martial Spirit. 3. To show that America is worth fighting for.” Luce had the military writer George Fielding Eliot produce a series of articles claiming that Germany could bomb the United States from several bases in Latin America. Yet until the fall of 1939, so Eggleston writes, Luce had been “an admirer of Mussolini and uncritical of Hitler.”

Eggleston also notes Roosevelt’s political use of law enforcement agencies, an issue that historians are increasingly addressing. (See, for example, Richard W. Steele, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics,” Political Science Quarterly 44 [Spring 1979]: 15-22; Roy Turnbaugh, “The FBI and Harry Elmer Barnes: 1936-1944,” The Historian 42 [May 1980]: 385-398). On May 21, 1940, Roosevelt authorized his attorney-general to bug certain private telephone lines. Lindbergh soon told Eggleston that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ordered wire taps on all Lindbergh telephones, the phones of the America First Committee, and the lines of Scribner’s Commentator. (Both Lindbergh and Eggleston said that they welcomed the electronic surveillance, as they had nothing to hide). Eggleston also claimed that the Internal Revenue Service was used politically against him and Stewart.

For Eggleston, however, such intimidation was just beginning. He writes that because such journals as the newspaper P.M. attacked Scribner’s Commentator as being pro-Nazi and pro-German, a number of news dealers sabotaged sales. In addition, two sacks of mail were stolen from his mailrooms and never recovered. In the spring of 1941, the journal moved from New York to Lake Geneva, a resort town some 80 miles from Chicago. One day that summer, as Eggleston tells the story, he received a phone call from Stewart, who had been in Lake Geneva about a week after a business trip to New York. Stewart said, “Please come by the house as soon as you can. I found a very curious parcel in my front hall a few minutes ago — curious, to say the least.” Upon discovering that the parcel contained an anonymous $15,000 donation in the form of twenty-dollar bills, Eggleston first thought that Henry Ford was giving the money, doing so via a messenger of Harry Bennett. However, writes Eggleston, it could have been any one of “a score of wealthy anti-war friends,” to whom “any such contribution as Stewart received would have been considered minuscule indeed. And we could quite understand the donor’s desire for anonymity.”

In October 1941, Eggleston, Stewart, and several members of the journal’s staff were called before a grand jury in Washington. Before meeting with the jury, Eggleston conferred with such anti-interventionist senators as Gerald P. Nye, Bennett Champ Clark, and Burton K. Wheeler. All three senators told him that Roosevelt had directly ordered “the grand jury witch hunt” investigation “to harass us out of business.” Eggleston was interrogated concerning the finances and backing of his journal, but the case was temporarily dropped. Once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Scribner’s Commentator closed down. “Freedom of speech,” Eggleston writes, “was out for the duration.”

Eggleston’s battle with the Roosevelt Administration, however, was far from over. In December 1943, he received a commission as lieutenant junior grade. However, before he could serve on active duty, he was again called before a grand jury. In February 1944, government prosecutor O. John Rogge accused Eggleston of being “an officer in the Navy [who] had criticized his Commander in Chief.” Rogge’s evidence? Anti-Roosevelt cartoons Eggleston had drawn and published in Scribner’s Commentator, said cartoon being published while the nation was still at peace with the Axis. Rogge also kept harping on the anonymous $15,000 contribution. Almost immediately, and without being granted any hearing, Eggleston was dropped from the service. When he told the anti-interventionist senator David I. Walsh about his experience, Walsh told Eggleston he was lucky not to have been “shipped off to the Aleutian islands for the duration of the war.”

Even as late as the middle of 1946, Rogge still hammered at Eggleston, demanding that the Justice Department prosecute him. Rogge, trying to cast as wide a net as possible, also sought to implicate such people as Senator Arthur Vandenberg, Reader’s Digest publisher De Witt Wallace, former president Herbert Hoover, and labor leader John L. Lewis as being Nazi dupes. At this point, Attorney General Tom Clark fired Rogge for violating the confidentiality of Justice Department exposes. Stewart and Eggleston, however, still had to face another grand jury. They were charged with accepting the mysterious $15,000 in New York from a German agent, but Eggleston showed that he was in California at the time of the supposed “drop” and was cleared. Stewart, however, faced trial. The defense attorney, in his summation, stressed that the prosecution failed to produce the two material witnesses necessary in a perjury case, had failed to produce any evidence whatsoever, and had forced the two major prosecution witness — two employees of the German embassy — to make statements under threat of death. The jury took little time in finding Stewart not guilty.

During the war, Eggleston started to work for the Reader’s Digest, and he was always close to its publisher, De Witt Wallace. For many years, he directed the Digest’s arts and graphic section, and in 1957 he retired to St. Lucia island.

For a historian of the anti-interventionist movement, the most important part of Eggleston’s account deals with the intimidation of the Roosevelt administration. Even Leonard Mosley, who was highly critical of the aviator’s politics, concedes that Roosevelt used the FBI politically. Eggleston’s story shows that far more must be researched and written on this topic. Stanford historian Barton J. Bernstein notes the long governmental tradition at work. Showing that secret and partisan use of national security agencies did not begin with Nixon, he writes, “Franklin D. Roosevelt used the FBI to investigate opponents of his foreign policy and wiretap his own aides. Harry S. Truman, acting through his attorney-general, also had the FBI wiretap a former FBI adviser (probably Thomas Corcoran), who was trying to influence the new administration. John F. Kennedy leaked secret income tax information to the press and offered FBI reports to a friendly journalist in return for favorable stories. Johnson used the FBI for electronic and physical surveillance of rival forces at the 1964 Democratic convention, order FBI reports on Barry Goldwater’s staff that year, had the FBI check on the phone calls of Vice-President-elect Spiro Agnew in 1968, and gave other fruits of FBI snooping to friendly congressmen for use against Johnson’s enemies” (“Call it a Tradition,” Inquiry, November 21, 1977, p. 22).

Nor is this all. It is public knowledge that Robert F. Kennedy wiretapped Martin Luther King because he believed that King was influenced by a suspected communist. John F. Kennedy ordered the FBI to bug reporters who might have leaked classified information. Attorney General Ramsey Clark directed that federal poverty programs be used to help the Justice Department, in Clark’s words, obtain “the most comprehensive intelligence possible regarding organized or other purposeful stimulation of domestic dissention.” Then, of course, there are the antics of the Nixon administration.

The Eggleston story, though, is particularly important, for it deals with a president not usually censored by historians and the press for abuses of presidential power or for crude violation of civil liberties (the Nisei internment excepted). Roosevelt, Rogge, and the rest always claimed that issues of great “national security” were at stake. The proof, as so often in recent years, was never forthcoming.

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

THIS IS THE MOVEMENT YOU HAVE CHOSEN

by the Old Curmudgeon

The Craniacs Swoop Again

We owe our estimable colleague, SIL’s Individual Liberty (February 1982, a bargain at $5 a year for this monthly, at P.O. Box 1147, Warminster, PA. 18974) the fascinating saga of a Craniac strike in the Maryland LP. At the December 1981 Maryland convention, the Crane Machine was able to depose its long-time opponent, Dean Ahmad, as Chairman and replaced him with a certain Richard Kauffman. The interesting item is that, of those attending the convention, 22 voted for Ahmad and only 5 for Kauffman. The problem, however, was that 36 new member proxies were signed up and paid for by Craniac leaders Kent Guida and Paul Kunberger at the beginning of the meeting. Many of these proxy newcomers were residents of Virginia and of Washington, D.C., and included such Craniac/Kochtopus employees as Chris Hocker (Inquiry), David Boaz (Cato) and Kristina Herbert (Cato).

Allowing proxy votes, especially those paid for on the spot, of course opens itself completely to this kind of odious abuse of the democratic process. There should be no proxy votes in the LP, and this saga confirms that point.

The New York Party

It is high time to call attention to the parlous state of New York LP (the Free Libertarian Party), in particular its deteriorated and unfortunate condition in its heartland and my homeland, New York City.

First, politically, as we documented in the August-January issue the FLP is one of the worst parties in the nation. Under the tutelage of State Chair Gary Greenberg and his friends the Riches, the New York Party is Craniac to the core. For example, of the 24 votes it cast for National Chair, it voted 18 for Guida, 3 for Clark, 2 for Mason (of which one was the editor of the Lib. Forum’s) and one for none of the above. The Crane Machine candidates for NatCom all won by a landslide in New York. Organizationally, it was almost fanatic in its detestation of requiring accountability of our Presidential candidates. And, ideologically, it is generally ultra-rightist, with Greenberg favoring foreign intervention and Albany leader Mike Kessler leading the obstructionist forces in blocking consideration of the radical new planks in the LP Platform.

Organizationally, the New York City party, at least, is in an advanced stage of putrefaction and petrifaction. In our great city of 7 million, in the cultural and media center of the nation, the number of people who showed up at our August NYC FLP convention in the fall of 1981 was approximately 25! This compares to about 35 in the fall of 1980, and slightly more in the fall of 1979. The New York City party never meets, or so it seems, except for the boring and no-show annual convention. The only “meetings” consist of twice-a-week sessions at FLP headquarters, where a handful of youthful acolytes stuff envelopes at Greenberg’s direction. A large number of dedicated activists have been totally turned off after observing one such “meeting” at the NYC FLP.

Contrast this to the vibrant — if a bit wacko — meetings that the NYC FLP used to have in the mid-1970s, when 70 or more militants would show up, and vote and argue all day over issues and tactics!

Furthermore, the FLP is perhaps the only LP in the nation which stubbornly refuses to have any platform! At the keynote address of the annual NYC meeting in the fall of 1980, Lib. Forum publisher Joe Peden strongly urged the NY party to have a platform, so that it could apply libertarian principles openly to local and state issues. The idea generated no interest whatever, and Greenberg flatly turned down the proposal. With no platform, this of course leaves all interpretation of issues in the hands of whatever candidate the FLP has to offer, and insures zero treatment of issues outside of actual campaigns.

The latest big election race of the NYC FLP was that of Judith Jones, who ran for Mayor in 1981. After the vote, which can only be accounted a total disaster, the Jones campaign (seconded by the Craniac mouthpiece, UpChuck) issued a release somehow claiming a great victory, the highest number of votes ever for a Mayor, etc.

But let us examine the record. The Jones campaign managed to amass a hefty campaign chest of about $27,000. Ms. Jones obtained a total of 6,902 votes, an expenditure of $3.91 per vote. This is such a dismal showing to anyone who knows anything about politics that I wonder that the contributors don’t ask some very pointed questions and make some agonizing reappraisals.

More than that, the Jones vote amounts to a 0.56% of the total Mayoral vote in New York City. (As one Western LP leader commented “Hell, in my state, the candidates we don’t vote for get 2%!) Furthermore, the abject decline of the FLP may be gauged by contrasting Judith Jones’s 6,902 votes for Mayor with the race that Francine Youngstein made for Mayor way back in 1973, when Youngstein got no less than 8,818 votes!

It is true that the FLP leadership can rationalize this away by pointing out that, after all, Fran Youngstein’s 8818 votes was a teeny bit lower percentage of the total vote that year (0.52%). But if we consider that Youngstein’s was the first important LP race in the country, at a time when virtually no one had heard of libertarianism, and when we consider that now that we are “the third major party” (Hah!) our total number of votes had declined by 21.7 % in eight years, the true sorry picture of the New York party now emerges in full blazing light.

And speaking of “third major party,” let us ponder the fact that one of the Youngstein campaign’s proud boasts (and properly so) is that she got more votes than all the other minor parties put together. But look at the 1981 record: Jones’s 6,902 votes only barely edged out Wells Todd, mayoralty candidate of the Socialist Workers Party, who obtained 5,793 votes. And in other races on the New York City ticket in 1981, the SWP candidates literally trounced the FLP nominees. The SWP’s nominee for President of the City Council got 9,093 votes to FLPer John Francis’s 5,966, and SWP’s Raul Gonzales got 19,192 votes for Controller in contrast to Bob Flanzer’s 6,444 on the FLP line. If we compare the total votes for all three city-wide races in November 1981, we get 19,312 votes for the Free Libertarian Party, and 34,078 for the Socialist Workers Party!

Our record looks even more dismal if we realize that the left-sectarian trotskyite Socialist Workers Party makes no pretense at being a mass party, or at running “winnable” candidates. It is frankly a cadre party, with stringent requirements, both in study and activism, for membership, and it regards its electoral campaigns as strictly and purely educational — at least until the hoped-for revolutionary lightning is supposed to strike. And yet the FLP, like the rest of the Libertarian Party, is trying its darndest to be a “third major party,” to win elections, to take power through the political party route, and all the rest.

It is true that Greenberg deserves due credit for resurrecting the FLP from its depths in 1977, when Bill Lawry ran an “est-hole” campaign for Mayor, and got 1,068 votes. But it should be clear after eight years that the FLP, at the very least in New York City, is in deep, deep trouble, and that its survival value is very close to zero. Only a thorough and agonizing reappraisal by the Party itself, and a total reconstruction from top to bottom could possibly save it, and the chances of that happening are virtually nil.

ARE WE BEING BEASTLY TO THE GIPPER? — PART III

4. Macro-Reaganomics: Money

Now that the American people are inured to expect inflation, there is only one way to stop our chronic and accelerating inflation: by stopping, immediately, sharply, and once-and-for-all, the Federal Reserve’s continual creation of new money, that is, to stop its counterfeiting. It has to be done sharply and swiftly to be credible, and therefore to end the inflationary process. Furthermore, a sharp, swift “slamming on of the brakes” would lead to a sharp but short recession which would liquidate the unsound investments of the preceding inflationary boom and pave the way for rapid and sound recovery.

Reagan had the opportunity to perform this quick surgery when he came into office. Instead, he turned his economic policies over to the Friedmanite monetarists. Reaganomics is largely monetarism. The monetarist view is that the Fed must only very, very slowly reduce the rate of counterfeiting, and thereby insure a gradual, painless recession with no unemployment or sharp readjustments. The hoax of Reaganomics was that the phony “budget cuts” and “tax cuts” were supposed to provide the razzle-dazzle to give gradualist Friedmanism the time, or the “breathing space,” to work its magic.

Instead, gradualism has led to the present shambles of Reaganomics. The rate of counterfeiting declined, enough to bring about our current recession, but not nearly enough to end inflation. Since November, in fact, the Fed, stung by the deep recession and by political urgings to expand the money supply, has increased M1 by a startlingly high annual rate of 13.7%. Panicky, the Administration is fighting amongst itself. Secretary Regan blames the Fed for looming re-inflation and higher interest rates since November; Fed Chairman Volcker lashes back by blaming Reagan and Regan’s enormous deficits for the fear of Wall Street and higher interest. Both, of course, are right.

There were two fundamental reforms the Reagan Administration could have proposed to end our Age of Inflation. First, either the abolition or the brutal checking of the Fed. Nothing was done, since monetarism wishes to give all power to the Fed and then naively urges the Fed to use that power wisely and with self-restraint. Second, the Administration could have followed Reagan’s campaign pledge and reinstituted the gold standard. But the Friedmanite monetarists hate gold with a purple passion and wish all power to government fiat money.

When the Reagan program lay in shambles by the end of 1981, the Reagan Administration briefly flirted with the supply-side notion of instituting some form of phony gold standard, where the dollar would not really be convertible into gold but would cloak its decaying corpus in gold’s well-earned prestige. For a while, it looked as if a phony gold standard would be the Reaganite diversion from the realities of grinding recession, zero economic growth, high interest rates, almost double-digit inflation,’ and huge $100 billion deficits. But this was not to be, and Reagan has clearly given the green light to the packed Friedmanite majority and staff on the U.S. Gold Commission to reject the gold standard out of hand and to continue the monetary status quo.

Instead, Ronald Reagan has found another diversionary tactic, another razzle-dazzle hoax with which to bemuse the media and the electorate: the “New Federalism” (see Part IV of this article).

Not only the gold standard, but all fundamental reform has been rebuffed by the Reagan Administration. The National Taxpayers Union’s balanced budget amendment — as namby-pamby as it is — has been spurned by the Reagan Administration, as has the Friedmanite Tax Limitation Amendment, even though that would only freeze the status quo.

All of this raises the dread spectre of Thatcherism, of going down the disastrous route blazed by Mrs. Thatcher. More and more it looks as if the Reagan Administration, despite the warning signals sent up by the Thatcher experiment for the past several years, is going down the Thatcher trail. That is, to ignominy and disastrous defeat, and more important, to the discrediting of the free-market, hard-money cause by employing its rhetoric while thoroughly betraying it in practice.

5. Macro/Reaganomics: The Spectre of Mrs. Thatcher

Mrs. Margaret Thatcher came in roaring to the Prime Ministry of Great Britain in May 1979 with the promise of free markets, denationalization, and an end to deficits and monetary inflation. The denationalization has been virtually nil. Deficits continue very heavy; money and price inflation continue at double digit levels. The only result of Thatcherism has been to stifle economic growth and to bring about a seemingly permanent recession with very high unemployment. In short, Thatcherism has brought about the worst of all macro-economic worlds. Inflation continues high and rampant, along with very high unemployment levels and chronic stagnation. Moreover, the slight fall in income tax rates was immediately more-than compensated by an even greater increase in the VAT (essentially sales) tax. In this way, slight gains for upper income groups were more than offset by increased burdens on the poor and the middle class. If leftists were asked to describe a right-wing Bogey Man, they couldn’t have done better, and with more disastrous results for the cause of economic freedom.

Why such disastrous results from an allegedly free-market regime? Because the Thatcherites are “Burkeans” rather than “right-wing Leninists,” and are therefore committed to the glories of gradualism and moderation rather than to a hard-nosed radical and abolitionist approach to the achievement of economic freedom. But it is too late for gradualism. Gradually tight money succeeded in bringing about a chronic recession, but it was not tight enough to end inflation or turn the economy around. Hence, the worst of both worlds, and the economic collapse.

Look for PART IV in the next issue of Libertarian Forum.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard. Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 4

May, 1982

OH, OH, OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR!

I’m sorry. I know that war is a grim and evil business, and I’ve surely paid my dues by personally participating in every anti-war movement since the United States launched its savage attack on Great Britain in the War of 1812. But oh please, don’t ask me to be grim about, no ho ho ho, not about the tinpot Falkland/Malvinas Islands! No, there is an irresistibly comic quality about the Falklands Caper. Oh glorious Marx Brothers, where are you now that we need you? Where are you now, Rufus T. Firefly, of Duck Soup, who launched his idiotic little war in defense of the Honor of Fredonia?

The title of this piece is of course taken from the joyous music-hall song that sent the demented British masses off to the monstrous charnel-house known later as World War I. It was then used as the ironic title to a (not very good) anti-war movie about that war. But, dammit, this is such a lovely war.

In the first place, the Falklands Caper reeks of nostalgia for the Good Old Wars of the nineteenth and earlier centuries. It is so adorably low-tech. In an age when Tom Lehrer can sing: “Goodbye Mom, I’m off to Drop The Bomb . . . Goodbye Mommie, I’m off to kill a Commie . . . I’ll see you again when the war is over, an hour and a half from no-o-ow”; in that sort of age, a war which takes the British fleet three weeks to get to the action exudes an undeniable raffish charm. And the British ships have good old names like the Invincible. It’s good to see that some values remain eternal.

And then, there’s not a Commie in a carload. There’s not only no Commies involved, but also no Marxist-Leninists, no ragtag guerrillas, no national liberation front, no non-existent bearded Libyan hit men, no Comrade Carlos, no nuttin! The only “terrorists” involved are the good old-fashioned terrorists of the respective State apparati: Argentina and Britain. (In the modern Claire Sterlingian lexicon, of course, States don’t qualify as terrorists, only non-state groups.) The Argentinian junta are good old-fashioned right-wing military dictators, champions therefore of the “free world.” No problem there.

Furthermore, only those people who think that every square foot of the globe is of “vital strategic interest” can find any strategic interests whatsoever in that godforsaken little lump of rock known as the Falkland Islands (and you can toss into the pot the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands to boot). There might be some offshore oil, but hell, there might be offshore oil almost anywhere. In the old coaling station days, someone could work up a case about a strategic naval route around Cape Horn, but in a current epoch of the Panama Canal and air travel that old excuse seems a bit motheaten.

That little rock could not serve as a more comic excuse for a mighty imperial inter-State conflict. Most of these islands are unoccupied (e.g. the South Georgia and South Sandwich); and virtually the only occupation on the island is sheep-herding. The Falklanders are called “kelpers,” because the islands are surrounded by the seaweed called kelp, and because they often spend their days up to their knees in icy sea-water gathering kelp with which to form mulch to feed the sheep. The 1800 inhabitants, half of whom live in a little town of Stanley that functions as the capital, are heavily outnumbered by the 650,000 sheep whom they tend. (Hey, animal rightsers: how about calling for a democratic vote by the sheep?)

The climate of the Falklands is unbelievably awful. The wind is brutal and perpetual, it rains two-thirds of the year, and the sky, to quote an hilarious article in the Village Voice (April 13) by Alexander Cockburn, is “perpetually the color of a mud-stained sheep.” There are no manufactures on the island, no trees, no fisheries (doubtless they are scared off by all the kelp), and no roads except for the streets of little Stanley. The population of the Falklands has been steadily declining for the last half-century: in the 1920s it had reached the august total of 2300. Why has it been declining? Are you kidding? Would you stay on the Falklands?

Yet over this barren and windswept little hole mighty states and armies rage. Each state proclaims the importance of its precious “sovereignty” over this rock, each state quickly mobilizes the deluded patriotic masses of their nation behind it, as Britain trumpets that it will regain the Falklands “by any means possible,” (even more ominous a threat than the old “by any means necessary”), and Argentina vows to defend the captured (recaptured) Falklands “at any cost.” My, my, where is old drunken Winnie at this hour, cigar aloft, proclaiming that “We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the hills, we shall nevah surrender?”

So both nations rush exultantly to war, with the British, as usual, being far more repellent and hypocritical about the whole deal. Poor old Lord Carrington, the doveish Foreign Secretary who “lost” Rhodesia to the Zimbabweans, has been thrown quickly to the jingo wolves, and Mrs. Thatcher herself might yet fall, victim of the very war hysteria she is whipping up. The old cretinous nonsense about “National honour” and “Shame!” has been dusted off, and the kept Labour Party has played its usual social-imperialist role to the hilt. The only critic of the Falkland War in Britain seems to be the leftist leader Tony Benn, and even he, as Cockburn pointed out, has been wearing his old Naval Reserve tie.

Leave it to the British to use the most odious justification for the Falkland War, The London Times mentioned that some of the 1,800 Falkland Islanders, despite their enthusiasm for the remaining British, were “terrified” at the prospect of the British fleet storming the battlements, and slaughtering all of them in the process of “liberating” them from the wicked Argentines. (By the way, is it pronounced Ar-gen-TEENS or Ar-gen-TYNES? The newscasters can’t seem to get it straight.) But isn’t that always the way? Isn’t war always a process of murdering innocents in the name of “liberating” them? Isabel Paterson’s beautifully named “the humanitarian with the guillotine” is never more aptly applied than in war. But when Mrs. Thatcher was asked, on television, “what of the people of the Falkland Islands? Some of them seem to be terrified at the prospect of a British invasion,” here — and I swear I took it down word for word — is what this Great Statesman (Stateswoman? Statesperson?) replied:

“When you try to stop a dictator, there are always risks. But my generation found out long ago that there are greater risks if you don’t stop a dictator.”

There it is: a world of high camp in two sentences. First of all, Mrs. Thatcher, who is bearing these “risks?” The poor kelpers, huddling on their rock in the Falkland Islands, or you perhaps or your smug Cabinet, sitting snugly in London? “There are always risks,” indeed, but nothing can be clearer than in the Falkland Caper who is being forced to bear those risks. For the risks are being taken up not by the victims (the Falklanders) themselves, but by the rotten gang in London who are ruling Britain and the tatterdemalion remnants of the British Empire, and the risks are being imposed by said gang upon the hapless Falklanders, whose “rights” are supposed to be preserved by the British State. Group A (The British State) imposes grave risks solely on Group B (The kelpers/sheepherders of the Falklands) and has the unmitigated gall to mouth national honor, “rights,” and all the rest in so doing.

It’s always been that way, especially with the British and (following after their instructors) the U.S. empires. What sticks in one’s craw is not so much their foul deeds but the hypocritical rationalizations and moralizing that have always been the unique specialty of the U.S. and British empires.

And then there is the Munich Model, reduced to the utterly ludicrous in being used in the Falkland Caper by Thatcher and the rest of her ministry. “Appeasing a dictator,” indeed! Yes, yes. Are we asked to believe, as gossip columnist James Brady sardonically noted, that “let the Argentines keep the Falklands, and next they’ll grab the Sandwich Islands, and next they’ll grab Coney Island”? Are we to believe that the Argentine Threat will loom if the first domino — the Falklands is not saved? Is Argentina going to bomb Britain?

And speaking of Threats, what about the good old Russian Threat which the Brits seem to have put in mothballs for the duration? We’ve been hearing for years about the necessity for a mighty British navy, since Britain is surrounded by Soviet subs poised to cut the jugular of “Britain’s sea lanes.” And yet fully two-thirds of the entire British fleet are now taking many weeks to steam back and forth to an incredibly remote island. For shame, Mrs. Thatcher! You are leaving Britain helpless and prostrate before the Commie Soviet threat for months! Resign!

And the hokum about “dictators”! Are we really supposed to believe that the Thatcher government would be any less warlike if Argentina were a duly certified democracy instead of being a military junta? Fat chance! But the baloney about “dictators” is deliberately designed to recall probably the single most pernicious fallacy ever promulgated about international relations: the Wilsonian myth that “democracies” are always peaceful and dictatorships ever warlike, so that in any dispute between two nation-states, the “democracies” are always assumed to be angelic and the dictators aggressors. Well, it sounds plausible, but it just ain’t true. To find out who are more at fault in international disputes, there is no substitute for detailed empirical/historical investigation of the facts.

The facts, by the way, provide us with two rules-of-thumb that work remarkably well in virtually all disputes through modern history: (1) the United States is always wrong (or more wrong); and (2) Great Britain is always wrong. And what if, once in a while, the U.S. and Britain conflict? Then we look in more detail to the data. Britain was wrong in the Revolutionary War (which was not really an inter-state conflict), and the U.S. was wrong in the War of 1812 and in the near-war Venezuelan Crisis of the 1890s.

The British and pro-British apologists keep repeating the refrain: “the Argentines used force.” Heavens to Betsy! What do these worthies think governments always use? In fact, what do they think governments are, if not repositories of organized force? The Argentines, yes, used force when they conquered the tiny band of British Marines (who, however, managed to kill a few Argentinians and then surrender before any of their necks were at stake). But the British are now proposing to use a lot more force to kick the Argentines out. And, more to the point, the British, by virtue of governing the Falklands, “used force” every day of the year, against the Falklands population. Government is force.

Which sets international relations in proper perspective. Ever since the incredibly evil Woodrow Wilson, U.S. foreign policy has been committed to “collective security” against any nation “committing aggression” upon another, by using force across boundaries. The United Nations is grounded on this very principle, which is why the Security Council condemned the Argentines and at least implicitly put their imprimatur on the British counter-action. But this analogy with individual criminals and “police actions” is a pernicious fallacy, which libertarians at least should be the first to denounce. For all governments, by virtue of their existence, are “aggressors” whereas not all individuals are criminals or aggressors. The British government, day by day, aggressed against their Falkland subjects. But if all parties are aggressors and criminals, the self-righteous moralizing so beloved by British and U.S. imperialists is peculiarly out of place. If all nation-states are aggressors, the best any nation can do — the best for the cause of liberty and the avoidance of mass murder — is to stay out of the fray. Neutrality, not “collective security,” becomes the crucial libertarian watchword for international relations.

Moreover, the simple use of the concept of “aggression” every time one nation-state attacks another implicitly assumes that each nation-state has just title to its current status quo boundaries. But why so? For after all (1) no nation-state has legitimate title to any territory; and (2) even apart from that, why should any status quo boundary be more just than any other, past or future? Thus, in the Falkland Crisis, Argentina’s use of force in 1982 is countered by the British conquest of 1833, in which Britain used force to oust the Argentine government then in charge of the Falkland Islands.

Argentina’s claim, moreover, is strengthened and Britain’s weakened by considering the simple fact that the Falklands/Malvinas are only a few hundred miles off Argentinian shores, whereas Britain is 8,000 miles away. And what in blazes are the Brits doing there, anyway? (See our separate article in this issue, The Historical Claims to the Falklands.)

Another irritating aspect of British/pro-British propaganda in the Falklands Caper is the claim that the Argentine junta is using the crisis as a method of whipping up patriotic unity at home and distracting the masses from the economic troubles at home. No doubt. But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Isn’t the discredited Thatcher Administration using this foreign crisis to silence opposition and distract the minds of the public from its economic failures?

It is patently clear that the Reagan Administration, instead of keeping its mitts off of at least this foreign affairs crisis, is hip-deep on the British side. It’s professed “neutrality” is a sham, a cover for thinly veiled support for the British, a support which includes providing the British intelligence estimates of the movements of the Argentine fleet. (In one of the less comic notes of the crisis, the Soviets are countering by providing Argentina with intelligence on British fleet movements). The pro-British, pro-NATO wing of the State Department (Haig, Eagleburger) has won out over the pro-South American — junta wing (Enders, Kirkpatrick.)

By international law, the Argentine claims are far superior to the British, and besides, the United States — believe it or not — played a key role in inducing the British to invade the Falklands and oust the Argentines in 1833 (See our article on the Historical Claims). The United States should be neutral-neutral in this dispute, but if it simply has to get involved, it should be “neutral anti-British” rather than “neutral pro-British.”

Sink the Brits! Destroy the last tattered remnants of the bloody British Empire! Fulfill the Spirit of 1776!

But stop, you may say. What about the poor accursed kelpers, those 1800 stalwarts consumed with love of Great Britain? They want desperately to be British, so much so that these very odd ducks, consumed with hatred of all things Argentine, stubbornly refuse to eat good Argentinian steaks and fresh fruit and vegetables, and refuse to drink good wine, instead insisting on canned peaches and second-rate beer imported from Britain. For meat, they persist in eating tough Falkland mutton. Well, so, haven’t these curmudgeons the right to remain British?

No, dammit. For why should the British taxpayer be forced to pay for this nonsense, for the maintenance of this godawful rock, for the fleet and the munitions to go to war to defend it, etc? The fact that the Falklanders want to be British does not suffice; for why should the British, 8000 miles away, be stuck with the welfare-imperialism of supporting and defending them?

The Argentines, indeed are graciously offering to allow the benighted kelpers to remain British citizens, so long as the “Argies” can occupy and claim sovereignty over the island. But more than that, one is tempted to suggest that the sainted Queen of England disgorge a teeny fraction of her ill-gotten “private” property and offer to move the little cluster of kelpers from the Falklands to Britain proper. They could settle in the marshes of East Anglia, where they could enjoy bad weather, the wind whipping across the North Sea, could go up to their knees in some marshes, and live out their days eating authentic British food and hanging out in authentic British pubs. Surely, a simpler and less costly solution all around.

If not, let the British, suddenly so suffused with the love of “national self-determination,” grant independence to the Falklanders and pull the hell out, leaving the stubborn kelpers to their own devices. If they want “national self-determination,” then they should be granted such, and let them take the consequences. And, then, if all the British and pro-British blowhards want to put their money and their lives where their mouths are, let them send Bundles to the Kelpers or let them form an International Falkland Brigade to defend the kelpers against the terrible Argies. Let us localize, not internationalize, the conflict.

Even the “self-determination” argument is not as clear as one might think. For one thing, the British Falkland government has been forcibly keeping out Argentine scrap dealers who wish to emigrate to that lovely rock. Even more interesting is the fact that while there is indeed not a Commie in a carload, the feudal land question once again emerges as crucial even in the remote and barren little Falklands.

As much research as I have been able to muster reveals that fully 1¼ million acres, or 43% of the Falkland land area, is owned by one company, the Falkland Islands Company Ltd., which also employs 51% of the labor force and owns 50% of the sheep. How did the Company get its title? By feudal concession, natch. The land area was illegitimately (according to libertarian homestead theory) sold by the British government in 1846 to one Samuel Lafone, a Uruguayan, who transferred his relatively vast holdings in 1851 to the newly-created Falkland Islands Company.

The Company has a monopoly on all the wool exports from the Falklands. Wool, as one might imagine, is the only export — the only product — from the Falklands, and a company-owned wool ship sails once a year to London to sell 1000 tons of wool at auction for $6 million. The Company also owns the only steamer that sails once a week to and from the mainland.

The Company is the kelpers’ main feudal landlord. We are also informed that the other landlords are absentees living in Britain, and that it is difficult for any kelper to own, rather than rent, his own home. (How did these other landlords get their titles? Who knows? We have been trying to do as much research as we can on the Falklands’ socio-economic situation, but as you might imagine, these islands have not been the focus of very much detailed historical research. To put it mildly.)

The Wall Street Journal (April 8) supplies us with a fascinating tidbit of recent Falklands Company history, which puts the present crisis in sharp relief. It seems that in 1965, when the Falkland Islands Company was still a subsidiary of Charringtons Industrial Holdings (it is now a subsidiary of Coalite Group Ltd.), an Argentine consortium, sponsored by the Argentine government, offered to purchase the Company for $7 million. In fact, the consortium was willing to pay “almost any price” to acquire the Company. The shareholders were happy to do so, but the takeover bid was blocked by the British and (British-run) Falkland governments, at the behest of the Company management.

So there we have it. In the grand old Free Trade slogan, “If Goods Can’t Cross Borders, Troops Will.” In this case, Argentina, in essence, tried to buy the damn island by purchasing the Falklands Company, and the sale, though desired by the shareholders, was prohibited by force by the British government. The Brits, so devoted to the “free market,” prevented goods (in this case, money) from crossing borders, and so the troops came. It serves the Brits right.

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

THE HISTORICAL CLAIMS TO THE FALKLANDS

Who, Argentina or Britain, has the better historical or international law claim to the Falklands? I take my analysis from a massive and definitive work on the history of the Falklands Question up to the British seizure in 1833: Julius Goebel, Jr., The Struggle for the Falkland Islands: A Study in Legal and Diplomatic History (Yale University Press, 1927). Goebel, a crusty Old Right legal historian at Columbia University Law School, was a friend and disciple of those two Grand Old Men of old-fashioned “isolationist” international law: John Bassett Moore and Edwin M. Borchard.

Goebel begins his study with a thorough international law analysis of when a new, unowned land property comes under national title. On an analogy and extension from the private natural law of “homesteading” — or occupation and possession — Goebel asserts that international law properly grants the ownership and sovereignty of an unoccupied land area (res nullius), not simply to the first nation whose ship finds it or sails near it (“discovery”) but to that nation which first occupies and possesses it. The occupation and possession must be an “apprehension,” a physical act of taking possession and control, in effect a Lockean mixing of labor with the land. In a detailed analysis of international law doctrines, Goebel gives top honors not so much to Hugo Grotius but to his now-forgotten German contemporary, Johann Gryphiander, who in his then influential Tractatus de Insulis (1623), presented the clearest version of the correct doctrine.

After a lengthy and closely reasoned determination of that doctrine, Goebel then proceeds to apply international law to the history of the Falkland Islands. The Falklands were first colonized by a French expedition under a young naval officer, Antoine de Bougainville, in 1764. Remarkably, De Bougainville financed the expedition himself and from among his relatives, who lived in the French port of St. Malo, whose merchants and sailors were long familiar with the islands. They called the islands a name derivative from their town: Les Malouines, from which the Spanish got their current name, Las Malvinas.

Bougainville established a French colony of 150 settlers on the island of East Falkland (the major island), setting up the fort and village of St. Louis. In 1766, Spain purchased the Malouines from France for a stun of 680,000 livres, and placed the islands under the vice-royalty of Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, in 1765, a British ship had nosed around the neighboring island of West Falkland, and established a small colony there at Port Egmont a couple of years later. (Though “neighbouring,” the seas were so rough that it took a few years for each nation to be aware of the existence of the other’s colony.)

In 1770, the Spanish conquered the British settlement at Port Egmont, and finally, the following year, the British made a deal with Spain: in return for Spain’s allowing the British government to return to Port Egmont, the British would abandon the entire colony after a suitable interval. In 1774, the British fulfilled their unpublicized agreement with Spain, and abandoned the Falklands. Not only that: the British recognized the Spanish right to the Falklands at the Convention of Nootka Sound in 1790.

Spain, therefore, enjoyed undisputed and acknowledged sovereignty to both the East and West Falklands for two generations. During the Napoleonic Wars in 1810, Argentina (along with the rest of South America) went into rebellion against the Bonaparte-imposed regime in Spain, and during the press of war, Argentina abandoned the Falklands settlement in 1811. After the Napoleonic Wars were over, however, the South American republics declared their independence from Spain, and the new republic of Argentina sent a frigate to the Falklands in 1820. The Argentine government not only claimed possession of the Falklands, but embodied that claim in action by once again settling the islands in 1826. In order to stimulate the colonizing of East Falkland, Argentina had granted a colonial concession to Louis Vernet. After Vernet successfully planted the colony in 1826, Argentina appointed him governor two years later, and granted him a concession of lands and a monopoly of the fisheries in the Falklands. Fishing regulation, while scarcely consonant with a free-market, has always been accepted in international law as a function of any government in its territorial waters, a function which may not be interfered with by outside powers.

There is precious little fish in the Falkland waters, but there were a considerable number of seals, and foreign sealers persisted in defying the Argentine/Vernet edicts. Finally, in July 1831, Governor Vernet precipitated the final crisis of Argentine rule in the Falklands by seizing three American sealing ships for violating the sealing regulations.

At this point, the United States leaped in to play a fateful role in the coming of British imperialism to the Falklands. Andrew Jackson, despite his commitment to libertarian policies in many areas, was a militarist and an arrogant expansionist in foreign affairs. (It was later to be the Jacksonian Polk who would launch the savage imperial assault on Mexico in the 1840s.) The U.S. consul to Argentina, George W. Slacum, was an inexperienced lout who fit the Jacksonian mould in foreign affairs. Slacum began to launch intemperate attacks on Argentina, and to persistently refer to Governor Vernet as a “pirate” who must be brought to trial. Slacum worked his influence on Commander Silas Duncan, captain of the U.S.S. Lexington then in Argentine waters, who began to rant about steaming to the Falklands and “protecting the rights of U.S. citizens.” In the great tradition of 19th century U.S. naval captains, Duncan was a militarist aggressor, ever ready to use American naval force against foreign countries, even unauthorized and on his own whim. Duncan began further to call for the surrender of Governor Vernet for trial as a pirate and robber.

In all probability, the thirst for war by Slacum and Duncan was whipped up by the British consul-general to Argentina, Woodbine Parish, who saw a beautiful opportunity for Britain to fish in troubled waters. Two years earlier, in 1829, Parish had filed a formal protest against the Argentine occupation of the Falklands, claiming that Britain, despite its abandonment of the islands in 1774, was still “really” sovereign of the islands. Argentina paid no attention to a note she regarded as nonsense, and Parish did nothing further until the Vernet/U.S. dispute arose in 1831. Parish now proceeded to tell Slacum that Britain was still the true sovereign of the Falklands, and Slacum, grateful for a way of shoring up the legality of his position, welcomed the point and began to write home that it would be a “terrible tragedy” for U.S. trade if the Falklands should remain in Argentine hands.

Finally, on December 28, 1831, Commander Duncan sailed the Lexington into the harbor of Puerto Soledad (which Spain had renamed from the French Port Louis). After inviting a top aide of Vernet’s aboard his ship, Duncan clapped him in irons, and proceeded to invade and lay waste to the Argentine settlement. Duncan seized all weapons, burned all the ammunition, and sacked the settlements, not incidentally confiscating many of the sealskins. Having plundered the Falkland settlement to his satisfaction, Commander Duncan seized seven Argentines, including the Vernet aide, and took them away in irons. On arriving in South America, Duncan only agreed to free the Argentines after receiving assurances that the U.S. Government would retroactively sanction his plunder expedition.

Not that Andrew Jackson was loath to do so. As early as his annual December message to Congress, before Duncan had reached the Falklands, Jackson attacked the Falkland administration as a pirate “band,” and announced that force would be sent there to “protect American citizens.”

After the Duncan incident, Secretary of State Edward Livingston weighed in, denouncing Vernet as a “pirate” Finally, after a fruitless exchange of charges, the U.S. charge d’affaires at Buenos Aires, Francis Baylies, gave the green light, in an entirely unauthorized manner, to the British to invade the Falklands. In the fall of 1832, Baylies asked Fox, the British minister to Argentina, whether Great Britain, sovereign over the Falklands, would continue to tolerate the “horde of pirates” from Argentina then infesting those islands.

That disingenuous question was all the British needed. The British promptly sent two warships to the Falklands, which claimed and invaded Port Egmont in December 1832 and Puerto Soledad the following January. The British invaded in force, proclaimed themselves the government, and expelled all the Argentine settlers.

Such was the act of naked aggression by which Great Britain ousted the Argentines and gained its rule over the Falkland Islands. Furthermore, the United States government, ever since, has refused to indemnify the Argentines for the illegal acts of plunder committed by Commander Duncan. The excuse was that no indemnity would be paid until the sovereignty question was cleared up. It never has been.

Such is the “powerful” argument, as Samuel Flagg Bemis called it, by which Julius Goebel established the merit of the Argentine claim and the shabbiness of the British claim to the Falklands. But another revelation is the action of the United States, plundering and kidnapping the Argentines, and goading the British on to its invasion of the Falklands in 1833.

FELIX MORLEY, RIP

So Felix Morley is dead. Never again will I be able to visit Felix’s lovely home on Gibson Island, in Maryland, and listen to the charming and civilized discourse of this man of deep individualism and rugged integrity. Felix has died at the age of 89 and up to the end, though crippled by arthritis, he continued to be a man of great intellectual and personal vigor.

Felix’s death leaves a great void that can never be filled. Not simply because each individual is unique and irreplaceable. But because Felix Morley was the last of the Old Right. With him now disappears that wonderful tradition of classical liberalism that animated the right-wing before the mid-1950s, and that dominated the conservative wing of the Republican Party until that period.

An educator, political scientist, journalist, foreign affairs expert, man of affairs, Felix Morley was not only a staunch believer in individualism and minimal government at home, but its corollary in non-intervention, and “isolationism” abroad. A co-founder of Human Events during World War II to foster the insights of non-intervention, Morley broke with the publication after the war when it became an organ of global crusading and the Cold War. A man of courage and integrity, Felix would never think twice of bending with the prevailing winds to join another futile crusade that could only aggrandize State power and crush the individual.

During the last gasp of conservative isolationism in the Presidential campaign of Robert A. Taft in 1952, Felix was Taft’s major foreign policy adviser. There was talk that if Taft had won, Felix might have been Secretary of State. If so, the entire course of modern history would have been changed.

Felix Morley shall always be remembered for his great political works, expounding classical liberalism and nonintervention, Power in the People (1949) and Freedom and Federalism (1959) (All conservatives and libertarians should be required to read three chapters from the latter: “Democracy and Empire”; “Nationalization through Foreign Policy”; and “The Need for an Enemy”). But the best introduction to Felix is his fascinating intellectual autobiography, For the Record (1979), in which he sets forth the dimensions of his life. Acknowledging the influence of F. A. Hayek and Albert Jay Nock, Felix ends by saying that he is a libertarian, even though it is hard to give up the good old term “liberal,” in its original nineteenth century meaning.

Felix Morley is one of the reasons why libertarians who were around in the 1940s and the 1950s automatically called themselves “extreme right wing Republicans.” With the now vanished Old Right of that epoch, it was a pleasure to be a comrade in friendly dialogue, pointing to the logical conclusions of classical liberal doctrine. All that is long gone, swept away by the theocratic warmongers who have constituted the post-1955, National Review and later Right-wings.

We may hope, however, that future generations will be inspired by Felix Morley’s life and works to take up the torch of liberty. But one thing they will have to miss: sitting on the patio of the Morley home at Gibson Island and being inspired by conversing with Felix in person. For that some of us will be forever grateful.

ARE WE BEING BEASTLY TO THE GIPPER — PART IV

6. Macro/Reaganomics: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

But there is hope, of a peculiar sort, for the hard-pressed American people. If the Reaganauts cannot relieve inflation or unemployment, they may moderate these twin evils by sleight-of-hand: by doctoring the statistics which everyone has been following avidly. Despite the pretensions of “scientific” economic forecasters, the seemingly precise quantitative data spewed forth by the various statistics factories are highly imperfect indicators of what is going on in the economy. There are no even approximately “scientific” measurements of inflation or unemployment, and there is no way of arriving at such measurements. Every person experiences his own “inflation rate,” depending on what he customarily buys. I, for example, buy a great number of books every year, whereas the paradigmatic blue-collar Dayton, Ohio housewife with 2.2 kids buys no books at all. Yet, book prices have been skyrocketing upward at an alarming rate in the last few years, though none of this has been reflected in the orthodox Consumer Price Index (CPI).

There is, then, no “scientific” or unflawed measurement of the movement of consumer prices. The only excuse for any such index is that it be consistent, that is, whatever its flaws, it be consistent over the years so that movements in the index can have a substantial degree of coherent meaning. To change the nature of such indices is to deceive, for it is to abandon consistency and to doctor the data for political effect.

If the Reaganites cannot bring down inflation, however, they have decided that they can bring down the index by redefinition. This, of course is equivalent to bringing down a patient’s fever by repainting the numbers on the thermometer. The Reaganites have decided that rises in housing costs have been embarrassing them, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which issues the CPI, has been ordered to change the bases for its measurements: From now on, instead of housing prices, all housing will be costed as if it were rented. The reasoning is that one buys a house as a durable good, but during each year one only lives in an amortized yearly quota; hence, a purchased house will be treated in the index as if it were rented.

The reasoning sounds plausible, but is as phony as a three-dollar bill. For why stop at housing? Why not similarly “imputed rents” for all consumer durables: speedboats, hi-fi sets, furniture, even clothing — none of which is used up during one year? The main point is that there are good arguments either way, but the overriding consideration is to remain consistent so as to enable meaningful comparisons over time. Reaganite doctoring of the CPI — which will begin in early 1983 — may help to fool the public into thinking that inflation is getting better, and may also reduce the upward indexing of numerous contracted wage rates.

The latest scheme of the mendacious Reaganite statisticians is to doctor the embarrassing unemployment data. Once again, there are good reasons both for increasing the number of unemployed (disheartened who have given up seeking work) or reducing them (those only recently off the employment rolls or who are not really seeking work). But the vital thing is to keep the measures consistent over time, and not to doctor the data by changing the measurements. But the unemployment figures have been embarrassing for many years, and are getting worse. After World War II, the blissful state of “full employment” was defined as unemployment of 4% of the labor force. But since we haven’t seen hide nor hair of such a figure for decades — it’s been hovering around 7% — “full employment” has now been redefined as 5-6%. But apparently that’s still not enough, and the Reaganites are moving toward still further mendacity.

Specifically, Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan has now proposed to stop including in the unemployment figures all teenage workers still in high school. Since teenage unemployment has been far higher than adult — largely because of minimum wage laws — what better and more painless way to reduce overall unemployment than by tossing teenagers out of the statistics?

And, indeed, why stop there? Why not drop out all teenagers whatever, indeed everyone below 25, where unemployment is the highest? And also drop out women workers, since their unemployment rates are also high? And blacks too? And urban areas of the Northeast, and of New England?

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Why stop there, Reaganauts? Why not include in the CPI only computers and hand calculators? Then, precise statistical data could “prove” that prices have been going down rapidly. And why not include in the labor force only adult white males in the Sun Belt? Then we could “prove” that there is virtually no unemployment in today’s America.

The Reagan Administration might be a macro-economic disaster, but it has brought us “creative” language (“revenue enhancement”) and “creative” statistics. Mendacity, mendacity. For shame, “free market” Reaganites! As Swift once put it, “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

Look for Part V in the next issue of Libertarian Forum.

CHANGING JUDGMENTS AND ALLIANCES

I am often gently chided by friends and acquaintances about changing assessments about people that I have made over the years. In particular, the chiding applies to changing evaluations of persons and groups in the libertarian movement and Party. “Four years ago, you said that Joe Zilch was a great guy; now he’s a schmuck.” Or, “how do I keep up with your fast-changing alliances?”

Of course, the quick, flip answer is: “Keep reading the Forum.” But there is more to be said here. Because the implicit assumption of the chiders is that there is something a bit bizarre about the very fact of changing assessments and alliances. But, oddly enough, these critics only think of making such statements about ideological friendships and alliances. They would never think of doing so about personal friendships or romantic relationships. Neither they nor anyone else would ever contemplate charging: “Hey, you were in love with Miss X three years ago and now you’re split up; what’s wrong with you, buddy?” For in personal life it is taken for granted that values change, more is learned about another person whether for good or for ill, etc. So why should it be any different in an ideological movement?

Taken in this light, we see that changing assessments of persons is no odder in the libertarian movement than in “real life” itself. Life, to use the current horrible cliche, is a “learning experience.” Joe Zilch, who seemed like such a great guy at first blush, indeed turns out to be a schmuck. On the other hand, Jim Doe, who seemed like a bad guy way back, turns out to be a great fellow when more is discovered and misunderstandings are cleared up. That’s life, after all, and the movement (though it sometimes seems to be taking place on Mars) is part of the whole shebang.

In fact, we should naturally expect more shifts of friendships and enmities within the movement than in life itself. For the movement is ideological, and ideology (a) must always be applied to new conditions and priorities in the real world, and the result is continual reassessments of strategy and tactics. Even people who agree 100% on ideology can and do disagree on tactics. As a result, a movement and a Party create enormously greater opportunities for shifts in personal ties and assessments than does “real life” itself.

One hopes, of course, that friendships can persist and deepen even in the face of all the conditions generated for shifts and breakups. Friendships which fuse the personal and the ideological bring a deep joy which cannot be equalled. But one should not be puzzled or shocked when such friendships or alliances break up and scatter. C’est la condition humaine.

ERRATA

August 1981 — January 1982 Issue:

We noted (p. 7) the assurance of a genial and highly perceptive LP participant/observer after the Nov. 7-8 Bethesda Natcom meeting that the Crane Machine had had it: “Murray, it’s the Battle of Iwo Jima. They’re (the Machine) the Japs,” etc. This self-same observer recently pointed out my error in recalling the conversation: “It wasn’t Iwo Jima; it was Okinawa.” I stand corrected. It should also be noted that Leslie Key, the Madame DeFarge of the libertarian movement, in her hysterical samizdat attacking alleged “errors” in this issue, missed this one — a real error. Which proves that Leslie’s grasp on World War II military history is at least as weak as my own.

The latest from our Military Maven occurred after the Houston NatCom meeting on March 27-28, a quietly but deeply satisfying meeting in which the cowed Crane Machine was revealed to be in a distinct and substantial minority. Our Military Maven who himself has been one of the great architects of the continuing Craniac defeat, put it this way after Houston: “Murray, I’ve got a new analogy. They’re punchy, they don’t know what’s going to hit them next. It’s France in and they’re the French.”

Some of our readers have asked us who Madame DeFarge was. The good Madame, of course, was the ultra-revolutionary in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, who sat, coolly gloating, as various Enemies of the French Revolution were marched off to the guillotine. She was perpetually knitting, and I believe that the Madame knitted the names of each of the victims in the sweaters or whatever that she churned out. She looked suitably evil and hatchet-womanish in the Ronald Colman movie. (If she was not knitting the names of the victims, we can depend upon La Key to read the book, find the old movie somewhere, and report — and then get the whole thing wrong.)

March 1982 Issue:

Various Texas LPers have corrected our account of the etiology of the suppressed Randolph interview with Free Texas. In addition to the fact that there were two interviews involved, the crucial point is that the suppression was effected, not by the Randolph camp, but by editor Mike Grossberg himself in a dispute with interviewer Robert Sablatura over the editing of the interview. One further point: apparently the Jeff Hummel article which touched off the Randolph attack on the concept of a principled Libertarian Party was not his controversial call for unilateral disarmament, as we had believed, but another radical article of Hummel’s calling for repudiation of the public debt. The point of the Old Curmudgeon’s critique of the unprincipled nature of Randolph’s position, however, remains unblemished and intact. For the content of this odious interview remains undisputed, and repudiation of the public debt is the evidently principled libertarian position, which does not suffer from fears of Russkie invasion or from pointing out the even greater blessings of joint mutual disarmament.

REAL WORLD NOTES

by The Old Curmudgeon

One cheery note for libertarians is the occasional realization that there are lots of crazies who are not libertarians, who are actually out there in the “real world.” The New York Times (March 11) published an absolutely hilarious article (an odd source, of course, for hilarity) about a new cult flourishing in the West. The cult, imbibed by “thousands upon thousands”, is called “manifesting” and is one of the “therapies” (natch) taught at Wingsong, a therapy center founded in Oakland, California by a certain Miss Lisa de Longchamps. “Manifesting” is the theory that one can have anything one wants, says a Rolls-Royce, simply by wishing for it. The de Longchamps “divine plan of opulence”, which came to her through divine voices, costs only $815 for four one or two-day “workshops.” A Wingsong administrator explains that the workshops are so costly because people only evaluate something highly when they have to pay a lot for it. One of the Wingsong aides clarifies the theory: “Manifesting is about getting rid of all that junk in our consciousness so that we can join the rich.”

Miss de Longchamps arrived at her theory by an appropriate route: she got a degree in “humanistic psychology” and then worked in real estate. By then she was ready for the Higher Life.

One of her ardent customers, Toby Clark, 44, denies that the price of the workshops is high. “The cost of the classes doesn’t matter to me at all,” he said, “I would spend my last dime on them.”

Another “therapy” outfit, the Prosperity System, is based, appropriately enough, in Washington, D.C. Founded and run by Jeff Blake (also a real estate maven) and Charles Stinson, this $75 one-day workshop has clients throwing crumpled $10 bills at each other, to “teach people that as money goes out, it also comes back” (Huh?), and that “there is so much money in the world that you can take as much of it as you want and it doesn’t matter”. One of the Prosperity Systemites, noting its success so far in the West, complained that Easterners “resist” the theory far more: “Easterners have a lack of trust in self-actualization.” Rather a lack of trust, we might add, in get-rich-quick hokum at a couple of hundred bucks a throw.

But the last word belongs to the aforesaid Mr. Clark, who, before he arrived at Wingsong, had been through est, “rebirthing”, and 14 enlightenment “intensives”. (Why do these noted theorists habitually confuse adjectives and nouns?) “Life,” concluded Mr. Clark, “is just a workshop.”

How come there are no libertarians in this movement?

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 5 June, 1982

MORE ON THE FALKLANDS

1. Insane Disproportionality

Political spectrum on the Falkland War grows curioser and curioser. While ordinarily dovish liberals like Mary McGrory whoop it up for Britain and Empire, the ultra-hawk Patrick J. Buchanan has been a model of rationality. In an attack of good sense and rationality, Buchanan has been asking, in his columns, for God’s sake how many thousands will have to die and how many billions wasted in order to give to the 1800 kelpers the flag they love? As Buchanan asks (May 21), “Assume it is the wish of the Falklanders to live, forever, under a British flag. What price should London pay, what price can Britain afford, to meet those desires?”

If he were a libertarian and an anarchist, Buchanan might press on. For, even apart from the imperialist aspects of the war, the minarchist view that the “government should provide defense” runs afoul of a problem they never answer. For “defense” is not a single, homogeneous good, not a single lump. It can be one cop or it can be thousands of missiles, aircraft carriers, etc. How much defense should be provided? Minarchy can furnish no free-market answer, and therefore the State, even to the extent that it is really defending, does enormously too much because the taxpayer is forced to pick up the tab without his consent. (The taxpayer’s rights are of course not being defended — quite the contrary.)

And, as usual with States, disproportionately means virtually infinite step-by-step escalation. For the British, by mid-May, maddened by the gall of Argie aircraft in actually sinking a British destroyer, the H.M.S. Sheffield, were planning to bomb the Argentine mainland to get at the pesky air bases. At that point (New York Post, May 14), the Reagan Administration became alarmed, and the President threatened to withdraw his support of the British cause if the Brits bombed the mainland. Presumably, this threat brought the war-crazed Brits partially to their senses. For the next step would surely be to get at the damn factories and loading points that supplied the air bases, and . . . would we really maybe one day see the Brits nuking of Buenos Aires? All over which national rag flies over the 1800 kelpers?

2. Freedom of Immigration

Libertarians favor freedom of movement and immigration, and yet few have noticed that it was the migration problem that actually sparked the present conflict. Some Argies would like to migrate to the Falklands, and the Brits have prevented them from doing so. The present war began when an Argie group of scrap dealers sailed to the island of Leith, in the South Georgias hundreds of miles from the Falklands proper. For libertarian fans of “self-determination,” it should be noted that the South Georgias are uninhabited, and that therefore there are no kelpers for Brit imperialists to weep crocodile tears over.

The scrap dealers were in Leith temporarily and not permanently, and were sent there by an Argentine scrap dealer named Constantino Davidoff, to dismantle abandoned whaling stations on the island. Davidoff’s expedition was perfectly legal, and had been cleared with Britain. After arriving at the island this March, the 43 Argie workmen, perhaps on a drunken impulse, hoisted the blue-and-white Argie flag.

It was then that all hell broke loose. First, a group of crazed kelpers, fanatically devoted to the Union Jack, broke into the Argentine national airline office at Stanley, the little capital of the Falklands, and decorated it with a Union Jack. Three days later, on March 22, the Brits sent the patrol ship Endurance and a group of British Marines to forcibly and illegally (even by Brit law) evict the Argies. Quickly, Argentina and Britain escalated the number of warships sent to South Georgia, and a few days later, on April 2, the Argentine invasion, or reconquest, of the entire Falkland constellation — the Falklands themselves, the South Georgias, and the South Sandwich islands (also uninhabited) — was underway.

3. How Much Do the Brits Love the Kelpers?

How much do the Brits really love the kelpers? They may be willing to fight, die, and kill to keep the Union Jack flying over 1800 sheepherders 8,000 miles from home, but they don’t seem to be willing to allow them elemental justice. For example, the kelpers are not British citizens. Since they are not citizens, they are not allowed to emigrate to Great Britain unless their parents or paternal grandfathers were born there. Perhaps if they were allowed to get off that blasted rock, the kelpers would solve the Falkland problem once and for all by emigrating to their beloved Britain and allowing the Argies to peacefully move in.

And since the kelpers are not British citizens, they are excluded from top jobs, and are not allowed to purchase very many houses or to buy land. Furthermore, in 1980 Britain was ready to grant sovereignty over the Falklands to Argentina in return for a very long, Hong-Kong like, lease back arrangement that would keep the Brits there de facto. Argentina was willing to along with the deal, which was blocked by the Falklanders themselves.

Free the kelpers! Independence for the Falklands! In point of fact, one prominent young kelper is now calling for independence, which we thought had been a lone cry of the Lib. Forum. Graham Bound, 24-year old editor of one of Falklands’ two monthly newspapers, the Falkland Islander, who last year called for independence from Britain. Unfortunately, Bound did not stop there, and wackily suggested that the UN take over the islands and maintain them as an International Wildlife Sanctuary, presumably allowing the kelpers to remain there along with the rest of the wildlife, (see J.H. Evans and Jack Epstein, “The Real Losers Are The Locals,” In These Times, May 5-11, 1982, p. 22.)

Evans and Epstein, who have actually been to the Falklands, supply us with fascinating data about their daily life. The British citizens, working as officials or technicians for the British government, the Falkland government, or the monopoly Falkland Islands Company, receive almost twice the salary as the native kelpers for the same jobs. The Brits all live in the “city” of Stanley, population 1,000. Every part of the island outside Stanley is sheep ranches known as “The Camp.” The Camp suffers from a feudal-like social structure, in which the absentee Brit landlords serve as veritable lords of the land who double as justices of the peace and are empowered to baptize and to wed the kelpers.

In Stanley, furthermore, vandalism abounds among the bored and discontented youth. Since there are few single women, “young men habitually drowned their sorrows and frustrations in the five busy pubs.” Alcoholism is an “urban” kelper problem. (Evans and Epstein, “A Port That Time Forgot,” ibid., p. 9.)

4. If the Brits Are Doing All This for the Kelpers, Why Do They Insist on Keeping South Georgia?

The British insist that all this monstrous expenditure of blood and treasure is being done to insure justice for the 1800 kelpers. But if that is the case, why is it that the Brits, in their lengthy UN negotiations before their invasion of the Falklands, insisted that South Georgia shall remain British? And that the British seizure of that island has nothing to do with the Falkland crisis and therefore is not subject to negotiations with the Argies? For South Georgia, as we have seen, is an uninhabited island, and therefore there are no loyal kelpers to mope over. Could it be that Britain is simply interested in maintaining its sovereignty and its Empire, period?

FREE TEXAS, RIP

by Michael Grossberg

(Recently, Free Texas, along with California’s Caliber by far the outstanding LP state newsletter in the country, was eviscerated and its editor, Mike Grossberg, an outstanding party theorist and activist, was ousted from his post. The name Free Texas is slated to continue, but its soul and substance is gone. Grossberg has been trying to get his point of view published in the Craniac smear sheet UpChuck, which had printed critical material, but without success. We are therefore happy to print Grossberg’s case as originally written for UpChuck. — Ed.)

Confident that the track record of FREE TEXAS is its own best defense, I wish to offer a rebuttal to certain allegations recently published in Update.

FREE TEXAS has been criticized by one letter writer as a “sectarian newspaper” with a “slanted editorial policy in favor of narrow ‘ivory tower’ libertarianism.” Since 1979, when I first volunteered to upgrade FREE TEXAS into a quality outreach tabloid for the Libertarian Party of Texas, the bimonthly newspaper has featured several hundred articles, editorials, investigative reports, interviews, letters, and news stories reflecting a broad diversity of viewpoints within the libertarian movement. During the past two years, FREE TEXAS theme issues have appeared on such “ivory tower” subjects as health care, urban affairs, civil liberties, inflation, education, and regulation.

Under my editorship, FREE TEXAS regularly presented debates between libertarians on a wide variety of current issues, from foreign policy to the Equal Rights Amendment. Typical of my own “sectarian” editorials was a balanced critique of the Clark campaign, which just may be the only such editorial praised by both Murray Rothbard and Ed Crane, not to mention Ed Clark himself.

One anonymous Texas activist, quoted in an Update news story, charged that “the anarchist viewpoint gets a disproportionate amount of space compared to the limited government viewpoint”. A quick glance through the newspaper’s back issues reveals the ironic fact that although several articles and letters disagreeing with anarchism were printed, not one article disagreeing with minarchism has ever appeared!

FREE TEXAS was also castigated for its so-called “lack of news reporting”. Fortunately, there is an objective standard by which to judge such arbitrary complaints: FREE TEXAS itself. Of the over 100 articles published in the newspaper during 1981, 48 of them — almost half — were news stories, largely written by myself, including the most comprehensive News Notes of any LP publication.

Such incredible allegations are obviously contradicted by the facts. But critics of FREE TEXAS go even farther, stooping to a personal attack on my professional ethics by accusing me of “censorship”. I am proud of my work as FREE TEXAS editor and want to state for the record that I have never “censored” the ideological content of any FREE TEXAS article — even if it was one of the articles with which I differed. Due to space limitations, I often condensed articles, trying to preserve their “meat” while cutting their “fat”. For an objective, if somewhat diverse, test of my relative merits as an editor, why not poll a representative sample of those FREE TEXAS contributors who frequently experienced the editor’s “knife”: Scott Bieser, Ed Clark, Michael Dunn, Jeff Hummel, Bill Howell, Honey Lanham, Wendy McElroy, AnnMarie Perier, Robert Poole, or Sheldon Richman? My critics are highly disingenuous when they urge Update’s readers to compare the Randolph interview published in the LPT’s 1982 newsletter with the “same” interview in the Winter FREE TEXAS. In reality, as my critics are will aware, that “same” interview is actually two separate Randolph interviews.

Editing a newspaper is impossible without editorial standards; such standards inevitably imply occasional rejection of unsuitable articles. Although I encouraged — an often cajoled — party activists to contribute to FREE TEXAS, my “editor’s slushpile” of unpublished submissions (including, in my opinion, the other Randolph interview) amounted to a grand total of 4 articles! In any event, it is ridiculous for Libertarians, of all people, to accuse a private newspaper of “censorship”.

My critics also accuse me of “opposition to the ballot drive”. If I were opposed to the LPT ballot drive — prerequisite for any Libertarian to run for office in Texas — why would I have invested so much energy finding a gubernatorial candidate and developing a statewide campaign strategy for the LP of Texas? My fulltime work on six LP ballot drives, including all three in Texas, happens to be a matter of public record. Apparently, some people misinterpret my opposition to their own political strategy as a generalized “hostility to successful political action.” Yet I have always praised Libertarian successes, as shown by my many articles about the LP and its victories in FREE TEXAS.

Beneath such hollow allegations, I sense an unspoken dissatisfaction among a few party activists, not with any imaginary “absence” of news, but with the very real presence of honest ideology, intelligent debate and principled libertarianism in their state party’s newspaper. Their constant reiteration that “FREE TEXAS is alive and well” evades the fact that FREE TEXAS has been altered drastically in content, format, length, editorship, and editorial philosophy. Why would so many libertarians, both in Texas and nationwide, be so concerned about the fate of one state party newsletter — unless its particular content and guiding philosophy had succeeded in making it of more than just regional interest?

Contrary to popular report, Texas activists did not face a clearcut budgetary decision between a much less, expensive, voluntarily edited newsletter and the FREE TEXAS “status quo”. At recent LPT Executive Committee meetings the choice was between two FREE TEXAS proposals of similar net cost, but different guiding philosophies. By arguing that the “bottom line” of this controversy was economics, my critics gloss over the real strategic and ideological differences which divide Libertarians in Texas. Politics, not economics, was the real bottom line.

It is not a pleasant task to “wash the dirty linen” of the LP of Texas in public, to express my differences with Libertarians who I have worked with for years and still care for as friends. But the controversy over FREE TEXAS is only one manifestation of a deeper conflict within the Libertarian Party, of vital importance to libertarians everywhere.

Will the Libertarian Party remain a Party of Principle? Can the LP continue to combine both political activism and principled ideology? Or shall the pressing need to transform our culture’s wider philosophical context be sacrificed for a naive short-range strategy of “Quick Victory” which, even if “successful”, may be doomed to ultimate impotence?

When, after many years as a volunteer for the state party and its newsletter, I became the LP of Texas Publications Director in 1981, I was hired not merely to continue my work on FREE TEXAS, but also to implement a broad program of internal education and ideological outreach — based on an earlier consensus that such a principled strategy of consciousness-raising was indispensable to the LP’s ultimate success.

Besides my efforts as FREE TEXAS editor, writer, business manager, layout and art director, and advertising salesman last year, a significant portion of my time (and salary) was devoted to media relations, issues research, office work, literature development and distribution, and organization of the successful Politics of Principle Conference (which generated an unprecedented $1,100 profit). Yet no mention is made of this important program by my critics. Virtually the entire education outreach program seems to have disappeared down some Orwellian “memory hole”, along with any lingering interest in the value of such a strategy. Despite certain efforts to rewrite history, over 110,000 printed copies of FREE TEXAS remain an eloquent reminder of the truth.

I would like to conclude by taking this opportunity to thank all the libertarians who have demonstrated their support for FREE TEXAS over the years. I am also grateful for the efforts of the Independence Pledge, the LPT Execom, and particularly Matt Monroe, who made it possible for FREE TEXAS to continue for so long. Notwithstanding any of our honest disagreements over political strategy, I wish all my friends and co-workers in the LP of Texas nothing but the best. May we all succeed in “Legalizing Freedom!”

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

FUHRIG FOR SENATE

There are many good men and women running for high office in the Libertarian Party this year, but it gives me particular pleasure to give my highest endorsement to Joe Fuhrig, running for U.S. Senate from California.

I have known Joe Fuhrig for years. He is intelligent, cheerful, articulate, and tirelessly energetic, an economics professor (“Austrian” to the core) and a dedicated radical libertarian. (Also, a champion golfer, for those with bourgeois cultural tastes.) But what is more, he enters this campaign a determined anti-statist and abolitionist. Libertarians who are either pragmatic opportunists or anti-party purists are going to be buffaloed by the Fuhrig campaign: For Fuhrig is going to prove, is in the process of proving, that one can run a Libertarian campaign and still be a principled libertarian, and an anti-state abolitionist to boot. Fuhrig will hide nothing. There are no hidden principles in his closet, waiting for the “proper time” for our LP politico to spring them upon an unsuspecting voter. What the voters for Fuhrig are going to get, they are going to see right now.

Joe Fuhrig, in short, is a model of what every Libertarian candidate should be. He is running as an honest and unterrified libertarian: out to abolish the State ASAP. Although an economist, he is running on principle, moral libertarian principle, first and foremost.

Here are some samples of Fuhrig on the issues from his campaign brochure, which is subtitled “No Compromise in the Fight for Liberty.” On Conscription: “Human beings have a right to control their bodies and live their lives. No person or agency can use the person or life of another. Conscription of ALL types from military service to jury duty is a violent crime.” Note how Fuhrig commendably raises and widens the consciousness of libertarians from the draft to jury conscription, which is a similar act of slavery in kind, though not of course in degree. How many other LP candidates have come out against jury slavery, even though this is now in the LP platform?

On taxation, there is no nonsense about “allowing people to keep more of their money.” Fuhrig is upfront: “Taxation is Legalized Theft.” He goes on: “Human beings have a right to the fruits of their labor and to all the property they can justly acquire in voluntary trade. Tax cuts are not ‘gifts’ to specific people, they are affirmations of property rights.”

On foreign policy, Fuhrig emphasizes nuclear disarmament: “The only way to achieve world peace is to have a nuclear-free world combined with international free trade and cooperation.” In his campaign, Fuhrig has come out for unilateral disarmament and that other radical platform plank suppressed by pragmatists at the Denver convention: repudiation of the public debt. Fuhrig also stresses “free immigration”: “It is essential that a policy of free trade include a return to a policy of free immigration. Immigration laws inevitably become foreign policy tools used to harm third world peoples.”

I have accepted with enthusiasm the offer to become Honorary Chairman of the Fuhrig for Senate campaign. Send whatever contributions you can to the Fuhrig campaign. For information or for sending contributions, the address is: Joe Fuhrig for Senator, 5960 Zinn Drive, Oakland, CA 94611. Phones: (415) 861-2982; (213) 345-3733.

And furthermore, why stop at the Senate? Libertarians everywhere are looking frantically for a Presidential candidate to be nominated in the summer of 1983 at the New York convention. Why not Joe Fuhrig, a Respectable Radical, in 1983-84? Why not Fuhrig all the way? If you contribute to Joe Fuhrig’s senatorial campaign now, you might just possibly help put this highly articulate and principled radical in as President in 1983!

ARTS AND MOVIES

by Mr. First Nighter

Chariots of Fire, dir. by Hugh Hudson, with Ian Charleson and Ben Cross.

Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award last year — and it richly deserves it despite chauvinist grumbling about a British film winning a coveted U.S. award. This is a charming, old-fashioned movie-movie, beautifully acted and photographed, celebrating good old-fashioned values like hard work, dedication, and competition. There is a captivating old-fashioned romance between the Jewish runner, Ben Cross, and the marvelous Alice Krige, and there is no sex or four-letter words in the entire picture — a marvel these days. But is it still possible to portray an old-fashioned romance that does not deal, as does Chariots of Fire, with an older and sweeter era? Charmingly, Alice Krige has a delectably round face — another nostalgic note in an age of gaunt and haggard actresses.

The picture employs a fascinating counterpoint of the two Olympic runners who, in fact, were British heroes at the 1924 Olympics. One, a Jewish student at Oxford, angers genteel anti-Semites at the college by being bumptious and challenging aristocratic values by hiring his own track coach — superbly played by Ian Holm. John Gielgud is outstanding as one of the college anti-Semites, muttering behind the arras and trying to get Cross to give up the coach.

Particularly admirable is the Scottish runner, played excellently by Ian Charleson. Dedicated to the Calvinist religion, Charleson, a missionary, runs for the honor of God. The most dramatic scene in the movie comes when the English Establishment, finding that the trial heat for Charleson’s race comes on Sunday, tries to get him to surrender his cherished religious principle of not participating in activity on’ the Sabbath. The British Olympic head, and even the Prince of Wales, use all the standard patriotic arguments, but Charleson stands firm on putting God above the State.

Many critics have gravely misunderstood Chariots of Fire by claiming that it celebrates the English imperial Establishment of time gone by. But the obvious sympathy of the movie with the runners as against a bigoted aristocracy and the British State shows that the thrust of the film is quite the reverse. In fact, the best lines of the movie are delivered by the Duke of Sutherland, attacking the various Lords trying to talk Charleson into running on Sunday. The Duke points to the recent bloody and senseless war for the honor of the English State as a reminder of where unthinking devotion to the State can lead.

No, the old-fashioned quality in the movie does not lie in loyalty to State and Empire. It stems from the celebration of values, of dedication and individual integrity, and of older charming styles of movie-making, that have virtually disappeared from the modern cinema.

Death Wish II, dir. by Michael Winner, with Charles Bronson and Vincent Gardenia.

No movie in recent times has been vilified by liberal critics as much as Death Wish, that magnificent celebration of one man’s pursuit of justice in using violence to defend person and property against thugs and killers. The liberal excuse was that the movie exalted “violence.” That, of course, is nonsense, since countless pictures wallowing in senseless and brutal violence have received the plaudits of the critical fraternity. The difference is clear: senseless, random violence is OK, since it “reflects the realities of our sick modern society,” blah blah. But purposeful violence, rational violence so to speak, violence in firm defense of person and property against the aggressive violence endemic in modern urban life, that is terrible, evil, and “racist.” Particularly when the defensive violence is practiced not by the official State apparatus, not by the police, but by one lone man, one previous victim, who gloriously turns that victimization into a triumphant victory over brutal street crime. It was bad enough, for liberals, when Dirty Harry, as a maverick cop, did it, but when a mere citizen turns “vigilante,” then all liberal hell breaks loose. For it might give all of us ideas.

Death Wish was a marvelous, exhilarating movie, almost mythic in theme and stature. Most libertarians enjoyed that movie as no other. I saw that film in a jammed theater, of which the audience was about 95% black, and every time Bronson shot down a mugger or rapist, black or white, the entire audience erupted in a roar of approval. Let upper-class white liberals call the film “racist”; that was hardly the reaction of the black man in the street.

Now Death Wish II, the sequel, has appeared, and has received the exact same liberal response. But don’t worry, it’s a splendid sequel, and those who loved Death Wish are bound to cherish this one. If it does not have quite the same paradigmatic and mythic quality, it is still worthy of the original.

Admirers of Death Wish will remember the superb final sequence. Bronson, after being expelled from New York for his vigilante activities which had cut the street crime rate dramatically, arrives at the Chicago airport, and immediately sees a mugging taking place. He has no gun on him of course, but he bends over and, his face playing in a happy and triumphant grin, crooks his fingers at the criminal in the familiar sign of a revolver going off.

Death Wish II opens in L.A., where Bronson, an architect, has moved after a brief stay in Chicago. Once again, as in the previous film, Bronson’s daughter — a mental case from a New York assault — is raped and killed, as is his Filipina housekeeper. Bronson becomes a vigilante once more, and once more the cops, holding formal legality and State monopoly higher than justice and individual rights, are out to stop him. In a fine touch, Vincent Gardenia, a police inspector who tracked down Bronson in New York, is sent out allegedly to help the L.A. police, but actually to hunt down Bronson and even kill him to prevent the New York affair from becoming publicly known.

Gardenia, who fans remember was always snuffling in the first film, has now developed even worse nasal problems, and he is sneezing and coughing throughout the picture.

Bronson’s vigilante quest differs from the previous film, for now he got a look at the killers before they knocked him out. And so he sets out, not after random muggers, but to get the rapists and killers of his daughter and housekeeper. In the most dramatic scene in the picture, Gardenia tracks Bronson to a lonely wood, where he comes across our vigilante in a shootout with a half-dozen of the killers. Remarkably, Gardenia jumps in to aid Bronson. In a marvelous confrontation, Bronson, after the shooting is over, goes over to comfort a dying Gardenia,

“Why did you stick your neck out — for me?”, Bronson wonderingly asks his old enemy.

“It was either you — or them.”

At that point, Gardenia asks whether he got the killers. “All but one,” Bronson replies.

And then, in one of the great lines in the recent cinema, the expiring Gardenia implores:

“Get the m---------- for me!”

Attaboy, Gardenia, and attaboy Bronson, who of course does, in a great scene which manages to blast away at modern “insanity” defenses for violent crime.

Another excellent note is Jill Ireland, Bronson’s love interest, a bright lawyer and criminological liberal, who as do so many females in vigilante/spy drama, can’t take the gaff when they find that their boy friends are willing to fight and use violence in defense of right and justice. One thinks immediately of the magnificently tough Matt Helm in the Donald Hamilton spy novels, who is always being abandoned by females even when they too are allied spies who are convinced that it is perfectly legitimate for the CIA or whatever to assassinate killers and bad guys.

After the sensitive ending of Death Wish II, with Bronson alone and deserted by Jill Ireland, one is left with the question: will our vigilante hero ever find a heroine, a “Rebel Girl,” who admires him as vigilante as well as architect and is willing to stick? Let’s hope that there will be a Death Wish III so we can find out. In the meantime, Michael Winner has produced another Death Wish great.

To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the state is doing.

– Benjamin R. Tucker

VOLUNTARYISTS ORGANIZE

George Smith, Carl Watner, and Wendy McElroy have organized a new anti-political group of libertarians called The Voluntaryists. The basic purpose of the new organization is to explore nonpolitical strategies to achieve a free society. They claim that one consequence of libertarian political activity is that almost no thought has been given to other ways of broadcasting the libertarian message. The Voluntaryists hope to remedy this oversight.

The term “Voluntaryist” was chosen to identify the group because of its long-standing historical significance in the libertarian tradition. Its roots go back to the Voluntaryist insight formulated in the 16th Century, which claims that all governments must cloak themselves in an aura of legitimacy in order to win the passive acquiescence of their subjects. The Voluntaryists believe that libertarians must seek to dissolve this aura of legitimacy by using nonpolitical methods.

The group has published a number of pamphlets in The Voluntaryist Series. George Smith, a long time libertarian and author of the Atheism The Case Against God (1974), has written the first in the series. His Party Dialogue is a Voluntaryist critique of political action and the LP. Smith is also a frequent lecturer for Cato Institute, The Institute for Humane Studies, and the Center for Libertarian Studies.

No. II in The Voluntaryist Series was written by Carl Watner and it deals with his interest in the history of the libertarian tradition. The pamphlet addresses the development of anti-political ideas in libertarian thought, with special emphasis on the controversy about voting in the 19th Century abolitionist movement. Watner has written for Reason Magazine and the Libertarian Forum and has published numerous articles in The Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Wendy McElroy, the third co-organizer of The Voluntaryists, has been active in the libertarian movement for many years. She has recently compiled and published Liberty 1881-1908, which is a comprehensive index to Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty, the most famous of the 19th Century individualist journals. This was facilitated by a grant from the Center for Libertarian Studies. Her lead article in the Autumn 1981 issue of Literature of Liberty dealt with Tucker and the individualist movement. Wendy is editor of a forthcoming anthology on individualist-feminism to be published by Cato Institute. She has lectured widely on subjects of interest to libertarians.

“An Introduction” to The Voluntaryists, which includes their Statement of Purpose, may be obtained by sending them a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The Voluntaryists pamphlets are available for $1.00 each postpaid. Orders and inquiries may be sent to: The Voluntaryists, Box 5836, Baltimore, Maryland 21208.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 6 July, 1982

DOUBLE VICTORY FOR AGGRESSION

June 1982 will go down in history as a banner month for aggression. In the same week, two aggressors in two separate wars — Great Britain and Israel — smashed their opposition in an orgy of empire, vainglory, and mass murder, all to the scarcely disguised cheers of the Reagan Administration.

In the Falklands, all the macho mouthings of the Galtieri junta ended in abject surrender, with the Argie troops turning tail and fleeing the action. The excuse that the Brits had secret technology equipping them for night-fighting rates a loud raspberry: perhaps the Argies need to eat a lot more carrots. The Air Force did well in sinking several Brit ships, but even it lacked the fortitude for an assault on the beloved British troopship, the QE11. Meantime the triumphant Brit war machine re-planted the sacred Union Jack on Falkland soil — with the only cost hundreds dead on both sides and no less than one billion dollars to be extracted from the long-suffering British taxpayer. Strutting and bloated with victory, the Brits now insist on keeping Argies out forever — though the admitted cost will be another billion to garrison troops permanently in that remote hole and to pour in money for sheep development.

The Brits reached the depths of shame after the fighting ended, when Mrs. Thatcher virtually threatened death for some prisoners of war unless the Argies surrendered officially as well as de facto; how vile can one get? Meanwhile, the only face left for the Argies is at least to continue the war de jure; but clearly the increased power of the dovish Air Force means that the Argies have no intention to carry the war forward in a protracted struggle by air and sea against the British garrison in the Falklands. It seems that the Argies are all wind.

There are only two points of solace in the Falkland outcome for libertarians: (a) that we have another argument for the superior fighting qualities of volunteer mercenaries (the Brits) as against draftees (the Argies); and (b) the pro-British intervention by the United States has opened a serious rift between the Reagan Administration and its right-wing authoritarian allies in Latin America.

Meanwhile, across the globe, Israel, which likes to launch aggression when a distracting war is being fought elsewhere (pace 1956), sliced through Lebanon, unmercifully slaughtering Lebanese civilians as it went. For a few days, the flimsy excuse sufficed of ending shelling threats for a 25-mile zone north of the Israeli border (Never mind that the PLO guerrillas had observed a cease-fire in that zone for eleven months). That excuse kept the United States benignly favorable and the Arab governments out of the action, permitting Israel to shell and murder Lebanese cities far north of the zone — such as Sidon and of course Beirut. Suddenly, Israeli troops were on the edge of Beirut itself.

Trudy Rubin, in a revealing article (June 17) in the Christian Science Monitor, shows that Israel was able to conduct these operations without generating an outraged world opinion by simply exercising press censorship and keeping journalists out of the war zone — thereby avoiding the protests following its far more limited invasion of south Lebanon in 1978.

So far, estimates are that over 10,000 Lebanese civilians, have been killed or injured in Beirut alone. In Sidon, the Israelis killed a thousand Lebanese and wounded 3,000. And in the Lebanese city of Tyre, conquering Israel ordered large numbers of civilians to gather on the beach before it began to shell the town; the civilians were left on the beach by Israel for two days without food, water, or shelter. Overall, in southern Lebanon, 600,000 Arabs have been made homeless by Israelis engines of destruction. But this news has only been allowed to trickle out after the deed has been done, allowing the U.S. to cheerfully accept the new fait accompli presented by Israel.

The Reagan Administration, in fact, shamefully looks forward to Israel’s imposing a new “strong, central government” on war-torn Lebanon. (There’s a real libertarian goal!) Clearly, the U.S. is prepared to help Israel accomplish that objective. This “restructuring,” however, is in the absurd direction of re-imposing rule over Lebanon by its Christian minority. Christians are now only 30% of the Lebanese population, which means an attempt to keep the overwhelming Muslim majority in permanent subjection.

Israel has once again pursued the logic of empire. A territory is first conquered, then more has to be conquered to defend the frontier areas from being shelled, then a narrow frontier zone has to be conquered, then a wider zone, and on and on, until . . . Until what? The logic of empire is endless; it can never end until the entire world has been forced into subjection.

But suppose that Israel conquers Beirut. Then what? What will it do with hundreds of thousands of sullen and hostile subject Arabs? Unless they are genocidally slaughtered, they too will become nuclei for continuing guerrilla struggle. And then what? On to Damascus?

The logic of empire promises only permanent war, permanent tyranny, and permanent injustice, and, in the end, failure even on its own terms. But war — especially winning war is the eternal unifier, and so this venture by Israel’s supreme war-hawk Arik Sharon has simply silenced the previously vocal opposition within Israel and strengthened the forces for permanent aggression.

In the meanwhile, with the exception of the PLO itself, Arab macho seems to have matched Argie macho. The Syrians, for all their tough talk, didn’t lay a glove on the Israelis and caved in quickly, and the other Arab states did precisely nothing. If nothing else, the invasion of 1982 should finally teach the PLO the lesson which they should have learned after the Jordanian massacre (“Black September”) of Palestinians in 1970 and the Syrian invasion of Lebanon to crush the PLO-Muslim forces in 1976. Only treachery to the Palestinians can come from the Arab states. The “rejection front” was right: Palestinian achievements will be built on quicksand until a long march is made through the political institutions of the frontline Arab states.

Until that day, we will continue to receive such horrifying reports as the one on June 10 by ABC correspondent Hilary Brown from the devastated Lebanese city of Sidon: that Israel had “destroyed the infrastructure of all civilian life in cities where the PLO was based.”

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

FLAT-RATE: THE LATEST CON

Suddenly, they’re all going for it. Reaganites trying to find some gimmick, some distraction from the current economic mess now that New Federalism is dead in the water. Democratic Neo-Liberals trying to find something newer than 1930s left-liberalism. Conservatives sick of the progressive income tax. Tax-wielders trying to find and crush the sheltered, the exempt, those not paying taxes. “It,” of course, is the flatrate income tax.

Flat-ratism originated with the Friedmanites, who have always praised its “simplicity.” Secretary of the Treasury Regan calls it “maybe the fairest tax of all.” The sainted Bill Simon, for a while back there the ubiquitous belovedest man in the free-market movement, is for it. Even my friend Congressman Ron Paul (R., Tex.) has swallowed this one hook, line, and sinker. In a June 1 press release, Ron calls flat rate “An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” and repeatedly praises not only its simplicity but its “perfect fairness,” since no one is allowed to “get away without paying their fair share of taxes.”

And finally, of course, there are the Craniacs, ever ready to tail after someone else’s sellout bandwagon. None other than Jule Herbert, head of the Craniac National Taxpayers Legal Defense Fund, has added his mite, hailing flat-rate as a sensible transition step toward the ultimate libertarian goal of income tax abolition.

The problem with conservatives and minarchists is that they have no theory of taxation. They favor taxation for protection and other services. But how much taxation, and who shall pay? As Ayn Rand would have said, Blankout. They can only fall back on the pernicious nonsense of “fairness.”

But beneath the moral cloak of “fairness” rests the ugly reality of institutionalized envy. For saying that Smith is “not paying his fair share” of the taxes paid by Jones is really saying that since Jones has suffered by God Smith should be forced to suffer equally. Behind the cloak of “fairness” is the real mean-spirited “ethic” of compulsory equality of suffering. It is as if a group of slaves had escaped from the South before the Civil War, and they were met with the following: “Yes, we too are opposed to slavery and we seek the day when all men are free. But in the meantime, it is very wicked of you to escape slavery while your brothers and sisters are still under the yoke. For you are thereby evading your fair share of slavery, and therefore we shall send you back to your masters, to remain there until all slaves can be freed equally.”

And yet that is precisely what conservative and libertarian flat-raters are saying. For the key to flat-ratism is not the welcome reduction in the tax paid by the upper-income groups; it is the eager search and destroy mission to eradicate tax shelters, credits, and exemptions, so as to force these lucky or ingenious people to pay.

And what now happens to the libertarian transition demand for tax credits of all sorts? For tax credits for tuition, charity, or whatever? All this will be pulverized in the name of “fairness.” Even Ronald Reagan demurred that those suffering from catastrophic illness would be forced to lose their exemptions under flat-rate domination. And here lies an interesting point. For none of the flat-raters are consistent enough to carry their logic through. The poor, the lower-income groups — in most plans those below $10,000 income — are not to pay any taxes at all. But why should the poor be exempt from the universal fairness of flatness while the catastrophically ill are not?

The slavery analogy is correct because there can be no such thing as “fairness in taxation.” Taxation is nothing but organized theft, and the concept of a “fair tax” is therefore every bit as absurd as that of “fair theft.” Conservatives often see that there is something iniquitous about taxation, but they misidentify the “progressive” part of the income tax as theft, mistakenly thinking that the progressive income tax is a system whereby the poor rob the rich. In truth, taxation is a system whereby the State robs everyone else, rich, middle, and poor. Taxation is robbery, not simply progressive taxation.

But that means that Herbert and other libertarians who think of flat rate as a sensible “transition” step toward tax abolition are dead wrong. Gradualism toward a goal is one thing; gradualism away from a goal is quite another. Flat-ratism would sock much higher taxes upon the exempt and the sheltered. The proper transition demand should be precisely the opposite: not to join the envious in blathering about forcing the sheltered to pay “fair shares,” but to hail their ingenuity and to set about widening these exemptions to include all the rest of us. Widen and deepen the flight of fugitive slaves, don’t drag them back.

Furthermore, the broad base of the middle class — the exploited and conned majority who pay virtually all the taxes now — will continue to pay most of the taxes and are likely to find their tax burden increase. For if the poor and the rich are to have their burden cut, who but the long-exploited middle class will be expected to take up the slack? Once again, the Sumnerian Forgotten Man, the member of the middle class, will be socked. Or at least he will unless he catches on to this new Con as fast as possible.

And, finally, we cannot move toward tax abolition by increasing the taxes of any person or group. Ever. That strategy is very much like the Marxists moving toward the goal of the “withering away of the State” by first maximizing State power. It is opportunist double-talk.

HOUSTON: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE

The LP NatCom meeting at Houston, March 27-28 was a quiet but deeply satisfying event, for it marked the distinct turning of the tide on the National committee. As we reported in our August-January issue, the Bethesda, Maryland meeting on November 7-8, 1981 was an exciting one in which a newly forged Grand Coalition of Mason and Clark forces beat back a determined attempt by the Crane Machine to seize power. Houston was deeply satisfying because it became clear there that the Crane Machine had reached its high-water mark at Bethesda, and was now in a distinct and subdued minority. (Our Military Maven who had predicted this great decline after Bethesda was proved, once again, right on the mark.)

One observer complained at Houston that the meeting lacked exciting battles and was therefore “boring.” Not so. For the strategic and tactical offensive had now clearly passed from the Craniacs to the Grand Coalition, who now began to pepper the National Headquarters staff (a Craniac stronghold) with audit reports and demands for accounting. So while there were few vitally important votes at the meeting, there were resonances and behind-the-scenes events of considerable long-run importance, including the obvious passing of the initiative. The following were some of the important resonances to emerge from the Houston meeting:

1. Alicia Clark as an Effective Leader

Alicia Clark emerged at this meeting as an effective, tough, and savvy chairman. This emergence surprised the Crane and the Mason camps, both of whom had obviously underestimated Alicia all the way. The Craniacs evidently thought that they could steamroller Alicia, and it hasn’t worked that way at all.

2. The Strengthening of the Grand Coalition

The Grand Coalition is now firmly in place and working effectively—another continuing shock to the Crane Machine. In effect, the old Mason and Clark camps are now merged into one force, one “Majority Caucus,” as one wag put it. Paul Grant (Col., Mason) is our acknowledged leader, assisted by Emil Franzi (Ariz., Clark), Mike Emerling (Nev., Clark), and Bill Evers (Cal., Mason). This unity is forged on two positive ideological themes: Principle First, and grass-roots organization, taken from the two campaigns in 1981, and providing an effective base from which to confront the power-hungry opportunists of the Crane Machine.

We have also found—in a surprising and welcome serendipity—that the Grand Coalition members all like each other, that we are a congeries of diverse, interesting, and authentic personalities. This contrasts to the Crane Machiners who look and act in an uncannily similar and robotic manner. One astute observer at the Denver convention last year put it this way: “You can spot a Guida delegate at 100 yards. They all look alike—all Preppies.” The anti-“Preppie” note is an interesting cultural point that has gone unobserved in the movement; there is, outside of the Northeast quadrant of the country, a deep underlying hatred of “preppies,” who are all identified, rightly or wrongly, with the Crane Machine. My own perspective is that the Craniacs, preppie or no, all try to look and talk like tough, cool young professionals, neo-Haldemans. Look at the Craniacs, and one gets the feeling that one is back in the Nixon White House, with all the tough, cool, obnoxious young folk—the Cheneys, the Deans, et al., ruled by Haldeman/Crane himself.

If the Grand Coalition made any mistakes at Houston, it was in underestimating the extent and depth of our majority. Presumably that will be rectified at the next NatCom meeting at Billings, Montana on August 7-8.

3. The Audit Report

Dave Walter (Pa.)’s Audit Report was a thorough investigation of the National Headquarters, a Craniac stronghold, with some sensational implications. Most fascinating was the revelation that National Director Eric O’Keefe had made “at least a hundred” calls to the Cato Institute in San Francisco during 1981. Since Cato, Ed Crane’s base, is supposed to be non-political, what would the director of a political party be doing making almost daily calls to Cato? Unfortunately, NatCom failed to question O’Keefe in depth on this one.

There is also the revelation in the Walter Report that national treasurer Vivian Baures is not getting proper records from Headquarters to prepare the books, and is “also having trouble, apparently, in getting the staff to understand the financial procedures she is trying to institute in order to bring, at long last, proper bookkeeping and controls to the Party.” Walter, a CPA, adds sardonically that this lack seems to be due not only to the headquarter staff’s unfamiliarity with accounting, but also “to the fact that accounting is boring, etc. when there are exciting political action tasks that can be done instead.”

4. The Headquarters Staff

The most important measures passed by NatCom at Houston were to curb actual or potential abuses by headquarters staff. First, Evers’ motion that no person who has been terminated from the national staff for non-performance of duties can return as an employee or volunteer without approval of the National Chair, passed by the overwhelming vote of 23-7 with one abstaining. Then, Emil Franzi (Az.) moved that the national headquarters may not be used for partisan activity within the LP by the staff or the National Director. 1 moved to strengthen the motion to prevent headquarters staff from being delegates to the national convention, and my motion passed by the overwhelming vote of 20-10. After crushing an attempt by Jule Herbert (D.C.) to gut the resolution, NatCom passed the Franzi-Rothbard resolution by a smashing vote of 22-6-1. History should record the bad guy voters on this important motion. Two out of three bad-guy votes: Herbert, Lindsay (Ark.), Palm (Mont.), A. Rich (N.Y.), Taylor (Minn.). Three out of three wrong votes: Baures (Ore.), Burch (Va.), Hocker (D.C.), and Johnson (Ill.).

5. Behind-the-Scenes Memos

Behind the scenes at Houston there circulated two stunningly revealing memos which embarrassed and helped subdue the Craniacs and strengthened the resolve of the Grand Coalition. One was a memo by Crane himself to the various Crane Machine bigwigs, setting the line about what should be done about Ed Clark’s proposal to hold a public opinion poll about the LP, and stressing the importance of keeping the interpretation of poll results in Craniac hands. In this Feb. 16 memo, Crane instructed his Machine to stop opposing the poll itself, but rather to make sure to control its interpretation. The shocker is that the memo was sent, not only to top Craniacs Tom Palmer, David Boaz, Leslie Key, Chris Hocker, Kent Guida, and the Riches, but also to LP National Director Eric O’Keefe, who, as an emloyee of the entire Natcom, is supposed to be strictly neutral among the factions. This memo raises profound questions as to whom O’Keefe is reporting to.

The other fascinating memo circulating at Houston was anonymous, dated Feb. 16, and sent to other top Crane Machiners. Our sister magazine Libertarian Vanguard has now revealed that the author of this snide and arrogant memo was none other than Chris Hocker, publisher of Crane-run Inquiry magazine. The June issue of Libertarian Vanguard publishes the entire memo (this bi-monthly is available for $10 a year at 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102).

One important aspect of the Hocker memo is that he refers frankly and openly to the “Crane Machine” and assumes that his readers are all members thereof. This should put to rest once and for all the various naifs and Pollyannas in the Libertarian Party who have claimed that there is no Crane machine and that it is all a figment of some of our imaginations. So let us all from now on stipulate: there is a Crane Machine.

It is clear both from the Hocker memo and from other evidence that, having lost control of NatCom, and being strong in only a handful of state parties, the only hope for Craniac control of the LP is to dominate—once again—the Presidential campaign in 1983-84. The Crane machine managed to control, with Crane himself as campaign manager, the MacBride campaign in 1976 and the Clark campaign in 1980, and domination of presidential campaigns has always been his major interest.

Since Crane’s strength has always been Kocktopusian money and the employment of full-time cadre, his emphasis within the LP has and continues to be on TV spots for the Presidential campaign rather than the building of grass-roots cadre and organization. As opportunists ever ready to jettison principle, the Crane Machine yearns for a “name” presidential candidate which it thinks will help the campaign amass votes and monetary contributions.

The focus of the Feb. 16 Hocker memo is to warn about an expected anti-Crane Machine strategy in 1983-84 which would concentrate on local races, local-oriented publicity and partybuilding, and not on TV spots for the presidential candidate. All this sounds pretty good to me, but the prospect drives Hocker to frenzy, or as frenzied as this neo-Haldeman can ever get.

Hocker worries that Ed Clark and Alicia will be the leaders of this line, which, according to Hocker, would weave together “every version of Wrongthink we’ve had to contend with for the past year: emphasis on local, bottom-up organizing, “terminal Crane-haters,” and opponents of Craniac centralized elitism. As Hocker puts it: the argument he fears “holds the subconscious message that all us rank-and-file soldiers don’t have to just shut up and let the big guys run the show anymore.” An interesting revelation of course of what Craniacs have in mind for every party member except themselves: to “shut-up,” and, of course, to contribute money and gather signatures. Hocker also attacks Clark’s “we need to turn out more people for campaign events refrain.” At first, the reader might be puzzled: what’s wrong with Ed Clark’s wanting more people to turn up for campaign events? Until we realize, of course, that the Craniacs don’t want people, but TV spots and money. They want to do it all with mirrors.

Hocker’s major worry about the influence of the Clarks is, as he puts it, that “they’ve amply demonstrated that they hold no loyalty whatsoever to the Crane Machine, and will be happy to push it to the background.” Tsk, tsk!

Another notable feature of the Hocker memo is his repeated use of an obscenity to characterize his opposition: “the Rothbard/Colorado” faction as well as the state of Texas. One would think that this Stanford graduate could find some invective that is a bit more precise and on a bit higher level. It is one of the sad consequences of the Kochtopus for the libertarian movement that it has elevated a raft of know-nothings like Hocker to continuing power and influence in the movement. Absent the Kochtopus’s artificial inflation of the labor market, and Chris Hocker would be back selling busses in the Bay Area, a job in which he would, one hopes, no longer stand as a permanent living proof of the Peter Principle.

6. Leslie Key’s Missing Agenda Items

More amusing than earth-shaking were two items which Leslie Key, the Madame DeFarge of the movement, had originally placed on the agenda, but which cooler and wiser Crane Machine heads had apparently convinced her to withdraw. One was an item entitled “NatCom behavior toward National Headquarters staff,” presumably some sort of resolution proclaiming that we should not (no longer?) be beastly to Eric O’Keefe and the rest of the staff. This would have given an opportunity for various NatCom members who have felt aggrieved at their treatment by the staff to amend the resolution ordering them to be nice, etc. ad absurdum.

But the really bizarre agenda item originally introduced by La Key was “Request for retraction by Craig Franklin of his statement on the Maryland LP elections”–in which the Craniacs used proxy votes to take over the party. Now there would have been a fun item indeed, especially coming from someone always ready to instruct the rest of us in proper strategy and tactics. 1 was tempted to introduce an amendment, saying that this superb resolution lacks one critical item: an enforcement procedure. And that therefore an Enforcement Committee should be set up, perhaps to be called the Holy Office of the Libertarian Inquisition, to catechize the errant heretic Franklin, to stretch him on the rack to force him to confess and recant his crimes, and then to finish him off with an auto da fe, in which, inter alia, he would be castrated with Madame’s notorious knitting needles. One is almost tempted to call Leslie the Madame Nhu of the movement, except that she would have to be considerably shorter and more Oriental to qualify.

7. More on the Alaska Party

The Houston meeting also provided an opportunity for further revelations of the social philosophy and world outlook of the Alaska LP. Steve DeLisio, Alaska NatCom rep., and myself addressed the Texas LP banquet Saturday night. On being asked what advice 1 would give the elected Texas Libertarian school board officials, I replied that they might begin to widen the libertarian consciousness of the Texas electorate by attacking the bona fides of the public school system itself, and not only those of that particular board. This advice seemed to fall like a lead balloon on the heads of the banqueters, to be topped off by DeLisio grabbing the mike and accusing me of advocating “mooning.” It is an interesting revelation that the Alaska LPers seem to liken an honest assertion of libertarian principle to the commission of an obscene act.

8. The Voting Alignment

Without going into more details of the voting, it was clear that there was considerable movement away from the Craniacs and toward good-guydom. Tom Bogel of Kentucky was a truly impressive newcomer to NatCom. Clark Hodge of Florida moved dramatically from a largely Cranian stance to a fine voting record. Sheldon Richman, Vice-Chair, had a similarly fine record moving from a middle-of-the-road position, as did Jim Lewis of Connecticut, and especially Secretary Frances Eddy (Md.). In a significant change, DeLisio of Alaska moved from a Craniac to an independent, middle-of-the-road stance. Top voting records (in addition of course to myself) were turned in by: David Brazier (Wash.), Mike Emerling (Ariz.), M.L. Hanson (Col.), and Dale Pratt (Haw.); followed closely by Dave Bergland (Cal.), Tom Bogel (Ky.), Lynn Crussel (Okla.), Frances Eddy (Md.), Bill Evers (Cal.), Emil Franzi (Ariz.), and Matt Monroe (Tex.).

There was a lot of jocularity about Craniacs and fellow-travellers changing their votes “to look good in the Forum” — if true, a delightful example of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle at work on NatCom. The booby-prize, won last time by Jim Johnston (Ill.), was shared at Houston by three Craniac stalwarts: the irrepressible Johnston, whose stentorian voice was often heard booming out “Nays” even when fellow Craniacs were willing to go along with a vote; Chris Hocker; and Mike Burch — the latter two Craniac employees.

ARE WE BEING BEASTLY TO THE GIPPER? — PART V

7. Macro-Reaganomics: the Latest

Since we have begun this series, the Reagan record has become so putrid that even the right-wing of our movement has fallen into a conspicuous silence about their erstwhile Hero. Our assaults on the Reagan performance have lately been pushing on an open door.

Inflation has dramatically “abated,” but interest rates remain very high, clearly because the public and the market understandably distrust the enormous and unprecedented deficits and the fact that the Fed has been quietly pouring in more money since last October at the whopping annual rate of per cent. All this means an imminent reflation, high interest rates, and a big increase in both once a boom reappears.

For the last several months, the Reagan Administration has been desperately attempting to deflect the attention of the public from its rotten record. In addition to scapegoating the Democrats and the Carter Administration, the Reaganites have thrown up a series of razzle-dazzle gimmicks to try to gull the voters.

First, trotted out in last-minute desperation at the 1982 State-of-the-Union message, was the New Federalism (remember that one?). Even the original version was so vague and so pie-in-the-sky (taking a decade to go into effect), that it was difficult to take it seriously or to figure out whether federal spending or each state’s spending, would go up or down as a result. But, in offering to assume all state Medicaid costs for the federal government in exchange for shifting welfare and food stamp costs to the states, it was at once clear that Reagan was offering to shoulder the fastest-growing expenditure of the three (Medicaid) by the federal government, so that the feds would probably wind up spending more money than ever before. In addition, Robert Carleson, White House aid in charge of welfare, was reportedly unhappy because the proposed swap would be setting the stage for national health insurance from the next administration.

Now, the Reagan Administration has caved in even more, since it is now offering to keep food stamps for the feds, and only shift welfare to the states. More and more, the New Federalism is looking like the same old gallopping statism under the cloak of Reaganite rhetoric.

When the New Federalism failed to fly, the next gimmick adopted by Reagan was the balanced budget amendment, which has been kicking around for a long while, and has now been introduced in the Congress. The President must get high marks for unmitigated gall; here he is, presiding over by far the biggest budget and the biggest deficit in American history, and still attempting to carry favor with opponents of Big Government by self-righteously urging a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget! How can Reagan keep getting away with his favorite ploy of being Head of State and yet still sounding like a private citizen reading oppositional anecdotes attacking Big Government from his eternal 3x5 cards?

Furthermore, the main balanced budget amendment before Congress is so namby-pamby and so attenuated that it would probably be better if it were defeated right now. First, Congress is not required to balance the actual budget, but only its estimates of future budgets, estimates which are notoriously vague and chronically inaccurate. Second, there is no enforcement procedure to bring Congress to heel. Deficits are right now against the law, though not yet unconstitutional, and yet no one pays any attention to the continuing violation, let alone proceed to incarcerate some erring Congressmen. Third, it is absurdly easy for Congress to override this solemn amendment, ranging from a mere majority to a three-fifths vote. Even easier than overriding the constantly abused statutory limit on taxes would tie tax revenues to a percentage of the “national income.” It is truly absurd to enshrine a slippery concept such as “national income” in to the basic law of the land. Who knows what “national income” is? This is not a precise or scientific concept, but whatever government statisticians say it is. For example, every time the government hires a bureaucrat, the salary is counted as a per se addition to the “national income.” The saints preserve us from Friedmanites (for such they are) adding their mumbo-jumbo to an already much-abused Constitution!

LETTER FORUM

Solution to the Falklands

Dear Editor:

One of your proposed solutions to the current dispute in the Falklands (“Oh, Oh, Oh, What A Lovely War” — May 1982), namely to move the Islanders to East Anglia, has one further attraction.

Not only could the Islanders “enjoy” the bad weather, the strong winds, the marshes, the food and the pubs of East Anglia but also the seaweed which, as in the Falklands, grows in abundance offshore.

However it is a much higher quality seaweed than the Falklands variety.

Whereas the latter is fed to the sheep, the East Anglian variety is a local delicacy which, when pickled, is called samphire or St. Peter’s herb and is eaten with a cold meat salad.

Yours for the duration,

John Blundell
Menlo Park, California

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 6 August, 1982

SMEAR: THE STORY OF UPDATE — PART I

by Derrick “Ed” Welles

In March 1981, a new newsletter first appeared in the homes of libertarians. In its inaugural issue, this newsletter proclaimed its raison d’etre: “It’s often difficult to separate facts from rumors and personal opinions when covering the libertarian movement, but we believe that it’s in the best interest of the movement, as well as our own, to try to make these distinctions. Therefore, we intend our news items to be factual, while opinion and unsubstantiated reports, valuable and interesting as they may be, will be clearly labeled as such.”

This newsletter is Update, a publication already lovingly referred to in previous issues of Lib. Forum. For the past year and a half, it has performed in the opposite manner to what it had promised its readers. It has fused rumors, personal opinions, and facts, and has incorporated unsubstantiated reports and editorial bias into articles that pose as news items. This practice has certainly been valuable to Update’s editors, and indeed it has served their interests as they see them. Decoding the truth from Update’s coverage has proven to be an interesting project.

Update is the unofficial organ of the Crane Machine. It is unofficially so, because nobody in Update has come out and admitted that their purpose is to offer readers a distorted view of the movement through Craniac lenses; instead, they pose as impartial reporters of facts. The fact, however, is that Update is published by the Libertarian Review Foundation, heir of the late Libertarian Review and publishers of the ex-Cato magazine, Inquiry. Its three editors (until June 1982) have been Chris Hocker, Madame Defarge Leslie Key, and Kent Guida. Ed Crane himself often writes in Update (the only publication, besides Cato’s Letter, where his written work appears). In nearly every issue, libertarians who have criticized, opposed, or resisted Craniac domination of themselves or the movement are made to look uniformly like fools or incompetents, and their achievements are belittled, misrepresented, or ignored and hidden from the reader.

As a libertarian news publication with pretensions of impartial journalism, Update is an unqualified disaster. This does not stop it from being a success in terms of what its publishers may wish to accomplish. Since its first issue, Update has served the dual functions of inflating the performance and image of those who submit to Craniac ways, and of discrediting those who refuse to submit, regardless of the actual accomplishments of each.

There is a new word cowed for this occasion, for Update’s peculiar style of journalism. It is “Updating,” by which we shall mean the practice of distorting the reader’s perception by either 1) omitting relevant facts; 2) creating nonexistent “facts”; 3) incorporating editorial bias into a news item; or 4) giving favorable coverage to one side of a controversy in an ostensibly impartial news report.

We should note that Update’s biased reporting is mixed with other, generally factual and newsy articles, mostly on scholarly institutions and projects that deal with libertarian theory or which are not currently threatening or inconvenient to Craniac designs. Thus, Murray Rothbard may be praised for his theoretical contributions — not even Update can deny him credit for these — but is portrayed negatively wherever possible when it comes to his activist work and strategic outlook (which in many cases, as Forum readers well know, is very different from that of Craniacs).

This generally accurate reporting of non-controversial movement activities, of course, only makes it more difficult for the reader without an independent (i.e., non-Craniac) source of information to discern what is truth and what is smear when it comes to Update’s coverage of the Machine’s enemies. Update will brook no obstacles — and spare no trick of biased journalism — to advance the unfettered control of movement activism by the Crane Machine. To be a resister of Craniac views is, in Update’s eyes, to be a nincompoop, a ranting factionalist, or (can you believe this) a sellout of libertarian principle.

We shall see why, and how, all of these statements are true about Update in the analysis that follows. Although thus far we have made no pretense of approaching the matter with a false air of impartial reporting, a reading of the following will be seen to be more logical and factual than what we have become used to on the pages of Update. We invite the reader to analyze this, and to check our statements about Update for himself.

1. In the Beginning

From the start Update was easily perceived — by trained eyes — as the organ of the Crane faction. In its very first issue, quips and snide remarks were directed at those not in association with the Crane Machine: After criticizing a Reason magazine article by Rees proposing the sale of passports, Update cracked: “In the same issue, ironically, Murray N. Rothbard makes the ‘case for libertarian pessimism’; having one’s own article appear in a libertarian magazine alongside Ree’s would indeed tend to make one a trifle pessimistic.”

It’s interesting that Update would fault Rothbard for having his work published in such unworthy company. . .but, after thirteen issues, it still has never written anything about the decidedly unlibertarian comments that have aired on “Byline,” Crane’s Cato Institute’s radio-commentary show. What’s more, Murray Rothbard doesn’t decide what goes into Reason, and in all likelihood did not even know the rest of the contents of the Reason issue prior to its publication. But Cato presumably does control “Byline”! This is the first instance in a long series of Update’s practice of pointing to (real or alleged) faults or problems in their “enemies,” while ignoring similar faults and problems in their allies. If Update postures as keeper of libertarian principle (as we shall see over and over), then why doesn’t it, in its intrepid analysis of purity in the actions and pronouncements of others, apply the same surgical knife to its own buddies?

That first issue carried summaries of the then-candidates for LP National Chair (Dallas Cooley, Kent Guida, John Mason). In its first act of “Updating,” Update offered positive and negative comments about each candidate (it did not say who made these comments). For Cooley and Mason, the negative comments concerned points of substance that, if true, could affect the attractiveness of the candidate. Of Cooley, who was at the time LP National Treasurer, Update said, “It’s hard to tell where he stands on anything,” and “He hasn’t watched the LNC finances very closely.” Of Mason, the negative remarks were “He hasn’t really done anything on the National Committee,” and that he was “too tied in with the Rothbard faction.” Guida (who most assuredly was and is tied in with the Craniac faction) escaped with the silly and innocuous “He’s too short” and “Don’t know anything about him.”

Guida also received Update’s most positive comments: “He knows a lot about libertarian theory” (presenting him as strong in libertarian background), and “He did a great job with ballot drives and organizational work” (a quality activist, too!); while Cooley’s pro side was limited to the vacuous “being very generous to the party” and “looking like a chairman,” and Mason “has been a hard worker” and “has a good sense of humor.” Guida got the substantial praise and the innocuous criticism; his competitors, just the opposite. Hmmm. Update did not endorse any candidate officially — its reporting practices took care of that.

2. Unfulfilled Promises I

In the second of many attacks on Rothbard, Update began “a contest” in June 1981, “Name That Author.” This was to be, supposedly, “the first in its soon-to-be famous ‘Occasional Contests’ series.” The quotation that followed was a ringing call for burying intramovement hatreds and working together for Liberty. The author turned out to be Murray Rothbard; the effect was to embarrass Rothbard for his well-known critique of the Crane Machine and the 1980 Clark for President (CFP) campaign, of which Hocker (first Update editor) et al. were in control. It is ironic, given Update’s thinly-disguised partisanship, that it would publish an ecumenical passage. But then, Update poses as an impartial rag dedicated to the benefit of the movement as a whole.

And the “soon-to-be famous ‘Occasional Contests’ series”? As of this writing, that one, in June 1981, has been the only one Update has conducted. One is hard-pressed to avoid thinking it was devised merely to take a cheap shot at Rothbard and to ridicule the forces for principled campaigning.

3. SLS Whitewash

Update’s August 1981 article on the SLS Convention claimed there was “unity” in SLS and made a point of asserting the Radical Caucus’ lack of influence at the Convention. (The Radical Caucus have been acerbic critics of the pre-1982, opportunist SLS National Office faction). Half the article discussed resolutions and strategy decisions made at the Convention, giving the impression that the affair was an activist-oriented huddle dedicated to discovering how best to further the cause of Liberty in the upcoming year.

In fact only one, Sunday morning session out of the three-day affair was concerned with resolutions. The major, and quite heated, debate dealt with the internal structure of SLS in the face of drastic cuts in Koch funding. While it mentioned the Radical Caucus twice (both times in glee over the “virtual shutout” of the Radical Caucus), the report made no mention of a third force present at the Convention which did have an effect upon the course of events. This “Non Caucus,” which proposed to decentralize SLS and reduce the powers of the Craniac-dominated SLS National Office, had more support than the RC, but received no mention by Update. Nor did Update report on the hectic night before the debate on an SLS constitution, which Milton Mueller and friends spent bargaining with this “Non Caucus” in an attempt to head off the new opposition to their control. But it would have looked bad for Update’s friends who arranged the closed-door meeting, to seem like power-broking politicos. Instead, SLS’ Convention was “smooth,” whereas in truth it was stormy and revealed deep-seated and unresolved differences in organizational philosophy between significant sectors of the movement.

4. Updating the November LNC Meeting

The same Update claimed, in another article, that RC leader Bill Evers, a member of a NatComm subcommittee appointed to look into the issue of the CFP campaign’s FCC complaint against NBC, had issued a report critical of CFP’s actions, “with neither the knowledge or consent of the other subcommittee member, Andrea Millen Rich.” This was false, since Evers had already read all the details of his report to Andrea Rich. Then, in its November 1981 issue, Update reported on that month’s NatComm (LNC) meeting. In that article’s section on the Libertarian Congressional Committee (LCC), Update said “A move by Murray Rothbard to replace Ross Levatter with Jorge Amador of Pa. was defeated.”

What is interesting about Update’s reporting on LCC, in sharp contrast to its earlier report on Evers, is that Howie Rich LCC Chair and Andrea Rich’s husband — gave a report at the LNC meeting that purported to be the “LCC report.” This report, as Amador has indicated, was given without knowledge or consent of other LCC members, including Amador. Update did not say this about its friend Howie Rich, although it did not hesitate to make a similar claim about Bill Evers, a Craniac critic.

Nor did Update report that Amador had been an LCC member, and had been critical of Howie Rich’s failure to initiate action in seven months as LCC Chair — or to communicate with LCC members. By not reporting these facts, Update protected Howie Rich’s reputation as a take-charge activist, and conveyed the impression that Amador was merely a last-minute, unqualified nominee by the sectarian Rothbard. Rothbard was actually only trying to reinstate Amador to a position he had held since LCC’s inception, and from which he’d been kicked out by the Crane Machine. How interesting, in light of Update’s explicit dictum that “we present all the facts in a given situation so that our readers may make up their own minds” (emphasis added)! Apparently, Amador’s having been an original LCC member and a critic of Howie Rich’s failure did not count as relevant facts. Not only did Update not mention Rich’s inaction with LCC, it went the other way to quote him as saying “We are a work-oriented committee”— an amazing statement for a person who, in seven months as Chair, had held a grand total of one meeting. (Rich was busy managing Kent Guida’s campaign, a matter of much greater importance than Libertarian campaigning against statists.)

In the aforementioned story on Evers and the FCC, Update quoted Craniac Jule Herbert as saying that Evers’ inclusion of 18 “libertarian scholars” in a letter on the CFP complaint, was a “phony argument from authority and it doesn’t address the issue.” On the other hand, Update had no qualms in listing among Kent Guida’s supporters for LP National Chair (Mar.-Apr. ’81): “Howie Rich, Clark National Ballot Drive Co-ordinator and Steering Committee member; Andrea Rich, National Committee member and former National Vice Chair; Cissy Webb, former Illinois party chair.” Quite an impressive-looking assortment of titles and offices supporting their candidate, isn’t it? So much for “arguments from authority.” Among John Mason’s supporters were listed “members of the ‘Coalition for a Party of Principle’, including David Nolan, Murray Rothbard, and Reason editor Robert Poole.” Why didn’t Update report Nolan’s membership in the Libertarian National Committee, as it faithfully reported the most high-sounding titles for Guida’s supporters — including membership in the Libertarian National Committee? Updating, my friend, that’s all. Update wouldn’t want to overextend itself blowing up the credentials of their competitor’s supporters.

While we’re on the subject, Craniac logician Herbert might be surprised to learn that, in refuting Evers’ alleged “phony argument from authority,” he himself made a phony ad hominem argument. He tried to discredit Evers’ letter by saying that “two of these scholars have been telling people they voted for Reagan.” How does that address the issue of whether libertarian principle was violated, oh Jule?

Speaking of David Nolan, he was the victim of another case where Update went out of its way to take a cheap shot at a Craniac critic. In the September-October ‘81 issue, an article entitled “National Committee Gears Up for ’82” said that 15 candidates for the LP Judicial Committee were not elected, “including David Nolan. “The reader will be left to ponder why Nolan was singled out from among the 15. Surely he wasn’t the only noteworthy unsuccessful candidate, for that committee or others. . . .

The same article referred to the possibility that the new LNC would be factional, due to the fact that most of the members had supported one or another of the National Chair candidates. Update had a peculiar way of listing the factional makeup of the LNC: “just 5. . .supported Clark’s race. . ., 10 supported Mason’s candidacy, and the remainder either supported Guida (who is himself a member of the LNC) or did not make their positions on the Chair’s race public.” Why did Update refuse to report the number of Guida (Craniac) supporters on NatComm — so as not to reveal the true strength of the low-tax liberal, opportunist camp?

Returning to Update’s treatment of the November NatComm meeting, Update laid the blame for the factionalism that did develop, on Craniac opponents who held a caucus Saturday night, November 7. In reality a number of votes earlier that day had already revealed a deep split between the Guida and Clark-Mason camps. Update claimed this caucus was “closed,” quoted a couple of caucus attendees as saying so, and listed several people who attended — all of whom have various degrees of independence from (or opposition to) Craniac domination. It did not say that Guida supporter Dick Randolph attended the meeting with a comprehensive list of proposals for the next day’s agenda — a list which could only have been drawn up with extensive consultation with the Craniac faction; nor did Update report that this “closed” meeting was attended by several people who are not even members of NatComm. In its zeal to lay the blame for factionalism on its opponents, Craniac organ Update seems to have little problem with omitting facts and even altering them to suit its purposes.

Anti-Craniac forces were smeared another way in the same infamous article. It proudly announces that “Update’s research indicates that, besides Murray Rothbard,. . .the only NatComm member who actually works for the government is Emil Franzi, who is employed by the Pima County (Arizona) government.” (Franzi was a leading Alicia Clark — i.e., non-Guida — supporter in the Chair race.) This “research” turned out to be wrong on two counts. First, Rothbard’s university is a private institution, and he is thus not a government employee. Update ran a retraction of this assertion, and printed two letters pointing to the error. The first letter printed was by Kent Guida, and was a cool, collected refutation of Update’s assertion. The “second” was Rothbard’s letter, which in his usual hard-hitting style, stated that Update was “flatly, perhaps even maliciously wrong.” One cannot escape wondering whether Guida’s calm letter was written to order for the purpose of contrasting it with Rothbard’s, and so that Update could issue its retraction in answer to friend Guida and not Rothbard.

Not only that: in his correction letter, Guida managed to take an irrelevant and false swipe at Rothbard as holding that all universities in the United States are in effect public anyway. This is in stark contrast to Rothbard’s oft-repeated view that any university gaining more than 50% of its income from private sources may be held to be privately owned, and vice versa. Again, the impact was to take the sting out of the “retraction,” and as far as possible to continue to put the blame on Rothbard for Update’s false statements.

Second, there was the failure to mention, as David Bergland put it in Frontlines, Dick Randolph’s “rather substantial relationship with the government of Alaska.” Randolph is close to the Crane camp, of course, so his governmental connections went unreported in the smear of anti-Craniacs. Or are we supposed to accept the line that Dick, as an elected representative of the people of Fairbanks, really works for “the people” and not the government??

5. Updating SLS

Elsewhere in that issue, Update reported that “15 new SLS chapters” had been started since Kathleen Jacob became SLS National Director in August 1981 The news item was titled “SLS Picks Up Support.” In spite of Update’s zeal to keep readers informed of what’s going on in the movement, Update never told its readers of the numbers of SLS chapters when these were dwindling. Specifically, Update did not say that the 15 new chapters placed the total of SLS chapters in the mid-50’s, whereas sixty-nine chapters had been reported to be in active existence at the SLS Student Board meeting immediately prior to the SLS Convention that elected Jacob. Again, Update reports favorable news about its pet groups, and ignores unfavorable facts about them. But pity the poor, beleaguered reporters at Update! They don’t really build bias into their articles, do they? Maybe they’re just incompetent journalists, and it’s simply a big coincidence that they never manage to find the unfavorable facts about their friends, but do find negative things about their enemies — and, of course, dutifully report these in the “best interest of the movement.”

As a case in point of the above statement, on the same page where the article on SLS appeared there was an item reporting the decline in membership and registration of the California LP and Libertarian Council. Update could have handled this case the same way as it treated SLS, by reporting how many new LP registrations and Council members had joined, but instead it chose to report their overall decline. By contrast, Update reported the new SLS chapters, without stating the overall decline. Reason? For a possible clue to this unequal treatment, we quote Update: “Mike Hall is the chair of the California Libertarian Council, while Bill Evers chairs the LP of California. . . .”

The January 1982 Update’s report on the Center for Libertarian Studies’ Ludwig von Mises Centennial Dinner served as a forum for a Craniac, and featured more Updating. After noting that President Reagan had sent a telegram to CLS praising Mises, Update had Andrea Millen Rich sound off on the “vast differences” between Mises and conservatives, and complain about conservatives claiming Mises “as one of theirs.” Perhaps Rich is not aware that Mises, far from being a consistent libertarian, considered Communism the greatest evil to threaten the West and, in Human Action, even supported the military draft to defend against the Commies. Update gave one of its own a soapbox, and she fell off it.

The article then went on to discuss CLS’ financial problems. Anti-Craniac Rothbard is associated with CLS, so Update was quick to point out CLS’ troubles. Coverage of CLS’ problems continued with a front-page item in the February Update. (To its credit, Update did report CLS’ funding growth and future plans in its September-October ’81 issue.) But Update’s dedicated investigative reporters seemingly were ignorant of the similar—or even deeper—financial woes of SLS, which is located in their backyard in Washington, DC. In contrast to the two-article, multiple-quotation coverage given to CLS’s money troubles, Update has kept mum about SLS’s travails following the loss of 90% of their Koch funding and failure to replace it with new contributors. While SLS’s troubles began in September 1981 (and loss of Koch funding was known since July or August, at the latest), Update did not report on this until June 1982, when there was but a brief reference to SLS’s “serious and ongoing financial problems”— and then only presented it in a less detractive light by linking it to the more positive-looking expectation of achieving nonprofit, tax-deductible status.

CRANE’S GRAND DESIGN FOR UPDATE

Editor’s Note: To accompany our critique of Update, we publish the following secret September 1981 plan written by Ed Crane for the future of Update. In a paragraph of the memo on classified ad revenue — one that we have omitted for space reasons — Crane anticipated that by September 1982 Update’s circulation would reach 5,000. Want to bet? An interesting thought presents itself as one reads this memo. The famous and fascinating July 26, 1982 Fortune article on the feud in the Koch family suggests that Charles Koch is leading David Koch astray. This memo suggests rather that it is Ed Crane who is leading David Koch astray.

September 16, 1981

Memorandum

TO:

Chris Hocker, Leslie Key, David Koch, and other Interested Parties

FROM:

Ed Crane

SUBJECT:

Update

What with all the changes going on these days I thought it would be appropriate to put down in writing some thoughts concerning the future of Update. To begin with, Dr. Hocker’s new position as publisher of Inquiry probably makes it inappropriate for him to continue to be responsible for Update. This is true both because of the more than full-time job involved in getting Inquiry on its feet and headed in the right direction and because the magazine should not be directly connected to the libertarian movement (this despite the fact that it needs to become more explicity libertarian in its editorial policy). Which means we’re stuck with the lovely and vivacious Leslie Key who resides in Madison, Canada. I would recommend that she begin her responsibilities as editor of Update with the November issue. We could pay her, say, $500 a month for assuming this responsibility. David Koch has indicated he will kick in $10,000 to Update next year. If Leslie is very nice to him we might be able to talk him into $5,000 more (right, David?). There should be a production manager in Washington, D.C. who will function as Leslie’s assistant editor as well as being in charge of getting the newsletter and direct mail efforts physically printed and mailed. That person could be an employee of the Libertarian Review Foundation who has other responsibilities and works on Update one-third to one-half of the time. I’m open to suggestions as to who that person should be. Let us, then, get on with the analysis of what we want to do with Update. . .

Columns — I’d like to retain Birmingham to do one page worth of his Opening Shots (although we should probably change the title and put the column somewhere toward the back of the newsletter). Because of the nature of the newsletter he might mix real world commentary in with comments about movement activities. The thought of Birmingham on Rothbard is exhilarating [sic] to contemplate. He must, of course, be watched for his heresies and therefore should be requested to submit about 30% more items than we can run. There should be a Washington Update column which analyzes what’s going on in Congress and the White House from an explicitly libertarian perspective. Perhaps Sheldon could write this. We should bring back Grinder’s old Crosscurrents column which discusses intellectual trends of relevance to the movement. Whether Walter or Tyler Cowen and his crew should write it I do not know.

Book Reviews — Libertarians are notorious book readers and we could add to the salability of Update if we had a page devoted to short, pithy reviews of current books. Riggenbach might be the book review editor if he could be directed away from obscure 19th Century fiction writers . . . .

The News — This has to be the main focus of the newsletter. We need hardhitting news stories about the movement (broadly interpreted to include such groups as anti-war, pro-gold, NORML, etc.). These articles should have as many direct quotes from the personalities involved as possible. The person asking the question should be intelligent and know from what perspective we want information (that means you, Leslie). For instance, someone should have interviewed me about my reaction to the national convention. A lead story could focus on the fact that there are only three Alicia Clark supporters on a 35-person national committee. This, it seems to me, is of extreme relevance to the future of the party. Articles, editorials, and columns should not appear to be pure puff pieces for the Machine. We should have some criticism of our own people and activities where it is appropriate. We must never take on the tone that frontlines has — it really discredits what they’re trying to accomplish. On the other hand, we do have to keep the newsletter focused on our objectives and it needs to be interesting in order to get readers so we shouldn’t avoid controversy and we should seek out the sexier elements of stories. There needs to be many more news stories than we are currently putting into Update.

Editorials — There should be one well thought out editorial in each issue. Anyone from Boaz to Hocker to Crane to Herbert to all of the geniuses that comprise our merry band of plotters could write it. Which brings up a relevant point. We should have a conference call with Leslie each month to go over what should be in the upcoming issue. The people in Washington can get together on an informal basis to come up with ideas, as well. All of us should be willing to write articles from time to time so the entire burden doesn’t fall on Leslie and the production manager.

Calendar of Upcoming Events — I’d like to see an entire page devoted to upcoming libertarian events, again widely defined Remember that this is an opportunity to show up Bill Burt and his three functions in the country for the whole month trick. . . .

Political Analysis — It would be a good idea to have a article from Riggenbach or Childs or Hocker or Sheldon on some current political issues from time to time if not in each issue. We need to have LR type articles (only shorter) which explain the libertarian position on current major issues.

All in all I think if we follow this approach we will have an excellent newsletter which will generate a large amount of interest. . . . .Comments but no criticisms are welcome.

THE POST OFFICE AS CENSOR

by Dyanne M. Petersen

You probably never read the booklet Stale Food vs. Fresh Food—and you probably never will. That’s because the Postal Service, in its supreme wisdom, has banned the booklet from being distributed through the U.S. mails. And when you hear the whole story you’ll want to check your calendar to make sure the year isn’t 1984!

In February 1981, postal inspectors busted a Mississippi man for distributing a 42-page booklet he wrote, published, and advertised which explained his theory of how fresh foods, when properly prepared, could help to keep one’s arteries clean. “$4.40 a copy plus 60 cents for postage. Makes a fine gift. Order extra copies for your friends,” the ad read. Sounds pretty harmless so far, right?

Certainly not! At least according to postal authorities. Mr. Ford, our fresh food advocate, was charged with “engaging in the conduct of a scheme or device to obtain money or property through the mail by means of materially false representations in violation of 39 U.S.C. 30005.” The case went to trial before one Edwin Bernstein, a Federal Administrative Law Judge, who found Mr. Ford guilty as charged. The verdict was appealed and upheld. Not on the grounds that the ad misrepresented the information provided in the booklet, but because “the representations of the booklet were contrary to the weight of informed medical and scientific opinion.” As a result, Mr. Ford was forced to take his booklet — his ideas — off the market.

Maureen Salaman, President of the National Health Federation, is justifiably concerned over the Ford decision. “Those of us who are concerned with developing new, innovative and poison-free approaches to health care do so knowing that the present-day ‘weight of scientific and medical opinion’ see things differently,” writes Ms. Salaman. “The ‘weight of informed medical and scientific opinion’ once held that the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around the earth, that ‘bleeding’ a sick person was a cure for illness. . . . Where new ideas have been suppressed, the growth of human knowledge has stagnated. Where free inquiry has been encouraged, progress has been made in years rather than centuries.”

It’s a frightening proposition that the postal service, under present legislation, can arbitrarily suppress ideas with which it does not fully agree. Their censorship, if carried to a consistent conclusion, could therefore apply to more than medical publications that dare to contradict informed opinion. Consider all the publications that resist accepted or “informed” economic, philosophical, political, and psychological opinion! You can kiss The Libertarian Forum goodbye. And save some kisses for anything written by people like Mises, Rand, Hayek, Nock, Chodorov, Szasz, Barnes, ad infinitum.

Keep the precedent established in the Ford case in your mind while you read what is now pending in Congress.

H.R. 3973, introduced in the House by Rep. Claude (“Red”) Pepper (D., Fla.), and S. 1407, introduced by David Pryor (D. Ark.) in the Senate, were proposed to help stop “mail fraud.” Under this guise, the bills have attracted support by 300 cosponsors in the House and 16 in the Senate. President Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget has duly given these bills its support.

The bills will give new, expanded powers to the U.S. Postal Service to regulate what is being sent through the mail, allowing it to serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury in determining the guilt of the accused party. The bills would require the accused to open his business records to postal inspection or face a maximum $10,000 per day penalty. If one is simply an employee or agent of the accused, he or she can be held in violation as well. (Employees of Laissez Faire Books, watch out!) Moreover, the bills could also forbid the shipment or transportation of the banned publication by a private vehicle or any other means of transport, as well as through the mails.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, “an average of at least one book a year has been successfully banned by the U.S. Postal Service during the past 20 years.” Publishers, needless to say, want to end this practice. The Association of American Publishers retained Ian D. Volner to testify before a House Post Office subcommittee and ask that proposed legislation to greatly expand “police powers of the Postal Service be amended to bar ‘an unfortunate tradition of suppression’ of books it believes to contain ‘false ideas.’ ”

Volner charged that since 1959 “the Postal Service has attacked at least 17 books and publications outright, and has proceeded against many others.” He added that there may be numerous other cases because “the sale of many other books via the mails has been interrupted by proceedings that ended in settlement or capitulation by the publishers — thus leaving little written record of the nature of the book or of the complaint against it.”

Ms. Salaman believes that “this bill stands a very good chance of becoming law this year. . . in the name of protecting the public from false representation.” She feels that the fight can be won “but it will take a maximum effort to succeed.” The National Health Federation, after winning “this round in the ongoing battle for good health and freedom,” will go on the offensive. They propose to “get a bill through Congress abolishing the government monopoly on postal service, so that never again will would-be Thought Police be able to come so close to eliminating freedom of choice and freedom of thought in the land of the free.” Hard core!

If H.R. 3973 and S. 1407 are passed, forget about constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, ideas, and expression. The post office will let us know what we can read and which ideas are acceptable for dissemination and consumption. Orwell was right. He was just a little optimistic about the year. The Thought Police may be at our mail boxes two years early!

THE ASSAULT ON ABORTION FREEDOM

Debating vital issues is fine and proper; but there must come a time when debate gives way to action, else there is no point to a debate to begin with. Over the years, the Lib. Forum has probably given more space to the pros and cons of the abortion question than has any other libertarian periodical. With all due respect to our colleagues who believe that abortion is murder and therefore unjustifiable and criminal, the time for action on the abortion issue has now arrived. We can wait no longer to attempt to convert every libertarian on this question. For the rights, the lives, the liberties, the happiness of countless women in America are now under severe assault. The right to abortion, finally recognized by the Supreme Court in 1973, is in grave danger.

After holding off his Moral Majority supporters for a year, President Reagan has now given the green light to federal attempts to stamp out abortion by law. The two major attempts are the Hatch Amendment to allow any state to outlaw abortion, and the Helms bill to declare the fetus as human with full human rights from the moment of conception. The Hatch effort, being a constitutional amendment, is not an imminent threat, since it would have to go through the drawn-out ratification process by three-quarters of the states. The Helms bill is more radical and sweeping, and can pass by a mere majority of Congress. It must be stopped.

One point that our anti-abortionists have never considered should be emphasized here, a point which the Helms bill would throw into sharp relief. The fundamental axiom of the anti-abortionists is that abortion is murder. But murder is not the only crime against human beings. If the fetus is to have full human rights, then it must be protected against more crimes than murder. There is, for example, assault. Surely, when a pregnant woman drinks alcohol, or smokes cigarettes, this ingestion causes an assault against, an “insult to,” the fetus. But, in that case, these are tort actions which must be declared illegal, and stoppable by injunction. And not just cigarettes and alcohol. If a pregnant woman eats an unbalanced diet, the fetus suffers. If a pregnant woman is overly emotional, this injures the fetus. But then all these actions become torts and crimes, and must be proceeded against by full majesty of the law.

Okay, pro-lifers, are you willing to accept the ineluctable consequences; that pregnant women are to be prevented by armed force from drinking, smoking, eating unbalanced meals, and becoming upset? And how many Gestapo members are you going to enlist in snooping on pregnant women, and how in blazes are you going to enforce the protection of these fetal “rights”? How are you going to accomplish all this except by putting every pregnant woman in a cage and making sure that all the proper substances and none of the improper substances are going to be ingested by the fetus?

For that is the logic of the anti-abortionists: not just trying and convicting all pregnant women and their doctors who engage in abortions, but installing a totalitarian despotism over every pregnant woman. To go a step further: won’t there have to be government spies in every bedroom to spot pregnancies as soon as they occur, so that the pregnant-women-in-a-cage doctrine can be put into effect the moment conception takes place?

Will the REAL Tom Palmer Please Stand Up?

by Derrick “Ed” Welles

Taxation is one of the most important features of Statism that libertarians can assail. Not just because extorting taxes from people is one of the multifarious ways in which the State commits wide-scale aggression, or even because it’s one of the most obvious and burdensome forms of oppression, but also because the continuation of many of government’s other aggressive activities depend on the steady influx of funds to finance them. Thus it is fitting for, and indeed behooves, libertarians to assail the concept of taxation and to struggle against taxes.

Much to our surprise and delight, the New York Times ran a piece on Tax Day, April 15, attacking taxation. It was written by a libertarian — by that LP veteran and Koch-era SLS officer, Tom Palmer. Painfully aware of his previous association with the low-tax liberal forces who managed the Clark campaign, SLS, Cato and many other libertarian institutions through 1981, we were doubly pleased to read these words from Tom Palmer’s pen:

While the Internal Revenue Service boasts of a ‘voluntary compliance’ system of tax collection, the fact is that taxation is carried out at the point of a gun. If you choose not to pay — whatever reason — armed men will seize you and forcibly take you to jail. If you resist, violence will be used against you. This is not ‘voluntary compliance.’ It is theft.

Bravo Tom!

Only a few weeks later, we received our copy of Update, the Craniac organ. Amid the routine (and silly) denunciations of everyone known to have resisted their control, and the gushy praise for anyone who does submit to their benevolent rule, was quoted another Tom Palmer statement:

. . .(T)here have been other negative reactions to Project Liberty’s strategy (of Libertarians’ advocating repeal of the Income Tax Amendment — Ed.). Tom Palmer. . .told Update that most voters ‘perceive drives to amend the constitution as “kooky,” unless they have a tremendous amount of support, as in the case of the Equal Rights Amendment or the Balanced Budget Amendment.’ He said this particular drive, which was started by the Liberty Amendment Committee over fifty years ago, has ‘definite right-wing connotations in the eyes of the media.’

Whew, Tom, how can we keep up with you? Just this April past you were describing taxation as theft. Now you criticize trying to abolish the income tax as having “right-wing connotations.” Are we supposed to think that it’s bad to address issues and call for action on them, just because they have “right-wing connotations”? Then perhaps we oughtn’t talk about property rights or the free market because these, too, are tainted with “right-wing connotations.” Let’s let the CIA, Selective Service, and EPA continue their fine work financed by taxation we’re afraid to attack. Which is the real Tom Palmer: the public Tom Palmer who stands steadfast for libertarian principle, or the private (intra-movement) Tom Palmer who counsels his fellow libertarians to avoid “right-wing connotations”?

But maybe we’re being a bit unfair to Tom. Update preceded his remarks by saying “there have been other negative reactions” to the income-tax repeal campaign promoted by Project Liberty (which was founded by Craniac critic David Nolan — perhaps reason enough for Update to reject the anti-tax strategy), whereupon Tom was quoted, presumably to illustrate one of these “negative reactions.” So we read his quote accordingly. Upon closer reading, however, the statement that an issue has “right-wing connotations” doesn’t necessarily imply disapproval. It’s simply a sentence expressing Tom Palmer’s view on what the media thinks of the issue. It needn’t mean that he disapproves of taking up a “right-wing” issue. If so, our apologies go to Tom, and all our venom goes instead to Update for printing Tom’s remarks in a misleading manner — or, at least, for once more making impressive-looking claims unfavorable to Craniac opponents (“there have been other negative reactions to Project Liberty”) without a shred of substantiation.

That politician tops his part,

Who readily can lie with art:

The man’s proficient in his trade;

His pow’r is strong, his fortune’s made.

— John Gay

The field of politics always presents the same struggle. There are the Right and the Left, and in the middle is the Swamp. The Swamp is made up of the know-nothings, of them who are without ideas, of them who are always with the majority.

— August Bebel

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

DON’T CRY FOR IRAQ

Watch out: if Iran continues to do well in its war against Iraq, the Kept Press will complete a process already begun — the magical transformation of the Iraqi regime from Soviet puppet to free-world hero. Only a year or two ago, Iraq was supposed to be a vicious tool of the Soviet Union; now already it is becoming a free-world bulwark against Khomeini Shiite expansionism.

Before we all get swept away by the new line, what are the facts? In the first place, let’s not forget that it was the Iraq regime that launched the war in September 1980. After winning spectacular victories, the Iraq army was ground to a halt. Finally, during 1982, Iran began to drive Iraq out of its territory, at the same time rejecting typical demands by the United States for a cease-fire. (“Typical” in the sense that ceasefire calls are generally a pacifist-seeming mask for leaving existing conquests intact.) In June, the expulsion process was completed, and on July 14, Iran began its retaliatory invasion of Iraq. So, on the level of who started the war, the culpability is clearly Iraq’s, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein can hardly be taken seriously now in griping about Irani expansionism. In short, Iran did not launch the war.

What of Iraq’s original demands? Were they justifiable? They were border demands, breaking a 1975 agreement between the two countries on long-standing territorial disputes. Hussein’s case was mixed; it is true that the agreement was forced upon him by the Shah of Iran’s regime; and it is also true that three islands at the mouth of the Persian gulf are ethnically Arab and not Persian. On the other hand, the major territorial claim — of Iraq sovereignty over the Shatt-al-Arab waterway — is an arrogant attempt to “own” the entire river, whereas Iran chose the sensible course of splitting sovereignty down the middle of the river: in effect, joint sovereignty over the river. On the whole, then, it would seem that Iraq’s case scarcely justified launching the war.

Don’t cry for Iraq in another sense. The Iraq regime is a despicable dictatorship under the totalitarian despotism of Saddam Hussein, whose picture graces every home and office in Iraq. Hussein rules through the socialist Ba’ath Party, which has cells and cadres in every government department, school, and neighborhood. Speech and press are curbed by the fact that no Iraqi is allowed to own a typewriter without license from the government. When Saddam Hussein launched the invasion of Iran, his controlled media hailed the conflict as “Saddam’s Qadesiyya,” the notable seventh century battle in which the Arabs drove the Persians out of Mesopotamia. This time, however, Saddam drove out of Mesopotamia and into Iran.

But even more important: the Khomeini regime carries with it the inspiration of Shiite fundamentalism, attempting to uproot Hussein, who is not only a secular socialist, but also the ruler of a Sunni Muslim minority over a Shiite majority in Iraq. The key, as so often in world history, is religion, and the Saddam dictatorship is minority rule of Sunni over Shiite. Hence, the Iranians might possibly be able to inspire the Shiite masses, not only in Iraq, but also on the east coast of Saudi Arabia, to rise up and try to control their own destinies. Which might mean that the feudal-slave owning oil barons of the Middle East might be toppled from their thrones: and where would U.S. oil imperialism be then? Hence the U.S. drift toward Iraq which might be coming in the next few months.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 7 September, 1982

BLOCKBUSTER AT BILLINGS

On Sunday, August 8, in Billings, Montana, only a few miles from where the imbecile General Custer got mowed down at the Little Big Horn, the National Committee of the Libertarian Party held one of the most dramatic and significant meetings in its history. Eric O’Keefe, ex-radical turned Craniac National Director, was ousted from his long-held post by National Chair Alicia Clark. Alicia’s right to fire O’Keefe was upheld by the NatCom by a vote of 17-11, after which it was approved by 20-7 Alicia’s naming of former Texas LP Chair Honey Lanham as interim Director for a six-month period.

1. The Chairman’s Right to Fire vs. Bureaucratic Usurpation

LP Bylaws and long-standing custom have granted the National Chair the absolute right to fire the National Director, who is a full-time employee of the NatCom. Furthermore, the Chairman has the sole right to name a new Director, subject to the approval or rejection of NatCom. The reason for this elementary managerial practice is obvious: the Chair works in close day-to-day contact with the Director, and the two must be able to work well together. Therefore, even if the Chair’s firing of the Director was simply personal chemistry, it should have been upheld without question or complaint.

On Sunday morning, before the meeting, Alicia Clark asked O’Keefe for his resignation. Any gentleman, concerned about alleviating trouble for the Party, would have resigned without question. But not only did O’Keefe refuse to resign, he stubbornly refused to accept the Chair’s right to fire him. In the tense opening hours of the Sunday meeting, O’Keefe persisted in claiming that Alicia had no right to fire him, and maintaining that he was and would continue to be the National Director, and would resume his duties in Washington promptly. Things were getting hairy. Would O’Keefe have to be ejected from headquarters for trespass?

Suffused with bureaucratic megalomania, furthermore, O’Keefe made stump speeches, virtually adopting an “I am the Party” attitude, and maintaining his own indespensability to Party success. By taking this absurd and arrogant line, O’Keefe unwittingly helped demonstrate to one and all the necessity for his ouster. What we were all seeing in action was the behavior of a runaway, power-hungry National Director, whose dismissal clearly came none too soon

Taking up O’Keefe’s preposterous assertion of his immunity from discharge by the Chair was the stunned, shocked, and apoplectic Crane Machine, led by “Mr. Robert’s Rules” himself, Jim Johnston. In a claim even more idiotic than usual, Johnson asserted that the Chair did not even have a legal right to rule on his point of order. (It is said that every year the Illinois LP auctions off, at high rates, Jimmie’s dog-eared copy of his previous year’s Robert’s Rules). Johnston even had the discourtesy to block unanimous consent to allow the NatCom to hear the arguments of the Chair’s parliamentarian, I. Dean Ahmad. Alicia of course ruled against Johnston’s point, and the motion went to the full NatCom. It needed a two-thirds majority to overrule the Chair, but the Chair won out on her right to fire O’Keefe by the comfortable majority of 17 to 11.

2. The Craniacs Go Wild

The chair submitted the name of Honey Lanham as Interim Director. The Craniacs then began to pepper Alicia with questions about Honey Lanham’s background, including many insulting ones. It was particularly fascinating to see the self-styled Best and Brightest, the supposedly tough cool young political professionals and would-be Haldemans, lose their cool and give way to insult, rancor, and ranting hysteria. Thus, when told that Honey Lanham had been an able Texas chair and asked what Honey’s occupation is, Madame DeFarge Leslie Key burst out, with sneering contempt in her voice: “She sells cosmetics.” Never was elitism more odiously displayed at an LP meeting. When Andrea Rich badgered Alicia with the question: “How does Honey Lanham make her money?”, a NatCom member, a person conceded by everyone to be one of the finest and kindest gentlemen in the Libertarian Party, was moved to burst out, in a rare display of anger, “That’s none of your business, Mrs. Rich!”

When one NatCom member asked about Lanham’s managerial experience, former chairman Dave Bergland incisively pointed out that the three previous directors, including O’Keefe, had had virtually no managerial experience before being hired.

The Lanham appointment was finally confirmed by a vote of 20 to 7, with one abstention (Craniac DeLisio, the only one left to really believe the Johnston nonsense and to go even further to claim that the firing was still illegal, even though now confirmed by the NatCom). The seven opponents were the hard-core Craniacs: Herbert, Hocker, Johnston, Key, Palm, Andrea Rich and Howie Rich. The Craniacs had lost the votes of three members who had earlier voted against the ruling of the chair: Richman, Hodge (Fla.), and Hemming (Minn.).

Meanwhile, O’Keefe’s threat of insisting that he was still the National Director was hanging in the air. After the NatCom had decisively upheld Alicia Clark’s actions, Emil Franzi (Az.) asked O’Keefe the crucial zinger. “Well, Eric, do you still think that you’re the National Director?” For the first time, O’Keefe’s arrogance faltered “Well, I’m not sure.” The threat was over, and a bit later, O’Keefe declared that he was advised by “my parliamentarian” that he was no longer National Director. It was a minor but interesting note to discover that Eric had brought his own “parliamentarian” in tow. Who it was never got brought out, but one likes to think that it was the irrepressible Jimmy Johnston, “Mr. Roberts” himself, silenced at long last.

During the course of the proceedings and particularly after the Lanham vote, the Craniacs kept delaying matters with ranting “points of personal privilege,” which turned into lengthy harangues. Although they had not criticized the Monroe, Hanson, and Franzi committee reports of the day before, the Craniacs let loose against them in many revealing broadsides. Thus, Madame Defarge hurled irrelevant and inchoate insults left and right, denouncing Matt Monroe, head of the Finance Committee, claiming that he had not raised any money; Franzi, head of the Membership Committee, for not adding members; and even M.L. Hanson, head of the Minority Outreach Committee, for sending out questionnaires later than Defarge would have liked. The point, however, as brought out the day before, was that Monroe’s fund-raising efforts were stymied by O’Keefe and national headquarters, and Franzi’s were handcuffed by an egregious computer problem which headquarters had done nothing about. (As Franzi inimitably put it, “we can’t add members if there is no way of knowing who the members are.”)

The attack on Monroe was particularly asinine, since Monroe is widely respected throughout the Party for his famous and successful Texas Pledge program for Party fundraising. For a pipsqueak like Key to try to heap mud on Monroe was not only deplorable; it could only be counterproductive for whatever credibility she might have had left in the Party.

But the most revealing ranting of the day was emitted by Howie Rich, possibly the top Craniac straw boss on NatCom. In her explanation of why she fired O’Keefe, Alicia had mentioned that Eric had repeatedly failed to carry out NatCom and her own directives to: expand much-needed internal education, help build state parties, and assist in fund-raising. All these three vital areas of activity were grievously and consistently neglected by O’Keefe, despite Alicia Clark’s repeated urgings. What he had done instead was to devote virtually all Headquarters’ resources to campaigning, particularly to assisting the Craniac ventures of Howie Rich’s Campaign of ’82 and especially the Randolph race for governor of Alaska. In the course of his phillipic, Howie Rich thundered that all these other matters were “peripheral,” that only campaigns really counted. Evidently, ideas, principles, state parties and even financial stability could go hang. There spoke the naked, sinister voice of the Crane Machine.

After the vote and the ineffectual ranting were over, the Craniacs all walked out of the meeting, never (with the exception of Hocker and Palm) to return. This childish action capped one of the most inglorious days in Craniac history. I can see Crane’s reaction now: “Why am I keeping these turkeys on the payroll?”

3. The Shockeroo

The shock and stupefaction of the Craniacs on August 8 showed what fools these Best and Brightest really are. The ouster had been building up for months, as Alicia tried repeatedly and in vain to get O’Keefe to expend resources her (and NatCom’s) way. Instead, O’Keefe had his own agenda, the Craniac agenda for the Party. And yet, despite their knowledge that Alicia could fire Eric at any time, the Crane Machine walked into Billings heedless and unconcerned, so heedless indeed, that no less than four Craniac members failed to show up at what looked to be just another boring meeting (Burch, Randolph, Lindsay, Guida.) It was General Custer once again, marching with heedless arrogance onto the Little Big Horn.

Obviously, the Craniacs were stupidly overconfident because they grossly underestimated the competence, strength, and determination of Alicia Clark. All of us in the Mason and Guida camps greatly underestimated Alicia last year. The difference is that we, in the Mason camp, learned differently very quickly, while the Craniacs still haven’t learned, and probably never will. As one perceptive wag put it, “The Craniacs are learning-disabled. They suffer from a closed information loop.” And they still are, as revealed by a top Craniac coming up to Bill Evers (Ca.) after the Lanham vote, and saying bitterly, “You, Bill, are solely responsible for this.” Why are they incapable of understanding that Alicia makes her own decisions?

The most ironic note of all is that, on Friday August 6, after the Craniacs had departed for Billings, the Headquarters staff was sitting around Washington, D.C. talking about the upcoming meeting. What was likely to happen? Well, they concluded, four Crane Machine people are not going to show up at Billings. What might the opposition do if they have the votes? Fire Eric. So the staff was neither shocked nor surprised, while the top Haldemanian politicos blundered their way into disaster. Why, indeed are they on the payroll, Eddie?

This of course was not the main reason that O’Keefe was ousted, as we will detail below. But the top Craniacs should have been at least as alert as their subordinate staff.

4. Why She Did It

To those who had eyes to see, the gathering storm should have been evident at the superficially boring proceedings on the previous day, Saturday August 7. For the buildup of anti-O’Keefe evidence became overwhelming. It was these damaging revelations that sparked the final decision of Alicia on Saturday night to ask for O’Keefe’s resignation for the following morning.

Perhaps the most damaging disclosure was the Finance Committee report by the highly respected Matt Monroe, a report which the bored Craniacs hardly attempted to challenge. Monroe reported that under O’Keefe tutelage, the heavy NatCom debt, instead of being paid off, had increased since the beginning of the present NatCom term in September 1981. Even more irresponsible in view of the LP’s shaky financial shape was the change in the nature of the debt. For some of the long-term debt had been paid off, but only by seriously increasing the short-term debt to various vendors in Washington, D.C. Monroe wrote ominously that “this debt should be rolled back as much as possible if we are to function among vendors in Washington, D.C.” He continued by warning: “Our effectiveness in the future will depend, not only on the amount of money and candidates we can raise but also on our credibility with local merchants who provide us with their merchandise and allow us to use credit. At this time there are few of those, if any, left in the Washington, D.C. area who are willing to extend us credit.”

And yet, despite the seriousness of the financial situation, Monroe reported that, “My impression is that the financial and fund raising activities are low priority items at this time in the minds of the people who manage the National office.” In trying to launch a monthly pledge program for the national party, Monroe found in despair that “I have requested help from Eric O’Keefe and have not received it.” As a result, Monroe reported that he would instead have to do all the work in Houston with local Houston volunteers, since O’Keefe and headquarters would not cooperate. Monroe also noted that he had requested assistance from the previous Finance Chair [Leslie Graves Key], but had received no “promises or advice in matters of fund raising.”

The most poignant and damaging theme to O’Keefe in the Monroe report was: “My belief is that the National Office should have people who are able to and capable of working with volunteers.”

The clear implication, of course, is that O’Keefe and his crew were not capable of doing so. Working with volunteers, including—as Monroe made clear in his oral statement— Monroe himself, is of course the warp and woof of political activity. But the paid bureaucratic staff, in typical arrogance aping their mentor Crane, were not equipped to do so. But if the pros are not capable of working with volunteers, they might as well shut up shop. Or be fired.

The Monroe revelation stunned Alicia, as did Bill Evers’ motion requesting that the headquarters staff devote ten hours a week to developing internal education in the Party. What dismayed Alicia Clark is that a NatCom member should have to plead that ten hours a week be devoted to a task which headquarters should be doing far more of, automatically and voluntarily. Another nail had been hammered into the O’Keefe coffin.

If O’Keefe & Co. were incapable of working with volunteers, they were apparently even less able to work with many state parties. Bitter letters were read into the record on Saturday by the state central committee of the Louisiana LP and by the chairman of the New Mexico LP denouncing O’Keefe, headquarters and its practices. Hie Louisiana Party wrote of national’s “arm-twisting recruitment [of candidates] process,” and declared that “at this point we don’t know if we are victims of an overzealous staff, poor management, an amateur con game, or a combination of all three.” Christa Bolden, New Mexico LP chair, wrote bitterly of “the ineptitude, incompetence and lack of trustworthiness demonstrated by the individuals purportedly in charge of National Headquarters.” O’Keefe’s failure to pay petitioners in New Mexico as promised, led to Ms. Bolden’s conclusion: “It is up to the people running the National Party to support state organizations where possible, and part of this support may require a realistic evaluation of what can be done. It is counterproductive to make promises which can’t be fulfilled. I don’t think Jimmy Carter understood that concept, and the only solution was to replace him.” Precisely.

Another dramatic Saturday moment revealing the temperament and character of Eric O’Keefe came when Bill Evers questioned him on his headquarters report, and asked him how many and which people might have tried to persuade him to adopt the strategy outlined in the infamous secret Hocker memorandum which had been published in the June 1982 issue of the Libertarian Vanguard (a frankly Crane Machine memo attacking the Clarks, obscenely denouncing the Machine’s enemies, and calling for a name Presidential candidate the Machine can control). O’Keefe lost his cool, evaded answering the question, and bellowed that he would not answer an “unsigned article published in a disreputable rag.” Evers mildly commented that Hocker, sitting in the room, would not deny writing the memo (Hocker smilingly said nothing.) Evers could have added that not many years ago, turncoat O’Keefe had sat on the editorial board of this selfsame “disreputable rag.” Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear?

Another important Saturday moment was the Region V report of Emil Franzi. In a slap at the Rich-Crane-O’Keefe emphasis on numbers of candidates, regardless of quality, Franzi wrote: “The Arizona Party has asked me to comment on the constant push by certain NatCom members for more and more candidates. After having been burned in the past by turkeys and embarrassments, Arizona has decided that the idea is to have as many good candidates as possible, not just a lot of names of warm bodies on a ballot. This fixation with ‘body-counts’ is as fallacious as Westmoreland’s. The thought that somewhere there is a magic number of votes for LP stiffs that will somehow cause Dan Rather to suddenly pay attention to us is as realistic as ‘the light at the end of the tunnel.’ It’s time the LP really thought out what it wants candidates for, instead of having them for the sake of it.”

But the most damaging revelation from the point of view of libertarian principle was the June 15 memo from O’Keefe to Howie Rich on “Campaign Issue Selection,” setting forth O’Keefe’s strategy for the campaign. In the first place, this odiously sellout memo was sent to Rich over the head of Sheldon Richman, chairman of the outreach committee and supposedly Rich’s boss, to the justifiable complaint of Richman. In addition, O’Keefe’s Craniac strategy is horrendous, and represents another giant step downward in the degeneration of Craneism into blatant and total opportunism. Proposals by LP candidates, declared O’Keefe, must be confined to “proposals which voters can believe could be implemented in the near term. Like the Clark campaign’s proposals, they should be essentially first year proposals. . . Congressional candidates have only two short year terms, so voters shouldn’t be expected to support a candidate who wants to start work on a proposal that would take five years to pass. Of course the proposals should be radical, but they should be proposals which could at least conceivably be passed next year.”

O’Keefe’s strategic concept is breathtaking in its iniquity. One year proposals, indeed! Take this advice, and our candidates, far from calling for dismantling the State, would have to confine themselves to something like attacking Reagan for his $100 billion tax increase. So why not become Jack Kemp Republicans already, and be done with it? Do we really need sellout artists wrapping themselves in the noble name Libertarian peddling Republocrat hogwash? As one prominent LP leader wrote, in justifiable outrage at this infamous memo, it “was the usual collection of gradualist Craniac bilge we have come to expect from Eric and his cohorts.”

There were other revealing passages in O’Keefe’s memo to Rich. One: “No particular civil liberties issue seems nationally prominent right now.” So much for civil liberties. Oh really, Eric? And what about the massive assault on abortion rights looming in Congress? And what of federal drug enforcement? And grandson of S.1.? And the unleashing of the FBI and CIA, etc. And the Post Office Bill? But I suppose none of that could be handled realistically, pragmatically, in one year’s time

Not content with these ideological crimes, O’Keefe capped it all by denouncing Project Liberty, a superb program launched this year by Dave Nolan, LP founder. Project Liberty is dedicated to raising the banner of abolition of the income tax and repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment to that end. Project Liberty is trying to get LP candidates to pledge themselves to making abolition of the income tax a major campaign issue. Madame Defarge had already denounced Project Liberty viciously in the Craniac smear sheet UpChuck [Update], Here, O’Keefe, while grudgingly admitting that taxation is a key issue to most voters, added that “we need a workable first-year proposal for next year’s budget.” Well, sure Eric, I guess chances are not very realistic for abolishing the income tax in 1983, so we have to drop that one.

O’Keefe, in his repellent memo, urges that all LP candidates attack the Republicans and Democrats and explain why we need a Libertarian Party. Well, I’ll bite, why do we need a Libertarian Party if we all must confine ourselves to “realistic” proposals that have a good chance of passing next year—a task for which the Republocrats are far better equipped than we? Eric then takes up a couple of common LP answers which he brusquely dismisses as “inadequate” because “very few people can identify with them.” One was that “I realized that the Libertarian Party was the only party which recognized my right to lead my life as I see fit. . .”. Another brusquely dismissed notion was that the LP “stands for complete individual liberty on all issues. . .” So what is O’Keefe’s substitute for these excellent compact statements? “I can’t tell the difference between Republicans and Democrats. . . We need some fresh ideas and a real change.” Go ahead say it, Eric: we need a new beginning. And we got one, but with Ronnie Reagan.

For this monstrosity alone, Eric O’Keefe should have been sacked, and sacked hard, and Rich and his cohorts along with him.

Alicia Clark came into the chairmanship race determined to bring unity to the Libertarian Party, and to rise above seemingly petty and useless factional disputes. When she came into office, she was open to all NatCom members and factions, and distributed committee posts and functions with an even hand. But she found that O’Keefe & Co. would not cooperate. It was their way or nothing. She saw O’Keefe and the Headquarters Staff keep to their own agenda, and so, after a long train of abuses, she finally acted, and acted with decision and dispatch. Just as we learned about Alicia, Alicia seems to have learned about the nature of the Crane Machine.

As one top Clark adviser of 1981 put it recently, with his usual wit and flair: “A year ago I believed in unity and balance in the Party, and an end to all the petty bickering and faction fighting. I’m a slow learner but I’ve learned, and now I make Rothbard look like a moderate on the Crane Question.”

5. What Next?

So what’s next? Well of one thing we can be certain: every NatCom member, including the blind, the lame, and the halt, is going to show up at the next meeting on December 3-5, at Orlando, Florida. No one is going to miss the action.

I would remind our readers that so far our Military Maven has been stunningly prophetic, and hasn’t missed a shot. As early as our May 1982 issue, we reported that the Military Maven told us after the Houston NatCom meeting in late March: “Murray, it’s France in 1940 and they’re the French. They’re punchy, they don’t know what’s going to hit them next.” Indeed.

The Maven’s comment after Billings harked back to the Okinawa analogy which he had coined after the November 1981 NatCom meeting at Bethesda. Then he had forecast that “they’ve peaked and are going into a decline. It’s Okinawa in World War II and they’re the Japs. They have all the bunkers, but we’ve secured the landing strip and we’ve planted the flag. We can expect a lot of banzai charges, but I hope they have plenty of saki and rice stored up, because they ain’t getting any more supplies. All the freighters off shore are ours.” The Military Maven’s comment after Billings: “We launched a flame thrower into their bunker.” Or, to use an alternate military model: “Tora! Tora! Tora!” In fact, O’Keefe and his headquarters crew—the major Craniac foco in the LP—have now been cleaned out.

We can expect some banzai charges from the full Cranian membership on NatCom from now on, but the scene of the action is bound to shift in the coming year. For bereft of national office and national headquarters, dominant in only a handful of state parties, the Crane Machine has only one shot left: as forecast by the secret Hocker memo—they must attempt to storm the Presidential convention in New York and nominate a “name” candidate whom Crane and his Machine can control. That is their only hope, and their plan must be stopped. The Crane Machine must not pass at New York. If we defeat whatever patsy the Machine puts up, we may confidently expect that Crane and his minions will wither away, and allow the Party to grow and flourish once again as the true Party of Principle.

6. Late Flash!

On Wednesday, August 11, three days after Billings, Alicia Clark and Honey Lanham held an unprecedented press conference call with representatives from three libertarian publications: frontlines, Update, and the Lib. Forum. During the Q. and A., several interesting items emerged:

(1) When asked whether she intends to run for re-election as National Chair, Alicia Clark replied: “I wish I could say that I won’t run again, but I can’t.” This of course opens the door for Alicia to run again, and to complete the work she has launched.

(2) Alicia reported that in the few short days since Billings, a considerable amount of money has poured into National Headquarters as a vote of confidence in the new regime.

((3) Honey Lanham stated that the office staff had resigned (Craniacs all), that replacements had been hired, and that the principled and intelligent Kathleen Jacob, head of SLS who had been working part-time at the Headquarters, will now edit (or at least “work on”) LP News. This shows that Ms. Lanham can install a new regime with efficiency and dispatch, and also shows that she can tell quality and competence when she sees it.

(4) Ms. Lanham stated that she will definitely apply for the post of permanent National Director when the interim term runs out in six months.

THE DEATH OF REAGANOMICS

Reaganomics is stone cold dead. President Reagan has managed to precipitate the worst recession/depression since World War II, and one which shows no signs of disappearing. Interest rates remain super high, to such an extent that any possible recovery from the depression will be fitful and weak. Big Spender Reagan is presiding over the biggest budget and by far the biggest deficit in American history. The estimate for the looming deficit keeps leaping upward; only a few weeks ago it was $99 billion; now it is $140 billion.

In an idiotic attempt to cure the depression, High Tax Reagan has replaced his piddling “tax cut” that was really an increase in 1981-82, with the most massive tax increase in American history. What school of economic thought counsels tax increases in depression? Answer: this has been the unique contribution of Reaganomics. Let us note with horror what the Reagan-inspired Senate tax package does:

It raises taxes on the backs of the sick, drastically cutting income-deductible medical expenses by raising the threshold from 3% to 7% of gross income.

It imposes withholding taxes on dividends and interest, which will cripple small investors, greatly reduce thrift and investment, and put the boots to the ailing savings and loan industry.

It sharply raises taxes on business by gutting the depreciation exemptions made only last year, and by eliminating one-half the deductions for business expenses for meals when not traveling: thus also clobbering the restaurant industry.

It heavily taxes high-income retirement plans, only a year after investors were suckered into these plans by government and Establishment propaganda.

It greatly raises taxes on the backs of the unlucky, by restricting tax deductions for uninsured casualty losses to over 10% of one’s income.

It taxes pensions and utility dividends.

It drastically curtails the “safe-harbor leasing” provision of last year’s tax reform which enabled firms making losses to sell their tax credits to firms making profits. Thus, businesses will be further clobbered.

It further penalizes smokers by doubling the federal tax on cigarettes, thus adding increased taxation to the hazards of social obloquy and lung cancer already suffered by smokers.

In the midst of a drastic recession and looming bankruptcy for many airlines, it drastically increases federal taxes on passenger tickets, air freight, and aviation and jet fuel. That’s really smart, Ronnie!

It injures everyone who uses a phone by tripling the federal tax on phone service.

In case one wants to get away from the disaster of Reaganomics by going fishing, it levies a stiff excise tax on small recreational boats, including rowboats, designed for fishing.

And so High Tax Reagan has struck a body blow at: the sick, the unlucky, telephone users, smokers, pensioners, recreational fishermen, airline users, and interest and dividend receivers. That means all of us. For this monstrosity alone, Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party deserve a smashing defeat at the polls in 1982 and 1984, for that is the only way in which the average citizen can express his indignation at what is going on.

Big budget; enormous deficits; the biggest tax increase in our history; but that is not all. For inflation, which had abated for the last several months in the wake of the grinding depression, has now spurted upwards again. The Administration’s kept economists have tried their best to pooh-pooh this, but the fact remains that in the last two months, May and June, the Consumer Price Index increase has skyrocketed back up to an annual rate of 12%—just about precisely the rate when the Reaganites took over in Washington.

If this reinflation persists, everything will click into place, for interest rates will then start rising inexorably once more, and the great bear market in gold and silver should start turning around in force. And that will be the finish, the Bye Bye Lulu for Reaganomics, for the Republican Party, and for Ronnie himself. No group will have deserved it more.

Continuing with this scenario, the most likely conclusion will be the triumphal march of Teddy Kennedy into Camelot Reborn in November 1984. If it looks like a Teddy victory, then the summer of 1984 should see a massive anticipatory inflation. Will Reagan drive the last nail into his own coffin by imposing price-wage controls, “temporarily” of course? It will be fascinating to see.

Meanwhile, the departure of free-market economists from the Reagan Administration has now become a veritable mass exodus. It began with the highly principled Martin Anderson. Since then, the honor roll of those who (at least presumptively) deserted the fleshpots of Power on behalf of some sort of principle include: John McLaughry (White House), Paul Craig Roberts (Asst. Sec. Treasury), Norman Ture (Undersec. Treasury), Jerry Jordan (Council of Economic Advisors), Murray Weidenbaum (Council of Economic Advisors), and, the most libertarian of them all, Steve Hanke (staff of Council of Economic Advisors). Although a lawyer not an economist, we can add to the list of presumptively principled defectors Doug Bandow (White House), now publisher of Inquiry magazine.

This exodus is too massive and too concentrated to be fobbed off with the usual political bilge of “personal reasons.” But in that case what are we to say of moral status of alleged libertarians or free-market people who are still in place, say Bill Niskanen (Council of Economic Advisors) or Dana Rohrabacher (ex-LeFevrian troubador in the White House)? And what, even further, are we to say of the moral status of alleged libertarians who in a sense have leaped in to fill the gap, and to provide the decaying hulk of the Reagan Administration with at least some sort of libertarian or free-market cover: Pete Ferrara (White House), Lance Lamberton (White House), and David Henderson (staff of Council of Economic Advisors)?

The cases of Lamberton and Henderson are particularly fascinating (fascinating, that is, in the sense of watching the progress of malignant cells). At the very beginning of the Reagan Administration, your editor, in the Lib. Forum and elsewhere, began a crusade to alert the public and the libertarian movement about the anti-libertarian, anti-free market nature of the Reagan policies. Two of the most ardent libertarian defenders of Reagan from these and similar criticisms by Sheldon Richman and others were none other than Comrades Lamberton and Henderson, then private, if not exactly cushily employed, citizens. Both of them are now ensconced in the White House itself. Could this rise to fame and fortune have been a reward for work well done? It would be charming to think so.

Joseph R. Peden, Associate Editor
Daniel M. Rosenthal, Publisher
Dyanne M. Petersen, Associate Publisher
Carmen Accashian, Circulation Manager

SMEAR: THE STORY OF UPDATE— PART II

by Derrick “Ed” Welles

6. Unfulfilled Promises-II

Update for January ’82 “examined” Reason magazine, published by CPP member Bob Poole. It was the latest in a series of attacks on Poole and Reason, criticizing Reason for certain “anti-libertarian heresies” and ‘a pragmatic, as opposed to principled,’ approach to issues. In yet another instance of posing members of their faction as impartial observers. . . Update cited Ed Crane—that pillar of principled libertarian activism—as saying, “‘We all owe Reason a debt of gratitude. . . (W)hile I don’t think Reason can really be called a libertarian magazine, it serves a useful purpose. It’s a good magazine for conservatives because it makes them more aware of the free market, and that’s valuable. Instead of complaining that Reason isn’t libertarian anymore, we should just accept that, and judge it on it’s own terms.’” Crane, while supposedly coming “to Reason’s defense,” continues the smear on that magazine by “accepting” that Reason “isn’t libertarian anymore.” How odd that Crane and Update’s mentors at the Libertarian Review Foundation, who masterminded and managed the 1980 Clark low-tax liberal sellout, should now (now that they’re on the way out, and that principled forces are reasserting themselves) pose as bulwarks of principle, and criticize others for lacking principles!

This article pretended to begin a “two-part examination” of Reason and Inquiry, and concluded by promising that in a “future issue, Update will examine the new, combined Inquiry and Libertarian Review and its contribution to the libertarian movement.” This was in January 1982. As of June, no “second part” had been published. One suspects that, just as the “Name That Author” contest was the only one in a supposed “series,” and served as a potshot at Rothbard, this purported survey of movement magazines was intended to be a potshot at Reason, competitor of Update’s sister publication Inquiry. Update faulted Reason for its conservative orientation, but one wonders whether Update would be equally eager to treat Inquiry as harshly. (Certainly Update did not do that with pre-merger Inquiry’s own heresies, closet libertarianism, and liberal orientation.) Since no article on the new or the old Inquiry has come out, one thinks not.

7. A Phantom Author and a Blind Review

Update continued its unblemished record of illogic and distortion in its February ’82 issue. Two articles in question were each guilty on one of these counts.

An editorial, “Clark TV Spots Off Target,” was critical of the CFP’s television commercials. [Surprise! The people who ran CFP will now critique the people in charge of CFP.] The editorial said “we can sympathize with the reasoning of those running the Clark media effort” [we can sympathize with ourselves], but the ads “assumed a broad public acceptance” of Clark’s legitimacy as a candidate. Later it stated: “The temptation to which the Clark staff [i.e., we] succumbed. . . was the hope that the network news would start reporting on his daily speeches and news releases.”

Update does not disclose the identity of the editorial writer. Knowing who edits and publishes Update, we could figure that someone associated with the CFP/Crane camp wrote it. But Update does not publicly acknowledge that its publishers ran CFP; thus we note their inability to admit openly any errors in the way they ran Clark’s campaign. More ludicrous is their self-congratulation for “surprisingly professional” TV ads that “were ideologically sound.”

The second February article in question is Leslie Key’s hatchet job on the Society for Individual Liberty’s “Principles of Liberty” (POL) study course. Although an extensive analysis of the many flaws in Key’s review is up to SIL and out of place here, certain aspects of the review do fit the Updating tradition of biased reporting and illogic.

SIL’s course is not the only one being promoted by libertarian organizations for study by libertarian groups. SIL has had a lengthy and in-depth study course out for a year. Yet only SIL’s program gets “reviewed” and given prominent mention by Update. SIL’s co-director, Dave Walter, sits on the LNC and was John Mason’s campaign manager for the East. Could this, plus a possible forthcoming Cato home study program, have anything to do with Update’s attack on POL?

Regardless of the truth of these speculations, journalistic and logical mistakes render Key’s “review” invalid. Key assails POL for not giving individuals a “thorough understanding of libertarian principles and the ability to apply these principles to issues.” She offers several quotations that are supposed to give us the idea that certain SIL issue papers are unlibertarian or irrelevant to libertarianism. . . but she fails to name their titles or otherwise cite the sources of these quotes, making it difficult for anyone attempting to establish the truth of her claims, to examine them for himself. (“We present all the facts in a given situation so that our readers may make up their own minds,” said Update just a month earlier.)

One quote by Key that was found (in William Burt’s “Transportation and Regulation”: “Transportation is highly vulnerable to envy,” upon scrutiny of what follows is seen as quite sensible. Transportation is in fact viewed by many as a “basic” and very important industry, one upon which a host of other industries and market activities depend, and which therefore some people might wish to control for their own alleged benefit, and might resent seeing others in control. Taken out of context, as Leslie Key did, the statement looks strange; in context, though, it is perfectly comprehensible.

In another place, Key positively misrepresents the views expressed in an issue paper: “Yet another paper openly advocates development of such ‘defensive technologies’ as ‘assassination of enemy leaders and sabotage’ as the proper ‘libertarian’ course for the U.S. government to pursue. Giving our government license to act as a saboteur and murderer shows no understanding of the nature of the state. . .”

In fact it is Key who shows no understanding of what she reads. The paper in question is Jarret Wollstein’s “U.S. Foreign Policy: The Libertarian Alternative.” While Key is eager to censure Wollstein for advocating the government’s use of sabotage and assassination, the paper does not say that these policies should be adopted by the U.S. (or any) government. (In another paper—“Military Defense Without a State”— Wollstein even discusses sabotage and assassination specifically as voluntary alternatives to government defense.) Key simply reads this into the essay and then lambasts the paper for the flaw that she made up.

Other “quotations” that, according to Key, “confuse” libertarian political philosophy with unrelated moral, psychological, and philosophical doctrine” seem—even if true—reasonable enough to libertarian eyes. Key appears to think that the statement “sexism is morally wrong and irrational” is objectional be in a libertarian study course. Why? Are libertarians to content themselves with living in a “free” society full of sexists? How can a free society even come about if large groups of people think that others are subhuman? How can such people be expected to respect the rights of others they consider inferior?

Furthermore, on the one hand Key criticizes SIL’s foreign-policy papers for taking a “thoroughly pragmatic” point of view. On the other hand, she criticizes other SIL papers for “irrelevant Randian dogma.” Now, if one can’t be pragmatic or dogmatic with respect to issues, what is there left? But perhaps Key chastizes SIL for promoting Randian dogma or irrelevant dogma, not dogma as such. This opens the door for saying that it’s OK to promote Leslie’s own “relevant” dogma instead? Or maybe one should be dogmatic (not pragmatic) on foreign policy, and pragmatic (not dogmatic) on domestic and social issues. How are any of these better than what Key criticizes about SIL? O Leslie, tell us the solution to this quandry, for You are the Key to the Truth!

In March, as the April 15 tax deadline approached, Update asserted that “until 1982 (when the LP National Headquarters joined in the promotion of Tax Protest Day), no coordinated effort has been made to organize libertarians across the country for this purpose.” This was a direct slap in the face of SIL, which has indeed been promoting and staging April 15 tax protests across the country for ten years. But maybe that doesn’t count in the Updated Version of History, since the Craniacs don’t control SIL and do control LP National.

8. Updating Galore

Later in that issue, Update ridiculed an LP State Chairs meeting by beginning its report stating that the meeting had been attended by only four of the 50 chairs. Since the State Chairs Caucus represents an alternative to the LNC, where Craniac forces are strong, it’s not surprising that Update gave such prominance to the number in attendance. Given Update’s bias, one hardly wonders whether Update would report similar adverse facts about pet Craniac organs.

Update also quoted Buck Crouch, meeting organizer, as saying that the Caucus is important because “‘national people wish to control what happens in the states.’” Update then made a point to remark that Crouch “declined to give any examples of this to Update,” as if to imply either that Crouch had no case or didn’t know what he was talking about—either way discrediting a potential competitor to Craniac-controlled LP National. If Update really were interested in reporting all relevant information in order to allow readers to reach their own decisions, they could have cited numerous examples of “national people” controlling “what happens in the states,” including Hocker’s August LNC move to authorize the LP National Director to spend up to $10,000 a month on his favorite state LP ballot drives; or Key’s November proposals to establish LP national goals (which necessarily have to be implemented by state LPs). Impartial reporting leading to truthful conclusions is not, however, Update’s strong suit.

The April issue moaned and griped about “proceduralism” and “bureaucracy” building in the LP, as a result of events at the March NatCom meeting. Of course, according to Update, the “most positive and progress-oriented reports” were by Craniacs Howie Rich and Eric O’Keefe.

Update didn’t seem concerned about “proceduralism” during any previous NatCom meetings, which they controlled. The March meeting was the first in which the Crane faction lost substantial numbers of votes, and their grip on NatCom and the national LP structure began to loosen. Then, and only then, did Update begin to notice signs of “proceduralism” creeping up on the LP. Update had been silent when LNC member Jim Johnston (who voted 100% Craniac) held up the November meeting with his interpretations of Robert’s Rules of Order: and when procedural technicalities prevented Bill Evers for hours from questioning Howie Rich on his lack of performance with the LCC.

Furthermore, the acme of proceduralism came at the Denver 1981 meeting of the old NatCom, at which the Crane Machine used an enormous amount of parliamentary proceduralism to try to block Bill Evers from introducing his resolution condemning the attempt by Crane and Herbert during the Clark Campaign to use the FCC to highjack TV time from the networks. And the leader of this Craniac obstructionism was Leslie Key herself!

Update referred negatively to “other LNC members” who “attempted, with some degree of success, to create more procedural requirements for other people to follow.” Update’s writers have no compunction in the June issue, though, in taking up the same “proceduralism” they criticize in others. They assail Advertising/Publications Review Committee members David Bergland and Bob Poole, charging that Bergland and Poole were not following an LNC resolution mandating review of materials authorized for use in LP educational programs (i.e., SIL’s Principles of Liberty). This they did after chastizing other NatCom members for also complaining that established rules had not been followed! Apparently, in Update’s eyes the issue is not whether one is a “proceduralist” and tries to make or enforce “requirements for other people to follow”: the issue is whether the requirements followed are what Update’s writers want, who is making the requirements and who is to follow them. It’s not what is being said or done, but who is saying or doing it that matters to Update. If it’s Them who are enforcing the requirements, then these are onerous and bad; if it’s Us who are enforcing the requirements upon Them, then these are OK and They are being remiss in their duties if They don’t follow the rules.

Look for Part III in the next issue of Lib. Forum.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 8 October, 1982

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, NY 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

THE MASSACRE

All other news, all other concerns, fade into insignificance beside the enormous horror of the massacre in Beirut. All humanity is outraged at the wanton slaughter of hundreds of men (mainly elderly), women, and children in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The days of the massacre— September 16 to 18—shall truly live in infamy.

There is one ray of hope in this bloodbath: the world-wide outrage demonstrates that mankind’s sensibilities have not, as some have feared, been blunted by the butcheries of the twentieth century or by watching repeated carnage on television. Mankind is still capable of reacting to evident atrocities that are wreaked upon other human beings: be they thousands of miles away or members of a different or even alien religion, culture, or ethnic group. When hundreds of manifest innocents are brutally and systematically slaughtered, all of us who are still fully human cry out in profound protest.

The outrage and protest must be compounded of several elements. First, of course, we must mourn for the poor downtrodden people of Lebanon, especially the Palestinians, who were driven out in 1948 to a reluctant exile from their homes and land. We must mourn for the slaughtered and their remaining families. And for the hundreds of thousands in Lebanon and in Beirut who have been killed, wounded, bombed out, and rendered homeless wanderers by the aggression of the State of Israel.

But mourning and compassion are not enough. As in any mass murder, the responsibility and the guilt for the crime must be pinpointed. For the sake of justice and to try to make sure that such a holocaust—for holocaust it has been—may never happen again.

Who, then, is guilty? On the most immediate and direct level, of course, the uniformed thugs and murderers who committed the slaughter. They consist of two groups of Christian Lebanese, working their will on innocent Muslims: the Christian Lebanese Forces of Major Saad Haddad, and the Christian Phalange, headed by the Gemayel family, now installed in the presidency of Lebanon.

But equally responsible, equally guilty, are the aiders and abettors, the string-pullers, the masters of West Beirut where the slaughter took place: the State of Israel. When the PLO was evacuated from West Beirut, to the fanfare of an international accord and international armed force supervision, the State of Israel saw its way clear to the conquest of Muslim West Beirut. Its protectors gone, the international forces cleared out, the poor huddled people of West Beirut had to put up with the conquest of the Israeli aggressors, who marched in on September 16. It was the deliberate decision of the Israeli government to usher the Phalange and the Lebanese forces into camps, to have them, in Israel’s words, “purify” the camps and rid them of PLO members who might be lurking therein—masquerading, no doubt as babies and children. Israeli tanks guarded the perimeter of Sabra and Shatila to permit the Christians unlimited control of the camps, and Israeli army observation posts on rooftops supervised the scene less than 100 yards from the slaughter.

On Friday, on the scene, Reuters correspondent Paul Eedle spoke to an Israeli colonel who explained about the operation: it was designed to “purify” the area without the direct participation of the Israeli army. This policy is of course all too reminiscent of the Nazi policy on the Eastern front, when the German soldiers stood by and benignly allowed the Ukrainian and other non-German SS to massacre Jews and other natives of Russia.

Also on Friday, it is particularly edifying to know that the Phalangists came to Israeli positions on the perimeter of the camps to relax, eat and drink, read and listen to music, and in general “rest up” before returning to butcher the few people still remaining. A Phalangist officer, a gold crucifix dangling from his neck, later told a reporter that there was still shooting going on in the camps, “otherwise what would I be doing here?”

Writing from the scene of the crime in evident horror, New York Times reporter, Thomas L. Friedman (Sept. 20) wrote that from the Israeli observation posts “it would not have been difficult to ascertain the slaughter not only by sight but from the sounds of gunfire and the screams coining from the camp. In addition to providing some provisions for the Christian militiamen, the Israelis had tanks stationed on the hilltop, apparently to provide cover for them if the militiamen encountered fiercer resistance than had been anticipated.”

We know now that by Thursday night the Israeli army and government knew about the massacre, and that yet they did absolutely nothing for 36 hours, until Saturday morning, when, the bloodbath completed, they gently waved the Christian murderers out of the camps. All was secured.

As a grisly finale to Israel’s blood crime, even after the world outrage, the Israeli army turned over a huge number of captured weapons to the Lebanese Forces—the Haddad army which Israel has trained and armed for seven years, which has held and occupied the southern Lebanese border for many months on behalf of Israel, and who, as the New York Times put it, are “virtually integrated into the Israeli army and operate entirely under its command.”

One of the most heartening aspects of the response to the massacre has been the firestorm of protest within Israel itself, even from the ordinarily pro-Begin press. Thus, Eitan Haber, military correspondent of the ordinarily pro-Begin Yediot Ah-ronot, wrote in shock:

“Government ministers and senior commanders already knew during the hours of Thursday night and Friday morning that a terrible massacre was taking place in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and despite the fact that they knew this for sure, they did not lift a finger and did nothing to prevent the massacre until Saturday morning. For 36 additional hours, the Phalangists continued to run rampant in the refugee camps and to kill anyone who fell in their path.”

An editor of the Beginite daily paper, Maariv, appearing on ABC-TV Nightline, was evidently shaken and pinned full responsibility for the holocaust on the Begin government, and clearly called for its resignation.

Unfortunately, the response of American Jews was not nearly as outraged as that from Israel itself. It is well known that the lockstep and knee-jerk support by American Jews for any and all acts of the State of Israel is scarcely replicated within Israel itself. But even here the ranks were broken or at the very least confused. Even William Safire, always ardent in support of Israel, attacked its “blunder”—a strong word coming from Safire. Only the “professional Jews,” head of the leading Jewish organizations in America, continued to alibi and excuse. For a few days, they fell back on the view that “we can’t judge until we know the facts,” but even this lame alibi fell apart when Begin arrogantly refused any impartial judicial inquiry and pushed his view through the Knesset. Among the American Jewish leaders only Rabbi Balfour Brickner and the highly intelligent Professor Arthur Hertzberg—who have always been unafraid to speak their mind—lashed into the responsibility of the state of Israel.

An illuminating scene occurred on ABC’s Nightline, when Rabbi Schindler and Howard Squadron, two top “professional” American Jews, were asked their views of the Israeli action. It was squirmsville. One particularly sharp question was asked by Nightline: How is it that American Jewish protest has been so muted compared to that within Israel itself? Rabbi Schindler’s response was one for the books. In essence he said: “Within Israel there are political parties which can be critical of the government’s action. But our role as American Jews is to support the State of Israel regardless of its specific actions.” A chilling admission indeed!

And so American Jewish leaders consider it their role to support the State of Israel come hell or high water. How many deaths would it take? How many murders? How much slaughter of the innocent? Are there any conceivable acts that would turn off the American Jewish leadership, that would cause these people to stop their eternal apologetics for the State of Israel? Any acts at all?

After this statement of his role, the rather startled Nightline interviewer asked Rabbi Schindler, “but what about support for right and wrong? Doesn’t that count?” Having marched to the edge of the abyss and perhaps revealed too much, Rabbi Schindler rallied, and muttered something about “of course, we’re interested in right and wrong; but we can only judge after we know the facts.” Since Begin had just vetoed a fact-finding board of inquiry, this line fell pretty flat.

In American politics, the magic attraction of the State of Israel has at last lost some of its power. Even Scoop Jackson, even Senator Alan Cranston (D., Calif.) have become critical of Israel. The leading all-out supporter of Israel in the Reagan Cabinet—Al Haig—has been booted out, perhaps partially on that issue. But these are only small, fitful steps toward de-Israelizing American foreign policy.

One bizarre aspect of this affair has been the American perception—at least until the massacre—of the Gemayel family and its Phalange. It has now been revealed that the Israeli intelligence services—notoriously savvy people—had warned Begin and Defense Minister Sharon in advance that the Phalangists were likely to commit a massacre if the camps were turned over to them. To say that these warnings were “ignored” by Begin, Sharon & Co. is putting matters very, very kindly.

Well, what are the Gemayels and the Phalange like? Perhaps it is best to contrast reality with the Alice-in-Wonderland comments of the Reagan Administration upon the assassination of Phalangist leader and near-president of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel on September 15. “A tragedy for Lebanese democracy,” opined the Reagan Administration, while Ronnie himself spoke of Bashir as a brilliant, rising young democratic politician. The U.S. and Israel both spoke of their hope that Bashir could impose a “strong, centralized government” to unify anarchic Lebanon.

Since the Massacre, we should now have a better idea of the sort of “unity” that the Gemayels propose to bring to Lebanon: the “unity” of the charnel house and the cemetery. Perhaps the name of the political and military organization known as the Phalange should give a clue. For Bashir’s father, Pierre, founded the Phalange after an enthusiastic visit to Hitler’s Germany. The Phalange (named after Franco’s Falange) are fascists, pure and simple, in goals and in method.

But let us concentrate on the rising young politician and see if we should shed any tears for Bashir. Bashir is distinguished from other leading Lebanese politicians in that he is himself a mass murderer. I mean personally. The Gemayels had two sets of powerful rivals among the fascistic Maronite Christian community. “Pro-Western” and “Pro-Israeli” a little less fanatically than the Phalange, these were the followers of elderly exPresidents Camille Chamoun and Suleiman Franjieh.

Here is the way that young democrat, Begin and Reagan’s Man in Beirut, dealt with dissent within the Maronite community. Five years ago, the then 29-year-old Bashir Gemayel led a commando raid on Franjieh’s mountain stronghold in northern Lebanon. Bashir made Franjieh’s oldest son Tony watch while he and his gang tortured and killed Tony’s wife and two-year-old daughter. Bashir then murdered Tony and 29 followers, calling the massacre a “social revolt against feudalism.” Two years later, Bashir took care of the Chamouns. In May, 1980, Bashir and his men, in a lightning strike, massacred 450 of Chamoun’s followers at a beach resort near the city of Junei. Over 250 were murdered on the beach or while swimming. The wife and daughter of Camille Chamoun’s son Dany were both raped. Less than a month later, Bashir and his men invaded Chamoun’s headquarters in east Beirut, and savagely killed over 500 of Chamoun’s followers as well as bystanders. Many of the victims were castrated by Bashir’s thugs, and one captured Chamounite was blown apart with a stick of dynamite shoved down his throat.

Who assassinated Bashir? It could almost have been anyone in Lebanon.

The fascist savagery and the willingness to be a catspaw of Israel may be partly explained by demographic factors. Lebanese political rule is set by quota system, in which dominance— including the Presidency—is assured the Maronite Christian community. Unfortunately, the census on which the quotas are based is that of the early 1930’s, when the Christians were a majority in Lebanon. The early 1930’s census still rules, even though it is now conceded by everyone that Muslims are about 55% of the Lebanese population, to the Christian 45%. This means that freezing Maronite Christian rule over a majority of Muslims—the Begin-and-Reagan solution to the Lebanese problem—in addition to being profoundly immoral, in the long run will not work. The Muslims are out-producing the Christians in future population, no matter how many Muslim babies the Phalangists are proposing to kill.

Unfortunately, no matter the anguish and the outcry within Israel, there is little hope that the Israeli opposition will be able to do much to correct the fundamental problem. For while individual voices are raised on the massacre, politically there is almost no opposition to the fundamental Zionist axiom within Israel. The chief opposition Labor Party, the Founding Fathers and Mothers of Israel, paved the way for Begin in their commitment to the Zionist ideal and to the consequent expulsion of 1 million Palestinian Arabs from their homes and their lands. Only a few minor parties in Israel, such as those of Uri Davis and Shulamith Aloni, can be considered to have broken with the Zionist paradigm, and these are only on the fringe of Israeli politics.

The fundamental problem, the Zionist paradigm, is simply this: The establishment of the State of Israel was accomplished by the expropriation of the Palestinians from the overwhelming bulk of the land of the “original” 1948 Israel. Over a million Palestinian Arabs fled outside the borders of Israel, and the remaining Arabs have been systematically treated as second-class citizens, kept down by the fact that only Jews are allowed to own land within Israel that once falls into Jewish hands. (And more is doing so all the time.) In 1967, Israel aggressed against and conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights of Syria, which it is in the process of annexing. Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories are, again, treated as second-class citizens, and Zionist settlements are planted amongst them.

Israel and its American apologists are wont to blame everything on the dread bogeyman, the PLO, and to excuse all Israeli crimes as necessary to defend the security of the Israeli state from PLO “terrorism.” And yet it is conveniently forgotten that there was no PLO at all until after the shame of the 1967 war, when the Palestinians realized that they had to stop relying on the faithless Arab states and could only try themselves to win back their homes and their possessions. Since there was no “PLO terror” until 1968, how come that Israel aggressed against and terrorized the Palestinian Arabs for two decades previously?

The answer lies in the Zionist paradigm. Zionism was a nineteenth-century creation of European (not Middle Eastern) Jews, and was sold to Great Britain as a conscious colonial settlerstate, a junior partner to British imperialism in the Middle East. After World War I, when the British and French dismembered the Ottoman Empire, they betrayed their promises to give the Arabs their independence, and they established mandates or puppet states across the Middle East. We are still living with the legacy of that final outcropping of British imperialism.

How did the early Zionists sell their scheme to Western public opinion? The favorite Zionist slogan of the day rings peculiarly hollow now: “A land without people [Palestine] for a people without land [the Jews].” A land without people; there are no Palestinian Arabs, the Zionists assured everyone, and so a million and a half people, many of them productive farmers, citrus growers, businessmen,—people “who made the desert bloom” first—were at a stroke written out of existence. And before the PLO launched its fight-back, Israeli leaders stoutly continued to deny reality, Golda Meir repeatedly maintaining that “there are no Palestinians.” Say it often enough and maybe they go away. Maybe.

Libertarians are opposed to every State. But the State of Israel is uniquely pernicious, because its entire existence rests and continues to rest on a massive expropriation of property and expulsion from the land. Libertarians in the United States often complain about the radical libertarian adherence to “land reform,” i.e. the giving back of stolen land to the victims. In the case of expropriations centuries ago, who gets what is often fuzzy, and conservative libertarians can raise an important point. But in the case of Palestine, the victims and their children—the true owners of the land—are right there, beyond the borders, in refugee camps, in hovels, dreaming about a return to their own. There is nothing fuzzy here. Justice will only be served, and true peace in the devastated area will only come, when a miracle happens and Israel allows the Palestinians to stream back in and repossess their rightful property. Until then, so long as the Palestinians continue to live and no matter how far back they are pushed, they will always be there, and they will continue to press for their dream of justice. No matter how many square miles and how many cities Israel conquers (shall it be Damascus next?), the Palestinians will be there, in addition to all the other Arab refugees newly created by the Israeli policy of blood and iron. But allowing justice, allowing the return of the expropriated, would mean that Israel would have to give up its exclusivist Zionist ideal. For recognizing Palestinians as human beings with full human rights is the negation of Zionism; it is the recognition that the land was never “empty.”

A just Israeli state (insofar as any state can be just), then, would necessarily be a de-Zionized state, and this no Israeli political party in the foreseeable future would have the slightest desire to do. And so the slaughter and the horror will go on.

DEBATE ON ERA

(In our June-July 1981 issue, we published an excellent critique of the ERA by anarchist scholar Wendy Me Elroy. ERA was a cause that unaccountably captured a large majority of libertarians, and so Wendy’s strictures were especially welcome.

In response, Joan Kennedy Taylor, once of Libertarian Review and now of the Manhattan Institute, sent us a critique of the Me Elroy article, and Wendy has offered a reply. The original article was a year ago, but the issue is timeless, and so we are happy to present the exchange now. — Ed.)

McELROY ON ERA

by Joan Kennedy Taylor

I would like to call attention to some factual misstatements in Wendy McElroy’s article “Against the ERA” in your June-July 1981 issue.

She states, “It was the opinion of the originators and chief proponents of the ERA (the National Woman’s Party) that the ERA would extend protective legislation to both sexes.” Some of them may have hoped for that eventuality, but it could not have been their opinion. The 1920’s was the period in which the Supreme Court was consistently holding that any regulation of the working conditions of men was a deprivation of their liberty of contract without due process of law, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Such legislation for women, however, had been held to be permissible, because the state has an interest in protecting “the future of the race,” because women are inherently . . . . . . . weaker, and because women are not legally “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ERA was introduced in 1923 to invalidate these rulings. By mentioning that there was a conflict over protective labor legislation among feminists and then making the above statement about the National Woman’s Party, Ms. McElroy clearly implies that it was the National Woman’s Party that was the group in favor of such legislation. This is not the case — the argument was between the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, which was introducing such laws, and the National Woman’s Party, which supported ERA even though it would invalidate them.

McElroy’s discussion of the concept of state action is similarly misleading. The concept was introduced in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, as follows: “Until some State law has been passed, or some State action through its officers or agent has been taken, adverse to the rights of citizens sought to be protected by the 14th Amendment, no legislation of the United States under said Amendment, nor any proceeding under such legislation can be called into activity. . .the legislation which Congress is authorized to adopt in this behalf is not general legislation upon the rights of the citizen, but corrective legislation, that is, such as may be necessary and proper for counteracting such laws as the State may adopt or enforce, and which, by the Amendment, they are prohibited from committing or taking.” McElroy is correct in implying that “state action” has been loosely interpreted to include some private-sector activities.

However, the first example she gives, the HEW rules interpreting Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has nothing to do with state action under the Fourteenth Amendment (which would similarly apply to the ERA). The Civil Rights Act doesn’t get its constitutional sanction from the Fourteenth Amendment, but from the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce — it deals with the private sector.

Earlier, McElroy cites the Yale Law Journal article of 1971 — an article cited as definitive by both proponents and opponents of the ERA during the Congressional debates on the subject — as an authority on the impact of the ERA on the draft, but she neglects to mention that the same article says, “. . .under present court decisions on state action private educational institutions would remain within the private sector, not subject to the constitutional requirements of the Equal Rights Amendment.”

McElroy also implies that “some form of license” would trigger the invocation of state action, but a case in the mid-1970’s, Moose Lodge v. Irvis, specifically rejected the concept that state action is involved in the granting of a liquor license to a private club.

She has a long description of a case which she misidentifies as Marsh v. Alabama (1946), a case that held that a company town is a town and must allow freedom of speech to religious groups on its streets. That case was a precedent to the case she describes, which is Food Employees v. Logan Valley Plaza’ (1968). However, Logan Valley was the high water mark for this particular expansion to the concept of state action, and (partly because of a ringing dissent in Logan Valley by Justice Hugo Black which championed private property) the Court refused to apply Logan Valley to two similar cases in 1972, holding instead that property rights must not be violated. So the libertarian arguments that Ms. McElroy refers to ultimately prevailed, contrary to the implication of her article.

My own research into state action cases is sketchy as to what has happened after 1977 — it is entirely possible that there are recent cases which would indicate that the concept is being expanded again, but Wendy McElroy has not supported her contention by the evidence she cites.

Finally, I would like to make two points about her concluding argument, that “If one-half of the energy and money that has been thrown into the ERA had been used to repeal specific laws that oppress women on a state-by-state, perhaps city-by-city level, freedom would have been substantially increased.” First of all, such an effort has been made under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which has brought suit on a selective basis to invalidate individual laws, and this effort has in my opinion lessened freedom, because the basis for the suits was the power of congress to regulate commerce and demand that no sexism be involved in the production of any good or service that might in the usual course of events ultimately cross state lines.

And secondly, women have been trying to repeal discriminatory laws on a law-by-law basis since the 1840’s when the first Married Woman’s Property Act was passed in New York State, allowing a woman to keep the title to real estate which she owned before her marriage. What women have consistently found is that, while they are working to dismantle the state apparatus in one area, additional laws were being passed in another — as they were working on the legal disabilities of married women, protective labor legislation began being passed for the first time, for instance. After all these years of working to repeal discriminatory laws, thousands of them are still in place. It is not surprising that women wish to invalidate them all at once.

REPLY TO MS. TAYLOR

by Wendy McElroy

If someone were accused of stealing a 1978 Buick and a voice in his defense declared, “That’s quite wrong; it was a 1978 Ford!”, observers might well be at a loss for words. Joan Kennedy Taylor’s critique of my article opposing the E.R.A. (L.F. June-July 1981) leaves me in a similar state. In that article I raised important moral objections to the E.R.A. To indulge in the nasty habit of quoting oneself, I wrote: “Equality under government laws means equality under laws that are overwhelmingly unjust in content and indefensible as to means of enforcement.” Moreover, I questioned the wisdom of libertarians appealing to government for the achievement of social goals. In concluding this section, I stated, “without resolving these moral objections, a discussion of strategy is superfluous.” It was explicitly for the “sake of argument” that I continued to discuss the strategic aspects of the E.R.A.

Ms. Taylor’s critique is remarkable in that it does not address these objections even in passing It concentrates entirely upon my discussion of strategy, and comments, “I would like to call attention to some factual misstatements.” Although my response to Ms. Taylor’s critique will be to emphasize, again, the fundamental moral principles, I would like to discuss Ms. Taylor’s comments.

The easiest criticism to dispense with is one in which Ms. Taylor is correct. Through an error in transcribing notes, I did misidentify Marsh v. Alabama though my description of the case was accurate. Ms. Kennedy does not contest my presentation, but points out two subsequent court cases which did not violate rights in a similar manner. Thus, it is demonstrated that when government is given the power to violate rights sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. What importance does this have for libertarian theory? Surely this underlines rather than denies the folly of appealing to government and to the state court system. If I were to engage Ms. Taylor in a debate on her own terms of quoting court cases and legal precedents, what would it prove? Courts across the country interpret the constitution and laws in a diametrically opposed manner. What the Supreme court gives, it can also take away. The libertarian stand on E.R.A. must be based on principle, not on the shifting sands of a government agency. (For additional reading see J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen, and Crystal Eastman, On Women.)

The longest paragraph in Ms. Taylor’s critique deals with an historical aside which I interjected in parentheses. I observed that the National Woman’s Party (N.W.P.), the originators of the E.R.A., initially believed it would extend protective labor laws. Ms. Taylor emphatically states, “it could not have been their opinion.” Although this historical dispute is superfluous, it has arisen and should be answered. The N.W.P.’s position on protective labor legislation underwent a pronounced shift from 1921 to 1923. Originally, it maintained that the E.R.A. would not endanger such legislation or that it would extend protection to men. When this notion was severely attacked by “social feminists” and legal experts, the N.W.P. backpedalled to label protective labor laws as a form of reverse discrimination. The original stance of the N.W.P. is exemplified by the response Alice Paul, head of the Party, made to Mary Anderson’s conclusion that the E.R.A. would do away with special legislation. Paul responded, “It won’t do anything of the kind,” and refused to speak to Anderson for several years. Whatever position the N.W.P. assumed after the dust had settled, they initially envisioned the E.R.A. as compatible with and/or extending protective labor laws.

If Ms. Taylor wishes to address the core of my objection to the E.R.A., it will be necessary for her to answer the following questions:

1. Is it proper for libertarians to turn to government for the solution of social ills?

2. Is the equality called for the equal protection individual rights and not the socio-economic equality endemic in contemporary feminism?

3. Will government use additional power to protect the individual or to extend its own authority?

4. Will all the laws which will be extended protect rather than violate rights?

This last question cannot be overemphasized. If some averaging mechanism could prove that the E. R. A. violated some rights but was generally beneficial, libertarians would have no alternative but to condemn it. The cornerstone of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle. As a libertarian, it is not within your range of discretion to violate rights of some people in some instances. Logic denies you this option. You cannot on the one hand say it is wrong to violate rights and, on the other hand, say it is beneficial to violate rights.

Ms. Taylor has entirely missed the point of my article. And of the E.R.A.

SMEAR: THE STORY OF UPDATE—PART III

by Derrick “Ed” Welles

The June issue is particularly replete with misinformation and ranting. The attack on SIL’s study course continues at full blast, SLS gets more kid-glove treatment, Project Liberty absorbs a double blow with a “news” article and another “review” by Update’s expert reviewer Leslie Key, and more Updating. Let’s begin with the latter case.

On page 2, Tom Palmer is quoted criticizing David Nolan’s Project Liberty because its call for libertarians to get involved in the drive to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment “has right-wing connotations in the eyes of the media.” All tax-limitation, tax-abolition drives have “right-wing connotations” in the eyes of the media. Why then didn’t Update reject the LP’s Tax Protest Day? It was directed from LP National by Craniac groupie Bruce Majors. As with the vaunted “proceduralism” problem, a strategy or principle is to be adopted or rejected not on its own merits, but depending on who’s in charge

And, if right-wing connotations are to be avoided, why then does Update tell us, on page 10, that Craniac hireling Milton Mueller had a Cato study published “that explains the application of property rights in the telecommunication field”? Well well, here would seem to be a prime target for Palmer and Update’s anti-“right-wing connotations” counsel! Why doesn’t Update warn that this stuff about property rights is a right-wing concern? Because Mueller is a faithful Crane servant?

Key’s review of Joe Cobb’s booklet for Project Liberty, “The Income Tax Must Go!”, suffers from more of her distortion and misunderstanding (if not deliberate misrepresentation). She attacks the work for appealing, not to the general public, but to those who are already convinced about abolishing the income tax: “it is impossible to believe that anyone who doesn’t already support income tax repeal will be convinced by this book.” In so saying, she misses the point of the book. Nobody ever said that it was intended for a mass audience. It was sent to libertarian activists, not to the public at large, and is being promoted in libertarian publications, not in general-interest periodicals. Its purpose is to galvanize libertarians into implementing a strategy of advocating income-tax repeal, and thus draw new recruits, contributions and votes from among disillusioned taxpayers and from dissatisfied tax protesters who haven’t had anti-tax candidates to vote for and contribute to.

Another interesting comment by Key is her insinuation that Cobb’s book has “obvious” overtones of anti-ethnicity (because “‘waves of immigrants’ were ‘envious of rich industrialists’ ”). Remarkable that Leslie Key would count alleged “anti-ethnicity” in Joe Cobb’s disfavor, yet thought nothing of denigrating an SIL issue paper’s statement that “sexism is morally wrong and irrational.” Is sexism OK, Leslie, but racism bad? What substantial difference is there between the attitude of a sexist toward the opposite sex, and that of a racist toward another race? Again, the only criterion seems to be that whatever non-Craniacs say is to be criticized because they said it, not because of lack of validity in their positions. Key criticizes the (alleged) views of non-Craniacs, even if she has to take self-contradictory positions in order to do so.

The Project Liberty article (page 2) is another instance of weighted coverage to place non-Craniac projects in a disparaging light. It states that “about 25 candidates have responded favorably to the suggestion that they make [income-tax repeal] the major focus of their campaign. [Nolan] had originally hoped that 150-200 candidates would. The Libertarian Party plans to run at least 1,000 candidates in 1982.”

Note how Update gives a figure for how many candidates Nolan seeks to recruit for his strategy, and contrasts it to the actual number achieved by that time (without pointing this out); then Update gives a figure for how many candidates the LP seeks to run in 1982, and does not report how any have actually announced their candidacies. Moreover, the LP “plans” to run 1000 candidates, while Nolan only “hoped” that 150-200 candidates would run on antitax planks. Another slick use of vocabulary to slant perceptions in favor of Update’s faction and against others. (Note: in fact, we have learned that nearly 100 Libertarian candidates have already endorsed Income-Tax Repeal, in a paid advertisement to appear in The Duck Book and The liberty Amendment News.)

Elsewhere, the article tries to give the impression that the income-tax repeal strategy is right-wing (as already discussed) and that it doesn’t have much support—both, supposedly, reasons for rejecting the strategy. Nowhere does Update report the very relevant fact that their darling Dick Randolph is a Project Liberty endorser, and that he has introduced the Liberty Amendment into the Alaska legislature. Why not criticize him? Ah, but Dick, whose campaign for Alaska governor is managed by Kent Guida, is one of their boys. The news doesn’t fit so it’s dropped. (The failure to provide this relevant information contrasts with the quickness with which Update offered background information to dispute Nolan’s assertion that Income-Tax repeal is a popular issue, in noting that only two state legislatures have passed the Liberty Amendment in the past 17 years.) Once again, relevant information is given in Update only when it advances the views and fortunes of Craniac sympathizers or discredits their opponents.

On the same page begins the article on the A/PRC and SIL’s course, Principles of Liberty. Again conveniently handling words to inflate Update’s claims, the article starts by saying there were strong protests “from several quarters” against Bergland and Poole’s position on reviewing POL. One would think that Update would dredge up and quote as many critics as it could on this one, as it does with anything it wishes to criticize. However, the only person from these “several quarters” who is cited in opposition to Bergland and Poole, is Chris Hocker. No one else was named. How much opposition is there, really, to Bergland and Poole’s position? Update makes a misleading statement to make its friends’ case stronger than it really is, and its enemys’ weaker than it actually is.

We have already contrasted Update’s detailed coverage of Rothbard’s CLS’s financial woes, with its nearly nonexistant and very cursory treatment of SLS’s even more serious troubles. At the end of the A/PRC article, SLS’s own study course is finally—and very briefly—described. It is referred to as a “new publication” that “has not yet been widely distributed.” The first statement is flatly wrong; the second, while literally true, is one more instance of distortion through omission of information. In reality, SLS’s study program has been around for a year, having made it’s debut at the 1981 SLS Convention. It is in no sense a “new” publication. It has not been widely distributed (Update’s euphemism for poor sales), not because it is “new,” but because it is much more expensive than the SIL course ($14, compared to POL’s $5), it calls for 14 meetings (POL suggests 6 to 8 meetings), and it requires an amount of reading that makes it comparable to a full semester’s college course. All in all it demands a much greater degree of time, expense and commitment than the SIL kit, a degree which few if any students or others have to allocate to a study course. In addition, it has not been promoted at all, except in SLS’s own publications. This is why it has not “been widely distributed.” Quick to point out shortcomings in the activities of anti-Craniacs, Update makes no similar analysis of the failures of its kindred institutions.

“We will seek out and print the truth in a straightforward fashion,” proudly declared Update in January 1982. In fact, however, the truth has been run straight out of Update since the beginning. When it comes to reporting the news on and about Craniac allies and critics, reality and logic take a back seat to distortion, innuendo, logic, omission of inconvenient facts, and creation of convenient facts.” These are all built into what is supposed to pass for objective reporting, in a fashion started by historiographers and statist sycophants bent more on presenting a favorable view of our pet ideas and factions than in reporting facts and presenting all sides of controversies. From a journalistic standpoint, Update is a disaster. In terms of benefiting the libertarian movement, Update inhibits the search for effective strategy and sound principle by biasing unsuspecting readers’ perceptions of personalities and ideas through selective, partial reporting—to the benefit of the beleaguered, yet still powerful, action that brought us low-tax liberalism and opportunism rampant. As one victim of the Crane Machine has put it, “I’d rather read Pravda than Update. At least Pravda makes less pretense to objectivity.”

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVI Number 9 November-December 1982

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

Special Double Issue!

THE ELECTION

1. Reaganism Repudiated

Come, leave us face it: the election was a resounding repudiation of Reaganomics and the Reagan Administration. The Establishment media, ever looking for impulses toward “compromise” and “consensus” within our current statist framework, are interpreting the election as a call for moderation. And the Republicans are finding “victory” because their losses were not even greater.

But consider: the Democrats swept a net total of seven governorships, with one more almost eked out in Illinois; and a substantial shift in the House of 26 seats. The governor-conquests will put the Democratic state machines in a favorable position for the 1984 presidential race; and the House victories, coming on top of a comfortable existing margin for the Democrats, should enable them to break the Reagan-boll weevil coalition in the House. It is true that there were no net Senate changes, but consider again that far more Democrat than Republican seats were up this year, and that many of the Republican victories were by wafer-thin margins (Danforth in Missouri, Stafford in Vermont, Chafee in Rhode Island, and Trible in Virginia). A shift of only 1.1% of the voters in these four states would have given us a tied Senate.

The fact that the Democrats have nothing new or startling to offer to get us out of our economic mess is irrelevant. The important point is that the voter has no power to insure that anything good will ever come from a new ruler; the only power he has is to punish, to repudiate, to “throw the rascals out,” in the grand old phrase. And that is what the voters are now proposing to do. So Carter messes up, and they throw him out, and the same will be done by the aroused electorate to the Great Prevaricator in 1984. Or, it will be done if Reality is going to triumph in any sense over Personality. In reality, Ronnie has led us into a quagmire of seemingly permanent stagnation and of depression (yes, “depression,” as Nobel Laureate economist George Stigler delightfully and cantankerously told the world from the White House the week before the election) unprecedented since the 1930s. Coming into office on the promise of getting government off our backs, balancing the budget, and slashing the swollen budget and crippling taxation, Ronnie has instead brought us catastrophic deficits, far higher taxes, and the biggest budgets in American history. If reality impinges at all upon the American electorate, Ronnie will receive a landslide repudiation; the only thing to stop it will be the personal admiration which the booboisie unaccountably still have for the dimwit actor in the White House.

2. The Right-wing Repudiated

Suffering particularly in this election were a raft of right-wing Republicans, who went down to often unexpected and ignominious defeat. Particularly heartening was the surprising loss by fascistic Texas governor William Clements, who lost to conservative Democrat Attorney-General Mark White by 8%, despite pouring in $14 million into the campaign (much of it his own), in contrast to White’s $5 million. Lewis A. (“Skip”) Bafalis, a veteran right-wing agitator, lost to Governor Robert Graham of Florida by a whopping 65 to 35 per cent. Exastronaut Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico was thrown out of the Senate by eight percentage points by Attorney-General Jeff Bingaman. Representative Jim Collins, an ultra-conservative from Texas, was creamed by centrist Senator Lloyd Bentsen, by 59 to 41 per cent. Two leading Moral Majoritarians and NCPAC endorses, were also clobbered for the Senate: Robin Beard was annihilated (by 62 to 38 per cent) in his bid to oust Jim Sasser of Tennessee; and Cleve Benedict was eradicated (69 to 31 percent) in his attempt to throw out the veteran Democrat incumbent Robert Byrd in West Virginia.

Two of the repudiated right-wingers proclaimed themselves as “free market” men. Their defeat is particularly welcome, since the last thing we need these days is to elect people who will help provide a phony “free-market” cover for the disastrous statism of the Reagan Administration. One of these losers is Richard Headlee, who lost the Michigan Gubernatorial race to left-liberal James Blanchard by a hefty 7%; the other is Larry Williams, who was generally expected to unseat the dumb and lacklustre left-liberal John Melcher of Montana, but lost by a substantial margin of 12 per cent. The Montana race was distinguished by a particularly charming TV commercial, in which old “Doc” Melcher, a veterinarian in civilian life, hugged some cows, who in turn mooed in basso voices about how “I hear certain Eastern city slickers have come into Montana to smear good old Doc Melcher.” This influential commercial resonated with culture conflict: in particular, the resentment of many Montanans against Williams, with his buttoned-down, blow-dried, Eastern preppie image.

3. Cuomo vs. Lehrman

But by far the most important and visible repudiation of a right-winger was the defeat of Lew Lehrman for governor of New York. Because liberal Democrat Mario Cuomo won by 3%, the Lehrmanite press is claiming some kind of “moral” victory since the polls had forecast a wider margin. But polls are only polls, and the fact is that the 3% margin is no slouch, especially considering the $14.5 million ($8.5 million from Lehrman personally) which Lehrman spent against Cuomo’s $5 million. Since the election, Lehrman has already arrogantly proclaimed himself a kind of governor-in-exile, with a permanent staff to monitor Cuomo and to run again in 1986.

Despite his support for the gold standard, there is no reason for libertarians or free-marketeers to shed any tears for Lew Lehrman. The gold standard, after all, is not a gubernatorial issue. But more than that: Lehrman in no sense ran a free-market or libertarian campaign. He had just two issues. One was crime, which he demagogically promised to stamp out by “taking the handcuffs off the police.” Lehrman’s omnipresent anti-crime commercials were unusually repellent: “There are savages out there, they’re raping nuns and killing rabbis [thus working the two dominant religious groups]. Vote for Lehrman!” Will any candidate in favor of raping nuns and killing rabbis please stand up?

Lehrman’s second big issue was his much vaunted “40% income tax cut.” But the issue was a phony. In the first place, the cut was to stretch out over a period of ten years, making for a piddling 4% decrease per annum. Secondly, the cut was a phantom, because New York State is constitutionally mandated to have a balanced budget, and the budget is already in $1 billion deficit. And Lehrman failed to talk about any spending cuts. In short, with the budget remaining at its current swollen level, and taxes to be cut, the budget could only be balanced if the Laffer Curve would work, and state revenues rose enough to balance the budget. Lehrman pledged that if this Laffer Effect did not work in any given year, then that year’s tax cut would be scrapped. And since the Laffer Curve has already been thoroughly discredited on the national scene, the Lehrman tax cut plan is precisely a phony.

Apart from these two major thrusts, Lehrman abandoned any free-market proclivities he may have had right down the line. The lure of power. He waffled on rent control; he called for keeping out rapacious Japanese and West German imports to save jobs in New York. It is only unfortunate that the Lehrman defeat was not resounding enough to send him back for good to where he richly deserves to be: the private sector.

Mario Cuomo, in contrast, proved to be a delightful candidate, a quintessential New Yorker: warm, fast, bright, and very funny. Even the fanatically pro-Lehrman New York Post admitted that Cuomo crushed Lehrman in their first and major TV debate—a victory so blatant that the Cuomo forces actually worried about a sympathy backlash for Lehrman. In contrast, Lehrman came across as cold, serioso, monomaniacal.

Some examples of the Cuomo wit:

On the debate, Lehrman, asked why he carries a gun, started to ramble on embarrassingly about how “you can’t take the country out of the boy,” and how as a young lad growing up in rural Pennsylvania, he had to carry a gun in order to shoot gophers, because gophers made holes that horses fell in and broke their legs. (A dumb statement on its face, since it played into Cuomo’s charges of carpetbagging—Lehrman having moved from Pennsylvania only a few years ago). To which Cuomo shot back: “In my 54 years in Queens [a borough of New York City], I never saw a horse fall into a gopher hole.” Zing!

As Cuomo talked on in the debate, Lehrman ostentatiously looked at his watch and flashed it in front of Cuomo’s face. Cuomo: “That’s an expensive watch, Lew.” Zing!

Lehrman: “You’ve just spoken for ten minutes and I only spoke for one.”

Cuomo: “It only seemed like ten minutes, Lew.” Zap!

Another time Lehrman complained about Cuomo’s talking, and Cuomo shot back: “This is my only chance to get my views across, Lew. I haven’t got nine million dollars.” Zing!

At another point, Lehrman talked about one of his favorite themes—advocacy of the death penalty—and cited the Bible for support. At which Cuomo magnificently shot back: “The Old Testament also calls for the death penalty for adultery and sabbath-breaking.” Zap!

And when Lehrman argued that businesses are fleeing New York because of its taxes and regulations, Cuomo riposted: “Rite-Aid [Lehrman’s drug chain] came to New York, and did very well, Lew.” Zing!

And finally, when, after the debate, Lehrman whined that Cuomo is a “fast-talking lawyer,” Cuomo shot back: “From now on I’ll speak v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y so he can understand everything I say.” Zing!

The keen political columnist Ken Auletta (“Lehrman’s Sunday-school Politics,” N.Y. Daily News, Oct. 24) caught the essence of Lehrman’s style. It was clear, Auletta noted, that Lehrman doesn’t enjoy politics. He pointed out that if a politico enjoys politics, he doesn’t simply sit at the dais of a big $1000-a-plate fund-raising luncheon (such as Lehrman had at the Waldorf.) He jumps off the dais and, in show biz parlance, “works the room,” chatting with and back-slapping everyone there. Instead, Lehrman talked to no one, not even his neighbors on the dais. He “ground his teeth, buried his head scribbling speech notes. . .” As one worried Republican supporter said of Lehrman, “I would be hitting those tables.” Vice-President Bush, in his speech at the Lehrman luncheon, paid him an ambivalent compliment: “I’ve never seen such energy as this guy has. You know, I got an ulcer just sitting here next to him eating my dessert and waiting for him to chum on out of the place.” Not good.

A particularly chilling aspect of Lehrman was noted by Geoffrey Stokes in the Village Voice (“If Lehrman Is So Smart, Why Is He So Dumb?”, November 2). When Lehrman was asked how he, as governor, proposed to get his tax plan through a Democratic Assembly and an unsympathetic Republican Senate, he replied: “That is my responsibility. I shall be the chief executive, and I shall have been elected to be the chief executive.” I see. But what office did Lehrman think he was running for, governor or Führer? There is a strong whiff of would-be dictator about Lew Lehrman, which makes us even happier that he is still a private citizen.

Finally, no one can understand the Cuomo victory without grasping the ethnic politics that dominates New York. The fact that Lehrman made no inroads into the big Jewish Democratic vote even though Jewish himself was no surprise; Jews only vote for Jewish Republicans who are authentically left-liberal, such as ex-Senator Javits. Cuomo was elected by a massive defection of Italian Republican voters from New York City and the suburbs, who at long last voted for one of their own for governor. Italians, the largest single voting in New York, register about 60% Republican and 40% Democratic, and their defection was enough to carry Cuomo. (Why the Italian Republicans of Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester did not defect remains a mystery.) It has been the particular cross of Italians in New York that their confreres who have made it politically have either been Episcopalians(!) like LaGuardia or Corsi, or from northern Italy (Marchi). To your true Italian-American, who is Catholic and whose family hales from southern Italy, these were scarcely authentic soulmates. Cuomo, at last, is one of their own. (As was the Nassau Republican Al D’Amato, who won the New York Senate seat in 1980. But D’Amato is a nitwit, which took some of the edge off ethnic pride.)

4. Ethnic Lives!

Which brings me to the ethnic factor, still very much a key in this election. In my experience, orthodox liberals, Randians, and Californians have never understood ethnic. They are all baffled and slightly embarrassed by it, as if the fascinating and multi-varied ethnic mosaic which constitutes America shouldn’t exist, and everyone should be an abstract “rational” machine (Randian) or an abstract spouter of liberal cliches. Californians have managed to homogenize ethnics, and except for blacks and Asians, everyone else seems to have blended neatly into a standardized California culture. I remember attending a St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Palo Alto several years ago, and it was pathetic. After a feeble try at “Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” the band played rock for the rest of the night.

At any rate, in the Northeast, ethnic is often the key to politics. Thus, only ethnic explains why Pat Moynihan crushed his Republican opponent for the New York Senate by 2:1 this year, and why he will keep being re-elected by such whopping majorities for the rest of his life. It is not just that he is personally popular and charismatic, although of course that helps. The point is that once he gets past the Democratic primary, a centrist Irish Democrat will crush his Republican opponent in a state-wide election. His first primary is the toughest; once he is elected, winning the primary again should become easy. The reason is that Democratic primaries are dominated by left-liberal Jewish voters, who tend to elect left-wing Jews who are in turn slaughtered in the general election by Republicans + Irish and Italian swing voters. In 1976, Pat Moynihan squeaked past left-wing Jew Bella Abzug by a tiny majority, and then sailed into office. For, after the primary victory, a centrist Irishman can keep the Jewish Democratic votes, and then add the Irish and Italian swing voters for a big majority. And so on into the future.

In the New Jersey Senate race, only ethnic can really explain the surprise victory of the left-liberal Jewish millionaire industrialist Frank Lautenberg over the widely known and widely beloved left-liberal WASP Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick. It is true that Lautenberg spent several million of his own money to achieve name recognition, but money as Lehrman and Clements found—was no guarantee of victory in this election. No, the real point is that no Catholic ethnic—of which there are very many in northern New Jersey—can relate in any way whatsoever to an elegant, elderly upper-class WASP lady with an ultra-Groton accent who smokes a pipe. No way. Never. Millicent Fenwick got the WASP votes in her horsey, upper class district of South Jersey; she got, as “Lacey Davenport,” the votes of the hip younger generation who read “Doonsbury,” and she got the votes and/or the cheers of the quiche-and-white wine-set everywhere. But that was not enough to win. Not in a million years could she get the votes of your average Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholic ethnic. The key to this race was not ideology but culture. The “cross of culture,” as historian Paul Kleppner put it, still lives.

5. The Nuclear Freeze and Other Initiatives

There were several positive indications for libertarians (with a small “1”) in this election. Most important was the nuclear freeze initiative, which won across the country, in nine states plus the District of Columbia, and in numerous cities and counties. All in all, the nuclear freeze won in areas covering one-third the population of the country, and the victories ranged from California and Oregon to Michigan, Montana, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Only in Arizona was the nuclear freeze defeated. And the California victory came despite the Reagan Administration’s vigorous campaign against it, and despite the Republican victory in that state. And so the voters of America sent a firm message to Washington that they don’t want nuclear war, and that they want to begin rolling back the monstrous arms race.

Other victories for liberty were the defeat of two despotic initiatives in California. One was a gun-control measure, the latest in a long series of left-liberal maneuvers to deprive every citizen of his right of self-defense: whether against “private” criminals or against the State apparatus. The other losing initiative is not, I know, as important in the cosmic scheme of things, but it is a cause personally close to my heart: stopping the tyrannical bottle-deposit laws. I hold non-refundable bottles to be, like Kleenex, one of the great advances of Western civilization, and I will be hanged if I will let them take it away. I am not going to shlep bottles back to the supermarket, and I don’t see why I should pay a tax for not doing so. If environmentalists don’t like cans or bottles littering the woods, let them organize squads of devotees to go around picking them up. At least it will keep them out of mischief. Besides, to outlaw bottles or cans because some people might litter them in the woods is equivalent to prohibiting the distribution of political leaflets because someone might litter them in the street, or outlawing knives because someone might be stabbed. And what is more, from my own urban point of view, it is far worse to have dirty bottles and cans sitting around the supermarket attracting roaches than it is to have them scattered around distant and deserted woods.

At any rate, the California masses stopped bottle-law tyranny in its tracks, and let us hope they will set an example for other states.

6. Losing Republican Governors in the Midwest

Another positive item for the free-market was the way in which the voters punished outgoing Republican governors in four big states of the Midwest. In each case—Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan—the state had had very popular, largely moderate, Republican governors. In each case, they had been elected on a cut-taxes, balance-the-budget program. And in each case, they had betrayed their pledges, raised taxes, and incurred big deficits. So much did they sense their disgrace that each of the governors—Quie in Minnesota, Dreyfus in Wisconsin, Rhodes in Ohio, and Milliken in Michigan—decided to quit before they were defeated. The result was that their hapless successors were left holding the bag, and all the Republican candidates went down to defeat. In Minnesota, ex-Governor Rudy Perpich was fondly remembered as someone who had left his post with a surplus, whereas the state now has a $1 billion deficit.

7. Don’t Trust Polls a Lot

The public opinion polls have proved highly unreliable this year. The day before the election, Mario Cuomo was named as points ahead in the Daily News poll, and other respected polls had his lead at 11 per cent. Hence, his actual 3 per cent victory was made to look like a “moral” triumph for Lehrman. The New York Times had an article after the election on how the polls differed from the actual results across the country (e.g. Bradley was supposed to be leading in California, Thompson was supposed to be way ahead in Illinois, etc.) But so much are we trapped in the “scientific” mystique of the polls that the Times blamed the problem on an alleged enormous volatility of the electorate, which apparently fluctuates wildly from day to day. (Whatever happened to the theory that everyone makes up their mind a month before an election?) Apparently, it never occurred to the Times that perhaps the explanation is that the polls themselves are wildly inaccurate, rather than that the public is always changing its mind.

8. The Low Turnout

Despite many hot races, once again the turnout rate of voters was low, at 40% of eligible voters. Why? Are they all closet Smith/Konkinites, not-voting with their feet in protest against the electoral process? Who knows? Certainly, it doesn’t show a great deal of devotion to the political system.

The LP and The Elections

How did the Libertarian Party fare in the elections? To be blunt: not very well. The time has come for plain speaking; the Great Craniac Swindle, the hype, the con, of Quick Victory, the quick fix, the Instant Third Major Party, is dead, finished, kaput. Throughout the country, and with a few local exceptions, we have plateaued out, and in most cases declined, to about 1 to 2 per cent of the vote. We must face reality: For the foreseeable future, we are not going to be the Third Major Party. Some of us should write 100 times on the blackboard: We are a minor party. We may be a large minor party with potential for eventual mass membership, but right now we are pretty damn small compared to the majors.

Mostly, it’s the same dismal story across the country. Dick Jacobs, who has a great deal of name recognition in Michigan as a veteran of anti-tax initiatives, and who ran a very active campaign, lost existing ballot status by obtaining only 0.5% in the race for Governor. (He needed 0.66% for the LP to remain on the ballot.) The Oregon LP also lost ballot status. David Hutzelman, who had piled up a large vote in the last election for the state-wide race for Texas Railroad Commissioner, got only 0.56% for Governor. Jim Lewis, who ran an active campaign and got on major-party TV debates, got only 0.8% for Senator of Connecticut. Bea Armstrong got only 0.8% for Governor of Illinois. In Colorado, Paul Grant, who ran a very active campaign and was on TV debates, got only 2% of the vote.

The California races were quite instructive. The California LP narrowly managed to retain ballot status when two of their minor state-wide candidates got a little over 2% of the total (2% by one candidate was needed.) But Ed Clark’s campaign for Governor is now only a long-faded memory; in 1978, Clark got a remarkable 5.5% of the vote. When will we see its like again?

Nevertheless, the story of the major state-wide California races this year (Senator and Governor) is enlightening. Compare: Joe Fuhrig, who ran for Senator in an uncompromisingly radical campaign, managed by one of the leaders of the Radical Caucus, Eric Garris; and Dan Dougherty, who ran a non-radical campaign for Governor, managed by a top Craniac operative, Tom Palmer. Typically, Fuhrig collected and spent only $25,000, while Dougherty managed to amass almost twice as much, $45,000. Both the Senate and Governor races among the Democrats and Republicans were tight, and both were perceived to be so. (If anything, the Senate race was supposed to be closer, which should have given Dougherty a comparative edge.) And yet, the result was that Fuhrig amassed 106,000 votes, the largest LP vote in absolute numbers for a major statewide race in the country, while Dougherty gained only 79,000 votes. Fuhrig’s percentage of the total vote was 1.4%, as against Dougherty’s 1.0%. But, more significantly, what was the crucial dollar/vote ratio, that critical figure which gauges the monetary effectiveness (or “productivity,” if you will) of each campaign? Fuhrig’s campaign cost only 24 cents a vote, whereas Dougherty’s cost almost two and a half times as much, at 57 cents a vote.

Two of the relatively bright spots in this somber picture were Montana and, Arizona. In Montana, the intelligent and affable Larry Dodge received 4% of the vote for U.S. Senate, while in Arizona the charismatic, former five-term Republican Congressman Sam Steiger got 5.0% in his race for Governor, narrowly winning ballot status for the LP. Steiger’s race was certainly a bright spot in the nation, but when we consider that he had great built-in name recognition, that he was acknowledged by the press to have won his TV debate with his Democrat and Republican rivals, and that he was endorsed for the first time in his career by the newspaper in his home city of Prescott, Steiger’s performance scarcely bodes Quick Victory in Arizona. The really bright spot of the Steiger race is that he accomplished his total of 36.5 thousand votes by spending only about $3000, for a marvelously effective performance at 8 cents a vote.

Another highlight was Florida, where Radical Caucus leader Dianne Pilcher, spending only $2000, or $1.30 a vote, garnered an excellent 9.5% of the vote for State Rep in a threeway race.

For a grisly and sickening contrast, let us now turn to the two top Craniac campaigns in the nation. The most important, of course, was Dick Randolph’s race for Governor of Alaska. In early summer, Randolph, for some curious reason, turned his entire campaign over to the Crane Machine, lock, stock, and barrel—and to Eastern preppie carpetbaggers at that. After offering the job to several others and having it turned down, the Crane Machine sent Kent Guida—fresh from his only political experience as third-place loser in a three-person race for national chair in 1981—to Alaska as campaign manager (?!) for Randolph. Other Craniacs poured up there, including Anita Anderson and Paul Beckner, and Ed Crane himself and the Riches were much in evidence. Crane and his hireling Chris Hocker were made co-finance directors of the Randolph campaign in the lower 48. And when Craniac Eric O’Keefe was kicked out of his job as National Director of the LP in August, he was immediately trundled up to Alaska to help run the show.

For a year, the Craniacs had been trumpeting Randolph as a “winnable” candidate, and O’Keefe managed to direct a great deal of headquarters resources into the fight. Randolph put out a campaign book, Freedom for Alaskans, which was witheringly reviewed by a former VP candidate and National Chairman Dave Bergland in the October frontlines as gravely downplaying libertarian principle.

In short, a typical Craniac campaign: lots of hype, lots of splash, lots of money, opportunistically burying principle, and run by the much vaunted tough young neo-Haldeman “professionals” of the Crane Machine itself.

And what was the result? Absolute unmitigated disaster. Remember that Ed Clark got 12% of the Alaskan vote for President in 1980, and that a popular minor party candidate should do much better for Governor or Senator than some out-of-stater running for the top political jab of President. Remember also that Dick Randolph was a two-term State Representative as a Libertarian, and had been a Republican State Rep in the past; he had name recognition throughout the state. And how much did Randolph get, after all the “professionalism,” and tons of money? Only 15 per cent! Unbelievable.

Furthermore, the amount of money collected and spent by the Randolph campaign was enormous. At this writing, we don’t know the precise figures, but various reports from Crane Machine sources range from the enormous $550,000 to a staggering $1 million. This means, that to gain his 25,000 votes, Randolph spent somewhere between a whopping $22 and $40 per vote. (Contrast this to Steiger’s 8 cents a vote in a similar absolute vote range!) This is surely one of the highest dollar/vote ratios in American political history. It is true that Jay Rockefeller spent in this range in his race for governor of West Virginia, and that Tom Hayden spent something like it this year for State Rep in California. But the difference is that they won, whereas all Randolph got was a measly 15 percent.

Or look at it this way. Since Clark got 12% in Alaska with very little expenditure of money (Clark spent over $3 million for the whole nation), this means that we can say it took Randolph from $550,000 to $1 million to get a lousy extra 3% of the Alaskan vote. Since the total Alaskan vote this year was approximately 175,000, we can make the rough calculation that the marginal dollar/vote ratio of the Randolph campaign was an incredible $105 to $190 per vote.

But this does not complete the Alaskan disaster. By the hubris of giving up his State Rep post to run for governor, Randolph lost the Alaska LP his own seat, while Ken Fanning lost his as well, and neither of the other two LPers who were supposed to win did anything at all. So that the only thing that Randolph and the Crane Machine and its bombastic hype Accomplished was to spend from half-a-million to a million dollars and to lose us the Alaskan seats we already had. After spending lots of money and hope and energy in Alaska, we are back to square zero.

In sum, the Crane and the Randolph myths have both been shattered beyond repair by this campaign. Randolph, our “big-time” candidate, blew it unbelievably, while the Craniacs and Randolph managed to pour perhaps a million dollars down a tundra rathole. As a perceptive LP politico said as early as a year ago: “who have these so-called ‘professionals’ [the Craniacs] ever elected?” Who indeed?

The Crane Machine are not only lowdown opportunists and betrayers of libertarian principle, they are incredibly inept and bumbling opportunists to boot. They sell their souls only to win a mess of nothing. But, if you look at their record, they have been successful so far in two and only two important ways: (a) in continuing to con the Koch brothers and other contributors into pouring millions into their shabby operations; and (b) in continuing to con activists into doing the foot-soldier work of getting signatures, stuffing envelopes, etc.

But the Craniac Con is a cruel one, because hundreds of activists have become disillusioned when the hype has turned to ashes, when the “many million” votes become 900,000, or the “winnable” race becomes a piddling 15 per cent. There is no better way to waste and burn out activists than deliberately hyping their expectations, and having them work and contribute feverishly to campaigns, only to have their hopes cruelly dashed on Election Day. As for the Koch brothers and the other deluded contributors, surely some day they will wake up and stop pouring out their substance for the sake of Crane and his repellent Machine.

Even before the November disaster, long-time LP activist, Barbara B. Kamm, formerly head of the Clark campaign in California, set forth a position which should be heartily seconded by every libertarian. In a letter to frontlines (October), Ms. Kamm wrote: “I will not contribute a cent of my hard-earned money or a minute of my precious time to any campaign that is managed by the ‘Crane Machine’. . .” Brava!

A grim footnote to the Crane/Randolph; Alaska disaster was the equivalent Craniac catastrophe in New York. In a race where Eric O’Keefe claimed the chances to be “excellent” for FLP gubernatorial candidate John Northrup to get the 50,000 votes needed for ballot status, Northrup got a miserable 18,000 votes for 0.36% of the total. But, in contrast to Alaska, this calamity was scarcely a surprise, since it simply continues the grisly and unbroken record of disasters committed by the tiny, inept, and Craniac-ridden New York Party. The New York Party is run like a feudal fiefdom by Craniacs Gary Greenberg and Howie and Andrea Rich, and Northrup’s campaign manager was the well-known Craniac operative, Bruce Majors.

But, once again, in a manner echoing the much more grandiose Alaska caper, the New York Party managed to raise the hefty sum of approximately $100,000 for the doomed Northrup, weighing in with a big dollar/vote ratio of about $5.50 a vote. Yet the Northrup defeat should easily have been foreseen by anyone familiar with the New York Party or the state’s political situation.

So, what are the lessons of the 1982 election for the Libertarian Party? Where do we go from here? What lessons, that is, aside from the obvious one of never, ever again contributing to or devoting time and energy to, a Crane Machine candidate for any political office?

The first lesson, as I have indicated, is to face reality, and accept the fact that we are a minor party, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The quick fix is over. But that means we must act like the minor party-with-an-ideological message that we really are, while preparing for future greater effectiveness and higher vote totals. We must give up all dreams of victory in two years, or thinking that everyone will rush to vote for us once they hear a brief TV spot for some candidate. We must give up any thought of selling out for nonexistent votes. For, even though statism has failed dismally, the public sees this as a failure of a particular political party, and we can therefore expect them to grope from one major party to another and back again for many years to come.

So do we have a continuing role to play? Yes indeed, but not the one pushed by the Crane Machine. Our current role as a political party is to use the electoral process to (a) educate the public in libertarian principles and how they apply to political issues; and (b) use campaigns — and all our other activities — to recruit “cadre”, that is, to add to our membership dedicated and consistent libertarians. Education and recruitment are our twin tasks, and the two reinforce each other. For we cannot educate anyone in libertarian principle by softening our message, selling out, and sounding like everyone else. We can only educate in libertarianism by being pure and radical and consistent libertarians and always doing so. And we want most importantly to recruit not people who vaguely want a 4 per cent tax reduction or looser rent control, but cadre — people who are knowledgeable and consistent libertarians all the way, and are not afraid to say so. True education and genuine recruitment go hand in hand.

And we must all realize that we are in this thing for good, and for ever. We are libertarians not because we expect a Quick Victory (although of course we would love to have one!) but because we are in a life-long commitment to the cause of liberty. We must buckle down and realize that the struggle against the State is going to be a long and protracted one. To use an apt military analogy, we libertarians are a “guerrilla band”; we are a minority, trying to win the hearts and minds of the public. We are, as “guerrillas,” engaged in a protracted struggle; tactically, we must therefore concentrate on small advances and pursuing those short-term goals that are realistic and realizable with our highly limited resources. The Crane Machine, on the contrary, has been trying to beat the massive “conventional armies” of the two statist major parties by aping them in every way. By flash and hype and mirrors, the Machine has been trying for Quick Victory over the majors at their own game. The Crane Machine has been trying to pretend to us and to everyone else that we are already a “real,” “major” party. Hence, the enormous waste of resources poured into “glamor” campaigns for president or governor, along with the grievous neglect of principle and of grass-roots party building.

The 1983 Presidential convention in New York is Armageddon time. It will be the great turning-point, the watershed event which will determine the fate of the Libertarian Party for years and perhaps for ever. If we follow the Pied Piper and pick a Craniac candidate, we will be choosing hype and dishonesty and burnout and sellout, and possibly permanent death and destruction for the Libertarian Party. But if, on the contrary, we repudiate the corrupt and degraded Crane Machine, if we face reality and are honest with ourselves and with the public, if we emphasize long-term commitment, radical principle, and grassroots recruitment, we can save the Party and build soundly and solidly toward a glorious future of mass support and effectiveness in making libertarian ideals a reality. It is ours to choose.

THE WAR IN THE BRITISH MOVEMENT

The English libertarian movement has been around, and growing, for many years. It is far smaller than the U.S. counterpart, but intelligent and lively. For a while it ran some independent races for Parliament, but gave that up as premature. Its social and intellectual center is the Alternative Bookshop in London, probably the world’s finest libertarian bookstore, run by dynamic young Chris Tame. For years, Tame and Mark Brady have been close friends, an intelligent duo who virtually founded the modern libertarian movement in Great Britain. All of us have usually coupled “Tame-and-Brady” or “Brady-and-Tame” in conversation, like Damon-and-Pythias; they have been models of both erudite scholars and committed activists, anarcho-capitalists who have been able to work with a wide spectrum of libertarians in Great Britain.

Several years ago, Brady and Tame founded the Libertarian Alliance as the umbrella organization for libertarian activists. About a dozen good friends formed themselves into the Executive Board, and they and twenty-odd others have formed the body of British activism. Since they were close friends, agreeing largely on ends and means, they did not feel it important to form anything but a loose organization. After all, why be formal among friends and allies? And so the Alliance was formed with virtually no by-laws or any legal way of resolving disputes among the Board, or indeed of choosing Board members. Why do so if no real disputes will arise?

Unfortunately, the Libertarian Alliance failed to perceive the cruel world out there, or even in here, and a realistic assessment of the nature of Man would have led them to stop, arrange for some formal mechanisms, and been safe instead of sorry. Not that that would have resolved all problems by any means, but it surely would have helped.

For the Libertarian Alliance has lamentably fallen on evil days, and has plunged into a wracking Civil War that has so far proven unresolved and unresolvable. The Tame-Brady team has split apart. Beginning with an important ideological point, the internecine warfare within the Alliance has escalated into power struggles and personal faction-fighting, replete with all the paraphernalia that we have come to know all too well: lengthy phone calls, constant meetings, and a besetting preoccupation with the technical minutiae of the dispute.

We American well-wishers can do little to aid the wracking travail of our English compatriots. Deploring “petty factionalism,” or asking shrewish questions like: “Why aren’t you spending your time fighting the State?” are both insensitive and pointless. In a sense, they are like a healthy outsider impatiently asking someone: “Why do you keep bellyaching about your toothache?” Such questions hardly ease the pain. Both sides in the fray, as well as those in-between, understand their situation full well; they don’t need to be hectored. Offers to mediate are pointless also; each side is firm-in-the-faith, and they don’t need officious suggestions by relatively ignorant bystanders uninvolved in the fray.

So what is the fight all about? Briefly, it began because of two fundamental strategic errors by what is now the Tame group apparently felt that not enough people in the West understand the evil nature of the Soviet regime. If this were 1945, they would have a point; but for forty years now, we have heard ad nauseam about the horrors of the Soviet Union. The second, allied strategic error, was in concluding that the Libertarian Alliance, with its thirty or so members, could play a major role in overthrowing the Soviet government. It seems to us that our little movement has enough problems with our own governments of the U.S. or Great Britain without taking on the task of overthrowing the government of the Soviets.

But these errors led the Tame group, first, to set up a front organization called The Anti-Soviet Society, and, second, to engage in fraternal symbiosis with a long-standing Russian fascist outfit known as NTS. By no stretch of the imagination is NTS libertarian or even classical liberal; they are fascists and Great Russian chauvinists. But to the Tame group, the lure of smuggling libertarian pamphlets into the Soviet Union, of working with a “real” underground outfit, seemed irresistible. The Anti-Soviet Society apparently soon became an NTS front, instead of a libertarian one.

When alerted to the nature of NTS by the English media, seconded by its own critics, by Libertarian Vanguard, and by LA Executive Board members Mark Brady and David Ramsay Steele, now both graduate students in the United States, the Tame group seems to have largely agreed that they erred in playing footsie with this shabby Russian outfit. But the warfare within LA then began to escalate over to what extent the Tame group should admit their errors, over whether the thorough and hard-hitting critique of the NTS Connection by Brady and Steele should be published in LA’s magazine Free Life, and by many ancillary disputes. The war was on.

All we can do in the American movement is to sympathize with the grief of our English comrades, hope that the English movement eventually resolves its conflict, and note for our own purposes (pace Sam Konkin) that you don’t have to be involved in a political party to have a barrel-full of turmoil.

NEW GRASS-ROOTS HARD-MONEY GROUP!

There are many investment newsletters which analyze the market from an Austrian hard-money, free-market perspective. They will cost you anywhere from $100 to $200 a year, and some of them are worth it. But there has been no educational, activist organization devoted to an “outreach” effort to educate the public on money, inflation, and business cycles.

Now at last such an organization has been formed: the Alliance for Monetary Education, Inc. The Alliance plans to educate the public on monetary matters from a hard-core Austrian, hard-money, free-market libertarian perspective. Founder and President of the Alliance is Dr. Murray Sabrin, the country’s leading “Austrian” economic-geographer, who wrote an important Ph.D. dissertation on the geographical spread of inflation in the United States. Vice-President of the Alliance, and head of its public policy division is Dr. Joseph T. Salerno, professor of economics at Rutgers University, and one of the outstanding young Austrian and monetary economists in the country. Salerno’s doctoral dissertation was a notable contribution to the history of international monetary thought.

The Alliance for Monetary Education is a non-political, nonprofit, tax-exempt organization, founded last year in Lenox, Massachusetts and now located in Leonia, New Jersey.

The Alliance’s major objective is to place advertisements on money, inflation, and economic activity in our most widely read and influential newspapers and magazines. It intends to inform millions of Americans about “inflationism,” as Ludwig von Mises described the monetary policy of this century’s guiding monetary policies.

The Alliance seeks tens of thousands of contributors who are eager to educate themselves and others on money and on the way in which government manipulation has caused our chronic problem of inflation. It seeks the support of libertarians, free-market advocates, hard-money people, or indeed anyone who would like to help themselves and others understand our grave economic mess.

The Alliance’s first newspaper ad is ready to go but advertising money is needed. For the absurdly low tax-deductible sum of $18 a year you can help pay for the ad. What is more, you will also receive “The Monetary Outlook,” the Alliance’s quarterly newsletter, as well as “Special Bulletins” which will be issued at least four times a year analyzing the latest monetary developments.

Hurry! Send your contribution of $18 or more to the Alliance for Monetary Education, P.O. Box 476, Leonia, NJ 07605.

HURRY! READ THE BANNED ISSUE!

The Laissez-Faire Bookstore has always tried to serve impartially all sectors of the libertarian movement, and it has carried the Libertarian Forum since its inception. For several years, the Bookstore computerized our mailing list and shipped out each issue to our subscribers. Now, Andrea Millen Rich, the new proprietor of the Laissez-Faire Bookstore and a top operative of the Crane Machine, has banned the Lib. Forum from its sacred portals. Mrs. Rich’s reason: because the lead article in the September issue (“Blockbuster at Billings”), which told the story of the firing of Eric O’Keefe as National Director of LP, consisted of “vile and demented lies.”

Those of you who would like to be able to make up your own mind are invited to check for yourself by purchasing the issue from us for $1.50 while they remain in stock, or by subscribing to the Lib. Forum, stating that you wish to begin your subscription with this “banned” September issue. Don’t let them suppress the truth! (And if you want to check some more, you can purchase a copy of the tape of the NatCom meeting from National LP Headquarters.)

And renew your subscription when the time comes. How many more banned issues do you want to miss?

THE NEW LIBERTARIAN VANGUARD

The newly revamped bi-monthly, Libertarian Vanguard, is a joy and a delight, and is absolutely indispensable for anyone interested in keeping up with the real events of the Libertarian Party and movement. Under the new editorship of Scott Olmsted, Vanguard is now a sober, professional-looking, 16-page newsletter. While still analyzing events foreign and domestic, Vanguard has shifted its focus toward news and critiques of the movement, a shift made necessary by the continuing crisis in the Party. That crisis is expected to reach a climax at the Presidential nominating convention in New York next August. (The organ of the LP Radical Caucus, Lib. Vanguard can be obtained for a measly $12 for six issues, 1800 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94102).

The current issue of Lib. Vanguard (October 1982) is a cornucopia of goodies, a veritable blockbuster. There is a thoroughly researched article by Justin Raimondo, “Ron Paul for President?”, which exposes the manifold anti-libertarian aspects of Congressman Ron Paul’s voting record in the current Congress. The point of the article is that while Congressman Paul’s voting record may be fine as a Republican, Libertarian candidates, particularly new converts aspiring to run for President, must be held to a far higher standard. And the odious Crane machine has been making loud noises about Mr. Paul for the LP Presidential nomination. While everyone has free will and can change his mind, Mr. Paul as a candidate for the LP nomination would have to face up to and repudiate his long list of anti-libertarian votes and stands before anyone except the goose-stepping devotees of the Crane Machine could even consider him for such a high post. Also available from the Radical Caucus is an even longer list of Mr. Paul’s anti-libertarian votes before the current Congress. (Send $3.00 to LPRC, 3790 El Camino Real, Box 172, Palo Alto, CA 94306, specifying that you want the packet of “Ron Paul Congressional Votes.”)

Also in Lib. Vanguard is an article by Dan Fiduccia attacking Ed Crane’s repeated use of threats of libel suits against books and newspapers, which, as Fiduccia notes, “seems even more curious in light of Crane’s published views on libel suits,” i.e. his article in Inquiry correctly denouncing them as contributing to “the perilous state of the press in America.” Fiduccia also links such threats with Crane’s attempted use of the FCC to force the NBC-TV network to sell prime time to the 1980 Clark campaign. Fiduccia’s article quotes a number of prominent libertarian theorists and spokesman, all denouncing libel laws and threats to invoke them. The neatest attack on Crane’s FCC access suit against NBC is that of former Inquiry editor Glenn Garvin. Noting the lamebrain Jule Herbert/Ed Crane excuse for the suit, that radio-TV channels are limited by government control, Garvin commented: “innumerable things are limited by government regulation of the auto industry. Does this mean someone has a right to use Crane’s Mercedes?”

One of the most important and certainly the most fascinating contribution of Lib. Vanguard has been to uncover what it has dubbed “Herbertgate,” the financial “imbroglio” (to put it very charitably) at the National Taxpayers Legal Fund Military Procurement Project (PMP). The firing of PMP head Dina Rasor has been covered extensively in the press, but only its ideological aspects, which Vanguard (in its August 1982 issue) has essentially shown to be phony. The press had not picked up on the financial mess, which has now been exposed both in Vanguard and in the current, October issue of frontlines (In its story, “Vanguard Accuses Herbert.” The monthly frontlines is available for $18 a year from the Reason Foundation, 1018 Garden St., Santa Barbara, CA 93101).

One of the most esthetically pleasing aspects of the Vanguard expose comes in the current issue. In its August issue, the Editor had replied to Herbert’s denial of a financial imbroglio with a raft of specifics. This editorial reply moved Craniac Frank Horn to write a letter to Vanguard (October) saying angrily, “Regarding Jule Herbert’s home plumbing bills being paid out of the NTLF Procurement Project account, you had better accompany such serious charges with more specific and solid evidence, e.g. photographs of checks. . . .etc.” In the course of a classic reply, which should go down in the annals of our Movement, Vanguard’s Editor not only supplies a lot more specifics, but also the photographs of three checks made out by Herbert on the NTLF Procurement Project account: one to Fry Plumbing, for a home plumbing bill, one to Holland’s, a liquor store for a party, and one for $3200 to Herbert himself. Also itemized are 16 sets of checks totalling over $27,000 which are either personal to Herbert or made out to employees of the disastrous 1981 NTLF tuition-tax credit campaign in the District of Columbia. Furthermore, for $5.00, anyone can send away to LPRC, 3790 El Camino Real, Box 172, Palo Alto, CA 94306, ask for the “Procurement Project Packet,” and receive: (a) photographs of 67 such checks; (b) a copy of Howie Rich’s new financial “controls” over NTLF (Rich is a top Craniac operative who was made an NTLF Board member in June 1982, and given power to control NTLF finances to avoid a similar imbroglio in the future); and (c) a copy of dissident NTLF Board member Anne Zill’s memo on Procurement Project finances, in which she talks of the appearance of “personal inurement amounting to thousands of dollars,” and wonders whether the Project account had become “a secret slush fund” for outside political activities or for “the personal enrichment of its president (Jule Herbert).”

OK, we’re all convinced about the facts on what might be called the lower rungs of Herbertgate. Now, how about escalating the inquiry and looking to higher levels of possible responsibility? Because the $27,000 Question (or as some would put, the $52,000 Question) now becomes: What did Crane know, and when did he know it?

THE REAL WORLD

by The Old Curmudgeon

(An occasional column dedicated to the proposition that not only the libertarian movement is slightly wack-a-ding-hoy.)

The Joy of Pain?

Jeremy Bentham is not one of my favorite philosophers, but even he does not deserve the pummelling the poor guy has been getting these days. In his nineteenth century naivete, Bentham held that man at all times tries to attain pleasure and avoid pain. But pain these days is In. The Joy of Sex, in all of its positions and varieties seems to be Out these days, and the Joy of Pain is In.

I was reminded of this stark fact the other day when my optic nerves were twice assaulted by the latest example of the Pain fad: the Workout. First, there was the latest Village Voice, much of which seems to have been designed over the years as commando raids upon my blood pressure. The article exalted the latest example of Jane Fonda’s robotic trendy crusades: the Workout, which apparently combines vague leftism with “burn it out,” “burn it through” pain. That night, who should come bounding onto the tube but Kim Novak redivivus, leading a bunch of followers through a fast round of what used to be called calisthenics.

So now your average upper-middle class booby, as long as he/she has money to burn (and the supply seems to be inexhaustible, even in a recession), can spend several days a week enjoying wracking physical pain in the Workout, and then spend the rest of his evenings enjoying emotional pain through group Workshops at the command of his favorite shrink/guru. And finally, considering the flowering of S-M these days, if he or she has any energy or dough left, they can hop into the sack and enjoy some whipping or other forms of torture. Hell, in my day, I used to think that the Flagellant and Hair-shirt movements of old were a bit looney. It turns out that they were just ahead of their time.

Before the Workout, the big example of what Mencken called the “striated muscle fetish” — and it’s still going strong! — was Running, a frenzy that began as mere “jogging.” There were books on the Joy of Running, the Mystique of Running, the Philosophy of Running, and even (the saints preserve us!) on the Theology of Running. Even in New York, ordinarily a sophisticated and skeptical city, two million boobs recently turned out to watch tens of thousands of far more advanced boobs chugging through the marathon.

My own exposure to running was short but far from sweet. When I went to Columbia during World War II, physical fitness was all the rage, in order to toughen us all up for the War Effort. Phys. Ed. was — and for all I know still is — compulsory, and one of the legends permeating the Columbia of my day was what had happened some years before to the now distinguished philosopher, Mortimer Adler. Young Adler had sailed through Columbia’s undergraduate program with flying colors, but had been prevented from graduating because he couldn’t pass the idiotic compulsory swimming test. In those days, the Great Guru of Columbia was Professor John Dewey, and the compulsory phys. ed. — swimming program was one of the more repellent products of Prof. Dr. Dewey’s looney theories of “progressive” education, in which the Whole Man and not just the mind would be uplifted. Mortimer Adler, the story went, left Columbia without a degree (he was apparently too ethical to suborn a friendly physician and get himself exempted), possessed of an eternal and undying hatred for Professor Dr. Dewey and all of his works.

At any rate, I was pressed into compulsory running, and I still remember the non-joy of chugging along half a lap behind my confreres, to the bewilderment of our beloved coach. Then — thank the Lord! — winter came, and running moved to our indoor track. It so happened that that oddly constructed track was about one-third visible, the other two-thirds winding around various exercise and other rooms. It so happened that our locker room bisected the hidden section of the track, and so us more enterprising types soon found out the way to Beat the System. We would hang out in the locker room for about ten minutes, kibitzing and arguing philosophy, and then someone would say, “well time to put in an appearance,” and then we would race out onto the visible portion of the track, and the assorted coaches would be impressed by our vim and vigor after so many laps around the track. Then we would collapse into the locker room for another extended rest. Once in a while, one of the less dumb coaching aides would say, in puzzlement, “Hey, I haven’t seen you guys in quite a while.” The coaches would scratch their heads, but they never caught on.

I had never had occasion to run before entering Columbia. (In the spirit of the true New Yorker, my attitude was, “why run if you can always hop a cab?”) From my short-lived experience of compulsory running, I conceived a hatred for this form of leisure activity that has remained undimmed in its fervor to the present day.

Now let me make my attitude perfectly clear. I am not opposed to running, or other forms of athletics, for those few who are best at it. Athletics takes its honorable place alongside other occupations in the Great Division of Labor. If Renaldo Nehemiah wants to try to break 12.9 seconds for the 110-meter hurdles, God bless him, and I will be there, beer can in hand in front of the tube, to cheer him on. Athletics, in my view, is for the pros or the Olympic amateurs, or for football players who weep at getting a mere 100 thou a year. Like coal mining or lion taming or brain surgery, it is not an occupation for everyone. I have, all my life, been a sports fan, with emphasis on fan rather than participant. But the problem is that no one has ever written a book virtually ordering you and me and the guy next door to rush out there and become a coal miner or brain surgeon or lion tamer on our off hours. No one has ever written a book on the joys, the philosophy, or the religion, of garbage hauling.

One crucial difference between professional athletes and all our joy-of-workshop-workout folks is the old economic conundrum: who pays whom? Professional athletes (and top amateurs, too, of course) get paid; the current crop of pain fetishists do the paying. Many murky social problems get rapidly cleared up if we heed the immortal words of “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame: “Keep your eye on the money.” It is the flow of money that tells you who is fleecing whom.

A common argument for putting oneself through all the pain is “eventually, you’ll like it.” I do not call that a compelling reason. Mankind has shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to almost any hardship, including the concentration camp. But that does not mean that the concentration camp is something one seeks out, or rushes to embrace. No, sorry, people, thanks but no thanks, or, in the words of Samuel Goldwyn, “kindly include me out.” Call me a crusty old reactionary if you will, but I remain as I always have, solidly anti-pain. Nowadays, poor old Bentham needs all the friends he can get.

ARTS AND MOVIES

by Mr. First Nighter

The Golden Age of Comedy

My Favorite Year, dir. by Richard Benjamin. With Peter O’Toole and Joseph Bologna.

For half a century, the major comic talents in American culture have been Jews, mainly from New York: the Marx Brothers, the great wit and linguistic virtuoso S.J. Perelman, Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield. The last great generation of New York Jewish humorists were all schooled as writers of the mighty TV revue of the 1950’s: Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Their very names tell us that here is the last great comic force in our culture: Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart (author of most of the MASH series on TV). For two decades we have mainly relied on these men for all that is hilariously funny on stage, film, or TV.

All these humorists emerged from the great shpritz tradition of New York Jewish humor. Young, would-be comics would hone their budding talents by standing on favorite street comers in Brooklyn or Manhattan and shpritz (go on a roll, from Yiddish for “effervesce,” as in “wine shpritzer” for soda pop). Fast, funny, articulate, improvizing on a dime, weaving in their own experience and observations with cultural references, low, middle or high. But above all timing was everything, and when that was missing the entire package was hopeless.

The life of the comic performers can be both highly gratifying and frenetic. Gratifying because the existence and intensity of the laughs are an instant direct measure of success; frenetic because of the misery when the laughs aren’t there.

In recent years, great comedy has almost vanished from our culture. MASH, so funny and heartwarming for years in the Gelbart episodes, has gotten increasingly tedious as Alan Alda’s solemn left-liberal sentimentality has pushed out all the humor and hi-jinks. It deserves its death at the end of the current season. (In a recent episode, Alda goes on at great embarrassing length in eulogizing a nurse recently killed: “She covered up her deep feelings by her shyness, just as I have for years covered up my deep and wonderful feelings by my humor and pranks. . . .” Yecchh!) Neil Simon seems to have gone as far as he can go in his comparisons of New York and L.A. upper-middle class Jewish life. And the last films of the great Woody Allen and Mel Brooks have been absolute and unmitigated floperoos. Allen’s “Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” is one of the worst movies ever made, a brief (but seems very long) exercise in unrelieved tedium. Allen’s serioso and pretentious flirtations with the Bergmans and the Fellinis have finished him, at least for the time being. As for Brooks, his last “History of the World, Part I,” was almost as bad, an unrelieved and almost totally unfunny exercise in schatology. Brooks has always been schatologically oriented, but this time the balance and timing are gone.

The younger generation of comics seem to be hopeless, too. It is either low-key and druggy, like George Carlin, with “jokes” largely devoted to in-marijuana or cocaine references. Or it is simply witless low-slapstick like “Animal House” or sourly ideological, a la Lily Tomlin. And all current TV comedy seems to be self-referential, about TV rather than about oneself or the world. (A la Saturday Night Live, and all its imitators). For those of us who don’t regard TV itself as the be-all and end-all, this will hardly do.

And so My Favorite Year comes like a delightful bolt-from-the-blue. Undoubtedly the best movie of the year, it is fast, hilarious, tightly paced, evocative of the Golden Age of Comedy. It is the saga of a drunken Errol Flynn-type actor (played marvelously in high-farce style by Peter O’Toole) being prepped to do a stint on Stan “King” Kaiser’s hit TV show, Comedy Cavalcade. Beginning with the voice-over, “1954 was my favorite year,” it captures the spirit and comedy of the times, as well as the frenetic, drunken, wild ambiance of the Your Show of Shows program and of the live-TV of that era.

My Favorite Year, in all of its aspects, also captures the spirit of the movies of that and earlier decades. It is not only funny and richly textured, it is also fast and tightly paced. There is not a single wasted moment, not a lost millimeter of film. It is the antithesis of the modern “art film,” in which one is treated to boring and lengthy closeups of the facial pores of some hang-doggy actor about whom one couldn’t care less.

The acting is excellent, with the exception of the lead Mark Linn-Baker, who plays the young Mel Brooks-type protagonist in an excessively schnooky manner. And his voice sounds like a carbon-copy of director Richard Benjamin’s—Benjamin’s one lapse in an otherwise sterling piece of work.

But there is one question that must be asked of my favorite movie-of-the-year. Will it ever again be possible to make an Old Culture movie, a funny or otherwise movie-type movie, about the current world? Must every good picture be set nostalgically at some time in the past? Will we ever be able to turn the current culture around? But in the meanwhile, there is hope, for the producer listed for My Favorite Year is none other than Mel Brooks Productions. Perhaps this means that Baby will be Coming Home.

FALKLAND FOLLOWUP

We have not for some time turned our attention to the poor kelpers, the 1,800 unfortunate inhabitants of the Falkland Islands. Their “liberation” by the massed might of the British government has been costly for everyone concerned, including the kelpers themselves. The deluded British taxpayers were the major losers in this caper, having had to shell out $1 billion for the war, plus many more billions to come in the glorious postwar world. The Brits could have paid each of the kelpers a small fraction of that loot to simply emigrate to their beloved Britain. Furthermore, the kelpers find quartered among them, apparently forever, a permanent occupying garrison of no less than 4,000 British troops. To gauge the disruptive effect of this occupation, it’s as if the United States were suddenly to be permanently occupied by 450 million foreign soldiers!

Now Lord Shackleton has come up with a report for the Thatcher government that should shiver every rational person’s timbers. The British government is to pour in about $60 million for “development” and “job creation” for the Falklands. But consider that unemployment is zero on the island, and that this enormous sum, according to Shackleton, “might” create another 200 jobs (for whom?) This amounts to over $300,000 per job, which, as John Blundell writes, will be “possibly the most expensive jobs in the world.”

Indeed. Why not just give, say, $50.000 in cash to each kelper? Every kelper would be happier, and the poor bombarded British taxpayer would save about $50 million. But of course, the British bureaucracy would then not get their beloved boodle. Blundell reports that the proposed Falkland Islands Development Agency is slated to have a Chief’ Executive and a Development Officer making $100,000 and $50,000 plus expenses annually. At an average income of $4,000, we can be sure that the kelpers will be duly appreciative.

In the meanwhile, the poor kelpers might be getting “developed,” but they are not going to be very mobile. With Argie mines planted all over the island, the kelpers can’t walk out of town for their favorite strolls, for kelping, or for forage. All a seemingly permanent legacy of their “liberation.”

Again, it looks like the only gainers from the Falklands fray were the Thatcher regime and the British State apparatus. As per usual.

But there were other gainers as well. We have previously mentioned the sinister role in Falklands life of the privileged monopoly Falkland Islands Company, granted by the government 75% of the land, a monopoly of the wool exports, and owner of the sole shipping line. But who owns this Company? In 1973, the owners, the Slater-Walker consortium, were in financial trouble and put its subsidiary Company up for sale. A generous Argentine bid to buy the Falklands Company was vetoed by the British government, which decreed that no Argentinians may be permitted to buy land in the Falklands. That took care of that. But there was still the problem of bailing out Slater-Walker, which was accomplished by Charrington Industrial Holdings, English conglomerate and current owner of the Falkland Islands Company.

But the interesting point for conspiracy buffs is that Charrington’s purchase was made possible by a syndicate of bankers and underwriters, who accepted as part of their payment substantial holdings of Falkland Company stock. And prominent among these financiers was none other than our old friend, the Chase Manhattan Bank, flagship of the Rockefeller world empire. Oho! The plot thickens!

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard. Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Volume XVII, Number 1 January, 1983

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

The Economy:
the Year Ahead

This is the season of the year when a host of high-priced economists unlimber their high-speed computers and uncork their precise predictions for the economy for the year ahead: the exact level of the GNP, the inflation rate, unemployment, and so on. In this lucrative forecasting industry, all the forecasts are more or less the same, and they will usually be proven way off the mark. The reason they all are so off base is simple are so off base is simple: all they are really doing, when you cut through the cloud of obscurantist jargon, is extrapolating this year’s trend: i.e., they take a ruler and continue the trend of the last six months or so onto the coming year. Of course, they don’t say they’re doing that; for, after all, who in their right mind would pay $100,000 or $1 million for some bozo to take a ruler and extrapolate trend? You don’t need a Ph.D to do that.

Actually, the situation is worse than that. For numerous studies have shown that forecasts based on econometric mumbo-jumbo have done less well than simple extrapolation of trend! As any given year wears on, and the forecasts of the previous December look more and more haywire, the “scientific” econometric equations are then “adjusted” so as to conform to the current situation, and then that, is extrapolated for the remaining few months. In that way, economists think they will look a bit better.

Any schmo with a ruler can extrapolate trend, but the real trick in forecasting is to predict changes in trend, and that can be done neither with rulers nor with equations and computers. That’s where all the errors come in.

So why are all the forecasts alike? Because there is security riding in packs. If all economists are wrong together, well that’s the luck of the draw, and no one economist will be blamed by his clients. But if an economist is very different from his colleagues, and he’s proved wrong, then he will lose clients in droves.

Where We Are At

Having said all this, I will now enter the lists and at least give a sense of where the economy is and what I think lies ahead.

First, we must face up to the fact that we are in a de-pression. (Some readers should write this slowly 100 times on the blackboard so this will sink in.) Reaganite whitewash propaganda to the contrary, a 10.8% unemployment rate (and no sign of going down) is a depression by any standards. So is a bankruptcy rate higher than at any time since the 1930’s. The usual reply that unemployment is not as bad as the 2025% rate during the 1930’s is beside the point. That was not just a depression, but the biggest one in American and world history. By general depression standards, we are in one, and it’s a lulu.

Second, don’t be fooled by the constant, unremitting stream of Reaganite propaganda that “recovery has begun” because some minor index somewhere has turned up. (“Hey, look here, bubble gum production has just increased by 0.2% last month. The depression is over!”) Last summer, Reagan at one press conference, almost said IT. Referring to the economy, he almost said: “Prosperity is just around the corner” (he was talking about “turning the corner” soon when he stopped), the infamous and disastrous Herbert Hoover phrase during the depths of the Great Depression.

Third, conservative protests that the unemployment rate is not precise and too high (as well as left/liberal protests that it is imprecise and too low) miss the point, and probably deliberately. Of course, the figures are not precise. By using interview techniques, they overweight the number of people looking for work, making the figures too high, but also by omitting discouraged workers and those unemployed very recently, they make the figures too low. But the point is that over the decades the trend of the same imprecise figures will give us a pretty good idea of what is happening in the economy. If the comparable unemployment rate was 3% in the 1950’s and nearly 11% now, something is very wrong, and no mistake.

Fourth, the undeservedly revered National Bureau of Economic Research, the self-appointed experts on dating business cycles, have decreed that the current recession began in the summer of 1981, following a boom beginning in the previous year. But the pretentiously “scientific” National Bureau is hobbled by its own faulty methodology. Its methods, for example, prevent it from distinguishing minor from major booms or busts. It looks more and more that we have been in a depression, not just since the summer of 1981, but since the recession of 1979. The “boom” of 1980-81 now looks like simply an aborted fitful uptick within a depression that has been chronic since 1979. The economy has stagnated since 1979; production and standard of living have been depressed and declining.

Fifth, does this mean that Reagan is off the hook, and that he has only been struggling against disastrous policies inherited from his predecessor? No, for Reaganite policies swiftly put an end to the fitful recovery and plunged us into a far deeper depression that we had from 1979-80.

What were these calamitous Reaganite policies? The important thing to realize is that Reagan is not, repeat not, a free-market, hard-money hero manfully seeing us through the painful but necessary consequences of his “drastic budget-cutting”, “drastic-tax slashing”, hard-money policies of 1981-82. There were no such policies. That was all hot air and mendacity. On the contrary, Reagan raised the budget sharply, increased not lowered (much less “drastically” lowered) taxes, and launched the by now familiar disastrously accelerating deficits.

Thus: in fiscal 1980, the last full fiscal year of the Carter administration, and by far the biggest spending year in Jimmie’s reign, total federal spending was $580 billion. (Carter’s average spending for his three full fiscal years was $508 billion.) Despite all the boasting (by Reaganites) and wailing (by liberals) about the “disastrous” Reagan budget cuts, Reagan’s budget totalled $661 billion in fiscal 1981 (a year he shared with Carter), and rose to an estimated $725 billion in Reagan’s first full fiscal year, 1982. Next year it will be much higher.

All right, but what about the famous ill-advised “drastic” supply-side income tax cuts put through by Reagan in 1981? Let’s look at the record. In fiscal 1980, Carter collected $520 billion in taxes from the hapless American public. (Carter’s average taxes for his three full fiscal years were $463 billion.) Ronnie Reagan, after a year of “drastic tax slashing”, raised tax revenues to $603 billion: in fiscal 1981, and then to an estimated $627 billion in fiscal 1982. The much vaunted income tax cut was so small that it was more than outweighed by the programmed Social Security tax increase (which Reagan did nothing to cut) and by “bracket creep”, the sinister process by which inflation wafts us into a higher tax bracket, so that even though we are no better off, we have to pay higher tax rates even when rates have officially remained the same or even been reduced!

As for deficits, free-spending Carter incurred the second biggest deficit in American history in his last fiscal year, 1980, at $60 billion, topped only by good grey Jerry Ford’s $66 billion in his last year, fiscal 1976, (The previous high had been $57 billion in 1943, the depths of World War II). In fiscal 1982, his first full year, “tight-fisted Scrooge” Ronald Reagan came through with by far the biggest deficit in American history, an estimated $99 billion, and for the present and for next year, estimates (which almost always undervalue the deficit) are now predicting a $200 billion annual deficit, and rising.

So: on the budget, taxes, and deficits, Reaganomics has not been a reversal or even a deceleration of previous New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society trends. On the contrary, Reaganomics was and continues to be an acceleration of statist Great Society economic policies.

Sixth, but what about Reagan’s proudest achievement, the “abatement” of inflation in his two years in office? It is true that inflation has come down, from approximately 13 to 5 per cent, but it is no trick to bring down inflation when we are suffering the greatest depression in half a century. Quite the contrary, the 5 per cent is a cause for alarm, not congratulation. In the middle of a depression, prices should be going down sharply, and not rising at a substantial 5 per cent. In fact, the worrisome chronic nature of our inflation problem can be seen in the fact that only eleven and a half years ago, Richard Nixon panicked and imposed price-wage control because inflation was then hitting us at the then alarmingly high rate of 5.5%. It is the measure of the way inflation has permeated our lives that we think of 5 per cent not as alarmingly high, but as a sign that inflation has ended, and that we can now, in the current phrase, “declare victory” over inflation and proceed to tackle unemployment.

Seventh, since July 1982, the Reagan Administration and the Federal Reserve have thrown in the towel on any feeble attempt to stop inflating and inflation. Since that time, the rate of Fed counterfeiting (“increase of the money supply”) has accelerated to the massive figure of over 15 per cent per year. The Fed has indeed “declared victory” over inflation and gone all-out to try to inflate the money supply as its seemingly only way out to get us out of the depression.

What Went Wrong?

What went wrong? How did the high hopes get dashed so quickly? The Reagan Administration had a plan, which they figured to be a cunning one. It would employ the trappings of old-fashioned free-market rhetoric (“drastic” budget cuts and tax cuts, balanced budget, hard money) and supply-side jargon, while doing precisely the opposite, and in the meanwhile behind this smoke-screen, Friedmanite monetarism was supposed to perform its magic. The Friedmanites had gotten control of the Treasury Department and most of the economic advisers, and were able to bludgeon the Fed into going along with them. The Friedmanites had a plan: the Fed would slowly, ever so slowly, lower the rate of counterfeiting year after year, and thereby bring down the rate of inflation without getting the economy (as had always been true in the past) into a recession. Gradualism would be the key. Furthermore, the Friedmanites claimed that the “real” rate of interest (the nominal interest rate minus inflation rate) was always, as if by divine commandment, at 3%. Therefore, as inflation would be brought down by the Fed’s gradual reduction of money growth, real interest rates—and therefore money rates—would fall, stimulating the economy and insuring us against any major recession.

The rate of money growth did fall significantly as the Fed put monetarism into effect. But, lo and behold!, the supposedly inflexible 3 per cent rule for real interest rates was broken, and interest rates stayed way up while inflation fell sharply. Hence, real rates rose to unprecedentedly high levels. By the late summer of 1981, it was clear that a recession was upon us, and interest rates stayed almost at boom levels while inflation abated rapidly. And, while interest rates have fallen a bit since then, they have fallen far less than a depression would usually warrant, and the continuing very high real interest rates have put a lid on any significant recovery.

Gradualism, however, was the Friedmanites’ undoing. Not only did the reduction in money growth precipitate a recession, but gradualism made sure that the recession would be slow, dragged out, grinding. For recessions are not irrational acts of God nor random events. They perform a vital function: washing out the unsound malinvestments of the preceding inflationary boom, and redirecting land, labor, and capital to their most efficient uses in the service of consumers. The longer and the more intense the distorting inflationary boom, the greater the work that the cleansing, corrective recession will have to do. This is the insight of the “Austrian” theory of business cycles. But this means that the best that can be done about a recession is for the government to keep hands off—to allow the recession to do its crucial work as quickly as possible. If the government intervenes to allay, check, or stop the workings of the recession, it will only transform a short, sharp recession into a chronic, stagnating depression. The choice is either: transitory acute infection, or a chronic, grinding debilitating disease.

But why has the 1979 depression been so much worse than its predecessors? Because, after several decades of inflation, the public has stopped being suckers; the public has learned to expect, or anticipate, inflation, and has therefore taken steps accordingly: spending money faster, or adding expected inflation to the interest rate. Suppose that the “natural” or “real” rate of interest is 5 per cent, for example, and that everyone then comes to expect a 12 per cent inflation rate in the coming year. Any creditor who continues to charge 5 per cent interest will now be losing 7 per cent of his money per year, for the dollars he gets paid are worth 12 per cent less than the dollars he loaned out. The debtor is in a reverse situation; inflation permits him to expropriate the creditor. Over the years, as both sets of people catch on to the permanent inflation policy, both creditors and debtors agree to attach an expected-inflation premium to the interest rate. Hence, decades of inflation will raise nominal interest rates greatly.

And real rates too. For the Friedmanites’ great error was in assuming that the current rate of inflation (whether 12 percent or 5 per cent) is identical with what people on the market expect inflation rates to be. But that is not necessarily true, especially after decades of inflation. For the market, the public, now do not trust the Fed or the administration —any administration—not to resume inflating after the inevitable recession strikes.

Most people assume that current and expected future deficits have raised interest rates directly, by the government entering the bond market as borrower and thereby bidding up interest rates and yields. But while important, the far more critical impact of the Reaganite deficits was in signaling the market that the Fed would soon resume its inflationary role in order to finance them. The resulting anticipated inflation was then quickly reflected back in interest rates.

The market was right not to trust the Reagan Administration and the Fed, for despite their endless promises and rhetoric, the Fed, as we have seen, has inflated to a fare-thee-well since July, and “victory” over inflation has now been declared. For the depression and the high real interest rates have discredited Friedmanite monetarism, and so the Administration has now turned to the good old gang that brought us the calamitous Nixon and Ford administrations: the conservative Keynesians. For that is precisely what the Shultzes, Burnses, Greenspans, Steins, Feldsteins, are. And Keynesianism—though now totally confused—means we are back to inflationary monetary policy, coupled with higher taxes and deficits.

Poor old Keynes must be spinning in his grave. If Keynesianism means anything, it means: don’t increase taxes during a depression. Indeed, it is hard to think of any school of economic thought which calls for wallopping tax increases in a depression: one would expect common sense to tell you that saving, investment, and productive activity would be crippled. But this is what 1980’s Keynesianism decrees, and that is what Ronald Reagan has become, thereby following the footsteps of the illustrious Herbert Hoover, who aggravated the Great Depression by doing the very same thing. It is ironic that the Democratic Party, which ran for half a century on a platform attacking Herbert Hoover, should now in effect have embraced him as their very own. And so has Reagan, who has been pouring on the tax increases in the latter half of 1982, and will continue to do so—all the while declaiming “his hatred of taxes and unbalanced budgets.

The Coming Year

So what will happen this year? Will there be a recovery? In a sense, it doesn’t matter, for it is almost impossible to see any recovery as being anything other than weak and fitful. Why? Because the current tremendous expansion of the monetary supply is bound to accelerate inflation sometime early this year, and because the anticipation of inflation from the money supply and from monetized deficits will drive inflation up still further. And it will also raise interest rates even earlier, in anticipation of renewed inflation, and aided by the pressure that huge deficits will put on the bond market. And rising interest rates from already high current levels will put a damper on any recovery that might occur.

Expectations of inflation and rising levels of interest rates have therefore put the kibash on all nostrums of government intervention in the economy. If the Reagan Administration had continued to follow the Friedmanite path, we would have faced continuing stagnation and depression; if it had followed the supply-siders (who never really had a chance), even greater deficits, inflation, and depression would have ensued. Now, following Keynesian doctrines, trying to inflate our way into lower interest rates and out of depression, we will still only experience higher interest rates and more depression.

So—our Fearless Forecast is that 1983 will be another year of a quagmire of inflationary depression. We will have more of the same but worse. Unemployment will continue at disastrous peak levels since World War II; stagnation of productive activity will continue. Either we will have zero recovery or a brief fitful one. If (A) we have zero recovery, unemployment will be higher even than now, production will be in the doldrums, bankruptcies will continue at a high rate, and interest rates and inflation will be substantially higher than now, in response to late 1982 levels of monetary expansion and staggering deficits. The Fed has had its brief happy bout of slightly lowering short-term interest rates through massive monetary inflation. The Piper will now be paid, beginning first in long-term interest rates (bond prices) which are most sensitive to inflationary expectations. Longterm rates will rise, followed later and reluctantly by shortterm.

That’s if there is zero recovery. If, on the other hand, (B), there is a brief but aborted recovery, the pattern will be slightly different. Recovery will embolden, the market, and that, combined with the other inflationary factors of a huge expansion of money and enormous deficits, will cause a much larger and faster rise in prices than under Scenario A. Interest rates, too, will rise higher and earlier than under Scenario A. And while unemployment might fall a wee bit, and production rise by marginal amounts, this weak recovery will soon be aborted by the much higher interest rates, sending the economy spiralling downward and getting worse.

Either way, then, we estimate that the economy will continue to be in a double bind, so that anything the government will do will quickly rebound to aggravate all the least loved facets of the current economy: high unemployment, stagnation, high interest rates, inflation.

The interesting question to speculate on is: what will the Reagan Administration do when, panicking in early 1984, with the presidential elections coming up, they see that conservative Keynesianism too will be a flop, and they will have failed across the board with no options open (that they will bother to consider). Will they drift down the road to inevitable oblivion, like the late unlamented Jimmy? Or will they seek bold and desperate measures, such as: credit controls; price and wage controls (perhaps thinly disguised as “incomes policy”), massive socialistic public works projects (which Reagan is already starting, on the highways)? Or, just maybe, a lovely little war somewhere, to bring on the juices of patriotism and all-out government intervention? Who knows? But don’t bet your life against any or all of these measures by our beloved “free-market” Administration.

What Should Be Done?

What then, should or could be done to get the economy out of this locked-in double bind of inflationary depression? Must everything be hopeless? No—the correct prescription for our ills comes from the analysis of the Austrian School. In the area of money, we must, as the current dean of the Austrians, F. A. Hayek, says: “slam on, the brakes.” We must abandon the decay of gradualism for the short swift surgical procedure of radicalism. We cannot avoid recession; but if we stopped monetary inflation, and we made the stopping credible, then inflationary expectations, embedded—for good reason—in the hearts and minds of the public, would be reversed, and the Final Recession would be short and lightened greatly by the outpouring of savings and investment as inflation is seen to be over and real interest rates fall. But for the public or the market to trust that the brake-slamming will last beyond a couple of months, there must be radical institutional change to induce that credibility.

What sort of radical change? In the Fed and in the monetary standard. The dollar must be denationalized, taken out of the hands of the Fed and the Treasury. The only way to do that is to redefine the dollar as a weight of gold (i.e. “return to the gold standard”), and then redeem the hoard of gold that the federal government stole from us in 1933 and has never returned. The Fed should then be abolished, with banks set free, but held to the strictest market standards of outlawry of fraud, and forced to close their doors at the slightest refusal to redeem their deposits on demand (or whenever they fall due).

Pending the gold standard and abolition of the Fed, the very least to be done would be passing a law freezing the Fed permanently. That is, prohibiting the Fed from buying any assets ever again (or making any further loans, or lowering reserve requirements). If the Fed cannot politically be abolished outright, then it should be frozen into innocuous desuetude.

In addition to freezing the Fed and/or returning to a real (not a phony) gold standard, fiscal policy can help this monetary program by drastically cutting taxes (that’s real cutouts, not “cuts in the rate of increase”, cuts in percentage of GNP, or the rest of the namby-pamby evasions), and drastically cutting government spending even further. Where O where can the budget ever be cut? Anywhere and everywhere, with meat axes, hacksaws, anything to hand. For openers, pick the precise budget of some previous President—anyone, including Carter, but the earlier the better, back to Jefferson, say, and just copy each figure in the budget line by line. You wouldn’t need thousands of White House staff members to accomplish this feat either; just two guys and a pencil. How many people realize that if we merely cut the budget back to the last, free-spending full Carter figures, we would have a handsome budgetary surplus? Of course, if I had my druthers, and could push a magic button, the federal, budget would be cut back to a nice fat zero. So don’t start wailing about “where can we cut the budget?” All we need is the will.

Leave the Street Vendors Be!

by Jon D. Wisman[*]

If a growing number of urban chambers of commerce and boards of trade are to have their way, the poor and unemployed will face the closure of what is perhaps the last legal exit from their destitute condition. What these locally organized business interests wish to do is to make it all but impossible for the down-and-out to become business folks themselves — their proposals range from outlawing street vending in certain areas to putting it out of reach in all areas through exorbitant licensing fees for all but rather well-to-do folks. Their petition is understandable, but it mustn’t be supported. Capitalists are all too renowned for extolling the virtues of free competition while conspiring to avoid its harsh discipline. As that apostle of capitalism, Adam Smith, put it: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

If one were a conspiracy theorist of sorts, this latest proposed move against the dispossessed might be seen as simply one more element in a concerted right-wing push to put the working class back in its traditional place — a complement to cutting off welfare, reducing unemployment benefits, eliminating or at least reducing minimum wages, weakening workplace health and safety rules, and of course, most importantly, creating massive unemployment. The conspiracy’s goal would be to render, workers docile, willing to do dirty, boring, perhaps dangerous, repetitive, non-creative work for poverty-level wages. Profits could then soar, the rich get richer, and once again good cheap maid service could be had. However, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s only an orgy of trickle-down economics in the void left by the bankruptcy of so-called liberal economics.

*Jon Wisman is Associate Professor of Economics, The American University.

It would appear that in their naivete, the President and his supply-side advisers (Stockman surely excepted) don’t view Reaganomics as a program for pacifying the working class and enriching the rich. Instead, they feel that it will unlock American initiative, creativity, and self-reliance. They wish to re-open America to their herpes, the self-made captains of industry. Although this is pretty much Hollywood reality, there’s always been just enough “real-world” reality in it to make it credible to large numbers of Americans. What these organized business interests conspire to do is eliminate from their competitive spheres that last remnant of “real-world” reality — to leave the poor with no legal means of escape from wage-dependency and poverty. Of course that would appear to suit the interests of many already established businesses in a dual sense: The poor would effectively be blocked from becoming competitors; and, with all outlets for their self-reliance foreclosed, they would have no choice but to offer their labor services to local business at bargain-basement wages. These organized business interests are simply being too greedy!

However, there are a couple of other reasons — good ones for keeping urban streets open and free to sidewalk vendors. First, every society produces a number of individuals who are uncomfortable in organizations, and above all, who don’t wish to take orders. Fortunately, America has been blessed with a great number of such folks, which is understandable given the sorts of people who migrated here. The freedom and health of our society depends upon leaving channels within which these people might exercise their independence and express their creativity. Indeed, there are far too few such channels left. For far too many Americans — thanks, in part, to the kind of licensure and other governmental restrictions sought by these organized business interests — the only channels left for expressing creative individualism are found in street crime and hustling. At the time of our struggle for independence, approximately seven out of every ten didn’t take orders. Today, over nine out of ten take orders — hardly an improvement in terms in independence and democratic self-determination.

Second, the prevalence of street vendors in a neighborhood enhances the quality of community life in a number of ways. The streets become colorful — even somewhat exotic. In fact, street vendors and open-air markets create the street life which makes so many foreign places charming and exciting escapes from our own busy-but-seldom-alive streets. A street bazaar atmosphere encourages residents to venture forth more readily from their closed-in existence. Neighbors meet, linger, get to know one another. A community spirit emerges.

Finally, streets filled with lingering folks are simply safer streets. This point seems of paramount importance for most middle to large size urban centers. As is well known, street crime is in good part responsible for the outmigration of the middle class, scared-off shoppers, and the subsequent outmigration of business itself. In fact, those areas which have experienced an influx of so-called young professionals tend to possess a greater degree of street life. In this sense, these organized business interests are perhaps a bit myopic. Safer streets, people-filled streets — that’s got to be better for local business in general. True, some shops may have reduced sales due to sidewalk-vendor competition. It is likely, however, that the strollers — enticed in part by the bazaar atmosphere — increase the total business of most shops in the affected locales.

But even if the unlikely were true: that established businesses are harmed in the aggregate by street vendors, it would still not justify government intervention. After all, if the street vendors are winning out then they must be providing the sovereign consumers with what they want. That’s capitalism and the game is competition. Often chambers of commerce and boards of trade argue that the street vendors — located on public space — are getting a free ride. Poppycock! If shopkeepers think that street vendors have it so good, they’re always free to close up shop and become street vendors themselves. Street vendors mustn’t be scapegoated and destroyed for the depressed business conditions under Reaganomics.

Movement Memories

(With this issue, we inaugurate an occasional feature on the Old Days of the Movement Revisited. In those early days, the Movement was undoubtedly smaller, probably wackier, and undoubtedly more lovable than the sobersides Behemoth we know so well today. The focus was on ideology and not image, and, at least in our corner of the movement, there was a lot of merriment along the way. There were deviations and heresies aplenty, but the one deviation that no one ever seriously entertained was opportunism. The very idea that our teeny movement could even consider selling out for Quick Victory would have been treated as a hilariously ironic takeoff on ideological sellouts of the past. Live and learn.—Ed. Note)

1947: I Enter The Movement

Recently, a friend found a copy of the following letter, in the files of my late friend, Dr. F. A. (Baldy) Harper. It was a nostalgic moment, because this fateful letter constituted my entry into the libertarian movement, although of course I could not realize this fully at the time. With the sending of this letter, at the age of 21, my life was irretrievably changed.

As a budding free-market economist surrounded completely by various species of socialists and communists, I was then in my first year at Columbia Graduate School, working for a Master’s degree in economics. I had never known that any free-market people existed until, in late 1946, I came across a pamphlet attacking rent control and published by a new organization entitled the Foundation for Economic Education, which had been launched several months before. After obtaining other literature from FEE, I sat down with great enthusiasm to write people whom I had never met and knew little about, and send them suggestions on how to organize an intellectual movement for liberty. On receiving this letter, Baldy and the other FEE staff invited me up there, and I entered a new world, a world of libertarians.

Rereading the letter, it still seems pretty good, and some of the suggestions worthwhile even now. But I publish it for those interested in the long-gone, early days of the modern movement.

* * *

March 5, 1947
370 Central Park West
New York 25, N.Y.

Mr. W, M. Curtiss
Executive Secretary
The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
Irvington-on-Hudson
New York

Dear Sir,

I am deeply honored to be considered an Affiliate of The Foundation. I have delayed writing to you for so long because I wished to read thoroughly all the material that you so generously sent and I have devoted considerable thought to suggestions as to the program of The Foundation. Unfortunately, my status as a graduate economics student requires me to limit the extent of my financial contribution to the minimum (one dollar.) However, I shall make every effort to cooperate with The Foundation through ideas, suggestions, and every other way that I possibly can, even though my time is severely limited at present while studying for the Ph.D. degree at Columbia.

I have been profoundly stirred by the program of The Foundation, because it fills a gap which I believe is desperately important to close—the lack of an organization of liberal economists who combine a firm faith in the principles of liberalism with an expert knowledge of economics. Liberal organizations have invariably confined their statements to affirmations of general principles, which, though admirable, ignore the numerous subtle arguments of the statists. This is a fatal error, since the result is to leave the intellectuals prey to leftist arguments. “Never underestimate your opponent” is very important when applied to the intellectual process of the leftists. At the present time the overwhelming mass of the molders of public opinion in the United States—the intellectuals—are engaged in disseminating statist propaganda. This is particularly true, I am sorry to say, among economists, most of whom seem to be expending their valuable brain power devising schemes of government intervention. Most of the discussions in the economic journals center on the relative merits of this or that scheme for new government interference.

The Foundation has the noble and gigantic task of leading us on the road back to liberalism in economics. It is a struggle that will have to be fought on many fronts: among the mass of the people, the politicians, the lay intellectuals, and the professional economists. I am particularly pleased that you welcome the support of all who are interested in aiding this effort—this is unique and is indispensable to the acquisition of a “mass Base” for economic liberalism (to borrow a handy Marxian term.)

Accepting your invitation, the remainder of this letter will be taken up with suggestions and comments for The Foundation program. I hope you will forgive the undue length of this letter; I realize I am taxing your patience. The fault is due entirely to my unbounded enthusiasm for your organization and to a deep conviction that the Foundation must grow and expand and become an influential force if the American ideal of liberty is to be saved.

The Foundation can advance the cause of liberalism in many ways. One of the most effective is through the distribution of pamphlets such as you have sent me. These pamphlets, are on such a uniform level of excellence that my only suggestion concerning them is “keep up the good work.”[*]

Working with students should be an important part of The Foundation program. I believe that this program should be divided into two phases: lecture institute, and seminars. The lecture courses should be designed for students and for intelligent laymen, coverings a number of broad fields of political economy, and designed to develop a general liberal program in these fields. These courses should be open to all those interested in attending, and should also serve the purpose of answering anti-liberal arguments. The courses would be conducted by authorities in the various fields.

* After careful study of the pamphlets, I could find only one minor point of disagreement—I think Mr. Read is over-austere as to the inevitability of inflation due to the present increased stock of money; to the extent that this stock is not spent, inflation can be avoided.

The seminars should consist primarily of graduate economics students. These groups should do more intensive work in the various specific fields, concentrating on problems where there are large differences among liberals, as well as research in the refutation of anti-liberal arguments. These seminars should be guided by one or more liberal authorities. At the end of a certain period of time, these seminars may issue joint reports on the results of their investigations. I think it important that membership in these research seminars be restricted to liberals only, since the problems that will arise due to differences among liberals will be serious enough, without having to spend time in the seminar trying to convince the members of the necessity of liberalism. This restriction should not apply to attendance of the lecture courses. The nature of the various problems is outlined below.

Many of the problems and areas of study will undoubtedly be of such wide and complex scope as to require publication in book form of researches conducted by the Foundation staff. Books would provide a necessary complement to the pamphlets, particularly when dealing with problems that cannot be adequately handled by articles of pamphlet size. In these cases, it would seem valuable to have close liaison between the Staff members and the members of the research seminars. Perhaps this could be accomplished by appointing the seminar members as assistant or junior Staff members.

I suggest New York City as the obvious center for the Foundation program and activities. It provides excellent facilities for research as well as a vast potential supply of new Affiliates.

I think that the study group program could be improved by providing more organized guidance from The Foundation. In addition to such informal study groups as now exist, there is a great need for study groups of a more formal nature. For example, the college campuses in New York City are permeated with numerous organization of all shades of left-wing opinion with no liberal groups at all in evidence. For example, on college campuses at present are the following groups, reading from left to right: Marxist Study Group, American Youth for Democracy, Young Citizens Political Action Committee, American Veterans Committee, National Association for Advancement of Colored People, Student League for Industrial Democracy, and the Student Federalists. Now, I am not suggesting that Foundation study groups be conducted along lines of totalitarian discipline as are most of the above. However, The Foundation should endeavor to establish formal study groups on all the college campuses in New York City, providing guest speakers, topics of discussion, etc. Such groups are greatly needed on the college campuses to offset the steady barrage of leftist propaganda to which college students are subjected by organizations such as listed above.

The Foundation states as an aim the establishment of a “periodic journal devoted to economic and political discussions.” I think that this activity is so important that three periodic publications will be necessary. One should be a monthly news bulletin. This would be brief, and would inform the Affiliates of The Foundation’s activities, plans, and progress. This bulletin should also include a list of formal study groups organized by The Foundation; these groups should be classified according to general occupation of its members (such as student, housewife, business man, etc.) and should contain the control location of each study group. This would serve to inform Affiliates who are desirous of joining study groups of the existence of groups of similar occupation and location as their own.

A second journal should be bi-monthly (or perhaps quarterly) and devoted to learned articles and discussions of economic liberalism and all its phases. The journal should be on a high level of discussion, similar to the Journal of Political Economy, and should contain book reviews of current books dealing with problems of political economy, as well as critiques of influential books that have been written in the recent past. This journal would be directed primarily toward professional economists, and would furnish a much-needed corrective to the articles and reviews in current economic journals, which only rarely are written from a liberal point of view.

In addition, there is an urgent need for a weekly magazine, directed toward the intelligent layman, that furnishes articles, comments, book reviews, etc. from a liberal viewpoint. Every crackpot left-wing group has its weekly ideological publication, and several have won widespread circulation among intellectuals (viz; New Republic, The Nation, New Leader, New Masses.) Yet there is no liberal weekly of a comparable nature.[*] Of course, there are many magazines that have nationwide circulation which, every so often, publish a liberal article. But these articles are submerged in a plethora of trite love stories, and articles on deep-sea fishing, etc. There is urgent need for a liberal counterpart to the New Republic. If such a weekly could not gain a newsstand and subscription circulation comparable to the New Republic, the cause of liberalism would indeed be in desperate straits. At least, the effort is well worth making. Perhaps The Foundation could sponsor such a magazine in cooperation with other liberal groups.

I am pleased to see that The Foundation is planning a nation-wide radio program. Radio, an extremely important medium for the influence of public opinion, was silently captured during the war by various leftists and fellow-travellers, in the guise of “commentators.” The importance of these “commentators” in the plans of the Left is shown by its agitation when many of these unnecessary commentators were ousted after the end of the war. Even now, liberal points of view seldom get a hearing except in debates, which, when held before a studio audience, often result in liberals being drowned out by an audience “packed” with leftist supporters. All this makes it more urgent for The Foundation to institute such a program. The program should feature talks by a competent economic analyst, or a series of such authorities, presented in a popular fashion.

Before outlining the content of the major problems that The Foundation will have to deal with, I would like to suggest that The Foundation, at the proper time, embark on a large campaign of self-advertising. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times, for example, would be invaluable in informing the public about the existence and the purposes of your organization. I am sure that the number of Affiliates would expand enormously if the public were informed in such a manner.

* Newsweek and U.S. News, though excellent, do not qualify, since they are mainly devoted to a presentation of the news.

The contents of The Foundation program should, I believe, be devoted mainly to problems arising from differences of opinion among liberals, and to answers and critiques of statist arguments. The research seminars mentioned above could serve to iron out many of these differences, or, at least, to clarify the issues involved. The following are some of the problems which would greatly repay future study by The Foundation:

(1) Monopoly

In my many arguments with leftist friends, their favorite point of attack is: “Yes, all you say is very true, assuming a perfectly competitive system. This may have been true in the nineteenth century, but now in the days of monopoly, oligopoly, monopolistic competition, big business and, under present conditions, the government must. . . etc., etc.” I think that this problem deserves paramount consideration by The Foundation. If The Foundation can demonstrate the falsity of this line of argument, I believe that an inestimable service will have been done to the cause of liberalism. Corollary to this would be a discussion of: the anti-trust laws and how they should be applied, the problem of price flexibility and price rigidities, the Schumpeter thesis that many “monopolistic restrictions” and deviations from perfect competition are beneficial when looked at in the long run, the so-called “concentration of economic power” (I do not see how any person or group can have economic power except through the aid of the government), and the favorite case studies used by the left, Aluminum Company of America, U.S. Steel, the price of steel rails, the N.Y. milk shed, etc.

I think it particularly important to demonstrate the growth of monopoly due to the active aid of state and federal governments, a point which statists always conveniently overlook. There are many people, however, who seem to be sincere liberals, who side with the left in this discussion, and believe that vigorous anti-trust laws are necessary. For example, the late Professor Henry C. Simons apparently believed that a corporation constituted a monopoly element. It is necessary to thrash out this whole issue of monopoly. My own personal belief is that the cases of monopoly that are important in our economy are the government-sponsored ones. However, a thorough investigation by The Foundation is greatly needed.

(2) Monetary and Fiscal Policy

Here is another extremely important subject which has probably caused the most dissension among liberals. It is mainly the problems of monetary demand or monetary purchasing power. In the long run, I think it is undoubtedly true that “supply creates its own demand.” In the short run, however, and in the course of the cycle, many liberals feel that there are deficiencies and excesses of monetary demand. What should the government do about this, if anything? Should the government attempt to stabilize the price level, and, if so, at what level? What should be the role of the government in relation to the banking system? Where are the merits in the famous controversy between the Currency School and the Banking School? What are the advantages of the gold standard, or the commodity reserve standard? (The gold standard is essentially the fixing of the price of gold. But why free prices in all commodities and not in gold? This brings us back to the problem of whether or not the price level should be stabilized.) In the field of fiscal policy, the crucial problem is whether the government should pursue a “cyclically balanced budget” policy or an annually balanced budget. On paper, the cyclical proposal seems plausible, except that it raises very dangerous political problems.

This whole problem of monetary demand has caused grave splits among economists who otherwise are united on adherence to the free price system. Thus liberals Graham and Simons lean heavily on the government in stabilizing total demand, although they advocate doing this in accordance with the Rule of Law. This issue is at the core of the interesting debate between the CED and the National Economic Council which you sent to me. Miss Lane and Mr. Hart made many good points in their review of “Jobs and Markets,” but the entire problem calls for a thorough, detailed analysis. Simply denouncing the CED program as Nazi does not dispose of this troublesome issue. Personally, I feel that making government responsible for total demand might well prove fatal to the free enterprise system. However, an investigation by the Foundation is definitely necessary.

(3) Business Cycles.

The problem of business cycles, their nature, causes, etc. should be considered, particularly the problem of the Great Depression. The unemployment and depression of 1929 and the 30’s is continually being brought by the leftists as evidence of the “failure” of the free enterprise system.

These are a few of the topics of study for The Foundation. Other useful topics would be: government tax policy, social insurance, labor problems, international economic policy (the merits and demerits of the ITC, Bretton Woods, etc.) critiques of Keynes and Veblen[*], the fascinating Mises-Hayek-Lange dispute on the economics of socialism, and a discussion of the historical roots of liberalism.[*]

Also important would be a discussion of proper techniques and methods to convey the message of liberalism to the American people. I think that much profit would be derived from studying the propaganda devices, slogans, etc. of the leftists who have excelled in spreading the collectivist cause.

In concluding this overlong letter, I would like to note that Professor Schumpeter has stated that capitalism, despite the overwhelming arguments in its favor, can not survive because not enough people have faith in the system. Then, I turned to read these words from Mr. Read’s Pattern for Revolt: “We need patriots who will stand against wrong even though they cannot see the time when right will triumph.” As long as Americans exist who can write these stirring words, as long as organizations such as The Foundation exist and thrive, the cause of freedom is not dead.

Very truly yours.

Murray N. Rothbard

* A critique of Veblen is particularly important, it is astonishing how this clown has won the adoration of the intelligentsia.

* Valuable would be a critique of Sombart and other historians who constantly talk of capitalism as an organism that is inevitably giving way to socialism—presumably the next stage in the “historical process.”

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

FEBRUARY, 1983

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, NY 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

For President: Gene Burns

I bring tidings of great joy: We have a presidential candidate.

His name is Gene Burns, of Orlando, Florida.

At the last NatCom meeting at Orlando, on December 4-5, I first met Gene Burns by appearing on his radio talk show. I was impressed by the astuteness of his questions and his obvious sympathy with and knowledge of libertarianism. Then, at the banquet Saturday night, Gene delivered a magnificent, stem-winding speech that brought the entire audience to its feet.

Jocularly, without realizing how prophetic we were, some of us nudged each other and said, “Hey, what about him as a Presidential candidate?” And now, that dream has come true.

If you ask: “What about good old so-and-so for President?”, chances are excellent that good old so-and-so has already firmly refused the chance. They are all too tired, or too impecunious, or too whatever to make the grueling sacrifice of months of one’s life needed to make the race.

But Gene Burns is enthusiastic and rarin’ to go. He has been a radio talk-show host for eleven years, and well known in the Orlando area. He is mature, knowledgeable, charismatic, and a super speaker. Chances are you will get to meet him at your state convention. He has already addressed the Georgia LP convention and received a standing ovation. He has a dedicated and politically savvy staff, a staff that includes some of the top leaders in the Florida LP. He is of course familiar with the media and how it works. The Orlando Sentinel has already published a long article on the Bums candidacy. Qua candidate, he will run a great race.

But how is he ideologically—always a critical bone of contention? Well, I can report that Gene Burns has been vetted and catechized at great length, by some of the toughest and most ideologically rigorous people in the Libertarian Party, and he has come through with flying colors. He agrees enthusiastically with the entire national platform. He is sound in all areas. He is, if reason and justice prevail, the LP’s next Presidential candidate.

So far, Gene Burns has only one possible opponent, or quasi-opponent. The joker is that that antagonist is not a person but a committee: The Committee to Draft Ron Paul, headed by Crane hireling Chris Hocker. The heinous and degraded Crane Machine is desperate, its back to the wall. Having lost control of the Libertarian Party apparat, its fortunes sliding into oblivion, trapped in the last Bunker, it has only once chance left: The capture of the Presidential nomination. And so the Draft Paul boomlet.

As long as there was no candidate in the race, drafting someone, however remote, had a certain plausibility. But now we have a live candidate. It will be difficult to sell the LP on drafting a non-existing candidate when there is a live one eager for the race.

Hocker has been trying desperately to line up some people for the draft committee beyond the small circle of Crane Machiners. But he has had difficulty in specifying the scenario he has in mind. For Congressman Paul (a) is a Republican Congressman, and (b) while more libertarian than any other Congressman, he has a voting record spotted with numerous anti-libertarian votes. To presume to run for the highest nomination in the Libertarian Party, he would, at the least, have to do two things: change his affiliation from Republican to Libertarian, and pronto; and explain in detail how or whether he has changed his mind on these votes and other key issues and become a genuine libertarian with a capital L.

So far, Congressman Paul has given no indication of any willingness to run. So what do Hocker/Crane have in mind? Is Paul going to change his affiliation and explain his votes before the Presidential convention? If not, does the Crane Machine have the unmitigated gall to believe that Libertarian Party delegates will buy a pig in a poke? When there are candidate debates at the Convention, or at preceding state conventions, is Gene Burns going to have to debate an empty chair?

Rumors have, been circulating that are so monstrous that it is hard to credit them. They state that Crane/Paul are thinking of running Ron Paul for President on the Libertarian Party ticket, while at the same time running for reelection to Congress on the Republican ticket! (Texas uniquely has the “Lyndon Johnson law”, so named because Lyndon was able to run for Vice-President and Senate in 1960, and he won both races.) Libertarians welcome ex-Democrats and ex-Republicans into the Party (indeed, we’d better, since who else is there?), but we most emphatically do not welcome Democrats or Republicans who retain their party labels and affiliations and yet have the chutzpah to try to run on the Libertarian ticket.

So far the only thing the Crane Machine has come up with to attack Gene Burns is that he used to be a Democrat. Well, gee willikins! Whom do we want: Someone who used to be a Democrat and is now a 100.per cent Libertarian, or someone who used to be and still is a Republican?

I hereby offer unsolicited my favorite slogan (which I did not originate) for the Burns campaign: Gene Burns, the libertarian candidate.

The Crane Machine Revealed

Who are the Crane Machine, anyway? New readers have been asking us this question, and one reader wanted to know if a “Craniac” is some giant malign computer run by Crane out of Washington, D.C. No sir, our word for a Crane Machine member is “Craniac”, or, if we are feeling charitable that morning, “Machiner.”

Note: Being employed in a Crane-bossed institution does not necessarily make one a Machiner. A tipoff is whether or not said employee is active in the Libertarian Party, the institution closest to Boss Crane’s heart. A Crane employee who is active in the LP should be considered a Machiner, unless demonstrated otherwise.

Also note: the affiliations listed in parentheses may not be up-to-date. It is the essence of faithful Crane Machiners (those who would, in the immortal words of Chuck Colson, “walk over their grandmothers” if Crane gave the order) that they are slotted back and forth as they are needed in various Crane institutions, and in and out of various LP campaigns. Often they are “warehoused” for periods of time in one of these institutions. In short, the Crane Machine operates like a mini-multinational corporation, moving people in, out, and around. Also: some of the lesser Machiners are listed as “present whereabouts unknown”. I hasten to add that that means unknown to me, not that they have gone underground, although that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. If we had the resources of Time magazine, we could track them down, and also print front and profile mug shots of all the Craniacs, but this article will have to do until a fuller profile comes along.

I Edward H. Crane III The Big Boss: capo di tutti capi. Main power base: Head of the Cato Institute, which moved from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. early in the Reagan Administration to be close to the Corridors of Power. Also, Boss of: Libertarian Review Foundation, and its publications Inquiry and Update; National Taxpayers Legal Fund; and the Crane Machine in the Libertarian Party. Formerly, boss of Students for a Libertarian Society, and formerly, National Chairman of the LP. Managed the LP presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980.

* * *

II The Top Craniacs (In no particular order of rank)

Christopher (“Chris”) Hocker (Crane hireling; publisher of Inquiry, editor of Update. Recently brought in as editor of the latter to tone down the smearsheet. Former National Director of the LP, now NatCom member, head of Draft Ron Paul Committee.)

Howard (“Howie”) Rich (New York businessman. Top Craniac politico. Ran the disastrous Guida campaign for national chair in 1981, the equally disastrous Randolph campaign in 1982, and the likewise disastrous Northrup for Governor campaign in New York in 1982. Craniac straw boss on LP NatCom.)

Andrea Millen Rich (Wife of Howie. Proprietor of Laissez-faire Bookstore in New York, which has become a social center for New York Machiners. Banned the Libertarian Forum from the bookstore for being critical of the Crane Machine. NatCom member.)

Jule (“The Tool”) Herbert, Jr. (Highly paid Crane hireling. Runs the National Taxpayers Legal Fund in Washington. Former Alabama lawyer. Runs the District of Columbia LP with an iron hand. NatCom member.)

Leslie Graves (alias Leslie Graves Key. Crane hireling. Former editor, now reporter, for Update. NatCom member. Boss of the Wisconsin LP, based in Madison, now rumored to be suffering a revolt from the long-downtrodden Milwaukee forces.)

Gary Greenberg (Legal Aid lawyer, boss of the New York LP, of which he apparently aspires to be lifetime chairman. Suffering a widespread revolt against his leadership, headed by 1982 U.S. Senate candidate Jim McKeown.)

Tom Palmer (though young, long-time Crane devotee. Former Crane strawboss on SLS, now working for Crane’s sister—or rather cousinly—organization, Council for Competitive Economy, in Washington.)

Jim Johnston (economist for Standard Oil of Indiana. Craniac straw boss in the Illinois LP, NatCom member, and self-styled Parliamentarian).

III Quasi-Independent

Dick Randolph (A special category for the straw boss of the Alaska LP. Formerly State Rep, ran disastrous campaign for Governor in 1982. Turned his entire campaign over to the Crane Machine. One has the feeling, however, that Dick could someday leave the Machine. Is rumored to be suffering from revolt within Alaska LP.)

IV Lesser Craniacs

Kent Guida (Crane hireling. Used to be, and perhaps still is, working for both Update and NTLF. Came in third in three-man race for national chair in 1981, ran the calamitous Randolph campaign under Rich’s supervision. NatCom member. Former Maryland businessman.)

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (Crane hireling. Former editor of now defunct Libertarian Review. Crane-imposed keynoter at LP Presidential convention in 1979. Now “foreign policy analyst”—Has anyone ever seen any of his analyses?—at Cato.)

Eric O’Keefe (The Martyr. Former National Director of the LP; when ousted, went to Alaska to help Guida run the Randolph fiasco. Present whereabouts unknown.)

David Boaz (Crane hireling. Vice-President, Cato Institute. Research director, LP Presidential campaign, 1980).

V Minor Craniacs

Janet Nelson (Crane hireling at Cato. Ex-wife of Kent Guida.)

Kristina Herbert (Crane hireling at Cato. Ex-wife of Jule Herbert.)

Deb Haws (wife of Chris Hocker. Ex-O’Keefe aide at LP headquarters. Daughter of Minnesota LP bigwig Frank Haws. Present whereabouts unknown.)

Anita Anderson (Ex-Cato employee. Now rumored to be working at Laissez-Faire Bookstore.)

Dr. Ross Levatter (Young Ohio physician. Formerly Craniac straw boss in the Ohio LP. A national organizer in the 1980 presidential campaign. Writer and “philosopher.”)

Frank Horn (Computer person, now in California. Crane hireling as reporter for Update. Former top lieutenant in the Graves (Key) machine in the Wisconsin LP.)

Robert Capozzi (Ex-editor, Update. Present whereabouts unknown.)

David Lampo (Crane hireling at Cato. Ex-SLS operative.)

Paul Beckner (Helped run Randolph campaign in Alaska. Present whereabouts unknown.)

Celeste “Cissey” Webb (formerly Illinois LP bigwig, now rumored to be Crane hireling in D.C.)

VI Peripheral Craniacs, Some Now Inactive

These are mainly Craniacs who are—generally for career reasons—at present inactive in the Machine, but might be brought back by the Boss at any time.

Ray and Carol Cunningham (formerly top Craniacs—in California, on NatCom, and in the presidential campaign of 1980. Both are Connecticut engineers.)

Robert Costello (formerly in California, now working for free-market investment letter in Chicago.)

Milton Mueller (formerly head of SLS, when Crane-run, then presumably booted out for Left Deviation. But recently wrote a Cato leaflet. Present Machine status questionable.)

Jeff Friedman (formerly head of SLS, when Crane-run, then presumably booted out for Left Deviation. Student at Brown University. Present Machine status questionable.)

Jeff Riggenbach (Crane hireling. Head of Cato’s Bylines, radio commentary series. Inactive in LP, but can be trundled in for writing jobs, e.g. his hatchet job against the Mason campaign and for Guida in Libertarian Review, 1981.)

Bill Birmingham (Crane hireling. Ex-staff of Libertarian Review, now used occasionally by Update for hatchet-job writing assignments.

David Henderson (Friedmanite economist, ex-Crane hireling at Cato. Present employment, the White House. Therefore presumably inactive in the Machine, but recently wrote book review for Reason back at the old stand, attacking Austrian economics.)

VII Possible Craniac Defector

Bruce Majors (graduate student, D.C. Until just before press time, would have been listed as a leading youth member in Category IV. Reputed to have been straw boss at Update. Ran the disastrous Northrup campaign under Rich, 1982. Late information, however, spots Majors as possible defector from Machine. No present Machine employment.)

I apologize if I left anyone out. Will try better next time. New editions as needed.

Eubie Blake: RIP

by Mr. First Nighter

When I first saw this great man, this veritable phenomenon, play the piano he was 92 or 93 years old, making his mighty comeback. The wonder was not so much that one of the outstanding ragtime composers and pianists was still alive, and well, and kicking at 93. It was not just that he was spry, and alert, and sparkling, telling charming anecdotes and playing the piano and singing his songs. For O my countrymen, what playing!

I first saw Eubie on an all-ragtime program, the first half of which was played by young Joshua Rifkin, who has replayed much of the old ragtime repertoire. Rifkin was weak, drab, monotonic, although it was of course good to hear the old tunes again. Then, on the second half, out came Eubie. He went to the piano, and then . . . The power, the tone, the nuance! The power was unbelievable, and the grace and tone almost equally so.

Eubie was not only a ragtime composer and pianist. After the ragtime era ended, after World War I, Eubie moved on to become a great popular song composer. His most famous songs are the charming I’m Just Wild About Harry (1921) and the magnificent Memories of You (1930), one of the greatest popular songs ever written. Get the record of Eubie playing his own Memories of You in his early 90’s, and you’ll see what I mean, both about the playing and the song.

In his late 90’s, Eubie began to seem a bit frail. On February 7, 1983, Eubie Blake celebrated his 100th birthday, an event commemorated and well publicized in several events in New York City. Eubie was home ill, but he was able to watch some of the celebration on television and listen on radio. A few days later, this wonderful man was dead.

Eubie Blake is a testimony to what the human spirit can achieve. In a world filled with sin and sorrow and injustice, he makes one proud of the human race. God bless you, Eubie, and, to plagiarize Horatio, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Economic Notes

Flip-flop on Oil.

Hey—has anyone noticed the incredible flip-flop of the Establishment on the oil price question? For ten years we had been regaled, endlessly and ad nauseam, about the evil Arabs in OPEC, and how they caused a decade of terrible inflation, and how they have ruined the standard of living of everyone, and how maybe the good old USA should send troops in there and grab the oil before it’s too late, and how oil is going to run out any day now. Now, at long last, oil prices have started to slip, and the evil OPEC is falling apart, and you might ask yourself the question: The Establishment is happy now, right?

Wrong. Now what we are hearing is how terrible it is that OPEC, a fountain of oil stability, is falling apart, and how prices are falling (horrors!), causing depression and chaos in the undeveloped world which of course the good old USA is supposed to bail out.

So, here’s a question for all the mavens in the media: Tell us, what’s the good oil price, the price at which you will stop bellyaching, and at which the USA is not supposed to step in, at great expense, to save the day in some way or other? We await an answer.

Reaganomic Semantics.

The long-awaited Regan budget for fiscal 1984 is mainly remarkable for coining some more hoax words and phrases to cover up ugly reality. We had already suffered last year, from various euphemisms for tax increases, including “revenue enhancement”, “closing loopholes,” and “user fees” (for more than doubling federal gasoline taxes). The new budget now brings us the concept of “accelerated” taxes and spending—instead of increase, you see—and a spending “freeze” that is not a freeze, but merely an average increase of 5 percent. This is on top of 1981-82 tax and spending “cuts” which were really hefty increases.

Out of respect for the English language alone, we must all yearn for the good old days when a “cut” meant a reduction of a given number from the year before, and a “freeze” meant zero growth.

Were We Being Beastly to the Gipper?

In the early days of the Age of Reagan, when some libertarians and free-marketeers were under the illusion that Ronnie was at least moving the economy in the right direction, our lambasting of the Reagan Administration was chided by some right-wingers in our movement for concentrating on absolute numbers rather than on the rate of growth of the budget or the percentage of the GNP. OK, let’s look at the record. In the first three years of the Carter Administration, free-spending Jimmy increased federal spending at the rate of 11 per cent per annum. In the first three years of Reagan, our “free-market” President has increased spending at the rate of 13 per cent per annum. In 1980, at the end of Carter’s reign, the federal budget was over 22 per cent of the GNP. The Republican platform of 1980 thundered that this was too high, pledged a substantial reduction in the percentage. The percentage is now, in 1983, at 26 per cent.

‘Nuff said.

The Greenspan Sellout.

The disgraceful performance of the Greenspan Commission on Social Security is well known. Instead of moving toward the abolition of the biggest and cruelest racket in the government—the Social Security System—even instead of cutting benefits, the Commission moved in the opposite direction: toward raising taxes and dragooning more people into the system. The only benefit cut was a one-shot six-month suspension of cost-of-living benefits; everything else was more intensive and extensive coercion, including forcing non-profit organizations into the SSS.

How could Greenspan do it, when he’s supposed to be a Randian-libertarian, and wrote in the past calling for abolition of Social Security? Who knows? Except to point to Lord Acton’s famous maxim that “power tends to corrupt”; in Alan’s case, that tendency seems to have reached an aggravated rate.

But Greenspan’s report should not be surprising. During his zenith of power in the Nixon-Ford Administration, Greenspan was an Establishment conservative-Keynesian, and he continues so to this day. In contrast to Reagan, who once in a while slips into a free-market rhetoric at total odds with his statist policies, even Greenspan’s rhetoric has long ago ceased being in any sense libertarian. It is cautious, modulated, boring and statist—the very model of a modern Establishment economist.

Scorecard on Reaganomics.

As the old adage says, “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard”, and lack of a scorecard, or knowledge of the players, has led most people to believe that “Reaganomics” is a homogeneous lump that has a position and sometimes changes. Actually, Reaganomics has been the resultant of the pushes and pulls, the shifting coalitions and conflicts, among four sets of economists (a) for want of a better word, “old-fashioned conservatives”, or free-marketeers; (b) Friedmanite monetarists; (c) conservative Keynesians—the Shultzes, Burnses, Greenspans, Walkers—the folks that brought us the Nixon-Ford Administration; and (d) the Lafferite supply-siders, who are strong in the media, including Jude Wanniski, Irving Kristol, and the Wall Street Journal, and in politics have Rep. Jack Kemp as their point man. Up to the Republican convention, Reagan relied mainly on such unorthodox thinkers as Laffer, and Reagan’s rhetoric throughout his campaign was a blend of old-fashioned free market and supply-side. (Briefly, supply-siders want a big tax cut in the upper-income brackets to stimulate saving, and no reduction in government spending).

But at the Republican convention, Laffer and company were ousted, and all of a sudden, the old conservative Keynesian crowd, who had to a man backed Ford in the internecine struggles of 1976, roared back in and took over Reagonomics in coalition with the Friedmanites. Reagan I—which we may call Reaganomics from early 1981 until the middle of 1982—consisted of continuing to bamboozle Americans with the rhetoric of free-market + supply-side, while actually pursuing the policies of the monetarists, in tandem with the Keynesians.

As it became clear that monetarism had plunged the country into a depression marked by unusually high real interest rates, the Reagan Administration began a dramatic shift leftward, into Reagan II, a total takeover by the Keynesians. One by one, the few free-market or quasi-libertarian economists (Martin Anderson, Steve Hanke) were forced out of government, the supply-siders were booted out (Paul Craig Roberts, Norman Ture), and the monetarists were kicked out or shunted aside (Jerry Jordan, and the quiescence of Beryl Sprinkel). The accession to power and influence of George Shultz (virtually No. 2 man in everything), and Martin Feldstein symbolizes the final Keynesian victory. That victory, and the crushing of the Friedmanites, has been evident since July 1982, when the Federal Reserve embarked on a massive course of monetary inflation—now proceeding at 15 per cent per annum in M-1 and 30 per cent in M-2.

The Logic of Anarchy

by Carl Watner

In 1793, William Godwin wrote that “To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny.” Godwin asserted that the advocate of coercion is in a logically precarious position. Coercion does not convince, nor is it any kind of argument at all. The initiation of coercion is “a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me, because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because he is weak.”

The presupposition that the one who initiates violence is in a morally and logically indefensible position is the epistemological bias against violence. As Godwin added, “Force is an expedient, the use of which is much to be deplored. It is contrary to the nature of the intellect, which cannot be improved by conviction and persuasion. It corrupts the man that employs it, and the man upon whom it is employed.”

Historically, man’s original condition was anarchic. Government arose through conquest; through the initiation of coercion against the unwilling. Anarchism is the doctrine that the State, as a social institution, should not exist; that mankind should be allowed to return to its natural state of no government. Epistemologically, we must start out as anarchists, too. The advocate of the State must convince us that the positive belief in government is justified. The burden of proof is not on the anarchist to justify the absence of government. Logically, this burden of proof rests on the advocate of the State.

This point was made clear by those who argued against compulsory vaccination in late 19th Century England. They presented two independent arguments; (first), that the medical and scientific claims of the vaccinationists were wrong; and, (second), that the initiation of compulsion was wrong in and of itself. For them, the hallmark of civilization was the abandonment of legalized compulsion. As John Morley put it, “liberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion.

Without realizing it, the anti-vaccinationists hit upon the logic of anarchy. Whether their medical argument was correct or not was essentially beside the point. The epistemological bias against violence precludes the initiation of force. This prevents the existence of the State (or legislation) which is by its very nature invasive. If those who advocate the State must rely on force in order to bring it about, then their arguments are already tainted. The anti-vaccinationists claimed that “vaccination is either good or bad. Its goodness removes the need for compulsion and its badness destroys the right to coerce those who oppose it.” So for the State. It is as illogical as it is wicked. In the nature of the case, the more the government protects, the less need there is to make it compulsory. On the other hand, the less it protects, the more infamous is its compulsion. In their anxiety to coerce others, statists demonstrate their own lack of faith in the prescription which they assert affords complete protection from anarchy.

Recommended Reading: Monopoly and Anti-trust

Hey, what’s going on here? There has developed a drum-beating network of considerable scope for free-market books and writings; so why has almost nothing been said about the best book ever published on monopoly, competition, and anti-trust? This is Dominick T. Armentano, Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure (New York; John Wiley & Sons, 1982). Ten years before, Professor Armentano had published his excellent The Myths of Antitrust; now this earlier work has been thoroughly revised and updated. Not only that: Whereas in his earlier book, Armentano was a blend of Austrian and Schumpeterian, he is now solidly Austrian, which means that, in contrast to every other “free market” specialist on monopoly, Armentano is opposed to all government intervention in industry, including all anti-trust laws, which he realizes to be a monopoly-creating, rather than monopoly-fighting device. Armentano writes clearly, and his book is a judicious blend of theory and examination of the most important case law in the field. So why is the hard core, uncompromisingly free-market work of Armentano ignored, while mushy moderates carry the day? These days, that question has become purely rhetorical, but you can overcome this Blackout by rushing out and buying a copy today!

Margaret Mead: Justice at Last!

Once in a while, once in a very great while, justice really triumphs in this world. In the case of the incredibly pernicious Margaret Mead, it took justice six decades to arrive, but it has triumphed at long last.

Ideas have consequences in history, although they scarcely work in the direct Randian “From Kant-to-Hitler” manner. But Margaret Mead’s writings, beginning with her whopping best-seller, Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 and continuing through her New Guinea tribal investigations of the 1930’s, moulded the hearts and character of literally generations of Americans. The Mead message is now, of course, all too familiar, but it struck Americans of the day with blockbuster force. The thesis was simple and captivating enough to permit the book’s being a best seller: The lovable natives of Samoa (and the Arapesh of New Guinea) are, in contrast to our own uptight and repressed Western civilization, happy, happy, happy. And why are they so happy—in contrast to the miseries of the West? For two reasons: first, the Samoans and the Arapesh of both sexes are culturally encouraged—and from an early age—to screw like rabbits. Since there is no monogamy, there is no jealousy, no frustration, no repression, no bourgeois possessiveness or insecurity. And second, and as a corollary, there is no private property in these peaceful happy tribes. Since every thing is tribally owned, there is no economic repression, no jealousy, frustration, bourgeois possessiveness or insecurity.

On the other hand, and by stark contrast, the Mundagamor tribe in new Guinea, like you-know-who, has a culture marked by monogamy and private property. And, by gum, the Mundagamor are uptight, miserable, warlike, uphappy. So there!

The not-so-implicit message of Margaret Mead was crystal clear: If only we Americans can cast off the incubus of monogamy, chastity, and private property, and adopt communism and screw-like-rabbits, we too could be happy, happy, happy. And all this in the Name, not of value-judgments, heaven forfend, but of Science itself. Science tells us, after all, that communal property + free sex equals peace, contentment, and happiness, and private property + monogamy spells the reverse.

In short, Margaret Mead was the pre-World War II version of the venerable dean of the polymorphous perverse of the New Left era, Herbert Marcuse. But there was a key difference. Margaret Mead wrote in clear and graceful English, and therefore her message spread wide and sunk deep into our consciousness. Marcuse wrote in incomprehensible, jargon-filled, neo-Hegelian Germano-English, in a style, as Mencken once wrote of Veblen, “that affected the higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses.” He was therefore the fad of a day.

Margaret Mead, in short, was the living embodiment and carrier of the twin banes of the twentieth century, Marxo-Freudism or Freudo-Marxism. From the point of view of orthodox Marxists and Freudians, of course, the two doctrines are at sword’s point, but the great fashion of our century has been the odd mating of both of these assaults upon reason and individual dignity. Mead’s writings were also one of the banes of my college years, since the Meadian atmosphere was everywhere. The whole argument struck me as a geyser of pishposh, and besides I was ready to defend private property, romantic love, and Western civilization against the primitive communal life even if the latter was supposed to bring happiness. Since I did not know enough to refute the Argument From Samoa on its own terms, I dismissed not only La Mead but also anthropology per se as the devil’s cauldron and proceeded to other disciplines.

But now, Hallelujah! and at long last, anthropology itself is, with great pain and turmoil, overthrowing the Meadian vision. A book forthcoming in April from Harvard University Press is a slashing refutation of the Mead/Samoa myth from top to bottom: Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. It turns out that in the “science” of anthropology—unknown surely to any other alleged science, even social or behavioral—every anthropologist’s field work in primitive tribes is taken as gospel by everyone else. Professor Freeman, an Australian anthropologist, has actually been to, and lived in Samoa for years, and he found precisely the opposite there (and strong evidence of the opposite during the 1920’s as well). Instead of happy, happy, Samoa is marked by jealousy, tension, homicide, rape, competitiveness, and nobody screws like rabbits. (The news reports did not go into the private vs. communal property angle. As usual, sex sells more papers than economics. See the New York Times, January 31 and February 1.) It turns out that this widely beloved and influential “scientist” pretended to know all about Samoan life, even though (a) she didn’t know the language, and (b) she lived with white expatriates rather than natives. Dr. Freeman speculates that what misled Mead is that adolescent girls had a lot of naughty fun telling Margaret what she wanted to hear: That they were all screwing like rabbits and Having a Wonderful Time.

The reactions among the profession as recorded in the New York Times were fascinating. Since the book was published by Harvard and not by some backwater Australian press, it could not be laughed off by status-conscious academics. There was the usual left-liberal hysteria and charges that Freeman was an evil crypto-Lorenzian and hereditarian. But there was less of this than I had expected. Most affecting was the remark of a native Samoan professor of anthropology who exulted that at long last his native culture was portrayed accurately, and liberated from the nonsensical Meadian myth.

In fact, the dominant academic reaction was to cut their losses. At her death five years ago. La Mead was virtually canonized by the profession. Now, it turns out that her methods have long been under severe questioning, that everyone had great doubts. And then the retreat to the final line of defense: Yes, we see now (as we have seen for a long while) that she was wrong, but she provided a great contribution to anthropology for her time. As Professor Richard Basham of the University of Sydney put it: “A lot of us had already discounted the scientific work of Dr. Mead. To the extent that we assign her books, it is to show how anthropology has developed.”

No fellows, that copout is not good enough. For six decades, the gross distortions and ideological flim-flam of Margaret Mead were inflicted upon American life. The damage that she did was incalculable, and you are not going to slide out of it with “correct for her time” bushwah. The Christian tradition is correct: Forgiveness can only come after genuine repentance. And the one thing that academics, whatever their discipline, are never going to do is Repent.

But still justice has come at last. It is too bad that Margaret Mead is not alive to appreciate it.

Four Ways to Insure a Very Short Phone Conversation

I

Dr. Rothbard?

Yes.

Dr. Murray Rothbard?

Yes.

I’m a libertarian from _______. Do you have time for some constructive criticism?

II

Dr. Rothbard?

Yes.

There’s an inner contradiction on page 856 of your Man, Economy, and State, and I quote . . .

III

Dr. Rothbard?

Yes.

Dr. Murray Rothbard?

Yes.

We’re calling from this bar in _______. We saw your name on this neat poster. Are you really the “greatest living enemy of coercive government”? Hey, that’s great, hey, where do you stand on rent control?

I’m against it.

You’re against rent control? You must be some kind of nut. . .

IV

Murray Rothbard?

Yes.

Why did you write that pack of lies about me in your last issue?

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

MARCH, 1983

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

The New Menace of Gandhism

Wisdom has taught us to be calm and meek,

To take one blow, and turn the other cheek;

It is not written what a man shall do,

If the rude caitiff smite the other too!

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Somewhere in Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead there is a striking passage where one of the Bad Guys (and Rand’s Bad Guys are always unmistakably bad) abandons the Communist Party and rushes off to India to plunge into Hindu/guru mysticism. Rand caught one of the striking intellectual movements of our age. Time and time again, left-collectivists, after toiling many years in the Marxian vineyard, get disillusioned, give up, and join some Maharishi cult or other, babbling about the ineffable Wisdom of the East. On the New Left, Rennie Davis was a striking example; before that, veteran Communist fellow traveler Louis Fischer suddenly rushed down to India to do a biography of Mahatma Gandhi.

In my own experience, I knew a bright young Trotskyite who, during the New Left epoch, suddenly discovered LSD, and started distributing LSD tracts instead of Trotskyite ones. Pretty soon, one mind-destroying experience begat another, and he was putting up Krishna/Vishnu Indian mystical posters and babbling accordingly.

One of the most thoughtful analysts of this phenomenon has been Arthur Koestler; even the titles of some of his works portray his insights: the Lotus and the Robot, the Yogi and the Commissar. The point is that the Yogi is but the flip side of the Commissar. After years of trying to transform the world by forcing others to do his bidding, the Commissar abandons the world and strives to obliterate his ego in some mystical Great All-is-One Nirvana.

1 The Menace of Gandhism

It is said that history comes the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. In my more pessimistic moments, I sometimes believe that the libertarian movement is destined to repeat-as-farce many of the calamities that have befallen the Marxian and other ideological movements. And so there is now a spectre haunting the libertarian movement: the spectre of Gandhian non-violence, of the old Hindu baloney sliced once again.

Part of this new fad undoubtedly stems from seeing the movie Gandhi, which has inspired a lot of this nonsense, and so the fad might well be over when the movie fades at last from the theater screens. But the non-violence fad cuts deeper than that. For one thing, it has been picking off some of the best and most radical Libertarian Party activists, ones which the Party can ill afford to lose if it is to retain its thrust and its principles.

There has long been an anti-party tendency in the libertarian movement, headed by Sam Konkin, a tendency holding all voting and political action to be immoral for libertarians. But, in confronting the challenge of activism by we pro-Party types: What is your strategy for rolling back the State, Konkin could only fall back on forming a cheering section for black marketeers. But most libertarians find this an unsatisfactory outlet for activism, first, because black markets, while helpful, do not strike at the core of State power, and second, because black markets will be formed by adept entrepreneurs and need no cheering squads to urge them on. The other major anti-party leader, George H. Smith, confronting the same challenge, has come up with another strategy that has already drawn many radical activists out of the LP: Bringing down the State by massive non-violent resistance, or civil disobedience. This is the nub of Smith’s recently formed Voluntaryist movement, and the current Gandhi film has lent effective focus to Voluntaryist efforts.

At the heart of the Voluntaryist strategy is an unquestionably correct syllogism: If the mass of the people were, at one blow, to withhold their obedience from the State, refuse to pay taxes, stop circulating the State’s paper money, or refuse to obey unjust laws, then the State would be brought down. The major problem, of course, is the likelihood of the If.

There are many successful examples of violent revolution against the State in modern history; the state only two examples of successful non-violent revolution. (Professor Gene Sharp, the current apostle of non-violence, mainly cites marginal examples which have a similar standing to Konkin’s black markets: they ease some of the pain of oppression without doing much to end it. E.g., Danish slowdowns in obeying Nazi orders during the German occupation in World War II). These two examples are instructive, especially in light of the fact that violent revolutions are attacked from all sides as leading to new forms of State oppression. For they are Gandhi’s India, which led to Mrs. Gandhi’s dictatorship and the horrifying experiment in compulsory sterilization; and the Khomeini revolution in Iran, which brought down the Shah’s regime by a series of non-violent actions culminating in a universal general strike. The non-violent Khomeini revolution, of course, has brought forth the monstrous tyranny of Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism.

The comparative record of non-violent revolutions is, then, worse than that of violent ones, for the violence of the American Revolution after all brought forth a pretty good result, while non-violence has accomplished nothing fruitful at all.

Which leads to a fundamental libertarian point: What’s so great about non-violence anyway? Libertarians, after all, are not opposed to violence per se; they are opposed only to violent aggression, to the initiation of violence against another’s person or property. With the exception of the LeFevrian aberration, all libertarians, including Konkin and the Smithian Voluntaryists, concede the right to use violence in defense against violent invasion of person and property. So what’s so great about non-violence? Why wantonly abandon an important tool of self-defense?

The new craze of non-violence or Gandhism, is a menace to the libertarian movement for several crucial reasons. It is a dead-end for the libertarian movement. It serves the function of providing burnt-out LP activists with the illusion of an alternative form of productive libertarian activity. My observation is that many, if not most, Voluntaryists or their fellow-travelers do not arrive at this strategy from a studied conviction that political action is immoral. (Even if it were, non-violent resistance would still be an illusory, dead-end strategy). Instead, they begin with various forms of disillusion or exhaustion with LP activities. At this perhaps temporary moment of weakness, they seize on Voluntaryism for providing them with a cosmic rationale for dropping out of a commitment to the libertarian movement.

Why is non-violent resistance a dead end? First, because if we observe the two successful examples of mass resistance, they emerged from a monolithic religious tradition (Shi-ite Islam) or were steeped in the religious culture of the country (Yogi/guru India.) The United States has no monolithic religion or religious culture, and we have no real tradition of coordinated mass non-violence. If anything, Americans, more than most other Western countries, have often been ready to pick up the club or the gun at infractions on their liberty.

Secondly, since there is zero possibility of Smith and his confreres generating a mass movement for civil disobedience, this means that the Voluntaryist movement is destined to take one of two roads, each disastrous in different ways. For when a dozen or so libertarians sit around for a year or two talking about bringing down the State by non-violent resistance, what is likely to happen? Either nothing, in which case everyone gets bored with meta-discussions of revolution, and the movement falls apart and disappears. Or the couple of dozen revolutionaries decide to put their talk into practice by confronting the State apparatus with their bodies, by throwing themselves into stalling the machinery of the State. And what will happen then is inevitable: They will get smashed. The police hate pacifists and non-resisters even worse than Commies, and they will be the first to have their bodies dragged through the muck. Since these are some of the finest young men and women I have ever known, the personal tragedy, let alone tragedy to the movement, will be incalculable. If the movement needs martyrs, I have scads of suitable candidates for martyrdom before George Smith, Wendy McElroy, Carl Watner and the others get ground under the heel.

Note that the inner contradiction, the inner tension, in a handful of people talking continually about non-violent revolution is almost the same as in any similar group sitting around talking about violent revolution (e.g. the Weathermen, et al, in the New Left period.) For then the tendency, after a while, is either for the members to dismiss the whole thing as fruitless palaver and re-enter the mainstream of life, or else to start bombing. Either way, the movement is finished.

For those who believe that libertarian political action is immoral, there are other forms of activism that do not involve what is tantamount to self-destruction: education, lobbying, even Common Cause-type membership organizations. But of course I do not believe for a minute that political action is immoral for a libertarian or an anarchist (see the article by Scott Olmsted and myself on “Is Voting Unlibertarian?” in the next issue of Libertarian Vanguard.)

It is true, moreover, that Smith and McElroy are squarely in the Benjamin Tucker tradition. Tucker and Liberty counselled against political action and called for mass nonviolent disobedience. Their call, of course, got exactly nowhere. The difference between Tucker and his followers, and Smith and his, is that Tucker shrewdly never tried to put his strategy into practice, only paid lip-service to civil disobedience, and remained content to forge a scintillating intellectual movement of individualist anarchism. Would that Smith and the Voluntaryists did the same! Unfortunately, Smith seems to be taking the more reckless and futile course.

Smith, McElroy and the others deny vehemently either that they are mystics or that they are courting martyrdom. I remain unconvinced. In the same way that Smith is certain that there is an inner logic of libertarian political action that leads ineluctably to sellout, so I am convinced that the inner logic of the new Voluntaryist fascination with Gandhite nonviolent resistance will lead ineluctably either to disintegration or to what the Black Panthers used to call “Custeristic” confrontations with the State apparatus.

Indeed, one of the keenest analysts of the libertarian scene attended Smith’s Voluntaryist workshop at the recent February California LP convention, and reported that “George is psyching himself up for confrontation with the State.” The “psyching up” is what Smith, Sharp and other preachers of non-violence refer to vaguely and disquietingly as “training.” I personally find the very word “training” one of the most irritating in the English language, conjuring up as it does linked words such as “basic”, “military”, or EST. Top sergeants “train” the humanity out of their recruits, so as to form a disciplined team, ready to carry out instant orders from above. Even apart from the military connotations, “training” implies distorting persons away from their natural inclinations and choices, and toward some form of imposed regimen. Even if the training is self-imposed, the word has the smell of suppression of the individual and his or her values and authentic personality.

In a session on non-violence held in New York recently, I challenged Professor Sharp in the Q. and A.:“You speak repeatedly of ‘training.’ What is this training? And more important, who is to train whom? Because I tell you one thing: I ain’t going to be ‘trained’ by anybody.” Sharp’s answer was that I had obviously already “trained myself.” Cute, but evasive.

II The Mahatma Desanctified

The time has now come to rip off the veil of sanctity that has been carefully wrapped around Gandhi by his numerous disciples, that has been stirred anew by the hagiographical movie, and that has greatly inspired the new Voluntaryist upsurge. In considering various aspects of his thought and life, we must realize that, for Gandhi at least, they all formed part of a seamless web, an integrated whole.

(Note: this section is based on the superb revisionist article on Gandhi by Arthur Koestler, “Mahatma Gandhi: A Revaluation,” in Bricks to Babel [London: Hutchinson, [980] pp. 595-619.)

1. Economics

Let us not mince words: Mahatma Gandhi was an economic crazy. For Gandhi, not only modern technology but almost any technology was sinful and evil. Railroads were evil, the industrial revolution was evil, cotton textiles were evil, modern medicine was evil, education was evil.

On railroads, Gandhi literally took the line that if God meant us to move around he would have provided us with personal locomotives. Note the following from Bapu (“father”, a widely used term of affection for Gandhi in India) himself:

Man is so made by nature as to require him to restrict his movements as far as his hands and feet will take him. If we did not rush about from place to place by means of railways and other maddening conveniences, much of the confusion that arises would be obviated . . . God set a limit to a man’s locomotive ambition in the construction of his body. Man immediately proceeded to discover means of overriding the limit . . . According to this reasoning, it must be apparent to you that railways are a most dangerous institution. Man has gone further away from his maker.

(Quoted in Sir C. Sankavan Nair, Gandhi and Anarchy, Madras, 1922, pp. 4-5.)

It is characteristic of Bapu that he nevertheless spent most of his life “rushing from place to place” in railway carriages in organizing his movement; it is also characteristic of his phony egalitarianism that he insisted on traveling third class—but with a special coach all to himself.

For Bapu, modern medicine and hospitals were pure evil: “Hospitals are institutions for propagating sin . . . Hospitals are the instruments that the devil has been using for his own purpose, in order to keep his hold on his kingdom. They perpetuate vice, misery and degradation and real slavery.” (Nair, pp. 6-7, 18). All his life, accordingly, the Mahatma experimented with nature-cures and remedies. And much of his life he was ill. But it was again typical of the quality of Gandhi’s alleged devotion to the unity of theory and practice that each time he was seriously ill he began on nature cures, refusing Western medicine and surgery, but invariably ended submitting to drugs, injections, and Western-style surgical procedures.

Again and again, Gandhi, though himself highly educated, attacked education: not just public schools, or private schools, but education per se. A typical quote: “To give millions a knowledge of English is to enslave them.” And: “A peasant earns his bread honestly. What do you propose to do by giving him a knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? Do you wish to make him discontented with his cottage or his lot?”

(Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Ahmedabad, 1946, pp. 63-66.)

But Gandhi’s nuttiest and most intensely held economic fallacy was his bitter attack on machine-made textiles and his holding up of homespun clothing as having virtually sacral value. It must be emphasized that Gandhi’s lifelong war against manufactured textiles was not just a tactic to boycott English products in his struggle against British imperialism. For Gandhi, the home spinning wheel, which he had designed as the centerpiece of the Indian flag, was a holy symbol of a hoped-for return by the Indian masses to the Simple Life, and of absolute rejection of the impious Industrial Revolution.

Thus: “The call of the spinning-wheel, Gandhi wrote in Young India, is the noblest of all. Because it is the call of love . . . The spinning-wheel is the reviving draught for the millions of our dying countrymen and countrywomen . . .” (In The Gandhi Reader, London, 1958, pp. 229-230.) The cult of the spinning-wheel spread through the Gandhi movement, and Gandhi’s Congress Party resolved that all of its members should take up home spinning and pay their membership dues in self-spun yarn; Congress officeholders had to pay to the Congress 2000 yards of yarn per month. In its meetings, the top politicians of the Congress Party participated in the debates while operating their portable spinning-wheels. The plain white cap and white cloth became the uniform of the Congress movement, and Gandhi’s hand-picked successor, Pandit Nehru, called this uniform “the livery of freedom”. Gandhi, meanwhile, called the homespun cap and cloth “the sacrament of millions” and “a gateway to my spiritual salvation.”

Gandhi led large-scale public bonfires of foreign (manufactured) cloth. His burning of English cloth might be considered a tactic in the revolution against Britain, but why then burn all foreign cloth, British or no? In a reply to his lifelong admirer, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had accused him of employing a “magical formula” in burning all foreign cloth, Gandhi essentially confirmed the charge: “I do indeed ask the poet to spin the wheel as a sacrament . . . It was our love of foreign cloth that ousted the wheel from its position of dignity. Therefore I consider it a sin to wear foreign cloth . . . On the knowledge of my sin bursting upon me, I must consign the foreign garments to the flames and thus purify myself, and thenceforth rest content with the rough khadi made by my neighbors.” (The Gandhi Reader, pp. 228-231).

The homespun khadi may have made a deep imprint on the Congress Party and other Gandhi cultists, but ironically it never did so for the mass of Indian peasantry and villagers for whom the khadi campaign was intended. The peasants after all, were not loonies, and it took them little time to realize that there were better things to do, and that foreign manufactured textiles were not only better in quality than homespun, but also that homespun cost fully three times as much! As Koestler sardonically writes: “The spinning-wheel found its place on the national flag, but not in the peasants’ cottages.”

Arthur Koestler begins his excellent article, with a quote from a long-time friend of Gandhi’s: “It takes a great deal of money to keep Bapu living in poverty.” Mrs. Naidu, who made that statement, was more perceptive than she knew, for the “great deal of money” applies not only to fund-raising campaigns for khadi, but also to the Indian masses who had to suffer from demented attempts at economic self-sufficiency and reversing the Industrial Revolution.

2. Sex

From his late thirties, Mahatma Gandhi engaged in a lifelong crusade for chastity and against sex. For Gandhi, devotion to brahmacharya (sexual abstinence) was heavily influenced by the mystical Indian yogi tradition which can best be likened to the views of the nutty general in Dr. Strangelove (played by Sterling Hayden), who was chiefly concerned with “preserving his vital bodily fluids (bindu).” Whether married or not, people were supposed to engage in brahmacharya as “the conduct that leads to God”, as the “sine qua non for those who aspire to a spiritual or higher life.” From the age of 37, when he began the practice of abstinence, Gandhi repeatedly “tested” his devotion to brahmacharya by sleeping with a succession of women, beginning with his own wife and ending with the young granddaughter of a cousin.

It must be understood that, for Gandhi, sexual abstinence and non-violence (satyagraha) were mutually intertwined and interdependent. It was in 1906 that Gandhi embarked on his vow of chastity, and when he also launched his first campaign of non-violent resistance. Brahmacharya put Gandhi “in touch with the infinite,” with the soul-force which also powered satyagraha. For Gandhi, furthermore, sex is violence, and so abstention from the two evils become closely linked.

One of the worst aspects of Gandhi’s anti-sex crusade was the way he treated his own sons, conceived, of course, in his pre-chastity days of “sin” and lubricity. He apparently hated his sons for being the living embodiment of his own sin, and he tried his best to keep them from falling into the same sinful trap. He disowned his eldest son, Harilal, for daring to marry and thereby disobey his father’s injunctions to chastity, and when his second son, Manilal, committed the mortal sin of losing his virginity to a woman, the Mahatma went on a public pentential fast. Gandhi decreed that Manilal might never marry, and managed to persuade the guilty female to shave her hair in penitence.

Scorning all education, Gandhi kept his sons from school, intending to teach them himself. An admirable goal—except that, in his pursuit of the higher truth, he somehow never found the time.

Gandhi’s lifelong struggle to “purify” his diet was linked with his campaign against sex. When taking the vow of chastity, he wrote: “Control of the palate is the first essential in the observance of the vow . . . The brahmacharya’s food should be limited, simple, spiceless and if possible uncooked . . . Six years of experiment have shown me that the brahmacharya’s ideal food is fresh fruit and nuts.” (Gandhi, “How to Serve the Cow”, Ahmedabad).

3. The Scam of Non-Violence

It should be clear that the life of Mahatma Gandhi was essentially a scam, from start to finish. Making a big show of his allegedly deeply-held principles, claiming to make his life and thought a seamless web, he always ended Up betraying those principles. He rode on railways, he fell back repeatedly on Western medicine and surgery, and he continued to “test” his chastity with various females until the end of his life. The same is even true for his allegedly great contribution, the theory and practice of non-violence. Let us then examine two aspects of Gandhi and non-violence: first, how successful was Gandhi’s campaign, and second, how consistently did he adhere to the principle?

a. The Effectiveness of Gandhi’s Non-Violence

Mahatma Gandhi launched his first nationwide civil disobedience campaign in 1919. But the campaign was an abject failure, for the non-violent action quickly degenerated into violent rioting all over India. Gandhi suspended the action, confessed to having made a “Himalayan blunder”, and, characteristically, went on a penitential fast. He attributed the failure to launching the campaign before the Indian masses had been sufficiently “trained” in the philosophy and techniques of satyagraha.

A year later, apparently believing that sufficient training had now taken place, Gandhi launched another nationwide campaign of non-violent resistance. But it too led to widespread violent riots, culminating in the massacre of Chauri Chaura; Gandhi again suspended the action and went on a penitential fast.

Gandhi’s most successful campaign of civil disobedience occurred in 1930-31, in his “march to the sea” against the salt laws. But even here, there was widespread rioting by the Indian masses. His later satyagraha campaigns—1932-34, 1940-41, and 1942-43—were highly publicized, but inconclusive. In general, we can say that Gandhi’s nonviolence did not “liberate India”; on the contrary, the British decision to pull out of India was triggered far more by their general withdrawal from Empire after World War II, attendant up on British economic exhaustion, than it was by Gandhi’s campaigns of non-violent resistance. Indeed, many historians have pointed out that India would have won independence earlier without Gandhi’s existence. (See, for example, John Grigg, “A Quest for Gandhi,” London Sunday Times, Sept. 28, 1969).

What Gandhi did manage to achieve, in contrast, was (a) to make himself into a living and eternal legend, misleading countless Western seekers after truth; (b) poisoning the wells of Indian culture by perpetuating its most misguided, foolish, and genuinely reactionary economic and social views; (c) seeing to it that the reins of the new independent India were seized by his own statist and dictatorial—and scarcely nonviolent—Congress Party; and (d) achieving an independence that led to the decidedly non-nonviolent slaughter of literally millions of Hindus and Muslims.

b. How Consistent was Gandhi?

In some ways, Gandhi was horrifyingly consistent on nonviolence, especially if the non-violence was supposed to be practiced by other people in other countries. Thus, after the first nationwide pogrom against the Jews in Germany, in December 1938, Gandhi counselled the Jews to react in a nonviolent manner: “if the Jews can summon to their aid soulpower that comes only from non-violence, Herr Hitler will bow before the courage which he will own is infinitely superior to that shown by his best stormtroopers.” And after the news of the Holocaust became known, Gandhi, in 1946, counselled retroactively.

The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs . . . It would have roused the world and the people of Germany. (Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi: A Study in Revolution, London, 1968, p. 341.)

Perhaps what the Jews lacked was little Bapu to give them their “training.”

After the fall of France, the Mahatma praised Petain for his courage to surrender, and on July 6, 1940, Bapu published an “Appeal to Every Briton” to follow Petain’s lead:

want you to fight Nazism without arms or with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have . . . You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

(T. A. Raman, What Does Gandhi Want? Oxford, 1943, p. 24.)

George, Wendy, Carl: In the grand old Randian phrase, check your premises! Is this really the credo that you would like Americans to adopt? I personally find it odious, repellent, and extraordinarily creepy, and I venture to predict that there are damned few libertarians, let alone the mass of Americans, who will go along with it. Arthur Koestler’s reaction to this paragraph was scintillating: “It would have taken a great deal of corpses to keep Bapu in non-violence.”

Perhaps the height of Gandhian idiocy on non-violence came in his reaction, on the last day of his life, before he was assassinated, when a Life magazine reporter asked him: “How would you meet the atom bomb . . . with nonviolence?” Here’s Bapu’s answer to what is certainly a crucial question in our modern world:

I will come out in the open and let the pilot see I have not a trace of ill-will against him. The pilot will not see our faces from his great height, I know. But the longing in our hearts—that he will not come to harm—would reach up to him and his eyes would be opened.

(The Essential Gandhi, London, 1963, p. 334.)

I suppose that we should be thankful that we cannot now hear Bapu opine on how the longing in our hearts will reach out to button-pushers of missiles many thousands of miles away.

If the Mahatma was fiercely consistent on non-violence for other people, how was he on his own home ground? First, in 1918, he served as a recruiting sergeant for the British Army, stating that to achieve home rule India “should have the ability to defend ourselves, that is, the ability to bear arms and to use them”, and therefore “it is our duty to enlist in the army.” Three years later, Gandhi stated that “Under Independence I too would not hesitate to advise those who would bear arms to do so and fight for the country.”

(The Essential Gandhi, p. 125; and Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, London, 1951, p. 371.)

Gandhi later excused these positions as early lapses: “I had not yet found my feet . . . I was not sufficiently sure of my ground.” (The Essential Gandhi, p. 125.) Okay, fair enough. At 52, Gandhi was not exactly a spring chicken, but nobody expects a man to arrive in the world a full-blown theoretician. Chalk that one up to a learning experience. But we surely cannot use such an alibi for the last years of Gandhi’s life, when he had long since found his ground. In late 1947, after the partition of the newly independent states of India and Pakistan, the two new states went to war over largely Muslim Kashmir (a province which India unfortunately was able to conquer and keep.) Where did Bapu stand on the India-Pakistan war? The true Bapu now took his stand. He had been, he said in an important speech.

an opponent of all warfare. But if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan, if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimize it, the Indian Union would have to go to war against it. War was no joke. No one wanted war. That way lay destruction. But he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice.

(Nirmal Kumar Bose, My Days with Gandhi, Calcutta, 1953, p. 251.)

In the crunch, then, when his theories came home to roost, the Mahatma caved in and sold out. Traveling through massacre-torn East Bengal, Gandhi admitted to his intimates that “for the time being!” he had “given up searching for a non-violent remedy applicable to the masses.” And a few days later: “Violence is horrible and retarding, but may be used in self-defense.” To Nirmal Bose, in commenting on Indian Deputy Premier Patel’s decision to send troops into Kashmir, the Mahatma confessed that

he could no longer successfully apply the method of nonviolence which he used to wield with signal success. I have made the discovery that what I and the people with me termed non-violence was not the genuine article, but a weak copy known as passive resistance.

And to Professor Stuart Nelson, Gandhi admitted that “what he had mistaken for satyagraha was not more than passive resistance, which was a weapon of the weak . . . Gandhiji proceeded to say that it was indeed true that he had all along laboured under an illusion. But he was never sorry for it.”

(Bose, My Days, pp. 104, 107, 251, 270-71, 4n.)

I suppose that being a successful ideologue means never having to say I’m sorry, even if millions of followers had been tragically misled. Gandhi never lived long enough to adumbrate any new doctrines of “genuine” civil disobedience, but I suppose that we are just as well off.

*****

Thumb through your library and you will find a raft of hagiographical works on Gandhi, many sporting such titles as “The Mahatma: Seer and Prophet”. Louis Fischer, in his biography, called Gandhi “a unique person, a great person, perhaps the greatest figure of the last nineteen hundred years.” A more accurate assessment is that of Arthur Koestler:

He had been lavish with his advice to Britons,

Frenchmen, Czechs, Poles, Jews to lay down their arms and surrender to injustices infinitely more terrible then those committed by Pakistan. As on earlier critical occasions, when the lofty ideal clashed with hard reality, realism carried the day and the Yogi succumbed to the Commissar. He had believed in and practiced nature medicine, but when critically ill had always called in the practitioners of Western science which he held in such contempt. Nonviolence had worked like magic on the British, but did not work on Moslems.

(Koestler, p. 615).

Enough! I had not thought that the libertarian movement, steeped as it is in the rationalist heritage of Rand and Mises, would ever fall prey to the wiles of this little Hindu charlatan. But once again, I seem to have underestimated the folly of which the libertarian movement is capable.

The Burns Campaign

The Gene Burns Presidential campaign is rolling along splendidly. He has already proved to be a super candidate. He is highly intelligent, articulate, and learns very rapidly, seeing quickly how issues fit into libertarian principles. Burns is a rousing speaker, getting standing ovations wherever he goes. As a media talk show and newsman for two decades, he is superb in Q. and A., and in media interviews.

Burns took the highly important California LP state convention by storm in Oakland on the weekend of February 18-21. He was on numerous interview shows, and spoke twice at the convention. He has also impressed libertarians in other states wherever he goes, and he intends to go to as many states as will have him before the convention.

Burns came to the Oakland convention with an impressive and savvy staff of five people. They were extremely well-organized, and highly knowledgeable about the Libertarian Party, its personnel and its particular concerns.

Gene Burns wowed the California convention in his speeches, interviews, and Q. and A. Not only is he hard core and principled on all issues, but unlike some LP candidates who deaden issues in their replies, he uses every answer to widen the consciousness of his audience and expand their knowledge of libertarian principles. And he does so without ands, if, or buts.

Examples from the Q. and A.

Item: Q. Where do you stand on the legalization of heroin?

A. I don’t like the word “legalize” because it implies that the State should have something to do with drugs. It should have nothing whatsoever to do with drugs.

Item: On immigration restrictions, on which we have had candidate trouble in the past, Burns gave a rousing and clear-cut answer: In this land of the Statue of Liberty, there must be no restrictions whatever on immigration to our land.

Item: On a topic dear to all of our hearts, taxation, he was asked what he would do as President about income taxes? This to me was one of the great moments of the convention. Instead of talking about a 30 per cent cut, and all the rest of the hokum, Burns said:

“First, I would call for repeal of the 16th amendment, and abolition of the income tax.”

And second, until that occurred, Burns took up a pet scheme of my own which I had pressed, with no success, on the previous presidential campaign:

“As President, I would announce an automatic pardon for all past and future victimless Federal crimes. And among such victimless crimes, I would include income tax evasion.”

And so Burns has said it, he has committed himself that, in the one-in-a-million chance he would get to be President, he would immediately make federal income taxation voluntary, since he would announce an automatic use of the unappealable power of the Chief Executive to pardon “criminals.”

Not only is this immediate grasp by Burns of the principled, hard-core position personally gratifying, it shows that he is gutsy and hard-core, and does not begin every reply with worrying about the most “respectable”, most Tweedeldum position he might possibly take.

Item: Burns was asked if he would give the public and the media the sort of answers he was giving the LP at its convention. He immediately answered: “I’ve just spent several hours telling the media the exact same things.” Which he had.

Item: Most LP members are gun-shy about deficit spending during campaigns. They are properly so, because of the years of experience we have had with Crane Machine-run campaigns that spend money like water and then induce the LP to pick up the tab. Gene Burns’ reply to a question on campaign deficits was clear-cut and unmistakeable: an absolute pledge to incur no deficits in his campaign. Period. There was thunderous applause on that one.

The other side of the coin to zero deficits is Burns’ already evident ability to raise money. In the two weeks that he had been in the race, he had already raised close to $20,000 for his campaign, clearly from new sources of funding. His fundraising ability is not the least of Burns’ attractions as a Presidential candidate. Burns also pledged that he will run a balanced campaign, that is, he will concentrate on grass-roots party building fully as much as on media spots for his own race. Again, a most refreshing change from the past.

Item: Q. Do you have any intention to run for other offices in the future?

In reply, Burns made clear that he is totally committed to running for President, and that, if nominated, he will devote full time to the Presidential campaign from January 1, 1984 until Election Day. But, after that, since he does not intend to make a career in politics, he will remain active in the LP, but will not run for any political office ever again. His presidential race, he feels, will be his contribution to the spread of libertarian ideas and the buildup of the Party.

Gene Burns is a godsend to the Libertarian Party. He will make a superb Presidential candidate. All libertarians are hereby urged to join the Libertarian Party, and either become a delegate to the national convention in New York, or else elect delegates who will vote for Gene Burns for President.

Gene Burns, the libertarian candidate.

An Open Letter to the English Movement

To both factions in the English movement, and to those in between: Please guys, de-escalate.

The inter-necine warfare within the English movement has only been under way since last September, and yet already it has escalated to a horrifying extent, making the famous struggle over the Crane Machine in the U.S. seem like a game of pattycake. So far, the charges of one side against the other, or allegations of such charges, include:

blackmail, threats of libel suits, calling in the police, rifling through each other’s papers, racism, fascism, anti-Semitism, Nazism, being in bed with British intelligence, being agents of the KGB, being in bed with international Trotskyism, threats of turning people in to the income tax authorities, threats of turning people in to the immigration authorities, threats of assault, actual physical assault, and threats of murder.

In the immortal words of Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, “Are we to be spared nothing?” It seems that the only thing left is a general shootout in the streets of Covent Garden.

Basta! Enough! In the name of liberty and reason, please cool it! To each side I say, paraphrasing the immortal words of Cromwell in his letter to the Church of Scotland: I beseech you, in the bowels of Nock, think it possible you may be mistaken.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

April, 1983

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

Movement Depression

We have to face it: The libertarian movement is in the most financially parlous shape of many years—and certainly since the “takeoff’ phase of the modern movement in 1971-73. We have been in a grievous financial depression for the last year or so that matches and outstrips in intensity the parallel depression in the “real world” outside. Virtually every libertarian institution that I know of is sharply contracting, going under, or hanging on by its very toenails. Contributions are collapsing. The exponential growth that the movement enjoyed throughout the 1970s has been replaced by recession, flight, and near panic. People who have been gamely making it as professional libertarians have been forced to drop out and take “job-jobs”. In 1973-75, the evident collapse of statism and the reaction against it throughout the United States led me to coin the “case for optimism” for our movement. The channeling of the public reaction against Big Government into Reaganism and the Reagan triumph in 1980 led me to signal the end of the “case for optimism”, at least for the short-term, and events since then have unfortunately more than confirmed my diagnosis.

What has caused this plight? I think we are in a multi-causal depression cycle, something like the kooky business cycle theories that see a bunch of independently moving cycles coinciding at one time to send the economy into a tailspin—the “Kitchin”, the “Juglar”, the “Kondratieff’, etc. Except that in our case the coinciding causal factors are quite explainable and are not merely an effusion of numbers mysticism.

Consider the following causes:

1. The Real World Depression. In 1981-83 the real world economy suffered the most intense depression since the 1930s (A recovery has begun in the last couple of months, but our bet is that the recovery will be weak and fitful—and even at best, there will be a considerable time lag before prosperity can improve matters.) A real world depression can only cause a big drop in financial contributions to movement institutions.

2. The Republican Menace. Ever since the Eisenhower Era, every time the Republicans win, the effect has been tragic for free-market or libertarian institutions. For right-wing businessmen, whose perspective tends to be no longer than the end of their arm, then say: “Good old Ike (or Dick or Jerry or Ron) has been elected. We’ve won already! Why do we need any further education?” As a result, the election of a Republican President in itself means a financial setback for free-market or libertarian causes. With Reagan, who is supposed to be Mr. Free Market, the misapprehension, and therefore the financial setback, has been even worse. This is true except for those few favored organizations that have a direct pipeline to the Reagan White House (e.g. the Heritage Foundation.) Everyone else is hurting.

3. The Gold Crash. The crash in the price of gold since 1980 has done in most of the gold bugs, most of whom tend to be free-market, Austrian, or even libertarian. Many of them have gone under; the once flourishing gold-investment seminar movement has collapsed, and many such seminars have folded or gone bankrupt. Many gold coin dealers have also collapsed, the less scrupulous ones taking their customers down with them. And all this means far fewer contributions to libertarian institutions.

4. Reagan Tax Reforms. Two of the very few Reagan tax reforms, though good morally and good for the economy as a whole, have had a disastrous effect on contributions to libertarian institutions. (Every silver lining has a cloud, it seems.). One such reform was a new law allowing tax-exempt charitable foundations to accumulate assets instead of being forced to spend all their annual income. Why a tax-exempt foundation should want to accumulate assets which have no owner and which cannot be used for owners’ purposes, God only knows, but such has been the case. One massive contributor to libertarian scholarship has taken advantage of this new bonanza to contract its annual contributions by something like 40%. Yes, Yes, I know, everyone has the natural and/or God-given right to commit senseless acts, but the result is triage for the movement.

The second good reform with baneful consequences for the movement was Reagan’s slashing the top income tax rate to 50%. This meant that what a friend of mine cynically calls the “zero-cost philanthropy point” has been pushed much further downward. A wealthy person or firm who used to contribute a certain amount at zero (or very low) cost, now finds, with a lower top bracket tax rate, that that point is much lower. Hence, a sharp falling off of movement contributions.

5. A Private Business Cycle. Adding to, and forming a synergistic effect with the above factors, a few Giant Donors have, coincidentally, acted as our own private “Federal Reserve Bank”, pouring millions into the movement adding to the general boom of 1977-80, and then sharply contracting ever since. This adds a “private business cycle” to the other four factors, since all the above booms and busts have coincided in time. We have, then, a five-fold depression for the libertarian movement.

The result of all this is that the libertarian movement has experienced all the syndromes of an “Austrian” business cycle in the real world. A massive and sudden infusion of funds in 1977-80 led to an artificial lengthening of the structure of production, an over-investment in new and expanded institutions. Unknown nerds were plucked from obscurity, vaulted into positions of prominence and power, and given hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, to play with. After the hubris came the inevitable disillusion and drastic contraction, with the attendant painful liquidation of people and institutions that we see in every panic depression phase of the cycle. That liquidation is now taking place, unfortunately dragging many estimable people and organizations down with it.

There is something worse than poverty of material goods, and that is poverty of the soul. And so, the most repellent aspect of this financial crisis has been the attendant rapid flight from principle among libertarians. Among donors and donees alike, a mad scramble has been taking place away from hard core libertarian principle, and toward the squishy center, toward the mainstream, toward respectability, toward what is perceived to be the sources of jobs and funds. Libertarians have become “responsible” welfarestaters, anti-imperialists have become third-campers and apologists for U.S. domination abroad, believers in moral principle have become “value-free” efficiency experts, hard-core Austrians have become eclectic and wimpy public-choicers, and, perhaps saddest of all, Misesians have become Popperite-Buchananaite moderates and respectables. Everyone is trying to cozy up to the Reagan Administration and its corrupt hangers-on. The great Ludwig von Mises, neglected, scorned, and traduced in his lifetime, is now beginning to meet the same fate among his former followers, among whom the Word is going out: Play down Mises. He was too controversial, too hard-hitting. Not respectable enough. Businessmen, once convinced of the vital Hayekian insight of the overriding importance of ideas and scholarship in the long-run political struggle, have reverted to anti-intellectual type, and have increasingly abandoned scholarship.

All in all, a loathsome performance, worthy of a chapter out of Swift or a deep circle in Dante’s Hell. But there are bright spots on the horizon, not to be lost sight of in the encircling gloom. A new turn of the business cycle or the gold market might well ease the financial burden. The hoped-for ouster of the Reagan Administration in 1984 would eliminate a great deal of the rampant opportunism in libertarian/free-market circles; honesty would be policed, so to speak, by a welcome drying up of temptation.

And there are, here and there, happy exceptions to the general blight, institutions that are flourishing and getting more principled, rather than less. A particularly shining area right now is the Libertarian Party, which has cast off the corrupt and opportunist dominance of the Crane Machine, and, under Chairman Alicia Clark’s guidance, is rapidly paying off the mountainous debt and re-establishing devotion to principle in the Party. Gene Burns is a great Presidential candidate, and the latest news is that Paul Grant of Colorado, the only man to run a national LP convention (Denver, 1981) at a profit, a highly able young businessman with great organizational skills, has thrown his hat into the ring for national chair to succeed Alicia Clark. Grant, one of the leaders of the old Coalition for a Party of Principle, would make a splendid chairman.(For inquiries or contributions to the Burns campaign, write Gene Burns, P.O. Box 740, Orlando, Fla. 32802. For inquiries or contributions to the Grant campaign, write Paul Grant, 12477 W. Cedar Ave., Suite 106, Lakewood, Colorado 80228).

The other shining spot is a truly exciting piece of news on the scholarly front, which has suffered the most in the current financial and moral miasma of the movement. The estimable Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., a unique combination of scholar, writer, politico, and organizer, has recently founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, Inc., with himself as executive director. Rockwell, who over the years has moved steadily and surely from conservative Republican to hard-core libertarian, began his career as a senior editor of Arlington House publishers; became director of public relations at Hillsdale College, where he set up the highly successful outreach and Imprimis program; was editor-in-chief of Private Practice, a free-market magazine for physicians; and then became chief of staff for several years to Congressman Ron Paul. He then became associate director of the Law and Economics Center at Emory University.

The purpose of the new Mises Institute is to advance the cause, without waffling or compromising, of Austrian Economics in general and of the hard-core Misesian branch of that economic school in particular.

A new scholarly journal will be published, with yours truly as editor; the Mises Institute has taken over the publication of the successful Austrian Economics Newsletter, and booklets, seminars, fellowships, and books are being planned for the future.

It is particularly heartwarming that, in the current intellectual bog, the banner of Ludwig von Mises is being held high once again. Rockwell points out that the Mises Institute is the first organization in the world explicitly dedicated to Mises and to Austrian economics. Chairing the advisory board of the new institute is Mrs. Margit von Mises; other members are Ron Paul, F. A. Hayek, Hans Sennholz, Henry Hazlitt, and the Lib. Forum editor. “Ludwig von Mises was the greatest champion of liberty in our time,” says Rockwell. “For the sake of justice, as well as freedom, Mises and his work must have the influence they deserve.”

And so, perhaps the old cliches are right, and it is always darkest before the dawn, and there is light at the end of the tunnel. With a spirit such as Lew Rockwell’s at work, the miasma afflicting the scholarly wing of the libertarian movement will be lifted, and soon. (The Mises Institute is a tax-exempt educational foundation. Inquiries and contributions should be sent to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics, 325 Pennsylvania Avenue, S. E., Washington, D.C. 20003.)

Free Franzi

Emil Franzi, LP NatCom rep from Arizona, Menckenesque wit, raconteur, and the keenest political mind in the Libertarian Party, has been indicted for perjury by a grand jury. In the course of working for long-time friend and associate Conrad Joyner in the Republican primary for Congress, Franzi was accused of soliciting corporate contributions, which is (unfortunately) illegal under current law. It is a bizarre case. In the first place, the amount ($4000) is so small that the Federal Election Commission, usually responsible for prosecuting such matters, has displayed no interest whatever in the proceedings. Franzi is a minor figure in the case, but the County Attorney was under pressure for some indictment, after spending eight months in a fruitless grand jury investigation.

The charge is untrue and a frameup, but the powers that be apparently felt that Franzi, the smallest character in the drama, would be a perfect fall guy. Also, Franzi had long been an effective burr under the Establishment political saddle in Arizona. As Franzi put it: “These guys (the local power elite) don’t care about your position on El Salvador. But they get really pissed when you start attacking local zoning or utility franchises or point out that there’s not going to be any water in the Central Arizona Project”, a massive boondoggle beloved by both major parties.

The charge has no weight and the State apparatus knows it, but the evident object is to bleed Franzi (no millionaire he) to death financially. Legal defense is very costly, and court costs in this case are astronomic. Thus, to get the necessary facts of the charge against him, Franzi is forced to spend his own money buying the entire eight months’ worth of the grand jury transcript, at an enormous cost per page.

So what Franzi needs is money for legal and court costs to fight the frameup. Please send whatever you can to the Franzi Defense Fund, Box 2128, Tucson, AZ 85702.

Free Franzi and All Political Prisoners!

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

The Verdict. Dir. by Sidney Lumet, with Paul Newman.

The critic who doesn’t see a film in a plush-lined preview studio is necessarily affected, though scarcely determined, by the critical reception of the movie. My expectations in going to see The Verdict were mixed. On the one hand, it sounded like a good old-fashioned movie-movie, a Horatio Alger story where the lone hero triumphs over the sleek and evil Establishment. On the other hand, its advertised gritty realism sounded like a possible slow and soggy downer.

I am happy to report that the old-fashioned movie-movie is triumphant. Paul Newman turns in one of the great acting performances of his career as a downtrodden, alcoholic lawyer, sacked and betrayed by the corporate law Establishment. His very stance and walk, a sagging of knees, vividly portrays his exhaustion and defeat. He has been reduced to haunting funeral parlors looking for a client, and is handed his last case, his last chance for any sort of comeback. Instead of taking the easy way out and settling for a hefty fee, Newman pulls himself together and tackles the combined wealth and public relations power of the Archdiocese and the corporate legal Establishment. He determines to win justice and expose the malpractice of powerful physicians operating in an Archdiosesan hospital.

There are some marvelous scenes. Particularly striking is the contrast of Newman working with his only helper, his old law professor and retired partner, Jack Warden; while the sleek and unctuous “The Prince of Darkness”, Kincannon, marvelously played by James Mason, is surrounded by dozens of eager, smart young lawyers on his corporate law team. One of the great lines occurs when Mason finds that Newman’s only witness is an elderly anesthesiologist from a fourth-rate hospital who turns out to be black.

Young Lawyer (virtually licking his chops): And, furthermore, he’s black.

Mason (sternly): Here’s how you deal with the fact that he is black. You don’t mention it at all, ever. And, by the way (smilingly), make sure to put a black lawyer on our team in the courtroom.

In short, an old-fashioned movie-movie. Charlotte Rampling is suitably Ramplingesque as Newman’s taciturn love interest with more than a hint of ruthlessness. Warden is great as the old prof. And no one should miss Newman’s climactic speech to the jury in which he simply calls for the jurors to vote for the justice they know is in their heart. “Today,” he instructs them, “you are the law”, as he pleads with them to overrule, for once in their lives, the legal flimflam and technicalities which the Establishment habitually uses to betray the interests of truth and justice.

So what about the gritty realism? It’s not too bad. It’s true that everyone talks very slowly and portentously, and the photography all seems to have been shot in some dark tunnel: All this is veteran Sidney Lumet’s way of pounding it into us that the picture is pregnant with Social Significance. But the picture is suspenseful and tightly-knit nonetheless, and the hokey aspects do not get in the way of the action.

All in all, since My Favorite Year was of course not nominated for the Academy Awards, The Verdict should have gotten this year’s Oscar.

Tootsie, Dir. by Sydney Pollack, with Dustin Hoffman.

Talk about advance hype: The ubiquitous press interviews with Hoffman were almost enough to keep me out of the movie theater. For decades, just as Jane Fonda has been the living embodiment of political left-liberalism on the silver screen, so Dustin Hoffman has been the talky exponent of cultural left-liberalism. Ever since The Graduate, Hoffman has been the living symbol of the replacement of handsome WASP leading men by homely (to put it kindly) ethnics. (That is, who look ethnic—there have always been ethnic leading men like Paul Newman and Kirk Douglas, but they looked like handsome WASPS. Hoffman was the first one who looked ethnic.) The homeliness has been worn by Hoffman and the others as a badge of honor, demonstrating as it allegedly does their superior sensitivity. The theory is that homeliness equals sensitivity, and that Jews, in particular, can feel and have emotions, in contrast to poor, uptight, repressed WASPS. Hence the myth of the sensitive Jew (who looks Jewish) as cultural liberator to the poor, repressed goyim. (Usually this myth comes to the screen as the Jewish psychoanalyst liberating WASPS; perhaps Hoffman is not yet old enough to play a shrink. But the time will come.)

With the triumph of the feminist movement, macho is Out and sensitivity is In, and Hoffman has been shrewd enough to ride the crest of the current cultural wave. But the press interviews surrounding Tootsie have been particularly repellent. Hoffman’s Sensitivity goes all the way through to unconscious parody: playing a woman “changed his life”; he now knows how a woman feels; in fact he now feels as a woman does, etc., etc. ad nauseam. One wonders why any woman would sit still a moment for this baloney. (Years ago, during the height of the civil rights movement, a turkey appeared on the screen portraying the true life story of a white journalist who put on blackface and suffered as a black does for all of couple of months. The movie, whose name I have blissfully forgotten, got laughed off the screen. Maybe audiences were more prescient then, or maybe it was because Hoffman wasn’t playing the lead.)

The most odious moment of the press interviews came when Hoffman virtually started sobbing at the terrible shock that hit him when he looked at his female persona in the mirror and came to the conclusion that he was not good-looking enough to take himself out on a date. Well, I have some news for you, Dusty baby. I have come to terms long ago with the soul-searing insight that I am not good-looking enough for me to take out on a date either. Somehow, I have managed to make this adjustment without a great deal of fuss and feathers, or of whining about this terrible truth to the press of America. As has, come to think of it, almost the entire male half of the world’s human population.

Equally as repugnant was the way that the press made certain to telegraph to one and all that, despite his sensitivity and appearing in drag (or perhaps because of it?), Dustin Hoffman is the Casanova of the twentieth century. In order to cast aside any suspicion of Hoffman as effete, tales of his heterosexual prowess filled the newspapers and magazines. That way, Dusty can have it both ways.

All this I found a powerful argument for not seeing Tootsie. The critics also poured it on: They informed us that Tootsie was a truly hilarious movie, but that it operated on many deep levels, levels of sensitivity, feminist philosophy, etc. The hilarious sounded good, but I always distrust “deep levels” in comedies, since unless the author is a genius like Shaw’ or Wilde, the “multi-levels” usually turn out to be large dollops of left-liberal treacle.

After all the hoopla and hullaballoo, I found the movie itself neither hilarious nor obnoxious; in fact, it was difficult to know what the shouting was all about. Basically, Tootsie is a one-joke movie carried on too long, ringing the changes on the man-in-drag theme. It is a tepid and pleasant film, certainly not hilarious or even particularly funny, punctuated from time to time by brief feminist speeches by Hoffman. Aside from drawing dutiful applause from the audience, however, the speeches are not intrusive enough to wreck the picture. But there are very few funny lines; in fact, the only really hilarious lines—by the most delightful character in the picture—are delivered by Sydney Pollack himself, who does a marvelous’ turn as Hoffman’s agent. Pollack plays the Voice of Reality to all his oddball actor-clients. Thus, Bill Murray, Hoffman’s actor-roommate, is trying to peddle an avant-garde play about lovers who return to the Love Canal. Pollack’s marvelous response: “Who wants to see a play about the Love Canal? If you want to see toxic waste, go to Hoboken.” (Non-New Yorkers will not, I’m afraid, appreciate this cultural reference.)

As to Hoffman’s allegedly great feat in playing a female, I saw nothing to it; after all, in the picture he is supposed to be a great actor, and playing a woman should be duck soup. Gorgeous Jessica Lange plays someone gorgeous, and the other actors are adequate enough. Except for Terri Garr, who is shrill and annoying as Hoffman’s original love interest. (I couldn’t figure out the problem until reading John Simon’s perceptive critique. Simon pointed out that Garr can’t act, and therefore simply played herself, which audiences can only find irritating.) Nevertheless, Mr. Sensitive Hoffman treats Garr with unfeeling cruelty, and poor Charles Durning is dealt with unmercifully as Jessica Lange’s father who is dumb enough to have a thing for Ms. Hoffman. A double standard is here at work: for Hoffman’s own lubricity toward Miss Lange is treated as part of the lovable aspect of Hoffman’s all-encompassing sensitivity.

1776: A Buffoonery

by Emil Franzi

If those who ran the First American Revolution had been talked into using some of the current methodology of American politics, then the following discussion might have taken place . . .

It is June of 1776—We take you to the New York Executive office of the public relations firm of Shakeit, Fakeit, and Hoare, retained by the Continental Congress for the job of putting together American Independence.

Shakeit: Gentlemen, let’s go over the Continental Congress Account. The issue is possible independence from Great Britain. Bob, what are the latest survey results?

Fakeit: Bad news. Only 22% for independence, 29% like George III, 49% undecided or don’t care. Want the cross tabs on age, sex and geography?

Shakeit: Not now. And they’re meeting in Philadelphia next month? .

Fakeit: Right. And some of these clowns actually want an upfront Declaration! On 22%! How the hell do we pull that one off?

Hoare: It’s worse than that. One of our agents at Monticello slipped me this out of Jefferson’s desk. Listen. “When in the course of Human Events it becomes necessary . . .

Fakeit: That’s his opening?

Hoare: Right.

Fakeit: You’re kidding me. We can’t move that high-flying crap. Get it down to re-write.

Shakeit: Hang on a minute. I’m not sure about this whole independence thing anyway. Where are the rest of them standing?

Hoare: Well, Franklin’s leaning that way and he does have the host city . . .

Fakeit: I told those limies they should’ve bought him off with some printing contracts.

Hoare: Things are reasonably cool here in New York and in most of the South. It would seem the real movers are in Massachusetts and Virginia.

Fakeit: Yeah, that Sam Adams. Him and his Boston Massacre. That not only screwed up the image we were trying to build for these yo-yos, but he and his Sons of Liberty creamed that tea-house chain we had a piece of. That bastard cost us a lot of bucks!

Shakeit: Now gentlemen, may I remind you that Mr. Adams is very close to Mr. Hancock, and we have that shipyard proposal coming up.

Fakeit: I forgot. Hey, about his cousin Jim?

Shakeit: John.

Fakeit: Yeah, John, Remember when we wired the British to use his law firm? He got a fat retainer out of that one. He owes us.

Hoare: Well, I’ll see if we can call it in. But Virginia’s even worse.

Fakeit: You mean that Henry Patrick guy?

Hoare: Patrick Henry.

Fakeit: That loud-mouthed jerk. Doesn’t he realize every time he shoots off his yap he loses support? People don’t buy his extremist bull-shit.

Hoare: If you think he’s bad, you ought to see what this guy Paine puts out.

Fakeit: Christ, I have. Talk about far out. He ran some copy by a buddy of mine over in London a few years ago and he told me all about him. A real kook. Is that kook in on this scam too?

Shakeit: Gentlemen, where are we on this one? To summate, our client is planning an open break with the crown, they’ve got no leader with any charisma, the media is basically hostile, internally their hot-heads seem to be taking over, and they have only 22% in the latest poll.

Fakeit: The guy the British are using told me only 16%, but I figure he loaded it in favor of his client.

Shakeit: Either way, we need to make a decision. Bob?

Fakeit: I say screw ’em, they’ve become too unmanagable. Besides, it looks like the tories have it locked. It’s time we hustled some Canadian accounts anyway.

Shakit: Bill?

Hoare: Well, it’s still got possibilities. If we could maneuver somebody like Washington to front it and cover him with a group of moderates who’d make a deal with the British at the right time—you know, cut a few taxes here and there, move a few seats in parliament around. Mostly showcase stuff, but I’m afraid it’s about all they’re worth. What concerns me the most is that I checked with accounting just before I came in, and their last two retainer checks have been returned by the bank.

Fakeit: You mean these dodos are out of bread?

Hoare: Looks that way. Their French loan didn’t come through.

Fakeit: Typical of those frogs. Big talk, no action.

Shakeit: Then I take it that the consensus of this meeting is that this account is a loser, right?

Fakeit: A real turkey.

Hoare: Afraid so. No futures.

Shakeit: All right. I’ll notify accounting to send them our final bill, and I’ll cancel our reservations in Philadelphia.

Fakeit: Boy, that’s gotta be the smartest move this firm ever made.

The Pentagon’s Budget Through Soviet Eyes

by Jon D. Wisman
Associate Professor of Economics
The American University

Why do the Soviet people tolerate a totalitarian government? It’s true that they lack the legacy of a democratic tradition. And it’s also true that repression of dissent has been brutal and largely effective. But these reasons alone are not adequate, given the Soviet people’s greatly improved standard of living, universal literacy, and the penetration of foreign information. The clincher is that the Soviet people live, and have lived since their Revolution in 1917, in fear of external aggression. And as history has endlessly demonstrated, the one effective argument for a suspension of civil liberties, or freedom more generally, has always been the threat—whether real or cunningly contrived—of foreign aggression.

What then is the rationality of the latest outbreak of U.S. hawkishness? On the one hand, there’s the disturbing correlation of this rise of cold-war mongering with deepening economic crises in the past 10 years. It would seem to be the case that when a nation suffers internal divisiveness as a result of worsened economic conditions, there is a high likelihood that an external threat will be created or given added importance. Accordingly, this current heightened fear of Soviet aggression diverts attention from our government’s inability to provide adequate employment, growth and price stability. And then there’s the horrid memory that World War II capped the Great Depression!

But the rationality of the U.S. defense buildup should be examined from another perspective. There is its government. And that government is a far cry from the utopian vision of the early revolutionaries. What happened? No sooner had the Bolsheviks taken power than the French, British and U.S. set out to topple their government, principally by arming and financing counterrevolutionaries. The ensuing policies in the Soviet Union were called “War Communism” and they included a restriction of civil liberties and an increase in the concentration of political power at the top. Throughout the 1920’s there was a perceived threat that the socialist experiment would be undone by hostile capitalist countries. So strongly did Stalin feel this that he announced in 1931: “We must make good this distance (to become a first-rate economic and political power) in ten years. Either we do so, or we shall go under.” Stalin’s words were of course prophetic, for ten years later Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

The Russian people had greatly suffered during World War I, but that would pale next to the horrid costs of World War II—20-25 million Soviet people died as a result of the war. The Soviet fear of external aggression had not been unjustified, and it was that fear which had successfully legitimized a suspension of civil liberties, rule by an elite clique, and a sacrifice of consumer welfare for defense.

Unfortunately, World War II ended in such a way that Soviet fears of external aggression would continue, with, of course, the concomitant legitimation of a totalitarian regime. The U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese, even though it didn’t appear to be necessary to U.S. victory. The Soviet leadership had it made: To justify their every action they had only to remind their people of that act as evidence of how ruthlessly inhumane the U.S. can be in pursuit of its interests.

In light of the above, President Reagan’s record budget request for the Pentagon is catastrophic. Not only does a rapid buildup of the military worsen our current economic crisis and push us even closer to nuclear Armageddon, but it also serves to perpetuate the legitimacy of the undemocratic power structure in the Soviet Union. The twentieth century has schooled the Soviet peoples in fear and the reality of its objects. Given their unique history, there is every reason to expect that they will be willing to sacrifice practically everything for defense. The Reagan camp’s contention, that the Soviet regime’s power will be weakened as the Soviet peoples refuse yet more sacrifice for defense, has it all backwards. So long as the elite leaders can convince the Soviet peoples that the external threat is real, their power is secure. Thus, our only effective means for weakening totalitarian government in the Soviet Union is to demonstrate beyond all doubt our peaceful intentions. Voice of America propaganda won’t do the job. Instead, the best first step would be a dramatic decrease in military spending.

Crane Machine Notes

1. In the Bunker?

It was the weekend of February 18-21 in Oakland, at the annual convention of the California LP. Things were going so well with the sparkling kickoff of the Burns-for-President campaign that some of the worrywarts of the Majority Caucus were getting concerned. “What’s Crane’s next move going to be?” they fretted. Finally, the Military Maven, who has had a phenomenal record of accuracy calling the shots in the LP, spoke up. “Hey, guys, this is like Eisenhower, Bradley, and Marshall sitting around in March, 1945 worrying about Hitler’s next move. The answer, of course, is that he had no next move. He was in The Bunker.”

Our attention riveted, the Military Maven went on. “The Crane Machine has no next move. They’re in The Bunker. The lesser Craniacs can go to de-Cranification centers. As for the top ones, the only interesting question is, which one of them is going to shoot their kids so they don’t have to live in a non-Craniac world (Goebbels) and which one of them is going to skip to Paraguay with all the gold (Bormann).”

It looks very much as if the Military Maven was right once again. The Crane Machine is dwindling rapidly, collapsing, losing its cool, becoming a small, isolated bunch of soreheads.

Item: The Gene Burns campaign is doing beautifully, looking more impressive all the time, gathering adherents in state after state.

Item: The desperation Craniac try for drafting Ron Paul for President seems to have collapsed. No one except the Craniacs was willing to join it, and Paul himself has apparently nixed the idea for good.

Item: David Koch is, reportedly, definitely not going to run for Veep again.

Item: Craniac Leslie Graves (Key), until now ruler of the Wisconsin LP, is in big trouble in her home state. Reports have it that the state LP is being audited, and that Treasurer Leslie Key somehow failed to keep records. The outraged Wisconsin party has asked Leslie to resign her post. Certainly, the Key Machine is in deep trouble in Wisconsin.

Item: It therefore looks as if the only real focos of Craniac strength left for the mighty PresCon in August are Alaska, New York, the Jule Herbert satrapy in the District of Columbia (where the Crane hirelings congregate), and the small Kochian fiefdom of Kansas. All else is crumbling.

Item: the Crane-dominated Judicial Committee has passed into the dustbin of history not with a bang but a whimper. Even the Machiners did not adopt the original Palmer thesis of total power to the JudComm. The Craniac majority of the JudComm has issued its report (as has the minority), and it did not even presume to order the reinstatement of the Martyr O’Keefe as National Director. It simply declared that NatCom’s approval of Alicia Clark’s ouster of O’Keefe at Billings in the summer of 1982 was invalid; but it did not even criticize the NatCom’s reaffirmation of that firing passed at Orlando in December. And so, exit the JudComm. And, possibly, exit the Crane Machine?

2. Personnel Update

In our “Crane Machine Revealed” (February), a rundown of the personnel of that now well-known aggregation, we missed a couple and there have been a couple of changes.

Two we missed (sorry, fellas) in what could either be “Minor” or “Lesser” Craniac categories are:

Mike Burch (Crane hireling. Exec, director of Crane/Herbert-run National Taxpayers Legal Fund. Virginia NatCom Rep. Distinguished for his silence at NatCom meetings.)

Mike Hepple (Former Craniac straw boss of Illinois LP. Now head of D.C. Libertarian Party; Jule “the Tool” Herbert is his control. Works in “real world” job as fundraiser.)

Changes, or More Information, on already listed Machiners:

Eric “The Martyr” O’Keefe (Crane hireling. Has now surfaced as Vice-President of Crane/Herbert-run NTLF, which seems to be the current favorite warehousing tool for the Machine.)

Robert Capozzi (Crane hireling. Ex-editor of Update; cashiered when that Machine organ went respectable. Has now surfaced as employee of NTLF (see O’Keefe, above.))

Deb Haws (Crane hireling. Now working as managing editor of husband Chris Hocker-run Update.)

Dr. Ross Levatter (ex-young Ohio physician; now young Michigan physician. Watch for attempted influence or takeover of Michigan LP.)

Anita Anderson (Ex-Cato employee. Now definitely known to be working at Rich-owned Laissez-Faire Bookstore, New York.)

Celeste “Cissey” Webb (former Craniac bigwig in Illinois LP. Now working in DC. Not Crane hireling, however; has “real world’ art-frame business.)

—— Double Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVII, No. 5-6

May-June, 1983

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

frontlines, RIP

frontlines is dead, “murdered” in part by the economic “movement depression” we discussed in our April issue. The loss of this thorough and courageous monthly newsletter leaves an irreparable gap in the libertarian movement. “How will we know what is really going on?” will be the cry of all movement activists, regardless what faction they may belong to. For frontlines was our New York Times: careful, diligent, objective, apart from all the factions. frontlines had the resources—the money, the time, the personnel—and the willingness, to do scintillating investigative reporting, as well as to check and double-check all the facts. Hence, the enormous moral authority that frontlines properly commanded in the movement, because we all knew that if something was in frontlines, it was important, and it was true. It brought us all the real movement news, and not just pap and press releases. It also enlivened and enriched the movement with articles and letters debating issues and strategy from various alternative perspectives. I did not always agree with frontlines, especially in its earliest days, but the measure of its importance and its excellence is that it is literally impossible to conceive of the movement without it.

We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the frontlines staff, performing these vital functions, and keeping up their standards even while trying to stay afloat: In particular to editor Bob Poole, and to indefatigable investigative reporter Patrick Cox.

Even though the loss of frontlines will be permanently mourned by the movement, we can at least be grateful for the fact that it lasted long enough to perform its most vital task: The unremitting exposure of the malignant Crane Machine which had dominated the Libertarian Party and much of the movement for so many years. Precisely because of its thoroughness and its well-deserved moral authority, the exposures by frontlines were vital and indispensable to the great work of Bringing Down the Crane Machine, a task which I hope and trust will be completed at the Armageddon PresCon this Labor Day weekend. We can all be thankful that frontlines survived long enough to complete that task.

The death of frontlines should also be placed in a wider perspective. It is part and parcel of the unfortunate trend of the last few years, of ignoring movement concerns, movement news and issues, principles and applications, in order to whore after “outreach”. And so we have had the death, in the last few years, of Libertarian Review and of frontlines, both movement publications, while the “sexier”, bigger circulation, “outreach” magazines such as Reason and Inquiry keep rolling on. In the name of “let’s stop talking to ourselves” we have gradually cut out all talking, discussing, etc. within the movement itself, and thereby we are more and more failing to nourish, educate, and reinforce the people who count the most: our own libertarians. Libertarians have been isolated enough by the culture and by world conditions over the years; it is a crying shame that libertarians themselves are abandoning our own people, our own movement, in a vain quest for an outreach that is pointless, vapid and self-defeating without the solid base of an “inreach”, a nourishing of precious cadre. If the movement should ever collapse, it will come, not from oppression by the State, but by a moral and strategic failure from within the movement itself, by its leaders and moneybags.

In the meantime, except for the various LP newsletters, movement journalism is now down to a small number of monthly newsletters: the Lib. Forum, our sister publication Libertarian Vanguard, the increasingly aberrant Voluntaryist, and the Craniac smearsheet Update. It is not, to say the least, a very healthy situation.

Leonard Read, RIP

Leonard E. Read died as I’m sure he always wanted, in harness, active to the very end of more than eight decades of a rich and active life. More than any other single person, Leonard was the founder of the modern libertarian movement. During World War II, this elegant, charismatic, eloquent man was executive director of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He paid a visit one day to Bill Mullendore, crusty head of Commonwealth Edison of Southern California, to find out why Mullendore opposed the structure of economic controls that all “enlightened” businessmen were supporting. Mullendore changed Read’s life, and converted him on the spot, to what he came to call “the freedom philosophy”, Toward the end of World War II, in an era when literally no one, anywhere, believed in the free market, let alone liberty, Read and Mullendore organized Pamphleteers, Inc. and began to change American culture by publishing unknown, totally neglected libertarian authors: Rose Wilder Lane’s scintillating Give Me Liberty; Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a marvelously individualist short story; and the most important works of the French laissez-faire economist Frederic Bastiat.

After the war, Read came to New York to work at the National Industrial Conference Board, but the idea of dedicating his life to liberty, to becoming, in effect, a professional libertarian, consumed him. And so, in 1946, in a beautiful setting at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, Read launched the Foundation for Economic Education, the oldest libertarian institution in the world.

We must realize that becoming a professional libertarian, founding a libertarian institute and think-tank, was far more foolhardy a project then than it is now. Intellectuals were all socialists, economists were Keynesians, businessmen were statists; there seemed to be no constituency for freedom. But Read was undaunted, and he gathered in Irvington the best libertarian and free-market scholars of the day.

Nowadays, quasi-Free-market think tanks are all the rage, but God forbid they should ever discuss ideas, or moral principles, or even go beyond arguments for alleged economic efficiency or narrow reformist (allegedly “practical”) projects on how to fix up the FTC or Social Security. Early on, and throughout the life of FEE, Leonard Read realized that white economics is important, the crucial questions were moral, and that liberty must be grounded firmly in natural rights and moral principles. Paradoxically, this made the FEE people better economists, because they stuck to laissez-faire principles without allowing themselves to get bogged down in reformist traps, traps which are the very opposite of “practical” because they accomplish nothing and only divert attention from fundamental principles.

As a result, Leonard Read was squarely an “abolitionist”, a principled strategy made clear in his hard-hitting pamphlet, I’d Push the Button, a speech made before a business group in 1946. At that time, business favored gradual, phased relaxation of the crippling network of wage-price controls that we had inherited from World War II and that many Americans wanted to make permanent. Read startled the business leaders by calling for immediate and total abolition of price and wage controls. If I had a button on this podium that would permit me to do away with all controls at this moment, he proclaimed, I would push that button!

During the Korean War, Read courageously and openly opposed both conscription and the Korean War. His beautifully written pamphlets, Conscience on the Battlefield and On That Day Began Lies, in which he came close to Tolstoyan anarchism, are some of the best libertarian products of the 1950’s.

At FEE, Leonard Read provided that critically indispensable feature of any movement: an Open Center, a place where people can go to find libertarian publications and meet other libertarians. In those days of total libertarian isolation, of the absence of any real movement, the bringing together of libertarians was extraordinarily important. If in the 1960’s It Usually Began with Ayn Rand, in the 1940’s and 1950’s It Usually Began with Leonard Read and FEE. Indeed, FEE, to this day, continues to serve as an Open Center and as a channel for conversion of new people especially young people, to the libertarian philosophy.

In addition, more than anyone else Read coined the name “libertarian” for the current movement. Before that, we had no single name, awkwardly going back and forth between “individualists” and “true liberals”. The problem with the latter phrase is that the quasi-socialists had already succeeded in appropriating the term “liberal”, and calling ourselves “true” anything was confusing and hardly persuasive. And the term “individualist” tended to confuse political philosophy with possessing a spirit of individual autonomy. Read and a few others launched the term “libertarian” for the freedom philosophy, and it stuck—the only case I know of when we were able to appropriate a word from others. For before that, communist-anarchists had often referred to themselves as “libertarian.” The first time when we were referred to publicly as “libertarians” was in an odious book, published in the 1950’s, by a certain Ralph Lord Roy, entitled Apostles of Discord. There was a repellent literature in those days of works written by aggressive centrists and “moderates” who pilloried all “extremists” as per se evil. Roy, a Social Gospel Protestant, wrote this book to attack both Communist and ultra-rightist “extremists” in the Protestant church. That was par for the course in those days, but lo and behold! he included a chapter called “God and the ‘Libertarians’ ”, spotting quasi-anarchistic extremists then centered around a libertarian publication for Protestant ministers called Faith and Freedom. Libertarianism had arrived on the American ideological scene.

In later years, Leonard Read drew away from the libertarian movement which he had named and founded. He drew away sharply from anarcho-capitalism, and denounced it vigorously; he was also strongly opposed to any form of libertarian political action, or indeed to active proselytizing in general. (Even though in the early months of FEE, he had written a surging pamphlet, Pattern for Revolt, in which he presented the speeches he would have written if he had been a Presidential candidate.) Increasingly, Read took the view that any refutation of error was pointless, and that we should confine ourselves to quiet reiteration of fundamental truths. As a result, in a way somewhat similar to the case of Ayn Rand, the movement passed Leonard by. But Leonard Read stuck to his guns. He was, as always, his own man, and all libertarians owe him an enormous debt as our founder and the creator of our first and most enduring Open Center In any case, I am sure that Leonard is now with the angels, indulging in his favorite aristocratic sports of croquet and curling (of which he was for many years a champion.) As a lad from the streets of New York, croquet and curling are about as familiar to me as lambing or Ming pottery; but one great thing about liberty is that it can encompass people from a huge variety of climes and cultures. Leonard Read was one of the Immortals, and he must never be forgotten.

The New Menace of Gandhism: A Comment

by Wendy McElroy

In Libertarian Forum (March, 1983), Murray Rothbard warns the movement of a new menace, a fad which is draining the best minds from the Libertarian Party—Gandhism. The specific inaccuracies of this article are the subject of a response by George Smith to be published in the next issue of The Voluntaryist (June). As a founder of the Voluntaryists and editor of its newsletter, I wish to address instead a prominent implication of Rothbard’s critique; namely, that Voluntaryists are neo-Gandhians bent on martyrdom as a strategy. This is absurd. If anything in Voluntaryist literature called for pacifist martyrdom, if any of our activities remotely reflected this approach, you could be sure it would have been cited in evidence. Moreover, both George Smith and I have attempted repeatedly to inform critics, including Rothbard, that we advocate the moral right to use defensive force and that non-violent resistance is merely one of several strategies we are exploring.

Equally absurd is the idea that George Smith, Carl Watner or I have become disciples of Gandhi. We do not share his religious, economic, cultural or lifestyle views. But Gandhi as a political theorist, Gandhi as one of the foremost strategists of this century, makes for fascinating study. We do not worship anyone, but there are people from whom we can learn.

In expressing and expanding the theory of anti-political anarchism, the Voluntaryists are exploring various non-political strategies of fighting the State. One of these is non violent resistance as advocated by such Nineteenth Century libertarians as William Lloyd Garrison, Ezra Heywood, Henry David Thoreau and Benjamin Tucker; that is, a withdrawal of the cooperation and consent upon which so much of the State depends. Non violence involves saying “no” to the State. Not a passive, meek “no”, but a determined and active refusal to participate in injustice by lending support to it. As a strategy, non violent resistance subsumes dozens of activities, including letters-to-the-editor, tax resistance, boycotts, bumperstickers, personal statements, picketing, petitioning and demonstrations. Thus far, the Voluntaryists’ main expression of non violence has been a fund established to support the efforts of the libertarian, Paul Jacob who was indicted for his refusal to register for the draft and who has been balancing precariously the need to live underground with his anti-draft agitation (e.g. giving interviews to numerous periodicals). Rather than rushing to the martyrdom so vehemently predicted for us by those committed to the political means, our first priority is to set up a financial base for those libertarians who have currently, by living their principles, incurred the wrath of Leviathan. This is in contrast to the Libertarian Party which seems content virtually to ignore such law breakers as Paul Jacob, leaving them to dangle on whatever limb the State hangs them.

Although pacifists often champion non-violence, there is no necessary connection between the two positions and, in investigating non violence as a strategy, the Voluntaryists in no way reject the moral right of self defense. Against the criminal in a dark alley or a rapist climbing through the window, defensive force is not only moral but, perhaps, the most effective method of achieving your goal—personal safety. Defensive force against the State is moral but may be the least effective method of achieving the goal of libertarianism—a peaceful society. This is not simply because force tends to breed force. Non violence is based on a particular analysis of the U.S. government as requiring legitimacy; the delineation of this analysis has been the first priority of The Voluntaryism Ute strength of the U.S. government lies not only in its ability to use force, but in the legitimacy people grant to it. The taxman can steal with an impunity unknown to the common criminal because people accept the authority of the government to tax. To attack the State, it is first necessary to tear off this veil of legitimacy. This cannot be accomplished through political action which sanctions the system or through force which lends credence to the State’s claim to guardianship of law and order. Terrorists and others who use force give the State the moral justification to enact more and stricter legislation. Non violent resistance is one promising alternative to force and politics as strategies. Whether or not it lives up to this promise is an empirical matter—that is, are there theoretical flaws? What is its history? Is it compatible with libertarianism/anarchism? What is the cost compared to the benefit?

If the Voluntaryists can be said to stress any strategy, it would be education, perhaps reflecting the background of its founders. George Smith is a philosopher; Carl Watner and I are historians. Having written and lectured oh libertarianism for years, we consider education to be the necessary basis on which to build any other strategy. Within this context, the two most exciting strategies are non violence and the establishment of parallel institutions; that is, the withdrawal of consent from the State and the creation of private alternatives to government services (schools, court systems, police). These are by no means the only strategies we are or will be considering. Nor do we have any emotional or moral commitment to a particular strategy, with the possible exception of education. Any strategy consistent with libertarianism will be examined empirically. It is with this spirit that the Voluntaryists approach Gandhi and other strategists. And it is for this spirit, this willingness to consider the strategies of Gandhi and Thoreau (one of Gandhi’s mentors), that we have been called all manner of exotic names from “mystic” to “martyr.” Even George Smith, author of Atheism, the Case Against God, has not escaped accusations of spiritualism. Perhaps it is a tribute to the strength of our ideas that critics’ prefer to critique the people rather than the theory.

One of the challenges of non violence vis-à-vis libertarianism will be fitting it into a specifically anarchist framework. The left has used non violence to good advantage (the anti-war, anti-nuclear movements), but their goal was to reform rather than to abolish the State. A critique of non violence pointing to holes in the theory or problems with its application would be welcome, A critique attacking the Voluntaryists for positions they do not hold and distorting the ones they do has no value.

* * *

The Editor Replies:

In her article, Wendy McElroy adopts what might be called the “official” line of the Voluntaryists: that they are not Gandhi cultists or proto-martyrs, but are simply and reasonably exploring the empirical benefits of a strategy of non-violent resistance in bringing down the State. Why am I not convinced? Not because I believe that she or other Voluntaryists are lying, but because I perceive an inner dynamic at work of which they are perhaps not aware: a dynamic that is pushing them rapidly in the direction of cultism. For example: After their sober investigation of Gandhite strategy is over, do they propose to explore the empirical possibilities of other successful historical strategies for social change: such as the American Revolution, Lenin, the Zionist movement, etc.? Somehow, I bet not. Moreover, if Ms. McElroy were right, and they are not cultists, then George Smith would have written a very different response to my “Menace of Gandhism” than he is in fact publishing in Update. He would have said, in effect: “Rothbard is right: Gandhi was a statist charlatan and a terrible man, but so what? We are only studying the possible empirical benefits of a strategy of non-violent resistance.” It would have been great if Smith had written in that vein, but unfortunately he did not. He acted as if I had traduced his best friend, and he leaped in to defend the undefendable Mahatma virtually root and branch. So what does that tell us about the infection of Gandhite cultism among the Voluntaryists? Of course it is possible that an unrecognized schism is developing in Voluntaryist ranks, and that Smith has become a cultist while the others have not. But I will have to leave it to the Voluntaryists themselves to sort that one out.

And leave them I will: For I hope and expect that this issue of The Lib. Forum closes the books on my side of the Great Debate over Gandhism. The Voluntaryists may or may not choose to spend the rest of their lives poring over the life and works of this little Hindu charlatan; I for one do not.

Gandhism Once More

In a sense, the current Great Debate in the libertarian movement over Gandhism/Voluntaryism is one of the most bizarre ideological disputes ever recorded. For even though there are only four or five protagonists, they are waging the battle in no less than five different channels of opinion: the Lib. Forum, the Lib. Vanguard, the Voluntaryist, Update, and a samizdat Open Letter. Since there are probably only three or four other libertarians in the country who are on all the above mailing lists and who are fascinated enough to pore over all these articles, this means that point-by-point refutations become mere beatings of the air.

We will try, then, to be mercifully brief. George Smith, leader of the Voluntaryists, has curiously chosen to make his initial reply to our “The New Menace of Gandhism” (Lib. Forum, March, 1983), not in our publication but in the pages of the Craniac smearsheet Update. His draft, “Rothbard on Gandhi: A Reply”, has fallen into our hands. Writing in scarcely controlled fury, Smith adopts the standard polemical trick of asserting (1) that there were errors in my article, and (2) that what was accurate was already known by everyone so why write it? The answer, of course, is that the article did not pretend to be the definitive biography of the Mahatma, but was intended to bring basic and unpleasant facts about Gandhi to the item on of the libertarian movement.

Yet despite Smith’s vague trumpeting about my alleged errors, he says not a word about the most important points in my article: Gandhi’s medical hypocrisy, his odious advice to the Jews of Europe to commit mass suicide and to the British to invite the Nazis to occupy their island, his advice to meet the atomic menace by sending love-vibrations to the pilots carrying the bomb, or his hatred of the “sin” of Western technology or industrialism. Indeed, the only point that Smith disputes is my contention that Gandhi opposed education per se, to which he retorts that the Mahatma was only against compulsory schooling. Here we have an abiding difference in interpretation.

For the rest, Smith triumphantly discovers “contradictions” that don’t exist. Dredging up a forgotten tempest-in-a-teapot of four years ago, he wonders why I then attacked the high-tech “space cadets” in the Libertarian Party and am now attacking the “low tech” Gandhi. The two situations, however, are very different. It seemed to me that the “space cadets” were in favor of abandoning political action (within a political party!) in behalf of futuristic projections, and furthermore there were disquieting implications in their statements that high-tech should be coercive, and that those who wanted to bask in a low-tech community would have to be dragooned out of it. In any case, that dispute only lasted a couple of months, the space cadets abandoned some of these implications, and a happy compromise was reached by all. Gandhi, on the contrary, was not only low-tech, but compulsorily low-tech, denouncing industry as sinful, and leading the burning of machine-made textiles.

In both cases, coercion was the major problem. As for my own personal values, yes, I plead guilty to Smith’s charge of “embracing American middle-class culture”, that is, I favor the advance of technology, industrialization, and higher standards of living. If this be “American middle-class values”, then yes, I uphold them, and Smith and his cohorts can make the most of it. There is a mighty equivocation in Smith’s charge that “Presumably Gandhi does not meet the Rothbardian imperative that the entire world should embrace American middle-class culture.” “Should’” yes, “must” no. In other words, I think that Third World countries should adopt the values of the free market, increased productivity, higher living standards, etc., but I am of course opposed to forcing them to do so. This is a strange slip for our bright young libertarian philosopher to make.

The other alleged contradiction is that I maintain that Gandhi did and yet did not advance the cause of Indian independence. What I actually wrote is that some historians maintain that his deeds delayed the advent of Indian independence (I don’t take a stand on this one way or the other), but that even so, independence bore the stamp of Gandhism, a stamp which led, as I pointed out, to the slaughter of millions of Hindus and Muslims. In short. Gandhite independence may have been delayed, but it also bore his stigmata of mass murder—with Gandhi throwing over his alleged principles of non-violence to justify the slaughter of Muslims and the Hindu invasion of Muslim Kashmir.

There are other curlosa in Smith’s article. Why, he wonders, did I bring in the allegedly irrelevant views of Gandhi on sex and food? I thought I made it clear in my article that I did so because Gandhi did not think them irrelevant; to the Mahatma, his entire social philosophy was an integrated and seamless web, and the article was about that philosophy and how it was expressed in action. Smith also charges that I left out various flaws of the Mahatma, e.g. that he favored prohibition of liquor. Indeed. As I said earlier, I did not claim that my article was an exhaustive discussion of Gandhi. For example, everyone is urged to read a devastating and scintillating critique of Gandhi, the man and the movie, by Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, in Commentary (March 1983), pp. 59-72. Grenier adds a great many more horror stories about the Mahatma, including his joining in the suppression of black Africans in South Africa, and his abiding obsession with excrement, in his life and his writings. Particularly hideous is the fact what while Gandhi himself, when ill, invariably abandoned his anti-Western-medicine principles, that he allowed his own wife to die of pneumonia rather than receive injections of “sinful” penicillin. Surely this one act alone should make the Mahatma unacceptable even as a quasi-guru.

A Final oddity is Smith’s wondering why I did not press on to echo Churchill’s attack on Gandhi’s clothing habits (Churchill denounced him as a “half-naked fakir.”) Well, I’m sorry George, I just don’t give a damn how the man dressed.

One unfortunate point is all too clear from Smith’s enraged article. The Voluntaryists claim that they are not Gandhite cultists, that they are simply studying the man and his life to extract tactical and strategic lessons for our time. Fair enough. Except then: Why does Smith have the chutzpah to write that the “fundamental Gandhi” “devoted his life to the cause of liberty”? And also: Why does Smith act as if an attack on the Mahatma is tantamount to a personal attack on himself? Why did my article touch a raw nerve? I am afraid that these are not the reactions of a sober analyst trying to extract lessons from all examples of successful social change. These are the reactions of a cultist who has found his guru. I hope that I am wrong, but it looks very much as if the nascent Voluntaryist movement has rapidly degenerated into a Gandhite cult.

Another unpleasant aspect of the Smith article is that he chose to submit it to Update, and also that that Craniac smear-sheet chose to publish it. At first blush this alliance between the Voluntaryists and the Crane Machine seems a strange one indeed. For what could George Smith, the White Knight of Purity, the man who holds all political action to be immoral have in common with the Prince of Darkness, the master opportunist, Ed Crane? There is, of course, the fed that the Crane Machine would be happy to publish almost any attack on Yours Truly. But there is a far deeper bond between the two groups. For both groupings are bitterly hostile to the existence of a principled Libertarian Party. Smith, erroneously convinced that any Libertarian Party is immoral, has apparently gotten to the point where he would like to see the LP as unprincipled as possible, so as to make more converts to his own cause, and to see more good libertarians leave the LP. The Crane Machine, steeped in opportunism and sellout, are also bitter about the recent emergence of a principled Libertarian Party which they, in consequence, cannot control. Hence, the Unholy Alliance between both groups, both trying to wreck the growth of a principled Libertarian Party.

But that Unholy Alliance shall not succeed.

One turns with relief from Smith’s intemperate assault to Carl Watner’s unpublished “Open Letter to Murray Rothbard.” Not only does Watner—the Other major Voluntaryist leader—eschew Gandhite cultism (either because he doesn’t believe in it or because he is content to let Smith carry the ball), but his article is characteristically sober and courteous. Unfortunately, Watner’s argumentation is scarcely compelling. He writes off the American Revolution as a failure, since oppression eventually resulted, and Benjamin Tucker’s non-activism as a failure because the Tuckerite movement dissolved after a generation. Well, since the anarcho-capitalist Utopia has never been established, in a sense Watner could write off all of history, and all people and movements, as “failures” by definition—which is essentially what he does. And yet of course, there are relative degrees of failure and success. The American Revolution, which was violent, despite Watner’s protestations, was relatively successful—in fact the most successful example of libertarian social change in history. Benjamin Tucker might not have destroyed the State, but he fashioned a scintillating intellectual movement of libertarians that lasted a long time—far longer, I ween, than if they had adopted a Voluntaryist stance and this handful of intellectuals had rushed to put their bodies on the line to try to destroy the State. Watner ‘denounces Tucker’s lack of direct activism as “cowardice”—I would rather call it good sense instead of an inane rush to embrace martyrdom and self-destruction.

In contrast, Watner upholds the example of the English Levellers, who “all risked their lives for their ideas.” No doubt. But Watner neglects to add that while the Levellers may have been heroes, they were scarcely Voluntaryist heroes. Instead, they (a) engaged in violent rather than non-violent revolution, and (b) they believed strongly in political action. Indeed, they constituted a political party advocating universal suffrage. And they unfortunately wound up being jailed by Cromwell.

The most revealing part of Carl Watner’s article is when he explains in more detail than before the essence of the Voluntaryist strategy for non-violent revolution against the State. Non-violent resistance against the Slate serves, for the Voluntaryists, as the basic means by which the resisters dramatically “educate” the public on the evil and brutal nature of the State. Here is Watner: “If we can provoke the State into initiating unwarranted aggressions, then it proves itself not only the attacker but loses public support.” The cat is now out of the bag: The Voluntaryists hope that by lying down in front of State tanks, or whatever, that they will then “provoke” the State into aggression, presumably preferring the State to be as brutal as possible. They hope that this will swing public support dramatically against the State. But there are two great problems here. First, that despite Voluntaryist protestations, they are clearly courting martyrdom, and as brutal and vicious a one as possible. Second, that this martyrdom won’t work. I clearly remember the night when Mayor Daley’s police ran riot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention. On nationwide TV the cops ran amok, dragging innocent citizens out of their cars and viciously beating them up. In my naivete, I believed that that would be it, and that the public, watching this evident brutality and aggression, would turn against the State and demand that the Vietnam War be brought to an immediate halt. But the public reaction was precisely the opposite. The mass of the public sided with the cops, and hailed their beating up of groups of people whom the public felt to be provocateurs and loonies, and who eminently deserved whatever they got.

The public reaction to the Chicago convention should be a lesson to all libertarians. The point is that seeing the cops beat up demonstrators won’t educate anyone in the viciousness of the State unless they had already become libertarians. The mass of the public, not being libertarians, think of the police as good guys, as the protectors of the rights of the citizens. Hence, if they see the cops beating up annoying demonstrators, they will automatically side with the cops and vent their anger against the demonstrators, whore they accurately guess had been trying, in Watner’s own words, to “provoke the State,” In short, “education” by non-violent resistance will be counter-productive, unless the mass of the public is libertarian already, in which case there is no need for such resistance.

Finally, Watner upholds Voluntaryism as a kind of “free-market” competition among strategies, and wonders why I do not encourage his movement even if I cannot be “on the frontlines” with them. The answer is that competition in the free-market of ideas does not mean that everyone is supposed to be namby-pamby about strategies that they wholeheartedly believe to be disastrous and self-defeating. The competition in the marketplace of ideas must include candid and unsparing criticism of such strategies. Then, after reading and weighing such criticisms, the libertarian “consumer” can make up his or her own mind.

The Real Conventioneers’ Guide to New City

by The Old Curmudgeon

This is the summer when the Libertarian Party will have its mighty Presidential nominating convention (PRESCON) in New York City, the Big Apple itself, for the first time since its first major Presidential convention in 1975. While there will be events before and after, the heart of the convention—the voting on platform, officers, nominees, etc.—will take place on September 1-4 at the Sheraton Center. It is an event not to be missed, for it will be Armageddon Time—the apocalyptic climax of the several years-long battle to overthrow the once-dominant, now cornered Crane Machine.

For those delegates, alternates, friendly observers, and sociologists of ideological flora and fauna flocking to the convention who have not been in New York City before, the following is a Conventioneers’ Guide. I’m leaving out the pap—true as far as it will go—that you will undoubtedly find in the official PRESCON literature where the restaurants, sights, shops etc. will be. The following guide is the real stuff about the big, brawling city where I have been born, bred and lived all my life.

In the first place, it is not really true—contrary to Johnny Carson and other jibesters about New York—that you are likely to be mugged. Provided that you follow the elementary rules of survival listed below (what New Yorkers call “street smarts”), you will probably be safe enough. The real problem of New York is not mugging but hassle, for life in New York is simply one continuing and permanent hassle.

First, on Mugging. There really should be published a mosaic-type map of the safe and unsafe streets, and even the corners, in New York. But the following broad rule of thumb should keep you out of trouble: Don’t go above (north of) 116th St. on Broadway, or 96th St. on the rest of the West Side, and don’t go above 96th St. on the East Side. Given that injunction, the main thoroughfares should be fine at any time of the day and night.

Warning: almost every out-of-town visitor gets caught on this one: Trying to go north, on Broadway, lo Columbia University (116th St.), he or she takes not the Broadway subway, but the Lenox Ave., which forks northeast off the Broadway line at 96th St. If you find yourself at the Lenox Ave. station at 116th St. don’t, whatever the circumstances or whatever the hour, get off the station and decide to walk west to Broadway through Morningside Park. Get the bell out of there and go back down the Lenox Ave line to 96th St., and then take the Broadway line uptown And never, ever stroll through Morningside Park.

Speaking of parks, Central Park is lovely, but should only be entered in the daytime, and even then the stroll should be confined below 100th St. Exercise great care at night; best not to go there at all, for it is then Mugger’s Paradise where even (?!) the cops dare not enter.

As to the “outer boroughs”: the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens, there is no point listing the unsafe areas because there is no reason to go there. Ever. The Staten Island ferry is fine if you like that sort of thing, but there is simply no reason to hang around on Staten Island. All this is denounced by outer boroughniks as arrogant Manhattan chauvinism, but what the hell, it’s true. Note that outer boroughniks implicitly acknowledge the superiority of Manhattan by habitually referring to Manhattan as “New York” or “The City”, thereby granting that they’re really not part of the city. One amusing evidence of this you will see when you land at Kennedy airport (in Queens, and therefore technically in New York City), where you will see buses labelled “To New York City” If you are a literalist, you will wonder what in hell that means, since you are at that point in New York City. Forget it: Queens ain’t “the city”.

Again, as to mugging: sticking to rain thoroughfares is best. Also, for women: don’t wear visible gold chains, they might well be ripped off your neck, and keep your purses closed and tight against your body. And for men and women: best not to wear and flash expensive gold watches, because they could be ripped off your arm. Also, for men, especially when riding on subways and buses, don’t flash your wallet, and particularly don’t let anyone know in which pocket you keep it. Actually, it’s best to have loose cash in one pocket and your wallet in another, so you won’t lose your credit cards in case of theft. And also it’s best to have lots of other things in the same pocket you keep your wallet, so pickpockets won’t be able to slip it out easily: i.e. stuff in handkerchiefs, pens, pencils, etc. Also, when riding in a bus, watch out for the coin-dropping trick, when, as you’re getting off the bus in the back, a guy in front of you, in the process of getting out, drops a coin in back of him. For while you are concentrating with irritation on the guy’s backing up, picking up his coin, and blocking your path to the exit, his confederate behind you could be slipping his evil hand into your pocket and extracting your wallet.

As for the famous New York City subways, you may, like many out-of-towners, be fascinated by the action. Actually, their only advantage is speed; they are dirty, decrepit, incredibly noisy, and filled with potential muggers and thieves (people who in New York are generally euphemistically referred to as “the community.”) That potential, however, is not likely to be actualized so long as you avoid northern Manhattan and the outer boroughs, and stick to the middle cars, particularly avoiding rear cars at night. Aside from speed, buses are better, you can see the city, and you can get out easily in case the vehicle gets stuck.

But, as I said earlier, the real problem with New York is not mugging but continual hassle. How hassle? In the first place, “consumer sovereignty”, that delight of the free market, does not exist in New York (you know, that’s when store clerks are happy for your custom.) Forget it. The attitude of store clerks in New York is that you, the customer, are an imposition on their valuable leisure time. What’s more, if you ask for a product and they don’t have it (very likely) they claim that you’re crazy because the product doesn’t exist. If you’re suggestible, they’ll have you half believing it.

Note: this does not apply to a happy exception, a raft of Korean-owned fruit stores that have popped up all over Manhattan, which tend to stay open late (sometimes all night), sell great fruit, and are courteous and polite. They still have the work ethic.

Also, hassle exists everywhere in New York if you ever stop on the street. Don’t stop and look around, or enjoy the sights. For if you do, you won’t get mugged, but you will get hassled: by guys looking for a touch, by crazies, by religious fanatics, by people pressing leaflets on you, or whatever. To avoid street hassle, do the following: Always keep walking purposefully, avoiding more than fleeting eye contact with your fellow strollers. Look ahead. If you see a guy on the next block, standing (or weaving) in the middle of the sidewalk, talking briefly to first one person and then the next, avoid him. He’s up to no good; he’s a hassler. Walk to the right or left of him. Above all: pay no attention if anyone talks to you or accosts you on the street. Don’t stop politely to find out what he wants as you would in your own home town. It doesn’t matter what he wants; chances are 100:1 he’s up to no good. If anyone talks to you on the street, pay no attention and accelerate your pace rather than slow down; he will then forget about you and hassle the next sucker behind you. If he’s really in distress, he can accost a cop or go into the nearest store.

In general, the cardinal rule of New York street smarts is to Trust No One, or rather Trust No Strangers. If you find New Yorkers brusque and unfriendly on the street, remember that most of them are not really unfriendly if you catch them in a legitimate social situation. They are simply obeying the rules of street survival, rules they have learned in New York street life, often the Hard Way.

There is also the justly famed New York taxi driver. The classic cab driver is unfortunately a dying breed: tough, street-smart, wise-cracking, gabby, deeply contemptuous in a kind of village-libertarian manner of any and all politicians. They also tend to be deeply racist and make no bones about it. These classic cabbies tend to be elderly the younger ones are very often just off the boat from some foreign clime and don’t know where anything is even Broadway. So it is best to carry a street map with you at all times, so you can instruct them. Once in a blue moon you will get a charming taxi driver who is a college student or out-of-work actor who will be an opera buff, and that will be a real treat.

Why, you may ask, do New Yorkers put up with this permanent hassle that marks their city? The answer, universal to New Yorkers of whatever class or stripe, is: “this is where the action is.” The action is the key for whatever kind of action one seeks is here, from the toniest theatre and opera down to the local street corner mugging. Whatever New York is, it is never boring. It is where things happen. Once I lived in California for two years. I loved it. The people were so friendly it took me six months to decompress, and to realize that when the bank clerk or the supermarket checker said, “Have a nice day, sir”, or “Good morning, sir”, they weren’t out to rip me off in some way, they had no ulterior motive, they were just being friendly. The people in California were all handsome and beautiful, and the ambiance was lovely, a great contrast to the grotesques that populate New York. The streets were clean, and there were no potholes, in contrast to the wreck of the Big Apple. It was great, except for one thing. No matter how hard I worked, I felt that I was on permanent vacation, that I was in exile, 3000 miles away from where the action really was, from the great big throbbing pulsating densely packed “cross-section of democracy” that is New York City.

So come on, folks, live it up and come to the Big Apple. Be prepared, trust no one, and then enjoy, enjoy!

FDR: the True Legacy

by Jimmy Harris

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 100th birthday has come and gone. For several days the media was filled with testimonies to his wisdom and achievements, and paeons to his greatness and warmth as a leader. Aged New Dealers tearily recalled personal experiences, and former presidents of various political spectrums spoke admiringly of his influence in their careers.

Behind all this hoopla and sentiment, though, lies concealed the actual truth of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Roosevelt was, in reality, one of the worse presidents this country has ever endured—no mean achievement, considering the competition. In the three great areas of presidential concern—economics, civil liberties, and international affairs—his record is utterly disastrous. Furthermore, most of the serious problems that new threaten this country took strong root during Roosevelt’s term That he is remembered otherwise by the great majority is due to his personal charisma, the bias of many mainstream historians and newspeople, and perhaps the fact that we as a nation have yet to pay the full price for Roosevelt’s action.

Economics: A Platform of Lies

Roosevelt took office on January 15th, 1932, on a platform of lies. His predecessor Herbert Hoover’s wrongheaded attempts to legislate the country out of the Great Depression had failed miserably—not surprisingly, since government intervention in the economy was largely responsible for the depression in the first place. An increasingly desperate public elected Roosevelt to office on campaign pledges to balance the budget, slash the size of government, adhere to a gold standard, and remove government interference from the marketplace—the only policies that would have effectively restored a sound economy. He did none of this, of course. Instead, within weeks he embarked upon a spree of government spending and meddling in the economy the likes of which had never been remotely approached in this nation’s history.

Roosevelt was an economic illiterate who actually bragged that he had never read a book on economics. “We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature,” he once said. “They are made by men.” (The Boston Transcript astutely observed that “Two more glaring misstatements of truth could hardly have been packed into so little space.”) This attitude made his administration easy prey for any variety of economic snake oil; and it is hardly surprising that they shortly embraced the then-new vogue of Keynesian economics, which gave academic sanction to their wholesale inflation and economic tinkerings.

Roosevelt created a dizzying procession of alphabetically named agencies empowered to “create jobs” by spending tax dollars, and he saddled the economy with a plethora of senseless and destructive regulations. Never before had the federal government dared to expand into so many areas of American life as it did under this new flood of legislation. The Roosevelt administration regarded its word as law, and considered constitutional restraints on the power of the executive branch as merely a nuisance. Typical of the administration’s attitude was this quote from Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s right-hand man, speaking to the Advisory Committee of the National Youth Administration: “I want to assure you that we are not afraid of exploring anything within the law, and we have a lawyer who will declare anything you want to do legal.”

This unparalleled meddling led inevitably to a grossly distorted economy far removed from the actual needs and demands of the marketplace. Ill-considered and destructive federal loans, subsidies, wage and price controls, public works programs, taxation, pro-union legislation and the like wreaked havoc upon society. Needy Americans watched in mystery and horror as dairymen dumped milk out into the streets and the federal government paid farmers millions of dollars to destroy livestock and plow under crops—actions somehow designed to produce prosperity by destroying goods. As much of the country’s productive power was confiscated or restrained by the government, millions of jobs were destroyed and more and more businesses closed. The government’s desperate, lurching actions often bordered on the comic—or rather the tragi-comic. The poorly named National Recovery Administration attempted to prohibit newspaper boys from selling papers, and declared that, somehow in the interest of the economy, no burlesque production could feature more than four strips. In its infinite wisdom, the Supreme Court, in the case of Wickard vs. Filburn upheld the government’s contention that a man growing grain solely for his own use was unlawfully interfering with interstate commerce and therefore subject to penalties and regulation.

The millions who received relief assistance or make-work jobs (and one may judge the usefulness of many of these jobs by the fact that they are responsible for introducing the word “boondoggle” into the public vocabulary) were thankful for this concrete evidence of government concern. What they could not see, and failed to perceive, were the millions of needed and productive jobs that were destroyed by these same governments programs, the lower prices that failed to materialize of goods and services whose prices were artificially inflated by government policies, and the many businesses that failed or never came to existence because of government actions. This was the real, unseen cost of the various Roosevelt emergency programs, and it was a cost no society could bear and still prosper. Thus the relief roles continued to swell and the unemployment lines grew, despite one frantic Roosevelt effort after another.

Among the most shameful of the many shameful and foolish economic acts of the Roosevelt administration was its seizing of the nation’s privately held gold and its subsequent repudiation of the gold redemption clause in all government and private debts. Not only was this dishonest (as Senator Gore of Oklahoma noted at the time, “Why, that’s just plain stealing, isn’t it, Mr. President?”), it also pave the Federal government almost complete control of the nation’s money supply, setting the stage for the devaluation of the dollar and the massive inflationary policies the administration was to pursue.

All of this economic meddling and financial flim-flammery may be justified in the minds of some by one of the most fallacious, yet often-heard, claims about Roosevelt: that “he got us out of the Depression.” Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Despite all the “pump-priming,” the endless government programs, the currency manipulation, there were still twelve million unemployed at the end of 1937. Between 1937 and 1938, industrial production declined by over a third–the fastest decline in American history. The policies of the Roosevelt administration were a colossal, abject failure. What actually brought the American economy out of its doldrums was the huge boost given to manufacturing by the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, and the subsequent U.S. entry into World War II. This artificial growth in the economy was funded in large part by inflated dollars and huge federal deficits—debt that, in the main, has yet to be paid, and still burdens the U.S. economy.

Thus we have the true economic legacy of the Roosevelt administration: sanction for massive government interference in the economy, acceptance of foolish and destructive economic nostrums as standard policy, a private sector distorted for decades from the true needs of the marketplace, and a huge debt that still weighs heavily upon the backs of American taxpayers. And no discussion of Roosevelt’s economic fiascos would be complete without at least a brief mention of Social Insecurity, that great government ponzi scheme which Roosevelt signed into effect in 1935, and which has since mushroomed into a monstrous fraud that has drained capital for decades and become ever more oppressive. For this, too, we must thank FDR.

As terrible and foolish as the above-mentioned actions of the Roosevelt administration were—in this limited space I have only touched on a few highlights—we can only be thankful that not all of Roosevelt’s proposed legislation passed. Among his failures were attempts to place a ceiling on salaries at $25,000 and a bill to limit top income to $12,000 and tax the upper brackets at 99%! It is frightening to even imagine what any of this would have done to the United States.

International Affairs

“. . . I shall say it again, and again, and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,”

Roosevelt made this pledge while campaigning for reduction in October, 1940. Needless to say, he was no more faithful to this promise than he was to his earlier economic platform. In fact, shortly after a campaign filled with statements similar to the above, he embarked upon a program of deliberate harassment of the German and Japanese governments. He engineered intentional military confrontations with the German navy in September and October of 1941, and then lied to the American public about the nature of these confrontations—at a time what the vast majority of Americans favored a policy of strict neutrality. Through a series of crippling trade restrictions, unreasonable diplomatic demands, threats, and hostile speeches, Roosevelt baited and goaded the Japanese government into a fiercely anti-United States position that led inexorably to war. And if some of the more radical revisionist historians claims are true—and these claims are becoming increasingly well documented—Roosevelt not only deliberately led the United States into World War II, he actually had advance knowledge of the planned Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, yet refused to notify U.S. naval forces, realizing that the attack would inevitably cause the United States to enter the war. Whether one accepts such extreme claims or not, there can be no doubt that Roosevelt was fully aware that many of the aggressively anti-German and anti-Japanese acts he took in the months before Pearl Harbor carried a serious risk of provoking a declaration of war against the United States—a war that as much as 85% of Americans wished desperately to avoid.

Roosevelt must share, along with the other combatants in World War II, blame for extending the horrors of warfare to civilian populations. Roosevelt joined with Churchill in the sanction of deliberate indiscriminate bombing of enemy civilian areas (a tactic, incidentally, first adopted by the British, in 1940; not the Germans, as commonly supposed.) This practice led to hundreds of thousands of utterly innocent, helpless, and uninvolved women, children, and civilian men on both sides being slaughtered in gruesome manner. The casualties incurred in these raids are virtually inconceivable. In Dresden, a single firebombing raid turned that city into a blazing hell where 100,000 to 150,000 civilians burned to death. In Tokyo, 185,000 were killed or injured as a result of one firebombing raid. The apotheosis of all this, of course, was Hiroshima and Nagasaki, As a result of the general acceptance of this tactic, mass slaughter of innocent non-combatants in now considered standard policy for future wars. To criticize these bombings is not, of course, to deny the terrible atrocities committed by the Axis forces; but brutality on one side, or by one’s allies, do not give sanction to such acts by the oilier. There can be no excuse for the deliberate, planned murder of innocent noncombatant adults and children as a way of combatting the actions of an aggressive state, especially when one considers how little effective say such people have in the actions of their governments.

Roosevelt might well have been able to avoid much of the vast carnage and destruction of the war had he been willing to negotiate a truce with the Axis powers. It is quite possible that Germany and Japan would have been willing to accept peace terms as early as middle or late 1943. Had such efforts been pursued, millions of lives might have been saved and much of the waste and destruction of the war averted. However, Roosevelt never wavered from his insistence on unconditional surrender thus removing any chance for such a settlement.

Roosevelt’s fondness for the Russian dictator, Stalin, led to some of the very worst consequences of World War II. During the war, Roosevelt deliberately allowed Russian spies to steal American uranium samples and atomic bomb research documents, ordering that nothing be done to prevent this. There is no way of calculating how much this aided the Soviets in their own attempts to create a nuclear bomb, but its effect was surely enormous. And after the war, Roosevelt made a series of concessions to Stalin that resulted in Russia acquiring dominance over 16 European and Asian nations with a combined population of over 725 million people. Thus, millions in Soviet slavery, and the thousands who have died in these areas since World War II for at the hands of the Soviets, can thank Roosevelt for much of their predicament. Roosevelt also approved Stalin’s insistence that all persons displaced by the war be forced to return to their home countries—a policy that all too obviously meant death camps and firing squads for thousands. For this horror, too. Roosevelt must share blame.

These post-war concessions to Stalin were greatly responsible for the creation of the monstrous Soviet Union that we know today. The end result of Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II, then was simply to replace the horror of Nazism with the horror of international state communism—at an unimaginable cost of life and property.

Civil Liberties

Finally, an examination of Roosevelt’s actions in the area of civil liberties shows that in this, too, his record is dismal. Roosevelt can take credit, at least, for ridding the country of the scourge of Prohibition. However, a few years later he introduced a new kind of prohibition: the use of marijuana was made illegal in 1937. The devastation that this nation has suffered as a result of this single act is incalculable. Roosevelt also greatly increased the power and jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, helping to create a national police force that routinely spied upon citizens engaged in peaceful, non-illegal activities.

As it inevitably does, the outbreak of war, and these accompanying increase in rabid nationalism, brought with it numerous violations of basic civil liberties—and as always, once the state assumes a power during wartime, it rarely retreats fully when peace resumes. Thus World War II was, as many have noted, a period of massive growth of state power in all areas of life.

One of the most outrageous and well documented domestic actions of the Roosevelt administration was the imprisonment of 112,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry in prison camps at the outbreak of U.S. entry into the war. This was truly a black page in the history of this country. Roosevelt can also take credit for instituting the first peacetime draft in this nation’s history, and for supporting the 1940 Smith Act, which, among other things, specified fines and imprisonment for written or oral “treasonous” arguments and persuasions. The Smith Act was so broad in scope that, as The New York Times observed at its passing, “if strictly construed, several of the leading speakers at last week’s Republican National Convention might be in danger,”

Mention must also be made of Roosevelt’s refusal, along with other Allied countries, to loosen immigration restrictions in order to allow refugee European Jews to enter this country. This left hundreds of thousands of Jews without refuge and doomed to fall into the hands of the Nazis.

Gone But Not Forgotten

These few examples of the ignorance and perfidy of the Roosevelt administration barely scratch the surface but they give at least some idea of the true legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And make no mistake about it, his influence is still very much with us today. Roosevelt bears much of the responsibility for the creation of today’s political boundaries and centers of power; and his influence is apparent in the approach of this nation’s leaders to foreign policy, economics, and social concerns—much to our misfortune

Even more aggravating, the hand of his ghost is still reaching into our pockets. Not only are Americans still struggling under the burden of the enormous national debt he saddled us with, we are also being faced, now that his centennial is upon us, with pleas from politicians and assorted blind worshippers of Roosevelt for millions of tax dollars to be spent to create a memorial to the former president. A fine reply to this sort of nonsense was made by Inquiry in their January 11 and 25, 1982, issues:

Our own suggestion (for FDR memorial) would be to bronze the SI trillion national debt. Surely it would never have been possible without FDR.

John Flynn, in the final pages of his brilliant, caustic book, The Roosevelt Myth, summarizes the truth about the Roosevelt administration in a few biting sentences:

“But go back through the years, read the speeches and platforms and judgements he made and consider them in the light of what he did. Look up the promises of thrift in public office, of balanced budgets and lower taxes, of disbanded bureaucrats, of honesty in government and of security for all. Read again the warnings he uttered to his own people against those wicked men who would seize upon a war in Europe to entangle them upon specious visions of false war abundance. Read the speeches he made never, never again to send our sons to fight in foreign wars. Look up the promises he made, not to our own people, but to the Chinese, to Poland to Czechoslovakia, to the Baltic peoples in Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia, to the Jews out of one side of his mouth and to the Arabs out of the either side. He broke every promise. He betrayed all who trusted him . . .

The figure of Roosevelt exhibited before the eyes of our people is a fiction. There was no such being as that noble, selfless, hard-headed, wise and farseeing combination of philosopher, philanthropist and warrior which has been fabricated out of pure propaganda and which a small collection of dangerous cliques in this country are using to advance their own evil ends.”

SOURCES

William E. Leuchtenburg’s Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963) is an excellent source of general information about the pre-World War II Roosevelt administration, though it tends to be rather favorable and uncritical. John T. Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth (New York: Devon-Adair, 1956) is a lively and highly critical attack on Roosevelt’s years as president and the results of his terms.

For discussions of how government intervention in the economy was responsible for the Great Depression (and the subsequent years of economic chaos) set Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1972) and Garet Garret and Murray Rothbard’s The Great Depression and New Deal Monetary Policy (San Francisco: CATO Institute, 1980). For brief summaries of this position, see The Incredible Bread Machine by the Campus Studies Institute (San Diego: World Research, Inc., 1974), pp. 29–53, and John Hospers’ Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1971), pp. 330–344.

There are many revisionist history works concerning World War II, of varying quality. The definitive—and exciting—book on Pearl Harbor is John Toland’s Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982). The writings of James J. Martin are pithy, highly readable sources of little known information. Particularly relevant to the issues in this article are his essays “On the ‘Defense’ Origins of the New Imperialism.” “The Bombing and Negotiated Peace Questions-In 1944,” and “The Return of the ‘War Crimes’-War Criminals Issue,” from his Revisionist Viewpoints (Colorado: Ralph Myles, 1971); and the essays “The Consequences of World War Two to Great Britain: Twenty Years of Decline, 1939-1959” and “Pearl Harbor: Antecedents, Background, and Consequences,” in his collection The Saga of Hog Island and Other Essays in Inconvenient History (Colorado: Ralph Myles, 1977). Marlin’s essays and footnotes serve as good introductions to other revisionist works.

Bruce Russett’s No Clear and Present Danger (New York: Harper and Row, 1972) gives a brief yet concise discussion of Roosevelt’s pre-Pearl Harbor manipulative actions against Germany and Japan. Russettdiok also makes an excellent, though somewhat non-libertarian, argument against U.S. entry into World War II, anti demonstrates how U.S. aims could have been achieved without military actions.

Roosevelt’s friendship with Stalin, and the tragic international consequences, are discussed in Roosevelt’s Road to Russia by George N. Crocker (Chicago: Henry Regency Co., 1959). Stalin’s post-war repatriation program and the resulting mass slaughter is detailed in Operation Keelhaul by Julius Epstein (Conn: Devin Adair, 1973) and The Secret Betrayal by Nikolai Tolstoy (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1977).

—— Double Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVII, No. 7–8

July-August, 1983

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

Ronald Reagan, Warmonger

The world is in very dangerous waters. The “true” or rhetorical Ronald Reagan, the second Reagan of the conservative “Let Reagan be Reagan” slogan, has functioned only in the world of rhetoric since the beginning of his misbegotten Administration, or arguably since he embraced the Rockefeller Republicans at the convention of 1980. The rhetorical Reagan, he tf the “Get Big Government off our Backs,” free market, war-with-Russia stance, has been particularly eclipsed since the end of the first year of his Administration. In economics, quasi-libertarians, monetarists, and supply-siders have been elbowed aside since 1982, and replaced by the same kind of quasi conservative Keynesians who brought us the Nixon and Ford Administrations. In foreign policy, however, while the war fanatics like Richard Allen and Richard Pipes were booted out after a year, there has recently been a recrudescence of war-hawk domination by a troika of old Reagan buddy Judge William P. Clark, national security adviser whose admitted total ignorance of foreign affairs seems especially to qualify him for a top foreign policy post; Cap Weinberger of Bechtel Corporation and the Defense Department; and neo-conservative hatchet-lady and political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose contribution to political theory was to distinguish between “good” authoritarian and “bad” totalitarian torture.

The war-hawk troika signalled its accession to power by booting out Thomas Enders (one of the people most responsible for the Vietnam War) and Deane Hinton from their key State Department posts in Central American policy, for the sin of being too dovish and soft-nosed. This was a shock to those knowledgeable in foreign affairs, since it was roughly equivalent to Hitler’s firing Goebbels for being soft on the Jewish Question. Clearly, we were in for a lot of trouble. Since the rise of the troika, and the relative eclipse of the “dovish’ George Shultz in foreign policy, the following events have occurred as the Reagan Administration heats up the Cold War and marches, step by step, toward World War III.

I Reagan Breaks the Law

If there is one thing that conservatives are firm about, it is that one must never, ever break the law. No matter how unjust the law, they prate, one must never disobey it; one must only try one’s best to get the law changed. But as long as a law is on the books, it must be enforced. And yet Ronnie Reagan has broken at least two laws openly, flagrantly, and defiantly. Even so, no one, least of all conservatives, has called for his Impeachment.

What are these laws? One is the Boland Amendment, in which Congress made illegal any U.S. government attempt to give covert aid to Nicaraguan rebels in order to overthrow, or, as they say these days, “destabilize”, the Nicaraguan government. Yet the CIA has been giving massive aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and has even established bases for the contras in neighboring Honduras, setting up the conditions for an escalating war between the two nations. This has been perhaps the most open “covert” operation in history. For many months, the U.S. government has been using the patently lame excuse that the “covert” aid was certainly not designed to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. No, it is only to put some pressure on Nicaragua to stop sending aid to the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. While this aid might well be there, it has been so elusive that the best efforts of the U.S. and its satraps to prove Nicaraguan aid have so far been abject failures. Most guerrilla weapons, in the time-honored tradition, have come from the United States, either via capture of government arms or sale by corrupt government officials.

Recently, however, the Reagan Administration has felt so emboldened on the march toward war that it has allowed ultra-hawk Under Secretary of Defense Fred (“the Ick”) Ikle to proclaim frankly and boldly that yes indeed the “covert” aid is designed to overthrow the Nicaraguan regime. So why isn’t Reagan impeached and Ikle booted out?

The second flagrant defiance of the law was Reagan’s refusal to obey the War Powers Act, by which Congress ordered the President to subject the maintenance of U.S. troops abroad to its wishes as soon as these troops become subject to actual hostilities. U.S. Marines have been killed in Beirut, and yet the President stubbornly refused to obey the War Powers Act, and only grudgingly agreed to a compromise when Congress knuckled under and ratified the Marines staying in Lebanon for at least another 18 months. Yet, amidst Congressional appeals and whines for Reagan to please, sir, obey the law, no one, of either party mentioned Impeachement. Since the brief and glorious flurry in 1974, has impeachment once again become Unthinkable?

II Deeper Into Lebanon

U.S. policy in Lebanon is a classic case of sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire, almost deliberately escalating step-by-step into another Vietnam. We begin, seemingly innocent enough, contributing 1,300 Marines to an international “peacekeeping” force. Amidst all the the right-wing jibes at the United Nations, we forget that the major problem with the UN is not its “anti-Americanism” but its being designed as an instrument for “collective security against aggression,” i.e. bringing us a state of potentially permanent war in seeking the chimera of permanent peace. The trouble with the UN is that it gets us into situations like a seemingly harmless “peacekeeping” operation.

But how, after all, do soldiers “keep the peace” except through fighting and killing? And so here we are in the midst of a civil war that has raged among literally dozens of groups in Lebanon for decades. What in hell does the United States know or care about the ancient Druse people, for example, and how dare it set itself up as an arbiter of their fortunes? Originally, in Step 1 of the operation, U.S. Marines were only supposed to fire if fired upon. But then a U.S. naval force with 2,000 more men came, and began shelling Druse positions in the Shouf mountains above and south of Beirut. The excuse was that these positions were shelling Marine positions. But soon hostilities escalated further, and it turns out that the U.S. Navy began to shell the Druse not for endangering our Marines but for battling against the Christian Lebanese Army, to which the U.S. is increasingly committed to winning the civil war. I suppose that, in that logic, the Lebanese Christians become surrogate U.S. Marines, worthy of the same protection. And so it goes.

But not only is the United States presuming to intervene ever further in the Lebanese civil war, it is also coming down unerringly on the (long-run) losing side. For a steady fact amidst the confusion of forces is that “Lebanon” is not a true country but an abortion. It was carved out of Syria by French imperialism after World War I, to serve as a French client state. Furthermore, the religious proportional representation imposed since the 1930’s used as a basis the census of 1932. In that year pro-French Maronite Christians along with their Christian allies, had a majority of the Lebanese population. But if current demographics, a half century later, were ever used as a basis for quotas of power in the government, the Muslims would be dominant, since they now form about two-thirds of the population. The essence of the Lebanese struggle is an attempt by a minority of “pro-Western” Maronite Christians to dominate and bully a Muslim majority. In the long run, this system cannot work and will be overthrown, and it is in this cauldron that the United States has decided to make itself the major enemy of Islam in Lebanon. The Lebanese army, much vaunted in the U.S. media, is a Maronite Christian army, and the President of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel, is the leader of the very same Phalangist forces that massacred helpless Palestinian women and children at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

American officials are engaging in a great deal of hand-wringing about their terrible dilemma in Lebanon. If we stay, we might get embroiled deeper and deeper in another Vietnam; but if we leave, the Gemayel government will fall. Tough. It is not a proper function of the United States to prop up dictators all over the world. And to those who think we have “national security” interests in Lebanon (assuming that word can be defined intelligently) it would be nice to hear exactly what they may be.

As for the cease-fire, it is nice to have it, but there have been many cease-fires in Lebanon, and how long does anyone think this one will last? Any more permanent solution is being held up by the insistence of Gemayel, a man whose power depends almost totally on U.S. military might, on conducting negotiations in his own presidential palace.

Americans must ask themselves and their government: Why die for Gemayel? Why die to impose Maronite Christian rule over Muslims? What kind of foreign policy is that? Is such a policy really necessary to protect Maine or Seattle from foreign aggression? If we don’t fight the Druse in their ancestral home in the Shouf mountains, will we really have to fight them in the streets of Boston?

III Deeper into Central America

The Central American morass is not as boldly in the headlines right now as Lebanon, but is fully as dangerous for escalating military conflict. The Untied States is backing an unpopular and despotic regime in El Salvador, and is building bases in Honduras in order to aid and abet the “contra” invasion of Nicaragua. All of these are inexorably losing propositions, and therefore to keep its wildly interventionist commitments, the U.S. must continue to escalate its forces and its war in Central America.

In El Salvador, the much touted “free elections” are rtow forgotten, as the guerrillas slowly but surely increase their power in one province after another. In this country ridden by dictatorship and by right-wing paramilitary squads murdering dissenters, government army officers refuse to go out on patrol in guerrilla country (in the words of the old joke, “you can get killed out there!” and stay confined to their base, punctuated occasionally by grand but pointless sweeps throughout the countryside. Weekends they take off to cavort amidst the fleshpots of the capital city. In Nicaragua, in contrast, the army is doing very well and the well-supplied contras are getting nowhere. For one reason, in contrast to the Salvadoran army, the Nicaraguan forces go out habitually in small patrols to encounter the enemy.

And the egregious Fred Ikle proudly proclaims that in Central America “we seek victory for the forces of democracy.” These are the same “forces” that expelled the bureau chief of the Associated Press from El Salvador for telling the truth, and that are daily torturing and murdering dissenters from the right-wing dictatorial government.

IV 007 Hysteria

Fueling all of these war escapades, softening any resistance to them in Congress and the country, adding to pressure for any and all military expenditures, is the hysteria whipped up by Reagan, the right-wing, and the Establishment media over the tragic shooting down of Korean Airliner 007 over Sakhalin Island. After milking the maximum amount of propaganda from the failure of the Russians to admit shooting down the plane, or to explain the incident, for eight days, it turned out that the U.S. authorities were also engaged in telling untruths on a massive scale. For one thing, the U.S. finally and grudgingly admitted that the Soviet jet interceptors had indeed fired several warning shots at 007 before shooting it down. This after many days of hopped-up denunciations that the Soviets had neglected to fire any warning shots. Also, it took several days for the U.S. to admit that a U.S. RC-135 spy plane flew near the 007 route and that for some time the paths of the two actually coincided.

There are many unanswered questions and fuzzy areas about 007—enough, surely, to defuse the hysteria and try to get back—or forward—to a sane approach toward the airliner and toward the Soviets generally.

1. What in hell was KAL 007 doing flying 300 miles off-course for several hours over Soviet airspace? KAL 747’s are equipped with three separate, cross-checking, internal navigation systems. The pilot and crew of 007 should have known instantly that they were off course. And why were there no radio communications from 007 until fifteen minutes before it was shot down? The idea of radio failure makes no sense. Not only because they did make contact at long last, but also because 747’s are equipped with five separate radios, two of which can reach anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the route flown by 007 is well-travelled; there are planes up there all the time, including another 747 twenty minutes behind that was carrying Senator Jesse Helms. Why didn’t 007 contact any of these other planes and check where they were?

Moreover, all Pacific pilots are well aware, and it is marked clearly on their navigational maps, that one does not fly over Soviet airspace without advance clearance, because the planes are likely to be shot down. Why then the insouciance of the 007 pilot? Especially since a civilian KAL airliner was shot down over the Soviet Arctic in 1978? There is one crucial difference, however, between the 1978 incident and that of 1983: the 1978 airliner was a 707, with little of the sophisticated navigational systems of the 747. Its pilot could well have gotten lost; the 007 pilot could not.

Another point: 007 was supposed to report every hour to air controllers on the ground. Why didn’t any of the U.S. or Japanese air controllers, also well aware of the dangers of flying over Soviet territory—especially the sensitive military installations in the Kamchatka-Sakhalin area—why didn’t they ever notify 007 that it was way off course and to get back pronto?

Specifically, we know that the RC-135, our spy plane, was flying on the course that day to monitor Soviet tests. But our most capable monitor for the Soviet tests is the U.S. Cobra Dane radar at Shemya, at the tip of the Aleutians and only 450 miles from Kamchatka. The Shemya radar would have seen quickly that 007 was off course, and would have tracked it from then on. Why, then, didn’t an American official at Shemya immediately pick up a phone, call 007, or call the Japanese controllers at Narita? It is no wonder that the London Sunday Times concluded from its investigation of the 007 incident that “there is now a growing conviction in military, political and aviation circles that Captain Byung In was not in Soviet airspace by accident.”

2. Was the 007 incursion planned, and, if so, why? If KAL pilot Chung Byung In was “witting”, and the U.S. and Japanese air controllers were perhaps aiding and abetting, what was the point? The suggestion in the media that Chung Byung might have taken this dangerous route deliberately to save money on fuel seems idiotic; surely a hell of a risk to take for saving some gasoline. It is more plausible to look at Korean Air Lines, nearly all of whose pilots are former officers in the South Korean Air Force, and who retain high security clearance. Chung Byung himself was considered one of KAL’s best pilots, as witness the fact that he was chosen to be the pilot for several 747 flights of the South Korean president to the U.S. and to various countries in Southeast Asia during 1981 and 1982. The present form of Korean Air Lines originated in 1969; before then, the Korean government was running the company. In that year, the government decided to put KAL into the hands of a private transportation company, the Hanjin Group, headed by two brothers, Cho Chong (“Harry”) Hoon and Cho Chong (“Charlie Cho”) Kun. Most KAL business is manufacturing aircraft for the Korean Air Force, which of course cements the closeness of its ties with the Korean military.

Furthermore, Fred Kaplan reports in the Boston Globe that the two brothers have close ties with the Korean CIA. A former director of Korean affairs at the U.S. State Department told Kaplan that throughout the 1970’s Charlie Cho ran money back and forth between the KCIA and Japanese bigwigs. Kaplan was also told that KAL used to run money and spies in and out of Korea and assisted the KCIA in its lucrative drug smuggling.

And where the KCIA is, can the US CIA be far behind?

The Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda claimed, on Sept. 16, that Chung Byung had boasted to intimates that he was carrying out special tasks for U.S. intelligence, that he had placed equipment on 747’s to spy on Soviet installations, and that he intended to leave KAL soon because of the high risks entailed in flying for the CIA. This could well be hokum, but it is surely suggestive in light of the evidence.

If the 007 incursion was planned by the KCIA, with or without US connivance, why did they do it? There would appear to be three possible reasons, or some combination of the three: First, the 747 could have been functioning as a spy plane. A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer remembers being told in 1967, according to Fred Kaplan, that KAL habitually attached side-view cameras to commercial airliners capable of long-distance photography. Newt Royce of the Hearst press reported on September 4 that U.S. intelligence officials admit that civilian airliners are routinely used for spying: Aeroflot for the Russians, and Finnair and others for the U.S. The common counter argument that the U.S. needs no such photos because of its satellites, runs against the fact that satellites fly at regular times and so can be evaded if necessary, and that photos taken at 30,000 feet can often tell more than, or at least confirm, photos from satellites.

A second, more plausible, reason was to test the quality and speed of Soviet air defenses. What they found should have gladdened their hearts, since they discovered that the Russian military are a bunch of stumblebums. There is a peculiar tendency of right-wingers, from conservatives to conservative libertarians, to look upon the Soviet Union as a mighty, super-efficent, Satanic monolith, omniscient if not omnipotent, and always ready to strike. Yet what is the Soviet Union but a giant, rigidified bureaucracy, and what is bureaucracy but a bunch of confused, ineffective stumblebums? Free market advocates should after all, be particularly alive to this fact.

And so what we saw in the 007 incident was a Soviet air defense that didn’t seem to know what was going on or what to do, that allowed a large, slow, passenger airliner to fly for two-and-a-half hours over sensitive Soviet airspace without interception, that took all of thirty minutes to get the interceptor jets off the ground. Not only that: three days after 007, several test-fired Russian ICBMs blew up over the same area! With this record, it is very possible that it took Marshal Ogarkov all of eight days to find out what in hell happened over Pacific Siberia that night.

So crummy have Soviet air defenses shown themselves to be that various press reports have U.S. intelligence authorities believing that up till the very end the Soviets were convinced that they were tracking and shooting down not a civilian 747 but an RC-135 spy plane. For one thing, Soviet interceptors may have misidentified the plane because they were always at least 2,000 feet below 007 and therefore could not make out its distinctive silhouette. Furthermore, the Soviets could have been misled by their obsolete radar equipment, and by the fact that Soviet commanders don’t trust their pilots with access to radio frequencies with which they could have contacted the Korean airliner. In fact, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Charles A. Gabriel happily concluded from the 007 incident that the Soviet air defense performance “gives us a little more confidence” in the ability of the U.S. Air Force to penetrate Soviet air space “if necessary.” (New York Times, Sept. 18.) Could finding this out have been the point of the whole exercise?

One thing that the U.S. authorities acknowledge they discovered is the tense, nervous state of the Soviet air defenders. The Americans confirmed the Soviet account of nine U.S. military spy plane incursions into Soviet airspace over the Kurile Islands this year. Take frayed nerves, the deep fear that the next U.S. military air incursion might be a nuclear attack, and the Soviet penchant to punish severely any commanders who allow intruding aircraft to escape, and the stage was set for the tragedy of 007.

A third possible reason for the incursion, less plausible than the others but which should not be dismissed out of hand, is that 007 was a right-wing US/South Korean intrigue designed to provoke the Soviets into doing precisely what they did—thus heating up the Cold War and ending any possibility of detente for a long time to come.

There are various other conspiracy theories about 007 that can be dismissed tout court. One is the Bircher theory that the Soviets shot down 007 because they knew that Rep. Larry McDonald (D., Ga.), head of the John Birch Socity, was on the plane. It seems to me that in the improbable event that McDonald was No. 1 on a Soviet hit list, they could have assassinated him far more easily in Washington without causing an international airplane incident in which they lose an enormous number of propaganda points. (If I were in the Kremlin and had an Americanski hit list, McDonald would scarcely be high up on it.) Even less plausible is the kooky antipodal conspiracy theory, voiced by Larry Flynt of Hustler fame, that McDonald himself was in on the disaster, along with the CIA, in order to make himself an anti-Communist martyr and heat up the Cold War. Another kooky sub-variant is that 007 was a coordinated plot by the Reagan Administration and the Russians to get rid of McDonald, since the Administration is run by Trilateralists. A hilarious “sub-sub-variant,” as noted by the Menckenesque Marxist journalist Alexander Cockburn, “is that the Russians’ true target was Scoop Jackson, knowing full well that news of the incident would give him a fatal heart attack.” (Village Voice, September 20).

3. What are the Lessons of 007?

The alleged lesson pushed by the war hawks, the right-wing, and the Reagan Administration (at least in rhetoric), and following them the bulk of the media, is that the shooting down of 007 was mass murder or even a “massacre,” that this “proves” that the Soviet system is evil, and that the Soviets are barbarians and mass murderers who should be treated as such. What being treated as such really means is never fully spelled out. Oddly enough, the policy conclusions never match up to the bitter and sweeping analyses. Thus, a group of orthodox, unreconstructed Randians, centered around Peter Schwartz and his magazine The Intellectual Activist, took the trouble and the enormous expense to take out a full page ad in the New York Sunday Times (Sept. 11). The thrust of the ad was that the Soviet Union should be treated as a “well-armed” neighborhood police force would deal with murderers in their midst. The Randians proceed to spell out what they claim to be the implications of their analogy: specifically the breaking of all diplomatic relations, since one does not engage in “detente” with local murderers. Other right-wingers, pursuing the same logic, have added a call for prohibition of all East-West trade. But these logicians are acting haltingly and bizarrely on the basis of their own logic. For of course this sort of thing—ostracism, refusal to trade or negotiate—is not what neighborhood police do to a murderer. What they do is to apprehend and execute him. Following Randian and other right-wing logic, then, what the United States is supposed to do, right now, is nuke the Soviet Union.

The interesting point is: Why don’t the Randians and other right-wingers see that this is their real thrust? Is their grasp on the logic of their own position that weak? In short, are they that dumb?. Failing that conclusion, the Randians/conservatives can have only two things in mind: either (a) they favor the immediate nuking of the Soviet Union and haven’t got the guts to say so, i.e. this is precisely the hidden agenda behind their beating of the war drums; (b) something is holding them back from going all the way in whooping it up for a nuclear holocaust. If so, it would behoove them to examine what that something is, and, if they focussed fully on that for a while, they might begin to reconsider their entire war-hawk perspective. Perhaps then the Intellectual Activist, which proudly proclaims its subtitle, “In Defense of Individual Rights,” might begin to see that a nuclear holocaust would, to put it mildly, be a massive assault on the individual rights to life of countless millions of innocent Russians and Americans. Perhaps then they will also see that their own irresponsible rhetoric is tantamount to threatening and bringing closer a nuclear confrontation that would slaughter far more innocents than even Communist regimes have managed in ruling their own subjects. In the good old Randian phrase: Randians, “Check your premises!”

The real lessons of 007 are very different, and have gotten very little attention in the media. They can be summed up as follows:

a. Americans are Very Selective in their Moral Indignation.

In February 1973, the State of Israel shot down a Libyan commercial airliner over the Sinai Desert, killing 109 persons. Yet no President of the United States got on the air to denounce the “massacre,” no media people claimed that this incident demonstrated the “evil nature” of the “barbaric” Israeli system, no one demanded that all trade and diplomatic relations with Israel be cut off, and no Randians took out full-page ads declaiming that Israel should be treated as local police treat mass murderers. Why not?

b. No Superpower is to be Trusted with High-Tech Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The major lesson of this incident is that both superpowers are paranoid and trigger-happy, and each has its finger close to the nuclear button expecting momentary assault from the other side. Both sides can unleash enormous destruction within moments. Instead of trying to keep the 007 tragedy from ballooning into a full-blown war crisis, the Reagan administration seized the opportunity to heat up the Cold War, kill all attempts at detente, and intensify arguments for any and all accumulations of nuclear weaponry. For a while, the atmosphere looked very close to the blundering into World War that marked the Guns of August, 1914. The major lesson of the 007 crisis is the desperate need for joint nuclear disarmament of the superpowers, for the permanent elimination of the nuclear button by which the super-States hold the entire human race at risk.

We might as well consider here the agitation for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament that has been pushed for the last couple of years by people within the left-wing of the Libertarian Party. (The argument over unilateral disarmament transcends Crane Machine-anti Crane Machine boundaries. It is, as it were, trans-Machine. Thus the main advocates have been Sheldon Richman and Leslie Graves Key of the left-wing of the Machine, and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, in the anti-Machine camp. Hummel, in particular, has been an eloquent and knowledgeable spokesman for unilateral disarmament.) My own position is that while I would prefer unilateral disarmament to the monstrous status quo, these are not our only choices. For I vastly prefer mutual nuclear disarmament to unilateral; clearly the people of the world, their rights and liberties, would be far more secure under the former. The unilateralists like to think of their position as more radical than that of us mutualists; but isn’t it more radical to have every super State disarm their weapons of mass destruction, than only one? In fact, the shoe should be on the other foot: why wouldn’t any libertarian strongly prefer mutual to unilateral disarmament? Why are our unilateralists hanging back rather than going all the way?

I remember back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the anti nuclear movement was gaining strength in the United States. The all-out pacifists took the peculiar position that they would rather see the U.S. government disarm unilaterally than negotiate an agreement with Russia for joint disarmament. The reason for this odd position was not, of course, that these pacifists were secret Commies, trying to open us up for a Soviet takeover. The reason was that their idea of politics was making a moral statement rather than accomplishing results. A government that disarms unilaterally can be said to be making a purer, more heroic, moral statement than one that persuades other governments to disarm together. By extension, the pacifists themselves were making a purer, more heroic moral statement than those in the anti-nuke movement who advocated joint nuclear disarmament. I am afraid that something like this is driving our unilateralists, who, in their desire to make purer and more heroic moral statements than anyone else, are losing sight of the fact that mutual disarmament would be a far more libertarian event, a far greater cause for rejoicing by us and by the entire human race, than unilateral disarmament. So why not go for it?

V Conclusion: Reagan: Rhetoric and Reality

Ronald Reagan was swept into office by the conservative movement, whose leader and spokesman he had become. He made a raft of campaign promises to that movement, each and every one of which he has broken egregiously. He raised income taxes rather than lowered them, he brought us $200 billion deficits rather than balancing the budget, he entrenched fiat money rather than bringing back the gold standard, his budget is the highest absolutely and as percentage of GNP in American history, he has deregulated nothing, he has not abolished the Departments of Education and Energy, etc. The conservative movement has long been animated by three broad concerns: (a) Freeing the economy and Getting Big Government Off Our Back; (b) using government to enforce Judaeo-Christian morality (so-called “social” issues), and (c) engaging in nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Simply listing these concerns reveals that (b) and (c) the theocratic and the war-mongering, contradict the libertarian (a), to put it very mildly. The conservative movement is so constituted that in a tussle between these three, (b) and (c) always win out in their hearts and minds over the free market.

The quintessence of Ronald Reagan is that he is a master in supplying the conservative movement with the rhetoric they want to hear. In all politicians there is a gulf between rhetoric and reality, but in Ronald Reagan that gulf has become a veritable and mighty ocean. There seems to be no contact whatever between Ronnie the rhetorician and Ronnie the maker of policy. In that situation it is hard to know which one is “the real” Reagan. The conservatives, feeling betrayed but lacking any guts for a break with the Administration, persist in asserting (publicly, at any rate) that the rhetorical Reagan is the real one, and that if only his evil pragmatist advisers would “let him,” this real Reagan would finally emerge. Hence, the famous right-wing slogan, “Let Reagan Be Reagan.” But the problem with that slogan is the “let.” What do you mean, “let”? Who picked these evil advisers, and who persists in maintaining them in power? None other than Reagan himself. So in what sense is this visible person not the “real” Reagan?

There are only two solutions to his dilemma, neither one a happy situation for conservatives. Either Reagan is a total cretin, a puppet who gets wheeled out for ceremonial speeches, and who really believes that he is putting conservative policies into effect. Or Reagan is a cynical master politician, keeping the conservatives happy by dishing out their rhetoric and his phony 3x5 card anecdotes, while keeping corporate centrists happy by pursuing the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society-Nixon-Ford policies that we have all come to know so well. Either way: Reagan the imbecile or Reagan the cynical manipulator, the situation is hopeless for conservatives, who yet persist in wilfully not perceiving this stark reality.

Of the three conservative concerns mentioned above, Reagan has clearly and flatly sold out the free market, and also pretty much for the theocratic social issues. Unfortunately, the anti-Soviet part of the rhetoric is something that Reagan seems to believe in more firmly than the rest of the stuff, so that he has more difficulty abandoning his conservative mass base on this issue than on the others. “Unfortunately,” because the more Reagan betrays conservatism on the war front (and on theocracy), the better. The drift toward war, and the ascendancy of the war-hawk troika, are ominous signposts for the future. The only silver lining in the cloud is that, despite the whipped-up hysteria, the Reagan Administration hasn’t really done anything to crack down directly on the Russians. (He couldn’t retaliate by banning Aeroflot in U.S., since Carter had already locked that into place when the Russians marched into Afghanistan.) His not doing anything concrete has, of course, sent conservatives up the wall, for this is by far their most emotional and most deeply felt of the three broad issues. It is a helluva note when we have to rely, for saving us from nuclear annihilation, on the likes of the Rockefellers, the Trilateralists, the Shultzes, the Kissingers, and all the rest. But that is unfortunately the way things are.

Hopefully, as rhetoric and reality clash and as we weave back and forth in the direction of the Final World War, Ronnie will be booted out in 1984, and we will all be able to leave the question of who or what is the “real” Reagan to shrinks and historians. Ronald Reagan will, then at long last, become supremely irrelevant for our time.

Letters on Gandhi

Dear Editor:

I should say I am aghast at Murray Rothbard’s “The New Menace of Gandhism” (March) but I am not surprised. Aghast at the blatant intolerance, un-surprised by the Randian-Objectivist attitude toward anything spiritural.

The rising tide of Gandhism is, at any rate, not the worship of the man or even of his particular methods or beliefs, but of his attitudes. Gandhites (speaking for myself) will certainly modify the methods to benefit the times. Nonviolent resistance, in this country, would certainly be a far cry from the massacres and slaughter of Gandhi’s time. Also, libertarians are indeed not especially pacifist by being non-violent in intent. Certainly I do not turn the other cheek, rarely. And before Gandhi came into my reading, I was cheering Thoreau who advocated the same civil disobedience. Where do Randians get off setting the standards for a philosophy and movement, ages old, long before Ms. Rand came upon the scene?

Defending this libertarian’s defection against Mr. Rothbard’s observations, I would have to say that, firstly, I have always been a supporter of the American Revolution, violence and all. I do not, however, believe it is necessary now, but if so I have no doubts libertarians will fight one.

This “craze” does not serve a function for “burnt out” activists as speaking for myself I am working just as hard and harder than ever. My activity remains the same. I have simply decided I cannot support a libertarian political party or government by voting. I still participate in political activities but no “candidate-type” support and action. A “drop out” of anything I am not, Mr. Rothbard. Only that which has clay feet or I have outgrown. Politics is a child’s-play-ego-trip. A mania for fame and power, what good have the ego trips of those who are in office, and have been for a while, done for libertarian freedom? Not one iota. Not one. They have compromised themselves right back to warmed-over republicansville from whence they came. I have yet to see a leopard successfully change his spots.

I do not think any of us are going to throw ourselves into the machinery of the state. We are not martyrs, but we are activists. I cannot speak for the others, but I do not “sit around” talking, since my non-political decision. I am still writing, and to editors, and legislators and in other areas. I am publishing. I am involved in Toastmasters, speaking libertarianese wherever I am. I have offered “education” with other writers’ works and my own reasoning, to my share of potential believers. I do not consider myself burnt out or inactive. Crazy maybe. But not lazy.

I do not think reviling of Gandhi’s motives or beliefs serves any purpose since they are not the core of the nonviolent, non-acquiescing philosophy. Certainly I have not heard anyone of us call him a libertarian or a saint. Certainly he had his personal motives just as you, I, and others have theirs. Gandhi’s fanaticism is acknowledged. It served its purpose, for its time and place. It is not necessarily ours. His sexual attitudes are also his personal business. I fail to see the pertinence except to sneer and revile. A man’s belief is his fortress. Although perhaps not agreed with, the man is no less guilty of anything than those who mindlessly obeyed. A man sets himself up as a certain something, rounds up a following and pursues his dream. Everyone has that privilege and prerogative Mr. Rothbard, and may the most effective and “followed” movement win. What “type” of libertarians eventually start, or win, or lose, the “revolution” will determine the future direction of this nation.

I have chosen the way I feel is the most decent, ethical and honest. Shame on you Murray Rothbard, for showing your “fear” through such an intolerant article.

Yes, the best activists are deserting your L.P. and that is the fear. That there are no longer any libertarians in the political party. And there are not.

As for Mr. Gandhi “selling out,” he had the prerogative of living and learning and changing his mind as do all the rest of us. Except we start where he left off.

Perhaps, Mr. Rothbard, you may consider that the libertarian movement is not as steeped in the heritage (?) of Rand and Mises as you think, but instead, steeped in far deeper philosophies besides the objectivists and the economists. Any movement sans spiritually will die and the L.P. is already very ill. I would be afraid, too, Mr. Rothbard, for truth will out and will then set us all free. Whose? Only time will tell.

Respectfully,

Lorraina M. Valencia.

Dear Editor:

I am writing in response to your article about Gandhi and Non-violent action in your recent issue of LF. I admit I didn’t get a chance to read the article thoroughly and do not have it before me so my comments are really very general.

First I intuit that you are attacking non-violent action because it might drive people away from the party. In truth, the thing that drives most people away from the party/including myself, before I realized its general strategic impotence—was the infighting and the backbiting—of which your article might easily be considered an example.

Second, you may oppose non-violent action because of your fervent ideological and perhaps psychological attachment to the idea of our “right” to use violence to enforce our view of libertarian “justice”—both as a means of abolishing the state and as a way of maintaining order afterwards. Your ego bridles at the very suspicion that someone might disagree with your sacred “right” to use violence.

Mostly, I think you are afraid of what you may perceive as real competition to your brand of libertarianism. You are afraid that libertarians might accept Gandhi’s essential message—that there are no absolute standards of truth and justice and therefore we should settle all our disputes, including those over property—non-violently. You quote Koestler to attack Gandhi. I don’t have the quotes or even the original title of the work you quoted from, but I can quote you some certainly later Koestler which indirectly supports Gandhi’s basic assumption—that absolute truth is probably unattainable. “In fact our physicists have been engaged, over the last fifty years, in ruthlessly discarding previously sacrosanct ‘Laws of Nature’ and replacing them with obscure mental constructs which cannot be represented in three-dimensional space, and whose quasi-mystical implications are hidden in technical jargon and mathematical formalism . . . (Physics and parapsychology) have in common an attitude defying commonsense and defying ‘Laws of Nature’ previously considered inviolable.”

This from one of his last and most “synthetic works,” Janus, (1978.) Also from Janus an understanding of the concept of our essential interconnectedness as human beings in this description of “Mach’s Principle” which “states that the inertial properties of terrestrial matter are determined by the total mass of the universe around us.” The metaphysical implications are fundamental—for it follows from it not only that the universe as a whole influences local, terrestrial events, but also that local events have an influence, however small, on the universe as a whole . . . which reminds one of the ancient Chinese proverb: “If you cut a blade of grass, you shake the Universe.” Such thinking is a basis for the opinion of all violence is wrong because it hurts us all . . . something Gandhi would certainly agree with.

As you know Tim Leary, Robert Anton Wilson and Karl Hess all have rejected absolutist truth though they may not have come out for total non-violence. LeFevre, rather than being an “aberration,” in fact expresses the purest form of libertarianism: toleration and non-violence.

As you can see from the enclosed I myself am into relativism and non-violence and am working hard on several articles and booklets to bring this message to the libertarian movement—but even more so to the rest of the world. The very big “New Age” movement which study the New Physics and the Non-violent action movement in the anti nuclear and disarmament movements are ready for this new synthesis. Austrian economics will of course be incorporated into what I write because it it based on the realization that all values are relative. However, natural law and natural rights are out the window. There is no excuse for violence! And to avoid the violence of the bully—whose numbers would be negligible in a non-violence society—stay out of dark alleys and put good fences around your neighborhoods!

I realize you have invested your life and reputation into promoting natural rights and aren’t liable to be swayed by a rambling letter from me. But if you really are into the search for “truth”—or at least greater probability, I’d advise you to read the books on list at end of enclosed article.

I believe the “revolution” will come from those of us who believe in the metaphysics of relativistic creative consciousness, the ethics of freewill and non-violence and the rituals—of sex and drugs and rock and roll???!!! Why wait till your next life to get hip? Get hip now!

(Try reading Tim Leary’s autobiography which is quite amusing . . . though I don’t agree with all his views on physiology.)

Carol Moore

c/o Libertarian Office

1550 Westwod Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90024.

The Editor Replies:

I know I promised my readers (May-June) to have done with the Gandhi Question, but these letters are too fascinating not to print. Both letters are interesting chiefly in revealing the inchoate and mystical mind-set of the modal Voluntaryist. The only other comment worth making on Ms. Valencia’s letter is that it has been twenty-five years since I have been called a “Randian.” While the charge is as absurd as the rest of her letter, it does have a kind of nostalgic charm.

Ms. Moore adds a special blather about the “new physics,” which, since the popular misinterpretation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle decades ago, is supposed to show us that there is no truth. We then find that since “there are no absolute standards of truth and justice,” that absolute non-violence follows from this . . . this what? Absolute truth?! Ms. Moore’s assertion that there are no absolute truths is either itself an absolute truth, and therefore self-refuting, or else it is only her own admittedly “relative” truth, in which case we can and should toss it in into a relative ashcan.

Ms. Moore’s blithe contention that since there “are no” absolute standards of truth and justice that non-violence therefore follows, is old-hat but absurd nonetheless. If there are no objective standards of justice to resolve disputes then the tendency will be—as throughout history—to settle disputes by sheer force, by the will to loot and power. And if Ms. Moore is serious about refusing to cut a blade of grass, then she is in for big trouble, since she will not be able to eat anything vegetable, let alone animal. With such advice, the human race would die out very quickly.

As for Arthur Koestler, who ever said that he was omniscient?

We might note also the unfortunate penchant of both letter-writers to engage in psycho-smears of their opposition. Not only is this invalid, but one is almost tempted to remind them of the admonition about people in glass houses.

Ms. Moore writes later to announce to us that she is at work on a tract on the New Physics and non-violence, to be entitled Anarchy is Peace. In the immortal words of Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came To Dinner: “Are we to be spared nothing?”

Meanwhile, back at Voluntaryist GHQ in Los Angeles, George Smith seems to have flipped out entirely. Mirabile dictu, The Craniac Update must have laid a restraining hand on the young ranter in his reply to our “New Menace of Gandhism.” For the true Smith now emerges, unedited and unbuttoned, frothing at the mouth, in his own Voluntaryist: the entire issue being Part I of a full-scale hymn of hate launched in our direction, a hymn which I suppose will continue on and on into the twenty-first century—for who knows how many parts this “article” is going to contain? At any rate, as we promised our readers, he will have to continue flailing away in the snake pit all by his lonesome, since indeed we have had our final say on the Gandhi Question.

High Tech ‘Crime’: A Call for Papers

The other day an old friend of mine, a libertarian and a veteran New Yorker who like myself is determinedly low tech, was lamenting the crime problem. “Somehow,” he grinned, “the one thing I can’t work up any worry about is ‘computer crime.’” We laughed heartily. But later I began to ruminate on the new areas of alleged crime opened by our new “high tech” technologies. The press is full of mounting hysteria about the alleged need for new laws to cope with new high-tech crimes. Young lads in Milwaukee, inspired by the marvelous and exciting film War Games, use their home computers and modems to enter secret computer information networks. The New York Times headline (Sept. 18) proclaims: “Prosecutors Find Laws Inadequate to Fight New Computer Crimes”. Meanwhile, senders of cable-TV programs fight to prosecute enterprising folk who build antennae on their roofs to catch signals without paying, or others who purchase satellite dishes to trap every possible TV frequency. And the Supreme Court is gravely hearing a case that might allow producers of video films to prohibit (or at best tax) people from using their own VCRs to tape TV programs or movie cassettes which they rent from entrepreneurs.

But wait a minute! Before we rush to pass new laws making criminals out of large groups of people, surely we should pause and think—and surely, too, our a priori presumption must be that whatever anyone is doing is legitimate, unless someone can prove otherwise. The burden of proof is on those who would make criminals out of previously peaceful and productive citizens. At first blush, it seems that, yes, we must pass new laws adapting the concept of crime to new technological realms. But then we must stop and consider: Why can’t the common law, which has always applied principles to new technological situations, be applied without creating new statute law—always a dubious instrument at best?

Take, for example, alleged “computer crimes.” We learn that, for what all of us would recognize as theft, such as the computer bank theft committed years ago in a lovely British film by Peter Ustinov, there is really no need for new laws. Thus, the New York Times (Sept. 18): “Prosecutors distinguish between two types of computer criminals. On the one hand, they said, are those who use computers as a tool to defraud banks or other businesses, often using modern technology to cover their tracks. Prosecutors and private computer security consultants said such cases were still the most common and the laws dealing with them were adequate.” (Italics mine.) In short, the regular laws against fraud and theft are sufficient; for such deeds which everyone would recognize as criminal there is no need for new laws.

What worries prosecutors, then, where their hands are now tied, are situations where young computer mavens or “hackers”, using their own computer, their own modem hooking them up legitimately to a telephone line, can extract information from other computers also hooked up to the same line. When, typically, a password is needed to hook into the other computer, the hacker can often discover the passwork by guesswork or by randomizing sequences of numbers.

Well, before we rush to laws, let us ponder the problem Why should it be illegal for a young hacker, using his own computer and modem, to hook into a modem of another computer? It seems to me that libertarianism decrees that every person should have the right to do whatever he wants with his own property. Only the hacker’s own property, and phone lines for which he has bought access, is involved in this “computer crime.” So how can it be a crime at all?

But how then can copyright be justified at all? If I buy a book from a bookstore, by what right does the word “copyright” stamped on the book prohibit me from reprinting and reselling it? The answer there—and the reason why copyright is a common-law action—is that I contracted with the bookstore (who in turn contracted with the publisher and author), when I bought the book not to reprint and resell it. In short, my contract decreed that I do not own the book outright; I own every aspect of the book except the right to print and sell it, which the publisher or author reserves to himself. Therefore, violation of copyright should indeed be illegal.

But the problem has been raised: What of third parties? Can they be said to violate copyright? Someone else, Zeke, sees the book in my house, or I lend it to him. He then copies it and reprints and sells the book. Since he didn’t sign any such contract, how can Zeke be violating copyright or doing anything illegal? My reply here is that whether Zeke signed any contract is immaterial. The important point is that my own title to the book was obtained with the right to copy reserved to the author/publisher; and that Zeke’s title cannot be any wider than my own. The point here is akin to a tort problem. Suppose that I had stolen rather than purchased the book. And suppose, too, that Zeke had bought the book from me in good faith, thinking that I had purchased it legitimately. Doesn’t he then really own the book, and can’t we then say that when Zeke is apprehended with the stolen book, that the injured bookseller can’t deprive him of it? Surely not, for a contract cannot convey a greater title than the one originally held. I stole the book, and therefore the book is stolen property, and Zeke must disgorge it if apprehended. He can then try to take damages out of my hide, for defrauding him. But the book properly belongs to the bookstore alone. Similarly, my title to any copyrighted book is not mine fully; I don’t have the right to copy, and therefore Zeke can’t have the right to copy either.

So while I defend the common law of copyright, I contend that there is nothing analogous to a copyright contract in the case of “theft of information” from a computer and its modem. The young hacker has not contracted anything with the other computer-owner; his only contractual status is with the phone company, whom he pays for access to its lines. And I can’t see that the hacker has committed any tort either. His “entry” into the other computer is only metaphoric. In actual fact, he was only able to get information through a phone line to which both owners have voluntarily hooked their computers.

I conclude, then, that there is here no computer crime at all. And that if the computer owner wants to safeguard his information from free-loaders, it is up to him to install security safeguards so as to make entry into his system impossible for those not paying a fee. The burden is on him to keep his own phone line free of unwanted persons. I conclude further that no new computer crime laws should be passed and that libertarians should oppose them as interfering with the property rights of hackers.

Why, in fact, do the owners keep their modems hooked into general telephone lines, despite the unchecked “theft of information”? Because of the great convenience in having a large number of computers hooked into each other to constitute a vast, nationwide data network. All right then; if the owners calculate their benefits and costs, and figure that the benefits to them of plugging into the information network outweigh the costs of hackers being able to use it for free, then so be it. If not, let the owners get out of the networks, or else tighten their security systems. Let them take their cue from the Defense Department, which has now decided to “build a fence” around their networks, especially their military computer networks, with “virtually uncrackable” coded messages and special passwords required for entry. (New York Times, Oct. 5).

Let us now turn from computer “crimes” to TV frequencies. The situation, I submit, is analogous. If a TV station, whether regular or cable, emits frequencies on a certain channel at a certain place, then it should have the private “ownership” of the right to transmit signals on such frequencies. Anyone else trying to broadcast on the same channel at the same place should be dubbed an aggressor against the property right of the pre-existing TV station. Indeed, that is precisely how the federal courts were beginning to apply the common law to the new technology of radio transmission (Tribune Co. v. Oak Leaves Broadcasting Station, Circuit Court, Cook County, Illinois, 1926), when the federal government, in panic that each radio station might obtain private property rights, rushed through laws to prevent it and to nationalize the airwaves (The Radio Act of 1927).

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But even though every station should have the unimpeded right to transmit signals on any given channel or frequency, it should not be able to interfere with anyone’s right to receive signals. The station does not and cannot own the signal itself, only the right to transmit the signals. Why should Tex, a man with his own satellite dish or antennae on his own property, not have the right to receive any signals he darn pleases with his own equipment? Cable-TV stations, of course, can and do scramble their signals so that TV set owners who don’t pay cannot receive a clear signal. And that’s fine. Let Home Box Office scramble its signals, then, and good luck to it. But I find it monstrous that Home Box Office can and does send out the gendarmes to harass people ingenious enough to build antennae on their roofs in Brooklyn and Queens and point them toward the World Trade Center, thus picking up HBO signals without payment. If HBO doesn’t like it, let it set up a better scrambling system. If it can’t do so or it finds that alternative too costly, then it should jolly well have to put up with ingenious freebies, with satellite dishes or pointed antennae.

Finally, there is the almost incredible harassment of VCR owners. If I buy a VCR and a blank tape, I should be able to tape a movie or other program off my own TV set. If the TV or movie people don’t like it, they should jolly well have to lump it. It is grotesque that movie producers might get the Supreme Court to agree to outlaw use of the VCR. Worse yet is that the movie producers are harassing poor SONY, who only manufactures and doesn’t use VCRs. Obviously, SONY has the deep pockets to enjoin and sue, which most home owners do not. Obviously, too, the government would have a great deal of difficulty mobilizing an enormous Gestapo, armed to the teeth, to break in on and confiscate or destroy the VCRs in many million American homes. Defend your VCRs to the death, fellow Americans! In practice, then, the movie people are not going to outlaw VCRs. They will just force SONY and the other manufacturers to pay a tax to the movie people, a tax which will be passed on to every VCR buyer. But the unfortunate principle—and the higher cost—might well be enshrined in the books.

The problem in all these cases is not whether “property rights” should or should not be upheld. The problem in each of these cases is: Who should have the property right? The computer hacker to do what he wants with his own computer and his access to the telephone lines, or the other computer owner? The signal sender or the signal receiver in the latter’s own equipment? The VCR owner or movie producers? In all of these cases I believe that the concept of copyright has been illegitimately extended to become invasive, and that the fact that the common law cannot combat these “crimes” is already an indication that they are not crimes at all.

But I am in an odd position here. Of all the people in the libertarian movement, I probably know the least about computer technology. There are few movement people lower tech than myself. And yet among all the computer mavens in the movement, I have seen no discussion of these thorny issues. But it is important to apply libertarian property rights theory, i.e. judgments in various areas on who is a criminal and who is a victim, to advancing technology. So on these matters I still have a relatively open mind. Before the Iron Door closes, I cheerfully invite libertarian theorists and high-tech mavens to submit papers, on any or all sides of this problem, for possible publication in the Libertarian Forum. Is there computer crime? Are VCR and satellite dish owners criminals? Please send in your discussions, and help advance libertarian theory.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Zelig, dir. by and with Woody Allen.

In recent years, Woody has been a highly erratic filmmaker. After reaching a glorious peak with the hilarious and perceptive Annie Hall and especially Manhattan, Woody trended downward. Sunrise Memories I like more than most critics, but it was still far below Annie Hall and Manhattan. The last Allen opus, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, an hommage to Ingmar Bergman’s only worthwhile movie, the charming and early Smiles of a Summer Night, was simply atrocious. Not only was it not funny, it had no redeeming features, and was a torture to sit through. Its brief span seemed like many hours, if not weeks.

Zelig has been hailed by almost all critics as his masterpiece, and they have waxed rhapsodic over its technical brilliance in integrating Allen into a host of old documentary film clips of the 1920s. Well, the hell with technical. From the point of view of the movie consumer, Zelig is a nothing, a zero, a brief piece of fluff with virtually no content. It is better than Midsummer Night because it is not a trial to sit through; it is simply blah, not funny at all, except for one or two quiet chuckles, and with nothing profound to say. And mine was not the only such reaction. I saw Zelig in the heart of Woody Allen Country, in what New Yorkers sardonically refer to as the Golden West Side. There was not a laugh for the whole length (again, brief) of the picture.

In no sense is Zelig a masterpiece or breakthrough. It is simply Allen treading water until the next one.

Never Say Never Again, dir. by Irvin Kershner. With Sean Connery.

Yes, Sean Connery, a they say, is James Bond. And is it grand to have him back. Even though the last Bond film, Octopussy, with Roger Moore, the second best Bond, was one of the better Bond movies, Moore’s perpetual elegant smirk can never substitute for Connery’s rugged persona. It is a pleasure to see Connery again surrounded by gorgeous babes and high-tech gadgets supplied by British Intelligence. It is also a pleasure to see Old Culture seduction on the screen again, shorn of all angst, kvetching, and endless bleatings about sensitivity, commitment, “relationships,” and “parenting.,” As Jan Hoffman writes in the Village Voice (November 1): “unlike the conscience-stricken New Men of the screen, he never even dangles the possibility of a ‘relationship.’ He continues to seduce and is seduced by his women with an oddly innocent shamelessness, as if feminism and post-1968 sexual dialogue had never happened.” And even though obviously getting on in years, he still bless him eats red meat and drinks martinis.

But there is, however, a problem. This is a new set of Bond producers and directors, with the results that the usually witty dialogue is now virtually non-existent, the marvelous metallic musical theme is replaced by blah rock, and much of the acting is inferior to the old team. Alec McCowen hams it up too much as the gadget-man “Q” x; Edward Fox is poor and hammy as “M” (how we miss the late Bernard Lee!); and the Ernest Blofeld, head of SMERSH, is far inferior to the original. When ordinarily fine actors like McCowen and Fox do badly, we can blame it on the director, and Kershner is obviously more at home in action shooting than he is at handling actors.

But of course Connery is back and we’ve got him, and that’s worth a great deal. And there is one great piece of dialogue, worthy of the classic Bonds (the best being Dr. No and From Russia with Love.) The main villain, SMERSH’s Number One, Largo, played very well by Klaus Maria Brandauer, after losing a sinister war game to Bond and seeing Bond grandly abandon the prize, says: “Do you lose as gracefully as you win?” To which, Bond replies, in his best style: “I don’t know. I’ve never lost.”

A word of warning: the title song, a piece of unmelodic trash, is not the great Harry Woods tune of 1936 with virtually the same title.

Cassandra Moore For Palo Alto City Council!

In this political off-year, Libertarians throughout the country have the chance to support an outstanding candidate for City Council of Palo Alto, California, and one with a good chance to win! Cassandra Moore is a 48-year-old businesswoman, head of her own real estate firm, and a Director-Elect of the Palo Alto Board of Realtors. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her husband, Thomas Moore, is an outstanding transportation economist at the Hoover Institution, who took the courageous step of endorsing Clark for President and not Reagan for President in 1980.

The City Council race is non-partisan, but Cassandra and her literature identify herself as a Libertarian, and she is one of nine candidates running for four at-large seats, and has an excellent chance to win. She has aggressively attacked the Palo Alto tyranny imposing no-growth on housing, preventing cable TV in the area, and the use of zoning laws to put neighborhood shops and restaurants out of business.

Cassandra Moore is a member of the People Against the Draft, the Nature Conservancy, Amnesty International, and the National Taxpayers Union, as well as the Libertarian Party. Send your dollars in support of this remarkable candidate! Contributions can be sent to Moore for City Council, 3766 La Donna Ave., Palo, Alto, CA 94306.

—— Double Convention Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVII, No. 9-10

September-October, 1983

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

Up From Chaos

Total Victory:
How Sweet It Is!

On Saturday, September 3, H-Hour of Armageddon Day in the four-year war against the Crane Machine finally arrived. Out of a chaotic, confused, wild, hectic, crazy, convention, in the closest, murkiest, most exciting all-out contest in Libertarian Party history, David P. Bergland of California won the nomination for President on the fourth ballot. Despite the narrowness of the race, it is the consensus of all the Political Mavens that the victory of the faction of principle over the “pragmatists”, as the Washington Post aptly called the two sides, was smashing and complete. The Crane Machine is dead, finished, kaput. In the words of Emil Franzi The Magnificent, our Military Maven, and the chief architect of the glorious victory: “it is the most decisive and total victory since the British took out the French at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), and that lasted for 109 years.” The Crane Machine (CM), routed, fled the field, and hopefully will never be heard from again.

(Yes it is indeed Franzi who has been our Military Maven, often cited in these pages. It Was Franzi who gave me hope in the dark days after the Denver convention of 1981, and it was Franzi who called all the shots with stunning accuracy during the great NatCom struggles of 1981-83.)

I The Lull Before the Hurricane

It wasn’t supposed to be an exciting convention. Since January, radio talk show host Gene Burns of Orlando, Florida had been campaigning hard for the Presidential nomination. No one was in the field to oppose him. The desperate Crane Machine, trying hard for a “big name” candidate, sought for months to induce Republican Representative Ron Paul to run against Burns, but without success. After several similar failures, it looked very much as if the CM had decided to give up, surrender their power without a struggle, support the Burns campaign as best they could, and bide their time for another few years, hoping that the rest of the Party would fall on its face and come begging to them for aid. Similarly, Paul Grant of Colorado, head of the “Majority Caucus” on NatCom and a leader of the Grand Coalition for the Party of Principle, was unopposed in his race for national chair. It all looked like a pleasant, serene, harmonious, and even boring convention—a consummation devoutly to be wished. As Franzi put it, “all we have to do now is cross the Rhine and take their bunker.”

For the naturally wary, in fact, it all looked too good. In the speeches to state and local LPs I made this summer I urged everyone to attend the convention, and promised them that somewhere, somehow there would be a contest. Little did I know its extent. I was worried that not many of our impoverished Libertarians would foot the expense to travel to New York to attend a no-contest convention. Furthermore, there was evidence that the CM was deliberately trying to hold down the attendance by delegates. The Northeast, particularly New York, is the stronghold of the Crane Machine, and the convention was being held on CM turf, while virtually the entire West (except Alaska), the heartland of our Party, was pro-Coalition. The fewer Westerners that showed up, the more it would be possible for the CM to pull a fast one. Apart from that one small nagging worry, all seemed secure.

In fact, the attendance of delegates and others, despite a frenzied last-minute spurt, was way down from previous conventions. The last Presidential convention at L.A. in 1979 amassed an attendance of over 1400 people. In 1981 at Denver, there were 900 persons; at this year’s PresCon in New York, total attendance was in the 700s. And while there were 719 authorized delegates this year, a maximum of only 540 appeared on the floor—and this included an unprecedented number of “ringers” for the Presidential vote (see below). The following day, after the Crane Machine had given up and the ringers gone home, total delegates on the floor fell to about 440.

II What Happened to Burns?

The peaceful lull, and all hopes for a serene convention, ended abruptly on Thursday, August 25, when I and’ a few others received a lengthy mailgram from Gene Burns announcing his withdrawal from the race, this announcement coming a mere four days before the convention. Burns made the mailgram public that afternoon, declaring that not enough funds had been raised for his race. Following a pattern that he had established in early and mid-June, Burns, when faced with a financial problem, dropped out of the race without consulting any of his LP friends and supporters, then promptly made himself incommunicado for many days, going fishing, and answering no calls.

From January until late May, it seemed to his LP supporters that the Burns campaign was in seagoing shape. Zipping around the country with several aides to virtually every state LP convention, tireless and indefatigable, the Burns campaign seemed problem-free. But the home staff in Orlando was not experienced in the LP, or apparently, in campaigning or simple accounting, since a piled-up debt shocked Burns and led him to withdraw from the race for the Presidency in early June. That time, however, he did not make a public announcement of withdrawal, and so his supporters were able to talk him back into the race by working out and presenting him with a campaign structure, a Master Plan, and arrangements for fund-raising. Everything seemed hunky-dory, certainly until the convention, after which a full structure and staff could be established. Some of us argued vociferously for an experienced LP campaign manager to go posthaste to Orlando and stay there until the convention. An Orlando manager could communicate constantly and directly with Burns, get the feel for problems as they develop, and make sure that he did not go off half-cocked again. We were overruled, however, partly because there was no obvious person ready to go to Orlando, and partly because we were assured that there was no problem, and that the campaign could be successfully decentralized with no man on the spot in Orlando. The fact that the more cautious of us were proved right when Gene pulled a Burns on August 25 gave us no comfort.

What was the problem with Burns? Deeper than the financial issue which was already in the process of being overcome when Gene pulled out, was the fact that we and Burns didn’t really know each other very well. Burns, for example, had been under the delusion that we are much stronger than we really are, and he became deeply discouraged when he would attend a state convention, expecting to see 100 people and only 25 would show up. Clearly, the great lesson of the Burns episode was that from now on, we must no longer buy a pig in a poke; from now on, especially for the key, vital nomination for the Presidency, we must nominate someone who is tried and true, a proven quantity, a hard-core principled libertarian, someone whom we know in our heart and in our gut will neither drop out nor sell out. But now we only had two or three days to find that someone.

III Into Chaos: The Unity Scam

We were in turmoil and chaos, and I would hate to see the phone bills for the top party and Coalition leaders for that three-day period. The great danger, as Bill Evers pointed out, was that a one-man-ruled “professional” machine such as the CM may not be able to do well in the long-run, when it will be outvoted by the Party majority. But in chaotic short-run crises, such as brought about by the disappearance of Burns, the Crane Machine could do very well. In brief, short-run forays, the CM could pour in a lot of money, quickly mobilize its troops, communicate orders swiftly, maneuver, advance, or retreat, while the principled majority of the party, confused, rudderless, slow to react, might well be conquered at the convention. In short, the sudden withdrawal of Burns provided a golden moment for the CM to attempt a mighty comeback, to fish in troubled waters. And that is precisely what it did, coming within a hair’s breadth of victory.

It became vitally important, then, for one of the Good Guys, for one of the leaders of the coalition for principle, to enter the race, and pronto. Fortunately, David P. Bergland, a California attorney, a hard-core and principled radical libertarian, needed no coaxing. He saw that the Libertarian Party needed a candidate, and a principled one, desperately, and so he threw his hat promptly and enthusiastically into the race. Specifically, Bergland became a candidate on Friday, August 26, the day after Burns’s withdrawal, with the following caveat to his supporters: “If you can find someone better, do it, but do it quickly.” By noon on Saturday, Bergland was permanently committed to the race. The former Burns supporters now became ardent Berglandians, and the old Gene Burns buttons were quickly recycled into buttons for Bergland. Bergland was a veteran campaigner, a known quantity, a man who had run successful campaigns for Vice President in 1976, and for U.S. Senate from California in 1980, where he amassed 200,000 votes, more than Ed Clark got from the same state that year for President. Great; we had Bergland in place; now, what would the Crane Machine do?

The situation was now hopelessly confused by a new and unexpected factor: it so happened that Roger MacBride, presidential candidate in 1976, who had displayed no interest whatever in the LP since his man Bill Hunscher was defeated by Ed Clark for the nomination in 1979, was holding a social gathering for friends of his in the LP the weekend before the convention at his summer home in Biddeford, Maine. In fact, MacBride and his Maine neighbor Hunscher were joint hosts at what I soon came to call Camp MacBride. The best evidence is that Roger had no devious political ends in mind when the social gathering was originally called. At any rate, the Burns withdrawal came only a day or two before the MacBride party, and Roger quickly seized the opportunity to come roaring back into the LP as unifier, harmonizer, and kingmaker of the Libertarian Party. Originally, and before the Bergland announcement, MacBride’s unity pitch was probably sincere enough albeit misguided; his first thought was to invite leaders of a broad spectrum of the party, including Dick Randolph, Ed Crane, Ed Clark and myself to decide what to do and to pick a candidate.

In politics, whenever I hear the word “unity”, to paraphrase the famous words of a German politico of the 1930’s, “I reach for my revolver”. For almost always, “unity” is a scam, a call to abandon principle and follow the leader into some form of tyranny or sellout. Indeed, one of the best statements uttered at this convention was that of Tonie Nathan (Ore.) when she announced her race for the Presidential nomination: “This used to be the party of principle. Now it is the party of ‘unity’ ”. Or, to put it another way, genuine unity is only viable in a context of shared values and premises. Unity is only proper within a framework of Justice. Anything else is a hoax, a scam, and an implicit call for the betrayal of principle.

When MacBride called me, before the weekend, he made it clear that his first choice for the Presidency was Dick Randolph. I made equally clear my lack of enthusiasm for Randolph, a top Craniac politico, who had run a disastrous campaign for governor of Alaska in 1982. Approximately twenty-four hours later, after Dave Bergland had entered the race, MacBride gave Bergland his enthusiastic endorsement. Two days after that, MacBride had become chairman of the campaign Committee for Earl Ravenal for President. This is indeed a fast-moving world.

In between MacBride’s endorsements for Bergland and for Ravenal, Bergland received a conference call from the guests assembled at Camp MacBride. Randolph, Chris Hocker (emissary from Crane, who could not attend), MacBride, and Hunscher asked Bergland pointed questions about his campaign. The key question of course was: What would be the role of Crane and Hocker, leaders of the Crane Machine, in a Bergland campaign? Bergland replied that since they controlled a lot of magazines, he would be happy for those magazines’ enthusiastic support. He also declared, and repeated this intention in his Master Plan, released during the convention, that he would ask Crane to help in fund-raising, Howie Rich to work on Eastern ballot drives, and to ask various Machiners such as David Boaz, Sheldon Richman, Chris Hocker, and Tom Palmer to help in research and writing for the Bergland campaign. In sharp contrast, MacBride claimed that Bergland planned to deny Rich and Hocker any active role in his campaign.

The Biddeford group began to wax impatient. They were not interested in any of this. They were interested in only one thing: “What would be the managerial roles of Crane and Hocker in your campaign?” Bergland was firm. “Absolutely none”, and proceeded to explain why. It was at that point, so the story goes, that MacBride decided to turn to another candidate, a “unity” candidate for the presidential race. But curiously enough, Earl Ravenal, the Crane Machine candidate for the nomination, made precisely that same pledge, publicly and privately, during the convention: That since Crane and Hocker, though good friends of his, are considered divisive, they have agreed to play no managerial role whatever in his campaign. Since the Bergland and Ravenal positions on Crane/Hocker were supposedly identical, MacBride’s turn to Ravenal on the basis of superior “unity” looked slightly odd, to say the least.

Ironically, Earl’s statement on Crane and Hocker proved to be counter-productive. Most of the delegates, in their lack of savvy, had had no idea that Ravenal was a close friend of theirs. The reaction of many of them to his statement was: “What? He’s a good friend of those two? I’m voting for Bergland.”

In fact, there was no excuse for Roger to continue the unity line after Bergland, a perfectly good candidate, had entered the race. It was one thing for MacBride to look around desperately for a nominee when we had no candidate. It was quite another to continue to look around after Bergland had announced. Such action was patently sowing disunity rather than unity.

Indeed, it is absurd to speak of the nominee of one of two factions as the “unity” candidate. When Alicia Clark made a late entry into the national chair race in 1981, she sincerely believed that she was the unity candidate, come to harmonize and integrate the two previous warring factions (Crane Machine, and the Coalition for a Party of Principle.) Soon after her election, she came to learn that the two factions were not simply pointless personality squabbles but profoundly clashing groups warring over ideology and strategy: the principled versus the opportunistic “pragmatists.” When she came to realize this profound fact, there occurred during the last two years, a virtual amalgam of the old Alicia Clark and Mason forces into one Grand Coalition for Principle. There were now two factions and two candidates, Bergland and Ravenal, so on what basis could a CM candidate call for “unity”? In a few days, to our horror, we were to find out.

When Roger MacBride and Bill Hunscher endorsed Earl Ravenal for President, I asked our Political Mavens (see below) what the value of such endorsements might be. The unanimous consensus was that MacBride’s endorsement was worth about 5 votes. “Hell,” said one, “half the delegates out there have never heard of Roger MacBride.” As for Hunscher, his very presence angered many delegates profoundly. After being routed by Clark for the Presidential nomination in 1980. Hunscher fled the party and joined the Republican Party, virtually wrecking the New Hampshire LP in the process. Now here he was, four years later, having the arrant chutzpah to pop up again and counsel us on what candidate to select. Indeed, as Hunscher fled the field once again, after the Ravenal defeat, my old friend Judith Blumert (California) got in the best single zinger of the convention. “So long, Bill,” she called out loudly, “see you in four years!”

Out of Camp MacBride, riding the unity theme, came the pretentious Biddeford Statement, which the reader should hold in mind until the end of this story. Unpleasantly reminiscent of standard ploys of Republicans and Democrats, the Biddeford Statement, signed by all the participants, pledged everyone’s best effort to support whoever was nominated for President by the Libertarian Party.

IV Building Bergland Central

It was a long, bloody long convention, starting on Monday, August 29, and building to a stunning climax on the morning of Saturday, the 3rd. On Sunday the 4th the election of officers was to take place. The official business proceedings of the convention, the keynote, bylaw and platform debates were to begin on Thursday. The delegates therefore came in spurts, some on Monday, and a lot more on Thursday. On Friday came the “ringers”, and others interested only in the Presidential vote.

On Sunday, August 28, the day before the opening of the convention, my old friend Burt S. Blumert (CA), for many years an unsung and neglected hero of the Libertarian Party and movement, decided that since the Bergland forces would benefit enormously from a central headquarters suite at the convention, that he would rent such a suite. Reserving a suite on Sunday, Burt went down the next day to the Sheraton Centre, headquarters of the convention, to case the various suites and select one. I tagged along as friend and kibitzer. After hassling at length with the labyrinthine Sheraton bureaucracy, Bery finally rented a large two-room suite for the week and also installed a rented photocopier. When the top Bergland people came into town that day and the next, they were dazzled to find a fully equipped suite already in place. Room 4501, what I came to call Bergland Central, then became for the rest of the week the nerve center, the communications, network, message and planning center for the Bergland for President Committee. The suite was also used to give parties for the delegates almost every night, and to feature Bergland speeches to groups of delegates.

Bergland Central was particularly necessary at the New York PresCon because, as our unhappy Political Mavens pointed out, the Sheraton Centre was not really built as a convention hotel. It has no central place to communicate with delegates. Other large hotels typically have restaurants and bars which, along with the floor and corridors, serve as places to “work” and communicate with the delegates. But here there was virtually nothing; no real restaurant or bar, and only a small combination that was open only a few hours a day. Besides, there were so many restaurants and bars nearby that there could be no central gathering places for Libertarians.

Another word about the hotel. Overpriced, underqualitied, it was one of the shlockiest hotels in LP convention history. Outside the hotel is the raunch and sleaze of Times Square. Hookers, dope addicts, and other street folk hang around the outside of the hotel at night, and the taxi drivers in front of the Sheraton are the scuzziest in New York, disreputable and scruffy oafs who would only take you to a few locations, and who fought among themselves for fare, sometimes almost running over the would-be passengers in the process. Furthermore, in an outrageous ripoff that scarcely made friends for the FLP in the other state parties, if Joe doakes called up the hotel and asked for the “Big Apple Weekend” rate at the Sheraton, he would be charged $65 per night for single or double, whereas if he called and said “Hey, I’m with the LP convention!”, he would be charged $82 per night—a $17 “surtax” for proclaiming oneself a Libertarian! (The Monday through Thursday, “Value Line Special” rate was $76 a night, a $6 Libertarian premium.) Usually, of course, conventioneers reap a discount from regular rates, not a surtax.

In a day or two, Bergland Central was in full-scale, impressive, and seagoing operation. Room 4501 was occupied twenty-four hours a day, with someone always there to receive and send messages and to answer the phone, “Bergland for President.” Head honcho and floor manager, Franzi the Magnificent, arrived on Tuesday, and was promptly installed in the suite as resident. Also sleeping in the suite were other top Berglandians, including John Mason, and our indispensable gofer, Mark Pickens, of the Radical Caucus and the San Francisco Party, who stayed in the suite virtually every minute of the week, and in the words of an admirer “thought, ate, slept, and lived Bergland.” Emil Franzi dubbed Pickens admiringly, “the Rookie of the Year.” Tom Shook (Arizona), a powerfully built ex-SDSer turned proud “redneck”, was the official “smuggler” for the suite, bringing in cases of beer under the vigilant eyes of the hotel polizei.

Featured at the suite were the Political Mavens, the floor manager and his assistants who were the nerve center of the Bergland campaign. Floor manager was Franzi the Magnificent; top assistants were the savvy Steve Davis (Ga.), who ran the computerized count of delegates; Richard W. Suter (Ill.), a bubbling, witty and highly knowledgeable Maven; John Mason (Co.), the heroic standard-bearer of the Coalition for Principle forces in the 1981 struggle at Denver; and Bill Evers (Calif.), tireless scholar and organizer, and my veteran comrade in the four-year struggle against the Crane Machine. Other highly effective regional floor leaders for Bergland were young Christopher Winter (Hawaii), the Hawaii state chair; Jim Lewis (CT), who would later gain the Vice-Presidential nomination; Geoff Steinberg (PA); and Dave Saum (VA). Another key person in the Bergland suite was Davis’s wife, Dr. Heide Hartmann, who ran the computer, which gave continuing printouts on which delegates were firmly for Bergland, leaning to Bergland, undecided, leaning to Ravenal, or firmly for Ravenal. Characteristically, when asked by Davis and Hartmann whether we should have a computerized “count” of the delegates, Franzi answered: “Sure. It will be very helpful.” “And besides,” he added, grinning happily, “The computer will scare the s- out of them.”

It should be added that “counting” is a crucial function of floor managers. Counting of course does not simply mean adding up the numbers of delegates. It means that the floor manager and his assistants are constantly “working” the floor and the delegations, getting a feel for the “count” of who is for whom, who is undecided, etc. During the actual balloting, they move constantly around the floor, taking samples of delegates from various representative states, getting the feel of the ever-changing situation. In addition, the Mavens perceive the impact of different moves by themselves and by the opposition, decide what countermoves will be made, etc. Especially in a close race, the floor managers must take their readings and make their moves rapidly and be ever ready to meet new situations and the moves of the enemy. Decisions must be swift, and correct most of the time, and ability at this craft depends on experience as well as innate talent.

As I got to know our Mavens during the week, I concluded that they are surely the best in the LP. In the midst of an amorphous, highly difficult and ever exploding situation, Franzi, Suter and the others kept their cool and were able to keep on top of the morass with amazing accuracy.

I also discovered that the Mavens on both sides keep in continual touch with each other, discussing the various moves, feeling each other out, making suggestions, and hoping to pick up stray bits of important information from the other. Also each side generally has too much respect for the other’s ability as managers to try to con the other. The Crane Machine honchos might spread Disinformation among the delegates, but they don’t presume to try to con the Mavens on the other side. Each side respects the ability of the other as craftsmen. Thus, in a post-victory analysis, our Mavens all agreed that the CM almost beat us because they had the smarts to put in Dick Randolph, their only real pro, as floor manager. “If Howie Rich (who ran the Guida campaign in had been their floor manager,” they said, “we would have won easily on the second ballot. And if Crane himself had been their manager, we would have beaten them on the first.” “How is Howie as a counter?” one of us asked. “Pah,” replied one of our Mavens, “Howie can’t count his change.”

Our Mavens were worried from the first day of the convention. As Franzi concluded when it was all over, “This was the most difficult, hardest-to-read, most uncontrollable convention I have ever been to, of any party.” From the very beginning, all the Mavens agreed that there were “an enormous number of undecideds, of wimps and mushheads out there, even more than at Denver.” How do you figure out where the undecideds will jump? And information was at a minimum. As Franzi reported during the middle of the week, “there are still lots of delegates out there coming in asking, ‘Where’s Burns?’” By Thursday, it was the general consensus, concurred in by the Machine’s Mavens, that we were definitely ahead. “If the vote were taken now,” they agreed, “the vote would be about 180-190 for us, 120-130 for them, with about 250 needed to elect.” But the Machine vowed that they would overtake us by the time of the voting on Saturday. For one thing, they knew they had several aces up their sleeves.

V Enter Earl Ravenal

Earl Ravenal, professor of international relations at Georgetown University, entered shortly after Bergland as the Crane Machine candidate. It is true that very few of the delegates had ever heard of Ravenal, but in this chaotic situation the lack of knowledge worked for him, for he seemed a charming and knowledgeable gentleman of stature, which indeed he certainly is. To the delegates, he appeared simply to be the candidate of the MacBride Unity Faction; Ed Crane kept a very low profile all week, in evidence only on the actual day of the balloting.

Bill Evers and I were two of the very few who knew Ravenal, from our days at the Cato Institute, where he has served for many years as a Board member. My first, instinctive reaction when I heard the news that the Machine had entered Ravenal as candidate was the same as that of a number of my friends, all of whom liked and admired the man whom Ed Crane affectionately refers to as “Earl the Pearl.” That first instinctive reaction of each of us was: “But he’s not a libertarian!” A libsymp (libertarian sympathizer) for sure; a man generally in agreement with libertarian concerns. But a hardcore principled libertarian? Certainly not. The sort of man a presidential candidate might ask for scholarly advice on foreign affairs, but not the sort of man whom the LP should make its presidential candidate. I knew that Earl had told me several years ago that some day he might like to run for President on the LP ticket, but that before that its platform would have to become far less extreme. I also knew that in several Cato summer seminars in recent years, Ravenal had told the participants that he was not a Libertarian, but a sympathizer. In addition, many recalled that in the past, at least, Ravenal had been hesitant about the full right of women to have abortions. How to research Ravenal’s views in the almost zero time available, and to get those views to the delegates?

Several intellectuals in the Bergland camp swung instantly into action, looking up articles by Ravenal in Reason and elsewhere in 1978 expounding a raft of important deviations from libertarian principle. Furthermore, interviews with Ravenal on his current views elicited a number of problems, including softness toward the draft in wartime or other emergency, great reluctance to abolish the welfare state, apologia for the illegal CIA-run Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam—and in general a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis toward issues rather than basing his views on a solid groundwork of moral principle and natural rights. Under hard-hitting questioning at a Radical Caucus (RC) candidates’ meeting Wednesday night, Ravenal insisted that he now admired the consistency of the LP platform and that he now opposed the draft root and branch. His reply to a question eliciting specifics of what government programs he would not abolish at this time was unsatisfactory, however; and he continued to justify the Phoenix program, given the hard choices faced by the Defense Department in a war we should have pulled out of. In general, it was disquieting to find an LP candidate thinking from the point of view of a Defense Department official, which he himself had been for three years, rather than from the point of view of someone outside of, and opposed to, the government.

Furthermore, Ravenal got angry quickly under the rigorous questioning, proclaiming that he would never apologize for his work in the Defense Department. This gave rise to widespread speculation on whether he would lose his cool under far more hostile questioning by journalists and others during the heat of a long, grueling Presidential campaign.

Ravenal’s continuing support in interviews for compulsory vaccination revealed his troubling utilitarian rather than rights orientation. And even in his area of expertise, foreign policy, his strong suit according to his supporters, Ravenal continued to deviate sharply from the libertarian principle of non-intervention. Even in convention week, Earl Ravenal continued to justify in retrospect his position on Iran during the hostage crisis. His excessively legalistic view—to put it mildly—was that the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was legally sovereign U.S. soil; that therefore the attack on the embassy was equivalent to an attack on the U.S. and an act of war; and that military attack on Iran by the U.S. was therefore justified. Whatever that is, it is certainly not a creed of non intervention.

Apart from the RC questioning, how to get this vital information on Ravenal out to the delegates? The Radical Caucus Central Committee, then still pro-Bergland, issued a blue sheet of facts on Ravenal, and I wrote a widely distributed Open Letter to the delegates, a rather gently written letter not in my usual rip-roaring style. The letter had the positive effect of alerting undecided delegates and others, who knew little about Ravenal, about the grave ideological problem with Ravenal’s candidacy. The brunt of the letter was that, after the Burns episode, it is vitally important to nominate a tried and true hard-core Libertarian for President, and that meant Dave Bergland, a man we could trust without reservation. Perhaps the most effective sentence in my letter was a cry from the heart: “Never do we want to wake up one morning next March, June, or September and say ‘My God, did he say that?’ ”

Each nominee was entitled to a nominator and two seconders. Ed Clark was the obvious choice to nominate Bergland. I was originally supposed to be one of the seconders. My letter had done essential negative work, but now it was important to put in someone with a more positive image among the delegates. Dave Nolan (CO) was a fine choice for my replacement. Although at least as ardent a Bergland partisan as myself, he was perceived by the convention as more of a unifying factor, and he had built a new constituency among the delegates by serving as chairman of the platform committee. Some of them were urging a Nolan draft for president. The other Bergland seconder—an excellent change of pace—was Lori Massie, who was later selected as regional NatCom rep from Florida.

The big argument for Ravenal by the CM/Unity Faction was that he, as a professor at Georgetown, was a candidate of stature. The counter-argument was that stature as a professor does not necessarily mean stature as a candidate, and that the most “presidential” occupation, after all, in America is that of attorney, which is what Dave Bergland happens to be. Besides, we have had only one Ph.D.-Eastern Establishment professor as President in American history, Woodrow Wilson, and he was probably the greatest single disaster in the history of the Presidency. When asked what is Ravenal’s “natural constituency”, Bill Evers quipped: “One-fifth of the Georgetown faculty.”

Another powerful counter-argument was Ravenal’s proudly proclaimed past and present membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, the infamous Rockefeller-controlled foreign policy outfit. Ravenal’s proclamation that the CFR is a harmless discussion group that gives one the opportunity to have frequent lunches with David Rockefeller to try to influence Rockefeller and others from within, scarcely sat well with the many anti-CFR buffs among the delegates. His further explanation that he had refused an invitation to join the dread Trilateral Commission, which he claimed is a policy-making group, hardly helped matters. Many delegates wondered why in heck Ravenal was even invited to the Trilaterals, and the indefatigable anti-Rockefeller researcher Howard Katz (Mass.) did spade work among the delegates, pointing out that, technically, the Trilaterals are also a discussion group rather than a policy-making body. Many delegates were instantly converted to Bergland when Ravenal’s CFR membership was pointed out. “My God,” said a prominent LPer, “if Ravenal is nominated, what do I do with all my Trilateral and CFR charts? Then we’ll be on them!” Another effective point was that a Ravenal nomination meant that we could kiss goodbye to the votes of all disaffected Reaganites, all the tax-rebels, all the anti-tax groups, Birchers, and many others who would never ever vote for a CFR Presidential candidate, “discussion group” or no discussion group.

After all the hullaballoo, the question still remains why Earl Ravenal suddenly entered the race. Undoubtedly, the Crane Machine/Unity Faction lied to him, in the inimitable Craniac manner, telling him that his candidacy was desperately needed to save the Libertarian Party. Such an argument might have seemed plausible had no one else entered the race. What arguments they used to convince Earl that a Bergland candidacy still required him to save the Party I do not know, but they must have been lulus. In a sense, Earl Ravenal is the major unfortunate figure of this convention, a good man who was used, abused, lied to, and manipulated by the Machine.

If Earl Ravenal was lied to, what was the motivation for MacBride and Hunscher to suddenly re-enter the party on his behalf? Certainly an intense desire to be kingmaker. But I think there is something else going on here. Emil Franzi, in his typically perceptive way, has engaged in an incisive sociological class analysis of the composition of the Libertarian Party. “There are three groups in the Party,” he points out, “the preppies, the rednecks and the hippies.” The “preppies” or would-be aspiring preppies are the Crane Machine, the epitome of the three-piece suit Eastern Establishment; the “hippies” are the Radical Caucus, and the “rednecks” are the Alicia Clark supporters of 1981. There is not, of course, a 1-to-1 correlation here, but the broad breakdown provides a remarkably accurate fit of the three factions. The Crane Machine is the “respectable” preppie elite, the opportunistic seekers after power; the rednecks are the unpretentious populist voters, the people of the heartland of America.

Let us then turn to MacBride and Hunscher. Both of them are ultra-preppie. The Preppie Connection extends also to Earl Ravenal, and to the entire Crane Machine, which is uptight, Eastern Establishment, and pretend-intellectual. So that when Roger MacBride, in a dramatic moment at one of the Ravenal open meetings, took off his jacket and dramatically showed his “hatchet” marks from the Crane Machine and proclaimed his own willingness to forgive and forget in the name of the Unity Scam, he was reverting to the preppie Ties that Bind. Besides, the famous breakup between MacBride and his campaign manager Crane in 1976, it turns out, was trivial, petty, and strictly personal, having no ideological components whatever, centering on Crane’s opposition to Roger’s flying his own private plane on campaign trips around the country. Considering that kind of reason for their breakup, the Unity reconciliation of these two Titans in 1983 becomes far less puzzling.

VI Pushing The Unity Scam: Snaring Bob Poole

The Unity Faction had a problem. How could they demonstrate to the delegates that they were truly the “unity” group in the Party? To do so, they had to get some supporters beyond the Crane Machine and Roger MacBride. Specifically, they had to get some leaders of both Left and Right to make their Unity pitch plausible. On the right, they asked John Hospers to be their Vice-Presidential candidate, but Hospers would have none of it. Indeed, the hawkish right-wing of the Party, as mobilized in the small but tightly-knit Libertarian Defense Caucus, were disgusted with both candidates. Bergland they considered a radical, and Ravenal was a CFR member who had long been associated with the Institute for Policy Studies, which all dedicated right-wingers absurdly claim to be the KGB agitation and espionage post in the United States. Tonie Nathan was the Defense Caucus candidate, and after she dropped out, the Defense people, with the exception of Robert Poole, Mike Anzis (CA) and some other leaders, went for Bergland as the “lesser of two evils.”

But the Craniacs were able to snare one important rightwinger, Robert Poole, Jr., editor of Reason magazine. Poole, though formerly an enemy of the Machine, and whose now defunct frontlines was a leading architect of its overthrow, had long been looking for a less pure, broad-based, big name candidate, Libertarian Party. Besides, he fell hook, line, and sinker for the Unity Scam, trusted a promise in writing from Crane and Hocker that they would play no role in a Ravenal campaign, accepted a future post on a supposedly all-powerful three-man Ravenal Campaign Oversight Committee, and generally fell for the self-same promises that the Crane Machine had broken egregiously only four year before. My reaction was that if Bob had only reread his own frontlines he wouldn’t have fallen for this hokum. There is a wise saying that if you are cheated once by another person it is his fault; but that if you allow yourself to be cheated by the same guy once more, you too are to blame. Or, in the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, “To lose one parent is a misfortune; to lose two, smacks of carelessness.”

VII: The Radical Caucus: the Stab-in-the Back

Radicalism was a powerful force at this convention, among RC members and numerous sympathizers. How powerful may by gauged by the fact that Joe Fuhrig, the RC candidate for Vice-President, received 61 votes on the first ballot on Sunday and 91 votes on the second. The Radical Caucus was founded in early 1979 by Justin Raimondo (San Francisco) to back radical hard-core principle in the LP, the main activity of the RC being the organizing of members of the LP and the publishing of the periodical Libertarian Vanguard. In the spring of 1979, Bill Evers and myself, in the process of defecting from the Crane Machine because of its growing opportunism, joined the RC Central Committee. The RCCC is the 7-person governing body of the RC; its membership is not empowered to vote in any elections for officers. Eventually, the RC intends to call a National Conference to regularize its operations and have periodic elections from the membership; but in the meanwhile it is a body governed by a seven-person self-perpetuating body.

For years, there was only a six-man CC, and soon it became apparent that there were two basic factions on the CC: the laughingly but accurately termed “Revolutionary Tendency (RT)”, consisting of Raimondo and Eric Garris (San Francisco); and the rest of us, including myself, Evers, and two old Stanford friends of Evers, Scott Olmsted and Colin Hunter. Last year, the flaky and volatile RT relinquished the editorship of Vanguard to the more sober rest-of-us. Specifically, the shift from Raimondo to Olmsted-and-Evers meant a shift from pictures of burning police cars and a format aping the Young Spartacist of 1968 to a sober, professional-looking newsletter brimming with incisive news and critiques of the libertarian movement as well as analyses and bibliographies of real-world issues. The improvement in Vanguard was enormous, and Raimondo seemed perfectly happy to retire and concentrate on his novel-in-progress about AIDS and the CIA.

Evers had been a leading figure in the Burns campaign, a development one would think would be greeted with enthusiasm by his supposed comrades in the Radical Caucus. Instead, Raimondo and Garris were eternally sour and gripey, almost as if they personally envied and resented Evers’s prominence in the LP. But of course the RT claimed just the opposite. They began to complain increasingly about the “emphasis on personalities” in Evers’s and my attitude toward the malignant domination of the Party by the Crane Machine. Privately and publicly, we pointed out to our RT volatiles that there is no such thing as Platonic ideas floating in some sort of abstract vacuum, that ideas are held, for good or bad, by people, and that people form machines and try to dominate the Libertarian Party. When such people act badly, sell out principle, and dominate libertarian institutions, it becomes necessary to attack them, their ideas and their actions. All in all, it was a strange position for the RT to take; usually it is the wimps and mushheads in movements who shrink as if from the head of Medusa at any negative criticism. But the RT has never been known for its saintly forbearance.

The Radical Caucus Central Committee came to the PresCon on Monday of convention week supposedly full of enthusiasm for Dave Bergland. And no wonder: He and his campaign manager Sharon Ayres had always been friendly to the RC and the radical cause. And Less Antman, RC member and editor of Caliber, the outstanding state LP newsletter from California, had long been an effective and rousing speech-writer for Bergland campaigns. And yet, as the week progressed, a strange and almost lunatic volatility seemed to take possession, not only of Garris and Raimondo, but also of long-time Rocks of Gibraltar, Olmsted and Hunter. Sporting Bergland buttons and pledging to Bergland and Ayres their all-out enthusiasm for the Bergland campaign, Garris, Raimondo, Olmsted and RCCC member Dianne Pilcher (Florida) fluctuated wildly like yo-yos for three days. One minute enthusiasts for Bergland, three hours later they would start muttering about how Ravenal was “impressive”; three hours after that they were back to hailing Bergland; and so on for three entire days. Talk about your “volatile”; after a while I began to form the impression, in talking with my RCCC comrades, that I was living in a looney bin. For example: on Wednesday night, while subjecting Earl Ravenal to searching questioning, Raimondo was hopping up and down muttering about Ravenal’s warmongering and pure evil; twelve hours later, Raimondo officially endorsed Ravenal and the next day spoke at a “Unity” meeting for Earl.

By Wednesday night, all four RCCC comrades were showing a distinct trend toward Ravenal, a trend which to me was incomprehensible. Although volatile, none of these people is stupid, and yet they began to argue on the intellectual level of nine-year olds, and to argue in total opposition to their usual hard-core radical stance. Two examples will suffice:

When, two weeks before he pulled out, an interview with Gene Burns was published by the Libertarian Defense Caucus, Burns took a horrendously hawkish view of what he would do as President if Nicaragua installed short-range missiles. Bill Evers quickly contacted Burns, and showed him the fallacy of his argument, including the fact that such a stance would justify an immediate Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Burns quickly saw the error of his ways and recanted, and he had issued a retraction statement before he withdrew from the race.

Yet for Raimondo, Garris and other radicals in the party, such as the Crane Machiner Sheldon Richman, one slip, even retracted, and you’re out. Hard core to the hilt and even beyond. And yet . . . when numerous deviations of Ravenal were pointed out to our self-proclaimed r-r-revolutionaries, suddenly the milk of human kindness took over. “Well, he’s getting better”; “he’s learning”; “he says he’s not a statist”, and other utterances so far out of synch with the usual stance of Raimondo, Garris, Olmsted, Richman et al that it boggled the mind.

Or take my conversation Wednesday night with Scott Olmsted, a bright young Ph.D. in decision theory. After pointing out the impeccable hard-core radical record of Dave Bergland, and contrasting it to the decidedly leaky and softcore record of Ravenal, Scott turned to me and said, perfectly soberly, “Well, you can’t predict the future.” Apart from the fact that this little gem contradicts Olmsted’s own decision theory which claims that one can predict the future, the answer was so absurd that I could only gape. Otherwise, I would have had to descend to degrading quasi-baby talk, to explain patiently that of course no one can absolutely predict the future, but that one goes on the best evidence one has, that the evidence for Bergland’s hard-coreness was far superior, etc. ad nauseam.

After these chilling conversations Wednesday night, I concluded that our Gang of Four (Garris, Raimondo, Olmsted, and Hunter) were about to endorse Ravenal, and that, given the absurdity of their arguments, there were only two explanations for this gross betrayal of principle, of friends, of their word, and of honor itself. Either they had jointly gone crazy, in a highly improbable folie a quatre; or they had, quite literally, sold out. Being an economist rather than a psychobabbler, I was strongly inclined to the latter explanation.

An RC Central Committee meeting had been called for Thursday noon, to consider possible endorsements, to be followed by an RC membership meeting at 1 P.M. When I got to the floor late Thursday morning, I found that matters were even worse than I had expected. Without even calling a meeting of the CC, the Gang of Four had issued a leaflet proclaiming that the RCCC had endorsed Earl Ravenal for President. I was stunned, pointing out that, (a) no meeting had been called, and (b) only a majority of the RCCC would make such an endorsement. Demanding an immediate meeting of the Central Committee, I pointed out that this unseemly haste and breach of form was relatively minor, since they had the votes and a majority was clearly ready to move for a Ravenal endorsement. I tendered my immediate and irrevocable resignation from the Radical Caucus, and the meeting, to all intents and purposes, was over.

I added a minor but interesting point: that Justin Raimondo, who, with Eric Garris, are the self-proclaimed Leninists on the RCCC, had publicly distributed a leaflet attacking Evers and myself for not being willing to repudiate Gene Burns absolutely after his Nicaragua gaffe. I pointed out that this was not only an arrant breach of Leninist caucus discipline, but also of proper behavior in any other caucus, be it Menshevik, Debsian, redneck, or sewing circle: Namely, you refrain from public criticism of fellow caucus members. If such a rule was not to be followed, there was no point in having a “caucus” at all.

Since I was no longer a member of the RC, I did not go to the open meeting, which I understand was a disaster, with Evers breaking down in tears amidst the emotionalism of the meeting. The reaction of his former friends and comrades in the Gang of Four was revealing: They all accused Evers of faking it, of only pretending to cry for effect. This is highly revealing of the personal character of the Gang of Four, one that I suppose could be called “callous” if one wanted, for some obscure reason, to be very very kind.

The next day, Garris and Raimondo appeared with MacBride, Crane and a bunch of other Unity Factionalists at a Unity meeting. The high point of unconscious humor at the meeting came when Raimondo urged a vote for Ravenal in the name of Party unity, going on to say that when Ravenal was nominated the right-wing would be driven out of the party!

And so the Crane Machine, by Thursday, had built its Unity facade. From the right-wing it had snared Poole, and from the Radicals of the Left came the Gang of Four, who constituted the majority of the RC Central Committee.

What had happened? We don’t know for sure, but rumors abounded that my erstwhile friends and comrades had sold out—sold out for promised jobs and especially influence and power in the Ravenal campaign. The Crane Machine was willing to promise a lot to suborn the radicals, and particularly to capture Garris’s excellent ability as organizer and vote-getter. When it was all over, our Mavens estimated that Garris’s sellout cost Bergland 30 votes. Considering that the eventual Bergland victory was by 40 votes, it is clear that the RC sellout was a powerful weapon, and that without it Bergland would have won handily.

Specifically, the Crane Machine, noticing the argument in Vanguard over Leninism between Raimondo and Evers and myself, sensed that there was a rift in the RCCC that they could exploit. David Boaz, Crane underling as Vice President of the Cato Institute, approached the RT, and for three days Raimondo, Garris and the rest dickered with the Crane Machine behind our backs, in the meantime using their sudden volatility and inane arguments as a cover for their secret machinations. The rumored price for which they cut the deal was as follows: Garris and Raimondo got promises of full-time jobs in the Ravenal campaign and of veto power over all other posts in the campaign; and Scott Olmsted obtained a seat on the allegedly all-powerful three-man Campaign Oversight Committee, along with Randolph and Poole. Not only was this a betrayal of principle, of friendship, of personal integrity, and of honor, it was also stupid—for what made these bozos think that the Crane Machine would keep such lavish promises? Especially when very similar promises by the same people in the 1979-80 campaign were broken as soon as the Clark nomination was secured? In fact, a high ranking Crane Machine operative was laughing out loud during the week to one of our top Mavens, chuckling about how, on Sunday night, the entire Gang of Four would have been out on their ear. It almost, but only almost, would have been worth a Ravenal nomination to see these renegades, get their just deserts. Clearly, they should have held out for the traditional price: thirty pieces of silver, cash on the barrelhead.

Emil Franzi’s comment to the Ravenal leaders (Randolph and Howie Rich) on the RC defection was: “Remember—the British never let Benedict Arnold guard one of their bridges!”

The RC betrayal was perhaps the single most dramatic event of the convention before the actual voting. People kept coming to me in the corridors, urging me to form a new organization. Among leading radicals, Less Antman promptly quit the RC, Jeff Hummel stuck with Bergland, and Mike Grossberg shifted to Ravenal.

And so we have another powerful argument against Leninism: What happens to the movement if “Lenin” sells out?

VIII: Ideology vs. People: The Importance of Integrity

The RC stab-in-the-back led me to ruminate on the role of ideology as against personal behavior in our movement. When Garris and Raimondo argue for sticking to ideas and against criticizing people it sounds nice, cozy, and humanistic. But what does concentrating only on ideology and forgetting about individual persons mean in practice? Let us set aside for a moment the betrayal of radical principle in shifting from Bergland to Ravenal. In practice, holding individual persons of no importance is used to justify betrayal, breaking one’s word, and a general pattern of behavior devoid of personal integrity. In a far greater degree, of course, this is what all fanatical ideologues do: the Robespierres who send dissenters to the guillotine; the Communist rulers who are cheerfully willing to slaughter tens of millions in order to advance “the cause”. Libertarians, we have found all too starkly, can be the same sort of ideologues. They can possess the same sort of commissar mentality. They will not—one hopes—slaughter millions, but they can justify climbing to influence and power on the backs of former comrades because after all, and what the hell, people, individuals are not important, only “the cause of liberty.” Such people forget, of course, the whole point of achieving liberty: to give individual persons the chance to develop their own lives in freedom.

In this connection, Robert Heinlein has written a highly perceptive analysis of the difference between old-fashioned pols, who stress loyalty and integrity, and ideologue “reformers”, who are far more dangerous. In Time Enough for Love (p. 110), he has Lazarus Long say:

“Reform politicians not only tend to be dishonest but stupidly dishonest—whereas the business politician is honest . . .

I don’t mean that a business politician won’t steal; stealing is his business. But all politicians are non-productive. The only commodity any politician has to offer is jawbone. His personal integrity—meaning, if he gives his word, can you rely on it? A successful business politician knows this and guards his reputation for sticking by his commitments—because he wants to stay in business—go on stealing, that is—not only this week but next year and years after that. So if he’s smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, . . . he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.

But a reform politician has no such lodestone. His devotion is to the welfare of all the people—an abstraction of very high order and therefore capable of endless definitions . . . In consequence your utterly sincere and incorruptible reform politician is capable of breaking his word three times before breakfast—not from personal dishonesty, as he sincerely regrets the necessity and will tell you so—but from unswerving devotion to his ideal.

All it takes to get him to break his word is for someone to get his ear and convince him that it is necessary for the greater good of all the peepul. He’ll geek.

After he gets hardened to this, he’s capable of cheating at solitaire.”

But yes, it is true, libertarianism is a strictly political philosophy. As long as one sticks to the non-aggression axiom, one can continue to be a good libertarian. But in all personal relations, including our movement, there are other things as important as being a pure, hard-core libertarian. Sometimes it might be fully as important to be a person of morality, honor, and integrity as it is to Have the Correct Position on the El Salvador Question. In short, one can be a pure and consistent libertarian and still lie, cheat, betray, and be devoid of honor and integrity. You can be a libertarian, all right, but you will not be worth a hell of a lot as a human being.

As usual, the inimitable Franzi expressed this sentiment best: “Hey, this guy, Mike Lewis, a physician from Iowa, is really a great guy. He delivered 5 out of 5 delegates in Iowa, he did exactly what he said he was going to do, he didn’t give me any crap, he didn’t break his word . . . What the hell is he doing in this Party?”

The seething cauldron, the intense pressure-cooker of a Presidential convention, is a fascinating testing-ground of personal character. It is easy to be a good guy when there is no pressure and events are moving serenely. But at a convention, and especially a Presidential convention, one truly finds out the mettle of one’s compatriots: that is when you find out who are the good guys, who are the responsibles, who are the wimps, who are the flakes, and who are the whores.

In a little known but revealing crisis at the convention, the mettle of David Bergland was tested and, as far as I am concerned, he came out with flying colors. Richard W. Suter, a superb Political Maven and an old friend of Bergland, and a man who had nominated Bergland for chair years ago, was denounced by many people in the Illinois delegation. Suter had been indicted for “mail fraud”, and had plea bargained his way to a guilty verdict. He was then expelled from the Illinois party on the patently absurd charge that he had violated the Pledge that all LP members sign that they oppose the use of violence to achieve political and social ends. First of all, “mail fraud” is scarcely violence, and more important, whatever was done was hardly done for political and social ends. Tremendous pressure arose within the Bergland camp to dump Suter because many Illinois votes would be lost otherwise. Several delegates informed me that out of “principle” they could not vote for Bergland if Suter was kept on. What to do?

Emil Franzi is often scorned by radical ideologues for Not Having the Correct Position on a few issues. But Franzi’s “position” on the Suter Affair was crystal-clear: “Suter,” he said, “if you were guilty of rape or bank robbery, I’d blow you off. But ‘mail fraud’? What kind of a chicken s- - - - charge is that?” To me, his sentiments were more explosive: “If I have to rat - - - - my friends to pick up a few votes, I might as well go back to the Republicans!”

Dave Bergland’s reaction to the Suter Question, by the way, was tough and decisive. After listening to all the evidence and arguments on both sides, he said, “Suter stays”. Suter himself ended the crisis by withdrawing from his official role as midwest coordinator, in order not to embarrass the Bergland campaign and keep it above reproach. However, Suter stayed on as unofficial but influential Maven.

IX: David Koch: The $300,000 Question

The Crane Machine had three aces up its sleeve at this convention. The first was the suborning of the RC Gang of Four. The second, which appeared toward the end of the week, was the very visible and imposing appearance of multi-millionaire David Koch. Koch, moving around the delegations with Randolph and MacBride, laid it on the line: If Ravenal were nominated, he as prepared to give $300,000 to the Party for ballot drives. And what this “Unity” spokesman was asked, “if Bergland is nominateds Would you, in the name of unity, then contribute an equal amount to ballot drivess” “Certainly not,” David Koch replied, “I only contribute to first-class candidates.”

The Koch offer was, as on might expect, highly effective. After Bergland was nominated, Koch’s statement to the press was, to say the least, ungracious. Instead of calling for unity behind the winner, he deplored the fact hat such a fine candidate as Earl Ravenal had been rejected by the Libertarian Party. What price “Unity” nows

Actually, while all support to the LP is to be welcomed, it will not harm the Party in the long run to be no longer dependent on the Koch family; it will not harm us to make it on our own in the real world. There was getting to be a danger of the Libertarian Party’s becoming a perpetual welfare client of the Koch family. It will in the long-run be better for the LP to go out and develop more broadbased sources of funding, and hence more feisty independence.

X Bringing in the Ringers

The third trump card played by the Crane Machine at the PresCon was the pouring in of an enormous amount of money to bring in the ringers, to “paper” the various delegations at the convention. I hasten to emphasize that there is nothing illegal about “papering” delegations with “ringers.” There is no residence requirement for membership in any state LP, and, so long as one is a paid-up LP member, any state delegation can make one an alternate to vote in its delegation. The problem is that many delegations do not have their assigned quotas filled at conventions. If a state is allowed, say, 10 delegates at a national convention, it may and usually will elect 10 delegates and other alternates, but often far less than that will appear. If only 7 delegates show up, then the state can “paper” its quota by 3 more delegates.

At the 1983 PresCon, there were huge gaps in many of the Western delegations. But clearly the best place to find “ringers” is the host city. The problem is that most of the Western states were principled while New York City, the local pool for ringers, is a stronghold of the Crane Machine. Most Western states would not add Craniac delegates, but Alaska, another Machine stronghold, was available. Alaska was allowed 36 delegates at the convention, but very few genuine Alaskans showed up. Thus, on the fourth ballot, the Alaska vote was 5 for Bergland, 25 for Ravenal. After Ravenal lost the Presidential nomination, and the Crane Machine surrendered the field, the ringers all trooped home. The next day, on the second ballot for Vice-President, there were nine Alaskan delegates on the floor. Emil Franzi walked over to one Alaskan and asked, “Hey, what happened to all the Alaskans?” “They flew back to Maryland,” was the bitter reply.

Bringing in ringers is not illegal, but the Crane Machine operation was shameless, intense, and enormously expensive. Apparently there were not enough New Yorkers to paper the delegations, and so many Craniac ringers were flown in to New York, their airfare paid, and their hotel rooms taken care of. As far as I know, all of the far less numerous Bergland ringers paid their own way. As one of our Mavens said in wonder afterward, “All day Friday buses were coming from the airport loaded with Ravenal delegates. Some of them were walking in already equipped with Ravenal signs.” Any and all Crane Machine friends, past, present, and hopefully future, suddenly showed up. Ghosts out of the past who had lost all interest long ago in the LP or in libertarianism suddenly popped up, and they were all delegates from somewhere wearing Ravenal buttons. Ray Cunningham, whose last act in the LP had been to swear up and down at the 1979 convention that he, not Crane, would be running the Clark presidential campaign and then quickly disappeared leaving Crane in charge—Cunningham showed up sporting a Ravenal badge. Bill Burt, pre-Hocker national director, who had left the LP years ago to become a railroad tycoon, suddenly appeared with a Ravenal button. Fran Youngstein, who had run for mayor of New York City in 1973, and had dropped out eight years ago to become an ESTian, suddenly popped up out of the blue—as an Alaska delegate for Ravenal. Professor Mario Rizzo, old friend and NYU economist who has never had the slightest interest in the LP, suddenly showed at the convention. “What are you doing here, Mario,” I asked? “Oh, I got bored at home and decided to see what was going on.” Three days later this self-proclaimed “value-free” economist was a delegate from Alaska, snake dancing through the hall, carrying a Ravenal placard. Professor Jack Sanders, libertarian philosopher and proto-Voluntaryist who has always scorned the LP, was flown down from Rochester to be a Ravenal delegate along with Victoria Varga, former employee at the old Crane-run Libertarian Review/SLS warehouse in San Francisco.

It was truly bizarre, a Through the Looking Glass version of Old Home Week.

Estimates are that the Crane Machine brought in about 75 ringers. Remember that our estimates on Thursday had put Bergland about 180-190 and Ravenal about 120-130. In fact, on the first ballot on Saturday the vote was Bergland 185, Ravenal 190, with about 270 needed to elect. It is not too much to say that the difference was the ringers.

Another way to look at the importance of the ringers is to note that there were 540 delegates on the floor for the Presidential balloting, falling dramatically to about 440 the following day. Virtually the entire difference was the ringers.

Tentative estimates by our Mavens judge that the Crane Machine spent at least $50,000 on the Ravenal campaign, mostly on the ringers. As one of them said, “I bet they spent more money per vote than on the Randolph campaign” (for governor of Alaska). Since the Bergland forces probably spent about $10,000 total for the campaign, the inferiority of the Crane Machine in dollars/vote effectiveness once again becomes dramatically clear.

On the other hand, the situation was immeasurably confused by the fact that some ringers on both sides shifted their vote after they were seated. One of our Mavens talked about one state where “they had four Ravenal ringers. But on the ballot, they voted I for Bergland, I for Ravenal, I for (Dick) Siano (of New Jersey), and I for None of the Above.” On the other hand, some Radical Caucus ringers shifted with the Garris defection to the Ravenal camp.

XI The Ruwart Phenomenon

As the convention opened, there were three announced candidates for the Presidency, Bergland, Ravenal, and James (“Piggi”) Norwood, an eccentric retired colonel from Texas who was not himself a Party member or delegate and who got a maximum of two votes in the balloting. Another announced candidate was one Larry Smiley, a favorite son from Wisconsin; just before the balloting, Smiley withdrew and threw his entire delegation to Ravenal. At the last minute, Tonie Nathan was put in nomination. In mid-week, a complete unknown threw her hat into the ring: Mary Ruwart of Michigan, who announced that “you should vote for me because I am a woman.” I only heard Mary in the Radical Caucus candidates’ meeting, and she could not be heard beyond the first row. I dismissed her candidacy and went on with other pressing concerns. I was dead wrong.

By Friday night, I learned to my astonishment that Mary Ruwart, though perhaps not audible without a mike in a big room, was very effective in the candidates’ debates in the regional delegates caucuses. In a small, living room situation, she was poised and articulate, and she began to accumulate support from the newcomers, the “mush,” the undecideds, hungry for a nonexistent unity and increasingly seized by the emotionalism of a Ruwart candidacy. The cry, “Mary, Mary” would redound throughout the hall on Saturday. On Friday night, our Mavens estimated that Ruwart would get 7 to 8 per cent of the vote. Actually, ever they underestimated the Ruwart Phenomenon, although they correctly saw that hers would be the decisive voice at the convention. For on the first ballot, Mary got 77 votes, 15% of the total, and on the second ballot her vote rose to 99.

On Friday night, then, both of the “superpowers” began an intensive effort to woo Mary Ruwart by getting her to drop out in their favor, with a Vice-Presidential nomination as her reward. Neither side had determined on a Vice-Presidential choice, and so both were playing the situation by ear. The Crane Machine tried first, but they struck a snag. Since Bergland promised to be a full-time candidate after January, and Ravenal said he had to teach two graduate courses all year, the Craniacs felt they needed a Vice-Presidential candidate who would be full time; but Mary Ruwart, a biochemist, could also campaign only part-time. That, plus the important fact that Ruwart “liked our side better”, as one of our Mavens put it, led her to consider an agreement with the Bergland forces late Friday night: She would drop out Saturday morning before the balloting in return for the Bergland camp’s support for the Vice-Presidency. Thinking they had lost Ruwart, the Crane Machine announced their own Dream Ticket early Saturday morning: Ravenal for President, and Roger MacBride (who had sworn up and down his unavailability for running in 1984), for Veep.

XII H-Hour

One of the prime charges—indeed, the only charge against Bergland—was that he was not a charismatic speaker. “What kind of criterion is that for a Party of Principle?” asked Christopher Winter, chairman of the Hawaii Party and devoted Berglandite, in considerable anguish. Besides, the most perceptive word on the charisma question came from the highly charismatic former Congressman Sam Steiger (AZ), who endorsed Bergland before the convention: “It’s easier to make the stable guy a little flashier than to make the flashy guy stable.” Actually, Bergland often gives rousing speeches, his most moving being one delivered on behalf of principle and against sellout at the California LP state convention in 1980. Less Antman, who had written that speech, came flying in from California on Friday, and stayed up virtually all night writing a dynamic speech for a special pre-voting speaking session on Saturday morning, featuring Ed Clark, Larry Dodge, a highly popular Montanan, Dave Nolan, and Bergland himself. I thought all the speeches were highly effective, including Dodge, who is such a charming and amiable person that criticism coming from him is especially effective: “I worry about Ravenal. Why does he say ‘you’ instead of ‘our’ when he talks about the Party?” Our Mavens tell us, however, that the pre-balloting session swung very few votes.

Our forces had promised a “Special Announcement” at this session, but there was none, because Mary Ruwart had begun the first of several teases for that day. She decided that she would not throw her support to Bergland before the balloting, but only at the end of the first ballot. The Bergland forces struck an agreement on that basis.

10:30 A.M. The nominations had started and the voting was about to begin. Mason and Evers were optimistic, the latter on the basis of the loudness of relative applause. I myself had thought that Ravenal’s applause was slightly louder, and then I became greatly worried to find that Emil Franzi, for the first time since I had known him, was no longer buoyant and optimistic, “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t like the feel of this convention. I haven’t liked it for two days.”

Never let it be said that the working press, at least the top journalists, are not highly astute. Frank Lynn, one of the top political reporters for the New York Times, who wrote two lengthy and perceptive articles on the convention, walked over to Bill Evers just before the first ballot began. “You look like one of the leading Bergland people,” he said. “I think Bergland’s going to take it. How do I get his picture taken?”

Dave Bergland was nominated by Ed Clark, who had announced for Bergland in mid-week in an open letter to the delegates, and who was selected to be Chairman of Bergland’s campaign committee.

Franzi had made an excellent decision, which most of the rest of us had disagreed with at the time. He decided not to have any of the banners, placards, boaters, etc. that the Ravenal forces were amassing, and not to have the traditional snake-dance demonstration when Bergland was put into nomination. As a result, when Bergland was nominated, there was great applause, cheering, but nothing else. Then, came the Ravenal demonstration, snaking around the floor. It was at that moment that I began to take heart, because peering closely at them, it was evident that (a) there were not very many of them, and (b) they were only the old toadies and hirelings and ringers of the Crane Machine that we had all come to know so well. For me, that was the psychological turning-point of the balloting. It turned out later that Franzi and Mason had precisely the same reaction: the thinness of the Ravenal demonstration was the psychological turning point, and probably influenced the undecided delegates as well. As Franzi the Military Maven put it: “The Ravenal demonstration was when I knew we’d won it. Like Meade watching Pickett at Gettysburg, I knew there weren’t enough of them to overrun us.”

Franzi later explained his choice for no demonstration. “Look, when both sides do it, it’s fun, and everyone looks to see who has more demonstrators. But, among Libertarians particularly, if only one side does it and the other doesn’t, then the side that doesn’t looks serious, while the people doing it look hokey and silly.” Hokey and silly is precisely the way the Ravenal demonstrators looked, as the same relatively small number of Craniacs kept it going on and on.

It was now nail-biting time. On the first ballot the result was Ravenal 190, Bergland 185, Ruwart 77, and scattered votes for Nathan, Siano, assorted write-ins, and None of the Above. It was bad to be behind on the first ballot, but it was also clear that we would soon pick up Nathan and Siano votes (both of whom preferred Bergland) and most of the None of the Above. The key was the Ruwart vote.

Mary Ruwart now came to the microphone, on a point of personal privilege, ready to make her agreed-upon withdrawal statement. She began: “I see now that it is impossible for a woman to be nominated for President today.” If she had simply made a withdrawal statement, all would have been over, and she might now be the Vice-Presidential candidate. Instead, roars went up, not only from her own supporters but even more from the Ravenalians, desperately anxious to stop the withdrawal: “Mary, Mary!” Swept up in the tide of emotion and thinking perhaps that she might even win, Mary Ruwart cancelled her agreed-upon announcement.

The second ballot was a cheery development for the Bergland forces. It was obvious that on the second ballot, both sides would pick up a lot of the None of the Above and minor candidate votes. One of our Mavens guessed that each side would pick up 5 or 10 votes on the second ballot. Instead, while Ruwart picked up 22 votes and Ravenal added 8, Bergland picked up 33 votes to spurt ahead of Ravenal by 218 to 198. The excellent showing on the second ballot made things look good for Bergland, but once again La Ruwart was the key. What would she do?

Once again, the fandango started. This time, Mary went to the podium, and milked every minute for what it was worth, playing her hopped-up supporters—and all the rest of us—like an accordion. Stopping and starting, milking every bit of applause, and “No, Mary, Mary”, Mary Ruwart finally Did It—she finally not only withdrew from the race but also threw her support to Dave Bergland. It was all over but the shouting.

Yet is was not over on the 3rd ballot. Ruwart scarcely delivered to us more than half of her own supporters. Bergland added 51 votes on the third ballot, but Ravenal added almost as many, 45. A particular oddity is that in Mary’s own state of Michigan, she only delivered her own vote to Bergland, and not any of her seven supporters. It was now 260 for Bergland and 243 for Ravenal, with 34 None of the Above, and 272 needed to win.

We looked good, but it was still very close. Bill McMillen of New York charged that Gary Greenberg, boss of the New York delegation, was not counting votes correctly, and asked for a polling of the delegation. Greenberg started bellowing that California—whose voting procedures under chairman Mary Gingell were scrupulously fair—should also be polled. For some reason, the chair failed to gavel down Greenberg or insist upon polling the New York delegation. We started putting pressure on the None of the Above Delegates to change their votes, preferably to Bergland, but even to Abstain, since the winner must only have a majority including NOTA but not of Abstainers. One delegate was wringing her hands, virtually in tears. “I can’t do it,” she said, twisting her handkerchief in agony, “I can’t vote for a CFR member.” She had been a Ravenal ringer. She changed her vote to Abstain, and then at the last minute on the 4th ballot, changed her vote again to Bergland.

On the climactic fourth ballot, with 270 needed to nominate, Bergland picked up ten votes for 270, while Ravenal lost 13 to 230, with 24 sticking stubbornly to NOTA. We started screaming and shouting in triumph; Bergland was over the top, by one vote, although the flow of the voting made it certain that we would win handily on the next ballot. (Fortunately NOTA cannot hold up things forever; after the fifth ballot the low man—Ravenal—would have had to drop out and all would have been over.) At that point, the Crane Machine pulled their last tacky and sleazy stunt. They pulled a fast one with the North Carolina delegation, inducing one delegate to get up and announce a shift in his vote on the fourth ballot from “Robert Heinlein” to Ravenal. That would not have changed matters, since we would still have had 270. But somehow he was able to fox the chair into polling the entire North Carolina delegation, which gave an opportunity for one delegate to change—ostensibly on the fourth ballot but actually and illegally after the ballot was over—from Bergland to Ravenal. We now only had 269 votes.

Emil Franzi then walked over to Dick Randolph and said: “Look Dick, the question now is not who but when. The question is whether you go out with class.” Randolph scowled a refusal, but at this point Ravenal himself decided to withdraw. Earl went up to the podium and delivered a gracious, even noble, withdrawal speech, saying that the wishes of the delegates were clearly with Dave Bergland. It was over, and now we could shout and sob without hindrance. Armageddon was finished and the Good Guys, the Guys in the White Hats, had triumphed. Despite the money, and the ringers, and the swiftly moving cadres of the Enemy, Justice had finally triumphed. Hallelujah! In the words of the great Christian hymn of James Russell Lowell,

Once to every man and nation

Comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

For the good or evil side . . .

Amidst all the chaos and confusion of the 1983 convention, amidst all the temptations of Power, the Libertarian Party had arrived at its moment of decision, its moment of truth, and it had chosen the side of good and of righteousness. The Libertarian Party is indeed, and shall remain, the Party of Principle.

XIII Aftermath

One of the charming aspects of the Bergland victory is that, since he won a full majority by only one vote, there were an enormous number of Bergland voters each of whom was convinced that it was his or her own vote that had put Bergland over the top. And in a sense, of course, each of them was right. All this gave every Bergland voter an extra stake in the triumph.

Saturday night is traditionally the big banquet after the Presidential nomination, the time when everyone slaps everyone else on the back, pledges unity behind the winner, and opens his or her checkbook for the campaign. And where, at the banquet this Saturday night, were all the Unitymongers, all the movers and shakers of the Biddeford Accord? The answer is, precisely Nowhere. No MacBride, no Hunscher, no Crane, no Hocker, no Koch, no Herbert. Of the top Craniacs and the Unity crowd, only the Riches and Randolph were there. And Randolph lurked in the wings, sourly refusing to put on a Bergland button and leaving before the fund-raising. Earl Ravenal, however, was there to his great credit, as was Bob Poole, greatly distressed to see the extent to which the cry for unity had proved to be a hoax and a scam. But despite the Craniac-Biddeford walkout, Larry Dodge as fund-raiser at the banquet managed to raise the excellent sum of over $42,000 to kick off the Bergland for President campaign.

On Sunday, the Crane Machine turned tail and ran; it rolled over and disappeared, gone perhaps forever. No Craniac contested the Vice-Presidency, or any of the national party offices, and no leading Craniac ran for any of the At-Large seats on NatCom. The floor had fortunately defeated ultradecentralist attempts to eliminate at-large seats or to have each state chair appoint a state rep to NatCom, which would have made NatCom impossibly large and unwieldy. There are only a handful of lesser Craniacs on the new NatCom as regional reps.

One might have expected that, after the fervor of the day before, Mary Ruwart would sweep in to the Vice-Presidential nomination. But the delegates had had a day to think over the Ruwart Phenomenon, and presumably were having second thoughts. The Radical Caucus flew in Joe Fuhrig from California to run for the Vice-Presidency, heedless of the dubious constitutionality of running two candidates from the same state. I nominated my old friend Jim Lewis from Connecticut, stressing that Lewis was a hard-core libertarian and active campaigner, that he particularly emphasized the importance of abolishing the income tax, that he was a member of no faction, and that his job as bookbinding salesman made him particularly qualified to travel, especially among the campuses of the East and Midwest. Dave Nolan was also put into nomination, and the first ballot had Ruwart leading with 140 votes, Lewis second with 117, Nolan third with 84, and Fuhrig fourth with 61, with 224 votes needed to elect.

Dave Nolan then withdrew, throwing his support to Jim Lewis. On the second ballot, Lewis picked up virtually all the Nolan votes, rising to 206, with Fuhrig increasing to 91, and Ruwart holding about the same at 145. Ruwart’s failure to pick up votes on the second ballot signalled an imminent Lewis victory. What happened to Ruwart demonstrates the extreme volatility of the convention psyche. Fuhrig then withdrew, and Lewis went over the top on the third and final ballot. We now had a fine Bergland-Lewis ticket.

And so the Crane Machine, at least within the Libertarian Party, rolled over and died. It is no longer a factor; PresCon was indeed another Trafalgar. The Libertarian Party now enjoys a true unity, unity with Justice. A lingering question is whether the CM is finished forever or will someday return. Presumably they would not dare to challenge Franzi on his home turf, for the 1985 convention will be in Phoenix; so the earliest they might possibly be heard from is in four years.

With his flair for the pomposo, Craniac Roy Childs, after the Presidential vote, announced his immediate and eternal departure from the Libertarian Party. Some of the drama in this proclamation, however, was punctured by Franzi, who asked: “In what sense has Roy left the Party? All he ever does is come to conventions when he’s paid to speak.” Whether Roy will continue in his role as Minister of Hate and Disinformation for the Crane Machine, which consisted largely of calling up my friends in the LP and boozily denouncing me at great length as being the quintessence of evil, only time will tell. Chris Hocker has also resigned as publisher of Inquiry and from the Crane Machine, and Mike Burch has resigned from the National Taxpayers Legal Fund, in order to rejoin the real world. Is the Old Gang really breaking up?

On the status of the RC Gang of Four in the Party from now on, Franzi summed it up in his inimitable style: “They have the word WHORE written all over them.” He added that his biggest single mistake in the campaign was “to be naive, to think that Libertarians have higher standards of integrity than Democrats or Republicans.” Franzi also noted that he had made two other mistakes at the convention. One was that his enormous admiration and respect for Dave Bergland led him to lose his normal convention cool at the stab-in-the-back performed by the Radical Caucus. Another was that as campaign manager, he had not pointed out early enough and forcefully enough to some that campaigns necessarily have only one manager.

As for the new NatCom, it overwhelmingly ratified the action of the old one just before the convention in moving the National Headquarters out of Washington, D.C., the heart of the State and what the New Left used to call the Bowels of the Beast, and also and not coincidentally the home of the Crane Machine, and to Houston, Texas, a stronghold of the Party where there are a myriad of eager volunteers.

XIV: Overall Assessments

1. Did It Just Happen, or Was Burns Pushed? The mainstream account of what happened was as I have written above: Burns dropped out, a general scramble occurs, and Bergland and Ravenal enter the race. Our Armageddon, like the classic battles of Gettysburg and Jutland, was a fortuitous accident, planned or expected by neither side. But there is an alternative, “conspiracy” explanation, believed fervently by many leading Berglandians. The conspiracy view holds that the Ravenal forces were too well organized, their buttons and placards too professional, to have been planned for only one week. They also maintain that Burns has a friend and leading supporter in Orlando who has been in contact with the Crane Machine. The hypothesis goes on that the Machine, learning of Burns’ Achilles’ heel about finances, worked on Burns through the contact, inducing him to leave the race by discouraging his financial expectations about the campaign We also know that Craniac Chris Hooker was in frequent contact with Burns over the summer. In a sense, then, according to the conspiracy analysis, Burns was “pushed” out of the Presidential race, with Ravenal already prepped, and waiting in the wings.

One counter to the conspiracy view is the fact that Crane and Hocker officially endorsed Burns only two days before he pulled out, so that seemingly his pullout caught them unawares. But of course a counter to that would claim that the official endorsement was a cover for Craniac knowledge of the impending pullout.

So there we have an alternative scenario. While there isn’t enough evidence as yet to embrace this view, it certainly cannot be ruled out of court. Perhaps we will one day learn the full story. At any rate, this sort of thinking in the Bergland camp, shows that we, at any rate, have never made the fatal mistake of underestimating the enemy.

2. The Crane Machine Engaged in “Maginot-Line” Strategy, Imitating the Successes of the Last War. The French were smashed in World War II because of their “Maginot Line” thinking, their generals re-fighting the successful battles of World War I. Similarly, the Craniac Unity Scam was a mechanistic aping of the successful unity theme of the victorious Alicia Clark campaign of 1981. The Crane Machine was unimaginatively re-fighting the Guida-Clark struggle at Denver. Whereas the Bergland forces won on the old Mason theme of 1981; they won on a theme of principle. As Franzi succinctly put it, “The Bergland campaign was the victory of principle over unity.” Or, as Bill Evers sardonically suggested, if the Crane Machine should return in 1985 or 1987, they will probably run on a theme of “principle”! Always one convention out of synch.

3. The Crane Machine, As Usual, Underestimated its Opposition. Because of its overall megalomania, because its very being is rooted in the myth of its own unique “competence” and “professionalism”, the Crane Machine is inherently doomed to underestimate its enemies. Its preppie orientation also leads it to underrate people of different cultures or lifestyles. It grievously underestimated Alicia Clark for years, and probably still does so, and in this campaign it underrated and continues to misunderstand Dave Bergland. Low-key rather than flamboyant, Bergland is solid as a rock. As Franzi points out, Bergland is “absent the manic-depressive tendencies of most candidates, possessing deep inner convictions, and is one of the most principled people in the entire LP.” Franzi adds that, if he were to give a title to Bergland, it would be “The Quiet Fighter.”

4. The Bergland Forces Had the Better Mavens, and the Smarter Troops. The Bergland forces turned out to have the better field people as well as the superior Mavens. The troops were also smarter and more knowledgeable. As Franzi notes, “certain hard-core states such as Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Texas—filled with real people, not ringers—held tight, saw through the scams, and made the difference.”

5. The Biggest Internal Problem of the Bergland Campaign was a Tendency to Panic and React to the Opposition. Franzi points out that, as often happens at conventions, some Berglandians had a tendency to panic at opposition moves and were impelled to copy or react blindly. Franzi’s insistence over opposition on not having the snake-dance demonstration at the nomination is one example. Another was a desire to mimic the favorite CM tactic of putting your candidate in a big room and hyping it up with staged questions and big name LP supporters. Instead, Franzi, seeing that Bergland comes across better in small groups, successfully insisted that the campaign stress Bergland speaking close-up to several groups a night in Room 4501. When Antman arrived Friday to write Bergland’s speeches, the large-room tactic could then be successfully used. Franzi also denounced some supporters’ yen to leaflet for Bergland outside Ravenal meetings or parties; as he puts it, “tacky, bad manners, and worth no votes.”

6. Populism Triumphed over Elitism. Corollary to the victory of principle over “unity” was the fact that the Bergland nomination was a triumph of populism over preppie elitism. As Evers cogently put it, the convention rejected the fundamental Craniac vision of the role of the LP as being socially acceptable and “making liberals like us.” Instead, the triumphant vision is that of an LP seeking out principled constituencies, whether they be Right or Left. Or, as Franzi phrased it, “there are still more rednecks than Ivy League graduates!”

7. Whither the Radical Caucus? What happens now to the Radical Caucus? Essentially, the RC, apart from conventions, consists of Libertarian Vanguard. But most of the work on Vanguard had been done by Olmsted and Evers. Olmsted, however, burnt out, tired of the turmoil, and lacking confidence in the wisdom of his decision at jumping on to a losing ship, has now quit the Radical Caucus and the LP itself. Ironically, the bright young decision theorist has announced that he doesn’t want to have to make any more tough decisions. And Evers is likely to be inactive in the RC. This leaves the RC in the hands of a Raimondoite rump, and one can only be dubious at the prospect of Raimondo writing and editing Vanguard by himself. If Vanguard ever comes out again, it will be ineffective and irrelevant to Party concerns. The best guess is that the RC, having aided in the historic task of overthrowing the Crane Machine and then self-destructing, will sink quietly under the waves.

And so, despite the treachery of the Gang of Four, it was indeed a glorious and magnificent victory. A New Era is dawning for the Libertarian Party, an era of true harmony based on shared principles and common strategic insights. Onward and upward with Bergland and Lewis!

Keeping Low-Tech

By The Old Curmudgeon

I inhabit a movement where nine out of ten activists are—or at least seem to be—computer programmers. And this was in the Neanderthal Era when computers were esoteric and mainframe. In the last year or so, as everyone knows, personal and home computers have hit America like a thunderclap, and of those I know who are writers, I am one of only a tiny handful that remain determinedly low-tech. Conversations at cocktail parties and soirees, which used to be devoted to exquisite analysis of political or social mores, are now redolent with talk of modems, peripherals, hard disks, Kaypros, and all the rest. Not only that: But I have been bombarded by well-meaning enthusiasts among friends, colleagues, and acquaintances urging me to get a computer, dedicated word processor, et al., along with detailed advice on brands, compatibles, etc. My stubborn insistence on pounding away on my reconditioned IBM-Model D electric (not electronic) typewriter tends to send my friends into paroxysms of frenzy at my failure to join the modern epoch.

Well, people, I’ve finally found the way to shut my freres up. I didn’t plan it that way, but this has been a great serendipity, a mitzvah, the unplanned consequence of human action not human design. And for those of you who want to stay peacefully low-tech, happy and undisturbed, I offer you my solution.

I told my friends and colleagues the following: Look, people, I have no, repeat no, interest whatsoever in playing video games, having a computer balance my budget, or keeping a file on the non-existent nails stored in my non-existent garage, have no interest in “fooling around” on the computer, spending my leisure time at it, etc. I have the sneaking hunch that the alleged time the computer saves you is calculated by overlooking the “fooling around” and learning times, which you guys seem to enjoy but to me is boredom personified, multiplied to the nth power. Recently, the university at which teach tried to nudge all of us into the modern age by giving us a Texas Instrument computer gratis, a computer which, typical of our shop, can do nothing. We were also handed a free instruction booklet which is slightly larger than the computer itself. I have found, my friends, an instant cure for insomnia: Pouring over the computer instruction booklet. By the end of Page 1, my eyes glazeth over, and I’m off to the arms of Morpheus. I can be high-tech too, but it’s a different and even higher kind of tech, I ween: the kind of tech where I push a button and it does all the work. Like my TV set; like my VCR. Like my hand calculator. The kind of tech that I want is the kind of tech where I don’t have to have an intimate relationship with the tech in question; where I don’t have to know how it works or what are its special needs. Can your much vaunted computer say the same?

Yes, it’s true I write a lot, so I would indeed have one, but only one, use for a computer/word processor. Here is what I’m looking for (at this point my listener perks up, for he thinks—a grave error!—that he has me): I want to continue to type my stuff on a typewriter, with old-fashioned paper in the machine, and the paper emerging with the words on it; then, I would also like the typewriter to be hooked up to a computer, so that the same words register on it. But I pay no attention to the computer whatever, Finally, after I do my usual editing of the first draft on my beloved “hard copy” (with naturally real letters and not the monstrous collection of dots that cheapo computer printers give out), and I’m ready for final printing, I go to the computer, redo the mistakes and correct to the final draft, and print the whole thing out on a letter-quality printer. In short, I want to ignore the blasted computer until the time has come for final printing, thus saving money and/or lots of time and effort for my long-suffering spouse.

By this point, my perky friend has grown quiet and thoughtful. Usually, he says, “I don’t see why that can’t be done,” but if he pursues it at all, he reports back, crestfallen, that the thing is impossible. One of my friends, a computer maven to the hilt, said “I know what you want! You want to buy a .44 Magnum, and then use it as a club!” “Precisely,” I replied. The Maven ended the conversation with high hopes, but later declared that it was impossible. Another Maven, a professional word processor, also grew thoughtful, and he said: “You know, I’d advise waiting a while. They’re coming out with great new advances all the time.” Aha! Precisely my view, too. Yes, I will hunker down and wait. After all, I was that way with all modern developments. I first got a TV set in 1967, thereby skipping the entire Uncle Miltie-Dagmar era, and I dare say I am little the worse for my loss. I hung on to my sturdy old mechanical Olympia for years after people cut their eye-teeth on electrics, but here I am, a decade or two behind perhaps, but happy at my IBM. So, unless one of my friends or readers can come up with a hot new development, I shall be content to wait it out, escaping the excruciating boredom of the instruction booklet, the eyestrain of peering at the green letters, and all the rest. They tell me, by the way, that there is an even better way available to me right now. I can type my stuff on my electric typewriter, take the final corrected hard copy, and place it under a hotshot computer with a photo-method, which can then photograph the copy and thereby implant it in the computer, from which I can correct, print out, etc. Aha! Eureka! Better even than a wire leading from the typewriter. But there is, of course, a catch. The thing apparently costs about 10 grand, and none of my friends is so wealthy that he can, with a straight face, advise my to buy this equipment. But hell, ain’t technology wonderful, and maybe in a few years I can buy this photo-computer marvel for the same price that my friends are now putting out for their high-tech systems. Or, better yet, maybe a computer will eventually be so high-tech that I can push a button and it can do all the work. Like I said, I can wait.

—— Double Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVII, No. 11–12

November-December, 1983

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

New Airline Massacre: Where’s the Outrage?

Remember 007? It wasn’t so long ago. Remember the wave after wave of hysteria that permeated the media, led by the cries of outrage from the Reagan Administration? Remember all the howls about the “massacre,” and about how this “proves” that the Soviet system is barbaric and evil? Remember the righteous wrath of Reagan on nationwide TV, of the Dragon Lady Kirkpatrick at the UN, of ordinarily mild-mannered Shultz in yelling at Gromyko? Remember the outcry from the entire right-wing, smelling blood at last, yowling for retribution for vengeance against the evil Russkies? Remember the full-page ad of the orthodox Randians grouped around the Intellectual Activist, urging the United States to treat the Soviet Union as neighborhood police treat local murderers?

Emotions ran high in the United States, and nothing that the Reagan Administration or the right-wing has done in years has been so successful at heating up the Cold War. Within our movement, it was Reason magazine’s refusal to print my revisionist Viewpoint column on 007 and editor Robert Poole’s calling it “monstrous” for me to equate the U.S. and Soviet lies on this issue, that sparked my resignation from Reason as columnist and Contributing Editor (see below).

Well, folks, how many of you know that sometime in November an Angolan civilian jetliner, carrying 126 people, was shot down deliberately by the “pro-Western” southern Angolan UNITA guerrilla movement, headed by Dr. Jonas Savimbi? I say deliberate because there is no question about it, because Dr. Savimbi “proudly claimed credit for shooting it down” (Washington Monthly, January 1984, p. 6.)

Well, now. How come not one word of this, as far as I know, appeared in any of our august media? There was no Reagan, burning with indignation, denouncing Dr. Savimbi’s deliberate butchery and mass murder No outraged Dragon Lady. No call from any right-wing for retribution and vengeance. No clamor saying that this mass murder proves that Dr. Savimbi and UNITA are thugs and monsters, running an evil system in southern Angola. No calls for ending all covert U.S. aid to UNITA, or even for reproving South Africa for its continuing aid to what is virtually a client guerrilla movement of its own. No Randians taking full page ads urging the U.S. to treat Dr. Savimbi and his guerrillas as police treat local mass murderers. No clamor from Reason magazine.

In our July-August 1983 issue, (“Ronald Reagan, Warmonger”) I denounced Americans for being very selective in their moral indignation, noting that there had been no cries of outrage when Israel shot down a Libyan airliner in February 1973. A reader noted that Israel apologized the next day. Okay. It is now admitted by U.S. intelligence experts that the Soviet downing of 007 was probably a bumbling mistake on their part. But in the case of Dr. Savimbi, there is no mistake, and certainly no apology. Quite the contrary, UNITA is proud and happy at their accomplishment. So therefore the cries of outrage against UNITA should be far greater than they were against Russia. Yet the silence is deafening.

So silent has the media blackout been in the U.S. that I had to write “sometime in November” above because I don’t know the specific date that this barbarity occurred. The only notice I have seen was the aforesaid paragraph in the Washington Monthly, and it gave no further details. If any readers know anything more about the Angolan butchery, I would appreciate their letting me know.

So there we have it. Anyone willing to bet that the orthodox Randians, in their consistent devotion to moral principle, will take out an equivalent full-page ad denouncing Savimbi and UNITA in the same terms? If anyone is willing, I have a Brooklyn bridge, in mint condition, I’m ready to sell you.

As for Reason magazine, this was the second column they had killed out of the last three, the first one suppressed being about the growing legend of tax-rebel Gordon Kahl, who was at large and had not yet been killed by the authorities. In my letter of resignation to Bob Poole, I pointed out that I had originally taken on the column in order to bring the radical libertarian viewpoint to their conservative readers. At the time, he appeared enthusiastic about this idea, but clearly times have changed. I also told Bob that he wouldn’t have to worry any more about my columns disturbing the somnolence of himself or his readers, since no new or disquieting idea is likely to be offered them by the likes of the columnists that remain.

And so I leave Reason magazine, with its instructive lessons on how to demunicipalize government services. Ideologically, Reason has always been somewhere in that murky zone where extreme-right-wing Libertarianism and extreme-left-wing Reaganism meet and overlap. Let’s hope that the unwillingness to bring a radical or anti-war message to its readers does not presage a glitch rightward out of libertarianism altogether.

The Bergland Campaign

The Bergland campaign is off to a seagoing start. While Dave Bergland intends to campaign full-time starting in February, he has really been campaigning almost full-time ever since the convention.

1. Hard-Core Principle

It was evident from the very beginning that this is going to be a Presidential campaign devoted to hard-core principle. A few days after the PresCon I happened to flip on the tube to C-Span Cable, and there, as luck would have it, was Dave Bergland on a call-in show. Dave was magnificent, answering questions about the LP’s aims clearly and candidly: Yes, we want to abolish the income tax, and yes we want to privatize everything, including defense. Wow! What a joy! and all this explained patiently and calmly in a non-inflammatory manner.

This, our glorious goal, is what libertarianism is all about. Sure we should have transition demands, but this is what we’re aiming for, this is why we’re here. Eat your heart out, Crane Machine!

2. Setting Priorities on Issues

The Bergland for President Committee has issued a Campaign Statement that is highly important, for it sets out the priority issues for this campaign as Bergland and his team see them. Bergland will be hard-core on all issues, but every candidate must select those issues that he will particularly stress during the campaign.

The goal of the campaign, the Statement begins, “is to continue to spread and implement the ideas of individual rights throughout American society.” Rights, not some utilitarian cost-benefit calculus. By being on the ballot in all 50 states, Bergland and the other LP candidates “will give every American the opportunity to expand their freedom by voting to cut back the federal government, the principal source of oppression within our country.”

After this preamble, the Statement specifies the four basic goals of the LP in this campaign: (1) to “remove all controls on the peaceful, voluntary and honest actions of all Americans;” (2) “to abolish draft registration and the threat of the draft;” (3) “to repeal the federal personal income tax;” and (4) “to reform American foreign policy so as to promote peace and better defend Americans.” At long last: A Presidential campaign that says flat out and urges repeal of the monstrous income tax! Tax rebels and other anti-tax folks take heed! What other candidate can you vote for, to send an anti-income-tax message to Washington?

In the next paragraph, the Bergland Statement makes clear that we seek not only repeal of the income tax, but of all taxes! quote in full: “We seek as quickly as possible the end of all government violation of individual rights, including the end of the seizure of the wages and savings of the American people by income, excise, property, gross receipts, capital gains, or any other taxes.” Note that we are pledging ourselves not only to seek repeal of all taxes, but that, at long last, we are doing what radicals in the LP have long been urging: that we don’t set up our own self-imposed roadblocks on the path to our goal. Lord knows that there will be roadblocks enough without adding to them. In short, we are no longer hobbling ourselves by adopting obligatory gradualism, but stating that other considerations are more important than the achievement of liberty. And so we seek these goals “as quickly as possible.” In short, the Bergland campaign has adopted a specifically “abolitionist” stance toward the ills of statism.

The Bergland Statement then goes on to set forth specific immediate demands on the road to the above goals. In economic affairs, these are: repeal of all minimum wage and licensing laws; an end to federal expansion of the money supply, “the cause of inflation”; the establishment of gold or other commodity money; the elimination of all subsidies; and “major reductions in social and military spending so as to reduce the federal deficit at the same time the personal income tax is eliminated.”

In foreign policy, specific programs are: “immediate and permanent withdrawal of the United States from ?all entangling military alliances;” pulling all U.S. military personnel out of foreign countries; “development of adequate defensive weapons to protect the United States against nuclear attack” (In my view a chimera, but certainly laudatory for a non-tax-funded goal); “establishment of a ‘no first strike’ nuclear policy;” reductions in U.S. nuclear arms as part of arms reduction negotiations;” and “free trade with all nations.”

In social policy, the basic goal is “the right of Americans to control their own lives and to educate and protect their families.” As interim reforms, the Statement calls for a large income tax credit for private tuition, for one’s own children or anyone else’s; and abolition of the “compulsory and deficitridden Social Security System” and replacing it “with voluntary alternatives while providing present beneficiaries with payments from private annuities purchased with the proceeds of the sale of land and the assets of the federal government.”

The Statement thus implicitly repudiates all pseudo “voluntary” plans that are voluntary only in the sense that one is not forced to join them, but not voluntary for the long-suffering American taxpayer (e.g. the much hyped but sellout Ferrara Plan pushed by the Cato Institute, which, even worse, would retain compulsion for older citizens.) And finally, firm support for the “natural and constitutional right to keep and bear arms as a necessary means of self-protection.” It is great to see our Presidential candidate come out squarely and fully against gun control, even though this will anger the liberal media. Tough crackers!

The Statement ends in an eloquent concluding passage: “A Libertarian vote will be the strongest statement that can be made that we all want to be free of the crushing burden of taxation, free of social control and free of the U.S. government’s dangerous foreign policy with its resultant risk of war. Every vote for every Libertarian candidate will be a powerful message that millions of Americans demand respect for their right to keep their earnings, their right to exercise control over and responsibility for themselves, and their right to have their federal government adopt a foreign policy that will provide a growing hope for peace.”

Ideologically, the Bergland campaign is in superb shape. We can all support the Bergland/Lewis ticket—physically, morally, and financially—with a high heart.

(Send money or inquiries to Bergland for President, Suit 105 West, 1525 Mesa Verde Drive East, Costa Mesa, CA 92626).

3. Non-support by Alaska

At the NatCom meeting on Dec. 3–4 at New Orleans, it was reported by the Bergland Campaign committee that three state LPs have been reluctant to support the Bergland/Lewis ticket. One is Delaware, a virtually non-existent party headed by a flaky state chair. Another is Kansas, the heartland of the Kochtopus. Most important is Alaska, where Craniac state chair Dick Randolph told the Bergland campaign that the Alaska party doesn’t want Bergland to appear in their state. This announcement understandably shocked the NatCom members, who grilled the Randolphian Alaskan rep, Steve DeLisio. DeLisio explained that there is “nothing personal” involved, but that the Alaskan Party feels that Bergland is not sensitive to the special needs of Alaska. On the other hand, they would love to have Ed Clark up there at any time. (If this pronouncement is not “personal,” then what is?)

DeLisio never specified exactly what the Alaskan LP feared about a Bergland speaking engagement. After all, usually citizens of states are enthusiastic about Presidential candidates appearing there, especially in a place so far off the beaten path as Alaska.

One of the LP’s top political Mavens later explained what the DeLisian gobbledegook was all about. The problem was Dave Bergland’s critical review in frontlines in 1982, of Randolph’s pussyfooting campaign book written for his race for governor. Bergland had criticized Randolph for failing to oppose the major source of revenue for the Alaskan government. It turns out that the reason why Randolph was easily able to spark the repeal of the Alaskan income tax is because the bulk of Alaskan revenue comes from a tax soaking the oil companies. Like Third World countries living off confiscation of Yankee investments, Alaskans apparently love this tax by which they can finance goodies from government by socking it to Big Oil. According to the Randolphian Party, it would be “political suicide” for the LP to come out for repeal of the oil tax. Apparently what the Randolphians are worried about is Bergland coming up to Alaska, and being asked by the media what he thinks about the tax on oil. And by the patently obvious fact that Bergland, bless him, would answer that he favors its abolition. And there would go all “credibility” for the Alaskan LP!

Well, tough cookies, Alaskans. Libertarianism never promised you a rose garden. Did you become LP members because you thought that the majority of the public would automatically support us? Are you for free markets and against tax theft, or are you not? Are you Libertarians, or are you just, after all, Republicans in Libertarian clothing? Isn’t it best that we all find out now, before it’s too late?

And, dear readers, now how do you feel about all the money you gave to Randolph-for-Governor?

4. Response of the Crane Machine

The Bergland campaign did precisely what it said it was going to do at the PresCon: it asked each and every Crane Machine member to work in the campaign. In contrast to the Unity hoaxers at the PresCon, Dave Bergland is a man of his word. And what has been the Craniac response? In every case, an angry refusal, with the honorable exception, according to reports, of Howie Rich.

The Libertarian Party membership will duly note this sourgrapey response, this refusal to cooperate after the vote ran against the Machine. One defeat, it seems, and they’re out. Well, OK, that’s their privilege. But let them not think that the LP will ever again take them seriously, or consider them for positions of influence. The Machine has decided to walk away from the campaign, and their walk will, whether they like it of not, be a permanent one. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Life In “1984”

1. Of All Time. Recently, one Dan Lurie, publisher of Muscle Training Illustrated magazine, decided to search for someone whom he could dub “the best physically fit President of all time.” After an exhaustive search, Lurie came up with, lo and behold!, Ronnie Reagan.

Ronnie Reagan? But how about George Washington, a strapping 6'2" in a world where most male Americans hardly poked up above 5'5"? How about Abe Lincoln? Or Ike Eisenhower? No, he couldn’t pick people like that, Lurie explained, because “You can’t go back and honor a President who’s no longer there.” Oh. Well, that takes care of that.

2. The Shortest Time Period. It is an old New York quip that the definition of the shortest perceivable interval of time, is the time it takes between the change of the traffic light to green and the moment when the car behind you honks its horn. I offer a new definition of the shortest period of time: the length of any given cease-fire in Lebanon.

3. Unemployment in Grenada. In the last days of the Marxist Bishop regime, unemployment in Grenada was severe, at 14 percent. The United States invasion—oops, “rescue mission,” as Lew Lehrman’s Citizens for America managed to have it called—had the effect of more than doubling that unemployment, which is now about 30 percent. Why? Because of the “sudden unemployment,” imposed not by wicked capitalists, but by the U.S. military occupation regime: i.e. on former members of the People’s Revolutionary Army, former officials in the Bishop government, former members of Bishop’s ruling party, the New Jewel Movement, and workers building the famous airport.

Comment by a 19-year old Grenandian who hasn’t had a job yet: “They call it a rescue mission, but they haven’t rescued me yet.” To each his own, on Grand Fenwick.

Living Liberty, And All That

For many years I have heard the injunction that it was not enough to “merely” (?) be a libertarian, i.e. to favor and work for a society resting on non-aggression. What we should all be doing instead, these people imply, is to “live liberty.”

Now I confess that I have been unable, even with the best will in the world, to understand what these people—and there are many of them—are talking about. Until now, “living liberty” has seemed to me a congeries of egregious fallacy, including: attacking all organization per se as “unlibertarian”, denouncing the political process (that is, the process of running an ideological organization) on the same grounds, and berating as unlibertarian kicking one’s dog or yelling at one’s neighbor. “Living Liberty” has also extended to the horror of voluntarily sharing one’s energy and worldly goods with anyone who shows up proclaiming his libertarian credentials—a sort of voluntary libertarian communalism.

All this, however, has been so vague and amorphous as to scarcely deserve rebuttal. As far as I am concerned, if I were ever to use this odd phrase at all, “living liberty” implies two things: (a) not robbing banks or hitting people over the head, and (b) doing one’s best to promote the doctrines of libertarianism. If this were all that the “living libertarians” were talking about, then fine, but it is pretty clear that this is not what they mean. Whatever they do mean is far fuzzier and more grandiose. Their fuzziness, however, hardly prevents them from adopting a smug air of moral superiority to the rest of us peasantry who have not been clued in to the message.

Lately, the Living Liberty concept has been sharpened, and the message is getting a bit clearer—much to my regret. Somewhere in an Ayn Rand novel one of the villains whiningly complains to one of the heroes or heroines: “You don’t understand me.” And the hero replies, in a marvelous riposte: “I am trying very hard not to understand you.” As the Living Libertarians etch their position more clearly, I am beginning to get a similar reaction.

Two recent items highlight this problem. One was an episode where I appeared at a state LP convention, and someone came up to us and insisted that the LP Presidential candidate should be Irwin Schiff. Our lips curled, and he bristled. We pointed out to him that, inter alia, Mr. Schiff was weak—to put it kindly—on civil liberties. All this was dismissed by our LP comrade as of no account. “No, no,” he expostulated. “Irwin Schiff is a better libertarian than any of you. He lives liberty. He doesn’t ay taxes.”

A second item: I received ar anguished letter a few months ago from one of the best and most dedicated libertarian activists I have ever met. She had a moral problem and asked my advice. Taxes were criminal and immoral, and therefore paying taxes was immoral, and so wasn’t it incumbent upon her to drop out of libertarian activism altogether, and head for the hills, so that she would not have to participate any longer in an immoral system?

I was rather astonished, and wrote back pointing out to her that it was absolutely vital to libertarianism to preserve a clear and crucial distinction: between the criminal and the victim. The criminal is the guy who inflicts taxes; the victim is the person who is forced to pay it. Inflicting taxes is immoral; paying taxes is not. The mugger is the criminal, not the muggee; the rapist the criminal, not the person being raped.

After the episode of the exhausted activist (which is what she turned out to be) and the odd Schiffian, I was one day raising my standard question: “What do these people mean by ‘living liberty?’ “, to a keen analyst of the current movement, and he answered immediately: “not paying taxes, not possessing a driver’s license, not getting married.” At that point, the Living Liberty puzzle fell into place, and its ramifications appeared grave indeed. For what this breed of living libertarians, at any rate, are doing is systematically fuzzing over or obliterating altogether the crucial distinction of libertarianism: between the criminal and the victim. For if it is equally or even partially immoral to pay taxes, then the victim, too, is implicated in the crimes of the State apparatus. The distinction between criminal and victim also implies the crucial difference between freedom and coercion. For libertarianism holds that only voluntary actions are moral or immoral, and that therefore if one is coerced into an act it cannot be considered either voluntary or immoral. But this means that the Living Liberty libertarians, who have adopted a superior moral pose to the rest of us, are not simply wrong but ironically 180-degrees wrong; for in obliterating the criminal-victim, or voluntary-coercive distinction, they are slipping out of libertarianism altogether.

On the libertarian “left”, Voluntaryist literature is redolent with the living liberty fallacy. Sometimes they refer explicitly to “living liberty” in hushed tones. But more often their crucial error is placing undue emphasis on the La Boetie-Hume insight that, in the long run, any government, no matter how dictatorial, rests on the majority consent of the governed. By riding hard on this insight and distorting its lessons, the Voluntaryists implicitly attack the rest of us who do not disobey laws or resist taxes as being immorally implicated in the continuing existence of the State. From being victims of coercion according to libertarian theory, we non-Voluntaryists have suddenly been transmuted into people who consent voluntarily to State coercion; we have become criminals rather than victims. A crucial flaw in the Voluntaryist embrace of La Boetie-Hume is that they forget two key aspects of their insight: long-run and majority. Consent is not unanimous but by a majority, and individuals cannot be implicated in any collective guilt; furthermore, this is only a long-run insight, because in the short-run even a highly unpopular government has the guns and can use them successfully. Overthrowing even such a government will take many years of bloodshed, suppression, and revolution. Exercising long-run majority preferences against a State is emphatically not a dinner-party.

There is another crucial point here: if paying taxes is really voluntary, as left-libertarians and Voluntaryists seem to maintain, then what’s wrong with the State after all? For if taxation is voluntary, then the archists are right, and we can have no complaint against taxation or against the State itself as a criminal enterprise. In short, while loudly proclaiming their “living” of liberty, our left-libertarians and anarchists have unwittingly abandoned libertarianism altogether. By making victims into criminals they are also transforming genuine criminals into non-criminals. Vociferous anarchists wont to sneer at the rest of us as only half-libertarians, they have become, in the last analysis and in a bizarre way, objective apologists for statism and the State apparatus.

Right-wing libertarians, on the other hand, erase the crucial distinction between criminal and victim, between coercion and the voluntary, in a different way. One delegate to the national LP platform committee at Austin, Texas this spring, for example, kept maintaining that it is not murder of innocent civilians to wipe out Russia in a nuclear attack. There are no innocent civilians in Russia, he declared, because since the government exists, they must be consenting to its rule. Hence, all Russians are implicated in the crimes of their Communist rulers. This standard right-wing (and also Randian) line is the flip side of the Ieft-anarchist-Voluntaryist reliance on La Boetie. In both doctrines, the very existence of a government or of taxes means that those who obey the State or pay its taxes are implicated in its crimes. The victims have become murderers.

Note that the only real difference between the right-wing and left-wing libertarian approaches is that the former confine their melding of criminal and victim to Communist regimes, whereas the left consistently applies this confusion to all governments and all countries.

The final irony is that the left-libertarian, Voluntaryist-anarchist tendency, in its eagerness to assume moral superiority to the rest of us by Living Liberty, by not engaging in any State activities or State contamination, by not paying taxes, not getting drivers’ licenses, et al., yet necessarily fail even on their own terms. For I bet that they are willy-nilly still enmeshed in the State and “giving it their sanction” by, e.g. paying sales taxes through buying products, flying in government-regulated planes that take off from and land in government-owned airports, sending letters through the evil U.S. Post Office, and walking and driving on evil government roads. I do not consider them statists for engaging in these activities, but they should. If they cannot bring themselves to rethink their negation of libertarianism’s pivotal distinction between the coerced and the voluntary, they should at least get off their high horses and acknowledge what they should consider their own voluntary enmeshment and adherence to the Leviathan State.

Reagan War Watch

I. Escalation in Lebanon

As we predicted in our July-August issue, the conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate dangerously, with the U.S. leading the parade. Reagan’s reaction on learning of the truck-bombing of Marine headquarters is that the most unthinkable of all the hard options is to pull out. And so, as Lebanon becomes more and more of a Vietnam, the Marines stay on the flat at the Beirut airport, establishing a hunkered down symbolic presence at the now closed airport, while snipers in the hills use them for target practice and Muslims take dramatic action to try to remove the hated U.S. presence from their country.

And no one seems to know why in hell the Marines are there. First they were supposed to be part of a small International Peace-keeping Force to interpose symbolic bodies in between fighting forces in the permanent floating Lebanese civil war: mainly between Christian militia and the Palestinian refugees. Like the handful of British and Italian troops, the troops were supposed to be smiling and visible, handing out candy to Lebanese kiddies, and generally making ourselves visible and universally beloved. Since then, the supposed role of the Marines has been changing every month. “Peacekeeping” has been transformed into maintaining and extending the rule of a minority government of Maronite Christians and thug Phalangists over the majority Muslims of Lebanon. But as “peacekeepers”—an Orwellian term in itself—the Marines can hardly be expected to run amok and slaughter the civilian population. But step by step we are beginning to do so. First, we began to shell and bomb Muslim villages in order to defend the Marines against snipers. Then, we began to bomb Muslims in order to extend Maronite rule over them, describing this as a kind of indirect protection of the Marines. And then, we began to bomb in order to “punish” an enemy we have not been able to find. And in all this, the Marines had to hunker down and abandon the very “presence” that was supposed to be the original point of the exercise. And now President Reagan says the Marines will remain until peace and a stable and united government have come to Lebanon. Well, if that is the goal, U.S. troops are in Lebanon until — in the grand old phrase of Khruschchev/shrimps learn to whistle.

One problem with the dark Reagan threat to “punish” those responsible for the truck-bombings is that we can’t find out who in hell the villains are. An organization called the Islamic Holy War has claimed credit for all the car-bombings, but no one seems to know who they are. The Lebanese police are investigating the incident, but, as Thomas L. Friedman wrote in a witty article in the New York Times (October 25), they will undoubtedly never find the culprits, because: “for one, the investigation is being led on the Lebanese side by the military prosecutor, Assad Germanos, who led the investigation into the Sabra and Shatila massacre a year ago. In a draft report on the massacre . . . he concluded that it was impossible to say who exactly did the killing, though an Israeli investigation was able to do so.” And further: “Since the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1974, virtually no major crime of any political significance has been solved in Lebanon by the military prosecutor or anyone else.”

But the Reagan Administration is not worried about such niceties as pinpointing the guilty. Instead, we seem to be adopting the Nazi practice of hauling in and “punishing” any and everyone in sight. First, we became convinced that the Islamic Holy War are “pro-Iran Shiites.” Sounds ominous, except that most Shiites are “pro-Iran” in the sense that they consider Khomeini the highest spiritual leader in the Shiite world. But this hardly means that Tehran gives them orders, or that the Tehran government can be held responsible for any action committed in Lebanon by any “pro-Iranian group.” Indeed, Iran—usually not shy about their achievements—has completely denied any role in the truck-bombings. Despite the lack of evidence, however, the U.S. remains convinced of Iran’s guilt, and so we have finally—along with trigger-happy Israel—punished the “guilty” by bombing . . . Syria! or rather Syrian positions in Lebanon. Go figure this lunatic logic. Syria, after all, is nearer to us in Lebanon than Iran is, and so the Syrians make a handier target. And the bombers allegedly live in Syrian-occupied territory in Lebanon, so that makes the Syrian government guilty of their crimes. Great! On that basis, if John W. Hinckley, Jr. had happened to have been a Canadian, the U.S. would have been justified in fire-bombing Toronto. The next step, I suppose, will be: on to Damascus!

Just as in Vietnam, we hear from the Reagan Administration that, whether or not the Marines should have been there in the first place, once they are there they cannot be pulled out, else the U.S. will lose its “credibility.” Once a “commitment” is made, no matter how idiotic, it must be pursued to and beyond the bitter end in order to preserve American “credibility.” A beautiful recipe for permanent war, and for an escalation and a morass that will make Vietnam look like a tea party. In a sense, the situation is worse than Vietnam. With Soviet military advisers among the Syrians, the danger of World War III breaking out is far greater. And instead of two or three political or military forces at work, the U.S., the Ugly American bull in the china shop, has blundered into a region where there are literally dozens of warring ethnic, religious, political, and military groups, each of whom has hated the guts of the others for up to a thousand years—and often with good reason. How dare we bulldoze our way into this tangled web that is none of our damned business, and then proceed to grow petulant because there are all these inconvenient groups that won’t roll over and obey American orders: Druze, Shiites, Sunni “fundamentalists”, “pro-Iranians,” Palestinian loyalists, Palestinian rebels, left secularists, Christian anti-Phalangists, and on and on? Yankee, go home!

It even got to the point that the U.S. became worried about an attack of neutralism in Israel, as Israel, stung by its heavy losses and its lack of accomplishment in the war of aggression against Lebanon, retreated to the south, where it is surrounded by a hostile Shiite civilian population. In the midst of this, the U.S. began to pressure Israel to resume its old ultrahawk role, to come back and crush the Druze and the Shiites in the villages of the Shouf mountains. The astonishing (and unconstitutional, if anyone cares) Reagan-Shamir agreement was designed to lure Israel into resuming its war-fighting role in Labanon (Note the irony: the U.S. Marines were originally sent in to protect the Palestinian refugees from the Israeli puppets of the Christian Phalange.)

The escalation of American fighting is based on the madman view of “world terrorism” that has been pushed successfully for years in the U.S. by the Stirling-DeBorch-grave-Moss-CIA axis. That view holds that any “terrorist” bombing or shooting or kidnapping anywhere is run by evil Cuba or Khomeini’s Iran and through them to the Muscovite puppetmasters of the KGB. As Robert Scheer pointed out in his scintillating and scary book, With Enough Shovels, Ronald Reagan—and his ultra-right confreres—came to office with a world-view held fast for over four decades that all trouble in the world is caused by the masters of the “evil empire” in the Kremlin. It’s as if every bad guy in the world must be, ultimately, a Commie. To call this “simplistic” is to put far too kind a face on it. Do any of these jerks know what Khomeini does with real, that is, Iranian Commies? If the Reagan warhawks should ever find out on their own hides, they would sing a different tune.

There is, of course, a curious exception. Any U.S. political figure who gets assassinated is invariably killed by a lone nut. The long hand of the KBG invariably stops at the water’s edge. We might note, too, that Colonel Khadaffi, after enjoying his day in the sun as the top neo-Commie bogey-man for our ultra-right, has faded away and been replaced by the Ayatollah. (Does anyone remember the bearded Libyan “hitmen” who were supposed to have invaded our shores in order to kill Reagan? And whatever happened to them?)

The United States seems to be constitutionally incapable of being neutral in anyone else’s conflict, and sure enough, we are moving further into the Iraq-Iran war, raging now for four years. Iran being neo-Commie bad guys, Iraq, the reasoning goes, must be good guys, and so the U.S. is now “tilting toward” Iraq. Mitterand’s France, the Social Democrat running dog of U.S. imperialism, has sent fighter-bombers to Iraq, fueling the crisis and threatening escalation. Iraq and Iran have been fighting a war of attrition, which the far less populous Iraq is ill-equipped to wage. Iraq’s despicable totalitarian dictator, Saddam Hussein, is openly threatening to bomb Iranian oil facilities at Kharg Island in order to provoke the Iranians into mining or sinking Western oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, whereupon U.S. imperialism will once again rush to the aid of yet another “free world” regime.

As we wrote in the August, 1982 Lib. Forum (“Don’t Cry for Iraq”) the Hussein despotism deserves no support whatever. Iraq launched its war of aggression against Iran in September 1980, and deserves to take the consequences. Its regime is a socialist despotism ruled by the Ba’ath party and devoted to the cult of personality of Saddam Hussein. Recently it was discovered that the driver of the truck-bomb of the U.S. Embassy at Kuwait was a “Pro-Iranian Iraqi.” A “pro-Iranian” because he was a Shiite. And the crucial religious dimension in Iraq is that Hussein and his Ba’ath dictatorship constitute a Sunni minority tyrannizing over a Shiite majority in Iraq. That’s the reason why anti-Hussein dissidents are apt to be both Shiite and “pro-Iran.”

II Syria, the Palestinians, and Yasser Arafat

When I was growing up, we used to scoff at the Communist Party for its dizzying reversal of “line”, of who the good guys and bad guys might be. Well, the CP had nothing on U.S. imperialism for dizzying reversals. Blundering into age-old conflicts, not knowing what the hell it’s doing, and yet desperately anxious to intervene somehow, to find groups that are one micrometer more Good Guy than the opposition, the United States has reversed its field without shame on the question of Yasser Arafat. Reviled for many years as a terrorist thug, Arafat, now on the ropes, has suddenly been transformed by U.S. propaganda into a shining “moderate”, the last best hope for peace on the Palestinian question. Indeed, the U.S. had to put enormous pressure on its Israeli allies so that Israel wouldn’t blow the Arafat troops to smithereens as they embarked from Tripoli to Tunis and other far-off Arab climes. Before that, Arafat’s bacon was saved by his old friend the Soviet Union, who put tremendous pressure on its Syrian ally, and, in turn, on the PLO rebels to let Arafat and his men slip out of the squeeze that the rebels had put on Arafat’s forces in Tripoli. If not for the Russians, Arafat might well now be permanently out of the Middle Eastern picture.

So what’s the real story here? For many years, Arafat was revered by all Palestinians as the George Washington of his people, as the guerrilla leader and head of Al Fatah, by far the biggest single force in the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Using great diplomatic skill, Arafat was able to win recognition and acceptance for the PLO at the UN and at many world capitals. For years, however, the Palestinians have been faced with an important quandary: should they accept a mini-Palestinian state, consisting only of the 1967 Israeli conquests of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? Should they accept this half (or rather one third of) a loaf, rather than the full program for Palestinian justice, which would mean returning all the lands stolen by Israel to their Palestinian owners? In the latter event, the state of Israel would virtually cease to exist. The Palestinian quandary is complicated by the fact that Israel has shown no sign of offering such a deal; the deal has been bandied about by assorted “moderates” in the U.S., among the Arabs, and among some of the peace dissidents in Israel. Most of the non-Al Fatah forces in the PLO, constituting the “rejection front” headed by Dr. George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, angrily reject such ideas. Arafat and Al Fatah have always been ambivalent and vague on the issue, and the “extreme moderates” of Fatah, headed by the late “pro-American” Dr Issam Sartawi, eagerly embraced the idea of such a deal. Dr. Sartawi was reviled as a traitor to Palestinian justice, and executed summarily by refusenik “terrorists”—an instructive lesson to other Palestinians who might have been tempted to follow his lead.

It must be realized that the issue is not simply whether or not to accept half a loaf. The rejectionists are not so crazy that they would simply refuse an outright mini-State. The problem is that the “moderates” are not simply offering a mini-State to the Palestinians. In order to appease Israel and gain its acceptance of the scheme, the mini-State would (a) have to renounce all claims to justice for the Palestinians driven out by Israel in the 1947-67 period, that is for the Palestinians who once lived in Israel proper; and (b) would have to remain disarmed, its borders patrolled by UN “peacekeepers”, and suffer other indignities in order to reassure Israel. It is these conditions that no self-respecting Palestinian would agree to. A Palestinian State would have to be a sovereign state among nations, and not accept any sort of special demilitarization, and it could not barter away the just rights of Arab brethren despoiled by Israel in 1947–48. This renunciation of just claims to stolen lands within Israel is what Zionists are always referring to as “recognizing Israel’s right to exist.” And that is why this renunciation or “recognition” is the heart of the Palestinian problem.

In the midst of this tinder-box, Ronnie Reagan unveiled his famous Plan to solve the Palestinian problem. The plan would create a mini-State on the West Bank and Gaza, all right, but it would involve the renunciations, the disarmanment and the guarantees mentioned above, and (b)—final indignity!—the mini-State would not even be Palestinian! The PLO would be deprived of any role, and the Palestinians would be “represented” by the infamous King Hussein of Jordan, who turned and butchered the PLO guerrillas without warning in the brutal month of Black September, 1970. For the United States, in its typical ignorance and arrogance, to airily appoint the “pro-Western moderate” Hussein as eternal spokesman for the Palestinians was bound to raise their hackles.

Issam Sartawi was eager to embrace even this egregious sellout, and so he was summarily disposed of by the refuseniks. But the rejectionists and even increasing numbers in Al Fatah looked upon Arafat’s evasive and ambivalent response to the Reagan Plan with deep suspicion. The Al Fatah guerrillas began to realize that for years Arafat had done more talking and showboating than real fighting. He was so enamoured of his jet-set image that he had neglected the actual war front. His eagerness to display his “moderation” was becoming increasingly evident. And, to top it all, he gathered around him as guerrilla commanders lazy and corrupt cronies. When Arafat greeted his pummelling by the Israeli aggressors in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon as some sort of heroic “victory,” it became apparent to the majority of the Al Fatah fighters that the showboating Yasser Arafat had outlived his usefulness to the Palestinian cause. He had become a drag upon the revolution.

There is another important difference between the strategic perspective of Arafat and the refuseniks: Their position on the “front-line” (those bordering on Israel) Arab states. In order to pursue a short-cut to victory, Arafat has always trusted blindly in seemingly sympathetic Arab regimes. Yet he has consistently been betrayed. Arafat trusted King Hussein of Jordan, and as a result the PLO was almost wiped out by the horror of Black September. Then Arafat settled in Lebanon, and he trusted Syria, who responded by invading Lebanon in 1976 when the coalition of the PLO and the Lebanese Left were on the point of total victory. It was “Commie” Syria, now supposedly the champion of the radical Palestinian cause, who crushed the Lebanese Left and restored minority Christian rule. In contrast to this running after short-runs, to this purblind reliance on Arab states that are only interested in their own power and not injustice for Palestinians, Habash and the rejectionists have long pointed out that the Palestinians can only win in a long-run perspective, by first engaging in a long march through the institutions, overthrowing the untrustworthy Arab states and relying mainly on Palestinians themselves for a Palestinian victory.

Thus, it is true in a very different sense from the Reagan Plan that the large majority of Jordanians are ethnically Palestinian. Jordan is Palestinian, but the only way to effectuate this reality is not to call King Hussein a surrogate “Palestinian”, but to overthrow Hussein and his Bedouin praetorian guard and replace them by a Palestinian-ruled Jordan. There is no sign of this happening, although the gutsy movement, Black June, headed by Abu Nidal, is headed toward this goal. Taking this radical perspective will be slower, but it will in the long run be a far surer path for the Palestinian cause.

The situation now is tangled and complex. Aided by the Soviet Union and the United States, Arafat was able to escape from Tripoli. He has no base anywhere near Palestine, his troops are scattered all over North Africa, and yet the U.S. is pinning its hopes on his re-forming an alliance with Jordan. Arafat clearly has nine lives, so it is difficult to know which way events will jump. Although scorned and repudiated by most of the Fatah guerrillas, headed by Colonel Abu Moussa, Arafat still has the strong support of the West Bank civilian masses, who have not caught up with the significance of recent events. Only time will tell how much of a role the wily Arafat will be able to carve out for himself in the Middle East.

As a footnote to the inability of the United States to be neutral in any situation, let us note the cries of horror with which it greeted the recent declaration of independence by the new sovereign state of Northern Cyprus. For years, Cyprus has been in effect partitioned between the Turkish-occupied North and the Greek South. But why shouldn’t the Turkish minority on Cyprus have the power to secede and set up their own republic?

It is true that when Turkey invaded Cyprus several years ago, it occupied the ethnic Turkish areas, but unfortunately extended Turkish rule to places far beyond the range of Turkish ethnicity. In short, it congered many ethnically Greek areas. Still and all, partition is always to be welcomed. Why shouldn’t the Turkish Cypriotes have their own country? And why does the United States, with unvarying accuracy, not only intervene in all foreign quarrels but usually take the wrong side?

In this Turkic-Greek fight, there is nary a Commie in a carload. As a matter of fact, the Turkish government is considerably to the right of Greece. So why did we come out on the side of Greece over Turkey? Could it, by any chance, be due to the fact that there are lots of Greek-American voters and hardly any American Turks? Is this too cynical a stance? Or is it that U.S. imperialism has an all-pervasive instinct for coming out against the course of justice in any given foreign policy situation?

Finally, while ruminating on the Middle East, we may ponder the following fascinating question: Is sacrificing one’s life for a cause Heroism or Crazed Fanaticism? This is a tough question, especially for someone like myself who espouses a pro-life ethic. Ayn Rand, the great opponent of self-sacrifice, tried to bring it in again through the back door by justifying such action in the name of a “life worth living”. Perhaps, but this is hardly very convincing. At any rate, on one thing I am clear: It is illegitimate to brand someone who dies for a cause you don’t like as a crazed fanatic while honoring as heroes those who die for a cause of which you approve. But yet the press has been denouncing the young lad who drove the truck-bomb into American Marine headquarters in Beirut as a bestial fanatic who dared to smile at the end, while lauding Marine Commandant General Paul Kelley for opining: “I would simply ask that all Americans this evening, with bended knee, thank God, that this country of ours can still produce young Americans who are willing to lay down their lives for free men everywhere.”

Maybe it all depends on which God one is praying to. If the young truck driver was indeed a Shiite Muslim, as is generally believed, then he had a powerful incentive for his kamikaze deed. For Shiites believe that all who die for their cause are assumed straight to Heaven, without any of the delays and uncertainties that afflict everyone else. Can the Judeo-Christian religion offer anything comparable?

III. Conquering Little Grenada

Unfortunately, our title and article, “Ronald Reagan, Warmonger” (July-August Lib. Forum) proved to be all too prophetic. In a brutal act of naked aggression, Reagan on October 25 invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada, along with a few measly troops from neighboring client governments used as a flimsy cover. Not only was this a reprehensible act of aggression and murder, but it violated every tenet of international law and of U.S. treaties. International law is scarcely libertarian law, but at least it offers some restrictions on one government’s intervention into another country. Thus, it is anti-libertarian for one government to aid another state militarily against the other’s revolutionarties, but it does happen to be consonant with international law. But governmental aid to subversive troops in another country (such as the massive U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan contras) does violate international law. Even more of a violation is a naked act of aggression against another state and its people. But that is what U.S. imperialism, at last shedding much of its usual pose of legalistic hypocrisy, has done in Grenada.

Note the following:

A. The U.S. invasion was a clear and dramatic violation of Article 15 of the 1948 charter of the Organization of American States, of which the U.S., the puppet island governments, and Grenada were all signatories. Article 15 states: “No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state”, whether by “armed force” or otherwise.

B. The invasion of Grenada was also a clear violation of Article 17 of the OAS charter: “The territory of a state is inviolable; it may not be the object, even temporarily, of military occupation or other measures of force taken by another state, directly or indirectly, on any grounds whatever.” The United States did not seek the approval of the OAS before invading, because it would not have received it.

C. The invasion of Grenada was a violation of the UN charter, which prohibits “the threat or use of force” in international affairs except for defense against “armed attack.” Grenada, it seems superfluous to add, had not launched any armed attack against the U.S.—or indeed against any other state.

D. The invasion of Grenada was illegal, because it did not follow upon a declaration of war by the Congress.

E. The invasion of Grenada was illegal, because it violated the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Reagan lied in claiming that he had notified Congress after the fact of invasion, in a manner “consistent with the War Powers Resolution.” For Regan wilfully failed to report that he had introduced U.S. troops “into hostilities”; if he had so reported, the resolution would have required him to “terminate” the use of troops within 90 days.

F. The excuses used by Reagan for his brutal act of murder were feeble to the point of obscene. He claimed he acted to protect U.S. citizens in Grenada. But there was no evidence whatever that these citizens, mostly students at the St. George’s University School of Medicine, were under any threat, imminent or otherwise. In fact, the head of the medical school, Charles R. Modica, was bitterly critical of the invasion, and pointed out that the only threat to the lives and persons of the students was that posed by the invasion itself.

It’s true that Mr. Modica, after a lengthy session with State Department officials, changed his tune, and declared that their “information” had led him to favor the invasion in retrospect. One wonders what in fact the State Department told Modica, and whether anything was mentioned, for example, about the legitimacy in American eyes of his Grenadian medical school and their practice of medicine in the U.S.

The United States lied, too, when it said that the Grenada airport was closed and that therefore the students could not have been evacuated without the invasion. Only the day before the invasion, Canada evacuated its citizens from Grenada at the airport with no problem. Furthermore, in a desperate attempt to forestall the attack, the Grenada authorities offered any guarantees that the Americans wanted on the safety or the rapid evacuation of the students. In fact, Grenada’s Revolutionary Military Council, the Austin junta ruling the island, hand-delivered a note to the U.S. Embassy in Barbados, stating that: “We reiterate that the lives, well being and property of every American and other foreign citizen residing in Grenada are fully protected and guaranteed by our government. There is absolutely no basis whatsoever for any country launching an invasion of our beloved country and homeland.”

But all to no avail. No plea was enough or was even heard by a Reagan Administration hell-bent on a war they could finally win. The Grenadians delivered the message at the U.S. Embassy at 2 A.M. Monday morning October 17. The U.S. reply—ignoring the Grenadian guarantees and simply reiterating concern about American safety—was sent not by normal diplomatic channels but by slow commercial telex after midnight Tuesday morning (a ploy reminiscent of U.S. actions at Pearl Harbor!). The idiotic excuse was that the Reagan Administration didn’t “recognize” the military regime on Grenada as a “legitimate” government. The Council never received the telex. The real reply came a few hours later, from U.S. Marines and Army Rangers spitting death.

The Reagan Administration also claimed that the invasion was needed to “restore law and order and governmental institutions”, and, as a corollary, “to forestall further chaos.” But, first, it is unclear why the United States is supposed to be functioning as the imposer of law, government and “order” throughout the world, or why its function is supposed to be that of universal repressor of “chaos.” And, second, there was hardly any chaos or absence of law and government on Grenada. On the contrary, there was all too much government. Obviously, what Reagan was really saying is that the U.S. has the right to invade any country having a government it does not like, in this case Marxist-Leninist, and impose any other government—including its own troops—that it desires.

One of Reagan’s excuses for his aggression is that the existing government (the Austin regime) murdered the Prime Minister. But since this Prime Minister, whom Reagan was claiming to avenge, was Maurice Bishop, a Marxist-Leninist who had seized control of Grenada in a coup in 1979, this means that the U.S. is willing to go to war to defend the honor of one Marxist-Leninist group against another—in this case a harder-core faction. Further, there is a great deal of evidence that Reagan had been toying with the idea of invading Grenada when it was still ruled by the beloved Bishop.

Secretary of State Shultz’s excuse—that the U.S. had to act to put an end to “an atmosphere of violent uncertainty” in Grenada—is an even more destructive variant of the anti-“chaos” argument. Every time there is “violent uncertainty” somewhere, are we supposed to go to war?

The final insult was Reagan’s last alibi for the invasion; “to restore democratic institutions” in Grenada. So are we supposed to wage war around the globe to impose “democracy” everywhere? Why then doesn’t Reagan invade Haiti, Chile, South Africa, South Korea and a host of other undemocratic states? In fact, how many countries around the globe does this cretin think can pass muster in any sense as “democratic”? Darned few is the answer. We are back to the worst lunatic doctrines of Woodrow Wilson, in which the United States is supposed to wage perpetual war in order to cram “democratic institutions” down everyone’s throat. Even the hawk Senator Moynihan (D, N.Y.) protested at this and declared that he could not see how “democracy” can be brought to Grenada at the point of a bayonet.

And, finally, what in the concrete does this “restoration of democratic institutions” amount to? It turns out that the U.S. plan was to reactivate the British “Governor-General” in Grenada—the last defunct remnant of British imperialism in Grenada—and get him to appoint a new puppet government. What price “democracy” now?

In fact, since the American invasion, the resurrected Governor-General, Sir Paul Scoon, has been imposing “democracy” upon Grenada via the American troops. His hand-picked Cabinet is only a figure head, without power, and Scoon rules directly with the aid of American bayonets.

A particularly bizarre aspect of the Grenada caper was reactivating Scoon, since Great Britain itself not only refused to join the invasion, but sharply warned the U.S. against it. We have come to a helluva pass when Margaret Thatcher, the Butcher of the Falklands, is pleading with Reagan to show some common sense and restraint in Grenada. Legally, furthermore, Grenada is and has been a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and is an ally of Great Britain, so that the U.S. attacked and invaded a British ally. In fact, in one charming though highly unrealistic scenario, Britain could have interpreted the U.S. assault on Grenada as an attack on itself, and so we could have seen the fascinating spectacle of Great Britain launching a missile strike on Miami in retaliation for our aggression against its Commonwealth protectorate!

Ronald Reagan, in announcing his attack upon Grenada, condemned its regime as a “brutal group of leftist thugs.” But what are we supposed to do about rightist thugs? And especially about the Greatest Rightist Thug of them all, Ronald Reagan? For Reagan is not only a thug but a cowardly bully, only ready to launch armed aggression against a nation too tiny to fight back. As a friend of mine suggested, “Reagan has been anxious to Win One for the Gipper, and so he finally picked on a country he could—probably—beat.” But even teeny Grenada minus an army gave us unexpected trouble, the Pentagon admitting that it had greatly underestimated the fighting capabilities of the Grenadians and of the Cuban construction workers (!) In fact, to defeat several hundred Grenadians, the U.S. had to send wave after wave of fresh troops, totalling over 5,000, from Marines to Army Rangers to the famous 82nd Airborne. Perhaps Maurice Bishop, who in 1981 forecast a U.S. aggression against Grenada, will prove prophetic when he warned: “The United States will find it a lot easier to land here than to leave.”

In fact, Bishop’s prediction has already come true. At first, the U.S. authorities trumpeted that our troops would be in and out—a quick victory taking no more than a week. Then it became “many weeks.” And finally it was out by Christmas. When Christmas arrived, the Reagan Administration had totally changed its tune: only all “combat” troops were out of Grenada, with four hundred American troops remaining indefinitely, i.e. permanently. Half of these “non-combat” troops are military police, brandishing their “non-combat” weapons as they swagger around Greada, seeking subversive Cubanos.

The determined resistance of the Grenadians has obscenely been used by Reagan to justify the aggression itself. They had a large cache of arms! What would the evil Grenadians need arms for anyway? Surely not to guard against an American invasion, as the “paranoid” Grenadians had kept muttering? Don’t they know that the U.S. is always peace-loving, and never never commits an act of aggression? So that the cache of arms, many of which were 1870 rifles, were marked down by the Reagan Administration as “proof’ of the imminent aggression to be launched by teeny Grenada. Whom do you suppose they were going to attack, they with no army, navy or air force? A massive strike against Pensacola, perhaps, the “soft underbelly” of the North American continent?

It now turns out that the evil airport, which Grenada had under construction and which the U.S. denounced as a base for military attack, was a genuine airport after all! There were none of the underground installations that mark a military airstrip. The construction workers may have been Cuban, but the company employing them was British, and now the Americans are talking about finishing the airport for Grenada.

Ronald Reagan claimed that the invasion had come “just in time.” Just in time for what? Even the Reagan Administration has not claimed that Grenada was planning, much less about to launch, armed aggression against any other Caribbean island, let alone the U.S. (No, dammit: If we don’t stop them now, in Grenada, we will soon be defending the shores of Coney Island from Grenadian attack. And so, in the “complex of fear and vaunting” which Garet Garrett pointed out is endemic to Empire, we launched a “preventive” strike.) No, it was just in time in the sense that the Grenadians might have been able to defend themselves for a longer time, to turn even this tight little island into another Vietnam for U.S. imperialism.

Another post facto rationale has been to play up the Cuban connection, as if the Austin-Coard regime were Cuban puppets. Apart from any other problem with this reasoning, the fact is that Maurice Bishop, the man Reagan was supposedly avenging, was far closer to the Cubans than were Austin-Coard. Castro and the Communist Party of Cuba strongly denounced the Austin-Coard coup against Bishop, and Fidel has described his relations with these ultra-hardliners as “cold and tense” at best.

A particularly repellent aspect of the Reagan announcement of his aggression was his trundling out M. Eugenia Charles, Prime Minister of Dominica, the most “pro-American” of the Caribbean puppet regimes, to supply a native fig leaf for the invasion. Miss Charles provided a unique justification by interdependence and kinship: “I don’t think it’s an invasion,” she said. “We are one region. We belong to each other. We are kith and kin.” Well, that clears that up: alibiing mass murder by invoking a “sense of belonging.” Truly, in Isabel Paterson’s memorable phrase, the “humanitarian with the guillotine.”

A few days after the invasion, La Charles came up with another dubious contribution to the cause of the Grenada War. She then maintained that the beleaguered Governor-General Scoon, who had been deposed in 1974 when Grenada became independent of Britain (though still a member of the Commonwealth), had asked the U.S. and its Caribbean stooges to intervene and invade Grenada. Miss Charles’s assertion that Scoon is the “only constitutional authority” in Grenada proves a bit too much. For on those grounds, Queen Elizabeth would, right now, be the “only constitutional authority” over the American “colonies”, and the U.S.A. would still be a vassal of Great Britain. It is strange for the U.S. to endorse this sort of argumentation.

Another heinous aspect of the invasion was the impudence by which the U.S. barred reporters from accompanying the invading forces. It was an act unprecedented in American history. In fact, when the U.S. troops found four American reporters on the island they promptly shipped them off by force. The insulting excuse was that the U.S. “feared for the safety” of the journalists. Again, phony humanitarianism and liberal paternalism were being used to justify arrant aggression. For, of course, it should be up to the journalists themselves whether they should endanger their safety. Does the Reagan Administration think it owns the bodies of the men and women of the press, and is therefore entitled to make such decisions?

The real reason why the press was kept out, while the war was going on, is that the Reagan Administration didn’t want any Vietnam-like repetition of the media taking pictures of innocent civilians butchered by U.S. bombs and bullets. As it was, the Reaganite tactics worked beautifully, the embarrassing photos were avoided, and the pictures could be confined to happy Americans (happy to be evacuated from the Grenada war zone, that is) kissing U.S. soil. Far better for the Reaganite image!

Mercantilism and Public Choice

by Richard A. Cooper

Ekelund, Jr., Robert B. & Tollison, Robert D., Mercantilism as a Rent-Seeking Society: Economic Regulation in Historical Perspective. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1982. $17.50.

Reviewed by Richard A. Cooper

Today’s debates over economic regulation versus deregulation render yesterday’s debates over the system and doctrine of mercantilism of contemporary interest. In the view of Ekelund and Tollison mercantilism emerged as a result of efforts to obtain monopoly rents thorough state privileges. The authors state that, “. . . the supply of and demand for monopoly rights through the machinery of the state is seen as the essence of mercantilism.” The authors apply the modern economic theory of public choice and economic regulation in order to understand mercantilism and its decline. Previous studies, they contend, were excessively “ideological,” concerned with the arguments of the proponents and opponents of mercantilism. The mercantilist doctrines arose to provide an ideological cover for the privileged monopolists.

The authors rely heavily upon the Swedish classical liberal economist Eli Heckscher’s classic study Mercantilism for historical data. However, Ekelund and Tollison reject Heckscher’s interpretations, which emphasize the role of ideas in the rise and decline of mercantilism. The authors explicitly reject the concept that it was the free trade writers who overthrew the mercantile system in England.

Instead, using public choice analysis, Ekelund and Tollison assert that English mercantilism declined because the rise of parliamentary power raised the lobbying costs for monopoly privileges. As parliament refused to delegate its newly won powers to anybody, any prospective monopolist had to secure majorities in the legislature as well as the acquiescence of the king.

Ekelund and Tollison level two valid criticisms of Heckscher’s work. First, they denounce the absence of economic actors from a work purportedly on economic history. Second, they note that Heckscher concurred with the German historical school economists (who praised the mercantilist system) in taking at face value the mercantilist doctrines for the building of state power. Ekelund and Tollison reject this public interest appeal as self-serving cant.

Certain observations are in order. My training was in European intellectual history and I believe that the German historical school accepted the Hegelian notion of a state above the interests in society. Moreover, the tendency I found In Heckscher’s Mercantilism is not so much that of an emphasis upon intellectual history as upon “juristic” developments, an approach which owes much to the German historical school.

Ekelund and Tollison skirt close to the most vulgar sort of Marxist interpretation, albeit with a free-market perspective. Of course, people justify themselves to others on the grounds of serving the public interest. But is it not true that people can sincerely believe that the protectionist or other mercantilist schemes are good for the vast majority of people? I hesitate to say that I do not sincerely believe that free trade and laissez-faire are good for most people while at the same time I believe they personally benefit me. The mercantilists of the age of absolutism, like their counterparts today, will tend to favor a strong state, even though they recognize that it might not work to their advantage in all instances. The authors fall down in not clearly distinguishing between the particular historical actors in the mercantilist system, namely the monarchs, the royal bureaucrats, the guilds, the merchants, and officials of the various municipalities, as well as the writers of mercantilist tracts.

Ekelund and Tollison appear to hold the sterotypical Ricardian view of “Economic Man.” This places them in a quandary: they shrink from the implications of their own statements by not applying the same rent-seeking analysis to themselves, other contemporary supporters of deregulation, and their free trade predecessors. They should take note that Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action and other works, forcefully reminds us that all values desired by acting humans, whether material or “spiritual,” are the objects of economic behavior.

However, Ekelund and Tollison provide a necessary corrective to that somewhat naive concern with mercantilist and free trade propagandists on the part of previous students of mercantilism. The authors interpret prior views as guided by an evolutionary theory of the history of economic thought, which appears insupportable to me in the light of twentieth century experience, but which was

. . . . propagated by historians of economic thought, such as Viner, who tend to view the history of economic theory as a progression from error to truth. These writers, whose approach is derivative of Adam Smith’s famous critique of the mercantilists, have concentrated on an expose of the fallacies of the mercantilists as expressed by the “central tendencies” in the vast literature of the writers of the period. These scholars emphasize the presence of grave errors in mercantilist logic, errors that were exposed by David Hume and the classical economists.

Correctly, in my view, the authors stress the similarity between mercantilism and persent-day economic regulation, despite the changes in the political system. I concur with their application of Stigler, Peltzman, Posner and Niskanen’s theories of economic regulation to the study of French and English mercantilism. Beyond that, I maintain that they fail to provide the promised application of the interpretation of their model of mercantilism to the contemporary deregulation debate. Perhaps this is because the present controversy contradicts their dismissal of subjective-philosophical influences.

Take airline deregulation for example. We can identify particular authors and studies that persuaded Ralph Nader, Senator Kennedy, and President Ford to champion airline deregulation and to shepherd it through Congress. Did they have self-interest behind them? Yes, but what of it?

We can place Ekelund and Tollison into intellectual perspective. Clearly, they draw upon Chicago and Virginia School approaches, with a greater stress upon the Virginia “public choice” model as most relevant to the auctioning of monopoly privileges. As they see themselves: “It should be stressed that our purpose is not to evaluate mercantilist ideas from the standpoint of modern economic theory. Rather, it is to explain mercantile political economy using positive economic theory.”

Such an approach does have some elements in common with the praxeological method of Von Mises, in that it is concerned with the actual subjective motivations and choices of the historical actors rather than quantification in the Chicago mould.

The authors’ methodological assumptions appear “Austrian”: “A blend of methodological individualism and evolving institutional constraints is central to our main thesis concerning the rise and fall of mercantilism . . . Given the standard and timeless assumptions of individual-choice theory, the rent-seeking, model telescopes into a specification of the constraints that modify economic behavior.” James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock of the Virginia School have acknowledged their intellectual debts to Von Mises and the Austrian School. Ekelund and Tollison are quite “Austrian” in their stress on mercantilism as a dynamic process rather a set of legal institutions.

Ekelund and Tollison have created an impressive reinterpretation of mercantilism, despite the flaws in their conception of economic behavior. It should start a healthy debate on mercantilism.

—— Double Issue ——

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVIII, No. 1–2

JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1984

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

Bergland Campaign in High Gear

On February 1, the Bergland for President campaign, ideologically sound from the very beginning, swung into organizational high gear. The Bergland campaign opened national headquarters in Orange County, in southern California, and moving down to take over as full-time campaign manager for the duration was the redoubtable Williamson Evers. Coming down to join him as his full-time Administrative Assistant was Evers’ wife, outgoing California LP chair Mary Gingell, a sparkling combination of efficiency and warmth. Since Evers’ installation, a steady stream of knowledgeable and hard-core statements on current news and political issues has been flowing from the Bergland camp—all of which (in stark contrast to the 1980 campaign) have been cleared in advance with the Review Committee. Coming on board as Bergland media coordinator was a pro at the job, Laurie Sano, and no sooner was Laurie in place than she began to line up scads of top media interviews for Bergland. One of our Mavens pointed out the incredible contrast with the media coordinator of the 1980 campaign, Ed Crane, who had virtually specialized in the instant personal alienation of leading media people.

The veteran John Robertson has taken to the road as travelling ballot-drive coordinator, and fund-raising has been going well under the dedicated direction of Burt Blumert and Emil Franzi.

Alicia Clark did a fine job as Bergland scheduler for LP appearances, and this task has now been turned over to Melinda Pillsbury-Foster of the southern California party.

Meanwhile, Jim Lewis, LP Vice-Presidential candidate, has been doing a fine job travelling tirelessly around the country, conveying the hard-core radical Libertarian message without fear or favor.

The Bergland campaign has also developed a crucially important organizational tool: the name and address of everyone who calls headquarters for information is being computerized, put on cards, and the cards sent to the local LPs where the caller resides. In that way, the Bergland campaign will not be just a ship that passes in the night; it will systematically use its resources to develop grass roots Libertarian parties throughout the country. In this way, the presidential race is functioning harmoniously as a combination education, recruitment, and grass-roots party-building campaign.

Call for information, or send money to, Bergland headquarters: Bergland for President Campaign, Suite 105 West, 1525 Mesa Verde Drive East, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 (714) 754–1776.

As an example of the excellent statements emerging from the campaign, we are herewith publishing Dave Bergland’s article on The Nebraska Seven.

The Nebraska Seven

by David Bergland

Prison is not the happiest place to spend the holidays, but in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, seven fathers spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Cass County Jail—while their wives lived as fugitives in a neighboring state—all for the “crime” of sending their children to a church school which had not been certified by the Nebraska Department of Education. Worse—the men had not been tried and found guilty of any charges. They were imprisoned when they invoked the Fifth Amendment at a court hearing, believing their testimony would later be used against them. Until they break down and agree to waive this Constitutionally protected right they must remain in jail, where they have already spent nearly three months.

This travesty of justice is no surprise to those who have been following the underlying conflict. State officials and their allies in the education establishment have been stepping up their opposition to parents seeking alternatives to a government operated school system. Across the country, parents are increasingly disenchanted with government schools. They are aware of the billions of tax dollars poured into these institutions, while each year graduates emerge less literate and informed than their predecessors. Children are not receiving adequate instruction in such basic skills as reading and arithmetic. They are being engulfed in what the National Commission on Excellence in Education has called “the rising tide of mediocrity.” Parents are alarmed, and to save their children from being swept away by this tide, many are removing children from government-operated schools, to teach them at home or in private schools where parents have direct control over subject material.

It is often said, incorrectly, that only the well-to-do can afford to send their children to private schools. But, these new private schools are being established and supported by parents of moderate, even low incomes. As such repudiation of government schools becomes a widespread movement, the educational establishment is panicking.

To inhibit this grass-roots movement, many states have established mandatory certification requirements for schools and teachers which give state authorities the power to prohibit the formation or continuation of any school of which they disapprove. By making it very difficult to operate a private school, the government monopoly on education—and its control over children—is being protected.

Foremost in the new home education-private school movement are Christian fundamentalist parents for whom reading the Bible is of primary importance. They are thus also foremost in challenging the government monopoly over education. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision outlawing prayer and Bible reading in public schools, many Protestant parents were dismayed—but this ruling did force the issue. Religious observances in tax-supported schools violate the principle of separation of church and state required by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

But the first Amendment not only separates church and state, it also outlaws government interference in the exercise of religion. Yet such interference is taking place in Nebraska.

The church-school parents there take seriously the Biblical injunction to “train up your children in the way they will go . . .” As they see it, it is not only their right, but their duty to oversee the education of their children—and to be certain they receive thorough instruction in the Bible.

Five years ago, as an expression of their convictions, nine sets of parents in Louisville, Nebraska, formed a school which met in the basement of their church, Faith Baptist—an independent Baptist church. They were assisted by their pastor, the Rev. Everett Sileven and his daughter, Theresa Schmidt, the school supervisor. There were 29 students enrolled, grades K-12. Emphasis was on the basics: reading, arithmetic, spelling, grammar, etc.—and the Bible, for them, the most basic text of all.

From the school’s founding, the Nebraska Department of Education opposed it—refusing to certify it or the teachers, although several had college degrees, and the children consistently scored one to three years above the Nebraska average. The parents and their pastor offered to permit yearly testing on standardized tests to demonstrate that the children were maintaining their high performance level. They refused, however, to hire state certified teachers who may well hold doctrines contrary to those held by the parents themselves. As long as the students are maintaining certain objective standards, the parents reason that the state has no legitimate interest in the matter.

Nebraska authorities feel otherwise. On several instances, through court order, the church itself was forcibly closed down and padlocked—to be open only Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings for permitted services! On November 23, 1983, a hearing was held at which Everett Sileven and Theresa Schmit were ordered to show cause why they should not be held in contempt of court if they continued to operate the school. Warrants were issued for the parents, but through an error, only seven couples were subpoenaed. The day of the hearing, the seven fathers appeared, took the Fifth Amendment, and were thrown into jail. The mothers, fearing their children were to be seized and made wards of the court, fled into hiding. Bench warrants were ordered for their arrest.

The Louisville parents are not alone. Six other independent Baptist schools in Nebraska are similarly threatened, and school authorities across the country are watching to see how the courts handle the situation.

We libertarians wholeheartedly support the parents and the Rev. Sileven in their courageous and non-violent stand against the arrogant Nebraska government. The argument is not about literacy—but about authority. Who has the ultimate right to decide about the upbringing and education of children: parents or bureaucrats? That is what is at stake. We hold that the right to direct the education of one’s children is as important a right as freedom to practice one’s religion or exercise free speech—and should be recognized as such.

Centuries ago the great cry was for a separation of church and state—and in this country that was achieved. Libertarians are calling for a similar separation between education and state. In particular, we would repeal mandatory certification requirements as well as all other tax and regulatory roadblocks to the growth and development of private schools or home schooling. A free people requires freedom in education—and separation from the state is critical if education is to be free. Without that crucial separation, government will assert ever increasing control over our lives, and the lives and future of our children.

Who Is the Real Mafia?

by Emil Franzi

A MAN OF HONOR—The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno. With Sergio Lalli. Simon and Schuster, $17.95.

by Emil Franzi

After reading several rather poor reviews of this book, all by more or less WASP reviewers. I would maintain that only an Italian, even a Piedmontese like me, is fully capable of appreciating this magnificent piece of cultural anthropology. After all, even my half-WASP older daughter referred to the unfortunately demised television series “The Gangster Chronicles” as “Guinea Roots”. Fascination with what has come to be known as “The Mafia” is as American as fascination with the Old West. Having an autobiography of Joe Bonanno is as valuable to the study of the former as having an autobiography of Geronimo or Crazy Horse would be to the latter. The critics of this book claim that it is Bonanno’s goal to make himself look better than his press clippings. Well, so what? Most, if not ALL autobiographies are written in favor of their author, leaving little difference between Bonanno’s and, say Kissinger’s. Except I think Bonanno was probably more honest than Kissinger—but that wouldn’t be hard.

This book may be far more relevant than its author may have expected. In telling his own story, Bonanno tells many others. There is a steady and growing interest in this country in what Joe Bonanno calls “The Tradition”. While several interesting biographies of principal players have been published, notably Meyer Lansky’s, and while such decent fictional accounts as The Godfather exist, most of the literature about “the Mafia” is pure garbage. From the Valachi Papers to The Last Mafioso to the reams of government-produced drivel, most of what we have been told about “The Tradition” is false. To have this rather candid discourse by someone who was a “heavy hitter” from the 1920’s onward (I know of no other book that gives you a lineage chart of the five New York families, complete with photos) is of great value to students of this aspect of American history and sociology. No one who was as many places as Joe Bonanno and was at so high a level has chosen to tell us as much about it. In this regard, Lalli’s translation (Bonanno’s English is admittedly inadequate) of Bonanno’s lifestyle, principles, and reminiscences may well be as important historically as Riordan’s similar efforts on behalf of Tammany leader George Washington Plunkitt (Plunkitt of Tammany Hall) some 75 years ago.

A Man of Honor has many passages that are of distinct interest to Libertarians. After one recognizes, as Joe Bonanno ably points out, that “Mafia” is one term for what is, to many Sicilians, not a formal organization but a way of life based on custom and tradition, it’s easy to understand how the Sicilian people, one of the most oppressed in history, have chosen to react to varied but constant tyrannies. To begin with, they have comprehended (as most WASPs coming from a freer tradition have not) that the game of government isn’t on the level. Their response was to group around family and village in mutual self-defense. In doing so, trade-offs were made—such as submitting individual will to the good of the group. While this response would hardly be applauded by hard-core Randians, the reason for it is of obvious interest to those of us who share a distrust in “lawful” and “legitimate” rulers. What Joe Bonanno tells us about his Sicilian heritage—family group first, allegiance to a small piece of turf, a lack of interest in the political process as a solution to problems—is validated by (or aids in validating) Thomas Sowell’s superb treatise Ethnic America. Sicilians, when moving to a new country, treated their new government with the same distrust as they did the old one. In fact, they often found it more baffling. As Joe Bonanno explains:

. . . if people, ordinary people, didn’t demand such services as gambling and money lending, no one would bother to supply these services . . . It is difficult, therefore, for me to take seriously government attempts to dislodge the entrepreneurs who provide such services . . . Men of my Tradition (Family members) some of whom were involved in illicit gambling operations, understood the human condition and provided these services, which society demanded. The naive view is to believe that a certain group of people, such as Sicilians, somehow force these activities on society . . . (p. 218)

I think we call them victimless crimes.

Other portions of the book of direct interest to Libertarians are the many accounts of the sloppy, shoddy, sleazy, unconstitutional behavior of our law enforcement “Mafia”. Bonanno make a rather good case that the government wanted him in the slammer, and didn’t care how many rules (or laws, or rights, or constitutions) they had to screw over to do it. It’s easy for Libertarians to defend constitutional rights when the victim is a little old lady getting eminent domained, or an Amish farmer losing his livestock for non-payment of Social Security, or young men being drafted for some lousy war. Those are cheap, and relatively popular. Well, let’s try it when the victim is this time someone who is supposed to be one of the biggest criminals in America. Same rights. Same Constitution. Same principles.

Whatever Joe Bonanno is supposed to have done, whatever laws he may have broken, it is glaringly apparent to me that he is of far less danger to the rest of us than many of the lawenforcement dirt-balls and scum-bags who claim to be protecting us while they treat such items as the Bill of Rights as so much toilet paper. I do not, as some Libertarians have in the past, mean this as a blanket condemnation of all of those involved in law enforcement, many of whom are decent people with a tough job. Let Joe Bonanno himself differentiate:

In discussing policemen, it is best to distinguish between street cops and paper cops. Street cops are the ones who work for a living. They’re out on the streets, responding to calls, chasing criminals, settling disputes, putting their lives on the line. A man of my Tradition can have respect for a street cop.

Then there are the paper cops, the bureaucrats of their profession. Paper cops spend most of their time at a desk, shuffling papers, doing research, making out reports, filing for government grants and the like. Paper cops rarely put themselves in dangerous situations. They have normal working hours for the most part. Paper cops like to sit around and chew the fat. They are very big on holding conferences and attending crime seminars. Of course, paper cops wouldn’t be seen dead in uniform. (p. 358)

The “Organized Crime” Scare of the last 20 years or so will someday be looked upon by rational Americans the way “Reefer Madness” is now. As an attempt to manipulate the truth and scare the Hell out of people for the primary purpose of giving certain select government agencies more money and more power over the lives of the rest of us. The danger to this country posed by the “Mafia” is as phony as the politicians and paper cops who promote it. This book helps make that clear.

Take it from a Piedmontese.

Crisis ’83: The Council of Foreign Relations and the Libertarian Party

by Howard S. Katz

“Libertarian Party nominates C.F.R. for President.”

These words were not the headline to come out of the Libertarian Party National Convention of 1983. They missed by a margin of 27 votes. And there hangs a tale.

One week before the convention, Gene Burns, the leading contender for the LP’s presidential nomination, withdrew, leaving an open field. Several candidates emerged, most prominent of whom were Dave Bergland, the Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 1976, and Earl Ravenal, who has been featured in libertarian publications for his anti-interventionist foreign policy analyses.

Ideologically these were two fine choices, although Ravenal is somewhat of an unknown quantity in economics. The problem was that Ravenal is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The further problem was that a substantial minority of delegates did not understand what was wrong with that. Ravenal was defeated, but a great many people did not realize that nominating a member of this organization would seriously threaten the basic goal which the Libertarian Party was set up to achieve.

I History of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission

A generation ago, intellectual Objectivists and conservative economists in the pro-liberty movement used to turn up their noses at crackerbarrel Birchers who ranted about a giant conspiracy centered about the Council on Foreign Relations. Conspiracy theory was not respectable.

It turned out that the intellectuals were wrong. The Birchers colored their view of this conspiracy with a right-wing interpretation, but the basic facts were true. We owe a note of thanks to people like Pete McAlpine for making the study of this conspiracy intellectually respectable and to Steve Zarlenga for publishing one of the definitive works on the subject, Carroll Quigley’s second conspiracy book, The Anglo-American Conspiracy. Taking all of these things together, the following facts have now emerged.

In the late 19th century, a group of British conservatives, inspired by the ideology of the arch-reactionary John Ruskin, formed a secret society dedicated to the goal of British imperialism. England was superior, these people argued; therefore, the British way of life should be imposed on all the inferior peoples of the world (for their own good of course). The British public of the time, which tended to more liberal ideas of freedom and self determination, would not have supported this policy of imperialism openly. Therefore, the group had to operate in secret, that is to become a conspiracy, to further its goal.

This conspiracy, like thousands of others that are hatched each year in the political arena, would probably have died a rapid death if not for the fact that its early leader was a millionaire named Cecil Rhodes, who devoted a large share of his fortune to its promotion. The crucial element was its ability to control the London Times, one of the world’s most influential papers. This conspiracy was variously called, the Rhodes group, the Round Table, Milner’s Kindergarten, the Cliveden set, the All Souls group, or just Us. It fomented the Boer War[1] as an excuse to achieve one of its goals, the Cape to Cairo railway (a prelude to British control of Africa), and it regarded the loss of America as one of the worst mistakes of British foreign policy (a mistake it fully intended to rectify).

J. P. Morgan was the head of the American affiliate of the Round Table, and when Germany challenged the British Empire in World War I, Morgan manipulated to bring the United States into the war on England’s side.[2] After the war, Morgan set up the Council on Foreign Relations as a public forum to serve as a front for his Round Table group. Its key positions would be controlled by Round Table members, but it would also contain naive third parties and publicly hold idealistic goals.

Thus, it is necessary to make a few corrections in the Birch view of the conspiracy. First, it is not a left-wing conspiracy, and there is no connection with any Bavarian Illuminati.[3] Its founder, its ideology and its most important members were on the extreme right.[4] Second, the C.F.R. itself is not the conspiracy but merely a front for it. Thus many naive and innocent people can belong to the C.F.R. without understanding anything about the conspiracy that controls it. Third, the goal of the conspiracy was not one-world government in the idealistic sense in which Birchers oppose it. (Although, since it wanted England to control the world, it did favor one-world government in the imperialistic sense in which many conservatives favor it.) Fourth, the conspiracy is nowhere near as powerful as the Birchers make it appear. It failed to bring the United States back into the British Empire. It failed to conquer the world for England. In fact, it stood helplessly by in the late 1940s as the British left smashed the empire into little pieces. And finally, this conspiracy was never a top-down, authoritarian organization headed by a firm leader (a la a James Bond movie). It was an old-boy network of people in the same social class who used their college, business and class associations to good advantage, and were able to accomplish many things by these associations, their money and their positions.

In the 1930s the U.S. Branch of the conspiracy passed out of Morgan hands and came under the control of the Rockefellers. From the late ’30s on, it began to have a dominant influence on U.S. foreign policy. It was the Eastern Establishment in the Republican Party, and it controlled the Democratic Party. A succession of Secretaries of State and advisors came from C.F.R. ranks: Cordell Hull, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles and Henry Cabot Lodge, to name a few. Under the influence of these advisors, Presidents abandoned traditional American anti-interventionism and followed a foreign policy of successive hot and cold wars in various parts of the globe. There is a great deal of evidence that several of these wars were deliberately provoked by the C.F.R. officials in Government (Vietnam,[5] possibly Korea, probably the Pacific theater of World War II. Again, see The Warmongers.) In 1972, a sister organization, the Trilateral Commission, was formed by David Rockefeller (C.F.R. Chairman), and from that time on the C.F.R. played a less active role in foreign affairs. C.F.R./Trilateral control of the American media is so complete that information about these organizations cannot penetrate to the American people. Some prominent Trilateral in Government in recent years have been: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paul Volcker, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Alan Greenspan, John Anderson, Alan Cranston, John Glenn, George Bush, Casper Weinberger, Arthur F. Burns, I. W. Abel, George Ball, Bill Brock, Hedley Donovan, Walter Heller, Lane Kirkland, Paul McCracken, David Packard, Robert Roosa, Bill Scranton, Michael Blumenthal, Warren Christopher, Elliot Richardson, Cy Vance, Paul Warnke and Andy Young.

II Goals and Modus Operandi

When I questioned Earl Ravenal about his membership in the C.F.R., he responded that the C.F.R. did not take any ideological positions. It was merely a discussion group of the top foreign policy people in the country. As a foreign policy analyst, it was his duty to belong. The Trilateral Commission, Ravenal continued, was another matter. It did take positions, and he has refused to join this group. He felt this justified his membership.

It should be pointed out that Mr. Ravenal was incorrect in his answer. I debated George Franklin, the Trilateral Commission’s coordinator and David Rockefeller’s brother-in-law, on two occasions; each time he strongly affirmed that the Trilateral Commission did not take positions but, like the C.F.R., was open to all views.

Although the C.F.R. and the Trilateral Commission are theoretically open to all points of view, there is a tacit understanding that lunatic positions, such as support for a gold standard or reduction in the size of the government, are beyond the pale. After all, the organizations must be limited to sane people if the discussions are to be fruitful. (Which is another way of saying that despite their non-ideological cover these organizations are still loyal to the ideology of their founder, John Ruskin.)

But even if we grant that the C.F.R. and Trilateral organizations are non-ideological, citing this as an excuse for cooperating with them shows a frightening naivete. It reflects a premise that our entire battle is ideological and that changing people’s minds is 100% of what we have to do.

To win the battle for liberty, it is necessary not only to defeat the ideas of the enemy, it is also necessary to block his anti-liberty actions. If you are fighting the Marines, the Notre Dame football team or the CIA, you must defeat them in reality; there is no contest in the ideological realm. In the same way, the C.F.R. and the Trilateral Commission are not our ideological enemies. They are not (as organizations) expounding anti-liberty ideas. They are aiding and assisting their members to take anti-liberty actions. Draft boards, local boards for seizing property by eminent domain, and the I.R.S. are not ideological organizations either. But no libertarian can join one of these organizations without violating his fundamental principles. So to justify a membership by taking the C.F.R./Trilateral ideology (or their non-ideology, or their propaganda about their non-ideology) at face value very much misses the point.

In general, a person or organization cannot be condemned for his (its) ideas. Even false or evil ideas can be held by error. This is unfortunate, but it is not immoral. People or organizations must be judged on the basis of what they do, not what they say. The CIA is evil because it is engaged in lying and murdering on a wide scale, that is, because of what it does not what it believes.

In the same way, there is a long list of C.F.R. and Trilateral officials who have lied and schemed to kill millions of people, to subvert freedom in this country (and others) and to steal billions of dollars. I condemn these officials, and I condemn the organizations which helped them get power.

To get the flavor of these organizations, one must get a sense of John Ruskin, the intellectual inspiration for this conspiracy. Ruskin was a fervent enemy of the 19th century and longed to go back to some time about the 12th, back to the time when an armed aristocracy had reduced the majority of the people to serfdom and when the only meaning given to the word “rights” was “Permissions granted by the lord.” Although these aristocrats armed themselves to the teeth and trained themselves in techniques of fighting, they were not able to maintain their power completely by brute force because they were outnumbered by the peasants 100 to 1. Therefore, they devoted themselves to the art of politics and became extremely skilled in intrigue and insider manipulation. The object was for the small elite to control the government which, in turn, controlled the people. It is this basic idea which motivates the members of the C.F.R. and Trilateral Commission today.

Power today results from a combination of media, money, intellectuals and politicians. One function of C.F.R. and Trilateral meetings is to bring these four elements together so that things can happen. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the intellectual, could never hope—given his anemic personality—to win an election. But pair him with Jimmy Carter, who is as American as apple pie, and they are off to a start. Let Carter meet Hedley Donovan, then editor-in-chief of Time Magazine,[6] at a Trilateral Commission meeting, add a few wealthy contributors, and presto. Four elements, neither of whom could achieve its goal alone, have power when they work together. These organizations are trying to seize control of the apparatus of the state, to increase state power and to use this power for the furtherance of their goals. They are in a direct succession from men whose goals have been the fomenting of war, the killing of millions of human beings, the seizure of vast amounts of wealth and the suppression of freedom. They do not publicly state their current goals,[7] but in The Warmongers I marshal a great deal of evidence that these are in essence the same.

The Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations have been extremely successful in seizing control of the U.S. Government in our generation. Their members get appointed to high positions in both Democratic and Republican administrations. They had three of the top five Presidential contenders in the 1980 election—Bush, Anderson and Carter. The man whom the American people actually elected was the one candidate who spoke out against the Trilateral Commission; but still they occupy the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, the Vice-Presidency and the positions of Secretary of Defense and Ambassador to Germany.[8]

But the really frightening thing about the Trilateral Commission and the C.F.R. is that they are never covered in the press. When Trilateral members perform acts which by any contemporary standard are newsworthy, there is a wall of silence. When a conflict of interest tempts a high official from his public duty, it is normally a front page story. But if the conflict involves the Trilateral Commission, silence. The associations of men in public life are carefully studied; they are exposed to a blinding publicity. But Trilateral and C.F.R. associations are never mentioned, even when these associations directly affect actions and policy decisions.

A good example of this is the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80 (which probably surfaced because of an internal conflict in the Trilateral Commission itself). This crisis was fomented by David Rockefeller using his Trilateral connections (principally Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Warren Christopher). I broke this story in The Gold Bug, and it was picked up by L. J. Davis, a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine. Davis did an excellently researched article and offered it to the New York Times, which turned it down. If finally appeared in Penthouse (October 1980, December 1980) where the establishment could pooh-pooh its conclusions because they had appeared in a girlie magazine. Shortly after the article ran, Iran offered to return the hostages, and Christopher, who was the U.S. negotiator, refused to accept them unless Rockefeller’s bank was guaranteed $500 million which was in dispute. This conflict of interest on Christopher’s part was never mentioned anywhere in, the media. Neither was his membership in the Trilateral Commission. Neither was Kissinger’s membership in the T.C. or the fact that he is now under salary to Rockefeller’s bank.

Careful students of current events will have noted that, when the U.S. gave the Panama Canal to Panama, it paid them a sum of money to take it. This bonus from the U.S. taxpayers enabled the dictator of Panama to pay a debt to Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. The negotiator of the canal treaty for the U.S. was a Trilateralist. Similarly, the Federal Government bailed out New York City, whose bonds were held in large quantities by Chase but never bailed out other cities faced with bankruptcies.[9]

III The Threat to the Libertarian Party

The total number of C.F.R. and Trilaterals is quite small (100 U.S. citizens in the T.C. and a few thousand in the C.F.R.), and despite their wealth and power, they could not dominate the country to the extent they do without the use of certain techniques. One of these is to infiltrate from within and control all parties (small p as well as capital P). Their ideal election is a Republican Trilateralist against a Democratic Trilateralist. The C.F.R. would have no objection to Earl Ravenal accepting the Libertarian nomination. It fits perfectly with their policy of a foot in all camps. They understand that access is power and that personal ties are more important in determining policy than ideology.

Of course, the C.F.R. is not engaged in an all-out effort to control the Libertarian Party. We are, as yet, but a mosquito to them, perhaps a petty annoyance. But it is quite possible that during the campaign certain libertarian positions would become embarrassing to the C.F.R. Naturally almost all libertarian positions are anathema to C.F.R. members, but one particular position could easily become dangerous. It might tilt the balance of power to have a nosy little third party harping on this issue (for example, the issue of the IMF bailout of the big banks[10]). A major party candidate might be forced to pick the issue up to keep us from taking votes from him. And if one major party candidate picked it up, the other might be forced to go along. That would be very bad for the power structure.

The Ravenal supporters were promising delegates that Ravenal’s establishment (that is, C.F.R.) connections could be used for the benefit of the Party. Would they if one of the Party’s positions began to annoy these people in this way?

If one of Ravenal’s positions began to annoy the establishment, then lo and behold, the promised connections would disappear. The pressure would be on, not necessarily to change his position, but merely to tone it down a bit. If he cooperates, he gets the support and the votes, and most Party members don’t even know that he has sold out. If he doesn’t cooperate, no connections, electoral disaster, shame and disgrace.

This is what happened to Gov. Brown of California in the 1980 New Hampshire Democratic primary when he began speaking out about the Rockefeller-Iran connection. He simply disappeared from the newspapers.

To depend on an enemy for support is incredibly stupid. To walk into a situation such as I have described—as Ravenal was intending to do—indicates, at best, that he had not thought the matter through. One does not place one’s self in a position in which integrity requires the destruction of one’s enterprise.

(Libertarians, of course, are not supposed to put things like personal ties above ideology in determining political actions. It is only the power structure which understands the importance of such things. For example, some years ago after a presidential campaign in which the Libertarian Party candidate had been pristine pure on the issues, I found his name—along with his conservative friends—on a letter supporting the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. I did not make an issue of it because by that time the election was over and done, and I do not enjoy intra-Party fighting. Perhaps he did not consider the ability of the Chilean state secret police to make people disappear to be a deprivation of civil liberties.)

Since Ravenal was proposing to place himself in a position in which his integrity would be under a great deal of strain, a key point becomes relevant.

One of Ravenal’s apologies for his C.F.R. membership consisted in asserting that C.F.R. members represented the top people in his field. Membership was a professional sine qua non. Sadly this is nothing more than establishment propaganda. It is what George Franklin told me about the Trilateral Commission during our first debate. It is the myth of the best and the brightest.

Strange it is, Mr. Ravenal, that David Rockefeller is so well qualified (and motivated) to choose America’s best and brightest. For moral integrity he has given us Henry Kissinger. For intellectual achievement he selected Jimmy Carter, for charm and personality, Zbigniew Brzezinski. For economic advice he picked Walter Heller and Arthur Burns but passed over Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. For advice in foreign policy, he selected many of the people who gave us the Vietnam War. How curious that our foreign policy is in such a mess with such intellects to guide it.

I find Ravenal’s assertion that this collection of boot lickers and power mongers constitute America’s best and brightest to be offensive and absurd, and I will take a random sample of LP delegates over them, for integrity, for political theory, for awareness of the facts, any day in the week. But it does lead to a question. If Ravenal really believes that his C.F.R. associates are the best and the brightest, from where would he have selected his advisors for the campaign, from libertarians or from the “top” people in their field (meaning his C.F.R. associates)?

Worse than what Ravenal said was what he implied. For to advance expertise as a virtue carries the implication that the people in question are on our side. It would only be said in the context that there is one foreign policy which is best for America and that all of these people are carefully searching for it.

But the fact is that there is not one America with interests at stake; there are two. There is the American power structure and the American people. These interests are often diametrically opposed, and the damning thing about Trilateral and C.F.R. operatives is that, when faced with this conflict, they do not hesitate to place the interests of the power structure above the interests of the people. In such a situation, intelligence or expertise, were it to exist, would be a negative quality.

For example, Kissinger helped the Shah of Iran to manipulate the price of oil higher in the early ’70s.[11] This was of benefit to Exxon (a Rockefeller controlled corporation) but hardly to American motorists, who were shooting each other in frustration over the gas lines of the time. When Russia invaded Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter committed the lives of American youth to help defend Saudi Arabia, again protecting the special relationship which that country has with Exxon (through Aramco). At present the issue is whether the American people should be taxed to make good the bad loans which Chase Manhattan and a number of other banks made to a variety of tinhorn and Communist dictators. (These dictators are not seriously worried about paying back those loans because they know that the real payment owed is subservience to David Rockefeller. As long as they make this payment, they do not have to worry about the other kind.)

For the Libertarian Party to nominate a C.F.R. for President would be to immediately and permanently lose the support of all those political activists who are familiar with the above facts. It would seriously undercut the message of those like myself who are writing and lecturing to tell the American people that the Rockefeller organizations are an evil power which must be rejected. It would deal a long term blow to the Party from which it might never recover.

David Rockefeller is a man obsessed with power. He has studied it with the intensity of a Hitler, a Louis Napoleon or a Julius Caesar. He has assembled all of the elements of power, including a very tight grip on what is widely considered to be a pluralistic press. You cannot have power and liberty together. You cannot place the Libertarian banner in the hands of a member of the C.F.R.

If I am permitted to assume what was going on in the mind of a Ravenal supporter during the time of the convention, I would say something like: “These people have the power. They are the establishment. We will win them over to our side by our ideology, and they will do lot of good for our cause.” Such people do not understand the structure of power in our society. Their naivete dooms them to defeat. There are two factors, one inherent to any power structure, the other unique to 20th century America, which give us much more power than they realize and which indicates the nature of our battle.

(1) The first factor, inherent in any power structure, is that liberty is in the interests of the people. The classical liberal political activists understood this, but it appears that modern libertarian theorists do not. Power is always wielded on behalf of a small elite and against the majority. The propaganda of the New Deal, to rob from the rich and give to the poor, is a myth. It is one of the lies of our time, on everyone’s lips but nowhere in reality. What our government does, on issue after issue, is to rob from the poor and give to the rich.

This means that direct appeals to the interests of the majority are a useful libertarian tactic—as Howard Jarvis proved with Proposition 13 in California. California property owners were not voting on the basis that taxation is theft. They were simply voting their narrow interests. In the same way the Anti-Corn-Law League in 19th century England was able to abolish the corn tariff. The average Englishman of the time did not understand the economic theory of free trade. He voted for cheap bread.

In short, the pro-liberty theorist concretized a libertarian principle, and its concrete form was in the interest of the majority (who would not necessarily understand the abstraction). In this way pro-liberty activists of the 19th century (Jefferson, Van Buren, Sam Adams) won victory after victory. By neglecting this principle and by cutting themselves off from their mass base, pro-liberty advocates in the mid-20th century (Robert Taft, Ayn Rand) suffered defeat after defeat.

(2) The second factor results from the very success which the statist forces have had. In the 19th century, the average person’s political views were more collectivist than the existing system. The statists could not make an appeal to those views because the liberals had a better grasp of the mechanism of power. The liberals controlled the press; they had committed political activists, and they understood the proper techniques of mass action. They literally pushed the country to be more free than was strictly warranted by its ideas.

But in the 20th century exactly the opposite has occurred. The power structure has gotten control of the press and understands the proper techniques of insider manipulation. They have pushed the country to be less free than is strictly warranted by its ideas. For this reason, if every issue were left to be decided by a nationwide referendum to be voted on immediately without any consideration in the media, libertarians would win some striking victories. We would definitely have a balanced budget. We would probably have a gold standard. We would certainly have lower taxes. We would probably not have troops in Lebanon or El Salvador. The average American is not ideologically a libertarian, but he is closer to libertarianism than the current power structure is.

I found that, when I toured the country promoting my books on the gold standard and against the Trilateral Commission, I was shut out by the establishment media. But I was avidly welcomed by the local radio and TV stations. The public response in some of those areas (such as Dallas and San Diego) can only be described as overwhelming. And I was described as “one of the hottest guests on the circuit” by a talk show host in Illinois. But no network show wanted one of the hottest guests on the circuit, not when he was advocating a gold standard and denouncing David Rockefeller by name. No way. It is my understanding that Ed Clark was treated the same way, being welcomed by the local media but shut out by the majors.

The major infusion of statism into this country came in the 1930s when a number of left-wing intellectuals who had brought socialism and chaos to Germany were kicked out by Hitler and came to the U.S. These people were well trained in the mechanisms of power. They moved quickly to capture the high points, the most influential newspapers, the TV networks the places where power was centralized and could be controlled by a small number. They played up to wealthy businessman, like the Rockefellers.[12] Their converts still hold power in those places today.

Thus, the American people are more libertarian than the existing power structure, and the existing system is only maintained by a combination of media pressure and power politics (of which the forced resignation of Secretary Watt is only a recent example). The media may create an image totally different from reality. They may present an issue in a way that plays upon the fears of a large ethnic group. They may create an impression in a politician’s mind that there is a large majority for some position, causing him to espouse the position out of expedience. For example, there are millions of people in this country who believe that John Anderson was a liberal (in the modern sense of the term) Republican and do not know that he is a member of the Trilateral Commission. In fact, Anderson is an ultra-conservative who once tried to make Christianity the official religion of the country. Registered Democrats do not know that the main choices being promoted by the media for the 1984 presidential nomination (Glenn, Mondale and Cranston) are Trilateralists. People are never told of David Rockefeller’s dealings and manipulations, and every effort is made to prevent issues from being joined in a national election (which is why we have election after election in which both candidates take identical positions on all the issues).

Again, it is well known that political candidates routinely lie to the American people. (The media always treat this moral outrage with jovial good nature.) But they almost always lie by taking a pro-liberty position in the campaign and betraying it after the election. They very rarely lie in the opposite manner. They promise to balance the budget; they promise to keep us out of war (1964); they promise a free economy (1968); they promise an outsider who has no connection to the power structure (1976); they promise to reduce the size of the government (1968 and 1980). Why would they make these promises during a campaign if they did not find such promises effective in gaining votes? Why would they betray them after the election if they were not basically in league with the power structure? Thus the American power structure is fundamentally out of touch with the American people and only maintains its positions by a succession of lies and manipulations.

It is this position of fundamental weakness which determines elitist strategy and which must determine our strategy as well. A few members of the elite, those with unusual integrity, might be won over to our side by ideology. But the majority can only be moved by direct self-interest. (And, quite frankly, I do not put much faith in the program of attempting to convert David Rockefeller to our ideas by pointing out to him that he suffers a loss of self-esteem every time he steals millions from the American people. It may be true, but I don’t think it will play in lower Manhattan.)

Rather than try to convert 60 or 70 elitists who gain wealth, power and fame from government programs, it makes more sense to try to convert the 200 million Americans who are taxed, regimented, conscripted and murdered by big government. These are exclusive strategies. Power is fundamentally an elitist instrument. It is always authority which wields power. To expect this elite to dismantle the power which makes them rich is extremely naive. During the pro-freedom revolutions of the 19th century there were always a few aristocrats who come over to the side of the people on moral grounds—but there were never more than a few.

Two essentials to defeat this power structure are media which tell the truth to the American people and a political party which stands for something and does not betray its campaign promises.[13] The power structure depends on its members placing personal loyalty above loyalty to principles. It bears a striking resemblance to a medieval power structure where a small group of related families schemed and manipulated to maintain and increase their power over the peasants. Behind-the-scenes manipulation and personal contacts are their game. To nominate a C.F.R. and to hope to use his personal contacts for our purposes is to play it by their rules. It is the formula for defeat. It is precisely the formula by which the Republican Party gave up any hope of saving liberty in America.

If Earl Ravenal wants to aid libertarianism vis à vis the Council on Foreign Relations, I would suggest the following. He should immediately quit the C.F.R. and denounce it and the bulk of its members as evil. He should publicly reveal the proceedings of the meetings.[14] He should maintain the kind of association with these people that a virtuous person has with pimps and prostitutes. And he should start a campaign with the media to cover C.F.R./Trilateral meetings and activities. This would put the pressure on David Rockefeller in the same way that Ravenal put the pressure on the Libertarian Party by his attempt at the nomination.

The power structure’s great weakness is its smallness in size. Given a persuasive ideology, it is possible to assemble considerably larger amounts of both people and wealth against them. The only way to stop this from happening is by the insider manipulation I have described above. To enter into personal associations with these groups is to play their game. It is to play the only game they can win. It is like a man trying to defeat a woman by sexual intrigue. It is like an elephant trying to defeat a mosquito by seeing who can fly fastest. It abandons the arena of principle and truth, which are our forte, and allows the issue to be resolved by personal wealth, connections, insider manipulation and media influence. It is a sure formula for defeat.

IV On the Need for a Libertarian Movement

What almost happened at the LP Natcom ’83 is very alarming. It shows that a significant percentage of the most involved libertarian activists do not understand the evil of the C.F.R. and the danger of getting into bed with it. It reveals a libertarian movement composed of coteries of experts in several fields. There are experts on the power structure. There are experts on education. There are experts on monetary theory. There are experts on tax law. But the experts in one field do not understand the other fields. And the five days of education we try to cram into our national conventions every two years is simply not enough.

What is happening is that libertarians are falling victim to the American consensus. This is a set of views propagated by the major media that dominate the country: the validity of the welfare state, the need for foreign involvement, the nonexistence of a power structure (or the identity of its interests with the country’s interests), the basic truth of everything printed in The New York Times.

This set of ideas is continually propagated by the establishment media and convinces many people. But a small number of the most intelligent discover, through their own thinking and through specialty work in their field, that the consensus is wrong. They get very upset about this and then find that the libertarians are also against the consensus on this point. Thus they join the libertarian movement.

However, they keep reading the establishment newspapers, watching the network news on TV and believing most of the establishment lies. Their home town newspaper carefully copies the New York Times, and their home town TV station carries the news produced in New York. Outside of their own specialties they do not understand the lies and misrepresentations of the consensus. They become one-issue libertarians.

It used to be a saying in the socialist movements of the early part of the century that no one was a socialist in his own field of expertise. This was because the socialists had established a consensus. They had a network of socialist media read by their membership, and this media convinced them of all aspects of socialist ideology—except where the individual had special knowledge or expertise. What we have in the libertarian movement is the opposite. Everyone is a libertarian in his own field, but we are ragged about the edges. Our people are getting their basic sources of news from the lies of the opposition. Thus the movement is undercut in every way.

On the issue of the power structure, the media propounds the view that it does not exist and anyway, if it does, its interests are the same as those of the American people; so what difference does it make? Although I have twice debated the Coordinator of the Trilateral Commission, I still get know-it-all looks from people when I assert that this organization exists. (“Oh, he’s one of those kooks who believe in the Trilateral Commission.”) Believe me, I do not appreciate seeing a similar attitude coming from libertarians who take the attitude, “I don’t have any evidence of a conspiracy.”

Those who do not have evidence of a conspiracy should not offer their ignorance as evidence in a debate. They should educate themselves. For starters I would recommend:

The Anglo-American Conspiracy by Carroll Quigley (New York, Books in Focus, 1982).

The Warmongers by Howard S. Katz (New York, Books in Focus, 1979).

The Carter Presidency and Beyond by Laurence H. Shoup (Palo Alto, Ramparts Press, 1980).

Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley (or for those who do not want to wade through this long book, only small parts of which deal with the conspiracy, The Naked Capitalist by Cleon Skausen contains its essential parts from a Bircher point of view.)

the L. J. Davis articles on David Rockefeller in Penthouse, Oct. and Dec. 1980.

Trilaterals Over Washington by Anthony Sutton.

The solution is two fold. We need more libertarian media, not just one or two magazines. And we need movement people to shift their basic source of information from the American consensus to the libertarian consensus. This will make us into a true movement and avoid disasters of the type that almost occurred at Natcom ’83.

1. The conspiracy managed to place two of its men into top positions, one on the English, the other on the Boer side. These two men began a series of provocations and ultimatums which led to war. The Boers never found out that one of their highest officials was an English agent. See Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley.

2. Aside from Morgan’s overt war policy and his control of The New Republic, we have substantial evidence that he indirectly controlled much of the American press. This press pilloried anti-war congressmen and frightened them into voting for war in April 1917. President Wilson was in Morgan’s pocket. He was reelected in 1916 by running as peace candidate and then immediately reversed his stand. The submarine warfare issue (which we are still taught in school) was a smokescreen for Morgan’s policies. See my book, The Warmongers.

3. Which was probably a pro-liberty organization.

4. However, Ruskin was a socialist, common among the 19th century right.

5. Upon arriving in South Vietnam, Lodge found that Premier Diem had the Communists well in check and did not want American troops in his country. Lodge used the CIA to overthrow Diem and replace him with a more pliant, less effective leader. In the chaos, Communist strength grew until American troops were “necessary” to prevent a Communist takeover. This was the pretext for American entry. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was copied from Lodge’s manipulations in Vietnam (overthrow a friendly head of state who refused to accept your troops and replace him with a more obedient chief who would “invite” them in).

6. It was Time which, by a number of features prior to 1976, made Carter a national figure. See, The Carter Presidency and Beyond by Laurence Shoup. Conversely, libertarians who begin with more public support than Carter are treated as non-entities.

7. Except in very namby-pamby terms indicating that they are in close alliance with the Girl Scouts (“a group of concerned citizens”).

8. There are also a number of aspiring members who serve the conspiracy’s goals, for example, Richard Burt, who as a reporter for The New York Times acquired a reputation as Brzezinski’s mouthpiece and who is now an underling in the Reagan Administration.

9. The House Banking Committee, which normally moves at snail’s pace, was in session until 3:00 A.M. to get the NYC bailout voted through on schedule. When David Rockefeller cracks the whip, mere congressmen jump.

10. The I.M.F. bailout is being managed in Congress by Rhode Island Congressman Fernand St. Germain. We may assume that Mr. St. Germain is not indifferent to the current Rockefeller interest in acquiring R.I. radio and TV stations, as with their recent purchase of The Outlet Company.

11. This probably would have happened anyway because that was the direction indicated by supply and demand. But looking at the incident from the point of view of a man like Kissinger, who does not know anything about supply and demand, it is indicative of the way the men involved thought and acted.

12. Which is why so many Trilateralists still have trouble with the English language.

13. Yes, a victory by idealistic Communists would also defeat the power structure (but not in the way we want).

14. I am sure this suggestion will be met with horror on the part of C.F.R. members. Their promises to each other are considered sacred. It is only their promises to the American people, involving millions of lives and billions of dollars, which are treated as a joke.

Reagan War Watch

Part II

IV. Bringing “Democracy” to Grenada

It is instructive to examine what kind of regime the U.S. military brought to little Grenada. Having gotten rid of the Leftist Thugs, what was the New Democracy U.S. Army-style?

The victorious U.S. troops, in collaboration with their ally Scoon, imposed a regime of military despotism. After the war was over, the occupation ensued. Key to the occupation was the U.S. attempt to purge the little island of anti-democratic elements. Using a computer which classified all Grenadians as “A” (no risk), “B” (uncertain) and “C” (hard-core Communist), the U.S. military arrested, interrogated, and detained without warrant or formal charges more than 1,000 Grenadians in the first two weeks of November. That’s one per cent of the Grenada population, the equivalent of a foreign occupying army arresting and detaining over 2,000,000 Americans in two weeks. Note the revealing explanation of his role that Brigadier-General Jack Farris, commander of the occupying forces, gave to the Philadelphia Inquirer in early November:

You develop a human intelligence network, whereby you have your police and your agents throughout the country and find out who the bad guys are and find out who were guilty of murders and torture and hard-line politics and have them tried for their crimes . . .You build a data base on those people, on thousands of them . . . and that’s how you stamp out something like that.

Oh. “Hard-line politics”; is that a new crime that somehow worked its way into the common law or the U.S. Criminal Code while none of us were looking?

Of the over 1,000 Grenadians arrested, nearly 500 were detained for at least twenty-four hours, many of them kept for two days in solitary confinement in specially constructed 8x8 foot wooden crates with leaky roofs. Kendrick Radix, minister of legal affairs under former Prime Minister Bishop, was held for nearly twenty-four hours in such a box at the Point Salines detention camp, charged with “sowing discontent and ill will in public places” (Oh, gee, we can’t have any of that in a “democratic” country), and released while handed a green card. The card warned: “Refrain from participating in any anti-government activities.” Over fifty detainees were sent to prison for being “extremist-Leninists”, while nearly forty foreigners were simply expelled from Grenada without a hearing.

Amnesty International protested the political detentions and the degrading punishment of the wooden crates, which violated the Human Rights Convention of the OAS. James E. Thyden, director of the Orwellian-termed “Human Rights Office” of the U.S. State Department, said about the crates that “the use of those structures was reasonable and not a violation of human rights.” Is that because, pace Dragon Lady Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S.-conducted torture is only “authoritarian” and not “totalitarian”?

As a final icing on the cake, the U.S. Army conducted its own propaganda campaign in occupied Grenada. Its Psychological Operations Unit took over the island’s only radio station, and the Army put up posters showing the junta leaders Austin and Coard bound and blindfolded, with Coard wearing only undershorts—a clear violation of the Geneva Convention on treatment of detainees. One of the posters, presuming to speak on behalf of the Grenadian people, thundered that “The Grenadian people will never again allow such characters to assume power . . . Support democracy in Grenada.” (For the above picture of Grenada under U.S. occupation, see Jonathan Rosenblum, “Grenadian Dilemmas,” The New Republic, January 9 & 16, 1984, pp. 14–16).

One man who has been detained by the U.S.-Scoon combine for two months now is the much-hated Bernard Coard, the fat, jolly alleged hard-line theoretician of the Austin regime. Coard, Coard’s wife Phyllis, Austin and other members of the Revolutionary Military Council were captured by the U.S. forces and still languish in prison, detained without charges, and suffering restricted access to legal counsel. Unrepentant and understandably not very jolly now, Coard insists that he resigned from the Austin regime several days before the murder of Maurice Bishop on October 19. He threatens to sue the U.S. government and the associated Caribbean governments for kidnapping and libel for denouncing him publicly as a murderer and tyrant. Also, some Grenadian lawyers are getting worried that Coard might have a good case in attacking the constitutionality of Scoon’s assumption of absolute power behind U.S. bayonets and his jailing of Austin, Coard et al for political acts on the grounds of criminality—a precedent that could easily boomerang on many State apparati, including the U.S. (Edward Cody, “Jailed Coard May Sue U.S.”, Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1983. On other aspects of the Scoon dictatorship, see the (London) Sunday Times, Dec. 11, 1983).

But never fear, the Yankee dollar is here. Already, $30 million is being poured by the U.S. into the little island, not just for reconstruction but for economic development. It is the Falklands all over again, or, on a lighter note the delightful satire by Leonard Wibberley, The Mouse that Roared. Declare war on the U.S., lose quickly, and then sit back and see the money pour in.

V. Are the American Masses Pro-War?

One discouraging aspect of Reagan’s October Surprise is the huzzahing by which the American public greeted the war in Grenada. It is over-optimistic to believe that the public is opposed to war; as was the case in Vietnam, the American masses are only opposed to a war that the U.S. has difficulty in winning. Give them a quick victory, with small loss of American life, and they love it. As one Pennsylvanian said after the invasion, “I’m glad our President is a man!” Americans seem to have little interest in the immorality or illegality of the invasion, in the principle of non-intervention, or in the fact that the closest modern analogy to the U.S. assault on Grenada was the much-reviled Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the Soviets invaded a country whose Commie ruler was too Commie for the Soviets to handle. No, the average Americano seems to glory in the vicarious macho thrill of war, provided victory is swift, and the resistance of the foreign victim disappears quickly. But let the resistance of the natives grow chronic, and U.S. casualties mount, and then finally the Americano will grow tired of the fun, and begin to adopt moral as well as strategic arguments for finding a way out of the morass. It is sad but apparently true that the only consideration that might deter Reagan (or, for that matter, other Presidents since World War II) from aggression and war is the prospect or fact of heavy American casualties. And even that might not be enough, as witness the willingness of U.S. Presidents, in the Berlin airlift crisis, in Korea, and in the Cuban missile crisis, to threaten nuclear aggression.

VI. Who’s a “Coward”?

A cowardly bully is a person who exults in the macho thrill of kicking the teeth out of a small, virtually defenseless victim, and then thinks better of the deal when his victim shows a good prospect of fighting back. On that criterion, Ronald Reagan and his host of supporters among the American masses qualify neatly for the “cowardly bully” emblem.

Yet, in a reversal of proper meaning, the apologists for the U.S. war machine in Grenada have, of course, placed the “coward” label on all with the guts enough to stand out against the cheers of the war mob. Thus, Rep. Mark Siljander (R., Mich.) accused the (all too mild) Congressional critics of the invasion of “creeping cowardice.” And his ultra-right colleague Rep. Henry Hyde (R. Ill.) added the psycho-smear: “An abnormal psychologist would have a field day listening to some of you people.” The gutsiest Congressional critic was Rep. Theodore Weiss (D., N.Y.) the only one to call for—and still call for—the impeachment of Ronald Reagan for his invasion of Grenada.

A curious—and special pleading—use of the “coward” label is also habitually placed by the U.S. on the actions of enemy “terrorists.” Characteristically, Vice-President Bush, in his trip to Beirut after the truck-bombing, denounced the bombing as the work of “cowards”. Now however we might want to designate the young putative Shiite who drove the truck to his death into the Marines’ headquarters building, “coward” is surely not a sensible label. In fact, how he came to be a “fanatic” and a “coward” at the same time passeth understanding.

The designation of “coward” has been used by imperial troops against guerrillas and “terrorists” since at least the American Revolution. Thus, at the Battle of Lexington where untrained farmers picked up their rifles and virtually annihilated a crack British force, the British heatedly denounced the Americans for being “cowards” by not marching into open-field battle and getting mowed down for their pains. Instead, the Americans instinctively turned to effective guerrilla tactics, hiding behind windows, barns, and trees, and picking off the British with sniper fire as they marched, with their superior firepower, down the road from Concord back to Boston. Ever since, imperial forces with greater fire-power have always denounced the alleged immorality of natives with greater numbers and inferior firepower who fight the best way they can, in the guerrilla mode. And among all the Western Empires, the British and the American have always been the most adept at the use of phony moralizing to spin a web of excuses for their acts of conquest and to sucker the American and British publics into enthusiastic support of “their” Empires. It is the old trick of inducing the citizen to identify with “his” State; but the trick has always been most effective in time of war, real or imagined. That is just one of the reasons that the libertarian Randolph Bourne, during World War I, called war “the health of the State.” Unfortunately, many libertarians, here and in Britain, are just as ready as avowed statists to hail “their” State whenever it fights a war of aggression. How can the cause of liberty ever triumph if libertarians themselves are confused about this central issue?

VII. Reagan “Takes Responsibility”

It is fitting to conclude by noting Ronald Reagan’s allegedly noble gesture in “taking full responsibility” for the fact that the truck-bombing killed 241 ill-prepared and badly defended Marines. In this way, by drawing all sin upon his own head, Reagan let our incompetent military commanders off the hook. A noble gesture? But let us examine this: In precisely what sense did Reagan “take responsibility” for the killing of a large number of Americans? Clearly in no sense, for the limit of Ronnie’s assumption of responsibility is obviously his oral statement. After which statement, we are supposed to forget about the whole thing. (In much the same way, ESTholes often claim that they have “taken responsibility” for the world’s hunger—whatever that is supposed to mean.)

What should “taking responsibility” for the deaths of hundreds mean? It should mean, first, that Ronnie be indicted and tried for criminal negligence, and accept the full measure of legal penalty for the deaths of the Marines. Perhaps he might even be convicted of manslaughter, and spend many instructive years in the pokey as a result. But to indict and try Reagan, he must first and at the very least be impeached. Impeaching Reagan seems to be the very least that could be done as a way of taking this “assuming responsibility” hogwash at Ronnie’s own word.

But he doesn’t have to be impeached; for if Ronnie really meant what he said, if this cretin had any idea of the meaning of what he said, he would resign posthaste from the presidency, and then I suppose that George Bush could pull a Ford and grant Reagan legal absolution.

The chance of either impeachment or voluntary resignation is of course nil, the world being what it is. But one thing the American people have the power to do, provided they understand the meaning of Reagan’s confession. They can vote the monster out come November 1984.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol XVIII, No. 3–4

MARCH-APRIL, 1984

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

CAMPAIGN FEVER ‘84

1. The Pits: Here’s The Beef!

In the course of a sparkling confrontation with the evil liberal and conservative Braden & Buchanan on Crossfire, Dave Bergland was asked, in their usual nasty fashion: “What makes you think you’re qualified to be President?” Dave shot back: “Well, I’m an attorney and former law professor. I think I’m at least as qualified as an old actor and a peanut farmer.”

And how! Comparing notes the other day with my old friend and libertarian comrade Professor Ralph Raico (and it is he, it should be noted for present and future historians, who came up with the magnificent motto, “This is the Movement You have Chosen”), we both agreed that this Presidential campaign—the “real world” one, that is—is the scurviest and most repellent in our memory, perhaps even in all of American history. Can you imagine, for example, a debate between, say Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, or even, on an infinitely lower level, between Lincoln and Douglas, and can you imagine the crucial, telling phrase in such a debate being “Where’s the beef?” It is almost incomprehensible to me that the Hart-Mondale contest should have turned on Mondale, in his flat, nasal, Minnesota twang, intoning this idiotic slogan. Presumably, poor Hart, still burdened with a modicum of intelligence and dignity, was so taken aback by the aggressive thrust of the Minnesota Moron, that he was reduced to nerd-like dithering for the rest of the campaign. And so Fritz the Pits joins the basso profondo of the octogenerian lady in the fast-food commercial, going arm in arm down the Memory Lane of history. Never has mainstream American politics been so dumb, odious, and . . . creepy.

As Ralph Raico points out, the American voter now chooses his or her President solely on the basis of symbolism. Is he an aggressive Leader? Does he score idiotic points in what might be called sardonically the “guerrilla theater” of American politics? Mondale’s turning on the poor, bemused Gary Hart was one big ploy. And then of course we could reminisce about the two guerrilla-theater ploys that won the election—and probably eight years of absolute rule over us all—for the Monster Cretin Ronnie Reagan: “I paid for this microphone” (crushing George Bush), and “there you go again,” disposing of poor, Uptight Jimmy Carter. One can fantasize: It’s October, 1984, and the climactic debate between Cretin Reagan and Minnesota Fats Mondale is underway. Mondale suddenly wheels on Ronnie: “I say: Where’s the beef?”, to which Ronnie retorts: “There you go again!” One is tempted to surrender completely to mirth at the total idiocy of American politics, when one stops short at the incredible but overriding fact that the fate of the human race may rest in the hands of one of these two egregious turkeys.

2. Do We Gotta Have Hart?

Don Ernsberger, in SIL’s Individual Liberty, cynically disposes of the entire Hart Phenomenon as a pure media creation, with Hart’s “New ideas” signifying only nothing. Long cynical about the Libertarian Party, Don unsurprisingly deduces from the Hart experience that Americans are all hopeless puppets of the media, and that therefore the Libertarian Party can never hope to get to first base.

But, first, Hart was not a deliberate media creation. It is true that the media, like the rest of us, prefer excitement to boredom, but they had pretty much adjusted to the idea of a Mondale sweep until—genuine surprise!—Gary Hart came in second in the Iowa caucus vote. It was only after this astonishing showing that the media — quite properly—concentrated on Hart; and that he then went on to win the New Hampshire primary.

Second, it is blindly insensitive for Don Ernsberger to miss the fascinating nature of the Hart Phenomeneon. It is true that Hart’s “new ideas” hardly amount to a well-thought out political philosophy that we could stack up against Locke or Hobbes. But there are new ideas, and certainly a new style, about Gary Hart that will loom large in years to come. In a deep sense, Hart is at least part of a wave of the future, whereas Fritz the Pits Mondale is marching steadily into the dustbin of history.

Mondale and Hart differ sharply in their ideas, their style, and their personae. Mondale, as Hart has pointed out, is the living embodiment of “the old arrangements’, of the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society Establishment that has been ruling over us since the 1930’s. This Establishment is quintessentially statist, the essence of the Welfare-Warfare State, symbolized in the fact that Fritz Mondale is the heir and shadow of one of the most repellent and odious politicians in 20th century America, the loudmouth Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Fritz Mondale is the monotonic leavings, the detritus of HHH. His boring persona is the living incarnation of his boring, old-hat ideas.

More than that: the Mondale coalition is a bunch of turkeys marching into oblivion. Studies have shown that the modal Mondale voter is: an elderly, male, doggedly regular Democrat, low-income, Jewish or Catholic union member from the smokestack industries of the Northeast quadrant of the U.S. A dying demographic from a dying region. It is only people such as these who could, at this late date in history, be impressed by endorsements from Al Shanker and the AFL-CIO Teachers’ Union. On the other hand, Gary Hart managed to mobilize groups who are in many ways the wave of the future, people who have been called the Yuppies (young, upscale, urban professionals—although it should be Yuspies, since most of them live in the suburbs). Yuppies are young, upwardly mobile, professionals in high tech industries, strongest in the West and Southwest.

But “where’s the beef?” Is there any substance in Hartism apart from the Kennedyish hair and gestures, and the cowboy boots? Yes, there is. In contrast to the good, grey New Dealer Mondale, the Yuppie Generation, including Hartpence, came of age during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, imbibing innate skepticism about the power of Big Government to achieve much of anything, in domestic or foreign affairs. The legacy of Vietnam (and Watergate) accounts for the far harder-core anti-interventionism of Gary Hart—a policy that drove Mondale to reveal his cloven Humphreyite hoof in joining the Monster Reagan in accusing Hart of aiming to turn Central America over to the eager arms of the Russkies. On domestic policy, Hart is also noticeably less statist, especially attacking protectionism and other subsidies to old, decaying smokestack industries. As a Coloradan, Hart is also—or at least was until his confrontation with Fritz—opposed to gun control.

Hart met his doom by rolling over and turning wimpy under the blows of Mondale’s vicious personal attacks. Presumably, he fell for the fatal temptation of turning stuffily “Presidential” before the presidential nomination was wrapped up. For some reason, Hart failed to pay tit for tat, failed to desanctify Mondale with a “negative” campaign of his own.

But whatever the fate of Gary Hart, the underlying demographics remain clear. 1984 is the Mondale constituency’s Last Hurrah, and in 1988 and afterward, the Yuppies will take on ever more power and clout.

3. LP Constituencies?

From the Hart phenomenon, we can dimly discern the outlines of the voting coalition that present and future LP campaigns can appeal to. Apart from hard-core Libertarians, our potential constituency consists of two broad and very different groups: on the one hand, disaffected “extreme” Reaganites: tax rebels, gun toters, opponents of the inflationist Federal Reserve; and, on the other, anti-war and high-tech Yuppies, disenchanted at the savage way that Mondale and the media, barracuda-like, went for Gary’s jugular. A Yuppie-redneck coalition, forged on an anti-war, pro-civil liberties, anti-tax, pro-free market perspective!

And now John Anderson, the quintessential Yuppie—quiche and white wine—candidate in 1980, has dropped out of the 1984 race. The Anderson defection and the Hart mugging should drive a substantial number of Yuppies into the Bergland-Lewis LP camp. That, plus the increasing statism of Ronnie, should form a substantial constituency among which libertarianism can do its vital spadework.

4. Ridgeway on Hart as Libertarian

In the left-liberal Village Voice (May 1, 1984), the astute political analyst James Ridgeway, covering the Hart campaign in Ohio, identifies Hart and his supporters as quasi-Libertarian. Thus, Ridgeway points out that it is clear why Hart opposes the Chrysler bailout—and has the guts to do so in a smokestack state like Ohio. That bailout, he points out, is “a remnant of New Deal government, and Hart is a neoliberal who thinks the New Deal is dead. He believes organized labor is a special interest. He is for free enterprise. He ought to be running in the right wing of the Republican Party, or more aptly in the Libertarian Party, where there is an economic and historic context for his views.” Well! Ridgeway is going overboard, or course, but it is fascinating that libertarianism and the LP is embedded in his consciousness as the logical framework for genuinely free market views.

Even more fascinating is an interview Ridgeway conducts with one John Turk, owner of Grabowski’s food market in Clevaland’s Slavic Village, precisely the sort of Democratic voter one would expect to be a Mondale diehard. It turns out that Turk, a lifelong registered Democrat, broke ranks in 1980 to vote for Ed Clark! He is now for Gary Hart in the primary. Turk dismisses Mondale as someone who would “say anything, do anything to get elected.” He opposes Jackson because Jesse would mean higher taxes. On the other hand, Turk is against Reagan because of his fanatical anti-Soviet and interventionist foreign policy. “Reagan is so intense in his McCarthyism. He hates Russia so bad he can’t see clear. That’s no solution because the Russians are going to be there after Reagan is gone. Hart would be more realistic about it.”

On Central America, John Turk takes a charming Old Right-isolationist—to hell with them all—position:

These problems didn’t happen yesterday. They’ve been there for a long, long time. Even if you occupy the territory, what have you accomplished? The problem will still be there. You might kill a few troublemakers, but you’re not going to help the situation. I think that where these dictatorships are entrenched, and everybody is in the underclass, we should let them fall. Let what will happen happen. They don’t deserve anything else. The answer is not to throw billions of dollars to those bastards. They are going to squander it.

Wow! Bless you, John Turk. Maybe, in addition to the tax rebels, the ultra-Reaganites, and the Yuppies, we can also snare a good chunk of Catholic ethnics. What an LP coalition that would be!

4. The Rev. Jesse: Report from Hymietown

“The Reverend Jesse Jackson,” as he is always referred to in full regalia (sort of like the German “Herr Professor Doktor . . .”), has provided by far the most spice and interest in this otherwise appalling Democrat campaign. The media speak in wonder at Jackson’s presence, articulation, charisma, and unique ability to mobilize the black masses—and all this is true. As someone with no hope to win the nomination, and yet in command of a formidable bloc of voter support (carrying Philadelphia, and winning one-third of New York City votes), Jackson necessarily sails above the fray, since his two rivals dare not indulge in negative campaigning against him. He can therefore afford to be candid, and candid he is. In a sense, although he lacks the brilliance of Malcolm X, Jesse is Malcolm’s natural successor, and being a Christian rather than a Muslim minister, he is far more in a position to influence and lead the black masses. Like Malcolm, Jesse Jackson carries the message of the “Protestant ethic”—hard work, thrift, self-discipline—to the black ghetto.

In his candor, furthermore, Jackson has been bringing a radical political perspective to the Democrat Party for the first time in a decade: Everything from a consistent anti-imperialist, anti-war position to raising the hitherto taboo stance of revisionism on the Martin Luther King assassination. (It’s OK to make a compulsory national holiday out of King’s birthday, but not to raise questions about the alleged sole responsibility for King’s murder of James Earl Ray.) In contrast to Gary Hart’s ritualistic obeisance to the gods of military expansion, furthermore, Jackson even favors a substantial cut—a cut-cut—in the military budget.

But, as a Hymie from Hymietown, am I not deeply aggrieved, shocked and saddened, etc. by Jackson’s Hymie references? The answer is No. In this genuinely rotten campaign, where “Where’s the beef?” becomes the font of political wisdom, and where, on the other side, Ronnie Baby is revving up more of his lying anecdotes and his war schemes, Jesse at least provides some much-needed fun in the campaign, from “Hymietown” to his habitual speech in rhyming couplets: (e.g., “Lebanon is only the text, for without the context of the Middle East, it’s only a pretext”; or, “we must move from the outhouse to the White House”)

Never fear, however; this does not mean that I have become a Jackson enthusiast. The man is, after all, a socialist, which is the real and unsung problem with his campaign.

The Hymietown material provides a fascinating example of a clash of political cultures. As Jackson soberly went on at length to the press, detailing why “Hymietown” was not meant as a slur, the effect was hilarious, since Jackson was presumably unwitting that every single phrase rubbed raw the hypersensitivities of his Jewish listeners: “You see, when I was growing up in Chicago, we called ‘Hymietown’ or ‘Jewtown’ the area where we could buy cheap clothing. ‘Where’s Jewtown?’ we’d say. Now, if I had said ‘kike’ that would have been derogatory.” To speak in Jacksonian rhyme: Every word was true, but none of it flew.

As the Jewish-black clash escalated, neocon and right-wing columnists, who are now spread all over the media, hammered away at the theme that an evil double standard rules in American life, because if a white candidate had said these same allegedly anti-Semitic slurs, he would have been driven rapidly from political life and by now would have had to resign. True enough, but the rightists seem not to understand that this argument, like the left-liberal wailing about the “gender gap”, is a doubled-edged sword. For, how is it that white Christians, for fear of their political lives, exist in mortal fear of saying anything that might in any sense be interpreted as anti-Semitic? (The double-edged aspect of the gender gap, of course, is: if Republicans should worry about their lack of female support, why shouldn’t the Democrats equally worry about their dearth of male voters?)

Arts And Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Swing Shift, directed by Jonathan Demme, with Goldie Hawn.

In the “real world,” we are used to the idea of an integrated, useful, and pleasing product emerging out of organizational chaos. But in the world of drama, we expect production chaos to result in a tangled, chaotic movie or play. Well, no film in recent years has suffered the problems of Swing Shift, which went through three movie companies before completion, and has been repudiated by the three main principals: the director, the screenwriter, and the star. And yet, it emerges onto the screen, a lovely, charming, and beautifully integrated film. Go figure it! Despite their unhappiness, director Jonathan Demme, assisted by main screenwriter Nancy Dowd, deserve the lion’s shares of credit.

First of all, for those, like me, who don’t like Goldie Hawn, with her generally infantile mugging and clowning, have no fears, because Miss Hawn has been tamed and cabined for this picutre—and as a result, for once she gives a fine performance. Swing Shift is an exercise in nostalgia, specifically for the home front during World War II. It ranks up at the top, with Summer of ’42, and that picture was far more a timeless story about adolescent love than about America during the war. The lovely thing about Swing Shift is that it captures the mood of the era perfectly by not talking down to it. It achieves total empathy by adopting the values and styles of the era and working within them, and not trying to score points from the superior vantage point of 1984.

Swing Shift is the story of two women home front workers at an aircraft plant in southern California, “Rosie the Riveters”, who responded to the call of patriotism and of good jobs not previously open to females. It is a story of great sweetness, sensitivity and charm, although it does not underplay the tension coming from affairs on the home front while the hubby is off to war. There are marvelous performances from the nonstar players, especially Christine Lahti as the second female lead.

See Swing Shift, the picture of the year—a lovely valentine to a lost world.

This Is The Movement You Have Chosen

By The Old Curmudgeon

1. Post Pres-Con Notes:

More on media astuteness on the issues involved in the climactic Bergland vs. Ravenal race. T. R. Reid, in a long Washington Post (Sept. 4, 1983) article called Dave Bergland “an outspoken anti-government activist who is considered a hard-liner even by the Libertarians’ stern standards.” (Whoopee!) “In choosing Bergland”, the Post’s Reid added, “the Libertarian delegates chose ideological purity and turned away from the more pragmatic approach of their 1980 Presidential nominee, Ed Clark.” Earl Ravenal, he went on, was backed by “the party’s pragmatic wing.” He astutely noted that “the distinction between them was clearly drawn when the voting was interrupted to let both address the delegates.” Bergland, Reid pointed out, spoke of “the ideal of liberty” and the “ugliness” of government; while Ravenal talked of making the LP “relevant” to the “broad sweep of the American people.” In contrast to the Clark campaign of 1980, Bergland declared that Social Security should be “terminated forthwith”. Reid went on to detail the Libertarian programs and principles.

Philip Lentz, in the Chicago Tribune (Sept. 6, 1983), while breezier and less perceptive, also pointed out the crucial differences, with Bergland representing the forces devoted to principle and ideology, and Ravenal backed by the pragmatic “Washington-New York connection”. Many purists, Lentz noted, “were afraid he might deviate from the party line in a long campaign.” “Some recalled,” Lentz noted, that Ravenal “once wrote in a magazine article that there were circumstances where the draft might be necessary.”

But perhaps the most illuminating post-Prescon press note came from Earl Ravenal himself. Interviewed by his hometown newspaper, the Easton (Md.) Star-Democrat (Sept. 20, 1983), Ravenal held forth at some length in decidedly ungracious fashion, denouncing the winners. In contrast to his own “larger (sellout?) vision” of the party with projected “mass appeal”, Earl the Pearl denounced the rest of us as fighting to maintain the LP “like a tightly cloistered church”, “just guarding the flame of dogma.” OK, that tears it, because, you see, one man’s principle is always another man’s “church dogma”. And if principle equals “dogma”, what does that make the person who bitterly denounces “dogma”? The answer is “unprincipled, opportunist— not a libertarian—” in short, all the things many of us were worried that Earl Ravenal really was down deep. But now it’s not so deep. It all came out in the wash, and it didn’t take very long.

Meanwhile, speaking of coming out in the wash, Professor John Hospers, hero of the LP’s small ultra-right wing, has slithered his way out of the Libertarian Party and into the ranks of the Republicans. Hospers now supports Ronnie Reagan for re-election, and laments that the LP has been taken over by backers of unilateral disarmament. (See the USC Daily Trojan, Oct. 21, 1983). Since the LP’s platform is still solidly pro-multilateral disarmament, and hasn’t changed on the issue in many years, and since the unilateral disarmamentists have always been in a minority, one wonders what world John Hospers has been inhabiting in recent years.

2. Crane Machine Notes:

And what of our old friends the Crane Machine, once so scary, now a figure only fit for raucous mirth? In addition to refusing to support the Bergland ticket and sulking loudly and angrily in their tent, so filled with angst were these turkeys that they actually contemplated for a while joining John Anderson’s National Unity Party ticket, and then “taking it over” from Anderson! What a gas that would have been: the Machine extending their Unity Scam from the LP, after its failure there, to a bigger failure for the entire country! To finally get their hands on another source of funds than The Donor, i.e., matching funds from the taxpayers! Truly, the Crane Machine has now become, in the, great phrase of Nietzsche, only a “laughingstock, a thing of shame.”

And speaking of laughingstocks, the intellectual collapse of the CM’s once-puffed up theoretician and would-be demagogue, Roy Childs, the no-show “foreign policy analyst” for the Cato Institute, is proceeding apace. The one-time champion of anarchism has become an archist, the one-time inspiring speaker against war now defends the U.S. invasion of Grenada, the one-time anti-imperialist has become pro-Zionist. And the one-time atheist is now seriously considering “converting to Judaism.” And, of course, the one-time out-and-out champion of lying (“if lying helps . . .”) now spends his time accusing the rest of us of lies. He also has the historiographical sleaze to laud his paymaster, Ed Crane, as the modern embodiment of Cobden and Bright.

On Childs’s projected conversion to Judaism: May he get a mohel with a rusty knife!

Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here.

3. Exit Upchuck?

Our farflung intelligence network reports the impending demise of Update. Apparently, The Donor has pulled the plug on this old Craniac smearsheet, long since become toothless and unread. Let me ask you, dear Reader, how long has it been since you have seen, much less read and pondered Update? If Update is truly leaving us, it will depart unwept, unhonored and unsung.

NEW YORK POLITICS

For political buffs, there is nothing more amusing or fascinating than politics in New York. (Or, to put it another way, if politics can’t be principled, it may as well be fun.) For one thing, New York, especially “the City”, still luxuriates in old-fashioned “ethnic” politics. To wit:

1. Mayor Ed Koch

Ed Koch enjoys enormous popularity among the New York City masses: for two basic reasons, (a) his personality, and (b) because he is perceived, by both white and black voters, as anti-black. The anti-black image is not of course attained by rabid demagogy, but by various subtle blends of rhetoric and reality. Since, almost alone among Northeastern inner cities, New York City still has a large majority of white voters, the result is a generally satisfied conclusion that “he has put ‘them’ in their place.” But Koch, as was shown by his disastrous race for Governor in 1982, cannot parlay that great popularity anywhere outside the boundaries of the city. His loss “upstate” (defined as anywhere in New York outside “the City”) has, of course, nothing to do with his anti-black image. The problem is Koch’s flamboyantly “ethnic” personality, a trait that hardly goes down well in soberly WASP-dominated upstate.

But they love him in “the City.” For one thing, Koch, in contrast with most politicians, even ethnic ones, who generally cultivate an image of unbearable serioso sobriety, Koch lets it all hang out. Candid, funny, abrasive, he tells it like he sees it—including the dressing-down of fellow politicos and pressure groups. As he puts it in his newly published and scandalous memoir (see below), he gives ulcers rather than gets them. As one top New York official put it recently, Koch’s popularity “reconfirms the notion that he is a unique type, irascible, sometimes charming, sometimes petulant—the embodiment of a typical New Yorker.” Yeah! But how, you might ask, can he be a “typical New Yorker” and yet unique? Because he is unique among politicians, and hence his great support among a public, as one reporter put it, that “admires candor and has little regard for most politicians.”

Recently, Koch shocked and stunned the political world by publishing his memoirs, “Mayor”, while still in office. This is a political first, since invariably memoirs are written after the statesman in question has safely retired and doesn’t have to cultivate political allies. And Koch even for a memoirist, is unusually candid and self-glorifying, spending his time in the book patting himself on the back and, in particular, getting back at his numerous enemies. Koch spares no one: the former Mayor, Abe Beame, tried to delay getting out of the mayoral mansion; a Koch employee, proven incompetent, broke into tears when Koch fired him, etc. Getting back at his enemies; as Koch might say, why else write a political memoir?

But, Koch was asked, why write the book while still in office, when the impact is bound to be divisive, and not follow the custom of waiting until he retired? Koch’s answer was not only candid, it was definitive:

I believe that no matter how interesting books on public life are, if they are published long after the events occurred and when the individual who was in the eye of the hurricane is no longer in office and gone from the scene, those books are purchased and placed on coffee tables and read by very few and have no major impact.

But won’t the book prove divisive in New York City and make it more difficult for Koch to govern? Sure, but Koch doesn’t care, because the people, the voting public, who are not themselves under attack and who love the Kochian style, won’t care tuppence. As Queens Democrat leader Donald Manes, who was bitterly mocked in the book, said: “The book is Ed Koch—he is open and outspoken. People already know what he is, so I don’t think the book will hurt him.”

Among all the sputtering responses by politicos, only two displayed the wit and verve worthy of the occasion. Public relations bigwig Howard Rubenstein, a Koch friend, griped about not being mentioned in the book at all, but then: “I expected to at least be in a footnote, but I’m not terribly upset because from the tone of some of the attacks on some of the other people, I come out ahead.” And the always witty Governor Mario Cuomo, strongly attacked in the book: “One should never write a book immediately after losing an election.”

Sometimes, of course, Koch’s ethnic persona gets to be too much. This fall, he overate in some restaurant, and, a few hours later there he was on radio, treating us all to a blow-by-blow account of the dishes he ate, of how an ambulance was rushed to his side (clearly needlessly), etc. Hypochondria on one’s own time is one thing; to inflict it on the rest of us is something else.

2. Mario Cuomo

Constant readers of the Lib. Forum will remember my enthusiasm for Mario Cuomo—the man not the political philosopher—in his successful race for governor of New York against the rightist Lew Lehrman in 1982. Cuomo’s style as governor continues in the same charming vein as Cuomo the candidate. Eloquent, bright, witty, worried about becoming a “Governor” rather than a person, Cuomo has been criticized by Albany mavens on two grounds. One is that, a hard worker, Cuomo delegates no power to his staff and does almost everything himself. Not unusual in government—or in business—but the charm is in Cuomo’s reason for this practice. True to the Italian-American values inherited from the Mezzogiorno, Cuomo doesn’t delegate work because he Trusts No One, except his own immediate family. As his son Andrew, his informal second-in-command, commented when asked about some of Cuomo’s early political allies who felt they were being ignored in the new administration: “Mario Cuomo has two political allies, Matilda Cuomo (his wife) and Andrew Cuomo.” And who is to say that he is wrong?

The second criticism is that Cuomo is often indecisive, postponing important decisions. Mario Cuomo often speaks in parables, and his reply was to tell the story of the Czar, the rabbi, and the dog. The Czar, wishing to show up the Jewish community, called in the revered and elderly rabbi. “If you are so wise,” taunted the Czar, “how about teaching my dog to talk?” Politically, the rabbi could not afford to refuse the Czar’s challenge directly, and so he replied: “I accept your challenge on condition that you give me a year.” When the rabbi later told his wife and students about his decision, they were astounded: “How could you say you could teach the dog to talk?”

The rabbi’s answer was definitive: “In a year the Czar could die. In a year, the dog could die. In a year I could teach the dog to talk.”

An Italian politician who tells rabbi stories: Only in New York!

3. Meade Esposito

And this brings me to the third ethnic politico of the month, the great Meade Esposito, long-time head of the Brooklyn Democrat Party, and the last of the old-time (“my word is my bond”) bosses.

Meade has the grand old Brando-Godfather-Mafioso croak (How do they get those croaky voices? Do they go to school?) He was asked last year by the ultra-reform, ultra-liberal Village Voice why he so often selected inferior candidates (for judgeships, city council jobs, etc.) over better ones who were running. Meade was too honest to sputter any denials. He simply “croaked” one word in reply: “Respect!” Respect—isn’t that what everyone wants, in the last analysis? (Remember one of the great lines in the Godfather when several Mafia biggies were discussing whether or not to talk to a newcomer? Brando assented: “I hear he’s a serious man, worthy of respect.”) Or, if Meade had studied philosophy, he might have retorted with the Kantian: “I want to be treated as an end, and not just as a means.”

A year or so ago, all the major Democratic leaders staged an unusual event, an open discussion forum. In the course of the evening, Meade spoke proudly about his balanced ticket in Brooklyn. It was something like: “We have two Jews, two women, an Italian, two blacks, two Irish, an Hispanic . . .” And, wonders of wonders, not a soul, either in attendance, or in the widely reported press accounts, took Meade to task one iota, much less drove him out of office as had been done shortly before to James Watt. Why the double standard? At any rate, in the case of Esposito, everyone knew full well that the balanced ethnic ticket had always been the case in New York, and always will be, and no one—even the reformers—saw anything wrong with it.

In January, 1984, Meade, in his mid-70’s, retired from his long-time post, proud that “they’ve never laid a glove on me”, and explaining that politics had become a “menagerie.” And besides, “I’m tired.” He recommended long-time aide Howard Golden to succeed him as party leader. At this point, Ed Koch intervened, and pressed hard for his own ally, Tony Genovesi, while the blacks put up Assemblyman Fortune. The press touted the fight for the Brooklyn party leadership as nip-and-truck, a dead heat. But when the vote came, it was a landslide for Golden, and Koch’s man Genovesi came in a distant third, beaten by nearly three-to-one. It was a grand Last Hurrah for the last of the old-time bosses.

Still Keeping Low Tech

By The Old Curmudgeon

In our famed double convention issue on the PresCon (September-October 1983), we had an article on computerism (“Keeping Low Tech”) which in its way drew as much attention (amused rather than agitated) as our lead article (“Total Victory: How Sweet it Is!”). Here are some reactions.

1. The Revolution Has Come and Gone.

My brother-in-law the printer, a computer maven long before everyone else, read my article with considerable amusement. He pointed out to me that the Revolution I am waiting for—being able to type hard copy on a regular electric typewriter and have it register automatically on a computer at the same time—has already come and gone. He has been using such a machine in typesetting for over a decade. You type on a seemingly regular electric typewriter, with hard copy coming out of the typewriter as usual. But, at the same time, punched tape emerges like magic out of a hole in the typewriter (it’s called, I believe, a Justowriter or Flexowriter), and then one feeds the punched tape into a computer, corrects it there, and, voila, it’s printed out. Of course, it’s true that it’s not quite automatic, and you have to know the codes, etc. to be able to feed the tape in, but still and all, it’s almost my desired revolution.

In fact, my brother-in-law wryly pointed out, if I used this gadget I would still be my desired decade or two behind current tech. There is, however, an unfortunate hitch. The machine is already obsolete, and if I managed to get one, the parts for repair have probably vanished. The idea is so old-tech that I missed the entire Revolution.

2. The Hands-Off Maven.

I have found a wonderful new way to Keep up with the latest computer tech, to be able to hold my own at cocktail parties, and yet still not actually have to touch a computer. My role model is an old friend of mine who has done this in many areas of endeavor for many years. He is virtually a Universal Maven, who can discourse learnedly on almost all topics, but without actually doing anything about them. For years, he has been a learned Maven on all aspects of consumer electronics. He subscribes to endless consumer electronic magazines, knows the plusses and minuses of every model of every hi-fi set, VCR, and advanced techno-gizmo imaginable. But he actually has almost nothing.

My friend the Universal Maven took to the personal computer age as a duck takes to water. It’s his meat. He subscribes to all the computer magazines, uses all the lingo, advises everyone else on what computer to get, engages in critiques of instruction manuals, but he himself has never touched a computer and has no intention of ever doing so.

At first I was puzzled: What can I call this paragon? You can’t call him a “theoretician”, since he doesn’t actually know any physics, engineering, or whatever. I finally figured that the perfect name for him is the Hands-Off Maven—the man steeped in hands-off experience in the often bewildering world of computers.

And so I find that I have become an apprentice Hands-Off Maven. I will never match my cher Maitre, but what the hell! I now understand the lingo, and can discourse upon the advantages and disadvantages of different kinds of computers. And, further, I have recently discovered the magnificent Macintosh, which, at the very least, has the best ad copy I have seen for any product in a long time. It goes straight to our hearts. (E.g.: “In this country there are 250,000,000 people, of whom only a small fraction know anything about computers. The Macintosh. For the rest of us.”) With the Macintosh you don’t have to learn complicated computer codes and signals. You “point” and move the cursor around the screen by shuffling the pointer (the “mouse”). Of course I haven’t touched a Macintosh yet, but I have become, in my own way, a Hands-Off Macintosh specialist, carving out my own little though growing niche in the mad, mad world of computers. I have read articles and learned journals on the Macintosh. It has a sparkling black on white screen instead of the dull green stuff. Etc. Why don’t I get one? Well, aside from the fact that it doesn’t fulfill my Revolutionary requirements, it will take at least a year (a lifetime in the computer world) to develop enough software, to get a letter-quality printer produced for it, etc. And hell, like I said, I can wait.

3. Lower Tech than I.

I received a touching and heartwarming note from a young lad in response to my original article. In a cry from the heart, he wrote that he is even lower tech than I, and that he is deeply convinced that all high-tech is a creature of the State, and that, in a purely free market and free society, none of it would be used. Well, I can’t really subscribe to this young chap’s position, but I find it quintessentially charming. First, for its own sake, and second because I am always delighted when someone makes me look like a middle-of-the-roader.

Fifteen Years Old!

With this March-April issue, the Lib. Forum is now fifteen years old. Apart from Reason, we are the longest-lived libertarian magazine, and, if you don’t consider Reason libertarian . . . Unlike the fifth and tenth anniversary issues, we’ll spare our readers the saga of the ups and downs of the movement over the years, and the legendary start of the Forum on a suggestion of Joe Peden’s while driving down a cold and rainy New Jersey Turnpike. The point is that for fifteen years we have called the shots as we’ve seen them, a plumb line voice for truth and jusice both in the libertarian movement and in the “real world.” We have seen the movement through its takeoff stage, and have combatted deviations from right, left, and all over the compass. We began the Forum in an epoch when many libertarians were hailing the new Nixon Administration as the advent of liberty in our time; and as we celebrate our fifteenth anniversary, there are still a few benighted comrades who are claiming the same thing for Ronnie Reagan. Plus ca change . . .

And as for why we spend so much of our time denouncing deviations, errors, and follies in the movement, the answer is short and sweet: it is a task that needs to be done, and nobody else is doing it. And if we have to do it, we may as well do it with panache.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol XVIII, No. 5-6

MAY-JUNE, 1984

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

Democrats Self-Destruct

The Democrat Party seems to have a veritable genius for self-destruction, at least on the Presidential level. Either that, or the fix is indeed in. Man for man, and dollar for dollar, they rival the Crane Machine for blithering ineptitude. And all of it done to the tune and the guidance of the Establishment Media.

1. Hart Had No Heart

Just as Mondale was moving smoothly toward his coronation, Gary Hart pulled the one interesting phase of the campaign, by making it a horse race, from Iowa to Florida. But Hart had no guts. “New ideas” or no, the guy turned out to be a wimp and a nerd. For what happened when the stunned Fritz Mondale, his crown a bit wobbly, lost his “Presidential” cool and went viciously for the jugular, making Hartpence’s name and date changes sound like being caught in flagrante with a page on the steps of the Capitol? Hartpence, instead of replying in kind, wilted and wimped and whined. End of Hart.

Note, by the way, that once again the Establishment press lied through its teeth. It’s a lot of nonsense (pace the analysis of Don Ernsberger) that the media created and virtually fabricated the Hart phenomenon to whip up interest in the campaign. You’d think a priori that’s what they might do. But the press’s action was just the opposite: as soon as they recovered from the shock of the Hart horse race, they were on the poor schmuck’s back like a pack of barracudas, raking over his name and date and his cheating on some high school exam and his mother being a bot dotty, and all the rest. Not only that: the press always maintains sternly that, though it might be fun, negative campaigns always backfire at the one who hurls the smear. Bull! Mondale’s negative campaign won the primaries for him, and this is now conceded by everyone. But poor Hart’s brain or guts have apparently been softened by a lifetime of quiche and yogurt and American Indian mysticism and all-around yuppiness, and so he only dithered and called for his momma as Fritz the Pits raked him fore and aft. Where’s the gut-fighter?

But Hartpence’s actions after June 5 were the final straw. Even though he lost New Jersey — because of the media-blown up gaffe about how California is nicer than toxic waste dumps in New Jersey (the understatement of our epoch), he after all won California handily. He still had a fighting chance, if he’d had the guts. If he had the guts, he could have pulled the same stunt that the Eisenhower forces employed to steal the Republican nomination from Bob Taft in 1952. He could have howled about the “tainted” Mondale delegates, whom he’d already pointed to, and raised a big fuss, and allied himself with Jackson, and gone into the convention fighting and scratching all the way. He could have yelled “Thou shalt not steal!” in his best Disciple of Christ manner, and he could have insisted that none of the tainted delegates (500-600 odd) be allowed to vote on any of the credentials, fights. And he just might have pulled it off, because if he had won that fight, his momentum might have carried him to victory.

There was a chance of that, but immediately the goddam Media rushed in like a personal crusade—all of them, the Restons, and Krafts, and all the know-alls—and they virtually ordered Hart, day after day, to lie down and roll over. If he fought, they said, it would destroy the Unity of the Democrat Party. And, they went on, bitter fights are always counterproductive, because if Hart won the Democrats could never win in November, and if he lost, his name would be ruined forever as a “spoiler.” What a lot of mendacious bilge! You’d think they’d forgotten that Unity is supposed to come after a convention not before, that the convention is supposed to be a time of savage bloodletting. The idea that conventions must always be boring coronations is very new. And as for a bitter fight ruining things, how come Eisenhower went on to win handily? How come, after “ruining” Ford by the bitter 1976 battle, Reagan’s name was not mud in 1980? Etc. These sober, “scientific” political analyses were a pack of lies, designed to stop all struggle, to ensure Fritz’s nomination, and to insure Fritz’s going on to a quiet, dignified, landslide defeat in November.

Obviously, something very odd has happened to American politics. In the old days, you could count on a few things: for example, exciting fights at conventions, and the Establishment Press being liberals. Now this is all out the window, as we could have seen from the Press’s supine failure to expose the galloping cretinism of Ronald Reagan. They failed dismally to hound Reagan out of office as they did the far less dangerous and more capable (or less incapable) Tricky Dick. Getting Gary to lie down and roll over was patently part of the fix, and, naturally, El Wimpo stood up to the pressure for something like 24 hours. And that was that.

2. Jackson at Bay

With Hart on ice, Jesse took front and center as the only really interesting legacy of this repellent campaign. Hart having prostrated himself in a satisfactory manner, the next step of the Media jackal pack was to humble the Reverend Jackson. Jesse, after all, was still acting feisty, several weeks after he was supposed to join the phony Unity chorus. Jesse, after all, of all this smarmy crew, had actually accomplished something in the real world during the campaign. Notably, he had freed Lt. Goodman, and the several dozen Americans from Castro’s prison camps. One would think that this would be a cause for rejoicing. No indeed. Gripes all the way. How dare Jesse talk to the bearded Butcher? And besides, they all grumbled, Jesse’s speech in Nicaragua attacking the CIA and the contras, even though true, was, as one big Democrat politico put it, “well, tacky.” What in hell do the Democrat Party bosses, whose very lives and beings are steeped in tacky 24-hours a day, what do they think they’re doing getting uppity on this issue?

But riddling Jackson on issues might be dangerous, and so the pack pored over the weekly broadcasts of the famous Minister Farrakhan as they would Satanic Writ. And then the shock of it! How in the world could the Minister refer to Judaism as a “gutter religion,” and then the Marx Brothers element was introduced as everyone wrangled for days about whether he had said “gutter” or “dirty.” Now there’s a textual and semantic lulu for you! All of a sudden, every cub reporter has become a linguistic analyst.

And a philosophic analyst, too. For weeks, months, the furor has raged: It’s not enough for Jackson to repudiate the statements of Farrakhan, why doesn’t he also repudiate the man? When Jackson reasonably replied that Farrakhan had not played a role in his campaign for months, the jackal pack grew impatient: “But why don’t you repudiate the man?”

This bunch of clowns are refugees from a second-rate Woody Allen movie. What would they have Jesse do? What is the objective correlative of “repudiating the man?” Would they have Jackson go back to colonial days, and take an effigy labelled “Farrakhan” and stick pins in it, and stomp on it, and cut off its head, and set fire to it? Or would they have him read some kind of medieval damnation or exorcism procedure? “I curse thy bones and thy hair,” etc. Or would they have him execute Farrakhan for real?

Jesse is smarter than the whole bunch put together. His reply to the press pests was that “Pope John Paul II denounced the attempt to assassinate him but forgave the would-be assassin, and Jesus Christ continued to love Judas, who betrayed him.” Can Jackson do any less? Jackson emerges as the only one of the Democrat candidates with brains and guts and integrity, perhaps because he’s not a professional poi. But whether he will survive the money and the power of the jackal pack remains to be seen. It’s too bad the guy’s a socialist. He has a little bit of the brains and charisma of Malcolm X, the the greatest black leader of our century.

There is more to be said about the philosophic point and about the hypocrisy of modern liberalism. Every liberal, every Christian (or at least every liberal Christian), every ESThole, every humanist, every shrink, every humanist shrink, every day of their lives, says: “I’m OK, you’re OK, he’s OK. Condemn the actions of a man, but never condemn the man himself.” The Rational-Emotive shrink Albert Ellis holds this as central to his entire world-outlook: “Just because he lies a lot, doesn’t mean he’s a liar,” etc. Now I have always held all this to be balderdash, and I have never understood any of it. It seems to be if a guy lies a lot, what else is he but a liar, and if a guy commits evil acts what else is he but evil? But it seems to me liberals should be stuck with their own petard, i.e. they should have to eat it. Presumably, this doctrine, if one holds it at all, applies to Minister Farrakhan as well as anyone else. When Jesse Jackson attacked “the amazing degree of cynicism” on the part of the media, he was right on target.

As for Minister Farrakhan, why should everyone fall down and go boom because he condemns Judaism as either a “dirty” or a “gutter” religion? Farrakhan is the leader of the “fundamentalist” wing of the Black Muslims, and as such he believes that all whites, Jew or gentile, are “devils.” Presumably their religions are diabolic as well. If so, why should anyone go into deep shock at the “gutter” reference? Why swallow an elephant yet strain at a gnat? Or could there be a curious double standard at work on the part of Jackson’s band of persecutors: that reviling Judaism is infinitely worse than denouncing Christianity? And if so, how come?

3. The Woman Question

At this writing, a couple of weeks before the Democrat Convention, Mondale having been already crowned by everyone and Jackson forced, at least partially, to bow down, the Big Issue has suddenly become the enormous and surprising pressure to force Fritz to nominate a female Vice-President. The capacity of the Democrats for self-destruction has not been so patently, and hilariously, on public display since the ill-fated hari-kari committed by the McGovern convention of 1972.

It all started when NOW abruptly ended its vaunted non-partisanship and endorsed Fritz very early in the campaign. So much so that New York NOW participated in the savaging of poor Gary Hart, despite the anguished pleas of Hart’s main female, Representative Patricia Schroeder. With Hart wimping out and the coronation in tow, Mondale decided to add a little spice to the June-July boredom by engaging in an ostentatious Interview Game with a bunch of Veepabiles. Something to fill the time, to get a little press, and to hand out little harmless kudos to various party stalwarts. A pleasant charade. And besides, Fritz clearly had a sentimental attachment to this crummy new process, since that is how he had vaulted from deserved obscurity to his present high eminence. So if you’re going to see a bunch of Veep-types, how about throwing in a few women, blacks, and maybe an Hispanic? That way we can get a little old-fashioned balanced-ticket stuff going without having actually to select anyone.

One thing that has always marked the feminists: they are experts at upping the ante. (In more innocent days, the motto would have been, “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.”) So all of a sudden the whole thing had turned deadly serious, and the relatively sane idea of the balanced ticket went out the window as “the old politics.” The pressure turned intense: “It’s either Hart or a woman!” and the muttering in many quarters was that even Hart—the obvious choice for Unity and coalition-mending—was becoming unacceptable.

Now, I refuse to feel sorry for Fritz the Pits for getting into this pickle. No one deserves it more. No one has played the dangerous game of pandering to the quota-system-Left as diligently as he. And even now, when the process began, he dared to answer critics who mildly questioned some of the political credentials of the women and blacks interviewed: that, since blacks and women have been oppressed, we can’t apply the same criteria to their record as we do to white males.

Well, there we have it. Pick any boob, so long as he or she has enough characteristics of the Oppressed! Well, in that case, why stop at a woman or a black? Why not go out and find someone who wears every one of the following Badges of Oppression: say, a Spanish-speaking, one-armed, black Single Mother who has converted to Judaism? That person, whoever she may be, will be not simply once-blessed (as would Geraldine Ferraro or Tom Bradley) or even twice-blessed (as is Dianne Feinstein), but five-times blessed! And using only a little more imagination will bring in someone even more strikingly “qualified” for high office!

What is there to say about all this? My God, is this the Real World? Have the inmates really taken control of the asylum? Compared to this, the Libertarian Movement begins to seem a model of sobriety and rationality.

By the way, I was not kidding about the “one-armed” candidate. It seems unbelievable, but several of our leading political pundits have seriously been pushing Senator Inouye of Hawaii for Vice-President, solely on the grounds that he is at the same time a Japanese-American and a one-armed war veteran. Are we to be spared nothing?

Another horse laugh is the stated reason why the feminists have moved in recent days from Dianne Feinstein to Geraldine Ferraro. It seems that while the masses are panting desperately for a woman Vice-President, they are not yet ready for the twice-oppressed (Jewish and woman) La Feinstein. On the other hand, veteran San Franciscans have scarcely been aware until recent weeks that Feinstein is Jewish at all. She had never trumpeted her being Jewish, and as a matter of fact, her bio would stress her having gone to a Catholic school (Catholic mother—three-times blessed!) But now that her big chance is here, she seems to have suddenly discovered Judaism, meaning that she thinks that the world is ready to embrace oppressions, the more the better. (If someone wanted to have some fun in this loony bin, he could start denouncing the Ferraro forces as “anti-Semitic.” It would make about as much sense as anything else.)

As for the electoral impact of a female candidate, my guess is that it would constitute the final plunge of the samurai sword in the quadrennial hari-kari ritual of the Democratic ticket. Left-feminists, after all, would have voted for Fritz in any case (or would have before they began to take the whole thing seriously). No votes to be picked up there. But let us not forget that the modal Mondale primary voters have been elderly, male, low-income, union members of the Northeast, Jews or Catholics, and that these elderly male Catholics are apt to take a walk en masse if confronted with a sassy, feminist veep candidate. The fact that Ferraro is Catholic is not going to swing it, especially since she is pro-choice on abortion. In the meanwhile, there is the danger that the Hart voters, the upwardly mobile WASP Yuppies and the Westerners, are going to take a walk themselves if Mondale does not pick Hart for Veep.

But, in any case, it looks very much as if the Great Cretin is going to waltz into a veritable landslide, and that only Divine Providence can save us from the horrible, gut-wrenching prospect of Four More Years. Four More Years of that smile, that folksy shake of the head, that soothing syrup of a voice. Oh Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.

Another word on the Woman Question: Why has there been no whooping it up for the highest-ranking female in Democratic politics, Governor Martha Layne Collins of Kentucky? Curious. One suspects it is because Governor Collins is pretty much of a southern conservative. And she is a right-winger on the abortion issue. One suspects, by the way, that just as in the old saying, one may be cursed by getting one’s wish, that organized left-feminism may not be very fond of whichever female is the first of her sex to rule over us. Feminists are always looking for role-models. Well, there are some female rulers that come to mind. In the past: Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great. In the twentieth century: Golda Meir, Mrs. Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi, Mrs. Thatcher, Sandra O’Connor, Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Why are there no feminist hosannas to these surely gutsy and powerful, even if a little too powerful, rulers? Why the silence?

ERIC MACK AND THE ANARCHIST CASE FOR WAR

1. Reason and the Case for War

At the Libertarian Party’s first Presidential convention, in New York City in 1975, a titanic struggle, spearheaded by Bill Evers and myself, was waged in the Platform Committee and on the floor over the mighty issue of war and foreign policy. Against great odds, the struggle was successful, and ever since then the Libertarian Party has stood committed to opposition to all foreign as well as domestic intervention, to the warfare as well as welfare segment of the modern Welfare-Warfare State. Having thrown off the right-wing, Cold War heritage of much of the libertarian movement, libertarianism has since then stood squarely in opposition to the Leviathan State, whether it be stationed in the Pentagon or the Department of Education. Indeed, the Libertarian Party has, year after year, consistently strengthened its commitment to isolationism and opposition to the imperialism and militarism of the modern United States government.

A small minority, the ultra-right-wing of our movement, the John Hosperses and Tibor Machans and Michael Dunns, they who stand in the murky zone where extreme right-wing libertarianism blends with the civil liberties “left” of Reaganism, have never accepted this consistent anti-statism, at home and abroad. The headquarters of this pro-war ultra-right has always been the engineers and technocrats clustered around Reason magazine. Until now, Reason’s stance on foreign policy has been symbolized by editor Tibor Machan, who characteristically prefaces his pro-war, pro-foreign intervention lucubrations by remarking that he knows nothing about foreign policy, and then proceeds only to demonstrate this proposition at great length.

Robert Poole, editor-in-chief of Reason, has apparently decided that a pro-war libertarian stance needs an intellectual groundwork that goes beyond aggressive ignorance. He has put together what amounts to the Reason line on military and foreign affairs in a new book, published by the Reason Foundation, Defending a Free Society (Lexington Books). The eleven essays, by nine authors, dealing with such hardnosed topics as “Effective Land and Tactical Air Forces,” are kicked off by an article on the moral ease for war, and it is this attempt to ground a war-fighting stance in libertarian moral theory that will concern us here.

Some of the great opponents of war and imperialism in the past—such as Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Herbert Spencer—have been laissez-faire minarchists, and what has been true in the past could also exist in the present and the future. I simply don’t know, however, of any leading minarchists of our time who are solidly opposed to war and foreign intervention.

On the other hand, while you don’t have to be an anarchist to be opposed to war and mass murder, it assuredly helps. There are precious few anarchists who have been in the forefront of the Cold or Hot War crusades. In fact, the concept of “anarcho-warmonger” boggles the mind. And yet, in our Movement all is apparently possible. As a case in point, note the major moral set piece and lead article in the Poole book: Professor Eric Mack’s “The Moral Basis of National Defense.” Eric Mack is a talented and productive young philosopher at Tulane whose world outlook may be best summed up as “anarcho-Randian.” Here Mack attempts the notable feat of making a moral anarchist case for international war.

2. Substitutionism: Assimilating Man to the State

How does he do it? One critical device for Mack is what we may call “substitutionism” assimilating man to the State, and implying that if, for example, it is all right for Joe Zilch to do something in a free society, or for a Private Protection Agency to do so, then it is ipso facto all right for the State to do so. Now, Mack would agree with mainstream anarchists that the State should be abolished and all functions privatized; but, failing that he sees little wrong with the State and with what it does. In other words, the first deep flaw in the Mackian world-view is that he doesn’t hate the State, he doesn’t resent it from the very depths of his being. Like all other anarchists he regards taxation as theft; but like other Randians, who agree that taxation is theft, he unaccountably does not pursue the logic one more step. For if the very being of an organization—the State—rests on organized theft, then this makes the State simply an organization of thieves, a criminal institution. Unlike other robbers and criminals, the State, far from being scorned and reviled as are most other marauders, is admired and even worshipped as “sovereign.” The State is the only socially legitimate organization of criminals. And yet, like other Randians, Eric Mack evidently regards taxation as a mere technical error, unfortunate perhaps, but not enough to hold the organization itself up to condemnation. So that he is able to apply to the State the same standards as to any private individual and organization; he lacks the state-hatred vital to any libertarian and which certainly should be in the bones of any self-proclaimed anarchist.

Note that I am not taking the absurd position that a person sanctions the State by walking or driving on government roads or by taking off in planes from government airports. Given the monopoly of roads or airports or postal service in the hands of government, and until they are privatized, we have no sensible alternative to using them. But this does not mean that we must blithely accept the State as an automatic proxy, or surrogate, for a firm in the private sector.

For example, suppose that, if roads were totally privatized, we would conclude that “private road firms would be embarking immediately on a $20 billion program of repairing and expanding the interstate highways.” Let us set aside the valid point that, without a market in operation, there is no way whatever—especially for an outside observer—to figure out how much firms on that nonexistent market would now be spending on roads. But let us assume for the sake of argument that private firms on the free market would now be spending $20 billion on investment in roads. But this by no means implies that, as libertarians, we should now advocate that federal or state governments spend $20 billion on roads. Even when the State is actually performing an important service that it has seized and monopolized, it does not follow in any sense that we are warranted in calling for more government spending. For we cannot do so without adding to the burden of tax-theft in the society. In short, even in the case of valid but monopolized functions, it is always impermissible for libertarians to support an increase in tax-theft. For the State is not a private firm. If people want more roads, they should be willing to support this activity privately and voluntarily, and blocking at least any more State funding might even give them the idea of privatizing roads entirely. We cannot substitute the State for a private person or firm because it is inherently unsubstitutable. It is unsubstitutable because the nature of the State differs totally and radically, and not just marginally and technically, from all other social institutions. The State’s very being rests on theft and invasion of private property, and this theft and aggression must be reduced and hacked away at every way we can. At the very least, libertarians must never justify its increase.

The odd thing is that I can’t see Eric Mack looking so benignly on the State postal service, or fire departments, or departments of roads. Certainly Robert Poole would not. Poole, and Reason magazine, have devoted considerable space and ingenuity to showing us how these State functions can and should be privatized. I can’t see groups of Pooleans writing books on a “Global Strategy for $100 billion for the Postal Service.” Only when it comes to “national defense” does knowledge of inherent State theft drop out and is the government treated as equivalent to a large and benevolent private firm, busily and earnestly protecting our “freedom.” And this “protecting” is supposedly being furnished by the largest and most aggressive group of criminal looters in our society!

The truth about the State is just the reverse. When it provides postal service, or roads, or steel plants, the State can only loot and miscalculate. It is monumentally inefficient and monumentally thieving. But, at least, in those functions it does not kill. It is precisely in war, in its active use of force outside its borders, that the State Murders. And murder is not something which may be properly done either by an individual or by a private defense agency in a free society. On this ground alone, in contrast to the right-wing libertarian view that the State provision of war and defense is less immoral than State provision of regular goods and services, it is far more so. For it is in the use of force, especially externally, that the State habitually murders. (And it is in the army, and not in local police, that the State conscripts, but we need not worry about that, because, fortunately, on this issue Poole and the Pooleans are true to their Randian heritage and are vigorously opposed to conscription-slavery.)

Since the State murders—that is, kills innocent people— and private defense agencies must not, we cannot simply advocate that the State, in defending us, do whatever a private defense agency would do. For one thing, precisely as in the case of roads or postal services, libertarians cannot advocate an extension of taxation. But, for another, a crucial feature of the State is that it always coercively monopolizes the exercise of coercion over a given territorial area. A private, free-market defense agency could not do so. So that when the French government takes a course of action in military or foreign policy, it willy-nilly commits all “French citizens” living in that area to that policy. If the French government attacks Spain, then all French citizens are implicated, at least in the eyes of Spain, which government will force its own citizens to retaliate. In this way, the subject peoples of every State are (a) forced to pay taxes for the war, (b) conscripted, and (c) forcibly subject to the retaliatory force of the “enemy” State. In our world, States cannot have enemies without dragging in their citizenry. Even Frenchmen who are opposed strongly to the war or who are ardent pacifists are coercively implicated in the strife.

Eric Mack, for example, asserts that there is nothing a priori immoral or untoward about State A making an alliance with State B, since, after all, in an anarcho-capitalist world, various Defense Agencies A, B, and C may well make alliances with each other, regardless of territory, in order to curb outlaw “Defense Agency” X, now turned aggressor, or simply for more efficient operation of their police functions. But the whole point is that, unfortunately, we are not living in an anarcho-capitalist society, and therefore States are not like private Defense Agencies. It is vital, then, that the two institutions not be conflated.

If Defense Agencies A, B, and C, for example, make an alliance, they do not thereby commit anyone else in any territorial area; they only commit their own members. But States commit everyone, willy-nilly, in the geographical area which they have grabbed and over which they exert sovereignty.

In short, it is impermissible to say with Mack that, given the unfortunate existence of the State, we should treat it as if it were a private defense agency. We must say rather that, given the unfortunate existence of the State, we must limit and reduce its power, anywhere and everywhere, and wherever possible. We must try constantly to abolish or at least lower taxes—whether for “defense” or for anything else—and never, never advocate any tax increase. Given the existence of the State, we must try to abolish, and if not abolish to limit and reduce, its internal power—its internal exercise of taxation, counterfeiting, police state aggression, controls, regulations, or whatever. And similarly, we must try to abolish its external power—its power over the citizens of other States. The criminal State must be reduced as much as we can everywhere—whether it be in its internal or external power. In contrast to the usual right-wing partiality for foreign over domestic intervention, we must recognize that foreign intervention tends to be far worse. For if State A invades or commits war against State B, it aggresses against the citizens of State B, in their lives and their property. And by expanding its activity, as we have seen, the State also ipso facto expands its aggression (tax and/or conscription as well as public debt) against its own citizens as well. And, finally, since States have the power to commit every one residing in their territorial area, war by State A against the citizens of B automatically subjects the citizens of A to retaliatory death and destruction at the hands of State B.

Put another way, if we suffer from the very existence of States, we must at least see to it that the State confines itself to power over its own territorial area. At least let it not make things far worse and aggrandize State power everywhere by aggressing against the subjects of other States.

But, in addition to all this, the State, in its capacity to kill, is all too likely to commit the ultimate crime: the mass murder of innocent people.

3. Forgetting the Rights of Innocent Shields

Eric Mack has two defective, fallacious, pernicious arrows in his anarcho-warmongering bow. One, as we have pointed out, is the assimilation of man to the State, the substitutionism of treating this coercive, organized criminal gang as if it were a private individual or defense agency in the midst of a free, world-wide anarchist society. The second fallacy is on the “micro” level, in dealing with the individual groundwork for his doctrine. The scenario goes something like this: A, the victim, is being threatened by B, a criminal aggressor; but he cannot effectively defend himself against B because B is using C, an innocent person, as a “shield.” We postulate that A cannot use defensive force against B without also using force against the shield. Therefore, although consumed with regret at the tragedy of the human condition, A, the victim of aggression, is justified in himself aggressing against the shield. In this emergency situation, Mack uses the principle of “double effect” and claims that after all A doesn’t want to shoot or kill C; that effect is foreseen but not directly intended. If killing C is the necessary consequence of self-defense against B’s aggression then, says Professor Mack, so be it.

All this stems from Mack’s well-known theory of emergency, or “lifeboat,” situations. X and Y are afloat on the high seas, X grabbing on to a plank. Y, according to Mack, is then justified in pushing X off the plank, i.e., in murdering X. Whys Because, in the Randian schema, the rights of person and property, of self-ownership, are not absolute, but “contextual.” In short, they are not really natural rights at all, despite Randian protestations, for they can be cast off whenever things get truly hairy, i.e., when emergency situations arise. In those situations, say the Randians, rights disappear, and we are in a contextual war of all against all.

As someone who strongly believes that rights are absolute and inviolable, and that the “context” is the nature of man and the universe in all its aspects, I propose to examine the numerous flaws and problems in the Mackian approach. In the first place, “emergencies” have a way, in political philosophy as well as in the realities of politics, of expanding and becoming permanent. If Professor Mack is willing to give his imprimatur to the killing of innocent shields, and to kicking people off planks and lifeboats in the name of the life and survival of A, the original victim or focus, then what about numerous other emergency situations where neither he nor otherfree society.”) The question is: to whom do we direct this regret? Or, whom do we kiss off in any given situation? I submit that, despite the fact that his life is at stake and the Thomson protagonist’s is not, no one has the right to claim someone else’s kidney in any circumstances, emergency or no.

And so on down the line. As Judith Thomson also states, if her protagonist is feverish, and she can only be saved from terminal illness by the touch of Paul Newman’s hand on her fevered brow, she does not have the right to commandeer Newman and drag him to her bedside.

And then there is the inevitable welfare argument. Jones is starving, on the point of death; he sees a grocery store and rushes to steal a loaf of Wonder Bread and wolfs down the loaf, isn’t this an emergency situation? Isn’t there, as there was in the Thomson cases, a contextual Mackian conflict of rights, don’t person and property rights drop out, and isn’t the thief justified in his theft? The answer is no, both for its own sake, and also because given one “emergency” argument, almost all other situations of theft and aggression can be justified. Criminals can usually come up with good and plausible reasons for their crime.

There may be various extenuating circumstances in each crime, so that we may hope that a victim will be merciful and forgive part or all of the punishment he can inflict on the criminal. We may hope, however, but not require. Crime is crime, and the victim is the victim, and he must always have the right to defend himself and to retaliate.

Another deep flaw in the Mackian approach is that it focuses solely on the actions of the original victim, A. Is it or is it not moral, in certain circumstances, for A to steal or commit murder? There are two problems with even focusing on this question. One is that we are interested in political philosophy, not in questions of personal morality. We are not interested in whether or not, for example, the ingestion of heroin is moral or not; we are only interested in whether or not one has a right to do so. Frankly, I don’t particularly care whether or not it is moral, in some framework of personal ethics, to rob or to kill the guy on a plank or the innocent shield. I personally think it is not. But even if, on a self-preservationist ethic, one concludes that it is moral, such a conclusion totally misses the point. We are only concerned in political philosophy, and particularly in libertarian political philosophy, with rights and with crime in variohether or not the action by A is moral, he has definitely criminally invaded the rights of his victim—the storeowner, the man on the plank, or the innocent shield. These victims, therefore, have the right to defend themselves against A’s criminal aggression. Rights are rights and crimes are crimes.

Let us now come to the case of the innocent shield, which is the most relevant to the problem of war and the State. A, an original victim, is being threatened with assault by criminal B. Let’s say that B is threatening A with a rifle, and he hides behind innocent shield C, who for some reason cannot get out of the way. Does A have the right to shoot in self-defense? No, for this makes A the criminal aggressor against C, a fact dramatically revealed by asking the key question: Does C have the right to shoot A in self-defense? Absolutely. C is causing no harm, and he has the perfect right to defend himself. Shooting the innocent shield is murder, and C has the right to defend himself with force, and he or his heirs have the right to retaliate. Again, our regrets, our “that’s the human condition,” or “tough cookies” comments, must be directed to the criminal A and not to C.

Eric Mack and other political philosophers focus exclusively on A, on his needs and problems: they forget about C, the only person in this tangled triangle who is a pure and undoubted victim and not an aggressor. To borrow a phrase from Sumner, in all this analysis, C, the innocent shield and his rights is the Forgotten Man.

If Professor Mack were to talk about the shield at all, he would admit that the shield has the right to defend himself against A, but then simply say that each person—A or C—has the right to shoot the other. In short, in Mackian emergency situations, rights are in inherent conflict. But this violates the very nature of libertarian natural rights. The whole point of natural rights is that they are eternal and absolute, and that every man’s rights are compossible with the rights of every other man. In every situation of a seeming conflict of rights, the libertarian political philosopher must search to eliminate the supposed conflict, and to identify whose rights are to prevail, to find out who is the victim and who is the aggressor. In the case of A aggressing against the innocent shield, it is the shield’s rights that are violated, and A who is the murderer. Compossibility is saved.

I like to think of the libertarian political philosopher as a kind of spiritual Lone Ranger, dedicated to defending rights and justice and to combatting crime against such rights wherever he finds it. Examining all the possible hypotheticals, the Lone Ranger descends from the sky with his six-shooters ablaze, interested in one and only one concern: defense of the victim’s rights against aggression. He cares not for excuses, alibis, starvation, or emergency situations; he cares only for defense of rights. He is, in short, the spiritual Defense Agency in an anarcho-capitalist society.

Who, then, would the Libertarian Lone Ranger, the surrogate anarchist Defense Agency, defend—whose side would he take with his six-shooters—in all of the above situations? He would unhesitatingly leap to the defense of the storekeeper, the guy on the plank, the Thomson protagonist . . . and, of the innocent shield. He would pop the Mackian victim Mr. A, because he (though unfortunately not Professor Mack) recognizes that taking action against the shield, the original victim has now become a criminal aggressor and must be gunned down.

We have finished our analysis of Mack’s anarcho-warmongering. The innocent bystander is the case most relevant to the question of war and the State. Except that we must postulate a mass of innocent bystanders or shields instead of just one. Ponder this: A is being threatened by B, a sniper, hiding in a crowd of hundreds of innocent people. For various reasons he can’t simply leave and he also can’t warn the crowd. A must either be shot or else he throws a bomb into the crowd, killing hundreds of bystanders along with the sniper. Is A’s action, is mass slaughter of innocents, justified because A’s life is at stake? It is hard to believe that any civilized person, much less any libertarian, would justify such an action—not simply because it would be profoundly immoral, but because it commits what for libertarians is the ultimate crime: mass murder. In this case, the Lone Ranger would be happy to pop A before he commits mass murder, and even do it with a Randian “mocking smile” rather than a sigh of regret.

And yet this is precisely what is involved in modern warfare, and is increasingly involved as weapons become more and more horrifyingly destructive. We must now address our final question to Mack, to the other anarcho-warmongers, and even to minarcho-warmongers like Bob Poole and the Reason group: If it is monstrous and criminal for individuals and anarcho-Defense Agencies to commit the slaughter of innocents for any reason whatever, how much more monstrous is it for the modern criminal State to do so? Never has the phrase “a fortiori” been more in order.*

Once I was arguing with a distinguished libertarian theorist who believed that one could sell one’s liberty permanently in an enforceable slave contract. When I pointed out that this was the classic defense of State tyranny, since the people were assumed to have sold themselves into perpetual slavery, he replied heartwarmingly: “That only applies to the market. Nothing can justify the State!”

New Crane Machine Floperoo!

In our last issue we wrote that the once dreaded Crane Machine had become a laughingstock, a thing of shame. Boy were we understating the case! The CM’s latest gaffe is so outrageous, so odious, that one doesn’t know whether to fall on the floor laughing or to reach for one’s machine gun.

It turns out that the rumor we reported about the Craniacs playing footsie with John Anderson and his jerry-built Potemkin village, the “National Unity Party,” only scratched the surface of this caper. Our farflung intelligence network reports the following:

After John Anderson decided to withdraw from the Presidential race, he announced that he would give his allegiance to his shadowy vehicle, the “National Unity Party,” and that there would be a national convention of the NUP—whether in 1984 or not until 1988 was not clear, and that he would support the NUP but not run again for President. Well, either before or after this withdrawal—the chronology is not yet clear—the Crane Machine hatched its plan and began to carry it into effect.

The idea—get this—was to pack the convention of the NUP and take it over from John Anderson, and then use the $6 million of the federal matching funds to run a Craniac candidate for President on the NUP ticket! At last, the Craniacs would have had their pipe dream: (a) they’d be able to use taxpayers’ funds and not just Koch moolah; (b) Eddie Baby would be able to run a presidential campaign that the LP had deprived him of last September. Galvanizing their forces, the CM operation, the new Operation Unity, as we might call it, was run by Eric O’Keefe (the martyr redivivus!), Tommy Palmer, and Howie Rich, with the Boss, of course, pulling the strings. O’Keefe-Palmer-Rich contacted various people about ballot drives, and the plan (using taxpayers’ funds) was to put the NUP on the ballot in 40 states.

The proposed Craniac candidate would have been one Martin Stone, a millionaire industrialist living at Lake Placid, who once owned Monogram Industries (makers of airplane johns), and Golden West Airlines, and is still the publisher of the periodical, California Business. Whether Stone was in on this gig I know not, but I do know that the boys were very serious about the whole campaign. Not only that: but Roger Lea MacBride, now gloriously reconciled with Crane and the gang, and perpetrator of the notorious Biddeford Unity statement, called up at least one long-time LP activist and urged her to attend the NUP convention as delegate to vote for Stone.

What happened, however, is apparently that the boys needed at least one key element for this scheme to work, and that was to get ahold of the taxpayers’ $6 million. And the key to that was at least the benign neutrality of John Anderson, the Founding Father of the NUP. Our reports are that Crane went, himself, to Anderson in order to clinch the deal, and that Anderson in effect told him where to go.

End of the latest Unity Caper.

Well, what lessons can we learn from this rather unedifying caper? I suggest the following: (a) that whatever pretensions the Crane Machine ever had to libertarian principle are now long gone, and that this mucking around with Anderson and with our tax money demonstrates that all these bozos now care about are money, power, and being big shots in the political process—any political process. Any devotion to liberty has gone down the proverbial drain. W have seen the spectacle of genuine moral corruption at work, in the profound philosophical sense. Have they, at last, no shame?

(b) One hopes that none of these clowns will presume, ever, to set foot again in the Libertarian Party.

And (c) Boy, are they a pack of losers! What can be more demeaning than being, not only complete opportunists, but opportunists who are also totally incompetent? In a sense, this is a fitting Coda to our total victory, and to their total defeat, at the September convention. The next thing to contemplate is what would happen to these bozos if they should ever lose their access to Kochian subvention? Now there’s a happy thought to while away the hot summer nights!

Prohibition Returns!

Prohibition is back, and with a vengeance. Actually, this infamy never really disappeared, and in the half century since the repeal of the monstrous 18th Amendment, we have had dry counties, dry states, Sunday blue laws, and outrageous taxes on liquor as well as cartellized licensing and regulation of the sale of liquor. Arguments have stressed different blends of the “moral” (drinking is a “sin”!) to the “scientific” (“It’s bad for your health.”) The latter argument has been particularly virulent in this fanatically health-oriented age.

But there is enough libertarianism in the American people not be driven completely to prohibition by the arguments of paternalism. And so the final clincher is the seemingly libertarian point that drinking (or smoking or whatever) “harms others.”

If you push the chain of causation back far enough, however, almost any action you take can be said to “harm” someone. If people don’t take enough Vitamin B1, it may be argued, they will become more irritable, and a higher level of irritability will lead to more fist fights and more aggressive behavior against others—to more assaults and batteries. Therefore—why not force everyone to take daily injections of Vitamin B1, and outlaw any attempts to avoid this coerced intake as committing harm against others?

The point cannot be stressed too emphatically: people must be free to do whatever they want, and the only illegal action can be the initiation of an act of physical violence against another. There must be no preventive punishment, no preemptive first strike of any kind. Any such action is itself criminal aggression against the rights of others.

We are now in a position to evaluate the new prohibition. Specifically, there are now two assaults against the drinking of alcohol. First, President Reagan is now leading a bipartisan, nationwide drive to raise the minimum drinking age from 18 to 21. The rationale, led by Mothers Against Drunken Driving, is that drunken teenage drivers constitute the major proportion of those culpable in automobile accidents around the country.

But this legislation is idiotic as well as tyrannical. In the first place, 21 is a highly arbitrary age line. It is a date far later than the age of the onset of rationality and yet far below the continued existence of hopped-up youth. On the one hand, as the opponents of the legislation point out, if 18 is old enough to fight, or vote, why not to drive cars? And on the other hand, there are plenty of drunkards aged 22 or 23, or even 40. What about them? So why not raise the minimum age to 25, or 30? Or perhaps 95, and we will achieve full prohibition once more.

Secondly, statistics are a slippery groundwork for political action. If drunken teen-age youth is the focus of the traffic accident problem, it is almost always drunken male youth, and not female. So why not prohibit all sale of liquor to males under 30, while allowing all sales to females?

Furthermore, the minimum drinking law is not only monstrous and despotic, it is almost impossible to enforce. Once an adult buys a bottle of liquor, how large would the Gestapo have to be to ensure that the bottle is not resold, or given, to someone under 21? Who will police the nation’s homes to prevent this transfer?

And finally, what of the hapless teenagers of America who don’t have cars and don’t even know how to drive? This may sound outlandish to Middle America, but in New York City, for example, where automobiles are generally a net liability rather than an asset, only one-third of teenagers drive cars. So why should the non-drivers be prevented from imbibing a bit of John Barleycorn?

This brings us to the second of the current assaults against liquor—laws against drunken driving itself. This at least has the merit of focussing on the problem a bit more directly. There are laws against drunken driving per se and against teenage drunken driving, but the latter seems pointless and discriminatory, since if such laws are good and necessary, why single out teen-agers for special punishment? If X percent of drunken drivers are (male) teenagers, then they will be caught in the net proportionately to their deserts, and there is no need for special hysteria in their direction.

But the general drunken driving laws are deeply flawed as well. For, contrary to the media hysteria that liquor automatically destroys one’s ability to drive, there are plenty of habitually drunken drivers who are so skillful that they never get into accidents. I know one libertarian who is one of the finest drunken drivers in the country; who has the uncanny ability to scoot around the dark and winding roads of the South at 3 in the morning, at high speeds and in unfamiliar terrain, totally tanked up, and never get or cause anyone a scratch. Why should he be penalized by the might of the law?

On the other hand, there are rotten drivers, who cause accidents habitually, whether or not under the influence of Demon Rum. Why should they go scot free, while the poor drunken driver, by virtue not of harm to anyone but simply of “potential” harm through imbibing, gets socked by the full majesty of the law, including in some states, instant jail terms just by virtue of driving around with an alcohol content in their blood of more than X percent? By what right, by what standard of justice, does a person’s state of legality depend on the content of his blood? How dare it be a high crime merely to drive while drinking, and to receive a swifter and sometimes greater punishment than actually mugging or robbing or assaulting someone?

In short, there should be no penalties whatever on drinking, on the sale or purchase of liquor, or on driving while drunk, regardless of age or gender. On the other hand, if someone actually causes a real, honest-to-God accident, then penalties can and should be levied, based, for example, on the degree of voluntariness in causing the damage, and certainly the imbibing of alcohol, contrary to the blatherings of determinists, is a voluntary act. It is there, after an accident, after damages have been committed, that penalties or punishment can come into play. Anything else is simply a criminal invasion of the rights of the innocent, of those who have not committed a crime or damages.

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVIII, No. 7–8

JULY-AUGUST, 1984

Box 341, Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

Patriotic Shlock: The Endless Summer

What in hell is happening in America? This has been an Endless Summer, an odious, repellent, horrifying orgy of Patriotic Shlock. In all my years I have never seen so many blankety-blank American flags being waved, mindlessly, over and over again.

It started on that rotten last night of the Democratic convention, when the massed delegates were all waving, instead of the usual banners for their nominees, American flags, duly issued to them by the smooth Mondale machine. The culmination was the acceptance speech of Geraldine Ferraro, in which La Ferraro droned on about her immigrant mother, immigrant daughters, and God knows what else, all to the tune of American flags being waved, and, yes, masses of delegates sobbing and hugging each other.

I put it all down to one night’s aberration, little realizing what an orgy of mass sobbing and flag-waving we were all in for. The next step, of course, was the infernal Olympics, in which patriotic shlock reached a new all-time low. Again, what in hell is going on? There was nothing at all like this in the last Olympics held in the U.S. — the winter Olympics of 1976. There was no sobbing, no flag-waving, in fact there was a healthy realism by the media focussing on the transportation foulups at Lake Placid. But here, in L.A., in the home of Hollywood shlock, all of a sudden everyone went nuts, the audience, the media, even the athletes. The pattern began with the Opening Ceremonies, a vast exercise in tedium, when the flag-waving, the sobbing, and all the rest began, and never let up. Come on: 84 pianists in blue tuxes, simultaneously faking the playing of Rhapsody in Blue! And it wasn’t only ABC (see below) that went bonkers; the press was almost as bad, San Francisco’s famous voice of the Peepul, Truman Democrat Herb Caen, writing two lengthy columns on the wonders of the Opening Ceremonies, how it “made everyone proud to be an American again,” “proud to wave flags again,” etc. Yecchh! Also characteristically weighing in to do his muddled bit was philosopher Tibor Machan in Reason magazine, taking off on a few facts, all of them wrong, about the Olympics.

ABC was disgustingly chauvinist, much more than in past Olympics. Cameras pointed shamelessly to Americans to the exclusion of virtually anyone else; commentary was American-hype to the nth degree; behind every American athlete pictured was a huge American flag waving in the nonexistent breeze. ABC got so bad that Olympic authorities began to complain.

But it wasn’t just ABC or the press. It was the American masses, the audience themselves, that succumbed to the most unsportsmanlike behavior. The mob, bellowing “USA,” “USA,” the cheers for every U.S. point, the booing when a U.S. gymnast got less than a perfect 10. Probably the low point of the entire Games was when Carl Lewis, upon winning the 100 meters — typically, about 20 meters ahead of everyone else — grabbed a huge American flag, and virtually wrapping himself in the thing, ran around the Stadium. It was the apex of a truly obscene spectacle.

And what ever happened to the old propaganda of the U.S. media that the Olympic Games are not a team, but an individual, sport, so that one shouldn’t even count the medals gained by the various countries? That old hype apparently applied only when the Soviet Union and East Germany used to walk off with most of the medals. But now that the East European bloc was safely out of the way, Oh the crowing and oh the gloating about all the medals “we” of the U.S. were racking up! Hey, fantastic, so we beat up on the British Antilles, and all the other one-horse countries that the U.S. paid to show up. As usual, the American mob was ungallant from start to finish, as in the invasion of tiny Grenada, gloating about the huge U.S. stomping on minuscule opposition!

An old friend of mine, a U.S. patriot from many years of being obliged to live in a hated foreign land, upon watching the opening ceremonies, lamented, “It made me ashamed to be an American!”

I tell you: Watching the Olympics made me nostalgic for the good old days of the New Left, and the ranting about “Amerika” or even “Amerikkka.” One more day of this horror, one more binge of patriotic sobbing and flag-waving, and I will be ready for the Jeff Hummell Deviation (i.e. opposition to all nationalism, even national liberation against imperial States.) And for the first time in decades I look with favor on old Herbert Hoover, President when the last Summer Olympics were held in the U.S. (Los Angeles in 1932), who didn’t bother officiating at the opening ceremonies because “they weren’t important.” At this point, I am almost ready to forgive Hoover his origination of the New Deal.

Life In “1984”

1. Of All Time.

Recently, one Dan Lurie, publisher of Muscle Training Illustrated magazine, decided to search for someone whom he could dub “the best physically fit President of all time.” After an exhaustive search, Lurie came up with, lo and behold!, Ronnie Reagan.

Ronnie Reagan? But how about George Washington, a strapping 6'2" in a world where most male Americans hardly poked up above 5'5"? How about Abe Lincoln? Or Ike Eisenhower? No, he couldn’t pick people like that, Lurie explained, because “You can’t go back and honor a President who’s no longer there.” Oh. Well, that takes care of that.

2. The Shortest Time Period.

It is an old New York quip that the definition of the shortest perceivable interval of time, is the time it takes between the change of the traffic light to green and the moment when the car behind you honks its horn. I offer a new definition of the shortest period of time: the length of any cease-fire in Lebanon.

3. Unemployment in Grenada.

In the last days of the Marxist Bishop regime, unemployment in Grenada was severe, at 14 percent. The United States invasion — oops, “rescue mission,” as Lew Lehrman’s Citizens for America managed to have it called — had the effect of more than doubling that unemployment, which is now about 30 percent. Why? Because of the “sudden unemployment,” imposed not by wicked capitalists, but by the U.S. military occupation regime: i.e. on former members of the People’s Revolutionary Army, former officials in the Bishop government, former members of Bishop’s ruling party, the New Jewel Movement, and workers building the famous airport.

Comment by a 19-year old Grenadian who hasn’t had a job yet: “They call it a rescue mission, but they haven’t rescued me yet.” To each his own, on Grand Fenwick.

Democrat Convention Notes

The Democratic convention went out drowned in a deluge of odious and maudlin hokum, everyone crying and singing, all sexes and races joined together. The last time I saw all this was at the Democratic gathering of 1976, when Jimmy and Miz Lillian and all the rest of the gang sang “We Shall Overcome.” It’s getting to be a stale act. The difference, of course, was that Jimmy was nowhere to be seen, having himself bombed out in his pre-keynote address. It looks as if the Great Family of Democrat doctrine, the Family of the dispossessed and the left out, has no room for their old has-been and Former Peerless Leader. It’s like the old shaggy-dog jokes; the Party of Inclusion can’t include everybody.

* * *

And speaking of singing. There were two absolutely rotten and unforgivable aspects of this convention. One was the fact that they robbed us of the best part of a political convention: the suspense, the excitement, by making sure that everyone, even the Veep, was picked way beforehand. That left only the tinsel and the hokum. The media kept quoting grand old H.L. Mencken on the obscene glories of political conventions. But that was when conventions really meant something, and the suspense and the excitement were there until the end. Tinsel by itself is mere ashes. The second terrible thing was the takeover of the convention by the blankety-blank band. Instead of allowing the conventioneers to set the rhythm of events by their own shouting and enthusiasm, the band took over at all times, and imposed its overpowering noise on-everyone, changing shouting and demonstrations to jiggling and dancing to the band’s tunes. The band was everywhere, ruining the demonstrations. Sometimes it was the 1812 Overture, no less. More often it was repellent rock, and while the convention was a shameless scramble by the Democracy to recapture American Values from the Republicans, they will learn that you cannot do so by the sight of thousands of delegates boogeying down to goddam rock, regardless how many plastic American flags they wave at the same time.

Even five minutes of George M. Cohan and “the Grand Old Flag” won’t do it. The Democrats are suffering badly from an adult white male gender gap. They will not recapture that lost vote by playing songs written in 1912. (Hey, bunky, we ain’t that old!) To quote the great line from “Kids”: “Why can’t they dance like we did? What’s wrong with Sammy Kaye?”

* * *

The high point, the only high point, of the convention, was the magnificent keynote by Mario Cuomo. Note the difference between Cuomo’s and the other instantly forgettable speeches; the content, in many ways, was superficially the same. But the difference was not simply the “delivery,” although it was certainly true, as one journalist wrote, that Cuomo’s speech had the “grace, the elegance, the strength” of Joe DiMaggio playing center field. In one of the greatest political speeches I have ever heard, Cuomo fused reason and rhetoric in a masterful demonstration of what oratory is really supposed to be about.

One difference is that Cuomo wrote the speech himself, and it was indeed, as speeches are supposed to be, an embodiment of heart and mind. It was the expression of an unusual politician for the current age. A man of luminous intelligence, articulation, Catholic values, insight, and high wit — in short, an ethnic New Yorker in the best sense of the phrase. He is, as Nora Ephron wrote, perceptively if inelegantly, after the speech: “Adlai Stevenson with balls.” Note, too, one of the famed New Yorkers who preceded Cuomo to the podium, his old opponent and fellow-author Ed Koch, the obnoxious clown who spent his entire speech in an unbelieveable torrent of fascist hogwash, calling upon the President to mobilize the “Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines” (no less!) to fight the “war on drugs.” Koch did everything but call for a return to the draft for that great battle.

But Cuomo’s speech was superb. He took Reagan’s only known metaphor — the New England Puritan depiction of America as the “shining city on a hill,” and, in the great tradition of political conflict as against consensus, declared that America is a “Tale of Two Cities.” In doing so, Cuomo harked back to the left-wing tradition best symbolized in the famous line of Dos Passos’s USA: “all right, we are two nations.”

No, dear readers, I have not flipped my wig, and joined the Cuomo crusade. For indeed it was a socialist-organicist speech, embodied in the premise that the nation-state is a Great Family. Given that deeply fallacious axiom, however, the rest follows. Libertarians, it must be added, also believe that we are two nations, or two “cities.” The division, of course, is quite different: for left-liberals or socialist-organicists, it is the rich vs. the poor, or, nowadays, it is an inconsistent jumble of rich-adult-white-male vs. poor-everyone else (fuzzing over what one does with rich women or blacks.) But libertarians have our own two-nation model: the State apparatus and its allies who constitute the ruling class, and the rest-of-us, who constitute the ruled. This division, of course, has a very different fault-line. Our two nations is the old class distinction set forth by Representative “Sockless Jerry” Simpson of Iowa: “there are two classes in America — the robbers and the robbed.” Or, as James Mill (not his wimpo son, John Stuart) put it: there are two classes in society, “the first class, those who plunder, are the small number. They are the ruling Few. The second class, those who are plundered, are the great number. They are the subject Many.”

The solutions, too, are different. The Cuomo, or socialist-organicist, solution is of course vague and fuzzy; but in some way it involves bringing about one organic city-family by compulsory egalitarianism. The libertarian goal is to bring about “one nation,” a society of free people rather than a Giant Family, by abolishing exploitation by the “first nation.” And they call us “Utopians!” The libertarian goal is simple, non-Utopian, and achievable if only enough of us have the will. The goal of achieving a Family of 200 millions or 6 billions is absurd, quixotic, and impossible.

* * *

Still and all, Cuomo’s speech was a great event, and it towered over the other speakers at the convention as a giant over a motley crew of pygmies. The Lib. Forum is happy to note that we were among the first to spot Cuomo as a rising star in his debates with Lew Lehrman for the New York governorship in 1982 — where Cuomo sliced Lehrman to ribbons with sallies of high wit that left the serioso Lehrman gasping. If Cuomo really makes it to a major national nomination in 1988, the campaign is going to be a treat.

And some of Cuomo’s content was unexceptionable: such as his denunciation of Reagan for the killing of 279 Marines in Lebanon, his attack on U.S. aid to “governments that murder nuns,” and his call for “privacy for people, openness in government,” which capsulizes the libertarian position on the secrecy-publicity question.

* * *

Cuomo’s keynote stress on the family and on his immigrant roots set the tone and the theme for the rest of the convention. But they were pygmies following a giant, and so they botched it by drawing the theme out and working it over until tedium reigned supreme. It was like the difference between a great movie and and Grade Z shlock. For example, Cuomo spent only about half a minute on his “little immigrant father who worked 16 hours a day, ‘sometimes bleeding from the feet,’” and went on to other concerns. The other speakers worked the whole hard work-immigrant theme into the ground and six feet under. In particular, La Ferraro, the other Queens Democrat. It seemed that her entire damn speech was focussed on her sainted mother, her daughters, on immigrants, on the generations, until one longed desperately for escape. Hey, we’re not supposed to vote for someone simply because he/she is a child of Italian immigrants! Give us a break! To make matters worse, the networks, particularly NBC, interspersed Ferraro’s speech with endless shots of women delegates crying. Are we to be spared nothing?

* * *

And then there is all the insufferable cant about Ferraro-Zaccaro’s “working-class” persona from an “Archie Bunker district” in Queens. Her mother may have indeed been sainted and poor, but Ferraro-Zaccaro is a millionairess who lives in a Tudor mansion in Forest Hill Gardens, a highly posh pocket within the Archie Bunker district. She and her husband own three houses, their palatial estates including Long Island and the Virgin Islands. John Zaccaro may, for all I know, be “supportive” and “in touch with his feelings,” but he is also a member of one of the most hated classes in New York City life, “millionaire slumlord.” His houses have received 100 citations for housing violations. (Note: I have nothing against “slumlords,” but, if the Republicans are smart, they can do effective work exposing all this among urban ethnics, also thereby ripping off the Democratic veil of phony populism).

* * *

Note: if the canons of the New Feminism require that Ferraro be treated androgynously by one and all, then why is it that Mondale and Ferraro must never, under any circumstances, be seen to clasp hands overhead or put an arm around each other, in public? Male candidates do it. So why isn’t sauce for the gander also sauce for the goose?

* * *

Problem I’m Not Going to Give Even a Fleeting Worry About: Whether Mondale should precede, or follow, Ferraro down the aisle, or out of a car; or the precise gavotte of how Mrs. Mondale and Ferraro should act, or where they should stand.

* * *

On the speeches. I unfortunately missed the Jackson speech, but from the snippets I saw I would not have been impressed. I am not a fan of sweaty, oratory. Being sincere or impassioned is scarcely enough; there must be reason, thought, and elegance of delivery. Also, for me Jacksonian metaphor breaks the mood and is too reminiscent of a Woody Allen sendup: “If mah grape turned into a raisin” indeed!

Gary Hart’s speech simply didn’t make it. Teddy Kennedy’s was a good solid stem-winder. And, as far as I’m concerned, both acceptance speeches were washouts. Ferraro told far more about her lovable Italian family, redolent of American Values, than any of us shall ever want to know. And Fritz the Pits strained manfully not to be boring, but simply didn’t make it. Also, the note of apologia to the Reagan voter for not being American Family enough in the past, was weak and absurd. Fritz the Pits did, however, perform an American First: the definite promise to the American voter that he will raise taxes next year. Well, there’s a kick-in-the-head! And after this, we’re all supposed to sing and cry and L-O-V-E that ticket! It is true, of course, as Fritz said, that Reagan will also raise taxes next year (after all, he already did so, in 1982, 1983, and 1984), except that he won’t admit it. Well, what are we supposed to do, Fritz, admire your “courage” or at least concede the good sense of Reagan’s handlers in not courting our vote by hitting us openly over the head?

* * *

God what a choice! The Pits vs. The Great Cretin. The Bore vs. the Idiot Smiler. Socialist-organicism and maudlin cant vs. militarist-collectivism and a pack of lies.

Mr. and Ms. America: work, vote for, support the only ticket of liberty and principle, the only way that your vote will not be “wasted” on collectivism and drivel. Vote for Bergland and Lewis, Libertarians!

Arts and Movies

By Mr. First Nighter

Red Dawn, dir. by John Milius.

It’s not only the Supreme Court that follows the election returns. Hollywood, too, does its bit, and movie theatres have been increasingly filled with right-wingy patriotism, like the rest of the media this endless summer. I went to see Red Dawn expecting a bout of anti-Soviet warmongering, bat instead was pleasantly surprised. This is hardly a great picture, and is indeed flawed. But Red Dawn is an enjoyable teen-age saga, and, apart from right-wingy pro-NATO credits at the beginning of the film, it is not so much pro-war as it is anti-State. The warfare it celebrates is not interstate strife, but guerrilla conflict that the great radical libertarian military analyst, General Charles Lee, labelled “people’s war” two centuries before Mao and Che.

The beginning of the picture is exciting, if idiotic. Cuban, Nicaraguan, Mexican and other Commie Hispanic troops, headed by Soviet advisors, parachute into and successfully conquer the entire prairie MidWest, from the Rockies to the Mississippi. In the opening sequence, the Red paratroops swiftly invade and, for some reason, annihilate a high school in the mythical town of “Culver City,” Colorado, presumably somewhere in the East Slope foothills of the Rockies. In a neat touch, gun control has made it easy for the Commie occupiers to round up all the registered guns in the area. But a half-dozen high school kids escape and set up a guerrilla camp in the Rockies. Jed, the older leader and a former school quarter-back, whips the other reluctant lads into shape, and soon the tiny guerilla band, using light arms, mobile tactics, and superior knowledge of the terrain, strike terror into the Red occupying forces while brandishing the rallying name of “Wolverines.” There are some revoltingly macho touches at the beginning, especially when one of the young lads receives his mystical baptism into the guerrilla rites by drinking the blood of his first kill — fortunately a deer rather than a Commie. These touches subside after a while, although they are hardly softened by the appearance of two young lady guerrillas who are fierce and androgynous enough to pose for a Viet Cong or Algerian guerrilla poster.

One of the best parts of the picture is the graphic portrayal of how the Red response to the Wolverines runs the gamut of the U.S. counter-revoluntionary responses to the Vietnamese. That is, at first the Russian commander decides to hole up in the cities and military bases, into the “safe zones,” whereupon the Wolverines boldly demonstrate that in guerrilla war there are no safe zones, and that the “front is everywhere.” At that point, another crackerjack Russian commander takes over, and replicates the “search and destroy” counter-guerrilla response of the Green Berets. This is more punishing, but still does not succeed.

One big problem with the picture is that there is no sense that successful guerrilla war feeds on itself; in real life the ranks of the guerrillas would start to swell, and this would defeat the search-and-destroy concept. In Red Dawn, on the other hand, there are only the same half-dozen teenagers, and the inevitable attrition makes the struggle seem hopeless when it need not be.

Another problem is that there is no character development through action, so that, except for the leader, all the high school kids seem indistinguishable. As a result, there is no impulse to mourn as each one falls by the wayside.

But whatever flaws the movie has are redeemed by one glorious — and profoundly libertarian — moment. The Nicaraguan-Cuban insurgent leader is increasingly unhappy acting as a State occupying force. He tells the implacable Russian commander: “Once I was an insurgent. Now I’m a policeman” — the last word spoken with profound contempt. He writes his wife: “What am I doing in this cold and lonely spot, so far away from home?” So that, in the climax of the film, as one people’s war guerrilla to another, he saves the hero, Jed, and allows him to slip out of the Russian net. Ideology, left and right, gets swallowed up in hands-across-the sea of people’s guerrillas against their respective States.

In all war pictures there is the annoying pacifist nudge, griping about “how do we differ from them,” since both are shooting and killing (The LeFevre-Smith motif.) Jed’s answer is satisfactory enough, even though lacking profound argumentation: “Because we live here!”

Another fine touch is that the evil informer who almost does the Wolverines in is, naturally, the son of the town Mayor, who is identified by friend and foe alike as “the politician.” The Mayor, who directs the betrayal, cringes fawningly if despairingly in carrying out the orders of the occupation force.

All in all worth seeing — exciting as well as libertarian.

In books or in movies, my favorite form of fiction is—for want of a better word—“tough-guy,” especially tough-guy espionage. The three prime subdivisions of tough-guy fiction as (a) detective, the major form, invented by Dashiell Hammett in the late 1920’s, (b) spy, and (c) the Western movie genre. Tough-guy detective fiction is my least favorite form, largely because the genre is generally grubby and gritty, and more so because it has become corrupted by the cynicism and implicit psychobabble of Raymond Chandler and his numerous followers, including Ross McDonald and his California variant (the Lew Archer series). The sort of tough-guy fiction I am interested in is the defender-of-justice theme, in which a tough, smart, decisive, laconic hero defends right and justice against villainy and evil. In the Western genre, this theme was dominant all during the movies of the 1930’s and 40’s, all the marvelous films featuring the Coopers and the Waynes. On a juvenile level there was the Lone Ranger motif. In tough-guy detective or tough-guy urban movies, the leaders have of course been Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry series and Charles Bronson in the Death Wish vengeance movies.

Because of the great importance of its theme as against the grubby minutiae of detective fiction (e.g. atomic secrets as against some Mafia rub-out), spy fiction is inherently exciting, even when it is not tough-guy. Indeed, there are differences of only nuance and degree between non-tough-guy spy novels, such as those of the Pre-World War II originals: John Buchan and Eric Ambler, or the faster-paced post-war Helen MacInnes, and the modern tough-guy genre (e.g. Ian Fleming, Donald Hamilton or Robert Ludlum.) The poisonous equivalent of the Chandlers and the Ross McDonalds is the grubby, cynical both (or all)-sides-are-bad guy novels, exemplified by Graham Green, (in Confidential Agent) in the 1930’s, and John LeCarre in the modern epoch. The main problem with the Greene-LeCarre works is that they become deadly boring, since if the spies on all sides are bored time-servers and they don’t care about the outcome of the plot, why in hell should we? Sometimes, as in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, LeCarre can rise to the level of good spy fiction, but usually there is not much to hope for.

The question now is: if the hero is to be a tough, smart defender of justice, where do women fit into this heroic picture? Usually, they don’t, and it is easy to see why. It simply will not do to have a tough hero slugging it out with bad guys, only to return at night to a home-cooked meal by the Little Woman. That’s why in Western movies, from the Lone Ranger to Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, the hero is a rover, moving mythically onward across the plains, with women dropping out altogether. Either women play no role whatever in the life of the tough-guy hero, or he screws them with abandon, as in most tough-guy spy fiction (e.g. Ian Fleming’s James Bond). But marriage won’t do, and so Bond’s new bride gets killed with lightning speed, or a John Wayne or another Western hero sets out to avenge the murder of his wife and children at the very beginning of the movie.

Of course, in the corrupt versions of the spy genre, women play a perverse role. It is typical of the elderly, tired, filled with self-disgust, George Smiley (LeCarre) that he is married, but that he is a brooding cuckold. In non-tough-guy detective fiction, such as in Gregory McDonald’s Inspector Flynn, he can of course have a sprawling family at home; McDonald’s other hero, Fletch, is a wise-cracking hippie, so he can have a long-term, if wise-cracking relationship. In a few fascinating cases, authors get around the female problem by having the protagonist be a heroine. A non-tough-guy spy heroine, with a new lover in each book, is featured in the recent and excellent series by Evelyn Anthony. The only tough-guy heroines I can think of are in two marvelous series: Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels, in which Modesty is a James-Bond-type heroine; and Walter Wager’s Blue trilogy, featuring a smart, tough-guy, jazz-loving heroine. Where do men fit in? Essentially it’s James Bond-in-reverse, but with more sentiment. Wager’s tough-guy heroine, who sleeps with one new man per book, is mourning her long-dead lost love. O’Donnell solves the problem in a fascinating way: Modesty Blaise has a series of nice-guy, but confused and a bit wimpy lovers (again, one per book—in contrast with several for Bond et al.) But at the same time she has a constant male disciple, boon companion and assistant, tough, heroic Willie Garvin. Modesty and Willie love each other dearly, magnificently, and romantically, but there is never, ever any sex between them, since this would spoil Willie’s pedestal image of someone who is essentially his mentor and superior. (If you are worried about Willie’s sex life, don’t because he has a series of lovers too.)

Of course, one way to bring in females, as is done in TV-detective series (e.g. Mannix, Perry Mason), is to have a loyal female aide and assistant. But in the nature of things, the focus is on the male hero, and furthermore there is never anything between him and his rather shadowy aid.

In the solid, prolific Sam Durell series (by Edward S. Aarons, and lately by Will Aarons), the CIA agent-hero has a true love and fellow agent, Dierdre Padgett, but either they quarrel or she appears in only a few books, in some of which Sam rescues Deirdre from the bad guys.

But the most interesting, bittersweet, way of tackling the female problem in tough-guy fiction is to have a tough-guy female (often a fellow CIA or whatever agent) romantically attached to the hero, but the female is proverbially not tough enough, and so has to be discarded at the end of the book. The locus classicus of this theme is the marvelous Matt Helm series, by Donald Hamilton (please: forget the execrable Dean Martin movies). Especially in the first seven or eight of the twenty-book series so far, Helm finds a succession of worthy, tough-guy heroines, but they always buckle at the last, whining that Matt is just too darn tough. Matt is indeed the toughest of them all; toughness, by the way, is not to be confused with drawn-out violence and gore, as in so many current horror and science-fiction movies. Toughness is a matter of expertise and attitude of spirit, essential to the genuine hero. For example, a typical plot: Matt is assigned to kill a bad guy; he has a female assistant who also understands why the bad guy is bad and must be killed post-haste. But, at the climax, the female turns wimpy; Matt, for example, shoots him in the back, instead of fulfilling the heroine’s romantic notion of a “fair” duel. Another whiner and loser in Matt’s quest for a mate and help meet as tough as himself. (There is a key lesson which we all have learned, by the way, from Hamilton/Helm: if a bad guy is holding a gun either on yourself or on another good guy, shoot him right away and shoot to kill. None of this nonsense about “drop your gun or I’ll shoot,” or shooting him in the hand, a la the Lone Ranger: no one can shoot that accurately with any certainty. All else is namby-pamby liberalism.)

After the first eight or so Helm novels, there was a dropping off of some of the excitement of the earlier works, and in ringing the changes on the female-toughness theme. In his last novels, however, Hamilton is back in full-stride. Number 19, The Revengers, is a rather sweet work, a retrospective, in which Helms links up with several of his old girl friends in turn, each whom get rubbed out until he seems to have found his true love at last at the end of the novel. In Number 20, his most recent work (The Annihilators), however, she is killed at the beginning of the novel, and Matt is off in the pursuit of vengeance.

The woman as not-tough-enough theme appears also in Death Wish II, where Bronson, in love with a liberal lawyer, after wiping out the rapist and killers of his daughter and housekeeper, is abandoned by this namby-pamby female for being too tough. In Sudden Impact, we have an interesting twist: the great Inspector Harry Callahan (“Dirty Harry”) finds that the female lead has been murdering a series of people, but that she has done it in heroic vengeance against those who raped her and her young sister years ago. At the end, cleaving to the higher law of justice, Dirty Harry lets her go and walks off into the Bay Area night.

Sometimes, rarely, the untough female can find redemption by becoming tough. The major theme of the classic Western High Noon was the fact that Sheriff Gary Cooper’s young bride, Grace Kelly, infected by Quaker pacifism, bitterly opposed Cooper’s coming shootout with the bad guys. To the point of leaving him. But Kelly comes through in the end by overcoming her pacifism and killing one of the bad guys to save Coop’s life.

The female lead can, of course, be very tough, but in a sense too tough; that is, she can turn out to be the major villain herself. In that case, of course, the tough-guy hero, pursuing right and justice to the very end, overcomes his emotions and gives her the works. In that superb movie The Maltese Falcon, Bogart gives the delectable Mary Astor the business by turning her into the cops. And in the first, blockbuster novel of the toughest-guy detective (as opposed to spy) of them all, Mike Hammer (Mickey Spillane) ends I, the Jury by shooting his true-turned-false love in the belly.

Well gee, I might hear it asked, can’t the female problem be resolved by having two equal partners, male and female, slugging it out together for right and justice? Ideologically si, dramatically no. I can’t see it working in the tough-guy genre. There were no movies more delightful than the Nick and Nora Charles Thin Man series (with William Powell and Myrna Loy), but these were films of frothy and high-style wit rather than tough-guy action. The closest this parity came to working was the great The Avengers TV series (during the Diana Rigg period), when Mrs. Emma Peel (Rigg) and Steed (Patrick Macnee) swatted the bad guys on behalf of British intelligence. But there Diana Rigg really outshone Macnee to take the central role, and the series was so swathed in outre effects and high-style elegance that one may question its “tough-guy” credentials.

The Miss America Caper

The fascinating thing about the Vanessa Williams — Miss America caper — apart from the fact, of course, that S-E-X is involved — is that there are so many sides to the issue. There are the legal sides involved: of Ms. Williams, of the Miss America Pageant, and of Penthouse Magazine, and many more moral sides, including the above three, the left-feminist position of Susan Brownmiller, and many others.

Let us say, in the first place, that the least tenable position is that of La Williams herself. All the bilge about being “only 21” (what happened to the slogan, old enough to vote, and fight, at 18?), it happening months ago before she was mature, that she didn’t know what she was doing, what she was signing, and all the rest! Pah! She clearly broke her contractual arrangement with the Pageant, and, therefore, precisely got her comeuppance. And all that guff she slung around about being a “role model” for her race!

Giving Ms. Williams a tough race for last place in these moral sweepstakes is Susan Brownmiller and the Left Feminist movement. Left Feminism, which is a sort of Through-the-Looking-Glass reversion to Ultra-Right Puritanism, claims that Ms. Williams was an innocent victim of male-capitalist exploitation, but that the Pageant, though evil itself for its own quasi-pornography, was right in demanding that she relinquish the crown because of the contractual problem. But, to Ms. Brownmiller, the worst villains of the piece were Bob Guccione and Penthouse, who set out deliberately to oppress and destroy Ms. Williams, because oppression and destruction of females is precisely what pornography is all about.

The pornography as destruction and as “violence against women” argument is pure bilge. First, of course, the women and men who participate in pornography are doing so voluntarily, and usually with enthusiasm, considerin the money involved. Secondly, only a small proportion of porno involves violence (unless, of course, as I suspect left-feminism does, one equates all heterosex with violence by definition!), and probably most of that involves female violence against men! How does the porno-as-violence-against-women theme apply in those cases?and how about male homosexual porn? Where is the violence-against-women there? Unfortunately, Brownmiller and other WAPs (Women Against Pornography) are having some success in having porno outlawed on this absurd “violation of civil rights of women” motif.

On the other hand, it is hard to take seriously the smarmy moral justifications of Robert Guccione and his aide, Ms. Keeton: that they are bringing liberation to all women, and specifically helping and advancing the career of Ms. Williams. Presumably, Ms. Williams has no need for such “help” done very much against her wishes. We can also be spared all the claptrap about Guccione’s “moral obligation to the Penthouse readers ‘right to know’.” Let’s clear the air by getting one thing straight: Penthouse published the famous pictures of Ms. Williams, not to further some long-standing campaign to crush American womanhood, nor to liberate it; neither did it give a damn about its “moral obligation” to its readers. Penthouse published those pictures to make big bucks, and there is nothing particularly wrong with that. Penthouse served the consumers in order to make heavy profits, and, while this “marketplace morality” may not be heroic morality, it should be sufficient to carry the day. And that, plus the voluntary participation in both the pictures and in signing the consent form by Ms. Williams, is enough to say that, in the outcome of this case, justice triumphed. Guccione had the perfect right to publish the pictures and to sell the issue, and the Miss America Pageant had both the right and the obligation to get the crown off Ms. Williams’ head.

As for the Miss America pageant itself, it is shlock but it is charming shlock, and I hope it stays around a long time. It is equally idiotic to say that it constitutes “pornography,” or that it ennobles American Womanhood. Its main problem is neither of these; its problem is that it has gotten increasingly dull, probably from taking itself too seriously. First of all, they should loss out the “talent” section, which has grown like Topsy, and inflicts upon the viewers what seem like hours of terrible singing or screeching violin playing. Secondly, the tone has gotten so High in recent years as to become almost unbearable. It was bad enough when the girls all announced their career goals to be a good wife, mother, an owner of a vine-covered cottage. It is much worse nowadays, when every one of them outlines her scholarly future with pinpoint precision: “I am going to be a Master of Communication Arts, and become associate editor of a magazine for design.” Please, Miss America Pageant! Cut out the so-called talent, and the pronouncements for World Brotherhood, and the forest of prospective Master’s degrees! Get back to basics!

Campaign Notes

What’s wrong with the American masses? Since when, when in blazes, did they ever vote for a President because he was a “nice guy?” Nobody in his right mind, even the man’s most fervent admirers, ever thought Harry Truman a “nice guy.” Not “give ’em hell, Harry.” Surely no one ever thought Nixon a nice guy. Roosevelt had charisma and was beloved, but nobody considered him “nice.” The only authentic nice guy, Gerry Ford, was defeated, for Chrissake. Ike? Thought a nice guy, sure, but he was elected, dammit, for his alleged accomplishments, like winning World War II. What has the Great Cretin ever accomplished, except making a slew of bad movies? So what is it with this guy?

Optimism? OK, but look at Hubert Humphrey, who proclaimed himself the champion of the “politics of joy,” who was grinning like an ape all the time. He was defeated too. So go figure it. Has the country become some sort of Randian nightmare?

* * *

There was a brief moment of joy in this campaign, though it disappeared all too quickly. The wonder of seeing the Cretin exposed at long last, stumbling and fumbling his way through the first Great Debate, the Minnesota Whiner nailing him to the wall, smiling all the while. God bless Rich Jaroslavsky of the Wall Street Journal, the fearless reporter who, the day after the first debate, thought the unthinkable and said the unsayable. It was euphemistically called the “age factor.” Call it rather the Cretin Factor.

For a few days, the open conspiracy parted, and the media finally let the public in on the hidden truth, the truth that the Great Communicator is really a Great Cretin when he doesn’t have a script placed in front of him. So for a while there was hope of a real contest, but then they propped him up, and probably put him to sleep for 24 hours before the Event. They scheduled it early in the evening so it wasn’t past his bedtime, and then, though the Cretin stumbled and made little sense, he seemed OK and wasn’t visibly addled, and that was enough, God Bless America and America’s Cretin Candidate. The rest is history.

* * *

So let’s join the Great Cretin in his boundless Optimism, and look at the bright side of this most dismal presidential campaign in modern times. My beloved grandma used to say that “everything works out for the best,” and let’s try to approach the election in that spirit and list the Good Things about this election that we can be Thankful for:

1. Never, ever again will we have to see or listen to the Minnesota Whiner. (Some comic said the other day that he just had a terrible nightmare: that both Reagan and Mondale won the election!) Exit Fritz the Pits.

2. Never, ever again will a Presidential candidate make the only clear statement of his campaign (or of either campaign this year): “I will raise your taxes.” If any wise guy in the Mondale camp thought this a savvy political ploy, one hopes that this election will put that myth to rest.

3. Maybe the Democracy will no longer pander quite so starkly and so wimpily to the special interests, the unions, the minorities et al. Certainly the allegedly mighty power of NOW and the Sisterhood of left-feminism turns out to be mainly hot air.

4. It is too much to expect that La Ferraro/Zaccaro will fade away, but at least the golden glow is considerably tarnished, now that the sainted immigrant, etc. family seems not at all so saintly.

5. Maybe, just maybe, the Democracy will realize that trying to sound as hawkish as Ronnie, and trying to compete in flag-waving with America’s Party, ain’t gonna work. So perhaps, at the next Democrat Convention we will not have to watch a sea of waving American flags, punctuated by everyone sobbing and hugging each other because Ferraro/Zaccaro achieved the golden breakthrough — and got clobbered.

6. Maybe, too, the Democracy will wise up, and realize that a party consisting of blacks, Jews, Hispanics, elderly union members, and people making under $5000 a year, is not going to win. Hey, fellows, you gotta get some white males, some WASPS and Catholics, too. Can this election be called the Revolt of the WASPS?

So I conclude: maybe, just maybe, the American people aren’t so dumb after all. After all, if you were a yokel from Boonville, USA, and all you knew about these two candidates is that one guy smiles a lot, and talks about American Standing Tall, while the other guy spends his time whining about the “poor and the elderly” and promising his darndest to raise your taxes, who would you vote for?

A Bi-Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Murray N. Rothbard, Editor

A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER Vol. XVIII, No. 8–12

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER, 1984

Box 341. Madison Square Station, New York, New York 10010

US-ISSN0047-4517

The State of the Movement: The Implosion

The end of a Presidential election year is a good time to take stock, to ask ourselves how our movement is going, and therefore how it may be shaping up for the future. All right: so how goes our movement? The quick answer is, not very well. For the last four years, the movement has been suffering through a severe contraction, reaching during 1983 and 1984 the status of what wordsmith Sam Konkin has called an “implosion.” The recent implosion, however, is no reason for despair. No ideological revolution proceeds on a continuous straight line from birth to triumphant victory. Every such revolution proceeds in a zig-zag manner. The modern libertarian movement took off into explosive growth in 1969-70, and accelerated that growth during the 1970’s. During the 1980’s we have been in a zag period. The zag period can only bring despair to those who unrealistically expected Quick Victory, or who were lured by honeyed promises of such Victory to plunge into activity with short-run fervor, only to burn out in disillusion when the triumph never came. We must understand that liberty is a lifetime commitment, and not a quick ticket to fortune and glory. To the extent that the summer soldiers and the sunshine libertarians have left the fold, the movement is better off for this recession, better off to remain with “cadre” (i.e. knowledgeable activists) who are inured to temporary reverses and who can rise above the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

1. Why the Implosion?

Before surveying the terrain in detail, let us summarize the reasons for this movement recession. They can be summed up as three-fold: the change in the Zeitgeist, the Reagan phenomenon, and the vagaries of the Kochtopus. The first and second causes are, of course, interrelated. The 70’s were a decade of endemic discontent with the system and with the U.S. government. Being a time of discontent, it was a decade of searching, of passionate interest in ideology and in exploring alternatives to the status quo. Hence the enormous explosion of interest in libertarianism, and therefore of growth in the movement and in the fledgling Libertarian Party. The 1980’s, however, has marked a return to the smugness, the contentment with “America,” that had characterized the 1950’s and the Eisenhower Era. On the campus, there is virtually zero political activity, and equally zero interest in ideology of any sort. As in the 1950’s, careerism is back with a vengeance.

An anecdote will illustrate the ideological and political apathy these days on the campus, as well as everywhere else. I’ve been spending this year teaching in Sin City, Las Vegas. When asked by a national LP leader what activity there was on our campus during the 1984 campaign, I replied that there was good news and bad news. The bad news is that there was no LP or Bergland activity whatsoever. The good news is that there was no activity for the Democrats or Republicans either.

The Reagan re-election campaign exemplifies this new smugness and lack of interest in ideology. As we have detailed in the Lib. Forum, the entire campaign, and particularly the Reagan effort, was the most odious Presidential campaign in American history. There was not even a feeble attempt to discuss ideology or issues. The all too successful nub of the Reagan campaign was, like Carl Lewis at the equally repugnant and flag-waving Olympics, to wrap himself in the American flag, to make himself “America’s candidate” running on the ticket of “America’s party,” nominated in the home of “America’s (football) team.” The Republicans successfully carried out the strategy detailed in the June, 1984 memorandum of Richard Darman, a leading White House aide: “Paint RR he wrote,” as the personification of all that is right with, or heroized by, America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America’s idealized image of itself — where a vote against Reagan is, in some subliminal sense, a vote against a mythic ‘AMERICA.’” (Italics Darman’s. Newsweek, Election Extra, Nov.-Dec. 1984, p. 88).

The 1970’s was an era of explosive growth in the libertarian movement and Party because everything came together in 1973–75 to spread a healthy disgust among the American people for the U.S. government. First, during those years came the big inflationary recession, the first sign that inflation was now permanent in American life, even in the midst of a deep recession. As a result came the breakup of the Keynesian consensus, and the search for alternatives among economists, as well as the general public. Something had gone radically wrong after four decades of arrogant fine-tuning by statist economists. Second, the United States, during this same period, suffered its first losing war, a retribution for its unjust imperial intervention and mass murder in Vietnam. The American public was as fed up with foreign intervention as it was with inflation. The third mighty blow to the American State came, once again, during the same crucial 1973–75 period: the glorious bringing down of the mighty institution of the Presidency over the crookeries and tyranny of Watergate.

Those three events — inflationary recession, Vietnam, and Watergate — happening coincidentally at the same time, exerted a synergistic effect in spreading massive disillusionment in the American State. Surely it can be no accident that this was precisely the beginning of enormous growth in the modern libertarian movement. Americans got increasingly repelled at high taxes, saw that marijuana laws were counter-productive, and became far more concerned with civil liberties after seeing the peccadilloes committed by the FBI and CIA during Watergate. A healthy distrust of politicians spread throughout the land. Increasing interest in libertarianism came as the public grew intrigued with a movement dedicated to getting Big Government “off our backs.”

Things began to sour during the last two years of the Carter Administration, even while, on the surface, libertarian sentiment escalated among the American public, and the Movement grew apace. The powerful, war-mongering forces of neo-conservatism began to dominate foreign policy opinion in the Democrat Party, symbolized by the dovish Cyrus Vance losing out in the Carter Administration power struggle to the hawk Brzezinski. The desperate Russian attempt to keep Afghanistan in its sphere of influence proved to be the spark that reignited anti-Soviet and pro-foreign intervention hysteria in the Democrat Party and in the country as a whole, leading to Carter’s ill-advised grain embargo and his scuttling of the 1980 Olympics. Then, the Iranian hostage case inspired an apparently permanent resurgence of jingoist hysteria, paving the way for Carter’s collapse and the Reagan victory. Finally, Carter’s restoration of draft registration awakened little furor, and thereby helped to stimulate a rollback of civil liberties during the Reagan Administration.

Finally, it was in the late 1970’s that the Moral Majority grew into a mighty force, and formed a powerful element in the Reagan majority. Theocracy was now a vital part of the conservative movement as it had not been during the entire post-World War II period.

The stage was set for the Reagan victory, which was able to co-opt much of the anti-Big Government, pro-free market sentiment, and cement it for the Republican Party. Reagan’s masterful manipulation of rhetoric was enough for what Lawrence Dennis perceptively called the “dumbright;” to keep the fervent support of the dumbright masses, it was not actually necessary to implement that rhetoric in action. Pure verbiage was enough.

The advent of the Reagan Administration intensified enormously the malign underbelly of the later Carter years. The famous Reagan personality, that has inspired an outpouring of unconditional love and affection from everyone in America except the tiny staff of the Libertarian Forum, did the rest. In trying to explain the unanimous enthusiasm for the Great Cretin. Chicago columnist Mike Royko speculated that Reagan delivers the “snappiest salute to the Marines that he had ever seen,” even including an authentic general, Ike Eisenhower. The consequence is that Reagan has managed to bring with him an Endless Summer orgy of flag-waving and jingoism, has given even greater life to the theocrats of the Moral Majority, and has managed to convince the quasi-libertarians among the masses that he has actually rolled back Big Government, all failures being successfully loaded onto the hapless Democrat Party.

As we wrote in our early analysis, “Movement Depression” (Lib. Forum, April 1983), Republican Administrations always bring a financial setback to the Movement, since many movement-inclined businessmen immediately conclude: “Why educate? We’ve already won.” This phenomenon, which set back the movement in the Eisenhower Administration and in the early Nixon years, has been particularly virulent under Reagan, since Reagan’s right-wing rhetoric has intensified the misconception that Victory has already arrived. We also wrote that the Reagan recession of 1981-83 set back financial support for the movement. Unfortunately, the 1983-84 boom does not seem to have worked the other way, to revive financial sources for liberty. Partly this is because many of the libertarian business supporters hailed from the old smokestack industries of the Middle West which have never recovered and are in secular decline.

But there is more to the debacle. For there has been a deep ideological shift among many of our business and wealthy individual and foundation patrons. Many of the quasi-individualist Old Right supporters have died off, and have been replaced by trendy young neo-conservatives, and hence the flow of funds has changed accordingly. In contrast to libertarians, neo-cons are nothing if not Respectable: Respectably anti-Communist and war-mongering, respectably in favor of the welfare state (if more efficient and a bit tighter), respectably in favor of theocratic and anti-“subversive” censorship, and oh so respectably in favor of the Beloved Little “Democracy” in the Middle East. The neo-cons are respectable because at every step of the way in the careers of this, handful of ideologues beginning in the early 1940’s, they have been in the mainstream of respectable opinion: Trotskyites at the beginning, then pro-war Social Democrats, then liberals, then Humphrey Democrats, then centrists, then Reaganite conservatives. In the entire lives of these shrewd and opportunistic careerists, not once have they gone one millimeter beyond respectable opinion, while at each step of the way loudly wrapping themselves in the mantle of being in a heroic “minority.” Few in number but ensconced in key positions in academia and in the media, cunning and effective organizers who honed their skills in the Marxist sects of old, the neo-conservatives have been able to bulldoze dumbright wealthy businessmen into turning their funds and their very values over to neo-con control. It is not only the Crane Machine but virtually the entire movement of conservative and quasi-libertarian supporters who have sacrificed principle for respectability and alleged pragmatism. It should always be remembered that neo-conservatives are in no sense libertarians; indeed they are our polar opposite. What they are, as they themselves often proclaim, are Humphrey Democrats, i.e., they are once and present and future liberals. Or, as we say in New York, they are “liberals who have just been mugged.” That is, they are liberals reacting in permanent hysteria against all the mixed values and movements of the New Left: i.e., civil rights (affirmative action); anti-war and anti-draft sentiment; hostility to the public school system; and “liberation” for every allegedly “oppressed” group under the sun. For neo-cons, these obsolete battles of the late 60’s are overlaid on top of their previous permanent trauma: the anti-vs. pro-Communist battles at the origin of the Cold War in the late 1940’s. It is only these gangs of New York liberals for example who can still wax passionate over such long-dead and unimportant questions as the Rosenberg Case.

2. The Anatomy of the Implosion

We have talked about the causes of the implosion; it is time to detail the grisly anatomy of the implosion itself. For it is precisely one of the hallmarks of this massive implosion that there are no longer any institutions or organs of opinion to convey news and analysis of what is going on to movement members. For much of the implosion occurred in our newsletters and magazines, indispensable institutions of cementing the libertarian movement, and conveying news and information as well as analyses to movement members. How do you keep the movement from fragmenting if there are no means of regular communication? Note the following deaths of magazines and newsletters in the last two years. (Some of these defunct periodicals were hardly among my favorites, but all together their loss is a devastating blow to the movement.)

Inquiry

frontlines

Free Texas

Caliber

Competition, along with its organization, the effective and principled Council for a Competitive Economy (for more, see below).

Libertarian Vanguard (if not dead, moribund, along with its organization, the Radical Caucus of the LP),

The Volutaryist (if not dead, moribund).

Various Konkin magazines

Libertarian Review

Update

Literature of Liberty

Libertarian institutions have either collapsed, greatly contracted, or abandoned principle in a generally unsuccessful attempt to corral more support and more funding (known in the trade as focussing on “outreach” — and to hell with inreach, i.e. movement activity). Thus, our premier organ of opinion, Reason, not only remains as our sole outreach magazine now that Inquiry is dead. It has also become much softer core and much less movement-oriented, even aside from the killing of the movement newsletter, frontlines. It has gotten so soft-core, and so outreachy (to say nothing of even more boring), that it is now scarcely discernible as being libertarian at all.

The various think-tanks in our movement are limping badly, most of their “activities” (when they are not being sellouty) confined to fund-raising of one form or another. (And what must we call an organization in which fund-raising has become an end rather than a means?) One leading exception to this ghastly trend is David Theroux’s Pacific Institute, which has managed to publish a number of reasonably hard-core, well-edited and widely distributed books. But, on the other hand, the Institute for Humane Studies has had to shut down its once substantial book-sponsoring and publishing program, and has sold off its inventory of books. And it has had to kill its scholarly journal, Literature of Liberty.

One example of the implosion that I am particularly familiar with is the almost total collapse of the libertarian movement in New York City. The Libertarian Party (a topic I will deal with in a future issue) has long been very weak in New York City, and now some of its leaders, after a lengthy string of declines in votes and members, are actually talking of not running a mayoralty candidate at all in 1985 (Particularly ironic since the first major race in the nation was an excellent run by Fran Youngstein for Mayor of New York City in 1973!) But more dramatic has been the collapse of the rest of the New York movement. The Laissez-Faire Bookstore, which for a decade has been the social center of the New York movement, is expanding to larger quarters, but it will no longer be a store-front bookstore. Dyarine Petersen’s Libertarian Supper Club, once meeting monthly in Manhattan, now hardly meets at all. And the Center for Libertarian Studies has moved out of New York to the more cordial and supportive clime of the San Francisco Bay Area. (New address for the CLS: P.O. Box 4091, Burlingame, CA 94011.)

3. Big Changes in the Kochtopus

We have mentioned as the three basic reasons for the big zag in the movement in the last few years: the Zeitgeist, the Reagan phenomenon, and the vagaries of the Kochtopus. In our “Movement Depression” article we have already described what might be called the “Kochcycle,” the “Austrian business cycle” that the Koch family engendered in our movement by pouring in millions within a few years (largely 1977–80), followed by a severe contraction of funding in the years ever since. Partly as a result of that contraction and of the general implosion in the movement, there have been no news organs to inform the movement about the enormous and highly significant changes that have taken place within the Kochtopus in the last year or two.

Until this moment, news of these vast changes in the Kochtopus has been largely confined to excited phone conversations among friends. It is high time that the movement as a whole found out what was going on. Once again, the Libertarian Forum, mindful of its responsibilities to liberty, to History, and to the “Movement’s Right to Know,” steps forward to supply this vital gap in movement knowledge.

But first: probably only our oldest and most faithful readers have any idea of what the “Kochtopus” is (named, once again, by Sam Konkin, who has contributed such deathless words as “minarchist” and “Partyarchy” to the libertarian vocabulary). The Kochtopus used to include the Crane Machine (CM) as the clique of “professionals” that once ruled the Libertarian Party and was vanquished at the mighty and titanic PresCon at New York City in September 1983 (For the full story of the PresCon, told in loving and exuberant detail, see “Total Victory: How Sweet It Is!” in our September-October 1983 issue.) Since that PresCon the CM has left the Libertarian Party. But the CM, while the most visible and dangerous tentacle of the Kochtopus, by no means constitutes its entire body, and the time has come to focus on the “organism” and the enormous changes that have been recently wrought within it.

4. Origins of the Kochtopus: the Founding of Cato

The Kochtopus began when Charles G. Koch, young multimillionaire scion of the Wichita-based Koch oil empire, was converted from a passive LeFevrian view of libertarian strategy (he had been converted as a youth to libertarianism by LeFevre) to an activist stance. This latter transformation was largely effected by Ed Crane, on the strength of Crane’s running of the MacBride presidential campaign in 1976. I myself had been urging Charles (C.K.) to adopt a more activist strategy, so that perhaps I might gain some of the responsibility for this second conversion.

Before then, C.K.’s ideological activities had been minimal and very low-key, and were run by his Wichita-based assistant and servitor, one George Pearson. After the death of F.A. (“Baldy”) Harper in 1973, Koch became President of Harper’s scholarly Institute for Humane Studies, and he also became involved, with Pearson as his satrap, in sponsoring various programs and conferences promoting Austrian, or Misesian, economics.

The Kochian burst into ideological, and even political, activism at the end of 1976 launched the “Kochtopus.” The focus of this new activism was the San Francisco-based Cato Institute, headed by Crane, which also became the nucleus for Crane’s continuing domination of the Libertarian Party. (Crane had been, and for a while continued to be, national chairman of the LP, and managed to keep dominating the LP until the titanic struggle at the national convention at Denver in 1981.) Cato’s initial focus was twofold and intellectual: the creation of the glossy, intelligent semi-monthly Inquiry magazine, which would win an audience of intellectuals and academics to an appreciation of libertarianism; and the forging of a university cadre of libertarian faculty and students. The obvious location for this kind of ideological journal-and-think-tank was New York City; but Crane, in those days dedicated to San Francisco, insisted on locating there. “Cato” was named, at my suggestion, after the Roman opponent of Caesar who had inspired a corps of libertarians in Britain and America in the eighteenth century, and whose ideology in turn inspired much of the American revolution. The board of Cato had, and still has, a low-key inner cadre of stockholders possessing the ultimate legal power to fire and reconstitute the governing board of directors. The original stockholders were the three founders of Cato and carriers of the Cato vision: C.K., George Pearson, and myself.

What was this guiding vision of the new Cato Institute, and of other institutions that were rapidly created, during 1977, to form the massive new Kochtopus? The idea was that C.K. would (as he indeed did) pour in millions into creating institutions that would find and gather the best and the brightest of the libertarian movement, mobilized by the supposed organizing ability of Eddie Crane. The object was to promote a consistent ideology of hard-core and uncompromising radical libertarianism, of which Misesianism was the economic arm. For a movement that had long languished in abject poverty, this was a dazzling vision indeed, and the first year or so was a glorious time for those of us caught up in the excitement of it all. Inquiry was founded — a great magazine considering its relatively meager resources and shoddy publishing management, and some excellent editors passed through its ranks: notably Bill Evers, scholar, journalist, and early top Crane Machiner, who put his own personal stamp on Inquiry as editor-in-chief that lasted remarkably for years after his ouster; Professor Ralph Raico, who lasted from beginning to end and managed to give to Inquiry the finest back-of-the-book section in the country; and Professor Ronald Hamowy, thrown willy-nilly into the task of being Evers’s successor, who did a splendid job under trying circumstances.

To “Cato proper,” to the academic cadre section, came David Theroux, fresh out of University of Chicago’s MBA program; his assistant Robert Formaini, out of University of Virginia graduate economics; and Leonard P. Liggio as editor of Cato’s new scholarly journal, Literature of Liberty.

This was the group housed at the posh quarters of Cato on Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Just down the block, another very different, and culturally lumpen-proletarian, group began to form in an old warehouse run by Crane but not officially connected with Cato. In this “warehouse” was placed our raffish brethren. The movement magazine, Libertarian Review, had been purchased from its founder Bob Kephart by C.K., with Roy A. (“Roychick”) Childs as editor inherited from the Kephart era. It soon became clear to Crane and the others that, despite his potential talents, Roychick as editor and meeter-of-deadlines was in dire need of supervision (In current educationist jargon, Childs might be called the prototype of a PINS, a person-in-need-of-supervision.) And so Childs and L.R. were brought from New York to the warehouse down the block on Montgomery Street. Housed with him in this barracks-like office was the newly created Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS), a then radical libertarian group pungently termed by a perceptive critic a “general staff in search of an army.” Young Milton Mueller, an unemployed film editor out of Chicago, was plucked from the Windy City, made head of this mighty army of “students,” and blessed, at least in the heady first year, with an enormous budget of $1 million. The LP of San Francisco also found rental quarters in the warehouse, and this entire bloated and overpaid crew, festering together in a bizarre stew, pushed each other into increasingly weird cultural and ideological positions. Jeff Riggenbach was also brought up from Los Angeles to take charge of Cato’s mighty radio propaganda effort, now still plodding its way through the unheeding airwaves.

In the heady excitement of the first months, it was all too easy for us to overlook the pitfalls that this vision of the Best and the Brightest would inevitably stumble into. Overall, there were two major flaws which would all too soon take over and bring the entire vision down: (1) A monopoly of any movement lacks the essential feedback and checks-and-balances that competition always brings; for what happens if the top leader or leaders make mistakes, fall prey to temptation to give up or alter their principles, or, in some way, sell out? The answer is that the entire movement can well be destroyed on the rock of such errors, and we must remember that errors by any person or group are inevitable. (2) Almost comparably to government action, throwing lots of money at a problem doesn’t always solve it. C.K. threw enormous amounts of money too fast at people (many of whom turned out to be turkeys) who scarcely deserved it. And what happens when the inevitable disillusionment sets in?

Add to these systemic problems the fact that this collection of the Best, the Brightest, and the Kookiest was a gathering of what is known euphemistically as “strong personalities.” With the exception of Liggio, there was not one of us who would rank in the top deciles of any “Mr. Nice Guy” contest. And so clashes of temperament were not only inevitable, they came thick and fast. But certainly the effort was doomed from the start by the fact that the Organizer, Big Eddie Crane, couldn’t organize or manage his way out of a paper bag, and in addition was by far the most abrasive of us all.

But in the first months or years the Kochtopus expanded and seemed to flourish. Cato Summer Seminars were founded to educate and recruit likely new people to the Best and Brightest ranks, and out of the first of them, at Wake Forest University in the summer of 1977, came two who would become leading Kochtopusians: Jule Herbert, a young Alabama lawyer, and Sheldon Richman, a scholarly-inclined journalist from Wilmington, Delaware. Herbert was soon set up in Washington as head of the National Taxpayers Legal Fund (NTLF), a spinoff of Jim Davidson’s National Taxpayers Union. In addition, Richard (“Rich”) Wilcke, who had founded an institute for free-market agriculture, was taken off that track and brought to Washington to head up the Council for Competitive Economy (CCE), designed as a purist group to educate and lobby for genuine free competition, and to express candid opposition to all government privileges and subsidies to business.

5. The Early Kochtopusion Power Structure

Before the advent of Crane and Cato, the “power structure” of C. K.’s ideological activities was simplicity itself. There was C. K., The Donor, and his faithful aide, Pearson, who ran, supervised, and helped fund Austrian and other scholarly activities. Now, suddenly, there was deep change. Now there were two co-equal viceroys reporting to Koch: Pearson, still in charge of scholarship, and Crane, now in charge of activism. (The one exception was Wilcke, who was independent, and presumably continued to report to Pearson or to Koch himself). There undoubtedly was and still is no love lost between Crane and Pearson. The power relationships between them were complex. On the one hand, Crane was the rising star, the carrier of the glamorous new vision, and he commanded an enormously greater Kochtopusian budget than did Pearson. And, in the course of the new dispensation, Pearson found himself also moving out of Le Fevrianism and into LP activism, at least on the Kansas level. But although the advantage seemed clearly with Crane, Pearson had one lasting and decisive edge: namely, he was and still is based at Mother Wichita, a direct employee of Koch Industries as well as of various Kochian foundations (including Koch-name foundations as well as the Foundation for the Advancement of Studies in Liberty (FASIL)).

6. 1979: The Paradigm Shift

Around the spring of 1979, a radical, systemic paradigm shift occurred throughout the entire Kochtopus, a shift that has accelerated and intensified to this day. As in the case of most such shifts within bureaucratic empires, the transformation occurred unheralded and unannounced, yet it was no less profound for all that. Most libertarians are all two familiar with the drastic change in outlook, beginning in early 1979, of the Crane Machine within the Libertarian Party. What they do not realize — largely because no one has ever informed them — is that the same drastic change has occurred in all layers of the Kochtopus, from Cato proper through the rest of the ranks, including scholarship in Austrian economics. And the thrust everywhere is precisely the same: abandonment of principle, from radical libertarianism all the way to Misesian economics. In short, a cataclysmic metamorphosis from an organization pressing for hard-core principle, to a mealy-mouthed, soft-core yearning for Establishmenty respectability.

Being in the middle of this monstrous switch was extremely unpleasant, not the least because none of us in the unregenerate Old Guard who cleaved to principle could understand what in hell was going on, or precisely who was responsible. Looking back on it, however, and weighing the entire Kochtopusian switch in perspective, it is possible to piece together this horror and to sum up its broad features.

The key to the puzzle (and countless are the man-hours that were wasted at the old San Francisco Cato trying to solve it) is not the inept, blustering subordinate Crane but the motivations of The Donor, C. K. Once, while grousing for the nth time to an old friend on The Question: Why does Charles keep this blundering incompetent (Crane) as his unquestioned viceroy? The old friend went to the heart of the matter: “The trouble is that you’ve been assuming that Charles’ motivations are the same as the rest of us (i.e., the advancement of the cause of liberty in the most efficient manner.) Crane sure doesn’t fulfill our goals but he might be first-rate at promoting Charles’s. “But,” I asked, “what are Charles’s goalss” “I don’t know”, he replied, “that’s what we have to figure out.”

From what we can gather, Charles’s goals in all this have been unique and twofold. (First, as one long-standing Kochologist has euphemistically put it, “Charles is control-oriented rather than results-oriented.” Yes, indeed, control-oriented! What Charles demands above all is absolute, unquestioning loyalty, and that is something that Crane, above all others, was equipped to give him. In this pursuit Big Eddie has not been hobbled by ideological scruples. Those few — all too few — who were so hobbled, those who placed the cause of libertarian principle above going along with the latest twist and turn of the Kochtopusian program, have all been ruthlessly cast aside. Those who refused to go along, Crane, the inveterate hatchet man, accused of “ingratitude” to the man who supplied them with their daily bread.

Hence, the series of purges that have plagued the Kochtopus ever since its 1979 paradigm shift; for these were the people who, in the immortal Craniac phrase, “failed to go along with the program.”

Control for C. K. also means the willingness of his top managers to speak to him as hour every day, to go over and clear with the Donor every aspect, no matter how minor, of the day’s decisions. Continual daily checking with the Donor is a high road to Kochtopusian success. Those poor souls who, either out of integrity or independence or diffidence about taking up so much of a multi-millionaire’s time, failed to perform this daily task eventually found themselves on the beach, one of the Purged.

It is a sad commentary on our movement that in a group of supposedly committed hard-core and intransigent ideologues, that the great majority of them should have turned out to be gutless toadies, willing to cast aside supposedly cherished principles at the first whiff of the Long Green. Well, that’s the way it is, and bad cess to them. In this whole grisly saga, the real villain is not C. K., but the legion of men and women who proved so willing to sell their minds and their souls for a bit of gruel. I suppose that this is common is the history of ideological movements, but it surely happened much faster and more thoroughly than usual in our fledgling little movement.

All right, so C. K. wanted control above all, and hence the purges of the minority who would not go along, with the transformation. But why this particular shift? Here we come to the second putative part of this pattern of motivation: Namely, Charles wants total control of the movement’s institutions, but he wants others to fund them. On its face, this is a grave inner contradiction, for almost always with the flow of money goes the flow of control. But that is what Charles has sought for the last five or six years, and what he cannot and will never obtain. After one or two years of lavishing funds on these new organizations, C. K. appeared to panic, and to look around desperately for ways to get others to fund his own institutions. On the one hand, this aim might appear perfectly understandable, since he had already poured five or ten millions into libertarian institutions, and was tired of being the sole Donor. But then we must stop short and realize the full implication: that ten million dollars to C. K. is roughly the equivalent of what the rest of us would spend for one month on gasoline. Once put that relative proportion in perspective, and C. K.’s panic at his lavish funding becomes far less supportable.

I am hardly saying that mistakes were not made. In particular, too much was trundled too fast at incompetents, and C. K.’s top honcho, Crane, seemed to have no sense of cost whatever. For example, it was absurd for C. K. not to realize that all ideological magazines incur a deficit, and that therefore that deficit (for Inquiry) should have been foreseen from the very beginning as permanent. On the other hand, Crane compounded the problem by failing to hire a business or circulation manager for the magazine, for then the half-million a year Inquiry deficit could have been considerably lowered.

In fact, the first big crisis at Cato came only six months after it was founded. C. K., appalled at Inquiry’s deficit, mandated a sudden death slash of the magazine’s budget in half. Crane, covering his rear, blamed Evers for going over budget. Evers, however, had never been permitted so much as a peek at the budget. But Evers then proceeded to commit the truly cardinal Kochtopusian sin: protesting C. K.’s actions rather than loyally proclaiming his gratitude and going along with the program. That was the beginning of Evers’s long-drawn-out expulsion from Eden.

In the spring of 1979, C. K., in increasing shock at the failure of others to join him in donating to the Kochtopus, effected the Great Paradigm Shift. From all indications, he apparently concluded that the main reason why no one else was contributing is because no one else — either big businessman or mass of small businessmen — was a hard-core radical. Koch was learning the lesson he of course should have known from the very beginning: hard-core radical libertarianism is not a very popular creed. It might be a noble creed but it is also a lonely one. Hence the new, dawning conclusion: the way to get other people to contribute is to soften the creed. The way to get funding is to become respectable, non-threatening: and the way to become respectable and non-threatening is to Sell Out. To Sound Like Everybody Else. Hence, the opportunist sellout of the Crane-run Clark Campaign. In short, you can be very, very rich and still Sell Out principle; all you have to do, regardless of your wealth or income level, is to hold the obtaining of outside donations or payments higher than your own cherished principles. And then you have made your Faustian Bargain.

The precise etiology of how the Kochtopus made this decision is still unclear, but reports are that the guru, the theoretician who formulated and sold C. K. on this transformation was none other than Roychick Childs. Childs had always been hard-core, but also he had always lived on the margins of existence. Now, Roychick on Montgomery Street felt a strong, heady whiff of Power. He had the ear of King Koch, and, he felt, by formulating the honeyed vision of Other People’s Funding, he could ride the Kochtopus to the heights of absolute Power. Visions of sugarplums, of hegemony, of riding the Kochtopusian train to total power began to dance in the Childsian noodle. He began to talk about running for Senate in California on the L. P. ticket, indeed of actually becoming Senator. And after that, who knows? Hell, with Kochian billions, and with Crane as the organizer, all things were possible, all things provided that such inconvenient baggage as hard-core principle were quickly buried and forgotten. For this was the Real World at long last, and Roychick was going to be up there running it. Roychick had come into his own. In preparation for his historic task, he began to groom himself as the great demagogic orator of the LP, he who would sweep millions off their feet with his masterful oratory. Also in preparation, Childs began to cultivate the steely look of his Master and mentor, Ed Crane.

And so 1979 saw the beginning of the radical paradigm shift within the mighty Kochtopus, i.e., the accelerating abandonment of hard-core principle in order to attract outside funding. And that, of course, is virtually the classic definition of opportunism or “sellout” in ideology or politics. It began with a cloud seemingly no bigger than a man’s hand: namely, the hiring of an anti-Austrian Friedmanite at Cato (David Henderson); followed by the Muellerite SLS coming out against nuclear energy per se in order to try to attract the left-liberal students on campus. And the opportunist betrayal has escalated from there ever since.

7. Enter D. K.

The new Kochtopusian Line soon brought its first — and indeed, up till now, its only — success: the attraction into the movement of Charles’s younger brother, David. David is nothing if not soft-core, as is shown by his curt public refusal to support the Bergland ticket in 1983–84 if Bergland should come out with such radical and “crazy” proposals as abolition of the income tax. (Which Bergland, and Lewis, promptly did, to their eternal credit.) It could surely not be an accident that the entry of D. K. into the Kochtopus in a big way coincided with the abandonment of the old hard-core line by the Charles Koch-Crane forces.

And so the Clark — David Koch ticket was duly nominated in Los Angeles in 1979, and D. K. gave approximately $2.1 million to the Crane-run presidential campaign. The Crane Machine was truly in its glory.

Phase II of the New Order occurred after the Presidential election. With Reagan and conservatism ensconced in power, it was apparently determined to move the entire Kochtopus (with the exception of course of Mother Wichita) to Washington, D.C., where Crane and his various institutions could cozy up to Big Daddy and slither along the Corridors of Power. The massive shift of the Kochtopus to D.C. symbolized and physically embodied the shift of the Kochtopusian Line toward the State and toward Respectability.

And so Cato, which had previously emphasized Inquiry and the building up of a cadre of intellectuals, shifted radically to become just another conservative policy-studies Think Tank trying to Make It in D.C. Inquiry, whose intellectual and leftish tinge was becoming an embarrassment to Cato anyway, was hived off to the Crane-run Libertarian Review Foundation, (LRF). In fact, the entire tactical perspective of tailing after the liberal Left, which had motivated the nuclear power stance in SLS, and had permeated the Clark campaign and Libertarian Review, now had to be dropped amidst the new climate of conservative victory. The new Rightward shift after the Reagan victory perhaps had something to do with the killing of Libertarian Review, and merging it into Inquiry. Also both Cato and Charles Koch were relieved of financing the massive Inquiry deficit, which was now being picked up by D. K. This allowed Cato proper to expand without C. K.’s having to enlarge his contributions, and perhaps also meant an accelerated implosion and the final dumping of SLS.

And so, from 1981 to 1983, Eddie Crane set astride the entire Kochtopusian world like a Colossus. All of activism, except the CCE, was his. There was the powerful Crane Machine in the Libertarian Party; Inquiry was his through the LRF; his servitor Jule Herbert was ensconced as head of NTLF; and Update was founded under LRF to be the Machine newsletter and to do the hatchet work within the LP. At the center of the power web was Crane’s Cato, located in an historical landmark mansion in Washington. Cato began to hold the usual ultra-soft-core conferences, and to push such soft-core sleeves as Pete Ferrara’s Social Security Plan (keep forcing older people on Social Security and try to transfer youth to private insurance), and to publish a monthly Policy Report as well as a tri-annual Cato Journal. With the conference and the journal, Crane began to intrude heavily on the Austrian economic and scholarly sphere once allocated to Pearson, the excuse being that this was scholarship applied to policy questions. These applications, however, were incredibly sellouty; the featured speakers at these conferences were invariably Friedmanites or even Keynesians, and a few marginal Austrians were let in around the edges, as commentators. More and more, Cato began to take on the dimensions of yet another Reaganish Washington think tank, except, of course, that it was much less amply funded than, say, A El or the Heritage Foundation. In fact, a case could be made that, at this point, Cato is less libertarian, at least on domestic economic questions, than the closely Reagan-connected Heritage, and that is One Hell of a Note indeed.

8. The World of “Scholarship”: Enter Richie Fink

In the meantime, curious things were happening in the Pearson-run domain of scholarship, a part of the Kochtopusian world on which the light of publicity has never really shone. The Kochtopus had played a major role in reviving Misesian Austrian economics, with high level Austrian conferences in the summer of 1974, 1975, and 1976, and instructional conferences after that. Also, Austrian fellowships and programs were promoted at New York University, where Misesian economist Israel Kirzner happened to be located, and then later at George Mason University in Virginia, where a small Center for Market Processes (CMP) was set up under Kochtopusian auspices. Then, even before Cato cut loose for D.C., Leonard Liggio’s scholarly quarterly Literature of Liberty was shifted, logically enough, to Menlo Park’s low-key libertarian scholarly organization, the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS).

IHS did not begin as a Kochtopusian organization. It was founded by the late hard-core libertarian Dr. F. A. (“Baldy”) Harper in the early 1960’s, and it struggled for many years, with little or no funding, buoyed up solely by Baldy’s lifelong and heartfelt dedication to the cause of liberty. The Board of IHS was manned by old friends and colleagues of Baldy’s. After Baldy’s death in 1973, Charles Koch, who had been on the board, agreed to become President, and after that, IHS gradually became drawn into the Kochtopusian orbit, run by George Pearson as Treasurer and through Kochian contributions via FASIL. When Liggio moved the Literature of Liberty operation to Menlo Park, he became President of IHS, and in another year, Walter Grinder was taken on at IHS as Liggio’s assistant in academic affairs (succeeding our own ex-publisher, Joe Peden, who had been at IHS for a year.) Grinder, who had taught economics at Rutgers, Newark, had dropped out of graduate school at NYU, and then gone to University College, in Cork, Ireland for graduate work. There, he had fallen ill, and, his and his family’s medical treatments paid for by Charles Koch, he eventually moved to IHS to Menlo Park.

Despite strong Kochian influence, IHS was not yet under full Kochian power. Not only did much of the Board predate Koch, but also the extensive summer fellowship program was largely provided by the totally independent (and also increasingly soft-core) Liberty Fund, which was personally friendly to Liggio. By 1983, however, Liberty Fund, emboldened by changes in the tax law permitting foundations to accumulate part of their income, drastically cut back its overall funding, with the result that IHS was one of the first to suffer. The loss of Liggio’s personal financial base, so to speak, apparently emboldered the Kochtopus to seize total control. The IHS Board began to meet very rarely, with all important decisions now taken by the Koch-controlled Executive Committee of the Board. And one of its major decisions was to remove Liggio from all power in IHS, while retaining him as President as a kind of figurehead, and moving their faithful and loyal servitor Walter Grinder into the post, not only of Vice President, but also of CEO of the Institute.

The time has come to highlight, for the first time, the Kochtopusian engineered change in Austrian economics. For precisely what Crane did to libertarianism in the LP, other Kochtopusians were doing to Austrian economics and also to my revered mentor, Ludwig von Mises. For Mises was, in economics, the quintessence of uncompromising hard-coreness, both in laissez-faire; and in methodology. Mises and opportunism have always, both in his lifetime and now in death, been totally and diametrically incompatible. And so Mises had to go.

Mises has been quietly ditched throughout the world of Kochtopusian scholarship. At NYU, Professor Mario Rizzo, who popped up as a Ravenal delegate at the 1983 PresCon, has led the way in dropping Mises altogether and in transforming Misesian economic thought into a wishy-washy pastiche of “evolution” and what could be called mildly conservative institutionalism. But Kirzner has been resisting the New Dispensation. At George Mason’s Center for Market Processes, however, this new Kochtopusian paradigm could proceed unchecked and untrammelled. Instead of the name or the concepts of Mises or laissez-faire scaring off academics or spoiling the new scramble for mainstream respectability, most Center “Austrians” speak only vaguely about “market process”, and of “evolution”. Nothing threatening there. Leading the parade in this betrayal of Misesianism from within was young NYU graduate student Richard (“Richie”) Fink, who had studied under Grinder at Rutgers, Newark. Grinder of course gave his blessings to this New Order. A manifesto for the new paradigm, which Mises would have scorned brusquely as “anti-economics”, was an as yet unpublished but widely circulated essay co-written by Fink and by his student at Rutgers and then George Mason, Tyler Cowen, now a graduate student at Harvard and widely touted by the burgeoning Fink Machine as The Comer in Austrianism.

And so the important point to note here is that the Crane Machine sellout is not unique; that it has its precise parallel in the world of Kochtopusian scholarship. With Fink in charge at George Mason and Grinder at IHS, the Fink-Grinder apparatus began to dominate the scholarly arm of the Kochtopus.

9. — The Big Change: The Coming to Power of the Finktopus

Richie Fink, in his academic maneuvering at George Mason, in hanging on at least part-time despite his failure to attain a doctorate, began to catch the eye of C. K. In particular, what apparently captivated C. K. was a new plan of Richie’s, another, very different way of attracting the Outside Funding that C. K. had long craved. Richie’s idea was to set up a lobbying outfit in Washington (where he already was, George Mason being in a Virginia suburb) the Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which would do for soft-core (very soft-core) libertarianism what Common Cause had already done for Establishment liberalism, and what Jim Davidson had done with the National Taxpayers Union: create a flourishing membership organization. If no Big Businessman except D. K. seemed to fall for the soft-core Kochian paradigm, then maybe the masses out there, the updated little old ladies in tennis shoes, could provide the desired funding, leaving C. K. of course in even more secure total control than if other big businessmen had been donors. Whoopee! What could be better, from C. K.’s point of view?

So young Richie was now the shining star, the Comer in the Kochtopus, but how would he find the funding, the seed money, the nucleus, to get launched? C. K. was surely not going to provide much anew; in fact, he was presumably busy contracting his overall giving rather than expanding it. What better than using CCE as a launching pad? There were good reasons for this. In the first place, CCE was already there, in Washington, with some money and an organizational nucleus, already doing lobbying. But its head, Rich Wilcke, had fallen out of Kochtopusian favor, and had to go. Why? I can only think of two main reasons. One, Wilcke, unlike the rest of the Kochtopus, had never “leaked”, i.e. had always maintained his hard-core, uncompromising, laissez-faire perspective. And two, Wilcke was not a Kochian Loyalist. He did not Clear Everything with C. K. for an hour every day. He had mistakenly thought that his job was to manage CCE himself and to do well with it. For these two unforgivable errors he had to be purged.

Getting rid of Wilcke, however, was not easy, and the execution turned out to be a bloody mess. Wilcke did not go quietly, and C. K. was reluctant for a long time to use the famous Stockholder Ploy which he had used to dump me from the Board at Cato. It is true that here at CCE he had even tighter control then at Cato; for while Cato had had three Ultimate Stockholders, of whom I was one, Charles had taken the precaution at CCE to have only one stockholder when CCE was founded: himself. (All this conjures up an amusing picture: C. K. enters a phone booth, strips off his jacket and shirt, and reveals a red shirt with S for Stockholder on it, after which he springs into action.) But C. K, was apparently reluctant to use his Ultimate Stockholder power at CCE because it would have meant firing the entire board, including a number of Big Businessmen he was trying to get funds from. But finally, the messy deed was done, and poor Wilcke, whose only sin was to be both highly competent and highly principled, was booted out, without so much as a penny of terminal pay from the organization he had built up and run successfully for years.

The path was now cleared for young Richie, and the Great Kochtopusian Reorganization now occurred, during the spring and summer of 1984. The baby Finktopus, son of the Kochtopus, was born. First, Richie became head of CCE; then CCE was liquidated into the new, mighty CSE, which also incorporated unto itself the old lobbying activities of NTLF. Fink now heads up the lobbying-activist program, luring the masses into supporting the new activism. But to get the masses you can’t be hard-core, at least so runs Kochtopusian conventional wisdom. And so it looks as if Finktopusian activism will be even softer core, and more sellouty, than Craniac activism. Reports are, for example, that the two planks that will be pushed heavily by the CSE are (a) the fiat tax — a rotten program also endorsed by Big Ed, and (b) widening IRA’s for Social Security — a cosmetic that would leave the SS intact.

But soft: whatever happened to the basic allocation of power in the Kochtopus: Crane in charge of activism, and Pearson, or later Pearson-Fink, in charge of scholarship? The answer is that this allocation, this “job-description” to use management lingo, is now kaput. All bets are off. Richie Fink is now in charge, not only of most scholarship (and through his friend Grinder, virtually all scholarship), but also in charge of most Kochtopusian activism. Consider the dramatic change that has occurred in 1984 in the relative power positions of Crane and Fink. Fink, we are reliably informed, now reports directly to C. K. himself, circumventing Pearson. In addition, Fink, now in charge of CSE, the old CCE and NTLF, the Center for Market Processes, and through Grinder of IHS, now bestrides the Kochtopusian world like a new Colossus. And Eddie Crane? Consider his current status: Inquiry is now gone, Update is gone, SLS is gone. The Crane Machine deserted the Bergland-Lewis ticket and, at least for now, in effect has left the LP. Crane is left in charge only of Cato.

Not only that: but the latest hot news is that IHS itself will, in the fall of 1985, be moved to affiliate with George Mason University, and will be housed in the same building as the Center for Market Processes. Virtually all of Kochtopusian academia will then be under Finkian control, both spiritually and in its physical embodiment in or near Washington, D.C.

10. Exit Craniacs

Nothing can better testify to the enormous slippage of Crane’s power within the Kochtopus than the fate, in the watershed year of 1984, of two of Big Eddie’s most faithful satraps and servitors: Jule (“The Tool”) Herbert and Roychick Childs.

For Jule is now reportedly On the Beach: let go from NTLF when Fink acceded to power. Our informants tell us that Crane pleaded with Fink for months to take on Jule in some capacity in his expanded CSE organization, but no dice. Why then did not Cato hire Jule? Presumably either for budgetary reasons, and/or because his hiring was vetoed by C. K. Whatever the reason, good or bad, Jule is out of favor, and Crane could not save him. Other former top Craniacs have earned Big Ed’s lasting emmity by accepting jobs in Fink’s new CSE: Bob Capozzi, Kent Guida, and Sheldon Richman.

In a sense even more interesting is the recent dismissal of Roychick, once so close to the Pinnacle of Power, he who thought he always had the C. K.ear. I heard from a highly placed source at the PresCon that the command decision had already been made to fire Roychick, presumably because very little foreign policy analysis had been forthcoming from Cato’s Foreign Policy Analyst. I didn’t reveal this in the Forum, because to the query, “when?”, the Highly Informed Source said that the timing had not yet been decided. Crane told Roychick in the fall of 1983 that his firing was imminent, but the other shoe did not drop until the following summer. Why the firing took so long, whether out of humanitarian sentiments or to let Roychick twist slowly, slowly in the wind, is anyone’s guess. But at any rate, exit Roychick, the end of an era. How the mighty have fallen!

And now? Roychick has returned to New York, there to work at the Laissez-Faire Bookstore, and to live in one of Howie Rich’s apartments. The Childsian parabola, his meteoric rise and fall, his coming full circle, can only be fully understood by being put in historical and sociological perspective. For over the years, the Laissez-Faire Bookstore has become the place where young lads begin their libertarian career. It is the place where budding libertarians hope to make their mark in the movement, and begin their rise to something like fame and fortune. It is from the bookstore, for example, that young anarchist Lance Lamberton began as a clerk and book-packer and then rose in a few short years to the pinnacle of power as a renegade in the Reagan White House, only to be dropped shortly thereafter. Indeed, Roychick himself began his own career in libertarianism very similarly — as a young bookpacker in the old Libertarian Review Book Service. And here we are, a decade and a half later, and here Roychick is, returned to the status of clerk and bookpacker. But the bookstore, one hopes, is a place where one begins, not where one ends up, not a refuge to which one returns in one’s late 30’s, an aging boy wonder after having once hobnobbed with the mighty and dreamt great dreams of Total Power.

Whither Roychick now? Does he deserve yet another One Last Chance? Will he redeem himself, become regenerate, and Build a New Life? Or will he tax the patience of his indulgent employers, fail to show up at the Bookstore, and finally be reluctantly let go, then to sink to Lord knows where? Who knows? Present guesses depend on one’s view of human nature in general, and of Roychick’s nature in particular. One long-time Roychickologist puts the hard line on this question with great gusto: “They who keep giving Roy ‘One More Chance’ have been preventing the noble workings of Social Darwinism from giving one of its most convincing demonstrations.”

Tune in to the Lib. Forum for the next installment of this continuing, Not Quite Ready for Prime Time Soap Opera saga that is the Libertarian Movement.

11. Whither the Kochtopus?

And what of the Kochtopus itself? And of the Crane Machine? What will happen to them? Will the Crane Machine try for an LP comeback in 1985 at Phoenix? Or at the next great PresCon in 1987? And even if it wants to try, will it be able to commandeer the Kochtopusian resources to do so? Considering the waning of the Craniac star, this prospect begins to seem dubious at best.

And what of the Finktopus? Will young Fink continue, in future years, to dominate the Kochtopusian world? in our view, the answer depends on the success of his Grand Plan to sucker the panting masses into supporting the CSE. Answering that question depends on how clear our crystal ball may be. But our strong hunch is that the Fink Plan is going to be a floperoo. The success of Jim Davidson’s National Taxpayers Union was based on the fact that there is a strong constituency for the neatly-titled NTU, and that, despite its excessive moderation, NTU has been doing good and farily consistent work in the direction of a clear-cut goal: lowering taxes and government spending across the board. But a big constituency for a very soft-core “sound economy”? Not hardly. If our analysis is correct, then the handwriting is on the wall for the Finktopus. As for Fink’s future as head of academia within the Kochtopus, the prognosis, as usual in academia, is far cloudier. A lot depends on such factors as the dubious prospect of Fink getting his doctorate, and on whether George Mason University is willing to bet heavily on the glittering but highly unlikely chimera of lots of Kochtopusian money pouring into the new combined CMPIHS. But at any rate, we would remind young Richie of the lesson already learned painfully by Childs, Herbert, and by Crane himself: sic transit gloria mundi, or, Put Not Your Trust in Princes.

Why the Apotheosis of Ronnie?

There is no surcease; every occasion is taken in the media for wave after wave of adulation of the Big Boob. Now that the election is over, even his quasi-enemies have thrown in the towel. Even left liberals, even the New York Times, have nothing but admiration for the Boob’s greatness, his political wizardry, his lovability, etc. Even those who retain one or two nagging doubts about the wisdom of Reaganism join to sing the praises of Reagan the man, our wonderful All-American hero. “Of course I don’t like his policies, but he’s such a great guy.” Is there no rest? And even if we have to concede the majority, where in hell are the Reagan-haters? After all, even at the height of popularity and adulation for FDR, there was always a militant minority of embittered Roossevelt-haters to whom one could turn for solace amidst the horrific avalanche of enthusiasm. Looking back on these four years of Reagan I, we can see all too clearly that the historic function of Reagan, the “Reagan Revolution” if you want to call it that, was to wipe out as if it had never been the 1970’s mass disillusion with the U.S. government in general, and with the Presidency in particular. By spreading this disillusion, Nixon and Watergate did more for libertarian sentiment in the U.S. than anyone else in this century. And now, this disillusion is all washed away, and the American people are back in their rotten, disastrous love affair with their Sovereign Lord, the President of these United States. In the same way, the lessons of Vietnam have been washed away in the jingoism of Ronnie’s heroic conquest of teeny Grenada, that Grand Fenwick without an army, navy, or air force, where yet a handful of Cuban construction workers were able to hold off the massed might of U.S. Imperialism for a solid week. Ronnie has managed to recreate jingoism and flag-waving, literally and figuratively, with the willing collaboration of Fritz the Pits and the Loyal Opposition. And do we wonder why the Libertarian Movement is at a low ebb in America?

If we search, in our bitterness and frustration, for some solace, for some small beacon light in the all-encompassing darkness, we will find nothing. But hold! There is something. In the January 29, issue of the Village Voice, there is an article by J. Hoberman, “Stars and Hype Forever”, that warms the cockles of our heart, Hoberman usually functions as the Voice’s movie critic and spokesman for the wierdo avant-garde cinema.

Well, perhaps it takes someone familiar with avant-garde absurdism to do full justice to the meaning of Ronnie and his mass adulation by the American public. For once, even Hoberman’s crazed left-Freudianism seems almost plausible. For the appeal of Ronnie Reagan is so irrational, his being a walking, talking contradiction so starkly evident, that its almost as if the irrationality is the essence of appeal. As Hoberman nuts it:

“Is Ronald Reagan the greatest American who ever lived, or is he only the most American? Only a few recalcitrant minorities seemed able to resist the spectacle of a 73-year-old ex-actor waxing nostalgic for God, neighborliness, the nuclear family, strong leadership, the work ethic, and the small-town community. Especially since — as everyone knew — he himself seldom attended church, rarely gave to charity, was divorced by his first wife, communicated badly with his children (and indeed everyone else if there was no script), failed to control his own staff, kept banker’s hours, hung out with a passel of corrupt billionaires, and had fled the small town (scarcely a Norman Rockwell paradise but a place where his hapless father had been the local drunk) for the fleshpots of California at the first opportunity.”

Hoberman suggests that the American masses love Ronnie precisely because he’s a walking contradiction, a boob, a nice guy, etc. Because that is what they are. He notes that Douglas Fraser, head of the United Automobile Workers, told Time magazine last August that it’s a mystery to him, but that Reagan is “very, very effective with the American worker.” Hoberman suggests that the mystery could be cleared up in an explanation given by a UAW regional director in the same issue of Time: “He looks good and he’s an actor. He’s the kind of guy you could strike up a conversation with if he lived in the neighborhood.” Back in the I940’s, Hoberman reminds us, Ronnie the movie-star told the fan magazines: “I’m no Flynn or Boyer. Mr. Norm is my alias.” “Mr. Norm” indeed! The mystery begins to clear, As Hoberman explains:

“‘At Camp David,’ Time recently reported in its Nancy Reagan cover story, ‘the two former movie stars cozy up on a sofa in the dark, holding hands and sharing a bowl of popcorn as they watch good, wholesome films.’ . . . ‘I never suggested where the weapons should be or what kind. I’m not a scientist’, he said when questioned about his star wars program. His confusion of countries in South America, his blatant ignorance of arms control (which handily keeps him from implication when talks collapse), his proud lack of cultural sophistication endear him to the public. Far from threatening, the gaps in the president’s knowledge are positively . . . normal.”

Brilliant! And now we begin to see where poor Jimmy Carter went wrong. Because until Ronnie, the American public, in its respect and admiration for the office of the President, desired to put in there someone greater than they, someone larger than life, someone whom they could admire and look up to as their Sovereign. And Carter tried so hard worked hard as a beaver, studied, knew a lot, and he looked so worried as a result. Because, after all, that’s what Presidents always were supposed to do. They were supposed to know a lot, and work very hard and take the cares of the American people upon their own brows. Hell, they were supposed to age in office, in order to show how much they cared, how responsible they were for what went on. Unlike Ronnie, they weren’t supposed to be some kind of Dorian Gray.

But Ronnie broke the mold, or perhaps the American masses broke it for him. For Ronnie is just the opposite, and the masses love, adore, worship him precisely because he is so, aw shucks! dumb, cretinous, friendly, normal, just like they are! Perhaps the numskull Senator Roman Hruska (R., Neb.) was an unwitting prophet during the Carswell appointment hearings for the Nixon Supreme Court. When his man was charged with being “mediocre,” Senator Hruska rose to the occasion. “Well,” he complained, “why can’t the mediocre people have representation on the Supreme Court?” He was laughed at by the liberal media, but he may have been a harbinger of the 1980’s. Well, if every conceivable group in American life deserves its quotal representation: the blacks, Hispanics, women, elderly, handicapped, one-eyed Albanians, etc., why not the mediocre? After all, there are a hell of a lot more of them. Why not Mr. Norm? Mencken, Mencken, thou shouldst be living at this hour?

Hoberman goes on, with a scintillating analysis of Ronnie Reagan as media creation, as the ultimate product of the movie star system and of Hollywood-California politics. He cites a yuppie quoted in the New York Times as favoring Reagan because he is “a John Wayne type,” and “standing for the values of the men” as against women. Hoberman notes sardonically that, while Reagan and Bush posed in cowboy hats in Texas with a pair of sexy cheerleaders, Fritz played into his opponent’s hands by appearing “in the Mondale Family Cookbook wearing an apron . . .”

But there is much more to Ronnie as media creation. For, Hoberman adds,

“Like any modern politician, Reagan’s image is pure feedback. He shows the visage that every other-directed person in America might present had he the benefit of scientific polls, demographic statistics, and an endless knowledge of old movie cliches. Even his post assassination ripostes were quotations: ‘Honey, I forgot to duck,’ he told Nancy just as Jack Dempsey had quipped to his wife after losing to Gene Tunney in 1926. Faced with death, he thought of the epitaph on W. C. Fields’s tombstone: ‘All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’

And then, came this illuminating sentence: “Perhaps because he himself is so utterly a product of American mass culture, mass culture has proved unusually responsive to Ronald Reagan.

As a movie critic, Hoberman sees and points out, for the first time, that the Republicans waged the Presidential campaign in pop-movie and pop-culture imagery, and that they “won the battle” to seize that imagery for 1984. Indeed, running through the Hoberman article are quotes from the wildly popular song from Ghostbusters. Hoberman continues:

“The 1984 campaign was dominated by movie imagery. ‘Star Wars’ and the ‘Evil Empire’ remained buzz words while Vice-President Bush mocked the Democratic convention as the ‘Temple of Doom’ and Reagan appropriated the slogan that made his erstwhile employer Warner Bros, famous. ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, he affably threatened the screaming crowds that turned out to see him — the slogan, in its proudly illiterate use of the double negative, echoing the punch line of the summer’s number one song, ‘I ain’t afraid of no ghost!’ (from Ghostbusters). Yes, as everyone in America was lining up for the same film, both Democrats and Republicans realized on some level that the party that controlled Ghostbusters would win the election — and the Democrats had about as much chance of that as Walter Mondale of wearing his apron to Wyoming and serving the cowboys quiche.”

Hoberman goes on to analyze Ghostbusters as an arch-Reaganoid film. Since I haven’t seen it, you will have to turn to the article for explanation.

So far, so wonderfully clear and perceptive. Now comes the murky left-Freudian part, which still seems to make a substantial amount of sense. Basically, it holds that Jimmy Carter’s most basic and fatal error was to “secularize the American myth,” to reduce “America” to the level of common sense,” in the words of Sacvan Bercovitch. In short, Jimmy tried to explain to us soberly that “America” was no longer all-powerful, omnipotent, king of the walk, a truth that was beginning to dawn on the American masses after a quarter-century of Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations, “black and sexual revolutions,” and “humiliation at the woggy hands of OPEC sheiks and Iranian mullahs.” Reagan came to the American masses as America’s projected savior, the agent of its religious and theocratic “rebirth,” its return to greatness. America, in the fundamentalist-pietist image, would be “born again,” once more to achieve the certainty, in the words of Hoberman, that “the president has made quite clear with his chilling assertions that the U.S. was God’s country and folksy reassurance of an after life. (I ain’t afraid of no ghost.)”

Hoberman continues:

“Reagan pandered to a latent aggression waiting to be released. To be truly reborn, America would have to (as George Bush said, reasserting his manhood after the humiliation of having to debate Geraldine Ferraro) kick ass. Where ineffectual Carter chose to scold America for its indulgence, Reagan would show us how to punish the weak to make ourselves feel strong.”

Instrumental to the success of this “salvation,” Hoberman goes on, was the Hinckley assassination attempt upon Ronnie. By remarkable coincidence, he points out, both Time and Newsweek featured cover stories on “America’s climate of violence” the week before the attempted assassination. It was a media “message,” opines Hoberman, that someone like Hinckley might well decide to act upon. Combined with the widespread popular belief in the “die-in-office” jinx on anyone elected President in a year ending with zero, “his ability to take a bullet in the gut and live gave him an almost divine aura.” And: “If America’s problems could be said to have begun on November 22, 1963, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Reagan’s miraculous survival made him a kind of JFK redux.”

Fascinating! Could this be the reason (along with JFK’s media-created personality) that Reagan and conservatives — they who once hated the guts of JFK — keep praising Kennedy and trying to cast Ronnie in the mould of JFK, as well as Truman and FDR?

Having surmounted the assassination, having become reborn, “having proved himself strong enough to contain the nation’s violence, Reagan was mandated to wield it.” Hence, for Hoberman, the enormous military buildup, and the repeated bullying action? of Reaganite foreign policy. Reagan began his campaign of rebirth through violence in the summer of 1981 with “two carefully staged events, attacks on symbolic (and appropriately weak) targets — the labor union PATCO and two Libyan jets . . . . ”

However, in late 1981 came a grave setback to Reagan’s popularity — the Reagan recession, and his approval rating began to decline. How recoup? In the words of Hoberman, “When the social fabric is straining at the seams, when capitalism (sic) reneges on its promise of universal abundance, when humiliation is in the air, military nationalism is the time-tested recipe for the new unity.” Specifically, as war fever arrived with the excitement over the Falklands war and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Ronnie unleashed two monstrous, saber-rattling speeches in March 1983, his “Evil Empire” and “Star Wars” addresses, which, as Hoberman calls them, were “masterpieces of applied irrationality.” He goes on:

“As one conjured up the menace of an implacable deadly foe, poised to strike, the other raised the promise of risk-free nuclear war should we, understandably, choose to smash the aggressor first.”

During the summer of 1983, Reagan heated up the propaganda against Nicaragua, obviously seeking a war-incident there. Then, in September came the KAL 007 caper, in which, as Hoberman correctly notes, U.S. “War fever reached an almost hysterical crescendo, reminiscent of the anti-Khomeini madness of 1980.” Shortly after KAL 007, Reagan began moving toward war in Lebanon, baiting the Syrians until we found that we couldn’t pin the Islamic Jihad’s blowing up of the American Marines on the Syrian government it was at that point that Ronnie Baby found a safely puny and powerless victim for U.S. blood lust: little Grenada. For then.

“A few days later, the marines landed in Grenada and America went berserk. At last, Reagan had provided a war. The remarkable thing about Grenada, cited again and again during the 1984 campaign as Reagan’s supreme triumph, was its disproportionate effect upon the American public. Tawdry as the spectacle of the greatest power on earth subduing the tiniest nation in the Western hemisphere may have been, it actually sufficed to get America ‘standing tall.’ ”

Hannah Arendt once wrote that the whole point of the Vietnam War was to enable the U.S. government to “create for itself an image which would convince the world that it was indeed ‘the mightiest power on earth.’” Hoberman writes that Reaganism is a replay with this slight difference: the desire of the U.S. to “create images which will convince itself that it is the mightiest power on earth.” In 1966, Ronald Reagan mused that “Politics is just like show business. You need a big opening. Then you coast for a while. Then you need a big finish.” Grenada’s was Ronnie’s big finish. The silver lining in the cloud is that it could have been worse. Thus Hoberman:

“Considering how infinitely more costly wars against the Sandinistas or Syrians — not to mention a confrontation with the Evil Empire itself — would have been, one actually has to be grateful for Grenada. If all it takes is shooting down two Libyan jets a year to keep Reagan from nuking Moscow — then, by all means, fire away.”