WEBVTT NOTE Frank Chodorov, Non-Voter 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:23.000 It was 44 years ago this holiday season, on the 28th day of December 1966, that Frank Chotorov died. 3 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:34.000 Chotorov had been born nearly 80 years earlier on the day after Valentine's Day, February 15, 1887, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. 4 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:41.000 He was the youngest child of a pair of Russian-Jewish immigrants who gave him the name Fischel Chotorovsky. 5 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:51.000 But he was the only one of their 11 children to be born in this country, and he seems to have known early on that he was an American who needed an American name. 6 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:57.000 As a child, he rechristened himself Frank and shortened his last name to Chaturav. 7 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:01.000 He also showed an unusual enthusiasm for schooling. 8 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:05.000 After spending the customary eight years in the local grammar school, 9 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:12.000 he became one of only 400 students accepted at the first high school to be established in New York City. 10 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:19.000 When he emerged a few years later as one of the 120 students who successfully completed that high school program, 11 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:24.800 Program, you might say in modern terminology that his graduating class had a dropout rate 12 00:01:24.800 --> 00:01:26.560 of 70%. 13 00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:32.420 He moved right on to another program of classes, this time at Columbia College, the heart of 14 00:01:32.420 --> 00:01:36.180 what we know today as Columbia University. 15 00:01:36.180 --> 00:01:41.780 While there, he became interested in anarchism, but was disillusioned by his discovery that 16 00:01:41.780 --> 00:01:47.960 the various schools of anarchism then extant took a dim view of the institution of private 17 00:01:47.960 --> 00:01:54.680 Property, without which it seemed to me even then individualism was meaningless. If a man cannot 18 00:01:54.680 --> 00:02:01.160 enjoy the fruits of his labor without let or hindrance, he is enslaved to the one who appropriates 19 00:02:01.160 --> 00:02:07.560 his property. A slave has no property rights. Besides, the abolition of private property 20 00:02:07.560 --> 00:02:13.000 could be accomplished only by the intervention of an all-powerful state, which the anarchists 21 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:15.700 were so bent on destroying. 22 00:02:15.700 --> 00:02:22.160 By the time he graduated from Columbia in 1907, Chotarov was no longer an anarchist. 23 00:02:22.160 --> 00:02:27.560 Instead he had decided he was a poet, like Shelley and Keats and Byron. 24 00:02:27.560 --> 00:02:31.440 But I soon realized that my muse was not up to it. 25 00:02:31.440 --> 00:02:36.920 Besides, I acquired a wife who needed regular sustenance, therefore I turned to teaching 26 00:02:36.920 --> 00:02:38.480 as a career. 27 00:02:38.480 --> 00:02:41.600 That promised some regularity of income. 28 00:02:41.600 --> 00:02:47.340 From teaching, Chatarov drifted into advertising. During a stint as a copywriter in Chicago 29 00:02:47.340 --> 00:02:52.980 when he was in his late twenties and Woodrow Wilson was in the White House, a friend recommended 30 00:02:52.980 --> 00:02:58.980 a book to him and even lent him a copy of it, Progress and Poverty, by someone named 31 00:02:58.980 --> 00:03:05.220 Henry George. The book impressed him immensely. He read it several times and decided that 32 00:03:05.220 --> 00:03:09.980 what it offered was nothing less than the simple, inescapable truth about political 33 00:03:09.980 --> 00:03:20.980 but what was he, Frank Chotarov, supposed to do about that? He had a living to make. He had no time in his life for causes, however worthy they might be. 34 00:03:20.980 --> 00:03:29.980 So he put Henry George's Progress and Poverty on the bookshelf. By now he had his own copy and went on with his daily routine. 35 00:03:29.980 --> 00:03:40.980 Then, one night in the fall of 1936, when he was just a few months short of his fiftieth birthday, Chotarov stopped in at the Players Club for dinner. 36 00:03:40.980 --> 00:03:46.980 There, he fell into conversation with a dignified elderly gentleman who was playing pool. 37 00:03:46.980 --> 00:03:54.980 Avid conversation, you might call it. One of the most memorable conversations Chotarov had had in his entire life up to that time. 38 00:03:54.980 --> 00:04:08.980 The dignified elderly gentleman turned out to be the noted journalist and author Albert J. Nock, another man who had been swept away in his youth by Henry George and had clung to George's ideas ever since. 39 00:04:08.980 --> 00:04:22.980 The two men rapidly became good friends. In fact, during the last decade of Nock's life, the period when his libertarianism was at its finest, purest pitch, Frank Chatarov may have been his closest friend. 40 00:04:22.980 --> 00:04:28.900 He wound up in the summer of 1945 as executor of Knox Modest Estate. 41 00:04:28.900 --> 00:04:34.460 More important for our present purposes, Knox's influence led Chaturov to walk away from his 42 00:04:34.460 --> 00:04:40.220 career in the world of profit-making business and take up a new one in the world of political 43 00:04:40.220 --> 00:04:44.220 journalism and non-profit advocacy work. 44 00:04:44.220 --> 00:04:49.980 He launched his new career in 1937 at the Henry George School of Social Science in New 45 00:04:49.980 --> 00:04:50.980 York. 46 00:04:50.980 --> 00:04:57.740 The school was at that time 5 years old, having been founded back in 1932, and it needed help 47 00:04:57.740 --> 00:04:59.900 of several different kinds. 48 00:04:59.900 --> 00:05:05.980 Chaturav advertised and promoted it, raised money to support it, oversaw its operations, 49 00:05:05.980 --> 00:05:11.580 taught many of its classes, and edited its monthly magazine, which he founded and named 50 00:05:11.580 --> 00:05:17.500 The Freeman, in honor of the Georgist Weekly edited by his friend Albert J. Nock back in 51 00:05:17.500 --> 00:05:19.500 the early 1920s. 52 00:05:19.500 --> 00:05:24.980 Ultimately, Chatarov was ousted from his editorship of The Freeman and from his position 53 00:05:24.980 --> 00:05:31.180 as director of the Henry George School because of his unpopular views on World War II. 54 00:05:31.180 --> 00:05:37.700 He had warned his readers as early as the fall of 1938 that no war is justified, that 55 00:05:37.700 --> 00:05:42.620 no war benefits the people, that war destroys liberty. 56 00:05:42.620 --> 00:05:49.220 And after the war was over, nearly a generation after the war was over, in the early 1960s, 57 00:05:49.220 --> 00:05:55.380 at a time when that war was well on its way to being remembered fondly as the good war, 58 00:05:55.380 --> 00:06:01.420 nobly waged by the greatest generation to save us from the most evil man in mankind's 59 00:06:01.420 --> 00:06:08.660 history, Adolf Hitler, and the most evil political movement in mankind's history, Nazism. 60 00:06:08.660 --> 00:06:11.700 At that point, Chaturov wrote this, 61 00:06:11.700 --> 00:06:17.020 It is a well-known fact that during a war the state acquires powers which it does not 62 00:06:17.020 --> 00:06:20.180 not relinquish when hostilities are over. 63 00:06:20.180 --> 00:06:25.340 When the enemy is at the city gates, or the illusion that he is coming can be put into 64 00:06:25.340 --> 00:06:31.900 people's minds, the tendency is to turn over to the captain all the powers he deems necessary 65 00:06:31.900 --> 00:06:34.380 to keep the enemy away. 66 00:06:34.380 --> 00:06:38.140 Liberty is downgraded in favor of protection. 67 00:06:38.140 --> 00:06:44.260 But when the enemy is driven away, the state finds reason enough to hold on to its acquired 68 00:06:44.260 --> 00:06:45.260 powers. 69 00:06:45.260 --> 00:06:50.700 Its conscription, which Mr. Roosevelt reintroduced at the beginning of the war, has become the 70 00:06:50.700 --> 00:06:56.380 permanent policy of the government, and militarism, which is the opposite of freedom, has been 71 00:06:56.380 --> 00:06:58.940 incorporated in our mores. 72 00:06:58.940 --> 00:07:05.300 Whether or not this eventuality was in Mr. Roosevelt's mind is not germane, it is inherent 73 00:07:05.300 --> 00:07:08.140 in the character of the state. 74 00:07:08.140 --> 00:07:12.860 Taxes imposed ostensibly for the duration have become permanent. 75 00:07:12.860 --> 00:07:18.200 The bureaucracy built up during the war has not been dismantled, and interventions in 76 00:07:18.200 --> 00:07:23.760 the economy necessary for the prosecution of war are now held to be necessary for the 77 00:07:23.760 --> 00:07:25.880 welfare of the people. 78 00:07:25.880 --> 00:07:31.460 This plus the fact that we are now engaged in preparing for World War III was the net 79 00:07:31.460 --> 00:07:35.360 result of our entry into World War II. 80 00:07:35.360 --> 00:07:40.500 Whichever side won, the American people were the losers. 81 00:07:40.500 --> 00:07:46.240 So Frank Chotarov left the Henry George School and its magazine and became editor-in-chief 82 00:07:46.240 --> 00:07:49.140 of another monthly called Analysis. 83 00:07:49.140 --> 00:07:54.260 It was during his years in that job that he became the first editor to publish a promising 84 00:07:54.260 --> 00:08:01.160 newcomer, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate student named Murray Rothbard. 85 00:08:01.160 --> 00:08:07.540 From Analysis in the early 1950s, Chotarov moved on to a weekly called Human Events, 86 00:08:07.540 --> 00:08:12.740 and from there back to another monthly called The Freeman, this one published by Leonard 87 00:08:12.740 --> 00:08:16.440 Reid at the Foundation for Economic Education. 88 00:08:16.440 --> 00:08:23.260 When he left The Freeman in 1955, he was 68 years old and ready for a break from the constant 89 00:08:23.260 --> 00:08:28.620 deadlines that had defined his life for most of the preceding 20 years. 90 00:08:28.620 --> 00:08:30.780 He didn't stop working, though. 91 00:08:30.780 --> 00:08:36.700 He wrote his last two books, The Rise and Fall of Society, an essay on the economic 92 00:08:36.700 --> 00:08:44.100 Forces that Underlie Social Institutions, which was published in 1959, and Out of Step, 93 00:08:44.100 --> 00:08:50.500 The Autobiography of an Individualist, which was published in 1962, and Summers, he taught 94 00:08:50.500 --> 00:08:55.020 at Robert LaFave's Freedom School in Colorado. 95 00:08:55.020 --> 00:08:56.980 What did he say in these books? 96 00:08:56.980 --> 00:08:58.940 What did he tell his students? 97 00:08:58.940 --> 00:09:01.140 Let him answer in his own words. 98 00:09:01.140 --> 00:09:06.700 I should like to see society organized so that the individual would be free to carry 99 00:09:06.700 --> 00:09:13.060 on his pursuit of happiness as he sees fit, and in accordance with his own capacities, 100 00:09:13.060 --> 00:09:15.660 Chaturav wrote in Out of Step. 101 00:09:15.660 --> 00:09:21.340 That is because I assume that the individual is endowed at birth with the right to do so. 102 00:09:21.340 --> 00:09:26.700 I cannot deny that right to my fellow man without implying that I do not have that right 103 00:09:26.700 --> 00:09:30.180 for myself, and that I will not admit. 104 00:09:30.180 --> 00:09:36.600 The best that society can do in the circumstances is to see that one's way of pursuing happiness 105 00:09:36.600 --> 00:09:42.440 does not interfere with that of another's, and then to leave us all alone. 106 00:09:42.440 --> 00:09:46.100 That is the way I should like to see society organized. 107 00:09:46.100 --> 00:09:51.220 But it is not so organized, and I find its rules quite distasteful. 108 00:09:51.220 --> 00:09:57.100 In the first place, it has instituted a system of taxation whereby one-third of our earnings 109 00:09:57.100 --> 00:09:58.720 is confiscated. 110 00:09:58.720 --> 00:10:04.540 To the extent of such confiscation the pursuit of happiness is delimited or circumscribed, 111 00:10:04.540 --> 00:10:08.080 for one cannot spend what one does not have. 112 00:10:08.080 --> 00:10:14.160 And then the spending of this vast amount of money calls for a bureaucracy of proportions, 113 00:10:14.160 --> 00:10:19.920 and this monstrous bureaucracy, in order to justify its existence, pays out largesse to 114 00:10:19.920 --> 00:10:27.260 favored groups, who must conform to certain regulations and controls in order to get it. 115 00:10:27.260 --> 00:10:32.940 Now the people who have organized society in this way are known collectively as the 116 00:10:32.940 --> 00:10:33.940 state. 117 00:10:33.940 --> 00:10:39.400 In The Rise and Fall of Society, Chaturav wrote that the state consists of a number 118 00:10:39.400 --> 00:10:45.380 of people who, having somehow got hold of it, make use of the machinery of coercion 119 00:10:45.380 --> 00:10:51.460 to the end that they might pursue their version of happiness without respect to the discipline 120 00:10:51.460 --> 00:10:53.540 of the marketplace. 121 00:10:53.540 --> 00:10:59.660 In the beginning, he explains in Out of Step, the gang of people who later became the State 122 00:10:59.660 --> 00:11:05.160 were a band of free-booters, who had developed an appetite for other people's property and 123 00:11:05.160 --> 00:11:07.820 went after it with vim and vigor. 124 00:11:07.820 --> 00:11:13.780 Repeated visitations of this nature left the victims breathless, if not lifeless and propertyless 125 00:11:13.780 --> 00:11:15.060 to boot. 126 00:11:15.060 --> 00:11:19.700 So as men do when they have no other choice, they made a compromise. 127 00:11:19.700 --> 00:11:25.000 They hired one gang of thieves to protect them from other gangs, and in time the price 128 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:29.660 paid for such protection came to be known as taxation. 129 00:11:29.660 --> 00:11:34.900 The tax gatherers settled down in the conquered communities, possibly to make collections 130 00:11:34.900 --> 00:11:37.020 certain and regular. 131 00:11:37.020 --> 00:11:43.680 And as the years rolled on, a blend of cultures and bloods made of the two classes one nation. 132 00:11:43.680 --> 00:11:49.620 But the system of taxation remained after it had lost its original significance. 133 00:11:49.620 --> 00:11:55.620 Citizens and professors of economics, by deft circumlocution, turned tribute into fiscal 134 00:11:55.620 --> 00:11:59.220 policy and clothed it with social good. 135 00:11:59.220 --> 00:12:05.040 Nevertheless, the social effect of the system was to keep the citizenry divided into two 136 00:12:05.040 --> 00:12:09.100 economic groups, payers and receivers. 137 00:12:09.100 --> 00:12:15.480 Those who lived without producing became traditionalized as servants of the people and thus gained 138 00:12:15.480 --> 00:12:17.500 ideological support. 139 00:12:17.500 --> 00:12:23.900 They further entrenched themselves by acquiring sub-tax-collecting allies, that is, some 140 00:12:23.900 --> 00:12:31.020 of their group were granted subsidies, tariffs, franchises, patent rights, monopoly privileges 141 00:12:31.020 --> 00:12:33.620 of one sort or another. 142 00:12:33.620 --> 00:12:35.820 This is the state. 143 00:12:35.820 --> 00:12:38.180 These people are the state. 144 00:12:38.180 --> 00:12:43.540 And Frank Chaturov was very firm about how these people should be treated by self-respecting 145 00:12:43.540 --> 00:12:45.620 members of society. 146 00:12:45.620 --> 00:12:50.100 Having fixed in our minds the fact that the State consists of a number of people who are 147 00:12:50.100 --> 00:12:55.100 up to no good, he wrote, we should proceed to treat them accordingly. 148 00:12:55.100 --> 00:12:58.460 You do not genuflect before an ordinary loafer. 149 00:12:58.460 --> 00:13:01.160 Why should you pay homage to a bureaucrat? 150 00:13:01.160 --> 00:13:06.240 If a prominent politician hires a hall to make a speech, stay away. 151 00:13:06.240 --> 00:13:08.740 How should you regard a government building? 152 00:13:08.740 --> 00:13:15.100 You enter it under duress only, Chaturov replied, and you do not demean yourself by admiring 153 00:13:15.100 --> 00:13:29.380 Above all, you stay away from elections entirely. 154 00:13:29.380 --> 00:13:34.460 Why should a self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded in thievery? 155 00:13:34.460 --> 00:13:36.000 Chotorov demanded. 156 00:13:36.000 --> 00:13:38.880 For that is what one does when one votes. 157 00:13:38.880 --> 00:13:44.560 If it be argued that we must let bygones be bygones, see what we can do toward cleaning 158 00:13:44.560 --> 00:13:53.360 The answer is that it cannot be done. 159 00:13:53.360 --> 00:13:58.960 We have been voting for one good government after another, and what have we got? 160 00:13:58.960 --> 00:14:04.300 Perhaps the silliest argument, and yet the one invariably advanced when this succession 161 00:14:04.300 --> 00:14:10.220 of failures is pointed out, is that we must choose the lesser of two evils. 162 00:14:10.220 --> 00:14:13.580 Under what compulsion are we to make such a choice? 163 00:14:13.580 --> 00:14:16.260 Why not pass up both of them? 164 00:14:16.260 --> 00:14:22.400 The two evils that confront voters in a typical election, Chaturov pointed out, are not really, 165 00:14:22.400 --> 00:14:27.240 as they themselves insist, exemplars of opposing principles. 166 00:14:27.240 --> 00:14:34.660 For with principles, that is, moral or philosophic concepts, politics simply has nothing to do, 167 00:14:34.660 --> 00:14:39.620 except as convenient slogans in the promotion of its business, which is the acquisition 168 00:14:39.620 --> 00:14:40.880 of power. 169 00:14:40.880 --> 00:14:43.920 No politician stands for any principle. 170 00:14:43.920 --> 00:14:47.720 No politician even has an opinion of his or her own. 171 00:14:47.720 --> 00:14:53.120 The politician's opinion is the opinion of his following, and their opinion is shaped 172 00:14:53.120 --> 00:14:56.520 by what they believe to be in their own interest. 173 00:14:56.520 --> 00:15:01.760 This is why, in a typical American election, there is no difference in the political philosophies 174 00:15:01.760 --> 00:15:03.760 of the contending candidates. 175 00:15:03.760 --> 00:15:09.280 The only difference between the candidates is a matter of personality, or between Tweedle 176 00:15:09.280 --> 00:15:17.640 I see no good reason for voting, Chotirov wrote, and have refrained from doing so for 177 00:15:17.640 --> 00:15:19.720 about a half century. 178 00:15:19.720 --> 00:15:26.120 During that time, my more conscientious compatriots, including principally the professional politicians 179 00:15:26.120 --> 00:15:32.080 and their ward-healers, have conveniently provided me with presidents and with governments. 180 00:15:32.080 --> 00:15:37.760 They have put the nation into two major wars, and a number of minor ones, regardless of 181 00:15:37.760 --> 00:15:59.760 Laws have been passed, a whole library of them, and most of these laws, since they are not self-enforcing, have called for enforcement agencies, who have interminably interpreted the laws which created them, and thus have spawned more laws. 182 00:15:59.760 --> 00:16:13.260 The effect of these laws is a. to put restraints on the individual and b. to concentrate in the hands of the central government all the powers that once were assigned to local government. 183 00:16:13.260 --> 00:16:17.760 The states are now little more than administrative units of the national government. 184 00:16:17.760 --> 00:16:27.260 Political power has increased. Social power has waned. Would it have been different if I had voted? I don't think so. 185 00:16:27.260 --> 00:16:37.260 It is interesting to speculate, Chaturov wrote, on what would happen if, say, 75% of the electorate refrained from casting their ballots. 186 00:16:37.260 --> 00:16:48.260 More than that is out of the question, for at least a quarter of the voting public are concerned with what they can get for themselves from the election of this or that candidate. 187 00:16:48.260 --> 00:16:54.260 In the first place, the politicians would not take such a repudiation of their custodianship in good grace. 188 00:16:54.260 --> 00:16:55.260 Grace. 189 00:16:55.260 --> 00:17:00.220 We can take it for granted that they would undertake to make voting compulsory, bringing 190 00:17:00.220 --> 00:17:05.900 up the hoary argument that a citizen is morally obligated to do his duty. 191 00:17:05.900 --> 00:17:10.780 If military service can be made compulsory, why not political service? 192 00:17:10.780 --> 00:17:16.120 And so, if three-quarters of the citizenry were to refrain from voting, a fine would 193 00:17:16.120 --> 00:17:21.820 be imposed on first offenders, and more dire punishment meted out to repeaters. 194 00:17:21.820 --> 00:17:27.340 The politician must have the moral support of a goodly number of votes. 195 00:17:27.340 --> 00:17:32.700 But not only would the politicians undertake to counteract the revolutionary non-voting 196 00:17:32.700 --> 00:17:38.720 movement, but many of the citizenry having a vested interest in the proceeds of taxation 197 00:17:38.720 --> 00:17:43.640 would raise a hue and cry about the duty of the citizen to vote. 198 00:17:43.640 --> 00:17:48.580 The teachers in our tax-supported schools would lecture their pupils on the lack of 199 00:17:48.580 --> 00:17:51.460 of Public Spirit on the part of their parents, 200 00:17:51.460 --> 00:17:54.300 propaganda would emanate from tax-exempt 201 00:17:54.300 --> 00:17:58.280 elemosynary foundations and from large manufacturers 202 00:17:58.280 --> 00:18:02.360 dependent on government contracts, farmers' organizations 203 00:18:02.360 --> 00:18:04.840 with an eye to government largesse, 204 00:18:04.840 --> 00:18:07.900 veterans' societies asking for handouts, 205 00:18:07.900 --> 00:18:10.420 and particularly the bureaucracy, 206 00:18:10.420 --> 00:18:15.240 would denounce non-voting as a crime against society. 207 00:18:15.240 --> 00:18:20.920 Altogether, we would be told most emphatically that by not voting we would be turning the 208 00:18:20.920 --> 00:18:24.240 reins of government over to rascals. 209 00:18:24.240 --> 00:18:29.100 Probably so, but do we not regularly vote rascals out? 210 00:18:29.100 --> 00:18:34.880 And after we have ousted one set, are we not called upon to oust another crew at the next 211 00:18:34.880 --> 00:18:36.460 election? 212 00:18:36.460 --> 00:18:41.420 It seems that rascality is endemic in government. 213 00:18:41.420 --> 00:18:42.500 Don't vote. 214 00:18:42.500 --> 00:18:44.800 It only encourages them. 215 00:18:44.800 --> 00:18:48.600 That in essence was Frank Chaturav's message. 216 00:18:48.600 --> 00:18:54.560 But if we don't seek to use the vote to steer American society away from the direction in 217 00:18:54.560 --> 00:19:00.260 which it has been moving for all these many decades, what do we do instead? 218 00:19:00.260 --> 00:19:03.840 For Chaturav, that was a question very easily answered. 219 00:19:03.840 --> 00:19:06.720 We put our efforts into education. 220 00:19:06.720 --> 00:19:13.000 As to exactly how and why we do that, well, that's another podcast. 221 00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:20.000 This is Jeff Rigenback.