The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
Joan Sampson was a depression baby, born in 1937.
She died of cancer in 1976 when she was still in her thirties.
In 1975, the year before her death, she published her only novel, The Auctioneer.
This seems to be just about the sum total of what is publicly known regarding Joan Sampson.
And that, I'm here to tell you, is a damn shame.
Because that one novel of hers, The Auctioneer, is a real humdinger.
And it would be nice to be able to tell you a bit more about its author before I go on
to build the rest of my podcast around the novel itself.
The novel is set in and around the small town of Harlow in central New Hampshire sometime
in the early 1970s.
The main characters are a farmer, John Moore, who seems to be in his late 40s and is just
beginning to look a bit worn down by the hard life he's lived, his wife, Mim, short
for Miriam, maybe ten years younger, still bursting with energy and utterly devoted to
her husband, their four-year-old daughter Hilde, and their rural lifestyle, for all
its austerities and deprivations, and John's mother, variously known as Mrs. Moore and
Asmaw, who can no longer walk or even stand for very long without the aid of a pair of
of Canes, and who spends her life on the living room couch watching TV and minding Hildy while
her son and daughter-in-law do the work of both household and farm.
One day the Moors have a visitor, Bob Gore, the local chief of police, or perhaps it would
be more accurate to call him the entire one-man local police force.
Gore is not taken quite as seriously by his neighbors in and around Harlow as he probably
would like to be, at least if Mrs. Moore's comments may be relied upon as typical of
the common view in those parts.
Anything said by a gore, Ma tells her daughter-in-law at one point, you can put right out of your
head.
That was ever a topsy-turvy household.
Weren't no one in it ever cared two whoops and thunder for the truth.
Of course she also tells her daughter-in-law, in a different conversation on a different
Say, that for all his talk Bobby got the share of cents for the whole 19 of them Gore kids,
and if he'd a lit out of Harlow like the rest, we'd have old Toby, Gore's elderly father,
on the dole, sure.
But she tells Gore himself to his face that you ain't got no more cents than the rest
of the Gores, and she ought to know.
She's been acquainted with Bob Gore and his 18 brothers and sisters since they were students
in her Sunday school class 30 or 40 years before. Nor does her son John think very highly
of Bob Gore's prowess as a cop. All these seven years, John Moore says, he's been dreaming
of having a real honest-to-gosh crime to solve, and now he's got a whopper, a stranglin',
not to mention the break-in and the hold-up. And poor old Bobby ain't scared up so much
as a suspect.
That strangling Moore refers to is, as he himself notes, the only murder Harlow's had
in a hundred years, and he believes it was committed by an outsider for sure.
So's that other stuff, the break-in, the hold-up, most like.
But as it turns out, Gore has paid them a visit on this Thursday afternoon in the early
spring, hoping to convince them to donate something for an upcoming police benefit auction,
John Moore is skeptical. If everybody in town was a deputy, there'd still be trouble, he grumbles, but he and Mim agree to contribute some rummage from the vast space underneath the barn that they've filled up with such stuff, stuff that could still be useful with a bit of mending, but they'll probably never get around to mending it.
A week later to the day, Thursday afternoon, Gore reappears.
He reports that the auction was a great success, and since, if one's good, two's better, they've
decided to have another one the very next weekend.
Might John and Mim have any more rummage out under the barn they'd like to see hauled away?
They do.
Gore loads it up and hauls it off.
And a week later, he's back for more.
It turns out the spark plug, the energy behind this sudden enthusiasm for police benefit
auctions is the town's newest resident, Pearly Dunsmore, a professional auctioneer in his
50s who recently bought the old Fox Mansion on the town square, the house where the strangling
took place, the strangling that made the house available for purchase by an outsider like
Pearly Dunsmore.
Each successive auction is deemed a great success for the safety of Harlow and vicinity.
It isn't long before Bob Gore has five armed deputies and a couple of new cruisers for
his department.
It isn't long before the auctions become regular weekly events, as do the Thursday afternoon
visits to pick up donations.
And it isn't long before the Moors have completely emptied out the space under their barn where
For the weekly Thursday afternoon pickups are now being made by armed deputies, deputies
who also pass along local news and gossip while they wait to carry this week's donation
out to their truck.
That's how the Moors learn about what happened to Caleb Tuttle, for example.
Caleb Tuttle, who cut the auctioneer off earlier than any of the other locals.
Caleb Tuttle, who, the Moors here, ain't allowed Purley Dunn's Moor so much as a broken
chair for a month, and meets them with a shotgun now, if Purley or any of the deputies he seems
to have hand-picked for Bob Gore to hire so much as show up on Tuttle land.
What a great pity it was when a heart attack got Caleb Tuttle just as he was heading into
the barn to do the milking.
Something must have startled him.
Then there was Emily Carroll, whose husband took a job as a deputy, but then quit and
afterwards refused to contribute to any further auctions.
The steering on Emily's car suddenly and mysteriously went out as she was driving on a curving rural
Road, leaving her paralyzed.
And there was Tad Oakes, who owned a couple of commercial greenhouses near the town square,
in which he grew geraniums.
He stopped donating to the auctions, and then, mysteriously, a dead elm tree fell across
his two greenhouses and smashed them up pretty good, one of the deputies tells John Moore
on a Thursday afternoon.
They was lucky, you ask me, whole damn family was up to Concord at the time.
To the surprise of some of the townsfolk and nearby farmers like John Moore, Oakes sold
his place immediately and moved to Manchester.
Dunsmore gave him cash on the barrel head, the deputy tells Moore.
These items of gossip about local people who opted out of the weekly auctions sound all
the more ominous because of the folks passing them along.
For the deputies who now do the collecting for the auctions, and otherwise seem to spend
their time running errands and doing odd jobs as needed for pearly dunsmoor, are a pretty
troubling lot, local thugs and hooligans most of them.
When Bob Gore rattles off the names of his first five new deputies early in the novel,
John Moore frowns and comments, Tough Lot.
His mother is more emphatic about one of the five, the one that ends up replacing Bob Gore
as chief of police.
This deputy, Maude describes as the rottenest egg this town's turned out since I was big
enough to hear tell.
So the people in and around Harlow, including the Moors, allow themselves to be intimidated.
They keep on donating to the auctions, even after they've already got rid of all the
the old junk they really don't mind giving away. Gradually, they donate almost everything they own.
They find themselves, after all, in their own particular version of a situation confronted sooner or later by every victim of the protection racket.
They can see no alternative to their present course. It seems to them that they must either flee Harlow under cover of darkness,
or stay and continue donating to the weekly police benefit auctions.
It seems to them that there is no other way to ensure that an accident won't befall them,
that they won't end up like Caleb Tuttle, Emily Carroll or Ted Oakes.
Ultimately, the Moors are left sleeping on the floor on bare mattresses, all their furniture
are gone, their tractor gone, their family heirlooms, as John later learns, now on display
in Pearly Dunsmoor's fancy house on the town square.
They're left, the Moors, without the wherewithal to run either their household or their farm.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold the emergence of the state in a community that previously
had only government.
Not that Harlow was any kind of libertarian paradise before Purley Dunsmore appeared on
the scene.
But Albert J. Nock, whose usage I am following in this discussion, didn't maintain that
government was always libertarian.
He maintained that it should be.
But the main thing he maintained was that in contrast to the state, government originated
in the common understanding and common agreement of society, and served to implement the common
and Desire of Society.
And that sounds to me like a fair description of Harlow and vicinity in the pre-Dunsmore
era.
The people of this area had, of course, grown up in a society in which it was assumed, and
never really questioned, that certain functions that could just as easily have been handled
by private companies belonged properly to government, not to private enterprise, grading
Planning and repairing the local roads, for example, ploughing those same roads when they
got clogged with snow in the winter.
The people who lived in and around Harlow had grown up in a society in which it was
assumed and never really questioned that such services should be financed by taxes, that
is, by forcible seizure of the assets of local residents.
But the town government, as depicted in the pages of the Auctioneer, would probably pass
The Government of Harlow is extremely unintrusive.
It makes few interventions of any kind into the lives of the individuals who make their
The Theory of Money and Credit
Presently the purpose of the new order of things in Harlow and vicinity, the order introduced
and maintained by Purley Dunsmoor and his corps of loyal deputies, Purley and his deputies
have brought a genuine state to Harlow.
Like most modern states, it lulls its victims into acquiescence and acceptance by kicking
back to them an insignificant percentage of what it stole from them in the first place,
whereby painting itself in the eyes of its victims as some sort of benefactor, but like
most statesmen historically, the ones running pearly Dunsmore's state are quite willing
to squeeze their victims until they are extinguished.
As Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott notes in his recent book The
Art of Not Being Governed, given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively
In the case of Harlow, it soon becomes clear that
Dunsmore plans to bleed the existing population until it flees for its life.
Then he plans to take the houses and farms those people used to own and sell them to
new people, whom presumably he can bleed in turn, exploit to his profit.
Does he bring it off?
Or do the residents of Harlow and vicinity finally rise up against the state that has
grown uninvited in their midst?
Read The Auctioneer by Joan Sampson for yourself and find out.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.