WEBVTT NOTE The Auctioneer 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.640 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.640 --> 00:00:12.840 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:12.840 --> 00:00:17.840 Joan Sampson was a depression baby, born in 1937. 4 00:00:17.840 --> 00:00:22.980 She died of cancer in 1976 when she was still in her thirties. 5 00:00:22.980 --> 00:00:30.160 In 1975, the year before her death, she published her only novel, The Auctioneer. 6 00:00:30.160 --> 00:00:36.420 This seems to be just about the sum total of what is publicly known regarding Joan Sampson. 7 00:00:36.420 --> 00:00:39.820 And that, I'm here to tell you, is a damn shame. 8 00:00:39.820 --> 00:00:44.760 Because that one novel of hers, The Auctioneer, is a real humdinger. 9 00:00:44.760 --> 00:00:49.380 And it would be nice to be able to tell you a bit more about its author before I go on 10 00:00:49.380 --> 00:00:54.100 to build the rest of my podcast around the novel itself. 11 00:00:54.100 --> 00:01:00.220 The novel is set in and around the small town of Harlow in central New Hampshire sometime 12 00:01:00.220 --> 00:01:02.540 in the early 1970s. 13 00:01:02.540 --> 00:01:08.580 The main characters are a farmer, John Moore, who seems to be in his late 40s and is just 14 00:01:08.580 --> 00:01:14.620 beginning to look a bit worn down by the hard life he's lived, his wife, Mim, short 15 00:01:14.620 --> 00:01:20.480 for Miriam, maybe ten years younger, still bursting with energy and utterly devoted to 16 00:01:20.480 --> 00:01:26.020 her husband, their four-year-old daughter Hilde, and their rural lifestyle, for all 17 00:01:26.020 --> 00:01:33.260 its austerities and deprivations, and John's mother, variously known as Mrs. Moore and 18 00:01:33.260 --> 00:01:39.300 Asmaw, who can no longer walk or even stand for very long without the aid of a pair of 19 00:01:39.300 --> 00:01:45.980 of Canes, and who spends her life on the living room couch watching TV and minding Hildy while 20 00:01:45.980 --> 00:01:51.540 her son and daughter-in-law do the work of both household and farm. 21 00:01:51.540 --> 00:01:57.860 One day the Moors have a visitor, Bob Gore, the local chief of police, or perhaps it would 22 00:01:57.860 --> 00:02:03.220 be more accurate to call him the entire one-man local police force. 23 00:02:03.220 --> 00:02:09.160 Gore is not taken quite as seriously by his neighbors in and around Harlow as he probably 24 00:02:09.160 --> 00:02:15.040 would like to be, at least if Mrs. Moore's comments may be relied upon as typical of 25 00:02:15.040 --> 00:02:17.920 the common view in those parts. 26 00:02:17.920 --> 00:02:23.640 Anything said by a gore, Ma tells her daughter-in-law at one point, you can put right out of your 27 00:02:23.640 --> 00:02:24.680 head. 28 00:02:24.680 --> 00:02:27.720 That was ever a topsy-turvy household. 29 00:02:27.720 --> 00:02:31.900 Weren't no one in it ever cared two whoops and thunder for the truth. 30 00:02:31.900 --> 00:02:36.800 Of course she also tells her daughter-in-law, in a different conversation on a different 31 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:43.440 Say, that for all his talk Bobby got the share of cents for the whole 19 of them Gore kids, 32 00:02:43.440 --> 00:02:49.300 and if he'd a lit out of Harlow like the rest, we'd have old Toby, Gore's elderly father, 33 00:02:49.300 --> 00:02:51.120 on the dole, sure. 34 00:02:51.120 --> 00:02:56.000 But she tells Gore himself to his face that you ain't got no more cents than the rest 35 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:58.840 of the Gores, and she ought to know. 36 00:02:58.840 --> 00:03:03.700 She's been acquainted with Bob Gore and his 18 brothers and sisters since they were students 37 00:03:03.700 --> 00:03:10.020 in her Sunday school class 30 or 40 years before. Nor does her son John think very highly 38 00:03:10.020 --> 00:03:16.500 of Bob Gore's prowess as a cop. All these seven years, John Moore says, he's been dreaming 39 00:03:16.500 --> 00:03:23.200 of having a real honest-to-gosh crime to solve, and now he's got a whopper, a stranglin', 40 00:03:23.200 --> 00:03:28.100 not to mention the break-in and the hold-up. And poor old Bobby ain't scared up so much 41 00:03:28.100 --> 00:03:30.460 as a suspect. 42 00:03:30.460 --> 00:03:36.660 That strangling Moore refers to is, as he himself notes, the only murder Harlow's had 43 00:03:36.660 --> 00:03:42.540 in a hundred years, and he believes it was committed by an outsider for sure. 44 00:03:42.540 --> 00:03:47.220 So's that other stuff, the break-in, the hold-up, most like. 45 00:03:47.220 --> 00:03:52.700 But as it turns out, Gore has paid them a visit on this Thursday afternoon in the early 46 00:03:52.700 --> 00:03:58.960 spring, hoping to convince them to donate something for an upcoming police benefit auction, 47 00:03:58.960 --> 00:04:25.960 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. 48 00:04:25.960 --> 00:04:31.600 A week later to the day, Thursday afternoon, Gore reappears. 49 00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:37.920 He reports that the auction was a great success, and since, if one's good, two's better, they've 50 00:04:37.920 --> 00:04:41.400 decided to have another one the very next weekend. 51 00:04:41.400 --> 00:04:46.800 Might John and Mim have any more rummage out under the barn they'd like to see hauled away? 52 00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:47.800 They do. 53 00:04:47.800 --> 00:04:50.000 Gore loads it up and hauls it off. 54 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:52.740 And a week later, he's back for more. 55 00:04:52.740 --> 00:04:58.620 It turns out the spark plug, the energy behind this sudden enthusiasm for police benefit 56 00:04:58.620 --> 00:05:05.420 auctions is the town's newest resident, Pearly Dunsmore, a professional auctioneer in his 57 00:05:05.420 --> 00:05:11.820 50s who recently bought the old Fox Mansion on the town square, the house where the strangling 58 00:05:11.820 --> 00:05:17.300 took place, the strangling that made the house available for purchase by an outsider like 59 00:05:17.300 --> 00:05:19.200 Pearly Dunsmore. 60 00:05:19.200 --> 00:05:25.160 Each successive auction is deemed a great success for the safety of Harlow and vicinity. 61 00:05:25.160 --> 00:05:31.000 It isn't long before Bob Gore has five armed deputies and a couple of new cruisers for 62 00:05:31.000 --> 00:05:32.480 his department. 63 00:05:32.480 --> 00:05:38.560 It isn't long before the auctions become regular weekly events, as do the Thursday afternoon 64 00:05:38.560 --> 00:05:41.020 visits to pick up donations. 65 00:05:41.020 --> 00:05:46.400 And it isn't long before the Moors have completely emptied out the space under their barn where 66 00:05:46.400 --> 00:06:03.640 For the weekly Thursday afternoon pickups are now being made by armed deputies, deputies 67 00:06:03.640 --> 00:06:09.720 who also pass along local news and gossip while they wait to carry this week's donation 68 00:06:09.720 --> 00:06:11.560 out to their truck. 69 00:06:11.560 --> 00:06:16.320 That's how the Moors learn about what happened to Caleb Tuttle, for example. 70 00:06:16.320 --> 00:06:21.600 Caleb Tuttle, who cut the auctioneer off earlier than any of the other locals. 71 00:06:21.600 --> 00:06:27.040 Caleb Tuttle, who, the Moors here, ain't allowed Purley Dunn's Moor so much as a broken 72 00:06:27.040 --> 00:06:33.520 chair for a month, and meets them with a shotgun now, if Purley or any of the deputies he seems 73 00:06:33.520 --> 00:06:39.800 to have hand-picked for Bob Gore to hire so much as show up on Tuttle land. 74 00:06:39.800 --> 00:06:45.500 What a great pity it was when a heart attack got Caleb Tuttle just as he was heading into 75 00:06:45.500 --> 00:06:48.020 the barn to do the milking. 76 00:06:48.020 --> 00:06:50.520 Something must have startled him. 77 00:06:50.520 --> 00:06:56.160 Then there was Emily Carroll, whose husband took a job as a deputy, but then quit and 78 00:06:56.160 --> 00:07:00.380 afterwards refused to contribute to any further auctions. 79 00:07:00.380 --> 00:07:07.320 The steering on Emily's car suddenly and mysteriously went out as she was driving on a curving rural 80 00:07:07.320 --> 00:07:10.400 Road, leaving her paralyzed. 81 00:07:10.400 --> 00:07:16.080 And there was Tad Oakes, who owned a couple of commercial greenhouses near the town square, 82 00:07:16.080 --> 00:07:18.320 in which he grew geraniums. 83 00:07:18.320 --> 00:07:24.360 He stopped donating to the auctions, and then, mysteriously, a dead elm tree fell across 84 00:07:24.360 --> 00:07:30.240 his two greenhouses and smashed them up pretty good, one of the deputies tells John Moore 85 00:07:30.240 --> 00:07:32.360 on a Thursday afternoon. 86 00:07:32.360 --> 00:07:37.820 They was lucky, you ask me, whole damn family was up to Concord at the time. 87 00:07:37.820 --> 00:07:43.800 To the surprise of some of the townsfolk and nearby farmers like John Moore, Oakes sold 88 00:07:43.800 --> 00:07:47.480 his place immediately and moved to Manchester. 89 00:07:47.480 --> 00:07:52.940 Dunsmore gave him cash on the barrel head, the deputy tells Moore. 90 00:07:52.940 --> 00:07:58.440 These items of gossip about local people who opted out of the weekly auctions sound all 91 00:07:58.440 --> 00:08:02.260 the more ominous because of the folks passing them along. 92 00:08:02.260 --> 00:08:07.300 For the deputies who now do the collecting for the auctions, and otherwise seem to spend 93 00:08:07.300 --> 00:08:13.500 their time running errands and doing odd jobs as needed for pearly dunsmoor, are a pretty 94 00:08:13.500 --> 00:08:18.340 troubling lot, local thugs and hooligans most of them. 95 00:08:18.340 --> 00:08:24.260 When Bob Gore rattles off the names of his first five new deputies early in the novel, 96 00:08:24.260 --> 00:08:28.740 John Moore frowns and comments, Tough Lot. 97 00:08:28.740 --> 00:08:34.340 His mother is more emphatic about one of the five, the one that ends up replacing Bob Gore 98 00:08:34.340 --> 00:08:36.280 as chief of police. 99 00:08:36.280 --> 00:08:41.540 This deputy, Maude describes as the rottenest egg this town's turned out since I was big 100 00:08:41.540 --> 00:08:43.380 enough to hear tell. 101 00:08:43.380 --> 00:08:49.940 So the people in and around Harlow, including the Moors, allow themselves to be intimidated. 102 00:08:49.940 --> 00:08:54.500 They keep on donating to the auctions, even after they've already got rid of all the 103 00:08:54.500 --> 00:09:02.100 the old junk they really don't mind giving away. Gradually, they donate almost everything they own. 104 00:09:02.100 --> 00:09:11.600 They find themselves, after all, in their own particular version of a situation confronted sooner or later by every victim of the protection racket. 105 00:09:11.600 --> 00:09:20.000 They can see no alternative to their present course. It seems to them that they must either flee Harlow under cover of darkness, 106 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:25.280 or stay and continue donating to the weekly police benefit auctions. 107 00:09:25.280 --> 00:09:31.400 It seems to them that there is no other way to ensure that an accident won't befall them, 108 00:09:31.400 --> 00:09:36.720 that they won't end up like Caleb Tuttle, Emily Carroll or Ted Oakes. 109 00:09:36.720 --> 00:09:43.080 Ultimately, the Moors are left sleeping on the floor on bare mattresses, all their furniture 110 00:09:43.080 --> 00:09:49.840 are gone, their tractor gone, their family heirlooms, as John later learns, now on display 111 00:09:49.840 --> 00:09:54.680 in Pearly Dunsmoor's fancy house on the town square. 112 00:09:54.680 --> 00:10:02.040 They're left, the Moors, without the wherewithal to run either their household or their farm. 113 00:10:02.040 --> 00:10:07.600 Ladies and gentlemen, behold the emergence of the state in a community that previously 114 00:10:07.600 --> 00:10:10.440 had only government. 115 00:10:10.440 --> 00:10:15.680 Not that Harlow was any kind of libertarian paradise before Purley Dunsmore appeared on 116 00:10:15.680 --> 00:10:16.680 the scene. 117 00:10:16.680 --> 00:10:22.320 But Albert J. Nock, whose usage I am following in this discussion, didn't maintain that 118 00:10:22.320 --> 00:10:25.000 government was always libertarian. 119 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:27.300 He maintained that it should be. 120 00:10:27.300 --> 00:10:33.720 But the main thing he maintained was that in contrast to the state, government originated 121 00:10:33.720 --> 00:10:40.420 in the common understanding and common agreement of society, and served to implement the common 122 00:10:40.420 --> 00:10:42.740 and Desire of Society. 123 00:10:42.740 --> 00:10:47.940 And that sounds to me like a fair description of Harlow and vicinity in the pre-Dunsmore 124 00:10:47.940 --> 00:10:49.560 era. 125 00:10:49.560 --> 00:10:55.620 The people of this area had, of course, grown up in a society in which it was assumed, and 126 00:10:55.620 --> 00:11:01.140 never really questioned, that certain functions that could just as easily have been handled 127 00:11:01.140 --> 00:11:07.900 by private companies belonged properly to government, not to private enterprise, grading 128 00:11:07.900 --> 00:11:13.140 Planning and repairing the local roads, for example, ploughing those same roads when they 129 00:11:13.140 --> 00:11:15.800 got clogged with snow in the winter. 130 00:11:15.800 --> 00:11:20.380 The people who lived in and around Harlow had grown up in a society in which it was 131 00:11:20.380 --> 00:11:26.820 assumed and never really questioned that such services should be financed by taxes, that 132 00:11:26.820 --> 00:11:31.280 is, by forcible seizure of the assets of local residents. 133 00:11:31.280 --> 00:11:36.420 But the town government, as depicted in the pages of the Auctioneer, would probably pass 134 00:11:36.420 --> 00:11:57.300 The Government of Harlow is extremely unintrusive. 135 00:11:57.300 --> 00:12:02.500 It makes few interventions of any kind into the lives of the individuals who make their 136 00:12:02.500 --> 00:12:32.500 The Theory of Money and Credit 137 00:12:32.500 --> 00:12:38.380 Presently the purpose of the new order of things in Harlow and vicinity, the order introduced 138 00:12:38.380 --> 00:12:44.900 and maintained by Purley Dunsmoor and his corps of loyal deputies, Purley and his deputies 139 00:12:44.900 --> 00:12:48.460 have brought a genuine state to Harlow. 140 00:12:48.460 --> 00:12:54.460 Like most modern states, it lulls its victims into acquiescence and acceptance by kicking 141 00:12:54.460 --> 00:13:00.220 back to them an insignificant percentage of what it stole from them in the first place, 142 00:13:00.220 --> 00:13:06.100 whereby painting itself in the eyes of its victims as some sort of benefactor, but like 143 00:13:06.100 --> 00:13:11.820 most statesmen historically, the ones running pearly Dunsmore's state are quite willing 144 00:13:11.820 --> 00:13:15.600 to squeeze their victims until they are extinguished. 145 00:13:15.600 --> 00:13:21.720 As Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott notes in his recent book The 146 00:13:21.720 --> 00:13:28.080 Art of Not Being Governed, given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively 147 00:13:28.080 --> 00:13:57.880 In the case of Harlow, it soon becomes clear that 148 00:13:57.880 --> 00:14:04.360 Dunsmore plans to bleed the existing population until it flees for its life. 149 00:14:04.360 --> 00:14:09.840 Then he plans to take the houses and farms those people used to own and sell them to 150 00:14:09.840 --> 00:14:16.480 new people, whom presumably he can bleed in turn, exploit to his profit. 151 00:14:16.480 --> 00:14:18.140 Does he bring it off? 152 00:14:18.140 --> 00:14:23.680 Or do the residents of Harlow and vicinity finally rise up against the state that has 153 00:14:23.680 --> 00:14:26.960 grown uninvited in their midst? 154 00:14:26.960 --> 00:14:33.480 Read The Auctioneer by Joan Sampson for yourself and find out. 155 00:14:33.480 --> 00:14:34.960 This is Jeff Rigenbach.