Vol. 1.5, June 1, 1969

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The Libertarian

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher	Washington Editor, Karl Hess	Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOL. 1, NO. V	JUNE 1, 1969	35¢

THE MOVEMENT GROWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onward and upward!

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

— Henry Clay, 1818

Letter From Washington

By Karl Hess

The Coming White Terror

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T TREAD ON ME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Peter Blake

FOR REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHO-CAPITALISM

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

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

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

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

— Walter Block

RECOMMENDED READING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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