Vol. 11.1, January–February 1978

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME XI NUMBER 1	JAN.-FEB., 1978	US-ISSN0047-4517

The Last Word on Efronia

Edith Efron’s false and loathsome attack on myself and on the libertarian movement in her column in the February Reason has, predictably, stirred up a storm of response within and around the movement. My own reply appeared in last month’s Lib. Forum (“L’Affaire Efron”.) The April issue of Libertarian Review includes an editorial reply plus an excellent critique of Efron by David Ramsay Steele, in which Steele applies Efron’s own criterion of “news twisting” which she had used to attack CBS, and demonstrates, point-by-point, how Miss Efron employs the very devices which she denounces so indignantly when used by people she doesn’t like.

Reason’s May issue now publishes a selection of what its editors presumably consider the best comments of both sides of the Efron affair. I would urge Lib. Forum readers to read all the letters and judge for themselves the quality of the insight, knowledge, and analysis displayed by the writers on each side of the question. I don’t think I am being merely biassed when I say that, in my judgement, the anti-Efron writers display almost invariably a high level of knowledge and acumen on the libertarian movement and on all the theoretical and factual issues at stake; whereas the pro-Efron writers are almost invariably dumb and boobish. Perhaps in this very fact lies a clue as to why, as several of the writers point out, the anarcho-capitalists won hands down the famous “anarchist-minarchist” debate.

Let us make a brief survey of the Reason letters. On the anti-Efron side, my own letter simply rebuts the egregious falsehoods “reported” about me by Miss Efron. Karl Hess justly rebuts Efron’s vicious smear that Karl “now calls himself a Maoist.” Karl and I have our political disagreements, but to assert that he is a “Maoist”, much less that he “calls himself” one (where, Ms. intrepid reporter?) is an irresponsible calumny that can only be found, as he deftly points out, “in the intelligence files of the FBI, parts of which I (and perhaps Miss Efron) have recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” Karl states that he regards Efron’s charge as an “actual libel” and that, “if actionable, I shall certainly take the advantage of Miss Efron’s own ethics and seek redress from state law.” Touche!”

Other letters, all of them first rate, are written by Thomas Avery, David J. Dawson, Jule R. Herbert, Jr., Aaron Leonard, Tom G. Palmer, Ann Kotell, George H. Smith, and James L. Burns. Tom Avery points out that, contrary to the smears of Efron, libertarian feminists and libertarians for gay rights have always made clear that they were not endorsing the coercive aspects of those movements. David Dawson, as limited government and as “constitutional Republican” as Efron could wish, points out the necessity and success of himself and other anti-draft activists working with the Left against conscription in the late ‘60’s Apparently no one pulled any mythical guns on Dawson!

Aaron Leonard’s effective letter quotes Efron against herself: citing her own previous Reason column (November, 1977) defending alliances with “fellow travellers”. He also points out that “As Michael Emerling reminds us, the reason the debate was discontinued in the first place was that the anarchists won! If Ms. Efron would like, I am sure any number of anarchists are willing to refresh her memory on that point.” Jule Herbert’s hard-hitting letter defends Inquiry and takes a neat swipe at Reason by saying that “One would have hoped that she (Efron) would have at least waited until . . . (Inquiry) had appeared before reading it out of the movement. The first five of its issues . . . have not had anything as distasteful as, say, an interview with Bill Simon in which he tells us that government policy on gold has nothing to do with inflation or that ‘obviously’ government has a responsibility to help those people who cannot help themselves.” Concluding with a comparison of Libertarian Review and Reason, Herbert notes: “The difference is this: While Reason is telling us that non-zoning is great in Houston (at least as long as strict building codes are maintained), Childs is exhorting us to throw the tea in the harbor. I can stand both, but I can not help feeling that some self-styled libertarians would be happier with Reagan’s Citizens for the Republic.”

Ann Kotell denounces the Efron article as unworthy of Reason, and states that “Efron’s reasoning errors were easy to take compared to her tone, the name calling, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, unbacked assertions, discussions of other people’s discriminatory faculties, motivations and emotions . . .” Implicitly recalling Efron’s past in the Objectivist movement, Miss Kotell points to the Objectivists’ failure to make more headway as a function of their propensity to condemn anyone who disagreed with their position. George Smith’s letter is a personal defense of myself which is too embarrassingly favorable for me to summarize in any more detail.

James L. Burns points out that, contrary to Efron’s righteous indignation, the United States government was a mass murderer of both Americans and Vietnamese in Vietnam. He also attacks her “libertarian” affirmation of a “national culture” as collectivist. Burns’ most effective point is to cite the fact that the very Timothy Leary, whom Efron inaccurately smeared as “drug-soaked” was interviewed by Reason itself last year. “Does this mean that Reason has crawled into bed with the New Left?” Burns might have added that, if so, why did Efron leave Reason out of her collection of libertarian hate objects?

Bill Birmingham gets in a couple of characteristic rapier-like thrusts at Miss Efron. First, that he is “grateful to Ms. Efron for proving that there is no such thing as unprintable rubbish”. Second, in his own lively “Brickbats” column in the same issue, Birmingham points to the falsehood involved in the common right-wing smear against Counterspy Magazine in the affair of the murder of Greek CIA station chief Richard Welch. He concludes that “Reason was one of those (publications) manipulated (by the CIA). Edith Efron regurgitated the Counterspy myth whole in February, 1978, the better to revile (sight unseen) Inquiry magazine.”

We come now to the proponents of the Efron piece (Tom Palmer’s anti-Efron letter will be further discussed below.) Most of them are of the “God (or Rand) bless you, Miss Efron, for uncovering the dangerous anarchists-Communists” variety, and I shall not mention their names in order to protect the guilty. (This must be my month for charity rather than retribution). They lack only in explicitness the general world outlook satirically portrayed by Estelle Epstein (see below), except that they are all too serious.

That leaves us very little to discuss. Mark Tier unfortunately swallows Efron’s disgraceful distortions of my own views, but he’s an anarchist, and therefore does not make a very comfortable ally for her. Valerie Valrejean also accepts all of Efron’s malicious fantasies about myself, from the gun-in-the-ribs hokum to the idiotic idea that I somehow counsel libertarians to ally themselves always with the Left, regardless of circumstances. When she exhorts libertarians to “concentrate on building our own principled, vocal and aggressive” movement, she is unwittingly repeating my own views. If such a movement is being “obstructed” by anyone, it is not by Ms. Valrejean’s mythical “group of pragmatic anarchists”, but by the likes of Miss Efron, who would subordinate the movement to statists like Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, et al. That’s being principled?

Mrs. Shirley Gottlieb’s letter really belongs in the “Rand bless you, Miss Efron” category, but she does make a few points that are inadvertently worth commenting on. By whining about the defeats suffered within the Libertarian Party by John Hospers, William Westmiller and their minarchist faction, Mrs. Gottlieb unwittingly gives the lie to the Efron charge that all debate has ceased within the libertarian monolith. Unconsciously humorous in her Nixonian inveighing on a mythical “silent majority” within the Libertarian Party, Mrs. Gottlieb misses the whole point by petulantly urging the anarcho-capitalists within the LP to change its name to the “Anarchist Party”. No one in the LP has ever had the intention of converting the party into an anarchist party. The LP is a coalition of anarchists and minarchists who aim to roll back the State, as quickly as we can, to the minarchists’ own idea of a truly minimal, laissez-faire government. Once we get to that demi-Paradise, the LP can then have it out fiercely within its own ranks as to whether or not to press on to the full Paradisaical condition. Why the minarchists, if they are truly such, and if they are not simply Birchites or Reaganites in sheep’s clothing, should gripe so bitterly about this situation passeth my understanding.

Paul Beaird’s letter is a centimeter above his “Rand bless you, Miss Efron” colleagues, but that is more than compensated by an hysterical tone that almost matches Efron herself. His approving summary that “You (Efron) accuse Rothbard and associates (?) of not being open with us about their cooperation with the New Left, whom they intend to take over,” neatly capsulizes at least three major errors in a single sentence, which even La Efron, at her best, is hard put to match. First, neither myself nor any of my so-called associates have engaged in any secret activity, much less some kind of secret deals with the New Left; second, there is no more New Left, and hasn’t been for about seven years; and third, if there were any New Left, nobody has ever intended to “take them over”, whatever in hell that may mean. Nor, if there were a New Left, would my goal be, as Mr. Beaird puts it, “Persuading the New Left to libertarianism.” If such were my objective, it would indeed be folly.

To put it for what seems like the 785th time: the primary objective of any libertarian alliance with any non-libertarian group—be it New Left, Old Left, New Old Left, Right, Center, None of the Above, or whatever— is to exert maximum leverage in advancing specific goals that happen to be common to both libertarians and the group in question (e.g. repeal of the draft, abolition of a property tax, abolition of a drug law). That’s it. If any member of such group,—Right, Left, Center, or whatever—should also get converted wholly or partially to libertarianism by working with libertarians and seeing the consistency of our position, why that’s great. And certainly no opportunities in that direction should be passed up. But the primary goal is leverage for common aims. Also, there is nothing at all covert or sneaky about this alliance process. I must confess a growing impatience here; it seems to me that my proposed strategy is such simple common sense that I find it increasingly difficult to regard such outpourings as Beaird’s and Efron’s as honest misunderstandings of my position.

Beaird then drifts off into an irrelevant calling attention to his pro-government article in Option. He seems to think that he has scored a significant point against anarcho-capitalists by triumphantly demonstrating that they don’t believe that a criminal’s consent should be required in order to punish him for a crime. Actually, this argument is even irrelevant to the archism-anarchism debate. Do you have to be an anarchist to conclude that a murderer can be punished without having to obtain his consent to the process? Fortunately, there are very few archists whom maintain Beaird’s position.

Beaird concludes characteristically by exhorting the reader to study both minarchism and anarchism “with your own mind”. Can you do it with someone else’s mind? Is that what I am supposed to be advocating?

But Beaird, too, willy nilly gives the lie to the Efron charge that the anarchist-minarchist debate has been stifled within the movement. He does so by citing, not only his own article, but also the replies to it by Roy Childs in Option and by Bill Evers in the Journal for Libertarian Studies.

Finally we have Tibor Machan’s missive. While it is true that Machan hails Efron’s “stirring” and “crucial” contribution, he characteristically spends most of his letter tooting his own horn, citing his various writings to show that the famous debate had not died. The rest of his letter exhorts Efron and her fellow thinkers to print their stuff in the mainstream magazines. Yeah, right; I can just see the countless millions of readers of TV Guide flipping through its pages, and stopping, fascinated, to read La Efron’s smears against myself or Roy Childs.

There were a number of other excellent letters sent in reply to Efron, but which Reason did not see fit to print. Some of them also came into our hands, and we are publishing a selection of them below. With this selection, we close the books on the Efron Affair, with the hope that Miss Efron will confine herself to her more general inaccuracies in the future, and that her career of personal vilification of libertarians is now at an end.

A word on a couple of the letters printed below. Tom Palmer’s letter was published in Reason with two important concluding paragraphs omitted. We are publishing the missing paragraphs. In the published parts of his letter, Palmer attacked Efron’s “outpouring of invective” as a “very poor and shoddy display of professional ethics”, in attacking a magazine, Inquiry, that she had never seen; Palmer also denounces Efron’s “lengthy distortion of facts” and “unsupported innuendoes.” More specifically, Palmer makes an important corrective point to Efron’s broadside charges: namely that Inquiry “does not purport to be a libertarian magazine, though libertarians are involved with it in various ways.” Rather, Inquiry is a magazine that should be of great interest to libertarians, as “it has the potential to be one of America’s finest forums for investigative journalism, maintaining a probing and iconoclastic view of government machinations.” Palmer points out that the early issues of Inquiry contained “truly searching and revealing analyses” of Soviet and American psychiatry, gun control, the Panama Canal controversy “the need to deregulate the professions”, etc. I might add that every one of the positions taken in these articles has been either explicitly libertarian or consistent with the libertarian position. Palmer adds that “Ms. Efron was right in maintaining that Inquiry is far from ‘reverent’ about the CIA, FBI, IRS, Pentagon et al., but for reasons which should be obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers. As a journalist, Ms. Efron should understand better how a magazine works. To list someone on a brochure as a writer does not imply that he exercises editorial control. Ms. Efron’s partially inaccurate and unfair blasts at Marcus Raskin seem to have little relevance to what I have seen of Inquiry so far.”

I would add this comment: In her attack on Inquiry, Efron engaged in a typical right-wing tactic by confining her critique to the people who might be writing for the magazine, and not at all to the contents of the articles therein. There are only two explanations for such base conduct: (a) to enable the writer to engage in free-swinging guilt-by-association charges that make Joe McCarthy seem like a careful and cautious historian; and/or (b) that Efron and her fellow-right wingers are not competent to judge or assess the content of such articles, and that they know darn well that that is the case. I suspect that in La Efron’s case, it’s a combination of both.

The letters below, not published in Reason, by the Misses Estelle Epstein and Letitia Grant are satires. But, it should be noted that the paranoid views of the world held in jest by Epstein and Grant are only slightly more absurd than the outlook, seriously held, by Efron and by many of her supporters.

From . . . Monica Swift
The State the Enemy

I must defend Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs and Williamson Evers against the unjust attacks made by Edith Efron in your Viewpoint.

A Libertarian anarchist believes in his right to his private property, which includes his body and life. A Libertarian’s resentment and “lack of reverence” toward the State has been created by the State itself by its continuous interference with this right.

Has not the State confiscated our monies and sacrificed lives to create a powerful USSR, which Ms. Efron so abhors? Was the State’s attitude similar to those of the French under Hitler, who saw any alliance acceptable, provided the goal is to destroy the (another) State? These are Ms. Efron’s words and are Orwellian in concept.

It is after all this State which actually uses everyday force against the individual – not the leftists, the pathetic Timothy Learys, Hustler magazine or even Mao Tse-Tung’s followers.

Would Ms. Efron approve of a limited government or mini-State that can dictate an interventionist foreign policy and back it up with a military might and enforce that policy at home and abroad? No doubt she would approve of a law that would confiscate her fellow citizens’ monies to subsidize the neutron bomb, thus sparing property, but destroying the State’s enemy, whoever he may be at the time; or making it a national policy to finance Israel’s economy and military expansion and leave the Arabs to tender Israeli mercies.

The above are just some of the many reasons why a Libertarian cannot show “outraged love” for the State.

My suggestion to Ms. Efron is to experiment with the concepts “free market”, “voluntarism” and “non-intervention”, the back-bones of Libertarian thought, and refrain from attacking individuals dedicated to Liberty.

Tempe, Arizona

From . . . Joseph R. Peden
Nation Not State

The provocative and ill-informed attack by Edith Efron on anarchist libertarians will undoubtedly elicit much spirited debate. As the editor of the Libertarian Forum was identified specifically and linked with many different charges against the anarchists, may I be permitted to challenge and disavow at least one of these accusations.

In several places Ms. Efron says that the anarchist libertarians hate the nation and the State. We do indeed hate the State, with just cause, we believe. But, speaking for the anarchists associated with the Libertarian Forum, edited by Dr. Murray Rothbard, whom Ms. Efron names as leader of the offending anarchists, I deny categorically that any fairminded reader of our publication could say we hate any nation.

Nations are natural communities based upon the sharing consciously, by individuals of a variety of common attributes or experiences which they prize and which serve to create an affectionate social bond among them. Such shared attributes may include a common language, folkways, geographical setting, historical experiences, spiritual, intellectual or social values. In all instances, by habit or conscious choice, nations are born, live, die and are even resurrected. Nations exist prior to the State, apart from the State, and have only an accidental, not a necessary relationship to the State. It is true that nations, especially in the last two centuries, have more and more turned to the formation of a State structure as a means of protecting their nationhood from the cultural aggressiveness of imperial States. This has been more often than not an act of desperation in the face of policies of national genocide by more powerful, aggressive and Statist nationalities.

Now the Libertarian Forum has been a consistent champion of the rights of nations to be free of persecution by other nations or imperial States. We have expressed editorially our sympathy with the aspirations of the French Canadians, the Puerto Ricans, American Indians, Biafrans, Bengalis, Welsh, Scots and Irish, Bretons and Corsicans, Basques and Catalans, for national independence and rights to free cultural expression. Nor have we been intimidated to exclude the Palestinian Arabs from our sympathy for their rights to their own lands and cultural and political freedom. We wish them the same rights and national freedom enjoyed by the Israelis. While we always question the wisdom and morality of nations seeking to establish State structures, we do not believe it any more sinful for one nation to seek such ends than another.

But if the case for the anarchist position on nation has been distorted, as I contend Ms. Efron has done, her attack on anarchists as unpatriotic deserves some elucidation also.

Leaving aside the old truism that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels”, I believe that anarchists generally are great patriots in the sense that patriotism is an emotional commitment to those attributes or settings consciously perceived as valuable by those who compose the nation. Now any familiarity with living anarchists ought to tell Ms. Efron that they are just as patriotic as others, but the object of their patriotism may be more local—the village, the town or city, the region and its particular dialect, customs and artifacts. Anarchists hate the forces of standardizations and centralization and any kind of collective which submerges the particular and eccentric. The nation-State thus represents to them the destruction of all the diversity which the anarchist cherishes. Thus he can never be a patriot of the nation-State variety who usually gets his emotional kicks by contemplating the destruction of individuality and diversity in the interest of the unity and power of a single nation-State. Like Belloc who called himself a Sussex patriot, or Thoreau whose emotional loyalty found fulfillment at Walden Pond, the anarchist has a local patriotism as does any man of sensibility. We contemporary anarchists are patriots of natural communities, not worshippers of abstract, amoral, unnatural entities called States.

From . . . Tom G. Palmer
Hoopla over Israel

. . . . . . Besides Irving Kristol, who has penned some excellent attacks on egalitarianism as well as numerous dismal attacks on statism, who else among Ms. Efron’s new-conservative friends would she include among the friends of liberty? Surely not the “queer-baiting” Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, the foremost neo-conservative journal, who recently blamed World War Two on the English being “homosexual” and who has consistently defended statism, albeit a more “efficient” version of the welfare-warfare state. The neo-conservatives hold a hodgepodge of pro and anti-liberty views, and I suspect that the primary reason that Ms. Efron embraces them with such loud hosannahs is their mutual hoopla over the socialist, militarist, religious state of Israel. If Ms. Efron wants to send money to defend a theocratic state (how quaint for an advocate of “reason, science, technology, individualism,” etc.) she should be free to do so, but her stance is hardly appropriate to one sincerely interested in liberty.

Ms. Efron’s defense of a “serious metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical base” is rather misplaced, along with her “reopen the anarchist-minarchist debate”, I’m afraid. While such matters are important to libertarians and libertarianism, they have no place in a political context. Specifically, in the Libertarian Party to denounce someone as “slovenly” or “gutter-like” because he does not wholeheartedly embrace Ms. Efron’s metaphysical Weltanschauung and is, say, a Kantian in epistemology, would be ridiculous. Such matters as these, along with the “anarchists-minarchist debate” should be threshed out in journals and magazines, not in the manner Ms. Efron imperiously hands down from on high (hate mail to libertarian patrons, denunciations, etc.) . . . . .

St. John’s College Annapolis, Maryland

From . . . Danny Shapiro
Apologize!

It would probably take a ten-page essay to straighten out fully all the errors in Edith Efron’s column, so I will limit my remarks to three major points: the attack on Libertarian Review, the attack on the anarchists in the movement, and the question of our putative neo-conservative allies.

Ms. Efron claims that since Roy Childs took over as editor of Libertarian Review it has become dependent upon the counter-culture for its social themes, and contains a heavy dose of “leftist” articles which are designed to “expose industry as corrupt and to render America militarily impotent.” They are also, according to her, brimming with hatred. Ms. Efron gives only one piece of concrete evidence for her claims, namely Walter Grinder’s alleged endorsement of the works of historian Sidney Lens, an anti-capitalist leftist; but this evidence can easily be shown to be no evidence at all. First, Grinder recommends one book, not the works of Lens. Second, Efron conveniently forgets to quote Grinder who says, referring to the revisionist works he is recommending: “most of these works have been written by historians who have . . . . . . leftist biases,” Grinder calls for free-market historians to take the facts uncovered by the revisionists and interpret them in the light of libertarian ideology, a process he calls “revising the revisionists.” Grinder does not recommend Lens’ book because he is a left-winger opposed to capitalism and hostile to the United States; he recommends it because he believes it contains a great deal of historical truth. Unless Ms. Efron plans to assert some competence in judging Lens’ work to be lacking in historical truth, then we must apply her own strictures to herself! Ms. Efron admits that we should “acknowledge truths if they are spoken by the Left.” If so, why can’t he do the same??

Not only does Ms. Efron’s one piece of evidence not make her case against L. R., but a survey of L. R.’s articles conclusively demonstrates that Efron’s belief that a hateful, counter-culture anti-American leftism is creeping into L. R. is totally without foundation. Let us examine the first five issues of L. R. under Childs’ reign (July through November 1997). There have been a total of 24 articles in those issues, 18 of which would have to be considered unequivocally libertarian in content or concern. These are:the Rothbard article attacking Carter’s energy proposals; an article by Roger MacBride outlining how controversial political ideas are repressed in America by federal campaign laws and other devices; a brief critique by Ralph Raico of historian Henry Steele Commager’s love of statist Presidents; Charles Koch’s case for a free market in energy; an interview with Friedrich Hayek; Rothbard’s demolition of the myth of democratic socialism; John Kennedy Taylor’s discussion of the attack on the First Amendment under the guise of fighting pornography; Roy Childs’ slashing critique of Kevin Phillips’ program for censorship of the media; Lawrence White’s analysis of how the city government killed New York City; Don Lavoie’s examination of socialism’s retreat from radicalism; Henry Ferns’ plea for a new radicalism in Britain to combat socialism; Tom Palmer and Tom Avery’s summary of the 1977 LP convention; Jeff Riggenbach on why libertarianism so rarely appears in the media; Murray Rothbard on the tax revolt in Illinois; and David Brudnoy’s expose of the American Spectator’s obsession with attacking homosexuals.

This leaves a grand total of six articles in five issues which could possibly have raised Efron’s fire: Joan Kennedy Taylor’s piece on feminism; Seymour Melman (of SANE) on the war economy; Earl Ravenal on the relationship between liberty and “national security”; Joseph Stromberg’s case for a non-interventionist foreign policy; Richard Barnet’s dissection of the Committee on the Present Danger; and Murray Rothbard’s attack on Reason’s defense issue of July 1977.

Taylor’s piece gives qualified praise to the feminist movement a la Betty Friedan for articulating the libertarian value of the individual leading his/her own life; this could hardly be considered a sop to leftist counter-culturists.

Melman’s piece explains how the US has been transformed from a private capitalist economy to a war economy, that the latter is largely responsible for America’s growing economic inefficiencies and capital formation problems, and its justification derives from erroneous Keynesian economics. This is a profoundly libertarian piece; rather than being an attack on business it demonstrates how state intervention, whether for “domestic” or “foreign” purposes, distorts genuine capitalism. This analysis can be used to show liberals that their dislike of military spending is inconsistent with their Keynesianism, and to show conservatives that their love of such spending is inconsistent with their alleged commitment to the free market.

Ravenal’s article explains how the US government’s obsession with national security and controlling the destinies of other nations leads to assaults on liberty; once again, a libertarian, not a hatefilled or crudely “leftist” analysis.

Stromberg’s article explains how libertarianism implies non-interventionism, and that the latter is part of the America tradition— sounds real real counter-culture, hate-oriented, anti-American, doesn’t it?

The Barnet article soberly evaluates the unfounded claims of the Committee on the Present Danger and shows no evidence of a careening hatred for America; rather it is motivated by a desire to deflate the scare tactics which could precipitate nuclear war. Of course Barnet committed the apparently ultimate sin of being a co-founder of the left-wing think-tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, but again we must cite Efron’s statement that a leftist may very well speak the truth.

Lastly. Rothbard’s piece argues that non-interventionism is a logical outgrowth of libertarianism; the only “leftist” statement I could find within it was the historical claim that the USA, not the USSR, is the major nuclear threat today. Unless Ms. Efron plans to give historical evidence that Rothbard is wrong, she should realize it is the height of chutzpah to claim that a denunciation of America’s foreign policy is motivated by hate and designed to sap America’s military strength.

Thus, after a thorough analysis of the first five issues of Childs’ editorship, we find no evidence whatsoever (!!!) for Ms. Efron’s vitriolic claims. We must sadly conclude that she is guilty of falsehoods and distortions; whether this was intentional or not one cannot be sure. However, since presumably Efron read L. R. before writing her article, one is tempted to believe that her campaign of falsification is in part a device to make libertarians shy away from engaging in radical anti-interventionist critiques of America’s foreign policy, then one must protest that this is not reverence but a mind closed to the un-libertarian nature of America’s foreign interventionism.

Efron’s anti-anarchist polemic is on a par with her attack on L. R.: inaccurate and unfair. Rather than a huge gulf separating anarchists and limited governmentalists—the former, according to Efron, being motivated by a burning desire to destroy everything American—the differences between the two sides are quite small. Tibor Machan, in a reply to a letter to the editor in the September 1977 issue of Reason, noted that “my own and Rothbard’s position (on government) aren’t that different,” and this statement is merely a specific instance of the general state of the debate. In fact, in a recent debate between Professors Jeffrey Paul and Eric Mack on this issue at the American Association for the Philosophical Study of Society, it was hard to tell if the two sides really disagreed!

It is ridiculous to think that the small differences separating anarchists from minarchists would be such that the former were committed to a virulent anti-Americanism; if this were so, why are there Objective anarchists? I urge all open-minded readers of Reason to examine the writings of leading anarchists like Rothbard and Childs to see if they are simplistic, sympathetic with the counter-culture, and hostile to all aspects of American culture, as Efron claims. Even a cursory reading will show such claims to be laughable.

Ms. Efron’s commitment to misreading and distorting facts apparently doesn’t apply only to libertarians she disagrees with; it extends also to the neo-conservatives, whom she hasn’t read very well. There is no way Kristol et al. could be considered our allies, but since I have an article analyzing and critiquing their views in the February and March issues of L. R.—an article I urge Ms. Efron to read, should she deign to pick up that journal—I will limit myself to three brief points. (1) Kristol supports censorship on the grounds that our “quality of life” needs improving, and has applauded the Prohibitionist movement for having a good conscience. (See On the Democratic Idea in America). In short, Kristol is one of those on the Right who believe that the State should help to inculcate virtue. That’s an ally? (2) Kristol and other neo-conservatives are committed to welfare statism: they want the welfare state to be efficient and fiscally sound, but they have no objection to unemployment insurance, national health care, welfare and social security. (see American Spectator, November 1977). (3) Most important, the neo-conservatives are not fighters for capitalism and liberty. Their emphasis is on “practicality” not justice. Thus, they almost never invoke individual rights and their qualified support of capitalism is not based on moral grounds. Their main interest is not in expanding liberty so much as opposing extreme forms of statism like affirmative action or the push for “equality of result.”

In conclusion, I call upon Ms. Efron to apologize to Childs and the other libertarians she has smeared; this way we can erase from the record the most vicious piece I have ever seen in a libertarian journal since I became a libertarian five years ago.

Department of Philosophy
University of Minnesota

From . . . Joan Kennedy Taylor
L. R. Not Leftist

I quarrel with the implication at the end of Edith Efron’s Viewpoint (February, 1978) that Libertarian Review hides its libertarian values and alliances, does not wish to publish articles by those who support a limited-government libertarian position, or wishes to make an alliance with the Left. Any publication with the word “Libertarian” in its title is hardly hiding its light under a bushel, and the values of both civil liberties and economic freedom are constantly being reiterated and explained in LR’s pages.

For those not familiar with the magazine, I would like to mention that the first four issues under Roy Childs’ editorship contain not one but two negative analyses of democratic socialism, an interview with F. A. Hayek (a constitutional republican, in Miss Efron’s words), an article by Roger MacBride (a constitutional republican), a twentieth-anniversary tribute to Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (a constitutional republican) written by John Hospers (a constitutional republican). And a favorable review of Affirmative Discrimination by Nathan Glazer (a “neoliberal” I written by me (a constitutional republican).

There are also articles and editorials advocating such “conservative” positions as a free market in oil, the abolition of the minimum wage, the legalization of Laetrile, and the study of Austrian economics, all of which, for all I know, may have been written by anarchists, but certainly not with an eye toward conciliating the Left.

Since it is the articles on “social themes” as distinguished from “economic and political content” that Miss Efron feels to be “dependent upon the counter-culture” in these first few issues, and since I am the author of the only such articles in these first few issues, I would like to put forth my view of constitutional republicanism.

I happen to be a limited-government libertarian who is primarily interested in the study of the Constitution of the United States as it actually exists and is interpreted. Some Reason readers may have read an article of mine on the constitutional compromise over slavery, in Tibor Machan’s The Libertarian Alternative. For the first three issues of the new LR. I have written articles on feminism, pornography, and affirmative action—counter-culture issues all—or are they?

My feminism piece was an analysis of Betty Friedan’s growing awareness, as she chronicled it in her latest book, that Marxists and Maoists are against what she considers to be true feminism, that is, individualism and social freedom for both men and women; and her discovery that she is (in Miss Efron’s words) a “reverent revolutionary.” My piece on pornography was a discussion of the way in which the First Amendment has been interpreted by recent Supreme Courts and a defense of the absolutist position regarding it: this is the only constitutional right supported in absolute terms by members of the legal community today. My review of Nathan Glazer reported his brilliant legal analysis of what is wrong with affirmative action in busing, jobs, and housing, and his conclusion that “group rights” do not exist.

I consider that the most important point that I, as a constitutional republican, can make is that rights are an absolute that should limit government power in a Constitution. The next most important point is the libertarian corollary that human beings have both personal and economic rights. Unfortunately, a student of the American Constitution finds little in it to support absolute economic rights, and can only point out what should exist in the area. Therefore, discussions of rights as they exist in the Constitution tend to seem to be left wing. This may also explain why there are no voices today on the conservative side of the legal spectrum for absolute restraints on government power. Conservatives in law tend to support strict Construction, states rights, and a “balancing test” in which individual rights are weighed against compelling government interests.

Rights are absolute and indivisible; libertarians cannot afford to sanction such a balancing test, or the liberal-conservative split that says the right to run a business is only a right-wing right, while the right to view pornography or take drugs is only a left-wing right. This view allows each side to advocate curtailing other people’s rights for the “good” of society.

I do not claim that a fascination with legal issues is a necessary hallmark of constitutional republicanism; this is my particular view. But the fact that I am not only published in LR but have been made an associate editor should reassure your readers that there is no hostility toward the advocates of limited government in the editorial policy there. Roy Childs is an excellent editor who refuses to be identified exclusively with either the left or the right, and I think he deserves the support of all libertarians. So I would urge everyone who reads this to disobey Miss Efron and both buy and contribute to Libertarian Review.

New York City

From . . . Ross Levatter
Without Having Read . . .

I do not want my motives for writing this to be misunderstood. I’m as free-market as they come. I’ll square off against Edith Efron any day of the week in explaining the function of the pricing system and private property ownership in allocating scarce resources to their most value-productive ends, as well as detailing both the immorality and impracticality of a centralized economic system. I wax ecstatic over the virtues of the market-place every chance I get. I hate socialism — if pressed I will even assert it’s anti-man and anti-life. But, even with so much in common with Ms. Efron, I do not understand her justification in writing, or Reason’s justification for publishing, the issue of falsehood, non-sequiters, and overgeneralizations that comprised her February Viewpoint.

Let’s set the record straight:

1) According to Dr. Rothbard, that amusing anecdote that starts off her article and constitutes her theme of rampant “non-compromise” is simply not true. Murray’s never had a gun stuck in his ribs. This was certainly easy enough to check—have Reason’s professional standards fallen so low that they make not even the feeblest attempt to confirm the claims they print?

2) The idea that Ralph Raico, Bill Evers, Roy Childs, Murray Rothbard. Leonard Liggio, etc., are deluded, blind followers of leftist revisionist historians is laughable. Virtually all of these people (all libertarians possessing high intelligence and integrity) are professional historians themselves, and even those who aren’t, I suspect, have studied history far more carefully than Ms. Efron, who is forced to spend so much of her time watching television.

As Ms. Efron herself admitted, the issue is indeed contextual. None of these people have accepted leftist historical interpretations, they have only agreed with leftist-discovered facts, facts which are documented in far too much first-hand detail to deny. Is Ms. Efron totally unaware of the above people’s contributions to libertarian revisionist history—of Child’s pioneering work in historical methodology, of Rothbard’s thesis on the relationship between history and ideology, or of Liggio’s demonstration that Marxian social class theory is a stolen and distorted version of an earlier libertarian version of class analysis advanced by Nineteenth century French libertarians (e.g. C. Comte, C. Dunoyer, J. B. Say, A. Thierry), or of the Grinder/Hagel model of state capitalism? Does she really want to call this “blindly supporting” leftist historians?

And just what specific claims of her opponents does Ms. Efron object to? Does she think that third world citizens struggling to regain land taken from them by their government, are violating rights? Does she think that America should send aid to Israel, or risk nuclear war with’ Russia protecting it? Is Ralph Raico’s pamphlet on gay-lib an example of anti-libertarian pandering to a statist collective? Is Murray Rothbard’s “classic work” on Women’s Lib an example of blindness to the coercive egalitarianism of that movement? Does Ms. Efron think that the CIA, FBI and Pentagon have not been violating individual rights or that dope addicts and pornographers are not worthy of having their rights respected? Does she still believe that Big Business is America’s most persecuted minority?

3) Efron’s claim that this ultimate evil of collaborating with the left logically stems from the “constitutional republicans” giving up the debate with the anarchists on the limited government question is overly bizarre. This is so obviously a strategic question, with archists and anarchists on both sides of the deal-with-the-left issue, that one almost marvels at Efron’s ability to tie her particular pet hatred in with anything she happens to be writing on. Surely Reason’s editors knew there was no necessary entailment in the anarchocapitalist position to deal with the left (at least one of the editors is a professional philosopher, supposedly trained in logic.) This merely confirms the growing suspicion that at least some Reason editors have lost all objectivity on the government question, and are willing to print anything as long as it is anti-anarchist.

And as for the “constitutional republicans” giving up—they did not give up; they were defeated. Where has there not been (pace Machan’s denial) a defense of the minimal state that was not either replied to several times over (e.g. Nozick) or manifestly not worth replying to (e.g. Paul Beaird). On the other hand, for almost a decade there has yet to be an adequate response to the Childsean dilemma, outlined in Roy’s now classic open letter to Ayn Rand. But, should they wish to, the “constitutional republicans” are welcome to reopen the debate—it’s always good for a few more Ph.D. theses on the foibles of lesser minds. The differences between archist and anarchist intellectual defenses are well displayed in Efron’s article: while Childs demonstrates from a logical paradigm that a government must necessarily violate rights, while Evers analyzes the adequacy of a title-transfer conception on contracts, while Rothbard grapples with the possibility of market defense and judicial services, Efron talks vaguely of “the value of nation, the necessity of a national culture,” and the reverence of the limited government position. I’m truly surprised she left out hearth and home, motherhood and apple pie, etc. ad nauseam.

4) The fact that Efron’s attack on Inquiry was based merely on prepublication notes, and that she had not read any issues of Inquiry, would have led one to expect such a seasoned professional journalist to tone down her condemnation somewhat, in the name of objectivity, if not good manners. And lest anyone think that Inquiry remained unread simply because Efron couldn’t obtain copies, let it be known that Roy Childs offered to bring her the first two issues and she simply refused to read them. (How reminiscent of Rand’s condemnation of both Rawls’ and Nozick’s works without having read either of them!) How far need we look for an explanation of Reason’s willingness to print an expanded Viewpoint condemning its two major competitors, written before one of them had even hit the stands?

5) Let’s just look at the evidence and see how anti-libertarian the articles printed by Inquiry and Libertarian Review are (keeping in mind that Inquiry never advertised as a libertarian publication, and therefore cannot be said to misrepresent the libertarian viewpoint.) L. R. has denounced Carter’s energy policy as fascism, bemoaned the turning of America’s private capitalist economy into a perpetual war economy, advocated foreign non-interventionism, argued that “national security” claims and liberty don’t mix, laughed at the power-hunger of recent Presidents, argued for a free market in energy, published Roger MacBride’s piece on political repression of ideas, interviewed F. A. Hayek, claimed that socialism leads to brutality, detailed the bureaucratic killing of New York City, and brought sanity back to the question of U.S.-Soviet military balance. Inquiry has detailed several of Carter’s misdeeds and special favors, discussed the tie-in between the CIA and the big banks, printed several columns by Thomas Szasz, argued against expanded defense spending, federal intervention in schooling and government subsidies to business, published a detailed analysis of the story behind the Panama Canal treaty (better than Reason’s coverage), given us brilliant arguments against gun control and regulation of professions, and given us non-hysterical analyses of the extent of Russia’s threat to America. All in all, some excellent investigative journalism. And not terribly anti-libertarian, either. Condemnation of big government interfering with the voluntary lives of individuals—and yet, surprisingly not even the hint that armed revolution is the answer, or that the solution, is to have the government pass restrictions more to our liking. Just what part of this program rubs Ms. Efron’s constitutional republicans the wrong way?

And as long as we’re comparing articles, let’s not forget these libertarian favorites, courtesy of Reason: R. J. Rummel’s piece suggesting that American defense spending be increased; Kizer’s article claiming that when we drag unwilling “mental patients” away, kicking and screaming, for “treatment” we’re not really violating their rights because they’re “sick” and don’t know any better, a piece written by two engineers who, in their off hours, discovered that those natural rights really aren’t. And to continue the comparison, what are we to say of the libertarianism evinced by those writers of TV Guide’s “News Watch” whom Ms. Efron is willing to collaborate with?

University of Cincinnati
Medical School

From . . . Estelle Epstein
Kill the Hate-filled Anarchists!

Edith Efron is right. Thank God that she has called all of us true libertarians to arms, to destroy the anarchists scum that has organized and run the libertarian movement for the last twenty years that we have looked the other way.

Look at what these accursed anarchists have done, ye gods! in the name of liberty. They have subverted our national culture and our deep love for the concept of the nation-State, and, I might add, of its sovereign Leader, the President. They have objected to the noble libertarian work of the CIA in bugging, wiretapping, and assassinating enemies of the American State. They have opposed the libertarian program of trying to bring freedom to Vietnam by destroying a large part of the population: in the great words of General Curtis LeMay, by “bombing them back to the Stone Age.” These Commie-loving anarchists have even dared to oppose the draft, so necessary to preserve freedom and security to America. Hippies to the core, they have opposed the community consensus in outlawing drugs, pornography, and kinky s-x, all in the name of precious Liberty. Only anarchists and perverts could argue for such license; Miss Efron is dead right that no Constitutional Republican would ever do so! It is wonderful to see Miss Efron rehabilitate that genuine libertarian leader, Irving Kristol; she might also have added that Mister Kristol is a staunch advocate of both the draft and expanding censorship of immorality in literature and the arts.

I am also glad that Miss Efron zeroed in on the overwhelming importance of defending and nurturing the State of Israel—a task even more important for libertarians than exalting the American State. The key point is that rights to life, liberty, and property belong only to civilized men and women, that the Jews are eminently and superbly civilized, and the Arabs, being savages along with the rest of the dumb goyim, have no rights. QED.

I am delighted that Miss Efron did not allow any namby-pamby sense of privacy or ethics to prevent her from saving the Republic by disclosing private conversations by these anarchists. I, too, have heard such disclosures, and, inspired by Miss Efron’s example, I am now willing to tell all. Murray Rothbard and Roy Childs have told me, in the strictest confidence, that they have personally murdered eighty-five Constitutional Republicans in their mad design to seize power over the libertarian, movement, and then over the country. And they told me confidentially that their final aim was to take power and throw open the gates of America to the Cambodian Communists, whose first act would be to rape fair American womanhood!

Fellow Constitutional Republican libertarians! We must act, and act now, to destroy the anarchist incubus in our midst! My one disagreement with Miss Efron’s perceptive article is that her suggested measures are much too wishy-washy. Her prescriptions lack the high courage of her analysis. Boycotts and hate mail indeed! We must take up arms, and physically annihilate these monsters before it is too late! That is the true libertarian path, the path of a Constitutional Republican. Anyone who balks at such measures vital to our national security as unlibertarian damns himself immediately as one of the anarchist haters—and we know what to do to them! In the spirit of Edith Efron, I say happy hunting—with love and reverence, of course.

San Francisco, California

From . . . Letitia Grant
A Trotskyite Dupe

Edith Efron is either projecting, or deliberately hiding the truth. As Edith has told me in private conversation, it is Irving Kristol who stuck a gun in her ribs, to force her to go along with the neo-conservative line. Let us never forget that Mr. Kristol is a self-admitted “ex” Trotskyite Communist, and all true anti-Communists know that once a Trotskyite always a Trotskyite. Danny Bell, Marty Lipset, Nat Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Milton Himmelfarb an all the rest are “ex” Trotskyites too. Edith has revealed to me that Mr. Kristol is the head of a sinister Trotskyite conspiracy to develop a phony “neo-conservatism” in order to split and demoralize the libertarian movement. It is unfortunate that, governed by fear and terror, Edith is allowing herself to become a conscious dupe and tool of Trotskyite Communist neo-conservatism.

Sacramento, California

Market Prospects for Nuclear Power

by Patrick L. Lilly

The ongoing debate over the future of nuclear-generated electrical power is a good example of how traditional political ideas obscure real political issues and lead to the erroneous conclusion that there are no acceptable solutions to our problems. Conservatives would have us believe that failure to go ahead with our existing nuclear plans will inevitably lead to virtual unavailability of electricity and a takeover by the Communists in the near future. From the left, we are told that unless we totally ban the development and use of nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs and reactor accidents will just as quickly render the world completely uninhabitable. Now, it should be clear that both these positions are extreme. What is less clear is that they both fail to address the real issues that the past quarter-century of nuclear development present us with. So let’s look at the possibilities for nuclear development—or non-development—in terms of voluntarism and the free market for energy.

The problems we now have with nuclear energy technology can be traced directly back to the fact that from the very start, atom-splitting was an activity carried out only under the aegis of the federal government. Because of its close tie-in to that traditional statist bugaboo—“national security”—this monopoly was only slightly modified when research relevant to atomic power for peaceful uses was begun in the 1950’s. As a result, through fiscal 1974, the government provided over $8.25 billion, according to its own figures¹, to directly subsidize research on and development of nuclear power stations—almost 47% of the total investment made in those stations. In 1975, the industry spent less of its own money to generate power from nuclear energy than the government did to support it².

Yet, when a state law was proposed in 1976 giving the Colorado legislature veto power over the construction of nuclear plants which were deemed to be inadequately secured against various mishaps, these same companies and their sympathizers complained that this was unwarranted government interference with energy development. We were given the impression that valiant entrepreneurs were being frustrated by illogical regulations in their attempts to do us all a big favor. Nothing, of course could be further from the truth. The “valiant entrepreneurs” expected their schemes to be heavily subsidized, and their future profits absolutely guaranteed by the public, but declined to give that same public any role in the decisions to be made along the way.

It is not hard to see why the subsidization is necessary to nuclear development as we know it. As late as October, 1975, White House sources were parroting the same short-sighted drivel that we once heard about oil technology—that nuclear plants were “too. . .economically risky to be financed by the private sector alone”³. Pursuing that notion, the federal government has spent 25 years forcibly frustrating not only all alternative modes of developing usable nuclear energy, but all alternative sources of energy—such as solar—as well. This despite the fact that, in 1974, a federally-authorized task force concluded that by the year 2000, solar technologies could provide four times as much energy as the most optimistic estimates of energy to be derived from nuclear fission, and that, at the most, the cost of development would be the same⁴.

As a result of these policies, the expected time when the enormous tax investment in nuclear power would begin to be repaid with cheap, abundantly available energy has been steadily pushed back, the yearly government outlay has steadily increased, and the unsolved problems associated with nuclear technology have steadily proliferated. Costs have risen astronomically not because of the emergence of requirements that nuclear developers refrain from polluting the world with their wastes (which have never been strictly enforced, anyway), but, rather, as a direct result of the government’s tunnel-vision approach to the problem—and the inefficiency-encouraging “we can always get more money” attitude that it fosters.

It should be clear from the basic scientific considerations that nuclear reactors are at least theoretically capable of generating power with far less resource consumption than petroleum technology. But it is also clear from economic considerations that if nuclear power development were stripped of its subsidies tomorrow, it would come to a screeching halt the day after. How can we reconcile these facts? The answer is that by forcing nuclear research and development through the cumbersome process of “pilot studies”, certification requirements, “demonstration plants”, etc., the government and its monopoly-oriented cronies in big business have prevented nuclear technology from developing in a flexible way commensurate with people’s changing needs and wants—that is, they have subverted the market. By requiring the taxpayers to take the developers’ risks, the government has inhibited innovators from making investments—recoverable in the market—that would lead to safe and efficient nuclear power stations being built when and where needed.

Furthermore, despite this massive spoon-feeding of dollars from the public treasury, the companies and agencies who tell us that we “need” their version of nuclear power are actually further from finding economical ways to build nuclear plants and dispose of their wastes than they were 25 years ago. The ERDA spent almost $88 million last year to try to find a way to get rid of the wastes that commercial plants are already producing⁵, although nuclear energy still supplies only about 1% of all our electricity, and no end to the waste disposal problem is even in sight.

In short, the existing nuclear industry is nothing but an economic creation of the federal government. That is why it has failed to produce the energy we need, and that is why it has produced dangerous wastes we don’t need without any way to get ride of them. Ignoring the Randian maxim that “government research” is a contradiction in terms, the government has not only directly subsidized nuclear development, but has also enacted the infamous Price-Anderson Act, limiting the liability of plant operators for any damage that escaped radiation, fires, or explosions might cause. A more complete deviation from market principles of research and implementation of new technologies could scarcely be imagined. Insurance companies quite sensibly refuse to insure nuclear developers at affordable rates because of the almost unlimited damage that their careless and short-sighted schemes could easily cause. The response of the industry was to transfer the risk, by statute, to the taxpayers, while keeping the (guaranteed) profits for themselves, all the while bemoaning regulatory interference with “energy independence”.

Given the current high price of nuclear power plants—about $1100 per kilowatt-hour of capacity for a light water reactor⁶—the size of known petroleum reserves, and the unknown potential of solar technologies, it seems unlikely that Americans will feel any “need” to turn, voluntarily, to nuclear energy as a major source of power anytime in the near future. Given the level of government involvement, it seems equally unlikely that they will be able to turn to nuclear energy should the need arise.

All that is needed for real energy independence is free world-wide trade to make the resources of the world available to the whole world. Remember here that we—America—still have the lion’s share of the world’s purchasing power. All that is needed for the rapid development of domestically-supplied, energy technologies is to stop forcing the taxpayers to subsidize that schemes of Westinghouse and GE instead. The federal task force mentioned earlier concluded that solar collectors, developed for less then we plan to spend on nuclear plants, could provide electricity for about force cents per kilowatt-hour by 1995 for a total installation cost of less that $2,500 per home. And, finally, all that is needed to make nuclear energy available when and if we do need it, in a form that is safe and at a price that people will be willing to pay, is to remove the security state’s monopoly on the possession of the materials and information needed to carry out innovative and responsible development plans subject to the give-and-take of the free market.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Donnelly, W. H. “Federal Expenditures Related to Civil Nuclear Power, Fiscal Years 1948-74” (Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress manuscript of 22 June, 1973)

² Welch, B. L. “Let the Dinosaur Die” CHEMTECH, May 1977

³ Office of the White House Secretary “Fact Sheet: Energy Independence Authority” (U.S. White House, 10 October, 1975)

⁴ Federal Energy Administration “Project Independence Blueprint, Final Task Force Report: Solar Energy” (U.S. Government Printing office 1974).

⁵ Controller, U.S Energy Research and Development Administration

⁶Eng News Record, 1976

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