Vol. 3.2, Feburary 1971

A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME III, NO. 2	February, 1971

TAKE OFF

After two years of rapid growth and accumulating publicity, the libertarian movement has at last taken off into the empyrean. How long this will last no one can foretell, but at least for the moment we have become well-known, and, even, who could have predicted? respectable!

The critical turning-point has come with the article by Stan Lehr and Louis Rossetto, Jr., “The New Right Credo – Libertarianism”, in the New York Sunday Times Magazine of January 10. Not only that – but this audience of over a million influential readers was also treated to the article as a front cover picture: with Lehr and Rossetto looking at the reader flanking an enormous red fist, under which was the caption “laissez-faire”. It is surely well over a century since laissez-faire has been widely represented as the radical and even pugnacious creed that it really is, and it was a pleasure to see the article if for this reason alone. The Times and other media had previously given considerable publicity to Karl Hess, but rather as a lone curio than as a member of an ever-widening movement. Here was the first major piece on the movement itself, and written by two of its young leaders. The article is festooned with pictures of some members of the libertarian pantheon, the relevant ones being Hess, Rand, Tuccille, and myself, a juxtaposition well calculated to send Ayn Rand, at least, up the wall.

Lehr and Rossetto are the leaders of the “Freedom Conspiracy” – the libertarian club at Columbia University, affiliated with SIL. It is ironic, and also indicative of the divergence among libertarians in applying their creed, that Lehr and Rossetto first came to the attention of the Times and the media for their work for Buckley for Senate, – a political stance with which at least three, and possibly all, of the pantheon were in profound disagreement.

The rewards of fame are heady indeed; in my case, consisting of several college friends whom I had not seen in over a decade calling to ask “hey, what is this libertarianism?” and the hardware man on the corner slapping me on the back: “So you’re an ulta-liberal, eh?” More tangibly, Chairman Bill himself was goaded into devoting an entire column (Jan. 14) to the libertarians. So long as the libertarian split in YAF remained unpublicized, Bill Buckley could ignore the movement from his lofty papal perch and print blather in National Review about the harmonious convention at St. Louis. But now that the split on the right was in the open, and the Times had devoted two lengthy articles in two months to this new creed, Buckley clearly felt that he owed it to the conservative legions to protect their flank from this new threat – especially when the threat was particularly annoying in taking seriously the conservative rhetoric about individual liberty.

Buckley’s column was characteristic: a blend of cheap debating points (e.g. smirking at the kids for “co-opting”

Spinoza as a libertarian, when the co-optation was clearly a feat performed by the Times’ picture editor); pseudo-scholarship (“absolutization of freedom . . . is the oldest and most tempting heresy”. Where, Bill? Who are this legion of ancient libertarian heretics? Tell us so we can add them to the pantheon); and petty bitchery (e.g. referring to Jerry Tuccille only as a “semi-literate gentleman”). As for myself, I am apparently back in Buckley’s good graces as a lovable (or perhaps not quite so lovable) nut, endlessly intoning my well-known passion for de-nationalizing lighthouses. (The changes are rung on the well-worn lighthouse theme in a particularly cretinous review of my Power and Market by a spiritual whelp of Buckley’s in National Review Jan. 26). The only new feature of the review is the charge that the purely free market society would be tantamount to feudalism – this from a magazine that has endlessly extolled the virtues of feudalism as compared to the modern despotic state! Karl Hess is found to be “nauseating” rather than lovable for his pointing out that the Soviet Union is at least one up on us for having executed Beria, while we still have J. Edgar Hoover; apparently Chairman Bill’s appreciation of political wit suddenly disappears when it is, for once, directed against his own totems.

The most interesting aspect of the Buckley column is the fact that in the last paragraph, Buckley apparently felt driven to concede grudgingly that perhaps his friend Nixon “has not sufficiently indulged the presumptions in favor of individual liberty”. The fact that Buckley has been driven by the libertarian publicity to criticize the Nixon Administration for the first time since it assumed office is itself testimony to the anxiety of Chairman Bill to protect the libertarian flank of his conservative coalition. Thus, the libertarian movement has already made a significant impact on the American political scene.

An important consequence of the Buckley column is the keen interest promptly taken in the whole affair by the, highly influential “Op-Ed” page of the New York Times – the new forum for opinion and controversy opposite the Times’ daily editorial page. On January 28, the Times published a blistering reply to Buckley by Jerry Tuccille, “A Split in the Right Wing”. At this writing, it is scheduled to publish a follow-up column by myself, further attacking Buckley and expounding the libertarian philosophy in the issue of Feb. 9, to be followed perhaps by further comments from Buckley and Karl Hess.

Libertarianism is the new rage, and it is incumbent upon all of us to strike while the iron is hot; in this receptive atmosphere to push the creed in book, article, lecture, radio and TV. Let us seize the opportunity to expand the cause. One of the revelations of this new atmosphere is the friendly interest in us by liberals of all persuasions, in and out of the media. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the liberals, if they heard of us at all, considered us as more extreme, more evil, than the conservatives. Now, however, seeing our devotion to peace, freedom from conscription, decentralization, and civil liberties, the liberals realize that, from their point of, view, we are much better than conservatives, and, indeed, almost-allies. There are two factors at work here: the tactical political insight that we can be useful allies to the liberals in whacking the conservatives; and, more deeply the realization by Very many liberals that there is something profoundly wrong with the Leviathan State they have wrought upon us since the New Deal, and that maybe these libertarians are in some way on the correct path out of our contemporary troubles. In any case, now that libertarianism is having its day in the sun, may we prove as adept at taking advantage of the opportunities for success as we have been in years of slogging through the ideological wilderness.

Come One! Come All!

Hear ye! Hear ye! The rapidly growing Libertarian movement in New York City is holding a libertarian conference, the first conference since the October, 1969 gala at the Hotel Diplomat. This conference will be held on the weekend of March 13-14, at Columbia University Law School. Speakers include Murray Rothbard on Strategy for Liberty, and Austrianism vs. Friedmanism; Jerry Tuccille on Psychology of Left and Right; and a debate between Roy A. Childs, Jr. and Jeffrey St. John on Anarcho-Capitalism vs. Limited Government. The conference is being organized by the New York Libertarian Alliance, an affiliate of the Society for Individual Liberty. For details on the conference, write to Gary Greenberg, 460-5D Old Town Road, Port Jefferson Sta., N.Y. 11776.

Libertarianism: A Warning

Libertarianism is experiencing, paradoxically, both a fantastic upsurge in numbers and popularity and a serious blow to its continued effectiveness. In order to make this clear, it will be necessary to take a serious look at what effectiveness within the context of libertarianism would have to be (and is, on many occasions). Before I do that, let me adduce some facts which I think will serve to demonstrate my claim.

Today America is experiencing what might properly be considered a very important choice in its political directions. This choice has existed, of course, throughout America’s history – which is to say, individual citizens in this country have always had the choice between pursuing wise or unwise political ends (as well as, and logically tied to, wise or unwise personal ends). The culmination of past errors has, however, flowered only in the last few years. To put it bluntly, the curtain may be falling on the close of the few decades of individualism in the world.

There is no inevitability to this, of course, but, free will notwithstanding, the implications of past misbehavior cannot be avoided; at best, they may be coped with rationally. Which is just what our problem is. Unless libertarians attend carefully to coping with the implications of the misbehavior of past members of this society—including, of course, at times their own past misbehavior – there is not very likely going to be a way to cope with it and thus no successful, rational actions will be taken to cope with it.

From the realms of industry, education, military defense, criminal court procedures, farming, ecology, to those of unionism, poverty, and art (yes!), the implications of corruption and bankruptcy in values are surrounding us. What are libertarians, on the whole, doing these days? Well, here we are getting into some delicate matters, so let me point out that I am dealing in generalizations, statistical ones, based not on a precise count but on the general but oft reliable knowledge I gain by keeping tabs on both the world in general and libertarianism in particular. As such, my answer to the above question must be seen for the generalization that it can only be. As regards, then, the great majority of young libertarians, writing in the various journals, active on the various campuses, present at the numerous meetings – scholarly and other – the bulk of them is concerned with dealing with utopianism. Too many have lifted their eyes from reality to the never-to-be-reached future. Even those who are non-utopians in their theoretical explorations in libertarian political philosophy are engaged predominatly in scholastical debates about the most minute details of – of all things – the structure of a libertarian society. This concern with Platonic perfection, this attitude of producing a final, absolute, static, non-contextually perfect societal structure is now a part of the libertarian intellectual movement – but not practiced by intellectuals, individuals who have become specialists at for example political theory, ethics, epistemology, economics, sociology, psychology, or other intellectual fields. Everyone in the libertarian movement included in this special category of Utopian involvement has become an “expert” at everything relating to society and man. There simply is no division of labor, on the whole, within this new class of people. Without the slightest awareness of the difficulties of ethics and meta-ethics, young libertarians are writing books on the subject of how men ought to act in all kinds of specialized circumstances, of what should men in voluntary cooperation or out of it do for themselves in all kinds of specialized circumstances, etc. There is very little respect for education among the libertarians; there is, in fact, an anti-intellectualism in the sense that matters of intellectual concern are treated frivolously, in two page essays and in hundred page dissertations alike. Intellectual rigor which gave birth to the movement in men’s minds, which produced the discoveries of Locke, Spencer, Mill, Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Rand, et al. through hard work, has fallen by the wayside. Respect for the human mind, resulting in respect for reality, is slowly leaving libertarianism, at least in many circles.

Many, of course, are doing hard work – which is where man’s salvation lies. Hopefully these reap beneficial results in their own personal lives. It would be so much more productive in behalf of our central aims to do the hard work we can do well within our respective fields of competence. If we haven’t got such a field, we ought to find one. For, to get back to a point I promised I would return to, our effectiveness lies centrally in our own individual abilities to lead the best lives we can within the context–needs, abilities, requirements, obstacles, problems, realities – of our own lives. It does not appear that many libertarians are taking their own philosophical position seriously enough to live it within their own lives consistently (or at least to try to do so to the best of their abilities). The evidence for this lies in what I have laid before the reader. It is clearly bad for one to do something badly – and so many libertarians are doing bad thinking these days, thinking which produces no knowledge because it is thinking about things that are very difficult to think about without very thorough preparation. We would not trust a man totally untrained in medicine to be our doctor. And so forth. Nor should we trust people totally untrained in the specialized thinking required to cope with very complicated and refined philosophical, political, psychological, sociological, economic, etc. problems to do this thinking for us well. Others who are not libertarians catch on to this, of course, and there is just one important place where effectiveness is suffering. We aspire to be doctors of these fields, but few go through the difficulty of earning their doctorates – not necessarily in universities (they are not always the right places these days to earn a meaningful doctorate, although they ought to be). Too many of us do not earn doctorates simply by failing to educate ourselves thoroughly within the fields in which we make pronouncements. Too many of us have lost respect for man’s mind and, therefore, our own absolute need to become mentally equipped to cope with reality. That, in part, explains why so many of us turn to problems of future societies – the context within those realms is as open as is the context within speculations about dancing angels on the head of a pin. Tomorrow is not around to fly in the face of our speculations, so tomorrow is an easy target for those willing to speculate wildly.

I say all this with utter sincerity; partly I say it as a result of some self-investigations, partly because I know the substance of the libertarian intellectual movement, and mostly because of my love of liberty for myself and all human beings. I hope, therefore, that, instead of hostile reactions, we may embark upon some serious considerations as we come across the ideas expressed above.

— Tibor R. Machan

ON WOMEN LIBERATION

The benefit which the libertarian right can derive from alliance with the radical left, as well as the strictly defined limits of this alliance, arise from the nature of socialism as an inherently incompatible mix of polar-opposite political philosophies–libertarianism and mercantilistic statism. From the former, the left draws its sensitivity to the abuse of power, and from the latter, the readiness to wield state power to advance its chosen ends. Those who imbibe this strange mixture develop an uncanny ability to sniff out with great accuracy the large and the petty pathologies of our social system, and an equally uncanny ability to propose solutions which surpass the disease in destructiveness.

The latest fad of the left is Women’s Liberation, and in pursuit of this cause, its combined forces have surely reached new heights of muddled thinking and misdirected rhetoric. Nonetheless, libertarians would be well advised to consider the old maxim, that fifty million freaks can’t be all wrong all of the time, before writing off Women’s Lib all together. History tells us time and again that when the left says something’s wrong here, something is indeed wrong. To find out just what is wrong and what to do about it, the libertarian need only rotate the analysis and recommendations of the left by 180 degrees or so and extrapolate according to the tables in the back of The Wealth of Nations.

In the case of Women’s Lib, for example, the left wing analysis has it that the feminine half of humanity is being brutally exploited by the capitalistic, male-chauvinist sexist “system”, and that the State in shining armor must come riding to the rescue on a bundle of tax money. The libertarian, decoding this message, concludes correctly that the male-dominated state is riding roughshod over the fairer sex, and that only a quick injection of laissez-faire can save the day.

Now, let’s be more specific. The exploitee dearest to the hearts of the braless set is Mrs. American Housewife, inexorably trapped by the system in the triple role of sex object, nursemaid, and cleaning woman. Trapped by the system, yes, but by just what part of the system. By the brainwashing of the socialization process? By the prejudice of the male-chauvinist captains of industry? The leftists gloss over this delicate issue with a little sloganeering, but the libertarian, with his usual incisive insight, quickly identifies the true mechanism of oppression – the TAX SYSTEM. Here is the chain which binds the housewife to her stereotyped role – a multi-billion dollar subsidy from Washington for her husband-oppressor!

How does it work? Well, to begin with, we must note a fact which is somehow passed over by the leftist Women’s Libbers, namely, that the housewife is a highly productive and in many respects highly skilled worker, producing an extremely valuable service. Corresponding to the massive aggregate service output of American housewives is an income stream of equal magnitude – but an income stream which remains wholly implicit, never makes it into the national income accounts, and is never tapped by the Internal Revenue Service. Compared to this most gargantuan of tax loopholes, the oil depletion allowance and municipal bonds are mere pinpricks!

Now, as any student of Economics I knows, when differential rates of taxation are applied to different lines of production, a misallocation of resources develops. If oil production is taxed and coal mining is tax exempt, we may be sure that the use of coal will increase, and that coal will be used unproductively in areas where oil would in fact be a more efficient fuel. Likewise, then, if housewife services are untaxed, while commercial janitorial services, child care centers, laundries, restaurants, and houses of prostitution are taxed, then housewives will have a competitive edge, and every male wanting any of these services will be encouraged to contract for them via marriage rather than contracting for them via the market.

Suppose a woman, before marriage, has been trained in the skill, let us say, of computer programming. Suppose her marginal product as a computer programmer is $3.00 an hour, while her marginal product as a domestic servant is only $2.25. Clearly, it would be good economics for her to find employment as a programmer and hire various specialists to fulfill the bulk of her cleaning, cooking, and child care functions, pocketing a clear premium of 75 cents an hour. Yet what if her husband is already earning $10,000 a year, putting her in the 30 percent tax bracket? That leaves her with $2.10 take home from her programming job, less than enough to pay the cooking, cleaning, and child care contractors. This poor woman is indeed trapped in the home in an employment which does not exploit her full training and productivity, just as the Women’s Liberationists claim. Oddly enough, however, the conventional order of villain and hero (tax supported state sector vs. profit supported capitalist sector) is reversed – who now appears to set the trap, and who would offer her a way out if left free to do so?

What is to be done to end this massive misallocation of human resources? Short of the ideal, but long-range, solution of abolishing the income tax altogether, it would appear that there are two ways to end the distortion. On the one hand, an attempt could be made to measure the income generated by domestically employed housewives, and subject it to taxation at the rates applicable to all other forms of income. Alternatively, a tax deduction could be allowed for the purchase of commercially produced “domestic” services.

From the point of view of equity and pure theory, I think that the first approach has superior merit, if one must choose between the two inequitable and theoretically objectionable alternatives. The weight of practical arguments, however, I think, favors the latter. The key issue in choosing between the options is that of information gathering. If domestic income were taxed, the incentive for the household would be to hide it, and for the IRS to build up a huge snooping and prying apparatus to combat this tendency. People are already objecting, after all, to a census form which once every ten years asks how many toilets you have in the house. What if in addition you had to fill out a monthly report detailing the number of times you mopped the kitchen floor or washed your underwear? In contrast, if domestic service substitutes were tax exempt, the information required would be happily volunteered by the tax payer. In addition to keeping track of the number of gallons-worth of gas tax paid, and of expense-account dinners, he would also keep receipts and records of payments to janatorial contractors, day care centers, appliance sales and rental outlets, etc.

For a dramatic example that clinches the relative superiority of the deduction scheme, consider the important household service of sex. The extended taxation method would not only require records to be kept of the frequency of intercourse, but would have to tackle the forbidding problem of deciding which partner was the “producer” and which the “consumer”! In contrast, under the deduction system, it would only be necessary for the taxpayer to keep receipts from the services of (male or female) prostitutes. Here, consumer and producer would be clearly identified, and, if the taxpayer preferred to keep his sex-life private rather than to claim his deduction, he could do so at his own discretion.

Removal of the tax incentive for household production would have immediate beneficial repercussions of both an economic and sociological nature. Those women who did not have a natural comparative advantage for the performance of housework would flow into the labor force, creating an immediate spur to production. At the same time, millions of new jobs would be opened up in the rapidly expanding fields of commercial child care, janitorial contracting, production of ready-to-wear clothing and ready-to-eat foods, manufacture of labor-saving appliances, and so forth. As soon as these services became widely available (many of them at reduced cost because of the opportunity to exploit economies of scale) women would no longer have to duck in and out of the labor force every time a child arrived, or of necessity hold only part-time jobs. Employers would immediately recognize this, and drop their reluctance to put female employees through expensive managerial and on-the-job training programs. The next generation, fully accustomed to female bus drivers and bank presidents, and to male secretaries and school teachers, would grow up without the occupational stereotypes of our present society which the Women’s Liberationists find so unnecessary and artificial.

Of course, the full liberation of women would require a few other changes in addition to tax reform. Needless to say, all of the misguidedly paternalistic laws designed to “protect” the “weaker sex” by barring females from certain lines of employment, or limiting their hours of work, would have to be written off the books. The cultural adjustment of the younger generation would be facilitated by replacing public with private education, so that women would not be forced to send their children to schools where the curriculum, dictated by male-chauvinist boards of education, shunted little girls into home-ec classes, and little boys into wood working and machine shop. The institution of marriage would have to be put on a truly contractual basis, that is to say, restrictions on the scope, nature, and duration of marriage contracts would have to be abolished. This would open the way for experimentation with fixed-term marriages, various forms of alimony and child support clauses or none at all, homosexual marriages for both sexes, and assorted communal, multi–lateral, interlocking, or even Heinieinian chain marriages.

So you see, beneath the phantasmagoria of RAT and SCUM, there is something to the idea of Women’s Liberation after all, for the plight of women in our society is but a specific manifestation of the general lack of liberation. As in the case of blacks, migrant workers, soldiers, and hippies, the left has once again pointed out to us one of the multiple projecting tips of the huge iceberg of statist repression. The leftists, not knowing that all of these visible sore points of society are connected underneath to a common mass, think that the iceberg can be done away with by cutting off the tips, but we libertarians know that this would have the effect only of making another, probably larger part of the iceberg rise to the surface at another point!

How easy it is to expose the Women’s Lib radicals for what they are, a group of pudding-headed, slogan-chanting neo-amazons, but this is only half the task which libertarians must undertake. We must go beyond this to include a Women’s Liberation plank in our general program, to use the Women’s Lib issue as an opening for libertarian agitation and propaganda, and to hammer, hammer, hammer in the point that no single oppressed group will be free until all men are free, living in a society where repression is abolished and the free market is triumphant!

— Edwin G. Dolan

Living Free

For some time now I have seen enunciated in the libertarian press the view that the important thing about liberty is not the “negative” and rather petty goal of getting rid of statism, but the “positive” act by each libertarian of “liberating himself”, of “living a truly free life”, of “living anarchy”, etc. Now I must confess that I simply do not understand what these people are talking about, or, more concretely, that either they are writing pure rhetorical gibberish, or they are slipping into grave and even dangerous error.

Since their inception, libertarians have always been accused of being “negative”. “Why do you always attack the government? Why can’t you advocate positive programs?” has always been a popular charge against us. Happily the “living free” advocates do not wish to achieve their “positive” goals through government, but the fundamental error still remains. The point is that the fundamental definition of liberty is “negative”: it consists in the absence of molestation, the absence of invasion of anyone’s property rights in his person or material goods by other people. And the first philosophical error of every statist or socialist, left or right, is always to denounce the “superficiality” of “negative” freedom, and to set forth their views of “positive” freedom, which can include a grab-bag of goodies from full employment and three-square-meals a day to the present fad for “personal liberation.” One of F. A. Hayek’s great contributions in his Road To Serfdom was, once and for all, to eviscerate the call for “positive” freedom, to reveal the fatal admixture of the concepts of freedom and positive power or wealth in the same context. This is not to deny the value of wealth or other positive goods, but simply to distinguish between freedom and other good things in life.

It follows then that libertarianism per se is indeed “negative”, and that liberty is, to be sure, not the be-all and end-all of anyone’s personal philosophy. The libertarian does not believe that liberty per se provides the magic panacea for all ills or the magic guide for all actions; he simply advocates the liberty for every man to work out his own goals and his own personal philosophy. Once liberty is achieved, there can be all sorts of moral philosophies which different libertarians can pursue; the rationalist libertarians, for example, among whom I include myself, would hope that the free man would use his liberty in accordance with a rational ethic, an ethic derived from a rational study of the objective nature of man. But this plea for rationalism is on a different plane than the wider plea for liberty.

Talk about “living a free life” or “living anarchy” then becomes, at best, meaningless pap. As long as the State exists and has its being, none of us can be totally free; on the other hand, we all enjoy varying degrees of partial freedom, of partial non-molestation. Obviously, the enslaved draftee, for example, enjoys little or no freedom. If we zero in on coercive violence as being the sole obstacle to freedom, then, the hokum about “personal freedom” allows us to bask complacently in our present highly imperfect state. It is dangerously close to the old reactionary view that “the slave is completely free so long as he knows he’s a slave” – a bromide that has always struck me as being almost obscene in its smugness. The concept of “living free” comes close to being the age-old opium of the intellectual. Over the centuries this is a bromide that has taken many forms: from the Hegelian “freedom is the opportunity to obey the perfect orders of the perfect State” to the present-day “true freedom is exploring your inner feelings.” In none of these forms should this cop-out concept be at all palatable to the libertarian.

Take for example the latest Winter 1970 issue of the quarterly RAP, the organ of Rampart College of Los Angeles.

This issue has the advantage over the previous one of featuring a profile of Kathy Forte, who is a lot prettier than the previously featured Dana Rohrabacher (and if this be “sexism”, then make the most of it!) But Kathy’s “philosophy”, as described in the article, seems to consist largely of defining freedom as dancing barefoot on the beach. An estimable activity perhaps – though what do you do with those of us who don’t like sand? – but surely having nothing in the world to do with freedom. If Kathy wishes to define freedom as dancing on the beach, then us anti-sanders are going to rise up angry in protest; if, on the other hand, she merely wants to use her freedom in this way, well that’s fine, but then the whole discussion has been shifted from “freedom” to moral or esthetic philosophy. And the danger is that the freedom-dancing group will come to regard the whole problem of statism and violence as irrelevant and unimportant; for as long as they let you dance on the beach, why worry?

Thus, Kathy states: “There are many external ways to achieve liberation . . . but all of them mean looking very deeply inside yourself. That’s where you must find your own spiritual high—without politics, without institutions, without the games designed to keep people cut off from experiencing life.” Without politics, fine. But “without institutions”? How can any civilized life be conducted without institutions? And suppose many people don’t want to “look very deeply inside themselves”? What’s wrong with that? Why is it supposed to be our function to pester and harangue them into doing so? Why can’t one be a libertarian without “looking deeply”? And what “games” is she talking about? It is easy to sneer at other people’s values and life-styles as “games”; if we wished to be nasty, we might even apply such derogatory terms to spending one’s life dancing on the sand.

Elsewhere in the article, Kathy indicates that she means such “games” as “power games” and “ego trips” such as are allegedly prevalent in YAF, trips which block one off from “a higher trip called life.” But why is Kathy’s “life trip” any more moral, any more rational, than the “ego trips” in YAF? I am the last person to leap to the defense of YAF as an institution or as a group of people, but it is not self-evident to me that the desire of YAFers’ both to advance their ideals in the world and to advance their personal careers is “anti-life”. On the contrary, and setting aside the unfortunate YAF involvement with Republican politics, it strikes me that the YAFers’ desire to advance both personal careers and ideals in the world is a lot more moral, a lot more rational, and a lot more attuned to the life of man as a purposive, goal-seeking being, than pirouetting on the seashore.

After all, libertarians, if they have any personal philosophy beyond freedom from coercion, are supposed to be at the very least individualists, and if they are individualists they should be heartily in favor of each individual’s advancing of his own “ego”. What’s, wrong with ego? and why are libertarians falling into the cultural-New Left trap of denigrating ego and purpose in favor of some sort of cloudy ego-less whim?

There is a basic and important problem here for the libertarian movement. And that is that most libertarians are ex-Randians, and that, after having liberated themselves from the totalitarian and bizarre aspects of the Rand cult, all too many libertarians have tossed over the important core of Aristotelian doctrine: the emphasis on reason and purpose, the cleaving of one’s actions to an objective and purpose, the cleaving of one’s actions to an objective, rational ethic. Too many libertarians have thrown out the rational baby with the Randian bathwater. And since no man can live with no personal ethic at all, the unfortunate drift has been in the direction of “cultural New Leftism”, and all the aimlessness, inrrationality, and whim-worship which this doctrine implies.

Thus, for example, in the same issue of RAP, the editors answer a question from a reader about prostitution, and they write that “prostitution is the outgrowth of psychological and political repression, not of freedom”, and “we think that free choice would be a liberating force and that most people would seek beauty rather than ugliness.” Without discussing the morality of prostitution, we are here on very dangerous waters indeed. What, for example, is “psychological repression”? “Repression” of what? Methinks there is underlying these words the cloven hoof of Herbert Marcuse and “left-Freudianism”, a doctrine highly fashionable on the Left today but I believe highly pernicious. We have seen in the last couple of years the danger of libertarians catering to anti-libertarian ideologies on the New Left; the same holds true for the catering to the pervasive anti-rationalism of the New Left “counter-culture.”

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL-POLITICAL DICHOTOMY

Much of the confusion concerning the question of whether libertarianism is now a phenomenon of the Left or of the Right can be resolved if we think in terms of Left and Right politics and Left and Right psychology. It is my contention that an individual can be a psychological Right Winger and a political Leftist, a psychological Leftist with Right Wing politics, or that he can belong psychologically and politically to the same side of the division.

In the broadest sense, Left Wing psychology operates in terms of concretes. Left Wingers are more apt to see the world in its specific reality; they relate directly to sensual experience; they identify with the victims of injustice and therefore have a more naturalistic understanding of what injustice means. Psychological Leftists are more feeling-oriented in the sense that they are more willing to break a philosophical principle to rectify an unjust situation. Even if they do not believe in robbing the rich to feed the poor they may be willing to do so if they see someone going hungry. They are also philosophical in that they intellectualize their own attitudes, but they are usually not so bound by philosophical absolutes that they will not break one for the sake of relieving someone else’s misery.

The psychological Right Winger, on the other hand, deals more with abstractions. He is also against injustice and on the side of liberty, but he is more likely to become incensed because his theories are not being put into operation than he is because somebody’s baby was bitten by a rat. He knows that there is discrimination in the world, that some people are denied decent housing and adequate employment, but he is more annoyed at the “irrationality” of this condition than he is by its real-life effect on human beings. Not only is the psychological Right Winger unconcerned about the specifics of injustice, he may even denounce all sympathy for the misery of others as misguided “altruism.”

Both psychological Left Wingers and psychological Rightists can be violently anti-state, but their different psychological attitudes will flavor the nature of their anti-statist motivation. The psychological Leftists will fight the authorities, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives, as long as there is one little pocket of injustice remaining in the world; the efforts of the psychological Rightist will be directed toward securing his own personal freedom and putting his theories into practice if only on a limited scale. The psychology of the Left is primarily altruistic and world-oriented; that of the Right selfish and ego-oriented From this we can see that the psychology of Left and Right can co-exist within the framework of a Left Wing political perspective (in the case of anti-establishment radicals), and also within the framework of a Right Wing political perspective (in the case of pro-establishment liberals and conservatives).

The great danger inherent in this condition is that the psychological Right Winger may abandon his Left Wing political position and align with the political Right if the going gets too rough. His doctrinaire selfishness renders his mania for self-preservation paramount over all other considerations, and he may temporarily renew his alliance with his Right Wing political counterpart in a crisis situation. The psychological Left Winger runs the risk of being so self-less and other-oriented that he will be driven to Left Wing adventurism if his goals are not achieved tomorrow. In other words, the radical movement can be betrayed on both counts – by the psychological Rightist who will compromise his political principles to save his own neck; by the psychological Left Winger who will adopt suicidal tactics in the cause of his service to humanity.

At its worst, the psychology of the Left rejects reason altogether. It can be so selfless, so other-oriented, so concerned about the happiness of the “general community” that it exhibits little if any understanding of personal interests, the value of self-esteem or even self-regard, or the importance of rational considerations as a guideline for human action. To die rather than to live for one’s beliefs takes on heroic proportions. To go to jail is regarded as morally superior to remaining free and struggling for an ideal. So is born the adventurism of the psychological far Left which is every bit as defeatist and destined to failure as the retreatism of the extreme psychological Right.

So it would seem that a mixed psychology is the ideal condition: a mentality that is committed to reason but not to the extent that it begins to regard itself as infallible; a mentality concerned with personal happiness, but not to the extent that it is willing to sacrifice the happiness of others to attain its own ends; a mentality that recognizes good and evil in the world, but not to the point where all others not in agreement with itself are viewed as reincarnations of Beelzebub; a mentality vitally concerned about abstract questions of morality but, again, not to the extent that it is unwilling to re-evaluate the abstract when concrete evidence calls it into question; in brief, a balanced mixture of the ego and the other, the abstract and the concrete.

As for politics? If Left is broadly defined as opposition to an inequitable status quo, and Right as an attempt to preserve and protect an inequitable condition in society, then it is mandatory by any standard of morality to throw one’s lot in with the political Left. But the Right sees itself as safeguarding, not inequity, but a just and moral religious and cultural tradition. To my way of thinking, Right Wing politics is justified only in a libertarian or reasonably libertarian society providing a great degree of liberty and justice for all its citizens. The Right Wing sees this condition as already having been largely achieved. It is for each individual to make up his own mind on this subject, to weigh the evidence pro and con and reach his own conclusions.

When the war is over, when all American troops are home, when the institutions of this country are in the hands of the people in the neighborhoods, when there is a semblance of economic and social justice for the myriad groups which constitute this society, it will be time enough to talk about preserving and protecting the status quo. When that day arrives the onus of being a political Right Winger, a custodian of the status quo, will have become, happily enough, a thing of the past.

Recommended Reading

The Right. There have been several annotated guides to the right-wing, but none so thorough, perceptive, and fair-minded as the new booklet by Ferdinand V. Solara, 58 Key Influences in the American Right (available for $1.95 from Polifax Press, P.O. Box 20067, Denver, Colo. 80220). Ignore the soggy title; Mr. Solara has done his homework; he has done thorough independent research, as well as eliciting information from the groups and publications involved. Admittedly, he has unavoidable difficulties in defining “right-wing”, as well as difficulties with his numerical scale: O for total “1984” government; 10 for zero government and total individual freedom. (Where, for example, would Mr. Solara place anarcho-syndicalists or anarcho-communists?) However, I can have no objections to a scale which, delightfully, places myself and the Lib. Forum as the only publication or organization with a 10 rating. We at the Forum are proud to accept the accolade. Solara’s comments on us are amusing and perceptive, e.g.: “The Libertarian Forum . . . is the end-point of the American political spectrum; beyond this, there lies only the static of random noise. Its editor . . . is . . . consistent in his thinking to the point that he frightens 99% of his compatriots on the American Right.” Characteristically, not one of the other “rightist” outfits mentioned the Forum admiringly; however, we may not be loved, but we’re feared!

In his questionnaire, Mr. Solara asked each group or publication to list other right-wing groups which it admired or disliked; it is typical of the namby-pamby attitude of most of the groups that very few – excluding, of course, ourselves – could bring themselves to express public antipathy toward any other group.

Mr. Solara divides the American Right into five separate nuclei or sectors, each of which have their separate groupings, central and satellite organizations: the National Review group, the Birch Society group, the Liberty Lobby sector, the racist-paramilitary sector, and the admittedly far looser “independent” sector, which is very roughly free-market or libertarian, and among whom we are included. Certainly Human Events and probably “Our Peoples Underworld” are better included in the National Review than in the Independent sector, but apart from this there are remarkably few errors in the volume. There are important omissions, (e.g. Modern Age, Intercollegiate Studies Institute) but but these are probably accounted for by Mr. Solara’s policy not to include organizations that did not care to reply to his questionnaire (typically, The Objectivist specifically requested that it not be included in the book.) Highly recommended.

Pollution and the Law.

All those interested in the legal defense of property rights against pollution will find indispensable the summary of recent developments in tort liability law by Harvard professor Milton Katz, The Function of Tort Liability in Technology Assessment (pamphlet available free from the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society, 61 Kirkland St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138). It becomes clear to the libertarian in the article that the stopping of an invasive nuisance requires more than simple compensation for damages (the Chicagoite solution); it requires also a permanent injunction against continuing invasion. The injunctive proceeding is one of the great legal defenses against invasion of property, and it must be used to the hilt.

Privatizing the Public Sector.

Some of the ways in which “public” activities are being turned over to the infinitely more efficient private sector are summarized in “Creeping Capitalism”, Forbes (Sept. 1, 1970). Forbes points out that even liberals, fed up with the ever-growing urban mess, are beginning to look with favor on private, market solutions to our problems.

Thus, on police: two-thirds of all the nation’s law enforcement officers are now private. And, to those who think it’s impossible: “on a typical block of big corporate headquarters buildings in Manhattan . . . it’s possible that perhaps 20 different private police forces are working at any one time.” Private fire-fighting companies are discussed, including the Rural/Metropolitan Fire Department, a private corporation which has been fighting fire for over two decades in a wide area of Arizona, ranging from large cities to small towns and rural regions.

Education.

Richard F. Schier, “The Problem of the Lumpenpro-fessoriat”, AAUP Bulletin (Winter, 1970, $1.50). A blistering critique of the educational Left, especially of the discontented younger faculty, who lead in the debasement of educational standards. Thus, Professor Schier: “it is not surprising that people are drawn to reform who cannot, in their own careers, meet the traditional expectations. For such people the seemingly modest insistence that they have little, if anything, to teach students aside from a narrow and technical specialty. . . has more than a germ of truth. Professionalism does require specialization and cerebration and is not well adapted to the heightening of sensory awareness nor sympathetic to what is called, in the modish jargon, nonrational ways of knowing. Hence the drive away from traditional education, with its emphasis on the intellect, to affective education designed to educate the whole man . . . . Nor is the popularity of such innovations with students difficult to understand . . . . The competitiveness of the grading system is unpleasantly demanding, and it is pleasurable to be told that one’s emotions are an adequate or perhaps a surer guide to Truth. Scholarship is painful in a way that the eroticization of experience is not.” Schier goes on to add that the especial popularity of the new reforms at the “best” colleges is a way of trying to keep down a competitiveness in getting ahead which has always been annoying to Establishments already in power. And the working-class students at the lower-ranking colleges resist these “humanitarian” reforms for the same reason.

Isolationism.

The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $12.95, 1038 pp.) The massive, fascinating pre-war and wartime diaries of a fearless opponent of America’s entry into World War II. Particularly interesting is the courage of a moral leader who could not think in terms of the political jungle; hence Lindy’s spurning of the opportunity to become the mobilizer of the isolationist forces even after Pearl Harbor. (Note particularly his confrontations with John T. Flynn (541) and Herbert Hoover (546)). The friendly reviews in some liberal journals (e.g. the New Republic) of the man for long most hated by liberals indicates a growing willingness to re-evaluate all of America’s wars.

Economics.

F. A. Hayek, “Three Elucidations of the Ricardo Effect,” Journal of Political Economy (Mar.-Apr. 1969), pp. 274-85. An important article in which Hayek, returning for the first time in decades to economics, explains how, in Austrian theory, injections of increased money can lead to continuing distortions in relative prices.

John K. Gifford, “Critical Remarks on the Phillips Curve and the Phillips Hypothesis”, Weltwirschaftliches Archiv. (1969-I), pp. 79-94. A much-welcomed critique of the highly overrated “Phillips curve”, which allegedly sets off against each other price changes and unemployment, in inverse ratio.

Journal of Law and Economics (April, 1970).

Steven Cheung, “The Structure of a Contract and the Theory of a Non-Exclusive Resource”, on property and externalities, particularly as applied to weaknesses of absence of private property rights in the fisheries.

Kenneth G. Elzinga, “Predatory Pricing: the Case of the Gunpowder Trust”. A decade ago in the same journal, John S. McGee exploded once and for all the common myth that Rockefeller built his Standard Oil complex on “predatory price cutting”: on deliberately cutting prices below cost, driving out competitors, and finally raising prices. Now, Elzinga does a similar demolition job on the same myth as applied to the Gunpowder Trust at the turn of the twentieth century.

Bernard H. Siegan, “Non-Zoning in Houston”. A lengthy, excellent article demonstrating in detail how the absence of all zoning works well in Houston, indeed better than in zoned cities. The aims of zoning are accomplished better through private covenants in real estate contracts, restricting development in the area to certain activities.

Journal of Law and Economics (October, 1970).

Yale Brozen’s “The Antitrust Task Force Deconcentration Recommendation”, taken together with the paper by Eugene M. Singer, “Industrial Organization: Price Models and Public Policy”, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings (May, 1970), provide the most up-to-the minute refutation of the common left-liberal contention that “highly concentrated” industries have higher rates of profit; Brozen and Singer refute the major studies proposing this view.

Negroes and Education. Thomas Sowell, “Colleges are Skipping Over Competent Blacks to Admit ‘Authentic’ Ghetto Types,” New York Sunday Times Magazine (Dec. 20). A black free-market economist points to the scandal of university discrimination against competent Negro students, in order to give scholarships to incompetent but politically “in” blacks.

Women’s Lib. The counter-revolution against women’s lib noted by TIME (“Women’s Lib: A Second Look”, Dec. 14).

Reprints.

Greenwood Press, Westport Conn., has reprinted the full run of a large number of radical American journals, from 1890 on, and is engaged in the task of doing the same for right-wing magazines. Of particular interest to libertarians is Greenwood’s reprint of the entire run of Benjamin R. Tucker’s magnificent Liberty, all 17 volumes, bound, 1881-1908, with an introduction by Prof. Herbert Gutman. The price, unfortunately, is a prohibitive $545.00, but we understand that Liberty will soon be available for something like one-tenth the cost on microfiche.

Greenwood Press has also reprinted the following books: George L. Anderson, ed., Issues and Conflicts (1959). A forgotten but important book of revisionist essays, brought together by the William Volker Fund. Particularly good are the essays by William Neumann on China, Alfred M. Lilienthal on the Middle East, Louis Martin Sears on Revisionism, Roland Stromberg on “collective security”, and Richard N. Current on the Kellogg Pact. Price: $15.25.

Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953). Long out of print, this is a classic, the last great work of World War II revisionism, especially on Pearl Harbor, and including Harry Barnes’ blast against the “historical blackout.” Also includes excellent articles on early Cold War Revisionism by George Lundberg, William L. Neumann. Includes articles by Tansill, Sanborn, Morgenstern, Greaves. Price: $19.50.

Charles A. Beard, The Devil Theory of War (1936). An important between-the-wars work of revisionism. Price: $8.25.

Charles Vevier, The United States and China, 1906-1913 (1955). A Williamsite revisionist view of U.S. imperialism and the quest for investments in China. Ranks with McCormick in applying the Williams view to Asia. Price: $10.75.

NOW! AT LAST!

The long-awaited work by

Murray N. Rothbard

The sequel to “Man, Economy, and State”

Is Available!

IT is CALLED

POWER AND MARKET

POWER AND MARKET demonstrates how a free market can be truly free, providing protection and defense without the need for coercive, monopolistic government.

POWER AND MARKET analyzes all forms of government intervention and their consequences, focussing on intervention as a grantor of monopolistic privilege, direct and hidden.

POWER AND MARKET dissects the rationale and effects of every kind of taxation, including the poll tax and the “Randian” voluntary taxation solution.

POWER AND MARKET provides the first thorough critique in years of the Henry George “single tax”.

POWER AND MARKET exposes the inner contradictions of the theories of democracy.

POWER AND MARKET extends praxeology to a critique and refutation of important anti-market ethical doctrines, including: the problems of immoral choices, equality, security, the alleged joys of status, charity and poverty, “materialism”, “other forms” of coercion, human and property rights. Also an exposition of libertarian social philosophy in refuting a book solely devoted to attacking it.

Available in paper ($3.00) or hard-cover ($6.00).
From:

Institute For Humane Studies

1134 Crane St.

Menlo Park, Calif. 94015