Vol. 3.2, March 1971

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME III, NO. 2	March 1971	75¢

TAKEOFF II

The past month has seen a ballooning, an expanding, a veritable wonderment of publicity for the libertarian movement. For the first time in my life, I meet average intellectuals: in colleges, in TV studies, in the press, who are extremely sympathetic toward and interested in the libertarian doctrine. Libertarians are literally popping up everywhere, and the chances are large that the next intellectual or opinion-moulder you meet will either consider himself a libertarian or at least be interested in the idea. The basic reason seems to be the failure of Liberalism, a failure evident to all but the most obtuse liberals. After all, Liberals have been in power for nearly forty years, and what they have wrought has been the Frankenstein’s Monster of Presidential war and dictatorship, the war in Vietnam, and the Leviathan government, the military-industrial complex, and big bureaucracy at home. And so many Liberals are ripe for a way out. The New Left, to the extent that it still exists, has become Stalinist and crazed; the conservatives, with their devotion to Throne, Altar, and the Big Bomb are out of the question. So who does that leave as the new road to salvation? Us!

The current tidal wave of publicity was touched off by Chairman Bill’s overreaction to the Lehr-Rossetto piece in the New York Sunday Times magazine section, as noted in our last month’s editorial. The momentum might have died with Buckley’s snide and bitchy column of Jan. 14; but Jerry Tuccille, having been sneered at by Buckley as a “semi-literate gentleman”, was provoked into belting out an attack on The Chairman, which he simply sent in to the New York Times remarkably influential Op-Ed section (the new page of the daily Times opposite the editorial page which is devoted to lively controversy and challenging ideas.) The editors liked the Tuccille piece, and printed it on Jan. 28: “A Split in the Right Wing.” Jerry pointed out that Buckley’s anti-libertarian hysteria was prompted by the fact that, with the Times article by Lehr-Rossetto, the libertarian-conservative split on the Right has at last received nationwide publicity, there by eroding Chairman Bill’s much-coveted power base.

The Op-Ed editors then asked me to follow up Tuccille’s piece with a philosophic statement of what this new libertarianism is all about; and this was printed as “The New Libertarian Creed” in the Times of Feb. 9.1 pointed out the evil influence of National Review in converting the old Taft-era right-wing from a roughly libertarian, individualist, and isolationist creed to the present crusade for extirpating Communists at home and abroad, and apologia for Big Government at home, both of which we have come to know so well. I also briefly outlined the libertarian philosophy as resting on two basic axioms: the absolute right of every individual to “self-ownership”, to the ownership of his own body; and the right to own all virgin resources that the individual finds and transforms by his personal energy. From these two axioms can be derived the entire system of property rights, freedom of contract and bequest, and free-market economy. I also pointed out that the conservative’s revered “law and order” really means the coercive dictation of the State, the historic harbinger of disorder and aggression, an aggression against person and property which it habitually commits through the robbery of taxation, the enslavement of conscription, and the mass murder of war. I ended by pointing out that libertarians are in the historic American tradition of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson, and Garrison; and that in contrast, James Burnham, in a recent National Review (Dec. 1) called for a new Bismarck for America and for a re-evaluation of fascism. Accompanying the article were pictures of Mencken, Jefferson, and Robert Taft.

The “New Libertarian Creed” was then placed into the Congressional Record (Feb. 24, pp. S1888-S1889) by Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Ore.) Senator Hatfield declared: “One of the unique and well articulated new philosophies on the political scene is libertarianism. Although it claims a long history, it has not received much public attention until rather recently. Its proponents vary in their intellectual histories, coming to this point of view via the right wing of the Republican Party on one extreme and from the New Left on the other.” Hatfield then proceeded to read my article into the Record as a “most comprehensive and concise presentation of this perspective.”

Buckley wound up the exchange with his “The Conservative Reply”, New York Times (Feb. 16). The article was a typical Buckley performance: a series of catty ad hominem smears and misrepresentations, carefully avoiding the substantive issues. One gets the impression, indeed, that Buckley has ceased to think at least a decade ago, so caught up is he in his career as the rich man’s insult-comic (although somehow less lovable than Jack E. Leonard).

As usual Buckley rings the changes: first, on the Karl Hess comparison of Beria and J. Edgar Hoover. As usual, Chairman Bill misses the point. It was not that Karl claimed that Hoover is as bad a character as Beria; the point Karl was making was that in one sense at least, Soviet Russia is more democratic than the United States: that they managed to depose the head of their secret police, whereas we are apparently unable to do so. An astute and witty point. And then, once more, for the 858th time, there is me and lighthouses. It should be clear to the most superficial reader of mine and Buckley’s writings, that he and his cohorts have devoted at least twenty times as much space to the lighthouse question as I ever have. Bill Buckley may consider socialized lighthouses to be one of the burning questions of our time, but I certainly do not.

In his article, in fact, Buckley affirms that the State does good as well as bad things, but the only positive example he can point to are those lighthouses again. One begins to wonder what accounts for Chairman Bill’s strange obsession with lighthouses? Setting aside with reluctance the possible Freudian interpretation, we are left with the thought that Mr. Buckley is very anxious to keep coercing landlubbing taxpayers into donating free light to his beloved sailboat–a true example of the “welfare state” in action, and surely a worthy reason for abandoning the free market.

Bill, I’m willing to make a trade: if you’ll give up the Cold War and the war in Southeast Asia, I’ll let you have your beloved socialized lighthouses, and may Social Darwinism work its way on your boat!

Buckley tries to defend himself against my charge of statism by wheeling into position four distinguished free-market economists, “whose intellectual fortress continues to be National Review.” The problem is that of those he mentions, one (Wilhelm Ropke) has been dead for years, another (Ludwig von Mises) has never written for his magazine, and a third (F. A. Hayek) broke with the magazine many years ago, vigorously denouncing Bill Buckley for his tasteless implication after the death of Dag Hammerskjold in an airplane crash that the latter had been cheating at cards. Buckley’s reply to Hayek was typical of his aristocratic taste and refinement: tossing off his remark as a jeu d’idee and implying that Hayek was not familiar enough with the English language to appreciate the Buckleyite wit. That leaves only Henry Hazlitt, who writes but seldom for National Review in any case.

Again for the umpteenth time, Buckley repeats Hazlitt’s charge that I am an “extreme a priorist”, a charge coming with ill grace from Henry, since the methodology of his own and his mentor Mises’ economics is precisely “extreme a priorism.” In the only piece of reasoning in his article, Buckley again gets matters completely mixed up: presuming to link me with the “extreme a priorist” view that every landowner owns the heavens up till infinity, Buckley conveniently ignores the fact that this is diametrically contrary to my own “homesteading” theory of property. On the contrary, it is his and Hazlitt’s presumably sensible and non-extremist common law that takes this admittedly absurd position. And so it goes, a farrago of smear, error, and clouding of substantive issues.

It might have struck some of Buckley’s readers that there was one curious omission in his pantheon of free-market economists: Professor Milton Friedman. Undoubtedly because even such a sober, conservative and Establishmenty economist as Friedman has been read out of the movement by Buckley for his kooky, “frivolous”, and extremist defense of free trade, legalized narcotics, and freedom for prostitution. In fact, it becomes ever clearer that any theorist who does not fit in cozily and completely as a champion of the status quo will be denounced by Chairman Bill for frivolity and absolutism.

It is clear that the conservatives are hurting from the libertarian upsurge, otherwise Buckley would not be devoting so much valuable space to our continuing excommunication.

Sure enough, on Feb. 23, National Review returned to the attack with a malicious editorial, “Serving Their Times”. Stooping to the very conspiracy view of history for which Buckley once read the Birchers out of the movement, N. R. asserts that the evil liberal New York Times has entered into a conspiracy with me and other libertarians to do the Times’ “dirty work” in attacking conservatism. Well, well! And, terrible thing, we were paid for this work by the Times, “with its offer of the check and the space to frolic in.” Buckley’s fulmination that we are all paid agents of the Times runs up against a few cold facts: (1) that the Times slipped badly enough in its conspiratorial work to give Buckley rather than myself or any other libertarian the last word in the dispute, there by allowing his smears and innuendos to remain unanswered. (2) that the Times magazine recently did a laudatory story on the Buckley family without visible protest from the chairman. (3) that the amount of money all of us received from the Times is as nothing compared to the money which Chairman Bill receives, day in and day out, for his regular column in the ultra-Liberal New. York Post. Who’s selling out to whom, Mr. Chairman? To cap the irony, Buckley conveniently forgets how Lehr and Rossetto came to write their article in the Times, which touched off the entire furor. They came to the Times’ attention for their ardent work for Buckley for Senate in last fall’s campaign!

Here we must record a refreshing interlude in the Buckleyite snake pit. William F. Rickenbacker, former editor of National Review and libertarian economist, has a letter in the March 9 issue of N. R, gently but firmly reproving one Witonski for his Buckleyite review of my Power and Market. This break in the N. R. monolith of hostility to liberty must be chalked up to the fact that the magazine could hardly refuse to print a letter from one of its former editors.

Turning to more pleasant matters, the next piece of scintillating publicity for our cause came in an organ which hardly fits the pattern of liberal conspiracy. The widely-read weekly, the National Observer, published a lengthy, amusing, sprightly, and perceptive article on the libertarian movement in its issue of March 1. The article by James R. Dickenson, “Abolish Government”, takes up the entire coveted upper half of the front page of the issue, and spills over to a large part of an inside page. Other subtitles in the Dickenson article are: “Down with all Governments!”, and “Own Your Own Road, Hire Your Own Police”. Dickenson did a great deal of work on the article, as is evident from the contents, and he is perceptive enough to base his summaries of the libertarian position on lengthy Interviews and quotes from myself, Leonard Liggio, Jerome Tuccille, and Karl Hess – and is also astute enough to perceive the differences between Karl and the rest of the movement. Generally a delightful article, highlighted by an amusing front-page cartoon on the movement, depicting a group of Breughel-like libertarians with swords aloft, blindfolded, carrying flags upside-down, and dancing around an eagle tied to the stake.

Another important contribution to the recent publicity on libertarianism is the March 1 issue of WIN, the semimonthly journal of the pacifist War Resisters’ League (30¢ per copy, $5.00 per year, available from 339 Lafayette St., New York, N.Y. 10012.) Virtually the entire issue is devoted to “right-wing libertarianism.” The lead is an article by myself, “Know Your Rights”, the most comprehensive survey to date of the libertarian movement – who we are, and what are the different positions in the libertarian spectrum. The article first outlines the central core of the libertarian creed, and then goes on to a description and critique of the positions of FEE, the Randian movement, the neo-Randians, Robert LeFevre, the California and Hawaii movements, the development of SIL and RLA, the split within RLA. and the emergence of the National Taxpayers’ Union. Then there is an excellent article by Leonard Liggio, “Your Right to be Against War”, in which Leonard sets forth and analyzes the history of the anti-militarist and anti-imperialist movement in the twentieth century, the filiation from Old Right to New Left, the roles of Albert Jay Nock and Senator Taft, etc.

Another article in the WIN issue is an interesting contribution by a left-wing Friedmanite, Henry Bass, “Libertarian Economics.” Bass instructs his fellow syndicalists that they must incorporate the insights and truths of free-market economics in any vision of a utopian syndicalist society. Finally, Karl Hess contributes “What’s Left?”, a critique of the extreme right-wing of the libertarian movement, in particular Stanford’s Harvey Hukari, Jr. and the striking gap between Ayn Rand’s novels and her current political views. While Karl’s strictures are well-taken against the extreme right-wing of the movement, he does not come to grips with the sober center-mainstream of anarcho-capitalism. To top off the issue, one Bob Calese has compiled a useful bibliography of right-wing libertarian literature which includes the individualist anarchists: Andrews, Warren, Tucker, Spooner, Greene, Mackay, Swartz; libertarian classics such as Spencer and Nock; modern contributions such as Mises, Rand, Rothbard, Tannehill, Wollstein, Tuccille; and historical accounts and collections such as Martin, Silverman, Krimerman and Perry.

All in all, the issue is must reading for libertarians.

Newspapers and magazines: can other media be far behind? Numerous radio appearances by various libertarians were capped by my appearance on the NBC-TV Today show on March 8. – Furthermore, books galore by major publishers on libertarianism are scheduled for next winter’s season; there will be libertarian manifestoes, readers, personal statements, reprints, and non-fiction novels. If National Review is livid now, it had better brace itself for the flood of books next season. Onward and upward!

Notice To Subscribers

Because of the imminent rate increase in postage the subscription price of the Libertarian Forum will be $8.00 per year.

The Libertarian Forum will soon resume its former twice-monthly publication schedule in response to reader reaction.

Facing Bureaucracy

BY NORMAN H. CROWHURST

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

— Declaration of Independence.

To me, for whom the “long train” has extended over nearly 20 years, that particular sentence of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the mechanism by which “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while the evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed,” has come to have very real meaning.

Only when I was faced with a choice of what crime I should elect to commit at the instigation of a government agent, for which I, not he, would be punishable, did I finally realize that something is very, very wrong in America.

But let me start at the beginning, for my story will show how almost imperceptibly freedom can be encroached upon-just as others may have experienced it, with the difference that encroachment on mine was pushed further than the average citizen’s, for reasons that will emerge from my story.

My career, a highly successful one, started in England before World War 2. I was chief engineer of a leading electronics company, not long after ‘electronics’ was prevalently explained as ‘an outgrowth of radio, which is an outgrowth of electricity’! At the same time I was senior lecturer at two of London’s colleges, with responsibility for curriculum coordination between districts.

World War 2 resulted in concentrating my attention on the electronic communications equipment needed to win the war. After the war, bureaucracy raised its ugly head very quickly in Britain, making life quite difficult. After countless frustrations with the socialist government, the Land of Opportunity attracted my attention, and my wife and I emigrated in 1953.

Because my reputation preceded me I found work easily – in fact I had a choice. The first selection was a job with Fairchild Recording, developing multi-track sound to go with the then-new wide-screen movies. Fairchild also had government contracts to develop systems for the armed services, which had been “my bag’ in my native England.

This was where I should have been alerted that trouble was brewing, but perhaps America was too new for me to see the trend. I was precluded from this development work, because (a) I was not yet an American citizen, and (b) I did not possess security clearance. However, with my reputation, I encountered no difficulty finding other work.

After a little more than a year with Fairchild, I left full-time employ with that company, continued as a consultant to do work permitted to me, and extended my consulting clientele elsewhere. Being precluded from government-connected projects created “no sweat” for the time being.

From 1958 to 1961, one of my major clients was CBS Laboratories in Stamford, Connecticut. The Labs had a similar mix of work to that at Fairchild, part for consumer or industrial application, part for government contracts. However, several times engineers working on a particular government contract intimated that they would like to consult me about what they were doing, but were not permitted to do so.

In 1961, the CBS executive made a decision that affected me seriously: the Labs were to do no work except that ‘covered’ by government contracts. However, a coincidence gave me one more job before our association terminated. The classified job about which the engineers had wanted to consult me became declassified by being authorized as operational. It was called “Net Alert.”

So my final job was writing the operating manual for NetAlert. As an engineer, I could not resist asking why they adopted somewhat inefficient ways of designing certain parts of the system. Then I learned that these places were precisely where they could have used my services. I found it a little frustrating to describe a system that I could easily have improved upon, when it was ‘frozen’ – all I could do was describe it.

During the late 50s and early 60s, I received several work offers for which I was highly qualified – both the people offering and I knew that – but when they learned that I had no clearance record, they sought other means of getting the work done – or else forgot about the contract opportunity altogether.

The reason for this reaction was simple. Obtaining clearance for a person of foreign birth (even if he eventually gets it) takes about 18 months. Such contracts are open for competitive bid between different companies. So a company cannot make a bid contingent on perhaps securing the services of a man necessary to its fulfilment, when that “perhaps” cannot be resolved for 18 months hence.

So I continued to work in areas that avoided this problem. However, I began to realize that my work opportunities were dwindling, as the government extended its activities into more and more fields, under one pretext or another. I have received dozens of letters from newly-formed government agencies, asking for personnel recommendations, to fill vacancies for which I was qualified, but “need not apply” for this reason.

In 1960 my wife and I became citizens. We liked what we learned, in studying about our new country. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States made a lot of sense to us, and we identified very readily with the principles there enunciated. Citizenship should be a step toward solving what was obviously looming as a problem.

In 1962, I started renewing my interest in education, and to further this, I wrote to England to obtain written confirmation about my career there. That was when I discovered that the Department Head under whom I did most of my work could not obtain written verification, because all records of my schooling and teaching work before World War 2 were destroyed by enemy action during the war.

Complicating my problem was the Englishman’s typical attitude, “Don’t those stupid Americans know we had a war here? Why should they insist on us producing documents that no longer exist?” I had letters explaining the situation from people who knew me – wouldn’t that be enough for anyone?

In 1962, something else began, that promised to help. I received a letter typed on plain paper, with a Virginia address, and signed ‘Earl Holliman.’ He wrote to ask me some technical questions, which I answered, as I did all letters from readers of my books and articles. Next came a letter on the stationery of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, identifying Earl Holliman as a Colonel in that service, thanking me for my information and asking more questions.

To cut a long story short, in 1964, Colonel Holliman asked if I would be prepared for retention by the U.S. Army Security Agency as a consultant, for which a relatively low order of security clearance was needed. As a possible door to resolve my growing problem, I readily agreed.

As a precaution, I mentioned the difficulty in verifying certain parts of my record in England, but was told to submit this application, that this need not prevent my securing clearance. So I filed some forms in quintuplicate and received notification they had been received: I should know the result in about 6 months.

But about 3 months later, I received a letter with another, much larger bunch of forms, saying the requirements for clearance had changed, would I please complete these? It did not occur to me at the time that the reason for a change in requirements might be because they had changed the clearance being sought for me – nothing was said about that. I just assumed this was still the same application.

I did not receive a response until over 2 years from my original application: clearance denied. No reason given, and a letter asking for explanation received the answer that reasons could not be given as a matter of “national security.”

During this time, while my reputation continued to expand, my work opportunities continued to contract: more people would ask me to undertake something, then withdraw the offer when the security problem was mentioned. They apparently assumed that anyone with my background would have “picked up” security clearance somewhere along the way. When they found I had not, they dropped me like the proverbial hot potato: to even discuss anything with me could be “dangerous” for them.

So when I got this freeze-out letter, I wrote to Senator Wayne Morse, who tried to elicit some information from the U.S. Army Security Agency, as unsuccessfully as I had myself. After Senator Hatfield was elected to office, I wrote to him; he tried again, with more success.

The answer he obtained was that there were 3 reasons why I had been refused clearance: (1) my wife’s parents were not American citizens, being British by birth, and having lived, worked and now retired, in their native England; (2) my records could not be verified satisfactorily; and (3) they could trace no details of my pre-World-War-2 associations, either those I mentioned in my application, or any others. They made it quite clear that there was no suspicion that I might have had ‘undesirable’ associations. On the other hand, there was no evidence that I had not.

About this time. Bob Packwood defeated Wayne Morse as Senator from Oregon, and Bob became interested in my case. He took up the matter, and as a result of his representations in my behalf, the first and third reasons were withdrawn, but on the second the agency remained adamant: they must have access to original written documents; no affidavits and no copies of information that I had in my possession would be acceptable as evidence of my career back there.

Now, the reason given for this rigid requirement was the relatively high order of security clearance being sought. For lesser levels, the requirement might not be so stringent.

What had happened? Where did my clearance application get “upped” in level? What was that change in forms, about 3 months after my initial application? A piece of news about a year later gave me a clue as to a possible, but I hoped improbable, reason, but I tried to pursue the possibility anyway.

This was when the dispute about deployment of ABMs first came up. I read one small news item suggesting that there was doubt about the effectiveness of the weapon, and that it had never been tested, even on a simulated interception. So I wrote to ask about this and the only responses I could get were assertions that all kinds of “experts” had “testified.”:

Some time later a conservative group solicited my support for lobbying for the ABM. So I wrote to this group to question its validity as a weapon, saying that I believe we vitally need such a weapon, if we could be sure it works. In reply this group sent me a booklet, issued by the American Security Council, prepared by a committee of 31 experts.

The names of the 31 experts are listed. They include not a single person competent to judge the question I have persistently asked, and concerning which I certainly could answer, IF I had the facts. In the book’s 72 pages, less than one page is devoted to the objection, “It Won’t Work,” in which my question is not even mentioned.

The main argument of the book is that deploying ABMs is a matter of military strategy. No argument about that. But I suggest that if the enemy should obtain reliable information that the weapon does not work, the strategy is not very strong! Which brings me to my question, and its relation to my security clearance application.

For an ABM to successfully intercept an incoming enemy ICBM, it needs four essential parts:

1. A warhead capable of destroying the incoming ICBM when it meets it.

2. A propulsion system (rocket) capable of thrusting it up into space fast enough to effect the interception at a safe distance before the ICBM’s intended arrival here.

3. A steering mechanism capable of ensuring that the ABM does actually intercept the ICBM.

4. An electronic guidance system, capable of receiving data about the course of the ICBM, and correcting its own course to ensure that the steering mechanism does its job of intercepting properly.

The panel of experts address themselves to the first three requirements, but not to the fourth, and no expert on the panel is competent to judge this. Nor has the ABM been tested.

The layman has no way of knowing what is involved, so he tends to trust the experts. Congressmen are laymen, in this sense. But the communists have people who are not laymen in this field. Of that you can be sure!

Let me explain the problem this way: can you fire a gun to “shoot down” a bullet coming toward you? The best gunman alive (or dead) has never attempted this. Bullets travel faster than sound, at about 1000 mph. ICBMs travel through space at from 3 to 10 times the speed of a bullet, and any ABM that can intercept them must travel at least at an equal speed.

Presumably this possibility has been verified under item 2 above. And presumably item 3, the capability of steering precisely enough to hit head-on at a cumulative speed of approaching 20,000 mph has been verified too. What has not been verified is the electronic system that can direct the steering so it actually DOES that.

Electronic systems can be designed to function in millionths of a second. But in a millionth of a second, these two objects, the ICBM and the ABM, will be approaching one another by a distance of more than 100 feet. And if their courses miss one another by 100 feet, they miss one another, period!

If the electronic system reacts only a millionth of a second slow, or over-reacts in a way equivalent to a millionth of a second fast, no hit! And if the system is designed that way-which has not been checked, either way – the possibilities of an “accidental hit” are not even as good as the possibility of your shooting down a bullet speeding toward you.

The notion that a sheer quantity of such defense will prevent some of the mass of enemy ICBMs getting through – the pepper-pot theory – is sheer nonsense, in this context. How many bullets would you have to fire off to stop the other man’s bullet hitting you, “by accident”?

That is the key question, now how do I connect this with my security clearance application? One of the jobs about which I gave information was with a technical school where I wrote the very first textbook published about Electronic Navigational Aids and Guidance Systems, right after World War 2.

I did not name the book in my application, because I have more than 40 books and close to 1000 magazine and journal articles published, so it seemed pointless to attempt to list them. But one of the first things the investigators would learn, on checking my work at that job, would be that I wrote that book, which is still used as a text.

Realizing this I began to see why my clearance application was apparently uprated. Somebody saw that I could be useful to check the ABM guidance system, unaware that somebody else in the bureaucracy had reasons for not wanting it checked!

This was affirmed later, when I met another electronic engineer, a native-born American, with capabilities similar to my own, who had also been invited to apply for clearance, and been refused in a similar way, although he had no basis for determining why he was refused.

Now put these items together: the only thing not checked about the ABM is that item 4, which is vital – and nobody competent to do that has been retained as an expert. Two people with that competence (to my knowledge – there may be more) have been invited to apply for clearance, and both have been inexplicably refused.

Had I been asked to check the design, even if I could find no fault in the theoretical design, I would want to see it tested on an actual simulated intercept mission: it is too easy to be a microsecond “off” here or there. Such a test has never been conducted either. Some experts with no knowledge of this kind of system have declared it will work, and that no test is necessary!

In my own case, the reason finally given for refusing clearance, and stated with adamance as an unbendable “rule,” is the one that I was told at the beginning did not matter loss of prewar records. Had there truly been such a rule, I should have been so informed, to save unnecessary application and processing at taxpayer expense. Obviously, this “reason” was invented after the event. What other explanation is possible? And why the “need” to invent such a “rule”?

While uncovering this basis for the peculiar action – and this issue seems too hot for anyone to tackle – portends ill for our country’s future, the problems that the action itself has created for me personally are no small ones either.

During that same period, in an endeavor to break the growing impasse, at my own expense I developed a new circuit principle which became the subject of a U.S. patent in 1967. This cost me a great deal of my own resources, and I produced a convincing demonstration of its effectiveness. Its first major application would be in high power sound projection, for which any company wanting to develop it would seek government support, for application by army, navy or airforce.

As soon as the patent was issued, several companies contacted me about it, hoping I would work with them as consultant on its development with some arrangement to our mutual benefit. As such a possibility was based on an enquiry from a government agency, one question inevitably asked was, did I have security clearance? Upon learning my status, the matter was promptly dropped. So I have invested, thousands of dollars, plus a few years of my time, in something that government bureaucracy is effectively prohibiting from further development, because of their other decision.

In 1967 I encountered yet another severe setback. Much of my income, as other sources receded, had been from my books and articles. But that year proved a bad one, for several distributors went bankrupt, returning their stocks of books to the publishers for refund or credit. This resulted in reverse royalties that wiped out my income that year. Actually, this was a cancellation of a large part of my 1966 income, and should be treatable as such.

But the Internal Revenue Service refused to accept this explanation, and insisted that I pay tax based on my cancelled earnings, even when I had no actual income. I was living on loans from the bank to support future work, and by advances from publishers, also against future work. The IRS agent was not satisfied: I must negotiate more contracts with advances, for work I could not possibly do, and then declare bankruptcy, when I had “found” that I could not fulfil the contracts.

He made some other suggestions, each of which was equally dishonest, if not outright illegal. He also told me that it was fruitless to appeal his decision, since I had already written to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in Washington, as a result of which letter (and a few more) he was visiting me.

I managed, at the time, to get a further loan to pay the immediate tax he demanded, partly because he threatened that if I did not, and if I did not sign a completely false statement of my financial position that he wrote for me to sign, he could seize all my property, including my technical library, thus preventing me from even fulfilling the contracts I had already signed.

The following year, I retained a tax accountant to prepare my return. Then I found that, not only do I not get any refund for income extracted as return against previous years, but when I repay the loans I obtained to carry on living, these are also taxable as further income! I am being taxed several times over. The only offset to make it possible for me to live is to have the accountant fill in all kinds of deductions I could not possibly have paid to anyone, to which I put my signature on the 1040 form.

This was when I reread the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and saw the light. Twice already I had been coerced into perjury: this must stop. The only way was to refuse to cooperate at all. Putting anything on that form committed me, and there was no legal way I could make a true return.

Somewhere around this time I learned about Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education, and about Willis Stone’s Liberty Amendment. When I made the decision to quit allowing myself to be forced into perjury, and to stand upon the Constitution, as we had undertaken to do when we took the oath as citizens, I wrote to Leonard Read. His response was that he would not refuse to pay taxes in any way whatever, unless he was ready to start a revolution, which he was not! Did I have any choice?

I also attended a “tax revolt” meeting organized by the Liberty Amendment people. They urged me to support their cause – at a time when I could not afford a penny to support anything! Willis Stone himself told me, when I tried to explain my position, that I must pay my taxes first, and then support his movement to get taxes repealed: that was the democratic way, he told me. When I asked him what I could use for money, first to pay impossible taxes on fictional income that I did not even have, then to support his program, he did not understand and said I must obey the law. He could not seem to understand that I had been given no possible way of obeying the law: my choice was only how I must choose to disobey it!

That was about the time when I realized the full import of those words in the Declaration of Independence that I put at the head of this article. I wrote a 10-page statement, setting this forth, sent a copy with my blank, but signed 1040 form, to the IRS, with copies to President Nixon, our two Senators and the District congressman.

It is high time that we did just what the words that head this article say. It is our right and our duty. But we sure have to be pushed, before we realize it!

“War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley.

IN DEFENSE OF NON-ROMANTIC LITERATURE

BY JEROME TUCCILLE

It should be self-evident that there is something seriously amiss with the literary views of someone who regards Mickey Spillane as one of the great writers of our time, but this apparently is not the case. A growing number of libertarians are now entering society with erroneous ideas about the great body of literature that pre-dates the publication of The Fountainhead. It is almost ironic that these New Intellectuals, who are so far advanced in the fields of economics and philosophy, are almost passionately illiterate when it comes to the subject of literature. They have accepted the literary pronouncements of Ayn Rand at face value without bothering to explore them as deeply as they have her more abstract theories, and they are willing to champion publicly the literary tradition of Victor Hugo – Ayn Rand – Mickey Spillane even as they challenge Randian political concepts.

This article is an attempt to add more balance to the Objectivist Inheritance. In the last year or two many Objectivists have abandoned the trappings of classical liberalism for the more consistent doctrine of political anarchism (thanks in large part to the hortatory talents of Roy Childs). Now these same Objectivists who have had the independence of mind to break officially from the papal aspects of Randianism ought to look more closely at her views regarding literature.

In her article, “What is Romanticism? (Part 1),” appearing in the May, 1969 issue of The Objectivist, Rand cites the following “Romantic” novelists as belonging to the “top rank” in the literary hierarchy: Victor Hugo, Dostoevsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz in Quo Vadis, Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter; and among “Romantic” Playwrights, Schiller and Rostand. Later in the same article she blames “Naturalistic” tendencies for the “breakup of Romanticism.” She lists H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Sinclair Lewis as being among the “better-known” Naturalists (as far as characterization is concerned) and the best that Naturalism has to offer, which is of course many notches below that of even the mediocre Romantics. For contemporary examples of the best authors in the “simplified, more obvious” Romantic School she names: Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming and Donald Hamilton, all mystery-pulp writers (Part 2 of the same article, The Objectivist, June, 1969).

The “destroyer of Romanticism was”, predictably enough, “the altruist morality.” Again in the same article she compares Naturalism with journalism, the mere recording of “real life” events and characters, and she vilifies Balzac, Tolstoy and Zola as the archetypical practitioners of this accursed art. They dealt with “stolen concepts”, “social determinism”, and their values are “concrete-bound.” Apparently there are wide gaps in the Rand’s reading background for she makes no mention at all of English and American literary giants of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: Hardy, Galsworthy, Maugham, Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Waugh, and others. This is a serious omission and necessarily belongs in any valid discussion of the nature of literature.

In rebutting her thesis, it has unfortunately become necessary to state the obvious: Ayn Rand to the contrary, Naturalism and journalism are not to be confused. There is a world of difference between a realistic accounting of last night’s riot in a daily newspaper and a Naturalistic portrayal of the quality of life in a given society at a given time by an accomplished novelist. The novelist brings a depth of insight to his subject matter which a journalist may not possess. Those journalists who do have this incisiveness of mind usually graduate into novelists, a la Hemingway.

The best literature usually combines good Naturalism with good Romantic values – that is, a superb rendering of what it was like to live in a certain place at a certain time, along with a moral message which will aid the reader in his own quest for values to live by. The element that makes We The Living a better novel than Atlas Shrugged is Miss Rand’s gripping and Naturalistic account of what it was like to be in Leningrad, circa 1920s, when the revolution had already been betrayed by power-lusting bureaucrats, combined with the Romantic struggle of a young woman and her lover for the right to live their own lives. It portrays believable people in a believable situation while expressing positive moral values. On the other hand, the dialogue in Atlas Shrugged belongs in a comic strip and the characters in a James Bond fantasy.

The quality that separates good Naturalistic rendering of events from bad Naturalism is the artist’s capacity for selectivity – knowing what to put in and knowing what to leave out. This is what makes Hemingway and Maugham good Naturalists (economy of style; saying more with fewer words), and Thomas Wolfe a bad Naturalist (including every extraneous detail with a floodtide of words). If it weren’t for good Naturalists such as Hardy, Galsworthy, Anderson, Fitzgerald, we would all be harder pressed to understand the true quality of life that existed in nineteenth and twentieth century England and America. A single novel of Hardy’s is worth far more than a thousand newspaper clippings from his era. Journalists relay surface events to the public; a good Naturalist drives beneath the surface to the spiritual, intellectual, and psychological currents of his time.

Didn’t Victor Hugo employ Naturalism in his Romantic story of the life of Jean Valjean? What else would you call his artistic rendering of the conditions of French society that Valjean found himself enmeshed in? Or Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov or The Possessed? What else would you call the vivid imagery he used to describe the street scenes of Moscow and the Siberian countryside? It is apparent that Rand excoriates the Naturalist Emile Zola because she views his intriguing descriptions of working conditions in eighteenth-century France as an attack on capitalism. It is – an attack on state capitalism, but Rand has not troubled to see the distinction and berates Zola for his “moral depravity.”

Rand has little to say about comedy and satire. On the two occasions on which I heard her speak about the subject she denounced both as “negative” values, and satire as particularly evil because it negates viciously. It would be too easy to attribute these views to the fact that Miss Rand is incapable of writing comedy and has absolutely no understanding of the nature or purpose of satire.

Satire is the highest form of comedy and the best satire is an extremely positive value because it negates that Which deserves to be negated. It’s purpose is to destroy that which is evil by holding it on a skewer for public ridicule. Even a “sense of humor” and “laughing at oneself” (condemned, of course, by the Rand as a chipping away of self-esteem) is an attempt to eliminate the worst in man (and in ourselves) by focusing on human imperfections with the hope of doing something about them. But if one is perfect to begin with . . . Evelyn Waugh was probably the greatest satirist writing in English this century, and his son Auberon is following closely in his steps. Kurt Vonnegut is the closest approximation we have in this country of a first-rate satirist using the novel as an effective vehicle for social criticism. Art Buchwald and Jules Feiffer are now attempting to use satire in the theater, but whether they will stake out lasting reputations in this direction remains to be seen. So what if satire doesn’t offer positive values for the reader to identify with? Isn’t the stripping away of hypocrisy and immorality value enough? Does one have to produce a philosophical treatise every time he writes a story?

A contemporary “serious writer” whom Ayn Rand admires very much is Allen Drury. Drury has produced some of the dreariest prose since Theodore Dreiser, and his novels are little more than apologias for the type of gunboat diplomacy advanced by Teddy Roosevelt. He calls himself a Robert Taft Republican but he is really a hard-line conservative, which is why he is so popular with the Buckleyites – and now the Randians. Mickey Spillane, presenting Mike Hammer as his protagonist in the struggle between “good guys” and “bad guys”, permits his hero to break the arms of innocent people in order to extract information from them and he is praised by Miss Rand as a valuable Romantic writer. The fantasy world of James Bond is surely not “concrete-bound” (entertaining fantasy, yes; concrete-bound realism, definitely not) so it is promoted as the best of contemporary Romantic literature. This is the type of absurdity that the literary views of Ayn Rand inevitably lead to. I would suggest that she has fallen into the pitfalls of her own “mind-body dichotomy” regarding the subject of literature. More concrete-bound Naturalism in the field of Romantic fantasy might help to elevate it to the level of serious literature.

Despite all the trash that is offered in the pages of the New York Times Book Review as “good modern fiction,” one does not have to turn to Mickey Spillane or Allen Drury as an alternative. There are many good writers publishing fiction today whom Ayn Rand has apparently never even heard about. She might pick up the novels of Friedrich Duerrenmatt and discover concise Naturalistic description as a background for Romantic moral themes. She might read An Operational Necessity by Gwyn Griffin or King Rat or Tai-Pan by James Clavell for valuable Naturalistic Romanticism of the type she employed in The Fountainhead. The Godfather by Mario Puzo reveals more insight into the psychology of mobsters than can be found in a hundred news reports.

She might read Mother Night or Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut for good social and political satire; Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov for Romantic themes in the realm of science fiction.

Anyone who thinks Naturalism is unplotted should study An Operational Necessity for tense and exciting plot structure. Those who think Naturalistic description is journalism ought to re-read Hemingway and Fitzgerald for economy of style and precise selection of detail. Miss Rand, herself, could use a jolt of imagination to liven her own predictable phraseology. Those who see only real-life characters in Naturalism fail to understand the subtleties of interpersonal relationships depicted by first-rate Naturalists such as Mary McCarthy. Any who think that Naturalism is devoid of moral themes should read The Quarry by Duerrenmatt. Or they can read any one of the above books for all four of these basic ingredients in a single work. Plot, theme, characterization and style are not copyrighted products of Romantic fantasists.

Literature is an exciting and multifaceted subject. It ought to be explored in great detail by those who want to enlarge their capacity for knowledge and enjoyment. Anyone who pretends to compartmentalize it with trite sloganeering does an injustice to himself. And rational men are capable of better things than parrotting the simplistic, school-girl rhetoric of others.

From The ‘Old Curmudgeon’

Have you noticed how many leftists at one and the same time hold (a) that we have entered a “post-scarcity world” making obsolete any concern with private property, a free price system, or with work and the Protestant ethic; and (b) that capitalist greed is destroying our natural resources, and therefore that government must step in and plan for their conservation? To the observer, this may seem irrational and inconsistent; but there is a “higher” consistency here: use any stick, self-contradictory or not, with which to clobber the free market and the rights of private property.

In every cloud there is a silver lining, and so there is one good fall-out from Women’s Liberation: the savage attack that the women’s libbers have been mounting against Freudianism. Until a year or so ago, the Left-liberal intellectual held Freudianism, an irrationalist creed which all Old Curmudgeons have been opposing for many years, as virtually their prime article of faith. But now the Women’s Lib assault has seriously weakened the devotion of the guilt-ridden male liberals to their Freudian faith. In a war between Freudians and Libbers, we are reminded of the old joke about the wife who hated her husband and found her husband attacked by a bear. Torn in her sympathies, she alternately shouted: “Go Husband! Go Bear!” in the hopes that these two antagonists would kill each other off. In the same spirit, we raise the cry: “Go Libbers! Go Freudians!”

One of the more amusing items in the grim news of the day was the recent report that Mrs. Patricia Buckley Bozell, managing editor of the Ultra-Catholic Triumph, had taken a swing at Ti-Grace Atkinson, leading Women’s Libber, for charging at a speech at Catholic University that, even assuming the Virgin Birth to be correct, that this makes God’s “male chauvinism” even worse, for this means that God had impregnated Mary without even sex as a compensation. While of course all libertarians deplore any physical assault upon the exercise of free speech, I confess to a sneaking sympathy for Mrs. Bozell. To have this creature spawned by the dregs of our culture heap obscene abuse upon the Catholic faith on the campus of a Catholic university would seem almost too much provocation for a dedicated Catholic to bear.

Apart from this: by what right did the federal judge force Catholic University to permit Atkinson to speak on its campus? Here was a clear invasion of Catholic University’s property right in its own campus, and the clear implication that anyone has the right to speak on anyone else’s property, even unto abusing the property owner himself. This is the kind of “free speech” which every genuine libertarian should steadfastly oppose.

Recommended Reading

Libertarianism.

The Individualist, monthly organ of SIL (415 2nd St., N. E., Washington, D.C., 50¢ per copy) has a particularly stellar product in its February isssue. Featured are Murray N. Rothbard’s “Milton Friedman Unraveled”, an evisceration of Friedman’s “libertarian” pretensions; a laudatory review of Rothbard’s Power and Market by U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield (R., Ore.); an excellent critique of the Friedmanite scheme for school vouchers to parents by George H. Pearson, “How Tuition Vouchers Socialize Private Education”; a defense of free will by Jarret B. Wollstein, “Free Will and the Natural Order”; and James D. Davidson’s attack on psychiatric tyranny, “The Dangers of Psychiatry”. The issue also features an ad for pro-private school leaflets available from the Center for Independent Education, at which George Pearson is associate director. (Address of the Center for Independent Education is 9115 East Thirteenth, Wichita, Kansas 67206).

In his review of Power and Market, Senator Hatfield writes that it “argue(s) persuasively against the economic functions of government”, and “suggests alternative method of dealing with problems normally assumed by government.” Hatfield concludes that “I look forward. . . to the further application of this praxeological method to the practical problems of today . . .” and ends with the famous quote from Thoreau that “That government is best which governs not at all.”

Also to be commended is the February issue of Reason (750¢ per month, $6.00 per year, P.O. Box 6151, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93105). There is a very good article by Robert Poole, Jr., “The Power Crisis”, on the ways in which government has been creating crises through its various interventions in different parts of the fuel industry. And an excellent article by Roy Childs, Jr., “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism: A Revisionist History”, the first of a two-part article in which Roy sets forth a revisionist analysis of the intimate connection between big business and the emergence of statism in twentieth-century America. The article also features an analysis by Roy of the philosophy of history and historical inquiry.

One thing which the libertarian movement has been in desperate need of is a quarterly scholarly journal. We now have a libertarian quarterly, Libertarian Analysis, whose first Winter, 1970 issue has recently been published ($1.25 per copy, $5.00 per year; P.O. Box 210, Village Station, New York, N.Y. 10014.) Its basic stance emerges out of the RLA (Radical Libertarian Alliance) background of its editorial board: a quest for unity between “left” and “right”-wing anarchists. Aside from reprinted articles from Paul Avrich, Paul Buhle, and Noam Chomsky, the first issue contains three original articles: Murray N. Rothbard’s “Individualist Anarchism in the United States: the Origins”, a history of little-known anarchist thought and practice in 17th century America; Joseph R. Peden’s “Courts against the State”, a case study of three notable twentieth-century private commissions of inquiry against governmental atrocities; and a letter by Karl Hess calling for a revolutionary strategy.