Vol. 3.5, June 1971

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph. R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME III, NO. 5	JUNE, 1971	75¢

How To Destatize

The libertarian movement has long been far stronger on ultimate principle than it has in strategic thinking. While we cannot overrate the importance of providing a theoretical picture of the society toward which we are striving, we have done much more of this needed theorizing than we have considered how in the world to get from our current “here” to the ideal “there.” This deficiency of strategy and tactics is highlighted by our general failure to consider two dramatic recent victories for liberty, for destatizing, and to ponder what lessons they may offer for future strategy. These recent victories are the generally rapid movement for the repeal of abortion laws, and the successful movement to rollback and eventually abolish rent controls in New York State.

To use those much-abused terms once more, the “right-wing” of the libertarian movement tends to be pure “educationists”, while the “left-wing” tends to call for immediate destruction of existing society. Both strategies are self-defeating, and both in effect insure that the success of liberty can never be achieved. The educationists call for increased devotion to education, to spreading the ideas and the scholarship of libertarianism throughout society, for a new form of “cultural revolution” in behalf of reason and liberty. Now while I wholeheartedly endorse the proposal for ever-wider education, the problem is that this strategy is necessary but scarcely sufficient for victory, i.e. for translating these libertarian concepts into the real world. The educationist view tends to hold that as more people are converted, the State will somehow automatically wither away. But how? And by what mechanism? Often the educationists explicitly rule out all possible mechanisms for pressuring the State to roll itself back or dismantle itself: violence is dismissed as evil, mass demonstrations as coercive, voting or influencing politicians as injuring libertarian purity, civil disobedience as violating the principle that while the laws are on the books they must be obeyed. But how then is the State to be rolled back? The educationists have thereby systematically ruled out all ways but one: convincing the men in power to resign.

In short, Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson or Henry Kissinger or whoever is supposed to read Atlas Shrugged, or Power and Market or Human Action or This Bread is Mine or whatever and say: “Eureka! This is it! They’re right, and I’ve been wrong. I resign and look for honest employment.” Now certainly such instant conversions by our sinners are conceptually possible, and once in a while, in isolated cases, they indeed happen, and should be saluted and cheered. But surely history shows that such large-scale conversions are highly unlikely, to say the least; no ruling elite in history has voluntarily surrendered its power on any grounds, much less on massive recognition of its own sins. And surely for libertarians to rest their strategic perspective on such conversion of sinners would be folly indeed. And yet that is the strategic dead-end to which our educationists would consign us.

It is true that our left-wing R-r-revolutionaries confront the problem of Power, which the educationists do not; but their strategic prescription of instant and indiscriminate destruction is not only self-defeating but suicidal as well. The moral legitmacy of self-defense against the State is beside the strategic point: the point being that the use of violence only serves to alienate the very American public whom we are trying to convince. And “alienate” is of course a very tame word here: “polarize”, “enrage”, would be far more accurate. Another point which the violent revolutionaries forget is that there has never been a successful armed revolution against a democratic government; all toppled governments have been seen by the public to be outside themselves, either as dictatorships or monarchies (Cuba, China, Russia, 18th Century France, 17th Century England) or as imperial powers (the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution). The Left is fond of pointing to the Tupamaros of Uruguay as a successful urban guerrilla movement, but the evident point here is that the Tupamaros have not at this writing succeeded, or shown any signs of doing so. So long as free elections exist, then, the use of violence by American rebels will only prove suicidal and counter-productive.

We must reject then both strategies: the defeatist torpor of the educationists, and the frenzied nihilism of the Revolutionaries. What then should be our positive strategy? This is a difficult problem, especially since the art of strategy and tactics depends on the forces at work at the particular time. But here is a prime strategic lesson: that while we must be pure and consistent in principle, we must be flexible in tactics. We must be willing to adopt any tactic that seems likely to bring about the goal of liberty, any tactic, that is, that is not in itself immoral and itself violates the libertarian creed. Take, for example, the MayDay Tribe demonstrations this spring in Washington. In contrast to the effective and moving demonstrations that preceded MayDay, the goal of the Tribe seemed to be to blockade and “trash” private automobiles, thus typically expressing the Left’s hatred against the private car. For the libertarian, however, not only was the May Day tactic counterproductive in alienating the great bulk of Americans, it also violated libertarian principle by directing its’ ire against private property – the very thing that the libertarian is concerned to defend and expand. No genuine libertarian could consider such trashing in any way except with abhorrence.

For a more positive model, let us consider the two most prominent victories for destatizing in recent years: the repeal of abortion laws and the substantial removal of rent control in New York. How did these victories come about? Let us consider the rent decontrol case first, as a simpler model. Rent control has been imposed in New York since World War II, and a few years ago it was even imposed anew on post-war buildings. Seemingly, it was a system destined to last forever. All these years, the aggrieved landlords of New York had protested, but in vain. The new recent ingredient was clearly the patent failure and collapse of housing in New York City in the last few years. For few new apartment houses have been built in recent years, due to rent controls and zoning restrictions; existing housing has deteriorated, and abandonments of houses by landlords unable to pay taxes have increased, adding to the plight of the homeless. Furthermore, the Liberal claim that rent controls are merely a temporary device until the apartment shortage disappeared was given the lie by the fact that the shortage of apartments in New York has gotten visibly worse rather than better. In short, as a result of rent controls and high property taxes, the housing situation in New York has reached a crisis stage, and it was this crisis situation that impelled the state authorities to turn to new solutions – to turn, indeed, onto the firm path of decontrol. But the lesson here is that the government cannot be induced to change its ways by theory alone; it was the crisis situation brought about by controls that led Governor Rockefeller and the state legislators to turn to the free-market theorists who were there with the decontrol solution at hand. Theory, however correct, will not be put into effect unless a crisis situation arrives to force the government out of its habitual bureaucratic inertia and onto a search for new solutions.

Abortion reform also had the ingredients of sound libertarian theory at work plus a crisis situation. The theory had been propounded for years by pro-abortion groups, but was accelerated recently by the fact that the Women’s Lib groups, in their raucous and annoying manner, had stumbled across a purely libertarian theory which they propounded with force and effect: that every woman has the absolute right to own and control her own body. The attention devoted to Women’s Lib by the media assured that the politicians finally were able to hear, not a wishy-washy liberal plea for moderate abortion reform, but the “extreme” – and consistent – view that the State had no right to pass any abortion restrictions whatever.

While libertarian theory had been firmed up and spread more aggressively, a crisis situation was becoming ever more blatant: and this was the massive, non-violent civil disobedience of women and doctors who obtained their abortions illegally. And not only were increasing numbers of women and doctors willing to ignore the law; but others were increasingly willing to broaden the fuzzy zone that often exists between legality and illegality: for example, doctors willing to stretch the definition of “endangering the health of the mother”, which made abortion permissible. Furthermore, it was also becoming evident that, taking place as they did under conditions of illegality, the abortions were both unnecessarily expensive and unnecessarily dangerous. In the case of abortions, then, it was mass civil disobedience that brought about the crisis situation, while the spread of libertarian theory made the government more willing to turn to the de-statizing solution. But not only theory: also the use of the theory to pressure the politicians, by petition, by noise, by threat of votes, etc.

As the Marxists would say, there is needed for victory both the “objective conditions” and the “subjective conditions.” The objective conditions refer to crisis situations in the real world; for libertarians, finding crisis situations is easy, especially since these crises (e.g. the abortion mills, housing decay) have invariably been created by the government itself. The subjective conditions refer to the need for groups of libertarians to propound the libertarian solutions to these crises and to pressure the politicians when the objective conditions are ripe. Both methods were applied in the successes of housing and abortion – and both successes were won without a self-conscious group of pure libertarians bringing their wider and more systematic doctrines to bear on the struggle. How much greater will the success be when libertarians will have made their mark as an active, expanding, self-conscious movement, stepping into crises as they appear and providing the benefit of their far more systematic insight, or, to paraphrase the Marxists, “raising the level of libertarian consciousness” among all parties concerned! Times, moreover, are going to be increasingly ripe for this sort of action, because crises are piling up as the failure of the Welfare-Warfare State becomes increasingly manifest in field after field: education, foreign policy, conscription, welfare, transportation, etc. As crisis situations multiply, libertarians will find their own opportunities multiplying as well, provided we are not stultified by the educationists or discredited by the nihilists. And we must remember that if we do not pursue these opportunities, more sinister forces – socialists or more likely fascists – will be standing in the wings to offer their alternatives to the failure of the Liberal-Conservative Consensus. Considering the numerous failures and tyrannies of socialism and fascism it will be easy to discredit these alternatives – provided that we are there to offer liberty as the only rational — and reasonable – alternative to the existing order. But a reasonable alternative emphatically does not include insane blatherings about “ripping off Amerika”. Liberty is profoundly American; we come to fulfill the best of the American tradition, from Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Jeffersonian movement, and beyond. As Benjamin R. Tucker put it, we are “unterrified Jeffersonian democrats”, and we come not to destroy the American dream but to fulfill it.

Syndical Syndrome

New Yorkers have recently had to suffer yet another irresponsible blackjacking at the hands of power-drunk labor unions. This time it was the bridge tenders and garbage incinerator workers who, angered at the state legislature’s balking at their receiving pensions which no private industry could afford, took their frustrations out on an innocent public by not only striking but sabotaging traffic facilities. Admittedly, there was no way that they could win their strike, since upstate legislators could hardly be brought to their knees by traffic tieups and sabotage in New York City, but it was a nice way to have a couple of days off while sticking a knife into the ribs of John Q. Public. Libertarians must always concede the right to strike, since otherwise labor would be compulsory rather than voluntary; but if employers had the fortitude and they were allowed to do so by law, they would automatically fire any and all strikers, and thereby take the strikers’ quitting their jobs with the serious response that they deserve. In the case of outright sabotage and destruction, along with threats of violence against those who continue to work or are hired to replace the strikers, the unions who commit such aggression should be treated as the criminals that they are. And since such coercion is the general rule in strikes, these criminal penalties would, in a libertarian society, be widespread rather than nonexistent as they are now. For it should never be forgotten that a libertarian society does not mean the total absence of coercion but only the absence of coercion against non-criminals. Those who invade the rights of others by violence deserve their proper check and punishment by the force of law.

In the light of the black record of union violence and intimidation over the years – a violence inherent in their assumed power to keep non-strikers off “their” jobs it is difficult to understand why so many libertarians have lately become enamoured of anarcho-syndicalism and the “working class”. For the arrogant and coercive labor unions are indeed “syndicalism” in embryo, and the harbinger of any future fully syndicalist society.

Of the three major proposals for running an advanced industrial society – socialism, syndicalism, and free-market capitalism – syndicalism is the most blatantly unworkable and most rapidly disastrous. For in such a society, there must be some rational mechanism for allocating resources efficiently, for seeing to it that the proper amounts of labor, land, and capital equipment are employed in those areas and in those ways most efficient for satisfying the wants and desires of the mass of consumers. Free-market capitalism not only provides the most smoothly efficient way, it is also the only method that relies solely on voluntary inducements. Thus, suppose that a great number of new workers are needed in a new and expanding industry, say, plastics or electronics. How are these workers to be supplied? The market way is to offer new jobs at higher wages in these new areas and fields, while firing people or cutting wages in those industries that are in decline (say the horse-and-buggy industry). The pure socialist way is to direct the labor out of one industry and into another purely by coercive violence, i.e. by forced labor direction. The socialist method is both despotic and highly inefficient, and so even the socialist countries have been turning more and more to free-market methods in the allocation of labor. But at least socialism is an attempt at a rational allocation of labor in a modern, industrial society.

Syndicalism, on the other hand, i.e. full worker “ownership” of “their” industries, does not even attempt to achieve a rational allocation of resources. Both the free method of market allocation and the coercive method of central dictation are eliminated. And what is to take their place? In effect, nothing but chaos. Instead of a coordinating mechanism there is now only the chaotic will of groups of brawling monopoloid syndics, each demanding parity and control regardless of economic law. Does anyone think for one moment that the horse and buggy workers would have permitted higher wages in the budding automobile industry? Or have permitted the dismissal of workers? All one need do is to observe the arrogant behavior of unions with monopoly power to know the answer. But the problem lies deeper than bad will on the part of union syndics. The problem is that, even in a community of “saints”, even in an improbable world of meek and altruistic union monopolists, there would be no way for the syndics to make their decisions on wages, employment, or allocation of production. Only a system of market pricing and wage rates, guided by profit and loss considerations for market firms, can provide a mechanism for such decisions.

Furthermore, the myriad jurisdictional disputes that already plague our system of unionism would be far more intense and out of control in a syndicalist society. Take for example carpenters working in the steel industry. Would the carpenter syndic “own” the product of their carpentry, or would they be merged unheralded and unsung into the general syndic of steel workers? Professor von Mises has scoffed at the syndicalist cry of “steel to the steel workers, aluminum to the aluminum workers, syndical society, who indeed would own the garbage, the garbage collecting syndic or the street maintenance and repair syndic?

Syndicalism would therefore be totally incapable of organizing an industrial economy, and this total failure is, indeed, the economic embodiment of the dysfunctionality of the anti-technological youth culture which has given rise to the new syndicalism. In a recent Firing Line interview, Bill Buckley asked Karl Hess the elementally silly question: in an anarchist society, if one group of workers wanted to work from 8 to 4, and another set in the same plant wished to work from 9 to 5, who would decide? Karl, trapped in an anarcho-syndicalist framework, could only lamely reply that the workers would come to some sort of agreement. The proper and swift answer would have been that the stockholder -owners would decide, just as they are doing now. Anarcho-capitalism is an easily explainable system, precisely because its configuration would be very similar in most ways to the society that we have now.

Like the New Left generally, the proponents of syndicalism suffer most from a total ignorance of economics, and therefore of the ways in which an industrial society can function. If the syndicalists can be persuaded to get “into” reading, especially of a subject which they usually define as being inherently “repressive”, they might learn something from the critiques of syndicalism in Mises’ Socialism and Human Action, and in Henry Simons’, Economic Policy for a Free Society.

It is true that the Yugoslav economy is working well, but the remarkable Yugoslav shift from socialist central planning to a relatively free market economy has never been clasped to the New Left bosom. For while the workers in each plant indeed own their plants, the relations between plants are strictly governed by a free price system, and by profit and loss tests. It is precisely the adoption of the free market, of money, prices, competition, self-reliance, etc. by the Yugoslavs which prevents the anarcho-syndicalists and the other egalitarians and anti-marketeers of the New Left from treating Yugoslavia with anything but pained silence. Furthermore, the Yugoslavs are rapidly moving in the direction of individual shares of ownership for each worker, and the subsequent trading of such shares in some sort of “people’s stock market”, which will culminate their shift to a free-market economy.

The Yugoslav system, therefore, is indeed not syndicalist, but a market economy of producers’ cooperatives. If this is really all that the anarcho-syndicalists demand, then they can easily bring the new society into being, by simply forming producers’ coops owned by the workers themselves. In free-market capitalism, there have never been any restrictions on workers banding together in producers’ coops to own their own capital equipment. And yet, in the free economy, producers’ coops have been notorious by their non-existence, or rapid failure in competition with “capitalist” firms. The reason is that, unknown to the economically ignorant syndicalists, the capitalists perform an extremely important service to the workers, as a result of which most people prefer to be hired by capitalists rather than be self or cooperatively employed. The two basic functions are those of the “capitalist” per se and those of the “entrepreneur”. As a capitalist, the employer saves money from his possible consumption, and invests the money in paying workers their income in advance of sale of product. In an automobile factory, the capitalist pays workers their weekly wages now; in a producers’ cooperative factory, the workers would have to go without income for months or years, until their product is finally sold to the consumers. The capitalist earning of “interest” for this advance payment is precisely equivalent to the creditor who earns interest by lending someone money now while being repaid at some point in the future. In both cases, “interest” is earned as payment for savings and time preference for income now rather than waiting for the future.

The second service performed by the employer is to assume the significant risks of entrepreneurship. A producers’ cooperative firm invests resources in a product, and then hopes to sell that product to the consumers at a net profit. But suppose that the efficiency and the foresight of the workers is minimal; suppose, in short, that they produce an Edsel that fails to sell? If they do, their income is negative rather than positive, and they lose capital assets which they can scarcely afford. In the capitalist economy, the employer assumes these capital risks, and only he therefore is subject to monetary losses if his product is inefficiently produced or if he cannot achieve satisfactory sales.

Most workers are unwilling or unable to assume these risks of entrepreneurship, and therefore they greet the employer’s willingness to do so, as well as to pay them in advance of sales, with sighs of relief. Or would if they understood the process. We can confidently predict that if Yugoslavia ever allows full-scale capitalist employment (as it does now for small-scale enterprise) that its producers’ coops will rapidly give way to orthodox “capitalist” modes of production – to the benefit of all concerned.

The question of whether a future free society will be “coop” or communal or capitalist brings up the most disturbing problem about the anarcho-syndicalists and communalists. This is the famous “question of Auban” the question that “Auban”, the individualist anarchist hero of John Henry Mackay’s novel The Anarchists, put to the left-wing anarchists. In essence: would you, in your proposed anarchist society, permit those who so wished to have private property, to engage in free market transactions, to hire workers in “capitalist” relations, etc.? The communist anarchists in Mackay’s book never answered the question clearly and lucidly, and neither do any left-wing anarchists that one may encounter today. (For the Auban speech from Mackay, see Krimerman and Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy (Doubleday, 1966), pp. 16-33.) Generally, the left-anarchists reply that, in their Utopian society, no one will be so base as to want to indulge in private property or in capitalist social relations. But suppose they do? one persists. The answer is generally either a repeat of the Utopian answer or an evasive silence.

And when the left-anarchists can be pressed for an answer, the response is disturbing indeed. Take for example one of our most distinguished socialist-anarchists, Professor Noam Chomsky. Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our “right-wing” libertarian movement; apparently he is – I am afraid unrealistically – concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute “the greatest tyranny the world has ever known”. (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? than Ghengis Khan?) Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an “anarchist” at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an “anarchist”. And I very much fear that the same can be said for the other varieties of left-anarchists: communal, syndical, or whatever. Beneath a thin veneer of libertarian rhetoric there lies the same compulsory and coercive collectivist that we have encountered all too often in the last two centuries. Scratch a left-wing “anarchist” and you will find a coercive egalitarian despot who makes the true lover of freedom yearn even for Richard Nixon (Arghh!) in contrast.

If this analysis is correct, as I believe it is, then it makes all the more absurd the hankering by so many of our “left-wing” for an intimate comradely alliance with the anarcho-left. Beneath superficial agreement in rhetoric, there is nothing in common between genuine libertarians and collectivist “anarchists”. Superficially, we both oppose the existing system – but so too do monarchists, Nazis, and those who hanker for a return to the Inquisition – scarcely enough for a warm and comradely dialogue. It is indeed fortunate for Liberty that the left-anarchists have about as much chance of victory as some of our Conservatives have to restore the Bourbon dynasty. For if they did, we would soon find that the embrace of left-anarchy is the embrace of Death.

Jerome Daly Once More

Readers of the Forum may remember that we had pointed to the struggle of the intrepid libertarian activist, attorney Jerome Daly of Savage, Minnesota, against fractional reserve fiat banking (Lib. Forum, Aug. 1, 1969). In 1967, Mr. Daly refused to make any further mortgage payments to his bank; at his jury trial (First National Bank of Montgomery v. Jerome Daly) in December, 1968, Daly argued that the bank had loaned him, not real specie money but only bank credit which it had created out of thin air, and which was therefore valueless. Since it was valueless, the credit was not a valid consideration, and the contract was, according to Daly, null and void. Remarkably, the jury and Justice of the Peace Martin Mahoney ruled in Daly’s favor, and, furthermore, Mahoney refused to accept the required fee from the Bank for a judicial appeal, on the ground that only gold and silver can be used to pay such fees.

The unfortunate death of Judge Mahoney ended the Daly case; but now Mr. Daly is back in action. In 1966, Mr. Daly had deposited $71 in silver coin in a savings account at the Savage State Bank. Now he is suing the bank for return of the silver coin which he had deposited; he refuses to accept the fiat paper of the government. At the end of April, the Justice of the Peace of Credit River Township decreed that the bank must pay gold and silver coin to a depositor upon demand! In a companion decision, the same court held that the State Treasurer of Minnesota must pay an income tax refund check of $61 in nothing but gold or silver coin. This decision is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, not on the correctness of the decision but on whether the Justice of the Peace had jurisdiction in the case.

In the meanwhile, Mr. Daly has also been active on the tax resistance front. He hasn’t paid income taxes since 1965, claiming that the income tax is unconstitutional and also that the IRS returns violate the Fifth Amendment. Daly also ties the claim in with the Minnesota court decision on the unconstitutionality of banks’ issue of fiat money. What Daly does is to submit an income tax return, consisting of over 40 pages of his legal claims, and suggesting that the IRS sue him for the tax in U.S. District Court. So far IRS has not sued Mr. Daly, who is now holding seminars around the country instructing people how to fill out similar income tax forms. (For further information, Mr. Daly can be reached at 28 East Minnesota St., Savage, Minn. 55378).

Recommended Reading

The Individualist. The April issue, just out, features an article by Murray N. Rothbard, “Education: Free and Compulsory”, a philosophical discussion of the nature of the education of children and a critique of compulsory education by the State. Also featured are two excellent review-articles: Professor Edwin G. Dolan’s review of Robert P. Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism; and Roy Childs’ review of G. William Domhoff’s The Higher Circles.

Revisionism, in the March issue of Reason, Roy Childs continues his great educational work in instructing SIL members in the nature of empirical reality in twentieth-century America. This is the conclusion of his two-part article on “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism: A Revisionist History”.

Education. A valuable stream of inexpensive leaflets generally priced at 10¢), has been pouring forth from the Center of Independent Education, 9115 East Thirteenth, Wichita, Kansas 67206. These include leaflets on education by Armen Alchian, Robert L. Cunningham, David Friedman, Benjamin A. Rogge, E. G. West, and James M. Buchanan. Particularly important is a critique of the dangerous Friedmanite scheme for educational vouchers by George Pearson, Another Look at Education Vouchers, which can also be found as “The Case Against Education Vouchers” in the April-May issue of Reason.

Libertarian Growth. The burgeoning importance of libertarianism is reflected in the Spring issue of Modern Age, the leading conservative quarterly. (743 North Wabash Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611, $4.00 per year, $1.25 per issue.) Rothbard and libertarianism are discussed in no less than four places in the Spring issue, ranging from the highly favorable review of Power and Market by H. George Resch, to an objective and respectful account in M. Stanton Evans’ “Varieties of Conservative Experience”, to a harsh account by Gary North, to a silly smear by Donald Zoll, who accuses us of being secret agents of Herbert Spencer. (I for one am happy, now and formerly, to hail Spencer’s Social Statics as the greatest single work of libertarian political philosophy ever written.)

Meanwhile, our favorable recognition in the media continues to expand. David Deitch wrote a series of three articles on our movement in the Boston Globe, April 10, 11, and 12. The first deals with the National Taxpayers Union, the second is a general interview with Murray Rothbard, and the third deals with Senator Hatfield’s proposals for tax reform.

The Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin or January 24 has a lengthy article on SIL’s Philadelphia offices, including pictures of David Walter and Don Ernsberger. And the Stanford Daily of May 27 has a long article proclaiming the death of YAF and its replacement by the new libertarians.

Garland Reprints. In these days of massive reprinting, the libertarian should be alert to reprints of classics in his areas of interest (unfortunately they are usually very expensive.) Now Garland Publishing, Inc., 24 West 45th St., New York, N.Y. 10036, has announced the publication of a Garland Library of War and Peace, a mighty series of 328 volumes, largely anti-war and isolationist, and focussing most heavily on World War I and environs. The books are available individually, or in a complete collection for $4500, and are supposed to be available now (though this is doubtful). Many of these works are indispensable for any libertarian interested in foreign policy, and at the very least, everyone should send away for the handsomely produced catalog. Some of the important titles follow.

John Foster Dulles, War, Peace and Change (1939). $11.00. Dulles’ isolationist work about Europe in the 1930’s.

Charles H. Hamlin, Propaganda and Myth in Time of War. $9.00. Includes Hamlin’s excellent 1927 booklet on U.S. aggressive wars throughout its history, as well as his critique of U.S. war propaganda by educators during World War I.

Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World. War. $13.00. A classic on war propaganda.

Harold Lavine and James Wechsler, Propaganda and the War (1940) $18.00. An excellent and detailed study of war propaganda in the late 1930’s.

Edmund D. Morel, Truth and War (1916) $17.00. The leader of English revisionism on secret diplomacy and World War I.

Albert Jay Nock, The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922). $7.50. The first American revisionist work on World War I. By the great libertarian writer and theorist.

Caroline Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations (1925), $21.00. Comprehensive work on English revisionism of World War I.

Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War Time (1928), $11.00. The classic work on British atrocity stories fabricated about Germany in World War I.

Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda in the Next War (1938) $11.00. A chilling forecast of British propaganda to be used to draw the U.S. into World War II.

Irene Cooper Willis, England’s Holy War (1928), $19.50. Critique of English press propaganda in World War I.

John Bakeless, The Economic Causes of Modern War (1921), $14.50. On the economic causes and colonial rivalries leading to World War I.

Frederic Bastiat, Paix et Liberte 1849), on classical liberalism, free trade, and peace, and their opposition by socialism and nationalism; includes within it the later classical liberal work by Emile Laveleye, On the Causes of War (1872). Both for $10.

Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of R. Cobden, 2 vols. $34.00. A treasure chest – the collected works of the great libertarian and “isolationist”.

John A. Hobson, The War in South Africa 1900). $18.00. The book also includes G. P. Gooch’s pamphlet The War and its Causes (1900); the classic volume on Boer War Revisionism.

Carl Marzani, We Can Be Friends (1952). $18.00. The first work of Cold War Revisionism, which stood alone for a decade until Fleming.

Gustave de Molinari, The Society of Tomorrow (1904). $11.00. A great libertarian work, and of all the Garland collection, a must for every libertarian. Deals not so much with war and peace as with the free market economy, in which Molinari, the Belgian libertarian economist and successor to Bastiat, goes beyond the master to the brink of free-market anarchism.

Parker T. Moon, Imperialism and World Politics (1926). $24.00. A classic, this remains the best single work ever written on imperialism. A country by country history of the development of imperialism, it is objective and unmarred by Marxian fallacies.

Charles A. Beard, The Devil Theory of War (1936), $7.50. A brief analysis of the U.S. entry into World War I based on the revelations of the Nye Committee. By the Dean of revisionist history.

Henry N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (1914), $16.00. A blistering critique of competing Euopean imperialisms, written on the brink of world war.

H. C. Engelbrecht and Frank C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death (1934), $16.00. The classic muckraking work on the tie-in between war and the munitions industry, or what would now be termed the “military-industrial complex.”

Seymour Waldsman, Death and Profits (1932), $10.00. The first critique of the armaments industry and World War I.

Edwin M. Borchard and William P. Lage, Neutrality for the United States (1940), $21.00. The great work of “international law revisionism”, by the leader of “isolationist” international lawyers. Mostly on World War I, with a supplement on World War II. Shows that the U.S. consistently violated international law, and that we: had far more international-law grievances against Britain than we had against Germany.

Clarence M. Case, Non-Violent Coercion (1923), $19.75. A classic sociological espousal of non-violent action.

Barthelemy de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence (1938), $15.00. A classic work by a Dutch non-violent revolutionary left-anarchist.

Cook, Chatfield, and Cooper, eds., Three Generals on War $22.00. Three pamphlets from the 1920’s and 1930’s by generals who turned against war. Includes the revulsion against the killing that he had done by General Frank Crozier, a blistering attack on World War I by General Christopher Thomson, and the famous repudiation of his own service to the U.S. military-industrial complex by General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket.

Cook, Chatfield, and Cooper, eds., Sermons on War by Theodore Parker. $6.00. Three sermons attacking the Mexican War by the great minister, abolitionist, and classical liberal.

Franziskus Stratmann, The Church and War, a Catholic Study (1928), $12.00. The classic repudiation of the Thomist doctrine of the “just war” in the light of modern conditions of warfare, by an eminent Catholic theologian.

Blanche Cook, ed., American Anti-Imperialism, 1895-1901, $15.00. A collection of essays and previously unpublished correspondence by the great laissez-faire anti-imperialists of the turn of the century, including Edward T. Atkinson, and William Graham Sumner.

Blanche Cook, ed., Max and Crystal Eastman on Peace, Revolution and War. $15.00. Selected essays and correspondence by the great libertarian-inclined journalist Max Eastman, including his early days as a left anti-militarist and his later views of the cold war. Also includes essays by Eastman’s sister Crystal, a leading anti-militarist in the feminist movement.

Blanche Cook, ed., Oswald Garrison Villard: The Dilemmas of the Absolute Pacifist in Two World Wars. $15.00. Until now the only biography of the great pacifist and laissez-faire liberal journalist has been the Old Left hatchet job by Michael Wreszin. Now Professor Cook collects writings and unpublished correspondence to show the consistency of Villard’s pacifism and anti-militarism in World Wars I and II. A very important work.

The Senate And The Draft

It is one thing to be against the draft pro forma, even to vote against it in Congress; it is quite another to really fight against it in the crunch, on a crucial vote that might have some possiblilty of success. This year, the crunch came on the Senate vote, on June 23, to impose cloture to shut off a planned filibuster on the two-year extension of the draft. Since two-thirds of those voting are needed to shut off debate, and since many Southerners have been supposedly committed to the filibuster as preserving the right of the minority to talk an objectionable measure to death, here was a real chance, and the only one on the horizon, to smash the draft. Here then, on the cloture vote, is a real test of the dedication of a Senator, either to abolition of the draft or to retention of the filibuster principle.

Most Southerners, lifelong devotees of the filibuster, hung their heads and voted for cloture, since “national security” (i.e. military slavery) was at stake, and the latter came first. On the other hand, many liberals, supposedly against the draft, voted for cloture because they are more devoted to majority tyranny than to the abolition of slavery. Most shameful are those supposedly anti-draft conservatives, headed by Barry Goldwater, who voted for the anti-draft Hatfield-Goldwater amendment last session, but who voted for cloture this June. These include Goldwater, Fannin (R., Ariz.), Boggs (R., Del.), Gurney (R., Fla.), Fong (R., Haw.), Jordan (R., Id.), Dole (R., Kan.), Pearson (R. Kan.), Cook (R., Ky.), and Prouty (R., Vt.). Since a shift of only three votes in the Senate was needed to preserve the anti-draft filibuster, a special cry of shame should be directed against these ten renegades.

In fact, only five Republican senators withstood Administration pressure enough to stand fast against cloture. These five men deserve a special vote of thanks from all Americans dedicated to liberty: Case (N. J.), Hatfield (Ore.), Javits (N.Y.), Mathias (Md.), and Schweiker (Pa.).

As for the Democrats, we should record that handful of Southerners who favor the draft but who love the filibuster principle better: Allen (Ala.), Byrd (Va.), Ellender (La.), Fulbright (Ark.), McClellan (Ark.), and Spong (Va.). Among the liberals, the egregious Hubert Humphrey, Mike Mansfield (Mont.), and Edmund Muskie, all voted for cloture, although Muskie’s vote was perfectly in keeping with his vote against Hatfield-Goldwater last year. The most pleasant surprise was the anti-cloture vote of Teddy Kennedy, notorious champion of the lottery system and opponent of the Hatfield-Goldwater amendment. Good Lord! Does this mean we might be getting Camelot again?

Special commendation should be meted out to the major organizers of the draft filibuster, Senators Mike Gravel (D., Alaska) and Alan Cranston (D., Calif.) This is Gravel’s first leadership role in the Senate, and bears a happy augury of the future.

“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.” — Thomas Babington Macauley.

Bits And Pieces

By Jerome Tuccille

VANDENBERG by Oliver Lange. Stein and Day, New York. 1971. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. 1970.

Good fiction is a product that has always been difficult to find. There are many elements which go into the making of a novel, and a weakness in any one of them can either destroy the final product completely or provide it with a structural flaw that seriously reduces its total impact. The author’s style, his use of dialogue, his narrative skill, his depth of insight into his own characters, his plot structure and the organization of his material, his discipline and architectural control over the building of his book, his selection of detail – knowing what to put in and what to leave out – his ability to maintain a firm grasp on his basic theme and thread it into his story so the reader is drawn into the fiction progressively as it unfolds – all these are essential pillars upon which the final product will rest. If any one is seriously flawed, the novel will fail. If all are good and sound and carefully developed by the author, the novel will stand firm and endure.

It is because of all these fickle variables that go into the creation of a novel, because of the overwhelming difficulty an author faces in getting all these pieces to fit together and work as a whole that the writing of good fiction is the most difficult job a writer can attempt. It is nerve-racking work and exhausting work. There are only a handful of people in any generation who can do it well. More novels are closed and left unread after fifty pages than are given a thorough and enthusiastic reading. There simply isn’t enough good fiction, in the avalanche of books that is published every year, to satisfy the appetites of people like myself who literally hunger after a good piece of serious fictional writing.

For this reason it is an exciting experience to come across two new novels in the span of a couple of weeks which not only qualify as top-quality fiction, but fiction which is also of interest to the libertarian reader. Vandenberg, the more recent of the two books, a current bestseller published this past Spring by Stein and Day, is explicitly libertarian in theme. In perhaps the only serious flaw in the story the pseudonymous author, Oliver Lange, has invented a Russian dictatorship in the United States sometime in the near future. The means of takeover is never adequately explained. We only know that it was bloodless and mysterious and somehow not completely credible in terms of contemporary political reality. Lange would have been much better off had he stuck with our present regime in Washington and shown how it might have evolved into a full-scale dictatorship, a much more likely possibility than the one he presents. The story he tells would have been equally valid and a bit more credible.

Overlooking this point, the bulk of the novel is rich with exciting narrative and vivid description, crisp dialogue and a tense momentum which carries the reader right on through to the final pages. The story deals with the attempts of an individual, a fifty-year-old painter named Vandenberg, to avoid the reaches of dictatorial government and live his life as a self-owned human being. He escapes from a “rehabilitation” center in the southwest where the authorities, through the use of drugs and political indoctrination, attempt to break down the resistance of recalcitrant individualists and fit them into a state-controlled socio-economic system. Vandenberg escapes and is driven into the mountains with nothing more than the clothes on his back. With a powerful driving style and descriptive detail, Lange shows us how Vandenberg is able to obtain food and the materials essential to his own survival, and elude the various efforts to re-capture him over an extended period of time. Later on, after he has established a mountain hideaway and the search is virtually abandoned by the political authorities, Vandenberg is joined by several cronies who are as anxious as he is – for various reasons — to assert their own individuality. The final section of the book deals with Vandenberg’s plan to dynamite the “rehabilitation” center from which he escaped and free the political prisoners, to set an example for others who feel as he does and eventually launch an underground movement to actively resist the rule of total government. The ending is about as up-beat as it could be in the time-span Lange is covering, and the reader is left with the understanding that Vandenberg’s efforts will bear fruit over a period of time.

Several reviewers have referred to the “Hemingwayesque” tone of Lange’s style, dialogue and characterizations, and the comparison is not without substance. Vandenberg himself is a hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living individualist – not unlike a Hemingway hero. The dialogue is terse, clipped and to-the-point, another Hemingway trademark. The survival scenes in the mountains are reminiscent of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories in that they deal with the individual and his ability to dominate his natural environment. Finally, Lange’s description of the raid on the “rehabilitation” camp is as exciting as some of the war scenes in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But comparisons are always dangerous. Hemingway was a master novelist who produced a great body of work over a period of more than thirty years. Lange (as far as I can tell, not knowing his true identity) has given us a single novel, a fine piece of art which deserves to be judged on its own merits. And there is much in it to make it a more-than-worthwhile experience for the libertarian, and for the general reader.

Deliverance by James Dickey is one of those landmark novels which comes along every twenty years or so, a novel which towers in every respect so high above everything else written in its time that it belongs to its own category. James Dickey turned form advertising to full-time poetry in 1961 when he was thirty-eight-years-old, and through the decade of the ’60s he has staked out a reputation as one of our leading poets. In 1970 he published his first novel, Deliverance, which has just come out as a $1.25 paperback.

Reading Deliverance is, simultaneously, one of the most terrifying and ennobling experiences one is apt to find anywhere – short of actually living the adventure Dickey unfolds in his book. Dickey’s status as a major poet is evident in virtually every sentence for a solid 278 pages. The sensuous floodtide of his language has a narcotic effect on the reader as the author pulls you deeper and deeper into the flow of his narrative. The story itself is about three generally average men – one a salesman, another a supervisor in a soft-drink company, the other an art director in an advertising firm – and a fourth man, an expert archer and outdoorsman, who decide to break from routine and take a canoe trip down a remote river in a southern mountain range. Their adventure starts off quietly enough, with each man making plans to be away from job and family for a three-day period. But before they are actually in the water and launched on their way downriver, the reader is aware that there are dark times looming ahead and all will not come off according to plan.

On the second day of the trip, two of the party are ambushed and attacked by a couple of mountaineers who are totally hostile to any visitors from the world beyond their mountain range. From this point onward the story becomes a flooding, cascading exercise in terror and human endurance. What we are faced with is this: four men from an established world of laws, order, organization and social structure have entered a place in which there is none of these. Suddenly our four adventurers find themselves in a direct confrontation with nature and human aggression. There is no court of appeals out here, no law or police they can turn to for protection, no source of authority higher than themselves. They are in a place where every citizen is a deputy sheriff, where their attackers represent the forces of law and order. Our four adventurers are devoid of any peaceful means of protecting their rights of survival. Their choices are now, either to “take the law into their own hands” and provide for their own defense, or to submit to the tyranny that is forced upon them.

Their predicament is complicated by the fact that the leader of the expedition, the archer-outdoorsman, suffers a crippling injury which puts him out of action. One of the three “average” men, the advertising art director who has no prior experience in a survival situation, is forced to take command and lead his party to safety. Dickey’s description of what this average individual is capable of doing, of the heights he is capable of reaching, of the mental and physical gymnastics he is able to perform when it literally becomes a matter of life-or-death, is without equal in recent fiction. The powerful driving force of the author’s narrative is all-of-a-piece with the violent cascading rush of the river. And the river with its many rapids and treacherous falls, representing as it does their only means of exit from this lawless place, seems to be symbolic of life itself. Here are four individuals who are suddenly and unexpectedly forced to combat the tyranny of nature and human depravity, forced to rise above it all in their struggle for survival.

Vandenberg and Deliverance are similar in that they both deal with individual men locked in a life-and-death struggle with other men and with their natural environment. But each book is a unique and separate reading experience unto itself. They are different from each other in more ways than they are similar. Each book is a fine example of good first-class fiction. If at all possible, they should be read together, one right after the other. One can only hope that Lange and Dickey will give us more like this in the future.

“Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization.” — Herbert Spencer.

Nixonite Socialism

(Continued)

1. The Lockheed Boondoggle. The Lockheed scandal was first broken by a Pentagon official, the libertarian-oriented A. Ernest Fitzgerald, who was fired by the Pentagon for his pains, and now heads the Businessmen’s Educational Fund, dedicated to the reduction of wasteful military spending. Now, the Nixon Administration proposes a $250 million guaranteed loan to bail out this flagrantly inefficient corporation. Secretary of Treasury Connally, defending the Lockheed subsidy on behalf of a “conservative” Administration, declared that we don’t have a free enterprise economy anyway, so why not bail out our largest defense contractor. In contrast, “liberal” Senator Proxmire (D., Wisconsin), who is close to Fitzgerald and who has the highest rating of the National Taxpayers Union of anyone in the Senate on tax-and-spending bills, charged that a loan guarantee to Lockheed and other such firms would wreck the entire “vitality and discipline” of the free enterprise system.

So who’s the “liberal” and who the “conservative”? Senator Proxmire, by the way, is running for the Democratic nomination for President, although one would never know it from the studied lack of publicity he has been receiving from the press.

2. The Deficit. The astute Establishment columnists Evans and Novak report that the Nixon Administration, which had actually forecast a budget surplus for fiscal 1971, is now expecting a $23 billion deficit. The estimate has been getting ever larger for months. Added to a currently estimated $23 billion deficit for fiscal 1972, this amounts to the largest two-year deficit in American history, barring the all-out war of World War II. Evans and Novak report that many economists are beginning to worry about perpetual inflation (Well, well!). They are also beginning to realize that the perpetual deficits and inflation are raising interest rates, and thereby possibly keeping the economy in a state of simultaneous recession. It is indeed possible that the astute “free enterprise” economists of the Nixon Administration will have ushered in the lovable era of perpetual inflation-recession.

“A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefitted.” — Herbert Spencer.