Chapter 57 of 168 · Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984) by Murray N. Rothbard

Vol. 4.5, May 1972

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME IV, NO. 5	MAY, 1972	75¢

NIXON’S WORLD

Richard Milhous Nixon has long thought of himself as a world statesman. His genius, he has felt, really lies in foreign affairs: not in domestic policy, but in the impact he would have as President on the world scene. Let us assess the Nixonian record.

1. Vietnam.

In 1968 Richard Nixon had a plan for ending the war in Vietnam; it was a plan which he clasped to his bosom; it was a secret plan, the fruits of which we would all be contemplating should he attain the Presidential office. We have a lot to contemplate. Milhous has become the greatest bomber in the history of mankind; he had rained more tonnage of bombs than anyone else in history. The latest offensive of the NLF-DRV in Vietnam shows quite clearly how successful Milhous has been in “winding down the war.”

At the Lib. Forum we take no pride in our Cassandra-like warnings, day in and day out, that the war in Vietnam was not over, was not “winding down”, was and would continue to be the prime and central issue. Sometimes we stood alone: during the Paris negotiations, and before Cambodia when almost the entire anti-war movement was convinced that Vietnam was over. Nixon could have ended the war as soon as he took office; he could have blamed the whole thing on the Democrats, packed up his marbles, and gone home. But we knew, given the Nixonian mindset, that he wouldn’t. “Vietnamization” was the palpably absurd but typically Nixonian attempt to defuse the opposition at home by ending American ground casualties and continuing and accelerating our rain of death and devastation from the air. But this was simply a return to the pre-1965 Johnson policy, a policy that had already failed with Johnson, and which the Pentagon Papers reveal that the astute CIA had long predicted would be a failure.

Ever since World War II, the United States policy-makers have been fascinated with the big bomber. Bombing seemingly allows us to have our cake and eat it too: to punish, devastate, and control nations throughout the globe, while doing it from a safe distance above the ground; we could commit mass murder and not get our hands bloody. But it didn’t even work in World War II, even against an industrialized Germany which was far more vulnerable to bombings than the peasant and jungle population of Vietnam or the rest of Southeast Asia. The Strategic Bombing Survey, in Europe after World War II, found to its shock and amazement that mass bombing had had no really crippling effect on the German war machine. Millions of innocent civilians, women and children, had indeed been slaughtered; but the factories continued to produce, and even the torn railroad tracks were quickly rebuilt by the German population. And as for breaking enemy morale, bombings, whether in Germany or England, only served to cement the population behind their government’s policy. But the fascination with mass bombing continues.

Even the Nixon Administration now knows that its hokum about bombing war supplies “at the top of funnel” in North Vietnam is a pack of lies. There is no “funnel.” We are bombing in North Vietnam purely out of rage and frustration; out of a vicious vindictiveness; if we can’t get to the enemy in the South, if we can’t see or touch the NLF or Hanoi troops in the South Vietnamese arena, why we can jolly well kill the civilians up in the North. But the danger is that the pointless murder in the North will be worse than pointless; for part of the American mythology has always been the myth of “outside” control. There is no real problem in South Vietnam, we maintain, and so we have to write off the NLF as purely a puppet of Hanoi; and, proceeding further, we have to write off Hanoi as a puppet of someone else. First it was Peking that was supposed to be pulling the strings; but now, with this myth evidently breaking down, Milhous is yearning for a confrontation with the Soviet Union. We are back to the old discredited myth of Moscow as outside string-puller. The Administration’s whining about Russian aid to Hanoi would be ludicrous if it were not so deadly; for Russian aid is less than one/tenth of the massive and enormous aid which the U.S. has been pouring in to shield our veritable puppets in Saigon.

The mighty offensive of perhaps the greatest military genius of our age, General Vo Nguyen Giap, has already demonstrated, dramatically and finally, the fraud of “Vietnamization.” Is it not crystal clear to everyone, everywhere, that without the massive American air and naval support,’ as well as military aid, our Saigon puppets would collapse in a matter of days? Where, indeed, is the mythology of the well-armed and heavily primed “million man” Saigon army? Where have they gone? If Saigon really had a million well-trained men, would they have to dangerously deplete their forces around Saigon and in the Mekong Delta and rush them north?

Many Nixonite frauds now lie in shambles. There was the absurd notion that, with “Vietnamization”, the NLF would simply “fade away”. Some fadeout! There was the totally phony Nixon “peace plan”, the sensation of a day and now quietly forgotten. The “peace plan”, so widely hailed in the American press, was a humdinger: first a general ceasefire, then the withdrawal and the disarming of NLF and Hanoi troops, and then a “free” election in the South, supervised and controlled by the same Saigon crooks who have long made a mockery of all elections in the South (Neutralist opponents of Thieu still languish in Saigon jails!) The Paris peace talks had long been a phony, consistently sabotaged by the Nixon Administration; until they were finally suspended altogether. It was only when Nixon cut off the Paris talks that General Giap finally decided to strike. Now, of course, the Nixon Administration declares that we cannot resume these talks “under fire” and unless we “negotiate from strength,” which means no negotiations at all. And then there was the totally fraudulent “prisoner of war” issue, fraudulent because Milhous knows full well that, in every war in history, there is one and only one way to secure return of POW’s: by ending the war. If we really want to aid American prisoners of war, the only way to do so is to end the war – to pull out and come home.

There is only one way to end the monstrous horror that is the Vietnam War: and that is for the United States to get out, pronto, lock, stock and barrel. But that is the one thing that Nixon will not do. Only the ouster of Milhous from the White House offers hope that the horror will come to an end.

2. China.

The China trip, another sensation of the day, has happily begun to fade from memory. It was a truly repellent spectacle. The idea of normalizing relation with China, of ending the Cold War with that country, is fine, just as all inter-state relations should be so normalized. But this did not mean that Mr. Nixon had to make a total ass of himself, hailing Chinese Communist society, calling for a long march together, engaging in fawning toasts and all the rest. Is the American government, or the American character, really incapable of dignified relations? Must we either condemn every other government as an evil menace about to conquer the world, or else picture them as the greatest human invention since the discovery of the wheel? Certainly the TV viewer will long remember the contrast between the dignity and intelligence of Chou En-lai and the silly and insincere fawning of Mr. Nixon. It was not a pretty sight.

Why was it done? Who Knows? But if it was done in the hope that China would put pressure upon Hanoi or the NLF, it was a vain and ludicrous hope as by now should be evident. The Communist nations are now “polycentric” largely because they had all bowed the knee to Stalin in the past, and had time and again been clobbered and betrayed for their pains. They will never do so again.

3. Bangladesh.

We have before denounced Nixon’s policy of support of Pakistan and Punjabi imperialism, and its joining China in hostility and near-intervention against the Bengali rebellion. There was, however, method in Mr. Nixon’s madness; for Nixon was pursuing the dream of Woodrow Wilson which has guided nearly every Administration in this century: the dream of America intervening to prop up the status quo everywhere, to combat “aggression”, to put down and stamp out any and all revolutions (whether Communist or not) against all status quo States everywhere. It is the evil and imperialist dream of “collective security”. The Bengalis were presuming to disturb that status quo and therefore had to be put down. By his policy, and by his lagging in recognition of the new nation, Mr. Nixon has permanently alienated the Indians and the Bengalis.

4. Ceylon.

One of the ugliest examples of Wilsonian imperialism in years was the joining together of all the Great Powers – the U.S., Soviet Russia, Great Britain, and China – to send massive aid to the socialist government of Mrs. Bandaranaike in Ceylon, in order to suppress the youthful rebellion by the “Guevarist” JVF in that torn country. All objective observers agree that without that aid, the rebels would have been successful; and we have, again, another bout of mass the account of Richard Nixon.

5. Cyprus.

The problem in Cyprus is a complex and knotty one; but suffice it to say that the island is 80% Greek and 20% Turk, and that the Greeks on Cyprus have yearned for decades for unity (enosis) with their fellow Greeks on the mainland. The head of the Cypriote government, Archbishop Makarios, though originally pledged to enosis, has betrayed the cause. The Greek government has been trying to pressure Makarios to submit. As for the guarantees of autonomy to the Turks on the island, Makarios has been systematically violating them, and one of the reasons for the Greek pressure against him is to preserve the autonomy of the Turks against Greek Cypriote discrimination and possible slaughter. In this situation, enosis makes great good sense; wouldn’t you know, then, that Mr. Nixon, once again Wilsonian to the core, should, in the recent Cyprus crisis, step in and save the day for Makarios by severely warning the Greek government against any use of violence against the Cyprus regime? Once again, with uncanny accuracy, Milhous intervened where it was none of our business, and on the wrong side.

6. Northern Ireland.

As usual, the crisis in Northern Ireland has been grievously misrepresented in the American press. The version we get is: the Catholics and Protestants irrationally “hate” each other, and that Northern Ireland is, after all, largely Protestant and therefore entitled to their own land and autonomy. The hatred is there, of course, but if we only take the trouble to inspect the slogans of the two sides in their marches and clashes, we can begin to see the true situation. For the Catholics call for civil rights, for an end to discrimination and gerrymandering, for an end to internment and torture without trial in British-Northern Irish concentration camps, and for the ouster of the British troops. The Protestants call for crushing the Catholics, for keeping them “in their place”, and for hanging the Pope. Get the picture?

More particularly, it is a lie and a myth that Northern Ireland is “largely Protestant.” The partition that gave Northern Ireland to the Protestant ascendancy was a phony partition, a typically Wilsonian device imposed by British bayonets. The largest part of the land area of Northern Ireland has a clear majority of Catholics: namely, the counties of Tyrone, Fermanagh, Londonderry (including the torn and bleeding Derry City), southern Armagh, and southern Down. The truly just solution for bleeding Ulster would be a second partition: in which the above areas would join the Irish Republic, leaving to an independent Northern Ireland the city of Belfast and county Antrim, northern Armagh, and northern and eastern Down. The problem would then be reduced to minor dimensions, leaving only the Catholic minority in Belfast in a state of oppression. But, too much blood has flowed for either side to accept such a rational solution. The best that can be hoped for now is unity with the Irish Republic, with strong guarantees of autonomy for the Protestants in the north.

By this time, it is pointless to ask where the Nixon Administration has stood in this crisis; naturally and predictably, it has lent its considerable weight to the British and Northern Irish side, and thereby helped to perpetuate the turmoil.

7. International Monetary Relations.

With characteristic vainglory, President Nixon dubbed the Smithsonian agreement of December 18 as the “greatest monetary agreement in this history of the world.” It took only a few short months for the “greatest agreement” to show definite signs of crumbling. The soundest – and the most libertarian – international monetary order would be a world gold standard, with each currency indelibly fixed in terms of units of weight of gold; a far distant second best would be a pseudo-world gold standard of the Bretton Woods type; a distant third would be the Friedmanite dream of national fiat moneys and fluctuating exchange rates, a world which emerged on August 15, 1971 and lasted until December 18. But the Nixon Administration has managed to bring us the worst features of both fixed and fluctuating exchange rates: by fashioning a world where exchange rates are fixed but where there is no international money (such as gold) to validate them. Fixed exchange rates with no international money to back them up make no sense whatever, and it would be difficult to find any reputable economist to defend such a system. The pattern of exchange rates fixed on December 18 is already obsolete; the dollar is still overvalued; and the shaky shoring up of the system depends on the continuing willingness of foreign nations to absorb dollars ad infinitum, willingness which must soon come to an end. Throughout, Nixon and Secretary Connally stubbornly refuse to consider any restored convertibility of dollars into gold; by this stubborn monetary nationalism they are making inevitable a rapid relapse into the fiat currencies, blocked accounts, exchange controls and crippling of international trade, of the 1930’s.

In short, Mr. Nixon’s record in the international monetary field is of a piece with his record in international politics. Both can be summed up as: statism, moral evil, and consequent disaster.

The Party Once More

Mr. David F. Nolan, temporary national chairman of the Libertarian Party, writes in high dudgeon that while it is true that the party had only 52 activist members last November, that it now (March 24) has “nearly 350 members” and six state chairmen. Anyone who thinks that his makes any difference for the viability of a nationwide party is welcome to re-evaluate our position (Lib. Forum, March, 1972).

More substantially, Mr. Nolan writes that the primary purpose of the Libertarian Party is not immediate electoral victory but to educate the public in libertarian ideas. We never thought otherwise. But the problem with this approach – a long-standing objective of minor parties – is that the psychology of the mass of the public being educated is overlooked. Let us take, for example, the poor old Socialist Labor Party, which, doggedly, every four years for nearly a century, has been nominating Presidential candidates and getting them on the ballot. What impact on the electorate has the SLP achieved? The problem is that the party has been so small, so flagrantly unviable, that the educational impact for socialism by the SLP has ranged sternly from zero to negative. For what is the reaction of the public? The reaction of the average citizen is that here is a tiny collection of kooks making a mockery of the electoral process (which the average person unfortunately reveres) in presuming to run someone for the Presidency. In short, the SLP is invariably written off as a bunch of crackpots, and their ideology often goes down the drain with them.

Why then does the SLP continue to slog along, decade after decade, even though unheeded by one and all? Because they manage to ingest just enough funds to keep the party bureaucracy going; in short, as so often happens with ideological and social action groups, the ends have been lost sight of, and the means – the preservation of the party bureaucracy – have become the end.

The way to avoid this unhappy dead end is to confine oneself to viable parties, that is to parties whose publicly proclaimed grasp is not absurdly beyond their means. An example are the Liberal and Conservative Parties of New York, which are large enough to have considerable weight within the state. And because of this weight, they do have considerable educational impact as well. But note that even they, as powerful as they are, are prudent enough not to extend their reach into any of the other states.

Libertarianism

By John Hospers

(Nash, $10.00, 488 pp.)

— reviewed by R. A. Childs, Jr.

Part I

Whenever a new libertarian work appears, we should focus on two aspects of it in evaluating it: what gaps does it fill in the existing body of literature, and what are its flaws? I am assuming that if it is a basically libertarian work, that its virtues will be more numerous than its flaws, that it will excel in respects in which it is fundamentally correct than those in which it is not. This is true of the new work by Dr. John Hospers, LIBERTARIANISM. It is a very great contribution to the growing library of libertarian literature, and it has its flaws.

First, the easy question: what are its contributions and strengths? It is, first and foremost, a comprehensive, integrated and systematic statement of the libertarian political philosophy. Those who have been looking for a comprehensive yet not-too-technical work to use in introducing people to the libertarian philosophy need look no longer. In most respects, LIBERTARIANISM is now the work to give to people who want to understand what the libertarian political philosophy is all about. It performs an heroic task in integrating most of the libertarian arguments that I have seen on behalf of a social philosophy of freedom. In doing this in terms of essentials, with a very conversational style, it easily replaces more than a half-dozen libertarian works as serving as an overview of our ideology is concerned. One need no longer pile up works by Rand, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Carson, Friedman, Paterson, Mises and the Tannehills for the neophyte to read. LIBERTARIANISM will serve just as well. By thus confronting the most often heard and repeated objections to liberty and laissez-faire, Hospers makes it possible for the newcomer to libertarianism to spot those areas and issues which are the greatest problems for him, thus enabling him to go on to more specialized study. There is not a great deal here which will be new to someone already acquainted with libertarianism, as Hospers himself is the first to admit. That isn’t the purpose of the work – its purpose is to provide for a systematic overview of libertarian arguments for liberals and conservatives alike.

There is a generally excellent discussion of liberty, rights, property, the role of government (Hospers advocates a limited government), rent control, federal housing projects, price fixing, minimum wage laws, social security, tariffs, automation, monopolies, medicine and the state, welfare, public utilities, roads, licensing, inspection, consumer protection, conservation, coinage, education, and so forth. The best part of this type of discussion in the Hospers book is the constant subordination of economic arguments to ethics, though the two are usually integrated. He bases his case strongly on natural rights, which is the greatest virtue of his work vis à vis those of Hazlitt, Carson, Mises, and the others who cover some of the same territory.

These, then, are in summary form the greatest virtues of the work: its scope, integration, clarity, and systematic working out of a multitude of arguments for libertarianism.

Its flaws are few, but that doesn’t mean that they are insignificant. On the contrary, I think that they are crucially important. To sum up my objections: Hospers errs precisely when and where he follows Rand too closely on three issues – limited government, history, and foreign policy. The limited government dispute isn’t that important in the context of the book – Hospers devotes the last chapter to the question “Is Government Necessary?” and presents the anarchist case there, in the form of a dialog between an anarchist and an archist. Hospers makes one major error here: he takes up the case for the structure of an anarchist society from the Tannehill’s book THE MARKET FOR LIBERTY and presents it as though it were something agreed upon by all libertarians of the anarchist variety. But nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are alike necessarily only on one issue: they all deny the necessity and legitimacy of a State. For positive alternatives to the State, we have nearly as many proposals as we do anarchists, just as there are as many conceptions of limited government as there are people who take the time to attempt to work out a constitution and define the “proper” functions of government. In a sense, though, while anarchism is fairly well presented, Hospers creates a straw man, by having the anarchist in his dialog state that his “main contention” is that anarchism is a more efficient system. This is not the “main contention” of me, Wollstein, Rothbard, or a host of other anarchists. So the problem with Hospers’ treatment of anarchism, as I see it, is that he fails to recognize that all anarchism has to do to be validated as anarchism, is to refute alleged justifications for the State. Positive theories are a secondary matter. Similarly, all that an atheist has to do to validate atheism per se is to refute proofs for the existence of God. Since the burden of proof is on the proponent of any positive theory, “negative” positions such as atheism and anarchism are themselves justified when those positive positions are refuted. What they attempt to put in the place of the positive theory is another matter.

But far more important than anarchism is Hospers’ position on matters of history and foreign policy. There is a long chapter on “Liberty and International Relations” which will undoubtedly be second only to the chapter on anarchism in raising controversy. But unlike the anarchism chapter, in his treatment of foreign policy he does not even acknowledge the existence of an opposing libertarian view. His view is, basically, Randian. My view is, basically, Rothbardian. Between these two poles there is a world of difference.

First, on domestic history, Hospers makes absolutely no use of the excellent discoveries and insights of the revisionists. Thus although there is a criticism of business/government partnerships, there is no real critique of the role big businessmen have played in furthering statism. Down deep, Hospers has the view of “big business” as “America’s persecuted minority,” to use Ayn Rand’s phrase. Thus though he is critical of the anti-trust laws, he does not seem aware that the major force in putting them over on America was big businessmen and financial leaders, such as J. P. Morgan and Eldridge Gary. Though he is critical of federal housing projects, he does not seem aware that these were rammed through largely with the backing of the giants of the construction industry who witnessed falling profits and a “recession” during parts of the 1950’s and ’60’s. Though ostensibly addressed largely to liberals, Hospers overemphasized their role in the growth of American Statism vis à vis that of the business and financial community. It was big businessmen and financiers, for instance, who supported the first “liberal” professors in style at the end of the 19th century, who bankrolled the “Progressive Movement,” who put up the money for such organizations as the American Historical Association and American Economic Association, and who paid the bills of THE NEW REPUBLIC. Yet none of this is mentioned by Hospers.

Part of my disagreement with this emphasis, or lack of it, by Hospers lies in his distinction between the public and private sector. “In most nations of the world, there is what is called the ‘public sector’ and the ‘private sector.’ More accurate labels would be the coerced sector and the uncoerced sector. In the uncoerced sector – that is, the free market – we have only voluntary exchange. In the coerced sector, conditions are imposed on the free market by govern-which distorts the market and impedes its efficiency.” Now my objection to this is fundamental: the radical distinctions are not between the public and private sectors, or public and private ownership and control, but rather between just and unjust ownership and control. Ultimately, all decision making comes down to a few individuals, or one person, over a specific property. It is morally irrelevant whether this be “private” or not. What is relevant is whether or not it is just. Suppose, for instance, that a thief makes off with someone’s watch. Is that watch in his possession now “public” property? Is is “private” property, which, remember, is equated by Hospers (and Rand, apparently) with the uncoerced, free market sector? Or take the case of a government seizing everyone’s property and giving it to individuals who are not technically part of the State apparatus. Is that “private property,” or the “free market, uncoerced sector”? Also take the hypothetical case of someone justly owning something and donating it to those in the government, such as somebody’s donation of a private library to the government. Is this part of the “public sector” which is equated, with the coercive sector”?

The point is this: whether public or private, the real moral distinction is between property which is justly held, and that which is unjustly held. And a large part of the “private sector” in the world is property which is, by libertarian standards, unjustly held, such as is the case with the land in in the multitude of feudalist countries which still exist. But if this is true in one case, it may also be true in another. Which cases it is true in, can only be established by means of detailed research and by the application of libertarian principles. I submit that had Prof. Hospers approached the issue this way, he would have been far more harsh on so-called “private” people and institutions than he has been in LIBERTARIANISM. The questions of “ultimate responsibility” and the like are, of course, different issues, and must also be analyzed. But it is Hospers’ concern with “public” or governmental actions which has led him to play down the role of practically anyone except liberal intellectuals in the rise of Statism.

There is the same problem in the case of Hospers’ critique of student takeovers of university campuses. The argument against this in the case of justly established “private” universities is clear. But what about State universities? And what about the so-called “private” universities which are nearly 90% bankrolled by the state? Or which seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain? Or those which align with the State to do “research” into ways and means of destroying other people’s lives and property? Whatever one’s position on these might be, it is surely more complex an issue than Hospers makes it.

Let us take one final, related, issue before zeroing in on foreign policy: the case of the students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants at the height of the Vietnam War. Hospers makes it a simple case of free speech. A good case can be made for this position. But if one holds – as I do – that the Vietnam War is a criminal war for which the U.S. is far more responsible than the Communists of North Vietnam, then the issue becomes more complex. In his chapter on international relations, his response to the menace of the Communist criminals is not “having relations of any kind with such nations – not diplomatic and, more important, no trade . . .” This is not made clear – does Hospers support U.S. government prohibitions of American citizen trading with communist countries? If so, then this is the age-old problem of whether or not one is morally justified in coercively preventing one from trading with a criminal. If one is, and if the U.S. government is also criminal (i.e. it initiates force, though perhaps in lesser measure than some other government), then are private citizens justified in preventing other “private” citizens – such as Dow Chemical – from trading with our criminal government? This is an extremely complicated issue, and I think that Hospers does it a disservice in discussing it in only a few paragraphs. I myself am opposed to preventing Dow from recruiting on campuses, but the issue is not so simple as Hospers makes it sound.

The Liar As Hero

By Walter Block

It is all too easy to be an advocate of free speech when it comes to the rights of free speech of those with whom one is in agreement. It is all too easy to wax eloquent about the free speech rights of people who recite the boy scout pledge or the pledge of allegiance, or who sing the star spangled banner. Or other equally controversial things. The real test of free speech advocacy, is when it comes to controversial speech; better yet, when it comes to vicious, nasty speech that practically everybody is against.

There is perhaps nothing nastier or more vicious than libel, especially when it is personal and even false. We must therefore take especial care to defend the free speech rights of the libeler who furnishes us with a most important arena for free speech protection. For if the free speech rights of libelers and slanderers can be protected, the rights of any of the rest of us who do not give as much offense will certainly be more secure. If the free speech rights of libelers and slanderers are not protected, they are done a disservice, and the rest of us are that much less secure.

The reason that there has not been much action (to say the least) in behalf of the slanderer and libeler on the part of civil libertarians is that it is widely felt that they (unjustifiably) ruin people’s reputations. Grim tales about lost jobs, friends, etc., abound. Far from being concerned with the free speech rights of the libeler and slanderer, civil libertarians have been concerned with protecting what they call the rights of those who have had their reputations destroyed by libelers and slanderers. It should be realized, however, that the truth as well as falsity can ruin reputations; so merely stopping false charges from being uttered is no guarantee of maintaining a person’s reputation. If we take the view that reputations are all somehow sacrosanct, then we must prohibit all sorts of denigration, even truthful ones. No kind of unfavorable literary criticism, satire, movie, play, music, or book reviews could be allowed. All diminish reputations to some degree.

Although it is interesting that the deniers of free speech to libelers would not be willing to consistently deny free speech to all detractors, this alone will not clearly and unambiguously establish the free speech rights of the libeler. In order to do this, we must realize that a person’s reputation is not his private property – as, for instance, is his coat. His reputation is rather what other people think of him. His reputation consists solely of the thoughts of other people. Thus, to prohibit the slanderer from ruining someone’s reputation is to prohibit the slanderer from trying to affect the thoughts of other people. A man does not own his reputation any more than he owns the thoughts of others –because that is all his reputation consists of. A man’s reputation cannot be stolen from him any more than can thoughts of other people be stolen from him. Whether his reputation was taken from him” by fair means or foul by truth or falsehood, he did not own it in the first place and hence should have no recourse to the law for damages.

Paradoxically, reputations, owned or not, will probably be more secure without laws prohibiting libelous free speech. Nowadays, with laws prohibiting libelous falsehoods there is a natural tendency for the public to believe any publicly made libel or slander. “It would not be printed if it were not true,” reasons the gullible public. If libel and slander were freely allowed, there would be so much of it, and from every possible slant, that the public would not be so gullible. Scurrilous attacks would have to be checked out or substantiated before they would have much effect. Commercial agencies like Consumers Reports or the Better Business Bureau might arise to meet the demand on the part of the public for more accurate scurrilous information.

Until that great and glorious time when vicious nasty false remarks are accorded their proper free speech protection, we should all, liars and truth tellers alike, give aid and comfort to the libeler and slanderer; failing that, we should at least recognize them for the heroes that they are. For it is the libeler and slanderer who is on the front lines of the battle to protect the freedom of speech of us all.

From The Old Curmudgeon

Psychology and All That.

My strictures against the California Psychology conference gave rise to a few critical letters from the California movement, ranging from the cogent to the frenetic. Roy Childs pointed out, quite correctly, that humanistic psychology is philosophically far more akin to libertarians than behaviorism, since both believe in free will. Roy holds that the Conference made no particular commitment to forms of therapy. All this is fine, although the conference literature made far more grandiose claims. But it still leaves the conference as just one recent example of the festering growth, both in the libertarian movement and in the American culture as a whole, of what we might call psychologism.

The hallmark of the psychologizer is that the focus of his attitudes undergoes a severe change. Instead of concentrating his activities on grappling with the outside world (including the world of ideas), he turns morbidly inward, and spends his energies worrying about his own psyche and inflicting this worry on all around him. Note that I am not trying to denigrate the almost universal existence of psychological problems, their importance to the individual, or the possible value of therapy. What I am attacking is the person’s elevation of his psychic problems into a matter of seemingly cosmic significance, in the course of which the person’s effectiveness in dealing with the outside world withers amidst the bog of fuzzy-headed morbidity. A typical psychologizer will say: “I now see that all these political and economic problems are unimportant; the only really important concern is one’s inner ‘growth’, experiencing one’s feelings, expanding one’s ‘openness’.”

Not only does all the palaver about inner growth shift the focus from the outside world, thereby often intensifying the person’s troubles, but the psychologizing promotes not only chuckleheadedness, but also the very instability, hedonism, and “whim worship” that the world is suffering too much of in the first place. Much of the humanist writings, particularly those of the late Abraham Maslow, contain a great deal of value, emphasizing as they do free individual choice and the importance of individual self-development. But the problem is that even in the best of these writings, whim-worship is encouraged, because they have no moral principles, no ethical guides for choice to offer to their readers and followers. Stressing individual self-development without setting rational moral guides for that development (develop where? in what direction?) leads to caprice, hedonism, instability, and irresponsibility – in short, whim-worship.

I suppose it was bound to happen; much of this is an overreaction against Randianism. Many of these people are former Randians; after spending several years in the cast-iron rigidities of Orthodox Randianism, in which the slightest deviation from the tastes of the cult was condemned as “irrational”, many ex-Randians have gone whole hog the other way: in place of a rational ethic they have substituted unstable and hedonic submission to whim and caprice; in place of reason they have set unanalyzed feelings upon the throne.

A large part of the newly burgeoning psychologism in the libertarian movement is due to the intensifying influence of the New Nathaniel Branden, in his post-Randian development. In many ways, the New Branden is Rand-gone-Hollywood, as the old emphasis on reason begins to get lost amidst the hip and the mod, in immersion in all the fashionable, Hollywood-spawned techniques of the day from hedonism to encounter groups to the Instant Cure. As a veteran battler against Orthodox Randianism, I never thought that I would ever come to say this: but I think that the Movement could benefit from an increased dose of the Old Rand, with her insistence on the primacy of a rational ethnic. Let us not throw out the rational ethical baby along with the Orthodox Randian bathwater.

The Shadow Cabinet

Back in the days when I was a youthful extreme rightist, one of our great party pastimes was to conjure up a “dream cabinet”, a cabinet to be installed in the unlikely event that we would “have our druthers”. And regardless of the differences of opinion amongst us, there was always one selection we could all agree upon: “For Secretary of Labor . . . Westbrook Pegler.” Yes, those were heady days.

But now, lo and behold!, fantasy cabinet-making has come out of the closet. It is now indeed the fashion among those presidential candidates without what used to be called a “Chinaman’s chance” for victory. The candidate – be he Dr. Spock or Senator McCarthy – issues a promise of what might have been. Not one to be caught lagging, I hereby present my shadow Cabinet – the men and women whom I would have chosen had I swept to victory on the Libertarian Party ticket this year. Each one of these choices could be trusted to do the appropriate and proper thing by his chosen field of expertise. There are, I’m afraid, many gaps in the Cabinet, but that is because I have not yet been able to find the right man for the vacancy.

And now, heed this, America:

Secretary of State	Leonard P. Liggio
Head of the Middle Eastern Desk	Stephen P. Halbrook
Ambassador to the Court of St. James	John P. McCarthy
Secretary of Defense	Robert LeFevre
Secretary of the Treasury	Jerome Daly
Secretary of Labor	Sylvester Petro
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development	Edward C. Banfield
Secretary of Transportation, and Head of the Obscenity Division of the Dept. of Justice	Ronald Hamowy
Head, Anti-Trust Division	Sam Peltzman
Head, Bureau of Indian Affairs	Rosalie Nichols
Head, National Institute of Mental Health	Dr. Thomas Szasz
Head, Voice of America	Karl Hess
Head, NASA and the Patent Office	Andrew J. Galambos
Administrative Assistant, in Charge of Minority Groups	Walter Grinder
Administrative Assistant, in Charge of Women’s Rights	James D. Davidson
and last, but certainly not least,
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare	Ayn Rand

“The art of government is the organization of idolatry.”

— George Bernard Shaw.

Frank S. Meyer, RIP

There are surely few more painful tasks than to write about a very close friend shortly after his death. It was one Frank’s remarkable attributes that without giving an inch in argument, he was able to separate the personal from the ideological more clearly than almost anyone I have known: and so he could continue to be close friends with people who differed sharply from him in many areas. Frank indeed was one of the great conversationalists of our day; talking with him was always a profound pleasure, whether in all-night conversations in Woodstock or over late-night phone calls. For Frank’s great erudition was matched by a veritable passion for ideas, and so conversation with him meant a fascinating play of ideas and insights over a vast range of human thought, history, events, politics, people, chess (not the least!), and on and on. Frank indeed gave off an intellectual excitement matched by few people in my experience; pacing up and down, a cigarette in one hand and a Scotch in the other, he would convey that excitement to everyone in the room, and enrich all of our lives. He was exciting, stimulating, fun; and with all that, he cared deeply for each and every one of his legion of friends. And so when I think of Frank, I think first not of the towering eminence in the conservative movement that he truly was, but of the wonderful quality of his friendship. The death of Frank Meyer is a great loss in my own life, and I am sure in the lives of all of his friends. Every person is of course unique and irreplaceable, but Frank leaves a gap in our lives that can never come close to being filled.

Frank and I shared a special bond, the bond of dedicated Night People in a world of 9-to-5. One of the tributes to Frank in National Review mentioned the joy at always being able to call Frank at 3 in the morning. For a Night Person, this was still more appreciated. Frank was even more steadfast than I in his all-night schedule, and at the times when I would zonk out early, Frank would playfully accuse me of betraying our Night People principles.

One of the great joys of knowing the Meyers’ was experiencing the quality of the marriage between Frank and Elsie. Never have I known two people so close, so intimate on every level; in this age of instability, here was a truly rare marriage, a marriage to cherish even for those of us who experienced it as friends.

In the field of ideology, Frank Meyer towered mightily over the rest of the conservative movement. Not only for his erudition and intelligence, but also because among them all he was by far the most dedicated to the liberty of the individual. That I do not believe that his attempt to fuse conservatism and libertarianism can ultimately hold does not detract from the importance and the nobility of the venture. Among all of his colleagues, Frank Meyer never yielded to the temptation to bend the knee to Power, to join the Establishment, to play patty-cake with President Nixon. He held the banner of his conservative-libertarian principles aloft, and denounced with all the great intelligence at his command all attempts to betray them.

In no area was Frank more dedicated a libertarian than in the field of education. Scorning both the public school system and the miasma of Progressivism that the private schools have become, Frank Meyer, quietly and without fanfare, proceeded on the heroic; and enormously difficult task of educating his two sons at home. The energy and devotion that this task consumed can only make the rest of us stand in awe and admiration. The result of this devoted tutoring was two sons who, on the first formal exam of their lives, sailed into Yale and are proceeding to make their mark in the world with brilliance and in steadfast devotion to conservative standards and values. The education of John and Gene Meyer is one of Frank’s finest accomplishments.

Frank’s quality of taking ideas seriously can be seen from the way in which he handled his defection from the Communist Party, in which he had risen to be one of its leading “cadres.” He was not content, along with the bulk of his ex-Communist colleagues, to rush into print with glib explanations and excuses. When he left the Communist Party, Frank Meyer went off to Woodstock and meditated deeply, on his life, his ideas, and values. He took years to do this, but the price was worth it; for when he “returned” to the world of ideas and actions, he had hammered out his new conservative ideology and comprehensive world-view. How many people have had the vision, the fortitude, the dedication, the sheer guts to do this, to take the time arid energy to mould their own personal reconstruction?

By the time he had re-emerged, Frank had become a Christian, but various theological doubts had prevented him from joining the Catholic Church. Very shortly before his death on Holy Saturday, however, his doubts resolved, Frank was received into the Church, and a Requiem Mass was held for him the following Wednesday. As soon as he was received into the Church, Frank found peace before the end. One of the writers of tributes in National Review said that he was looking forward to the Frank Meyer of old debating Thomas Carlyle in Heaven. Given my own theological views, I can’t say that I expect this to happen, but I can hope. And I do.

“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly, to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.”

— Samuel Adams

Complete Libertarian Forum (1969-1984)

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