Vol. 3.9, October 1971

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME III, NO. 9	October, 1971	75¢

ATTICA

Some political issues are crystal-clear for the libertarian, issues on which he can come to firm conclusions very quickly – such as wage-price controls or the draft. Others, however, are morally more complex, and require the fine scalpel of rigorous analysis before the libertarian may take his stand on one side or another. Such an issue is Attica and the entire prison problem in which it is wrapped.

Unless I miss my guess, the left-wing of the libertarian movement has already taken its stand, in the following kind of simplistic syllogism: (a) prisons are State-run; (b) prisons are coercive; (c) Attica was a rebellion by political “revolutionaries” against the State. Ergo, we should take our stand with the prisoners and denounce the resolution of the Attica question as a “massacre.”

I contend that the conclusion is dead wrong. But before analyzing the core of the problem – the libertarian attitude towards prisons and criminals – let us clear up some tangential but dramatically important issues.

(1) The Fuss. In the first place, one wonders what the great fuss – the sense of surprise, shock, of a felling among many people that somehow Attica marks a significant milestone – is all about. For those of us who were raised on the prison movies of the 1930’s, there is nothing surprising or shocking about the course of events. There were countless scenes the prisoners in the mess banging their spoons against their cups, and led by young Jimmy Cagney or Dane Clark; then finally some guards are grabbed as hostages, the prisoners capture the inside cells, a young prison psychiatrist tries in vain to mediate, and then comes the great climactic scene when the state reestablished its authority, and Jimmy Cagney dies in agony. It’s all there, and the conclusion of the scenario is inevitable. It should be clear to everyone that (a) the government runs the prisons; (b) that by the nature of the prisoner situation, prisoners are ruled severely by their jailers; and (c) that any mutiny by the prisoners is going to be put down and put down hard.

In fact, the entire fuss, and the whole spate of fascinated publicity, was generated by a grave strategic and tactical error on the part of the prison authorities. By “negotiating” with these hoodlums and criminals, by treating them as if they were a legitimate political pressure group, the authorities fed the absurd fantasies of the prisoners of being “revolutionaries” engaged in a profound revolutionary act. By negotiating day after day, furthermore, the authorities fed similar fantasies on the part of the liberals and leftists on the outside – and the whole farce was intensified by the institution of the negotiating committee, and the host of free publicity granted to such agitators as William Kunstler and Bobby Seale, who accomplished nothing except a publicity build-up for themselves. And they “accomplished” something else: consciously or unconsciously feeding the absurd hopes of the prisoners that somehow they might “win”, and thereby hardening the prisoners’ stand. Of course, when the crunch came, agitators like Kunstler, Seale, and Tom Soto of YAWF were safely outside the gates.

It is clear that the major error of the authorities was the shilly-shallying, the endless negotiating that built up the prisoners’ fantasies and morale. What the authorities should have done was to move in fast and hard, immediately, say a half hour after the mutiny. At worst, the killing would certainly not have been more extensive than it turned out to be.

The tragedy of the hostages does not negate this position. For one of the points that prison guards have made clear all during this crisis: that the authorities must move quickly and not be swayed by the hostage problem. For if they are, then this will serve as an open invitation to all prisoners everywhere to grab a few guards, and the guards would be helpless as a result. And as for the moral guilt of the killings, it should be clear that this lies upon the head of the kidnappers themselves, and not upon the guardsmen who were trying to end the crisis and rescue the hostages.

There are other points that came out during the crisis. The time-honored prison method of dealing with trouble-makers is to break them up – if there are, say, 50 trouble-makers, they are broken into five or so groups, with each being shipped out to different prisons in the system. But, under the influence of debilitating liberalism, the state of New York had previously prohibited this sort of treatment – thus allowing the buildup of a cohesive mutinous group within Attica prison.

And then, under an excess of sentimental liberalism, New York State had, a few years ago, abolished capital punishment for murderers. This meant that a hard core of murderers existed within Attica, ready to stir up trouble and take maximum measures for mutiny.

Thus, at least within the immediate context of the prison system, the conservatives are right: the crisis was allowed to develop and intensify because of the debilitating influence of liberalism – in abolishing capital punishment, in disallowing the breaking up of criminal cadres in the prisons, and in allowing endless “negotiations” which were bound anyway to end in failure.

(2) The “Revolutionaries.”

The old-fashioned criminal has always tended to be a “right-winger”, for he has generally acknowledged that his actions were morally wrong, that he had broken the moral law. Hence, while personally trying to keep out of prison as much as possible, the old-fashioned criminal does not challenge the correctness or propriety of the prison system per se. Hence, when sent to prison, he tries not to be a trouble-maker, tires to win privileges and early parole by good behavior, etc.

But, in the last few decades, liberals and leftists have turned their mischievous attentions to the prison system, and to the concept of crime and punishment. They have promulgated the absurd theory, for example, that “society” (i.e. everyone except the criminal, including his victim) is responsible for crime, and not the criminal himself. Criminals have of course become adept at using their increasing literacy to wrap themselves in left-wing justifications for their misdeeds. In the thirties and onward, it was sentimental liberalism that they clasped to their bosoms, whining that they were not responsible, but only the fact that not enough playgrounds had been provided for their childhood, or because their mother and father hated each other. In recent years, this liberal cop-out has been succeeded by revolutionary leftism. Now the murderer, the rapist, the mugger, can preen himself as a member of the vanguard of the “revolution”; every time he knifes an old lady he can proudly label it a “revolutionary act” against the Establishment.”

This phony “revolutionism” was rife at Attica, especially among the hard core of the mutineers, and it will continue to be rife so long as softheaded liberals in the media continue to disseminate this hogwash.

Once begins at last to sympathize with the exasperated Conservative Party leader in Queens, who, after the umteenth justification by Black Panthers and others of themselves as “political prisoners” or “prisoners of war”, finally said: “O. K., if these people are prisoners of war, let them be treated as such. In other words, let them be locked up until the ‘war’ is over.” For another curious aspect of this whole line of argument is this: why do criminals expect, and often get, preferential treatment when they proclaim that they are “revolutionaries” dedicated to overthrowing society and the existing system? If you knife a candy store owner and then trumpet this as an “act of the revolution”, why shouldn’t you expect to be treated even worse than otherwise by authorities whose very task it is to protect existing society? Why expect “acts of violent overthrow” to be treated especially gently by the very people who are being “overthrown”? On the contrary, they should expect even harsher treatment as a result, for what kind of boobs are they who take threats of violence against themselves as passports for that violence? And yet, such boobs have obviously abounded in recent years. Once again, only firm and swift action against criminals, regardless of alibi, will restore proper perspective and end this latest form of “revolutionary” cop-out for crime.

(3) Liberal “Humanitarianism”.

Another interesting point in the whole prison question is the pernicious role of liberal “humanitarianism” in dealing with crime. The classical argument for punishment of crime is that the purpose is (a) retribution for the criminal’s invasion of the victim’s rights; and (b) deterrence of future crime by isolating the criminal from other potential victims. And yet, liberals have for decades denounced retribution and the very concept of “punishment” itself as barbaric; instead, they would substitute the idea of “rehabilitating” the criminal so that he would re-enter society as a better person. Superficially more humane, the objective consequence of this liberal humanitarianism, as libertarian psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz has pointed out in the case of psychiatric methods of dealing with crime, has been a monstrous and unjustified tyranny over the prisoner.

For example: suppose that a certain crime calls for a punishment of five years in the pokey. The liberal comes along and says: No, this is barbaric punishment; let us not simply give this man five years, let us let him loose when he becomes “rehabilitated”, when he becomes a better person. A better person, that is, according to the prison authority, who now is supposed to become a healer, teacher, and ethical guide as well – or, in the case of the psychiatrist, when the prisoner is pronounced psychiatrically “cured.” This may mean, of course, that, of the original five year prisoners, Prisoner A may get turned loose after a few months. But it also means that Prisoner B may receive a life sentence, because he has not yet been “rehabilitated.” In short, objective law and therefore objective punishment which “fits the crime” and is somehow proportionate to it, gets tossed away, and is replaced by the subjective decisions and whims of the “humanitarian” overlords of the prison system. As a result, some prisoners receive “indeterminate sentences” of inordinate length; and also as a result, the jailers have to become the censors of the prisoners’ reading, associations, and writing in jail; for how else will they become “rehabilitated”?

In short, the “humanitarian” program of liberalism becomes a far worse – and a far less justified – tyranny over the prisoners, who no longer enjoy the certainty of objective punishment, who must work to please their Big Brother rulers, and whose lives are now permanently at the mercy of their brain-washing authorities. Once again, Dr. Szasz has almost singlehandedly begun to force a reexamination of the tyranny of psychiatric liberalism in ruling over the prisoners.

We conclude, therefore, that in every aspect the liberals and the left have failed or are dead wrong, and that the response of hard-headed conservatism on the prison question and on the Attica crisis has been the correct one.

But wait, the libertarian left, might cry, what of the context? You might be correct within the context of the prison system, but what of that system itself? Shouldn’t a libertarian be totally opposed to it? Here, there are three questions to distinguish: (A) are the prisoners really criminals? (B) Aren’t prisons themselves tyrannical rule over the prisoners? And (C) Aren’t the prisons government institutions and therefore to be combatted?

On the first point, it is true that the prison population contains not only people whom libertarians would agree are criminals (murderers, muggers, thieves, rapists, etc.) but also non-criminals who have engaged in what are now called “victimless” actions: pornographers, drug possessors, pimps, income tax evaders, draft resisters. But the point is that in the question of Attica this point is irrelevant. For Attica is a “maximum security prison”, a prison specifically designed for people whom libertarians acknowledge to be criminals: murders, rapists, etc.

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The second point brings up the whole problem of crime and punishment in a libertarian society. Would prisons exist in such a society? In my view, libertarianism does not bar defensive violence, which is perfectly legitimate as a defense or punishment against violent aggression. In my view, the libertarian creed states that an aggressor loses his rights to the extent that he has deprived victims of theirs. Hence, it is perfectly proper to exact capital punishment on murderers, who have deprived victims of their right to life, or to exact a lesser punishment which is in some way proportionate to other crimes. It is true that the focus of punishment in a libertarian world would be different than it is now, for the focus would be on forcing the criminal to recompense the victim rather than on exacting such recompense to a meaningless “society” as a whole. But force against the criminal, isolating him from potential victims, forcing him to work to repay the victim, etc. would still remain, and therefore a prison system might remain as well. Certainly there is nothing in the libertarian creed to rule out the existence of prisons, and much to imply that they will still be here. And, again, since criminals lose their rights proportionally to their crimes, they will be subject to rule by prison authorities as they are now.

Thirdly, it is true that prisons are now government owned and that this would change in the purely libertarian society. But we must always distinguish carefully between legitimate services that the State has now monopolized and arrogated to itself, and illegitimate activities that no one, including the State, should be permitted to perform. An example of the latter is the draft, which is the illegitimate enslavement of innocent people to serve the purposes of others. The draft could therefore never exist in a purely libertarian world. But other services are legitimate but now coercively monopolized by the government: e.g., postal service, roads, police, . . . and prisons. In opposing the Post Office, libertarians do not oppose postal service per se; on the contrary, we wish to make that service more efficient and of higher quality by allowing competing private postal businesses. The case of the prisons is similar; a libertarian world would not be devoid of prisons, but would have more efficient ones run on a competitive private basis. Until the day when the government divests itself of the compulsory monopoly of the post, roads, and police, therefore, we must continue to make use of their services, and the same applies to prisons as well.

We conclude therefore that, even when taking the widest context into account, the libertarian must support the tough conservative line on the question of Attica and other prison mutinies.

REPRINT BONANZA

A veritable reprint bonanza for libertarians will be issued this winter by Arno Press, 330 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017. Arno, a subdivision of the New York Times, specializes in reprint series devoted to some phase of American history. The forthcoming series, “The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America”, all bound similarly in hard-cover, will be available either as an entire set or in individual volumes. Advisory Editors for the series were Murray N. Rothbard and Jerome Tuccille; the series will be advertised in an annotated brochure written by the advisory editors. The series is not perfection: for one thing it was limited to 38 volumes, for another, many books we would have loved to reprint have already been reprinted by other publishers or are scheduled for reprinting. And furthermore, various curmudgeons refused to sell reprint rights to their books to Arno. Still and all, the series should be a great boon for libertarians to catch up on great books which have long been unavailable. Furthermore, the advisory editors went to special pains to balance the list, so that the 38 books are roughly equally divided into five categories: libertarian, anarchist, free-market economics, isolationist, and conservative.

The entire set of “The Right Wing Individualist Tradition in America” will be available for $492.00. Urge every library you know to obtain one! Show the publisher the large size of the libertarian market! Furthermore, if you order the set before December, you will get a 15% discount – $418 for the set!

The individual books and their estimated prices follow:

William Bailie, Josiah Warren: The First American Anarchist (1906), 182pp. $8.00. The only biography of any of the great giants of American individualist anarchism – by a follower.

Thomas H. Barber, Where We Are At (1950). 268pp. $11.00. A charming book, lashing out at American bureaucracy, and employing “economic determinism”, by a lovable old curmudgeon. Witty, hard-hitting.

Harry Elmer Barnes, Pearl Harbor After A Quarter Of A Century (1968). 138 pp. $7.00 The final story of Pearl, by the dean of American Revisionists. Reprinted from the final issue of Left and Right.

Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice: De-Bunking the War Guilt Myth (1928). 438 pp. $19.00. A delightful book, with Harry lashing out at all his enemies on World War I Revisionism. A treasure-trove, including the evisceration of war propaganda by America’s eminent historians during the War, by C. Hartley Grattan.

Harry Elmer Barnes, Selected Revisionist Pamphlets. 332 pp. $14.00. Harry Barnes was a great pamphleteer, and this collection includes all of Harry’s post-World War II Revisionist pamphlets, all of which were privately printed and were known only to a tiny “underground” of right-wing isolationists. The collection includes Barnes Blasting the Historical Blackout, a review-essay on A. J. P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War; The Chickens of the Interventionist Liberals Have Come Home to Roost: The Bitter Fruits of Globaloney; The Court Historians Versus Revisionism – a critique of Langer and Gleason, and of Feis, on the road to World War II; Rauch on Roosevelt, a critique of Basil Rauch; Revisionism and Brainwashing: A Survey of the War-Guilt Question in Germany After Two World Wars, which includes a discussion of the monumental revisionist work on 1939 by David L. Hoggan; Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books, an annotated bibliography dealing with World Wars I, II, and Cold; The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout (9th, final edition), an exciting blast, detailing the discrimination against revisionist literature by “objective” historians and reviewers; and Was Roosevelt Pushed Into War By Popular Demand in 1941? Must reading.

Louis Bromfield, A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), 344pp. $15.00. The last product of the “Old Right” – a plea for domestic liberty and foreign “isolationism” by the famous novelist. Attacks the Cold War from “the right”.

John W. Burgess, Recent Changes in American Constitutional Theory (1923). 130 pp. $7.00. Read this, if you want to know what real “strict constructionism” looks like. The eminent political scientist and constitutional lawyer claimed that both the draft and the income tax were unconstitutional.

Charles H. Carroll, Organisation of Debt Into Currency: And Other Papers. (1964). 468 pp. $20.00 Reprint of the collected essays of an ultra-hard money, 100% gold economist of the mid nineteenth century. From the old Volker Fund, Van Nostrand series.

Harold M. Fleming, Ten Thousand Commandments: A Story of the Antitrust Laws. (1951). 228pp. $10.00. Excellent critique of the antitrust system, and the way it promotes rather than combats “monopoly”, and restricts competition.

John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching (1944). 284pp. $12.00. A brilliant work, analyzing the similarities between the political economies of fascist Italy, Germany, and the New Deal, and prophesying that the New Deal and its World War II would bring to the United States the permanent rule of the military, the garrison state, and the political economy of fascism. Flynn’s concluding sentence: “My only purpose is to sound a warning against the dark road upon which we have set our feet as we go marching to the salvation of the world and along which every step we now take leads us farther and farther from the things we want and the things that we cherish.”

George Harris, Inequality and Progress. (1897). 174pp. $7.00. An excellent and neglected work that stresses the importance and necessity for inequality. Particularly needed now in an age when fatuous egalitarianism has infected even the libertarian movement. Stresses the variety and individuality of man.

Individualist Anarchist Pamphlets. 140pp. $7.00. A collection of excellent, rare individualist anarchist pamphlets of late nineteenth century America. A great bargain. Includes: Henry Bool’s Apology for his Jeffersonian Anarchism, Lysander Spooner’s No Treason, Nos. 1 and 2 – from the great master of individualist anarchism and antistatism, the great critic of the Constitution; and Edwin C. Walker’s Communism and Conscience. A must.

Bruce W. Knight, How to Run a War (1936), 258pp. $11.00. A slashing, sardonic critique of war, especially America in World War I. With a new preface by Professor Knight.

Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (1943). 282pp. $12.00. A great individualist and rationalist, Rose Lane was the unsung heroine and inspiration for libertarians in the 1940’s and 50’s. A beautifully written, lilting prose-poem to freedom in human history. Rose Lane stopped writing for many years in protest against the self-employed social security tax, and she deserves the widest distribution. With a new introduction by Roger MacBride and a new forward by Robert LeFevre.

Flash! Because of the great interest in Mrs. Lane’s book, Arno Press will also print simultaneously an inexpensive paperback of the book. Available from Rampart College as well as Arno Press.

Left and Right: Selected Essays. 124pp. $7.00. A great bargain; this includes two rare pamphlets. One is the all-isolationist, all anti-Cold War issue of the right-wing individualist monthly Faith and Freedom, April, 1954 issue. This issue includes essays by Garet Garrett, Ernest T. Weir, and “Aubrey Herbert” (Murray N. Rothbard). The other selection is the now classic, and long out-of-print, first issue of the libertarian journal Left and Right 1965), containing articles by Murray N. Rothbard and Leonard P. Liggio.

James McGurrin, Bourke Cockran: A Free Lance in American Politics. (1948). 388pp. $17.00. Sympathetic biography of a leader of the Bourbon Democracy of the late nineteenth century: an aggressive champion of free trade, individual liberty, anti-imperialism, and opponent of the income tax.

H. L. Mencken and Robert R. La Monte, Men Versus the Man (1910). 260pp. $11.00. The only important work by Mencken as yet out of print, this features the scintillating debate between Mencken, individualist, libertarian, and sparkling wit, and a leading socialist of the period.

Zacariah Montgomery, comp. Poison Drops in the Federal Senate (1889). 146pp. $7.00. A blistering attack on the growth of compulsory attendance laws in the American school system.

Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State(1935). 220pp. $9.00. A great libertarian classic. No libertarian should be without this, one of the great works in libertarian political philosophy. Also anticipates Kolko’s views of big business with a hard-hitting Beardian analysis of the development of the American Constitution and government.

Marshall Olds, Analysis of the Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike (1922). 504pp. $21.00. One of the great and undeserved victories of organized liberalism was the Interchurch report on the steel strike of 1919, which won great sympathy, and paved the way for federal government pressure to force the steel industry into an 8-hour day. Here is the totally neglected other side of the picture, the comprehensive critique of the report from the point of view of the steel industry.

The Collected Works of Lysander Spooner

The only collection available . . . 34 rare and provocative works (1834-1886) in six volumes . . . With an extensive critical biography and individual introductions by Charles Shively . . . Bound in durable library cloth and printed on acid-free paper.

Send for free brochure listing other research editions, including The Collected Works of John Jay Chapman in 12 volumes, introductions by Melvin H. Bernstein.

Write to M & S Press, Box 311, Weston, Mass. 02193.

Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) was an intellectual activist — for 50 years not only probing; but vigorously prodding his government and society. Prolific, producing more than 30 separately published books, pamphlets, and broadsides (the existence of many not even known to the Library of Congress), Spooner is one of 19th century America’s most profound and coherent minds. While producing some of the finest constitutional arguments ever devised against slavery, Spooner concerned himself equally with the subtle subjugation of supposedly free citizens by a governmental system which he saw become increasingly restrictive of personal rights.

“There is no difference, in principle — but only in degree — between political and chattel slavery,” he declared in 1867. A nation which fought to free slaves should be prepared to fight to free the rest of its people — even if (as he suspected) this required the overthrow of the Constitution.

Lysander Spooner had an absolute genius for opposing the government; and his protests against governmental restraint were not limited to brilliant writings on slavery, the Constitution, the jury system, copyright practices, and the economics of our rapidly industrializing country. Spooner actually forced a reduction in postal rates — by setting up his own private mail company in competition with the U.S. Post Office — and at the same time scored important points for freedom of the press. Charles Shively’s biography, using hitherto unexamined Spooner papers and letters only recently deposited in the New York Historical Society, brings to light much in Spooner’s life that is important to 19th century American history including, for example, Spooner’s little known plan to force the release of John Brown after Harper’s Ferry — by kidnapping Governor Wise of Virginia — and Spooner’s own personal relations with such men as Brown and Gerrit Smith.

Lysander Spooner is remarkably prophetic of governmental interventions into personal and community life, and in his understanding of the psychological as well as the economic problems of industrialization and the dangerous pressures of conformity. These M & S Press volumes provide a rich and vital historical dimension for much of our own contemporary social and political protest.

CONTENTS

Volume I: Biography and Miscellaneous Writings

A. DEIST
Deist’s Immortality (1834)
Deist’s Reply (1836)

B. MAIL COMPANY
The Unconstitutionality of the Laws
. . . Prohibiting Private Mails (1844)
Who caused the Reduction? (1850)

C. RADICALISM & ANARCHISM
No Treason, No. 1 (1867)
No Treason, No. 2 (1867)
No Treason, No. 6 (1870)
Revolution (1880)
Letter to Bayard (1882)
Natural Law (1882)
Letter to Cleveland (1886)

Volume II: Legal Writings (I)
“To the Members of the Legis. of Mass.” (1835)
Spooner vs. M’Connell (1839)
Illegality of the Trial of Webster (1850)
Trial by Jury (1852)
Drew vs. Clark (1869)

Volume III: Legal Writings (II)
Law of Intellectual Property (1855)
Articles of Association of the Spooner
Copyright Co. (1863)
Letter to Scientists and Inventors (1884)

Volume IV: Anti-Slavery Writings
Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845-60)
Defence for Fugitive Slaves (1850)
Plan for the Abolition of Slavery (1858)
Address of the Free Constitutionalists (1860)
Letter to Sumner (1864)

Volume V: Economic Writings (I)
Constitutional Law Relative to Credit (1843)
Poverty (1846)
New System of Paper Currency (1861)
Our Mechanical Industry (1862)

Volume VI: Economic Writings (II)
Considerations for Bankers (1864)
A New Banking System (1873)
Our Financiers (1877)
Law of Prices (1877)
Gold and Silver (1878)
Universal Wealth (1879)

6 hardcover volumes•2400 pages•ISBN 087730-006-2•$140.00 per set

Franz Oppenheimer, The State: Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically (1926). 324pp. $14.00. The great work on the State, its history and its nature Indispensable for libertarians. Oppenheimer punctures completely the mystical “social contract” view of the State, and shows that it was born in violence and conquest, and continued on this course thereafter.

Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943). 302pp. $13.00. Another indispensable work for libertarians, a great and challenging work on political philosophy. Particularly important are Mrs. Paterson’s critique of the anti-trust laws, her defense of the gold standard, her superb dissection of progressive education (“Our Japanized Educational System”), and her devastating blast at the politics of liberal altruism (“The Humanitarian with the Guillotine”).

C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson, Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States. (1937). 292pp. $12.00. One of the best books on the 1929 depression, applying Mises-Hayek business cycle theory to the facts of the depression. Unfortunately has been totally neglected by economists and others.

Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds., Scientism and Values (1960). 290pp. $12.00. One of the best of the out-of-print Volker Fund series of books, embodying conservative and libertarian scholarship. This is a critique of dictatorial scientism in the social sciences. Includes articles by Richard M. Weaver, Pieter Geyl, Eliseo Vivas, Helmut Schoeck, Murray N. Rothbard, and others.

John W. Scoville, Labor Monopolies – Or Freedom (1946). 196pp. $8.00. One of the best, and most hard-hitting, books ever written on labor unionism. Includes an economic critique and a dissection of the habitual violence of unions. By a former economist for Chrysler Corporation.

John W. Scoville and Noel Sargent, comps., Fact and Fancy in the TNEC Monographs (1942). 830pp. $35.00. A massive, thorough, monograph-by-monograph critique of the TNEC monographs, the greatest single force for trust-busting during the New Deal. Totally neglected.

Carl Snyder, Capitalism the Creator: the Economic Foundations of Modern Industrial Society (1940). 492pp. $21.00. An excellent economic – and moral – defense of capitalism and its beneficial creative force in civilization. By the former economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Poor on money, however.

Society Without Government (1969-70). $10.00. The first hard-cover compilation of two works indispensable for libertarians: Morris and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty, and Jarret B. Wollsteing, Society Without Coercion. Both answer the vital question: how could a libertarian society, without a State, provide police and judicial defense activities purely through the free market?

Lysander Spooner, Let’s Abolish Government. 418pp. $18.00. Absolutely indispensable. Here is a collection of the major works of the greatest individualist anarchist theorist of all time. Contains: An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852), A Letter to Thomas F. Bayard (1882), the magnificent No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority #6 (1870), and the brilliantly hard-hitting Letter to Grover Cleveland (1886).

Charles T. Sprading, ed., Liberty and the Great Libertarians: An Anthology on Liberty: A Hand-Book of Freedom. (1913). 546pp. $23.00. Another indispensable book for libertarians. The best libertarian anthology ever compiled, by an individualist anarchist follower of Spooner and Tucker. Contains articles by: Edmund Burke (his repudiated, anarchist book), Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, William Godwin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Josiah Warren, Max Stirner, Thoreau, Herbert Spencer, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Josiah Warren, Robert Ingersoll, Spooner, Tolstoy, Benjamin R. Tucker, William B. Greene, Auberon Herbert, and many, many others. Also an excellent introduction by Sprading. Don’t miss it!

William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883). 172pp. $7.00. A superb work, a great classic of political philosophy by this leading libertarian, individualist, and “Social Darwinist.” Great critique of liberal reformers and “uplifters.”

Frederick B. Tolles, George Logan of Philadelphia. (1953). 388pp. $17.00. Sympathetic biography of this leading individualist, pacifist, and Jeffersonian. Broke with Jefferson on Logan’s opposition to the war of 1812 against Britain. The “Logan Act” was designed to suppress his peacemaking activities.

Benjamin R. Tucker, Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism. (1893). 528pp. $22.00. The greatest single classic of individualist anarchism. A collection from Tucker’s magazine Liberty, featuring Tucker’s brilliant, lucid, logical, and withering critiques of any and all deviations from Tucker’s “plumb line”. Particularly good on the State and on land, weak on money and economic theory.

Hamilton Vreeland, Jr., Twilight of Individual Liberty (1944). 188pp. $8.00. Excellent work, detailing the areas in which the courts have weakened the constitutional defenses of individual liberty and have aggrandized government power.

What is Money? 106pp. $7.00. A compilation of two books, one modern, the other of the late nineteenth century, setting forth a libertarian analysis and prescription for money – in short, favoring the separation of money from the State. They are: Murray N. Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money? (1963), and the totally neglected Isaiah W. Sylvester, Bullion Certificates: The Safest and Best Money Possible: The People’s National Currency (1884). Both available for the first time in hard cover.

Harold F. Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827-1905. (1934). 326pp. $14.00. Sympathetic biography by one of our leading economic historians of one of the great leaders of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberals in America. A Boston businessman, Atkinson was also a distinguished journalist, economist, champion of free trade and hard money, and vigorous battler against late-nineteenth century American imperialism.

Ambrose Pare Winston, Judicial Economics: The Doctrine of Monopoly as Set Forth by Judges of the U.S. Federal Courts in Suits under the Anti-Trust Laws. (1957). 194pp. $8.00. A devastating and totally neglected little book, in which economist Winston rigorously dissects the classic anti-trust cases, the ones in which the government supposedly had the best case against business, the cases “in restraint of trade.” Using the detailed court hearings for the first time, Winston shows the utter fallacy – legal, economic, and philosophical-behind the trust-busting in every instance.

Disestablish Public Education

by Leonard P. Liggio

One had to be struck by the vehemence with which Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (New York, Harper & Row, 1971) has been attacked. The review in the New York Times Book Review (July 11, 1971) by one of the educational establishment is an example. Why this violent reaction, one wondered, reading through the review? And then, the answer came. Illich’s advocacy of the free market in education is the bone in the throat that is choking the public educators. The reviewer says: “If the consumer approach has misled and cheated people in supermarkets (and particularly poor and uneducated people), why would any of the free market mechanisms so popular in radical circles work better in education?”

One cannot allow to pass un-noted the reviewer’s remark that “free market mechanisms” are “so popular in radical circles.” The historic conjunction of free market and radical when free market concepts were in their prime and really challenged the monopoly system, has been restored. After being long lost in the baggage of stand-pattism, the free market has been liberated as the result of the hard work of recent libertarian economists, philosophers, and historians, and has moved to the forefront as the only solution to the chaos of the monopoly system.

Illich begins by saying that “I had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.” He feels that the public school system is the paradigm of all the “bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state,” and that his basic approach to de-monopolizing education (ending its compulsory nature in all its aspects) is the answer for the rest of the corporate state’s bureaucracy. Illich’s solution is to de-finance these institutions – remove their tax support. Illich notes: “Justice William O. Douglas observed that ‘the only way to establish an institution is to finance it.’ The corollary is also true.” Illich wants to eliminate the tax support for the schools as well as health, welfare and one supposes American business in general. Illich contrasts right-wing (monopoly) institutions with left-wing (free market) institutions, showing the advantages of the un-tax supported, competitive approach to serving consumer wants:

“Right-wing institutions, as we can see clearly in the case of schools, both invite compulsively repetitive use and frustrate alternative ways of achieving similar results.

Toward, but not at, the left on the institutional spectrum, we can locate enterprises which compete with others in their own field, but have not begun notably to engage in advertising. Here we find hand laundries, small bakeries, hairdressers, and – to speak of professionals — some lawyers and music teachers. Characteristically left of center, then, are self-employed persons who have institutionalized their services but not their publicity. They acquire clients through their personal touch and the comparative quality of their services.”

Illich places public education near the extreme right of the spectrum: “they belong near the extreme of the institutional spectrum occupied by total asylums.” Illich presents an interesting contrast between science in a free market and science in the monopoly system:

“An even more valuable body of scientific objects and data may be withheld from general access – and even from qualified scientists – under the guise of national security. Until recently science was the one forum which functioned like an anarchist’s dream. Each man capable of doing research had more or less the same opportunity of access to its tools and to a hearing by the community of peers. Now bureaucratization and organization have placed much of science beyond public reach. Indeed, what used to be an international network of scientific information has been splintered into an arena of competing teams.”

Just as the role of the state has transformed science and deformed it, the role of the state has been to deform education and learning. Compulsion and public tax support are the common destructive elements. The right-wing or tax-supported approach – the current matter of government aid to Lockheed which developed from government contracts is instructive – with its twin of compulsion must be confronted.

“School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. The nation-state has adopted it, drafting all citizens into a graded curriculum leading to sequential diplomas not unlike the initiation rituals and hieratic promotions of former times. The modern state has assumed the duty of enforcing the judgment of its educators through well-meant truant officers and job requirements, much as did the Spanish kings who enforced the judgments of their theologians through the conquistadors and the Inquisition. Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. The first article of a bill of rights for a modern, humanist society would correspond to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education.”

Until that happy day when education is disestablished Illich is searching for methods of moving strongly away from the public education system. He has been influenced by the conversations and papers of members of the Chicago school of economists who advocate a program of tuition grants.

“Taxpayers are not yet accustomed to permitting three billion dollars to vanish from HEW as if it were the Pentagon. The present administration may believe that it can afford the wrath of educators. Middle-class Americans have nothing to lose if the program is cut. Poor parents think they do, but, even more, they are demanding control of the funds meant for their children. A logical way of cutting the budget and, one hopes, of increasing benefits is a system of tuition grants such as that proposed by Milton Friedman and others. Funds would be channeled to the beneficiary, enabling him to buy his share of the schooling of his choice.”

The approach of the Chicago school of economists, in this as in so much else, requires two comments: first, they more than any other group address themselves to real issues and not imaginary constructs; and second, as they are not libertarians, their solutions fall far short of the answers which the free market offers. A tax credit approach, for instance, would be preferable. But, however much they may be holders of the truth, libertarians do not bring that truth to those such as Illich who are seeking it. While Chicagoans are here, there and everywhere, giving or attending seminars, libertarians retreat. How many libertarian scholars will be contributing to the seminar on “Alternatives in Education” next year at Illich’s Center for International Documentation in Cuernavaca. Mexico?

A Note On Revolution

BY R. A. CHILDS, JR.

“Revolution” has been defined, by all too many libertarians as well as by most other people, as simply massive acts of direct violence. But “revolution” is really the application of Aristotelian final casuality to the process of social and political change, and should not be confused with throwing bricks or any other random acts of violence. But what does this mean?

It means that revolution, in contradistinction to evolution as an approach to social and political change, is truly goal-directed, having as its end the ending of any current political-statist system, and the replacement of statism with a libertarian society. Final casuality is really not anything complex: it is the process of choosing and acting which results when the end one has established determines the means required to attain it. These means must be truly worthy of the end, or capable of attaining it, which means that they must be determined by reason, by thinking about the context in which one finds oneself and one’s political system, and deciding what would be the best possible way of attaining the end.

Does revolution involve violence? Not necessarily, but probably most likely it will, at least in its final stages. What the libertarian must focus on is that such violence must always be defensive or retaliatory violence, not invasive, aggressive violence. It may be necessary in the final stages of any revolution because there always tend to be those in the “ruling class” who will not simply quit using aggression and intimidation voluntarily, and whom people must defend themselves against, peacefully if possible, violently if not.

What I want to call special attention to here is the fact that revolution is not merely any concrete violence against, the state apparatus, the set of institutions and men who systematically use aggression to accomplish their ends. Indeed, in many not texts such violence will be truly counter-revolutionary and unproductive of the end of liberty. But violence should not therefore on that account alone be ruled out a priori as a means of dealing with the systematic coercion of the State.

To quote Murray N. Rothbard, in July of 1969 (“The Meaning of Revolution,” LIBERTARIAN FORUM): “Revolution is a mighty, complex, long-run process, a complicated movement with many vital parts and functions. It is the pamphleteer writing in his study, it is the journalist, the political club, the agitator, the organizer, the campus activist, the theoretician, the philanthropist. It is all this and much more. Each person and group has its part to play in this great complex movement.”

What integrates all of these actions and functions? Very simply, the end of getting rid of the coercive apparatus of the State. If one believes in a “limited government,” then he must still admit that by his own standards what we have today is light-years from any such thing, and that therefore he too is in favor of getting rid of the coercive apparatus of the present State.

The point that I want to make, then, is a simple one. In answer to the oft-asked question of “when is it time for a revolution?” the real answer becomes, in view of the above: it is always time for revolution, whenever there is a State ruling over any people anywhere. Because, remember, revolution is not merely the acts of violence near the end of the road, when victory is almost won – it is each and every action which is taken to attain, the final end of the abolition of the State. The tactics and strategy will change from time to time and place to place, depending upon the concrete nature of the State which a movement is concerned with. And, finally, we should also be aware that there are such things as roundabout means of production, i.e. establishing certain pre-conditions for the final victory. If we ignore these points, then we run the risk of becoming irrelevant to the time and place we live in. If we remember them, then at least we have a chance for victory, for we shall understand the true meaning of what it is to advocate setting a revolution into motion.

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Recommended Reading

Psychology, Culture, and Standards.

There is never much to recommend in the New York Sunday Times Book Review, but the July 4 issue has a superb, slashing attack on the Esalen hokum and, by extension, modern culture generally. This is Donald Kaplan’s review of the new book, Here Comes Everybody, by William Schutz, founder of Esalen and the Encounter group “therapy.” In the course of his demolition of Schutz and the Encounter cult, Dr. Kaplan also makes a fine, wistful defense of intellectual standards and points up the evident decline of standards in our present culture. Kaplan concludes: In psychology, “the learned community that ultimately maintained intellectual standards is becoming less learned by leaps and bounds . . . By all that has ever been worth believing, a book like “Here Comes Everybody” should be the beginning of the end for the movement it mirrors. But at this moment I am persuaded by Professor Chargaff’s observation: ‘That in our days such pygmies throw such giant shadows only shows how late in the day it has become.’”

Contra Women’s Lib.

The counter-attack on the Women’s Lib pathology continues. James Lincoln Collier has a valuable anthropological critique, “Millett-Mailer Nuptials: The Anthropology of Sexism”, Village Voice, July 1. And Mary McCarthy, certainly a fiercely independent writer for three decades, scoffs at Women’s Lib as well. Miss McCarthy states that “I have more sympathy for American men than women”. She reports that French Women’s Lib is particularly exercised by wife-beating, but comments that “The dominance of American husbands by their wives is worse than a Saturday night beating. The Craig’s-wife type still exists. Even thought control of a husband is common in the United States. The whole business of the man in the office and the wife as the culture bearer gives an ineffable superiority to women.” And, on the current rejection of men by the Libbers: “To have a fatherless child is a terrible mistake and hard on the child. To bring up a child in a community of women is like a Greek satire.” Miss McCarthy might have added that large parts of our culture are becoming unconscious satire.