I would like to call your attention to a virtually unknown little book, The Lost Literature of Socialism, by George Watson, Fellow in English at St. John’s College, Cambridge and editor of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.

As the publishers explain on the back of this book: “In this hard-hitting and controversial new book, the author examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say… and the result is blasphemy against its canon of saints. This study, the first review of socialist literature since 1945, reveals how closely socialism was linked to conservative, racist, and genocidal ideas. As a literary critic the author’s concern is to pay a due respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say rather than to what their modern disciples wish they had said. The book forces the reader to abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought, enabling a genuine debate to be revived.”

In this brilliant work examining the foundation texts of socialism, Watson provides a powerful indictment of their reactionary, racist and genocidal ideas. There is a direct line from Marx and Engels to Hitler and the Holocaust; to Lenin and Stalin and the liquidation of the Kulaks and the extermination of the Ukrainians; to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and to Kolima, Vorkuta and Karaganda.

What distinguishes “socialism,” the political/economic ideology, and its ideological twin, “sociology,” the social science, are their common inheritance and origins from backward, reactionary ideas (anti-individualism, collectivism, anti-capitalism) and thinkers (Hegel, Comte, de Bonald, de Maistre, Southey, Saint-Simon). Scholars such the sociologist Leon Branson, The Political Context of Sociology, and Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, have thoroughly traced and documented this non-liberal lineage. These horrific ideas were explicitly formulated and conceived against those of classical liberalism, individualism, and free market (laissez-faire) capitalism. But today, according to established authorities in academia and the media, they are the height of “progressive” thought. How did this all come about? Here is how Murray Rothbard put it in his magnificent For a New Liberty:

“(W)e must first remember that classical liberalism constituted a profound threat to the political and economic interests – the ruling classes – who benefited from the Old Order: the kings, the nobles and landed aristocrats, the privileged merchants, the military machines, the State bureaucracies. Despite three major violent revolutions precipitated by the liberals – the English of the seventeenth century and the American and French of the eighteenth – victories in Europe were only partial. Resistance was stiff and managed to successfully maintain landed monopolies, religious establishments, and warlike foreign and military policies, and for a time to keep the suffrage restricted to the wealthy elite. The liberals had to concentrate on widening the suffrage, because it was clear to both sides that the objective economic and political interests of the mass of the public lay in individual liberty. It is interesting to note that, by the early nineteenth century, the laissez-faire forces were known as “liberals” and “radicals” (for the purer and more consistent among them), and the opposition that wished to preserve or go back to the Old Order were broadly known as “conservatives.”

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Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

The Memorial Day 2009 weekend is upon us. Many will use this weekend as the first short vacation of summer. Picnics, boating, traveling, family gatherings, and dedication to enjoyable activities are the rule this weekend.

But Memorial Day is meant to honor the men and women who died in military service to the United States of America. Formerly known as “Decoration Day,” it was first established in 1868 to decorate the graves of the Civil War (War of Northern Aggression) dead.

This weekend, there will be memorial services and parades across America in town squares, churches and at cemeteries. Flowers will be strewn and American flags will be in grand display. Politicians will walk the route, and veterans will don old uniforms and walk with them. Twenty-one gun salutes and taps will echo among the headstones. Impassioned speeches will be delivered to patriotic crowds on the goodness of America and the honor and bravery of the fallen soldiers and sailors.

And Americans will be remembering all the wrong things.

How about a reality check?

Those who fought and died (over 364,000) in Lincoln’s Army died invading another sovereign nation, the Confederate States of America. The CSA, who lost over 139,000 soldiers, was defending itself from the aggression of a foreign nation. It would have been no different morally if the Northern Army would have invaded Canada. So, Northern mourners should remember the shame of the North, not just that their loved ones died in battle. And Southerners should forever laud their sons who valiantly died in an attempt to thwart a foreign invasion and protect their homeland.

The 3,500-plus military personnel who fought and died in the Spanish-American War of 1898 died invading Cuba and the Philippines against Spain. Last time I checked, neither country was a state of the Union and did not require defense from a foreign aggressor. The war was perpetrated by the McKinley Administration and an expansionist Congress, assisted by Theodore Roosevelt and fomented by propaganda in the Hearst newspapers.

The American war dead of World War I (1914-1918), numbering over 116,000, died fighting a war between European nations. America had absolutely no business becoming involved, but as George Washington predicted, our treaty obligations dragged us into war.

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Anyway, back to Chrysler. They are apparently fighting to be able to use loans from US and Canadian governments. Why can’t they get a loan from a bank or some other organization? The answer is because every private company knows that Chrysler is already dead and it just doesn’t know it. I suppose I can understand why people want Chrysler to stay afloat. It employs 4800 people. If they went under and had to liquidate then all of those people would lose their cushy overpaid jobs. What people need to realize is that Chrysler is a drain on the economy, and is helping to keep the rest of us in this recession. It is keeping valuable resources, machinery, raw material, skilled laborers and managers in a company that can’t create wealth. It is simply drawing all money towards it and basically making it disappear. You cannot simply spend yourself into prosperity because spending money is not the same thing as creating wealth. We are in this recession because there is not enough wealth. Just printing money and spending it does not create wealth, it is simply redistributing wealth. It is like trying to raise the level of water in a pool by taking water out of one end and pouring it into the other. This company needs to go under to free up its resources to go to other areas that will be able to help create the wealth needed to pull us out of this recession and bring us back into prosperity.

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It is very interesting and they have done a lot of research.

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There are lots of great ideas for expanding liberty. The most important is probably spreading the ideas of liberty through popular articles, lectures, books, interviews, and formal classes. For these things, we need a professional class of libertarian intellectuals. For those of us who are not quite scholars and who are fed up with politics, but are motivated to do something relevant, entrepreneurship beckons. Entrepreneurship is the peaceful, libertarian version of propaganda by deed. Entrepreneurship is the creative and productive form of direct action.

What is Libertarian Entrepreneurship? It is the creation of new institutions with the goal of advancing the cause of liberty. Examples, tried and untried:

Galt’s Gulch. Once fiction, Werner K. Stiefel tried to make Galt’s Gulch a reality at sea in the 1970’s. The Seasteading Institute is now giving it another shot, following other related efforts, such as The Republic of Minerva and the Principality and Sealand.

The Free State Project operates on the idea of geographically concentrating freedom-lovers in the state of New Hampshire. It was and is one of many libertarian institutions to successfully leverage the power of the internet.

Monetary Entrepreneurship. Re-establishing commodity money – or at least making commodity money possible again – is a tricky problem. Bernard von Nothaus established a warehousing-and-money certificate company in 1998 whose face values mimic those of contemporary US currency. Douglas Jackson and Barry K. Downey founded e-gold in 1996. While e-gold’s effort has been impressive, it still hasn’t broken into the mainstream. The Free Lakota Bank combines secession with monetary entrepreneurship, and is partnered with the AOCS initiative to re-establish silver coinage. Of course, PayPal also began as an effort to create a digital currency.

Adjudication. Arbitration and mediation are thriving business sectors, but quite rare in the area of personal torts. Victim-offender mediation arose through the simple suggestion of a youth probation officer in the early 1970s, and has grown to considerable size, but it is far from ubiquitous and not yet a replacement – as it should be – for criminal proceedings.

Firefighting. In 1667, after the great fire of London, Nicholas Barbon set up a fire insurance business, and in 1680 set up a fire brigade. By the 1700’s, insurance companies in London maintained their own firefighting companies. These institutions passed away for bad reasons.

Crime Insurance and Patrol. My own pet project is subscription patrol and restitution, an attempt to bring restorative justice and accountable patrol to the masses.

Identification. The state crowds out production of personal identification. There is a crying need for good non-state identification methods.

Libertarian Entrepreneurship Society. Maybe there needs to be one. More than one person has mentioned it to me.

Much has been done, but there is also much to do.

Why Entrepreneurship?

As Patrick Tinsley and I noted in our article on Subscription Patrol and Restitution, there are several good reasons to advance libertarianism through entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs already sculpt the institutions that create social change: Henry Ford and his motorcar, Fred Smith and overnight letter delivery, J. C. Fargo and travelers’ cheques, Akio Morita and the Sony Walkman. Some might fear that being a libertarian first and an entrepreneur second might be bad for business, but Collins and Porras have shown that companies who succeed in creating major social change while trouncing their competition and beating the returns of the general market all share the characteristic of having a core ideology beyond just making money that guides and inspires people throughout an organization and remains relatively fixed for long periods of time, and that their less successful rivals lack this characteristic. Consumers do not tend to be ideological in their purchases of goods and services: they purchase what works. (This is partially because few people are temperamentally ideological.) But, entrepreneurs are and must be ideological, for they are creating a better way: they must have a vision of the good.

What we libertarians cannot do is “leave to the market” the essential task of sculpting libertarian institutions. The reason that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world is that they are focusing on creating institutions. We have met the market, and the market is us.

So dust off your Napoleon Hill (I recommend this and this), start eating like a bird and pooping like an elephant, and let’s see some hustle out there!

April 10, 2009

Gil Guillory [send him mail] is a libertarian entrepreneur, professional engineer, and project manager in Houston, Texas.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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Also, I hate when people say that you can’t complain if you don’t vote. If the candidacy is between a giant douche and a turd sandwich, or between a steel chain or a carbon allow chain of slavery, you can choose to not choose.

Anyway, I would not have voted, but I was reading the Probability Broach by L. Niel Smith (a wondering fiction and non-fiction writer and co-founder of the Libertarian Enterprise) the other day. This book is about a cop living in this world who is thrown into a parallel universe which is basically a libertarian utopia ever since George Washington failed to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in that reality. In that alternative world there is always an option for “none of the above” if you can’t stand the idiocy of any of the candidates, because who “will die if there is no president?”

So, I thought that this would be fun, and a small protest against the usual suspects that appear on the ballot.

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This is just one example of the incredibly ridiculous, stupid, waste of time and money, crap that the government does on a regular basis. It’s not huge like Obama’s budget. The mass media is all over how controversial the budget is, but everybody seems to think that it is OK for the government and their  to try and influence our thoughts. Just like they think it

I think that one of the worst things that the government can do is to try to influence how people think.  It is incredibly immoral for the government to use people’s money that they took at the point of a gun to try to influence the views of people. From the pro-war propaganda US during WWII to the ridiculous anti-marijuana ads of today, it is an insult to the freedom of the mind that the founding fathers fought for (not to mention not at all authorized by the constitution). It’s not exactly surprising that the government would do this though, for 150 years the government has been using their public school system to pump out good little citizens that basically worship the almighty government.

In conclusion, I’m just too pissed off at the government to due the kind of research a well thought out post on the budget would require.

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One thing of note is that Obama promised to halve the national deficit by the end of the his first term. How he’s going to do this with the way the government is spending I’d like to see. Of course if he’s halving the deficit starting after all of these bailouts it won’t be too hard. Even with halving the deficit, that still will not do anything to the federal debt, or to the $50 trillion in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid obligations in the next 40 years.

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