Free Thoughts Blog

“The government, lest we forget, is the formal, legitimized expression of the sum total of a nation’s will,” writes Stephan Richter over at The Globalist. “Under the concept of representative government, it directly reflects the citizens’ abilities, actions and aspirations.”

Richter makes this remark as part of a larger argument about “one of the biggest competitiveness challenges the United States faces in the global arena,” which is “entirely self-imposed—and easily remediable.” Namely, “the widespread belief that the idea of government itself, as opposed to a free-wheeling and unimpeded private sector, is somehow a very bad idea.”

I have to wonder which government Richter’s talking about when he praises its supposed perfect connection to the general will. Certainly not the one in power in the United States, nor any I’m aware of elsewhere in the world. How many of us really feel like the massive federal government and its bureaucracy, with its handouts to the politically connected, its endless war, and its constant assault on civil liberties, in any meaningful way represents the “legitimized expression of the sum total of [the] nation’s will?” It baffles the mind to think Richter actually believes such platitudes.

But let’s return to this self-imposed and easily remediable challenge Richter claims America faces. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it. Some of us, of course, very much want a more robust private sector and a much diminished state. But if there’s one thing I did not take away from the clash of the two parties’ titans Wednesday night, it’s that America teeters on the brink of jettisoning government entirely in a wave of hostility towards the very idea of the state.

This libertarian skepticism about government, Richter writes, rises to the “level of absurdity.” He exposes its incoherence by telling a story about McDonald’s. A reporter, he tells us, went and quizzed patrons about the company’s new policy of posting nutrition information in each store. Most of them thought it great. But one bad apple,

who initially reacted very positively, however, was taken aback when Ms. Kliff informed him that McDonald [sic] was simply getting a head-start on implementing a stipulation in President Obama’s health care reform law, which requires fast-food chains with at least 20 locations to provide that information to their customers.

After applauding the company’s move when he thought it was completely voluntary, the customer’s viewpoint changed quite radically. It now became a foreboding sign of the government restricting individual freedoms and consumer choice.

How downright crazy! “How is it humanly possible to consider a decision as positive if made by the private sector — and as highly negative if made (“imposed”) by the government?” Richter asks.

Let me answer Richter’s question by way of a hypothetical. Richter’s gone out to dinner with a nice couple, recently married. They tell him about the wedding, about how beautiful it was, and he thinks it all sounds positively grand. What’s better than two people falling in love and deciding to spend the rest of their lives together? But then, while the husband’s off taking a phone call, the wife leans over and tells Richter that this marriage was forced upon her by her strict parents and that, while she’s now glad to have her husband, she was threatened with death if she failed to marry him.

Clearly Richter, by his own analysis, ought to feel nothing as she tells him this. For “how is it humanly possible” to consider their decision to marry positively when he believed it voluntary and negatively when he finds it was imposed upon at least one of the two partners? I mean, what could be more absurd?

Because Richter has entirely failed to comprehend the moral case against coercion, he is left seeing the libertarian position as simply, in his words, “companies good, government bad.” But of course companies can be bad, too. And government, when limited to its proper role, can be quite good.

Furthermore, Richter believes that we must maintain belief in the awesome power of the state to effect good. The alternative—widespread skepticism—is too terrible to imagine. He tells us that, “if a critical segment of the population — not just Republicans, but also significant parts of the Independents, now the country’s largest voting bloc — do not believe in the legitimacy or even well-advisedness of the government taking action, then the United States does have a problem.” We have to believe the state is well-functioning, even if it isn’t. “The U.S. government annually spends $3.7 trillion at the federal level alone,” Richter writes. “We are talking about real money here. As long as the effort is maintained to declare much of that expenditure a waste, it is tantamount to claiming national impotence.”

One can easily imagine Richter standing among the crowd at the parade, desperately begging them to see—to oh please, see—the glorious clothes the emperor wears. 

“The real menace that any American interested in resuscitating the nation’s competitiveness today ought to address urgently is the demonization of government,” Richter concludes. But he’s wrong. The real menace is in not recognizing how and where the government has failed us, how and were it doesn’t live up to its role as “the formal, legitimized expression of the sum total of a nation’s will.” The real menace is in seeing the state, as Richter does, as a good in-and-of-itself—instead of as merely a tool to be modified, enervated, or even done away with as needed to encourage and support what really matters: liberty, prosperity, and peace.

Ayn Rand was a brilliant author, an influential polemicist, and a great thinker. I don’t care if the academic mainstream thinks less of me for saying so. That’s so much the worse for them.

But she wasn’t always right. Foreign policy is one of the areas where she stumbled, at least on one occasion. Her essay “The Roots of War” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is magisterial, and I love it in particular for the following:

The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders—for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as “selfish” and conquest as “noble.”

Truer or more important words have never been written about human history. I find it difficult, however, to accept the following quotation, also from her:

Anyone who wants to invade a dictatorship or semi-dictatorship is morally justified in doing so, because he is doing no worse than what that country has accepted as its social system.

I recognize no right whatsoever for dictatorships to exist. But I think that Rand erred here in two ways.

First, it is perverse to hold that people suffering under a dictatorship have “accepted” the dictator’s evil acts, such that anything we do to them in the course of a war is no better than what they are in effect doing to themselves.

Many of a dictator’s subjects doubtless are responsible.  Not just the dictator and his cronies, but also his enablers in politics, the press, the academy, the business world, and elsewhere. But others surely wish the dictator were gone. If anything, they probably wish it more strongly than we do. Lumping these people together with their domestic persecutors is indefensible. 

Note the collective noun, “that country,” and ponder its moral implications. It’s not the sort of thinking I would expect from an individualist like Ayn Rand. Indeed, coming from her, I find it prima facie evidence that this answer – first given in an interview – wasn’t the product of deep reflection.  It’s on such thin foundations that some have even built a foreign policy approach that Jennifer Louise Burns has likened, embarrassingly, to neoconservatism. All of which I ultimately find hard to reconcile with “The Roots of War.”

Many in a dictatorship would obviously prefer a free, liberal polity. Yet achieving that goal may well be impossible, and we do not ordinarily blame or punish people for failing to do the impossible, or for not achieving it on a schedule of our devising. Nor can we discount their lives to nothing; they are not sacrificial animals any more than we are. That’s the reason why acts of war must survive an exceptionally difficult moral test.

Rand’s second mistake was to neglect another relevant group of people: the citizens of the liberating country. I agree as a matter of principle that it is always legitimate to overthrow a dictator. Dictators also need to know that when we are attacked, we will destroy them, as we should, wherever they may be located geographically.

Yet for better or worse, I am also a student of history. And in the history of our country, there has not been one single armed conflict of any note in which Americans’ liberties did not contract. War has always brought restrictions on travel, immigration, trade, free expression, habeas corpus, and the judiciary as a whole. It can still mean conscription, the closest thing to slavery that we tolerate under law. Here or abroad, it can mean displacement, dispossession, internment, and torture.

These are not accidents or coincidences. They are the very stuff of war; they are what war is. As James Madison put it, “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

If I could push a button and depose a dictator without any other consequences, then of course I would do it. But that is not and has never been a choice in the real world. There the question is much more complicated, and experience has shown that very often we must decline the offer, not because we are indifferent to liberty, but because we value it so much.

On the book jacket for Carlin Romano’s America the Philosophical, we’re told that “America today towers as the most philosophical culture in the history of the world, an unprecedented marketplace of truth and argument that far surpasses ancient Greece or any other place one can name.”

Maybe, but certainly not when it comes to our politics. We Americans are all too unphilosophical in our approach to politicians and policy, relying instead on tribalism, moral posturing, motivated reasoning, and everything that leads to politics making us worse.

In fact, everyday American politics looks a lot more like villagers supporting and condemning rival sets of witch doctors than it does ancient Greeks conducting symposia in the Lyceum.

Imagine you’re living long, long ago. Your crops fail. This could’ve happened for a number of reasons, from bad soil to insects to poor weather. If you understood how any of those causes work, you might be able to address them. But you don’t. So, instead, you decide some agent must be at fault.

Who? Why, that nasty neighbor always giving you the evil eye. In fact, he probably put a curse on you! So, in desperation, you turn to your tribe’s witch doctor. He waves his arms around, chants a few chants, and tells you to slaughter some livestock. Problem solved. Except it isn’t, because next year your crops fail again. Who’s to blame this time? Your first thought is maybe your witch doctor didn’t do a good job. His spell was supposed to prevent this sort of thing, after all. So you storm over to his hut and ask him to explain himself.

But he’s got a convincing response: It wasn’t me, he said. It was that neighbor. The guy must’ve gone and got his own wizard to cast a new spell—a more powerful spell—on your crops. The witch doctor says you have to give him another chance—and another paycheck—and he’ll take care of it. For real this time.

This ought to sound familiar. It’s depressingly similar to how politics all too often works in America. Low-skilled, high-paying manufacturing jobs are disappearing? Why that’s happening is complicated, especially if it has something to do with underlying shifts in the economy and social structure of the United States that lean towards more economic value being found in knowledge-based, creative fields. Better to blame our neighbors in China for giving us the evil eye and turn to the guy who promises to “get tough” with them. Health care costs rising? Must be because insurance companies are evil, and so we need to turn to someone who will tell them to be nice.

This isn’t good, and it contributes to politics making us worse. We distinguish rival witch doctors not by how effective they really are or will be but by which set of specific incantations we prefer. We may like the witch doctor who talks about “fairness” and “social justice.” Or we may prefer the one who likes mentioning “American exceptionalism” or “the middle class.” Once these incantations have been spoken, we rarely bother to examine their effectiveness thoroughly.

Here I should note that it’s probably not correct to think all (or even most) politicians consciously mislead the public about their abilities or necessity. Most of them likely believe that (1) they are capable of solving policy problems and improving the lives of citizens and (2) are necessary for both to occur. But just because they believe that doesn’t mean it’s true. Witch doctors actually thought their spells helped and that appeasing spirits (a task only they could accomplish) was a sine qua non of a functioning community.

The thing is, politicians have every reason to believe in the effectiveness of politics. It’s difficult to sell a product you have no faith in, after all. What’s more, politicians self-select: if you don’t think politics can solve problems, chances are you’ll have little motivation to enter politics in the first place.

So we shouldn’t take the claims by politicians that we need them as dispositive. Neither should we accept at face value similar claims from those dependent on politicians for their livelihoods. We humans are awfully good at convincing to believe absurd things, and we’re particularly good at it when we count on those beliefs to put food on the table.

What’s needed, then, is some way of evaluating the effectiveness—and even necessity—of politics outside of the claims of politicians. This is how witch doctors eventually lost their influence. As we became better able to understand the causes of crop failure, disease, and so on, we came to see that the witch doctors’ spells simply didn’t work. Knowledge drove out superstition.

Such evaluation can and does occur in the realm of policy, of course. But the simple fact is that it’s really difficult—especially given how complex the interaction is between policy and society, and how impossible it often is to compare the performance of alternatives in the real world.

But that’s not the real problem. The real problem isn’t that most of us try to independently evaluate political claims and do a poor job of it. It’s that we don’t bother trying at all. Instead, we emotionally invest ourselves in particular politicians or parties and then take their words as gospel—even going so far as to evaluate independent claims on the standard of how closely they align with what our favored politicians say.

Which all makes politics still look an awful lot like witch doctoring. We identify a problem and then turn to our witch doctor for help. He says he’ll take care of it if only he gets the support he needs. He then mouths incantations—or writes them down and channels them through the impenetrable, eldritch rituals of Congress. If things get better, we praise our witch doctor and pledge to return for more spells in the future. If circumstances fail to improve, we blame the opposing witch doctor and pledge to never let him exercise such pernicious power again.

Most of us in the western world eventually saw through the charlatanism of witch doctors, shamans, and patent medicine hucksters. It’s high time we include politicians, regardless of party, among their lot.

Originally appeared in Liberty Magazine, July 1992.

It has been nearly thirty hours since Andrea Rich called me with the terrible news: Roy Childs had just died in a Florida hospital, apparently from respiratory failure. I am pleased to write this tribute, a welcome relief from my tears.

Roy and I were close friends for twenty-one years; over the past six years, we talked on the phone virtually every day. He used to say that I knew him better than anyone else. That was a great compliment, for I loved the man dearly.

How does one explain Roy Childs? I am tempted to answer: For friends no explanation is necessary, for strangers no explanation is possible. Roy was a presence - physical, intellectual, and emotional. To meet him once was to remember him forever. Roy was an army of raw emotions which, as they careened and collided in his immense frame, were refined by a powerful intellect, expressed with a rich voice and tempered with a wry sense of humor. It is difficult even to imagine a skinny Roy Childs; everything about him was bigger than life.

It is also difficult to imagine the libertarian movement without Roy Childs. He was a colossus who profoundly influenced the early movement. Those who know of Roy only through his book reviews should read some of his early work on anarchism and political theory. Those articles reveal a mind of astonishing brilliance and depth, a mind fueled by a passion for ideas and a love of liberty.

Aside from his original contributions, Roy played a crucial role in the early movement. He disseminated and popularized the anarchistic ideas of Murray Rothbard, thereby giving libertarians a much-needed radical alternative to the more conservative views of Ayn Rand. The conflict and competition between those two paradigms, the Randian and the Rothbardian, excited many young libertarians and inspired them to explore new frontiers in libertarian theory.

There was yet another area where Roy played a crucial role, one he was especially proud of. Through his articles and reviews, Roy introduced a predominantly Objectivist audience to a broader philosophical framework, most notably to works by Aristotelian philosophers on epistemology and ethics. Those books provided valuable intellectual ammunition, and they helped to wean many young Objectivists from their cliquish, defensive attitudes.

J.S. Mill once said of Jeremy Bentham that he was a teacher of teachers. This was equally true of Roy, especially with me. During the early seventies, Roy told me repeatedly that I should branch out into fields other than philosophy. He complained (with characteristic tact) that I was “tabula rasa” when it came to history, and that philosophers who know nothing except philosophy are a social menace. (He believed the same was true of economists and other specialists.) Libertarianism would never progress without interdisciplinary scholars. Therefore, Roy asked rhetorically, why didn’t I become one? Did I want to remain a boy Objectivist for the rest of my life?

I took Roy’s advice to heart, and for the next eight years I devoted myself almost exclusively to history. Roy didn’t always give good advice, but when it was good, it was very good.

Those were exciting times, the early seventies, when Roy and I lived in the same Hollywood apartment building. I was writing my book on atheism, and Roy was writing a remarkable series of articles on “Anarchism and Justice” (published in The Individualist). Here we were - two budding intellectuals with a diet of discussion consisting of epistemology, psychology, politics, theories of sex, and much more.

Inflamed with the innocence and enthusiasm of youth, Roy and I haunted libraries and bookstores, attended lectures, gave lectures of our own, participated in debates on anarchism, religion, and free will, and bugged Nathaniel Branden. Roy seemed delighted when I called him “the fountainhead of libertarian gossip.” He quizzed everyone on the Rand-Branden split and had figured out the details of that scandal long before they became public knowledge.

We were flat broke during those years, but we didn’t seem to mind. Pleasures of the mind substituted for creature comforts. Roy was happy if he had enough money to go to the movies and buy an occasional classical record. We brought in some money by writing book reviews at twenty-five dollars a pop, which kept us in frozen dinners and soft drinks for a week. Roy’s biggest score came when he located a bookseller who had drastically underpriced a first edition presentation copy of We the Living, which Roy could resell for a handsome profit. But there was a problem: the dealer was thirty miles away, and Roy lacked transportation. Roy offered me twenty dollars if I would drive him on my motorcycle. So we piled aboard a 250cc “two banger” Yamaha and embarked on a sixty-mile journey along treacherous California freeways.

With Roy as my constant companion, I had a perpetual source of free entertainment. I often urged Roy to repeat his best routines for young fans, who would double-up with laughter as he acted out the role of a disturbed Donald Duck (complete with an authentic voice) who was doing “sentence completion” in group therapy. (“Mother was always…sitting on me. Mother was always…dunking me in water.”) Or Roy might deliver his famous speech explaining how Dracula was the ideal Randian hero. (Dracula pursued his rational self-interest according to the standard of “vampire qua vampire”; he despised mysticism as manifested in holy water and the cross; most significantly, it was he who penetrated and the woman who was penetrated.)

Roy and I often reminisced about those halcyon days; we wondered what had changed, and why. The libertarian movement seemed to have lost much of its vitality, and the viciousness of politics had turned many former friends into bitter enemies. Or maybe it was just us - older, wiser, and somewhat more cynical.

Roy’s later years were not easy for him. Plagued with physical problems, and faced with the need to earn a living, Roy was unable to muster the time and resources to undertake major projects. He often spoke of his desire to write a book on the history and ideas of the modern movement. And he desperately wanted to have his own newsletter, so he could write the kind of incisive commentaries and articles he had become famous for as editor of Libertarian Review.

Unfortunately, these dreams were never realized. Roy had been stigmatized in some circles as “difficult,” so he found it nearly impossible to obtain funding. Much of the movement he had helped create turned its back on him, and I shudder when I recall the pain this caused him.

Yes, Roy could be difficult at times, but he gave far more than he got. His ideas and his vision, the fruit of many years of intense intellectual labor, were free for the asking. He sparked enthusiasm in others when he felt none himself. He set up projects for others when he had no hope of getting one himself. He was a generous and kind man.

Some libertarians stuck by Roy to the end. I wish to thank those people on Roy’s behalf. He spoke of you often, and with great affection.

Barely a day has passed since Roy ceased to exist, and I already feel pangs of terror and dread. So much of what I am I owe to him. I would probably have given up long ago, if not for his counsel and encouragement.

Farewell, my fine friend! Farewell!

The number and variety of friends that Roy Childs had was astonishing.

I became one of the many planets orbiting Roy’s sun in 1984 when he moved to New York. On my occasional visits to his apartment, I heard him speak on the telephone with everyone from Alan Greenspan to a gay porn star to students in a wide range of disciplines he had met during his career as a public intellectual.

Roy shone brightest as a talker, equally at ease in declamation and conversation. His deep, resonant voice, ever-ready wit, and knowledge gained through wide reading made it a great pleasure to listen to him.

Those who never had the pleasure still have as evidence of his intellect a number of his writings. Roy’s chosen form was the essay, where he could make his points quickly and deftly, like Scaramouche cutting off the buttons on an opponent’s shirt with a few flicks of his sword.

Roy had a touch of genius. As with many such people, it was a source of some pain to him. Libertarians, as the advocates of a political philosophy that has always been and perhaps always will be in the minority, are especially prone to feelings of anger or despair about the difference between the world as it is (including ourselves as we are) and the world as it could be. Roy responded to these feelings with binges of alcohol and food. Eventually his heart could not withstand the strain that Roy’s eating, drinking, and heavy smoking placed on it. I had the ill fate to be with him when it gave out.

More than twenty years after Roy’s death, I think of him frequently.

In the afterlife, if offered a choice of destination, first I will ask where Roy is.

R. A. Childs, Jr., or just plain Roy, was an inspiring man. Thanks to republication of some of his essays, he will inspire again.

I met Roy in 1972 when I was teenager attending a libertarian conference in Los Angeles, probably at UCLA. I had purchased and listened to a cassette tape of Roy and Professor John Hospers, chair of the philosophy department at USC, debating two socialists. Both John and Roy did quite well in the debate. Roy was simply amazing. Besides the arguments he marshaled, he had such a distinctive voice and a truly commanding presence. When I heard that voice at UCLA from a nearby conversation, I went up and announced to him “You’re R. A. Childs, Jr.,“ to which he responded, “Yes!” And we started to talk. About everything.

The talk continued over the telephone after he moved to New York and whenever we were in the same city. Along with George H. Smith, author of a new book on classical liberalism forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, we were in various reading groups in southern California, where we plumbed the depths of epistemology, economics, moral theory, history, and other topics, and were thrilled at what we saw as the imminent triumph of liberty. We were young.

Liberty is still my passion, and it would still be Roy’s, had he not died twenty years ago. Still, when I think of the goodness and the justice of our cause, I can hear Roy’s voice. Now, thanks to the posting of his lectures and republication of some of his youthful essays by Libertarianism.org, you can, too.