Letters to the Editor

THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 582, August 8, 2010
"I do not regard a lock on my door
as a limit to anybody's freedom."

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Letters to the Editor

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Letter from Richard Bartucci

Letter from Curt Howland

Letter from L. Neil Smith

Letter from Manuel Miles (aka Kaptain Kanada)

Another Letter from L. Neil Smith

Letter from Richard Bartucci

On 1 September 2006, Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo published an online review of Jim Powell's Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy.

See [link] for Dr DiLorenzo's review, from which I quote:

"Socialists of all stripes praise TR's 'conservation' policies, nevertheless, because he strenuously opposed the privatization of government-controlled land. Private property is the mortal enemy of socialism. In reality, TR's 'conservation' policies were just another Republican party mercantilist scheme. Mostly western 'lobbying groups hoped to enrich themselves with... free dams, free waterway improvements, cheap water, cheap timber, cheap access to grazing lands, and other goodies, at somebody else's expense.'"

It takes a bit of balls as well as some brains for an academic to get into scholarly historical revisionism. As Richard Lindzen (MIT) has observed, there is a sort of "iron rice bowl" effect in which those whose prominence and pelf depend upon the publish-or-perish model defend the myths upon which they have predicated their careers. Roosevelt the First (good old Teddy) has pretty much the same amount of the myth-making machinery around him as Ashurbanipal or Thor.

Or maybe that ought to be Nyarlathotep.

Anyhow, the tenured and entrenched sustainers of the official and approved set of frauds which make up American History in the schools resent factually supported challenges every bit as much as do the career popularity contest types whom we call "politicians."

After all, you can't baffle 'em with bullshit if people like Mr. Smith and Dr. DiLorenzo and Jim Powell keep hosing it away.

Richard Bartucci
[email protected]

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Letter from Curt Howland

Dear Editor,

During the last week, I found another example that Richard Bartucci, author of "On Plagiarism" might find interesting in answer to his question, "Has anybody ever before developed an idea of what might happen...?"

Crossroads of Destiny by H. Beam Piper, Fantastic Universe Science Fiction July 1959.

A short story of a history professor meeting producers in the club car of a train coming up with a TV show, which would feature one event in history being different than the way history turned out, and how that might change things. Columbus getting his ships from Henry of England is an example given.

Then an oddly dressed gentleman says,

"Zees—'ow you say—zees alternate probabeelitay; eet ees a theory zhenerally accept' een zees countree?"

Later, after getting a hold of an American 1 dollar bill the strangely-dressed man had dropped that didn't have the right portrait, or color, the protagonist muses,

"Then I realized that I knew just where the Crossroads of Destiny for his world and mine had been.

"As every schoolchild among us knows, General George Washington was shot dead at the Battle of Germantown, in 1777, by an English, or, rather, Scottish, officer, Patrick Ferguson—the same Patrick Ferguson who invented the breech-loading rifle that smashed Napoleon's armies. Washington, today, is one of our lesser national heroes, because he was our first military commander-in-chief. But in this other world, he must have survived to lead our armies to victory and become our first President, as was the case with the man who took his place when he was killed.

"I folded the bill and put it away carefully among my identification cards, where it wouldn't a second time get mixed with the money I spent, and as I did, I wondered what sort of a President George Washington had made, and what part, in the history of that other United States, had been played by the man whose picture appears on our dollar bills—General and President Benedict Arnold."

Alternate American history, dead George Washington, involuntary travel between "alternate probabeelitay"?

Who, indeed, could ever had developed that idea, or made money from it, but H. Beam Piper?

Curt Howland
[email protected]

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Letter from L. Neil Smith

Chrysler's Gun-Toting Pickup Truck

[link]

L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

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Letter from Manuel Miles (aka Kaptain Kanada)

I say we send them all back where they came from:

Charlie Hill on the Richard Pryor Show, 1977

Peace and Liberty,

Manuel Miles
aka Kaptain Kanada
[email protected]

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Another Letter from L. Neil Smith

Dear Ken,

Following up on my article last week about what the lefty-trendies are calling the "legacy media", our readers might find the following Gallup Poll interesting:

"In U.S., Confidence in Newspapers, TV News Remains a Rarity"

L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

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