Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Those who are familiar with my work all know that I consider myself an acolyte, of sorts, of the late, great libertarian philosopher, author, and lecturer Robert LeFevre. You can look Bob up in Wikipedia; the entry isn’t too bad. He is said to have been the model for Prof. Bernardo de la Paz in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Also, my friend Carl Watner wrote a biography of Bob that you should read. I didn’t agree 100% with Bob—among other things, he was a pacifist—but he taught me a very great deal about history and human nature.

In the end, I think Bob believed that the various divisions between human beings—communists vs. fascists vs. loyal American patriots—we have lived with all our lives are less important, less fundamental, than the basic one that Heinlein identified: “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Call the first group authoritarians or feudalists and the second, generic libertarians.

The first time, in the history of Western Civilization, that this became an issue, was the Renaissance/Reformation. Information suddenly came flooding, unbidden, into Europe, from North Africa, through Galileo’s telescope, out of Gutenberg’s printing press, and a dozen other undesirable, unlicensed, and deplorable sources. It must have been a nightmare for the aristocrats who considered themselves to be in charge, the kings and barons and bishops and bullies. They struggled in vain to get it back under control. They got the Church to condemn it. They intimidated and tortured its emissaries when they could. They invented universities to get a handle on it, a collar around its neck, but it was a lost cause. In just a couple of centuries (compared to the previous 500 generations), people—ordinary people; who the hell did they think they were?—came to know too much for the good of Authority.

And they soon proved it, in the American Revolution, which told 10,000 years of kings to go to hell, and the French Revolution, which cut to the chase and removed their overly-pampered heads. I have actually seen the blade. Many other revolutions followed, worldwide, and people began to learn, slowly and awkwardly, to live their own lives. The one good thing to come out of the brutal and deceitful Russian Revolution was the ultimately individualistic philosophy of refugee Ayn Rand.

Otherwise, it was a naked attempt by the authoritarians, the feudalists, to regain control of the masses that the Czar had clumsily let slip through his overly-manicured fingers. Whenever human beings have clashed over whether their lives should be controlled by others or not, it has almost certainly been a matter of who gets to be the next king, baron, bishop, commissar, etc., a battle between liberated entities and those who would restore feudalism.

World War II, which I have described (in The Probability Broach) as a struggle between competing brands of fascism, was much the same thing. For the beleaguered people of Europe, it meant being forced to choose between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Would you rather be shot or gassed?

For Americans, it meant looking for protection by a political regime so grossly and criminally corrupt that future historians will shake their heads, wondering how an entire people could be such suckers. “The Greatest Generation”, that miserable collectivist mouthpiece Tom Brokaw has called them. Looking back over what my father told me of his life, how his family suffered in the government-caused Great Depression, how he and his comrades risked unspeakable danger in the war, and how he became a prisoner in Germany—all to aggrandize the virtual godhood of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—I call them “The Gullible Generation”.

On the other hand, people loved the Roosevelt Administration so much that they passed a Constitutional amendment to make sure that no sonofabitch could ever be elected to more than two Presidential terms again.

World War II gave government complete, dictatorial control of American society, control of industry, control of communications, control of the economy, control that Roosevelt had desperately lusted after before the war, but failed to achieve. If anyone objected, or insisted on his rights under the Constitution, all the other side had to say was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

The government enjoyed that level of control. Once the war was won, and people looked forward to a period of peace, the government plunged us into the Korean War, Vietnam, and an increasing number of undeclared and stupid conflicts in order to retain its power. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” never worked quite as well as it had to shut dissenters up, but it’s clear that this scam will go on and on and on until something drastic is done to stop it.

Against us are outfits like the Bilderbergers, the Bohemian Club, and Silicon Valley, pitiable (if still wealthy and influential) remnants of feudalistic power and coercion.

I’m old enough that I understand it will have to be left to another generation. The Deep State desperately needs war to retain its hold on you and me. The Deep State has been robbing and extorting people for ten thousand years. It’s time to outlaw taxation the same way that other forms of slavery have been outlawed. Taxation is fundamentally immoral. What’s your “fair share”, after all, of the dead children blown up in middle eastern countries?

Taxation is theft.

Taxation is slavery.

Taxation is the fuel of war.

Write me if that needs explaining.