Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Thanks, I guess, to books I’ve written like The Probability Broach and The Gallatin Divergence (both still in print, gift-givers), some readers have accused me of being an historian. I am not guilty of the charge, I rush to assure you. There is not a single academic cell in my body.

I am, however, an avid student of the lessons that history has to teach us, which is why I was able to accurately predict, in the early 1970s, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the dismal economic failure of Japan, Inc. I have been especially interested in the political evolution of individual liberty since at least 1964 (I was one of the Goldwater kids), greatly appreciated what Ronald Reagan (who was once, I shall point out, a liberal Democrat) tried to accomplish, and witnessed the exhilarating rise and humiliating fall of the Libertarian Party. Thanks to them, nobody today knows exactly what a libertarian is, least of all the Libertarian Party. (if you’re curious, click over to https://ncc-1776.org/whoislib.html.)

It’s just a feeling (sigh).

Not mentioning the highly significant fact that he was not Hillary Rotten Clinton, that’s why, to the hysterically vocal dismay of many of my fellow “libertarians”, I cast my vote in 2016 for Donald J. Trump, who has consistently made me proud, since then, of my vote, with virtually every decision the man has made. It is what compels me now to predict that, in the 22nd century, Trump will be regarded with the same awe and reverence that the left has always reserved for that worthless lump, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Remember, you heard it from me, first.

Aside from various items in the news like nixing underhanded Democrat attempts to institute national voter-fraud, like telling the Chinese Communist Party, the W.H.O. and the U.N. to fribble off (while leftists screamed and sobbed), and like pounding the White House press corps into a smelly paste, Trump would have won my vote all over again by founding the United States Space Force, my late father’s lifelong dream (an Army Air Corps veteran, he was among the first to join the Air Force when it was created in the 1940s). Trump is also building three different space-capable craft, so we won’t have to beg for a ride with the Russians any more. One of those ships is going to Mars. I wish I was forty years younger.

Now, according to reporter Gabrielle Reyes on April 9th (regrettably I lost the rest of the citation), Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, is whining bitterly that the Bad Orange Man is “Trying to Expropriate Outer Space” and “trying to take over other planets” by signing an executive order outlining United States policy on commercial mining in space. “Attempts to expropriate outer space and aggressive plans to de facto seize the territories of other planets will hardly encourage other nations to participate in fruitful cooperation,” Roscosmos blathered in a screed spewed by Russian state propagandists on Tuesday.

Really, Vladimir?

Since when does supporting free market activity amount to expropriation? As Saul Alinski advised the left, always accuse your opponents of whatever you’re trying to get away with, yourself. Who’s doing the expropriating, here? Many among you (the old people) will remember the late 1970s, when the Soviets, using their abjectly compliant butt-monkeys the U.N., pushed something called the “Moon Agreement” treaty, which declared all of outer space, the Moon, and every other celestial body, known and unknown, to be “the common heritage of all mankind”, in effect establishing a Marxist revolution in space before we even get there.

Now that’s expropriation.

I’m extremely happy to inform my readers that when an attempt was made, by the usual suspects, to ratify that nasty treaty in the United States Senate, it was roundly defeated, thanks at least in part, to the Libertarian Party (which was actually worth something back then) and to the late, lamented L5 Society. I was on the LP National Platform Committee at the time, and that “great scholar and historian” Professor Murray N. Rothbard made fun of our concerns in this connection and called us names.This new executive order by the Donald (who also killed the equally despicable “U.N. Small Arms Treaty”) finally drove a stake through its vile heart. Guess Donald’s a “Space Cadet”, too, Murray.

The fundamental right of every American individual and company (in fact of every individual and company in the world) to exploit what they find in space for their own purposes and profits—remember that the average asteroid contains more gold than has ever been mined and refined here on Earth (read my novel, Ceres)—will be defended by the United States Space Force.

We need a song.