Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

The Foundation
by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
Wolfpack Publishing, 2021

The Gears are probably best known for their novels of pre-Colombian North America. These span from the first explorers across the land bridge between Alaska and Asia to contact with European powers such as the Spanish in the Southeastern US and Viking traders in Newfoundland. Wyoming denizens, they are by training and education anthropologists and archaeologists.

Civilizations have risen and fallen time after time. The Gears have brought out that theme in novels about Cahokia and the Anasazi, two civilizations that, at their heights, ruled large chunks of North America. Lately, however, they have turned to the collapse of modern civilization. How might it happen, and how thorough would it be? In Dissolution (Wolfpack, 2021), we follow an archaeological field trip in Wyoming as the banking system fails.

The present novel, The Foundation, takes on the theme of the fall of civilization, but from a very different and unusual angle.

Captain Brenda Pepper, US Army Rangers (ret.), has been in Afghanistan, and come out of that experience shattered and put back together. She left the Army, and started an executive protection service. Her clientele are corporate executives and celebrities. Now she finds herself in Jackson, Wyoming, at the Federal Reserve’s annual retreat, protecting someone she’s never heard of—but someone who has enough clout in that rarefied atmosphere that Senators and cabinet secretaries come to her. And who has enough clout that someone is trying to kill her.

The Foundation goes back to the end of World War II, when a victorious and wealthy American and a defeated and impoverished German agree that the next war will cause the end of civilization, and set out to stop that war. If you’ve read Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope or John Stormer’s None Dare Call it Treason, or Gary Allen and Larry Abraham’s None Dare Call it Conspiracy, you know the idea: a hidden elite that runs the world, with of course only the best of intentions.

Chantel Simond is of one of the families that make up the shadowy Foundation. The Simond family is vastly wealthy, complete with their own island in the Caribbean, named Simond Island. Other families in The Foundation control chunks of Asia, Russia, and other parts of the world.

As you might expect, the players play for keeps. In order to protect Chantel, Captain Pepper must figure out who is trying to kill her. Another family? Chantel’s psychopath brother? And why? That quest takes us down labyrinthine twists and turns, like skiing the moguls at Jackson Hole’s Snow King.

And then there’s the assassin. A topnotch sniper who has never missed a kill—until now. At over a million dollars per kill, he has to be good. And he has a reputation to uphold. His client is not pleased at his results. The result is a deadly game of tag, played at over a mile range, move and counter-move, tautly written. Sniper versus counter-sniper.

That’s the face of the novel. But, as Gear readers have come to expect, there are layers to this novel. There’s analysis of the geopolitics and geoeconomics as the various families jockey for position in a world economy getting ready to tank. The symptoms described in the book are out there, they’re real. That includes a United States Government which, even after two failed presidencies, refuses to so much as contemplate the radical reforms necessary to prevent that tanking.

“Captain, the first priority of government is to perpetuate more government. If the politicians have to do it at the expense of their own people, so be it.”

In the book there is also a proposal I’ve not seen before for radical reform which has attractions for libertarians. Libertarians will also enjoy the economic analysis. There’s even a mention of TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, a fundamental law of economics known to everybody except economics wonks.

The novel does something the three books mentioned earlier do not do: it takes the reader inside the powerful elite. Are they the unalloyed evil that Stormer, Allen, and Abraham would have us believe? The wise, beneificent rulers Quigley asserts? They mean well. As Noah Webster put it, they mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

But, given the tactics prevalent when the stakes are that high, what price do people like Chantel Simond and her family pay for their positions and for their good intentions?

Libertarians, conspiracy buffs and Gear fans can expect a literary feast.

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