Libertarian Conservatives

"It was like being quite alone on the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over … I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in dust across interminable plains. All the clamor and clatter, confusion of voices, tumults, and conflicts, must still be going on, down there—over the edge, and below—but here there was only the sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself."

"We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land.... The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair."

"That way of life against which my generation rebelled had given us grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility, and a capacity for relentless hard work."

"The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance."

"One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one’s self.... All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction."

"Since 1914...I wait for the natural to return; for newspapers to report news with care for accuracy and grammar; for schools to teach and for pupils to study; for faces to be sane and intelligent, and even humorous; for American artists and poets and writers to be exuberant and optimistic...it is all gone with the music of Vienna and the gaiety of San Francisco. But I still see everything against that background, and really I see nothing funny anywhere. The Beatnik beard and the mini skirt and the topless waitress, they ARE funny, I know they are funny but they only make me tired, I don't laugh."

"The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year’s seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed."

"Writing fiction is … an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it."

"Two deep human desires were at war … the longing for stability, for form, for permanence, which in its essence is the desire for death, and the opposing hunger for movement, change, instability and risk, which are life. Men came from the east and built these American towns because they wished to go no farther, and the towns they built were shaped by the urge to go onward."

"It was not seen that woman’s place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change."

"Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special [Sunday] quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes."

"There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is."

"In 1919 I was a communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered now; some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China and Russia, and I did not know the last American chiefs of the Third International, who now officially embrace Democracy. They would repudiate me even as a renegade comrade, for I was never a member of The Party. But it was merely an accident that I was not."

"The picture of the economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as I asked myself that question. For, in actual fact, The State, The Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful enough in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible to subtract anything from nothing; when a purse is empty, it is empty, it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of actuality, no State, no Government, exists. What does in fact exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men."

"Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills."

"A republic is not possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an economic aim. Economic power differs from political power."

"The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive. Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them. But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not…To that end they have suppressed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work, freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience."

"The Communist hope of economic equality in the Soviet Union rests now on the death of all men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, had already been so shaped and schooled that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee-swarm, the ant-hill."

"I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, because I believed in personal freedom. Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born. It seemed as necessary and as inevitable as the air I breathed; it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived."

"The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as ‘war,’ ‘glory,’ ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘home,’ mean the same in two languages, is an error."

"Resisting step by step, I was finally compelled to admit to my Italian friends that I had seen the spirit of Italy revive under Mussolini. And it seemed to me that this revival was based on a separation of individual liberty from the industrial revolution whose cause and source is individual liberty. I said that in Italy, as in Russia, an essentially medieval, planned and controlled economic order was taking over the fruits of the industrial revolution while destroying its root, the freedom of the individual."

"This rejection of one's self as an individual was, I knew, the spirit animating the members of the Communist Party. I heard that it was the spirit beginning to animate Russia. It was the spirit of Fascism, the spirit that indubitably did revive Italy. Scores, hundreds of the smallest incidents revealed it."

"No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking."

"The American pioneers phrased this clearly and bluntly. They said, ‘Root, hog, or die.’ There can be no third alternative for the shoat let out of the pen, to go where he pleases and do what he likes. Individual liberty is individual responsibility. Whoever makes decisions is responsible for results. When common men were slaves and serfs, they obeyed and they were fed, but they died by thousands in plagues and famines. Free men paid for their freedom by leaving that false and illusory security."

"We would learn more by looking at America. Oddly enough, statistics appear only in times of agitation and distress. Their function would appear to be that of omens of worse to come. We seem to have a morbid taste for them, like that of children for ghost stories that raise the hair. The American air has not been so full of fragmentary statistics since the Panic of 1893. I read again, for instance, that less than 10 per cent of our population own more than 90 per cent of the wealth… I read also that a hundred years ago 80 per cent of our population owned property and that today the percentage is 23."

"What I can't understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government."

"History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past."

"To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason."

"[D]uring half a century, reactionary influences from Europe have been shifting American thinking onto a basis of socialistic assumptions. In cities and states, both parties began to socialize America with imitations of the Kaiser's Germany: social welfare laws, labor laws, wage-and-hour laws, citizens' pension laws, and so-called public ownership."

"For nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar. I am not an alarmist; that is plain fact."

"In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism."

"The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics."

"Men are alive on this earth, only because the imperative human desire is to attack the enemies of human life."

"This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free."

"I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I'd rather read a pulp magazine."

"The reason is that Government, by its nature, can not per mit a competitor within the field of its activities. Everyone knows that Government is a monopoly of the use of force; it can not permit individuals to use force against each other, or against the Government, nor can it permit another Government to use force inside its frontiers; if it does, it ceases to be Government."

"When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines."

"Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been to much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is."

"Inside these modern National frontiers, the workers have been working harder and getting little more than their ancestors did in the feudal system. So the so-called revolutionists attack their Governments and ruling classes, accusing them of not controlling the social system as it should be controlled. Socialist, Social-Democrat, Communist, Fascist, National Socialist (Nazi) all demand that Government make a better social system; that Government control the men who produce and distribute goods; that Government create security for men on this earth. The basis of all this thinking is ignorance of creative energy; it is ignorance of the real nature of human beings; it is the ancient, pagan superstition that Authority controls a static, limited universe."

"Freedom is not a permission granted by any Authority. Freedom is a fact. Whether or not this fact is known, freedom is in the nature of every living person, as gravitation is in the nature of this planet. Life is energy; liberty is the individual control of human life-energy. It can not be separated from life. Liberty is inalienable; as I can not transfer my life to anyone else, I can not transfer my liberty, my control of my life-energy, to anyone else."

"Public debt is a new problem for Americans; a century ago, no one imagined it. Congress then did not know what to do with all the surplus money in the Treasury, and finally returned it to the States."

"But responsibility for whatever the men in American Government do, is the individual citizen's responsibility. The men who began the Revolution created and bequeathed to every future American the tools for progressively reducing the use of force in human affairs. Every American inherits these unique tools: the Constitution that checks the acts of men in public office, and the convention of delegates which is the peaceful means of changing the Constitution."

"Men stood up in Parliament and pointed to the American facts. What had created the clipper ships? Not the American government. Not protection, but lack of protection. What made the British marine second-rate? Safety, shelter, protection under the British Navigation Acts… The result was catastrophe. American clipper ships ran away with the Indian trade. They ran away with the trade in England's own home ports."

"American clipper ships opened the British ports to free trade. Half a century of American smuggling and rebellion and costly ineffectual blockades; seven years of war in America, and the loss of the thirteen colonies; and all the sound and sensible arguments of English liberals and economists, could not break down the British planned economy. American clipper ships did it."

"They were the final blow that brought down that whole planned structure. The great English reform movement of the 19th century consisted wholly in repealing laws. There was nothing constructive in it; it was wholly destructive. It was a destruction of Government's interference with human affairs, a destruction of the so-called ‘protection’ that is actually a restriction of the exercise of natural human rights. In that mid-19th-century period of the greatest individual freedom that Englishmen have ever known, they made the prosperity and power of the British Empire during Victoria's long and peaceful reign. And to that freedom, and prosperity and power and peace, the American clipper ship contributed more than any other one thing."

"As to the restraint of trade by business, that is impossible; the notion that money is power is another lie. There is no possible means by which the duPont Company can stop me (if I have the brains, and not a penny) from starting an enterprise that will eventually totally destroy the duPont Company. I can be stopped only by violence, by physical force. The duPont Company, desiring to stop me, has two possible methods: (1) You can hire and pay a gunman to kill me or kidnap me, and gangsters to destroy my property; you cannot do this successfully if the State performs its proper function of protecting human rights (my right to life, liberty, and ownership of property). (2) Or, you can bribe enough Congressmen to pass an Act of Congress setting up a commission and requiring that anyone engaging in any enterprise in the field of duPont Company’s activities must first obtain a permit from the commission and thereafter be ‘regulated’ by the members of the commission."

"Freedom of enterprise CANNOT ‘produce a society in which there is great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few and considerable poverty among the many.’ Dr. Blake might as well ask, ‘What is our political and Christian duty when water runs uphill, when the earth turns from east to west, when air is heavier than lead?’ Doesn’t he know any facts at all? Does he never LOOK at his country? How can he avoid seeing, if he ever glances at any city, town, highway, or farm, that the salient characteristic of this country is distribution, not concentration, of wealth? Doesn’t he know that even ownership of capital wealth is not concentrated?—that, for example, some 600,000 ‘among the many’ own General Electric? What free enterprise produces most unexpectedly, is a society in which great economic responsibility is concentrated and great wealth is distributed among the many."

"It is obvious that by robbing others, he robs himself, because obviously, if ALL human beings tried to live by not producing but stealing goods from others, none could survive beyond a limited time. So anyone’s using his life-time-energy in stealing, instead of in producing goods, reduces by so much the amount of wealth that potentially could be produced, and progressively diminishes in time the amount that he can get, even by stealing."

"Chattel slavery really was an interesting illustration of this fact. The slavery-owners were in process of destroying their own economy by maintaining slavery. That’s why they could not win a military victory over the northerners. ‘Natural resources’ were more abundant in the south than in the north, but wealth was progressively less in comparison because slavery inhibited the use of human energy in the south. So the southerner was hampering the use of his own liberty by suppressing the slave’s use of his. The increasingly indebted slave-owner on his increasingly mortgaged property was unable to do much that he wanted to do, and the reason for his diminishing area of freedom was his denial of freedom to his slaves."

"More and more southerners were seeing this fact and trying to get rid of their slaves; there were all kinds of plans for doing this. So many simply freed their slaves that most, if not all, southern legislatures passed Acts forbidding this—Acts intended to compel slave-owners to continue to bear their responsibility for their slave-property, and to prevent an increase of the numbers of untrained, uncontrolled, unfed and unsheltered person at large in those states. To evade these laws slave-owners moved temporarily into ‘free’ territory, freed their salves there, and returned. So laws were passed forbidding this. And laws forbidding such freed slaves to return to the slave States, on penalty arrest, punishment and sale."