 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, narrated by James Foster. Introducing Anarchism and Justice by Roy A. Childs Jr., Part 2. A 19-year-old Roy Childs published his first article in Robert LeFevre's journal Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, spring 1968. This article was soon followed by another, Autarchy and the Statist Abyss, summer 1968. These articles exhibit three major influences on Roy's early thinking. Robert LeFevre, 1911 to 1986, Ein Rand, 1905 to 1982, and Murray Rothbard, 1926 to 1995. Those people who first learned of Roy in 1969 when he burst upon the Libertarian scene with his controversial and influential open letter, would scarcely suspect the role that Robert LeFevre played in Roy's early thinking, for the open letter shows no traces of LeFevre's influence. Yet this influence is clearly evident in Roy's two Rampart Journal articles published the previous year. It was during his freshman year at SUNY at Buffalo, 1967, that Roy became interested in the ideas of Robert LeFevre, who, in 1957, established his Freedom School, later Rampart College, on 320 acres of land in a valley of the Rampart Mountains near Colorado Springs. In 1967, Roy won a full scholarship to Rampart's comprehensive course on the fundamentals of freedom. Roy so impressed LeFevre and other faculty members that he was invited to join the teaching staff, so he quit college at the end of his sophomore year and moved from Buffalo to Colorado. Unfortunately, debts from a devastating flood in 1965 and other financial problems caused Rampart College to shut down within months of Roy's arrival, so his teaching career never got off the ground. Greatly influenced by Rose Wilder Lane's classic Discovery of Freedom, Robert LeFevre developed a philosophy of freedom that differed in several major respects from the theories of Einrand and Murray Rothbard. Although Roy read Einrand and Ludwig von Meises while in high school, he later attributed special significance to the discovery of freedom. I first read it at the age of 16 and more than any other book, it is this one that made me a libertarian. Roy's admiration for Lane may have made him gravitate to the ideas of Robert LeFevre. Many years later in Anarchist Illusions, Roy mentioned LeFevre as one of his mentors. LeFevre's doctrine of autarky or self-rule caught my fancy as a teenager. Although LeFevre rejected government, root and branch, he disliked the terms anarchy and anarchism and preferred the label autarky instead. As LeFevre explained in his 1965 article Autarky vs. Anarchy, the accusation that I am an anarchist has continued sporadically. Usually the term is tempered with the qualifying adjective philosophical. A careful check of the writings of those anarchists, both European and American, have earned this badge of identification leaves me outside their fold. In each case I find those so-called, engaged in stating the necessity of some kind of economic intervention or in downgrading some of the conditions which are essential to the operation of a free market. While many of them, Prudone, Tolstoy, Tucker, Warren, etc., take a position similar to mine in respect to the evils of state controls imposed upon the creativity and productivity of the individual, they defeat themselves in my judgment by calling for arbitrarily imposed or voluntarily accepted extra-market restraints upon property and its ownership. In a subsequent article Autarky LeFevre wrote, auto means self. Arche means rule. Autarky is self-rule. It means that each person rules himself and no other. As I will use the word, Autarky will signify total self-rule. It will presume a system or social arrangement in which each person assumes full responsibility for himself, proceeds to control himself, exercises control over himself, exercises authority over himself, supports himself, takes initiative, acts with others or not as he pleases and does not in any way seek to impose his will by force upon any other person whatever. In his second article for Rampart Journal, Autarky and the Statist Abyss, Roy Childs, in discussing the most principled opposition to statism, defended not anarchy or anarchism, but Autarky. The choice today is called Autarky as in principle opposed to the rule of man by man to the authoritarian subordination of the unique individual human being to anything outside of his own will. Autarky entails first and foremost the acceptance of individual self-sovereignty, the respect for individual rights and an uncompromising hostility to the state. How can it be achieved? In addition to using the label Autarky instead of Anarchy, Roy followed LeFavre in rejecting electoral politics as an effective strategy to achieve a free society. Calling elections opinion-mongering on a mass scale, Roy contended that the choices allowed the people are artificial and superficial at best and are always determined by the state itself. People are given a choice only over the question of who will be their rulers and never over the questions of power and authority. Keenly aware of the crucial role of legitimation in maintaining the moral authority of governments, Roy, like LeFavre, opposed voting as counterproductive. Voting and political action itself implies a sanctioning of the state and hence of its basis, the rule of man by man. Although Roy never embraced LeFavre's brand of pacifism, he did oppose violence on tactical grounds, even when used in self-defense against unjust actions by government. Attributing the tactics of violence and physical obstructionism to the New Left, Roy observed, the New Left had wanted to decrease the power of the state. Has it done so? Quite the contrary. The state, as always, has turned the threat of force into a resource for accumulating force in itself. If political action and forcible resistance are not viable political tactics, then we must find a third alternative based on a different premise. Roy recommended the principle of volunteerism, reason and persuasion. In short, education. All this is vintage Robert LeFavre, as illustrated by the fact that Roy quoted LeFavre in his concluding remarks on strategy. Governments cannot be abolished, but they can be abandoned. How? In the words of Robert LeFavre, they will be abandoned when you demonstrate that you can manage your affairs without the supervision of Peter Familius. In short, when you abandon your political adolescence and come of age, you will stop seeking to impose your will upon others and at the same time demonstrate that your will is strong enough to control your actions within a framework of non-molestation. Do this, in your own case, with your own life, in your own affairs and no political agent or agency can justify its existence on grounds that you require its help. Within a year after autarky and the abyss of statism had been published, Roy dropped the word autarky and openly embraced anarchism, as we see in the first line of his open letter, August 1969. Dear Miss Rand, the purpose of this letter is to convert you to free-market anarchism. Virtually every other trace of LeFavre's influence had disappeared as well, replaced by a thoroughly Rothbardian approach. I don't know what happened to Roy during late 1968 and early 1969, but it was clearly an important period in his intellectual development.