 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 1 I first met Roy A. Childs Jr. in August 1971, shortly after he moved to Hollywood. We hit it off immediately. Roy and I were both 22 when we met, but he had published much more than I had, and his knowledge of libertarianism and history was more extensive. Like many libertarians of that time, my introduction to the philosophy of freedom came from reading Ein Rand, beginning in 1967, after her appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Around two years later, I organized a student of Objectivism Club at the University of Arizona. This was essentially a philosophy discussion group, one that used Rand's ideas as springboards for discussions and arguments. Possibly because of my interest in free-thought literature, which I had been reading for nearly three years before I read Rand, I was repelled by the true believing mentality that characterized many similar organizations. Philosophical Enlightenment, or lightning, depending on one's point of view, struck many Randians in August 1969 after Jared Wolstein's magazine The Rational Individualist, later The Individualist, published Objectivism in the State, an open letter to Ein Rand. This article by Roy converted many Randians, including some who would go on to become prominent members of the libertarian movement, to the anarchism of Economist and Historian Murray Rothbard, 1926 to 1995. Thus did Roy change the course of the modern libertarian movement with a single article. My transition via Roy from Randian Minarchism to Rothbardian Anarchism occurred quickly without any inner turmoil. As conversions go, it was not much of an experience. It seemed little more than a minor course correction during an intellectual journey. Within days of reading the open letter, I decided to write a reply and submit it to The Rational Individualist. Having read some things by Murray Rothbard and Robert Lefebvre, I was not hostile to the idea of anarchism. Lefebvre, as we shall see, called this autarchy. Despite Rand's vitriolic and inaccurate attack in the nature of government. But I found Roy's style of writing presumptuous and grandiose. Passages like this graded on my nerves. Finally, I want to take up a major question. Why should you, Ein Rand, adopt free market anarchism after having endorsed the political state for so many years? Fundamentally, for the same reason you gave for withdrawing your sanction from Nathaniel Brandon in an issue of the Objectivist. Namely, you do not fake reality and never have. If your reputation should suffer with you becoming a total voluntarist, a free market anarchist, what is that compared with the pride of being consistent? Of knowing that you have correctly identified the facts of reality and are acting accordingly. A path of expedience taken by a person of self-esteem is psychologically destructive and such a person will find himself either losing his pride or committing that act of philosophical treason and psychological suicide which is blanking out. The willful refusal to consider an issue or to integrate one's knowledge. Objectivism is a completely consistent philosophical system, you say, and I agree that it is potentially such, but it will be an objectivism without the state. I did not believe that Rand needed to be lectured by a lad of twenty on the value of consistency. Roy conceded as much years later. I didn't know it at the time, but Roy had sent Rand a typescript of the open letter a month before its publication. Later, in anarchist illusions, he recalled the consequences of his youthful naivete. Things did not work out exactly as planned. In place of the astonished but eager acceptance of my argument, and there was some minor hope on my part for that result, I received notice in my mailbox of the cancellation of my subscription to Ein Rand's magazine, The Objectivist. I took my original letter to Ein Rand and circulated it to a handful of friends and acquaintances, and after making a few minor line changes, published it in a magazine of small circulation. Another source of my annoyance was Roy's apparent belief that his open letter might actually change Rand's mind. I dismissed this tactic as a publicity stunt. I did not believe that anyone familiar with Rand could be that naive. Not until a few years later, after I became good friends with Roy, did I understand that he could, in fact, be that naive. Even in his later years Roy displayed a streak of innocence that was part of his charm. My initial negative reaction to the open letter prompted me to write a rebuttal. After deciding on a title, Strange Bedfellows, the anarchism of Roy A. Childs Jr., I sat down at my portable typewriter and began writing. For the purpose of my critique, I divided Roy's article into three parts. The first several pages in which we find Roy's core argument about a basic contradiction in Rand's theory of government, a middle section in which he lists some subsidiary issues and responds to them one by one, and a final part in which he covers some miscellaneous points and returns to the contradiction discussed in the first part. The middle section, with five numbered points, struck me as the most vulnerable so I started there. After covering all five points in as many pages of my rough draft, I returned to the first part which contains the core of Roy's argument about a contradiction in Rand's theory of government. My earlier reading of that part left me with a vague feeling of uneasiness. Although a rebuttal did not immediately occur to me, I assumed one could easily be found. Why? Because Roy's allegation, if true, seemed far too simple and obvious not to have been noticed before. I took a break from my heroic task to re-read the nature of government and related material by Rand, but I could find nothing that addressed the problem posed by Roy. I then re-read the first part of Roy's article in search of some fudging on his part. After finding nothing of the sort, I put aside my initial reaction and focused on this passage. The quickest way of showing why a government must either initiate force or cease being a government is the following. Suppose that I were distraught with the service of a government in an objectivist society. Suppose that I judged, being as rational as I possibly could, that I could secure the protection of my contracts and the retrieval of stolen goods at a cheaper price and with more efficiency. Suppose I either decide to set up an institution to attain these ends or patronize one which a friend or business colleague has established. Now, if he succeeds in setting up the agency which provides all the services of the objectivist government and restricts his more efficient activities to the use of retaliation against aggressors, there are only two alternatives as far as the government is concerned. A. It can use force or the threat of it against the new institution in order to keep its monopoly status in the given territory, thus initiating the use or threat of physical force against one who has not himself initiated force. Obviously, then, if it should choose this alternative, it would have initiated force, QED. Or B. It can refrain from initiating force and allow the new institution to carry on its activities without interference. If it did this, then the objectivist government would become a truly marketplace institution and not a government at all. There would be competing agencies of protection, defense, and retaliation. In short, free market anarchism. Although Rand's political philosophy falls generally in the tradition of classical liberalism, she departed from most classical liberals in two crucial respects. First, she was very specific in prohibiting the initiation of physical force or the threat of force as a fundamental social principle that even governments are forbidden to violate. To the extent that a government initiates force against innocent people, it violates the very rights that it should protect. Second, Rand opposed coercive taxation on principle because taxation necessarily involves the initiation of force by government. Rand therefore discussed possible alternatives that would enable a government to finance itself by voluntary means. It was not until later that I understood that these two principles, especially the opposition to taxation, placed Rand more in the tradition of individualist anarchism than in the limited government tradition of classical liberalism. But Roy understood the situation clearly. By highlighting the key problem in Rand's theory of government, he upset the delicate balance she had attempted to achieve between essentially anarchistic premises and a monopolistic government. This is why, like many other Randians who were persuaded by Roy's core argument, I moved so easily from limited government to anarchism. The essential principles were already in place for those who embraced Rand's theory of rights. All that remained was to apply Rand's principles consistently without fear or favor. Thus, after rereading the first part of the open letter, thinking about it some more and writing some notes that I hoped would eventually qualify as a refutation, I soon decided that there was no credible response to Roy's argument. I then sat back in my chair and thought, well, I guess I'm an anarchist, and that was that. But that was not that for Roy, who years later repudiated his own defense of anarchism and embraced a theory of limited government. Although Roy planned to write a lengthy article explaining his reasons, he never did so. All we have is the opening fragment written during the late 1980s that Joan Kennedy Taylor found among Roy's papers after his death and published in Liberty Against Power, essays by Roy A. Childs Jr., Fox and Wilkes, 1994. I shall discuss this fragment in the last part of this introduction. Thank you for listening to Excursions. To learn more about libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.