 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is George H. Smith. He was formerly Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Humane Studies, a lecturer on American history for Cato summer seminars, an executive editor of knowledge products. His fourth book, The System of Liberty, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He's also a contributor to Libertarianism.org in many ways, including his popular weekly column. And he's the co-editor with Marilyn Moore of the Libertarianism.org book, Individualism a Reader. But today we're here to talk about your friend Roy Childs. You wrote an introduction where you talked about Roy's ideas and your relationship with him for an e-book Libertarianism.org put out quite a while ago. There was a collection of his works called Anarchism and Justice. So how did you first meet Roy or when did you meet him? Okay. Some of this just to let listeners know. Some of this information will probably duplicate material in that introduction, which was published and posted in five parts on a part of my Libertarianism.org series. But in any case, I met Roy in person in early 1971. He had been in New York. He was well known at the time. He had worked with Jared Wollstein on the rational individualists as it was called. They later changed the name to the individualist. It was a very early Libertarian magazine. But I thought I'd waste a joke with Roy about taking the word rational out. Like, we'll go for anybody, whether they're rational or not. And anyway, by that time he had written his very famous and influential article, Anarchism on an open letter to Ayn Rand. But he and I had corresponded briefly because the rational individualist was starting local chapters at colleges. I formed one of the first at the University of Arizona. SRI, it was called, later changed to SIL, Society for Individual Liberty. And we'd had some correspondence. They had this sort of nifty little organizational kit for college campuses. It was cheaply done, but they had no money. And so I had some correspondence with him. He knew of some things that I had written. I knew of him primarily through his article on open letter to Ayn Rand. And when he came out to California, he came out to attend one of Nathaniel Brandon's therapy groups. It was sort of the thing to do among Libertarian types. We all went to one or another Brandon's therapy groups during the time. When was this? I met him in early 71. He called me on the phone. I don't know exactly how he got my phone number, but he wanted to meet me. And I honestly can't remember our very first meeting, but we really got along very well. It was just one of those instant bondings where you just are talking, you know, you meet at seven and you're talking until seven in the morning. And I found him a fascinating character. He liked me, I think, because I was open to new ideas and interested in learning whatever I could from people who knew more than I did. And Roy certainly in many areas knew more than I did. And what finally kind of cemented it, I was living in Inglewood near LAX. And I had to move. And Roy said, why don't you move in this apartment building where I'm living? It was on Selma Avenue in Hollywood. And then we can chat every day. So there were basically efficiency apartments. And I moved into the same building. So we lived in the same building for a little over a year until he moved back to New York. And we saw each other literally every day. We did everything together. We were both broke writers. It's sort of the classic story of the salad years. Neither of us had any money. I was working on my first book, Atheist in the Case Against God. He was, among other things, writing not only running books for libertarians, which was an early version of libertarian reviews, doing reviews. But he was also working on that wonderful series he wrote called Anarchism and Justice. So we'd get together every day, sometimes for hours, and talk over what he was working on, what I was working on. He gave me advice about things in my book. I gave him some feedback about what he was doing. And it was, I have to say, in terms of justice, sheer intellectual excitement, it was one of the most exciting years of my life. We were both young. Roy only was a month older than I was. We were the same age. We came from similar but somewhat different backgrounds. He had strong personal connections with Murray Rothbard, who at that time I had never met. And it was largely through Roy that I had first learned of the ideas of Murray Rothbard. I had read a little bit by him before that. But as with many people, you have to understand the movement at that time, which we can get into later if you want. It was very young and very exciting because it just seemed like the sky was the limit. But he got me very interested in Murray's ideas. I had converted to the Rothbardian version of anarchism after reading his open letter to Ein Rand, which was published when I think it was in 69. So he didn't have to convert me to that. But he convinced me of a lot of things. Can you talk a little bit about his personality in that sense? Because that was the sense I got, especially when I came to Cato first and started meeting people who knew Roy. Yeah. Did you ever meet him personally? I did not. People who knew Roy, and everyone was very affected by him in many ways, intellectually and personally. Yeah. He was one of the great personalities of the modern movement. The only person who would even come close to Roy in personal charisma that I can think of was Nathaniel Brandon, who was also very charismatic. But Roy was more engaging, more outgoing. You just hard not to like him when you first met him. He was, I used to call him after Star Wars came out, I call him the Yoda of the movement. He was sort of the guy that kids would cluster around at conferences and ask sort of what I like to call guru questions, kind of open-ended questions like a master in parts of your wisdom. He liked that role, and he was very good at it. He was very large physically, that was a problem that eventually caused his severe health problems. When I first met him, actually he was quite trim. He had separated from his wife, he wasn't in good shape psychologically, so he wasn't eating that much. And he used to swim every day in the pool in that apartment building we lived in. Later, of course, he started to gain his weight back. But his personality was just, I hate to use cliches, but it was larger than life. He really was just a very interesting guy to be around. I honestly can say I never got bored being around Roy. It also seemed like there was no intellectual subject that was foreign to him. No, he would talk about anything. And he was just, it wasn't just an exterior of a charismatic personality, he really had a first-rate mind. One of the things, we were very blunt with one another. I was probably one of the few people who wasn't actually intimidated by Roy. And I would tell him exactly what I thought. I would jump all over him if I thought he did or did not do something. One example of that would be, when he arranged, he was, you have to understand at this time, the whole anarchism, minarchism controversy, minarchism being a term coined by Sam Konkin for advocates of limited government. We were both spending a lot of time with both Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon. We both wrote book reviews for academic associates, which was run by Barbara and Bob Burrell. Bob Burrell being the rational dancer in a two-chillies book at usually ends with Ein Rand. Nice people, they were living together at the time. I spent a lot of time in her apartment, which ironically I later moved into myself long after she had left that apartment building. And he was the go-to guy to argue about the anarchist controversy. It was a much bigger controversy then than it really is now. I think it's settled down a lot, although I think the issues are still interesting and important. But everyone in the LA area, and LA, Southern California was one of the really active hubs. There were others in San Francisco and New York, but I think Southern California, just everybody seemed to be in Southern California. People who would later disperse throughout the United States, but you could go to a meeting of some kind or another once or twice a week easily. So Roy and I did a lot of supper clubs, we engaged in debates with other people. But actually, Brandon, Nathaniel Brandon once suggested a debate, an informal debate on the anarchism, minarchism controversy to be held at Barbara's apartment on Franklin Avenue, not far from the Chinese theaters. And I was going along as Roy's second, and Barbara and Nathan, Nathan would be the primary debater on the limited government side, and Barbara would be the backup. So we met at Barbara's apartment, had a basically a three-hour discussion. And then Brandon said, why don't we continue this? And so we went back maybe a week later for another three-hour discussion. Now I brought that out. That would have been a good thing to have on tape. Yeah, I always regret it. But I have a good memory of it. And I don't know if you want me to tell the story, but the reason I brought that up was I thought Roy dropped the ball in the first discussion. Well, before we go into that, actually, though, because I would like to go back to sort of parse out some of his ideas on the open letter to Ayn Rand. Yeah. So, I mean, that seems to be this, I mean, it's an important text in this early debate. So can you just tell us what was he, what was he responding to and what were his arguments in that open letter? Yeah, I do discuss this on the online a lot of work, I say, so people can look for more information there. But it basically, Roy gave what would become the standard argument against Randy and Minnickism. I know some limited government people don't like that term, but it's just become part of the lexicon in the libertarian movement. And the basic argument, he had a number of subsidiary arguments as well. But the basic argument was that according to Rana, she was very specific about this, no government has the right to initiate the use of force. And Roy pointed out, well, if that's true, then how can a government claim a monopoly on protection, on justice services, so-called protection agencies? Because in order to keep out competitors, it has to threaten them with force. It has to say, if you go in, even if your system is perfectly just, even if we have no complaints with how you conduct yourselves, we have the monopoly on this. So we're not going to allow you to compete. Therefore, how do you keep out competitors? Well, like in any industry, you keep out competitors by threatening coercion against them. This was the basic, as he sought, contradiction in Rand's defense of government. So you're saying they could either use force or agree to competition. Yeah, and he'd give the example. Because always, I mean, first of all, he pointed out the presumption that government is going to, any monopoly is going to become inefficient. So even if you have a government that's essentially just, if it's grown fat and lazy, and people are unhappy with it, they have to pay too much in tax or in money, Rand opposed taxation in theory. So coercive taxation really wasn't an issue. But suppose you have dissatisfied customers, and they say, look, we have this other agency over here that's more efficient, less expensive. We would rather go to them to resolve our disputes. So on what grounds can the government say, maybe it uses even the same procedures as the government? Maybe there's no difference in substance between those two agencies. Nevertheless, a monopolistic government will say, no, no, we reserve that right of deciding disputes, legal jurisdiction to ourselves. And we won't let you go to somebody else. So now, according to Rand, again, this is the theory. She did write some things saying, I'm against taxation in principle. But, and then the yada, yada, yada followed, which always follows on those exceptions. But the problem was, what if somebody just refuses to pay for the government? Now, according to Rand, you couldn't force him to pay. So can they go elsewhere? Can they take their money to another service? And Roy's argument was an objectivist government would not permit that. And it would have to initiate force. And insofar as it initiated or threatened to initiate force, it would violate Rand's basic maximum of no one, including government, has the right to initiate force. And that brought in the whole thing of competing agencies that Murray Rothbard wrote about Randy Barnett, who, by the way, once told me he was also convinced by Roy's open letter. And he's been a very influential, very high level intellectual influence on libertarianism. Law professors, you guys know. But we were sitting. Yeah, I heard that, as a matter of fact. He and I sat around one time at a conference and talked about who's actually converted by that open letter. And I don't remember all the people on it that he knew about and that I knew about. But there's quite a few people who are still very active in the libertarian movement who were converted, if I can use that term, to the anarchistic cause later. I'm sure you want to get into this later. But Roy, as you know, later retreated from that and went back and embraced limited government. And that's a whole other story. Now, did Rand have a response to this letter? Did she reply to it? Or if she didn't, did she have a argument directly against anarchism? Well, that's the odd thing. Roy later wrote, it was in that papers just, I heard also from Roy. Well, I don't need to tell you how I got the information. But basically what happened was Roy had a type script of the manuscript. And he saw a speech by Rand. And he managed to hand her a copy of the manuscript as she didn't say anything. Before it was published, you mean? Before it was published. The only response he got, he was cut off the Objectivist mailing list. And a subscription to the Objectivist mailing list. Wait, so they canceled your subscription? I mean, it wasn't the, like, cancel my subscription. It was they told you your subscription is now canceled? You just got a note in the mail saying they didn't tell you to serve. You don't deserve our newsletter anymore. It's sort of like the Spanish Inquisition. You weren't given many details. You just knew you were in trouble. Now, after that, there were various Rand never replied directly to it. She had written some things, a thing that provoked, and I think Roy dealt with this in the open letter. I think it was in her article, The Nature of Government. And she wrote some, I hate to say this, but I like Rand, but some pretty lame stuff about anarchism. I mean, painting worst case scenarios. And failing to explain how government got out of those problems, you know. But, and that enraged a lot of us. Well, I mean, she wrote them before Roy wrote his open letter. But that sort of opened the door. No, she never responded directly. But some of her subordinates did in various venues. I think Peter Schwartz was one guy. And Roy had some unkind things to say about Peter Schwartz. Now, you set, you yourself, you write about this in the introduction, but it's like a, you set down, your initial thought about the letter was that it was a little bit presumptuous. First of all, it's just like, Miss Rand, you should be an anarchist. Somebody tell you why. Yeah. For like a 19-year-old kid, was he, was he, Roy was 19 or so when he wrote it? He was 20. Okay. Well. It's basically, I'm going to show you the light sort of. Yeah. Which is, I mean, which is hilarious. That's the attitude she had toward people. And if someone take that attitude toward her, it probably made her upset. But the, but you try, you said, I'm going to kind of write something about this. And when, how did that go? I'm going to refute this. Well, I was in Tucson when I got, I had heard about it in advance from some people. Oh, this article, you know, depending on anarchism against Rand. Well, it's a big deal then. You have to understand that kind of article today has become fairly common. And there were so many outlets. Back then, there weren't many inter-libertarian magazines. The individualists, earlier the rational individuals, was one of them. So this was a big deal. I mean, people were talking about it. And I was sort of the leader of my little subculture at the University of Arizona. I'd started a student's objectivism club. So when my, I'd subscribed to the rational individualists when it came, or maybe, I'm sorry, it could have been the individualists by that time. I just, it doesn't matter. But I don't remember the exact time that the name changed. But Jarrett Wolstein started the magazine. And so I got it. And I read it. And it annoyed me. I've even written on those articles. It just sort of aggravates you on a basic level. But you still know there's something there, and you need to calm down and not just put it aside and not think about it again, which I think is what a lot of objectivists did. I thought, yeah, but there's something here. So I thought, well, I was capable of writing a refutation. This is anybody. So I was in my bedroom at my little portable electric typewriter. And I'd read through the article several times. I typed out some quotations. And I even had a title before I started writing. It was called Strange Bedfellows, a reply to Roy Child's open letter 9 Rand. Had you met Roy at this point? No. No. We had corresponded because of the connection. I was running a SIL group on campus. So we knew of one another. Who were the Strange Bedfellows? Beg your pardon. Who were the Strange Bedfellows? Well, Roy, considering himself sort of not an objectivist, but sort of a neo-objectivist. He was trying to incorporate anarchism within the objectivist movement. And anyway, I started out with the easier points. Some of his subsidiary points were not that difficult to answer, sort of. But I avoided that contradiction point that I explained earlier. I just thought, ah, there's got to be an answer to that. So I reread Rand's articles on government. I went through them several times. It was odd because I couldn't find any awareness of that problem at all of how do you sustain the monopoly status of a government. And so I reread it, and I remember it's very distinctly, I had a little typewriter table with this typewriter. And I reread it over and over, and I could have ran through it. And then suddenly I said, I don't, there's just logically no way to answer that. And I remember thinking to myself, well, I guess I'm an anarchist. And it wasn't like some great religious- But did it hurt? Did it feel, did it feel, yeah, did that, was that a difficult thought to have? No. And that's the odd thing. I think I mentioned this again in the introduction to Roy's writings. It was very simple, and I speculate that the reason it was, because I already accepted the basic premises, you know, it wasn't until later that I realized that what Rand had really done is laid down some classic anarchist premises, one of the most important being is the illegitimacy of course of taxation. Now once you start that ball rolling, you talk about a slippery slope. You know, this was not something new. I mean, you may be familiar with a very good, consistent libertarian in the 19th century named Bob Ron Herbert. Oh yeah, one of our favorites. Yeah. Well, Herbert was in favor of what he called voluntary taxation. That's a phrase that Rand herself never used. But Spencer disagreed with him on this, oh, it's totally impractical. Your novel's never going to sell that program. But the American anarchist, the Benjamin Tucker School of Individualist Anarchists, liked Herbert because of his voluntary taxation thing. But Herbert reputed the term anarchist, claiming that this was a form of financing government. And basically the Tuckerite argument was, yeah, I mean maybe technically, but you're not going to be able to sustain a government if you have to actually let people decide whether they want to pay for your services or not, and they brought up the same problem. But if competing services want to, you know, get in the game. And that, by the way, that was an early argument. There was a fellow, a Tuckerite, wrote a book called Voluntary Socialism, Francis Tandy. Marilyn and I included an excerpt from that book, a privately printed book, which is not well known. It was mentioned, however, by Nozick at one point. And Tandy comes straight out a peculiar title, Voluntary Socialism to the Modern Year, but he was an individualist anarchist, free market type. And he explicitly laid out a plan to take what are now legitimate government services and put them in the private market in the form of insurance companies as a model. And went into quite a bit of detail, it's a very interesting discussion. But anyway, when I realized that there was no way around this monopoly thing, I just, it was an easy transition. Frankly, I didn't think it was that big of a deal. And I didn't think, I learned differently when I went back to my little club, the sort of 10 people that were the core of it, and started saying, you know, we really should be anarchists. And let's just say that was not received with universal acclaim among some of the harder core Randians there. Oh, Ms. Rand has denounced anarchism. And I said, yeah, well, she was wrong. But that wasn't a good argument, I guess. When you had this conversion, was it a purely logical one in the sense of just like, okay, I'm I know I'm opposed to the use of force and any state seems to require it because of this monopoly issue. So therefore I'm an anarchist. But was there any like concern about, well, but maybe anarchism wouldn't work? Well, you know, that's an interesting point, because I think one of the great values people say to me all the time or in past years have said, well, what's the point of this is anarchism is never going to happen in America, which I have to agree with, by the way. So what's the point of debating it? Now, I think there are a number of issues, answers to that. But I think the most important for a libertarian audience is that it got us thinking about alternatives. I had never really considered before. I knew that Rothbard had advocated this sort of thing, but I'd never really considered before the implications of that in terms of how, in fact, would you structure a competitive system? Randy Barnett in the structure of liberties, he calls it legal pluralism, sort of a euphemism for anarchism. He goes into quite a bit of detail about that. And some articles he wrote for the Harvard Law Review and stuff he did also. But it got me and a lot of other people thinking. It sort of, you know, we awoke from our dogmatic slumbers and thought, well, that's interesting. In particular, it got me thinking about justice. And what is the ultimate criterion of justice? And could that be maintained in a competitive system? I actually put a lot of that in writing and some early articles I wrote for the Journal of Libertarian Studies. The main one was called Justice, Entrepreneurship, and a Free Market. And the point of that article, which was really an offshoot of my thinking about my conversion to anarchism, was what market forces would tend to work in favor of maintaining justice. And I developed an argument kind of market incentives that would want justice agencies, as I call them, to remain pure, so to speak. That the sulling of the reputation, once they became known as an outlaw agency that lose customers, more or less a standard libertarian argument. But I used Israel Kersner's concept of entrepreneurship and applied it to the issue of market forces that would favor justice. While conceding, of course, that you're always going to have bad eggs in any of these things, I didn't deny you're going to have outlaw agencies, you know, masquerading as justice agencies and that sort of thing. But that was well received, for the most part, in the libertarian community. And I still see it referenced from time to time. But you get this, I mean, the idea that we have no sacred dogs in the state that gets us thinking about other possibilities outside of a monopoly. And that's something you write about in the introduction, too, which I think is really, really interesting when you say there's a distinction between anarchy and anarchism. Right. Can you talk a little bit about what that is? Yeah, I came up with those distinctions more or less on my own, just trying to clarify. Many things I've written in past years, I've actually written little mini essays just to myself, trying to be clear about distinctions. And the point I was making there was that we often, first of all, that if you look up even in standard dictionaries, anarchy, you'll find one reference to a society without a state and another definition being political chaos and confusion. So right away we're off to a bad start here. But what I pointed out was that just as an advocate of minarchism doesn't endorse every form of government, so an advocate of anarchism and won't endorse every type of anarchy. There can be chaotic anarchistic systems. There can be vicious anarchies. So to call yourself an anarchist, and somebody says, oh, they've got anarchy over there in that country and look at all the slaughter going on. Well, what's the implication there? Supposedly, just because you don't have a government, lack of a government, in other words, is necessary but not sufficient for a good society, an anarchist theory. Anarchism is a theory, a positive theory. Anarchy is simply the absence of government. And you can have all kinds of stuff, good and bad, without government. Well, there's an interesting analogy you make in there. You kind of just said it, too, that an anarchist does not endorse every stateless society as being good. And just like a status, a believer in government, doesn't endorse every form of government as being good and just a system. So you want a system of working peaceful, effective institutions in the, that's what you're advocating for, not just Somalia, for example. Right. But that's very common, as you may know, that when someone, libertarian funds out your anarchists, they'll go, well, they've got anarchy over in Somalia or wherever, or in the Middle East somewhere. So you approve of that and I'll say, well, by the way, if you hear her tweeting, I have my parakeet I got recently. I covered him up with a sheet so he'd be quiet, but I think he's cheering what I'm saying. I like to, I take it that's not true. It's a good backdrop. It's fine. All right. Anyway, but it's like me saying to some objectivist advocate of limited government, I says, well, you believe in government. Well, look at the government in Iran. So you approve of your pro-government, so does that mean you approve of the government of Iran? Well, of course they say, no, no, no, I believe in this type of government. Well, in same way, individualist anarchists will say, I believe in this type of anarchy, an anarchy, a society, a stateless society in which there are in fact mechanisms to enforce justice, that sort of thing. Now to go back, oh, sorry. I was just gonna go back to Roy, because Roy used autarchy for a while. In his earlier writings, that was under the influence of Robert LeFave. Who was, who started the Rampart School, correct? Yeah, he started in Colorado. He and his associates actually built from scratch. These wonderful cabins. I never saw them. Roy said it was wonderful. They had a library, a dining hall, rooms for students. And I think they were financed originally by, what's his name, Millican. He was a textile businessman that LeFave met. But anyway, everyone spoke very highly of the courses that were given there. Roy, I think he was a sophomore in Buffalo at college. He went to that, he got a scholarship. And they were so impressed with him that they invited him to become a lecturer. So he quit college. And before he could actually start his lecturing or teaching career, there was a terrible flood. I guess his place was in kind of a valley in near Marksburg, Colorado. And basically they couldn't dig themselves out of the financial hole. So Rampart, which later became, I think called the Freedom School, basically moved to Orange County. They just had a suite of offices there. They didn't have nearly, they did some programs, but they didn't have nearly the facilities. They weren't able to do as much as they'd done previously. But Roy was very much influenced by LeFave. And he wrote some very important articles, interesting articles before he wrote his open letter to Rand. Now remember, he was like 17, 18 when he wrote these things. And like LeFave, who expressly repudiated the term anarchy or anarchism, because he thought it had bad associations, essentially. Roy talked about autarchy, not anarchy. And I don't think it was until he wrote his open letter that he started using the term anarchism. But nowhere that I know of. In fact, Roy didn't even discuss it with me. I was largely unaware of his, I knew about his association with LeFave. But even to the point where in his early articles, Roy slammed political action by libertarians. And he later became a big advocate of the Libertarian Party. But he used some of the same arguments that the volunteers, the anti-political libertarians, including myself later used, that basically you were playing, you were playing into the government's hands by, you legitimated through voting. But he was well aware of that. And he, so his views changed in a number of ways, including the terminological shift from the term autarchy to anarchy. And would you say Roy himself was sort of a combination of LeFave, Rothbard and Rand? Those his biggest influences, do you think? Well, that's a good point. I think he was a combination of Rothbard and Rand. Both were very influential. As far as I can tell, his LeFavian beliefs pretty much disappeared. I never saw any trace of LeFave's writings. I did a public debate at the Los Angeles Libertarian Supper Club. This was probably, I guess in the late 70s, with Bob LeFave, a very nice guy. Old school gentleman, very gracious man. I liked him a lot. And we debated the issue of retaliatory force. Cause LeFave was a pacifist and he didn't believe in the use of violence, even basically in self-defense. And so as I was preparing for the debate, I talked to Roy who knew LeFave very well and he coached me. He said, now he's weak on this issue. Bring up this example. The example he wanted me to bring up was, if somebody shoots a gun at me in my, do I have to wait till the bullet hits my body before I can, and then claim ownership of the bullet. Did he throw it back at them? Yeah, because LeFave did have this theory if somebody stabbed you with a knife, why you would pull the knife out if it belonged to the other guy? He says, well, once it goes in your body, it basically belongs to you. I know this stuff so well. You can imagine a criminal gang that uses this to, exactly, they're just gonna swallow the stolen jewels. Well, I did use some of these arguments with Bob and he got visibly annoyed with me, which kind of bothered me. I thought, well maybe, cause frankly some of his positions on that were just indefensible, I mean theoretically. But he did have a respect. He wrote a very nice booklet called The Philosophy of Ownership, I believe, and he had a really good bead on history. I just thought his theoretical defensive pacifism was just not defensible really, even to the point of denying the individual right of self-defense. He used to talk about a couple of muggers coming up to him on the street and trying to take his wallet, and he talked him out of it. Now, maybe Bob could do that. He was a very charismatic fellow, but it's not something that I think works very often. So, the fave, the fave said Roy too in some directions, but it was really Rothbard and Rand. As far as I can see, Rothbard completely flipped him around. I never saw any trace of Latavian influence in Roy, except the stress on education, but that was a stress that all of the major libertarian figures made. Still that today, that's what libertarians were not aware of, it's always the case. What did, you mentioned some of the Roy's jobs. What were his jobs, some of them when you were living with him in the same apartment building? Well, I had a bunch of different ones, but his main activities, as I may have mentioned, when we were in that apartment on Selma apartment building, were he was the editor of books for libertarians, which at that time was kind of one of those fold-over, long sheets folded over, and I think there were usually eight pages. He wrote reviews every month for that, and he got paid for those. He had me write quite a few reviews also, and I was thankful because I got $25 a review, and considering I was living on zero income, basically, while writing most of that book, that meant something, that, by the way, was also the standing fee for writing book reviews for Barbara Brennan's and Bob Barol's book news. It was $25 a pop. And so I made a little extra money that way, and he was also working on his Anarchism and Justice series. He was towards the end of that series by the time I met him. But then he moved on later, Bob Kephart hadn't come out to the East Coast, his kind of fell through. He wanted to expand libertarian review. Roy later became editor of libertarian review. I think that was from 77 to 81. Then he was a policy analyst from Cato. I made a note before we started this, I'm sort of reading it from 82 to 84. He then became the editor and chief reviewer for Lesley Fair Books. Which was starting in 84, and that continued until its death in 1992. And he used to write an astounding number of reviews. Yes, it's really a remarkable. And he was a very good reviewer, and I know from being around him so much. I mean, when you live in the same building and you're walking down to his place and knocking on the door, and he's typing away and working on a certain review, he'd read some reviews to me. I thought his reviews were remarkable on a number of levels, some of which I explained in the article, the articles people can read on L.org. But he was always honest. With one exception, I had a big argument with him about it caused sort of a personal risk. The Irving Crystal discussion? Yeah, I didn't think, that kind of, you know. You never resolved that. So the issue, explain the issue, because not all of our listeners have also read the essay. Well, the problem in my view, and I used to tell him this straight out, and he'd get kind of pissed. We'd have arguments, but we're the type that could argue pretty heatedly, and then after it was over, I was like with Jeff Rickenbach like this too, was another close friend of Roy's. Very active in the early movement in the LA area. We would be in shouting matches, and then we'd just, okay, that's over. Let's have a beer. We didn't, you know, it was remarkable that you would be able to argue with people like that and let it all out and not hold a grudge. But there was a grudge held by Roy on this issue. Roy got political, as I used to tell him. I said, Roy, you've gotten political, and it's affecting your intellectual candor. That happened when the LP was formed, and Roy got very interested in it. And if I were to mark kind of a bad turning point in Roy's life, I would say it was, it is intense interest in political activity, because that took all of his time away from substantive theoretical issues, for the most part, not entirely. And that's why his earliest, best earliest theoretical writings are early in his career. And I said, Roy, I just think you're wasting your talent. There are plenty of people out there, if you believe in a libertarian party, that can do that kind of work. Your real talent is in theory and history, and that's what you should do. What did it mean for him to turn political? What kind of stuff was he doing? Well, he was very active with Rothbard initially, although they had a falling out and a personal break over issues involved in the libertarian party. He was very active. He talked a lot about running to run, I'm sorry to laugh when I say this, but he knew Roy. He wanted to run first state senator of California, first senator of California. And he was even practicing his, now don't take this the wrong way. Stomping speech? Well, see this, I hesitate to tell these sort of eccentric stories about, because people get the wrong impression. He was a very brilliant guy. He was well connected to the world. But when he did something, he went all out. And I walked into his apartment one time, and even that early, he was watching a show like on TV on PBS or something that had Hitler's speeches. Now he didn't speak a word of German. I said, why are you watching that? He says, well, I want to get an idea. I mean, he was a son of a bitch, an evil guy, but he was an effective propagandizer to the masses. So when I speak to the masses, he's watching his arm move, and you know how much stuff Hitler did. And I actually saw him give a speech not long after that, and he went a little overboard with the arm movements. And I said, what did you think? I said, well, the speech was good, right? But I really think you should cut down on the gestures. This isn't a mass audience of tens of thousands. This is a supper club, but 45 people. Well, he did get the audience at the LP. It was in 79 when he got them to come to the theater. Oh yeah, that was a classic speech. Do we have that video on this side? I think you do. Maybe I'm just an audio recording. I don't think it was. It's a great, they were standing up and cheering. Oh, they were stopping on the floor. I wasn't there, but I heard secondary accounts. Oh, he was a great speaker. So maybe, and I'm making fun of him here, kind of in a friendly way. In a loving way, it's yes. Yeah, but I may have done him some good, but I always thought he was an excellent speaker. And he used to, I used to sit down on his Cato lectures. He gave the Cato lectures the first two called the Ethics of Liberty. Later, for various reasons, he didn't lecture for Cato anymore. I took over those two lectures for a while. And, but he was very good. He was very engaging. The problem was later in life, he was so heavy, he had trouble standing for any length of time. And it was kind of a running joke that he'd have an assistant in his lectures. And literally, she'd put like 10 glasses of water on the table and he would drink all of them during the course of his talk. But he was very quick on his feet. One of the best speakers I've ever heard, frankly. And so you were talking about getting political and the conversation with Irving Christel. Yeah, he just got so wrapped up in politics that he just didn't have the timer interest. And so what happened with Christel is that this was before, this is why I was still living in the same apartment building. He was gonna review Christel's book, I think it's called Two Cheers for Capitalism. It's a collection of his early essays. Irving Christel being the so-called Godfather of Neoconservatism. And he had talked to me independently. He had won a contest for the best essay which got him a free trip to the Mount Pellerin Society meeting. I don't know where it was held that year, maybe Belgium or someplace. So he was supposed to give a speech and Christel was gonna be at that meeting. Anyway, he had developed this grand strategy to convert Irving Christel to libertarianism. And he told me- To libertarianism or to anarchism? No, to libertarianism generally. Okay. Bit of a stretch to make a neocondren anarchist, but. So I was aware of this. And he said he was gonna review Christel's book in the book review periodical when it was still called libertarian review but before it turned into a magazine. Meanwhile, I go back to Tucson. I finished my book, I needed to rest up so I stayed with my parents for a while. So I get a copy of the review and I just thought it was, for the first time I thought Roy had written a review that wasn't completely intellectually honest because he praises the book as just full of scintillating insights and got him thinking about a lot of issues. And then he mentions the chapter on censorship and he calls it, I forget how he put it, he didn't call it weak but he said it, it had some problems or something, some watered down criticism. Well, I ordered the book immediately from Wednesday for a book's thinking, well, Jensen must be pretty good. And I was just appalled by the book. I didn't think any of the essays were particularly good. They certainly didn't get me thinking new thoughts. I thought it was just pretty much hackneyed stuff. But when I got to the chapter on censorship and Crystal says his outright, I said, unless there been a mistake, I'm calling for government censorship of not only literature but also movies across the board. Everything to make people more virtuous and better. Yeah, that's part of the eight neocon plan. You have to have virtue before you can have freedom. So coincidentally, I was getting married and I asked Roy if he'd be my best man. He said yes, so I sent him plane tickets to fly out from Hollywood to Tucson. And after the marriage, after reception, a small group of people, in fact, Michael Emerling, that's what we call him at the time, he's now known as Michael Cloud. He was active in a lot of libertarian stuff, party stuff. But he was there and there were maybe six people sitting in my living room. And we got into a discussion of Crystal and his review. And at first I was kind of polite. I said, Roy, I don't know why he wrote that review. I said, that book is junk and he doesn't, he's not just weak on the censorship Roy, he's an outright advocate of censorship. It's not that he's got some mistakes or flaws that are minor. He wants to censor everything, basically. Well, Roy challenged me on that. He said, I never said that. And now I had a copy of LR, Libertarian Review. I had a separate office that I did my work. It was on Tankerbury Road in Tucson and it was about a 15 minute drive each way. I got so angry that I drove to my office to get a copy of my review, and which quoted him directly, and drive back and then I read it to him. This was during your wedding reception? Well, it's my wedding, I know, I'm a typical Libertarian. My wife was there. I have to solve this problem before, hold on, honey. Yeah, what did your wife think of this? Well, she was kind of into herself. So I brought it back and read it, and it said what I claimed it said. And Roy kind of puffed himself up and said I was questioning his integrity. And that was difficult for me. I did go, I basically said that he had kissed Crystal's ass in the hope of converting him. He wanted to cozy up to him. Because if you read the essay he wrote for the Mount Pelerin Society, he also mentioned to a distinguished audience and including Irvin Crystal, and that Crystal had posed one of the most profound problems of the 20th century. How do we maintain a culture of freedom? And I just- Well, yeah, as opposed to being like you're not a believer in freedom, you should get out of here. That would have been a little bit weird. Maybe that's what he should have said. Anyway, Roy took it as a personal insult. And, admittedly, I was heated up because I didn't appreciate making a half-hour drive just to prove my point. To prove yourself right, but you liked it at the end of the day. Well, it did bother me. It did bother me. We didn't really talk after that. Roy and I didn't really talk after that for about two or three years. He was involved with other things. We weren't in the same city anyway, but we didn't talk on the phone. We later patched things up, and during the last three years of his life, it was slight exaggeration. I'd say we talked on the phone nearly every day for at least an hour. It was a normal part of my life then. And in some ways, it wasn't until those later years of our phone conversations that I got to know certain parts of his personality that I never really got to know before. And he knew when he called me. He usually called me, and sometimes he'd be drunk, sometimes not, but usually drunk. Roy was at a problem with alcohol. And but I never condemned him. I never judged him. He knew that I would listen to him and tell him what I honestly thought. And we became very, very close. I also saw him, the last times I saw him when he was lecturing at the Cato Conference in Dartmouth. I remember we'd spent a lot of time together. I'd watch him with students. And he was in such bad health then that the distance from the dorm rooms where we stayed with the students to the cafeteria couldn't have been more than a five-minute walk, maybe seven minutes. I usually walked with Roy over there. And he always had to sit down and take a rest two, maybe three times in what would be a five-minute walk. At that point, he was over 400 pounds and could barely walk at all. So it was sad, very sad. I'm curious about the book reviews because it is, I mean, he wrote a lot of them. He's well known for the book reviews that he wrote for La Saif Air Books. I should note, a couple of years ago, Trevor and I got tasked with it. The Roy's Library was given to the Cato Institute. We were tasked with going through those boxes of books and organizing them and putting them in the new library on the second floor here at Cato. Interesting way of kind of getting to know someone. Yeah, it's, yes, it's... Yeah, be very personal. Yes, it's extremely personal to go through someone's library. And it was an astonishing collection of books. And he had very good taste. Right. But so you meant that when he turned towards politics, he stopped doing the theoretical writings that you wish he had done. But did any of that theoretical work emerge in that body of book reviews? Was he kind of doing theoretical thinking behind the scenes by way of reviewing books? In fact, I'd say there's a good deal of theoretical work. And that's where I should make an exception to my general statement. He did include a lot of very interesting theoretical comments. But if you look at his major essays, both history and theory, most of them are written in the late 70s, late 60s, early 70s. He did write, I think around 75, an extensive critique of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. That was published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. And he was writing what was supposed to be an extensive critique of anarchism and explaining his own conversion to minarchism. But after he died, that was never published for various reasons. I don't think, but he never completed it. Joan Kennedy Taylor went through his papers, I think are now at Stanford, unpublished papers, and did find a fragment which you guys reprinted in that collection of Roy's articles. I think it was called, gosh, I can't remember the title he gave to it. But that was where he explained that he had changed his mind about anarchism and had converted to limited government and he was going to explain why. That seems like the big mystery, especially for a guy who converted so many people to anarchism. Yeah, I discussed it extensively with him or asked him extensively about it during those last three years. He seemed to have given different explanations to different people, which is not all that unusual, but the explanation that I got from him, I said, Roy, that would be a very significant article and you can't you figure out some way to write it and get it published. He said, well, Bill Bradford at Liberty Magazine, at that point it was a print magazine. I think it exists anymore, I think it's all online. I'm not sure it exists anymore. Wants to publish it, but I told him I wanted $500 and he said his quote, policy was not to pay for articles, which is kind of ridiculous because the policy was what he was the owner and publisher. I mean, that's what he said it was. Now, I didn't know, Bill, I of course, I published some things in Liberty myself but didn't know him, but I thought that's really too bad that he didn't fork up to 500, he could afford it. And that article had it been published, it would have been very, very significant. But he never did write the thing. And if I'd had the 500 at the time that I could spare, I would have paid him the 500 because it would have been important. But the impression I got, and I think I explained this in one of those L.O.R. posts, I kept asking him, okay, Roy, just give me the essentials of the argument. I don't need to, but I'm curious how you get around your own argument about the monopoly problem. And I badgered him quite a bit. Come on, Roy, tell me. Come on, you know, da, da, da. And as I explained in one of those articles, finally, and it was not long before he died, he opened up a little bit. He said, I said, so what's the basic point you're making? And he said to me, and this is an exact quote, he says, well, anarchism isn't practical. Now, knowing Roy, there was a lot more thought behind that. And I should have realized that and said, okay, I don't understand what do you mean and try to draw him out more. But I was in a belligerent mood. I'd gotten annoyed because I had so much time to get him. And I was used to the old Roy who would argue with you until you drove you into the ground. And I said, that's it, Roy. That's your great secret refutation. I call it a secret refutation because it was secret if you didn't tell anybody. That's your secret refutation of anarchism. It isn't practical. Then there was this long pause and he said, you're mocking me. And I said, okay, Roy, yeah, I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry, but anyway, go ahead. And he said, no, I don't wanna talk about this anymore. So that's all he ever told me. I made the big mistake of shutting him down. Cause I think he knew that the people he had converted like myself or Randy and others would be very interested in the argument, but they'd also hold him to pretty high standards. Cause he was tough on Minarchus. I mean, he didn't hesitate to drive Minarchus into the ground with arguments when he was on the anarchist side. So I figured he'd expect that himself. And my honest opinion is that he wasn't really happy with his own ideas about it. I don't think he really came across any earth-shattering news beyond the usual thing, which even I admit, anarchism isn't practical in terms of current politics. But I think that was probably another influence on him, on his interest in politics, meaning by that, if libertarians are gonna get anywhere in the political world, they gotta drop all the talking about anarchism, cause people are just immediately gonna turn off. That's genuitary, yes. And it is true. I agree that it's true, which is why I've always said that anarchists shouldn't get involved in political movements. First of all, you're not gonna be taken seriously. And I understand that. It doesn't mean you give up the ideal. It doesn't mean that the ideal is flawed. But to be practical, if some politicians out there running on, I'm an anarchist vote for me, well, aside from the kind of strange self-contradiction that I'm against political power, so give me political power so I can abolish political power, there's some problems there. But aside from that, we all knew that anarchism, it was something, it was sort of one of those in-house debates, you know, where we talk among ourselves. And I think theoretically it's very significant because it focuses on certain issues about the nature of sovereignty. And it also focuses the problem of certain practical effects of government. Its monopoly status does account for a lot of, broadly speaking, for a lot of the inefficiencies in such a government. But to actually go out, and I think, and advocate anarchism in a political movement is just suicide. You just stab yourself with a knife before you go to the podium and just be done with it because that's what's, you're committing political suicide. Then at least you'll own that knife. Yeah, maybe you'll own that knife. So I know the answer to this question, but I assume you miss Roy a lot. Me? Oh yeah. I know, I do. I used to talk to Barbara Brandon a lot since I moved to Bloomington 15 years ago. We spoke on the phone a lot. And she said that she sometimes thought about Roy almost every day. And if not every day, even after all these years, I often think about him. He's just one of those guys or people that just leaves an indelible impression on you. And as I said, life was never boring when you're around Roy. And if he was a remarkable talker, he was also a very good listener. I rarely run across someone who listened as efficiently or intensely as Roy did. If you had a personal problem, if you were a friend of his, he would listen very seriously and give you his best advice. And sometimes the advice was good, sometimes not so good. But I took his advice so seriously in the story I've related before. And we spoke very frankly. He would give me kind of guru advice about my career. And at one point he said to me, I don't remember the occasion, but it was while we were in his apartment on Selma. He said, George, you're great in theory, but you're tabula rasa in history. In other words, you don't know anything about history and you need to learn history. I took it so seriously that within days I had resolved that once I finished my book, I wasn't gonna read anything except history for five years. That turned into 10 years, at least a decade, maybe more. So that gives you an indication. When Roy gave me serious advice like that, not just joking around, but serious advice, I took him very seriously because he was very well rounded, much more rounded than I was. He had a good grasp of history, certain areas of it. And if you read that, I know that L.org has posted this, big business in the rise of American statism. That was published in early 70s, I think 71 by Reason Magazine in several parts. It was first given as a lecture in 1969, as I recall. That shows you, even at the time, that very young age when he was writing open letter to Ein Rand, his view of history was very sophisticated. I recently read the first part of that, where Roy gives a philosophy of history. Frankly, it holds up remarkably well even today. There's nothing in it I disagree with, it actually goes into a sort of prologue about the meaning that history can have. He criticizes a Marxian view of history, tells, explains from a libertarian point of view it's so important. It's a wonderful little piece on the philosophy of history in a very early piece. And he was probably, what, around 1920 when he wrote that. It's really quite remarkable. Yeah, definitely, definitely a remarkable guy. Do you have any, in terms of the most important essays that you think people should read by him? Which ones? Yeah, well I think his best overall theoretical piece was Anarchism and Justice, which I think, one part of that was never published. There's some controversy about whether he ever wrote it. I don't think he did, but I think it was published in four parts. It's more like a monograph. And I think theoretically it's a more significant than his open letter to Ein Rand. It's written in a calmer, more major tone. And basically what he did was went through the traditional arguments for government. I think he may have voted one to Rand, but I'm not sure. But, and discussed the traditional arguments for the necessity of government. And I do remember one of his later parts. I remember this because he was working on it when we were living in the same building. He was discussing Mortimer J. Adler, the Aristotelian philosopher, in a book called The Common Sense of Politics. He reviewed it for libertarian review. And he told me that he thought Adler's case for government was the best he had seen. And that at points he almost converted him. But ultimately he didn't. But I read the book a long time ago and I thought it was a good book. But I would recommend The Anarchism and Justice. The open letter to Ein Rand is almost necessary reading just because of historical importance. The other thing that's very good and is probably the most sophisticated thing he wrote about the anarchist controversy was the critique of Bob Nozick. It's called The Invisible Handstrikes Back. And it was published in Journal of Libertarian Studies. I don't recall the year. I think it was 1975. It couldn't be found online. And that's a very interesting and at times humorous discussion of Nozick's argument for a minimal state, as he called it. And beyond that, you know, it's hard to think what I wouldn't recommend. I mean, the big business in the rise of American stateism is very important. However, I think that he took Gabriel Cocoa too much at his word. I later did some research on Cocoa and I thought he fudged quite a bit. I think Cocoa's, maybe you're listening, I'm sorry, I may not even know Cocoa's. Gabriel Cocoa was a Marxist historian who went against traditional Marxist history, claiming that the progressive era, going from, say, 1880 through the early 1900s, was not a time of increasing monopolies. That the attempts of these large companies in oil and the Rockefeller Group and all these people and other industries to form these pools fell apart. And in fact, there was increasing competition during that period. And that's what so bothered the really big giants in industry. And that they are the ones who initiated not only antitrust legislation, but other government regulation as ways of keeping out the smaller competitors. Today we call that crony capitalism. And Cocoa gave very extensive statistics to show this. The number of companies that increased in railroads was another one. And much of the railroad legislation was not only backed but proposed by the major railway companies as a means of establishing the status quo, keeping prices up, because these competitors are coming in and charging for our land. This was a source for Roy's statism, but you think he took it at his face? Well, no, Cocoa. The Cocoa was a source for Roy on his big business in the United States. Yeah, that book basically is a summary of Cocoa's work. And he talks about the significance of Gabriel Cocoa, how he's a Marxist and he thinks he's proving a Marxist case, but he's really not. He's actually supporting the libertarian case for a free market. But it sounds like there's not much that you wouldn't recommend for Roy in general, though. Yeah, I guess I gave a list of almost all those writings. It depends on what your interests are. If I were to recommend only one thing by Roy, it would probably be the Anarchism and Justice articles. But yeah, there's merit in virtually everything Roy published. And he had a lot of unpublished material. I assume these are with his unpublished papers at Stanford. I kind of hope they are, but they were kind of off-topic from a libertarian point of view. He, aside from his book reviews, I don't think Roy ever wrote a short article. He, one of the first things he gave me when I met him in California was a 20-page, single-page manuscript called In Defense of Rational Bisexualism. Later, when Roy decided he was gay, not bisexual, he wrote a long criticism of Nathaniel Brandon's views on homosexuality, which at that time, Brandon held fairly conventional views in psychiatrists at the time. And I remember sitting in on at least one argument he had with Brandon about this. So whenever Roy had a strong belief about something, he'd sit down and write not a couple pages. He'd write 20, 30 pages, going extensively into these arguments. And I just thought that was a fascinating aspect of his personality. This is pretty obvious that Roy had a profound impact on you. What's his impact, Ben, on the libertarian movement itself, his continuing influence? Well, that's a difficult question to answer because more and more I've found the younger libertarians barely know the name. He's one of those guys who was very important at the time, influenced a lot of people, but his writings were fairly few, his published writings never wrote a book. So his influence has been mainly through what I would call second generation or third generation libertarians. In other words, without Roy, I don't think the anarchism-minarchism debate would be nearly as live as it remains. So he established a lot of themes, you might say. But those themes weren't so much or carried on not so much because people directly read his writings unless the collection that Eldon Orr did of his writings has become a bestseller, which I probably not the case. People learn about Roy's ideas through the medium of the people that he influenced. He was a teacher in the best sense. John Stuart Mill once said of Jeremy Bentham that he was a teacher of teachers. I think that applies to Roy. He had a lot of influence, I mentioned Randy Barnett, there are other names, who have then sort of carried on his tradition. So even though his name isn't super famous, he's not a name like Rothbard or Rand, but his ideas are very important in terms of being transmitted by people that he directly influenced. Pre-Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.