A Semi-Monthly Newsletter

The libertarian movement is growing at a remarkable pace throughout the country. Yet the organizational forms, the means of communication, among libertarians are not only miniscule, but actually suffered a considerable blow during 1968. Last year saw the collapse of the Freedom School-Ramparts College of Palmer Lake, Colorado, with its attendant Ramparts Journal, Pine Tree Press, and Pine Tree Features. New Individualist Review, the theoretical quarterly published by graduate students at the University of Chicago, is all but defunct, and had been moribund for a long time. The need is acute for far more cohesion and inter-communication in the libertarian movement; in fact, it must become a movement and cease being merely an inchoate collection of diffuse and haphazard personal contacts.

The launching of The Libertarian, a twice-monthly newsletter, was announced at the first meeting of The Libertarian Forum, founded by Gerald Woloz and Joseph Peden in New York City for periodic dinners, lectures and discussions among libertarians. The fact that over sixty persons attended this initial dinner-meeting, some coming from as far away as Buffalo, Delaware, and South Carolina for the affair, demonstrates both the rapid growth of the movement and the widespread eagerness for increased activity and organization.

We believe that one of the greatest needs of the movement at this time is for a frequently appearing magazine that could act as a nucleus and communications center for libertarians across the country. We also believe that while many libertarians have thought long and hard about their ideal system, few of them have been able to rise above the merely sectarian exposition of the pure system to engage in a critique of the present state of affairs armed with the libertarian world-view. This kind of critique is not merely "negative", as many libertarian sectarians believe. For it is the kind of work that is indispensable if we are ever to achieve victory, if we are ever to get our ideal system off the drawing board and applied to the real world. In order to change the present system we must be able to analyze and explore it, and to see in the concrete how our libertarian view can be applied to such an analysis and to the prospects for social change.

One would think that such a need would be obvious. No movement that has been successful has ever been without organs carrying out this kind of analysis and critique. The key word here is "successful"; for a magazine like The Libertarian is desperately needed only if we wish to unite theory and action, if we wish not only to elaborate an ideal system but to see how the current system may be transformed into the ideal. In short, it is needed only if our aim is victory; those who conceive of liberty as only an intellectual parlor game, or as a method for generating investment tips, will, alas, find little here to interest them. But let us hope that The Libertarian will be able to play a part in inspiring a truly dedicated movement on behalf of liberty.

Changeovers in Administration are always a disheartening time for any thoughtful observer of the political scene. The volume of treacle and pap rises to the heavens, as the wit and wisdom and the high statesmanship of both the outgoing and incoming rascals are trumpeted across the land. But this year things are even worse than ever. First we had to suffer the apotheosis of Lyndon Baines Johnson, before last November the most universally reviled President of modern times; but after November, suddenly lovable and wise. And now Richard Nixon has had his sharp edges dissolved and his whole Person made diffuse and mellow; he too has become uniquely lovable to all. How much longer must we suffer this tripe? It is bad enough that we have to live under a despotic government; must we also have our intelligence systematically defiled? Already, Ted Lewis of the New York Daily News, a dedicated Nixonian, tells us gleefully that the new charm and grace and folksy friendliness of Dick and his aides are so pronounced that maybe this time the Presidential "honeymoon" will last the full four years.

Amidst the cloud of goo surrounding the new Administration, it has been difficult for anyone to penetrate the fog and figure out what the new President is all about. Of the thousands of top jobs at the immediate disposal of the new Administration, only 90 have been filled. We have been getting inured to both parties and both sets of rulers having the same policies; but now it looks as if the very same people continue in power, regardless of who happens to be chosen by the public. How much clearer can it be that the much vaunted free elections in the United States are a sham and a fraud, designed to lull the public into believing that their votes really count? It had long become physically impossible for any of us to cast a vote against such ageless and lifetime oligarchs as J. Edgar Hoover; now the same

During February, the state of Palestine is being launched at Cairo. For the first time in many centuries, Palestine is being proclaimed as an independent nation, free, at least in aspiration, from foreign imperial domination. The delegates are a mixed team of guerrilla fighters from Al Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations, as well as members of the Popular Liberation Front.

A highly significant preliminary meeting took place in January in Cairo, at a conference called by the Communist Party, and shepherded by delegates from the Soviet Union. The Communist line has been to force the Arabs to accept the Soviet peace plan and the UN resolution of November, 1967, which is to guarantee the borders of Israel once it surrenders its gains acquired during the Israel-Arab war of 1967: In short, to ratify all the previous aggressive gains of Israel if she withdraws from her latest conquests. Despite the fact that the conference was loaded in favor of the Communist line, the conference was swung from Communist control in favor of a militant position by the leadership and the oratory of Dr. Nabeel Shaath, 30-year-old American-educated professor, formerly teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and now head of the proposed Palestinian state residing in unoccupied Jordan.

Dr. Shaath, a Christian like most of the Palestinian delegation to the conference, declared that "We will not accept any substitute for a war of national liberation. We will not accept any settlement that denies our rights, be it the Security Council or any other proposal or political settlement." Shaath proclaimed the goal of the Palestinians to be the return of the forcibly exiled Arab refugees to their homes and properties in Palestine, and declared: "We are fighting today to create the new Palestine of tomorrow, a progressive and democratic nonsectarian Palestine in which Christian, Moslem and Jew worship, live peacefully and enjoy equal rights."

Previous to this meeting, Al Fatah affirmed its emphasis on the independence of its "armed Palestine revolution" from all governments everywhere, obviously implying the reactionary machinations of the Arab governments of the Middle East as well as of the long-standing cynical maneuvers and manipulations by the Soviet Union.

The way "private" enterprise works in our era of the neo-fascist corporate state is well shown in an article in the Wall St. Journal (Feb. 5) on the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships. The NCHP, created by President Johnson, but supposedly run along the Nixonian lines of revving up the "engine of private enterprise", wants to raise $50 million from private industry to invest in low-rent housing projects which would eventually mount up to $2 billion of capital.

Praiseworthy? But wait. In order for the corporation to get started, there must be a substantial flow of Federal funds to subsidize rentals in the new projects. The NCHP wants $150 million from the Federal government for this year and next before it sets up business as a corporation. With this huge subsidy, "private enterprise" in the form of the NCHP would be willing to build 10,000 low-rent units in the first year, and hopefully move up to 60,000 units annually.

A particularly desired form of federal subsidy would be to pay a subsidy that would keep mortgage interest costs down to a near-zero sum of l% per year. With this kind of subsidy, a whole roster of the nation's largest corporations stand eager to do their great humanitarian work. This includes Kaiser Industries Corp, whose head, Edgar Kaiser, is the president of the NCHP, Westinghouse, Metropolitan Life, Deere and Co., and Ling-Temco-Vought. Many of the biggest banks, such as Chase Manhattan, First National City, Bank of America, Mellon National, would be willing to lend the corporation money to launch its operations. Also, not surprisingly, a host of local realty firms would be happy to join in the bonanza.

The big attraction, apart from humanitarianism, is a huge, guaranteed profit, or, as the Journal puts it, "a guaranteed, Government-supported market to attract profit-motivated private industry and investors." The estimated annual rate of profit for these investors would begin at over 24% and end at 17%. Pretty good returns for "helping the poor"!

In the January 1969 issue of The Center Magazine Gerald Gottlieb, a consultant to the Center For Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, Calif., has made a proposal of great interest to libertarians. Reviewing the failure of the World Court and other international judicial bodies to preserve the peace and ensure justice to individuals, he proposes the creation by private citizens of a universal court of man "independent of nations and able to render judgment upon those who misuse sovereign power". Its jurisdiction: crimes against human rights and peace; its legitimacy: arising from the sovereign rights of the people retained by them and not granted to governments. How would such a body enforce its jurisdiction and decisions against sovereign states? By arousing world public opinion through any and all media, through appeals from professional and business associations, churches, social institutions, etc. Recalcitrant States would be faced with boycott and public degradation by an aroused world public. While Gottlieb eventually would depend upon the coercive influence of other states, this is not crucial to his argument. The recent success of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal in arousing European sentiment against American actions in Vietnam, and the propaganda success of the American Commission of Inquiry on Conditions in Ireland in 1920-22 in forcing the British government to moderate its policy in the Irish rebellion, suggests that privately-constituted international courts may serve to mitigate the criminality of sovereign states, or at least focus world attention on their grosser violations of human liberties.

Perhaps libertarian foundations and scholars could sponsor further study of this proposal — so libertarian in principle and so feasible in practice.

J. R. P.

The city of San Francisco has adopted a law giving the police the right to arrest anyone found sitting, lying, or sleeping on the sidewalk. The criminal sitter is subject to punishment of six months in jail and a $500 fine. The law, passed to the great glee of the citizens of the town, is commonly known as the "anti-hippie" law, and everyone is looking forward with enthusiasm to cracking down on hippies who are notorious users of the streets.

While we hold no particular brief for hippies, we must note one more step on the road to a totalitarian America. So now we can't sit on the street! The police are assuring everyone that the law will be used reasonably, and only against large groups of sitters who obstruct the sidewalks. But liberty requires not that despotic laws be passed and then only moderately enforced, but that the law not be passed at all.

This new incident points up a vital problem in political philosophy: who gets to own and therefore to control the streets. For so long as the urban governments are allowed to continue to own the streets, we are at any time liable to be oppressed by all sorts of regulations and controls made over those of us who use the streets — which means everyone. Thus, during the riots of the summer of 1967, all the cities decreed compulsory curfews for everyone, thus making criminals out of anyone having the effrontery to walk out of his home after, say, 10:00 P.M. How much more despotism over our daily lives is needed before we question whether we are, indeed, a free country?

The only ultimate solution to this problem is to abolish all government ownership and control of the streets, and to turn the nation's streets over to private ownership, which might assume all sorts of individual, cooperative, or corporate forms. But until that golden day, we must at least see to it that government exercise its ownership powers as little as possible. We must proclaim that the streets belong not to the government, but to the people, for the people to use as they see fit. Community no-ownership is far better than government ownership; for a little obstruction of the streets is better than frozen tyranny.

In the meanwhile, the citizens of San Francisco can count their small blessings, for their streets were saved from a graver fate. One of the eager beavers on the board of supervisors urged a law prohibiting anyone from "standing aimlessly" on the pavement. The law failed to pass, not of course because the supervisors were taken with a sudden fit of concern for the liberty of the individual who might, sometime, wish to stroll or even stand, rather than stride purposefully down the street. No, as so often in the past, vested self-interest came to the unwitting rescue of liberty. For the anti-sitting law was passed under pressure of the local merchants, and the merchants became uneasy at the thought of throngs of aimlessly strolling tourists, with money in their pockets, getting hauled off unceremoniously in the paddy wagon. Like politics, liberty sometimes makes strange bedfellows.