Now that the New Left has abandoned its earlier loose, flexible, nonideological stance, two ideologies have been adopted as guiding theoretical positions by New Leftists—Marxism–Stalinism and anarcho-communism. Marxism–Stalinism has unfortunately conquered SDS, but anarcho-communism has attracted many leftists who are looking for a way out of the bureaucratic and statist tyranny that has marked the Stalinist road.

In his vitally important article on this issue,1 Karl Hess properly refers to the genuine libertarian movement as a “revolutionary” movement. This raises the point that very few Americans understand the true meaning of the word “revolution.”

The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points out, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed people. Aside from being a necessary condition to the achievement of justice, national liberation is the only solution to the great world problems of territorial disputes and oppressive national rule.

It should be no news by this time that intellectuals are fully as subject to the vagaries of fashion as are the hemlines of women’s skirts. Apparently, intellectuals tend to be victims of a herd mentality. Thus, when John Kenneth Galbraith published his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958, every intellectual and his brother was denouncing America as suffering from undue and excessive affluence; yet, only two or three years later, the fashion suddenly changed, and the very same intellectuals were complaining that America was rife with poverty.

The libertarian movement has been chided by William F. Buckley, Jr., for failing to use its “strategic intelligence” in facing the major problems of our time. We have, indeed, been too often prone to “pursue our busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors” (as Buckley has contemptuously written), while ignoring and failing to apply libertarian theory to the most vital problem of our time: war and peace.

We have heard a great deal in recent years of the “public sector,” and solemn discussions abound through the land on whether or not the public sector should be increased vis-à-vis the “private sector.” The very terminology is redolent of pure science, and, indeed, it emerges from the supposedly scientific, if rather grubby, world of “national income statistics.” But the concept is hardly Wertfrei, in fact, it is fraught with grave, and questionable, implications.

Among the many highly touted “liberations” of recent years, sometimes genuine and more often spurious, “kid lib” seems to be waiting in the wings. In fact, one libertarian publication claims that “kid lib” is the next wave of the future. What “kid lib” is supposed to be is now unclear; and I suspect it may amount to little more than the supposed “right” to kick every adult in the shins and to enjoy a guaranteed annual income to be provided by long-suffering parents and the longer-suffering taxpayer.

It is high time, and past due, that someone blew the whistle on “Women’s Liberation.” Like the environment, women’s lib is suddenly and raucously everywhere. It has become impossible to avoid being assaulted, day in and day out, by the noisy blather of the women’s movement. Special issues of magazines, TV news programs, and newspapers have been devoted to this new-found “Problem”; and nearly two dozen books on women’s lib are being scheduled for publication this year by major publishers.

The Failure of Utilitarianism

Until very recently, free-market economists paid little attention to the entities actually being exchanged on the very market they have advocated so strongly.

Wrapped up in the workings and advantages of freedom of trade, enterprise, investment, and the price system, economists tended to lose sight of the things being exchanged on that market.

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore Time itself, is against him, and hence the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and Communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run optimism; for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment.