Amateur social scientists such as Norbert Wiener (a professional mathematician) predicted, in 1949, that we faced “a decade or more of ruin and despair” from the wholesale unemployment which would occur in the 1950’s. Cybernation and automation were going to abolish jobs at an unprecedented rate. The prediction was reaffirmed by a parade of witnesses in the mid-1950’s before a Congressional committee investigating automation.

The cataclysm of Pearl Harbor occurred twenty-five years ago, and yet the average American, bemused by official propaganda, still thinks of Pearl as an unprovoked act of Japanese aggression that took the United States and the Roosevelt Administration unawares. Yet the ‘revisionist’ insight: that the attack was sought and welcomed, and known of in advance, by the Roosevelt Administration in order to get the U. S. into World War 11, has managed, despite overwhelming odds, to make a bit of headway.

Volume 2, Number 3; Autumn 1966

Above all else, Earl L. Francis cherished freedom; and to Earl Francis freedom meant working for himself, his own man on his own property.

[This is not an endorsement of any of the members discussed below.]

In recent months, the cry of ‘black power!’ has been heard resounding in the land. As usual, both Conservatives and Liberals have reacted violently and on the wrong side, each for their different and characteristic reasons. The Conservatives, in their mindless racism, can only react in paranoid visions of nameless “Reds” and of black violence against person and property. The more sophisticated Liberals have reacted, again typically, no more nobly and with considerably more hypocrisy.

Volume 2, Number 3; Autumn 1966

Why be libertarian, anyway? By this we mean: what’s the point of the whole thing? Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation which equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and prestige. When life is short and the moment of victory far in the future, why go through all this?

Volume 2, Number 3; Autumn 1966

Education is a perennially important and controversial subject, especially in a country as child-centered as the United States. Within libertarian ranks, an unlimited diversity of viewpoint prevails, ranging from rigorous traditionalists to ultra-progressives. Among the numerous Libertarians in the Los Angeles area, a controversy is now raging between the Cardin and Montessori methods of education.

The recent activities of the Passport Office of the State Department have recently made headlines in the press. Official maneuvers to restrict the passport of Professor Staughton Lynd have been matched by FBI demands that Professor H. Stuart Hughes be officially observed on his visits abroad. No friend of liberty can fail to abhor any interference with the freedom to travel, a freedom that has been one of the most basic liberties in American constitutional development.

Volume 2, Number 2; Spring 1966