Trashing the
Founders' Dream

Our once great nation was founded on a single, overriding principle: freedom. Not the freedom of a dog to roam however far its leash extends, but the freedom of an eagle -- to fly as high and far as its wings will take it.

When the Founders cast off the leash of King George, their first concern was to protect their posterity from ever suffering such tyranny again. But they knew that we could abuse the democratic processes by which our new republic would operate, introducing a new form of tyranny: the tyranny of the majority. They warned that factions would emerge, each trying to gain special favors and advantages from government at the expense of their neighbors. They did their best to structure the new government so that minorities -- ethnic, religious, or political in nature -- would always be just as free as their more numerous neighbors. But they never imagined how cynically the factions we call Republicans and Democrats would pervert their beautiful design.

Our Forefathers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the cause of individual freedom. Democrats and Republicans have squandered that legacy in pursuit of the very majoritarian abuses the Founders feared and abhorred. Raw political power now tramples the ashes of our Constitution.

There are Americans who believe the Founders got it right. Who are willing to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the most important principle the world has known: freedom.

We call them Libertarians.

If you share the ideals of the founders, you need to discover the Libertarian Party -- the "third party" we believe America is asking for.

Have you lost your dream, too?

Maybe you don't believe we can get out of this mess. Maybe you're not sure just how much better off we'd be without the chains of government hampering our every movement.

Take heart. You just need a little help envisioning a truly libertarian world. Fortunately, that help is right at hand, thanks to an inspiring article by noted science fiction author L. Neil Smith. A somewhat shortened version of "Reclaiming Utopia" follows.

Libertarians take their own philosophy too much for granted. Their concepts of what it can accomplish are too abstract. They wrongly assume that others can see its potential as clearly as they do. And they have never found a way to communicate that potential to others.

It may be sufficient -- for Libertarians -- that America today is politically, economically, and socially repulsive. It may be sufficient -- for Libertarians -- that what they propose represents a moral imperative. It is not enough for others. Most people require a concrete realization of the future, a series of pictures that will motivate them to learn what Libertarians mean by "right" and "wrong", and inspire everyone to work toward its fulfillment.

H.G. Wells used to start with the premise "What if ... ?" What if you could travel to the Moon in a gravity-proof ball? What if you fell asleep and woke up 200 years later? What if you found a way to become invisible? Well, I have a "what if" for you: what if one Commandment, "Thou shalt not initiate force against another human being for any reason whatsoever", became the fundamental operating principle of society, soon enough for all of us to see it and benefit by it?

For the moment, we'll skip how we got from "here" to "there", although of course that is the critical question. That's not quite the cop-out it may seem: just now we're trying to envision a new civilization uncontaminated by any previous social order. In science, this is called a "controlled experiment". In creative writing, it's called "poetic license". And in any case, our Utopian vision -- what it says to us and to others, what it motivates us all to accomplish -- will be the major force itself, in getting us from "here" to "there".

Of course, the word "Utopia" is more often associated with "impossible scheme" than with "vision." Visions can come true. Impossible schemes cannot.

There are no right-wing Utopias, either, not one spellbinding adventure novel of the colorful William F. Buckleyite future. The conservative's view of heaven is the status quo, or better yet, the status quo ante, a dead, flat, black-and-white daguerreotype of a past that probably never really existed. And any status quo will do, as long as it isn't a gay, communist, drug-using status quo. If its victims are tortured in banana republic jails, that's perfectly acceptable as long as they're not Marxist jails. If a long train of abuses and usurpations are visited on liberty in this country, that's fine, as long as they're not left-wing abuses and usurpations -- and even better if they're in the name of Moral Recti- tude or National Security.

Traditionally, Utopia is the territory of the Left. Imaginative stories gave ordinary people images of what had previously only been the abstractions of pasty-faced socialist intellectuals, and this -- the work of men like H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy -- had more to do with the progress of socialism than anything Karl Marx, Friederich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, or even Geraldo Rivera ever accomplished. The dictionary, in a burst of unusual candor, defines Utopia as "the ideal State where all is ordered for the best, for mankind as a whole, and evils such as poverty and misery do not exist". Not only have we learned the hard way that this self-contradictory in practice, but it is more than sufficient reason why Utopia is a province populated, almost exclusively, by the enemies of liberty.

The word "Utopia", however, only came to be synonymous with "impossible dream" when the internal inconsistencies, the inherent cynicism, and the utter emptiness of socialism became unmistakable to whoever happened to be watching. (In some instances, its sterile, no- exit character was already visible in the pages of otherwise upbeat Victorian novels, decades before it became political reality -- a case of Utopia boring itself to death.) Socialist victories in the real world turned into disasters all by themselves, generating economic, social, and military devastation, and incidentally smashing the Utopian promises they had been built upon, along the way.

Ordinary people want Utopia. They watched the original Star Trek until the emulsion wore off the celluloid, and they helped Star Wars outgross World War II, because Jim Kirk, Mr. Spock, Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo assure them simply that there is a future, a future worth looking forward to, a future in which human beings (and other critters) will still be doing fascinating, dangerous things and having a good time.

What kind of Utopian vision should Libertarians look to? I like "freedom, immortality, and the stars". No, I didn't dig that out of the pages of The National Enquirer. I mean: individual freedom in the Libertarian sense of a society totally without coercion; immortality as a logical, scientifically foreseeable extension of that freedom into time; and the stars as an equally logical and foreseeable extension of that freedom into the universe surrounding us, as human beings reach out for what has always seemed to me to be their evolutionary Manifest Destiny.

I do have a more specific dream, a more detailed vision, and I wouldn't be surprised if my dream and vision are similar to your own. If we differ at all, it's because I've never believed it pays to be bashful about dreams and visions. We must share them with other people, so that those others will begin to help us work toward the fulfillment of those dreams and visions, themselves.

I know, many people think it's ridiculous to posit any good future when we Libertarians are so few, and civilization is so obviously on the downward slide. Isn't it smarter to be a catastrophist? Unfunded government liabilities currently seem to spell doom for Western Civilization As We Know It. Social Security alone is short by several trillion bucks, and it now looks to observers like Ross Perot like the early 21st Century will go up in a flourish of Molotov cocktails, hurled mostly by little old ladies with blue hair.

And yet, consider: in 1666, the Great London Fire wiped out one third of the total wealth of England, a cataclysmic loss amounting to $10 million. Could it be we're using the wrong scale to assess our own problems? Trillions seems like about as much money as there ever will be -- but "seems" is a very conditional word. We have in our hands the means to create a market so vast and so strong that even quadrillions will seem trivial by comparison: our Utopian vision can hasten the day when a free economy straightens out the mess left to us by our predecessors.

Read history. The future is malleable, sometimes by a single individual standing at a sensitive-enough leverage point.

In our own projections of the future, we make the same stupid mistake as the Club of Rome. And it's even stupider when we make it. We forget about us! Aren't we going to affect the future? You bet your dried Prussian War-surplus fruit preserves we are!

We already have.

The shape of the future is determined, just like the shape of the present was, by two factors, almost exclusively. The first is the virtually unlimited power of the individual human mind and of the free market system which is its most monumental achievement. The second -- frequently forgotten, but no less important -- is the inefficacy of evil.

It won't surprise anyone likely to read this to hear of the power of mind and market. The human mind may inhabit what a cynic once called "a sort of skin disease on a ball of dirt", but its grasp encompasses the entire range from subatomic particles to the geometry of the intergalactic void. The mind alone is the reason our species became dominant on this planet in a geological microsecond.

And yet, aren't we confronted every day -- even within our own movement -- by the victorious gloatings of evil? How can evil be "inefficacious" when it owns the world?

Let's answer that by considering what condition humanity, its culture, technology, and economy would be in, if the villains always won. Hasn't there been overall progress in the human situation over the past several thousand years? Would there have been a Scientific Method, an Industrial Revolution, a Declaration of Independence, and a Non-Aggression Principle if evil were all that omnipotent? In spite of the most ravenous and hyperthyroid governments, the most pointlessly murderous wars, and the most disgustingly despicable badguys in all of history, the 20th Century and the United States of America offer the highest standard of living, the longest lifespans, and the greatest amount of individual liberty that have ever been available to our species.

None of which is any testimony to governments, war, or badguys, of course, but to the human mind, and the ineptitude of its enemies. Most of us have already learned that mind and market always find a way.

The point that liberals, conservatives, and even many Libertarians always seem to miss is that this -- the highest standard of living, the longest lifespans, and the greatest amount of individual liberty that have ever been available -- isn't any reason to avoid asking what kind of future world a completely uninhibited human mind could create, economically, socially, and technologically. The three areas overlap, but we'll begin with economics.

The economic future under Libertarianism will be as different from our times as ours are from the pre-industrial era of history. No one in 1666, for example, could have imagined our relative freedom from the constant threats of death by starvation, exposure, and disease which characterized those times. Few today can visualize a future of vastly greater wealth, world peace, and no bureaucrats to pry into every moment of one's daily life. Historical blindness works both ways, of course: those born in the future will react with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement when we try explaining our times to them. The insane were once beaten, tortured, and chained, a practice that seems ludicrous and terrible to us. The IRS will seem equally barbaric to our great-grandchildren. We'll try to tell them, but they'll attribute it to senile dementia and never really believe us.

The average individual today is forced to expend about half his income paying income, property, sales, and other kinds of taxes. Under Libertarianism, with all taxation gone, not only will we have twice as much money to spend, but it will go twice as far, since those who provide the goods and services we desire won't have to pay taxes, either. In a single stroke we'll be effectively four times as rich.

There's no equally simple way to estimate the cost of regula- tion. How can you estimate the cost of lost opportunities? Some truckers say that they could ship goods for one-fifth the present price without it. Many businesses spend a third of their overhead complying with rules and filling out forms. The worst damage it does is to planning and innovation. Since you don't know what the whim of the legislature will be next year, how can you plan? And projects that require ten, twenty, or fifty years to mature? You might as well forget them.

Let's follow the example of economist William J. Laffer III, quoted in Dixy Lee Ray's Environmental Overkill, who estimates that "the total cost of regulation now exceeds the total cost of taxation", and calculate conservatively that deregulation will cut prices, once again, by half. Now our actual purchasing power, already quadrupled by "detaxification", is doubled again.

Take your current income and multiply it by eight. What kind of lifestyle do you think that will permit? What kind of house will you live in? What kind of car will you drive? Where will you go on vacation? What will you do with 35 of the 40 hours a week you used to spend working for somebody else?

And th at isn't all that will change under a system that requires separation of economy and State. Future generations won't be able to grasp, even remotely, the concept of inflation, or that the government once imprisoned people for competing with its own counterfeiting operations. They'll be accustomed to a stable diversity of competing trade commodities -- gold, uranium, cotton, wheat, cowry shells -- which will not only flatten out a lot of wildly swinging economic curves, but will give news sources something to publish besides government handouts: "Cowrie shells sold late on the market today at 8 1/4. Oats and barley at 4 1/2, Uranium at 87."

87 what?

Sheep, gold grams, kilowatts, gallons of oil -- who cares, as long as they're free market rates, determined by uncoerced bidding, buying, and exchange.

The Libertarian future, as I see it, will come to us in segments: continuation, for however long, of things as they are, counterpointed by our increasing success -- as a result of the very article you're reading, no doubt -- at convincing others of the necessity and desirability of liberty. I've said we'll skip that period, and I wish we really could.

Having sold others, we'll change what's left of what we have now into a free society: degovernmentalization of culture and the economy characterized by an eight-fold increase in individual purchasing power and an end to the importance of the State in our lives. Eight times richer, we'll be free to do whatever we wish with our new wealth. Why not a color wallscreen in every room of your mansion? Why not a brand-new Porsche every year? Why not steak and lobster every night? Why put up with a Pentium, when you can have a Sexium?

Increased spending appears in the economy as increased demand, leading, despite what government economists tell us, not to shortages, but to increased production. After all, somebody has to make all those wallscreens, Porsches, steaks, lobsters, and computers. And with all that money loose, there's new investment in established companies as well as zillions of new companies -- whole new industries -- striving to satisfy everyone's newfound consumer greed.

America didn't abandon manufacturing and convert itself to a "service economy" because it wanted to. American manufacturing was driven out of business by taxation and regulation. Under Libertarianism, however, factories will spring up overnight, old ones expand, obsolete machinery will be junked and new machinery installed. More people will be working harder (or at least more efficiently) producing all those goods and services demanded by a newly-rich population consisting of -- themselves!

Naturally, unemployment will disappear overnight. And as labor becomes scarcer, wages will skyrocket, hours will shorten, work-weeks will truncate, all to entice workers that are increasingly hard to find. Will this drive prices up again? Absolutely not, because industry won't hire at a loss, especially since they'll know that it's low prices which are driving the unprecedented boom. "Headhunters" will flourish, not only stealing managerial talent, but bribing assembly workers to desert their employers for even better wages, conditions, and benefits. Unable to figure out what happened, unions will dry up and blow away completely. Despite increased wages and benefits (leading to more buying, demand, production, and jobs), prices will continue to plummet as demand drives industry to even greater efficiencies. Plants now standing idle half the time will operate full-blast around the clock. Society will be geared to operating 25 hours a day, eight days a week.

Against a chronic labor shortage, "evil", "exploitive" capital- ists will take unfair measures -- like offering free training, free child care (which could be the wellspring of a new, entirely private educational system), and free health insurance. In short, everything that socialism ever led us to expect from government at the point of a bayonet, the market will provide voluntarily, as companies begin to compete ruthlessly for workers. Managers desperate for your talents will have to change their petty, coercive behavior. Their restraints on your freedom and their insults to your honesty and intelligence will vanish, simply because, for once, they need you, not some anonymous, numbered, plug-in module, but you.

Oh, they'll resist at first. They'll try imports and foreign labor, but it'll be their undoing, as living and working standards -- and expectations -- begin to rise abroad, as they did here. Free world trade will have another effect: increased demand, increased production, more jobs, and lower prices. Monotonous, isn't it?

They'll try more automation, but that's another trap. It always results in more -- not less -- employment. For each 19th century quill-pusher perched high at his desk, how many computer designers, engineers, manufacturers, assemblers, installers, repairmen, pro- grammers, and key-punchers are there today? For every buggy-whip maker, how many involved in automotive ignition? And automation has another side-effect: it increases production, which lowers prices.

In a free society, the availability and quality of goods and services increases constantly, while prices drop. Wages and living standards escalate continuously. What we call a "boom" is a normal and permanent condition. (Just look at the electronics industry -- which grew so fast in every direction that the regulatory process was never entirely able to catch up with it -- and imagine that kind of progress everywhere else.) With no State to bloat the currency, good times will have nothing to do with inflation. "Forced draft" advances in technology that we associate with war are a snail's pace when people are free to pursue the buck with all ten greedy little fingers. Which is why those future whippersnappers will think we're hallucinating about the bad old days of price-controls, strikes, inflation, tariffs, and the IRS.

Although it will long since simply have been abrogated, they'll want to know why we didn't just buy off that pesky National Debt with our lunch money.

Many problems are trivial, viewed with the proper perspective. The high-technology answer to our civilization's weird desire for "flat clothing" didn't turn out to be a bigger, more complicated automated ironing-board, but simply clothing that stayed flat when it was washed.

The wrong perspective can lead to disaster. In the 1890s, according to Bob LeFevre, the government decided -- Club of Rome fashion -- that mere private corporations could never bear the cost of prospecting, drilling, extracting, refining, and distributing petroleum. Therefore, oil should be a State monopoly. A kid's book I have from the 1950s opines that no single government could possibly finance a mission to the Moon and it would have to be done by the U.N. (If the Challenger disaster was a mess, think what a U.N. space program would be like!) These predictions should be kept in mind whenever we contemplate the inevitability of disaster or the impossibility of our dreams. The only prediction we can make safely about the future is that it will be more fantastic than we can safely predict.

Presently we live within a cramped, narrow, chronically de- pressed culture, largely unaware of the limitations it imposes on us, simply because we've never seen anything better. Faced with prob- lems, we understandably -- but mistakenly -- view them from the worm's-eye level to which we've always been limited by the culture we live in. Solving today's problems, however, demands a vastly wider scope. We have to learn to think big -- bigger than we've ever dreamed or dared before.

Take the routine objection that firing millions of bureaucrats will lead to economic disaster, or that civil servants are unlikely to support Libertarians if it means doing away their own jobs. Our candidates tend to keep a low profile on this subject, but they should think big. As John Hospers once pointed out, 10 million GIs were absorbed into the post-World War II economy with scarcely a ripple, despite somewhat less than laissez faire conditions. A booming free market suffers perpetual labor shortages; nobody will need to persuade bureaucrats to enter the private sector and enjoy its benefits. They'll desert in hordes. The State will shrink like the little dot when you used to turn off your TV, and vanish.

Under Libertarianism, those inclined to Future Shock are in for a rough ride. Free trade worldwide, an end to economic disincentives of all kinds, and steadily-increasing automation will spiral living standards upward dizzily. Just as uranium was once thrown aside to get at lead and tin, we have no way of knowing what untold sources of wealth, energy, and comfort we're stumbling over now. New materials, new production methods, new lifestyles, and new opportunities w ill arise by the myriad every day, if not every hour.

Already in our own time, a manufacturing counter-revolution is under way: high-quality investment-casting, laser and electron- discharge cutting, detonic welding, ion implantation, computer-aided design, and computer- controlled machining, are all decreasing the amount of plastic and cardboard in our lives, increasing the titanium, steel, and glass. At the same time, plastics seem more like steel and glass every day, while even cardboard gets stronger and longer-lasting.

Underdeveloped nations won't just emerge, they'll splash into the 21st century like the overripe melons Marx was so fond of mentioning, but in a very different way than he intended. New territories opened up by the free-market will make over-population one of the future's biggest jokes. Antarctica, Greenland, and northern Canada will all feel the plow and deliver up their wealth. The floor, the surface, the cubic volume of the sea, the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, all of the Solar System and open space itself will be subdivided. If the total human population reaches 40 billion or 400 billion, we'll have more elbow-room than we do now, and Marshall McLuhan's one-horse Global Village of the 1960s will turn into Times Squared.

During the coming Libertarian century, poverty and unemployment will become a dark, half-believed nightmare of the remote past. All our elaborate discussions of private charity in a Libertarian world will be academic where any basket-case who can twitch once for yes and twice for no will be desperately needed for quality control on a production line. They'll put chimpanzees and gorillas on the payroll and killer whales and porpoises will be buying split-level aquaria on the installment plan.

Pollution will b e another dead issue in a 21st century Libertarian America where every square inch of real estate is private property and -- without any Environmental Protection Agency to "save" them -- individuals are free to sue polluters. In any case, no competitive industry will be able to afford the waste of energy and materials that pollution represents. Not that there won't be wilderness: when they auction off the National Forests, I'll be there, bidding with all the other hunters and fishermen. To me, heaven is being able to fire a rifle in any direction from my front porch, and not hit anyone but trespassers.

As with charity, all of our theoretical concerns about police and security are a waste of breath. In the 21st century, peace will break out uncontrollably, and cops will have to be retrained for office jobs. With victimless crime laws repealed and America n cities populous and prosperous once again, 99 percent of the crime we presently endure will vanish. Our descendants won't understand how it ever became an issue. Middle-class values are market values. A wider regard for property, education, and long-range planning will mean less crime. A single mugging in Central Park will get four-inch headlines in New York's several dozen newsplastics. And in the absence of unconstitutional laws against dueling, people will be more polite to each other and less inclined to offer unwanted advice. Either that or, as Robert Heinlein predicted, thanks to natural selection, their grandchildren will have faster reflexes.

Lacking victim disarmament laws to protect them, the few criminals left in society won't live long enough to transmit their stupid-genes. The next century will give us a welcome look at the other side of a familiar paradox: people who are free to carry weapons usually don't need them. Prisons will be abandoned when those who never did anything to hurt anyone are released. The rest of the convicts will be out working to restore their victims' property or health. Crimes against persons and property, including murder, will be civil offenses, with volunteer agencies acting for those without relatives or friends to "avenge" them. Restitution may even be possible for murder, given techniques of freezing corpses for later repair. Those who commit irrevocable murder (and survive) will suffer the cruelest punishment of all: exile to a place where there's a government!

The concerns of the left with conglomerates, multinational corporations, and monopolies are as misplaced as ours with charity and crime. Be fore the 19th century government invasion of the market, companies had reached their optimum size and begun to shrink. Although the government still keeps competition off their backs today, huge companies must divide themselves into competing subsidiaries to survive. Increased competition will doom these dinosaurs, break up concentrations of wealth and power frozen by securities and tax laws, and produce companies much smaller than those of today. The survivors will be stuck with the boring old laissez faire task of pleasing as many customers as possible with the best quality goods and services available at the lowest attainable prices.

Now it's possible that you're way ahead of me at this point -- you may even have noticed that I haven't been following my own advice. All of these predictions I've been making are pretty general, pretty abstract, pretty impersonal. And so the time has come to answer the questions, "What do I really want; what's in it for me?"

Immediately, as we've seen, the free market will boost our pur- chasing-power eightfold, and this, of course, is only the beginning - - although I hesitate to risk your willing suspension of disbelief by estimating wages and prices several decades into the Libertarian era. Let's just say that we will have eight times as much disposable wealth. Even this rather modest multiplier will offer a range and choice of goods and services unimaginable today.

One's basic material well-being will be much easier to maintain when a loaf of Grandma's Automated Bread goes for a nickel and buffalo steak for twenty cents a pound. How about a pair of two- dollar shoes or wristwatches for a dime a dozen? How about suits and dresses for ten bucks, or disposable Kleenex outfits for a quarter? Come to think of it, the toughest decision consumers make may be choosing between durability versus disposability: should you drive an imposing 2087 Rolls-Rolex Fusionmobile, good for generations, or a plastic Mattel-Yugo, easily discarded when you tire of it; should you wear a Saville Row three-piece ironclad gabardine, or a toilet-paper toga? Increased leisure-time and plenty of loose cash will mean what it always has, more emphasis on expensive, hand-crafted, one-of-a- kind items. We all may wind up running second, third, or fourth businesses on the side, which means, of course, more jobs, more buying, and so on.

How about paying two to four thousand dollars for a home that's built to last until the sun burns out, aided by the slump in land prices when government holdings hit the market? The trend will be back to single private dwellings, on substantially larger lots, paid for in full out of this month's paycheck. If you can afford a home in the city and another in the mountains or at the beach, why not? One unhappy note for Howard Roark: higher living-standards will encourage an extremely unRandish human vice for embellishment. They'll bring back Baroque, Rococo, Victorian gingerbread, medieval gargoyles, and the new times will create their own elaborate forms, as well.

Aztec Modern, anyone?

For transportation, you'll choose between a five hundred dollar auto, a two thousand dollar personal aircraft, or some convertible combination. Or Laissez-Faire Airlines will fly you anywhere in the world for twenty bucks. Highways and railroads will benefit from a free market. Speed, safety, and efficiency will improve. 60-lane, 300-mile-per-hour ribbons of plastic will power your electric car by induction, provide guidance if you want to read or watch TV, dissipate rain, fog, ice and snow. Or, as I predicted in The Probability Broach, highways may evolve into contoured swaths of hardy grass for steam-powered hovercraft.

Our grandchildren will have a good laugh over the Carter "Energy Crisis" of the last decade presently being revived by Clintonite reactionaries, not simply because any real shortages, then or now, are totally political in character, but because the free market will ultimately render fossil fuels obsolete. Fusion, using water for fuel and lasers, particle beams, or palladium for sparkplugs, producing as its only by-product inert, useful, helium, will be driving our civilization the day after government gets out of the way.

On the other hand, fusion is merely the nuclear reaction that powers the stars. Quasars are billions of times more energetic and we don't know what powers them. When science and industry are free of government interference, we may find out. In any case, energy will be practically limitless and, by our standards, virtually free.

I could go on for hours discussing the technomiracles you can read about in Popular Science, Analog, or any of the novels I've written. I've elaborated on them to this extent because I believe they're only possible under free market conditions, which explains why we never really got the picture-phones and flying automobiles which science fiction promised us in the 1930s and 1940s. Read those other publications with that caveat in mind, and you'll get the idea.

Far more important are the social and psychological effects of freedom. I can't tell you what it's like to be free, having never had the chance to try it. I'd be up against the unpredictability of human action which any Austrian economist or quantum physicist delights in lecturing about. Authoritarians who still believe in a static model of "the way things ought to be" -- a model that they're willing to impose on everyone at bayonet-point -- work overtime to make society dull and boring. Among Libertarians, the one rule is that nobody may impose his views on anybody else, for any reason, which makes for an open-ended culture impossible to describe in detail. There's no single Libertarian future, but as many different futures as here are individuals to create them. For each and every Sunday-supplement guess I could make about who'll take care of the street lights or paint stripes down the middle of the road, coming generations will produce thousands of answers not even remotely similar to mine. Our Libertarian future may be weird and confusing, but it'll never be dull and boring.

So instead of listening to my guesses, try an experiment, one that'll give you a clearer picture of the future than I could draw in another hour or another hundred hours. Lean back in your chair. Relax.

Imagine now that you'll never have to worry about money again. Never again for the rest of your life. You'll never waste another golden moment of your precious time tearing your hair, biting your fingernails, or shredding the inside of your mouth over paying the bills. There's no limit to what you can afford. It's no longer a significant factor in your plans.

Now, say quietly to yourself: "All my life, I always really wanted _________ ", and fill in the blank. Finish the sentence yourself. Only you know what it is you always really wanted.

"All my life I always really wanted _________".

How many dreams have you denied yourself or never even acknowledged, because there wasn't enough money? Or because your dreams were being consumed to feed bureaucrats, build atomic bombs, launch nuclear submarines, or construct government office buildings? Libertarianism will change all that. Everything you always really wanted can be yours, if you are free.

If.
You.
Are.
Free.

The only thing that Libertarianism can't give you, the only goods it can't deliver, is power over the lives of others. And yet, through that one "failure", that single "sacrifice", we achieve everything else.

"All my life, I always really wanted".

And that, my friends, is the ultimate promise of Libertarianism, an invention so fundamental, so potent, so revolutionary, and so unstoppable, that the Scientific Method and the Industrial Revolution pale by comparison. And now you understand why I'm a fanatic, why I must make you fanatic, and why we must create an entire nation, a whole world of fanatics.

We can always mess it up, of course. We can disappoint the neophytes so excited about the future and eager to begin creating it. We can euphemize the difficult, embarrassing concepts, temporize the uncompromised positions that we must take if we want to win. We can follow the chicken-livered, quail-hearted leadership of many previous LP candidates, the cowards, cravens, cringers, and crybabies whose campaigns are indistinguishable from those of Republicans and Democrats. We can emulate the weak-kneed recreants, faint-hearted, faltering, gritless, pluckless invertebrates who counsel restraint in the face of tyranny. We can accept the advice of pusillanimous milksops, gutless, spineless, spunk-deficient slinkers and skulkers, weaklings, dastards, and poltroons too fearful to take an open approach with those who need so badly to learn from us.

Or we can stop waiting for an electoral victory to bestow itself upon us, stop depending on mass media controlled by the enemies of liberty, and instead, take big bites of the future, on their own, in sure and certain knowledge that Heinlein was right when he said, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing".

That's the only way our future's going to happen. We're going to win as soon as we recognize, as soon as we communicate, as soon as we act on one simple fact: in order to "capture the hearts and minds" of America and the world, in order to have the major part in determining what the "shape of things to come" is going to be, we must first pull off a coup d'etat in the Province of Utopia.

"All my life, I always really wanted".

It's as simple as that.

It really is.

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