Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto Page 3

  So normal Americans were too busy, and the barriers of entry into our participatory republic were too high for us to know. But the insiders, and the well-heeled interests that wanted a special deal, or a subsidy, or a carve-out, or an earmark, or an exemption, always showed up in Washington, hat in hand. Why? Because the return on the investment made cozying up to Washington a very profitable “business” proposition. Public choice economists refer to this perverse incentive structure as the “concentrated benefits” of D.C. power players versus “dispersed costs” incurred by anyone paying taxes.

  In other words, you get screwed. This isn’t a Republican versus Democrat thing. It’s more about who manages to get a seat at the table first. Typically, you won’t find your chair available when things really matter.

  This process, more than anything else, explains all of the bailouts and debt and seemingly mindless expansion of government into our personal and economic lives.

  The answer, today, is to fight the power. Government goes to those who show up. The old dismal calculus of big government is being undermined by the Internet, the decentralization of knowledge, the breakup of the old media cartel, social media that lets us easily connect with other concerned and newly activated citizen shareholders. The democratization of politics is shifting power away from insiders, back to the shareholders.

  But you still have to step up and take personal responsibility. No one’s going to do it for you. You can’t proxy-vote your shares in America’s future to some third party. If you don’t like the direction your country is taking, if you don’t like the dominance of D.C. insiders, senators-for-life, and super-lobbyists who get special access to the West Wing, it’s time to take a look in the mirror.

  The burden of individual responsibility means that sometimes there’s no one else to blame but yourself.

  Before you convince yourself that it’s impossible to change things, think about Samuel Adams, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Lech Walesa or any other lonely activist that has done the undoable through peaceful resistance to government power.

  Before you tell yourself, after years of fighting, that it’s just too hard, think about the price Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. paid for his willingness to step up.

  This burden, the weight of liberty, is what has driven a small minority, those special few freedom fighters over history, to buck the status quo, often at extraordinary personal costs. Those who step up, in an act of lonely entrepreneurship, and fix “unfixable” problems even as the anointed experts “laugh at them.” Would you be willing to risk your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor for the principle that individuals should be left free, provided that they don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff?

  CHAPTER 2

  YOU CAN’T HAVE FREEDOM FOR FREE

  IN 1977, I BOUGHT my first Rush album. I was thirteen. The title of the disc was 2112, and the foldout jacket had a very cool and ominous red star on the cover. As soon as I got it home from the store, I carefully placed that vinyl record onto the felt-padded turntable of my parents’ old Motorola console stereo. The moment I dropped the stylus, and that needle caught the groove, I became obsessed with Rush. I got obsessed with Rush like only thirteen-year-old boys can get obsessed. I turned up the volume as loud as I thought I could get away with, and I rocked.

  Mom was not nearly as pleased as I was with my new discovery. I know it sounds cliché, but she was surely the most patient woman in the world. Barbara Kibbe’s youngest son was what the best peer-reviewed academic journals on parenting refer to as “a handful.”

  My highly anticipated jam session didn’t last very long that day. Mom shut it down.

  So I turned down the stereo, sat down, and began to read the liner notes inside the album’s cover jacket. One of the things lost in today’s era of digital downloads is the ritual of reading the lyrics and the commentary that used to be an essential part of what you were buying when you purchased new music. The notes gave context and understanding to the music and helped you connect with the musicians who created the songs you listened to.

  “With acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand,” read the text inside the cover of 2112. What an odd name, I thought. Who is Ayn Rand?

  “2112” is a song cycle that tells the story of a futuristic, tyrannical society where individual choice and initiative have been replaced by the top-down control of an autocratic regime, where all decisions are guided by “the benevolent wisdom” of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx. The Priests boast that they’ve “taken care of everything” using the awesome power of their “great computers” to bestow equality on all mankind. They lord over a “nice, contented world.”

  In the plot of this dystopian tale, one of the “common sons” approaches his controllers with a new discovery: a guitar, an instrument that could change things for the better by providing inspiration and music. Could this “strange device” be a vehicle for individual expression? He naïvely thinks that his controllers will care, will be open to new beauty, new innovation, and more creative freedom. “There’s something here that’s as strong as life,” he tells them. “I know that it will reach you.” Instead of hearing him out, the Priests crush his newly found instrument under their feet, crushing his spirit in the process. “Forget about your silly whim,” the troublemaker is told. “It doesn’t fit the plan!”

  In the 1970s it was virtually impossible to find out about new music and different genres that didn’t fit the one-size-fits-all mold of commercial pop. Everything on the radio was Top 40, predetermined to be what you wanted to hear by some nameless, gray-suited music executive. Everything was very top-down, and choices and information typically flowed just one way, leaving alternatives undiscovered, unheard by consumers, crushed by the silence of ignorance. You just didn’t know what you didn’t know. So the experts chose for you, and in 1977 they had selected, for me, really awesome songs like Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything,” Barbra Streisand’s “A Star Is Born,” and Captain & Tennille’s “Muskrat Love.” The insipid disco version of the Star Wars cantina bar song, by Meco, sat on the top of the Billboard charts for two weeks, subjecting me and otherwise discerning people to its cruel torture on an endless rotation.

  Until I found Rush, that is. I actually discovered the band as I was walking past the recreation center at my high school. Some cool kid was playing All the World’s a Stage, a live album by Rush released soon after 2112. Of course, the record store didn’t have that album when I finally convinced my mom to drive me there, so I settled for the one with the cool, ominous red star, the only Rush album in stock. There were very few choices in the days of bricks and mortar—no “long tail” of the Internet that gave people the freedom to buy the music they wanted, when they wanted—and vital shelf space that should have held my much-wanted record instead offered up Andy Gibb, Barbra Streisand, and Captain & Tennille. I don’t honestly remember, but I have little doubt that there were stacks and stacks of Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk by Meco.

  All the World’s a Stage by Rush? It didn’t fit the plan.

  It was as if these faceless record executives entrenched in the Music Industrial Complex were goading me to revolution. Why did music have to suck so bad? Why did everything have to sound the same?

  As it turns out, I was hardly alone in feeling this way. In the mid-1970s, several years before I would discover 2112, the members of Rush were battling their own record label for control of their artistic direction. What kind of music would the band make? Would anyone buy it? The band wanted to pursue its own creative path, even if it didn’t fit with someone else’s conception of “good” music. Mercury Records wanted something more “commercial.” They wanted Rush to sell more records, or else. “There was a great deal of pressure on the band at that time,” says Alex Lifeson, the band’s guitarist.

  If you follow any genre of music, how it evolves and mutates, you have already heard this story a thousand times. It is the clash between tradition and innovation, and the creative d
estruction that drives individuals to challenge the status quo. Record-label executives always get squirrelly when some difficult-to-manage artist creates new music that deviates from the norm. Even Miles Davis, the great jazz trumpet innovator of the 1950s, eventually would disavow the new creative directions his most important collaborator, saxophonist John Coltrane, took jazz in the 1960s. Perhaps challenged by his protégé, Davis himself redefined the genre again in the late 1960s, after Coltrane had passed at a tragically young age. Jazz critics would later attack Davis for his groundbreaking masterpiece Bitches Brew, released in 1970, as “commercial crap that was beginning to choke and bastardize” jazz standards.1

  The inherent discomfort the established conventional wisdom has with musical innovation is captured perfectly, and hysterically, in the 1984 movie Amadeus, when Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II tells a young Mozart that the “Non più andrai” march from his 1786 opera The Marriage of Figaro has “too many notes.”

  “Cut a few,” Joseph advises, “and it will be perfect.”

  Incredulous, Mozart asks: “Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?”

  Too far. Too individualistic. Too extreme. Too many notes. You just know it’s going to happen, the labels and the name-calling, the defensiveness, when the protectors of the status quo feel threatened by change and principled disruption.

  When it comes to innovation, sometimes the customer is always right. But other times an innovator shakes up market perceptions and upsells buyers on a better product—a new idea that you didn’t even know you needed until someone else figured it out for you. This process of creative disruption—standing on the shoulders of your intellectual forefathers all the while challenging them and their best work—seems to be where the good stuff in life comes from. And it can only happen if people are free. Free to succeed. Free to fail. Free to speak their minds and disagree with the experts. Free to choose. Think about the horseless carriage, handheld computers, or the MP3 files on your iPod that replaced CDs, that replaced cassettes and eight-track tapes, and yes, that even replaced vinyl.

  This disruption seems particularly true in music. Music and freedom just seem to go together, just like the word “bacon” belongs in any sentence that includes the phrase “proper meal.” I can’t prove it, but you just know that it’s true.

  Back in 1977, such profound insights eluded me. I was still wearing black concert tees and wondering who the heck Ayn Rand was, when I stumbled upon a used copy of her novella Anthem at a neighborhood garage sale. I took it home and read it without putting it down once. What an awesome book it was, about a dystopian society where the word “I” had been erased by an oppressive, collective “We.”

  It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. . . .

  Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a burden, for there are not many men who are six feet tall. Ever have the Teachers and the Leaders pointed to us and frowned and said: “There is evil in your bones, Equality 7-2521, for your body has grown beyond the bodies of your brothers.” But we cannot change our bones nor our body.

  We were born with a curse. It has always driven us to thoughts which are forbidden. It has always given us wishes which men may not wish.

  Despite insurmountable odds, the good guys, the “cursed” ones, the ones who begin to start their sentences with the word “I,” persevere. I connected with the struggle to be free—different, independent, responsible for my own successes and failures.

  I immediately set out to find The Fountainhead, which was listed in the front pages of my dated, dog-eared paperback copy of Anthem as one of the “other novels” by Rand. No mention of Atlas Shrugged, which hadn’t even been conceived of when my now-cherished copy of Anthem went to press. Imagine how long it took me to find a copy of The Fountainhead. Back in the day, you couldn’t just log into your account on Amazon.com and find it, or the multitude of other books related to it. I looked in any bookstore, at every opportunity. It was difficult to find. But I was obsessed.

  Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for Rush, was also obsessed with Ayn Rand at the time of his band’s career-defining struggle with their record label. He started off reading The Fountainhead because “all the smart kids used to carry that around” in high school.2 Peart “introduced her writing to us,” says lead singer and bass guitarist Geddy Lee. “We all liked the book Anthem, which is the thing that kind of inspired 2112.”

  The band had toured relentlessly in support of their last album, Caress of Steel, but the record had been trashed by music critics (a trend that would go on for decades).

  Without the music industry press on Rush’s side, album sales were disappointing. For the next album, company headquarters wanted something conventional, something that would sell. “I felt this great sense of injustice that this mass was coming down on us and telling us to compromise, and compromise was the word I couldn’t deal with,” recalls Peart. “I grew up a child of the 60s and I was a strong individualist and believed in the sanctity of: ‘you should be able to do what you want to do, you know, without hurting anyone.’ ” Artistic integrity, for Peart and his bandmates, had crashed headlong into the expediency of the moment.

  Instead of following the rules, instead of recording an album that conformed to the expected, Rush made 2112. At a time when successful pop songs ran about three minutes long, a twenty-minute song cycle about totalitarian oppression on a far-away planet was hardly what that sales team at Mercury Records had in mind. “We got angry and thought, okay, if this is our last shot we are going to give it everything and we’re gonna do it our way,” recalls Peart. So Rush did it their way, giving it everything they had in them.

  After discovering Anthem and The Fountainhead, by the time I turned fifteen I had read all of Rand’s fiction and many of her nonfiction works, such as her anthology, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in which she recommends the works of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.3 I somehow found a copy of Human Action, Mises’s comprehensive treatise on economics, and began to read it. I didn’t really know what I was doing, and maybe I understood a fraction of what I was reading, but don’t ever try to tell a teenager what he can’t do. I was, after all, obsessed.

  As you might imagine, wearing black AC/DC concert tees, listening to Rush and Led Zeppelin and the Stones, and quoting Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises to anyone who would listen turned out to be the worst possible strategy for meeting girls in high school. Thanks to the stagflation of the Carter presidency and the minimum wage, I could not find a job in Grove City, Pennsylvania, when I turned sixteen. My schedule was clear! My lack of social skills, a job—and dates—provided plenty of time to read things normal kids don’t.

  I graduated from high school not knowing what I wanted to do. I wasn’t particularly interested in going to college, but at my father’s insistence I applied to a number of schools. Sumner Kibbe was obsessed—obsessiveness being an apparently hereditary trait—and I didn’t typically get away with saying “no.” I ultimately chose Grove City College for one simple reason: It was the cheapest. I was able to pay my tuition by clearing trees and washing dishes for the college (students were exempt from the minimum wage that had been such a barrier to my earlier entry into the workforce). I set out as a biology major, but I was bored with it. I was barely scraping by with my classwork. I was now reading Adam Smith and other “classical liberal” philosophers that I had discovered reading Mises, and that was far more interesting. I never imagined that I could pursue a degree (let alone a career) consistent with the ideas I was learning about outside the classroom. I just didn’t know there were others who thought like I did, had read what I was reading.

 
; It seems so ridiculous to admit today, but as an incoming freshman at Grove City College, I was utterly unaware of the fact that the head of the economics department, Dr. Hans Sennholz, was only one of a handful of economists who had earned his Ph.D. from Ludwig von Mises. Human Action was the required text for Econ 301. I walked past that department every day on my way to the science classes I was not really interested in, but I just didn’t know. Talk about a “knowledge problem.”

  I didn’t figure any of this out until a late-night argument with a friend, Peter Boettke.4 We were in the same fraternity, and we were of course debating just how limited “limited government” should be. I know what you’re thinking. Nerd. Really big nerd. Wikipedia defines a nerd as “a person, typically described as being overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired. They may spend inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical or relating to topics of fiction or fantasy, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities.” There were few girls at the ADEL house that night, but at least they were spared an intense discussion on the proper role of government in a constitutional republic. As our argument wound down, Pete suddenly stopped to ask me, “Why aren’t you an economics major?”

  I didn’t know.

  It’s remarkable how my life changed that night. I switched to economics and philosophy, and my grades immediately went from C’s and D’s to A’s and B’s. (My wife, Terry, whom I started dating around the same time, was given full credit for the miraculous turnaround in my academic performance by my parents. She was an engineer, like Pops, so she was “smart.” She never disabused them of this belief. Like I said, she’s a smart girl.)