Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto Page 4

  My veil of ignorance was lifted, and I was quickly exposed to a body of ideas and community of people united by the values of individual freedom and the limitless potential of people when offered a chance to strive, seek, and achieve. It seemed like there were dozens, maybe hundreds of people who were thinking about liberty, individualism, and the power of ideas, just like me. Dr. Sennholz, who by that time had developed a close mentoring relationship with Dr. Ron Paul, a newish congressman representing the 14th District of Texas, also became my intellectual mentor. He introduced me to the Foundation for Economic Education, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, and the Institute for Humane Studies and eventually the Center for the Study of Market Processes, both at George Mason University.

  I went to GMU for graduate studies in economics, again at Pete Boettke’s urging. In 1984, Citizens for a Sound Economy was founded out of the Austrian economics program at George Mason, and Dr. Paul became the founding chairman. As a graduate student at Mason, I was loading trucks at UPS to pay the tab. I took a 50 percent pay cut to join CSE in 1986, but I was thrilled. I was going to get paid to fight for freedom. How cool was that?

  I went on to other things, but came back to CSE in 1996. CSE became FreedomWorks on July 22, 2004. I became president of FreedomWorks that day.

  Back in 1976, Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist for Rush, was thinking about his future and pursuing his dreams. He penned the dystopian lyrics to “2112” thinking about his individual freedom. “I did not think of politics and I did not think of global oppression,” he recalls. No, he was thinking: “These people are messing with me!” He and the rest of the band found their inspiration in Anthem, the same novella that had turned me on.

  “You can say what you want about Ayn Rand and all the other implications of her work, but her artistic manifesto, for lack of a better term, was the one that struck home with us,” says Geddy Lee. “It’s about creative freedom. It’s about believing in yourself.”

  Fans agreed. Despite its not-ready-for-pop-radio format, 2112 reached number 61 on the Billboard pop album charts, the first time the band had cracked the Top 100. Which is the only reason I was able to find a copy in the record stacks among the multitudinous pressings of “Muskrat Love.”

  Creative freedom aside, the brief note inside the sleeve of 2112, the one hat-tipping Ayn Rand, set the world of music experts—the critics—afire with ideological rage. H. L. Mencken once described a historian as “an unsuccessful novelist,”5 referring to the propensity of some historians to make it up as they go along. Similarly, you might characterize music journalists as frustrated musicians that shower their bitterness on youth. That was certainly the case with Barry Miles, a music critic writing for England’s New Music Express, who had a philosophical ax to grind in his trashing of Rush that had nothing to do with the quality of the music they made.

  It was right out of a scene in The Fountainhead, where self-styled architectural critic and committed hater of intellectual achievement Ellsworth Toohey decides to destroy the young architect Howard Roark with words. On page 7 of the March 4, 1978, issue of NME, the headline read “Is Everyone Feeling All RIGHT (Geddit?)” As someone who reads the music press, this ranks as one of the most hateful hit pieces on a band I have ever seen. The problem, it seems, was the source of the band’s ideas. Neil Peart is quoted, arguing that his band is “certainly devoted to individualism as the only concept that allows men to be happy, without somebody taking from somebody else.”6 The article gave short shrift to Rush’s music. No, this was a hit piece and a clumsy vehicle for a hack journalist to express uninformed disdain for Neil Peart’s developing libertarian ideology:

  So now I understood the freedom they are talking about. Freedom for employers and those with money to do what they like and freedom for the workers to quit (and starve) or not. Work makes free. Didn’t I remember that idea from somewhere? “Work Makes Free.” Oh yes, it was written over the main gateway to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

  “You have to have principles that firmly apply to every situation,” the story quotes Peart again as saying. “I think a country has to be run that way. That you have a guiding set of principles that are absolutely immutable—can never be changed by anything. That’s the only way.”

  “Shades of the 1,000 Year Reich?” observes a very bitter Miles, darkly.

  “This journalist,” recalls guitarist Alex Lifeson, “wrote it up like we were Nazis, ultra-right-wing maniacs.”

  Really? Auschwitz? Shades of the Third Reich? Nobody likes being called a Nazi—except, I suppose, Nazis. For the rest of us, it is a conversation stopper, one of the deepest insults one can hurl, like “racist.” A “Nazi” is more than a “national socialist” or even a “fascist.” No, a “Nazi” is a cold-blooded mass murderer.

  Of course, “individualism” as described by Ayn Rand or Neil Peart or anyone else for that matter is the very antithesis of national socialism or any ideology that enables a government act of mass murder. I think the accusers who smear others with Nazism know that, and the real purpose is to stigmatize their philosophical enemies. Saul Alinsky, the radical community organizer from Chicago, said it best in Rules for Radicals.

  Rule number 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

  Rule number 13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

  Well, the New Musical Express certainly personalized it: Both of Geddy Lee’s parents had been teenage prisoners held at Auschwitz. “I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee told a reporter for JWeekly in 2004. “She didn’t believe [liberation] was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”7 The article goes on:

  In fact, when Manya Rubenstein looked out the window of a camp building she was working in on April 15, 1945, and saw guards with both arms raised, she thought they were doing a double salute just to be arrogant. She did not realize British forces had overrun the camp. She and her fellow prisoners, says Lee, “were so malnourished, their brains were not functioning, and they couldn’t conceive they’d be liberated.”

  It is easy to see why Manya Rubenstein had given up on civilization. She and future husband Morris were still in their teens—and strangers to one another—when they were interned in a labor camp in their hometown of Staracohwice (also known as Starchvitzcha), Poland, in 1941. Prisoners there were forced to work in a lumber mill, stone quarry, and uniform and ammunition manufacturing plants.

  From Staracohwice, about an hour south of Warsaw, Manya and Morris, along with many members of both their families, were sent to Auschwitz. Eventually Morris was shipped to Dachau in southern Germany, and Manya to Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany. Thirty-five thousand people died in Bergen-Belsen from starvation, disease, brutality and overwork, according to information from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Another 10,000 people, too ill and weak to save, died during the first month after liberation.

  His parents’ heroic struggle against Nazi genocide really defined Geddy Lee’s upbringing in Toronto, and their experiences were discussed openly. “These were the things that happened to them during the most formative time in their lives,” he says. “Some people go to horseback riding camp; my parents went to concentration camp.”

  Can you imagine his reaction to Barry Miles’s ad hominem “Nazi” smears against the band in 1978? “Just so offensive,” says Lee, in his typical, understated way.

  Ayn Rand, like Geddy Lee, had firsthand knowledge of just how deep such smears can cut. Born Alissa Rosenbaum, Rand was growing up in St. Petersburg, Russia, when the communists took power in 1917. Her Jewish family “endured years of suffering and danger” after her father’s small business was confiscated. She wanted to be a writer, but saw no hope for that under a new government regime where the freedom to express opinions, to question authority, to think for yourself, was prohibited. With the help of her family, she fled communist Russia for
the United States, arriving when she was twenty-one years old.

  “To free her writing from all traceable associations with her former life,” observes Stephen Cox, “she invented for herself the name Ayn Rand and set out, like the hero of [Anthem], to make a new life for herself, in freedom.”8

  The critics never really warmed up to Rand’s work, just like they never really warmed up to Rush’s music. More than their art, I suspect it was their combative individualism that really irked the critics. As Gore Vidal noted in his contemptuous review of Atlas Shrugged, the book was “nearly perfect in its immorality.” For Rand—as for Rush—there was a price to be paid for pursuing her chosen path in life. Challenging the status quo, and the freedom to do so, all came at a price. Freedom, for them, was not free. There was a downside, and it might have been easier to give in and comply with the expectations of others.

  But the upside to freedom is so much better. Fans, customers hungry for something else, found Rush just like they found Rand.

  The critics may have resented their work, but fans, customers hungry for something else, found them. It is said that Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s magnum opus, is the second-most influential book in history, a distant second to the Bible.9 According to the Recording Industry Association of America, 2112 has sold more than 3 million copies since it was released, a triple-platinum record. Overall, Rush has sold some 40 million records, and the band ranks third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for the most consecutive gold or platinum studio albums by a rock-and-roll band.

  And it all started with 2112. It started with a willingness to stand on principle when the easier path was compromise. It started, incidentally, “with an acknowledgement to the genius of Ayn Rand.” The band took off, fueled by music fans looking for something different, something inspired by disruptive innovation and creative freedom.

  My personal tastes in music, like the books I was reading, eventually branched out to many different genres. I got into the Grateful Dead. If you don’t get the Dead, you likely never saw the band live. There was a profound sense of community between the players onstage and their audience. Jerry Garcia, the iconic lead guitarist for the Dead, often spoke of his musical influences, including jazz, bluegrass, and blues. As a player, Garcia was very immersed in American musical traditions, and his opinions led me to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and even bluegrass.

  I particularly liked the spontaneous nature of the Dead’s jams and the way Coltrane’s quartet would explore the outer bounds of jazz structure. There were very few rules to guide, but plenty of room for individuality and exploration. The resulting interplay between musicians, sometimes leading, sometimes following, was a perfect metaphor for the peaceful cooperation of individuals working together towards a common goal greater than the sum of its parts. The music seemed analogous to the free association between individuals in a civil society, the interplay between institutional rules and creative disruption that Hayek and his protégés would dub the “spontaneous order.” My musical interests, in a sense, tracked my expanded understanding of the ideas of freedom.

  I really didn’t revisit my early obsession with Rush until 2010, when an insurgent Senate candidate named Rand Paul began playing the band’s “Spirit of Radio” at campaign events. He’s a big fan, it turns out.

  “I grew up in a libertarian family,” the now well-known senator from Kentucky told me when I had a chance to sit down with him in 2013. “Ayn Rand was on a lot of different bookshelves. I read Ayn Rand when I was seventeen. I was probably a Rush fan before that, but I already knew of Ayn Rand. So to me the serendipity was that I actually liked this band that knew about Ayn Rand. I remember reading the lyrics to 2112 and then reading Anthem and saying this is basically Anthem in music.”

  As it turns out, the lawyer for Rush’s record label is not, apparently, a big fan of Rand Paul. Robert Farmer, general counsel for the Anthem Entertainment Group Inc. in Toronto, issued the following statement in response to the candidate’s musical choices at events: “The public performance of Rush’s music is not licensed for political purposes: any public venue which allows such use is in breach of its public performance license and also liable for copyright infringement.”

  The warning was issued after a reporter from The Atlantic pressed the issue.10

  Okay, so maybe the band just doesn’t like politics. Maybe they respect their fans enough not to choose sides. Maybe, as their song “Tom Sawyer” goes, “His mind is not for rent, to any god or government.”

  Or maybe it really sucks being called a Nazi. Maybe the hate cuts deep when it’s so personal, so unfair, so offensive. Maybe they just want to do their work.

  Ever since that ridiculous, slanderous, and, yes, hurtful article was published—just as their hard work as musicians was starting to pay off—it seems that the band members have had to answer the same question, over and over: “Are you guys really ultra-right-wing lunatics?”

  In 2012, Neil Peart was giving a rare interview to Rolling Stone to talk about the band’s new album, Clockwork Angels. He’s not a talker, and typically “doesn’t like all of the hoopla.” But he really wanted to talk about his latest work. Of course, the question came up again. Do you really like Ayn Rand?

  He says:

  For me, it was an affirmation that it’s all right to totally believe in something and live for it and not compromise. It was as simple as that. . . . Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into . . . a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.11

  That’ll do. I’m a bleeding heart libertarian, OK? You can almost hear the resignation in his voice. Can we talk about my work now?

  I found some personal inspiration in seeing Rush play live in 2013 in Austin, Texas. I hadn’t seen the guys for quite some time. Work and life got in the way. They still have incredible passion and talent, and their audience is still one of the most connected as a community, with the band, in all of live rock music.

  I started thinking about them again in the midst of particularly challenging times for me and my extended family at FreedomWorks. The critics were calling us names. They were trying to smear us. We were “too uncompromising.” We were too “pure.” And that was coming from our supposed friends. We were willing to hold both Democrats and Republicans to the same standard instead of just picking sides that were artificial. We helped hold a number of politicians accountable to their shareholders, the voters. We were in the process of repopulating Washington, D.C., with more principled representation, young leaders more accountable to the principles of liberty.

  Somewhere along the way, we apparently pissed off somebody really important. To this day, I’m not sure who exactly tried to take us out. But it was a hard time, and some of the personal attacks cut deep.

  You see, I work in a town, Washington, D.C., that values compromise over principle. The streets that crisscross the nation’s capital are lined with buildings filled with people who make a lot of money getting special favors from the political process. A typical meeting with an elected official begins with a question: “What can I do for you?” In reality, the question really being asked is “What can you do for me?” Compromise is the currency, because that’s how everyone gets paid. Everyone wants something from someone. Everyone is looking for your “tell,” the Achilles’ heel that makes you wobbly enough, wanting the money and the power and the influence. Wanting to cut a deal. To compromise.

  I remember debating Chris Matthews, the guy on MSNBC’s Hardball, once at an event in Aspen. I was making a (surely profound) point, and Matthews abruptly interrupted. He does that. “I know, I know,” he said. “I read Ayn Rand in high school. I used to believe that stuff, too, but then I grew up.” Maybe he didn’t know he was parroting his favorite president, Barack Obama.

  I’ve heard
this so many times. I’m sure you have, too. I suppose Neil Peart heard it more than most when he was trying to live down the youthful enthusiasm for liberty he shared with a dishonest critic in 1978. Grow up. Play ball. Get in line.

  Well, I don’t want to “grow up.” I don’t want to if growing up means abandoning the principle that individuals matter, that you shouldn’t hurt people or take their stuff. I don’t want to give up on values that have gotten me down the road of life this far. I won’t “grow up,” if that means not seeking ideals, taking chances, and taking responsibility for my own failures. I don’t want to compromise, at least not on the things that really matter. I don’t want to split the difference on someone else’s bad idea, and then pat myself on the back for “getting something done.”

  I have no plans to fall in line.

  I do the best that I can, and I belong to a community of many millions of people who seem to agree with me on the things that really matter. And we are going through this test together. Not compromising seems to be the glue that holds us as a social movement. Alone you might buckle, but are you really willing to let all of us down?

  Many people in Washington, D.C., want to stop us. Sometimes they call us names, names meant to damage and hurt. Should we let them? Should we back down, or take the easier path? I can only think back to that afternoon in 1977, lying on my back on my parents’ plush red wall-to-wall carpeting. “You don’t get something for nothing.” The final song on the second side of 2112 is playing. It’s called, appropriately, “Something for Nothing.” I’m listening, reading the lyrics inside the record sleeve, the one with the cool, ominous red star. “You can’t have freedom for free.”

  CHAPTER 3