Laura Ingalls Wilder as 'libertarian matriarch'

The Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, One of America’s First Libertarians | TIME - David Boaz:

May 9, 2015 - "Laura Ingalls Wilder is a bestselling author again, 83 years after she began publishing her Little House on the Prairie books and 58 years after her death at age 90. Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography is a 472-page edition of Wilder’s original memoir, for which she couldn’t find a publisher in 1930....

"Wilder was born just after the Civil War in the Big Woods region of Wisconsin. Life was hard on the frontier, and with her parents and then her husband she moved to Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Florida, and eventually Mansfield, Missouri. She also became, unexpectedly, a sort of libertarian matriarch.

"Laura’s only child was Rose Wilder Lane. Lane was born in DeSmet, South Dakota, and grew up on her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. After high school she drifted to San Francisco, married briefly, and began a career as a writer.... [B]y the 1930s ... she was a staunch libertarian. In 1935 she wrote in the Saturday Evening Post:

I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better — and more productive, even in material ways — than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends.

"Those ideas can be found in the Little House books, which Lane is said to have helped edit or ghostwrite. In Little House on the Prairie, young Laura hears the Declaration of Independence read and thinks, 'Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. … When I am a little older, Pa and Ma will stop telling me what to do, and there isn’t anyone else who has a right to give me orders. I will have to make myself be good'....

"Lane wrote two novels of her own about her family’s homestead, Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) and Free Land, which made her a bestselling, well-paid writer. But her interests turned more to politics, and she became a vociferous adversary of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, which she saw as 'creeping socialism'....

"In the dark year of 1943, during World War II, Lane and two other remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern Libertarian movement. Lane published a passionate historical book called The Discovery of Freedom....

"Also in 1943 Lane met Roger MacBride, the 14-year-old son of her editor at Reader’s Digest. MacBride was fascinated by her ideas, visited her frequently at her Connecticut home, and came to think of himself as her ''dopted grandson.'

"[MacBride] was made a Republican elector in Virginia in 1972.... He cast his electoral vote for the new Libertarian Party ticket of philosopher John Hospers and journalist Tonie Nathan, the first woman to receive an electoral vote. He became the 1976 Libertarian presidential candidate and put the party on the map with ballot status in 32 states, a widely distributed campaign book, and a distant third-place finish....

"As Lane’s heir, he published another of Wilder’s manuscripts, The First Four Years, arranged for the popular 1970s television series, and wrote eight novels of his own about Rose’s early life, continuing in the vein of Little House."

Read more: http://time.com/3848967/laura-ingalls-wilder-is-back/
'via Blog this'

Ayn Rand at 110

Ayn Rand at 110 | Cato Institute - David Boaz:

February 2, 2015 - "In the dark year of 1943, in the depths of World War II and the Holocaust, when the United States was allied with one totalitarian power to defeat another, three remarkable women published books that could be said to have given birth to the modern libertarian movement. Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had written Little House on the Prairie and other stories of American rugged individualism, published a passionate historical essay called The Discovery of Freedom. Isabel Paterson, a novelist and literary critic, produced The God of the Machine, which defended individualism as the source of progress in the world.

"The other great book of 1943 was The Fountainhead, a powerful novel about architecture and integrity by Ayn Rand. The book’s individualist theme did not fit the spirit of the age, and reviewers savaged it. But it found its intended readers. Its sales started slowly, then built and built. It was still on the New York Times bestseller list two full years later. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the 1940s, millions eventually, some of them because of the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, and many of them were inspired enough to seek more information about Ayn Rand’s ideas. Rand went on to write an even more successful novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957, and to found an association of people who shared her philosophy, which she called Objectivism....

"George Gilder called Atlas Shrugged 'the most important novel of ideas since War and Peace.' Writing in the Washington Post, he explained her impact on the world of ideas and especially the world of capitalist ideas: 'Rand flung her gigantic books into the teeth of an intelligentsia still intoxicated by state power, during an era when even Dwight Eisenhower maintained tax rates of 90 percent and confessed his inability to answer Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion that capitalism was immoral because it was based on greed.'

"Rand’s books first appeared when no one seemed to support freedom and capitalism, and when even capitalism’s greatest defenders seemed to emphasize its utility, not its morality. It was often said at the time that socialism is a good idea in theory, but human beings just aren’t good enough for socialism. It was Ayn Rand who said that socialism is not good enough for human beings.

"Her books garnered millions of readers because they presented a passionate philosophical case for individual rights and capitalism, and did so through the medium of vivid, can’t-put-it-down novels. The people who read Ayn Rand and got the point didn’t just become aware of costs and benefits, incentives and trade-offs. They became passionate advocates of liberty.

"Rand was an anomaly in the 1940s and 1950s, an advocate of reason and individualism in time of irrationality and conformity. But she was a shaper of the 1960s, the age of “do your own thing” and youth rebellion; the 1970s, pejoratively described as the “Me Decade” but perhaps better understood as an age of skepticism about institutions and a turn toward self-improvement and personal happiness; and the 1980s, the decade of tax cuts and entrepreneurship.

"Throughout those decades her books continued to sell — 30 million copies over the years, and they still move off the shelves. The financial crisis and Wall Street bailouts gave Atlas Shrugged a huge push. A Facebook group titled 'Read the news today? It’s like Atlas Shrugged is happening in real life' was formed. More than 50 years after publication, the book had its best sales year ever. And sales have remained high — more than a million copies of Rand’s books were sold in 2012."

Read more: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/ayn-rand-110
'via Blog this'

The Libertarian Republican Heritage by Justin Raimondo -- Part 1

The Libertarian Republican Heritage by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com:

Part I: From the Old Right to the New Nixon: Downhill All the Way

March 4, 2013 "The Republican party wasn’t always the party of war, unlimited military spending, and reckless foreign entanglements. There is a long albeit largely unknown tradition of opposition to militarism in the GOP, starting with the so-called "isolationist" opposition to US intervention in World War II and continuing right up until the 1960s....

"The conservative wing of the Republican party had been at the center of opposition to US entry into World War II. They had rightly feared two things: 1) that the war would rescue the Soviet Union from certain destruction, and 2) that we would defeat national socialism on the battlefield, only to find it had triumphed on the home front. In his public pronouncements, President Franklin Roosevelt bowed to popular opinion, which was overwhelmingly opposed to entering the European war, while slowly but surely – and covertly – involving us on the side of Great Britain. He was opposed in this by a coalition of conservative Republicans and Midwestern progressives, such as the Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who resisted the New Deal as a quasi-totalitarian betrayal of American ideals, and who also saw foreign intervention as a way for the New Dealers to further centralize power in Washington and cement their own dominance of the political landscape."

"The major anti-war organization of that time, the America First Committee, was founded and funded by conservative Republican Midwestern businessmen, such as Gen. Robert E. Woods, the head of Sears & Roebuck, and Henry Regnery, a Chicago businessman who would later go on to establish the first large scale conservative book publisher.... At its height, the Committee had 800,000 dues-paying members, and the sympathies of 75 percent of the American people.

"In those days, it was the left that constituted the core of the War Party. While ostensibly opposed to US intervention in principle, the far-left – that is, the Communist Party and its fellow travelers – turned on a dime the moment Germany invaded the Soviet Union. From that point on, it was the Communists who were in the vanguard of the War Party: it was they who led the vicious attack [on] the America Firsters as pro-Nazi and demanded they be prosecuted for treason....

"When war finally came, the America First Committee dissolved.... Rationing was imposed: the economy was militarized, and a wave of political repression swept the nation from coast to coast, as thousands of Japanese-Americans were put in concentration camps and political dissenters from both sides of the political spectrum were charged with 'sedition.' The federal government spent 43 percent of the gross domestic product in the years 1943-45.... A country that had once been the freest on earth was now only half-free, with the rudiments of the welfare state established and thriving. Worse, the outlines of the American empire began to take shape: far from freeing the US from the alleged necessity of meddling in the affairs of other nations, our victory only presaged a deeper involvement."

Read more: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/03/03/the-libertarian-republican-heritage/
'via Blog this'