Wilder & Lane's Libertarian House on the Prairie

Wilder’s ‘Little House’ on a libertarian prairie - San Francisco Chronicle - Christine Woodside:

December 26, 2016 - "Libertarian ideas are woven into the very fabric of American life.... I think of the libertarian branch of the Republican Party as the 'Little House on the Prairie caucus.' Why? Because the beloved Little House children’s book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder was full of free-market ideals.

"Wilder was a chicken farmer and occasional journalist who became the author and heroine of the Little House books about her 1870's-80's pioneer childhood. Wilder’s secret collaborator, her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, infused the books with libertarian views....

"In 1930, during the Great Depression, Wilder and Lane were 63 and 44 years old and living on the family farm in southern Missouri. At Lane’s request, Wilder sat down and wrote of the family’s migration from Wisconsin to the future state of Kansas to Minnesota to Dakota Territory, with her Pa, Ma, and sisters, looking for the ideal farm.

"In Wilder’s early drafts, the family withstood frontier life staunchly, jaws set. Wilder told her daughter the Ingallses never showed emotion. But as Lane rewrote Wilder’s notes, she removed difficult events, like a baby brother’s death or the government’s subsidy of their blind sister’s schooling, and inserted plenty of happy dialogue with no bitterness, resentment or remorse.

"Within a few months, Lane had sold the first book, Little House in the Big Woods. One editor said it was 'the book no Depression could stop.' Readers asked for more, so the two women wrote seven more books together.

"The books extolled the power of ordinary people to make their own destinies. Consider this scene in The Long Winter, the sixth book: When frequent blizzards kept trains from bringing supplies to their Dakota Territory town, the storekeeper tries to overcharge starving neighbors who want to buy the last stock of wheat. A riot seems imminent until Pa speaks up: 'Don’t forget that every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever, and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over.' It’s an appealing distillation of the idea that a free market can regulate itself....

"The series has sold millions of copies and inspired the TV show Little House on the Prairie.

"With the comfortable income provided by book royalties, Lane helped fund a free-market academy in the early 1960s in Colorado called the Freedom School [run by Robert Lefevre - ed.]. Two of the graduates were perhaps the most profoundly influential donors in modern conservatism: Charles and David Koch. Both joined the new Libertarian Party, along with Lane’s heir, Roger Lea MacBride, in the 1970s, before later returning to the Republican Party."

Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Wilder-s-Little-House-on-a-libertarian-10819927.php
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See also: Wilder's Little House books as libertarian propaganda

Koch bio shines light on libertarian billionaires

Koch Brothers: The Real Thing - Justin Raimondo, The American Conservative:

July 9, 2014 - "According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming and much else that’s wrong with the world. This is part of a strategy to demonize Charles and David Koch — the principals behind the country’s largest privately-held company — and make them the issue come Election Day. There’s a big problem with this strategy, however: a recent poll shows that most of Reid’s own constituents haven’t the slightest idea who the Brothers Koch are.

"Daniel Schulman’s much anticipated book, the first biography of the Koch family, may help voters bridge the knowledge gap — but Democrats are going to be disappointed if they think it will help their smear campaign. Indeed, it is likely to do the opposite....

"The story starts with Fred Koch, a son of Dutch immigrants who ... was at the 1958 meeting where [Robert] Welch first laid out his plan to fight the Communist menace and roll back the New Deal. The John Birch Society was a hybrid of Old Right libertarian economics and the McCarthyite paranoia of the 1950s, and Fred — by this time a tycoon — relentlessly lectured his four sons on the evils of collectivism and the value of hard work....

"When he took over from his father, Charles not only immersed himself in the details of the business but also undertook a systematic study of philosophy, economics, political science, and history because he understood that the success of his company — his life’s work — depended on the condition of the society it was selling to and serving. This was his doorway to libertarianism.

"In the early 1960s, Charles attended the Freedom School, a modest lodge surrounded by little cabins set amid the scenic foothills of Colorado’s Rampart mountain range. There he listened to the lectures of the school’s founder and leading light, the libertarian pacifist Robert LeFevre, an idiosyncratic figure whose charisma and absolute devotion to the idea of a stateless society ... sent one of the wealthiest and most politically influential figures on the American right down the road to a more humane and enlightened philosophy.

"A fork in that road was Charles’s developing relationship with the economist Murray Rothbard.... At a seminal meeting at a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado, in the winter of 1976, the two discussed what course to take — and what came to be known as the 'Kochtopus' was born.

"Rothbard wrote a lengthy memo outlining an ambitious plan that would come to fruition with the injection of a large amount of Koch funding. There would be a think tank, a magazine, a campus group, seminars and grants for promising libertarian scholars — all of which came to pass in the form of the Cato Institute; Inquiry, a biweekly directed at the left; a movement magazine, Libertarian Review; and a campus group dubbed Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS).

"To manage this operation, Charles and Rothbard recruited Edward H. Crane III, a young financial consultant and stockbroker whose tenure as head of the barely four-year-old Libertarian Party had demonstrated rare organizational abilities."

Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/koch-brothers-the-real-thing/

Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, Daniel Schulman, Grand Central, 432 pages.