Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (5 page)

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.)

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.”