Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto (6 page)

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

T
HEM
V
ERSUS
U
S

ON AUGUST 28, 1963,
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the speech of his life.

“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,”
¹
he began. MLK was, of course, addressing some 250,000 people who had joined together for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he told the crowd, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

It had been a long journey to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and many black Americans had suffered, and died, along the road to that moment. But King eloquently rejected calls to meet the police dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs, and tear gas in kind. “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence,” he implored.

King, who was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a nonprofit organizer of the march, eventually put aside his prepared remarks and proceeded to deliver the most eloquent call for equal treatment under the law ever spoken: “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he told the crowd. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The next day, William Sullivan, the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s domestic intelligence division, penned an internal memo: “Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation.”
²

It was the eloquence of the speech. MLK had connected with a fundamental American value, that everyone should be treated equally under the laws of the land. Because he spoke out, he became “dangerous.” He was deemed a threat, so he would not be treated equally under the law by agents of the U.S. government. He would be singled out, targeted by government bureaucrats. He had to be stopped.

The FBI’s obsession with MLK’s rising star started at the top of the FBI, with Director J. Edgar Hoover. In a clandestine campaign against King—against an American citizen attempting to practice his First Amendment rights to petition the government for a redress of grievances, to peaceably assemble, and to speak freely—a cabal of powerful federal government bureaucrats with extraordinary discretionary power proceeded to stalk, persecute, and smear a man they viewed as an enemy to their interests. “FBI officials viewed the speech as significantly increasing King’s national stature,” says MLK historian David J. Garrow. After August 28, he became “measurably more ‘dangerous’ in the FBI’s view than he’d been prior.”
³

On October 10, Hoover convinced the attorney general of the United States to authorize wiretaps on MLK’s phone as well as the office phones of the SCLC. The official rationale was their suspicion that MLK was collaborating with communist sympathizers. The attorney general at the time, the top law enforcement officer in the nation, was Robert F. Kennedy, brother and close confidant to President John F. Kennedy. Wiretapping King’s phone was perhaps one of RFK’s most ignominious acts.

Of course, by December 1963, Hoover went well beyond what the Kennedy administration had authorized, and began installing microphones in the hotel rooms where King was staying. One conversation, taped in May 1965 and released in 2002, captured a conversation between King and Bayard Rustin regarding a dispute between the SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over a proposed statement of coalition unity.

“There are things I wanted to say renouncing communism in theory but they would not go along with it,” complains King. “We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us but they wouldn’t go along with it.”

The FBI failed to disclose this information to the White House, instead using its illicit snooping to intimidate, threaten, and blackmail King.
⁴
Information that the FBI gathered about MLK’s personal behavior was used in vicious attempts to control him, to silence him, to break up the coalition he was struggling to hold together, to stop him. By any means necessary.

F
REEDOM,
OR
P
OWER?

Does it ever make sense to give so much unchecked power and authority to government agents? Can we trust them to
be better
than the rest of us? Can we trust them to
know better
?

I say no. This book argues for more individual freedom and for limiting the discretionary power of government. Too much power corrupts. Absolutely.

And J. Edgar Hoover’s iniquitous behavior proves my point. The treatment of MLK certainly meets my definition of government tyranny.

I believe that there is a growing awareness among people in America, and all over the world, that governments have too much power, and that power is abused. Individual freedom, choice, upward mobility, and voluntary cooperation among free people is the better approach. In a world that is rapidly decentralizing access to information, lowering barriers to entry, barriers to knowing, freedom works even better today than it did in 1776.

Others argue the opposite, that the fear of runaway government power is outdated, that America has outgrown the old model based on liberty. It is time to reject an abiding skepticism of too much central control, they say, and let the benevolent redesigners work their magic.

They say:
More government involvement in our lives is essential to offset concentrated market power and corrupt businessmen and anyone else who might take advantage. People can’t be trusted with freedom. Besides, freedom is messy and chaotic, and we won’t always make the right choices. We won’t always like the way things turn out, the way wealth and resources are allocated. Government can fix these problems. We just need to make sure that the power rests in the hands of the right people. There are good guys and bad guys. The right public servants can be trusted to rein in the greedy hordes.

This was the pipe dream of “progressives” going back to the late 1800s. Well-paid civil servants, with all the right pedigrees, from all the right families, and protected from political judgment and the push and pull of democracy, would be given the power and the resources to better manage things from the top down.

The architects of this country were pretty clear on these questions. The author of that “promissory note” that Dr. King referred to in 1963 while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Thomas Jefferson, wholly embraced the genetically ingrained American skepticism of government power and an idealistic belief in dispersing authority across society, from the bottom up. The power should be with individuals, Jefferson believed, with “We the People.”

The founders were very much a product of, as well as advocates for, “the Spirit of ’76.” “Government is not reason,” warned our first president, George Washington. Government “is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

That was then, says the progressive historian Joseph J. Ellis. Today, the really sophisticated thinkers, the ones with the right academic pedigrees, are shedding their fear of big government. The divide is clear, says the Mount Holyoke professor, between those who view the government as “them” and those who view government as “us.” Them versus Us. On this question there is little doubt where he stands: “The expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ has become utterly essential.”