1. I have some thoughts on Ayn Rand, Marcus Aurelius, the mafioso Frank Costello, the Benedict Option, LSD, Little Orphan Annie, Libertarian Zionism, & solar power.
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5. A key theoretical moment was Albert Jay Nock's essay "Isaiah' Job" (1936) which argued that masses were hopeless & real salvation would come from "saving remnant."
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6. Stating in 1937 Harold Gray, the hard-right creator of Little Orphan Annie, started crafting stories of Daddy Warbucks creating free market utopias outside USA. The first "going Galt" narratives.
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7. As
@brianmdoherty notes in fine book Radicals for Capitalism, 1950s libertarians had a spiritual turn because they felt thwarted by triumphant statism.Show this thread -
8. 1950s libertarians around Faith & Freedom magazine started following guru Gerald Heart, advocate of LSD & mescaline (also an influence on Aldous Huxley).
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9. These LSD-tripping libertarians were otherwise squares (one was a union-buster). But they found an inner freedom in spiritualism & rural retreats.
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10. The heirs of these beatnik businessmen were the 1960s libertarians, led by Tom Marshall, who concocted the idea of Vonu "an invented word meaning a life outside the reach of any who could oppress you."
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11. The followers of the Vonu ideal, embracing back to earth hippy-dom, went full-hog: giving up society & squatting out in the woods.
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12. Of the hippy-libertarians, one particularly fascinating figure was Karl Hess (1923-1994), a right-wing journalist & Goldwater speechwriter who went full New Left.
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13. Hess had always had a lawless streak. In early 1960s he & a friend tried to convince the gangster Frank Costello to use mafia goons to beat up Soviet couriers giving money to USA communist party.
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14. But by late 1960s Hess had moved to radical left and was refusing to pay taxes to protest Vietnam war. He & his wife moved to woods & supported themselves by bartering.
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15. One time Goldwater ran into Hess protesting the war. Why don't you come around anymore, Goldwater asked. You office might not like that, Hess said. "Piss on them," Goldwater responded. "You're my friend."
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16. Anyways, Hess in 1970s got heavily involved in appropriate technology movement, running a solar-powered farm.
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17. Libertarian Zionism ("the idea that the only way to find freedom in this unfree world was to hide from or physically escape the eyes of the state" is still around in seasteading (and, in a way, Bitcoin).
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18. Milton Friedman's recently married grandson is really into seasteading:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/fashion/weddings/a-commitment-for-more-than-one-lifetime.html …
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19. Wrapping up,
@brianmdoherty's Radicals For Capitalism, where I took much of this from, is a hugely entertaining book:https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/brian-doherty/radicals-for-capitalism/9780786731886/ …Show this thread
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