THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME:

Long Love Affairs With Libertarianism (MICHAEL SHERMER, January 24, 2007, NY Sun)

I attended one of these seminars in 1981, when a close friend told me about Andrew Galambos, a retired aerospace engineer and physicist teaching private courses through the Free Enterprise Institute (hundreds of such organizations come and go throughout Mr. Doherty's history), under an umbrella field he called "Volitional Science." The introductory course was V-50. This was Econ 101 on freemarket steroids, an invigoratingly muscular black-and-white world where Adam Smith is good, Karl Marx is bad; individualism is good, collectivism bad; free economies are good, mixed economies bad.

Galambos's course was popular in Orange County, Calif. (labeled by our neighbors in L.A. County as the "Orange Curtain"), and the time was right with President Reagan in office and conservatives on the ascendant. Where Rand advocated for limited government, Galambos proffered a theory in which everything in society would be privatized until government simply falls into disuse and disappears. Galambos identified three types of property: primordial (one's life), primary (one's thoughts and ideas), and secondary (derivatives of primordial and primary property, such as the utilization of land and material goods). To Galambos, capitalism is "that societal structure whose mechanism is capable of protecting all forms of private property completely." To realize a truly free society, then, we have merely "to discover the proper means of creating a capitalist society." In this free society, we are all capitalists.

Galambos's story is not unusual in the history of this oft-fringy movement. He had a massive ego that propelled him to a successful career as a private lecturer, but led him to such ego-inflating pronouncements as his classification of all sciences into physical, biological, and his own "volitional sciences." His towering intellect took him to great heights of interdisciplinary creativity, but often left him and his students tangled up in contradictions, as when we all had to sign a contract promising that we would not disclose his ideas to anyone, while we were also inveigled to solicit others to enroll. ("You've got to take this great course." "What's it about?" "I can't tell you.") And he had a remarkable ability to lecture for hours without notes in a colloquial style, but when two hours stretched into three, and three hours dragged into four, his audiences were never left wanting for more.

Most problematic, however, was any hope of translating theory into practice, which is where the rubber meets the road for any economic or political principle. Property definitions are all well and good, but what happens when we cannot agree on property rights infringements? The answer was inevitably something like this: "In a truly free society all such disputes will be peacefully resolved through private arbitration." Sounds good in theory, but I would like more data from the real world.

What do Rationalists have to do with the real world? It's all in their heads...

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2007 12:03 AM