I was young once, and I remember how deeply I hated the oppressive, all-seeing matrix of smalltown society. The only refuge from parents, siblings, school, church and extended family was the wee hours of the night, when I had no legal right to be roaming the village streets. It prompted me to truancy, delinquency, early emancipation at age 17, and a variety of blunders that seemed unending. Before I became an adult at age 21, I had comitted a wide variety of crimes and misdemeanors, morally as well as legally forbidden by common sense and centuries of philosophy.This explains part of the problem. Philosophy is everywhere, wagging its finger at liberty, just like the law, which is mostly a tame, dry echo of the church. Delinquents can almost always evade the donut-shaped arm of the law. But it's harder to escape village opinion. I have a distinct recollection that I entered upon life already tarred, pegged, and mythologized by who my grandfather, uncles, and cousins were. After I successfully escaped to the nearest Big City, it was the unchosen fate of four other boys to hear endless renditions of "Oh, yes... Wolf is your oldest brother." My parents suffered for my sins, too, obviously.
That was said tongue in cheek. I did wrong and people were hurt. I had nothing to justify 'rebellion' or criminal conduct, except an incoherent thirst for freedom, long before I was competent to manage my own affairs. Given the ineptitude of all government, public and private (church, school, neighborhood, family), anarchy has no effective counterweight. I spent a few nights in jail, got lectured, sent to boarding school -- but the punishments visited on an 'incorrigible' teenager were always mild in the 1960's. Today they are almost nonexistent, providing you don't blow up a public building, like Timothy McVeigh, or start a shooting war with campus police, like Eric Harris. I am very much impressed by the fact that no one prevented McVeigh or Harris from catastrophic wrongdoing.
Having obtained early manumission and bright enough to make bigger trouble, much of my life was spent gambling that I could get away with mild havoc of an ever-increasing scope, especially in show business. Privately and professionally, my liberty knocked about a hundred people for a loop, all innocent bystanders who gravitated too near. Nowadays I wonder what hath Wolf wrought? A lot of people have read my strange writings, and I'm sure at least some readers were misguided thereby. I know that I certainly was, on occasion. I misjudged the fate of the Euro currency, for example, and the resilience of the Federal Reserve.
For the reason given above, I claim to know something about error and deliberate wrongdoing. Frankly, I'm in favor of it, including but not limited to homosexuality, misappropriation of funds, lies, conscription of the willing, reckless fatherhood, high-speed games of chance, contraband, and gross negligence in tax matters. Liberty entails the right to do wrong and get away with most of it. Half of all murders go unsolved, unless you're living in Central America or Africa, where criminal investigation is especially weak.
I believe that Ayn Rand gave us two versions of Ayn Rand, and I forgive her the mismash of minarchy that she was seduced into misappropriating. The young Rand was a vamp -- my kind of babe. The Fountainhead had it all. Rape, dynamite, ruthless manipulation of weaker characters like Peter Keating, smashing up priceless museum pieces and fireplaces by the dozen (if you include Night of January 16th and We The Living, written in the same period). How anti-NAP can you get? I sometimes wonder why Randroids don't seem to grasp the obvious, that Rand the seeker was an immoral anarchist to the very roots of her hair, top and bottom. Galt killed tens of thousands by starvation, right?
And that's what this article is about. It seems to me that the United States is not going to roll over and play dead, so we can have a nice, sensible chat about what's wrong. Some (including me) have predicted that bankruptcy is the ultimate destiny of all empires. But 'ultimate' could mean decades, maybe centuries, unless the immoral, reckless, illegal Sons of Liberty enter the fray on behalf of our innocent posterity again.
