Fiction

Reclamation

2021-06-28 By Rob Weir Leave a Comment

In the not too distant future, after the Second Civil War, two seceded territories share a precarious détente with the United States. The Texas Territory, which includes much of the south, is a conservative state. The Colorado Territory, on the other hand, contains the southwest and the Great Plains, and is a pacifist, anarchist stateless society. The rump United States, suffering from bad economic policies and cut off from the Texas oil, struggles, resentfully, through a deep depression. This is the setup at the start of Jon Christian’s novel, Reclamation.

Amidst this uneasy balance, the United States brutally attacks the Colorado Territory, attempting to reclaim that territory. This act sets in motion a series of actions and reactions, involving a group of family members, friends, colleagues, an old love interest and a new one, who work through official channels and outside of them, to keep Colorado free.

This is a quick and fun read. Christian keeps the plot moving, cutting between events in Colorado, Texas and United States, as the protagonists converge toward the amor vincit omnes ending.

If I could make one change, it would have been to give a more in-depth illustration of how the economy in the Colorado Territory worked. One of the benefits of libertarian fiction, or for that matter any kind of utopian/dystopian fiction, is that it gives us the opportunity to explore other possible systems, to experience, through the lens of fiction, a society constructed on different principles than our own. Perhaps there is room for a prequel here?

iPony: Blueprint for a New America

2020-04-13 By Rob Weir Leave a Comment

Conventional wisdom says that a presidential candidate’s campaign book ought to strike a balance between erudition and populism, demonstrate deepness of thought as well as make an appeal to the working man. Vermin Supreme is unconventional, so his political manifesto, iPony: Blueprint for a New America, is none of these things. Or all of these things. It is really hard to say.

At one level we have here an dystopian, post-apocalyptic thriller, a mashup of Planet of the Apes, Omega Man (one of the characters is named “Chuck Heston”), the Chronicles of Narnia, 1984, King Kong, and every schlocky B-film from the 1950s that featured a brain in a jar.

At another level this book provides barbed commentary on our own political system. Unintended consequences abound. An entrenched bureaucracy is everywhere. Regulations are overbearing and intrusive. Political leadership inept. And in a further break from tradition, the author places himself as the inept leader in his own political manifesto:

Dictator Forever Vermin Supreme was completely and utterly insane…How these deranged hobo made it all the way into the White House was still not completely understood.

Imagine Bastiat meets Swift meets the Harvard Lampoon meets Netflix, and you get the idea.

Accompanying the text are full-page drawings from a a dozen or so artists.

I can’t say I entirely “get” Vermin Supreme and his style of political protest, but I think I understand him more than I did before. Yes, he is absurd. But perhaps that is the very point. Is it not also absurd that the government simultaneously spends taxpayer money to subsidize tobacco farmers as well as to persuade people not to smoke? That we have waged a 70 year “war on poverty” that has left the poverty rate right where it started? That we spend $50 billion/year on foreign aid but have 15 million children here living in poverty? That I’m writing this from a government-enforced quarantine here in the “Live Free or Die” state? That Donald Trump is president? Given what we have as reality, perhaps Vermin Supreme is the sanest among us? Probably not…

Granite Republic

2019-01-09 By Rob Weir 1 Comment

I’m not a frequent reader of fiction. As I see it, there is enough real in this world to marvel at. But I will, on occasion, pick up an alternative history novel. It helps limber the imagination, broaden one’s view of the possible. So, when J.P. Medved’s short story, Granite Republic, popped up on my Kindle recommended list, I gave it a try. As a New Hampshire resident and a Free State Project participant, how could I not, given it portrays a libertarian revolution in New Hampshire?

The story is told via a stream of newspaper stories, television broadcast transcripts, magazine articles, blog posts, emails, etc., as a confrontation between the libertarian-leaning state of New Hampshire and the left-leaning federal government comes to a head. I won’t say much more, lest I give away plot details. But I do recommend this gripping short story.

The one thing I expected to see, but didn’t, was an explicit mention of Article 10 of the New Hampshire State Constitution:

Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

That would have been quite appropriate, I think.

Pictures of the Socialistic Future

2018-09-25 By Rob Weir 1 Comment

Eugen Richter (1838-1906) is not a name that prompts immediate recognition, at least not in the English-speaking world. He was, in the late 19^th century, the preeminent advocate for free markets and institutions in German politics. He took a stance, as libertarians do today, criticizing both left and right. He was outspoken both against the socialists (Marxists) as well as against the conservative, Bismarck, especially opposing his tariffs. He did this as a journalist, but also in the arena, with a seat in the Reichstag, as leader of various short-lived political parties, such as the Freisinnige Partei (Free-minded Party).

In 1891 Richter wrote a popular work, Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder: Frei nach Bebel, literally “Social-democratic future pictures, freely adapted from Bebel.” August Bebel (1840-1913) was a near-contemporary of Richter, and founder of the German Social Democrats. Social Democrats back then were pretty much hard-core Marxists and remained so until after WWII. So, to avoid confusion, the English translation of Richter’s book is titled, Pictures of the Socialistic Future.

This is a remarkable book, one that has aged quite well. Richter gives us here a diary of a Berliner, a middle-aged, middle-class everyman, a bookbinder with wife and children and an elderly father, a man who is sympathetic to Bebel and the socialist platform, a man who is comfortable in his position, but knows that others struggle, and so is happy the day the revolution comes and with it a new government and new institutions to bring this vision to fruition. The book continues, in diary form, given day-by-day snapshots of the ups and downs, from the euphoria of the revolution to the…well, one would not expect Richter to give this story a happy ending, would we?

What surprised me about his unfolding (and unraveling) of socialism is that all the leaders have the best intentions and proceed methodically on the soundest of socialist principles. There is no evil dictator here, only a benevolent socialist leader, democratically elected. This is not The Road to Serfdom. The downfall of this socialist vision comes nevertheless, rotting from within, from economic inefficiency, from misplaced incentives, from malingering, and from the denial of human nature. There is an intimation of the Economic Calculation Problem here, the core economic flaw of socialism, illustrated in fictional form long before economists like Mises would describe it rigorously.

This is a quick and easy read. Henry Wright’s 1893 English translation, though it will send you headed for the dictionary on occasion, still works quite well. The new e-book edition, by the Mises Institute, comes with a short introduction by Bryan Caplan. If you want more on Richter’s life and thought, Ralph Raico wrote a piece, “Eugen Richter and Late German Manchester Libreralism: A Reevaluation” in The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 4, 1990, pp. 3-25.