Golden GateLIBERTARIAN

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Libertarian Party of San Francisco • 2215-R Market Street, PMB170, San Francisco, CA 94114 • (415) 775-LPSF • www.lpsf.org • January 2001

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Wollstein Challenged on Advocacy of Action and Compassion

Jarret Wollstein gave an informative, inspiring, provocative, and hilarious presentation to Free Exchange on December 16. Wollstein skyrocketed to fame in April 1967, when he acquired the distinction of being the first admirer of Ayn Rand to be denounced by her in The Objectivist. (He was followed 3 months later by Edith Efron.) He certainly didn’t present it that way, but his talk could be heard in part as a commentary on the baleful influence of Rand on the libertarian movement. Wollstein read Atlas Shrugged around the time he graduated from high school in 1963, and attended an Ayn Rand Club at the Drexel Institute of Technology. He reports having been quiet through a number of meetings, agreeing with the deplorable state of society as characterized in Atlas Shrugged. When he finally asked what people there were planning to do about it, he was met with silence; the leader eventually said, "Nothing." It was "too early" for action, Wollstein was told.

Rand herself was a thinker, not a doer. The two are not exclusive, of course, and the heroes of her novels were both--except when it came to political change, where their strategy was passive withdrawal. Doers&endash;SJ types, in the Kiersey-Bates terminology of Please Understand Me&endash;are much more common in the general population than thinkers, the NTs; but libertarianism, and especially Objectivism, have always been disproportionately attractive to NTs. It is easy to imagine that the idea of changing the world&endash;in the long run&endash;through passivity held a natural emotional appeal. In any event, one can easily get the sense at such gatherings, with Jarret, that we will still be analyzing and bemoaning the state of the world as it comes crashing down around our ears.

Some of Wollstein’s own activist efforts were met with fierce opposition. When he offered a course on Rand’s philosophy at the "Free University" at the University of Maryland to try

(See Wollstein, p. 3.)

Your Local Officers Have Been Active

Membership Chair Michael Denny reports that, following the forum for supervisorial candidates hosted by the LPSF at the Thai House on December 4, his office made over 300 calls to the targeted list for Tony Hall. Vice Chair Kelly Russell Simpson also volunteered to help with the campaigns of both Tony Hall and Mark Leno, though when she went to help out at the Leno headquarters, she found she wasn’t needed because there were so many volunteers already. So she spent 14 hours of volunteer work with the Hall campaign, including calling likely voters on the day of the election. She noted that Outreach Director Starchild also showed up to help with the Hall campaign. Hall, a registered Independent, defeated Mabel Teng by only about 40 votes, so it is possible that local Libertarians made a real difference.

Starchild suggested that we should begin lobbying efforts with members of the Board of Supervisors, in particular Tony Hall and Mark Leno. He proposed to draft a resolution against the War on Drugs that he would like the LPSF to push for adoption by the SF Board of Supervisors. While the resolution would be non-bonding, Starchild sees it as a great way to bring publicity to the LPSF and make our presence known at City Hall.

Bryce Bigwood volunteered in the meeting of December 16 for the position of Website Chair, and was duly appointed to that position by chair David Molony. Molony has been handling the LPSF website heretofore, and Bigwood’s assuming responsibility will free him up for work on the database. Bryce presented many ideas he had to improve the website, including a "news of the day" section. This section might have included our recommendations for District Supervisors or the fact that Mark Leno, shortly after the LPSF recommended him for District Supervisor, voted to hold gun manufacturers liable for gun fatalities. Bryce also was considering including an "e-mail" button to the website, as well as links to websites of other political parties, members of the Board of Supervisors, and other local politicos. He noted that he will post all LPSF newsletters on the website.

(See Officers, p. 2.)

GOLDEN GATE LIBERTARIAN JANUARY 2001 PAGE 2

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Officers (from p. 1)

Treasurer and Newsletter Editor Mike Acree gave a talk to a class on international relations at Dominican University in San Rafael on November 27. The instructor, Paul Cheney, had called the LPSF number to invite a Libertarian to debate a socialist. Cheney, who is Oxford-educated, is a little unusual these days in that he likes to get his students to think. The socialists insisted on sending two people&endash;one wit suggested that they never do anything individually&endash;but in the end neither showed up (no comment).

Mike felt afterward that he had spent too much time preparing his introductory statement and not enough time anticipating likely questions. (Knowing in advance that Cheney was a Nader supporter would have helped to narrow the range.) Still, both he and Cheney felt the class was a success, and both hope to do it again.

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Wollstein (from p. 1)

to spread the word, he drew a personal denunciation from Rand herself in The Objectivist, and 20,000 subscribers wondered what kind of monster he was. He also founded the Society for Rational Individualism in 1966 and edited the Rational Individualist. This was one of three groups that merged, after the libertarian-conservative split at the famous Young Americans for Freedom conference in St. Louis in 1969, to form the Society for Individual Liberty, a precursor of today’s International Society for Individual Liberty, which is a cosponsor of Free Exchange.

One of the highlights from Wollstein’s history of the libertarian movement, which comprised the first part of his talk, was his account of Operation Atlantis. This was the first of several schemes to build a Galt’s Gulch, in this case on a coral atoll. The first task the group set for themselves was building a boat&endash;out of concrete. Phil Coates interjected from the audience: "This is leading up to why the libertarian movement hasn’t been more successful?" (It evidently is possible to make boats out of concrete, but you have to know what you are doing; this one, like the great warship Vasa of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1628, sank before it got out of the harbor.)

The second half of Wollstein’s talk was an analysis of the current state of the libertarian movement. He himself is in the unusual position of being an anarchist who thinks the Libertarian Party is too radical. He thinks, as do many other observers, that the LP faces a marketing problem, which it has never really addressed, and that this would mean toning down many of our positions for the sake of electoral success.

Regardless of whether LP strategy is partly to blame, there is (See Wollstein, p. 3)

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Chair

David Molony

chair@lpsf.org

(415) 820-3923

Vice-Chair

Kelly Russell Simpson

KellySimpson@pacbell.net

(415) 487-9325

Secretary and Database Manager

Vince Grubbs

vwg@sirius.com

(415) 682-9482

Treasurer and Newsletter Editor

Mike Acree

macree@psg.ucsf.edu

(415) 668-5794

Elections Chair

Jerry Cullen

gtcullen@slip.net

(415) 567-9642

Membership Chair

Mike Denny

mfd@MichaelDenny.net

(415) 750-9340

Outreach Director

Starchild

(temporarily without e-mail)

(415) 626-3036

Media Coordinator

Jerry Pico

picoman@mindspring.com

(415) 885-5350

Fundraising Chair

Chris Maden

crism@shore.net

(415) 504-8677

Opinions expressed in unsigned columns of the Golden Gate Libertarian do not necessarily represent those of anyone but the Editor.

Submissions are encouraged. The deadline (including agenda and calendar items) is the first Thursday of the month. Text should be sent to Mike Acree at <macree@psg.ucsf.edu>. Photos and artwork should be mailed to Mike Acree, 859 45th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94121-3223. Please let us know if you want your item returned.

Next meeting: January 13, 3-5 p.m. (business), 5-6 (social), upstairs at Round Table Pizza, 5160 Geary Blvd. (at 16th Avenue).

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GOLDEN GATE LIBERTARIAN JANUARY 2001 PAGE 3

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Wollstein (from p. 2)

no doubt that we are worse off, in terms of liberty, than we were when Wollstein became a libertarian in 1963. Thanks mostly to the War on Drugs, we have 4 times as many people in prison, and the right to privacy is essentially gone. Like many other libertarians, he sees some basis for cautious optimism. One source, as usual, is technology. He said that a Stanford student is developing a system to decentralize the Internet, which will make it impossible for the government to shut it down, as it can now when all messages are routed through one or a few central servers. He also pointed for encouragement to the rapidity with which dictatorships, like those of Marcos and Milosevic, had come tumbling down in recent years.

But Wollstein doesn’t see libertarians doing very much about the state of the world. He offered a variety of examples of possible actions. There is only a 20% profit in asset forfeiture sales, for one, so we might be able to bring forfeitures to a halt by reducing that margin&endash;for instance, by legal challenges that prolonged the process.

Legal changes themselves may be the least accessible to us, but advocacy can be a powerful propaganda tool. He proposes, for example, that Congress be required to obey its own laws. It has, on the contrary, exempted itself from all major social legislation since Social Security, including Medicare, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act, sexual harassment legislation, and all the rest. More drastically, he proposes that new legislation not go into effect until it has first been tried on Congress for 5 years. That, he admits, is unlikely to pass. But the propaganda lever is this: If the legislation is as good as they claim, on what basis could Congress possibly object?

The most important thing we can do, however, is to defend the victims of the State. If you want to stop a police state, he said, you have to defend its first victims. You don’t wait until they start building camps; you respond when windows are being broken. There are thousands of victims of asset forfeiture in Oakland alone, for example. We could put an ad in the newspaper listing their names. We could investigate and publish their stories. We could cultivate relationships with media people, letting them get to know us over the long term and discover what nice people we are, and then introduce them to victims of the forfeiture laws, so that their stories might be publicized.

The reaction of the audience to Wollstein’s call to action made clear one reason why libertarians weren’t doing anything. The questions and challenges revealed a deep, entrenched pessimism about the prospects for any kind of action making a difference. Now, pessimism is hard to argue against; the world is a hell of a place, for sure. But it is simply stupid, on the other hand, to argue for it. We can rarely be sure how much we can accomplish until we have tried. What on earth do we stand to gain by arguing that action is futile? The only possible pay-off in arguing in advance for our own impotence is just the satisfaction of proving ourselves right.

The opposition was most sharply pronounced when Wollstein went on to argue that, in reaching out to victims of the State, we would be perceived as compassionate, which would do much good for our image. Wollstein was echoing here Karl Hess’s exhortation for us all to be good neighbors, helping out in our communities when there is a need; but his audience would have none of it. It was argued that compassion has nothing to do with libertarianism, and that liberals have coopted use of the term so that compassion refers only to actions of the State, and so consequently (a) we can’t compete, and (b) we wouldn’t want to, anyway. Wollstein surmised afterward that it was Rand’s influence we were seeing here, too.

Wollstein was encouraging us, in sum, to take action to try to make the world a better place and&endash;not completely separably from that, in his view&endash;to be nice people. That this message should have met such stiff resistance says a lot in itself about the lack of success of the libertarian movement.

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More on Ballot Recommendations

[Note: This letter was sent October 23. --Ed.]

Ballot recommendations and candidate endorsements are a help, not an embarrassment, in my opinion. I appreciate the time and effort that you as a group take to try your best to come up with a libertarian analysis of what is on the ballot. Many voters like myself have no desire to spend hours upon hours investigating everything that is on the ballot. Your analysis allows me to save time. By relying on your analysis, I am placing a great deal of trust in the hands of those that make these recommendations. I would hope that your reccomendations are made only by those people who are well-informed about that which they are voting on.

J. Schwartz

GOLDEN GATE LIBERTARIAN JANUARY 2001 PAGE 4

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Golden Gate Libertarian

2215-R Market Street, PMB 170

San Francisco, CA 94114

Forthcoming events:

Saturday, January 13: Regular LPSF meeting. Election of officers.

February 16-19: State convention at Doubletree Hotel in San Jose. Special Sunday Seminar, "Marketing for Libertarians," by Jarret Wollstein. Registration info at www.ca.lp.org/conv/2001/.