UNANIMOUS CONSENT AND THE UTOPIAN VISION == OR == I DREAMED I WAS A LIBERTARIAN IN MY MAIDENFORM BRA Presented at the Future of Freedom Conference Culver City, California, November, 1987 The continued relative invisibility of Libertarianism in America, after forty years of back-breaking, heart-breaking labor, has nothing to do with any lack of money, ideas, personnel, or anything else we Libertarians continually whine about. It isn't the fault of any evil Northeastern conspiracy. Nor, as the timorous, timid, and trembling among us often recommend, is it any reason to tone down our rhetoric, to soften our principles or their expression, or to make it more "conservative" or "practical" in approach. All of that has been tried, over and over again in the history of the movement, and by now its miserable, abject failure is self-evident to everyone but a blind, deaf, and, particularly dumb handful of seminar schlockmeisters and Libertarian Party "pragmatists". What we Libertarians sometimes lack in our own hearts and minds, what we often fail to communicate to others, is a vision of the new civilization we intend to create. It may be sufficient -- for Libertarians -- that America today is politically, economically, and socially repulsive. It may be sufficient -- for Libertarians -- that what we propose represents a moral imperative. _It is not enough for others._ Most people require a concrete realization of the future, a picture which will motivate them to learn what Libertarians mean by "right" and "wrong", and inspire them to work toward its fulfillment. It may appear contradictory that the achievement of practical ends must rely on what seems to be a fantasy -- but nothing could be further from the truth. What we Libertarians need is a foot in the door. There's no conflict between flights of imagination and political realism, any more than there is between "radical abolitionism" and "moderate gradualism". Each has a role in the creation of progress. Neither can afford to try operating without the other. Division-of-labor is more than an abstract economic principle, it's a matter of life or death for the cause of individual liberty. Utopianism, far from being a hindrance or embarrassment, is a vital, effective means toward that goal. We Libertarians take our philosophy too much for granted. Our concepts of what it can accomplish are too abstract. We wrongly assume that others can see its potential as clearly as we do. We often fail to see it ourselves. As a remedy, we must begin to ask ourselves, now, and each day for the rest of our lives, certain fundamental questions. Why are we Libertarians? What do we wish to accomplish? What constitutes success? By what signs will we know that we've won? What's in it for us? What's in it for me? What do I really want? Our present collection of answers seems to range from the negative to the obscure: "Well, _you_ know ... " "Because I want to see that bastard (insert the bastard of your choice) get what's coming to him!" "Because what's going on now is wrong and I want to stop it." "Because I'm afraid that civilization is going to collapse unless we do something". A common variation noted by Our Founder David Nolan is, "Because I _know_ that civilization is going to collapse, and I want to be around to say 'I told you so'!" I first heard the best of this rather unsatisfactory lot from English Libertarians who told me, "Because, even if I were absolutely convinced that my efforts would come to nothing, I can't honestly imagine doing anything else." I'd like to share with you some of my answers. Before I began spreading them around through my novels, they were somewhat different from those of most Libertarians. To the extent that I'm a fanatic, they are what's responsible. They are what drives and motivates me. They are the reason I'll keep right on "disturbing the peace" until I'm hauled off to some 21st Century Super-Dachau and lasered to death, or pigeons begin paying respects to my statue in a private city park. One of them, of course, comes from an adolescence of filling my head with "garbage" -- pulp science fiction stories in which I witnessed cultures, societies, whole galactic empires being created, tinkered with, torn down, and built up all over again by talented (and some not-so-talented) yarn- spinners who, just like me, were obsessed with finding out what makes civilization tick. They taught me that the future is _malleable_, sometimes even by a single individual standing at a sensitive-enough leverage point. I have been looking for that leverage-point ever since. I have an idea of what I want the future to look like. What's more, I want to have a principal role in its making. In short, I have a Utopian vision of my own, rooted in the Libertarian philosophy of Unanimous Consent. I want to see that vision realized, not just for my daughter's sake, but soon enough to enjoy it myself. That's what _I_ really want. Thirty years ago, singer and social activist Joan Baez smugly observed that there are no right-wing folk songs. I'd noticed the same thing myself, but as a professional guitar player busily compromising his newly-fledged Objectivist principles to the Barry Goldwater campaign, I was disinclined to gloat about it. There are no right-wing Utopias, either, not one spellbinding adventure novel of the colorful William F. Buckleyite future. The conservative's view of heaven is the _status quo ante_ -- a dead, flat, black-and-white daguerrotye of a past that probably never existed. And any _status quo_ will do, as long as it isn't a _Communist_ status quo. If its victims are tortured in banana republic jails, that's perfectly acceptable as long as they're not _Marxist_ jails. If a long train of abuses and usurpations are visited on liberty in _this_ country, that's fine, as long as they're not _left-wing_ abuses and usurpations -- and even better if they're in the name of Moral Rectitude or National Security. Traditionally, Utopia is the territory of the Left. Imaginitive stories gave ordinary people images of what had previously only been abstractions for pasty-faced intellectuals, and this -- the work of men like H.G. Wells and Edward Bellamy -- had more to do with the progress of socialism than anything Karl Marx, Friederich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, or even Geraldo Rivera ever accomplished. The dictionary, in a burst of unusual candor, defines Utopia as "the ideal state where all is ordered for the best, for mankind as a whole, and evils such as poverty and misery do not exist": not only have we learned the hard way that this self-contradictory in practice, but it is more than sufficient reason why Utopia is a province populated, almost exclusively, by the enemies of liberty. The word "Utopia", however, only came to be synonymous with "impossible dream" when the internal inconsistency, the inherent cynicism, and the utter emptiness of socialism became unmistakable to whoever happened to be watching. In some instances, its sterile, no-exit character was already visible in the pages of otherwise upbeat Victorian novels decades before it became political reality -- Utopia bored itself to death. More frequently, socialist victories in the real world turned into disaster all by themselves, generating economic, social, and military devastation, and incidentally smashing the Utopian promise along the way. Utopian novels fell out of fashion only when the idealists on the Left ceased to believe in their own fairy tales. Dispirited, disoriented, beaten in a way they could never understand, reduced to a petulant nihilism, they couldn't _dream_ any more. Rather than being exceptions, today's few, sad, threadbare left-Utopias make the case. Read Skinner's _Walden Two_ for its constipated lack of scope. Examine LeGuin's _The Dispossessed_ for its injured perplexity. Try Clarke's _The Songs of Distant Earth_. He's peddling shopworn goods and he knows it. He ought to, living in Sri Lanka! Socialism's time has run out on this planet because the credibility of its Utopian vision self-destructed. The tragedy is that, when leftist Utopias fell into dishonor, they took all the rest with them. Shattered socialist dreams discredited any dreams at all of a rational, humane social order. Libertarianism was born an orphan in an age of negative Utopias like _Brave New World_, _1984_, and _We_. Ayn Rand wrote disUtopias, _Anthem_, _Atlas Shrugged_, _We The Living_, admirably showing us the dirty, bloodstained underside of collectivism's brilliant promises, but she and others like her made too few promises of their own. She pointed out a great deal to avoid, but gave us little to aspire to, which, I submit, is poor motivational psychology. Before I began writing, there were semi-Libertarian Utopias, glimmers in the works of Robert A. Heinlein and Poul Anderson, the stories of Eric Frank Russell -- brighter, more explicit pictures drawn by H. Beam Piper and Jerome Tuccille. But somehow -- perhaps the fault was mine -- they failed to stick to my philosophical ribs. Nor were our "basic" Libertarian works much better. Where most Utopian fiction failed to be Libertarian enough, most Libertarian non-fiction failed to be Utopian at all. Where was the softly glowing promise in John Hospers' _Libertarianism_, Murray Rothbard's _For A New Liberty_, Roger MacBride's _A New Dawn_, or David Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_? Where was the excitement and adventure in Paul Lepanto's _Return to Reason_, Harry Browne's _How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World_, or Robert LeFevre's _This Bread Is Mine_? Where was the color in Hazlitt's _Economics in One Lesson_? Where was the _fire_ in any of them? Was it enough only to be satisfied that most of our "beginner's books" weren't too boring? If Rand had written _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_, or edited its cynical and pessimistic ending, if Heinlein had written _Atlas Shrugged_, and paced it like _Door Into Summer_, John Hospers would have made it to the White House and auctioned off the furniture, because we'd have captured people's _imaginations_. Their hearts and minds, their money and votes would have followed faithfully behind. Ordinary people _want_ Utopia. They've watched _Star Trek_ until the emulsion wore off the celluloid, and helped _Star Wars_ outgross World War II, because Jim Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Luke Skywalker assure them that there _is_ a future, one worth looking forward to, at that, in which human beings (and other critters) will still be doing fascinating, dangerous things. _Having a good time_. It says here, eighty-four percent of us first-generation Libertarians got hooked by reading _Atlas Shrugged_, which I've just described as disUtopian. Now I'll contradict myself. It _wasn't_ just to watch civilization crumbling down deservedly around Dagny Taggart's ears that I waded through that kilopage of _magnum opus_ at the tender age of fourteen. Its fascination for me was in that all-too-brief glimpse of a small, working, slightly kinky Libertarian society. _Atlas Shrugged_ is mainly disUtopian, but, in the end, it's every bit as cheery as Piper's _A Planet For Texans_, and almost as delightfully bloodthirsty. Those among my audience who haven't read my novels may well ask what kind of Utopian vision I think we Libertarians ought to communicate. Well, once, in a moment of mixed premises and moral depravity, I defined it in terms of "freedom, immortality, and the stars". No, I didn't dig that out of the pages of _The National Enquirer_. I meant individual freedom in the Libertarian sense of society totally without coercion; immortality as a logical, scientifically foreseeable extension of that freedom into time; and the stars as an equally logical and foreseeable extension of that freedom into outer space -- as human beings reach out for what has always seemed to me to be their evolutionary Manifest Destiny. I do have a more specific dream, a more detailed vision. It's expressed in the Covenant of Unanimous Consent which I first wrote as a kind of moral substitute for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and later included in my novel of the Whiskey Rebellion, _The Gallatin Divergence_. The Covenant has circulated in more than forty countries, and has Signatories in a majority of the states and provinces of North America. I wouldn't be surprised if the dreams and visions expressed in the Covenant are similar to your own. If we differ at all, it's because I've never believed it pays to be bashful about visions. We must share our vision with others, so that they'll begin to work toward its fulfillment, too. For practice, let's try building a "Utopia of Unanimous Consent" right here and now. You already know the rules. Morally, in a future Libertarian society, each individual is free to live his or her own life as an end in itself and defend it against anyone who would compel otherwise. Ethically, this is accomplished by adopting a single law or custom: individuals are forbidden -- the specific mechanism, as we all appreciate, is still being debated -- to initiate force against others. Socially and economically, a voluntary exchange of values, rather than force, is the basis for all human relationships. H.G. Wells used to start with the premise "What if ... ?" What if you could travel to the Moon in a gravity-proof ball? What if you fell asleep and woke up 200 years later? What if you found a way to become invisible? Well, I have a "what if" for you: what if one Commandment, "Thou shalt not initiate force", became the fundamental operating principle of society soon enough for all of us to see it? For the moment, we'll skip how we got from "here" to "there", although it _is_ the critical question. That's not quite the cop-out it may seem: just now we're trying to envision a new civilization uncontaminated by any previous social order -- in science this is called a "controlled experiment"; in writing it's called "poetic license" -- and in any case, our Utopian vision, what it says to us and to others, is a major force itself, in getting us from "here" to "there". We'll also skip the possibility of thermonuclear war or a spectacularly unpleasant economic or civil collapse. There are reasons, as we'll see later, why I'm unconvinced of the inevitability of it all. In any case, it'll either happen or it won't. If it does, we'll either live through it or we won't, and we'll succeed in carrying off the Libertarian Millenium, with or without an introductory catastrophe -- or in the long run, just like John Maynard Keynes, we'll all be dead. A frequent error Utopia-builders make, understandably, is leaving items they're unaware of out of their extrapolation. In the surviving mutation of the leftist Utopian repertoire -- Doomsday predicting -- Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, the Ozone Boys, and most science fiction writers make a stupid mistake amidst their orgasmic cries of disaster: they aren't figuring on Libertarians. Before we get smug, recall that I said, back at the beginning, that this is our fault. Look how it happened, think of all those "Buy Gold, Buy Silver, Buy Irradiated Garbanzo Beans" advertisements, pamphlets, and seminars we were once so fond of. In our projections of the future, we made the same stupid mistake -- and it's even stupider when we make it -- we forgot about _us_! Aren't we going to affect the future? You bet your dried war-surplus fruit preserves we are! We already have. The shape of the future is determined, just like the present was, by two factors almost exclusively. The first is the virtually unlimited power of the individual human mind and the free market system which is its most monumental achievement. The second, frequently forgotten but no less important, is the inefficacy of evil. It won't surprise anyone in this room to hear of the power of mind and market. The human mind may inhabit what one cynic called "a sort of skin disease on a ball of dirt", but its grasp encompasses the subatomic particle and the intergalactic void. The mind alone is the reason our species became dominant on this planet in a geologic microsecond. Yet, aren't we confronted each day with the victorious gloatings of evil? How can it be inefficacious when it owns the world? Let's answer that by considering what condition humanity, its culture, technology, and economy would be in, if the villains always won. Hasn't there been overall progress in the human situation over the past several thousand years? Would there have been a Scientific Method, an Industrial Revolution, a Declaration of Independence, a Non-Aggression Principle, or even a Covenant of Unanimous Consent, if evil were all that omnipotent? In spite of the most hyperthyroid governments, the most pointlessly murderous wars, and the most disgustingly despicable badguys in all of human history, the 20th Century and the United States of America offer the highest standard of living and the greatest amount of individual liberty that have ever been available to our species. None of this is any testimony to governments, to war, or to badguys, of course, but to the human mind and the ineptitude of its enemies. Most of us have learned that mind and market always find a way. The point that liberals, conservatives, and even many Libertarians always seem to miss is that this -- the highest standard of living and the greatest amount of individual liberty that have ever been available -- isn't any reason to avoid asking what kind of future world could a completely uninhibited human mind create, economically, socially, and technologically? The three areas overlap, but we'll begin with economics. The economic future will be as different from our times as ours are from the pre-industrial era of history. No one in 16[??], for example, could have imagined our relative freedom from the constant threat of death by starvation, exposure, or disease which characterized those times. Few today can visualize a future of vastly greater wealth, world peace, and no bureaucrats to pry into every moment of one's daily life. Historical blindness works both ways, of course: those born in the future will react with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement when we try explaining our times to them. The insane were once beaten, tortured, and chained, a practice that seems ludicrous and terrible to us. The IRS will seem equally barbaric to our great-grandchildren. We'll try to tell them, but they'll attribute it to senile dementia and never really believe us. With taxation gone, not only will we have _twice_ as much money to spend, but it will go _twice_ as far, since those who produce the goods and services we desire won't have to pay taxes, either. In a stroke we'll be effectively _four times_ as rich. There's no equally simple way to estimate the cost of regulation. How can you estimate the cost of lost opportunities? Truckers say that they could ship goods for one-fifth the present price without it. Many businesses spend a third of their overhead complying with rules and filling out forms. The worst damage it does is to planning and innovation. Since you don't know what the whim of the legislature will be next year, how can you plan? Projects that require ten, twenty, or fifty years to mature? You might as well forget them. Let's calculate that deregulation will cut prices, once again, by half. Now our actual purchasing power, already quadrupled by "detaxification", is doubled again. _We now have eight times our former wealth_! What kind of world will _that_ result in? Future generations won't grasp, even remotely, the concept of inflation, or that the government once imprisoned people for competing with its own counterfeiting operation. They'll be used to a stable diversity of competing trade commodities -- gold, uranium, cotton, wheat, cowry shells -- which will not only flatten a lot of wildly swinging economic curves, but give newspapers something to print besides government handouts: "Cowrie shells sold late on the market today at 8 1/4. Oats and barley at 4 1/2, Uranium at 87." 87 what? Sheep, gold grams, kilowatts, gallons of oil -- who cares, as long as they're free market rates, determined by uncoerced bidding, buying, and selling? Hardly anyone, of course, will carry sheep, seashells, or barrels of oil around with them. Everyone assumes that 21st century barter will be carried out on ferro-magnetic media in electrical impulses. But I suspect that a few of us surly old curmudgeons, having spent our lives being swindled with paper and plastic -- and tracked by electronic impulse -- will insist on having something in our pockets that jingles. Young folks will look knowingly at us and wink. The future, as I see it, comes in segments: continuationm for however long, of things as they are, counterpointed by our increasing success -- as a result of this speech, no doubt -- at convincing others of the necessity and desirability of liberty. I've said we'll skip that period, and I wish we really could. Having sold others, we'll change what's left of what we have now into a free society: degovernmentalization of culture and the economy characterized by an eight-fold increase in individual purchasing power and an end to the importance of the State in our lives. Eight times richer, we'll be free to do whatever we wish with our new wealth. Why stick with black-and-white when you can have a color wallscreen in every room? Why drive an '84 Subaru when you can afford a brand-new Porsche? Why eat hamburger when you can have steak and lobster every night? Increased spending appears in the economy as increased demand, leading, despite government economists, not to shortages, but to increased production. Somebody has to make all those wallscreens, Porsches, steaks, and lobsters. With all that money loose, there's new investment in established companies as well as zillions of new ones striving to satisfy everyone's newfound consumer greed. Factories will spring up, old ones expand, obsolete machinery will be junked and new machinery installed. More people will be working, producing all those goods and services demanded by a newly-rich population consisting of themselves. Unemployment will disappear overnight. As labor becomes scarcer, wages will skyrocket, hours will shorten, work-weeks will truncate. "Headhunters" will flourish, not only stealing managerial talent, but bribing assembly workers to desert for even better wages, conditions, and benefits. Unable to figure out what happened, unions will dry up and blow away completely. Despite increased wages and benefits (leading to more buying, demand, production, and jobs), prices will plummet as demand drives industry to even greater efficiency. Plants now standing idle half the time will operate full-blast around the clock. Society will be geared to operating 25 hours a day, eight days a week. Against a chronic labor shortage, evil, exploitive capitalists will take unfair measures like free training, free day-care, and free health insurance. In short, everything that socialism ever led us to expect from government at the point of a bayonet, the market will provide voluntarily, as companies begin to compete ruthlessly for workers. Managers desperate for your talents will have to change their petty, coercive behavior. Their restraints on your freedom and insults to your honesty and intelligence will vanish, simply because, for once, they _need_ you, not some anonymous, numbered, plug-in module, but _you_. Oh, they'll resist at first. They'll try imports and foreign labor, but it'll be their undoing, as living and working standards -- and expectations -- rise abroad. Free world trade will have another effect: increased demand, increased production, more jobs, and lower prices. Monotonous, isn't it? They'll try more automation, but that's another trap. It always results in more -- not less -- employment. For each 19th century quill-pusher perched high at his desk, how many computer designers, engineers, manufacturers, assemblers, installers, repairmen, programmers, and key-punchers are there today? For every buggy-whip maker, how many involved in automotive ignition? And automation has another side-effect: it increases production, which lowers prices. In a free society, the availability and quality of goods and services increases constantly while prices drop. Wages and living standards escalate continuously. What we call a "boom" is normal and permanent. With no State to bloat the currency, good times have nothing to do with inflation. "Forced draft" advances in technology that we associate with war are a snail's pace when people are free to pursue the buck with all ten greedy little fingers. Which is why those future whippersnappers will think we're hallucinating about the bad old days of price-control, strikes, inflation, tariffs, and the IRS. And they'll want to know why we didn't buy out that pest David Rockefeller with our lunch money. Many problems _are_ trivial, viewed with the proper perspective. The high-technology answer to our civilization's weird desire for "flat clothing" didn't turn out to be a bigger, more complicated automated ironing-board, but simply clothing that _stayed_ flat when it was washed. The wrong perspective can lead to disaster. In the 1890s, according to Bob LeFevre, the government decided -- Club of Rome fashion -- that mere private corporations could never bear the cost of prospecting, drilling, extracting, refining, and distributing petroleum. Therefore, oil should be a State monopoly. A kid's book I have from the 50s opines that no single government could possibly finance a mission to the Moon and it would have to be done by the UN. (If the _Challenger_ disaster was a mess, think what a UN space program would be like!) These predictions should be kept in mind whenever we contemplate the inevitability of disaster or the impossibility of our dreams. The only prediction we can make _safely_ about the future is that it will be far more fantastic than we can _safely_ predict. Presently we live within a cramped, narrow, _chronically depressed_ culture, largely unaware of its limitations simply because we've never seen anything better. Faced with problems, we understandably -- but mistakenly -- view them from the worm's-eye level to which we've always been limited by the culture we live in. Solving today's problems, however, demands a vastly wider scope. We have to learn to think big -- bigger than we've ever dreamed or dared. Take the routine objection that firing millions of bureaucrats will lead to economic disaster, or that civil servants are unlikely to support the LP if it means doing away their own jobs. Our candidates tend to keep a low profile on this subject, but they should think big: as John Hospers once pointed out, ten million GIs were absorbed into the post-World War II economy with scarcely a ripple, despite somewhat less than laissez faire conditions. A booming free market suffers perpetual labor shortages; nobody will be required to persuade bureaucrats to enter the private sector to enjoy the benefits of that. They will desert in hordes. The State will shrink like the little dot when you turn off your TV, and vanish. Other problems are amenable to the same sort of analysis. For example, I'm not a very enthusiastic catastrophist, despite the fact that unfunded government liabilities currently seem to spell doom for Western civilization as we know it. Social Security alone is short by several trillion bucks, and it now looks like the early 21st Century will go up in a flourish of Molotov cocktails. In 1666, a great London fire wiped out a _third_ of the total wealth of England, a cataclysmic loss amounting to some 10 million dollars. Could it be we're using the wrong scale to assess our own financial problems? Trillions seems like about as much money as there ever will be -- but "seems" is a very conditional word. We have in our hands the means to create a market so vast and strong that even trillions will seem trivial by comparison. The Utopian vision can hasten the day when a free economy straightens out the mess left by our predecessors. Those inclined to Future Shock are in for a rough ride. Free trade, an end to disincentives, and steadily-increasing automation will spiral living standards upward dizzily. Just as uranium was once thrown aside to get at lead and tin, we have no way of knowing what untold sources of wealth, energy, and comfort we're stumbling over now. New materials, production methods, lifestyles, and opportunities will arise by the myriad every day, if not every hour. Already in our time, a manufacturing counter-revolution is under way: high-quality investment-casting, laser and electron-discharge cutting, detonic welding, ion implantation, computer-aided design, and computer-controlled machining, are all decreasing the amount of plastic and cardboard in our lives, increasing the titanium, steel, and glass. At the same time, plastics seem more like steel and glass every day, while even cardboard gets stronger and longer-lasting. Nations won't just emerge, they'll splash into the 21st century like the overripe melons Marx mentioned, but in a very different way than he intended. New territories opened by the free-market will make over-population one of the future's biggest jokes. Antarctica, Greenland, and northern Canada will all feel the plow and deliver up their wealth. The floor, the surface, the cubic volume of the sea, the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, all of the Solar System and open space itself will be subdivided. If the total human population reaches 40 billion or 400 billion, we'll have more elbow-room than we do now, and Marshall McCluhan's one-horse Global Village of the 1960s will turn into Times Squared. During the coming century, poverty and unemployment will become a dark, half-believed nightmare of the remote past. All our elaborate discussions of private charity in a Libertarian world will be academic where any basket-case who can twitch once for yes and twice for no will be desperately needed for quality control on a production line. They'll put chimpanzees and gorillas on the payroll and killer whales and porpoises will be buying split-level aquaria on the installment plan. Pollution will be another dead issue in a 21st century America where every square inch of real estate is private property and -- without any Environmental Protection Agency to "save" them -- individuals are free to sue polluters. In any case, no competitive industry will be able to afford the waste of energy and material that pollution represents. Not that there won't be wilderness: when they auction off the National Forests, I'll be there, bidding with all the other hunters and fishermen. To me, heaven is being able to fire a rifle in any direction from my front porch and not hit anyone but trespassers. As with charity, all our theoretical concern with police and security is a waste of breath. In the 21st century, peace will break out uncontrollably and cops will have to be re- trained for office-jobs. With victimless crime laws repealed and American cities populous and prosperous once again, 99% of the crime we presently endure will vanish. Our descendents won't understand how it ever became an issue. Middle-class values are market values. A wider regard for property, education, and long-range planning will mean less crime. A single mugging in Central Park will get four-inch headlines in New York's several dozen newsplastics. In the absence of laws against duelling, people will be more polite to each other and less inclined to offer unwanted advice. Either that or, thanks to natural selection, their grandchildren will have faster reflexes. Lacking gun control to protect them, the few criminals left in society won't live long enough to transmit their stupid-genes. The next century will give us a welcome look at the _other_ side of a familiar paradox: people who are free to carry weapons usually don't need them. Prisons will be abandoned when those who never did anything to hurt anyone are released. The rest of the convicts will be out working to restore their victims' property or health. Crimes against persons and property, including murder, will be civil offenses, with volunteer agencies acting for those without relatives or friends to "avenge" them. Restitution may even be possible for murder, given techniques of freezing corpses for later repair. Those who commit _irrevocable murder_ (and survive) will suffer the cruellest punishment of all: exile to a place where there's a government! The concerns of the left with conglomerates, multinational corporations, and monopolies is as misplaced as ours with charity and crime. Before the 19th century government invasion of the market, companies had reached their optimum size and begun to shrink. Although the government keeps competition off their backs today, huge companies must divide themselves into competing subsidiaries to survive. Increased competition will doom these dinosaurs, break up concentrations of wealth and power frozen by securities and tax laws, and produce companies much smaller than those of today. The survivors will be stuck with the boring old laissez faire task of pleasing as many customers as possible with the best quality goods and services possible at the lowest possible prices. It's possible you're way ahead of me by now -- and you may even have noticed that I haven't been following my own advice. All of these predictions I've been making are pretty general, pretty abstract, pretty impersonal. The time has come to answer the questions, "What do I really want; what's in it for me?" The Answer? Basically, we're all get to have our cake and say, "I told you so", too. Immediately, as we've seen, the free market will boost our purchasing- power eightfold, and this, of course, is only the beginning -- although I hesitate to risk your willing suspension of disbelief by estimating wages and prices several decades into the era of Unanimous Consent. Let's just say that we will have eight times as much disposable wealth. Even this rather modest multiplier will offer a range and choice of goods and services unimagineable today. One's basic material well-being will be much easier to maintain when a loaf of Grandma's Automated Bread goes for a nickel and steak for twenty cents a pound. Or how about a pair of two-dollar shoes or wristwatches for a dime a dozen? How about suits and dresses for ten bucks, or disposable outfits for a dollar? In fact, the toughest decision consumers make may be choosing between durability versus disposability: should you drive an imposing 2087 Rolls-Rolex Fusionmobile good for generations, or a plastic Mattel-Yugo easily discarded when you tire of it; should you wear a Saville Row three-piece ironclad business suit, or a toilet-paper toga. Increased leisure-time and plenty of loose cash will mean what it always has, more emphasis on expensive, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind items. We all may wind up running second, third, or fourth businesses on the side, which means, of course, more jobs, more buying, and so on. How about paying two to four thousand dollars for a home that's built to last, helped out by a slump in land prices when government holdings hit the market? The trend will be back to single private dwellings, on substantially larger lots, paid for in full out of this month's paycheck. If you can afford a home in the city and another in the mountains or at the beach, why not? One unhappy note for Howard Roark: higher living-standards will encourage an unRandish human vice for embellishment. They'll bring back Baroque, Roccoco, Victorian gingerbread, medieval gargoyles, and the new times will create their own elaborate forms, as well. Aztec Modern, anyone? For transportation, you'll choose between a five hundred dollar auto, a two thousand dollar personal aircraft, or some convertible combination. Or Laissez-Faire Airlines will fly you anywhere in the world for twenty bucks. Highways and railroads will benefit from a free market. Speed, safety, and efficiency will improve. 60-lane, 300 mile-per-hour ribbons of plastic will power your electric car by induction, provide guidance if you want to read or watch TV, dissipate rain, fog, ice and snow. Or, as I predicted in _The Probability Broach_, highways may evolve into contoured swaths of hardy grass for steam-powered hovercraft. Or both. Or something else entirely different. Our grandchildren will have a good laugh over the Carter "Energy Crisis" of the last decade being revived by Clintonite reactionaries, not just because any real shortages, then or now, are political in character, but because the free market will ultimately render fossil fuels obsolete. Fusion, using water for fuel and lasers, particle beams, or palladium for sparkplugs, producing as its only byproduct inert, useful, helium, will be driving our civilization the day after government gets out of the way. Fusion is the nuclear reaction that powers the stars; quasars are billions of times more energetic and we don't know what powers them. When science and industry are free of government interference, we may find out. Energy will be practically limitless and virtually free. I could go on for hours discussing the technomiracles you can read about in _Popular Science_, _Analog_, or any of the novels I've written. I've elaborated on them to this extent because I believe they're only possible under free market conditions, which explains why we never got the picture-phones and flying automobiles which science fiction promised us in the 1930s and 1940s. Read those other publications with that _caveat_ in mind, and you'll get the idea. Far more important are the social and psychological effects of freedom. I can't tell you what it's like to be free, having never had the chance to try it. I'd be up against the unpredictability of human action which any Austrian economist or quantum physicist delights in lecturing about. Authoritarians who still believe in a static model of "the way things ought to be" -- a model they're willing to impose at bayonet-point -- work very hard to make society dull and boring. Among Libertarians, the one rule is that nobody may impose his views on anybody else, which makes for an open-ended culture impossible to describe in detail -- I know, because I've tried harder than any other writer or scholar. There's no single Libertarian future, but as many different futures as individuals to create them. For each Sunday-supplement guess I could make about who'll take care of the street lights or paint stripes down the middle of the road, coming generations will produce thousands of answers not remotely similar to mine. Our future may be weird and confusing, but it'll never be dull and boring. So instead, try an experiment, one that'll give you a clearer picture of the future than I could draw in another hour or another hundred hours. Lean back in your chair. Relax. Imagine now that you'll never have to worry about money again. Never again for the rest of your life. You'll never waste another golden moment of your precious time tearing your hair, biting your fingernails, or shredding the inside of your mouth over paying the bills. There's no limit to what you can afford. It's no longer a significant factor in your plans. Now, say quietly to yourself: "All my life, I always really wanted _____", and fill in the blank. Finish the sentence yourself. Only _you_ know what it is you always really wanted. "All my life I always _really_ wanted _____". You may be surprised. How many things have you denied yourself or never even acknowledged, because there wasn't enough money? Or because your dreams were being consumed to feed bureaucrats, build atomic bombs, launch nuclear submarines, construct government office buildings? Unanimous Consent will change all that. Everything you always really wanted can be yours, if you are free. Retirement? Save it out of pocket change. Your kids' education? A new home, car, boat, plane? All of the above? Nothing more than ordinary, easily accessible objectives which will hardly dent the family budget. If you are free. "All my life, I always really wanted _____". Is it illegal? A machine-gun to mow down beer cans on a lazy country afternoon? Driving your car at 185 miles per hour? A nickel bag that really costs a nickel? An android sex-slave? A dynamite collection? A date with a one-legged jockey? It's all yours, as long as you don't hurt anyone. If you are free. "All my life, I always really wanted _____". The only thing that Unanimous Consent, that individual liberty _can't_ give you, the only goods it can't deliver, is _power_ over the lives of others. And yet, through that one "failure", that single "sacrifice", we achieve everything else. "All my life, I always really wanted _____". And that, my fellow Libertarians, is the ultimate promise of Unanimous Consent, an invention so fundamental, potent, revolutionary, and unstoppable, that Scientific Method and the Industrial Revolution pale by comparison. Now you understand why I'm a fanatic, why I must make _you_ fanatic, why we must create an entire nation, a whole world of fanatics. I'm fighting for everything I always really wanted! _That's_ what's in it for me! That's what it's is all about! Everything. You. Always. Really. Wanted. To the traditional strategies of our movement, education and politics, now add a third -- practical Utopianism -- which will break trails for the other two. While others teach, and run for office, I'll continue writing science fiction. Educators and candidates will find, as they're already finding, that their students and voters came to them because of the promises I made them. They can always mess it up, of course. They can disappoint neophytes excited about the future and eager to begin creating it. They can euphemize the difficult, embarrassing concepts, temporize the uncompromised positions we must take if we want to win. They can follow the chicken-livered, quail-hearted leadership of many previous LP candidates, the cowards, cravens, cringers, and crybabies whose campaigns are indistinguishable from those of Republicans and Democrats. They can emulate the weak-kneed recreants, faint- hearted, faltering, gritless, pluckless invertebrates who counsel restraint in the face of tyranny. They can accept the advice from pusillanimous milksops, gutless, spineless, spunk- deficient slinkers and skulkers, weaklings, dastards, and poltroons fearful to take an open approach with those who need to learn from us. Or they can stop waiting for an electoral victory to bestow itself upon us, stop depending on the mass media controlled by the enemies of liberty, and instead, take big bites of the future, on their own, in sure and certain knowledge that Heinlein was right when he said, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing". That's the only way our future's going to happen. We're going to win as soon as we recognize, as soon as we communicate, as soon as we act on one simple fact: in order to "capture the hearts and minds" of America and the world, in order to have the major part in determining what the "shape of things to come" is going to be, we must first pull off a _coup d'etat_ in the Province of Utopia. "All my life, I always _really_ wanted _____". It's as simple as that. It really is.