From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

L. Neil Smith (full name Lester Neil Smith III), also known to readers and fans as El Neil, is a Libertarian science fiction author and political activist. He was born on May 12, 1946 in Denver. His works include the trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (1983), Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon (1983), Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka (1983), and the Omnibus edition The Lando Calrissian Adventures. He also wrote the novels Pallas, The Forge of the Elders, and The Probability Broach, each of which won the Libertarian Futurist Society's annual Prometheus Award for best libertarian science fiction novel.

Writing career

L. Neil Smith should not be confused with J. Neil Schulman, another Libertarian science fiction writer. Smith is aware of this occasional confusion, once humorously signing a letter to Samuel Edward Konkin III as "Neil (L., not J.)"

Several of his works constitute the North American Confederacy series:

• The Probability Broach (1980) is an alternate history novel in which history has taken a different turn because a single word in the Declaration of Independence was changed. The United States has become replaced by an anarchist / Libertarian society, the North American Confederacy, in this parallel universe, also known to science fiction fans as the Gallatin Universe, due to the pivotal role of Albert Gallatin in the point of divergence. The antagonists of the series are styled Federalists after the historical political party of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. In 2004, a graphic novel version was released, illustrated by Scott Bieser.
• The Venus Belt (1981) is the next written novel from the Gallatin Universe, which takes place in outer space and discusses other settlements in our solar system. The Federalists are attempting to base a new civilization in outer space, with a plan to someday return to take over the government.
• Their Majesties' Bucketeers is the third novel set in the Gallatin Universe. The story is a pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing the Lamviin, a trilaterally symmetrical race of aliens native to the arid planet of Sodde Lydfe. Their Majesties' Bucketeers introduces characters who would later interact with others in the Gallatin Universe.
• The Nagasaki Vector is about a time traveller who is shifted into the Gallatin Universe by the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki (on August 9, 1945) during World War II.
• In Tom Paine Maru, the entrepreneurs of the Confederacy travel from world to world, exploring the various kinds of messes made by the Federalists who had been shifted back in time and scattered at random over the universe at the conclusion of The Venus Belt. The Federalists had created dozens of colonies, all of which had suffered disaster and retrogression under Federalist rule. Smith uses this device to criticize non-libertarian forms of government.
• In The Gallatin Divergence, a time-traveling Federalist woman wants to change history but is opposed by the protagonists of The Probability Broach. As these two forces clash, history is once again altered and a third timeline is created.
• The American Zone (2001), the most recent entry in the series, is a direct sequel to The Probability Broach concerned with the refugees from various anti-libertarian versions of the United States who take up residence in the Confederacy, and the response of the Confederacy to terrorist violence.

Another series of his works constitute the Lando Calrissian (Star Wars) series:

• Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (1983), the first novel in the series, was set in the Star Wars expanded universe, between the events of the Star Wars films Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope, and concerned character Lando Calrissian. When Lando heard that the planets of the Rafa System were practically buried in ancient alien treasure, he hopped aboard the Millennium Falcon, never stopping to think that someone might be conning the con man.
• Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon (1983), the second novel in the series, is a direct sequel to Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu concerned with The Oseon, a solar system of luxury hotels catering to the underemployed filthy rich -- every gambler's dream come true. And so it was for Lando and his robot companion Vuffi Raa until Lando broke the gambler's cardinal rule: never beat a cop at high-stakes games of chance.
• Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka (1983), the most recent novel in the series, is a direct sequel to Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon concerned with how, for a year, Lando and Vuffi Raa, his robot astrogator, had roamed space. But then Lando had gone out on a limb to help a race of persecuted aliens, and now he and Vuffi were up against several sets of their own enemies.
• The Lando Calrissian Adventures Omnibus Edition (1994), is an omnibus collection of the three Lando Calrissian novels, Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka .

Other works:

• Pallas is the first installment of what Smith has called "The Ngu Family Saga"[1], a planned four-volume series. Pallas is the story of Emerson Ngu, a boy who lives in a dystopian socialist commune in a crater on the asteroid Pallas. Emerson creates a crystal radio and is astonished to learn of the world outside the commune. Escaping, he discovers that the rest of Pallas is a libertarian utopia. Unable to forget his semi-enslaved family -- whose "workers' paradise" is starving to death -- he innovates a cheap but durable gun (because the Libertarians on Pallas, to their shame, did not have a domestic firearms industry), and sets about liberating his former commune. At the same time, he must learn the skills necessary for life in the outside world. The novel thus functions both as a bildungsroman and a story of political revolution.
• Ceres is the second work in "The Ngu Family Saga," completed on December 25, 2004, planned to be followed by Ares, both set in the Pallas universe and being funded by private investors. The Ceres Project was organized by Alan R. Weiss, a friend of Neil's. After efforts to find a publisher for Ceres proved fruitless, on March 23, 2009, Smith decided to begin publishing the novel online, one chapter being added each week.
• The Mitzvah, which is a novel about a Catholic priest who is a pacifist and influenced by socialist values of the 1960s. His entire world is shattered when he learned the German immigrant parents he grew up with adopted him, and that his true parents were a Jewish couple who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Politics

In 1999, Smith announced that he would run for president in 2000 as an independent if his supporters would gather 1,000,000 online petition signatures asking him to run[2]. After failing to achieve even 1,500 signatures, his independent campaign quietly died. He next tried an abortive run for the Libertarian Party nomination, which ended almost as quickly when, in the California primary, Harry Browne overwhelmingly defeated him, 71% to 9%[3].

However, Smith did appear as the Libertarian Party candidate for president on the Arizona ballot in 2000, although Browne was chosen by the party's national convention, due to a major dispute between the Libertarian Party's national organization and their Arizona affiliate. He and running mate Vin Suprynowicz received 5,775 votes. Shortly thereafter, Smith's supporters announced a new 1,000,000-signature petition drive; however, in late 2003, with the new drive once again failing to achieve even a small fraction of that total, Smith announced that he would no longer pursue political office.

Smith is no newcomer to the Libertarian Party, though: he joined in 1972 (just after its beginnings in 1971), in 1977 and 1979 served on the Platform Committee, and in 1978 ran for state legislature in Colorado (winning 15% of the vote with a total expenditure of forty-four dollars). His influence, and that of the "Ad Hoc Conspiracy to Draft L. Neil Smith" (which has hundreds of informal members) helped influence the 2004 Libertarian Party selection of Michael Badnarik for President (although third-place candidate Gary Nolan's endorsement of Badnarik may have had a more immediate effect). Badnarik was profoundly influenced by Hope, by L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman (Zelman founded and is Executive Director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership). Smith endorsed the Free State Project in 2004, and endorsed Badnarik's campaign for President in 2004.

Smith is the founder of and regularly contributes essays to The Libertarian Enterprise, an influential anarcho-capitalist and paleolibertarian journal, and his most influential essay is considered to be Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?.

Published works

North American Confederacy series

• The Probability Broach (1980, unexpurgated edition 1996, graphic novel 2004)
• The Nagasaki Vector (1983)
• The American Zone (2001)
• The Venus Belt (1980)
• Their Majestys' Bucketeers (1981)
• Tom Paine Maru (1984)
• The Gallatin Divergence (1985)
  • Brightsuit MacBear (1988) [1st in new series set in NAC universe]
  • Taflak Lysandra (1989) [2nd in new series set in NAC universe]

Lando Calrissian (Star Wars) series

• Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (1983)
• Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon (1983)
• Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka (1983)
• Omnibus edition The Lando Calrissian Adventures (1994)

Forge of the Elders Series

• Contact and Commune (1990)
• Converse and Conflict (1990)
• Forge of the Elders (2000) [comprising the previous two books plus a previously-unpublished 3rd book]

Ngu Family Saga

• Pallas (1991)
• Ceres (2009) (on-line publication, with a new chapter added each week)

Stand-alone works

• The Wardove (1986)
• The Crystal Empire (1986)
• Henry Martyn (1989)
• Bretta Martyn (1997) [sequel to Henry Martyn]
• Roswell, Texas (2006) (on-line comic with art by Scott Bieser)
• Timepeeper (2008) (on-line comic with art by Sherard Jackson)
• Phoebus Krumm (2009) (on-line comic with art by Scott Bieser)

Non-Fiction

• Lever Action (2001)

With Aaron Zelman

• The Mitzvah (1999)
• Hope (2001)

Criticism

Smith's vision of a libertarian utopia, particularly in reference to the free ownership of firearms, was criticised by implication in the military science-fiction novel, First to Fight, the first volume of the StarFist series by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. The principal action in First to Fight takes place on a planet named Elneal. David Sherman reportedly named the planet after L. Neil Smith^[1] because of Sherman's belief that the conditions portrayed on Elneal (and the real-world country of Somalia, upon which the situation on Elneal is based) are the logical conclusion of unfettered civilian ownership of firearms.

External links

• L. Neil Smith's website
• "My Political Plans", an essay by Smith
• Advocates for Self-Government page on Smith
• The book award annals List of L. Neil Smith's award-winning and finalist books
• L. Neil Smith's blog
• Roswell, Texas new on-line comic by Neil.
• Asteroids in Science Fiction
• LibraryThing author profile

References

From Wikiquote

L. Neil Smith (full name- Lester Neil Smith III, also known by his nickname El Neil or The Sage of the High Plains) is a libertarian science fiction author and political activist. He was born on May 12, 1946 in Denver. His works include the novels Pallas, The Forge of the Elders, and The Probablity Broach, each of which won the Libertarian Futurist Society's annual Prometheus Award for best libertarian novel.

Sourced

• People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.
  Make no mistake: all politicians — even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership — hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician — or political philosophy — can be put.
  If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you.
  • "Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?"[1]

• [I]f a politician won't trust you, why should you trust him? If he's a man — and you're not — what does his lack of trust tell you about his real attitude toward women? If "he" happens to be a woman, what makes her so perverse that she's eager to render her fellow women helpless on the mean and seedy streets her policies helped create? Should you believe her when she says she wants to help you by imposing some infantile group health care program on you at the point of the kind of gun she doesn't want you to have?
  On the other hand — or the other party — should you believe anything politicians say who claim they stand for freedom, but drag their feet and make excuses about repealing limits on your right to own and carry weapons? What does this tell you about their real motives for ignoring voters and ramming through one infantile group trade agreement after another with other countries?
  Makes voting simpler, doesn't it? You don't have to study every issue — health care, international trade — all you have to do is use this X-ray machine, this Vulcan mind-meld, to get beyond their empty words and find out how politicians really feel. About you. And that, of course, is why they hate it.
  • "Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?"

• A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.
  • Zero Aggression Principle ("ZAP"), from "Who is a Libertarian?"

• What I want to accomplish artistically amounts to nothing more than fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution.
  • Statement of purpose, L. Neil Smith's "The Webley Page"[2]

• Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.
  • "The Atlanta Declaration,"[3] presented at WeaponsCon I, Atlanta, Georgia, September 1987

• My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war - in fact it's been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion - and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don't read fiction.
  • "Merchants of Fear" Presented to the Boulder County Libertarian Party, 20 February 1994 [4]

• As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear.
  • "Merchants of Fear"

• Poverty is a solved problem - all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.
  • "Merchants of Fear"

• Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.
  • "Merchants of Fear"

• The function of government is to provide you with service; the function of the media is to supply the Vaseline.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections" (15 January 1998)[5]

• Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• Choose your enemies carefully: you'll probably be known much better and far longer for who they were, than for anything else you ever managed to accomplish.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• The fact that nobody asks you to sing is not an indication that you should sing louder. This sounds obvious until it's applied to matters like mass transportation. There are virtually no private mass transit companies. This does not represent the failure of the market to provide a needed service, it represents the failure of an unneeded service to go away!
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• Great men don't 'move to the center' — great men move the center!
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican'.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• Once you've taken a public stand you know is right, never back down; anything less than a rock-hard stance will let your enemies nibble you to death.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• Those who sell their liberty for security are understandable, if pitiable, creatures. Those who sell the liberty of others for wealth, power, or even a moment's respite deserve only the end of a rope.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• Try never to speak of your enemies by name. Any publicity is still publicity — and there are those for whom your disapproval constitutes a recommendation.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• You cannot force me to agree with you. You can force me to act as though I agree with you — but then you'll have to watch your back. All the time.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• Money, first and foremost, is a medium of communication, conveying the information we call 'price'. Government control of the money supply is censorship, a violation of the First Amendment. Inflation is a lie.
  • "Some New Tactical Reflections"

• I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.
  • "I'm Tired (With Apologies to Pearl Bailey and Madeleine Kahn) Presented to the second annual Liberty Round Table Conclave near Estes Park, Colorado, 2 July 1998[6]

• The first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists — or ever existed, or ever will exist — is a kleptocracy, meaning 'rule by thieves'. Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce. If the taxpayer/voters won't willingly fork over to end poverty, then maybe they'll cough up to fight drugs or terrorism. Conflicting ideologies, as presently constituted, are nothing more than a cover for what's really going on, like the colors of competing gangs.
  • "Why Aren't We There Yet?"

• Gun ownership is a problem, not because it represents any physical danger to [the IRS]. Americans have proven dismayingly forbearing in that regard. But people who own guns often look at the world differently than those who don't. That's the real danger to social and political parasites. Roughly 25% of Americans own guns. The number increases each time there's widespread discussion of more gun control - call it what it is: 'victim disarmament'. If the figure ever rises to 50%, I suspect the widespread discussion will be about repealing the 16th Amendment.
  • "Vermont Fudge,"[7] originally published in The Sierra Times 18 March 2002

• It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.
  • "How Many Americans Does It Take to Change a Dim Bulb?" Presented to the Second Annual Freedom Summit, Phoenix, Arizona, 12 & 13 October 2002[8]

• Like the government, corporations must be bound with the chains of the Constitution, and especially of the Bill of Rights.
  • "How Many Americans Does It Take to Change a Dim Bulb?"

• We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it... for the children.
  • "How Many Americans Does It Take to Change a Dim Bulb?"

• It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.
  • "Empire of Lies" Presented to the Libertarian Party of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 15 June 2003[9]

• Thanks to guys like Boss Tweed, famous for saying, 'I don't give a damn who does the voting, as long as I do the nominating,' there hasn't been an honest election in the USA since sometime around the War Between the States.
  • "Libertarians: The Connies Speak Out (Part Two),"[10] 2 October 2005

• To politicians, solved problems represent a dire threat — of unemployment and poverty. That's why no problem ever tackled by the government has ever been solved. What they want is lots of problems they can promise to solve, so that we'll keep electing them — or letting them keep their jobs in a bureaucracy metastasizing like cancer.
  • "Of Pharaohs and Firearms"[11]

• I grew up in the Bible Belt — not the buckle end, as the cliche goes, but the other end where all the holes are. You know what kind of holes. I don't mean to underestimate them, but if you laugh at these idiots enough — show them up as the phonies most of them are — they'll go away.
  I'm concerned about another kind of religious fundamentalism: environmentalism. The Greenies have no more respect for scientific truth and individual liberty than the Goddies do. Both operate on faith, rather than fact. And neither of them has any qualms about dusting off the rack, the pincers, the Iron Maiden, and the red hot branding irons in order to see their mythology ensconced as beyond question.
  • Interview, Ari Armstrong, "Catching Up with L. Neil Smith," [12] 7 December 2006

• We're all a bunch of badminton birdies who just got batted from the Republican side of the court to the Democrat side. We'll eventually get batted back again, of course, unless libertarians can manage to do something about it. If your principal concern, like mine, is freedom, there's absolutely no discernable difference between the two 'majors,' and for all practical purposes, they're one big party — the Boot On Your Neck party — pretending to be two.
  • Interview, Ari Armstrong, "Catching Up with L. Neil Smith"

• We live in times of wonderful technology and crappy politics. The task before us now is not to let the latter destroy the former.
  • "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Des Moines,"[13] 29 June 2008

• ...[T]ry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.
  • "Only Nixon,"[14] 9 November 2008

• Barack Obama is the pampered pet of Chicago gangsters. He is good buddies with a murderous African dictator. And his wacko leftist academic background evokes memories of the style of sideways thinking that inspired the death marches in Cambodia.
  The man burns to have a private army all his own. During the election campaign, he threatened to create a 'domestic security force' as large and well-funded as the entire U.S. military, just the thing to send door-to-door (as the police attempted in the Chicago projects) searching for privately-owned weapons. Sure enough, the very first item to appear on his website www.change.org following the election was a proposal to require 'mandatory community service' — 50 hours a year from junior high school and high school students, 100 hours from those in college — or the individuals in question needn't expect to graduate.
  • "Only Nixon"

• Over the years, I've made a lot of predictions that have come true. Remember this one: two years from now, even those who supported Barack Obama most enthusiastically will be feeling a certain nostalgia about George W. Bush and secretly wishing they'd voted for John McCain.
  Yeah, I know, disgusting. But that's the way the world works. Nobody alive today would willingly admit to voting for Adolf Hitler, although the third or fourth worst mass-murderer in history (behind Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, and, on a per capita basis, Pol Pot) won by a landslide. Once the outrages to come have ended and there are thousands — perhaps even millions — of Obama's crimes to account for, would you want to admit to having voted to make those crimes possible?
  • "Only Nixon"

• Conventional politicians almost never think their philosophy through and set it down for everyone to examine. In most cases, they don't dare. Republicans would soon discover that they're actually socialists. Democrats would discover that they're actually fascists.
  • "What Libertarians Believe,"[15] 4 January 2009

• Ask yourself this question: if you were one of America's Founders, and you'd just surprised the world (and yourself) by winning a war of secession against the most powerful and heavy-handed government on the planet, and the last thing in the world you wanted for yourself, for your children, or for your grandchildren was to fall beneath the heels of its jackboots again, what would you want the Bill of Rights to mean?
  And if the first act, under martial law, of that powerful, heavy-handed government had been to try to take your guns away at Lexington and Concord, would you have written a Second Amendment to guarantee its 'right' to own and carry weapons? Would you have written a Second Amendment that was subject to whatever government claims is 'reasonable regulation'? Or would you have written the Second Amendment to forbid government from having anything to do with your guns?
  Anything whatever.
  • "Police Reform,"[16] 11 January 2009

• Politicians must be taught, in no uncertain terms, that the only real way to economically 'stimulate' the Productive Class is to stop stealing their fucking money! If the government announced a total tax amnesty, as well as a complete, permanent end to individual and corporate taxes — repealing all unconstitutional economic regulations would help, too — this depression would be over by the end of the week.
  • "Collectivism's Last Stand,"[17] 18 January 2009

• Government is doing the exact opposite of what really needs to be done. George Bush and Barack Obama have pumped trillions more in counterfeit currency and credit into an economy already deathly ill from such treatment. If it goes on, we stand to suffer hyperinflation (all inflation consists of, no matter what they told you in Economics 101, is government generation of phony money) followed by another, very possibly terminal depression. Before it's over, the country — if not the whole world — will be locked down under brutal military rule, and our species likely will never again know freedom, progress, or prosperity.
  • "The Unnecessary Depression,"[18] 1 February 2009

• Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.
  • "The Unnecessary Depression"

• All real libertarians are dedicated to the eventual elimination of all taxes. That's one way you can tell them from the fakes. If anyone asks what government will run on, tell them it's not our problem. If they can create a 'government' that doesn't initiate force and steal from us, that doesn't break things and kill people in the enforcement of the will of parasites, that doesn't subsist by beating individuals up and killing them, they're welcome to try. Just leave us out of it altogether.
  • "The Unnecessary Depression"

• I have long argued that we need to reopen Alcatraz to house government criminals, and let tourists on excursion boats in San Francisco Bay pay to chum the water with meat with an expired sell-by date that would otherwise have to be discarded.
  • "It Has to Cost Them Something," [19] 8 February 2009

• One of the nastiest aspects of the 'no-fly list' — and believe it or not, its authors are proud of this part — is that you can't find out whether you're on it until you've paid for your ticket and are standing in line to get your boarding pass. Denied the service that you paid for, to my knowledge there is no way to get your money back. Nor is there any way to find out why you're on the list, or how you can get off. It is known that civil rights advocates of various kinds have been placed on the list, apparently because they're civil rights advocates.
  • "It Has to Cost Them Something"

• Just about everybody in politics has something to hide. The higher they rise in the system, the more skeletons they have stuffed in their closets. And as we have all come to appreciate, this goes double — or perhaps even squared — for politicos who got their start in Chicago. And because the system no longer cares about our rights (to the extent it ever did) we can no longer focus solely on issues related to them, but must cast about more widely to ensnare and defeat the enemies of liberty.
  • "It Has to Cost Them Something"

• I have a recurring daymare that when the Glorious People's SWAT Teams smash their way in, most of us — by which I mean members of the general freedom movement — will be caught flatfooted, sitting in our underwear behind our computer monitors, guzzling Jolt and gorging on Cheetos, while arguing with our friends and enemies online about immigration or abortion, two of the issues that the Lefties know they can always rely on to keep that general freedom movement divided and powerless.
  • "Pushing Rope,"[20] 15 February 2009

• I do know enough about economics — and so do you — to understand that the 'stimulus program' of Barack Obama and his ravenous parasitic hordes, supposedly designed to 'repair' America's broken economy, reveals him to be unimaginably stupid, gibberingly insane, or simply the biggest, most barefaced criminal thug ever to occupy the White House.
  And that's saying a lot.
  • "A Little Austrian Flea,"[21] 1 March 2009

• Only someone as puffed up and demented as John Maynard Keynes, every left wing fascist's sainted mentor in this connection, could manage to convince himself that taxing America's Productive Class can restore it to prosperity. In point of fact, it's like screwing for chastity, guzzling alcohol for sobriety, or gorging to fight gluttony. It's like killing indiscriminately for peace — oops, Democrats, Republicans and their moral and spiritual ilk have devoutly believed that particular bit of perverse nonsense since at least the War of 1812.
  • "A Little Austrian Flea"

• The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual — and his rights — as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.
  • "Cambodian Road Trip,"[22] 15 March 2009

• It seems that Wikipedia.com, that splendid source for all kinds of information, is no longer dedicated to the truth, assuming it ever was.
  Individuals who have tried to edit the pages about Barack Obama — to reflect the incontrovertible fact that he is not God, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan — report that their contributions have vanished within minutes of posting them, and that they, themselves, have been suspended for three days following each 'infraction'.
  When some sort of official at Wikipedia was contacted about this, she stonewalled, claiming that this censorship was the work of 'volunteers', implying they were somehow beyond control of Wikipedia itself.
  Like the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge were 'volunteers'.
  • "Announcifications From Your Publicatorialist: Wikipedia, Missouri, and Ceres,"[23]
    15 March 2009

• Many individuals spend a considerable portion of their lifetimes in terror of one imagined catastrophe or another. The classic is that your immortal soul will be consigned to eternal torment in the never-ending subterranean barbecue if you fail to follow the whacky edicts of one particular set of puckered dogwhistles or another. You may recall from the great movie Strange Days that a "dogwhistle", is a guy whose asshole is so tight that when he farts, only dogs can hear him.
  • "The Bad Guys,"[24] 28 April 2009

• Nobody would claim that America has never made mistakes, never failed to live up to its own rhetoric. Nothing in the universe is perfect. There isn’t a nation anywhere on the planet whose record for slavery and slaughter isn’t worse. What the British did to the Irish and the Scots would have had their leaders doing the hemp dance right along with the Nazis at Nuremberg. And even the Swiss thought it was acceptable to inflict unspeakable cruelties on Gypsies and their children.
  The difference, for better or worse, is that America never seems to stop examining and reexamining its historical failures, while other countries do their damnedest to sweep theirs under the rug and forget them.
  • "Wanna Buy a Future?"[25] 2 June 2009

• "Global Warming" represents the last gasp of so-called "scientific progressivism", a mass of pitifully transparent falsehoods being employed to justify reducing mankind under the absolute despotism of "experts", the obvious implication being that we can’t even breathe responsibly. Environmentalism, Gaianism, is a religion on the basis of which — illegally under the First Amendment — public policy is being generated. Exhaling carbon dioxide is Original Sin, a reliable source of unlimited power and wealth to a Parasitic Class of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops with which our civilization now finds itself infested.
  • "Wanna Buy a Future?"

• There’s a big difference between keeping the peace, which is something folks do pretty well themselves, and enforcing the law, which is another thing altogether.
  • Ceres, Chapter Fourteen[26], 2009

• Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective — economic value, anyway — while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process.
  • Ceres, Chapter Eighteen[27], 2009

• The embarrassing truth — the brontosaurus in the broom closet that nobody wants to talk about — is that the Republican Party was never the party of freedom. That Goldwater business in the 1960s was a fluke, immediately snuffed out by "older, wiser heads" in the GOP like those of Nelson Rockefeller, Weeping Willy Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Romney. The Republican Party was created in the 1850s by northeastern mercantilists just like them, to crush the hopes of poor southerners for individual liberty and independence, and keep them bound in serfdom, paying 80 percent of all taxes collected in America.
  • "The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet"[28] 18 October 2009

• The War on Drugs is over. Drugs won. It's time to stop wasting money, destroying lives, grinding up the Bill of Rights, and giving greater and greater power to the jackbooted thugs, in an unnecessary and futile attempt to enforce one group's ideas about what chemicals and vegetables some other group ought to manufacture, cultivate, distribute, purchase, possess, and consume. Repeal the drug laws, and prices will drop a thousandfold, driving most participants out of the business.
  • "The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet"

• Any politico who's afraid of his constituents being armed, should be. Leaders of the anti-gun movement (for the most part, politicians who enthusiastically advocate confiscatory taxation and government control of everything) realize that a populace is much easier to herd, loot — and dispose of — if it has been stripped of its weapons. The naked fraud and transparent fascism of victim disarmament must be eradicated through the repeal of all gun laws at every level of government.
  • "The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet"

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

L. Neil Smith

• L. Neil Smith's website
• "My Political Plans", an essay by Smith
• Extropians mailing list - some are L. Neil Smith's friends
• Advocates for Self-Government page on Smith
• Tactical Reflections, Some Tactical Reflections, More Tactical Reflections, Even More Tactical Reflections, and Too Many Tactical Reflections (collection)
• The Libertarian Enterprise Archives (almost every issue of this "Reader-Supported eMagazine" contains articles, letters, and other commentary written by L. Neil Smith)