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NOTES
Revised June 2019

1. The Open Letter is reprinted in Joan Kennedy Taylor, ed., Liberty Against Power: Essays by Roy A. Childs, Jr. (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1994), pp. 145-56, under the subtitle it carried in The Rational Individualist, "Objectivism and the State." Despite disagreements with the editor on some matters, I strongly recommend this book not only for the essays it contains, but for the short biographical essay by Taylor. The influence Roy had on the libertarian movement cannot be gauged simply from his essays. It extended through the books we read, many of which we might not never have heard of but through him, to say nothing of his lengthy letters and telephone calls and faxes, facts for which Taylor has a deep appreciation. There is also a warm tribute by Thomas Szasz.

I discussed the immediate influence of the Open Letter in the first part of my series on the illegitimacy of the republic, "This government is illegitimate ... and you don't have to be an anarchist to see it." It is available here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110723132732/http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/racolar.html

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2. At this same meeting, Morris was excited that Roy had recently managed to win Robert D. Kephart over to free-market anarchism. Kephart, an entrepreneur with a reputation for high energy, was then the publisher of the conservative weekly, Human Events. His change of mind was to have far-reaching consequences for the libertarian movement and for Roy and me, both personally and professionally.

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3. In the July 1973 issue of Books for Libertarians, Kephart announced his intention to publish Libertarian Review in the fall of 1973. From market tests he ran that summer, however, he determined that the libertarian movement and the market for libertarian books were still not sufficiently robust to follow through with that plan. Even so, with the September 1973 issue he began using the "Justicia" logo that was later carried over to Libertarian Review until it was dropped in mid 1977. And in October 1974, he began using the name "Libertarian Review," though there was no immediate change of format.

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4. Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Spring 1968 (Vol. IV, No. 1), pp. 84-98. The Rampart Journal was a publication of Robert LeFevre's Rampart College. In the Open Letter, Roy characterized his arguments in this earlier piece as "ineffective and weak." I find them interesting and provocative, if not quite as compelling as those he produced in later works.

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5. "The Cashing In: The Student 'Rebellion'," in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Signet Books, 1971), p. 38; The Objectivist Newsletter, July-September 1965. The comments on civil disobedience are on p. 40. "The Cashing In" was also reprinted in the paperback edition of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

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6. Rampart Journal, Summer 1968 (Vol. IV, No. 2), pp. 1-18. In using the term "autarchy" Roy is reflecting the thought of Robert LeFevre, whose essay "Autarchy" (Rampart Journal, Vol. II, No. 2) he quoted: "[Governments] will be abandoned when YOU demonstrate ... that your will is strong enough to control your actions within a framework of non-molestation. Do this in your own case with your own life in your own affairs and no political agent or agency can justify its existence on grounds that you require its help." (p. 16; quoted in Childs, as it happens, also on p. 16) LeFevre eschewed the term "anarchism."

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7. Roy was never misled to believe that either conservatives or the New Left were genuinely anti-state. For the sake of analysis he is merely taking them at their word, or rather taking the general impression that each, for its own purposes, created.

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8. Rand, The Objectivist Newsletter, February 1965, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 7-8; reprinted in Leonard Piekoff, ed., The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand (New York: Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 17-22). Excerpts can be found http://www.freedomkeys.com/ar-whodecides.htm.

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9. Formerly the Institute of Objectivist Studies. Bidinotto's essay can now be found at Robert Bidinotto: Contra Anarchism.

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10. TLD posted the debate in audio form in November 2015.

Robert Kephart was a pioneer in the marketing of spoken-word cassettes. His Audio Forum featured recordings of speakers ranging from conservative heroes (such as Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, and even Madame Chiang Kai Shek) to libertarians (such as Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, and Karl Hess). Later, he used Audio Forum to market entire investment conferences. By mid 1979 he had sold Audio Forum to Jeffrey Norton Publishers, Inc.

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11. The timing here is a little problematic. The Individualist was nearly always late, sometimes months later than the date on the cover, and any essay published in it in the early 1970s must be thought of as having been completed anywhere from one month to six months before the date on the issue in which it appeared.

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12. In a review of The Common Sense of Politics (Books for Libertarians, July 1972, p. 3), Roy wrote that Adler's attempt to refute anarchism "is more convincing than almost any other work I have read.... Although it is wrong, this is the best statement of a revised Aristotelian-Thomistic political philosophy that I have seen, and I have profited from it a great deal."

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13. A response to Roy's discussion of Mises was published in The Individualist, May 1972: Robert M. Cloes, "The Praxeological Approach," pp. 18-21.

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14. His paper, "Land Reform and the Entitlement Theory of Justice," is reprinted in Taylor, pp. 185-208.

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15. Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 23-33; it is reprinted in Taylor, pp. 157-78, and can be downloaded from http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/1_1/1_1_4.pdf.

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16. "Anarchist Illusions," in Taylor, pp. 179-83. The fragment is available at the Thornwalker “Recoveries” page.

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17. Taylor "feels" that the arguments of limited-government libertarians like herself were decisive. She reports that Roy had said that the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 had been a "turning point for him." That, at least, would be consistent with his later considering the chaos of 1982 Beirut to be an example of real-life anarchy.

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18. Smith's account of this conversation, "On the 'Secret Refutation' of R.A. Childs, Jr.," can be found at https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/excursions/introducing-anarchism-justice-roy-childs-jr-part-5.

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19. In an earlier, longer review of Power and Market (The Individualist, July 1970, pp. 14-16) Roy remarked that Rothbard had not given sufficient attention to how a market in defense would function: "In chapter one [Rothbard] gives summary answers to the questions of how a free market can enforce the rights of person and property against aggressors without a government. Unfortunately, he doesn't go into this practical problem enough...."

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20. Reprinted as "Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Movement" (Taylor, pp. 265-81). It is on the Web in four parts listed at http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/books/other/power.html. (Scroll down to "Related Links.")

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21. It may be relevant in considering Roy's views of political action to mention that in 1971 or 1972 he told me that he had been approached to ghost-write a campaign book for — hold on to your hat — George Wallace. He did not tell me who had approached him, but he did seriously consider taking on the project; apparently there was some real money at stake. He joked that if Wallace was elected, he might actually be in a position to influence the administration. At least I hope he was joking.

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22. I treat this error in my reply to Jacob Hornberger's Five Questions.

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23. In a statement of autobiographical revisionism Roy says that one of his mentors as a teenager was "Murray Rothbard, particularly through my acquaintance with one of his associates, the late Wilson Clark." (pp. 180-81) One would never guess that Roy and Rothbard enjoyed a close friendship over those early years. As for Wilson Clark, I never heard Roy speak of him except once and that in a gutter context I will not repeat. To mention him in this context would have been a slap in Rothbard's face. Wilson Clark it was who delivered the famous "necktie speech" that resulted in the "inglorious end" to the first New York Libertarian Conference. His ultraleftist message was carried on by other speakers, and in the end a contingent left the conference to join a ridiculous New Left "action" against Fort Dix in New Jersey. A few years later, Clark was working on left-wing environmentalist projects. Whether any of his writing influenced Roy in the "nuclear power" disputes I cannot say.

Accounts of the first New York Libertarian Conference may be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20131029185718/http://royhalliday.home.mindspring.com/confer.htm and in Murray N. Rothbard, "The Conference: Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back," Libertarian Forum, November 1, 1969 (volume 1, number 15), pp. 1-3, which is included in the bound volume included in the bound volumes that are available from the Mises Institute here:
http://mises.org/store/Libertarian-Forum-P300C0.aspx.
The article itself is also available in PDF format here:
http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_11_01.pdf.

Justin Raimondo, in An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books: Amherst, N.Y., 2000), quotes a letter from Rothbard to Bob Kephart (p. 280; letter dated June 13, 1992), in which Rothbard says, "Roy and I had pretty much reconciled in the last year [or] two; the last time he called it was about two weeks before he died."

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