John Singleton with Bob Howard, Rip Van Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1977), pp. 9-12, under the heading “Alternatives”.

In our society, there are three broad areas of human interaction: social affairs, economic affairs and political affairs.

Social affairs are such things as codes of behaviour, sexual conduct, modes of dress and culture. Economic affairs include such things as business activities, profits, losses, supplies, demands, wages and so on, while political affairs include the whole range of legislation and regulation.

Obviously, these three areas are not independent of one another. There is interaction within each area and also between the separate areas, and in fact, the interaction between political affairs and the other two has grown to such an extent that political affairs now dominate the other two.

Our economic and social affairs are effectively controlled by politics — by the vast array of governmental regulations.

Just precisely how they are controlled depends to some extent on who is in control of the political machinery at any time.

In this regard, the groups in control fall into two broad categories: Left and Right, or, in Australia, Labor and Liberal/NCP respectively. In the broadest terms each of these has a characteristic attitude towards social and economic affairs, and, when in government, tend to control them accordingly. (These differences are, of course, more marked in the rhetoric of the two groups. The differences tend to get rather blurred in practice.) Now it’s the curious paradox of our times that the following breakup occurs in these different attitudes, and thus sets up two conflicting sets of relationships among political, social and economic affairs.

_______| Left (Labor) | Right (Liberal/NCP)
Social Affairs | Freedom | Control
Economics Affairs | Control | Freedom

The Left believes in freedom in social affairs, but control in economic affairs. This is seen in Labor Party support for the repeal of victimless crime legislation in the areas of prostitution, gambling, drug abuse, sexual activity between consenting adults and so on, in the area of social affairs, and their support in the area of economic affairs of the idea of a planned economy, through the creation of a socialist or communist state.

The Right traditionally takes the opposite point of view. In social affairs, the Right supports victimless crime legislation that outlaws pornography, homosexuality, gambling (except at the government TAB), prostitution and so on, while in economic affairs it supports — in theory at least — a free enterprise economy.

Thus we have this curious situation in which each side believes in some freedom and some control, but in opposite areas.

Just how and why this situation arose is a subject large and complex enough to require another book, but people supporting each side can find enough in the ideas of each to give them a feeling of conviction and certainty about the essential correctness of the ideas they support. Each can say with some justification “We believe in freedom and individual rights” and know with gut level certainty that they really do.

It is this split of attitudes that maintains the division between Left and Right and is the basis of all the conflict in the third area of interaction—political affairs. In their attempts to resolve social and economic conflicts, both Left and Right have increasingly resorted to using politics — practising what James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government”.

In this way political affairs has come to dominate social and economic affairs — it feeds on the conflict.

This is the trap that most alternatives proposed to solve social and economic problems fall into. They seek to solve the problem by using politics. Therefore we see the growth of the “welfare state” to solve social problems, and the proliferation of regulations in an attempt to solve economic problems. Even the solutions of the more radical groups make this sort of error. The feminist groups, for example, want all sorts of political aid to solve their problems — free child- minding centres, free contraceptives, free health care, a living wage, and so on.

We believe that attempts such as these are examples of stepping out of the frying pan into the fire. What is the point of “solving” the problems of our so-called capitalist economy by replacing it with a totally controlled economy — an economy where everything is run with the efficiency of the Post Office?

Equally, what is the point of trying to build up a highly efficient technological society that emotionally cripples all the people who live in it?

We believe that much of the currently existing conflict and confusion in our social, economic and political affairs can only be eliminated by a completely new approach. We believe that we have to break away from the old Left-Right categories and create a new category. This new category is what this book is all about, and it can be shown very simply by adapting the previous diagram:

_______| Left (Labor) | Centre (Libertarian) | Right (Liberal/NCP)
Social Affairs | Freedom | Freedom | Control
Economics Affairs | Control | Freedom | Freedom

This new category of libertarianism is a genuine alternative. It eliminates the internal contradictions of both the Left and the Right stands and uses the best of both. It is a true philosophy of freedom — freedom in social affairs and freedom in economic affairs.

The position of the Left is to somehow believe that if a person can smoke pot, be a homosexual and speak his or her mind, then that person is free — even though he or she might be told how much to earn, what businesses to start, under what conditions to work, and so on.

For its part, the Right makes the opposite mistake (but again only in theory). It believes that if a person has freedom of enterprise then that person is free, and that this remains the case if at the same time his or her private personal behaviour is regulated.

These are obvious contradictions, but very pervasive ones. Unfortunately, the situation is not helped by the fact that most people on the Left misunderstand what is meant by freedom of enterprise, and that most people on the Right don’t appreciate the far-reaching consequences of social regulation. We hope that the rest of this book can do something to throw some new light on this confusion.

By unit[ing] the ideas of freedom in social affairs and freedom in economic affairs, the libertarian philosophy also does something else. It almost completely (some people would say completely) eliminates the power of the third area — politics. It frees both our social and economic affairs from political manipulation, domination and control. It allows individual people to control their own social and economic affairs.1

This libertarian philosophy, based as it is on voluntarism or individual freedom, can equally encompass people who wish to live as communists in voluntary communes, and people who wish to be free traders and run their own business enterprises for a profit.

In fact, the only criterion of libertarianism is that all relationships should be voluntary. In this sense it is a truly radical alternative rather than a reactionary one.

It is a consistent application of the philosophy of freedom.

And it’s about time we gave it a go.

Footnote

  1. It is important to remember here that by freedom in economic affairs we mean a free enterprise economy and not a corporate capitalist economy. We believe that the evils of capitalism that so anger the left are only made possible by the collusion of business and government in what is a mixed economy and not a free economy. We do not believe that freeing the economy from government regulation would simply place people at the mercy of the big corporations, etc.