John Zube, 7 Oxley St., Berrima, NSW 2577, Australia 5 Jan. 93 Tel. (048) 771 436 Mrs. Bettina B. Greaves, 19 Pine Lane, Irvington, N.Y. 10533 Dear Bettina, thanks for your x-mas greetings and the note, received yesterday. One's job is all too often one's 9-5 daily prison sentence, unless it also amounts to a personal commitment or hobby. And even then a salary can tie a person down, to regular hours, even when one has no longer any family members who are financially dependent upon one's income. Extra spending money is not bad - but often not necessary and not worth the extra investment of one's scarce time, that is required. I assume that you have arranged for a small regular income that allows you to keep your home & go on pursuing your interests. It is a great feeling to be close to and finally finishing some major projects that one has set for oneself, in your case the definite bibliography of Mises's writings and of a revisionist study, summing up all prior ones, of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The latter was made possible by many great lies and cover-ups. In some ways it was thus unique and in others all too common. For in being built upon lies, cover-ups, myths and prejudices and some conspiracies, the Japanese - U.S.A. segment of W.W. II was not quite unique at all. Are not all wars built upon and made possible and continued and repeated over and over again, based upon some big and popularly accepted lies? E.g.: The lies of protectionism. Japan was put under an economic blockage and depended upon outside resource markets and sales markets for its products - and knew no better way than to conquer them, in the face of this blockade. Payment via international purchasing certificates or clearing certificates, as advocated by Prof. Dr. Edgard Milhaud, Switzerland, and Ulrich von Beckerath, Berlin, since the thirties, in order to peacefully "conquer" or rather penetrate into foreign markets and maintain and expand one's position there, was not known to them and remains widely unknown even today. The lies that maintain that a territorial statist defence is moral, possible and effective. It all too often becomes an aggression, e.g. the air raids on Dresden and Tokio and Hiroshima, and the price in blood and money becomes too high this way. Libertarian alternatives are still all too rarelly discussed or remain too much under the influence of statist notions. The monopolist decision making on war and peace, no matter how immoral and harmful it may be, is still not questioned today but tacitly assumed to be the only possible and rightful way. Even MAD ( Mutually Assured Destruction ) nuclear policies have not yet destroyed the myths of the territorial State as a protector rather than a threat to our security, peace, prosperity and very survival. After their kinds of nuclear disarmament agreements, our rulers still retain for themselves thousands of anti-people mass murder devices and maintained their territorial powers as military targets for them. What they have done away with is the costly over-kill preparations. They maintained their kill powers - and receive scarcely even any protests about them from the targeted victims. Moreover, they more and more tend to disarm people and disorganize them, to prevent them from engaging in effective armed resistance against mass murder preparations. See gun control laws and the federal take-over and regulation of volunteer militias. All these under the cover of numerous lies, false pretences and prejudices and myths. The myths of the effectiveness of military hierarchies and of military discipline not based on self-discipline and initiative but rather upon blind obedience, are still maintained and result in the usual havoc. The election of military officers and duties to resist wrongful orders have still to be established. Secrecy laws still protect all too many govenment actions from public scrutiny, which ought to be publicly revealed. The term "national security" covers still all too many crimes and has achieved anything but national security. We are still more insecure now - before any holder of mass extermination devices than we were ever before. And Hitler, Stalin and Mao were not the only madmen in power in this century. Territorial goverments are based on numerous lies, regardless of their war promoting tendencies and powers. Compulsory taxes, one of the preconditions of most aggressive wars or defensive wars with all too many aggressive features, are still mostly unquestioned, considered to be necessary to "run" a country, even if thereby it is run into the ground. There are x myths upholding monetary despotism, whose inflationary finance makes prolonged wrongful wars possible and causes many of them in the first place, via the depressions and mass unemployment it causes and its inflationary empoverishment of large segments of the population. The lies that the government would be an able and willing inflation and unemployment and depression fighter are still widely maintained and believed in, quite contrary to the truths on these subject. ( Neither would be possible without legal tender and the issue monopoly, legislatively established and maintained by governments. ) I was just keyboarding in, on this computer, a few hundred more entries of quotes and notes, definitions, slogans and explanations relating to individual sovereignty, individual secession and panarchism ( exterritorial autonomy for volunteers ), when I cam across a footnote in Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, comment to page 181 : "Mises recognized this point, and supported the right of each individual to secede in theory, stopping short of the individual for merely "technical considerations." - Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, 2nd. ed., Kansas City, Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1978, pp. 109-110. - It is a pity that it seemed impossible to rid Ayn Rand, L.v. Mises and F.Hayek of the remaining blocks in their minds on this subject. Even Rothbard has still some mind blocks remaining on this because he does not consistently develop this right into the competitive and voluntary and exterritorially autonomous associationism, not only among anarchists but among all kinds of archists, too, that would result from it. Their steps towards full monetary freedom were similarly limited to rather limited monetary freedom models. Hayek went furthest in this but not yet all-out and few of his followers have, so far, except in all too general formulas. In practice and on all too many points they still deny the efficient working of the free market in this sphere and still manage, after close to 200 years, to misunderstjnd essential aspects e.g. of the "real bills doctrine". The good is all too often the enemy of the best. I have a few dozen additional titles semi-prepared ( cut up and glued up ) but page arrangements and hand-corrections and cover sheets and some comments remain to be typed. Up to Peace Plans 1046 are being filmed. And x other books still wait in my collection for semi-or full processing for filming. Maybe I waste too much time on touching up imperfect originals and photocopies of them. But I feel obliged to offer the texts as legible as I can seeing that I can offer them only on microfilm. They should not bear, in my opinion, too many of the flaws of other media on top of being reproduced in a still unpopular medium. My general libertarian and anarchist bibliography, rough, by authors, titles, publisher, date etc. only, is still stuck at around 2.5 MB and not even printed out yet, while boxes of material are still to be included. If I would find the time and energy I could use some on-line facilities and scanning equipment at Wollongong University for this but had too many other projects on hand and have not felt well enough for prolonged visits there for all too many months. As detailed bibliographies as your own on Mises and Watner's on Rothbard, would have to be left out of such a general one. It woul just have to be referred to in it. Otherwise it might become too long, even for microfilm and disks, and also too boring to peruse in total. You are welcome to stay in my place for a few days. But I have only a simple accommodation and a primitive kitchen. Most of the house is filled with books and papers. It is in the centre of a tourist area, the Southern Highlands. Situated south of Mittagong, north of Goulbourn, on the Hume Highway, ca. 85 miles south of Sydney and 50 miles inland of th Pacific. My address lists of Australian free marketeers and libertarians is rather outdated. I could pick you up in Sydney or you could take a train to Mittagong, Moss Vale or Bowral, railway stations nearby, from which I could pick you up for the rest : 5, 6 or 9 miles to Berrima. I guess you have anyhow a long list of correspondents world-wide and access to the mailing list of FEE. I spent only 10 days of my one year trip in hotels, the rest with libertarians or anarchists. I made no use of my "youth hostel" membership, which is extended to all ages, nor of the two cheap or free travel accommodation networks which I had joined for a year : Seidbard World Enterprises, P.O. Box 197, Prince Street Station, N.Y., 10012 or Seidboard Enterprises, 75 Bleeker St., N.Y. 10012. The Hospitality Exchange, Joy-Lily, 4214 Army Street, San Francisco, CA 94131, USA, Tel. 1-415-826-8248. They cost only a few dollars p.a. The first is the larger one. Another exist, centered in Germany, but I do not have their current address. Named Servus, I believe. And quite recently antoher appeared : The Crash Network, send SASE to The Crash Network, 519 Castro Street # 7, San Francisco, CA 91 114. "The new guide to traveling through the underground." - That might not be exactly your cup of tea. The former are usually private homes in which members who are international travellers, are welcomed. Special interests are mentioned in the lists. A few of my anarchist and libertarian contacts were also members of these associations. My trip of one year got the travel bug out of my system for a long time. And the material I collected will still keep me busy for quite some time. If you should have a spare copy of Read's How Do We Know?, it would be appreciated. I was preparing mine for filming, by guillotining off the margins, in order to photocopy fast and easily, closely arranging the blocks of printed text, when in a moment of inattention I almost halved the pages, by inserting them incorrectly or with the guillotine wrongly set up. With it I may have his books complete or close to complete in my series. There are 2 o 3 texts which I copied incompletely at the FEE library. E.g. some of the works on Bastiat and one of the reviews of R.W. Lane. This in spite of doing a double check after the copying. May be when you returned from your world trip, I will bother you about these 2 or 3 photocopies. Savings of FEE : Production-wise and in its mailings it could have saved enormously by converting to microfiche. For those willing to pay for the extra costs of the paper options, it could still have supplied these. Alas, most of the financial sponsors - as apart from literature buyers, are not yet awake to the micrographic options or are single-track minded only in favour of the much more expensive and involved and less reliable electronic options, with their numerous hopes and promises and their so far low text storage and delivery rates. Thus it is quite possible that if you had largely converted to microfilm production and distribution, your donations might have dried up even futher than followed a) from the competition of by now x libertarian think tanks and b) as a result of your conservative and theistic image, which appeals only to shrinking numbers. The atheistic Ayn Randians, though, have experienced a similar shrinkage. Once FEE was almost the Catholic Church of the freedom movement. Now it has so many protestant, humanist, rationalist, agnostic and atheist competitors. I think it should have gone much further in offering its seminars on audio tapes and possibly video tapes and also in microfiche duplicating and selling at least all its out of print titles and those manuscripts, which I cannot as yet afford to print and those of titles in its library and those of its supporters, that it cannot afford to reprint. And for the low costs involved and additional texts for this duplication, it could have invited reader - participation. In this fashion, FEE alone, within a few years, could have led to the reproduction of at least all free market literature in this format. And by becoming the only or main supplier of it, it might have regained its preeminence. Moreover, the is the large potential market in the countries formerly controlled by communist regimes. For years to come they will not be able to afford to buy many printed freedom books and donors from Western countries, still themselves unerspupplied with such books, will not be able to make up this deficiency there, fast and sufficiently, either. Micrographically this gap could be filled fast and relatively cheaply. But there another entrepreneurial task would have to be undertaken first : The regular supply of these areas with cheap used or cheap new reading machines. They are still much more out of sight there then they are in the West. Alas, even outstanding freedom institutions like FEE can become stuck in a rut of old ways and procedures and it is assumed that the old ways will always continue to work because they have in the past. A change in personal direction is often desirable but not enough. Dr. Hans Sennholz is probably the best you could have got now, apart from yourself, as perhaps the only surviving and active member of the old guard. ( Would you really have liked the administrative labours and problems of an executive? Some advisory and consultant position would possibly have been better for you. And at least in an informal way you will retain that anyhow, without provoking the envy and ambitions of office seekers. ) I do greatly respect him and his extensive, although not yet quite complete stand for monetary freedom. Standard salaries are a great burden upon any freedom publications. Amost as good and as many freedom writings could, I believe, be obtained from unsalaried contributors who are not paid for their contributions but are glad to get them published at all. And there are so many contributions that ought to be reprinted, with only copyrights permissions often hard to obtain. And the production and distribution apparatus of FEE, rather than being run on the usual employer-employee relatinship - mitigated by comradeship and friendship among the staff, could greatly benefit by being run through small autonomous work groups, with separate profit and loss accounts, rather than guaranteed and fixed salaries for each, like suggested by H. Dubreuil in A Chance for Everybody, recommended. by A. Huxley in Ends and Means, like those described in J. Spark's Production Unlimited article in The Freeman and the autonomous groups of the shoe manufacturer Bata, while producing in Chekoslovakia before W.W. II, and of gang workers in the mines. No fixed salaries but the volunteer group earns its share of the take for its productive contributions and makes independent and competitive bids for parts of the total labours involved. That model would have led to lower production costs and many rationalizations, probably even in a small productive unite like FEE. By extensive use of suggestion boxes and utilizing their input and rewarding it, Matsushita and Sony had achieved at first 8, then 20, then even 350 employee suggestions for improving productivity, in the average and per annum, with 90% of them useful and used. I doubt that FEE has internally and in a similar way "released all creative energies", to use Read's apt wording. Perhaps the whole of the charitable financing ought to be reviewed, too. Perhaps the total result would be better if, for fixed and different subscription amounts, different quantities of literature supplies were offered, mailed, according to the wishes of the donor, direcly to him or, partly or completely, to intitutions or individuals of his choice, at least for trial periods, to be ended when after a while no positive responses are received from the recipients. Instead of converting the whole financial system in a rather risky way totally to a new financial utopia, such alternative options could be built up gradually, from small beginnings. Your do, after all, have much information to sell, not only to give away. But you let much of it get out of print or out of your hands ( UMI and myself, on a much smaller scale ). You could get it all back into print and in your own hands if you wanted to, micrographically. I would gladly do without your titles if you yourself pushed them micrographically. Alas, I cannot report that those of your titles which I have microfilmed do sell well through my small scale and limited efforts. You might be more successful in selling them. Your literature list would become much larger. Brian Summers believes that it is more effective to get articles launched in the mass media. However, out of the newspapers - or other mass media - out of the minds. Few such articles are read by the masses or remembered or kept or filed away for easy retrieval. In my experience there were only 5 to 20 responses for each such article or broadcast and most of these were rather superficial. I have heard only of on response by tenthousands, upon an article by Hans Habe, in defence of capitalism, in a U.S. newspaper, an article which so far I was unable to obtain. Instead, your could provide, micrographically and computer indexed, a rapidly growing encyclopedia of freedom articles, offering wanted segments of it on fiche or on disks or on line, using all affordable options of the information revolutin and the expensive ones to the extent that they pay for themselves. Your 12 volume Essays on Liberty collection and your index to it were right steps in this direction but not continued, as far as the integrative indexing is involved, which is a chore too great for an individual, anyhow, and for which reader-participation via their PCs should be invited. To produce and distribute expensive, limited and temporary paper impressions, speculatively, seems to me like an the proverbial attempt to fill a bottomless barrel. I rather produce many less copies but of many more titles and keep all of them permanently in print upon demand. Even a bestseller does, after all, reach only a fraction of the world population. And ultimately one has to reach only the relatively few who can and will make a difference. And they, sooner or later, will be without a bias against micrograhics. And sooner or later they will then be the better informed and effective opinion makers for most others. Season's greetings and the best wish of all : PIOT ( Panarchy In Our Times ) John Zube.