Ayn Rand's lasting contribution lives in women. She instilled the idea that the world is moved by a few who think and act in accordance with certain principles, such as refusing to chirp like ET airhead Mary Hart or soap peddler Martha Stewart -- both of whom are professional shills for the patriarchy. Don't tell me this is hot air. I witnessed Maggie Thatcher in action at a NATO Summit, away from the cameras and microphones. I know precisely what I'm talking about. She made Bush and Kohl squirm like scared little boys, and she couldn't have done it without Rand. The bottom line on history is that Ayn Rand and Simone de Beauvoir were political shipbuilders who launched a thousand warrior queens, including Camille Paglia and Hillary Clinton, and they are destined to win. I explained why in a 50,000-word online book that was banned by Chris Whitten. Our revolutionary sisters will triumph (eventually) because they have more at risk and because Women Are Men Plus. It only takes one of them to defeat ten of us, if she decides to wage war. Ayn Rand took out male opponents by the hundred and won the hearts of six or seven million, because she was brave enough to say that she had a right to live her own life. Her novels toppled the Berlin Wall (via Thatcher) and cut welfare spending (in New Zealand).

I know this is an uncomfortable subject -- that women are a power in their own right -- but facts are facts. Andrea Millen Rich sighed to me that the disease of patriarchy has no cure. 95% of her Laissez Faire customers are male. Worse: neatly completed multiple-choice surveys are a sign of terminal impotence. That's why Bradford's pals are agitating for a kinder, gentler party platform:

A distinct issue is whether libertarians should support half-measures that leave the state intact but move toward more liberty and efficiency. One current case is whether to campaign for charter schools and school vouchers, while ultimately arguing, of course, for the complete removal of government from schooling. Libertarians should indeed do this. We are not like millenarian socialists, who think that it's futile to tinker with the system, that no good will come until the world is made anew. Piecemeal tinkering sometimes pays off, and nothing else ever does. Small steps in the direction of somewhat greater liberty will yield dividends in human happiness, as well as new information about the way institutions work, to help guide the subsequent direction of reform. Anarchy will come like a thief in the night. (David Ramsay Steele, Liberty, May 99)

Try telling Hillary, Wendy, or Phoolan Devi that justice will come like a thief in the night and piecemeal begging is the best way to liberate her oppressed sisters. Try convincing yourself that you read Rand's Anatomy of A Compromise and you still respect Steele's happytalk half-measures. For Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters, there was no piecemeal gray area. Either women won the right to vote, or they didn't. It required riots, pouring acid on golf courses and in Royal Mail letterboxes, smashing the windows of Parliament and much of Regent Street (twice), exile, prison, and a hunger strike to force the English partiarchy into recognizing women as people.

Justice for women. Does that mean anything to you? Is it anywhere on your moral agenda? I doubt it.

The moralistic approach makes bad propaganda because it is philosophically defective. Either it is rank intuitionism or it is utilitarianism disguised and crippled.... Utilitarianism upholds basic ethical precepts that are almost invariant from time to time and place to place, the standard ones that have stood the test of experience" (Leland B. Yeager, Liberty, May 99)

Yeager is so stupid, he gives away the game. For a refresher course on utilitarianism, you are cordially invited to study the following political pragmatists and confirm that I've quoted their basic ethical precepts correctly, the standard ones that have stood the test of American experience:

The secret juices from which the law draws all the juices of life... is considerations of what is expedient for the community. The law does undoubtedly treat the individual as a means to an end, and uses him as a tool to increase the general welfare at his own expense. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens... that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. (James Madison)

I've been told that since the beginning of civilization, millions and millions of laws have not improved on the Ten Commandments. (Ronald Reagan)

Ludwig von Mises, the hero of New Utilitarianism, wasn't far from Reagan's patriarchal creed, dismissing anything that feminists tried to say about the existence of a Second Sex:

Mises moved into political commentary about the feminist movement itself. He argued: If feminism merely sought the economic and legal freedoms that permit women to become self-determining, then feminism was no more than a "branch of the great liberal movement, which advocates peaceful and free evolution." (McElroy, The Freeman, Sept 97)

It ought to be the Boulder-Mises New Libertarian Consequentialist Theme Song -- a peaceful, prosperous evolution, everybody wearing seat belts in the Jeep, until anarchy comes like a thief in the night to put a bar of gold under your Christmas tree.

The daydreamers at Liberty should be ashamed of themselves, but I suppose that their's was a truly innocent mistake. Men have no idea of what women put up with on a daily basis qua women. For those who need an example, here's one that men probably won't believe, but women will recognize as par for the course. My neighbor Annie is a professional photographer, much sought after for upscale weddings, which is her specialty. She's one of the most experienced, creative wedding photographers in Colorado, often booked a year in advance because she has a reputation for excellence. Her services are not cheap. In fact, she charges twice as much as her male competitors, of which there are many hacks and few experts. Are you with me so far? We're talking about a competent professional, who is also a mother of two young children. She is capable, dignified, industrious and successful. Annie is an experienced individual who knows how to conduct herself in public. When she goes to work, it's usually a ten-hour day, covering six or seven locations, burning dozens of rolls of film at the bride's house, church, getting in the limo, and a reception held in another city (or an inaccessible park). She carries at least 40 lbs of photographic equipment on her shoulder all day long, not including strobe lights for traditional portraits of the parents, newlyweds, bridesmaids, etc. She basically works her butt off nonstop, while everybody else stands around listening to a sermon or eating and drinking.

Annie came home yesterday dumbfounded. She ambled over to a neighbor's yard, where Doug and I were helping Phil put in a swamp cooler about the size of Texas. It's been so hot recently, that vast amounts of cold air are the only thing that people care about. Except Annie. She wanted me to explain something that was apparently inexplicable. At the church, the bride's father walked up to her and said, in the tone of a displeased patriarch: "You should be wearing a beige suit, so you blend in with the carpet." Annie found this remark almost impossible to understand, since she was wearing new beige pants that went down to her knees and a modest white blouse.

I told her that the patriarch (a Roman Catholic) was upset because the earth is unreal to Platonic-Augustinian mystics, and they believe that the "real reality" is life after death in heaven. Her "phenomenal" existence clashed with his determination to decorate the profane world according to God's will that everybody wear a suit.

Overhearing this, Doug shook his head and said: "Naw. It was sexual."

Constable Doug got it right, and I told him so. All my scholarship was crap, compared to the simple dynamic of sexism. She was a girl and had to be "put in her place" by applying a little humiliation. It has been inflicted on women for 5000 years, and nothing has changed much in the last 50. A woman can be competent, but she cannot live or work with being blind-sided by some man telling her what to do in the tone of a deliberately hurtful (often irrational) criticism.

Enacting laws to control how people interact is rubbish. We live in de facto anarchy 99% of the time. What we do as private citizens is the problem, not some alleged need for coercive "rules."

Human beings need rules to enable them to live together peacefully and productively. As for what libertarians actually believe, in the Liberty Poll nearly 90 percent of 'libertarians' agreed that "All men by their nature have a right to life . . . liberty . . . property . . . [and] the pursuit of happiness." Sounds good to me. (David Boaz, Liberty, May 99)

This is what happens when you poll a bunch of sophomores. Justice suddenly takes a back seat to Dead White Male sound bites. The Declaration sounds good to men because it says "All men..." At the time it was written, it referred specifically and exclusively to white landowners (i.e., patriarchs). It doesn't say boo about women or children, which gives Hospers room to argue for their involuntary "care and protection" by male law-givers. Hospers wants his team of men to someday replace the Democratic and Republican men in power, but nothing else will change. In fact, libertarians will likely repeal Affirmative Action, which gave women a shot at earning a living wage. Certainly, the LP hopes to terminate the welfare state entitlements that make it possible for an uneducated woman to feed her children without depending on an equally dumb, abusive, and unreliable "husband" whom she hates, but doesn't dare say to his face because he'd beat the shit out of her. This is the de facto truth. Women need the protection of government, as much of it as they themselves determine, to redress a long train of abuses.

Personally, I'm in favor of two party platform planks that I hope the Democratics will consider as speedily as possible: (1) We should exempt women from the criminal law. The vast majority of criminals are men, and when women kill, they usually have a good reason for taking life. This includes an absolute right to abortion at government expense, if she's indigent. Anything less means slavery, tied to an unwanted child for the rest of her life, or living with the terrible shame of having lost a child by adoption to someone wealthier and "better" than its natural mother. (2) Amend the U.S. Constitution to bring it into line with reality, and give women one of the two houses of Congress. It doesn't matter which one. Men can keep the Senate, if they think it's a sacrosanct club with special magic powers. Women will feel right at home in the House of Representatives, anyway, since a lot of them can only serve a couple years between bouts of infant care. They will also feel at home with the pursestrings, since all spending bills have to originate in the House, and women are known to be de facto financial managers of most American households. Recent research indicates that female Wall Street traders and money managers earn a slightly higher return on portfolio, mainly because they take fewer risks with the client's money and don't panic in an emergency. Male traders churn shares, act on impulse, and lose.

How do you like the idea of two Houses of Congress, one male and the other female?

Imagination works well in art, where the objective is to sketch a vision, a happy ending. Art leaves out most of the details -- sort of like the artistÕs rendition of a new building which then engineers must make actual. And soon that artistÕs rendition will be filled in with a great deal that is quite good but also not quite what the imagination constructed. There is simply no way to produce the utopia that will solve everyoneÕs problems, be these economic, romantic, educational, psychological or what have you." (Tibor Machan, LFC Times, Vol 3, No 28)

Machan doesn't trust women. But women wouldn't bomb Serbia.

Queenie's soap operas annoy the hell out of me, but I see why they exist and why they are politically important. Soaps are a forum of philosophical debate, women talking to women. The storylines are about women who are ignored and men who make bombastic, patriarchical statements that don't make a hoot of sense.

In the population as a whole, anarchists are a small, vanishing minority. (David Friedman, Liberty, May 99)

Hardly. De facto anarchy exists in abundance. There is no cop looking over your shoulder, David. Not when you write those words, not when I read them, and not when I turn the computer off. There is no cop telling Queenie to bring me a vitamin supplement, no cop telling me to drink more water and smoke less. I'll bet you a dollar to a nonprofit donut that you didn't see a cop anywhere today or, if you did, he didn't take any notice of you.

Islamic patriarch, Jewish patriarch, Catholic patriarch, Libertarian patriarch -- all of them in office or trying to get one, so men can continue to govern women. This is why Machan wants us to believe that "utopia" for women is impossible. It's best to wait for men to decide affairs of state and adjudicate the silly notions that women advocate, like universal health care, equal pay for comparable job descriptions, gun control, and taxation to ameliorate poverty.

Women have a separate, non-male agenda. They deserve their own branch of government as of right. It's a plain question of justice, no matter if some men believe that women are too stupid (or too emotional) to govern as real equals with real power.

Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights.... They said, some are too ignorant and vicious to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance, and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant wiser, and all better and happier together. (Lincoln, quoted in Sandburg, The Prairie Years)

Have a little courage. Hippies are here to cheer you up while you're waiting for the girls to experiment with public policy. If you want to participate in some hip street threater and 1st Amendment fun, feel free to spraypaint our slogan in an alley: BAD COP NO DONUT.

It is a terrible, irreversible decision to kill, to take human life. Men do it routinely, in every language, with every conceivable weapon, from machete to cruise missile. We've done it for thousands of years. Women rarely kill. If we're serious about "non-initiation of force" -- if morality still matters -- put women in power, pronto.