Anarchy

by Robert LeFevre
Copyright 1959, by Robert LeFevre Permission to reprint in whole or in part granted without special request. PRINTED IN COLORADO SPRINGS, U.S.A. Published June, 1959 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-13480 THE FREEDOM SCHOOL P.O. Box 165 Colorado Springs, Colorado
Robert LeFevre, president and founder of the Freedom School, has also served as the editorial writer for the Gazette Telegraph in Colorado Springs, since 1954. In addition to several thousand editorials, he has written numerous articles for the Freeman Magazine, including: “ The Straight Line ,” “ Jim Leadbetter’s Discovery ,” “ Shades of Hammurabi ,” “ Grasshoppers and Widows ,” and “ Coercion at the Local Level .”
His article “Even the Girl Scouts” (Human Events, 1953) led to a recall of the Handbook of this organization and extensive revisions. His book, “The Nature of Man and His Government,” has recently been published by Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho.
A rational being, intent upon learning the nature of liberty or freedom, is confronted almost at once with innumerable instances of governmental predation against liberty.
As the subject of liberty is pursued, the more frequently and the more persistently the fact emerges that governments have been one of the principal opponents if not the only principal opponent to liberty.
Invariably, this discovery leads the perspiring seeker after truth to a fork in the road. Is it possible, the aspirant to libertarian certainty asks himself, to pursue the end of the rainbow of liberty into a miasma of quicksand and uncertainty?
Might I not end at a place where I would advocate the cessation of all government? And if I reached such a conclusion, would I not find myself aligned with the very forces I sought to oppose in the beginning, namely, the forces of lawlessness, chaos and anarchy?
At this fork in the road, libertarians hesitate, some briefly and some for lengthy periods of time. The choice to be made is a difficult one. To abandon liberty at this juncture and to endorse minimal governments as devices which might prevent license, could cause the devotee of liberty to endorse the active enemy of liberty, albeit in small doses. On the other hand, to pursue liberty to its logical conclusions might end in an endorsement of license, The very antonym of liberty.