The Libertarian Forum, edited by Murray N. Rothbard; April 1, 1969.  The second issue of this obscure journal and already a tremendous insight.  But this can wait….

FBI And CIA

After identifying a stupefying (well, for the time) list of government and crony-corporate abuses, Rothbard offers:

Libertarians have every reason to view all of these matters with knowledgeable horror.  They could predict any enormity of the state simply because they know that enormities are the nature of the state, enormities and crimes against liberty.

There is one area of struggle in Washington, however, that may be viewed with special horror.  It is the struggle between the CIA and the FBI for covert control of the government, the world, the galaxy or whatever else comes along.

Rothbard identifies the special advantage that is held by the CIA: money.

The CIA has far and away the greater edge in economic power and freedom of movement.  Assassination has been its business overseas all along.

When it comes to money, the CIA has no equal.

In contrast, the FBI can offer data.  

Rothbard offers a story, that of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrenti Beria, "the top cop of the Soviet Union."  It seems Beria "made the mistake of entering a Kremlin meeting without his bodyguard."  Hence, Nikita had the opportunity to have Beria done in – and took it.

Conservatives in America are "clucking and tushing."  This could never happen in America:

And this is precisely the point.  In democratic America there has appeared no way to relieve the head of the political or secret police of his command.

As Donald Trump has so well discovered almost fifty years later.

"Dear Ted": Prelude to Repression?

Richard Nixon, "the Man Who Isn't There, a zero wrapped in a vacuum," has written an open letter to the president of Notre Dame University, Father Theodore M. Hesburgh.  It is a letter in which Nixon demands that the university president gets "tough with our students."

Nixon, presiding over a war that sees the deaths of Americans by the tens-of-thousands and Vietnamese (and others in Southeast Asia) by the millions…

…has the gall to express his horror at the violence of some kids who have broken a few windows, or who have stepped on some campus grass.  He has the sheer bravado to call for the submission of reason for force!