The writings of Science Fiction writer Robert Heinlein--the acknowledged grand master and nearly single-handed creator of realistic, near-future SF--are not for everybody. [ Alexei Panshin has apparently devoted his life to trashing him .] And as much as Libertarians would like to claim him on the basis of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress , the Grand Old Man ranged in his life (and in his fiction) from being a near-socialist to a jingoistic militarist. The older he got, the further to the right most of his fiction got--except (as with Stranger in a Strange Land ) he was very far on the left. His letters and papers-- now available online (for pay, but at extremely reasonable prices )--show the man behind the stories, and often read much like his novels. It is exceptionally moving to read Heinlein's correspondence between 1945-1948 as his career is really taking off, his first (actually, second, but that's another story) wife is descending into alcoholism, and he is tentatively c...

Once (no shit) I wrote a footnote that turned into a book . This could happen again, although I hope not. Among the other ten thousand projects I'd like to accomplish with this blog is the development of a rational Libertarian foreign policy proposal for the United States. That hasn't existed up to now. Ron Paul's foreign policy is a non-interventionist strategy based on the near-immediate return of our troops and our navy to the direct physical defense of our borders: Today, we have troops in 130 countries. We are spread so thin that we have too few troops defending America. He's right about the bases, and I applaud in many ways the sentiment that we should shun military interventionism in favor of economic and diplomatic action, but his lack of apparent understanding of modern warfare is not re-assuring in a man who would be president. Other prominent Libertarians are worse. Former LP Presidential candidate Harry Browne (now a self-proclaimed Populist) has a four-poin...

Of course, if you're a Libertarian or an SF fan (or both), you know RAH. You know him as the story-teller who almost single-handedly created modern science fiction, and you have probably heard him praised as a Libertarian (the Moon is a Harsh Mistress), denounced as a jingoist warmonger (Starship Troopers), memorialized as a creator of the counter-culture (Stranger in a Strange Land), condemned as a racist (Farnham's Freehold), and read secretly as a sex maniac (I Will Fear No Evil).... But before all that, before World War Two, before he met Ginny, Robert Heinlein was both an aspiring writer and a supporter of Sinclair Lewis, government control of the economy, and the American Social Credit Movement. His 1938 unpublished novel, For Us, The Living is a failure as a novel--nothing much happens and the plot, such as it is, becomes nothing more than a framework for Heinlein's social and political agenda to be explained. If you're willing to suffer through it, however, y...