Yes, they do...
And their school spirit... 
is unsurpassed!
The Texas A&M Corps of Cadets provide... 
many of the US Armed Forces Officers!
And if I ever go to war... 
I want an Aggie on my six!
Posted on 08/19/2007 6:06:46 AM PDT by tpaine
Heinlein the Libertarian
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me," shows yet another side to the Heinlein paradox.
As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to Rand.
Yet his statement about self-sacrifice and duty to the species seems as un-Randian as you can get. Heinlein, a human chauvinist, always believed freedom and responsibility were linked. But he would never have thought it proper to impose the duty he saw as the highest human aspiration.
Heinlein once told a visitor, "I'm so much a libertarian that I have no use for the whole libertarian movement." Although never in lockstep with every libertarian attitude, Heinlein's fictions seemed derived from libertarianism before the modern movement even fully existed. Before books like Rand's Fountainhead and F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom sparked the modern libertarian movement in the mid-'40s, Heinlein had published a novelette, "Coventry," about a world whose government was based on a freely entered covenant that said that "no possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another."
Heinlein's other contributions to the libertarian zeitgeist include one of the epigrams of the gun rights movement, "an armed society is a polite society" - a line first published in his 1942 serial Beyond This Horizon.
He was also a direct intellectual influence on many important libertarians. David Friedman, author of the anarcho-capitalist classic The Machinery of Freedom, considered Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress vital to his intellectual evolution. (One of Moon's heroes was a professor advocating "rational anarchy," partially based on Heinlein's one-time neighbor, Robert LeFevre, founder of the libertarian Rampart College.) David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, got his start in political activism in 1960 sporting a self-made "Heinlein for President" button. Another Heinlein devotee was Robert Poole, longtime editor of Reason and founder of the Reason Foundation, one of the first institutions to try to effect libertarian change in the real world in a practical manner. Poole's efforts could be seen as a legacy of Heinlein's interest in the nuts and bolts of how his imagined societies would actually function.
Even though he adopted the Milton Friedmanite phrase "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as a slogan for his revolutionaries fighting colonial oppression in Moon, Heinlein was not deeply embedded in the economic strain of libertarianism, which stresses the importance of spontaneous order, the failures of central planning, and the efficiency of free markets. As the economist Robert Rogers has argued, Heinlein's fiction seemed to believe that it took Great Men or a single mind (sometimes human, sometimes computer) to make sure economies ran well. In a 1973 interview with the libertarian writer J. Neil Schulman, Heinlein was doubtful when Schulman referred to the greater efficiency of free markets. "I don't think the increase in efficiency on the part of free enterprise is that great," Heinlein said. "The justification for free enterprise is not that it's more efficient, but that it's free."
Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein's bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture's freedom or survival.
Heinlein the Iconoclast
The prominence of his juvenile novels and his galvanizing effect on so many adolescent fans have led many critics to condemn Heinlein's work as inherently unworthy of serious adult attention. As one scholar, Elizabeth Anne Hull, has written, "In an attempt to account for the extraordinary popularity and influence of the novels of Robert Heinlein, it would be all too easy to assert that the masses are asses and let it go at that. Those of us academics who read Heinlein are likely to admit it with an apology [and consider] our weakness in enjoying his work a minor character defect."
Heinlein is indeed best approached when young, because his work appeals to that eternal youthful question: How should you live as you grow into a culture you did not make?
Heinlein does this best via his defining characteristic, one that bridges the apparent divides in his work. As William Patterson, the author of a forthcoming two-volume biography of Heinlein, told me, the best way to understand Heinlein in toto is as a full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are.
That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America.
Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.
It isn't a quality amenable to pigeonholing, or to creating a movement around "What would Heinlein do?" As Heinlein himself said of his work, it was "an invitation to think-not to be-lieve." He created a body of writing, and helped forge a modern world, that is fascinating to live in because of, not in spite of, its wide scope and enduring contradictions.
Aggies have all the fun!! >:-}
Yep.
Yes, they do...
And their school spirit... is unsurpassed!
The Texas A&M Corps of Cadets provide... many of the US Armed Forces Officers!
And if I ever go to war... I want an Aggie on my six!
Good job on your coverage!
LOL. I can relate. So far I've bought 3 or 4 copies of the 1632 even though I can download it for free because I keep loaning it out, and you know what happens when you do that...
Jim Baen was a hell of shrewd businessman who realized that when you treat your customers like decent human beings they'll do the same to you. The music/vid industry could learn a few things from him.
AmP
Tanniker, what was your qustion about the Dragon series?
Those books went back into Ye Old Packing Crate of Paperbacks to await my locating the beginning of the series. (Actually, I just picked up "Category 7" from the library, so it'll be a while.)
If you find a 1st edition of The Dragon and the George, it is worth a pile of money.
On the other hand, this whole Heinlein thread got me looking... I found my copy of The Past Through Tomorrow, which I passed over because I'm going on vacation in a few days and I wanted something smaller to carry (like I'm actually going to find time to read!) and found a copy of "The Star Beast" from 1954. It was in a pile of books that an old couple gave me before they moved after 10 years ago. There's nothing on the copyright page to indicate that it's a reprint or 2nd or 3rd, etc printing. And the cover says that it cost 95 cents. It's just an old Ace paperback with a Steele Savage illustration on the cover and a review from the Denver Post taking up the entire back cover. This one's going into the queue.
Heh. I spent 11 years looking for a book, once.
Mr. C. is tremendous Heinlein fan. I liked Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Didn’t care for Stranger in a Strange Land, but liked some others.
Probably written by some limp-wristed, Ivy League, "Humanities" major.
“On The Bounce!”
I'm not quite that bad, but ...
In the late 90s, I picked up a few "bargain" books for about 49 cents each, figuring that if one was good, I still got my money's worth. The first one I read was "The Western King" by Ann Marston. I hadn't noticed when I picked it up that it was the 2nd book in a trilogy. Oh, well. It turned out to be a very good book, and there was only a little bit in the beginning that I did "get" right away because I hadn't read Book 1 (which took place 20 years earlier). I enjoyed the book, but really didn't think about it much afterward. Occasionally, I scanned the library and the bookstores, but I never saw her name.
Finally, it occured to me to use the library catalogue system and just reserve the other books. I got book 1 and enjoyed it as much as the second book, which I'd read about 5-6 years earlier and then read again, enjoying it even more. And the third book -- well, let's pretend that it doesn't exist.
The third book of the first trilogy suffers because of the word "first" in that description. It was okay by regular standards but sucked in comparison to books one and two. And basically, you had to read the second trilogy for any kind of closure. (This is something that was NOT true for book 1 and 2 which could stand alone.)
Anyway, I read five books (4 and 5 not much better than 3, but the story was progressing at least) and then found that neither the Brooklyn Public Library nor the New York Public Library had a copy of book six. I really didn't want to shell out ten bucks (incl shipping) to buy it from Amazon, especially if it might prove disappointing.
Finally, a librarian, who said that she was familiar with Marston's work, but whom I think had mistaken her for someone else, told me about interlibrary loans. I was able to borrow a copy from a library in Florida, Ft. Lauderdale, I think. It was the third best book in the series, but that is faint praise (although "second best" would be high praise indeed). Those are the only six books that she ever published, and I wonder if someone else had written the last four.
I haven't gone to that length to find a book since then, but it's nice to know that it's an option if I really, really want to read something obscure or out-of-print.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it - find an extant copy of “The Witches of Karres”, by Schmidt.
Naw, it was written... 
by some limp-wristed teasip.
What do University of Texas grads call the Aggies they meet after graduation?
Boss...
BTW most of my family on my late Father's side are Aggies except for my cuz Larry, a UT grad who is a millionaire. Balancing him out is my cuz David, an Aggie who is also a millionaire.
I, of course, went to six different colleges... 
and am a hundredaire several times over
Well, now you're just bragging.
He ain’t got no hunard dollars!!
Not all at once, anyways.
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