http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Chodorov

Frank Chodorov

In November 1944, Chodorov established a four-page
monthly broadsheet called analysis, described as "an
individualistic publication—the only one of its kind
in America." Attracting a modest subscriber base, the
magazine merged with the conservative weekly Human
Events [a CIA front] in 1951.

In 1953, Chodorov founded the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute (ISI), with William F. Buckley, Jr. as
president. In later years, ISI became extremely
influential as a clearinghouse of conservative
publications and as a coordinator of the conservative
intellectual movement in America.
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http://www.mises.org/etexts/taxrob.asp
Ludwig von Mises Institute

Taxation Is Robbery
by Frank Chodorov



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[From Out of Step: The Autobiography of an
Individualist, by Frank Chodorov; The Devin-Adair
Company, New York, 1962, pp. 216–239.]
THE Encyclopaedia Britannica defines taxation as "that
part of the revenues of a state which is obtained by
the compulsory dues and charges upon its subjects."
That is about as concise and accurate as a definition
can be; it leaves no room for argument as to what
taxation is. In that statement of fact the word
"compulsory" looms large, simply because of its
ethical content. The quick reaction is to ques tion
the "right" of the State to this use of power. What
sanc tion, in morals, does the State adduce for the
taking of property? Is its exercise of sovereignty
sufficient unto itself?

libertyhaven.com/thinkers/frankchodorov/frank.html



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Frank Chodorov:
Champion of Liberty

Aaron Steelman

December 28, 1996, marks the thirtieth anniversary of
the death of Frank Chodorov, one of the giants of the
American Old Right. It seems appropriate to look back
at his life and career, not only to pay homage, but
also to rediscover some of the fundamental insights he
brought to the fore in his many books, articles, and
speeches.

Frank Chodorov had a profound influence on the postwar
American Right. Murray N. Rothbard, William F. Buckley
Jr., James J. Martin, and many other exponents of the
free market have cited Chodorov's work as vital to the
formation of their worldviews. Indeed, Buckley once
said, "It is quite unlikely that I should have pursued
a career as a writer but for the encouragement he gave
me just after I graduated from Yale." 1

Born in New York City in 1887, Chodorov graduated from
Columbia University in 1907, and spent the next 30
years working in a variety of jobs, including a stint
as an advertising representative and running a
clothing factory. "From four to seven years was about
all I could take of any occupation throughout my life.
I went at each job I undertook with verve, mastered it
and when it became routine I lost interest and went
looking for something else," Chodorov wrote in his
1962 autobiography, Out of Step. 2

Besides working in various fields, Chodorov read
widely in the literature of liberty, and was
particularly impressed by the work of Henry David
Thoreau, Albert Jay Nock, and Henry George. By the
time he was offered, and accepted, the directorship of
the Henry George School of Social Science in 1937, he
counted himself firmly within the classical liberal
tradition.

For the first time-at the age of 50-his position
afforded him an opportunity to write and speak widely
on the issues of the day and to spread the
anti-statist gospel. He and his students started a
school publication, The Freeman, borrowing the name
from the then defunct journal Nock had edited in the
1920s. In its pages Chodorov found his ultimate
calling: journalism with an intensely personal,
individualist flair.

Chodorov pulled no punches in his many articles for
The Freeman. He viewed the state as the greatest
threat to individual liberty and human happiness. In
the tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Nock, he did not
limit his disdain for the use of state power to
domestic actions; he feared the state's ability to
conscript its citizens and use them to wage war as
much as, if not more than, he did its ability to
control the economy. This intellectual consistency
eventually gained Chodorov many devoted followers but,
for the time being, it attracted some important
opponents. "In The Freeman

I took delight in attacking the New Deal and Mr.
Roosevelt, mainly on economic grounds. That went well
until Mr. Roosevelt started preparing the country for
war, in 1939. Prudence should have prompted me to
avoid the war issue, but prudence was never one of my
virtues, and I continued to hammer away at the war
measures right up to Pearl Harbor." 3 The school's
board regarded his principled and steadfast opposition
to American involvement in the war as too
controversial and too frightening to potential donors
and, therefore, relieved Chodorov of his duties in
1942.

Fulfillment of a Dream

Following his dismissal, Chodorov looked for a new
medium for spreading his ideas. The result was his
creation of analysis, which he later called "the most
gratifying venture of my life." An unpretentious
four-page broadsheet published from 1944 to 1951,
analysis was hard-hitting and uncompromising, just
like The Freeman. Unlike The Freeman, however,
analysis did not actively solicit articles from
outside writers; nearly every issue was written
entirely by Chodorov.

In an early promotional letter to would-be
subscribers, Chodorov summed up his paper's editorial
position concisely and accurately:

. . . analysis ... stands for free trade, free land
and the unrestricted employment of capital and labor.
Its economics stem from Adam Smith and Henry George.

. . . analysis goes along with Albert Jay Nock in
asserting that the State is our enemy, that its
administrators and beneficiaries are a "professional
criminal class," and interprets events accordingly. It
is radical, not reformist.

In short, analysis looks at the current scene through
the eyeglass of historic liberalism, unashamedly
accepting the doctrine of natural rights, proclaims
the dignity of the individual and denounces all forms
of Statism as human slavery. 4

In issue after issue of analysis, Chodorov kept the
flame of the anti-statist, antiwar cause burning
during some of classical liberalism's darkest nights.
He approached myriad topics from the same perspective:
voluntary, peaceful actions are moral and productive
and should be encouraged; coercive actions are immoral
and should be condemned. As both an anti-statist
committed to individual liberty as a great moral ideal
and a social scientist examining past events
objectively and empirically, Chodorov was a formidable
and prescient critic.

The "Ratchet Effect" Theory

For example, in the 1940s Chodorov hit upon the
"ratchet effect" theory to explain the growth of
government, thereby setting the stage for some of the
most incisive and probing work by classical liberals
in the decades to come. In the August 1950 issue of
analysis, he wrote: "All wars come to an end, at least
temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state
hangs on; political power never abdicates. Note how
the 'emergency' taxes of World War 11 have hardened
into permanent fiscal policy. While a few of the more
irritating war agencies were dropped, others were
enlarged, under various pretexts, and the sum total is
more intervention and more interveners than we
suffered before 1939." 5

In a pamphlet distributed by Human Events, he struck a
similar chord, using the ratchet effect theory to
explain the rise of direct taxation in the United
States: When war or the need of ameliorating mass
poverty strains the purse of the state to the limit,
and further indirect impositions are impossible or
threaten social unrest, the opposition must give way.
The state never relinquishes entirely the prerogatives
it acquires during an "emergency," and so, after a
series of wars and depressions direct taxation became
a fixture of our fiscal policy, and those upon whom it
falls must content themselves to whittling down the
levies or trying to transfer them from shoulder to
shoulder. 6

On education, Chodorov was ahead of his time,
developing a radical critique of government schooling
long before the so-called "school choice" or "voucher"
movement got on its feet many years later. To
Chodorov, it was no surprise that students were
receiving subpar educations at government schools. As
he saw it, the purpose of the public school was not to
educate children, but to turn them into "good
citizens" - schooled in the ways of the democratic
system and taught that "they were the government"
despite the obvious absurdity of such a claim. By
controlling the schools, the state could control, to a
large degree, the minds of future generations, thereby
limiting the possibility of dissent.

In Chodorov's mind, the only solution to the education
problem was to separate schooling completely from
politics: "If we would reform our education system
basically, we must desocialize it. We must put it back
where it belongs, in the hands of parents. Theirs is
the responsibility for the breeding of children, and
theirs is the responsibility for the upbringing. The
first error of public schooling is the shifting of
this responsibility, the transformation of the
children of men into wards of the state." 7

Editing analysis brought great joy to Chodorov, but
the journal was financially shaky. At its peak in
1951, it had no more than 4,000 subscribers. Edmund
Opitz recalls that Chodorov was pouring so much of his
own money into his enterprise that he was sustaining
himself on one meal a day. 8 In 1951 analysis was
merged with Human Events, a Washington-based
publication founded in 1944 by Felix Morley, Frank
Hanighen, and Henry Regnery. Chodorov became an
associate editor at Human Events and stayed there
until 1954, when Leonard Read chose him to edit a
revamped version of The Freeman, which Irvington Press
(a subsidiary of FEE) had recently purchased.



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The Later Years

By the early 1950s, Chodorov was already well
established as an individualist writer of the highest
quality. In his view, the movement he had helped to
preserve and shape in the 1940s was not
"conservative"; it was "individualist." 9 He was
disturbed by the growing influence of a system of
thought he viewed as fundamentally majoritarian in
nature. The "new" conservatism of Russell Kirk, Walter
Berns, and Harry Jaffa did not in any way resemble the
historic liberalism that Chodorov and other prominent
Old Right figures held dear. This new strain of
thought held that unbridled individualism, not an
omnipotent federal state, posed the greatest threat to
the social order. Moreover, Jaffa and company believed
that the Soviet Union placed the United States in
imminent danger and that decisive federal action was
needed to thwart Soviet expansion.

Over the next ten years, Chodorov spent as much time
trying to check this new brand of conservatism as he
did refuting the myths and dogmas of the Left. In
Chodorov's mind, only individuals themselves could,
and should, make all relevant personal decisions. To
rely on the vague notion of the "community" to make
such decisions, as Kirk and others urged, was to
subjugate the individual to the collective, and this
subjugation was to be avoided at all costs.

The Cold War

Chodorov's unwavering defense of individualism and the
minimal state also led to clashes with other American
rightists regarding foreign policy. By the late 1950s,
most conservatives agreed that noninterventionism no
longer constituted a viable option; Soviet power was
so immense and threatening that the United States
needed to prosecute another expensive war, the Cold
War. Chodorov balked. The Soviets, he argued, were a
threat to the United States only if Americans allowed
them to be. The real danger was not that the Soviet
Union would conquer the United States militarily but
that in the name of a "strong national defense," the
United States would take actions that would thoroughly
collectivize the nation-this time, for good.
Increasing the power of the state in response to the
Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but
bring it to the United States. 10 For these reasons,
he called the Cold War a "war to communize America."

In a brilliant essay on "Isolationism," Chodorov once
again stated his position for those who had ignored it
the first time. He believed that isolationism was not
only the type of foreign policy that kept the state to
a manageable size, but also the one compatible with
the makeup of human beings. "It is in the nature of
the human being to be interested first, in himself,
and secondly, in his neighbors." To ask someone in
Michigan, for example, to be interested in the affairs
and political stability of Tennessee is slightly
unreasonable; to ask that same person to be interested
in the affairs of a far-off Latin American country is
simply absurd.

For Chodorov, a noninterventionist foreign policy was
incompatible with protectionism or a restrictionist
stand on immigration. Noninterventionism restricted
the power of the state; tariffs and immigration quotas
expanded it. Noninterventionism, free trade, and open
borders belonged in the same package. To accept one
part of the package while rejecting the others was not
only to give in to the state, but to flirt with
nativism. In chastising the America First Committee's
defense of trade and immigration restrictions, he
wrote:

One flaw in their program was a tendency toward
protectionism; the anti-involvement became identified
with "Buy American" slogans and with high tariffs;
that is, with economic, rather than political,
isolationism. Economic isolationism tariffs, quotas,
embargoes and general governmental interference with
international trade-is an irritant that can well lead
to war, or political interventionism. To build a trade
wall around a country is to invite reprisals, which in
turn make for misunderstanding and mistrust. Besides,
free trade carries with it an appreciation of the
cultures of the trading countries, and a feeling of
good will among the peoples engaged. Free trade is
natural, protectionism is political. 11

Chodorov also parted company with most of the
conservative movement regarding big business. Unlike
many of his colleagues, Chodorov did not hold a
romantic view of corporate America; and he certainly
did not agree with Ayn Rand's belief that big business
is "America's most persecuted minority." Instead he
saw big business as all too willing to compromise with
big government, producing a disastrous result for most
Americans. In this way, he foreshadowed the arguments
made by William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko in
the 1960s. Chodorov argued that "in America it is the
so-called capitalist who is to blame for the
fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the
state's siren song of special privilege, the
capitalists have abandoned capitalism." 12 And to
abandon capitalism was to abandon the very system
necessary for the preservation of individual liberty
and the attainment of human happiness.

Despite Chodorov's differences with many on the Right
- and there were a number of significance - he
maintained a position of prominence even after he left
The Freeman in 1955. This was largely because of the
Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which
he founded with Buckley in 1953 and continued to
oversee until his death in 1966. 13 ISI was the first
large free-market organiza-tion to focus its efforts
on influencing college students. Its goal was to be an
effective antidote to the well-organized
Intercollegiate Society of Socialists. It attempted to
accom-plish its mission by distributing free-market
books and pamphlets to interested students, sponsoring
classical liberal speakers on the campuses, and
organizing discussion clubs. By the early 1960s, more
than 40,000 students had taken part in its programs.

ISI was an important part of Chodorov's strategic
program for turning back the tide of statism. Having
tired of attempts to directly influence the political
process (he did not vote after 1912), Chodorov became
convinced that the only way the individualist
tradition could be saved was by spreading classical
liberal ideas among young people, who would one day be
the opinion-shapers. Students, he believed, could be
influenced and, thus, at-tention should be directed
toward them. "What the socialists have done can be
un-done, if there is a will for it. But, the undoing
will not be accomplished by trying to destroy
established institutions. It can be accom-plished only
by attacking minds, and not the minds of those already
hardened by socialistic fixations. Individualism can
be revived by implanting the ideas in the minds of the
coming generations.... It is, in short, a fifty--year
project." 14

Unfortunately, Chodorov did not have 50 years left to
see what would come of his prediction. He suffered a
stroke in 1961 while teaching at Robert LeFevre's
Freedom School in Colorado. The stroke limited his
activity sharply, and his output dwindled
con-tinuously until his death five years later. Yet,
in many ways, his work had already been accomplished.
He had done more than his part to ensure that the
great American tra-dition of individualism would not
die-at the hands of either the socialists or the
growing legion of conservatives who saw little value
in the ideals of classical liberalism. And he had
built upon the intellectual foundations of this
tradition himself, adding many keen and original
insights. As libertarians continue to wage an intel
lectual war against the omnipotent state, they would
be wise to consult Frank Chodorov's writings. For as
William F. Buckley Jr. has said, everybody "is bound
to benefit from exposure to his purist and dogged
battle against institutionalized power, and the case
he weaves for the presumptive denial to the central
government of every additional BTU it asks for. 15 

At the time of the original publication, Mr. Steelman
was a staff writer at the Cato Institute.

1. Cited in George H. Nash, The Conservative
Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York:
Basic Books, 1976), p. 380.

2. Frank Chodorov, Out of Step: The Autobiography of
An Individualist (New York: Devin-Adair, 1962), p. 75.

3. Ibid., p. 79.

4. Cited in Nash, pp. 17-18



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5. Charles H. Hamilton, ed., Fugitive Essays: Selected
Writ-ings of Frank Chodorov (Indianapolis: Liberty
Press, 1980), p. 363.

6. Frank Chodorov, Human Events Pamphlet Number 15,
"Taxation is Robbery" (Chicago: Human Events
Associates, 1947), p. 9.

7. Hamilton, p. 239.

8. Cited in Nash, p. 353.

9. In a 1956 letter to National Review, Chodorov
stated: "As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a
conservative in the nose. I am a radical." Cited in
Hamilton, p. 29.

10. In Chodorov's mind, the Soviet Union was not a
viable experiment; it would eventually implode. Thus,
the United States didn't need to wage an activist
battle against it. As he liked to state: "Private
capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism
makes pyramids." To him, the Soviet Union was in the
process of making a number of pyramids, while
neglecting the production of things that sustain a
society.

11. Out of Step, p. 119.

12. Hamilton, p. 149.

13. ISI was renamed the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute after Chodorov's death and remains in
operation to this day. 14. Out of Step, p. 248.

15. William F. Buckley Jr.."Nay-Sayer to the
Power-Hungry," National Review, December 4, 1962, p.
447.

Reprinted with permission from The Freeman, a
publication of The Foundation for Economic Education,
Inc., December 1996, Vol. 46, No. 12.