Oh my God!! Harry Brown died!!

The Libertarian Party has the announcement here.

This is Harry website.

I own his books, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, Fail-Safe Investing and Why Government Doesn't Work, and the videotape The Great Libertarian Offer.

I also own a couple tapes of him speaking at Liberty Magazine conferences and I think he's in an Advocates for Self-Government set I bought. I still intend to buy Libertarianism A-Z.

I voted for Harry in 2000. (I was still a Republican in '96.)

You deserve a quote from How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Heck, I'll give you a whole section of the chapter "Freedom from Government":

Three Principles
The first principle in in dealing with government, then, is: Don't be awed by it. What little the government accomplishes is almost always due to the voluntary participation of its citizens. Those who don't want to help the government can go their own ways without running into much trouble.

The second principle is: Don't confront the government. A sure way to make your life miserable is to attack the government head on. Its resources are limited, and it can't waste them tracking down every possible violator of every law. But it will certainly aim its power at anyone who publicly defies it. So keep to yourself, do what you have to do.

The third rule in dealing with government is: Don't organize. Don't get a large group of people together to defy tax laws, promote ways of circumventing the government, or openly violate regulations.

By joining protests, you might wind up in jail. And you won't have much freedom there.

And mass campaigns are easy targets. That's where the government is likely to devote its limited resources. When many people are doing the same thing, it's easy to stop them by passing laws or by applying existing laws against them.

When you act alone, however, you're usually not worth the trouble.

I once summarized the book jokingly to my wife as "Tell everyone who bugs you to f***-off!" Actually, it's more like, "Do whatever you want to do, but don't tell anyone who doesn't need to know." Emerson said, "Every actual government is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well." [I didn't cut and paste that one. I have it memorized.]

I was also rather enamored of chapter 12: The Previous-Investment Trap: my summary, you don't owe it to anybody or anything to "go down with the ship." [I'd say that the Egyptian ferry crew, the other day, misunderstood this principle to the point of justly prosecutable dereliction of duty, if not manslaughter... I mean... What did they think their job was? They committed fraud on the people who depended on them for their lives, to the point that many people died unnecessarily.] You have no duty whatsoever to sink you life with an obvious loser. In fact you have a duty to the preciousness of your own life to cut that loser loose.

[I just posted the latter paragraphs, somewhat edited, as a review at Amazon.

Hm. I might be editing that further, if I can. It seems that there were thoughts I'd thought I'd expressed that didn't appear.]

Apply the stop-loss investing principle across the board in your whole life.

Have I done that?

Not entirely, no. There are still some people in whom I've invests sizable portions of my life who haven't paid off yet, in terms of my happiness, but they may yet. The promise is not yet extinguished. With people, a hard and fast 25% stop-loss order is just another oppressive regulation.

The canon of libertarianism is named Human Action, after all.

Update: there are many beautiful encomiums to Harry on the blog of his latest great effort Downsize DC. An effort that will last well beyond his lifespan and doubtlessly bear the fruits of Freedom and Peace beyond its own lifespan.