Principality of New Utopia 

PRINCE LAZARUS RULES THE WAVES

An Article in the "INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY"

(A British Publication)

By Tim Hulse

Published in the 31 MAY 1998 Issue, "THE SUNDAY REVIEW" Magazine Section, Pages 4 through 7

Reprinted with permission. 
Page 3 

"We will open the gates of our city to those who deserve to enter, a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, orchards, markets and inviolate homes... With the sign of the dollar as our symbol -- the sign of free trade and free minds -- we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, it splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us: those who don't, will not have the power to stop us; hoards of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind." -- from John Galt's speech to the nation in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
 
The Prince told me that when he last counted, there were 463 fully paid-up citizens of New Utopia. Citizenship is currently available to anyone willing to fork out a minimum of $1,500 for a New Utopian five-year bond which will pay 9.5 per cent annual interest. As the Prince points out, this is peanuts compared to, say, the $55,000 which a tax haven like Belize charges for citizenship. He's confident that by the time the birthday celebrations come around he will have his planned full complement of 4,000 passport-bearing New Utopians. quot;I have thousands and thousands of people who have been sent information who I'm sure are just waiting to see the construction start before they jump on the bandwagon," he said.
 
"Everything is very genuine, very straightforward and very above board." Sawyer reassured me, adding that he is "very confident" that New Utopia will be built. In fact he's already looking forward to living there.
 
THE PRINCE officially changed his name to Lazarus Long three years ago. He'd decided there were too many Howard Turneys around, and anyway, as he puts it, "Prince Lazarus has a ring to it." He took his new name from a character in Time Enough For Love, a novel by the American science-fiction author Robert A Heinlein. "I admired his philosophy. It was close to my own philosophy," he says of his fictional antecedent.
 
The Lazarus Long of Heinlein's epic saga is centuries old and lives in a world where ageing is a thing of the past. His "philosophy" amounts to a series of pro-individualistic slogans that can fairly be said to represent the thinking of the man who created him. Heinlein coined the phrase "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" and among his other catchy apophthegms are "All men are created unequal", "Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed" and "Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil."
 
Heinlein died in 1988, but his works live on in seminal texts for the libertarian movement which thrives in America and in particular on the Internet. Libertarianism comes in many forms but roughly speaking it stands for the rights of the individual to make his or her own choices without government interference. Gun laws, drug prohibition and taxes are considered violations if a citizen's rights, and the welfare society is anathema. "He who governs least, governs best" is the libertarian motto.
 
"The reason for New Utopia's existence is the philosophy behind it," the Prince told me. He describes himself as "a moderate libertarian" and, like Robert Heinlein, he believes that democracy doesn't work, which is why it won't exist in New Utopia and why he has proclaimed himself a prince. quot;A democracy 
  has to turn into a welfare state," he said. "The nature of a democracy is that people who have nothing or very little outnumber the people who have assets. And they will constantly vote people into power to give them more and more bread and more and more circuses. The welfare state cannot survive, as you saw with Communism."
 
If Heinlein is an influence, the true philosophical inspiration behind New Utopia, indeed the person who could fairly be said to have written the blueprint, is another key figure in libertarian thought -- Ayn Rand. Although generally written off as a capitalist fascist during the sixties and Seventies, in recent times, Rand has come to be seen as more and more of an influential figure, at least in right-wing business circles. A Soviet émigrée who fled Russia with the coming of Communism, she was the founder of "objectivism", a philosophy which holds that the highest purpose of existence is to live for oneself, and that altruism is evil. Her most famous work was the vast novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, which depicts a strike by America's most talented individuals. Tired of a collectivist society in which they are bled dry by their unappreciative fellow countrymen, the prime movers and money-makers disappear one by one to a hidden valley in Colorado, where the establish a new community based on laissez-faire capitalism. It is called Galt's Gulch, after the strike leader, a brilliant engineer called John Galt.
 
In it's own small way, New Utopia will be the concrete realisation of Rand's fictional community, a haven for capitalists the world over who believe that all men are not created equal and that the welfare society can go to hell. "I have very little patience with people who will not work and will not contribute to their own welfare," the Prince told me quite simply.
 
In fact, Prince Lazarus is not the first to attempt to put Rand's ideas into action. In 1995, a group of businessmen placed an advertisement in the Economist looking for others to join them in founding Laissez Faire City, a free-market paradise which would be built on 100 square miles of land leased from a friendly government. "When Laissez Faire City becomes a reality," said the advertisement, "Rand's spirit will undoubtedly become one with the rays of the sun which shall shine down on what may become known as the miracle city of the 21st century." Laissez Faire City has yet to be built, and when last heard of, the trustees were contemplating Peru as the site of their great adventure.
 
Another scheme was Oceania, a planned giant floating city based on libertarian ideals, which attracted a fair amount of publicity a few years ago. "The problem was that it was conceived by a bunch of radical militiamen," the Prince told me.

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Last Updated: Sunday August 23, 1998 at 19:32 CT Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998 The Principality of New Utopia. All rights reserved. The article is copyright © 1998 By the Independent On Sunday. All rights reserved.