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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 |
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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
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