An Excerpt from “‘Have Gun, Will Nudge’”: from Ayn Rand’s Bound Periodicals, Now in Paperback

Between 1962 and 1976, Ayn Rand published a series of periodicals: The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter. Many of the articles she published there went on to be anthologized in the collections of nonfiction essays she published as books. But some were never anthologized, and have only been available in bound periodicals long available for purchase from the Ayn Rand Institute. ARI is now happy to offer these periodicals, for the first time in paperback, at a significant discount from the original hardback versions.

The bound periodicals are especially invaluable as a means of understanding the historical context in which Rand wrote her nonfiction. We see her view of the American cultural-political scene unfolding in reaction to major milestones of the twentieth century: the Kennedy–Johnson administrations, the Vietnam War, the campus student rebellion, and the stagnation of the 1970s. Readers can see a high-level survey of the rich array of content in this earlier article in New Ideal. Rand not only comments on politics, but publishes theoretical articles on epistemology and esthetics, along with reviews of the art and literature of her day.

New Ideal is pleased to feature short excerpts from those bound periodicals over the coming months. Each is from an article never anthologized, exclusively available in the bound periodicals, and now available for purchase from Amazon. Here we republish a short excerpt from one of her first essays in her first periodical, The Objectivist Newsletter. “‘Have Gun, Will Nudge’” (March 1962) is an analysis of the thuggish tactics of the Kennedy administration’s FCC chairman, Newton Minow. The essay has perennial significance for understanding how statist governments threaten free speech.

Mr. Newton N. Minow, Chairman of the F.C.C., is performing a great, educational public service – though not in the way he intends. He is giving the public an invaluable object lesson on the nature and results of a “mixed economy.”

The basic evil in any theory of a “mixed economy” – an economy of freedom mixed with controls – is the evasion of the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force and that political power is the power of coercion. While a dictatorship rests on a blunt acknowledgment of this fact, on the motto that “might is right” – a “mixed economy” rests on pretending that no such distinction exists, that might and fight can be safely scrambled together if we all agree never to raise this issue.

The current policy of the F.C.C. has provided a spectacle of not raising that issue, on a grand scale.

First, Mr. Minow announces that any television or radio station which does not satisfy his unstated criterion of an unspecified public service, will lose its license, that is: will be silenced forever. Then, while the victims mumble feeble protests, vaguely referring to censorship, Mr. Minow assumes an air of injured innocence and asserts that his sole intention is “to nudge, to exhort, to urge those who decide what goes on the air to appeal to our higher as well as our lower tastes.” And President Kennedy declares: “Mr. Minow has attempted not to use force, but to use encouragement in persuading the networks to put on better children’s programs, more public service programs.”

No one has stepped forward to ask Mr. Kennedy whether his word usage is correct; and, if it is, whether we should claim that a holdup man who points a gun, is not attempting to use force, but to use encouragement in persuading a citizen to hand over his wallet.

To read the rest, order your copy of The Objectivist Newsletter from Amazon today.