libertarianism's north star

I looked up F.A. "Baldy" Harper at Wikipedia and found ... nothing!

This is the man whom Murray Rothbard described as, "my first dear friend and mentor in the libertarian movement."*

Can you imagine?

Harper founded the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) but their website tells us practically nothing about him. Wikipedia has a page on IHS, which mentions Harper, but his name is one of those red links that invites you to create a new page.

I also couldn't find an image of him online -- not even at the institute he founded. The one in this post was scanned from one of Harper's books by Chad Parish of the Mises Institute. (Thanks Chad!)

Here's a Spencer MacCallum's summary of Harper's anarchism:

[L]et's now come to the question of limited government versus anarchy and which term, if either, a thinking person could adopt as his philosophical badge. (And so as not to let it cloud our minds, let's try to leave out of account the fact that anarchy, as popularly understood, is a pejorative term, bringing to mind images of terrorism.) Baldy Harper, Leonard Read's first associate at FEE and later founder of the Institute for Humane Studies, looked at it in a way that I find attractive. He had no more idea than the man in the moon whether we or our descendants will ever actually see a "total alternative," as he put it, to political, tax-supported government. But he pointed out the importance of holding the ideal clearly in mind as a heuristic device and a compass to help us keep moving always in the direction of freedom. The analogy he used was that of the north star and the mariner who steers by it. The mariner doesn't expect to reach the star. But, steering by it, which is a process entailing innumerable small decisions and self-corrections, not one of which he could make without the star, he eventually reaches Liverpool. We need a transcendent ideal always in mind, Baldy would say, to help guide our everyday decisions that determine whether or not we keep on our heading toward freedom.

That's why I'm less than fully satisfied with the ideal of "limited government." Whether mankind will ever regain the completely free society we know he enjoyed at the pre-state level, where the authority of the village headman was the same in kind i.e. authority over his person and property and not that of anyone else, as that exercised by the poorest member of the village, it will probably not be for you or me to know. But while we live, let perfect liberty be our guiding star.

The "limited government" concept cannot serve reliably as a guiding star because it is relative; any government at virtually any time or place in the world is limited with respect to some other government, real or imagined, that might be named. So we must ask, limited by comparison with what?

* You can read Rothbard's memorial for Harper in the May, 1973 edition of Libertarian Forum, available from the Mises Institute in PDF.