Laurance Labadie (1898 – 1975) was an individualist anarchist, influenced by the work of his father Jo Labadie, Benjamin R. Tucker, Max Stirner and Ragnar Redbeard. He was affiliated with the School of Living, but because of his confrontational nature was also a harsh critic of the group. Little Black Cart has issued a collection of his writing under the title Anarcho-Pessimism.

The following text was taken from the Peace Plans microfiche of John Zube’s Libertarian Microfiche Project , and contains footnotes from Zube when he transcribed it in 2001.

Nov 8 1966

I cannot now remember and furnish the reference, but I have read somewhere that Stirner translated Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” into German. There is little or no question that he realized that for a “free economy” to work satisfactorily, it was positively necessary that competition be given the largest scope of operation. Which means that opportunity to produce and exchange needed to be equitable. In other words, it demanded an equitable access to land. ¹⁾I rather believe that especially here he would have upheld the supposed “right of the strongest”, which in most cases is the existing statist land title system, rather than free competition with it, by various other land reform “ideals”, all at the expense and risk of their supporters. – J.Z., 6.9.01. He certainly understood that opportunities to exchange products without being held up by financial monopolies was also an essential prerequisite.²⁾Just like L.L., he was insufficiently specific about the details of monetary and financial freedom. The strength of Ulrich von Beckerath’s writings on the subject lies in the details and his avoidance and refutations of popular errors, myths and prejudices in this field, shared by most monetary reformers, even most of those who advocated degrees of monetary freedom. – J.Z., 6.9.01. 

That he did not make an elaborate economic analysis of economics in his “Ego and His Own” does not warrant the belief that he was unaware or ignorant of economics. The main purpose of his book was to show up the fatuousness of the self-styled revolutionaries of his time, when they thought, believed, or hoped that any sort of revolution or insurrection could be satisfactorily carried out by other than self-acknowledged egoists who understood what they were about. His target obviously was communists — whom he no doubt considered fools fighting for their own enslavement.³⁾Marx felt this attack and tried to defend himself by a long and sharp counter-attack, which is largely said to reveal the flaws in Marx’s thinking. I have not yet bothered to microfiche this book by Marx’s, since all too much literature, with its pro and con, has already been dedicated to Marxism and anti-Marxism. The sooner most of the ideas, that he scrounged together and turned into a “system”, become altogether forgotten, as long refuted errors myths and prejudices, the better. – Perhaps only in an Encyclopaedia of the Best Refutations should they be “preserved”, so that others do not too easily fall for these notions, once again. – J.Z., 6.9.01.