Ray Harvey

More and More unto the Perfect Day

A literary crime novel, by Ray Harvey

Nothing is as it seems under the sharp western sun. After recovering from an enigmatic and near-fatal illness, Gasteneau, a man with an iron will, suddenly glimpses something so extraordinary and so horrific that he feels his life irrevocably altered. But did he really see what he thinks he saw?

In the aftermath of his sickness, he is drawn deeper into a resolution he made just prior to getting sick: to seek out a piece of evidence that shows with certainty God's hand at work upon the earth. But in seeking this evidence, he finds instead that he's growing more and more obsessed by the loss of his mother, whom he barely knew, and is pursued as well by a ghostly figure in black and a feeling of hypochondria he can neither shake, nor fully define.

Part mystery story, part literary crime, More and More unto the Perfect Day is at its core a tale of philosophical intrigue, a metaphysical thriller that combines the surreal descriptions of Nabokov with the psychological complexity of Dostoevsky. The result is a novel of dreamlike strangeness and philosophical power.

"Ray Harvey is a special writer, whose work will do what fine fiction must: take you on a journey from which you return transformed and renewed, seeing this world differently because of the world he has created. It is always heartening to find a new storyteller, and we can only hope that there will be more stories to come."

— Nicholas Christopher, author of Veronica and Trip to the Stars

"Uncanny. Like viewing the world through smoked glass."

— Chilton Williamson Jr., author of The Homestead and Mexico Way

"Cinematic and strange -- and not quite like anything I've ever read."

— Pat Hartman, author of Call Someplace Paradise and Ghost Town

"A brilliant tour-de-force."

— Fort Collins Forum

Read an excerpt

Leave Us Alone

A Capitalist Credo

"An excellent read: thought-provoking, methodical, and most of all straightforward."

— Major Diggs Brown, Green Beret, US Army

"Many conservatives today don't know why they believe what they believe. They simply parrot what pundits and talking heads are saying. Ray's book will help build your philosophical foundations for the complex political issues."

— Dan Tripp, National Political Director with Americans for Limited Government

"A powerful book of essays written with utter clarity. By reducing the issues down to essentials, the author brings political-economic principles to the level of complete comprehensibility. Read it and weep."

— Truth

"An arsenal of political ammunition."

— Patrick Crossland, Fort Collins Weekly

"Books on freedom are relatively easy to come by, the vast majority of which are undistinguished. But occasionally you read a philosophical defense of freedom that makes you feel as if the scales have fallen from your eyes. Leave Us Alone is one such."

— Tom Lucero, CU Board of Regents

"Inarguable."

— Paul Hummel, Investment Advisor, Investment Center of America

"Never has it been more important to read this book."

— John Kirsch, Publisher of the Fort Collins Forum

From the book:

Laissez faire means literally "Let do," but in a political context it translates into "Let us do as we please."

Embellished history has it that the term laissez faire was coined in 1680, during a meeting between Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French finance minister, and a group of businessmen. Colbert had asked these men how the government could best help the merchants and citizens, to which a wise fellow by the name of Le Gendre responded "Laissez-nous faire." ("Leave us the hell alone!")

Laissez-faire politics are not, however, a call for anything-goes hedonism, as is sometimes supposed. Laissez faire is a call, rather, for a live-and-let-live society. Like all political theory, it rests hierarchically upon an ethical foundation, thus:

Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is the science of human action.

Politics (also known as the theory of government) is the science of human action in societies.

Governments are those political bodies that have the power to make and implement the laws of the land, and economics, as the great French economist Claude Frederic Bastiat said, is the science of production and exchange.

To survive humans must produce.

This latter thing is so because humans evolved neither the balls of bulls, nor the trunks of elephants, nor the claws of bears, nor the necks of giraffes, but the brains of Homo sapiens, with a capacity to think.

Thus property is the precise link between economics and politics.

Here's why:

The fundamental law of economics is supply and demand.

Supply means production; demand means want.

In order to live, humans must produce. This means we must use our environment.

(Sidenote: the quasi-philosophy of environmentalism - which is nothing more, or less, than "repackaged Marxism," as the co-founder of Greenpeace accurately expressed it - believes that government, in the form of an elite bureau of centralized planners, are best suited to determine this use, over and above the law of supply and demand.)

In free societies, humans are allowed to trade freely. Among other things, this means that what you produce, and the action required to produce it, are yours by right.

Fundamentally, that action is the right to property.

Property is the crux of freedom; it is also, therefore, the crux of coercion:

You cannot, in any meaningful sense, be said to be free if you are not allowed to use the things you own, including those things necessary to live.

It is also why the defining characteristic of socialism, in any of its ugly disguises, is "communal" or governmental ownership of property (both of which amount to the same thing). Indeed, communal or governmental ownership of property is the only alternative to privately owned property.

Capitalism is fundamentally defined by each and every individual's inalienable right to private property.

Capitalism by definition means you may rightfully and freely produce and trade your property, and you may rightfully and freely dispose of your property.

It is in this way that laissez-faire capitalism, operating upon the principle of free trade and peaceful exchange, systematically bars coercion from human interaction. Humans, said Adam Smith, "have a natural tendency to truck, barter, and exchange."

The legal freedom to do that is laissez faire.

Read the full excerpt