Introduction
I had an early interest in political ideas from my father, a conservative Republican. I turned 13 when Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee for President. Shortly after his defeat, I read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, and was taken by her arguments for laissez-faire. As a student at the University of Washington, I identified myself as a libertarian — pretty much down-the-line libertarian, but with some questions. Later some of those questions became exceptions, and I took a more pragmatic view.
I found other favorite authors besides Rand. One was Mark Twain. I had read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in grade school and tackled the more difficult Huckleberry Finn, then A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. There was something essentially American about Twain — his skepticism, his individualism, his voice. I read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild at age 11. In junior high I read George Orwell’s Animal Farmand Nineteen Eighty-Four. In my early 20s I was much impressed by Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier. I had decided to be a writer, and I was impressed with Orwell’s grasp of fundamental issues, and his ability to hold up his own “side” to scrutiny and analysis. Maybe I could take that approach to libertarians and conservatives. By then, I thought they needed it.
I might have become a writer for libertarian magazines, had there been a way to make a living at it. There wasn’t. I decided to become a journalist for daily newspapers. It was a fateful decision. Building on my college major in business and graduate study in journalism, I became a business reporter, and much of my old interest in libertarian theory waned. I still had the same political views, more or less, but it wasn’t what I wrote about or thought about most of the time.
Starting in 1976, I was the business reporter for the Daily Journal-Americanin Bellevue, Wash. In December 1978 I moved to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,where I was the marine writer, the reporter in the business section that covered the port and the Alaska fishing industry. In 1980 I went to work for Marple’s Business Newsletter, which circulated among bankers and business owners across the Pacific Northwest. In 1981 I went back to the Post-Intelligencer as a general business reporter, a job I had almost to the end of the decade.
A friend had given me a gift subscription to the longest-lived libertarian magazine, Reason, which is why in September 1987 I received a pitch to subscribe to Liberty, a magazine being started up in Port Townsend, Wash., by Bill Bradford. The questionnaire had a number of philosophical questions, such as whether it was morally justified to steal someone else’s property in order to survive, etc. I filled out the answers, generally in the direction of self-preservation rather than dying for purity of theory, and mailed it back in with a letter.
e “I haven’t been a libertarian, rigidly and orthodoxly defined, for at least a decade,” I wrote. “The thing that’s wrong with libertarianism is that it’s a social philosophy based on one value. It’s a black box, a mathematical function. Put in the problem, crank the handle, and out comes the answer. It’s totally logical and consistent. And sometimes also idiotic.
“Not that there’s anything the matter with individual liberty. It’s a pretty good value — my favorite, still. But there are other ones, like family and caring for children. Like saving a human life. Like personal responsibility. Like solutions that work. As long as libertarians run around talking about selling the roads and having heroin available in 7-Eleven stores, they’ll just be a joke.”
But I subscribed to Bill Bradford’s Liberty, which was an in-reach magazine aimed at libertarians. And I liked it. And several years later I began writing for it. Often I took that Orwell stance — I agree with your ideas mainly, but what about THIS?
The radical libertarians read me out of their club, and that was fine. I was still a libertarian in the looser sense that that individual liberty and responsibility is a starting point. My position was best expressed by two prominent men. One was H.L. Mencken, who once was asked how much freedom of the press he favored. “As much as people can stand,” he said. The other was Louis Rukeyser, the host of the PBS-TV show, “Wall Street Week.” I interviewed him once, in the late 1970s, and asked him to describe his political philosophy. He said, “I’m for liberty and what works.”
Mencken was a journalist. So was Rukeyser. And so was Orwell. Journalists are not philosophers. Our job is to explain the world as it is. We may become attached to a set of ideas, and I am guilty of that, but always there is the professional urge to ask: Will it work? Does it make sense? Could people stand it? For a journalist to maintain a pose of radicalism is professionally difficult. Even a columnist on the editorial page, with a publisher’s license to be opinionated, is expected to gather and interpret facts and keep his fantasies under control.
As one of my favorite libertarians, Charles Murray, has noted, there is an airy-fairness to libertarians. They have an idea, absorbed from Ayn Rand, that in the long run the philosophers rule the world. Well, philosopers do have their influence. But there is more to human society than philosophy, law and economics. It is telling that academic libertarians are concentrated in these abstract disciplines and not in more earthy ones like history, literature, anthropology or public administration. It is telling also that the most libertarian school of economic thought, the Austrian, insists on an entirely deductive kind of reasoning. No empiricism for them. I like many of their explanations, but their epistemology is atrocious. It reminds me of a statement I heard years ago that the average member of the Libertarian Party was a 32-year-old male computer programmer. Another artificial world.
I am not opposed to theory. If I were, I would not have subscribed to Liberty, let alone written for it. But when I see a theory, my concern is where it touches the ground.
On this web page I have posted some of the things I wrote for Liberty. The first is from a seminar at Princeton University, and is all about theory. Among the rest, several are book reviews, some of them books by libertarians, some books about libertarians, and some books by non-libertarians that reach a destination of interest to libertarians by a route libertarians don’t usually take. Several are arguments with radical libertarians in favor of a more pragmatic view.
I was never paid for these pieces. I did them because I wanted to — which is why they are here.
You can read them by scrolling down under “Libertarian” on the menu above.