Why Libertarianism Will Succeed

Scott Adams explains how to predict a winning idea:

I heard a useful rule about predicting success during my (failed) attempt at creating a hit Dilbert animated TV show. While watching the Dilbert pilot being tested on a focus group, an experienced executive explained to me the most non-intuitive way to predict success. Since then I’ve observed it to be true a number of times. It goes like this:

If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed.

…The reason that a product “everyone likes” will fail is because no one “loves” it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it…

Dilbert was the same way. From the very beginning, the vast majority of people who saw it didn’t care for it. But 10% who saw it not only liked it, they cut it out and mailed it to friends. They talked about it. They hung it on walls. They were passionate about it. Before the first Dilbert reprint book was sold, I heard stories of people making their own Dilbert books from newspaper clippings. Bingo.

Libertarian ideas have not been one of those things that “everyone likes”.

When I first learned about libertarianism, and I know many others just like me in this way, I voraciously read everything I could get my hands on… Laissez-faire economics, libertarian political theory, etc. I looked for libertarian organizations that I could learn from and went to libertarian conferences to meet libertarians in person. When I went to a conference put on by an organization that clicked with me I brought my sister to the very next conference that organization held. She became a libertarian and then, soon after, her husband and several of their friends became libertarians. Bingo.

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10:58 pm on October 12, 2006