Bill Buckley Made Me a Libertarian. Really.
by Dan Spielberg As a High School student in the late 1980's I watched a debate on television about the legalization of drugs between William F. Buckley, Jr. (the recently deceased founder of National Review magazine, which was instrumental in turning the American Right Wing from a pro-peace-and-freedom position into the anti-freedom movement we know and love today) and everyone's favorite "poverty-pimp," Jesse Jackson, with Buckley for once taking the libertarian position and calling for an end to the caging and torturing of drug sellers and users. I had never heard of Buckley before, and I thought to myself, "well, this is an interesting fellow." As one who favored the legalization of drugs, even back then, I couldn't help but be charmed by Mr. Buckley’s aristocratic manner combined with his willingness to take such a controversial, and some would say "radical," position. Once I arrived at college, I began spending several hours a week perusing the political books and magazines in the school library. I eventually came upon several collections of Buckley's old columns, and one column struck me in particular. It was an analysis of one of LBJ's "State of the Union" speeches in which the President was bragging about all the wonderful things that the "country was doing for it's people." Buckley pointed out that what Johnson really meant was "what the GOVERNMENT was doing for it’s people" and he went on to point out that, despite all the kindergarten chatter about democracy we have to put up with in this country, the government and the people are distinct, separate entities and that the government is in many ways a parasite on the body of the people. By way of illustration he pointed to a federal "housing" program that had destroyed thousands of more homes than the private sector had built in the period of time that it had existed. That column was the first explicit defense of the free market I had ever read. Soon after that I was exposed to essays by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and soon became a devoted intellectual foe of socialism and government planning. Once I had adopted this perspective I came to believe that the great menace to liberty came from the Left, and particularly the extreme Left. Coming to that conclusion, and being surrounded by silly Lefties on campus (like the white hippy girl in my Spanish class who had just come back from Nicaragua and wanted me to put on a Sandinista neckerchief for a class presentation) drove me right into the hands of the Conservative Movement. I registered Republican, donated money to the RNC, subscribed to National Review and listened to Limbaugh every day (I was even a charter subscriber to the Weekly Standard! Yuck). It was through reading National Review, and also Buckley’s older work from the ’50’s and ’60’s, that I first heard of the great free market economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who both had proved in their works that socialism is not only wicked, but counterproductive to boot. It was reading the works of Hayek and Mises that first planted the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist seed in my brain. (For if it is wicked and counterproductive for the state to tell people how to run their economic affairs, is it not even more so to require people to pay taxes at the point of a gun? Or to require them give up their freedom and their very lives to become a pawn in the racket known as war?) One day in a used bookstore I ran across a copy of a collection of essays by Frank Meyer, a founding editor National Review, called "The Conservative Mainstream." Of all the people who wrote for NR in its early days, Meyer (a former high-ranking member of the American Communist party) was the most libertarian. He stressed the importance of individual rights while most of the NR writers were stressing the need for the "community," through the apparatus of the state, to enforce it’s will on individuals. He criticized Lincoln for launching the Civil War and suppressing freedom throughout the country while the execrable pro-Lincoln "historian" Harry Jaffa babbled on about how the Union created the States (as if that were even metaphysically possible). I soon began thinking of myself a "Frank Meyer Conservative" to distinguish myself from the nationalistic, government-worshipping types that control the Right Wing today. Then, in March of 2003, an issue of National Review arrived at my door with a cover story by David Frum called "Unpatriotic Conservatives" which was about all the supposedly evil, anti-Semitic types on the Right who opposed the Iraq war because they hated America and Israel. I knew most of the names mentioned in this article, like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Robert Novak and Thomas Fleming (of Chronicles Magazine and the Rockford Institute). One I did not know was Lew Rockwell. He seemed to be the staunchest opponent of the war, judging by some of the quotes in the article. The next day I checked out LewRockwell.com and read several of Lew’s articles. It became a daily destination after that, and since then I’ve read writers who I would never have been exposed to otherwise. These writers have greatly deepened my understanding of American history and American politics and have strengthened me in my conviction that the state is an inherently anti-social, evil institution. These writers include writers of the past era (such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Murray Rothbard, James J. Martin, Garet Garrett, Albert Jay Nock) and writers of the present era (such as Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, and LewRockwell.com’s Thomas E. Woods, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, as well as too many others to name). I soon came to realize that the Conservative Movement is a fraud, and that they are as pro-state as the Left. They just like different parts of the state (the Pentagon, the CIA, the cops). Although I have come to see Buckley as a true villain of American history, I at least have to be grateful that I came upon his work at a time when my political beliefs were forming and could easily have taken the socialist road, because otherwise I may have never have been exposed to libertarian thought at all, and would have been a ripe victim for pro-state propagandists, as most Americans are. March 10, 2008 Dan Spielberg [send him mail] works in the real estate industry in Northern California. 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