Becky, evidently in your eyes I have committed the Big No No, the unpardonable and irredeemable sin for an anarcho-capitalist.  I spoke in glowing praise and admiration of a politician, even stated I looked forward to seeing this person possibly becoming president some day.  To this I plead guilty. Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa. So in this ignominious day of cancel culture and casting transgressors down the Orwellian Memory Hole, I eagerly await my dastardly fate. Whatever the high pooh bah tribunal of politically correct libertarian rectitude and stentorian virtue decides will be my fate, I am proud that I will be joined in that Hellish punishment by an old compatriot and colleague. Perhaps you have heard of this minor obscure personage who also labeled himself an “anarcho-capitalist?” This little guy authored over twenty five books and thousands of academic journal articles and pieces for the popular press in his lifetime on topics related to this subject. Including this one. 

Here is the closing heretical paragraph from this outcast thrown to the outer darkness for committing the same transgression as I have been charged :

I know, I know; I know all about the cries of protest that will now be welling up in scores of libertarian hearts, those hearts which, like mine, aye steeped in innate and instinctive distrust for any and every politician. The remarkable thing is that Mark Hatfield himself understands such distrust just as well, and probably shares it. A while ago he told a group of us, spontaneously bringing up the point himself: “I have not, like Faust, sold my soul to politics.” I believe him. And if the time should ever come when Mark Hatfield runs for the Presidency, I shall enlist without hesitation behind his banner.

That guy I have been describing above was one Murray N. Rothbard. Ever heard of him?

I can well remember going to see Senator Mark Hatfield speak on the campus of Oral Roberts University, the buckle on the evangelical Bible Belt. As an off-campus covert interloper from the University of Tulsa, I was bedecked in bell bottomed jeans and shoulder-length hair, not the standard attire of an ORU clean-cut Christian clone. After the senator delivered his powerful remarks I stood in the line of persons seeking to ask him questions. When my turn arrived, suddenly the Q&A period ended. Undaunted, I approached Hatfield, who was now surrounded by fawning admirers and showed him this issue of Murray N. Rothbard’s Libertarian Forum. Hatfield’s eyes suddenly lit up and glowed, and he began to treat me as his long lost prodigal son (to the bewilderment and dismay of the ORU crowd). For that brief moment we shared something really special which I will never forget.

The Best of Charles Burris