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Young American Revolution

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March 2011
Contents
March 2011 / Issue 06

5 Revolutionary Reading By Daniel McCarthy 4 Editorial

The books you need to win the war of ideas The Year of Youth: Project 2012

12 Summer of Liberty
9 Campus Round-Up By Bonnie Kristian By Wesley Messamore
YAL had been busy on college campuses across the country
Get a degree in fighting the state
—by interning with YAL
15 Where Statists Are Made By Ben Wetmore
Meet your foe: the big-government campus Left 25 Mind Your Language
By Vladimir Rudenko
How to talk about liberty
20 Concealed Carry—On Campus By Andrew W. Smith
—to any audience
The Second Amendment goes to college

27 The Secrets of Shot Selection

28 Get Realist By Roy Antoun By Jeff Fulcher
How liberty activists can change foreign policy What Wayne Gretzky got wrong

30 Profiles in Liberty: Lawrence Reed

32 Secession Brings People Together By John Payne
By Trent Hill
Radical Kirkpatrick Sale explains why smaller is more beautiful Ambassador of Freedom

38 Emperor Romney By Jack Hunter 34 Colleges Need a Revolution

No Apology: The Case for American Greatness By Matt Cockerill
by Mitt Romney The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and
Resistance in the American University
by Louis Menand
40 Know Thine Enemy By David Gordon
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Young American Revolution
 The Year of Youth: Project 2012

I n 2010, Americans re-

jected the statism of
Nancy Pelosi and Barack
path for recovery. This
failure of government is
mind-numbing. Yet who
Publisher Obama—just as in 2008 will bail them out?
Jeff Frazee and 2006, they rejected The answer is al-
the statism of George ways you, the taxpayer.
Managing Editor
W. Bush and the Repub- You will be responsible
Bonnie Kristian
lican Congress. Voters to pay for this radical
Editorial Director could not be more clear growth in government.
Daniel McCarthy about their dissatisfac- This is why Young
tion with the choices be- Americans for Liberty
Deputy Editors fore them, and the need is making a call to all
Edward King,
for fresh ideas and new who care deeply about
Roy M. Antoun
leaders fueled the Ron their country and the
Art Director Paul revolution and the direction in which it is
Matthew Holdridge Tea Party movement. heading. We must take
Now it’s your turn. our government back
Illustration The Year of Youth: and downsize it—re-
Shane Helm, Project 2012 is a ground- peal regulations page by
Anthony Rousseau breaking idea, based page, cut taxes to truly
Contributing Editors on the power behind stimulate the economy,
W. James Antle III, Dylan Hales, educating, organizing, and slash spending at all
George Hawley, Trent Hill, and mobilizing young levels. And that is just
Jack Hunter, Bonnie Kristian, activists to run for local a start. The challenge
Jeremy Lott, Kelse Moen, John Payne office and manage elec- before us is truly enor-
toral campaigns. Young mous, but with careful
Americans for Liberty’s organization we can pull
Young American Revolution is the official publication
of Young Americans for Liberty (www.YALiberty.
goal in this project is to identify thousands the country free from Washington, D.C.’s
org). Subscriptions are $50 for one year (4 issues). of young leaders willing to dedicate their fatal grasp.
Checks may be made out to Young Americans for lives to fighting for what they believe in— This is a wake up call to the next gen-
Liberty and sent to PO Box 2751, Arlington, VA 22202.
freedom, peace, and prosperity. If enough eration: You are drowning in a sea of
Young American Revolution accepts letters to the patriots rise up against Leviathan and di- debt, your country is broke, and you are
editor and freelance submissions. Letters should
be between 50 and 300 words. Submissions should rect their actions to the political process in responsible for paying it off. Obama has
be between 700 and 2400 words. Letters and 2012, we will witness real, historic change. been a giant disappointment—a triumph
submissions may be edited for length and content. For once the American people will have of cynicism and imperial liberalism. The
Write to us at contact@yaliberty.org or PO Box
2751, Arlington, VA 22202. a real choice in their elections, not just a “hope” and “change” that captured the
choice of evils. youth in 2008 seems like a distant memory
Young Americans for Liberty is the continuation of
Students for Ron Paul (SFP). In less than 8 months, You can make this happen—and you now, and as a result we are disenfranchised
SFP established over 500 college and high school must. Otherwise, the next generation more than ever. Who will rise to the occa-
chapters in all 50 states and over 26,000 students
joined the Ron Paul 2008 campaign.
will suffer the shackles of a broken and sion to capture the hearts and minds of
bankrupt government. Look at the future my generation?
The mission of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL)
is to train, educate, and mobilize youth activists
before you: The national debt alone is un- Don’t look to merely the leaders we
committed to “winning on principle”. Our goal is to sustainable. In the past four years, Bush already have. You must become the lead-
cast the leaders of tomorrow and reclaim the policies, and Obama—with help from Pelosi and ers of the future. Join YAL, organize on
candidates, and direction of our government.
Reid—have amassed more debt than the your campuses and in your communities,
We welcome limited government conservatives, previous 43 presidents combined. That’s and make the Year of Youth a victory for
classical liberals, and libertarians who trust in the
creed we set forth. over 230 years of debt more than doubled America’s long-neglected ideal of liberty
in only four years. These politicians are and self-government.
Opinions expressed in Young American Revolution
are not necessarily the views of Young Americans stealing your future. They are also destroy-
for Liberty. ing your neighborhoods: Dozens of city -- Jeff Frazee
Copyright 2011 Young Americans for Liberty
and state governments face dramatic bud- Executive Director
get shortfalls this year, and they have no Young Americans for Liberty

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March 2011
 Revolutionary Reading
The books you need to win the war of ideas
Daniel McCarthy
I f America no longer has the constitutional sys-
tem the Framers envisioned, it is not because
the people have freely chosen a more statist alter-
native. The changes for the worse that have come
to American politics over the past century were
only made possible by a great deal of miseduca-
tion—by malign neglect in our primary schools
and institutions of higher learning of the studies
that can preserve freedom. In place of curriculums
that would give students the means to identify and
resist propaganda, the American educational sys-
tem, abetted by television and the news media,
has taught citizens to conform to the demands
of statism. Even campus rebels are unaware of
how thoroughly their own ideas of battling “the
system” have been molded by the system itself.
If they knew, they would burn their Che Guevara
shirts.
There are many good professors, and even courses by medio-
cre professors will often feature great books. If you take serious
classes, you will certainly hear about, if not actually read, the most
important classic texts in politics and economics: Plato and Ar-
istotle, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Adam Smith and John
Maynard Keynes, etc. The educational establishment has a statist
bent, but an intelligent student can judge these works for himself.
What is more, a student involved in the liberty movement will
learn from his friends about many other classic works, such as F.A.
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the
State, that directly repudiate the philosophy of servility.
Independent reading can fill many of the gaps in your educa-
tion. But much of the indoctrination that is carried out in univer-
sities does not take the form of excluding good books from the
syllabus—rather the statist lesson is taught by how the course is
arranged. The educational establishment shapes the structure of
knowledge in higher education in such a way as to put anti-statism
at a disadvantage. There is thus a need for a systematic anti-statist
alternative, one that can provide a foundation from which to ap-
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proach the great works you encounter in class and
in your self-directed studies.
The liberty syllabus below is not intended as
a substitute for independent reading, and it is
far from being a comprehensive bibliography of
works that liberty activists should know. Instead it
is designed to give you some basic but highly ef-
fective tools for all of your other studies. The four
units cover contemporary politics, history, eco-
nomics, and a smattering of philosophy, as well as
providing ideas about how to put the principles of
liberty into action on your campus—to help you
fulfill Young Americans for Liberty’s mission of
“winning on principle.”
These units can be covered at your own pace:
reading one unit per semester is a good idea, but it
is better to take as long as necessary to absorb an
important work than to rush through it on an arbitrary schedule.
Unit 1: Freedom 101
Ron Paul—The Revolution: A Manifesto
Barry Goldwater—The Conscience of a Conservative
Douglas Hyde—Dedication and Leadership
Henry Hazlitt—Economics in One Lesson
These four are introductory books that are also very good
books. An activist who comes to college already grounded in the
liberty philosophy may be tempted to skip them, but that would
be a mistake. Ron Paul’s The Revolution is a concise and engaging
look at how a return to freedom can redress the evils of war and
bankruptcy that currently bedevil the nation. Even readers already
familiar with Dr. Paul’s ideas will benefit from seeing his world-
view brought into sharp focus on the written page.
The Conscience of a Conservative is perhaps the only other “cam-
paign book” that stands the test of time. Barry Goldwater had
been very reluctant to run for president in 1960. But grassroots
libertarian and conservative activists drafted him, and they con-
vinced him to work with writer Brent Bozell to produce this book,
whose opening chapters remain a brilliant exposition of the liber-
tarian side of conservatism (or the conservative side of libertari-
anism). Be wary of Goldwater’s Cold War interventionist foreign
policy, but aside from that, Conscience is not only a good book, but
a book that can help communicate the liberty message to conser-
vatives by reminding them of what they once stood for.
Douglas Hyde had a remarkable life story: he was an influ-
ential Communist activist in Britain who grew disillusioned with
totalitarian ideology and became a Roman Catholic. He distilled
everything he had learned from the Communists about effective
political organizing into Dedication and Leadership, in the hopes that
the side of freedom could learn how activist-leaders are made.
The book is no mere memoir or attack on Communism—it is
an indispensable manual for creating and maintaining effective
cadres, and Hyde’s work has lost none of its relevance since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Every student activist should read it.
Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is perhaps the best and
most accessible crash-course on free-market economics ever pub-
lished. It will open many doors to more advanced paths of study,
and like the other volumes in this section, its clarity of reasoning
will be helpful even to readers already well-versed in its subject
matter.
Each of these four books is a breeze, and covering all of them
in a single semester should be feasible even for the busiest student.
Get started on them right away—you will be glad you did.
Four other works that are worth picking up during your first
semester in college are The Politically Incorrect Guide to U.S. History,
by Thomas E. Woods Jr.; The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitu-
tion, by Kevin Gutzman; and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capital-
ism and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the
New Deal, both by Robert P. Murphy. Don’t be deceived by the
cartoon pig on the covers: these volumes are brimming with real
learning, and they provide useful correctives to the economic and
political myths common in all too many classrooms.
Unit 2: What They Don’t Teach You in School
Felix Morley—Freedom and Federalism
Gene Callahan—Economics for Real People
Israel Kirzner—Ludwig von Mises
Andrew Bacevich—American Empire
Colleges and universities are not uniformly politically correct.
But even professors who strive to be fair can omit important per-
spectives from their courses. The ideas of the Austrian School
of economics, for example, only have a prominent place in the
curriculums of a few universities. The books in unit 2 have been
chosen to supply viewpoints that are missing from most college
educations.
Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People is an exemplary intro-
duction to Austrian economics, while Israel Kirzner’s Ludwig von
Mises is a short intellectual biography of the most important Aus-
trian economist of all. Taken together, these books will prepare
you for a deeper study of the most radical school of free-market
economics. Armed with what you learn here, you will be able to
tackle Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State and ultimately
Mises’s own magnum opus, Human Action.
The best single volume on the decline of the American re-
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public as the Founding Fathers envisioned it and the rise of an
American empire in its place is Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federal-
ism. Morley, a staunch individualist, was one of the original editors
of the conservative journal Human Events, but he never embraced
interventionism during the Cold War. Morley was one of the most
principled and talented men ever to lift a pen in the service of
liberty, and Freedom and Federalism spells out in pellucid prose how
genuine federalism was displaced by the centralized power of
Washington, D.C.
Equally brilliant is Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, which
examines the economic and political engines that have driven
America’s foreign policy—and led to deadly “blowback” in the
form of terrorism. Bacevich criticizes the wars of Republicans
and Democrats alike from a compelling perspective: he’s a former
U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and veteran of the Persian Gulf War
who has become one of the military-industrial complex’s staunch-
est critics. He’s an antiwar conservative whom hawks and liberals
cannot dismiss.
Unit 3: Extremism in Defense of Liberty
Murray Rothbard—For a New Liberty
George Carey, ed.—Freedom and Virtue
Saul Alinsky—Rules for Radicals
Daniel Flynn—A Conservative History of the American Left
The first unit gives you a grounding in the basic ideas of liberty
today. The second unit presents a theoretical and historical con-
text for expanding your knowledge. Now you are ready to explore
some radical ideas, beginning with the book that is the best in-
troduction to radical libertarianism, Murray Rothbard’s For a New
Liberty. Just how much government does a free society need—and
how much can it endure? Rothbard offers the anarcho-capitalist’s
answer. (For a New Liberty, and all of Rothbard’s books, are avail-
able as free downloads at www.mises.org, which is a vital resource
for thousands of other pro-liberty works as well.)
Freedom and Virtue, edited by Georgetown University profes-
sor of government George Carey, provides several other answers
from conservatives and limited-government libertarians. This
book will give you a feel for the disputes that have enlivened de-
bate between traditionalists and libertarians on the Right. It will
also show you how broad the philosophical range of anti-statism
can be, and how much common ground conservatives like Robert
Nisbet and Richard Weaver share with libertarians like Friedrich
Hayek and even Rothbard. (If you have trouble finding a copy of
Freedom and Virtue, you can substitute Frank Meyer’s In Defense of
Freedom—or better yet, read both.)
Karl Marx once wrote, “Philosophers have hitherto only in-
terpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Having pro-liberty ideas is a start, but it’s not enough—you must
also act on them. The Left can teach conservatives and libertarians
impressive techniques for putting ideas into action, and no book
is more useful in this regard than Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Alinsky was the original “community organizer,” and he developed
strategies to succeed against opponents with far more money and
larger organizations. Friends of liberty today find themselves in
just such an underdog position on most college campuses.
Alinsky is badly misunderstood by many on the Right—he
was no friend of capitalism, but he was not a
communist or mega-statist, either. For a long
time, conservatives and many libertarians have
only understood the Left through caricature.
A more accurate understanding of what the
Left really is—and of the crucial distinction
between the coercive “Force Left” and the
relatively non-coercive “Freedom Left”—can
be obtained from reading Daniel J. Flynn’s A
Conservative History of the American Left. From
his own perspective on the Right, Flynn gives
a fair-minded and highly readable account of
the Left’s evolution. There is an important mi-
natory lesson for the Right in the tale of how
the Force Left ultimately routed the Freedom
Left.
If you want to dig deeper into the history
of the Left, and see it from the perspective
of a progressive, try The Long Detour by James
Weinstein. Weinstein was publisher of the left-
wing magazine In These Times, and his book is
brutally honest about how an infatuation with Soviet Commu-
nism subverted a genuinely American Left. As an addendum to
the Rothbard and Carey readings, meanwhile, consider exploring
The Irrepressible Rothbard, available from Mises.org. That collection
includes many of Rothbard’s later writings, in which he empha-
sizes his affinities with cultural conservatives.
Unit 4: Advanced Studies
Hans-Hermann Hoppe—Democracy, The God That Failed
Bertrand de Jouvenel—On Power
Jacques Ellul—Propaganda
Richard Weaver—Ideas Have Consequences
Bibliographies in the books from the first three units will give
you many ideas for further study. This fourth unit is intended
to highlight works that you may otherwise miss: four advanced
books that every student of freedom should tackle at some point
during his or her college years.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy, The God That Failed was
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published a decade ago, but it still represents
the most comprehensive synthesis of Austri-
an economics and radical libertarian political
theory. Hoppe argues for a “natural order”
based on property rights and self-ownership,
and he shows that democracy as a political
system is inevitably corrosive of liberty. Mon-
archs at least think of their countries as their
own property, and attempt to conserve them
as such. Democracy encourages short-term
thinking in rulers and the ruled alike, which
leads to a steady decay of civilization.
French political theorist Bertrand de Jou-
venel, meanwhile, shows historically how
attempts to minimize political power have
actually led to its concentration—indeed to
the creation of the modern all-encompassing
State. But the intermediary institutions that
stand between the individual and govern-
ment—the groups and habits of civil soci-
ety—can act as “counterweights,” Jouvenel
argues, and preserve freedom in the face of encroaching power.
Another Frenchman, the Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul,
provides an insightful and deeply troubling account of systems of
indoctrination and control in his book Propaganda. The phenom-
enon he describes is more than just the advertising of political
ideas—it is the shaping of an individual’s and a society’s mental
horizons. Propaganda is a difficult but vastly rewarding work.
Finally, if the production of propaganda is about falsifying
the world to serve political power, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have
Consequences, a famous book little read, provides a cure: Weaver
is a metaphysical realist concerned to restore words and ideas to
their true meanings—or at least to restore meaning to the idea
of truth. Ideas Have Consequences diagnoses the evils of modern
politics on a philosophical level, seeking ultimate explanations for
how contemporary warfare has slipped all civilized restraints and
what forces have reduced the citizens to political serfdom. The
book is as much a work of prophecy as philosophy.
Daniel McCarthy is editorial director of Young American Revolution.
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March 2011
 Campus Roundup
YAL has been busy on college campuses across the country
Bonnie Kristian
S am Spaiser and other members of the YAL chapter at Indi-
ana University-Bloomington learned exactly what their college
thought about free market economics – and it wasn’t pretty.
Spaiser and his chapter had applied to the school’s Indiana
Memorial Union Board Lectures Committee for funding to bring
Mises Institute senior scholar Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. to speak
on campus. After a consult with the school’s economics depart-
ment, however, the board returned a flat refusal, citing the blatant-
ly false excuse that Woods – a graduate of Harvard and Columbia
and a New York Times bestselling author – lacked “sufficient aca-
demic credibility.”
The rejection was remarkable, particularly given the board’s
past funding of a visit from presidential candidate John Edwards
to the tune of $35,000, more than seven times what Woods had
requested. As Spaiser noted, “It is clear that the Lectures Board
rejected Woods based on philosophical differences, not his lack
of credibility.”
Woods himself commented, “If my academic credentials are
in question, anyone can judge for themselves at TomWoods.com.
But from their point of view I’m surely uncredentialed: unlike
other speakers they might consider, I haven’t wrecked any econo-
mies.”
The YAL chapter sprang into action, gaining the attention of
the local press…and reconsideration from the lectures board.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the reconsideration proved to be short-
lived as the board once again rejected the group’s request, this
time on the grounds that they were “too prepared” in their event
planning.
Fortunately, YAL supporters from the university’s alumni net-
work, Campaign for Liberty, CampusReform.org, and other pro-
liberty organizations rallied around the IU-Bloomington chapter
and raised the funds necessary for the group to host Woods on
campus this fall. As Spaiser put it, YAL at IU-B was “ready to take
IU head on with Austrian Economics!” The September event was
a wild success, with more than 250 people in attendance.
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Young American Revolution
Some sort of headline here
The Young Americans for Liberty chapter at Youngstown
State University in Ohio joined Ohioans for Concealed Carry, a
local gun rights group, to protest a nearby town’s ban on gun sales
within city limits. They picked out a location, did their research,
found out they wouldn’t need a permit for their peaceful event,
and began a publicity campaign.
But all that planning appeared to be for naught. The local
police station -- a strong supporter of the draconian gun sales
law -- changed its position, deciding that an event which originally
required no fee or permit would now cost the YAL chapter $2000.
Cash-strapped town officials first maintained that the fee
was for police protection for the event, but later admitted that
if the rally had been to support the troops instead of the Second
Amendment, no police protection – and thus no fee – would have
been deemed necessary.
Fortunately for the YAL chapter involved, this was clearly un-
constitutional ideological discrimination – and the town backed
down. First, the fee for the rally was lowered and graciously paid
by Ohioans for Concealed Carry so the event could proceed as
planned. And better yet, as a result of YAL’s activism, the town’s
gun sales ban was repealed shortly thereafter.
Some sort of headline here
In 2010, the University of Washington at Seattle found itself
affected by state-wide budget cuts. Some university workers lost
their jobs as class sizes grew and student services declined. These
changes, coupled with upcoming tuition hikes, left the school’s
Socialist Student/Worker Coalition unhappy – and calling for a
big government solution to the UW’s fiscal problems.
Then the president of the campus’s YAL chapter, Mikayla Hall
described what happened next:
Rushing on my way to class yesterday, I took a short-cut
through the Quad and found myself facing a small crowd of
 angry students. These students, members of the Socialist Stu-
dent/Worker Coalition, gathered at various locations across
campus and yelled in an all-day strike for progressive solutions
to the state-wide budget cuts…
Rather than decrease regulation and state involvement to
promote competition and lower prices, they propose salary
caps, a state income tax exclusively for wealthy Washingto-
nians, and a freeze on tuition.
“In an effort to remind people that more government is not
the solution,” Hall continued, “the local YAL chapter stepped up
and hosted a counter-strike.” Their efforts paid off when the
YAL members became the angle of the story many local news
sources chose to highlight. Standing amid more than a hundred
angry socialists, the YAL members’ message of free trade and lim-
ited government became the center of attention.
Some sort of headline here
Western Michigan University’s YAL chapter teamed up with a
campus conservative group to take advantage of the warm May
weather with a dunk tank and take a stand against government-run
health care.
Renting a bright blue and yellow tank, they set up shop in the
middle of campus. Members of the two groups got into costume
as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Congressman Bart Stu-
pak, two key players in the passage of Obamacare. They then
offered passing students the chance to dunk the “politicians” and
their unfortunate support of government health care, not to men-
tion a fun break from exams.
The representation of Reid as Darth Vader in a tie played well
with the crowd, and participating students received information
about YAL and the problems with socialized medicine.
YAL’s activism antics brought out the local CBS station and
resulted in coverage in the student-run daily newspaper, the West-
ern Herald.
Some sort of headline here
As anti-TSA sentiment swelled across the nation in response to
the agency’s increasingly invasive and unconstitutional screening
techniques, YAL sprung into action. With many students about to
leave college for Thanksgiving break -- and perhaps fly home for
the holiday -- the YAL national staff compiled an activism guide
for students to protest the TSA, both on and off campus.
The YAL chapter at Vanderbilt University, however, already
had the right idea, tabling on their campus to raise awareness
about the TSA’s concerning (and 100% ineffective) practices.
After the activism guide was posted, other chapters began
to stage their own protests. At UC-San Diego, for instance, the
YAL chapter covered their campus with anti-TSA flyers and chalk
messages. The Indiana University chapter created a video appeal-
ing to fellow citizens to stand up to the TSA’s abusive practices.
Meanwhile, the Auburn University chapter created a clever dis-
play which enticed passing students to take information about the
TSA.
However, perhaps the most exciting TSA protest story comes
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March 2011
from the University of Virginia. Included in YAL’s activism guide
were several flyer templates which chapters could download and
customize with their own contact information. When the YAL
chapter at UVA downloaded a template which depicted as the
TSA mascot Pedobear, a well-known internet meme represent-
ing sexual deviance, to post around campus for their protest, they
snapped a picture of one of their flyers and put it on Reddit. The
image made it to the front page of this high-traffic website, gar-
nering more than 400,000 views and over 400 comments! From
there, it was picked up by the Huffington Post and was subse-
quently posted on several other sites. Congratulations again to the
UVA chapter for this incredible viral success!
Some sort of headline here
To encourage involvement on Constitution Day 2010, YAL
held an activism contest for all participating chapters. Aside from
some awesome prizes – including and HD flipcam for the first
place winners – these chapters took home bragging rights for the
coming year. The competition was stiff, but the first, second, and
third place chapters went above and beyond the call of duty in
their celebration of our founding document:
First Place: University of Wisconsin-Madison
YAL UW-Madison had great success on Constitution Day
2010, passing out over 100 Constitutions and collected nearly 500
signatures of students who wanted to see Ron Paul come to Madi-
son. They tabled at a campus hot spot and engaged in friendly
conversation with passersby. The group collected information
from about 40 potential recruits who expressed serious interest
in joining YAL. Local news outlets ignored press releases and
pictures which were sent out after the event, but a law professor at
UW-Madison who runs a widely-read blog saw the event and very
favorably covered it -- which elicited 130 comments from readers.
It appears freedom is popular at UW-Madison.
Second Place: University of Texas-San Antonio
Young Americans for Liberty at UTSA created a 17-ft Con-
stitution and displayed it in a populated area on campus. The
chapter handed out over 200 Constitutions -- all they had -- and
received six feet of signatures on the display, totaling more than
325 signatures. An additional 80 students signed up to learn more
about YAL. The attention didn’t go unnoticed! KSAT 12, a San
Antonio ABC-affiliate, picked up the story and hung around for
over an hour at the event. The event was also covered by a local
blog and Students for Liberty.
Third Place: Washington State University
After an evening of chalking and covering campus with flyers,
YAL-WSU tabled all day for Constitution Day using the Opera-
tion Politically Homeless kit. Enticed by the colorful posters say-
ing “student survey” and the full table display, nearly one hundred
students came up to take the World’s Smallest Political Quiz. All
participants received pocket Constitutions and a flyer. Any stu-
dents who landed in “libertarian,” “conservative,” or “centrist” on
the quiz were asked to sign the signup sheet and received a copy
of YAR. Group membership increased ten-fold!
To read about other chapters’ events on Constitution Day
2010, visit www.YALiberty.org/constitutionday2010.
 11
Young American Revolution
 Summer of Liberty
Get a degree in fighting the state—by interning with YAL

Wesley Messamore

B efore telling you exactly

how the Young Americans
for Liberty internship made this
last summer the very best one
of my life, allow me to tell you
a little about YAL:
During Congressman Ron
Paul’s meteoric presidential
bid in 2008, over 26,000 young
Americans joined together
from over 500 college and high
school chapters to form Stu-
dents for Ron Paul. Inspired by
a robust, principled alternative
to the same old partisan bick-
ering and talking points, they
bravely banded together to
fight for their future, instead of
just letting it happen to them. YAL member dressed as Soviet guard
After the campaign ended,
Students for Ron Paul became
Young Americans for Liberty, dedicated to training, educating,
and mobilizing youth activists on college campuses. In addition
to learning valuable lessons in political activism and campaigning,
students in YAL have the opportunity to become the leaders of
tomorrow. Just one of the many opportunities YAL provides is
its internship program, which accepts students each semester and
during the summer.
I write this as my Summer Internship with YAL comes to a
close, and I could not recommend the program more highly. My
time with YAL has been the best, most fulfilling, most productive,
and most enlightening summer I have ever had.
Interns work at YAL’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, a
short drive or subway ride to Washington D.C. with its many op-
portunities for students interested in learning more about gov-
ernment (and how to fight it) and making important connections
with political groups and nonprofits. Every week, political groups
like the Cato Institute and Reason throw happy-hour meetings in
Washington’s many excellent bars and restaurants, where activists
can network while relaxing from the grind. In many ways, this is
the real D.C., where provocative conversations about policies be-
ing dreamed up just down the road take place.
Of course, there are tourist attractions as well. Being in Wash- later than some internships do—around 7 pm. So in total, we put
ington for a season gives students a chance to see the U.S. Capitol,
Supreme Court, Smithsonian, and other unique sites of interest.
Political leaders of all kinds—the good, the bad, and the
12
March 2011
ugly—are a common sight,
and YAL interns get some
up-close interaction with the
best of them. Near the begin-
ning of the summer, I had the
opportunity to attend a fund-
raiser for U.S. Senate hopeful
Rand Paul. In addition to get-
ting a picture with Rand, I got
to meet his father, Ron Paul,
and to shake hands with Sen.
Jim Bunning.
True story—the next day,
I was mentioned (as a “long-
haired intern”) in Dave Wei-
gel’s column at the Washington
Post, in a write-up he did about
the fundraiser. One day after
that, Weigel resigned over the
publication of some heated
comments he’d made on
“Journolist,” a private e-mail group for left-leaning journalists.
When you go to Washington, you get to observe things up close,
and kind of, sort of, peripherally be a part of them. It’s awesome.
The internship itself is leaps and bounds ahead of other politi-
cal internships. To begin with, the pay is phenomenal. Most politi-
cal internships for students pay peanuts—if they pay anything at
all. $700 a month is a pretty standard wage for a student internship
in Washington D.C., which in this town is not even enough to
make rent. YAL pays its interns $1500 a month to work hard ad-
vancing liberty while learning things that many people in politics
pay money—sometimes a lot of money—to learn in professional
workshops and seminars.
Another great perk is the YAL intern house. Instead of spend-
ing time and stress searching for an apartment in an unfamiliar
city, YAL interns get to live together in a really cool internship
house for just $800 a month. So to think of it another way: YAL
pays what most political internships do—$700 a month—while
also providing free room and board in a house with other interns,
something that very few other political internships provide.
What’s a typical day like? We usually arrive at the office around
10 am. Seriously. It’s that awesome. Of course, we also leave much
in our eight hours at the office with a lunch break, but it’s pushed
back in the day to avoid the morning and afternoon rush and to
accommodate our college-aged circadian rhythms.
 We also work at home a lot off-the-clock Regional Directors program to manage the
because tyranny never sleeps, and neither organization’s explosive growth.
should liberty. When you’re living and work- While working, I’ve also had free access
ing out here, what you do is not just a job to all of the Leadership Institute’s seminars
or internship anymore—it just becomes and schools—an extremely valuable oppor-
a lifestyle and a constant fight against the tunity for anyone interested in becoming a
injustice of a corrupt establishment. I love more effective political activist. People pay
what I do, so it’s not even work. It’s fun. And big money to go to these training seminars
it’s critically important to building a lasting and literally travel from all over the world
political movement to reclaim our liberties. to attend them. I attended LI’s Future Can-
YAL interns don’t just make coffee or didate School, a program for anyone who
fetch bagels. Executive Director Jeff Frazee might one day run for an elected office or
is interested in cultivating our unique talents help someone run for office. The school was
and interests to advance the cause. Much of attended by people from France, Paraguay,
the job is very task-oriented and requires and China, not to mention those from all
someone with a lot of self-motivation and over the United States.
initiative—someone who knows what he or If you are driven, hard-working, self-
she wants to do and to learn. motivated, and dedicated to liberty, YAL’s
As someone interested in media, I’ve internship could be one of the best ex-
had the opportunity to write a lot of opin- periences of your life. After learning and
ion editorials and make videos to spread our growing so much this Summer, building my
message and defend our principles. And as resume, and meeting so many important
someone with experience in sales and an Wesley Messamore contemplates life people, innumerable doors have opened to
interest in nonprofit development—that is, me because of the internship. I could not
raising funds for a political cause—I’ve had have found a better opportunity.
the chance to talk to YAL’s donors personally to raise money for
sponsoring students to our national convention and launching our Wesley Messamore is a recent graduate of Belmont University.

13
Young American Revolution
 14
March 2011
 Where Statists Are Made
Meet your foe: the big-government campus Left

Ben Wetmore

R adicalized during the 1960s and

the Vietnam war, college cam-
puses have long been considered a
Almost every major component
of the “progressive” or “liberal”
movement has a campus analogue.
hotbed of left-wing popular discon- The Left keeps a keen eye to groom-
tent and statism. In truth, the philo- ing new recruits and developing new
sophical underpinnings of campus leaders. The radicalism that the Left
radicalism extend much farther back, once promoted has now been tem-
and the strength of the Left’s intel- pered into a dispassionate and cold
lectual resources is greatly overstated. control over institutions they once
Nevertheless, the college campus in fought against. Roger Kimball in The
America remains a place where 18.4 Long March chronicles this transfor-
million students at any given time mation of higher education by ’60s
are being pushed through a systemic radicals, their “long march” through
process of indoctrination while also the institutions. Ben Folds also hilari-
being mentally assaulted by various ously sings about this in one of his
SDS members demonstrate during a speech by
outside groups, speakers, and entities more underappreciated songs, “The
Governor Jeb Bush.
that push bright young minds into Ascent of Stan,” where Stan has be-
subservience to the state. come the man he used to rail against;
The Left has always been comfortable on campuses. Allan Stan has become the establishment.
Bloom, in his remarkably honest 1987 book The Closing of the There are only a handful of truly universal and controversial
American Mind, equates the role of religion and churches on the issues on most college campuses. The two main types of issues
Right to the place of education and the universities on the Left— are those that are “natural student issues” and those that are rela-
and while churches are declining, the campuses are growing. The tively artificial student issues. Natural student issues are those that
campuses have long been finely tuned to produce a very valuable play off of self-interest and are topics already being discussed on
political commodity: lifestyle leftists who have office skills and campus even before ideological groups intervene. So, for instance,
can percolate throughout society. Conservatism exists by virtue of issues of tuition, academics, and dorm life are natural student is-
births within a family protected through time by various institu- sues. A few more abstract political issues fit this bill, such as femi-
tions. Leftists exist as a consequence of the educational institu- nism, sex and sexuality, race, and so on, because they are the kind
tions that they control. The campus Left is where the professional of issues that everyone has strong intractable opinions about.
Left gets its supporters, where it forms the malcontents who later The artificial issues are pretty easy to spot. They usually involve
ruin freedom-loving people’s chances for a country bound to the an outside group that does work on a given topic coming to cam-
Constitution. pus and trying to convince students that not only is their policy
The challenge that the Left has managed to solve on campuses correct, but that their cause is a vitally important one to address.
is how to create an organic movement that grows and evolves on Groups that cover natural student issues, by contrast, never have
its own, without direction. This great radical experiment in social to convince a crowd as to why their cause is relevant.
engineering is only sustainable when it grows bottom-up and not There are also two types of youth outreach that any cause will
top-down. The Left makes much of the purported $35 million naturally lend itself to—the type used by groups that signal their
spent annually by center-right groups on college campuses—as opinions to students in a very passive way by throwing informa-
if that compares to the billions in the budgets of colleges, or the tion out there hoping it gets read and makes an impact; and the
many millions spent in youth outreach by the Left. In truth, $35 type that is much more effective and successful, though usually
million figure is simply the combined budgets of the three most more costly, that involves sending someone to show up on cam-
prominent college-oriented center-right groups, and much of pus in person and help local students take some sort of action.
their programming is not directly aimed at students. For the most Many if not most student political groups—including con-
part, the campus Left exists unchallenged, and through the doc- servative and libertarian organizations—love breaking the bank
trinal control of speech and thought known as “political correct- to bring in big speakers. But consider the effectiveness of that
ness,” it manages to avoid any serious criticism on campus, even approach—on a given campus of 5,000 students, it would be
from the conservative groups who are constantly demonized. impressive to have an event with a well-known speaker attended
15
Young American Revolution
by 500 students, or 10 percent of campus. Most attendees will
already be in agreement with the speaker. The speaker talks for
30 minutes and takes questions for another 30, a routine that the
average undergraduate goes through 10 times a week with some-
one ridiculously more left wing than the most right-wing speaker.
Only those other 10 times a week, the event is called a class, and
the student gets credit for it. Big-budget speakers are no way to
combat the campus Left.
Changing minds and changing campuses is difficult. The tac-
tics student groups employ are somewhat universal, but also re-
quire a great deal of modification to be most effective locally. The
campus Left has honed its techniques masterfully. Looking at the
financials, the nation’s 2,533 four-year colleges spend billions each
year, with most of that money controlled
by left-leaning administrators and faculty.
As well, hundreds of millions are spent by
college-oriented left-wing groups, which are
almost too numerous to list. Funded by glo-
balists like George Soros, left-wing groups
have made a high priority of organizing the
youth, especially in years—like 2004 and
this year—when liberals seem to have poor
chances at the ballot box.
Many of these left-wing groups do very
interesting work. “Young People For” takes
200 selected left-wing campus leaders and
tries to develop and advance their individual
skills. The “New Organizing Institute” fo-
cuses on training activists, many of whom
are young and on campus, in workshops
strategically targeted to electoral battle-
ground states. The College Democrats set
up chapters to provide a general and generic
center-left foundation for other groups on
campus. There’s quite a bit of small-scale
organizing and efforts directed at campus
students. This essay will focus on some of Roger Kimball
the more important groups.
The main center-left organization right
now is certainly the Center for American Progress. With 127 staff-
ers and a $29 million budget, the center is a well-funded and ap-
parently well-managed think tank that has escaped the orbit of
mediocrity that ensnares most institutions of its ilk. The neocon-
servative American Enterprise Institute is going through an iden-
tity crisis right now, and while the Heritage Foundation has been
raising money handily, it lacks a serious campus outlet. Heritage’s
comment on the Center for American Progress was that they
“fuzzed the definition of a think tank”—but that’s because the
CAP has many programs that are more effective than those of the
typical Beltway policy outfit. Their main college outreach is done
through the “Campus Progress” division of CAP. Campus Prog-
ress takes organizing seriously, and they’re a real force for statism
to be reckoned with. Already they boast of having affiliated with
50 campus publications in 5 years. Compare that to the Intercol-
legiate Studies Institute’s 114 center-right papers after 30 years.
What’s particularly interesting about Campus Progress is how
inflexible they are when it comes to doctrine and liberal ortho-
16
March 2011
doxy. Thus, even when it is clear that mandatory health-insurance
schemes are not in students’ financial interest, Campus Progress
insists on them anyway. The Left mandates that college students
and recent grads pay for healthcare they don’t use, because this
helps to subsidize baby boomers’ healthcare. This is certainly
not the liberalism of liberty or even remotely consistent with the
screaming soundbites of “my body my choice” that one can hear
at any rally where abortion-rights activists show up. It isn’t even
New Deal liberalism, since the baby boomers are much wealthier
than the young people who are expected to pay for their health-
care. This is simply statism for the sake of statism.
Campus Progress’s indifference to its audience’s actual in-
terests plays out in other ways. CAP pushes energy policy to its
students through an “Energy Action Coali-
tion,” which sounds a lot more exciting than
it sadly is. The “coalition” is a nice website
with tools to start local groups and not
much more. It has a snarky logo—a knock-
off of the raising of the Iwo Jima flag fea-
turing instead students raising a windmill.
But wait—many environmentalists now
consider wind not to be green enough ei-
ther, because it’s too destructive of birds or
simply unsustainable. Wind did have, for a
brief period, political momentum spurred
no doubt in part by the great monied in-
terests lined up to profit from it, but the
fad has since sputtered out. The internal
divisions within the Left are going to slowly
come out again and wreak havoc with seri-
ous coalition building.
Campus Progress has a real problem
balancing the advancement of the establish-
ment political agenda of their party with
what are natural student issues. To resolve
this they have focused, smartly, on tuition,
debt, and banks as organizing issues for stu-
dents. But the reality of college financing
makes this smart only on paper and frustrat-
ing in reality. Students are borrowing money they aren’t going to
pay off for a long time; the minorities who typically compose the
base of the Left are already given handsome discounts in the form
of scholarships, remission, and other aid; and those students who
pay full price are often the kind of rich kids who would rather
party than worry about social concerns.
It would be revealing if Campus Progress decided to approach
college budgets, tuitions, and financing in a way that stressed in-
stitutional reductions of cost, the promotion of efficiencies, or
a stable price system that could rid the education market of the
needless complexities of aid, scholarships, and various bureau-
cratic subsidies—that is, if Campus Progress came out in favor
of a price reduction for all, a sort of flat tax for tuition whose
savings could simply be in the costs borne by bloated bureaucra-
cies. But instead Campus Progress maligns the banks who lend
money, credit card companies who offer “predatory lending,” and
evil Republicans who won’t write unlimited checks for financial
aid and ballooning Pell grants. Campus Progress’s doctrinal inflex-
ibility makes them a caricature of left-wing thought.
The College Democrats are also very active on campuses,
though usually as a social club for center-left people. They have,
for some reason, always been organizationally inferior to the Col-
lege Republicans. Lately though, the CD’s have made a serious
effort to overcome that second-string reputation and build their
organization. Perhaps finding colleges already significantly left-
wing and relatively anti-establishment, the CD’s have historically
been quite complacent. Most College Democrat chapters, as with
CR chapters, receive little or no overt direction from their national
organization and function as a clearinghouse of generic political
activity. They become the first stop for politically-minded fresh-
man to get involved on campus, but they usually lack the intel-
lectual enthusiasm to be a force on campus.
The environmentalists have the problem
of success—in that they have achieved po-
litically what they have always sought. Their
friends are in control of Congress and
the presidency and advance their agenda,
yet still this amorphous goal of “a cleaner
environment” seems elusive. Is the envi-
ronment suddenly cleaner now that the
political regime has changed? Undeterred,
environmentalists are usually pretty smart
and savvy about “thinking globally and act-
ing locally” and almost always have a cause
of the month or year to advance on their
college campus. Within the last year, oddly,
that cause has been getting rid of trays in
dining halls. Even though this costs more in
the end, leads to unsanitary conditions, and
is an extreme inconvenience to students and
workers, it’s justified with the typical chick-
en-little reasoning that the world is running
out of water, or rather, “clean” water. George Soros
Much of the infrastructure for green
statism in the colleges comes from Public
Interest Research Groups, or PIRGs, which exist on about 100
campuses. PIRGs give students internships and course credits, but
are often so stuck with the challenges of fundraising and running
their organization that they have little time for campus activism.
Many campuses are experimenting with largely feel-good or orna-
mental environmental measures, such as “going green” by putting
up more recycling bins or planting a new garden. As the adminis-
trations of most colleges ostensibly agree with the green agenda
and fall over themselves to advance and promote it, most of the
environmental campus action becomes this relatively empty mea-
sures to look really green and add a bit of enviro-mortification
to campus life, making students suffer a little bit for the sins of
Exxon-Mobil.
Unions, on the other hand, have been rolling out a few slick
campaigns over the last decade or so, many of which aren’t direct-
ly seen as union activities. The most prominent efforts were the
now-fizzled “Killer Coke” campaign—which alleged that Coca-
17
Young American Revolution
Cola was involved in violent anti-union efforts in Colombia—as
well as the ubiquitous so-called “living wage” effort. Killer Coke
became a way to rebrand a major corporation and give people a
chance to reject what they grew up with, but the living wage actu-
ally promotes some seriously bad economic theory.
Relying on the premise that the university budget is an endless
pot of gold and that janitorial work is dirty and one should feel
guilty about the workers who clean up students’ literal crap, this
union scheme to subtly advance a minimum wage by more than
doubling it and calling it a “living wage” causes widespread inef-
ficiencies in the labor market. It’s fantastically popular with the
student Left, because no serious campus activist wants to define
their undergraduate years by saying Esmeralda ought to earn less.
This effort has proved to be a great way to
identify and train union organizers, as well
as to recruit and unionize service employ-
ees, and to do so in a way that defies politi-
cal rebuttal. Conservatives and libertarians
who make the case against scheme—which
in fact must be paid for by higher tuition
and may result in overly expensive workers
being fired rather than given raises—risk
sounding heartless.
As for issues of multiculturalism, they
may seem very tempting for non-leftists to
ignore because the debate is so charged and
so loaded. The overpowering emotions in-
volved can become stifling, even suffocat-
ing. But just because liberty-minded and
center-right people want to ignore the topic
doesn’t mean that the Left plays along, and
in fact leftists are rarely content with any-
thing but acquiescence to their demands.
Those demands inherently pit races and
cultures against one another, through the
abuse of the political system to hand out
money, preferences, and awards for non-
academic and non-meritorious reasons.
If ever there was a clear case of the moral wrongs of coercive
state power, it is here. One recent example of this high-stakes
game of racial politics involved Loyola University New Orleans
professor Walter Block, who gave “politically incorrect” answers
while speaking at a college in Baltimore. Asked why blacks often
are paid less than whites, he replied that by economic reasoning it
must be because they were less productive—because if they were
as productive as higher-paid workers, there would be tremendous
market pressure for companies to hire more of them, thus bid-
ding up their wages to parity. Though tenured, Block returned
to a campus asking what the “limits” on academic freedom were.
Evidently the only acceptable answer to the question he received
was “racism,” and giving an economic explanation for why racism
probably was not to blame must be even more racism. Fortunate-
ly, Block survived the campaign against him.
Other similarly loaded and controversial topics on campus are
those involving the feminists and women’s issues. The last decade
has seen the development of “women’s centers” that provide a
permanent presence for statist feminism on campus. The 800
women’s centers around the country represent a very left-wing and
anti-male. Men in 2007-08 made up, on average, only 43 percent
of college enrollments—they are statistically underrepresented.
All evidence suggests that future growth in college enrollments
will be among women as well. Experts claim they’re baffled as to
why this trend has emerged, but the answer is obvious: official or-
thodoxy of feminism disincentivizes men from enrolling, staying,
or surviving in higher education. This has not, however, stopped
feminist groups from continuing to demand still more power.
The pro-abortion/pro-choice movement has a covert pitch
for organizing on college campuses—they usually prefer pretty
generic “women’s issues” instead of being too open about their
real goals. Even when overt, they set up groups to advance the
ideas behind “choice” rather than working to increase abortions.
There’s definitely an aspect of hardened social promotion, as evi-
denced by the poorly considered “I had an abortion” T-shirt mar-
keted primarily to college women for the past five years, combined
with the “I’m not sorry” day on campuses. These groups typi-
cally call themselves “Vox” or “Students for Choice” on campus.
There are, so far as Planned Parenthood claims, 192 such youth
and college groups. This is thankfully less than half of the 492
groups claimed by Students for Life of America as pro-life cam-
pus organizations around the country. But most university health
plans cover abortion: the political battle here is mostly won by the
pro-choicers, and the costs of their policies are well hidden within
18
March 2011
university budgets and healthcare premiums that mask the cost
of compliance. The abortion battle, as it plays out on campus,
usually centers around the display of graphic images of aborted
children rather than the fundamental policy questions relating to
the university.
The sheer scale of the campus Left’s power does much to dis-
courage campus conservatives and libertarians. This discourage-
ment does not mean that non-leftists do not take action, but all
too often it means that they act only in ineffective ways, preferring
to focus on national policies or theoretical questions that are not
“natural student issues.” Yet anti-statists have a program that best
serves students’ natural interests—a program that offers more
jobs upon graduation, better long-term prospects (for families as
well as businesses), and lower costs and greater freedom on cam-
puses right now.
People want change, as they apparently do every four years, but
only the Right and especially the libertarian Right, understands
what real change can look like. On all the issues that the Left or-
ganizes upon, the center-right has real answers that would make
positive change in the local area. The challenge is getting through
people’s general boredom with economics and applying its princi-
ples to these largely emotional problems. Well-focused libertarian
activists advancing freedom on campus can accomplish amazing
results and change the world, if they give the campus Left the
resolute and definitive answer they deserve. Campus statists na-
tionwide depend on our silence.
Ben Wetmore is a graduate of American University.
 19
Young American Revolution
 Concealed Carry—on Campus
The Second Amendment goes to college
Andrew W. Smith
T he Constitution makes no provision for gun control. On
the contrary, it guarantees the right of the people to keep
and bear arms against any enemy foreign or domestic. George
Washington said it best when he said, “A free people ought to be
armed.”
But does the right to carry arms extend to college campuses?
Legislation pending in Texas would recognize that it does. The
bill faces stiff opposition from university bureaucrats and gun-
controllers—but there is already a responsible firearms culture on
at least one state campus.
Texas A&M University is quite exceptional in its handling of
this natural and constitutional right. While the school administra-
tion and the state legislature contentedly hold fast to their falla-
cious, unconstitutional gun-control principles, there is a cultural
movement afoot among students to resist this the notion that the
state is our sole protector.
Around the country, federal, state, and local governments are
very hostile toward gun rights on college campuses. Regrettably,
A&M is not much different in this regard. Here we are not al-
lowed to have guns in our dorms or in any other official school
buildings. A&M’s campus policies are not much different from
those of most colleges across the nation. We have not learned the
lessons we should have learned from Columbine, Virginia Tech,
and the myriad of other rampages that could have been stopped
by armed citizens.
But officialdom’s fear of guns makes little sense given the cul-
ture of College Station, Texas. College Station sits on Highway
6 between Houston and Waco. It’s a southern town with a very
southern culture. One thing I learned very quickly when I moved
here was that it is what I like to call “gun heaven.” On the main
road that leads to A&M’s entrance there are at least five different
gun stores with the best quality firearms money can buy. These
stores sell everything from the most basic of six shooters to “as-
sault rifles,” “combat shotguns,” and “high-capacity handguns.”
These are the sorts of stores that would make the average gun-
control fanatic run for his life. The dichotomy that exists between
campus policy and campus culture defies the imagination.
20
March 2011
Guns are not just part of the culture beyond campus. Texas
A&M also has some very successful sports shooting teams. Our
4-H shooting teams are some of the best in the nation. Students
from all over Texas come to A&M on 4-H scholarships to com-
pete in national competitions against students from all over the
country. Not only do they compete, but they tend to win—a lot.
Texas as a state has actually won nationals ten times in a row, with
several Aggies competing on the Texas team.
As well as campus competitive teams, Texas A&M has a just-
for-fun shotgun club. Members go shooting at the local range and
learn about gun safety and proper shooting technique. While guns
are first and foremost for the protection of our rights and liber-
ties, they also can be quite a bit of fun: I personally enjoy going
out on the weekends and shooting some trap and skeet. There is a
lot more to “gun culture” than what the news media and popular
culture let on.
Aggieland also has the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. The
Corps is the single largest non-academy ROTC program in the
country. Here students learn a basic honor code, military disci-
pline, and a variety of skills. The Corps is the backbone of the
military traditions the school was founded upon. This program
does not require enlistment in the armed forces, yet still offers
military-grade training in the usage and operation of standard-
issue combat weapons. This particular organization even provides
an escort service for students who need to go across campus
alone after dark. Yet even these dedicated keepers of tradition are
disarmed by government regulations.
The Texas Legislature, in light of increasing campus violence
across the nation, has begun to take action. Texas State Senator
Wentworth, from San Antonio, put forward Senate Bill 1164,
which would allow citizens who have Concealed Handgun Li-
censes to carry their concealed weapons on campus and, more
importantly, in public buildings. The bill, which received staunch
support from the Texas State Rifle Association, passed the Senate
but has been tabled in the House. It has been the most successful
of any campus-carry legislation so far across the country. Unfor-
tunately, since it reached the House it has become bogged down
in the swamp of state politics.
When the bill came out, Jess Fields and the Young Americans
for Liberty in Texas A&M chose to do their part to educate about
it. Fields was elected to the Student Senate and presented a refer-
endum to the Texas A&M body. The result was clear. Aggies, who
turned out in droves, wanted the right to keep and bear arms on
campus. At a time when around a hundred students protested the
bill on the steps of the state Capitol, an overwhelming number of
Fighting Texas Aggies voted in accordance with the Constitution
and expressed their support for extending Second Amendment
rights to campus.
Times are changing. I believe that Texas A&M, and the rest
of the country are at a turning point. College students, working
adults, and American citizens all across the country have a choice
to make. That choice is freedom or the illusion of security. As Ben
Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to pur-
chase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I
for one, have hope. I believe that the freedom-loving atmosphere
exhibited on the Texas A&M campus and across the Lone Star
State will encourage Americans to not surrender this quintessen-
tial right fought for so hard by our Founding Fathers. Indeed, just
as our Founders fought for this right, it is our duty to fight the
educational battle for our liberties by spreading the message of
freedom and the Constitution on campuses across the country.
No Revolution can survive without a tireless group of people
continually struggling and fighting against the statist status quo.

Drew Smith is a student at Texas A&M University.

21
Young American Revolution
 The Original Tea Partier
Paul Revere finally gets his due
Jeremy Lott
J oel Miller is a vice president at
Thomas Nelson who oversees the
publisher’s nonfiction line (full disclo-
sure: that includes my new book Wil-
liam F. Buckley). He had written books
about the drug war (Bad Trip) and over-
weening government (Size Matters). For
his third book, he decided to go in a
different but—he argues—still related
direction by giving readers a lively his-
torical biography of the famous Bos-
ton goldsmith and tea partier Paul Re-
vere—The Revolutionary Paul Revere.
Revere is best remembered for his
ride, memorialized by a Henry Wad-
sworth Longfellow in a poem that ap-
peared in The Atlantic in 1861. It began,
“Listen my children and you shall hear
/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”
and told the lightly fictionalized tale of
Revere’s ride (along with several other Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton
patriots) to warn the citizens of Mas-
sachusetts that British reinforcements
were on the way to put down an incipient rebellion.
Revere was also an important player in several other moments
in the early history of the new nation. Yet while some found-
ers have gotten the full-length biographical treatment in recent
years, Revere’s life had languished. Miller looked to fill that gap.
He aimed to retell Revere’s life with an eye on some of the contro-
versies of today. I corresponded with him recently about bailouts,
tax resistance, and how his subject “embodied the new order.”
You’ve written books about the drug war and the size of
government. Why did you decide to write a biography of
Paul Revere?
There were at least a couple reasons. The first is that I knew a
bit of the Revere story and saw very little in the market about him.
George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas
Jefferson, Ben Franklin—there’s enough out there on these guys
to collapse a bookcase. Just seemed like a good idea to get Revere
into the mix.
There’s a set-the-record-straight reason as well. Revere’s life is
remembered for his famous ride, and because of that his name
has been devalued to the point it serves as a mere synonym for
Bringer of Alarm. In both 2002 and 2006, for instance, U.S. con-
gressmen introduced whistleblower legislation named after him.
During the 2004 presidential race, Michigan’s governor compared
22
March 2011
John Kerry to Revere because, she said,
he “has been waking up America.” Sa-
lon.com even invoked him for a story
on depleted petroleum reserves: “To-
day’s Paul Reveres of ‘peak oil’ aren’t
waiting for Washington to save us from
apocalypse.” Worse, the headline (the
oil is going, the oil is going!) tied him to
Chicken Little, a peculiar humiliation.
In many ways, the man embodied en-
trepreneurialism and was a commercial
visionary, but we only remember him
as a trope. I wanted to fix that.
Revere’s profession is listed as
“goldsmith,” but that doesn’t come
close to describing what he pro-
duced over his lifetime, right?
Goldsmith was the proper term
for a smith who worked in fine metals,
usually silver and gold—usually more
of the former than the latter. They also
worked with copper and other metals. The output of his shop
included everything from spoons to platters to goblets to teapots
to—and I’m not making this up—a chain for a guy’s pet squir-
rel. But Revere wasn’t content with that. He also engraved copper
plate for printing, creating political cartoons for local publications
like the Boston Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy. He worked as a
dentist and a coroner, built a gunpowder mill during the Revolu-
tion, cast cannon and bells, and revolutionized the way copper was
utilized in the fledgling United States. Robert Fulton, for example,
got copper sheets for his early steam engines from Paul Revere.
When I was working on the book, Malcolm Gladwell pub-
lished Outliers and I remember thinking that Revere was a great ex-
ample of his 10,000-hour rule. When you look at Revere’s career,
the more metallurgic knowledge he accumulated over the years
the bigger creative and entrepreneurial leaps he was able to make.
He went from a simple shop-bound artisan to one of America’s
first industrialists.
When he was fifteen, Revere’s father beat him for going
to the church of the radical pastor Jonathan Mayhew. Some
people have suggested that this was because of Mayhew’s
politics. What’s your view?
Mayhew’s politics can smack people as pretty radical. When
Paul was 15, for instance—around the time of the infamous cloth that opposed the imperial government as well.
thumping—Mayhew preached a sermon on the right of civil re-
How common was smuggling in the British colonies?
sistance, arguing against the divine right of kings and defending
the beheading of Charles I. How common is going to the grocery story today? In the
But this isn’t as radical as it a might seem. Mayhew was speak-
papers of Massachusetts’s royal governor Thomas Hutchinson
ing from what was by then a long tradition of civil resistance, pri-
I found a report from 1676—a hundred years before Indepen-
marily from the Calvinists. While John Calvin himself opposed re-
dence—in which a crown official complained about the Bay Col-
bellion, his Huguenot heirs in France penned treatises defending
ony’s total disregard of England’s trade laws. I paid the most at-
it: François Hotman, Theodore Beza, and Phillipe du Plessis-Mor-
tention to Massachusetts in my research, but it was true for other
nay and his famous Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos. Ditto for Calvin’s
colonies as well. The trade laws were restrictive and designed to
Puritan heirs like George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, and John
channel as much business as possible back to Britain and prevent
Ponet. These writers shaped Puritan and Huguenot ideas about
trade with foreign powers, particularly France and Holland. But
civil power and rights and were hardly radical to those standing
the colonists ignored the rules from the start. When the Crown
in their stream. John Adams spoke
finally cracked down on smuggling,
glowingly of them. “The original
there was more than a hundred-year
plantation of our country was oc-
tradition in the practice. Try stop-
casioned, her continual growth has
ping that.
been promoted, and her present
And it’s not just like ruffians
liberties have been established by
were doing it. The reason John
these generous theories,” he wrote,
Hancock signed the Declaration
specifically referring to Ponet and
of Independence with such gusto
the Vindiciae.
was that just a few years prior, the
All this matters because Paul’s
Crown had seized one of his ships,
family was Calvinist. His dad was
the Liberty. He learned all about
a Huguenot refugee from France
smuggling from his uncle Thomas
and married into a Puritan family in
Hancock, Boston’s leading mer-
Boston. Mayhew’s politics wouldn’t
chant. It was a widespread practice
have been radical to him at all, and
and seen by most as a legitimate re-
preachers all over Boston echoed
sponse to excessive taxes and regu-
Mayhew’s political sentiments. The
lations.
problem for Revere’s dad was the
rest of Mayhew’s theology. Mayhew What were “writs of assis-
was a winsome, exciting preacher— tance”? What role did they play
and also a heretic. He denied some in inflaming Bostonian pas-
basic Christian teachings, such as sions?
the Trinity. From my reading, Paul Writs of assistance were one of
got the beating for lending ear to a the early crackdown measures used
heretic. Mayhew’s politics were ac- to combat smugglers. They were
tually pretty orthodox for their time search warrants that allowed cus-
Paul Revere’s ride.
and place, which was one of the toms men vast and arbitrary pow-
reasons Boston so quickly fell into ers. They ran directly afoul to the
their resistance against England. deep-seated legal principle that a man’s home is his castle. Because
How important was Mayhew to the resistance of Bosto- a man’s privacy could be violated whenever the authorities chose
nians to the British government? to do so, the colonists put up a vigorous fight against the writs.
They failed—and their legality was a constant sore spot for patri-
I think very important—but not by himself. In Paul’s day, you ots. I quote from a letter by royal governor Francis Bernard that
learned about politics from the papers, the pubs, and the pulpits. shows the Stamp Act riots that came several years later were fu-
Pastors like Mayhew were key voices in their communities. And eled by the people’s ongoing resentment to the writs.
they used their pulpits to inveigh against unjust laws, arbitrary
rule, burdensome taxation, all the stuff that formed the list of Several of the conflicts of Revere’s lifetime seem remark-
grievances against Britain. And that lent the resistance a kind of ably similarly to issues that we are still hashing out today.
divine approval that no doubt justified resistance while it also em- For instance, how was the Tea Act like the auto bailout?
powered it. I highlighted Mayhew’s role in the narrative because The link to taxes and regulation are easy to see, but I was re-
of his proximity to Paul, but there were dozens more men of the ally struck by the auto bailouts. The British East India Company
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Young American Revolution
was in dreadful disorder and in hock to the government for over
a million pounds. So Parliament gave them a bailout package
that sounds eerily similar to the deals given the automotive and
financial sectors. They extended a loan to cover the existing debt
and also extended their reach into the corporate governance of
the company. They then turned around and made decisions with
significant tax implications and pointedly ignored the people on
whom the burden would fall. I remember flipping between the
newspaper and the history books and saying, “This is the same
story.”
About 20 years ago, there was a book titled I Love Paul Re-
vere Whether He Rode or Not. Did he ride, or not?
He definitely rode—and it’s a pretty adventurous story. Spies
and subterfuge, rowing a boat under the bow of a British battle-
ship, narrow escapes on horseback. He just didn’t get as far as
some might think. He made it to Lexington but was captured by
redcoats before he could get to Concord. He was set free when
the soldiers realized that they were riding into a swarm of Revere’s
compatriots, all of them armed and ready for trouble.
What surprised you most about Revere’s story?
Penobscot. Paul Revere won fame for his ride across the New
England countryside. But his darkest period came later when he
was court-martialed for his part in America’s greatest naval di-
saster—the route of the fleet at Penobscot, Maine. Revere was
responsible for the artillery, and the entire expedition was a botch
from the word go. The story has all the elements—disaster, slan-
der, revenge. This episode in his life came entirely out of the blue
24
March 2011
for me.
What role did Revere play in the ratification of the U.S.
Constitution?
The story goes that Sam Adams was basically on the fence
about it. Don’t forget the Constitution expanded the powers of
the central government and many patriot leaders, Patrick Henry
for instance, were opposed to it. Revere backed the new plan and
rallied a slew of fellow artisans to sign a petition in favor of the
charter. Revere put the petition under his old friend’s nose, and
Adams decided to sign off on the Constitution.
The working title for your book was Paul Revere: The New
Man in the New World, and an epigraph tells us that Revere
“embodied the new order.” What was new about Revere?
The class ladder in America was as short as it was rickety, and
a man like Revere could start out life the son of a poor French
immigrant and end up wealthy, well-esteemed by neighbors high
and low, as well as having lived a life of honor and worth. That
sort of social and economic advance was virtually impossible in
Europe. Not so in America—and I thought that Revere embodied
that change. The book starts with the quote from John Winthrop
that England has grown weary of its inhabitants. America and its
people like Revere were the counterpoint to that—fresh, exciting,
and full of possibilities.
Jeremy Lott’s most recent book is William F. Buckley, part of Thomas
Nelson’s Christian Encounters series.
 Mind Your Language
How to talk about liberty—to any audience
Vladimir Rudenko
A fter decades of being utterly ignored, libertarian turns of
phrase now resonate in the hearts of ordinary Americans
and even in the minds of certain honest intellectuals. Thanks to
Ron Paul and his revolution, we no longer represent the fringe.
Our ideas are now viable challengers to the false promises of
sugarcoated tyranny. We have an opening to win the American
people back to the side of freedom once again.
But our main problem in the marketplace of ideas is rhetoric.
Statists of all sorts have taken the English language and turned it
inside out to fit their agendas. “Liberal” now means statist. Being
“for progress” is definitely statist. “Noninterventionism” is now
“isolationism.” “Nullification” is, of course, a racist term. One
would think the name “John Bolton” cannot be correctly used in
the same sentence as “Defender of the Constitution”—at least
without the word “not”—but Republican statists have done that
too.
To reach people who have been confused by decades of social-
democratic rhetoric, we must be willing to suspend our purist ter-
minology and speak the language of ordinary Americans, no mat-
ter how propaganda-addled we believe them to be. Are we willing
to be pragmatic in our choice of words and couch our arguments
in terms our various potential audiences will be willing to accept?
Take the War on Drugs as an example. When talking to conser-
vatives, don’t rely on civil liberties, racism, and Mexico’s troubles
to make your case. Talk about the horrifying spending involved,
the violent criminals on parole because of prison overcrowding—
and don’t forget to mention the 10th Amendment. With argu-
ments like these, you can show that being opposed to the drug war
does not mean being soft on crime.
When talking to liberals, however, reverse all of this. Forget the
Constitution and fiscal concerns. Focus on the black communities
destroyed by these unfair policies, the effects of our drug war on
other countries—and don’t forget to mention civil liberties and
tolerance of alternative ways of life.
How about the Federal Reserve? When talking to conserva-
tives, astound your audience by pointing out that no budgetary
spending rivals the irresponsible money-printing villainy of our
unconstitutional central bank. Point out that there is a hidden in-
flation tax on all savings, a tax that should not exist at all. Outrage
the victims of government theft with facts about the Fed’s inter-
national bailout schemes and zero genuine accountability to our
elected government.
25
Young American Revolution
On the other hand, help liberals discover where the money
for all these endless wars and covert interventions comes from.
Explain where all the really big money is and how it got there.
Expose the machine that is our empire. In the process, try to il-
lustrate to them the folly of Keynesian economics.
With a college audience, we can take advantage of the diverse
benefits of the libertarian philosophy. We have responsibility for
the ambitious business students along with peace and love for the
hippies. We can very nearly satisfy pacifists and even pacify envi-
ronmentalists. And we have proven, age-old tools for attracting
traditionalists and social conservatives. With Ron Paul behind us,
we can even cure the apathetic.
Then there are plenty of ways to solve particular problems
we encounter in making our arguments. For example, an accusa-
tion of conservatism by a liberal can be countered with the idea
that libertarians have more in common with the extreme Left than
with the establishment Right. An accusation of liberalism by a
conservative can be countered with Reagan’s famous quote: “the
very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
If we speak to a thoroughly mixed audience, we can always
do what Ron Paul does: use as many common-sense common
denominators as possible—fiscal sanity, peace and free trade, in-
dividual liberty, etc. The drawback is that we cannot use all of
our techniques to convert the true believers of the various statist
ideologies, but we can still convince a few open-minded listeners.
Remember that the choice between liberal and conservative
policitians today is ultimately an illusion. Liberty is the real alterna-
tive. Being able to compare the two parties and pointing out their
absurd similarities, including an unspoken consensus on every-
thing from war to deficit spending to wiretapping, is an enormous
asset to us. Yet another approach is realigning American politics
along libertarian vs. communitarian lines instead of conventional
liberal vs. conservative ones. We have many options in presenting
our arguments. Most of us are good enough to make a difference
if we put in the work.
Liberty is once again an idea whose time has come. We have
done enough sulking in the corners of our institutions and in the
incredulous circles of our close friends. We must capitalize on the
fact that pretty much no one likes the government right now. Our
opportunity lies in the very values this country was founded upon.
Let us go out there and change things.
Vladimir Rudenko is a graduate student at Christendom College.
 26
March 2011
 The Secrets of Shot Selection
What Wayne Gretzky got wrong
Jeff Fulcher
F reedom activists have a serious problem. Too often we ap-
proach our outreach efforts as door-to-door salesmen or tele-
marketers. We play the numbers game—the more people we talk
to, the better the chance that one of them joins our cause.
But our numbers need to be better. To power the liberty move-
ment, we need to identify, recruit, and create a huge number of
new activists. And more often than not, our outreach efforts come
up short. Person after person walks away, rejecting our appeals
and marginalizing our anti-statist arguments. Our libraries of his-
toric, economic, and philosophic data aren’t enough to win that
many converts.
When the Numbers Game Strategy fails, the problem isn’t
boldness. The liberty movement has no shortage of passionate
people who care enough to take our message to the people. The
problem is shot selection.
Wayne Gretzky is once supposed to have said, “You miss
100% of the shots you never take.” With all due respect to the
Great One, this isn’t quite right. I’m positive you miss all those
shots you don’t take, but your accuracy ratio will be just as bad for
all those blindfolded, behind-the-back, circus shots you do.
The key to winning isn’t taking the most shots. It’s identify-
ing the highest-percentage opportunities and converting them
into points. A winning movement finds the most effective ways
to reach out to potential supporters and converts them into com-
mitted activists.
Unfortunately, constitutionalists so often approach their out-
reach like the Harlem Globetrotters. Trying to win over the pub-
lic solely on esoteric issues like decriminalizing drugs or ending
the Federal Reserve is like trying to make a half-court shot with
your eyes closed. While we might find the intricacies of monetary
policy captivating, these types of issues almost never register in
the lives of normal people.
Freedom activists are good at taking the low-percentage shot.
The Federal Reserve, drug policy, the gold standard, and highway
privatization make up a small sample of the antistatist’s pet-issues
library. Although many of these are fringe issues to the general
public, for us they are often central. Constantly talking about them
becaomes a way to prove our movement bona fides.
Too often we dismiss those regular folk who aren’t passion-
ate about our eccentricities. But what we’re really doing is ham-
stringing the movement’s success. Instead of focusing on the low-
percentage openings, like drug decriminalization, we need to take
better shots. We need to meet people where they are, not where
we wish they were. Most people care more about finding a job
than they do about the Fed and fiat currency, more about taking
care of their children than legalizing marijuana, and more about
living a good and comfortable life than about intellectual cases.
Luckily, the liberty movement has two important advantages
going for it. One: the American tradition defines the concept of
27
Young American Revolution
liberty as an essential part of our patriotic identity. And two: the
practical applications of liberty really do hold the best answers for
everyday problems.
High-percentage shots come in answering regular people’s
concerns. It isn’t important if a new recruit agrees with you 100
percent on your top issue. What really matters is that the new, raw
activist absorbs the basic principle of liberty.
The simple beauty of the freedom philosophy is its consis-
tency. Unlike the other major political groups, the liberty move-
ment approaches every issue from the same position—that free
markets, civil liberties, and self-ownership have been the driving
force behind all the positive progress the human race has enjoyed
for the past few centuries. We believe that people should be free to
do whatever they want as long as they don’t initiate force against
someone else.
For us, this principle is more important than any of its specific
applications. Unlike other political movements, which engage in
logical gymnastics to fit reality into their rhetoric, the freedom ac-
tivist has one, defined goal. Winning people to liberty really means
winning them to this core concept. Once someone accepts the
basic premise of liberty, their objections to its application will fall
like dominoes.
A college senior needs to know that there are more jobs when
employers are deregulated and can set their own wages. A writer
on the student paper needs to see how the free marketplace of
ideas uncovers the truth better than censorship. Your pre-med
friends need to know how universal health insurance harms the
people they want to help (and slashes their own future salaries).
Once your targets accept liberty as the best option on the is-
sues they most care about, then widening their perspectives be-
comes easy. It’s almost like liberty is its own gateway drug.
We need to acknowledge that since true freedom is rare in the
status-quo culture that the spectrum of pro-liberty policy can be
challenging to most people. Instead of forcing new recruits to
agree with each and every issue from day one, we should see our-
selves as tour guides. Our goal shouldn’t be to insist upon agree-
ment on a particular policy, but rather to introduce prospective
allies to the beauty and benefit of our ideas.
Freedom activists have a serious problem. It isn’t that our ideas
are weak or that people are predisposed to hate us. It’s that we
choose to cripple our outreach with ineffective, impractical tactics.
We try to win with behind-the-back, off-the-arches arguments.
But the solution is easy. Instead of pushing the public to ac-
cept liberty through our pet issues, we need to approach people
with answers to the things they care about. We need to take better
shots.
Jeff Fulcher is the Director of Programs at the Advocates for Self-Govern-
ment. He has a Ph.D. in mixing sports metaphors.
 Get Realist
How liberty activists can change foreign policy
Roy Antoun
T he neoconservative theory of in-
ternational relations rests upon
pure ideology and a complete disre-
gard for domestic fiscal discipline. Yet
even though the failures of this school
of thought are readily apparent—from
the dumping of troops in Afghanistan
to the whirlpool of political failures in
Iraq—neoconservatives remain highly
influential in the Republican Party
(and the Democratic Party, too) and
in much of the press and academia.
Neoconservatism has had some note-
worthy defectors in recent years, how-
ever. Francis Fukuyama, once closely
identified with the ideology, has be-
come critical of the neocon belief that
“history can be pushed along with the
right application of power and will,”
leading him to state that “neoconser-
vatism, as both a political symbol and
a body of thought, has evolved into
something I can no longer support.”
There is now an opening on the
Right for a different kind of foreign
policy—one more in keeping with the
ideals of the Founding Fathers. Ron
Paul has given voice to this alternative Soldiers at the end of a patrol near Wynot, Iraq.
tradition. But as yet, many activists
have failed to recognize what must be
done to reverse the course of empire.
The Founders understood that heavily investing in military
“hard power” abroad would lead to the republic’s destruction.
They prescribed instead free trade, pure diplomacy, and honest
friendship with other nations. Yet today hard power is Washing-
ton’s solution to practically any problem—real or perceived—
while our diplomatic and commercial “soft power” withers away.
European and Chinese businesses trade with Iran, for example,
while the U.S. places sanctions upon the Islamic Republic. The
same is true the world over, from Cuba to Africa. America has
become the planet’s policeman, much to the detriment of our par-
ticipation in the international economy—to say nothing of the
harm to our international reputation.
To change this situation, friends of liberty must learn how
the foreign-policy game is played. The first lesson is that the di-
visions between Republicans and Democrats matter little on the
international stage. The foreign-policy community is split not be-
28
March 2011
tween partisan positions but between
theories—realists vs. liberals. Realist
theories emphasize national bound-
aries and national interests; liberals
adhere to international institutions
and believe in collective action for aid
and decision-making. Both the GOP
and the Democrats have, at various
times, acted as both realists and liber-
als—foreign policy ultimately has less
to do with party affiliation than with
questions of national survival and he-
gemony.
Libertarians can benefit from a
better understanding of international-
relations theory. Immediately switch-
ing from incipient empire to a more
freedom-loving foreign policy is high-
ly improbable, but for any gradual re-
orientation of America’s international
role to succeed, freedom lovers must
know who their friends are and which
institutions can be won over to our
side. Realists make better allies than
liberals—indeed, neoconservatism
itself, for all its patriotic pretenses, is
a species of foreign-policy liberalism,
what neocon Max Boot has called
“Hard Wilsonianism.” (President
Woodrow Wilson was the archetypal
foreign-policy liberal.)
Understanding that countries such as Iran, Venezuela, Afghan-
istan, and Iraq will not become friendly to the U.S. overnight, lib-
ertarians need to begin by pushing for a less reactionary and more
strategic foreign policy that angers no state but does business with
all whilst ensuring the safety and security of the American nation;
to achieve this, we need an articulate strategy, not an emotional
reaction. More is required of us than merely protesting wars.
A crucial political step is to restore Congress’s constitutional
role in foreign policy. The legislature was never intended to be a
rubber stamp for “authorizing” military adventures already em-
barked upon by the president. Congress is supposed to declare war.
Getting real about foreign-policy requires reasserting legislative
powers, limiting the executive branch and restoring the consti-
tutional act of declaring war through Congress before sending
troops abroad. Short of that, empty promises of “bringing the
troops home” mean little. Liberty voters must hold candidates
to strictest constitutional standards. policy from within and for the better.
And it’s not only voters who have Outside of government, working
the power to impress change upon for a think-tank can also be an ef-
representatives—noninterventionists fective way to bring about change in
should work to join campaigns and America’s stance toward the world.
congressional staff, too, where they From policy papers to book writing
can have a direct influence. Getting a to news media appearances, think-
Capitol Hill job is much easier if one tank researchers influence foreign
has the proper policy background, policy in myriad ways. They can sway
which is another reason why familiar-
public opinion (thus indirectly influ-
ity with international relations theory
encing congressional votes) and the
is important.
thinking of policymakers directly.
Congress is not the only institu-
The liberty movement needs more
tional vehicle through which freedom
activists can reshape foreign policy. scholars to move foreign-policy de-
U.S. military at Uday and Qusay Hussein’s hideout. bates in a more nonaggressive, non-
Joining the Foreign Service is another
possible route. Although Foreign Ser- interventionist direction. Countering
vice Officers rarely have a direct af- neoconservatism requires academics
fect upon the Secretary of State’s perspective, they do have the who are keen on freedom and peace and who have an informed
valuable power of policy dissent. Dissents that explain why cer- and reasonable assessment of global cultures. Reminding people,
tain orders and policies are flawed can eventually find their way to on paper and in writing, that liberty is a good thing tends to go a
the secretary’s desk, especially if there are enough of them. And long way.
considering that the Foreign Service has a substantial number of With American foreign policy on the verge of imploding un-
vacancies at presents, there are significant opportunities here for der the weight of unsustainable debt and military commitments
well-grounded liberty activists. The beauty of this form of na- around the globe, it is up to the youth, college students, graduates,
tional service is that the one learns about other cultures at first and young entrepreneurs to begin changing our country’s interna-
hand. This is precisely what the United States needs today: sound- tional relations.
minded individuals with carefully considered perspectives on for- Roy Antoun is a student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and
eign policy and foreign cultures, people able to change foreign is editor of the YAL Foreign Policy Handbook.

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Young American Revolution
 Profiles in Liberty
Lawrence Reed—Ambassador of Freedom
Trent Hill
L awrence Reed, Larry to his friends and
many students, is best known as the presi-
dent of the Foundation for Economic Educa-
tion (FEE), one of the largest and oldest free-
market educational institutions in the United
States. He also founded the Mackinac Center,
a free-market think tank in Michigan. Reed is
known all over the world for his advocacy of
freedom. His stories are laced with optimism
and passion, his responses to questions are
riddled with quotes from various giants of the
liberty movement.
Reed’s free-market journey began when
he was a young boy in Western Pennsylvania.
Reed jokingly notes that his ancestors lived
in the area during the Whiskey Rebellion—
so he may have inherited some “authority-
questioning genes.” When he was 12 he saw
“The Sound of Music” and was entranced by
the themes of government oppression versus Lawrence Reed
“people who just wanted to be left alone.” In
1968 he witnessed Czechoslovakia’s “Prague
Spring,” during which the Czech and Slovak peoples experienced
a reawakening of freedom—before being brutally suppressed
again by the Soviet Union, which invaded the country and put
down the peaceful uprising against communism. Reed remembers
wanting to do something but feeling helpless.
He joined the conservative youth organization Young Ameri-
cans for Freedom (YAF) soon after reading a newspaper article
about the group. They organized an anti-communist rally in Pitts-
burgh that he attended. He recalls with pride that he burned a
Soviet Union flag in Mellon Square. In those days, YAF was very
freedom-oriented, and members would frequently receive books
like F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics
in One Lesson, Frederic Bastiat’s The Law. Reed even recalls being
sent copies of The Freeman, the magazine of FEE, the foundation
he would lead over 40 years later. As someone who benefited im-
mensely from a student group that advocated free-market ideas,
Reed understands how vital organizations like Young Americans
for Liberty are. In response to a question about how important
liberty-oriented student groups are, he replied, “It would be diffi-
cult to overestimate the importance of student groups to the liberty
movement!” Reed himself went on to found and lead chapters of
YAF at his high school and college.
30
March 2011
Lawrence Reed very quickly came to the
conclusion that the best way to combat com-
munism was with the ideas of liberty. Edu-
cating himself about the moral and economic
foundations of freedom became his mission.
He attended Grove City College as an under-
graduate and had the studied under Dr. Hans
Sennholz, who had himself been a student
of Ludwig von Mises and was one of the top
scholars of Austrian economics in the nation
at the time. Reed wrote his first article for The
Freeman, FEE’s main publication, in 1977.
But to assume Reed is just an egghead
would be a serious mistake. Although he’s
widely recognized among Austrian economic
thinkers, he is also a globe-trotting freedom
fighter who has seen tyranny up close. Since
1985 he has visited 70 countries on six con-
tinents, mostly during the course of his anti-
communist work. He traveled to communist
countries including the Soviet Union, China,
Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Poland—most of
them multiple times. He has studied inflation in Brazil, witnessed
voodoo ceremonies in Haiti, and defended the leadership of the
anticommunist rebellion in Marxist Mozambique. In 1986 he was
thrown out of Poland—the only country he was ever tossed out
of—after spending two weeks living with the anti-regime under-
ground. Indeed, one of his most treasured possessions is “a copy
of Milton Friedman’s book Free to Choose illegally translated into
Polish and printed and distributed by the Polish underground. It
contains a handwritten inscription from a leading Polish freedom-
fighter.” Talk about moving—all too often we take for granted
that we can stroll down to Barnes and Noble and purchase what-
ever pro-liberty literature we desire, but here is a tangible artifact
of real censorship on a nationwide level. During Reed’s anticom-
munist travels he spent countless weeks living among and assisting
rebels in various countries scourged by tyranny. This means he has
firsthand knowledge of the destruction socialism causes: “Social-
ists have said that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,
but as I’ve written in a number of places, socialists never make
omelets. They only break eggs.”
Reed, unlike many theorists in the liberty movement, does see
a need for people to get involved politically. He once ran for Con-
gress himself, in fact. Although he says the lessons he learned
were important and he has never re-
gretted it, he discovered that politics
really is not for him. Yet he recognizes
a need for others to be involved, and
he follows politics very closely. He
references an Ayn Rand quote for
good measure: “I am interested in
politics so that one day I won’t have
to be interested in politics.”
When asked about whether there
are any politicians he admires, he of-
fers quite a few caveats. Like any good
libertarian, he is naturally distrustful
of politicians in general and quips,
“most of the politicians I admire are FEE was founded in 1946 by Leonard Read
dead.” He eventually names a few liv-
ing ones: “I deeply appreciate such
members of Congress as Ron Paul, Jeff Flake, Mike Pence, Paul
Ryan, and Michele Bachmann, and Senators Tom Coburn and Jim
DeMint.”
Despite all of Reed’s personal encounters with tyranny all over knew them all personally. First and foremost, though, he credits
the globe, he remains unfailingly op-
timistic. What did he learn from his
many travels? “I’ve learned that indi-
viduals are often phenomenally enter-
prising in the face of enormous, ar-
tificial roadblocks.” Reed tells a story
to audiences all over the world about
the Polish underground, a story that
he says still moves him to tears:
I remember visiting with a couple
in Poland in 1986 during martial law,
Zbigniew and Sofia Romaszewski,
who had just been released from
prison for running an underground
radio. They were active once again on
behalf of freedom because it meant The Foundation is located in Irvington, New York on a
everything to them. I asked them seven-acre 19th-century estate
many questions including, ‘When you
were broadcasting, how did you know if people were listening?’
She said, ‘We could only broadcast a few minutes at a time and
then had to go off the air to avoid detection, but one night we
asked people to blink their lights if they were listening and were University and the editor of IndependentPoliticalReport.com.
supportive of freedom for Poland.
We then went to the window and for
hours, all of Warsaw was blinking!’
Lawrence Reed was indefatigable,
and indeed he still is, in his pursuits
to help spread the message of liberty.
This included putting his life in dan-
ger to get pro-liberty literature behind
the Iron Curtain.
This optimism is laced through in
everything Reed suggests to his stu-
dents and colleagues. When asked
about what he would want readers to
know, he urged liberty advocates to
stay hopeful, follow the golden rule,
and never make enemies out of allies.
“Smile. Stick to your principles. Don’t
ever give up.”
Reed’s history in the movement reads like a Who’s Who of
freedom: Hans Sennholz, Leonard Read, Henry Hazzlit—he
his father for imparting to him a life-
time’s worth of knowledge about vir-
tue, honesty, and hard work. In 2003
Rep. Ron Paul made a speech on the
floor of the House of Representa-
tives commending Lawrence Reed for
his lifetime of service to advancing
freedom worldwide. He said of Dr.
Reed, “few have so vigorously thrust
themselves into the intellectual and
policy battle on the side of freedom,”
high praise indeed. Despite Reed’s
remarkable accomplishments, singu-
lar life stories, and deep understand-
ing of ideas, he still comes across as
genial, patient, and most importantly,
pro-liberty. Reed is the liberty move-
ment’s ambassador to the rest of the
world, and we couldn’t ask for a better one.
Trent Hill [thill19@lsu.edu] is a history major at Louisiana State

31
Young American Revolution
 Secession Brings People Together
Radical Kirkpatrick Sale explains why smaller is more beautiful
John Payne
W hen most Americans think of seces-
sionists—if they think of them at
all—they probably think either of grizzled
and bearded survivalists holed up with a small
arsenal in a Western mountain compound or
sweet-tea-sipping, seersucker-wearing South-
erners who talk vaguely like Foghorn Leg-
horn. Alas, the first archetype was noticeably
absent from a conference on secession a few
months ago. But as the conference was held in
Charleston, South Carolina, the very cradle of
the Civil War, and sponsored by the Abbev-
ille Institute, which is dedicated to celebrat-
ing the “inner light” of Southern culture—as
founder and former professor of philosophy
at Emory Donald Livingston puts it—South-
erners made up the vast majority of the eighty
or so in attendance.
In fact, the closest thing the conference
had to mountain survivalists were Thomas
Naylor and Kirkpatrick Sale, representatives
from the Second Vermont Republic (SVR), which aims to return
the Green Mountain State to the independence it enjoyed from
1777 until it joined the United States in 1791. And even Naylor,
founder of SVR, spent most of his life in the South; he was born
in Jackson, Mississippi and taught economics at Duke University
until his retirement in 1993. Sale is a rarity here: a real Yankee who
grew up and attended college in upstate New York—although
he currently resides just north of Charleston in Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina.
Sale’s politics also make him something of an outsider at this
conference. In terms of attendance, the conference is a massive
success compared to most other secessionist events, but the view-
points in evidence are not terribly diverse—most of the speakers
and attendees are deeply conservative. During a question and an-
swer session, for instance, a participant suggested that secession
might be necessary if the federal government forced the states
32
March 2011
to accept gay marriage and received a strong
round of applause from the rest of the audi-
ence for the idea. But Sale has been known as
a man of the Left for many years. After gradu-
ating from Cornell in 1958, Sale worked for
the prestigious liberal journal New Leader. In
1973, Sale literally wrote the book on Students
for a Democratic Society, the emblematic or-
ganization of 1960s radicalism, with SDS. In
the decades since, Sale has continued to write
for left-wing publications like The Nation and
Counterpunch. It might seem strange to see him
at a conference amid this assortment of bour-
geois reactionaries.
But Sale finds common ground with these
conservatives because he shares their belief
in smaller, more localized polities, and he cer-
tainly does not see his connection to the se-
cessionists of the Right as any betrayal of the
Left. “I would say [decentralism] has always
been a minor chord in the anti-authoritarian
Left,” he tells me in an interview before the last session of the
conference. “SDS, in fact, was an expression of that: people hav-
ing the right to control ‘the decisions that affect their lives.’ That
is a decentralist concept of democracy.”
In his 1980 book Human Scale, Sale made the case that our
institutions—political, economic, and social—have grown too
large and argued that they should be downsized to make them
more sustainable and responsive to the individual. He reiterates
these themes on the second morning of the conference in his
speech “To the Size of States There Is a Limit,” a title Sale bor-
rowed from Aristotle. Despite the emcee’s admiring introduction,
Sale instantly comes across as modest, declaring that he does not
so much consider himself a scholar as “poor, humble scrivener.”
And he looks the part. While all the other presenters and most
of the attendees sport three-piece suits, Sale spends the entire
weekend in slacks and an unassuming black fleece jacket. With
his glasses and neatly trimmed beard, he looks like the Beat poet system and holds out hope that “the ones who follow their anger
Gary Snyder. out to its logical conclusion will be led to secession as the only
Sale begins by considering that Aristotle might be wrong; his possible means of getting back to the kinds of democracy and
world was very different from ours, after all. But Sale is confident freedom these people think they are fighting for.”
that the modern state, particularly the United States, has grown Sale seems more excited about the plethora of secessionist
too large, declaring, “We have abundant evidence that a nation groups across the country. The Second Vermont Republic is the
of 305 million people can’t work. It is ungovernable!” Then, in best chance in the near future—especially with Naylor announc-
his halting manner of speech that serves to emphasize the words ing a slate of secessionist candidates in Montpelier a few weeks
before each pause, Sale unfurls an impressive array of statistical before the conference—but Sale points to a number of other
evidence to show that not only are small polities viable, they are in areas as well. Along with Vermont, Texas “come[s] immediately
fact the best polities: over half of the world’s states have popula- to mind.” Alaska and Hawaii should have better movements, but
tions of fewer than 5 million people; outside of the United States, they lack organization, particularly in Hawaii where the groups
keep splintering. (When I point out that this is just secession from
the average population size of the top 27 world economies is 5.1
secessionist organizations, Sale tells me, “That’s alright. Once they
million; 85 countries are under 10,000 square miles in size (rough-
got an independent Hawaii, they can divide up the islands. That
ly as large as Vermont), and 77 percent of prosperous countries
wouldn’t bother me a bit.”) Returning to where we stood, Sale
are under that size. The average population size of states listed as
mentioned that although the Southern National Congress had not
“free” (again, excluding the U.S.) by various studies is 5 million. yet made secession a plank of its platform, it had only met twice,
And so forth. Iceland, Sale points out, is a beacon of democracy and it took the Continental Congress three times before demand-
with the oldest parliament in the world, a very high standard of ing a split with Britain.
living—and only 319,000 people. “Small is not only beautiful,” Yet even with the idea of secession alive and seemingly grow-
Sale concludes, “but bountiful.” ing, Sale’s basic outlook remains dyspeptic. At the final roundtable
Sale contends that large size can be a hindrance to any institu- discussion with all the conference’s speakers, one person asked
tion as communication, transportation, and administration costs what the chances were of people returning to institutions of hu-
all scale up alongside population and landmass. Consolidated man scale, to which Sale replied with very little hesitation, “ap-
states, moreover, require vast amounts of money and eventually proximately nil.” Let us hope he is wrong.
resort either to inflation, war, or both to expropriate it from the
people. Striking a very libertarian chord, he sums up his politi- John Payne is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. He thanks
cal thought with what he calls Sale’s Law: “Economic and social the Abbeville Institute for allowing him to attend free of charge and supplying
misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the him with lodging.
central government of a nation.”
Although pretty much everyone at the conference is at least
sympathetic to the idea of secession, most seem to believe that
things need not come to that. If only the states could reassert
their prerogatives through processes like nullification—in which
a state refuses to enforce a federal law and declares it void—the
central government could be restrained. But Sale will have none
of this milquetoast talk. When 70 percent of Americans agree
that the country is broken and cannot be fixed, “The only hope is
secession,” he announces with grim determination at the end of
his speech. During a short question and answer session afterward,
Sale is asked about the resolutions currently being advanced by
Tea Party activists claiming that states have the right under the
Tenth Amendment to ignore unconstitutional federal laws; Sale
tells the questioner that such movements must either crumple un-
der pressure, possibly even violence, from Washington or lead to
secession.
I ask Sale directly about the Tea Party movement, and he
admits it “reflects a deep-seated feeling that Washington is off
track, not just spending too much money but faced with a whole
range of problems they don’t know how to solve.” However, Sale
faults the movement for never raising objections to such massive
and obscene exercises of national power as the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, and the detention camp at Guanta-
namo Bay. He argues that their silence on these matters indicates
that they “don’t understand that this is not because Democrats,
Republicans, or whoever the individuals are there but because the
system is broken.” But Sale is glad that they are at least mad at the
33
Young American Revolution
Colleges Need a Revolution
The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University
Louis Menand, W.W. Norton and Co., 176 pages
Matt Cockerill
W hether they are students or profes-
sors, campus libertarians are often rel-
egated to “kook” status by a statist academic
establishment. This lack of open-mindedness
stems from a university culture that, in the
words of former UC Berkeley Chancellor
Clark Kerr, is “so conservative about its own
affairs while so liberal about the affairs of
others.”
Important as it is to call out political bias,
Harvard literature professor Louis Menand
believes we need to focus our attention on the
university’s general tendency to be “so con-
servative about [its] own affairs.” In The Mar-
ketplace of Ideas, Menand attributes the uni-
versity’s lack of ideological diversity, among
its others problems, to a overall reluctance to
change anything about itself.
Even when change comes to institutions
of higher education, it’s often geared towards reinforcing existing
paradigms. Few would guess Columbia’s famous general educa-
tion program was a propaganda course for American intervention
in World War I. (It was charmingly titled “War Aims”; Columbia
historian Robert McCaughey described the class as “apologetics
for the Allies, with no pretense at balance.”)
Yet while deeply flawed, the American university undoubtedly
remains an important institution. After all, despite all of our criti-
cism of higher education, most of us still readily fork over tuition
fees. Since the university plays an important role in our lives, we
should seek to rectify rather than ignore its problems.
Menand doesn’t offer many quick fixes to these problems, and
those solutions he does offer aren’t exactly libertarian ones. But
he is right to say we must educate ourselves about the history
of the university before credibly attempting to cure its maladies.
To that end, Menand’s informative book answers four important
questions: Why is it so hard to institute a general education cur-
riculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of
legitimation? Why has “interdisciplinarity” become a magic word?
And why do all professors tend to have the same politics?
General education courses—those all students must take re-
gardless of major—are often relegated by students to “GPA pad-
der” status. But the universities designing general education cur-
riculums certainly take them seriously. This is demonstrated by
the intense competition between departments to get their courses
34
March 2011
included in the curriculum.
They have good reasons to want a piece
of the pie. The “liberal culture” instilled by
general education is the lens through which
the educated will see the world. As the edu-
cated become society’s leaders, they pass their
worldview on to the rest of the population.
Altering the general curriculum thus alters
the worldview of the entire country. Even
the staunchest libertarian and methodological
individualist must admit that the mainstream
acceptance of new-age values like “diversity”
could not have come from person-by-person
inquiry and persuasion alone.
Two main forms of general-education
program exist: “core curriculums,” which
specify courses a student must take, and the
more lenient “distribution system,” which re-
quires students to take various courses outside
their major, but let’s them choose which ones to take. The latter
is the program at most universities. Menand attributes this to the
anti-establishment movement of the 1960s, which pushed aca-
demia away from the authority-respecting academic mindset of
the early Cold War.
But Menand notes that the core curriculum has made a come-
back over the last decade. The post-’60s skepticism of consensus
has resulted in “no one thinking what students need to know is
self evident.” Universities are starting to agree that whatever it is
that students need to know, “college has an obligation to give it
to them.”
In one of his most powerful attempts at advocacy, Menand ar-
gues for a strong system of mandatory general education. Claim-
ing that liberal education merely teaches students to think, rather
than imposing a subjective set of values, Menand believes that
general education gives us the best of all worlds. Not only are
critical thinking skills useful in all professions, but learning for the
sake of learning will prove fulfilling for a student in the long term.
And a liberal education will give students the ability to “make
more enlightened contributions to the common good.”
Yet while Menand claims that a liberal arts education can be
wholly dispassionate, in reality self-interest influences everyone.
Academics are no different; their vested interest in particular ideas
gets in the way of genuinely open-minded inquiry. The best way to
test the validity of a particular idea is to allow students to choose
classes they want, rather than trusting universities to mandate spe-
cific courses.
Perhaps “social justice” is a legitimate field of study and per-
haps not. But we’ll never know if universities continue to stymie
competition by imposing such courses on students through gen-
eral education curriculums. These and all other courses ought to
succeed or fail on their own merits through totally open competi-
tion. In addition to opposing government intervention in higher
education, libertarians should advocate that private universities
voluntarily abolish general education requirements. We shouldn’t
expect this move to make people more receptive to our ideas
overnight. Still if we believe in our ideas, we should think they
would stand a better chance through more open competition.
Another key problem of academia Menand addresses is the
perceived unseriousness of some of its subjects. Specifically,
some of the humanities are undergoing a “crisis of legitimacy.”
Regardless of whether we attribute this problem to an ignorant
public or a deficient professoriate, it is clearly a relevant one.
To address this problem, Menand again turns to his knowledge
of academia’s history. At first glance, the university’s “Golden
Age” of 1945-1975 seems to be aptly named. Americans of this
generation were 500 percent more likely than the previous genera-
tion to attend school. Past religious sentimentality gave way to a
“dispassionate” spirit of sober truth-seeking in higher education.
A spirit of discipline shaped a dedicated, efficient student body.
The humanities shared this strict devotion to truth-seeking. Even
seemingly subjective, abstract studies like creative literature “relied
on the notion that texts can be interpreted non-contextually, and
that these interpretations have hard-and-fast degrees of validity.”
However, Menand notes that this era had at least as much
superficiality as solid accomplishments. Many uninterested stu-
dents attended college only for a military draft-avoiding educa-
tion deferment. Budgets for supposedly “dispassionate” research
ballooned largely because of government subsidies. Indeed, the
“value-free” research of the era was largely based off of a desire
for scholars “not to offend their granting agencies.”
The failure of the war in Vietnam led to skepticism about the
neutrality and credibility of academia, both in its political and
moral judgments. By 1975, conventional wisdom was that the
war was immoral and unnecessary. But decades earlier, much of
the political and academic establishments had supported it. Why
should these voices, asked a cynical populace, continue to be re-
vered after being proven so terribly wrong?
Menand describes how the war led to a growing antiestablish-
ment movement, especially in the humanities. The idea caught on
that there was no objective truth to be found in the humanities.
The prejudices and self-interest of an individual played a role in
even the most sober humanist’s reasoning.
Menand seems to believe that contradictory aspects of the hu-
manities aren’t necessarily right or wrong. They’re just different.
However, he believes humanism’s “eclecticism” need not have
reduced it to irrelevancy. New fields arising from the humanities’
35
Young American Revolution
ostensibly inclusive, non-conformist mentality, such as women’s,
studies don’t represent a deviation from the traditional model,
but a challenge to it. They are highlighting factors old paradigms
overlooked because of their internal biases and homogeneity. In-
deed, Menand argues that the humanities’ crisis of “illegitimacy”
is “performing a service to the universe,” insofar as it represents a
perpetual challenge. If scholars always need to justify themselves,
they’re more likely to produce good scholarship.
But Menand’s claim that uncertainty is a good in and of itself is
faulty. Isn’t the whole point of academic inquiry to discern truth?
The new fields that Menand praises, like women’s and black stud-
ies, are themselves rooted in accepted moral truths, such as the
idea that it is immoral to discriminate based on race and gender.
While rejecting Menand’s solution, however, liberty-minded
youth shouldn’t disregard his reasoning. Objective truth is diffi-
cult to discern in the humanities, and it’s very dangerous to accept
uncritically whatever you are told. While we must reject academic
nihilism in favor of the pursuit of truth, even our most deeply
held views must be questioned from time to time. Failing to do so
will only perpetuate the crisis of the humanities.
Next, Menand describes how “interdisciplinarity,” became a
buzzword of modern academia, and what that means. There are
certainly good reasons for it. Among other things, interdisciplin-
arity exposes academics to alternative viewpoitns and helps them
come up with original ideas.
Still, interdisciplinarity is sometimes criticized as pseudoscien-
tific, subversive, and a distraction from sound research. The strict
disciplinary boundaries of the “Golden Age” were broken down
into a pseudoscientific “anti-disciplinary” university by the infil-
tration of 1960s countercultural radicals, so the story goes.
Menand rightly dispels these false impressions, noting that
interdisciplinarity is not “transgressive, transformational, or even
new.” The Golden Age was the anomaly, with the government
heavily intervening in academia to maximize students’ utility to
the state. Prior to 1945, interdisciplinarity was quite common.
But maybe nostalgia for disciplinary segregation is justified?
Confining professionals to studying their own fields is clearly de-
sirable to an extent. A doctor cannot effectively practice medicine
if he is distracted with ecology. A lawyer cannot effectively prac-
tice law if she is preoccupied with finance. Opportunity costs and
tradeoffs apply to academics as they do to everyone else.
This objection brings us to the history of professionalism,
which Menand describes quite well. He demonstrates that the
present crisis of legitimacy is hardly unique to the humanities. All
disciplines have withstood the same challenge at some point. In
the 19th to early 20th centuries, their answer was professionaliza-
tion, or the imposing of standardized requirements.
Rather than uncritically taking the mainstream line about stan-
dardization’s greatness, Menand paints a more nuanced picture.
Professionalism is conducive to freedom and prosperity. It func-
tions as an “extension of the division of labor,” by acting as “a
mechanism for producing the specialized experts who are needed
to perform those tasks.” On the other hand, state-mandated pro- a professor shorter and easier? It is discouraging enough for a
fessionalism is “monopolistic,” and monopolies are self-interest- conservative, libertarian, or radical professor to try to work for
ed. They can be expected to work to maintain their advantage, people who almost all disagree with him. But if the process were
even at the expense of sober inquiry. streamlined, he may be more likely to give it a shot. Menand’s sug-
The libertarian response to the problem is to open competi- gestion is interesting and worth looking into.
tion by abolishing government certification of professionals. But In any case, internal biases currently play a role in the ideology
this would hardly be a sufficient check on professionals’ social of professors. These biases, argues Menand, need to be repudi-
power. To be sure, Menand is right that there are methods of self- ated. “Fostering a greater diversity of views within the profes-
regulation by private professional groups. And there is something soriate is a worthy goal,” he argues, but the current university
to be said for his point that the character and intelligence of pro- “implicitly demands and constructs conformity.” On this point,
libertarians must emphatically agree and redouble their efforts to
fessionals makes them naturally devoted to dispassionate research.
change things.
But there still must be another method of checking professional-
By describing the problem of general education, the legitimacy
ism’s social power.
question of the humanities, the controversy of interdisciplinarity,
That method, Menand believes, is interdisciplinarity. By mak-
and the issues resulting from all professors agreeing with each
ing academics codependent on each other, we ensure that no de-
other, Louis Menand has written a worthy book on the problems
partment will become too powerful. If one department produces of the American university. The growing libertarian youth move-
low-quality research, it undermines the whole university. Interdis- ment is in a particularly good position to change things. We are,
ciplinarity promotes accountable departments and proactive uni- after all, simultaneously blessed with radical political principle and
versity administration. For these reasons, it is conducive to change a heartfelt commitment to free inquiry. But only by educating our-
and libertarians ought to promote it. selves on the machinations and history of the university will we be
By far the shortest and most interesting section of the book able to reach a day where universities are a bit more conservative
is the fourth, about the political views of academics. There are about upholding the Constitution, and a bit more tolerant about
many surprising discoveries in this section. Professors are heavily deviations from their own traditions.
ideological, but in a more homogeneous way than Americans tend
to think. Matt Cockerill is a student of philosophy and economics at Creighton
Citing studies from Harvard and George Mason University, University.
Menand debunks the myth of the radical professoriate. Only 9.4
percent of professors identify as very liberal and just 3 percent
consider themselves “Marxists.” In fact, professors are “over-
whelmingly” mainstream liberals, “not Ralph Naderites or social-
ists.” But while the radical Left is on the decline, conservatism of
any stripe is even less popular. Case in point: in the 2004 presiden-
tial election, 0 percent of humanities professors voted for George
W Bush. That’s right: statistically, 0 percent.
Clearly, the common moniker of “radicalism” attached to uni-
versities by people like David Horowitz is a myth. Instead, we
have a startling center-left homogeneity of political views among
professors. And those academics with radical views, most of
whom came of age during Vietnam, are dying and retiring. They
are being replaced by newcomers less cynical about the state.
This is a disturbing trend. Though libertarians may oppose
the counterculture movement’s libertinism and socialist leanings,
the country undoubtedly became a freer place because of them,
through the abolition of forced segregation, conscription, and the
end of the Vietnam War. We need more radical professors of all
ideologies at universities, because radicalism encourages dissent-
ing viewpoints. America is in recession, perpetually at war, and
bankrupt. The academic status quo has failed at leading us, and we
can’t afford to let it go unchallenged.
Acknowledging the problems surrounding the fact that all
professors tend to think the same way, Menand offers an inter-
esting proposal: why not make the process necessary to become

36
March 2011
 37
Young American Revolution
Emperor Romney
No Apology: The Case for American Greatness
Mitt Romney, St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages
Jack Hunter
I t’s hard to imagine a politician more schizo-
phrenic than Mitt Romney. As Massachu-
setts governor, Romney was pro-choice, sup-
ported amnesty for illegal aliens, and was gay
friendly. As a 2008 Republican presidential
candidate, Romney became pro-life and op-
posed amnesty and gay marriage. In No Apol-
ogy: The Case for American Greatness, Romney
says hardly anything about abortion, illegal
aliens, or social issues, but plenty about how
government must grow and do more. His
biggest beef with President Obama is about
where it should grow and what it should do.
Critics might be inclined to compare Rom-
ney’s big-government philosophy to that of
the last Republican president, but Romney’s is
actually worse—particularly on the issue that
has most defined Bush’s legacy.
Whereas President Bush ran for presi-
dent in 2000 opposing Bill Clinton’s nation-
building overseas (something Bush would not live up to), Romney
begins his book, and presumably his 2012 campaign, by making
clear that his concept of “American greatness” is inextricably tied
to more war, more nation-building, and an even more ambitious
foreign policy. Romney not only firmly believes the U.S. should be
the world’s policeman, but continuously frames practical foreign-
policy questions in moralistic, quasi-religious language. Claims
Brother Romney: “there can be no rational denial of the reality
that America is decidedly a good nation. Therefore it is good for
America to be strong ... freedom for our grandchildren and for
people everywhere can be guaranteed only by America—a strong
America.” Looking back on the 20th century, Romney explains:
“we found that our vital interests could not be secure in the face
of threats to the cause of freedom elsewhere ... America took
on the task of anticipating, containing, and eventually defeating
threats to the progress of freedom in the belief that actively pro-
tecting others was the best way to protect ourselves.”
For Romney, foreign policy is not simply a question of the na-
tional interest or even practical defense, but of securing freedom
for “people everywhere.” To him, “American greatness” means
recognizing that the national interest and global interests are, and
always have been, indistinguishable. While Bush said in 2000 of
America’s dealings with other nations, “If we’re an arrogant na-
tion, they’ll resent us... If we’re a humble nation but strong, they’ll
welcome us,” Romney explicitly rejects the idea that America has
been or ever could be “arrogant.” Bush’s notion of a humble na-
38
March 2011
tion directly contradicts what Mitt believes
makes America great—benevolent hubris.
Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser
to presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald
Ford, gives some insight into the origins of
Romney’s philosophy: “I think we developed
in the Republican Party a—well, you know,
the buzzword for it is ‘neoconism.’ But I
think what it is, it’s an ideology—it’s really an
idealistic approach to things. But it’s a com-
bination of idealism and, if you will, brute
force.” Whereas in 2000 Bush believed Amer-
ica should lead by example, in 2010 Romney
believes America should lead by sheer force
based on an idealistic notion of America’s
purpose and greatness. He dedicates a good
third of his book to this explicitly neoconser-
vative concept.
Romney use of neoconservative ideology
as a platform to position himself as “Mr. Re-
publican” for the 2012 GOP is particularly interesting when con-
trasting his views with the original “Mr. Republican,” Sen. Robert
Taft, widely considered the GOP’s conservative standard bearer in
the mid-20th century. While Romney’s Republican brand begins
and ends with Dick Cheney, Taft looked back to George Wash-
ington, or as John Moser of the Ashbrook Center writes, Taft be-
lieved “the ultimate purpose of our foreign policy must be to pro-
tect the liberty of the people of the United States.’ Having made
this clear, he went to great lengths to discuss what U.S. foreign
policy should not be. He was completely opposed, for example, to
the idea that wars should be fought as ‘crusades’.” Where Romney
looks back on World War II as a war to protect “freedom every-
where,” Taft “rejected the notion that World War II was fought ‘to
impose our ideas of freedom on the rest of the world,’ … . In a
speech given in the summer of 1946, he emphasized that the U.S.
had only entered World War II in order ‘to maintain the freedom
of our own people .... Certainly, we did not go to war to reform
the world’.”
Whereas George Washington warned against “foreign entan-
glements” and John Quincy Adams advised that America “goes
not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” Romney wants
endless entanglements and sees monsters to destroy everywhere.
In addition to championing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Romney considers Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia grave
threats and also believes it is the America’s moral obligation to
admit Georgia into NATO, which would have conceivably put
American boots on the ground in that country in 2008. During
that border battle between Georgia and Russia, a campaigning
John McCain immediately injected that we Americans were “all
Georgians now.” No doubt Romney shared McCain’s sentiment,
though what concrete interests the U.S. might have in that conflict
are speculative at best.
“American greatness” is more accurately described by Romney
as “American exceptionalism,” some-
thing the author defines as maintain-
ing U.S. global dominance through
military might. Criticizing President
Obama for not subscribing to this
notion with sufficient passion, Rom-
ney writes “in response to a question
about whether [Obama] believed in
‘American exceptionalism’—a phrase
that indicates America has a special
place and role in the world—he re-
plied ‘I believe in American excep-
tionalism, just as I suspect the Brits
believe in British exceptionalism and
the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.’
Which is another way of saying he
doesn’t believe it at all.” Not so coin-
cidentally, Romney firmly rejects those
who “believe that we should simply
accept the notion that our power is
limited.” Limiting government power?
This conservative impulse is anathema
to Romney.
Romney sees military domination
as the very definition of American
greatness. Taft also believed in the
exceptionalism of Americans—but
considered war a threat to it. Writes
Official Massachusetts State House portrait of
Moser: “Foremost among the prin- Governor Mitt Romney. Artist Richard Whitney.
ciples that guided Taft’s foreign policy
was a strong faith in the exceptionalism of America and its people.
Although he was educated at Yale and Harvard, Taft’s belief in
basic American values was one that he shared with most Mid-
westerners of his time, particularly those of his native Cincinnati.
Like them, he was convinced that the United States was based on
certain noble ideas that placed the nation far above the rest of
the world.” So far, Taft’s belief in American exceptionalism seems
little different from Romney’s. But Moser continues: “Of these
ideas, individual liberty was for him the most important; indeed,
he proclaimed early and often that the ‘principal purpose of the
foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of
our people.’ He held that there were three fundamental require-
ments for the maintenance of such liberty—an economic system
based on free enterprise, a political system based on democracy,
and national independence and sovereignty. All three, he feared,
might be destroyed in a war, or even by extensive preparations for
war... . The First World War had, he claimed, ‘set up more extreme
39
Young American Revolution
dictatorships than the world had seen for many days.’ He was cer-
tain that another war would destroy American democracy, creating
‘an absolute arbitrary dictatorship in Washington.”
History notes that World War II and the administration of
Franklin Roosevelt—a president Taft firmly opposed—coincided
with one of the largest expansions of government power in Amer-
ican history. While “Mr. Republican” Taft feared big government
abroad might lead to big government
at home, would-be “Mr. Republican”
Romney believes big government
abroad is not only America’s primary
mission, but somehow protects lim-
ited government at home. For Rom-
ney, constitutional government is an
afterthought in the wake of the end-
less pursuit of more war; for Taft, war
would inevitably render constitutional
government an afterthought.
Romney writes of President
Obama, “His effort to expand the
size, reach and role of government is
without precedent in our history,” yet
the former Massachusetts governor—
who still defends TARP but complains
it’s just being handled wrong—actively
promotes a foreign policy whose size,
reach and role is also without prec-
edent in our history, of precisely the
type that Taft feared. Writes The Amer-
ican Conservative’s Daniel Larison: “A
huge standing army, military outposts
scattered around the globe, perpetual
war and the arbitrary use of force by
executive order—are these really com-
patible with the national character[?]...
The security and warfare state is … far
more alien to these shores than any
entitlement program. It is far more
dangerous to the constitutional government that truly was one
of the most admirable achievements of our ancestors, and it goes
against the grain of most of our national history.”
In 2000, Bush campaigned on a foreign policy closer to that of
America’s first president, but went on to drive his administration
in the opposite direction. With this book, Romney has kicked off
an early 2012 presidential campaign by abandoning the limited
government vision of the Founders from the start, while making
the case that imperial hubris is the very definition of “American
Greatness.”
If the big government case for perpetual war and protracted
empire Romney makes in his book counts as “conservatism” in
2010, then limited-government advocates will need to find a new
term. And if Mitt Romney becomes the Republican presidential
nominee in 2012, conservatives will need to find a new party.
Jack Hunter is the “Southern Avenger” columnist for The American
Conservative.
Know Thine Enemy
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes, introduction by Peter Berkowitz, Regnery, 619 pages
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, introduction by Roger Scruton, Regnery, 227 pages
David Gordon
T o many libertarians, the essence of
political philosophy is simple and
straightforward. Each person is a self-
owner; he has the right to prevent others
from using his body or labor without his
consent. By appropriating unowned land,
further, he can acquire property, which
then becomes his. Other people, individu-
ally or in concert, may not take it from
him without his consent. By exchange or
gift to others, property may be passed on
from its original owner; but, in principle,
all property may be traced to an initial act
of appropriation.
In this view, the structure of rights
to personal liberty and property cannot
rightfully be disrupted by a government
that claims the power to tax and other-
wise coerce people. Quite the contrary,
persons in the libertarian conception have
no need to resort to the State to protect
themselves; they can do so through private contractual ar-
rangements.
This position, developed in great detail by Murray Roth-
bard, strikes me as entirely persuasive. However convincing
libertarians may find it, though, it stands far from the main-
stream of political philosophy. Libertarianism certainly has
antecedents in the standard literature, most notably in John
Locke’s advocacy of self-ownership; indeed, Rothbard can
be seen as a radical Lockean. Nevertheless, the bulk of mod-
ern political philosophy is far more statist than libertarians
would like.
Two of the greatest works of modern political theory,
Leviathan and The Social Contract, stand among the foremost
representatives of statist thought. Regnery Publishing has
recently released new editions of both books, with intro-
ductions by contemporary political philosophers. By study-
ing these classics, libertarians will be able to understand very
ways of looking at morals and politics very different from
their own.
Thomas Hobbes’s long life (1588-1679) encompassed the
English Civil War, and aversion to civil strife and its atten-
dant disorders lies at the root of his political theory. How
had the Civil War arisen, and how may a polity be secured
40
March 2011
against collapse? Hobbes answers the first
question in Behemoth, his history of the
Civil War. Various factions, in the grip of
competing religious doctrines, disrupted
the order of the State. In rebelling against
duly constituted authority, they placed in
jeopardy man’s principal social aim, the
preservation of peace. The lesson is that
disastrous wars of religion must at all
costs be avoided.
No doubt disorder and civil strife are
bad. But, one might object to Hobbes, are
not religious believers required to obey
their consciences, come what may? This is
precisely what Hobbes denied. His view,
antithetical to the whole classical liberal
tradition, was that the sovereign had the
right to prescribe the articles of religion.
Christians could not object, demanding
that their own theological opinions be fol-
lowed. All that is necessary for salvation,
Hobbes says, is “to repent, and to believe that Jesus is the
Christ.” Given these minimal requirements, no subject could
properly insist on more: “And in case a subject be forbidden
by the civil sovereign to profess some of those his opinions,
upon what just ground can he disobey? Christian kings may
err ... but who shall judge?” (Leviathan, Chapter XLIII)
The authority of the sovereign is of course not confined
to governing religion. He possesses unlimited power. To ar-
rive at this drastic doctrine, Hobbes begins from his famous
state of nature. For each person, the preservation of his
own life stands as the foremost requirement of reason. (Evi-
dently, Hobbes had read Atlas Shrugged.) To secure his life,
everyone ought to seek peace, provided that others are will-
ing to do so as well. Lacking a common authority, though,
people cannot obtain the peace they seek. They will have
to be constantly on guard against one another; and, even
if most people sincerely desire peace, a few evildoers will
suffice to create general disorder. The Hobbesian state of
nature is a state of war. “In such condition there is no place
for industry … no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is
worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and
the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Le-
viathan, Chapter XIII. Every article on Hobbes is required to
quote this passage.)
Faced with such a dire situation, how can the people in
it escape? Each person, in the state of nature, has the right
to do whatever he deems necessary to preserve his own life;
but he can cede his right to someone else. Is this not a fool-
ish thing to do? Not, Hobbes thinks, if everyone in society
cedes his right of nature to the same person, who then be-
comes the sovereign. Under these circumstances, there will
no longer be general fear and constant enmity, since every-
one has agreed to accept the decisions of the sovereign as
binding.
One might object that Hobbes has
not solved his problem. What if people
go back on their agreement? Hobbes an-
swers that they will have no choice in the
matter. They have surrendered their arms
to the sovereign, and he is now in a posi-
tion to compel them to fulfill their promise
to obey him. “Covenants without the sword,
are but words.”
Of course, there is an obvious problem
with Hobbes’s solution to the problem of dis-
order. Everyone is now at the mercy of the
sovereign. The situation is made worse be-
cause the sovereign has made no promises to
his subjects: rather, they have mutually prom-
ised to obey him. Hobbes does recognize one
limit to this total surrender. Because the pur-
pose of the agreement is to increase the abil-
ity of each person to preserve his own life, no
one can give up his right to life. Should the
sovereign command someone to give up his
life, the subject need not obey. Furthermore,
the sovereign will know that he acts in a sufficiently oppressive
manner, people will cease to obey him. Hobbes’s moral theory
requires that they do obey—they have made a binding promise to
do so—but most people will not always do what justice requires.
This knowledge will serve to check the sovereign.
Readers who have read the 19th-century American anarchist
Lysander Spooner will raise an obvious point: people have never
actually made an agreement of the sort Hobbes has conjured
up. What relevance, then, does Hobbes’s discussion have for real
states? Hobbes knew full well that most states had not arisen
through mutual agreement, but he thought that this did not mat-
ter. Even if someone becomes sovereign by conquest, threaten-
ing to kill people if they do not accept his rule, subjects are still
required to obey. By thinking about the dire outcome that would
ensue were society to lapse into chaos, subjects will realize that
they are fortunate indeed to find themselves under the command
of a sovereign. How they got there is irrelevant.
One further clarification is essential. When Hobbes speaks of
a sovereign, he does not mean that only a state ruled by a king is
legitimate. Although he himself thinks monarchy the best form of
government, he recognizes that aristocracies and democracies are
also acceptable. Whatever the form of the sovereign, though, the
obligation to obey remains constant.
Libertarians will rightly recoil from Hobbes’s remedy for dis-
41
Young American Revolution
order. The fatal objection to his system is no less true for being
blindingly apparent. Hobbes is certainly right that disorder is un-
desirable; but the dangers of an unchecked sovereign far exceed
the discomforts of the state of nature. Hitler, Stalin, Mao—the
historical record teaches an unmistakable lesson. Hobbes had
constantly in mind the need to avoid the passions of civil war;
but the English Civil War, after all, was not an example of his
state of nature. Rather, two competing sides struggled to obtain
sovereignty. It is the existence of a powerful state, not its absence,
that leads to war and massacre. And Hobbes vastly underestimates
the ability of people to reach voluntary agreements to protect
themselves. Hobbes should have read Murray
Rothbard as well as Ayn Rand.
Peter Berkowitz has written, on the whole,
a useful introduction to Regnery’s edition of
Leviathan. He is, I regret to say, a neoconser-
vative, and in one instance this disfigures his
remarks. He constructs a wholly imaginary
Hobbesian right of foreign intervention on
humanitarian grounds. “Where the threat to
the international order is sufficiently grave
and sovereignty has been forfeited by inac-
tion or incompetence or nullified by a gov-
ernment’s violently turning on its own people,
states may reasonably perceive a national in-
terest in intervening abroad to head off hu-
manitarian disaster or thwart crimes against
humanity.” Berkowitz does not pretend to
find this supposed “right” in the text of Le-
viathan, and he should have written about his
argument somewhere else—or better still, not
written about it at all.
Hobbes unacceptably puts liberty in jeop-
ardy; does Rousseau do better? He certainly professes concern
with freedom. He asks, “Is a method of associating discoverable
which will defend and protect, with all the collective right, the per-
son and property of each associate, and in virtue of which each
associate, though he becomes a member of the group, neverthe-
less obeys only himself, and remains as free as before?” (The Social
Contract, Chapter VI.) It is clear that his answer is yes; but readers
of a libertarian bent will not be impressed.
Rousseau’s conception of freedom is most peculiar. Everyone
surrenders all his rights to a collective body, consisting of the
whole population. Because each person has made an equal sur-
render to this collective body, he is somehow equally free! “Each
gives himself to everybody, so that … he gives himself to nobody
and since every associate acquires over every associate the same
power he grants to every associate over himself, each gains an
equivalent for all that he loses, together with greater power to pro-
tect what he possesses.”
If everyone has surrendered everything in this way, it becomes
of crucial significance to find out how this collective body makes
its decisions. Unfortunately, Rousseau leaves us largely in the dark.
He tells us that society is properly ruled by the “general will,”
which is not to be equated with the “will of all.” The general will
can, if properly informed, never, err; but Rousseau does not tell
us how we can know that a collective decision really expresses the
general will.
What happens if someone does not agree with the decision of
the general will? Suppose, e.g., that the general will decides that
inequality of incomes should be placed under strict limits. You are
among the wealthy and do not wish to surrender what you take to
be your legitimate property. Have you any right to resist?
The answer will come as no surprise. You have surrendered
everything to the collective body; so, no more than the Hobbesian
subject, have you any right to resist. How, then, does, Rousseau
differ from Hobbes?
He does so in this way. Hobbes does not disguise the fact that
that if the sovereign commands you to do something you do not
want, your freedom has been restricted. Rousseau, in Orwellian
fashion, says that in this case, you are free because what the gen-
eral will has decided is what you “really” want to do, your present
opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. In a passage to which
the distinguished British philosopher Roger Scruton calls atten-
tion in his excellent introduction, Rousseau says: “In order then
that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly
includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest,
that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled
to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he
will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving
each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal depen-
dence.” (The Social Contract, Chapter VII)
Rousseau here adumbrates one of the most dangerous ideas in
42
March 2011
the history of political philosophy. To be free, according to this
idea, is to be able to do what your real self wants, not what you,
in your present consciousness, think that you want. What your
real self wants is what you would want, if you were fully rational,
well informed, and sought to attain what is good for you. Thus,
you really want to surrender your money for redistribution, even
though you have to be pried loose from your cashbox kicking and
screaming.
Rousseau has here fallen victim to what Scruton aptly calls “an
intoxicating metaphysical picture.” Of course, you are not free if
you have to be coerced into giving up your money, even if on so-
ber thought you should not have resisted. In practice, Rousseau’s
idea will lead to some people deciding what they think is good for
others, forcing them to do it, and calling the outcome “freedom.”
Therein lies the path to dictatorship.
Unfortunately, we are not rid of this malign idea. An influ-
ential group of contemporary economists claim that we can be
“nudged” out of our irrational preferences while remaining free.
Such irrational choices do not express what we really want. (See,
e.g., Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge.) Rousseau could
not have said it better.
If Hobbes and Rousseau serve more as warning signs than
guides to a true account of freedom and order, studying them
nevertheless puts one in contact with two powerful and immense-
ly influential thinkers. By trying to see where they went wrong, we
sharpen our own ideas.
David Gordon is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor
of The Mises Review.
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 44
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