Twenty Years of Liberty  

Where We've Been

by Bruce Ramsey

Two decades of Liberty's best and most memorable.

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When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Randal O'Toole noted that "the people who got out were those with automobiles."

Considering Slavomir Rawicz's survival classic "The Long Walk," William Merritt wrote that it is "one hell of a book, if you believe it" — which he pretty clearly did not.

When Murray Rothbard was on a trip to Switzerland, he became more and more annoyed at the goyish fascination with the sheer north face of the Eiger, long a challenge to climbers. Wrote Rothbard, a man content to experience the Alps from a veranda, "I am willing to attest that there is not a single Jew who has ever climbed the Eiger, of whatever face, or had the slightest inclination to do so."

Such is Liberty. It has ideology, as in David Friedman's "Do We Need Government?" and Brink Lindsey's "Am I a Libertarian?" It also has charm, as in Bill Bradford's explorations of sun-dried ruins of Western ghost towns and his quest to find the memorial to Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to have voted against both world wars.

Liberty cares about a political theory and everything that goes with it — the people and the stories, and all the arguments about drugs, guns, war, money, cars, cops, cryptology, and any other thing that may inflame the mind, or possibly enlighten it. Here follows my view of what has made Liberty what it is.

To take an obvious thing: the Libertarian Party. What other independent magazine covers it? Liberty has covered it for 20 years — and not always to the subject's satisfaction. Bill Bradford, the founder of Liberty, voted Libertarian on principle, but that did not prevent him from declaring, sadly, that Libertarian politics were to real politics as the Special Olympics are to the real Olympics. He covered the party's conventions and wrote about its presidential candidates, but he also said that none of them had even a sniff of success, and none of the happy talk to donors was believable. In 2001 he argued that the only things the LP had learned to do well were raising money from libertarians and getting on the ballot. He said he was not ready to give up on the party, arguing at one point that it ought to focus on a single issue — he suggested marijuana legalization — that Americans might go for. He printed a proposal by Randal O'Toole that the LP become a political group like the Sierra Club, and endorsed that, too.

Liberty also ran several pieces decrying LP candidates for undermining somewhat libertarian Republicans — Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia was an example — and in one case tipping control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats.

There were some fireworks in this coverage. Bill discovered that a man who had been the LP's national director in 1995 had secretly worked for Harry Browne's campaign to become the 1996 nominee. I don't know how many Liberty readers cared about this — I did not — but Bill did, and he went after it. In September 2002, he reported that the LP had taken the strange step of denying Liberty credentials to attend its convention, but that Liberty had covered it anyway.

It's hard to say what would have happened with the LP had Liberty not been around to follow it and challenge it. Maybe it wouldn't have been challenged at all, and only ignored.

Bill was a hard-money guy. He had made his grubstake by dealing in gold and silver coins. He was a font of facts on the history of money, but as a forecaster he was afflicted with the gold bug's congenital inclination toward gloom. In the magazine's first year he was part of a round robin of writers opining about the meaning of the stock market crash of October 1987. All but Karl Hess were hard-money men who either forecasted calamity or were, in hindsight, overly cautious. Hess, whose main interest in metal was what he could fashion from it in his workshop, said he thought the American people had a fine economic future and that readers should invest in their own tools. Bill, to his credit, soon came to the conclusion that "almost all investment advice is smoke," and kept it out of Liberty. He focused his attention on politics, where his judgment was much better.

His great subject was William Jefferson Clinton. In the February 1993 issue, which appeared before Clinton took office, Bill Bradford wrote (as Chester Alan Arthur) that Clinton was "a liar, and an extraordinarily skilled one." The man had "only one ideology: Bill Clinton ought to run things," which meant that Clinton would make no fundamental changes to American government. (A decade later he said that Arnold Schwarzenegger was "the Republican Clinton.")

On March 11, 1994, Liberty's editor placed a bet with a colleague that Clinton would resign or be impeached. He won that bet: on Dec. 19, 1998, Clinton was impeached. And in the issue of April 2001, writing just after Clinton decamped, Bill summed up his subject as a sexual predator, a "liar of extraordinary skill," and a politician who indeed had made no fundamental changes to American government.

During the eight years of Clinton, Liberty took a special interest in two of his subsidiary obscenities. One was the 1993 burning of the David Koresh cultists at Waco, Texas. Liberty was quick on the newsstands with "Holocaust at Waco," in which Bill labeled Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno "the coldest of all cold monsters." Several years later, when the FBI confirmed that it had used incendiaries at Waco, Bill reminded readers of what that meant. After the Oklahoma City bombing — Timothy McVeigh's retaliation for Waco — Liberty cofounder Stephen Cox compared the national media's sentimentality about dead government employees with its lack of interest in dead religious believers. The other Clinton-era obscenity was the fatal shooting of Vicki Weaver, the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver, at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Bill said that he found the Ruby Ridge story "endlessly fascinating," and eventually printed Randy Weaver's account of it. In 2000 came a ruling in a criminal complaint filed by the state of Idaho against the FBI sniper. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution prevented the state from prosecuting a federal agent who was acting reasonably. However, Judge Alex Kozinski filed an eloquent dissent — and Liberty printed it.

Among Clinton's major obscenities were his wars, particularly the 79-day bombing of Serbia over the issue of Kosovo. The arguments made by American politicians for dropping explosives on Slavs infuriated Bill. Most of the warmongers were Democrats, but not all. There was Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., arguing that World War I had started in the Balkans, and implying that as a reason to intervene. Bill wrote that Europe had gone to war in 1914 "because the Great Powers chose to intervene — which is exactly what course of action Dole recommends."

In September 1999, Bill pointed out that the supposed holocaust of 100,000 civilians in Kosovo — the ostensible cause for intervention — had shrunk to a number of deaths smaller than the number the Clinton administration had burned to death at Waco.

There was more controversy among libertarians about the two Middle East wars. In the May 1991 issue, Jim Robbins, Steve Cox, Leland Yeager, and Loren Lomasky argued for the retaking of Kuwait — and Sheldon Richman, Robert Higgs, and Bill Bradford argued against it. A split reappeared a decade later, after the 9/11 attacks, with Rep. Ron Paul and Richard Kostelanetz arguing for restraint and Sarah McCarthy calling for attack. Then came George W. Bush's proposal to invade Iraq. Bill denounced it, and would have liked for Liberty to come out unabashedly against it, but he was aware that some libertarians supported it. That view was also reflected in Liberty, though the majority feeling in its pages was against the invasion.

The magazine covered other controversies. One was whether a libertarian ought to vote. In May 1996 Wendy McElroy said provocatively that she wouldn't have voted against Hitler — "but I would have no moral objection to putting a bullet through his skull." Bill chided her for that, but there was a certain down-to-earthness to it.

I offered Bill an article questioning the gold standard. He hated it, and ran it anyway, along with a reply by Robert Higgs; he entitled the two pieces, "I'll Settle for Paper" and "I'll Go for the Gold." Liberty ran Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute arguing against ratifying NAFTA and Brian Doherty, now with Reason, arguing for it. It ran my piece, "The Conversion of a Gun Grabber," which rejected all the arguments of the pro-gun position, then embraced the position itself.

Not to be stereotyped, Liberty also printed a piece on the Enron collapse by Andrew Chamberlain, arguing that business ethics (which are often regarded as "liberal") are a cornerstone of the free market. "Formal law matters," Chamberlain wrote, "but informal law matters more." The magazine also printed "Who Owns the Fed?" by Bill Woolsey, a lecturer at The Citadel. His no-nonsense (and correct) answer was that the Fed belongs to the government.

The War on Drugs has been another Liberty interest — and one in which the magazine has not been content to make theoretical arguments only. In the 1990s it ran "What Am I Doing Here?" by Rycke Brown, and "Behind Bars" by Dyanne Petersen, both of them serving time for drug violations. In May 1998 it ran writer Peter McWilliams' account of being busted for medical use of marijuana, and two years later it ran Bill's angry report that McWilliams had died while vomiting up his prescription medication — a reflex he had been able to control with marijuana, before authorities had denied him the ability to use it.

Over the years Liberty has chronicled the fight by Nevada libertarians Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw against FDA regulation of nutritional supplements, ebulliently headlining one piece "FDA TKO." In December 2003 the magazine ran libertarian psychologist Thomas Szasz's commentary on the news that Rush Limbaugh had been nailed buying prescription painkillers on the black market. "It will be interesting to see if Limbaugh learns anything," Szasz wrote. Szasz also took on Jack Kevorkian in a piece called "Alias Dr. Death."

Liberty also staked out a position on "recovered memories": it didn't believe them. As early as March 1994, David Ramsay Steele denounced the recovered-memory movement, and in July 1996 Liberty followed up with "Witch Hunt in Wenatchee." The author was Kathryn Lyon, the journalist who would write "Witch Hunt" (1998), the definitive story of the modern Salem in the state of Washington. Her article denounced the use of "recovered memories" by a cop and a social worker to accuse an improbably huge ring of people of group sex with children and send those people to prison. It took guts to side with the supposed perpetrators. The local press didn't do that until much later, but Liberty did, and Liberty was right.

Liberty also covered the theory of liberty. One argument rolled out in these pages has been between those who see liberty as a moral imperative and those who are for it because it works. Bill was in the second group, arguing (as Ethan O. Waters) for "consequentialism" in "The Two Libertarianisms" (May 1988) and (as R.W. Bradford) in "The Poverty of the Nonaggression Imperative" (Dec. 1999). A related argument was between utopians and non-utopians. An example was my "Dialog with an Absolutist" and Aeon Skoble's reply, "In Defense of Extreme Libertarianism," in 2003. There were also arguments about alliances. In 2003 Bill argued in "Liberty and the Right" that the time had come for libertarians to end their alliance with conservatives. In 2006 I took the opposite view in "Our Allies, the Conservatives."

A new writer, Indian-educated Jayant Bhandari, recently offered Liberty readers a fresh way of thinking about their central political value. Comparing India to Britain and America, Bhandari wrote that the state was a manifestation of liberty, or the lack of it, but that the source was the beliefs and habits of the people. "The seedbed of oppression," he wrote, "is not the state but the culture."

Many, many more examples of Liberty's interest in theory could be mentioned. But the magazine has never neglected its interest in the people of liberty, the individuals who have been important to the individualist movement. Granted, it has not always covered them in a reverential spirit. In the magazine's second issue, Bill wrote "The Apostasy of Robert Nozick," about how the celebrated author of "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" had used rent-control laws against a landlord. This set a tone: no one was sacred, though wanton tearing-down was not appreciated either.

Some of Liberty's subjects had ties to the individualist movement that many in the mainstream media missed the significance of. Alan Greenspan, with his ties to Ayn Rand, was the obvious example, but there were others. Liberty noticed in 1990 that Stan Tyminski, who had come in second in the balloting for the presidency of Poland, had been the head of the Libertarian Party of Canada. Tyminski was beaten by Lech Walesa, but he made a splash. Liberty also noticed that Clarence Thomas, a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, had been a fan of Rand, and suggested that if he were confirmed he might be surprisingly hardcore in his opinions. He was.

An editor at Liberty once told me that having Ayn Rand's name on the cover boosted newsstand sales, and she is probably the most written-about libertarian in the magazine. The first issue featured Cox's "The Films of Ayn Rand," followed shortly after by Bradford's "In Search of 'We the Living,' " the movie made in Italy, during World War II, from Rand's first novel. Liberty printed Rothbard's "My Expulsion from the Rand Cult," Tibor Machan's "Ayn Rand and I," John Hospers' "Conversations with Ayn Rand," Bradford's "Was Ayn Rand a Plagiarist?" (his answer: she wasn't), Barbara Branden's account of the making of the TV movie "The Passion of Ayn Rand," Cox's account of "The Development of Ayn Rand," and Chris Matthew Sciabarra's complaint about the posthumous editions of Rand ("Bowdlerizing Ayn Rand"). The magazine ran Bradford's "The Selling of Ayn Rand's Papers" and Sciabarra's "The Search for Ayn Rand's Roots." It covered Rand in the book section with Bradford's hostile 1989 review of Nathaniel Branden's "Judgment Day" — "Nor hath hell a fury like a man scorned," Bill wrote — and, a decade later, with Brian Register's milder review of Branden's "My Years with Ayn Rand." Liberty interviewed Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden both, nearly a decade apart, and also R.A. Childs ("Ayn Rand, Objectivism and All That"), whose comments were published shortly after he died.

For all the magazine's fascination with Rand, when it came to choosing the Libertarian of the Century, Liberty's editors voted for Ludwig von Mises, who narrowly edged out Rand, Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. The magazine's senior editors had a lot to say for each of these important figures.

H.L. Mencken was Bill's favorite author, though he allowed that the Sage of Baltimore was not a libertarian "in the sense the term is used today." Bill repeatedly defended Mencken against the charge of anti-Semitism that rose when Mencken's diary was published 35 years after his death. It annoyed Bill that Mencken's words were taken out of the context of his life, his times, and his overall style, and that the publisher had smeared its deceased writer in an apparent effort to sell more books. When biographer Terry Teachout repeated the charge of anti-Semitism in "The Skeptic: The Life of H.L. Mencken" (2002), Bill wrote, "I detect something missing: an argument."

Liberty has carried many articles on libertarians, protolibertarians, and writers of distinctive interest to libertarians. There was Cox's work on Isabel Paterson, mine on Garet Garrett, Richard Kostelanetz's on George Orwell, and David Friedman's on 19th-century jurist Stephen Field. In March 1992, William Holtz wrote a provocative piece arguing convincingly that Rose Wilder Lane had ghostwritten her mother's "Little House on the Prairie" books. Two years later Bill charged that Holtz's book, "The Ghost in the Little House," had been ignored in libertarian circles because of opposition from Lane's heir, Roger MacBride.

Other articles of note on libertarians are Randy Barnett's "In Search of Lysander Spooner," Richard Ebeling's "The Lost Papers of Ludwig von Mises," Martin Morse Wooster's piece on the "fusionist" Frank Meyer, and Bettina Bien Greaves' on Friedrich Hayek. David Ramsay Steele reviewed Justin Raimondo's biography of Murray Rothbard, "An Enemy of the State," artfully deflating its subject by saying, "Rothbard was not an outstanding thinker who pursued fringe politics as a hobby, but an outstanding influence in fringe politics who pursued intellectual system-building as a hobby." And I can't forget Liberty's review of "Truth Is Not a Half-Way Place," a biography of Robert LeFevre supposedly written by Carl Watner and supposedly reviewed by Ethan O. Waters. Actually, "Waters" was Bill and the book had been written by LeFevre himself. It was worth reading, Bill concluded, for "the sheer nuttiness of its subject and its wealth of unintended humor."

Reviews have been a Liberty specialty. I recall the late William Moulton's delightful retrospective on John Stormer's tub-thumping 1964 tract, "None Dare Call It Treason." "What was the book about?" Moulton wrote. "Well, the kind of things that seem very fascinating and sinister when one is 16." (I was 13 when I read it.) Richard Kostelanetz tickled my fancy with his review of Mel Bucklin's PBS documentary on Emma Goldman, noting that the program left less of an afterimage of Goldman than the brief portrayal by Maureen Stapleton in the movie "Reds." The PBS documentary, which cared more about Goldman's fornications than her thoughts, was, Kostelanetz said, another bit of blah financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities "in the sad continuing tradition of inept federal welfare."

Probably my favorite review, partly for the editorial audacity displayed in running it, was written by Robert Watts Lamon, who identified himself as "a sort of right-wing beatnik." In the July 2004 issue, Lamon took on Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," an account by a prosperous leftist who went slumming among the working poor. "I spent many years in low-paying jobs, and found 'Nickel and Dimed' remarkable for its defects," Lamon wrote. He went on to discuss how a poor person can flee harsh climates, shop in secondhand stores, and find friends to share housing with. Concluded Liberty's practitioner of poverty: "She just didn't know how to live as a poor person."

Certain articles gave especially memorable signals of what to expect from Liberty. The journal tracked down the principal author of the underground anarchist classic "The Market for Liberty," and printed an article on her life as a nomadic seller of rope sandals. It ran pro and con reactions to the death of Ronald Reagan ("Rot in hell," said Jeff Riggenbach), and it provided a warm sendoff to Karl Hess, the man who coined Barry Goldwater's line that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." Liberty provided posthumous tributes to Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Robert Heinlein, and, of course, Bill Bradford.

Liberty has an interest in openly capitalist aspects of American popular culture — the part that deals with images of achievement and wealth. It ran my piece about Samuel Merwin and Henry Kitchell Webster, the early 20th-century authors of the business romance "Calumet 'K.' " It ran a story on the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which grew out of the Horatio Alger books, and how Stratemeyer managed the Hardy Boys series. It ran a story on the Disney character Scrooge McDuck. It ran a piece by current Liberty editor Cox, who teaches literature at the University of California at San Diego, on J.R.R. Tolkien's revival of the epic literary form in "The Lord of the Rings." It ran a piece by Scott Bullock, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, on Neal Peart, the libertarian drummer of the rock group Rush.

The magazine published such unusually American memoirs as Jim Bristol's "Fighting the Draft in WWII," John Hospers' "The First Time: I Run for President," and Michael Freitas' "The Best Little Whorehouse in Idaho." It published a piece by Wendy McElroy on how establishment feminists, who had once defended the rights of prostitutes, had abandoned them as politically incorrect. Correspondents occasionally wrote of other parties' meetings, such as Tim Slagle's 2004 account of the Green Party convention in Milwaukee and Bill's report in the same year of the Democratic caucuses in Liberty's hometown of Port Townsend, where he was outed by a perceptive lefty. The magazine also provided vivid on-the-spot coverage of the shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle on Nov. 30, 1999, and, shortly after, coverage of the opening of a dirt road at Jarbidge, Nev. Both were political acts.

Jarbidge, a cluster of houses around a dusty general store, has been called the most isolated town in the Lower 48 states — which made it one of Liberty's interesting places. The magazine has a thing about places. It ran Bradley Monton's piece about living in Lebanon, and an article by Jim Peron, when he was about to be expelled from South Africa. Liberty's most peripatetic writer, Doug Casey, has filed reports from Cuba, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Dubai, Haiti, Colombia, and Guatemala; if his investments ever run dry, he should be able to sell his passport to a museum. Bill Kauffman, a champion of small-town America, has written lovingly about his hometown of Batavia, N.Y., and Richard Kostelanetz has argued that the best place for a libertarian to be is Manhattan. Larry Sechrest briefly attained national notoriety with his none-too-flattering piece on Alpine, "A Strange Little Town in Texas."

The magazine sometimes annoys the neighbors. Sometimes it annoys me, too, though more often it delights. I ponder why that is, and out fall several reasons. Partly it's because Liberty believes what I believe in a general way, and partly it's because it is not too fussy in any particular way. Partly it's because the magazine serves the unexpected along with the features, like Cox's "Word Watch," that I count on. Partly it's because of the writers that I have come to like, though I have never met them. Hess was one: I saw him only once, 36 years ago, and never agreed with him politically. But I liked him. There are other people in the magazine like that.

I have been reading this journal for 20 years. I wish Liberty (and liberty) a rich and unpredictable future.

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