Steve Bainbridge’s post, discussed below, cites Russell Kirk’s famous insult of libertarians as “chirping sectaries.” This reminded me of my college days, when I was testing out various political philosophies. I decided to spend Spring Break (yes, it was a wild college life for me!) reading the three books National Review consistently referred as the foundational works of modern conservatism: Kirk’s almost unreadable and unedifying The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot; James Burnham’s racist and imperialist Suicide of the West; and Whittaker Chambers’ meandering and hallucinatory Witness. I was, not surprisingly, sorely disappointed. Around the same time, I received my first Laissez-faire Books catalogue, and started reading Hayek, Nozick, Rothbard, and, especially, Milton Friedman (unlike many libertarians who get their first inspiration from Ayn Rand, I didn’t read her until much later). I started calling myself a “libertarian-conservative,” and the rest is history.
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