Is There Hope for Liberty in Our Lifetime?
Speech given at the Mises Circle in Chicago on April 9, 2011. The video and audio recordings are available through Mises.tv.Is there hope for liberty in our lifetime? It's tempting to think so.
As I discuss in the first part of my book, Libertarianism Today, libertarianism used to be of interest only to a tiny handful of people scattered across the country. As I've heard Walter Block and others say, if you were in the libertarian movement a few decades ago, it was easy to feel like you knew almost everyone else in the movement.
This was even true to a considerable extent when I first became involved in libertarianism about 15 years ago. I only discovered libertarianism because I happened to know someone who saw that I was interested in political ideas (conservative ones at the time) and suggested that I subscribe to The Freeman magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education. But of course most people didn't know anyone who could recommend The Freeman to them, and they almost certainly didn't hear about libertarianism on television, in their schools, or in any major periodicals, apart from Henry Hazlitt's Newsweek column.
Now, of course, everything has changed. You meet people who call themselves libertarians everywhere. And, sure, some of them don't necessarily understand what that means, but it's remarkable that they even know the word "libertarianism." And what's really remarkable is how many of them do know what it means. I've done some speaking at law schools across the country over the past year, and I've been surprised by students who come up to me and start telling me that they read LewRockwell.com every day, that they're reading books about Austrian economics by Murray Rothbard from the Mises Institute. Even when I was in law school less than a decade ago, this was unheard of.
There are two big factors that have contributed to this, and each has built on the other: one is the Internet, and the other is Ron Paul.
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