18. Libertarian Journey

18

ROY CORDATO

LIBERTARIAN JOURNEY

I DISCOVERED LIBERTY AS POLITICAL philosophy (as opposed to libertarianism as a movement) during the first Jim Buckley for Senate campaign in 1968. Buckley was the candidate of New York’s Conservative Party. At the time I was actually the Chairman of the Teen Age Democrats in Columbia County, New York. Buckley was interesting because a central part of his campaign was to end the draft, and at the time the only candidates endorsing such an idea were left-wingers. I found this fascinating and began to look more closely at his views and candidacy. This led me to leave the Democrats, which was tough since my father was a long time Roosevelt-Humphrey Democrat and Chairman of the Hudson, New York Democratic Party. One of my high school teachers, a Conservative Party activist, told me about the Young Americans for Freedom, and I joined. I went on to form a YAF chapter in my high school and became very active in the organization. I remember becoming disillusioned with YAF when I realized that they were not as consistently for freedom as their statement of principle (The Sharon Statement) would indicate. While they were officially against the draft, it was never something they emphasized, and on social issues like drug legalization they were at best silent. Oddly enough, one of the things that stands out in my mind as being particularly disappointing was their change in position on Social Security. Somewhere around 1969 or 1970, they publicly withdrew their position paper favoring its repeal. I never understood this, since I thought the case made in their original position paper was quite compelling and philosophically sound.

I was first made aware of libertarianism as a word and a philosophy/movement in 1971 as a senior in high school. A friend of our family, who was an extreme leftist and activist in New York’s Liberal Party, gave me a copy of the now famous article in the New York Times Magazine (January 10, 1971) titled “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism.” This article mentioned David Friedman as a leader of this new movement and identified the Society for Individual Liberty as “the chief libertarian organization nationally.” I recognized Friedman’s name, not because of his father (I had no idea what economics was at the time), but because he was a regular contributor to the YAF magazine called The New Guard. I proceeded to write a letter to Friedman in care of The New Guard asking him about the movement. He responded and told me about Don Ernsberger and David Walter at SIL and the strained relationship between YAF and the libertarians. (As an aside, he warned me that my letter had been opened by YAF before he received it. From that point on I received no more mailings from YAF and my subscription to The New Guard suddenly ended. I expect now that that was not a coincidence.) After hearing from Friedman I contacted SIL and joined.

My next step forward came the following year when I became a college student at The Hartt School of Music, which was part of the University of Hartford. At the time, Dom Armentano was a young professor at University of Hartford and was writing a regular column for the school’s student newspaper. I immediately recognized his point of view as libertarian and went knocking on his office door. Dom was the first real libertarian I ever met and I was amazed by how radical his views were. He was an unabashed anarchocapitalist. It was Dom who introduced me to the radical libertarian thinkers like Rothbard, the Tannehills, and Rand. During my four years as a music student, I developed a close relationship with Dom (and his family) and gradually became interested in economics. Two years after I graduated from music school, and after reading a good deal of Austrian economics on my own (most of it way over my head), I entered the masters program in economics at University of Hartford. I must admit that part of my motivation was that I could take Dom’s courses for credit. During this period Dom introduced me to libertarian academia. I accompanied him to Libertarian Scholars’ conferences sponsored by the Center for Libertarian Studies, then in New York, and to Austrian economics conferences at NYU. Dom also introduced me to the Cato Institute and got me to attend their weeklong conference at Dartmouth (1979). It was there where I met Rothbard, Roy Childs, Leonard Liggio, Walter Grinder, Roger Garrison, Israel Kirzner, Ralph Raico, and a host of others. It is the cumulative effect of these events and my association with Dom that convinced me to pursue a Ph.D. in economics. I realize now that the point of this new career path was not to study economics per se but to position myself to better advance the ideas of liberty.

Roy Cordato is vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation, Raleigh, North Carolina.