Let me go back a little farther. It's late 1966. Bill Bradford and I are both
denizens of an obscure state college, lost on the plains of western Michigan.
He's the assistant editor of the college newspaper. I'm nobody. I write a letter
to the editor, opposing conscription. Bill prints it, and seeks my further
acquaintance. The rest is history. Both of us had a lust to write and publish.
During the next 21 years, we talked our inclinations over, and in 1987, Bill
started Liberty.
When some libertarians get successful, they start wearing
coats and ties. Not us. It's still T-shirts and jeans at Liberty. And when some
libertarians get successful, they start getting serious about everything. Again,
that's not us. We're still as silly as we ever were, although we've learned a lot
more stuff. I'm not sure that Bill needs to learn any more. One of his favorite
sentence openings is, "I'm sure you know . . . " which he follows with some
astonishingly obscure fact that he, in the innocence of his heart, actually
imagines you've heard of.
Whether either of us is right about what we
deduce from what we know — that's another question. Indeed, "we" couldn't
ever be right, because nobody at Liberty ever agrees with anybody else. Bill
works about 15 hours a day, but he's still able to call me up and fight with me.
What has Liberty accomplished? It wasn't Liberty that brought down the
Berlin Wall. It wasn't Liberty that invented the Internet. But it's Liberty that
provides the only really free forum for radical advocates of freedom in
America.
I don't mean that other libertarian journals are filled with the
voices of slaves agitating for slavery. On the contrary: I value all of them, and
all of them have their place, just as Liberty has its place. What I mean by
"free," in this context, is "independent," "nonaligned," and "nonpartisan."
People who write for Liberty can be as partisan as they want to be, but Liberty
has no party line. It is not the voice of any libertarian party, tendency,
institute, lobby, or cause. It exists only to publish the best libertarian
writing we can find.
Maybe that's not much. But it's a lot of fun.
