Over at Libertarianism.org, we’re celebrating our old friend Roy Childs, once the anarchist enfant terrible of the mostly Objectivist libertarian movement, later a Cato foreign policy analyst, editor of Libertarian Review, and editorial director of Laissez Faire Books. Libertarianism.org has published its first ebook, Anarchism and Justice, a collection of Roy’s essays on anarchism available in book form for the first time. And they’re posting never‐before‐seen videos, including this one on the history of the libertarian movement from the Cato Summer Seminar in Political Economy:
Today I posted my own reminiscences about Roy at the Libertarianism.org blog, Free Thoughts:
When I got involved in the tiny libertarian movement back in the early 1970s, I had the impression that its two leading intellectuals were Murray Rothbard and the much younger Roy Childs. Rand, Mises, and Hayek were out there as great thinkers; Milton Friedman was regarded with some skepticism as a “Chicagoite”; but the fledgling movement seemed centered around Rothbard and Childs.…
In two stints as editor of Libertarian Review and as editor of Laissez Faire Books, Roy brought his keen insight and radical vision to a dazzling range of topics: the nature of rights, neoconservatism, foreign policy, Third World land reform, Iran, Ayn Rand’s influence on libertarianism, and much more. He seemed to have read everything and to know how it fit into his overall worldview. And he knew everybody. What fun it would be to read his correspondence – or better yet, listen to his phone calls – with Rothbard, Friedman, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Thomas Szasz, and Robert Nozick. You can read his formal interviews with some of those people in the Libertarian Review archives.…
Watch for more videos this week.