WHAT I THINK......C.J. MALONEY

I don’t know what had me more surprised – a combination of 8.30 on a Saturday morning with a room full of college students all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed – or the fact that I, a relative nobody, had been invited to participate as a "featured speaker" for the event. "The event," in this case, was the second annual New York Students for Liberty Conference held this past October 10th at Columbia University, a joint production brought about by the trio of the school’s libertarian club, the Students for Liberty, and the Ivy League Alliance for Liberty.

The litany of speakers was an impressive one – if you excluded me. Yet there I sat with my wife and 125 or so others, sipping the first of my doctor’s recommended daily dose of ten cups of coffee and a few Red Bulls (caffeine: the trendy drug of choice to those responsible for a four-year-old). The only reason I was allowed to step behind a podium was due to the kind invitation of J.D. Fernandez, vice president of Columbia University’s Libertarian Club, probably since demoted to janitor.

While I am not enamored of the whole idea of college in general I do like hanging around libertarians – they’re a fun bunch. The libertarians grab the best from both major parties, casting aside the bloodthirsty war-lust of the Republicans and ignoring the prissy, self-righteous moralizing of the Democrats. While they might not be the party in power, they certainly throw the best parties, and that has to count for something.

It’s often quipped that a libertarian is a Republican who likes to smoke pot, and I was not surprised to hear "pot brownies" and "marijuana" 75 or so times before I’d reached my second cup. Granted, you’ll also hear the same at a Democratic or Republican gathering, too, but the participants at such soirées likely don’t cheer happily at the mention of the demon drug’s name.

Outside the conference room, among the booths pitching Reason magazine, Bastiat, and the Mises Institute was a table bearing calendars that featured attractive young women holding signs that urged us to end the war on drugs and to throw in the Fed for good measure. The calendars were helping announce the Ladies of Liberty Alliance, a female-oriented libertarian organization recently birthed by Allison Gibbs.

Ms. Gibbs once worked for the Department of Defense as a microbiologist (Department of Defense and microbiologist topping my list of "words you don’t like to see together") until one day she up and quit, right into the teeth of a deep economic depression, because she didn’t want a job funded by the taxpayer. I’d never before met anyone who had done such a thing and doubt I ever will again.

As one would imagine an Ivy League shindig is a well-appointed one, food and drink were provided. Maybe they followed Cartman’s advice on South Park, "you gotta serve punch and pie!" as last year’s regional conference attracted 15 people – for this year’s almost 200 signed on and 125 actually attended.

The anti-bailout and anti-war rallies I’ve attended only reach 125 people if you count the 100 cops ringed about all the chanting. It’s sad, the progressive strong point is now almost solely libertarian; the Democratic "left" having largely abandoned the field.

I went to NYU for grad school and not once during my entire time there had I even heard of Mises, and they certainly aren’t teaching him at Columbia. It made me wonder where all these kids had come from. My answer came soon enough as I listened to the first couple of speakers. I could hear the constant chirping of the Ron Paul movement’s official bird – the soft ticking of keyboards.

Everything was being twittered, blogged, and filmed, bringing me back a few years to my time hanging around Dr. Paul’s primary campaign. Going through the day, almost every kid I asked, "how’d you fall in with this bunch" had the same two words for an answer – Ron Paul. If you are wondering where Ron Paul nation disappeared to, they haven’t. They’re hanging about your college campus.

I sat in the back of the room in admiring silence; my brain slack-jawed surprised to be surrounded by youth who listened raptly to speakers on Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard, their heads nodded with approval as Reason magazine’s Damon Root condemned Jim Crow Mississippi as "lawless." They get it; they understand why Ron Paul’s ideas are so revolutionary and radical.

It was a long day, running from the one morning’s start to leaving the after bar the next morning, and at one point late in the proceedings a young woman stood up and announced "capitalism is cool." What she really meant to say is "freedom is cool" meaning freedom is fun, because it gives you a choice; and as Lenny Bruce always reminded us, that’s what it’s all about.

And it’s not only the freedom of speech and religion and the right to strap a surface to air missile across your truck’s rear windshield, that’s all just a part of it. Libertarianism is anything you want it to be, it includes the freedom to foolishly throw it all away as and if you please, rather than be forced to let some politically connected shit-head throw it away for you as he pleases. But above all, mostly, it’s the freedom to be left alone.

We were sitting outside the after bar, the younger set smoked cigarettes with their drinks; I led the orchestra’s cigar section. Off leaning against the side of the building a young attendee announced his conversion to libertarianism by vomiting most of the after midnight hours away. I looked up to a tired, pot-bellied man smoking a cigarette, he asked me sheepishly if I could move three feet closer to the street, to smoke a little further away from the building.

His name was James, I think, and he owned the bar. He launched into an unprovoked litany of complaints about all the "rules and regulations" he needed to constantly keep up on, lest the City Council send its agents to shut down the bar – the one that he’s just opened to fulfill a life-long dream. My smoking had caught his attention; he apologized, because they’d been repeatedly fining him for allowing his customers to smoke too close to the front of his bar.

More than anything it’s the relentless crusading of the tea-drinkers; the lily-white, ill-tempered agents of good, healthy clean living that drove me into the arms of libertarianism. It’s the libertarian concern for the workingman, a concern that does not manifest itself in the twisted, elitist urge to make him "better" so endemic to the mislabeled "progressives," but manifested instead in the simple, Christian act of leaving him alone. Libertarianism today is a rear guard action, fought to protect our weekends from the legions of moralistic, do-gooder assholes America produces in such abundance.

The same kind that put a pot-bellied, apologetic bar owner smack dab next to my outside table rather than tending to his business inside, because he’s forced to be there, forced to smoke outside his own goddamn bar because our city’s self-righteous midget of a mayor quit smoking – so now we all have to. When I think about that bar, all our city’s bars, in fact, Washington Irving’s take on the pub springs to mind. "That temple of true liberty, the inn" he called those of his time, and I lament how we’ve sunk so low.

We left early, as forty-year-olds always do. Everybody else stayed behind – for the younger set now, as always, the night was there to be lived through, a time to wring out every drop of dark until daylight sent you to a diner. I drove home; I always drive, and knew that back there the bar was dew cheeked and full of that bright-eyed hopeful earnestness that only the young can hold.

All these Ron Paul kids have yet to come to terms with the fact that they live in a thoroughly socialist world, and that strikes me as just fine. If there’s any chance we’re going to get out of this mess we’re in, we’d better pray they never do.