Archive | November 27, 2008

Check out this interview with the founders of Reason magazine. It’s an interesting interview, but there are four quotes in there (actually five, I merged two) that will make left-libertarians want to tear their hair out and throw things:

The magazine took collective pride in being one of the architects of the Reagan Doctrine with those Jack Wheeler pieces.

When we took it over, reason was in a paradoxical stage of becoming more burdensome. Instead of economies of scale, there were diseconomies of scale. When you are small you can do your own address labeling, but the bigger you got, the more outside costs you have. There were more things you couldn’t do yourself. [Diseconomies of scale! Who ever heard of those? How … paradoxical!]

The social ethos of much of the libertarian movement in the late ’60s/early ’70s was SDS-like but with free market ideas, [with activists] seeing themselves as part of an outlaw radical underground movement that was under surveillance by [the] FBI. … We were interested in gentrifying the libertarian movement so there would be more suits there and less people who reminded one of the hippies. We were concerned with showing that libertarianism was serious, that it wasn’t some ragtag bullshit movement.

I remember being impressed by [Reason Foundation board member] David Koch. I mean, here was this billionaire, and this was back in the ’80s – back before we all were billionaires! – so you didn’t see many people like that. I was impressed that he made his own coffee.