Another is that it preaches a selfish unconcern for the plight of one’s fellow humans, especially the least among us. One of the widespread misconceptions about libertarianism is that it denies the importance of community-assuming, in the words of the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, that “the individual lives, or could live, in splendid isolation” from others. They would spend the next 48 hours socializing with fellow attendees, scouting job opportunities in the “liberty movement” and watching panel discussions with titles like “Got a Permit for That Bouquet? Why Occupational Licensing Laws Restrict Opportunity” and “How to Defund the Government and Help Your Community: The Arizona Model.” Later, the libertarian activist Matt Kibbe would declare that “changing the world is not only possible, it’s inevitable, if we all do this together.”Įconomic freedom can be morally, not just materially, empowering. Around me, people erupted into cheers.Ī thousand or so college kids and recent grads had gathered for 2017’s iteration of the largest meetup for young libertarians in the world. He was hoping to pump up the crowd, and he succeeded. On stage, the cartoonishly villainous-sounding Wolf von Laer, the executive director of the group Students for Liberty, leaned into his microphone and announced something he knew would come as no surprise to the audience: Recently, for the first time, extreme poverty had fallen below 10 percent of the global population. I was sitting in a nondescript hotel ballroom, press credential strung around my neck, listening to the opening remarks at a conference in Washington, D.C.

Reason magazine online