Wednesday recommended reading for libertarians

Libertarian mayor of Johannesburg elected (The Freeman)

Libertarians and Greens did not prevent Hillary's coronation (Jacobin)

Trump's enablers (Ari Armstrong)

Libertarian Party now a major party in New Mexico (Miami Herald)

Oil fires suggest secret war between Iran and Saudi Arabia

Oil fires suggest secret war between Iran and Saudi Arabia: Proxy skrimishes flare on numerous fronts

Steve Bannon talks Richmond roots, says Trump will condemn all forms of racism

Steve Bannon talks Richmond roots, says Trump will condemn all forms of racism: Asked about scenes at a recent alt-right conference in Washington, Bannon said race-based nationalism is a 'non-starter.' He added:'I don't think it stands the test of logic and there is no future for that really in America.'

An AR-15 in Every Home: 3D Gun Printer Cody Wilson on Resistance, Trump,...

Saturday links

A leftist picks his fave "right wing" websites to counter confirmation bias parochialism (Guardian)

Hillary team joins recounts (Medium)

Establishment journos create list of "fake" aka ideologically subversive news sites (Alternet)

Cuba - the de-developed country (City Journal)

Milton Friedman - I, Pencil

Thanksgiving weekend links

Donald Trump's grandfather was conscientious objector, anti-imperialist activist (CNN)

Why Hillary Lost 1 (The Resurgent)

Why Hillary Lost 2 (Townhall)

Why Hillary Lost 3 (TrapNeuterRelease)

Are liberals educable?  (The ARC)

Feminist Gets OWNED on Hillary Clinton's FBI Investigation

The Incredible Bread Machine Film

Libertarian job posting links

We will update this semi-regularly, and move it to the top of the blog when anything new comes up

State Libertarian Party executive directors 

Hamilton's Brandon Victor Dixon wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving

Although the Hamilton cast/ Vice President-elect Mike Pence controversy was a major topic of conversation on every daytime chat show today, a cast member was a guest on only one show.

Appearing on The View yesterday, Hamilton star Brandon Victor Dixon thanked Vice President-elect Mike Pence both for stopping to listen to Victor's criticisms of Donald Trump from the stage after the play ended and for his public statement in favor of free speech the next day.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Pence told host Chris Wallace "Hamilton is just an incredible production, incredibly talented people and it was a real joy to be there...I nudged my kids and reminded them that’s what freedom sounds like."

This weekend self-proclaimed "cultural libertarian" and Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopolous re-posted a tweet by Brandon Victor Dixon on his eponymous blog, not nearly as old as the "pussy grabbing" comments of the President-elect. Dixon, the Hamilton actor who hectored Vice President-elect Pence from the stage, had back in 2012 tweeted that one should hang out with white women on St. Patrick's Day, since they become inebriated enough to make easy sexual prey:

St. Patty's day weekend is like Christmas for black dudes who like white chicks. Happy holidays boys. @reesewaters#seasonsgreetings

— Brandon Victor Dixon (@BrandonVDixon) March 17, 2012

The all female panel of The View did not ask Brandon Dixon about this tweet, but did discuss President-elect Donald Trump's tweet demanding that the cast apologize. Apparently what Michelle Obama actually meant in her famous maxim comparing Democrats and their opponents was "When they get high, we go low."

There may have been some legal pushback, as the article by Milo then disappeared from the internet, the link to it no longer takes you to anything. (I emailed Milo today to ask but did not hear back, and one person at Breitbart said they wouldn't get involved in covering this but would let Milo sort it out himself.)

But Brandon Dixon's twitter feed still has plenty of wisdom to edify the nation:

Wishing America a Happy Thanksgiving

Happy to see my good christian brothers n sisters out faithfully celebrating the pagan holidays.

Next up, Christmas n Easter!

As you were

— Brandon Victor Dixon (@BrandonVDixon) October 30, 2016

Explaining that Pence was lucky to only get a tongue lashing

The amount of lives I save by daily controlling the generations of rage contained n me is astounding. Im a goddamned superhero#yourewelcome

— Brandon Victor Dixon (@BrandonVDixon) September 22, 2016

Out magazine a few days after the election, for the alleged bravery and rarity of being an out, gay, HIV+ man on Broadway, tweeted that he blocks and mutes trolls and critics who tweet negative things to him:

Dixon's co-stars, Lexi Lawson and Javier Munoz have also spent a lot of time tweeting, with Lawson tweeting defenses of their hectoring Pence, and Munoz urging people to vote the first week of November and promoting the Hamilton cast' pre-election performance on The Colbert Report. Munoz, who won an award from

Thats what mute/block is for 😚
I don't see or receive those. Besides I didn't survive 2 terminal illnesses to be brought down by words❤️👊🏽 https://t.co/tO5ALL8hZl

— Javier Muñoz (@JMunozActor) November 12, 2016

Unfortunately for Vice President-elect Pence, it's hard to mute a cast when you are a captive audience.

Are liberals educable?

New York Times apologizes, doesn't apologize, wins award

Tucker Carlson Thursday night finally booked a decent guest who wasn't a personal friend or a ubiquitous FOX contributor on his so far uneven albeit high ratings new FOX show Tucker Carlson Tonight.  New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof went on to discuss his article on a 12 step program for liberals to deal with and learn from Donald Trump's election and Tucker grilled him and got him to admit that liberal journalists had failed to see the coming wave of Trump voters, mainly because they were largely white working class people Democratic policy makers have abandoned and liberal journalists and academics have smeared and demonized.

Kristof was following his boss, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who admitted in a front page op ed after the election that his paper had provided partisan, nonobjective, and incompetent reporting.

But across town from Tucker's set, a different New York Times columnist was telling a room full of FOX stars that his paper was right in everything it did at exactly the same hour.

Frank Bruni was accepting the National Gay and Lesbian Journalist Association's "Randy Shilts Award for LGBT Coverage" at a ceremony held in the glittering showroom of upscale furniture vendors Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams in D.C.'s super-posh, recently gentrified, gayborhood, Logan Circle.  And his audience of mainly local journalists (Jeremy Peters may have been the only other New York Times writer there) was studded with FOX talent:  a statuesque Jennifer Griffin towering over everyone in attendance, a bemused James Rosen, a petite and elegant Catherine Herridge on crutches from a running injury ("When I commit to go to something I show up!"), a dapper Leland Vittert, and a stunning Kristin Fisher (in a cocktail dress that had to have come with a warning label advising that it was only safe to wear at an event where most of the attendees would be gay men).

Bruni told his audience, gay or - like the FOX heavy hitters - straight, that reporters should not conclude from the election results that their efforts were futile: "We were right to send out 'truth squads' to check everything the Trump campaign said or did." (Doing the same for Presidential-wannabe Clinton did not come up.)  Bruni cited elections that proved results were mixed -  pro-gay marriage Republican Rob Portman was elected, and Democrats might yet take the North Carolina governorship.  And besides partisan victories, Bruni insisted that pro-gay journalism was the reason American's had shifted in their opinions about gay marriage and in their general acceptance of gay people, though he cited no evidence for this.

No one debated any of these points.  This was a celebration, as evidenced by the free flowing champagne and vodka at the open bar, the $3,000 couches and dining room tables, and Ms. Fisher's turn as the requisite supermodel at a truly A-List gay party, which curiously always requires at least one woman who is more beautiful and bedazzling than any man present.

I had more than my share of the free vodka, but I am fairly certain I met new FOX News CEO Jack Abernethy there who told me, when I observed I was surprised to see so many FOX superstars, that he felt it was important for FOX to be there.

Across the room Nicholas Benton, the gay leftist who publishes and edits a suburban DC penny-saver, the Falls Church News-Press, told me "Under Trump the right is going to try and take over part of the gay movement."

But except for Bruni's sermon and Benton's prediction, the evening was not only apolitical, but politically incorrect.  Local NBC anchor Angie Goff introduced Bruni to receive his award, and looking at the open bar and beautiful people and venue told the crowd:  "We need to learn from you - at AAJA [the Asian American Journalism Association] events, all we have is karaoke.  I can make that joke!  I'm Asian!"

A clutch of local metrosexual TV reporters and meteorologists at the bar, uniformly 5'11" without an ounce of body fat, dressed in Hugo Boss and Prada, teased Goff that they were live streaming her comments.

Leaked Video Shows Bill & Hillary Clinton Celebrating Prematurely On Ele...

Tulsi Gabbard on meeting with Donald Trump today

 

Friends - 

As you have no doubt heard by now, I met with President-elect Donald Trump earlier today. 

He asked me to meet with him to discuss our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face. 

It would have been easier for me to refuse this meeting. The establishment and social media have been talking about this all day. But I never have and never will play politics with American and Syrian lives. 

In fact, like President Obama, I firmly believe that now is the time for us to put our country first, and come together, regardless of political party, and tackle the many challenges we face. 

This was an opportunity to advocate for peace—and I felt it was important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect to counteract neocons’ steady drumbeats of war, which threaten to drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government.

This war has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families. It has also strengthened al-Qaeda and other violent, extremist groups in the region. It would have been irresponsible not to accept this invitation. I feel it is my duty to take every single opportunity I get to advocate for peace, no matter the circumstances of those meetings. 

I shared with him my grave concerns that escalating the war in Syria by implementing a so-called no-fly/safe zone would be disastrous for the Syrian people, our country, and the world. It would lead to more death and suffering, exacerbate the refugee crisis, strengthen ISIS and al-Qaeda and bring us into a direct conflict with Russia–potentially resulting in a nuclear war. We discussed my bill to end our country’s illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government and the need to focus our precious resources on rebuilding our country, and on defeating al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups who pose a threat to the American people. 

Also, where I disagree with President-elect Trump on issues, I will not hesitate to express that disagreement. You didn’t send me to Washington to make friends with the political elite. You sent me to represent you, and I am committed to doing just that. 

In short: I will never allow partisanship to undermine our national security when the lives of countless people lay in the balance. 

If that earns me enemies in Washington or at the State Department, then so be it. 

I hope you’ll continue to stand with me and stay engaged. The cause of peace is too great for us to allow political disagreements or partisanship to stand in our way. 

Aloha, 

Tulsi Gabbard

Thanks to Trump, now gay people can come up with creative excuses not to commit as well

My boyfriend is undocumented. His sister married a US citizen and may receive a green card. We had hoped to someday do the same. But next year, the extreme right will control all three branches of the federal government. Deportation will surely come for my boyfriend. Additionally, we're a gay couple, and Donald Trump has pledged to repeal marriage equality, if not ban it outright. So if we were to marry now, the timing would look suspicious. And even if we did marry, that marriage is likely to be invalidated in the coming years. Is it still worth it to try? What do I do if the government takes away the love of my life?

Keep Him Home

You should marry your boyfriend immediately, KHH, and do so with confidence.

"There is no realistic possibility that anyone's marriage will be invalidated," said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which has taken marriage-rights cases to the US Supreme Court (and won). "The law is very strong that if a marriage is valid when entered, it cannot be invalidated by any subsequent change in the law. So people who are already married should not be concerned that their marriage can be taken away."

And Minter says the court is unlikely to overturn Obergefell, the decision that legalized same-sex marriage across the country.

"The doctrine of stare decisis—which means that courts generally will respect and follow their own prior rulings—is also very strong, and the Supreme Court very rarely overturns an important constitutional ruling so soon after issuing it," said Minter. "Even the appointment of an anti-marriage-equality justice to replace Justice Scalia would not jeopardize the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling on marriage equality, and the great majority of Americans still strongly support the freedom of same-sex couples to marry."

---

mail@savagelove.net

@fakedansavage

How to make libertarian pie for Thanksgiving

Institute for Justice attorney Rob Pecola shows how to grind your statist adversaries into flour.

Trump's First 100 Days

This was published earlier today at Breitbart.

A meme currently popular on the internet features President Obama and Vice President Biden sharing a joke on the front steps of the White House.  "Our followers have no idea we handed Trump the right to indefinitely detain people without trial," said Biden.  "I know it's hilarious," says the (meme) President.  "Got 'em!" concludes meme Biden.

And the use of the levers of federal and executive power Democrats have created for years against them by Trump and the Republican House and Senate is likely.  A few days after the election, retiring Senator David Vitter suggested using the federal purse strings to regulate sanctuary cities that take a secessionist approach to immigration law:  "Withholding fed $ from #sanctuarycities puts clear, negative consequences for jurisdictions ignoring federal law."

But the policy areas that could - or should - feel the pressure of a federal government expanded by President Obama, Senator Reid, and Congresswoman Pelosi but now controlled by President-elect Trump, are numerous.

A prime candidate is education policy.

This is potentially a contentious issue.  Trump supporters include a healthy portion of people who have hated  "common core," Michelle Obama's inedible school lunches, and other federal interventions in local schools.  One of Trump's rumored candidates for Secretary of Education, Stanford University academic Williamson Evers, is one of the chief critics of common core and other federal interventions in education.

But one issue stands out as a more fundamental, often described as a civil rights issue:  school choice.  And school choice was one policy Trump ran on, especially when campaigning in urban areas among minority voters trapped in failed traditional public school systems, with the President-elect proposing shifting $20 billion of the Department of Education's budget into funding for local school voucher programs modeled on Washington, D.C.'s Opportunity Vouchers.

One of the dirty secrets of education in America is that American students receive separate and unequal educations.

In Washington, D.C., for example, where 45% of the students have left the city's largely failed traditional public schools  - D.C. ranks last after the 50 states, with a 69% graduation rate - for charter schools (and to a lesser degree private schools using the Congressionally mandated Opportunity Scholars voucher program), a child receives a radically unequal amount of public funding depending on where they choose to go to school.  D.C. traditional public school students earn the public school system $29,000 each (the highest per pupil budget in the nation aside from Manhattan and a few other jurisdictions).  But kids in charter schools are only budgeted in the low $20,000s.  And kids using the Opportunity Vouchers to go to a private or parochial school receive $13,000.  Even more remarkably the recipient of the vouchers in D.C. are overwhelmingly African American, while the most contented parents and students in the traditional public schools are the mainly white bureaucrats and lobbyists who live in the million dollar plus housing in posh sections of Capitol Hill and Upper NW and send their kids to the well tended public schools in their wealthy neighborhoods.

Public school systems don't like to share the data about their radically unequal school funding (or their sometimes disastrous graduation rates), but school choice reformers tell me the unequal funding one finds in Washington, D.C. is true across the country.

So why not tie federal funding of education (or of highways or anything else), to ending the discrimination against children who choose to be educated outside of the traditional, politician and teacher's union dominated, public schools?  Why shouldn't the amount of public money budgeted for a child's education be the same no matter where she goes to school?

It should be a popular move.  

The number of students attending charter schools is on the rise, and so are the number of politicians running on the issue.

In a little over 2% of the 6,000 races for state houses and legislatures this November, one relatively new political group backed candidates and had an extremely high success rate. "If the teacher's unions spent more than any other political entity, but can only point to a handful of local races where those they supported won, that speaks for itself," says Matt Frendewey of the American Federation for Children.

The American Federation for Children supported 120 state and local 2016 candidates who ran on expanding school choice - including charter schools, vouchers, and tax credits - and by Frendeway's count 108 of them won.

In one race the AFC did not get involved in, a Republican, Ashley Carter, dislodged a 10 year incumbent for the D.C. city wide at-large seat on the school board (in a technically non-partisan race).  (Though she did campaign on school choice issues, Carter says not being the incumbent in such a failed system, and going to hundreds of events and listening to people in every Ward is act helped her win.)

Though school choice is often associated with Republican (and Libertarian) candidates, a growing number of Democrats, especially urban and African American Democrats whose constituents are trapped in failing traditional public school systems, have also come out for school choice.  AFC does not support candidates for federal office, but notes that of the Democratic victories for the House of Representatives last week, three were pro-school choice candidates: Al Lawson (FL), Darren Soto (FL), and Dwight Evans (PA).

AFC, less than a decade old, spent $5 million supporting pro-school choice candidates (down from $8 million it spent in previous election cycles, when it was involved in opposing the recall election of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker).

The American Federation of Teachers, in opposition to whom the American Federation of Children takes its name, also claimed victories in the election.  “When the issue was whether to support its community public schools, communities said ‘yes.’ Voters chose to protect and support the institution of public education. You can see this in the defeat of measures to expand charter schools, in the passage of measures to invest in public education, and in the support of school board members who will work with educators to provide a high-quality public education for all children,” Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT said. “These victories send a strong message that Americans want our schools to use proven, evidence-based solutions to the challenges that hold children back.” 

Yet in the AFT's press release "Americans Voted for Public Schools over Privatization" the elections where candidates or initiatives favoring more taxes for and investment in traditional public schools and limits on the expansion of charter schools and other education alternatives won were limited to Detroit, San Francisco, and a very small number of other very Democratic jurisdictions.

AFT and the National Education Association had spent nearly twenty times as much money on electoral activities.  The two groups (and their state affiliates), which unlike AFC, do support candidates in federal elections, had concentrated some resources on the presidential race in support of Hillary Clinton.  The NEA's headquarters building in D.C., located a few blocks north of the White House, was bedecked for months with a large banner in support of Mrs. Clinton's presidential bid.

Pollsters are widely believed to have failed in their predictions for this election cycle, but the American Federation for Children commissioned a poll in January 2016 that predicted that 70% of American voters would support a pro-school choice candidate.

With such wide support in polls for school choice, and with the number of students leaving traditional public schools growing, making receiving federal funds conditional on treating all students equally should be a popular issue.

Stephen Bannon and the Media Meltdown

This was published earlier today at The Daily Caller.

As Democrats - or at least people hired by groups funded by George Soros - break windows, burn cars, and assault suspected Trump supporters in liberal cities around the country, neither President Barack Obama or Presidential-wannabe Hillary Clinton have admonished their violent followers to return to peaceful protests.

Only Senator Bernie Sanders has.

But there is another danger to public safety President Obama and Presidential-wannabe Clinton have not addressed.

That's the imminent danger to those who work in, or near, America's newsrooms.

The American media, now exposed as frauds, liars, and incompetent pollsters - in the case of the New York Times, which has belatedly apologized, admittedly so - are doubling down, and are so much in denial of reality they are on the edge of a psychotic break.

It's only a matter of time before one of them goes postal, and comes to work with a gun, shooting the innocent receptionists, secretaries, advertising sales reps, and cleaning crews who are unfortunate enough to be working when the final wires snap.

So far they are concentrating their ire on one individual, former Breitbart publisher Stephen K. Bannon.  President-elect Donald Trump has chosen him to be the chief strategist  for the White House, a position for which associates say he is better suited than the chief of staff position that went to former RNC chair Reince Preibus, because Bannon is said to favor casual dress and a looser schedule than the chief of staff position would require.

But casual dressing is not what the establishment media is attacking Bannon for.  They claim - with no evidence - that Bannon is a "white nationalist"...or maybe encouraged or mainstreamed "white nationalists"...or maybe supported something they call the "alt right" which they then associate with white nationalists.  Or something.  Anyway, the party that earns about half of its campaign donations, after Wall Street of course, by kidnapping poor black children and selling them to National Education Association and American Federation for Teachers bureaucrats in exchange for candidate support, is as usual screaming that the people who beat them at the ballot box are racists.

Bannon doesn't really need me to defend him.  Bernard Marcus, of the Republican Jewish Committee has already publicly said he knows Bannon and he is no anti-semite.  I'm a lowly gay libertarian writer at Breitbart and have barely met Bannon, though I have been to an event at his home.

If you check any of the TV or print stories denouncing Stephen Bannon and Breitbart, you will mainly see the headlines of two articles cited over and over.  You won't see the articles quoted.  You won't find a link to them so you can read them.  You won't learn who the authors are.  You will just be told the headlines, and be expected to conclude from that that Breitbart is an oceanic cesspool of bigotry with Stephen Bannon as its slimy Poseidon.

The first article is entitled "Bill Kristol - Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew".  I'm personally not a fan of headlines that discuss people's religion, but what the smear merchants aren't telling you is that the author of this piece, David Horowitz, is himself a Jew and a constant critic of anti-Semitism.  He simply thinks Kristol inserts himself into elections in ways - helping recruit independent conservative Evan McMullin to run for President, for example - that are rarely helpful for Republicans.  But the smear merchants on TV or newspapers want you to assume that this article was anti-semitic.

The second article was headlined "Gay Rights Have Made Us Dumber It's Time to Get Back in the Closet" and the author is one of Breitbart's gay contributors (I am among them), its most famous gay editor and contributor, the satirist and provocateur Milo Yiannopolous.  One can easily not like all of Milo's shtick, though he's very clever and very funny and almost exclusively targets the intellectually dishonest academic and media types conducting the smear merchantry against Stephen Bannon.  But what none of the smear merchants will tell you is that this inflammatory headline is to an article written by a very openly gay man criticizing parts of the gay establishment.

The media have few tools.  Mainly all they know how to do is scream "racism" (or in the monotone hectoring of Presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton "racist... sexist... homophobic... xenophobic... Islamaphobic..."  What they actually fear is that a "paradigm shift" is happening, to use the academic jargon of the 70s, or we are at a "tipping point," to use the jargon of a few years ago.  They have been the American Pravda for decades, the well remunerated propaganda class of the ruling political elite.

It is projection that journalist's journalist Jack Shafer labels Breitbart to be Pravda in the pages of the DNC house organ Politico.

Now a populist politician has beaten their elite candidate.  And he has his own media allies.  They are shut out.  Trump is already tweeting rebukes at them when they lie.

They have no idea what to do.

So the only thing they can do is to slime and decry as a racist the person they most fear, their media rival, Stephen Bannon, who helped Andrew Breitbart build an alternative to the mainstream media, who then beat them in an election they were sure they would win, and who is now a chief strategist in the enemy administration-elect.

The moment when Young Turks realize Trump won over Hillary

Libertarian thoughts on the election

Carla Howell:  "If only 'reason' magazine would cover the Libertarian Party we could get some traction!"

Austin Petersen: "Between Adam Kobkesh and Gary Johnson, none of you mutherfuckers know a damn thing about gun safety!"

William Weld: "My candidate lost!  And after I used ever form of duplicity known to politics to elect her.  Hiccup.  I mean him."

Gary Johnson:  "What?  It was last Tuesday?  Damn!"

Mike Shipley: "This disaster is all because that Milo guy pink washed Trump.  Why do we let these foreigners into our campaigns?"

Angela Keaton:  "I wrote in Melania."

Best Of The Young Turks Election Day Meltdown 2016: From smug to utterly...

Rothbard laughs at crying Hillary supporters

'Your Tears Are Delicious and Your Parties Will Die,' Says Libertarian Party chairman

In other elections....

An edited version of this was published at The Federalist today.

"If I hadn't become an academic economist, I wanted to be a college basketball coach, maybe at Duke," Peter Boetke says when asked what he wanted to be when he was young.  Boetke, at 56, has just been elected as the youngest person to serve as president of the Mont Perelin Society, an invitation-only international association of 500 "thought leaders," mainly academics, and overwhelmingly economists, with some historians, journalists, lawyers and law school professors, and philosophers thrown into the mix.  It's the most influential society you've never heard of.  But it isn't the fantasy of some fevered conspiracy theorist.

Boetke is the 30th president of the Society, founded in 1947 by F.A. Hayek.  Hayek - author of The Road to Serfdom - in the years after World War II and the rise of Hitler and Stalin, wanted academics to study and promote individual rights, the rule of law, international peace, and the market society.  Hayek, and several subsequent Mont Pelerin Presidents - Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Vernon Smith - have all been Nobel prize winners.  (Members other than the Presidents have also won Nobel prizes, including novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and economists Ronald Coase and George Stigler.)  Imagine something like what you see when you watch or listen to a TED talk or Freakonomics broadcast - except the Pelerines have rarely made their events public, leading one group of academic critics of free global trade to brand them a shadowy "neoliberal thought collective." 

Despite the Society's being in the intellectual stratosphere, Boetke says he wasn't a reader of any kind as a high school student: "I played basketball ten hours a day when I could.  I'd play all day, come home for dinner, and go out and play some more.  The only thing I ever read were the books on basketball by [award winning UCLA] coach John Wooden." 

Boetke is discussing his love of basketball to answer my question of how he would state his life goals in the form of the statement by the famous Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (who coined the phrase "creative destruction").  Schumpeter said he wanted "to be the greatest economist in the world, ... the best horseman in all of Austria and the greatest lover in all of Vienna."  Boetke, happily married to his high school sweetheart, Rosemary, and the father of two twenty-something sons, says basketball coaching or tennis, each of which he played in college until a series of broken ankles stopped him from playing basketball (he went on to captain the tennis team), are the only other lives that would have tempted him, with the possible exception of having been a philosophy professor. 

  

Boetke explains his capture by the world of ideas partly by the times and partly by a charismatic professor.  Good jobs where scarce in the late 70s when Boetke was working summers to save college money.  He dug swimming pools for a local construction company in his home state of New Jersey, and one of his jobs was to siphon gas from one company truck to another so crews could drive to job sites - there were long lines for gas in the floundering Carter-era economy, and no one wanted to wait in them to keep the tanks filled up. 

At Grove City College, the small Pennsylvania school that is Boetke's alma mater, he met Hans Senholz, a former German air force officer who had been a prisoner of war in the United States.  After the war Senholz returned to Europe for a master's degree and then immigrated back to the U.S. and earned a Ph.D. in economics at New York University.  Boetke says Senholz was a great orator and a true public intellectual, who made ideas come alive for his student.  Boetke became excited about economics because Senholz's lecture on how gas price controls caused shortages and queues made him see how economics could explain the events he was living through. 

Grove City has produced a disproportionate share of influential free market movement people for its small size.  Senholz was eulogized by Ron Paul for interesting the Congressman in free market ideas.  Matt Kibbe, the former director of the advocacy group FreedomWorks, was a friend, fellow student, and fraternity brother of Boetke at Grove City: "Peter Boettke's election to the Presidency of Mont Pelerin is a clear signal that this august intellectual community first established by Hayek in the dark days after World War II is adapting to the new opportunities and challenges of the Internet Age, and speaking to a younger generation of classical liberals. The audience for our ideas is so much bigger than ever before, and Pete brings a unique combination of Austrian scholarship, a rare ability to teach others, and the open spirit of a community builder.  I can't wait to see how the Mont Pelerin Society grows from here." (Kibbe's wife Terry, also a Grove City undergrad, credits Boetke with their careers in politics: "The story of Pete being the one who got Matt to change his major to economics from biology is actually important because it changed the course of our lives and is the reason we do what we do. And it happened over many beers at a party.") 

  

"The Mont Pelerin Society is in a position of deciding whether the Presidency is to be an honor for great achievement or great ambition,"  according to Michael Munger, director of a political economy program at Duke University (where the alternate life Boetke would be coaching basketball) in the Political Science Department.  "It is the nature of using the office as an honor that the great scholars and leaders of a previous generation are recognized.  For the past fifteen years at least, the Mont Pelerin Society has chosen as its Presidents men and women in their late sixties who have earned recognition and honor.  And that has served the Society well. 

  

"But the Society faces a number of challenges, not least appealing to a new generation of scholars who will write the books, journal articles, and op-eds that will contest the intellectual and ideological spaces of tomorrow.  The selection of Peter Boettke as President, a man of great achievement but who is still in his 50's, betokens a "passing of the torch."  Prof. Boettke has already played a key role in expanding and animating the Association for Private Enterprise Education, and I fully expect him to do the same for the Mont Pelerin Society."  Munger says he was never interested in joining, but now that Boetke is president, plans to apply.

  

At George Mason University, where Boetke has been Director of Graduate Studies and of Advanced Studies in the Economics Department, he has served as a coach:  "Basketball is a team sport played by individuals who get to be creative within the flow of the game."  He works with a team of young economists who do research in fields Boetke describes as "institutional economics" and "analytical anarchism," that study the way groups of people deal with government failure, areas where laws, regulations and badly defined property rights fail to solve problems like the use of scarce water resources.  Many of his faculty also have undergraduate degrees from small colleges like Hillsdale or Manhattan College.  Yet they have an impressive output combining the schools of two Mont Pelerin Nobel winners, Hayek's Austrian economics - which views the economy as a dispersed cloud of information agents must learn, interpret, and navigate - and Buchanan's public choice theory - which studies the "profit motivated" self-interested actions of all institutions, including teacher's unions, regulatory agencies, political parties and other groups that are not the traditional for-profit companies people think economics addresses.  One of Boetke's faculty, Peter Leeson, wrote a widely praised book, The Invisible Hook, an economic history that applied "analytical anarchism" to 18th century pirate ships, showing how racial equality and democracy came to exist, unplanned, on pirate ships, before they existed on land, because economic efficiency required it.  Hook (which Boetke takes no credit for - "I've learned far more from Leeson than Leeson learned from me") won the 2009 Gold Medal Award for the best book in economics and business.  Leeson agrees with Munger and Kibbe: " One of the world’s most important classical liberal thinkers is now the president of one of the world’s most important classical liberal organizations; a perfect fit."  Another young faculty, Christopher Coyne, who, employs economic theory to analyze military intervention and empire-building, says "I second everything Pete Leeson said." 

  

Boetke is currently working on two books, one on Hayek for a series on great thinkers in economics, and one a book on public administration from a classical liberal perspective.  When asked about how he would change the Mont Pelerin Society - in an age where mass movements and demagogues seem to be opposed to the free trade and open borders liberals have favored since the 19th century days of Richard Cobden and John Bright and their British Anti-Corn Law League - he answers that it should keep doing what it has always done, but address new issues like "mass migration, or the debt crisis." 

  

When asked about any particular new agenda for Mont Pelerin he doesn't have one (yet).  "I'm an academic so I am reading Max Hartwell's book The History of the Mont Pelerin Society.  I've been a member for a few years but I don't know everything the society has done."  Boetke didn't run for the office; that's not how the Pelerines choose their president.  A nominating committee nominates you and then those members who come to the annual meeting vote on you.  Asked if the Society's conferences will become more public like TED talks or South by Southwest, Boetke says "I am reading up the various debates that have been part of the history and don't have a settled position yet. I do think the Mont Pelerin Society in New York City was a great success," referring to a 2009 open panel on the financial crisis.  "But not sure that changes the general policy."   The next regional Mont Pelerin Society meeting, in 2017, in Seoul, Korea, is being advertised on social media.