My wife and I had lunch this afternoon with Lee Currie, executive director of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington on Hudson, New York.  FEE has generously donated copies of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson to the 21 students in my senior seminar course at Brooklyn College.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with FEE, it has been providing high quality support to students and faculty and giving exposure to free market ideas via its journal, the Freeman, and successfully performing a range of other educational activities.  Quite a few leading free market economists have had relationships with FEE.  Lee showed me a letter that he had just uncovered from Leon Trotsky to Henry Hazlitt, who led FEE in the 1940s.  Likewise, he reminded me that FEE had funded the academic career of Ludwig von Mises after von Mises had fled Germany and came to the US.

Lee and I exchanged some thoughts on recent political events, and I suspect most members of the RLC would agree with what we said.

Many libertarians and conservatives have been stunned by the events of the past few years. The Republicans had two opportunities: the Reagan revolution of 1980 and the Gingrich Contract with America in 1994.  Even though the tide of socialistic economic policies and declined was stopped, these enormous Republican opportunities of 1980 and 1994 were squandered.  Although President Clinton did attempt to change course in 1993 with health reform, he found it more successful to limit his “liberal” reform impulses because of the power of the Reagan-Gingrich transformation.  Thus, loose monetary policy and expansive government were not on many of our minds until…the second administration of George W. Bush.

It was not the Democrats but the Republicans who pulled the rug out from under the semi-libertarian transitions of 1980 and 1994.  In the end, which I define as 2004, George W. Bush announced that he believes that government can solve problems, and proceeded to go on a spending spree that culminated in the bailout proposals of last year and increases in the monetary base and Federal Reserve Bank Credit that are reminiscent of Revolutionary War days, when the US dollar of that time, the Continental, was devalued to almost zero.

The public is not happy with the bailout, and although monetary policy is something that won’t make them look until they see the whites of inflation’s eyes,  most people are fed up.

I have a dream: The Republican Liberty Caucus has unlimited funds. In my dream, the funds are sufficient to inform every voter in every Congressional district whose Congressman voted to support the bailout that the Congressman did so–and to bring home this information through local TV and other local publicity.  In my dram the RLC has attracted enough libertarian candidates to run in each of those same districts.

Were my dream a reality, libertarians could enjoy a strong showing if not a majority in Congress.

It is not time to roll over in frustration. Rather, it is important to gain a better understanding of why the Republican Party has lost its way; why the Republican leadership has failed; and why there was no pressure on the Bush-Cheney administration to familiarize themselves with John Locke and Adam Smith.

This is a time to get mad. And that’s no dream.

–Mitchell Langbert