And it is a trip.
I happened to run across this and thought it might be of interest to some because of what it reveals about the history of the Propertarian movement (misnamed "Libertarian").
It comes from a 1972 Harvard Crimson article about a new political organization in Boston, the New Right Coalition.
The article draws in the reader with this startling quote (remember, this is 1972 in Cambridge):
"We are believers in greed," says founder and chairman Don Feder, a third year student at B.U. Law School. "We are believers in self-fulfillment, and greed is the desire to be fulfilled." Members of NRC maintain, as a result, a passionate advocacy of total liberty--the right to do, peacefully, whatever one desires.
The pitch of these apologists for the rich was already in the form we hear today:
The group sprang from a dormant Massachusetts YAF (Young Americans for Freedom) last April, when eight of the most active and extreme members of YAF decided that its conservatism was no longer tolerable to their philosophy.
"YAF is basically conservative," NRC Mass. co-chairman Frank Peseckis, a freshman at MIT, explains. "NRC is different--its members are libertarians. Conservatives usually have a lot of religious neuroses--ideas about man being God's servant rather than an end in himself--and think that the 'rights of society' take precedence over individual rights in many cases. Libertarians don't--we think individual rights are sovereign. We are the New Right."
It was already clear who their Messiah was:
Disaffected Old Rightists flocked to the new organization, making up the bulk of NRC's membership. The organization seems to be a comfortable nesting ground for former Young Republicans, Y AFers, Buckleyites and Birchers, suddenly turned libertarian. Converted socialists and liberals comprise the rest of NRC's ranks. But one common thread is found through all: practically every member of NRC credits her or his transformation, and determination, to a 68 year-old novelist named Ayn Rand--the philosopher of greed.
And the Messiah's prophets will ring a bell as well:
The New Right Coalition does not rest its belief in libertarianism on moral consistency alone. Through the influence of economists and theoreticians such as Murray Rothbard, Ludwig Von Mises, Morris Tannehill, and Edwin G. Dolan, the group has designed arguments for laissez-faire on practical grounds. The arguments are, in a number of surprising areas, persuasive.
Echoes of the NRC's views on education can even be found in the Obama Administration's policies. NRC co-founder, Niel [sic] Wright, classmate of Ben Bernanke '75 and Lloyd Blankfein '75, argues that:
If you combine the ideas of deferred tuition, the voucher system, and performance contracting, you get some sense of what we favor.
NRC was not well-received back in the days when the Hare Krishna held the high ground at Harvard Square:
For the public at large--at least the dominantly liberal public of the Cambridge vicinity--NRC's standing vies with that of the Mafia. Hardly a single one of their posters has not been visited by angry pens of thumbnails, or ripped down completely. A recent rally for "laissez-faire" in Harvard Square ended when street people drenched an NRC Revolutionary War flag (WTF is that?) with lighter fluid, lit it, and fled as pieces of the burning flag fell on an NRC member. On TV and radio talk shows, more than the normal number of hostile listeners call in.
The Randroids were undeterred, however. One of them thought that salvation was nigh:
"Who knows?" Wright said several days after the University officially recognized the Harvard NRC chapter. "Maybe the seventies will be the decade of radicals for greed."
Well, Mr. Wright, it took a little longer than you expected, but the past ten years have been pretty good for not-so-radical greedheads like your classmate Blankfein.