What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

Libertarianism: A Primer, by David Boaz, and What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation, by Charles Murray, are rock-solid, engaging introductions to libertarian tradition and thought. Both books are also essentially epistles to the heathen, attempts to convert the unconvinced into true believers. Reading them, I thought often of one of my college roommates, an evangelical Christian who took the evangelizing part pretty seriously. (Not being religious myself, we eventually worked out a sort of non-proselytization pact.)

My roommate's main strategy revolved around disseminating religious tracts with the enthusiasm of, well, a religious zealot. He bought boxes and boxes of the things. Each tract was a palm-sized comic book that used incendiary language and graphic images to make the point that you should "invite Jesus into your life to become your personal savior." Colorfully titled ("The Gay Blade," "Hell Isn't For Heroes," "This Was Your Life"), some of the tracts told cautionary tales of sinners in the hands of an angry God, while others depicted successful conversion narratives in which the protagonist saved him or herself by accepting Jesus.

My roommate distributed the tracts around campus in various ways. Some he would force on people waiting in line at the cafeteria. Some he would leave on top of pay phones. Some he would sandwich between the pages of library books. The idea was to circulate the tracts as widely as possible, ever increasing the odds that a non-believer might stumble across and embrace the Word. My friend was not so naive as to assume that reading any single pamphlet would start a person down the road to Damascus. Rather, he explained to me, the goal was to get the ideas out, to make them part of the general atmosphere. You could never know, he said, what might provide the final nudge that causes a person to walk into the light. In a sense, my roommate told me, all conversions are accidents of being in the right place at the right time. But, he added, there are ways of making them accidents waiting to happen.

A similar process undergirds all successful outreach, whether the goal is to save a man's soul, to demonstrate with finality that A is A, or to convince someone, as the libertarian writer Frank Chodorov valiantly, vainly strove to in 1954, that the income tax is the "root of all evil." Over the years, I've made a habit of collecting conversion stories of fellow libertarians, and the results suggest that accidents happen all the time. One person felt the scales drop from his eyes as he watched a minutes-long Ed Clark for President television spot in 1980. I bought a used car from a libertarian (a terrifying thought!) who'd come in from the cold after taking the "World's Smallest Political Quiz," originated by Libertarian Party founder David Nolan. In the pages of REASON, humorist Dave Barry spoke of being persuaded by his friend, libertarian writer Sheldon Richman. (See "'All I Think Is That It's Stupid,'" December 1995.)

More often, though, the conversion stories include unplanned encounters with books: the writings of Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Anton Wilson; moldy old Reader's Digest versions of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom; used-bookstore copies of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty; unsolicited Laissez-Faire Books catalogs.

My own interest in libertarianism was such a bookish accident. My parents belonged to the Book of the Month Club but often either forgot to indicate they didn't want that month's selection or randomly chose books that they then stacked, still in the mailing boxes, on their shelves. Periodically, I would rip through the boxes and see if there was anything that seemed worth reading. Milton and Rose Friedman's Free to Choose caught my attention because its title appealed to my de riguer late-adolescent anti-authoritarianism; I knew virtually nothing of Milton Friedman, other than having a vague notion he was an evil, heartless man (an impression not particularly dispelled by the book's jacket photo, in which he stares inscrutably at the prospective reader, a pencil jutting...