Well, it's hard to tell on the basis of the Party's rhetoric, after all they're running for state office, but my experience is that most people who ar… - Karl Hess

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Well, it's hard to tell on the basis of the Party's rhetoric, after all they're running for state office, but my experience is that most people who are in the Libertarian Party have pretty decent anarchist impulses, even if they do not say they are anarchists—most of them will say they are libertarians, at any rate.<p>And one thing that is useful is that they have a fairly well-refined analysis of why they aren't conservative. It took the New Left to do a proper analysis on American liberals, it seems to me, and I suspect that the libertarians are doing the best analysis of American conservatives.<p>I think that they are quite good people, and that the Party contains within it probably more people of an anarchist tendency than any other organisation in the country.

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About Karl Hess

Karl Hess (born Carl Hess III; 25 May 1923 – 22 April 1994) was an American libertarian and speechwriter for Barry Goldwater. He was also a free-market anarchist political philosopher, editor, welder, motorcycle racer, tax resister, atheist, and libertarian activist. Although fundamentally a libertarian, his career included stints on the Republican right and the New Left.

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Additional quotes by Karl Hess

The most interesting political questions throughout history have been whether or not humans will be ruled or free, whether they will be responsible for their actions as individuals or left irresponsible as members of society, and whether they can live in peace by volitional agreements alone.<p>The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.

We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.

There is scarcely anything radical about, for instance, those who say that the poor should have a larger share of the Federal budget. That is reactionary, asking that the institution of state theft be made merely more palatable by distributing its loot to more sympathetic persons.

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