“Don’t do what I did when I was your age - a lot of running around. Instead, read and learn as much as you can so you’re prepared to effectively fight for peace and liberty.”
This sounds like the advice Campaign for Liberty Chairman Ron Paul gives young people, but it was advice given to me when I was a young lad of 25 by my friend Justin Raimondo. Justin passed away last week from lung cancer at the age of 67.
Most of you probably know Justin from his column on Antiwar.com, the website he co-founded with longtime friend and collaborator Eric Garris in 1995. But Justin had a long history of supporting the libertarian movement, starting in the late seventies when he worked for The CATO Institute’s Libertarian Review and Students for a Libertarian Society.
Justin’s priority was ending militarism and war, which he, like Murray Rothbard, saw as the greatest threat to liberty in our times. He also followed Murray in seeking to build alliances with those on the left and right who oppose interventionism.
With the end of the Cold War, Justin joined those libertarians interested in reforming the Old Right libertarian-conservative coalition that opposed both welfare and warfare.
Of course, Justin was a great champion and defender of the Ron Paul Revolution, seeing it as the realization of his dream of mass movement for peace and liberty.
He also wrote two must read books Reclaiming the American Right, a history of the rise and fall of the old right, the rise of the neocons and the reemergence of an antiwar right following the end of the Cold War and Enemy of the State, a biography of Murray Rothbard focusing on Rothbard’s scholarly work and his activities in the libertarian movement.
You can buy Reclaiming the American Right here and Enemy of the State here.
Justin saw education and activism as necessary components of an effective movement. He educated to activate, and he activated to educate.
Justin Raimondo serves as a model for those wishing to end the American empire, and the Keynesian money system that fuels it, and restore the old republic of limited government, free-markets, individual liberties, and a foreign policy of peace and free trade.
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