We had an absolutely awesome time at the Students for Liberty (SFL) conference this past weekend. There were about 1500-2000 undergraduate students attending, all of whom reflected a deep and passionate interest in libertarianism.
There were also numerous libertarian foundations and think tanks participating in the conference, including The Future of Freedom Foundation, with booths and exhibits and lots of speeches and panels — so many in fact that there were many simultaneous sessions for students to choose from.
Bart Frazier, FFF’s program manager, manned our booth, and both he and I interacted with lots of students and distributed lots of free copies of our monthly journal Future of Freedom, our booklet “Economic Liberties and the Constitution,” and our book Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax by Sheldon Richman.
On Saturday, we hosted a panel entitled “Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy, and the War on Terrorism.” The two panelists were Bruce Fein and Sheldon Richman. I moderated the panel. It was a great session, with a lively Q and A session.
On Sunday, Bruce and I gave talks sponsored by the Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), with whom, as you will recall, FFF partnered with in two College Civil Liberties tours last year. SFL had provided YAL with several slots for programs within the SFL conference, a model in cooperation between libertarian organizations. YAL then invited Bruce and me to fill two of the slots with individual talks.
In his Sunday talk, Bruce talked about the U.S Empire and what it has done to us, the American people. I talked about why civil liberties are so important — in fact, why they are even more important than economic liberty — and that everyone who wants a free society cannot avoid confronting the U.S. government’s pro-interventionist/pro-empire foreign policy and the national-security state’s grave infringements on civil liberties since 9/11.
We videotaped the panel and the two talks and will be posting them this week on our website (www.fff.org) and including them in our FFF Daily. I hope you’ll take the time to watch them and recommend them to others. I think you will find all three of the presentations important and constructive.
