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Clearly, in 1967, at the age of 20, Samuel Edward Konkin III had not yet discovered libertarianism.
He would do so in short order, however. He had already discovered the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, and when the mass-market paperback edition of Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was published in 1968, Sam picked up a copy as quickly as he could manage it and sat down to read. This new Heinlein tale, in which colonists on the moon — Luna — stage a libertarian revolution against the tyranny of politicians on Earth, captured Sam's imagination in a way none of Heinlein's other books ever had. He was particularly fascinated by the views of the self-described "rational anarchist," Professor Bernardo de la Paz, the intellectual leader of the rebels on Luna. So when, in the summer of 1968, Sam Konkin moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he would start as a graduate student in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin in the fall, he was a former advocate of Social Credit newly converted to libertarianism by Robert A. Heinlein, though still somewhat tentative and full of all kinds of questions.
The questions were answered in short order, too. His new roommate, another chemistry grad student, named Tony Warnock, turned out to be a big fan of everything related to Ayn Rand. Through Warnock, Sam was introduced not only to the writings of Rand, but also to those of a couple of economists — Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard — and to those of Robert LeFevre, the real-life anarchist philosopher on whom Robert A. Heinlein had based Professor Bernardo de la Paz. Warnock also steered Sam to the Wisconsin Conservative Club, and Sam found his own way with no trouble at all from there to the University of Wisconsin chapter of YAF — Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative student organization founded in 1960 on William F. Buckley Jr.'s family estate in Connecticut. Sam joined YAF during the fall term of 1968. Within a few months, he had been selected as a delegate to the organization's national convention in St. Louis in August 1969.
As all the world knows by now, the young libertarians expelled from that YAF convention, along with the young libertarians expelled from the SDS national convention a month before in Chicago, became the nucleus of what Sam later called "the libertarian population explosion of 1969." At that YAF convention Sam met Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Dana Rohrabacher. Yes, I refer to the GOP Congressman from Southern California, who is today indistinguishable from any other conservative Republican, but who was something else entirely 40 years ago, when he was, as Sam put it once in an interview, newly "radicalized by Robert LeFevre, who provided him with small funding to travel the country with his [guitar] and [libertarian] folk songs from campus to campus, converting YAF chapters into Libertarian Alliances and SIL chapters." At that YAF convention, Sam Konkin confirmed his new identity as a libertarian.
Back in Madison, he schemed on how to get to New York, where he could build his new relationship with Rothbard and attend Mises's famous seminar at New York University. He transferred to NYU in the fall term of 1970. Almost upon his arrival at his new graduate school he assumed the editorship of the NYU Libertarian Notes, a campus newsletter, quickly renaming it New Libertarian Notes and aiming it at a broader readership. His mission, as he saw it, was to "cover" the newly expanded libertarian movement — to report on its issues and events, and to offer commentary aimed at steering the new movement in what Sam took to be the proper direction.
There was much going on in Manhattan in the early '70s, much libertarian ferment and growth. And it was not all in Murray Rothbard's living room. Over on Mercer Street in the Village, Laissez Faire Books, a new libertarian bookstore, was being established by Sharon Presley and John Muller. The Free Libertarian Party was polarizing libertarian strategic thought between those who believed political action could be used to achieve a free society and those who believed political action was a betrayal of libertarian principle. There were talks, parties, gatherings of every kind. It was a scene that cried out for a journalist with the imagination and (given the still very small market for news of this subculture) the sheer guts to make it his chief subject.
Sam stepped up. When he saw the focus of the movement change from New York to LA in the early '70s, he followed it there. New Libertarian Notesmorphed into New Libertarian Weekly and finally into New Libertarian, which was supposed to be a monthly but actually appeared on a monthly basis only in fits and starts and finally fizzled out altogether in the '90s. By this time, of course, the Age of the Internet was upon us. Sam taught himself html and he launched a couple of websites, along with an email discussion group called Left Libertarian. But the '90s proved to be merely the beginning of the long, gradual decline of his once-startling energy and productivity. By the turn of the new century, he had pretty much ceased publishing at all. By 2004, he was dead.
Looking back, it seems clear that the '70s and '80s were Sam's peak years — his time in the sun. He published aggressively during that period — not onlyNew Libertarian but a dozen other newsletters and various pamphlets as well, including his famous New Libertarian Manifesto, with endorsements from both Rothbard and LeFevre.
He attracted funding for his various activities. For a few years in the late '80s, he found enough funding to open a small suite of offices in a downtown office building in Long Beach, California for his own libertarian think tank, the Agorist Institute. The name, "Agorist," was derived from the ancient Greek word agora, meaning open marketplace. Sam attracted a coterie of admirers and fellow revolutionaries during the '70s and '80s, a couple of whom — J. Neil Schulman and Victor Koman — made independent marks as award-winning libertarian science-fiction writers during the '80s and '90s.
Sam was one of the great eccentrics of the libertarian '70s and '80s. You've heard that it's impossible to live in Los Angeles without owning a car, getting everywhere on public transportation the way many New Yorkers do? Sam did it in L.A. for 25 years or more. You've heard that there's never been a libertarian publication that didn't favor the views of one faction or another of the movement? Sam opened his publications to every libertarian point of view. At the top of his masthead, in every issue, he proudly printed the statement, "Everyone appearing in this publication disagrees!"
1972 photo of John Muller and Sharon Presley, founders of Laissez Faire Books Sam had a marked talent for neologism. You've heard that there are two types of libertarians, anarchists and minarchists — that is, advocates of very small or minimal government? "Minarchist" and "minarchy" and "minarchism" were all coined in the '70s by Sam. You may have heard that back in the '70s, libertarians who gave up political activism under the influence of Harry Browne's book, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, were called "Browne-outs"? Another Konkin coinage. You may have heard the term "Kochtopus" applied to the group of libertarian organizations funded in the late '70s and early '80s by the Kansas oil billionaire Charles Koch? "Kochtopus" was yet another of Sam's many coinages.
It wasn't only his coinages that attracted attention, of course. It was also his ideas. Younger libertarians today have sometimes heard of Sam Konkin but don't really have a clear understanding of who he was or why he was important. Yet, despite Sam's failure to take proper advantage of the Internet and help assure the survival of his work for at least another generation, I still run into references to him and his ideas in libertarian publications. I ran into one just the other day in an article by Walter Block in the newest issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Predictably, the reference was to the most interesting and probably the most enduring of Sam's ideas — his concept of counter-economics and the counter-economy.
"Nearly every action," Sam wrote in the mid-1980s, "is regulated, taxed, prohibited, or subsidized." So "everyone is a resister to the extent that he survives in a society where laws control everything and give contradictory orders. All (non-coercive) human action committed in defiance of the State constitutes the Counter-Economy." The Counter-Economy is, therefore, pretty vast. "The more controls and taxation a State imposes on its people," Sam wrote, "the more they will evade and defy them. Since the United States is one of the less (officially) controlled countries, and the Counter-Economy here is fairly large, the global Counter-Economy should be expected to be even larger — and it is." According to "U.S. government estimates … just the tax-dodging part of the Counter-Economy is twenty to forty million of the population."
That's big, but not big enough to cause the collapse of our official economy. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, Sam noted,
Communism collapsed in no small part due to the Counter-Economy. Nearly everything was available in the Counter-Economy with only shoddy goods and shortages in the official socialist economy. The Soviets called Counter-Economic goods "left-hand" … and entire manufacturing assembly lines co-existed … with the desultory State industry ones, on the same factory floor. Counter-Economic "capitalists" sold shares in their companies and vacationed in Black Sea resorts. Managers of collective farms who needed a tractor replaced in a hurry look[ed] to the Counter-Economy rather than see their kolkhoz collapse awaiting a State tractor delivery.
Nor is this all, for, as Sam pointed out, "Tax evasion, inflation avoidance, smuggling, free production, and illegal distribution still compose only half the Counter-Economy. Labor flows as freely as capital, as hordes of 'illegal aliens' pour across borders from more-statist to less-statist economic regions," and as these people and others begin providing services that are both unlicensed and unregulated.
Most of these people, Sam argued "are acting in an agorist manner with little understanding of any theory." They "are induced by material gain to evade, avoid, or defy the State. Surely they are a hopeful potential?" Sam thought they were. What we libertarians needed to do, he believed, was educate these people, help them to see that getting rid of the state was good for business, good for prosperity — we needed to convert them to agorism. Then, basically, let nature take its course. "The path from here to agora now becomes blindingly obvious," Sam wrote.
As more people reject the State's mystifications … the Counter-Economy grows both vertically and horizontally. Horizontally, it involves more and more people who turn more and more of their activities toward the counter-economic; vertically, it means new structures (businesses and services) grow specifically to serve the Counter-Economy.
Among these services designed to "serve the Counter-Economy," Sam listed arbitrators as an example. But he also commented that
Counter-economic entrepreneurs have an incentive to provide better security devices, places of concealment, instructions to aid evasion and to screen potential customers and suppliers for other counter-economic entrepreneurs. And thus is the counter-economic protection industry born. As it grows, it may begin insuring against "busts," lowering counter-economic risks further and accelerating counter-economic growth.
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Eventually, of course, after a period of increasingly rapid change of this kind, the "underground" will break into and displace the "overground"; the state will wither away into irrelevance, its taxpayers, soldiers, and law-enforcement people having deserted it for the marketplace; and we'll be left with a free, agorist society. Or so Sam expected, anyhow.
It's good to know that Sam's vision still excites interest, comment, and criticism, so long after his heyday — the '70s and '80s — has faded into a steadily less and less precisely remembered past. It would be good to see even more attention being paid to his ideas. It would be good to see them playing a larger part in the emergence of whatever turns out to be our future.
Jeff Riggenbach is a journalist, author, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A member of the Organization of American Historians and a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, he has written for such newspapers as The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle; such magazines as Reason, Inquiry, and Liberty; and such websites as LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com, and RationalReview.com. Drawing on vocal skills he honed in classical and all-news radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston, Riggenbach has also narrated the audiobook versions of numerous libertarian works, many of them available in Mises Media. Send him mail. See Jeff Riggenbach's article archives.
This article is transcribed from the Libertarian Tradition podcast episode "Samuel Edward Konkin, III: The New Libertarian."