"I Was a Teen-Age Reactionary"

Doug Henwood
Bad Subjects, (February 1998)

I have an embarrassing confession to make: in 1972, I cast my first ever presidential votes -- primary and general -- against Richard Nixon, because he wasn't conservative enough. The final straw was wage and price controls, a statist defilement of the market's purity.

I wasn't always a right-winger. My eighth-grade world history teacher, who was in all other respects a classic coach-style teacher, devoted a full period one day to a sympathetic lecture on Marx. When I got home, I announced to my parents that I was now a Marxist, and, supplemented by a bit of reading, thought of myself as one for the next four years.

But sometime in my senior year in high school -- in 1970, when the world was largely in rebellion -- I had a collision with one of William Buckley's collections and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. Subscriptions to National Review and the American Spectator soon followed. By graduation I was a raving libertarian.

Full story is at Henwood