Conscience Of A Conservative, Indeed!
by Vince Daliessio
Listening to a Mises.org lecture by tax historian Charles Adams, I heard him speak kindly about Karl Hess. Hess was a famous speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, who referred to him as "Shakespeare". Hess was radicalized from a traditional Conservative into a proto-libertarian by his disgust with the Vietnam War. Many people might have the same experience over the Iraq War, if they read and understand this article;
"The immediate cause was Vietnam," he says. "Conservatives like me had spent our lives arguing against Federal power — with one exception. We trusted Washington with enormous powers to fight global Communism. We were wrong — as (former senator Robert) Taft foresaw when he opposed NATO. We forgot our old axiom that power always corrupts the possessor. Now we have killed a million and a half helpless peasants in Vietnam, just as Stalin exterminated the kulaks, for reasons of state interest, erroneous reasons so expendable that the Government never mentioned them now and won't defend them. Vietnam should remind all conservatives that whenever you put your faith in big government for any reason, sooner or later you wind up as an apologist for mass murder."
Another article, "The Death Of Politics", written by Hess in 1969 for Playboy, essentially defines the political radicalism of what was to become the Libertarian Party.