Garry Reed
[Continued from page 4]
SUNNI: You once told me you're "on everybody's email list". Which ones do you particularly enjoy?
GARRY: Just a few of the lists I'm on are Mises, Cato, Future of Freedom Foundation, Downsize DC, Ernest Hancock, Marijuana Policy Project, Frederick's of Hollywood, for Mary's birthday of course --
SUNNI: Riiiiight! [laughs]
GARRY: -- Harry Browne, national and Texas LPs, Ron Paul, Rational Review, Reason Online, stop me any time here. Unfortunately I just don't have time to read many of them any more, although I have gotten article ideas from many of them. I also have Reason, Liberty and LPNews coming in through the snail mailbox. But the sources I absolutely must read every day are ISIL's Freedom News Daily, Lew Rockwell and -- this is not apple polishing -- your blog. There are others too numerous to mention that I love to visit routinely.
SUNNI: Again, thank you. It's nice to know there's something worthwhile there -- I try to address things others don't, or take a different perspective, but that can be tough sometimes. Last year, you were one of twelve people chosen in a competition to write guest columns for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. What was that experience like? What kind of response did your articles generate?
GARRY: Well, it really was ego-trippy to be chosen from over 200 applicants but it turned out not to be as much fun as I had thought it would be. First, they wanted stories with local connections and as I mentioned earlier that really cramped my style. Then, I toned down that style because my target audience was general population rather than libertarian specific. In retrospect I should have just let it rip and allowed the editors to tell me where to back off. If I ever get another chance, that's what I'll do. Also, I got virtually no feedback from these articles either.
SUNNI: You've covered a wide range of issues over the course of your columns. Which ones are most important to you personally, Garry?
GARRY: I cover a wide range of issues because I can't narrow down the ones that are most important to me. That's been a curse/benefit -- pick one -- my whole life. Everything grabs my interest. I'm a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. It's one of the things that kept me out of college beyond cherry-picking courses I liked the most, like history, psychology, journalism, creative writing, art -- and that randomness just doesn't add up to a degree in anything. After all these years I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I swear if I was trapped in a waiting room with nothing but a single issue of Modern Bride I'd find something interesting in there to read.
SUNNI: Where do you think this country is headed? Can voters really choose a leader worse than Dubya?
GARRY: I'm not a conspiracy theory buff, although I find some of those interesting along with all the other subjects I listed, but the current power structure sure looks like a cabal of powerful people who control both major political parties who could care less who gets elected to the figurehead presidential position. Bush, Kerry, who cares? So of course a "leader" worse than Dubya can be chosen. But maybe we'll be like the Roman Empire for a while who managed to survive in spite of a long succession of mediocrities.
SUNNI: What do you think is the greatest challenge for pro-freedom individuals to overcome?
GARRY: Trying to get some deep thoughts out of me, eh? Okay, how's this? Not fragmenting. The freedom movement has to be big enough to accommodate everyone who identifies their libertarianism on the most fundamental level. To me that means "Maximum freedom, minimum coercion." Beyond that I refuse to pin myself down as being an anarchist or minarchist or partyarch or whatever other splinter people want to use for their personal identity. If we can achieve that with or without government, or in an entirely as-yet-undreamed of way, that's fine with me, I'm all for it. Western civilization learned how to separate church and state, which was probably deemed an unthinkable possibility by Medievalists, so maybe our progeny will succeed in miniaturizing government and keeping it away from civil society. Could you live with that as an anarchist? If it turns out that government has to be 100% abolished in order to achieve "Maximum freedom, minimum coercion" can small government proponents live with that? And what if you're both wrong, what if a hitherto unknown way of organizing society evolves? So I think that all true freedom-lovers should hold to their individual commitments but keep the doors to the mind open. Remember what our economists tell us, that knowledge is diffused throughout the population and no person or group of persons has the perfect knowledge needed to run society, and then apply that principle to the freedom philosophy in general.
