If you seek his monument, look around.
I learned yesterday that Manny Klausner died recently at age 85.
Photo credit Reason magazine.I remember Murray Rothbard referring to H.L. Mencken as the “joyous libertarian.” For me, Manny was the joyous libertarian.
My late friend Harry Watson and I came down from Canada in September 1972 to start in the Ph.D. economics program at UCLA. We had been reading Reason magazine regularly and following the libertarian movement that way and through other publications. We were charmed by much of what we read. So we arrived somewhat familiar with the American libertarian landscape. We knew enough to know that Los Angeles was one of the hotbeds of libertarianism.
Naturally, we started looking around for libertarian events and we found out about the Libertarian Supper Club that met once a week (or was it once a month?) to discuss issues and developments. It met at a restaurant called the Eaters’ Digest. There was a very positive vibe at the time and so people would stand up and briefly share something that they had read or heard in the mainstream press or on talk radio that was somewhere between vaguely libertarian and actually libertarian. I think it was there that I first met Manny.
I remember that he handed out a pamphlet he had produced because he was running as a write-in candidate for Congress in the 1972 election. That makes him the first candidate for Congress I ever met. I don’t remember all the policy positions in his pamphlet, but I do remember that they weren’t hard-core libertarian but, rather, something I found more sensible: laying out policies that would take us closer to freedom.
I got a kick out of one particular position he took and I thought it made sense. He proposed ending the federal civil service system and returning to a 19th century-style spoils system. I think he told me, or maybe it was in the pamphlet, that the advantage of such a system is that it would be cheaper: instead of funding new programs to pay off supporters, successful politicians could fire the current employees and replace them with their supporters. I’m not positive any more that it’s a good idea but I think it is.
I was talking to my friend Eric Garris this morning about Manny. Eric worked in the Reason office in 1974-75 and got to know Manny that way. Manny was part of a group that had bought Reason from its founder, Lanny Friedlander, in 1970. It was a very small publication at the time. But Eric tells me that Manny was hugely important in growing Reason as a business.
British architect Sir Christopher Wren’s famous epitaph was “Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.” Translation: Reader, if you seek his monument, look around. It is inscribed on his tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of 56 churches he was instrumental in building, including St. Paul’s Cathedral itself, after London’s massive fire of 1666.
Similarly, if you seek Manny’s monument, look at Reason and the Reason Foundation.
Note: Both Brian Doherty and Bob Poole have done excellent remembrances of Manny.
P.S. Later today, I will post a more personal remembrance of Manny on my Substack. I’ll update here when that is done.
