On Friday night, Justin bought one of Dave Barry’s recent books, Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, a very funny look at politics and related insanity (yes, Justin, I’ve actually read it). We talked briefly about the fact that Barry is a libertarian, and I mentioned that Reason magazine ran an excellent interview with him back in 1994.
I discovered Dave Barry in my early teenage years (maybe even preteen — like, 11 or 12 years old), and his wacky sense of humor seemed tailor-made for me. It was a surprising bonus to discover that Barry was a libertarian as well, years later after my own political beliefs had solidified
Reason: Last fall you wrote a piece in the Tropic and explicitly acknowledged being a
libertarian. . . Barry: John Dorschner, one of our staff writers here at Tropic magazine at The Miami Herald, who is a good friend of mine and an excellent journalist, but a raving liberal, wrote a story about a group that periodically pops up saying that they’re going to start their own country or start their own planet or go back to their original planet, or whatever. They were going to “create a libertarian society” on a floating platform in the Caribbean somewhere. You know and I know there’ s never going to be a country on a floating anything, but if they want to talk about it, that’s great.
John wrote about it and he got into the usual thing where he immediately got to the question of whether or not you can have sex with dogs. The argument was that if it wasn’t illegal to have sex with dogs, naturally people would have sex with dogs. That argument always sets my teeth right on edge.
And I always want to retort with, “You want a horrible system, because you think the people should be able to vote for laws they want, and if more than half of them voted for some law, everyone would have to do what they said. Then they could pass a law so that you had to have sex with dogs.”
I was ranting and raving about this here in the office. So my editor, Tom Shroder, said “Why don’t you write a counterpoint to it?”
So I wrote about why I didn’t think libertarians are really doing this kind of thing so that they can have sex with dogs. I discussed some of the reasons that a person might want to live out of the control of our federal, state, local, and every other form of government. Actually, I don’t think I even called myself a libertarian in the article. I think Tom Shroder identified me as one.
Reason: Did that give you pause, coming out of the closet on this?
Barry: I guess libertarianism is always considered so weird and fringe that people assume that you’re in the closet if you don’t go around talking about it. Usually in interviews we’re talking about humor writing and they don’t bring it up. Because I don’t write an overly political column, people just assume I’m not. I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It’s a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it’s not as simple as being for or against something.
Reason: Did you get any mail about being a libertarian after that article?
Barry: I got a few letters, mostly pretty nice. One or two letters saying, “Here’s why it wouldn’t work to be a libertarian, because people will have sex with dogs.” Arguments like, “Nobody would educate the kids.” People say, “Of course you have to have public education because otherwise nobody would send their kids to school.” And you’d have to say, “Would you not send your kids to school? Would you not educate them?” “Well, no. I would. But all those other people would be having sex with dogs.”
