This afternoon, we had AlexanderMcCobin as a guest at the MPC. Alexander is the president of the huge,
pro-liberty, student movement, Students for Liberty. He studied a major in the
University of Pennsylvania and now is getting a Ph.D. in philosophy from
Georgetown. Our dialogue was about the best ways to advance liberty, and for
that we read Leonard Read’s article, How
to Advance Liberty, a Learning, not a Selling Problem. By the way, it’s a
great article, which I highly recommend. Our dialogue was very interesting,
dynamic, and thoughtful. As Bert told us later, “I
was very proud to hear so many strong voices in the dialogue yesterday. Very
thoughtful and courageous. We have come a long way from our first dialogue.” I
have to agree with Bert, we have improved dramatically since our first
dialogues and I hope we keep improving. 
The argument, which
Leonard Read proposes, is that in order to advance liberty, we must use the
power of attraction and it consists of attracting people to the libertarian
ideas through our passion and expertise towards these ideas. He opposes to mass
media communication because he believes it’s not a selling problem but a
learning problem, which we must engage personally. Although many of the MPC’ers
thought like this, Alexander didn’t. He thinks marketing is very useful to
accomplish the expansion of libertarian ideas. I agree with both perspectives
in the sense that marketing is a useful tool to engage people to learn the
libertarian ideas, and we must also encourage them through our experience and
expertise for them to understand these ideas by themselves. What we all agreed
on, was that there is a long road in the success of advancing liberty,
nevertheless we must start now and do our best to expand them.
