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College senior Taylor Buley on his new book, campus politics, and why young people are turning libertarian

Nick Gillespie | August 18, 2006

Taylor W. Buley didn't just serve as Reason's Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern this summer (though he was that; check out some of his writing here and here). He's also the author of The Fresh Politics Reader: Making Current Affairs and Public Affairs Relevant to Young Americans, recently out from Silver Lake Publishing.

A rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, Buley writes for The Pennsylvania Independent, blogs at Fresh Politics, and maintains a Web site here.

In August, he sat down to talk via email with Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie about The Fresh Politics Reader, the state of campus politics, and more. What follows is an edited transcript of that exchange. Responses can be sent to [e-mail].

reason: What's the one-minute version of your book: What's it about and what inspired you to write it?

Taylor W. Buley: Many young Americans look at politics like a treadmill running on high-speed. Standing beside it, it can be pretty intimidating. When you talk about politics, people give you the look: "Do you really expect me to jump on that thing?"

What I do in my book is to take that treadmill and slow it down so young Americans can jump on and crank it up to whatever speed they please. I do this by breaking issues down into digestable morsels of information.

What inspired me to write the book was the lack of anything like it on the market. I wrote my publisher asking him to put out a book aimed at issues affecting young people—and he asked me to write it instead.

reason: The back cover of The Fresh Politics Reader says "this book is a libertarian tool for seeing past the stale politics of statism." Why are you a libertarian?

Buley: When you take a look at the world we live in, I think that small government is the obvious conclusion.

Social Security is crumbling. Our foundation for health care is unstable. The roof is collapsing on the heads of the next generations of Americans. And if we don't get out of the way, it's going to hurt.

Truthfully, I think most young people today are libertarians. If you look at polling data, the overwhelming majority fall in line with libertarian principles—abortion, gay marriage, Social Security, etc.

I think our position on gay marriage is simple: More people than ever before are openly gay, so more and more of our friends and family are falling into this category of sexuality. In America, homosexuals are not treated equally under law and I think most young people perceive the unfairness in this.

Abortion is a little more sticky. My publisher bills me as "pro-life," but I think that's just an effort to fit my view into the current paradigm. I wasn't alive for Roe v. Wade, and so America's stance on abortion isn't so much as a "debate" as it is a reality. So I ask: What does Roe v. Wade do? It establishes the principle of "point of viability," which preserves the right to choice while protecting conscious human beings who also have rights. I think this is pretty fair, and when I bring up the point in meetings for political organizations like my university's Penn4Choice, I've found that even "radicals" agree with it.

At my school, a paltry 4 percent call themselves "libertarian." Yet when we put out 3,000 copies of our libertarian student newspaper The Pennsylvania Independent they all disappear. Why?

I know that libertarianism isn't easy. How do I explain that I'm against taxes and pro-gun, but that I also happen to support gay marriage and oppose the death penalty? Most people have just a handful of issues that matter to them, and they look for a group with whom they can identify. They assume that since they agree with one issue they will probably agree with most other issues, which isn't the case.