Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto by Matt Kibbe Page A

government is doing too many things. We were always supposed to have a limited-purpose national government, a federal government with only a few basic responsibilities. It was supposed to perform those really well, and it was supposed to take care of those things to the exclusion, in many circumstances, of state authority. But outside of those areas, it was supposed to stay out and let state and local governments take care of the rest, along with civil society.
    JUSTIN AMASH: I was done with college, done with law school, and noticed that my views on politics were a little bit different than some of my Republican colleagues. It was the [George W.] Bush era of Republican politics. So, I decided I’d do a Google search and threw some of the terms into Google that I thought matched my viewpoints. Up popped F. A. Hayek.
    I like Hayek’s style. It’s an intellectual style. There’s a strong focus on spontaneous order, the idea that order pops out of our free interactions with each other. I found that very appealing and when I read Hayek’s works, they really struck a chord with me.

    MK: Hayek talks about how individuals come together in voluntary association and create institutions, and those institutions both inform, and are a constraint on our behavior. I always thought that that interplay between community and the individual made a lot of sense and explains how the world holds together and works so well without some benevolent despot telling us what to do.
    JUSTIN AMASH: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. He’s very good at making the distinction between government and society. There can be societies where people interact, where they cooperate, where they form groups together. But you don’t have to have a government deciding how all of those interactions work.
    MK: The left loves to use this atomistic caricature that we’re all Ayn Randoids, selfish individuals willing to do absolutely anything to get what we want. But that’s the complete opposite of what I get out of Rand. Her work was really focused on individual responsibility. We need to take the word “community organizer” back, I think, and take the word “community” back.
    JUSTIN AMASH: Right, and a lot of what libertarians are about this idea that people work together, that they cooperate, that they form these sort of social groups. That’s perfectly acceptable as long as they’re voluntary associations.
    MK: Let’s talk about politics for a little bit. I think that we’re in the midst of a realignment, maybe even a paradigm shift. That same disintermediation, decentralization, more power to the individual dynamic is happening in our politics. And people like you are beating establishment candidates with all of the traditional advantages: more money, more people jetting in from Washington, D.C., to endorse them. Tell me that story.
    THOMAS MASSIE: I think the old model was that you ran for state legislature and you became a state representative, then you became a state senator, and you were a good party player, a good team player, and then somebody recommended that you get into a congressional race, and you come up the ranks. That’s been turned on its head.
    There are some guys here in Congress that have never held an elective office. Ted Yoho, he’s great. He’s a large-animal veterinarian. Jim Bridenstine, he’s great. He was a Navy fighter pilot. Neither of those guys held an elective office, and they beat an incumbent Republican in a primary to get here to Washington, D.C. That’s only possible with grassroots support. Social media is part of it. Alternative media through talk radio is part of it. It’s enabled a different model of coming to Congress. You have the grassroots, these outside organizations like FreedomWorks, which are immensely important in the races, and not just in the races, but after the race is won in influencing these congressmen when they get here.

    TED CRUZ: I think there is a fundamental paradigm shift happening in