Harry Browne

Hit and Run posted an obituary for former US Libertarian Party presidential candidate, Harry Browne:

Harry Browne, two-time Libertarian Party presidential candidate, has died of effects of a neurological disorder that had been plaguing him suddenly in past months.

Beyond his early libertarian movement bonafides, as a disciple and colleague of the amazing and bizarre Andrew Galambos (a libertarian educational entrepreneur in Southern California in the 1960s with his Free Enterprise Institute), Browne was also a prominent voice and thinker in two major, though inchoate, social movements, or at least idea-viruses, that helped make the 1970s as funky and fascinating as they were: a "me decade" pioneer with his How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973, and still abundantly worth reading today) and a guru of hard money and its bleeding over into survivalism with a series of books including How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation (1970) and You Can Profit from A Monetary Crisis (1974).

Browne was a controversial figure in the LP, at first because he had for years been one of the loudest anti-political voices in the movement before changing his mind and seeking the presidential nomination, and winning it, in 1996. He had been so loud and firm an anti-political voice, in fact, that the term "Browneing Out" was used in the 1970s in libertarian circles to mean retreating from any commitment to further libertarian goals through political action, or any sort of action. Part of finding freedom in an unfree world to Harry was freeing yourself from various "traps," including any expectations on others' part, or any cause's part, that you owed them a damn thing.