My Europe Trip: Final Thoughts

I am writing this in an airplane on my way home; we land in a little less than an hour. Over the past sixteen days I have given thirteen public talks, mostly lectures, a few discussions. Most were set up by libertarian organizations, broadly defined—liberal in the current European sense of the word. The four largest had audiences of about two hundred people each.

There were two related features of my experience that I found encouraging, beyond the size of the audiences. One was that in almost every case most of the audience, so far as I could tell, had come to hear me, not to hear my father’s son. The other was that, with only a few exceptions, the audience contained a lot of people familiar with libertarian ideas. The libertarian movement is alive and well in Europe.

Although a total audience of over a thousand people feels like a lot of people, it is a very small fraction of a population of several hundred million; I am not counting on a European shift to anarcho-capitalism, or even minarchism, in the immediate future. But at least the ideas are out there.

And to shift to a topic that has gotten a good deal of attention lately in the libertarian blogosphere, my wife’s observation of the larger audiences was that women made up about twenty percent. The one exception was my final talk, given to an audience not of libertarians but of college students interested in economics. That audience was almost half women.