Surprising, but true: It’s Richard Milhous Nixon, America’s thirty-seventh president, who offered the inspiration. Nixon certainly didn’t directly encourage the party; his proposal for economic regulation convinced a few ordinary-yet-extraordinary Americans that they’d had enough federal meddling in citizens’ lives, thanks very much.
Here’s what happened, in 1971 (at a time when Nixon was about a year away from a landslide presidential victory):
On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon gave a speech announcing what would be known as his “New Economic Policy.” The speech led directly to the formation of the Libertarian Party.
In the speech, Nixon announced two measures that were of particular concern to libertarians. First, a government-imposed freeze on wages and prices. Second, and end to the convertibility of dollars to gold.
Nixon said, “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States for a period of 90 days.”
Libertarians saw both of these actions as betrayals of the principles on which the United States was founded.
This speech has often been cited as the critical moment that ignited the formation of the Libertarian Party.
In his history of the libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty writes that the late David F. Nolan “was working for an ad agency in Denver and happened to have a handful of libertarian-minded friends over that day when Nixon hit the airwaves with his wage and price controls announcement. They all agreed: It was time for a third party…a Libertarian Party.”
Nolan and several others formally created the Libertarian Party in Colorado Springs on December 11, 1971.
It says much — and much that’s creditable to him, I think — that Nolan founded the party despite the strength, in both major parties, of regulatory zeal. Nolan wasn’t a situational man, assessing chances for victory, and trying to fit in. He was a principled man, beginning a new party at a time when its ideas were far less accepted than they are today.
There were libertarians in American before 1971, and even libertarians before Americans started to use the term with any frequency (in the 1950s). The odds were long back then, but Nolan was — to his credit — undeterred.
Still, David Nolan owed Richard Nixon the assist.