One Vote for a Libertarian Foreign Policy

I first met Zach Huff when he was 15, at Nellie’s, a gay sports bar in D.C.

I had organized some libertarians to join me in sort of crashing or joining a Log Cabin Republican happy hour.

Eileen, a libertarian woman I knew, then in D.C. to finish a master’s degree in public policy, was sitting with me at a tall bar table having burgers, fries and beer. We were probably wearing some Ron Paul buttons, hoping to proselytize the Log Cabin peeps for Dr. Paul.

Then this young guy showed up, Zach Huff, about 5’7″ maybe. He was an intern in the Ron Paul/Campaign for Liberty office in northern Virginia. A woman managing the office, Allison Gibbs (now semi-retired from politics) had sent Zach to represent Paul (maybe not realizing it was a bar more than a restaurant).

Young Zach told us he was a sophomore and all about his working for the Paul campaign and his life back home in the Pacific northwest.  We kept offering to buy him a beer, since he was not 21, and we were having beer. He declined. (When I was a college sophomore you could buy beer at 18, so, libertarian that I am, I don’t consider college sophomores to be underage drinkers.) Toward the end of the evening we asked Zach what his major was, and I was horrified to learn that he was a high school sophomore and I had been offering to buy a 15-year-old kid beer at a gay happy hour.

I’m glad he didn’t accept our offer.

I watched Zach for the next few years as he attend every CPAC and then went back out to work caucuses and primaries for Ron Paul in 2011.

Then, via the magic of FaceBook friendship, I got to watch him move to Manhattan, go to college, get a real estate license, and then make aliyah, moving to Israel and serving in the Israeli Defense Service (Zach’s mother is Jewish).  I had somewhat avuncular worries for his safety looking at his photos on social media of he and his army friends travelling around Israel.

And now I see at the Israeli website Mida, that  Zach has taken his IDF skills and is training Kurdish fighters. He’s a remarkable person.

He’s still in his early 20s.

And not most people’s idea of what a libertarian is like.

I guess libertarians are individualists.

And I wonder if a foreign policy of direct people-to-people assistance (not totally legal when it comes to donating weapons) might do better for the Kurds than the government-to-government policy we have been pursuing?

Bruce Majors is a former major donor to the Human Rights Campaign, Al Gore, and other candidates he is ashamed to mention.