Here is a snippet of a longer interview between Bill Steigerwald at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Brian Doherty, author of Radicals for Capitalism: A (Freewheeling) History of the Modern Libertarian Movement:

Q:

What was the most surprising or important thing you learned from doing this book?

A:

Exactly how despised and outsider these ideas were in the '40s and '50s. I kind of knew it, but I was shocked to find certain details about it. One was the story of Rose Wilder Lane, the great libertarian author and the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the "Little House on the Prairie" books. She was actually investigated by the FBI in the late '40s for daring to write on a postcard, that an officious postmaster read, that she considered Social Security the sort of socialist central control that we were supposed to be fighting against in World War I and World War II.

Q:

Of the big five of the libertarian movement — Von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard and Friedman — who is your favorite?

A:

Murray Rothbard, and I'll tell you why. Rothbard, in one way, was the most distinctly libertarian of the libertarians. He was influenced a lot by both Mises and Rand, not so much by Hayek and Friedman. He brought together Mises' deep economist's understanding of why government economic intervention tends to fail and Ayn Rand's sort of natural rights-based philosophy that argued that it is morally wrong for government to do certain things, whether or not it worked better — even though it didn't work better.

Rothbard also took them to sort of the most colorful and radical extremes. He actually was a complete anarchist. Unlike Rand and Mises, he didn't believe there was any role for government. He wrote so well and was so impassionedly in so many fields — philosophy, economics and history — and was so intimately involved at an organizational level with lots of great libertarian institutions, from the Cato Institute to the Institute for Humane Studies to the Foundation of Economic Education. He really had his hands in every aspect of the story, was such a colorful and fun writer, and was so bracing in his radicalism, that I found him the most fun to contemplate of all those figures.

Q:

Who has been the most influential American libertarian of the last 100 years?

A:

Milton Friedman, unquestionably. His success as a technical economist — he won the Nobel Prize in 1976 — was combined with a very great skill in explaining technicalities to a popular audience, which he did in a column in Newsweek from 1966 to 1984, and in popular books in "Capitalism and Freedom" and "Free to Choose" and then the PBS series that "Free to Choose" arose from. Unlike a Rothbard, he didn't try to bang you over the head with sort of the anarchist radicalism, which helped in him being influential.

As my book tells, he really was the guy who convinced the Nixon-era Gates Commission that an all-volunteer army could work and was directly responsible for the end of the draft in the early '70s. His writings on monetary policy were the key intellectual influence that helped shape Federal Reserve policy in the Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan era that brought the inflation level down to a more manageable level. Those were his two biggest polemical victories and certainly vitally important. He was certainly also the most widely respected of the great libertarian thinkers.