If Orange County Register publisher R. C. Hoiles hated anything worse than unions, it was public schools. He preferred whorehouses, which, he'd point out, were voluntary, while public schools were not: "As long as the government . forces us through a twelve-year indoctrination . forcing our parents and everyone else to pay for it, how can American kids grow up to understand the true meaning of our Declaration of Independence or Constitution?" To Fountainhead author Ayn Rand, most right-wingers were pushing an unmoored, tradition- and religion-based defense of the capitalist order that was not only weak, but actively detrimental: "God save capitalism from capitalism's defenders! Nobody El can defeat us now-except the Republicans!" Rand was contemptuous of a substantial strain of modern conservative thought, from William Buckley to Ronald Reagan-what she derisively called the "God-family-country swamp." Leonard Read, founder of the first modern libertarian education institution, the Foundation for Economic Education, believed that "Communism or socialism-or the same thing, state interventionism here at home-is a philosophy to be despised and explained away. It is not a military threat to be feared and shot away.

" The Circle Bastiat boys liked to disrupt other people's realities for libertarian Zen wisdom. One of their favorite stunts involved filling the studio of a televised talk by the governor of New Jersey, hitting him with questions as If their ideological universe was the norm and his some sort of aberration. "What, governor? You zvefor public schools? Where did you get such strange ideas? Can you recommend any books on this subject?" Vietnam troop commander William Westmoreland gruffly announced that he was not interested in leading an army of mercenaries. Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Milton Friedman replied, "Would you rather command an army of slaves?" Westmoreland bristled, "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries," Friedman snapped back. Book jacket.