Your View: Criticism of YAL recruiting flawed

Last week's criticism of Young Americans for Liberty accused the freshman organization of lying to recruit the interests of the Libertarian Party.

If Mr. Greenemeier had come to the meetings and group events, he would have met anarchists, Republicans, Democrats, constitutionalists, conservatives and classical liberals.

The fact that it took Mr. Greenemeier "less than five minutes on Google" further demonstrates his rash condemnation of YAL.

I went to their website to see where he read that YAL advocated libertarianism. I found no such luck on www.yaliberty.org.

I found such luck on Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines YAL as an advocacy group dedicated to libertarian principles and emphasizing the role of the Constitution.

While many beliefs of libertarianism coincide with YAL, the two are not one.

As for the propaganda Mr. Greenemeier insists YAL hands out, there is nothing in their free literature that promotes the agenda of libertarianism.

Perhaps he was confused with a certain line in the introduction written by famed economist Friedrich Hayek: "[Bastiat's work on noninterference] is indeed a text around which one might expound a whole system of libertarian economic policy."

Hayek writes that something as complex and with such confounding variables as a whole economy cannot be empirically tested.

This statement emphasizes what economists and economic professors already know: you cannot empirically test human behavior in a complex reality.

Andrew McCaslin

sophomore, journalism