Introducing my Dad's Substack... and my Dad

Butler D. Shaffer (1935 - 2019)

My father passed away at the end of 2019, just shy of his 85th birthday. For those who didn’t know him, I’ll let the words of one of his students – and one of the many many people for whom knowing my dad was “life changing” – serve as an introduction:

“Butler was a giant in the pro-freedom and pro-peace movement.  He was a tireless and uncompromising advocate for the liberty of all individuals to assert personal and sovereign ownership over one’s own body, property, time and money.  Butler firmly opposed all forms of coercion, fraud, and all initiations of force. He believed in the unplanned and spontaneous order that arises out of complex systems and emanates from the bottom up rather than imposed by some great leader.

“Butler was a spiritual and compassionate man who tirelessly sought to better understand and to promote the idea that all life is connected.  Butler exemplified the best aspects of tolerance, open-mindedness, and a sincere desire for peaceful relations with others.  Butler sincerely believed and promoted the idea that humans can live together in a productive, peaceful, civilized society by utilizing only private voluntary transactions between consenting adults.  Through his many articles, and speeches, and by intentionally creating chaos in the minds of his law students over many years, Butler influenced and challenged countless people to think differently and to advocate for a more free and peaceful world.”

• Marc Victor.

Marc – now a criminal-defense attorney and freedom activist – was profoundly impacted by my father’s teaching when he was a law student at Southwestern School of Law. Marc has created a website dedicated to my dad, where you can find a lot of his articles and some of his talks.

Very often, when I write something that gets any kind of attention, I will get a few emails from people I’ve never met, saying something along the lines of: “I met your dad once at a conference in the Andes…” or “I never met your dad, but I always enjoyed his writing…” or “your dad’s writing changed my whole outlook on life.”

I am very very proud of my father. Having this kind of impact on people was what he always strived for, and whether he ever realized it or not, he succeeded. He impacted people’s thinking in ways that are still reverberating after his death, and I believe will continue to do so into the future.

But as important as his writing was, what was most important to my dad in the last years of his life was his grandchildren. (The photo above is of my dad with one of my nieces.) He cared deeply about the kind of world he was leaving behind for them, and loved them more than anything else in the world.

I am starting this Substack to memorialize my father, and also to help to spread his ideas even more than he was able to do himself. I’ll be posting some of his articles (you can find most of them at LewRockwell.com), reviews of his books, and talks and interviews that he has done, as well as some personal observations and memories.

For now, I will leave you with my favorite of all of his talks. Given at the Mises Institute’s Austrian Scholars Conference in 2003, “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Human Spirit: The Luddites Revisited” is a response to the authoritarian boot that came stomping down on us after 9/11, and it foreshadows so much of what we were to experience seventeen years later. I hope that you find it inspiring, and that perhaps it might even “change your whole outlook on life.”

The written version of this talk can be found here.