• To build and maintain roads adequate for use of conveyances, their operators, and passengers.
• To increase the average span of life by 30 years.
• To convey instantly the sound of a voice speaking at one place to any other point or any number of points around the world.
• To convey instantly the visual replica of an action, such as a presidential inauguration, to men and women in their living rooms all over America.
• To develop a medical preventive against death from pneumonia.
• To transport physically a person from Los Angeles to New York in less than four hours.
• To build a horseless carriage of the qualities and capabilities described in the latest advertising folder of any automobile manufacturer.

This thought experiment was proposed in 1954 — the year I was born — by an entrepreneur named John C. Sparks in a short essay entitled “If Men Were Free to Try.” Sparks noted that of these seven problems, the first one would have been the easiest to solve, since there were already roads on which to improve, while the other six would have seemed like the wildest of science fiction.

By 1954, however, the first problem had yet to be solved because the roads were made public and the government put itself in charge of building and maintaining them. And today we still drive on congested roads on which 37,332 died in 2008, the lowest in four decades and yet the equivalent of more than ten 9/11s every year. By contrast, the other six problems were not only solved but were so effectively implemented that by 1954 they were simply taken for granted. Why? Because, Sparks’ noted, “solutions have been found wherever the atmosphere of freedom and private ownership has prevailed wherein men could try out their ideas and succeed or fail on their own worthiness.”

Imagine, however, if in 1900 the roads were privatized and the automobile industry was nationalized (as may yet happen in 2009). As Sparks noted, instead of racing competitions between automobile manufacturers, “we would have likely participated in a contest sponsored by the privately owned highway companies to suggest how to improve the government’s horseless carriage so that it would keep pace with the fine and more-than-adequate highways.” Why? “We never do think creatively on any activity preempted by government. It is not until an activity has been freed from monopoly that creative thought comes into play … as long as men are free to try their ideas in a competitive and voluntary market.”

Now, I would like to propose another thought experiment. It is 1954 and you are challenged to solve the following problems:

• Build and maintain an educational system that will provide the highest quality education at the lowest price for the most number of students.
• To convey instantly verbal and visual communication between two or more people anywhere in the world with or without wires.
• To manufacture and distribute high quality powerful computers small enough to sit on your lap and cheap enough for almost anyone to afford.
• To design and distribute software programs to run personal computers such that anyone can operate them with minimal experience or training.
• To create a world wide web of connectedness with virtually instantaneous access between servers, computers, and people anywhere in the world with or without wires.
• To innovate a computer engine that allows all knowledge to be catalogued, searched, and downloaded for free or at a miniscule cost by anyone, anywhere, anytime with or without wires.
• To make available, for free or at a miniscule cost, all the world’s knowledge for use by anyone, anywhere, anytime with or without wires.

Once again, innovators and entrepreneurs in 1954 would have thought the first problem the easiest to solve and the other six problems the product of a mind mired in madness. And yet, over half a century later, the first problem has yet to be solved, problems two through six are not only solved but continue to be improved at an exponential rate and, assuming the continued application of Moore’s Law of accelerating growth, the seventh problem will likely be complete by 2054, the centennial celebration of what I call Sparks’ Law: innovations are best generated when people are free to try their ideas in a competitive and voluntary market.

Why can we talk to nearly anyone, anywhere, anytime on wireless communication systems? Because innovators and entrepreneurs were free to try. Why can most of us afford powerful laptop computers that run easy-to-use software programs that allow us to access other computers, web pages, and digital books, movies, and music for free or at a miniscule cost? Because inventors and businessmen were free to try. Why is America’s public school system an abysmal failure (UNICEF, for example, ranked it 18th out of 24 industrialized countries in 2008)? Because the public education system has not been allowed to thrive and grow in a competitive and voluntary market. Only when it is, will significant innovation be generated.

This is why private schools are so superior to government schools, and why even pro-public school liberal Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama send their children to private schools — just as most pro-public school liberals do who can afford it. Why can’t most Americans afford private schools? Because education has not been allowed to flourish in a free market in which, like wireless communications systems and computer hardware, software and search engine technologies, education quality would grow exponentially while the price would drop precipitously. This can only happen if education innovators and entrepreneurs are free to try.

Since the turn of the millennium, a new militancy has arisen among religious skeptics in response to three threats to science and freedom: (1) attacks against evolution education and stem cell research; (2) breaks in the barrier separating church and state leading to political preferences for some faiths over others; and (3) fundamentalist terrorism here and abroad. Among many metrics available to track this skeptical movement is the ascension of four books to the august heights of the New York Times best-seller list—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Hachette Book Group, 2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—that together, in Dawkins’s always poignant prose, “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral and intellectually fulfilled.” Amen, brother.

Whenever religious beliefs conflict with scientific facts or violate principles of political liberty, we must respond with appropriate aplomb. Nevertheless, we should be cautious about irrational exuberance. I suggest that we raise our consciousness one tier higher for the following reasons.

1. Anti-something movements by themselves will fail. Atheists cannot simply define themselves by what they do not believe. As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises warned his anti-Communist colleagues in the 1950s: “An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.”
2. Positive assertions are necessary. Champion science and reason, as Charles Darwin suggested: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science.”
3. Rational is as rational does. If it is our goal to raise people’s consciousness to the wonders of science and the power of reason, then we must apply science and reason to our own actions. It is irrational to take a hostile or condescending attitude toward religion because by doing so we virtually guarantee that religious people will respond in kind. As Carl Sagan cautioned in “The Burden of Skepticism,” a 1987 lecture, “You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.”
4. The golden rule is symmetrical. In the words of the greatest consciousness raiser of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his epic “I Have a Dream” speech: “In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” If atheists do not want theists to prejudge them in a negative light, then they must not do unto theists the same.
5. Promote freedom of belief and disbelief. A higher moral principle that encompasses both science and religion is the freedom to think, believe and act as we choose, so long as our thoughts, beliefs and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. As long as religion does not threaten science and freedom, we should be respectful and tolerant because our freedom to disbelieve is inextricably bound to the freedom of others to believe.

As King, in addition, noted: “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.”

Rational atheism values the truths of science and the power of reason, but the principle of freedom stands above both science and religion.

I attended one of these seminars in 1981, when a close friend told me about Andrew Galambos, a retired aerospace engineer and physicist teaching private courses through the Free Enterprise Institute (hundreds of such organizations come and go throughout Mr. Doherty’s history), under an umbrella field he called “Volitional Science.” The introductory course was V-50. This was Econ 101 on freemarket steroids, an invigoratingly muscular black-and-white world where Adam Smith is good, Karl Marx is bad; individualism is good, collectivism bad; free economies are good, mixed economies bad.

Galambos’s course was popular in Orange County, Calif. (labeled by our neighbors in L.A. County as the “Orange Curtain”), and the time was right with President Reagan in office and conservatives on the ascendant. Where Rand advocated for limited government, Galambos proffered a theory in which everything in society would be privatized until government simply falls into disuse and disappears. Galambos identified three types of property: primordial (one’s life), primary (one’s thoughts and ideas), and secondary (derivatives of primordial and primary property, such as the utilization of land and material goods). To Galambos, capitalism is “that societal structure whose mechanism is capable of protecting all forms of private property completely.” To realize a truly free society, then, we have merely “to discover the proper means of creating a capitalist society.” In this free society, we are all capitalists.

Galambos’s story is not unusual in the history of this oft-fringy movement. He had a massive ego that propelled him to a successful career as a private lecturer, but led him to such ego-inflating pronouncements as his classification of all sciences into physical, biological, and his own “volitional sciences.” His towering intellect took him to great heights of interdisciplinary creativity, but often left him and his students tangled up in contradictions, as when we all had to sign a contract promising that we would not disclose his ideas to anyone, while we were also inveigled to solicit others to enroll. (“You’ve got to take this great course.” “What’s it about?” “I can’t tell you.”) And he had a remarkable ability to lecture for hours without notes in a colloquial style, but when two hours stretched into three, and three hours dragged into four, his audiences were never left wanting for more.

Most problematic, however, was any hope of translating theory into practice, which is where the rubber meets the road for any economic or political principle. Property definitions are all well and good, but what happens when we cannot agree on property rights infringements? The answer was inevitably something like this: “In a truly free society all such disputes will be peacefully resolved through private arbitration.” Sounds good in theory, but I would like more data from the real world. And, also typical of the movement, Galambos never published his long-promised book in his lifetime. Finally, in 1999, his estate issued Volume 1 of Sic Itur ad Astra (The Way to the Stars), a 942-page, $125 tome published by the Universal Scientific Publications Company, Inc. Galambos’s dream was to be a space entrepreneur and fly customers to the moon. According to his logic, in order to realize this dream he believed that society in its entirety had to be privatized first. Too bad Galambos did not live long enough to witness the space entrepreneur and libertarian Burt Rutan succeed in being the first to build a private rocket that reached space. It is a lesson libertarians should take to heart — we don’t need to do everything at once, and freedom is achieved one step at a time.

Another disturbing theme running throughout the libertarian movement, so well recounted by Mr. Doherty, is the sense that we are absolutely right. Absolute certainty generates absolute intolerance. One would think, for example, that Randian Objectivists would embrace other libertarians. But no, like the Baptists and Anabaptists, who warred over whether baptism should be implemented at birth or in adulthood, some of Rand’s biggest battles were fought not with socialists but with fellow libertarians. For example, libertarians disagree about foreign policy and the role of troops overseas, with some arguing that what other nations do is none of our business, while other libertarians hold that the protection of domestic property sometimes requires foreign intervention in a preemptive manner. Most commonly, libertarians rarely agree on the best strategy to bring about a free market society — through direct political activism within the system or by nonparticipation in hopes that the system will fall into disuse.

Barbara Branden, a close friend of Rand’s, recalled a dinner catastrophe that resulted from the first meeting between Rand, the libertarian economist Henry Hazlitt, and Ludwig von Mises, the greatest intellectual defender of freemarket economics of the 20th century. “The evening was a disaster. It was the first time Ayn had discussed moral philosophy in depth with either of the two men. ‘My impression,’ she was to say, ‘was that von Mises did not care to consider moral issues, and Henry was seriously committed to altruism … We argued quite violently. At one point von Mises lost his patience and screamed at me.’” Economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, one of the godfathers of libertarianism, recalled an incident at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, at which was gathered a veritable Who’s Who of free market economists (including himself, Hayek, Hazlitt, Mises, Fritz Machlup, George Stigler, and Frank Knight). “One afternoon, the discussion was on the distribution of income, taxes, progressive taxes, and so on. In the middle of that discussion von Mises got up and said ‘You’re all a bunch of socialists,’ and stomped out of the room.” Such moral absolutism leads to moral absurdities, and the libertarian movement has been plagued with the problem for the entirety of its history. Defining a movement with bullet points that require a commitment to the entire list before membership is conferred more often than not leads to lower membership rolls, and libertarians are more guilty than most at excommunicating those who deviate even slightly from the canon.

Ironically, I believe that the libertarian dream of free minds and free markets will come about not through the traditional channels of libertarian books, magazines, and seminars, or even through political action (the Libertarian Party is alive but organizing its members is like herding cats), but through the marketplace itself — the Wikification and Googlefication of the economy has turned every man and woman into a capitalist. EBay is the biggest retail outlet on the planet, and anyone can participate — you don’t need a state license or a government permit. Through the Internet, anyone can communicate and trade with anyone else, thereby bypassing traditional channels of state control over commerce. With the open access to knowledge that the Internet provides, it is only a matter of time before the government control of peoples’ lives becomes obsolete. At that point, we will have achieved something close to the libertarian dream.

This article was originally published as “We Are All Capitalists Now” in the New York Sun.