From her facial features I feel confident that her family is Jewish. We fall into conversation and she is very bright and opinionated and oriented politically toward the radical left. She's considerably more sophisticated than I was at her age. She's studying at Harvard and is flying home to Beverly Hills for summer vacation. I can't recall how our conversation begins but it isn't long before we're debating the relative merits of a socialist versus a libertarian viewpoint.
Libertarian idealism is irrefutable in argument.
In real life its first premise, that we should not initiate force to gain our political or social goals, is not going to be taken seriously by anyone with power. Anyhow, we argue it out for 1,500 miles. She asks if I'm a writer, what sort of things I write, where I've been published and so forth. I explain that I'm carrying with me the final edited version of a book manuscript that was to have gone to the printers next month but that this very morning in the Newark Air Terminal I had read where my publisher has been burned to the ground by arsonists. This isn't as clear-cut as people think it is.