 I've always been a radical, I've always challenged the state's quo. Do you feel that you're part of a libertarian movement? No, I don't. No, so what are you then? Well, I'm not a part of a movement. I've never been a part of a movement. I just I just do my own thing. Walter Williams, the free market scholar and iconoclast, died last week at the age of 84. He was the author of 13 books and was best known for his work demonstrating that government interference in the free market has been especially harmful to black Americans. Born in 1936, Williams grew up in the Richard Allen homes, one of Philadelphia's first housing projects. I broke out of the North Philadelphia ghetto nearly 30 years ago and so did most of my friends. When he was a small child, his father deserted his family. He was brought up by his mother, a high school dropout, and the family spent time on welfare. But Williams would later draw a distinction between material poverty and what he called poverty of the spirit. Even though we grew up poor, we didn't we didn't consider ourselves poor. That is a matter of fact, during those days to call somebody poor was an insult. When I was a kid, my mother used to always say to us, she says, you know, we have a beer pocketbook, but we have champagne taste. Williams worked as a taxi driver in the city of brotherly love and was once ordered out of his cab by a white police officer beaten up and then charged with disorderly conduct. He was drafted into the army and while stationed in Georgia kept getting in trouble, occasionally with his fists for standing up to the racism of white officers. But he came to believe that discrimination should be legal just as long as it didn't involve government resources. One of my strong values is freedom of association. If you believe in freedom of association, you have to accept that people will associate in ways that you find offensive. And I believe people have the right to discriminate on any basis they want so long as they're not using a government. For me, discrimination is just simply an act of choice. After the army, Williams studied economics at California State College and then went to UCLA for graduate school where he was exposed to titans of free market economics, including Milton Friedman, James Buchanan and UCLA's department chair, Armin Alcheon. Flunking economic theory the first time around he wrote in his memoir, I later realized did have a benefit. It convinced me that UCLA professors didn't care anything about my race. They'd flunk me just as they'd flunk anyone else who didn't make the grade. I don't judge people by colors. I say that, well gee, you're a man just like I am. And that's what my stepfather used to say. He says every man stands up to piss and he's whatever he is after that. In 1977, Williams started writing a weekly column which was eventually syndicated in 140 newspapers. He was also a contributor to Reason Magazine and served as a trustee on the Board of Reason Foundation, the non-profit that publishes Reason TV. For all his individual accomplishments, Williams was especially proud of his role in making George Mason University's economics department a home for free market radicals. There was considerable hostility towards our department and I had a lot of difficulty and so I just said well the only way I'm going to improve the department is to try to privatize the department and actually go out and raise money. Last week, his former colleagues at George Mason paid tribute to their mentor and friend. GMU Econ has lost an iconic and heroic figure, wrote Pete Betke. He taught with wit and passion the logic of economic reasoning. He's one of my few heroes, wrote Don Boudreau. Liberty is the rare state of affairs in mankind's history. Arbitrary abuse and control by others is the standard dish even now and all the tendencies are it's for us to have greater and greater amounts of our liberty usurped by government. Rest in peace, Walter Wuggins.