A key ingredient to Buckley’s conservatism was a defense of free markets and capitalism as having produced human flourishing incomparable to other systems of economy tested throughout human history and that without property rights and economic freedom, the other liberties and virtues so central to that flourishing were not possible. Buckley’s mentors in his free market vision included: Albert Jay Nock, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and Henry Hazlitt.
In Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale, his central target was the economics department, of which he was deeply familiar given he was an economics major. Buckley was encouraged to write the book both by his Yale mentor, Willmoore Kendall, and a disciple of Nock’s, Frank Chodorov.
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