be "opposition to central political authority" and "concern for people as individuals." His rejection of standard American party politics was reflected in a lecture he gave during which he said, "The Democrats or liberals think that everybody is stupid and therefore they need somebody... to tell them how to behave themselves. The Republicans think everybody is lazy..." In 1969 and 1970, Hess joined with others, including Murray Rothbard, Robert LeFevre, Dana Rohrabacher, Samuel Edward Konkin III, and former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader Carl Oglesby to speak at two "left-right" conferences which brought together activists from both the Old Right and the New Left in what was emerging as a nascent libertarian movement. As part of his effort to unite right and left-libertarianism, Hess would join the SDS as well as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), of which he explained, "We used to have a labor movement in this country, until I.W.W. leaders were killed or imprisoned. You could tell labor unions had become captive when business and government began to praise them. They're destroying the militant black leaders the same way now. If the slaughter continues, before long liberals will be asking, 'What happened to the blacks? Why aren't they militant anymore?'" In the 1980s, Hess joined the Libertarian Party, which was founded in 1971 and served as editor of its newspaper from 1986 to 1990. Adams-Morgan experiment and back-to-the-land Hess was an early proponent of the "back to the land" movement, and his focus on self-reliance and small communities happened in part by government mandate. According to a Libertarian Party News obituary, "When the Internal Revenue Service confiscated all his property and put a 100 percent lien on all of his future earnings, Hess (who had taught himself welding) existed on bartering his work for food and goods." Hess's life as a welder put him in rapport with a very large segment of the American population who are manual laborers. He eventually came to the conviction that virtually no one in national politics identified with these people anymore. Hess's revolt against public giantism reflected a distrust toward large-corporate business as well as big government. After Hess had made friends within the New Left and related circles, he began to encounter the young, new-breed appropriate technology enthusiasts (exemplified, by the early 1970s, in the editors and readerships of the Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth