(July 20, 1899 - March 2, 1989)

By David Nolan

Willis Stone was the founder and long-time Chairman of the LIBERTY AMENDMENT COMMITTEE. The LAC (originally known as the National Committee for Economic Freedom) had the sole purpose of promoting a proposed Constitutional Amendment that would require the U.S. government to disengage from all activities not specified in the Constitution. It also would have repealed the Sixteenth Amendment and prohibited the Federal government from taxing `incomes, estates and gifts'.

Under Stone's leadership, by 1959 the Committee was able to persuade seven state legislatures to petition Congress to send the Amendment out for ratification; this was far short of the 38 such resolutions that were needed to force Congress to act. (Eventually, two more states - Indiana and Arizona - joined the list of petitioners.) The Congressional resolution for the Amendment (H.J. Res. 23) was sponsored by several Representatives over the years, the last being Ron Paul.

The Liberty Amendment was a popular rallying-point for the activists in the fledgling libertarian movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. Murray Rothbard called it a `magnificent' idea. Libertarian Party founder David Nolan led the Committee's youth division in the late 1960s, and Stone was a speaker at several of the Libertarian Party's early conventions.