LibertyManiacs launches line of Reason regalia

LibertyManiacs formally launched its Reason Official Online Store today featuring products for "Free Minds and Free Markets."

Under a licensing agreement with Reason, LibertyManiacs will offer a wide range of items featuring the organization's logo, reason.com, reason.tv, Reason Foundation, and images of Ayn Rand.

It's a natural partnership. Reason is the flagship publication of the libertarian movement while LibertyManiacs touts itself as "the World's Liberty Store," a major producer of liberty-centric individualized products that range from tee shirts to bumper stickers to posters to coffee mugs to ball caps to shoes – yes, shoes – to just about anything else that can be printed on.

The creative maniac behind LibertyManiacs is Dan McCall, a talented graphic artist with a libertarian's sense of freedom and an artist's eye for "fun, cool products."

McCall's development both as a commercial artist and as a libertarian began at about the same time.

While attending an art academy, McCall says, "I picked up Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and it was pretty much a done deal. Ludwig von Mises then sealed it."

Which may explain why the LibertyManiacs website includes a section not likely found anywhere else, called "Economics 101," that includes Ludwig von Mises T-shirts and others that proclaim, "Hayek Is My Homeboy."

Other hard, if not impossible, to find libertarian economic heroes enshrined on pullovers and other products include Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Sowell, and Carl Menger.

It was this hard if not impossible to find "freedom-themed products" state of affairs that drew McCall into the market in the first place. He began making his own items "as a side project for fun" but once he began selling a few products on the internet he noticed a strong response from around the world.

"A few years ago," he says, "it really started taking off in a way that I had to go full-time on it and bring others in for help."

LibertyManiacs.com, according to the website itself, began life in 2003 "on the notion that people’s freedom—liberty—is, was, and always will be the driving force of progress, happiness, and well-being in the World."

Today, McCall and his fellow maniacs not only offer a dizzying array of explicitly libertarian and other liberty-oriented products but they specialize in "instantly customizable" products, allowing customers to personalize what they buy. They call it "Individualism X3," meaning "Individuals choosing individualized products that celebrate individuality."

And, rest assured, there are plenty of explicitly libertarian, Libertarian Party, Nolan Chart, and anti-government raiment such as tees and caps to be had at LibertyManiacs as well.

As for the new line of Reason gear, "We are all set to go," McCall told the Libertarian News Examiner. "Reason is linked with LibertyManiacs.com and the first installment of products are available."

Those products include not only everybody's favorite, the ubiquitous tee shirts and ball caps, but also a selection of key chains, refrigerator magnets, shopping bags, mouse pads, neckties and, especially for mutt maniacs, a "two-color baby rib 100% combed ringspun cotton" doggie T-shirt imprinted with "reason.com."

(All photos courtesy of LibertyManiacs)