I first met Manny Klausner at a small gathering at Tibor Machan's house in Santa Barbara in 1970. Later that year, when Tibor and I worked on a proposal to acquire struggling Reason magazine from its editor Lanny Friedlander, we shared the proposal with Manny, and he was interested in helping out. We ended up creating a general partnership, Reason Enterprises, for which Manny did the legal work and became one of initially six partners. We flew Lanny out to California to finalize the deal, celebrating with a small dinner at a restaurant in Montecito.
Manny was far better connected in libertarian and free market circles than I was at that point. In his time at the University of Chicago, he met Milton Friedman and other Chicago school economists and helped produce the classical liberal journal New Individualist Review. Later on, at New York University Law School, he got to know Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian school economists. And he became friends with Murray Rothbard.
Reason Enterprises published Reason from January 1971 through June 1978, building the circulation from about 400 to around 10,000. We rotated titles among the partners, so at various times Manny served as publisher or editor, as did I. Manny was an early enthusiast for the Libertarian Party (L.P.), and he ran as a write-in candidate for Congress on the L.P. ticket. He was also enthusiastic about Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist book, For a New Liberty.
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